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 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. 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. 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.

The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifying ideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats of daring. Yet very few of us have any idea of the enormous debt we owe them. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer and Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, would never have survived. A riveting blend of readability, vibrant humor, and penetrating insight, A Brief History of History is a must for anyone for whom living in the present, and looking to the future, is unimaginable without serious reflection on the past.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.īyzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificent empire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than a thousand years. From its humble origins as a minor literary genre in ancient Greece, to its modern-day status as perhaps the most successful monument to the global spread of Western civilization, Wells traces the remarkable evolution of this branch of knowledge, and shows how it has long been the turf on which we fight our culture wars. The most accessible, concise, and clear-sighted biography ever of history as a living idea, this book brings together evocative sketches of the great historians with concise summaries of their key works. What Daniel Boorstin did for science in The Discoverers, Timothy Ferris for cosmology in Coming of Age in the Milky Way, and Robert Heilbroner for economics in The Worldly Philosophers, Colin Wells now does for history in A Brief History of History.

Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells