Fans pick 100 books like Theophano

Byzantine history has only sporadically inspired historical fiction, although Empress Theodora, wife of Emperor Justinian, has had more than a few novels written about her. I’ve read and enjoyed many of them but this book is one of the best. Her dramatic life encompassed the deadly Nike riots, the building of the magnificent Hagia Sophia, and the Justinianic Plague. And did I mention that she was a courtesan prior to marrying Justinian? Martin’s Theodora is a glorious and sympathetic woman, even if flawed. The author tells her story wonderfully through the eyes of a court eunuch!

Simon Turney’s novel, The Bear of Byzantium, covers a period of time in late 1041 to late 1042 that I wrote about in my own book. This was a real-life Game of Thrones period with stupendous Viking members of the Imperial Varangian Guard such as Harald Hardrada, a dying emperor, a spurned empress, a conniving heir, and a crafty Viking wise-woman foretelling the future. Turney’s battle scenes will have you believing you are there manning the Great Palace’s walls with the Varangians, looking down on the streets of Constantinople seething with rioting mobs ready to execute a hated emperor. 

Anne Perry is a superb mystery writer who ventured once into the Byzantine world with this novel and I am so glad she did. The story takes place in 1273, twelve years after the overthrow of the Latin rulers who had occupied Constantinople since the horrific attack by the leaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The city still struggles to recover and a young woman, Anna Lascaris, who has learned medicine from her father, decides to disguise herself as a eunuch to more easily find out who framed her brother for murder, which resulted in his exile to a distant monastery. Poisonous political intrigue swirls around Anna/Anastasius as she practices the healing arts while searching for clues about who was the true killer.   

Gordon Doherty is a prolific writer of ancient and medieval historical fiction, including this first in a three-book series, Strategos. Strategos was a title for a general in the Byzantine military. This first novel in the series starts the life of Apion, a boy living in Byzantine eastern Anatolia in 1046 as the Seljuk Turks begin their incursions into the empire’s borders. His life is shattered when a Seljuk raid kills the rest of his family, and the boy is taken in by a nearby Seljuk farmer. Apion lives with that farmer and falls in love with his daughter, Maria. A twist of fate leads him away from his home and into the military where he begins his rise in the ranks. The next two books lead our hero inevitably to the betrayals on the battlefield at Manzikert.   

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.

This work of historical fiction attracted me to the study of the Byzantine Empire.

I read it as a first-year university student and was astonished at its story of intrigue, mutilation, and murder in a medieval, Christian Roman Empire. Fans of medieval fantasy such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series might be drawn to this riveting and dramatic tale.

This story of the life of the volcanic and unpredictable emperor Justinian II (r. 685-695 and 705-711 A.D.) welcomed me to the Byzantine world, and perhaps it will do the same for you!

Basil II, who ruled as emperor from 976 to 1025, is an enigma. On the face of it, his reign was a great success which saw the Byzantine borders extended further than they had been for centuries. Yet no one at the time seems to have celebrated that success and we only know about his reign from accounts written a long time afterward by people who were either too young to remember his reign, like Michael Psellus, or who were not even born. It is this enigma that Holmes grapples with by analysing our most detailed source for Basil’s reign: the historian John Skylitzes who was writing around 1100. Her subtle uncovering of the cultural values that underlie the text reveal Basil not so much as a great conqueror but as a shrewd politician who knew exactly how to get what he wanted as much by persuasion as by force. 

Both readable and minutely researched, this book analyses the reasons behind Byzantium’s sudden collapse in the mid-eleventh century. Kaldellis offers a refreshing alternative to the prevalent narrative of the achievements of Basil II being squandered by the feeble emperors who came after him. Instead, stress is laid on the problems to which the expanded borders gave rise after 1025 and the very reasonable steps taken by Basil’s successors to deal with them. He even comes to the rescue of the much-maligned Constantine IX (1042-1055), an emperor whom Psellus presents as affable and likable but a completely incompetent ruler.

Kaldellis points out how Constantine secured the frontier in Northern Syria through his treaty with the Fatimid caliph of Egypt and how his administrative reforms would have seemed sensible at the time. He drives home the lesson that it is never satisfactory to single out a few individuals to blame for a… show more.

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.  

I remember buying The Long Ships about twenty years ago on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Generally speaking, 1950s Swedish novels about Vikings are not my thing, but there was an absolutely over-the-top introduction from Michael Chabon.…'best novel ever’ kind of stuff…so I bought it.

Since then, I have recommended it to dozens of people, almost all of whom have, often to their surprise, loved it and recommended it to others. My favorite recommendation was to a pal whose daughter absconded with it and was reading it on a parapet in southern Spain when a guy came by and asked her what she was reading. She showed him the book, he perused it gravely, and then tore out the frontispiece and used it to roll a joint. This is a very satisfying book in every way.

Don’t get it confused with the derivative Norwegian comedy series, Norsemen. The Long Ships… show more.