Sailing from Byzantium
Dec. 31st, 2006 03:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77Over the holidays, I was reading Colin Wells' Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World, which traces the influences of the medieval Byzantine Empire on Western, Islamic, and Slavic civilizations. Wells describes Byzantine culture as having a "dual nature," embracing "both Christian faith and Greek culture" ("Athens and Jerusalem"), and recounts how different aspects of that "dual legacy" impacted the cited "younger civilizations."
Besides treating one of my favorite intellectual hobbyhorses, Wells' book is one of the more quote-able academic treatises I've run across lately:
For example, Wells describes a ninth-century scholar and surgeon known for translating classical Greek medical texts into Arabic as follows: "Yuhanna, who possessed what one can only hope was an unusually macabre and ironic sense of humor, glowers from the sources with the bedside manner of a peckish condor." And just in case you think he's kidding, Wells lets Yuhanna speak for himself: "Had it not been for the meddling of the ruler and his interference in what does not concern him, I would have dissected alive this son of mine ... As a result of dissecting him I would thus come to know the reasons for his stupidity, rid the world of his kind ..."
In a more sober vein, Wells writes very eloquently of how that "dual heritage" played itself out in the cultures of the late Byzantine Empire, Abbasid Baghdad, Renaissance Italy, and Kievan Rus. Meditating on the final decades of the Byzantine state, Wells considers how a "devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise." (He's referring to the fading hopes of compromise between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity during the years before the fall of Constantinople.) Regarding the late Abbasid movement against autonomous reason in favor of divine faith, Wells comments sadly that "[c]ircumstances that favor the agendas of reason are relatively rare in history." And, echoing his earlier remarks apropos of Byzantium, he judges that "[c]onstriction, adversity, and loss of cultural confidence favor the appeal to religious zealotry, nativist paranoia, and patriarchal authoritarianism."
After reading this and several general histories of the Byzantine Empire, I find that I want to know a lot more about the Empire's so-called "Golden Age" under the Macedonian dynasty. In particular, I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Digenes Akritas, which was apparently a kind of Byzantine equivalent to El Cid and The Song of Roland.
Besides treating one of my favorite intellectual hobbyhorses, Wells' book is one of the more quote-able academic treatises I've run across lately:
For example, Wells describes a ninth-century scholar and surgeon known for translating classical Greek medical texts into Arabic as follows: "Yuhanna, who possessed what one can only hope was an unusually macabre and ironic sense of humor, glowers from the sources with the bedside manner of a peckish condor." And just in case you think he's kidding, Wells lets Yuhanna speak for himself: "Had it not been for the meddling of the ruler and his interference in what does not concern him, I would have dissected alive this son of mine ... As a result of dissecting him I would thus come to know the reasons for his stupidity, rid the world of his kind ..."
In a more sober vein, Wells writes very eloquently of how that "dual heritage" played itself out in the cultures of the late Byzantine Empire, Abbasid Baghdad, Renaissance Italy, and Kievan Rus. Meditating on the final decades of the Byzantine state, Wells considers how a "devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise." (He's referring to the fading hopes of compromise between Orthodox and Catholic Christianity during the years before the fall of Constantinople.) Regarding the late Abbasid movement against autonomous reason in favor of divine faith, Wells comments sadly that "[c]ircumstances that favor the agendas of reason are relatively rare in history." And, echoing his earlier remarks apropos of Byzantium, he judges that "[c]onstriction, adversity, and loss of cultural confidence favor the appeal to religious zealotry, nativist paranoia, and patriarchal authoritarianism."
After reading this and several general histories of the Byzantine Empire, I find that I want to know a lot more about the Empire's so-called "Golden Age" under the Macedonian dynasty. In particular, I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Digenes Akritas, which was apparently a kind of Byzantine equivalent to El Cid and The Song of Roland.
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Date: 2006-12-31 11:30 pm (UTC)I like making my own history.
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Date: 2006-12-31 11:34 pm (UTC)Regards to the Doge. ;)
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Date: 2006-12-31 11:39 pm (UTC)I hate exterminating entire peoples, but they're really hurting my bottom line yanno?