History · Article
Bessarion and the Greek Scholars of Italy
Byzantine scholars brought Greek learning to Renaissance Italy before and after 1453. Chrysoloras, Bessarion, the Aldine press, and the library that founded the Marciana in Venice.
The standard story is that Greek scholars fled Constantinople in 1453 carrying manuscripts, and the Renaissance followed. The story is wrong in its chronology and roughly right in its substance.
Greek scholars had been teaching in Italy for two generations before 1453. Italian humanists had been travelling to Constantinople to buy manuscripts and learn the language since the 1390s. The fall of the city accelerated a process already well under way and added a strong element of urgency and pathos to it.
Manuel Chrysoloras
The decisive figure came first. Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine diplomat and teacher, was invited to Florence in 1397 to teach Greek, and held the chair for three years.
Before Chrysoloras, knowledge of Greek in western Europe was effectively nil outside a few Sicilian and Calabrian communities. Petrarch owned a Homer he could not read. After Chrysoloras, a generation of Italian humanists — Leonardo Bruni, Guarino da Verona, Poggio Bracciolini — could read Greek, and they set about translating.
His teaching method mattered as much as his presence. He produced a Greek grammar, the Erotemata, arranged as questions and answers, which was the standard western textbook for a century and was among the first Greek books printed. And he argued for a style of translation that rendered sense rather than word for word, against the medieval literal method — a shift with large consequences for how ancient texts were read.
Bessarion
Basilios Bessarion (c. 1403–1472) was born in Trebizond, educated at Constantinople, and studied at Mystras under George Gemistos Plethon. He became metropolitan of Nicaea and went to Italy with the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Florence in 1438.
At the council he argued for union, believing both that the doctrinal differences were reconcilable and that the empire’s survival depended on western help. He signed, was made a cardinal of the Roman church in 1439, and remained in Italy for the rest of his life. He was twice a serious candidate for the papacy.
Byzantine opinion regarded him as a traitor. Italian humanism regarded him as the most learned man in Europe.
The Library
Bessarion’s great achievement was a library. He collected Greek manuscripts systematically for thirty years, employing copyists and buying wherever he could, with explicit urgency after 1453: his stated aim was to save Greek letters from extinction now that the Greek state had ended.
He assembled roughly 480 Greek and 260 Latin manuscripts, the largest Greek collection in the western world. In 1468 he gave it to the Republic of Venice, choosing Venice because of its large Greek community and because he judged it the safest place in Italy.
It became the founding collection of the Biblioteca Marciana, which still holds it. A substantial number of the standard texts of Greek literature descend from Bessarion’s manuscripts.
The Academy
His household in Rome functioned as an informal academy where Greek and Italian scholars worked together on translation and textual criticism. Among those associated with it were Theodore Gaza, John Argyropoulos, Niccolò Perotti and Regiomontanus, the astronomer, whom Bessarion set to work on a summary of Ptolemy that later influenced Copernicus.
He also intervened in the philosophical controversy of the period. His teacher Plethon had attacked Aristotle in favour of Plato; George of Trebizond replied with an attack on Plato of considerable violence. Bessarion’s In Calumniatorem Platonis (1469) defended Plato while treating Aristotle with respect, arguing that the two could be reconciled and that neither was incompatible with Christianity. It is a work of genuine philosophical substance and it shaped the Italian reception of Plato.
The Others
John Argyropoulos taught Greek in Florence from 1456 and translated Aristotle; his pupils included Lorenzo de’ Medici and Poliziano.
Theodore Gaza taught at Ferrara, translated Aristotle’s biological works, and wrote a Greek grammar that Erasmus used.
Demetrios Chalkokondyles taught at Padua, Florence and Milan, and produced the editio princeps of Homer in 1488 — the first printed Homer.
Janus Lascaris worked for the Medici, travelled east to buy manuscripts — bringing back some two hundred from Athos and elsewhere — and later served the French crown.
Marcus Musurus, a Cretan, was the principal editor for the Aldine press in Venice, preparing the first printed editions of Plato, Aristophanes, Pindar, Euripides and others.
The Aldine Press
Aldus Manutius established his press in Venice in 1494 and made it the instrument that turned manuscript scarcity into print abundance. Between 1495 and 1515 he printed the editiones principes of most of the Greek classics: Aristotle, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes, Plato, Pindar.
The work was done by Greeks. Aldus employed Cretan and Byzantine scholars as editors and compositors, cut his Greek type in imitation of contemporary Greek handwriting, and ran what one of his associates called a “New Academy” whose members undertook to speak only Greek.
The significance is difficult to overstate. Once a text was printed in a few hundred copies, it could not be lost. The thousand-year Byzantine effort of recopying described in the transmission of classical learning ended at the Aldine press, because it no longer needed to continue.
What They Actually Changed
Three things, specifically.
Direct access to Greek texts. The west had known Aristotle through Arabic and Latin intermediaries; now it read him in Greek, and the differences mattered.
Plato. Almost unknown in the Latin Middle Ages beyond two dialogues; recovered entire, translated by Ficino, and central to Renaissance thought thereafter.
The Greek New Testament. Erasmus’s edition of 1516, prepared from Byzantine manuscripts, put the original text of the scriptures in front of western scholars and was one of the technical preconditions of the Reformation.
The Greeks who did this were, for the most part, exiles from a state that had just been destroyed, working in a language not their own, for patrons who valued their learning and generally did not value their church. The consequences are traced in Byzantine influence on the Renaissance.
The Library, Counted
Bessarion’s collection is documented precisely because he made a formal deed of gift, and the numbers are worth having.
The deed of donation to Venice, dated 31 May 1468, transferred 482 Greek and 264 Latin manuscripts — the largest Greek library in the western world at the time and, on any measure, the most important private collection of Greek books ever assembled.
He had built it deliberately over three decades, employing copyists in Italy and Greece, buying from refugees, and commissioning transcriptions of manuscripts he could not acquire. After 1453 the acquisition became explicitly a rescue operation: he wrote that with Greece enslaved, the books were all that remained and had to be saved somewhere.
His choice of Venice was reasoned. He rejected Rome, where he lived, on the grounds that the Curia was unstable; he chose Venice for its stability, its large Greek community, and its maritime links to the Greek world.
The collection became the founding core of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, where it remains. Among its treasures is the Venetus A, the tenth-century Iliad with the ancient scholia, which is the single most important manuscript for the text of Homer.
The practical consequence is that a substantial share of the standard editions of Greek literature descend from books one cardinal bought.
The Plato–Aristotle Quarrel
The philosophical controversy Bessarion intervened in was the most serious intellectual dispute of the fifteenth century, and it is worth following.
Plethon opened it at Florence in 1439 with a treatise On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato, arguing Plato’s superiority and criticising Aristotle sharply. His motives were partly philosophical and partly religious, since his own Platonism was tending toward the reconstructed paganism of the Nomoi.
George Scholarios — later Gennadios, the first patriarch under the Ottomans — replied in defence of Aristotle, whom he read through Aquinas.
George of Trebizond, a Cretan working in Italy, escalated in the 1450s with the Comparison of Aristotle and Plato, which attacked Plato as immoral, blamed Platonism for heresy, and argued that Plethon was attempting to found a new religion.
Bessarion replied in 1469 with In Calumniatorem Platonis, “Against the Slanderer of Plato.” It defends Plato against the charge of immorality, treats Aristotle with respect, argues that the two philosophers agree more than they differ, and maintains that neither is incompatible with Christianity.
It was published in Latin, widely read, and effective. It made Plato intellectually respectable in the Latin west at exactly the moment Ficino was translating him, and it set the terms — Plato and Aristotle as complementary rather than opposed — on which Renaissance Platonism developed.
Bessarion, who had been Plethon’s pupil and remained loyal to his memory while rejecting his religion, was uniquely placed to write it.
The Long List
Naming more of the scholars establishes how substantial the migration was, since the story is often told through Bessarion alone.
| Scholar | Where they worked | What they did |
|---|---|---|
| Manuel Chrysoloras | Florence, from 1397 | Founded Greek studies in the west; the Erotemata grammar |
| Theodore Gaza | Ferrara, Rome | Translated Aristotle’s biology; a Greek grammar Erasmus used |
| George of Trebizond | Rome | Translations; the attack on Plato |
| John Argyropoulos | Florence, Rome | Taught Lorenzo de’ Medici and Poliziano; Aristotle |
| Demetrios Chalkokondyles | Padua, Florence, Milan | Editio princeps of Homer, 1488 |
| Constantine Lascaris | Milan, Messina | First book printed in Greek, 1476 |
| Janus Lascaris | Florence, France | Manuscript-hunting expeditions to the east |
| Marcus Musurus | Venice, Padua | Chief editor for the Aldine press |
| Michael Apostolis | Crete | Copyist and manuscript supplier to Bessarion |
| Arsenios Apostolis | Venice, Monemvasia | Editor, Aldine collaborator |
Several of these were Cretans rather than Constantinopolitans, which matters: Venetian Crete had a bilingual, book-producing Greek culture that supplied scribes and editors to Italy for a century, and the Cretan contribution to the transmission is easy to overlook behind the more dramatic story of 1453 refugees.
- The Transmission of Classical Learning — the thousand years before
- Byzantine Influence on the Renaissance — what Italy made of it
- The Council of Florence — how Bessarion came to Italy
- Mystras — where he studied under Plethon
- Byzantine Manuscripts — the books they carried
- The Fall of Constantinople — the event that gave the work urgency
- Byzantine Literature — what else was in the libraries