Byzantine Humanism and the Transmission of Greek Texts to Italy

Byzantine intellectual life in the 14th and 15th centuries, even as the empire itself contracted territorially under mounting Ottoman pressure, produced a notable secular humanist revival centered on renewed close study of classical Greek authors, particularly Plato, alongside continued Aristotelian scholarship. Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355–1415), a Byzantine diplomat and scholar, was invited to teach Greek at Florence beginning in 1397 at the initiative of the chancellor Coluccio Salutati, a position often credited as the effective founding moment of systematic Greek studies in Renaissance Italy; Chrysoloras's students there included Leonardo Bruni, who would become one of the most influential early humanist translators of Greek philosophical and historical texts into Latin, and Chrysoloras's own Erotemata (a Greek grammar) became a standard teaching tool for a generation of Italian humanists learning Greek.