Norwich has a special gift for infusing the past with a special vitality: reading this you really feel as if the events happened yesterday, not 1000 years ago. Perhaps that is why I really enjoyed reading this and coming back to it, even though I was a young child when I first broached it. The fascinating history of Byzantium doesn't hurt, either.

This book is deserving of more than just five stars; it needs a 10 star rating, because it really was a wonderful book. The ending of this book was written in a way that made me feel like I was getting ready to cry; it is those kinds of books that are well written. The author wrote a 3 volume series on Byzantium, and this book was his compression of that into one book, and I imagine his 3 volume series is just as great, if not better. I was glad I picked this book from the shelf of my local library. History buffs, I recommend this book to you, because you'll love it.

I took a lot away from this book. So much tragedy, so many things that could've been better, and even more saddening is a great empire with it's culture was lost forever. I took a medieval history class at the beginning of this year, and I will tell you I learned more from John Julius Norwich than I probably could ever learn from any college textbook. It is books like these that encourage me to read, because books are much more informational than classes, TV shows, and documentaries. I will admit, I think the history of Byzantium is deserving of a historically accurate (maybe even historical fiction) TV series focused around Constantinople, the emperors, and the history of this nation. Maybe something like that would enlighten more people about this empire and it's significance in history.

After reading this book, I came away with an enlightenment about this empire, and I admit that now I am a fan of Byzantine history, more than I ever was before.

What a great beginning! First comes a date I can easily remember: the Byzantine Empire was founded by Constantine the Great on Monday, May 11, 330. Then Norwich quotes Alice In Wonderland: "Begin at the beginning, and go on until you come to the end: then stop." Very promising indeed!

What a great ending! Norwich is a nonfiction author who can use prose and present his story as effectively as a great novelist. I expected that the end would be depressing (as I observed years ago, everyone dies at the end when you're reading nonfiction) but I didn't expecting it to be beautiful and satisfying.

Everything in between was great too. In general, this is a great book, but I read it way too fast. I hope to read the three volume edition next year, just to be fair to the author and Byzantium. I also want to be fair to myself by giving myself a chance to learn a great deal about Byzantium --- I can't retain many details when they are coming at me as thick and fast as they do in this history (though the fact that they came too fast was my fault. . .).

Several interesting observations:

(1) The Byzantine Empire contained much fear of religion, but little fear of God.

(2) Considering the fact that people can't go around assassinating presidents and setting up new leaders with minimal difficulty and protestation from the people, I'd say we in the United States should be pretty thankful.

(3) According to Norwich, every last emperor died either too soon or too late.

(4) According to me, every last emperor was not the sort of person I'd like to meet in a dark alley. That may be a slight exaggeration, but it's certainly true of the majority of emperors.

In conclusion, I'm glad the bit we learned in school about Byzantium made me want to learn more, and that this book made itself available as a source that could teach me! I suggest reading it when you can take plenty of time and many, many notes (Guess who didn't do that. . .). It's very fast-paced book --- how else do you cover 1,123 years and 18 days of history in 383 pages? --- but should be read and savoured unless you're reading simply for entertainment. It does offer colorful entertainment, that's a fact!

Learning about a forgotten corner of history the impacted so much of the medieval and modern world. My only complaint was that in turning his huge history of Byzantium into a single book, Norwich often removes narrative connecters and the flow of reading from paragraph to paragraph can be fairly jagged. But the book is still extremely thourough. If a fact, anecdote, or moment of Byzantine history if left out of this book, you didn't need to know about it.

Greed? Check. Ambition? Check. Murder? Check. If “Game of Thrones” isn’t quite doing it for you, consider checking out John Julius Norwich’s “A Short History of Byzantium.”

Most of us (in America, at least) have a Byzantium-sized hole in our knowledge of the history of the Middle Ages. Which is a shame, because if ever there was a historical model for walking the line between East and West, it was Byzantium. This book is actually a distillation of a much larger 3 volume set. As such, it does feel a bit rushed and it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with all the names, dates, and places. But overall, Norwich does a pretty good job of bringing some of the more colorful episodes to life and he can’t help himself from occasionally inserting some British dry humor. Although Norwich does his best to keep the pace brisk and lively, the book still feels like it drags on a bit, particularly towards the end.

Still, the book was a great introduction to Byzantium and I’m inclined to read Norwich’s other book on the history of the papacy.

Some of the best quotes below:

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# Constantine the Great
No ruler in all history has ever more fully merited his title of “the Great”; for within the short space of some fifteen years he took two decisions, either of which alone would have changed the future of the civilized world. The first was to adopt Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second was to transfer the capital of that Empire from Rome to the new city which he was building on the site of old Byzantium and which was to be known, for the next sixteen centuries, by his name: Constantinople. Together, these two decisions and their consequences have given him a serious claim to be considered - excepting only Jesus Christ, the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed - the most influential man in all history.

The battle of the Milvian Bridge made Constantine absolute master of all Europe. It also marked, if not his actual conversion to Christianity, at least the moment when he set himself up as a protector and patron of his Christian subjects.

# Julian the Apostate
His real tragedy lies not in his misguided policies or in his early death, but in the hairsbreadth by which he failed to achieve the greatness which he in so many ways deserved… he also possessed two faults, which made any lasting achievement impossible: first, his religious fanaticism; second, a lack of sharpness and definition in his thinking.

# Empire at Bay (Theodosius)
It was a turning-point in the history of Christendom - the first time that a Churchman had had the courage to assert the rights of the spiritual power over the temporal and the first time that a Christian prince had publicly submitted to judgement, condemnation and punishment by an authority which he recognized as higher than his own.

# Rise of Justinian
It has seemed worth describing the religious riots in some detail simply to emphasize that aspect of daily life in Byzantium the twentieth century finds hardest to comprehend: the involvement by all classes of society in what appear today to be impossibly abstruse doctrinal issues

In Tribonian, Justinian found the one man capable of bringing a long-cherished dream to fruition. This was a complete recodification of the Roman law, removing all repetitions and contradictions, ensuring that there was nothing incompatible with Christian teaching, substituting clarity and concision for confusion and chaos.

Belisarius was a supreme strategist and superb commander; there was only one quality that he lacked: the ability to inspire the loyalty of his subordinates

# Justinian - The Last Years
There is no more convincing testimony to the ability of Belisarius than the collapse of Byzantine power in Italy after his departure in 540.

Economically, despite all his efforts, Justinian left the Empire prostrate: for that reason alone, he cannot be considered a truly great ruler… more than any other monarch in the history of Byzantium, he stamped the Empire with his own character.

# The First Crusader
The appearance of the Emperor Phocas was distinctly unprepossessing. Under a tangle of red hair, his thick, beetling eyebrows met across his nose; the rest of his face was deformed by a huge, angry scar that turned crimson when he was aroused, giving it a still more hideous aspect. He was not, however, as pleasant as he looked. Debauched, drunken and pathologically cruel, he loved nothing more than the sight of blood.

On 14 September 628, Heraclius entered his capital in triumph. Before him went the True Cross… it was, perhaps, the most moving moment in the history of the Great Church.

Without his leadership, Constantinople might well have fallen to the Persians, and would then inevitably have been engulfed by the Muslim tide, with consequences for Western Europe that can scarcely be imagined.

# Iconoclasm
But Leo conferred a still greater benefit on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and sceptre, the Emperor of the Romans… By what authority, then, was his extraordinary step taken? The answer to this question leads us to the most momentous - and the most successful - fraud of the Middle Ages: that known as the Donation of Constantine, according to which Constantine the Great diplomatically retired to the “province” of Byzantium, leaving his imperial crown for the Pope to bestow on whomsoever he might select as temporal Emperor of the Romans. It was a totally spurious document, but it was to prove of inestimable value to the papal claims for well over 600 years.

# The Images Restored
This decade saw the rise of Krum, the most formidable leader the Bulgars had ever produced.

Charlemagne’s Empire was soon to disintegrate. But the Pax Nicephori is no less important for that. It marked the acceptance, for the first time, of two simultaneous Roman Emperors, genuinely independent of each other, each pursuing his own policies but at the same time recognizing and respecting the claims of his counterpart. In doing so, it created the mould in which later medieval Europe was to be formed.

To say that Michael II ascended the Byzantine throne with blood on his hands is an understatement. Many other Emperors, to be sure, had done the same; none, however, had dispatched his predecessor more cold-bloodedly, or with less excuse… His motivation, in short, was ambition alone.

[Of Theophilus] Like his exemplar, the great Caliph Harun al-Rashid, he early adopted the habit of wandering incognito through the streets of Constantinople, listening to the grievances of the people and endlessly investigating prices - especially of food.

John… had also been given 36,000 gold pieces to distribute as he liked… where all this wealth came from remains a mystery… he could never have saved a quarter of the amount his son dispensed with such largesse. Yet Theophilus never ran into debt and was to leave his treasury a good deal fuller than he found it. Some time towards the end of Michael’s reign, therefore, the Empire must suddenly have had access to a new and seemingly inexhaustible source of wealth, possibly the opening of certain gold mines in Armenia; but we shall never know.

# Of Patriarchs and Plots
In the high summer of the year 860, the people of Constantinople underwent as terrifying an experience as any of them could remember. Suddenly on the afternoon of 18 June, a fleet of some 200 ships from the Black Sea appeared at the mouth of the Bosphorus and made its way towards the city, plundering the monasteries that lined the banks… it was the Byzantines first real confrontation with the Russians. The leaders were probably not Slavs at all but Norsemen.

Does this mean that the baby boy, Leo, to who she gave birth on 19 September 866 was not Basil’s child but Michael’s? If so, what we call the Macedonian dynasty was simply a continuation of the Amorian; we shall never know.

Basil’s ambition had been fulfilled. The transition from stable-boy to Emperor had taken him just nine years.

In little over a decade, the illiterate Armenian peasant, who had reached the throne by way of the two vilest murders that even Byzantium could recall, had proved himself the greatest emperor since Justinian.

# The Scholar Emperor [Constantine Porphyrogenitus]
From his father Leo the Wise he had inherited a passion for books and scholarship which he had had plenty of time to indulge; and the body of work he left behind him is impressive by any standards. No other Emperors have contributed so much to our knowledge of their time.

As recently as 928 the infamous Marozia, Senatrix of Rome - mistress, mother and grandmother of Popes - had had her mother’s lover, Pope John X, strangled in the Castel Sant’Angelo in order ultimately to install her son by her own former paramour, Pope Sergius III.

# The Tale of Two Generals
[John Tzimisces] In his short reign, he proved himself one of the very greatest of the Byzantine Emperors. He had conquered the Russians, the Bulgars, and the Caliphs of both Baghdad and Cairo; he had regained the greater part of Syria and the Lebanon, of Mesopotamia and Palestine. He had been admired by allies and enemies alike for his courage, his chivalry, his compassion. His radiant personality, like his golden armour, leaves us dazzled. Yet it can never quite blind us to another, darker vision: that of a pitiful misshapen heap lying huddled on a palace floor, while another figure - spare, sinewy and immensely strong - gazes contemptuously down, and kicks.

# The Bulgar Slayer
How, he asked him, could he best guard against any further rebellions by the ‘powerful’? Sclerus recommended that they should be kept on the tightest of reins, taxed to the hilt, financially persecuted, even deliberately and unfairly victimized; they would then be far too preoccupied to pursue any schemes of personal ambition. Basil remembered those words for the rest of his life.

There she [Anna] and Vladimir were duly married… the Prince of Kiev was baptized by the local bishop in the most fateful religious ceremony in Russian history. The conversion of Vladimir marked the entry of Russia into the Christian fold.

Poor Zoe: if she and Otto had had a son, he might have inherited not only the Western Empire but - in the absence of any other male heir - the Eastern as well, uniting them at last and ruling from France to Persia; and the history of the world would have been changed.

It was now that Basil meted out the punishment for which he is chiefly remembered. Of each hundred prisoners, ninety-nine were blinded; to oneman a single eye was left, that he might conduct the remainder to the presence of their king… at the sight of his once-splendid army Samuel, already a sick man, collapsed in a fit of apoplexy, dying two days later.

He had been a phenomenon: effortlessly dominating Church and State and - by virtue of his ability to combine the strategic vision of a commander-in-chief with the meticulous attention to detail of a drill-sergeant - showing himself one of the most brilliant generals the Empire had ever seen. More remarkable still… he was utterly devoid of glamour. His campaigns generated no thunder or lightning. Under him the imperial army was more like a flood of volcanic lava, advancing slowly but inexorably. After his youthful humiliation at Trajan’s Gate - which he never forgot, and for which the entire Bulgarian war was, in a sense, an act of revenge - he took few risks and suffered few casualties. But although he was trusted by his troops, they never loved him. No one ever did. No lonelier man ever occupied the Byzantine throne… Basil was ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, philistine and almost pathologically mean… he cared only for the greatness of his Empire. No wonder that in his hands it reached its apogee.

# The Decline Begins
… Michael V proceeded to his consecration. No Emperor ever had less title to the throne. His birth was lowly, his military record non-existent. He owed his elevation to the machinations of a self-seeking minister and to the weakness of a foolish old woman.

Tuesday, 20 April 2014, was one of the bloodiest days that Constantinople had seen in all its history. In that one day over 3,000 perished. In the early hours of Wednesday morning the palace fell and the whole vast complex of buildings was overrun by a frenzied mob, pillaging and looting wherever it went but with one supreme objective in mind: to find the Emperor and kill him.

# Manzikert
The battle of Manzikert was the greatest disaster suffered by the Empire in the seven and a half centuries of its existence… the fate of the Emperor, too, was unparalleled since the capture of Valerian by the Persian King Shapur I in AD 260… thus it came about that tens of thousands of Turkoman tribesmen swarmed into Anatolia… The Empire still retained western Asia Minor and its former Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts; but it had lost at a single stroke the source of much of its grain and more than half its manpower.

# Alexius Comnenus
Sichelgaita needs some explanation. She was cast in a Wagnerian mould, the closest approximation in history to a Valkyrie. A woman of immense build, she hardly ever left her husband’s side - least of all in battle, one of her favourite occupations. At such moments, charging into the fray, her long blonde hair streaming from beneath her helmet, deafening friend and foe alike with huge shouts of encouragement or imprecation, she must have looked - even if she did not altogether sound - worthy to take her place beside Brunnhilde herself.

Antioch fell to Crusader arms; and finally on 15 July 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, slaughtering all the Muslims in the city and burning all the Jews alive in the main synagogue.

# Manuel Comnenus
He gained many victories, but he consolidated none of them; and he left the Empire in a worse state than he found it.

# The Fourth Crusade
It remained only for the Saracens to mop up the isolated Christina fortresses one by one. When they came to Jerusalem, its defenders resisted heroically for twelve days… Saladin’s magnanimity was already celebrated. Every Christian, he decreed, would be allowed to redeem himself by payment of a suitable ransom… Everywhere, order was preserved. There was no murder, no bloodshed, no looting. Few Christians ultimately found their way to slavery.

Thus it was the Venetians who were the real beneficiaries of the Fourth Crusade; and their success was due, almost exclusively, to Enrico Dandolo.

# Exile and Homecoming
From the start, the Latin Empire of Constantinople had been a monstrosity. In the fifty-seven years of its existence it had achieved nothing, contributed nothing, enjoyed not a moment of distinction or glory… But the dark legacy that it left behind affected all Christendom - perhaps all the world.For the Greek Empire never recovered from the damage, spiritual as well as material, of those fateful years… now that unity was gone. There were the Emperors of the Trebizond… There were the Despots of Epirus… how, fragmented as it was, could the Greek Empire continue as the last great eastern bulwark of Christendom against the Islamic tide?

# The Angevin Threat
Michael Palaeologus is principally remembered today for the recovery of the capital, for which he deserves little of the credit. But then he was never really a soldier-Emperor; he was above all a diplomat, perhaps the most brilliant that Byzantium ever produced.

# The Two Andronici
The battle of Pelekanos marked the first personal encounter between an Emperor of Byzantium and an Ottoman Emir. It had not been a disaster, but it had shown that the Turkish advance in Asia Minor was unstoppable.

# The Reluctant Emperor
In the spring of 1347 Constantinople was stricken by the Black Death. One contemporary chronicler claims that it eliminated eight-ninths of the entire population.

# The Sultan's’ Vassals
When in 1389 Sultan Murad advanced on to the plain of Kosovo, ‘the field of blackbirds’, they were there to meet him. The battle that followed on 15 June has entered Serbian folklore and has inspired one of the greatest of all medieval epics; but the Serbs’ defeat was total.

# The Fall
But the problem of manpower was more serious still: a census of all able-bodied men in the city, including monks and clerics, capable of manning the walls amounted to just 4,983 Greeks and rather less than two thousand foreigners. To defend fourteen miles of wall against Mehmet’s army of a hundred thousand, Constantine could muster less than seven thousand men.

He [Mehmet II] had achieved his ambition. Constantinople was his. He was just twenty-one years old.

# Epilogue
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… eighty-eight men and women occupied the imperial throne… a few - Constantine himself, Justinian, Heraclius, the two Basils, Alexius Comnenus - possessed true greatness; a few - Phocas, Michael III, Zoe, and the Angeli - were contemptible; the vast majority were brave, upright, God-fearing men who did their best, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Byzantium may not have lived up to its highest ideals, but it certainly did not deserve the reputation which, thanks largely to Edward Gibbon, it acquired in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Byzantines were, on the contrary, 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; a society which alone preserved much of the heritage of Greek and Latin antiquity.

One of the first and most brilliant of twentieth-century Philhellenes, 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

Un livre historique génial. Ça faisait longtemps que je n'en avais pas lu et quel plaisir de reprendre par un livre d'une elle qualité. Tout y est bien expliqué et on a également droit à tout un tas d'anecdotes très drôle. Un incontournable pour découvrir l'Empire Romain d'Orient.

This is an abridged version, but still rather long, though not for the very long history of this Empire.

This is dynastic history--the story of the kings and queens, their coups and battles. Quite well done and well-written, it certainly gives one a sense of the vigor of this civilization.

That said, I'd like to know more about the economy, ecology, the cultural and daily life of the Empire. Still, I can't fault the author for writing the book he did.

Summary of his standard work in three parts. Method: description per emperor, with accent on the events around the court. So above all a military-political history; economics and culture are grossly neglected. And no synthesis. Also peculiar: Norwich sides for or against the main players.

Good amount of detail for such a large period of history to overview, with the right amount of depth at certain points to keep you hooked in the story of this period of history. Would recommend!

What a thrilling and spectacular read, encompassing eleven and half centuries of Byzantine history in fewer than 400 pages. John Julius Norwich is a virtuoso of the English language - vivid yet succinct, subtle but potent, no part of this book ever threaten to be boring even as the narrative turns increasingly upsetting and desperate. The last chapter depicting the eventual fall of Constantinople is nothing short of an epic and brings all the emotional catharsis and reflections to a satisfying end. The epilogue synthesizes this millennium long narrative by honoring the profound humanity displayed in the story of Byzantium and the unparalleled virtue, glory, and legend the Byzantines had achieved in the process, despite all their limitations.

This is the perfect history book and epitomizes why we fall in love with history: only in the greatest struggles do we see the noblest of human spirit. With our faith reinvigorated, we can face the world with newfound courage and integrity, ready to do our best and strive for the highest ideals, just like the people and emperors of the bygone Empire in the East.

Fascinating, if difficult keeping emperor names straight -- some great leaders, some tyrants, most good enough if unremarkable. All willing to kill to claim ascendancy. I see now that 'dark age' empires were/are little different from cartels. Norwich does an admirable job of keeping this narrative interesting amusing and defending the Byzantines as the most developed culture (in terms of art and literacy) in the world at that time. Byzantium was always under threat from outside forces, other rulers scheming on its wealth. Yet this empire survived for nearly 1200 years. Reading this, I got an overall view of the age, its violent between state dynamic, internal early Christian conflicts between Eastern and Western Christianity, and within Orthodox Christianity itself.

This is history the way you always wished it could be but never is. It is a scarcely-believable catalogue of violent deaths (try being pierced at close range by hundreds of arrows until you bleed slowly to death), sexual intrigues (one Empress had specially-trained geese to peck corn from her nether regions), and religious oddities (men who live their whole lives on top of a column, for instance).

With barbarian hordes, crusading knights, treasures and quests, the whole thing is like Tolkien got together with David Lynch to invent something that you could never get away with if it were fiction.

There are times, especially near the beginning and end, where you can tell that this has been abridged from the three-volume edition (which doesn't seem to be easily available any more). But on the whole it's a very enjoyable and fascinating canter through a period of history which is still not well known, and which is the link from the classical world to the mediaeval world. Great fun.