Böcker av Anthony Kaldellis

Byzantium has long been regarded by many as one big curiosity - decadent, degenerate, superstitious, theocratic, effeminate. With its tales and trivia - ranging across religion, bureaucracy, food, theatre, medicine, xenophobia, warfare - this book will confirm some of these prejudices, but also open eyes to the life of this extraordinarily interesting civilization.

Byzantine Studies has reached a tipping point: a growing number of historians have realized that the terms "Byzantium" and "the Byzantines" distort the reality and identity of the society that we study, and encode a series of prejudices that were embedded in western perceptions. The aim of these terms was to exclude the eastern empire from important discussions and historical developments. It is time to end this exercise in orientalist fiction, but what are the alternatives? In this book, Anthony Kaldellis surveys the pros and cons of a range of possible options and examines the implications of a field name-change also for art history, philology, and the study of Eastern Orthodoxy. The new name he proposes will carry the field into the next phase of its history, renegotiate its relationships with its peers and respect the testimony of our sources.

The New Roman Empire is the first full, single-author history of Byzantium (the eastern Roman empire) to appear in a generation. It begins with the foundation of Constantinople in 324 AD and ends with the fall of the empire to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, presenting those twelve centuries in an accessible narrative of events, free of jargon. The book focuses on political and military history as well as all the major changes in religion, society, administration, demography, and economy.

Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.

Ethnography After Antiquity explores the modes and motivations of Byzantine ethnographic writing, shedding new light on how Byzantines distinguished themselves from foreign cultures.

A major new study of the last great historian of classical antiquity.