Portrait of Basilios Bessarion

Basilios Bessarion came to Italy from the Greek east as the Byzantine world was collapsing. He had crossed over for the church council of 1438 that briefly tried to reunite the Greek and Latin churches, and when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 he stayed, a cardinal in Rome working to rescue what he could of Greek learning. He gathered manuscripts wherever he could and left the whole library to Venice, where it became the heart of the Marciana that still keeps his gift. He handed the city nearly 1,000 volumes, and a good many ancient Greek texts survive only because they once sat on his shelves.