VIZANTIJSKA RENESANSA KAO PREVASHODAN TEMELJ ITALIJANSKE RENESANSE: TEODOR GAZA U MANTOVI, FERARI, RIMU I NAPULJU I NIKOLAUS LEONIKUS TOMEUS U VENECIJI, FIRENCI I PADOVI
The Byzantine Renaissance as the premier foundation of the Italian Renaissance: Theodore Gaza in Mantova, Ferrara, Rome and Naples and Nikolaus Leonikus Tomeus in Venice, Florence and Padua

Summary/Abstract: Two persons whose arrival in Italy helped immensely to direct the existing human- ism from its initial focus on rhetoric were Byzantine professors Theodoros Gaza and Niccolo Leonico Thomeo, who both chaired Greek philosophy at universities across the peninsula. Their careers may be divided into different large phases. Certain stages are insufficiently known due to a lack of resources, before the fall of the Byzantine capital Constantinople into Turkish hands in 1453. Other periods, considerably longer and more important for the Italian Renaissance, represent the Byzantine scholars as lecturers employed throughout Italy, at a time when this country was about to reach the peak of its fame as a humanistic center.The “Renaissance man”, a man with a broad scope of thoughts and deeds, a world renowned term usually applied to Italian humanism and Renaissance, obviously be- longs first and foremost to Byzantine scholars. As clearly visible here, the root of the term and essence of the “renaissance man” actually lies in the Greek and Byzantine “encyclios paideia”, the “all embracing thoughtfulness”, which was the main feature of the educational system of the country that was leading in all terms and most devel- oped in Europe and the Mediterranean for more than eleven centuries, just as much as Constantinople’s Katholikon University, whose rectorate building was financed by the Serbian Tsar Uroš the Weak (!?), was the leading one for nearly a millennium before Bologna, Padua, Sorbonne, and Oxford universities were established. That isexactly where the Italian renaissance originated.

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