Nick Holmes writes accessible history and historical fiction about Rome, Byzantium and the Crusades, often focusing on the causes of imperial decline.
Nick Holmes is a British historian, author and podcaster who studied history at the University of Cambridge. A university travel award enabled him to follow part of the route taken by the First Crusade, strengthening an interest in the points where Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and western European histories meet. He later worked in international finance before concentrating more fully on historical writing and broadcasting, bringing an analytical interest in institutions and long-term change to his treatment of the past.
Holmes is known for the multi-volume Fall of the Roman Empire project and for work on Byzantium and the Crusades, subjects he also explores through the Echoes of Empires podcast. His novel Trebizond places fictional lives within the eleventh-century Byzantine world, using imperial rivalry, trade and religious conflict to give narrative form to a complex period. Across his nonfiction and fiction, Holmes is particularly concerned with why states lose cohesion and how border regions preserve older political traditions. He is useful to readers interested in late antiquity, the eastern Roman Empire and the First Crusade.
