Constantinople

My general view is that people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they probably deserve to.

I never bother with what's going on in Constantinople.

I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden, which I cultivate, off to be sold there." Having said these words, the old man invited the strangers into his house.

His two sons and two daughters presented them with several sorts of sherbet, which they had made themselves with kaymak enriched with the candied peel of citrons, with oranges, lemons, pineapples, pistachio nuts, and coffee.

Take some beds and grow asparagus and carrots.

Stop worrying yourself with humanity if you ever want peace of mind again.

Who cares what's happening in Constantinople or what's up with the next Grand Mufti? Live quietly like the old Turk, enjoying the sunshine in the orange bower next to your house.

This is Voltaire's stirring, ever-relevant form of horticultural quietism.

But they went and dug through monastic libraries, and they found forgotten works by Romans who had not been Christian but had done, you know, works of engineering, works of philosophy, works of geography.

And then some of the same people actually they discovered behind the Romans, be- older even than Roman civilization, was ancient Greek civilization, and that was just the time when the Roman Empire in the East with its center in Constantinople was finally being overrun by the Ottoman Turks.

So lots of Greek speakers who retained their links to ancient Greek civilization fled westwards to Italy in particular, and then they taught ancient Greek.

So the Renaissance was able to rediscover not just the ancient Roman but also the older ancient Greek roots of their own European civilization, and in that way, Christendom became more of, if you like, organically bolted on to the older heritage of the pre-Christian Roman and Greek civilizations of Europe.

One is sheer technological development.

For the first time, they're able to do that.

People talk a lot about how the developments to the east in Asia had kind of blocked the trading routes to the east through Constantinople and, and so on.

But I take a slight-- I take the slightly stronger view of that, that what was actually happening in the fifteenth century was that just as the Europeans were fighting their way westwards and they were reconquering Iberia, Spain, and previously Portugal, from the Muslims who had already co-- who conquered them in the early Middle Ages, so Islam, in the form of the Ottoman Turks, was moving right into Europe through the Balkans.