[13] Some of the Italian universities participated but little in the new movement. Bologna and Pavia, in particular, held to their primacy in law and were but little affected by the revival.
[14] Bessarion (c. 1403-72), at one time Archbishop of Nicaea and afterwards a cardinal at Rome, is said to have been surrounded by a crowd of Greek and Latin scholars whenever he went out, and who escorted him every morning from his palace to the Vatican. He was a great patron of learned Greeks who fled to Italy. On his death he gave his entire library of Greek manuscripts to Venice, and this collection formed the foundation of the celebrated library of Saint Mark's.
[15] Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy, vol. II, p. 139.
[16] In 1436, Niccolò de Niccoli, a copyist of Florence, died, leaving his collection of eight hundred manuscripts to the Medicean Library for the use of the public, meaning thereby any scholar. This is said to have been the first public-library collection in western Europe.
[17] Nicholas as a monk had had his enthusiasm for the new movement awakened, and had gone deeply into debt for manuscripts. He was helped by Cosimo de' Medici. When he became Pope (1447-55) he collected scholars about him, built up the university at Rome, laid the foundations of the great Vatican Library, and made Rome a great literary center. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, in 1492, the glory that had been Florence passed to Rome, and it in turn became the cultural center of Christendom.
[18] Much earlier, another Oxford man had returned from study under Guarino at Ferrara—William Gray (1449)—but he seems to have made no impression. A few other scholars went before Linacre and Grocyn and Colet, but these men were the first to attract attention on their return.
[19] Agricola's real name was Roelof Huysman, meaning "Roelof the husbandman." In keeping with a common practice of the time he Latinized his name, taking the equivalent Roman word.
[20] This was bound in two volumes, and in 1911 a copy of it was sold at a sale of old books, in New York City, for $50,000.
[21] A second edition of this Psalter was printed two years later, and contains at the end, in Latin, a statement which Robinson translates as follows: "The present volume of the Psalms, which is adorned with handsome capitals and is clearly divided by means of rubrics, was produced not by writing with a pen, but by an ingenious invention of printed characters: and was completed to the glory of God and the honor of Saint James by John Fust, a citizen of Mayence, and Peter Schoifher of Gernsheim, in the year of our Lord 1459, on the 29th of August."
[22] The usual early edition was three hundred copies.