In the 2002 romantic comedy, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the father of the protagonist is a Greek emigrant, living in the US, who spares no opportunity to list the accomplishments of Greek civilization for anyone willing to listen to him. His list includes democracy, philosophy, science, and many other benefits to mankind, initiated or developed by his ancestors. One achievement that he does not mention is the Byzantine Empire. This is not surprising because the Byzantines have had a consistently bad press for the last 500 years, ranging from its name becoming an adjective in English meaning unnecessarily complicated to the disrespect shown its capital in the 1953 American pop song Istanbul (not Constantinople).

In this book, Colin Wells attempts to present the legacy of the Byzantines in a more positive light. There are three sections, covering the West, the Islamic world, and the Slavic world. In each the author describes how, during the sixth through the 15th centuries, the Byzantines more or less taught each of these societies how to be civilized, although some were more enthusiastic pupils than others.

This is a very readable book and the author provides lists of the major personages discussed to make it easier for the reader to keep score. One of the more interesting features is the collection of maps showing the political divisions at various dates so that the reader can keep track of the evolving international relationships.

Scholarship about ancient scholars, interesting but at the same time boring.

A good read, Wells makes some very good points. I found his non-chronological narrative to be frustrating while the word choice and grammar was surprisingly sloppy for a published work. Wells has many a good point to make, it's too bad that the editing could not be more sound.

A little uneven? Sometimes I was really hooked, and other times it was a slog. There's a lot of information here.

This was an easy to read account of Byzantium's influence on Western Europe, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. I won't pretend that I'm going to remember the whole litany of names and places that figure in the history, but I will at least retain a nice overview.

A Simply terrific telling, for the general reader, of the story of the preservation and ultimate dissemination of the store of ancient greek learning and philosophy kept by the byzantine greeks in constantinople until its fall in 1453. The book follows 3 main threads: The influence of Byzantium on the Muslim, Slavic and Western worlds. Well written, and informative, even for folks without a background in medeivel history.

Byzantium is one of those mythic places we tend to know little about. This book purpose is to tell the story of how the wreck of Byzantium fertilized three civilizations, each in a different way, the West, the Slavic and the Islamic. I knew so little about this I found it all fascinating.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I appreciated how it was divided into three sections: Byzantium's influence on the West, on the Islamic world, and the Slavic world. I also loved how the themes of Athens and Jerusalem were traced throughout.

The gifts of Greeks

Byzantium disappeared from the maps in 1453 when it was conquered by the Turks. It had been on the skids for some time previously. Constantinople became Istanbul and though all us kids studied Rome in detail, our teachers tended to skip over Byzantium in a few sentences, if they mentioned it at all. But for many centuries the second Rome, the Rome of the East, shone brightly as a beacon of civilization as Europe went through the Dark Ages. As a great civilization of its time, Byzantium would have had influences on surrounding areas, as all great civilizations do. But what exactly would these have been ? To tell the truth, before I read Colin Wells' book, I had very little idea.

Byzantium's influence spread in three different directions, in three different ways. First, the victorious Arabs arrived in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, taking over from the erstwhile Byzantine rulers. The style they adopted, once they realized that they were no longer a nomadic, desert people without cities, owed a lot to the Byzantines, both in architecture and in political regime. But the larger Byzantine influence was to provide the rising Muslim power with knowledge---in science, medicine, and philosophy---the knowledge that fueled the flowering of Islamic civilization in the 8th and 9th centuries in Damascus and Baghdad. Though Islam eventually turned away from such knowledge to its own detriment, the mass of Arabic translations from Greek, aided by Byzantine scholars, helped in turn to re-seed knowledge gleaned by the ancient Greeks in western Europe at a later time.

Second, in the 150 years before Byzantium's end, intellectual activity had begun to stir in Italy. Almost all classical literature in Greek had been lost, thanks to nearly 1000 years of invasions and wars. Even if Italian scholars could get their hands on Greek manuscripts, they couldn't read them. A few Byzantine scholars began to travel to Italy to teach Greek and to spread Byzantine philosophical trends of different kinds. Moves even were made to reunite the Orthodox and Catholic churches, though none were successful. After Byzantium fell, many Greek scholars took refuge in Venice or other parts of Italy. The whole European humanist school of philosophy, with its reliance on Plato and its subsequent influence on Catholic thinkers, can be traced to the debates in Byzantium between those who favored "Athens" (humanist tradition) and those who backed "Jerusalem" (stricter interpretation of religion).

Third, Byzantium engaged in a long struggle with the Slavic peoples who invaded the Balkan peninsula as early as the 400s. Among these numbered the Bulgars and the Serbs. Over time, these peoples adopted Orthodox Christianity and in turn became a conduit to spread the religion further, to the outer Slav peoples in Ukraine and Russia. Wells relates a long, extremely complex tale of how Russia came to adopt the faith of Byzantium and become, at last, the "Third Rome". The type of Orthodoxy that they accepted meant that mysticism would dominate, rather than humanism as in the case of the West.

The overall topic, then, is "what contributions did Byzantium make to world history". Even if you are not fascinated by schools of philosophy and positions on the nature of Christianity, you will be able to follow and appreciate Wells's work because this is one of the clearest history books I've ever read. It has a number of excellent maps also (always a plus). The section about Russia gets bogged down in a sea of names for a while, but you will be able to navigate through. Humor marks the pages, and a rather informal, rather than `heavy academic' style predominates. I suspect SAILING FROM BYZANTIUM will influence more people than most previous books on the subject.

This book emphasizes the unanimous fact that this forgotten and less noticed empire shaped the world in terms of influence and culture. without Constantinople the domes of the Islamic mosques would not have come to be ( the Blue Mosque, the Dome of the Rock and many Omayyad and Turkish Mosques) and without the resurrection of ancient Greek works many sciences would not have come to be and those sciences would not have been enhanced by the Muslims if Constantinople did not provide the works. I learned that this empire and city withstood more than a millennium and still made an impact in the world.

Isaac Asimov referred to Byzantium as a forgotten empire, lost and dismissed to the western mind as a decayed remnant of a once-great power. But Byzantium had a greatness of its own that inspired civilizations around it, even its enemies. Sailing from Byzantium examines the literary, political, scientific, and other influences the Eastern empire had on the western Renaissance, Eastern Europe, and even the nascent Islamic civilization. Though somewhat impaired by being name-dense and not giving sketch of the Byzantines in brief, Sailing does deliver a sense of the eastern empire as an inspirational fount during the long millennium that followed its western antecedent's demise. The three civilizations drinking from its waters took different elements of the Empire home with them, with some sharing; to the Italians, Byzantium was the temple of Greek civilization, its scholars the teachers of the first medieval humanists, including by extension Erasmus. Islam cut its imperial teeth when it seized some of the East's richest provinces, and Byzantine notions about politics, law, and the aesthetics of royalty became incorporated into the Islamic civilization as it came of age. This lessened somewhat after the conquest of Persia, pursued after Constantinople proved too tough to crack. The Russians, too, were initially rivals of their southern neighbors, making their introduction with a good old-fashioned Black Sea raid; having common enemies and rivals, however, pushed the two together, and as the tribe of Russians matured into a state of their own, their religion was that of Byzantium's. Later, once Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, Russia would even claim to be the inheritors of the Empire; just as it moved from Rome to Constantinople, so it now had moved to the third Rome, Moscow. The marriage of a Russian potentate to a Byzantine princess even attempted to give such a claim practical validation. In examining the Byzantine influence on these three powers in turn, Wells not only demonstrates the richness of its culture, but pries open worlds probably mysterious to western readers, connecting exotic history with some slightly more familiar. It's quite fascinating, though readers would be better served reading an overview of Byzantine history before launching in.

A great primer dealing with the role of the Eastern Roman Empire, otherwise known as Byzantium. This is one area and period of History that I knew so little about (never covered it at Uni, or at least only briefly touching the edges), basically just knowing about the schism between the East and Western Churches - the Orthodox and Catholic. However, the book is not really a history of Byzantium per se, but rather details the influence it held over the religious and educational development in Europe and the Middle East, covering the West, the effect on the rise of the Islamic Middle East and, for what I think is the most long standing legacy, the rise of the Slavic Rus, helping and actively encouraging the development of Russia as a unified nation (carrying on the legacy and being known in time as the 'Third Rome'). Without the Eastern Roman Empire surviving when Rome was sacked (and it survived for almost a millennia longer, till 1453), then we would not have many early books and texts surviving from Ancient Greece and much important learning would have been lost forever.

The book is more or less a cultural and religious study, explaining the divide between Western and Eastern religious thought (explaining the Hesychast debate for instance) and the most important historical figures involved throughout Byzantine's history. It held and incorporated the legacy of the Greeks, and its teachers became widely recognised and sought after for their translations, both amongst the Latin Christians and the Islamic Scholars. Islam became such a progressive movement in its early stage of growth with developments in science, expanding and developing what the early Greek Scholars started, and without the Byzantine translators then this could not have happened. Likewise amongst the Catholics in Florence and Rome, Byzantine Scholars were often invited to teach, to impart their knowledge such was the respect they held. However, Colin Wells' book is short and contains no great depth into certain periods and events - hardly mentioning the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and what happened afterwards, but does discuss the Fourth Crusade and the sacking in 1204 (the beginning of the end of such a powerful, grandiose and dare I say, beautiful city); it must be seen as a primer and I suppose it succeeds in this task. There is a considerable bibliography however which is always useful and much needed here. The book has whetted my inquisitve appetite to read more regarding this almost 'mystical' and exotic Empire.