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apparently less exposed to Turkish conquest than Constantinople or Thessalonica.

We have several times compared Byzantine cultural interests and problems with analogous interests and problems of the epoch of the earlier Italian Renaissance. Both Italy and Byzantium were living through a time of intense cultural activity with many common traits and a common origin arising from the economic and intellectual revolution achieved by the Crusades. This was not the epoch of an Italian Renaissance or a Byzantine Renaissance but, to use the word in its broad sense and not to limit it to a single nation, the epoch of the Greco-Italian or, generally speaking, South-European Renaissance. Later, in the fifteenth century, in the south-east of Europe this rise was ended by the Turkish conquest; in the west, in Italy, general conditions shaped themselves in such a way that the cultural life could develop further and spread to other countries.

Of course, Byzantium had no Dante. The Byzantine Renaissance was bound by the traditions of its past, in which creative spirit and independence had been subdued by the strict authority of church and state. Formalism and conventionalism were the characteristics of the Byzantine past. If we take into consideration these conditions of Byzantine life, we must be amazed by the intensive cultural activity of the Palaeologian period and by the energetic efforts of its best minds to enter the new way of free and independent investigation in literature and art. But the fatal destiny of the Eastern Empire prematurely crushed this literary, scientific, and artistic ardor.4

402

402 In his very interesting article "Das Problem der Renaissance in Byzanz" (Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 133, 1926, 393-412), A. Heisenberg, generally speaking, denies the existence of the Byzantine Renaissance; but he ends his article as follows: "It was only some centuries later that the leading educated class (in Byzantium) began to feel that, under the covering of antique tradition, imposed rather ostentatiously by state and church, forces of a new, richer, and deeper life lay hidden. But at that moment, through the avarice of Western Europe, the strength of the Byzantine world was forever broken down; a real Renaissance was destined neither to the Byzantine people nor to the rest of the Orthodox World in Eastern Europe" (p. 412). See also F. Dölger, in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 47 (1926), coll. 1442-43 and 1445; also in the Historisches Jahrbuch, 47 (1927), 765. "A real Renaissance" in Byzantium of the fourteenth century is emphasized by R. Guilland, Essai sur Nicéphore Grégoras (Paris, 1926), p. XI, 294-95 and passim. Cf. a brilliant although rather one-sided article by C. Neumann, "Byzantinische Kultur und Renaissancekultur," Historische Zeitschrift, 91 (1903), 215-32; this article was also published separately (Berlin-Stuttgart, 1903).

Taking into account all that has been said above, it will not be amiss to touch, though briefly, on the problem of Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance.

BYZANTIUM AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

Our aim is to become acquainted with the influence which was exerted on the Italian Renaissance by the mediaeval Greek tradition in general and by the Byzantine Greeks in particular. We must always keep in mind the fact that it was not interest in and acquaintance with classical antiquity that called forth the Renaissance in Italy, but that, on the contrary, the conditions of Italian life which evoked and developed the Renaissance were the real cause of the rise of interest in antique culture.

In the middle of the nineteenth century some historians thought that the Italian Renaissance was called forth by the Greeks who fled from Byzantium to Italy before the Turkish danger, especially at the fall of Constantinople in 1453. As an example, we may quote the words of a Russian slavophile of the first half of the nineteenth century,403 J. V. Kireyevsky: "When after the capture of Constantinople the fresh and pure air of Hellenic thought blew from the East to the West, and the thinking man in the West breathed more easily and freely, the whole structure of scholasticism collapsed at once."404 Obviously, such a point of view is quite untenable if only for no other reason than elementary chronology: the Renaissance is known to have embraced the whole of Italy by the first half of the fifteenth century, and the chief leaders of the so-called Italian humanism, Petrarca and Boccaccio, lived in the fourteenth century.

Of the two problems, the influence of the medieval Greek tradition upon the Renaissance and the influence of the Byzantine Greeks upon the Renaissance, we shall take the latter first and examine what sort of Greeks those were whose names are

403 See above, v. I, 43-44.

404 J. Kireyevsky, Works (Moscow, 1861), II, 252 (in Russian). This opinion was even given in the first edition of J. Kulakovsky's History of Byzantium (Kiev, 1910), I, 12 (in Russian); in the second edition of this work (Kiev, 1913) it was omitted.

connected with the epoch of the earlier Renaissance, i. e. the fourteenth century and the very beginning of the fifteenth.

Chronologically, the first to be named is a Greek of Calabria, in South Italy, Barlaam, who died about the middle of the fourteenth century; we are already acquainted with his participation in the Hesychast quarrel. He put on the monastic habit in Calabria, changing his name from Bernardo to Barlaam, and spent some time in Thessalonica, on Mount Athos, and in Constantinople. The Emperor, Andronicus the Younger, sent him on an important mission to the West concerning the crusade against the Turks and the union of the Churches; after a fruitless journey he returned to Byzantium, where he took part in the religious movement of the Hesychasts, and then went back to the West, where he ended his days. Barlaam is a personality of whom the first humanists often speak, and the scholars of the nineteenth century vary in their opinion of him. At Avignon Petrarca met Barlaam and began to learn Greek with him in order to be able to read Greek authors in the original. In one of his letters Petrarca speaks of Barlaam as follows: "There was another, my teacher, who, having aroused in me the most delightful hope, died and left me at the very beginning of my studies (in ipso studiorum lacte)." In another letter Petrarca wrote: "He (i. e. Barlaam) was most excellent in Greek eloquence, and very poor in Latin; rich in ideas and quick in mind, he was embarassed in expressing his emotions in words."405 In a third letter we read: "I always was very anxious to study all of Greek literature and if Fortune had not envied my beginnings and deprived me of an excellent teacher, now I might be something more than an elementary Hellenist."40 Petrarca never succeeded in reading Greek literature in the original. Barlaam also had some influence on Boccaccio who in his work "The Genealogy of the Gods" (Genealogia deorum)

405 Fr. Petrarcae, Epistolae de rebus familiaribus, XXIV, 12, and XVIII, 2; ed. Fracassetti (Florence, 1863), III, 302, and II, 474. See Th. Uspensky, Essays on Byzantine civilization, 301-302 (in Russian); A. Veselovsky, Boccaccio. His surrounding and contemporaries. Works, V, 86 (in Russian).

400 Variarum epistolarum XXV; ed. Fracassett., II, 369. See Th. Uspensky, op. cit., 303 (in Russian).

calls Barlaam a man "with a small body but enormous knowledge;" and entirely trusts him in all Greek matters.407

The theological and mathematical essays, notes, and orations of Barlaam accessible to us afford no sufficient reason to call him a humanist. In all probability, his writings were unknown to Petrarca; and Boccaccio distinctly says that he "has seen no single one of his works."408 Neither do we have enough data to testify to his wide education or exceptional knowledge of literature. In other words, we have no reason to believe that Barlaam possessed enough talent or cultural force to exert a great influence on his most talented and educated Italian contemporaries, the leading spirits of the epoch, such as Petrarca and Boccaccio. Therefore we cannot agree with the exaggerated estimation of Barlaam's influence upon the Renaissance which we find sometimes in excellent works. I shall give here but two examples. A German scholar (G. Körting) observes: "When Barlaam, by his hasty departure from Avignon, had deprived Petrarca of the possibility of deeper knowledge of the Greek tongue and civilization, he destroyed thereby the proud structure of the future and decided for centuries the destiny of the European peoples. Small causes, great effects!"409 A Russian scholar (Th. Uspensky) wrote on the same subject: "The vivid conception of the idea and importance of Hellenic studies with which the men of the Italian Renaissance were filled, must be wholly attributed to the indirect and direct influence of Barlaam. Thus, great merit in the history of medieval culture belongs to him. . . . On the basis of real facts, we may strongly affirm that he combined the best qualities of the scholarship then existing."410

The role of Barlaam in the history of the Renaissance was in reality much more modest. He was nothing but a rather imperfect teacher of the Greek language, who could impart the ele

407 De genealogia deorum, XV, 6 (Joannis Bocatii, De genealogia deorum libri quindecim, Basileae, 1532, p. 389). See M. Korelin, The early Italian humanism and its historiography (Moscow, 1892), p. 993 (in Russian).

405 De genealogia deorum, XV, 6: hujus ego nullum vidi opus (ed. Basileae, 1532, p. 390).

409 G. Körting, Petrarca's Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1878), p. 154.

410 Th. Uspensky, Essays, p. 308 (in Russian).

ments of grammar and serve as a dictionary, "containing," to quote Korelin, "very inexact information."411 I think the most correct estimation of Barlaam's significance has been given by A. Veselovsky: "The role of Barlaam in the history of earlier Italian humanism is superficial and casual. . . . As a medieval scholastic and enemy of Platonic philosophy, he could share with his Western friends only the knowledge of the Greek language and some fragments of erudition; but he was magnified by virtue of the hopes and expectations in which the genuine evolution of humanism expressed itself and to which he was unable to reply."412

The second Greek who played a considerable role in the epoch of the earlier Renaissance was a pupil of Barlaam, Leontius Pilatus, who like his teacher came from Calabria and who died in the seventh decade of the fourteenth century. Moving from Italy to Greece and back again, passing in Italy for a Greek of Thessalonica and in Greece for an Italian and living nowhere without quarrels, he stayed for three years at Florence with Boccaccio, to whom he taught Greek and gave some information for his "Genealogy of the Gods." Both Petrarca and Boccaccio speak of Leontius in their writings, and depict in a similar way the refractory, harsh, and impertinent character and repulsive appearance of this "man of such bestial manners and strange customs."418 In one of his letters to Boccaccio Petrarca writes that Leontius, who left him after many insolent remarks against Italy and the Italians, on his journey sent him a letter "longer and more disgusting than his beard and hair, in which he exalts to the skies hated Italy and vilifies and blames Greece and Byzantium, which he greatly exalted before; then he asks me to call him back to me and supplicates and beseeches more earnestly than the Apostle Peter besought Christ commanding the waters." In

411 Korelin, op. cit., p. 998 (in Russian).

412 A. Veselovsky, Works, V, 100-101 (in Russian).

413 Petrarca, Lettere senili di Petrarca, V. 3, ed. G. Fracassetti (Firenze, 1869), I, 299; also Sen., III, 6: è certamente una gran bestia (Fracassetti, I, 73); then Lettere di F. Petrarca, ed. G. Fracassetti (Firenze, 1866), IV, 98. Boccaccio, De Genealogia Deorum, XV, 6 (Basileae, 1532), p. 389. See A. Veselovsky, Boccaccio, 11. Works (Petrograd, 1919), VI, 364 (in Russian).

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