New book published on Byzantine history

The Byzantine Empire: a case study in decline and decadence or one of the longest surviving states in European history?

In his new book 'A Short History of The Byzantine Empire', Dionysios Stathakopoulos tells a compelling story of an elusive Empire that refuses to be shoehorned into conventional narratives: staunchly Orthodox, yet preserving, studying and imitating a vast number of pagan ancient Greek texts; constantly at war, yet never a warlike state, prioritizing diplomacy instead; unchanging on the surface, while assimilating foreign individuals and practices beneath it. This new short history is above all a series of threads that will help readers navigate the eleven centuries of its existence marked both by what Byzantium prevented (the expansion of Islam in Europe) and by what it facilitated (the conversion of the Slavs to Christianity, the preservation and dissemination of Greek knowledge and Roman law in both East and West). It gives equal attention to political history as well as the major social, economic and cultural trends that defined the history of the Byzantine Empire. From Constantine I in the fourth century to Constantine XI in the fifteenth, emperors resided at the magnificent city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and were the living embodiment of the saying: on earth as it is in heaven.