Download or read book Once Upon a Time in Byzantium written by Jim Elledge and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-07-09 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium: the word itself denotes a period of chicanery, treachery and willful duplicity. Thus this novel begins with a conundrum that foretells the intricacies the reader will encounter as the plot unfolds. “Richard Unger is dead,” the story begins. “gone for twenty-eight years. Murdered in 1974.” (An excerpt from Richard Unger’s diary, entered February 10, 2001.) Herein, these words tell you everything and yet nothing. And so the story unfolds in an aura of mystery. From the beginning Richard Unger makes it clear he is writing of these events under extreme pressure. He prays those who read this material, after examining the facts, might grant some sort of absolution. But that is for the reader to decide. Richard and Mary Nell have, the last twenty-eight years, been leading a privileged life in Dallas, Texas enjoying the fruits of lucrative careers. Their tranquility is shattered when they receive an anonymous note taunting them with information which proves the correspondent knows they are living under false pretences. The missive concludes he possesses knowledge they are responsible for the death of the writer’s soul-mate in 1974. Now it is their time to be destroyed. The author’s memoir is based on events from the distant past which now are destined to spin out of control. He sums it up when he writes: “Whenever I think of the past I try to rearrange the facts in some sort of logical manner. However events can only be changed at the point of origin. If then. If ever.” Thus, Richard and Mary Nell find themselves caught in a net of mystery and subterfuge where they are about to enter a bizarre world of their own making. As Richard recalls how his past was marked by involvement in a life of trickery and deception he also express hope that the contents of this journal might pave the way for a better understanding of the forces that precipitated the actions herein and in the end might give a capacity for some degree of exoneration. In any event the big question for readers becomes: How would I have handled this under similar circumstances? This scenario goes back to the early’70s introducing Richard, then known by the name of Michael Hanlon, a card counter making his living at the tables in Vegas, and Mary Nell a.k.a. Rebel Smith, who dealt blackjack at the Sands. They were drawn to each other through their dexterity at the game and soon formed a partnership as card sharps traveling up and down the west coast. Every game was not rigged. As Mary Nell once said, “The difference between smart play and duplicity is sometimes a hundred miles of gravel road.” They were always careful. They knew the odds on each draw. When to stay and when to fold. And above all, how to read the faces around the table. Although their goal had always been in the pursuit of money, their dream was to hit the big score, find something legit, and settle down. They had the intelligence and the grit to make it work. But, for the present, the money was easy, and there was the thrill. Always the thrill. However, fate was predestined to dictate their future and they found themselves about to be caught in an undertow of intrigue that would sweep them away into a chaotic sea. To the perfect pigeon. Toward the consummate scam. Into a tangled web of deceit. Their good times come to an abrupt end when a high stakes poker game at the Fairmont in San Francisco goes sour. Upon discovering he has been cheated, a disgruntled player who brought a gun to the hotel room forces them to drive to a secluded spot across the bay with murder on his mind. Once there the tragic basis for this story unfolds when, in a struggle for the gun, he is killed. The most poignant of the author’s forays into the truth is centered around the twenty-four hours after this event and give crede

Download or read book Byzantium written by Stephen R. Lawhead and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 1199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to rule Although born to rule, Aidan lives as a scribe in a remote Irish monastery on the far, wild edge of Christendom. Secure in work, contemplation, and dreams of the wider world, a miracle bursts into Aidan's quiet life. He is chosen to accompany a small band of monks on a quest to the farthest eastern reaches of the known world, to the fabled city of Byzantium, where they are to present a beautiful and costly hand-illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, to the Emperor of all Christendom. Thus begins an expedition by sea and over land, as Aidan becomes, by turns, a warrior and a sailor, a slave and a spy, a Viking and a Saracen, and finally, a man. He sees more of the world than most men of his time, becoming an ambassador to kings and an intimate of Byzantium's fabled Golden Court. And finally this valiant Irish monk faces the greatest trial that can confront any man in any age: commanding his own Destiny.

Download or read book The Byzantines written by Averil Cameron and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 John D. Criticos Prize This book introduces the reader to the complex history, ethnicity, and identity of the Byzantines. This volume brings Byzantium – often misconstrued as a vanished successor to the classical world – to the forefront of European history Deconstructs stereotypes surrounding Byzantium Beautifully illustrated with photographs and maps

Download or read book The Histories written by Polybius and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book written by Polybius and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Byzantium in the Seventh Century written by John F. Haldon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analytical account of developments within Byzantine culture, society and the state from c. 610 to 717.

Download or read book Sailing from Byzantium written by Colin Wells and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final moments of a millennial city under siege…. Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them. The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifying ideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats of daring. In Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells tells of the missionaries, mystics, philosophers, and artists who against great odds and often at peril of their own lives spread Greek ideas to the Italians, the Arabs, and the Slavs. Their heroic efforts inspired the Renaissance, the golden age of Islamic learning, and Russian Orthodox Christianity, which came complete with a new alphabet, architecture, and one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions. The story’s central reference point is an arcane squabble called the Hesychast controversy that pitted humanist scholars led by the brilliant, acerbic intellectual Barlaam against the powerful monks of Mount Athos led by the stern Gregory Palamas, who denounced “pagan” rationalism in favor of Christian mysticism. Within a few decades, the light of Byzantium would be extinguished forever by the invading Turks, but not before the humanists found a safe haven for Greek literature. The controversy of rationalism versus faith would continue to be argued by some of history’s greatest minds. Fast-paced, compulsively readable, and filled with fascinating insights, Sailing from Byzantium is one of the great historical dramas–the gripping story of how the flame of civilization was saved and passed on.

Download or read book Land and Privilege in Byzantium written by Mark C. Bartusis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pronoia was a type of conditional grant from the emperor, often to soldiers, of various properties and privileges. In large measure the institution of pronoia characterized social and economic relations in later Byzantium, and its study is the study of later Byzantium. Filling the need for a comprehensive study of the institution, this book examines the origin, evolution and characteristics of pronoia, focusing particularly on the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But the book is much more than a study of a single institution. With a broad chronological scope extending from the mid-tenth to the mid-fifteenth century, it incorporates the latest understanding of Byzantine agrarian relations, taxation, administration and the economy, as it deals with relations between the emperor, monastic and lay landholders, including soldiers and peasants. Particular attention is paid to the relation between the pronoia and Western European, Slavic and Middle Eastern institutions, especially the Ottoman timar.

Download or read book The Sultan of Byzantium written by Selcuk Altun and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting the Ottoman invaders in Constantinople in 1453, Emperor Constantine XI was killed, his body never found. Legend has it that he escaped in a Genoese ship, cheating certain death at the hands of the Turks and earning himself the title of Immortal Emperor. Five centuries after his disappearance, three mysterious men contact a young professor living in Istanbul. Members of a secret sect, they have guarded the Immortal Emperor's will for generations. They tell him that he is the next Byzantine emperor and that in order to take possession of his fortune he must carry out his ancestor's last wishes. The professor embarks on a dangerous journey, taking him to the heart of a mystery of epic historical significance. The Sultan of Byzantium is a symbiosis of story and history and a homage to Byzantine civilisation.

Download or read book Authority in Byzantium written by Pamela Armstrong and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invisible force of authority bound the diverse groups in the Byzantine state and maintained its existence across many centuries. The present volume brings together an international cast of contributors to explore the many aspects and construction of authority within the state, the church and the family. They examine the authority of knowledge and text, the depiction of authority, and lastly, the legacy of three great scholars of Byzantine studies. Five of the sections are followed by responses from a specialist in the western middle ages bringing a wider European perspective to the subject.

Download or read book Byzantium Its Neighbours and Its Cultures written by Danijel Dzino and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium was one of the longest-lasting empires in history. Throughout the millennium of its existence, the empire showed its capability to change and develop under very different historical circumstances. This remarkable resilience would have been impossible to achieve without the formation of a lasting imperial culture and a strong imperial ideological infrastructure. Imperial culture and ideology required, among other things, to sort out who was ʻinsiderʼ and who was ʻoutsiderʼ and develop ways to define and describe ones neighbours and interact with them. There is an indefinite number of possibilities for the exploration of relationships between Byzantium and its neighbours. The essays in this collection focus on several interconnected clusters of topics and shared research interests, such as the place of neighbours in the context of the empire and imperial ideology, the transfer of knowledge with neighbours, the Byzantine perception of their neighbours and the political relationship and/or the conflict with neighbours.

Download or read book Byzantium written by Sean McLachlan and published by Hippocrene Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long after Rome fell to the Germanic tribes, its culture lived on in Constantinople, the glittering capital of the Byzantine Empire. For more than 1000 yeras (AD 330-1453) Byzantium was one of the most advanced and complex civilisations the world had ever seen. As the Mediterranean outlet for the silk route, its trade networks stretched from Scandinavia to Sri Lanka; its artists created sombre icons and brilliant gold mosaics; its scholarship served as a vital cultural bridge between the Muslim East and the Catholic West; and it fostered the Orthodox Christianity that is the faith of millions today. This book shows the innovative art that inspired French kings and Arab emirs. It includes a gazetteer of historic Byzantine sites and monuments that travellers can visit today in greece, Italty, Turkey and the Middle East. A chronology of Byzantine history and a list of emperors complete this ideal resource for the student, traveller or generally curious reader.

Download or read book Agent of Byzantium written by Harry Turtledove and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times–bestselling “standard-bearer for alternate history”: A spy takes on the enemies of the Byzantine Empire (USA Today). In another, very different timeline—one in which Mohammed embraced Christianity and Islam never came to be—the Byzantine Empire still flourishes in the fourteenth century, and wondrous technologies are emerging earlier than they did in our own. Having lost his family to the ravages of smallpox, Basil Argyros has decided to dedicate his life to Byzantium. A stalwart soldier and able secret agent, Basil serves his emperor courageously, going undercover to unearth Persia’s dastardly plots and disrupting the dark machinations of his beautiful archenemy, the Persian spy Mirrane, while defusing dire threats emerging from the Western realm of the Franco-Saxons. But the world Basil so staunchly defends is changing rapidly, and he must remain ever vigilant, for in this great game of empires, the player who controls the most advanced tools and weaponry—tools like gunpowder, printing, vaccines, and telescopes—must certainly emerge victorious. A collection of interlocking stories that showcase the courage, ingenuity, and breathtaking derring-do of superspy Basil Argyros, Agent of Byzantium presents the great Harry Turtledove at his alternate-world-building best. At once intricate, exciting, witty, and wildly inventive, this is a many-faceted gem from a master of the genre.

Download or read book The Lost World of Byzantium written by Jonathan Harris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Byzantium and the Crusades “offers a fresh take on this fabled but hidden civilization” across 11 centuries of history (Colin Wells, author of Sailing from Byzantium). For more than a millennium, the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Rather than recounting the standard chronology of emperors and battles, leading Byzantium scholar Jonathan Harris focuses each chapter of this engaging history on a succession of archetypal figures, families, places, and events. Harris’s introduction presents a civilization rich in contrasts, combining orthodox Christianity with paganism, and classical Greek learning with Roman power. Though frequently assailed by numerous armies, Byzantium survived by dint of its unorthodox foreign policy. Over time, its sumptuous art and architecture flourished, helping to establish a deep sense of Byzantine identity in its people. Synthesizing a wealth of sources to cover all major aspects of the empire’s social, political, military, religious, cultural, and artistic history, Harris’s study illuminates the heart of Byzantine civilization and explores its remarkable and lasting influence on the modern world.

Download or read book Serving Byzantium s Emperors written by Dimitris Krallis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a microhistory of eleventh-century Byzantium, built around the biography of the state official Michael Attaleiates. Dimitris Krallis presents Byzantium as a cohesive, ever-evolving, dynamic, Roman political community, built on traditions of Roman governance and Hellenic culture. In the eleventh century, Byzantium faced a crisis as it navigated a shifting international environment of feudal polities, merchant republics, steppe migrations, and a rapidly transforming Islamic world. Attaleiates’ life, from provincial birth to Constantinopolitan death, and career, as a member of an ancient empire’s officialdom, raise questions of identity, family, education, governance, elite culture, Romanness, Hellenism, science and skepticism, as well as political ideology during this period. The life and work of Attaleiates is used as a prism through which to examine important questions about a long-lived medieval polity that is usually studied as exotic and distinct from both the European and the Near Eastern historical experience.

Download or read book Byzantium written by James Howard-Johnston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Byzantium was a strange entity--a relic of classical antiquity which survived deep into the Middle Ages. Drawing on a lifetime's work in the field of Byzantine studies, James Howard-Johnston aims to explain Byzantium's longevity, first as a state geared to fighting a two-centuries long guerrilla war of defence, then as an increasingly confident regional power. It is only by analysing its economic, social, and institutional structures that this strange medieval afterlife of the rump of the Roman empire can be understood. This collection of linked essays outlines the fundamental features of Byzantium, with a focus on the seventh to eleventh centuries. The essays delve below the agitated surface of political, religious, and intellectual history to home in on (1) alterations in economic conditions; and (2) structural change in the social order and apparatus of government. The economic foundations of society and state are examined over the long term, with emphasis placed on mercantile enterprise throughout. Howard-Johnston identifies warfare as the prime driver of social and institutional change in a first phase (seventh to eighth centuries), when the peasant villager rose to a dominant position in the collective mindset and the administration was centralised and militarised as never before. A second phase of change is then highlighted, after the mid-ninth century when Byzantium's security was assured. Military and administrative arrangements were adapted as the empire expanded. The service aristocracy which had developed in the dark centuries began to assert itself to the detriment of the peasantry, but was, Howard-Johnston argues, countered reasonably effectively by new legislation. There was a renaissance in cultural life, most marked in the intellectual sphere in the eleventh century. Finally, the sharp decline in Byzantium's military fortunes from the mid-eleventh century is attributed to external factors rather than internal weakness.

Download or read book The Byzantine World written by Paul Stephenson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Byzantine World presents the latest insights of the leading scholars in the fields of Byzantine studies, history, art and architectural history, literature, and theology. Those who know little of Byzantine history, culture and civilization between AD 700 and 1453 will find overviews and distillations, while those who know much already will be afforded countless new vistas. Each chapter offers an innovative approach to a well-known topic or a diversion from a well-trodden path. Readers will be introduced to Byzantine women and children, men and eunuchs, emperors, patriarchs, aristocrats and slaves. They will explore churches and fortifications, monasteries and palaces, from Constantinople to Cyprus and Syria in the east, and to Apulia and Venice in the west. Secular and sacred art, profane and spiritual literature will be revealed to the reader, who will be encouraged to read, see, smell and touch. The worlds of Byzantine ceremonial and sanctity, liturgy and letters, Orthodoxy and heresy will be explored, by both leading and innovative international scholars. Ultimately, readers will find insights into the emergence of modern Byzantine studies and of popular Byzantine history that are informative, novel and unexpected, and that provide a thorough understanding of both.