Was Julius Caesar the real Jesus Christ?

[Zadius Sky]

I've attached Petrarch's Prefaces to de Viris Illustribus - don't know if this helps or not.

Item Citation
Petrarch's Prefaces to de Viris Illustribus
Benjamin G. Kohl and Petrarch
History and Theory, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May, 1974) , pp. 132-144
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University

 

[Mal7]

There's an online scan of the 1527 edition of Petrarch's "Lives" in Italian here:

_http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/resolve/display/bsb10188800.html

The Life of Julius Caesar starts on page 294.

The file can also be downloaded as a PDF, for private or scientific purposes. File size: 182 MB.

(I found this by doing a library search here: _http://www.vialibri.net/library_search.php
Or the same results can be found by searching on_http://www.worldcat.org)

 

[Laura]

This is Edward Gibbon's story of how the ancient texts were "transmitted to the Western world", i.e. Petrarch and Boccacio.

From: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 6

Chapter LXVI
Part IV
Union of the Greek and Latin Churches.


The most learned Italians of the fifteenth century have confessed and applauded the restoration of Greek literature, after a long oblivion of many hundred years. ^85 Yet in that country, and beyond the Alps, some names are quoted; some profound scholars, who in the darker ages were honorably distinguished by their knowledge of the Greek tongue; and national vanity has been loud in the praise of such rare examples of erudition. Without scrutinizing the merit of individuals, truth must observe, that their science is without a cause, and without an effect; that it was easy for them to satisfy themselves and their more ignorant contemporaries; and that the idiom, which they had so marvellously acquired was transcribed in few manuscripts, and was not taught in any university of the West. In a corner of Italy, it faintly existed as the popular, or at least as the ecclesiastical dialect. ^86 The first impression of the Doric and Ionic colonies has never been completely erased: the Calabrian churches were long attached to the throne of Constantinople: and the monks of St. Basil pursued their studies in Mount Athos and the schools of the East.

Calabria was the native country of Barlaam, who has already appeared as a sectary and an ambassador; and Barlaam was the first who revived, beyond the Alps, the memory, or at least the writings, of Homer. ^87 He is described, by Petrarch and Boccace, ^88 as a man of diminutive stature, though truly great in the measure of learning and genius; of a piercing discernment, though of a slow and painful elocution. For many ages (as they affirm) Greece had not produced his equal in the knowledge of history, grammar, and philosophy; and his merit was celebrated in the attestations of the princes and doctors of Constantinople. One of these attestations is still extant; and the emperor Cantacuzene, the protector of his adversaries, is forced to allow, that Euclid, Aristotle, and Plato, were familiar to that profound and subtle logician. ^89

In the court of Avignon, he formed an intimate connection with Petrarch, ^90 the first of the Latin scholars; and the desire of mutual instruction was the principle of their literary commerce. The Tuscan applied himself with eager curiosity and assiduous diligence to the study of the Greek language; and in a laborious struggle with the dryness and difficulty of the first rudiments, he began to reach the sense, and to feel the spirit, of poets and philosophers, whose minds were congenial to his own. But he was soon deprived of the society and lessons of this useful assistant: Barlaam relinquished his fruitless embassy; and, on his return to Greece, he rashly provoked the swarms of fanatic monks, by attempting to substitute the light of reason to that of their navel. After a separation of three years, the two friends again met in the court of Naples: but the generous pupil renounced the fairest occasion of improvement; and by his recommendation Barlaam was finally settled in a small bishopric of his native Calabria. ^91

The manifold avocations of Petrarch, love and friendship, his various correspondence and frequent journeys, the Roman laurel, and his elaborate compositions in prose and verse, in Latin and Italian, diverted him from a foreign idiom; and as he advanced in life, the attainment of the Greek language was the object of his wishes rather than of his hopes. When he was about fifty years of age, a Byzantine ambassador, his friend, and a master of both tongues, presented him with a copy of Homer; and the answer of Petrarch is at one expressive of his eloquence, gratitude, and regret. After celebrating the generosity of the donor, and the value of a gift more precious in his estimation than gold or rubies, he thus proceeds: "Your present of the genuine and original text of the divine poet, the fountain of all inventions, is worthy of yourself and of me: you have fulfilled your promise, and satisfied my desires. Yet your liberality is still imperfect: with Homer you should have given me yourself; a guide, who could lead me into the fields of light, and disclose to my wondering eyes the spacious miracles of the Iliad and Odyssey. But, alas! Homer is dumb, or I am deaf; nor is it in my power to enjoy the beauty which I possess. I have seated him by the side of Plato, the prince of poets near the prince of philosophers; and I glory in the sight of my illustrious guests. Of their immortal writings, whatever had been translated into the Latin idiom, I had already acquired; but, if there be no profit, there is some pleasure, in beholding these venerable Greeks in their proper and national habit. I am delighted with the aspect of Homer; and as often as I embrace the silent volume, I exclaim with a sigh, Illustrious bard! with what pleasure should I listen to thy song, if my sense of hearing were not obstructed and lost by the death of one friend, and in the much-lamented absence of another. Nor do I yet despair; and the example of Cato suggests some comfort and hope, since it was in the last period of age that he attained the knowledge of the Greek letters." ^92

[Footnote 85: Of those writers who professedly treat of the restoration of the Greek learning in Italy, the two principal are Hodius, Dr. Humphrey Hody, (de Græcis Illustribus, Linguæ Græcæ Literarumque humaniorum Instauratoribus; Londini, 1742, in large octavo,) and Tiraboschi, (Istoria della Letteratura Italiana, tom. v. p. 364--377, tom. vii. p. 112--143.) The Oxford professor is a laborious scholar, but the librarian of Modena enjoys the superiority of a modern and national historian.]

[Footnote 86: In Calabria quæ olim magna Græcia dicebatur, coloniis Græcis repleta, remansit quædam linguæ veteris, cognitio, (Hodius, p. 2.) If it were eradicated by the Romans, it was revived and perpetuated by the monks of St. Basil, who possessed seven convents at Rossano alone, (Giannone, Istoria di Napoli, tom. i. p. 520.)]

[Footnote 87: Ii Barbari (says Petrarch, the French and Germans) vix, non dicam libros sed nomen Homeri audiverunt. Perhaps, in that respect, the xiiith century was less happy than the age of Charlemagne.]

[Footnote 88: See the character of Barlaam, in Boccace de Genealog. Deorum, l. xv. c. 6.]

[Footnote 89: Cantacuzen. l. ii. c. 36.]

[Footnote 90: For the connection of Petrarch and Barlaam, and the two interviews at Avignon in 1339, and at Naples in 1342, see the excellent Mémoires sur la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 406--410, tom. ii. p. 74--77.]

[Footnote 91: The bishopric to which Barlaam retired, was the old Locri, in the middle ages. Scta. Cyriaca, and by corruption Hieracium, Gerace, (Dissert. Chorographica Italiæ Medii Ævi, p. 312.) The dives opum of the Norman times soon lapsed into poverty, since even the church was poor: yet the town still contains 3000 inhabitants, (Swinburne, p. 340.)]

[Footnote 92: I will transcribe a passage from this epistle of Petrarch, (Famil. ix. 2;) Donasti Homerum non in alienum sermonem violento alveâ ?? derivatum, sed ex ipsis Græci eloquii scatebris, et qualis divino illi profluxit ingenio . . . . Sine tuâ voce Homerus tuus apud me mutus, immo vero ego apud illum surdus sum. Gaudeo tamen vel adspectû solo, ac sæpe illum amplexus atque suspirans dico, O magne vir, &c.]

The prize which eluded the efforts of Petrarch, was obtained by the fortune and industry of his friend Boccace, ^93 the father of the Tuscan prose. That popular writer, who derives his reputation from the Decameron, a hundred novels of pleasantry and love, may aspire to the more serious praise of restoring in Italy the study of the Greek language.

In the year one thousand three hundred and sixty, a disciple of Barlaam, whose name was Leo, or Leontius Pilatus, was detained in his way to Avignon by the advice and hospitality of Boccace, who lodged the stranger in his house, prevailed on the republic of Florence to allow him an annual stipend, and devoted his leisure to the first Greek professor, who taught that language in the Western countries of Europe.

The appearance of Leo might disgust the most eager disciple, he was clothed in the mantle of a philosopher, or a mendicant; his countenance was hideous; his face was overshadowed with black hair; his beard long an uncombed; his deportment rustic; his temper gloomy and inconstant; nor could he grace his discourse with the ornaments, or even the perspicuity, of Latin elocution. But his mind was stored with a treasure of Greek learning: history and fable, philosophy and grammar, were alike at his command; and he read the poems of Homer in the schools of Florence. It was from his explanation that Boccace composed ^* and transcribed a literal prose version of the Iliad and Odyssey, which satisfied the thirst of his friend Petrarch, and which, perhaps, in the succeeding century, was clandestinely used by Laurentius Valla, the Latin interpreter. It was from his narratives that the same Boccace collected the materials for his treatise on the genealogy of the heathen gods, a work, in that age, of stupendous erudition, and which he ostentatiously sprinkled with Greek characters and passages, to excite the wonder and applause of his more ignorant readers. ^94

The first steps of learning are slow and laborious; no more than ten votaries of Homer could be enumerated in all Italy; and neither Rome, nor Venice, nor Naples, could add a single name to this studious catalogue. But their numbers would have multiplied, their progress would have been accelerated, if the inconstant Leo, at the end of three years, had not relinquished an honorable and beneficial station. In his passage, Petrarch entertained him at Padua a short time: he enjoyed the scholar, but was justly offended with the gloomy and unsocial temper of the man. Discontented with the world and with himself, Leo depreciated his present enjoyments, while absent persons and objects were dear to his imagination. In Italy he was a Thessalian, in Greece a native of Calabria: in the company of the Latins he disdained their language, religion, and manners: no sooner was he landed at Constantinople, than he again sighed for the wealth of Venice and the elegance of Florence. His Italian friends were deaf to his importunity: he depended on their curiosity and indulgence, and embarked on a second voyage; but on his entrance into the Adriatic, the ship was assailed by a tempest, and the unfortunate teacher, who like Ulysses had fastened himself to the mast, was struck dead by a flash of lightning. The humane Petrarch dropped a tear on his disaster; but he was most anxious to learn whether some copy of Euripides or Sophocles might not be saved from the hands of the mariners. ^95

[Footnote 93: For the life and writings of Boccace, who was born in 1313, and died in 1375, Fabricius (Bibliot. Latin. Medii Ævi, tom. i. p. 248, &c.) and Tiraboschi (tom. v. p. 83, 439--451) may be consulted. The editions, versions, imitations of his novels, are innumerable. Yet he was ashamed to communicate that trifling, and perhaps scandalous, work to Petrarch, his respectable friend, in whose letters and memoirs he conspicuously appears.]

[Footnote *: This translation of Homer was by Pilatus, not by Boccacio. See Hallam, Hist. of Lit. vol. i. p. 132. -- M.]

[Footnote 94: Boccace indulges an honest vanity: Ostentationis causâ Græca carmina adscripsi . . . . jure utor meo; meum est hoc decus, mea gloria scilicet inter Etruscos Græcis uti carminibus. Nonne ego fui qui Leontium Pilatum, &c., (de Genealogia Deorum, l. xv. c. 7, a work which, though now forgotten, has run through thirteen or fourteen editions.)]

[Footnote 95: Leontius, or Leo Pilatus, is sufficiently made known by Hody, (p. 2--11,) and the abbé de Sade, (Vie de Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 625--634, 670--673,) who has very happily caught the lively and dramatic manner of his original.]

But the faint rudiments of Greek learning, which Petrarch had encouraged and Boccace had planted, soon withered and expired. The succeeding generation was content for a while with the improvement of Latin eloquence; nor was it before the end of the fourteenth century that a new and perpetual flame was rekindled in Italy. ^96

Previous to his own journey the emperor Manuel despatched his envoys and orators to implore the compassion of the Western princes. Of these envoys, the most conspicuous, or the most learned, was Manuel Chrysoloras, ^97 of noble birth, and whose Roman ancestors are supposed to have migrated with the great Constantine. After visiting the courts of France and England, where he obtained some contributions and more promises, the envoy was invited to assume the office of a professor; and Florence had again the honor of this second invitation. By his knowledge, not only of the Greek, but of the Latin tongue, Chrysoloras deserved the stipend, and surpassed the expectation, of the republic. His school was frequented by a crowd of disciples of every rank and age; and one of these, in a general history, has described his motives and his success.

"At that time," says Leonard Aretin, ^98 "I was a student of the civil law; but my soul was inflamed with the love of letters; and I bestowed some application on the sciences of logic and rhetoric. On the arrival of Manuel, I hesitated whether I should desert my legal studies, or relinquish this golden opportunity; and thus, in the ardor of youth, I communed with my own mind -- Wilt thou be wanting to thyself and thy fortune? Wilt thou refuse to be introduced to a familiar converse with Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes; with those poets, philosophers, and orators, of whom such wonders are related, and who are celebrated by every age as the great masters of human science? Of professors and scholars in civil law, a sufficient supply will always be found in our universities; but a teacher, and such a teacher, of the Greek language, if he once be suffered to escape, may never afterwards be retrieved. Convinced by these reasons, I gave myself to Chrysoloras; and so strong was my passion, that the lessons which I had imbibed in the day were the constant object of my nightly dreams." ^99

At the same time and place, the Latin classics were explained by John of Ravenna, the domestic pupil of Petrarch; ^100 the Italians, who illustrated their age and country, were formed in this double school; and Florence became the fruitful seminary of Greek and Roman erudition. ^101 The presence of the emperor recalled Chrysoloras from the college to the court; but he afterwards taught at Pavia and Rome with equal industry and applause. The remainder of his life, about fifteen years, was divided between Italy and Constantinople, between embassies and lessons. In the noble office of enlightening a foreign nation, the grammarian was not unmindful of a more sacred duty to his prince and country; and Emanuel Chrysoloras died at Constance on a public mission from the emperor to the council.

[Footnote 96: Dr. Hody (p. 54) is angry with Leonard Aretin, Guarinus, Paulus Jovius, &c., for affirming, that the Greek letters were restored in Italy post septingentos annos; as if, says he, they had flourished till the end of the viith century. These writers most probably reckoned from the last period of the exarchate; and the presence of the Greek magistrates and troops at Ravenna and Rome must have preserved, in some degree, the use of their native tongue.]

[Footnote 97: See the article of Emanuel, or Manuel Chrysoloras, in Hody (p 12--54) and Tiraboschi, (tom. vii. p. 113--118.) The precise date of his arrival floats between the years 1390 and 1400, and is only confined by the reign of Boniface IX.]

[Footnote 98: The name of Aretinus has been assumed by five or six natives of Arezzo in Tuscany, of whom the most famous and the most worthless lived in the xvith century. Leonardus Brunus Aretinus, the disciple of Chrysoloras, was a linguist, an orator, and an historian, the secretary of four successive popes, and the chancellor of the republic of Florence, where he died A.D. 1444, at the age of seventy-five, (Fabric. Bibliot. Medii Ævi, tom. i. p. 190 &c. Tiraboschi, tom. vii. p. 33--38.)]

[Footnote 99: See the passage in Aretin. Commentario Rerum suo Tempore in Italia gestarum, apud Hodium, p. 28--30.]

[Footnote 100: In this domestic discipline, Petrarch, who loved the youth, often complains of the eager curiosity, restless temper, and proud feelings, which announce the genius and glory of a riper age, (Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 700--709.)]

[Footnote 101: Hinc Græcæ Latinæque scholæ exortæ sunt, Guarino Philelpho, Leonardo Aretino, Caroloque, ac plerisque aliis tanquam ex equo Trojano prodeuntibus, quorum emulatione multa ingenia deinceps ad laudem excitata sunt, (Platina in Bonifacio IX.) Another Italian writer adds the names of Paulus Petrus Vergerius, Omnibonus Vincentius, Poggius, Franciscus Barbarus, &c. But I question whether a rigid chronology would allow Chrysoloras all these eminent scholars, (Hodius, p. 25--27, &c.)]

After his example, the restoration of the Greek letters in Italy was prosecuted by a series of emigrants, who were destitute of fortune, and endowed with learning, or at least with language. From the terror or oppression of the Turkish arms, the natives of Thessalonica and Constantinople escaped to a land of freedom, curiosity, and wealth. The synod introduced into Florence the lights of the Greek church, and the oracles of the Platonic philosophy; and the fugitives who adhered to the union, had the double merit of renouncing their country, not only for the Christian, but for the catholic cause. A patriot, who sacrifices his party and conscience to the allurements of favor, may be possessed, however, of the private and social virtues: he no longer hears the reproachful epithets of slave and apostate; and the consideration which he acquires among his new associates will restore in his own eyes the dignity of his character. The prudent conformity of Bessarion was rewarded with the Roman purple: he fixed his residence in Italy; and the Greek cardinal, the titular patriarch of Constantinople, was respected as the chief and protector of his nation: ^102 his abilities were exercised in the legations of Bologna, Venice, Germany, and France; and his election to the chair of St. Peter floated for a moment on the uncertain breath of a conclave. ^103 His ecclesiastical honors diffused a splendor and preeminence over his literary merit and service: his palace was a school; as often as the cardinal visited the Vatican, he was attended by a learned train of both nations; ^104 of men applauded by themselves and the public; and whose writings, now overspread with dust, were popular and useful in their own times.

I shall not attempt to enumerate the restorers of Grecian literature in the fifteenth century; and it may be sufficient to mention with gratitude the names of Theodore Gaza, of George of Trebizond, of John Argyropulus, and Demetrius Chalcocondyles, who taught their native language in the schools of Florence and Rome. Their labors were not inferior to those of Bessarion, whose purple they revered, and whose fortune was the secret object of their envy.

But the lives of these grammarians were humble and obscure: they had declined the lucrative paths of the church; their dress and manners secluded them from the commerce of the world; and since they were confined to the merit, they might be content with the rewards, of learning. From this character, Janus Lascaris ^105 will deserve an exception. His eloquence, politeness, and Imperial descent, recommended him to the French monarch; and in the same cities he was alternately employed to teach and to negotiate. Duty and interest prompted them to cultivate the study of the Latin language; and the most successful attained the faculty of writing and speaking with fluency and elegance in a foreign idiom. But they ever retained the inveterate vanity of their country: their praise, or at least their esteem, was reserved for the national writers, to whom they owed their fame and subsistence; and they sometimes betrayed their contempt in licentious criticism or satire on Virgil's poetry, and the oratory of Tully. ^106

The superiority of these masters arose from the familiar use of a living language; and their first disciples were incapable of discerning how far they had degenerated from the knowledge, and even the practice of their ancestors. A vicious pronunciation, ^107 which they introduced, was banished from the schools by the reason of the succeeding age. Of the power of the Greek accents they were ignorant; and those musical notes, which, from an Attic tongue, and to an Attic ear, must have been the secret soul of harmony, were to their eyes, as to our own, no more than minute and unmeaning marks, in prose superfluous and troublesome in verse. The art of grammar they truly possessed; the valuable fragments of Apollonius and Herodian were transfused into their lessons; and their treatises of syntax and etymology, though devoid of philosophic spirit, are still useful to the Greek student. In the shipwreck of the Byzantine libraries, each fugitive seized a fragment of treasure, a copy of some author, who without his industry might have perished: the transcripts were multiplied by an assiduous, and sometimes an elegant pen; and the text was corrected and explained by their own comments, or those of the elder scholiasts. The sense, though not the spirit, of the Greek classics, was interpreted to the Latin world: the beauties of style evaporate in a version; but the judgment of Theodore Gaza selected the more solid works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and their natural histories of animals and plants opened a rich fund of genuine and experimental science.

[Footnote 102: See in Hody the article of Bessarion, (p. 136--177.) Theodore Gaza, George of Trebizond, aud the rest of the Greeks whom I have named or omitted, are inserted in their proper chapters of his learned work. See likewise Tiraboschi, in the 1st and 2d parts of the vith tome.]

[Footnote 103: The cardinals knocked at his door, but his conclavist refused to interrupt the studies of Bessarion: "Nicholas," said he, "thy respect has cost thee a hat, and me the tiara." *

Note: * Roscoe (Life of Lorenzo de Medici, vol. i. p. 75) considers that Hody has refuted this "idle tale." -- M.]

[Footnote 104: Such as George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza, Argyropulus, Andronicus of Thessalonica, Philelphus, Poggius, Blondus, Nicholas Perrot, Valla, Campanus, Platina, &c. Viri (says Hody, with the pious zeal of a scholar) nullo ævo perituri, p. 156.)]

[Footnote 105: He was born before the taking of Constantinople, but his honorable life was stretched far into the xvith century, (A.D. 1535.) Leo X. and Francis I. were his noblest patrons, under whose auspices he founded the Greek colleges of Rome and Paris, (Hody, p. 247--275.) He left posterity in France; but the counts de Vintimille, and their numerous branches, derive the name of Lascaris from a doubtful marriage in the xiiith century with the daughter of a Greek emperor (Ducange, Fam. Byzant. p. 224--230.)]

[Footnote 106: Two of his epigrams against Virgil, and three against Tully, are preserved and refuted by Franciscus Floridus, who can find no better names than Græculus ineptus et impudens, (Hody, p. 274.) In our own times, an English critic has accused the Æneid of containing multa languida, nugatoria, spiritû et majestate carminis heroici defecta; many such verses as he, the said Jeremiah Markland, would have been ashamed of owning, (præfat. ad Statii Sylvas, p. 21, 22.)]

[Footnote 107: Emanuel Chrysoloras, and his colleagues, are accused of ignorance, envy, or avarice, (Sylloge, &c., tom. ii. p. 235.) The modern Greeks pronounce the b as a V consonant, and confound three vowels, (h i u,) and several diphthongs. Such was the vulgar pronunciation which the stern Gardiner maintained by penal statutes in the university of Cambridge: but the monosyllable bh represented to an Attic ear the bleating of sheep, and a bellwether is better evidence than a bishop or a chancellor. The treatises of those scholars, particularly Erasmus, who asserted a more classical pronunciation, are collected in the Sylloge of Havercamp, (2 vols. in octavo, Lugd. Bat. 1736, 1740:) but it is difficult to paint sounds by words: and in their reference to modern use, they can be understood only by their respective countrymen. We may observe, that our peculiar pronunciation of the O, th, is approved by Erasmus, (tom. ii. p. 130.)]

Yet the fleeting shadows of metaphysics were pursued with more curiosity and ardor. After a long oblivion, Plato was revived in Italy by a venerable Greek, ^108 who taught in the house of Cosmo of Medicis. While the synod of Florence was involved in theological debate, some beneficial consequences might flow from the study of his elegant philosophy: his style is the purest standard of the Attic dialect, and his sublime thoughts are sometimes adapted to familiar conversation, and sometimes adorned with the richest colors of poetry and eloquence. The dialogues of Plato are a dramatic picture of the life and death of a sage; and, as often as he descends from the clouds, his moral system inculcates the love of truth, of our country, and of mankind. The precept and example of Socrates recommended a modest doubt and liberal inquiry; and if the Platonists, with blind devotion, adored the visions and errors of their divine master, their enthusiasm might correct the dry, dogmatic method of the Peripatetic school. So equal, yet so opposite, are the merits of Plato and Aristotle, that they may be balanced in endless controversy; but some spark of freedom may be produced by the collision of adverse servitude. The modern Greeks were divided between the two sects: with more fury than skill they fought under the banner of their leaders; and the field of battle was removed in their flight from Constantinople to Rome. But this philosophical debate soon degenerated into an angry and personal quarrel of grammarians; and Bessarion, though an advocate for Plato, protected the national honor, by interposing the advice and authority of a mediator. In the gardens of the Medici, the academical doctrine was enjoyed by the polite and learned: but their philosophic society was quickly dissolved; and if the writings of the Attic sage were perused in the closet, the more powerful Stagyrite continued to reign, the oracle of the church and school. ^109

[Footnote 108: George Gemistus Pletho, a various and voluminous writer, the master of Bessarion, and all the Platonists of the times. He visited Italy in his old age, and soon returned to end his days in Peloponnesus. See the curious Diatribe of Leo Allatius de Georgiis, in Fabricius. (Bibliot. Græc. tom. x. p. 739--756.)]

[Footnote 109: The state of the Platonic philosophy in Italy is illustrated by Boivin, (Mém. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, tom. ii. p. 715--729,) and Tiraboschi, (tom. vi. P. i. p. 259--288.)]

I have fairly represented the literary merits of the Greeks; yet it must be confessed, that they were seconded and surpassed by the ardor of the Latins. Italy was divided into many independent states; and at that time it was the ambition of princes and republics to vie with each other in the encouragement and reward of literature. The fame of Nicholas the Fifth ^110 has not been adequate to his merits. From a plebeian origin he raised himself by his virtue and learning: the character of the man prevailed over the interest of the pope; and he sharpened those weapons which were soon pointed against the Roman church. ^111 He had been the friend of the most eminent scholars of the age: he became their patron; and such was the humility of his manners, that the change was scarcely discernible either to them or to himself. If he pressed the acceptance of a liberal gift, it was not as the measure of desert, but as the proof of benevolence; and when modest merit declined his bounty, "Accept it," would he say, with a consciousness of his own worth: "ye will not always have a Nicholas among you."

The influence of the holy see pervaded Christendom; and he exerted that influence in the search, not of benefices, but of books. From the ruins of the Byzantine libraries, from the darkest monasteries of Germany and Britain, he collected the dusty manuscripts of the writers of antiquity; and wherever the original could not be removed, a faithful copy was transcribed and transmitted for his use. The Vatican, the old repository for bulls and legends, for superstition and forgery, was daily replenished with more precious furniture; and such was the industry of Nicholas, that in a reign of eight years he formed a library of five thousand volumes. To his munificence the Latin world was indebted for the versions of Xenophon, Diodorus, Polybius, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Appian; of Strabo's Geography, of the Iliad, of the most valuable works of Plato and Aristotle, of Ptolemy and Theophrastus, and of the fathers of the Greek church.

The example of the Roman pontiff was preceded or imitated by a Florentine merchant, who governed the republic without arms and without a title. Cosmo of Medicis ^112 was the father of a line of princes, whose name and age are almost synonymous with the restoration of learning: his credit was ennobled into fame; his riches were dedicated to the service of mankind; he corresponded at once with Cairo and London: and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books was often imported in the same vessel. The genius and education of his grandson Lorenzo rendered him not only a patron, but a judge and candidate, in the literary race. In his palace, distress was entitled to relief, and merit to reward: his leisure hours were delightfully spent in the Platonic academy; he encouraged the emulation of Demetrius Chalcocondyles and Angelo Politian; and his active missionary Janus Lascaris returned from the East with a treasure of two hundred manuscripts, fourscore of which were as yet unknown in the libraries of Europe. ^113

The rest of Italy was animated by a similar spirit, and the progress of the nation repaid the liberality of their princes. The Latins held the exclusive property of their own literature; and these disciples of Greece were soon capable of transmitting and improving the lessons which they had imbibed. After a short succession of foreign teachers, the tide of emigration subsided; but the language of Constantinople was spread beyond the Alps and the natives of France, Germany, and England, ^114 imparted to their country the sacred fire which they had kindled in the schools of Florence and Rome. ^115 In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill: the Greek authors, forgotten on the banks of the Ilissus, have been illustrated on those of the Elbe and the Thames: and Bessarion or Gaza might have envied the superior science of the Barbarians; the accuracy of Budæus, the taste of Erasmus, the copiousness of Stephens, the erudition of Scaliger, the discernment of Reiske, or of Bentley. On the side of the Latins, the discovery of printing was a casual advantage: but this useful art has been applied by Aldus, and his innumerable successors, to perpetuate and multiply the works of antiquity. ^116 A single manuscript imported from Greece is revived in ten thousand copies; and each copy is fairer than the original. In this form, Homer and Plato would peruse with more satisfaction their own writings; and their scholiasts must resign the prize to the labors of our Western editors.

[Footnote 110: See the Life of Nicholas V. by two contemporary authors, Janottus Manettus, (tom. iii. P. ii. p. 905--962,) and Vespasian of Florence, (tom. xxv. p. 267--290,) in the collection of Muratori; and consult Tiraboschi, (tom. vi. P. i. p. 46--52, 109,) and Hody in the articles of Theodore Gaza, George of Trebizond, &c.]

[Footnote 111: Lord Bolingbroke observes, with truth and spirit, that the popes in this instance, were worse politicians than the muftis, and that the charm which had bound mankind for so many ages was broken by the magicians themselves, (Letters on the Study of History, l. vi. p. 165, 166, octavo edition, 1779.)]

[Footnote 112: See the literary history of Cosmo and Lorenzo of Medicis, in Tiraboschi, (tom. vi. P. i. l. i. c. 2,) who bestows a due measure of praise on Alphonso of Arragon, king of Naples, the dukes of Milan, Ferrara Urbino, &c. The republic of Venice has deserved the least from the gratitude of scholars.]

[Footnote 113: Tiraboschi, (tom. vi. P. i. p. 104,) from the preface of Janus Lascaris to the Greek Anthology, printed at Florence, 1494. Latebant (says Aldus in his preface to the Greek orators, apud Hodium, p. 249) in Atho Thraciæ monte. Eas Lascaris . . . . in Italiam reportavit. Miserat enim ipsum Laurentius ille Medices in Græciam ad inquirendos simul, et quantovis emendos pretio bonos libros. It is remarkable enough, that the research was facilitated by Sultan Bajazet II.]

[Footnote 114: The Greek language was introduced into the university of Oxford in the last years of the xvth century, by Grocyn, Linacer, and Latimer, who had all studied at Florence under Demetrius Chalcocondyles. See Dr. Knight's curious Life of Erasmus. Although a stout academical patriot, he is forced to acknowledge that Erasmus learned Greek at Oxford, and taught it at Cambridge.]

[Footnote 115: The jealous Italians were desirous of keeping a monopoly of Greek learning. When Aldus was about to publish the Greek scholiasts on Sophocles and Euripides, Cave, (said they,) cave hoc facias, ne Barbari istis adjuti domi maneant, et pauciores in Italiam ventitent, (Dr. Knight, in his Life of Erasmus, p. 365, from Beatus Rhemanus.)]

[Footnote 116: The press of Aldus Manutius, a Roman, was established at Venice about the year 1494: he printed above sixty considerable works of Greek literature, almost all for the first time; several containing different treatises and authors, and of several authors, two, three, or four editions, (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. xiii. p. 605, &c.) Yet his glory must not tempt us to forget, that the first Greek book, the Grammar of Constantine Lascaris, was printed at Milan in 1476; and that the Florence Homer of 1488 displays all the luxury of the typographical art. See the Annales Typographical of Mattaire, and the Bibliographie Instructive of De Bure, a knowing bookseller of Paris.]

Before the revival of classic literature, the Barbarians in Europe were immersed in ignorance; and their vulgar tongues were marked with the rudeness and poverty of their manners. The students of the more perfect idioms of Rome and Greece were introduced to a new world of light and science; to the society of the free and polished nations of antiquity; and to a familiar converse with those immortal men who spoke the sublime language of eloquence and reason. Such an intercourse must tend to refine the taste, and to elevate the genius, of the moderns; and yet, from the first experiments, it might appear that the study of the ancients had given fetters, rather than wings, to the human mind. However laudable, the spirit of imitation is of a servile cast; and the first disciples of the Greeks and Romans were a colony of strangers in the midst of their age and country.

The minute and laborious diligence which explored the antiquities of remote times might have improved or adorned the present state of society, the critic and metaphysician were the slaves of Aristotle; the poets, historians, and orators, were proud to repeat the thoughts and words of the Augustan age: the works of nature were observed with the eyes of Pliny and Theophrastus; and some Pagan votaries professed a secret devotion to the gods of Homer and Plato. ^117

The Italians were oppressed by the strength and number of their ancient auxiliaries: the century after the deaths of Petrarch and Boccace was filled with a crowd of Latin imitators, who decently repose on our shelves; but in that æra of learning it will not be easy to discern a real discovery of science, a work of invention or eloquence, in the popular language of the country. ^118 But as soon as it had been deeply saturated with the celestial dew, the soil was quickened into vegetation and life; the modern idioms were refined; the classics of Athens and Rome inspired a pure taste and a generous emulation; and in Italy, as afterwards in France and England, the pleasing reign of poetry and fiction was succeeded by the light of speculative and experimental philosophy. Genius may anticipate the season of maturity; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded: nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.

[Footnote 117: I will select three singular examples of this classic enthusiasm. I. At the synod of Florence, Gemistus Pletho said, in familiar conversation to George of Trebizond, that in a short time mankind would unanimously renounce the Gospel and the Koran, for a religion similar to that of the Gentiles, (Leo Allatius, apud Fabricium, tom. x. p. 751.) 2. Paul II. persecuted the Roman academy, which had been founded by Pomponius Lætus; and the principal members were accused of heresy, impiety, and paganism, (Tiraboschi, tom. vi. P. i. p. 81, 82.) 3. In the next century, some scholars and poets in France celebrated the success of Jodelle's tragedy of Cleopatra, by a festival of Bacchus, and, as it is said, by the sacrifice of a goat, (Bayle, Dictionnaire, Jodelle. Fontenelle, tom. iii. p. 56--61.) Yet the spirit of bigotry might often discern a serious impiety in the sportive play of fancy and learning.]

[Footnote 118: The survivor Boccace died in the year 1375; and we cannot place before 1480 the composition of the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci and the Orlando Innamorato of Boyardo, (Tiraboschi, tom. vi. P. ii. p. 174--177.)]

 

[Laura]

Two names in Gibbon's recitation above attract interest: John of Ravenna and Pope Nicholas V.

Apparently, the name "John of Ravenna" is a bit ambiguous since two of the following selection could be the one referenced by Gibbon:

John of Ravenna is the name of:

A famous abbot of Fécamp abbey in France from 1031 to 1082. He succeeded William of Volpiano. In 1080 he went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

A young Raverinese born about 1347, who in 1364 went to live with Petrarch as secretary. In 1367 he set out to see the world and make a name for himself, returned in a state of destitution, but, growing restless again, left his employer for good in 1368. He is not mentioned again in Petrarch's correspondence, unless a letter to a certain wanderer (vago cuidam), congratulating him on his arrival at Rome in 1373, is addressed to him.

A son of Conversanus (Conversinus, Convertinus). He is first heard of (November 17, 1368) as appointed to the professorship of rhetoric at Florence, where he had for some time held the post of notary at the courts of justice. He entered (c. 1370) the service of the ducal house of Padua, the Carraras, in which he continued at least until 1404, although the whole of that period was not spent in Padua. Between 1375 and 1379 he was a schoolmaster at Belluno, but was dismissed as "too good for his post" and "not adapted for teaching boys". On March 22, 1382, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at Padua. During the struggle between the Carraras and Viscontis, he spent five years at Udine (1387-1392). Between 1395-1404 he was chancellor of Francis of Carrara, and is heard of for the last time in 1406 as living at Venice. His history of the Carraras, a tasteless production in barbarous Latin, says little for his literary capacity; but as a teacher he enjoyed a great reputation, amongst his pupils being Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona.

Malpaghini (De Malpaghinis. Born about 1356, he was a pupil of Petrarch from a very early age to 1374. On September 19, 1397 he was appointed professor of rhetoric and eloquence at Florence. On June 9, 1412, on the re-opening of the studio, which had been shut from 1405 to 1411 owing to the plague, his appointment was renewed for five years, before the expiration of which period he died (May 1417). Although Malpaghini left nothing behind him, he did much to encourage the study of Latin; among his pupils was Poggio Bracciolini.

As for Pope Nicholas V, there are a few interesting clues though, of course, one cannot rely on Wikipedia. Still, it gives an overview:

Pope Nicholas V (Latin: Nicholaus V) (15 November 1397 – 24 March 1455), born Tommaso Parentucelli, was the head of the Catholic Church from 6 March 1447 until his death in 1455.[1] The Pontificate of Nicholas saw the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. He is the last pope to take the name "Nicholas" upon his election.

He was born at Sarzana, Liguria, where his father was a physician.[2] His father died while he was young. Parentucelli later became a tutor, in Florence, to the families of the Strozzi and Albizzi, where he met the leading humanist scholars.

He studied at Bologna and Florence, gaining a degree in theology in 1422.[3] Bishop Niccolò Albergati was so awe-struck with his capabilities that he took him into his service and gave him the chance to pursue his studies further by sending him on a tour through Germany, France and England. He was able to collect books, for which he had an intellectual's passion, wherever he went. Some of them survive with his marginal annotations.

He attended the Council of Florence[4] and in 1444, when his patron died, he was appointed Bishop of Bologna in his place.[5]
...
At the papal conclave of 1447 he was elected Pope in succession to Eugene IV on 6 March. He took the name Nicholas V in honour of his early benefactor, Niccolò Albergati.

The eight scant years of his pontificate were important in the political, scientific, and literary history of the world. Politically, he concluded the Concordat of Vienna, or Aschaffenburg (17 February 1448) with the German King, Frederick III, by which the decrees of the Council of Basel against papal annates and reservations were abrogated so far as Germany was concerned. In the following year he secured a still greater tactical triumph with the resignation of the Antipope Felix V on 7 April and his own recognition by the rump of the Council of Basel that assembled at Lausanne.

In 1450, Nicholas V held a Jubilee at Rome, and the offerings of the numerous pilgrims who thronged to Rome gave him the means of furthering the cause of culture in Italy, which he had so much at heart. In March 1452 he crowned Frederick III as Holy Roman Emperor in St. Peter's, the last occasion of the coronation of an Emperor at Rome. Within the city of Rome, Nicholas V introduced the fresh spirit of the Renaissance. His plans were of embellishing the city with new monuments worthy of the capital of the Christian world. {This suggests that Rome was still pretty much a wreck. See what follows.}

His first care was practical, to reinforce the city's fortifications,[6] cleaning and even paving some main streets and restoring the water supply. The end of ancient Rome is sometimes dated from the destruction of its magnificent array of aqueducts by 6th-century invaders. In the Middle Ages Romans depended for water on wells and cisterns, and the poor dipped their water from the yellow Tiber. The Aqua Virgo aqueduct, originally constructed by Agrippa, was restored by Nicholas V and emptied into a simple basin that Leon Battista Alberti designed, the predecessor of the Trevi Fountain.

But the works on which Nicholas V especially set his heart were the rebuilding of the Vatican, the Borgo district, and St Peter's Basilica, where the reborn glories of the papacy were to be focused. {In short, it was all a ruin and who knows if what he was "rebuilding" had ever been what it was claimed to have been in the first place?}

He got as far as pulling down part of the ancient basilica, made some alterations to the Lateran Palace (of which some frescos by Fra Angelico bear witness), and laid up 2,522 cartloads of marble from the dilapidated Colosseum for use in the later constructions.

Under the generous patronage of Nicholas V, humanism made rapid strides as well. The new humanist learning had been hitherto looked on with suspicion in Rome, a possible source of schism and heresy from an unhealthy interest in paganism. For Nicholas V, humanism became a tool for the cultural aggrandizement of the Christian capital, and he sent emissaries to the East to attract Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople.[7] The pope also employed Lorenzo Valla to translate Greek histories,[8] pagan as well as Christian, into Latin. This industry, coming just before the dawn of printing, contributed enormously to the sudden expansion of the intellectual horizon.

Nicholas V, with assistance from Enoch of Ascoli and Giovanni Tortelli, founded a library of nine thousand volumes, including manuscripts rescued from the Turks after the fall of Constantinople. The Pope himself was a man of vast erudition, and his friend Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, said of him that "what he does not know is outside the range of human knowledge".

He was compelled, however, to add that the lustre of his pontificate would be forever dulled by the fall of Constantinople, which the Turks took in 1453. The Pope bitterly felt this catastrophe as a double blow to Christendom and to Greek letters. "It is a second death", wrote Aeneas Silvius, "to Homer and Plato."

Nicholas V preached a crusade and endeavoured to reconcile the mutual animosities of the Italian states, but without much success. He did not live long enough to see the effect of the Greek scholars armed with unimagined manuscripts who began to find their way to Italy.

 

[Zadius Sky]

Two names in Gibbon's recitation above attract interest: John of Ravenna and Pope Nicholas V.

I found a reference to John of Ravenna and Petrarch in "Renaissance in Italy: The Fine Arts"

http://www.archive.org/stream/renaissanceinit22symogoog/renaissanceinit22symogoog_djvu.txt

In the course of this work, John of Ravenna became himself a learned man acquiring a finer sense of Latinity than was possessed by any other scholar of his time. Something, too, of the sacred fire he caught from Petrarch, so that in his manhood the very faults of his nature became instrumental in diffusing throughout Italy the passion for antiquity.

He could not long content himself with being feven Petrarch's scribe. Irresistible restlessness impelled hrm to seek adventures in the outer world, to mix with men and gain the glory he was always reading of. Petrarch, incapable of comprehending that any honor was greater than that of being his satellite, treated this ambitious pupil like a willful child. A quarrel ensued. Giovanni left his benefactor's house, and went forth to try his fortunes. Without repeating the vicissitudes of his career in detail, it is enough to mention that want and misery soon drove him back to Petrarch; that once more the vagrant impulse came upon him and that for a season he filled die post of chancellor in the little principality of Carrara.

The one thing however, which he could not endure, was the routine of fixed employment. Therefore we find that he abandoned the Court of the Malaspini, and betook himself to the more congenial work of a wandering professor. H is prodigious memory, by enabling him to retain, word for word, the text of authors he had read, proved of invaluable service to him in this career. His passionate poetic temper made him apt to raise enthusiasm in young souls for literary studies.

 

[Laura]

The BIG question, in view of Fomeko's claims, is from where, exactly, did Petrarch acquire his copies of Sallust and Livy? (This is why I want to check what John of Salisbury knew about Caesar and if it corresponds with what Petrarch "revealed to the world", as in 'there were manuscripts in the collections of various monasteries that could be consulted.')

The web is useful, but obviously, one has to get hold of more in-depth work. Nevertheless, a few clues may be in the following:

Petrarch: Books and the Life of the Mind

A paper presented at the Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference, May, 1995, Illinois State University


During the Renaissance scholars began to turn their attentions to the great works of the pre-Christian writers. In rediscovering the classics, these scholars developed a new way of thinking, a new way of viewing themselves and their world. With this sea-change in the way scholars thought about knowledge, they went beyond the recovery of old knowledge to the development of new knowledge. However that rebirth of learning did not burst forth instantly. Many of its early figures still had one foot firmly in the Age of Faith. Although they saw the works of the ancient writers with new eyes, they still looked at the world with the eyes of the medieval scholars. One of these scholars Petrarch, who officially was a member of the clergy of the Catholic Church while he pursued his studies and writing in the new secular literature he and others like him were creating.

Francisco Petrarca, whose name is commonly anglicized as Francis Petrarch, was born on July 20, 1304 in Arezzo.1 He was the son of Ser Petracco dell'Ancisa, a Florentine notary exiled because of factional politics. Thus he grew up on the move as his father sought work in various cities. After an early attempt to study law he decided he wanted to be a man of letters. However in that time there were few ways to make a living by one's pen, so he took Holy Orders, although he had no real vocation.

In 1335 Pope Benedict XII made Petrarch a canon at the cathedral of Lombez. {Lombez is actually in the Gers department of France, south of us here.} This appointment gave Petrarch a good income in return for very light duties. In fact, Petrarch probably did very little real work in return for his benefice, since it was common practice in those days for a titular canon to farm out his duties to one of the cathedral's working priests for a small fee. While such an act may seem like a dreadful abuse of the system to moderns, it was a common practice at the time. Certainly Petrarch did not regard it as being wrong. His biographer Bishop compares his attitude towards his benefice to the attitude of a modern stockholder who receives dividends derived from the labors of others and never questions the moral rectitude of such transfers of wealth.2

Although Petrarch needed the benefice from his canonry to support himself and his scholarship, he turned down several subsequent offers of higher positions in the Church hierarchy. In particular he turned down a bishopric offered by a later Pope because it would have involved more work that he would have had to personally attend to, work that would have interfered with his own literary efforts. The only high-level post that he appears to have been interested in was that of Cardinal, which would have given him access to vast wealth and power while demanding very little in the way of mandatory duties, but that was not to be.3 Thus he remained at the low levels of the Church hierarchy, receiving a relatively small benefice that enabled him to carry out his real work.

That work was the recovery of the literature of the ancient world. Petrarch devoted most of his time to the collecting and editing of classical manuscripts. He developed a system for critically editing those manuscripts and undertook to teach it to others.4 While the traditional monkish copying techniques insisted that every bit of the available parchment be used, resulting in pages crammed with text, Petrarch left wide margins in which to place future notes and commentary.

Certainly Petrarch possessed the skills necessary to do this sort of work. By all indications he was quite skilled in the Latin language, to the extent that all of his marginalia and most of his correspondence are in that language.5 Petrarch was even able to recover much of the classical Latin sense of words, instead of remaining immured in the Church's usages and the outlook that they represented. This shows particularly well in his epic poetic works, which he did in Latin. In his long narrative poem Africa, which concerned Scipio Africanus, he used the original classical senses of the terms fides (fairness, loyalty, and mutual confidence) and pietas (devotion to parents, family, race and country) rather than the Christian senses from which their English cognates "faith" and "piety" come.6

In fact, Petrarch saw no break between pagan and Christian Rome, unlike his contemporaries. Instead he regarded the whole span of history as one great divine epic. In his historical writings Petrarch often would write of the parallels between the Biblical chronology and that of ancient Rome. For instance, he said that Rome was founded at the same time as King David was writing the Psalms.7 He regarded Christianity's rejection of the classics of antiquity as the greatest failure of Christian scholars and the cause of what he saw as a great shadow over learning during the Middle Ages.8 Although it does not appear that he ever used the term "Dark Ages," his attitude probably helped create the concept that learning came to a halt between the time Rome accepted Christianity and his own time.

Certainly Petrarch's scholarship was far in advance of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. While Isadore of Seville derived his Etymologies from vague similarities between Latin words that supposedly supported some characteristic of the creatures or things so named, Petrarch rejected such fanciful ideas in favor of sound critical thinking. Even when he couldn't come up with more scientific explanations to replace the ridiculous ideas of his contemporaries, he refused to be absorbed into them simply because he had nothing better.9

Petrarch was aware that traditional medieval classifications of the arts lumped historia with grammar. In his work On His Own Ignorance he discussed an incident in which four young scholars of Aristotle came to him, pretending to be admirers of him, and then called him ignorant, although a man of good character and faithful in his friendships. In response, Petrarch pointed out that the things that they considered important were little more than collections of trivia that missed the things that were really important to a scholar.10

Petrarch was quite well-read in the literature that he studied, to a depth unusual today, where breadth of study is more common than depth. In a letter to Boccaccio he told about how he read and re-read the classical authors so thoroughly that he not just learned them, but absorbed them. They became a part of his being, to his very marrow.11

Petrarch viewed collecting books as being the actions of a custodian of memories, until the ghosts of the past filled his memories.12 In a sense he saw his work as that of bringing the authors to life within his mind by learning their books, and the transmission of them to future generations by seeing to it that adequate copies of them were made.

Although Petrarch was primarily a student of the Latin classics, he made a redoubtable effort to learn ancient Greek so that he could study the Greek classics in their original language instead of Latin translations. However obtaining the necessary instruction was almost impossible in his time. Through great dint of effort he did manage to secure the efforts of a Greek monk visiting Avignon for talks with the Pope, {Which suggests that the papacy was seated at Avignon at this time, NOT AT ROME which was still a ruin.} but this monk proved to be a poor teacher, although a willing one, and Petrarch learned no useable Greek. His method of teaching involved taking Plato and translating it bit by bit into Latin, with the idea that Petrarch would thus grasp the mechanics of the language and be able to read it. However flawed its approach and intended results might have been, this endeavor did provide him with a serviceable translation of Plato into Latin in the process.13 And in spite of the failure of his efforts to learn Greek, Petrarch did collect a number of Greek books in hopes that one day he would be able to read them in the original. Many times he would stare at them in longing for the day when he would be able to find a suitable tutor in the language and be able to fathom the mysteries hidden within a language that would remain shut to him for all his days. In a letter to Nicholas Sygeros, the Byzantine envoy to the Papal Court, he talks about his copy of Plato and his appreciation of the man's works, combined with his regret at not being able to read the language. Yet he still continued to hope that one day he would be able to, noting that Cato learned a substantial amount of Greek at an advanced age.14

Petrarch was a prolific writer of letters, and a great deal may be learned of his character from his letters. In his day it was far more difficult for a person to send a letter to a friend than it is in modern times. In the Fourteenth Century there were no regular mail services. The only way to send a letter was to entrust it to a person travelling in that direction, hoping that the person would not discard or lose the letter. Bandits lurked along the roads to rob and kill the unwary on an overland trip, while a journey by sea held the peril of storm and shipwreck. Many travellers never got through to their intended destinations, and many letters fell by the wayside with them, or were taken by bandits to be sold, particularly if their authors were well-known figures.16 This is one of the few letters in which he refers directly to his love of books. However his attitude toward his books comes out quite clearly in the way he uses the things he has learned from his books when writing on other subjects. In many of his letters he makes frequent references to the classical writers, regarding them as fine sources of wisdom.17 When trying to motivate Cola de Rizzo to take Rome and restore it to its former glory, he refers to the histories of Livy and Sallust.18 {Another evidence that Rome was still in ruins.}

Petrarch undertook his famous climb of Mont Ventoux in 1336 after reading Livy's account of how Philip of Macedon climbed Mount Hermus (now Mt. Balkan in Bulgaria) in order to find out if he could see the Black Sea and the Adriatic at once from its peak. However that was justification for the undertaking. Petrarch's primary motivation in climbing was the challenge of scaling the peak. On this basis , Morris Bishop calls Petrarch the first modern mountain-climber.19 Petrarch discussed the climb in a letter to his former confessor, and stated that the account he found in Livy's History of Rome inspired him to make the climb.20

Petrarch once quoted Virgil in his defense of a young peasant who was condemned to death by the lord of his manor for having premarital sex with the girl he loved in violation of the traditional droit de siegneur.21 (Traditionally, the lord of the estate had the right to bed his serf women on their wedding nights. Although the women should have been virgins, there were no doubt cases in which they were not. While many lords probably chose to ignore such things, or were deceived by clever wenches who found ways to produce false blood, this one apparently chose to demand his rights and lay punishment for those who dared to filch what was regarded as rightfully his.)

But of all the classical authors, Petrarch held Cicero in the greatest of esteem. Perhaps it was one particular discovery that Petrarch made which inspired him to be such a great correspondent. During his visit to Verona in 1345, Petrarch found Cicero's Letters to Atticus in the cathedral library. Although still recovering from a fall from a horse, Petrarch set himself to the work of copying them in their entirety, along with a number of other letters of Cicero. The resultant manuscript was so large that it could not fit on a bookshelf and had to be set on the floor instead.22 These letters had been unknown to the scholarly world until that time, and they revealed a totally new side of Cicero to Petrarch. While Cicero's public works had shown him as aloof from politics, his private letters revealed him as a sly politician and courtier.23

Petrarch made many other journeys to discover manuscripts that had laid unknown and unused in monasteries and cathedral libraries. In this effort being a member of the clergy served him well, since it is unlikely that he would have been allowed to peruse many of those libraries if he had been a lay scholar instead. In one of his letters he recounts his travails on those voyages and how he found an oration of Cicero in LiŽge, but had a terrible time obtaining ink and had to make do with some that was yellow as saffron.24

Even when he had the means to hire others to copy manuscripts for him instead of doing his own copying, he frequently had difficulties in hiring reliable individuals. In a letter to Lapo di Castiglionchio he discusses his difficulties in getting a copy made of a work of Cicero that Castiglionchio had loaned to him. He begins by bemoaning the woeful lack of scribes that have a real understanding of the works that they are copying and ignorant scribes would produce unintelligible manuscripts and thus a great loss of learning. In regards to the specific problems he had in obtaining a copy of the Cicero in question he does not go into great detail, saying only that he could not have it copied because of the "incompetence of the copyists."25 One can only imagine what sort of frustrations must underlie that succinct summation of the problems encountered. His patience apparently exhausted by these inadequate results, he finally decided that there was simply no other way to obtain an adequate copy except by setting his own hand to the pen, and so he did. But even as he was midway through his undertaking, he began to have second thoughts about whether he should be devoting his time to such manual pursuits as the mere transcription of a text. That was when he came across Cicero's own account of copying down various orations of others during his idle hours. Seeing this evidence that his great hero had performed the work of a scribe to pass the time, Petrarch felt chastised at his doubts and decided that he should not be unwilling to make his own copies of Cicero's works when Cicero copied the works of others.

It is particularly fascinating to see the way in which he related to his books. In an earlier letter to Castiglionochio, thanking him for the receipt of a copy of Cicero (perhaps the selfsame volume that he was at such pains to get a copy made), he speaks of the book as though it were the man himself. He talks about how Cicero's writings were his companion in his lonely days at Vaucluse, but in language more typically used with the actual presence of the person, not merely the individual's writings.

In a letter to Neri Morando, an official in Venice, he related the story of how that huge tome of Cicero's letters that he had copied many years before fell over and wounded him in the ankle. In giving his account he talks about the volume as though it were Cicero himself, relating how he asked the tome why it fell over and that it (of course) said nothing in reply. Yet he relates it as though he really expected the book to answer him and give account of itself.26 Of course Petrarch was a poet, so it could be said with complete justice that he was merely speaking in the manner of a poet, ascribing human characteristics to the inanimate when he knew the difference perfectly well. Even so, it is clear that he regarded his books with great fondness. Petrarch did go so far as write two of his letters to Cicero himself, addressing the ancient writer as though he were still among the living.27 One may say that this was naught but a rhetorical device and his real audience was his own contemporaries, but it seems that at least in part he regarded himself as addressing his remarks to Cicero.

His greatest grief was caused by one of Cicero's writings, the famous De gloria which has been lost to scholarship forever. In a letter to Luca da Penna, while relating how he was a lifelong devotee of Cicero, he tells the story of how that manuscript passed through his hands. He had received several works of Cicero from Raimondo Soranzo, including De gloria, which he immediately recognized as a great treasure. However that precious volume was not long to remain in Petrarch's hands, to the eternal regret of all scholars of the antiquities. Not long after he acquired this treasure, an old friend of his boyhood days came to him. This was his former schoolmaster, Convenevola da Prata.28 He borrowed a number of Petrarch's books, claiming that he needed them in order to complete a project. Among them was that priceless volume of Cicero, which Petrarch was planning to have copied.29

When some time had passed and da Prata did not return the volumes, Petrarch grew concerned about them. Finally Petrarch began to suspect that da Prata had put them to some other use than study and began to investigate their whereabouts. In time he discovered that they had been pawned and went to da Prata, asking the name of the pawnbroker in order to redeem them. Da Prata refused, regarding this as something that would irredeemably besmirch his honor. He also refused Petrarch's offers of money so that he could go and redeem them himself. Finally the old man died, and all of Petrarch's further attempts to discover the whereabouts of that volume came to naught, much to his great grief.30 Perhaps the lost volume still lies hidden in some musty attic, forgotten and unrecognized. But after so many centuries that is unlikely, particularly in light of the devastation of the many wars between Petrarch's time and our own. It is more likely that the pawnbroker, not recognizing the importance of the treasure that had passed into his hands, sold it to someone who scraped or wiped off the writing and reused the parchment in the practice in that time.

Petrarch died in his library, surrounded by his beloved books and busy reading Virgil, on his seventieth birthday.31 However his influence upon the scholarly world did not die with him. Petrarch interested the other Italian humanists in seeking out and studying the classics.32 Many historians of philosophy have recognized just how important Petrarch was in initiating that movement that is now known as Renaissance humanism.33 His attitude toward the classics shaped the attitudes of the rest of the Renaissance scholars. Aldo Scaglioni gives the example of Machiavelli dressing up in his best clothes when he went into his library to read and study the works of the classical authors.34 And even Petrarch's weaknesses affected the course the study of the classics took. Robinson suggests that Petrarch's inability to read Greek and appreciate the Greek classics led ultimately to modern tendencies to overemphasize the Roman classics at the expense of the Greek classics.35

Probably there still would have been a Renaissance if Petrarch had never lived, or if he had drowned in the Arno as an infant as he so nearly did. There were certainly enough other brilliant minds in that period, all working to recover the knowledge that they regarded as being lost. But no doubt the Renaissance would have been poorer for the absence of Petrarch.

Copyright 1996 by Leigh Husband Kimmel, all rights reserved.

This paper was originally given under the name of Karen S. Boyer. It is an excerpt from a longer paper originally submitted as part of the requirements for a class in European Intellectual History at Illinois State University, taught by Professor Niles Holt. The author would like to thank Dr. Holt for his assistance in condensing it to a length suitable for presenting at a conference.
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1 Morris Bishop, Petrarch and his World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1963, p. 13
2 Bishop, P. 100-101
3 Bishop, P. 65
4 Bishop, P. 91
5 Bishop, P. 20-21
6 Thomas G. Bergin, Petrarch,. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1970, P. 113.
7 James Harvey Robinson, Petrarch: the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969 (originally published in 1914 by G. P. Putnam), P 98
8 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch. Duke monographs in medieval and Renaissance studies: 14. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1993, P. 17
9 Robinson, P. 36-37.
10 Mazzotta, P. 103
11 Petrarch, P. 182-183
12 Mazzotta, P 24.
13 Bishop, Pp. 185-186
14 Petrarch, P. 153
15 Robinson, P 52.
16 Petrarch, Pp. 40-41.
17 Petrarch, P 18, 86-87
18 Mazzotta, P. 112.
19 Bishop, P. 103-104
20 Petrarch, P. 45
21 Petrarch, P. 43.
22 Bergin, P. 61.
23 Bishop, P. 229.
24 Petrarch, P. 295-296
25 Petrarch, 154-156.
26 Petrarch, P. 170.
27 Petrarch, Pp. 206-210
28 Bishop, Pp. 19-20
29 Charles and Mary Elton, The Great Book-Collectors, quoted in Leslie W. Dunlap, Readings in Library History, New York: Bowker. 1972, P. 102.
30 Petrarch, Pp. 298-299
31 Bishop, P. 99.
32 Dunlap, P. 100.
33 Mazzotta. P. 33
34 Aldo Scaglioni, "Petrarcha 1974: A Sketch for a Portrait" in Francis Petrarch: Six Centuries Later: A Symposium. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures: Symposia 3, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1975, P. 18
35 Robinson, P. 237

 

[Laura]

Respecting Livy, there is this on Wikipedia which is not satisfactory.

Livy wrote during the reign of Augustus, who came to power after a civil war with generals and consuls claiming to be defending the Roman Republic, such as Pompey. Patavium had been pro-Pompey. To clarify his status, the victor of the civil war, Octavian Caesar, had wanted to take the title Romulus (the first king of Rome) but in the end accepted the senate proposal of Augustus. He did not abolish the republic de facto but adapted its institutions into the empire.

Livy's enthusiasm for the republic is evident from the first pentade of his work, and yet the Julio-Claudian family (the imperial family) were as much fans of Livy as anyone. He could not have been an advocate of any sort of sedition in favor of restoring the Republic; he would have been put on trial for treason and executed, as many had been and would be. He must have been viewed as a harmless and relevant advocate of the ancient morality, which was a known public stance of the citizens of Patavium. His relationship to Augustus is defined primarily by a passage from Tacitus[13] in which Cremutius Cordus is put on trial for his life for offenses no worse than Livy's and defends himself face-to-face with the frowning Tiberius as follows:

I am said to have praised Brutus and Cassius, whose careers many have described and no one mentioned without eulogy. Titus Livius, pre-eminently famous for eloquence and truthfulness, extolled Cneius Pompeius in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeianus, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship.

To avoid conviction, while waiting for a verdict, Cordus committed suicide by self-starvation. His worst fears were realized in absentia: his books were sentenced to be burned by the aediles, but the task was performed without zeal and many books escaped. Livy's reasons for returning to Padua after the death of Augustus (if he did) are unclear, but the circumstances of Tiberius' reign certainly allow for speculation.

{BIG SKIP! and then, boom: Middle Ages!}

During the Middle Ages, interest in Livy declined.[14] Due to the length of the work, the literate class was already reading summaries rather than the work itself, which was tedious to copy, expensive, and required a lot of storage space. It must have been during this period, if not before, that manuscripts began to be lost without replacement.

The Renaissance was a time of intense revival; the population discovered that Livy's work was being lost and large amounts of money changed hands in the rush to collect Livy manuscripts. The poet Beccadelli sold a country home for funding to purchase one manuscript copied by Poggio.[14] Petrarch and Pope Nicholas V launched a search for the now missing books. Laurentius Valla published an amended text initiating the field of Livy scholarship. Dante speaks highly of him in his poetry, and Francis I of France commissioned extensive artwork treating Livian themes; Niccolò Machiavelli's work on republics, the Discourses on Livy is presented as a commentary on the History of Rome. Respect for Livy rose to lofty heights.

The story of the fate of Quintillian might offer a clue:

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35 – c. 100) was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.

Quintilian was born ca. 35 in Calagurris (Calahorra, La Rioja) in Hispania. His father, a well-educated man, sent him to Rome to study rhetoric early in the reign of Nero. While there, he cultivated a relationship with Domitius Afer, who died in 59. "It had always been the custom … for young men with ambitions in public life to fix upon some older model of their ambition … and regard him as a mentor" (Kennedy, 16). Quintilian evidently adopted Afer as his model and listened to him speak and plead cases in the law courts. Afer has been characterized as a more austere, classical, Ciceronian speaker than those common at the time of Seneca, and he may have inspired Quintilian’s love of Cicero.

Sometime after Afer's death, Quintilian returned to Spain, possibly to practice law in the courts of his own province. However, in 68, he returned to Rome as part of the retinue of Emperor Galba, Nero's short-lived successor. Quintilian does not appear to have been a close advisor of the Emperor, which probably ensured his survival after the assassination of Galba in 69.

After Galba's death, and during the chaotic Year of the Four Emperors which followed, Quintilian opened a public school of rhetoric. Among his students were Pliny the Younger, and perhaps Tacitus. The Emperor Vespasian made him a consul. The emperor "in general was not especially interested in the arts, but…was interested in education as a means of creating an intelligent and responsible ruling class" (19). This subsidy enabled Quintilian to devote more time to the school, since it freed him of pressing monetary concerns. In addition, he appeared in the courts of law, arguing on behalf of clients.

Quintilian retired from teaching and pleading in 88, during the reign of Domitian. His retirement may have been prompted by his achievement of financial security and his desire to become a gentleman of leisure. Quintilian had also survived under several emperors; the reigns of Vespasian and Titus were relatively peaceful, but Domitian was reputed to be difficult even at the best of times. Domitian’s increasing cruelty and paranoia may have prompted the rhetorician to quietly distance himself. The emperor does not appear to have taken offence; in the year 90, Quintilian was made tutor of Domitian's two grand-nephews and heirs. Even this may not have been a vote of confidence; "by the time [Quintilian] finished the Institutio Oratoria, the two young men—potential rivals to a shaky throne—had vanished into exile" (Murphy, xx). Otherwise, Quintilian spent his retirement writing his Institutio Oratoria. The exact date of his death is not known, but is believed to be sometime around 100. He does not appear to have long survived Domitian, who was assassinated in 96.

The only extant work of Quintilian is a twelve-volume textbook on rhetoric entitled Institutio Oratoria (generally referred to in English as the Institutes of Oratory), published around AD 95. This work deals not only with the theory and practice of rhetoric, but also with the foundational education and development of the orator himself, providing advice that ran from the cradle to the grave. An earlier text, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae ("On the Causes of Corrupted Eloquence") has been lost, but is believed to have been "a preliminary exposition of some of the views later set forth in [Institutio Oratoria]" (Kennedy, 24).

After his death, Quintilian's influence fluctuated. He was mentioned by his pupil, Pliny, and by Juvenal, who may have been another student, “as an example of sobriety and of worldly success unusual in the teaching profession” (Gwynn, 139).

The Middle Ages saw a decline in knowledge of his work, since existing manuscripts of Institutio Oratoria were fragmented, but the Italian humanists revived interest in the work after the discovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 of a forgotten, complete manuscript in the monastery of St Gall, which he found "buried in rubbish and dust" in a filthy dungeon. The influential scholar Leonardo Aretino, considered the first modern historian, greeted the news by writing to his friend Poggio:

It will be your glory to restore to the present age, by your labour and diligence, the writings of excellent authors, which have hitherto escaped the researches of the learned... Oh ! what a valuable acquisition ! What an unexpected pleasure ! Shall I then behold Quintilian whole and entire, who, even in his imperfect state, was so rich a source of delight ?... But Quintilian is so consummate a master of rhetoric and oratory, that when, after having delivered him from his long imprisonment in the dungeons of the barbarians, you transmit him to this country, all the nations of Italy ought to assemble to bid him welcome...Quintilian, an author whose works I will not hesitate to affirm, are more an object of desire to the learned than any others, excepting only Cicero's dissertation De Republica.[2]

The Italian poet Petrarch addressed one of his letters to the dead to Quintilian, and for many he “provided the inspiration for a new humanistic philosophy of education”

Poggio ... hmmm...

 

[dantem]

Just to clarify Dantem, I don't speak Italian so if you and Gaby want to do an IT, I'll proofread it :)

Yup! Can you join sott_translate anyway, so you can check the files and upload the correction there?
Thanks.

 

[Laura]

Poggio...

(Gian Francesco) Poggio Bracciolini (February 11, 1380[2] – October 30, 1459) served under seven popes, as a Florentine/Roman scholar, writer and an early humanist. He recovered a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries, including the only surviving Lucretius, and disseminated manuscript copies among his learned friends.

{Okay... but how did these manuscripts get to be in those particular monasteries and no others?}

He was born at the village of Terranuova, ... near Arezzo in Tuscany.

Taken by his father to Florence to pursue the studies for which he appeared so apt, he studied Latin under Giovanni Malpaghino of Ravenna, the friend and protégé of Petrarch. {John of Ravenna} His distinguished abilities and his dexterity as a copyist of manuscripts brought him into early notice with the chief scholars of Florence: both Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò Niccoli befriended him. He studied notarial law, and, at the age of twenty-one he was received into the Florentine notaries' guild, the Arte dei giudici e notai.

In Oct. 1403, ... he entered the service of Cardinal Landolfo Maramaldo, Bishop of Bari, as secretary, and a few months later, was invited to join the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs in the Roman Curia of Pope Boniface IX, thus embarking on eleven turbulent years when he served under four successive popes (1404−1415). First as scriptor (writer of official documents), soon moving up to abbreviator, then scriptor penitentiarius, and scriptor apostolicus. {Now, notice that this is called the "Roman Curia" but, as you will see, the HQ of the Pope - the "Roman Curia" - was not actually at Rome, but traveled around. Because of this misleading nomenclature, people think that the Popes have always been at Rome, that there is a long history of the Church's activities there from the time of St. Peter, supposedly, until the present day.}

It is, finally, under Martin V, that he reached the top rank of his office, as Apostolicus Secretarius, papal secretary (amanuensis). As such he functioned as a personal attendant (amanuensis) of the Pope, writing letters at his behest and dictation, with no formal registration of the briefs, but merely preserving copies. He was esteemed for his excellent Latin, his extraordinarily beautiful book hand, and as occasional liaison with Florence, which involved him in legal and diplomatic work.

Throughout his long office of fifty years, Poggio served a total of seven popes: Boniface IX (1389−1404), Innocent VII (1404−1406), Gregory XII (1406−1415), Antipope John XXIII (1410−1415), Martin V (1417−1431), Eugenius IV (1431–1447), Nicholas V (1447−1455).

While he held his office in the Curia through that momentous period, which saw the Councils of Konstanz (1414−1418), in the train of Pope John XXIII, and of Basel (1431−1449), and the final restoration of the papacy under Nicholas V (1447), he was never attracted to the ecclesiastical life (and the lure of its potential riches). In spite of his meager salary in the Curia, he remained a layman to the end of his life. {This is misleading. He made a fortune on his manuscripts, as we will see further on.}

The greater part of Poggio's long life was spent in attendance to his duties in the Roman Curia at Rome and the other cities the pope was constrained to move his court. Although he spent most of his adult life in his papal service, he considered himself a Florentine working for the papacy. He actively kept his links to Florence and remained in constant communication with his learned and influential Florentine friends: Coluccio Salutati (1331−1406), Niccolo Niccoli (1364−1437), Lorenzo de' Medici (1395−1440), Leonardo Bruni (Chancellor, 1369−1444), Carlo Marsuppini ("Carlo Aretino", Chancellor, 1399−1453), and Cosimo de' Medici (1389−1464).

After July 1415 - Antipope John XXIII had been deposed by the Council of Constance and the Roman Pope Gregory XII had abdicated – the papal office remained vacant for two years, which gave Poggio some leisure time in 1416/17 for his pursuit of manuscript hunting.

In the spring of 1416 (sometime between March and May), Poggio visited the baths at the German spa of Baden. ...

Poggio was marked by the passion of his teachers for books and writing, inspired by the first generation of Italian humanists centered around Francesco Petrarch (1304−1374), who had revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313−1375) and Coluccio Salutati (1331−1406). Poggio joined the second generation of civic humanists forming around Salutati. Resolute in glorifying studia humanitatis (the study of "humanities", a phrase popularized by Leonardo Bruni), learning (studium), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concern of man, Poggio ridiculed the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.

The literary passions of the learned Italians in the new Humanist Movement, which were to influence the future course of both Renaissance and Reformation, were epitomized in the activities and pursuits of this self-made man, who rose from the lowly position of scribe in of the Roman Curia to the privileged role of apostolic secretary.

He became devoted to the revival of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he played an official part as first-row witness, chronicler and (often unsolicited) critic and adviser.

Thus, when his duties called him to the Council of Constance in 1414, he employed his forced leisure in exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to this period, 1415−1417. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St. Gall, retrieved from the dust and abandon many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied scholars and students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in fragmented or mutilated copies. {For a pretty penny, it should be said.}

In his epistles he described how he recovered Cicero's Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian, Statius' Silvae, part of Gaius Valerius Flaccus, and the commentaries of Asconius Pedanius at St. Gallen. {How did they get there? Around 613 an Irish monk named Gallus, a disciple and companion of Saint Columbanus, established a hermitage on the site that would become the Abbey. He lived in his cell until his death in 646. Following Gallus' death, Charles Martel appointed Othmar as custodian of St Gall's relics. During the reign of Pepin the Short, in the 8th century, Othmar founded the Carolingian style Abbey of St. Gall, where arts, letters and sciences flourished. Several different dates are given for the foundation of the Abbey, including 719, 720, 747 and the middle of the 8th century. Under Abbot Waldo of Reichenau (740–814) copying of manuscripts was undertaken and a famous library was gathered. Numerous Anglo-Saxon and Irish monks came to copy manuscripts.}

Manuscripts of Columella, Silius Italicus, Manilius and Vitruvius were unearthed, copied, and communicated to the learned. {From St. Gallen, or where?}

He carried on the same untiring research in many Western European countries.

In 1415 at Cluny he found Cicero's complete great forensic orations, previously only partially available.{Cluny was founded by William I, Duke of Aquitaine in 910. He nominated Berno as the first Abbot of Cluny, subject only to Pope Sergius III. The abbey was notable for its stricter adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict, whereby Cluny became acknowledged as the leader of western monasticism.}

At Langres in the summer of 1417 he discovered Cicero's Oration for Caecina and nine other hitherto unknown orations of Cicero's. {Louis Duchesne considers Senator, Justus and St. Desiderius (Didier), who was martyred during the invasion of the Vandals (about 407), the first three bishops of Langres. The See, therefore, must have been founded about the middle of the fourth century.}

At Monte Cassino, in 1425, a manuscript of Frontinus' late first century De aquaeductu on the ancient aqueducts of Rome. {Montecassino is a rocky hill about 130 kilometres (81 mi) southeast of Rome, Italy, c. 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) to the west of the town of Cassino. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529.}

He was also credited with having recovered Ammianus Marcellinus, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper and Eutyches.

If a codex could not be obtained by fair means, he was not above using subterfuge, as when he bribed a monk to abstract a Livy and an Ammianus from the library of Hersfeld Abbey. {Benedictine imperial abbey in the town of Bad Hersfeld in Hesse, founded by Saint Sturm, a disciple of Saint Boniface, in 736–742.}

One of Poggio's finds that has become especially famous was, in January 1417, in a German monastery (never named by Poggio, but probably Fulda), the discovery of the only manuscript of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura known at the time. Poggio spotted the name, which he remembered as quoted by Cicero. This was a Latin poem of 7,400 lines, divided into six books, giving a full description of the world as viewed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. It has been translated as On the Nature of the Universe (Oxford World's Classics). The manuscript found by Poggio was not preserved, but he sent the copy he had ordered to Niccolo Niccoli, who made a transcription in his beautiful book hand (the creator of italic script), which became the model for the more than fifty other copies circulating at the time. Poggio complained that Niccoli didn't return his original copy for 14 years! Later two 9th-century manuscripts were discovered, the O ("Oblongus", ca. 825) and Q ("Quadratus") codices, now kept at Leiden University. The book was first printed in 1473.

After Martin V was elected as the new pope in Nov. 1417, Poggio, although not holding any office, accompanied his court to Mantua in late 1418, but, once there, decided to accept the invitation of Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, to go to England. His five years spent in England, until returning to Rome in 1423, were the least productive and satisfactory of his life. {No manuscripts there? Or was he busy writing them to be "found" later?}

Poggio resided in Florence during 1434−36 with Eugene IV. On the proceeds of a sale of a manuscript of Livy in 1434, he built himself a villa in the Valdarno, which he adorned with a collection of antique sculpture (notably a series of busts meant to represent thinkers and writers of Antiquity), coins and inscriptions, works that were familiar to his friend Donatello.

In December 1435, at age 56, tired of the unstable character of his single life, Poggio scoured Florence for a wife, and married a girl not yet eighteen, Selvaggia dei Buondelmonti, of a noble Florentine family. In spite of the remonstrances and dire predictions of all his friends about the age discrepancy, the marriage was a happy one, producing five sons and a daughter. Poggio wrote a spate of long letters to justify his move, and composed one of his famous dialogues, An Seni Sit uxor ducenda (On Marriage in Old Age, 1436)

{This next bit is very interesting.}

In his quarrel against Lorenzo Valla — an expert at philological analysis of ancient texts, a redoubtable opponent endowed with a superior intellect, and a hot temperament fitted to protracted disputation − Poggio found his match.[13] Poggio started in Feb. 1452 with a full-dress critique of the Elegantiae, Valla's major work on Latin language and style, where he supported a critical use of Latin eruditio going beyond pure admiration and respectful imitatio of the classics.

At stake was the new approach of the humanae litterae (profane classical Greek and Latin literature) in relation to the divinae litterae (biblical exegesis of the Judeo-Christian "sacred scriptures"). Valla claimed that biblical texts could be subjected to the same philological criticism as the great classics of antiquity. Poggio held that humanism and theology were separate fields of inquiry, and labeled Valla's mordacitas (radical criticism) as dementia.[14]

{Over fifty years later...}

Erasmus, in 1505, discovered Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum (New Testament Notes), which encouraged him to pursue the textual criticism of the Holy Scriptures, free of all academic entanglements that might cramp or hinder his scholarly independence — contributing to Erasmus's stature of leading Dutch Renaissance humanist.[15] In his introduction, Erasmus declared his support of Valla's thesis against the invidia of jealous scholars such as Poggio, whom he unfairly described as "a petty clerk so uneducated that even if he were not indecent he would still not be worth reading, and so indecent that he would deserve to be rejected by good men however learned he was." (Quoted in Salvatore I. Camporeale in his essay on the Poggio-Lorenzo dispute).

After the death, in April 1453, of his intimate friend Carlo Aretino, who had been the Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, the choice of his replacement, mostly dictated by Cosimo de' Medici, fell upon Poggio. He resolved to retire from his service of 50 years in the Chancery of Rome, and returned to Florence to assume this new function. This coincided with the news of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.

Poggio's declining days were spent in the discharge of his prestigious Florentine office − glamorous at first, but soon turned irksome − conducting his intense quarrel with Lorenzo Valla, editing his correspondence for publication, and in the composition of his history of Florence. He died in 1459 before he could put the final polish to his work, and was buried in the church of Sant Croce. A statue by Donatello and a portrait by Antonio del Pollaiuolo remain to commemorate a citizen who chiefly for his services to humanistic literature deserved the notice of posterity.

During his life, Poggio kept acquiring properties around Florence and invested in the city enterprises with the Medici bank. At his death, his gross assets amounted to 8,500 florins, with only 137 families in Florence owning a larger capital. His wife, five sons and daughter all survived him.... {He didn't do too badly selling manuscripts...}

Poggio cultivated and maintained throughout his life close friendships with some of the most important learned men of the age: Niccolo de' Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni ("Leonardo Aretino"), Lorenzo and Cosimo de' Medici, Carlo Marsuppini ("Carlo Aretino"), Guarino Veronese, Ambrogio Traversari, Francesco Barbaro, Francesco Accolti, Feltrino Boiardo, Lionello d'Este (who became Marquis of Ferrara, 1441−1450), and many others, who all shared his passion for retrieving the manuscripts and art of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

His early friendship with Tommaso da Sarzana stood Poggio in good stead when his learned friend was elected pope, under the name of Nicolas V (1447−1455), a proven protector of scholars and an active sponsor of learning, who founded the Vatican library in 1448 with 350 codices.

Poggio, like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (who became Pius II), was a great traveller, and wherever he went he brought enlightened powers of observation trained in liberal studies to bear upon the manners of the countries he visited. We owe to his pen curious remarks on English and Swiss customs, valuable notes on the remains of ancient monuments in Rome, and a singularly striking portrait of Jerome of Prague as he appeared before the judges who condemned him to the stake. {I'd like to get my hands on his description of Rome before it was excavated.}

In literature he embraced the whole sphere of contemporary studies, and distinguished himself as an orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises, a panegyrist of the dead, a passionate impugner of the living, a sarcastic polemist, a translator from the Greek, an epistolographer and grave historian and a facetious compiler of fabliaux in Latin. {In short, all the abilities needed to falsify ancient manuscripts if he so chose.}

His cultural/social/moral essays covered a wide range of subjects concerning the interests and values of his time:

De avaritia (On Greed, 1428−29) - Poggio's first major work. The old school of biographers (Shepherd, Walser) and historians saw in it a traditional condemnation of avarice. Modern historians tend, on the contrary, especially if studying the economic growth of the Italian Trecento and Quattrocento, read it as a precocious statement of early capitalism, at least in its Florentine form — breaking through the hold of medieval values that disguised the realities of interest and loans in commerce to proclaim the social utility of wealth. It is the voice of a new Age linking wealth, personal worth, conspicuous expenditure, ownership of valuable goods and objects, and social status, a voice not recognized until the late 20th century.;[16]
An Seni Sit uxor ducenda (On Marriage in Old Age, 1436);
De infelicitate principum (On the Unhappiness of Princes, 1440);
De nobilitate (On Nobility, 1440): Poggio, a self-made man, defends true nobility as based on virtue rather than birth, an expression of the meritocracy favored by the rich bourgeoisie;
De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, 1447);
Contra Hypocritas (Against Hypocrisy, 1448);
Historia disceptativa convivialis (Historical discussions between guests after a meal) in three parts (1450):
1) on expressions of thanks
2) on the dignity of medical versus legal profession (a reprise of Salutati's 1398 treatment of the same subject, De Nobilitate Legum et Medicinae): Niccolo Niccoli, appealing to the lessons of experience, is arguing that laws are imposed by the will of the stronger to hold the state together − not God-given to rulers, nor a fact of nature − leading biographer Ernst Walser to conclude that "Poggio, in his writing, presents Machiavellism before Machiavelli." [17]
3) on literate Latin versus vernacular Latin in classical Rome; Poggio concludes that they were both the same language, not two distinct idioms.

De miseria humanae conditionis (On the Misery of Human Life, 1455), reflections in his retirement in Florence inspired by the sack of Constantinople.

These compositions, all written in Latin − and reviving the classical form of dialogues, between himself and learned friends [18] − belonged to a genre of socratic reflections which, since Petrarch set the fashion, was highly praised by Italian men of letters and made Poggio famous throughout Italy. They exemplify his conception of studia humanitatis as an epitome of human knowledge and wisdom reserved only to the most learned, and the key to what the ancient philosophers called "virtue" and "the good".

And thus, they are invaluable windows into the knowledge and Weltanschauung of his age − geography, history, politics, morals, social aspects — and the emergence of the new values of the "Humanist Movement".

They are loaded with rich nuggets of fact embedded in subtle disquisitions, with insightful comments, brilliant illustrations, and a wide display of historical and contemporary references. Poggio was always inclined to make objective observations and clinical comparisons between various cultural mores, for instance ancient Roman practices versus modern ones, or Italians versus the English. He compared the eloquence of Jerome of Prague and his fortitude before death with ancient philosophers.

The abstruse points of theology presented no interest to him, only the social impact of the Church did, mostly as an object of critique and ridicule.

On the Vicissitudes of Fortune became famous for including in book IV an account of the 25-year voyage of the Venetian adventurer Niccolo de' Conti in Persia and India, which was translated into Portuguese on express command of the Portuguese King Emmanuel I. An Italian translation was made from the Portuguese.

Poggio's Historia Florentina (History of Florence), is a history of the city from 1350 to 1455, written in avowed imitation of Livy and Sallust, and possibly Thucydides (available in Greek, but translated into Latin by Valla only in 1450–52) in its use of speeches to explain decisions. Poggio continued Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People, which closed in 1402, and is considered the first modern history book. Poggio limited his focus to external events, mostly wars, in which Florence was the defensor Tusciae and of Italian liberty.

But Poggio also pragmatically defended Florence's expansionist policies to insure the "safety of the Florentine Republic", which became the key motive of its history, as a premonition of Machiavelli's doctrine. Conceding to superior forces becomes an expression of reason and advising it a mark of wisdom. His intimate and vast experience of Italian affairs inculcated in him a strong sense of realism, echoing his views on laws expressed in his second Historia disceptativa convivialis (1450).

Poggio's beautiful rhetorical prose turns his Historia Florentina into a vivid narrative, with a sweeping sense of movement, and a sharp portrayal of the main characters, but it also exemplifies the limitations of the newly emerging historical style, which, in the work of Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini and Pietro Bembo, retained "romantic" aspects and did not reach yet the weight of objectivity later expected by the school of modern historians (especially since 1950).[19]

His Liber Facetiarum (1438−1452), or Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales expressed in the purest Latin Poggio could command, are the works most enjoyed today: they are available in several English translations. This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy. "The worst men in the world live in Rome, and worse than the others are the priests, and the worst of the priests they make cardinals, and the worst of all the cardinals is made pope." Poggio's book became an internationally popular work in all countries of Western Europe, and has gone through multiple editions until modern times.

In addition Poggio's works included his Epistolae, a collection of his letters, a most insightful witness of his remarkable age, in which he gave full play to his talent as chronicler of events, to his wide range or interests, and to his most acerbic critical sense....

In the way of many humanists of his time, Poggio rejected the vernacular Italian and always wrote only in Latin, and translated works from Greek into that language. His letters are full of learning, charm, detail, and amusing personal attack on his enemies and colleagues. It is also noticeable as illustrating the Latinizing tendency of an age which gave classic form to the lightest essays of the fancy.

Poggio was a fluent and copious writer in Latin, admired for his classical style inspired from Cicero, if not fully reaching the elegance of his model, but outstanding by the standards of his age....

Among contemporaries he passed for one of the most formidable polemical or gladiatorial rhetoricians; and a considerable section of his extant works is occupied by a brilliant display of his sarcastic wit and his unlimited inventiveness in "invectives". One of these, published on the strength of Poggio's old friendship with the new pontiff, Nicolas V, the dialogue Against Hypocrites, was actuated by a vindictive hatred at the follies and vices of ecclesiastics. This was but another instance of his lifelong obstinate denouncing of the corruption of clerical life in the 15th century.

Nicholas V then asked Poggio to deliver a philippic against Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, who claimed to be the Antipope Felix V — a ferocious attack with no compunction in pouring on the Duke fantastic accusations, unrestrained abuse and the most extreme anathemas.

Invectivae ("Invectives") were a specialized literary genre used during the Italian Renaissance, tirades of exaggerated obloquy aimed at insulting and degrading an opponent beyond the bounds of any common decency. Poggio's most famous "Invectives" were those he composed in his literary quarrels, such as with George of Trebizond, Bartolomeo Facio, and Antonio Beccadelli, the author of a scandalous Hermaphroditus, inspired by the unfettered eroticism of Catullus and Martial. All the resources of Poggio's rich vocabulary of the most scurrilous Latin were employed to stain the character of his target; every imaginable crime was imputed to him, and the most outrageous accusations proffered, without any regard to plausibility.

Poggio was famous for his beautiful and legible book hand. The formal humanist script he invented developed into Roman type, which remains popular as a printing font today (as his friend Niccolò de' Niccoli's script developed into the Italic type first used by Aldus Manutius in 1501).

 

[dant]

Ah, I got tripped up...

What are we looking for exactly please?

<edit>
Ok, I think I understand now.. there is no English translations!
Bah!

Yes, all I want/need is a translation of PETRARCH's bio of Julius Caesar. There are plenty of translations of PLUTARCH's Life of Caesar.

Like I said, I ordered the book - Italian, Latin, dunno - and when it arrives, I can scan ONLY the text wanted unless someone finds exactly that on the net somewhere.

I'm already waiting for the John of Salisbury texts since what I am trying to get at is a comparison of what was known and how early it was known and what is the provenance of the texts if that is possible to learn. Usually, that information is given in an introduction or commentary to a text. So, if there is an intro to the Petrarch text, that might be important.

I have found Petrarch in Latin/non-english at a FTP site:
_http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/mel/medievalftp.html

Or you can download my ZIP file (350+MB) for a limited time
(2 wks) here: http://www.cdkkt.com/dant/docs/His/Petrarch.zip

John of Salisbury: Attached (Not sure if this is what you want)

Going through the list @ https://openlibrary.org/search?q=John+of+Salisbury

 

[dantem]

[quote author=Laura]In his quarrel against Lorenzo Valla — an expert at philological analysis of ancient texts, a redoubtable opponent endowed with a superior intellect, and a hot temperament fitted to protracted disputation − Poggio found his match.[13] Poggio started in Feb. 1452 with a full-dress critique of the Elegantiae, Valla's major work on Latin language and style, where he supported a critical use of Latin eruditio going beyond pure admiration and respectful imitatio of the classics.[/quote]

So - jaw drop - if Poggio was such a professional forger, can we be suspicious also of Petrarch's works?

From Wiki:

Lorenzo (or Laurentius) Valla (c.1407 – 1 August 1457) was an Italian humanist, rhetorician, and educator. He is best known for his textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.

[...]One of Valla's most remarkable achievements lay in his emendations of Latin texts. He made countless suggestions for better readings in his manuscript of Livy's Ab urbe condita, which, in the previous century, had belonged to Petrarch, who, likewise had inserted emendations.

With all there 'emendations', and these guys roaming from Court to Court making lots of money, are we reading Bible-like books when we read Classic texts?

Just reading that a lot of copying and re-writing was going on after the Arabian expansion in Europe. Aristotle for example was 'made in Mount St. Michel', or so it seems.

Averroes

Averroes is most famous for his commentaries of Aristotle's works, which had been mostly forgotten in the West. Before 1150, only a few of Aristotle's works existed in translation in Latin Europe (i. e. excluding Greek Byzantium). It was in large part through the Latin translations of Averroes's work beginning in the 12th century that the legacy of Aristotle was recovered in the Latin West.

The 'Mount Saint Michel' legacy is described in the Italian page on Averroes, but no source is given though..

[Quick translation]

Averroes did not know the greek , and therefore approached the Greek works only thanks to Arabic translations made ​​by Syrian Christians . Waves of translations of the works of Aristotle, made ​​directly from the Greek texts in the Abbey of Mont-Saint- Michel , were made ​​50 years before they started in Spain by the Arabs subjugated the translations of Arabic versions ( made ​​by Arabized Christians ) those the same texts. To Giacomo Veneto (who died between 1140 and 1150 ) must be the translation of almost all the works of Aristotle, he began translations before 1127. France and England , for example, They arranged the whole work of Aristotle before they could have available translations from the Arabic. These two countries , together with the Church , were among the main speakers of the greek - Latin translations of Aristotle. The flight of Christians of the East, from the eighth century , due to the Arab conquests , brought in Europe, especially in southern Italy, the Greek culture and knowledge . Not to mention the ongoing cultural exchange between the Byzantine world (where the Greek texts were preserved) and the West, which guaranteed the greek dissemination of knowledge in Europe. This shows that the Europeans themselves have been made ​​in search of the greek word of knowledge . The works of Aristotle were translated in the first half of the twelfth century, from greek to latin by the many copyists of the abbey of Mont-Saint- Michel . These monks were the pioneers of the spread of Aristotelian philosophy in Europe. Their work was not limited to the translation of the texts, but was accompanied by comments to them. [Citation needed] Historically, Averroes was important for his translations and commentaries of Aristotle's works , which in the West had been almost completely forgotten (before 1150 only very few works of Aristotle were accessible Europe Latin America). The recovery of the Aristotelian tradition in Europe owes much to the Latin translation of the writings of Averroes , which began in the twelfth century. Thomas Aquinas , although opposed to some schools of thought Averroist contemporary to him , then strongly represented in the University of Paris , [2] Averroes has in common with a deep appreciation of the work of Aristotle.

 

[Laura]

I think we have to accept that a LOT of these ancient texts may very well be authentic to a certain point since there has been found a lot of archaeological and epigraphic evidence to support the history, broadly.

Petrarch was such an enthusiast, I doubt that he faked anything. Poggio, I think, may have used some questionable tactics to get manuscripts. He may also have copied some, presented them as "original" and thereby made a good bit of money. Some of this copying may have included copying really decayed pieces and "filling in the blanks" with things he knew from other manuscripts. This is all just speculation.

What IS compellingly odd is the general uniformity of dates of some of the oldest MSS.

Regarding Plutarch:

The oldest and, with one exception, the most authoritative MS, is the Codex Sangermanensis (S2)in the library of the monastery of St. Germain des Pres, in the French department of the Loire. It is a parchment MS, of the Xth century. (TENTH Century)

The exception:
The second oldest MS, and on the whole, the most authoritative, is the Codex Seitenstettensis, (S), belonging to the monastery of Seitenstetten, near Waidhofen, in Lower Austria. It is a parchment MS of the XIth century... (ELEVENTH Century) It is only since 1870, and the edition of the Aristides and Cato by Hercher, that this MS has been known to be not only the second oldest, but the best extant MS of Plutarch.

Three parchment MSS in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, No. 1671 (A), of the XIIIth (13th) century, containing all the Morals and Lives, No. 1672 (C), also of the XIIIth (13th) century, containing all the Lives, and No. 1674 (D), of the XVIth (16th) century containing all the Lives, are of supreme importance... Of these three MSS, A and D seem to be more closely related to S2, while C partakes of the characters both of S and S2, and is often corrective of A and D.

Another MS in the same library, No. 1676 (F2), of the XVth (15th) century, has only more recently been recognized as the chief authority of Stephanus, and as partaking of the character of S.

The editio princeps of the Parallel Lives, 1517, "Florentia, in aedibus Philippi Juntae," was based on Florentine MSS. of relatively inferior value.

The Aldine edition of the Parallel Lives, 1519, "Venetiis, in aedibus Aldi et Andreae soceri," was based on Venetian MSS, which were of greater excellence than the Florentine, some of them retaining their importance to the present day.

The first edition of the complete works of Plutarch, 1572, Paris, 13 vol. 8vo, was edited by Henri Etienne (Stephanus), who improved the text of his predecessors with readings of better MSS unknown to them, making special use of Codex Parisinus, N. 1676 (F2). The Paris edition of 1624, in two volumes folio, reproduce the text of Stephanus, and became the textus receptus. {Excerpts from the intro of Loeb's edition of the works of Plutarch.}

A couple of points, it seems that much of what was written during ancient Roman times was written on papyrus paper which did not survive very well. The fact that the above copies mentioned were on parchment is what made them survive better. But notice the dates of most of the copies: as early as the 10th and 11th centuries.

Perhaps it would help to know what was going on in Europe and around the Mediterranean to see if anything stands out as possibly important to our problem:

The 10th century is the period from 901 to 1000 in accordance with the Julian calendar

The 10th century is usually regarded as a low point in European history. In China it was also a period of political upheaval. In the Muslim World, however, it was a cultural zenith, especially in Spain under the Caliphate of Córdoba. Additionally, the 10th century was the zenith for the Byzantine and Bulgarian Empires.

Medievalist and historian of technology Lynn White said that "to the modern eye, it is very nearly the darkest of the Dark Ages"...

Helen Waddell wrote that the 10th century was that which "in the textbooks disputes with the seventh the bad eminence, the nadir of the human intellect." Even in the 15th century, Lorenzo Valla described it as the Century of Lead and Iron and later Cardinal Baronius as the Leaden Century or Iron Century. ...

• The beginning of the Medieval Warm Period

• The Byzantine empire reaches the height of its military and economic strength

• c. 909: The Fatimid Caliphate arises in eastern Algeria.

• c. 980: Al-Azhar University is established in Cairo by the Fatimid dynasty.

• Khazar kingdom is attacked and defeated by Kievan Rus (965)

• In 907, Sumbing volcano erupted, according to Rukam inscription.

• In 928, Ziyarid dynasty was established in northern Iran.

• In 928, During the reign of King Wawa, the capital of Medang Kingdom in Mataram was devastated, probably by the massive eruption of Mount Merapi.

• In 929, Mpu Sindok moved the seat of power of the Medang Kingdom from Mataram in Central Java to Tamwlang in East Java and established Isyana Dynasty. The shift was probably as a result of the eruption of Mount Merapi and/or invasion from Srivijaya.[4]

• Seljuks convert to Islam.

• Viking groups settle in northern France

• 907: Loire Vikings overrun Brittany; Breton court flees to the England of Edward the Elder.

• The Norse become Normans

• 910: Foundation of Cluny, first federated monastic order, founded by Duke William I of Aquitaine

• 911: Rollo granted County of Rouen by France: official foundation of Normandy.

• In 917 the Bulgarians destroyed the Byzantine army in the Battle of Anchialus, one of the bloodiest battles in the Middle Ages

• 927: official recognition of the first independent national Church in Europe, the Bulgarian Patriarchate

• 927: Kingdom of England becomes a unified state.

• 936: Alan II, with support from Æthelstan, commences the reconquest of Brittany.

• Incursions of Magyar (Hungarian) cavalry throughout Western Europe (47 expeditions in Germany, Italy and France, 899–970)

• Mieszko I, first duke of Poland, baptised a Christian in 966

• Collapse of Great Moravia

• The medieval Croatian state becomes a unified kingdom under Tomislav

• Swedish influence extends to the Black Sea

• Vladimir I, Prince of Kievan Rus, baptised a Christian in 988

• Reindeer and Bears become extinct in Britain

• Lions become extinct in Europe by this date, with the last dying in Caucasus.

• Ferdowsi, Persian poet

• Avicenna, one of the foremost physician and philosopher of Medieval Era(c. 980 - 1037).[6]

• Al-Farabi, a Muslim polymath and one of the greatest scientists and philosophers (c. 872 – between 14 December, 950 and 12 January, 951).

• Alhazen, a Muslim scientist and mathematician, (965 in Basra - c. 1039 in Cairo)

• Abu Rayhan Biruni, a Muslim Scientist, (born 5 September 973 in Kath, Khwarezm, died 13 December 1048 in Ghazni)

• Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, united Norway in 872 and remained its ruler until 933. One of the most powerful lords of Europe at the time.

• Vladimir I, Prince of Kievan Rus (lived 958–1015)

• Tomislav, king of Croatia, united the medieval Croatian state into the Kingdom of Croatia, crowned in 925

• Abd-ar-rahman III of Cordoba

• Simeon the Great, Emperor of Bulgaria (reigned 893–927)

• Otto I the Great, Holy Roman Emperor (lived 912–973, reigned 936–973)

• King Edmund I of England (lived 921–946, reigned 939–946)

• Hugh Capet (lived 938–996), first Capetian King of France

• Géza of Hungary, ruler of the Magyars (lived 940–997, reigned 970–997)

• Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor (lived 955–983, reigned 973–983)

• Theophanu, wife of Otto II, mother and Regent of Otto III, (lived 956–991, reigned 983–991)

• Tsar Samuil of Bulgaria (lived 958–1014, reigned 976–1014)

• Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor (lived 980–1002, reigned 983–1002)

• Erik the Red, Norwegian explorer, founded Greenland

• Leif Eiriksson, Norwegian explorer, son of Erik the Red, made the first European attempt to settle in America.

• Olav Tryggvason becomes the first king to try to Christianize Norway, dies at the Battle of Svolder in 1000.

A number of things strike me as significant for our topic, mainly Otto I, The FIRST "Holy Roman Emperor."

Otto I (23 November 912 – 7 May 973), also known as Otto the Great, was the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, reigning as German king from 936 until his death in 973. The oldest son of Henry I the Fowler and Matilda of Ringelheim, Otto was "the first of the Germans to be called the emperor of Italy"

Otto inherited the Duchy of Saxony and the kingship of the Germans upon his father's death in 936. He continued his father's work to unify all German tribes into a single kingdom and greatly expanded the king's powers at the expense of the aristocracy. Through strategic marriages and personal appointments, Otto installed members of his own family to the kingdom's most important duchies. This reduced the various dukes, who had previously been co-equals with the king, into royal subjects under his authority. Otto transformed the Roman Catholic Church in Germany to strengthen the royal office and subjected its clergy to his personal control.

After putting down a brief civil war among the rebellious duchies, Otto defeated the Magyars in 955, thus ending the Hungarian invasions of Western Europe.[2] The victory against the pagan Magyars earned Otto the reputation as a savior of Christendom and secured his hold over the kingdom. By 961, Otto had conquered the Kingdom of Italy and extended his realm's borders to the north, east, and south. In control of much of central and southern Europe, the patronage of Otto and his immediate successors caused a limited cultural renaissance of the arts and architecture. Following the example of Charlemagne's coronation as "Emperor of the Romans" in 800, Otto was crowned Emperor in 962 by Pope John XII in Rome.

Otto's later years were marked by conflicts with the Papacy and struggles to stabilize his rule over Italy. Reigning from Rome, Otto sought to improve relations with the Byzantine Empire, which opposed his claim to emperorship and his realm's further expansion to the south. To resolve this conflict, the Byzantine princess Theophanu married his son, Otto II, in April 972. Otto finally returned to Germany in August 972 and died of natural causes in 973. Otto II succeeded him as Emperor.

Now, notice that Otto was trying to recreate the Roman Empire. That means he LEARNED about the former existence of the Roman Empire from somewhere...

Otto first gained experience as a military commander when the German kingdom fought against Slavic tribes on its eastern border. While campaigning against the Slavs in 929, Otto's illegitimate son William, the future Archbishop of Mainz, was born to a Slavic mother. With Henry's dominion over the entire kingdom secured by 929, his family was given the right of sole succession over the kingdom. Henry had the arrangement for his succession ratified by an Imperial Diet at Erfurt. After his death, his lands and wealth were to be divided between his four sons: Thankmar, Otto, Henry, and Bruno. Departing from customary Carolingian inheritance, the King designated Otto as the sole heir apparent without a prior formal election by the various dukes.

While Henry consolidated power within Germany, he prepared for an alliance with Anglo-Saxon England by finding a bride for Otto. Association with another royal house would give Henry additional legitimacy and strengthen the bonds between the two Saxon kingdoms. To seal the alliance, King Æthelstan of England sent Henry his two half sisters Eadgyth and Ælfgifu so he could choose the one which best pleased him. Henry selected Eadgyth as Otto's bride and the two were married in 929.

Let's back up and look at Otto's father, Henry the Fowler:

Henry the Fowler (German: Heinrich der Finkler or Heinrich der Vogler; Latin: Henricius Auceps) (876 – 2 July 936) was the Duke of Saxony from 912 and the King of Germany from 919 until his death. First of the Ottonian Dynasty of German kings and emperors, he is generally considered to be the founder and first king of the medieval German state, known until then as East Francia.

Born in Memleben, in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, Henry was the son of Otto the Illustrious, Duke of Saxony, and his wife Hedwiga, daughter of Henry of Franconia and Ingeltrude and a great-great-granddaughter of Charlemagne, or Charles I. In 906 he married Hatheburg, daughter of the Saxon count Erwin, but divorced her in 909, after she had given birth to his son Thankmar. Later that year he married St Matilda of Ringelheim, daughter of Dietrich, Count of Westphalia. Matilda bore him three sons, one called Otto, and two daughters, Hedwig and Gerberga, and founded many religious institutions, including the abbey of Quedlinburg where Henry is buried and was later canonized.

Now, let's look at the father of Henry The Fowler:

Otto (or Oddo) (c. 851 – 30 November 912), called the Illustrious (der Erlauchte) by later authors, was the Duke of Saxony from 880 to his death.

He was father of Henry the Fowler and grandfather of Otto the Great. he also was father-in-law of Zwentibold, Carolingian King of Lotharingia....

By a charter of King Louis the Younger to Gandersheim Abbey dated 26 January 877, the pago Suththuringa (region of South Thuringia) is described as in comitatu Ottonis (in Otto's county). In a charter of 28 January 897, Otto is described as marchio and the pago Eichesfelden (Eichsfeld) is now found to be within his county (march). He was also the lay abbot of Hersfeld Abbey in 908. He was described as magni ducis Oddonis (great duke Otto) by Widukind of Corvey when describing the marriage of his sister, Liutgard, to King Louis.

Let's look at Matilda:

The details of Saint Matilda's life come largely from brief mentions in the Res gestae saxonicae of the monastic historian Widukind of Corvey (c. 925 – 973), and from two sacred biographies (the vita antiquior and vita posterior) written, respectively, circa 974 and circa 1003.

{Hmmm... another source to check out? Widukind?}

St. Mathilda was the daughter of the Westphalian count Dietrich and his wife Reinhild, and her biographers traced her ancestry back to the legendary Saxon leader Widukind (c. 730 – 807). One of her sisters married Count Wichmann the Elder, a member of the House of Billung.

As a young girl, she was sent to the convent of Herford, where her grandmother Matilda was abbess and where her reputation for beauty and virtue (probably also her Westphalian dowry) is said to have attracted the attention of Duke Otto I of Saxony, who betrothed her to his recently divorced son and heir, Henry the Fowler. They were married at Wallhausen in 909. As the eldest surviving son, Henry succeeded his father as Saxon duke in 912 and upon the death of King Conrad I of Germany was elected King of Germany (East Francia) in 919. He and Matilda had three sons and two daughters:

Hedwig (910 – 965), wife of the West Frankish duke Hugh the Great, mother of King Hugh Capet of France
Otto (912 – 973), Duke of Saxony, King of Germany from 936 and Holy Roman Emperor from 962
Gerberga (913 – 984), wife of (1) Duke Giselbert of Lorraine and (2) King Louis IV of France
Henry (919/921 – 955) Duke of Bavaria from 948
Bruno (925 – 965), Archbishop of Cologne and Duke of Lorraine

After her husband had died in 936, Matilda and her son Otto established Quedlinburg Abbey in his memory, a convent of noble canonesses, where in 966 her granddaughter Matilda became the first abbess. At first she remained at the court of her son Otto, however in the quarrels between the young king and his rivaling brother Henry a cabal of royal advisors is reported to have accused her of weakening the royal treasury in order to pay for her charitable activities. After a brief exile at her Westphalian manors at Enger, where she established a college of canons in 947, Matilda was brought back to court at the urging of King Otto's first wife, the Anglo-Saxon princess Edith of Wessex.

Matilda died at Quedlinburg, outliving her husband by 32 years. Her and Henry's mortal remains are buried at the crypt of the St. Servatius' abbey church.

Okay, so we've got a bunch of Franks very much involved in the church and a most interesting connection: Theophanu, the wife of Otto II

Theophanu (Greek: Θεοφανώ Σκλήραινα, Theophano Skleraina; c. 955 – June 15, 991), also spelled Theophania (Θεοφάνια), Theophana or Theophano, was the niece of the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes. ...

According to the marriage certificate issued on 14 April 972—a masterpiece of the Ottonian Renaissance—Theophanu is identified as the neptis (niece or granddaughter) of Emperor John I Tzimiskes (925–976) who was of Armenian descent. She was nevertheless of distinguished noble heritage...

Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great had requested a Byzantine princess for his son, Otto II, to seal a treaty between the Holy Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. ...

According to the Saxon chronicler Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, Theophanu was not the virgo desiderata, the anticipated imperial princess, as the Ottonian dynasty had marked out Anna Porphyrogenita, a daughter of late Emperor Romanos II. Nevertheless, when Archbishop Gero conducted her to Rome, Emperor Otto knew that he could not refuse the offer. The young princess duly arrived in grand style in 972, with a magnificent escort including Byzantine artists, architects and artisans, and bearing great treasure.

{And, I suspect she also brought manuscripts with her. What seems certain at this point, if not even earlier, going back to Charlemagne, there was communication between the Byzantine Roman Empire and some of these "upstart" Franks with Imperial ambitions.}

Theophanu and Otto were married by Pope John XIII on April 14, 972 at Saint Peter's and she was crowned empress the same day in Rome.

{Notice this reference to being married at "St. Peter's" as though it actually existed at the time. From what we have learned re: Petrarch and his gang, the Papacy was more or less a traveling salvation show and Rome was still pretty much a ruin needing to be dug out. So, if they were married at "St. Peter's", it was a very different edifice than what we know today.}


Their children were:

Sophie I, Abbess of Gandersheim and Essen, born c 975[citation needed], died 1039.
Adelheid I, Abbess of Quedlinburg and Gandersheim, born November or December 977, died 1040.
Matilda, born 979, died 1025, married Ezzo, count palatine of Lotharingia
Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor, born June or July 980
A daughter, a twin to Otto III, who died before October 8, 980

{I would even speculate that Theophanu's children were taught Greek - at least a little.}

Otto II succeeded his father on 8 May 973. Theophanu accompanied her husband on all his journeys, and she is mentioned in ca. one quarter of the emperor's formal documents, evidence of her privileged position, influence and interest in affairs of the empire. It is known that she was frequently at odds with her mother-in-law, Adelaide of Italy, which caused an estrangement between Otto II and Adelaide. According to Abbot Odilo of Cluny, Adelaide was very happy when "that Greek woman" died.

The Benedictine chronicler Alpert of Metz describes Theophanu as being an unpleasant and talkative woman. Theophanu was also criticized for her decadence, which manifested in her bathing once a day and introducing luxurious garments and jewelry into Germany. She is credited with introducing the fork to Western Europe - chronographers mention the astonishment she caused when she "used a golden double prong to bring food to her mouth" instead of using her hands as was the norm." The theologian Peter Damian even asserts that Theophanu had a love affair with John Philagathos, a Greek monk who briefly reigned as Antipope John XVI.

Otto II died suddenly on 7 December 983 at the age of 28, probably from malaria. His three-year-old son, Otto III, had already been appointed King of the Romans during a diet held on Pentecost of that year at Verona. At Christmas, Theophanu had him crowned by the Mainz archbishop Willigis at Aachen Cathedral, with herself ruling as Empress Regent on his behalf. Upon the death of Emperor Otto II, Bishop Folcmar of Utrecht released his cousin, the Bavarian duke Henry the Quarrelsome from custody. Duke Henry allied with Archbishop Warin of Cologne and seized his nephew Otto III in spring 984, while Theophanu was still in Italy. Nevertheless he was forced to surrender the child to his mother, who was backed by Archbishop Willigis of Mainz and Bishop Hildebald of Worms.

{All this to-ing and fro-ing between Germany and Italy would have given these people plenty of opportunities to acquire manuscripts from there as well. And they would certainly have reason to "alter history" if it benefitted them.}

Theophanu officially took over regency in May 985 and reigned over the Holy Roman Empire until her death in 991, including the lands of Italy and Lotharingia. By her prudent policies, she also was able to conclude peace with Duke Henry's former supporter Duke Mieszko I of Poland and to safeguard her minor son's interests. Like the Byzantine empress regnants Irene of Athens (752–803) and Theodora (815–867), who also had ruled for their minor sons, she issued diplomas in her own name as imperator augustus, "Emperor", the years of her reign counted from the accession of her husband in 972.

She died at Nijmegen and was buried in the Church of St. Pantaleon near her wittum in Cologne. The chronicler Thietmar eulogized her as follows: "Though [Theophanu] was of the weak sex she possessed moderation, trustworthiness, and good manners. In this way she protected with male vigilance the royal power for her son, friendly with all those who were honest, but with terrifying superiority against rebels."

Because Otto III was still a child, his grandmother Adelaide of Italy took over the regency until Otto III became old enough to rule on his own.

I think these connections could certainly support the transfer, copying, existence of ancient MSS to French and German monasteries. But, as we have seen, the copies were not all of equal quality. What is also clear is that this tendency to want to recreate the Roman Empire actually began with Charlemagne in 800 which was quite a bit closer to the time of the collapse of the Empire so that, to be sure, there were memories and tales and possibly even a few manuscripts about that were re-copied, re-written to support the Frankish "rights", i.e. Gregory of Tours History of the Franks that blatantly stole episodes from Eastern Roman Empire history. But that could actually have come a bit later, we don't have to ascribe that to Charlemagne. But we do think that there was some knowledge of what went before.

It will bear a bit more scrutiny.

 

[dantem]

First thing to do would be:

1- Download all the images
2- OCR them into text files, .doc usually.
[...]

1- Done
2- Nearly done...

 

[Don Genaro]

First thing to do would be:

1- Download all the images
2- OCR them into text files, .doc usually.
[...]

1- Done
2- Nearly done...

Cool! Let me know when there's something to be proofread. Gaby, do you already have some of it translated?

 

[Gaby]

Cool! Let me know when there's something to be proofread. Gaby, do you already have some of it translated?

Yeap, but you'll have to give me until the end of this week when I have more time. I prefer to finish the chapter first and revise it. I'm getting used to the style: there are hardly any sentences (he uses commas a lot) and there are no paragraphs. Only a few days ago I learned how to distinguish a statement about Caesar from someone else's. Yes, literary techniques!

FWIW, here is a good and most handy Italian-Italian dictionary : _http://www.grandidizionari.it/