9. Transmitting Knowledge; Greek Scholarship Reborn
6 items in collection

Alongside the groundswell of interest for locating and editing classical Latin texts came an equally powerful revival in Greek-language literature, history, and theology. Italy, owing to its privileged geography, had always been an entry point for Eastern Mediterranean ideas and people into Western Europe, but the encroachment of the Ottoman Turks on Byzantine lands led to diplomatic missions in search of Western aid. In 1397, Emperor Manuel II’s erudite legate Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1350–1415) was brought to Florence by the city’s influential scholar-chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406). Lecturing there for a mere three years, he became a founding figure of Greek studies, instilling a love for the language in a generation of Italian humanists including Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli, Palla Strozzi, and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder. Bruni in particular would occupy himself with numerous translations from Greek into Latin, expanding the intellectual horizons of scholars across Western Europe. The Council of Ferrara-Florence (1439–44) gathered representatives of numerous Christian denominations, in an (ultimately vain) effort to unify the Church in the face of Ottoman territorial expansion. By the 1460s, a group of Hellenophile scholars active in Florence had coalesced into the Platonic Academy, whose major preoccupation was the elevation of lofty Platonic philosophy over the earthiness of Aristotelian thought. The putative leader of the group, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), was himself a prolific translator who took it upon himself to convert the entire, diverse corpus of known works in the Platonic tradition into Latin.