Antefatto bizantino. Libri e diplomatici greci nei secoli XIII-XV

The paper aims to focus particularly on the relations between the Greek East and the Latin West in the last centuries of Byzantium, in the period from the reconquest of Constantinople by the Palaeologans in 1261 to its fall in 1453 (and beyond). After the substantial incommunicability during the Middle Ages, in fact, in the 13th-15th centuries the contacts between Byzantium and the West were intense and articulate, and led to a profound and mutual cultural contamination, thus anticipating the dynamism that would mark the Modern Age. The Palaeologan diplomacy played a fundamental role in this, also because it was entrusted to leading scholars who had the merit of having brought back Latin to the East and Greek to the West. No less important were the implications on books and libraries, which were the object of a veritable translatio that took place often by means of international diplomacy. A particular attention is devoted to the figure of Manuel Chrysoloras, the well-known Byzantine bibliophile and scholar, active in the West from 1397 as a Greek professor and diplomat.