21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking., March 9, 2001
This review is from: The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025 (Paperback)
An excellent book for someone who wants to gain an understanding of the Empire and what drove it. The author makes a genuine attempt to help the reader to set aside the biases and prejudices of our age and to see things from a Byzantine perspective. He also calls into question certain myths that are repeated all too frequently in histories of the Empire -- such as the legend that Emperor Basil II blinded 14,000 Bulgarian prisoners. There is no contemporary evidence for this, yet the tale continues to be told. Also, as noted in the other review, Whittow calls into question standard views on the size and organization of the Empire's military resources. I'm not fully convinced by his arguments, but they cannot be ignored. Above all, though, this book is valuable for the attention it gives to parts of the Medieval world that are all too often ignored or forgotten, like Armenia and the Georgia in the Transcaucasus or the Khazars in the steppes of what is now southern Russia. The attentive reader will go away with a much fuller and clearer knowledge of the Early Middle Ages.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book that challanges widely held beliefs., December 16, 1998
Whittow makes the reader re-examine widely held beliefs on the structure and history of the Byzantine Empire. His views on the lack of success of the military structure of the Empire as well as the basic size and financing of the government caused me to completely rethink my impressions of the Empire. I haven't heard of much discussion concerning his views, however, I believe this book will dramatically alter the perceptions of the Byzantine Empire and will cause scholars to rethink their beliefs. Excellent!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great survey; important challenge to existing scholarship, July 31, 2011
This review is from: The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025 (Paperback)
This is a wide-sweeping narrative and thematic survey of middle Byzantine history. Whittow does an excellent job both briefly sketching out the story of what happened and supporting it with a great deal of solid analysis. While the narrative is sufficient, one should not look to this book if imperial politics and war is merely what one wants to read about. Although badly dated and lacking serious analysis, John Julius Norwich's trilogy still fills that gap rather well. The strength of this book is how Whittow manages to hit so many themes in so few pages and yet do the vast majority of them justice. As the title suggests, the major current that runs through this work is the changes to state, society and worldviews from the time of the end of the era of Justinian and his immediate successors to the beginning of the end for the Macedonian dynasty. Whittow deals with the rise of Islam and how the Byzantines attempted to deal with that challenge imperially, intellectually, and religiously. This is all tied in closely to the changes that took place in the economy with the decline of cities at the end of antiquity. As an archaeologist, Whittow can certainly (and rightly, I would argue) be accused to placing too little emphasis on literary materials at times, and especially in arguments where he deals with questions like the end of ancient cities, but all the same it remains an extremely refreshing view of the Byzantine world. He spends a good portion of page space on geography, and this goes a long to establishing Byzantium in its physical context, something that he is keen to do as an archaeologist and something that more textual historians should do. He also devotes a solid hundred pages or so to the various neighbours of the Eastern Roman Empire such as the Rus, the Armenians, and the peoples in the Balkans. The Khazars also get a particularly interesting section. My own problem with the book is that Whittow sometimes puts a little too much emphasis on purely archaeological evidence rather than exploring the issues with both archaeological and textual evidence. His treatment of the plague of Justinian is a good example of this, in which he posits the rather extreme position that the plague's effects were nil and that the literary sources have embellished the event. That the literary sources cannot be trusted is accepted, and the problems that the contradictory evidence from the plague is noted, but more nuanced arguments exist. The article in 'The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian' is a good example of this, as are some of the articles in Little's 'Plague and the End of Antiquity'. Another case where Whittow takes the archaeological evidence too far is during his section on Basil II's wars with the Bulgars, where he appears to argue that the given the numbers in the texts the wars and the ability of the two states to support them, some of the events must not have happened as they were described. Much of Whittow's scholarship on Basil suffers from not being updated with the latest research, so if you want to read a much more complex view towards Basil's campaigns in Bulgaria and how they were likely quite limited, check out Stepheonson's
The Legend of Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. However, these points are minor considering the book in its entirety, but the four-star rating remains to serve as a warning in this regard.
The core of the book deals with how the Empire survived and the changes that the nature of such survival wrought, and I have yet to read a better summary. Although Haldon's
Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture is far more detailed, and his
Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.680-850: A History expands upon it chronologically, neither have the succinctness or all-encompassing view that Whittow has. This is one of the best introductions to middle Byzantium and the changes that took place at the end of antiquity from the eastern perspective available. A few minor reservations have been noted above, but they are small points and do not detract from this important book, which effectively challenges many conventional ideas about this dynamic era.
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