Edward Garboczi
Tag: Book Review
Buildings tell us a lot about the people who built them. In fact, if you go far enough back in history, ruined buildings are mostly what we have left to go on in order to understand what the builders were like. In the Roman Empire, the architecture of 2000+ years ago was not so very much different from our present buildings. For instance, in ancient Rome did you know that the Roman engineers built multi-story apartment buildings in their biggest cities and huge outdoor theaters for the performing of plays and music that seated thousands and had perfect acoustics? The Buildings of Ancient Rome, by Helen and Richard Leacroft, tell the fascinating story of just how skilled and innovative the Roman builders were.
But the history of the Roman Empire is quite complex. At some point in the 200s AD, before the Emperor Constantine came along to legalize Christianity, the emperor at the time deemed that the Roman Empire was too big to be governed from Rome, Italy. He split his empire into two halves, the Western part whose capital was Rome and Eastern part, whose capital was Byzantium in what is now Turkey. When Constantine came to power a few decades later, he renamed the Eastern capital after himself to become Constantinople, which today is Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey. Not long after this renaming, the Western Empire fell to various new peoples who were invading Europe but the Eastern empire endured for 1000 more years and was called the Byzantine Empire after the original name of its capital.
The Byzantine Empire flourished and developed an architecture of its own. The Buildings of Byzantium, also by Helen and Richard Leacroft, describe the buildings of this new empire, which was always Christian and which became quite different from the original pagan-based Roman Empire. To understand Byzantine buildings one must understand the people who lived and worked in this Eastern Empire. The book The Byzantines, by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, shows what the people and the culture of the Byzantine Empire were like.
All three of these books are at the middle school to high school level.