The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  In the long interval before an agreement was finally reached, many members of the curia had found paths to new employment; some, like Poggio’s friend Bruni, had already returned to Italy. Poggio’s own attempts were unsuccessful. The apostolic secretary to the disgraced pope had enemies, and he refused to appease them by distancing himself from his former master. Other bureaucrats in the papal court testified against the imprisoned Cossa, but Poggio’s name does not appear on the list of witnesses for the prosecution. His best hope was that one of Cossa’s principal allies, Cardinal Zabarella, would be named pope, but Zabarella died in 1417. When the electors finally met in secret conclave in the fall of 1418, they chose someone with no interest in surrounding himself with humanist intellectuals, the Roman aristocrat Oddo Colonna, who took the name Martin V. Poggio was not offered the post of apostolic secretary, though he could have stayed on at court in the lower rank of scriptor. Instead, he decided to make a very surprising and risky career move.

  In 1419, Poggio accepted the post of secretary to Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The uncle of Henry V (Shakespeare’s heroic warrior of Agincourt fame), Beaufort was the leader of the English delegation to the Council of Constance, where he evidently met and was impressed by the Italian humanist. For the wealthy and powerful English bishop, Poggio represented the most advanced and sophisticated type of secretary, someone deeply versed both in the Roman curial bureaucracy and in prestigious humanist studies. For the Italian secretary, Beaufort represented the salvaging of dignity. Poggio had the satisfaction of refusing what would have been in effect a demotion, had he returned to the Roman Curia. But he knew no English, and, if that did not greatly matter in the service of an aristocratic cleric whose mother tongue was French and who was comfortable in Latin and Italian, it did mean that Poggio could never hope to feel entirely at home in England.

  The decision to move, as he approached his fortieth birthday, to a land where he had no family, allies, or friends was motivated by something other than pique. The prospect of a sojourn in a distant realm—much more remote and exotic than Tasmania would now seem to a contemporary Roman—excited the book hunter in Poggio. He had had spectacular successes in Switzerland and Germany, successes that had made his name famous in humanist circles. Other great discoveries might await him now in English monastic libraries. Those libraries had not yet been thoroughly searched by humanists endowed, as Poggio was, with a careful reading of known classical texts, an encyclopedic grasp of the clues to missing manuscripts, and remarkable philological acumen. If he had already been hailed as a demigod for his ability to resurrect the ancient dead, how would he be praised for what he might now bring to light?

  In the event, Poggio remained in England for almost four years, but the stay was deeply disappointing. Bishop Beaufort was not the gold mine that Poggio, perennially short of money, had dreamed he would be. He was away much of the time—“as nomadic as a Scythian”—leaving his secretary with little or nothing to do. Except for Niccoli, his Italian friends seem all to have forgotten him: “I have been relegated3 to oblivion as though I were dead.” The English people he met were almost uniformly disagreeable: “plenty of men given over to gluttony and lust but very few lovers of literature and those few barbarians, trained rather in trifling debates and in quibbling than in real learning.”

  His letters back to Italy were a litany of complaints. There was plague; the weather was miserable; his mother and brother wrote to him only to pester him for money that he did not have; he suffered from hemorrhoids. And the truly terrible news was that the libraries—at least the ones he visited—were from Poggio’s point of view almost completely uninteresting. “I saw many monasteries,4 all crammed with new doctors,” he wrote to Niccoli in Florence,

  none of whom you would even have found worth listening to. There were a few volumes of ancient writings, which we have in better versions at home. Nearly all the monasteries of this island have been built within the last four hundred years and that has not been an age which produced either learned men or the books which we seek; these books were already sunk without trace.

  There might, Poggio conceded, be something or other at Oxford, but his master Beaufort was not planning a visit there, and his own resources were severely strained. It was time for his humanist friends to abandon their dreams of stupendous discoveries: “you had better give up hope of books from England, for they care very little for them here.”

  Poggio professed to find some consolation in embarking on a serious study of the Church Fathers—there was no shortage of theological tomes in England—but he felt painfully the absence of the classical texts he loved: “During my four years5 here I have paid no attention to the study of the Humanities,” he complained, “and I have not read a single book that had anything to do with style. You can guess this from my letters, for they are not what they used to be.”

  In 1422, after ceaseless complaining, conniving, and cajoling, he finally secured for himself a new secretarial post at the Vatican. Obtaining the money for the voyage back was not easy—“I am hunting6 everywhere to find some means of leaving here at someone else’s expense,” he wrote frankly—but eventually he cobbled enough together. He returned to Italy, having uncovered no lost bibliographic treasures and having had no appreciable impact on the English intellectual scene.

  On May 12, 1425, he wrote to remind Niccoli that he wished to see the text he had sent him some eight years earlier: “I wanted the Lucretius7 for two weeks and no more but you want to copy that and Silius Italicus, Nonius Marcellus, and Cicero’s Orations all in one breath,” he wrote; “because you talk of everything you will accomplish nothing.” After a month had gone by, he tried again on June 14, suggesting that he was not alone in his eagerness to read the poem: “If you send me the Lucretius you will be doing a favor to many people. I promise you not to keep the book more than one month and then it will come back to you.” But another year passed without any results; the wealthy collector seemed to feel that the best place for On the Nature of Things was on his own shelf, near the ancient cameos, the fragments of statues, and the precious glassware. There it sat, perhaps unread, a trophy. It was as if the poem had been reburied, now not in a monastery but in the humanist’s gilded rooms.

  In a letter sent on September 12, 1426, Poggio was still trying to recover it: “Send me the Lucretius too,8 which I should like to see for a little while. I shall send it back to you.” Three years later, Poggio’s patience was understandably wearing thin: “You have now kept the Lucretius for twelve years,” he wrote on December 13, 1429; “it seems to me that your tomb will be finished sooner than your books will be copied.” When he wrote again, two weeks later, impatience showed signs of giving way to anger, and, in a revealing slip of the pen, he exaggerated the number of years he had been waiting: “You have now kept the Lucretius for fourteen years and the Asconius Pedianus too…. Does it seem just to you that, if I sometimes want to read one of these authors, I cannot on account of your carelessness? … I want to read Lucretius but I am deprived of his presence; do you intend to keep him another ten years?” Then he added, in a more cajoling note, “I urge you to send me either the Lucretius or the Asconius, which I shall have copied as soon as possible and then I shall send them back to you to keep as long as you like.”

  But finally—the actual date is unknown—it was done. Released from the confinement9 of Niccoli’s rooms, On the Nature of Things slowly made its way once again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight. There is no trace of Poggio’s own response to the poem he had relaunched, nor is anything known of Niccoli’s reactions, but there are signs—manuscript copies, brief mentions, allusions, subtle marks of influence—that it began quietly to circulate, at first in Florence, and then beyond.

  Back in Rome, Poggio had meanwhile picked up the familiar pieces of his existence in the papal court: conducting often lucrative business, exchanging cynical jokes with his fellow secretaries at the “Lie Factory,
” writing to humanist friends about the manuscripts they coveted, quarrelling bitterly with rivals. In a busy life—the court rarely stayed in place for very long—he managed to find time to translate ancient texts from Greek to Latin, to make copies of old manuscripts, and to write moral essays, philosophical reflections, rhetorical treatises, diatribes, and funeral orations on the friends—Niccolò Niccoli, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, Leonardo Bruni, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini—who were passing away.

  He also managed to father children, many children, with his mistress Lucia Pannelli: they had, if contemporary accounts are accurate, twelve sons and two daughters. To take the scan-dalmongering of the times at face value would be rash, but Poggio himself acknowledged the existence of illegitimate children. When a cardinal with whom he was on good terms reproached him for the irregularity of his life, Poggio conceded his fault but added acerbically, “Do we not every day, and in all countries, meet with priests, monks, abbots, bishops, and dignitaries of a still higher order, who have families of children by married women, widows, and even by virgins consecrated to the service of God?”

  As Poggio accumulated more money—and his tax records suggest that he did so with increasing success after his return from England—his life slowly began to change. He remained passionately interested in the recovery of ancient texts, but his own voyages of discovery were behind him. In their place, he began to emulate his wealthy friend Niccoli by collecting antiquities: “I have a room full of marble heads,” he boasted in 1427. In that same year Poggio purchased a house in Terranuova, the small town in Tuscany where he was born and where he would over the next years gradually increase his property holdings. He raised the money for the purchase, it was said, chiefly by copying a manuscript of Livy and selling it for the princely sum of 120 gold florins.

  Poggio’s debt-ridden father had once been forced to flee from the town; now Poggio contemplated creating there what he called his “Academy,” to which he dreamed of someday retiring and living in style. “I fished out10 a marble bust of a woman, wholly undamaged, which I like very much,” he wrote a few years later. “It was found one day when the foundations of some house were being dug. I took care to have it brought to me here and then to my little garden at Terra Nova, which I shall decorate with antiquities.” About another cache of statues he purchased, he wrote that “when they arrive, I shall place them in my little gymnasium.” Academy, garden, gymnasium: Poggio was recreating, at least in his fantasy, the world of the ancient Greek philosophers. And he was eager to confer upon it a high aesthetic polish. The sculptor Donatello, he remarks, saw one of the statues “and praised it highly.”

  All the same, Poggio’s life was not perfectly settled and secure. At one point in 1433, when he was serving as apostolic secretary to Pope Eugenius IV (who had succeeded Martin V), there was a violent popular insurrection in Rome against the papacy. Disguised as a monk and leaving his followers to fend for themselves, the pope set out in a small boat on the Tiber to reach the port at Ostia, where a ship belonging to his Florentine allies awaited him. A mutinous crowd along the banks of the river recognized him and showered the boat with rocks, but the pope managed to escape. Poggio was not quite as fortunate: fleeing the city, he was captured by one of the bands of the pope’s enemies. Negotiations for his release broke down, and he was eventually forced to ransom himself for a substantial sum of his own money.

  But somehow each of these violent disruptions of his world was righted, sooner or later, and Poggio returned to his books and statues, his scholarly translations and quarrels, and the steady accumulation of wealth. The gradual changes in his life culminated in a momentous decision: on January 19, 1436, he married Vaggia di Gino Buondelmonti. Poggio was fifty-six years old; his bride eighteen. The marriage was not contracted for money but for a different form of cultural capital.11 The Buondelmonti were one of the ancient feudal families in Florence, a fact that Poggio—who wrote eloquently against taking pride in aristocratic bloodlines—manifestly loved. Against those who ridiculed his decision, he wrote a dialogue, “Should an Old Man Marry?” (An seni sit uxor ducenda). The predictable arguments, most of them charged with misogyny, are rehearsed and are met with the predictable replies, many of them equally dubious. Hence—according to the anti-marriage interlocutor, who is none other than Niccolò Niccoli—it is folly for any older man, let alone a scholar, to change his well-tried style of life for one that is inescapably alien and risky. His bride may prove to be peevish, morose, intemperate, sluttish, lazy. If she is a widow, she will inevitably dwell on the happy times she had with her late husband; if she is a young maiden, she will almost certainly prove to be temperamentally unsuited to the gravity of her aging spouse. And if there are children, the old man will experience the bitter pain of knowing that he will leave them before they reach maturity.

  But no—according to the pro-marriage interlocutor—a man of mature years will compensate for the inexperience and ignorance of a young wife whom he will be able to mold like wax to his will. He will temper her impetuous sensuality with his wise restraint, and if they are blessed with children, he will enjoy the reverence due to his advanced age. Why should he assume that his life must inevitably be cut short? And, for however many years he is granted, he will experience the unspeakable pleasure of sharing his life with someone he loves, a second self. Perhaps the most convincing moment comes when Poggio speaks in his own voice to say, with unusual simplicity, that he is very happy. Niccoli concedes that there may be exceptions to the pessimistic rule.

  As it turned out, in an age of what by our standards was exceedingly low life expectancy, Poggio flourished, and he and Vaggia had what seems to have been a happy marriage, one that lasted almost a quarter of a century. They had five sons—Pietro Paolo, Giovanni Battista, Jacopo, Giovanni Francesco, and Filippo—and a daughter, Lucretia, all of whom survived into adulthood. Four of the five sons embarked on ecclesiastical careers; the exception, Jacopo, became a distinguished scholar. (Jacopo made the mistake of being caught up in the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and was hanged in Florence in 1478.)

  The fate of Poggio’s mistress and their fourteen children is not known. His friends congratulated the newly married Poggio on his good fortune and his moral rectitude; his enemies circulated stories of his indifference to those he had thrown off. According to Valla, Poggio cruelly rescinded the procedure by which he had petitioned that four of the sons his mistress bore him be declared legitimate. The charge may be a malicious slander, of the kind rival humanists took vindictive pleasure in, but there is no indication that Poggio went out of his way to treat those he had abandoned with particular generosity or kindness.

  As a layman, Poggio was not obliged to leave the papal court after his marriage. He continued to serve the pope, Eugenius IV, through long years of bitter conflict between the papacy and the Church councils, feverish diplomatic maneuvering, denunciations of heretics, military adventures, precipitous flights, and outright war. On Eugenius’s death in 1447, Poggio continued on as apostolic secretary to his successor, Nicholas V.

  This was the eighth pope whom he had served in this capacity, and Poggio, now in his later sixties, may have been growing weary. He was, in any case, pulled in different directions. His writing occupied an increasing amount of his time, and he had a growing family to attend to. Moreover, his wife’s deep family ties to Florence intensified the links that he had always carefully maintained to what he claimed as his native city, a city to which he returned at least once a year. But in many ways his service to the new pope must have been deeply satisfying, for prior to his election, Nicholas V—whose secular name was Tommaso da Sarzana—had distinguished himself as a learned humanist. He was the embodiment of that project of education in classical learning and taste to which Petrarch, Salutati, and other humanists had devoted themselves.

  Poggio, who had met the future pope in Bologna and had come to know him well, had in 1440 dedicated to him one of his
works, On the Unhappiness of Princes. Now, in the congratulatory epistle he hastened to send after the election, he assured the new pope that not all princes needed to be completely unhappy. To be sure, in his elevated position, he would not be able any longer to indulge himself in the joys of friendship and literature, but at least he would be able to “become the protector of men12 of genius and cause the liberal arts to raise their drooping heads.” “Let me now entreat you, most holy father,” Poggio added, “not to forget your ancient friends, of which number I profess myself to be one.”

  In the event, though the reign of Nicholas V was highly gratifying, it was not perhaps as perfectly idyllic as the apostolic secretary might have dreamed. During this period Poggio had his grotesque scuffle with George of Trebizond, complete with screams and blows. He must have been vexed as well that the pope, as if taking seriously the injunction to be the patron of men of genius, chose as another of the apostolic secretaries his bitter enemy Lorenzo Valla. Poggio and Valla promptly embarked on a vitriolic public quarrel, mingling snide comments about each other’s mistakes in Latin with still nastier remarks about hygiene, sex, and family.