Sailing From Byzantium - Colin Wells

The focus of this short book on Byzantium is the Byzantine Empire's effect on three of the cultures that surrounded it - the West via Italy, which is a fascinating story, the Islamic world, and the Slavic world, including Russia.  The degree to which the legacy of ancient Greece was unknown in the West surprised me, but it was a side effect of the loss of Greek literacy in the West.  The West knew of Greek authors and knew the importance of them from the Latin authors' high regard for them - but they didn't have the Greek originals, and couldn't have read them if they did.   But their interest in them eventually paid off, when Greek scholars from a fast-dissolving Byzantine Empire began to transmit their knowledge of to to the West in the last 150 years of the empire.
The effect of Greek knowledge on the Islamic empires that surrounded it through the early Middle Ages was also a story I'd never read.  Briefly, the Byzantines transmitted a respect for and interest in the classical authors to the early Islamic empires, which had a major impact of the cultural and scientific achievements of these entities.  As far as the Slavic legacy, that seemed to be largely a religious influence, and the book really started losing me here, as Byzantium's influence on the Slavic cultures seemed less a matter of transmitting ancient knowledge, and more a matter of deliberate cultural, well, imperialism, using religious influence to create a source of political influence.  That just seemed to be different in character from the other two that Wells talked about.