I finished reading Colin Well's Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World. It's "cannot put it down" history. If, like me, your knowledge of the Eastern Roman Empire begins with Diocletian and stops with Justinian, this is the book for you.

The book is actually less about Byzantium than it is about the enormous legacy bequeathed by Byzantium to three younger civilizations that grew up around it: "the West," Islam, and the Slavs. Wells's hypothesis is that, in radiating waves, Byzantium sent out classical Greek learning and orthodox Christianity. These waves of thought prfoundly influenced the three surrounding civilizations. For example, Wells argues that the Byzantine spread of classical Greek rationalism triggered first Scholasticism and then the Rennaissance in the West.

For reasons unclear, this is the passage that stuck with me the most:

A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end preferring national suicide to religious compromise. This is what happened to the Byzantines. In that sense, Byzantium chose its fate. Military conquest by the Turks was less of an evil than spiritual submission to the hated Catholics.

The book has done nothing to dissuade me from "Noel's Grand, If Unproven, Hypothesis." But, more on that later....