By integrating extensive and diverse material, Haldon's book explains Byzantium's survival in a much more detailed and nuanced fashion than any previous study. It presents this survival in the form of a transformation and places the history of Byzantium during this century of crisis in a much broader framework, not only thematically, by adducing evidence about ideology, personal and group mentality, geography, administration, political history, and environment and climate, among other fields, but also geographically, by paying attention to regional diversity, offering consistent comparisons with the situation in the Byzantine-controlled territories in the west, and analyzing the developments in the lands that had been conquered by the Muslims.

John Haldon. The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740. Carl Newell Jackson Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

From The Medieval Review (TMR). Review by Sviatoslav Dmitriev, Ball State University