A Short History of Byzantium

Rating:
Summary: A great sweep of history
Review: Over a thousand years. 88 emperors, countless battles, plagues and theological intrigues. Norwich does a great job of making the story of this thousand years entertaining. His word picture of the final dramatic fall of Constantinople is superb.

Rating:
Summary: Superficial but worthwhile
Review: The chief difficulty with this book is that it crams an incredible amount of information, spanning over a millenium, into a little less than four hundred pages.
Thus it moves extremely quickly, presenting the reader almost non-stop with new people, facts, and events. This makes it at times hard to follow. It also seems to be quite superficial. The author himself likens the process of preparing this condensation of his trilogy on Byzantine history to using a hovercraft to skim over the surface. He seems mainly to focus on the Emperors and the people around them, putting a fair bit of energy into assessing how close the monarchs came to achieving "greatness." (Considering the autocratic nature of Byzantine government and the importance of the Byzantine Emperor as "God's Vice-Gerent on Earth," this is probably a reasonable approach.)
Its flaws notwithstanding, the book is very readable (although occasionally tiresome) and frequently quite entertaining, full of droll understatement and subtle humor. The description of Constantinople's final hours is powerful and moving. Norwich is an extremely gifted writer.
As a chronological outline of the major events and figures in Byzantine history, this book is quite effective; moreover, it is an interesting read.

Rating:
Summary: 1123 Years at Breakneck Speed
Review: This is a very fast-paced and enjoyable history from Norwich, cramming a gigantic amount of history into a rather short book. Here Norwich has condensed his masterwork, a 1200-page trilogy on the Byzantine Empire, into a single volume for maximum impact. The intricate details, references, and notes are left to the trilogy - so this book, while short on evidence and details, is full of action and intrigue. For various reasons the Byzantine Empire has been unappreciated by Western scholars, being condemned to obscurity in favor of the less cultured and shorter-lived Roman Empire. In fact the Byzantine Empire survived for another thousand years after the Romans fell to a bunch of scraggly barbarians, keeping the classic culture of Rome and Greece alive while Europe languished uselessly in the dark ages. In addition to his competent research and sharply enjoyable writing, Norwich performs a real service in bringing to light the religious and cultural accomplishments of the Byzantines. He also has a real eye for the empire's never-ending political intrigues and skullduggery (an example is their love of gouging out their opponents' eyes). Due to this book's focus on the action, it can get confusing at times. Short-lived emperors, and a few empresses, often zoom on by without making much of an impression, while intricate political shenanigans with Europe (especially in the later days of the Empire) are hard to follow. Another problem is the Byzantines' habit of giving everyone the same names, as about a gazillion Constantines, Johns, Michaels, and even Andronicuses blur together in confusion. The lack of detail and clarification in some parts of this book may be frustrating, or may make you yearn to read the much larger trilogy. In either case this breakneck tour of Byzantium is a fascinating read.