ABSTRACT

It is known that prior to the fifteenth century the people of Italy had become Hellenized through the literary and artistic tradition which accrued from the influx of Greeks and Hellenized Asiatics, the latter of whom, coming in the first instance as slaves, gradually coalesced with the native elements, so that while the rest of the Latin West was in a state of intellectual darkness, Italy maintained a semblance of culture, which in the thirteenth century was combined with a native renaissance and the influx of the Arabized Hellenism of the Arabians.