Kitabın dili çok akıcı, yazar bilimsellikten uzaklaşmadan olayları hikaye anlatır gibi bir üslupla anlatıyor. Bu topraklarda hüküm sürmüş koskoca bir imparatorluğun tarihini öğrenmek için çok güzel bir kaynak.

A long read and to anyone not interested in the Byzantium I suspect an impossible one. But to those who do an indispensable task.

Maybe a little systematic, one chapter per Emperor is the rule, concentrating on the recorded history rather than any other physical evidence and almost omiting any reference to its art or culture. Can get a bit samey. But inspiration for a number of future visits.

I have a lot of affection for these books. They're narrative histories that cover the Byzantine empire from Diocletian to Constantinople's fall to the Ottomans. Despite their length, there's a lot that's missed out: art (although this is something Norwich is clearly interested in), literature (apart from the odd evaluation of a chronicler/primary source), economics (outside these books, there's a lot of interesting scholarship on land tenure) and intellectual history (although this is well treated in the last volume). This perhaps reflects the diachronic nature of the project and we get a lot of interesting characters and anecdotes instead. This volume is particularly interesting for its description of piratical mercenaries like the Catalan Company (rather like the routiers in Europe at this time), its description of the Crusades from the Byzantine perspective (usually writing on the Crusading Kingdoms focusses on Jerusalem which had less relations with Byzantium than Edessa/Antioch), its description of the powerful Slavic kingdoms of the period (which are rarely found in English historiography), its description of the complex efforts to reconcile Eastern/Western Churches so that the pope could co-ordinate aid for Byzantium and particularly for its description of the Early Ottomans (I did not know they're power was based on Europe from a very early moment in their history and that they were on the point of taking Constantinople for about a century, while also having close relations with the Byzantines involving treaties and marriages). One criticism: the volume is slightly Islamophobic; it acts as if it is a genuine loss that Constantinople fell to Muslims rather than just a regime change. Bayezid I and Mehmet II are depicted in fairly negative terms, I do not know if this reflects a judicious assessment of historiography on them. Still a great end to a series that I have always liked, the description of the colossal efforts to take constantinople are a particular highlight.

Loved it. I want to read the other 2 but they seem to be out of print and rather pricey. /sigh

n  (16 July, 2020)n

Done! For some reason, this last part was much better than the other two. Norwich, perforce, spends more time on events outside of Constantinople and the end product is clear and intelligible, if anything in the Balkans and the Middle East can ever be described as such.

Anyhoo, having the entire Byzantine Empire history and the ridiculous western Church/eastern Church debacle reduced to 1000 pages or so seemed like an impossible task but J.J. made it work.

Today (24th of July, 2020) sees the return of Hagi Sofia in Istanbul to its use as a mosque. The present building was rebuilt by Justinian 1st (known as The Great) in the sixth century AD. The site served as the city's cathedral for over a thousand years before Constantinople (as it was then known) was captured by Sultan Mehmet The Conqueror. The Turkish sultan had the seat of Orthodox Christianity converted into a mosque, with the erection of minarets at each of its four corners. The interior walls, which were covered in mosaics depicting scenes from the bible and the devotions of Byzantine emperors, were plastered over, as Islam has taboos against the depiction of human and animal forms. In 1935, president Kemal Ataturk of the newly independent (and secular) Turkish state, had the building decommissioned as a mosque and handed over to the department of antiquities. What was left of the mosaics was re-exposed and the building re-opened as a museum to both its Christian and Moslem heritage. In this context, the set up of the interior reflected the building's use both as a mosque and Cathedral, so visitors were able to appreciate 17 centuries of religious devotion.

In November 1992, having newly arrived in the city, I tagged on to a group of tourists on a tour inside. I was struck by the sheer height and breadth of the building, and the fact I was wandering up & down staircases, in & out of side chambers, that had been constructed from huge slabs of stone by ancient Greeks. At the exit to the building, the guide stopped his listeners and put one hand on the wall at about shoulder height. He asked them to imagine the scene in 1453, when the old Byzantine capital was overrun by Turkish soldiers. He said, on the day the city fell, the conquerors were doing the traditional sacking of the city. Hagia Sophia was being used as a dumping place for the bodies of the slaughtered. It's unknown how many soldiers, civilians, women & children were killed. But the Sultan – “the Padishah” - came in to inspect the building. Tradition has it that he put his hand, which was covered in blood, on the wall, marking how high the corpses should be stacked before a halt would be called to the killing. It's an apocryphal tale which I haven't heard repeated again in twenty eight years of living in Turkey, but it has the ring of truth to it. In Julian of Norwich's third and final volume of “Byzantium”, subtitled “Decline and Fall”, the good lord tells us Mehmet called a halt to the slaughter after only one day, when according to Islamic practice, the normal length for sacking a city was three. But if you think that Mehmet - at just twenty-one years of age – was a merciful soul, please read this book.

I suppose the subtitle “Decline and Fall” is supposed to echo Gibbon's six volume history of the Roman Empire. At one point, the Romans even take centre stage in this account, as for more than half a century the Byzantine emperors were exiled from their own capital, and Constantinople was ruled by so-called Latins. But the whole decline is spread over four centuries: from the disastrous battle of Malazgirt (here called Manzikert) to the final capture of the imperial city by Mehmet the Conqueror. The rise and fall of the British Empire, if it's worth making comparisons, took less than half that time. If we measure the whole length of the Byzantine empire - from its foundation by Constantine the first, to its annihilation under Constantine Palaeologus - it's roughly seven times as long as it took India to gain independence from British rule.

As I've said in my reviews of previous volumes, the number of emperors here, several of whom barely qualify for two or three pages each, is daunting. Added to which is the difficulty of pronouncing some of their names. Comnenus, of whom there were no less than five, is a serious tongue-twister. Then there's Palaeologus – all nine of them (excluding non-emperors with the same name). Cantacuzenus, mercifully, makes only one appearance on the list (as John VI), but his career is spread over more than fifty pages.

Some do stand out. Alexius I Comnenus, who turned the Manzikert disaster around. Manzikert (1071) is rather like Hastings (1066) except that it marks - as Churchill might have said - the beginning of the end. Then there are the Anglo-Saxon warriors who escaped England after Hastings and who headed south to join the emperor's Varangian bodyguard. Alexius, who begins the process of paying off the empire's enemies, could be the corollary of William the Conqueror of England. But it's vain of me to try and draw comparisons between Byzantium and just about any other empire. Who or what could compare with the reign of John III Ducas Vatatzes, who spent thirty-three years ruling the empire in exile, but who died within a year of retaking the capital? At times the story reads more fantastical than some Star Wars saga. Somewhere along there are multiple emperors with names such as Manuel, Isaac, Theodore and Andronicus. How on earth students - or contestants on Mastermind – could consign half, or even a third, or these folk to memory boggles my mind.

The Fall itself should not go without some mention. I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone, though. Suffice to say, it does get somewhat emotional. There seem to be less of the blindings and defacings within the Byzantine camp, but there are some pretty gruesome accounts of impalement and beheadings as the net closes in. There's heroism and cowardliness, cruelty and compassion on both sides. The involvement of the Venetians and Genoese was an eye-opener for me, I knew they were around, but the extent the Empire was reliant on and subject to their colonisation was far greater than I could have imagined. The diaspora after the Fall is perhaps not so surprising, but definitely touching. The region has seen wave after wave of refugees going back five millennia and more.

I would feel a sense of loss coming to the end of this third and final volume. But... there's another I have yet to read. Norwich, I think realising he has covered too much ground to make cogent sense of it all, has written a single volume, condensed version. I have the book and sometime soon I shall dip again into the mysterious world of the Byzantines. They did, after all, keep Western civilisation going for centuries during what we call The Dark Ages. Even though the Greeks of medieval Athens considered them somewhat strange and foreign, they have inspired poets like Yeats. One day, I'm pretty sure Netflix will descend on this ready-made saga, which makes Game of Thrones look rather pedestrian and tame.

三部曲全部读完。

总的来说，由于拜占庭帝国的历史长达1123年零28天，想要尽数囊括在这三本不算特别厚的书里，实在是过于仓促了。而单纯从叙事的角度来看，作者对于历史素材的遴选，似乎也颇可商榷。最后再加上拜占庭人在起名上创意奇缺，导致无数同名人物叠加出现，因此整个三部曲的可读性一般，几乎也是必然的结果了。

With the initial two books of the trilogy behind and having read other volumes on the history of Byzantium, particularly its latter part, the ignominious end of the story was always in sight. It was perhaps this inevitability which caused me to zoom in on other elements which brought about the end of the Byzantine Empire than the territorial ambitions of the Ottoman Turks. Apart from the weakness of many of the emperors (this factor was mentioned in the context of the first two volumes of the trilogy) and the near constant domestic feuds within the Empire, two other factors sprang up.

The first was the unrelenting stance of the Roman Catholic Church. The power, both direct, military, and that of thought, commanded by the popes, if applied to the saving of the bulwark of Christianity, could have made significant difference in rallying the forces to the defence of the Empire. Instead, the parlous state of Byzantium was used for playing out the intra-Christian rivalry. Time after time, with a few notable exceptions, popes of Rome responded to the overtures from Constantinople in exactly the same way – insisting that acceptance of the supremacy of Rome would have to precede any military assistance. When that supremacy would be all but accepted, the envelope would be pushed further – into the dogma territory sacred to the Eastern rites – to a point where a popular outcry in Byzantium would bring any plans of the unification of churches crashing down, and with them – the emperors who tried to bring it about.

The second was the short-sightedness of Western Europe’s monarchs, many of whom saw the opportunity in Byzantium being weakened by the onslaught of Islam, rather than seeing the longer-term dangers inherent in the Muslim conquest. This short-sightedness would cost Europe dearly over the coming centuries. The absolute low point in this respect was the ignominious Fourth Crusade of 1204. Instead of (as originally intended) reconquering Muslim-held Jerusalem, at Venice’s behest it conquered Constantinople and installed a puppet Latin Emperor. Despite the Latin Empire lasting only half a century, the absence of a rightful unchallenged emperor caused the deterioration of the emperors’ standing, fragmentation of the Empire into several smaller quasi-Empires and the emergence of alternative statehoods, and thus irreparable damage to the Empire from which it would never recover. This situation would last until the fall of Constantinople, and a bit longer. Next to Venice, the top spot in terms of subverting the Byzantine Empire can safely go to the Normans of Sicily, whose imperious desires caused the Empire’s scarce resources to be diverted elsewhere than to the East where they were most needed.

Overall, a sad story and so reminiscent of many latter-day situations. Having finished the third volume shortly after the commencement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I could not resist seeing the parallels in the current situation. Instead of seeing the longer-term danger stemming from the rebirth of Russia’s imperious desires, and addressing it at an early stage, much of the West instead engaged in nurturing the expansive bear by engaging in trade bargains, often to Ukraine’s detriment. It seems that, as cultured as we may see ourselves, we appear to be committing the same mistakes over, and over.

A tragic ending to the series. The Komnenian Restoration was nice, but it held a tinge of pessimism, a warning of what was to come. The failure for the Byzantines to reconquer Anatolia proved to be fatal, alongside the crusading shenanigans the Western Europeans had gotten up to. Everything past the destructive Fourth Crusade feels hopeless, but it's oddly inspiring. They never gave up, they always tried. Constantine XI's last stand, or how it is reported, was truly honorable, and honestly I was getting a little teary reflecting on it. Wow. Already new the outline of the "story" myself, but it was told very well. I'd say in terms of complaints, some of the explanations of minute details could get a bit dry, a more so than in the previous two books, and also the epilogue of the book wasn't as fleshed out or detailed as I was expecting. But I think overall this is an amazing book. A 9/10 for me.

Three volumes history of the rise and fall of Byzantium and Norwich is brilliant. It's full of memorable characters, evil deeds and suspense and it's supremely erudite while being not just readable but fun to read. Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' has a worthy sequel in this.

John Julius Norwich was a great writer of lively and sparkling prose and a historian of varied quality. His best books were his earliest ones about the Normans in Sicily (rather like Stephen Runnciman who wrote about some of the eras and personalities as Norwich but who was a stronger historian) and his volumes on the history of Venice. It was probably Venice lead him to Byzantium and he wrote his first, rather good, volume on the history of Byzantium in 1988. His subsequent volumes, including this one did not appear until 1993 and 1995 and it is clear, particularly in this one, that he had lost the enthusiasm or at least the stamina for the task of writing such a long history.

I can't argue against the readability and charm of this volume but even in 1995 it was light on scholarship. As an amateur historian Norwich was an exemplar of a now extinct breed. Rich in knowledge of classical authors and medieval chroniclers (and rich in the funds which allowed him to do nothing but be an amateur historian) but light on knowledge derived from archaeology and other sciences. His books are a joy to read but are poor history. I could not recommend this book or any of his Byzantium books as reliable reading.

A fascinating, albeit depressing chronicle of the later years of the Byzantine Empire. Norwich gives us a picture, particularly after 1260 of an Empire surrounded by foes trying desperately to survive. We are given almost too much detail into the petty civil wars and diplomatic snafus that define the Paleologi dynasty. It is an interesting and very readable account. The history suffers from the problem of broad history's - focusing far too much on the people on top and leaving us to guess how life in the Empire for the non-aristocrat was like.