The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [30]
The Florentines’ only problem was how to provide their new, dynamic, bourgeois capitalism with intellectual and aesthetic credentials. The solution was to come, indirectly, from the Turks. As the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries advanced, so did the spectre of Muslim invasion from the expanding Turkish empire.
In a series of disasters the Western armies were annihilated before the Janissaries and their fanatical troops. In 1396 the greatest crusading army Europe could muster met the Turks at the battle of Nicopolis on the Black Sea, during which the flower of Western aristocracy was slaughtered. The cousins of the King of France, the heir to the Duke of Burgundy, the Marshal of France and other high-ranking members of European knightly families were captured. It seemed that nothing could stop the approaching holocaust.
The most concerned man in Europe, because he was closest to the threat, was the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II Palaeologos, who sent an academic called Manuel Chrysoloras to the West for help. When the mission failed because the Pope was as keen to see the destruction of Eastern Christendom as was the Turkish Sultan, the rest of Chrysoloras’ entourage returned to the East. Chrysoloras, however, accepted the offer of the Chair in Greek at Florence University, and in 1397 settled there for three years.
His pupils were to be among the most influential in the Florentine state. One of them, Leonardo Bruni, was to rise to the chancellorship. Among the others were major intellectuals such as Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolo Niccoli, and the most famous of teachers, Vergerio of Capodistria. Chrysoloras taught Greek, and thereby gave the Florentines a thirst for classical culture. A group of influential businessmen got together for regular classes in Greek culture, and in 1400 they arranged a package tour to Constantinople. Not everyone who visited the Greek capital was impressed. Ciriaco came back saying it was ‘a museum inhabited by a lot of people beneath contempt’. But in general the Florentine middle classes were impressed. And the contact with Byzantium stimulated an already growing interest in things Roman.
The mathematician Franciscan Luca Pacioli showing an example of Euclid's plane geometry to a noble pupil. Pacioli’s major contribution to Renaissance Europe was his treatise on double-entry book keeping.
A 1470 woodcut view of Florence at the height of her power and influence. New walls enclose the new suburb, to the right, across the river from the city centre.
The more wealthy Florence became, the more she began to compare herself with classical, republican Rome. Since medieval times there had been a strong Latin-speaking culture among the lawyers and notaries. Now, excited by the Greek example, they too began looking to the classical past for the glory that would be Florentine. Manuscripts were sought all over Europe. Many were found, in monasteries isolated among the mountains. This time, the parchments were scanned not for the scientific and legal expertise sought by the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but for new models of elegant living. It was the literature, the examples of decorum, the heroic ideal that the Florentines were seeking.
Petrarch had laid the groundwork decades before. ‘After the darkness has been dispelled,’ he wrote (the darkness he spoke of was the medieval period), ‘our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.’ The more they looked at pre-Christian classical thought, the more the Florentines found what they wanted: the civic glorification of the community-conscious individual. The Romans and Greeks were not to be regarded as paragons of knowledge, but as paragons of excellence. At the core of their writings, in