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 THE CLOSE : MIDDLE EUROPE 205 But in Italy, the land of city states, there had been a great intellectual revival comparable to the intellectual activity of the Greek city states. There had taken place that The new birth of art and letters which is called the Renaissance. Renaissance. From Italy the intellectual movement spread. In every field of thought men began to challenge the dictation of the time-honoured authorities which had hitherto claimed to speak with the voice of inspiration. The way was prepared for challenging the spiritual as well as the temporal authority of the papacy; and the channels through which new doctrines could be spread, and carried to all ranks, were multiplied by the invention of the printing-press. A further impulse was given to this intellectual movement by the fall of Constantinople, the final annihilation of the Greek Empire. The hostility of Greeks and Latins had Fall of Con prevented the Greeks from bestowing and the stantinopie, Latins from receiving much that Byzantium had 1453 * preserved when the hordes of barbarians overran the west. Now the Greeks fled before the Turks, and they found the west already sufficiently enlightened to welcome all the know- ledge they could bring. During the time of the crusades, Islam had ceased to be a grave menace to Christianity. The Christians had not con- quered ; they had not even recovered the old Roman dominion in Asia, though they had maintained a precarious footing in the west of Syria, and won back some of Asia Minor from the Seljuks. But the crusades had stopped the westward advance of Mohammedanism ; and even when the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem had become merely the shadow of a name, the divided Mohammedan powers were not in a position to resume aggression, their disruption having just been intensified by the Mongol invasion. But almost at this same moment The ottoman a more dangerous Turkish race, known to us as Turks, the Ottomans, from one of their first chiefs, Othman or Osman, was taking the place of the Seljuks. The Turks had made entry into the Ottoman Empire sometimes from the east of the Caspian Sea through Persia, sometimes between the Caspian and the Black Sea through Armenia. The Ottomans