The best books about the unique and often strange world of the longest empire in western history

After traveling to Turkey the first time, I was steered into this book by a friend and found it to be the best modern combination of historical and fiction writing in combination I have read. The author’s amazing use of language and dynamic characters and storylines detailing how the modern nation of Turkey emerged opened my eyes and interest to the larger and longer past I had witnessed there firsthand. This book and my trip fueled my interest in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, its importance, and its neglect in our knowledge of a place and a past that is too often ignored. Bernieres’ prose is masterful and his ability to take the reader back and forth from his fictional world to the actual events in real-time is gut-gripping but equally satisfying. 

Doerr’s follow-up to his amazing bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, is different and intriguing in its own unique way, to say the least. From my own perspective, I was enthralled by his descriptions of the city of Constantinople in its last days before falling to the Turks in 1453. The myriad events Doerr weaves into an amazingly complex, yet ultimately “Oh yeah, that makes sense” story may leave some readers gasping for air, but his ability to create characters and set them in time periods and locales that give the reader a sense of truly being there rather than just watching the action from an easy chair is becoming his deserved trademark.

Are you a fan of travel literature? If so, then you will be as amazed as I was to find this remarkable account. In the 1990s, the author, a noted travel writer, undertook a task that would be impossible to duplicate today for obvious reasons. Based upon the contents of a rare manuscript, he decided to trace the footsteps of two eastern orthodox monks who, in the Sixth Century, traveled through much of the Byzantine World, moving from one ancient monastery to another while describing their adventures. Tracing their route, the author relates in a witty, yet always respectful and well-written narrative the many obstacles he and his predecessors 1,300 years earlier faced. “The more things (and people) change the more they stay the same,” if for different reasons, and nothing can point that euphemism out better than this entertaining and informative book of a lost world and a time that may not be as far beyond us as we thought.

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 history provide a great service to those of us interested in this dramatic period, one which we too often still find ourselves immersed in the unresolved issues those times bequeathed us. 

Based upon his classic three-volume earlier work, this book courageously boils down the thousand-year empire into a readable and understandable version. I found this work essential when I first decided to enter into a subject that I had become fascinated with but understood I needed a good, basic entry point to familiarize myself with before contemplating writing even fictional subject matter on the vast topic. It is not for nothing that we use the term “byzantine” as an adjective to denote complex or intricate issues, or so one discovers from Norwich’s easily readable synthesis. Still, this masterwork sorts out a thousand years of what has seemingly become one of the least understood and taught subjects of our own past as we move farther away from it in time and our focus has become more ethnocentric and biased toward the European viewpoint. I felt I knew these people well enough after reading this book that I could take on the task of writing about them as real people, and I continually find myself revisiting their world in one fashion or another through frequent referrals to this book.