Before West and East: The Byzantine Empire in World History (The Lawrence Stone Lectures)

A revelatory new history of Byzantium that shows it was a center of global power for a thousand years, dominating the medieval world and shaping the emergence of the Latin West and the Muslim East The seeds of contemporary Western culture are rightly identified with Greece, Rome, and Christianity. But this cultural combination was forged across the entire Mediterranean world by the “inner Greek fire” of Byzantium long before there was a self-conscious West and East. In Before West and East, acclaimed historian Judith Herrin sets out how the thousand-year civilization of Byzantium preserved and expanded Christian belief and then withstood the Islamic explosion that it inspired. In this brief, richly illustrated history, she shows that both the Latin West and the Muslim East were founded upon the existence of Byzantium at the center of the medieval world. Herrin reveals how the “New Rome” of Constantinople (now Istanbul) became the leading metropolis of the Middle Ages thanks to the remarkable administrative machine that ran the empire from the vast palace complex of the Palation.