The Swerve: How the World Became Modern Part 3

The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry G.o.d the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions, the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with th.o.r.n.y branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.

By the year 600 there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. Many of these were still small-little more than fortified villas, with their outbuildings-but they possessed a spiritual rationale and an inst.i.tutional coherence that conferred upon them stability in an unstable world. Their inhabitants were drawn from those who felt compelled to transform their lives, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of others, to secure eternal bliss by turning their backs on ordinary pleasures. Over time, their numbers were supplemented by many less fervent souls who had in effect been given to the Church by their parents or guardians.

In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abas.e.m.e.nt, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment-virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and flagellatio-were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. Disciplinary practices that would, in pagan society, have been disgraces inflicted only on social inferiors were meted out with something like democratic indifference to rank. Typically, the guilty party had to carry the rod that was used for the beating, and then sitting on the ground and constantly repeating the words Mea culpa, submit to blows until the abbot or abbess was satisfied.

The insistence that punishment be actively embraced by the victims-literalized in the kissing of the rod-marked a deliberate Christian trampling on the Epicurean credo of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. After all, the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. Christian hermits, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, mortified their flesh, in order to experience in their own bodies the torments that Jesus had had to undergo. Though these acts of self-scourging began to be reported in late antiquity-they were novel and strange enough in the beginning to attract widespread attention-it was not until the eleventh century that a monastic reformer, the Italian Benedictine Peter Damian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practice acceptable to the Church.

It had taken a thousand years to win the struggle and secure the triumph of pain seeking. "Did our Redeemer not endure scourging?" Damian asked those critics who called into question the celebration of the whip. Weren't the apostles and many of the saints and martyrs flogged? What better way to follow in their footsteps, what surer method of imitating Christ, than to suffer the blows that they suffered? To be sure, Damian concedes, in the case of these glorious predecessors, someone else was doing the whipping. But in a world in which Christianity has triumphed, we have to do the whipping for ourselves. Otherwise the whole dream and doctrine of the imitation of Christ would have to be abandoned. "The body has to be shaped like a piece of wood," explained one of the many texts that followed in Damian's wake, "with beatings and whippings, with canes, scourges, and discipline. The body has to be tortured and starved, so that it submits to the spirit and takes perfect shape." In the pursuit of this spiritual goal, all boundaries, restraints, and inhibitions drop away. Shame at appearing naked before the eyes of others has no place, nor does the embarra.s.sment of being seen trembling, howling, or sobbing.

Here is a description of the Dominican nuns of Colmar, penned at the turn of the fourteenth century by a sister named Catherine von Gebersweiler who had lived in the convent since childhood: At Advent and during the whole of Lent, the sisters would make their way after matins into the main hall or some other place devoted to their purpose. There they abused their bodies in the most acute fas.h.i.+on with all manner of scourging instruments until their blood flowed, so that the sound of the blows of the whip rang through the entire convent and rose more sweetly than any other melody to the ears of the Lord.

This is no mere sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic fantasy: a vast body of evidence confirms that such theaters of pain, the ritualized heirs to St. Benedict's spontaneous roll in the stinging nettles, were widespread in the late Middle Ages. They were noted again and again as a distinctive mark of holiness. St. Teresa, "although she was slowly wasting away, tormented herself with the most painful whips, frequently rubbed herself with fresh stinging nettles, and even rolled about naked in thorns." St. Clare of a.s.sisi "tore apart the alabaster container of her body with a whip for forty-two years, and from her wounds there arose heavenly odors that filled the church." St. Dominic cut into his flesh every night with a whip affixed with three iron chains. St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended whips with relatively thin straps, "summoning pain into the flesh, but not into the bones." Henry Suso, who carved the name of Jesus on his chest, had an iron cross fixed with nails pressed into his back and whipped himself until the blood flowed. Suso's contemporary, Elsbeth of Oye, a nun from Zurich, whipped herself so energetically that the bystanders in the chapel were spattered with her blood.

The ordinary self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses of the lay public could not hold out against the pa.s.sionate convictions and overwhelming prestige of their spiritual leaders. Beliefs and practices that had been the preserve of religious specialists, men and women set apart from the vulgar, everyday imperatives of the "world," found their way into the mainstream, where they thrived in societies of flagellants and periodic bursts of ma.s.s hysteria. What was once in effect a radical counterculture insisted with remarkable success that it represented the core values of all believing Christians.

Of course, people continued to pursue pleasure-the Old Adam could not be so easily eradicated. In peasants' huts and the halls of the great, along country lanes, in prelates' palaces, and behind the high walls of the monasteries, there was drinking, overeating, raucous laughter, merry dancing, and plenty of s.e.x. But virtually no one in moral authority, no one with a public voice, dared speak up to justify any of it. The silence was not, or not only, the consequence of timidity or fear. Pleasure seeking had come to seem philosophically indefensible. Epicurus was dead and buried, almost all of his works destroyed. And after St. Jerome in the fourth century briefly noted that Lucretius had committed suicide, there were no attacks on Epicurus' great Roman disciple. He was forgotten.

The survival of the disciple's once celebrated poem was left to fortune. It was by chance that a copy of On the Nature of Things made it into the library of a handful of monasteries, places that had buried, seemingly forever, the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure. It was by chance that a monk laboring in a scriptorium somewhere or other in the ninth century copied the poem before it moldered away forever. And it was by chance that this copy escaped fire and flood and the teeth of time for some five hundred years until, one day in 1417, it came into the hands of the humanist who proudly called himself Poggius Florentinus, Poggio the Florentine.

CHAPTER FIVE.

BIRTH AND REBIRTH.

FLORENCE AT THE dawn of the fifteenth century had few of the architectural features with which it is now graced, features that deliberately evoke on a grand scale the dream of the ancient past. Brunelleschi's magnificent cupola on the Duomo, the city's vast cathedral-the first large dome constructed since Roman antiquity and to this day the princ.i.p.al feature of the city's skyline-did not yet exist, nor did his elegantly arched loggia of the Foundling Hospital or his other projects carefully constructed on principles derived from antiquity. The cathedral's baptistery lacked the famous cla.s.sicizing doors designed by Ghiberti, and the Church of S. Maria Novella was without Leon Battista Alberti's harmonious, gracefully symmetrical facade. The architect Michelozzi had not designed the beautiful, austere buildings for the Convent of San Marco. The wealthiest families of the city-the Medici, the Pitti, the Rucelli-had not yet built their grand palaces, whose columns, arches, and carved capitals conspicuously emphasize cla.s.sical order and proportion.

The walled city was distinctly medieval in appearance, closed in and dark. Its densely populated central zone was crowded with high towers and fortified stone buildings, with twisting narrow lanes and alleys made still darker by projecting upper stories and covered balconies. Even on the old bridge-the Ponte Vecchio-that crossed the Arno, shops crammed tightly next to each other made it impossible to glimpse an open landscape. From the air, it might have looked as though the city possessed many open s.p.a.ces, but these were for the most part the walled interior courtyards of the huge monasteries built by the rival religious orders: the Dominicans' S. Maria Novella, the Franciscans' S. Croce, the Augustinian Hermits' S. Spirito, the Carmelites' S. Maria del Carmine, and others. Secular, open, public s.p.a.ces were few and far between.

It was to this somber, constricted, congested city, subject to periodic outbreaks of bubonic plague, that Poggio Bracciolini came as a young man in the late 1390s. He had been born in 1380 in Terranuova, an undistinguished backwater within the territory that Florence controlled. Years later Tomaso Morroni, one of his polemical enemies, wrote that Poggio was the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of peasants who eked out a living from the soil. The account cannot be taken seriously-it is one of many libels that Renaissance humanists, Poggio among them, hurled recklessly at one another, like punch-drunk pugilists. But, growing up where he did, he was undoubtedly familiar with Tuscan farms, whether he toiled on one or not. It was difficult for Poggio to claim a long line of ill.u.s.trious ancestors, or rather, in order to do so with a straight face after he had established himself in the world, he had to purchase a fraudulent 350-year-old coat of arms.

A more plausible story, one Poggio himself seems to have allowed at certain points in his life, is that his father Guccio was a notary, though a tax record of the period describes him as a spetiale, that is, a druggist. Perhaps he was both. Notaries were not figures of great dignity, but in a contractual and intensely litigious culture, they were legion. The Florentine notary Lapo Mazzei describes six or seven hundred of them crowded into the town hall, carrying under their arms bundles of doc.u.ments, "each folder thick as half a bible." Their knowledge of the law enabled them to draw up local regulations, arrange village elections, compose letters of complaint. Town officials who were meant to administer justice often had no clue how to proceed; the notaries would whisper in their ears what they were meant to say and would write the necessary doc.u.ments. They were useful people to have around.

There was, in any case, an indubitable link in Poggio's family to a notary, his maternal grandfather Michaelle Frutti. The link is worth noting because in 1343, many years before Poggio's birth, Ser Michaelle signed a notarial register with a strikingly beautiful signature. Penmans.h.i.+p would turn out to play an oddly important role in the grandson's story. In the concatenation of accidents that led to the recovery of Lucretius' poem, Poggio's handwriting was crucial.

Other children were born to Guccio Bracciolini and his wife Jacoba-two daughters (one of whom died very young) and another son, about whom his older brother Poggio had angry complaints later in his life. To judge from his father's tax payments, Poggio's early years were reasonably comfortable; but around 1388, when he was eight years old, things took a very bad turn. Guccio had to sell his house and property, flee from his creditors, and move with his family to nearby Arezzo. According to Tomaso Morroni, young Poggio was sent out to the fields to labor for someone named Luccarus. When he was caught cheating Luccarus, Morroni reports, Poggio was condemned to be crucified and was pardoned only because of his tender years. Once again we should not take these slanders seriously, except as symptoms of the boundless loathing of squabbling scholars. In Arezzo, Poggio must have been attending a school, learning the elements of Latin, and mastering the art of handwriting, not ploughing someone's fields or dodging the executioner. But that he had few resources he himself attested later in his life, recalling that he arrived in Florence c.u.m quinque solidis-with five pennies in his pocket.

It was at some point in the 1390s, well before he turned twenty, that the impoverished young man came to Florence. He probably had in hand a letter of recommendation from his schoolteacher in Arezzo, and he might have acquired as well a smattering of legal knowledge from brief studies in Bologna. After a time he was reunited with his improvident father and the rest of his family, all of whom eventually moved to Florence. But when he initially set foot in the Piazza della Signoria or looked up for the first time at Giotto's beautiful belltower next to the Duomo, Poggio was by himself, a n.o.body.

With a population hovering around 50,000, Florentine political, social, and commercial life was dominated by a small number of powerful mercantile and n.o.ble families: the Albizzi, Strozzi, Peruzzi, Capponi, Pitti, Buondelmonti, and a few others. The leading families signaled their presence and importance through conspicuous expenditure. "It is much sweeter to spend money than to earn it," wrote Giovanni Rucellai, whose family had grown rich in wool dying and banking; "spending gave me deeper satisfaction." The wealthy were attended by large numbers of clients, bailiffs, accountants, clerics, secretaries, messengers, tutors, musicians, artists, servants, and slaves. The labor shortage after the Black Death in 1348 had greatly increased the market for slaves, brought not only from Muslim Spain and Africa but also from the Balkans, Constantinople, and the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea. The traffic was allowed, provided that the slaves were infidels, not Christians, and Poggio must have seen a fair number of them, North Africans, Cypriots, Tartars, Greeks, Russians, Georgians, and others.

Florence was an oligarchy, and the small coterie of the wealthy and wellborn were the people who counted. Wealth lay in banking and landowning, as it usually does, and it derived as well from the weaving and finis.h.i.+ng of cloth, for which the city was famous. The cloth business required a cosmopolitan outlook, strong nerves, and extraordinary attention to detail. The surviving archive of a single great merchant of this period, Francesco di Marco Datini of nearby Prato-not, by any means, the greatest of these early capitalists-contains some 150,000 letters, along with 500 account books or ledgers, 300 deeds of partners.h.i.+p, 400 insurance policies, several thousand bills of lading, letters of advice, bills of exchange, and checks. On the first pages of Datini's ledgers were inscribed the words: "In the name of G.o.d and of profit."

In Florence, G.o.d was served in the astonis.h.i.+ng number of churches that adjoined one another in the crowded streets. He was served as well in the long, pa.s.sionate sermons that drew huge crowds, in the harangues of itinerant friars, in the prayers, vows, offerings, and expressions of religious fear that recur in almost all writings, formal and informal, and must have saturated everyday speech, and in periodic bursts of popular piety.

Profit was served in a vibrant international cloth industry that required large numbers of trained workmen. Some of the most skilled of these were organized in powerful guilds that looked out for their interests, but other workmen labored for a pittance. In 1378, two years before Poggio's birth, the seething resentment of these miserable day laborers, the populo minuto, had boiled over into a full-scale b.l.o.o.d.y revolt. Gangs of artisans ran through the streets, crying, "Long live the people and the crafts!" and the uprising briefly toppled the ruling families and installed a democratic government. But the old order was quickly restored, and with it a regime determined to maintain the power of the guilds and the leading families.

After the defeat of the Ciompi, as the working-cla.s.s revolutionaries were called, the resurgent oligarchs held on to power tenaciously for more than forty years, shaping Poggio's whole knowledge and experience of the city where he determined to make his fortune. He had to find a way into a conservative, socially bounded world. Fortunately for him, by innate skill and training he possessed one of the few gifts that would enable someone of his modest origins and resources to do so. The key that opened the first door through which he slipped was something that has come to mean next to nothing in the modern world: beautiful handwriting.

Poggio's way of fas.h.i.+oning letters was a move away from the intricately interwoven and angular writing known as Gothic hand. The demand for more open, legible handwriting had already been voiced earlier in the century by Petrarch (13041374). Petrarch complained that the writing then in use in most ma.n.u.scripts often made it extremely difficult to decipher the text, "as though it had been designed," he noted, "for something other than reading." To make texts more legible, the individual letters had somehow to be freed from their interlocking patterns, the s.p.a.ces between the words opened up, the lines s.p.a.ced further apart, the abbreviations filled out. It was like opening a window and letting air into a tightly closed room.

What Poggio accomplished, in collaboration with a few others, remains startling. They took Carolingian minuscule-a scribal innovation of the ninth-century court of Charlemagne-and transformed it into the script they used for copying ma.n.u.scripts and writing letters. This script in turn served as the basis for the development of italics. They were then in effect the inventors of the script we still think of as at once the clearest, the simplest, and the most elegant written representation of our words. It is difficult to take in the full effect without seeing it for oneself, for example, in the ma.n.u.scripts preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence: the smooth bound volumes of vellum, still creamy white after more than five hundred years, contain page after page of perfectly beautiful script, almost magical in its regularity and fineness. There are tiny pinholes on the margins, where the blank sheets must have been fixed to hold them steady, and scarcely visible score marks to form straight lines, twenty-six per page. But these aids cannot begin to explain how the tasks could have been accomplished with such clean elegance.

To have invented a way to design letters immediately recognizable and admired after six centuries is no small achievement. But the way Poggio fas.h.i.+oned his letters showed more than just unusual skill in graphic design; it signaled a creative response to powerful cultural currents stirring in Florence and throughout Italy. Poggio seems to have grasped that the call for a new cursive writing was only a small piece of a much larger project, a project that linked the creation of something new with a search for something ancient. To speak of this search as a project runs the risk of making it sound routine and familiar. In fact it was a shared mania, one whose origin can be traced back to Petrarch, who, a generation before Poggio's birth, had made the recovery of the cultural heritage of cla.s.sical Rome a collective obsession.

Modern scholars.h.i.+p has found dozens of ways to qualify and diminish this obsession. Petrarch's admirers wrote as if the ancient past had been utterly forgotten, until their hero heroically recalled it to life, but it can be demonstrated that Petrarch's vision was less novel than it seemed. In addition to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, there had been other moments of intense interest in antiquity, both throughout medieval Italy and in the kingdoms of the north, including the great Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century. And it was not these moments alone that kept the intellectual heritage of antiquity alive. Medieval compendia provided much more continuity with cla.s.sical thought than believed by those under Petrarch's spell. In the high Middle Ages, scholastic philosophers, reading Aristotle through the lens of the brilliant Arabic commentator Averroes, constructed a sophisticated, highly rational account of the universe. And even Petrarch's vaunted aesthetic commitment to cla.s.sical Latinity-his dream of walking in the footsteps of the ancients-had been evident for at least seventy years before his birth. Much of what Petrarch and his followers claimed for the novelty of their approach was tendentious, self-congratulatory exaggeration.

But it is difficult entirely to demystify the movement to which Petrarch gave rise, if only because he and his contemporaries were so articulate about their experience. To them at least it did not seem obvious that the search on which they embarked was only a polite stroll onto well-trodden ground. They saw themselves as adventurous explorers both in the physical world-the mountains they crossed, the monastic libraries they investigated, the ruins they dug up-and in their inner world of desire. The urgency of the enterprise reflects their underlying recognition that there was nothing obvious or inevitable about the attempt to recover or imitate the language, material objects, and cultural achievements of the very distant past. It was a strange thing to do, far stranger than continuing to live the ordinary, familiar life that men and women had lived for centuries, making themselves more or less comfortable in the midst of the crumbling, mute remains of antiquity.

Those remains were everywhere visible in Italy and throughout Europe: bridges and roads still in use after more than a millennium, the broken walls and arches of ruined baths and markets, temple columns incorporated into churches, old inscribed stones used as building materials in new constructions, fractured statues and broken vases. But the great civilization that left these traces had been destroyed. The remnants could serve as walls to incorporate into new houses, as reminders that all things pa.s.s and are forgotten, as mute testimony to the triumph of Christianity over paganism, as literal quarries to be mined for precious stones and metals. Generations of men and women, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had developed effective techniques for the recycling of cla.s.sical fragments, in their writing as well as their building. The techniques bypa.s.sed any anxiety about meddling with the leftovers of a pagan culture: as broken shards whether of stone or of language, these leftovers were at once useful and unthreatening. What more would anyone want with the rubble over which the living had clambered for more than a thousand years?

To insist on the original, independent meaning of this rubble would cause trouble and moral perplexity. A pa.s.sion for antiquity could certainly not be justified on the basis of curiosity alone, for curiosity had long been rigorously condemned as a mortal sin. The religion of the pagans was widely regarded as the wors.h.i.+p of demons, and, even setting aside that fear, the Christian faithful was urged to remember the cultural achievements of ancient Greece and Rome as the quintessential works of the world, the kingdom of man, set against the transcendent, timeless kingdom of G.o.d.

Petrarch was a devout Christian, and throughout his life he reflected with ardent seriousness on his spiritual condition. And yet he was, over the course of a complex career of restless journeying, diplomacy, soul-searching, and compulsive writing, a man held in the grip of a fascination with pagan antiquity that he himself could never completely fathom. Though he was for long periods of his life a relatively solitary figure, Petrarch did not keep this fascination to himself. He insisted with missionary zeal on the expressive power, the beauty, and the challenge of all that lay broken and buried beneath the crus.h.i.+ng weight of neglect.

A gifted scholar, Petrarch began to search for ancient texts that had been forgotten. He was not the first to do so, but he managed to invest this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking: Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Copying, comparing, and correcting the ancient Latin texts that he found, Petrarch returned them to circulation by sharing them with a vast network of correspondents to whom, often rising at midnight to sit at his desk, he wrote with manic energy. And he responded to the ancient writers as if they were somehow a living part of this network, intimate friends and family with whom he could share his thoughts. When he found a great cache of Cicero's private letters to his wealthy friend Atticus, candid letters filled with glimpses of egotism, ambition, and resentment, Petrarch did not hesitate to write a letter to Cicero, reproaching him for failing to live up to his own high principles.

For his own present, where he was forced to live, Petrarch professed limitless contempt. He lived in a sordid time, he complained, a time of coa.r.s.eness, ignorance, and triviality that would quickly vanish from human memory. But his was the kind of contempt that seems only to intensify charisma and celebrity. His fame steadily grew, and with it the cultural significance of his obsession with the past. In succeeding generations that obsession was partly routinized and settled into an influential new educational curriculum, the humanities (studia humanitatis), with emphasis on a mastery of Greek and Latin language and literature and a particular focus on rhetoric. But the humanism that Petrarch himself helped to create and that he communicated to his closest friends and disciples-preeminently, to Giovanni Boccaccio (13131374) and Coluccio Salutati (13311406)-was not a strictly academic affair.

The early humanists felt themselves, with mingled pride, wonder, and fear, to be involved in an epochal movement. In part the movement involved recognizing that something that had seemed alive was really dead. For centuries, princes and prelates had claimed that they were continuing the living traditions of the cla.s.sical world and had appropriated, in some form or other, the symbols and the language of the past. But Petrarch and those he inspired insisted that this easy appropriation was a lie: the Roman Empire did not actually exist in Aachen, where the ruler who called himself the "Holy Roman Emperor" was crowned; the inst.i.tutions and ideas that had defined the world of Cicero and Virgil had been torn to pieces, and the Latin written by the philosophers and theologians of the past six or seven hundred years was an ugly and distorted image, like that reflected in a badly made mirror, of what had once been so beautifully eloquent. It was better not to pretend any longer, but to acknowledge that there was no continuity. Instead, there was a corpse, long buried and by now disintegrated, under one's feet.

But this acknowledgment was only the necessary first step. Once one recognized what was gone, once one had mourned the tragic loss, it was possible to prepare the way for what lay on the other side of death: nothing less than resurrection. The pattern was, of course, familiar to every good Christian-and Petrarch, in holy orders, was a very good Christian indeed-but the resurrection in this case was in this world, not in the next. The object of recovery was fundamentally cultural and secular.

Poggio arrived in Rome a quarter of a century after Petrarch's death, at a time when the charismatic moment of the movement had already begun to fade. The sense of creative daring was gradually giving way to a spirit of antiquarianism and with it a desire to discipline, correct, and regulate all relations with the ancient past. Poggio and his generation became increasingly caught up in the desire to avoid mistakes in Latin grammar and to catch the blunders of others. But the lingering sense of the strangeness of the recovery of cla.s.sical antiquity helps to explain the peculiar impact of his handwriting. The script that he fas.h.i.+oned was not a direct evocation of the handwriting used by the ancient Romans: all traces of that handwriting had long since vanished, leaving only the carved inscriptions in handsome capital letters on stone and occasional rough graffiti. But Poggio's script was a graphic expression of the deep longing for a different style of beauty, a cultural form that would signal the recovery of something precious that had been lost. The shape of his letters was based on the ma.n.u.script style of certain Carolingian scribes. But Poggio and his contemporaries did not identify this style with the court of Charlemagne; they called it lettera antica, and, in doing so, they dreamed not of Charlemagne's tutor Alcuin but of Cicero and Virgil.

In order to earn money the young Poggio copied books and doc.u.ments, probably a very large number of them. His handwriting and his skill in copying-for which he became celebrated in his lifetime-must have been sufficiently remarkable from the beginning to enable him to pay for lessons. He improved his Latin, which was already quite advanced, by studying with a gifted scholar from Ravenna, Giovanni Malpaghino, a restless, quarrelsome man who had in his youth been Petrarch's secretary and amanueunsis and who had made a living lecturing in Venice, Padua, Florence, and elsewhere on Cicero and Roman poetry. Poggio's earnings paid too for his training as a notary, training that had the advantage of being cheaper and shorter than the long course of study required to become a lawyer.

At twenty-two years old, Poggio stood for his exam, not in the university but before a panel of lawyers and notaries. He had managed to survive the vagaries of his impoverished childhood and was poised to begin a career. The first notarial doc.u.ment in his hand is a letter of recommendation for his own father, who had fled from Florence to Rimini to escape an irate moneylender. We do not have a clue what Poggio thought when he penned this copy. Perhaps what already mattered more to him was the person in whose name the letter of recommendation was written: Coluccio Salutati, the great chancellor of the Florentine Republic.

The chancellor of the Florentine Republic was in effect the permanent secretary of state for foreign affairs. Florence was an independent state in control of a substantial swath of territory in central Italy and engaged in a constant, high-stakes chess game with the other powerful states of the Italian peninsula, especially Venice and Milan in the north, Naples in the south, and the papacy in Rome, weakened by internal divisions but still rich, dangerous, and meddlesome. Each of these rivals was prepared, if its position seemed threatened, to take the risky step of calling for aid, in money and troops, from the rulers of the Continent who welcomed the opportunity to intervene. All of the players in the game were ambitious, cunning, treacherous, ruthless, and armed, and the chancellor's conduct of diplomatic relations, including relations with the Church, was crucial not merely for the well-being of the city but for its very survival in the face of the threats from France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain.

When Poggio arrived on the scene in Florence, in the late 1390s, Salutati-who had begun life as a lowly provincial notary-had filled this post for some twenty-five years, conducting intrigues, hiring and ridding himself of mercenaries, drafting precise instructions to amba.s.sadors, negotiating treaties, seeing through the ruses of his enemies, forging alliances, issuing manifestos. Virtually everyone-the city's bitterest enemies as well as its most patriotic citizens-understood that in its chancellor Florence had someone truly exceptional, endowed not only with legal knowledge, political cunning, and diplomatic skill, but also with psychological penetration, a gift for public relations, and unusual literary skill.

Like Petrarch, with whom he had corresponded, Salutati felt the concentrated force of the buried past and had embarked on a scholarly search for the vestiges of cla.s.sical culture. Like Petrarch, he was an intensely devout Christian who at the same time found almost nothing to cherish, at least stylistically, in anything written between Ca.s.siodorus in the sixth century and Dante in the thirteenth. Like Petrarch, Salutati sought instead to imitate the style of Virgil and Cicero, and, though he recognized that he lacked Petrarch's literary genius-Ego michi non placeo ("I do not like myself"), he ruefully wrote-he astonished his contemporaries with the power of his prose.

Above all, Salutati shared with Petrarch the conviction that the recovery of the past had to be of more than antiquarian interest. The goal of reading was not to make oneself sound exactly like one of the ancients, even if that were possible. "I much prefer that my own style be my own," Petrarch wrote, "uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else's, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect." Though there is clearly a large dose of false modesty here, there is also a genuine desire to fas.h.i.+on a new and original voice not by disappearing into the old masters but by taking those masters into the self. The ancient authors, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio, "have become absorbed into my being and implanted not only in my memory but in the marrow of my bones, and have become one with my mind so that even if I never read them again in my life, they would inhere in me with their roots sunk in the depths of my soul." "I have always believed," Salutati wrote in the same spirit, that "I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new. . . ."

To prove its worth, Petrarch and Salutati both insisted, the whole enterprise of humanism had not merely to generate pa.s.sable imitations of the cla.s.sical style but to serve a larger ethical end. And to do so it needed to live fully and vibrantly in the present. But here the disciple parted from his master, for while Petrarch, who was born in exile and never fully identified with a particular homeland, moved throughout his life from place to place-shuttling from royal palace to city to papal court to rural retreat, despairing of stable attachments and feeling the pull toward a contemplative withdrawal from the world-Salutati wanted to produce something new in the city-state he pa.s.sionately loved.

At the center of Florence's cramped urban landscape of fortified towers and walled monasteries was the Palazzo della Signoria, the political heart of the republic. It was here for Salutati that the city's glory resided. The independence of Florence-the fact that it was not a client of another state, that it was not dependent on the papacy, and that it was not ruled by a king, a tyrant, or a prelate but governed by a body of its own citizens-was for Salutati what most mattered in the world. His letters, dispatches, protocols, and manifestos, written on behalf of the ruling priors of Florence, are stirring doc.u.ments, and they were read and copied throughout Italy. They demonstrated that ancient rhetoric was alive, that it effectively stirred up political emotions and awakened old dreams. A supremely gifted diplomat and politician, Salutati had a range of voices, a range almost impossible to convey quickly, but something of his spirit may be gauged from a letter of February 13, 1376, to the town of Ancona. Ancona was, like Florence, an independent commune, and Salutati was urging its citizens to revolt against the papal government that had been imposed upon them: "Will you always stand in the darkness of slavery? Do you not consider, O best of men, how sweet liberty is? Our ancestors, indeed the whole Italian race, fought for five hundred years . . . so that liberty would not be lost." The revolt he was trying to incite was, of course, in Florence's strategic interest, but in attempting to arouse a spirit of liberty, Salutati was not being merely cynical. He seems genuinely to have believed that Florence was the heir to the republicanism on which ancient Roman greatness had been founded. That greatness, the proud claim of human freedom and dignity, had all but vanished from the broken, dirty streets of Rome, the debased staging ground of sordid clerical intrigues, but it lived, in Salutati's view, in Florence. And he was its princ.i.p.al voice.

He knew that he would not be its voice forever. As he reached his seventies, troubled by intensifying religious scruples and anxious about the many threats to the city he loved, Salutati looked to a group of gifted young men he had taken under his wing. Poggio was among these young men, though we do not know precisely how Salutati identified him or the others whom he trained, in the hope that one or another would continue his labor. The most promising student was Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, a man about ten years older than Poggio, and like Poggio, from a very modest background. Bruni had set out to study law, but, along with other intellectually gifted men of his generation and particularly those in the orbit of Salutati, he had been seized by a pa.s.sion for cla.s.sical studies. In his case, the decisive factor was the study of ancient Greek, made possible when in 1397 Salutati invited the preeminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras to reside in Florence and give cla.s.ses in a language that had been almost completely forgotten. "At the coming of Chrysolaras," Bruni later recalled, "I was made to halt in my choice of lives, seeing that I held it wrong to desert law, and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit so great an occasion of learning the Greek literature." The lure proved irresistible: "Conquered at last by these reasonings, I delivered myself over to Chrysolaras with such pa.s.sion that what I had received from him by day in hours of waking, occupied my mind at night in hours of sleep."

In the circle jockeying for recognition by the great Salutati, one might have expected Poggio most to identify with the earnest, hardworking, ambitious Bruni, a penniless, provincial outsider endowed only with his own acute intelligence. But though he admired Bruni-who eventually served as a brilliant, deeply patriotic chancellor of Florence and was the author, among other works, of the first great history of the city-the young Poggio formed his deepest bond of friends.h.i.+p with another one of Salutati's students, the hypersensitive, argumentative aesthete Niccol Niccoli.

Some sixteen years older than Poggio, Niccoli had been born to one of the city's wealthiest families. His father had made a fortune in the manufacture of wool cloth, along with moneylending, grain futures, and other enterprises. Tax records from the 1390s indicate that Niccol Niccoli and his five brothers were wealthier than most of the residents in their quarter of the city, including such ruling families as the Brancacci and the Pitti. (Modern tourists to Florence can gauge the scale of this wealth by recalling the grandeur of the Pitti Palace, built some twenty years after Niccoli's death.) By the time that Poggio came to know him, Niccoli's fortunes, and those of his brothers, were in decline. Though they were still very rich men, the brothers were quarreling bitterly among themselves, and the family as a whole seems to have been unwilling or unable to play the political game that was always necessary in Florence to protect and enhance acc.u.mulated wealth. Only those who actively exercised political power in the city and kept a sharp eye out for their interests could avert the crus.h.i.+ng and often vindictive taxes that were levied on vulnerable fortunes. Taxes were used in Florence, as the historian Guicciardini cannily remarked a century later, like a dagger.

Niccol Niccoli spent all he had on a ruling pa.s.sion that kept him from the civic pursuits that might have helped him secure some of the family wealth. The wool trade and commodity speculation were not for him, any more than serving the republic in the Signoria, the executive body of government, or on the important councils known as the Twelve Good Men and the Sixteen Standard-bearers of the Militia. Even more than his humanist mentor and friends, Niccoli was obsessed with the vestiges of Roman antiquity and had no time for anything else. He determined, probably at an early age, to have no career and hold no civic offices, or rather, he determined to use his inherited wealth to live a beautiful and full life by conjuring up the ghosts of the ancient past.

In the Florence of Niccoli's time, the family was the central inst.i.tution, socially, economically, and psychologically, and for anyone who did not choose to enter the special world of the Church-and particularly for anyone with inherited wealth-there was overwhelming pressure to marry, to have children, and to augment the family fortunes. "Marriage gives an abundance of all sorts of pleasure and delight," wrote Niccoli's younger contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti, summing up widely held views, If intimacy increases good will, no one has so close and continued a familiarity with anyone as with his wife; if close bonds and a united will arise through the revelation and communication of your feelings and desires, there is no one to whom you have more opportunity to communicate fully and reveal your mind than to your own wife, your constant companion; if, finally, an honorable alliance leads to friends.h.i.+p, no relations.h.i.+p more entirely commands your reverence than the sacred tie of marriage. Add to all this that every moment brings further ties of pleasure and utility, confirming the benevolence filling our hearts.

And if the picture painted here was exceedingly rosy, it was reinforced by dire warnings. Woe to the man, intoned San Bernardino, the greatest popular preacher of the time, who has no wife: If he is rich and has somewhat, the sparrows eat it, and mice. . . . Know you what his bed is like? He lies in a ditch, and when he has put a sheet on his bed, he never takes it off again, until it is torn. And in the room in which he eats, the floor is covered with a melon rind and bones and salad leaves. . . . He wipes the trenchers off: the dog licks them, and so washes them. Know you how he lives? Like a brute beast.

Niccoli rejected both the inducements and the warnings. He chose to remain single, so that, it was said, no woman would distract him from his studies. "Studies" is a perfectly accurate term-he was a deeply scholarly and learned man-but it does not adequately convey the overarching vision of a mode of life immersed in the past that Niccoli arrived at early and that he pursued with a tenacious single-mindedness. As for the rest, all that ordinarily const.i.tutes the pursuit of happiness, he seems to have been indifferent: "He had a housekeeper," his early biographer Vespasiano writes, "to provide for his wants."

Niccoli was one of the first Europeans to collect antiquities as works of art, prized possessions with which he surrounded himself in his Florentine apartments. Such collecting is by now such a familiar practice among the very rich that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it was once a novel idea. Pilgrims to Rome in the Middle Ages had long been accustomed to gawking at the Colosseum and other "marvels" of paganism on their way to wors.h.i.+pping at the places that actually mattered, the revered Christian shrines of saints and martyrs. Niccoli's collection in Florence represented a very different impulse: not the acc.u.mulation of trophies but the loving appreciation of aesthetic objects.

As word got round that an eccentric man was willing to pay handsomely for ancient heads and torsos, farmers who might in the past have burned any marble fragments that they ploughed up for the lime they could extract from them or used the old carved stones for the foundations of a pigsty began instead to offer them for sale. On display in Niccoli's elegant rooms, along with antique Roman goblets, pieces of ancient gla.s.sware, medals, cameos, and other treasures, the sculptures inspired in others the impulse to collect.

Poggio could not possibly hope to be served his meals, as his friend was, on ancient Roman plates or disburse gold coins, as his friend did, for antique cameos that he happened to glimpse around the necks of street urchins. But he could share and deepen the desire that underlay Niccoli's acquisitions, the desire to understand and to reenter imaginatively the cultural world that had fas.h.i.+oned the beautiful objects with which he surrounded himself. The two friends studied together, traded historical anecdotes about the Roman Republic and Empire, pondered the religion and mythology represented by the statues of the G.o.ds and the heroes, measured the foundations of ruined villas, discussed the topography and the organization of ancient cities, and above all enriched their detailed understanding of the Latin language they both loved and which they routinely used in their personal letters and perhaps in private conversation as well.

From these letters it is clear that Niccol Niccoli cared about one thing even more pa.s.sionately than the ancient sculptures that were being exhumed from the earth: the cla.s.sical and patristic texts that his fellow humanists were ferreting out of monastic libraries. Niccoli loved to possess these texts, to study them, and to copy them slowly, ever so slowly, in handwriting even more beautiful than Poggio's. Perhaps indeed their friends.h.i.+p coalesced at least as much around the forms of letters-Niccoli shares with Poggio the credit for the invention of humanist script-as around the forms of ancient thought.

Ma.n.u.scripts of ancient texts were expensive to acquire, but to the avid collector no price seemed too great. Niccoli's library was famous among humanists in Italy and elsewhere, and, though he was often reclusive, crotchety, and fiercely opinionated, he generously welcomed into his house scholars who wished to consult his collections. When in 1437 he died at the age of seventy-three, he left eight hundred ma.n.u.scripts, by far the largest and best collection in Florence.

Guided by Salutati's vision, Niccoli had formulated an idea of what to do with these texts. Petrarch and Boccaccio had both contemplated keeping together the ma.n.u.scripts they had acquired, after they died, but their valuable collections were in fact sold off, dispersed, or simply neglected. (Many of the precious codices that Petrarch painstakingly gathered and that he brought to Venice, to serve as the core of what he dreamed would be a new Alexandrian Library, were shut away and forgotten in a damp palazzo where they crumbled into dust.) Niccoli did not want to see the work of his lifetime suffer a similar fate. He drew up a will in which he called for the ma.n.u.scripts to be kept together, forbade their sale or dispersion, prescribed strict rules for loans and returns, appointed a committee of trustees, and left a sum of money to build a library. The building would be constructed and the collection housed in a monastery; but Niccoli emphatically did not want this to be a monastic library, closed off to the world and reserved for the monks. He specified that the books would be available not for the religious alone but for all learned citizens, omnes cives studiosi. Centuries after the last Roman library had been shut down and abandoned, Niccoli had brought back into the world the idea of the public library.

In the late 1390s, when Poggio first met Niccoli, the mania for collecting that led to this remarkable result must only have been in its early stages, but the friends bonded in their shared insistence on the superiority of all things ancient-setting aside matters of faith-over anything that followed. The astonis.h.i.+ng literary ambition and creativity characteristic of Petrarch had largely shriveled up in them, as had the patriotic zeal and the pa.s.sion for liberty that had fueled Salutati's humanism. What took their place was something far less expansive in spirit, something harder and more punis.h.i.+ng: a cult of imitation and a craving for exact.i.tude. Perhaps the younger generation simply lacked the overpowering talent of their elders, but it was as if these gifted disciples of Salutati had deliberately rejected the bold desire to bring something truly new into the world. Despising the new, they dreamed only of calling back to life something old. This dream, narrow and arid in spirit, was doomed to failure; but, all the same, it had surprising results.

To those outside the charmed circle of young humanists, the emerging att.i.tude toward language and culture could seem repellent. "In order to appear well read to the mob," wrote one disgusted contemporary, "they shout about the piazza how many diphthongs the ancients had and why today only two are in use." Even Salutati was uneasy, and with good reason, for though the fervent cla.s.sicism of Poggio and Niccoli was clearly indebted to him, it was also a parting of the ways, as he understood, and in some subtle sense a repudiation.

On the death of Petrarch on July 19, 1374, the grieving Salutati had declared that Petrarch was a greater prose writer than Cicero and a greater poet than Virgil. By the 1390s, this praise seemed to Poggio and Niccoli ridiculous, and they pressed Salutati to repudiate it. In all the intervening centuries, no one, they argued, had bettered the great cla.s.sic writers in stylistic perfection. It was impossible. Since ancient times all there had been, in their view, was a long, tragic history of stylistic corruption and loss. Indifferent or ignorant, even supposedly well-educated medieval writers had forgotten how to form sentences correctly, in the proper manner of the masters of cla.s.sical Latin, or to use words with the elegance, accuracy, and precision with which they had once been wielded. Moreover, the surviving samples of cla.s.sical texts had been corrupted, so that they could no longer serve as correct models, even if anyone had the ambition to use them as such. The "ancients" cited by medieval scholastics, Niccoli argued, "would not have recognized as their own the writings attributed to them, preserved as they are in corrupt texts and translated without taste and sense."

Petrarch, who repeatedly insisted that the mastery of a cla.s.sical style was by itself inadequate for the achievement of true literary or moral greatness, had once stood on the steps of the Capitol and had himself crowned poet laureate-as if the spirit of the ancient past had truly been reborn in him. But from the perspective of the radical, hard-core cla.s.sicism of the younger generation, nothing truly worthwhile had been achieved by Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio, let alone by lesser lights: "While the literary legacy of antiquity is in such a pitiful state, no real culture is possible, and any disputation is necessarily built on shaky ground."

These were unmistakably Niccoli's views, but they were not his precise words. Rather, they were the words attributed to him in a dialogue by Leonardo Bruni. For apart from letters to intimate friends, Niccoli wrote virtually nothing. How could he, given his hypercritical sourness and narrow, unrelenting cla.s.sicism? Friends sent their Latin texts to him and anxiously awaited his corrections, which were almost invariably punis.h.i.+ng, stern, and unforgiving. But Niccoli was at his most unforgiving in relation to himself.

Niccol Niccoli was, Salutati observed, Poggio's "second self." But Poggio did not suffer from the crippling inhibitions that virtually silenced his friend. In the course of his long career, he wrote books on such subjects as hypocrisy, avarice, true n.o.bility, whether an old man should marry, the vicissitudes of fortune, the miseries of the human condition, and the history of Florence. "He had a great gift of words," his younger contemporary Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote of him, adding, "He was given to strong invective, and all stood in dread of him." If Poggio, the master of invective, was not willing to grant to his old master that any writer of the past millennium could equal, let alone outstrip, the eloquence of the ancients, he was willing to concede that Petrarch had accomplished something: Petrarch was the first, Poggio granted, "who with his labor, industry, and watchful attention called back to light the studies almost brought to destruction, and opened the path to those others who were eager to follow."

That was the path on which Niccoli had decisively embarked, casting aside everything else in his life. Poggio, for his part, was happy to join him, but he had somehow to make a living. He had fantastic skill as a scribe, but that would hardly have supported him in the manner he hoped to live. His command of cla.s.sical Latin would have enabled him to embark on a career as a teacher, but this was a life with very few of the amenities he sought. Universities generally lacked buildings, libraries, endowments; they consisted of scholars and masters, and humanists were usually paid much less than professors of law and medicine. Most teachers of the humanities lived itinerant lives, traveling from city to city, giving lectures on a few favorite authors, and then restlessly moving on, in the hope of finding new patrons. Poggio had had the opportunity to witness such lives, and they did not appeal to him. He wanted something much more stable and settled.

At the same time Poggio lacked the patriotic zeal-the pa.s.sion for the city and for republican liberty-that inspired Salutati and had been stirred in Bruni. And he lacked as well the calling that might have led him to take religious orders and embark on the life of a priest or a monk. His spirit was emphatically secular and his desires were in and of the world. Still, he had to do something. In the fall of 1403, armed with a letter of recommendation from Salutati, the twenty-three-year-old Poggio set off for Rome.

CHAPTER SIX.

IN THE LIE FACTORY.

FOR AN AMBITIOUS provincial upstart like Poggio, the swirling, swollen orbit of the pope was the princ.i.p.al magnet, but Rome held out other opportunities. The powerful Roman n.o.ble families-most prominently, the Colonna or the Orsini-could always find some way to make use of someone endowed with excellent Latin and exquisite handwriting. Still more, the bishops and cardinals residing in Rome had their own smaller courts, in which a notary's ability to draft and pen legal doc.u.ments was a sought-after skill. Upon his arrival, Poggio found a place in one of these courts, that of the cardinal of Bari. But this was only a brief halt on the way to the higher goal of papal service-whether in the palace (the palatium) or the court (the curia). Before the year was out, the staunchly republican Salutati had pulled enough strings at the court of the reigning pope, Boniface IX, to help his prized pupil get what he most wanted, the coveted position of scribe-apostolic scriptor.

Most of the papal bureaucrats were from Rome and its surroundings; many of them, like Poggio, had some training in the law. Though scriptors were expected to attend ma.s.s every day before work, their post was a secular one-they busied themselves princ.i.p.ally with the business side of the papacy, the side that entailed rationality, calculation, administrative skill, and legal ac.u.men. The pope was (or at least claimed to be) the absolute ruler of a large swath of central Italy, extending north into the Romagna and to the territories controlled by the Venetian Republic. Many of the cities over which he ruled were perennially restive, the policies of the surrounding states were as aggressive, treacherous, and grasping as his own, foreign powers were always poised to make their own armed incursions into the peninsula. To hold his own, he needed all of the diplomatic cunning, money, and martial ferocity he could muster, and hence he needed and maintained a large governmental apparatus.

The pope was, of course, the absolute ruler of a much larger spiritual kingdom, one that extended, in principle at least, to the entire human race and affected to shape its destiny both in this world and in the next. Some of those he claimed as his subjects professed surprise at his presumption-as did the New World peoples whom the pope in the late fifteenth century grandly signed over en ma.s.se to be va.s.sals of the kings of Spain and Portugal-and others, such as the Jews or the Eastern Orthodox Christians, stubbornly resisted. But the great majority of Christians in the West, even if they lived in distant regions, or were ignorant of the Latin in which he conducted his affairs, or knew something of the spectacular moral failings that stained his office, believed that they stood in a special relations.h.i.+p to the pope's unique authority. They looked to the papacy to determine points of doctrine in a dogmatic religion that claimed these points were crucial for the fate of the soul and enforced this claim with fire and sword. They sought papal dispensations-that is, exemptions from the rules of canon law-in such matters as marriages and annulments and a thousand other delicate social relations. They jockeyed for appointment to various offices and confirmation of valuable benefices. They looked for everything that people hope an immensely wealthy and powerful lawmaker, landowner, and spiritual leader will confer upon them or deny to their rivals. In the early fifteenth century, when Poggio got his bearings in Rome, cases came into the papal court for settlement at the rate of two thousand a week.

All of this activity-far exceeding any other chancery court in Europe-required skilled personnel: theologians, lawyers, notaries, clerks, secretaries. Pet.i.tions had to be drawn up in the proper form and filed. Minutes had to be carefully kept. Decisions had to be recorded. Orders were transcribed and copied. Papal bulls-that is, decrees, letters patent, and charters-were copied and sealed. Abbreviated versions of these bulls were prepared and disseminated. The bishop of Rome had a large household staff, as befitted his princely rank; he had a huge entourage of courtiers, advisers, clerks, and servants, as befitted his political office and his ceremonial significance; he had an enormous chancery, as befitted his juridical power; and he had a ma.s.sive religious bureaucracy, as befitted his spiritual authority.

This was the world Poggio entered and in which he hoped to thrive. A position in the curia could serve as a step toward highly remunerative advancement in the Church hierarchy, but those who aspired to such advancement became churchmen. Poggio certainly understood that ordination was the route to wealth and power, and, unmarried as he was, there was no obstacle to his taking it. (He may already have had a mistress and illegitimate children, but that certainly was no obstacle). And yet he held back.

He knew himself well enough to understand that he lacked a religious vocation. That, of course, did not stop many of his contemporaries, but he did not like what he observed in those who had made this choice anyway. "I am determined not to a.s.sume the sacerdotal office," he wrote to his friend Niccoli, "for I have seen many men whom I have regarded as persons of good character and liberal dispositions, degenerate into avarice, sloth, and dissipation, in consequence of their introduction into the priesthood." This degeneration would, he thought, almost certainly be his own fate, one he was determined to avoid: "Fearing lest this should be the case with myself, I have resolved to spend the remaining term of my pilgrimage as a layman." He was, to be sure, turning his back on a particularly comfortable and secure existence in a very insecure world, but for Poggio the cost of this security was too high: "I do not think of the priesthood as liberty, as many do," he confided to Niccoli, "but as the most severe and oppressive form of service." The life course he opted for instead may seem to us a peculiarly constrained one-a lay bureaucrat in the service of the pope-but to Poggio the refusal of orders evidently felt liberating, as if he were guarding an inner core of independence.

He needed every bit of independence that he could muster. The Roman curia was, from a moral perspective, a notoriously perilous place, a peril deftly summed up by a Latin proverb of the time: Curialis bonus, h.o.m.o sceleratissimus ("Good curialist, wickedest of men"). The atmosphere he breathed is most brilliantly conveyed by a strange work of the 1430s, written when Poggio was still very much at the center of the curia. The work, ent.i.tled On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, is by a younger humanist contemporary, the Florentine Lapo da Castiglionchio. It is a dialogue, in the style of Cicero, a form much favored at the time by writers who wished to air controversial and even dangerous views without taking full responsibility for them. Hence, at the start of Lapo's imaginary conversation, a character called Angelo-not Lapo himself, of course, heaven forbid-violently a.s.sails the moral bankruptcy of the curia, a place "in which crime, moral outrage, fraud, and deceit take the name of virtue and are held in high esteem." The thought that this sink of hypocrisy makes a claim to religious faith is grotesque: "What can be more alien to religion than the curia?"

Lapo, professing to speak in his own voice, rises to the defense of the papal court. The place attracts crowds of pet.i.tioners, to be sure, but we know that G.o.d wants to be wors.h.i.+pped by mult.i.tudes. Therefore he must be particularly gratified by the magnificent spectacles of wors.h.i.+p staged in His honor by the richly dressed priests. And for ordinary mortals, the curia is the best place to acquire the virtue known as prudence, since there are so many types of people in attendance from all over the world. Just to observe the wide array of outlandish costumes and accents and ways of wearing one's beard is in itself a valuable lesson in the range of human customs. And the court is also the best place to study the humanities. After all, Lapo writes, as "the pope's domestic secretary" (and hence a very influential figure), "there is Poggio of Florence, in whom there is not only the highest erudition and eloquence, but also a unique gravity, seasoned with plenty of great wit and urbanity."

True, he concedes, it is disturbing that bribery and corruption lie at the heart of the curia, but these problems