The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium

by Anthony Kaldellis

The New Roman Empire by Anthony Kaldellis, a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, is a one-volume work, 918 pages long, that covers the entire history of Byzantium and what we know about it to date. Excluding the subtitle, the book actually avoids the words Byzantium and Byzantines as “misleading modern terms,” but this is the period between Emperor Constantine’s move of the Roman capital to the city that is now Istanbul in 330, and its fall to the Turks in 1453. This is a serious work of history, hard to hold in your hands if you’re reading it in bed, but accessible to the layperson. It’s an interesting empire to study the governance of because, as Kaldellis points out in the introduction, “Though other phases of Roman history are studied more, this was the longest one. The eastern Roman empire, known colloquially to its inhabitants as Romanía, was one of the most durable states the world has ever seen.”