Greek Scholars in Venice

THE MOVEMENT which more than any other served to widen the intellectual horizon of western Europe during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance was the restoration of Greek letters. In the history of this revival a significant role was played by the Greek scholar-exiles from the Byzantine, or former Byzantine, areas of the East. Beginning in the late fourteenth century and extending well into the sixteenth, a more or less steadily increasing flow of refugees or voluntary exiles from the Greek East—a veritable diaspora—seeking to escape the Turkish domination of their homelands, poured into the West. Many of these émigrés were well educated in the Greek language and literature, and through their work of teaching, manuscript copying, and preparing of texts for the press contributed materially to the advancement of Greek studies in western Europe.

Of these exiles the more prominent ones—Chrysoloras, Bessarion, Gaza, Trapezuntios, Argyropoulos, Callistos, Chalcondyles, and Janus Lascaris—have already been the object of considerable attention. But there are scores of others whose careers, less spectacular but perhaps more typical of the experience of the average refugee humanist, have not yet been closely investigated. This book is primarily concerned with the lives of several of these lesser-known figures whose careers are closely associated with the city of Venice in the period of the Renaissance when she attained the primacy in the study of Greek.