It’s hard coming to the end of this magnificent trilogy. Norwich has written quite a masterpiece of history—this final part being no exception. The last forty pages were the culmination of 11 centuries. I was struck by how awing it must have been to be one of those defenders the night before the fall of Constantinople; the despair was tangible through Norwich’s prose.

It’s strange to see something you have been illogically rooting for, since the first book, be brought so low an innumerable amount of times. Each part of this trilogy has its own villains—the Popes, the Emperors themselves and their wives, or the barbarians to the north and west— but this one had proven the true enemy to be the ITALIANS. God, I will never forgive the Venetians and Genoese their intriguing and perfidy for what they did to my precious Byzantium. I don’t know why I now have a para-social relationship with this now forgotten civilization but I do.

“That is why five and a half centuries later…it is the Land Walls—broken, battered, but still marching from sea to sea—that stand as the city’s grandest and most tragic monument.”

The third and final volume of Norwich's trilogy on the Byzantine civilization carries the empire through the Crusades, the rise of the Ottoman threat, and the disintegration - through internal miscalculation and external apathy - of the culture that kept Greek and Roman influence alive throughout the Dark Ages.

Standing as a bulwark against the ravaging hordes of the East, she provided safe passage for resentful religious armies intent on "liberating" Jerusalem, came frequently to the negotiating table in an attempt to heal her rift with the Latin papacy, and succumbed to the role of your basic marketing hockey puck through centuries of ruthless full-body checks between the shipping magnates of Venice and Genoa.

These are the sad years, rife with ineffectual leadership and short-term solutions, sacrifice and loss. Norwich catalogues it all, and honors this titanic kingdom in full as it fades forever from view.

Great trilogy, magnificient history of Byzantium..

Please see my review of Byzantium: The Early Centuries, which covers this volume as well.

Having read all three volumes of Byzantium by Norwich, I found that they filled in the blank spaces of my knowledge of medieval history, especially of the Levant and Greece, where I had roamed much of my mature youth in my 20's up to my 50's (and still roaming). My reading of Norwich's trilogy eventually revitalized my interest in ancient Rome and the history of the Church. Having travelled and lived in these areas before I read the trilogy, I found myself "connecting the dots" so often that I kept copious notes on tiny notebooks (my way of consuming a well written book).

The richness with which Norwich writes drives the narrative forward. I loved this intellectual light that shone down dark paths of my ignorance and capturing subjects that, being married into the Greek culture, I had to know perforce. By the time I finished reading the trilogy, I found that I was ahead on many points of accuracy on the other side of what most people who had grown up with this history that had been passed down to them through osmosis.

Now I would like to go to Runciman, whose name even sounds medieval and whose books I saw in a Beirut bookstore in the 60's and had vowed to read but never got around to it and then of course, Gibbon.

Note: Jan 2014 The whole trilogy: Early Centuries, Apogee, Decline and Fall is some of the best popular writing of history as I've ever read. It's a long read and a slow one because of the detail. You want to hold each page on your tongue like a rich chocolate bon-bon and wish that it would melt into your brain. I intend to read the whole trilogy again very soon. The history of Byzantium links for the modern student of history the ancient age with the beginning of the modern.
15 likes

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.

4.5 / 5.0

Wonderful Finish to Trilogy

the most recent take on this huge subject starts with the First Crusade and carries the view to the end and just into the 16th century following the descendants of the last families. Yep that's over 400 years in a little under 500 pages. I guess economy is the watchword for our times.

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.

Fantastic end of the series that first sparked my interest in the Byzantine Empire!

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

The last in the series is an ever-more dizzying whirligig of passing characters and incidents, few of them with enough purchase for this to be more than a shallow parade. Maybe that is the nature of the subject matter, given the sources – but who were these people?

Among the positives, what does stand out is that the Roman Empire, for some time before the end came, was at last truncated to a few scraps of land around Constantine’s city and in the south of Greece, and to almost complete powerlessness; that the population of the great city was reduced to a few tens of thousands, with much of the land within its walls given over to agriculture; and that in its final decades its emperors were obliged to go on tours of Europe begging for military and financial support (rarely forthcoming), one even going as far as England, where he spent a month with Henry IV at Eltham in what is now the Borough of Greenwich.

But when the end came, it came heroically; and the knowledge disseminated by the refugees, having been kept in-house for a thousand years since the end of the classical age, now kick-started the modern world. Byzantium seems so far away, yet it is the chief conduit through which we know about what went before as well as having been an astonishing civilization in its own right (if also barbarous in its ruthlessness). This version of it, while often seeming superficial, at least sets the record straight on how important it was, while much of the time spinning a good yarn.

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.