Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  The Cydones brothers’ enthusiasm for Aquinas reveals the temperament that the Byzantine humanists shared with the Catholics, whose church was moving toward rationalism just as the Orthodox church was moving toward mysticism. Like Boethius so long before, Aquinas strove above all to find a place for Aristotelian rationalism in Christian faith. As the Hesychasts well knew, Aquinas’ thought had recently been officially embraced by the pope. Just as Hesychasm completed Orthodoxy, so did Thomism complete Catholicism; Palamas and Aquinas were mirror images of each other.

  Demetrius Cydones’ translation work gave him not only a growing enthusiasm for Aquinas and Catholic theology but also a new receptivity to the Westerners with whom he increasingly came in contact. His home became a gathering place for Westerners who had texts that needed translation. For their part, the Frangoi were pleased to be seen in a new light, to show off achievements with which no Byzantine would earlier have been willing to credit them. “For the whole race,” says Cydones, “was judged only by the sojourners, and anyone speaking of things Latin would mention nothing more than sails, oars, and other things needed for a sea journey.” Byzantines, he continues, had carried over the old Greek habit of “dividing all mankind into Hellenes and barbarians, with the barbarians assumed to be stupid and gauche.”

  Now the barbarians appeared to have pulled ahead, and in theology, the queen of the sciences, no less. Entranced by the vigor of the new Latin theology, Cydones embarked on a determined crusade to break down his countrymen's ancient prejudice—and, like Barlaam before him, to effect the all-important reconciliation between the two churches. He managed to keep his place despite Cantacuzenos’ fall from power and soon made himself equally indispensable to the new emperor, John V Paleologus, who held power on and off over the next few decades, his own rule disturbed by periodic struggles with his sons. Cydones remained in office most of that time, eventually becoming the Byzantines’ most respected elder statesman. A trip to Venice in 1353 was his first venture abroad; eventually, others would follow as he deepened his contacts in Venice, in Rome, and finally in Florence.

  Engrossed in politics, diplomacy, and his Thomistic studies, Cydones let a further fifteen years go by before returning to Italy; in the interim, he converted to Catholicism. In 1369 he journeyed to Rome with John V, who at Cydones’ urging now took the drastic step of himself professing the Catholic faith in hopes of papal support against the Turks.

  It is a reflection of John's general weasliness that his conversion was completely ignored by the Orthodox hierarchy at home in Constantinople, and indeed by pretty much everyone else, too. For his part, Cydones enjoyed hobnobbing at the papal curia, but his letters of the period teeter between hope and despair when it came to the ever elusive goal of Western aid. Western promises had become so empty, he writes at one point, that “even the Turks ask with laughter if anyone has word of the expedition.”

  It's unlikely there was much the West could do anyway. In retrospect the point of no return was probably reached sometime around the middle of the century, with the dreadful civil war between Cantacuzenos and Anne of Savoy; after that, it seems impossible that any mere expeditionary force could have turned back the rising power of the Ottomans, who continued conquering more and more lands in Asia Minor and, after 1347, in Europe as well.

  The thirty-odd-year reign of John V Paleologos saw a rapid and catastrophic loss of territory to the Turkish juggernaut, which rolled right into the Balkans, smashing the culturally Byzantinized kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria. Ottoman rule in the Balkans would last until the modern period. By the 1380s, little remained of the Byzantine “empire” but a few cities and their environs: Constantinople, Thessalonica, Trebizond, bits and pieces of the Peloponnesus. The amazing thing is that Byzantines held on as long as they did.

  After a close call when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid blockaded Constantinople for eight years starting in 1394, Byzantium would owe its half-century reprieve only to the fearsome Mongol conqueror Tamerlane. He devastated Bayezid's army at Ankara in 1402 before withdrawing to the East, where he died a few years later. The Ottomans’ brutal defeat at Ankara proved a temporary setback, but—for the survival of Greek literature—a crucial one. As the Turks regrouped, siege craft would again rumble toward the big walls of the Queen of Cities.

  In Venice with Chrysoloras

  For two decades, as the Turkish tide washed into the Balkans, political concerns thwarted Cydones’ oft-expressed desire to return to the West. Throughout his letters—always, modern scholars point out, written with an eye toward publication— he mentions or congratulates friends, younger men who had made overtures to the West and its culture, either learning Latin or actually traveling themselves to Italy or France. Plans for his own return were continually laid and put off. Finally, by the late 1380s, conditions for a trip began improving, as Cydones’ advancing age (he was now in his mid-sixties) and his open affection for John's ambitious if loyal son Manuel combined to reduce his involvement at court. In late 1389, Cydones set out for Venice, again to seek aid against the Turks.

  Cydones’ second trip to Venice lasted just under a year and a half, during which he cemented his ties to this most Byzantine-flavored of Italian cities. In January 1391, a few months before Cydones ended his sojourn, the Venetian doge Antonio Venerio granted him honorary citizenship. The document, still in the Venetian state archives, confers upon “the noble and extraordinarily wise man, Lord Demetrius Cydones, now resident among the Venetians … all the rights, benefits, immunities, and honors now enjoyed by other Venetian citizens.”

  Perhaps, if they had known the eventual fruits of Demetrius’ residence among them, the Venetians might have gone even further. Cydones’ traveling companion was his student, friend, and compatriot Manuel Chrysoloras, and it was sometime in 1390 that Cydones put Chrysoloras in touch with an Italian, Roberto Rossi, who wished to learn some Greek. Barlaam may have failed with Petrarch, but over the succeeding decades the remarkable Manuel Chrysoloras would redeem that failure, and much more.

  The chances for an Italian seeking to learn Greek were becoming better than in Petrarch's and Boccaccio's day, a generation or two earlier. For one thing, it was someone like Rossi who now had the desire: not a pioneering genius, but a more representative figure, bright and talented certainly but one of a growing crowd. This development is directly attributable to one man, the Florentine chancellor and renowned humanist teacher Coluccio Salutati.

  Greekless himself, and destined to remain so despite his later efforts, Salutati nonetheless inspired an energetic enthusiasm for Greek literature among the wide circle of trendy young intellectuals in Florence who looked on him as their mentor. Rossi was one of this group of young Florentines (actually Rossi himelf was not so young; around forty, he was Chrysoloras’ rough contemporary). Historians believe that it was at Salutati's urging that Rossi came to Venice in the first place, expressly to seek out instruction from either Cydones or Chrysoloras, both of whom were well known. Rossi would probably have told the two Byzantines about Salutati; on returning to Florence, he certainly told Salutati all about them. Be that as it may, Cydones arranged for Rossi's lessons, and those lessons were the first link between Chrysoloras and Florence—an association that would, in the end, become legendary.

  Cydones, Chrysoloras, and Rossi all went home in 1391, the two Byzantines to Constantinople and Rossi to Florence. For the aging Cydones, the next few years seem to have been rewarding ones. Manuel II Paleologos—a Platonic “philosopher king,” Cydones calls him in a congratulatory letter— had succeeded to the throne shortly before Cydones’ departure from Venice. Once again taking a hand in affairs of state, Cydones immersed himself in Manuel's desperate attempts to treat with the Turks.

  Meanwhile, back in Florence, Rossi gave Chrysoloras enthusiastic reviews both to his teacher Salutati and to his fellow students in Salutati's circle. One of them, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, eventually grew so excited by Rossi's tales that in 1395 he took the simplest step he co
uld to emulate him—simple, maybe, but dangerous, for the Turks were even then laying siege to the city. Yet, Angeli possessed boldness to match his enthusiasm. He went to Constantinople to find Chrysoloras and learn Greek.

  *Greek dialects are still spoken in isolated pockets of southern Italy, which retained its Byzantine culture long after being lost to the empire.

  *The reader will find a brief description and history of Mt. Athos in Chapter Twelve.

  *Driven out of Rome by factional violence, the papacy resided at Avignon from 1309 to 1377.

  *The title can be translated as Summary Against the Gentiles. The other work was the Summa Theologiae, or Summary of Theology.

  Chapter Four

  Chrysoloras in Florence

  acopo Angeli da Scarperia had been born in a small town north of Florence around 1360. His father had died when Angeli was a boy, and his mother had brought him to the city, where she had remarried. It isn't known how he first came to Salutati's attention, but the older man had taken a special liking to Angeli early on. Though never a humanist of the first rank, the affable Angeli would remain one of Salutati's favorite pupils, and received the honor of being asked to stand as godfather for one of Salutati's own children.

  Salutati had urged Angeli to make the journey to Constantinople, having already conceived the idea of inviting Chrysoloras to teach in Florence. The plan was for Salutati to lobby Florence's main governing council, the signoria, to issue an official invitation; meanwhile Angeli would do everything he could to tempt Chrysoloras into accepting the offer when it came.

  To reach the Byzantine capital, Angeli probably followed the standard route, the same one, for example, the knights of the Fourth Crusade had used nearly two centuries earlier—that is, traveling overland to Venice, from there sailing down the Adriatic coast and thence eastward through the Aegean. We don't know exactly when he left Italy. But he most likely entered Constantinople sometime in the late fall, evading the Turkish blockade of the besieged city. He also almost certainly carried letters of introduction from Salutati and Rossi, along with instructions from Salutati to be on the lookout for alluring manuscripts of ancient Greek works.

  The discovery of lost books, usually from monastery libraries, had been a main humanist occupation ever since Petrarch, who had recovered Cicero's seminally important Letters to Atticus (in which the Roman author glorifies Greek culture), among other works. Along with the desire to learn ancient Greek, the attraction of acquiring important undiscovered Greek works would play a large role in bringing other Italians to Constantinople in Angeli's footsteps. Many more books would be brought to the West by Chrysoloras and the Byzantine humanist teachers who came in his footsteps. A letter survives from Salutati to Angeli in spring 1396, when Angeli had been in the East for several months, in which Salutati gives a list of specific titles and authors he wants Angeli to look for and try to bring back to Florence. In Byzantium as in the West, books were very expensive and hard to find. Each one still had to be laboriously copied by hand; the arrival of printing still lay more than half a century off. Salutati assures Angeli that a sponsor has been found for buying the books, and that whatever money was needed would be rapidly accessible to facilitate speedy purchase.

  Arriving in Constantinople in the fall of 1395, Angeli looked up Cydones and Chrysoloras, making a good impression on both older men and beginning his study of Greek with the latter. Chrysoloras introduced Angeli around, and soon the gregarious Italian had struck up friendships with other leading Byzantine humanists and intellectuals. Under Chrysoloras’ tutelage, he progressed well in his Greek studies, although it would be some time before he could read Greek without his teacher's assistance. This was only to be expected. Students today commonly use cribs, or helpful translations, well into their third or fourth year of ancient Greek, and often longer if the text is especially difficult, as many are. Such translations weren't available to Angeli—for the simple reason that it would be he and his future fellow students back in Italy who would make most of the first ones. Along the way, Angeli naturally took every opportunity with his teacher to play up Florence's attractions and Salutati's sterling qualities. In truth, though, Chrysoloras needed little convincing. As will become clear, he had compelling reasons of his own for accepting the offer. The official invitation from the signoria was duly forthcoming, along with a respectable stipend, as Salutati announced happily to Chrysoloras in a letter dated March 1396. Sometime around late summer or early fall that year, Chrysoloras and Angeli left Constantinople for Italy, traveling together with Chrysoloras’ old friend Demetrius Cydones. Angeli's highly successful visit to the Byzantine capital had lasted just under a year.

  Florence, Salutati, and Civic Humanism

  The city that Chrysoloras was traveling to wasn't yet the city familiar to the modern tourist. If transported back in time to admire the Florentine skyline as Chrysoloras would have seen it, the first thing we would notice would be the gaping absence of Brunelleschi's dome; the Duomo or cathedral, under construction since 1296, was still unfinished, its great size having baffled all attempts to design a dome for it. More than two decades would elapse before Brunelleschi would draw up his innovative plans for what would be the first large dome built in Italy since before Boethius’ day.

  Drawing closer, we might also remark on the city's extraordinary spikiness. Florence had once been a forest of towers. Many were pulled down by the fourteenth century, but earlier paintings of the city make it look like a quiver packed full of arrows. Enough survived to be noticeable, interspersed with the ruined stubs of others. As we entered the central part of the city itself, we would feel shut in by the dark, narrow streets, no more than alleys really, winding through canyons of solid masonry, only occasionally opening onto tiny piazzas and courtyards. This claustrophobic sense would lift slowly during the Renaissance, giving way to broader streets and wide-open public spaces. Already the city fathers had planning on their minds, though the characteristic odors of the medieval city would linger awhile yet. A few months after Chrysoloras got there, Florentine officials fined three residents 10 lire each for failing to dig a cesspool as ordered and instead letting their sewage flow into the street.

  Most times, then as now, life was fast and sharp. The marketplace up the street from the Ponte Vecchio was a daily throng of activity, with meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, exotic delicacies, and dry goods all laid out in profusion. Pack-horses and delivery carts vied with shoppers; wealthy men alertly shepherded their elaborately decked-out wives past thieves, gamblers, drunks, and whores. Verbal quips filled the air, punctuated now and then by the clash of steel on steel. It was not a safe place, Florence. It overflowed with energy, which expressed itself in constant factional strife and political experimentation. After dark a curfew was in effect— being caught out at night could bring a fine or worse.

  In winter, when Chrysoloras arrived, life slowed somewhat as the damp Tuscan chill settled in the bones. But winter or not, Florence was the most exciting place on earth. Florence's anarchic feel came from the fact that the city was ruled by its people; the towers had been there to protect the politically disenfranchised Florentine nobility from the people's wrath, until the people pulled them down. Not since classical Athens had such a place existed.

  Florence at the moment of Chrysoloras’ arrival was in the middle of a long, intoxicating, and ultimately rather dangerous flirtation with history. Even the Black Death, which struck repeatedly starting in 1348, had failed to dampen the city's spirit despite cutting down nearly half its population. By the turn of the quattrocento, Florence was poised to become, for just a few decades, the undisputed literary and artistic capital of the West. Chrysoloras was about to find himself in a June garden, which he himself would bring to rich harvest. And its prize products would owe their germination to the movement known as humanism. Though similar shoots were sprouting up elsewhere in Italy (in places such as Naples and Padua, for example), it was in Florence that the fruits of humanism ripened first.
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br />   Florence was not much of a university town. In this it differed from self-important centers of Scholastic learning such as Paris, Oxford, Bologna, or Padua, where the great universities—the “schools”—had arisen starting in the twelfth century. Founded only in the 1320s, Florence's studio (as the Italians called a university) was small and backward— when it existed at all, which it didn't for long stretches of time over the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth, much to the wealthy Florentines’ embarrassment.

  At the same time, Florence's wealth was based on activities (such as international banking, which the Florentines basically invented in the fourteenth century, but also manufacture and trade) that encouraged literacy, with the result that its citizens were likely the most literate in Europe. They may have had a poor university, but their elementary education was superb. Besides, Florentines could easily travel to nearby Bologna or Padua to attend university if they wished. And even at these universities, with their professional outlooks (they specialized in law and medicine, respectively), Scholasticism hadn't attained the monopoly it enjoyed in the northern schools such as Paris and Oxford. It was a northern European invention anyway, as has often been observed, an import from Paris and Oxford that had never sat comfortably in Italy in the first place. In Florence it was less comfortable still.

  All this made Italy in general and Florence in particular a promising place for literary and intellectual innovation. It was natural for that innovation to be inspired by Italy's rich Roman past, which remained immediate not just in the pages of Virgil and Cicero but more visibly in the ancient ruins present in many Italian cities and towns. In Florence's case, the city's Roman foundation would play a big role in its not inconsiderable humanistic self-regard.