I saw a very fun show on the Discovery Channel last night, on Greek fire.

Besides being very cool (what's not to love about jets of billowing flame directed against enemy ships?) it was a very timely invention, one that saved the Byzantine Empire from the first jihad in the eight and ninth centuries (yes, jihad is that old; Mohammed and his immediate successors were the first to prosecute holy wars, it's not a modern perversion of that great religion of peace).

Were it not for Greek fire, Muslims would have swept into Europe, and Christianity would have effectively died. Italy could not have had long without a Constantinople to defend her (and should the Muslims have encountered resistance they would not have stopped as they did at Poitiers; they would have worked harder for the Mediterranean than they did for more northern territories).

It really is a shame that Byzantium fell at all. Chronicles from the West spoke very highly of the state of education among the Byzantines (one traveler remarked that when he went to the barber he debated the Trinity and that when he went to the butcher he debated the Incarnation; sophisticated philosophical/theological dialogue was apparently quite widespread).

The balance between Church and state was also quite sophisticated (it neither went too far in the direction of the state controlling the Church, nor did the Church acquire too much temporal power as in the West; both spheres remained powerful and interrelated).

Byzantium never fostered the diseased strains of thought that prospered in the West: it never had an Enlightenment, and it never had a Reformation.

Who knows how history would have turned out had Tuesday May 29th, 1453 been just another regular day in Constantinople?