A History of the Eastern Roman Empire

Reprint of the 1912. Oversized octavo. Book xv, 530 p. London, Macmillan and Co., 1912. John Bagnell Bury was born in county Monaghan Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin, holding academic posts there and at Cambridge. He was both a classicist and a byzantinist and, for much of his career, a strong believer in the 19th century ideas of rationalism and progress. Bury was without doubt one of the most outstanding Byzantinists of his age. He was a scholar of great range and unusual learning, with a marked capacity for penetrating and critical analysis and a characteristically disciplined and austere approach. According to Bury, history must follow the methods of the natural sciences, stressing the exact determination of facts, rather than functioning as a branch of literature. This title is one of the most comprehensive on the 65 year period from the Fall of Irene to the Accession of Basil I. This is one of his more important works.