Byzantium: The Bridge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

by Michael Angold

Michael Angold's book is a clear, concise and authoritative history of the successor to Roman imperial the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was a Greek polis on the Bosphorus that gained importance in 324 AD when it was re-founded by Constantine the Great and named Constantinople. One of the pre-eminent cities of the Middle Ages, Constantinople played a vital role in the emergence of the medieval order in which Byzantium, western Christendom and Islam became three distinct civilizations.

This book charts precisely the development and characteristics of Byzantine art and society. Angold begins in Constantinople, from which the new empire emerged, and examines the city in relation to the world of the early Middle Ages. He shows how the foundation and subsequent growth of the city altered the equilibrium of the Roman Empire and shifted the center of gravity eastwards; he describes the emergence of political factions and their impact on political life; analyzes the disintegration of the culture of late antiquity; and elucidates the reaction among Muslims and western Europeans to Byzantine iconoclasm.

Angold concludes with an account of the end of imperial Byzantium and its disintegration. His book is an excellent introduction to one of the most important, and least well known, of Europe's civilizations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Ancient History, European History, World History

186 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Michael Angold is Professor Emeritus of Byzantine history at the University of Edinburgh.

He is Editor of Cambridge History of Christianity V - Eastern Christianity (2006); and author of A Byzantine Government in Exile (1974), The Byzantine Empire 1025-1204 (1985), Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni 1082-1261 (1995), and The Fourth Crusade (2003).

Reviews

[Little Timmy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is about my favorite era of history and it does a horrible job of telling it. The chapters seem to ramble and wander off into digressing tangents. I had hope for a nice overview of the time and got disjointed ramblings. Not recommended at all to anyone

[Leif Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

How can you fuck up a simple primer on the history of Byzantium from the establishment of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade? Well, focusing primarily on the iconoclastic issues will go a long way towards that. But I would have been fine with reading a detailed accounting of religious issues of early medieval Eastern Orthodoxy (would have preferred the publisher was more upfront about it on the jacket), God knows I've enjoyed far more obscure subjects. What really sinks this book is the lousy meandering writing. Subjects just kind of fade in and out throughout the paragraphs and way too many expository sentences start out with prepositions. It's as if Angold really pissed off his editor and is now paying the price. Wanted to give Byzantium 2 stars because of the subject but it doesn't rate an 'ok' & I definitely don't 'care for it.'

[Jack Dowling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not many hungry caterpillar references

[Illiterate · Rating 1 out of 5]

A thin idiosyncratic introduction. Lacks analysis and drive. Focuses on attitudes to icons.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pleasant book, and one that strives to deal with one of the more interesting aspects of the Byzantine legacy and that was the way that its long survival allowed for culture to spread from the ancient world to the Western world that had fared much worse in the collapse of the Roman world of late antiquity.  Cultural continuity in the face of societal problems depends often on the survival of enough literate people who are able to read and write and at least preserve learned culture from one generation to the next, and there are few areas where this was the place in Europe and the Western world as a whole in the period after the rise of the barbarian successor kingdoms to Rome, even though some of those kingdoms deliberately sought to imitate Rome for its prestige value as well.  This work shows how this was done and how various periods of periodic revival helped to spread more and more of the culture of antiquity into Europe from not only the Byzantine world but also the Muslim world, which in its own way also sought to recapture the spirit of antiquity for its own cultural benefit.

This book is a short one at just over 150 pages, and it could have included quite a bit more content than it does.  The author begins with a list of illustrations, notes for travelers, and maps, and then discusses the importance of the city of Constantine in the survival of the Byzantine Empire for so long (1).  After that comes a look at Byzantium (2) and the parting of the ways between the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire over the course of centuries of divergent change between the eastern and western parts of the former Roman Empire (3).  This leads to a discussion of the forging of Islamic culture in the aftermath of the Arab conquests of much of the Middle East and Persia (4) as well as the issue of Byzantine iconoclasm as a response to the fierce monotheism of Islam that had been so successful in sweeping over such a large area of the former Roman world (5).  After that the author discusses the troubled relationship between Byzantium and the West (6) and the triumph of Orthodoxy over the course of centuries of conflict within the Byzantine world as well as between it and its neighbors (7).  Finally, the book ends with a discussion of Norman Sicily and its cultural blend (8) as well as a glossary, bibliography, and index.

What credit does Byzantium deserve as a bridge.  If one takes it as a given that Byzantium, whether directly or indirectly, passed on a great deal of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome to us that we still enjoy to this day, and I think that a reasonable conclusion, how much credit belongs to the Byzantines themselves?  This is a matter that has been hard for contemporaries to address, given the fact that the Byzantine Empire has seldom been given a great deal of credit for what it has passed along to others.  It is thanks to the Byzantine text that the reformers of the early modern period were able to give the vernacular languages of Western Europe a sound biblical text of the New Testament to work from that went behind the vulgate to the Greek writings that had been faithfully copied for centuries--a matter that this book, intriguingly enough, does not discuss.  Similarly, the Byzantines are responsible for passing along to the West the use of utensils, something which makes us eat in a more cultured fashion, and also a matter that this book does not discuss.  It is my opinion, at least, that this book could make a far greater case for the role of Byzantium as a bridge to the modern world in ways that we care about greatly, although the author's focus on coins and architecture is by no means a bad one.

[David R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This study is neither fish nor fowl. It purports to address Byzantine art, and does some of that, but it also tries to encompass centuries of Byzantine history. Neither is entirely satisfactory. Much more could have been done on icons and mosaics. It's well written however just falls short in scope.

[Anatolikon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not at all what I expected, but a very good theological history of the first parts of middle Byzantium. Minus one star for some dated material on the seventh century political narrative.

[Chris]

Skims over the juiciest details in one sentence (empress Irene blinding her own son to ascend to the throne, amongst others) to focus almost exclusively on the debate regarding iconoclasm

Iconoclasm is frankly not a very interesting topic. I really expected much much more.

[Crissy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written and detailed but emphasis on art, culture and religion

[Brian Mosher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not imformative, not interesting. Anybody got a recommendation for a concise overview of the Byzantine empire?

[NIKOLAOS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ηάγ

[Jeremy Canipe · Rating 2 out of 5]

just okay

[Pedro Pascoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess, with a slim one-volume book on Byzantium, I was expecting a brief overall sweep of Byzantine history, an entry level intro from which to branch out.
My knowledge of the history of this city is largely from accounts of the Crusades, so largely from the perspective of the Crusaders (either second-hand through historians, or a few first hand accounts), or from the Islamic side, also during the Crusades. So in this regard, this book was a good solid intro to Byzantine history starting from its founding, through to near the year 1000, with an epilogue on Norman Sicily. It covered important and formulative threats and schisms that defined Byzantine from its Roman origin, to a unique Medieval player, dealing with the rise of Islam, and also the theological debates and issues which divided and highlighted the Byzantine mind of the time. It put quite a bit of early medieval history into more perspective for me, as my readings tend towards the latter medieval period.
However, I'm a bit puzzled as to why the book finished where it did, when there was more to cover? Having laid out the groundwork, I was looking forward to reading about the crusades from the Byzantine perspective, but it appears as though I will have to go further afield for that. (Luckily I have a three volume series 'in the pile' that should cover that). The subtitle 'The Bridge from Antiquity to the Middle Ages' seems to be the focus here, although the focus seems to be on the 'bridge' part rather than the loosely defined and often argued 'middle ages' period.
I was hoping for something of an insight into the notoriously complex political system of Byzantium also, but perhaps that was more of a feature of Byzantium in the High Middle Ages, rather than this 'bridging' period.
All things considered, a decent, brief introduction to the history of this crucial city, cut too short for my liking, but perhaps I should have taken the sub-title more at face value.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 2 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in January 2002.

While Angold, as Professor of Byzantine History at Edinburgh University, clearly knows the subject, his popular style book about the Eastern Roman Empire neither matches its subtitle nor the description on the inside cover. While in the west the discontinuity provided by the barbarian conquests is at least an explanation of the change from a classical to a medieval culture (and even there the picture is really much more complex), the political continuity at Constantinople presents a fascinating study - how did things change, what resisted or promoted change, and how different was life in the Byzantine Empire from that in western Europe?

What we have here is a competent, fairly easy to follow history of the Byzantine Empire from the time of Constantine the Great to the resolution of the Iconoclast controversy, a period of about six centuries, with an epilogue describing Norman Sicily (as a cultural melange of Western, Byzantine and Islamic influences). It is almost entirely political and cultural, and is an old fashioned narrative history. As such, it throws virtually no light on the relationship between classical and medieval that its title suggests is the theme of the book; nor does it cover the end of the Empire as the inside front cover suggests. My feeling is that the history of the economic relationship between east and west, particularly changes in trade routes in the Mediterranean, would say more about the change between the two periods, while a sociological study of the eastern and western cultures would help illuminated just what medieval means in the Byzantine context. To do this for a general readership would be quite a feat, but I feel that Angold has missed his opportunity.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

By page 17, I have discovered that that the author cannot hold one thought long enough to thoroughly explain it. The book is terribly meandering and hops from one subject to another with all the passion of an ADD 6 year old on caffeine. I made it to page 38 before packing it in, this book rambles from subject to subject with no clear chronology or even any connectivity. I found myself thinking of dinner instead of reading more than once.

Apparently the book is not so much a straight forward history of the Byzantine Empire but rather a discussion of the religious issues, particularly iconoclasm, in the early church. Whoever wrote the blurb obviously had not read the book. It's likely a far better read for someone familiar with the history of Byzantium and the issues of iconoclasm not to mention the doctrinal split between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism.

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not glamourous history, nor does the historian make himself known in the course of the book; it is old-fashioned history, slow and precise and covering the ground it wants to cover. That ground is somewhat unfocused; Angold is very interested in iconoclasm, in how different elites use art to define their culture, in the differences between the Frankish west, the Byzantine East, and Islam. The book meanders over that ground without ever having a real thesis it is arguing, so things never come into proper focus. I am glad I read it, but mostly as a springboard to better books, especially about the early Islamic world and the Carolignian Renaissance.

[Judie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title calls Byzantium the bridge from antiquity to the Middle Ages. I thought it was interesting, and a lot about early Christianity and the disputes over doctrine, art, icons, and etc. It is best read in small doses.

[English · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good short introduction to the Byzantine world. Exploring material culture and architecture as well as political history. Not always an easy read and perhaps some bias, but still useful academic work.

[Larissa]

I actually did not finish this - perhaps I am in a not-finishing rut - anyway, there was not enough background for me and I did not really follow it.

[Thomas Mackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good introduction to Byzantium as a lead in to the study of European middle ages.

[Debby Zigenis-Lowery]

Fascinating.