7/10

I don't have a lot of experience with history books so I'm not sure what qualities to look for in one nor the standards. I thus can only write about how I personally found it and my time with it. Byzantium, written as it is for the public (rather than historians), does a good job of laying out all the interesting bits of it's subject on the canvas; sometimes in broad strokes and sometimes in intimate details. The mostly self contained chapters, each around a single feature of the society make it very approachable each pages never failing to contain something interesting.

The Byzantines themselves make for an interesting tale, them having previously been mostly a mystery to me. The history of the Churches and how they came to take the shape they have today. How the familiar court and royal traditions of Europe came about from their Roman and, surprisingly, Persian roots. The exact shape of the world during the appearance of the Islam and it's empires and how it shaped it's history. A lot of the cultural heritage of the entire eastern Europe, these are but a few topics that the long lived Byzantines played a big role in and even if I can't say I had much interest in a lot of these topics before I picked up this book, it manged to capture my imagination and interest all the way through. What more can one ask?