Tacitus and Bracciolini. The Annals Forged in the XVth Century

by John Wilson Ross

V. It is, of course, (if there be any truth in the present theory), a thing by no means strange, but, on the contrary, to be thoroughly expected, when this temper and turn of mind are strongly enforced by Bracciolini in his Dialogue "De Infelicitate Principum"; his friend, Niccoli, one of the interlocutors, when asked "why he was more prone to blame than praise," replies that "there was no difficulty at all in giving an explanation, because he had been taught it by the experience of advanced age and the antecedents of a long life: he had too often been wrong in praising men, because he had found them worse than he had thought them; yet he had never been wrong when he had abused them, for there was such a multitude of rogues amongst men, such an amount of vices and crimes, such a superabundance of hypocrites, from people preferring to seem rather than be good, so many who threw such a veil of honesty over their rascalities, that it was perilous, and akin to falsehood, to bestow laudation on anybody." "'Cur in vituperando sis quam in laudando proclivior.' 'Hoc facile est ad explicandum,' Nicolaus inquit, 'quod longa aetas et ante acta vita me docuit. Nam in laudandis hominibus saepius deceptus sum, cum hi deteriores essent quam existimarem, in vituperandis vero nunquam me fefellit opinio. Tanta enim inter homines versatur improborum copia,—ita sceleribus omnia inficiuntur, ita hypocritae superabundant, qui videri quam esse boni malunt,—ita quilibet sua vitia aliquo honesti velamento tegit, ut periculosum sit et mendacio proximum quempiam laudare'" (Pog. Op. 394). Though these words are ascribed to his friend Niccoli, they exactly expressed his own sentiments, as may be seen in the letter to his friend, Bartolommeo Fazio, from which we have already quoted, where he speaks of himself as being "always excessively averse to the language of praise," and further reproves it as "a species of vice":—"non adulandi causa loquor, nam abfuit a me longissime semper id vitii genus" (Ep. IX. Bartol. Facii Epistol).

In that strongly expressed sentiment of the world being filled with so many knaves that it was dangerous, and all but destructive of truth, to believe in honesty, we have the keynote to the whole of the Annals; and the last six books are marked by a universal cynical disbelief in human honesty; for from the first character, Asiaticus, who is accused of every kind of corruption and abomination (XI. 2), down to Egnatius, with his perfidy, treachery, avarice, lust, and superficial virtues (XVI. 32), all are patterns of the vices, few, except the aged Thrasea, being bright examples of virtue. I have no doubt this description of the general depravity of Adam's descendants, the dwelling on which was so delectable to the disposition of Bracciolini, was a very correct portraiture of the human race in the fifteenth century, when, in Italy especially, and, above all, in Rome, the light from the lamp of Diogenes was, I suspect, very much wanted to find an honest man.

CHAPTER II.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

I. The intellect and depravity of the age.—II. Bracciolini as its exponent.—III. Hunter's accurate description of him.—IV. Bracciolini gave way to the impulses of his age.—V. The Claudius, Nero and Tiberius of the Annals personifications of the Church of Rome in the fifteenth century.—VI. Schildius and his doubts.— VII. Bracciolini not covetous of martyrdom: communicates his fears to Niccoli.—VIII. The princes and great men in the Annals the princes and great men of the XVth century, not of the opening period of the Christian aera.—IX. Bracciolini, and not Tacitus, a disparager of persons in high places.

I. The fifteenth century was the most curious of all ages: it has never been properly depicted, except on its darker side, indirectly, in the Annals. It is usually regarded as an age of barbarism; it was not that; it must ever be memorable for splendour of genius and the promotion of letters. A proof of the esteem in which literary excellence was held is afforded by the conduct of the Sultan of Turkey, Mahomet II., who deemed a mere ode by Filelfo a sufficient ransom for that scholar's mother-in-law, Manfredina Doria, and her two daughters. Astronomers were treading for the first time in the right track after two thousand years, since the days of Pythagoras, as may be seen by the hypothesis of Domenico Maria, about the variability of the axis of the globe, and by the labours of Mueller, better known by the Latin name derived from his native town of Koenigsberg, Regiomontanus, who almost anticipated Copernicus in discovering the true system of the universe. Few before or since have so excelled in mathematics and mechanics as Peurbach. Divinity had a profound and subtle exponent in the mild and gentle Thomas à Kempis. The age nursed the man who first philosophized in politics, Machiavelli. Italy was ablaze, like the galaxy, with a countless number of brilliant lights that shone in classical lore and accomplishments. Alberti shewed by his Gothic church dedicated to St. Francis (now the Cathedral at Rimini), that the genius of architecture was again abroad as much inspired as when Hermogenes reared the temple of Bacchus at Teos. Chaucer, the morning star of poetry in England, briefly preceded one greater, and even more learned, Rowley, whose few fragments recovered, as asserted by the sprightly boy-finder, Chatterton, in a chest in the muniment room of the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, reveal to us what we have unfortunately lost; his Battle of Hastings, though far away from the power and grandeur of the poetry, recalls, if not the tramp and march of the verse, attempts at the subdued tone, ease of manner, effect and picturesqueness of thoughts and figures, along with frequent, rich similes drawn from nature, which meet us at every turn in the Iliad, then newly brought to Europe, and with which the delighted poet had evidently saturated his astonished soul, a few of his expressions being close copies and some of his language a literal translation from Homer. [Endnote 251] All over Europe princes and nobles signalized themselves in martial achievements and the art of war: some revived memories of the mightiest: the great hero of antiquity, Cyrus, had not a history more obscured with fable than the great hero of the Tartars, Tamerlane; the tale of George Castriot, surnamed Scanderbeg, for his acts of valour and feats of strength, is as mythical as the tale of Ninus: Francis Sforza, Duke of Milan, could have stood by the side of Pausanias, having as signally defeated at Mont Olmo the great general Francis Piccinino as the King of Sparta crushed at Plataea the brilliant chief, Mardonius; the Hungarian sovereigns, John Corvinus Hunniades and his son Matthias occupied the ground that was held by the Theban princes, Pelopidas and Epaminondas; for the two Woiwodes of Transylvania kept their country free from the enslavement of the Turk, as the two Boeotarchs preserved Thebes in independence from the rule of the Lacedaemonians. Never did Athens produce a general superior to our own gallant and magnanimous Henry the Fifth:—

"quo justior alter Nec pictate fuit, nec bello major et armis."

Still the age, though distinguished for intellect and valour, was degraded by the most monstrous villainies that were ever perpetrated, and the most detestable characters who ever existed; and a becoming procreation of such an intellectual and depraved age was that revolting monster in letters,—the Annals.

The Muses were courted more than the Graces: talents were held in higher esteem than the virtues. Men were unremitting, indiscriminate worshippers of money; they were not trained in the school of good morals; and when people, brought up without the pale of the precepts of probity, are congenitally cursed with a greed for pelf and a legion of evil and rascally proclivities, they become easily pervious to the promptings of all sorts of knavery.

Profligacy was so wide-spread that it extended to men usually supposed to be most pious and exemplary in their lives: Bishops, Archbishops, Cardinals and the Pope himself, though celibats and holders of ecclesiastical dignities, did not arrive at Delphi without touching at Cythera: indirect evidence is afforded of this by the treatises which physicians, shortly after the commencement of the next century, wrote on the disease then called "Morbus Gallicus," when Gaspard Torella wrote his for the purpose of benefiting the manners of the Bishop of Avranches, Ulrich von Hutten his as a safeguard for the perils that attended the habits of the Cardinal Archbishop of Mayence, and Peter Pintor his to warn that gay pope, Alexander VI., of the danger of his ways, the Spanish physician even expressing the kind hope (which may not have been fulfilled) that the Holy Father would be preserved "morbo foedo et occulto his temporibus affligente": there is direct evidence of this state of abandonment to vice on the part of consecrated men from Bracciolini, who, during his excursion to the Baths of Baden in 1416, gave an account of that favourite watering place of the fifteenth century, where abbots, monks, friars and priests comported themselves with more licentiousness than the laity, laid aside all thoughts of religion, and sometimes bathed with women, whose hair they decked with ribbons and wreaths of flowers: "hic quoque virgines Vestales, vel, ut verius loquar, Florales: hic abbates, monachi, fratres, sacerdotes majori licentia quam caeteri vivunt, et simul quandoque cum mulieribus lavantes, et sertis quoque comas ornantes, omni religione abjecta" (Ep. I. 1). Joanna II., Queen of Naples, when a Doctor of Laws of Florence was sent to her court on an embassy from his fellow- citizens, and, seeking a private interview, made a coarse declaration of love, could look with a pleasant smile upon him, and ask mildly "If that was also in his instructions?" At the wonderfully numerous assembly that attended at Constance on the 22nd of April, 1418, on the formal dismissal of the Ecumenical Council by the newly elected Pope, Otto Colonna, who took the name of Martin V., there were present no fewer (according to one account) than 1,500 courtezans, many of whom heaped up a great mass of money, one accumulating 800 gold sequins, equivalent now to a little fortune of £16,000, not so much, it appears, from among the 80,000 married laymen, who were Emperors, Kings, Princes, Dukes, Counts and Knights, bankers, shop-keepers, bakers, tailors, barbers and merry-andrews, as from among the 18,000 celibats, who were the Pope, the prelates, the priests, the presbyters, the monks and the friars, grey, white and black.