Books like Before They Are Hanged

Will we ever be free of the Crusades and how it shaped our modern world? Not according to the author, who brings this idea to the forefront with a new perspective on the role that the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople in the 11th Century at the hands of western Christian crusaders wrought at the time. Personally, since this story unfolds less than a century after when my own focus on Byzantine history has been the past two years, I was fascinated by Holmes’ thoughtful interpretation of how the fading empire sitting at the center of three diverse cultural centers and their burgeoning religions, all dedicated to overt expansionism, has so often been neglected or overlooked entirely by later historians, even into the present. The Crusades were truly a “World War” at the time, and the author’s ability to connect so many diverse and related pieces of… show more.

John Meyendorff’s works are indispensable for understanding the theology and history of Orthodox Christianity. 

While several of his contributions belong to the must-read list for students of Orthodox Christianity, this book in particular offers a lucid account and an indispensable introduction to the broader and enduring problematic regarding the deep-seated connections between Byzantium and the historical development of the Orthodox Church.

The book addresses a series of historical events rarely researched and studied and it is a pioneer work highly suited for scholars of religious history.

Fighting off alien invasions has become a passé, so I’ve wondered what living on a conquered Earth, one where resistance was gone, would be like. How would we live? Way of the Pilgrim showed me that, along with what humans are willing to do to survive and, in some cases, thrive in such an environment. 

While I like reading about our better natures, it has always been our baser desires that have always enthralled me. Shane Evert is a cross between a selfless hero and a man with his own interests at heart, and his plans for humanity clash with his desire for comfort. In the end, he leads his own conspiracy and finds one among the aliens he never imagined could exist.

Study of the ins and outs, the steps and missteps of a particular crusade allow us to move from the general to the particular and to view closeup the choices and actions of participants who lacked our 20-20 hindsight. No crusade was more beset by unforeseen circumstances and miscalculations than the Fourth Crusade (1202-04), which left Venice headed for an amphibious assault on Muslim-held Egypt but wound up capturing Christian Constantinople not once but twice and establishing the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-61). This classic in-depth but never dull book puts a human face on that crusade and brings alive its numerous twists and turns. History is intrinsically exciting, and Queller and Madden’s enthusiasm does full justice to that fact. 

Among the great many books that simply narrate the Columbus story, this one stands out for its engaging writing style and—above all—for its interweaving of the Columbus story into the parallel (and, Boyle argues, closely overlapping) stories of Cabot and Vespucci. I found it a fun and fascinating reading.

That said, I do think Boyle deploys his imagination a little too freely at times. Some of the old myths and misconceptions about Columbus are nestled in here as facts—which is very much part of the Columbus tradition—and Boyle even adds some new ones. And yet that use of speculation and imagination is central to what makes the book so enjoyable. 

Despite my love for fantasy, I had grown tired of stories set in a generic Europe of the Middle Ages. So when I discovered this book, I was delighted to find that it drew on something entirely different: a re-imagined “crossroads of the world” based on the Byzantine Empire.

It felt entirely fresh to be immersed in this fertile place and time that had such an impact on world history but that had been largely ignored in most modern fantasy. I was further intrigued by the intricate forms of magic Pierce developed for her four mages-in-training–distinct and carefully designed things such as thread magic and plant magic that were unlike any I had read before.  

The masterpiece of Byzantium’s greatest historian is a dramatic military narrative by a gifted storyteller who happened to be the private secretary of Byzantium’s greatest general, Belisarius, during the reign of Byzantium’s greatest emperor, Justinian I (527-565). It’s in three parts: The Persian War, in which Belisarius defended Byzantine Syria against the Persians; The Vandal War, in which Belisarius conquered North Africa from the Vandals; and The Gothic War, in which Belisarius conquered most of Italy from the Goths, though the final conquest was the work of another great general, Narses. 

If you don’t have time to read the whole saga, I recommend reading The Vandal War, which is self-contained and particularly exciting. Procopius’ Secret History is more famous because it’s so scandalous, but it’s not as great a history as the Wars.

I love this book because it is the personal memoirs of a Byzantine statesman, Michael Psellus (c.1022-c.1080), who lived through the dramatic reversal of fortune of the mid-eleventh century. He tells the story through the lives of the emperors and empresses who ruled during his lifetime. To appreciate Psellus’ work, it is better to skip the first two biographies which are largely based on hearsay, and to start with the account of Romanos III (1028-1034). As the author himself says ‘I both saw Romanos and on one occasion actually talked to him.’

As Psellus rose through the ranks of the palace bureaucracy, he became the secretary and close adviser to one emperor after another. He describes events as he himself witnessed them, recording conversations and anecdotes, often illuminating the personal qualities and failings of the imperial incumbents. The work tails off at the end as Psellus reaches the time of… show more.

Anna Komnene (1083-c.1148) takes up the story where Michael Psellus left off. Like him, she was writing from inside the court: she was the daughter of Alexios I who reigned from 1081 to 1118. She gives a laudatory account of her father’s reign during which the tide of disaster was turned back and Byzantium began to recover some of the ground that it had lost. Some of the most memorable passages in The Alexiad are those that describe the passage of the First Crusade through Byzantium in 1096-7. Komnene takes a rather ambivalent tone in describing the hordes of bellicose warriors who had arrived from the west.

On the one hand, they were fellow Christians who had come to fight the common enemy, the Muslim Turks. On the other hand, might they not also constitute a threat, since they could be well tempted by the riches of Constantinople? That ambivalence… show more.

The best survey of Byzantine civilization by the best Byzantinist of recent times, this book covers all the main features of Byzantine life, thought, and culture with profound but unobtrusive learning, including many interesting details and covering ethnography, religion, literature, art, and architecture.

Mango’s penetrating analysis often reveals defects of the Byzantines and their empire that other scholars usually overlook, and his overall evaluation of Byzantium is more negative than my own, but his writing is lucid, brilliant, and always worth reading. I particularly recommend this book as an introduction for readers who know little if anything about the Byzantines and their empire.