ABSTRACT
The Byzantine Age extends from the founding of Constantinople, ad 330, to its capture by the Turks in 1453; and the significance of the continuous Greek tradition of scholarship and libraries at a time when the West was all but submerged in darkness and illiteracy, is evident. The work of a great many of the Byzantine scholars, especially perhaps of the encyclopaedists, the lexicographers and the historians, inevitably smacks of the library bookshelf; so much so that we can be reasonably certain that generous library resources of some type were available in Constantinople in every part of this period. The standard of historiography in the later Byzantine period was markedly higher than any of the Western histories and chronicles of the same period. The significance of the Byzantine period for our purposes lies in the careful conservation by its libraries of so great a proportion of the texts of Greek literature.
