Short answers, pulled from the story.
Coluccio Salutati was an Italian Renaissance humanist and notary who lived from the 16th of February 1331 to the 4th of May 1406. He served as chancellor of the Florentine Republic and functioned, in effect, as the republic's permanent secretary of state in the years before the Medici family rose to power.
As chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati handled the republic's official correspondence with other states, drafted confidential instructions for ambassadors, and negotiated treaties. He held the post from 1375 and became known as the most celebrated chancellor in Italy and a master of the formal letter.
Coluccio Salutati earned the nickname Ape of Cicero for the refined and masterful classical Latin of his letters to Florentine scholars. The name reflected his early literary studies in Buggiano, where he worked as a notary after his family returned from exile in Bologna.
Coluccio Salutati's most important manuscript discovery was Cicero's lost Letters to His Friends, known as the Epistulae ad Familiares. The find showed Cicero as a defender of republican liberty and shaped Salutati's own view of classical scholarship.
Coluccio Salutati brought the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to Florence in 1397 to teach one of the first courses in Greek held in the West since the end of the Roman Empire. The move let scholars such as Leonardo Bruni and Pier Paolo Vergerio read Aristotle and Plato in the original Greek.
After Coluccio Salutati died in 1406, the city of Florence paid 250 florins for his funeral. The payment stood as public testimony to his decades of service as the republic's chancellor.