Conrad Celtes

• 1. Introduction

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  Conrad Celtes died in Vienna in 1508, felled by syphilis. He was born on the 1st of February 1459. By the time of his death, admirers called him the Archhumanist, ranking him above every other scholar of the German Renaissance. One admirer called him, in a phrase preserved from the era, "the greatest lyric genius and certainly the greatest organizer and popularizer of German Humanism." Emperor Frederick III made it official, naming Celtes Poet Laureate in Nuremberg after the elector Frederick of Saxony intervened on his behalf. At that same imperial gathering, he also received a doctoral degree.

  What set a scholar from a small Franconian town on the path to that ceremony? And what complicated his reputation as a champion of German learning? The chapters ahead follow him from his early studies to the controversies that still shadow his legacy today.

• 2. A Vintner's Son Turned Scholar

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  Konrad Bickel, or Pyckell in some spellings, was the name given to him at Wipfeld, a village near Schweinfurt in what is now Lower Franconia. His father wanted him to become a vintner, so young Konrad left home rather than take up that trade. He enrolled at the University of Cologne in 1477 and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1479. By 1485 he had added a master's degree from the University of Heidelberg. At Heidelberg, two scholars named Dalberg and Agricola gave him patronage and instruction. Following a custom common among humanists, he Latinized his birth name into Conradus Celtis.

  Ars versificandi et carminum, or The Art of Writing Verses and Poems, became his first published work in 1486. Between stays at university towns, he delivered humanist lectures on the road in Erfurt, Rostock and Leipzig. He then extended his lecture tours abroad, traveling to Rome, Florence, Bologna and Venice. Those journeys also gave him a taste for organizing scholars into circles, a habit he would repeat again and again as he crossed the empire.

• 3. Literary Societies Along the Rivers

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  Kraków became his base from 1489 to 1491, where he enrolled at the Jagiellonian University to study mathematics, astronomy and the natural sciences. There he befriended fellow humanists Lorenz Rabe and Bonacursius and founded a learned society modeled on the academies of ancient Rome. He named the group Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, the Literary Society on the Vistula River.

  In 1490 he passed through Breslau, today's Wrocław, on his way to Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Hartmann Schedel later drew on Celtes' descriptions of Breslau when compiling the Nuremberg Chronicle, the Schedelsche Weltchronik. In Hungary he founded another circle, the Sodalitas Litterarum Hungaria, which was later reorganized as the Sodalitas Litterarum Danubiana and based in Vienna.

  Further stops took him to Regensburg, Passau and Nuremberg, and probably Mainz. He then reached Heidelberg, where he founded the Sodalitas Litterarum Rhenana, the Rhineland Literary Society. From there he traveled on to Lübeck and then to Ingolstadt.

  At Ingolstadt in 1492, Celtes delivered a speech urging Germans to match the Italians in learning and letters. That address later became one of the most quoted texts of sixteenth-century German nationalist sentiment. That performance in Ingolstadt marked the last stop of his wandering years; what followed would tie him to a single court for good.

• 4. Priest, Poet, Professor

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  Plague swept through Ingolstadt at one point, and Celtes responded by teaching instead at Heidelberg, now working as a professor. In 1497, Emperor Maximilian I called him to Vienna and honored him as teacher of poetry and conversation. The emperor granted him an imperial Privilegium, the first of its kind ever issued. His friend and fellow scholar Johannes Cuspinian had pushed hard for the invitation.

  Once settled in Vienna, Celtes lectured on classical writers and, in 1502, founded the Collegium Poetarum, a college devoted to poets.

  As early as his 1486 poem Ode ad Apollinem, Celtes had begun casting himself as a priest of Apollo. He treated Maximilian as his living Phoebus, and their bond, doubling each man's glory, echoes throughout Celtes' literary work. His friend Willibald Pirckheimer pressed him bluntly on this preference, since Celtes valued the pagan ideal over the Christian one. That same devotion to the ancient world would soon draw criticism that has followed his reputation ever since.

• 5. The Book Thief of Regensburg

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  In 1494, inside the monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg, Celtes rediscovered Hrosvitha's Latin writings. His friend Willibald Pickheimer introduced him to the abbess Caritas Pickheimer, and Celtes wrote to her in Latin, addressing her as the "new Hrotsvitha." Historian Richard Unger calls Celtes a large-scale book thief who wandered monastic collections and bishops' libraries, taking volumes for his emperor and himself. Celtes defended these thefts as patriotic, saying he wanted only to shield German patrimony from "damaging weather, dust, mold... insects," and from the Italians.

  Scholar Emily Albu argues that Celtes, Peutinger and their emperor prized artifacts linking the German Roman Empire to the ancient Roman imperium. The Peutinger map, a chart of Roman roads that Celtes discovered, became one such artifact. Celtes and Peutinger made sure any record of where he found it, and clues to its first three centuries, was erased. That same instinct for controlling the record of his own discoveries would resurface again before his life's work was done.

• 6. A Scholar's Lasting Marks

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  By 1501, printing presses across the Empire had mass-produced Hrosvitha's plays. That same year, the Imperial Aulic Council granted him a privilege to print her dramas. It ranks among the earliest recorded copyright privileges ever issued by an imperial government.

  Celtes brought systematic methods to the teaching of Latin and pushed the study of the classics further than his predecessors had. He was also the first scholar to teach world history as a single connected subject rather than isolated episodes. Celtes became the first early modern humanist to introduce the term "topography." He used it as a critical response to the Ptolemaic split between cosmography and chorography, categories too rigid for Europe's shifting borders.

  His largest undertaking was Germania Illustrata, a cosmographic and cartographic project. Its core included the treatise Germania generalis, four books of love elegies, and De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergae libellus, on Nuremberg. Nuremberg published this material in 1502 under the title Quatuor libri amorum secundum quatuor latera germanie.

  In a 1504 letter to the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius, Celtes claimed to have found the missing books of Ovid's Fasti. The supposed verses had actually been written by an 11th-century monk and were already known to the Empire of Nicaea, according to William of Rubruck. Even so, many scholars believed Celtes and kept writing about the missing books well into the 17th century.

  Karl Hartfelder eventually edited Celtes' epigrams, publishing them in Berlin in 1881. The Celtis-Gymnasium in Schweinfurt still carries his name today.