julis 's review for:

Byzantium: The Early Centuries by John Julius Norwich

4.0

---

This had some really good parts and overall was a comprehensive look at the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire from ~300 CE to 800 CE. There’s some amazing anecdotes in here, about how the Byzantine Emperor had the Pope arrested and exiled to the Black Sea for excommunicating the Patriarch of Constantinople, or how the Byzantine Empress almost married Charlemagne!

But also Norwich is racist, sexist, and homophobic by turns, nor is there any real interrogation of what it means to be a ‘barbarian’ and why that’s worse than being ‘Roman’.