Once upon a time there was a vast empire in the East, opulent and consequential, whose rulers wore jewel-encrusted robes and diadems, raced horses in teams “blue” and “green” around a hippodrome, built the world’s greatest ecclesiastical edifice and conducted its affairs (in all senses) in a manner which would give the world a word, “byzantine”, that conveyed a bizarre, duplicitous, even degenerate intricacy. This empire preserved and exemplified Christendom after the Roman Empire, newly Christian, collapsed under waves of barbarian assaults. Inaugurated on May 11, 330, it endured, by one expert calculation, for 1,123 years and 18 days.

Yet for most, this monumental achievement has been Western culture’s lost continent of Atlantis. Some young college graduates newly come to Washington for government work, strolling through Georgetown on Sundays, become dimly aware of rumors that somewhere inside the walled, gardened mansion called Dumbarton Oaks is a center for “Byzantine Studies”, where monographs with incomprehensible titles are published. But few pursue those rumors, much less Byzantine studies. I myself tried to explore mysterious Byzantium when, as a Foreign Service officer in Hong Kong, I bought a British paperback edition of Robert Graves’s historical novel Count Belisarius. I read only as far as the hippodrome races before giving up.

Blessedly, however, life is full of second chances. In preparation for reading Edward Luttwak’s big work The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire I went back to try Graves’s novel again. There in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library was a 1938 first edition in which William Lyon “Billy” Phelps, a revered professor of literature, had written his name, penciled some sideline notes for a few pages and then quit, giving the book to the college librarian. I did not quit, not the second time anyway, and now I think perhaps I understand the long indifference to Byzantium. For one thing, Emperor Constantine took the empire in the wrong direction. Having converted to Christianity in 313 after his vision of the Cross, he announced “in hoc signo vinces” and won a victory in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. But then he ignored the big red “wrong way” sign, heading from West to East when everyone supposedly knew that the translatio imperii et studii required imperial world power and learning to move, inexorably, from East to West. In the period between the founding of Constantinople as the capital of the empire, in 330, and Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, the main lines of history seemed to course through the Dark Ages of Western Europe, not in the Byzantine East.