At 09:39 PM 6/18/2002 -0400, Chris Turkel wrote: >On Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 09:33 PM, Ian sympatico wrote: >>From: "Chris Turkel" <zizban at adelphia.net> >>>While in England in March, I read the "The Fall of Constantinople". It >>>is a history, but like Steve mentioned about his book, it reads like an >>>adventure novel. It's quite good and is worth reading. >> >>Sounds Good, I am into Byzantine history Me too. Got into it with Asimov's _The Forgotten Empire_, and took a year-long sequence on Byzantium in college. (With a meeting on Wednesday nights-- the same night as the Science Fiction Club met. There were three members in the class, so we wound up moving the meeting day for that year.) >It's called "The Fall of Constantinople 1453" >By Steven Runciman >Cambridge University Press >ISBN 0-521-039832-0 > >It paints a sad portraits of how the mistakes by the Byzantines in the >centuries before the fall only hastened their demise and that if if any >one mistake had not been made, Constantinople might have lasted a few >centuries longer. I second the recommendation for the book-- one of the best and most entertaining narrative histories I've ever read. But IMHO, Constantinople wasn't going to survive the gunpowder age for centuries more without substantial outside help. (They'd already gotten an extra fifty years out of Tamerlane's attacks on the Turks' opposite frontier.) To really give them much more staying power, you probably have to reverse Manzikert, or at least the Fourth Crusade. (As it was, there aren't a lot of empires that can beat their run, whether it's measured from the beginnings of Rome, from Augustus, or from Constantine I.) >Also interesting is the last Emperor, Constantine, was the right man for >the job--he was just born about 250 years too late. You have to feel sorry for him. He did everything right, to the limits of his ability, and he even died well. Mike