Autor/-in: Demetrius O'Kelly

Demetrius O'Kelly grew up in County Waterford with an abiding fascination for the hinge moments of ancient and medieval history - the crises of nerve, resource, and political will that determined which civilisations survived and which did not. He has spent many years studying the late antique Mediterranean world, with particular attention to the complex relationship between military power and religious legitimacy in the Eastern Roman Empire. His interest in the Heraclian period began with the coins: those extraordinary seventh-century solidi on which two men in consular robes, bare-headed and defiant, announced a revolution to a world that read its politics in gold. The Purple and the Sword is his most ambitious work, and he considers it the book he was always going to write.