Poggio Bracciolini

• 1. Introduction

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  Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian scholar born on the 11th of February 1380, once bribed a monk to take books out of a monastery. The monastery was Hersfeld Abbey. The books were a Livy and an Ammianus. When a codex could not be had by fair means, Poggio was willing to use subterfuge. He died on the 30th of October 1459, after a long life as a papal clerk. Why would a church employee turn to bribery for old Latin texts? What did he hope to rescue from the shelves of forgotten libraries? And how did one man's restless searching change what later readers could hold in their hands?

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• 2. Scribe to Secretary

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  Poggio di Guccio was born in Terranuova, a village near Arezzo in Tuscany. The surname Bracciolini was added only later, during his career. In 1862 the village was renamed Terranuova Bracciolini in his honor. His father took him to Florence to pursue the studies for which he showed such aptitude. There he learned Latin from Giovanni Malpaghino of Ravenna, a friend and protégé of Petrarch. Malpaghino worked as an amanuensis, a scribe who writes at another man's dictation. Poggio's talent as a copyist soon reached the leading scholars of Florence. Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò de' Niccoli both befriended him. He also studied notarial law, and at the age of twenty-one he was received into the Florentine notaries' guild, the Arte dei giudici e notai.

  In October 1403, on high recommendations from Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, Poggio became secretary to Cardinal Landolfo Maramaldo, Bishop of Bari. A few months later he was invited into the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs in the Roman Curia, under Pope Boniface IX. Eleven turbulent years followed, from 1404 to 1415, during which he served four successive popes. He began as a scriptor, a writer of official documents. Promotions took him through abbreviator and scriptor penitentiarius to scriptor apostolicus. Under Martin V he reached the highest rank of his office, Apostolicus Secretarius, or papal secretary.

  Across a career of 50 years, Poggio served seven popes: Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII, the Antipope John XXIII, Martin V, Eugenius IV and Nicholas V. As papal secretary he acted as the pope's personal attendant, writing letters at his command and taking dictation. No formal register of the briefs was kept; he simply preserved copies. He was esteemed for his excellent Latin and his extraordinarily beautiful book hand. He also served as an occasional liaison with Florence, which brought him legal and diplomatic work.

  Despite a meager salary in the Curia, Poggio was never drawn to church life or to the riches it might bring. He remained a layman to the end of his days. He lived through the Council of Basel, which ran from 1431 to 1449, and the final restoration of the papacy under Nicholas V in 1447. Even so, he considered himself a Florentine working for the papacy. He kept up constant communication with his learned friends in that city.

  When Martin V was elected pope in November 1417, Poggio held no office. He still followed the new pope's court to Mantua in late 1418. There he chose to accept an invitation from Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and traveled to England. He stayed five years, until he returned to Rome in 1423. Those years were the least productive and least satisfying of his life. His best work had already been done, in the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys.

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• 3. The Book Hunt

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  In July 1415 the Council of Constance deposed Antipope John XXIII, and the Roman Pope Gregory XII abdicated. The papal office then stood vacant for two years. Poggio had come to Constance in 1414 on official duty, and the long pause left him with unexpected leisure. He spent it exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to the years 1415-1417.

  At Reichenau, Weingarten and above all St. Gall, he pulled forgotten masterpieces out of the dust. Scholars had known several of these authors only through fragmented or mutilated copies. According to his own letters, he recovered Cicero's Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian, and Statius's Silvae at St. Gallen. He also found part of Gaius Valerius Flaccus and the commentaries of Asconius Pedianus. The same abbey yielded Silius Italicus's Punica, Marcus Manilius's Astronomica, and Vitruvius's De architectura. Each manuscript was then copied and passed to the learned.

  In 1415 at Cluny, Poggio found Cicero's complete great forensic orations, which had previously been only partly available. At Langres in the summer of 1417 he discovered Cicero's Oration for Caecina and nine other orations that no one had known. He carried on the same untiring research in many Western European countries. At Monte Cassino in 1429 he found a manuscript of Frontinus's De aquaeductu, a late first-century work on the aqueducts of ancient Rome. He is also credited with recovering Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper and Eutyches.

  In the spring of 1416, sometime between March and May, Poggio visited the baths at the German spa of Baden. He described the visit in a long letter to Niccoli. Men and women bathed together there, barely separated and in minimal clothing. Poggio called it an "Epicurean" way of life and wrote: "I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure." He wrote the letter a year before he made the find that would carry his name furthest.

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• 4. A Lost Poem Returns

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  In January 1417, in a German monastery that Poggio never named, he spotted an author's name that he remembered from Cicero. Scholars think the house was probably Fulda. The manuscript held De rerum natura, "On the Nature of Things," by Lucretius. It was the only manuscript of the poem known at the time. The poem runs to 7,400 lines, divided into six books. It gives a full description of the world as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus saw it.

  The manuscript Poggio found has not survived. Fortunately, he sent a copy to his friend Niccolò de' Niccoli, who made a transcription in his renowned book hand. Niccoli was the creator of italic script. His transcription became the model for more than fifty other copies circulating at the time. Poggio later complained that Niccoli did not return his original copy for 14 years.

  Two manuscripts from the 9th century turned up later. One was the Codex Oblongus, copied around 825, and the other was the Codex Quadratus. Both are now kept at Leiden University. The poem was first printed in 1473.

  In 2011 Stephen Greenblatt published The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The book is a narrative of Poggio's discovery. Greenblatt also analyzes how the poem later shaped the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern science.

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• 5. A Circle of Letters

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  Niccolò de' Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo and Cosimo de' Medici, and Carlo Marsuppini headed a long list of Poggio's friends. The list also included Guarino Veronese, Ambrogio Traversari, Francesco Barbaro, Francesco Accolti and Feltrino Boiardo. Lionello d'Este, who became Marquis of Ferrara and held the title from 1441 to 1450, joined them. All of them shared Poggio's passion for retrieving the manuscripts and art of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

  An immense traffic of letters held the circle together. Constant communication across Italy came through this exchange. The friends wanted a rebirth of intellectual life, built on a vital reconnection with the texts of antiquity. Their outlook marked the earlier Italian Renaissance. It eventually spread over Western Europe, led to the full Renaissance and the Reformation, and announced the modern age.

  The circle's roots ran back to Francesco Petrarch, who lived from 1304 to 1374. Petrarch revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero. Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived from 1313 to 1375, and Coluccio Salutati, who lived from 1331 to 1406, carried the work forward. Poggio joined the second generation, the civic humanists who gathered around Salutati. They prized studia humanitatis, the study of the humanities, a phrase popularized by Leonardo Bruni. Poggio mocked the popes and princes who spent their days on wars and church disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.

  Berthold Louis Ullman once identified Poggio as the inventor of Humanist minuscule, the handwriting that gave rise to Roman type at the end of the fourteenth century. Roman type remains popular today. Recent research by Teresa De Robertis and others has shown that other scribes used the script before him. So Poggio did not invent it. He was, however, one of the most prolific and distinguished scribes to use it so soon after its development, and his influence helped it spread through Italy.

  One early friend rose higher than all the rest. Tommaso da Sarzana was elected pope in 1447 under the name Nicholas V. He proved a protector of scholars and an active sponsor of learning. In 1448 he founded the Vatican Library with 350 codices.

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• 6. Dialogues in Latin

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  In 1428-29 Poggio wrote De avaritia, "On Greed," his first major work. Older biographers such as Shepherd and Walser saw in it a traditional condemnation of avarice. Modern historians, studying the economic growth of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, read it differently. For them it is an early statement of capitalism, at least in its Florentine form. It breaks the hold of medieval values that disguised the realities of interest and loans, and it proclaims the social usefulness of wealth. Its voice linked wealth, personal worth, ownership of valuable goods and social status, and it was not recognized until the late 20th century.

  De nobilitate, "On Nobility," appeared in 1440. Poggio was a self-made man, and he defended true nobility as based on virtue rather than birth. The work expresses the meritocracy favored by the rich bourgeoisie.

  In 1450 Poggio produced Historia disceptativa convivialis, a set of discussions between guests after a meal, in three parts. The second part debates the dignity of medicine against law. There Niccoli argues that laws are imposed by the will of the stronger to hold the state together. In his view they are neither God-given to rulers nor a fact of nature. The biographer Ernst Walser concluded: "Poggio, in his writing, presents Machiavellism before Machiavelli." The third part asks about literate Latin and vernacular Latin in classical Rome. Poggio concludes that they were the same language, not two distinct idioms.

  On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, from 1447, became famous for book IV. That book recounts the 25-year voyage of the Venetian adventurer Niccolo de' Conti in Persia and India. The Portuguese King Emmanuel I ordered it translated into Portuguese, and an Italian translation was later made from the Portuguese. In 1455 Poggio wrote De miseria humanae conditionis, "On the Misery of Human Life." These were reflections from his retirement in Florence, inspired by the sack of Constantinople.

  All these works are in Latin and revive the classical dialogue between Poggio and learned friends. Petrarch had set the fashion for such Socratic reflections, and they made Poggio famous throughout Italy. He liked objective observations and clinical comparisons between cultures, such as ancient Roman practices against modern ones, or Italians against the English. He compared the eloquence of Jerome of Prague, and his fortitude before death, with that of ancient philosophers. Abstruse points of theology did not interest him. Only the social impact of the Church did, mostly as an object of critique and ridicule.

  Poggio rejected vernacular Italian and wrote only in Latin, in a classical style inspired by Cicero. Greek came harder. A letter to Niccoli, cited by his biographer Shepherd, says he began studying Greek in 1424, in Rome, at the age of 44. His Greek never reached the quality of his Latin. He nevertheless translated Lucian's Ass, a work linked to Apuleius's Latin masterpiece, The Golden Ass. He also put Xenophon's Cyropaedia into Latin. Modern standards cannot praise its accuracy, but he was the first critic to label it a "political romance" rather than history. His own son later used that Latin version to make an Italian one.

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• 7. Wars of Words

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  In February 1452 Poggio opened a full-dress critique of the Elegantiae, the major work on Latin language and style by Lorenzo Valla. Valla was an expert at philological analysis of ancient texts, with a hot temperament suited to long disputes. At stake was how to treat the humanae litterae, the profane classical literature, in relation to the divinae litterae, the sacred scriptures. Valla argued that biblical texts could face the same philological criticism as the great classics. Poggio held that humanism and theology were separate fields of inquiry. He labeled Valla's mordacitas, his radical criticism, as dementia.

  Poggio's five Orationes in Laurentium Vallam, which Valla relabeled Invectivae, were countered line by line by Valla's Antidota in Pogium of 1452-53. Remarkably, the two men eventually acknowledged each other's talents and gained mutual respect. Prompted by Filelfo, they reconciled and became good friends. William Shepherd, author of Poggio's most extensive biography, thought Valla held the advantage. Irony and satire make a sharp imprint on memory, while a plodding, heavy dissertation is quickly forgotten. These sportive polemics spawned a literary fashion in Europe, which later echoed in Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius.

  In 1505 Erasmus discovered Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum, which encouraged him to pursue textual criticism of the scriptures. In his introduction he declared support for Valla against envious scholars such as Poggio. He unfairly described Poggio as "a petty clerk so uneducated that even if he were not indecent he would still not be worth reading, and so indecent that he would deserve to be rejected by good men however learned he was."

  After his old friend became Pope Nicholas V, Poggio published the dialogue Against Hypocrites in 1448. It was driven by vindictive hatred of the follies and vices of ecclesiastics. It was one more instance of his lifelong denunciation of clerical corruption in the 15th century. Nicholas V then asked him for a philippic against Amadeus VIII, Duke of Savoy, who claimed to be the Antipope Felix V. The result was a ferocious attack, full of fantastic accusations, unrestrained abuse and extreme anathemas.

  Invectivae were a specialized genre of the Italian Renaissance, tirades of exaggerated insult meant to degrade an opponent beyond the bounds of common decency. Poggio's most famous examples came from literary quarrels with George of Trebizond, Bartolomeo Facio and Antonio Beccadelli. Beccadelli wrote a scandalous Hermaphroditus, inspired by the eroticism of Catullus and Martial. Poggio used his rich vocabulary of scurrilous Latin and imputed every imaginable crime to his targets, with no regard for plausibility. His quarrels with Francesco Filelfo and Niccolo Perotti set him against well-known scholars.

  His Liber Facetiarum, written between 1438 and 1452, is a collection of humorous and indecent tales in the purest Latin he could command. Today it is the most enjoyed of his works, and several English translations exist. It is chiefly remarkable for unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy. One line runs: "The worst men in the world live in Rome, and worse than the others are the priests, and the worst of the priests they make cardinals, and the worst of all the cardinals is made pope." The book became popular in every country of Western Europe and has gone through multiple editions into modern times.

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• 8. Florence, Family, and Fortune

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  In 1434 Poggio sold a manuscript of Livy and used the proceeds to build himself a villa in the Valdarno. He filled it with antique sculpture, notably a series of busts meant to represent thinkers and writers of antiquity. He added coins and inscriptions. His friend Donatello knew these works well. Poggio lived in Florence from 1434 to 1436 with Eugenius IV, and again from 1439 to 1442 during the Council of Florence.

  In December 1435, at the age of 56, Poggio decided that his single life was too unstable. He left his long-term mistress and delegitimized the fourteen children he had had with her. Then he scoured Florence for a wife. He married Selvaggia dei Buondelmonti, a girl of a noble Florentine family who was not yet 18. His friends remonstrated and made dire predictions about the age gap. The marriage nonetheless was a happy one, and it produced five sons and a daughter. Poggio wrote a spate of long letters to justify his move. He also composed one of his famous dialogues, An seni sit uxor ducenda, "Whether an old man should marry," in 1436.

  In April 1453 Carlo Aretino, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic and an intimate friend, died. Cosimo de' Medici mostly dictated the choice of a successor, and it fell on Poggio. He resolved to retire from 50 years of service in the Chancery of Rome and returned to Florence. The new office was glamorous at first but soon turned irksome. In these last years he also edited his correspondence for publication and worked on his Historia Florentina.

  The Historia Florentina covers the city's story from 1350 to 1455. Poggio wrote it in avowed imitation of Livy and Sallust, and possibly Thucydides, in using speeches to explain decisions. Valla had translated Thucydides into Latin only in 1450-52. The work continued Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People, which closed in 1402 and is considered the first modern history book. Poggio limited his focus to external events, mostly wars in which Florence stood as defender of Tuscany and of Italian liberty. He also pragmatically defended Florentine expansion for the safety of the Republic, a premonition of Machiavelli's doctrine. His rhetorical prose gives the history a vivid narrative and sharp portraits of its main characters. Yet it kept romantic features and did not reach the objectivity that modern historians expect, especially since 1950.

  Poggio died in 1459, before he could put the final polish on this history, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce. A statue by Donatello and a portrait by Antonio del Pollaiuolo remain to commemorate him. During his life he kept acquiring properties around Florence and invested in city enterprises with the Medici bank. His wife, five sons and daughter all survived him. At his death his gross assets amounted to 8,500 florins, and only 137 families in Florence owned more capital.

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