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!’