Sailing From Byzantium How a Lost Empire Shaped the World

"In this work of extraordinary learning.. readers will find themselves guided on a fascinating journey througt a story that has never before been presnted in such an accessible and thouht-provoking fashion." Thomas R. Martin Jeremiah O'Connor Professor of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross

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 enormouus 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. Colin Wells tells of the missionaries, mystics, and philosophers who often risked their lives to 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 setting off a debate among history's greatest minds on faith versus reason. Fast-paced compulsively readable and filled with fascinating insights, Sailing From Byzantium is the captivating historical drama of how the flame of civilization was saved and passed on.

"Colin Wells's smart and accessible new history... Sailing From Byzantium offers the reader a fascinating lesson in the strange transience and even stranger endurance of empires.. Mr. Welss offers capsule summaries of important intellectual developments while keeping vivid personalitieskings monks philosophers travelers to the fore. The reader comes away, accordingly with a broad outline of a complex subject and a whole bushel of interesting anecdotes."