Francesco Filelfo, Oligarchic Virtue, and Medicean Vice

Field, Arthur

doi:10.1093/oso/9780198791089.003.0005

Chapter

5 Francesco Filelfo, Oligarchic Virtue, and Medicean Vice

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791089.003.0005

Pages

187–230

Published:

July 2017

Abstract

This chapter looks at how Francesco Filelfo, a non-Florentine, taught classics at the University of Florence during 1429–34, turning his classroom into a forum for oligarchic ideology. In the classroom and elsewhere, Filelfo viciously attacked the Medici and all intellectuals close to him (namely Carlo Marsuppini, Ambrogio Traversari, Niccolò Niccoli, and Poggio). The chapter analyzes Filelfo’s own works as well as those of his students, his closeness to Bruni, and his enmity with the Medici party and the Medicean humanists. Adhering to the traditionalists and their ideology, Filelfo argued that the Medici rule was based on violence and money. Filelfo’s classroom became so controversial than pro-Medici students began actively disrupting it. The chapter includes an overview of Filelfo’s major polemics after he was chased from Florence at the end of 1434.

On the first of January 1429, in Bologna, Francesco Filelfo wrote to Giovanni Aurispa about his upcoming appointment to teach at the University of Florence. Florence, he knew, was famous for treating its scholars poorly. With “my serious and generous spirit, however, I hope to avoid easily the biting teeth of the envious. But if I fall short, I shall see that the blame falls on others, not on me.”¹ Meanwhile, in Florence, at the end of that same month the government was obliging citizens in the government to swear an oath on the Gospels to forget past injustices, forswear hatred and partiality, and honor the grandeur of the republic and the Guelf Society.² As I said earlier, these sorts of oaths were unmistakable indications that things were falling apart. Along with appeals to harmony and love, the oligarchs tried getting ruthless. A few weeks later they created the commission of Conservatori delle Leggi, officials designed to investigate and prohibit organizations outside the government, such as confraternities, from meeting and caucusing.³ So, then, what kind of Florence was Filelfo entering?

When he arrived in April, Filelfo wrote to Antonio Loschi in Rome that in a divided city he would, as “far as he could predict, sail between Scylla and Charybdis.” Florence, he explained, “was divided by factions no less than Bologna was. But here the temperaments seem to me to be sharper, more prone to harm.”⁴ Perhaps Filelfo would have soon come to view the Medici party as Scylla: a monster created by jealousy, as the ancient sources tell us, and protected by dogs with sharpened fangs. Or perhaps Charybdis represented the Medici, a huge whirlpool sucking everything to the depths.⁵ Of this at least we can be sure: no matter how Filelfo was guiding his ship, he managed to sail it right toward the seas of the Florentine oligarchy.

Born in Tolentino, in the Marche, in 1398, Filelfo studied in Padua under the humanist Gasparino Barzizza and the renowned philosopher Paul of Venice.⁶ A prodigy, he became professor of rhetoric in Padua when still in his late teens. Then, in 1417 he began to teach privately in Venice, coming to know the illustrious humanists there, including Guarino of Verona, Vittorino da Feltre, Francesco Barbaro, and Bernardo and Leonardo Giustiniani. As early as 1420 he gained Venetian citizenship. He then went on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he spent more than seven years. There he perfected his Greek, studying under John Chrysoloras, Manuel’s nephew. He continued carrying out ambassadorial work for Venice there, and in 1423 joined the court of the Byzantine Emperor as secretary and adviser. Diplomatic missions for the emperor took him him to the Turkish Sultan, to Buda, Transylvania, and to Moldavia. About 1424 Filelfo married Teodora, the very young daughter of his teacher Chrysoloras—she was thirteen or fourteen—and by the summer of 1426 the first of Filelfo’s many children was born. (He produced twenty-four, from Teodora and two later wives.)⁷ Teodora had blood ties to the prominent Doria family of Genoa as well as to the Byzantine emperor himself.⁸

In August 1427 Filelfo was lured back to Venice to become professor of Greek, at the behest of the prominent humanists Francesco Barbaro and Leonardo Giustiniani. His return was to have been a triumph: coming from the emperor’s court, he was accompanied by his beautiful and learned 16-year-old wife, 1-year-old son, five servants or slaves (four female and one male), and a man in charge of his household (a minister mercenarius).⁹ But his arrival was ruined by plague. It had struck not only Venice in general, but apparently a member of his own entourage.¹⁰ Evidently this caused the Venetian authorities, fearing contamination, to seal his trunks. But these carried two prized possessions: Filelfo’s Greek manuscripts and his wife’s clothes. As plague was rife and his entourage affected, none of his humanist friends would invite him to their villas in the country. The precious Greek codices, which Filelfo later described in detail in a letter to Ambrogio Traversari, became a sticky question. They were held by Leonardo Giustiniani and Francesco Barbaro, who refused for years (perhaps forever) to turn them over to him. Possibly their legal ownership was in doubt; they may have been acquired by loans from Giustiniani and have stood as surety for these loans, or they may have been held hostage in order to force Filelfo to assume the Venice appointment, as he had promised.¹¹ As plague continued through the winter, an exasperated and isolated Filelfo looked elsewhere, and finally, in February 1428, he took a professorship in rhetoric and moral philosophy at the University of Bologna, with a huge annual salary of 450 florins.¹²

Then his prospects in Bologna collapsed. That summer a rebellion broke out against papal rule, closing the university and suspending academic salaries. Even before this, perhaps in response to rumors of rebellion, or perhaps simply to widen his options, Filelfo had made overtures to Florence. At the very time of his arrival in Bologna, he mentioned the possibility of going to Florence, where, as he wrote to Francesco Barbaro in Venice, the youth were anxious to take up Greek literature and eloquence.¹³ By the end of August 1428 he was urging Palla Strozzi to secure him a favorable appointment.¹⁴ On September 19 he accepted an offer that carried the very large salary of 300 florins per year.¹⁵ The papal legate would apparently not let him leave (as Filelfo informed Leonardo Bruni in mid-February, 1429); however, perhaps through Bruni’s intervention with the church, permission was finally granted in early April.¹⁶ That month he arrived in Florence.¹⁷

Lecturing in the humanities, Filelfo remained in Florence until the Medici’s restoration in 1434. He then took a university position in Siena from 1434 to 1438. (All this will be examined in detail here.) Then, after a short period of teaching in Bologna, he went to Milan, as a professor of the humanities and court humanist of the Visconti. He stayed there for most of his remaining life, although there was always in him something of the Burckhardtian “vagabond” humanist, seeking and occasionally taking positions elsewhere. He had stints in Rome under his papal friends Nicholas V and Pius II, as well as in Naples, Bologna, and Ferrara. He attempted to return to Florence in the mid-1450s, when Cosimo’s son Piero, his former student, was influential with the university, as were his friends Andrea Alamanni and Donato Acciaiuoli.¹⁸ Cosimo very likely opposed this attempt, and Cosimo’s humanist ally and now chancellor of Florence, Poggio, surely did, so the effort came to naught.¹⁹ During the period of dominance of Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the earlier disputes with the Medici were pushed aside and Lorenzo finally invited Filelfo back to Florence in 1480, where he was to “resume” lecturing at the Studio, more than fifty years after the first appointment. Now in his eighties, Filelfo did return, but he died before his teaching began.

While in Florence from 1429 to 1434, Filelfo became a leading anti-Medicean intellectual. A difficult question is the following: did he bring this anti-Medicean ideological baggage with him? Of the non-Mediceans, he had made early intellectual overtures to both Leonardo Bruni and Palla Strozzi. In June 1428, from Bologna, he dedicated to Bruni his translation of Dio Chrysostom’s Oratio ad Ilienses or De Troia non capta, in the preface to which he compared Bruni to Cicero.²⁰ The text itself may have been of some particular significance, exposing the “myth” of the Trojan War, since Bruni himself had argued that the idea that Florence was founded by exiles from this war was fanciful. Bruni wrote back a warm letter, promising to help him with a Studio appointment.²¹ As noted earlier, the next year Bruni very likely intervened with the Church to get Filelfo permission to leave Bologna. At the end of August 1428 Filelfo wrote to Palla Strozzi, mentioning their recent encounter (Palla passed through Bologna after negotiations on behalf of Florence in Brescia) and said that he would accept a good appointment in the Florentine Studio if Palla could arrange it. The next month he wrote to Strozzi that he would accept a Florentine appointment at 300 florins per annum, especially since Palla promised to work to raise it the following year.²² In April 1429, a few months after arriving in Florence, Filelfo dedicated to Palla Strozzi a Latin translation of some orations of Lysias.²³

But Filelfo had also developed close ties to the Mediceans. As early as April 1428 he mentioned in a letter to Giovanni Aurispa that Ambrogio Traversari had written to him urging him to take up a Florentine appointment.²⁴ Filelfo sent a warm letter to Traversari in late June.²⁵ Cosimo meanwhile promised to provide him a residence in Florence,²⁶ and he and the humanist closest to him in Florence, Niccolò Niccoli, saw to it that mules were sent to Bologna to help Filelfo move his belongings.²⁷ According to Vespasiano da Bisticci, Niccoli was the one who got him appointed in the first place, and Poggio mentioned too that Niccoli worked tirelessly to support Filelfo before and immediately after his arrival in Florence.²⁸ Filelfo’s early translation of Lysias, dedicated to Palla Strozzi, carefully included praise not only for Bruni but also for the leading Medicean humanists in Florence, Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini, and Ambrogio Traversari.²⁹

The meager sources on Filelfo before he arrived in Florence show no clear ideological bent. We know nothing of what he did at the imperial court in Constantinople, or even how he came to be dealing with Venice as a diplomat. His letter book begins only after his arrival in Venice in 1427. Like almost all humanists, he argued that nobility was based on virtue, not on lineage. In a letter of 1428 to Gabriele Mauro, he praised his nobility as one founded not on ancestry (claritas maiorum), wealth, or other conveniences of fortune, but on virtue alone (sola meraque virtus).³⁰ Yet notions of an “aristocracy of virtue” were commonplace enough, and even the most old-fashioned knights could express such a sentiment.³¹It could be that Filelfo’s insistence on a high salary in Florence indicated a sort of exaggerated ego: he was not yet 30 years old, and he acted as if the promised salary, 300 florins per year, were not enough. This was an enormous salary for a humanist in Quattrocento Florence. Very early on Ambrogio Traversari found these salary demands offensive.³² Perhaps Filelfo’s entourage—five servants or slaves, plus a minister mercenarius (household manager)—also indicates some pretentions. Possibly more telling than anything is Filelfo’s wife. Apparently this 16-year-old was stunningly attractive and exotically so, learned in both Greek and Latin, and obsessively fastidious about the clothes she brought from the imperial court.³³ In one letter Filelfo seemed to be as worried about her clothes held in Venice as he was about his Greek manuscripts.³⁴ Even Filelfo’s Greek gave him an aristocratic demeanor. Humanists of all stripes wanted Greek studies promoted, but among amateur humanists a smattering of Greek could be nothing but a sign of “refinement,” one of the useless pursuits that aristocrats have always embraced. Those coming from the Greek court to Florence, both during the ecclesiastical council in 1439 and later, after the fall of Constantinople, enthralled the aristocrats, probably through their exotic speech and dress and their imperial manner.³⁵ Filelfo arrived in Florence even sporting a Greek beard.³⁶

If Filelfo came to Florence with an aura of otherworldly wisdom, he attempted to turn it into a radiant glow in his inaugural oration at the Florentine Studio. As the title indicates, the theme of this oration was Filelfo’s long-held desire to see Florence.³⁷ In expressions worthy of Leonardo Bruni, he praised its magnificent walls, marble churches, splendid houses, and Palazzo della Signoria.³⁸ But then he launched into a world tour, showing how the desire for learning had inspired not only Greeks and Romans but also Egyptians, Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Assyrians, even Druids. Homer had fashioned Ulysses as a man who came to know the entire world. “I, too,” he stated, “have traveled through many marvelous and diverse regions of the world, far distant from one another, and I have seen the cities of many men and know their various customs.”³⁹ Perhaps, too, this indicated an “aristocratic proclivity”: traditionalists loved these literary voyages to the edges of the earth.⁴⁰

Filelfo also possessed natural charm. His inaugural orations before lectures, our major source for his teaching, show much flair. He knew how to flatter his Florentine audience. In the one cited above, he suggested that, despite all his world travels, his great desire had always been to see Florence. Potentially great civilizations have become manifestly crude and foolish, he stated, lacking the Florentine “resolution, counsel, wisdom, and leadership.”⁴¹ If Filelfo tended toward snobbery, he exhibited it only toward academic colleagues, political enemies, and the masses. Toward his students he was never condescending. He promised to work with them in conditions of equality, even learning from them.⁴² More importantly, he gave his students the opportunity to make speeches of their own, in his class—not the regular pedagogical practice—and he did this, according to Vespasiano da Bisticci, in order to enhance their “confidence and fame.”⁴³ He also provided good, solid learning. Those few scattered notes we have from his early students show him patiently explaining the meaning of the words in his text, identifying Greek or other root words, and showing how words similar in form had different meanings or words similar in meaning had different nuances.⁴⁴

As I have already said, I could discover no actual statement from Filelfo that dates from before 1429 and might indicate which side (if any) he would take when he came to Florence. But even if he did not actively court the oligarchs, after his arrival Florence’s oligarchs courted him. This is dramatically illustrated in his first letter from Florence describing his reception. Dated July 31, 1429, the letter is addressed to his old friend, Giovanni Aurispa:

Florence delights me greatly. For the city lacks nothing, whether one considers the magnificence and the antiquity of the buildings or the dignity and number of its citizens. Moreover, the whole city has turned toward me. All love me, all honor me, and I am praised to the skies. My name is on everyone’s lips. Not only the leading citizens [primarii cives], when I walk about the city, but even women, for the sake of honoring me, make way for me …. Those hearing me lecture daily number four hundred, or perhaps more, and these especially comprise the citizens who are more powerful and belonging to the regime [grandiores et ex ordine senatorio].⁴⁵

Here of course the allusions are clear: Filelfo has been embraced by the oligarchs. Then Filelfo points to partisanship among the humanists:

Both Niccolò Niccoli and Carlo Marsuppini, with other citizens, attend my lectures. Niccoli speaks openly and seems straightforward (as far as I can tell for now), as one who takes everything in stride. Carlo Marsuppini, however, is gloomy and misanthropic, and he is nourishing a monster within. And people tell me that I should more fear him the more silent he is. For he is not moved by modesty or shyness but by envy. Bruni is close to me, and my presence here has relieved him of a great burden. Before my arrival, Niccoli and Marsuppini always spoke ill of him in truly vicious ways. But with my popularity, and Bruni’s speaking so highly of me, they have been deterred. Cosimo de’ Medici is being humane, and promises to see after my every need. Palla Strozzi, the most splendid and gilded knight, looks after me as well, and he treats me like a son. The learned Ambrogio Traversari professes his love for me, but I am suspicious.⁴⁶

Thus, already in the summer of 1429, soon after beginning his Florentine career, Filelfo was warmly embraced by oligarchs in general, by Palla Strozzi in particular, and by the oligarch favorite Leonardo Bruni. That the oligarchs took to Filelfo would in itself have worried Niccolò Niccoli and Cosimo de’ Medici, even if both, and especially the latter, concealed it for the time being. Niccoli and Marsuppini were forced to foresake one of their favorite activities: the vilification of Leonardo Bruni. Both Niccoli and Ambrogio Traversari would surely have been repelled by Filelfo’s arrogance. For Niccoli, this was part of his ideological stance on the “ancients versus moderns” question: humanists should keep a low profile. As we noted earlier, Traversari found Filelfo’s salary demands offensive, and, in a letter just one month after Filelfo’s arrival in Florence, Traversari noted that there was a difference of opinion among the learned (varia sententia inter doctos) about him.⁴⁷ Exactly one day after Filelfo’s letter to Aurispa, Traversari wrote to Leonardo Giustiniani, complaining of Filelfo’s “Greek” superficiality (levitas and vanitas) and maintaining that he had repellent tendencies to praise himself.⁴⁸ Whether or not Filelfo expected his letter to Aurispa to circulate, there can be no doubt that he—Florence’s new teacher of humanities—was, to the Medicean humanists, grossly pompous.⁴⁹ The letter to Aurispa is by no means exceptional. In his first academic oration, mentioned earlier, Filelfo (humbly) acknowledged the praise he was getting everywhere.⁵⁰

Moreover, the Medicean humanist Carlo Marsuppini, a favorite of Cosimo de’ Medici, was nourishing a monster. One could hardly expect otherwise. Marsuppini did, after all, aspire to be the premier Florentine lecturer in the humanities. Filelfo’s huge salary would have left little, if anything, for others who pursued teaching careers in the studia humaniora.⁵¹ Filelfo also had all the students. He claimed that 400 people were regularly attending his lectures and, even if Vespasiano da Bisticci’s more realistic figure of 200 students “or more” is closer to the truth, it was nonetheless a huge following.⁵² Whatever overtures Filelfo made to Marsuppini, they seem to have been half-hearted, or even insincere. In another inaugural oration—the recently discovered De laudibus eloquentiae, probably to be dated between 1429 and 1431—Filelfo went through the customary praise of poetry and oratory and then concluded his speech with what seemed to be warm praise of his teaching rival: “you have a truly unique teacher, Carlo [Marsuppini] of Arezzo, to whom I think is rightly attributed whatever I have that is or will be good, and whom I do not fear to call the prince of orators.” If this tamed the monster of envy, what immediately followed no doubt provoked it. “What do I have to fear? For Cicero, the light of eloquence, in a legal case did not fear to sing the praises of his teacher Archias, the highly celebrated poet.”⁵³ Thus Filelfo has made Marsuppini, known mainly for his poetry, into the minor Latin poet Archias, while Filelfo himself took on the mantle of Cicero.

By the end of 1429 Filelfo went on the attack. In a university oration dated December 19 and delivered before his lectures on Cicero’s De officiis, Homer’s Iliad, and Juvenal’s Satires, Filelfo launched into a diatribe against unnamed “envious detractors.” Using themes “against the envious” that became a preoccupation for him both during and after his academic career in Florence, Filelfo introduced his students, through Juvenal, to the genre of poetic satire, which he had already begun exploiting. And he concluded his speech with a brief quotation from Juvenal’s satire against Codrus, a wretched Roman poet and a code name that Filelfo was beginning to use for Carlo Marsuppini.⁵⁴

Whether or not Filelfo made a sincere effort to avoid controversy, as he had sworn he would do before coming to Florence, by the end of 1429 he was indeed in the thick of it. In the summer he could point to one sure enemy, although there were certainly others. By the end of the year he refers to his envious detractores in the plural. He may well have promised his students that he could cover Cicero’s De officiis, Homer’s Iliad, and Juvenal’s Satires in one series of lectures, but the enormity of the scheme could only have struck a figure such as Niccoli as the height of arrogance. Even worse, in one inaugural oration delivered that October he listed three outstanding Latin historians: Sallust, Livy, and Leonardo Bruni (in this order).⁵⁵ Not only, from Niccoli’s perspective, was this taking the wrong side in the “ancients versus moderns” controversy, but Filelfo was embracing a modern whom Niccoli and Traversari (and almost certainly Marsuppini) despised.

Moreover, like Bruni, Filelfo was building far too many bridges to traditional culture. Like most humanists, he carefully distinguished his pursuit of eloquence from the barbarism of scholastic culture. Nevertheless, in his inaugural orations, letters, and translations, he showed an especial fondness for Aristotle, the preferred ancient philosopher of the traditionalists.⁵⁶ In 1428–9, during his Bologna period, he translated into Latin the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, then attributed to Aristotle, and mentioned in a letter to Traversari in September 1428 that he had finished the translation.⁵⁷ Yet he seems not to have actually published it; for a few years later in Florence, on December 13, 1431, soon after he won the bitterly contested humanist chair from Carlo Marsuppini (to be discussed shortly), he announced the work to Leonardo Bruni’s oligarchic friend, Matteo di Simone Strozzi, and the latter dunned him to publish it.⁵⁸ He seems to have lectured regularly on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: like the lectures on Dante, these were given under government authority (not merely that of the Studio), and they no doubt attracted a wide audience from the general public.⁵⁹ We know from an inaugural oration that he gave one series of lectures on the Ethics in 1431–2.⁶⁰ As with the Dante lectures, on these public occasions Filelfo apparently had his students give lectures as well.⁶¹

Soon after his arrival in Florence, Filelfo would witness a major controversy over Plato and Aristotle. Ambrogio Traversari was promising a translation of Diogenes Laertius, a work that contained malicious gossip about Aristotle. Filelfo prudently attempted to cultivate the goodwill of local Florentines and frequently called on Traversari. With Diogenes, Traversari was having some difficulties: for certain Greek words, he said, he knew no Latin equivalents, and he was especially having difficulty with quotations from the epigrammatists (it took Traversari a decade, 1424–33, to finish the project).⁶² Filelfo knew classical Greek and a more idiomatic spoken Greek, and promised to assist Traversari with the translations.⁶³ What exactly happened, and when, is difficult to determine. What is most plausible is that Filelfo, who worked mightily to cultivate the goodwill of Leonardo Bruni, now a militant Aristotelian, no longer wanted to be associated with any project that castigated Aristotle. (When Bruni learned that the publication of Traversari’s translation was imminent, he rushed out a Vita Aristotelis to respond to the gossip in Diogenes.)⁶⁴ Filelfo later claimed, in a “conciliatory” letter to Traversari in May 1433, that he had not been able to assist with the Greek epigams because he had been too busy (and because he had been continually harassed by the invidiosi).⁶⁵ But he said he would do it—an odd promise, since Traversari had published the work a few months earlier!⁶⁶ If there is any truth to Traversari’s claim, in a letter of October 1430, that Filelfo had become a nuisance by spending too much time with him at Santa Maria degli Angeli, then the “busy” excuse is strained indeed.⁶⁷ Traversari described in this letter, rather huffily, his decision to block access to Filelfo (who by then was in open polemics with Traversari’s humanist friends). Filelfo, meanwhile, began to make dismissive remarks about Diogenes Laertius. In an undated satire addressed to Giannozzo Manetti, he urged Manetti to go to Traversari and tell him to abandon the translation project.⁶⁸ And in a letter to Giovanni Toscanelli dated January 9, 1432 (and perhaps earlier than the satire), Filelfo noted that Giovanni Aurispa wanted from Toscanelli a copy of Diogenes Laertius, probably in Greek, in exchange for Filelfo’s Dio Chrysostom. Filelfo remarked that the exchange was unfair: Dio was much more valuable.⁶⁹

Filelfo’s preference for Aristotle during this period appears in a number of works. An oration he gave in late December 1431, before the lectures on Aristotle, described him not only as the font of all philosophical learning but “as some kind of god rather than a mortal” (ut deus aliquis potius quam mortalis).⁷⁰ His students likewise were describing Aristotle as the leading philosopher of antiquity.⁷¹ In a Greek letter to George Scholarius in 1439, Filelfo declared that he had for many years adhered to the teaching of Aristotle. He especially admired the followers of Aristotle: he who embraces Aristotle embraces the truth, and we should defend those who defend him against his critics.⁷²

Besides this, Filelfo was bringing into his orations a large number of religious authorities. While it is difficult to imagine the monk Traversari objecting to this, more radical humanists such as Niccoli, however sincere their Christian religiosity, were regularly accused by their enemies of wincing at the use of such authorities, at least when they were used to defend studying the classics.⁷³ In one of his orations in Bologna, in 1428, and in another one in Florence, in the fall of 1429, Filelfo used biblical authorities to justify the study of poetry. As Lucia Gualdo Rosa has argued, Filelfo’s arguments sound very much like those of Petrarch and Coluccio Salutati.⁷⁴ We will see later that Niccoli, Poggio, and presumably Marsuppini were striving mightily to distance themselves, and the humanist movement, from that sort of cultural accommodation.⁷⁵

The year 1430 was not a happy one, not for Filelfo, not for the Florentines, and certainly not for modern scholars attempting to study Filelfo. Florence’s war against Lucca went from a series of disappointments to what looked like utter defeat. Filelfo left posterity with only a handful of letters. One, on November 1, 1430, mentioned the “divisions” of the Florentines.⁷⁶ This was no news to anyone anywhere: the previous April there had been even a proposal for a “quota system” in an advisory council, so that there would be an equal number of oligarchs and Mediceans.⁷⁷ We can only guess why Filelfo left few letters. Perhaps he suppressed a cache of them, a hypothesis permitted by the possibility of his having taken a belligerent (hence wrong) stand in the humiliating war against Lucca.⁷⁸ Perhaps he made overtures to the Mediceans and found the letters embarrassing later. He had already begun writing his Satires, and one, perhaps to be dated October 15, 1430, was an obsequious tribute to Cosimo. He left it out of his finished collection of one hundred satires, and only an odd manuscript in Florence has preserved it.⁷⁹ Perhaps he simply wrote few letters and recovered even fewer. Plague struck Florence that summer and early autumn, and contagion theories may have made people particularly fearful of correspondence. Cosimo fled to Verona, taking with him his revered classical library as well as two humanists, Niccoli and Marsuppini. This removed from Florence two humanist enemies and one political enemy—or potential enemy. But Cosimo was not yet an open enemy, as far as we know, and later on Filelfo let it be known that this interlude gave these humanists far too much opportunity to vent their anti-Filelfo hatred to their patron.⁸⁰ Moreover, plague led the ruling-class Florentines, who had flocked to Filelfo’s classroom, to flee the Arno republic en masse. Filelfo’s only extant university oration of that year, an inaugural piece dated November 27 (the school opening was surely delayed by plague), began on a sour note (and I quote the first sentence in its entirety): Magnam profecto nobis calamitatem intulit hic annus pestifer, viri spectatissimi (“Gentlemen: this pestilential year has truly been a calamity for us”). The second sentence tells us more: Nam quo tempore maximum auditorum concursum florentissimumque consessum speraram, eo vehementius illum attenuatum ac diminutum intueor (“For at a time when I had expected an extremely large concourse and a most flourishing [florentissimum] assembly of those hearing me lecture, I see my audience exceedingly thinned and diminished”).⁸¹ Evidently his salary was reduced as well.⁸²

During the next year, 1431, Filelfo remained quiet (as far as we know) until the approach of the new academic year, when everything exploded. In one poetic satire, dated September 13, he reproduced his old sobriquet for Carlo Marsuppini: Codrus.⁸³ Then he invented a name for Niccoli, “Utis,” from the Greek Οὔτις (“nobody”), taken from Homer’s tale of Polyphemus (where it is accented Οὖτις). Here he indirectly alluded to an earlier sobriquet for Niccoli created by the latter’s enemies, namely “Nichil,” a play upon Nicholaus Nicholus nichil (which worked best if one lacked Niccoli’s notorious insistence on orthographic precision), and an allusion to Niccoli’s refusal to publish and to his penchant for denigrating the publications of others.⁸⁴ The satire, addressed to Francesco del Benino, describes an effort orchestrated by Carlo Marsuppini to cut off Filelfo’s salary on the strength of the claim that Florence needed the money for war. The satire included mockery of Marsuppini’s level of learning and charges of drunkenness, sodomy, and a dissipated appearance (charges often repeated by Filelfo against all his enemies). Niccoli is described as burning in hatred toward Filelfo, running about the city day and night. Filelfo appeals to Benino for support against the campaign.⁸⁵

The academic year normally began on the Feast of St. Luke, October 18, when Filelfo was to begin his regular lectures on the Greek and Latin classics. Documents we now have do not tell us precisely what happened. Apparently before that date, Filelfo began giving lectures in Italian on Dante in the Florentine cathedral, under public auspices, but perhaps without public salary. We do know that his fears, expressed in his satire of September 13, were well founded: one week before the academic year was to begin, the Signoria and Colleges canceled all academic appointments.⁸⁶ Medici partisans had carefully come to dominate the university; and the rector, Girolamo Broccardi, was a strong Medici partisan who despised Filelfo.⁸⁷ Less than two weeks later, new lecturers were announced. Carlo Marsuppini was chosen, at a salary of 150 florins, to lecture in the humanities and in every possible field of classical antiquity: poetry, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and Greek.⁸⁸ A newly appointed canon of the Medici church of San Lorenzo, Lorenzo Pisano, a Medici protégé, was to assume the lectures on Dante.⁸⁹

Filelfo then began lecturing privately, in his house, and, with the new Signoria of November–December, he appealed to have the decision overturned. His appeal included Italian poems addressed directly to the government.⁹⁰ He was finally successful on December 8.⁹¹ On December 22 Palla Strozzi’s son Nofri remarked on the good news to Matteo di Simone Strozzi: “From your last two letters and by word of mouth from Giovanni da Bari I have heard that Filelfo has been restored to his original status, and this has made me happy beyond words. The honor resulted from the greatness of his spirit and because he reassumed his position against one whose force and guile did not suffice.” This is a “testimony that in our homeland reason has begun to overcome force.”⁹²

Now in open hostility with the Medici party, and especially hostile to the Medicean humanists, Filelfo resumed lecturing on Dante. For the Mediceans, this was a nightmare. For one thing, the lectures would be in Italian and in the cathedral and would hence attract a huge audience.⁹³ Even when the less prominent Antonio da Arezzo lectured on Dante a few years earlier, in the oligarchic enclave of Santo Stefano, he was forced to move to the cathedral because more room was needed.⁹⁴ Unfortunately we do not have any draft of the lectures, nor any later published commentary on Dante, and we do not know how Filelfo lectured on the Tuscan poet. When Dante in Canto 16 of the Inferno complained of the gente nuova invading Florence (lines 73–5), we do not know whether Filelfo took the opportunity to lambast the upstarts of the Medici regime. Perhaps it would have been too heavy-handed. What we do know is that Dante represented the brightest star of “traditional culture,” the late medieval volgare tradition, the aristocratic continuity that the ruling class so much loved, that humanists such as Bruni were trying to attach themselves to, and that Medicean humanists detached themselves from. Filelfo himself was not a Florentine, and he was a brilliant scholar of Greek and Roman antiquity. Yet he took upon himself the mantle of the vernacular, and he did so with a vengeance.

Presumably in his first oration before the lectures on Dante—that is, before his appointment was ever canceled—Filelfo surveyed some of the great geniuses of antiquity. Now in the modern world, he stated, “we see one such spirit.” By nature and by divine providence he was created so that he lacked nothing in perfection. “Who was this person? Who was he? He was the most noble and illustrious poet, the most erudite philosopher, sublime mathematician, and outstanding theologian, Dante Alighieri.”⁹⁵

Soon after his appointment was restored, on December 21, 1431, Filelfo delivered another inaugural oration on Dante and imitated the first one with a series of rhetorical questions, this time referring to his chief enemy: Who is the cause of such suspicious behavior? Who is the source of such injustices? Who is the author of the many outrages? Who is this person? Who is he? Shall I state the name of this monster? Shall I point out this Cerberus? Shall I say it? I certainly ought to say his name. I will name him, I shall name him. I shall name him if my life depends on it. He is that wicked and abnormal, that detestable and abominable …. Ah, Filelfo, be quiet, don’t say it, for God’s sake be patient.⁹⁶ We wish Filelfo had not left the name out, since he could have been ready to name any number of persons, including Niccoli, Marsuppini, the university rector Girolamo Broccardi, Cosimo or his brother Lorenzo, or perhaps even Ambrogio Traversari.⁹⁷ One thing we do know is that the oration resounded not only throughout Florence but throughout Italy. In mid-January 1432 Nofri di Palla Strozzi wrote from Ferrara to Matteo Strozzi that Filelfo’s inaugural oration was known not only in Verona (where Nofri had just been) but as far away as Trent. He also expressed the wish that Filelfo would temper his jubilation, since he was deliberately provoking his enemies.⁹⁸ In another letter a few days later Nofri mentioned that “just about the whole world was thundering owing to Filelfo’s vernacular oration.”⁹⁹

Medici partisans quickly took action, using those resources they had—certainly they were not going to stand by and let Filelfo gloat, as his friend Nofri Strozzi feared. There were still more attempts to block his lectures. Immediately after the famous oration of December 21, someone, perhaps sent by the university rector Girolamo Broccardi, apparently had the portable lecture podium removed from the cathedral, where the Dante lectures were given, and Filelfo had some difficulty securing a classroom at the Studio for his regular lectures in the classical authors.¹⁰⁰ At the very end of December 1431, the situation was even more ominous. Enemies were blocking his lecture halls, preventing him from teaching and even occupying his lecture podium. The government had to impose heavy fines to prevent this.¹⁰¹ Apparently during this academic year the rector of the university, too, Girolamo Broccardi, regularly harassed Filelfo with fines, evidently for petty breaches of university protocol. Filelfo had to turn to the government again, to get the practice stopped.¹⁰² At the same time the Medici began financing rival, concurrent lectures by their favorite academic humanist, Carlo Marsuppini. Here we have little evidence, but there is no reason to doubt the account of Vespasiano da Bisticci. When he wrote his lives, Vespasiano was looking back at the old culture of the oligarchs in a mood of nostalgia. Yet he noted that, through the initiative of Niccoli and Cosimo, Marsuppini’s lectures, concurrent and of course in rivalry with Filelfo’s, attracted a large number of students and diminished Filelfo’s fame.¹⁰³ And he also noted that these lectures turned Filelfo into a militant partisan who joined with “those of 1433,” that is, with Albizzi and the leaders of the oligarchic coup that year.¹⁰⁴ Thus, although Filelfo’s lectures were “popular” and delivered in Italian, the Medici yet managed to put together some organized “popular” opposition. We know this not only from Vespasiano da Bisticci’s account. Salary records for 1432–3 indicate that Filelfo’s stipend was reduced for that year from 350 florins annually to 225.¹⁰⁵ Filelfo himself noted in a letter to Cosimo of May 1433 that those who had attempted to cause him trouble “were borne about the city happy and exultant.”¹⁰⁶ Enemies of Filelfo took one final extraordinary measure that academic year. In March 1432 the Signoria and the Colleges ordered the arrest of Filelfo on the charge of slandering a visiting Venetian ambassador. We know little more, except that Filelfo was facing a three-year exile. The sentence was reversed the next month.¹⁰⁷

Unfortunately we have no draft of Filelfo’s lectures on Dante aside from his inaugural orations. But we do have one other source, and yet another indication of why the Medici would view Filelfo’s lectures with such apprehension. Filelfo had his students, one after another, give Italian orations before other students and leading citizens who attended the lectures in the cathedral. These lectures were immensely popular—a number were widely copied as models of vernacular speechmaking.¹⁰⁸

There has been no modern study of these orations, and only the best-known, those copied in numerous manuscripts, have modern editions.¹⁰⁹ For many of these speeches there are difficulties of attribution. Most are anonymous and bear no title or a general one, such as “on glory.” Sometimes their content reveals them clearly to be by students of Filelfo. At other times we can only suspect this, because of the presence of other texts near the oration in a manuscript. Some half a dozen manuscripts have a large number of such orations, containing items never discussed in the Filelfo literature.¹¹⁰ While it would be difficult to generalize on the basis on one or two orations alone, in their totality the orations leave me convinced that Curt Gutkind, in his Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater Patriae of 1938, was correct to call the school of Filelfo a sort of “oligarchic citadel.”¹¹¹

First of all, the school of Filelfo represented an extraordinary affirmation of traditional culture. Dante was praised as equal to the best of the ancients. Also, Filelfo’s one powerful humanist friend in Florence, Leonardo Bruni, was held up by the students as worthy of the ancients. The third modern praised by the students was of course Filelfo himself.

For Filelfo and Bruni, there is no reason whatsoever to doubt the testimony of Filelfo’s early letter after his arrival in Florence, that his own popularity and his closeness to Bruni caused both Niccoli and Marsuppini to desist from one of their favorite intellectual enterprises: denigrating the works of Leonardo Bruni. Their closeness appears in several areas. That letter reveals that Filelfo knew that Bruni was “controversial”: in such a case, particularly from a Florentine Studio lecturer who needed wide support, the way to deal with the controversial element was through silence. Even without controversy, contemporary humanists are rarely named in humanist academic orations (modern scholars wish they were named more frequently). Filelfo, however, went out of his way to praise Bruni, as in the oration in the fall of 1429 that makes Sallust, Livy, and Bruni the outstanding Latin historians.¹¹² A student oration on envy praised the eloquence of Cicero, Demosthenes, Lactantius, Jerome, and other ancients and then added one last figure, Leonardo Bruni.¹¹³ Pietro Perleoni’s inaugural oration before Filelfo’s lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics, given probably at the very end of 1430, included a lengthy Vita Aristotelis taken almost verbatim from Bruni’s own Vita published a year earlier.¹¹⁴ Another student, Giacomo da Pesaro, speaking before Filelfo’s lectures on Augustine’s City of God, paired Bruni’s learning with that of Filelfo: both were fonts of Latin eloquence, and not only in areas where grace is expected but in every area of learning. This student also praises Dante and Petrarch.¹¹⁵

A number of manuscripts illustrates this closeness. The two manuscripts with the oration by Giacomo da Pesaro (Magl. VIII 1440 and Ricc. 1200) both have interesting texts on Filelfo’s teaching in Florence and on how it relates to Bruni.¹¹⁶ Among the numerous works by Bruni and Filelfo, Magl. VIII 1440 contains anonymous epitaphs on Dante and Niccolò da Uzzano,¹¹⁷ an anonymous letter on a disputed appointment at the Studio that may in fact be dealing with Filelfo,¹¹⁸ and an overlooked version of Filelfo’s Orationes ad exules optimates.¹¹⁹ Sections of the manuscript have formularies for letter writing and various commonplaces, and these include a few examples of Bruni and Filelfo among those from Cicero and others.¹²⁰ The manuscript also contains an anonymous poem, entitled Exortatio ad studium, which praises Bruni and Filelfo.¹²¹ Ricc. 1200, copied by Angelo di Gaspare Marchi da Volterra around 1450, contains a very large number of Filelfo student orations and rarer texts, including the original version of Bruni’s letter to Filelfo on his Studio appointment, which Bruni later truncated for publication.¹²² It has a great number of Bruni’s letters and translations, as well as a fragmentary version of Bruni’s De temporibus suis and a copy of Lorenzo di Marco Benvenuti’s invective against Niccoli.¹²³

There are other aspects to Filelfo’s closeness to Bruni. In a poetic satire against Niccolò Niccoli, Filelfo praised a number of contemporary figures, one of them being of course Bruni. Among Trecento figures, Filelfo mentioned Dante and Petrarch; and he added to these a praise of Manuel Chrysoloras, hence following Bruni’s schema, whereby Chrysoloras, not Salutati, becomes the “fourth” crown (Boccaccio is not named).¹²⁴ Chrysoloras was mentioned also in the student oration by Giacomo da Pesaro, cited earlier, and later Filelfo would include in his dialogue De exilio a lavish praise of Chrysoloras, delivered by the interlocutors Palla Strozzi and Leonardo Bruni.¹²⁵ Filelfo’s various praises of Florence echo the language of Bruni, and on at least one occasion a student oration mentioned Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis.¹²⁶ Finally, Filelfo’s satire against hypocrites, a favorite antimonastic genre among humanists, follows Leonardo Bruni’s Oratio in hypocritas (almost ad litteram, as Silvia Fiaschi notes).¹²⁷

The numerous references to Bruni in lectures by Filelfo and his students convince me that Bruni not only attended Filelfo’s lectures but was used as a sort of in situ showpiece of classical learning. Gestures toward the learned Bruni were addressed not simply to a figure in Florence but to a humanist in Filelfo’s classroom.

Besides the various nods to Bruni, there is also in the orations by Filelfo’s students a language that, in its totality, seems to be directed against the “popular” aspect of the Medici regime. There are continuous complaints about the “filthy and impious crowd” and, on the other side, a praise of nobility—of the glorious blood of the Romans that runs in the veins of the noble Florentines. In an oration entitled On Poetry, for instance, a student contrasted the art of poetry with the “mechanical arts.” Poetry is appreciated by the noble intellects, not by the rustics.¹²⁸ In another oration, that one by Filelfo himself, the author noted that Dante was always esteemed by the better persons, by the ottimi, and not by the vulgar crowd. In an anonymous student oration entitled On Envy, the orator showed how the crowd was always envious of the better people.¹²⁹ This vice took root with Cain’s envy of Abel, and a host of later examples show how individuals and societies have been ruined by it. “Let us hear,” the student concluded his oration, “what our outstanding and noble poet Dante says about it.”¹³⁰ The formula optimi cives, used by Filelfo time and again in these orations, had become a code word for oligarchs. We need to remember that lectures on Dante’s Commedia and on Aristotle’s Ethics were public occasions, attracting hundreds of people and not simply those in the university. On occasion Filelfo and his students addressed the audience not just as ottimi citizens but as knights or cavalieri—that is, by the name proper to the more esteemed among them.¹³¹

There was also a language against the misuse of money that, in isolation, would seem to be innocuous enough but in the context of Filelfo’s classroom could well have carried an anti-Medicean message. In an oration On Liberality, for instance, a student of Filelfo’s insisted that money should never be used for political purposes but only to help the virtuous.¹³² In an anonymous oration entitled On Avarice (and this could possibly be by Filelfo himself), the orator seemed again to be making a veiled attack on the Medici.¹³³ Here Cain reappears, but this time not as one who is envious but as a greedy figure. Cain decided to use cheaper, low-quality grain in his sacrifice, and this did not please God.¹³⁴ This class struggle between the noble and upright Abel and the miserly, servile Cain was then applied by the orator to ancient Rome. There, those who wanted political power filled the purses of greedy citizens, and this was the ultimate reason for Rome’s decay.¹³⁵ In another oration, On Glory, a student criticized those who hoped to acquire fame through the use of money (and dinners and festivals). Fame should rather be based on liberality, justice, prudence, and a good moral character.¹³⁶

There were also expressions of strong support for the government. This was not simply support for “governing authorities” but sometimes amounted to direct praise for the Signoria and the Colleges and criticism of those who attempted to effect policy outside the government.

In 1432 and 1433 there was a flood of invectives by Filelfo, now openly against Medici partisans, and particularly against Medici humanists. In the spring of 1433, as events in Florence were reaching their climax—it is at this time that Cosimo was sending his own money out of Florence in anticipation of an oligarchic coup—there appears an odd letter of Filelfo to Cosimo de’ Medici. Dated May 1, the letter is a rehashing of Filelfo’s major difficulties with Medici partisans. When I first came to Florence, Filelfo wrote (to paraphrase his words), you helped me, and I dedicated to you works that gave you immortality. But then, during the period of plague in 1430, you went to Verona with your family and two humanists, Marsuppini and Niccoli. They have worked constantly against me, and Niccoli in particular has denigrated every man of learning who has appeared in Florence (rather boldly, Filelfo claimed here that Niccoli had attacked both Traversari and Poggio). While you were gone in Verona, I fared well in Florence. On your return, Niccoli and Marsuppini attacked me relentlessly, aided by your party and your clients. Filelfo then referred to the events of 1431, when his Studio appointment was briefly annulled. This, he said, was done by your supporters, as they attempted to drive me away from Florence. I then pressed my case before the Signoria and the Colleges, and Giuliano di Averardo de’ Medici spoke up against me. Yet, when the secret vote was taken, thirty-four of the thirty-seven were in my favor!¹³⁷ This indicates that even members of your party favor me when they are allowed to express themselves freely. Unlike Niccoli and Marsuppini, I am not the sort of sycophant who goes to your house seeking your goodwill: I am too busy with my own work. The life of the parasite is not mine. Please do not let the envy of my enemies be valued more than my goodwill (fides and observantia) toward you.¹³⁸

It is difficult to know how to evaluate this letter. If it really was designed to be conciliatory toward Cosimo, it might have asked, at most, for what would be called today a “truce.” But it was probably more of a threat and a sort of public recounting of events, intended to present Filelfo’s case in case the Medici–oligarchic struggle reached a denouement. The letter “reproduced” private communications from Cosimo to Filelfo, perhaps fanciful, perhaps containing an element of truth, designed to embarrass Cosimo’s humanist supporters. Cosimo, “smiling,” had told Filelfo not to worry about Niccoli: he “left not one man of learning untouched.” Nor should he worry about Marsuppini, for “he had no standing in the city.”¹³⁹ We have no idea how Cosimo responded to this “initiative,” and perhaps he did not respond at all. Any openly favorable response would have required him to renounce his support of his favorite humanists, which was out of the question. If we trust the dated correspondence for this period, Filelfo now feared for his life. In a “conciliatory” letter to Ambrogio Traversari dated May 2, 1433, one day after his letter to Cosimo, Filelfo stated that he had never wished Medici partisans any ill and could not understand why they should want to harm him.¹⁴⁰ We may be inclined to smile at Traversari’s conciliatory response, if we are willing to condone crimes that are more than half a millennium old. On May 18, two weeks after Traversari’s reply to Filelfo, which contained an assurance that Filelfo had nothing to worry about, Filelfo was attacked by an assassin in the Oltrarno (as he was leaving his house on what is now via Ramaglianti,¹⁴¹ off Borgo San Jacopo). He was slashed and escaped with a facial wound that left him scarred for life.¹⁴² An investigation of the crime led back to the rector of the Florentine Studio, Girolamo Broccardi, who confessed to hiring the assassin. According to Filelfo, the assassin got off with a fine, due to the intervention of Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo—and the Medici even paid the fine for him.¹⁴³

When Cosimo was arrested by the oligarchs in September of 1433, Filelfo’s letters and other works show a political astuteness rare for this period, perhaps matched only by Poggio, who saw the events from an opposite perspective. Filelfo knew what had to be done: Cosimo had to be put to death.¹⁴⁴ He knew quite well that Cosimo was exceptionally dangerous, mainly because he had money and could use it for political purposes. Thus, while many oligarchs rejoiced when Cosimo went into exile in Padua and Venice, Filelfo remained constantly worried. In a letter of November 1433 he mentioned that Cosimo, through Palla Strozzi’s clemency, had made his way to Padua, but that Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Giovanni Guicciardini had wanted him dead. Filelfo adds that the Gonfaloniere di Giustizia Bernardo Guadagni had assisted Cosimo in his departure after being bribed. Here Filelfo is clearly disappointed that Cosimo was not killed.¹⁴⁵

On Cosimo’s return from exile in 1434, Filelfo was apparently not under public censure: one has to work mightily to find in that period figures officially penalized for their “ideas.” Yet surely his academic career in Florence was over, and about the end of 1434 Filelfo had made his way to Siena and its university.¹⁴⁶ Apparently he learned that his friend Bruni was having difficulties in the chancery: Mediceans were stripping him of control over the records of the Tratte, or on who would be eligible for public office, and they may even have been threatening to fine him. Filelfo wrote to Bruni an odd letter, asking him how he was faring in his official duties. Bruni would not be baited; he simply wrote back that he was carrying out his duties as he always had.¹⁴⁷ Earlier, in February 1435, Filelfo had written a harsh letter to Poggio, accusing him of publishing ineptiae and deliramenta (“absurdities” and “deranged writings”) against him and promising to respond if he was indeed the author.¹⁴⁸ Poggio taunted Filelfo with his amusing reply, denying that he was the author of any ineptiae or deliramenta against him—thus, I think, conceding that he had authored what Filelfo had found offensive.¹⁴⁹ Not long after this, perhaps as early as the end of 1435, Filelfo wrote the first of his Orationes in Cosmum Medicem ad exules optimates Florentinos (despite the title, literally Orations against Cosimo de’ Medici to the Florentine Ottimati in Exile, there seems never to have been more than one oration), which included a vicious portrayal of Poggio and Cosimo;¹⁵⁰ we shall discuss this work shortly. Poggio learned of the oration and immediately fired off a letter to Cosimo, which he wrote in Italian, to make sure Cosimo knew that he was serious; there he mentioned ironically “an oration that Filelfo has made to your special praise, and mine too” (un’oratione, che Filelfo ha facta in tua singular lode e mia ancora), insisting that Cosimo take action.¹⁵¹

We cannot state with certainty who took action next. Our sources are unreliable—exacted confessions. In May 1436 an assassin was arrested in Siena for plotting against Filelfo, the same assassin who had attacked him in 1433. The sponsor of the earlier assassination attempt, Girolamo Broccardi, was implicated by the arrested assassin, but Filelfo claimed that the Medici were behind it.¹⁵² He proclaimed this rather loudly, since Florence wrote to Siena a state letter denying the Medici’s involvement. Siena answered that no one in the government had ever suggested this.¹⁵³ Then, in August 1436, as a gesture of goodwill toward Siena, Cosimo sent his own horse to participate in their race (palio). Apparently Filelfo arranged for an accomplice to entertain the custodian of this horse and get him drunk, with the intention of sneaking back into the stables and stabbing Cosimo’s horse.¹⁵⁴ A confession from this same period states that Filelfo hired an assassin to go to Florence and kill Carlo Marsuppini, Girolamo Broccardi, and someone else, perhaps Cosimo himself.¹⁵⁵ Bruni then composed the state letter to the Sienese government, urging it to suppress such initiatives.¹⁵⁶ By October 1436, in Florence, Filelfo was under sentence to have his tongue cut out.¹⁵⁷

Florence could not order Siena to turn over Filelfo, but he no doubt felt unsafe. Filelfo therefore left, at the end of 1438, first for Bologna and soon thereafter for Milan, where the Visconti presided. And there the polemics continued, in satires and letters, and especially in a major dialogue, the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, a work in ten books, as he stated in the preface; but he finished only three, threatening to publish more.¹⁵⁸ It is possible that portions or earlier forms of this work were composed before 1440, but the text we have contains references to the oligarchic defeat at Anghiari in 1440, as well as to Poggio’s own works De nobilitate and De infelicitate principum (Filelfo could hardly have known of them unless they were out, and they were completed in 1440).¹⁵⁹ The dialogue is set in Florence, immediately after the Medici coup of 1434 but before the sentences of exile were enforced. I have presented its structure in chapter 4 (p. 178, n. 265).

We have already looked at Filelfo’s positions on the major issues of the “cultural wars.” He was with the traditionalists in praising the tre corone, especially Dante, and in cultivating the Italian language.¹⁶⁰ Among Quattrocento figures, Filelfo praised a number of people, including Manetti, but he praised especially Bruni and himself. In the De exilio Filelfo defends even more pointedly the use of religious authorities, sounding themes very much like those of traditionalists such as Cino Rinuccini. In a discussion of the misuse of money, the interlocutor Manetti refers to the Gospel passage about the difficulties a rich man has in entering the kingdom of heaven. Manetti then complains about certain people turning their heads in disgust when a Christian authority is cited. These same figures exult if the example comes from the fables of poets or pagan gods. This they applaud, while the light of our religion offends them. At this point Palla Strozzi intervenes, praising Manetti’s remarks and stating that those who do not like Christian examples are “not Christian.”¹⁶¹

Filelfo had little to say about the Parte Guelfa (after all he was not a Florentine and had no special interest in Florentine history). Yet when he wrote De exilio in the early 1440s he had some hope that Pope Eugenius IV would support the oligarchic cause (in 1434, it will be remembered, the Pope acted as a Medici partisan). Filelfo claimed—and here Rinaldo degli Albizzi himself is the speaker—that the arciguelfi oligarchs had always supported the papacy and that Medicean partisans were now working in Basel to undermine the pope.¹⁶² (Despite this, Filelfo rarely spoke of the Guelfs, even before he went to Milan: for the Florentine oligarchs he used a term, optimates, that Bruni used both for these oligarchs and, on occasion, more particularly for the Guelfs.) This old-fashioned view of Guelfism as simply the “papal party” is symptomatic of one major problem that Filelfo had with Bruni’s civic humanism. Filelfo was now in Milan; and two of the major questions in the De exilio were to what extent the exiles should seek the support of the Visconti and whether a Milanese signorial rule over Florence was preferable to Medicean tyranny. In the first dialogue, Nofri di Palla Strozzi states that Florence had unjustly made war on Filippo Maria Visconti and the latter will perhaps reduce Florence to servitude. Rinaldo degli Albizzi then argues that such a servitude is preferable to the rule of Cosimo. Palla Strozzi agreed, urged the optimates to take up arms, and said that Florence was now a principatus anyway.¹⁶³ One of the “subtexts” of this dialogue was that several of its participants were considered rebels by the Florentine government and had had their portraits painted in infamia at the Palazzo del Podestà, along with Italian verses describing their crimes.¹⁶⁴ One of their alleged crimes dated back to the Sant’Apollinare putsch of 1434, when they were accused of meeting secretly, at Santa Maria degli Angeli of all places, with the Milanese ambassador Gherardo Landriani, in an attempt to get the Visconti to intervene to block Cosimo’s recall.¹⁶⁵ The second dialogue of the De exilio, entitled “De infamia,” was in part, it seems likely, a response to these charges. Any Milanese alliance was indeed controversial for the oligarchs. Even during the alleged Anfrosina da Monterchi plot of 1437, which implicated Bruni, the conspirators clearly stated that they were not seeking a Milanese signoria over Florence: indeed they “do not wish it at all.” Rather they would accept as a signore a condottiere from Anfrosina’s family.¹⁶⁶ One other departure from Bruni’s “civic humanism” was Filelfo’s defense of Julius Caesar: he found it infuriating, he had Palla Strozzi state in the De exilio, that some would compare him unfavorably with Scipio Africanus.¹⁶⁷ Of course Filelfo here is simply criticizing Poggio, who had published his favorable consideration of Scipio against Caesar in 1435.¹⁶⁸

Filelfo provides a lively portrait of the crimes of the Medici regime, but his is unfortunately not a particularly revealing portrayal: humanists of this period seem never to have been able really to analyze domestic politics (nonhumanists such as Giovanni Cavalcanti and, later, Niccolò Machiavelli were much better at this), and criticism involved reworking a few themes, rafts of moralisms, and numerous exempla. Much of the De exilio was a showpiece for Filelfo’s knowledge of ancient moral philosophy; much was also a sort of vaudevillian banter between wiser heads such as Palla Strozzi, Giannozzo Manetti, and Leonardo Bruni on one side and Poggio on the other, Poggio being a drunk—and a dumb one, to boot.

A major theme is that the Mediceans have no sense of what is right and just: as Filelfo states at the very beginning of his Orationes ad exules optimates, the Medici hate these very words.¹⁶⁹ All sense of law and duty to humanity is violated. Some good citizens are sent into exile; others are simply murdered.¹⁷⁰ That the Mediceans engaged in assassination was not something Filelfo invented after he was attacked in 1433. Earlier, in 1432, he had complained bitterly about the alleged assassination conspiracy against the leader of the oligarchs, Niccolò da Uzzano.¹⁷¹ In a letter to Niccolò Albergati in September 1432 he wrote that Niccolò and Tommaso Soderini were behind the event, but Uzzano himself, a vir gravissimus et in republica potentissimus, was blamed for trumping up the charges. If such a person, a vir primarius, can be subject to attack, Filelfo asked, what hope is there for me? Then, without directly stating that Cosimo de’ Medici was behind the assassination plot, he went on to describe Cosimo as the leader of the “opposing faction” and as one who supported all of Filelfo’s opponents.¹⁷² A satire probably composed a few years later put the Medici behind the episode, and Filelfo’s Orationes ad exules optimates of 1435–6 directly accused Cosimo of hiring the assassin.¹⁷³ After the Medici coup of 1434 assassinations become part of the general policy of the Medici: Filelfo claims that Matteo Bardi, Iacopo Salviati, and Antonio Rafacani were all murdered by them. Those noble citizens who were not killed, Filelfo points out, have been exiled. Others are thrown into prison. Others have been “excluded from public office” but are allowed to stay in Florence, “so that they can be mocked by the rabble.”¹⁷⁴ Cosimo used every sort of fraud to take power and to keep it. When the Medici were at last expelled from Florence, in 1433, calm was restored in the entire Arno republic. The optimates finally began to live in an atmosphere of moderation, innocence, and justice. Those hitherto bound by hatred and rage converted to love of peace and tranquility. No longer was there pillaging, embezzlement of public money, or thievery. Adultery, corruption, and poisonings came to and end. All day and all night long, fear went away. Acts spurred by libido or by impotentia animi were banned. All worked for the cultus divinus. And so the crafty Cosimo, with poisonings and sacrilege, went to work—and did it with money.¹⁷⁵

Indeed Cosimo’s use of money is perhaps the main theme of the De exilio. This of course was not a new discovery by Filelfo with his relegation to Siena: already in the Dante orations, a major theme was the corrupting influence of money on politics. As Palla Strozzi states in Book 1 of Filelfo’s De exilio, Cosimo’s crimes are due to his money: without it there could be no sceleres, flagitia, calamitates, ignes, or pestes. What happened in Florence was that Cosimo simply bought everyone off. The ignorant rabble, seeking money and money alone, was duped by Cosimo.¹⁷⁶ Here Filelfo seems to echo Bruni’s Historiae, where the lower classes look out only for their own interest and refuse to finance Florence’s wars. For Filelfo, the rabble is even worse: these people will simply take any money that is given them. And this is what, overall, has corrupted the republic of Florence: the largesse of its richest citizen, Cosimo, who has bought off the lower classes. Without money Cosimo would have no support at all. Filelfo notes in a satire the failure of Cosimo’s supporters to come to his immediate assistance after his arrest in 1433. At that point his money became ineffectual; hence support for him vanished.¹⁷⁷ Leonardo Bruni, who seemed to have commended Medicean wealth in his translation of the Aristotelian Oeconomicus, receives in the De exilio the role of condemning the Medicean use of money. While insisting that money was among the Stoic adiaphora, things morally indifferent, Bruni denounced the Medici for what they did with it.¹⁷⁸ Poggio intervenes by pointing out that Cosimo has provided dowries for Florentine women. Filelfo answers crisply: yes, and in exchange he demanded the ius primae noctis.¹⁷⁹ Nor indeed was Cosimo’s money based on healthy commerce, according to Filelfo. Mostly it came from robbery, from despoiling the optimates and the Church. When the estranged and later deposed John XXIII arrived in Florence, Cosimo simply stole his patrimony.¹⁸⁰ Anything “given” to religious institutions, such as the churches of San Lorenzo or San Marco, was based on money stolen from the Church in the first place.¹⁸¹

In humanist invectives many of the charges are patently recycled, and it is often difficult to know whether any are true. Poggio is Filelfo’s only enemy in the discussions portrayed in the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, imagined just after the Medici coup, and he appears there as a drunken and debauched idiot. When Palla Strozzi and others attempt to have serious discussions about the highest human good, Poggio intervenes by explaining that the soul is happy when the body is happy, and the body is happy when it is full of wine.¹⁸² He defends himself against the charge that he drinks too much by carefully pointing out that when he is with Niccolò Niccoli, the latter has already downed three or more goblets of wine before Poggio even gets started (while composed in 1440, the dialogue is set in 1434, and Niccoli died in 1437).¹⁸³ Poggio continually wants the gathering to end, so that he may go to the aedes Bartheldinae for food, drink, and presumably sexual debauchery.¹⁸⁴ Poggio has seduced other men’s wives (a common enough charge), other men (a common charge, especially for Filelfo: he names Niccoli as one of Poggio’s conquests), and, more imaginatively, his own mother and sister.¹⁸⁵ In the Medici households of Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo and in that of their cousin Averardo there is complete sexual freedom, and their hapless children are confused as to whether to address their mother’s consort as “father” or “grandfather.”¹⁸⁶

The Medici are also physically degenerate, a common enough theme in humanist invectives, especially since figures no less respectable than Cicero argued that physical abnormalities should be stressed. In reading Filelfo, one wonders whether some caste component is not at work in these descriptions: this, as I argued earlier, is not emphasized in traditional culture, but such elements are found in the Trecento and earlier. Filelfo states several times that the Medici are from the Mugello, a rural area northeast of Florence; and the deleterious influence of the Mugellenses on Florentine politics has been mentioned by Rinaldo degli Albizzi at the 1426 Santo Stefano meeting of the oligarchs.¹⁸⁷ Both Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo are bovine in appearance in Filelfo’s view. Cosimo has the complexion of a weasel and yellow eyes, the latter being due to his excessive drinking.¹⁸⁸ When Palla Strozzi is attempting to have a serious philosophical discussion, he at one point raises the terminist question of whether a “cow” is a “cow” because it is named a cow, or because of its nature.¹⁸⁹ Poggio then emerges from a stupor (philosophical discussions, he continually points out in the dialogue, bore him) and states that he knows precisely what a “cow” is. A “cow” is Lorenzo de’ Medici (bos est Laurentius Medices). He looks like a cow (his sagging jowls give him away), when he walks, he sways like a cow, he licks the mucus from his nose with his tongue, and when he tries to speak, a mooing sound emerges.¹⁹⁰ According to Filelfo, Lorenzo’s brother Cosimo had been nicknamed the “cow” by his domestic staff, and the name had now caught on in Florence.¹⁹¹

One would think that a university professor attempting to attract a large number of students would not attempt to ridicule the physically ugly either in the Quattrocento or in the modern world, especially if that professor were himself physically attractive (as Filelfo was, at least until he was scarred on the via Ramaglianti).¹⁹² Filelfo, as far as we know, did not exactly engage in such ridicule. In an oration before his lectures on Dante, for instance, he noted that natural deficiencies, such as Socrates’ notorious ugliness, can be overcome by a sort of beauty projected by virtue. Likewise, the greatest orators of Greek and Latin antiquity, Demosthenes and Cicero, were able to overcome natural defects of speech. This same oration then describes Dante as truly felice in that he was physically as well as intellectually beautiful.¹⁹³ In an early satire dedicated to Palla Strozzi (dated May 1, 1431), Filelfo declared Strozzi felix too and emphasized his intellectual and moral goodness, but also referred to his physical beauty and that of his children.¹⁹⁴ Surely Filelfo owed the reference to Palla Strozzi as felix to Leonardo Bruni, who had notoriously declared Strozzi to be the embodiment of happiness.¹⁹⁵ I think that Filelfo’s use of this image explains Bruni’s alleged statement: the definition of “happiness” must indeed derive from Aristotle.¹⁹⁶ Happiness expresses completion or fulfillment, a beauty, wisdom, and wealth that Palla Strozzi embodied. Palla was always a sort of alter ego of Cosimo, but for Cosimo’s critics he was at a much higher level. They were equally wealthy (Palla more so, at least according to the catasto of 1427), but Palla was more learned, good-looking, and healthy, and he had a large, healthy, and learned family. (The theme continues throughout the Quattrocento: Cosimo’s children die early, except the worst of the lot, Piero the Gouty, and Lorenzo il Magnifico was notoriously ugly, so much so that Machiavelli would describe a hideous prostitute as having his mouth.)¹⁹⁷ Unhealthiness, as represented by the Medici and their humanist supporters, is a regular theme in Filelfo: Marsuppini’s pallid face shows his addiction to sodomy, his vitiated eyes reveal a monster, his breath stinks, and he spits continuously when talking;¹⁹⁸ Poggio stutters constantly, even on those rare occasions when he is sober; Niccoli stays drunk also, and he dresses like an idiot; and Traversari, ensconced in his convent, is drooling over which boy to take next.¹⁹⁹

Moreover, the Medici inhabit “dark places.” As I argued in chapter 3, traditionalists found revolting the dark, cramped quarters of the womb, the tomb, and proletarian haunts. Franco Sacchetti’s wonderfully entitled La battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze con le vecchie revels in the young, beautiful, and better-born slaughtering the old, proletarian, and ugly, who plot their assaults from underground quarters. In Filelfo’s view, Poggio pretends to participate in a learned discussion but wants to head off to the aedes Bartheldinae, a place on what is now via Tornabuoni where sex could be bought.²⁰⁰ He does not tell us in the De exilio what went on there, but we can learn about that in an undated satire, probably from the mid-1430s, where in a cavernous retreat Cosimo, Poggio, Marsuppini, and Niccoli enjoy themselves with lots of wine, vomit, urine, and youth.²⁰¹ In this satire Filelfo states that Cosimo appeared to be virtuous during the day, but when darkness fell he headed to his dens of wickedness. Cosimo’s ancestors had indeed inhabited caves in the Mugello.²⁰² In another satire Filelfo described Cosimo’s “triumphal” return to Florence, in 1434: he came in under cover of darkness, because that is where his soul lurked.²⁰³

Often humanist invectives emphasized the lower-class background of the person under attack, sometimes adding to it a paternal criminal, usurer, or priest, or perhaps conception due to some irregularity. Filelfo plays on these themes, finding in Cosimo’s forebears mere peasants. But, unlike most polemicists who used such themes, he is able to expand on them through references that all could recognize. During the Ciompi insurrection, for instance, Cosimo’s relative Salvestro de’ Medici raised the hideous standard of the woolworkers’ sack and grappling hooks.²⁰⁴ Today all the best people in Florence shun the Medici: his followers are charcoal dealers, usurers, innkeepers, and petty gamblers.²⁰⁵ The theme is repeated several times in several forms in the work.²⁰⁶ Earlier, in a satire on Cosimo de’ Medici written before the events of 1433–4, Filelfo stated that he himself had the support of the political classes (ordo senatus) and middle classes (ordo medius). Cosimo’s support came from the lower classes only (plebs tibi dedita tantum / insequitur), as well as from disgraceful humanists such as Poggio, Traversari, Marsuppini, and Niccoli.²⁰⁷ Filelfo is thus portraying the Medici–oligarchic confrontations in stark terms of class struggle, something scholars have been reluctant to do from the Quattrocento to the present.

It is difficult to attempt to summarize Filelfo’s career in Florence. While Bruni was loath to enter the political arena, Filelfo arrived there quickly and very soon began composing polemics against the Medici regime. But while in Bruni one finds a core of ideas that he developed early and modified with time, with Filelfo one may question exactly what the core ideas were. He was so reactive to events that one wonders whether, on his arrival in Florence, more substantial Medici patronage and different reactions from humanists and others would have created a different figure entirely. I am therefore not claiming here to have provided any kernel of ideas that may form the basis of an intellectual biography.

Filelfo was, nonetheless, the leading critic of the Medici regime. While modern scholarship may want to place him and his critics at the periphery of culture, we should not forget the evidence presented in this chapter.²⁰⁸ Filelfo was exceptionally acute in a number of areas. He knew that Cosimo had to be put to death—and here we may contrast his wisdom with the dreary moralisms of modern scholars. He also made exceptionally astute observations about early philosophers and had an exemplary understanding of Aristotle.²⁰⁹

Most importantly for our purposes, Filelfo recognized the importance of ideology in the struggle between the Mediceans and their opponents. An odd statement from the Orationes ad exules optimates recognizes this ideology and offhandedly gives Poggio an exceptional role in the Medici regime. Without Poggio, Filelfo states, Cosimo de’ Medici is “feeble, maimed, and weak.” And, without Cosimo, Poggio is “useless.”²¹⁰

Let us now turn to this Medici party ideology.

Notes

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 8 and Mi BTriv 873, fol. 12: Invidentium autem morsus animi gravitate atque magnitudine me facile vitaturum spero. Quod si minus mihi diu licuerit, operam dabo ut aliorum id culpa factum iudicetur non meā. For Filelfo’s letters I shall be citing the 1502 Venice edition, which is considered the best early edition. Many other letters are in Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, ms. 873. The Trivulziana manuscript is a huge fifteenth-century codex of Filelfo’s Greek and Latin letters. But, for our purposes, it is not a treasure trove: most of the letters that are not in the Venice 1502 edition and are relevant to this study have been edited elsewhere, and most of the unedited ones deal with minor philological, medical, and similar questions, possibly of great interest to other scholars. When I cite the Trivulziana manuscript concurrently with the 1502 edition, this usually means I have found a better reading in the former. Vito R. Giustiniani, a careful scholar, worked for many years to prepare a critical edition of Filelfo’s letters (an immense project, with more than two thousand Latin letters); his death has left behind two separate projects to edit the letters. Jeroen De Keyser is preparing a limited edition, which is based on the Trivulziana manuscript and notes some variants, mainly from the 1502 edition. Silvia Fiaschi has embarked on a more ambitious critical edition project. Some of the Trivulziana letters, as well as the extravagantes, are edited in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfō, and Filelfo’s Latin letters to Traversari can be found in Book 24 of Traversari, Epist. For Filelfo’s Greek letters, see Theodor Klettē, Die griechischen Briefe des Franciscus Philelphus (Hildesheim: Olms, 1970 [1890]; many letters are truncated) and Émile Legrand’s 1892 edition, which gives the text with French translations or sometimes paraphrases and summaries (Filelfo, Epist., ed. Legrand). Italian translations, literal and based on Legrand’s edition, have been made by Lavinio Agostinellī in Lettere di Francesco Filelfo volgarizzate dal grecō (Tolentino: Tipografia Francesco Filelfo, 1899; preface and notes by Giovanni Benadduci). Probably in good faith, Filelfo claimed that the letters he wrote in Italian were not meant to be preserved, as noted in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), p. XLIII, and in Revilo P. Oliver, “The Satires of Francesco Filelfo,” Italicā 26 (1949): 23–4, n. 2. On Filelfo’s letter book, see Vito R. Giustiniani, “Lo scrittore e l’uomo nell’epistolario di Francesco Filelfo,” in Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenariō, pp. 249–74, and now Jeroen De Keyser and Luigi Silvanō, “Per un regesto dell’epistolario greco-latino di Francesco Filelfo,” Medioevo greco: Rivista di storia e filologia bizantinā 6 (2006): 139–43.

See chapter 2, p. 58.

⁴

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 9; MiBTriv 873, fol. 13v (April 19, 1429): Nam hic, quantum mihi augurari iam videor, inter Scyllam Charybdinque navigabo … . [H]aec urbs, non multo minus quam Bononia, factionibus dissidet, quin eo periculosius quo acutiora videntur mihi hominum ingenia et ad nocendum procliviora.

⁵

Although in this letter of 1429 Filelfo has Scylla and Charybdis represent the two main factions in Florence, in a satire to Giovanni Aurispa dated April 14, 1432, he made an analogy that was close to the one I have presented here: Scylla and Charybdis are both occupied by Medicean humanists and the horrific Arno makes clear sailing impossible: Arnus / fluctibus assiduis et turbine tollitur horrens. / Hinc nos Scylla rapit terrens latratibus auras; / Scylla porcellosis rabie stimulata furenti / cautibus et foedis alto sub gurgite monstris / nititur acre fremens immergere; saeva Charybdis / inde trahens furibunda comis funesta minatur (“The frightful Arno is swollen by unrelenting waves and eddies. On one side Scylla ensnares us with a terrifying barking. Moved by a furious rage, Scylla labors to submerge with a piercing howl, with her storms, jutting rocks, and repulsive monsters from the deep. On the other side one is drawn by the deadly threats of a raging Charybdis, her hair loosened in fury”: Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 3.3, ll. 74–80; for the dating, see Fiaschi’s note at p. 152). For similar remarks in a later work, see Filelfo, De exilio (p. 208).

⁶

Filelfo needs a modern biography. We shall mention a few comprehensive works here; more specialized ones will appear in the notes that follow. The three-volume 1808 study by Carlo de’ Rosmini (Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo), is still useful, although it mostly consists of a narrative based on Filelfo’s own letters. He ignored many of Filelfo’s polemical works, especially the Satires, which are of much interest to us, because he was offended by their obscenity (see, for instance, the note in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 75). Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze” is quite good for my present purposes (the numerous dating and technical errors are clear typos and can easily be sorted out). Benadduci edits a number of Italian poems and orations; see Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci). His “Contributo alla bibliografia di Francesco Filelfo” in that volume (pp. 459–535) lists primary and secondary works, and some manuscript sources too. Other wide-ranging documentary evidence comes from Calderini, “Ricerche,” and Aristide Calderini, “I codici milanesi delle opere di Francesco Filelfo,” Archivio Storico Lombardo, 42 (1915): 335–411; the latter has a number of useful listings and a checklist of his works. Adam, “Filelfo at the Court of Milan” has a comprehensive checklist of manuscripts spanning Filelfo’s entire career. The Deutches Historisches Institut in Rome has long promised to publish this fine dissertation and has even advertised it (some secondary literature has listed it as published), but it has still not come out, and its status is now uncertain. A number of interesting studies appear in Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario. See now Polo Viti’s excellent short sketch (Viti, “Filelfo,” with a comprehensive bibliography). Except for the period from about 1427 to 1439, for which I am using original sources, my summary of Filelfo’s life follows Viti.

⁷

Ambrogio Traversari’s letter of June 21, 1424 to Niccolò Niccoli stating that both Guarino and Teodora’s mother were repulsed by this union, the result of assault (Filelfo is unnamed), is suspicious (as noted in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 17n). As others have noted, Traversari may have composed the piece at a later date (more than half a decade later), after his polemics with Filelfo began in Florence, pretending that it was an earlier spontaneous reaction (see Traversari, Epist. 8.9, LuisoAT 8.11). Poggio, writing in the 1430s, was more imaginative: he claimed that Filelfo had raped both the girl and her mother (Invectiva prima in Philelphum, in Poggio, Opera, vol. 1, p. 167). As for Filelfo’s progeny, he himself remarked that he was oversexed, τριόρχης (“three-testicled”); see Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 15.

⁸

This entire paragraph closely follows Viti, “Filelfo,” pp. 613–14.

⁹

Letter to Leonardo Giustiniani, October 11, 1427; in Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 1.

¹⁰

Letters to Leonardo Giustiniani, December 18, 1427 and February 9, 1428 (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 2, 4).

¹¹

The hostage possibility is suggested by Filelfo’s letter to Leonardo Giustiniani from Bologna, dated June 1, 1428 (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 5–5v). See also Ambrogio Traversari’s letter to Giustiniani, August 22, 1429 (Traversari, Epist., 6.28, LuisoAT 6.31). For the various testimonies concerning the books, see

Berthold Fenigstein, Leonardo Giustiniani (1383?–1446) (Halle: Ehrhardt Karras, 1909), pp. 50–6;

Calderini, “Ricerche,” pp. 220–7.

¹²

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 4–4v (February 23, 1428; letter to Giovanni Aurispa). Three hundred florins were to come from public sources; the rest was guaranteed by private ones.

¹³

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 4 (February 13, 1428). According to J. Davies, Florence and Its University, pp. 17, 68–9, Florence was attempting to strengthen its university during this period.

¹⁴

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 6v (August 30, 1428).

¹⁵

Letter to Palla Strozzi on that date: Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 7.

¹⁶

Filelfo to Bruni, February 13 and April 4: Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 8, 8v.

¹⁷

Filelfo to Antonio Loschi, April 19; the letter mentions the recent arrival (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 9).

¹⁸

Piero de’ Medici and Filelfo seem to have always been on good terms. Even in Filelfo’s Orationes ad exules optimates, where the Medici are described as disgusting degenerates, Filelfo states that Piero was an exception (Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 340v).

¹⁹

See

Arthur Field, “The Studium Florentinum Controversy, 1455,” History of Universities 3 (1983): 31–59

(largely reproduced, with some additional information but less documentation overall, in Field, Origins, pp. 77–106).

²⁰

I have seen the copy in Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, ms. C 87; it bears the date and place at the end (Bologna, June 13, 1428).

²¹

Bruni, Epist. 5.6 (LuisoLB 5.3); the incipit is In bonam queso partem accipias mi iocundissime Philelfe (Bertalot 2: 9392). Bruni bowdlerized this piece when he prepared his letters for publication in the late 1430s. The original, warmer and more enthusiastic, can be read through Luiso’s notes, which are based on the Filelfo miscellany Ricc. 1200, fol. 157–157v (although Bertalot lists other early copies). The first ten lines of this earlier edition (counting from the Mehus edition) can be found in Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 121–121v, another Filelfo miscellany to which I shall soon return (p. 212).

²²

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 7, dated September 19.

²³

Dated August 9, 1429 in its earlier versions. Seen by me in Ricc. 1200, fols. 169–171v (dated August 9, 1429), in Lucca BStatale 1436, fols. 114v–23v (dated September 1 and 9, 1429), and in Vat. Chig. J V 153, fols. 47–65v (dated September 1, 1429, fols. 48v, 59v); but the work is in numerous other manuscripts and has several early printed editions. See the main entries in Bertalot 2.7759, 2.15764. Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” p. 222n. edits part of the earlier preface (Bertalot 2.22344), which is based on Ricc. 1200, fol. 169.

²⁴

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 4v (April 4, 1428).

²⁵

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 5v (June 28, 1428). Ten days later, on July 7, Filelfo wrote to Traversari again, mentioning a copy of his translation of Dio Chrysostom, which he had sent earlier to Leonardo Bruni (but Bruni is not mentioned in this letter). This second letter is edited in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, pp. 115–16. More than a month later, on August 17, in another warm letter to Traversari, Filelfo asked the monk to greet a number of people, “and especially Niccoli” (Traversari, Epist. 24.35, LuisoAT 24.22). This would indicate that by then Filelfo knew that the two were close. There are other early letters between Filelfo and Traversari, including a correspondence in Greek.

²⁶

Filelfo’s poem in praise of Cosimo, with the incipit Cosmus es et cosmi decus, is extant in its complete form in a single manuscript, FiBLaur Acq. e Doni 323, fols. 74v–76, written in Bologna and dated at the end August 16, 1428. Adam, “Filelfo at the Court of Milan,” p. 487 argues that the dates are jumbled in the manuscript, and the poem really belongs to 1430 (precisely to October 15). Silvia Fiaschi states that Adam is incorrect but does not really address the question raised by Adam (see Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, p. xix). I still think that Adam is correct, but the question is complicated. I intend to address it in a future study.

Filelfo made his scattered satires into a ten-book work in the late 1440s. Some manuscripts and early printed editions have glosses on them either in Filelfo’s hand or apparently authorized by him. These have now been studied and edited by

Silvia Fiaschi, “Autocommento ed interventi d’autore nelle Satyrae del Filelfo: L’esempio del codice viennese 3303.” Medioevo e Rinascimento 16 (2002): 113–88,

and “Deformazioni storiche e propaganda politica negli scritti antimedicei di Franceso Filelfo,” in Il Principe e la storia: Atti del convegno, Scandiano, 18–20 settembre 2003, ed. Tina Matarrese and Cristina Montagnani (Novara: Interlinea, 2005), pp. 415–37. Some of these glosses are now reproduced in her very fine edition of the first five books of the satires, Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi). In earlier stages of my research on these satires I was assisted with information from Fiaschi’s mentor, the late Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, as well as with publications and kind communications from José Solís de los Santos. His fine studies are now superseded by Fiaschi’s work; hence I shall not cite them regularly. For references, see p. 557 in Fiaschi’s edition. For books 6–10 of Filelfo’s satires I shall be citing the 1476 Milan edition.

²⁷

Filelfo, letter to Niccoli, September 30, 1428, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 7.

²⁸

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, p. 54. See also Filelfo’s letter to Niccoli, September 30, 1428, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 7. Poggio mentions Niccoli’s support of Filelfo in his funeral oration on Niccoli and in a letter to Pietro Tommasi written a decade later, on January 10, 1447: Poggio, Epist. (ed. Harth), vol. 3, pp. 39–43.

²⁹

The relevant section is in Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” p. 222n. (text based on an earlier edition). Filelfo also praised Giannozzo Manetti.

³⁰

Letter from Bologna, dated July 10, 1428, MiBTriv 873, fol. 8: tu longe secus tibi vitam instituisti, qui nobilitatem non tam a maiorum claritate opibusque definias et caeteris fortunae commodis quam a sola meraque virtute (“you have for a long time so regulated your life that you have defined nobility not by ancestry or wealth, or by matters of fortune, but by pure and genuine virtue”). The idea that “only virtue bestows and takes away the name of nobility” (sola virtus dat nobilitatis et aufert nomen) appears also in Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.4—a poem addressed to the Venetian Marco Lippomano sometime before February 1432 (quotation at ll. 31–32; for the date, see Fiaschi’s note at p. 23).

³¹

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 63–7.

³²

Letters to Stefano Porcari, dated by Luiso to the latter half of 1428 (Traversari, Epist. 5.14, LuisoAT 5.3), and to Leonardo Giustiniani, May 22, 1429 (Traversari, Epist. 6.34, LuisoAT 6.29).

³³

See the summary in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, pp. 15–17.

³⁴

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 1v–2, letter to Leonardo Giustiniani, December 17, 1427.

³⁵

This appears in paintings of the nativity, as either particular or generic Greeks become “wise men from the East” and are portrayed as Magi. Florentines were both fascinated and repulsed by the Greek “imperial manner.” In a letter dated August 1, 1429 and addressed to Giovanni Aurispa, for instance, Traversari complained about Filelfo’s Graeca levitas et vanitas (Epist. 6.26, LuisoAT 6.30).

³⁶

Poggio referred to him dismissively as a Graecus barbatus in a polemic in the mid-1430s. For this and other similar references, see Fiaschi’s note to Satire 5.7 in Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), vol. 1, p. 496. In his Commentationes Florentinae de exilio Filelfo has Poggio confront a bearded Rinaldo degli Albizzi and find him terrifying (p. 106).

³⁷

Oratio de visendae Florentinae urbis desiderio in suo legendi principio habita Florentiae, in Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), pp. 148–51. The oration is undated but the context makes it either his first or one of his first orations. A work listed in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), p. 13—namely Filelfo’s oration in praise of Florence, given on the feast of John the Baptist on June 24, 1429, in Brescia, Biblioteca Civica Querciana, ms. B VI 4—is actually a copy of Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis (see Fera, “Itinerari filologici,” p. 135). According to Fera, Bruni’s text bears no date and no other work of Filelfo bears the date given above. This remarkable confusion seems due to Bruni’s evocation of the Baptist in the oration, as well as to Benadduci’s imagination. I have not seen the Brescia manuscript, but Fera’s conclusion is confirmed by the detailed description in

Achilles Beltrami, “Index codicum classicorum Latinorum qui in Bybliotheca Quiriniana Brixiensi adservantur,” Studi italiani di filologia classica 14 (1906): 70–3.

³⁸

Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner). p. 148.

³⁹

Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), p. 149–50: Peragravi et ego ipse nonnullas orbis terrae cum claras tum maxime inter se distantes diversasque regiones, multorum hominum vidi urbes et varios mores novi.

⁴⁰

For these “world tours,” see p. 92. Filelfo used the topos elsewhere, as when he was threatened with exile in March 1432, and in a satire he imagined being sent to the Britanni in the west, the Hyperborei in the north, the Ganges in the east, or the Gorgones in the south (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.1, lines 36–41; I do not understand what the Gorgones have to do with the south). He used a similar image in a vernacular poem to the Signoria; the poem has the incipit Magnanimi Signori, in cui la fama and can be found in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 19–20. After his Studio appointment was temporarily canceled in November 1431, Filelfo described a personified Reason being sent away again to the edges of the earth, in a vernacular poem to the Signoria (A l’eccelsa e illustre reipublica Florentina, with the incipit Or che potrai tu più; in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari,” ed. Benadduci, pp. 16–18). The language was much like that of Cino Rinuccini, who described going to the ends of the earth in order to get away from the radical humanists (see chapter 3, p. 92).

⁴¹

Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), p. 150: qui homines Florentinorum praesentia, consilio, sapientia ac ductu vacant, ii etsi potentes lucupletesque sunt, nihil tamen habent insigne aliud quod ostendant praeter rusticitates egregias et ineptias singulares (“when men are lacking the resolution, counsel, wisdom, and leadership of the Florentines, even if they are wealthy and powerful, they nevertheless have nothing to show for it beyond an exceptional boorishness and singular foolishness”).

⁴²

For example in this early academic oration; see Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), p. 150: vos usque visere cupiebam, quo frequenter inter vos usu doctior ipse fierem: vos ultro cupientem devocastis, praemium et quidem honestissimum posuistis, e discipulo doctorem reddidistis, id est ut ex propemodum indocto et rudi doctissime eruditus existimarer praestitistis. (“I have desired to be in your presence, so that with regular contact I might become more learned. You moreover have beckoned your devotee, have offered a reward, and a very honorable one, and have created a doctor from the student, that is, you have seen to it that I, practically unlearned and without polish, can now consider myself learned and erudite.”) He repeated the theme elsewhere. This is more “collegial” in spirit than the humanist disclaimers—usual in such speeches, where they belong to the expected captatio benevolentiae—about one’s “modest” rhetorical capacities.

⁴³

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, p. 54: Et per exercitare gli scolari et dare loro riputatione faceva fare a ognuno una oratione volgare, et recitavala in Sancta Liperata, in sul pergamo, in publico, et in questo modo dava loro animo et riputatione (“And to train his students and to give them fame he had each compose a vernacular oration and deliver it in Santa Reparata, from the rostrum and before the public, and in this way he gave them confidence and fame”). Vespasiano is referring to lectures delivered by students in the fall of 1431, in vernacular, at the cathedral, when Filelfo took up the Dante course, but we have evidence that Filelfo organized the same sort of thing during his Latin lectures. Student orations were common at the beginning of the academic year, but Filelfo took this practice further. His novelty was perhaps mentioned by one of his students, in an oration titled Sermone de la liberalità (incipit Non piccolo spavento al presente nel mio animo and ending or desinit immortale et divina gloria acquisterete): see Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 33–6. Benadduci attributes it to Filelfo himself—or rather misattributes it, I think. Zippel, “Il Filelfo in Firenze,” p. 236, n. 55 quotes this oration from Ricc. 2272, fol. 105 and notes that the student mentions the “new custom started by him” (nuova usanza da lui incominciata). I have not looked systematically for manuscripts of this work, but I have seen it in five Filelfo miscellanies: Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 102–3v; Ricc. 1200, fol. 118–118v; Ricc. 2266, fols. 222v–4, with a slightly different desinit (immortale et quasi divina gloria sempre possederete); Ricc. 2272, fols. 105–107; and Lucca BStatale 1640, fol. 72–4 (the desinit is grolia sempre aquisterete). Only in the last of these manuscripts is the work attributed to Filelfo (or rather “Filerfo”). The orator mentions his adolescence and the novelty of his discourse (this language seems more appropriate for a student). But it is not entirely clear to me that the nuova usanza that the student (as I presume) mentions refers to a new university practice, as Zippel maintains, or to the novelty of his public speaking. But Zippel may well be correct.

Also in Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 92v–4v, is a Sermo de iustitia habito [sic] ad successorem in offitio with the incipit Non piccolo spavento nel presente da il mio animo, which reproduces almost verbatim the same text for the first sixteen lines, and then goes off on its own (desinit: et a presso allo eterno et omnipotente dio somma retributione et gloria sempiterna). At some point the text picks up Filelfo’s Sermo di giustizia, with the incipit Euripede poeta, uomo non solo di eloquenza (in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari,” ed. Benadduci, pp. 40–4). The texts of Filelfo’s vernacular orations and those of his students are extremely complicated, and one hopes that they will eventually be sorted out. There are two reasons why the student orations could at times follow very closely works attributed to Filelfo: either the student was obsequious or Filelfo composed them.

⁴⁴

See, for instance,

Giovanni Vignuolo, “Note inedite di F. F. a Giovenale (Sat. I–IV),” Studia Picena, 42 (1975): 96–125,

and Rossella Bianchi, “Note di Francesco Filelfo al De natura deorum, al De oratore, e all’Eneide negli appunti di un notaio senese,” in Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario, pp. 326–68. Most of these notes seem ordinary enough, although they show more originality than was the custom and greater attention to Greek etymologies. They do not show, however, much concern with anything other than the definitions of words. This may have reflected, however, the scribes’ interest rather than the actual teaching.

⁴⁵

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 9; MiBTriv 873, fols. 13v–14 at 13v: Florentia me plurimum delectat. Est enim urbs cui nihil desit, neque ad aedificiorum magnificentiam atque venustatem neque ad civium dignitatem et amplitudinem. Adde quod universa in me civitas conversa est. Omnes me diligunt, honorant omnes, ac summis laudibus in caelum efferunt. Meum nomen in ore est omnibus. Nec primarii cives modo, cum per urbem incedo, sed ipsae etiam nobilissimae foeminae honorandi mei gratia locum cedunt … Auditores sunt quottidie ad quadringentos vel fortassis etiam amplius, et hi quidem magna ex parte viri grandiores et ex ordine senatorio. Filelfo’s language is peculiar, since Florence had no ordo senatorius.

⁴⁶

MiBTriv 873, fols. 13v–14; cf. Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 9–9v: Caeterum quo me fortunatiorem esse animadverto, eo magis mihi metuo ab insidiis invidentium. Nicolaus Nicolus et Carolus Arretinus quottidie me publice audituri adeunt, una cum aliis civibus. Et Nicolaus quidem, quantum in hanc diem animadvertere potui, homo est loquatior, sed non admodum vafer, quippe qui effutiat [efficiat ed. 1502] facile ac temere omnia. At Carolus, ὥσπερ στυγνὸς [στυγηὸς ed. 1502] ὢν καὶ μισάνθρωπος tristis est semper, ac loquitur nihil. Videturque monstri quippiam intus alere. Et sunt qui mihi dicant eum cavendum eo esse magis quo magis silet. Id enim non a modestia atque verecundia proficisci sed ab invidentiae vulnere. Ego tamen in portu navigo. Leonardus autem Arretinus mihi vehementer afficitur, quem eo puto rerum mearum studiosum magis fore, quod adventu presentiaque mea maximo est levatus onere. Nam et Nicolaus et Carolus, qui ante adventum meum illi plurimum detrahebant, ab omni eiusmodi calumnia maledictoque destitere, mea causa, ut existimatur, deterriti, quod vidissent ab me Leonardum publice et graviter et ornate et pleno ore laudatum. Cosmus Medices, ut humanitatis plurimum prae se fert, adiit me perhumaniter [perhumane ed. 1502], nec id semel sed iterum atque iterum, dixitque si qua mihi in re opus foret, opera sua ne de se mihi ipse deessem unquam: nam sese mihi defuturum nunquam. Pallas Stroza splendidissimus eques auratus omnibus in rebus mihi semper adest, honorique et commodis, meis omnibus non secus studet, ac si essem filius. Ambrosius monachus vir disertissimus, etsi me amare videtur plurimum, tamen non potest mihi non suspectus esse.

⁴⁷

Letter to Leonardo Giustiniani, May 22, 1429 (Traversari, Epist. 6.34; LuisoAT 6.29).

⁴⁸

Traversari, Epist. 6.26 (LuisoAT 6.30; August 1, 1429): De Philelpho nostro tenes sententiam meam: nonnihil, immo verum plurimum, habet Graecae levitatis et vanitatis admixtum. Me adit et nimis quidem frequenter: magna de se pollicetur. Sed apud eos qui (ut ipse quoque verissime sentis) huiusque merces probe callent, melius consuleret sibi, si parcius de se loqueretur. Nam nescio quo pacto laus, vera etiam in ore proprio, ingrate resonat. Deus illum iuvet! (“As for our Filelfo, you know my opinion. He has a certain degree—no, a rather large degree—of Greek levity and vanity. He comes to me too frequently, promising much about himself. But among those who offer goods for sale with honesty, as you yourself truly know, it is better to examine more and talk less. For somehow praise, even if merited, sounds unpleasant coming from one’s own mouth. May God help him!”)

⁴⁹

See

Diana Robin, “A Reassessment of the Character of F. F. (1398–1481),” Renaissance Quarterly 36 (1983): 202–24,

who argues that the criticisms of Filelfo’s character that appear so often in the secondary literature are due to an unconsidered rehashing of the opinions of Filelfo’s critics. Much of Diana Robin’s work on Filelfo has merit: this essay is an exception.

⁵⁰

Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), p. 150, referring to ego qui quos … mearum laudum meorumque honorum studiosissimos diligentissimosque perspicio (“I who perceive those so very enthusiastic and scrupulous about my praise and honor”). See n. 37 in this chapter.

⁵¹

This would have been effectively true, even if the Studio did not have a fixed budget.

⁵²

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, p. 54 (dugento iscolari o più). The two figures are not necessarily contradictory, since Filelfo was obviously counting auditores who were not precisely students.

⁵³

Piacenza, Biblioteca Comunale, Landi 31, fols. 36v–38 at 38: habetis preceptorem verum singularem Karolum Aretinum, cui quicquid in me boni aut est aut erit iure tribuendo censeo, quem haud oratorum principem vereor nominare. Quid est enim quod verear? Archiam namque poetam celeberrimum preceptorem suum Marcus Tullius eloquentie decus quom iuvaret in causa non veritus est illius optimi viri laudes predicare. This oration (the incipit is Cum de litterarum magnitudine verba facturus sim) was recently discovered by me and announced in Field, “Leonardo Bruni, Florentine Traitor?” p. 1119. I was led to it by Bertalot, Initia, 2: 3062. The expressions of goodwill toward Marsuppini would seem to make the oration early. But the statement that Filelfo had learned much from Marsuppini, his magister, would make sense only if Filelfo was attending his lectures (this sort of attendance by fellow humanists seems commonplace, at least in Florence; Marsuppini, we just noted, was in 1429 attending Filelfo’s lectures). One possible date for this oration would be December 1431, when Filelfo had replaced Marsuppini as lecturer in the humanities, after a bitter dispute that we shall discuss shortly.

⁵⁴

Oratio in invidos quosdam detractatores Florentiae habita in principio extraordinarie lectionis Tulli de officiis et Homeri yliados et Juvenalis satiri, with the incipit Et dictitare [dictare Munich] et vitio nobis vertere quosdam audio (Bertalot 2.6044, following the Munich reading). This unedited oration is extant in two manuscripts, Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, ms. qu. 768, fols. 130–1, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. class. lat. 222, fols. 79–80v. I am currently editing the oration. The work has been cited in some inventories but in no literature on Filelfo before 1986 (I think)—that is, before Gualdo Rosa, “Una prolusione inedita,” p. 286, n. 32 (she edits another oration of that year). Credit for the discovery would seem to go to Ludwig Bertalot, R. G. Adam, Martin Davies, and Lucia Gualdo Rosa; and I am particularly grateful to Martin Davies for sending me a photocopy of the Oxford version. For Codrus, see Juvenal, Saturae, 1.2. For the Munich manuscript (identifying this oration and signaling also the Oxford manuscript), see Ludwig Bertalot, “Eine humanistische Anthologie: Die Handschrift 4° 768 der Universitätsbibliothek München,” in Bertalot, Studien, vol. 1, pp. 1–82, at p. 39. The timing of Filelfo’s public entry into the world of Florentine polemics with this oration of December 19, 1429, is fitting. It was then that the Florentine government created the lex contra scandalosos, attempted to impose the catasto on Volterra (where the Mediceans and the oligarchs were on opposite sides), and witnessed debates over beginning a military campaign designed to take over Lucca (see chapter 2, pp. 56, 59, 60–2).

⁵⁵

Oratio de laudibus historiae, poeticae, philosophiae et quae hasce complectitur eloquentiae, pro legendi initio Florentiae habita in publico auditorum, doctorum civiumque consessu (the title has an interesting phrasing: an “Oration in praise of history, poetry, philosophy, and what is understood to be embraced by ‘eloquence,’ held in Florence in a public assembly of auditors, doctores [roughly those with a university affiliation], and citizens”), edited in Gualdo Rosa, “Una prolusione inedita.” At p. 307, after the survey of Greek historians: Quid autem, ut ad nostros veniam, de Crispo Sallustio? Quid de Livio? Quid de hoc ipso nostro Leonardo Aretino, viro et felicitate ingenii et doctrinae praestantia et rerum ubertate et sententiarum gravitate et copia longe abundantissimo, dicendum statuemus? (punctuation slightly modified; “And, coming to our own [i.e. Latin] historians, what do we say about Sallust? What about Livy? And what about our very own Leonardo of Arezzo, a man so very much abounding in talent, doctrine, breadth, and learning?”)

⁵⁶

This is not to say that one should label Filelfo an “Aristotelian.” He was exceptionally astute, even by modern standards, in recognizing the difficulty of getting at Aristotle’s true opinion, since Aristotle’s works reached us through the filter of his students. On this see, Concetta Bianca, “Auctoritas e veritas: il F. e le dispute tra platonici e aristotelici,” in Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario, pp. 207–47. Yet during his Florentine and Sienese period, that is, throughout the late 1430s, Filelfo had a clear preference for Aristotle.

⁵⁷

The translation was dedicated originally to Cardinal Alfonso Carrillo de Albornoz (see Gualdo Rosa, “Una prolusione inedita,” p. 277). Filelfo announced the translation in a letter to Ambrogio Traversari, September 1428 (Traversari, Epist. 24.38, LuisoAT 24.25; Luiso dates the letter September 10–20, 1428).

⁵⁸

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.10, ll. 92–100. See Della Torre, Storia, pp. 288–9 and Gianvito Resta, “Francesco Filelfo tra Bisanzio e Roma,” in Francesco Filelfo nel quinto centenario, pp. 14–15. A certain Alessandro Arrighi very soon borrowed Matteo Strozzi’s copy, since he wrote to Strozzi that he was returning it (letter of February 29, 1432: FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 107/1): Librum rethoricorum Aristotelis traductum per eloquentissimum ac utriusque lingue peritissimum virum Franciscum Philelfum ad te mittere institui (“I am sending you Aristotle’s Rhetoric, translated by the very eloquent Francesco Filelfo, a man quite skilled in both [the Greek and Latin] languages”). I am inclined to identify this Arrighi with the prominent political figure Alessandro di Iacopo di Francesco Arrighi, born in 1394 (fl. through 1451) and a member of the Signoria in 1431: see

Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 171,

n. 763, and Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), vol. 1, p. 135, n. 438. In the letter to Strozzi, Arrighi mentions his public offices (onera publica). I am adding here some citations. There is a letter from Alessandro di Iacopo Arrighi to Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici, sent from Firenzuola on June 12, 1455 (MAP V 608). Mariotto Nori’s Latin letter from Mantua to Matteo di Simone Strozzi, dated August 19, no year (Cart. Strozz. III 131, fol. 6), praises Leonardo Bruni and asks Strozzi to convey greetings to Alexander Arrigus as well as to Manetti and Marsuppini. In early 1431 Biagio Guasconi wrote to Matteo di Simone Strozzi asking him to request Alessando Arrighi’s intervention in a political matter (Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 57/2). Vespasiano da Bisticci mentions that a certain Alessandro Arrighi, along with Matteo di Simone Strozzi, Benedetto Strozzi, and Antonio Barbadori, attended lectures by Giannozzo Manetti on the Nicomachean Ethics (life of Matteo di Simone Strozzi, in Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, p. 221; see also vol. 2, pp. 427, 525). A colophon of a manuscript of Phocas, probably copied in the 1410s, reads Allexander Arigus scripsit (FiBLaur Gaddi 169, fol. 20v; reference owed to Robert Black). For the manuscript and its presumed date, via a watermark, see

Colette Jeudy, “L’Ars de nomine et verbo de Phocas: Manuscrits et commentaires médiévaux,” Viator 5 (1974): 93.

⁵⁹

On such lectures in general, see

David A. Lines, Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1300–1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

⁶⁰

See his Oratio in principio Ethicorum, which has the incipit Cum egregiam et perillustrem moralis sapientiae vim (Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” pp. 242–4; and Reden und Briefe, ed. Müllner, pp. 158–60). The oration should be dated December 30, 1431 (3 kal. Ian., as Bertalot 2.3131 and Müllner have it); Zippel’s December 29 seems to be a lapsus mentis.

⁶¹

I have looked at a number of possible candidates for student orations, mainly in Filelfo miscellanies, and I shall list a few items here (some of them almost certainly date from Filelfo’s Sienese period). Pietro Perleoni da Rimini gave one, probably before the lectures of 1431–2. It has the incipit Cum meam imbecillitatem [imbecilitatem Rome] ingenii animique vires (Bertalot 2.3493) and survives in at least two manuscripts: the Filelfo miscellany Ricc. 1200, fol. 145v–6, and Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, ms. 141, fol. 55–55v. It was edited in Reden und Briefe (ed. Müllner), pp. 144–6, on the basis of these two manuscripts. See also the Filelfo miscellany, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 64v, where perhaps a form of this incipit appears in a list of formularies. Perleoni urges his audience to hear hunc eloquentissimum atque praeclarissimum doctorem nostrum legentem (“this our very eloquent and outstanding doctor lecturing”) on Aristotle; and he states that no one “of our age” can compare with the Stagirite (Reden und Briefe, ed. Müllner, p. 146). Another oration by Perleoni, In ethicorum Aristotelis initio in studio, with the incipit Multum diuque ipse mecum animo verti, is undated and survives in at least two manuscripts, both Filelfo miscellanies: Ricc. 1200, fols. 142–3 and Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 81–2. The title is partly cropped in the latter (Bertalot 2.12464, lists the former manuscript). Here again Perleoni calls Aristotle princeps omnium philosophorum (“most distinguished of all philosophers”), divinus, and deus ut ita dixerim eloquentie (“like a god, as it were, of eloquence”; Ricc. 1200, fol. 142v). Since the simile with a god echoes the language of Filelfo’s inaugural oration on the Ethics of December 30, 1431 (cited at n. 60 in this chapter and quoted further down at p. 202), it is likely that this student oration was contemporaneous. The student then states that, cum a Phylelfo preceptore nostro tum latinis tum grecis litteris omnique virtutum genere mirabiliter predito hodierno die liber ethicorum Aristotelis incoandus sit (“since lectures on Aristotle’s book of Ethics will begin today, by our teacher Filelfo, wonderfully endowed with both Latin and Greek learning and with every form of virtue”), he will give a brief introduction; and there follows a Vita Aristotelis (Ricc. 1200, fols. 142v–3) based very closely on Leonardo Bruni’s own Vita Aristotelis, which was recently published (see p. 163, above, and p. 211, below). An anonymous oration with the incipit Etsi iudicarem, viri prestantissimi, huius amplissimam loci dignitatem may have been given before lectures on moral philosophy; it is extant in the Filelfo miscellany (Ricc. 1200, fols. 147v–8v; Bertalot 2.6352 cites this manuscript alone), but the orator adopts an eclectic tone, and I shall leave to others its identification. The oration in praise of philosophy with the incipit Ferunt Marcum Tullium magistratus insignes, extant in a humanist miscellany containing much Filelfo material (Laur 89 sup., 27, fols. 101–6v, or 99–104v in older foliation), has been attributed to Agostino Dati (see Bertalot 2.7546); Adam’s listing of this work treats it as anonymous, possibly by a student of Filelfo (Adam, “Filelfo at the Court of Milan,” p. 484); the two attributions are not mutually exclusive (Laura de Feo Corso, “Il F. in Siena,” pp. 206–8). Finally, an oration with the incipit Quamquam ipse ornatissimi adolescentes philosophiam multifacio, extant in the Filelfo miscellanies FiBLaur Acq. e doni 323, fols. 129–30, and FiBN Nuov. Acq. 354, fols. 145v–6v, where it is entitled Oratio eiusdem Franch. qua ortatus est iuvenes ad capessendam disciplinam (an unclear reference, since there is no Franchiscus in the preceding text), and in Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, ms. 1350, fols. 8v–10 (early title crossed out), is an introduction to lectures on Aristotle (as Bertalot lists it, B2.17254, citing the Laurenziana and Angelica manuscripts). The forthcoming lectures were to be on Aristotle but probably not the Ethics; perhaps they were to be on the Physics, which Filelfo conceivably lectured on as well.

⁶²

On this translation, see Gigante, “Traversari interprete di Diogene Laerzio,” pp. 367–459 (p. 372 for the date). Gigante, however, barely mentions the politics of this translation.

⁶³

Traversari had earlier sought the help of his friend Carlo Marsuppini: see Traversari, Epist. 8.17, LuisoAT 8.20 (who dates the letter to 1426 with a question mark). For his turning to Filelfo, see the latter’s letter to Traversari, May 30, 1430, edited in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 117.

⁶⁴

See pp. 162–3. Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, one of Filelfo’s patrons, had a major role in all this, as noted by

Gary Ianziti, “Leonardo Bruni and Biography: The Vita Aristotelis,” Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 805–32

esp. 815–16.

⁶⁵

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 12v–13, dated May 2, 1433. This falls exactly one day after Filelfo’s “conciliatory” letter to Cosimo, to be discussed later (p. 217).

⁶⁶

See Traversari’s undated letter of dedication, to Cosimo (Traversari, Epist. 7.2, LuisoAT 7.2). Luiso dates it to the first half of 1433, but it would have to be more precisely at the very beginning of the year, before the Laurenziana copy came out of Traversari’s convent; see Laur. 65, 21: Michael monachus absolvit hoc opus in conventu Angelorum de Florentia anno domini MCCCCXXXII die VIII februarii (“the monk Michele completed [the transcription of] this work in the monastery [of Santa Maria] degli Angeli of Florence, on February 8, 1432” (1433 modern style); fol. 210). According to Gigante, “Traversari interprete di Diogene Laertio,” p. 372, this is the earliest known manuscript with the dedication. Traversari finally left out of his translation the difficult Greek passages, noting in the letter to Cosimo that “our friend” (amicus noster, said ironically, of course), i.e. Filelfo, had reneged on his promises.

⁶⁷

Traversari, Epist. 6.30 (LuisoAT 6.34), letter to Leonardo Giustiniani of October 14.

⁶⁸

Filelfo, Sat. 2.7 (ed. Fiaschi).

⁶⁹

MiBTriv 873, fol. 18, edited in Calderini, “Ricerche,” p. 288, with a different foliation. See Filelfo’s Greek letter to Aurispa of January 10, 1431, where Filelfo states less polemically that he did not need Diogenes because he already had the text (Filelfo, Epist., ed. Legrand, pp. 13–17).

⁷⁰

Oratio in principio Ethicorum, in Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” p. 243. The oration should be dated December 30, 1431 (see n. 60 in this chapter).

⁷¹

See my survey of the student orations, pp. 200–1, n. 61.

⁷²

Letter from Bologna, March 29, 1439 (Filelfo, Epist., ed. Legrand, pp. 31–4, at p. 31). That Filelfo once promised to translate “all of Aristotle” into Latin, as stated in some secondary literature, seems to be based on a misreading of Satire 1.10 (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.10). See the clarification in Della Torre, Storia, pp. 288–9, n. 2, and Silvia Fiaschi’s note on this satire: Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), p. 371.

⁷³

Traditionalists such as Petrarch or Salutati either used biblical authorities to justify the study of classical poetry or made strained attempts to find a proto-Christian Cicero or other such nonsense. Of course more radical humanists such as Poggio regularly used biblical and patristic sources in discussions of ethics, and they were more than willing to find similarities between pagan teachings and those of Christianity.

⁷⁴

Gualdo Rosa, “Una prolusione inedita,” p. 282.

⁷⁵

See also the opinion of two interlocutors in Filelfo’s later De exilio, Giannozzo Manetti and Palla Strozzi, who describe militant classicists revolted by the use of scriptural authorities (cited at p. 221 in this chapter).

⁷⁶

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 9v–10, letter to Giovanni Lamola.

⁷⁷

See chapter 2, p. 58.

⁷⁸

It seems possible that he supported the war against Lucca, since his students seem to have enthusiastically supported military enterprises (more on this soon). The war was initially defended vigorously by most, but not all, oligarchs, and especially by Rinaldo degli Albizzi, and only later did they try to place the blame for it on the Medici (see chapter 2, pp. 63–4).

⁷⁹

The incipit is Cosmus es et cosmi decus et sublime poetis (Bertalot 1: 858); the text is edited by Silvia Fiaschi in her appendix (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, pp. 513–15). But possibly the poem dates to 1428: see n. 26 in this chapter.

⁸⁰

Letter to Cosimo, May 1, 1433: Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 12v–13, at 12v.

⁸¹

Edited in Fera, “Itinerari filologici,” pp. 131–2 from Lucca, BStatale 1394, fol. 186–186v (but Fera gives a different foliation). As Fera notes (p. 132n.), the text has been incorrectly dated to 1435 in some secondary literature.

⁸²

In this oration he mentions, however, that he is expecting a better salary the next year. He was promised 300 florins per year when he arrived in 1429. According to Monte Comune records published by Katherine Park, his salary was only 225 or 250 florins per year for 1430–1, and then increased to 350 the next year (Park, “Readers,” pp. 287, 288). For the 350 florins per year promised for 1431–2, see Filelfo’s letter to Giovanni Lamola: Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 10 (August 1, 1431).

⁸³

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.6. For the dating and for Codrus, see Fiaschi’s notes at pp. 35, 36–7.

⁸⁴

See chapter 6 (on Niccolò Niccoli). Filelfo’s code names for his enemies were Mundus for Cosimo, “the mundane one,” based on Cosmus; Codrus for Marsuppini, the wretched ancient poet (Juvenal, Saturae, 1.2; 3.203–07); Bambalio for Poggio, the stammerer (Cicero, Philippics, 3.16), perhaps also with an allusion to Babylon; Hypocritius for Traversari; and, for Niccoli, Utis, Lycolaus (lupus populi, “wolf of the people,” according to a gloss on a satire), or Oenopotes, “winebibber,” a name adopted by one of Filelfo’s students, perhaps Andrea Alamanni, in a recently discovered oration against Niccoli (see chapter 6, pp. 234–5, n. 10). For all these, see Martin Davies, “An Emperor without Clothes? Niccolò Niccoli under Attack,” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 30 (1987): 132–3. The word mundus, used for Cosimo, is not always unflattering (except in Filelfo): it can mean simply “clean,” or it can be a Latin equivalent for “cosmos.” Marsilio Ficino, who was addicted to puns, referred to Cosimo de’ Medici as mundus meaning “cosmos,” in a flattering sense of course, in a charming early letter that he seems to have later suppressed. I am inclined to believe that wiser, older friends of Ficino’s told him that the term carried “baggage,” and that Ficino was horrifically embarrassed by it. I think this is a much more probable explanation for the “disappearance” of this letter than the hypothesis offered by

James Hankins, “Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 149–50, 159–60.

⁸⁵

Filelfo, Sat. 1.6 (ed. Fiaschi). For Benino there is a brief sketch by Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, pp. 377–8, which states that he had a “good knowledge of Latin” (buona notizia della lingua latina) and emphasizes his political authority and religiosity. Lanza, Lirici toscani, vol. 1, p. 263, lists a few government offices. Aulo Greco, the editor of Vespasiano’s Vite, describes this satire incorrectly as “against” del Benino and gives its source a nonexistent shelfmark, “Laurenziana 256” (p. 377n.). The source actually is FiBLaur Conv. Soppr. 256 (at fols. 22–23), one of the manuscripts that bear the date. Greco also cites (p. 376n.) a poem of Benino, again with an inaccurate shelfmark (“Magl. II, IV, 250”); its source is actually FiBN II IV 250, a poetic miscellany copied by Giovanni Pigli. The poem, irrelevant to this controversy, can be found at fols. 42–3v (“Chanzone di Francesco di Nicholo del Benino”) with the incipit È animale di tanta altera vista and is edited in Lanza, Lirici toscani, vol. 1, pp. 263–4. From Benino we also have a learned Latin letter to Mariotto Nori, dated August 19, 1430, now in FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 21, where Benino discusses the war against Lucca, complains of Florentines desirous of revolution (cupidi novarum rerum), and pairs Leonardo Bruni with Cicero. Unless someone has discovered another surname for him, Benino has been left out of the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.

⁸⁶

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), pp. 240–1. That the government canceled the appointments because of war is mentioned by Filelfo in his satire to Benino (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.6, ll. 6–11) and in his letter to Cosimo of 1433 (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 12v). It does not appear in the statute itself. Cesare Guasti, “Ramondo Mannelli alla battaglia di Rapallo,” Archivio Veneto 10 (1875): 54–70, at p. 59, cites a vernacular report from this period, stating that the university had few students and that money could be spent better in military enterprises. I have been unable to locate Guasti’s source.

⁸⁷

The new Ufficiali dello Studio were Felice Brancacci, Cristofano di Guerrianti Bagnesi, Francesco di Iacopo Ventura, Teri di Lorenzo di Niccolò Teri, and Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo (Statuti, ed. Gherardi, p. 241). Of these, only Felice Brancacci is known as an oligarch.

⁸⁸

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), pp. 413–15; see Park, “Readers,” p. 288, who lists annual Studio payments to him of 140 florins.

⁸⁹

Our only sources for these lectures are the official appointments in 1431 and in 1434 and 1435, just after the beginnings of the Medici regime, as well as a brief mention of them in the biographical sketch of Lorenzo Pisano by his nephew Teofilo (see Field, Origins, p. 161; Park, “Readers,” pp. 288, 292, 293). From what we know otherwise of Lorenzo Pisano, these lectures probably stressed religious themes, some form of Augustinian Platonism (Field, Origins, pp. 158–74). See also p. 271, below.

⁹⁰

The poems are in Filelfo, “Poesie e prose volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 7–18. Scholars such as Benadduci enriched the scholarly world much with their editions, on which my work relies. I suspect, however, that all efforts such as his will soon be replaced by a more thorough use of manuscript testimonies, about which we know much more than we did a century ago. Filelfo’s works of interest here are his Canzone morale fatta … contro a susuroni e invidiosi de la giustizia, with the incipit Quanta l’aureo smalto e vagheggia (pp. 7–12), and A l’eccelsa e illustre reipublica florentina, with the incipit Or che potrai tu più, invidia, farmi (pp. 16–18). It is possible that there were formal appeals by students as well. Andrea Alamanni’s Oratio ad pretorem, with the incipit Etsi maioris esset ingenii et prestantioris cuiusdam eloquentie (Magl. VI 189, fols. 68–74; Siena BCom H IX 9, fols. 113–20v), urges the praetor to restore the Studio to its previous status, recently interrupted by war. In the Magliabechiana manuscript the date anno domini MCCCCXXX / appears on the otherwise blank fol. 67v, but the text disappears into the right margin, and the date may well be a later one. The Magliabechiana manuscript also contains an anonymous oration, perhaps by Alamanni, attacking Niccolò Niccoli: see chapter 6, pp. 234–5, n. 10 and Field “Leonardo Bruni, Florentine Traitor?” p. 1121, n. 47.

⁹¹

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), p. 415. Filelfo also described to Cosimo the campaign against him in a letter a year and a half later (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 12–12v; letter dated May 1, 1433), where he argued that Marsuppini and Niccoli were emboldened to act against him after returning from Verona with Cosimo after the plague. He mentioned appealing to the government in an oration and the subsequent opposition he received from Cosimo’s friends and family. Finally he argued that, when the votes were counted, he, Filelfo, received thirty-four out of thirty-seven (in other words, this was an executive session of the thirty-seven in the Signoria and the Colleges).

⁹²

FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 91: Per le tue 2 ultime e a boccha da Giovanni da Bari ò sentito el Philelpho essere stato ristituito in suo pristino stato, della qual cosa quant’io mi sia ralegrato non credo facci [?] mestiero repricarlo a tte, sì per l’onore ne seguita alla grandezza dell’animo suo et sì per l’avere tirato questa posta contra a chii non valse mai forza né ’ngengnio. Non piglio di questo caso piccola testificatione della terra nostra, veggendo che lla ragione comincia a superchiare la forza. Strozzi’s language about the return of reason seems to reflect one of Filelfo’s poems to the government; see the poem with the incipit Or che potrai tu piú in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 16–18, where Filelfo asks: Oimé ragion, oimé, dove se’ andata? / In quale parte del mondo se’ arrivata (p. 16; “Alas, reason, alas: where have you gone? In what corner of the earth have you made your home?”). One of Filelfo’s students, Matteo di Simone Strozzi, was very close to Leonardo Bruni and had an interest in and some level of talent in the studia humaniora. At this same time (precisely December 13) Filelfo dedicated to Matteo a satire, sending him Pseudo-Aristotle’s Rhetorica ad Alexandrum (see p. 199 in this chapter), praising his eloquence, and offering consolation on his current financial straits (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.10; see also Filelfo’s own scholium to Satire 1.7, noted by Fiaschi, pp. 42–3). For Matteo di Simone Strozzi, see chapter 4, pp. 172–3, 179, n. 271; for his financial difficulties, see

Lauro Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 334–5.

⁹³

The language choice for lectures on the Commedia was by no means self-evident. Many chose to lecture in Latin.

⁹⁴

Bartolomeo del Corazza, Diario fiorentino, 1405–1439, ed. Roberta Gentile (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1991), p. 34

(notice dated January 16, 1429, modern style).

⁹⁵

Orazione fatta … al popolo fiorentino delle laude di Dante nel principio della lettura del Poema, in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 1–5 (the incipit is Se lo splendido e lampeggiante fulgore), at p. 3: Chi fu costui? chi fu? Ei fu il nobilissimo e illustre poeta, lo eruditissimo filosofo e sublimissimo matematico e prestantissimo teologo Dante Alighieri.

⁹⁶

Orazione … al popolo fiorentino delle laude di Dante eccellentissimo Poeta e gravissimo Filosofo, in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 21–3 (the incipit is Avendo maraviglioso e singulare desiderio), at p. 22: E chi è cagione di tanti suspetti? Chi è principio di tante ingiurie? Chi è autore di tanti oltraggi? Chi è costui? Chi è? Nomineròllo io tal mostro? Manifestarò io tal cerbero? diròllo io? Io certo il debbo dire, io il dico, io il dirò, io il dirò, se la vita n’andasse! Egli è il maledico et il prodigioso, il detestabile et abbominevole … Ahi Filelfo taci, non dire, per Dio abbi pazienza. The ellipsis is in the original.

⁹⁷

Traversari is an unlikely candidate. On October 26, 1431, he was made head of the entire Camaldulensian order and began immediately a journey to its various convents, as described in his Hodoeporicon. For the appointment, see his letter to his brother Girolamo Traversari, October 27, 1431, in Traversari, Epist.11.3 (LuisoAT 11.4). Most of Traversari’s letters to Florence in this period are to his brother Girolamo and deal with administrative questions relating to the reform of his religious order. As far as we know, he did not return to Florentine politics until the spring of 1432, when he began to make inquiries about Filelfo, who was at that moment under a sentence of exile (to be discussed shortly). See the letters to Girolamo, March 26 and especially April 5 (Traversari, Epist. 11.23, 25; LuisoAT 11.23, 25).

⁹⁸

FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 92 (January 16, 1432): Piacemi sommamente et ralegromi che Philelpho prosperi in tanta felicità come per tua intendo, perché alla franchezza dell’animo suo non è sí degnio premio che non vi si confacessi maggiore, ma bene tiramento quello che per altra mia feci et quello che amichevolemente scripsi a llui, et questo è che temperi la sua inmensa felicità, la qual cosa facciendo sarà incoronato di più verde corona che faccendo el contradio, et etiamdio combatterà più effectuosamente et con meno fatica d’animo et di corpo et con più sicurtà che pigliando delle vie ch’el più delle volte porgliano questa felicità. … E ssì divulghato el prohemio fecie el Philelpho che gli mandasti non dico per tutta Verona ma insino a Trento, essendo da ciascuno letto con grande admiratione. (“It pleases me much and I send congratulations that Filelfo thrives with such happiness, as I learn from your letter. The frankness of his spirit has not produced a reward so great that it could not become greater. I remind you of what I wrote to you in another letter and, in a friendly fashion, I wrote to him: that he should temper his immense happiness. If he does this, he will acquire a greater crown than if he does the opposite, and he will fight more effectively and with less exertion of mind and body, and with a greater security than taking paths that very often take this happiness away. … The inaugural oration of Filelfo is so diffused that I would say you sent it not to the entire town of Verona but as far away as Trent, and everyone has read it with great admiration.”) Evidently Nofri and Filelfo were in direct correspondence. On February 12, 1432 Nofri, still in Ferrara, wrote to Matteo Strozzi that he had received a letter from Filelfo and, apparently alluding to his (Nofri’s) advice to restrain his enthusiasm in the Studio, noted that it seemed to him that he had spoken to a “deaf man” (FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 101): Dal Philelpho ebbi la risposta della mia. Et conchiudomi che mmi conforterebbe (?) allo studio se non credessi parlato a uno sordo (“From Filelfo you have the response to my letter. And I would feel that I could take comfort in my effort if I did not believe that I had spoken to a deaf man”).

⁹⁹

Nofri di Palla Strozzi to Matteo di Simone Strozzi (Ferrara, January 20, 1432), FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 112, fol. 93: quasi tutta la terra rinbonba di questa sua oratione volghare.

¹⁰⁰

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), p. 245, document of December 24, 1431, requiring the Ufficiali dello Studio to assign rooms for Filelfo’s lectures and to place a podium in the cathedral (“or wherever Filelfo requests it”) for lectures on Dante.

¹⁰¹

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), pp. 245–6, mentioning qui contra mandata et deliberationes … Dominorum et eorum Collegiorum, et honestatem et bonos mores, se iactaverunt et iactant dictas scholas [sc. Filelfi] et seu cameram et cathedram invadere et occupare, seu ipsum dominum Franciscum impedire quominus legat secundum formam sue conducte (“those who, against the laws and deliberations of the lords [i.e. the priors of the Signoria] and of their Colleges, and against honor and good character, have taken it upon themselves to invade and occupy the said [i.e. Filelfo’s] places of instruction, the lecture room and podium, and who impede Filelfo from lecturing according to the terms of his appointment”). The fine was to be no less than 100 florins, equivalent to a two-year salary of a skilled artisan.

¹⁰²

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), pp. 418–19 (May 24, 1432).

¹⁰³

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, pp. 54–5 (life of Filelfo): [Filelfo] acquistò grandissima riputatione se non si fussi guasto, sendo in città aliena, a volerse impaciare di cose di stato, e di tenere parte più cor uno che cor uno altro. Per questa cagione, veduto ch’egli voleva fare quello che non si aparteneva allui, Nicolaio Nicoli et Cosimo et tutti gli amici di meser Carlo [Marsuppini] vollono che meser Carlo fussi condotto a concorrenza del Filelfo. Condotto meser Carlo et cominciato a legere, tutta la corte et assai giovani fiorentini andorono a meser Carlo, in modo che al Filelfo mancò assai scolari, et cominciò a perdere di riputatione. (“Filelfo would have acquired an immense fame if he had not ruined it: he was a foreigner, and wanted to get involved in matters of the regime by taking one side more than the other. For this reason, seeing that he wanted to do what was not his business, Niccolò Niccoli and Cosimo and all the friends of Carlo [Marsuppini] wanted to see Carlo appointed concurrently with Filelfo. When Carlo was appointed and began lecturing, the entire court and many young Florentines flocked to Carlo, so that Filelfo lost many students and began to lose his fame.”) The Italian tutta la corte, which I rendered “the entire court,” is an odd expression and would seem to be referring to the papal court. This would require Vespasiano here to be chronologically inaccurate, since Eugenius IV and his papal court did not begin arriving in Florence until the early summer of 1434, and the “court” could hardly have flocked to Marsuppini’s classroom before the autumn of that year, after the Medici coup. The word corte could perhaps be referring to something like an entourage, either of Cosimo or Marsuppini, as in the word “cohort” (or cohors in Latin). The only Florentine “court” that I know of would be the Court of the Mercanzia, and even if it was dominated by Medici partisans, it was a rotating body of people chosen by lot, and this court’s regular presence in Marsuppini’s classroom seems most unlikely.

¹⁰⁴

Seeing the forces arrayed against him, Filelfo, according to Vespasiano, subito cominciò a settegiare, et voltossi a meser Rinaldo degli Albizi et a quegli del trentatrè (Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, vol. 2, p. 55; “at once began to be sectarian and to turn toward Rinaldo degli Albizzi and those of the ‘33”).

¹⁰⁵

Statuti (ed. Gherardi), p. 424.

¹⁰⁶

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 12v, letter of May 1, 1433: Qui mihi incommodasse arbitrabantur laeti atque exultantes per urbem ferebantur.

¹⁰⁷

See Statuti (ed. Gherardi), pp. 415–18, documents of March 10, 12, 19, 22, 23 and April 9, 11 (1432); Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 69; Gelli, “L’esilio,” p. 72; FiAS Cart. Strozz. III 131, fol. 25 (letter of Benedetto di Piero Strozzi, from Empoli, to Matteo di Simone Strozzi, dated March 21, 1432, anticipating Filelfo’s exile and inquiring about retrieving a manuscript of Cicero’s Philippics, which the author fears may be impossible to get to after Filelfo has left).

There are a few odd aspects about this case. One is that Doffo di Nepo Spini, Gonfaloniere di Giustizia in March–April 1432, was apparently behind the charge against Filelfo. Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” pp. 232–3 describes him as a Medici “friend” (p. 232); but Kent, Rise of the Medici, pp. 163–4 treats him as an oligarch, and I think her description is accurate. Filelfo certainly blamed him for the incident: see his very first satire (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.1). Spini provided excellent grist for Filelfo’s mill. While he was Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, the highest office in the republic, under his watch were created the Ufficiali di Notte, a special magistracy mainly prosecuting sodomites. The first person charged under the new law was Spini himself, for assaulting a boy, and he was tried, confessed to the crime, and was fined. On Spini and this incident, see

Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–6.

Filelfo mentioned the incident in his first satire and elaborated on it in a manuscript gloss: Doffus Spinus, cum esset vexillifer iusticiae, legem tulit contra pathicos et paedicones, qua primus ipse damnatus est (“When Doffo Spini was Gonfaloniere di Giustizia he proposed the law against perverts and pederasts, and he himself was the first to be condemned by it”: gloss on lines 35–6; see Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, p. 341, with Fiaschi’s notes).

Also odd about this case is that we have no information (as far as I know) as to why Filelfo vilified the Venetian ambassador, if in fact he did. One motive could have been that Venetian authorities might still have refused, since the time of the “plague” incident of 1427, to return to Filelfo his Greek manuscripts and his wife’s clothes, or to encourage Leonardo Giustiniani to do it. Oligarchs tended to speak well of Venice: a sort of Venetian model of a closed elite ruling the city seems to be what many of them wanted—what Poggio would later describe in his De nobilitate as a Venetian factio cut off from other classes (see chapter 7, p. 296). Oligarchs during the catasto debates regarded Venice as a taxation model. Moreover, Antichi amanti—the poem of 1426 attributed to Niccolò da Uzzano—contrasted the donna fiorentina—the Florentine lady—manhandled by the Florentines masses with the donna veneziana honored by those who looked after her, who have remained in their seats of power for 1,000 years (che son mill’anni stati ne’ lor seggi; see Niccolò da Uzzano, Antichi amanti, ed. Martelli, p. 37). In an early satire Filelfo likewise praised the Venetians, nostri clarissima saecli lumina (“the great lights of our age”) who had ruled well mille per annos (“for 1,000 years”; Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 1.2, ll. 42–44; this satire was perhaps written in late 1433, according to Fiaschi’s note at p. 9); and this echoed Niccolò da Uzzano’s language. On the other hand, the Venetian situation as it relates to Florence is complex, and we should not overlook the warmth the Venetians showed Cosimo when he was exiled there.

¹⁰⁸

The miscellanies with these works were mentioned in chapter 4, p. 158.

¹⁰⁹

Four circulated widely; three of these are competently edited in Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgare,” ed. Benadduci (but better editions are surely forthcoming). One (pp. 29–33), with the incipit Poiché insino da infanzia e da mia piccola puerizia, is not dated but held in the Florentine cathedral in this anonymous version; but FiBN Nuov. Acq. 354, fols. 80–82, a miscellany with much Filelfo material, dates this work to 1431 and says that it was edita per (“composed by”) ser Battistam Volteranum. I know nothing of this Battista of Volterra. Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, ms. 1350 contains a number of orations; at least one is very likely by a Filelfo student (see n. 61 in this chapter), and the orations in this manuscript have earlier titles scratched out and attributions in a later hand to one Baptista Visconti Volterranus. A second of our four student orations (pp. 24–9), with the incipit Se dinanzi al vostro nobile et egregio conspetto, was also given in the cathedral and is dated June 29, 1432. Benadduci presents it as composed by Filelfo and recited by a student. Several manuscripts give the reading generoso instead of egregio in the incipit. The third oration (pp. 33–6), entitled De la liberalità, has the incipit Non piccolo spavento al presente. Benadduci attributes it, incorrectly I think, to Filelfo himself (for this text, see n. 43, above). Finally, there is the oration fatta per uno isscholare forestiero (“made by a foreign student”) at the cathedral; it has the incipit Quando la mangnificha e la observandissima moltitudine and is edited in J. Davies, Florence and Its University, pp. 201–5. For some idea of the orations’ dissemination, see the indices to Kristeller, Iter, s.v. “Filelfo, foreign pupil of”: this gives only a rough estimate of the texts’ diffusion, since Kristeller left out printed inventories and typically did not scrutinize vernacular miscellanies carefully.

¹¹⁰

I am grateful to Jonathan Davies, and especially to Daniela Pascale of Florence, for some indications of which manuscripts to study first. The most important ones I know of are FiBLaur Acq. e Doni 323, Magl. VIII 1440, FiBN Nuovi Acquisti 354, and Ricc. 1200. Of these, the huge and very messy FiBN Nuovi Acqsuiti 354 is a mother lode of unknown texts, many pertaining to Filelfo; and Kristeller’s description, Iter, vol. 1, pp. 173–4 (“writing bad and partly faded”) includes perhaps a third of the texts of humanist interest. There are other manuscripts containing occasional pieces as well, some of which will be cited in subsequent notes.

¹¹¹

Curt Gutkind, Cosimo de’ Medici Pater Patriae, 1389–1464 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 74–5.

¹¹²

See , p. 198 here.

¹¹³

FiBN II I 71, fols. 135v–136v, Oratione d’invidia per uno studiante forestiero, with the incipit Semmai per alchuno tenpo e sstato ismarrito il mio piccholo ingiengo. The reference to Bruni is at fol. 135v.

¹¹⁴

See the brief description of this oration (incipit Multum diuque ipse mecum animo verti) in this chapter, n. 61. In the Ricc. 1200 copy of the oration, fols. 142–3, the Vita begins on fol. 142v, roughly mid-page, and goes up to fol. 143, five lines down (then there is a sort of summary). The Vita copies very closely the curriculum in Bruni’s Opere (ed. Viti), from p. 506 to p. 510, and then reproduces a short section on Aristotle’s death from p. 516.

¹¹⁵

Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 168v–71 and Ricc. 1200, fols.140v–1v; the title is Pisaurii Jacobi oratio [oratione in M] habita in principio lectionis Augustini de ci[vitate] dei sub eloquentissimo preceptore F. Phy., and the incipit runs Optassem et ego praestantissimi viri (Bertalot 2.14960, citing the latter manuscript). See fol. 170v in the former and fol. 141–141v in the latter: Quis Leonardum Aretinum Philelphumque hunc nostrum graecae ac pariter latinae eloquentiae fluvios quosdam et feracissimos campos appellare dubitaret? Neque in ea solum parte quam pulchrum ornatum dicimus clarissimos praestantissimosque, sed in omni fere disciplinarum genere, quas humanum ingenium aut excogitare possit aut discedere? (“Who would be reluctant to call Leonardo of Arezzo and this our Filelfo the most flowing rivers and most fertile fields of both Greek and Latin eloquence? And who would deny that they are outstanding not only in what pertains to beautiful and ornate speech, but in every form of learning that one can imagine?”). This oration contains a lengthy description of the physical beauty of Florence, with praise of those who excel in painting and sculpture, including Giotto. At the end of the oration Giacomo addresses his fellow students in a couplet: Plaudite namque venit rhetor clarusque poeta / optatus vobis, ipse Phylelphus adest (“Clap your hands! For now comes the great orator and poet chosen by you: here is our very own Filelfo!”: fol. 171v; fol. 141v). On this Giacomo da Pesaro, see

Piergiorgio Parroni, “Un allievo del Filelfo alla corte di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta: Novità su Giacomo da Pesaro con un’appendice di inediti malatestiani,” in Miscellanea Augusto Campana (Padua: Antenore, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 541–60.

¹¹⁶

Each of these manuscripts, and especially the latter one, have an enormous bibliography, which I shall not try to reproduce. For a good description of Ricc.1200, see

S. Morpurgo, I manoscritti della R. Biblioteca Riccardiana di Firenze: Manoscritti italiani (Rome: Giachetti, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 261–70.

¹¹⁷

Dante’s epitaph (fol. 1, with the incipit Inclita fama cuius universum) circulated widely; see Bertalot 1.2689. Niccolò’s epitaph is on the verso (Fol. 1v: Epytaphium heroycum Niccolao de Uzano sub apostropha [sub apostropha = below and after a space or an elision?] and has the incipit Gloria summa tue merito Florentie felix. The latter is not in Bertalot; nor is another Niccolò epitaph, with the incipit Inclita Tuscorum praeconia florida proles. These texts are mutilated by a damaged folio.

¹¹⁸

Fol. 69, with the incipit Tuae mihi pergratae fuerunt litterae; not in Bertalot. The title is cropped, but the first letter may be an “A.”

¹¹⁹

Fols. 326–58v. Here without title and anonymous. I am copying the title from other sources, which have the plural, although there is only one oration.

¹²⁰

A section, fols. 117–56v, has these formularies, but other folios may contain them too. Fol. 121–121v contains a lengthy excerpt from Bruni’s letter to Filelfo (Bruni, Epist. 5.6, LuisoLB 5.3), 1428, which he later bowdlerized for publication. The next page (fol. 122) has a short section of Filelfo’s letter to Tommaso Bizzocco, of June 19, 1433 (in Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” pp. 244–6), verba d(omini) F(rancisci) Phy(lelfi) de magistro Ieronimi de Imola quando eum vulnerari fecit (“words of signor Francesco Filelfo on the teacher Girolamo [Broccardi] da Imola when the latter wounded him”), which describes the assassination attempt on Filelfo the previous May. Filelfo left this letter out of his epistolario, and Zippel’s edition is based on copies in two other Filelfo miscellanies: FiBLaur Acq. e Doni 323, fols. 68–9v, and Ricc. 1200, fols. 146v–7.

¹²¹

Fol. 172v, with the incipit Bella si (neque enim poteras mihi pulchrius …); not in Bertalot. The author is attempting to convince someone to take up the humanities in the Florentine Studio. After a quick survey of classical learning, the author states Nil opus est veteres cupiam memorare poetas (“there is no need for me to call to mind the ancient poets”), since, as he continues immediately, Hic Leonardus adest inter clarissimus omnis / Italiae populos; graeco pariterque latino / Eloquio orator summus, quem fama perennis / Instituit meritum summi Ciceronis alumnum / Praeterea in medium spatiantem cerne Phylelphum / Quem graeco latioque simul liquor undeque fundit / Nectare qui facili redimitas tempora lauro / Multa docens, priscis commiscet nostra Pelasgis. (“Here is Leonardo [Bruni], the most outstanding among all Italy, and a first-rank orator in both Greek and Latin. His eternal fame has made him a worthy disciple of the great Cicero. Moreover, look upon Filelfo here standing in out midst, into whom the divine nectar of Greek and Latin flows. He bears the laurel crown in an easy victory, teaching many things from our authors [i.e. the Latin ones] admixed with the early Greeks.”)

¹²²

Fol. 157–157v. For Ricc. 1200 I have not attempted to sort out the codicological questions regarding its composition: most or perhaps all of it seems to have a chancery context from Volterra, almost all works dating before 1450. But there are some later texts toward the end.

¹²³

Fols. 19v–28v for Bruni’s work and fols. 161–159 [sic], for that of Benvenuti. The Benvenuti piece is part of a section, fols. 159–62, where the folios are out of order: 161, 162, 159, 160 would restore the order (as is noted accurately in Morpurgo’s description).

I had at one time planned to publish descriptions of this and other Filelfo miscellanies and amassed a great quantity of notes, but my (extremely) modest skills in Italian paleography led me to abandon any attempt to publish a separate study of the Filelfo miscellanies. I shall happily communicate to any serious scholar what knowledge I have accumulated. When I finally reached the end of FiBN Nouv. Acq. 354 (Kristeller, Iter, vol. 1, pp. 173–4: “writing bad and partly faded”) and suddenly found on fols. 215–20 an unnoted copy of an oration of Bartolomeo Scala, with the incipit Hoggi se ho ben calcholato il tempo, on Federico da Montefeltro’s acquisition of Volterra, I realized at last that I was exploring truly unknown territory. This ugly, hard-to-read manuscript has been studied by others, but I am not entirely convinced that it has been looked at in its entirety before.

From Ricc. 1200 there is an anonymous oration with the incipit Vetus monet auctoritas eos qui sua ingenia trutinare gliscunt (fol. 152–152v; Bertalot 2.24385 cites this manuscript alone). The oration is addressed to an individual and praises his learning as equal to or better than that of the ancients. “Let those be silent,” the text reads, “who say that nothing elevated, nothing excellent, nothing worthy of praise can be found in the modern period” (fol. 152–152v: Sileant itaque hi qui nil altum nil egregrium nil magna laude dignum in hodiernis diebus scitum esse putant). I do not see how such an opinion can be read as anything but a criticism of figures such as Niccoli. A companion piece, the next oration in the manuscript (the incipit is Etsi de tuis celeberrimis virtutibus, orator illustrissime: see fols. 152v–154 and Bertalot 2.6252, citing this manuscript alone), praises an unnamed orator for his humanistic accomplishments (fol. 152v: Ex te … hec studia humanitatis et litterarum monumenta in dies maiora suscipiunt incrementa: “from you the humanities and the monuments of learning increase daily”) and states that the addressee’s oratorical skill not only surpasses that of the Greeks Aeschines and Demosthenes but without controversy overcomes Cicero (f. 152v: Deo profecto inmortali nostro seculo gratias reddo quod te … aut facundie disciplina prestantior aut facilitate ingenii perspicacior non modum illum ipsum Demostenem et Eschineim homines grecos nil in eloquentia rusticitatis habentes admistum, sed Ciceronem ipsum eloquentia sine controversia superares; “I thank God almighty that in our times no one surpasses you in eloquence or genius. For you without controversy are better than not only Demosthenes and Aeschines, Greeks of unmitigated sophistication in eloquence, but also in eloquence you without question surpass Cicero himself”). The orator then turns to a discussion de oratorie facultatis laudibus (fols. 152v–154). It would be intriguing to imagine one oration to be by Bruni (who was surely attending Filelfo’s lectures) and the other by Filelfo (though perhaps both were simply school exercises): I have an amateur appreciation of Latin prose style and I shall leave any such determination to others.

¹²⁴

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.5.

¹²⁵

In the third book of the De exilio, Filelfo has the interlocutor Palla Strozzi describe Chrysoloras’ teaching and how, when plague struck Florence, the Byzantine joined Strozzi in his villa in the country. (He also mentions that this Chysoloras was the grandfather of Filelfo’s wife.) Bruni then adds his praise, giving Chrysoloras credit for calling up the buried studia and giving them to the Latins (Filelfo, De exilio, p. 406).

¹²⁶

See, for instance, Antonio Pacino’s oration in a Filelfo miscellany, Lucca BStatale 1394, fols. 182v–184v, with the incipit Maximum et amplissimum munus magnifici domini vosque optimates (Bertalot 2.11752). After praising Florence’s streets and buildings, Pacino adds: Cuius laudes atque prestantia si quis uberius percipere cupiat Leonardum Aretinum hac tempestate oratorum principem de laudibus Florentinis legat (“Let him who wishes to learn more about the outstanding character of this [Florence], let him read the De laudibus Florentinis of Leonardo of Arezzo, the leader among orators of our time”: fol. 183v).

¹²⁷

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 5.3, vol. 1, pp. 280–7, with Fiaschi’s note at p. 282 (the dependence on Bruni is an observation owed entirely to Fiaschi). A quarter-century later, when John Argyropoulos was lecturing on Aristotle in Florence, Filelfo advised him to quit criticizing Bruni’s translations of the Stagirite (Field, Origins, pp. 123–4).

¹²⁸

Ricc. 1200, fols. 128–9. Oratio de poesia, with the incipit Stolto sarei, m(agnifici) ciptadini, s’io non mi persuadessi. The author speaks of attempting to carry out the wishes of the citizens and mio dottore (fol. 128), then says (fol. 128–128v): Per la qual cosa vi priego per la vostra eximia humanità voglate attentamente udire quello che mi pare si possa e debba dire della excelsa poesia, conciosia cosa che molti sono e quali per la loro inprudenza overo piu tosto inpudezza dicono la poesia non doversi seguire perché ella non sia letteratura (?); ma piu tosto queste arti mechaniche et simili mercenarii eserciti empieno le borse di denari et di richezza. O sciocha, o falsa, o vana opinione del vulgo la poesia la quale non è a huomini rustichani et inculti, ma solamente a nobili ingengni se stessa concede (“Therefore I beg you to hear what can and should be said about sublime poetry, since many, due to imprudence, or rather impudence, say that poetry ought not to be pursued since it is not a subject of learning. Rather, they say that these are manual and mercenary arts which fill one’s purses with money and wealth. It is a vain and false opinion of the public that poetry belongs not to rustics and to the unlearned, but to noble intellects alone”). In isolation, such opinions would in no way be remarkable, given the need to defend Dante from the common charge that he was a poet for cobblers, bakers, and fishmongers. Even Niccoli and other humanists of an anti-oligarchic bent, it was charged, were guilty of using depreciating terms for Dante. What I am suggesting is that Filelfo turned such defenses of Dante into a more general defense of oligarchic culture. This anonymous oration, by the way, praises also Petrarch and Boccaccio (fol. 128v).

¹²⁹

Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 106–8; FiBN, Nuov. Acq. 354, fols. 39–40v (without title); Ricc. 1200, fols. 122v–3. Della invidia et di sua ditestatione, with the incipit Quando io ben considero, magnifici et humanissimi cittadini, lo splendore et l’auctorita di questo luogho. For the attribution: Ma perché a me sì come agli altri miei compagni adempiere [adempire R] s’apartiene gli honesti et utili comandamenti del nostro amantissimo preceptore messer Fr(ancesco) Phy(lelfo), però io confidatomi nella vostra eximia sapientia et singulare mansuetudine, la quale non dubito m’arà negli errori per iscusato, sì per la mia età sì etiamdio per riputatione di tanto luogho. (“But, since it falls to me and to other fellow students of mine to fulfill the honorable and helpful instructions of our most beloved teacher, Francesco Filelfo, I trust in your excellent wisdom and singular politeness, which will overlook my errors, both because of my youth and because of the renown of such a great place [i.e. the Cathedral].”

¹³⁰

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 107: Non fu ella [sc. invidia] colei che per sua dette al [il R] crudele Chayn il giustissimo Abel uccidere? Costei [sc. invidia] comisse il più impio il più iniusto il più horribile peccato et sceleraggine che mai al mondo si nominasse, quando il vero angnello figliuolo di dio morte e passione patire constrinxe.(“Was it not envy that led the cruel Cain to kill the most just Abel? Envy committed the most impious, the most unjust, the most horrible sin and wickedness that the world has ever known, when it brought about the death and passion of the true angel, the son of God.”) Cf. FiBN Nuov. Acq. 354, fol. 39v; Ricc. 1200, fols. 122v–3. Toward the end one reads (M fol. 108): Ma lasceremo parlare di questa fraudolentia al nostro prestantissimo et generoso poeta Dante.

¹³¹

Here we may want to recall the hypothetical speech of Rinaldo degli Albizzi at Santo Stefano in 1426 (cited in chapter 2, p. 40, n. 90), which began by addressing the signori militi e spettabili cittadini: militi for cavalieri is a nice touch, almost certainly reflecting Bruni’s De militia dedicated to Albizzi a few years earlier. To be sure, some Medici partisans had been made knights as well, but chivalry as a whole waned under the Medici.

¹³²

Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 33–6, 497, refers to the rapacissimi e pestiferi tiranni, i quali i loro miserabili subditi di loro beni alcuni spogliano per dare a’ suoi iniquissimii assentatori (“most rapacious and pestilential tyrants, who despoil their subjects of their goods in order to give them to their wicked flunkies”). Those should be called most cruel (crudelissimi) and inhumane (inumani) rather than generous (liberali) or magnanimous (magnifici; p. 34). Benadduci attributes this oration, I think incorrectly, to Filelfo.

¹³³

Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 99v–101v, entitled Del vitio della avaritia et quanto sia detestabile, with the incipit Soglono comunemente prudentissimi cittadini tutti gli huomeni ragionevoli and the desinit (i.e. end) ogni comune utilita si converte im [sic] privata. There are other copies in Ricc. 1200, fols. 117–18 and in Ricc. 2266, fols. 220v–2v. The oration in Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 265v–7v (title Oratio habita ad successorem in offitio; incipit Soglono comunemente magnifici e prestantissimi pretori et spe.li circumstanti tutti gli huomini ragionevoli; desinit somma retributione et gloria sempriterna), seems to be a cobbling together of this oration and Filelfo’s Della giustizia (incipit Euripide poeta huomo non solo d’eloquentia), which is present in this manuscript (fols. 97–9v) and in many others. Cf. the text immediately following the Della avaritia (fols. 102–3v), which has the incipit Non piccolo spavento (discussed at n. 43 above).

¹³⁴

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 100; Ricc. ms. 1200, fol. 117: Ma donde sieno procedute le maligne radici di si odiosa et putrida pestilentia? Pare che cominciassino [cominciasseno R] a nascere insino dal principio di questo secolo o poco dopo la sua creatione, conciosia che si come nel Genesi [Genesis R] si legge per la predetta iniquità Cain huomo maladetto da dio quando faceva [facea M] il sacrificio, anzi piutosto simulatione di sacrificio, sempre aveva per usanza il più sterile grano et meno fructifero che trovasse ne’ campi suoi. (“But what are the malignant roots of this so odious and putrid pestilence? It seems that the roots started to arise from the beginning of the world and just after its creation, since one reads in Genesis that through that iniquity Cain, a man damned by God, when he made a sacrifice, or rather a simulation of a sacrifice, always used the most barren and least fruitful grain that he could find in his fields.”)

¹³⁵

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 101; Ricc. 1200, fol. 117v; Ricc. 2266, fol. 221v: Al tempo prospero de Romani quelli che desideravano l’imperio donavano et impievano le borse a cittadini avari, per la quale cosa venivano ad acquistare forze grandissime nella terra, et a quel modo si dibilitava et consumava a poco a poco l’amore di quegli cittadini verso la patria loro (“In the prosperous times of the Romans, those who desired power made gifts and filled the purses of the avaricious citizens, so that they could acquire great power in the land, and in this way step by step the love of the citizens for their fatherland was getting weaker and spent”).

¹³⁶

Ricc. 2266, fols. 217v–220v; the incipit is Gravissimo incaricho et sopra le forze mie ponderoso. See fol. 218v: Et non si dia ad intendere alcuno come nientedimeno fanno molti: potere aquistare la vera benivolentia d’altri per via di conviti, pecunie, guochi, over per altro vano et voluptuoso piacere, peroché quella tale non si de chiamare vera amicitia ma piu tosto ficta et colorata, la quale non dura se non secondo la mutabilità de la fortuna (“And one ought not to do what many do: try to win the goodwill of others by means of dinners, money, festivals, or other vain and voluptuous pleasantries. For that is not called true friendship but a feigned and adulterated one, which endures according to the whims of fortune”). This oration, perhaps because of its subject, is less dismissive of the masses than the other pieces I have considered. Glory consists in a sort of universal respect; and if the masses inherently and regularly cling to wickedness, then glory would be won by being wicked. In this oration the moltitudine turns away from the wicked and rewards the good. The author even makes glory reside non solamente ne gli uomini d’excellenti et singular virtù, ma ne’ mediocri, et anche non solamente nell’ arti liberali, ma etiamdio mecaniche et plebea la gloria si distende (“not only among men of outstanding and excellent quality, but also among those of lesser status, and glory extends not only in the liberal arts but in the manual ones among the masses”). This muova ciascuno artefice sempre a pensare et investigare cose nuove et inusitate per aquistare somma excellentia nell’ arte sua et per essere sopra gli altri nominato (“inspires each artisan always to consider and investigate new and untrodden paths and to acquire an excellence in his craft by being reckoned above his peers”: fol. 219v).

¹³⁷

The thirty-seven here would be a special session of the nine in the Signoria and, from the Colleges, of the twelve Buonuomini and sixteen Gonfalonieri; I know of no document confirming Filelfo’s claim, but his precision may indicate that he was telling the truth.

¹³⁸

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 12–12v.

¹³⁹

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 12v: Niccoli, said Cosimo subridens, was the sort who neminem doctum virum relinquat intactum and Marsuppini nullam in civitate auctoritatem habeat. At probably this same time Filelfo addressed a satire to Cosimo, urging him to renounce his humanist supporters—Marsuppini, Niccoli, Poggio, and Traversari—all named with Filelfo’s code words. See Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 2.1 (with Fiaschi’s note on dating, pp. 73–4).

¹⁴⁰

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 12v–13.

¹⁴¹

Earlier Vicolo dei Giudei, a name the street apparently had from the mid-Quattrocento until the Fascist era. On the location, see Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” pp. 237, n. 62 and p. 249.

¹⁴²

Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” p. 237. See also Robin, Filelfo in Milan, pp. 17–21.

¹⁴³

Zippel, “Il Filelfo a Firenze,” pp. 237–9, 244–50. Filelfo also claimed later that Niccolò da Tolentino was involved in helping to see to it that Broccardi received a light penalty.

¹⁴⁴

Or at least he claimed to have wanted this. The evidence is confusing, and some of the testimonials may be later reflections that Cosimo should have been put to death. In a letter of September 8, 1433, immediately after the oligarchic coup, Filelfo mentioned to Palla Strozzi the “very great danger” (permagnum periculum). Cosimo can either be put to death, in which case his followers, who depend on him for money, will rise in revolt; or he can be set free, in which case he will be dangerous as well. We have, he said, a wolf by the ears, and he urged Palla simply to withdraw from Florence to his Villa Petraia (Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, pp. 140–1). Yet in Satire 4.1, which was very likely written shortly thereafter, Filelfo urged Palla to resist no longer imposing the death penalty (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, 4.1, esp. ll. 36–8). Filelfo later criticized Strozzi, and later still had Strozzi criticize himself, precisely for lack of political involvement at a time a critical choice was so much needed (Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 190–2). As for Filelfo’s counseling of withdrawal in the letter of September 8, I should perhaps have emphasized more in this chapter how much Filelfo sought to withdraw himself (many letters of this period deal with his attempts to seek an academic position elsewhere). His preoccupation with Florentine politics, which continued long after he left Florence, was more a response to personal attacks than a commitment to the future of Florence. Here he can be contrasted with his friend Leonardo Bruni and with his enemies as well. Just after Cosimo returned to power in Florence, Filelfo wrote to Palla Strozzi again: Crede Philelpho tuo vel iuveni, cavendum est a pecunia Cosmiana: est enim vir ille et versutus et callidus (dated September 13, 1434; in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 143; “believe your Filelfo, who is like a son to you: one must fear the money of Cosimo, for he is a shrewd and crafty man”). Palla hoped to escape exile (see p. 70 above).

¹⁴⁵

Letter to Giovanni Aurispa, November 13; in Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, pp. 141–2: Nam qua arte se ab interitu vendicavit, eadem relegationis ius omne pessundabit (“for by artifice he escaped death, and with the decision to banish him all that was just came to ruin”: p. 141).

¹⁴⁶

See Laura de Feo Corso, “Il F. in Siena,” pp. 181–209, 292–316. For Filelfo almost nothing is known in the autumn of 1434. I do not know whether the verses perhaps to be attributed to him, from Florence, November 10, almost surely of that year, were some desperate attempt by Filelfo to ingratiate himself with the Medici. Perhaps the verses were satirical or were some sort of school exercise. They are extant in one manuscript only, Magl. VIII 1025, fols. 3–4, with the incipit Vincite e celsis titulis triumphos (Bertalot 1.6660).

¹⁴⁷

Filelfo’s inquiry seems to have survived in a truncated form; see Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 16, dated Siena, September 30, 1438 but correctly 1435, according to Luiso: see Bruni, Epist. (ed. Luiso), p. 124, n. 40). For Bruni’s reply, see Bruni, Epist. 6.11 (LuisoLB 6.16).

¹⁴⁸

Ed. L. Bertalot, “Eine humanistische Anthologie,” in his Studien, vol. 1, pp. 31–2, dated February 15.

¹⁴⁹

Poggio, letter dated March 14, 1435 (Poggio, Epist., ed. Harth, vol. 2, pp. 166–7).

¹⁵⁰

With some hesitation, I shall be referring to this piece according to its misleading original title, as the Orationes ad exules optimates. The work is as yet unedited, and I know of the following copies, listed by me (see Field, “Leonardo Bruni, Florentine Traitor?” p. 1136, n. 95). One copy is Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, cod. V 10 sup., fols. 1–58; at the end, f. 58: Finis die XV novembris 1437. Exscripsit Rainaldus Albizius eques Florentinus exul Ancone (“Copied by Rinaldo degli Albizzi the Florentine knight while in exile in Ancona”). Yet the colophon is surely copied by the scribe of the next piece, one Sachela, described B. Sachela ex comitibus Sancti Petri (i.e. from the contado of San Piero or San Pietro) in another manuscript—a copy he made of Justinus, April 29, 1432 (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, ms. K V 16, at fol. 80). Another copy, in Bergamo, Biblioteca Civica, ms. MA 286 (formerly Delta V 6), fols. 15v–45v, has, at the end, Compositus 1435. Another copy is in Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, ms. 7-1-7, fols. 1–68v, as described by Kristeller, Iter, vol. 4, p. 620, and by Silvia Fiaschi (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, vol. 1, pp. lxxviii–lxxix); Fiaschi states that the manuscript has Filelfo’s autograph annotations. To my listing, Fiaschi (p. xxii, n. 22) adds Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, N. F. Lat. 18532, fols. 31–91v (not seen by me). I am following the unattributed copy in the Filelfo miscellany, Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 326–58v. In a very short reference to these sources, which he learned about through me, Scott Blanchard, “Patrician Sages and the Humanist Cynic: Francesco Filelfo and the Ethics of World Citizenship,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1107–69, at p. 1114, n. 15, manages to make three errors. He states that I erroneously dated the work to 1435. I never attempted to date the work, and my “dating” is simply the colophon of the Bergamo manuscript, which I had reproduced (as above). Second, despite my information and that of Fiaschi, he uses as his authority probably the least reliable of the manuscripts cited: the one in Milan, a copy of a copy. Third, in “correcting” me, he dates the work to 1437 but does not present a shred of evidence. The earlier consensus, for a date between the end of 1435 and the middle of 1436 (as accepted by Fiaschi, p. lxxix, who in questions of this sort is probably a little more reliable than I am, and much more reliable than Blanchard), is for now the best we can do.

¹⁵¹

For this letter, recently discovered (or rediscovered) by me, see chapter 7, n. 65. In the mid-1430s Poggio published three or four invectives against Filelfo (Poggio, Basel edn., pp. 164–87; the third or fourth is the letter of March 14 in Poggio, Epist., ed. Harth, vol. 2, p. 187; see p. 219 above). Unfortunately these letters contain a series of personal slanders and do not reveal much about Filelfo, at least for my study.

¹⁵²

De Feo Corso, “Il Filefo in Siena,” pp. 190–2. Why were assassins engaged in activities that, it seems, involved so much risk and where the beneficiary had so little to gain (except for the assassin himself, who would be paid well)? I suspect that some of these resulted from verbal assaults. Why would a poem, written in Latin and perhaps read by few—and those who understood it knew well enough that such invectives reflected the imaginations of their authors—lead the targets to hire assassins? Here I think we must use our imagination too, or perhaps our imagination assisted by various testimonies about Niccolò Niccoli, who is described as running about in the Florentine piazzas denigrating men of learning. Filelfo and others make the charge, and he also describes Marsuppini being carried about the city on the shoulders of his students and cheering over the (temporary) dismissal of Filelfo from his Studio appointment. From all this I think we can only conclude that students and others at the University of Florence in the early 1430s were attending what today would be called “political” classes. With the numerous references in this period to verbal taunts, I think it would be safe to conclude that the ugly assaults in Filelfo’s satires circulated rapidly among his students and resulted in catcalls in the heart of Florence.

¹⁵³

De Feo Corso, “Il Filelfo in Siena,” pp. 192–3.

¹⁵⁴

De Feo Corso, “Il Filelfo in Siena,” p. 194.

¹⁵⁵

Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, pp. 111–15; Rosmini, Vita di Francesco Filelfo, vol. 1, p. 85; De Feo Corso, “Il Filelfo in Siena,” pp. 193–4.

¹⁵⁶

Dated August 20, 1436. See

Paolo Viti, Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: Studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), pp. 133–5.

¹⁵⁷

Fabroni, Vita, vol. 2, p. 115 (document of October 11).

¹⁵⁸

A listing of the ten books, not in Jeroen de Keyser’s recent edition, can be found in FiBN II II 70, fol. 4v.

¹⁵⁹

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 258.

¹⁶⁰

He even took up on occasion themes of courtly romance, e.g. Filelfo Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.7 (a satire on Pamphilus that evokes Boccaccio; see Fiaschi’s summary at pp. 43–4).

¹⁶¹

Filelfo, De exilio, pp.124–8. Manetti: Soleo … nonnumquam mirari quorundam inscitiam qui cum aliquod aut exemplum aut dictum e fidei Christianae religione vel tempestive apteque depromptum audierint, tanquam offensi et mutant vultum et avertunt faciem. Iidem si quid e poetarum fabulis atque gentium diis exceperint, laeti exhilaritatique exultant (“I often marvel at the ignorance of those who, when they hear some appropriate or suitable example or teaching from the Christian religion, frown and turn their heads away. These same, hearing some myth from the poets or something about the pagan gods, are happy and thrilled”: pp. 124–6, text slightly modified). Palla Strozzi: Adiuvas me Manette et recte quidem. Nam qui abhorret a dictis atque exemplis Christianae fidei is certe Christianus non est (“You are indeed correct, Manetti. For he who is averse to the teachings and examples of the Christian faith is by no means a Christian”: p. 128, text slightly modified).

¹⁶²

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 218–20. This part of the dialogue is a speech by Albizzi to Pope Eugenius IV (an editing lapse leaves omitted the interlocutor change at section 26, p. 196). Conciliarists had indeed deposed Eugenius in 1439 and elected their own pope, Felix V. Felix did not abdicate until 1449.

¹⁶³

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 158.

¹⁶⁴

Albizzi, Commissioni, vol. 3, pp. 665–8. For the genre, see

Gherardo Ortalli, La pittura infamante nei secoli XIII–XVI (Rome: Jouvence, 1979).

Ortalli’s work is sometimes cited under the title Pingatur in Palatio, a formula of condemnation (“let him be depicted in the Palazzo”) that appears on the book’s cover, printed at the very top.

¹⁶⁵

That such a meeting would be held in Ambrogio Traversari’s monastery seems odd, save for the fact that, despite Traversari and his obvious closeness to Cosimo, Santa Maria degli Angeli had long been a sort of oligarchic bastion. (Traversari’s difficulties there may be traced through his letters, but I have not even attempted to sort the politics of all this out.) For the alleged meeting, see the condemnation of November 18, 1434 (edited in Albizzi, Commissioni, vol. 3, p. 660; noted also in Gelli, “L’esilio,” pp. 89–90). See also Filelfo’s De exilio, pp. 186–98, with references to Landriani at pp. 188 and 198.

¹⁶⁶

See Field, “Leonardo Bruni, Florentine Traitor?” pp. 1140, 1144.

¹⁶⁷

Filelfo, De exilio, 80.

¹⁶⁸

For Poggio’s work, see now

Davide Canfora, La controversia di Poggio Bracciolini e Guarino Veronese su Cesare e Scipione (Florence: Olschki, 2001),

with an edition of Poggio’s text (p. 103 for the date).

¹⁶⁹

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 326.

¹⁷⁰

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 326v.

¹⁷¹

In the autumn of 1429. See chapter 2, pp. 59–60.

¹⁷²

Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fols. 10v–11, dated September 22, 1432, and MiBTriv 873, fol. 23–3v, dated December 11, 1432 (see Fiaschi’s note on Satire 1.2, but with citations that seem to be inaccurate: Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, p. 9, and n. 1); the incipit is Thomas Sarzanensis vir perhumanus (Bertalot 2.23207). Filelfo went on to state that Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo opposed him openly; Cosimo acted as if he were amantissimus of him, but he was a man qui et simulet et dissimulet omnia (“who both simulates and dissimulates everything”). Filelfo was known to “exaggerate,” but in this letter all seems truthful: Uzzano’s opponents did indeed throw back at him the charge that the assassination attempt was concocted by Uzzano himself, an accusation even made in the Consulte e Pratiche (see p. 59 in chapter 2); Cosimo’s brother Lorenzo was more forthcoming in dealing with the humanists, openly berating figures such as Bruni and Filelfo; that Cosimo, who may well have treated Filelfo as a dear friend, was one who et simulet et dissimulet omnia is a conclusion drawn in his own time and by many scholars today. Filelfo wrote to the cardinal in part because he was seeking support for a teaching position elsewhere.

¹⁷³

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.2. Fiaschi dates this satire to a few years after the events (p. 9), correcting Zippel, who regarded it as contemporary. Filelfo’s gloss on this satire implicates Iacopo Broccardi da Imola, brother of Girolamo—the rector of the university who had been harassing Filelfo (pp. 343–4). Girolamo was also implicated in assassination attempts on Filelfo in 1433 and 1436 (see pp. 218, 220 in this chapter).

¹⁷⁴

Orationes ad exules optimates, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 327: Reliqui vero honoribus cunctis spoliati ita servati in urbe sunt ut quibusque humili<bu>s abiectissimisque hominibus ludibrio sint.

¹⁷⁵

Filelfo, De exilio (book 1), p. 72 and passim. Widespread immorality during the period when factionalism dominated Florentine politics is also a theme of Filelfo’s Satire 1.2, dated to late 1433 by its editor (Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi, p. 9).

¹⁷⁶

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 72, 316 and passim. For Cosimo as Croesus, see also Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.3.

¹⁷⁷

But Filelfo is inconsistent on this. In his letter to Palla Strozzi of September 8, 1433, just after the oligarchic coup, he worried that if Cosimo was to be executed by the government, there would be a revolt led by his followers (see p. 218, n. 144 here).

¹⁷⁸

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 316, 318, 332–4.

¹⁷⁹

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 358.

¹⁸⁰

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 358.

¹⁸¹

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 358.

¹⁸²

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 102–4.

¹⁸³

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 256.

¹⁸⁴

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 304, 402. We shall return to the aedes shortly.

¹⁸⁵

See the Orationes ad exules, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 333 on Niccolò Niccoli and fol. 334v on Poggio’s mother and sister.

¹⁸⁶

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 224. Cf. the earlier Orationes ad exules, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 333.

¹⁸⁷

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 160, 332–4. In one satire Filelfo wrote at length on the origins of the Medici in the Mugello, but he removed the section in the official version he prepared in late 1440s. Fiaschi edits the expurgated section from Satire 5.8: Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fischi), vol. 1, pp. 521–3 (see esp. ll. 51–84). See also Fiaschi’s note on the final version (p. 500, n. to ll. 39–100).

¹⁸⁸

See Orationes ad exules optimates, Magl. VIII 1440, fols. 339v–340 for a detailed description of Cosimo’s physical appearance.

¹⁸⁹

Usually these discussions take asinus as an exemplum. This is an incidental part of the discussion. I have detected in Filelfo no particular interest in any form of nominalism; and even if the nominalists exploited such categories, others used them as well. Filelfo’s general philosophical approach, at least in this work and as portrayed by Palla Strozzi, is Stoic.

¹⁹⁰

Filelfo, De exilio, p. 256. For Poggio’s dislike of philosophy, see, e.g., pp. 106, 284 (and in fact the real Poggio noted that he had no expertise in philosophy). In this same dialogue Bruni comments: deformior Laurentio Medice … nemo (“no one is uglier than Lorenzo de’ Medici”: p. 338).

¹⁹¹

See Orationes ad exules optimates, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 339v, where Cosimo is addressed thus: ea es facie qua vel tui domistici bovinam vocitent, quod tibi cognomentum tota Florentia usurpatur (“you have the face that your servants call ‘bovine,’ and the nickname has taken hold in all of Florence”).

¹⁹²

Robin, Filelfo in Milan, pp. 17–20, discusses the possibility that the “assassination” attempt on him was really an attempt at mutilation, not murder. She may be correct, but I do not think that slashes across the face can easily be controlled and, in an era before antibiotics, they would not be expected always to heal. Her only real evidence is the attacker’s protestation that he was merely trying to wound. But this protestation could have been elicited by the need for some defense: a true assassination attempt would surely be a capital crime.

¹⁹³

Filelfo, “Prose e poesie volgari” (ed. Benadduci), pp. 1–5, at p. 2: ma certo felice colui e beatissimo chiamare si puote, alla cui buona sollecitudine la disposizione e convenienza delle parti corporee corrisponde (“certainly one is able to be called happy for whom a good vigilance has a correspondingly harmonious physical appearance”); then, the description of Dante (p. 3).

¹⁹⁴

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 3.1 (for the dating, see Fiaschi’s note at p. 139).

¹⁹⁵

See chapter 4, pp. 171–2.

¹⁹⁶

Those looking at the theme of the pursuit of happiness among eighteenth-century American authors (currently a popular subject) should, I think, look a little more carefully at Aristotle, or at eighteenth-century studies deriving from him.

¹⁹⁷

Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), p. 205.

¹⁹⁸

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 1.6, ll. 44–50.

¹⁹⁹

For the relation between moral and physical depravity, see also Filelfo’s Satire 3.6 on Antonio da Rho, which has no Florentine context (in Filelfo, Sat., ed. Fiaschi).

²⁰⁰

Filelfo, De exilio, pp. 304, 402. The location is where via Tornabuoni, facing north, doglegs to the right (at the church of San Michele Berteldi, whence the name). See

Maria Serena Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991),

especially pp. 277–80. These baths seem to have provided, as they say about certain forms of pornography, a little something for everybody. There were statutory attempts to do away with vice by separating the sexes at the baths: men and women went on alternative days. Here the modern reader may smile and say: “and guess what happened next!” Despite this noble effort, even heterosexual activity was not done away with entirely.

²⁰¹

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 3.2. They literally enjoy the vomit and urine. In this satire Filelfo also derides Cosimo’s support for the lower classes: see Fiaschi’s note to line 71 (p. 407).

²⁰²

In one satire Filelfo wrote at length on the Medici origins in the Mugello, but he removed the section in the official version he prepared in late 1440s. Fiaschi edits the expurgated section from Sat. 5.8, vol. 1, pp. 521–3: see especially ll. 51–84. See also Fiaschi’s note on the final version, pp. 500–1, at ll. 39–100.

²⁰³

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 4.9, ll. 7–10. This satire was apparently written toward the end of 1434, when Filelfo left Florence for Siena: see Fiaschi’s note to l. 41 (p. 468).

²⁰⁴

Orationes ad exules optimates, Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 342.

²⁰⁵

Rinaldo degli Albizzi, addressing Eugenius IV: Utris … credendum sit? Medicibusne et carbonariis et foeneratoribus et cauponibus et aleatoribus cunctisque impudicis, an viris optimatibus et luminibus rei publicae? (Filelfo, De exilio, p. 224, text slightly modified; “Whom do you believe? The medical doctors, charcoal dealers, usurers, innkeepers, gamblers, and all shameless people, or the ottimati and great lights of the republic?”).

²⁰⁶

e.g. in Filelfo’s preface to Vitaliano Borromeo, which mentions that the deteriores populi Florentini melioribus inviderent, ac plebei quidam et sordidi homines viros optimatis eosdemque praestantissimos et innocentissimos civis per omnem iniuriam atque contumeliam continuis insidiis latrociniisque vexarent (“the worst of the Florentine people begrudge the better, and plebeians and sordid men plague the ottimati and the outstanding and innocent citizens with every form of injury and slander, with continual plots and villanies”; Filelfo, De exilio, p. 8, text slightly modified).

²⁰⁷

Filelfo, Sat. (ed. Fiaschi), 2.1, ll. 12–13; humanists are listed by name or “code word” in ll. 67–78.

²⁰⁸

Brucker, Civic World, hardly mentions the humanists, save for an occasional remark about Bruni’s civic humanism. Kent’s Rise of the Medici, p. 234, finally gets around to describing the humanists; she mentions Filelfo’s “exile in 1431 and his replacement by a Medicean candidate.”

²⁰⁹

See p. 199, n. 56, and pp. 218–19, in this chapter.

²¹⁰

Magl. VIII 1440, fol. 335: sine Pogio Cosmus infirmus manchus debilisque esset, et Pogius sine Cosmo plane inutilis. It is interesting that, out of all his enemies in Florence, Filelfo has concentrated now his animus on Poggio (this did not happen earlier, when Filelfo arrived in Florence, since Poggio was in Rome then). This animus appears earlier than the Commentationes de exilio, in the Orationes ad exules optimates, composed perhaps toward the beginning of 1436, when Niccoli and Traversari were still alive (in a letter to Cosimo, Poggio described this piece as an oration “praising” the two of us). In 1437 Traversari, probably acting through Cosimo, attempted to intervene with Filelfo so as to effect a truce; Filelfo responded that he would never trust Cosimo for this and preferred Cosimo’s enmity to his friendship (Filelfo, Epist., ed. 1502, fol. 14v, letters of October 1 and December 9). Otherwise, I have not seen Traversari as much as mentioned in Filelfo’s works after he left Florence. Filelfo’s satire against Niccoli, in 1436 (Sat. 1.5; for the date, see Fiaschi’s note, p. 28), mentions Niccoli’s closeness to Marsuppini and Poggio (ll. 47–8) but is silent on Traversari. (There is an interesting discussion in Robin, Filelfo in Milan, pp. 34–42 on the complicated relations between Filelfo and Traversari.) Niccoli is barely mentioned in the De exilio, written about 1440 (he was dead at the date of the De exilio), and Marsuppini is described there by Leonardo Bruni as someone widely read but confused (see pp. 246–7 in chapter 6). Filelfo’s insights into so many areas are acute, and he is correct: Poggio was by far the most significant intellectual for the Medici regime.

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5 Francesco Filelfo, Oligarchic Virtue, and Medicean Vice

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