Reply #16: ... Moses of Bergamo was one of these scholarly Italians in twelfth-century Constantinople; he is [View All]

[struggle4progress]

the first Westerner known to have collected Greek manuscripts in great volume. If his own testimony is true, then the hunt for Greek manuscripts began two centuries before Guarino of Verona and Giovanni Aurispa. The Greek libraries of southern Italy were even closer to the Latins than those in Constantinople. Casole in Apulia, Carbone in the Basilicata, Stilo in Calabria, and Messina in Sicily had the most notable monastic libraries of the Italo-Greeks; the Cathedral Library of Rossano is still in possession of its cimelia, the famous sixth-century Greek purple evangelary ("Codex purpureus Rossanensis"), which was not "rediscovered" there by scholars until 1879 and which recalls the significance of southern Italy for the transmission of Greek texts. Not before the manuscript research of recent years has the astonishing volume and the high quality (manuscripts of the classics!) of Italo-Greek book production and transmission come to light. Manuscript by manuscript, a "translatio studii" from Byzantium to the West appears, whose line of textual transmission threads its way directly from the Macedonian Renaissance in tenth-century Constantinople, to the court library of the Norman and Hohenstaufen rulers of southern Italy, to the papal library of 1300; the Italian Renaissance picked up this thread as its starting point.

This hoard of Greek books first appears in 1295 at the end of a catalogue of the papal library: "Item Dyonisius super celesticam Ierarchicam in greco. Item Simplicius super phisicam Aristotilis . . ." With the exception of Dionysius the Areopagite (characteristically placed at the beginning of the list) and one other work, the twenty-three volumes all contain works of natural science and philosophy - a remarkable collection for the papacy ...

http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/Walter_Berschin_16.html