![]() Psellus is a terrible egotist he can’t stop talking about all his great achievements. He’s quite different from previous writers of Byzantium in that he inserts himself into the narrative all the time. His reaction to these changes is very specific, but at the same time he expresses them in a very delightful fashion, which I find eminently readable. ![]() He’s a product of the 11th century when things were changing very drastically and rapidly and, in a way, frighteningly. ![]() Would you say that Psellus is typically Byzantine? This book by Michael Psellus is so fascinating that if you only read one book about Byzantium, by a Byzantine, that would be the one I’d choose. The city became Istanbul in 1930, the capital of modern Turkey. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Byzantium, the ancient Greek city, established by colonising Greeks from Megara in 667 BC and named after king Byzantas, later, renamed as Constantinople, became the center of the Byzantine Empire, a Greek-speaking Roman Empire of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. I decided that it was very important to have a book by a Byzantine, because you get a much stronger sense of the culture and the atmosphere of Byzantium by reading what an individual who lived then wrote. The first book on your list, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers by Michael Psellus, is an autobiographical history. Foreign Policy & International Relations. ![]()
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