For hitherto, although an acquaintance with Latin had survived, it was chiefly in the monkish form, and the Latin authors were known only by fragments, often mutilated in the process of copying. The knowledge of the Greek tongue, while preserved in Byzantium, had all but entirely disappeared from Western Europe, and Petrarch, realising the need of recovering it, urged Boccaccio to begin the work. Accordingly the latter took lessons of an adventurer, named Leone Pilato, a native of Calabria who had resided in Thessaly, and succeeded also in having him appointed professor of Greek language and literature in the University of Florence. Boccaccio, like his friend Petrarch, was indefatigable in the search for manuscripts among the libraries and, as often, the lumber-rooms of the monasteries. And frequently he had to mourn their mutilation, as on one occasion when he found the precious sheets of vellum had been scraped clean of the classic text and inscribed with psalms for the use of the choirboys, while the decorated margins had been cut into bits and sold to women as amulets. During the fifteenth century the pursuit of scholarship continued, receiving a great advancement when Constantinople, in 1451, was conquered by the Turks. For many of the Greek scholars found refuge in Italy, where they were received with the highest enthusiasm in universities and the palaces of princes. Thus for a century the keenest spirits of what was then the most intellectually advanced people of Europe, devoted themselves to classical erudition. The world’s debt to them is incalculable, but the boon they conferred on others was not without detriment to themselves. Preoccupation with scholarship produced a certain affectation and pedantry of mind; led to an extravagant valuation of the antique over everything modern and undermined Christianity with Paganism. Nor was it the Stoic side of Paganism that was emulated. The pleasures of life were pursued as an ideal, and with no moral curb on conduct; freedom was confused with license and the desire of the senses ousted the restraint of law. The organisation alike of the Church and of society in time became honeycombed with corruption. In such an intellectual and moral atmosphere the ego in man was worshipped as divinity. Individualism, extolled to a fetish and unbridled by any considerations of good and bad, engendered faculties of glorious capabilities and also of monstrous depravity. Individualism, in fact, ran its hot and heady course at the expense of everything that had once counted for strength in communal and civic spirit. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the culmination of the Renaissance, a few giants survived, but the Italian people, while intellectually in the ascendant, had degenerated physically and morally and fell an easy prey to foreign aggression.