It was not only Venice and her history that held Sanudo's interest. He also showed interest in the collection of Cardinal Nicenus or Bessarion as he was often called. When the last of the Byzantine Emperors had traveled through Europe seeking aid against the Turk, he had chosen Bessarion to go with him. Not only did Bessarion know what Byzantium was worth, he could explain it. Just what the Emperor needed. The west wasn't much help but was able to help the Greeks hold out for a while longer.
In 1453 the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople destroying at last what was left of continuity to the ancient Byzantine empire. But Bessarion knew that an ancient culture shouldn't just disappear like passing fashions. True, the government was dismantled, the armies destroyed, great churches and monuments overtaken and their sacred articles dissembled. But still we can say that we mean something more when we speak of culture rather than government or buildings, offices or monuments.
"For eleven hundred years there had stood on the Bosphorus a city where the intellect was admired and the learning and letters of the classical past were studied and preserved. Without the help of Byzantine commentators and scribes there is little that we would know about the literature of ancient Greece. It was, too, a city whose rulers down the centuries had inspired a school of art unparalleled in human history, ...a great cosmopolitan city, where along with merchandise ideas were freely exchanged and whose citizens saw themselves not as a racial unit but as the heirs of Greece and Rome, hallowed by the Christian faith. All this was now ended. The new master-race discouraged learning among its Christian subjects. Without the patronage of a free government Byzantine art began to decay." [p.189*]
But Steven Runciman also tells us in his book The Fall of Constantinople that,
"The notion of Byzantine scholars hurrying to Italy because of the fall of their city is untenable. Italy had for more than a generation been full of Byzantine professors; and of the two great intellectual figures amongst the Greeks living in 1453 the one, Bessarion, was already in Italy ..." [p 188*]
After the conquest, for a time, the bishopric of the see of Constantinople, one of the oldest of the patriarchal offices continued to be filled by the pope in Rome in contravention to all tradition, because there was no one else who claimed authority to do it. Cardinal Bessarion was named Patriarch of Constantinople in 1463 - now only a title - but he had been staying, in reality in Italy. He had become so familiar that,
Editor's Note: "... in 1468 he bequeathed his great collection of manuscripts to the city of Venice, to be placed in a library bearing the name of Venice's patron saint, located near the Basilica of San Marco and accessible to the public.... During the decade following Bessarion's gift the 752 manuscripts, 482 of which were in Greek, arrived from Rome, but there was no building to place them in, and the fifty-seven crates in which they were packed were stacked in government offices. Over time, some manuscripts were borrowed, some lost, some deteriorated. Mostly the collection went unused and uncared for. In 1515 the government was still debating where the library should be built, and with what funds. Clearly this was a matter of governmental concern, but not yet a priority, given that the War of the League of Cambrai was still going on." p. 447
Sanudo's Diaries: February 7, 1515: (19:424); "The Council of Ten talked about making a library where lectures are currently held in the warerhouse facing the Flour Warehouse in the Terra Nova, where they would deposit the books of the late Cardinal Nicenus [aka Bessarion]. It would be paid for out of the money obtained from the rebels up to ---- ducats."
Editor's footnote: [The rebels were] "Inhabitants of the mainland cities who had rebelled against Venice in the War of the League of Cambrai and whose goods had been confiscated and sold." [p 477]
nedits: There were two sides. One agreed to the measure and the other,
Sanudo's Diaries: February 7, 1515: (19:424); "... maintained that it should not be put there because that is the most dismal spot in the city, and the books will be completely eaten by insects, etc. No decision was made."
nedits: This was left off til May when a decision was made and the importance of this collection and the legacy of Bessarion - the intellectual traditions of Byzantium and Greece and Rome before them - could be properly enshrined. The day before this entry, his friend Aldo Manuzio, the great publisher had died in Venice.
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* The Fall of Constantinople 1453 Steven Runciman, Cambridge University Press, 1965, Canto edition reprinted 2001
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All quotes as Sanudo Diaries or Editor's notes or Editor's Footnotes from Venice, Cita Excellentissima, Selection from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo translated by Linda L Carroll, editors: Patricia H LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
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