Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [14]
Politian belonged to a mid-fifteenth-century generation that took it for granted that a humanist scholar had some knowledge of Greek. Dante and Boccaccio knew no Greek. Petrarch knew a little, just enough to fill him with anguish that he did not know more and to allow him to perceive that, in Greek literature of antiquity, there was a treasure-house surpassing anything in Latin. In the later Middle Ages, Greek was quite unlike Latin in one important respect: it was still a living language, albeit in debased form, in the Byzantine Empire. That too, was debased and shrunken. The Italians, or Latins as the Byzantines called them, saw Constantinople, the capital, as a repository of marvels from antiquity, rather than a living cultural center. Contemporary Byzantine art was a static, moribund tradition, from which Italian artists in the Middle Ages had to struggle to free themselves. The Venetians exploited the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the thirteenth century to occupy Constantinople, which they saw as a trading rival, and pillage it, stealing the four great bronze antique horses they found there and placing them triumphantly over the arcade of their cathedral, St. Mark’s.
Constantinople was also known in the West to contain depositories of ancient Greek literature and a few scholars familiar with it. In 1397 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence, and it was from this point that classical Greek began to be studied seriously, and widely, in the West. One Italian scholar, Guarino da Verona, actually went to Constantinople, and spent some years there in the circle of Chrysoloras. He returned to Italy in 1408, not only fluent in Greek but with an important library of fifty-four Greek manuscripts, including some of the works of Plato, hitherto unknown in the West. The rest of Plato was brought from Constantinople in the 1420s by Giovanni Aurispa. This was the first great transmission of classical Greek literature. The second occurred during the ecumenical council of Florence in the 1430s, an attempt to heal the schism between the Latin and Greek churches. The attempt failed, but the Greek delegation, which included a number of distinguished scholars, brought with them many important manuscripts that remained in Florence. A third batch arrived in the baggage of refugees escaping from Turkish rule to the West in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Meanwhile, the rediscovery of Latin classics continued with the work of, among others, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), an indefatigable ransacker of monastic libraries in Europe, who brought to light more Cicero, Quintilian, and other authors.
One reason why the humanists, while failing to dominate the old universities, got such a grip on society was their ability to infiltrate courts. They ran, in effect, a scholastic freemasonry, getting one another jobs and recommendations and chances to acquire patronage from the rich and powerful. Bracciolini, like Petrarch, worked in the papal service and attended the Council of Constance, 1414–18, where much trafficking in manuscripts was done. He also worked for a time for the English grandee Cardinal Beaufort. The humanists had ready pens, which could be used for political purposes, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) was made chancellor of Florence, whose interest he defended fiercely with his literary skills. The Visconti of Milan claimed that Salutati’s pen had done more damage than “thirty squadrons of Florentine cavalry,” to which the chancellor replied, “I would not restrain my words on occasions when I would not fail to use my sword.” Humanists were prominent in Florentine government, being chosen as chancellor on four occasions. Leonardo Bruni, for instance, who acquired administrative