pageturner chronicles: i, 1497

On that rainy day in late April when the attempt by Medicean partisans to 'take back' Florence was secretly planned, the city leaders had been talked into summoning a number of partisans from within the city. These men once they arrived (and before the attack outside the walls had begun), were then held indoors under a strict guard. Meanwhile in the rain, the forces outside the walls tried to raise an alarm that was simply not answered. The city would not allow the bells to ring.

If the plan for Piero de Medici was to swarm the gate outside the city, while his cohorts and allies inside could gather the assumed swells of Medicean supporters answering that bell in order to topple the forces ranged against them within the city, then, those supporters in the city did not materialize in enough numbers. This deceptive summoning, followed by those persons being essentially seized as hostages, until the crowd's moment had passed, brought many things to light. There were also disastrous consequences for many.

Francesco Valori was later blamed for advising the fathers to take this measure. Several families and their offspring were implicated. Individuals in several churches were called out as secret Medicean sympathizers. Certain other individuals with a past, already exiled and officially called 'rebel' and 'outlaw' came back around. One in particular Lamberto dell' Antella had gone to Rome and had gained friends there, but had spent this spring coursing back and forth across Italy and eventually, had fallen out with Piero. Deemed too much a bother, Piero asked Siena to take charge of this rebel's rebel. They did, but then confined there, Lamberto's anger turned against Piero and he began sending messages to Florence asking for safe conduct there where he might tell them all he knew. He was coaxed out of hiding and by early August 1497, was captured and interrogated at Florence. He named names.

This investigation and its immediate effects would strike at the center of Florentine politics, destroying the lives of many and killing a number of its prominent politicians.

pp. 178-83; Martines, Lauro:  Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York, 2006 
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The plague had hit Italy again that June. In Florence it was coupled with a mysterious fever that killed many as well. People were still starving there. Parenti says as many as thirty-six victims a day were counted at the height of the sickness, Landucci not quite as many. Weinstein tells us,

"Those who could do so fled the city. Fearing contagion, the Great Council suspended its meetings and public business slowed. Imports and distributions of food suffered, and prices, already steep, soared. So many people were falling in their tracks from disease and starvation, wrote Landucci, that every hour the streets had to be cleared, while the hospitals overflowed with the sick and dying." [p. 236]

In early July fra Tommaso Busini, a Dominican colleague of Savonarola at San Marco fell to the plague. Reports say Savonarola then asked for 'divine protection' through prayer and led a procession through the cloister 'carrying white candles and red crosses' singing 'Ecce Quam Bonus'.  But his frequent letters show none of these difficulties in this, his last summer. Indeed he sharply criticized brothers who wished to flee to the country and avoid the 'city air'. He wrote to family members to reassure them that relatives were still safe in the cloister. Despite this he had to admit some fifty to a hundred people, or worse, were dying per day due to the alternate fever that year.

"But the pestilence grew more severe and it was decided to send the younger friars into the more slaubrious air of the countryside. ... Savonarola's adversaries put it about that this unusual measure of sending clerics out to live among the laity proved that there was disunity in the cloister, noting with perverse satisfaction, that having terrified the city by threats of plague, the friars were the first to suffer it." [p. 237]

But Savonarola remained unperturbed. He read a Hebrew bible and studied with close colleagues the Jewish prophets, he tended the sick, he wrote extensively. The letter to unnamed friends quotes Dominican Archbishop Antoninus Pierozzi on its first page. Pierozzi was made a saint as soon as 1523.

Quotes, references and pagination from, Donald Weinstein: Savonarola: the rise and fall of a renaissance prophet , Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011
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Marin Sanudo had already mentioned by 5th of June, 1497, that the plague had struck in Venice and that they had developed a municipal plan to combat it.

new books: ... each end begun a new becoming sprung

Since the fall of last year I had begun receiving and then reading a number of new books. Receding. I also have to acknowledge the general paucity and overall brevity of most of the posts here over the last year. Too little too late. The two concerns are related. So let me explain. For this I have to go back a bit.

In April of last year I had read there was a new biography of the Augsburg banker and money titan Jacob Fugger. Whether or not he was The Richest Man Who Ever Lived , I got this book by Greg Steinmetz on a whim and started into what reveals itself as a very easy introduction. A plain-spoken, if somewhat flatly episodic view from peak to peak along many of the ridges atop that European Renaissance world of commerce and finance. At twenty-seven years of age, Fugger gave a loan to the Archduke of Augsburg. By the age of thirty, in order to resolve a dispute with Venice, Fugger had exchanged a loan of 100,000 florins to the same Arch-duke for the rights of the mine at Schwaz until the principle of that loan could be paid off and also crucially, for control of the Augsburg state treasury. He also made investments in a particular Portuguese trip around the southern tip of Africa, along the way negotiating deals with princes, emperors and popes, reaping profits again and again. Sitting on top of the world indeed.

Still he preferred to work alone. As the decade of the 1490's proceeded, Fugger developed a rare partnership with one Johannes Thurzo. This man Thurzo, related to Ladislaus (through the Jagiello's of Poland) now the King of Hungary, was extended royal grants along the Carpathian mtns. allowing Fugger to put up the money to purchase lands there rich in copper. The consequent production system set in motion by Thurzo, a more sophisticated extraction, smelting and transport process, made Fugger one of the richest men in the world. By 1498 in the tail end of the decade, he had gained so much of the market that he flooded Venice with this metal and broke up and dismantled a number of competitors there. I'd like to see if this helped precipitate the fall of the Garzoni bank early the next year.

The copper shipments from Hungary extended into the Baltic and North Seas. In November 1510, a Dutch ship set off from Danzig full of Fugger's copper. It was boarded and captured by agents of the Hanseatic League. The Hansa one of the most powerful of forces in Europe, were a storied association of men in cities and on boats that had held the monoploy of trade in the northern seas for centuries. This mercantile endeavor set cities and kingdoms against each other to reap profit as well as organize the largest fairs and trading festivals from Novgorod to Bruges. They had built their maritime empire on herring and then cod, meanwhile branching out into timber and tin, furs and pepper, copper and silver.

It was then I wanted to learn about this well established, oft-times brutal, mercantile force and found a reprint of a quick read entitled The Hansa , first published in 1929. Full of seafaring tales and bitter rivalries, this bare, apologetic, almost monograph is doubled in length by mostly translated excerpts from texts from the various periods. Selections from Richard Hakluyt and John de Mandeville are set out as well as portions of the medieval maritime laws of Visby, items from the treaty of Stralsund, and lists of attacks by part-time pirates, once supported as Hansa agitators. Steinmetz in his book on Jacob Fugger has his exploits outshine and overwhelm the dominant Hansa. The older monograph by E. Gee Nash marks these difficulties for the Hansa as just one among many of the ups and downs in a long series of endeavors. Its selection of details in the translated sections can still reveal useful context. There have been several times I've wanted to post a number of these items here. It's too bad this book reads like it was produced as a popularizing pamphlet rather than real history. It suffers from that special blend of romantic sea urges full of daring-do set in larger type and spacing for encouraging high school boys at prep schools in the American 1920's, on behalf of their grandfathers.

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As the north was still building their various extractive and monopolizing economies and working its way in and out of endless conflict, the south was still fighting over land and titles and the opportunity to be heard. And for some, to let old voices be heard, to push for reform, and to reset or reinterpret old voices and old manuscripts in new ways. One of these sorts of explorers was Poggio Bracciolini, mentioned before. Famously, this papal notary and source of mostly reliable quips had also been one of the great book discoverers of the fifteenth century. Just a few years ago, Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard fame, an editor for the standardizing Norton English Literature and Norton Shakespeare tomes, released an overview uncovering the discovery of T. Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. Greenblatt calls it The Swerve (2011) and while ostensibly the subject and subtitle is 'How The World Became Modern', it spends only a few chapters on the content of Lucretius' once famous but also now obscure again, 1st c. BCE Latin poem describing his remarkable epicureanism.

Instead, most of Greenblatt's book explores the various methodological and environmental contexts by which this particular book of Lucretius was passed on, then rediscovered, and also, almost as an accidental by-product of the time, became its own issue when it was rediscovered and disseminated.

Like seeds spread by Love Herself, the elements would grow wings and speed, so filled with desire that they could attract and repel, at ease or all in a rush, each in its own nature, each toward its own end, each end begun a new becoming sprung. 

It was after I had remembered and ordered the modern day (20th c.) version of Lucretius in latin (with the intro and the commentary by Leonard and Smith), and had begun reading it ever so slowly, that a friend lent to me on impulse the relevant book of Greenblatt. Already I've sped through two-thirds of that so, more of Bracciolini's life and contexts will wind up here.

Already, three years ago I had promised to look more into the life of ser Bracciolini, and like so many other times, the more I looked, the more I found. For two of his contemporaries, one a famous critic, and the other, one of the most famous of the early Italian humanists, Bracciolini even makes mention of or, took time to publicly attack. Both have newly published works in blingual texts for english, in the 21st century by Harvard in the I Tatti Renaissance Library.

Correspondence (2013) of Lorenzo Valla includes letters both to and from this author. So it is this also provides the voices of a great many doers and thinkers, and a few other walks of life, over the decades across cultural Italy during the middle of the fifteenth century. On Exile (2013) has Francesco Filelfo composing a dialogue (c. 1445) with several members of exiled Florentine society taking part. The fact that this dialogue is a composed fiction that seems to purposefully not follow the motives or events discussed, adds even more interest. Not objective, not entirely factual, but instead intended as 'edifying'.

Additionally, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library has seen fit to publish A New Herodotus (2014) in a bilingual text for english along with a companion volume to provide much needed context for what should become an instant classic. Of course it won't, but it should, as it depicts the advance of the Ottoman Turk into Europe in the fifteenth century from a hitherto unacknowledged but excellent source.

There is a new biography of Martin Luther (2017) by Lyndal Roper I've just begun that looks absorbing.

There are several letters appealing for unbiased ears, and a crafty dialogue in Apologetic Writings (2015) by Girolamo Savonarola, also published thru the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
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Several works of fiction have made it to the top of a pile that has fallen over so many times that I couldn't avoid it anymore. So this year I told myself I'd read as many as I could. With these following books, some 1400 pages of fiction have crossed my eyes, so slow, with only half of the Blas de Robles book still left to see. Books that travel, think, explore.

The First I saw and began last year was an uncorrected proof of Charlie Smith's Ginny Gall (2016). It arrived in a donation bag at the local homeless shelter (and where it was returned to and now sits on the shelf awaiting another reader). Abundant in flora, bursting with emotion, painful and still sublime, both slick and sandy, this internal, swirling travelogue takes us with a young African-American male from Chattanooga, TN to the rails and America, through the depression years, and to prison for a crime he did not commit, and back. Heartbreaking, vicious, plaintive, mature, immediate, the visions this book conjures swell all senses and mocks the jailer, the owner, the censor, the judge. Pine trees that weep with compassion, Magnolia that bloom, dripping with a wary, still heavy sense of cautionary alarm, begging for a breeze to send such compressed desires aloft.

Translated from the French in 2011, Where Tigers Are At Home was originally published in a French edition 2006 by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles. It and its author won the Prix Medicis prize for literature in 2008. This prize is awarded to authors 'whose fame does not yet reach their talent'. This 800 plus page fiction intertwines several very different strands of action in modern day northern Brazil and intercuts them with what acts like eye-witness accounts of the travels and exploits of the famous seventeenth century Jesuit inventor and polymath Athanasius Kircher. There is the group of geologists heading inland, upriver to capture and document what is hoped to be a missing link between Africa and South America. There is the bitter wife of the arrogant governor who stuffs her emotions with alchohol, always seeking an ally or a ladder to climb out of her brutal husband's tightening circles. There is the despairing, cycnical french correspondent whose wife has left and whose daughter and her friends are running from debt and responsibility at a full gallop into hedonism and uncivil pleasure. A wandering woman shares the correspondent's interest in Kircher and in his research. He likes the bounce in her skirt and her quick ripostes, but she knows more than she lets on. There are the locals in a small village where a jet plane has crashed in the middle of the night. The correspondent's wife did go on that geology float. That expedition at first looks like a modernized African Queen tale, but it gets ambushed by bandits with machine guns, and those left still alive are cut off from any contact with the outside world. The governor's son is also on that float trip.

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel The Bleeding Edge (2013) is set in the New York City year of 2001. At the height of the dot-com financial bubble and amidst real estate and impenetrable virtual reality shifts, Maxine Tarnow, a loan-fraud investigator with courage to spare, tries to find out the eternal question, what just happened? Complex, ever-shifting, the backdrop and cast of characters speed by like credit card swipes at a peep show stealing a looksee in on the future. Or, set in 2001 New York, it still seems before it's time - like ghosts coming up to us and whispering the truth softly, gently ... and then, handed a corndog on a stick and slipping naturally onto a just-arrived child's carousel horse, with no visible wheels or locomotive possibilities, zips off down the street blaring some other generation's showtune. Echoes of which bounce back off of windowpanes, taco trucks and the gleam of receding taxi rearwindows.

In the last month I've also just read the last hundred pages of James Joyce's Ulysses. Again. These bits of review and crit should continue as I read more of modern fiction over time.

Savonarola: Epistula Ad Papam Alexandrum VI, 20May1497

A week after word about the excommunication of Savonarola the Dominican friar had arrived, and just under a month before it was publicly read out in Florence, the friar quickly penned a letter to the pope who had sent the breve. He had previously sent out a detailed work answering statements of purpose for the reorganization of the Lombard Congregations, set as an apology for the Congregation of Brothers of San Marco in Florence. He would also pen a letter 'Against the Sentence of Excommunication'  to numerous unnamed individuals which encouraged the continued work of reform and which countered the papal accusations. This was based on ideas inherit in and while extensively quoting the noted fifteenth century reformer Jean Gerson. This would be sent in the month of June. Savonarola was also putting the final touches on his book The Triumph of the Cross which he said would explain 'without any doubt' what they were doing at San Marco and why.

The quick letter to Pope Alexander VI, dated May 20, 1497 immediately starts with a number of defensive questions. Why are you angry? What have I done? This then leads to accusing Savonarola's antagonists, those who gave false information to the pope. Quoting Psalms 21:17, he claims, "Many dogs have surrounded me, a company of malicious men besets me."

The accusations against him he says have been refuted by his own very words which have also been printed accurately and widely disseminated 'by booksellers and printers'. If not by his word, then certainly, these written pieces should be enough to exonerate him.

"Let them be obtained, let them be read, let them be examined whether there is anything whatsoever that offends my lord's Holiness, as they have so often claimed, falsely. Can it be that I said one thing publicly and wrote another? I want to disprove the charges with the most public response possible. What is the sense in it? What is the purpose? What kind of unhinged mind would come up with such an allegation?" [iv, 1]

 Next, Savonarola states his own belief that there is one Florentine friar in particular who may have turned the pope against him. Fra Mariano da Genazzano (1412-98) was an Augustinian preacher that often spoke out vehemently against Savonarola during his ascendancy. During an Ascenscion Day sermon in 1491, Genazzano had devolved into an ad hominem attack on Savonarola and was soon forced to leave the city. It was he that went to Rome and in time began speaking to the new Pope about the trouble this Dominican friar from Ferrara was stirring.

Turning again his point of attack, Savonarola asks in the letter,

 "... what kind of conscience does that highflying preacher there with you accuse blameless me of the crime of which he himself is the guiltiest of all?"

There are witnesses, of course, that Savonarola knows who could testify that this informer Genazzano was raging at other times against His Holiness. And Savonarola had refuted 'his insolence' then. For,

"... it is not right to assail the smallest person, how much less a prince and pastor of sheep! Who is so demented as not to know that? God willing, I am not yet so stupid as to forget myself; and for no purpose, in no dealings, on no occasion would I knowingly dare to challenge or scorn the Vicar of Christ on earth, who especially ought to be obeyed." [iv, 2]

In conclusion, he claims he has preached or done nothing against the faith or the Catholic Church - 'heaven forbid!'. So he pleads, 'don't wish for the wicked and envious'. First he should 'adhere to the faith'. But further, he warns, if 'human assistance fails', he (Savonarola) will then tell the world of their 'impious iniquity', until God willing they repent. This friar does not seem to ask for forgiveness but then, in the very next sentence, he claims, 'I commend myself most humbly to Your Beatitude.' And, 'humilis filiolus et servus frater', humble son and little friar.

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Savornarola, Girolamo: Apologetic Writings; ed. and trans. in english , by M Michele Mulchahey, for The I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRI); by The President and Fellows of Harvard College, USA 2015

A Death In The Borgia Family: June 14, 1497

In Rome, a secret consistory was held where the pope made his son Juan of Aragon into the Duke of Gandia and gave him investiture of a new principality. The Duchy of Benevento, Terracina and Pontecorvo was created and which included the 'lands all about' in the region to the north and east of Naples. This present which only gained insistent resistance from Cardinal Piccolomini, was soon and rather easily granted by the twenty-six cardinals that Johann Burchard said were present for the vote that day on June 7, 1497. Two days later, in another secret meeting, the pope's other son, already a Cardinal, Cesare Borgia was officially made legate to the pope and given the task of placing a crown on Don Federigo, the Prince of Altamura, as the new King of Naples.

Through the day of June 15, Rodrigo grew increasingly worried and then lost all hope when Juan had not returned from one last night out in Rome before leaving to take up his new lands. He had gone and eaten dinner with his brother and his mother Donna Vanozza the night before on the 14th, according to Burchard. He also says a masked man had accompanied them there and then left with the Duke when the brothers parted ways after the dinner, with an understanding they would travel south together next day. This did not transpire.

When Juan did not show up in the morning of the fifteenth word was sent out to go collect him and bring him back to the Vatican. Reports kept coming back that the young duke could not be found. Eventually, 'after the hour of Vespers, or a little before', his body was found fully clothed in the Tiber River with his purse still attached to him and with 30 ducats still in it. He had nine stab wounds all over his body. He was placed in a boat which was sent to Castel San'Angelo. There, Burchard's colleague Don Bernardino Gutteri, quickly stripped, washed and clothed the body in military costume. Then it was taken about six o'clock, 'by members of his own household' to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Burchard says about one hundred and twenty torch bearers led the procession along with palace ecclesiastics, chamberlains, shield bearers, 'marching slowly and in great disorder'.

Pope Alexander VI, the young Duke's father shut himself into his inner rooms for days and wailed and wept. The mystery over who had done this would deepen and gain many different motives, conspirators, and troubling theories. At first the pope wanted a thorough investigation but his ardor for evidence cooled as time went on. For many this pointed the finger at the Duke's brother Cesare Borgia, but the truth has never been definitively discovered.

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pp. 143-47, Johann Burchard: At The Court of the Borgia translated for english, with introduction by Geoffrey Parker, The Folio Society, Ltd, 1963