They weren't restricted in the Byzantine empire nor among their
nearest neighbors, the Muslim communities, who existed
side-by-side. Skirmishes and grabs for political power, yes. But
nevertheless, similar education was available. How do you think
the texts survived? Did Gemistus Pletho hold a crumbling set of
800 year old texts that barely survived all of those centuries?
No. The Greeks - both in the pre and post Christian eras, were
excellent archivists and strict at copying precisely. You know
the term Status Quo? They made an art out of Status Quo: Keeping
things stable. Western Europe was DEFINITELY worse for lacking
the documents. Why didn't Western Europe have them? I don't
know. My historical interest is more on the Eastern Roman
Empire, not the crumbling West. They were the backwards cousin
of the Byzantine empire since the fall of Rome and started going
their own way after a while. I don't put them in the same class
as the East. Blame religion as you like but I see a Papacy as
simple Kingship. No one to answer to. In the East, they had to
answer to each other. Council of Churches. If you go off your
own way, well, you're excommunicated. Out. No money. No people.
No supplies. Not wanted anymore. Rome WANTED back in to the rest
of the Church but their own way. The East refused to let them
back. Militarily, the East sucked though. No surprise that
Constantniple fell. But religious-wise, they were stable and all
those documents presented to Western scholars were not crumbling
ancient texts from the 5th century AD. Even Wikipedia gets it
right here: "the original Greek texts what had been preserved in
the Eastern Roman Empire". Preserved means ongoing copying,
fresh copies made, knowledge transmitted successfully for
hundreds of years, while the West suffered with squat. "Direct
reception of Greek texts As knowledge of Greek declined in the
west with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, so did knowledge
of the Greek texts, many of which had remained without a Latin
translation.[3] The fragile nature of papyrus, as a writing
medium, meant that older texts not copied onto expensive
parchment would eventually crumble and be lost. After the Fourth
Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, scholars such as William
of Moerbeke gained access to the original Greek texts that had
been preserved in the Eastern Roman Empire, and translated them
directly into Latin.[4] There was a later stage when Western
knowledge of Greek began to revive in Renaissance Humanism, and
especially after the Fall of Constantinople when there was an
influx of refugee Greek scholars in the Renaissance." == Notice
the extreme biased telling of the story here. Emphasis on the
ancient and crumbling and the lost. They nearly completely glide
over the fact that the Eastern Empire kept them just fine. If
you don't look carefully, you could miss it. == One you spot
where they place most of the emphasis in this telling of the
story, and once you spot what they're AVOIDING talking about...
you can get a sense of the need to preserve the narrative of the
Glory of Western Europe, Humanism... etc, as if they'd invented
it entirely from fragments of scrap papyrus when that wasn't the
case.
