The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261

"It is not easy to recover the glory of a civilization brutally wounded in its nerve centers seven hundred years ago, changed profoundly elsewhere, and all but extinguished in much of its original heartland. Helped by the catalog of the truly overwhelming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, AD 843-1261, the historian has to recapture, without nostalgia and the bitterness of hindsight, Byzantium as it was around the age of Abbot Suger, in 1140 AD. At that time, the Christian civilization associated with Byzantium--though already long spread far beyond the political boundaries of the state controlled by the emperors of Constantinople--was not only, perhaps, richer and more populous than Western Europe; but throughout the Middle East, in much of the Mediterranean and in all of Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to Calabria and from the Carpathians to the Caucasus, it was the only Christian civilization that mattered. With the catalog of this exhibition in hand, let us first explore that vanished world, so as to try to decide where, exactly, lay the secret of its 'glory.'"N. Y.) Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York is the author of 'The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261' with ISBN 9780870997785 and ISBN 0870997785.