Books

I wrote this as a textbook for use in schools and universities but I hope that it will be of interest to general readers as well. Unlike many general histories of Byzantium, this one does not cover Late Antiquity (300-600 CE). I took the decision to leave it out because Byzantium after the crisis of the seventh century was such a completely different place. It also meant that I had more space to do more than just give a year-by-year political narrative. There is coverage of relations between Islam and the West, the impact of the Crusades, the development of Russia, the emergence of Orthodox Christianity and summaries of ongoing historiographical debates. There is even a small section about Byzantium on film!

Published by Routledge in April 2020.

In this book I took on the challenge of encapsulating the whole of Byzantium's long history from Constantine in the fourth century CE right through to the empire's final downfall in the fifteenth. I also wanted to give a flavour of its culture, mentality and spirituality. Clearly 1100 years of history was going to be a tight squeeze in just 250 pages. Something would have to go. I got round that by jumping ahead at the end of chapters with the next one beginning a century later. Entire reigns and epochs got left out but I also zeroed in on particular and events and people that interested me.

It seemed important to give the book an overall theme woven into the narrative. I wanted to explore why Byzantium survived as long as it did, given that it was almost continuously under sustained attack. There is no doubt that its rulers developed some very clever strategies for turning a very adverse situaton to their advantage. Then again this was a society whose culture and mentality was very different from the one I live in. Some aspects are frankly rather abhorrent, such as the insistence on religious uniformity. But that for me is why Byzantium is so fascinating: its remoteness, its strangeness and its stubborn refusal to be turned into some ancient mirror of our own world.

Yale University Press: (UK)

Yale University Press (USA)

Yale University Press blog (UK)

Yale University Press blog (US)

Any visitor to Istanbul will encounter Aya Sofya, the former Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the At Meydani or Hippodrome that lies nearby. Some may make the trip out from the centre to tour the Land Walls and the church of St Saviour in Chora. These highlights aside, the Byzantine monuments of the city can be difficult to find and once found are difficult to appreciate, hemmed in as they are by roads and apartment blocks. So a visit to Byzantine Constantinople has to some extent to be a voyage of the imagination and that is what I tried to do in this book. It focuses on the city as it was in 1200 CE and on what a visitor would have seen an experienced at that time. There is also a good deal on the city's turbulent political life, on its slow decline and on why so many of its great buildings and monuments ultimately disappeared.

Published by Bloomsbury in February 2017.

This book was produced in collaboration with Dr Georgios Chatzelis. He provided the basic translation and research much of the historical background. I revised the translation, wrote the introduction and supplied the footnotes and index. It is a fascinating collection of useful advice for military leaders and covers matters such as: battle formations, raids, sieges, ambushes, surprise attacks, prisoners of war, defectors, distribution of booty, punishments, espionage and even on how to guard against poisoned food.

Published by Routledge in June 2017.

Byzantium and the Crusades was originally published in 2003 by Hambledon and London. This third edition takes into account the wealth of new work that has been published since then, provides more detailed coverage of the thirteenth century and includes appendices with translations from primary sources.

The basic argument of the book remains unchanged though. The Byzantines were merely implementing a tried and tested policy of paying allies to turn on their enemies when, eager to reconquer Asia Minor which had been lost to the Seljuk Turks after 1071, they encouraged western knights to come east and fight on their side. They may even have used the possible liberation of Jerusalem as an extra incentive. What they did not realise was that their own lack of interest in taking Jerusalem and their willingness to ally themselves with Muslim powers when convenient, appeared to the western crusaders as treachery. As rumours of a Byzantine alliance with Saladin circulated after 1184, crusade leaders began to consider that Byzantium should be compelled to disgorge its wealth to support the effort of recapturing and holding Jerusalem. The stage was set for the confrontation of 1204 and the years of bitterness that followed.

For more information, see the Bloomsbury website.

Also available as an audiobook.

Steven Runciman's gripping account of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was one of the first books on Byzantium that I ever read. This book does not aim to replace it but it does investigate the rather more everyday aspects of the last fifty years of the empire's existence: the compromises, humiliations and moral dilemmas faced by people who knew that their long-term survival was dependent on decisions taken far away over which they had not control. There were examples of heroic self-sacrifice but for most inhabitants of Constantinople the last decades before their downfall were spent trying to preserve their wealth and to secure the future of their families. Sadly, when the end came, most lost everything.

For more information see the publisher's website:

Yale University Press, 2011