![]() ![]() I would have been quite at sea if I hadn't watched a rather good Great Course on the Byzantine Empire a month or so ago (. Reading between the lines, as well as what's on them, is recommended. Emperor, relative of emperor, or high government official were all high-risk professions in that era, with penalties for failure besides death or exile including blinding, castration, or forced conversion into a monk or nun (although a few managed to wriggle out of the latter disempowerment, sometimes.) A lively, colorful, and occasionally bizarre narrative, at once very approachable and sometimes very alien. ![]() A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine emperors. ![]()
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