that had characterized the renewed study of the pagan classics.
The pressure exerted on Byzantium by the Turks, for example,
was crucial. Relations between the Byzantine and western
churches in the later middle ages had been hampered by the unfor-
tunate reciprocal excommunication of the Roman pope and the
Constantinopolitan patriarch in 1054. In a last, desperate, and ulti-
mately futile effort to rally western support against the Ottoman
onslaught, however, Byzantine emperors had sought a rapproche-
ment with Latin Christendom. As Byzantine and papal legates
met at inconclusive councils, certain individual Greek Orthodox
churchmen turned to Latin Christianity with gusto. Prominent
among them was Bessarion of Trebizond, who was made cardinal
by pope Eugenius IV in 1439 and settled in Italy a year later.
Like many others, Bessarion brought the contents of his library
with him to the west, and while he may be best remembered
today for his efforts to introduce classical Greek texts to western
audiences, no less significant was his collection of early Christian
writers. Such texts became the focus of editorial activity by
humanists who began to publish both editions and translations of
these newly discovered works by the fathers of the Greek church
(Geanakoplos 1976: 265–80; Backus 1991: 296–9).
Given the extraordinary diversity of early Christianity that
we will investigate later in this book, it was perhaps inevitable
that the application of scholarly activity to its literary output
would produce some unsettling results in a society dominated
by a church that insisted on the essential unity of Christendom
and its faith. Among the pioneers of the new philological
approach to ancient texts was Lorenzo Valla (c.1406–57), whose
classical interests led him to produce Latin translations of Homer,
Herodotus, and Thucydides. It was to be philology that prompted
Valla’s most famous work, and one that was emblematic of the
extension of scientific antiquarian research to early Christianity.
In 1440 he produced his enquiry into the document known as the
Donation of Constantine(see p. 47), which had been exploited
since the eleventh century as a fundamental buttress of papal
claims to temporal authority throughout western Christendom.
THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
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