Gone, but not forgotten …

… Morning’s Canvas: Sailing from Byzantium.

… without Byzantium - an empire that fluctuated dramatically in its size, power, and influence during its relatively brief history - a great deal of our world would now be quite different: the separate cultural worlds of the Italian Renaissance to the west, the medieval Islamic empire to the south, and the Slavic cultures to the north would have been radically altered in their respective developments and successes.