ABSTRACT
When in 1453 Byzantium fell to Sultan Mehmet II, vast numbers of manuscripts in Greek philosophy and mathematical science were mobilized. Ottoman scholars, focused as they were on the Golden Age of Islamic nature-knowledge, did not regard the presence of these texts as an opportunity. But Italian scholars did. In Florence and Rome a movement of renewal in arts and literature was already under way. I follow convention and refer to this movement as the ‘Renaissance’, and to the scholars who contributed to it as ‘humanists’. They perceived a major difference between their own outlook and what they contemptuously referred to as ‘Middle Ages’ caught in the dark middle between the glories of the ancient world and its ongoing re-creation. All this was now reinforced by the arrival from Byzantium of those excitingly ancient manuscript sources in natural philosophy and mathematical science. Soon other parts of civilized Europe were involved in the translation and examination of these sources.
