Review: Sailing from Byzantium

Colin Wells, Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World (Delacourt Press, 2006).

Wells offers us three different tales emanating from a central source point: Byzantium. The issue that unites all three stories is the role Byzantium played in the civilizations of Renaissance Italy, Islam, and the Slavic lands.

The book begins with the Byzantine Greek influence upon the Renaissance humanists who wanted to learn Greek. The central conflict is the religious schism between the Catholic west and the Orthodox east. By the 14th century, Byzantium was in such a desperate situation that some were willing to accept western stipulations for re-union in an effort to secure help against the Turks. The envoys and diplomats sent back and forth between Italy and Constantinople over this issue played a key role in the reacquisition of Greek and Greek texts in the west.

Part II looks at how the Muslims embraced the Greek philosophical, scientific, and medical texts which had been preserved in Byzantium, and then further preserved them by translating them into Arabic. Once they had mastered ancient Greek knowledge, they were then able to expand upon that knowledge, making great advances, particularly in medicine, before a movement to reject reason and Aristotle in favor of faith and the Qu'ran. Throughout this story, the Byzantines make regular appearances, even though most of the history of Islamic-Byzantine relations amounts to steady warfare and conquest, although it took until 1453 and the rise of the Turks to finally bring down Constantinople.

In the last section, we see the passing of the Orthodox torch from Byzantium to Moscow, the Third Rome. A long narrative describes the Byzantine emperor's attempts to deal with the rising Slavic peoples in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia. In eastern Europe, Byzantium's main role was as political legitimizer for the various Slavic states that arose. This role was expanded as the Slavs become Christians, and their metropolitans were subordinate to the Patriarch in Constantinople.

The three sections are tied together thematically, Byzantium serving to unite all three sections. Wells wants to clarify the central role that the Byzantine Empire played in three regions which remain significant today. The idea is that Byzantium passed the torch of the ancient world, as the remnant of the Roman Empire, on to the modern world, embodied in the states that developed out of Renaissance Europe, the Islamic Middle east, and Eastern Europe.

A sub-theme that makes the book particularly interesting is the regular conflict between faith and reason. The Byzantines themselves had to wrestle with this issue, particularly with the rise of Hesychasm, as did the Muslims, the Italians, and the Slavs. Of these latter, Islam retreated away from reason, the Europeans embraced it more and more, while the Slavs essentially ignored it, focusing more on political expediency. And in this way, Wells makes an interesting commentary on the bequest of the Byzantines to the modern world.

Note: I listened to the audiobook, rather than reading the paper version.