Byzantine scholarship, humanism and reformation: positioning a question

The article deals with the issues of contact between Western and Eastern Christianity at the dawn of the New Times. On the one hand, the political collapse of the Byzantine Empire provoked a mass exodus of Greek intellectuals to the West, to Italy. On the other hand, in European cultural circles, Renaissance humanism itself sought to join the Byzantine heritage. The situation was complicated by the fact that the bipolar Christian world (Orthodox Constantinople - Catholic Rome) lost its stability. Instead of gaining the unity of the two centers in the Christian world centrifugal tendencies emerged that gave rise to the reform movement, which in its turn also needed both bases and allies. At the same time, the Byzantine heritage also attracted the emerging secular, bourgeois culture. It is no coincidence that the rich library of Cardinal Bessarion of Nicaea was donated to the Venetian trade republic, interested not in the struggle against the Turks, but in cooperation with them on commercial issues. But if the Greeks gave their philosophical and theological wealth to confessionally alien Europe, they made their political will to the one-sided Moscow as New Tsargrad