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Byzantium: The Decline And Fall:Volume Three - Couverture rigide

Norwich, John Julius

 
9780670823772: Byzantium: The Decline And Fall:Volume Three

Synopsis

The Byzantine Empire lasted for 1123 years, a period longer than that which separates us from William the Conqueror. The third and final volume of the author's history of Byzantium, this book tells of the dire consequences of the defeat of the Seljuk Turks at the battle of Manzikert in 1071; of the Fourth Crusade, whose Crusaders, led by the octogenarian Doge of Venice, turned their attention away from the holy places to hurl themselves against Constantinople, sacking the city and setting up a succession of Frankish thugs on the imperial throne; and of the 200-year struggle by the restored Empire against the inexorable advance of the Ottoman Turks. This account of the city's fall, the last great epic in the history of the Middle Ages, is the climax of the story. The Byzantines, under their last Emperor, Constantine XI, heroically held out against the immense army of the Sultan Mehmet II for 55 days until, in 1453, the massive walls of Constantinople crumbled at last.

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Biographie de l'auteur

John Julius Norwich was born in 1929. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, at Eton, at the University of Strasbourg and, after a spell of National Service in the Navy, at New College, Oxford, where he took a degree in French and Russian. In 1952 he joined the Foreign Service, where he remained for twelve years, serving at the embassies in Belgrade and Beirut and with the British Delegation to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva. In 1964 he resigned from the service in order to write. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall is the third in his three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire.

Présentation de l'éditeur

From the accession of Alexius in 1081, through the disastrous Fourth Crusade - when an army destined for the Holy Land was diverted to Constantinople by the blind, octogenarian but infinitely crafty Doge of Venice - to the painfully protracted struggle against the Ottomans, the closing centuries of the Byzantine era are rich in pathos, colour and startling reversals of fortune. The terrible siege of Constantinople in 1453 ended the empire, founded in the year 330, which Lord Norwich has devoted many years to re-creating; this volume forms the climax to an epic sequence of books.

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