Evaluation of Roman Science

[Sean Manning]

Well...they Byzantines did invent new machines for war. Or at least improved upon older models. For example, Chevedden has written a lengthy article on the technological development of the counterweight trebuchet, and while his conclusion that it was byzantine emperor Manuel Komnennos who personally designed the rope-assisted counterweight might perhaps be a bit much to swallow, he clearly shows that its development was not tied to one place or region, but the result of additions made to its design over time in the greek, latin and muslim (although his argument for a strong influence there rests a bit too much on linguistics for my taste), worlds.

The "Byzantine mindset" isn't really something that serious scholars take as a credo anymore - too many holes have been poked in Gibbon's theories over the years, and they weren't all that strong to begin with. These days, the only ones following those lines are layman writers like Freeman, who really need to update their reading lists.

Do you know of any other medieval inventions from Greek Christiendom? (You can count things like watermills and latteen sails which were known in the Iron Age but became common and important in the Middle Ages). I don't know enough about Byzantine technology to have a sense of how fast or slowlt it developed, and it sounds like you do know.

Offhand, I can think of the fire siphon as an invention and the stirrup, frame-first shipbuilding, and traction trebuchet as borrowings or shared inventions. All those are rather early, though, ...