I pin it down to historical happenstance: Had the byzantines not
   sent over a smart dude to re-educate the Latin West at the
   otherwise doomed council of Florence, all Europe would have is
   Aristotle when Byzantium (the carrier of Classical Greek
   tradition and knowledge) fell... Best two paragraphs - out of
   the Council of Florence page on Wikipedia: === The struggle for
   East-West union at Ferrara and Florence, while promising, never
   bore fruit. While progress toward union in the East continued to
   be made in the following decades, all hopes for a proximate
   reconciliation were dashed with the fall of Constantinople in
   1453. Perhaps the council's most important historical legacy was
   the lectures on Greek classical literature given in Florence by
   many of the delegates from Constantinople, including the
   renowned Neoplatonist Gemistus Pletho. These greatly helped the
   progress of Renaissance humanism.[10]"