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Authors: Stephen Greenblatt

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To all but a handful of people in Germany, this quest, had Poggio tried to articulate it, would have seemed weird. And it would have seemed weirder still if Poggio had gone on to explain that he was not in fact at all interested in what was written four or five hundred years ago. He despised that time and regarded it as a sink of superstition and ignorance. What he really hoped to find were words that had nothing to do with the moment in which they were written down on the old parchment, words that were in the best possible case uncontaminated by the mental universe of the lowly scribe who copied them. That scribe, Poggio hoped, was dutifully and accurately copying a still older parchment, one made by yet another scribe whose humble life was equally of no particular consequence to the book hunter except insofar as it left behind this trace. If the nearly miraculous run of good fortune held, the earlier manuscript, long vanished into dust, was in turn a faithful copy of a more ancient manuscript, and that manuscript a copy of yet another. Now at last for Poggio the quarry became exciting, and the hunter’s heart in his breast beat faster. The trail was leading him back to Rome, not the contemporary Rome of the corrupt papal court, intrigues, political debility, and periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, but the Rome of the Forum and the Senate House and a Latin language whose crystalline beauty filled him with wonder and the longing for a lost world.

What could any of this mean to anyone who had his feet on the ground in southern Germany in 1417? Listening to Poggio, a superstitious man might have suspected a particular type of
sorcery
, bibliomancy; a more sophisticated man might have diagnosed a psychological obsession, bibliomania; a pious man might have wondered why any sound soul would feel a passionate attraction for the time before the Saviour brought the promise of redemption to the benighted pagans. And all would have asked the obvious question: whom does this man serve?

Poggio himself might have been hard-pressed for an answer. He had until recently served the pope, as he had served a succession of earlier Roman pontiffs. His occupation was
scriptor
, that is, a skilled writer of official documents in the papal bureaucracy, and, through adroitness and cunning, he had risen to the coveted position of apostolic secretary. He was on hand then to write down the pope’s words, record his sovereign decisions, craft in elegant Latin his extensive international correspondence. In a formal court setting, in which physical proximity to the absolute ruler was a key asset, Poggio was a man of importance. He listened while the pope whispered something in his ear; he whispered something back; he knew the meaning of the pope’s smiles and frowns. He had access, as the very word “secretary” suggests, to the pope’s secrets. And this pope had a great many secrets.

But at the time that Poggio was riding off in search of ancient manuscripts, he was no longer apostolic secretary. He had not displeased his master, the pope, and that master was still alive. But everything had changed. The pope Poggio had served and before whom the faithful (and the less than faithful) had trembled was at that moment in the winter of 1417 sitting in an imperial prison in Heidelberg. Stripped of his title, his name, his power, and his dignity, he had been publicly disgraced, condemned by the princes of his own church. The “holy and infallible” General Council of Constance declared that by his “detestable and unseemly life”
3
he had brought scandal on the Church and on Christendom, and that he was unfit to remain
in
his exalted office. Accordingly, the council released all believers from fidelity and obedience to him; indeed, it was now forbidden to call him pope or to obey him. In the long history of the Church, with its impressive share of scandals, little like this had happened before—and nothing like it has happened since.

The deposed pope was not there in person, but Poggio, his erstwhile apostolic secretary, may have been present when the archbishop of Riga handed the papal seal to a goldsmith, who solemnly broke it in pieces, along with the papal arms. All of the ex-pope’s servants were formally dismissed, and his correspondence—the correspondence that Poggio had been instrumental in managing—was officially terminated. The pope who had called himself John XXIII no longer existed; the man who had borne that title was now once again what he had been christened, Baldassare Cossa. And Poggio was now a masterless man.

To be masterless in the early fifteenth century was for most men an unenviable, even dangerous state. Villages and towns looked with suspicion on itinerants; vagrants were whipped and branded; and on lonely paths in a largely unpoliced world the unprotected were exceedingly vulnerable. Of course, Poggio was hardly a vagrant. Sophisticated and highly skilled, he had long moved in the circles of the great. The armed guards at the Vatican and the Castel St. Angelo let him pass through the gates without a word of inquiry, and important suitors to the papal court tried to catch his eye. He had direct access to an absolute ruler, the wealthy and cunning master of enormous territories, who also claimed to be the spiritual master of all of Western Christendom. In the private chambers of palaces, as in the papal court itself, the apostolic secretary Poggio was a familiar presence, exchanging jokes with bejeweled cardinals, chatting with ambassadors, and drinking fine wine from cups of crystal and gold. In Florence he had been befriended by some
of
the most powerful figures in the Signoria, the city’s ruling body, and he had a distinguished circle of friends.

But Poggio was not in Rome or Florence. He was in Germany, and the pope he had followed to the city of Constance was in prison. The enemies of John XXIII had triumphed and were now in control. Doors that had once been open to Poggio were firmly shut. And suitors eager for a favor—a dispensation, a legal ruling, a lucrative position for themselves or their relatives—who had paid court to the secretary as a means to pay court to his master were all looking elsewhere. Poggio’s income abruptly ceased.

That income had been considerable. Scriptors received no fixed stipend, but they were permitted to charge fees for executing documents and obtaining what were called “concessions of grace,” that is, legal favors in matters that required some technical correction or exception granted orally or in writing by the pope. And, of course, there were other, less official fees that would privately flow to someone who had the pope’s ear. In the mid-fifteenth century, the income for a secretary was 250 to 300 florins annually, and an entrepreneurial spirit could make much more. At the end of a twelve-year period in this office, Poggio’s colleague George of Trebizond had salted
4
away over 4,000 florins in Roman banks, along with handsome investments in real estate.

In his letters to friends Poggio claimed throughout his life that he was neither ambitious nor greedy. He wrote a celebrated essay attacking avarice as one of the most hateful of human vices, and he excoriated the greed of hypocritical monks, unscrupulous princes, and grasping merchants. It would be foolish, of course, to take such professions at face value: there is ample evidence from later in his career, when he managed to return to the papal court, that Poggio used his office to make
money
hand over fist. By the 1450s
5
, along with a family
palazzo
and a country estate, he had managed to acquire several farms, nineteen separate pieces of land, and two houses in Florence, and he had also made very large deposits in banking and business houses.

But this prosperity lay decades in the future. An official inventory (called a
catasto
) compiled in 1427 by tax officials indicated that Poggio had fairly modest means. And a decade earlier, at the time that John XXIII was deposed, he almost certainly had far less. Indeed, his later acquisitiveness may have been a reaction to the memory of those long months, stretching into several lean years, when he found himself in a strange land without a position or an income and with very few resources on which to fall back. In the winter of 1417, when he rode through the South German countryside, Poggio had little or no idea where his next florins would come from.

It is all the more striking that in this difficult period
6
Poggio did not quickly find a new position or make haste to return to Italy. What he did instead was to go book-hunting.

CHAPTER TWO
THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY
 

ITALIANS HAD BEEN
book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory
1
on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental
History of Rome
and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch’s achievement had inspired others to seek out lost classics that had been lying unread, often for centuries. The recovered texts were copied, edited, commented upon, and eagerly exchanged, conferring distinction on those who had found them and forming the basis for what became known as the “study of the humanities.”

The “humanists,” as those who were devoted to this study were called, knew from carefully poring over the texts that had survived from classical Rome that many once famous books or parts of books were still missing. Occasionally, the ancient authors whom Poggio and his fellow humanists eagerly read gave tantalizing quotations from these books, often accompanying extravagant praise or vituperative attacks. Alongside discussions of Virgil and Ovid, for example, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that “Macer and Lucretius are certainly
2
worth reading,” and went on to discuss Varro of Atax, Cornelius Severus, Saleius Bassus, Gaius Rabirius, Albinovanus Pedo, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius, Marcus Pacuvius, and
others
whose works he greatly admired. The humanists knew that some of these missing works were likely to have been lost forever—as it turned out, with the exception of Lucretius, all of the authors just mentioned have been lost—but they suspected that others, perhaps many others, were hidden away in dark places, not only in Italy but across the Alps. After all, Petrarch had found the manuscript of Cicero’s
Pro Archia
in Liège, in Belgium, and the Propertius manuscript in Paris.

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards
3
at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,

 

they shall give him twenty
4
Psalms or two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he
is
illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read. (Rule 139)

 

“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading—“prayerful reading,” as he put it—as well as manual labor. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict’s time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary.

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