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Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World Hardcover – July 25, 2006

by Colin Wells (Author)

55 customer reviews

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A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing from Byzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forests of northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy to the final moments of a millennial city under siege….

Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them.

The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifying ideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats of daring. In Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells tells of the missionaries, mystics, philosophers, and artists who against great odds and often at peril of their own lives spread Greek ideas to the Italians, the Arabs, and the Slavs.

Their heroic efforts inspired the Renaissance, the golden age of Islamic learning, and Russian Orthodox Christianity, which came complete with a new alphabet, architecture, and one of the world’s greatest artistic traditions.

The story’s central reference point is an arcane squabble called the Hesychast controversy that pitted humanist scholars led by the brilliant, acerbic intellectual Barlaam against the powerful monks of Mount Athos led by the stern Gregory Palamas, who denounced “pagan” rationalism in favor of Christian mysticism.

Within a few decades, the light of Byzantium would be extinguished forever by the invading Turks, but not before the humanists found a safe haven for Greek literature. The controversy of rationalism versus faith would continue to be argued by some of history’s greatest minds.

Fast-paced, compulsively readable, and filled with fascinating insights, Sailing from Byzantium is one of the great historical dramas–the gripping story of how the flame of civilization was saved and passed on.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this deft synthesis of scholarship, classicist Wells shows how the Byzantines exerted a profound influence on all neighboring civilizations. Concrete examples still exist that testify to that influence—such as Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy—but this book focuses on the more ineffable products of culture that traveled from the Bosporus, influencing Western, Islamic and Slavic cultures. The story of Renaissance Europe's embrace of pagan learning is familiar, but Wells tells of a fascinating intellectual circuit that begins with the transmission of Greek learning to the newly powerful Arabs and leads to Averroës's commentary on Aristotle, Aquinas's use of this commentary and finally to the Byzantine Cydones's translation of Aquinas in the 14th century. By then, the dominant Orthodox movement of Hesychasm deemed pagan learning incompatible with Christian faith, forcing many humanists to the Catholic West. Wells devotes much space to the Hesychasts and blames them for this betrayal of Greek heritage and for weakening the empire before its final collapse in 1453, but duly credits them with shaping the Russian Orthodox Church and positioning Moscow as the Third Rome. This volume, which contains a useful glossary of historical figures, detailed maps and a time line, is a superb survey of Byzantium's many cultural bequests. (July 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Wells begins his detailed book with a list of the major characters--51 of them, including humanists, monks, emperors, patriarchs of Constantinople, philosophers, historians, classicists, and prophets. The Byzantine Empire began in the early fourth century with the foundation of a new Christian capital, Constantinople, on the site of the old Greek city of Byzantium. It ended when the Ottoman Turks captured that city in 1453, making it the capital of their Islamic empire, which in territorial aspirations and imperial style essentially replaced the old Byzantine Greek Empire. Wells points out that more recent historical research has revealed a story of lasting achievement and vigorous expansion. He divides the book into three parts: "Byzantium and the West," discussing the Byzantine legacy to Western civilization; "Byzantium and the Islamic World," describing the rise of the Arab Islamic Empire on former Byzantine lands in the Middle East; and "Byzantium and the Slavic World," exploring the religious side of the Byzantine legacy. Wells brings vividly to life this history of a long-lost era and its opulent heritage. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Press (July 25, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553803816
ISBN-13: 978-0553803815
Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1 x 8.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 55 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,055,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2122 in Books > History > World > Civilization & Culture
- #6945 in Books > History > Ancient Civilizations
- #21868 in Books > History > Europe

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Robert J. Crawford

ideal for the lay reader with a scholarly bent

December 18, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a excellent popular history about the impact of Byzantine culture on Renaissance Italy, the Arabs during their Baghdad apogee, and the Slavic world as it was differentiating into nationalities. While it is best to have a good grasp of these four periods of history, in particular Byzantium's, the author offers good skeletal explanations of vast swaths of time.

First, Byzantine scholars preserved most of what texts we know today as ancient Greek. They represented a crucial step in the evolution of the Renaissance as they contributed to the development of a secular understanding, a sense of history and philosophy not springing exclusively from Christian faith. As a classics major, this was very interesting to me, but I am not sure if it would interest most readers. This is the stuff of Plato v. Aristotle, mathematics, poetry, and the Greek historians. Interestingly, it was a mystic religious movement - the Hesychasm, which flourished as a reality-denying reaction to the decline of the Empire - that started pushing scholars out, well before the Turks conquered the city.

Second, we learn of the Byzantine roots of the practical scientific and medical texts that were translated by Nestorian Christians in SYria. This fostered a rationalistic branch of Islam, which an Abassid Calif attempted to force onto an unwilling populace, leading directly to the establishment of the conservative, anti-rationalist philosophy that later would underpin Wahabism. Their translations of Aristotle, transmitted via moorish Spain, were the source that the Scholastics first used, as they attempted to logically reconcile every Biblical reference, also a precursor of modern science. But it is also a portrait of Islam during a period where it was at the cutting-edge, an eclectic and dynamic civilization that surpassed anything happening in the West during the dark ages.

Third, over nearly 600 years, Byzantine monks decisively influenced the development of the Slavic world, as it evolved from a loose coalition of pagan tribes into the nations we know today. From Byzantines, they gained their Cyrillic alphabet, the first texts in their then undifferentiated languages, political-administrative organizational ideas, and lastly, their Orthodox (and in some cases Catholic) faith, based on the mystical Hesychasm. Unlike the Arabs and Italians with their intellectual pursuits, this is about the evolution of religious faith and doctrine. As I knew very little about this, it was the most fascinating part of the book. It also gave me a renewed sense of wonder at the sweep of human ambition, how civilizations collide, absorb, and borrow from each other.

This is really great fun, if these things interest you. If not, it will be rough going and perhaps dry.

Warmly recommended.

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Amazon Customer

Concise and Informative

July 28, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Thjis book ties in the many threads which so often are overlooked when dealing with history from one viewpoint.

For example, he said that one of the motivations for the iconoclastic controversy was that it followed a time when icons, particularly of the Virgin Mary were used to lead troops into battle. The icon-blessed troops did not fare well in several battles, so it was felt that the icons were the reason: they were offensive to God (as the Jews and Muslims held).

I felt the handling of the Serbian - Bulgarian influences was particularly enlightening.

Not a hard read -- well written and organized. A fresh [perspective.

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Gio

Forget Byzantium at Your Peril!

May 18, 2007

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Ignorance of Byzantium (in two senses: lack of knowledge and lack of attention) has confounded Islamicists and Western European historians alike in the past 100 or so years. Colin Wells offers a concise and cogent description of the role Byzantium,including exiled or conquered Byzantines, played in the preservation and transmission of ancient Greek science and philosophy to the Muslim empires of the pre-Crusade "golden age" and directly to Western Europe chiefly by way of Italy. For nearly a thousand years, Byzantium WAS Rome, the hinge of civilization, linking rising and sinking cultures from the Visigoths of North Africa to the Vikings who called themselves Rus, from the humanists of Renaissance Florence to the Nestorian Christians of Syria, the primary translators of the Greek classics into Arabic.

Yet despite the significance of the material presented, it's a fun book, a quick read, written in a relaxed and simple style, accessible even to people who couldn't locate Byzantium on the map. (Hint: "Istanbul is Constantinople, now you can't go back to constantinople...")

12 people found this helpful

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January 9, 2007

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Sailing From Byzantium (the title is morphed from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium") is a wonderful introduction to Byzantine civilisation for the general reader. Byzantine studies are sadly ignored in the UK and America, but without this powerful Christian state the West would never have survived. Beyond history, the culture of Byzantium informs our own culture in many and varied ways, and is a joy to celebrate.

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Orestis Schinas

Enlightening and easy to read

March 3, 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I've found the book very interesting and innovative, as it does not 'catalog' important historic dates and events but aims to provide an holistic approach to a very complicated issue. Apparently, the author is not addressing to an academic audience and the referencing is not as strict or as accurate, demanding researchers might need, yet it does not deviate from the facts, science considers as 'given'. The author points out the links of the Byzantine culture, State and society with the neighboring States, rivals or peoples, and provides evidence that explain some of the future developments. I strongly suggest the book for all readers interested in interpreting modern politics and cultures, and especially to those, who have been raised either with the biased texts of Fallmerayer or with the beliefs and perspectives of the Orthodox Church. Enjoy!

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November 16, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The book is written in a clear, succinct and intelligent style that guides the reader through the millenia and a cast of unfamiliar characters. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to know about the contributions of Byzantium. Except for going a bit overboard in the third section, dealing with Byzantines cultural contributions to Russia I can't think of anything negative.

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J. Hayter

"Sailing from Byzantium," a great read"

March 29, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This author has done meticulous research and his writing style almost make this a 'page turner.' During my undergrad years the history of the Byzantine Empire was glossed over or only appeared to me mentioned in passing. I think this is a fascinating book.

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Sally Dungan

Magnificent account of the influence of the Byzantine influence during ...

September 25, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Magnificent account of the influence of the Byzantine influence during the Late Medieval era. Profiles exceptional personalities and their specific contributions in theology, languages, and culture.

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