In 1425 the victorious Turks have
conquered all the Greek empire save the capital. Amurath II. besieged
it for two months, and was only prevented from taking it by a domestic
revolt in Asia Minor. At the end of his sixty-fifth chapter Gibbon
leaves Constantinople hanging on the brink of destruction, and paints
in glowing colours the military virtues of its deadly enemies, the
Ottomans. Then he interposes one of his most finished chapters, of
miscellaneous contents, but terminating in the grand and impressive
pages on the revival of learning in Italy. There we read of the
"curiosity and emulation of the Latins," of the zeal of Petrarch and
the success of Boccace in Greek studies, of Leontius, Pilatus,
Bessarion, and Lascaris. A glow of sober enthusiasm warms the great
scholar as he paints the early light of that happy dawn. He admits
that the "arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses" from
Greece to Italy. But he "trembles at the thought that Greece might
have been overwhelmed with her schools and libraries, before Europe
had emerged from the deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of
science might have been scattered on the winds, before the Italian
soil was prepared for their cultivation.
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