Books and their makers during the Middle Ages

by George Haven Putnam

To Florence, which stood at the front of the intellectual development of Italy, belongs the credit of instituting the largest and most important of the earlier public libraries of Italy. Niccolo Niccoli, one of the most energetic of the scholarly book collectors, specified in his will, made in 1430, that his manuscripts should be placed in the Camal-dulensian monastery of S. Maria, where his friend Traversari was prior, and that these manuscripts were to be available for public use. In 1437, however, the day before his death, he added a codicil to his will, under which the decision as to the abiding-place for his manuscripts was left to sixteen trustees.

He died in debt, however, and the books would have been seized by his creditors if they had not been redeemed by Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo placed them in the Dominican monastery of S. Mark, the collection in which, in 1444, comprised four hundred Latin and Greek manuscripts. Cosimo gave much care to the further development of this collection. As has already been mentioned, he used for the purpose the services of the great manuscript dealer, Vespasiano. After the earthquake of 1453, he caused the library building to be restored with greater magnificence than before. The care of the library was continued, after the death of Cosimo, by his son Pietro, and the collection finally became the foundation of the famous Laurentian library, which is in existence to-day.

Pietro took pains to send the Greek grammarian, Laskaris, twice to the Orient to collect further manuscripts. From his first journey, Laskaris brought back no less than two hundred works, of which eighty had not heretofore been known in Italy. On his second journey, Laskaris died.

The library suffered much during the invasion of Charles VIII., but a large proportion of the books were redeemed from the French invaders by the Dominican monks, who paid for them three thousand gulden.

Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici (later Pope Leo X.) took the collection from the monastery with him to Rome, but it was afterwards returned to Florence by Pope Clemens VII.

Clemens gave to Michel Angelo the commission to build a hall for the library, but both Pope and architect died before the work was completed, and the building took shape only finally in 1571, the plan of Michel Angelo having been carried out in substance.

The library of the Vatican passed through various vicissitudes according to the interest or the lack of interest of the successive popes, but under Pope Nicholas V. (1447-1455) it became one of the most important collections in the world for the use of scholars. In 1471, Sixtus IV. completed the library building and the rooms for the archives and added many works, and it was under this Pope that the use of the books was thrown open (under certain conditions) to the general public.

Frederick, Duke of Urbino, is reported to have spent as much as 40,000 ducats on the ducal collection in Urbino, and Vespasiano rendered important services in the selection and development of this library. The books were, in 1657, under the papacy of Alexander VII., transferred to the Vatican.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was very considerable interest in literary work in Hungary and some noteworthy collections of manuscripts were there brought together. The collectors in Italy found in fact some of their richest treasures, particularly in manuscripts in Greek, in the monasteries of Hungary and of Transylvania. The cause of literature was much furthered by King Matthias Corvinus, who brought together a very valuable collection in Ofen. He kept four scribes in Florence preparing works for the Ofen library, and thirty were continually at work in Ofen itself. His wife, Beatrix, who was a daughter of King Ferdinand of Naples, and a grand-daughter of Alfonso the Good, is said to have exercised no little influence upon the literary culture of the Hungarian Court. At her instance, many Italian scholars were brought to Hungary, and their aid utilised in completing the library. The codices Budences came to be well known in the scholarly world, and secured fame both for the beauty of their script and the richness of their adornment. Wattenbach says of these, however, that their text is very largely inaccurate, giving the impression that the transcripts had been prepared hurriedly and to order. After the death of King Matthias, a number of his books came into the possession of Emperor Maximilian, who used them for the foundation of the Court Library of Vienna. This was the only portion of the original Hungarian collection which escaped destruction at the hands of the Turks.

Among the public libraries in France is to be noted that of Louis IX., which was open for the use of scholars, but which, being limited almost entirely to devotional books, could not have been of any great scholarly service. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Richard de Furnival, chancellor of the Cathedral of Amiens, instituted a public library, and himself wrote, as a guide for the same, a work entitled Biblionomia.