Books like Fourteen Byzantine Rulers: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus

A very readable translation of a memoir/history written roughly a thousand years ago, by a Byzantine scholar and government functionary who, through the vagaries of his near-century of life and service, witnessed, sometimes firsthand, the reigns and deaths of an ungodly number of succeeding Byzantine emperors. Emperor, relative of emperor, or high government official were all high-risk professions in that era, with penalties for failure besides death or exile including blinding, castration, or forced conversion into a monk or nun (although a few managed to wriggle out of the latter disempowerment, sometimes.) A lively, colorful, and occasionally bizarre narrative, at once very approachable and sometimes very alien. Reading between the lines, as well as what's on them, is recommended.I would have been quite at sea if I hadn't watched a rather good Great Course on the Byzantine Empire a month or so ago ( http://www.thegreatcourses.com/course... ); as it was I was lost in a smaller swamp. This is a text that, for the non-scholar, could really have used about double its own weight in explanatory footnotes, but I'll have to look at other books for that. As it stood, it was that goldmine for the researching writer, a first-hand account, studded with the kind of telling details that general histories leave out. For my purposes, well worth it.The fact that I could for a pittance pull this man's direct voice, as it were, out of the air (and onto my Kindle) across barriers of time and space and language a millennium after he lived is a source of wonder to me. Given that he was apparently a notable scholar of his time, as well as times, it's bemusing to imagine how it would have seemed to him, could he have been told about it.Ta, L.