The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740

Abstract

"In the middle of the sixth century the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire was the largest state in western Eurasia. A century later it was a fraction of the size, its eastern provinces torn away by the early Islamic conquests in the middle of the seventh century. It had lost three-quarters of its lands and probably more of its tax revenues. How did it survive beyond the year 700 CE? Surrounded on all sides by challenges, most particularly from the dynamism and strength of the Islamic Caliphate, it should not have done: massively outnumbered and out-resourced, its territory repeatedly and continuously laid waste, its towns turned to fortresses, its population decimated by warfare and plague, even the capital, Constantinople, the largest city in the western world, besieged and threatened. Yet it did survive. By bringing together evidence for beliefs, identities and attitudes, administrative structures and the search for resources, the organization of its armies and the system of crisis management in its tax system, this book seeks to locate and describe the mechanisms of survival. The author places all these developments into their environmental context, looking at how the Byzantine state benefited from small-scale climatic changes...of which it was, of course, largely unaware...and how, together with other elements, these created the conditions that permitted the eastern Roman empire not just to survive, but indeed to recover sufficiently to mount its own major challenge to the Islamic world in subsequent centuries."...Provided by publisher

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