The Byzantine Empire

For centuries, the Byzantine Empire was dismissed as a corrupt afterthought to Rome, a thousand-year slide into decadence that history had largely written off. Charles Oman, writing in the late 19th century, set out to undo that injustice, and the result is a passionate revisionist history that recovers the forgotten grandeur of the empire that kept classical civilization alive. Beginning with the Greek colonists who founded Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus, Oman traces the empire's transformation from a strategic trading post into the most sophisticated civilization in medieval Europe, one that preserved Greek philosophy, codified Roman law, and shaped the Orthodox Christian world.Oman brings alive the great dramas: Justinian's dream of reconquering the West, the desperate wars against Persia, the terrifying arrival of the Arabs and the Slavs, the iconoclasts tearing down sacred images, and the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople even as the Turks closed in from the East. Throughout, he argues for Byzantium's centrality to European civilization, showing how this "Eastern Roman Empire" was anything but stagnant. The narrative ends with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but the real subject is how an empire survived so long, and why its loss mattered. This is history written with conviction, meant to change how you think about an entire civilization.