The surprising legacy of Byzantine scholars
Review of Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells
This is a popular history about the impact of Byzantine culture on Renaissance Italy, the Abbasids 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. It covers vast swaths of time.
Byzantine scholars preserved most of what texts we know today as classical Greek. Their availability directly enabled a crucial step to be taken in the evolution of the Renaissance, which developed a sense of history among other things. By providing a pre-Christian perspective in the texts, Byzantine scholars contributed to the development of a purely secular understanding, a de-Christianized sense of history, and skeptical philosophical school that could challenge Christian faith and certitudes.
As a classics civ 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, Epicurean atheism, Euclidian geometry, the poetry of Pindar and Sappho, and the Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides.
Interestingly, it was a mystic religious movement – the Hesychasm, which flourished as a reality-denying reaction to the military decline of the Byzantine Empire – that started pushing scholars out, well before the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453.
Furthermore, we learn of the Byzantine preservation of the proto-scientific and practical medical texts that were translated by Nestorian Christians in Syria. This fostered a rationalistic branch of early Islam, which an Abbasid 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 Umayyad Spain, were the source of the method that the Scholastics first used, as they attempted to logically reconcile every Biblical reference. The Scholastic project was a precursor of modern science, in that it established texts in which logical hierarchies of concepts and observations were elucidated. Finally, Wells also sketches a portrait of Islam during the period where it was at the cutting-edge, an eclectic and dynamic civilization that surpassed anything happening in the West during the dark ages. His account is vividly rendered and well worth the price of admission.
Finally, over nearly 600 years, Byzantine monks decisively influenced the development of the Slavic world, as it was evolving from a loose coalition of pagan tribes into the nations we know today. From Byzantium, they gained their Cyrillic alphabet, creating the first texts in their then-undifferentiated languages. Byzantium also introduced political-administrative organizational ideas, as supported by classical Greek writers. Lastly, the Rus were converted to their Orthodox faith, based on the mystical Hesychasm. In contrast to 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.
Though this book might be a bit obscure for the general reader, Wells convincingly demonstrates that Byzantine scholars were instrumental in the preservation and introduction of fundamental texts that later contributed to the modern sensibility. It is an engrossing read that is fascinating and fun.