Sailing from Byzantium (2 page)

he Byzantine empire was the medieval heir of ancient Greece and Rome, the continuation of the Roman empire in Greek territory and with Christianity as the state religion. It began in the early fourth century with the foundation of a new Christian capital, Constantinople, on the site of the old Greek city of Byzantium. It ended when the Ottoman Turks captured that city in 1453, making it the capital of their Islamic empire, which in territorial aspirations and imperial style essentially replaced the old Byzantine Greek empire.

Starting with Edward Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Western historians have until quite recently depicted the history of Byzantium as a long, unedifying tale of imperial decay. If the measure of empire is territory alone, this might appear to be true. From the once vast reaches of the old Roman empire, a millennium's worth of adversity reduced Byzantium in its final decades to little more than the city of Constantinople itself.

Measuring by cultural influence, however, more recent
historical research has revealed a story of lasting achievement and often vigorous expansion.
Sailing from Byzantium
tells this story for the general reader.

The book's organization comes from two ideas that together offer an easy handle by which to grasp the Byzantine cultural legacy. The first is the dual nature of that legacy, which is reflected in its embrace of both Christian faith and Greek culture. The book's second organizing idea is that the beneficiaries of this dual legacy were the three younger civilizations that emerged at first in lands wrested from Byzantium: the Western, Islamic, and Slavic worlds. Each of these three global civilizations was radically shaped by Byzantium— but each was highly selective about the side of Byzantium it chose to embrace. This book celebrates the energy and drive of these younger cultures as well as the extraordinary richness of Byzantine culture.

Accordingly,
Sailing from Byzantium
is divided in three parts. Part I, “Byzantium and the West,” narrates the Byzantine legacy to Western civilization. This consists primarily in the transmission of ancient Greek literature. As Latin West and Greek East drifted apart during the Middle Ages, Byzantine scholars painstakingly preserved the ancient Greek classics. Then, at the dawn of the Renaissance, they came to Italy and taught ancient Greek literature to the first Italian humanists, who were only then beginning to hunger for knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity. Were it not for this small but dynamic group of Byzantine humanist teachers, ancient Greek literature might have been lost forever when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453.
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Part II, “Byzantium and the Islamic World,” goes back in time to describe the rise of the Arab Islamic empire on former Byzantine lands in the Middle East. Long before the Italians rediscovered ancient Greece, the Arabs took up ancient Greek science, medicine, and philosophy, building on these works to found the Arabic Enlightenment commonly known as the golden age of Islamic science. Again, these texts ultimately came from Byzantium, as did the scholars who taught and translated them for the Arabs. The Islamic world eventually repudiated the ancient Greek legacy, as religious authorities suppressed the rationalistic inquiry on which ancient Greek science and philosophy were based.

Part III, “Byzantium and the Slavic World,” explores the religious side of the Byzantine legacy. Over centuries of determined missionary work, the Byzantines turned the southern and eastern Slavs from uncivilized invaders into the great defenders of Orthodox Christianity. Converting first the Bulgarians, then the Serbs, and finally the Russians, Byzantine and Slavic monks worked together to create what a leading modern scholar has called “the Byzantine Commonwealth.”
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This pan-Slavic cultural entity transcended national boundaries, blending Orthodox monastic traditions of mystical contemplation with energetic missionary zeal to utterly reshape the world north of Byzantium's borders.

Although these stories must be told separately, the reader should bear in mind that they happened, for the most part, concurrently. It has seemed best to tell them in the order in which they begin. Their climaxes fall in a different order. Part I begins with the sunset of Greco-Roman antiquity and moves forward to the humanistic rediscovery of that world in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Part II focuses on the rise of Arab Islamic civilization in Byzantium's shadow from the seventh to ninth centuries. Part III has successive narrative peaks from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, as the Slavic world coalesced to take its place as Byzantium's truest heir. For an overview of developments in all three areas, the reader is referred to the concurrent timeline at the front of the book.