In history it can often be difficult to find a beginning and ending to a movement; indeed, some movements that are truly influential have no real ending. Often, history is just not that neat. The Renaissance has no storming of the Bastille, posting of a thesis, or significant military campaign to mark its beginning; rather, this period can be seen as the continual development of ideas, events, and innovations of the late Middle Ages. To a sophisticated Florentine, the medieval period was nothing more than a dark time characterized by superstitions, meanness in manners, faceless masons building cathedrals only for the glory of God, and illiterate masses of people living in poverty. However, it was the late Middle Ages that planted the seeds of change that matured into the period we today call the Renaissance. The Scholastic Thomas Aquinas worked to make the writings of Aristotle accepted in the Catholic Church and, in doing so, elevated the importance of the individual. Francesco Petrarch, today known as the “father of humanism,” revived an interest in the classics among European society by collecting, translating, and recommending the virtues of these texts to people across the continent of Europe. His work was furthered after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, when many Greek scholars came to Florence, among other places, and brought their texts with them.