Download PDF | (Studies in Medieval History and Culture) Michael Malone-Lee - Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472)_ Most Latin of Greeks, Most Greek of Latins-Routledge (2023).
217 Pages
Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472)
Cardinal Bessarion was a towering figure in the fifteenth-century Renaissance. His life spanned the century. In his sixty-nine years of life, he was a stellar student, a Basilian monk, a Greek Orthodox archbishop, a Roman cardinal, a papal diplomat, and an eminent humanist and scholar. Bessarion’s life and career were shaped by the tidal wave of the advance of the Ottoman Turks towards the West and by the centuries-old tension between the Orthodox East and the Latin West. He made a significant impact in both these areas. His long-term legacy is his contribution to the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance. This biography presents the life of Cardinal Bessarion, exploring his personal perspective on his age and his experience. It will be of interest to anybody with an interest in the European Renaissance and to specialists in Christian/Islamic relations in the period, the theological tensions between the Latin West and the Greek East, and the history of scholarship.
Michael Malone-Lee took an undergraduate degree in classics at Oxford University. He had a career of nearly thirty years in the British civil service where he served in senior positions in several departments of state. He later became Vice Chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University. In retirement he returned to classics and did a doctorate at Oxford University on Cardinal Bessarion and the transmission of Plato in the fifteenth century. Until recently he was teaching undergraduates Latin and Greek
Introduction
In the National Gallery in London, there is a painting of Cardinal Bessarion painted at the end of his life by Gentile Bellini.1 The painting shows the Cardinal in an attitude of prayer before a reliquary. Beside him are two members of the confraternity of the Scuola della Carità. The reliquary, containing fragments of the cross and garments of Jesus, was given to the Scuola by the Cardinal in 1463 while he was the Pope’s Legate to Venice. The gift was made at the time of Bessarion’s election as a member of the Scuola. The Scuola was the oldest of the six scuole grandi in Venice.2 The three figures pray before the image of the reliquary; at its centre is a Greek cross which had belonged to the Byzantine princess Irene Palaiologina.3
The cross is flanked by images of the emperor Constantine and his mother, Helena. Bessarion himself is not dressed in the robes of a Cardinal but he wears the habit and beard of a Basilian monk. The portrait challenges the viewer with the ambiguity of its central character. Who was Cardinal Bessarion? Why is he, a Roman Cardinal, dressed as a Basilian monk? Why is the picture suffused with resonances of Byzantium and its history? What is the Cardinal’s link to a Venetian confraternity of which he was a member? (Figure 1.1) The key to this conundrum lies in two external events. Cardinal Bessarion’s life and career were shaped by the tidal wave of the advance of the Ottoman Turks towards the West and by the centuries-old tension between the Orthodox East and the Latin West. His long-term legacy is his contribution to the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth-century Renaissance.
Cardinal Bessarion is buried in the church of the XII Apostles which stands in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli in Rome, and which had been assigned to him as his titular church when he became a cardinal. His solemn funeral was celebrated there on 3 December 1472; his body had been brought to Rome from Ravenna where he had died on 19 November. In a departure from normal practice, the Pope himself, Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–1484), attended the funeral. The funeral oration was preached by Cardinal Niccolò Capranica (c.1450–1517 or 1518).4 Capranica’s oration, which he later polished for wider publication, is an encomium by a Roman cardinal for a distinguished Greek émigré. 5 He carefully states at the beginning his own credentials; he was born in Latium and nurtured and educated ‘on the milk of the Roman Church’. He draws an implicit contrast with Bessarion who was ‘born and raised in ancient Greece’. He maps Bessarion’s career against a succession of Popes from Eugenius IV to Sixtus IV. The oration is the work of an Italian humanist quoting Virgil and drawing parallels from Roman history and classical literature.
According to Capranica Bessarion had eloquently and diligently defended the Greek position at the Council of Florence but the truth of the Catholic faith prevailed over the love of his people and country, and he turned those same skills to persuading the Byzantine Emperor and his party to accept the teaching and rite of the Latins.6 For this he was made a cardinal. On becoming a cardinal, he changed his way of life. He became proficient in Latin and Italian. He, ‘who had been born in Greece and on reaching maturity had lived and been educated in Greek monasteries’, suddenly appeared as a Latin. Capranica cannot refrain from adding that there were some who muttered about the praise being heaped on a foreigner.
The theme which runs through Capranica’s oration is Bessarion’s powers as a conciliator. He started with what must be, at best, an exaggeration. As a young monk, Bessarion had smoothed the discord which had sprung up between the Emperor of Byzantium and the Despot of the Peloponnese and then persuaded the Emperor and the Despot of Trebizond to join in arms against the threat from the Turks. Capranica saw Bessarion’s greatest achievement as that of bringing peace between the feuding factions of the city of Bologna, where Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455) had dispatched him as his Legate and peacemaker. Capranica closed his oration with a poignant account of Bessarion’s final embassy to King Louis XI of France (reigned 1461–1483) in 1472. By this time, Bessarion was old and sick but, according to Capranica, accepted the task out of a sense of duty. Capranica compared Bessarion to Amphiaraus, the seer in Greek mythology, who was persuaded to join a raiding party against Thebes in the certain knowledge that he would die; so, said Capranica, Bessarion left Rome ‘with some hope of reaching the King but with no hope of returning’. He crossed the Alps in the middle of winter and journeyed through France to reach Louis on the Loire, where he was loaded with honours by the King but failed in his mission to persuade him to join a crusade against the Turks. Bessarion died in Ravenna on his return journey to Rome. While Capranica presented Bessarion as assuming the life and culture of the Papal court and Italy, others saw him as a scholar, accepted into the network of Italian humanists of the fifteenth century. The library in Rome of Angelo Colocci (1467–1549), secretary to the Medici popes Leo X (reigned 1513–1521) and Clement VII (reigned 1523–1534), held a manuscript containing Bessarion’s funeral oration and notes on the ‘principal humanists’ of the latter part of the fifteenth century. The document lists the names of thirtysix ‘humanists’ with brief biographical details. All are Italian with the two exceptions, Bessarion, referred to as ‘Nicenus’, who heads the list, and John Argyropoulos (c.1418–1457), whose inclusion in the Italian dictionary of national biography (henceforth DBI) may suggest that he was regarded as more Italian than Greek.7 About the time that Capranica was delivering his funeral oration Bessarion’s friend and ardent disciple, Michael Apostolis (c.1420–1480), was writing what he called a ‘eulogy’ or ‘lament’ (Laudatio Funebris Bessarionis) in his home in Crete.8 It is strikingly different from Capranica’s funeral oration. It is written in Greek for a Greek readership and is a passionate, personal lament by an ardent follower for the death of his beloved and revered master. Apostolis had settled in Crete after he was captured by the Turks at the fall of Byzantium and was taken to the Asiatic coast of the Black Sea as a prisoner but escaped and settled in Crete where he lived for the rest of his life in straightened circumstances, supported by a pension from Bessarion.9 He was a supporter of the union of the Greek and Latin churches and made frequent visits to Italy.
He met Bessarion in Bologna in 1454 and became his devoted follower. For a time, he lived in Bessarion’s house in Rome.10 He acted as his agent in acquiring Greek manuscripts many of which he copied for Bessarion.11 Apostolis begins by expressing his grief at the news of the unexpected death of Bessarion, at a point when he, Apostolis, had scarcely recovered from the shock of the capture and destruction of his fatherland. This is an exaggeration; Byzantium had fallen to the Turks nearly twenty years previously. But the reference to an experience which Apostolis shared with Bessarion grounds the whole of his eulogy in the Byzantine world and suggests that the personal shock of Bessarion’s death is of equal significance to Apostolis as the fall of Byzantium. His admiration and praise of Bessarion is extravagant. He describes him as more eloquent than Plato, more powerful than Demosthenes, superior to Thucydides in the breadth and beauty of his language, and equal to the philosophers Aristotle and Chrysippus. In the eyes of Apostolis Bessarion was primarily a man of God. He was admired not just by the Greeks and Romans but throughout Europe, as far as Britain and the Celts. Apostolis’ account of Bessarion’s life is selective.
He passes from his birth in Trebizond to parents of modest means; he writes of his studies in Byzantium, where he devoted himself to learning ‘without which life is blind’ and he emphasises his practice of the religious life, which was filled with a yearning for a time when the enmity between Greece and Rome would be resolved and peace restored. He describes Bessarion’s call to be Archbishop of Nicaea and how he accompanied the Emperor and Patriarch to Italy where he was chosen as the spokesman of the Greeks at the Council of Florence. In Florence, he was the object of universal admiration. ‘How many’, writes Apostolis, ‘because of you congratulated our nation!’. He says that because of this, the Romans bestowed on him the cardinal’s hat and made him Patriarch of Constantinople, ‘the one-time queen of cities’. He was judged worthy of the Papacy and would have become Pope ‘if the misfortune of our nation had not prevented it’. Apostolis uses the Greek word π!"# for the obstacle which prevented Bessarion from becoming Pope. The word is ambiguous, and by using it Apostolis glosses over any suggestion that it was Bessarion’s Greekness which was the obstacle. Apostolis’ account is a careful selection of the facts to present Bessarion as a Greek who was universally honoured and admired. His final, and perhaps greatest, honour and achievement was to become Patriarch of Constantinople. Apostolis makes no suggestion that Bessarion was converted to the Latin cause at Florence. The fact was that the Pope appointed Bessarion as the titular Patriarch of Constantinople. However seriously Bessarion took this role, he was not recognised in Greece. After the Greek church had repudiated the act of union agreed at the Council of Florence, it and not the Pope continued to elect Patriarchs of Constantinople.
One of these was an old friend of Bessarion, Gennadius Scholarios (1400–1473).12 For Capranica Bessarion was absorbed into the world of the Papal court and Rome.13 For Apostolis he was a Greek universally admired who kept alive the flame of ancient Byzantium. For others, Bessarion was primarily a scholar and collector of Greek manuscripts. Not everybody was an admirer of Bessarion. Capranica in his funeral oration referred to ‘mutterings’ against him. These were, presumably, mutterings among the Roman elite who ‘were unwilling to hear praise of a foreigner’.14 In a telling letter to Apostolis, who had just been received into the entourage of the Pope and the papal court, Bessarion advised him that he needed to learn to put up with the malice to which foreigners may be subjected. He wrote: ‘I know what I am talking about’.15 In the eyes of the Greeks, some of them his friends and colleagues, who could not accept the decree of union agreed in the Council of Florence in 1439, he was a traitor, even a heretic, who had betrayed his Greek heritage for personal advantage.16 Bessarion’s friend, Gennadius Scholarios, who became the standard bearer of the anti-Latin cause in Byzantium, wrote in a list of the signatories of the decree of the union at Florence against Bessarion’s name that he ‘was honoured as a cardinal among the Italians and he completely converted to their customs, sacrficing unleavened bread and eating meat’.17
In other words he implied that Bessarion had adopted the ritual practices of the Latins, which were repugnant to the Greeks, in return for a cardinal’s hat. In a peculiarly virulent later attack, Scholarios described those who followed Bessarion in supporting the cause of union with Rome as: ‘Demented little men without substance who weighed words like feathers so that they were beguiled by Bessarion’s words, whatever they were, in the hope that union would bring them honours and preferment and, in some cases, much money’.18 The Slavic history known as The Nikonian Chronicle compiled in the mid-sixteenth century accused Bessarion and his fellow Greek, Cardinal Isidore of Kiev (1385–1483), of ‘selling the faith for gold’.19 This negative view of Bessarion has survived into modern times. Prof. Tomadakis, chair of Byzantine history at the University of Athens, wrote in 1968: ‘Bessarion, dressed in the habit of the Greek clergy, was a humanist and at bottom was no more a believer than his master. He was great as a politician admittedly, an ecclesiastic certainly, but not a true believer. Bessarion is a humanist in the sense that, faced with the choice between faith and learning, he chose the philosophy of the Greeks’. Archimandrite Parthenius gives a more sympathetic but nonetheless critical appraisal: ‘[Bessarion] is the symbol of the patriot who for the sake of his country denies everything, even his faith’.20
Any serious book about the Renaissance in the fifteenth century will have references to Bessarion. But he is not easy to classify. He was a man with many faces and can be seen from many angles. In his funeral oration, Capranica described Bessarion’s life as a vast field. Scholars have emphasised different facets of the man. He has been the subject of many biographies. Apart from the funeral oration preached by Capranica and the Laudatio Funebris Bessarionis by his friend Michael Apostolis the source for Bessarion’s early life is a panegyric delivered in the presence of Bessarion himself in 1470 by the humanist scholar Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481), who was appointed Vatican librarian in 1475 by Pope Sixtus IV.21 Bessarion himself wrote a few biographical details on the flyleaf of his personal breviary.22 His one-time secretary, Niccolò Perotti (1429–1480), towards the end of his life, wrote a biography of Bessarion which is now lost.23 The Dominican friar Pietro Ranzano (1428–1492), who was a contemporary of Perotti, included a detailed biography of Bessarion in his Annales Omnium Temporum. 24 Since then, biographies of Bessarion have appeared regularly from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. One of the first was by the influential scholar and Byzantinist Aloysius Bandini, published in 1777 in Rome.25 Although Bessarion has been the subject of much scholarly literature, he has never attracted a full English biography.26
This is surprising for somebody whose life spans most of the fifteenth century and was at the intersection of so many of the political, theological, and scholarly currents of the time. His influence was felt in three overlapping circles – the humanist scholars of the fifteenth century, the circle of Greek émigrés, and in the papal curia and among European rulers. His own writings in Greek and Latin are extensive. They include philosophy, theology, politics, poetry, translations, and many letters to a range of persons, from popes and kings to humble friars.27 Bessarion’s friend, Lorenzo Valla (c.1407–1457), referred to him in a neat and much-quoted word bite as ‘among Greeks the most Latin, among Latins the most Greek (inter Graecos Latinissimus, inter Latinos Graecissimus)’.28
Valla’s word bite was intended as praise for Bessarion’s unique achievements, but it could be seen as an indication that he was neither one thing nor the other. Apostolis called Bessarion ‘the last of the Greeks and the first of the Europeans’.29 Bessarion’s experience at the Council of Florence and his encounter with Latin theology led him to see a theological continuum between St. Augustine and St. Basil the Great and the unity of Eastern and Western Christendom. Although his Latin friends portrayed him as absorbed into the mainstream of curial culture and politics, that was never the case. His vision was of a distinct tradition within a unified Christendom, and he never abandoned his Greekness.
In an inscription in a manuscript which he donated to the monastery of Grottaferrata, he pointedly referred to himself as ‘Cardinal by rank, Greek by descent’.30 For him, the dominating divide was not between the Greek and Latin churches, but between Christianity and the Ottoman Turks, who represented the tide of encroaching Islam. Bessarion’s life was devoted to maintaining that divide and to pushing back and erecting barriers, political and intellectual, to the encroachment of Islam. His long-held mission was to bring the riches of Greek literature and culture to the West, which would enrich the Latin Renaissance at that time at its high point. He was not alone in this mission, but he can be seen as its standard bearer. One of his great achievements was to make Greek learning accessible to the Latin West through the gift of his library of Greek manuscripts to the Republic of Venice, where his library is now housed in the Marciana Library. Bessarion, who referred to the Greeks as ‘the most celebrated and wisest nation’ and ‘the fount of all wisdom’, retained a conviction of the superiority of the Greek nation over the Latins.31 In a later dedicatory letter to a translation of a sermon of St Basil addressed to John II of Castile he wrote: ‘All knowledge comes [from the Greeks]’.32
On the other hand, in the encyclical letter which he wrote as titular Patriarch of Constantinople to the Greek church in 1463 he insisted that the Roman church had ‘all power over others’. In the same letter, he articulated clearly his pride in the achievements of Greek civilisation: ‘Above all, brothers and sons in the Spirit, bear in mind how great our nation was partly for its wisdom and partly for other virtues … and, in addition, how great in worldly achievements, in power and dominion. We were not only the inventors of all wisdom and all knowledge but brought them to perfection.
There our holiness shone forth; from there our monarchy ruled over the whole world’.33 He was known as a moderator between warring factions. Bessarion’s protégé, Giannantonio Campano (1429–1477), left a record of this endearing character when he described him as ‘an initiator and mediator of affairs’.34 At the end of the day he left his mark on history not by his ceaseless attempts to rouse the rulers of the West from their torpid indifference to the dangers of the advance of the Turks but because of the treasures of Greek culture preserved in the Marciana Library. Edward Gibbon described Cardinal Bessarion’s palace in Rome in an ungracious verdict as a school where ‘as often as the Cardinal visited the Vatican, he was attended by a learned train of both [Latin and Greek] nations; of men applauded by themselves and the public; whose writings, now overspread with dust, were popular and useful in their own times’.35 But this is less than fair. Classical scholars still feel the ripples of Bessarion’s influence.
Many contemporary editions of Greek classical texts cite as their sources manuscripts from Bessarion’s collection now in the Marciana Library. A contemporary scholar, Professor John Monfasani, has summed up the breadth of Bessarion’s influence as follows: ‘In his own time, Bessarion cut a large swathe … : as the greatest representative of the union of the Greek and Latin churches, as the Curia’s most consistent proponent of a crusade against the Turks, as the focal point of the most important intellectual circle in Italy outside of Florence, as a translator from the Greek of Aristotle and Xenophon, and, of course, as the author of the most important Platonic text in the Renaissance before Marsilio Ficino’s Theologia Platonica, namely, the In Calumniatorem Platonis’.36 He describes Bessarion as ‘a virtual one-man Renaissance Foundation for Greek culture in Italy.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق