Averil Cameron   The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395-600 (Routledge). Essentially the early Byzantine years.

 

Nicholas Cheetham   Medieval Greece (Yale UP, o/p in US). A general survey of the period and its infinite convolutions in Greece, with Frankish, Catalan, Venetian, Byzantine and Ottoman struggles for power.

John Julius Norwich   Byzantium: The Early Centuries; Byzantium: the Apogee and Byzantium: The Decline (all Penguin; Viking-Knopf). Perhaps the main surprise for first-time travellers to Greece is the fascination of Byzantine monuments, above all at Mystrás. This is an astonishingly detailed yet readable trilogy, also available in one fat volume as * A Short History of Byzantium (Penguin).

Vangelis Pavlidis   Rhodes 1306-1522: A Story (Rodos Image, Rhodes). A caricature-illustrated history of the Knights of St John's occupation of Rhodes, by one of Greece's leading political cartoonists, but this isn't tourist pap - rigorous research and witty text illuminate a little-known era in the Dodecanese.

Michael Psellus   Fourteen Byzantine Rulers (Penguin). A fascinating contemporary source on the stormy but brilliant period from 976 to 1078.

Steven Runciman * The Fall of Constantinople , 1453 (Canto-Cambridge UP) is the standard account of the event; The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge UP) follows the vicissitudes of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople up to the War of Independence. Byzantine Style and Civilization (Penguin, o/p in US) and Mistra (Thames & Hudson, o/p in US) are more slanted towards art, culture and monuments.

Archbishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware   The Orthodox Church (Penguin). A good introduction to what is effectively the established religion of Greece, by the Orthodox archbishop resident in Oxford.