![]() This book is about 300 pages long and is focused on looking at the influence of the Byzantine empire and its scholarship and knowledge of Greek philosophical thinking on the West, Arabs, and the Slavic world. And that lack of straightforwardness is not necessarily a disadvantage, as it allows the author to tell a fascinating story that has some surprising relevance when one examines the question of pietism within different religious traditions. This particular book is a relatively short one and certainly a very well-written one, and it certainly justifies the intents of its author to let the reader know about the importance of the Byzantine influence on surrounding peoples, even if that influence was not always straightforward. ![]() ![]() After all, why would one read about an empire that ended lamentably and definitively in 1453, decades before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, unless the empire had some importance on the way we currently live. In general, these books seek to demonstrate the importance of the Byzantine Empire to the contemporary Western world in one way or another, and this book certainly fits within that trend. I don’t know where I became someone who reads a lot of books on Byzantium, but there are a lot of books on that medieval society, and I somehow find myself reading a few of them also. ![]() Sailing From Byzantium: How A Lost Empire Shaped The World, by Colin Wells ![]()
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