Leo Allatius

• 1. Introduction

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  Leo Allatius spent decades earning the trust of the Vatican Library, cataloguing its rarest Greek manuscripts. When the top job of head librarian finally opened, he was passed over anyway. A Greek by birth, he built his Roman career moving between worlds that rarely trusted each other, Catholic and Orthodox, ancient and modern. His writing ranged across church politics and medicine, and it even wandered into a subject that had nothing to do with either. Today he is remembered less for the honors he earned than for one piece of writing that still puzzles readers. What kind of scholar gets passed over for the post he spent a lifetime preparing for, and still leaves behind a legacy this odd?

• 2. From Chios to Rome

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  Leo Allatius was born around 1586 on the island of Chios, then part of the Ottoman Empire and known locally as Sakız. His father, Niccolas Allatzes, followed Greek Orthodoxy, while his mother, Sebaste Neurides, came from the same Greek background. Allatius later converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, a change that would shape everything that followed. At age nine, his maternal uncle, Michael Nauridis, brought him to Italy for schooling, first in Calabria and then in Rome. He was admitted to the Greek college there and eventually graduated from the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius.

  Once settled in Rome, Allatius taught Greek and gave himself over to the study of classics and theology. Pope Gregory XV became his patron, a connection that opened doors far beyond the classroom. His earliest known publication appeared in 1629, an edition of a commentary on the Hexameron by the fourth-century bishop Eustathius of Antioch. It was bound together with a rebuttal of the theologian Origen. That same patron would soon pull Allatius into a project involving thousands of manuscripts and a journey across the Alps.

• 3. The Palatine Library

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  In 1622, imperial forces under Tilly captured Heidelberg, and the Protestant Elector Frederick V lost his position to a Catholic successor, Maximilian of Bavaria. Maximilian presented the Palatinate library, 196 cases holding roughly 3500 manuscripts, to Pope Gregory XV. Allatius supervised the transport himself, moving the collection across the Alps to Rome with a caravan of 200 mules, where it entered the Vatican Library. Not all of it stayed there permanently. Thirty-nine of the Heidelberg manuscripts were sent on to Paris in 1797 and later returned to Heidelberg under the Peace of Paris in 1815. Pope Pius VII added a further gift of 852 manuscripts back to Heidelberg in 1816. Aside from those, the rest of the original shipment remains in the Vatican Library today. Allatius's own account of the operation would not reach print until 1882, when Giovanni Beltrani published it in Florence.

• 4. Serving the Vatican Library

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  Cardinal Lelio Biscia, who had an extensive private library, hired Allatius as his librarian. When Biscia died, Allatius moved into the same role for Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Decades of that work eventually paid off. In 1661, Pope Alexander VII appointed Allatius custodian of the Vatican Library, a post he held for the rest of his life. By then he had spent a lifetime around the Vatican's Greek holdings without ever running the library outright. That experience had already pushed him toward a much bigger question, the centuries-old split between the two churches he had grown up between.

• 5. Bridging Two Churches

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  In 1651, Allatius brought out the first printed edition of George Acropolites's works, a 13th-century emissary of the Byzantine Emperor. Acropolites had once acknowledged the pope's supremacy and become something of a celebrity in the West. The Latin essay Allatius wrote as its preface, De Georgiis eorumque Scriptis, gained its own fame. It became known as a plea for common ground between the Greek and Roman churches.

  Few Western theologians of his time understood Orthodox life under Ottoman rule as well as Allatius did. He believed that this familiarity could help close the Great Schism. He argued that reunion did not depend on settling questions of faith or doctrine, only on transferring jurisdiction from one hierarchy to another. He went so far as to claim that the "Latin faith" and the "Greek faith" were essentially the same. He argued a church under "Roman obedience" could still remain Orthodox in practice.

  In 1648, he pressed this argument in a Uniate pamphlet titled De Ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione libri tres. Its English title translates as The Western and Eastern Churches in perpetual Agreement, in Three Books. The stance that eventually prevailed fell short of his vision. Eastern churches that entered union kept their own internal governance and customary rituals, rather than merging fully into the Catholic Church. Allatius, meanwhile, had trained for an entirely different profession before any of this theology took hold.

• 6. Beyond Theology

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  Allatius had trained as a physician. In 1645, he put that background to unusual use in De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, on certain modern opinions among the Greeks. The book is credited with giving the first methodical treatment of vampires in print. In his later years, Allatius added Greek and Syrian manuscripts to the Eastern Library that the late Pope Gregory XV had founded at the Vatican.

  As a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, he also knew many of the writers behind Venetian opera. His 1666 catalogue, Drammaturgia, listed every Italian musical drama staged up to that point and remains essential reading for historians of early opera. A later edition, extended to cover works through 1755, appeared in Venice that year. Long after his death, scholars would still be sorting through what Allatius had actually written.

• 7. The Vallicelliana Papers

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  Johann Albert Fabricius catalogued Allatius's output in his Bibliotheca Graeca, citing it at xi. 437. He sorted it into four categories. One covered editions, translations, and commentaries on ancient authors. Another covered works on the dogmas and institutions of the Greek and Roman Churches. A third gathered his historical works, and a fourth held his miscellaneous works.

  About 150 volumes of his manuscripts, along with an extensive body of scholarly correspondence, are held at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome. The archive is sometimes called the "Library of the Oratorians." A large number of his writings were never published at all, and most of those remain among the Vallicellian papers to this day. Allatius died in Rome on the 18th or the 19th of January 1669; sources disagree on the exact date. Not everything Fabricius catalogued turned out to be theology or history.

• 8. A Strange Footnote

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  Outside academic circles, Allatius is best remembered for De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba, a Discourse on the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Fabricius listed it among the unpublished works in the Bibliotheca Graeca, at xiv. 17, section 164. According to an unconfirmed nineteenth-century source, its thesis holds that the rings of Saturn are in fact that very relic. Saturn's rings had only recently been observed through telescopes at the time. Fabricius never printed the essay itself, so its exact wording still rests wherever the original manuscript happens to be filed.