Distilled, almost experiential, from my many years of teaching at the Sorbonne, this work is addressed to those modern Greeks who struggle with the problem of Greek historical continuity and to foreigners (mainly Western Europeans and their American offshoots) who are content with selective knowledge of their past.

My aim, therefore, is to place, as much as possible, even indirectly and almost clandestinely, Byzantium in the position that its achievements dictate: to briefly state, I mean, those things that highlight it as the first European empire and that explain not only its cultural grandeur (still insufficiently known) but also its unusual longevity for a global power (as Byzantium once was).

With this perspective as a priority, the selection of topics I developed and analyzed here (apart from the historical framework that I propose as a canvas, so to speak, for the embroidery) mainly relates to long-term phenomena that can somewhat interpret individual or collective reactions of the Byzantines to the challenges of their time and perhaps explain the "Why" of Byzantine political influence.