[3] Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d. ed., p. 364.
[4] Petrarch refused to have the works of the Scholastics in his library. Though a university man, he was out of sympathy with the university methods of his time.
[5] "Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in early modern times. Other nations have surpassed the Italians in their genius … but nowhere else except at Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence." (Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy.)
[6] Sandys, J. E., in his Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, pp. 35-41, gives a list of the more important later finds, which see.
[7] Of the Florentine scholars one of the most famous was Niccolò Niccoli (1363-1436), of whom Sandys says: "Famous for his beautiful penmanship, he was much more than a copyist. He collected manuscripts, compared and collated their various readings, struck out the more obvious corruptions, restored the true text, broke it up into convenient paragraphs, added suitable summaries at the head of each, and did much toward laying the foundation of textual criticism." (Sandys, J. E., Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, p. 39.)
[8] For example, Laurentius Valla (1407-57) of Pavia, exceeded Niccoli in ability in textual criticism. He extended this method to the New Testament and, at the request of King Alphonso, of Naples, subjected the so-called "Donation of Constantine," a document upon which the Papacy based in part its claims to temporal power, to the tests of textual criticism and showed its historical impossibility. This, indeed, was a new and daring spirit in the mediaeval world, but it represented the spirit and method of the modern scholar.
[9] For example, Ciriaco, of Ancona (1391-1450), has been called "the Schliemann of his time." He spent his life in travel and in copying and editing inscriptions. After exploring Italy, he visited the Greek isles, Constantinople, Ephesos, Crete, and Damascus. One of his contemporaries, Flavio Blondo, of Forli (1388-1463), published a four-volume work on the antiquities and history of Rome and Italy. These two men helped to found the new science of classical archaeology.
[10] Classical scholars assert that Greek became extinct in the Italy of the Roman Church in 690 A.D. Greek was taught at Canterbury in the days of the learned Theodore, of Tarsus (R. 59 a), who died in 690. Irish monks, who carried Greek from Gaul to Ireland in the fifth century, brought it back in the seventh century to Saint Gall, founded by them in 614. "John the Scot," an Irish monk who was master of the Palace School under Charles the Bald (c. 845-55), is said to have been able to read Greek. Roger Bacon, the Oxford monk (1214-94), also knew a little Greek. William of Moerbeke, in 1260, was able to translate the Rhetoric and Politics of Aristotle for Thomas Aquinas. Greek monks were still found in the extreme south of Italy at the time of the Renaissance, and Greek has remained a living language in a few villages there up to the present time.
[11] Gian Antonio Campano; trans. by J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, vol. II, p. 249.
[12] For long it was thought that the revival of the study of Greek in the West dated from the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, but this idea has been exploded by classical scholars. The events we have enumerated in this chapter show this, and at least five of the important Greek scholars who taught in Italy came before that date. As the Turks closed in on this wonderful eastern city, for so long the home of Greek learning and culture, many other Greek scholars fled westward. The principal Greek authors had, however, been translated into Latin before then.