The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and his Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium

by Steven Runciman

This study, centred around the reign of the usurping Emperor Romanus Lecapenus, was originally published in 1929, reissued in 1963, and has been out of print for several years. It contributed to the revival of interest in Byzantine studies at that time, and has since remained one of the most authoritative and readable accounts of the period.

Genres: History, Biography

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 1988

About the author

A King's Scholar at Eton College, he was an exact contemporary and close friend of George Orwell. While there, they both studied French under Aldous Huxley. In 1921 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge as a history scholar and studied under J.B. Bury, becoming, as Runciman later commented, "his first, and only, student." At first the reclusive Bury tried to brush him off; then, when Runciman mentioned that he could read Russian, Bury gave him a stack of Bulgarian articles to edit, and so their relationship began. His work on the Byzantine Empire earned him a fellowship at Trinity in 1927.

After receiving a large inheritance from his grandfather, Runciman resigned his fellowship in 1938 and began travelling widely. From 1942 to 1945 he was Professor of Byzantine Art and History at Istanbul University, in Turkey, where he began the research on the Crusades which would lead to his best known work, the History of the Crusades (three volumes appearing in 1951, 1952, and 1954).

Most of Runciman's historical works deal with Byzantium and her medieval neighbours between Sicily and Syria; one exception is The White Rajahs, published in 1960, which tells the story of Sarawak, an independent nation founded on the northern coast of Borneo in 1841 by the Englishman James Brooke, and ruled by the Brooke family for more than a century.

Reviews

[Ron Kastner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Byzantine Emperor mostly overlooked by history but with significant accomplishments.
A notable work of scholarship.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very comprehensive look at the state of the Byzantine empire during the reign of Romanus Lecapenus. Runciman devotes a chapter to all of the regions of the empire (Armenia, Byzantine Italy, etc.) and goes into detail on how the empire used diplomatic and military efforts to secure its borders. Runciman relies heavily on De Thematibus and De Administrando Imperio, and he includes a comprehensive bibliography which include Bulgarian and Armenian works, in addition to Greek and Arab texts. His writing style set a smooth and quick pace, and events and concepts were very understandable. As a work on a single emperor of the Macedonian house, this book is fantastic and is foundational in understanding the state of the empire in the ninth and tenth centuries.

[Dmytro]

please!

[Mahmoud]

kk