Greece's downfall and Europe's rennaisance

[Tsontos]

btw this is the link for the first post:

ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies

[Seleucus Nicator]

I would like to add to this subject one more source from Dr Noel.

Archimedes Palimpsest


"Paleography, or the study of ancient texts, can allow us to approximately date when manuscripts were written. The Archimedes manuscript was probably written in the second half of the tenth century. It was almost certainly written at Constantinople, for the simple reason that there is no other place that we know of where ancient mathematics was systematically studied and copied. Constantinople was the one place with a continued tradition of copying and preserving ancient texts from antiquity through the Middle Ages.
Specifically, the study of Archimedes texts can be associated with the work of Leo the Geometer. Leo the Geometer was the cousin of John VII Morocharzianus, who was Patriarch in Constantinople between 837 and 843. In the 820¢s, Leo was giving private instruction in Constantinople. Evidently he was successful at inspiring his students: one of them, who had read Euclid under his supervision, was captured by the Arabs in 830. His report of Leo¢s learning was sufficient to cause the Caliph to invite Leo to Baghdad. He did not go. Instead he took up the charge of the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus (829-842) to educate the public in the church of the Forty Martyrs in Constantinople. Leo was clearly something of a polymath, and a practical one at that. While in Theophilus¢s service, he built fire stations between the City and the border of the Empire. Should there be an emergency on the border north of Tarsus, a message could reach the Capital in less than an hour. In the Late 850¢s the assistant Emperor, Bardas, founded a school in the Imperial Palace, under Leo¢s direction. Other professors were appointed too: Cometas, a literary scholar, Theodegius, an astronomer, and, perhaps most significantly for us Theodore, a geometer. We know few of the details of Leo¢s school, but we can assume that it was a center of learning. Two surviving manuscripts containing texts by Archimedes contain inscriptions praising Leo the Geometer. It seems highly likely that it was as a result of his work that manuscripts of Archimedes were copied in this period.

The ninth and tenth centuries were glorious centuries for the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople was immensely wealthy, and physically secure. The imperial palace was a center of culture, and its monasteries flourished.
This is the climate in which it is easiest to see the Archimedes manuscript being copied. However, the long period of prosperity ended abruptly in 1204. In this year, the Fourth Crusade, sanctioned by Pope Innocent III, set out for the Holy Land. However, they stopped short of their goal, and sacked Constantinople. Constantinople was the richest City in Europe, and for over 700 years it had been a safe haven for ancient text
But the years after the sack of Constantinople were not years in which there was a great need for the advanced mathematical treatises of Archimedes, or the Ancient speeches of Hyperides. It was probably in the aftermath of this event that these texts were palimpsested. In 2002, Professor John Lowden of the Courtauld Institute, using Ultra-violet light, managed to decipher a colophon, on the bottom of folio 1 verso of the manuscript, which contains the date of April 13, 1229."

Perhaps the Byzantine empire's greatest contribution to literature was their careful preservation of Ancient Helenic literature, which was thereby transmitted both to Europe and to the Islamic world, as well as compilations of works on certain subjects, with certain revisions, most notably in the fields of medicine and history.The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was a turning point. Where Byzantine -Helens scholars fled west to Rome and Venice(the Hellenic community in Venice was established this period), bringing with them classical Roman and Hellenic texts as well as their knowledge of the classical civilizations, much of which had been lost in Western Europe for centuries.The main reason that Latins couldn't read Hellenic was the estrangement of Eastern and Western Christendom.By the year 450 there were very few in western Europe who could read Hellenic, and after 600, although Byzantium still called itself the Roman Empire, it was rare for a Byzantine to speak Latin, the language of the Romans.This estrangement was conditioned by cultural, political, and economic factors; yet its fundamental cause was not secular but theological.


Here is the 500th annivarsy of Hellenic community in Venice .

Events to honor 500th anniversary of Greek community in Venice conclude

[Tsontos]

This whole literary tradition that has come to us from pagan Greece and Rome, which was reinterpreted, consolidated and passed on to us largely through the efforts of christians in the middle ages. And particularly to those men working in Constantinople, as the Western Empire deteriorates, as its libraries are lost...

..Rhetoric was particularly prized. The orations of Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, were studied very intensively for preaching purposes. The whole tradition of classical biography was greatly appreciated, especially the lives of Plutarch, the great moral writer. Those biographies of Plutarch became the basis for the hagiography, the various lives of the saints. In another field the christians made sure to interpret their pagan heritage, that was in the field of history. One of the reasons we know so much about Justinian's reign was the quality of the historical writing in the 6th century. Procopius was trained in the traditions of Greek historiography, particularly the author Thucydides. There was an appreciation of cause and effect, there was even an effort to imitate the very style and nuances of Thucydide's language. And of course the poetic and philosophical traditions of the classical world were preserved without question. That particularly included the works of Plato. The survival of the Platonic works totally depends of Constantinople and the Greek tradition. And the same is true of Homer, these works were read and memorised and known by all of the Byzantine elites, until the very end of the Empire...

..when he (Justinian) dies in 565AD letters arts have taken a decidedly christian turn. At the same time, they are still very much embedded in the classical past and the Byzantine upper classes always remembered that. To be a gentleman, to be a lady (and those terms really do apply to the Byzantine elites) it was necessary to have the polish, the education, the 'good taste', the aesthetics of the classical past. At Afrodisias nearly all the great releif patterns of the city's entrance showing all the ancient myths were preserved; only two or three were chisled out because they could be seen as cult statues. For those Byzantines, the rest were just mythology and everyone knew mythology, that was not religion, that was not paganism. And in that sense the Byzantine scholars and artists really gave us one of their greatest legacies to us in preserving and transmitting to us that classical past.

Kenneth W. Harl, World of Byzantium

[Euklid]

It is known in Europe that the Europeans had a problem with the 0 concept until the 1400-1500 ACE.

Intro:

By 130, Ptolemy, influenced by Hipparchus and the Babylonians, was using a symbol for zero (a small circle with a long overbar) within a sexagesimal numeral system otherwise using alphabetic Greek numerals. Because it was used alone, not just as a placeholder, this Hellenistic zero was perhaps the first documented use of a number zero in the Old World.

The first work printed in 1488 that aimed to explain the concept 0 was from Johannes Sacrobosco claimed to have been originally written in the 13th Century.

In any case here is an excerpt from Fibonacci:

Fibonacci:

After my father's appointment by his homeland as state official in the customs house of Bugia for the Pisan merchants who thronged to it, he took charge; and in view of its future usefulness and convenience, had me in my boyhood come to him and there wanted me to devote myself to and be instructed in the study of calculation for some days. There, following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others, and for it I realized that all its aspects were studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, with their varying methods; and at these places thereafter, while on business. I pursued my study in depth and learned the give-and-take of disputation. But all this even, and the algorism, as well as the art of Pythagoras, I considered as almost a mistake in respect to the method of the Hindus (Modus Indorum). Therefore, embracing more stringently that method of the Hindus, and taking stricter pains in its study, while adding certain things from my own understanding and inserting also certain things from the niceties of Euclid's geometric art. I have striven to compose this book in its entirety as understandably as I could, dividing it into fifteen chapters. Almost everything which I have introduced I have displayed with exact proof, in order that those further seeking this knowledge, with its pre-eminent method, might be instructed, and further, in order that the Latin people might not be discovered to be without it, as they have been up to now. If I have perchance omitted anything more or less proper or necessary, I beg indulgence, since there is no one who is blameless and utterly provident in all things. The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ... any number may be written.[13][14]

It has been maintained that the Ellines did not have the concept of 0 at all, however Plato in the Sophist makes a whole analysis on the concept of nothing.

And Ptolemy used the letter Omicron with an overbar on top to denote zero in the early Ellinistic Era.

[Tsontos]

"At least three quarters of the ancient Greek classics that survived did so through Byzantine manuscripts."

-Michael H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, Scarecrow Press Incorporated, 1995, ISBN 0810837242



"Much of what we know about antiquity – especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law - would have been lost forever, if it weren’t for the scholars and the scribes of Constantinople."

-J.J. Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, 1997, Vintage Books, ISBN 0679772693

[Ariadni_Nefeli]

Yes indeed it is a fact what Tsontos says, because the Renaissance started to flourish very slowly after 1204. when the Crusaders stole thousands of manuscripts and artwork from Konstantinoupoli, and Arabs also, but they actually were reborn after 1453 and earlier, when many scholars immigrated to the West with their knowledge and spirituality, which not only was enriched with the Eastern history and culture but had also developed much more than West anyway.

Something which of course -except from some cases only- was never acknowledge fully and openly by the arrogant West.