I see vessels… as big as my mansion, their masts taller than its towers. They are as mountains floating on the waters. They go to face incalculable dangers in every portion of the globe. They bear wine to England, honey to Russia, saffron, oil, and linen to Assyria, Armenia, Persia, and Araby, wood to Egypt and Greece. They return heavily laden with products of all kinds, which are sent hence to every part of the world.54
This lusty trade was financed by private funds collected and invested by moneylenders who began in the fourteenth century to take the name of bankers, bancherii, from the banco or bench on which they sat before their tables of exchange. The chief monetary units were the lira (a shortening of libra, pound) and the ducat (from duca, duke, doge), a gold coin of 3560 grams. This and the Florentine florin were the most stable and most widely honored currencies in Christendom.*
Life here was almost as gay as in the Naples of Boccaccio’s youth. The Venetians celebrated their holidays and victories with majestic ceremonies, carved and colored their pleasure vessels and their men-o’-war, draped their flesh in Oriental silks, brightened their tables with Venetian glass, and made much music on their waters and in their homes. In 1365 the Doge Lorenzo Celsi, accompanied by Petrarch, presided over a competition among the best musicians in Italy; poems were chanted to various accompaniments, great choruses sang, and the first prize was awarded to Francesco Landino of Florence, a blind composer of ballads and madrigals. Lorenzo Veneziano and others were making the transition from medieval severity to Renaissance grace in frescoes and polyptychs already presaging the colorfulness of Venetian painting. Houses, palaces, and churches rose like corals out of the sea. There were no castles in Venice, no fortified dwellings, no massive forbidding walls, for here private feud soon submitted to public law, and, besides, almost every mansion had a natural moat. Architectural design was still Gothic, but light and graceful as northern Gothic dared not be. In this period the majestic church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari was built; St. Mark’s continued, every now and then, to lift its aging face with youthful decorations of sculpture, mosaic, and arabesques, and superimposed Gothic ogives upon some round arches of the old Byzantine form. Though the Piazza San Marco had not yet received its full encirclement of architecture, Petrarch doubted “if it has an equal within the bounds of the world.”55
All this beauty, quivering in the reflection of the Grand Canal, all this monolithic structure of economy and government, ruling an Adriatic and Aegean empire from an Archimedean fragment of the earth, met a mortal challenge in 1378, when the old strife with Genoa reached its peak. Luciano Doria led a Genoese armada up to Pola, found the main Venetian fleet weakened by an epidemic among the sailors, and in an overwhelming victory captured fifteen galleys and nearly two thousand men. Luciano lost his life in the battle, but his brother Ambrogio, succeeding him as admiral, took the town of Chioggia—on a narrow promontory some fifteen miles south of Venice—formed an alliance with Padua, blocked all Venetian shipping, and prepared, with Genoese seamen and Paduan mercenaries, to invade Venice itself. The proud city, apparently defenseless, asked for terms; these were so insolent and severe that the Great Council resolved to fight for every foot of water in the lagoons. The rich poured their hidden wealth into the coffers of the state; the people labored day and night to build another fleet; floating fortresses were raised around the islands, and were equipped with cannon, now for the first time appearing in Italy (1379). But the Genoese and Paduans, having already blockaded Venice from the sea, stretched a cordon of troops across its land approaches, and shut off the city’s food supply. While some of the population starved, Vittore Pisani trained recruits for the new navy. In December, 1379, Pisani and the Doge Andrea Contarini led the reconstituted fleet—thirty-four galleys, sixty large craft, four hundred small boats—to besiege the Genoese and their ships at Chioggia. The Genoese fleet was too small to face the new Venetian navy; Venetian cannon shot into, the Genoese vessels, fortresses, and barracks stones weighing 150 pounds, killing, among many, the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria. The Genoese, starving, asked leave to evacuate the women and children from Chioggia; the Venetians consented; but when the Genoese offered to yield if their fleet should be allowed to depart, it was the turn of Venice to demand unconditional surrender. For six months the siege of Chioggia continued; at last, reduced by disease and death, the Genoese gave up; and Venice treated them humanely. When Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, offered mediation the exhausted rivals agreed; they made mutual concessions, exchanged prisoners, and resigned themselves to peace (1381).
XI. TWILIGHT OF THE “TRECENTO”
Petrarch, sampling every city and every host, took up his residence in Venice in 1361, and lived there for seven years. He brought his library with him, containing almost all the Latin classics except Lucretius. In an eloquent letter he deeded the precious collection to Venice, but reserved its use to himself till his death. As a gesture of appreciation the Venetian government assigned to him the Palazzo Molina, furnished for his comfort. However, Petrarch took his books with him on his later wanderings; at his death they fell into the hands of his last host, Francesco I da Carrara, an enemy of Venice; some were kept at Padua, most were sold or otherwise dispersed.
It was probably at Venice that he wrote an essay De officio et virtutibus imperatoris (On the Duty and Virtues of an Emperor), and a long concatenation of dialogues De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Both [Good and Bad] Fortune). He counsels modesty in prosperity and courage in adversity; warns against hitching one’s happiness to earthly victories or goods; teaches how to bear with toothache, obesity, the loss of a wife, the fluctuations of fame. It is all good advice, but it is all in Seneca. About this time, too, he composed his greatest prose work, De viris illustribus, thirty-one biographies of Roman celebrities from Romulus to Caesar; the 350 octavo pages devoted to Caesar constituted the most thorough life of that statesman till the nineteenth century.
Petrarch left Venice in 1368 for Pavia, hoping to negotiate a peace there between Galeazzo II Visconti and Pope Urban V, only to learn that eloquence without guns finds no ears among diplomats. In 1370 he accepted the invitation of Francesco I da Carrara to live for the second time as a royal guest in Padua. But his aging nerves resented the city’s bustle, and he soon retired to a modest villa at Arqua, in the Euganean hills, twelve miles southwest of Padua. There he passed the remaining four years of his life. He gathered and edited his letters for posthumous publication, and wrote a charming miniature autobiography, Epistola ad posteros (1371). Again he yielded to the philosopher’s ancient failing—to tell statesmen how to manage states. In De republica optime administranda (1372) he advised the lord of Padua to “be not the master but the father of thy subjects, and to love them as thy children”; to drain marshes, ensure a food supply, maintain churches, support the sick and helpless, and give protection and patronage to men of letters—on whose pens all fame depends. Then he took up The Decameron, and translated the story of Griselda into Latin to win for it a European audience.
Boccaccio was now in a mood to regret that he had ever written The Decameron or the sensual poems of his youth. In 1361 a dying monk had sent him a message reproaching him with his evil life and merry tales, and prophesying for him, in case he deferred reform, a speedy death and everlasting agonies in hell. Boccaccio had never been an assiduous thinker; he accepted the delusions of his time in regard to casting horoscopes and telling the future through dreams; he believed in a multitude of demons, and thought that Aeneas had veritably visited Hades.56 He turned now to orthodoxy, and thought of selling his books and becoming a monk. Petrarch, advised of this, besought him to take a middle course: to turn from the writing of amorous Italian poems and novelle to the earnest study of the Latin and Greek classics. Boccaccio accepted the counsel of his “venerable master,” and became the first Greek humanist in Western Europe.
Urged on by Petrarch, he collected classical manuscripts; rescued books XI-XVI of the Annals, and books I-V of the Histories, of Tacit
us from their oblivion in the neglected library of Monte Cassino; restored the texts of Martial and Ausonius, and contrived to give Homer to the Western world. Some scholars in the Age of Faith had carried on a knowledge of Greek, but in Boccaccio’s day Greek had almost totally disappeared from the ken of the West except in half-Greek Southern Italy. In 1342 Petrarch began to study Greek with the Calabrian monk Barlaam. When a bishopric in Calabria fell vacant Petrarch successfully recommended Barlaam for it; the monk departed, and Petrarch dropped Greek for lack of a teacher, a grammar, or a lexicon; no such books were then available in Latin or Italian. In 1359 Boccaccio met at Milan one of Barlaam’s pupils, Leon Pilatus. He invited him to Florence, and persuaded the university—which had been founded eleven years before—to establish a chair of Greek for Pilatus. Petrarch helped to pay his salary, sent copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey to Boccaccio, and commissioned Pilatus to translate them into Latin. The work was frequently delayed, and involved Petrarch in a troublesome correspondence; he complained that the letters of Pilatus were even longer and dirtier than his beard;57 only through Boccaccio’s exhortations and cooperation was Pilatus prodded to complete the task. This inaccurate and prosaic version was the only Latin translation of Homer known to Europe in the fourteenth century.
Meanwhile Pilatus had taught Boccaccio enough Greek to read the Greek classics haltingly. Boccaccio confessed that he understood the texts only partly, but described what he did understand as surpassingly beautiful. Inspired by these books and Petrarch, he devoted almost all his remaining literary work to the purpose of promoting in Latin Europe a knowledge of Greek literature, mythology, and history. In a series of brief biographies De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Vicissitudes of Famous Men) he ranged from Adam to King John of France; in De claris mulieribus he told the stories of famous women from Eve to Queen Joanna I of Naples; in De montibus, silvis, fontibus, etc., he described in alphabetical order the mountains, forests, springs, rivers, and lakes named in Greek literature; and in De genealogiis deorum he composed a handbook of classical mythology. So deeply did he become absorbed in his subject that he spoke of the Christian God as Jove, of Satan as Pluto, of Venus and Mars as if they were as real as Mary and Christ. These books seem now intolerably dull, written in bad Latin and with middling scholarship; but in their time they were precious manuals for students of Greece, and played an important role in implementing the Renaissance.
So Boccaccio moved from the escapades of youth to the dignity of old age. Florence used him now and then as a diplomat, sending him on missions to Forlì, Avignon, Ravenna, and Venice. At sixty he was physically weak, suffering from dry scab and “more maladies than I know how to enumerate.”58 He lived in suburban Certaldo in bitter poverty. Perhaps it was to aid him financially that some friends in 1373 persuaded the Florentine Signory to create a cathedra Dantesca, or chair of Dante, and to pay Boccaccio a hundred florins ($2500) to give a course of lectures on Dante in the Badia. His health broke down before the course was complete, and he turned to Certaldo reconciled to death.
Petrarch had written, “I desire that death find me ready and writing, or, if it please Christ, praying and in tears.”59 On his seventieth birthday, July 20, 1374, he was found leaning over a book, apparently sleeping, actually dead. In his will he left fifty florins to buy a mantle for Boccaccio as protection against the cold during the long winter nights. On December 21, 1375, Boccaccio too died, aged sixty-one. For fifty years now Italy would lie fallow, till the seeds that these men had planted would come to flower.
XII. PERSPECTIVE
We have followed Petrarch and Boccaccio through Italy. But politically there was no Italy; there were only city-states, fragments free to consume themselves in hate and war. Pisa destroyed its commercial rival Amalfi; Milan destroyed Piacenza; Genoa and Florence destroyed Pisa; Venice destroyed Genoa; and half of Europe would join most of Italy to destroy Venice. The collapse of central government in the barbarian invasions, the “Gothic War” of the sixth century, the Lombard-Byzantine dichotomy of the peninsula, the decay of the Roman roads, the contest of Lombards and popes, the conflict of papacy and Empire, the papal fear that one secular power sovereign from the Alps to Sicily would make the pope a prisoner, subjecting the spiritual head of Europe to the political leader of a state: all these had wrought the disunity of Italy. Partisans of the popes and partisans of the emperors not only divided Italy, they split almost every city into Guelf and Ghibelline; and even when that strife subsided the old labels were used by new rivalries, and the lava of hate flowed into all the avenues of life. If Ghibellines wore feathers on one side of their caps, Guelfs wore them on the other; if Ghibellines cut fruit crosswise, Guelfs cut it straight down; if Ghibellines wore white roses, Guelfs wore red. In Crema the Ghibellines of Milan tore a statue of Christ from a church altar and burned it becaused its face was turned in what was considered a Guelf direction; in Ghibelline Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their hosts, who discovered from their way of eating garlic that they were Guelfs.60 The timid weakness of individuals, the insecurity of groups, and the delusion of superiority generated perpetual fear, suspicion, dislike, and contempt of the different, the alien, and the strange.
Out of these impediments to unity rose the Italian city-state. Men thought in terms of their city, and only a few philosophers like Machiavelli, or a poet like Petrarch, could think of Italy as a whole; even in the sixteenth century Cellini would refer to Florentines as “men of our nation,” and to Florence as “my fatherland.” Petrarch, freed by foreign residence from a merely local patriotism, mourned the petty wars and divisions of his native country, and in an eloquent ode—Italia Mia!— besought the princes of Italy to give her unity and peace.
O my own Italy!—though words are vain
The mortal wounds to close
Innumerable that thy bosom stain—
Yet may it soothe my pain
To sing of Tiber’s woes
And Arno’s wrongs, as on Po’s saddened shore
Mournful I wander, and my numbers pour….
Oh, is this not the soil my foot first pressed?
And here, in cradled rest
Was I not softly hushed and fondly reared?
Oh, is not this my country—so endeared
By every filial tie—
In whose earth shrouded both my parents lie?
Oh, by this tender thought
Your hard hearts to some pity wrought,
Look on the people’s grief,
Who, under God, of you expect relief,
And, if ye but relent,
Virtue shall rouse her in embattled might,
Against blind fury bent,
Nor long shall doubtful hang the unequal fight.
No, no! The ancient flame
Is not extinguished yet, that raised the Italian name!
Petrarch had dreamed that Rienzo might make Italy one; when that bubble burst he turned like Dante to the head of the Holy Roman Empire, theoretically the secular heir to all the temporal powers of the pagan Roman Empire in the West. Soon after Rienzo’s retirement (1347) Petrarch addressed a stirring message to Charles IV, King of Bohemia and, as “King of the Romans,” heir apparent to the Imperial throne. Let the King come down to Rome and be crowned emperor, the poet pleaded; let him make Rome, not Prague, his capital; let him restore unity, order, and peace to “the garden of the Empire”—Italy.61 When Charles crossed the Alps in 1354 he invited Petrarch to meet him at Mantua, and listened courteously to appeals echoing the impassioned pleas of Dante to Charles’s grandfather Henry VII. But Charles, having no force adequate to conquer all the despots of Lombardy and all the citizens of Florence and Venice, hurried to Rome, got himself crowned by a papal prefect for lack of a pope, and then hastened back to Bohemia, sedulously selling Imperial vicariates on the way. Two years later Petrarch went to him in Prague as Milanese ambassador, but with no significant results for Italy.
Perhaps there would have been no Renaissance if Petrarch h
ad had his way. The fragmentation of Italy favored the Renaissance. Large states promote order and power rather than liberty or art. The commercial rivalry of the Italian cities inaugurated and completed the work of the Crusades in developing the economy and wealth of Italy. The variety of political centers multiplied interurban strife, but these modest conflicts never totaled the death and destruction caused in France by the Hundred Years’ War. Local independence weakened the capacity of Italy to defend herself against foreign invasion, but it generated a noble rivalry of the cities and princes in cultural patronage, in the zeal to excel in architecture, sculpture, painting, education, scholarship, poetry. Renaissance Italy, like Goethe’s Germany, had many Parises.
We need not exaggerate, to appreciate, the degree in which Petrarch and Boccaccio prepared the Renaissance. Both were still mortgaged to medieval ideas. The great storyteller, in his lusty youth, laughed at clerical immorality and relicmongering, but so had millions of medieval men and women; and he became more orthodox and medieval in those very years in which he studied Greek. Petrarch properly and prophetically described himself as standing between two eras.62 He accepted the dogmas of the Church even while he flayed the morals of Avignon; he loved the classics with a troubled conscience at the close of the Age of Faith as Jerome had loved them at its opening; he wrote excellent medieval essays on contempt of the secular world and on the holy peace of the religious life. Nevertheless, he was more faithful to the classics than to Laura; he sought and cherished ancient manuscripts, and inspired others to do the same; he overleaped nearly all medieval authors except Augustine to regain continuity with Latin literature; he formed his manner and style on Virgil and Cicero; and he thought more of the fame of his name than of the immortality of his soul. His poems fostered a century of artificial sonneteering in Italy, but they helped to mold the sonnets of Shakespeare. His eager spirit passed down to Pico, his polished form to Politian; his letters and essays threw a bridge of classical urbanity and grace between Seneca and Montaigne; his reconciliation of antiquity and Christianity matured in Popes Nicholas V and Leo X. He was truly, in these ways, the Father of the Renaissance.