{"product_id":"sailing-from-byzantium-isbn-9780553382730","title":"Sailing from Byzantium","description":"A gripping intellectual adventure story, \u003cb\u003eSailing from Byzantium\u003c\/b\u003e 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….\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eByzantium: 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWithin 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFast-paced, compulsively readable, and filled with fascinating insights, \u003cb\u003eSailing from Byzantium\u003c\/b\u003e is one of the great historical dramas–the gripping story of how the flame of civilization was saved and passed on.\"In this work of extraordinary learning...readers will find themselves guided on a fascinating journey through a story that has never before been presented in such an accessible and thought-provoking fashion.\"—Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O’Connor Professor of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A superb survey of Byzantium's many cultural bequests.... In this deft synthesis of scholarship, classicist Wells shows how the Byzantines exerted a profound influence on all neighboring civilizations.... Contains a useful glossary of historical figures, detailed maps and a time line.\"—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This history is a needed reminder of the debt that three of our major civilizations owe a debt to Byzantium. Highly recommended.\"—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, starred reviewColin Wells has studied with eminent Byzantinist Speros Vryonis Jr. at UCLA and holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Greats (Greek and Latin language and literature). He has written numerous articles on world history and culture for over a decade. He lives in upstate New York.\u003ci\u003eChapter One\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Toward a Parting   of the Ways\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Travel to Italy, and you’ll find that Byzantium is never more than a  stone’s throw away. Even that short distance is closed, discreetly but  persistently, when you step into the painting galleries, the museums, and  especially the churches. In these places Byzantium swirls gently around  you like a mist, muting the hum of German, American, and Japanese voices:  in Venice’s Basilica di San Marco, for example, built with the help of  Byzantine artisans, modeled on Constantinople’s long-lost Church of the  Holy Apostles, and adorned with loot from Venice’s conquest of  Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade; or in San Vitale at Ravenna,  where the famous mosaics of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his wife,  the notorious stripper-turned-empress Theodora, each with their retinues,  gaze limpidly at each other across fifteen yards of apse and as many  centuries.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Byzantium comes to life in the monuments of Italy as nowhere else in  Europe, and in the monuments of Ravenna as nowhere else in Italy. Venice  certainly has more of a Byzantine feel today, but it’s the feel of a much  later period, and anyway Venice’s Byzantium is generally either lifted or  copied. Ravenna’s Byzantium is primal. Built long before the Venetians  sank their first piling, its swampy environs more easily defensible than  Rome, Ravenna in the early Middle Ages was the capital of the Byzantine  administration in Italy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then came the barbarians—Vandals, Goths, and   others—whose turbulent arrival and usurpation of political power we know  as “the fall of Rome.” Determined to reclaim the lost territory, in the  middle of the sixth century Justinian carried out a ruthless and grueling  Reconquest of Italy and other parts of the Western empire. Having  completed the long war, he built San Vitale to celebrate his victory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A few minutes’ walk from San Vitale, mosaics in the church of  Sant’Apollinare Nuovo offer a very different message from the bland,  assertive gaze of the imperial couple   and their retinues. Built by the Gothic king and statesman Theoderic the  Great just before Justinian came to the throne, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo  precedes San Vitale by a generation. It proclaims in the most buoyant  terms the Goths’ arrival on the Roman scene. Two extended series of  mosaics face each other on the church’s long interior walls: a grand  cityscape of Ravenna featuring Theoderic’s palace on the south wall and a  view of the nearby port of Classis on the north wall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The cityscape on the south wall once included portraits of Goths, members  of Theoderic’s Amal dynasty or other nobles; after the Reconquest, just as  they had painstakingly rooted the Goths out of Italy, the Byzantines  prised out and replaced the mosaic stones constituting the Gothic figures.  A visitor today can clearly make out the dappled areas where the new  stones, which don’t quite match, were applied. On the edges of columns  depicted next to the palace, between which billowing curtains replaced the  original Gothic figures leaning against them, you can still see a few  fingers: they are remains left by the revision, too delicately embedded to  chip away from the mosaic columns, so that it looks as if the last of the  Goths hide there behind them, waiting to spring out through the curtains.  On the wall nearby, what appears to be a portrait of Theoderic has had his  name excised from the legend and that of Justinian written in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sant’Apollinare Nuovo reflected a widespread state of affairs in Europe at  the time, a civilization really, but a clumpy one that scholars have given  the name “sub-Roman”: the part-Roman, part-barbarian cluster of cultures,  like the Goths, that arose in the West over the fragmented course of the  fourth and fifth centuries. These yeasty little worlds were the earliest  signs of the Western Europe to come, and appeared first in the former  Roman colonies from Spain through Gaul to Germany and down into the  Balkans, and then eventually in Italy itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In Italy under the Goths, however, there wouldn’t be time for the brew to  ferment properly; the vessel would soon be shattered for good by  Justinian’s vain attempt to grab it back. Not only the Goths would suffer,  for virtually the entire peninsula would be wrecked, its people deeply  traumatized by what was theoretically their rescue.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was not the barbarian invasions at all, but the havoc of this brutal  Byzantine Reconquest that ended the ancient world in the West.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet, Theoderic’s reign in Italy, which came right before the Reconquest,  had an air of optimism. The early fifth century had been violent and  unsettling in the West, with Roman rule petering out and the incoming  barbarians taking over in uneasy partnership with the now rudderless Roman  local elites: Vandals ending up in Africa, Visigoths in Spain, Franks in  Gaul. Rome itself was twice laid open to barbarian armies, in 410 and  again in 455. The crumbling of Roman power had led a Christian bishop and  writer from Roman Africa, one Augustine of Hippo, to turn away from the  earthly landscape and point his readers toward the City of God, whose  pristine invulnerability stood in splendid contrast to Rome’s decay.  However, within a few short decades the West turned a corner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The year 476, later seen as the end of the empire in the West, in fact  passed unremarked by contemporaries. The absence of imperial power had by  then lost its fearsome aspect. In the last decade of the century, the  Byzantines invited Theoderic—himself raised and more or less educated in  Constantinople—to occupy Italy with his followers. The Goths set  themselves up in an uneasy alliance with the old Roman senatorial elites,  ruling Italy in the name of good government and of the “Roman” emperor in  Byzantium.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Procopius, the main Byzantine historian of this era, describes Theoderic  as popular and dignified. The Gothic king, we are told, “was exceedingly  careful to observe justice, he preserved the laws on a sure basis, he  protected the land and kept it safe from the barbarians dwelling round  about, and attained the highest possible degree of wisdom and manliness.”  Though in time Theoderic himself could be considered “in name a tyrant,”  Procopius goes on, “in fact he was as truly an emperor as any who have  distinguished themselves in this office from the beginning.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Procopius’ description hints at a few of the intriguing ambiguities that  characterize this shifting world. What made a barbarian? A tyrant? A king?  Indeed, an emperor? Byzantines and Italians would soon begin to come up  with conflicting answers to such questions as they slowly went their  separate ways. The long divergence—marked by tiny, imperceptible steps  rather than huge, irrevocable ones—stretched over the whole thousand-year  history of Byzantium.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Boethius and Cassiodorus\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To start us on the path to this parting of the ways, we shall call on two  learned Roman gentlemen of Theoderic’s day, Boethius and Cassiodorus. Like  double-faced Janus, the Roman god of arrivals and departures, each looks  in two directions at once, harkening back to the fading world of antiquity  and beckoning us forward into the emerging world of the Middle Ages.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Modern scholars invariably introduce Boethius as “the last of the Romans  and the first of the Scholastics.”* What this comes down to is that  Boethius was the last Western European of cultural consequence to know  Greek and Greek philosophy for a very long time. He wasn’t the absolute  last—there were a number of stragglers, certainly more than used to be  thought—but he was the last heavyweight, at the very least until Thomas  Aquinas and other Scholastics rediscovered Aristotle starting in the  twelfth century, some seven centuries later. Even then few if any  Scholastics had Boethius’ knowledge of ancient Greek; knowledge on that  level in the West would have to wait nearly a thousand years, for the  Renaissance scholars of quattrocento Florence.†\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It isn’t certain how Boethius learned his Greek, or where he learned it,  though it’s possible from hints in the sources that he studied in Athens  or Alexandria, or both, as a young man. If so, it wasn’t much longer that  such sojourns, once standard practice for a vanishing Mediterranean-wide\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    * Scholasticism was the major intellectual movement in Europe before the  rise of humanism, and it, too, was stimulated by the discovery of ancient  literature—in this case, the partial recovery of Aristotle’s thought in  the twelfth century. It is closely associated with the rise of  universities or “schools.” The greatest scholastic was St. Thomas Aquinas,  whose thought was incorporated into Catholic doctrine after his death.  Scholasticism stressed the use of reason and dialectical disputation in  the formulation of theology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    † Quattrocentro, Italian for “four hundreds,” refers to the fifteenth  century and its cultural innovations in Italy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    upper class, would be possible. Boethius’ father died when he was still a  boy, and he was adopted by an older relative, Symmachus, a leading figure  in Rome who also had strong ties to the literary culture of the Greek  East. The refined Symmachus, it turns out, nursed an ambitious plan for  restoring Italian familiarity with the Greek classics, and this may have  been among his reasons for sponsoring his brilliant younger relative.  Under Symmachus’ guidance, Boethius undertook the almost unbelievably  audacious project not only of translating into Latin the entire works of  Plato and Aristotle, with commentary, but also of reconciling their often  divergent philosophical views. And he planned to do this in his spare  time, since from the age of about twenty he was writing prodigiously as  well as filling increasingly important political positions for Theoderic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Theoderic clearly valued Boethius’ wide-ranging intellect, making it part  of plans he had for revitalizing higher Roman culture and fixing in place  its Gothic veneer. But he also had worldly reasons for promoting Greek  learning in Italy. Boethius’ learning had a practical side, and the king  took full advantage of it in promoting his domestic and foreign prestige  agendas: fulsomely flattering letters exist in which he asks Boethius to  devise a tamper-proof system of weights and measures, to find a skilled  harpist to send to   Clovis, king of the Franks, and to come up with two timepieces, one a  sundial and the other a water clock, as impressive gifts for Gundobad,  king of the Burgundians. The letters present a pretty picture of peaceful  coexistence, cooperation even, between the Roman senatorial class—of which  Boethius was a member—and its new Gothic masters in Ravenna.","brand":"Delacorte Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304561201381,"sku":"NP9780553382730","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553382730.jpg?v=1767736039","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/sailing-from-byzantium-isbn-9780553382730","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}