As the Renaissance proceeded in Italy in the teeth of the strifes which ultimately destroyed Italian liberty, men turned with all the zest of new intelligence to the remains of Latin literature. Virgil had become for the Middle Ages a beneficent magician, a kind of classic Merlin, and as such he is framed by Dante in his great poem of the other world. Religion in Italy had been brought into something like contempt by the lives and deeds of its ministers; and only in the literature of civilized antiquity could intellectual men find at once stimulus and satisfaction. It is to be said for the popes and cardinals of Rome, now among the wealthiest princes of Christendom, that they too promoted the revival of learning by their rewards. On their urging, scholars retrieved classics from the garrets and cellars of a hundred monasteries, or from the scrolls from which they had been partly obliterated to make way for a theology that the scholars despised. Popes and cardinals themselves, indeed, were commonly held in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to care little about theology and to know less--a state of things which ultimately aided their heretical adversaries, as did the scholarship they helped to spread. With the fall of Constantinople came the final decisive impulse to new culture in western Europe. Ecclesiastical hates, and those aroused by the crusading conquest of Byzantium, had for centuries sundered the Greek and Latin worlds more completely than even those of Christian Europe and Islam, setting up a Chinese wall where paganism, albeit by fatal means, had effected mutual intercourse. But on the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1452 numbers of despairing Greek scholars sought refuge in the West, and were eagerly welcomed by students who desired Greek, not to acquire the theology of the Byzantines, but to read in the original the great pagan masters. Thenceforth the forces of culture in Europe became too strong for the forces of repression. It was thus by a return to the thought and science of buried paganism that Christian civilization so-called was put on a progressive footing. So long as Aristotle, known through Latin translations made from the Arabic, was a university text-book for students of theology under ecclesiastical supervision, he was but a modified instrument of dogmatism; and his limitations were made the measure of knowledge even as the Bible had been. With the free return to the recovered lore of free Greece came a new spirit of freedom, destined to break down the reign of all dogmatisms, and to build up a lore of its own. § 4. Religion and Art