spacestationtrustfund 's review for:

Byzantium: The Early Centuries by John Julius Norwich

4.0

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John Julius Norwich's Byzantine trilogy (this book, The Apogee, and The Decline and Fall) is THE definitive work. The three volumes together are around 1300 pages, although you can also read a much-abridged single volume, A Short History of Byzantium, which is only around 500 pages. Norwich's trilogy is not quite an academic work, although it is a bit heavy for the general public; even 1300 pages can't reasonably cover over a thousand years of a civilisation, particularly one with so much richness and diversity of history. You could easily fill that page space with the story of Byzantium's growth away from the Roman Empire alone. But as a general introductory overview, Norwich's trilogy is unparalleled: it is, for good reason, THE definitive work.