None of the links I posted is a substitute for actual scholarship and a nuanced and objective view of the Byzantines, which Romer decidedly does not have. His Romanticism about them is as misplaced as is the calumny which has been heaped upon them, in my opinion, by a very misinformed and prejudiced poster.
Fordham university has quite a good department on Byzantine studies and an online course outline with links to the pertinent reading material. His introduction is a quite balanced one, I think. The statements in parentheses are mine.
"These names give witness to the composite nature of Byzantium. It was, without any doubt, the continuation of the Roman state, (merely the eastern part of the Roman Empire administratively) and until the seventh century, preserved the basic structures of Late Roman Mediterranean civic culture: - a large multi-ethnic Christian state, based on a network of urban centers, and defended by a mobile specialized army.
After the Arab/Muslim conquest of Egypt and Syria, the nature of the state and culture was transformed. Byzantium became much more a Greek state [perhaps best seen in the emperor Heraklios' adoption of the Greek title
Basileus], all the cities except Constantinople faded away to small fortified centers, and the military organization of the empire came to be based on a series of local armies. There is then a persistent ambiguity about the beginning of
Byzantine history - between the building of Constantinople by Constantine I and the mid-7th century collapse of late antique urban culture.
The seventh to ninth centuries are generally accounted a low point of Byzantine history. Little literature - even saints' lives - survives, and even less art. The period is studied above all for the history of the struggle over icons. This
Iconoclastic Controversy bears witness to a continued intellectual vitality, and the emergence of one of history's most sophisticated analyses of the nature and function of art.
Under the
Macedonian Dynasty [867-1056], Byzantium's political power reached its apogee as former territories were incorporated in the Empire, and an element of multi-ethnicity was restored. This period is also significant as the time in which Byzantine culture was spread among the Slavs and other Balkan peoples. Following massive Turkish attacks in the late eleventh century, the Empire was able to maintain a lesser but still significant political and military power under the
Komnenian Dynasty: the cost was a social transformation which exalted a powerful military aristocracy, and gradually enserfed the previously free peasantry. In 1204, internal Byzantine politics and the resurgent West, effectively ended the imperial pretensions of the Byzantine state. The Fourth Crusade [1204] succeeded in conquering Constantinople and making it a Latin principality for half a century. The Greek political leadership, under the
Palaiologan Dynasty regained Constantinople in 1261, but the "empire" was just one state among many in the area for the final 200 years of its existence. Strangely, this period was among the most culturally productive, in art, in theology, and in literature.
It would be wrong then to present the later history of Byzantium as a "thousand year history of decline", leading inevitably to its conquest by the Ottoman Turks on Tuesday 29th May 1453. This perception, promoted disastrously by the English historian Edward Gibbon, reflects the origins in the classical studies of Byzantine studies. The classic periods of ancient cultures [the fifth and fourth centuries BCE in Greece and the late republican/early imperial period in Rome] have long appealed to modern Western sensibilities because - as times of rapid change and innovation in art and literature - echoes and origins of the present have been seen there. In comparison, Byzantine political culture changed slowly, and continuity was valued over change. Furthermore, classical secularism, so attractive to Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars, had no place in Byzantine thought worlds. As a result Byzantine culture was subjected to centuries of abuse as a time of barbarism and superstition.
The counterpart to the dismissal of Byzantine culture was its exaltation by 19th-century Romanticism, and by a substrate of Christian, especially Anglican, intellectuals. [Even now Anglican seminaries are good places to locate books on Byzantine studies.] Byzantium was also "claimed" by some Orthodox Christian intellectuals. The result was that, after having been demeaned by the Enlightenment, Byzantium acquired defenders, but defenders who concentrated equally on the culture's religious aspects. Far from calm scholarship, Byzantine studies has ever been a locus of contestation, of defamers and champions.'
I'll try to respond to some of the other posts, especially those related to genetics, later.
Ed. This is the link to the site from which I quoted:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/byzantium/