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.

Scholars have long claimed that the Eastern Roman Empire, a Christian theocracy, bore little resemblance to ancient Rome. Here, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that it was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of, and sometimes by, Greek-speaking citizens who considered themselves fully Roman.

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.

In this companion to the two-volume Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library translation of The Histories by Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Anthony Kaldellis explores the ethnic dynamics that undergird the Histories, which recount the rise of the Ottoman empire and the decline of the Byzantine empire, all in the context of expanding western power.

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