The 2020 Nonfiction Challenge Part X: Books About THE BYZANTINES / OTTOMANS in October

Reading Subject: The Byzantines, the Ottomans, and Their Empires

The Ottomans took over from the Byzantines in 1453. Their empire collapsed circa 1915/1918, after the first World War.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

This month's nonfiction challenge is to read anything set in this era that's about the region covered. From what was said before, you may read about Byron at Missalonghi or about the attempts to push the Turks back from Vienna. But a book about Crete or Athens during the classical era (pre-Byzantine) won't count.

As far as I'm aware, I have no books on this topic. (Although I had ancestors who lived in the region at the time?) If someone asks questions about the challenge, I will expect someone else who is not me to offer up answers.

I'll make corrections to this post if needed.

Here's what we're reading.

Hi - already started JUSTINIAN THE GREAT.

>2 aspirit:
I thought if nobody else was going to post this month's I would do it. You rescued me. I would have been forced to try to figure out how to post the thumbnail book covers - a skill that I have never been successful at doing. Others here on LT make it look easy, but I have not been able to get that function to work.

I would add that the Byzantine Empire lasted from (roughly) 400 C.E to 1453 when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. That gives us about 1,000 years of history to cover. It includes, the split of the Roman Empire into the Eastern and Western Empires, and the Fall of Rome in the 5th Century. Along the way were the Christian Crusades (all four of them), the rise of Venice, the conquering of the Balkans by the Ottomans, and the Battles of Manzikert, Lepanto and Gallipoli. Then there is the question of religion. The Great Schism, the rise of Islam, Sufism, and the Iconoclast Controversy. There is 1,500 years of art and architecture that can be covered - the Hagia Sophia, the art of the Icons, and the building of the great Islamic buildings throughout the Empire. There is the poetry of Rumi and the Code of Justinian to read about.

It is the story of the rise and fall of great empires and religions.

I plan on reading Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization by Lars Brownworth. I have had this book in my collection since before I joined Librarything. It is time to read it. I will start on it tonight when I get home from work.

>2 aspirit: Oh, thank you! My time has sort of gotten away from me, and I was feeling all manner of guilt for not getting on with this.
I think I have some books that may fit, but I haven't look them up either.
I am in love with a fair amount of fiction from various points in those 1,000 years, but I won't try to list it now since I'm brain dead. I did see that a translation of some of Rumi's poetry was on offer as either a BookBub or Kindle deal today.

I'm probably going to read Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin, a history of the Ottoman Empire - assuming I can get it from Overdrive reasonably soon!

>6 benitastrnad: I’m going to listen to the audio edition of Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization by Lars Brownworth. I know very little about the Byzantine empire so I wanted to find somethithat was more of an overview and also available in audio. I’m going to start this as soon as I finish off my current audiobook.

>8 drneutron:
I read Lords of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin and thought it an excellent work. I also love the mystery novels that Goodwin published that are set in Istanbul in the 1820' to the 1840's. These are the Yashim the Eunuch mystery novels and they are very well written novels that take you into a culture that is so exotic. Plus, like so many detectives, Yashim is a gourmand and Goodwin published a cookbook that features the recipes that Yashim cooks. I believe there are 5 Yashim novels and Goodwin has said that he is not going to write anymore. (sad face)

I am also going to try to read Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen. I hesitate to read this one given the times but then decided that it might be good to see how other societies have handled plagues.

I didn't have anything on my shelves for this topic so I got Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World out from the library for this month's read.

I will scour my shelves for something to read for this challenge.

I am presently watching the marathon "Resurrection : Ertugrul" which is about the eventual formation of the Ottoman empire .

>12 Familyhistorian: Meg, I didn't hunt through my shelves. Sailing from Byzantium looks like just the thing for me, and I've ordered a copy. Thanks!
Meanwhile, Sailing to Sarantium is a favorite fictional, alternate historical look at Byzantium. I loved it and its sequel, Lord of Emperors.
The other Byzantine fiction that sparks immediately are the two Crawford of Lymond books by Dorothy Dunnett: The Disorderly Knights, which is a well-researched look at the battle of Lepanto, and Pawn in Frankincense, which puts us in the harem in the Topkapi Palace. These are books three and four in a wonderful series; you really might want to start at the beginning........

>14 LizzieD: I'm hoping it's a good one, Peggy. It's looking good so far with maps, a timeline and a cast of characters to keep everyone straight.

I have read about 100 pages in Lost to the West in two days. Brownworth is a good storyteller. I can say that this is not great history. There isn't enough detail for that, but this is GREAT storytelling. Brownworth captures the reader right from the start. The book moves along at a fast pace so it doesn't give details to the reader - just the broad sweeping gestures of the story.

I have already placed a request at my library for a book on the Hagia Sophia because this book made me so curious about that building. Brownworth says "... it took only five years, ten months, and four days from the laying of the first stone to the completion of the building - a remarkable achievement in any age, much less one without modern machines." He contrasts that with the fact that Westminster Cathedral took some thirty-three years to rebuild, Notre Dame more than a hundred, and the Duomo in Florence about 230.

I am no reading about the great general Belisarius. Again, I requested a book from the library on Belisarius. Not much has been written about him.

I ought to join in with this as we have a surprisingly large selection of books about the Byzantine empire lying about. I will make a selection tomorrow.

I stayed up late last night to finish Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization by Lars Brownworth. This is narrative nonfiction in the style of Shelby Foote. It is just darn good storytelling. It is a blow-by-blow chronological overview of the history of the Emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is NOT a work of academic history. It IS storytelling. It succeeds wonderfully at telling the story. It does get a bit polemic at times, but the author stays on-track and draws the reader unto the great drama of the rise and fall of civilizations. And what a bumpy ride that is. (we can all attest to that given the current times in which we live.) If you don't know anything about the Eastern Roman Empire (AKA as the Byzantine Empire) this is the book to read. It never gets into details and it keeps the story rolling.

Why I have this book is tied up with why I am on LT. Back-in-the-day, School Library Journal ran an end-of-the-year review of great web sites for school teachers and librarians. In about 2007, that review included the web site, and nascent podcast done by a high school history teacher, Lars Brownworth and his brother Anders. The title of the site and the podcast was Lost to the West. It was about a forgotten part of Western Civilization - the Byzantine Empire. Brownworth was teaching high school history in New York and became obsessed with, what he saw as the forgotten history of the Eastern Roman Empire. His brother Anders was interested in this new thing called podcasts, so the two brothers developed one of the first podcasts as a teaching aid. It was specifically aimed at helping high school teachers teach about a historical subject that they knew little about. I downloaded the podcasts and still have them on my computer and my iPad. A few years later Brownworth wrote this book - which was a bestseller. A few years after that he developed another podcast on the Norman's and the Norman kingdoms of Sicily and Naples and the critical role that the Normans played in the history of the European Middle Ages.

When the book was published I purchased it and got one for our library. I am finally reading it now because of this challenge.

In that same issue of School Library Journal, in the same review section was a review of another new web site - Librarything. I thought that one sounded interesting as well, so I took a look and bookmarked it. I have been hanging around Librarything ever since.

As for School Library Journal. I hardly ever look at it now. I don't have time, and we stopped getting a paper copy of it, so I can't carry it around with me to lunch like a did in the past. Because of that I don't know about the new whiz bang stuff that might be out there on the internet. Something's lost and something's gained with every change. Not reading SLJ is one of the losses.

I have made my next selection for this month's reading. It will be Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen. I have read 20 pages in it and I can tell already that this is a more academic book in style and substance. I thought it would be an appropriate book for our times. It doesn't hurt to be reminded that we are not the first civilization to be attacked by a pandemic. In this case, at the very moment when Justinian and managed to reconquer all the lost territory of the Roman Empire along comes the worlds first recorded pandemic. The author tells of the consequences of the Bubonic Plague in the introduction. "The Plague of Justinian, ..., killed at least twenty-five million people; depopulated entire cities; and depressed birth rates for generations precisely at the time that Justinian's armies had returned the entire western Mediterranean to imperial control and only decades before Muhammad's followers emerged out of Arabia to conquer Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Libya, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Spain. It is therefore as difficult topcoat a course to modern Europe without acknowledging the presence of Justinian and the plague as it would be to send a satellite to the moons of Saturn without accounting for the gravitational impact (the technical word is perturbation) of the planet Jupiter." Introduction page 3.

Thank you for both those posts, Benita. I am now strongly drawn to *Lost*, but I don't know when I think I might read it.

>20 LizzieD:
If you do read it - it won't take long. It is very conversational in tone and definitely is popular history. Not in-depth in the same way as is Jason Godwin's Lords of the Horizons another book mentioned upthread. It is a great story. It is not - in-dpeth history and is meant to be an introduction to the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. If you go into it expecting that you will be fine.

>18 benitastrnad: I’m so pleased to see you say “ If you don't know anything about the Eastern Roman Empire (AKA as the Byzantine Empire) this is the book to read.” That is exactly why I chose this book. I’m looking forward to starting to listen to it today.

>3 m.belljackson: hi! Is your touchstone correct?

>23 aspirit:

Yes, when I click on it, it goes to the extensive complete title.

Here's a condensed version (corrections & additions welcome) from the book:

Constantine the Great - last emperor to rule a UNITED Roman Empire - changed religion from Pagan to Christian

Theodosius - issued Nicene Edict - suspended Olympic Games

Justinian the Great - religious differences became more pronounced - used "active diplomacy" to govern -
created St. Sophia in Constantinople - codified laws

Heraclius - dealt with Muhammed, Muslims, and Arab challenges

Basil I - founded Macedonian Dynasty - led many Byzantine victories

Constantine VII - led people to science and art - worked as sculptor, musician, painter, and writer

Nikephoros II - great scholar and well-loved yet not respected because a common man

Basil II - another good guy and, for Roman Emperors, very long-lived

>24 m.belljackson: okay, good! Thank you for confirming. I didn't want to show off a cover for a completely different work.

Lords of the Horizons will be my read. Read the first four chapters and am engrossed.

Welcome, Paul! I am more and more attracted to Lords of the Horizons. I'll have to read Sailing from Byzantium when it finally gets here, but I like the idea of getting into the meat!

I finished my second good book last night on the Byzantine's. This one was Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen. It was published in 2007 and is about the first recorded pandemic in Europe. It was in 541 and was the first recorded documentation of Bubonic Plague. This was a 326 page book and the first 150 pages of it were about the Emperor Justinian and a run down of all his accomplishments and a detailed account of the state of the empire up until 540. The last 150 pages were about how a horrific epidemic attacked the Eastern Roman Empire in 541 and killed, according to some estimates 50 - 60 % of the population. This resulted in severe depopulation and economic hardship that lasted for centuries. There were pages and pages of vector analysis, things like how the rat population had to crash for the bacterium to jump from its normal host species to humans, how the outside temperature had to be just right, how the plague traveled and what the bacterium actually does in the human body. There was even a whole chapter on the evolution of bacteria. This part of the book was fascinating reading, but gross at times. Descriptions of bursting buboes are not pleasant reading. Anyway, it served to make me feel better about the relative inconsequentiality of this current pandemic in the long run, because it has so far affected only a small percentage of the current population. In Constantinople so many people died that they couldn't bury them all and the stench of decaying bodies covered the city for months. There were also some parallel's - the disease killed most of the health care providers of the day at the very beginning of the plague. The worst thing is that from then on the Bubonic Plague reoccurred in waves every 16 - 30 years in the Eastern Roman Empire. Mysteriously, it disappeared for about 400 years, then came back to hit western Europe in the 1300's where it became known as the Black Death.

The author pointed out that the plague did not affect the Arabian tribes like it did the settled non-nomadic peoples. The severe depopulation of the Persian empire probably lead to the destruction of that empire at the hands of the Islamic warriors as did the loss of most of the territory Justinian restored to the Eastern Empire. The author also noted a feature of the Bubonic Plague that I didn't know. The first wave of the disease killed everybody in all age brackets. The succeeding waves tended to kill mostly younger people and children. The reason is that a certain amount of immunity was acquired by the population that survived the previous bouts with the plague, so that over time (and this is about 200 years) some immunity was built up to the disease that enabled more people to survive. Physicians at the time noted this phenomena and speculated about the concept of immunity, even though they didn't call it that.

This book turned out to be a very timely read. That might not be something that most people want to read right now, but I learned a great deal from it. Like, this is when the concept of the hospital being a place for sick people who couldn't pay for private care was invented. (sort of the reverse of what we have now.) I thought I was going to be reading history nonfiction, but there was a huge amount of science in this book.

It is not narrative nonfiction, but it wasn't academic history either. The writing style is breezier than what I would expect from an academic book, but it is still very much based in historical fact and historical writing. I am not sure that it should have been 326 pages in length. As I pointed out, the first half of the book was a historical narration of the high points of Justinian's life and the last half was all about the disease, how it spread, and what the results were. I realize that some understanding of Justinian was needed but I think the book and the reader would have been better served if the author had written some about the state of religion, science, and medicine. An understanding of the culture would would have helped the reader to understand the speed of response, or the lack of response in medicine, politics, religion, and culture.

It was a very timely read and I think that others would like to read it - given the times in which we are now living.

There goes another one onto my wish list. Thanks, Benita.

Sorry for being AWOL for the last few months. I'm regaining my ability to type, so if Peggy is OK with this, I'll step back into the breach for November??

Meanwhile, I'll try to identify a cool book to read in the final ten days of the month. I've been reading-challenged lately -- mostly audiobooks, and a LOT of re-reading. Ho hum. C'est la vie.

>30 Chatterbox:
that's OK. Some of us did lots of reading for you. I have just been churning through the books since the Covid crisis started.

Welcome back, Suzanne!!!!! As you see our friend aspirit took over the posting of this topic to my great joy. Please, Please take over in November unless you're still hurting.
Meanwhile, my initial order of Sailing from Byzantium has been delayed - might come tomorrow, might not. I have, therefore, ordered both *Flea* and *Horizons* in a fit of greed having to do with available birthday money, which is quickly running out. No way I'll read even one of these by the end of the month, but someday!

>31 benitastrnad: Glad you are picking up the slack for me!!

I'll spend some time thinking about 2021 categories and post some ideas in the next week or two.

>30 Chatterbox: Good to see you!

I'm wide open for ideas for 2021, if anyone has suggestions. You can post 'em here, or send me a PM...

What about some kind of topic worked around Transportation? Rivers, highways, oceans, trains, planes, automobiles, all have something to do with transportation. How did the jeans I have on today get here? What about my food. How does Walmart stock its shelves?

Lord of the Horizons by Jason Goodwin

Not so much a history of the Ottoman Empire, but a series of vignettes spread over its 500 year history - from the steppes to the fall of the last Sultan in the 20th century before the transition to a republic. It’s a good book, but short on facts and events, and oddly seems heavily based on Western sources rather than Ottoman.

>37 drneutron:
I found it an easy reading book and in general I agree with you. Goodwin is a great storyteller and that shows up in his mystery novels set in the 1820's to 1840's in Istanbul. He wrote a book about tea that I want to read and have managed to find a copy of. However, having the book doesn't mean I have read it.

I really liked the biography of Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey by Patrick Balfour, Lord Kinross that I read after I read the Goodwin book. It was a more traditional biography that had lots of history about the end of the Ottoman Empire in it.

I wonder if the reason why Goodwin used western sources is because there isn't as much of a tradition for writing history in the Ottoman Empire as there was in the west. The universities in that part of the world were great copiers of previous histories but didn't write that many of their own and the reason might be cultural. Both the Seljuks and the Ottoman's were nomadic people and they may not have thought histories to be important.

In contrast there are lots of written sources for the history of the Byzantines. Huge amounts of material have been lost, but it amazes me how much of it remains.

So here I am at the end of the month, and my copy of Lords of the Horizons finally came today. I'm going to start, of course, but who knows when I'll finish. I have my November non-fiction lined up (Daughters of Chivalry also thanks to Benita, I think), so I'll have to see how much I can handle.

>38 benitastrnad: having the book doesn't mean I have read it Ain't it so? Ain't it sad? I apparently believe that owning a book confers some kind of righteousness.

>39 LizzieD:
I haven't rad Daughters of Chivalry. I think it was Suzanne who read it. I read the one by Nancy Goldstone - Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe. Goldstone is a good author and the book was really easy to read. I know that Suzanne liked Daughters of Chivalry.

Ah...... I remember the Suzanne recc. now, Benita, and I have the *4 Queens* too, so that's two I'm eager for.

I quite enjoyed Daughters of Chivalry; it all depends on how into medieval history you are, but I like the emphasis on retrieving details of the lives of some rather interesting women from history.

Check back tomorrow for the link to the November thread!!

Here's the link to November's challenge! Thanks to all who chipped in to keep this going while I got my wrist and elbow back to (more or less) normal...

https://www.librarything.com/topic/325895

I’m unfamiliar with the history of Byzantium so an over-all history of the empire like Sailing from Byzantium seemed like a good place to start. I think that it was and maybe, if I read further about the history of this area, I would be able to keep the names of the various rulers and other people prominent in the history of the area straight.

Good to see you back, Suzanne. I hope your healing is continuing to go well.