Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance

Page 5

Fully recognizing the considerable influence of Leontius Pilatus on Boccaccio in the study of Greek, nevertheless, in the general history of the Renaissance, the role of Pilatus is reduced to the spreading of the knowledge of the Greek language and literature in Italy by means of lessons and translations. Moreover, the immortality of Boccaccio does not rest upon the material afforded him by Greek literature, but upon an entirely different basis.

Thus, the role in the history of the early humanistic movement of these Greeks who were in origin not Byzantines, but south Italians (Calabrians), is reduced to the mere transmission of technical information on language and literature.

Stress has several times been laid on the fact that Barlaam and Leontius Pilatus came from Calabria, from southern Italy, where the Greek language and tradition continued to live all through the Middle Ages. Regardless of the ancient Magna Graecia in southern Italy, whose Hellenic elements had not been entirely absorbed by Rome, the conquests of Justinian in the sixth century had introduced to Italy in general and to southern Italy in particular not a few Greek elements. The Lombards, who shortly after Justinian conquered the greater part of Italy were themselves affected by Greek influence, became to some extent the champions of Hellenic civilization. It is important to examine the evolution of Hellenism in southern Italy and Sicily, the Greek population of which gradually increased. In the sixth and seventh centuries many Greeks were forced to leave their country for southern Italy and Sicily under pressure of Slavonic invasions into Greece. In the seventh century a huge Greek emigration to Sicily and southern Italy took place from the Byzantine regions conquered and devastated by the Persians and Arabs. In the eighth century a vast number of Greek monks came to Italy, escaping the persecution of the iconoclastic emperors. Finally, in the ninth and tenth centuries Greek refugees from Sicily, then being conquered by the Arabs, inundated southern Italy. This was probably the main source of the Hellenization of Byzantine southern Italy, because Byzantine culture there began to flourish only in the tenth century, as if it were but the continuation and inheritance of the Greek culture of Sicily. A. Veselovsky, wrote: Thus, in southern Italy there formed densely populated Greek ethnic islands as well as a people and society united by one language and religion and by a cultural tradition, which was represented by the monasteries. The bloom of that culture embraces the period from the second half of the ninth century to the second half of the tenth; but it also continues later, in the epoch of the Normans... The founding of the most important Greek monasteries in southern Italy belongs to the twelfth century. Their history is the history of south Italian Hellenism.

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