THE PROCESS OF EVOCATION 131

originally been conveyed.1 Yet there were six centuries, reckoning from
the date of Boethius's death, during which his translations of these works
of Aristotle's were beyond the comprehension of the most acute Western
Christian thinkers, notwithstanding Boethius's foresight in leaving
them keys in the shape of Latin commentaries of his own and a Latin
translation of a commentary of Porphyry's.2

Moreover, there was once a time—between the date of the Crusaders*
capture of Toledo in A.D. 1085 and the date of their loss of Constanti-
nople in A.D. 1261—during which a Medieval Christendom *had', in the
sense of holding physically in its grasp, the whole philosophical,
scientific, and literary legacy of Hellenism that was extant, in that age,
in Dar-al-Islam in Arabic translations and at Constantinople in the
Ancient Greek originals ;3 yet Western Christian scholars failed to make
any use of their opportunity for winning a knowledge and understanding
of Hellenic poetry in the original Greek during those fifty-seven years
for which the Constantinopolitan store-house of Hellenism was under
Western Christian rule, whereas their fifteenth-century Humanist
successors in Italy, who were debarred from the Crusaders' potentially
invaluable direct access to the springs of Helicon by the successive
counter-strokes of a Greek Orthodox Christian revanche and a conse-
quent Ottoman Muslim conquest of an ephemerally liberated Romania,
succeeded nevertheless in acquiring a mastery of the Ancient Greek
language and literature as a KTTJIJ,* e$ atel4 for a Modern Western World,
thanks to their zest, energy, and acumen in profiting to the utmost from
the imperfect scholarship of a dozen Byzantine Greek refugees who had
found asylum in Italy from the Ottoman conquerors of their homeland
and had managed to bring away with them a handful of manuscripts of
Ancient Greek texts.

Considering the effectiveness of the fifteenth-century Italian Human-
ists' exploitation of these slender opportunities that were all that came
their way, how are we to explain their thirteenth-century Venetian and
French predecessors' signal failure to harvest their own immense
opportunities for gathering in all the fruits of an Hellenic literary culture
in Greece itself?

In seeking an explanation of this apparent paradox, we have, no
doubt, to take into account the bitterness of the two sister Christian
Hellenistic civilizations' animosity towards one another from the close
of the twelfth century of the Christian Era to the later decades of the
seventeenth.3 Their mutual estrangement went to farther lengths than
their common quarrel with Islam, and either of these Christendoms
found it easier to enter into fruitful pacific intercourse with its Muslim
neighbours than with its schismatic Christian co-religionists. For this
reason, a Palermo captured in A.D. 1072 and a Toledo captured in
AJ>. 1085 by the Western Christian Crusaders from the Muslims turned
out in the sequel to be more favourable forums for cultural intercourse

1 See Sandys, J. E.: A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge 1903, University
Press), pp. 239 and 507.

z Seeibid., pp. 339-40; Taylor, H. O.: The Mediaeval Mind (London 1911, Macmillan,
2 vols.), vol. i, p. 92. s See p. no, above,

* Thucydides, Book I, chap. 22. * See IX, viii. 151-65 and 380-92.