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.

Why do the Greeks hold Tuesday to be unlucky? Why were the Hesychats real navel gazers? Why did the Russian use the double headed eagle in their coat of arms and how did Moscow become known as the third Rome? Why must you never trust a Venetian or a Genoese? Why were the Crusades a ultimately disaster for Christendom? Why were there three Popes ruling at one time? Why was the ugly looking John called beautiful? Why was Andronicus terrible? Which Pope, a former pirate was deposed by a general council after being found guilty of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest (these were not the worst crimes apparently - the most scandalous charges were suppressed)?
Answers to all these questions along with a heartbreaking final chapter describing the final tragic, heroic fall of Constantinople are found in this, the final volume of Norwich's History of Byzantium.

Again wonderful work on Byzantine tragedy, series of tragical times for whole Christendom.

Frankokratia and Latinokratia derive from the name given by the Orthodox Greeks to the Western French and Italians who originated from territories that once belonged to the Frankish Empire.

So Greek brotherhood, kinship is well placed in Rome, Macedonia(Slavic) and France. (Apart from that there was large migration of Greeks to Poland itself, indeed, in XX c. )

Also about crusades,and event that caused them all, Crusade of the Paupers, peoples crusade, Rhineland massacres, also known as the German Crusade - series of mass murders of Jews perpetrated by mobs of German Christians

About Emir nur Ed-Din whos victory at battlein of Inab was motive for secend crusade. And victory of Zangid dynasty, that was a Muslim dynasty of Oghuz Turkic origin, which ruled parts of the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia on behalf of the Seljuk Empire.

About Council of Clermont, an assembly for church reform called by Pope Urban IIon November 18, 1095, which became the occasion for initiating the First Crusade. The Council was attended largely by bishops of southern France as well as a few representatives from northern France and elsewhere. - And deus volult cry.

About attack in 1156 on Cyprus Raynald of Châtillon and Thoros II, Prince of Armenia. Garrison defended bravely by distinguished general Michael Branas.

About The Treaty or Peace of Venice, 1177, was a peace treaty between the papacy and its allies, the north Italian city-states of the Lombard League, and Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. - And yes Venice back then was Power No1, before Mediterranean sea became just sea, and oceans took its place in trade.

About

Germany that was torn apart by civil war over the succession and England and France has been similar.
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So in England Norman Conquest, after the Battle of Hastings (October 14, 1066) resulting ultimately in profound political, administrative, and social changes in the British Isles.

Was prelude to yet another threat, in spite of Battle of Gisors that was victorus of English, Richard the Lionheart,was shot in the shoulder with an crossbow bolt, at siege of Châlus-Chabro. The wound turned gangrenous, and he died on 6 April 1199.

And so Treaty of Le Goulet was proclamied for over the Duchy of Normandy and finalising the new borders of what was left of the duchy.

The English sovereigns continued to claim them until the Treaty of Paris (1259) but in fact kept only the Channel Islands.

And finally about Battle of the Maritsa River that was disaster not only for Serbs, but for Byzantine and truly whole of Christendom. No longer was there any barrier for invaders to invade Serbia, Macedonia and Greece. Surviving nobility of Serbia became vassals of Turkish overlords, bound to recognize suzerainty of the ottoman sultans.

So Hundred Years' Croatian–Ottoman War ended with startup of The Long Turkish War or Thirteen Years' War , Peace of Zsitvatorok ended Long Turkish and Fifteen Years' War between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy .
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And this
The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453, died in 1481, and his two sons Cem and Bayezid fought a civil war over who would succeed him.

Desperate for money, Andreas sold his rights to the Byzantine crown in 1494 to Charles VIII of France, who attempted to organize a crusade against the Ottomans. The sale was conditional on Charles, who Andreas hoped to use as a champion against the Ottomans, conquering the Morea and granting it to Andreas.

Andreas Palaiologos sold all his titles to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.

Enjoyed the all although it was a lot of reading, and now I'm begging for polish literature.

Finished the whole series now. It was a wild ride. I put this one off because I thought it would be depressing, but not so much. It has re-stirred those romantic yearnings to visit the Orient again. This is a fabulous series as a whole and important for anyone who loves reading non-fiction history. Byzantium lives on!

Great read

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.

Yesterday, December 24 at 11:48 at night, I finished reading the third and last volume of Byzantium. It is a story whose melancholy increases as we flip the pages. In this last volume, the Empire is like a bonfire (or a pyre?) whose refulgence is still intense and bright by the time of the arrival of the first Crusaders, when Alexis I Komnenos was emperor and the empire could still be proudly called Empire. And then, gradually and inexorably, the fire begins to fade, and worse: the flames are not extinguished by itself or by the Islamic powers of Asia but by their Christian brethren of Europe.

By the envy of princelings of Eastern Europe, by the Franks of the Crusades, and to a much larger extent by the commercial empires of Venice and Genoa, for which their main credo was their own economic welfare at the expense of anything that stood on their way. La Serenissima and Genoa lose face in this story. Towards the end, there is a ray of hope when the (until then) invincible Ottoman army is humiliated by Timur and his Mongols, but Constantinople was already weak due to internal fractures, civil war, and low morale.

I want to share the following passage from the book. It is Monday, May 28, 1453. Mehmet II, camped outside the city walls, has ordered his army to dedicate the day to reflection and prayer. The sun is silently setting.

"Dusk was falling. From all over the city, as if by instinct, the people were making their way to the church of the Holy Wisdom [St. Sophia]... St Sophia was, as no other church could ever be, the spiritual centre of Byzantium. For eleven centuries, since the days of the son of Constantine the Great, the cathedral church of the city had stood on that spot; for over nine of those centuries the great gilded cross surmounting Justinian's vast dome had symbolized the faith of city and Empire. In this moment of supreme crisis, there could be nowhere else to go.
That last service of vespers ever to be held in the Great Church was also, surely, the most inspiring. Once again, the defenders on the walls were unable to desert their posts; but virtually every other able-bodied man, woman and child in the city crowded into St Sophia to take the Eucharist and to pray together, under the great golden mosaics that they knew so well, for their deliverance. The Patriarchal Chair was still vacant; but Orthodox bishops and priests, monks and nuns... were present in their hundreds…”

Imagine yourself crossing the threshold of Hagia Sophia as a random tourist visiting Istanbul. You’re wearing blue jeans, white sneakers, and a t-shirt with the Nike logo on it.

Now imagine yourself crossing the threshold after having read the above passage. The distance is unmeasurable, isn’t it?

Now imagine you are entering the church on 28 May 1453.

The final volume in Norwich's history of Byzantium is a satisfying but perhaps too brief look at the last centuries and the fall of this once great empire.

The book starts with the brilliant reign of Alexios Komnenos, followed by the many crusades, the gradual disintegration of the empire, the turkish onslaught and ends with the last of the Palaiologian emperors. There are about 400 years of history in just as many pages.

The ending feels a bit too rushed and would have liked to get more information about the fall of the last Byzantine remnants in Morea and Trebizond. Instead, after the fall of Constantinople the author just mentions the brief dates that these places were conquered and not much else. The enclave of Theodoro in Crimea is not even mentioned even though it was only conquered in 1475 by the Ottomans making it the last outpost of the empire to fall.

All in all this three book series has been a satisfying summary of the Byzantine Empire. Norwish is a fantastic and engaging storyteller and he manages to pack hundreds of years of history, events and characters into a streamlined story.

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.

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.

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.

Third and final volume in a great history of The Byzantine Empire. Fascinating reader.