Leonardo Bruni

• 1. Introduction

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  Leonardo Bruni sat in one of Florence's highest political offices. Still, historian Arthur Field has identified him as an apparent plotter against Cosimo de' Medici in 1437. Despite the chancellor's title, Bruni held far less real power than the Albizzi and Medici families who dominated the city. How did a career built on Florentine government and papal service produce a man willing to work against the city's most powerful family? The rest of this documentary asks how that career took shape. It also asks how the same man came to change the way historians divide the human past into ages.

• 2. Chancellor Without Power

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  In Arezzo, Tuscany, Bruni was born around 1370. He trained under Coluccio Salutati, the political and cultural leader who led Florence's chancery, and later succeeded him in that post. Under Salutati's tutelage, Bruni developed his own ideas about civic humanism.

  Between 1405 and 1414, four popes employed Bruni as an apostolic secretary. He then held the chancellorship itself on two occasions, first from 1410 to 1411 and again from 1427 until his death. Both periods were plagued by warfare.

  Bruni died in 1444 in Florence, and Carlo Marsuppini succeeded him as chancellor. A wall tomb built by Bernardo Rossellino in the Basilica of Santa Croce marks his burial place. The city buried its chancellor, but it was his manuscripts, not his office, that would carry his name beyond Florence.

• 3. Splitting History In Three

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  Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII, Bruni's twelve-volume History of the Florentine People, stands as his most notable work. It has been called the first modern history book. Scholars rank Bruni as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. That rank rests on one innovation. He was the earliest person to divide the past into three periods, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern age. His exact dividing lines differ from the ones historians use now, but the three-part structure he introduced still organizes how the past gets studied.

  Petrarch had already drawn a line between the classical world and what he called tenebrae, the darkness of the cultural decline that followed it. Bruni's three-period scheme grew out of that earlier distinction. He argued that Italy had revived over recent centuries and so could be described as entering a new age.

  Secularizing history was probably not what Bruni set out to do, yet the logic of his three-period framework is unquestionably secular. That same secularizing instinct would resurface in a phrase Bruni later coined to describe the study of human endeavors on their own terms.

• 4. Naming The Humanists

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  Studia humanitatis, the study of human endeavors, was the phrase Bruni used to distinguish this pursuit from theology and metaphysics. That same phrase became the root of the word humanists.

  New Cicero, Bruni's biography of the Roman statesman Cicero, ranks among his most famous works. He also wrote biographies of Dante and Petrarch, composed in Italian rather than Latin.

  The same humanist who wrote about Dante and Petrarch would soon turn to a different task, translating Greek philosophy into Latin.

• 5. Greek Philosophy For Florence

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  Aristotle and Procopius were among the Greek writers Bruni translated into Latin. That work was part of his broader effort to render Greek philosophy and history for readers of Latin. His versions of Aristotle's Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, along with the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, circulated widely in manuscript and later in print.

  Aelius Aristides' Panathenicus was a panegyric to Athens. Bruni drew on it to support the republican arguments in his own Panegyric to the City of Florence, written around 1401. That borrowing helped bring the Greek historian to the notice of Renaissance political philosophers. Historian Hans Baron traces that connection in his book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. Bruni also wrote a short treatise on the Florentine constitution, composed in Greek rather than Latin or Italian.

  Plato's discussion of same-sex relationships was one subject Bruni confronted directly. That made him one of the first Humanists to engage with that part of the philosopher's work. Decades later, in 1496, a Leipzig printing put Bruni's treatise on studies and letters, addressed to Battista Malatesta, into wider circulation.