How Byzantine Monasteries Saved Ancient Greek Treasures

One of the most amazing accomplishments of Byzantine monasteries is the miraculous preservation of ancient Greek knowledge and literature, treasures of ancient wisdom without which our world would have been completely different today.

These educational and spiritual hubs of the middle ages played a fundamental role in preserving a large portion of knowledge that would eventually inspire the Renaissance and influence Western civilisation in ways unimaginable at the time of their preservation.

Byzantine monasteries were not simply places of religious piety and spiritual uplift. They were thriving hubs of scholarship, where monks devoted their entire lives to researching and conserving ancient literature. Some Byzantine monks were more like academics as well as being Christian men devoted to God.

In the Middle Byzantine period, which lasted from 843 AD to 1204 AD, at the time of the sack of Constantinople, more than half of the literate people in the Empire were monks. This shows how important their role was in preserving ancient Greek knowledge for eternity.

This concentration of intelligent people produced the ideal setting for the preservation of these classical works, which was a Herculian task that was undertaken by people who spent decades upon decades transcribing, translating and preserving centuries of ancient knowledge.

The monasteries that saved Greek treasures on Mount Athos

Particular praise should be given to the monasteries of Mount Athos (Agio Oros in Greek) for their contribution to the preservation of classical literature and ancient knowledge.

The libraries of the monasteries at Mount Athos kept substantial collections of ancient Greek literature in addition to theological books. This was not something to be taken for granted, as it came in direct contrast to many other monastic libraries that only held religious texts, viewing their role as solely religious rather than more openly academic.

Innumerable classical manuscripts were preserved because of this innovative strategy that employed thousands of Greek and non-Greek monks who spent their lives on the Athonite peninsula.

Understandably, it took a great deal of commitment to preserve such large amounts of ancient literature.

Monastic scribes copied manuscripts meticulously for hours on end. This humble but time-consuming task was immensely important not only for the libraries of these monasteries but for the entirety of humankind.

However, the monks were not just creating identical replicas. These wise people frequently improved by modifying the writings, adding scholarly annotations (known in Greek as ”scholia”) and fixing anything they thought needed to be fixed.

The ancient literatures and the countless Greek treasures these monasteries preserved granted to coming generations access to well-preserved pieces of work that inspired many scholars of the late middle ages and the early modern era.

Monasteries across the Byzantine Empire became local hubs of knowledge and bases of stability and continuity throughout periods of social and political instability.

These religious establishments of the Christian Church became vital havens for Greek treasures when Constantinople was threatened or after it fell to the superior power of the Ottomans in 1453.

For example, numerous Byzantine academics sought sanctuary in monasteries across the former territories of the Empire, where they continued their studies and preservation of classical literature despite the Ottomans toppling the Byzantine elite.

Throughout the once mighty Byzantine Empire, monasteries established vast networks for information exchange that passed the spark of knowledge from area to area and from generation to generation.

The chances of these manuscripts surviving were greatly increased by these links, which made it possible for them to be copied, circulated and stored in several places across Europe, something that saved them from oblivion.

When individual monasteries were threatened by invasion or natural disasters, the system proved very helpful, as monks from other areas would do their best to transfer and keep these Greek treasures safe.

Obviously, the Byzantine Empire was not the only place where monastic preservation had an impact. The Byzantine state had collapsed completely by 1453, meaning that manuscripts kept in monasteries in its former lands were taken by many Byzantine scholars who fled to Western Europe after Constantinople fell.

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As Western academics found these classical works that had been meticulously preserved in Byzantine monastic libraries, this knowledge was gradually transferred to them and this proved to be a major factor in the emergence of the Renaissance.

Byzantine monasteries are the undoubted ”culprit” for the availability of ancient Greek philosophy, literature and science today.

Most classical texts and other Greek treasures that have survived, such as important plays, epic poems and philosophical writings, have come to us through manuscripts that were either copied by Byzantine monks in their Monasteries or were adapted from their copies and then passed on to scholars in medieval Europe.

There were obvious difficulties in the preservation process, this was not an easy task that happened overnight.

Palimpsests, or manuscripts in which earlier passages were scraped off to make room for new ones, were occasionally the result of the high cost and limited availability of writing supplies at a time when writing was a privilege of the few.

Thankfully, historians are able now to retrieve these underlying texts with the help of contemporary technology, uncovering many more classical masterpieces that have been preserved precisely because of this technique.

The tradition of Byzantine monasteries salvaging Greek treasures of the past and preserving knowledge for humanity still continues to have an impact on modern research.

For academics researching religious and classical texts, for example, major monasteries like St. Catherine’s, which has a collection of more than 2,300 Greek codices, continue to be essential research hubs. These establishments show how important the Byzantine heritage of education and preservation was.

Examples of works saved by Byzantine monks

An example of the work that was preserved lies at the Monastery of Dionysiou on Mount Athos.

There, a composite manuscript of Aeschylus preserved works such as Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebe and The Persians.

Other monasteries on Mount Athos, such as Iviron and Megisti Lavra, are recorded as housing codices of major authors like Aesop, Euripides, Sophocles, Thucydides and Hesiod.

The Monastery of St Catherine at Sinai contained numerous Greek manuscripts as well, including a single folio of Genesis and a remarkable palimpsest in which biblical text was reused to hold Arabic ”Lives of Saints.”

Likewise, several copies of Aristophanes’ comedies (Plutus, Clouds and Frogs)—often referred to as the ”Byzantine triad”—survived in monastic libraries, complete with scholia by the Byzantine scholars Thomas Magistros and Demetrius Triclinius.