Audiobook9 hours
Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World
Written by Colin Wells
Narrated by Lloyd James
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
Author
Colin Wells
Colin Wells is associate professor of English at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
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Reviews for Sailing from Byzantium
Rating: 3.7933332453333333 out of 5 stars
4/5
75 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Did the Byzantine scholars who fled Constantinople provide the spark for the Italian Renaissance? Did the Byzantines provide the bulwark against the Muslim invasion in the Middle Ages? Did the Byzantines dwell way too much on their past? All these questions are dealt with in this informative book.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If you’re familiar but not too familiar with this part of the world, it’s a decent little survey of various cultures that Byzantine culture influenced. Wish that it had more information, and that it did not feel “choppy” in its delivery at points. I still recommend it.
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good book that examines the role the Byzantine state, especially its religious figures had on its neighbouring civilizations that continue to exist to this day - western, slavic, and arabic.The majority of the book is devoted to the first two civilizations, with the arabic portions being mostly overlooked serving mostly as an intermission between the western and slavic portions. Unlike those the majority of the issues dealing with the arabs are on an architectural level, which is explained rather quickly which was fairly disappointing - further analysis of how the Byzantines influenced the Muslim world after the Ayyubids would have been greatly appreciated, especially in areas such as al-Andalus and the Ottoman Turks. Much more of the book is concerned with the various religious wranglings that go on between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, and eventually their interplay with the slavic areas of Europe which is rather the core of the book. Wells I thought did a good job, though it was very dense reading, a glossary of religious and political terms would have been appreciated - especially considering he has included several great maps, a good timeline of the four civilizations, and a list of prominent individuals of the era. I also liked the inclusion of a little bit of witty anecdote - the days of defeated emperors skulls being reused by the victors as gilded drinking cups has passed I fear.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Hard to Follow. I know nothing about Byzantium and I was eager and excited to learn with this book. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the right choice. I only read the first couple of chapters and didn't retain any information. It bounces between timelines and people so quickly it's hard to know what timeline is being spoken about or what person. I felt the author wrote the book assuming the reader already has a good understanding of the subject. Since I don't, I was in the dark with no flashlight.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A wonderful introduction to the unjustly forgotten history of Byzantium, read very well. See also the works by Averil Cameron and John Haldon in this library.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is one of those tricky books that I want to like more than I do. It's hard to pitch a history like this exactly right. There were parts where I felt the author was going into more detail than I wanted, since I picked the book based on prior interest. In other places, I wanted him to connect the dots more. So, how does this relate to what I already know? Why do I feel like there is a big hole here? I know there's something missing but I can't quite remember what? So, in some ways it is overspecialized and in other ways underspecialized.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Even though this book is short, it was a bit overwhelming. Comprehension was complicated by the lack of clear chronology and the amazing number of historical figures, each with a very long Latin, Greek or name Slavic name. 'Not a Rocco, Tony, Paulie, Frankie, or Nico - in the bunch!A thorough overview, worthy of a re-read. That should help with the comprehension.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Byzantines saw themselves as inheritors and continuators of the Imperial Roman legacy, and, as part of this, as the guardians of the one true Christian faith. But their European contemporaries, and many Westerners see it quite differently: we see ourselves as Rome's descendants to one degree or another, but the Byzantines are not part of that for us. They're alien, mediaeval, Orthodox, effete, decadent--Other.But we're doing the Byzantines a disservice when we see them as outside the Western progression from Rome, to the Middle Ages, to the restoration of ancient knowledge in the Renaissance. They had an inestimable impact on each of the three major civilisations that surrounded them--Europe to the West, the Arabs to the East and the Slavs to the North; and in each case, that impact took a radically different form. It's the nature of this cultural diffusion that is Colin Wells's subject in Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World.The book is fairly short, only 293 pages in the hardcover edition. It's divided into three sections: first the West, detailing how the diaspora of Byzantine scholars who fled Constantinople following its fall to the Turks in 1453 reintroduced the Greek language, and thereby Ancient Greek scholarship, to the humanists of the early Italian Renaissance; then the East, where Byzantine society and culture gave the primitive Muslim warriors who burst out of the Arabian desert a model of how to govern a multinational empire and establish a sophisticated cultural identity even as they gobbled the empire up piece by piece; and lastly the Slavs, who received from Constantinople literacy (the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by a Byzantine missionary), and religion, and lastly Russia's claim to Rome's imperial legacy, through intermarriage with the Byzantine royal houses and Tsar Ivan the Great's adoption of the imperial title and Byzantine regalia after Constantinople's fall.Sailing From Byzantium is fully accessible to the casual reader. It's not a scholarly study and doesn't pretend to be, but it's a great jumping in point.