One of history’s greatest ironies is that the Renaissance in Europe, a movement celebrated for reviving the classical wisdom of ancient Greece, was fueled by a deep-seated hatred and contempt for Byzantium and its people. This paradox—the wholehearted embrace of a long-gone culture while considering its living heirs inferior—highlights the bitter rivalry between Latin-speaking Western Europe and the Greek-speaking Eastern Byzantine world in the late Middle Ages.
No one embodied this contradiction more than Francesco Petrarch. Often called the father of the Renaissance, Petrarch was an ardent admirer of Plato and Homer. Yet, he harbored nothing but disdain for Byzantium and its people, who had safeguarded those very texts for a thousand years and were the rightful heirs of Greek civilization.
Why Western Europe hated Byzantium
To understand Petrarch’s deep hatred toward the Christian East, we must look back to 1204. That year, Western knights of the Fourth Crusade did the unthinkable: instead of fighting in the Holy Land, they turned their swords on Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Christendom. They sacked the city, desecrated its churches, and effectively shattered the Byzantine Empire, a wrong so grave that the Catholic Church issued an official apology in the early 21st century.
The chronicler Niketas Choniates described the horror of seeing the defilement of the magnificent Hagia Sophia, Christianity’s masterpiece. The wound for the Greeks was deep and lingered for centuries. A hundred years later, Petrarch was still fuming, urging the Doge of Genoa to destroy the “infamous empire” as an act of divine will. A century later, rather than showing any remorse, Western Europe’s hatred for Byzantium only intensified.
As scholar Nancy Bisaha argues in Creating East and West, this deeply rooted animosity between the two branches of Christianity likely stemmed from profound insecurity. Petrarch and his fellow humanists wanted to study the knowledge that Byzantium held, yet they could not bear the idea of being indebted to a culture they considered inferior to their own.
And herein lies the great irony: for all their disdain, Italian humanists desperately needed the very people they mocked for their extravagant views and lifestyles.
When Byzantine scholars such as Manuel Chrysoloras began arriving in Italy, fleeing the crumbling empire, they brought with them the language and texts that would ignite the Renaissance. Petrarch himself took lessons from a Greek monk in Southern Italy named Barlaam. However, in a typical display of the prejudice of the time, he mercilessly ridiculed another Greek scholar, Leontius Pilatus, whose knowledge he used but whose background he found distasteful. In his view, a Greek was little more than a “slave” to a Latin “master.” This reflected the widespread attitude of the era.
The Byzantine refugees who escaped the final fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 played a crucial role in supporting Western scholarship but were often met with suspicion and prejudice. You don’t have to look hard to see traces of this division today. The historical fault line between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East persists in cultural and political tensions, despite the recent rapprochement between Rome and Constantinople.
In many Western nations, the story of the Roman Empire is taught in detail, whereas the thousand-year history of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire is often treated as a footnote—a peculiar sequel to the Romans, not clearly Roman but something oddly close. This bias stems from the entrenched prejudice we see in figures such as Petrarch, who defined the “West” by casting the “East” as its decaying, inferior counterpart.
As this is all a story of the past, it may be time for Western academics to dig deeper into the Byzantine world and acknowledge the debt owed to its scholars. Doing so could help bridge a divide that, for centuries, has kept the Christian East and West apart both spiritually and intellectually.
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