What is thousand-year-old Byzantium? The heiress of the great ancient culture and the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which showed the European barbarian world high examples of artistic and religious creativity? Or a slowly dying fragment of the old world, with all its ugly features - despotism, spiritual and physical bondage, the treachery and cruelty of emperors, the greed of the nobility, the ignorance of the common people? Answering these questions, historians still cannot come to an agreement, and, as it turns out, these questions concern not only scientists. The book represents the view of the famous French Byzantine scholar Michel Kaplan on Byzantium as a special civilization.