Prelude One
“And why,” I asked myself, “why should I have learned that this precious book exists, if I am never to possess it – never even to see it? I would go to seek it in the burning heart of Africa, or in the icy regions of the Pole if I knew it was there. But I do not know where it is. I do not know if it be guarded in a triple-locked iron case by some jealous bibliomaniac. I do not know if it be growing moldy in the attic of some ignoramus. I shudder at the thought that perhaps its torn-out leaves may have been used to cover the pickle-jars of some housekeeper.”
ANATOLE FRANCE The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
“I have been rolling this stone a long time.
I have been rolling this stone for longer than should have been necessary.”
POGGIO
Delivered –To: Mr. Tsien Bo Tong
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Subject: Gem Status
Date: Thursday, 16 March, 2016 13:55:02 -0000
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Dear Mr. Tsien Bo Tong,
We hope that this message finds you well.
In reply to your query, we assure you that all is proceeding as planned. The cimelium has not only been received and appraised here in London, but it is on its way to you via our courier and will arrive within twenty-four hours along with hard copies and originals of all the accompanying attachments. Please respect the agreed payment schedule with the second installment to be deposited in the same account as before on receipt of the gem.
We have included in the attachments the following items:
1. A cover letter explain provenance up until c. 1417, by Dr. Basilis Vlahopoulos.
2. An additional bonus, which you will find in the attachment labeled “Jacopo.”
3. A letter explaining (or at least speculating upon) the provenance from 1417 to the present, also by Dr. Vlahopoulos.
4. The translation by Dr. Vlahopoulos.
We trust you will find all of this satisfactory. Please remember to use decryption code 3 with the appropriate number scale agreed on from the outset to open the attachments; otherwise, they will automatically corrupt. We hope that you will think kindly of us should similar services be required in the future.
Yours
The Acquisition Group
Attachment #1
Dear Mr. Tsien Bo Tong,
Well, it’s been a long road but at last we can all see the end. It was almost inconceivable to me four years ago that we would ever reach this point; but here we are! When the package arrives, you will be the sole possessor of this extraordinary cimelium. We have chosen to use that word because it means: “a treasure, a thing laid up in store as valuable.” This, of course describes the manuscript most precisely and in a term as rare as that which it describes. A manuscript, I might add, of whose existence only six people in the world are aware – despite the fact that it was held within a world famous library – and of whose existence you, yourself, were skeptical of when we first began discussions four years ago next Thursday. But now all our labours have come to fruition and you have in your hands electronic notation of that fact. More importantly, within a few hours you will have the item itself, along with one more item that has (literally) fallen into our hands in the course of our efforts on your behalf. This singular and unexpected document not only helps to explain the provenance of the cimelium but is also an invaluable collectible in itself. We hope that this unexpected bonus brings you great pleasure which you will express in a material fashion.
The first item of business is the provenance of the book, or the diary or the window on the past – it is all these things. I will give you here a brief précis of the story from the time of the author until around 1416. After that, the story will be carried forward by another, more qualified, I assure you, than I, to carry the tale forward until 1476. After that, I shall return to bring things (as best I can) up to the present. I shall be brief, as I said because much of this has been discussed between us before. Much of it, too, is speculative, but there are certain facts that we need no longer speculate about as their truth has been revealed so that we have been successful. To the story then.
The document in question was written by the Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, some time near the end of the fourth century, probably in Rome. It may have been based on notes or a diary kept during his peripatetic life as a soldier. It may even be, in part, a kind of a fiction. This is uncertain. At any rate it is in his style and contains enough verifiable material to establish that it is genuine – and no one would have the knowledge or desire to attempt such a dangerous forgery. Certainly Poggio Brachiolini accepted it as being by Ammianus – although it disturbed him very deeply. At some point Ammianus made what seems to have been an excellent copy on vellum and … what shall I say … passed it on to posterity. It is difficult to determine his motives in this. The document may have been written simply to ease his conscience in old age. It may, on the other hand, have been originally intended for publication (a foolhardy idea) like his official history, but, of course, it never was. Even in those days of the disintegration of power it would have meant a slow and rather nasty death.
Let us remember (what little we know)of whom we speak. Ammianus was born a member of the city of Antioch’s senatorial class, a privileged group (although if you believe Libanius they suffered dreadfully from the duties forced upon them by the authorities in Constantinople – but I digress). They were Greeks in descent (as was Ammianus, despite the name) and we Greeks never tire of complaining. Be that as it may, Ammianus seems to have had the best of up-bringings, was well educated in the Padeia: the Greek way of life since before the days of Alexander the Great. He loved his city with its many pleasures and privileges until – most surprisingly– he left it to pursue a career in the army.
It must be understood that today’s common concept of the Roman Army as a disciplined and dedicated force of gentlemen farmers – a collection of Cincinnatii, ready to return to the land once the enemy was soundly trounced – was only a distant folk memory in the fourth century C.E. The “Roman” Army of that time was made up of professional soldiers, mostly forced into their career choice from that sector of society often referred to so lovingly by their benefactors as “the scum of the earth.” In addition, they were few of them Roman, or even Italian. They were scraped up wherever they could be scraped. In the fourth century the most popular recruitment area was Illyria, “hometown” area of the ruling family. The only factor that made this army Roman – aside from the fact that they were supposed to be fighting for the empire of mother Rome (although they were actually fighting for whatever general paid and charmed them the most) – was the fact that the lingua franca of the army of that time was still Latin. Eastern military commanders of good Greek-speaking family actually had to be taught it so that they could give orders to their troops But I digress.
Ammianus had a most astonishing and varied career. He served in the Guards (or protectories), a most privileged position, in the east and then in Gaul. He was part of the Emperor Julian’s great and doomed expedition against the Parthians and was thought to be a strong supporter of that most interesting Apostate Prince. After Julian’s death, Ammianus managed to make it back safely and he seems to have retired as a soldier and returned to Antioch. At some later point, dates are often difficult in that era, he made his way to Rome where he started a new career as an historian. He seems to have published at least part of his official history of Rome (although only the last part is extant) by 392 and then he disappears from history’s radar. This is the official version, anyway; we know a great deal more.
Some commentary on his official history is necessary here. Judgments vary, based on temperament. Gibbon certainly drew heavily on him and considered him trustworthy. Many modern historians (or historical rhetoricians, if you ask me) deplore his style as excessively florid, ornate, and too heavily laden with quotes of and references to other writers, principally Cicero and Livy. They claim that this shows a pedantical mind, unused to writing in Latin and unsure of himself as an historian. They also deplore the fact that while he refers to some most interesting events(such as the demon trials in Antioch) he fails to give enough details, which he could easily have obtained, say his critics, by searching the trial records. He was, they say, guilty of small errors and exaggerations and that he was horribly digressive. Yet his rhetorical style was the standard historical style of the time and he would probably not have been accepted, writing in any other. All the great Classical historians made errors, exaggerated and digressed into areas that they found intensely interesting. A non-digressive mind is a narrow mind without a creative openness to the world around it. As to the charges concerning detailed research, it needs to be kept very, very much in mind that the kind of detail that some modern historians crave, would certainly have resulted in censorship and possibly the Ammianus’ death. As one sympathetic modern historian has put it, “under that iron despotism Ammianus had as much chance of inspecting official documents of state trials as a German scholar in the decade of 1935-1945 would have had of perusing the secret archives of the Gestapo. ”Those who attack Ammianus on these grounds are either in possession of private axes that need grinding, or are simply ignorant of this era. But I stray from my subject.
Let me briefly state, then, that despite all the general deploring and complaining about styles and methods, no one has seriously challenged Ammianus (outside of a few, minor matters) with being inaccurate, or of misrepresenting that astonishing period of the twilight of the Roman Empire. And yet … but we will come to that “and yet” when we come to the manuscript contained herein. And so, we have the publication of at least some of Ammianus’ official history by the year 392 CE. We also have a letter of commentary by Libanius that confirms he had read part of it by that year. Most likely it was published in the form of a book (or codex in the Latin), as the change from scrolls to books been almost complete by the fourth century – strange how we have begun reverting to scrolling. After that we know nothing of the history of this official history. With the fall of the Roman west to a succession of barbarian raids, waves, plundering and, finally, occupation, Ammianus’ history, like most of the written wisdom and art of the classical world, fell into the darkness. It is astonishing to me how few people know that by far the vast majority of the knowledge of Greece and Rome has vanished forever. As an example, allow me to remind you that more than twenty contemporaries of Alexander the Great wrote about him in some form or another. Not a single one of these works survives! The First surviving history of Alexander was composed some five hundred years after the events that it narrates and that work is incomplete. But let that pass. The next news that we have of the official history, is the discovery of a portion of it – the only portion that still survives – by another, most remarkable figure in this tale: Giovanni Francesco di Poggio di Brachiolini di Terranuova.
In order for you to understand the true provenance and significance of this discovery, I must tell you a bit about this remarkable, fascinating, Florentine who has had, perhaps, more impact on the world of the Renaissance and the contemporary world (including on this keyboard before me) than practically anyone else of his time– and yet is virtually unknown. What I will tell you is the official version of history and I will leave out our monumental discoveries. Those you will learn by yourself (see Attachment #2).
Poggio, son of Guccio, was born at Terranuova, near Arezzo (you may know the wine) in 1380. His father was a debt-ridden notary and when Poggio arrived in Florence he had only 5 soldi in his pocket. But he died a wealthy man. He studied at Florence at the Studio Fiorentino and someone must have taken a liking to him because he also was taught by Giovanni Malpaghino (otherwise known as John of Ravenna) who had been the close friend of Petrarch for 15 years. He also learned Greek from Manuel Crysolaras. Crysolaras had been brought to Florence by Chancellor Salutati when a significant number of ancient manuscripts had turned up in Greek and no one among these early Renaissance humanists could read Greek! Crysolaras may have single-handedly made the Renaissance possible. But I allow my cultural loyalties to lead me from the story.
Poggio entered the guild of notaries and rose quickly. In 1403 he went to Rome to serve as a scribe to the Curia. He became secretary to the Bishop of Bari and the next year he became the apostolic scribe of Pope Boniface IX and held that high office under Boniface, Innocent VII, Gregory XII and Alexander V. It sounds like a lot of popes, but you must understand that this was the time of the great schism in the church and there were always two (sometime three) popes at hand. When Alexander dies in 1410 Poggio was promoted to papal secretary by John XXIII who was deposed by the Council of Constance in 1416. John was accused, by the way, of a large number of murders (including of his predecessor Alexander V) and the seduction (or rape) of 200 women. Apparently, he was quite guilty. Poggio, I am sure, retained his high position in the Papal secretariat through so many different pontiffs because of his exuberant wit, his spotlessly clear handwriting (a bit of a rarity those days – and in these days) and his absolute political neutrality. Released from active duty by the deposition of his master and held in the area of Lake Constance by the perpetual delays and tergiversations of the Church Council, he had the time and opportunity to indulge his curiosity in a number of ways. First, he attended the trial and burning of a notable German heretic named Jerome of Prague – a terribly mishandled affair since Jerome had been proffered safe conduct by the emperor himself. He died very bravely with the equivalent gesture of refusing a blindfold and Poggio was moved to speak very favorably of a man who was a great enemy of the Church. Second, he made a bit of a tour of southern Germany and was most impressed by the pulchritude and lack of prudery of the young ladies, particularly at the spa at Baden, where they swam naked to the enjoyment of the men (particularly touring secretaries). Third, and most important, Poggio went looking for ancient books.
I must explain that a number of Italians (mostly Florentines) were in a state of perpetual pursuit of ancient manuscripts. This craze (well it WAS the Renaissance, after all) was begun by the poet Petrarch (inventor of the sonnet), who developed a fanatical devotion to the works of Cicero and began searching monastery libraries for them. Personally, I can’t stand Cicero’s style, but the fad became very widespread and was encouraged by Colluccio Salutati, one of the most important Chancellors of Florence, and an early patron of Poggio. They seem to have got it into their Quatroccento heads that, based on the few of his works that were extant at the time that Cicero was some kind of reclusive and dedicated Roman philosopher who refused to marry (“No man can serve both a wife and philosophy”), instead of a horribly hen-pecked provincial lawyer with a golden tongue who went into politics. After Petrarch died, the search was taken up, and widened to include other authors, thank god, by a number of searchers. Before we get too misty-eyed over these devoted intellectual seekers of ancient knowledge, we should keep in mind that much of the motivation was monetary. A number of VERY wealthy individuals had placed huge bounties on ancient books for reasons that ranged from “conspicuous consumption” to genuine scholastic interest. The most prominent of these wealthy collectors by far was Cosimo de Medici of Florence: the richest banker and wiliest politician of his era. Part of his political craft was to spread a great deal of largess around where it would do the most good in buying him support: repairing churches, commissioning paintings, donating to charities – that sort of thing. But as a young man he seems to have been genuinely interested in collecting (even reading) great works from the past and he was offering, as they say, big bucks. This is particularly relevant since one of his chief agents of search was one Niccolo Niccoli who was said to have recruited Poggio into the business and later became his closest friend. So, in 1415, when Poggio found himself temporarily out of employment and with time on his hands, his good friend Niccolo offered financial support (remember, this is the official version) and Poggio jumped at the chance to become a seeker of the intellectual past. And he was very good at it.
First, he went to the famous abbey at Cluny where he found a number of discourses by Cicero – thereby establishing his credentials with the Ciceronians. After that his search ranged from France to Germany to Switzerland to Rome. Poggio went prospecting for parchment for almost three years. Some sources insist that throughout all this time he was financed by Cosimo through their mutual friend Niccolo Niccoli. Certainly, many of the books that Poggio found were translated and copied by Niccoli, but there is a curious lack of hard evidence that Cosimo reaped the rewards of the finds – at least immediately. Others claimed that the funding was provided by Poggio’s friend Leonardo Aretina who referred to Poggio in a letter as being like Camillus – the second founder of Rome – in restoring these famous and ancient works. In the curious language of the book hunters, Aretina describes the works of ancient authors like Quintillian as being “delivered” from their “long imprisonment in the dungeons of the barbarians.” The barbarians, in this case, being the monks of the monasteries being searched who seemed to have a curious indifference – even antipathy – towards the extraordinary and rare tomes in their possession. At St. Gall, for instance …but I will leave that to Poggio to tell. Whoever was funding Poggio the funding was not exactly overwhelming. At one point Poggio located 12 missing plays by Plautus – 8 were already known – and it took him two years to persuade Cardinal Ursini to finance a trip to go and get them. When the plays were finally retrieved, the Cardinal took them and “locked them up from the inspection of the learned” in his own library, and then tried to take credit for finding them. Wrote Poggio to Niccoli: “I do not understand what the man means. He seems to think that he has done something great, though in fact he has not had the least participation in the discovery of the book. It was found by anothe rbut was hidden by him.” Eventually the plays were prized from the grasping Cardinal by Cosimo and copied by Niccoli. His copy is in the Marcian library to this day.
Poggio’s successes were nothing short of astonishing. He discovered whole masterpieces that had been thought lost forever or had never been known to exist. He also found complete versions of texts that had only been known in mutilated, incomplete or partially forged versions. He found works by Quintillian, Lucretius, Apicius, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Ammianus Marcellinus, Silius Italicus, Lactantius, Vegetius, Nonnius Marcellus, Columella, Tertullian, Aulus Gellius, Julius Frontinus, Firmicus, Calpurnius, Manilius, Lucius Septimius, Coper, Eutychius and Probus – in no particular order. He, quite literally, rescued more of the lost literary world of antiquity than any other single person; and would have found more if he had been better supported. In one particular case a gentleman known as Nicolas the Swede “solemnly assured” Poggio that he had seen a copy of the complete Livy in a Cistercian monastery in Hungary but no one could be persuaded to finance a proper search – not Cosimo, nor Cardinal Ursini, nor even the Marquis of Ferrara. Whether Nicolas the Swede was telling the truth or not, we are left today with an incomplete Livy, and little likelihood of a complete version.
Poggio had two regrets throughout his life: that he wrote and spoke about openly. One was how the wealthy and powerful of his time, given this sudden access to all the intellectual treasures of the past, were so uninterested and pre-occupied with foolish pleasures. In his dialogue, Ambrosii Traversarii Opera, he puts his own words into the mouth of Niccolo Niccoli: “When many of the ancient classics had been brought to light by our friend Poggio, and there was a most flattering prospect of the recovery of others of still greater consequence, no sovereign prince or pontiff contributed in the least degree to the liberation of these most excellent authors from the prisons of the barbarians. These exalted personages spend their days and their money in pleasures, in unworthy pursuits, in pestiferous and destructive wars. So great is their mental torpidity, that nothing can rouse them to search after the works of excellent writers, by whose wisdom and learning mankind are taught the way to true felicity.” His other major regret was that other manuscript hunters always acted with great secrecy, never revealing where they made their finds or even what they had recovered so that no copies could be made and handed around for the enlightenment of all. Poggio always insisted on absolute transparency except in one case (or possibly two). Poggio was generally quite scrupulous about leaving the manuscript with its original owners and only making a copy; or borrowing the document, copying it and returning it. The manuscripts that were left in situ have now mostly disappeared through deterioration and neglect, leaving the copies by Poggio and Niccoli as the only ones in existence while those that were that were stolen often still exist in their original form. It is, as they say, a hard one to call.
For Poggio, above all else, it was the books that were important. You see, he seems to have looked upon them as the living embodiment of their dead authors, begging for rescue from the terrible and squalid conditions that the monks sometimes imprisoned them in. Listen to what he says about discovering – rescuing – Quintillian: “I truly believe that had we not come to the rescue, this man Quintillian must speedily have perished; for it cannot be imagined that a man magnificent, polished, elegant, urbane and witty could much longer have endured the squalor of the prison-house in which I found him, the savagery of his jailers, the forlorn filth of the place. He was indeed a sad sight; ragged, like a condemned criminal, with rough beard and matted hair, protesting by his expression and dress against the injustice of his sentence. He seemed to be stretching out his hands, calling upon the Romans, demanding to be saved from so undeserved a fate.”
In 1417, having made many of the principal discoveries of his life, he was offered the job of Papal secretary to Otto Colonna who had been elected Martin V, thus ending the churches 39-year schism. Within a year Poggio was invited to England by the Bishop of Winchester, uncle to Henry V. He went, but spent most of his time kicking his heels and hoping for a rich benefice that never materialized. Finally, he gave up and returned to Rome. We know very little about him during this period. We know that he acquired a mistress and a large brood of children but refused marriage because he felt that it would conflict with his position as a scholar. He also declined becoming a priest – which would have opened up a lucrative and powerful church career. He said that he had seen “many men whom I have regarded as persons of good character and liberal disposition, degenerate into avarice, sloth, and dissipation, in consequence of their introduction into the priesthood.”
Poggio settled into a villa in the Tuscan district of Valdurno (purchased by selling one of his handwritten copies of a book of Livy’s for a 120 Florins) now part of Florence. His interests became widely varied: he surveyed the ancient ruins of Rome with care and began to unearth and collect ancient sculpture. At times he was rather badly cheated in his endeavors to purchase original works of Greek sculpture from abroad. And he wrote: my god the man could write! Now I mean this statement in two equally important ways. In the first sense, all of roman type (including the print of this attachment) is descended from his style of handwriting. Indeed, between him and his friend and mentor Niccolo Niccoli,we have the creators of modern print and modern cursive handwriting. For two centuries manuscripts had been copied in a clumsy Gothic handwriting. Poggio chose to work with a clear Carolingian style that was easily read and quick to write. He transcribed Quintillian’s The Training of an Orator in only 32 days. Instead of cramped, angular texts with all the words joined together(“piggy-back” as Poggio put it) he inserted dots between each word, as in Roman inscriptions and ruled both horizontally and vertically for exquisitely proportioned letters, left and right justified (as you will see when the package arrives). Cosimo liked Poggio’s script so much he had all of his books copied in the same style.
In addition to his continuing curial work and his circulation and copying of manuscripts, Poggio also lived the life of the 15th century Humanist scholar. This is not exactly what one would imagine based on academic life today: the so-called ivory tower. In this period the scholar was often a very public warrior of words on his own behalf and on behalf of his patrons. Nothing was separate from politics – especially in Florence. Poggio, Niccolo, Carlo Marsuppini, Leonardo Bruno and Ambrogio Traversari were all close friends of Cosimo and each one of them was a influential figure in Florentine politics, academics and society and they saw themselves as knight’s errant, rhetorically jousting for their patron. As a small example I give you the case of one Filelfo who was a scholar attached to the house of Albizzi, one of Cosimo’s political rivals. Poggio saw it as his duty to take on Filelfo in a war of pamphlets or, rather, a war of filthy words. The language was sordid and vile, resting heavily on images of diseased organs of reproduction belonging to prostitutes or female animals. Poggio was awarded the victory for, sadly, he seemed have both an ability and a taste for this sort of thing.
Ona more positive note (or rather it may have been the inversion of the above) Poggio had an extraordinarily well-developed talent for telling dirty jokes. Indeed, it could be said with some certainty that it was Poggio that created the Renaissance of the dirty joke (with a nod to Chaucer). Dirty jokes had been very popular among the educated Romans and Cicero had collected these facetiae, or anecdotes. Humour seems to have had very low status during the dark and middle ages. Poggio also collected them, or made them up, during his curial career. He heard and told most of them while working in the clerical common-room of the Vatican, which he called the Bugiale, the “workshop of lies”. Eventually he assembled them and published them as: Liber Facetiarum Poggii. It was placed on the Index Expergatorious, after everyone in the papal assemblage had a great laugh reading them and it was not translated from its original Latin into English until 1879 and it was not translated into Italian until 1924! How Poggio would have laughed at that. Even today, few libraries stock it and it’s hard to get a copy. Here’s a rather mild example:
“A very simple-minded woman was in the throes of the agony of birthing a child, the father of which was a local monk. When the pain had continued for a long time, the mid-wife took a candle and inspected the woman’s secret parts to see if the baby was coming out. At this, the mother-to-be told the midwife to also look up the other end, as the monk had occasionally used it, too.”
After almost a thousand years of scholarly and practical correspondence in grave and solemn Latin, the ice was broken and humor was alive again.
Poggio lived a long and eventful life. Now 79 years was not an impossible life span in the 15th century. Our imagination of that time (especially among the ignorant) is badly marred by foolish statistical concepts such as “average life span” which folds in the ages of childhood and new-born deaths into the statistical mix to give us average life-spans in the 30s and 40s; so that someone like Poggio, living to the age of 79, seems a queer anomaly. It is true that many died younger – Lorenzo de Medici at 43 – but Cosimo (and many others) lived on into his mid 70s even though plagued with gout. Indeed, the whole Medici family were familiar with the great Florentine killer. Cosimo had it, his son Piero the Gouty was crippled and then killed by it and Lorenzo the Magnificent died of it. The diet of the Florentine wealthy was rich in the internal organs of animals, game, red meat and red wine while weak in eggs, fruit and vegetables. And run-away gout causes fibrosis of the kidneys and arterio-sclerosis. The wise, like the Duke of Urbino, drank fruit juice and Poggio drank only white Cretan wine. Besides he was essentially a happy and uxorious man (18 children)who loved to play practical jokes. His heart was, as they say, light; and death often stalks those who seek for it, or fear it.
It is said that one day the Cardinal of Saint Angelo reproved him for having children without being married: “which was unbecoming to a cleric, and with having a mistress which was unbecoming to a layman.” “True I have children,” Poggio gaily replied, “twelve sons and two daughters – but that is quite becoming to a layman, and I have them by a mistress, which is a long-established custom of the clergy.” Despite this witty repartee, Poggio seems to have decided that, at the age of 55, it was time for him to get married. In December 1435, he suddenly put aside (although provided for) his mistress – and their 12 children – and married the 18 year old Vaggia,daughter of Ghino Menente de’ Buondelmonti, a rich Florentine who gave him six hundred Florins as dowry. Despite the age difference the couple got along well together and produced six children: Pietro Paulo, Giovanni Baptista, Jacopo, Giovanni Francesco, Fillipo and a daughter named Lucretia. They all rose to important positions in the church except Jacopo. He was, like his father, a scholar who did a number of translations from Latin into Italian (including some of his father’s historical works) and he composed a commentary on Petrarch’s Triumph of Fame which he dedicated, ironically enough, to Lorenzo de Medici. He died at the age of 37, suspended by the neck from a rope from the Pallazzo Vechio in Florence, his entrails spilling into the Piazza below.
Any discussion of Poggio’s politics (prior to the discovery of the letter to Jacopo in Attachment 2) would be entirely speculative although certain clues revealed in his writing suggest that there was a considerable change in the latter years of his life. Certainly as a young man he was a believer in the republican virtues of Florence, as was everyone – in public at least. He was also clearly a supporter of Cosimo and the oligarchical grip of the Medici family. So strong a supporter must he havebeen that in 1453 he was made Chancellor of Florence by Cosimo (under the guise of an election). Frankly, to be a “pen for hire” implies either great political support or a very ironic detachment. But Poggio’s writings do not bear out either position and they show an increasing resistance to the Medici position towards the end of his life. In Deavaricia (1428) he writes about wealthy “princes” who deserved their wealthcbecause they patronized the arts. But in his last dialogue, On the Misery of the Human Condition, written in the same year as the letter to Jacopo, he paints a dismally negative view of human life. Life, he says, is “nothing but a kind of pilgrimage full of toil, error and stupidity.” Cosimo, who appears in the dialogue, counters with the argument that it’s man’s own fault since nature has provided him with everything necessary in order to be happy. No, says Poggio, nature has only provided those things to you, the wealthy and powerful; you are the exceptions, not the rule. Only the elite can be optimistic because they have – an interesting and evocative phrase – a “greater liberty of sinning.” A curious argument, from the Chancellor of Florence, but strongly supportive of the authenticity of the letter to Jacopo.
Whatever the truth of Poggio’s inner life, he spent his last years as Chancellor and as an author of a history of Florence from 1350 until 1455. Oddly enough, it too became one of the lost books of the world. It disappeared into the maw of the Mediccian library and remained hidden there until 1715. And certainly, for Poggio, it was all about the books. Much of his surviving correspondence is about “the books,” finding them, reading them, translating and copying them, lending them and trying to get them back. What must he have thought when, on the death of his closest friend, Niccolo Niccoli, he saw that man’s books taken by Cosimo – over eight hundred priceless volumes – because Niccoli died in debt to Cosimo. The religious books were given to the Monastery of San Marco, but the other books Cosimo kept for himself. It was as if the accumulation of wealth and then power were to be followed by the accumulation of the surviving wisdom of the ancient world. If we are to accept the authenticity of the materiel enclosed – and I see no reason not to – then Poggio must have been determined that one text would not become Medici property. That he, in the end, failed was not entirely his fault. He died on October 30, 1459 and was buried in Santa Croce along with Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo Bruni, Machiavelli and Enrico Fermi. His portrait was painted by Pollaiuolo and a statue was done by Donatello in the style of the “Pumpkin Head”, paid for by the citizens of Florence. The statue originally stood in the front of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore – the Duomo – but when the façade was altered in 1560 it was moved inside and, curiously, became one of the group of the twelve apostles. I used to think that he would have been amused by that but now I am not so sure.
Now as to the provenance of the cimelium itself. We did not know for certain in exactly which monastery Poggio found Amminus’ official history until the letter to Jacopo was found. Why he should have been so mysterious about this find and so open about the others has long been a matter of speculation. The closest anyone had been to the location was Poggio’s statement that it was found “in the area of St. Constance, ”in ermitarium in visceribus Alpininum '– a monastery in the entrails of the Alps. This could mean St. Gall but it could also mean Eisiedeln or Reichenau or Wingarten or a number of other places. Most of the contemporary documentation points at Fulda or St. Gall, but now we know from the letter that it was at St. Gall and we also know why it was kept a secret.
St. Gall was (and is) a Benedictine monastery twenty miles from St Constance, up a winding mountain road, and still famous for its books. It had been founded by a group of Irish monks in the 8thcentury and was well known and very prosperous due it’s manufacturing and selling of high quality linen. Part of the confusion about the find comes from the fact that Poggio seems to have visited the monastery twice; once in 1416,with some Tuscan friends, at which time he found the Quintillian, and then again in 1417, the visit we are concerned with. I shall leave the details of the find to Poggio’s own telling in his letter to his son and simply remark that while Medieval monasteries may be (according to received wisdom) responsible for preserving much of the literary remnants of the classical world, they are (in my opinion) probably responsible for destroying as much as they preserved. In some of them the books (the last copies remaining of the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome) were treated as refuse. Pages were torn out to light fires or wrap fish in. The libraries of many Medieval – particularly late Medieval – monasteries were disorganized, garbage-laden, un-catalogued dungheaps. Poggio refers to them as “dungeons” and many modern scholars have taken him at his word. But he was speaking in metaphor, referring both to the appallingly squalid conditions that he found there and that the books were imprisoned because hidden and unread by anyone. What we do know is that Poggio found the last copy of the last volume of Ammianus’ official History at St. Gall. That book (or Poggio’s copy of that book) – none of this is yet very clear – was sent to Pope Martin V who gave it to Niccolo Niccoli to translate. This much is certain as Niccoli’s hand-written transcript is still in the Marcian library. As to what might have happened to the original found at St. Gall, or Poggio’s copy (if he made one), history is silent. But now we know that he found something else as well.
One last small item and then we can move on to the “Jacopo” letter. Although I am sure that you, as an educated man of taste and discernment, already have a relatively complete knowledge of the early Medici rule in Florence, I feel it incumbent upon me to briefly refresh that knowledge. It will assist you in understanding the context of some of wha tis to come and to appreciate the irony and dilemma of Poggio’s other find and his testamentary codicil, so to speak, to his son. If nothing else it will save you the effort of running to your library or to google to verify a fact or date. The history of the Medici is long, complex and deeply intertwined with the political history of early modern Europe. Fortunately, we need only concern ourselves with the early stages, the rise to power of Cosimo de’ Medici and his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Cosimo was born into one of the wealthiest merchant families in Florence in 1389. His father was Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici who had built the families wealth, principally through banking, and Cosimo was a consummate banker himself. Despite spending literally colossal sums of money on everything from Church renovations to building a family palace to commissioning countless works of art bestowed on many institutions, he remained the richest man in Europe. His family business spread throughout the continent but the most important “branch office” was in Rome because the Medici were the papal bankers. His political power in Florence was enormous. After a failed attempt by the Albizzi family to destroy him, he was literally the ruler of Florence and her little empire. Yet he seldom ran for office (oh yes, the republican façade was maintained) and always behaved as if he were merely a private citizen, a carefully chosen pose designed to disarm the democratically minded Florentines.
It would help, here to understand that the democracy of Florence was, in theory, largely a direct democracy, loosely based on that of Periclean Athens. Many positions, even important ones, were held by people chosen by lottery: literally, names pulled out of a bag. People who were interested in running for elected office had their names placed in the bag and those who were pulled out could run for election. In each case (depending on the position) their time of service was brief – sometimes as short as a month, sometimes as long as a year – and then the hand went back into the bag. It sounds wonderfully democratic; anyone could end up doing anything. But there was a catch – Cosimo controlled whose names would go in the bag. That, and his lavish civic spending, kept him in control and yet wildly popular. He had devised a brilliantly Machiavellian formula before Machiavelli was even born. After his death in 1464 he was voted Pater Patriae even as the city realized that he that he had set up a hereditary family rule for them. The power passed to his son Piero de’ Medici, Il Gottoso (the gouty) and then, five years later, to Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo. Lorenzo, who also plays a large part in our story, held power until his death in 1492 – a date of great significance in world history.
This is, I believe, sufficient background to comprehend the details of the first document that appears to you in translation. It is a letter written by Poggio to his son Jacopo in the last year of his life. It gives the provenance of the cimelium from the day that Poggio Brachiolini found it until his death and helps to explain what happened to it afterwards. This alone proves that there is no forgery regarding the manuscript, the document is genuine and unique and possibly unread by anyone except its author and Poggio. The letter is also a unique insight into Poggio’s life as well as his relationship with Cosimo. And, finally, it helps to make clear why his son Jacopo behaved as he did and so lost the manuscript to the hands of his enemies. Enjoy. I will take up the tale again after you have read the letter.
B. Vlahopoulos
BA MA PHD
