[4] Petrarch had been made a citizen of Rome at the time of his coronation.
[5] Petrarch, in the passage which follows, urges the Romans to procure the transfer of Rienzo's case to Rome, or at least to demand that he shall be granted a public audience and a fair trial.
Some two years after Rienzo's retirement, Petrarch addressed his first letter to Charles of Bohemia, who already enjoyed the title of King of the Romans, but had not yet been crowned Emperor at Rome, as was then customary. While we cannot attempt to analyse the anomalous character of this historically important personage, it will nevertheless be readily and justly inferred that little real sympathy could exist between our ardent southern doctrinaire and the sober northern ruler. Petrarch was too thoroughly Italian really to respect Charles personally. He could never place unreserved confidence in a German from the cold north, "where there is no noble ardour or vital heat of empire."[1] To his fellow-countryman, Rienzo, had been drawn both by the hope of seeing Rome once more supreme and, as we have seen, by natural affinity, and a common fiery enthusiasm for the mighty lessons of antiquity. Charles enlisted his interest only as the titular successor of the Cæsars. The vitality, and, it must be admitted, the absurdity, of Petrarch's political theories are clearly seen in his long correspondence with the Emperor. He clung to his ideal with such tenacity that he continued to despatch appeal after appeal across the Alps, in spite of deluded hopes and disappointments which might well have appeared decisive.[2]
The letters shed little or no light upon the conditions of the times, or upon the interrelations of the Italian states. We hear of Veii and of the Samnites, but the writer passes over the more pertinent Florence and the Visconti in silence. In one instance only does he refer to existing conditions. The success of Rienzo is cited with a hope of rousing the King's emulation.[3] If Peace and Justice and their inseparable companions, Good Faith and sweet Security, returned at the call of the Tribune, how much might not justly be expected from the spell of the imperial name? Charles was to free the Italians from slavery, to reinstate justice, now prostituted to avarice, and once more to bring back peace, long fallen into utter oblivion.[4] No more complete or specific program is offered; the poet satisfies himself with the constant reiteration of the eternal fitness of Rome's headship. This had satisfied many generations of political writers; it is the central idea of mediæval thought, whether in the field of secular or ecclesiastical political speculation. Petrarch adds nothing to it, and the chief interest in his messages is, perhaps, their conservatism. His study of the classics did not modify but served only to intensify the current conception. For him there was no mean between the traditional anachronism of a world-monarchy and the petty, unscrupulous, restless despotisms about him.
In one respect, however, Petrarch advanced beyond the fruitless repetition of old fantastic theory, for he viewed Charles not only as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire but as a new Augustus, a patron of literature. Upon receiving a letter from his royal friend he exclaims, "If it was deemed a glorious thing for Virgil and Horace to gain the notice and companionship of Cæsar Augustus and to receive his letters, why should not I, their successor, not indeed in merit but in time, and perhaps in the opinion of men,—why should not I feel justly proud to be similarly distinguished by Augustus' successor?"[5] The tribute here implied to the Emperor's interest in letters was by no means entirely unmerited. Petrarch, as we have repeatedly seen, was strongly attached to the rulers of his day, in whom he either discovered, or quickly aroused, a certain enthusiasm for the new culture. They came to relish the society of men of letters, and to extend to them their princely patronage, during the long humanistic epoch of which he was the herald.
[1] Fam., xx., 2 (vol. iii., p. 9).
[2] The senselessness of anticipating good from the arrival of the Emperor is bitterly dwelt upon in De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ, book i., chap. 116.