Sailing from Byzantium (9 page)

The chances for an Italian seeking to learn Greek were becoming better than in Petrarch's and Boccaccio's day, a generation or two earlier. For one thing, it was someone like Rossi who now had the desire: not a pioneering genius, but a more representative figure, bright and talented certainly but
one of a growing crowd. This development is directly attributable to one man, the Florentine chancellor and renowned humanist teacher Coluccio Salutati.

Greekless himself, and destined to remain so despite his later efforts, Salutati nonetheless inspired an energetic enthusiasm for Greek literature among the wide circle of trendy young intellectuals in Florence who looked on him as their mentor. Rossi was one of this group of young Florentines (actually Rossi himelf was not so young; around forty, he was Chrysoloras’ rough contemporary). Historians believe that it was at Salutati's urging that Rossi came to Venice in the first place, expressly to seek out instruction from either Cydones or Chrysoloras, both of whom were well known. Rossi would probably have told the two Byzantines about Salutati; on returning to Florence, he certainly told Salutati all about them. Be that as it may, Cydones arranged for Rossi's lessons, and those lessons were the first link between Chrysoloras and Florence—an association that would, in the end, become legendary.

Cydones, Chrysoloras, and Rossi all went home in 1391, the two Byzantines to Constantinople and Rossi to Florence. For the aging Cydones, the next few years seem to have been rewarding ones. Manuel II Paleologos—a Platonic “philosopher king,” Cydones calls him in a congratulatory letter— had succeeded to the throne shortly before Cydones’ departure from Venice. Once again taking a hand in affairs of state, Cydones immersed himself in Manuel's desperate attempts to treat with the Turks.

Meanwhile, back in Florence, Rossi gave Chrysoloras enthusiastic reviews both to his teacher Salutati and to his fellow students in Salutati's circle. One of them, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, eventually grew so excited by Rossi's
tales that in 1395 he took the simplest step he could to emulate him—simple, maybe, but dangerous, for the Turks were even then laying siege to the city. Yet, Angeli possessed boldness to match his enthusiasm. He went to Constantinople to find Chrysoloras and learn Greek.

acopo Angeli da Scarperia had been born in a small town north of Florence around 1360. His father had died when Angeli was a boy, and his mother had brought him to the city, where she had remarried. It isn't known how he first came to Salutati's attention, but the older man had taken a special liking to Angeli early on. Though never a humanist of the first rank, the affable Angeli would remain one of Salutati's favorite pupils, and received the honor of being asked to stand as godfather for one of Salutati's own children.

Salutati had urged Angeli to make the journey to Constantinople, having already conceived the idea of inviting Chrysoloras to teach in Florence. The plan was for Salutati to lobby Florence's main governing council, the signoria, to issue an official invitation; meanwhile Angeli would do everything he could to tempt Chrysoloras into accepting the offer when it came.

To reach the Byzantine capital, Angeli probably followed the standard route, the same one, for example, the
knights of the Fourth Crusade had used nearly two centuries earlier—that is, traveling overland to Venice, from there sailing down the Adriatic coast and thence eastward through the Aegean. We don't know exactly when he left Italy. But he most likely entered Constantinople sometime in the late fall, evading the Turkish blockade of the besieged city. He also almost certainly carried letters of introduction from Salutati and Rossi, along with instructions from Salutati to be on the lookout for alluring manuscripts of ancient Greek works.

The discovery of lost books, usually from monastery libraries, had been a main humanist occupation ever since Petrarch, who had recovered Cicero's seminally important
Letters to Atticus
(in which the Roman author glorifies Greek culture), among other works. Along with the desire to learn ancient Greek, the attraction of acquiring important undiscovered Greek works would play a large role in bringing other Italians to Constantinople in Angeli's footsteps. Many more books would be brought to the West by Chrysoloras and the Byzantine humanist teachers who came in
his
footsteps. A letter survives from Salutati to Angeli in spring 1396, when Angeli had been in the East for several months, in which Salutati gives a list of specific titles and authors he wants Angeli to look for and try to bring back to Florence. In Byzantium as in the West, books were very expensive and hard to find. Each one still had to be laboriously copied by hand; the arrival of printing still lay more than half a century off. Salutati assures Angeli that a sponsor has been found for buying the books, and that whatever money was needed would be rapidly accessible to facilitate speedy purchase.

Arriving in Constantinople in the fall of 1395, Angeli looked up Cydones and Chrysoloras, making a good impression on both older men and beginning his study of Greek with the latter. Chrysoloras introduced Angeli around, and
soon the gregarious Italian had struck up friendships with other leading Byzantine humanists and intellectuals. Under Chrysoloras’ tutelage, he progressed well in his Greek studies, although it would be some time before he could read Greek without his teacher's assistance. This was only to be expected. Students today commonly use cribs, or helpful translations, well into their third or fourth year of ancient Greek, and often longer if the text is especially difficult, as many are. Such translations weren't available to Angeli—for the simple reason that it would be he and his future fellow students back in Italy who would make most of the first ones. Along the way, Angeli naturally took every opportunity with his teacher to play up Florence's attractions and Salutati's sterling qualities. In truth, though, Chrysoloras needed little convincing. As will become clear, he had compelling reasons of his own for accepting the offer. The official invitation from the signoria was duly forthcoming, along with a respectable stipend, as Salutati announced happily to Chrysoloras in a letter dated March 1396. Sometime around late summer or early fall that year, Chrysoloras and Angeli left Constantinople for Italy, traveling together with Chrysoloras’ old friend Demetrius Cydones. Angeli's highly successful visit to the Byzantine capital had lasted just under a year.

The city that Chrysoloras was traveling to wasn't yet the city familiar to the modern tourist. If transported back in time to admire the Florentine skyline as Chrysoloras would have seen it, the first thing we would notice would be the gaping
absence of Brunelleschi's dome; the Duomo or cathedral, under construction since 1296, was still unfinished, its great size having baffled all attempts to design a dome for it. More than two decades would elapse before Brunelleschi would draw up his innovative plans for what would be the first large dome built in Italy since before Boethius’ day.

Drawing closer, we might also remark on the city's extraordinary spikiness. Florence had once been a forest of towers. Many were pulled down by the fourteenth century, but earlier paintings of the city make it look like a quiver packed full of arrows. Enough survived to be noticeable, interspersed with the ruined stubs of others. As we entered the central part of the city itself, we would feel shut in by the dark, narrow streets, no more than alleys really, winding through canyons of solid masonry, only occasionally opening onto tiny piazzas and courtyards. This claustrophobic sense would lift slowly during the Renaissance, giving way to broader streets and wide-open public spaces. Already the city fathers had planning on their minds, though the characteristic odors of the medieval city would linger awhile yet. A few months after Chrysoloras got there, Florentine officials fined three residents 10 lire each for failing to dig a cesspool as ordered and instead letting their sewage flow into the street.

Most times, then as now, life was fast and sharp. The marketplace up the street from the Ponte Vecchio was a daily throng of activity, with meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, exotic delicacies, and dry goods all laid out in profusion. Pack-horses and delivery carts vied with shoppers; wealthy men alertly shepherded their elaborately decked-out wives past thieves, gamblers, drunks, and whores. Verbal quips filled the air, punctuated now and then by the clash of steel on steel. It was not a safe place, Florence. It overflowed with energy,
which expressed itself in constant factional strife and political experimentation. After dark a curfew was in effect— being caught out at night could bring a fine or worse.

In winter, when Chrysoloras arrived, life slowed somewhat as the damp Tuscan chill settled in the bones. But winter or not, Florence was the most exciting place on earth. Florence's anarchic feel came from the fact that the city was ruled by its people; the towers had been there to protect the politically disenfranchised Florentine nobility from the people's wrath, until the people pulled them down. Not since classical Athens had such a place existed.

Florence at the moment of Chrysoloras’ arrival was in the middle of a long, intoxicating, and ultimately rather dangerous flirtation with history. Even the Black Death, which struck repeatedly starting in 1348, had failed to dampen the city's spirit despite cutting down nearly half its population. By the turn of the quattrocento, Florence was poised to become, for just a few decades, the undisputed literary and artistic capital of the West. Chrysoloras was about to find himself in a June garden, which he himself would bring to rich harvest. And its prize products would owe their germination to the movement known as humanism. Though similar shoots were sprouting up elsewhere in Italy (in places such as Naples and Padua, for example), it was in Florence that the fruits of humanism ripened first.

Florence was not much of a university town. In this it differed from self-important centers of Scholastic learning such as Paris, Oxford, Bologna, or Padua, where the great universities—the “schools”—had arisen starting in the twelfth century. Founded only in the 1320s, Florence's
studio
(as the Italians called a university) was small and backward— when it existed at all, which it didn't for long stretches of
time over the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth, much to the wealthy Florentines’ embarrassment.

At the same time, Florence's wealth was based on activities (such as international banking, which the Florentines basically invented in the fourteenth century, but also manufacture and trade) that encouraged literacy, with the result that its citizens were likely the most literate in Europe. They may have had a poor university, but their elementary education was superb. Besides, Florentines could easily travel to nearby Bologna or Padua to attend university if they wished. And even at these universities, with their professional outlooks (they specialized in law and medicine, respectively), Scholasticism hadn't attained the monopoly it enjoyed in the northern schools such as Paris and Oxford. It was a northern European invention anyway, as has often been observed, an import from Paris and Oxford that had never sat comfortably in Italy in the first place. In Florence it was less comfortable still.

All this made Italy in general and Florence in particular a promising place for literary and intellectual innovation. It was natural for that innovation to be inspired by Italy's rich Roman past, which remained immediate not just in the pages of Virgil and Cicero but more visibly in the ancient ruins present in many Italian cities and towns. In Florence's case, the city's Roman foundation would play a big role in its not inconsiderable humanistic self-regard.

In 1375, the year of Boccaccio's death, Coluccio Salutati was appointed chancellor of Florence. Petrarch himself, Salutati's correspondent and mentor, had died the year before. Petrarch was the first to recover the idea of
humanitas,
the ancient Roman idea that carefully tended, well-rounded literacy can enhance one's humanity. But while Petrarch
mentions
humanitas
a number of times in his writings, it was Salutati who really turned it into the programmatic catchword that it eventually became.

Born in 1331 in the Tuscan town of Stignano, Salutati had studied law in Bologna as a young man, but he'd soon abandoned legal studies in favor of an apprenticeship as a notary. His notarial skills had served him well, combined of course with his love of classical literature, and he'd been chancellor in several other towns before accepting the position in Florence. A chancellor
(cancelarius,
or first secretary) was the head of a city's official bureaucracy. In Florence the job was unusually prominent and well paid, and it brought Salutati great wealth, prestige, and power. Salutati would never again leave his adopted city. He served as chancellor until his death in 1406, upon which the city honored him with a magnificent state funeral. Florence's republican constitution ordained that elective offices on the various governing councils be filled only by members of the commercial guilds or business associations, who were also the only ones allowed to vote. In contrast with the enfranchised and often wealthy merchant class, both upper-class “magnates” (the old aristocracy) and lower-class workers were traditionally excluded from official power. But spots on the governing councils could be held only for very short periods, usually just a few months. This meant that Florence's bureaucracy furnished the only continuity in its public administration. As head bureaucrat, for decades Salutati was the city's most recognizable public figure and political leader.

By the 1390s, Salutati had gathered a following of talented younger men, often but not always aristocrats, who emulated his interest in Greco-Roman antiquity. Most of them would study Greek under Chrysoloras, and the two brightest
stars among them, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, would succeed Salutati in the office of chancellor. As a humanist, Salutati wasn't alone in his generation. Nor was he the only older Florentine humanist with a following of younger students. But he was certainly the most prominent.

Salutati's prestige and his value to Florence were all the greater because his tenure as chancellor coincided with a series of acute crises for the republic. The gravest threat came precisely in the late 1390s, when Florence faced the military might of its dangerous and aggressive rival Milan. Salutati turned the conflict with Milan into more than just a case of a powerful militaristic city-state waging war against a smaller, less militarized neighbor. Under the autocratic rule of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Milan stood in sharp contrast to the traditional Florentine values of liberty and republican freedom, values that Salutati forcefully championed in public letters against the Milanese “tyrant.”

It was a role Salutati relished, a role much like Winston Churchill's in the early years of the Second World War, with Salutati's widely circulated letters serving the same purpose as Churchill's defiant broadcast speeches. And as with Churchill in the dark days after Dunkirk, stirring rhetoric was Salutati's best—almost his only—weapon. At one point Visconti himself paid tribute to his adversary's eloquence, remarking famously that a single letter from Salutati was worth a thousand horsemen. Despite the vaunted power of Salutati's rhetoric, Florence would be delivered at its moment of peril only by Visconti's sudden, unexpected death in 1402.