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Lost To The West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization (2009)

by Lars Brownworth(Favorite Author)

4.03 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307407950 (ISBN13: 9780307407955)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Crown

review 1: Nice overview from the 3rd century onward as citizens looked from a disintegrating Rome to a fresh start in the wealthier east of the empire. It takes you from the days of Diocletian and the original split of the Empire into West and East followed by the dawning of Constantinople as the new capital. From there, over a thousand years of ups and downs of the Byzantines are pictured as they faced relentless threats from Goths and Huns, Persians, Arabs, Slavic and Balkan empires and eventually the Seljuks and tribe of Osman. By no means an in-depth account but a solid overview of the key emperors that were instrumental in the major successes and failures of the Byzantine Empire.
review 2: This is Baby's First History of the Byzantine Empire.I do NOT mean that as... more an insult. It is a stellar, one-volume history of the incredibly diverse, complex, and occasionally completely mystifying history of an empire that spanned over a 1000 years NOT including the near-half-millennium of Roman Empire that preceded it and that contemporaries did not consider at all separate from the latter empire we call Byzantine.See? You're already confused.I _love_ the Byzantines and the Ottomans, so I read pretty much everything that comes out on them. As far as empires go, they're two of the most fascinating and complex to ever have existed, and, while well-covered in English, not exhaustively so like the American Civil War or World War II have been. A few years ago, I read both all three volumes of Norwich's canonical history of Byzantium as well as Osman's Dream, Caroline Finkel's excellent one-volume history of the Ottomans in the space of a few months. By the end of it, I was burnt the hell out on the topic, as much as I enjoy it. When this smaller, more-focused and well-reviewed volume came out in 2009, I was still pretty torched on the subject, so I passed until recently, when it showed up on an Amazon search that, as they usually do, headed down the rabbit hole from my original search topic."Lost to the West" is a GREAT refresher for someone familiar with the topic but grown hazy on the details, AND it is what I would now consider the finest recommendation as a starter for someone who is interested but has little-to-no knowledge of the details of Byzantine history. When you're trying to cover 88 emperors in 352 pages, you have to have a judicious sense of what to compress or just cut out entirely, and author Lars Brownworth has done an excellent job in that. By focusing primarily on the emperors that really mattered, including a few that have historically been given short shrift, he is able to keep the story moving and the key details presented without getting bogged down in a way that would be inappropriate for a survey of this type.Starting in the Roman era, naturally, with the rise of Constantine and his moving of the capitol to the tiny Greek town of Byzantium, we quickly move through the fall of the West and the real "birth" of the Byzantine Empire (even though the Byzantines called themselves Romans throughout, and did not see a clean break at any time, just a continuity of empire that spans an almost-unimaginable 1500 years), with the increasing loss of Latin as a language, the growing separation between the Church in Rome and that of the East, etc. The great peaks under Justinian, the losses to Islam, the increasingly smaller "recoveries" under the Heraclius and the Comnenus dynasty... these are all given their fair share of the story, with good amounts of detail on the economy and regular people, both of whom are essentially characters that played a larger role in Byzantine history than they did in the various contemporary Western polities of the time, which were much more "Big Man" focused due to their lower levels of development.Brownworth goes out of his way to highlight just how different the Byzantines quickly became from their former Western brothers (distant cousins, at best, by the time of the Schism of 1054 that is essential to Byzantine history); the sections on just how awed the various western crusaders were by the majesty of Constantinople, which was larger than probably every urban city of Western Europe combined at the time, are well done, as is the contrast between the brutish, fist-first mindset of the French and German knights as compared to the more diplomatic, some might say "scheming" ways of the Byzantines.Brownsworth takes pains to show that he disagrees with the modern usage of "byzantine" as synonym for devious, overly complex and designed to confuse and obfuscate... it WAS a complex empire, much more so than any other polity in Europe for many centuries between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance Era. As he repeatedly shows throughout his book, any emperor who tried to govern strictly through just brute force OR through treachery and diplomacy usually came to a bad end. If there is a sour note in the book for me, it is the occasional reference to the Turkish conquests in Europe and of Constantinople as uniquely brutal or awful for the inhabitants of those areas _because_ it was a Turkish race that was involved. I doubt the average peasant in Serbia saw much difference in being fought over by Turks versus being fought over by Serbs, Bulgars, or Byzantines themselves. The scholarship on the Turkish occupation of the Balkans has expanded greatly over the last few decades, and has shown that a more temperate interpretation of that period is probably more accurate than the past consideration of it as an unbroken stretch of enslaved darkness. Brownsworth pretty clearly still believes in the latter and, while it doesn't take central place in the book by any means, it comes up a on a few different occasions and I found the tone of it jarring each time.That one relatively minor quibble aside, I won't be hesitating to recommend this book to anyone looking for a good summary of the Byzantine Empire, but probably would not refer those who are already well-versed in the area unless their knowledge has gone completely stale like mine had before I read it. less

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