How the Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople Contributed to the Renaissance

            The fall of Constantinople and its siege by the Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire and set the stage for the beginning of the European Renaissance.  Many people who had lived in Constantinople understood that the ancient city was in decline and that the Ottomans, with their cannons and fierce warriors, would eventually capture the city.  Many of these people fled for to the west for safety and to begin new lives, with most settling in Rome, Italy.  Among them were many intellectuals, artists, and wealthy individuals who would contribute their knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome to initiate the rebirth, or Renaissance, in Europe.  

The Byzantine Empire had endured for over 1,000 years; however, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople they set up the city as the capital of the Ottoman Empire and renamed it Istanbul.  The Ottomans gained control of the trading center connecting Europe and Asia Minor, which allowed Islamic forces to enter into Europe and diversify the population in the area.  Many Byzantine scholars relocated to European centers, especially Italy, taking with them thousands of valuable manuscripts regarding advanced intellectual developments.  Because Italy was composed of highly competitive independent city states, they were more receptive to this flood of new and old ideas.  For instance, the city of Florence became a major focal point for this revival of classical influence and thought.  The scholars moving to the west played a key role in the movement to revive and revise classical Greek culture.  One can see that the Fall of Constantinople directly affected the start of the Renaissance.

Even though the Fall of Constantinople was a dark and terrible event, it led to the beginning of the Renaissance, and helped pull Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the modern life of the New Age. Scholars fled Constantinople not only before, but after, the fall of the city due to the Ottoman menace.  They took hundreds of books and manuscripts written in Greek, which were translated into Latin, and the information that they contained, much of which was from Classical Greece, nearly a thousand years before, played an influential role in the intellectual life of the Renaissance.  The new arrivals also brought valuable information accumulated by Arab scholars from all over the Moslem world. Some historians even believe that Christopher Columbus was born in the island of Chios and immigrated along with many others to Italy as his own writings were in Greek.

The loss of Constantinople also severed European trade links with Asia, leading many to begin seeking routes east by sea and starting the age of exploration. After the Ottomans gained control of Constantinople and the trading center connecting Europe and Asia Minor, they denied Christian merchants access through the Black Sea to the lucrative trade routes to the East. With that entry denied, merchants from Western Europe were forced to seek new trade routes.  The need for western Europeans to find new avenues of trade, along with advances in shipbuilding technology and navigation methods increased the spread of Greek and Roman ideas, as well as newly accumulated wealth, across Europe and Asia.  The flood of scholars and explorers into Europe, together with the economic monopoly on Mediterranean trade by the Ottomans, helped jump start the Renaissance and the age of exploration.  

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