Sailing from Byzantium (10 page)

The keystone of Salutati's rhetorical campaign against Milan—indeed of his chancellorship as a whole—was the identification of republican Florence with the virtues and values of republican Rome, especially
libertas.
This elaborate
propaganda effort was just reaching its climax as Chrysoloras arrived. It ultimately gave birth to a mini-movement of its own, which historians call civic humanism.
^∗

In civic humanism, the Florentines embarked upon Italian humanism's second stage, after its Petrarchan first stage. Civic humanism determined which books Salutati and his followers most wanted to read and write about. Though still ultimately inspired by Petrarch, they took less interest in subjects like poetry, and more in political theory and especially history. The shift arose directly from the sense of civic crisis caused in Florence by the struggle with Milan. So if humanism as a whole made up the larger setting for Chrysoloras’ teaching, the birth of civic humanism supplied its immediate context, as Chrysoloras journeyed from besieged Constantinople to embattled Florence at the dawn of the quattrocento.

Setting out from the Byzantine capital in late 1396, Cydones, Chrysoloras, and Angeli stopped over in Venice for several months. There the elderly Cydones remained, no doubt happily, as the other two friends continued on the overland leg of their trip, arriving in Florence on February 2, 1397. Welcomed enthusiastically by Salutati and his coterie of younger humanists, Chrysoloras assumed his teaching duties at the Florentine
studio
almost immediately.

For someone who played such a crucial and celebrated role in the history of Western civilization, Manuel Chrysoloras remains a curiously elusive figure. He wrote little. Just a
handful of letters and a few other brief writings survive. Though modern historians have characterized those few works as exceptionally important, they tell us next to nothing about Chrysoloras the man.

What little we know about Chrysoloras comes mostly from the writings of his students, some of whom quite simply idolized him. They describe a man of charm and magnetism, a warm and gifted communicator, widely cultivated if not an unusually learned scholar. He was physically impressive. Though only medium in size, he had a strikingly healthy complexion. Over a reddish beard worn long in the Byzantine style, his eyes suggested an outlook at once grave and lighthearted. In a modern American university, Chrysoloras would be the popular classroom performer rather than the scholarly researcher—but one whose graduate students turn out to be conspicuous for the brilliance of their later achievements, as well as the depth of their teacher's influence on them.

The roster of Chrysoloras’ pupils reads like a who's who of early Renaissance humanism. And because his pupils went on to teach their own students, and so on, Chrysoloras’ pedagogic legacy spread out and was still dominating the humanist landscape generations after his death.

Chrysoloras’ teaching methods were innovative, even revolutionary, yet what's more striking is the way they were so perfectly in tune with the needs and values of the humanist milieu he encountered in Florence.

On a basic level, Chrysoloras boiled down the mind-numbingly complex Greek-language textbooks used in Byzantine classrooms to a clear and concise form, producing an elementary, user-friendly primer of ancient Greek called
Questions.
The title was less original, being the traditional one for such books in Byzantium, but Chrysoloras’
Questions
would remain the Western student's standard introduction to ancient Greek for well over a century. Its radical streamlining of Greek grammar had a huge practical impact. Where one traditional version made just a few years earlier offered Byzantine students fifty-six types of noun to memorize, for example, Chrysoloras’ new one reduced it to just ten. A measure of the book's importance is that when printing came along later in the quattrocento, Chrysoloras’
Questions
was among the very first books printed.

That was innovation, and brought great advances in a hands-on, daily-grind kind of way. Revolution came in more profound realms of nuance and sensibility, and is best illustrated by Chrysoloras’ approach to the deceptively complex problem of translation. Medieval Scholastic scholars, when they had translated from Greek into Latin at all, had practiced a method called
verbum ad verbum
—literally, “word for word.” This is exactly what it sounds like: a mechanical, word-by-word substitution of one language for another. At its best, this resulted in clumsy, graceless Latin. At its worst, as Chrysoloras pointed out, it could change the meaning of the original completely. Chrysoloras abandoned the old method. Instead, he taught his students to stick as closely as possible to the sense of the Greek, but to convert it into Latin that was as elegant, fluent, and idiomatic as the original.
^∗

The Italian humanists—who aspired above all to write perfect if rather sterile Ciceronian Latin—took up the new technique with gusto. It was perfectly in keeping with their literary values, and a logical outgrowth of the humanistic
program. Indeed, Salutati probably had similar ideas already, since Cicero himself had also condemned word-for-word translations for their stiffness. Chryoloras’ students soon began undertaking humanistic translations on a grand scale, and for the first time accurate and graceful Latin versions of important Greek works started appearing rapidly in the West.

The famed Leonardo Bruni, the most prolific translator among Chrysoloras’ students, exemplified the new approach. Commenting on his own criteria in translating Plato, Bruni wrote about the Greek author as if he were a good friend who was still alive: “I translate him in a way that I understand will give him most pleasure…. [B]eing the most elegant of writers in the Greek, he will not wish to appear lacking in taste in Latin.” Bruni, incidentally, was the first to use the word
translation (translatio,
literally “carrying across”) in this way, for the rendering of one language into another.

As Salutati had so clearly intuited, Chrysoloras in Florence at the turn of the quattrocento was truly the right man in the right place at the right time—in other words, the perfect teacher for the daunting educational task at hand. This is why Renaissance scholars agree that, despite Salutati's many accomplishments, his greatest contribution to humanism lay simply in bringing Chrysoloras to Florence.

Chrysoloras stayed in Florence for only three years, leaving in March 1400. In that short space of time, he ensured that the study of ancient Greek put down permanent roots in the West. His Florentine students represent the first true generation of classical Greek scholars in Western Europe:

• Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444).
  Born in the town of Arezzo (and therefore sometimes known as Aretino), Bruni was the most renowned Florentine humanist of the first half of the quattrocento. Interested mainly in history and political theory, he was the leading exponent of civic humanism.
  ^∗
  Bruni's many polished translations include Aristotle's
  Politics
  and
  Ethics,
  several
  Lives
  of illustrious Greeks and Romans by the ancient biographer Plutarch (a favorite of the early humanists, Plutarch would later be a rich source for Shakespeare), and rhetorical works by the Greek orators Demosthenes and Aeschines. Salutati had compared Florence with republican Rome; Bruni extended the comparison to include Athens as well. In 1401 Bruni published his famous encomium
  In Praise of the City of Florence,
  basing it on Greek models such as Aelius Aristides’ encomium of Athens. Later he wrote the pioneer work of Renaissance historiography,
  The History of the Florentine People,
  in which he revived the critical, secularizing methods of the ancient historians. Like many of his friends, Bruni spent time working at the Vatican, which also became a major center of humanist learning. His humanist skills brought him wealth and celebrity, and like his teacher Salutati he served as Florentine chancellor (from 1427 until his death).
  

• Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459).
  Poggio was a teenager when Chrysoloras arrived in Florence, and he may have been too young to be officially included among Chrysoloras’ students. He never mastered Greek and
  was probably more of a young hanger-on than a full-fledged student when Chrysoloras was teaching. Perhaps because of this situation, Poggio hero-worshipped Chrysoloras more than the other Florentines. However, at times he later appears mildly dismissive of Greek learning, which may reveal a touch of sour grapes after his youthful exclusion by the others. Regardless, he was certainly well accepted in Salutati's circle by 1400, winning his spurs as a superb Latinist and (with his older friend Niccolò Niccoli) eventually becoming the most celebrated discoverer of lost Latin manuscripts. Poggio's long and productive humanist career extended into the era when Medici absolutism ended the republican system in Florence. Unusually quarrelsome even for a humanist, he spent most of his career in Rome. He returned to Florence as an old man in 1453, when (following in Salutati's and Bruni's footsteps) he accepted the city's invitation to take up the post of chancellor.
  

• Niccolö Niccoli (1364-1437).
  Like Chrysoloras himself, Niccoli wrote next to nothing and therefore remains a rather cryptic character. Yet, it's clear from the writings of his fellow humanists that Niccoli was a highly influential figure of central importance to the movement. Even more quarrelsome than Poggio (which is perhaps why the two of them got along), the eccentric Niccoli was the most avant-garde of the humanists in his attitude of extreme classicism. A bit of a poser, he ostentatiously courted financial ruin in order to devote himself solely to his studies. Unlike Bruni, his other close friend, Niccoli was an aristocrat. Also unlike Bruni, Niccoli shared with Chrysoloras an intense interest in
  ancient art. An avid book collector, he also pioneered the study of ancient coins, inscriptions, and other artifacts. After his death Niccoli's magnificent book collection became the nucleus of the public library founded at San Marco in Florence by Cosimo de Medici.
  

• Pier Paulo Vergerio (1370-1444).
  Born in Capodistria and educated at Padua, where he was professor of logic from 1390 to 1406, Vergerio was visiting Florence in 1398 when he heard about Chrysoloras and joined the group. Like Poggio and Bruni, he would also do humanist work for the Vatican, but Vergerio is best known as a teacher and pioneering educational theorist. He championed a liberal, humanist education that broke sharply with medieval traditions and attempted to recreate the
  encyclios paidea
  of the Greeks.
  ^∗
  His book
  On Gentlemanly Manners and Liberal Studies for Youth,
  probably written a couple of years after Chrysoloras left Florence, was the first and the most influential work of Renaissance educational theory. It cites many Greek sources and seems to owe much to Chrysoloras’ ideas and example.
  

• Roberto Rossi (c. 1355-1417).
  While lacking the genius of some of his friends, Rossi mastered Greek and acquired a fine collection of Greek manuscripts. But he's mainly notable first for his trip to Venice in 1390-91 (when he met Cydones and Chrysoloras), and second because he later tutored the scions of many leading
  Florentine families in Latin and Greek. His students included the young Cosimo de Medici.
  

These were the standouts among Chrysoloras’ Florentine students of Greek. The brilliant threesome of Bruni, Poggio, and Niccoli made up the core group of friends, though there were others whose humanist credentials were perfectly respectable. The aristocratic Palla Strozzi, an exceedingly wealthy and well-connected patron of the arts and letters, had taken the lead in helping Salutati arrange for Chrysoloras’ invitation. It was he who paid for the Greek books that Chrysoloras used in teaching, and for having copies made for the other students. Antonio Corbinelli, another wealthy aristocrat in the group, eventually acquired one of the best classical libraries in Europe, the Greek portion of which included Homer, Plutarch, Herodotus, Thucyd-ides, Polybius, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Theocritus, and Pindar.

And of course there was Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, who kept up with his Greek after escorting Chrysoloras back to Florence, and who ultimately made a number of workmanlike translations of his own (including several of Plutarch's
Lives).
After Chrysoloras left in 1400, Angeli took a mid-level secretarial position at the Vatican, which enabled him to continue his humanist studies. Neither unusually talented nor terribly ambitious, he remained hardworking and openhanded, sharing his own hard-to-find Greek books with Salutati and the others. He did have an uncharacteristic collision with Bruni in 1405, in which he ungallantly tried to beat out the younger but more brilliant man for a prestigious post that had become available at the papal curia, and for which
Bruni had applied. Angeli, who had shown no interest in the position before Bruni made his move, was goaded by friends who thought he would be shamed if the younger man, a former fellow student, got the better job. When the pope had them each write a sample letter in Latin, Bruni won hands down despite his youth.

Yet, Angeli had a contribution to history left to make after Chrysoloras’ departure. When Chrysoloras left, he passed on to Angeli an unfinished translation he had been working on. The book was Ptolemy's
Geography,
the key geographical text of the ancient world, which Chrysoloras had brought with him from Constantinople. Angeli completed the translation Chrysoloras had started, making this highly sought-after work available to the West for the first time. Numerous copies of it began appearing rapidly, along with maps based on the information in the text. In fact, that “information” was inaccurate. Ptolemy's
Geography
greatly underestimated the distance between Europe and Asia. And so when, decades later, this widely distributed and pregnantly mistaken ancient authority found its way into the hands of a Genoan sailor named Christopher Columbus, it implanted in him a firm (and ultimately marketable) conviction that sailing westward to the Indies was likely to be a piece of cake.