Greek Scholars Settle in Italy After Constantinople

1454

Byzantine intellectuals fleeing the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople carried irreplaceable manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and the Greek dramatists to Venice, Florence, and Rome, where humanist patrons received them eagerly. Cardinal Bessarion donated his vast Greek library of six hundred volumes to Venice, where it became the nucleus of the Biblioteca Marciana. The influx of classical texts and Greek-speaking scholars supercharged Italian humanism and helped trigger the philosophical revolution of the High Renaissance.