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Article Excerpt
Byzantium (Allen Lane & Penguin, 2007-8), by Judith Herrin.
There was never anything like it: not a city but the world city for over a thousand years; her domes, towers and colossal walls dominated the crossroads between East and West, North and South. It replaced the ruins of Rome and made Paris, Beijing and Delhi look like overgrown market towns. Professor Herrin's book is subtitled 'The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire', and she sets out to persuade us how astonishing this imperium was. But also, she guides the reader towards understanding a millennial tragedy.
Byzantium/Constantinople (now Istanbul) was a precondition for what we now call modernity, above all in the large peninsula to its west, Europe. Yet in that mighty achievement lay a fate unimaginable to the inheritors of Rome: the great conurbation's own disappearance--as the centre of humankind, that is, rather than today's overblown regional capital stuffed with relics.
The introduction points out how decisive Byzantium's resistance was to various invasions from the East--above all that of the seventh century, when the first great expansion of Muslim power threatened the city. Had the Arabs succeeded then, they would...
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