Originally Posted by
FreelancePoliceman
Again, there were mini-Renaissances of a sort during the Middle Ages, and these were generally associated with leaps of artistic and scientific advances. But very generally speaking, the philosophical and intellectual climate you refer to had collapsed in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The population became largely rural, cities and infrastructure were destroyed or declined naturally with no one to live in/maintain them, and there weren’t as many institutions of learning besides the Church. As the Middle Ages advanced, this trend did begin to reverse at a *very* slow pace. But new ideas in art or science tended to be inspired by contact with the Muslim and Hellenic worlds, which in comparison were more literate, usually placed a greater emphasis on learning and, importantly, physical books, and tended to have noticably more developed architecture, infrastructure, cities, military planning, etc. (For instance, compare the Moorish architecture in Spain to Spanish architecture from the same period; the latter simply sucks in comparison.)
I think you misunderstood my post. The Byzantines developed humanism; the Ottomans just conquered them and caused a large number of Greek speakers to migrate to Italy.