Byzantium: The Decline and Fall.

In the days before social history and statistical "cliometrics," the word "history" implied thick, multivolume chronological narratives of events, usually political and military in nature and almost invariably the consequences of the decisions and actions of kings, emperors, and other leading individuals. This type of history, of course, has not disappeared, any more than novels with traditional plot structures disappeared following Robbe-Grillet. Like the traditional novel, the older sort of history, with its linear sequence of events and focus on individual actors, may often be more approachable for the general reader. John Julius Norwich's three-volume history of the Byzantine empire, which now culminates in Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, is a charming and entertaining piece of traditional history telling.

Norwich does not claim that his work represents a scholarly investigation of the Eastern Empire. In the introduction to this last volume, he cheerfully admits having relied on modern translations of his primary sources because of the inadequacy of his Greek. Original scholarship is not his goal. His goal is to tell the Byzantine story in a manner that will bring this important, but too often ignored, part of the human past to the attention of nonspecialized readers.

The first two volumes, Byzantium: The Early Centuries and Byzantium: The Apogee, covered the emergence, during the early Middle Ages, of a distinctively Greek empire in the Roman East and the empire's glory as a center of Christian civilization through the eleventh century. Westerners--that is, those of us who are heirs to the Latin half of Christendom--have long held two contradictory preconceptions of the Byzantine state during these years. First, like Yeats, we have tended to echo the wonder of bedazzled early Frankish visitors to Constantinople, imagining Byzantium as a kind of never-never land in which classical time stood still. Second, following Gibbon, we still use the adjective "Byzantine" to mean "duplicitous, tricky, untrustworthy." Norwich's first volumes did much to rescue the medieval Greeks from these prejudices. He portrayed their state as an impressive, but human enterprise; he showed how clever diplomacy, as well as military force, was necessary to maintain Eastern Rome through centuries of facing new threats and enemies on all sides.

This last volume recounts the tragedy of this great state's decay, humiliation, and death. It begins on a somewhat hopeful note in the late eleventh century, with the rise to power of Alexius I Comnenus a decade after the resounding defeat of Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert. Alexius is probably, after Justinian, the Eastern emperor best known to most readers, thanks to the writings of his daughter, Anna Comnena. Alexius was a genuinely heroic figure and he did much to resuscitate the empire after Manzikert and to defend it from the threat of the Normans in Sicily. But none of the succeeding emperors seems to have equaled Alexius, and Byzantium was caught between the expanding power of Western Europe, expressed in the Crusades that began during the reign of Alexius, and the expanding power of the Turks. In the disgraceful Fourth Crusade of the early thirteenth century, the Latin knights allowed the Venetians to convince them to seize Constantinople instead of proceeding to Egypt, shattering the empire. By the late fourteenth century, the Ottoman Turks held most of the territory formerly under the Romans in the East and the emperor had become a Turkish vassal.

I wondered, as I read this book, what difference it would have made if the emperors of the final four centuries had been of a higher quality. Perhaps little, since Byzantium's strength at its apogee lay in the fact that it alone retained the institutional organization of the ancient world. But it also suffered from the same institutional weaknesses that plagued Rome: excessive centralization of power and no smooth, well-established means of legitimate succession in leadership. Its socioeconomic system, moreover, had been increasingly based on large landowners, who were mostly exempt from taxation, and this not only made it hard to raise revenue, it also inhibited the development of merchant classes and prevented Byzantium from competing with the trading cities of Venice and Genoa. The structure of the empire, then, was politically inadequate to contend with increasingly well-organized military foes and economically inadequate to contend with incipient capitalism. Norwich's traditional emphasis on personalities leads him to largely overlook such root causes of Byzantium's decline.

The book's almost exclusive concern with high politics and diplomacy, another characteristic of traditional history, leaves little room for discussion of monasticism or theology, key matters in this theocentric society. The peasantry, who made up the overwhelming majority of the population, do not appear at all in these pages, and even members of the landowning class only find their way into the narrative when they have dealings with the ruling dynasties.

Although readers should keep these limitations in mind, they will find that this book and its two predecessors have much to offer. Norwich has previously written several travel books, and his style possesses the concreteness and descriptive richness of a good travelogue. The writing is witty and anecdotal and he manages to bring his characters to life, although he may occasionally employ a little too much imagination. Norwich has a habit of telling his readers about the thoughts and feelings of the long-dead emperors, and, while these psychological insights are interesting, it is frequently unclear whether they are based on evidence from primary sources or simply on the author's own speculations and conjectures.

The strictly chronological ordering of the narrative, following the lives of the rulers, makes it easy to follow and dates have been printed at the top of every other page. The family trees of the dynasties and of various Latin rulers help clarify the complicated kinship relations among the major players.

The clashes of the spiritual descendants of the Latin West, the Greek East, and the Ottoman Muslims demand our attention today every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on the television and see another report on the Balkans. Norwich's highly readable history can serve as a useful and pleasurable introduction to the state at the core of this old triangle, the Greek empire.