The capture of Rhodes, the last Christian bastion of the East, momentarily awakened the pope and the European powers. Again, a Greek contributed to this awakening, Janos Laskaris, a descendant of the Laskarids, the imperial family of Nicaea.
Another Lascarian would later play a catalytic role in the siege of Malta, rescuing his knights, and a descendant became grand master of the order. Of particular interest is Laskaris' speech before the German emperor Charles V in 1525.
The following passage has special weight in many respects, mainly because of Laskaris' references to ancient Greek history, reminding Westerners of what they owed - and owe - to Greece, but also putting to shame the arguments of some about the "anti-Hellenic" Byzantine destroyers of Greek spirit.
"And when I say ancient Greece, I mean that I speak of the great men whom it produced, and who refined and purified the world after all virtue and wisdom. These are the heroes Hercules, Theseus, Jason, and others like them.
"The great generals and statesmen Themistocles, Aristides, Epaminondas, the kings Agesilaus, Philip and Alexander , the first writers of human science, poets and historians and treasurers of the virtuous deeds of rulers, Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch, the researchers of nature and interpreters of divine and human, Plato, Aristotle and many such alike, the mathematicians and geographers Hipparchus, Strabo, Ptolemy, the health writers Hippocrates and Galen, the chorus of theologians, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom and a number of other distinguished people in all branches and sciences.
"The Greeks also introduced the other nations and especially the inhabitants of Europe, such as Italians, Germans, Spaniards, French and others, by teaching them. All the Greeks thus gave the laws, the religion and the morals, without making the people whole. Your majesty, in your measure of justice to take into account the obligations that everyone has towards the Greek nation and the truth is to recognize Greece as their mother and preserve the memory of the aforementioned men, considering them as teachers and protectors of...
"Thus the descendants of them and of ancient Greece, now laboring under the yoke, and each seeing their children torn from their arms to hasten to exodus and fight against the Christians , by messages and constant emissaries in secret and by all means they are exhorting the future Caesarian Majesty through me in these places of strife, to obtain mercy and mercy for them, promising to expose the lives of those in all danger, in the hope that they will see your action on behalf of the future Majesty.
"And don't think that they are outnumbered, or weak, or weak, and because of the weapons and munitions they have, they cannot produce great results for the success of the enterprise." Unfortunately, the beggar apostle of the freedom of the homeland received nothing from the German monarch.