rs and authors. The
Turks were renewing their attacks upon Europe. Constantinople, capital
of the last remnant of the original Roman Empire, was hard pressed. In
the year 1393 the Emperor, Manuel Paleologue, sent Emmanuel Chrysoloras
to western Europe to explain the desperate state of old Byzantium and to
ask for aid. This aid never came. The Roman Catholic world was more
than willing to see the Greek Catholic world go to the punishment that
awaited such wicked heretics. But however indifferent western Europe
might be to the fate of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in
the ancient Greeks whose colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus
ten centuries after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn Greek that they
might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato. They wanted to learn it
very badly, but they had no books and no grammars and no teachers. The
magistrates of Florence heard of the visit of Chrysoloras. The people of
their city were "crazy to learn Greek." Would he please come and teach
them? He would, and behold! the first professor of Greek teaching alpha,
beta, gamma to hundreds of eager young men, begging their way to the
city of the Arno, living in stables and in dingy attics that they night
learn how to decline the verb [gr paidenw paideneis paidenei] and enter
into the companionship of Sophocles and Homer.

Meanwhile in the universities, the old schoolmen, teaching their ancient
theology and their antiquated logic; explaining the hidden mysteries
of the old Testament and discussing the strange science of their
Greek-Arabic-Spanish-Latin edition of Aristotle, looked on in dismay and
horror. Next, they turned angry. This thing was going too far. The young
men were deserting the lecture halls of the established universities to
go and listen to some wild-eyed "humanist" with his newfangled notions
about a "reborn civilization."

They went to the authorities. They complained. But one cannot force an
unwilling horse to drink and one cannot make unwilling ears listen to
something which does not really interest them. The schoolmen were
losing ground rapidly. Here and there they scored a short victory. They
combined forces with those fanatics who hated to see other people enjoy
a happiness which was foreign to their own souls. In Florence, the
centre of the Great Rebirth, a terrible fight was fought between the
old order and the new. A Dominican monk, sour of face and bitter in his
hatred of beauty, was the l