To Save A Life
The Story: Heresy! War! Betrayal! To Save A Life is the story of three men, who struggle to keep the Empire of Byzantium from falling apart, beset as it is by a weak and depraved Emperor within and merciless, relentless enemies without. Read the story of these men and those they fight to see if the world order built by Caesar and Christ will survive, or crumble into the abyss. This is the story of those who fought to save the world.
To Save A Life has been praised by lovers of history, literary fiction, and master historians. Lord John Julius Norwich (author of the Byzantium series and much more) called it, "Splendid! Well done!" Professor Jonathan Harris (Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium) said it was, "Accessible, clear. Action rolls along smartly. The history is impeccable."
If you want a compelling story that feels like a movie, this is for you.
How To Get It: Order To Save A Life from Amazon.com here, or from us.
For a signed copy, email me.
The paperback is $9.75, Kindle edition is $2.99. For signed copies, shipping is $3.00.
Free Excerpt: Want to try before you buy? Click here for the first 30 pages of the book.
To Save A Life has been praised by lovers of history, literary fiction, and master historians. Lord John Julius Norwich (author of the Byzantium series and much more) called it, "Splendid! Well done!" Professor Jonathan Harris (Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium) said it was, "Accessible, clear. Action rolls along smartly. The history is impeccable."
If you want a compelling story that feels like a movie, this is for you.
How To Get It: Order To Save A Life from Amazon.com here, or from us.
For a signed copy, email me.
The paperback is $9.75, Kindle edition is $2.99. For signed copies, shipping is $3.00.
Free Excerpt: Want to try before you buy? Click here for the first 30 pages of the book.
New edition of To Save A Life ready to go!
The revised edition of the Langhorne original To Save A Life is ready! Everything about the new edition is better: revised cover with clearer text and a more succinct back cover; an improved interior lay-out and corrections to awkward phrasings that seemed like a good idea at the time and spelling errors; and a new "Introduction to the World of Byzantium" section to give more Byzantine goodness to those who got hooked from the book. You can get all that with the same great story and action now for a new, low price of only $10. Those who have previously purchased To Save A Life can get a free PDF of the updated edition just by going to the Those Langhorne Boys page to request one.
Research trip to Turkey was utter hardship
Believe it or not, the life of a writer and publisher isn't always easy. For instance, Stephen went for a week-long research trip to Turkey in September 2011, where he and his beautiful girlfriend had to soak in the sights of Istanbul/Constantinople in Europe and Iznik/Nicaea in Asia. They hunted down all manner of fortifications, hidden palaces, and more to add depth and realism to the sequel to To Save A Life and the swashbuckling fantasy story Stephen and JT are working on. The weather was perfect, the food was good, and the people were friendly. Oh, and he had the chance to sit down with noted historian Dr. Paul Magdalino to gain even more expertise on the medieval period at an upscale coffee joint in Istanbul's equivalent of Times Square. Just pure suffering.
Stephen Clements shook it up at American Family Radio!
On June 22nd, 2011, Stephen had the pleasure of talking with Tim and Marv on Today's Issues about the sacrifices US service members make, the threat of Islam and his book To Save A Life. Thanks to Johannes Cawood for helping get the word out, and thanks to all our service men and woman around the world. Remember, LCG will send a free copy of any of our titles to any service member deployed to a combat zone. Stephen remembers how much it sucks to be there, and we want to show our appreciation any way we can.
An introduction to the world of Byzantium
To Save A Life is set in the Byzantine Empire in the year 1204 AD, and the 4th Crusade comes smashing down on it, changing history forever. As I say in the introduction to the book, this story is historically accurate, but it was not intended as a history book, so to flesh out the world in which it takes place, I wanted to put together some basic background information to do that. Behold, as I shrink over 1,000 years of history into a few, short paragraphs!
First, what was the Empire of Byzantium?
Byzantium was a Christianized Roman Empire, a state that married the cultures of the Near East and the West, the imperial might of Rome with the humanity of Christianity. The Byzantines were a very spiritual, mystical, and superstitious people, who looked to omens and revelation as much as they looked to the sciences and philosophy they had preserved from the classical world. The Byzantines identified themselves as Romans as much as they did as Christians, because they saw them as one and the same: the Byzantine Empire was by right the universal Christian Empire, and it belonged to the Christians themselves.
Did I mention they LOVED to persecute the crap out of people? Once the Christian Church got wed to the Imperial Office, most of the Emperors and leaders of the Church saw any deviation from the defined orthodoxy as heresy, and they would launch wars, civil wars, persecutions, pogroms, etc to purge heresy. Jews and Muslims they weren't fond of, but they rarely did a whole lot about them. They did this because they believed that there was one God, and there was one way to approach Him. Never mind that sometimes they changed their mind about what "orthodoxy" meant, but they were a passionately religious and philosophical people.
The Empire where all the action takes place in the book was not known at all as the Empire of Byzantium back in the day, nor until recently, when a French scholar coined the term "Byzantine". From the establishment of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople in the 300s AD on, this Empire was always known to itself and to outsiders as just that, the Roman Empire. When the Western Empire fell in the 400s under barbarian domination, the Empire in the East continued to be known as the Roman Empire, with a Roman Emperor, with people that referred to themselves as Romans. But in the modern world, we mostly know it as the Byzantine Empire, a reference to the title of the ancient city that Constantine built his new Constantinople on top of, which was a Greek city named Byzantium. Scholars use the different names interchangeably, so feel free to do so.
Second, what did it do in history?
The Byzantine Empire both was a part of and a survivor of the classical world that saw the rise of the city of Rome, its Empire, the conquest of the West, the flowering of Greco-Roman culture, the spread of Christianity, and the coming of the barbarian hordes. When the Western Roman Empire fell to pieces, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, England, and much of Germany fell into what is called the Dark Ages. While much has been done to dispel the idea of a "Dark Age" from history, let's check the facts: the roads and hinterlands became the roaming grounds of bandit hordes; the massive cities with sophisticated intellectual, cultural, and economic activity all went to Hell, some even disappearing under torch and sword; and massive amounts of people were murdered, raped, and sold into slavery. That sounds pretty dark to me. Byzantium lasted for 1,000 years after Rome fell, so there's a lot to learn about this fascinating empire.
Byzantium kept all that fun stuff we like to call "civilization" and "not being pillaged by a ravaging horde" going, preserving the Greek classics which would later help the Renaissance happen, inventing new masterworks of engineering and architecture which can be seen in the Church of Hagia Sophia (pronounced haya sofia) the al-Agsa Mosque, and in palaces and worship sites throughout the Near East and Eastern Europe, and holding back the hordes of Asia that would have subjugated a weakened, divided Europe before it had the strength to defend itself.
While Charles Martel and the Conquistadors stopped the armies of Islam and turned back the tide, Byzantium stood like an unbreakable rock in the way of Islam in the East. It returned learning and culture to the courts of Europe, and there is plenty of reason that almost every European nation adopted a form of the name "Caesar" in emulation of the Heir to Caesar, the Emperor of Constantinople. (the Germans had a "Kaiser", several Slavic countries had "Tsars", Napoleon purposefully identified himself with the Caesars, and some say the Persian "Shah" is a corruption of Caesar) Hell, they even gave us the fork. Who doesn't like forks?!
Third, where did it go?
At its height, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Byzantium ruled Italy after a bloody reconquest, North Africa all the way to Morocco, southern Spain, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and chunks of Hungary and the Ukraine. It was big. Really big. This also meant that they were stuck in constantly fighting wars on two fronts at the same time, and that is kinda a problem you don't want to have (just ask the Germans).
This is how things stood until the late 500s AD, when the Persian Shah decided to launch the war to end all wars, to settle the struggle for world supremacy with Rome that had lasted for 600 years. After a bitter struggle that lasted decades, the Emperor Heraklius (originally from Carthage, in North Africa) destroyed the Persian Empire. He installed a puppet shah, recaptured the True Cross from the Persians and returned it to Jerusalem, and went home, a wreck of a man.
Then the Muslim Arabs showed up. Over the next 100 years, they eliminated the fire-worshipping Persian Empire forever, conquered Iraq, Iran, and took from the Byzantines Israel, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and almost took Constantinople. It was an epic struggle for Byzantium to recover, and over the next 400 years, it was constant warfare for the Romans to reestablish firm control over Turkey and a little bit of Syria. Under Emperor Basil II, the Bulgar-Slayer, the Empire achieved the heights of power, being feared and respected by every country in the known world. Few dared cross him, especially after the learned of how he earned his nickname: for twenty years, he ground the Bulgarian nationalists into dust, and after the final battle, he blinded 10,000 Bulgar men, leaving one for every 10 with one eye, so he could see that way back to the Bulgar capital. When the Bulgar khan saw this ghoulish parade, he died of a stroke. Oh, and Bulgarians remember this guy TO THIS DAY. Ever want to see some Bulgarians get upset in a hurry? Say something nice about Basil at a party.
Then Manzikert happened. After Basil II died in the mid-1000s AD, he was followed by a bunch of worthless imbeciles, who only succeeded in losing ground and bankrupting the richest Empire in Europe. When a strong and worthy Emperor finally won the throne (Emperors frequently got their jobs because the previous Emperor got dead real good), it was too late for much to be done. After a major military loss at Manzikert in the east of the Empire to the Muslim Turks (based in northern Syria), the Dukas family in Constantinople declared the Emperor deposed, put one of their own on the Throne, and plunged the Empire into twenty years of civil wars. Because the Turkish sultan had made a peace treaty with the deposed Emperor and not this pretender, he declared the Empire fair-game, and let loose his hordes, who colonized vast swathes of what is now modern-day, you guessed it: TURKEY.
While the Emperor Alexius Comnenus finally put the Byzantine house in order, he needed help. He was on good terms with the Pope, a rarity in Catholic-Orthodox relations, and asked for some mercenaries and some gold to aid in his war plan against the Turk. He got the Crusades. Somewhere around 100,000 Catholics went rampaging across his Empire, starting fights, fires, and thefts on the way to recapture Jerusalem, which Alexius hadn't asked for. It was a mess, a big, stinking mess. The event did help recapture some of Turkey from the Muslims, and then the Crusaders struck out on their own to conquer the Syrian coast and Jerusalem. Two more Crusades happened after that, both giving the Emperors massive problems, and then things went from okay to bad.
The Comnenus ruled the Empire for several more generations, until they were overthrown by the angered masses in Constantinople, who installed Isaac II Angelus as Emperor. This was a bad idea. Isaac had no real experience doing anything (his claim to fame was he hid from the last Comnenus Emperor in a church to escape being beaten), lost a bunch of border skirmishes with all his neighbors, and started on the task of spending all the Empire's money. In an act of familial charity, he paid the ransom to get his brother Alexius Angelus out of prison in Syria, and he returned the favor by having Isaac overthrown while he was out on a hunting trip, blinded, then thrown in prison. Isaac's son, also named Alexius, ran for his life to the Western courts, where he had relatives he tried to talk into helping him.
That was pretty much a bust. Until he convinced Doge Enrico Dandolo (think the President of the Republic of Venice), leader of the richest trading empire in the world at the time, to direct the Fourth Crusade against the Byzantine Empire instead of the Muslims, restore his dad Isaac to the Imperial Throne, and get mad paid. Why did Dandolo think this was a good idea? One, Byzantium was weak at the time; two, it is alleged that he had been blinded in the anti-Venetian persecution that swept the Empire twenty years ago; and three, the actual soldiers going on Crusade owed Venice a ridiculous amount of money that they couldn't pay back, which, if they didn't, would cause Venice to go bankrupt. In a merchant-ruled republic, that's a real bad accomplishment for a leader to claim as his own.
As the story details, the Fourth Crusade went to Constantinople, restored Isaac to the throne, had a falling out with him, and then crushed the armies of the Byzantine-nationalist Emperor Alexius Dukas, seized the City, and then went on a week-long rampage of burning, raping, and looting. Constantinople had been accumulating the riches of East and West for almost 1,000 years, complete with holy relics like the Crown of Thorns, the burial shroud of Jesus, and the Holy Lance, and now a bunch of people had almost all died in a shameful act (the Pope actually excommunicated the entire Crusade) and now got to rob it for themselves. It was probably the single largest robbery in all history.
Then the Venetians and the Crusaders parted up the Empire between themselves, thinking they were going to do things right where the Byzantines had been screwing it up all these years. Sixty years later, the Byzantine nationalists completed the reconquest of the Empire from the Crusaders by capturing Constantinople, which forms the scene that opens the book. But it was a wrecked, bankrupt Empire they got back. It is a testament to the sheer determination and will to survive that the Empire continued to exist for another 200 years, beset as it was from both sides, by European powers who wanted to claim the mantle of Caesar for themselves, and by the Muslim Turks, who waged a relentless war to spread the dominion of Islam.
In 1453, the last Emperor died fighting the Ottoman Turks, who fielded the first canons to be used in warfare, which were designed by a Hungarian Christian that worked for the highest bidder. Ironically, the Byzantines that fought to defend the capitol of an Empire that now consisted of a few scattered outposts now did so alongside Venetians, Catholics, and Genoese, the very people that had once destroyed the Empire.
The nations of Europe realized far too late what they had done in destroying Byzantium, the only thing that had been holding back the terror of Islam. Yeah, Spain had fought a long war to drive the Muslims out of Iberia, but they were an isolated group. The Muslims of the east could call on the wealth and manpower of Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere, and bear in mind, these were the richest parts of the world at this time (it would take centuries more of misrule for the Muslims to drive their economies into the ground). Several desperate Crusades were called to try to drive the Turk out of Europe as Byzantium clinged on for its very existence, but these were too little and too late. By this time, the Ottomans had already begun the conquest of eastern Europe, and would make it all the way to Vienna twice, where they were basically stopped by luck.
Fourth, why is Byzantium important today?
Byzantium, and its fall, left a legacy that still shapes the forces that drive the world today. Worried about global Islamic terrorism? Yeah, the Byzantines had tried, with quite a lot of success, to roll back the Muslim conquests and liberate the Christians that lived in those lands. So when you see news headlines of Christians and Jews being massacred in Iraq and Egypt, those were the people Byzantium struggled to save. Byzantium learned the lesson that in order to have peace with Islam, you must be able to defeat it. Muslim caliphs frequently made peace treaties with Byzantium, and broke them as soon as they could, because their religion encourages them to do so. Heck, they're not even supposed to make treaties for longer than 10 years, because the jihad must continue. Oddly enough, the most peaceful times of Christian-Muslim relations were during the reign of Basil II, who several times smashed Muslim attempts to raid his lands, until they realized that he was not to be trifled with. He showed us that the only thing Muslim fanatics respect is power.
The Empire of Byzantium has been long outlived by the cultural commonwealth it created, and its ideas and inspirations continue to have tangible effects today. With the fall of the Empire, a Russian prince who had married a Byzantine princess declared himself Caesar, or Tsar in the Russian tongue. Until the Communist revolution, Russia and one-sixth of the world's land mass was ruled by a Caesar, and the Russians took that role seriously. They considered themselves the next Rome, and tried to live up to it. However, Russia is a cruel land, and the resulting union was an empire driven by imperial majesty and inhuman brutality, a trait inherited from the Mongol khans that terrorized the Russians before they became free. Russian policy, even if nominally democratic, has returned to the imperial model.
In the Muslim world, the Ottoman sultan declared himself Caesar, and comported himself as the Emperor of all the Romans just as the Byzantines had done. This became a reanimated corpse of the Empire, full of a renewed strength that would see an almost complete restoration of the Empire, this one built on rapacious slavery. It was a reborn Byzantine Empire, but this one with a Muslim, rather than Christian, soul. In modern Turkey, there is a very real effort being made to restore the Ottoman Empire and to refound the Muslim Caliphate that the modern republic's founder Ataturk disbanded.
The key message Byzantium can give us then, is one of spiritual and cultural power. Europe is currently a culturally, spiritually, and morally hollowed-out husk, incapable of defending itself from its enemies or even a passive collapse. The citizens of Europe have little to fill their souls and dreams with, living as they are in their unsustainable socialist utopias. They see no reason to strive for something better, they don't reproduce their declining populations, and they waste their lives away in frivolities rather than contribute to the human values of freedom, equality, and Christian morality that made their nations powerful in the first place. And they face demographic conquest by the Muslims they let into their countries, who will take away those forgotten values and replace them with Islamic ones, of slavery, subjugation, and the treatment of women and children as property, not people.
The Byzantines were obsessed with meaning, truth, and faith. These are things we in the West must discover, unless we wish to join them in the dustbin of history
First, what was the Empire of Byzantium?
Byzantium was a Christianized Roman Empire, a state that married the cultures of the Near East and the West, the imperial might of Rome with the humanity of Christianity. The Byzantines were a very spiritual, mystical, and superstitious people, who looked to omens and revelation as much as they looked to the sciences and philosophy they had preserved from the classical world. The Byzantines identified themselves as Romans as much as they did as Christians, because they saw them as one and the same: the Byzantine Empire was by right the universal Christian Empire, and it belonged to the Christians themselves.
Did I mention they LOVED to persecute the crap out of people? Once the Christian Church got wed to the Imperial Office, most of the Emperors and leaders of the Church saw any deviation from the defined orthodoxy as heresy, and they would launch wars, civil wars, persecutions, pogroms, etc to purge heresy. Jews and Muslims they weren't fond of, but they rarely did a whole lot about them. They did this because they believed that there was one God, and there was one way to approach Him. Never mind that sometimes they changed their mind about what "orthodoxy" meant, but they were a passionately religious and philosophical people.
The Empire where all the action takes place in the book was not known at all as the Empire of Byzantium back in the day, nor until recently, when a French scholar coined the term "Byzantine". From the establishment of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople in the 300s AD on, this Empire was always known to itself and to outsiders as just that, the Roman Empire. When the Western Empire fell in the 400s under barbarian domination, the Empire in the East continued to be known as the Roman Empire, with a Roman Emperor, with people that referred to themselves as Romans. But in the modern world, we mostly know it as the Byzantine Empire, a reference to the title of the ancient city that Constantine built his new Constantinople on top of, which was a Greek city named Byzantium. Scholars use the different names interchangeably, so feel free to do so.
Second, what did it do in history?
The Byzantine Empire both was a part of and a survivor of the classical world that saw the rise of the city of Rome, its Empire, the conquest of the West, the flowering of Greco-Roman culture, the spread of Christianity, and the coming of the barbarian hordes. When the Western Roman Empire fell to pieces, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, England, and much of Germany fell into what is called the Dark Ages. While much has been done to dispel the idea of a "Dark Age" from history, let's check the facts: the roads and hinterlands became the roaming grounds of bandit hordes; the massive cities with sophisticated intellectual, cultural, and economic activity all went to Hell, some even disappearing under torch and sword; and massive amounts of people were murdered, raped, and sold into slavery. That sounds pretty dark to me. Byzantium lasted for 1,000 years after Rome fell, so there's a lot to learn about this fascinating empire.
Byzantium kept all that fun stuff we like to call "civilization" and "not being pillaged by a ravaging horde" going, preserving the Greek classics which would later help the Renaissance happen, inventing new masterworks of engineering and architecture which can be seen in the Church of Hagia Sophia (pronounced haya sofia) the al-Agsa Mosque, and in palaces and worship sites throughout the Near East and Eastern Europe, and holding back the hordes of Asia that would have subjugated a weakened, divided Europe before it had the strength to defend itself.
While Charles Martel and the Conquistadors stopped the armies of Islam and turned back the tide, Byzantium stood like an unbreakable rock in the way of Islam in the East. It returned learning and culture to the courts of Europe, and there is plenty of reason that almost every European nation adopted a form of the name "Caesar" in emulation of the Heir to Caesar, the Emperor of Constantinople. (the Germans had a "Kaiser", several Slavic countries had "Tsars", Napoleon purposefully identified himself with the Caesars, and some say the Persian "Shah" is a corruption of Caesar) Hell, they even gave us the fork. Who doesn't like forks?!
Third, where did it go?
At its height, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Byzantium ruled Italy after a bloody reconquest, North Africa all the way to Morocco, southern Spain, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and chunks of Hungary and the Ukraine. It was big. Really big. This also meant that they were stuck in constantly fighting wars on two fronts at the same time, and that is kinda a problem you don't want to have (just ask the Germans).
This is how things stood until the late 500s AD, when the Persian Shah decided to launch the war to end all wars, to settle the struggle for world supremacy with Rome that had lasted for 600 years. After a bitter struggle that lasted decades, the Emperor Heraklius (originally from Carthage, in North Africa) destroyed the Persian Empire. He installed a puppet shah, recaptured the True Cross from the Persians and returned it to Jerusalem, and went home, a wreck of a man.
Then the Muslim Arabs showed up. Over the next 100 years, they eliminated the fire-worshipping Persian Empire forever, conquered Iraq, Iran, and took from the Byzantines Israel, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and almost took Constantinople. It was an epic struggle for Byzantium to recover, and over the next 400 years, it was constant warfare for the Romans to reestablish firm control over Turkey and a little bit of Syria. Under Emperor Basil II, the Bulgar-Slayer, the Empire achieved the heights of power, being feared and respected by every country in the known world. Few dared cross him, especially after the learned of how he earned his nickname: for twenty years, he ground the Bulgarian nationalists into dust, and after the final battle, he blinded 10,000 Bulgar men, leaving one for every 10 with one eye, so he could see that way back to the Bulgar capital. When the Bulgar khan saw this ghoulish parade, he died of a stroke. Oh, and Bulgarians remember this guy TO THIS DAY. Ever want to see some Bulgarians get upset in a hurry? Say something nice about Basil at a party.
Then Manzikert happened. After Basil II died in the mid-1000s AD, he was followed by a bunch of worthless imbeciles, who only succeeded in losing ground and bankrupting the richest Empire in Europe. When a strong and worthy Emperor finally won the throne (Emperors frequently got their jobs because the previous Emperor got dead real good), it was too late for much to be done. After a major military loss at Manzikert in the east of the Empire to the Muslim Turks (based in northern Syria), the Dukas family in Constantinople declared the Emperor deposed, put one of their own on the Throne, and plunged the Empire into twenty years of civil wars. Because the Turkish sultan had made a peace treaty with the deposed Emperor and not this pretender, he declared the Empire fair-game, and let loose his hordes, who colonized vast swathes of what is now modern-day, you guessed it: TURKEY.
While the Emperor Alexius Comnenus finally put the Byzantine house in order, he needed help. He was on good terms with the Pope, a rarity in Catholic-Orthodox relations, and asked for some mercenaries and some gold to aid in his war plan against the Turk. He got the Crusades. Somewhere around 100,000 Catholics went rampaging across his Empire, starting fights, fires, and thefts on the way to recapture Jerusalem, which Alexius hadn't asked for. It was a mess, a big, stinking mess. The event did help recapture some of Turkey from the Muslims, and then the Crusaders struck out on their own to conquer the Syrian coast and Jerusalem. Two more Crusades happened after that, both giving the Emperors massive problems, and then things went from okay to bad.
The Comnenus ruled the Empire for several more generations, until they were overthrown by the angered masses in Constantinople, who installed Isaac II Angelus as Emperor. This was a bad idea. Isaac had no real experience doing anything (his claim to fame was he hid from the last Comnenus Emperor in a church to escape being beaten), lost a bunch of border skirmishes with all his neighbors, and started on the task of spending all the Empire's money. In an act of familial charity, he paid the ransom to get his brother Alexius Angelus out of prison in Syria, and he returned the favor by having Isaac overthrown while he was out on a hunting trip, blinded, then thrown in prison. Isaac's son, also named Alexius, ran for his life to the Western courts, where he had relatives he tried to talk into helping him.
That was pretty much a bust. Until he convinced Doge Enrico Dandolo (think the President of the Republic of Venice), leader of the richest trading empire in the world at the time, to direct the Fourth Crusade against the Byzantine Empire instead of the Muslims, restore his dad Isaac to the Imperial Throne, and get mad paid. Why did Dandolo think this was a good idea? One, Byzantium was weak at the time; two, it is alleged that he had been blinded in the anti-Venetian persecution that swept the Empire twenty years ago; and three, the actual soldiers going on Crusade owed Venice a ridiculous amount of money that they couldn't pay back, which, if they didn't, would cause Venice to go bankrupt. In a merchant-ruled republic, that's a real bad accomplishment for a leader to claim as his own.
As the story details, the Fourth Crusade went to Constantinople, restored Isaac to the throne, had a falling out with him, and then crushed the armies of the Byzantine-nationalist Emperor Alexius Dukas, seized the City, and then went on a week-long rampage of burning, raping, and looting. Constantinople had been accumulating the riches of East and West for almost 1,000 years, complete with holy relics like the Crown of Thorns, the burial shroud of Jesus, and the Holy Lance, and now a bunch of people had almost all died in a shameful act (the Pope actually excommunicated the entire Crusade) and now got to rob it for themselves. It was probably the single largest robbery in all history.
Then the Venetians and the Crusaders parted up the Empire between themselves, thinking they were going to do things right where the Byzantines had been screwing it up all these years. Sixty years later, the Byzantine nationalists completed the reconquest of the Empire from the Crusaders by capturing Constantinople, which forms the scene that opens the book. But it was a wrecked, bankrupt Empire they got back. It is a testament to the sheer determination and will to survive that the Empire continued to exist for another 200 years, beset as it was from both sides, by European powers who wanted to claim the mantle of Caesar for themselves, and by the Muslim Turks, who waged a relentless war to spread the dominion of Islam.
In 1453, the last Emperor died fighting the Ottoman Turks, who fielded the first canons to be used in warfare, which were designed by a Hungarian Christian that worked for the highest bidder. Ironically, the Byzantines that fought to defend the capitol of an Empire that now consisted of a few scattered outposts now did so alongside Venetians, Catholics, and Genoese, the very people that had once destroyed the Empire.
The nations of Europe realized far too late what they had done in destroying Byzantium, the only thing that had been holding back the terror of Islam. Yeah, Spain had fought a long war to drive the Muslims out of Iberia, but they were an isolated group. The Muslims of the east could call on the wealth and manpower of Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere, and bear in mind, these were the richest parts of the world at this time (it would take centuries more of misrule for the Muslims to drive their economies into the ground). Several desperate Crusades were called to try to drive the Turk out of Europe as Byzantium clinged on for its very existence, but these were too little and too late. By this time, the Ottomans had already begun the conquest of eastern Europe, and would make it all the way to Vienna twice, where they were basically stopped by luck.
Fourth, why is Byzantium important today?
Byzantium, and its fall, left a legacy that still shapes the forces that drive the world today. Worried about global Islamic terrorism? Yeah, the Byzantines had tried, with quite a lot of success, to roll back the Muslim conquests and liberate the Christians that lived in those lands. So when you see news headlines of Christians and Jews being massacred in Iraq and Egypt, those were the people Byzantium struggled to save. Byzantium learned the lesson that in order to have peace with Islam, you must be able to defeat it. Muslim caliphs frequently made peace treaties with Byzantium, and broke them as soon as they could, because their religion encourages them to do so. Heck, they're not even supposed to make treaties for longer than 10 years, because the jihad must continue. Oddly enough, the most peaceful times of Christian-Muslim relations were during the reign of Basil II, who several times smashed Muslim attempts to raid his lands, until they realized that he was not to be trifled with. He showed us that the only thing Muslim fanatics respect is power.
The Empire of Byzantium has been long outlived by the cultural commonwealth it created, and its ideas and inspirations continue to have tangible effects today. With the fall of the Empire, a Russian prince who had married a Byzantine princess declared himself Caesar, or Tsar in the Russian tongue. Until the Communist revolution, Russia and one-sixth of the world's land mass was ruled by a Caesar, and the Russians took that role seriously. They considered themselves the next Rome, and tried to live up to it. However, Russia is a cruel land, and the resulting union was an empire driven by imperial majesty and inhuman brutality, a trait inherited from the Mongol khans that terrorized the Russians before they became free. Russian policy, even if nominally democratic, has returned to the imperial model.
In the Muslim world, the Ottoman sultan declared himself Caesar, and comported himself as the Emperor of all the Romans just as the Byzantines had done. This became a reanimated corpse of the Empire, full of a renewed strength that would see an almost complete restoration of the Empire, this one built on rapacious slavery. It was a reborn Byzantine Empire, but this one with a Muslim, rather than Christian, soul. In modern Turkey, there is a very real effort being made to restore the Ottoman Empire and to refound the Muslim Caliphate that the modern republic's founder Ataturk disbanded.
The key message Byzantium can give us then, is one of spiritual and cultural power. Europe is currently a culturally, spiritually, and morally hollowed-out husk, incapable of defending itself from its enemies or even a passive collapse. The citizens of Europe have little to fill their souls and dreams with, living as they are in their unsustainable socialist utopias. They see no reason to strive for something better, they don't reproduce their declining populations, and they waste their lives away in frivolities rather than contribute to the human values of freedom, equality, and Christian morality that made their nations powerful in the first place. And they face demographic conquest by the Muslims they let into their countries, who will take away those forgotten values and replace them with Islamic ones, of slavery, subjugation, and the treatment of women and children as property, not people.
The Byzantines were obsessed with meaning, truth, and faith. These are things we in the West must discover, unless we wish to join them in the dustbin of history
Reference material for To Save A Life
Now that the book is on sale and you've read the introduction to Byzantium posted on this page, I want to give props to the great authors and presenters that I have really enjoyed in getting my fix of Eastern Roman Empire. Yes, I have a full-blown addiction to the Empire, and it's the strangest thing: people who get a taste of Byzantium often turn fanatic in their interest. If you've got the bug, below is a list of additional reading, watching, and listening that can take you further in exploring the fascinating history of the Byzantine Empire. I've purposefully left out the heavy academic reading, but will be glad to recommend some sources if you just have to know if Constantine the Great really had a beard or not. So without further ado:
Video -
John Romer's "Byzantium - The Lost Empire", by TLC. This is the fastest introduction to the sprawling history and influences of Byzantium, presented with enthusiasm by a whimsical short, chubby guy. The images Romer brings to this 4-hour documentary are the next best thing to actually seeing the magnificent vistas left from Byzantium in person, and his narration is humorous and informative. The only downsides of this series include his somewhat rambling narrative arc and his repetitive and dreamy intonation, "The Empire of Byzaaaantium". Excellent series, though, and he does a great job of emphasizing why you should give a damn about this Empire.
Book -
John Julius Norwich's Byzantium trilogy (the Early Centuries, the Apogee, and the Decline and Fall) for the grand tour, or his A Short History of Byzantium, if you don't deserve a hot date. This man's trilogy changed my life, when I got my hands on it as a teenager. Please skip over the urge to ask why this guy's books, not girls, were what changed my life as a teenager (short answer: the books couldn't run away). His history is excellent, but his wit and lively sense of humor make the reading a joy in itself. He's my literary hero, so I'm biased, but if you never read anything else on the subject, read Norwich. To Save A Life is dedicated to him for a reason, because without him telling a fascinating story with such skill, the book would have never been written, and I might not be wrong in the head.
Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium: How A Lost Empire Shaped the World takes a different tack on telling the significance of Byzantium, by telling the spillover effects and influence Byzantium had on its neighbors and their cultural, social, and intellectual development. Wells penned a short, eminently readable work on the subject, describing exactly who helped foster the Italian Renaissance, how Byzantine heretics helped mold the Russian imperial project, and other topics. Read Norwich for what happened, read Wells for how that shaped everybody else.
Jonathan Harris' Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium is the best, most focused text I've read on what Constantinople looked like, what was there, and how the City worked. It's no exaggeration that Constantinople, modern Istanbul, was the City at the Center of the World: there was no urban center comparable to it in wealth, intellectual, cultural, economic, or artistic power. Unlike most great cities, It didn't peak and wash out after a few decades or a century, it was the premier city in the world for 800 years! My only regret in writing To Save A Life is that I left out so much detail about the City that Harris nailed. He's also a really nice guy, besides being a very aggressive scholar.
Geoffrey de Villehardouin's Memoirs or Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople is a priceless piece of writing. Yes, it was written by the character from the novel Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who organized the Crusade, got its collective butt in hock to the Venetians, and then went on to wreck European history in one desperate attempt to dig out of debt after another. Not only was he an excellent writer, but he wrote the chronicle as he went along, so I got the feeling that it is an accurate representation of the events as they happened, rather than some white-washed, after the fact affair. While he personally led to the ruin of Byzantium and all of eastern and central Europe, at least ol' Geoffro wrote a good book. Jack-ass.
Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Constantinople is an excellent companion for To Save A Life and a great piece of history. The author's strength comes in his laser-like focus on this one pivotal event and then digging deep into it, to dredge up the smallest details with which to paint the most complete picture.
Audio -
Lars Brownsworth's podcast series "12 Byzantine Rulers" is probably the most pain-free way of getting a fairly thorough grounding in the full sweep of Byzantine history. With 17 episodes at roughly 15-30 minutes each, Brownsworth tells the story of Byzantium by focusing on a few key people that ultimately determined the fate of the Empire, and the world. The free episodes and a lot more are available at his website:
http://12byzantinerulers.com/
Video -
John Romer's "Byzantium - The Lost Empire", by TLC. This is the fastest introduction to the sprawling history and influences of Byzantium, presented with enthusiasm by a whimsical short, chubby guy. The images Romer brings to this 4-hour documentary are the next best thing to actually seeing the magnificent vistas left from Byzantium in person, and his narration is humorous and informative. The only downsides of this series include his somewhat rambling narrative arc and his repetitive and dreamy intonation, "The Empire of Byzaaaantium". Excellent series, though, and he does a great job of emphasizing why you should give a damn about this Empire.
Book -
John Julius Norwich's Byzantium trilogy (the Early Centuries, the Apogee, and the Decline and Fall) for the grand tour, or his A Short History of Byzantium, if you don't deserve a hot date. This man's trilogy changed my life, when I got my hands on it as a teenager. Please skip over the urge to ask why this guy's books, not girls, were what changed my life as a teenager (short answer: the books couldn't run away). His history is excellent, but his wit and lively sense of humor make the reading a joy in itself. He's my literary hero, so I'm biased, but if you never read anything else on the subject, read Norwich. To Save A Life is dedicated to him for a reason, because without him telling a fascinating story with such skill, the book would have never been written, and I might not be wrong in the head.
Colin Wells' Sailing From Byzantium: How A Lost Empire Shaped the World takes a different tack on telling the significance of Byzantium, by telling the spillover effects and influence Byzantium had on its neighbors and their cultural, social, and intellectual development. Wells penned a short, eminently readable work on the subject, describing exactly who helped foster the Italian Renaissance, how Byzantine heretics helped mold the Russian imperial project, and other topics. Read Norwich for what happened, read Wells for how that shaped everybody else.
Jonathan Harris' Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium is the best, most focused text I've read on what Constantinople looked like, what was there, and how the City worked. It's no exaggeration that Constantinople, modern Istanbul, was the City at the Center of the World: there was no urban center comparable to it in wealth, intellectual, cultural, economic, or artistic power. Unlike most great cities, It didn't peak and wash out after a few decades or a century, it was the premier city in the world for 800 years! My only regret in writing To Save A Life is that I left out so much detail about the City that Harris nailed. He's also a really nice guy, besides being a very aggressive scholar.
Geoffrey de Villehardouin's Memoirs or Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople is a priceless piece of writing. Yes, it was written by the character from the novel Geoffrey de Villehardouin, who organized the Crusade, got its collective butt in hock to the Venetians, and then went on to wreck European history in one desperate attempt to dig out of debt after another. Not only was he an excellent writer, but he wrote the chronicle as he went along, so I got the feeling that it is an accurate representation of the events as they happened, rather than some white-washed, after the fact affair. While he personally led to the ruin of Byzantium and all of eastern and central Europe, at least ol' Geoffro wrote a good book. Jack-ass.
Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Constantinople is an excellent companion for To Save A Life and a great piece of history. The author's strength comes in his laser-like focus on this one pivotal event and then digging deep into it, to dredge up the smallest details with which to paint the most complete picture.
Audio -
Lars Brownsworth's podcast series "12 Byzantine Rulers" is probably the most pain-free way of getting a fairly thorough grounding in the full sweep of Byzantine history. With 17 episodes at roughly 15-30 minutes each, Brownsworth tells the story of Byzantium by focusing on a few key people that ultimately determined the fate of the Empire, and the world. The free episodes and a lot more are available at his website:
http://12byzantinerulers.com/
