On the revival of learning at the middle of the fifteenth century, the Hellenists of Europe took the pronunciation of Greek from their teachers, the learned Greek refugees who fled from Constantinople when that city was taken by the Turks in 1453, and who carried with them the Greek language, both as the living people who used it, and as the inheritors of the rich store of philological learning accumulated by an unbroken succession of Alexandrian, Roman, and Byzantine scholars.