Dedication

This is for my mother, Bonnie, who was our school librarian while I was growing up. She taught me to love reading. I thought I should add a book to the shelves.

Acknowledgements

None of this would have been possible without Niketas Choniates (a law student in a lawless time) writing "O City of Byzantium" describing what he witnessed and heard in Constantinople. The other main chronicler of the period was Eustathios, Archbishop of Thessalonica. Other useful primary sources include William, Archbishop of Tyre (a guest at the wedding of the century) and Andronikos' own aunt Anne Komnenos.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Professor (emeritus) John Melville-Jones of the University of Western Australia was kind enough to send me the text of a lecture he gave in 2010 at a symposium. That gave me a solid track to build on.

https://aabs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/melvillejonesandronicus.pdf

Robin Pierson's podcast - "The History of Byzantium" - is superb.

https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/

I am very grateful to the people at Byzantium 1200 for the amazing visuals they have created.

https://www.byzantium1200.com/

The 'book cover' art for this comes from from gencraft. I simply entered a single line of text from the second page… and this is the picture it generated. Pretty close to how I imagined it.