Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth
Brownworth at least proves the thesis of this brief history: the Byzantine Empire did, in fact, hold the line for the West for nearly a millennium. Not only did it preserve the classics of Greece and Rome lost to the West in the centuries that elapsed between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, but it also – just as, if not more, importantly – managed to prevent the soldiers of Mohammed from swarming west and devouring a fractured, sub-developed Europe. "The great walls of Constantine's city…delayed the Muslim advance into Europe for eight hundred years," Brownworth points out, "allowing the West the time it needed to develop" (p. 302).
This is all that can be fairly said for it though. The annals of Byzantium offer very little distinct from the late Western Roman Empire. Both were plagued by ceaseless cycles of political, economic and social instability. With an admittedly fair share of exceptions, an individual would usurp the crown of the basileus, murder/blind/tonsure him and any other potential rivals, and then, sooner or later, suffer the indignity of a similar fate himself.
Beyond that which it preserved from the Ancient Greeks and Romans it is a struggle to come up with anything distinctive of the Byzantines' that would serve to guide and inspire posterity. When the minds of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment looked back it was to the Classical Age, not to the Byzantines, that they found something worthy.
The Byzantines' contribution was to ensure that the fruits of the Classical Age were still there. Byzantium essentially served as a bridge between that epoch and the modern one to which we today are a part. Without them not only would our earliest heritage have been (in keeping with the spirit of this history's title) completely lost to us but the West itself would have fallen beneath the conquering sword of Islam.
No Byzantium, no Western Civilization.
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