CHAPTER I.

COMMENCEMENT OF HUMANISM. COLUCCIO SALUTATI AND POGGIO BRACCIOLINI. THE

BOOK TRADE.

DURING the first half of the fifteenth century the great revolution

was accomplished which introduced a new era. The antique classical

world entered the lists against the Middle Ages. The contest had

already begun before events which properly extended beyond the learned

circles produced a swift and irresistible reaction. At a time when

ecclesiastical schism was already throwing its dark shadow over

the general disturbances in Western Christendom, two great poets,

Petrarch and Boccaccio, died, after having brought the ancient world,

of which they themselves possessed but an imperfect view, closer to

their contemporaries and those who followed them than had been the

case during the eight centuries which had elapsed since Theodoric the

Ostrogoth. Between the first humanists who pursued the road taken by

these writers and the faction who held fast to ecclesiastical and

learned traditions, a contest had arisen which, properly speaking,

never ceased in life and literature, however different might be the

forms under which it was designated. The Florentine chancellor,

Coluccio Salutati, to whom in the latter third of the fourteenth

century the first place belongs in State documents and learned

treatises, had displayed more Pagan learning than Christian views in

his book ‘De Fato et Fortuna.’ The Dominican Fra Giovanni Dominici,

afterwards cardinal of Ragusa, in his treatise on family life,[325]

spoke against a school which made youths, nay children, ‘rather heathen

than Christian, taught them rather of Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and

Cybele, than of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; would poison the

tender and helpless minds by sacrifices before false Gods, and train

Nature’s apostate from the truth in the bosom of infidelity.’

Another contest was beginning now. The Latin language asserted an

exclusive pre-eminence in the learned world. It had discarded the

ungainly form of preceding centuries; but although it claimed to

emulate Cicero and Virgil and renew the Augustan age, many decades

were to pass before learning clothed itself in the originality of a

living idiom. The authors of the time we are now considering, however

high they stand above those of the preceding epoch, among whom only

Petrarch possessed a shadow of true Latinity, were never otherwise

than imitators. Their true services are not to be sought for in

their own intellectual work as poets, rhetoricians, historians, or

letter-writers. While they retarded, if they did not prevent, the

development of the vulgar tongue, they created nothing new in the

direction they themselves pursued. The last third of the fifteenth

century was the first to witness the sudden and simultaneous revival

of Latin and Italian poetry. The first assumed a peculiar tone, while

the latter rose to a lofty flight by an independent use of the models

of its grand youth and a liberal appropriation of new elements. The

literature of the first epoch of humanism had played its part then.

Its importance did not so much consist in original productions as in

the ground it prepared and fertilised, in the ideas it smoothed the

way for, the intellectual material which it collected, and in the

superannuated things which it abolished for ever. This limited and

conditional recognition, which its representatives would have proudly

repelled at a time when they thought they governed the world, and

really did so in certain respects, includes both praise and blame. For

while the revival of classical spirit and forms called forth in the

plastic arts great works which will endure through all centuries by

their own merits, it left not a single independent typical monument in

literature.

To Florence belongs the praise of being first in this field as well

as the other. Her inhabitants were not able to attach to their city

Francesco Petrarca, who was not only the greatest poet, but the

greatest connoisseur and most passionate worshipper of antiquity in

his time; but his spirit seems to have remained with them. At a time

when in general the sciences were strictly separated from literature,

properly speaking, they were here united in many cases in a harmonious

whole. Lapo da Castiglionchio and Luigi Marsigli, in the latter part

of the fourteenth century, were brilliant examples of this.[326] The

first, a scion of a noble family, united to the most thorough knowledge

of the law, especially the canon-law, extensive scientific learning,

which was of great use to him in learned intercourse and literary work,

as well as in his commissions from the State. After having seen his

house burnt to the ground in the anarchy of 1378 and himself sentenced

to exile, his misfortunes procured him an honourable reception in

Rome, where he became senator, and played an important part under

Pope Urban VI. With Luigi Marsigli begins the illustrious series of

men who did not limit their usefulness to their own achievements, but

formed a centre of learning for their contemporaries, especially the

younger ones, which was most fruitful in results. Having entered the

order of the Augustinians when young, he was sent to Padua to complete

his studies, where Petrarca looked forward for him with the brightest

hope, and encouraged him to cultivate science as well as theology,

since it formed, as he said, the proper complement to this study. How

he entered into the ideas of his renowned countryman is shown by the

extensive knowledge he attained of Latin literature and most branches

of learning, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, many of

whom owed to him their first encouragement and guidance. His monk’s

cell at Sto. Spirito was a place of meeting for all who had any share

in intellectual attainments. The Republic was accustomed to seek his

counsel in numbers of difficult questions, especially during the

Great Schism which gave the State authorities so much trouble, and on

his death on August 21, 1394, it was determined to honour him by a

monument.[327] His collection he bequeathed to the convent in which he

had spent the greatest part of his life.

Luigi Marsigli was teacher of theology at the Florentine university,

the fortunes of which often varied, but which from the middle of the

fourteenth century till near the end of the fifteenth exercised a

powerful influence on the revival of scientific life. The first idea

of the foundation of a university, _studio pubblico_, seems to have

arisen in 1321.[328] Thirteen years later we find Cino da Pistoja,

the celebrated poet, as teacher of law; but it was in the late autumn

of 1348 that the institute was really founded, full ten years after

Pisa had given new provocation to the jealousy of the Florentines by

a revolution in her own college.[329] Matteo Villani, who begins his

chronicle with the year just mentioned, observes that the Government,

being satisfied of the extinction of the great pestilence, had intended

thereby to attract new inhabitants, to increase their fame and glory,

and afford the citizens an opportunity of gaining knowledge and skill.

Eight of the most illustrious citizens were chosen as superintendents

of the new institute, and a site selected between the cathedral square

and that of the Signoria, which, as already mentioned, is now occupied

by the Collegium Eugenianum. Among the superintendents we find Tommaso

Corsini, Jacopo degli Alberti, Bindo Altoviti, Giovanni de’ Medici, men

of illustrious names, and the first of whom, the teacher of law, had

already made himself of use in various embassies and public offices,

for at all times we meet with a combination of official activity and

learning which was profitable in both ways.

That it was prohibited under heavy fines to resort to foreign

universities, is a proof of municipal exclusiveness increased by

hatred of their neighbours. Pope Clement VI., who indeed needed

the Florentines, was more liberal-minded than they, and granted

from Avignon on May 31, 1349, the privileges of Bologna to the new

university. At first they seem to have cherished the hope of gaining

Petrarca for the university; and when, in order to win him over, they

redeemed his confiscated paternal inheritance (a tardy restitution),

Boccaccio was sent to him at Padua. The matter remained without any

favourable result, probably on account of the disinclination of the

celebrated man to bind himself to permanent residence there, although

the customs of university life at that time, which allowed the

teachers to withdraw after a short interval, would still have left a

wide scope for his wandering propensities. The first period did not

fulfil the hopes which had been entertained. The plan seems to have

met with many opponents; while even the payment of the subvention of

2,500 gold florins seems to have fallen very hard on the city, then

in its first contests with the Visconti and the mercenaries. The

school revived in the autumn of 1357. Lapo da Castiglionchio gave

lectures there then, and three years later we meet with the first Greek

teacher, the Calabrian Leonzio Pilato, who had been drawn thither

from Venice by Boccaccio and remained three years. In 1364, Piero

Corsini, Tommaso’s son, and Bishop of Florence, obtained from the

Emperor Charles IV. imperial privileges for the school. The residence

of the most celebrated legal teacher of his time, Baldo of Perugia,

was but a short one. In 1368 the number of the teachers amounted to

seventeen. The disturbances leading to the mob-rule of 1378 seem to

have resulted in closing the university anew. Among those who taught

after it had been re-opened in 1385 was Francesco Zabarella of Padua,

subsequently Bishop of Florence and cardinal, an influential member of

the Council of Constance. About the same time Pier Paolo Vergerio, of

Capo d’Istria, then a young man, but afterwards renowned as a legal

scholar and humanist, lectured on dialectics. Two years later the

school received its statutes under the name of _Ordinamenta Studii

Florentini_, from an assembly of superintendents, professors, and

students in the Benedictine abbey. In 1397, Florence gained two men who

powerfully contributed to the revival of classical literature. The one

was Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna, who had been Petrarca’s companion

for fifteen years, and who taught the Latin language and literature for

many years with great success; the other, Manuel Chrysoloras, with whom

a branch of classical knowledge hitherto neglected began to develop

with great vigour.

The study of the Greek language and literature began at Florence with

Manuel Chrysoloras, and through her and Venice, always intimately

connected with the Levant, it spread over the rest of Italy. Petrarca

and Boccaccio had rather followed the Greek authors with a longing

gaze than been able to appropriate them; and though the poet of

the ‘Decameron’ transplanted, as he boasted, the Homeric poetry to

his native land, yet several decades passed after his death before

these isolated endeavours gained any real influence. Leonzio Pilato’s

activity was but transitory. Manuel Chrysoloras, who had originally

come to Italy on a diplomatic mission for John Paleologus, the

oppressed Emperor of the East, laid the foundation of the earnest

and successful studies which, as it were, opened a new world to the

West. For it was these studies which led to the living fountain of

Hellenic intellect men of mature age as well as aspiring youths, who

had hitherto only moved within the beaten track of the university

instruction of that time, and the still narrow circle of classical

literature. The fate of Greek writings is essentially different from

that of the Latin. The dark ages passed over the East also. Even

before the end of the Western Empire Greece was heavily visited, its

people mixed with foreign elements, its language corrupted, and much

of its great literature lost. But when Rome relapsed into barbarism,

Constantinople remained the centre of an ancient but decaying

civilisation which was never thoroughly extinguished.

Manuel Chrysoloras, who publicly taught in Rome, Venice, Milan, and

Padua, found the most fertile soil for his teaching in Florence,

whither he was summoned towards the end of 1396 at the suggestion of

Messer Palla Strozzi. It was he who undertook to satisfy the desires

awakened by Petrarca and Boccaccio by a thorough knowledge of his

mother-tongue, and by an introduction to the works of the great classic

authors and fathers of the Church, which he gave to eager scholars.

By his Greek grammar, the ‘Erotemata,’ as the title names it, first

printed at Venice in 1486, and introduced by Reuchlin, during the

latter years of his life, at the Tübingen University, he prepared the

way in the West for a scientific treatment of the language. When,

accompanied by Demetrius Cydonius, he arrived at Venice on his second

Italian journey, with the intention of giving lectures on the language

and literature of his native country, two Tuscans, the Florentine

Roberto de’ Rossi, and Jacopo Angelo of Scarperia in Mugello, repaired

thither to enrol themselves among his students. The latter then himself

visited the East. Coluccio Salutati, who still belonged entirely to the

school of the times of Petrarca, but who felt strongly the strivings

of the new spirit, wrote at that time to Demetrius:[330]—‘Still more

than at your greeting do I rejoice at the favour of heaven shown to us

in your arrival. When the study of Greek was, so to say, extinct among

us, you and Manuel have appeared like light in the darkness. God has

led you to Latium. By receiving and instructing Roberto so kindly, you

have inspired many with a desire to know Greek, and I already see in

spirit what a crowd of eager students of Hellenic literature will have

gathered together in a few years. Happy I, if happiness be yet reserved

for a man at my age (to-morrow I complete my sixty-fifth year), if I

am yet able to see the fountain-head, the source of all the knowledge

of Latium! Who knows if I be not destined, like Cato, to obtain a

knowledge of Greek literature in my old age, and unite the fruits of

this study to my native learning!’

It is a characteristic feature in the history of the revival of classic

literature generally, and especially of Greek, in Italy, and above

all in Florence, that so many men and youths of the higher classes

devoted themselves to such studies. Classical literature was not a mere

ornament and secondary matter, nor was it restricted to schools and

convents or to the purposes of self-maintenance. It was used in the

palaces of the commonwealth as well as in ordinary business. To many

it was the companion for life in fortune and misfortune—a cheering

friend at home, a consoler in the gloomy days of exile. Florence can

boast of a whole series of statesmen who were intimately acquainted

with the Greek classics, whose works they translated in their leisure

hours. Among Chrysoloras’ scholars were men of the first families,

and many men who rose to the most important offices of State. Palla

Strozzi was himself one of them, and in his banishment he never ceased

to enjoy the fruits of his studies in earlier years. Roberto de’ Rossi

instructed a number of younger pupils. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, for

many years chancellor of the Republic, was among those who attained

the most thorough knowledge of Greek. In Florence they did not wait

till the fall of Constantinople scattered the ruins of the Grecian

world over Italy to become intimate with Greek literature, to attract

Greek teachers, and to purchase Greek literary treasures. Many went

to the East not only to collect manuscripts, coins, works of art, and

inscriptions, but also to study the language and literature in the

country itself. Even Pope Pius II., in the speech by which he announced

the plan of the crusade, testified that Constantinople had, till the

day of the conquest, proved itself the monument of antique wisdom, the

seat of science, and the stronghold of philosophy; the Italians had

only thought they could attain the palm of excellence when, as the

Romans did in Athens, they had pursued their studies in Constantinople,

whence so many excellent works of antiquity had come to the West, and

others were still to be expected. That the Byzantine school exercised

as much influence on Italian travellers as the later Athenian did on

the Romans is evident; the humanistic rhetoricians and philosophers

retained some habits of mind which profound and extensive study of

the great authors was not always able to overcome. But the good of a

wide diffusion of classical learning outweighed the disadvantages. The

rapidity of its dissemination in a short time was astonishing. The

Greek fathers assembled at the Florentine conference were not a little

surprised to find men among their native colleagues who knew far more

of Greek language and literature than they did.

Cosimo de’ Medici was in the prime of life when this great revolution

passed through its first stage. It was the epoch in which Greek

literature broke like a mighty wave over Italy, while the limits still

restricting Latin were broken through as with an enchanter’s rod. The

Council of Constance, which restored peace and unity to the Western

Church, opened also the libraries of German and French convents, in

which numerous treasures, especially of Roman literature, lay unread

and long forgotten. Poggio Bracciolini,[331] born at Terranuova, in

the Upper Arno valley, in 1380, was thirty-five years old when he

accompanied Pope John XXIII. to Constance. He was the most successful

discoverer the world has known in the field of literature, which he

has enriched in an undreamt-of manner. Nor was he merely a discoverer,

but also one who could turn these treasures to good account—learned,

skilful, acute, witty; a true child of his age in the literary quarrels

which often degenerated into mere janglings, in the slander, equivocal

wit and anecdotes, in the restlessness and disquiet which seemed

to have seized the humanistic class generally. The papal treasury,

to which he was attached all his life long without forfeiting his

attachment to his native land, appointed him her chancellor, when he

already numbered seventy-three years. Of no pre-eminent importance

as an historian and antiquarian, he had that lively feeling for the

grandeur and glory of the Roman epoch which had inspired Petrarca,

and in him it was united with a wider view and surer knowledge of the

monuments which had emerged from the mediæval world of fables. It was

Poggio above all who abolished the Rome of the Mirabilia. The literary

endeavours which began in St. Gall continued in operation during years

and decades, even into the time of Leo X., and extended over Germany

and France as far as Scandinavia. The movement affected the convents

of Italy, which were not more respected than foreign ones, and it

created a new life at the same time in literature by multiplying and

disseminating the old supplies of learning and those newly gained. The

book trade, in the proper sense of the word, then first began.

Books were exceedingly rare and proportionately dear till the fifteenth

century. Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s testimony brings vividly before

our eyes the straits in which learned men often found themselves; and

even those in high stations copied with their own hand works that they

would otherwise have been unable to procure, either on account of the

extravagant prices, or in cases where the originals could not be bought

on account of a deficiency of copyists and the difficulty of obtaining

them. When we regard with a feeling of gratitude the copies of Cicero’s

‘Meditations’ made by Petrarca, and now preserved in the Laurentian

library, one of which replaces the original for us, we can estimate,

in some degree, the value which these men placed on the discovery—for

discovery in a certain sense it was—of those antique models, which

became to them examples of life and conduct. This reflection brings us

back to the times which we are contemplating, when we find emendations

and conjectures of the text written on the margin of the manuscripts

in Coluccio Salutati’s hand. It but seldom occurred that learned men

copied for others, as Poggio Bracciolini, who wrote a beautiful hand,

did in his youth, when he had to live on such work. The copying for

money had in general become the business of very ignorant persons, of

whose negligence Petrarca, who had a skilful assistant in his companion

Giovanni da Ravenna, gives us an idea when he asks if Cicero, Livy,

and Pliny, would recognise their own works in this shape, or would not

rather consider them productions of the barbarians. Coluccio Salutati

wrote a special treatise on the unfortunate condition of books, and

the means of preventing harm arising to literature. Not only works

of antiquity were considered here, but modern authors also. ‘I cannot

express,’ says the Florentine chancellor once,[332] ‘how repulsive the

universal corruption which has crept into books is to me. We scarcely

find one manuscript of Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s works which does not

deviate from the original. They are not texts, but coarse caricatures

of texts (_similitudines_), while the real texts are in a measure seals

(_sigilla_) of the original documents. What we have deviates more from

the originals than statues from the men whose counterfeit they are.

They have a mouth, but they say nothing; or worse, they frequently say

what is false. In Dante’s book this calamity is the greatest, as the

uninitiated are often unable to follow those who are at all acquainted

with the poet.’

Nevertheless a certain kind of book trade was an old-established

calling;[333] not to speak of single sales, as for example the sale, at

the little town of Poggibonzi, of a perfect copy of the ‘Corpus Juris,’

as well as the decrees of Gratian, of which we possess a notary’s

deed of transfer bearing the date 1215. The _stationarii_ at the

universities, an expression preserved in the English word stationer,

were persons who kept a supply of text-books used in the lectures,

for the purpose of copying, in which learned and unlearned, and even

women, were employed. The thronging of the ignorant to this business,

which seems to have been lucrative, necessitated superintendence,

which was exercised by Peciarii, selected among the students, and

all of the clerical order. We can easily understand that, except at

the universities, in which Bologna and Padua took the lead, such

superintendence (for which, and for the trade in manuscripts generally,

special directions were issued in the fourteenth century) could not be

organised, so that much always depended on the pleasure and ignorance

of dealers and copyists.

Copying and painting were certainly favourite employments in the

monasteries; but either the requirements of the special community

were principally kept in view, or it was chiefly a question of

ecclesiastical and devotional books. As towards the end of the Gothic

period, Cassiodorus, one of the last who witnessed antique culture

still alive, recommended copying to the monks of Squillace, so did

Fra Giovanni Dominici in the beginning of the fifteenth century, when

he remarked that such employments raised monks and nuns to pure and

holy thoughts, words which plainly show what kind of books were meant.

Even in the cloister the want of books, and those the most necessary,

was at times felt. Most of the convent libraries were poor in ancient

manuscripts. It was worse in the more recently founded ones and in

nunneries. The sainted Chiara Gambacorta,[334] daughter of a ruler of

Pisa, towards the end of the fourteenth and at the beginning of the

following century, repeatedly complains of the destitution prevailing

in her convent of Dominican nuns, and rejoiced when any book was

promised as a legacy. Once she begs for information where a Book of

Lessons or a Bible may be found. ‘We are very poor in books, and need

them for Divine service. Copying is too expensive for us to be able

to think of it. If we should find any ready made, however, I hope to

God that I shall be able, by the assistance of good people, to pay for

them.’ Three and a half to four gold florins were paid at this time for

a devotional book, the offices of the Virgin, not only by noblemen but

by wealthy citizens. Rinaldo degli Albizzi considers it worth noticing

in his memoirs,[335] that in the summer of 1406 he paid eleven gold

florins for a Bible at Arezzo. Even in a city like Florence it was not

easy to procure books of devotion, because of the small number of good

copyists. An Augustinian brother of Sto. Spirito, a skilful writer, was

engaged in 1395 by the Cardinal Piero Corsini for full two years.[336]

The materials were also costly. The parchment for a book of Epistles

cost ten silver florins. The expense of illustrating manuscripts with

miniatures and ornaments was very considerable. The convents would not

have been able to obtain so many manuscripts of this kind had not the

industry of their inhabitants been specially directed to the art of

illumination.

The rapid diffusion of learning and the equally swift increase of

literary material created the book trade properly so-called, which

till then had been pursued occasionally by persons of every calling,

among others by tavern-keepers. One of the centres of this trade was

Venice, which was materially assisted in her dealings by her extensive

commercial connections. When the study of Greek began to revive,

numerous codices were imported from Candia, among other places,

where copying had become a fruitful source of gain, and were eagerly

bought up by native and foreign collectors.[337] Of course this trade

presupposed the formation of a special class of copyists, who were

under the direction of such persons as specially devoted themselves

to this branch of business, undertook large and small orders, and had

them executed by hundreds of workmen. A certain degree of literary

cultivation was requisite in those whose duty it was to control the

workers. The great mass of manuscripts of classical works belongs

to the fifteenth century. In some cases they represent for us the

originals, which have disappeared since, especially after the invention

of printing by types, for as we know from Aldo Manuzio’s complaint,

the parchment of manuscripts which had been printed from was often

used for binding purposes. In other cases they are to be counted of

especial value, because the originals were then already in a very

injured condition, like the manuscripts of Quintilian and the ‘Sylvae’

of Statius, which Poggio found in St. Gall and in France, as was the

case also with the manuscripts of Constantinople. A numerous progeny

of errors may be derived from such copies, of which the earliest, even

when made by learned men, were not always perfectly exact, not those of

Petrarca nor Poggio, who were occasionally forced to work in a hurry

(_velociter_). The costly parchment was by no means employed for all

new manuscripts. The paper manufacture, which, if not revived in the

fourteenth century, was at least developed then in a greater degree,

wherein the first place seems to belong to the town of Fabriano, which

still furnishes the best paper in Italy. This manufacture was begun as

early as 1379 at Colle, in the Elsa valley,[338] and was of essential

service to the book trade. Of this most brilliant but brief period

of the preparation of manuscripts, and the trade in them, an epoch

which immediately preceded that of the invention of printing, and the

memorials of which are to be found in all the libraries of Italy and

elsewhere, we shall speak again later.