One of the most important accounts of the Middle Ages, the history of Niketas Choniates describes the Byzantine Empire from 1118 to 1207. Niketas provides an eyewitness account of the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade.

O City of Byzantium is the first English translation of a history which chronicles the period of Byzantine history from 1118 to 1207. The historian Niketas Choniates provides an eye-witness account of the inexorable events that led to the destruction of the longest lived Christian empire in history, and to the ultimate catastrophe of the fall of Constantinople in 1204 to the Fourth Crusade. For the student of the Middles Ages who cannot read Greek, and for the historians and the general public, this volume contains one of the most important historical accounts of the Middle Ages. Recorded in detail are the political, economic, social, and religious causes of alienation between the Latin West and the Greek East that separated the two halves of the Christian world and broke apart the great bulwark of European civilization.