Fans pick 100 books like A Short History of Byzantium

This is a pretty dense scholarly work, but that very density makes it a cornucopia for anyone interested in how a specific historical culture regarded magic.

I appreciated that while academic, Price is never boring or needlessly obscure; he does a very good job of not only explaining the historical record but also the best guess at how it can be interpreted.

Not only did it teach me a great deal about the Vikings, but it also taught me other strategies and ways of thinking about other cultures’ magical practices, and for a fantasy writer, that’s pure gold.

I was in love the moment I opened an abridged version of Gibbon’s magnum opus as a young history buff, and was even more delighted when I sought out the multivolume full experience.

Gibbon’s view of the Roman Empire is magisterial and his footnotes are a cranky delight; he’s up-front when his sources have axes to grind and sourly suspicious of his own motivations.

Sure, he’s an 18th-century British colonialist with all that entails. He’s also deliciously ironic, hilariously sardonic, and does his mightiest justice when he’s skewering folly and tyranny of any stripe.

Too often, our idea of history (or prehistory) is of men doing things and women silently following. Barber dives into the history of textiles to show how spinning, weaving, and cloth were not only drivers of culture and civilization but also a major technological achievement akin to harnessing fire and developing agriculture.

I was blown away both by the book’s premise and by the obvious passion and breadth of knowledge Barber brought to showing just how the stunning leap forward taken by women with spindles kick-started what we think of as civilization.

We take clothes for granted, but the first person to think of cloth rather than animal skins gave a great gift to humanity, one which may never be equaled.

Over the years, I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved, stretched, and entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I would not get out of this one unchanged.

The author's inventiveness is astonishing, managing to create not one new world we inhabit but three, all deftly interconnected by the unlikely thread of a simple fable passed from generation to generation. Perhaps most striking to me is the sheer power of the book, its capacity to take us places and share lives we would otherwise never dreamed of.

While the mysterious document—itself a fascinating story within a story—wends its way through a narrative that spans a thousand years, its message is less important than the lives it touches.

And what lives. Each character is drawn so vividly and infused with such essential, defining human traits that we… show more.

I think this is a brilliant and, for me, unforgettable novel. It took an aspect of Ottoman history that I knew about as dry fact and imprinted it on my heart. I was fascinated by the daily lives of varied peoples in one small Ottoman town, how intertwined they were, even writing one language in the alphabet of another.

They tell their own stories of love and ambition, family and friendship, and how the Great War and its aftermath tore them apart. It reads like an epic unfolding through the eyes and voices of ordinary people, humane, evocative, humorous and brutal. 

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… show more.

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.

I hadn’t thought seriously about the problem of rubbish, sewage, and waste disposal before reading Jackson’s work.

I think it’s important, even crucial, for a fantasy writer to know where the poop and detritus go in the societies they’ve built; it’s part of the worldbuilding that gives an imaginary culture enough weight and heft to convince a reader.

Plus, Jackson’s prose is always marvelously clean, concise, and dryly funny.

Before the Holy Roman Empire, there was Byzantium. Prior to better-known names like Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas, there were men like Justinian, who codified Roman law for posterity, or Photius the Great, who gave concise theological treatises to eager audiences of the highly literate populace of Asia Minor. Wells explores the heart of Roman civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean where the flourishing Byzantine Empire preserved ancient learning. Sailing from Byzantium investigates the historical and geographic forces at play which eventually made Byzantium a "forgotten" empire, yet which today—whether it's acknowledged or not—has left its indelible mark on the modern world in remarkable ways. This is not just a journey into history, but an intellectual pilgrimage into the time and setting of almost forgotten intellectual and spiritual giants. 

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.