I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighbouring systems of being? Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a significant overlap between what is usually considered the epoch of the Renaissance, and the period in which Ottoman Empire grew in power from 1299, finally triumphing over the Byzantine state with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. If the Ottoman Dynasty were proto- imperialists starting out from a corner of the north-western Anatolian region to expand across the Caucasus, Balkans, Middle East and parts of North Africa, no such expansion could happen without there being a significant knock-on effect upon their European counterparts. The rise of the Ottoman Empire and the burgeoning of the Renaissance were intertwined in ways which were subtle and complex.

The impact of the military expansion which accompanied the rise of the Ottomans transformed both Europe’s political landscape and its military strategies. New military technologies such as the use of cannons and gunpowder caused Europeans to utilise new methods of warfare in reaction to Ottoman expansion, and the interruption of established trade routes inadvertently led to the later colonial exploration that sprang out of the Renaissance. Columbus, Vespucci and Cabot were each incentivised by the interruption of trade. 

With the fall of Constantinople, a large number of refugees, many of them Greek, fled to mainland Europe, bringing their ideas, creativity, and cultural values with them. If the Ottoman empire now became the exotic other, its texts and art left more than an imprint. The displacement of peoples fleeing the perceived new religious fervour of the Ottoman Empire forged the nature of the Renaissance to come, necessitating not just the transition between a medieval existence and a more modern one but providing a bridge between religious worlds and the secular.

The Byzantine Diaspora had played its own significant part in the proliferation of a new way of being across Europe.