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The Greek language served as a lingua franca in the eastern provinces and in Italy, and many Greek intellectuals such as Galen would perform most of their work in Rome. Saint Paul preaching in Athens by Raphael, ca 1515. During this time, Greece and much of the rest of the Roman east came under the influence of Early Christianity.
During Venetian rule, the Greek population of Crete was exposed to Renaissance culture. A thriving literature in the Cretan dialect of Greek developed on the island. The best-known work from this period is the poem Erotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros (Βιτσένζος Κορνάρος).
The Greek Middle Ages are coterminous with the duration of the Byzantine Empire (330–1453). [citation needed]After 395 the Roman Empire split in two. In the East, Greeks were the predominant national group and their language was the lingua franca of the region.
Crete, also known as Candia, (1211–1669), [1] one of the Republic's most important overseas possessions, despite frequent revolts by the Greek population, it was retained until captured by the Ottomans in the Cretan War. [2] Corfu (1207–1214 and 1386–1797), was captured by Venice from its Genoese ruler shortly after the Fourth Crusade.
Medieval works suggest that Modern Greek started shaping as early as the 10th century, with one of the first works being the epic poem of Digenis Acritas. However, the first literary activity which was important enough to be identified as "modern Greek literature" was done in the Cretan dialect during the 16th century in the Venetian Crete.
After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans also captured Athens by 1458, but left a Byzantine despotate in the Peloponnese until 1460. The Venetians still controlled Crete, Aegean islands and some cities-ports, but otherwise the Ottomans controlled many regions of Greece except the mountains and heavily forested areas.
In the 1907 Greek census, 4,675 people from the Ionian Islands stated Catholicism as their denomination, about 1.8% of the total population (254,494). At the same time, 2,541 Ionians (1.0%) gave Italian as their mother tongue, making it the second most frequent language by number of speakers. [ 122 ]
A map of the ancient world centered on Greece. Based on the above definition, the "cores" of the Greco-Roman world can be confidently stated to have been the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, specifically the Italian Peninsula, Greece, Cyprus, the Iberian Peninsula, the Anatolian Peninsula (modern-day Turkey), Gaul (modern-day France), the Syrian region (modern-day Levantine countries, Central ...