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The Cretan Renaissance
Mousouros wrote the preface to this work, and took the opportunity to
pay tribute to the Cretans:
But why should one be amazed at the talents of the Cretans, since it is Athena
herself who by order of her father taught them many arts? It is a Cretan who
has fashioned the type. It is a Cretan who has joined together the copper
letters, a. Cretan who inserted the accents one by one. The man who poured
the lead was also a Cretan, It was a Cretan . . . who paid the expenses, and the
one who closes this book with these [verses] is also a Cretan. May the Cretan
Zeus be favourable to the Cretans, 3
The nationalist Cretan may note with pleasure that the type used by
Kallergis’s Press is more beautiful than that of the Aldine Press.
Kallergis later introduced Greek printing to Rome, which under Leo X
became an intellectual centre unrivalled in Europe.
I have said enough to indicate Crete’s contribution to the revival of
Greek learning in the west. These three, the copyist Apostolis, the
teacher and editor Mousouros, and the printer Kallergis, are representative
in their skills; but they are the most brilliant examples.
There were many others: Demetrios Doukas, for instance, who moved
from Venice to become professor of Greek at Alcala university in
Spain. When he arrived he found ‘a great want of Greek books, or
rather, so to say, a desert’ – only fourteen Greek works in the chief
Library, and these a motley bunch including bores like Aratus. Doukas
started to publish. And with the encouragement of his patron Cardinal
Ximenes, he collaborated with learned Spaniards in the great enterprise
of printing a Polyglot Bible. The New Testament appeared in the
original Greek and in Latin Vulgate, and the Old was printed in
parallel columns of Greek, Latin and Hebrew. The Alcala Bible marked
a new starting point in biblical studies.
There were also the Cretan Peter Philarges (Pope Alexander V);
and the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Cyril Loukaris, who
worked for a reconciliation of Orthodox and Protestant, and was
murdered in 1638 for this revolutionary design. But their importance
lies in the work they did far away from Crete. It is time we returned to
the island.
Not all the learned and the talented went to the west. Throughout
the Venetian domination of Crete a native literature was growing up; a
literature quite unlike anything else in Greek letters, for it was produced
by a unique cross-fertilization. Venice met Byzantium on Cretan
soil. The result was a miniature renaissance. The best works of this
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cretan revival have always been
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