New Rome: The Roman Empire in the East, AD 395 - 700 - Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic Runciman Award

A painstaking and detailed work which examines a fascinating period in history in a format that is well constructed and clear. It is very detailed and one has to concentrate but it is well worth it!I know southern Turkey quite well and this book has given me a new slant on what I have seen and areas that I want now to go to.

Fascinating synthesis of information and views from a leading Byzantine historian.

This is the latest addition to the Profile (as published in the UK, Harvard UP in the US) History of the Ancient World and covers the Roman empire from the death of Theodosius the Great to the end of the 7th century AD at which point the Eastern Roman empire had shrunk under the onslaught of the early Islamic conquests in the East, coinciding with losses in the Balkans and West to the Avars, Slavs, Lombards etc.The book is structured in three parts, with the first part comprising thematic chapters dealing with social conditions, religion, culture, the importance of cities and Constantinople itself, a middle section dealing with the imperial political-foreign policy-military narrative, then a final thematic section essentially dealing with the transition from the ancient to the medieval, such as the change in that nature of cities and the impact of human-driven and natural change (Islamic conquests or the volcanic events driving famine and economic/population shrinkage).The author brings in the latest environmental and disease-science, fully discussing the impact of volcanic eruptions, the onset of the Justinianic plague (the first appearance of disease caused by the Yersinia Pestis bacterium), the impact of lead processing (pollution in the environment and the human body).There is a good volume of granular archaeological detail to support the trends identified, and very diverse written sources are quoted. There are good regional maps.The only negative aspects were probably not related to the author's output but rather the editorial guidelines of the wider series. The narrative section would have been improved it if has been somewhat longer. The final chapter on the Heraclian dynasty has to canter through events at a rapid pace, and I repeatedly had to retrace the narrative to remind myself of who various individuals were, court officials, foreign prices, religious figures, members of the imperial family etc. There are helpful headings to flag the imperial reigns being discussed, but I found the chapter pretty challenging. I suspect that this was due to space constraints, as the author writes very elegant prose, and I cannot imagine that he could not have made it clearer with a more expansive text. My other slight gripe is that the series guidelines have not really separated the volumes very clearly. The similarly excellent volume by Michael Kulikowski covers AD363-568:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imperial-Tragedy-Constantines-Destruction-363-568-ebook/dp/B07K8W73T5/ref=sr_1_1?Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0&__mk_en_GB=%C3%85M%C3%85Z%C3%95%C3%91&qid=1645293544&refinements=p_28%3Aimperial+tragedy&s=books&sr=1-1&unfiltered=1Putting it crudely, if the series editor had given clear "perimeter guidance" then Kulikowski could have ignored the East after 395 and had more text on the successor kingdoms, while Stephenson could have started his narrative a bit later and had more space to narrate a complex series of events. It seems slightly perplexing that the publishers have engaged these formidable titans of ancient history to produce separate volumes in a series then not given slightly more thought to avoiding overlap. All these volumes are great books, all can be read standalone, but a bit more series planning could have given more space to each author to expand their ideas.

This is a fantastic book. Unlike the works of John Julius Norwich, this isn't a maps and chaps history with a nice line in gossip. Instead, it opens by talking about lead. This was fascinating and the background provided by this gave a lot of context for the middle section of the book. It's nice when a book shows more of a slice of life than who was up and who was down.The middle section is the chronological history and this rattles along at a nice pace. I'll be honest, the niceties of the many theological arguments were beyond me, but they mattered deeply to the folk at the time and so are something of a necessary evil to follow. It was great to see some of the less fashionable emperors discussed, as much as the sources permitted, rather than just Justinian and Heraclius taking centre stage and the rest passed over.The final section was more of a mixed bag, with the many examples of life changing and the decline feeling rather repetitive. However, it did make the point that unlike some of the challengers to Pirenne who date these changes to the Vandal occupation of North Africa, the 7th century is much more plausible.It would have been nice to have seen something about the establishment of the Themes, as these have long intrigued me, but this is a minor quibble.I hope that Stephenson writes some successor volumes to this, as I'd like to read his thoughts on the rule of Romanus Lecapenus.

Having read a great deal about Roman Britain and ancient Rome this is my first book on the Eastern Empire and it is a very good introduction. Well researched and well presented I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone interested in this historical period.

This is an excellent book that works well as a standalone volume.It was a good idea to focus on the eastern empire after its separation from the western empire. The east was urban, commercially dynamic, international, intellectual and cultured - it provided most of the wealth generated in the ancient world (and, as Henri Pirenne pointed out long ago, it was far ahead of the west at this point). But most of our Roman histories focus on the western part - perhaps because it was undergoing deeper and more profound transformations in this period? It still seems a misrepresentation. This volume does good work expanding our provincial perspective.The author starts by setting out the distinctive culture of the east - giving quite a bit of space both at the start and the end to things like climate changes (the data is now so precise and specific to allow fascinating integration with economic and social evidence), urbanisation, the larger regional economy, theological issues and so on, leaving the political and historical narrative to the middle. As well as being a good way to establish this under-appreciated history, it is also largely a response to the fact we only have fairly thin narrative historical accounts from the period while we do have many and varied archaeological sources of evidence.This has a different in feel from the others in this series - it gave a stronger sense of a regional culture and this contextualised the political and military events. I think these were probably the aspects that I always thought missing from the 1st volume of John Julius Norwich's Byzantium series (which covers about the same region and timescale). It's a really interesting read with lots of fascinating bits of info and insight. It's a very good series and I think this still stands out.