Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 22

Summarizing what has been said of the cultural movement under the Palaeologi, one must first of all certify to a great strength, activity, and variety not present in earlier times, when the general situation of the Empire seemed much more favorable to cultural achievement. This rise, of course, must not be considered sudden, without roots in the past. These roots are to be seen in the cultural rise of Byzantium in the epoch of the Comneni; and the connecting link between these two periods, separated from each other by the fatal Latin domination, is the cultural life of the Empire of Nicaea with Nicephorus Blemmydes and the enlightened emperors of the Lascarid dynasty. In spite of all the difficulties of the political situation the Nicaean emperors succeeded in sheltering and developing the best intellectual spirit of the epoch to transmit it to the restored Empire of the Palaeologi. Under the latter the cultural life flowered abundantly, especially at the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth century. Thereafter, under the pressure of Turkish danger, it began to decline in Constantinople, and the best minds of the fifteenth century, such as Bessarion of Nicaea and Gemistus Plethon, transferred their activity to the Peloponnesus, to Mistra, the center resembling some of the smaller Italian centers of the Renaissance and apparently less exposed to Turkish conquest than Constantinople or Thessalonica. Several times Byzantine cultural interests and problems have been compared 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, southern European Renaissance. Later, in the fifteenth century, in southeastern 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. Taking into consideration these conditions of Byzantine life, one is 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  

Cf. more on Manuel II Palaeologus ||| Nicholas Cabasilas ||| Gregory Palamas ||| Gennadius Scholarius

Byzantine language, society and creativity

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/vasilief/literature-learning-science-art.asp?pg=22