The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction

Wishlist

Saved in this browser only - it isn't synced to your other devices.

Back to the full ranking
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire cover

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

Judith Herrin

0

awards won

1

score

#3739 of 3,809 books · #1152 in History

Longlisted for the Cundill History Prize (2008).

For a thousand years an extraordinary empire made possible Europe's transition to the modern world: Byzantium. An audacious and resilient but now little known society, it combined orthodox Christianity with paganism, classical Greek learning with Roman power, to produce a great and creative civilization which for centuries held in check the armies of Islam. Judith Herrin's concise and compelling book replaces the standard chronological approach of most histories of Byzantium. Instead, each short chapter is focused on a theme, such as a building (the great church of Hagia Sophia), a clash over religion (iconoclasm), sex and power (the role of eunuchs), an outstanding Byzantine individual (the historian Anna Komnene), a symbol of civilization (the fork), a battle for territory (the crusades). In this way she makes accessible and understandable the grand sweeps of Byzantine history, from the founding of its magnificent capital Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 330, to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Buy this book at AmazonAd
Publisher
Penguin UK
ISBN-13
9780141911366
Genre
History
Topics
Byzantine EmpireMedieval historyConstantinople

Awards

Other awarded books from Judith Herrin

If you liked Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, you could also like these