Author

Judith Herrin

About Judith Herrin

Judith Herrin (born 1942) is a British historian of late antiquity and Byzantium, for many years Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London and now professor emerita there. Her books include The Formation of Christendom (1987), Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (2001), Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (2013) and Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (2020). She has written for general readers as well as specialists, and Byzantium is her best-known survey.

On this site

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

2007 · Postwar Contemporary · History

Judith Herrin's Byzantium is a portrait of the Eastern Roman Empire from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, written for readers who know little about it. In the introduction she explains that the book began when two builders who passed her office every day asked her what Byzantium actually was; rather than answer with a continuous chronicle, she wrote twenty-eight short chapters, each built around a theme, monument, event or person, that can be read in sequence or on their own.