Really looking forward to this as part 2 of my self-made curriculum on Central Asia - past to present.

(Part 1 is 'In Search of Zarathustra' by Daniel Kriwaczek)

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This book was quite dense with very valuable information. It focuses on personalities and the movements they represented, rather than institutions, which I found hard to follow over the several months reading on and off.

That said, its three parts almost stand alone showing the Byzantine influence on the Western, Islamic and the Slavic worlds.

I hadn't known Byzantium was so important. Wells's book relates how, in the centuries following the end of the Roman Empire, Byzantium, the surviving portion in the east, continued to influence the Mediterranean world and the Middle East, as well as Russia and the Balkans. By preserving Greek culture and transporting it to those areas, Byzantium made possible the philosophic, religious, and artistic movements behind the Renaissance, the era of Arabic science and learning, and the rise of Russian Orthodoxy. Despite pressures from neighboring peoples, Byzantium was able to remain intact during the dark years following Rome's demise and was able to preserve the twin values of Greek culture and Christianity which were responsible for its own flowering and to pass them along, thereby exporting science and learning to the Arabic world and Christianity to the north. It's not so much a history of Byzantium as it is the story of how it was the fertile seed ground for the ideas and values of the ancient Aegean and how it used its influence to sow them in the surrounding regions, to finally come to us.

The book isn't a big one. I suspect the story's huge and much more complex than Wells's account, but his clear demarcations of the benchmarks of the region's cultural history and influence make for comprehension while laying the foundation for broader reading.

Great concept, mediocre execution. I was surprised by the injustice done to the Byzantine legacy and impact on eastern and especially western culture

Pesquisa de alto nível escrita de forma sucinta e atraente para o leitor tomar conhecimento da importância de Constantinopla para história mundial.

Survey of how Byzantium influenced the Western, Arabic, and Slavic cultures and religions it touched temporally and geographically, does a good job of setting the historical foundations of each interaction, but then gets bogged down in lists of names and places. Wells needs to spend less time typing unpronounceable names and more time explaining why we should try to figure out how to say them; that is to say, he needs to provide more context to explain why we need to care.

This book was fantastic!! The subtitle says it all. No, it's not a political history of the Byzantine Empire, but one narrowly focused on the valuable culture and Greek classical learning Byzantium has passed on to three major civilizations:

Western Europe, beginning with Italy and eventually spreading to the rest of Europe;
Arabs and their successor, the Ottoman Empire;
Slavic nations, from Bulgaria to Russia.

There are few of the "famous" people you would expect. For that you would need a more general Byzantine history. In this book, there are only a few words on the Fall of Constantinople, although the Sack of Constantinople [the 4th Crusade] is covered fairly extensively. Most of the historical figures discussed were esoteric scholars, religious figures, and some statesmen.

Each of the three sections into which the book was divided, was of interest. Yes, there were boring sections and at times I felt too many names and details were thrown at me all at once. There were some nuggets of information I did learn.

I learned the first time the word translation used in the sense of expressing the sense of a word in one language and rendering it into another, was coined by the Byzantines. Many Latin works they rendered into Greek. They passed on their knowledge of Greek to all three civilizations. Many religious concepts, such as the Great Schism, the filioque controversy, differences between Arians/Nestorians, Hesychasm were made clear for the layperson. As a result of Ptolemy's The Geography translated into Latin by a Byzantine scholar, a young Genoese sailor tried to find the riches of Cathay by sailing west. A "scriptorium" was first used in a Byzantine monastery and in the homes of rich, educated Byzantines; the idea of such a room spread quickly into Western monasteries. With the invention of the printing press and Aldus Manutius' Press, Greek texts were widely distributed in Europe.

First for the Arabs, then under the Ottomans, the Byzantines translated Greek medical texts into Arabic. The Ottomans went on to write their own original texts, when they felt they had learned everything the Byzantines had to offer. In architecture, the Dome of the Rock, which is a shrine , not a mosque , was built in Jerusalem, copying the nearby Byzantine Church of the Anastasis [Resurrection]. Then the Ottomans developed their own style.

The last part delineated the origin and spread of Slavs. Bulgaria transmitted Byzantine learning. Then followed much on the early history and on the conversion to Orthodoxy of the Slavs. For much of the early history, we rely on the Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. The "Cyrillic" alphabet was developed for the Russians, we do not know by whom, but not by Cyril and Methodius. The Russian story of their conversion is well-known. The Byzantine version is more mundane, but probably more accurate. Russian art [icons] reached a peak under the Byzantine, Theophanes the Greek and his pupil, Andrei Rublev.

I appreciated the "Major Characters" list in the front, to keep track of who was who. Sources for quotes in the text and footnotes were given in 'Notes' There was also an extensive bibliography; the index was adequate, but not terribly extensive. I could not find several things I wanted to check on. The book was perfect for a non-scholar.

Enthusiastically recommended!

Readable short history of the events and cultural trends and political and religious developments leading up to the fall of Byzantium from power. The author "cycles" through eras- first discussing philosophy and Greek thought among the people of Italy up to the fall of Byzantium, then looking at the Greeks through the same period, and then the Slavic regions and the development of the Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Russian peoples, among others.

The book is only 368 pages and many of those are notes, so, it has to leave out many details. However, it is a good introduction to the era for a beginner. The author writes the whole thing like a lovely interconnected story.

A short book summarizing Byzantium’s influence on Western Europe, Islam, and Slavic countries. Fairly easy to read, it works reasonably as a summary and reference book.

This is not a book about the history of the Byzantine empire or the city of Constantinople. It is a book focused on the effect of the Byzantine culture on its neighbors both before and after the fall of the city.

Although detailed, Sailing from Byzantium is clearly meant for the enthusiastic reader with some exposure to Byzantine history. The scholar or very casual reader might not be as satisfied; the author does not go into great depth on specific cultural and religious aspects nor does he chronologically cover the Byzantine era.

However, Wells does relate both the historical figures, religious, literary and educational influence the Byzantines had on the Catholic West, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Islamic World. It's all fascinating and told in an easy to digest manner.

I'd recommend this to any reader with a basic knowledge of Byzantine history and with an interest in a culture and empire that held the line for centuries against assertive rival empires and religion.

This book brought many different pieces that have been bouncing around in my head for the last decade or two into the same historical narrative, and it is a book I will return to again in the future I am sure. Sure, it covers a vast swath of history, and therefore could be probably fairly criticized for generalizing too often, but I would say in return that it should rather be praised for being so bold as to weave the different strains of time and place together the way that it did.

The book is broken down into three parts, each focusing on the influence of the Byzantine Empire and its Greek (Athens, metaphorically) and Orthodox (Jerusalem, metaphorically) cultures. The first part is about the influence of Byzantium on the Renaissance in Italy, and this section is the closest thing I have found so far to answer my question about how exactly ancient greek texts like the Odyssey were preserved up to modern times. The second part, about which I knew the most from my own scholarship in grad school, is about the influence of Byzantium on the Arab and Muslim worlds. The argument here was nothing new to me, but I had much more to possibly criticize here based on my own experience and reading, but didn't find much to criticize. And then the third part was about the influence of especially the Orthodox element of Byzantium on the Slavic world. I know a good bit about this from a ecclesiastical and theological perspective, but not from a historical perspective, so this was probably the most interesting part of the book to me. I enjoyed learning about the context for Rublev's iconography (he is the favorite iconographer in our household, and I spent time looking at his icons every day). This third section was also particularly timely because of the recent news that the head of the Orthodox Church in Moscow has severed ties with the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople. For a few days there, it almost seemed like what I was reading in the news and what I was reading in the book about the history of the Orthodox world in the late 1300s could have easily been swapped.

I often found myself thinking, "will he leave this or that out?" Every time I thought about something like this, he did discuss what I thought was missing. A few examples of this include the influence of Alexandria on spreading Hellenism (not just Constantinople), the role of Mt. Athos, or the importance of non-Chalcedonian Christianity (Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism in particular).

Because I had a pretty decent background for each section (even Hesychasm-Orthodox mysticism which is an important theme through the whole book-is something I have read about in some detail), this book meant a lot to me. If you don't have that background already, you would likely find this book frustrating for how it touched on subjects but then didn't explain them in much detail. But to be fair, if it had, the book would have been like 2,000 pages long.

In a lot of ways this book for me is sort of like how you bookmark websites or favorite tweets that you want to come back and read later. I know I can return to this book to remind me of topics that I still don't know much about but want to delve into later, like the Council of Florence for example, which sort of weakly rejoined Eastern and Western Christianity in the context of the last couple of decades leading up to the fall of Constantinople. You sure would think that after the Latins destroyed Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade in the early 13th century that the Byzantines would have abandoned ever looking west for political and military support, but such were the intrigues of Byzantine dynastic succession conflicts and such were the threats from various Slavic and Muslim invaders, that the Byzantines never really seemed to learn that lesson.

A nice little book if you have any interest in the history of Byzantium. It covers the take over by the Ottomans and the impact of this on the Greek/Roman culture. It also covers the expansion of Orthodoxy into Russia and the early political development of Russia and in particular the impact of Orthodoxy. It covers a little bit of the Polish/Lithuania situations that happened with the development of Russia, not at great length but it touches on them.

Superb, extraordinary, quite inspiring, well accomplished, so engaging, so meticulously framed, and fascinating in its description towards the heroic battles that occurred saving the western knowledge... this book demonstrates why history is so important to the cultural life of many as a whole! On the other hand, it represents the intellectual journey involving the entire human family about their efforts dealing with records concerning history. And, at the same time, this work speaks so eloquently of the unmerciful passing of time! Thanks to Byzantium and its cultural feats as well as its influential environment, the inheritance of the West was safe and sound. A real feast of scholarship and wisdom...