Western cultural impact of Byzantia

[Sevastokrator]

The Christian reconquest of Constantinople remained a fascinating and much sought-after event in Western Europe for years to come after its fall to the House of Osman. Rumours of Constantine XI's survival and subsequent rescue by an angel led many to hope that the city would one day return to Christian hands. However, as Western Europe entered the 15th century, the age of Crusading began to come to an end. Initially, the fall of the city seemed to cause a stir of crusading zeal in the West, where, apart from religious sentiments, Renaissance humanism had for about a century been fuelling an interest in the cultural and intellectual heritage of classical antiquity, and the role that Byzantium had played in preserving that heritage. The great humanist Aeneas Silvius lamented that with the fall of Constantinople "Homer and Plato have died a second death". While this utterance was surely true for learning in the fallen city, refugees from Constantinople to Italy brought with them ancient texts that further inspired humanist investigation of ancient philosophy and esotericism, especially Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought. As Pope Pius II, the same Aeneas Silvius declared a crusade in 1459 for the recapture of Constantinople, but any genuine enthusiasm that existed was short-lived, and a crusade never came into effect. Guillaume Dufay composed several songs lamenting the fall of the Eastern church, and the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, avowed to take up arms against the Turks. With the Protestant Reformation and subsequent counter-reformation, the recapture of Constantinople became an ever-distant dream. Even France, once a fervent participant of the Crusades, became an ally of the Ottomans. Nonetheless depictions of Christian coalitions taking the city and of the late Emperor's resurrection by Leo the Wise persisted. Entertaining such ideas became politically incorrect in the Western world after the Turkish war of independence, where Turkey emerged with a secular republic constitution.

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