ABSTRACT
The Renaissance as the 'rebirth of the ancient world' is an invention of special significance for the history of esotericism, as many scholars tend to speak of a kind of watershed between the 'early periods' of esotericism and its 'actual' formulation in the Renaissance. Important as Ficino's dissemination of Platonic and Neo-Platonic literature was for esotericism, the rediscovery of the Corpus Hermeticum had even greater consequences. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is numbered alongside Ficino among the most influential esoteric thinkers of the fifteenth century. The rise of Italy to a leading cultural region in the fifteenth and sixteenth century owed a great deal to the flight of Byzantine scholars once the Byzantine Empire had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks. George Gemistus was both one of the most important scholars of the declining Byzantine Empire and a pioneer of the Italian Renaissance.
