If ever you wanted evidence that epics are not confined to the mythical age, this would be it. The saga of the medieval Roman Empire can stand up to anything on fiction shelves, and Norwich possesses the unequal quality of being able to craft a good narrative out of history. He does the Byzantines' awfully sullied history a much needed degree of justice -- as well as distinguishing the actual faults they succumbed to in the end from the general miasma of slander agains thenm

However, he is of an era of Defending the West, and a bias for Christendom over the Islamic world is by no means subtle, even if he does recognise the qualities of the better Muslim rulers, as well as the great sins of the Crusader states.

The early centuries through to Justinian and Basil the Macedonian are particularly well handled in this abridgement, although in the years of decline following on from the Fourth Crusade, a density of names from usurpers and foreign agents make for a less clean story towards the very end.

For this reason, and regardless, one would do well to simultaneously read Judith Herrin's more thematic history: Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Together they make a great introduction to the Byzantines / the late Eastern Roman Empire.

One last thing, and it's only a nagging pet peeve, but: something compelled him to latinise the Greek names, which leads to regular monstrosities on the eyes like "Alexius Comnenus" (I shudder just to type it out).

Histoire de Byzance est un ouvrage extrêmement intéressant qui relate l’histoire d’un empire qu’on a souvent tendance à oublier aux travers surtout de ses empereurs aux personnalités fascinantes. John Julius Norwich est un auteur qui a beaucoup de choses à dire sur cette époque et bien que ce livre soit une version raccourcie de ses ouvrages sur Byzance, je l’ai trouvé riche en anecdotes et en personnages. Je pense que la grande valeur de cet ouvrage est la manière dont l’auteur arrive à mettre en évidence les personnalités diverses des empereurs de Byzance. Ce livre se lit vraiment comme une saga, on y découvre un bon nombre de complots et trahisons qui ont le mérite d’être aussi sordides que ceux de l’Empire romain. Le seul petit défaut que j’ai trouvé c’est que l’ouvrage manquait d’illustrations, que cela soit des photos des monuments ou d’œuvres d’arts ou même des descriptions plus précises de la vie byzantine en elle même qui auraient permis de mieux comprendre ce peuple. Malgré cela, L’Histoire de Byzance reste un très bon ouvrage qui met très bien en valeur cette période riche de l’histoire.

If Goodreads rating system went to 10 instead of 5 then I would give this book 9.5. Not because it doesn't deserve 10 but because I'm convinced it cannot be better than the three volumes that this is a condensed version of. The author admits that much has been left out in the production of this single volume and if I knew what I know now then I would have tried to obtain the original three volumes.

Having said that, this is a fantastic book for anyone who has more than a passing interest in Byzantium. It's a shame that we in the West know so little about Byzantium. Such a shame that the history of Byzantium has been sidelined and written out of what we teach in history. Hitler dreamt of a thousand year Reich - too late Adolf, Byzantium got there first. Not as a Nazi Reich you understand but as a magnificent Roman Empire stretching from Europe into Asia Minor and North Africa. Coupled with this Imperial Empire you also have the continuing history of the Orthodox church.

John Julius Norwich's book manage to twine together the historical and political story of the Western and Eastern Empires and also the intricacies of the relationship between the Latin and Eastern churches to produce what is to me a work of art. It's also a powerful book, almost reducing me to tears when reading about the final days of the Empire and the profane desecration of the Hagia Sophia, that majestic icon of the Orthodox church.

A must read.

An amazing story of the 1000 plus years of Byzantium. This is a huge amount of history to pack in. The author is keen to restore the reputation of this forgotten empire. Some of the language around ‘race’ and religion is dated and no longer holds up. The book has a bit of a ‘one damn thing after another’ quality. Important historical themes do emerge, but social and economic themes are subordinate to the rotating cast of Byzantine emperors.

History is my favourite reading and John Julius Norwich is one of my favourite authors. His trilogy of the history of Byzantium is in turns moving, sicking, frightening and funny. His short history condenses the whole three volumes into one without losing any of the narrative thrust of Byzantine history.

It naturally begins with the founding of the city by the Constantine (the Emperor who made christianity a state favoured religion and wh0 considered himself the thirteenth apostle) and covers Its trade with the vikings - the Emperor's historian daughter Anna Comen speaks of these huge blonds in quite breathless terms. Its invasion by Normans in the 4th Crusade - due to the machinations of the unscrupulous Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo, who was buried in the great cathedral -now mosque- Hagia Sophia. To the final fall, over a millennium after its founding, of the exhausted and impoverished city state to the Sultan Mehmed II- an event that put the city at the heart of a greater empire and gave it a new lease of live lasting a further thousand years. The name Instabul is a corruption of the name Konstantinoupolis, from the similar sounding Greek eis tin polin- come into the city. The City needing no other name as it was a jewel of the world.

Don't think of bone dry history, think of this book as Game of thrones with knobs on- but without dragons. There is war, politics, betrayal, love, stragegy (from the greek Strategos meaning a general in the Byzantine army. The book is choc-a-bloc with larger than life characters such as the Empress Irene (meaning Peace of God) who blinded and mutilated how only son to retain the reigns of power.

Norwich is a great writer lively,full of gossip and memorable. I read this book about 2 years ago and it still lives with me. I cannot recommend it enough. It will open your eyes if not your mind.
SitityRather than dry history -

I didn't finish this. By no means was this a bad book. In fact, I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a refresher on Byzantine history. "A Short History of Byzantium" is anything but short, but the author is hardly to blame. The history is expansive and even at 500 pages, so much is condensed that it all begins to blur together. What kept me going was the prose; the author knows his subject well and has a talent for telling it. Unfortunately the book is too dense to be considered a summary. I look forward to reading Norwich's original three part series on Byzantium in the future.

Roman Body, Greek Mind and Oriental Soul.

This book offers a quick and fascinating insight into the history of the Byzantium Empire. The writing is easy to understand, the analysis and point of view is fair and balanced. The story is epic. It is one of the greatest and most tragic in history and after years of blunders, intrigue, tragedy and politics it went down in glory. With the last Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus serving over 1100 years of history justice and honour. Like Rome itself this is a poetic symmetry begging and ending with Constantine (Rome began with Romulus, Imperial Rome with Augustus and ended with Romulus Augustulus).

This book of course could easily be 1500 pages long and would miss out key moments and exciting events. This is not the purpose here, this is an overview. The headlines of a long and complex history. It’s a starting point to understand the Eastern Empire and the history of Europe in general. The Byzantine Empire is so important in understanding Russia and the formation of the third Rome (Moscow). So much of the story of the emperors, their lives and fate is transferred to that of the Tsars.

Even though the book is short, I came away with a complete increase in knowledge. Why the Eastern and Western Church’s split, why the fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was devastating, why the Battle of Manzikert was a turning point. The influence of the Franks, Pope, Venice and Genoa and ultimately the Ottoman Sultans. Which emperors were good or great, which were bad and some that could have achieved greatness of not for the circumstances. I throughly enjoyed it and feel like I have a good overview, but not any expert knowledge. I would read this again or at least intend to use as a reference point.

So often the history of the Near East remains a mystery to us in the Anglo-sphere and it is a temptation to paint over this region with a broad brush.
Reading “A Short History of Byzantium”, I have come to appreciate the forgotten Roman Empire which lasted 1123 years, from 330 to 1453, and the innumerable accomplishments that occurred therein. A place with a Roman body, Greek mind, and Oriental soul, the intellectual, cultural, and theological contributions of Byzantium deserve their place among respectable histories that they have so long been denied in the Anglo-sphere.

This was the most engaging history book I have read yet. For about three weeks I was completely engrossed and have not forgotten some of the events. Incredible highs and lows all spanning centuries but with such enjoyable and easy to follow writing that it should not take the reader long to reach it's conclusion.

Usually, people give 3/5 stars when they didn't find in the book anything that would make them think it's very good or very bad. In my case, in "A Short History of Byzantium" I found both very good and very bad things, and they cancelled each other out.

Let's start with good things. "A Short History of Byzantium" is a shorter version of a trilogy on the history of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich. The idea was that many people won't read three thick books but can be persuaded to read one. So, the trilogy had to be cut down by two-thirds. It was a monumental task - 1150 years of history, full of emperors and generals, popes and patriarchs, wars, coups and intrigues, narrated on something about one page per year. And the history of Byzantium is not only about a country that no longer exists. It's in fact the same as the history of Greece, and what is now Turkey, it's a crucial part of the history of Balkans and Eastern Europe, and it's important if we want to understand something about the growth of Islam, crusades, and all the mess that was happening in Italy in Middle Ages. For that, "A Short History of Byzantium" is probably the most comprehensive guide. Read it, and then search elsewhere for details about each small part, already having the big picture in mind.

Unfortunately, the book is also full of bad things. Maybe not errors - I'm definitely not qualified to talk about historical errors here - but rather stylistic mistakes which make it difficult for me to recommend the book as a reliable source of information about Byzantium. Some of those mistakes clearly come from the fact the book is a shortened version of a trilogy. There are too many characters mentioned at once, many of them with the same name. The author often mentions the whole name and position of a given person once and then carries on, using the first name of that person for the next twenty or thirty pages, full of histories of people who are also called by their first name only. It happens from time to time that it's the same name. Also, sometimes the dates or places' names contain a typo, and I think at some point two characters were mistaken for one another in one sentence. Clearly, editing could be better.

But some mistakes are not faults of bad editing, but conscious decisions of the author to write in a certain way. The most prominent of them, in my opinion, is that Norwich ends a chapter about each emperor with a summary of his reign and those summaries are 90% positive. It reads almost like propaganda and it's very much at odds with historical facts we've just read about. The history of Byzantium is full of tyranny, bad decisions, civil wars, coups, and torturing and killing of fallen emperors. There are whole periods where the empire crumbles, suffers devastation, people die in thousands in horrible ways, and all this is clearly the fault of the emperors, not of foreign invaders, but at the same time Norwich summarizes the lives of those emperors as if they were good people, patriotic, religious, who wanted the best for their country... and they were maybe a bit unlucky.
There are also prejudices Norwich shows from time to time. There were periods when women ruled Byzantium - mothers, and wives of emperors who died leaving no heir, or were too young or too old to rule by themselves. Just as the author tries to show almost every emperor in good light, it's hard to find one positive sentence from him about empresses. Often they are scapegoats - if an emperor did something wrong, and there was a prominent woman at his side, Norwich will write it's her fault. He also seems to be biased towards Catholicism or at least Catholicism and the traditional Orthodoxy. Arians, monophysites, and other minor religious movements and their leaders, are described as little more than troublemakers. Again, they're scapegoats used to show emperors in a better light. It's their fault that there were civil wars and riots, that Byzantium couldn't have better relations with the West, etc.

These two biases - against women and against non-traditional religious movements - are in my opinion major drawbacks and the reason why I can't give the book more than 3/5. But if you're able to spot them and know where to look for more information, "A Short History of Byzantium" might be a good book for you.

norwich is like the batty old art history professor you had in college who seemed more interested in the scandalous stories behind the scenes of each moment in history than the traditional information that fills the usual history texts. he tells the history of byzantium in such a fun and lightning-paced way. its like a circus soap opera riding through history on a speeding roller coaster. its great fun reading about all the intrigue, scandal and destruction throughout the empire, and norwich revels in every minute of it. you can almost hear him snickering along at certain points of absurdity. if you want a dry recollection of historical dates then this isn't for you. but if you want an almost hilarious telling of the specific individuals, scandals and stories of an underrated and often forgotten empire and its people then this is for you.

The full history of Byzantium is richer and deserves more detail even in a shortened attempt.381 pages is the short version. In this rendition of Byzantium, one would think the empire were a one note song played out over a thousand years. The text is wash and repeat of Emperor rises, marries a cousin or daughter of an enemy; their child rises to banish or kill off the parents. The Emperor fights to the north and south. The Venetians are partially reliable partners. The schisms of the Church are never resolved.