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Greek scholars from Byzantium were teaching in Italy long before the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The conquest sped up a movement of teachers, manuscripts and ideas that had begun more than half a century earlier.

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In 1396 Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He arrived in 1397 and taught there until 1400. One of his pupils, the historian Leonardo Bruni, remembered it as a rare chance: no one in northern Italy, he wrote, had studied Greek for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras's Erotemata (Questions) became the first Greek grammar widely used in western Europe. In 1438–1439 the Council of Florence, called to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, brought more Byzantine thinkers west. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato, and Bessarion of Trebizond, today's Trabzon, stayed on in Italy as a cardinal. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library, with 482 Greek manuscripts, to Venice, where it became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana.

Türkçe oku
Bizanslı Yunan bilginler, Osmanlılar 1453'te İstanbul'u fethetmeden çok önce İtalya'da ders veriyordu. Fetih, elli yılı aşkın süredir devam eden bir akışı hızlandırdı: Hocalar, el yazmaları ve fikirler Bizans'tan İtalya'ya taşınıyordu.

1396'da Floransa'nın şansölyesi Coluccio Salutati, Bizanslı diplomat ve bilgin Manuel Hrisoloras'ı kentte Yunanca öğretmeye davet etti. Hrisoloras 1397'de geldi ve 1400'e kadar ders verdi. Öğrencilerinden tarihçi Leonardo Bruni bu gelişi kaçırılmayacak bir fırsat olarak anlatır: Ona göre kuzey İtalya'da yedi yüz yıldır Yunanca öğrenen olmamıştı. Hrisoloras'ın Erotemata (Sorular) adlı kitabı, Batı Avrupa'da yaygın olarak kullanılan ilk Yunanca dilbilgisi kitabı oldu. 1438–1439'da Katolik ve Ortodoks kiliselerini yeniden birleştirmek için toplanan Floransa Konsili, Batı'ya yeni Bizanslı düşünürler getirdi. Filozof Gemistos Plethon Platon üzerine dersler verdi; Trabzonlu Bessarion ise kardinal olup İtalya'da kaldı. Bessarion 1468'de, 482 Yunanca el yazması içeren kütüphanesini Venedik'e bağışladı; bu koleksiyon Venedik'teki Marciana Kütüphanesi'nin çekirdeğini oluşturdu.

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The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

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After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

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On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

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