The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks

by Edwin Pears

Enthusiasm in Italy for study of Greek.

Manuel Chrysoloras, about 1366 or the following year, after he had failed in his mission from the Emperor Manuel to France and England to obtain aid against the Turks, returned to Florence, the centre of the new intellectual movement in Italy, to teach the Greek language and explain its literature. His lectures were followed with delight. Boys and old men were among his audience. The study of Greek became the fashion. One of his pupils, Leonard Aretinus, who subsequently became the secretary of four successive Popes, tells how his soul was inflamed with the love of letters and how on hearing Chrysoloras it was a hard struggle to decide whether he should continue the study of law or be introduced to Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, and those poets, philosophers, and orators who are celebrated by every age as the great masters of human science. He gave himself up to Chrysoloras, and so strong, he declares, was his passion for the new studies that the lessons he imbibed during the day were the constant subject of his nightly dreams.[546]

The school of Chrysoloras was transferred from Florence to Pavia, thence to Venice, and finally to Rome, and everywhere was well attended. Aroused by his teaching, some of his pupils went to Constantinople to increase their knowledge of Greek and to acquire books and manuscripts. In that city, between 1400 and 1453, the libraries and monasteries were freely opened to the Italian students. The libraries were still stocked with the treasures of Greek learning and literature, and every effort was made by Italian scholars to draw upon their stores. The trading agents of the Medici and other great Florentine houses were instructed to buy manuscripts without regard to cost and to send them to Florence. The best credentials that a young Greek could bring from Constantinople was a manuscript. The discovery of an unknown manuscript, says Tiraboschi, was regarded almost as the conquest of a kingdom. Aurispa, one of the pupils of Chrysoloras, returned to Venice in 1423, with two hundred and thirty-eight volumes.

The Florentines had led the way in the acquisition of Greek and the collection of manuscripts. The chiefs of the political factions were also the leaders of intellectual progress and vied with each other in the noble rivalry of encouraging the new studies as much as they did in building libraries. Cosimo, the head of the Medici, carried out a well-organised plan for encouraging the revived learning. The leaders of his school in Florence were Niccolo di Nicolo and Lionardo Bruni, the latter of whom died in 1443. The chief ecclesiastics were hardly less eager than other scholars. The popes themselves threw their influence into the new movement. In 1434 Eugenius the Fourth took up his residence in Florence when he was expelled from Rome. Amid his own serious troubles, with refractory Councils, a hostile capital, the Bogomil and Hussian heresies, and the ever vexed question of the reunion of the Churches, Eugenius found time to encourage the study of Greek and to give a welcome to all Greek priests and students who brought with them their precious manuscripts. He appreciated the profound learning of Bessarion, archbishop of Nicaea, who had come to take part in the council at Ferrara and afterwards, in 1438, at Florence, retained him, as we have seen, after the Council, and made him in the following year cardinal. His patronage of Bessarion is the more remarkable since the Greek was an adherent and exponent of the philosophy of Plato as opposed to that of Aristotle. The other Greek Church dignitaries who were present at the Council, and who were hardly less distinguished, were welcomed as scholars even by those who treated them with scant courtesy as priests of the Orthodox Church. George Gemistos, who adopted the name of Plethon, the founder of a school of Neoplatonism, was one of them, and was popular generally except with the priests. George Scholarius, whom we have seen as the leader of the anti-unionist party in Constantinople, and afterwards as patriarch, Theodore Gaza, Andronicus, Philelphus, and others of repute, were also present. Cosimo de’ Medici, through the influence of Gemistos, undertook the task of translating Plato. When Gemistos died, in 1450, in the Morea, his body was taken to Florence as a mark of respect for his services in teaching Greek. The patronage of Eugenius was continued by his successor Nicholas the Fifth, the first ‘humanist’ who was made pope and the founder of the Vatican library.

The succession of scholars was kept up by constant new arrivals from Constantinople. Philelphus (or, in its Italianised form, Filelfo), who had married a daughter of Chrysoloras, was for a while secretary to the Venetian bailey in Constantinople, and had gone thither in 1420 mainly in order to study Greek. He was sent as envoy to Murad. He states that, though when in Constantinople he found the Greek of the common people much corrupted, yet that the persons attached to the imperial court spoke the language of Aristophanes and Euripides and of the historians and philosophers of Athens, and that the style of their writing continued to be elaborate and correct. It is especially interesting to note that the most elegant and purest Greek was spoken by the noble matrons.[547] He gained, upon his return to Italy, by his knowledge of Greek and his great learning, a wide reputation and came to be regarded as the most universal scholar of the age. On his visit to Naples, in 1453, he was treated as an equal by princes.[548] Many other distinguished teachers also during the same period visited Constantinople in pursuit of learning or manuscripts.

But while I have mentioned some of the leading Greeks who contributed before the Moslem conquest to the revival of the study of Greek literature in Italy, it should be noted that there were a host of others less known to fame who sought refuge from the disorders of the empire and found profitable employment in their new homes. Between the death of Petrarch, in 1374, and the conquest of Constantinople, in 1453, Italy had recovered the Greek classics. The intellectual movement caused a great increase in the reproduction of manuscripts. Among the professional copyists, those who could write Greek were specially esteemed and received very large pay.[549] They did their work so admirably that the new invention of printing with moveable types which came in just about the time of the Moslem conquest of Constantinople was regarded as unsuitable for, or unworthy of, important books. The envoys of Cardinal Bessarion when they saw for the first time a printed book in the house of Constantine Lascaris laughed at the discovery ‘made among the barbarians in some German city,’ and Ferdinand of Urbino declared that he would have been ashamed to own a printed book.[550] Notwithstanding this prejudice, Greek books were soon printed in Italy—though, for several years, only in Italy.

Increased number of fugitives after 1453.

The impulse given to the study of Greek by exiles during the half-century, preceding the conquest of Constantinople and by the enthusiasm of a series of scholars from Petrarch and Boccaccio down to 1453, was greatly stimulated by the increase of fugitives consequent on the capture of the city. Among the scholars who made their way westward the best known are Lascaris, who rose to high distinction as a statesman, Callistos, Argyropulos, Gaza, and Chalcondylas. Between 1453 and the end of the century, Greek was studied with avidity. Youths learned to speak as well as to write it.

Renaissance in excelsis.

The arrival of numbers of scholars in Italy shortly before and shortly after 1453 is contemporaneous with the full springtime of the great revival of learning. A series of remarkable efforts had been made to restore ancient Roman and Greek glory as seen in literature and architecture. Learning was regarded as a new and improved evangel. The learning of the ancients was compared with the ignorance of the Churchmen. The new movement marked a great reaction and went to unjustifiable extremes. Some of the advocates for classical influence went to the extent of discarding Christian in favour of Pagan morality. A curious passionate enthusiasm for the classic and venerated past took possession of the most enlightened men in Italy. Paganism, because it was contemporaneous with the classical period, invaded the Church itself. All the architecture, art, and literature of Christianity was bad except in so far as it approximated to Pagan models. The late J. A. Symonds gives a striking illustration of the distance this enthusiasm carried men, in suggesting that Faust may be taken as the symbol of the desire during the Renaissance for classical learning. Faust is content to sell his soul to the devil, but in return he sees Homer and Alexander and obtains Helen as his bride and is satisfied.[551] The careful study of the Latin classics, the marvellous development of painting, architecture, and sculpture, but, above all, the keen interest felt in the newly developed study of Greek with its Platonic philosophy and its new vision of life, were all to produce wonderful fruit within a generation after 1453 and to culminate in Italy in an age of singular intellectual brilliancy.