The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century: Some Different Interpretations

I was originally provoked into a consideration of this particular problem by reading Ostrogorsky's Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates. A long-needed and courageous attempt to reconstruct the history of the empire and characterized by acute and penetrating analysis, this book is nevertheless marked by a certain unevenness of treatment. Side by side with brilliant sections on the achievements of the tenth century and the complications of the fourteenth (this latter perhaps the finest part of the book) must be set the brief and inadequate account of the years 1025–1081. Ostrogorsky is not alone. Misstatements and omissions continue, and often in unexpected places. Recent much used general histories, as for instance the third volume of the medieval section of the Glotz Histoire générale, still repeat the old emphasis on 1081 as the dividingline between a time of painful disaster and the new era of Comnenian glory.