How long does it take to read Byzantium?
Judith Herrin
Byzantium by Judith Herrin takes about 7 hours 24 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 24 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2006. 404 pages, about 111,100 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 21 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 24 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 38 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
For a thousand years an extraordinary empire made possible Europe's transition to the modern world: Byzantium. An audacious and resilient but now little known society, it combined orthodox Christianity with paganism, classical Greek learning with Roman power, to produce a great and creative civilization which for centuries held in check the armies of Islam.Judith Herrin's concise and compelling book replaces the standard chronological approach of most histories of Byzantium. Instead, each short chapter is focused on a theme, such as a building (the great church of Hagia Sophia), a clash over religion (iconoclasm), sex and power (the role of eunuchs), an outstanding Byzantine individual (the historian Anna Komnene), a symbol of civilization (the fork), a battle for territory (the crusades). In this way she makes accessible and understandable the grand sweeps of Byzantine history, from the founding of its magnificent capital Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 330, to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Subjects: Civilization, History, Nonfiction, Byzantine empire, history, Byzantine empire, civilization, Histoire
