Quote Originally Posted by ooo View Post
@FreelancePoliceman the Greeks colonized Italy long before the Romans did, and the later Romans' culture was largely based on the Greek one. all through the middle ages (primacy of the Church) this influence continued, you can smell Plato (neo-platonism), Aristotle and the stoics in every work of religion, art, literature. the intellectual thinkers in the Roman empire have always spoken those "languages", and don't you dare saying that the middle ages had no enlightened artistic peaks.

btw, if the Greeks were the ones to promote what you define humanist values, we owe it to them for passing it along, not to the Ottomans. uh
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.