The circle of Florentine celebrities which, though its members were continually changing, always retained its peculiar character, included men of smaller importance than many of those already described, but yet worthy of mention. Among these are the philologer-poets who, in endeavouring to follow Poliziano, lost their individuality in imitations of the Roman poets of the Flavian and following periods. Their verses have but an historical and local interest for posterity, and even the sixteenth century, so busy with Latin verse-making, passed judgment upon them very freely.[87] Ugolino Vieri, who Latinised his name into Verino, celebrated his native city and its famous men in three books of a poem, ‘De Illustratione urbis Florentiæ,’ which spite of a few happy characteristics, is barely more than a dry catalogue. Naldo Naldi has acquired a more lasting reputation by his biographical works than by his numerous verses. People sang each other’s praises without end; and such laudations, though endurable from a Poliziano, are tiresome from inferior hands. Alessandro Bracci, one of the secretaries of state; Giovan Battista Cantalicio, afterwards Bishop of Penne and Adria; Tommaso Baldinotti of Pistoja; Alessandro Cortesi, the talented scion of a family of San Gemignano very intimate with the Medici; Piero Riccio, known under the Latinised name of Crinitus, and author of a history of the old Latin poets; these and many other pupils of Ficino, Landino, and Poliziano, belong to the dii minorum gentium. Verses by some of them have been printed, while heaps lie in manuscript in the Laurentian library to testify to the intellectual activity of the time.[88] The verses of the Roman Carlo de’ Massimi in praise of Pisa University have some interest for the history of literature. Literary productions of every kind were sent to Lorenzo from all quarters; he was the great patron of authors. Much of what he received he sent on to San Marco and to the Abbey of Fiesole, as may be seen by the inscriptions in the volumes.
All these men, small and great, found in Lorenzo their Mæcenas. But he showed very early that he invested the position of patron with more serious importance than his predecessors had done. When scarcely three-and-twenty he brought about the restoration of the University of Pisa, which was not only an act of justice, but, apart from its literary importance, a token of ripe political insight that helped to counterbalance in some degree the miseries inflicted on Volterra in the same year (1472). The university, formed in the fourth decade of the fourteenth century out of the existing public schools, and confirmed in 1343 by Clement VI., fell into decay from political causes later in the century, and finally succumbed to Florentine enmity. The mutual animosity of the two cities is only to be paralleled in the history of antiquity. Twenty-five years after the subjection of Pisa, the Ministry of War at Florence wrote to Averardo de’ Medici, their commissioner in the subject town:[89] ‘According to general opinion here, the most effectual means of securing the town is to empty it entirely of Pisan citizens and peasants, concerning which we have written to the Captain of the People till we are tired. He answers that he is hindered by the soldiery and officers. We now command thee to go to him and persuade him to spare no harshness or severity, as we perceive that no other remedy will avail. We have confidence in thee that thou wilt at once set everything to work, for thou couldst do nothing more pleasing to this whole people.’ The efficacious result was that the city was ruined, the marshy neighbourhood left fallow to become the home of fever, and the fleet vanished. So rooted was this hatred that when Pisa had freed herself amid the confusion which followed on Lorenzo’s death, Bernardo del Nero—a usually moderate man of the Medicean party—declared that against the Pisans nothing availed save force; all prisoners of war must be slain after the example of the Genoese, who let the Pisan captives taken at Meloria languish to death in prison.[90]
Lorenzo early perceived that the blind enmity which ruined Pisa was overshooting the mark. As his family held considerable property in the district he frequently had occasion to visit the city, whose position made it a halting-place for many travellers between northern and southern Italy. Pisa must not be allowed to give the Florentines any more trouble, but neither should it be allowed to perish. Two considerations in particular seem to have prompted the re-establishment of the old university. The first was the quiet, which was more favourable to study than the busy life of Florence; the second was the number and cheapness of dwellings, which were in increasing danger of falling to ruin since trade had departed from its old abodes, and the inhabitants were nearly all poor people. Yet Lorenzo needed great power and moral courage to set himself against rooted hatred and stubborn prejudices. On December 19, 1472, was issued the decree by which the university was restored to life.[91] A board of management was appointed—the Officiales studii—consisting of five Florentine citizens: Tommaso Ridolfi, Donato Acciaiuolo, Andrea Puccini, Alamanno Rinuccini, and Lorenzo de’ Medici. The yearly endowment was to consist of 6,000 gold florins, and the statutes of the University of Florence were to be in force at that of Pisa. Members of the state were to be entitled to academical honours and the authority to practise in Pisa alone. To raise the salaries of the professors, Pope Sixtus IV. consented to a tax on the clergy to the amount of 5,000 florins in five years, a tax which was renewed by his successor in 1497 for another five years, and drew complaints from Ficino, Poliziano, and others. Only the philosophical and literary branches of study were to continue at Florence.
The credit of all this was justly given to Lorenzo. ‘I heard a few days ago,’ wrote Antonio de’ Pazzi to him from Padua, January 29, 1473,[92] ‘that by your direction a new university is to be founded at Pisa; at which not only we Florentine students, but foreign ones too, are greatly delighted, seeing that Pisa is a city eminently suited for it, and because the scheme proceeds from a man who will strive to acquire honour by this as by all else that he undertakes.’ Scholars came flocking from all parts, and first among them Francesco Filelfo. He had found an asylum with the Sforza at Milan; but, dissatisfied and restless, extravagant and in debt, he tried to change his position. During the pontificate of Pius II. he made several attempts to this end, but, failing in his hopes, he attacked the pontiff before and after death with his usual invectives, and in consequence was imprisoned for a time. In April 1473 he applied to Lorenzo. Some time before he had managed to flatter Lorenzo’s father into forgetting his offences against Cosimo so far as to hold one of his sons over the font; and when in Florence in the autumn of 1469, shortly before Piero’s death, he obtained a loan from Lorenzo.[93] The letter which he now addressed to the latter[94] is curiously characteristic of the man. He attacks those who had long been in their graves—Marsuppini, Poggio, and their ‘synagogue.’ He begins by declaring that the Milanese chancellor, Cecco Simonetta, had advised him to prefer Pisa to Rome, where he was much wanted; and he ends with the artless assurance that Lorenzo must know well he cannot find in all the world a second Filelfo nor one more devoted to him. In another letter he remarks in the same style: ‘You are aware that at the present time no one can stand a comparison with me in my own branch.’ Simonetta, from Pavia, seconded the appeal, and sang the vain man’s praises. Lorenzo answered by asking what salary would be required, but the negotiation fell through, which Medici probably did not much regret, as he must have felt some hesitation in attaching the quarrelsome old man to his young establishment. Besides, the sentence of banishment once passed on Filelfo was still in force, and his services in the way of literary invective after the conspiracy of the Pazzi had not yet smoothed the way to his return. When he was at last summoned to Florence as professor of eloquence and moral philosophy, he had scarcely time to greet the city he had left for nearly half a century before he died, a few days after his arrival, in the summer of 1481, in his eighty-third year.
The new-born university, which was opened in November 1473, soon took its share in the working of many active forces in diverse directions. In its very earliest years it would have risen to the highly flourishing condition it afterwards attained had not various unfavourable circumstances come in the way. The unhealthy air of the city and neighbourhood had not been sufficiently taken into consideration. War, desolation, poverty, made matters worse, just at the time when Florence was also a prey to disease. For six years the establishment kept moving from place to place. Professors and students wandered away to Pistoja and Prato, and sometimes to Florence—even Empoli and San Miniato were thought of—till the state of affairs was improved, and the hitherto scattered lecturers were brought together in a university building erected by the care of Lorenzo. There was no lack of difficulties with the professors; the Sienese Bartolommeo Sozzini and the Milanese brothers Decio, all professors of law, gave Lorenzo a great deal of trouble by their unruly conduct. Among the best professors at the outset were the jurists Baldo Bartolini of Perugia and Francesco Accolti of Arezzo, brother of the Florentine chancellor, and a pupil of Filelfo; Piero Leoni of Spoleto, already mentioned, who afterwards, to his misfortune, became Lorenzo’s family doctor; the humanists Lorenzo Lippi of Colle and Bartolommeo of Pratovecchio. Special honours fell to the share of the Roman Francesco de’ Massimi, who came to the university at its opening as professor of law, was made Principal the next year, and gained such esteem both by his lectures and by his endeavours to establish and maintain a better understanding between the two hostile cities, that the rights of citizenship were conferred on him and his descendants, and he was permitted to add the arms of Pisa to his own.[95] The salaries of the professors were mostly considerable, and Lorenzo repeatedly contributed to them out of his own funds. The archbishop, Filippo de’ Medici, supported him in his efforts to benefit the institution, which was conducive both to the honour and advantage of the see. That pecuniary difficulties could not be escaped, however, is clear from the fact that in 1485, in consequence of the non-payment of the papal allowance, a retrenchment of 2,000 florins was deemed needful.
The philosophical and philological lectures continued, as has been said, at Florence, and scholarly activity there seemed in nowise diminished by the re-animation of the sister city. Among the native professors, Bartolommeo della Fonte (Fontius) made a name equally distinguished in Latin and Greek literature, and left Latin memoirs on contemporary events from 1448 to 1493, the value of which is not to be measured by their brevity.[96] His friendship with Poliziano became clouded when he obtained the chair of eloquence vacant by Filelfo’s death. He does not seem to have held it long, as he undertook the superintendence of Matthias Corvinus’ library at Ofen. The study of Greek flourished. The chair once occupied by Argyropulos and Theodoros was filled by the Athenian Demetrios Chalcondylas, who kept it longer than anyone else, and left a better reputation, both for learning and morality, than many Greek grammarians. Poliziano, who is supposed to have perfected his knowledge of the Hellenic tongue under him, addressed him in several Greek epigrams, which give no hint of the rivalry afterwards said to exist between them. A fine testimony to his Homeric studies is the edition of the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ which came out in 1488. Three years before, at the age of nearly seventy, he left Florence for Milan, where he long continued to teach, having been gladly welcomed by Lodovico Sforza, who rivalled the Medici in his patronage of science and art. Chalcondylas’ place at Florence was taken by Johannes Lascaris, who formed many fruitful connections with Milan, France, and Rome, in the days of Lorenzo’s son. The knowledge of Greek was, perhaps, never so widespread among high-born youths anywhere as in those days in the Tuscan city to which, Poliziano said, Athens with its native soil and all its possessions had transferred itself. In truth, strangers eager to learn came from all quarters—England, Germany, Portugal—just as of old everybody went to Athens. Here Alessandro Farnese acquired that knowledge of the language and literature of Greece which the greyhaired Pope Paul III. had not yet lost. Poliziano thus addressed the hearers of Chalcondylas:
Seek the Pierides not in their ancient home, O ye poets:
For in this city of ours dwells now the heavenly choir.
Where, do ye ask, have they chosen among us a place to abide in?
All the nine ye will find safe in Chalcondylas’ breast.