no RENAISSANCES

a considerable moral influence over their combatant comrades,1 not one,
so far as we know, should ever have thought of employing himself at
Constantinople in learning Ancient Greek in order to read in the original
language those philosophical works of Aristotle's that were being studied
so minutely and discussed so eagerly by these military chaplains' fellow
clerks in the universities of Western Christendom during both the cen-
tury preceding and the century following the establishment of a Latin
imperial regime at Constantinople in A.D. 1204.

This barbarous indifference to dazzling cultural opportunities was
not, of course, displayed by all contemporary Western Christian clerks.
Medieval Western students of the philosophy of Aristotle did not neglect
the chance offered to them in a Frank-ridden thirteenth-century Romania
of verifying and revising from the original Greek text the Latin transla-
tions of Aristotle's works that they had already been making from Arabic
translations in a Frank-ridden Sicily and Andalusia that had been overrun
by the Crusaders more than a hundred years earlier. It is significant,
however, that the translators who laboured with such devotion at Toledo
and at Corinth were not native local 'fresh-water Franks' of the lineage
of the conquistadores, but were 'salt-water Franks' born and bred in
Lombardy, Germany, Britain, Brabant, and other provinces of the
Crusaders' Western Christian homeland, whose enthusiasm for the
study of Aristotelianism had been passionate enough to nerve them, for
the sake of it, to make a long and perilous journey over the passes of the
Pyrenees or across the waters of the Mediterranean. These Medieval
Western culture-heroes will demand our attention in a later chapter.2
In the present context we have merely to observe that the indifference
to the opportunities for tapping the living waters of Hellenism at the
fountain-head which was displayed by the thirteenth-century Western
conquerors of Constantinople is cogent evidence that the predatory
Frankish adventurers who sallied out from a conquered imperial capital
to overrun outlying provinces of Romania in a Cis-isthmian European
Hellas and a Peloponnesus were not drawn in that direction by the spell
of classic ground, but were moved solely by the Medieval Western man-
at-arms' insatiable hunger to acquire for himself a feudal lordship over
some patch of rent-producing agricultural land where there was a
peasantry that he could use as serfs.3

If, on this showing, we find no evidence that a yearning to set eyes on
the homeland of an antecedent Hellenic culture was one of the motives
in the minds of the French and Venetian conquerors of Constantinople,
Central Greece, and the Morea in the thirteenth century of the Christian
Era, we shall not find any grounds for imagining that a cult of Hellenism

On pp. 133-5, below,
s The onty product of an occupied Greece that a Medieval Prankish 'ascendancy'
there can claim credit for having popularized in the Western European homeland of
those Levantine conquistadores was—not the Greek text of Aristotle's works which wai
translated at Corinth by a scholar from Brabant, William of Moerbcke (ace pp. n3-S»
tv^L^ a Malmesey' wine exported from the Laconian port of Moncmvasfo
(Frenchified as *Malvoisie').