Download Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization AudioBook Free
In Advertising 476 the Roman Empire fell–or rather, its western one half do. Its eastern one half, which would come to be known as the Byzantine Empire, would withstand and frequently flourish for another eleven decades. Though its capital would move to Constantinople, its individuals referred to themselves as Roman for the entire duration of the empire’s living. Indeed, so do its neighborhood friends, allies, and foes: If the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he had taken the title Caesar of Rome, placing himself in a direct brand that led back again to Augustus.
For too many in any other case historically savvy people today, the story of the Byzantine civilization is something of the void. Yet for greater than a millennium, Byzantium reigned as the glittering seating of Religious civilization. When European countries fell into the Dark Ages, Byzantium placed fast against Muslim development, keeping Christianity alive. When literacy basically vanished in the West, Byzantium made major education available to both sexes. Students debated the merits of Plato and Aristotle and commonly committed the entirety of Homer’s Iliad to storage. Streams of riches flowed into Constantinople, making possible unprecedented wonders of art and structures, from fabulous jeweled mosaics and other iconography to the fantastic chapel known as the Hagia Sophia that was a perspective of heaven on the planet. The dome of the fantastic Palace stood practically two hundred legs high and stretched over four acres, and the city’s inhabitants was more than twenty times that of London’s.
From Constantine, who founded his eponymous city in the year 330, to Constantine XI, who valiantly fought the empire’s last battle greater than a thousand years later, the emperors who ruled Byzantium enacted a saga of politics intrigue and conquest as amazing as anything in recorded background. Lost to the West is replete with reviews of assassination, mass mutilation and execution, sexual scheming, ruthless grasping for electricity, and clashing armies that soaked battlefields with the blood of slain warriors numbering in the tens of thousands.
Still, it was Byzantium that maintained for us today the fantastic gift items of the classical world. On the 55,000 ancient greek language texts in existence today, some 40,000 were sent to us by Byzantine scribes. And it was the Byzantine Empire that shielded Western European countries from invasion until it was prepared to take its own place at the guts of the world stage. Filled with memorable reviews of emperors, generals, and religious patriarchs, as well as fascinating glimpses into the life of the ordinary citizen, Lost to the West shows how much we owe to this empire that was the equal of any in its accomplishments, appetites, and long lasting legacy.
