By the time the revival had culminated in Italy it began to be heard of north of the Alps. France was the first country to take up the study of Greek, a professorship being established at Paris in 1458. There was but little interest in the subject, however, or in any of the new studies, until two events of political importance, forty years later, brought Frenchmen in close touch with what had been done in northern Italy. In 1494 Charles VIII, of France, claiming Naples as his possession, took an army into Italy, and forcibly occupied Rome and Florence. Four years later his successor, Louis XII, claimed Milan also and seized it and Naples, maintaining a French court at Milan from 1498 to 1512. Though both these expeditions were unsuccessful, from a political point of view, the effect of the direct contact with humanism in its home was lasting. New ideas in architecture, art, and learning were carried back to France, French scholars traveled to Italy, and early in the sixteenth century Paris became a center for the new humanistic studies. In Greek, France completely superseded Italy as the interpreter of Greek life and literature to the modern world. In 1473 a Spanish scholar, Mebrissensis (1444-1522), returned home after twenty years in Italy and introduced Greek at Seville, Salamanca, and Alcalà. [Illustration: FIG. 72. TWO EARLY NORTHERN HUMANISTS RUDOLPH AGRICOLA (1443-85) Early Dutch Humanist. Lectured at Heidelberg (From a contemporary engraving) THOMAS LINACRE (c. 1460-1524) English Professor of Medicine and Lecturer on Greek (From a portrait in the British Museum)] About 1488 Thomas Linacre (c. 1460-1524) and William Grocyn (1446-1514), two Oxford graduates, went to Florence from England, studying Greek under Demetrius Chalcondyles, and, returning, introduced the new learning at Oxford. [18] Linacre, as professor of medicine, translated much of Galen (p. 198) from the Greek, and he and Grocyn lectured on Greek at the University. From Oxford the new learning was transmitted to Cambridge, and, over a century afterward, to Harvard in America. A third Oxford man to study Greek in Italy was John Colet (1467-1519), who studied in Florence from 1493 to 1496, and returned home an enthusiastic humanist. He was the first Englishman to attract much attention to the new studies, and to him is chiefly due their introduction into the English secondary school.