Oh I know! John Julius Norwich"s A SHORT HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM. This is a one-volume condensation of a three-volume popular history Norwich wrote in the 80s. I read the first of the three volumes and found it hard sledding---not the writing but simply the unfamiliarity of it all, all the strange names and events. But if we're to take Wolfe's claim to have based the Autarchy on the Byzantine empire seriously, we owe it to our students to educate them in that direction.
-alga-