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3. The Church and Education.

No Church, except perhaps the most evangelical, can flourish without some standard of culture among its clergy and among its laity. It was in the sphere of education that the Greek Church was to feel the effects of servitude most profoundly and most disastrously.

At the time of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople the university was still in existence. Many of its best professors had already migrated to the greater security of Italy, where their learning was appreciated and their salaries more regularly paid. Its head in 1453 was an able youngish scholar, Michael Apostolis, who was in favour of union with Rome but whose views do not seem to have lost him pupils. He was taken prisoner when the city fell, but later escaped to Italy, where he had a distinguished career.²⁹⁸ At Thessalonica, at Mistra and at Trebizond there seem to have been academies which depended on the State for support. When each city was in turn captured by the Turks, all these centers of higher learning inevitably disappeared.²⁹⁹

At Constantinople all that was left out of the wreckage was the Patriarchal Academy. It had worked in co-operation with the university and shared professors with it; but it took boys at a younger age, and it concentrated on theological rather than lay studies. Now, more than ever, it had to devote itself to the training of clergy. Higher secular studies, including philosophy except for its rudiments, were abandoned. Martin Kraus, or Crusius, who became Professor of Greek at Tubingen about 1555 and was almost the only Western scholar to concern himself with the state of the Greeks of his time and kept up an active correspondence with the Greek clergy at Constantinople, was deeply distressed by what he learnt about their lack of schools. ‘In all Greece studies nowhere flourish’, he writes. ‘They have no public academies or professors, except for the most trivial schools in which the boys are taught to read the Horologion, the Octoechon, the Psalter, and other books which are used in the liturgy. But amongst the priests and monks those who really understand these books are very few indeed.’³⁰⁰

Crusius was unfair to the Patriarchal Academy, which was struggling to do its best, though badly in need of reform. On the whole such higher education as survived among the Greeks in Greek lands was provided by private teachers. A few teachers who had been educated in the old days before 1453 managed to keep the tradition of learning alive and to teach pupils. But the results were meager. We know of not a single Greek of intellectual distinction living within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire during the later fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth. There were distinguished Greeks alive at the time; but they were to be found in the West, mainly at Venice. Indeed, we can only tell that the tradition was not lost by the fact that towards the middle of the sixteenth century a number of Greek scholars begin to emerge who had never travelled abroad. Manuel of Corinth, Orator and Chartophylax of the Great Church, who died in 1551 after having written a number of works against the Latins and against the Neo-Platonism of Plethon and Bessarion, was a man of wide erudition, with a good knowledge of Latin, who never travelled outside of the Ottoman Empire. He must have received his education either at his native Corinth or somewhere in the Peloponnese — he is sometimes surnamed Peloponnesiacus — or else at Constantinople.³⁰¹ Damascenus the Studite, who wrote free Byzantium, and was the teacher of Arsenius of Monem homilies which are still admired by the Greek Church, was born at Thessalonica and died as Metropolitan of Arta, without having travelled farther afield. It is likely that he studied on Mount Athos.³⁰² His contemporary, Manuel Malaxus, who wrote a history of the Patriarchs which Crusius translated, seems to have lived all his life at Constantinople, where he ran a small school in a hut full offish hanging up to dry.³⁰³ The Patriarch Jeremias II, who was born at Anchialus and educated at Constantinople, probably at the Patriarchal Academy, in which he always took a deep interest, was a philosopher and a historian, as well as a theologian of real merit.³⁰⁴ The rich layman Michael Cantacuzenus must have been a scholar of some standing, to judge from the excellence of his library.³⁰⁵ But such men were rare; and we do not know who were their teachers.

By one of the few happy ironies of history, it was Venice, the state which by its part in the Fourth Crusade had done more than any other to destroy Byzantium, that now came to the rescue of Greek culture. There had been for some time past a Greek colony at Venice, originally composed of merchants and technicians. Recently it had been swelled by refugees from Constantinople, some of them cultured aristocrats, such as Anna Notaras, daughter of the last Emperor’s chief minister, Lucas Notaras,³⁰⁶ others scholars such as Apostolis, last Rector of the University.³⁰⁷ In addition ambitious boys from the Greek territories owned by Venice, in particular from the island of Crete, collected there to be educated and to advance their careers. By the end of the fifteenth century Venice had become a lively center of Greek culture. Eminent Greek-born philosophers and teachers, such as Mark Musurus, Janus Lascaris, George of Trebizond and Andronicus Callistus, made their homes there.³⁰⁸ Cardinal Bessarion had bequeathed to the city his incomparable library of Greek manuscripts.³⁰⁹ Cretan students were employed there to copy such manuscripts; and it was there, in the amicably rival presses of Aldus Manutius and the Greek Calliergis that the printing of Greek texts was first undertaken on a large scale.³¹⁰ It was to Venice that Erasmus travelled when he wished to perfect his Greek.³¹¹

To any ambitious young Greek of Constantinople who had intellectual tastes a visit to Venice was infinitely desirable. It was not so difficult to make the journey. The Turks seldom troubled themselves to prevent young Greeks from going abroad; and, if the student could raise enough money to reach Venice, he would find there a number of hospitable compatriots who would probably see him through his studies or would advance him the money that he needed. His religion need not embarrass him. Though the leading Greek scholars in Venice had all joined the Roman Church, and though Venice in the past had shown no friendliness towards the Orthodox, now there was far less intolerance, partly because the Venetians realized that they could not afford to offend their Greek subjects, partly because they had a large number of Greek soldiers of fortune in their armed forces, and partly because of their general spirit of enlightenment and independence, which made them refuse to allow the Inquisition to operate within their territory without a licence from the government.³¹² The Patriarch Maximus IV had been able to secure freedom of worship for the Orthodox in the Ionian Islands, and soon afterwards a Greek church was founded at Venice. It was at first supposed to be Uniate and under the authority of the Patriarch of Venice. In 1577 the Venetian government allowed it to be transferred to the authority of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. He appointed as its bishop the Metropolitan of Philadelphia, whose titular see in Asia Minor was now a half-ruined village.³¹³

Venice had a further advantage to offer. Nearby was the University of Padua. It had been founded in 1222 and from the outset had been famed for its medical and its philosophical studies. The Venetians occupied Padua in 1405; and the Venetian Senate had promptly confirmed the autonomy and the privileges of the university. This autonomy, guaranteed by a government that would permit of no interference from the Papacy or the Inquisition, enabled the university to indulge in religious speculation to an extent impossible elsewhere in Western Europe. The University of Padua was one of the first to encourage the study of Greek; and Greeks who could lecture on Greek texts were especially welcome. A Chair of Greek was founded there in 1463 and given to the Athenian Demetrius Chalcondylas.³¹⁴ One of his successors, Nicholas Laonicus Thomaeus, an Epirot by birth, gave in 1497 a course of lectures on Aristotle, using only the Greek text and a few Alexandrian commentaries. His course seemed to the future Cardinal Bembo to mark the coming of a new era in philosophical studies.³¹⁵ Aided by the printing-presses at Venice, which made Greek texts readily available, Greek studies at Padua won a high renown.

It was not surprising that Greek students should wish to go there. Young men who desired to enter the Church and who found the education provided by the Patriarchal Academy inadequate could study up-to-date philosophy there and thus equip themselves to deal with the hostile propaganda with which their Church was faced; and if they were intelligent they were welcomed there as native authorities on the Greek language. Boys who felt no special religious vocation gravitated towards its famous medical schools. Medicine offered a promising career in the Ottoman Empire; for few Turks would demean themselves to do the hard work that a medical training involved, and thus became dependent upon Greeks or Jews for their physicians; and the Greeks soon discovered how influential a family doctor can. become. They would study philosophy also; and a class arose of doctor-philosophers, of whom it was said that if they failed to cure their patients’ bodies they could at least provide their souls with the consolations of philosophy.

One of the first of the Greeks born in Ottoman territory to go to the West for his education was the Epirot Maximus, known later as the Haghiorite. He was born at Arta in 1480 and as a boy-he journeyed in search of learning as far as Paris, then went to Florence, and finally to Venice and Padua. On his return to the East he became a monk on Mount Athos, at the monastery of Vatopedi; he seems to have had some influence in keeping education alive on the Mountain. He was deeply conscious of the value of good libraries and acquired fame as a librarian. Consequently when the Grand Prince of Moscovy, Vassily III, sent in 1518 to Constantinople to ask the Patriarch Theoleptus I to send him a good librarian and translator, Maximus was selected for the post. The rest of his career belongs to Russian history.³¹⁶

Most of the Greek scholars of his and the following generation who were educated in the West had the initial advantage of having been born in Venetian-held territory, so that it was easy for them to go to Venice. There was Pachomius Rhusanus of Zante, the exact dates of whose life are unknown. He studied at Padua and other Italian cities, and was a good grammarian as well as a theologian. His chief theological works were directed against the Latins and against a heretic called Joannicius Kartanus, who taught fanciful Neo-Gnostic doctrines about God and the angels.³¹⁷ In the next generation there was the Cretan, Meletius Pegas, who died in 1601 after a distinguished career in Orthodox ecclesiastical politics.³¹⁸ There was another Cretan, Maximus Margunius, who died in 1602. He also had been educated at Padua. In later life, as Bishop of Cythera, he attempted to find a compromise acceptable to both East and West on the disputed filioque clause and was accused by the Metropolitan of Philadelphia, the head of the Greek Church at Venice, of harbouring Latin ideas. He was obliged to send an apologia to Constantinople to prove that he was sound on the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Ghost; and he wrote a number of tracts, as yet unedited, against the Jesuits and the Franciscans. As a result the Inquisition twice attempted to prosecute him; but he was protected by the Venetian government. His will has been preserved; and it is interesting to note how anxious he was about the proper disposal of his books, a vast number of which were in Latin. Most of his Greek library was to go to the Cretan monastery at which he learnt to read as a child, but one book which had somehow come from the monastery of Saint Catherine on Sinai was to be returned there. In the end his library was scattered.³¹⁹ His manuscript copy of the ancient Greek tragedians is now in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, as are most of his Latin books.³²⁰ His former critic, Gabriel Severus, Metropolitan of Philadelphia, was born in Monemvasia in 1541, just after its capture by the Turks. He too was an alumnus of Padua. He had spent most of his career at Lesina in Dalmatia, where there was a Greek colony, before taking charge of the Greek community in Venice. He wrote works attacking both the Latins and the Lutherans. He died in 1616.³²¹ His friend, the Athenian Theodore Karykis, who became Metropolitan of Athens and in 1596, in rather dubious circumstances, was elected Patriarch as Theophanes I, seems to have studied with him at Padua.³²²

Almost all these theologians, whether they came from Venetian or Ottoman territory and whether or not they studied in Italy, were strongly anti-Latin. It was only towards the end of the sixteenth century that the Church of Rome took counter-measures. In 1577 Pope Gregory XIII founded the College of Saint Athanasius at Rome for the education of Greeks in the proper faith. Its pupils came almost entirely from islands which were or had recently been under Italian domination, Corfu, Crete, Cyprus and, especially, Chios. It provided an excellent training; amongst its alumni was the great Chiot scholar, Leo Allatius. It also admitted boys from Orthodox families, in the hope of converting them, a hope that was not always gratified.³²³

In the meantime it had become easier to obtain a good education at Constantinople. From about 1550 onwards, owing to the influence of scholars educated at Padua, there had been attempts to reform the Patriarchal Academy. Higher studies were introduced, particularly the study of philosophy. In 1593 the learned Patriarch Jeremias II summoned a synod which gave a new constitution to the academy. Various departments, to include higher philosophy and certain of the sciences as well as theology and literature, were set up, each under a scholarch appointed by the Patriarch. The first scholarchs seem all to have been graduates of Padua.³²⁴

Thus by the end of the sixteenth century there were several courses open to an intelligent and enterprising Greek boy who wanted a higher education. But for a boy who did not live at Constantinople or who had not the opportunity of going to Italy, things were not too easy; and even places at the Patriarchal school were not so very plentiful. The synod of 1593 which reformed the Patriarchal Academy also urged metropolitans to see to the foundation of academies in their cities. It is doubtful how many metropolitans followed this advice. Academies were expensive to organize and to maintain; and the supply of good teachers was limited. Academies seem to have been founded within the next few decades at such large cities as Thessalonica and Trebizond and Smyrna, which were presumably under the care of the local metropolitan; but the evidence about them is very scanty.³²⁵ The only academy which achieved some renown and produced pupils of some distinction was founded not by a metropolitan but by an Epirot priest, Epiphanius the Higoumene, who was attached to the Greek church at Venice. He collected a sum of money, presumably from the richer members of his congregation, which he deposited in the treasury of Saint Mark, the interest from which was to pay for the salaries of teachers at an academy which was set up at Athens. In the first years of the seventeenth century the Athenian academy counted amongst its professors Theophilus Corydalleus, the Neo-Aristotelian, his pupil, Nicodemus Pherraeus, and Demetrius Angelus Benizelos.³²⁶ Amongst its pupils was Nathaniel Chychas, who achieved some fame as a polemical writer. But as Chychas went on from Athens to the College of Saint Athanasius at Rome, it may have been to the Catholic Fathers there that he owed his training. They converted him to Catholicism; but he moved to Venice and Padua and reverted to his ancestral faith. In the words of Dositheus of Jerusalem who subsequently edited an anti-Latin tract of his, ‘at Rome he drank of the troubled waters of schism and heresy, but going later to Venice he was set right by the late Gabriel Severus, Metropolitan of Philadelphia.’³²⁷ But Epiphanius’s endowment was too small and local Turkish suspicion too great for the Academy of Athens to survive. A Peloponnesian boy called Christopher Angelus went there in 1607, only to be arrested almost at once on the improbable charge of being a Spanish spy. He was stripped of his books and his money and only with difficulty escaped with his life. His later career was spent in England. Soon afterwards the academy closed its doors.³²⁸

In Asia Minor outside of the larger towns there seem to have been practically no Greek schools. Thomas Smith, writing towards the end of the seventeenth century, noted that the Turkish authorities in the Asiatic provinces were far more intolerant than those in Europe.³²⁹ In Europe a school was founded at Janina by Epiphanius the Higoumene, before he went to Athens. One was founded at Arta some time in the seventeenth century, and several in Macedonia, and, a little later, in the islands of Myconos, Naxos and Patmos. At Dimitsana in the Peloponnese there was by the end of the seventeenth century a celebrated academy at which no less than six Patriarchs of the following century were educated.

There was already a school at Nauplia.³³⁰ The school at Athens was refounded about 1717 by a monk, Gregory Sotiris, and was given a new endowment by an Athenian, George Anthony Melos, who had made a fortune in Spain; and this was supplemented by an Athenian living in Venice, Stephen Roulis. Its most famous headmaster was a Cretan, Athanasius Bousopoulos of Dimitsana, amongst whose pupils was the future Patriarch Gregory V. But it seems that this school was thought to be old-fashioned in its curriculum. A more up-to-date school was founded in 1750 by another Venetian Greek, John Deka.³³¹

Though the Sublime Porte never interfered with the Patriarchal Academy at Constantinople, provincial governors were free to be as oppressive as they pleased; and many of them regarded the education of the minority races as being most undesirable.

The most effective academies of the eighteenth century were situated in districts that were not under direct Turkish control, in the two capitals of the Danubian principalities, Bucharest and Jassy, and in the island of Chios, which enjoyed a limited self-government. In Chios there had been a tradition of good schools since the days of the Genoese occupation, when the Greco-Italian Hermodorus Lestarchus had conducted a famous establishment, attended by Catholics and Orthodox alike.³³² In the Ionian Islands, under Venetian rule, Greek schools had been permitted since 1550; and their standards were higher than any on the mainland, because many of the teachers had been trained at Venice or Padua. In Crete, equally controlled by the Venetians but inclined to be rebellious, schools were not encouraged.³³³

The average Greek provincial boy was thus not well served, particularly if he belonged to the poorer classes from which most of the monks and village priests were drawn. Many children remained uneducated and illiterate. A boy who wished to be a priest would go to the local monastery to learn to read and write and to memorize the religious works that he would need later on. But that was about the extent of his education. The monasteries were required to maintain libraries; but only a few were wealthy enough to keep them up to date and to buy new books; and in the poorer monasteries the monks began to lose the taste for reading. Only a few well-thumbed Gospels and Psalters and liturgical books, the Horologion and the Octoechon to which Crusius refers, were ever in circulation. Once the future priest had learnt the words of the Liturgy his education was finished.

He outshone his parishioners because he could read and could perform the Mysteries. But higher learning was beyond his reach, and he was suspicious of it. Amongst women illiteracy was even more widespread. A few girls might have lessons at the local convent; but many nuns could barely read. A richer farmer or a merchant might engage a literate monk to give his children, girls as well as boys, a smattering of education; but it did not go very far.

The decline in literacy was even felt in such great monasteries as the Athonite houses. In the sixteenth century they cared for learning sufficiently to buy up the library of Michael Cantacuzenus; and their catalogues show that they were still acquiring books, printed and in manuscript, on secular as well as on religious subjects throughout most of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century there was a decline. In 1753 the Patriarch Cyril V made a determined effort to restore the Holy Mountain to its proper place as a centre of religious culture. He founded an academy there for the monks and appointed as its professor one of the leading philosophers of the time, the Corfiot Eugenius Vulgaris. But Vulgaris was a modernist who had been largely trained in Germany; and his philosophical theories so horrified the monks that after a few years he was removed to become head of the Academy at Constantinople. Even there his modernism was considered somewhat extreme. He retired in 1765 to Germany, where he was better appreciated, and ended his life in Russia under the patronage of Catherine the Great.³³⁴

The story of the Athonite Academy showed how inadequate the new centers of learning were for the Church as a whole. There was a complete cultural cleavage between the cultivated hierarchs of Constantinople and the rich laity amongst whom they lived on the one side and the ordinary priest and monk on the other, who, even if he was well grounded in the traditional theology of the Church, found the new learning of the academies unfamiliar and shocking, and who more often was too ill educated to begin to understand it. Indeed, the type of philosophy that was fashionable amongst the Greek intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fitted badly with the traditions of the Church. The Greek scholars who had gone to Padua and had taught the professors there to study the ancient philosophers in their original tongue had helped to give birth to a new school of philosophy, a school of Neo-Aristotelians, whose chief spokesmen were Pietro Pomponazzi, who lectured at Padua and Bologna in the early sixteenth century, and Cesare Cremonini, who was professor of philosophy at Padua not quite a century later. The doctrine that they taught was a type of philosophical materialism. Matter is the permanent basis of everything. It contains in itself the germ of each form as a potential or active cause. Forms, or their Ideas (in the Platonic sense), pre-exist within matter and emerge from matter, determining it in the multiplicity of sensible objects. There is thus a purely natural and organic causality. God’s existence was not denied; but to Pomponazzi God does not and cannot intervene in the natural order of things. His nature consists of knowing everything but not of immixing in natural laws. The soul is purely mortal, a part of the form of the body, neither immaterial nor immortal. Cremonini carried the doctrine further, in that he was quite uninterested in the soul. Under his influence Neo-Aristotelianism concentrated on the exterior phenomena of nature and on empirical knowledge. The philosophy had its practical merits. It prepared the way towards notions of evolution and progress. It was a corrective against the medieval treatment of everything as being sub specie aeternitatis, a viewpoint that could lead politically to defeatism and intellectually to stagnation. But it was ill-suited for members of a Church whose strength lay in its fidelity to ancient tradition and its emphasis on the mystical life. The Greek intellectuals who fell under its spell had either to move towards Natural Religion or else make an arbitrary divorce between religion and philosophy.³³⁵

The Patriarch Jeremias II, when he reformed the Patriarchal Academy, seems to have been conscious of this. Though he encouraged the study of sciences such as physiology and chemistry, he did not include the new philosophy in the courses.³³⁶ The next generation was more advanced. The remarkable Cretan, Cyril Lucaris, who reigned as Patriarch, with a few short interruptions, from 1620 till his execution in 1638, was an eager patron of up-to-date thought. His career will be discussed later. Here it should be first noted that he managed to provide the Patriarchate with a Greek printing-press, procured from England, which proved a great asset for Greek learning during the short period that the Turks permitted its existence. Secondly, he continued the reform of the Patriarchal Academy. In 1624 he installed as its Chief Director his friend Theophilus Corydalleus, then head of the Academy at Athens. Corydalleus had come under the influence of Cremonini at Padua and was deeply interested in Neo-Aristotelianism. He instituted courses on it, and, more valuably, courses on physics and generation and corruption. Henceforward students at the Academy could obtain as good a scientific education as many of the Western universities provided. Corydalleus was removed from his post in 1639 because of his support of Cyril Lucaris’s doctrines, which had been condemned as heresy. He was later rehabilitated and became for a while Metropolitan of Arta. But the curriculum that he had started survived, the courses being revived by his pupil, John Caryophylles, who was appointed Director in 1642. Caryophylles in his turn was removed for heresy and rudeness; but the courses were now well enough entrenched not to be abandoned.³³⁷ Later Directors encouraged them, above all Alexander Mavrocordato, of whose remarkable career more will be said later. He became Director of the Academy at the early age of twenty-four in 1666, and himself gave lectures there on philosophy, medicine and Classical Greek. As he was at the same time Grand Orator of the Patriarchate and was a member of one of the wealthy families of Constantinople on which the I Patriarchate depended, no one would venture to accuse him of [heresy. He had studied both at the College of Saint Athanasius and at Padua and his early training made him sympathetic towards some understanding with Rome, which he seems to have hoped to reach on the basis of the new philosophy.³³⁸ When he retired from the Academy to become Grand Interpreter at the Sublime Porte, his successor was Sevastus Kymenites, who came from Kymena, near Trebizond. He too was an alumnus of Padua, but belonged to an older tradition. Indeed, he wrote a tract in support of Palamite doctrines. But he seems to have disliked life at Constantinople and soon went back to take over the Academy at Trebizond. He was a professor at Bucharest when he died in 1702.³³⁹

The study of these new-fangled sciences at Constantinople and at the academies at Bucharest and Jassy had its use. It enabled a Greek of education to keep up with the currents of thought that ran in the West. But Greeks of education were by now only to be found in the big cities, among rich merchant dynasties, and, in particular, the great families of Constantinople, usually known collectively as the Phanariots, as their houses clustered round the Patriarchate in the Phanar quarter. The Phanariots genuinely admired learning, and they were ready to spend money on it. It was thanks to them more than to anyone else that Hellenism was able to survive. But they were not interested in the education of the clergy. Their money enabled them to control the Patriarchate. They liked to secure the election of a Patriarch who was sympathetic to their ideas and who would appoint their sons to posts at his court. But they were quite uninterested in the provincial Church. A Patriarch with reforming zeal who attempted to face the problems of the education of the clergy lost their support, which he needed both for financial reasons and for the influence that they wielded at the Sublime Porte. As a result, the Patriarchate began to lose touch with the provincial Church. It was difficult to find among the well-educated bishops any who would go to a remote provincial see and devote himself to its needs. The provincial hierarchy was mainly composed of men of little learning, appointed because they were on the spot and willing to remain there. They were often devoted pastors to their flock, but often, too, narrow and ignorant men, with no use for the sophisticated circles of the Patriarchate and its Phanariot courtiers. The monasteries, in their reaction against the new learning, tended to turn against learning of any sort. Even on Mount Athos, with very few exceptions, monastic libraries were left neglected, the monks carelessly using pages of old manuscripts as wrappings for their victuals or, even more gladly, selling them to visitors who were ready to pay for such things. The village priest had no encouragement to interest himself in things of the mind. Travellers from the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were horrified at the low standards of the Greek clergy. The decadence must not be exaggerated. There were still a few establishments where the old traditions were maintained, such as the monastery of Saint John on Patmos or the Great Lavra on Mount Athos. There were still provincial bishops who could discuss theology with erudition and intelligence. But the overall picture was drab and depressing. It was in its failure to provide a proper education for its flocks and, in particular, for its clergy that the Orthodox Church of the captivity committed its worst fault. Yet the failure would have been difficult to avoid. Schools need money; and the Patriarchate was always short of money. Even if the Patriarchs themselves had not begun the habit of paying huge sums to the Turks for their own personal advancement, it is unlikely that the Turks would ever have allowed the Church to accumulate enough wealth for it to endow many schools. And, even if the money had been forthcoming, it was extremely doubtful whether the Turkish authorities in the provinces would have allowed Greek schools to operate on any large scale. There was never any official ban. But school buildings could be confiscated and individual pupils harried, so that in the end it was not worth while to keep the schools open. Moreover, the longer education is neglected the harder it is to revive it; for it will be impossible to find a sufficiency of trained teachers. And, even if teachers are available, it is never easy to induce them to leave the big cities to work in distant provinces.

It was only in the Ionian Islands that the level of education did not fall. They were comparatively rich; Corfu and Zante, in particular, contained prosperous communities; and the Venetian government, once it decided in 1550 to permit the existence of Greek schools, put no restrictions on them. Venice rescued Greek intellectual life by welcoming Greek students to its own libraries and to its University of Padua. It performed perhaps an even greater service in allowing the continuation of Greek provincial education in the islands. Elsewhere, the failure of the Church to provide proper schooling for any but its aristocracy of talent and of money was to cause a lack of sympathy and understanding between the hierarchy at Constantinople and the struggling churches of the provinces, which was to have serious consequences when the moment came for liberation.