Compelling series on the history of Byzantium (but also covering much of the Venice and Genoese republics, Sicily and the various Western and Balkan states), starting with Constantine’s establishment of the Eastern Empire and the end of the Western Empire and going through to the Ottoman sack of Constantinople.

The focus is very much and deliberately political (great men and battles) rather than social (we learn little about normal life) or economical (we know little of why Byzantium was so prosperous at its peak or of the reason for the wealth of Venice).

There is however detailed and in fact very clear description of many of the theological disputes and one of the author’s themes is that these were intimately bound up with Byzantine politics as well as its complex relations with the West).

The other theme is that the Byzantine Empire doesn’t deserve its relative obscurity in modern times and was the continuation of both Greek and Roman culture and civilisation for many years when the West was in the Dark Ages).

The series is well written, even if at times the many of hundreds of years of history and similar names Popes, Patriachs, Emperors and various Balkan princes and Muslim and Barbarian tribes can get complex (the book could do with more than just a list of Emperors at the back e.g. a summary of each or a more detailed timeline as well as with better maps).

Son kitapta haçlı seferleri çok öne çıkıyor. Haçlı seferlerini çok iyi idare eden Komnenos hanedanından sonra, darbeyle taht sahibi Angeloslar imparatorluğun sonunu hazırlıyor. 4.Haçlı seferiyle(gerçekten haçlı seferi denilebilirse) Venedik Doj'u ve Fransızlar Bizans topraklarını bölüşüyor. Sürgün imparatorluklar, Bizansı diriltmeye çalışsa da kendilerine zarar veriyor. İznikten gelen Palaiologos hanedanı Konstantiniyye'yi alıp imparatorluğu yeniden kursa da, dağılmış ordu ve düzen karşısında Türk vasalı olmaktan ileri gidemiyor..

Rather like watching a school bus crash, this volume covers the steady decline of the Byzantine Empire following the disastrous battle of Manzikert

This is the final volume of a fabulous series on Byzantium. I read them many years ago when they were first published, and I still remember how eagerly I awaited each volume. The names and number of characters are mind-boggling, but Norwich does such an outstanding job with their presentation that the reader just wants more.

An empire bounded by the walls of a sole city

By 1425, Byzantium had transformed into effectively a city state. In the concluding volume of this series, John Julius Norwich unravels the events that paved the way for the ultimate downfall of Constantinople.

Norwich adopts a chronological approach, presenting a mini-biography of each successive emperor. With each ruler's reign, the empire's territory diminishes, reminiscent of a juggler struggling to keep multiple balls in the air – one caught, another dropped.

The crusades are given its due attention, the wars between Venice and Genua are all told from Byzantine perspective.

I haven't read the previous two titles, but that was no issue. This book, and I suspect the other two volums as well, stands on its own merit. Norwich's style is engaging and clear - athough he limits himself only to the emperors and assumes from the reader some basic knowledge of Byzantine politics and society. But for me, lacking both, this was no problem.

In my opinion the definitive series on byzantine history. The style is engaging for amateur and veteran historians alike. The author did his research well and it shows. The level of detail is pretty solid for a broad general history like this. If someone was asking for a general history or understand of the Byzantium era this is the gold standard to my eyes.

1200 years in as many pages. As such it cannot be very detailed, it's focus on characters and plot makes it extremely entertaining however.

So much fun, and so tragic. Despite the overwhelming Islamopobia (though this trilogy is pre-9/11), the whole trilogy is a wonderful, engaging, and thrilling example of epic, big history. Game of Thrones has nothing on Norwich.

The conclusion of the masterful retelling of the history of Byzantium. The story of the final decline is depressing, but enlivened by Norwich's masterful prose and the heroism of Constantine XI.

Sometimes history reads like a tragedy, and the story of the final centuries of the Byzantine Empire is one of those times. Yet there is a certain beauty in tragedy, and that’s present too, perhaps best exemplified when Emperor Constantine XI removes his imperial regalia and charges into a hoard of enemy Turks as the city of Constantinople falls, the emperor never to be found and the city never to be redeemed.

John Julius Norwich does his own sum-up best: “The Roman Empire of the East was founded by Constantine the Great on Monday, 11 May 330; it came to an end on Tuesday, 29 May 1453. . . . Byzantium may not have lived up to its highest ideals—what does?—but it certainly did not deserve the reputation which, thanks largely to Edward Gibbon, it acquired in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century in England: that of an Empire constituting, ‘without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed.’ So grotesque view ignores the fact that the Byzantines were a deeply religious society in which illiteracy—at least among the middle and upper classes—was virtually unknown, and in which one Emperor after another was renowned for his scholarship. . . . It ignores, too, the immeasurable cultural debt that the Western world owes to a civilization which alone preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity, during these dark centuries when the lights of learning in the West were almost extinguished. . . . Robert Byron maintained that the greatness of Byzantium lay in what he described as ‘the Triple Fusion:’ that of a Roman body, a Greek mind, and an oriental, mystical soul.”

I enjoyed Norwich’s writing style and appreciated his distinction between facts, suppositions, theories, and legends. Well worth reading for anyone who enjoys history.

This final part of Norwich's trilogy picks up the pace again after the rather boring period of success and prosperity covered by the second volume. Like Herodotus, who condemned the confoundedly tedious 38 years of peace under King Gyges to a single sentence, I seem to be succumbing to a taste for disaster stories. This, basically, is one.

Greek culture, it has recently been claimed, spread so far into Asia as to influence Chinese culture. (And this is a Chinese source saying so, mark you.) It certainly made its mark long before the decline of Byzantium or even the existence of Christianity, yet Byzantium remains one of the world's great civilisations, and at the beginning of this story probably the joint dominator of the Old World alongside Islam. By the end, the Empire is reduced to a nearly-empty city, ripe to be overrun by the Ottoman Turks. The Conqueror, Mehmet, is sufficiently reduced to pity as to halt the traditional looting after only three days. But not enough not to take the city at all, of course. The worst part of this is that while it was the irreversible human wave of Turkish expansion that finally put an end to the Empire, it had been comprehensively raped and stripped by its fellow Christians long before they reached the Hagia Sofia.

After Manzikert, the Empire lost large tracts of hinterland in Asia Minor and with them a decisive source of wealth and manpower. The Crusaders arrived shortly after, and were received with extremely mixed feelings, initially representing merely a smelly irritation and rapidly becoming a major threat against which the Byzantines sometimes even aligned with local Muslim powers in the Middle East's endless game of alliance and faction. The Fourth Crusade ended up a tool in the hands of the avaricious Venetians and sacked Constantinople without ever even bothering to go on and fight Muslims. Afterwards, their former vassals competed with Genoa for dominance of the sea routes in the Eastern Mediterranean and Byzantium was largely stripped of power before the Turks ever reached the city.

In the end, its dispatch at the hands of the massive oil-cooled cannon of a Christian mercenary gunsmith working for Mehmet is almost a relief.

Lively, witty and highly readable. This is popular history at its best.

final book in the series. All good things must end, huh.