Byzantium Unbound

Anthony Kaldellis is a prolific scholar and certainly among the foremost historians of the Byzantine world in North America. He is also one of the most intellectually provocative and challenging, and his writing invariably generates vigorous discussion and sometimes strong disagreement. He is a scholar on a mission, and this short, well-written, and articulate book exemplifies that mission perfectly: to reinstate the study of Byzantine civilization and society as a foundational element in the historical study of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean, and to remove the cloak of Eurocentric and crusader “othering” of medieval eastern Roman culture and civilization that has beset its history for centuries. One important aspect of this is his insistence on calling the Byzantines what they in fact called themselves, Romans, and to call for an end to what he terms “Roman denialism.”

~John Haldon, Speculum 96, no. (2021): 836-37