Bibliography
for Byzantium.

General works

The whole eleven centuries

• Herrin, Judith. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. London: Allen Lane, 2007. The best introduction for a general reader; thematic rather than chronological.
• Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Trans. Joan Hussey. Oxford: Blackwell, 1968. The standard narrative for fifty years. Dated in emphasis, still unmatched in coverage.
• Treadgold, Warren. A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
• Norwich, John Julius. Byzantium. 3 vols. London: Viking, 1988–1995. Narrative history for pleasure rather than for footnotes, and very good at it.
• Shepard, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Kazhdan, Alexander, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. The reference work of the field.

Chapters I–III

Constantine, Justinian and the seventh-century crisis

• Cameron, Averil. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–700. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2011.
• Evans, J. A. S. The Age of Justinian. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Sarris, Peter. Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500–700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Haldon, John. Byzantium in the Seventh Century. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. On the transformation that turned a late Roman state into a medieval one.
• Howard-Johnston, James. Witnesses to a World Crisis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Chapters IV–VI

Iconoclasm, the Macedonians, Manzikert

• Brubaker, Leslie, and John Haldon. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Dismantles most of what was previously believed about iconoclasm.
• Whittow, Mark. The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600–1025. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.
• Holmes, Catherine. Basil II and the Governance of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Angold, Michael. The Byzantine Empire 1025–1204. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1997.
• Frankopan, Peter. The First Crusade: The Call from the East. London: Bodley Head, 2012. Argues the crusade from the Byzantine side, which is where it started.

Chapters VII–X

1204, the Palaiologan revival, 1453

• Phillips, Jonathan. The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
• Harris, Jonathan. Byzantium and the Crusades. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Nicol, Donald M. The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Runciman, Steven. The Fall of Constantinople 1453. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Still the classic account of the siege.
• Crowley, Roger. Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453. London: Faber, 2005.
• Philippides, Marios, and Walter K. Hanak. The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Art, religion and daily life

The civilisation rather than the state

• Cormack, Robin. Byzantine Art. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Mango, Cyril. Byzantine Architecture. New York: Abrams, 1976.
• Krautheimer, Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
• Herrin, Judith. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.
• Kaldellis, Anthony. The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Argues that the empire retained a genuinely Roman politics of popular legitimacy. Contentious and important.
• Ševčenko, Ihor. Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World. London: Variorum, 1982.

Byzantine sources

In their own words

• Procopius. The Secret History. Trans. Peter Sarris. London: Penguin, 2007. Justinian's court historian, writing what he actually thought. Vicious and indispensable.
• Procopius. The Wars of Justinian. Trans. H. B. Dewing, rev. Anthony Kaldellis. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014.
• Anna Komnene. The Alexiad. Trans. E. R. A. Sewter, rev. Peter Frankopan. London: Penguin, 2009. The First Crusade seen from the palace, by the emperor's daughter.
• Michael Psellos. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers. Trans. E. R. A. Sewter. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
• Niketas Choniates. O City of Byzantium. Trans. Harry J. Magoulias. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984. An eyewitness to the sack of 1204.
• Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. De Administrando Imperio. Ed. Gy. Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins. Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1967. An emperor's private briefing to his son on how to manage the neighbours.