I was very disappointed by this title which turns out to be even worse than the previous title on the Byzantine infantryman 900-1204. It duplicates (almost verbatim) significant sections of this title, published a couple of years before. Unfortunately, this duplication means that the errors are ALSO duplicated, in particular the dozen or so contained in the chronology and all those in the background section at the beginning of the book. This shows that the author did not even bother to check this section and just cut and pasted it from his previous title. Accordingly, all of the comments made for the previous title are also valid for this one.
Also, rather than using up valuable and limited space with a glossary of terms (3 full pages!) and photos of the author dressed up in what he believes to be the equipment of a byzantine heavy cavalryman, listing the various works that he has consulted would have been more valuable for the reader. There is simply NO bibliography at all.
There are two redeeming features in this title (hence the two star rating), although both suffer top some extent from the absence of a bibliography. One is the author's detailed descriptions of equipment, which is obviously his strongpoint, or at least the part that he really is interested in.
The other redeeming is the illustrations by Giuseppe Rava. I particularly liked the one on page 55 showing the fully-armoured Alexios Komnene escaping from the battlefield of Dyrrakhion in 1081, with the amount of protection largely explaining how he managed to get away from the pursuing Norman knights that intended to kill or capture him. Even this, however, is somewhat problematic. While the Emperor's and his horse's armour would have protected both of them from most weapons, it would probably not have allowed him to outrun his Norman pursuers, which he did. So the scene drawn from Anna Komnena's Alexiad seems to have been somewhat "interpreted" by the authors here to show the Emperor as a fully armoured "Kataphractos". Since we know from Anna Komnene that he was pursued off the battlefield by Norman knights but managed to escape them, it is rather doubtful (to put it mildly) as to whether he was really so heavily equiped on this occasion.
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