Before West and East

A revelatory new history of Byzantium that shows it was a center of global power for a thousand years, dominating the medieval world and shaping the emergence of the Latin West and the Muslim East

The seeds of contemporary Western culture are rightly identified with Greece, Rome, and Christianity. But this cultural combination was forged across the entire Mediterranean world by the “inner Greek fire” of Byzantium long before there was a self-conscious West and East. In Before West and East, acclaimed historian Judith Herrin sets out how the thousand-year civilization of Byzantium preserved and expanded Christian belief and then withstood the Islamic explosion that it inspired. In this brief, richly illustrated history, she shows that both the Latin West and the Muslim East were founded upon the existence of Byzantium at the center of the medieval world.

Herrin reveals how the “New Rome” of Constantinople (now Istanbul) became the leading metropolis of the Middle Ages thanks to the remarkable administrative machine that ran the empire from the vast palace complex of the Palation. Strikingly, she demonstrates how Byzantium’s capacity to survive through reinvention owes much to the role of the “imperial feminine” as the wives, mothers, and sisters of emperors acted to preserve their dynasty or restore orthodoxy. She also explains why the Byzantine Empire has long been ignored, abused, and treated as the “Other”—and how this hostility became a lasting prejudice after Constantinople, then the capital of Christianity, was sacked by the Venetians in the Christian crusade of 1204.

Written in a brilliant style and featuring close to 100 color illustrations, Before West and East restores one of history’s most important empires to its rightful place.