What motive did scholars from the Eastern Roman world have to go to Italy to teach western scholars? Cultural diplomacy - showing that their world was worth saving and had virtue
A perfect example is the “scholar Manuel Chrysoloras in the late 14th century…who held the first chair in Greek in Florence.” He “was determined that the Latin west should know of the close relationship between the Greeks and Romans” in antiquity so that they may “respond together to the threat to Byzantine civilization from the Ottoman Turks.” It was a kind of soft power the medieval Romans wanted to project westward. Arguably they were trying to convince the west that they were “worthy” of being saved from conquest. However, they never were saved, and Constantinople fell around forty years after Chrysoloras died.
Source: The Children of Athena by Charles Freeman
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