A Short History of Byzantium

Oct 10, 2024 6:25 AM

Author:John Julius Norwich

A Short History of Byzantiumis renowned historian, and author of A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich's classic history of Byzantium

Constantine the Great moved the seat of Roman power to Constantinople in AD 330 and for eleven brutal, bloody centuries, the Byzantine Empire became a beacon of grand magnificence and depraved decadence . . .

Here then are the centuries dominated by ferocious arguments over the nature of Christ and his Church. By knowledge, where scholars and scribes preserved the heritage of the ancient world. By emperors like Justinian the Great and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer - men pious, heroic or monstrous. By creativity, as art and architecture soared to new heights. In this abridgement of his celebrated trilogy, John Julius Norwich provides the definitive introduction to the savage, scintillating world of Byzantium.

'Norwich has the gift of historical perspective, as well as clarity and wit. Few can tell a good story better than he' Spectator

'A real-life epic of love and war, accessible to anyone' Independent on Sunday

'Norwich tells a remarkable story with boundless zest. He offers character sketches of the appalling personages who infest his narrative . . . with the assurance of a Macauley or a Gibbon' Daily Telegraph

John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and, after a spell of National Service in the Navy, at New College, Oxford, where he took a degree in French and Russian. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Service, where he remained for twelve years, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut. In 1964 he resigned from the service to write. He is the author of histories of Norman Sicily, the Republic of Venice and the Byzantine Empire. He has written and presented some thirty historical documentaries on television, and is a regular lecturer on Venice and numerous other subjects.

Reviews

This excellent book demands the attention of anyone concerned about civil liberties in the United Kingdom

—— Guardian

Grippingly written with the pace of a thriller

—— Financial Times

Makes Cold War duplicity a la Deighton and Le Carre seem positively endearing

—— Guardian

Will become the standard English work of Venetian history

—— Financial Times

He is the nearest thing we have to a living legend, this side of Famous Seamus - one of the few people from our world whose name will still be known a century on

—— Irish Times

Tim Robinson is the Proust of the western seaboard, a Ruskin of the isles

—— New Statesman

Will endure into the far future ... He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility

—— Colm Tóibín , Sunday Business Post (Books of the Year)

An extraordinary monument

—— Irish Independent

Anyone willing to get lost in this book will be left with many indelible mental images of places they may never have visited but will now never forget

—— Dermot Bolger , Irish Mail on Sunday

Captivating

—— Independent

Breathtaking ... the West of Ireland has found its ultimate laureate

—— Patricia Craig , TLS

[An] encyclopaedic, ambitious and fluent history of Europe ... [like] a great game of chess, except that as well as black and white pieces there are green, blue, orange and purple ones all moving around a multidimensional board. Place names swirl, battles are won and lost, and the pieces are reordered ... Inevitably readers will be drawn to Simms's fascinating picture of the origins of the European Union ... thoughtful and stimulating

—— David Abulafia , Standpoint

A tour de force ... With phenomenal surefootedness, [Simms] picks out the patterns in what might otherwise appear a trackless waste of victories, defeats, treaties and coalitions, extracting from them provocative lessons for Europe's present and future. Big ideas animate the book ... This fascinating book deserves a wide readership. Even those who do not share Simms's fears and hopes for the European Union will be enthralled by the brilliance of his analysis and the dizzying breadth of his vision

—— Christopher Clark , Mail on Sunday

Prodigious ... in its pages whole empires rise and fall ... Europe draws the reader forward with its grand epic of shifting alliances, clashing armies and ambitious statecraft. Mr. Simms ... is a skilled writer with a rare gift for compressed analysis. His focus on the military and diplomatic arc of European history lends his book a strong narrative line and thematic coherence

—— Jeffrey Collins , Wall Street Journal

European history comes in many guises, but Brendan Simms's strategic and geopolitical approach provides a strong and lucid framework within which everything else fits into place. His emphasis on the centrality of Germany offsets more western-orientated accounts while also giving due prominence to Eastern Europe. Covering the whole of the modern period, this book is more than an excellent introduction; it's a major interpretational achievement

—— Norman Davies

World history is German history, and German history is world history. This is the powerful case made by this gifted historian of Europe, whose expansive erudition revives the proud tradition of the history of geopolitics, and whose immanent moral sensibility reminds us that human choices made in Berlin (and London) today about the future of Europe might be decisive for the future of the world

—— Timothy Snyder (author of Bloodlands)

A tremendous feat ... Simms's pages teem with some of the greatest characters in European history

—— Dominic Sandbrook , Sunday Times

Remarkably, such a large and complex book ... offers a very straightforward argument and thesis ... The more familiar the story, the more arresting is Simms's repositioning of it ... This isn't simply academic history but an account of how we came to be, albeit ambivalently and conflictedly, involved in a continental narrative that is still unfolding

—— Sunday Herald

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