It is normal for an author to flatter their readers, to treat them as people of high knowledge and intelligence - why else would they have chosen the book? So it is a bit of a surprise when Judith Herrin begins Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by explaining that she was inspired to write it when two passing workmen knocked on her door and asked "what is Byzantine history". All they knew, she explains, is that it "something to do with Turkey".
Not exactly flattering to the reader, but be reassured, while at one level this might be a literary version of a popular British television show What the Romans/Victorians/etc Did For Us, there's a lot more depth than that, and you'll finish these 300-odd pages feeling educated, informed, and entertained.
I've always had a soft spot for Byzantium, because it has such a wonderful range of powerfully interesting women, as I found some 15 years ago when I last studied the subject of its history, although the course I took then resembles some of the texts Herrin describes without approval, as being little more than a long list of emperors and battles. Her Byzantium, while broadly chronological, isn't arranged like that, but rather as a list of themes and stories, which overall presents a very satisfying overview.
If you're thinking of Byzantium, then you can only think of the Hagia Sophia, and Herrin provides a reminder that it was not some late flowering of the ancient world, but the energetic burst of something new, and behind it once again was a strong woman - not (just) Justinian's famous and much maligned empress Theodora, but a wealthy senatorial lady, Juliana Anicia, who had just built a grand church, St Polyeuktos's, on her own property. But it was Theodora to whom more credit was due, for it was just before the great church was begun that she, ancient accounts seem to agree, stiffened Justinian's backbone when he was about to flee before a mob riot that conveniently cleared a large tranche of the centre of Constantinople.
It supports, with its very great weight and power, Herrin's thesis, that Byzantium boasted "a rich ecology of traditions and resources" - it didn't just passively preserve ancient traditions, as Gibbon claimed, just waiting for the West to be ready to receive them again, but rather creatively and constructively engaged with and developed them:
It bequeathed to the world an imperial system of government built upon a trained, civilian, administration and tax system; a legal structure based on Roman law; a unique curriculum of secular education that preserved much of pagan, classical learning; orthodox theology, artistic expression and spiritual traditions enshrined in the Green church; and coronation and court rituals that had many imitators.
And when the doomed Constantine XI in 1453 made his final desperate call to the last remnant of the empire, its capital, to resist the Ottoman Turks, he called out in Greek to his people to prove themselves true Romans - to emphasising the continuity of 1,323 years of Constantinople's history, and much further back. But long before that, Herrin argues, Byzantium's ability to withstand, albeit eventually in much reduced form, the shock of the Arab onslaught as the tribes burst out of Arabia, in the eighth century that protected a then ill-prepared West, which would otherwise have been overwhelmed.
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