Byzantium: The Decline and Fall.

NORWICH, John Julius.

Item Number: 75093

London: Viking, 1995.

Early printing of the final volume in the author’s Byzantium Trilogy. Octavo, original boards, illustrated. Inscribed by John Julius Norwich on the title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket.

With this volume, John Julius Norwich completes his magisterial narrative history of Byzantium. As in the earlier volumes he seeks to rectify the negative impressions perpetuated by 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon. Norwich records the history of a brilliant civilization that endured for over 11 centuries. From the founding of Constantinople (capital of Byzantium) by the first Christian Roman emperor and Byzantium's first flowering, to its fatal weakening after the treacherous attack on Constantinople by Western knights in the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the valiant death of the last Byzantine emperor in 1453 at the hands of the conquering Turks, Norwich has told Byzantium's story in elegant and moving prose.