How did the time period of the Renaissance come about?
The renaissance wasn’t a time period, it was an intellectual movement in the arts and sciences. In 1204, Western Crusaders captured Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire;and also took over most of Greece from the Byzantines. Western rulers, theologians and scholars now had access to many classical works and sources that had been preserved in the East, but lost in the West for centuries. Many of the ideas and contents in these works were transmitted back to the West, getting to Italy first (for geographic reasons).When the Byzantines retook Constantinople (1261) and Greece (1316) these Latin theologians and scholars returned to the West, speeding up the transfer of ideas, and taking copies from Constantinople and Greece of classical works back with them. It was this that disseminated the ideas and information that provided the intellectual stimulus for the renaissance to begin in the late 13th/early 14th century.
