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 COPYING CHALKOKONDYLES:
GREEK MANUSCRIPT PRODUCTION IN 16TH-CENTURY VENICE

Copying Chalkokondyles:
Greek Manuscript Production in 16th-Century Venice
Laonikos Chalkokondyles, one of the four contemporary Byzantine historiographers of the fall of Byzantium, composed his work in the early 1460s after the advancing Ottomans captured Constantinople and the remnants of the Byzantine Empire. His Herodotean treatise, the Demonstrations of Histories (Apodeixis Historion), gained considerable popularity in manuscript form during the first half of the 16th century before a Latin translation appeared in print in Basel in 1556. Two-thirds of 32 extant manuscripts are known or are likely to have been produced in Venice between 1540 and 1550. The purpose of the thesis is to contextualize this extensive copying activity centered in Venice around the 1540s. It will first examine the manuscript tradition of the Histories and the paratextual evidence found in manuscripts, then scrutinize the overall production output of the scribes and the collections of patrons or book merchants who were in possession of the manuscripts in question, and finally inspect the connections between the copyists and the patrons. By discovering the intellectual spaces in which the manuscripts of the Histories were placed, the study will reveal economic, social, and intellectual tendencies in mid-16th-century Venice that popularized the Greek manuscripts of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ narrative of the fall of Byzantium and the rise of the Ottomans.
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16. Yüzyıl Venedik’inde Yunanca Yazma Eserlerin Üretimi
Bizans’ın son dört tarihçisinden biri olan Laonikos Chalkokondyles, yapısal olarak Herodot’u örnek aldığı eseri Tarihler’i (Apodeixis Historion), 1460’ların başında, ilerlemekte olan Osmanlıların Konstantinopolis ve Bizans’tan geriye kalan diğer bölgeleri ele geçirmesinden sonra kaleme almıştır. Tarihler, 1556 yılında Latince çevirisi Basel’de basılmadan önce, 16. yüzyılın ilk yarısında yüksek bir popülariteye ulaşarak yazma eser formunda defalarca çoğaltılmıştır. Günümüze toplam 32 Chalkokondyles el yazması ulaşmıştır ve bunların üçte ikisinin 1540-1550 yılları arasında Venedik’te çoğaltıldığı bilinmektedir. Tezin amacı, 1540’lar Venedik’inde Chalkokondyles’in eseri çevresinde görülen istinsah faaliyetinin bağlamını çözümlemektir. Bu doğrultuda öncelikle Tarihler’i günümüze ulaştıran yazma nüshalar, derkenarlar ve diğer maddi kanıtlar da göz önünde bulundurularak incelenmiştir. Daha sonra, yazmaları çoğaltan kişilerin diğer çalışmaları incelenmiş, üretilen yazma eserlerin sahibi olan kişilerin yazma eser koleksiyonları gözden geçirilmiştir. Yazma eserleri üreten kişiler ve sonrasında bunlara sahip olan kişiler arasındaki ilişkiler de incelenerek, Chalkokondyles’in eserinin çoğaltıldığı ağlar mercek altına alınmıştır. Chalkokondyles’in Bizans’ın düşüşü ve Osmanlı’nın yükselişi anlatısı olan Tarihler’in Yunanca nüshalarının kendine yer bulduğu entelektüel bağlamın ortaya çıkarılması, aynı zamanda 16. yüzyıl ortasında Venedik’te bu esere popülarite kazandıran ekonomik, sosyal ve entelektüel eğilimlerin de keşfedilmesine olanak sağlamıştır.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis advisor Prof. Nevra Necipoğlu for her comments, suggestions, and guidance that helped me in the process of contemplating and completing this thesis. I am also thankful for her patience with my laconic writing style. I wish to express my gratitude to Assoc. Prof. Koray Durak as well, who, along with Prof. Necipoğlu, introduced me to Byzantine Studies and helped me without hesitation whenever I needed it. I am grateful to Dr. Athanasia Stavrou for her efforts in teaching me Ancient Greek. I am also grateful to Prof. Niels Gaul, who introduced me to and helped me with Greek palaeography. I am thankful to Asst. Prof. Siren Çelik for taking part in my defense committee and for her valuable comments that enriched my thesis. I am grateful to all my friends at Boğaziçi University, among whom two deserve the most gratitude, Berke Çetinkaya and Ege Gutay. Special thanks to Bihter Sabanoğlu for proofreading the entire thesis, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. I thank my family for their support during the process. I also express my gratitude to the Byzantine Studies Research Center of Boğaziçi University and the Mellon Foundation for their academic and financial support.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1
1.1 The obscure life of Laonikos Chalkokondyles .................................................. 6
1.2 The Demonstrations of Histories .................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2: LAONIKOS CHALKOKONDYLES AND THE HISTORY OF THE DEMONSTRATIONS OF HISTORIES ...................................................................... 20
2.1 The manuscript tradition ................................................................................. 20
2.2 Printing history of the Demonstrations of Histories ....................................... 25
CHAPTER 3: SETTING THE SCENE: BOOKS AND GREEKS IN VENICE IN THE MID-16TH CENTURY ..................................................................................... 36
3.1 Manuscripts vs. print in the 16th century: Production and trade ...................... 36
3.2 The Venetian book trade ................................................................................. 41
3.3 Printing in Greek and Greek manuscripts in Venice ....................................... 46
3.4 The Greek community in Venice and the book trade ...................................... 52
CHAPTER 4: MARKETING THE DEMONSTRATIONS OF HISTORIES .......... 59
4.1 Copyists of the Histories ................................................................................. 59
4.2 Chalkokondyles within collections ................................................................. 89
4.3 Marketing the Histories ................................................................................... 98
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ................................................................................. 106
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................... 110
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LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1 Opening of the manuscript Parisinus 1726 ..................................................... 11
Fig. 2 Stemma for the Histories’ manuscript tradition by Herbert Wurm ................ 21
Fig. 3 and 4 Fragments from the Greek Psalter (left) and Batrachomyomachia (right), printed by Laonikos and Alexander in Venice in 1486 ................................. 49
Fig. 5 Folio 40v from Monacensis 307a (M1) ........................................................... 77
Fig. 6 Michael Kontoleon’s dedication at the end of Parisinus 1729 (folio 293) ..... 79
Fig. 7 Hands of Georgios Bembaines (folio 30v) and Michael Kontoleon (folio 31) in manuscript Parisinus 1729 ..................................................................................... 81
Fig. 8 The title of Chalkokondyles’ vita by Antonios Kalosynas and Andreas Darmarios’ intervention, folio 1 of Monacensis 150 (M2) ......................................... 87
Fig. 9 The first folio of the Histories in Tubingensis Mb 11 (U).............................. 88
Fig. 10 The adjunct excerpts with the title “ex tertio conciliorum tomo, de concilio Basiliensi, ad quod et Graeci venerunt” ..................................................................... 88
Fig. 11 Basileios Baleris’ signature at the end of Parisinus 1726 (folio 268) ........... 95
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ABBREVIATIONS
BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
BML Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France
BSB Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
CUL Cambridge University Library
EBE Εθνική Βιβλιοθήκη της Ελλάδος / National Library of Greece
JÖB Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik
ODB Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
ÖNB Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
RKG I Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800‒1600. 1. Teil: Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Großbritanniens, Teilband A: Verzeichnis der Kopisten (Vienna, 1981)
RGK II Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800‒1600. 2. Teil: Handschriften aus Bibliotheken Frankreichs und Nachträge zu den Bibliotheken Grossbritanniens, Teilband A: Verzeichnis der Kopisten (Vienna, 1989)
RGK III Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800‒1600. 3. Teil: Handschriften aus den Bibliotheken Roms mit dem Vatikan, Teilband A: Verzeichnis der Kopisten (Vienna, 1997)
VG Die griechischen Schreiber des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, bearb. von Marie Vogel und Victor Gardthausen (Leipzig, 1909)
ГИМ Государственный исторический музей / State Historical Museum
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century forced many émigrés to seek a better life in the West. They soon established communities in their destinations, mainly in Italy. Simultaneously a revival of interest in the classical heritage was taking place: the Renaissance. This development created opportunities for some of the Byzantine émigrés who possessed certain skills that were valuable in their destination, such as literacy in Greek and basic knowledge of its classical canon. Using their social networks and cultural capital, those émigrés turned to book production and trade after resettling in the West, both creating and satisfying the demand for Greek manuscripts. The current study examines a specific case in mid-16th-century Venice within this context; namely, the extensive manuscript copying activity centered around Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Demonstrations of Histories (Apodeixis Historion).
The study involves individuals and groups from diverse backgrounds who were linked to each other through this endeavor. The main group consists of the Greek community in Venice, Venetian holdings in the Mediterranean, and Italy in general. By the first half of the 16th century, the Byzantine/Greek migration towards Italy was not a new phenomenon. The migration of Byzantine scholars and its consequences have been studied thoroughly by modern scholars such as Deno
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Geanakoplos,1 John Monfasani,2 Nigel Wilson,3 Jonathan Harris,4 Donald Nicol5 and many others. Nevertheless, the émigré scholars constituted only a very small segment of the large Greek communities that populated Venice and other Italian cities. However, these studies tend to give a rather general view of the nature of the westward Greek migration, and their temporal scope does not always extend to the mid-16th century. Moreover, the 16th-century copying activity in Italy is a shallowly evaluated issue, since the concurrent development in Greek printing is often an overshadowing subject. The issues regarding the general Greek community of Venice in the 16th century also received attention from modern scholars,6 as they constituted a large minority group in the city; yet again, scribes and manuscript production as an economic activity is often shadowed by numerous other professions the Greek subjects of Venice were involved in.7
While the present research involves individuals from the abovementioned large cluster of people, the focus of the study is the dissemination of a monumental work by the mid-15th-century historiographer Laonikos Chalkokondyles, the Demonstrations of Histories in manuscript form in mid-16th-century Venice (and Europe). The earlier studies on the life and work of Laonikos Chalkokondyles constituted the base for the current study. Even though the Histories have been printed since the early modern period, the critical editions and studies on its author
1 See Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice. Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe. Also see Geanakoplos, Byzantine East and Latin West: Two Worlds of Christendom in Middle Ages and Renaissance.
2 See Monfasani, Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy: Cardinal Bessarion and Other Émigrés.
3 See Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance.
4 See Harris, Greek Émigrés in the West, 1400-1520.
5 See Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations.
6 See Burke, The Greeks of Venice, 1498-1600: Immigration, Settlement, and Integration. Ploumidis, “Considerazioni sulla popolazione greca a Venezia nella seconda metà del ’500,” 219–226. Moschonas, “La comunità greca di Venezia: aspetti sociali ed economici,” 221–242.
7 However, studies on the Greeks in Italy and their involvement in the manuscript production and trade started to appear recently. See Piccione, Greeks, Books and Libraries in Renaissance Venice.
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first appeared in the 19th century. The literature on Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ life is often interwoven with the literature on his work, due to the scarcity of external evidence concerning his life.8
Specifically, the production and dissemination of the Greek manuscripts involved the contributions of numerous specialists in manuscript studies, whose articles on library catalogues, sales lists of the early modern book merchants, codicological and palaeographical findings in individual manuscripts, and biographical studies on early modern scribes and manuscript dealers9 have been invaluable throughout my research, such as Brigitte Mondrain, Paul Canart, Herbert Wurm, Ernst Gamillscheg, Inmaculada Pérez Martín, G. de Andrés, Teresa Martínez Manzano, and Tamás Mészáros, who have been paying particular attention to the Chalkokondyles manuscripts in the recent years.
In this study, I brought together the previous studies on the manuscript tradition of the Histories, scanned the scribal output of its copyists, and surveyed the personal collections of the individuals who commissioned the duplication of the Histories, therefore contextualizing the dissemination and production of Chalkokondyles manuscripts within the social, intellectual, and economic situation in
8 See Miller, “The Last Athenian Historian: Laonikos Chalkokondyles,” 36–37. Darkó, “Zum Leben Laonikos Chalkondyles,” 29–39. Darkó, “Neue Beiträge zur Biographie des Laonikos Chalkokandyles,” 276–285. Kurat, Die türkische Prosopographie bei Laonikos Chalkokandyles. Kampouroglou, Οι Χαλκοκονδύλαι. Wurm and Gamillscheg, “Bemerkungen zu Laonikos Chalkokondyles,” 213-19. Kaldellis, “The Date of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Histories,” 111–136. Kaldellis “The Interpolations in the Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles,” 259–283. Akışık, Self and Other in the Renaissance: Laonikos Chalkokondyles and Late Byzantine Intellectuals. Kaldellis, A New Herodotos. Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West. Akışık-Karakullukçu, "A question of audience: Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Hellenism,” 1-30. The Demonstrations of Histories has a number of modern editions by Immanuel Bekker (Bonn corpus, 1843), J. P. Migne (Patrologia Graeca 159, 1866), and the critical edition of Jenő Darkó (1922-1927). Vasile Grecu translated the entire text into Romanian (1958). Nikolaos Nikoloudis translated the books I-III into English (1996), and Ferhan Kırlıdökme Mollaoğlu translated the books V-VII into Turkish (2005). Recently, Anthony Kaldellis published a translation of the entire text in English (2014).
9 Since almost all the copyists of the Histories were from the 16th century, the specialists who work on this specific period were especially useful.
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Venice in the 1540s, a period when and a place where the bulk of over 30 complete or partial extant manuscript copies of the Histories were produced. So far, no such specific study on the reception and dissemination of Chalkokondyles’ Histories has been conducted. The closest study appeared in 2016 when Geri Della Rocca de Candal studied the early development of the Byzantine corpus,10 which includes the early Chalkokondyles editions in print from the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. Even though his study includes discussions on the reception and dissemination of the Histories in the second half of the 16th century, it is predominantly concerned with the printed editions; whereas the current thesis mainly investigates the dissemination of the Histories in manuscript form, in Greek, during the first half of the 16th century.
The current project owes its existence to the digitalization of the manuscript collections in recent years, since almost all the Chalkokondyles copies have been made available to the public by institutions such as Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Vatican Library, and Tübingen University Library. Being able to access the manuscripts, at least in digital form, enhanced my understanding of the articles written by specialists of palaeography and codicology. Multiple visuals of the related manuscript folios have been attached to the related sections to allow the reader to visualize the information given. Online databases, the Pinakes11 database above all, were also fundamental tools for conducting nominal research. Physical databases such as Repertorium der griechischen Kopisten 800‒1600 and, although outdated, Die griechischen Schreiber des Mittelalters und der Renaissance have been consulted as well. Published sales catalogues and inventory sheets were another source of the current study.
10 See Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina.
11 Main page: https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/.
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The thesis consists of five chapters. In the introduction, the reader will be acquainted with the author of the Histories, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and provided with a general opinion on the characteristics and specifics of the Histories as a literary creation. Furthermore, the subject, language, and structure of the Histories will be discussed.
The second chapter will delve into the manuscript tradition that has preserved the Histories up to the present day. The following discussion will present an overview of the early modern printing history of Chalkokondyles’ work, to display the continued interest in the Histories after 1550. The difference in the attitude towards the production and dissemination of the Histories in Italy in the first half of the 16th century, and in Spain, Germany and France in the second half of the 16th century will be discussed later in the thesis.
The third chapter will evaluate the issues of overall book production (both scribed and printed) in Venice as a commercial activity and provide an overview of the development of the Byzantine/Greek society in Venice concerning their internal and external social links, commercial relations, and their position within the book trade in the Venetian world.
The fourth chapter will search for specific reasons for copying or commissioning a manuscript copy of Chalkokondyles by examining the personal manuscript collections of the patrons who ordered the individual copyists or scribal ateliers to copy the Histories, and it will interpret the data gathered to understand the intellectual spaces in which the copies were included. This evaluation will allow us to amplify our perception of the reception of the Histories before it was widely printed and gained popularity in other parts of Europe after the mid-16th century.
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The final chapter will draw conclusions from the preceding chapters and present a comprehensive conjoint analysis of the findings at hand.
1.1 The obscure life of Laonikos Chalkokondyles
The earlier stages of Laonikos Chalkokondyles' life are known with certainty, whereas the latter stages can only be the subject of learned guesses. Based on Laonikos Chalkokondyles' description of the Byzantine Empire's territorial holdings during the time of his birth in the opening of his work, the Histories, it can be deduced that he was born circa 1430. Certain events in his life can be securely dated until 1447, when we find the last record on him. Although the historiographer was named "Nikolaos," he chose to use the anagram "Laonikos," which had a more classical sound.
The details on his earlier years (c. 1430-1447) can be found in the travel diaries of Cyriacus of Ancona, among Laonikos’ own notes, and in the Histories. At his birth, Athens was under the government of the Florentine Acciaioli family. The Chalkokondylai were an important family of the city and Laonikos’ father, Georgios, was a prominent figure in Athenian politics. Georgios had to leave Athens with his family following the death of Antonio I Acciaioli in 1435, after having struggled for and lost the city’s rulership, which resulted in their exile. Later, Georgios appeared in the service of Constantine Palaiologos, the despot of the Morea at the time, who sent him as an envoy to the Ottoman sultan Murad II in 1446 (the sultan was moving against Constantine upon his invasion of Latin and Ottoman-held lands near the Morea).12 When Georgios reached the sultan, he was detained by him in Serres for a period of time. It is likely that Laonikos was an eyewitness to the battle at the
12 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 5.
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Isthmus that followed the disagreement between the despot and the sultan, considering his detailed description of the battle.13 As Laonikos was mentioned by Cyriacus of Ancona in his account of his visit to Mistra in 1447, it is safe to assume that sometime after Georgios’ departure from Athens, the family took service with Constantine Palaiologos in Mistra. Cyriacus’ records indicate that Laonikos was close to both Georgios Gemistos Plethon who resided at the palace in Mistra and to Cyriacus himself who relates how Laonikos gave him a tour around the Spartan ruins.14 It is also deduced from Cyriacus’ account that Laonikos was remarkably learned in both Latin and Greek. Cyriacus calls him by his given name in Latin, Nicolaus.
Plethon (d. 1452 or 1454), the renowned Neoplatonist philosopher and Judge General of the Byzantine Empire, was Laonikos’ teacher and had a significant influence on his historiographical style. It is known that they owned the same copy of Herodotos, Laur. Plut. 70.06, which bears Laonikos’ own handwriting.15 Laonikos drew upon Herodotos’ work as a structural template for the Histories as discussed further below. At the end of the same manuscript, he included an inscription in which he commented on Herodotos’ work, the historiographer himself, and the Ancient Greeks. Laur. Plut. 70.06 was copied by Nikolaos Triklines in 1318, probably in Thessalonica, and later owned by Plethon in Mistra.16 Laonikos, who inherited the manuscript from Plethon, left the following inscription at the end of the text:
13 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 5.
14 Bodnar and Foss (trans.), Later Travels, 298-301.
15 Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ note in Laur. Plut. 70.06 was first brought to attention by Aslıhan Akışık. See Akışık, Self and Other, 8. See pp. 58-75 in the same study for further analysis of the annotations on Laur. Plut. 70.06.
16 The history of Laur. Plut. 70.06 is complex, yet its details are not vital for the reader within the framework of the present thesis; therefore, I will not discuss other individuals’ connections with this manuscript. For a brief account of the history of Laur. Plut. 70.06, see Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, Appendix 4.
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[Belonging to] Laonikos the Athenian. It seems to me that the Greeks displayed a virtue greater than what is merely human, and that they made a demonstration of deeds such as to amaze us when we learn about them in our inquiries. They [the Greeks] were also fortunate to have a herald who himself did not fall far short in worth of the deeds themselves, I mean Herodotos of Halikarnassos, who recounted these events in the way in which each happened, in a manner akin to a divine procession [i.e., of events].17
Although there are several suggestions regarding the development of Laonikos’ later life after 1447, we lack definitive proof on his location or deeds for the most part. We can guess that he was not in Constantinople in 1453, and his detailed narrative of the events in the Morea between 1453 and 1460 suggests that he was based there, logically in Mistra. The internal evidence leads us to the conclusion that he composed the Histories between 1464 and 1466,18 while he gathered most of his material from the mid- to the late-1450s as understood from the information given in certain digressions.19
A source supposedly informing us about his later life is the vita of Laonikos Chalkokondyles by one of the copyists of the Histories in the late 16th century, Antonios Kalosynas (see below for the manuscript and the vita in question). Kalosynas claimed that Laonikos fled the Turkish expansion, migrated to the West where he taught both Westerners and other Greeks as well, and lived to pursue knowledge and wisdom. However, the factual information found in this account is in fact in accordance with the life of another, a better-known Chalkokondyles, Laonikos’ relative Demetrios.20 Regarding a westward movement in the later life of Laonikos, it has been suggested that he moved to and settled in Crete, served as a uniate priest there, before eventually relocating to Venice.21 This suggestion is based
17 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 45-46. For a slightly different translation, see Akışık, Self and Other, 58.
18 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 18.
19 Kaldellis, “The Date of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ Histories,” 111-136.
20 Mészáros, “Antonios Kalosynas,” 87.
21 For a detailed explanation of the theory, see Akışık, Self and Other, 10-21.
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on the theory that Laonikos Chalkokondyles and a certain uniate priest called Laonikos of Chania were the same person, and that this latter Cretan Laonikos is also identical to the Laonikos who published a pseudo-Homeric epic in Greek entitled Batrachomyomachia, while in Venice in 1486. Legrand’s suggestion that the uniate priest Laonikos was indeed the person who published the Batrachomyomachia is universally accepted.22 However, proving that Laonikos Chalkokondyles is the same person as Laonikos of Chania is necessary to support the hypothesis that he moved to Crete and later to Venice. Akışık-Karakullukçu draws attention to the letters of Michael Apostolis, another student of Plethon, that are addressed to a certain Laonikos.23 The opening of one of these letters, letter no. 22, differs between copies. The letters’ editor Legrand, who did not have access to two of these copies24 that start with “To Nikolaos, Dearest Laonikos,” used the name Laonikos twice in his translation as the copies available to him required. Akışık-Karakullukçu brings together the facts that these two copies were produced by Andreas Darmarios and Nicolas de la Torre (Nikolaos Tourrianos), that Antonios Kalosynas, who wrote the abovementioned vita documenting the name change from Nikolaos to Laonikos, was part of this circle and that Kalosynas and Darmarios separately copied manuscripts of Chalkokondyles. Akışık-Karakullukçu uses the rarity of the name Laonikos as additional evidence to support her suggestion. While it is a possibility, I have identified several issues with this theory. Firstly, it is not necessarily accurate to claim that Darmarios' and Kalosynas' manuscripts were separate; Darmarios used Kalosynas' manuscript as a template for his own, and he included the vita in his copy as well, albeit only after making some modifications (see Subchapter 2.1 below).
22 Legrand, Bibliographie Hellénique, 6-7.
23 Akışık, Self and Other, 10-13.
24 These copies are found in Escorial Gr. 87 and Vindobonensis Phil. Gr. 85.
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Secondly, since both Darmarios and Kalosynas took an active part in the creation and dissemination of the vita, it is possible that they shared the idea that Laonikos moved westward and thought that Apostolis’ addressee must have been Laonikos Chalkokondyles. Besides these, it is important to note that Kalosynas documenting the name change does not necessarily imply that he had access to additional information that is not available to us today, since the antigraph of his own copy, Parisinus 1726, also suggests the name change on the first page (see Fig. 1). Given that Kalosynas and Darmarios were aware of the name change and the fact that Kalosynas transposed elements from Demetrios Chalkokondyles’ life onto Laonikos in his vita, it is possible that Apostolis’ letters copied in this circle may have been deliberately altered. In addition to these points, Kaldellis points to the fact that Apostolis referred to Kydonia as Laonikos’ patris, while identifying Constantinople, where he himself was born, as his own patris (so, for Apostolis, the word meant one’s place of birth, and Laonikos Chalkokondyles proudly defines himself as an Athenian both in the Histories and in the abovementioned Herodotos manuscript inscription).25 Having made these points, I am not convinced that we have suggestive evidence that Laonikos Chalkokondyles was Laonikos of Chania, and that he moved to Crete after the Turkish conquests and then later to Venice. On the other hand, neither do we have any counterevidence against a scenario in which Laonikos Chalkokondyles migrated to Crete or Venice at some point in his life, independent from the suggestions above.
25 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 247.
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Fig. 1 Opening of the manuscript Parisinus 172626
The introductory title commences with “Nikolaou Chalkondylou historik[on]…” and the book/chapter title with “Laonikou Apodeixis Historion A[lpha].”
Another scholarly opinion on the later life of Laonikos is that he settled in Constantinople, composed the Histories there, and that his work was circulated among the ex-Byzantine intellectuals based in Constantinople. Based on internal textual analysis and inspection of the manuscript tradition, Kaldellis suggests that the composition of the Histories took place in Constantinople.27 While his inferences from the textual analysis, though logical, may not provide conclusive evidence, his suggestions regarding the manuscript tradition are supported by material evidence. The copyist of the earliest Chalkokondyles manuscript, Parisinus Graecus 1780, is identified as Demetrios Angelos,28 who was active in Constantinople between the 1440s and 1470s. Kaldellis points to the unfinished state of the autograph text, and
26 Image of the folio retrieved from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/.
27 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 22.
28 See Mondrain, “Jean Argyropoulos,” 223-50.
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the interpolations regarding Trapezuntine history, inserted by Georgios Amiroutzes who played an important role during the fall of Trebizond and the subsequent execution of the Komnenoi, and the acquaintance between Amiroutzes and Angelos.29 The interpolations are to be found both in the copy of Angelos and in the second earliest copy which appeared a few decades later in the West, indicating that Amiroutzes and Angelos had access to the autograph copy, which was an almost finished draft, left uncompleted for reasons unknown to us. Kaldellis therefore suggests that Laonikos composed the Histories in Constantinople. Although possible, I think neither is this final suggestion supported with conclusive evidence, yet we can at least say that Laonikos was in touch with certain ex-Byzantine intellectuals in Ottoman Istanbul even if he himself was not physically present there.
Akışık-Karakullukçu does not agree with the idea that Laonikos lived in Constantinople, noting the differences between Chalkokondyles and Kritoboulos regarding their approach to the Ottomans. Kritoboulos does not refer to the Ottomans or Muslims as barbarians; whereas Laonikos refers to the Christians as civilized people, while presenting Muslims as barbarians (interestingly, the Armenians are also counted among barbarians as an exception).30 Laonikos does not leave it here and also portrays Mehmed II as a tyrant.31 It seems unlikely that Laonikos would have put himself at risk by authoring such a negative portrayal of the ruling sultan if he were living so close to him. Thus, as I stated above and as Akışık-Karakullukçu also suggests, it is possible that he was not in the city when Angelos copied the Histories. At this point, we should note that there is a third scholarly claim, namely the possibility that Laonikos returned to Athens after the Ottoman conquest (1456)
29 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 20-21. For the interpolations, see Kaldellis, “The Interpolations,” 259-83.
30 Akışık-Karakullukçu, “A question of audience,” 11.
31 Akışık-Karakullukçu, “A question of audience,” 11.
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and execution of Franco II of the Acciaioli dynasty (1460).32 Although Laonikos could very well have returned to Athens under the changing circumstances by 1460,33 and this would have put him in a position where he could not only gather information on the Ottomans and western people alike, but also stay at a safe distance from the sultan, we still do not have conclusive evidence to prove that this was the course of Laonikos’ later life.
1.2 The Demonstrations of Histories
The Histories consist of ten books of approximately the same volume; however, the temporal coverage of the books varies. To achieve a more Herodotean feeling, Laonikos does not offer any dates for events other than vague references, so the dating of the events is only possible through comparison with other sources. The first book covers the longest time period as it offers a quick survey of the historical development of both the Greeks and the Turks up to a more recent time (that is the late 14th century). The following books inquire a timespan of around two decades at most, and as the timeline approaches Laonikos’ own lifetime, books cover a narrower period. The last three books are devoted to the reign of Mehmed II, who might be considered as the counterpart of Xerxes in Herodotos; not only for leading the Ottomans at a point where Laonikos’ narrative reaches its climax, but also by his tyrannical style of government.
The main objective of the Histories, in Laonikos’ own words, is to narrate “the fall of the Greeks and the events surrounding the end of their realm, and … the rise of the Turks to great power, greater than that of any other powerful people to
32 First suggested by Kampouroglou in 1926. See Kampouroglou, Οι Χαλκοκονδύλαι.
33 For a list of reasons making the conditions ripe for Laonikos to return to Athens in 1460, see Kırlıdökme-Mollaoğlu, “Laonikos Chalkokondyles’in Hayatı,” 50-51.
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date.”34 Laonikos used Herodotos as a structural model in his quest. Herodotos builds up his narrative by explaining the origins and expansion of the Persian Empire until it reaches the Greek territories, and then relates the pursuing struggle which ends with the Greeks defeating the Persians. While the story continues, he expands the narrative with ethnographic information and anecdotes. In Laonikos’ Histories, we see a contemporary adaptation albeit with an opposite ending. Laonikos relates the origins and the expansion of the Ottomans at the expense of the Byzantine state, and at the end the Greeks lose all the territories they held including Trebizond and despotate holdings in the Morea. However, the narrative continues beyond this point and reaches the beginning of the Ottoman-Venetian War (1463-1479). Throughout the narrative, Laonikos gives ethnographic information on the people when they have their part on the storyline, classifies people regarding their customs, language, and governmental structures, and informs readers about the history, the recent events of the people or realm in question, and the geographical specifics of their realm. Besides establishing a structural similarity with Herodotos, Laonikos also employs a Thucydidean historiography. Unlike Herodotos, he does not allow mythical or fantastic elements into his narrative and does not speculate on parts of the world that are unknown to him, such as India and further east. He instead suggests to the reader not to believe the stories told about such far places. He does not present his emotions towards the events that he relates. His narrative formulations are repetitive when events of similar nature occur, such as battles, raids, and occupations of cities.
A striking element in the Histories is Laonikos’ views on the identity of the Byzantine people as it widely differs from other Byzantine historiographers. The Histories, even though the work effectively covers the period between the years 1298
34 Kaldellis (trans.), The Histories, 3.
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and 1463, opens with a brief account of the events that bring the reader to the actual time period that is the subject of the work. Albeit brief, this opening offers a plethora of insights regarding Laonikos’ reception of the cultural and political identity of his own kin and people surrounding the Byzantine world. He constructs a continuous relation between the ancient Greeks and the contemporary Greeks who now call themselves Romans, referring to the Byzantines. His views regarding the Byzantine identity are partially shaped by his teacher Plethon. In his famous address to Manuel Palaiologos, Plethon declared his opinion on this subject as follows:
We, whose ruler you are, are Greeks by birth, as our language and national culture testify. Now no country can be found which is more intimately and closely connected with the Greeks than the Peloponnese, with the part of Europe near it and the adjacent islands. It is a country which the same Greek stock has always inhabited, as far back as human memory goes.35
Laonikos develops this idea in the Histories and places it in a wider political context by re-establishing the historical relations between the Latins and the Byzantines through his brief narrative of the cultural and political transformation of the Roman Empire, and the formation of what he calls the Greek Empire.
Laonikos summarizes a long period of time in a few pages in the opening. Echoing Polybius, he declares that he will tell the reader about the fall of the Greeks and the rise of the Turks. He goes on to emphasize the respected present status of the Greek language. It is a language that “has spread to many places throughout the world and mixed with many other languages,” and as “it is already exceedingly prestigious,”36 he writes his account in Greek. After noting that the deeds of the Greeks have been recorded since long ago, he summarizes Greek history, from Dionysus and Heracles to Alexander’s victory over the Persians and his rule over a
35 See Barker, Social and Political Thought, 198.
36 Kaldellis (trans.), The Histories, 3.
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large part of the world. Emphasizing the importance of the Greek language and summarizing Greek history, he then explains the nature of the encounter between the Romans and the Greeks:
At that point, the Romans attained the greatest realm in the world… They entrusted Rome to their great pontiff and crossed over into Thrace under the command of their king. In the land of Thrace, which is the closest to Asia, they made the Greek city of Byzantion their capital for carrying on the struggle against the Persians… From this point on, the Greeks mixed with the Romans in this place, and because many more Greeks ruled there than Romans, their language and customs ultimately prevailed, but they changed their name and no longer called themselves by their hereditary one. They saw fit to call the kings of Byzantion by a title that dignified them, ‘emperors of the Romans,’ but never again ‘kings of the Greeks.’37
According to the excerpt, Romans did not migrate to the East as an entire people. The king entrusted Rome to the great pontiff, so that the Roman people would still be staying in the West. The Roman presence in the East was mainly political and administrative and they were to be assimilated by the Greeks soon.38 Laonikos refers to the later Roman emperors as “kings of Byzantion,” who were called “the emperors of the Romans” instead of the “kings of the Greeks.” By the notion of “entrusting Rome to the great pontiff,” he refers to the Donatio Constantini, a forged document claiming that Constantine the Great had given the authority in the western half of the empire to the pope.39 The document also validates the papal right to coronate a Roman emperor in the West. Thus, Laonikos not only keeps the Roman people in the West and under the authority of the pope, but also leaves the Roman political identity
37 Kaldellis (trans.), The Histories, 7.
38 Akışık, Self and Other, 251.
39 Lorenzo Valla, who was a member of Bessarion’s circle in Rome, has proven that it is a forged document c. 1440. It is possible that Laonikos Chalkokondyles, who was close to Bessarion as understood from the Histories, knew that the document was a forgery, and in that case, his injection of this document to his narrative might be intentional to strengthen his ideas regarding the Byzantine, Greek, and Roman identities. In any case, the early 15th century Greek polemical author Makarios of Ankara and numerous Western scholars, Valla being the most famous, challenged the originality of the document around mid-15th century. For a detailed discussion of the reception of the Donatio Constantini in the Late Empire, see Angelov, “The Donation of Constantine.”
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to the papacy or to whomever the popes see fit for the position. The following section demonstrates the deepening divergence between the Romans and the Greeks:
(...) the Romans and their great pontiff had diverged for many years and in many ways from the Greeks with respect to religion, they also set themselves apart in other matters, especially in electing for themselves a king of the Romans, sometimes from among the French and sometimes among the Germans, and they have continued to appoint one down to the present time. Yet they are always sending embassies to the Greeks – indeed, there has been no time when they let up in this effort – in order to establish religious concord with them and an accord between the two sides, and thus create unity concerning this. But after they had thus treated with the Romans for some time, the Greeks were unwilling to mix up their own established ancestral customs with theirs. Because of this disagreement and at the instigation of the pontiff of the Romans, many westerners and especially the Venetians mustered a great expedition against the Greeks.40
Similar to his teacher Plethon’s words about the same people inhabiting the same land for thousands of years (referring to the Peloponnese and its inhabitants), one of Laonikos’ maneuvers in establishing his perception of the Greek identity is to present it as culturally genuine and unspoiled. In the previous paragraph, he avoids mentioning Constantine the Great, does not pronounce the name Constantinople, and keeps the religious aspect of the transformation of the empire out of his narrative. Then in the above section, he presents the course of events leading to the Fourth Crusade and the conflict itself as a religious issue. Yet we see that the Greeks (Byzantines) do not wish to come to terms with the Romans (Latins) on the basis that they do not want to spoil their own established ancestral customs, rather than having a purely religious disagreement with their adversaries. In the rest of the paragraph, he summarizes the Nicaean period, and states that the Greeks still preserve their identity, as emphasized in their choice of capital city after they were driven out of Byzantion: “They chose the Greek city of Nikaia for themselves, and established
40 Kaldellis (trans.), The Histories, 7-9.
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their royal court there.”41 The following paragraph brings us to the contemporary situation of the Greek identity. After the Greeks recapture Byzantion, king Ioannes (John VIII Palaiologos) tries to solve the religious differences in the face of the growing Turkish threat. He goes to Italy with the senior clergy and the most learned Greeks, and reaches an agreement. However, when they return home, the Greeks do not abide by the decision they made in Italy, and thus they “remained at odds with the Romans to the end.” The differences between the Romans and the Greeks, and the reason why the latter do not call the kingdom “by its proper name [that is, the Greek Kingdom]” are thus explained by Laonikos. Hereby, in a few pages, he settles the identity conflict between the Byzantines and the Latins (I am using the conventional modern terms for the sake of clarity) in his own way.
Interestingly, Laonikos does not mention his teacher Plethon in his work, although, for instance, he praises the Greek cardinal Bessarion, another student of Plethon. Cyriacus documented that they were in Mistra simultaneously and described Plethon and Laonikos in similar terms. Even without this proof, we can assume that the connection existed as their opinions regarding the identity issue were melodious; their description of ethnic identity is more or less identical. Plethon, in his abovementioned address, describes the people whom Manuel rules over as “Greeks by race, as both our language and ancestral culture bear witness.” Laonikos follows the same pattern when he indicates that the people of Trebizond are Greeks: “They are Greeks by race, and their customs, and language too, are Greek.” Thus, their definition of ethnic identity stands on three elements, a common custom or culture, a common language, and genos. Both Plethon and Laonikos accept the Greek identity without embracing Catholicism.42
41 Kaldellis (trans.), The Histories, 9.
42 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 209.
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For the 15th and 16th century Greek-speaking audience of the Histories, Chalkokondyles’ narrative presented a fundamental change in regard to the manner a more traditional historiographer would depict Byzantium and its people. Perhaps, with the political end of Byzantium and its remnants, and the necessary assimilation or integration of the Greek-speaking people under the Ottoman rule or in the Western states, the narrative of the Histories helped the Greek-speaking individuals to reinforce their valuable position in a world that was divided between the Ottomans and the West.43 For the non-Greek Western audience of the Histories, the rich details regarding Byzantine and Ottoman history, as well as the Ottoman administration and social organization presented an inestimable source of information regarding their adversaries. In this practical sense, the Histories offered benefits to the Greek-speaking subjects of the Western powers as well.44
43 Indeed, the Histories did not initiate such a re-positioning movement for the Greek-speaking people of the early modern period, since the Greek-speaking people had been living in various other cities and regions that fell out of the Byzantine rule for centuries. However, the narrative of the Histories matches with the political situation of the Greeks in the late-15th and 16th centuries and empowers them, especially the people living in the Eastern Mediterranean islands and strongholds that neighbored the Ottomans in the Italian mainland, by presenting a Heredotean bipolarity in the political situation in the Mediterranean basin and Europe.
44 A more detailed discussion of the practical value of the Histories will appear in the following chapters.
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CHAPTER 2
LAONIKOS CHALKOKONDYLES
AND THE HISTORY OF THE DEMONSTRATIONS OF HISTORIES
2.1 The manuscript tradition
While the autograph copy of Chalkokondyles (manuscript ω) is missing, there are 32 known Greek copies45 of the Histories, of which 4 are excerpts. Palaeographical analyses of the copies suggest the existence of two antigraph copies apart from the missing autograph. A critical apparatus and a stemma for the manuscript tradition were suggested by the Hungarian Byzantinist Jenő Darkó in his 1927 edition of the Histories. Darkó’s work was widely consulted for decades in the absence of a newer edition and was celebrated for surpassing earlier editions in the range of examined manuscripts.46 However, the shortcomings of Darkó’s study of the manuscript tradition (due to understandable limitations of the period) made a new study necessary. Herbert Wurm’s 1995 article47 advanced Darkó’s stemma (see Fig. 2). The only correction to Wurm’s stemma has been made by Tamás Mészáros, who inspected the textual evidence on different manuscripts and demonstrated that the Chalkokondyles fragment Vaticanus Graecus 1408 (Va) could be the apograph of not only Parisinus 1781 (Z), as Wurm claimed, but also Parisinus 1780 (V).48
45 Except a 19th-century copy in Greece.
46 Such as Immanuel Bekker’s 1843 Bonn edition, Laonici Chalcocondylae Atheniensis historiarum libri decem.
47 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 223-232.
48 Mészáros, “Notes on a Fragment,” 75-84.
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Fig. 2 Stemma for the Histories’ manuscript tradition by Herbert Wurm49
Parisinus 1780 (V) is the earliest copy of the Histories. It was believed to be copied by Georgios Amiroutzes;50 however, Brigitte Mondrain identified the copyist as Demetrios Angelos.51 Amiroutzes and Angelos were part of the same intellectual circle52 in Constantinople, where the manuscript is believed to be copied in the second half of the 1460s.53 This manuscript appears to be the only one that was copied elsewhere than in the west of Europe.
The second earliest manuscript, Parisinus 1781 (Z), was copied by the Corfiot Georgios Moschos circa 1500 in Venice. It was first in the possession of Janus Lascaris and then passed to the library of cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi. Parisinus 1781 is the antigraph of Monacensis 307a (M₁), from which three manuscript families
49 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 232.
50 Gamillscheg, “Der Kopist des Par. gr. 428,” 287-300.
51 See Mondrain, “Jean Argyropoulos,” 223-50.
52 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 21-22.
53 Kaldellis, A New Herodotos, 22.
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sprung. Parisinus 1781 is also the antigraph of Vaticanus Ottobonianus 309 (K), which is an excerpt from Chalkokondyles about the Duchy of Athens and was copied in Rome in the 1540s by Alexios, a Corfiot. Ashburnhamianus 998 (Y) is its apograph and is believed to be written sometime between 1541 and 1548 as its scribe Cristopher Auer was active in Rome specifically in that time period. Apart from these two fragments and Vaticanus Graecus 1408 (Va), mentioned above, a fourth manuscript, Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N), also follows Parisinus 1781 (Z) in part. Written by several scribes, Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N) has a number of lost or damaged quires, two of which were copied by Antonios Eparchos who possibly followed Parisinus 1781 (Z). An unknown number of unidentified scribes who copied the remaining quires follow Monacensis 307a (M₁).
Monacensis-307a was copied by 13 scribes in Venice in the 1540s, and only two of these hands are identified: Georgios Moschos and Paolo de Canale. Three manuscript families descend from the apographs of Monacensis 307a. The hypothetical progenitor (Manuscript “α”) of the first family (a) has not been found yet. Four manuscripts follow the manuscript α, of which at least two were made in Venice: Escorialensis 245 (E₁), copied by Nikolaos Malaxos; and Monacensis 127 (M) by Georgios Tryphon, completed on February 2, 1548. Codex Bodleianus Roe XII (O) is the brother copy of Escorialensis 245 (E₁), which is, in turn, the antigraph of Vaticanus 1732 (D).
The progenitor of the manuscript family b, Escorialensis 190 I (E), was copied in Venice by another Corfiot, Andronikos Nukkios, and completed on February 6, 1543, for the well-known diplomat and state official Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Escorialensis 190 I also bears the annotation of Arnoldius Arlenius. Laurentianus 57.9 (L) is the apograph of Escorialensis 190 I. For most parts, it was
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copied in 1543/1544 by Nikolaos Bareles and Basileios Baleris/Bareles, who were relatives and also Corfiots like Nukkios himself. Andronikos Nukkios’ hand is identified in the annotation on the front page and on the last few pages. Wurm pointed to numerous marginal and interlinear corrections the manuscript contains, and suggested that this manuscript was used as a template copy for the atelier in which these three copyists were working between 1540 and 1545.54
One of the copies following Laurentianus 57.9 (L) is München UB 2° Cod. Ms 357 (Mu). This manuscript carries Arnoldus Arlenius’ hand in the annotation and also in the corrections noted on the margins where the unidentified copyist made omissions. Since these marginal notes correspond to the Laurentianus copy, Wurm assumed that the Munich copy is an apograph of the former. Another of the four copies following the Laurentianus is Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H), the two hands who copied the manuscript remain unidentified. However, the scholar Martin-Kraus/Crusius’ note dated 1575 demonstrates that this copy was used by Crusius and his students in Tübingen when they scribed Codex-Tubingensis Mb 11 (U) together. Two of the four copies that follow Laurentianus 57.9 (L) were scribed by Andronikos Nukkios again. Nukkios copied Vaticanus 159 (G) for Antonios Eparchos, which he completed in Venice on May 31, 1544, and worked with another unidentified scribe for Parisinus 1727 (Q). While the latter does not have any apograph copies, the former has two: Vaticanus Palatinus 266 (A) and Coislianus 314 (C). These two copies and another one, Neapolitanus III B 25 (X), were scribed by the same unidentified hand, who was active in Venice between 1545 and 1550, and to whom Wurm refered as “Anonymous ACX.” The Neapolitan copy follows the progenitor of the third manuscript family which will be discussed below. Vaticanus
54 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 228-229.
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Palatinus 266 (A) was the main text Darkó used in his edition and the one he considered to be one of the earliest copies.55 As seen at this point, this manuscript is not valuable for reconstructing the original text. Coislianus 314 (C) has two descendants, Vaticanus Palatinus 50 (I) and Parisinus 1728 (R). The latter was copied by the Cretan Konstantinos Palaiokappas, who was a librarian at Fontainebleau in the mid-16th century.56
The progenitor of the third manuscript family (c) is Parisinus 1726 (P), copied by Basileios Baleris. He completed the manuscript on April 5, 1544, in Venice, for the Cretan nobleman Antonios Kallierges. For the first four books of Chalkokondyles’ work, Basileios follows Monacensis 307a (M₁), and for books five to ten, Laurentianus 57.9 (L) in the creation of which Basileios worked together with Andronikos Nukkios. Parisinus 1726 (P) has three direct and two indirect descendants. One of the three direct descendants, Bodleianus Canonici 80 (B), was copied by an unidentified hand. The hand in the second one, Londinensis Additional 36670 (Lo), is similar to the hand of Michael Kontoleon.57 The final direct descendant is Monacensis 150 (M₂), possibly copied by the physician and scribe Antonios Kalosynas and completed on November 21, 1567, in Toledo. Kalosynas added a short biography of Laonikos Chalkokondyles as a preface to his copy; however, as an experienced scribe to whom over 40 manuscripts are attributed, the hand in his Chalkokondyles copy is disorderly and contains scribal errors even though it carries similarities with Kalosynas’ hand.58 Kalosynas worked for the notorious book merchant Andreas Darmarios of Epidauros. Darmarios, following Kalosynas’ Monacensis 150 (M₂), scribed another Chalkokondyles copy, Parisinus
55 Darkó, Laonici Chalcocandylae, IX (Præfatio).
56 RGK I, 225.
57 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 229.
58 For a detailed analysis of this short treatise, see Mészáros, “Antonios Kalosynas,” 77-87.
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1779 (T), which he completed on March 4, 1579. However, he erased Kalosynas’ name under the vita in Monacensis 150 (M₂) and, in his copy, he attributed the vita to John of Kyzikos, which is a fictional name. Darmarios’ motivation for this forgery was possibly the idea that a name like John of Kyzikos would inspire more respect and increase his chances to get a higher bid for the book.59 Two other manuscripts descend from Parisinus 1726 (P) indirectly via a lost link (manuscript σ). One of them is the abovementioned Neapolitanus III B 25 (X) by Anonymous ACX. The other one is Parisinus 1729 (S), which was scribed for the most part by Michael Kontoleon, who noted that the manuscript was a gift for a compatriot Epidaurosian, while the hand in the fourth quire belongs to Georgios Bembaines.60
2.2 Printing history of the Demonstrations of Histories
Since the current thesis primarily inspects the Venetian circles which produced and marketed Chalkokondyles’ work in the mid-16th century, this sub-chapter will not digress from the temporal proximity of the mentioned period. Therefore, I will discuss the printing activity up to the first half of the 17th century and briefly showcase the spatial shift in the interest in and motivational differences towards Chalkokondyles’ work.
The Histories appeared in print form only a few years after it was extensively copied in -mainly- Venice around the mid-16th century. Interestingly enough, the first printed version published by Johannes Oporinus in 1556 was not in Greek, nor was it bilingual. It was a Latin translation by Konrad Clauser which bears the date 1544, which shows that the work was published 12 years after it was translated. In 1562, Oporinus published the same translation again in a volume containing the editio
59 Mészáros, “Antonios Kalosynas,” 84-85.
60 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 230.
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princeps of Gregoras’ history by Hieronymus Wolf, who was on a mission funded by certain members of the Fugger family which aimed at bringing together a Byzantine corpus. Wolf and Oporinus’ effort to create a series of editions (known today as the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae) that form a continuous history of the Byzantine Empire was carried on with later editions that will be discussed below. The editio princeps of Chalkokondyles’ Histories, J. B. Baumbach’s edition of the Greek text, was printed in 1615. Following editions were undertaken by C. A. Fabrot in the Paris corpus in 1650, by I. Bekker in the Bonn corpus in 1843, by J.-P. Migne in the 159th volume of Patrologia Graeca, and finally the aforementioned edition of the Greek text by Jenő Darkó, published in three volumes in 1922, 1923, and 1927.
The events that led to the publishing of Konrad Clauser’s Latin translation are worthwhile to review for they carry hints about the manuscript tradition. Clauser was offered by Johannes Oporinus to translate a certain Chalkokondyles manuscript, which Oporinus received from the imperial councilor Leonhard Beck of Augsburg, who tasked him with the arrangement of its translation.61 Clauser had completed the translation by November 1, 1544, as understood from the colophon of the 1556 edition. Clauser was also allowed to copy this manuscript for Oporinus and even though the copying took longer than expected, it apparently succeeded as a 1583 report noted that both Oporinus and Beck possessed their own Chalkokondyles manuscripts by then.62 It is possible, yet not certain, that the manuscript Clauser translated is Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H).63 As discussed above, Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H) was the antigraph of the copy created by Martin Crusius and his students in 1575, Tubingensis Mb 11 (U). Crusius, who added an account of the copying process
61 Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 2.
62 Mészáros refers to Josias Simmler’s entry in the Gessner lexicon of authors published in 1583. See Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 2-3.
63 For the argumentation, see Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 6-7.
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at the end of the Chalkokondyles’ text in the Tubingen copy, relates that he borrowed Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H) from Guilielmus Xylander (Wilhelm Holtzman), former rector of the University of Heidelberg, who had received the manuscript from Oporinus. Mészáros draws attention to the parallelism in Crusius’ and Clauser’s independent comments about the poor quality of the manuscript they worked on.64 According to the latest datings, out of the three copies located in Heidelberg at the time, only Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H) could have been copied before 1545.65 The abovementioned record notes that both Oporinus and Beck had their own Chalkokondyles copies, and Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H) was possibly the copy Clauser and then Crusius used. A perplexing situation emerges here since this manuscript descends from Laurentianus 57.9 (L), which cannot be Beck’s copy (it was kept to be used as a template in the Venetian studio previously mentioned). A possible solution to the question could be a scenario in which the exemplar Graecum Clauser used was indeed the poorly scribed Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H), a manuscript he not only criticized but also “corrected” in his Latin translation,66 and Oporinus gave Beck the “better” Greek copy instead which Clauser scribed, which is lost today. This can explain how Oporinus was still in possession of Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H), which was passed to Xylander and then Crusius before ending up in the library in Heidelberg.
The 1556 Latin edition of Chalkokondyles is considered to be the first edition of the Corpus Hisoriae Byzantinae.67 While Clauser’s translation was waiting to be
64 Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 7. 65 As noted previously, Vaticanus Palatinus 266 (A) was copied by “Anonymous ACX”, who was active in Venice between 1545-1550. The other copy in Heidelberg, namely Vaticanus Palatinus 50 (I), is the apograph of Coislianus 314 (C) which is another copy by Anonymous ACX; therefore, it must have been copied after 1544 as well.
66 For a sample of Clauser’s corrections, see Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 5-6.
67 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 40-41.
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published by Oporinus, who kept delaying the publication possibly due to financial issues, Hieronymus Wolf, librarian and personal secretary of Johann Jakob Fugger, was tasked with the editing and translation of Greek manuscripts brought from Constantinople and Amasya in 1555 by the Fuggers’ agent Hans Dernschwam.68 A year after publishing Chalkokondyles in Latin, namely in 1557, Oporinus published Wolf’s edition of Zonaras and within a few months that of Choniates, both printed in Greek along with their Latin translations. Wolf completed the editio princeps of Gregoras in 1562, which was published by Oporinus as well, in the aforementioned volume also containing Wolf’s emended version of the Latin translation of Chalkokondyles by Clauser. Even though the Fuggers had Zonaras, Choniates, and Gregoras at their disposal, Wolf needed another account to create a continuous Byzantine history, as these three authors to whom he had access only covered the period from Constantine the Great to 1341. At this point, the Viennese lawyer Philip Gundel shared his own Latin translation of Chalkokondyles with Wolf. We learn from one of Wolf’s letters to Oporinus dated 1558 that Wolf was hopeful about publishing Chalkokondyles both in Greek and Latin thanks to Gundel’s Latin translation he had recently acquired and the “complete and correct” Greek manuscript Gundel already possessed.69 Nevertheless, Wolf’s patron Anton Fugger was unwilling to move forward with Gundel’s translation owing to the fact that Gundel was a lawyer and, in his consideration, not properly fit for the task. As Wolf did not see much difference in quality between him and Clauser, and as Gundel was becoming impatient with the whole process and wished to withdraw his Latin
68 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 28- 29.
69 Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 8.
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manuscript, Wolf decided, at Oporinus’ suggestion, to reprint Clauser with emendations over Gundel’s translation in the 1562 edition.70
The presentation of the 1556 and 1562 editions bears thematic similarities. The 1556 edition contains not only Chalkokondyles, but also twenty-eight additional shorter works about the Turks. This edition had two versions that differ only by their dedications. The first version is dedicated to the brothers Adam and Georg Otto von Schwalbach, the former being the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta, and the latter a jurist. The lengthy dedication was written by Konrad Clauser and evolved around the issue of repelling the Turks from Europe. Clauser draws attention to the ‘mistakes’ made by the Byzantines and preaches unity against religious and political strife among Germans. He is explicit when he notes the reason why people would buy and read Chalkokondyles: The present treatise would help the reader to understand the nature of the Ottoman advance and would stand as a warning for all Germans about what might happen to them as well.71 The second version carries a much shorter dedication written by one of Oporinus’ editors, Johannes Herold, to Daniel Brendel von Homburg, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. Herold, in a similar vein with Clauser, points out the civil strifes and personal ambitions that caused the Byzantine Empire to fall, many examples of which the reader would find in Chalkokondyles’ Histories, allowing them to make a comparison with the current state among Germans.72 In the preface of the 1562 edition of Gregoras, to which Chalkokondyles was adjunct, Wolf declares that the edition in hand can offer a continuous history of the Byzantine Empire from Constantine the Great to Constantine XI (“the Last”) and that they finally have a
70 Forwarding this suggestion, Oporinus was suspecting that Clauser might have died. See Mészáros “Chalcocondyles Latinus,” 8.
71 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 48.
72 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 48-49.
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corpus that presents valuable information on the Turkish threat. The lack of Chalkokondyles’ Greek text in the edition and Wolf’s discourse in the preface can give us clues about his motivational approach to this work. He emphasizes the actuality of the text and draws attention to the vices of the Greeks, such as the prodigality of the emperors, ignorance of the clergy, endless civil wars, the arrogance of the people, and so on; all of which are in stark contrast with the virtues of the Turks. Wolf is in fact surprised that the Byzantines could resist the Turks for so long; he deems the Turks more worthy of ruling than the Byzantines, and he supposes that when the public reads this work, they will be more conscious of the ever-nearing menace.73 Another point of interest, which Della Rocca De Candal also noticed, is the harmony between Wolf and Chalkokondyles in explaining the Roman/Byzantine identity issue.74 Wolf’s words are worth quoting here:
For when the main seat of the Empire was moved to Byzantium, which from its founder rather than restorer was called not only Constantinople but also new Rome, little by little the old Rome with the neighbouring provinces, torn away from the body (so to speak) of the whole Empire, was subject part to the Popes, part to foreign nations. Then followed also religious disagreements, disputes, plots, open wars, and even the use of different names for both peoples. For the Byzantines called themselves Romans, and their rulers ῥωμαίων βασιλέας; but the other Christian peoples and kings, who recognized the authority of the Roman Pope, those they indiscriminately called Latins, and by these the Byzantines were in turn called Greeks.75
The Histories is found in five other reprints and editions published in German-speaking regions, respectively in 1568, 1574, 1578, 1587 in Frankfurt, and in 1616 in Basel. The first four of these editions, published by Sigmund Feyerabend, contain Zonaras, Choniates, Gregoras, and Chalkokondyles together (following the 1567 Paris edition of Chaudière that is discussed below). The Frankfurt editions do
73 Reinsch, “Hieronymus Wolf as Editor,” 51.
74 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 54-55.
75 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 208-209. For a comparison, see the related Chalkokondyles passages quoted above (Chapter 1, pp. 17-18).
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not supply the reader with Greek texts – all four works were Latin translations, - and little editing effort is involved.76 The 1568 edition additionally includes two works, the Dogmatic Panoply (Thesaurus Orthodoxae Fidei in Latin) of Niketas Choniates, and the funerary oration for Niketas, composed by his brother Michael Choniates. The 1574 and 1578 reprints and the 1587 reissue of the 1568 edition underwent a strange change; instead of the chronological order, the works of Gregoras and Chalkokondyles precede Choniates. The 1587 reissue has two appendices. The first, Appendix ad Historiam Orientalem, is a compilation of anonymous accounts of certain events of the 15th and 16th centuries, some of which were previously published by Feyerabend in Chronicorum Turcicorum (1578).77 The second appendix is a short treatise by Zonaras on canon law. The last one of the publications, printed in Basel in 1616, is in fact a counterfeit reissue of Oporinus’ 1562 publication, with minor alterations that bear little to no importance for our subject.78
Four more editions and a large number of reprints and reissues of Chalkokondyles appeared also in Paris. The first edition, published by Guillaume Chaudière in 1567, contained Chalkokondyles along with Zonaras, Choniates, Gregoras, and preceded Feyerabend’s 1568 edition by presenting these four historiographers together. This Latin edition did not offer the Greek texts themselves, yet the title pages introducing Gregoras and Chalkokondyles noted that the editors followed Wolf’s edition while comparing it with the Greek text, which resulted in a few corrections.79 It is not certain which manuscript(s) the publisher followed.
76 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 58.
77 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 60-61.
78 For the details of changes made in the counterfeit reissue, see Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 57-58.
79 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 110.
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A French translation of Chalkokondyles edited by Blaise de Vigenère was published in 1577. Vigenère wrote a long preface to this publication in which he discussed Chalkokondyles’ life and certain aspects of the Histories. He considers Chalkokondyles a modern Greek author who tried to imitate ancient authors with limited success, and complains about digressions that harm the linearity of the text with details that are not more interesting than his main subject, which is the replacement of the powerful Greek Empire with the Turkish Empire, ‘the greatest empire since the Roman Empire.’80 The work, which also has a 1584 reprint, is dedicated to Louis Gonzaga-Nevers, an important figure during the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), whose family has a distant relation to the Palaiologoi.81 On a noteworthy occasion that took place in 1589, Louis took a stance similar to some of the dedicational prefaces mentioned above, by drawing attention to the civil wars that caused the fall of the Byzantines. On the said occasion, the Catholic League, which was on bad terms with King Henry III, also a Catholic, approached Louis and asked for his support against the king, in order to display a more effective struggle against the Huguenots. Louis kept his distance and advised the Ligueurs that the Catholic factions should unite rather than fight each other. He then listed recent Catholic defeats, claimed that these were punishments from God for their divided stance, and stated that if they revolted against their king, they could send France into chaos and cause a disaster that is similar to the fall of the Byzantine Empire.82
80 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 136
81 Louis’ mother, Margaret, was the last living member of the Palaiologos-Montferrat family. This cadet branch of the Palaiologoi goes back to Andronikos II Palaiologos’ son Theodore, who inherited the March of Montferrat through his mother Yolanda Montferrat. Margaret was married to Louis’ father, Federico Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.
82 Knecht, Hero or Tyrant - Henry III, 281.
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The next French edition, in 1612, was published through association printing83 and has sixteen variants printed between 1612 and 1640, and a number of reissues and reprints published between 1650 and 1733 (I will keep the discussion limited to the variants of the 1612 edition).84 Although the 1612 edition and its variants’ main text, that is the Histories, were a reprint of Vigenère’s edition, they included additional texts of shorter size, such as the Continuation de l’histoire des Turcs (which was updated in later versions with recent events), and also illustrations representing Turkish sultans, depictions of the Turkish army in a pitched battle, maps of Constantinople, and portrayals of Ottoman court officials and Turkish commoners as well as people from other backgrounds in the Ottoman lands such as the Greeks, in their own clothing.85
Finally, the editio princeps of Chalkokondyles appeared in Geneva in 1615, published by Pierre de La Rovière. This edition had Gregoras preceding Chalkokondyles, as usual in editions containing these two historiographers, but it also had Akropolites, which, interestingly, succeeded Chalkokondyles in order.86 The editor of Chalkokondyles’ Greek text, Johann Balthasar Baumbach, used the previously discussed three manuscripts that were located in Heidelberg.87 Rather than having three dedication letters at the beginning of each work, this edition contains a single dedication letter addressed to three people from Strasbourg, which
83 In this method, the publishers divide the costs of editing, and they also subcontract a printing house, thus decreasing the fiscal risks.
84 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 115
85 Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 121-122
86 The editio princeps of Akropolites was published the previous year (1614) by Theodorus Dousa in Leiden. Della Rocca de Candal suggests that this addition might be a marketing decision, due to the popularity of Akropolites thanks to the mentioned recent edition.
87 Noted in the internal title page of Chalkokondyles’ text in the edition. For the transcription, see footnote 330 in Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 142.
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hints that a mixed French and German market was intended. La Rovière’s dedication letter comes across as highly religious and is somewhat detached from the context.88
Surveying the printing history of the Histories both during the period when its manuscripts were being produced and in the few following decades, we can infer that the Turkish advance had recently become an immediate threat for German-speaking entities, especially after events such as the Siege of Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522), the Battle of Mohács (1526) and the subsequent collapse (and later, the annexation) of medieval Hungary, the Siege of Vienna (1529) and Günz (1533), as well as the naval quarrels between the Ottomans or Ottoman vassals and Charles V’s forces in the Mediterranean. The growing interest in the Ottomans for reasons mentioned above, the Reformation movement, and the following religious conflicts which weakened the defenses of Europe, explain the popularity of the Histories among the people living closest to the Turkish menace. However, we also perceive that the religious conflicts that enfeebled France in the 17th century were seen as a course of events similar to the one that ruined the Byzantine Empire. We should also note that although nearly half of the Chalkokondyles publications had the Histories as either the sole text or the main text that was supplied with shorter auxiliary treatises (as seen in four editions), the others were presented adjunct to other historiographers’ works (as seen in five editions). Publishers could thus offer readers a nearly uninterrupted world history through Zonaras (covering the period from the Creation to 1118, the death of Alexios I Komnenos), Choniates (covering the years 1118-1207), Gregoras (covering the years 1204-1359), and Chalkokondyles (covering the years 1298-1463), works that could be used as reference books.89
88 For more information on La Rovière’s dedication letter, see Della Rocca de Candal, Bibliographia Historica Byzantina, 144-145.
89 Indexes preceding the main texts in certain editions are an indication of such usage.
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Having noted this, the fact that the editio princeps of the Histories appeared a almost six decades later (1615, Geneva) than the first edition in Latin (1556, Basel) and nearly four decades later than the first edition in French (1577, Paris) implies a relatively less scholarly, rather practical attitude towards the Histories in the context of the war or the threat of war with the Ottomans and the religious and political turmoil in Europe in the 16th century.
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CHAPTER 3
SETTING THE SCENE:
BOOKS AND GREEKS IN VENICE IN THE MID-16TH CENTURY
3.1 Manuscripts vs. print in the 16th century: Production and trade
The introduction of the movable type and printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century is long considered a monumental development that swiftly marginalized the supply, demand, and circulation of manuscripts. However, even though printing spread out from Germany soon after its invention and became widely known and applied, manuscript production continued for centuries and was even preferred over printing in certain situations. Several points regarding the shortcomings of early printing or the advantages of copying by hand can explain the reasons behind the coexistence of manuscript culture and the printing press.
Early printing required multiple people or groups to participate in a significant investment with a risk of financial loss compared to copying by hand. The publishers could pull down the cost per unit only by having a large number of copies, and it was usually not profitable to print a hundred copies or less.90 Therefore, the investors were obliged to prepare the grounds for a successful financial operation and be ready to handle fiscal failures in order to survive in the printing sector. The investors had a few principal necessities that added to the total cost. Firstly, the texts needed to undergo an editorial examination to prepare them for printing. Sometimes, a translator was also involved in the case of books written in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and such. The costly typesetting process would take place at an early printing stage. Then the book would be printed, which is only cost-efficient through reaching a high
90 McKenzie, “Speech - Manuscript - Print”, 245.
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number of copies as mentioned above. In the meantime, a printing house should have been kept operational by the publishers throughout the year. A mercantile effort must be employed during the sale of the books. For transnational distribution, a web of intelligence should be set that is spreading over the target markets (a surprising number of correspondences between book merchants and the application of the branch system, which was widely used in banking, demonstrate the importance of obtaining up-to-date information for the print book merchants91). Finally, the investors should have prepared warehouses to keep a large stock of items (i.e., books) in good condition until their sale. Therefore, a risky fiscal operation of such scale was conducted mainly by families with a mercantile background.92
Manuscript production was generally immune from such issues. Printing of unusual elements, such as illustrations in black and white or multi-color, musical notation, and the issues originating from specifics of other alphabets, was slowly and gradually solved, and copying by hand filled the void until printing was cheaper and more effortless in these areas. If a text included or entirely consisted of technically problematic characters or images, the text was either copied by hand or printed in part and then completed by hand with added illustrations or rubrication of segments. Usually, the scribes copied manuscripts on demand, and there was no risk for the copyists comparable to the ones printers took.93 It was common for a copyist to have another profession while occasionally copying books based on contracts. In the context of Renaissance Italy and for the works in Latin or dialects of Italian, there
91 Regarding the correspondences, Nuovo gives the famous example of merchant Francesco Datini, whose correspondence amounts to at least 125,000 letters. For the branch system used by Italian families, see Nuovo, The Book Trade, 162-194.
92 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 4-5. Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 12.
93 It should be noted that there were also manuscript dealers who would hire scribers and ready a stack of certain books that were expected to be sold with ease. The expansion in the book market with the introduction of the printing press affected the prevalence of such workshops; however, the “mass-produced” manuscripts were generally inferior in quality to those produced on demand. D’Amico, “Manuscipt,” 13-14.
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was an abundance of such semi-professional copyists. Flourishing trade and the administrative burden of centers such as Rome needed many skilled individuals who were schooled and could use different hands.94 While most scribes who copied vernacular texts were semi or non-professionals who would often copy for personal pleasure, recreation, or consolation, most of the copyists of Latin texts were professionals who would be commissioned by the individual who wished the text to be copied.95
Apart from the copyist(s), the process of creating a manuscript copy involved bookbinders and illustrators, and the final product would be a personalized copy. A lavishly decorated manuscript would have a more significant gift value than a print book, and gifting a work in manuscript form before its printing was also esteemed higher.96 As one can imagine, for such reasons and the costs involved, the cost per unit for a manuscript would be much higher than a single print copy. However, since printing was not cost-efficient in the case of low numbers of copies, as discussed above, it made more sense for particular works to be copied by hand rather than printed. Some works were lengthy and regarded specific subjects; printing them would be too risky as the market response was not foreseeable beforehand. However, the large market potential of a work was also a reason for scribes to copy it by hand. Books were printed to be supplied to the market and purchased by previously unknown readers; thus, the printed text would be available to a random cluster of people on the market. On-demand production of the manuscripts, on the other hand, indicated a predetermined target audience (at least in the case of the first-hand
94 Different professions would use a variety of hands for documentation, some of which were more appropriate for certain textual contexts. For instance, a text on practical knowledge would be copied with the “mercantile” hand rather than the “humanistic” hand. Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 60 and 65.
95 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 68-69.
96 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 6.
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owners). Another reason for copying a text rather than printing was that even though the text had already been printed before, a reprint or a new edition was not coming up soon, making copying faster and more efficient.
The widespread interest in books powered the development of the printing press during the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The privileges, predecessors of modern copyright laws, were issued by governments to prevent the financial losses of the people investing in the printing business. Since printing was profitable through selling many copies, counterfeit issues would harm the sales of the original issue, resulting in investors pulling out of the market in question. The legislation to protect the copyrights also diverted many entrepreneurs into publishing what was not yet published; from typography varieties to the subject range and from different alphabets to musical notation and engravings, publishers tried to secure their profits by obtaining privileges on the unpublished material.97 The Reformation movement that started in the 1520s and the Counter-Reformation effort that was in effect from the 1540s onward affected the religious and governmental institutions’ approach to copyright legislation initially designed to defend the rights of the publisher. The state and the church started to tighten their control over publishing activities, and the expurgation or total prohibition of certain texts became a common way of policing the circulation of ideas. Towards the end of the 16th century, the sheer amount of published texts crippled the censorship efforts, which nevertheless continued and had their toll on the disappearance or distortion of many early publications.98 During this
97 This was generally the case with the newer texts and mostly for works written in the vernacular. Publishers who could edit and publish classical or medieval texts on technical issues were less prone to apply for privileges, as they did not rely on the novelty of their material. For a sample case, see Nuovo, The Book Trade, 213-214.
98 Fragnito, “The Expurgatory Policy,” 202.
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turbulent century, there was no system for monitoring manuscript production,99 and the relative freedom from censorship or reprehension made the manuscript an appropriate medium for texts intended to circulate among a limited audience for various reasons.
The ongoing relevance of manuscript culture can be observed through manuscripts’ share in the libraries and book collections of the 16h century. Public libraries that made a large variety of manuscripts accessible to the people started to appear in the Catholic world with the library of San Marco in Florence (1444) and spread to the continent. The invention of the printing press did not diminish the strong presence of manuscripts in public libraries, as many of these contained more manuscripts than print books, even in the 16th century.100 A considerable portion of the personal collections from the second half of the 16th century also consisted of manuscripts. The collections with more than 1,000 volumes are estimated to consist of manuscripts by 10 to 20 percent.101 Since the advances in printing and the introduction of smaller types and cheaper paper brought the prices for print books down to a level at which average-income citizens could obtain many volumes if they wished so,102 the ratio of manuscripts to print books in the personal collections is noteworthy in acknowledging the continued relevance of manuscript culture in 16th-century Europe.
99 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 4. Heavy censorship on print material prompted many people to circulate their opinions in hand-written format, which the governments countered with heavy punishments. For the extent of such punishments, see p. 158-159 in the same volume.
100 D’Amico, “Manuscript,” 16.
101 For several examples of personal collections with a large number of manuscripts, see Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 9.
102 For comparison, we can remember that Aldus Manutius’ edition of Aristotle’s Opera was on sale for 1,5 to 3 ducats at the end of the 15th century, whereas a modest annual income then was between 50 and 100 ducats. In the 16th century, though, it was common to find a 150-400 pages long book for 4-40 soldi (1 ducat = 124 soldi). Therefore, in the 16th century, books were well within the reach of the lowest income groups, whereas wealthy people could amass thousands of volumes with ease. For more details on the book prices in 16th-century Italy, see Grendler, “Printing and censorship,” 30-31, and Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 12-16.
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3.2 The Venetian book trade
The book trade in Venice flourished with the arrival of the printing press in 1469. Venice became Europe’s foremost printing center by the end of the 15th century. In the following century, nearly half of the books printed in Italy were produced in Venice and other Venetian territories. With its cosmopolitan structure, mercantile background, relatively liberal censorship policies, and copyright legislation protecting publishers, Venice was to become the capital of the printing press from the late 15th to the late 16th century.
The large scale of book production and trade in Venice in the second half of the 15th and first half of the 16th century was primarily due to several known reasons. Venice had an advantageous location from which it could efficiently distribute the products to the markets, and the population had already acquired mercantile know-how in the previous centuries. Nearby markets included other Italian cities with their universities and countless humanist visitors, adding to the demand created by Venice’s population with a relatively high literacy rate and the scholars at its own University of Padua. In addition, the 16th-century patricians of Venice were prone to support the publishers’ enterprises since their dominion over the spice and silk trade was shaken by the Portuguese. In contrast, they were closer to establishing a monopoly over the raw materials used in book production, paper being in the first place.103
The number of copies printed went from modest to vast amounts quickly. In Venice, John of Speyer / Giovanni da Spira printed 100 copies of Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares in 1469, while in 1490, Battista Torti published Justinian’s Codex in 1,300 copies.104 The Venetian government would not issue a privilege for a press run
103 Carroll, “Venetian Literature,” 618.
104 Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 217-218.
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lower than 400 by the mid-16th century, and a press run of 1,000 copies was common for ordinary books, while a press run of 2,000-3,000 copies could be ordered for titles that promised guaranteed success in sales.105 The estimations for the volume of Venetian publishing in the Cinquecento vary greatly. Earlier scholars suggested that over 7,500 editions were published in Venice in the 16th century; however, later studies reached a much higher number of 17,500 by taking into account the libraries and catalogues previously ignored and correcting methodological mistakes.106 Angela Nuovo estimates 27,000 editions were published in Cinquecento Venice.107 In comparison, Jane A. Bernstein suggests 35,000 editions,108 as both studies include the production that has not survived to our age due to the prohibitions of the Counter-Reformation and other (natural) reasons.
The individuals involved in the Venetian printing scene included members of certain large families who already possessed the capital to establish themselves safely in the publishing sector,109 along with people of humbler backgrounds who could run or work at a smaller press or a bookshop. Large publishers would take part in every step of the book trade, namely, not only in printing but also in the distribution and selling of books. Therefore, 16th-century Venetians interchangeably used the words stampatore, libraio, and bibliopola.110 The most outstanding presses, such as the ones of Giolito and Manuzio, issued around 10 editions per year, while
105 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 8.
106 The earlier estimation of 7,500 editions was suggested in 1924 by Ester Pastorello, Tipografi, editori, librai a Venezia nel secolo XVI, who made a survey of three Italian libraries. Grendler raised this number to 17,500, including other libraries in and out of Italy, and surveys of the output of major publishing houses. See Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 8.
107 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 49
108 Bernstein, Music Printing, 14.
109 Such as certain members of Giolito, Giunti, Manuzio, and Scotto families.
110 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 4.
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other active publishers of relatively large press111 issued 5-6 editions annually, and smaller companies reached an average of 2-4 editions annually.112 There were also nearly 500 individuals who published only a single edition in their careers.113 Some of the large publishers specialized in certain subjects. For instance, the Aldine press published numerous classical editions and humanist works, while the Giunti press invested in practical religious books such as missals and liturgical manuals. Conversely, smaller presses were less prone to subject specialization and would invest in any profitable publishing enterprise.114
Similar to most industries in Venice, the Venetian bookmen established their own guild named Arte/Universita delli Librari et Stampadori, officially in 1567, yet possibly they had an informal structure to solve internal issues prior to that date.115 They held their meetings at San Zanipolo (SS. Giovanni e Paolo), a Dominican church with a large warehouse that the guild members used for storing books.116 Even though the guild had around 70 members, while there were 125 presses at the end of the century, it included important printers such as the heads of the known firms of Giunti, Valgrisi, Arrivabene, Tramezzino, and Ziletti.117 The guild would help its members and their family after a member died and defend the interest of the printers against external factors, as in the case of petitioning the Catholic authorities in the city regarding the limitations that the Index of Prohibited Books brought upon them.118
111 Grendler counts Girolamo Scoto, Vincenzo Valgrisi, Michele Tramezzino, Comin da Trino, and Francesco Ziletti among these large size publishers, and except Ziletti, all of them were active from the 1540s to the 1570s. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 5.
112 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 5.
113 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 5.
114 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 6.
115 Bernstein, Music Printing, 18.
116 Bernstein, Music Printing, 18.
117 Bernstein, Music Printing, 18.
118 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition, 99-100.
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The social and political turmoil in Italy and Europe affected the Venetian book trade in the first half of the 16th century. The War of the League of Cambrai, during which Venice lost and then regained large parts of the terraferma, while following clashes between Charles V and Francis I over the domination in the Italian peninsula disrupted the Venetian trade in general. At the same time, the Reformation movement and the subsequent Counter-Reformation effort forced the Republic to alter its printing regulations. Back in 1469, when printing was introduced to Venice, the state issued a privilege to John of Speyer over the printing itself rather than a privilege over a literary work to be printed. This was the fashion Venice followed before, as such privileges would be issued for technical innovations similar to modern patents. John’s sudden death a few years later annulled this privilege, and soon the government ceased to issue this form of privilege to evade obstructing the printing industry.119
In the following decades, three types of privileges appeared; the literary privileges that protected the authors’ rights on their literary production, the industrial privileges that protected the innovators’ rights who brought novel techniques in printing such as the Greek typeface claimed to be invented by Aldus Manutius, and the commercial privileges that were given to publishers over a literary work.120 Acquiring privileges was not an obligation; it was granted on request instead. In its earlier stages, obtaining a privilege was relatively easy, which turned out to be a problem when people started hoarding privileges that they might use at a later time, and therefore blocking others who could readily invest if there was no privilege issue on the literary works in question. Thus, the Senate canceled all the previously granted privileges in 1517 and decreed that privileges should be granted only with a
119 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 200.
120 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 202-204.
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two-thirds majority vote of the Senate, and in 1534 the Senate compelled the privilege holders to publish the work or works within a year unless the work cannot be printed in a year due to its length.121 In such decrees that also appeared at later dates, an essential aspect of granting privileges was stressed that he privileges were to be issued for newer works, explicitly excluding the so-called common texts such as liturgical works and medieval or earlier authors’ texts, but not their translations or commentaries.122 A noteworthy outcome of the privilege system was the diversity it brought to the publishing sector as it discouraged entrepreneurs from publishing the same or very similar works and increased the volume of exports which generated higher tax revenue for the Republic. The Counter-Reformation movement that started with the Council of Trent (1545-1563) opened a new chapter in the regulation of printing in Venice. The Council forbade the possession or sale of the books of anonymous authors in 1546. In 1548 and 1549, the Venetian government issued legal deliberations decreeing that the publishers and booksellers should pay utmost attention to the Index of Prohibited Books, and the state ordered the establishment of a guild in 1549, aiming to regulate the sector. 123
The production and trade of manuscripts continued in Venice in the 16th century, similar to the rest of Europe. Italian cities with universities such as Bologna, Florence, and Venice’s own Padua witnessed extensive manuscript copying activity thanks to the pecia124 system developed in the previous centuries, a method for quickly copying university textbooks by dividing them into sections to be copied individually. As explained above, the privilege system developed in Venice necessitated the publishers to seek unpublished material for which no one held a
121 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 210-213.
122 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 213.
123 Nuovo, The Book Trade, 217.
124 Peciae means “quires” in Latin.
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privilege. Therefore, publishers would send their agents to distant locations where they could gather manuscripts with commercial potential if published, and we can infer that there was a flow of manuscripts toward Venice for this reason.
3.3 Printing in Greek and Greek manuscripts in Venice
Venice had a large Greek community thanks to the influx of Greek immigrants that accelerated after the fall of Constantinople, the Morea, and Trebizond. This influx became continuous due to easy access to Venice from the Greek-speaking parts of the Stato da Màr, which the still-advancing Ottomans threatened during the 16th century, and due to Venice’s need for manpower. Even though Venice acquired the necessary human resources, the rapid expansion in the printing business did not occur at the same pace in the Greek script as it did in Latin during the first two decades of printing in Venice because of the technical issues that grew out of the relative complexity of the former with its ligatures, contractions, accents, and letter variants. The typesetting process demanded the symbols to fit in the rectangular metal types, but Greek script had letter conjunctions and all kinds of marks that exceeded the limit of a type’s shape. Aldus Manutius, who initiated his press in Venice in the last decade of the 15th century, was the person who changed the course of events regarding printing in Greek and established a market for Greek print books across the continent. At the same time, a high number of Greek manuscripts were copied in Venice in the 16th century, which is a phenomenon that requires attention.
Although print books in Greek quickly evolved to be an essential part of the book trade in Venice and Europe with the Aldine press, Aldus Manutius was not the first person to print a book entirely in Greek. In Italy, primitive Greek typefaces were created in the 1460s in Rome, and at the end of the decade, the early printer John of
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Speyer used a better Greek typeface. Nicolas Jenson followed him shortly with his own very similar yet separate typeface. These early Greek typefaces, collectively known as the De Spira-Jenson model, were possibly modeled after a calligrapher who worked under Cardinal Bessarion and wrote headings to Bessarion’s manuscripts until 1468 when the cardinal gifted his library to San Marco, a few months before John of Speyer’s Greek typeface was created.125 The De Spira-Jenson model was used for two decades in different cities in Italy. Another Greek typeface created in the 1470s was based on Demetrios Chalkokondyles’ handwriting, which was a relief for the engravers with its characteristically separate letters fitting the rectangular grid individually. As Demetrios Chalkokondyles was an acclaimed professor of Greek, his style was also considered better for certain texts, while the De Spira-Jenson model, lacking in aesthetics, was deemed adequate for quotations in Greek.126 The first book ever printed entirely in Greek came in 1476 in Milan, the Erotemata (or Epitome)127 of Constantinus Lascaris. The typeface of this edition was created by Demetrios Damilas and based on the handwriting of Michael Apostolis.128 Damilas also acted as the editor of the publishing of the Erotemata. He moved to Florence later, and worked with Demetrios Chalkokondyles on publishing the editio princeps of Homer in 1488, for which he designed the typeface. Damilas, who continued his activity as a copyist in Florence for the Medicis and in Rome for the Vatican,129 is an example of diaspora Greeks who took part in different forms of intellectual production.
125 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 24.
126 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 30.
127 Erotemata were grammatical manuals in question-and-answer form, first introduced to Italy by Manuel Chrysoloras (c.1350–1415).
128 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 31.
129 Layton, The sixteenth century Greek book, 6-8.
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The first book printed in Venice entirely in Greek appeared in 1486. Laonikos, the Cretan priest discussed in Chapter 1, and his partner Alexander, son of George, another Cretan priest, published the Batrachomyomachia and the Greek Psalter. However, their press failed, possibly due to commercial problems or hardships with Greek typesetting.130 Their editions strike the reader with the simplicity of their Greek type (see Figures 3 and 4), and it is possible that the artless cutting of the types was of less experienced Cretans rather than experienced Venetian engravers.131 Given the existence of a large Greek community in the lagoon, the late development and limited success of Greek printing in Venice until Aldus Manutius’ press may seem perplexing at first glance. However, it was exactly the large number of Greeks in Venice that made copying Greek manuscripts in Venice more favorable than printing books in Greek script. The Greek immigrants flowing to the city had the appropriate cultural capital that enabled them to find employment as scribes. Also, as Barker noted, the demand for Greek works was large but scattered,132 that is, proper hands were sought for different types of texts, which would add to the toil of a publisher who would need more types. Besides, Greek was not commonly known enough to create a market for books in Greek among non-Greeks at the time, while the Greeks themselves constituted neither a promising market nor as many wealthy entrepreneurs willing to take a risky step.133 The Greek books printed in Italy until Aldus Manutius’ time included numerous grammatical treatises, showcasing an interest among the non-Greek population in learning Greek.
130 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 35-37.
131 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 37.
132 Barker, Aldus Manutius, 12.
133 Davies, Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher, 9.
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Appendix was a pamphlet of introductory linguistic exercises for Greek. It included the description of Greek letters and their pronunciation, the diphthongs and their pronunciation, and the consonant changes in verb conjugations.137 The pronunciation rules in the Appendix followed the demotic Greek of the time.
Aldus achieved great success with his second publication, which also came in 1459, the Organon of Aristotle. He also obtained a 20-year privilege for his Greek typeface in the same year. His claim of innovation was based on the cursive script type, which he modeled on the handwriting of contemporary Greek scribes, and the kerning138 of his typeface that allowed him to impress ligatures and contractions.139 Layton noted that the reason for Aldus to deploy a contemporary scribal style for his Greek type was commercial, as his target market was the Italian population rather than the Greeks. The contemporary hand was easier to read for non-Greeks, who found the Aldine type easier to read as a result.140 Aldus was affected economically and socially by the abovementioned political turmoil, and he even had to leave Venice for a while during the War of the League of Cambrai.141 After c. 1500, the Aldine press started to publish Latin works as well to survive the economic difficulties created by the Ottoman-Venetian War (1499-1503), although he continued to publish Greek works.
Aldus Manutius was not the only person printing in Greek in Venice; certain figures in the Greek community also managed to create their press and competed with Aldus with limited success. Zacharias Kallierges and Nikolaos Vlastos ran a
137 Tomè, Aldus Manutius and the Learning of Greek, 35.
138 Kerning is the process of improving the appearance of a text by arranging the spacing between letters. Spacing was a problem in early printing, especially in italic fonts, since letters on the types would not exceed the rectangular limit of the cast metal type, creating uneven spacing.
139 Layton, The sixteenth century Greek book, 15.
140 Layton, The sixteenth century Greek book, 12.
141 At a stage of the war, the Leauge led by the Pope fought against Venice, and since Aldus Manutius was a Roman citizen, he left Venice to be safe.
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short-living press in Venice at the end of the century, backed by Anna Notaras, the daughter of the last megas doux of the Byzantine Empire, Loukas Notaras.142 Kallierges and Vlastos created their own type, similar to the Aldine font with technical differences in letter spacing. Therefore, they managed to secure a privilege from the government and published four Greek books before they dissolved their partnership in 1500.143 Kallierges established another press in 1509 and printed four more works, the last of which was the first printed book in Modern Greek, Apokopos by Bergadis,144 before selling the firm (and therefore the typeset used to print the Apokopos) to the Florentine Giunti family.145 Kallierges moved to Rome afterward, where Pope Leo X established the Greek Gymnasium in 1513. He took part in the printing activity under the Gymnasium along with other learned Greeks of the time, such as Janus Lascaris, who was previously residing in Florence, and Markos Musuros, who worked as an editor with both Kallierges and Aldus Manutius in Venice.
Greek printing was thus created following the contemporary scribal hands or more traditional styles and then developed as the technical necessities demanded. Even though the first attempts were made in the north of the Alps, Greek printing became a commercial success in Italy, and more specifically in Venice at the end of the 15th century. The interest in the classical heritage and towards learning Greek fueled the development of Greek printing. The legal reasons required novelty in printing to be commercially successful; the privilege system favored newer works, translations, or works in other languages, as one could obtain legal ownership of the
142 Loukas Notaras, who was executed by Mehmed II soon after capturing the city, had sent Anna to Italy before 1453.
143 Layton, The sixteenth century Greek book, 22.
144 Apokopos is the title given to this early 15th century work in verse, attributed to Bergadis, an unknown author from a noble Cretan family.
145 Layton, The sixteenth century Greek book, 23.
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material if it could not be considered public domain. The movement of the manuscripts and their trade and production was also interwoven with the popularity of printing in Italy. Agents sailed overseas to bring more manuscripts to be edited and printed, and works that could not be printed for various reasons were to be copied by hand. Greek printing, being transformed in Italy for nearly half a century, expanded back to the north and west, to Germany, Spain, and France, where the royal printers of Francis I created the Royal Greek types around the 1540s, which then gained more popularity than the Italian fonts across the continent.
3.4 The Greek community in Venice and the book trade
The Greek community in Venice was of considerable size; a fifth of the city’s population consisted of foreigners in the 16th century, and a quarter of the foreign population consisted of Greeks, possibly the most significant minority.146 The formation of such a populous community was in part stimulated by the Turkish advance, which, after taking over the last Byzantine holdings, was threatening the Venetian overseas territories that were inhabited by Greeks, such as the remaining strongholds in the Morea and islands in the eastern Mediterranean. Since Venetian authority was long established in the areas in question, Venice proper was a natural destination for immigrants and a welcoming place for Greeks who sought security, stability, and better living conditions elsewhere than their homelands.
The Venetian state was receptive to other ethnic groups, and Venetian laws directed them towards incorporation as Venice needed more immigrants to
146 The population of the city of Venice was above 100,000 in the early 15th century. The population increased greatly and reached around 180,000 until the deadly outbreaks of plague between 1575-77. Despite the calamity, the city’s population did not fall below 100,000 in the 16th century. In the 16th century, there were 4,000 to 5,000 Greeks in Venice and around 20,000 foreigners in total. See Burke, The Greeks of Venice, 7.
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repopulate the city and fill the gap in the workforce after the devastation the Black Death brought. The citizenship in Venice was divided into three main categories The first two of these segments were proper Venetians; the patricians or nobles, who were given large economic rights that enforced their position, and the citizens by birth, the cittadini originarii (i.e., original citizens), which was open only to people who could prove that their family had been residing in Venice for several generations. The third category constituted a vast majority of the people and was called popolo minuto, who did not hold any political or social rights but acted as a workforce.147 People who sought to obtain the rights enjoyed by the cittadini could apply for two types of citizenship, internal citizenship (cittadinanza de intus), which allowed the holder to acquire property and engage in trade activities within the city, and internal and external citizenship (cittadinanza de intus et de extra) which added the right to take part in international trade to the rights of internal citizenship.148 The Venetian government gradually made the laws of neutralization through the last two types of citizenship easier in the 16th century as immigration and, relatively, the number of applicants increased. Besides personal actions to reach a legal status and more rights, Venetian subjects were permitted to establish confraternities in the form of scuola, a type of confraternity formed by groups of artisans or tradesmen previously. The adaptation of the scuola system for minority confraternities allowed the non-Venetian ethnic or religious groups (including the people of other Italian cities) to establish a level of autonomy, preserve their culture, and render them a legal entity. In turn, the Venetian state secured their loyalty by integrating them into the legal system.
147 Ravid, “Venice and its minorities,” 451.
148 Ravid, “Venice and its minorities,” 451.
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Greeks established their confraternity, the Scuola dei Greci, in 1498. The petition for the establishment of the confraternity emphasized the help of the Greeks who supplied manpower to the Venetian war effort in the east and that the confraternity would support the people of the community who lost their family members in the service of the Republic,149 and that such permits to establish confraternities were granted to Albanians and Dalmatians earlier.150 In 1511, a group of Stradioti151 petitioned to build a church to perform the service in the Greek rite, to be dedicated to San Giorgio. However, the plan was not implemented until 1539, when the construction of the church of San Giorgio dei Greci started. Although the establishments of these centers were milestones in the development of the Greek community in Venice, their members and activities do not represent the entire community. Yet, their records yield insightful information regarding the community. The registers of the confraternity reveal that the Scuola had 58 members in 1498, while the number reached 741 by the 1560s.152 The numbers may seem low compared to thousands of Greeks living in Venice in the 16th century. However, membership was not forced by the government onto the people of the minority group in question, and people could support or be in contact with the confraternity without being a member. Anna Notaras, who supported the establishment of a Greek rite church in Venice and left a sum of money in her will to be spent on the construction of the church, and who also supported cultural activities as seen above in the 149 Plakotos, “Diasporas,” 43.
150 For an account of the Albanian and Dalmatian confraternities, see Crouzet-Pavan, “Strangers in the City?” 365-384.
151 Stradioti were bands of mercenary light cavalries fighting in Venetian armies drawn mostly from the Balkans, and mainly among Greeks and Albanians. The word is possibly derived from the Greek word for soldier, stratiotes.
152 Ravid, “Venice and its Minorities,” 465.
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example of Kalliergis and Vlastos’ press, was known to be an active figure among the Greek community, even though she was not a member of the Scuola.153
The Greek community in the lagoon did not come into existence suddenly after 1453 by a large wave of refugees. Even though ethnic, religious, or linguistic similarities between the Greeks in Venice may make them seem like ‘a monochrome block within a multi-chrome mosaic,’154 it was a large community of people from different backgrounds and economic strata who came to Venice at different times and had varying levels of integration. To note a few of such groups, one can count the former land-owning and bureaucratic elite of the Byzantine Empire, who were members of the Palaiologos, Kantakouzenos, Raoul, Laskaris, Notaras, and other such well-known Byzantine families, and then the Morean archons (notables), and finally poorer groups who constituted the great majority of the Greek population in Venice.155 This large group of poorer people migrated to Venice throughout the 16th century to work, or reunite with their families, or retreat from the areas under Ottoman threat. Most of them were from the lands acquired by Venice after 1204 over the centuries; Corfu, Cyprus, Crete, Zante (Zakynthos), Cefalonia, Lepanto, Negroponte, Modon (Methoni), Corone, Nafplio, Monemvassia, and such locations. The professions that the Greeks engaged in Venice, for the large part, were not substantially different than what other immigrants did. Commonly found among the Greeks were those who labored in a sea-related profession, such as sailors, oarsmen, captains, traders, shipwrights, caulkers, and mariners. Other important professional
153 Burke, “Surviving Exile,” 117-118.
154 Rogers Brubaker challenges the view that regards the national, ethnic, and religious groups as monochrome blocks constituting a multi-chrome mosaic, referring to minority groups within a larger community; and “the tendency to define groups as internally homogenous and externally bounded constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflict, and fundamental units of social analysis.” See Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” 163-189.
155 For the wealthy and well-known Byzantine families who migrated to Venice and integrated (or at least tried to integrate) themselves into the Venetian nobility, see Burke, “Surviving Exile,” 109-132.
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groups were artisans and craftsmen, such as painters, tailors, swordmakers, and goldsmiths.156 Also prevalent among the Greeks were mercenaries and commanders,157 and household servants (which was a popular profession among single or widowed women).158
A small group of professionals worked for wealthier people as scribes, printers, teachers, secretaries, or agents who traveled for their employers. Many Greeks who took part in such professions were also involved in book trade and production both in print and manuscript forms, as working in the printing press, being an editor, a collector, a book merchant or an agent for a book merchant, or being a manuscript copyist required similar qualities. Since such jobs were mostly temporal, and employment opportunities would rise in different locations, such professionals would move often and appear in various positions at other times. As we have seen earlier, one of the founding members of the press which published the first print book in Modern Greek, Zacharias Kallierges, worked as a publisher in Venice and then moved to Rome to continue his activities under the Greek Gymnasium founded by Leo X. Around the mid-16th century, Antonios Eparchos was active as a publisher, a copyist, an agent seeking manuscripts on behalf of wealthy collectors, and he stands as another example of people with fluid professions.
The Greek manuscript trade in Venice attracted many foreigners to the city, and many Greeks found employment in other locations in Europe. Even though Rome also had an abundance of professional Greek scribes and intellectuals, Venice
156 For a statistical chart of artisan professions, see Burke, The Greeks of Venice, 70.
157 The stradioti, mercenaries of Venice, were occasionally employed before the last decades of the 15th century. With the Ottomans threatening the Stado da Màr, the maritime possessions of the Republic, and the political and military turmoil in Italy in the first half of the 16th century threatening the terraferma, the Venetian hinterland, the stradioti units acted as a standing army. I should also note that these mercenaries were not necessarily always Greek; Albanians and Slavic Balkan people were also employed as stradioti.
158 Burke, The Greeks of Venice, 90.
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led the manuscript trade and publishing. One of the reasons Rome fell behind might be the limitations of papal employment, which forbade the scribes working for the Vatican Library to copy for other patrons, as the mid-16th century documents show.159 This issue directed some foreign collectors elsewhere, mainly to Venice. The foreign collectors sought manuscripts that were frequently found in Venice. The emissaries of French and Spanish courts gathered a considerable portion of the collections in Venice. Between 1540 and 1560, the Spanish ambassadors collected and ordered the production of a large number of books for the Escorial Library, while the French ambassadors were competing with them to enlarge the collection at Fontainebleau.160 Most famous of these diplomat-collectors were Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the ambassador of Charles V to Venice, and Guillaume Pellicier, Bishop of Montpellier, representing Francis I. Another group of foreigners were not ambassadors but wealthy families of German regions. The Fugger family, and especially the brothers Ulrich and Johann (or Hans) Jakob Fugger, employed numerous agents, such as Martin Gertsman, Henri Scrimger, and Nicolas Stoppius, to name a few, in order to find manuscripts on their behalf.161 Johann Jakob Fugger collected 183 Greek manuscript volumes in a short time in 1548, aside from print books.162 Even papal dignitaries, such as Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, sought manuscripts in Venice, despite having access to the Vatican Library and many Greek scribes. Finally, the wealthy Venetian subjects themselves who aspired to establish a book collection employed scribes or bought manuscripts.
The reason for the widespread interest in Greek manuscripts centered in Venice in the 16th century was twofold. Firstly, after the demand for classical works
159 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, 76-77.
160 Canart, “Jean Nathanaël,” 418.
161 Canart, “Jean Nathanaël,” 419.
162 For the details regarding this collection, see Mondrain, “Copistes et collectionneurs,” 354-390.
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was satisfied by the printing press, there was a growing curiosity regarding the works from the Byzantine period in various subjects and regarding Byzantine theology due to the religious controversies caused by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements.163 Secondly, the Greek community in Venice was able to supply (and create) this demand thanks to the large number of intellectual professionals164 and the community’s ties with the regions from where they could gather and bring manuscripts, and their ability to copy and multiply them.165
163 For the interest in theological Greek manuscripts caused by the Council of Trent, see Mandelbrote, “When Manuscripts Meet,” 251-268.
164 I refer to scribes, editors, publishers, book dealers, and such individuals who were required to have a certain level of intellectual knowledge and professional competency to perform their trade with success.
165 Canart, who pointed to these two reasons for the increased interest in Greek manuscripts, also notes that another result of this demand was false texts or manuscripts, which demonstrates the contemporary demand to reach unpublished material. Canart, “Jean Nathanaël,” 435-438. The reader can remember an example of such forgery I related in the previous chapter regarding Andreas Darmarios.
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CHAPTER 4
MARKETING THE DEMONSTRATIONS OF HISTORIES
4.1 Copyists of the Histories
The Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles survives in 28 entire copies along with four excerpts found among different codices.166 The actual number of manuscripts might be higher as Herbert Wurm, who constructed the latest stemma, suggested the existence of two hypothetical manuscripts (𝛼 and 𝜎) in the manuscript tradition.167 The hypothetical progenitor of all Chalkokondyles copies (manuscript 𝜔) is also missing. Nearly two-thirds of 32 extant manuscripts are either known or believed to have been produced in Venice. Except for three manuscripts copied by Georgios Moschos, Antonios Eparchos, Paolo de Canale, and several other unidentified hands,168 the Venetian copies were produced during the years 1540-1550. Three of the excerpts were also scribed during the same period in Rome, one of which was copied by Nikolaos Sophianos who served the cardinals Marcello Cervini and Niccolò Ridolfi in the second quarter of the 16th century.169 The Histories’ popularity was not limited to 1540s Venice; the work was translated into Latin shortly after and printed for the first time in 1556 in Basel. Subsequently, numerous editions were published in Germany, France, and Italy following the initial 1556 edition through the second half of the 16th century. Meanwhile, scribes Antonios Kalosynas and Andreas Darmarios produced two more manuscript copies in Spain in
166 See Chapter 2.1.
167 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 223-232. 168 Parisinus 1781 (Z), Monacensis 307a (M1), and Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N). See Chapter 2.1.
169 Sophianos’ excerpt is found in BAV Vat. gr. 1890, folios 131-133v. Sophianos’s hand is also found in Monacensis 307a (M1) after the main text ends. The other two excerpts were Vaticanus Ottobonianus 309 (K) and Ashburnhamianus 998 (Y), scribed respectively by Alexios from Corfu and Christopher Auer. See Chapter 2.1.
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1567 and 1579.170
In order to contextualize the popularity of the Histories in manuscript form during the 1540s in Venice, it is crucial to expand the scope of the examination beyond the Chalkokondyles manuscripts produced in the city. The scribes and their patrons, as demonstrated throughout the study, were frequently on the move, engaging in different types of economic and intellectual endeavor. Consequently, I find it essential to include in the thesis an examination of the scribes who copied the Histories outside Venice as their activities and connections may contribute to expanding our understanding of the reception and dissemination of Chalkokondyles in 16th-century Western Europe.171 Even though the actual number is higher, 17 scribes who copied the Histories during c. 1500 – 1579 are identified so far: Georgios Moschos, Paolo de Canale, Antonios Eparchos, a certain Alexios from Corfu, Christopher Auer, Nikolaos Sophianos, Andronikos Nukkios, Basileios Baleris, Nikolaos Baleris, Nikolaos Malaxos, Georgios Tryphon, Michael Kontoleon, Georgios Bembaines, Konstantinos Palaiokappas, Antonios Kalosynas, Martin Crusius,172 and Andreas Darmarios. The current subchapter will present concise background information on each mentioned copyist of the Histories in the context of their scribal activities and will scrutinize their copying endeavors. The following subchapter will inspect the personal Greek manuscript collections of the patrons who commissioned the abovementioned copyists. A lesser number of individuals were attested as the first owners of the Chalkokondyles copies produced by the scribes in question: Janus Lascaris, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Antonios Kallierges, Antonios
170 Respectively Monacensis 150 (M2) and Parisinus 1779 (T). See Chapter 2.1.
171 Except Parisinus 1780 (V) copied by Demetrios Angelos in Istanbul in the late 1460s which is out of the spatial and temporal frame of the current study.
172 Tubingensis Mb 11 (U) was copied by Crusius and a group of his students; however, I consider this activity to be primarily initiated by Crusius himself and will therefore not be examining the students.
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Eparchos, and Francisco de Mendoza y Bovadilla. The final subchapter will evaluate the economic and intellectual relationship between the copyists and their patrons and discover the contextual differences and parallels behind the extensive copying activity centered around the Histories of Chalkokondyles in Venice in the 1540s.
4.1.1 Georgios Moschos
Georgios Moschos173 was a scribe active in the last quarter of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th. He was the maternal uncle of Antonios Eparchos.174 He spent most of his life in Corfu, where he was documented to be living in 1496.175 He eventually left the island for Italy and spent some time in Ferrara and Mirandola. He worked as a teacher of rhetoric and medicine. Around the year 1500, he took on the role of a corrector for the Aldine press. Around 50 manuscripts are attributed to him. Additionally, the Pinakes database lists 51 works that are known to have been copied wholly or partially by Georgios Moschos.176 As a scribe, he occasionally collaborated with a certain Ioannes, who is possibly his father. Among the individuals known to have possessed manuscripts copied by Georgios, one frequently encountered name was Ioannis Avramios, a scholar and manuscript collector (and scribe in a single manuscript177) active in Corfu at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, who held close ties with the Eparchos family. Antonios Eparchos also possessed, through inheritance, a high number of manuscripts that were copied by Georgios Moschos. It is noteworthy that certain monasteries in Ottoman Greece were also in possession of a few manuscripts copied
173 RGK I 67, RGK II 87, RGK III 111.
174 Martinez Manzano, “Criterios gráficos,” 264-265.
175 Harlfinger, Specimina griechischer Kopisten, 35.
176 Visit https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/copiste-possesseur-autre/1016/.
177 BNF Gr. 1774. The codex contains works on various subjects by nine different Ancient Greek and Byzantine authors.
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by Moschos.178
Two subjects, medicine and classical literature, stand out upon a cursory survey of manuscripts produced by Georgios Moschos, which reflects his dual professional background as a rhetorician and physician. Around a quarter of the works that he copied concern medicine, biology, or botanics. In addition to five works by Galen and a compilation of Aretaeus’ works, Moschos also undertook the copying of manuscripts by renowned eastern physicians of medieval times; Yuhanna ibn Masawaih (Janus Damascenus), al-Razi (Rhazes), Ibn al-Jazzar (Algizar). He also dedicated his efforts to Byzantine physicians such as Aetios of Amida, Alexander of Tralles, Theophilos Protospatharios, Nikolaos Myrepsos, and Ioannes Aktouarios. Nearly half of the manuscripts copied by Moschos contain either classical literature (encompassing history) or commentaries and miscellanies.179 Among Moschos’ manuscripts, ancient geographical treatises and commentaries garner significant attention. These works mainly inform the readers about Greece and the Levant, suggesting that they were produced for individuals on missions to the East. Besides Strabo’s Geographica,180 Stephanos Byzantios’ Ethnika,181 and Dionysios Periegetes’ Description of the Known World, Moschos twice copied the
178 A Euripides manuscript (Athèna, EBE, 1057) was in the library of the Monastery of Ag. Bessarion at Trikala (founded in the 1520s). The Lexicon of Pseudo-Zonaras (BNF Gr. 2597) was in the possession of the Monastery of Ag. Anastasia Pharmakolytria (near Thessalonica, founded in 1522). Another manuscript (ÖNB Suppl. Gr. 174), a compilation of works by Georgios Gemistos Plethon, pseudo-Kodinos, Constantine Manasses, Patriarch Ioannes IX Bekkos, and Neilos Kabasilas, was copied by Ioannes (probably I. Moschos) for the most part, while one folio of Kabasilas was copied by Georgios Moschos. The possessor of this codex was the Monastery of Ag. Triada in Chalke.
179 The “Greek Miscellany,” Trinity College MS R.9.18, contains numerous elements including excerpts from ancient philosophers and their biographies, and Maximos Planoudes’ commentaries on ancient rhetoricians. The final component of the miscellany is a very short excerpt from Georgios Scholarios (i.e., Patriarch Gennadios II).
180 This manuscript, BNF Gr.1396, was later given to Francis I along with a number of other codices by Antonios Eparchos in 1538.
181 The first edition of this valuable source for the geography and culture of ancient Greece was published by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1502 under the name “Περὶ πόλεων / De urbibus.”
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commentary of Archbishop Eustathios of Thessalonica on Dionysios Periegetes.182 A few codices with religious themes include the oeuvres of Gregory of Nazianzus, Apolinarios’ Metaphrasis of the Psalms that is adjacent to Ioannes Geometres’ Metaphrasis of the Odes,183 and a collection of Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos’ apologetic orations against Muslims and Jews.184
Georgios Moschos reproduced four history books, which encompassed two copies of Chalkokondyles among them.185 The other accounts were the Roman History of Cassius Dio186 and the Histories of Polybius;187 the former ended up in the Fontainebleau Library, while the latter was sold to the city of Augsburg by Antonios Eparchos in 1544. The earlier Chalkokondyles copy, Parisinus 1781 (Z) was scribed by Moschos alone and belonged to Janus Lascaris who annotated the codex.188 In 1525, cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi took possession of Lascaris’ collection which included the Parisinus. The second Chalkokondyles copy bearing Moschos’ hand, Monacensis 307a (M1), was scribed by more than ten scribes, among whom only Moschos and Paolo de Canale have been so far identified. Moschos’ hand intervenes often, and in sum, constitutes the largest part of the manuscript.189 This manuscript was apparently in possession of the Eparchos family as it was probably the antigraph of Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N), copied by young Antonios Eparchos and unidentified scribes from Moschos’ circle (see Subchapter 4.1.3 for more).
182 Eusthatios’ commentary is a longer account than the partially surviving work of Dionysios. While one of Moschos’ copies of Eusthatios contains Dionysios (CUL MS Kk.6.29), the other is a standalone version (Biblioteca Casanatense 0356 [G.V.5]).
183 Most of the surviving manuscripts of Geometres’ Metaphrasis are preceded by Apolinarios, similar to Moschos’ copy (BML Plut. 05. 37). For the manuscript tradition of Geometres’ Metaphrasis, see De Groote “The Manuscript Tradition,” 1-20.
184 BAV Vat. Gr. 0688.
185 I consider the emphasis on Chalkokondyles in Moschos’ output as a result of the interest of his patrons rather than originating from Moschos himself. See subchapter 4.3.
186 BNF Gr. 1689.
187 BSB Cod. Gr. 388.
188 Mondrain, “Les Eparque,” 158.
189 Mondrain, “Les Eparque,” 158. Moschos’ hand is found in folios 33-40v, 97-120v, 134-165v, 206-209v, 213r-v, 219v-230v.
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Monacensis 307a (M1) later appeared in the collection of Johann Jacobs Fugger in 1548.
4.1.2 Paolo de Canale
Paolo de Canale was a promising scholar and scribe active in Venice in the early 16th century, who died around the age of 25 in 1508.190 He was a member of the Neakademia established by Aldus Manutius. Although not listed in RGK, the Pinakes database has five manuscripts attributed to him. Two of these are philosophical works: The Dissertations of Maximus of Tyre191 and Deipnosophistae (“The Dinner Philosophers") of Athenaeus of Naucratis.192 One codex copied by him contains classical literature such as the Hipparchikos of Xenophon, Antehomerica, Homerica, and Posthomerica by the 12th-century Byzantine poet John Tzetzes, and The Eumenides of Aeschylus.193 Another codex was only partially copied by him and the section he reproduced includes 4th-century Byzantine geographer Marcian of Heraclea’s A Periplus of the Outer Sea and its Epitome, along with the Periplus of the Inner Sea of Pseudo-Scylax, the Parthian Stations by Isidore of Charax (surviving fragment of a larger work), and fragments from the 4th c. BC Greek cartographer and geographer Dikaiarchos.194 The Pinakes database also lists HAB Gud. gr. 082 as annotated by Paolo de Canale. This last codex includes the Imagines of Philostratos, along with four works of John and Mark Eugenikos.195 As previously
190 Morelli, Aldi Pii Manutii, 58-60.
191 Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 662.
192 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. graec. 47.
193 BSB Cod.graec. 546.
194 BSB Cod. Gr. 566. The section edited by Paolo de Canale in the manuscript was later used by the German librarian, editor, and scholar David Hoeschel/Höschel of Augsburg (1556 - 1617) in his 1600 edition of the Geographica.
195 John and Mark were brothers. Mark Eugenikos gained fame with his opposition to the Union of the Churches during and after the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1439).
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discussed, he partially copied a Chalkokondyles manuscript, Monacensis 307a,196 with Georgios Moschos and a number of other unidentified hands. Out of 234 folios in the manuscript, Paolo de Canale’s hand can be found on 121-133v.
4.1.3 Antonios Eparchos
Antonios Eparchos (c. 1491 - c. 1571)197 was a manuscript merchant, scribe, author,198 and a poet from Corfu. The Eparchos family was well-known in the profession of medicine. Georgios, his father, was a physician related to Janus Lascaris. On his mother's side, Antonios Eparchos was connected to the Moschos family, since his mother was a sibling of Georgios Moschos. He lived in Corfu until the Ottoman siege in 1537, after which he left the island for Venice. There, he joined the Greek confraternity and worked as a copyist, collector, and merchant of Greek manuscripts, eventually gaining fame as a prominent supplier of Greek manuscripts across Europe. He saved numerous Greek manuscripts from the devastating siege at Corfu and brought them to Venice, hoping to capitalize on these belongings. Most of these codices originated from his family library and the destitution he found himself in after leaving Corfu can be inferred from the fact that he had to disperse this collection.199 A catalogue he created in 1538 is still extant, listing 88 manuscripts in his possession.200 In the late 1530s and 1540s, Spanish and French ambassadors, cardinals, and representatives of German cities and merchants were actively searching for manuscripts to enrich their collections. Eparchos, traveling between
196 BSB Cod.graec. 307a.
197 VG 35, RGK I 23, RGK II 32, RGK III 36.
198 During and following the Third Ottoman-Venetian War (1537-1540) he authored two anti-Ottoman treatises; an atticizing work in prose, Ὑποτύπωσις τῆς Ὀτομάνων Τυραννίδος καὶ ποίω τρόπω ταύτην καταστρέψασθαι (Outline of the Ottoman Tyranny and How to Destroy It), and a poem, Θρῆνος είς τὴν Ἑλλάδος καταστροφήν (Lament for the Catastrophy of Greece).
199 Mondrain, “Les Eparque,” 163.
200 The original catalogue can be found in Vat. Gr. 3958. For the edition of the catalogue, see Omont, “Catalogue des manuscrits grecs,” 95-110.
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Venice, Corfu, and Ottoman Greece, gathered manuscripts from monasteries and supplied large quantities of codices to his customers in Italy and beyond. Notable recipients of his manuscripts include Guillaume Pellicier, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the city of Augsburg, Cardinal Cervini, and Cardinal Georges d'Armagnac.
In addition to trading manuscripts, Eparchos was a prolific copyist who founded an atelier in Venice where he and his employees engaged in the copying of books. It is worth noting that Eparchos had been functioning as a scribe long before his departure from Corfu in 1537. He began copying at the age of 15, his first documented scribal work being a 1506 New Testament.201 Three years later he copied the De Administrando Imperio of Constantine VII.202 The Chalkokondyles copy, Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N), which I will shortly revisit, is also an earlier work of Eparchos. However, most manuscripts copied by him are dated 1537 and later. Currently, his hand has been identified in nearly 40 manuscripts. The most frequent subject among these codices are theology and philosophy. He copied the works of ancient philosophers such as Asklepios of Tralles, Hierokles, Aristotle, Maximos of Tyre, and Proklos; and of early church fathers such as Methodios of Olympos, Clement of Alexandria, Polykarpos, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. Additionally, he produced copies of later Byzantine theological treatises by Maximos the Confessor, Patriarchs Ignatios and Photios, as well as the De omnifaria doctrina of Psellos, theological writings of Nikolaos Kabasilas and Demetrios Kydones, and the catenae203 of Ioannis Drungarios and Niketas of Herakleia. Among
201 London Harl. 5736.
202 This codex, BAV Pal. gr. 126, was copied by Zacharias Kallierges and Manuel Grigoropoulos along with Eparchos, and included works of John Tzetzes, the ancient philosopher Theophrastos, Hippocrates, as well as the letters of Bessarion and Nikolaos Sekoundinos.
203 “Catena” is a sort of florilegium of biblical commentaries, where the compiler brings together numerous explanations on bible verses; by weaving the syntax together, the compiler then creates a line-by-line commentary.
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Eparchos’ manuscripts, a few works concerning rhetorics and law are also present. These include writings by the Roman jurist Ulpian, the early Byzantine rhetorician Themistios, and the 11th-century rhetorician Ioannes Doxapatres. Nearly a quarter of Eparchos’ copying activity revolved around medical texts, comprising works by Aretaeus and Galen, the Viaticum of Ibn al-Jazzar, three copies of 1st-2nd century physician Rufus of Ephesus, and medical treatises of Janus Lascaris. Another scholar whose works were copied three times by Eparchos was Ptolemy (Geographica). Among Eparchos’ copies, only two codices are dedicated to history, namely, the accounts of Zonaras204 and Chalkokondyles.
Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N),205 which contains Eparchos’ copy of Chalkokondyles, is a problematic codex. The current binding combines various works scribed at different times, and the section containing Chalkokondyles, which is the work of several hands including Antonios Eparchos, is missing quires while the page layout appears confused. Wurm argued that the two quires attributed to Eparchos followed Parisinus 1781 (Z), while the other scribes, whose copying styles were not as meticulous as Eparchos, followed Monacensis 307a (M1). Wurm also pointed to the matching page breaks between Eparchos and Moschos.206 Tamás Mészáros, on the other hand, inspected the scribal errors and omissions between Reginensis and its abovementioned suggested antigraphs, and concluded that there is no definitive evidence to support the claim that the other scribes followed Monacensis 307a rather than Parisinus 1781.207
204 BNF Gr. 1768.
205 “Reginensis” refers to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626- 1689), who abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism, and settled in Rome. She brought along a large collection of manuscripts.
206 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 231.
207 Mészáros. “A Vaticanus Reginensis Graecus,” 83-92.
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4.1.4 Alexios from Corfu
The scribe Alexios208 was a priest from Corfu. He is documented to be in Rome in 1540, during which time he copied and signed Porphyry’s Introduction to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, an influential astrological treatise, for Giovanni Gaddi who held the position of dean of the Apostolic Camara (papal treasury). A total of four manuscripts are known to have been copied by Alexios. Apart from Porphyry and Chalkokondyles, he copied the works of three successive Archbishops of Constantinople; Gregory of Nazianzus in BAV Vat. Gr. 445, and Nektarios along with Chrysostom in BNF Gr. 815. His partial copy of Chalkondyles compiles the sections concerning the history of Athens. Alexios’ segment is found in the codex Vaticanus Ottobonianus 309 (K) which contained various texts including an edict of Constantine I, the novellae of Manuel I Komnenos, the Distichs of Cato, works by Amphiliochios of Iconium, Ephraim of Syria, Chrysostom, John of Damascus, Gregory Thaumatourgos, and De Officiis of Kodinos. Another hand added a two-line title on folio 172 of the codex, at which point Alexios’ excerpts start, “Περὶ τῆς ἐξ ἑλλάδος / ΛΑΟΝΙΚΟΥ Χαλκοκανδύλου ἀπόδειξις ἐκ τῆς τετάρτης ἱστορίας.”209
4.1.5 Christopher Auer
Christopher Auer210 was a scribe of Austrian origin active in Rome in the 1540s. During his time in Rome, he mainly worked for Cardinal Ridolfi, the French cleric and scholar Pierre Danes, Cardinal Georges d'Armagnac, Bishop of Rodez, and the Vatican. The Chalkokondyles excerpt he copied (Ashburnhamianus 998) follows Alexios’ manuscript.211 Around fifty manuscripts that were copied by Auer are listed
208 VG 13, RGK II 15, RGK III 18.
209 Féron and Battaglini, Codices manuscripti graeci, 164-166.
210 VG 428-430, RGK I 381, RGK II 525, RGK III 613.
211 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 226.
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in RGK. Not surprisingly, nearly half of these codices contain religious and philosophical accounts, including Kantakouzenos’ apologies, Theodore Metochites’ commentaries on Aristotle, and works by Gemistos Plethon, Cardinal Bessarion, and Chrysostom. Early Christian authors are also noticeable, such as Lactantius and Athenagoras, as well as Julian’s Misopogon from the same period. Concerning historiography, the density and variety of works among these codices are remarkable. The accounts of Josephus and Appian, the epitome of Cassius Dio by Ioannes Xiphilinos, Eusebius’ Chronicon, the Buildings and Wars of Prokopios (in separate manuscripts), the histories of Skylitzes and Gregoras are among the texts found alongside the Chalkokondyles excerpt that Auer copied during his time in Rome in the 1540s.
4.1.6 Nikolaos Sophianos
Nikolaos Sophianos212 was a Corfiot coming from a noble family. In 1514, he left the island and traveled to Rome to become a student at the Greek Gymnasium of Leo X. After the death of the pope in 1521, he moved to Venice where he worked as a secretary and scribe, notably for Cardinal Ridolfi among others. He traveled to Greece in 1543 to collect manuscripts for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. He was also a cartographer known for his work Totius Graeciae Descriptio, and an author who wrote a Greek grammar. He developed friendships with cardinals Marcello Cervini (future Pope Marcellus II) and Guglielmo Sirleto.213 The Chalkokondyles fragments Sophianos scribed are now found in Vaticanus Graecus 1890 (Vb). The current binding of the book dates to the 17th century, and the codex includes a number of
212 RGK I 318, RGK II 437, RGK III 517.
213 Cervini commissioned Sophianos for the purpose of publishing certain Greek texts. Sirleto, a friend of Cervini, must have met Sophianos through this venture which was, in the end, not entirely successful. See Mészáros, “A Chalkokondyles fragment,” 250.
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fragments added to the original composition, while the earlier parchment papers come from the estate of Cardinal Sirleto.214 The codex contains over 600 folios; Sophianos’ Chalkokondyles fragments are found in four folios only (131-133v), and they consist of a selection of passages summarizing the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Mészáros pointed out the fact that Cervini served as one of the first presidents of the Council of Trent and that Sirleto was compiling accounts and documents to support Cervini during the council, upon which he convincingly argued that Sophianos’ copying of Chalkokondyles may have happened within this context.215 Sophianos’ hand appears in yet another Chalkokondyles manuscript, the abovementioned Monacensis 307a (M1), at the end of the codex following the conclusion of the main text. This is a short “recipe,” describing solutions for dealing with bed bugs and fleas.216
4.1.7 Andronikos Nukkios
Andronikos Nukkios (or Noukios, Nountzios, Nuntius)217 was born around the turn of the century in Corfu and witnessed the Ottoman siege in 1537. Following the devastation of the island, he moved to Venice218 along with other family members. In the first half of the 1540s, he edited a number of books in Greek (including some written in Demotic), in collaboration with the publisher Andreas Kounades and the Sabbio brothers. During that same period, Nukkios was also highly productive as a scribe. He engaged in copying tasks on behalf of Antonios Eparchos and collaborated
214 Mészáros, “A Chalkokondyles fragment,” 249-250.
215 Mészáros, “A Chalkokondyles fragment,” 250.
216 Tamás Mészáros recently studied Sophianos’ entry in Monacensis 307a and offered a translation in Hungarian. See Mészáros. "Egy újabb bejegyzés a Monacensis Graecus 307a jelzetű kéziratban". (=Another post in the manuscript Monacensis Graecus 307a) Antik Tanulmányok 2:269-277. The recipe does not concern a type of insect that harms books as one could assume.
217 VG 31, RGK I 20, RGK II 27, RGK III 32.
218 He describes Venice as “the second homeland to Greeks fleeing before the invader.” See Foucault, Voyages, 9.
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with Basileios Baleris, Georgios Bembaines, and Petros Karnabakas. He worked for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza,219 Charles V’s ambassador for Venice and representative in the Council of Trent, for whom he copied six manuscripts that are currently housed in the Escorial. Despite the seemingly low number, the total count of folios reaches approximately 3,000.220 Between 1541 and 1548, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza oversaw an atelier that employed various scribes, with its most active period occurring between 1541 and 1543. Nukkios worked there alongside others including Nikolaos Mourmouris, Nikolaos Gaitanos, and Ioannes Mauromatis.221 In 1545, Nukkios was employed by Charles V, to join the envoy led by his ambassador Gerard Veltwick of Ravenstein to Constantinople. During the final years of his life, he continued to travel with Charles’ envoys, who visited several locations in Western Europe. He authored a travelogue based on these journeys, that serves as a valuable source providing detailed insights into his life.222
Nukkios took part in the publication of three books during 1542-1545; Apostolos (1542), Planoudes’ collection of Aesop’s Fables (1543), and Typikon kai ta aporreta (1545). He is known to have copied approximately 20 manuscripts, which encompassed various theological and philosophical texts. These included the works of philosopher Iamblichus, 5th-century neoplatonist Proklos, and Cyril of Alexandria (which he reproduced for Cardinal Cervini),223 as well as the Acts of the Council of Ephesus, Vita Constantini and other works of Eusebius. Nukkios’ repertoire also extended to literary works such as Eusthatios Makrembolites’ Story of
219 Nukkios was introduced to him by Antonios Eparchos and Sophianos. See Foucault, Voyages, 10.
220 Foucault, through a comparison of the dates on the subscriptions and calculation of work and time spent, reached the conclusion that Nukkios worked at a pace of two folios per day during his busiest years between 1541 and 1543, during his employment under Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Foucault, Voyages, 11-12.
221 Foucault, Voyages, 11.
222 For the French translation of the account, see Foucault, Voyages.
223 BAV Ott. Gr. 233.
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Hysmine and Hysminias, Claudius Aelianus’ Varia Historia (Various Stories), along with texts attributed to pseudo-Kodinos. Nukkios copied a number of histories as well, including Polybius (twice), Appian, and the History of Doge Marino Falerio, while his hand has been identified in four different manuscripts of Chalkokondyles. The first Chalkokondyles copy carrying Nukkios’ hand was Escorialensis 190 (E), copied for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in 1543, bearing annotations of Mendoza’s librarian Arnoldus Arlenius. The second one, Laurentianus 57.9 (L) was primarily copied by Nikolaos and Basileios Baleris, while Nukkios’ annotations can be found on the first few folios. He also copied the last few folios of the text (see Subchapter 2.1). As noted earlier, Laurentianus 57.9 (L) is considered to be the personal copy of the mentioned atelier. Out of four Chalkokondyles manuscripts that follow Laurentianus 57.9 (L), two were copied by Nukkios as well; namely Parisinus 1727 (Q) and Vaticanus 159 (G) (he reproduced the latter for Antonios Eparchos and completed on May 31, 1544).
4.1.8 Basileios Baleris
Basileios Baleris/Bareles224 belonged to the Corfiot Baleris family225 which included notable individuals such as Basileios’ father, Matthaios, as well as his brothers Georgios and Hippolytos. He became a member of the Greek confraternity in 1538 and remained part of it thereafter. In 1549 Baleris received ordination as a priest and served as the chaplain of the community from 1554 to 1556. In the early 1540s, he worked as a copyist, possibly alongside Andronikos Nukkios and Nikolaos Baleris in the same atelier. He also served as an editor of Greek liturgical books during 1546-
224 VG 54, RGK I 34, RGK II 50, RGK III 67.
225 The family name appears in many forms. Martínez Manzano lists nine versions: Bareles, Vareli, Balerís, Βαρέλης, Βαρέλλης, Βάρυλην, Βαλερίς, Βαλέρις, Βάλερις. See Martínez Manzano, “Certezas e incógnitas,” 239.
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1552, collaborating with Nikolaos Malaxos (see 4.1.10). He died before late 1558.
His hand has been identified in approximately ten codices containing the works of philosophers such as Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proklos, as well as the Lives of the Sophists by Eunapios. He copied the works of several theologians including Athanasios of Alexandria (Vita Antonii), Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cardinal Bessarion. Furthermore, he copied the New History of Zosimus, which contains annotations by Arnoldus Arlenius,226 and the novellae of Leo VI. He collaborated with Bartolomeo Zanetti and Nikolaos Pachys to produce a 552-folio long catena which eventually came into Luigi Lollino’s possession.227 Additionally, he worked together with Zanetti and Andronikos Nukkios in a copy of Synodicon de festo Orthodoxia.228 Basileios Baleris undertook the task of copying the works of Chalkokondyles on two separate occasions. The first instance was Laurentianus 57.9 (L), in which he collaborated with Nukkios and Nikolaos Baleris. This manuscript is assumed by Wurm to be a template for their atelier, due to the presence of numerous corrections and annotations found throughout the text, indicating that it likely served as a guide copy.229 Basileios copied the Histories for a second time by himself, and in this particular codex, he included pseudo-Kodinos immediately following Chalkokondyles. As understood from the subscription he left, he completed this copy, Parisinus 1726 (P), on April 5, 1544, for the Cretan nobleman Antonios Kallierges (see 4.2.4).
226 British Library Add. 10970.
227 Luigi Lollino was a Cretan nobleman, well-known among Greek intellectual circles on the island. In 1571, following the capture of Cyprus during the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (1570-1573), he left Crete and relocated to Venice. He was later ordained as bishop of Belluno.
228 BAV Vat. gr. 1799.
229 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 228-229.
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4.1.9 Nikolaos Baleris
Nikolaos Baleris/Bareles,230 or Niccolò Barelli, was assumed by Marie Vogel and Victor Gardthausen to be a brother of Basileios. He was a member of the Greek confraternity in Venice. In addition to his work as a copyist, he is known for gifting 22 codices to Felipe II of Spain in 1572. In the letters of the Spanish ambassador to Venice, Guzmán de Silva, to the king and his royal secretary, it is explained that Niccolò wished to send the king a collection of 22 rare manuscripts he inherited from one of his brothers, and that Niccolò was the brother of the knight Giovanni/Juan Barelli of the Order of Malta, Felipe’s informer (Giovanni Barelli is not necessarily the brother from whom Nikolaos inherited the codices).231 Not much is known about his scribal activities. He copied pseudo-Kodinos in 1541, and included a subscription stating, “Νικολάος Βαρέλης ἁμαρτωλὸς καὶ εὐτελὴς ἱερεύς,” which indicates that he, like Basileios, was also a priest.232 He collaborated with Basileios Baleris and Andronikos Nukkios in Laurentianus 57.9 (L).233
4.1.10 Nikolaos Malaxos
Nikolaos Malaxos (c. 1500 - c.1590)234 resided in Nafplio, where he became the πρωτοπαπάς (archpriest) of the city in 1538. He was a relative of Manuel Malaxos, who was possibly his brother.235 He had to leave Nafplio after the city was
230 VG 346.
231 Martínez Manzano, “Certezas e incógnitas,” 238-239. Martinez suggests an explanation for this generous gift. Niccolò’s brother Giovanni Barelli, who spied for Felipe II before and after the Battle of Lepanto, was imprisoned in 1571 in Palermo and charged for inconvenient reporting of his mission in the East. Niccolò was therefore trying to gain the king’s favor (see p. 260). Before Niccolò decided to send the codices to Felipe II, he was offered 1,000 ducats by Andreas Darmarios for the collection, which indicates its high value. See De Andrés, “Los códices griegos,” 71.
232 Modena, Biblioteca Estense α. T. 7. 09 (= Gr. 33).
233 For a comparison of Nikolaos Bareles’ hand and that of Basileios, see Bernardinello, Autografi greci,72-73.
234 VG 350-351, RGK I 312, RGK II 432, RGK III 502.
235 See VG. Manuel Malaxos was a notary, a teacher who taught at the Patriarchal School in Constantinople (as reported in 1577) and a prolific copyist. He apparently visited Italy as well where he collaborated with Andreas Darmarios and Manuel Glynzunios. He also had connections with
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surrendered to the Ottomans following the Third Ottoman-Venetian War (1537-1540). He initially moved to Venice, but relocated to Candia in 1549. He returned to Venice in 1552, where he assumed the role of chaplain at San Giorgio dei Greci. He spent his last years in Zante (Zakynthos). He was an editor and a productive scribe, who worked for patrons such as Guillaume Pellicier, Francisco de Mendoza y Bovadilla, and Antonios Kallierges.
Nikolaos Malaxos’ hand has been identified in around 20 manuscripts;236 however, some of these codices contain works by multiple authors.237 Nearly all his manuscripts focus on religious matters: hagiographies, liturgical works, hymnology, letters of religious figures, among others. The remaining few include a collection of works on philosophy and rhetorics by over 15 authors, spanning from Ancient Greeks to Late Byzantine figures such as Maximos Planoudes.238 Malaxos also produced a codex containing works on various subjects, ranging from religion to medicine (Galen) and warfare (Taktika of Leo VI, and of the 2nd-century tactician Aelianus Tacticus).239
Malaxos’ copy of Chalkokondyles, Escorialensis 245 (E1), was scribed in Venice and subsequently came into the possession of Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla. Another intersection of Chalkokondyles and Nikolaos Malaxos can be found in an earlier copy, Monacensis 307a (M1). Nikolaos, being from Nafplio, added a gloss in the margin adjacent to the section in Book II of the Histories, in which Chalkokondyles relates how Theodore I Palaiologos, the Despot of the Morea,
Antonio Augustin and Martin Crusius. For Manuel, see RGK I 250. Manuel’s relative, possibly another one of his brothers, John Malaxos, was also an active copyist in the service of the Patriarchate in Constantinople in the 1560s. For John Malaxos, see Schreiner, “John Malaxos,” 203-214.
236 RGK lists 15 manuscripts, while the Pinakes database lists 20. See: https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/copiste-possesseur-autre/1767/.
237 ГИМ Sinod. gr. 292 features over 20 different authors.
238 Oxon. Bar. 125.
239 BNF Coisl. 336.
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sold Argos to the Venetians and Mistra to the Knights of Rhodes (i.e., Knights Hospitaller), upon considering the difficulty of defending these settlements against Bayezid I.240 Nikolaos expanded upon Chalkokondyles’ account, by claiming that Theodore also handed over Troizena/Phanarion to the same Order in 1401, and to support his claim, reffered to a document which was signed by representatives of the Order and the “τζάσης (=τζαούσιος=çavuş?)” or the commander of Troizena/Phanarion, Georgios Malaxos (see Fig. 5).
4.1.11 Georgios Tryphon
Georgios Tryphon, alternatively known as Zorzi Triffon in Italian, hailed from Monemvasia. He was an industrious copyist based in Venice. The manuscripts attributed to him bear dates ranging from 1543 to 1555, during which time he cooperated with other well-known copyists in Venice, particularly in the 1540s and 1550s. The borrowing records of the Marciana Library document his close relationship with the brothers John and Cornelius Mourmouris. He is one of the few identified hands that took part in the creation of Johann Jakob Fugger’s extensive collection of Greek manuscripts; however, the precise nature of his professional relationship with other scribes such as Mihail Maleas, Petros Karneades, Mihail Sophianos, John Malaxos, and Emmanuel Bembaines remains unclear. Some of his manuscripts were annotated by Arnoldus Arlenius, the librarian of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Morever, his manuscripts were in the possession of cardinals Francisco de Mendoza y Bobadilla and Guglielmo Sirleto.
240 In Book II.45 (Kaldellis, 156) (Darko I, 91). For the context of Theodore’s sale/surrender and subsequent reacquisition of various cities and lands of the Despotate to the Latins, see Necipoğlu, Byzantium Between the Ottomans and the Latins, 257-258.
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Fig. 5 Folio 40v from Monacensis 307a (M1)241
Lines 14-20 read: “τὸ δὲ Ἄργος τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον κατεῖχον. ἀπέδοτο δὲ Θεόδωρος ὁ τῆς Σπάρτης ἡγεμών, ὡς ἀπέγνω τοῖς ῾Ἕλλησι τὴν σωτηρίαν τῷ τε Βυζαντίῳ, πρὸς δὲ καὶ τῇ Πελοποννήσῳ, καὶ ἐπὶ ξυροῦ ἀκμῆς ἤδη ἑστηκότα τὰ τῶν ῾Ἑλλήνων πράγματα ᾿ τό τε Ἄργος ὅμορον ὃν Ναυπλίῳ, πόλει τῶν ῾Ἑνετῶν, ἀπέδοτο οὐ πολλοῦ. καὶ Σπάρτην δὲ τοῖς ἀπὸ Ρόδου Ναζηραίοις ἐς λόγους ἀφικόμενος ἀπέδοτο πολλοῦ τινός.” The gloss added by Nikolaos Malaxos has been transliterated by Wurm: ᾿Ἰστέον, ὅτι ὁ παρὼν Θεόδωρος δεσπότης Μορέας ὁ ἀποδοὺς τὸ Ἄργος χαὶ συνϑέμενος δοῦναι καὶ τῇ ῥελιτζιοῦ τῆς Ρόδου τὴν Σπάρτην αὐτὸς δέδωκεν πρὸς τὴν αὐτὴν ῥελιτζιοῦν καὶ τὴν πόλιν Τροιζήνην τὸ νῦν καλούμενον Φανάριονἐν ἔτει τῷ ἀπὸ Χριστοῦ αὐα΄ μηνὶ αὐγούστῳ ἰνδικτιῶνος ϑ΄. οἱ δὲ ἐλϑόντες Ναζηραῖοι ἀντὶ τοῦ μεγάλου μαΐστορος Ρόδου παραλαβεῖν τὰς πόλεις ἐκαλοῦντο ὁ μὲν φρὰ “Ῥαμοῦντος ντε Λασκούρα, πριούρης τῆς Τολούζης, ὁ δὲ φρὰ Πικοὺς ντε Φωσάτ, χκούμεντουριος τῆς Πιζενᾶς, ὡς δηλοῖ καὶ ἣ παρ᾽ αὐτῶν γεγονυῖα πρᾶξις πρὸς τὸν τζάσην τῆς αὐτῆς πόλεως Τροιζήνης ἤτοι τοῦ Φαναρίου Γεώργιον τὸν Μαλᾳξόν, ἐν ἔτει καὶ μηνὶ καὶ ἰνδικτιῶνι τοῖς ἄνω [γεγραμμένοις].242
241 The digitalized manuscript retrieved via: https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00050015?page=83.
242 Wurm, “Die Übergabe Phanarions/Argolis,” 203. Wurm also offers a German translation: “Man muß wissen: Der hier (genannte) Despot der Morea, Theodoros, welcher Argos zurückgegeben und mit dem Orden von Rhodos auch die Übergabe Spartas vereinbart hatte, hat selbst im Jahre 1401 nach Christus, im Monat August der 9. Indiktion, auch die Stadt Troizene, das heutige Phanarion, an eben diesen Orden übergeben. Die Ordensritter, welche stellvertretend für den Großmeister von Rhodos kamen, um diese Städte zu übernehmen, hießen Fra Raymond de Lescure, Prior von Toulouse, und Fra Picon de Fossat, Komtur von Pézenas wie auch ihr Vertrag mit dem Kommandanten dieser Stadt Troizene, bzw. Phanarion, Georgios Malaxos, zeigt, im Jahr und Monat und in der Indiktion, wie oben [geschrieben].”
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Among the approximately 20 manuscripts attributed to Georgios Tryphon, the most prevalent subject is religion, followed by philosophical treatises that are also mostly interconnected with religious themes. Tryphon’s scribal output encompasses theological works by Origenes, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Anastasius the Sinaite, letters of Basil of Caesarea, catenae of Prokopios of Gaza, and Nikolaos Kabasilas' Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Additionally, his manuscripts include the works of neoplatonist philosophers, such as Syrianus’ commentary on Aristotle and Proklos’ Commentaries on Plato. Tryphon also copied Photios’ collection of entries comprising 280 works of both religious and secular nature, known as the Bibliotheca, in cooperation with John Mourmouris.243 In the domain of historiography, Tryphon copied ecclesiastical or biblical histories such as the Church History of Eusebius and the Religious History of Theodoret, the Chronicle of Constantine Manasses and also the History of Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos that is a work of history which deals with religious issues such as Palamism. Tryphon’s copy of Chalkokondyles, designated as Monacensis 127 (M) and dated 1548, is bound together with Leo VI’s military treatise Taktika, a work which contains information on the provisioning and battle formation of the Byzantine army, as well as traditional tactics deployed by various neighboring people such as Persians, Turks (and Bulgarians244), Scythians, Arabs of various regions, Lombards and Franks.
4.1.12 Michael Kontoleon
Michael Kontoleon245 was a copyist and printer from Monemvasia. He is
243 British Library Harley 5591.
244 Taktika notes that the way Turks and Bulgars wage war greatly resembles each other. Dennis, The Taktika of Leo VI, 459 and 463.
245 VG 313, RGK II 383.
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documented to have been in Venice in 1550, and it is likely that he left his hometown after the surrender of the city to the Ottomans in 1540. Both VG and RGK only list the Chalkokondyles copy as his sole manuscript, Parisinus 1729 (S), which he completed c. 1550 in Venice. In this copy, he cooperated with Georgios Bembaines, who only scribed the folios 24-30v. Michael left his signature at the end of the manuscript (see Fig. 6), and dedicated the work to a certain compatriot Peloponnesian from Epidauros as a gift.246
Fig. 6 Michael Kontoleon’s dedication at the end of Parisinus 1729 (folio 293)247
4.1.13 Georgios Bembaines
Georgios Bembaines248 was from Monemvasia, and called himself an archon.249 He was possibly related to Emmanuel Bembaines,250 another productive scribe with over 45 attributed manuscripts. Georgios Bembaines was attested to be in Venice and
246 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 230. The city of Epidauros on the Argolid Peninsula and Epidauros Limera (i.e., Palaia Monemvasia) near Monemvasia are different locations.
247 Image of the manuscript retrieved from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10723528j/f333.item.
248 VG 81, RGK II 76, RGK III 95.
249 See RGK II.
250 VG 117, RGK I 113, RGK II 145, RGK III 188.
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Trento in the 1540s. He copied for several prominent figures such as Diego Hurtado de Menzoda, cardinals Francisco de Mendoza, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle,251 Marcello Cervini, and Guglielmo Sirleto. He collaborated with previously mentioned figures such as Ioannes Mauromatis, Andronikos Nukkios,252 Manuel Malaxos, Georgios Tryphon,253 and Antonios Eparchos. His hand has been identified in 16 manuscripts,254 and his output concerns various subjects.
Among his works, theological writings of figures such as Athanasios of Alexandria and Cyril of Alexandria, along with the philosophical treatises of Sextus Empiricus and pseudepigraphical texts of Hermes Trismegistus draw attention. Bembaines’ codices include scientific works as well; Theophylact Simocatta’s Physical Problems (regarding natural history), Theon of Smyrna’s work on mathematics, and Pachymeres’ commentaries on Aristotle are among the manuscripts he reproduced. Bembaines copied Antonios Eparchos’ Lament for the Catastrophy of Greece together with Eparchos himself.255 Regarding historiography, the Histories of Polybius, Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus of Sicily, and Ioannes Xiphilinos’ epitome of Dio Cassius are other works Bembaines copied either entirely or partially, apart from his copy of Chalkokondyles [Parisinus 1729 (S)]. As mentioned in the subchapter 4.1.12, Bembaines collaborated with Michael Kontoleon, who scribed most of the work (see Fig. 7). Bembaines copied the fourth
251 Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle was a representative of Charles V in the Council of Trent and undertook important diplomatic missions in negotiations with the Protestant princes.
252 Nukkios, Bembaines, and Petros Karneades collaborated in a codex containing the works of Cyril of Alexandria, copied for Cardinal Cervini (BAV Ott. gr. 233).
253 In one of the codices containing pseudo-Kodinos’ De Officiis, Bembaines worked with Georgios Tryphon who copied the first section of the codex: Chrysostom’s homily on Isaiah. (BAV Ott. gr. 098).
254 See the Pinakes database for the manuscripts not listed in RGK: https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/copiste-possesseur-autre/978/.
255 The manuscript is BAV Vat. gr. 291.
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quire,256 which corresponds to a section towards the end of Book I.257
Fig. 7 Hands of Georgios Bembaines (folio 30v) and Michael Kontoleon (folio 31) in manuscript Parisinus 1729258
4.1.14 Konstantinos Palaiokappas
Konstantinos Palaiokappas259 was a highly productive scribe from Kydonia with over 60 manuscripts attributed to him. He might have lived in Mount Athos in the late 1530s and early 1540s; the manuscripts bearing the signature “Pachomios the Monk” were claimed to be copied in different monasteries in Athos by Palaiokappas;260
256 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 230.
257 1.45 - 1.58 (Kaldellis, 67-89)
258 Bembaines uses relatively larger letter forms towards the end of his section in folios 30-30v. The manuscript image was retrieved from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10723528j/f38.item.
259 VG 247-250, RGK I 225, RGK II 316, RGK III 364. Also see Omont, Fac-similés, 10-11.
260 This information is supplied by Palaiokappas in the colophons of Mount Athos copies. See García-Bueno, “El copista cretense,” 203.
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however, their authenticity is contested.261 In the 1540s, he possibly spent some time in Italy before relocating to France where he served Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, and worked as a librarian at Fontainebleau through the 1550s. He collaborated with Angelos Bergikios and Jakob Diassorinos in the drafting of the Fontainebleau library catalogue. He himself scribed and added many manuscripts to the library together with Bergikios and Diassorinos.262 Among these, at least six works are forgeries by Palaiolappas.263 The possessors of his manuscripts include cardinals Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle and Reginald Pole, and the Navarrese/ French diplomat Jean-Jacques de Mesmes (b.1490).
Palaiokappas’ copy of Chalkokondyles, Parisinus 1728 (R), was scribed in France c. 1550264 and was later documented among the Greek manuscript collection of the de Mesmes family.265 A large portion of the Greek works contained in the codices copied entirely or partially by Palaiokappas pertain to theological matters; these range from writings authored by early church fathers to more recent works by Gennadios Scholarios. The remainder of Palaiokappas’ repertoire presents a variety of subjects, perhaps copied to be used for educational purposes. Prevalence of works regarding music, astronomy, mathematics, and geometry is noteworthy, coming from authors such as Aristoxenus of Tarentum (Palaiokappas copied his Elementa Armonika at least three times), Pachymeres (Quadrivium), Euclid, Aristotle, Theon of Smyrna, John Philoponus, and Nikephoros Gregoras. Besides these codices, he partnered with Nikolaos Sophianos to produce a codex containing works by Ptolemy,
261 See Leroy, Les énigmes Palaeocappa, 191-200.
262 García Bueno, “El copista cretense,” 202.
263 For the list of forgeries and the methods Palaiokappas used to forge texts, see García-Bueno, “El copista cretense,” 214-217.
264 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 226.
265 Jackson, “Greek Manuscripts of the de Mesmes Family,” 98.
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Theon of Alexandria, and Isaac Argyros on astronomy.266 Furthermore, he collaborated with Zacharias Kallierges and Georgios Moschos on another codex that featured a range of texts; Palaiokappas copied Homer, Aristophanes, and pseudo-Cato in this 1545 manuscript,267 expanding the diversity of his scribal output. The presence of two copies of the Taktika of Aelianus Tacticus and separate copies of Dionysios Periegetes and Eustathios’ commentary on Dionysos, alongside geographical and military treatises, further capture attention.
4.1.15 Andreas Darmarios
Andreas Darmarios (b. 1540)268 was a native of Monemvasia and established himself as a prolific copyist and a book dealer. The Pinakes database lists nearly 250 manuscripts attributed to him, and there already exists a substential body of literature dedicated to his life and activity.269 Upon completing his education in Sparta, Darmarios left his homeland in the late 1550s270and visited several Italian cities, working in various locations such as Rome, Padua, Venice, and Trento where the final phase of the Council of Trent (1561) took place. During his time in Trento, Darmarios had the opportunity to meet a number of Spanish clerics and diplomats, and most notably, Antonio Agustín y Albanell who would become his most important patron in the following years.271 Over the course of the next three decades, Darmarios functioned as both a book dealer and a copyist, primarily catering to the needs of Spanish clerics and statesmen. When king Felipe II initiated the
266 BNF Grec 2400.
267 BNF Grec 2830.
268 VG 16-27, RGK I 13, RGK II 21, RGK III 22.
269 See O. Kresten, “Der Schreiber und Handschriftenhändler,” 6-11. Fuentes González, “Andrés Darmario, copista en Granada,” 719-728. Sosower, “A Forger Revisited,” 289-306. Domínguez, “Adquisición de códices de Andrés Darmario para El Escorial (1571),” 117-137. Martínez Manzano, “Las encuadernaciones,” 253-284. Martínez Manzano, “Die Aufenthalte,” 400-424.
270 Fuentes González, “Andrés Darmario,” 724.
271 Fuentes González, “Andrés Darmario,” 725.
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construction of the Escorial complex and established a library there, both the king himself and figures in close proximity to the court began to collect and donate volumes to the Escorial library. The activity of Andreas Darmarios and his atelier in Spain, as well as his prominent collaborators Antonios Kalosynas and Nikolaos Tourranios (Nicolás de la Torre), thrived within this welcoming humanist environment that fostered a high demand for manuscripts, whether they were created, acquired, or inherited. Darmarios traveled to numerous European cities including Augsburg, Strasbourg, and Tübingen, and made frequent visits to Venice and other Italian cities, with the purpose of procuring books for the Escorial Library as well as his Spanish clients. Darmarios’ activity spans three decades272 and includes a high number of affiliations with individuals from diverse backgrounds; however, the framework of his production is not directly related to the focal subject of the current study. Therefore, I will evaluate Darmarios’ activity based on his output in the field of historiography, together with the activity of Antonios Kalosynas, who was Darmarios’ assistant first in his atelier in Trento and later in Toledo. In addition, the Chalkokondyles copy by Darmarios, namely Parisinus 1779 (T), is an apograph of Kalosynas’ copy [Monacensis 150 (M2)].
4.1.16 Antonios Kalosynas
Antonios Kalosynas273 was born in Crete in c. 1540. His father Georgios was a parish priest in their hometown Rotasi in Southern Crete, and under his guidance, Antonios received a certain level of literary education and developed his calligraphic skills.274
272 In addition to the fact that Darmarios' activity spanned a long period of time, involved a large number of people, and took place in many different regions, the study of the Greek codices in the Escorial Library is further complicated by the fire of 1671, which destroyed over five thousand manuscripts.
273 VG 37, RGK I 25, RGK III 39.
274 De Andrés, “El cretense Antonio Calosinás,” 98.
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He was also a physician, who later attended the university at Alcalá de Henares. The earliest extant manuscript that contains his hand comes from Darmarios’ atelier, which is a copy of Theodore Metochites’ Miscellanea completed in 1560.275 The clerics attending the Council of Trent needed scribes, and as Kalosynas worked at Darmarios’ atelier from 1560 to1563, a large portion of his manuscripts were copied for the prelates of the Council. During this period, he might have traveled to different places to acquire books; Inmaculada Pérez Martín draws attention to the notes Kalosynas left on a manuscript which stated that the codex was purchased from Αὐλόν/Αὐλωνα (probably Valona, Albania).276
Kalosynas, having copied numerous theological texts for the prelates of the Council as an employee of Darmarios, moved to Toledo after 1563. Following a four-year hiatus in scribal activities, he copied the Histories of Chalkokondyles in 1567, which began with Kalosynas’ vita of Chalkokondyles (see Chapter 2.1 and Fig. 8). Kalosynas continued copying texts in Spain until the late 1500s. However, with the exception of Chalkokondyles and two other instances, the majority of his manuscripts focused on religion (including the Ecclesiastical History of Gelasius of Cyzicus which he copied at least two times). These two aforementioned exceptions were the Wars of Prokopios (1574),277 and the epitome of Cassius Dio by Ioannes Xiphilinos, with the Spanish translation on the verso of the folios (1588).278
While most of the manuscripts Darmarios copied were of theological nature, especially in the early 1560s, his output contained a greater number of historiographical works compared to Kalosynas. In 1573, Darmarios copied the
275 BNE fonds principal 4771. See Sosower, Signa officinarum, 219.
276 Pérez Martín, “El copista cretense Antonio Calosinás,” 283. Also, see footnote 25 in the same article. The manuscript in question is Biblioteca Estense fonds principal α. U. 9. 05.
277 Universitätsbibliothek (Basel) fonds principal E. III. 09.
278 BNE fonds principal 4818. See Martínez Manzano, “Entre Italia y España,” 367.
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Chronicon Paschale for Antonio Agustín.279 Additionally, he copied at least seven codices of Excerpta de legationibus Romanorum ad gentes of Constantine VII, which is a collection of works by numerous historiographers such as Polybios, Cassius Dio, Appian, Josephus, Arrianus, Eunapius, Malchus, Priscus, Prokopios, Theophylact Simocatta, Menander Protector, composed around 1574280 and 1579-80.281 He also copied Sphrantzes’ Chronicon in 1578 for the Paduan professor Ottaviano Ferrari.282 In 1579, Darmarios completed his copy of the Histories and the vita (see Chapter 2.1) of Chalkokondyles [Parisinus 1779 (T)] in March and in November finished the Chronicon Paschale.283 It is worth mentioning that Darmarios may have copied a large codex in the same year, which contained works by Gemiston Plethon, the teacher of Laonikos Chalkokondyles. This codex comprised Plethon’s addresses to Manuel II and Theodore as well as his work On Virtues, along with the Anthology of Stobaeus.284 Additionally he may have produced another codex solely dedicated to the works of Plethon.285 He undertook the copying of Philosophical and Historical Miscellany of Metochites seven times; one of them was commissioned by Johann Jakob Fugger in 1560,286 while another one additionally contained the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus.287 In 1581, he copied the Synopsis Chronike of Constantine Manasses.288 Among his
279 Stockholm Kungliga Biblioteket fonds principal Va. 7, 1-2.
280 BAV Vat. gr. 1418 and three apographs, BAV Pal. gr. 410, 411, 412. See Carolla, “A proposito,” 382-383. Also, Escorial, Real Biblioteca fonds principal R. III. 14, Biblioteca Ambrosiana fonds principal N 135 sup., and (BSB) Cod.graec. 267.
281 BSB Cod.graec. 185.
282 Biblioteca Ambrosiana fonds principal P 024 sup.
283 Uppsala UB fonds principal gr. 02.
284 Escorial (El-) Real Biblioteca fonds principal R. I. 11. See Dorandi, “La tradizione manoscritta,” 262.
285 BSB Cod.graec. 260.
286 BSB Cod.graec. 197.
287 Biblioteca nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III fonds principal III E 14 (1560), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) Barb. gr. 54 and 55 (Venice, 1584), BNE fonds principal 4771, Biblioteca Estense fonds principal α. T. 8. 09, and Biblioteca Estense universitaria fonds principal α. T. 8. 09, which contained the Roman Antiquities.
288 Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies fonds principal Greek MS 1.
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undated manuscripts are Prokopios’ Wars,289 Chronicle of Michael Glykas,290 and Kantakouzenos’ History which includes a short excerpt from De Administrando Imperio.291
Fig. 8 The title of Chalkokondyles’ vita by Antonios Kalosynas and Andreas Darmarios’ intervention, folio 1 of Monacensis 150 (M2)292
4.1.17 Martin Crusius
Martin Crusius/Kraus (1524-1607) was a German classicist and historian, who served as a professor at the University of Tübingen for almost 50 years, from 1559 to 1607. He was a follower of the Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon. As discussed in the subchapters 2.1 and 2.2, Crusius and his students in Tübingen copied Tubingensis Mb 11 (U) in 1575, using Vaticanus Palatinus 396 (H) as the antigraph (see Fig. 9). This copy also includes five folios of excerpts “from the third volume of the Councils, concerning the Council of Basel, to which the Greeks also came,” in Latin (see Fig. 10). Besides the fact that Crusius’ copy, similar to the ones examined
289 Biblioteca Ambrosiana fonds principal A 052-55 sup.
290 Bodleian Library Canon. gr. 090.
291 Biblioteca Estense fonds principal α. G. 3. 07.
292 The image of the folio retrieved from: https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0011/bsb00110692/images/index.html?seite=5&fip=193.174.98.30.
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4.2 Chalkokondyles within collections
In the previous subchapter, the scribal output of the known copyists of the Histories has been evaluated within a larger framework that included their biographic data and the personal and professional relations they formed. In the current subchapter, the known individuals who commissioned the Histories will be assessed similarly by reviewing the biographic information at hand and the personal and professional relations they had. In the case of the patrons, their collections of Greek manuscripts will be inspected to contextualize their decision of commissioning of the Histories. The known patrons who commissioned the Histories were Janus Lascaris, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Antonios Kallierges, Antonios Eparchos, and Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza de Bovadilla.
4.2.1 Janus Lascaris
Janus Lascaris (1445-1535)295 was a renowned humanist scholar and diplomat. He served as a librarian to Lorenzo de Medici, and traveled to Constantinople and Greece in the early 1490s to acquire manuscripts. He later served the French kings Charles VIII and Louis XII before entering the service of the Pope, and acted as the French ambassador to Venice (1503-1508). During his time in Venice he became a member of the Neakademia of Aldus Manutius. In 1513, he took part in the establishment of the Greek Gymnasium (the Quirinal college) of Leo X, who was a pope from the Medici family. He was sent to Charles V as a papal envoy by Clement VII in 1525. Lascaris was also the printer and editor of a number of editiones principes, issued in Florence during the 1490s and in Rome during the 1510s.
295 VG 157-158, RGK II 197, RGK III 245.
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As a scholar, editor, printer, copyist, librarian, book dealer and collector, Janus Lascaris’ name is not only affiliated with a large number of literary works, but also with individuals who copied, printed, or collected Greek texts. However, modern scholars who studied his personal collection were fortunate. In 1525, Lascaris, facing financial hardships, took a loan, with his library serving as collateral, which was guaranteed by Cardinal Ridolfi.296 An inventory of Ridolfi’s library, compiled after 1525, in the mid-1530’s according to Jackson,297 also includes possibly the entire personal collection of Janus Lascaris as it existed in Ridolfi’s possession at the time of the drafting of the inventory. The inventory was published by Pierre de Nolhac in 1886, and the list was revised by later studies.298 Within the personal collection of Janus Lascaris, there were a number of works related to the Histories’ subject matter, and history in general. The historiographical texts found among the listed items299 are the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus of Sicily,300 Anabasis of Xenophon (an excerpt301 and a missing copy), Lives and Moralia of Plutarch,302 histories of Thucydides303 and Polybius,304 Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews,305 Anabasis of Arrianus,306 Wars of Procopius,307 History of John VI Kantakouzenos,308 and History of Doukas copied by Nikolaos Sophianos.309 In a few other codices, Lascaris’ collection contained noteworthy texts: Acts of the Council of
296 Jackson, “An Old Booklist Revisited,” 79.
297 Jackson, “An Old Booklist Revisited,” 80.
298 De Nolhac, “Inventaire des manuscrits,” 251-274. Omont, “Un premier catalogue,” 309–324. Ridolfi, “La biblioteca,” 173–193. Papatriantafyllou-Theodoridi, “Ο Ιανός Λάσκαρις,” 117–131. Donald F. Jackson, “A New Look,” 83–108.
299 Based on the list supplied in Jackson, “An Old Booklist Revisited” 82-132.
300 BNF Gr. 1665.
301 BNF Gr. 1640.
302 BNF Gr.1671.
303 BNF Gr. 1736, BNF Gr. 1636, BNF Gr. 1734.
304 BNF Gr.1648 and a Latin fragment, BNF Lat. 6124.
305 BNF Gr. 1421.
306 BNF Gr.1407. Also contains the Geographica of Ptolemy.
307 BNF Gr.1699
308 BNF Coisl. 144.
309 BNF Gr. 1310. This codex contains a high number of other works on various subjects.
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Florence,310 Plethon’s philosophical treatises copied in part by Bessarion,311 and another codex which brought together Plethon’s address to Manuel II, Xenophon’s Hellenica, Appian’s Syrian War and the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus.312 Two other codices, the Periegetis of Pausinas313 and Peri Poleon of Stephanos Byzantinos314 concern the geography of Greece. Lascaris’ commissioning of the History of Doukas, which was the earliest extant copy of this work and the only one that is created in the 16th century, is interesting if taken together with the fact that Lascaris also commissioned the earliest Chalkokondyles copy to appear in Italy, Parisinus 1781 (Z). It can be inferred that Janus Lascaris had a genuine intellectual interest in the history of the Palaiologan period and its sources, as well as in the geography of Greece and surrounding regions.
4.2.2 Diego Hurtado de Mendoza
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503/1504 - 1575) was a Spanish nobleman who served Charles V first as a military commander and later as a diplomat. In 1539, he was appointed as the Spanish ambassador to Venice and held this position until 1546, when he was reassigned as the ambassador to Rome. Additionally, he was selected by the emperor as a diplomatic representative to the Council of Trent in 1545, where he left a remarkable impression with his extensive knowledge and garnered attention by bringing numerous Greek manuscripts on theology and by allowing others to access this collection.315 During his time in Venice, he took on a great endeavor to establish a personal library. Taking advantage of the presence of many talented
310 BNF Gr. 422.
311 BNF Gr. 2041.
312 BNF Gr. 2080
313 BNF Gr. 1399.
314 BNF Gr. 1412
315 Hobson, Renaissance book collecting, 81.
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Greek scribes in the city, as well as the abundance of Greek manuscripts, and the competition from rival book collectors such as the French ambassador to Venice, Guillaume Pellicier, he began collecting manuscripts as early as 1540.316 The political rivalry aspect of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's book collecting efforts, particularly concerning Greek manuscripts, might be inferred from the fact that he hardly left annotations over the pages of the Greek manuscripts he collected. This is noteworthy considering the significant financial investment he made to gather the collection;317 therefore, gathering more manuscripts than his political rivals could be one of his goals, rather than commissioning books for purely intellectual reasons.
In 1542, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza employed the Flemish scholar Arnoldus Arlenius as his librarian, entrusting him with the task of overseeing the copying activity and acquiring new manuscripts. The ambassador lodged Arlenius in the embassy, as well as the scribe Andronikos Nukkios. Furthermore, he enlisted the services of several other scribes to tackle the extensive copying activity that lay ahead: Nikolaos Mourmouris, Georgios Bembaines, John Mavromates, Petros Karneades, Nikolaos Gaitanos, and two more unidentified copyists. The ambassador also sent Nikolaos Sophianos to Greece in 1543 to acquire manuscripts, as previously mentioned (see Subchapter 4.1.6). The collection Diego Hurtado de Mendoza created during his service in Venice as a result of the abovementioned efforts amounts to 258 Greek manuscripts and was cataloged by his librarian Arlenius towards the end of the 1540s. While the original catalog has been lost, a copy of it, made by the contemporary scholar Jean Matal, survived.318 This latter catalog is a valuable source for the present study since Nukkios and scribes affiliated with him produced most of
316 Hobson, Renaissance book collecting, 72.
317 Pérez Martín, “El helenismo en la España moderna,” 64.
318 Hobson, Renaissance book collecting, 233-243.
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the Chalkokondyles copies during the 1540s.
Upon surveying the catalog published by Hobson, numerous works stand out, yet a number of them appear to be missing.319 The extant manuscripts include the historical accounts of Diodorus of Sicily (Bibliotheca Historica),320 Cassius Dio,321 Appian,322 Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews),323 Eusebius (Vita Constantini),324 Zonaras,325 Procopius (Wars),326 Niketas Choniates,327 Pachymeres,328 Gregoras,329 Theophylact Simocatta, followed by Chalkokondyles in the same codex [Escorialensis 190 (E)],330 and a codex containing multiple authors, mainly Aelianus, Nikolaos Damaskenos and John of Antioch.331 Several historical treatises are among the missing manuscripts as well, under the titles “Io. Curopalati historia quam orditur a Nicephoro primo cognomento apo genikon usque ad Nicephorum Botoniatem,”332 “Georgij Monachi Historiale Chronicon a creatione mundi usque ad Nicephorum Botoniatem (...),”333 “Historiae Georgij Monachia (...),”334 “Dionysij Halicarnassei Antiquitatum Romanarum libri undecim,”335 a codex containing multiple works including Plethon’s orations and related works,336 “Zosimi Historiae
319 The catalog of the missing Greek codices of the Escorial library was published by G. de Andrés in 1968 (Catálogo de los códices griegos desaparecidos de la Real Biblioteca de El Escorial). I will use the abbreviation CD for de Andrés’ catalog, following Hobson.
320 Escorial Υ. I. 02.
321 Escorial y. I. 04.
322 Escorial Τ. II. 04.
323 Escorial y. I. 14.
324 Escorial R. II. 04.
325 Escorial Υ. I. 11.
326 Escorial Υ. I. 08.
327 Escorial Ψ. IV. 17.
328 Escorial Ω. I. 10.
329 Escorial Υ. I. 07.
330 Escorial Φ. I. 12.
331 Escorial Ω. I. 11.
332 CD 7.
333 CD 89.
334 CD 2.
335 CD 82.
336 CD 565. “(...) Plethonis oratio funebris in Theodori uxorem. Eiusdem ad Imperatorem Peloponesi descriptio. (...).” See Hobson, Renaissance book collecting, 237.
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nouae libri sex,”337 “Iosephi de Bello Iudaico libri 7,”338 and “Briennij Historia quae Alexias inscribitur de rebus gestis Alexij Comneni.”339 Even though the majority of the Greek manuscript collection Mendoza assembled in Venice during the 1540s primarily focuses on theology, a considerable portion of the collection is composed of historical treatises.
4.2.3 Antonios Kallierges
Antonios Kallierges or Antonio Calergi (1521-1555) was born in Candia to a powerful Creto-Venetian noble family native to the island. Having received a Latin education in Crete, he left for Venice in 1543 after taking part in the Battle of Preveza (1538) alongside his brother Matteo.340 In Venice, he established connections with publishers such as Aldus’ son, Paulus Manutius, and Valgrisi, while Matteo remained in Crete and provided military support to the Republic in his capacity as an archon of the island.341 Antonios Kallierges also held the position of a senator in Venice.342 He authored a historiographical treatise on the history of Crete up to 1303, Commentarii delle cosse fatte dentro e fuori del regno e isola di Candia.343 He demonstrated his patronage for the arts and humanities, establishing connections with scribes such as Basileios Baleris, who, in 1544, copied Parisinus 1726 (P) specifically for him (see Fig. 11), Nikolaos Sophianos,344 as well as Nikolaos Malaxos who wrote an acrostic eulogical poem in his honor.345 Upon relocating to Venice in 1544, Antonios Kallierges amassed a large book collection
337 CD 78.
338 CD 422.
339 CD 87.
340 Terribile, “Non Contarini ma Calergi,” 22. Grimm, “Antonio Calergi als Stifter,” 184.
341 Terribile, “Paolo Veronese,” 188.
342 Bertin, “La versione ficiniana,” 295.
343 Stamoulou, Candia and the Venetian Oltremare, 96-97.
344 Grimm, “Antonio Calergi als Stifter,” 179-182.
345 Grimm, “Antonio Calergi als Stifter,” 183.
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consisting of approximately 800 volumes; the majority of this collection, however, comprised printed books.346 After his premature death in 1555, this collection was inherited by his brother Matteo. It would be misleading to make inferences solely based on this collection without conducting a comprehensive study to catalog the Greek manuscripts that were copied in Venice or elsewhere in Italy during Kallierges’ stay, since the collection consists of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian works, includes prohibited books, and encompasses a wide variety of subjects.347 Nevertheless, based on the information at hand concerning his life, whereabouts, and personal relations, I will offer learned guesses regarding Antonios Kallierges and the general copying activity in Venice in the 1540s, specifically focusing on the case of Chalkokondyles’ Histories (see Subchapter 4.3).
Fig. 11 Basileios Baleris’ signature at the end of Parisinus 1726 (folio 268)348
4.2.4 Antonios Eparchos349
Vaticanus 159 (G) was copied by Andronikos Nukkios in 1544 for Antonios
346 Terribile, “Non Contarini ma Calergi,” 22.
347 Bertin, “La versione ficiniana,” 295-296.
348 Image of the folio retrieved from: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10721756z/f273.item.
349 See Subchapter 4.1.3 for an evaluation of Antonios Eparchos as a copyist.
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Eparchos; however, it would be difficult to draw solid conclusions by examining the Greek manuscripts in Eparchos’ possession, not only due to their share number, but also due to the professional nature of his ownership of these manuscripts. As a book dealer by profession, his collections of manuscripts were not only a cluster of knowledge representing his intellectual realm but also valuable financial assets. Besides, in addition to their close professional relationship, Andronikos Nukkios and Antonios Eparchos were in-laws, as their children were married to each other.350 Therefore, I abstain from categorizing Antonios Eparchos alongside other patrons of scribes who built personal collections, as the other individuals discussed in this subchapter, since the line between his manuscript collection and commercial stock of manuscripts is blurred.
4.2.5 Francisco de Mendoza y Bovadilla
Francisco de Mendoza y Bovadilla (1508-1566) was a Spanish cleric from a noble family, and a cousin of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In his youth, he studied law and theology at Alcalá and Salamanca, and learned Greek and Latin.351 He entered Charles V’s service after completing his studies, and was promoted to the rank of cardinal in 1544. He remained in Rome and acted as an imperial representative until his appointment as the governor of Siena in 1555. He then returned to Spain in 1557.352 Being a great bibliophile, Mendoza y Bovadilla did not only collect books but also actively studied them.353 He assembled an extensive personal collection consisting of nearly 1,000 volumes, containing around 300 printed Greek books and
350 Sosower, “Antonios Eparchos,” 154.
351 Pérez Martín, “El helenismo en la España moderna,” 66.
352 Pérez Martín, “El helenismo en la España moderna,” 70-71.
353 For examples of many annotations by Francisco de Mendoza on the manuscripts he owned, see Pérez Martín, “El helenismo en la España moderna,” 59-96.
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over 120 Greek manuscripts. The majority of these acquisitons, around two-thirds, were obtained during his stay in Italian cities, mostly Rome, with the assistance of certain copyists354 active around the mid-century. Francisco de Mendoza y Bovadilla also received help from the former librarian of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Juan Páez de Castro, who joined him in Rome in 1547.355 Francisco de Mendoza’s large collection of Greek manuscripts has been largely dispersed over the years; however, the studies356 on the remainder of this collection can still provide a general understanding about his tendencies regarding Late Byzantine historiography.
Martínez Manzano considers that Francisco de Mendoza’s Chalkokondyles copy, Escorialensis 245 (E),357 and another codex358 containing a multitude of Byzantine historiographical texts, come from the same anonymous hand, active around the year 1542,359 while Wurm attributed Escorialensis 245 to Nikolaos Malaxos.360 Regardless of whether the second codex originates from Malaxos or not, it contained a noteworthy collection of texts such as the Chronicle of Symeon Logothete, the History of Leo the Deacon, the Synopsis of Skylitzes, various works by Theodore II Laskaris, Plethon’s oration to Despot Theodore II, and Manuel II’s Funeral Oration. With Chalkokondyles’ account, the two codices chronologically complement each other and present a more or less complete history of Byzantium. Moreover, Francisco de Mendoza’s collection included the History of Theophylact
354 For the period 1545-1557, De Andrés lists the copyists who worked for Cardinal Mendoza and signed their manuscripts: Corfiot John Mavromates, Camille Zanetti, Kornelios, Nikolaos and John Mourmouris from Nafplio, Georgios Tryphon, Georgios Basilikos from Constantinople, Petros Karneades from Monemvasia, Georgios Bembaines, Michael Maleas from Epidauros, Franciscus from Candia, John Chonianos/Choniates from Monemvasia, and Nikolaos Malaxos. See De Andrés, “Les copistes grecs,” 100-104.
355 G. De Andrés, “Les copistes grecs,” 97.
356 Graux, Essai sur les origines. De Andrés, “Les copistes grecs,” 97-104. Pérez Martín, “El helenismo en la España moderna,” 59-96. Martínez Manzano, “Las encuadernaciones,” 253-284.
357 Escorial Υ. I. 06 (Andrés 245).
358 Escorial principal Υ. I. 04 (Andrés 243)
359 Martínez Manzano, “Las encuadernaciones,” 272.
360 Wurm, “Die handschriftliche Überlieferung,” 227.
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Simocatta361 and Kantakouzenos,362as well as earlier works such as the epitome of Cassius Dio by Ioannes Xiphilinos,363 and the Hannibalic Wars and Spanish Wars of Appian found in two codices.364
4.3 Marketing the Histories
The origins of the extensive copying activity observed in Venice during the 1540s, with a specific focus on the Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, can be traced back to the first three manuscripts copied in Venice c. 1500, by Georgios Moschos and scribes collaborating with him. The earliest copy among them, Parisinus 1781 (Z), was copied for Janus Lascaris. Comparing the scribal output of Georgios Moschos and the personal collection of Janus Lascaris, it appears plausible that Lascaris took the initiative for the copying of the Histories of Chalkokondyles. Furthermore, his annotations on the manuscript suggest that he actively studied the text. Certain historical treatises found in Lascaris’ collection align with the narrative or historical context of the Histories. Examples include Polybius, who explains the rapid expansion of the Romans and the fall of Greece, the account of Doukas (copied by Sophianos), as well as works that chronologically complement the Histories, such as the History of Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos. The remaining historical treatises found within the collection of Janus Lascaris can be regarded as indicative of his general interest in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine history, or ancient (Polybios) and medieval (Doukas, Chalkokondyles) falls of Greece; however, the spirit of Renaissance Italy
361 BNE fonds principal 4707.
362 BNE fonds principal 4712.
363 BNE fonds principal 4714.
364 BNE fonds principal 4744 and BNE fonds principal 4746. Also, an instance of the collaboration and communication among the copyists of Greek texts is exemplified by the partnership between Andreas Darmarios, John Mavromates, Kornelios Mourmouris, and Zanetti in BNE fonds principal 4744.
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can also explain his fascination with the classical heritage. The fact that his collection included the acts of the Council of Florence and Plethon’s address to Manuel II also tips off his interest in the final years of the Empire and the Greeks’ relations with the Latins. Moschos, on the other hand, predominantly copied works concerning medicine, given his background as a physician, but also engaged in the copying of classical literature, theology, and geography. While he devoted less attention to historical treatises, he did copy Parisinus 1781 (Z), and supervised the copying process of Monacensis 307a (M1). Additionally, he made a copy of Polybius, distinct from the codex in Lascaris’ possession. The Polybios copy was sold to the city of Augsburg by Antonios Eparchos in 1544.
One of the remaining two copies from the early 16th century is Vaticanus Reginensis 103 (N), which bears the hand of a young Antonios Eparchos; however, it is a highly damaged copy exhibiting irregularities, as discussed in the subchapters 2.1 and 4.1.3. The other early 16th century copy, Monacensis 307a (M1), was destined to be the progenitor of 26 other Chalkokondyles copies, most of which were produced in Venice between 1540 and 1550. Monacensis 307a (M1) bears the annotations of Nikolaos Sophianos, who later copied a three-folio long Chalkokondyles fragment, namely Vaticanus 1890 (Vb). Sophianos was the secretary of Cardinal Ridolfi who took possession of Janus Lascaris’ personal manuscript collection in the course of events addressed earlier. The fragment copied by Sophianos pertains to the Council of Ferrara-Florence and scholars have proposed365 a connection between this activity and Cardinal Ridolfi’s preparations for the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which ultimately turned into a pivotal moment in the history of Counter-Reformation movement.
365 Mészáros, “A Chalkokondyles fragment,” 250.
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Monacensis 307a (M1), as mentioned above and explained in the subchapters 2.1 and 4.1.1, was copied by Moschos and a number of other unidentified scribes (except for Paolo de Canale who died at a young age). Moschos' hand intervenes between the scribes and constitutes the largest part of the manuscript. Given that young Paolo de Canale was one of Moschos’ collaborators in this manuscript, it is plausible that Moschos closely supervised the team’s work. The age gap between Moschos and Paolo de Canale, and Moschos’ interventions in a supervising manner, indicate that the other scribes were also possibly either inexperienced or young.
As a result of the Third Ottoman-Venetian War (1537-1540), many Greek speakers were compelled to flee areas that were either under threat or captured by the Ottomans in the course of the war. Antonios Eparchos, Andronikos Nukkios, Basileios Baleris, and Nikolaos Baleris left Corfu following the unsuccessful yet devastating Ottoman siege of the island in 1537 (Nikolaos Sophianos, who was also from Corfu, left the island earlier in the 1510s). The Venetian Republic suffered a terrible defeat in the naval battle at Preveza (1538), leading to its eventual surrender (1540), and the relinquishment of its Peloponnesian holdings, Monemvasia and Nafplio. After 1540, scribes Nikolaos Malaxos, Georgios Tryphon, Michael Kontoleon, and Georgios Bembaines, who hailed from these two cities, also departed from their respective homelands. All of these scribes moved to Venice, and it seems that Andronikos Nukkios was at the center of the web which produced numerous Chalkokondyles copies in Venice during the 1540s. Nukkios, as mentioned, was an in-law relative of Antonios Eparchos, and Eparchos was a blood relative of Georgios Moschos. Nukkios was fortunate to be in a city with public libraries, a large number of Greek individuals capable of working as scribes, and non-Venetian patrons eager to build their own collections such as Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and Guillaume
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Pellicier. In addition to these factors, the Council of Trent was also creating a demand for manuscript copies. Nukkios found employment in the early 1540s under Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who had been appointed as the Spanish ambassador to the Serenissima in 1539.
The first Chalkokondyles copy within this context was Escorialensis 190 (E), an apograph of the Monacensis of Moschos, which was copied by Andronikos Nukkios for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and completed in early 1543. Nukkios supervised Nikolaos and Basileios Baleris during the production of Laurentianus 57.9 (L), and his hand only appears at the beginning and the end. Herbert Wurm suggested that this copy was used as a template in Nukkios’ atelier (see Subchapter 2.1). Furthermore, for the scribes who occasionally collaborated with Nukkios, Monacensis 307s (M1) was also available to consult or copy. Wurm, based on palaeographical evidence, suggests that Monacensis 307a (M1) was used along with Laurentianus 57.9 (L) by Basileios Baleris who copied Parisinus 1726 (P) for Antonios Kallierges in April 1544. Nikolaos Malaxos, who collaborated with Basileios Baleris elsewhere, also had access to Monacensis 307a (M1), demonstrated by his annotation on the manuscript. Nikolaos Malaxos’ copy of Chalkokondyles, Escorialensis 245 (E1), was in possession of Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza y Bovadilla.
Both the Spanish ambassador Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and his cousin Cardinal Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza y Bovadilla built personal collections of considerable size during their missions in Italy, making use of the many talented copyists available in the peninsula, and employing agents to travel and acquire books on their behalf. The ambassador’s collection of Greek manuscripts consisted of theological treatises, which proved to be a noteworthy endeavor that garnered him
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admiration when he attended the Council in Trent as the imperial representative. Upon surveying the historical treatises in the collection, one can perceive a more or less cohesive narrative of universal history. The Cardinal’s collection on the other hand, was richer in Byzantine sources, and offered a more densely woven historiography for the Middle and Late Byzantine periods. The absence of another treatise chronologically overlapping Chalkokondyles, coupled with the fact that both cousins acquired a copy, might be an indicator that they regarded the Histories as an authoritative narrative for the period it covers.
Michael Kontoleon collaborated with Georgios Bembaines, a colleague of Nukkios from Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s atelier, to work on Parisinus 1729 (S). Kontoleon signed the manuscript, noting that the codex was intended as a gift for a Peloponnesian compatriot. This manuscript is believed to have originated from Basileios Baleris' copy for Antonios Kallierges, with a hypothetical copy in between (see Subchapter 2.1). Even though the compatriot’s identity remains unknown, it is noteworthy that both manuscripts were intended for individuals of Greek background who came from the Stato da Màr, which turned into a “frontline” between the Republic and the Ottomans during the 1540s. Kontoleon’s compatriot was from the recently occupied Peloponnesian holdings, while Antonios Kallierges himself had joined the Battle of Preveza. Kallierges’ family held significant positions in the military and political spheres in Venetian Crete. The interest in the Histories shown by Antonio Kallierges as a person with military and political links to Crete, and by the Greek compatriot as a migrant from newly occupied Peloponnesian holdings of Venice, present another group of people, the Greeks who commissioned the Histories for perhaps practical reasons. The Histories possibly provided practical benefits for Kallierges and Kontoleon’s compatriot, who lived in the battle zone with the
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Ottomans and who might benefit the advantage supplied by the knowledge they acquired through owning and reading the Histories, which informed its readers dearly regarding the history of the region that these two readers were active in, and also concerning their adversary’s military organization and administrative structure.
After the period of 1540-1550, interest in Chalcocondyles' work shifted to the north of the Alps. Although the first Latin edition appeared in 1556, we understand that Latin translations were in circulation prior to that.366 As discussed in Section 2.2, there were Latin translations available as early as 1544, indicating that the book was intended to cater to readers who did not possess proficiency in Greek. It might further be inferred that the book held practical benefits for non-Greek people. The fact that the Latin manuscript versions of the Histories mentioned in the subchapter 2.2 also appeared in Austria and other German-speaking regions in the 1540s suggests that the content of the Histories held significant influence on the communities directly targeted by the Ottoman advance. These groups found the Histories to be a valuable source of information regarding the history and emergence of their rivals, their customs, and organizational structures, in a similar manner with the abovementioned group.
The Greek Chalkokondyles manuscripts from the second half of the 16th century, specifically those by Palaiokappas at Fontainebleau, and by Darmarios and Kalosynas in Spain warrant separate analysis. Palaiokappas, who copied the Histories c. 1550 in France, was working as a librarian, classifying and cataloging the volumes at Fontainebleau with Angelos Bergikios and Jakob Diassorinos, and
366 See Chapter 2.2. It is probable that the circulation was not widespread since there is not enough data to assess the level of public availability of the Latin translation of the Histories before its printing. However, it is understood that there were at least two separately created Latin translations in different locations, and one of these, the translation by Viennese lawyer Philip Gundel, had been circulated.
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contributing to the enrichment of the collection by copying texts that the library did not possess. Despite the absence of a discernible pattern in the subject matter of his copying output, the time that both Palaiokappas and his colleague Diassorinos spent in Venice during the early 1540s may have contributed to Palaiokappas' decision to copy the Histories since it was highly popular among copyist circles in Venice, with five copies already produced between 1542 and 1545.
The copies created by Darmarios and Kalosynas in Spain in 1567 and 1579 should be analyzed within the network of Darmarios, who was a major book dealer based in Spain with connections in Italy and other Western European cities. Darmarios did not hesitate to make manipulative changes to the works in order to increase their appeal, and his primary target was non-Greek Westerners. As of 1579, no Greek edition of Chalkokondyles had been published, however his work was available in Latin, with a publication in Paris in 1567 and three subsequent editions in Frankfurt between 1568 and 1578. Taking into account the historical backdrop of the conflict between Habsburg Spain and its allies against the Ottomans in the western Mediterranean, which began in the era of Charles V and persisted throughout Felipe II's reign, it is reasonable to assume that Chalkokondyles' Histories would have held considerable commercial appeal in Spain, as well as in Italy. The majority of the works on history copied by Darmarios pertain to a period preeceding Chalkokondyles' time. However, a year before Darmarios copied the Histories in Spain in 1579, he copied the Chronicle of Sphrantzes, a contemporary of Chalkokondyles, for the Padovan professor Ottaviano Ferrari (see 3.1.16). Prior to this, Darmarios had obtained another Sphrantzes copy scribed in 1577.367 His former employee Manuel Glynzounios also copied Sphrantzes twice,368 which suggests that
367 BSB Cod.graec. 239.
368 BAV Ott. gr. 260 and British Library Add. 36539.
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the text was well-known among Darmarios’ circles. Additionally, it is documented that Darmarios cooperated with Makarios Melissourgos/Melissenos, the Metropolitan of Monemvasia who fled to Naples (under Felipe II’s rule) after the Battle of Lepanto, in creating a forgery known as Chronicon Maius by expanding Sphrantzes’ narrative.369
369 Binon, “L'histoire et la légende,” 300-301. ODB, 1336.
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CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
In this study, I surveyed the production of approximately 30 manuscripts of the 15th-century Athenian historiographer Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ work, the Histories. I also evaluated the social, economic, and political networks within which most of the manuscripts in question were produced by Greek copyists, while focusing on the production that was centered around Venice in the first half of the 16th century.
The Histories, a work composed following the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire, encompasses roughly the last 150 years of Byzantium, as well as the rise of the Ottomans from obscurity to a mighty empire. In terms of historiography, it represents a break from the Byzantine tradition and embraces the Hellenic identity. The Histories was composed in the 1460s and and was initially copied in Ottoman Constantinople. Subsequently, copies appeared in Venice c. 1500, and the dissemination of the work was slow until the early 1540s. However, within a mere decade, nearly 20 manuscript copies of the Histories were produced.
Even though Venice was the capital of the printing press in Europe during the first three quarters of the 16th century, with a plethora of talented publishers, editors, and printers swarming the city, the intriguing question arises as to why the Histories, despite its popularity, was not printed but disseminated by copying by hand. The printing history of the Histories, surveyed in Chapter 2, the specifics of the printing sector in Venice, surveyed in Chapter 3, and the copying activity centered around the Histories in Italy during the first half of the 16th century that peaked in the final decade of the given period, scrutinized in Chapter 4, suggest an answer when taken together. Since the Histories had been translated into Latin and this translation was in
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circulation in Central Europe by the mid-1540s, and given also the subsequent popularity of the Latin version after its eventual printing in Basel in 1556, we can safely conclude that the content of the Histories held a significant commercial potential. However, the individuals who were in possession of the text made a deliberate decision not to print the Histories in Venice, neither in Greek, nor in Latin (or Italian). From another point of view, the individuals who wished to print and monetize the text in Greek or Latin were not able to do so until the second half of the 16th century. As seen in the Chapter 3, Venice was a great center of printing, especially for Greek printing, for the first three quarters of the 16th century. In addition, Venice protected the print book producers and traders with early modern copyright laws and took measures against the production of counterfeit issues. Therefore, individuals who were contemplating to publish a book had to take numerous variables into consideration, such as the copyright issues regarding the text(s) to be printed in their original language or their translations, or the originality and the ownership of the typeset(s) that were to be used in printing. They also had to hold a good knowledge of the market and be able to calculate the profitability of their enterprise. By inspecting the individuals involved in the dissemination of the Histories in manuscript form, I reached the conclusion in the paragraph below for the specific case of the Histories regarding the transition in the method of dissemination of the text from manuscript to print.
In Chapter 4, I aimed to demonstrate the networks between the copyists and the patrons, and contextualized the rationale behind the marketing aspect of the copying of the Histories for both parties. The scribe of the first Chalkokondyles manuscript in Italy, Georgios Moschos, his young nephew, the future manuscript dealer Antonios Eparchos, and Eparchos’ in-law and associate Andronikos Nukkios
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were in control of the production and dissemination of the manuscripts of the Histories until and during the 1540s in Venice; and nearly all identified copyists were former colleagues or employees of Andronikos Nukkios. The complex and elaborate language of Chalkokondyles might have been considered a risk factor in the event that Nukkios or his circle had contemplated mass production by printing, particularly if they had ever considered printing the Histories in Greek. Nukkios himself was a publisher of three books featuring a simpler Greek, indicating that his target market was the everyday Greek people in Venice in the mentioned enterprises. Therefore, it can be inferred that neither Andronikos Nukkios nor his colleagues who were working at an industrial pace in copying scale under the patronage of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, saw a financial opportunity in printing the Histories in Greek; instead, they chose the safer option of copying the text for the commissioning patrons. Consequently, printing the text in Latin was a difficult mission as seen in the case of 1556 edition and making the text available in Latin would harm the possible commissioning deals of Nukkios and other scribes who were benefiting from their control over the text and its availability in Greek only. By the time the group of people who published the 1556 edition advanced in their mission, the Nukkios and his circle had already copied the text numerous times and popularized the text, while Nukkios himself left Venice along with his profession as a copyist for more adventurous enterprises (see subchapter 4.1.7).
With the conclusions drawn in the subchapter 4.3 regarding the intellectual, political, and practical reasons behind the commissioning of the copying of Chalkokondyles manuscripts by patrons, as well as the conclusions pertaining to the economic aspect of the manuscript production between 1540 and 1550 in Venice, specifically in the case of the Histories of Chalkokondyles, attained through
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systematic compilation and evaluation of the data at hand, I hope to have brought the reader to a more comprehensive understanding regarding the reception and dissemination of the Histories in early modern Europe.
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