The idea of Byzantium has haunted the western imagination for generations, but for most of us it has been hardly more than a drifting fantasy – a lovely arch or a lyrical mosaic, a dazzle of Klimt, a snatch of Yeats. Norwich’s great trilogy has dispersed none of this magic, but has given it humanity too. Mehmet the Conqueror and Khaireddin the Torch of the Faith, the Palaeologi and the Hesychasts, in these pages we recognize them as fallible human beings after all, just like you and me.Well, a bit like you and me…Above: the Anastasis fresco in the church of St Saviour in Chora, Istanbul, ‘perhaps the supreme masterpiece of all Christian art’. “Byzantine” has become a word more often pejorative than admiring, and the notion of Constantinople as a heroic bulwark of Christian values is generally familiar only to the Greeks – to this day Tuesday is an unlucky day throughout the Hellenic world. Lord Norwich has taken upon himself to straighten the record, and to give the martyrdom of Byzantium its proper place in European history.What he has done too, for me anyway, is to translate a dream into literary substance.

The spectacle suggests the slow sinking of some mighty and indomitable battleship, fighting to the last, flaming in the dark as her magazines explode, her steering falls and the shells fall like waterspouts all about her.Cynics might say that nothing so became Byzantium as its fall the 55 days of heroic resistance to the Sultan Mehmet II which ended with the last of the Emperors, Constantine IX, disappearing for ever from the battle as from history. For 400 years the Byzantines struggle to survive, harassed on all sides by Christians and Muslims alike, sometimes achieving victories, sometimes postponing disasters, but irretrievably weakening down the generations. Fifty-eight men called John complicate the index of this book, including nine Emperors, four Popes, three Tsars, five Patriarchs, two Despots, an ex-King of Jerusalem and John the Bastard of Thessaly.But however amused and intrigued he is himself by this wild profusion, Norwich never loses sight of his great theme We know from the start that Byzantium is doomed. There is the unfortunate princess Adelaide of Brunswick- Grubenhagen, brought all the way to Constantinople, poor soul, to wed the future Andronicus III, and conclusively dismissed as “a German lady of insufferable tedium”. Besides the towering figures at the centre of the narrative, the Emperors, the scholars, the theologians, the generals, a host of fascinating lesser characters is sighted along the way There is Bolkan the Zhupan of Rascia There is Hunyadi the Voyevod of Transylvania.

His tragic story is enlivened everywhere with humour and surprise. Norwich makes of them interesting matters of politics as of faith.Mind you, just occasionally the convolutions really are rather comical. I was nagged by a feeling of deja vu when I read the footnote on page 263 warning us that the city of Magnesia mentioned in the text was “not Magnesia ad Sipylum, the modern town of Manisa near Izmir, but Magnesia on the Meander, some thirty kilometres east of Kusadasi: until I remembered a note in one of Beachcomber’s columns years ago to the effect that the M’Hoho mentioned in a Colonial Office report was not the M’Hoho near Zumzum, but the M’Hoho near Wodgi.Lord Norwich will not resent the reference. In less fastidious hands these disputes could be incomprehensible or preposterous.