Pope Nicholas III. Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493, p. 216v.
The site of the sprawling modern city of Naples has been, continuously, a major center of human habitation perhaps longer than anywhere else in western Europe. The superb location attracted Oscans, Samnites, and Etruscans. And then, around the sixth century B.C., Greeks arrived as colonists. Later, the Romans created major ports along the Bay of Naples, and in addition the region became the prime resort area for Roman emperors and senatorial families, who found the many traces of its Greek period particularly attractive. Innumerable distinguished Romans retreated there to write or to enjoy the area's luxurious baths. But soon there was also a network of Christian catacombs; and as Christianity became established throughout the Italian peninsula, the city and its environs acquired an impressive array of churches and shrines.
It is important to bear all this in mind when considering medieval Naples, for the area's traditions strongly influenced the city's later history. Inevitably, from one era to the next, the shape and form of the city itself changed; Roman Neapolis, for example, occupies only a small portion of the area covered by the Naples of Frederick II. And the duchy of Naples, the city-state that flourished between those periods, encompassed the entire bay and considerable inland territory as well. Yet through all these permutations Naples never forgot its distinctive past, its ancient roots.
In the turmoil of the sixth century, when Justinian's armies sought to reclaim Italy from the Ostrogoths, Naples remained loyal to the Ostrogothic king and suffered grievously for this. Shortly afterward, however, when Lombard invaders began to penetrate the south, the city welcomed a Byzantine connection, and for the next three centuries it could legitimately be viewed as a real, if distant, segment of the Byzantine empire. Constantinople apparently dispatched new, Greek-speaking settlers to swell the diminished population, and Naples was expected to keep in contact with the Byzantine exarch at Ravenna.
But the eighth century brought change again, particularly after the exarchate collapsed in 751. It was arranged that thenceforth Naples would report to the Byzantine governor of Sicily, and for a time there was still at least some Byzantine control. Moreover, Naples in turn exercised some degree of authority over two smaller Byzantine satellites, Gaeta (farther north along the Tyrrhenian coast) and Amalfi (to the south). Nonetheless, by the second half of the eighth century it was obvious that Naples was not in every sense "Byzantine." The bishop of Naples and other local religious leaders answered to Rome, not Constantinople; the liturgy was Roman, and priests went to Rome to study. Furthermore, while many Neapolitans read Greek, had Greek-derived names, and signed documents in Greek letters, Latin remained the normal language of communication. Politically, too, the lay elite seems to have included both "pro-" and "anti-" Byzantine factions. And by the early ninth century, Naples was plainly choosing its own dukes without consulting the Byzantines, and minting its own distinctive coinage.
In contemporary documents, we find the duke of Naples called sometimes consul et dux and sometimes magister militum. But whatever its ruler's title, in the early ninth century the duchy spread almost all the way around the Bay of Naples as well as inland to the east and north for some distance. Also, by the ninth century the office of dux had become more or less hereditary, with only rare deviations when the elite of Naples (the optimates or nobiliores) became seriously disaffected. As for other governmental structures, we have little precise information except that disputes were settled with the aid of a judex. We know, too, that the nobiliores reveled in titles and that Naples had a highly stratified society, which may have meant fewer possibilities for lesser individuals. Nevertheless, the setting of Naples provided many advantages, and much of its land area was exceptionally fertile. All could thus have gone well had it not been for one fact: pressing against the borders of Naples were the Lombards, who by the start of the ninth century had been dominating most of southern Italy for 300 years.
Again and again the Lombards had attacked Naples, and over time they had nibbled away portions of the duchy's territory. The Lombards' aggression was surely one reason Naples had adhered to its Byzantine connection, which represented at least hypothetical protection (even though, now, there were seldom Byzantine armies in southern Italy). Yet by the 830s Byzantium was losing Sicily to the Arabs; all too plainly, it was no longer in any position to help. So at that point, when the Lombards threatened once again, Naples hired Arab mercenaries.
Almost immediately, in response, the Lombard princes of Benevento and Salerno hired their own Arab forces. Arab sea-raiders had been harassing the Tyrrhenian coast for decades. Now some Arabs were being handed the opportunity to create a place for themselves within southern Italy, and they made the most of it. For the rest of the ninth century, the political balance in the region was to be affected by the presence of marauding Arab bands—who benefited not only from the Lombards' desire to take Naples but from the fact that Benevento and Salerno were soon also at war with each other. When in addition, in 846, an Arab army from Sicily and North Africa actually invaded the city of Rome, looting Saint Peter's and other major churches, the German emperor Lothair I sent his son Louis south with a large contingent of troops. Later, after Louis himself became emperor (Louis II), he found it necessary to spend much of his reign in southern Italy, trying desperately to expel all the Arabs. Next, after Louis's death in 875, the problem of the Arabs became a preoccupation of Pope John VIII. Then, in the last two decades of the century, Byzantine forces suddenly reappeared in southern Italy, seeking both to drive out the Arabs and to take advantage of the general disarray.
Perhaps surprisingly, Naples profited from this ninth century turmoil. The Lombards, now fighting each other, and subject also to pressures from Louis II, the pope, and Byzantium, were usually too busy to harass Naples. So Naples, remaining on excellent terms with the Arabs, flourished. There was increased commerce with the Arab world and, simultaneously, an exceptional flowering of culture. New churches were built in the city, and old churches were richly embellished. Moreover, although Naples was now in effect autonomous, the Byzantine connection held firm in some respects; many Byzantine manuscripts were imported (and translated) during this period, some of them highly significant for subsequent developments in western culture.
The most notable figure in this ninth-century Neapolitan renaissance" was the duke and bishop Athanasius II (r. 876-898), who personified several of the duchy's distinctive characteristics. Most of Naples's bishops were key members of the ducal family, but sometimes, as in the case of Athanasius, duke and bishop were one and the same, governing both church and state. Furthermore, the elite of Naples prided itself on literacy in both Greek and Latin and indeed on a level of learning far exceeding that typically encountered elsewhere in contemporary southern Italy. Athanasius exemplified this. But he also exemplified the wiliness demonstrated by Naples's rulers as they strove, over the centuries, to preserve their duchy and enhance its power. Athanasius had become duke, ousting his brother with the help of Pope John VIII, and had apparently promised to expel all Arabs from Naples and to sever all links with the Islamic world. In fact, however, he soon proved even more pro-Arab than his predecessor, and openly contemptuous of the sentence of excommunication pronounced by the pope. Naples, under Athanasius, continued defiantly determined to go its own way.
If the turbulence of the ninth century had been of benefit to Naples, the relative tranquillity of the tenth century worked in some ways to Naples's disadvantage. The region's last Arab band (encamped north of Naples, along the Garigliano River) was wiped out in 915. And Naples actually helped in this campaign. Arab depredations had apparently worn down even the duchy's tolerance. But, in addition, something seems by then to have weakened Naples's Arab connections. In the tenth century, Amalfi, now no longer subject to Naples, dominated trade with the Islamic sphere and profited from it. Meanwhile—another change—the Lombard principalities (Capua-Benevento and Salerno) had ceased battling each other and thus were now flourishing to such a degree that Naples shrank in importance.
This last development did have its positive side. The Lombards seemingly lost interest in taking the duchy; instead it became a convenient refuge for any Lombards at odds with their rulers. Furthermore, beginning in the late ninth century, Naples had begun to figure on occasion in marriage alliances with the Lombards; by now, ethnic differences had come to seem less significant, and Naples was admired for its traditions. It also preserved its reputation for learning; at Monte Cassino, for example, the tenth century's most distinguished abbot, Aligernus, was a Neapolitan. Nonetheless, on the whole Naples appeared detached from major events during the tenth century. In the second half of the century, when the German emperors Otto I and Otto II tried to exert authority over southern Italy, and came into conflict there with Byzantium, the confrontations mostly took place well to the east and south of Naples; the duchy was seldom involved. It seemed mainly to be living on its memories and even to be somewhat stagnant.
Early in the eleventh century, however, the entire situation in southern Italy changed again, radically, for it was then that the first Norman adventurers appeared. From the late ninth century on, Byzantium had been dominant in southern Italy's easternmost region and its southern extremities (in other words, throughout most of Apulia and Calabria), while the Lombards held the central and northern portions, as well as all of Campania with the exception of Naples and Amalfi. Time and again the Lombards had fended off the Byzantines' attempts to take over the whole, but in the early eleventh century Byzantium looked stronger and more determined than ever. It was apparently this new struggle that attracted the first Normans; they saw opportunities for profitable employment as mercenaries. And in this they were not disappointed; Normans soon were hired by both Lombards and Byzantines. In the ensuing chaos, even Naples found itself under attack. And so c. 1030, to gain help from one prominent Norman, the duke of Naples granted him the fortified town of Aversa, within the territory of Naples. In the ninth century, Naples had been the first to import Arab mercenaries. Now it was the first to give southern Italian land to a Norman.
This was a fateful move. Other Normans began to demand land of their employers as well, or simply to seize segments of Lombard or Byzantine territory. By the end of the 1070s, less than half a century later, the last surviving Lombard principality (Salerno) had fallen to the Normans, who had also conquered Byzantine Apulia and Calabria. Only Naples, ever resilient, still retained (together with Amalfi) some measure of autonomy. But this was not to last much longer. For a time, the Normans were preoccupied by power struggles among themselves and by local rebellions in many parts of southern Italy. In 1130, however, Roger II, by then the unquestioned ruler of both Sicily and mainland southern Italy, secured a papal bull granting him authority over all southern Italian territory—and the wording specifically included the "honor of Naples" (honor Neapolis). Over the next two or three years, Roger was too busy elsewhere to act on this papal authority in relation to the duchy. In 1134, however, Duke Sergius VII found it necessary to swear allegiance to Roger. And when, shortly afterward, Naples dared to side with some rebels, Roger began a siege of the city that lasted nearly two years. By mid-1137, Sergius was again forced to swear allegiance; and this time, as a demonstration of loyalty, he and a Neapolitan force were compelled to join Roger's army, fighting in Apulia. There, Sergius was killed in battle. He was Naples's last duke.
The duchy's territory and the city itself were soon fully integrated into the Norman kingdom of Sicily. It is not entirely clear how the city fared under Norman rule; documentation is sparse. However, one of Roger's sons was named prince of Capua, and he apparently spent considerable time in Naples (now treated as part of the Capuan appanage). He and later Norman overlords engaged in major building projects within the city, to enhance its fortifications and also to create a suitable palace for royal visits. Both the Castel dell'Ovo and the Castel Capuana date from the Norman period. However, while the Normans thus made some use of Naples, it never figured large in their scheme of things; the city of Salerno, their most significant Campanian conquest in the previous century, far surpassed Naples in importance. Even after Naples had been taken, Salerno continued to serve as the Normans' mainland capital.
Those members of Naples's leading families who demonstrated loyalty seem to have been allowed to retain at least some of their property, as feudal fiefs. But other elements of Neapolitan society appear to have suffered. This was clearly true of ecclesiastical Naples; the powers of the archbishop were much reduced by the Normans, and contemporary charters indicate financial hardship for many of the city's countless small religious establishments. Furthermore, the middling class of laymen (merchants, artisans) found their opportunities even more restricted under Norman governance than had been the case in the status-conscious duchy.
Their discontent, and doubtless also discontent on the part of at least some of the elite, apparently led Naples to share in the general urban opposition to Norman rule during the reign of William I, Roger IPs implacable son. Since Naples was never as severely punished for rebellious behavior as some other south Italian cities, we must assume that no dramatic outbreaks took place there. Nonetheless, the existence of strong feelings seems indicated, if only indirectly, by a development in 1190. In that year, Tancred, the last Norman ruler, made a special point of granting privileges, including considerable local autonomy, to Naples. Tancred, whose right to the Norman throne was contested by the German emperor Henry VI. was desperately in need of support. He apparently viewed Naples as especially valuable as a potential ally and believed, correctly, that a major grant of privileges would win him the city's allegiance.
In fact the Neapolitans did fight valiantly on Tancred's behalf, withstanding a fierce attack by a combined land-sea force dispatched by Henry VI. By 1194, however, Tancred was defeated, and Naples under Henry VI was again reduced to playing a minor role within a centralized monarchy.
Naples suffered from the harshness of the Emperor Henry VI and showed little loyalty to the Hohenstaufen. Henry destroyed the walls and abolished the privileges of Tancred. On his death (1196), however, these privileges were revived and once more Naples became, for practical purposes, virtually autonomous. The attempt of Henry's son, Frederick II, to establish a rector there prompted Naples to recognize his rival, Otto of Brunswick, as emperor in 1212; but after Frederick's triumph the city again lost its autonomy. Frederick came there in 1220—1222, when he set up a new constitution, placing the municipal government under the justiciar of the Terra di Lavoro at Capua. The office of the former chief magistrate, the compalazzo, was, however, continued. This officer—first instituted by Roger II after the ending of the duchy, as his representative to administer royal finances and to act as judge in the king's name—had continued to head the administration, theoretically in the king's name but in practice as an executive officer of the commune. Under Frederick, he again became a means through which royal control of the town was exercised. Frederick appointed him through his local representative, the master chamberlain, and gave him a court of fourteen lawyers to assist him.
Frederick took measures to encourage the maritime commerce of Naples; later he further boosted the Neapolitan economy by abolishing tolls on commerce going from one province to another within the Regno. He promoted Naples as a subcapital on the mainland, using the castles, particulary the Castel dell'Ovo, as his mainland treasury, and even founding a university. Naples's new prosperity did not, however, prevent rebel lion—a conspiracy was uncovered in the Regno centered on Naples in 1246 and was cruelly repressed; and on Pier della Vigna's death in 1249, more unrest arose, which turned into a rebellion against Frederick II's sons, Conrad and Manfred, when Frederick died (1250). Naples then passed under the direct lordship of the pope, who authorized it to form a free commune: the first podestà was appointed in 1251. In 1253, however, Conrad came south, and after a long siege he took Naples. Apart from destroying the walls, he was merciful to the city and even confirmed its constitution. But in 1254 he died. Soon afterward, Pope Innocent IV, claiming overlordship of the Regno, came to Naples and confirmed its constitution. In 1256, Manfred reconquered Naples; but he never won its allegiance, and when Charles of Anjou invaded the Regno, Naples offered little resistance.
The Hohenstaufen did not undertake extensive building in Naples. Frederick built a palace, subsequently occupied by Piero della Vigna, and effected minor repairs on the castles, but the main interest of the Hohenstaufen was in Apulia and Sicily.
Politics and society. After Manfred's defeat at Benevento, Naples became the capital of Charles of Anjou's kingdom. In it were established the headquarters of the grand justiciar, the vicar and the captain of the Regno, the financial administration (the grand chamberlain, the treasury, the camera sommaria—i.e., chamber of accounts), and the mint: Palermo became no more than the capital of the island of Sicily. The city on the whole repaid its promotion with loyalty: it showed little support for Conradin; and although there was a rising after the Sicilian Vespers, it was minor.
Charles, coming from France, made his French followers prominent in Naples. From 1266, Naples had a French archbishop, a French justiciar, and many other French officials. French was used in the royal chancery (though Latin still predominated). A French architect, Pierre de Angicourt, was employed on all Charles's castles; early Angevin castle architecture shows much French influence. All newly founded churches were in the Gothic style and show varying degrees of influence from the Ile-de-France. But apart from architecture, the long-term effect of the French was not great; the Neapolitan monzu ("cook") was derived from the French monsieur, and there are some other linguistic borrowings, but surprisingly few.
Charles I died while his heir was in prison. The papal legate, Gerald of Parma, governed Naples for the vicar of the realm, Charles II's twelve-year-old son Charles Martel, until Charles II was freed. The war of the Sicilian Vespers reached the Bay of Naples in 1287 and the area of Gaeta by 1289 but did not touch the city itself. Once freed, Charles II established his court in Naples at the recently completed Castel Nuovo. Of the events that took place there, among the most remarkable was Pope Celestin V's resignation in 1294, while the pope was visiting Charles.
Under Charles II and his heir, Robert the Wise, the presence of the court brought prosperity to Naples. The luxury trade increased along with a thriving arms trade. Most of this trade was handled by foreigners, especially Florentines and Genoese, who benefited from it perhaps more than the Neapolitans; but the industry that it generated and the increased wealth that was brought into the city improved the economic situation for everybody. The population rose to approximately 40,000 in the 1290s and may have reached 60,000 under Robert.
Joanna I's reign saw chaos, mismanagement, and declining prosperity in Naples, as elsewhere in the Regno. These were made worse by an earthquake and flood in 1343, the cataclysm of the black death in 1348, and another earthquake in 1349. There are no precise indications of the mortality in this decade, but the European average of one-third of the population is probably not far out for Naples. Added to these disasters were those arising from brigandage, which became so bad that trade into the city was seriously disrupted and life there became very unsafe. The various political crises of the reign excited mob violence in Naples, particularly in 1346, when Joanna was slow to take action against the supposed murderers of Andrew of Hungary; in 1363, when a feud broke out between two noble factions; and in 1374, when a riot—provoked by famine in the city—broke out against Joanna's government (though not against her personally).
Saint Bridget of Sweden visited Naples during Joanna's reign and vehemently castigated the immorality and luxurious life of Naples. Other writers echoed Bridget's views.
At the end of her reign, Joanna lost the support of Naples: her main adversaries, Pope Urban V and Charles III of Durazzo, overthrew Joanna and her supporters. Charles was able to retain the loyalty of the city when he later quarreled with Urban. It was ill rewarded: when Charles died, Naples was still in a state of disorder.
Constitutional developments. Charles I kept the provincial divisions of Frederick II, so Naples remained a part of the Terra di Lavoro and became again subject to its justiciar. Communal liberty declined rapidly, but some local government remained. The nobles were divided into groups known as tocchi (a term apparently of Greek derivation, originally referring to their meeting places). Because each group was in one platea (piazza or subdivision) of the city, the tocchi were also often called platee. The popolo or non-nobles were likewise divided into platee, which might or might not overlap with the noble platee. Some ten of the platee contained both popoli and nobles; five were exclusively noble, and the rest (fourteen) were popular. Above the platee were the two università (communes) of the nobles and the popolo. These rarely acted together, but each had certain rights and a designated meeting place. Their main importance was for taxation. The annual subvention in the Regno was usually assessed by communes according to an estimate of the number of taxable households in each commune. In Naples, however, the nobles and the popolo were assessed separately, and each università then raised the tax through assessments on each platea. There was also an università dei casali for the outlying villages, but these were taxed as individual communes. The system was inequitable, falling more heavily on the popolo than the nobles. (In 1301, of a tax of 692 untie, 72 came from the five noble platee, 450 from the exclusively popular ones, and the rest from those of mixed composition). It also weighed more heavily on some platee—it could even prompt some people to change their platea of residence.
The magistrate above the università until Charles arrived was the compalazzo who had powers of justice in the city. As more of these powers were assumed under the Angevins by the justiciar of the Terra di Lavoro, the position of the compalazzo declined, though he retained certain fiscal responsibilities, notably fixing the prices of victuals and controlling measures, in consultation with the provincial authorities. He also had special jurisdiction over the university students and the communities of foreign merchants (mostly from northern Italy, except for the Jews), who had their own organizations in specific areas of the city (many in the newly developed suburb near the Castel Nuovo). His office came increasingly to resemble that of the baiuli, the normal executive officers of other cities of the Regno, and by the fourteenth century he was usually simply called the baiulo. Around 1300, a further change in the administration put the control of the economic lite of the city in the hands of six eletti for whom the baiulo became merely an executive. Five of these six were chosen by the noble tocchi. The sixth was chosen from the popolo and represented all twenty-nine divisions of the city, but a process of combining several platee had already reduced these to about sixteen.
Under Robert more changes were made in the structure of government. The number of platee was further reduced, probably to ten. Then, in 1339, the so-called ordinances of peace were issued, whereby the two major noble platee, Capuana and Nido, legitimized their growing power, gaining the right to one-third of the jobs in the city (onerum et honorum). The remaining two-thirds went to the rest of the city, nobles and popolo. At the same time it was specified that popolo meant the popolo minuto (the urban masses including small shopkeepers, journeymen, laborers, etc.). This was an imported distinction borrowed from northern Italy. A memory of former subdivisions remained in the sedili in which these congregated and which replaced the former tocchi. There were three of them—Porto, Montagna, and the sedile del popolo—making, with Nido and Capuana, five in all. The sedili do not survive, but later drawings of them show that they were buildings about ten meters square with open arches on all sides surmounted by a cupola. Their fifteenth-and sixteenth-century successors were richly decorated, as the Angevin originals probably were. Meetings between people from different sedili were forbidden, except in the case of the six eletti. The reforms had indifferent success in quelling unrest in the city, particularly among the nobles.
Under Joanna there was little development in government or administration, except that, for the first time, guilds of artisans were given official recognition in the city's constitution. They may also have been given military functions, though this is unusual and has been disputed.
Angevin building and artistic patronage. Charles of Anjou enlarged and reinforced the Castel dell'Ovo, which he made the royal residence until 1281, when it became predominantly a prison, while the court moved to the Castel Nuovo, begun two years earlier. The Castel Nuovo was essentially in French Gothic style (now somewhat masked by Aragonese accretions) and was more comfortable and commodious than the earlier Neapolitan fortresses. In addition to the Castel Nuovo, Charles undertook several building projects in Naples, also in French Gothic style—notably the Franciscan church of San Lorenzo Maggiore, built on the site of an earlier Romanesque building; and Sant Eligio al Mercato, with a hospital attached.
Of Charles II's public buildings, die most important were probably the duomo (begun in 1294 and completed under Robert); the enlargement of San Domenico and the building of a Dominican church and convent dedicated to Peter Martyr; the church of Santa Maria di Donnaregina; the massive rebuilding of the arsenal; the replacement of the Porta Pisana by a new gate; and the erection of several palaces for members of the royal family and other courtiers. Streets were paved, public fountains were erected, and new woods were planted on the hill of Sant' Elmo. Naples became more international in its artists: notably, the Roman painter Pietro Cavallini was employed on the painting of Santa Maria di Donnaregina, though it is doubtful that the overall scheme was his, as has sometimes been suggested.
Under Robert the Wise, the duomo was completed. The church and convent of the Poor Clares, Santa Chiara, were started around 1310; and a fortress and a Carthusian monastery (San Martino) were begun on the hill of Sant'Elmo. Santa Chiara is basically Gothic but with Islamic and Romanesque features. Santa Chiara shows the growing eclecticism of Neapolitan architecture: it is a hall church with a rectangular choir instead of an apse to the east, designed as a semi-independent church for the Poor Clares; and a double-arched cloister on the Sienese model. It became the accepted burial place of the Angevins. A second hospital, the Annunziata, was founded in 1318. Otherwise, Robert's building was not notable. His patronage of the arts, however, was far in advance of that of his predecessors (though by comparison with northern contemporaries Robert's reputation in this respect seems inflated). Still, if Naples itself produced few first-class artists and literati (though there were several whose abilities were not to be despised), some of the greatest names in both categories worked there. Simone Martini produced, in addition to his famous portrait of Saint Louis of Toulouse, a Christ Blessing for Santa Chiara and probably other works no longer extant. Giotto was in Naples in 1328—1332: none of his paintings from that time survive, but there are references to several in contemporary writings. On the literary side, Petrarch is perhaps the best-known visitor—he was "examined" by Robert (whom alone Petrarch agreed to accept as judge) for the laureate later conferred on him in Rome (8 April 1341). Boccaccio also came, though his sojourn under the next monarch, Joanna, is perhaps better known. In addition to his patronage, Robert also started a library (dispersed again under his daughter), one of the essentials for the budding humanist courts of the fourteenth century.
Joanna's principal ecclesiastical foundation was Santa Maria dell'Incoronata, a curious church with two unequal naves terminating in apses. Sant'Antonio abbate, with a hospital adjoining it for the care for those with ergotism (burning fever), was also founded in her reign. Otherwise, Boccaccio briefly enjoyed her patronage, but the upheavals of her reign left little scope for artistic developments.
The university. In 1224, Frederick II had founded the university—the first in Europe to be deliberately established with a foundation charter. It included all faculties, but theology was taught only by the friars, and when the Dominicans left Naples in 1234 (because of Frederick's dispute with the pope), the university declined. Under Conrad, it was moved to Salerno, where there was already a medical school, but it was almost moribund when Manfred returned it to Naples a year later. It revived somewhat under Charles I—though the revival was limited to the faculty of law (theology and arts were taught by religious bodies but were not highly valued; medicine was taught at Salerno). It was subject to royal authority in all matters. The students were under the authority of the royal chancellor and the jurisdiction of a specially appointed royal justice. Degrees were granted in the king's name after an examination by the doctors that took place in the royal court. The degree of control may perhaps explain why Naples produced no prominent scholars.
There is no adequate history of the city or duchy of Naples in English, but the references listed below include histories in Italian that have good bibliographies. Although the royal archives of Naples were destroyed during World War II, with a consequent loss of most medieval records, registers have, to some degree, been reconstituted by scholars such as Riccardo Filangieri and J. Mazzoleni.
See also Amalfi; Arabs in Italy; Aversa; Belisarius; Benevento; Black Death; Boccaccio, Giovanni; Byzantine Empire; Celestine V, Pope; Charles I of Anjou; Charles II of Anjou; Con radin; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Gothic Wars; Henry VI Hohenstaufen; Joanna I of Naples; John VIII, Pope; Lombards; Louis II, Emperor; Manfred; Martini, Simone; Monte Cassino Monastery; Normans; Otto I; Otto III; Petrarca, Francesco; Pier de la Vigna; Ravenna; Robert of Anjou; Roger II; Salerno; Sicilian Vespers; Tancred of Lecce and Roger III, Kings of Sicily
BARBARA M. KREUTZ AND CAROLA M. SMALL
Capasso, Bartolommeo. Monumenta ad Neapolitani Ducatus Historiam Pertinentia, 2 vols, (in 3). Naples: Giannini, 1881-1892.
Cilento, Nicola. Civiltà Napoletana del Medioevo. Naples: Ediztioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1969. (For culture of the duchy.)
Cronaca di Parthenope, ed. L. Astrino, 1526. (Originally 1382; several authors. Reprinted as "Chroniche della inclita Citta di Napoli." In Raccolta di varii libri overo, Opvscoli d'historie del regno di Napoli di varii et approbati avtori: Che con difficoltà si trouauano. . . . Naples: Carlo Porsile, 1680.)
De Seta, Cesare. Storia della città di Napoli: Dalle origini td Settecento. Rorne-Bari: Laterza, 1973.
Doria, Gino. Storia di una capitale: Napoli dalle origini al 1860. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1958.
Gleijeses, Vittorio. Storia di Napoli: Dalle origini ai nostri giorni. Naples: Societa Editrice Napoletana, 1974. (Reissued in 3 vols., 1981; in 1 vol., 1987.)
Rinaldis, Aldo de. Naples Angevine. Paris: Nilsson, 1929.
Storia di Napoli, ed. Ernesto Pontieri, 8 vols, (in 12). Naples: Societa Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1967-1974. (For the culture of the duchy, see sections by Nicola Cilento in Vol. 2, 2. For chronicles dealing with Naples, see Vol. 3, p. 325.)
Villani, Giovanni, and Matteo Villani. Cronica, 13 vols., ed. Ignazio Moutier. Florence: Magheri, 1823-1826.
The Florentine painter Nardo di Cione (died c. 1336), with his brothers Andrea (called Orcagna) and Jacopo, dominated painting in Florence in the decades following the black death of 1348. Nardo's date of birth is not known. His name appears for the first time in 1346-1348 in a list of members of the guild of doctors and apothecaries, the guild to which the painters belonged. By then his reputation was already established, for c. 1348, when the authorities of Pistoia asked the Florentines for the names of their best painters to execute the high altarpiece for Pistoia's church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Nardo was recommended along with Orcagna. At this time the brothers were living in the parish of San Michele Visdomini and may have shared a workshop. In the 1350s and the first half of the 1360s Nardo lived in the center of Florence, but not always in the same parish as Orcagna, although the two of them may have continued to work together. In 1356 Nardo signed a panel of the Madonna which hung in the offices of the Gabella dei Contratti but which no longer survives. And in 1363 he was paid for painting "the vault and other things" in the oratory of the confraternity of the Bigallo; only fragments of this work remain. These are the only two works to which his name can positively be attached. Nardo made his will in 1365, and by May 1366 he had died. Apart from a bequest to the Bigallo, he left his money and possessions to be divided equally among his three brothers—Andrea, Jacopo, and Matteo. Since no wife or children are mentioned, Nardo was probably a bachelor. These few facts are all we have for a working life that can be documented over some twenty years. Although most of Nardo's painting seems to have been for locations in Florence, he may also have worked elsewhere. At an unknown date the Pistoian painter Bartolommeo Cristiani entered into an agreement whereby whenever he worked outside Florence, Nardo would help him. In an altarpiece now in Prague the presence of Saint Ranieri, a patron saint of Pisa, suggests that Nardo may have painted it for a church in that town.
Nardo is credited with about a dozen surviving works comprising frescoes, altarpieces, and small-scale devotional panels. In reconstructing an oeuvre for him, Offner (1960) relied on stylistic evidence provided by the frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella (Florence), which Ghiberti, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, ascribed to Nardo. Here, on three walls, Nardo represented the Last Judgment with a scene of heaven and a hell in which the imagery is derived from Dante's description in the Inferno. The frescoes are probably contemporary with the altarpiece in the same chapel that Orcagna painted between 1354 and 1357. The decoration of the Strozzi Chapel exemplifies the Florentine taste in art after mid-century, a taste that departed in some ways from the more naturalistic style pioneered by Giotto. Spatial illusionism is rejected in favor of more abstract two-dimensional effects. The saints of Nardo's Paradise, for example, are stacked up tier on tier, like, as one writer said, a football crowd. Medieval conventions of scale, in which a figure's place in the hierarchy of the holy is indicated by his size, are strictly followed. God's divinity and the otherworldly piety of the saints tend to be emphasized at the expense of their humanity. The holy figures appear self-absorbed, preserving their distance from each other and from the spectator. Some of these characteristics may be seen in Nardo's large-scale panel of the Virgin and saints belonging to the New York Historical Society and his altarpiece with three saints in the National Gallery, London.
This reversion to what have been seen as archaizing modes of representation that draw on late thirteenth-century formulas has been explained in terms of the unsophisticated and conservative taste of a new bourgeois class in Florentine society (Antal 1948) and the psychological effects of the black death (Meiss 1951). However, Nardo's art evinces less obviously than Orcagna's the somber, pessimistic mood that Meiss identified in the art of Florence and Siena after 1348. Nardo's style is more lyrical and less austere than that of his brother; his color combinations are more harmonious, and the facial expressions of his saints are less intimidatingly severe. His stylistic origins lie in the decorative taste of Florentine painters such as Bernardo Daddi and the Sienese school as exemplified in the sumptuous work of Simone Martini. Bright enamel colors are juxtaposed with opulent brocades and patterned floors, as in the polyptych in Prague and the two panels with saints in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Nardo's Madonnas in Prague, Washington, and Minneapolis have a distinctive beauty that led Offner to describe him as "the most romantic artist of his age." The delicate sfumato modeling of pale flesh tones enlivened with rose-pink on the cheeks and lips, and of blond hair draped with diaphanous veils, is achieved by a patient application of successive layers of semitransparent glazes. The consummate care that Nardo lavished on his paint-ings—in the preparation of the panel, the detailed underdrawing, the meticulous application of paint and the painstaking execution of sgraffito and gilded punchwork—make him possibly the finest craftsman among Trecento painters. As a result, his works are remarkably well-preserved.
Nardo's reputation has fared less well. History has been unfair to Nardo. He has suffered from standing in the shadow of his more famous brother, Orcagna. Vasari must share some of the responsibility for this: he got the artist's name wrong (calling him Bernardo), relegated Nardo to the role of assistant in Orcagna's workshop, and credited to Nardo inferior works that were actually by others. Even now, despite Offner's study, Nardo has yet to receive the attention that is his due.
See also Florence; Orcagna, Andrea di Cione
BRENDAN CASSIDY
Antal, Frederick. Florentine Painting and Its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo de'Medici's Advent to Power—XIV and Early XV Centuries. London: K. Paul, 1948.
Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951.
Offner, Richard. A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, Section 4, Vol. 2, Nardo di Cione. New York: College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1960.
Pitts, Frances Lee. "Nardo di Cione and the Strozzi Chapel Frescoes: Iconographic Problems in Mid-Trecento Florentine Painting." Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1982.
The eunuch Narses (c. 480—c. 575) was of Persarmenian origin. He is first encountered, in his mid-forties, as a bodyguard commander and trusted official early in the regime of Emperor Justinian. After playing a major role in the defeat of the Nika riots in 533, Narses seems to have developed military ambitions.
In 538 he was sent to Italy to reinforce an expedition of the great general Belisarius against the Ostrogoths; but their personalities clashed, and Narses identified himself with dissident commanders whose squabbles disrupted Belisarius's progress, Narses's actions were held to be responsible for the loss of besieged Milan to the Goths, and for the ensuing massacres and destruction there. Eventually Justinian recalled Narses, leaving the field of action clear for Belisarius.
But Narses continued to enjoy the emperor's trust and respect, achieving the high court rank of grand chamberlain. Quiet and unprepossessing; not highly educated, but reportedly very bright; quick at grasping situations; remarkably courageous; and capable of inspiring great loyalty, Narses was not given his great opportunity until he had reached an advanced age. After Belisarius's final failure and recall, Justinian was persuaded to make one last effort, choosing as commander this eunuch then in his mid-seventies.
Narses was able to draw on such resources as Belisarius never had, and he proceeded energetically through 551 to gather an army in the Balkans, mainly of Lombards and other barbarian peoples. In early 552 Narses marched his army around the Adriatic headland into Italy to confront the Gothic king Totila at Busta Gailorum or Teginae (present-day Gualdo Tadino) in the Umbrian Apennines along Via Flaminia. Totila was utterly defeated and died in the aftermath of the battle. Narses's forces began claiming possession of key points through Italy, taking Rome. The remaining Goths rallied and, choosing the general Teias as their king, faced Narses again at the end of 552 below Mons Lactarius (Monte Lattario), on the slopes near Mount Vesuvius. Once more, Narses destroyed their army, their king, and much of their remaining manpower; acceding to the request of the pitiful Ostrogothic remnant, he allowed the survivors to go in peace, out of Italy and into oblivion.
In 554, at Capua, Narses wiped out an invading army of Franks and Alamanians who had hoped to profit from the turmoil. The taking of Verona in 561 extinguished the last pocket of Gothic resistance and completed Justinian's conquest of Italy. In 555, meanwhile, Narses arranged a public ceremony in Rome to establish the credibility of the new pope, Pelagius I. Settling in the imperial capital at Ravenna as resident governor, Narses undertook to restore order in the battered peninsula. Justinian's death in 565 brought to the throne Emperor Justin II and his consort Sophia who, hostile to the venerable Narses, ordered his recall. Later traditions have it that, in revenge, Narses was responsible for inviting the Lombards to begin their invasion of Italy, but such charges are incompatible with his apparent integrity and humane character. Though some accounts place his death in Rome, he apparently returned to retirement in Constantinople, dying there c. 575, in his mid-nineties. Stories are told that his hoarded wealth was hidden and then discovered after Narses's death by the avaricious emperor.
See also Belisarius; Frankish Kingdom; Justinian I; Lombards; Milan; Ostrogoths; Ravenna; Rome; Teginae, Battle of; Totila
JOHN W. BARKER
Bury, J. B, A History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death of Justinian (A.D. 395-565), 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1923. (Reprint, New York: Dover, 1958.)
Hodgkin, Thomas. Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. 4, The Imperial Restoration, 535—553; Vol. 5, The Lombard Invasion, 553-600. Oxford: Clarendon, 1889. (Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.)
Procopius of Caesarea. History of the Wars: Gothic Wars, trans. H. B. Dewing. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1928. (With reprints.)
A modern dictionary defines navigation as "the science or art of conducting ships from one place to another, using instruments to determine a ship's course, its position at a given time, the distance passed, etc." Before the Middle Ages, navigation could hardly be described in this way. In one sense, of course, seafarers had always navigated, in that they set out with a specific destination in mind and used all available skills to get there; only the legendary Saint Brendan put to sea with no plan, content to let the currents and winds determine his landfall. What we would consider instruments, however, did not play a role.
In the west, the first steps in the adoption of navigational instruments are particularly associated with Italy and its maritime republics. Some elements may have owed something to external influence, perhaps even from well beyond the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, all surviving sources point to Italy as the core region in which all the disparate components came together.
The first and most significant of these instruments was the maritime compass. Its evolution is somewhat controversial. The magnetic properties of one type of iron had been recognized in the Hellenistic era (and perhaps even earlier), but we do not know when or where men first discovered that a needle-like pointer rubbed against a chunk of magnetite, and then allowed to rotate freely, would invariably point north. Some scholars have placed this discovery in northern Europe, noting that an Englishman of the late twelfth century, Alexander Neckham, first reported sailors using a treated needle floating in a bowl of water. Yet Neckham is thought to have made at least one trip to Italy, and over the next fifty years all subsequent references to this primitive form of the compass suggest a Mediterranean context. For example, Guyot de Provins, who made such a reference around 1205, had gone to the Holy Land during the Third Crusade; and an Arab narrative from Cairo describes just such a device in use on a voyage from Syria to Alexandria in the 1240s. The references in Guy de Provins and the Arab narrative do not, of course, point specifically to Italy. For that matter, experts on China note that somewhat similar magnetized indicators were described there well before any western mentions; they therefore place this first stage in China, postulating some form of transmission to the west. However, this debate seems almost irrelevant, for neither a needle-in-a-straw floating in a bowl nor the somewhat similar Chinese gadgets would have enabled mariners to "navigate" in anything even remotely approaching the modern sense. Progress toward that capability demanded some further refinement, a genuine leap forward. And for that, Italy apparently does deserve credit.
Lane (1963) hypothesized that the last quarter of the thirteenth century was the decisive period in the development of a proper, practicable compass. Around 1280, the Italian maritime republics began to dispatch merchant ships overseas at all times of the year; winter, with its typically overcast days and starless nights, was no longer a closed season. Lane assumed that this change would not have been possible had there not been, by then, some improved sort of directional device: presumably the needle pivoted dry, with its pivot built into a little box. (And in fact it is notable that in the fourteenth century a common shorthand term for the compass was pyx or pyxis, a term otherwise used for the little round box in which the communion host was carried.) Lane further suggested that by 1300, the compass card or wind rose had become a standard component of these self-contained instruments. Moreover, Lane was prepared to credit Amalfi, in southern Italy, for these ultimate refinements, since later centuries would associate Amalfi with the "invention" of the compass. In granting Amalfi a key role in relation to the compass, Lane was in general agreement with Motzo (1947), and with Taylor (1956), whose work on navigational history still stands as the most valuable survey of this complex story. Taylor, however, like Motzo, put Amalfi's contribution much earlier, associating Amalfitan sailors with early use of the needle-in-a-bowl.
Whatever the truth in relation to the compass and Amalfi, Italy unquestionably figures in the other great thirteenth-century advance. This was the development of the portolan chart, a totally new approach to mapmaking. Clearly designed for nautical use, portolan charts were surprisingly close to modern maps both in concept and in the accuracy of their coastal outlines. They were large, were drawn in black and colored ink on whole lambskin or calfskin, and typically showed the Mediterranean region and the Black Sea (later, even England) with all harbors and islands, as well as coastal features such as prominent headlands, meticulously indicated. Such hazards as rocks or shoal waters were also sometimes marked.
Portolan charts are sometimes viewed as simply the pictorial equivalent of the narrative navigational guides knows as portolans, which also began to proliferate in Italy from the latter thirteenth century onward. The earliest surviving example of these portolan guides is the somewhat confusingly named Compasso da navigare, now dated to c. 1250 and probably Pisan; it directed the mariner around the Mediterranean step by step, from port to port, noting sailing distances from one place to the next, as well as landmarks and hazards along the way. Yet there is in fact no demonstrable link between the portolan guides and the portolan charts. The guides represented a continuation of a Hellenistic and Roman tradition: the dissemination of written itineraries, often incorporating useful local information in addition to suggested routings. (Medieval portolans would also, in time, evolve into broad-ranging handbooks for maritime ventures.) Portolan charts, on the other hand, were something new, and conceptually very different. They made it possible to see at a glance the geographical relationships within (for example) the entire Mediterranean—a vital feature should circumstances dictate deviations from the standard routes. These charts represented a true advance over the past and presaged a totally new approach to seafaring.
The earliest surviving portolan chart is apparently the Carte Pisane, thought to be late thirteenth-century and also thought, despite its name, to have been produced in Genoa. The next such charts (some of them incorporated into portable atlases) were unquestionably made by a Genoese, Pietro Vesconte, mostly while he was in the service of Venice.
The first Vesconte chart is dated 1311, and ( he earlier dating of the Carte Pisane is challenged by some scholars. Nonetheless, it is generally accepted that something resembling these examples was indeed available by the latter thirteenth century, for a passenger described a sea chart in use in 1270 on a Genoese ship carrying the King Louis IX to North Africa. Inevitably, then, there has been much debate as to whether the refining of the compass was directly connected to the development of portolan charts. Certainly, one distinctive feature of these charts is the web of intersecting "wheels" positioned over the water areas, with the "spokes" of the wheels suggesting rhumb lines, and the whole very like an overall pattern of compass roses. It is notable, too, that each "wheel" has sixteen of these "spokes," just as the early compasses used sixteen winds as surrogates for directions or compass points. Yet one should not make too much of this. In Italy, one can track back to Etruscan usage a sixteen-point division of the horizon (whereas in the Greek world a twelve-point division seemed standard). Thus this element of similarity may merely reflect a long-standing regional tradition.
In any case, it would surely be a mistake to assume that portolan charts were newly "invented," as adjuncts to the compass. It is more likely that both of these navigational aids had evolved slowly, and independently, over a long period of time. The needle-in-a-bowl-of-water may have come about as an adaptation of an ancient magic trick or some quasi-religious rite. And portolan charts surely also had more primitive prototypes, although none has survived. The most one can safely say is that by the latter thirteenth century, given the competitive climate in the Mediterranean, any enhancement of navigation would doubtless have seemed highly desirable to shipowners. The dramatic increase in maritime commerce undoubtedly put experienced mariners at a premium. For those less experienced (or as Lane proposed, for those sailing in winter), the possibility ol some form of help must have had great appeal. This, we must assume, provided the stimulus for the refining of both the compass and the sea chart.
Of course, both the compass and file portolan chart were still relatively crude instruments. At least to some degree they were complementary, and by the latter fourteenth century we often find both listed in various records as part of a ship's equipment. Portolan charts, however, while a vast improvement over the impressionistic world maps of earlier days, were still in essence freehand drawings, with their information about coastal outlines presumably patched together from mariners' reports. (It is therefore remarkable that they came so close to genuine cartographic accuracy.) But they did not indicate latitude, although the concept was recognized and latitude could have been at least roughly calculated. Moreover, a method for determining longitude was still many centuries away; and not until the time of Mercator, in the sixteenth century, would there come to be a satisfactory way of dealing with the sphericity of the globe. Finally, in addition, the "north" indicated by early compasses was only approximately north. All in all, truly precise navigation by means of instruments was still a long way in the future.
Perhaps for this reason, anecdotal evidence suggests that these new devices were initially of less interest to the generality of sailors than to poets and intellectuals. The directional aspect of the compass needle appealed to Italian poets such as Guido Guinizzelli and, notably, Dante, And as early as the end of the thirteenth century Ramon Llull, an extraordinary Catalan philosopher-scientist, described an elaborate system of navigation involving compass and chart and mathematical tables. But Llull's approach was apparently not actually used at sea until two centuries later. Meanwhile, in the real world, so to speak, the lawyer poet Francesco da Barberino, writing c. 1315, advised those traveling by sea to carry their own pyx or proper compass, and he describes a ship's navigator as using only the old needle-ina-bowl.
All together, then, while it is important to note the period in which the self-contained compass and the portolan chart first became available, it is equally important not to overestimate the immediacy of their impact on routine seafaring. Lane was clearly correct in calling the late thirteenth century a turning point; plainly, however, not everyone turned instantly. Some of the surviving portolan charts, especially some known to be Italian in provenance, show clear signs of having been used, presumably at sea. But others (including some of the splendid products of Catalan-Majorcan cartographers) were surely designed for affluent armchair sailors. Real sailors are notoriously slow to change their ways; one need only think of Columbus's minimal use of the instruments available in his day. In the late thirteenth century and the fourteenth, entrepreneurial shipowners of Genoa and Venice no doubt pressed compasses and charts on their ships' navigators. But we may suspect that for some time these new aids were in fact used only sporadically—and then not for navigation in the modern sense but only when mariners were blown off course and were therefore desperate for any sort of assistance. Pryor (1988) has indicated how standardized most routes were. When sailing familiar routes, most mariners doubtless still relied mainly on their own knowledge and experience, not on these new toys. The one destination that may have provided an exception was England. It is noteworthy that, in the 1320s, the Vesconte charts grew ever more exact in their depictions of that region, already of interest to Genoa in the late thirteenth century and rapidly becoming of interest to Venice, but surely unfamiliar territory for most Mediterranean seamen.
Many of the portolan charts are truly beautiful, especially some of those done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for rich patrons. Fanciful animals and people were sometimes depicted on the more remote landmasses, and colorful symbols or flags often marked key ports. These handsome versions of portolan charts tell us that men in positions of power were beginning to find seafaring romantic and interesting. And this may in fact have been one of the most important contributions of the medieval navigational advances; both the compass and the chart obviously captured the imagination even of many who had no direct involvement with the sea. It apparently became fashionable to own elegant versions of such "instruments," just as exploration would now begin to become fashionable.
There was also one other effect. Until quite late in the medieval period, science and technology advanced on essentially separate tracks. However, as the example of Ramon Llull indicates, the mariner's compass and the chart attracted the attention of science-minded philosophers. The intellectual challenge that navigation presented would increasingly draw theoreticians to address practical problems. This trend would not really bear fruit until well into the fifteenth century, when Portugal, not Italy, exemplified maritime innovation. (Only then, for example, do we find the quadrant, a simplified version of the Arab astrolabe, beginning to be used at sea.) Nonetheless, the compass and the portolan chart had marked the start of this slow march toward instrumentation. By the fifteenth century, both were widely accepted, and the making of portolan charts was spreading beyond the Mediterranean. But Italy's contributions had not been forgotten. For a long time, despite the accomplishments of the Portuguese, Italian navigators retain an enviable reputation for maritime skill and knowledge.
See also Geography and Cartography
BARBARA M. KREUTZ
Campbell, Tony. "Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500." In The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, Vol. 1. Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 371-463.
Kreutz, Barbara M. "Mediterranean Contributions to the Medieval Mariner's Compass." Technology and Culture, 14, 1973, pp. 367-383.
Lane, Frederic C. "The Economic Meaning of the Invention of the Compass." American Historical Review, 68, 1963, pp. 605-617. (Reprinted in Venice and History. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.)
Mollat du Jourdin, Michel, and Monique de La Roncière. Sea Charts of the Early Explorers. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984.
Motzo, Bacchisio R., ed. Il compasso da navigare: Opera italiana della metà del secolo XIII. Cagliari: Università di Cagliari, 1947.
Pryor, John H. Geography, Technology, atid. War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. (See especially ch. 3, "Navigation: The Routes and Their Implications.")
Taylor, Eva G. R. The Haven-Finding Art. London: Hollis and Carter, 1956. (Reprint, 1958.)
What little we know of the life of Francesco Nelli (Francesco di Nello Rinucci, d. 1363) has been transmitted through his correspondence with Petrarch, which is preserved in Paris (Bibliotheque Nationale, MS Lat. 8631.) Nelli wrote at least forty-five letters to Petrarch, thirty of which are still extant—the largest group of letters to Petrarch from any one correspondent. Nelli and Petrarch met in 1350, when Petrarch passed a few days in Florence on his way to Rome, and then again on his return. Boccaccio had invited Petrarch (the poet laureate) to Florence and assembled a group of like-minded admirers, including Nelli, to meet him. It seems probable that these few days in Florence were the only time when Petrarch and Nelli met face to face; yet this was enough time for them to form a close friendship, which would continue until Nelli's death. At the time of Petrarch's first letter to Nelli (6 April 1351; Lettere disperse, 29), Nelli was the prior of the Chiesa dei Santi Apostoli in Florence, and Petrarch often praised him for his piety—e.g., Tu pietate prior, tu religione praestantior, et familiaror Deo (Lettere disperse, 20). Nelli was a Florentine by birth and, as Petrarch noted, had not traveled far beyond his city: semper sedes, nunquam patrie limen transis (Lettere disperse, 56). From the letters, we learn that Nelli was a man of medium height and distinguished bearing (Familiarum rerum libri epistole, 20.7), slightly younger than Petrarch himself (Rerum senilium libri, 22.2). The correspondence reveals Nelli's passion for classical learning: he sought out texts for Petrarch, collated and edited manuscripts, and read avidly. Nothing remains of Nelli's own writings apart from the letters; he may have written poetry but seems to have preferred prose composition. In reference to Nelli's status as a priest and a poet, Petrarch awarded him the name Simonide in their correspondence; Boccaccio also uses this name in his Epistola a Nelli. Nelli was also a close confidant of Petrarch in political matters and was one of the recipients of Petrarch's Epistolae sine nomine, which criticized the papal curia at Avignon. Nelli had long had links to the Acciaiuoli family, and in 1361 he began working for Niccolo Acciaiuoli, the grand seneschal of the kingdom of Naples. However, the frenetic pace of his diplomatic activity weakened Nelli, and he fell ill and died of the plague in the summer 1363. Petrarch's sorrow at his friend's death was expressed in a letter to Boccaccio (Rerum senilium libri, 3.2).
See also Acciaiuoli, Niccola; Boccaccio, Giovanni; Petrarca, Francesco
GUYDA ARMSTRONG
Cochin, Henry. Un ami de Pétrarque: Lettres de Francesco Nelli a Pétrarque. Paris: Champion, 1892.
Though much of the work done during the period of middle Platonism (first century B.C. through the second century after Christ) has perished, its general tendencies were taken up by Neoplatonism, the final stage in the ancient reappropriation of Plato. Neoplatonism begins with Plotinus (205-269 or 270), who was probably born in Egypt and came to Rome after studying with Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. Plotinus's writings, which reflect live lectures and discussions, were edited by his student Porphyry in sets of nine treatises (Enneads) arranged in philosophical order beginning from those which deal with physical matters and ending with the supreme "one."
In Plotinus the earlier middle Platonic schemes of reality appear as a three-level hierarchy. At the top is the "one" or "good," absolute unity and simplicity so utterly self-contained as to be beyond any relationship and therefore beyond direct knowledge as well as beyond being. Since the "one" does not exist as other entities do, it can be spoken of only indirectly, often in terms of a mystical encounter, and Plotinus is a major source of later negative theology in the west. As the ultimate origin of everything, the "one" can be likened to the sun emitting light or to a fountain pouring out water in a process of emanation that accounts for what does actually exist. Since the "one" is beyond time, the material world, which is its last product, has neither beginning nor end in time, though it does exist temporally.
The initial product of emanation is the second great reality (hypostasis), mind or being, fusing what is with what thinks. Because mind both contains and is its own thought, subject and object coincide in it. Plotinus thus places Plato's perfect forms inside mind, which is accordingly omniscient and enjoys timeless contemplation of their perfect reality. This supreme mind lies beyond the ordinary discursive, temporal consciousness of our minds, and Plotinus can describe its state of intuitive knowledge in eloquent religious terms. Platonism in general turns on the relationship between the one and the many, and emanation, too, is a process of emergent multiplicity. All forms united in mind but without loss of identity constitute a one-in-many.
The next stage is the third major hypostasis, soul. Here multiplicity increases to form a many-in-one in which time first appears. The farthest extent of emanation at this psychic level comes at the point where reality fades into nonbeing, i.e., matter. For matter simply is absence of form, characterized as total darkness and insubstantiality; being negative, it is not itself a hypostasis, though it does paradoxically correspond to the "one" in that both are outside existence and beyond knowledge, the "one" because it is more than what actually is, matter because it is less. Matter is the raw stuff for soul's temporal and spatial activity, by which it is transformed into the highly complex material universe composed of bodies, i.e., matter and the forms brought into it from mind through soul. This is the domain of nature directed by a single great world soul while including also numerous individual souls linked to lesser bodies within the universe.
A salient characteristic of emanation is overlap between stages. Since mind is a projection of the "one," it exists only through a connection back to its source; by the same token, it is the source from which soul, in turn, comes and toward which it strives. As a result, a line of force—the great chain of being—runs from and back to the "one." Because the "one" is also the good, reality is inseparable from value, and so an objective guarantee for ethics is ensured. Furthermore, the immense vitality of the physical universe as a whole is an expression of two opposed yet complementary drives in soul. In so far as descent toward matter involves deterioration, emanation is a fall, and soul's longing ("love") to return to its origin explains the Neoplatonists' frequently hostile attitude toward body as a source of moral evil as well as their ideal of retreat into the intellectual self. The inner, real world is nonmaterial; hence the relative unimportance of politics in Neoplatonism. At the same time, against the Gnostics (whom he explicitly attacks), Plotinus also views emanation as natural in that it gives soul an opportunity to display its capacities by creating the universe in all its glory.
Porphyry (232 or 233-c. 305), Plotinus's most important student, was a Syrian from Tyre famous for the vast range of his learning. He spent some years with Plotinus in Rome, subsequently lived in Sicily, and returned after his teacher's death to edit the Enneads. Porphyry's own extensive publications include a book against the Christians, who were now beginning to appear more dangerous. So far as Neoplatonism itself is concerned, Porphyry advanced a version of Platonism substantially that of Plotinus, though with special attention to the role of Aristotelian logic. At their overlapping points of contact, Plotinus's hypostases tended to be indistinguishable—the highest phase of soul, for example, being virtually identical with mind. Porphyry emphasized this implication of the system; and, especially in his treatment of soul's relation to mind, he ran the separate stages of emanation together in such a way as to reduce lower levels to mere appearances of the ultimate source. The practical consequence in ethics was further deprecation of immediate empirical reality. A letter Porphyry wrote to Marcella, whom he had married late in life, illustrates the tendency to ascetic detachment from everyday concerns with the material world and retreat into an inner spiritual life.
With Iamblichus (c. 250-325), another Syrian, a shift toward religious forms becomes intrusive, perhaps in part owing to the ever-growing threat posed by Christianity. At any rate, interest in tapping forces beyond the material world led to an incorporation of current occult practices and their rationalization under the label of theurgy. Greek oracles had already been used for similar purposes by Porphyry; and traditional gods, too, were now given places in the philosophic system by identifying them with the rapidly proliferating planes of emanation discovered by Iamblichus and his successors. The theoretical justification of magic which took its power from Neoplatonic metaphysics remained influential into the Renaissance and beyond. Iamblichus argued his position on this score most fully in On the Mysteries. To avoid deterministic implications of the material sympathy binding the universe together, he explained occult influences in terms of a nonspatial, nonmaterial reality (one, mind, soul) undergirding the physical world. In this reality everything is present to everything else, and so by exploiting its dimensionless affinities the philosopher could indeed perform "supernatural" operations. Owing to this efficacy, Iamblichus concluded that occult religious disciplines are superior to philosophic knowledge for attaining contact with divine reality. Since he had abandoned Plotinus's and Porphyry's doctrine that an aspect of individual souls never descends from the higher realm, something more than purely rational means to achieve union with the gods seemed necessary. To this side of Iamblichus's thought belongs also a commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, along with much research on Pythagoras.
lamblichus also made substantial technical contributions to Neoplatonism. He drew a cleaner distinction within mind between its objective, intelligible (noeton) facet answering to being; and its subjective, intellective (noeron) facet answering to thought. The former is prior to the latter, and so additional levels are introduced into the chain of reality. He further refined the process through which emanation itself occurs by distinguishing unparticipated, participated, and participating phases. The first is the highest, most unified aspect of any entity taken by itself; the second is its capacity to be a whole immanent in lower entities; the third is that immanence, making whatever participates in it to be what is. The triadic pattern, which was to be carried much further by Iamblichus's successors, had the effect of linking levels firmly together while at the same time increasing the complexity of the system. Iamblichus's scheme thus in general counteracts the tendency exemplified by Porphyry to telescope the hypostases.
The final phase of Neoplatonism came with the flowering of the school in Athens during the fifth century, when its scholastic side also reached a climax under Proclus (410 or 412—485), an immensely studious and prolific man totally devoted to a philosophy that had now become as much religious as speculative. Proclus saw his own work as an exposition of the perennial theology hidden in Plato, who in turn had derived it from Pythagoreans and Orphics. Proclus wrote hymns and engaged in religious discipline while producing commentaries of vast scope on Plato's Republic, Timaeus, Parmenides, and other dialogues, which took on the character of inspired sacred texts. In The Elements of Theology he reduced Neoplatonism to a set of crisp quasi-mathematical interlocking propositions, whereas in the Platonic Theology it is elaborated in utmost detail.
Proclus's system is an exceedingly complex pattern of reified relationships organized in triadic groups. At the top again is the "one"; then comes the dyad ("rwoness"), a principle of multiplicity followed by henads ("ones") representing the one at lower levels where it enters into relationships. Next is intelligible reality (mind) subdivided (following lamblichus) into intelligible, intelligible-intellective, and intellective planes, and finally the material world. To this are added various chains of gods, angels, daemons, and heroes along with different levels of soul beyond and within the universe. The countless junctures along the chains are formed by triadic links which multiply in geometric progression as emanation moves away from the one. Emanation itself obeys a fundamental three-phase law of remaining-proceeding-reverting. For Proclus philosophic thought and religious experience—often theurgic in nature—are finally identical with this cycle.
When the schools were closed in the sixth century by Justinian, Damascius—the last head—went to the Persian court for a time. With the triumph of Christianity the transformation of Neoplatonic thought into theology reached its completion. A crucial figure in the transition was the enigmatic Pseudo-Dionysius, an unknown Christian thinker (c. 500) remarkably at ease with Proclan ideas. The notion of visible, material symbols serving as means for reaching higher reality through theurgy was readily applicable to the sacramental, liturgical life of the church; and the triadic system of remaining-proceeding-reverting seemed to fit easily into a trinitarian scheme. Against the background of these two principles Pseudo-Dionysius worked out highly nuanced stages leading from what can be said about God on up to mystic union with him beyond knowledge and beyond either being or nonbeing.
The Platonism inherited by the Christian west was largely Neoplatonic. Its influence was strongest during the initial phase of medieval philosophy and receded only to a degree even later during the Aristotelian period. The tradition followed two principal routes: on the one side, Platonically colored theology of Christians such as Origen, the Cappadocians, or Augustine; on the other, writers, Christian or not, who preserved more exclusively pagan material (Victorinus, fourth century; Boethius, c. 480-525; Chalcidius and Macrobius, c. 400). Pseudo-Dionysius could be said to belong to both groups. The first major use of Neoplatonism in medieval thought was made by Eriugena in connection with the Carolingian revival during the ninth century. Borrowing directly from Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he had translated into Latin, Eriugena elaborated the distinction between positive and negative theology in light of the key concept of procession and reversion, though not without some tendency toward monism or pantheism and some confusion between the biblical notion of free creation and automatic procession of divine substance. In the eleventh century, Anselm's ontological argument from grades of reality that necessarily entail and culminate in God had a generally Platonic structure; in the next century, Platonism was again of special importance for the so-called school of Chartres. In the fourteenth century, a more distinctively Neoplatonic relationship between the finite and the infinite, the immanent and the transcendent, was developed with great dialectic acuity by Nicolaus of Cusa; it then reappears during the fifteenth century in Italian Neoplatonism.
See also Boethius; Macrobius; Plato
PAUL PLASS
Iamblichus. Les mysteres d'Egypte, ed. and trans. Edouard des Places. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966.
—. Iamblicbi Chalcidensis in Platonis Dialogos Commentarium Fragmenta, ed. and trans. John M. Dillon. Leiden: Brill, 1973.
Isagoge: Porphyry the Phoenician, trans. Edward Warren. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975.
Plotini opera., 3 vols., ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolph Schwyzer. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964-1982.
Plotinus, 6 vols., ed. and trans. Arthur H. Armstrong. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1978-1988.
Proclus. Commentaire sur le Timee, 5 vols., trans. Andre J. Festugiere. Paris: Vrin, 1966-1968.
—. Commentaire sur la Republique, 2 vols., trans. Andre J. Festugiere. Paris: Vrin, 1970.
Proclus: The Elements of Theology, ed. Eric Dodds. Oxford: Clarendon, 1933.
Proclus's Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, trans. Glenn Morrow and John Dillon. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Theologie Platonicienne, 5 vols., ed. and trans. H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968-1987. (Proclus.)
L'Annee Philologique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. (Complete yearly bibliographies under the names of individual philosophers; topics are listed under the section "Philosophie.")
Armstrong, Arthur H,, ed. Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1987, 36.1 and 36.2.
Gersh, Stephen. Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition, 2 vols. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.
Klibansky, Raymond. The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition. London: Warburg Institute, 1939.
Kristeller, Paul O. "Proclus as a Reader of Plato and Plotinus and His Influence in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance." In Proclus, Lecteur et Interprete des Anciens: Actes du Colloque International du CNRS, Paris (2—4 Octobre 1985), ed. J. Pepin and H, D. Saffrey. Paris: Éditions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1987, pp. 191-211.
Lloyd, Antony C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
O'Meara, Dominic J. Pythagoras Revived. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
Rosan, Laurence J. The Philosophy of Proclus. New York: Cosmos, 1949.
Smith, Andrew. Porphyry's Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition: A Study in Post-Plotinian Neoplatonism. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974.
Wallis, R. T. Neoplatonism. London: Duckworth, 1972.
Neri (d. after 1282), of the Florentine family Visdomini, composed at least five canzoni (a possible sixth is ascribed in MS Vatican Latino 3793 to a "Neri"). Neri's poems concentrate on the mechanics of love and the problematic expression of the poet's desire, repeating his complaint that silent tolerance of love's cruelty cannot reveal the merits of his love. Two of his three laments (L'animo è turbato and Oi lasso) are composed because his heart, which can stand no more, forces him to "speak," indicting jealousy. Oi forte inamoranza and Lo mio gioioso core present conventional paradoxes of love (dolze piaga facite). All but Per ciò che 'l cor contain experiments in irresolute rhyme after rimalmezzo. Neri's language imitates courtly Sicilian tendencies while incorporating Tuscan forms, especially in equivocal rhyme—m'ha porto (syncopated participle): porto (from Oi lasso).
H. WAYNE STOREY
Contini, Gianfranco, ed. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960, Vol. 1, pp. 367-370.
Panvini, Bruno, ed. La scuola poetica siciliana: Le canzoni dei rimatori non siciliani. Florence: Olschki, 1957, Vol. 1, pp. 111-133.
See Moscoli, Neri
See Pagharesi, Nen
See Florence; Guelfs
See Acciaiuoli, Niccola
Little is known of the life of Niccolò (Sere Nichoiaus Prepositi, latter half of the fourteenth century) except that he was one of the middle generation of Italian musicians of the ars nova. His name appears in various forms; his surname presumes an origin in Perugia. It has been suggested that in Perugia, at the end of his life, he set a distinctly anti-Visconti text that was also set by his contemporary, Bartolino da Padova, whom he may have known personally. In our only hard datum, Niccolò is documented as visiting the monastery of Santa Trinita in Florence in 1362, along with Gherardello di Firenze. He has also been identified with a "Ser Niccolò" who was a singer of devotional laude in Florence in 1393. That identification is uncertain and highly speculative; but it is true that a number of Niccolò's Italian secular pieces were adapted with new texts for use as laude.
Niccolò's musical legacy is substantial. It consists entirely of Italian secular vocal pieces and survives extensively in the famous Squarcialupi Codex—which also contains his putative portrait—as well as in an important manuscript from Lucca. Niccolò's twenty-one surviving ballate are almost all composed not in the single-voice (monophonic) style that was then standard, but rather in two polyphonic voices, an innovation in which he was apparently the pioneer. However, many of these ballate are in a very simple, almost "popular" style: their subjects are often short moralizing themes, and Niccolò particularly favored short, pithy refrain lines, also suggesting dialogue effects. There are sixteen madrigals, all but one for two voices; and four cacce, all for three voices. Those works are essentially in an established style, identified with the writing of the earlier masters Giovanni da Cascia and, especially, Jacopo da Bologna, except that several of the madrigals are, in effect, through-composed, with different music for each of the two stanzas—another example of Niccolò's experimentation.
For his texts, Niccolò drew heavily on die important poets of his day, such as Niccolò Soldianieri and Franco Sacchetti; and among his documented settings of Sacchetti's verses there were three ballate and two madrigals that are now lost.
See also Ars Nova; Bartolino da Padova; Gherardello da Firenze; Giovanni da Cascia; Jacopo da Bologna; Lauda; Sacchetti, Franco; Soldanieri, Niccolo; Squarcialupi Codex
JOHN W. BARKER
Corsi, Giuseppe, ed. Poesie musicali del Trecento. Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1970.
D'Accone, Frank A. "Le compagnie dei Laudesi in Firenze durante l'ars nova." In L'ars nova italiana del, trecento III: Certaldo 1969, ed. F. A. Gallo, 253-280. Certaldo: Centra di Studi sull'Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, 1970.
—. "Music and Musicians at the Florentine Monastery of Santa Trinita, 1360-1363." Quadrivium, 12, 1971, pp. 145ff.
Fischer, Kurt von. Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frtihen Quattrocento. Bern: P. Haupt, 1956.
Ghisi, Federico "Gli aspetti musicali della lauda fra il XIV e il XV secolo, prima metà." In Natalicia musicologica Knud Jeppesen. Oslo and London: Hansen, 1962, pp. 51-57.
Konigslow, Annamarie von. Die italienischen Madrigalisten des Trecento. Würzburg: Triltsch, 1940.
Li Gotti, Ettore. La poesia musicals italiana del secolo XIV. Palermo: Palumbo, 1944.
Li Gotti, Ettore, and Nino Pirrotta. Il Sacchetti e la tecnica musicale del trecento italiano. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1935.
Marrocco, William Thomas. "The Fourteenth-Century Madrigal: Its Form and Content." Speculum, 26, 1951, pp. 449-457.
—. Fourteenth-Century Italian Cacce, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1961.
ed. Italian Secular Music. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 8. Monaco: Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1972.
Pirrotta, Nino, ed. The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, Vol. 8. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 8(8). Amsterdam: American Institute of Musicology, 1954.
Pirrotta, Nino, and Ettore Li Gotti. "Il Codice di Lucca." Musica Disciphna, 3, 1949, pp. 119-138; 4, 1950, pp. 111-142; 5, 1951, pp. 115-142.
Reese, Gustav. Music in the Middle Ages. New York: Norton, 1940.
Wolf, Johannes, ed. Der Squarcialupi-Codex, Pal. 87 der Biblioteca Medicea laurenziana zu Florenz. Lippstadt: Kistner and Siegel, 1955.
The poet and jurist Niccolò de' Rossi (c. 1290—c. 1348) was a nobleman from Treviso. He earned a degree in law at the studio in Bologna in 1317 and obtained a teaching post in Treviso the following year; one of his competitors for the position was Cino da Pistoia, the eminent legal scholar and prominent stilnovo poet. Niccolò participated in municipal politics between 1320 and 1321, and he served as an ambassador of Treviso to Pope Benedict XII in 1339. He was a Guelf in the difficult days when the troops of the Ghibelline Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona, carried out many raids in the Marca trevigiana. Treviso eventually succumbed to Cangrande in 1329. In 1339, Niccolò was nominated parish priest of the church of Saint Apollinare in Venice. He died in Venice, probably in 1348.
According to Brugnolo (1974, 13), Niccolò de' Rossi composed the entire corpus of his poems between 1317 and 1328. This is a remarkable feat, considering that his is one of the most substantial collections of verse from the Trecento (441 poems, consisting of 436 sonnets and five canzoni). It is also the oldest collection of poems edited by an author to have come down to us. The most important and most complete manuscripts of Niccolo's poems are from the first half of the Trecento: Manuscript Colombino 7.1.32 (of the Biblioteca Capitular in Seville) and Manuscript Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 3953 (of the Vatican Library), which also contains his anthology of Duecento poetry. (The Barberiniano manuscript is therefore an important primary source.) Niccolo deals with many themes in his canzoniere, although love is clearly the most prominent. In the first part of the collection the poet chronicles his relationship with Floruzza and reveals his affinities with the Sicilian, Tuscan and stilnovo schools of poetry. In several sonnets, such as 282 (Segnor, guardàteve da miser Kane) and 283 (Che çe fa noi se dentro questa terra), the poet speaks about political events. The correspondence between the numerical order of the poems in the collection and the chronology of political events that are occasionally mentioned underscores the autobiographical nature of the canzoniere.
Critics concur that Niccolò was a poet of limited talent. At the same time, however, they have come to appreciate his role as a mediator of the vernacular and of Duecento poetry in the Veneto. Indeed, Niccolò was one of the first poets outside Tuscany to recognize the linguistic importance of Dante and the stilnovisti.
See also Cino da Pistoia; Dolce Stil Nuovo; Italian Poetry: Lyric
DARIO DEL PUPPO
Belletti, Gian Carlo. "Postille derossiane." In Studi in onore di Guido Favati. Genoa: Commissionaria Editrice Tilgher, 1975, pp. 9-39.
Brugnolo, Furio, ed. Il canzoniere di Niccolò de' Rossi, 2 vols. Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1974.
Corsi, Giuseppe, ed. "Niccolo de' Rossi." In Rimatori del Trecento. Turin: UTET, 1969, pp. 683-694.
Salem Elsheikh, Mahmoud, ed. Niccolò de' Rossi: Canzoniere sivigliano. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1973.
Sapegno, Natalino. "Niccolo del Rosso." In Il Trecento. Milan: Vallardi, 1973, pp. 86-89.
Scudieri Ruggieri, lole. "Di Nicolò de' Rossi e di un suo canzoniere." Cultura Neolatina, 15, 1955, pp. 35-107.
Pope Nicholas I (saint; c. 819 or 822-867, r. 858-867) had been influential in papal government under Benedict III as a learned deacon. Nicholas became pope in April 858 as the "imperial" candidate, perhaps facing some discontent among the Romans. Although Nicholas remained respectful of Emperor Louis II throughout his pontificate, his ecclesiological views, lucidly stated in his many long letters (much quoted by canonists in the High Middle Ages), brought him to several confrontations with Carolingian rulers. Supremely aware of the responsibility of popes to lead a united Christendom to salvation, Nicholas also battled particularism in the churches of Italy, France, and Byzantium.
In Rome Nicholas imposed himself on malcontents by employing them in prestigious embassies, by undertaking grand building projects, and by providing for the poor. Within the Patrimony Nicholas tolerated no insubordination; the refractory archbishop of Ravenna was deposed for uncanonical conduct (861). When Emperor Louis II took up the cause of Ravenna and marched on Rome, Nicholas's fortitude, the fasts and processions he organized, the diseases that struck the invaders, and the empress's mediation caused Louis to relent (864). Abandoning his clerical allies to their fate (deposition and imprisonment), Louis even agreed to restrict imperial involvement in papal elections (866).
The Frankish churches, no longer able to look to a pious emperor for leadership, were seeking a new order, as the Pseudo-Isidoran (or False) Decretals of c. 850 reveal. Nicholas, who was probably uninfluenced by the Decretals, proposed his own solution: a united church, bride of Christ, obedient to Rome, whose bishop would end secular tendencies in the Frankish clergy. Nicholas pursued this goal resolutely. The Lotharingian bishops, guilty of complying with their king's uncanonical divorce, were chastised. Hincmar of Rheims, leader of the Frankish clergy, was compelled to allow his suffragans to appeal to Rome, rightful head of the Christian community. (Appeals to Rome multiplied during Nicholas's pontificate.) Nicholas even redesigned the archdiocese of Cologne in the interests of the Scandinavian mission, which was backed by the papacy.
Nicholas, on canonical grounds, disapproved of Photius's elevation to the patriarchate of Constantinople by the Byzantine emperor (858), though in the Byzantine tradition it was legitimate. Nicholas also misunderstood the tensions within the Byzantine church, so lately embroiled in a dispute over icons. He demanded papal adjudication of the patriarchal case and won an important concession; papal legates condemned the previous patriarch, Ignatius (861). Seeking to retrieve papal jurisdiction over Illyricum and southern Italy, Nicholas overturned his legates's decision and condemned Photius (863), believing that Ignatius was more malleable. When the Bulgarian king, Boris, turned to Rome for advice on proper Christian comportment (866), Nicholas saw an opportunity to save souls, gain a toehold in Illyricum, and apply pressure to Byzantium. Ambassadors bore an exhaustive papal reply to Boris. However, the Byzantines perceived the papal mission to Bulgaria as an overt attack on their vital interests, and as an attempt to spread incorrect beliefs. In 867 Nicholas (not papal primacy or Latin Christianity) was condemned by a Constantinopolitan council. Nicholas died (in November 867) unaware of the "Photian schism."
For his upright character and lofty vision of the papacy's role in Christendom, Nicholas was considered a saint early on. He was listed in the Martyrologium Romanum in 1630.
See also Franklsh Kingdom; Photian Schism
PAOLO SQUATRITI
Annates Bertiniani, ed. Georg Waitz. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover: Hahn, 1883.
Annates Fuldenses, ed. G. H. Pertz and Friedrich Kurze. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover: Hahn, 1891.
Flodoard of Rheims. De Christi Triumphis apud Italiam, 12(2), ed. J. Migne. In Patrologia Latina. Paris, 1853, cols. 819-822. (Attests to Nicholas's cult in the tenth century.)
Hincmar of Rheims. Epistulae, ed. Ernst Perels. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistulae, 8(1). Munich, 1978.
Hinschius, Paul, ed. Decretales Pseudo-Isidorianae et Capitula Angilramni. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1863.
Liber pontificalis, Vol. 2, ed. Louis Duchesne. Paris, 1892, pp. 151-167.
Mansi, J. Concilia, Vol. 15. Venice, 1770, pp. 518-806. (Records councils held during Nicholas's pontificate.)
Nicholas I. Epistulae, ed. Ernst Perels. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistulae, 6. Berlin, 1925, pp. 267-694.
Reginus of Priim. Chronicon, ed. Friedrich Kurze. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum. Hannover: Hahn, 1890.
Belletzkie, R. "Pope Nicolas I and John of Ravenna: The Struggle for Ecclesiastical Rights in the Ninth Century." Church History, 49, 1980, pp. 262-272.
Duchesne, Louis. Les premiers temps de l'état pontifical. Paris: Fontemoing, 1911.
Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. (Reprint, 1970.)
—. "Photius, Nicolas I, and Hadrian II." Byzantinoslavica, 34, 1973, pp. 33-50.
Gregorovius, Ferdinand. History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, Vol. 3, trans. G. Hamilton. London: G. Bell, 1903, Book 5, chs. 4-5.
Haller, Johannes. Nikolaus I. und Pseudo-Isidor. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1936.
Lapôtre, Arthur. De Anastasio Bibliothecario Sedis Apostolicae. Paris: A. Picard, 1885. (Reprinted in Etudes sur la papauté au IXe siècle. Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1978, pp. 121-466.)
Llwellyn, Peter. Rome in the Dark Ages. London: Faber, 1971.
Mann, Horace K. The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Vol. 3. London: K. Paul, 1906, pp. 1-148.
McKitterick, Rosamond. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987. London: Longman, 1983.
Morrison, Karl. The Two Kingdoms: Ecclesiology in Carolingian Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.
Perels, Ernst. Papst Nikolaus I. und Anastasius Bibliothecarius. Berlin: Weidmann, 1920.
LJlimann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages: A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power. London: Methuen, 1955.
Vlasto, A. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom: An Introduction to the Medieval History of the Slavs. Cambridge: University Press, 1970.
Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The Frankish Church. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society, 400-1000. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Pope Nicholas II (Gerard of Burgundy, c. 980-1061, r. 1059-1061) had been, before his election to the papacy, Bishop Gerard of Florence. He is numbered among the Lotharingian-Tuscan popes of the Gregorian reform because the houses of Lorraine and Canossa constituted his chief military support. Led by Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VTI) and Peter Damian, certain cardinals had agreed on Nicholas's election in opposition to Benedict X, a member of the Tusculani family, who had been elevated as antipope by the Romans. Nicholas's official election was probably delayed to 6 December 1058 (feast day of Saint Nicholas) and took place in Siena, once the young king Henry IV had solemnly designated him.
Outstanding events of Nicholas's pontificate were an Easter synod of 1059, held at the Lateran; and the council of Melfi, held in August 1059, at which the Norman leaders Robert Guiscard and Richard of Capua became vassals of the Roman church. At the council of Melfi, Nicholas reversed the attitude of the papacy toward the Normans in southern Italy. He invested them with their earlier conquests, which were thus legitimized, and, moreover, also enfeoffed Robert Guiscard with territories that were still in the hands of the Byzantines or the Saracens. Robert's oath of fealty is still preserved in the canonical collection of Deusdedit. In it he promised to protect the papacy, to aid in future elections, to abstain from further attacks on the lands of Saint Peter, and to make regular census payments. The Lateran synod of 1059 is most famous for a decree that placed future papal elections in the hands of the cardinal bishops; this too was a reversal of earlier practices, which had allotted the preponderant share to the Roman clergy and people in general. Other important legislation prohibited simony, prohibited marriage for the clergy, instructed priests to lead the lives of regular canons, and—a quite revolutionary measure—ordered the faithful to boycott masses celebrated by unchaste priests.
See also Councils, Ecclesiastical; Gregory VII, Pope; Melfi, Synod of; Papacy; Richard I, Court of Aversa; Robert Guiscard
UTA-RENATE BLUMENTHAL
Blumenthal, Uta-Renate. The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. (Paperbacked., 1991. Translation of Der Investiturstreit. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.)
Jasper, Detlev. Das Papstwahldekret von 1059: Ueberlieferung und Textgestalt. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Quellenkunde des Mittelalters, 12. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke Verlag, 1986.
Pope Nicholas III (Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, c. 1225-1280, r. 1277-1280) was the son of Matteo Rosso Orsini, senator in 1244 and 1246. Nicholas had been created cardinal priest of Saint Nicholas in Carcere Tulliano in 1244 and succeeded John XXI as pope in 1277 after a vacancy of seven months, in the face of strongly voiced opposition from Charles of Anjou, then senator of Rome. Charles's term as senator expired in September 1278. Nicholas prevented its renewal and, in the bull Fundamenta militantis Ecciesie, specified that any emperor, king, prince, marquis, duke, or baron could become senator only with express permission from the pope, and never for more than one year; Romans could become senator without problems. Nicholas (as an Orsini) was then elected senator himself, but he exercised power through deputies, all Roman nobles.
Rudolf of Hapsburg was negotiating to come to Italy for his coronation when Nicholas became pope. Nicholas agreed to receive Rudolf in return for the cession of the Romagna to the papal state (1278). The province, influenced by the Ghibelline leader Guido da Montefeltro, proved difficult to pacify, despite conciliatory measures including a temporary recall of the exiled Ghibelline faction to Bologna. Nicholas finally requested help from Charles of Anjou but died before order was restored in the Romagna.
Ptolemy of Lucca accused Nicholas of aspiring to establish an Orsini kingdom based on the Romagna. This has been seen as either an attempt to counterbalance the Angevin power, which was encircling the papacy, or an Angevin fiction designed to bring Nicholas into disrepute. Probably it was neither: Charles manifested no intention of attacking the papal state. The coolness between him and Nicholas shown in his opposition to Nicholas's election, in the ending of Charles's tenure of the senate, and subsequently in the termination of Charles's papal vicariate in Tuscany has been exaggerated, notably by Giovanni Villani. Although Charles probably distrusted the Orsini, he continued to receive support from the papacy in the south and sent support to the pope further north. Dante's story that Nicholas was persuaded by Byzantine gold, offered by John of Procida, to transfer Sicily from the Angevins to the Aragonese seems unfounded.
However, Dante justifiably denounced Nicholas for unprecedented nepotism. Nicholas created three Orsini cardinals. One nephew was papal vicar in the Romagna; another nephew was papal legate there; in Tuscany, a brother was senator twice; and so on.
Pope Nicholas III. Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle). Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493, p. 216v.
Before his election Nicholas had been cardinal protector of the Franciscans. As pope, he issued the bull Exiit qui seminat, which was based on the Apologia pauperum of Saint Bonaventura and was intended as a definitive statement on the problem of Franciscan poverty—on which it (unsuccessfully) forbade further discussion.
Nicholas began an artistic revival in Rome that was carried on by his successors. He extended and embellished Innocent III's palace on the Vatican, rebuilt the Sancta Sanctorum chapel (the only part of the medieval Lateran palace now surviving), and started improvements at Saint Peter's and Santa Maria in Aracoeli.
See also Angevin Dynasty; Charles I of Anjou; Dante Alighieri; Franciscan Order; Guido da Montefeltro; Orsini Family; Ptolemy of Lucca; Villani, Giovanni
CAROLA M. SMALL
Nicholas III. Les registres, ea. Jules Gay. Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1898-1938.
Ptolemy of Lucca. Historia ecclesiastica. In Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, ed. L. A. Muratori, Vol. 3. Milan: Societatis Palatinae, 1723-1751.
Davis, Charles T. "Roman Patriotism and Republican Propaganda: Ptolemy of Lucca and Pope Nicholas III." Speculum, 50, 1975, pp. 411—433.
Demski, Augustin. Papst Nikolaus III: Eine monograpbie. Münster: H. Schöningh, 1903.
Léonard, Émile G. Les Angevins de Naples. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. (See especially pp. 124-128.)
Partner, Peter. The Lands of Saint Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. London: Eyre Methuen, 1972, pp. 268-277.
Sternfeld, Richard. Der Kardinal Johann Gaetan Orsini (Papst Nikolaus III.) 1244-1277: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der römischen Kurie im 13. Jahrhundert. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1905.
Pope Nicholas IV (Girolamo Masci, Jerome of Ascoh; 1227-1292, r. 1288-1292) had been general of the Franciscan order (1274), cardinal priest of Santa Pudenziana (1278), and cardinal bishop of Palestrina (c. 1280). He was active in the controversy between the Spiritual and Conventual Franciscans and in negotiating the union of 1274 between the Greek and Latin churches.
Soon after Nicholas's election, Charles II of Anjou was treed, in accordance with the treaty of Canfranc, from an Aragonese prison, on condition that he would promote peace between his captors and their enemies, the pope and Philip IV of France. Nicholas rejected the treaty, forbade Charles to send his eldest son as a hostage for its fulfilment, and, ignoring Charles's promises to Aragon, crowned him king in 1289.
In 1290, Ladislas, king or Hungary, died witnout issue. Nicholas then claimed Hungary as a fief of the Holy See and invested Charles Martel—eldest son of Charles II and Marie, Ladi slas's sister—with it. This annoyed Rudolf of Hapsburg, king of the Romans, who wanted Hungary for his own son; and the Hungarians themselves, who elected a native prince, Andrew III. The upshot was a civil war that lasted until 1309, when Charles Martel's son Carobert finally emerged as the sole claimant.
In Rome Nicholas showed unwise favor to the Colonna family, provoking resentment that culminated in his having to flee to Rieti shortly before Charles II's coronation. Stefano Colonna, Nicholas's papal vicar in the Romagna, was defeated by the Polentani of Ravenna in 1290 and imprisoned—a disaster for the prestige of the papacy. Its prestige was further damaged by concessions to the college of cardinals, notably the bull Caelestis altitudo which granted the college a half share of all temporal revenues from papal lands.
The fall of Acre to the Mameluk sultan of Egypt in 1291 was the main disaster of Nicholas's reign. He provided some ships for an expedition to recover it but died before seeing how futile his efforts were. His attempts to convert pagans were not much more successful, though he was responsible for sending John of Monte Corvino on a famous mission to the China of Kublai Khan.
Nicholas IV encouraged the Inquisition and increased the number of inquisitors. He continued Nicholas III's building program in Rome: in particular, he built a palace next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore and restored the church itself (chough Torriti's famous apse mosaics showing Nicholas and Cardinal Giacomo Colonna side by side were paid for by the latter). As a Franciscan and theologian (he wrote a number of treatises), Nicholas had some reputation for holiness, but his pontificate was marred by his uncompromising repudiation of the treaty of Canfranc, his favoritism to the Colonna, and his arrogance in dealing with Hungary.
See also Charles II of Anjou; Colonna Family; Franciscan Order; Ravenna; Torriti, Jacobus
CAROLA M SMALL
Les registres de Nicolas IV, ed. Ernest Langlois. Paris: E. Thorin, 1886-1907.
Digard, Georges. Philippe le Bel et le Saint-Siège de 1285 à 1304, Vol. 1. Paris: Sirey, 1936.
Left, Gordon. Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250-c. 1450, Vol. 1. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967,
Leonard, Émile G. Les Angevins de Naples. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.
Martini, G. "Per la storia dei pontificati di Niccolò IV e Bonifazio VIII." Rivista Storica Italiana, 58, 1941, pp. 3-41.
Schiff, Otto. Studien zur Gesehichte Papst Nikolaus IV. Historische Studien, 5. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1897.
See Muscia, Niccola
See Pisano, Nicola
"Nicolaism" is a derogatory term for the practice of the higher clergy whereby they had wives or concubines. The word nicolaita was used in the eleventh century by church reformers as part of a campaign to enforce celibacy on bishops, priests, deacons, and subdeacons. Its earliest use during the eleventh century may be in Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida's Contra Nicetam (1054), directed against the marriage of the Byzantine clergy. Pope Nicholas II, in his Roman synod (1059), condemned "the heresy of the Nicolaites, that is, married priests, deacons and all others in the clergy" (Patrologia Latina, 143.1314B).
The reformers adopted the word nicolaita from the Book of Revelation, in which Jesus praises the Ephesian Christians because "you loathe as I do what the Nicholaitans are doing" (Revelation 2:6) and criticized the Christians of Pergamum because "among you, too, there are some as bad who accept what the Nicholaitans teach" (Revelation 2:14-16). From the context of Revelation, it appears that the Nicolaitans had lax teachings on sexual practices and the eating of food offered to idols. Some early Christian heresiologists, including Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, identified them as followers of Nicholas of Antioch, mentioned in Acts 6:5, whom they accused of teaching a form of gnostic sexual licentiousness.
There is no historical link between the early Christian gnostic libertines and the married clergy of the eleventh century. The reformers used the biblical word in order to strengthen their polemic in favor of clerical celibacy.
See also Humbert of Silva Candida
JOSEPH LYNCH
Amann, Émile. "Nicolaites." Dictionnaire de theologie catholique, 41, 1931, pp. 499-506.
Norris, Frederick W. "Nicolaitans." In Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson. New York: Garland, 1990, p. 652.
Robison, Elaine G. "Nicolaitism." In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, Vol. 9. New York: Scribner, 1987, pp. 128-129.
Nilus of Rossano (Neilos, c. 910-1004) is perhaps the best-known representative of Greek monasticism in medieval Italy before the Great Schism. The chief source for his biography is an anonymous eleventh-century Life of Saint Nilus the Younger, an impressive document of Italo-Greek monastic ideals; despite the exemplary import of the incidents chosen for narration, it seems in outline to be factually accurate. According to this account, Nilus was born to an aristocratic family in Rossano, an important eastern Roman (Byzantine) administrative center in eastern Calabria, received a good religious education, and was orphaned at an early age. At the age of thirty, he abandoned the world (he had sired a daughter, perhaps out of wedlock) for an ascetic life in the mountainous border region of the Mercurion and there came under the influence of Fantinus the Younger and other holy fathers. To evade a gubernatorial ban on his becoming a monk, he took the habit at a Greek monastery in the Lombard principality of Salerno. Nilus then returned to Fantinus's lavra (colony of anchorites). Living first there and then in a nearby cave, he learned and later taught calligraphy. During this time he also traveled to Rome to visit the tombs of the apostles and to consult books whose identity, regrettably, is unknown.
Arab raids caused Nilus to retreat in the late 940s to one of his properties near Rossano, where together with some of his students he founded a monastery of his own. He resided here as a penitent for the next quarter-century, achieving more than local repute as a holy man and miracle worker. He is said to have declined being named bishop of Rossano and to have obtained from the emir of Palermo the liberation of three of his monks who had been captured and enslaved. Around 980, fleeing further Arab incursions and his own growing fame, Nilus and his comrades left the eastern empire for good and were welcomed in the Latin west by the Lombard prince of Capua, Pandulf Ironhead. At the behest of Pandulf's successor Landulf IV, Abbot Aligern of Monte Cassino installed them in 981 at the abbey's daughter house at Vallelucio (now Valleluce), where they participated to a limited extent in the life of the neighboring Benedictine community. Here Nilus composed an office for Saint Benedict and probably some of his other poetry.
After Aligern's death, relations between the two groups soured, and in 994 or 995 Nilus founded a new monastery at tiny Serpen (now Serapo) in the duchy of Gaeta. From here he made journeys to Rome, where he failed to persuade his fellow Rossanese, John Philagathus, to renounce the papacy he had assumed in 997 after the ouster from the city of the imperially selected incumbent, Gregory V; and where, too, after John had been deposed and later blinded, Nilus attempted in an interview with the emperor Otto III to have the former antipope released to his custody. In 1004, the aged Nilus left Serperi and, staying at a small Greek monastery in the Aiban hills not far from Rome, obtained land for a new foundation from Gregory I, count of Tusculum. Nilus died there shortly after his monks had arrived at the nearby site and begun work on what would become the famous Greek abbey of Grottaferrata.
Nilus's surviving verse, all in his native Greek, is not a large body of work. Specimens of his scribal work and that of his students also survive, however. His correspondence does not survive, apart from brief summaries and extracts (mostly in the Life, a partly eyewitness account sometimes ascribed to his companion and successor Bartholomew of Grottaferrata). To Nilus himself has been ascribed, on very slender grounds, the commentary of Nilus the Monk on the Perí stáseon (On Issues) of the ancient Greek rhetorician Hermogenes.
See also Greek Language and Literature
JOHN B. DILLON
Gassisi, Sofronio, ed. Poesie di San Nilo Iuniore e di Paolo monaco, abbati di Grottaferrata, nuova edizione con ritocchi ed aggiunte. Innografi Italo-Greci, Fasc. 1. Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta della S. C. de Prop. Fide, 1906.
Giovanelli, Germano, ed. Bios kaí politeía toû hosíou patròs hemôn Neílou toû Néou. Grottaferrata: Badia di Grottaferrata, 1972. (Bartholomew, Saint, Abbot of Grottaferrata, ascribed author.)
Giovandli, Germano, trans. Vita di S. Nilo, fondatore e patrono di Grottaferrata. Grottaferrata: Badia di Grottaferrata, 1966.
Romano, Roberto, trans. "S. Nilo di Rossano, Kondakion per S. Nilo di Ancira." Italoellenika, 5, 1994-1998, pp. 401-405.
Caruso, Stefano. "Un tabu etico e filologico: La mutilazione verecundiae gratia del Cryptensis B.b II (Bios di Nilo da Rossano)." PAN: Studi dell' Istituto di filologia latina "Giusto Monaco," 15-16, 1998, pp. 169-193.
D'Oria, Filippo. "Attivita scrittoria e cultura greca in ambito longobardo (note e spunti di riflessione)." In Scrittura e produzione documentaria nel Mezzogiorno longobardo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio (Badia di Cava, 3—5 ottobre 1990), ed. Giovanni Vitolo and Francesco Mottola. Cava dei Tirreni: Badia di Cava, 1991, pp. 131-167. (See especially pp. 135-144.)
Gassisi, Sofronio. "I manoscritti autograft di S. Nilo Iuniore, fondatore del monastero di S. M. di Grottaferrata." Oriens Christianas, 4, 1904, pp. 308-370.
Atti del Congresso Internazionale su s. Nilo di Rossano (28 settembre-1 ottobre 1986). Rossano and Grottaferrata: n.p., 1989.
Follieri, Enrica. "Per una nuova edizione della Vita di san Nilo da Rossano." Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata, n.s., 51, 1997, pp. 71-92.
Luzzatti Laganà, Francesca. "Catechesi e spiritualita nella Vita di S. Nilo di Rossano: Donne, ebrei e 'santa follia.' " Quaderni Storici, 93, 1996, pp. 709-737. (Year 31, number 3.)
Romano, Roberto. "Il commentario a Ermogene attribuito a S. Nilo di Rossano." Epeterìs Hetaireías Byzantinôn Spoudôn, 47, 1987-1989, pp. 253-269.
Rousseau, Olivier. "La visite de Nil de Rossano au Mont-Cassin." In La chiesa greca in Italia dall'VIII al XVI secolo: Atti del convegno storico interecclesiale (Bari, 30 apr.-4 magg. 1969), Vol. 3. Italia Sacra, 20-22. Padua: Antenore, 1973, pp. 1111-1137.
Sansterre, Jean-Marie. "Les coryphées des apôtres, Rome et la papauté dans les Vies des saints Nil et Barthélemy de Grottaferrata." Byzantion, 55, 1985, pp. 516-543.
—. "Otton III et les saints ascètes de son temps." Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 43, 1989, pp. 377-412. (See especially pp. 390-396.)
—. "Saint Nil de Rossano et le monachisme latin." Bollettino della Badia Greca di Grottaferrata, n.s., 45, 1991, pp. 339-386.
See Siena
Nobilitas, or nobiltà ("nobility"), is a term denoting high social, political, and economic position within medieval Italian society. Beyond this thin definition, the term defies simple framing. Writers from Cassiodorus to the compilers of communal statutes to early Renaissance humanists to modern scholars have reflected the many-sided nature of nobility and the continuing debate over its characteristics. In general these characteristics included control of land and wealth on a scale greater than that of lay non-nobles; some political, judicial, and economic power over those on the land the nobles controlled, or within the polity to which they were subject, or both; personal or familial heritage that included service to an overlord or state; a military function (usually as cavalry); high social status with legal privileges beyond those of commoners; and the heritability of all this. Nonetheless, there are well-known exceptions to each characteristic over the course of medieval Italian history.
The term "nobility" is derived from the Latin nobilitas, which, in the later Republic, referred to an upper class of Roman senatorial families of both patrician and plebeian origin. This held true into the empire. Since nobility was also tied to office-holding, as the demand for civil and military officers grew in the fourth century, the number and complexity of levels within the noble class of clarissimi increased, as did mobility into it. As a result, by the end of the western empire the meaning of nobilitas had become vague. Cassiodorus claimed in one place that nobility applied only to full senatorial families, but in another he stated that it was a matter of ancestral wealth or native genius. Boethius attributed nobility to good birth and inherited morality, but not necessarily wealth. Late classical nobility was conceptually fluid, but it was generally characterized by ownership of land, antiquity of family status, and office-holding. Nobles tended to control local ecclesiastical and political patronage, though they eschewed ecclesiastical office. Nobles in northern Italy during the late Roman period usually centered their activities on the cities, especially on Rome and its senate, and their control of the countryside weakened. Southern nobles retained stronger rural bases, and those who survived the Gothic wars shifted their allegiance to Byzantium before being overrun by the Lombards.
Under the rule of the Ostrogoths, the northern Roman nobles had to share their property (fifty-fifty, a practice known as hospitality) and status with the barbarian warriors, who took over military affairs but complemented the Romans in most others. Ostrogothic society had long been socially stratified under leaders noted for their fine dress, their armor and weapons, and their thirst for land. Often they augmented their share of land from hospitality by purchasing more, further eroding the economic base of the Roman aristocracy. Though King Theodoric kept his Gothic nobility under control, his successors were unsuccessful; and Justinian's Gothic wars devastated the western Roman and the Ostrogothic aristocracy.
The Lombard invasions, beginning in 568, nearly obliterated the Italian nobility as the warriors seized what they could and destroyed the rest. Both Goths and Romans fled or were massacred, and the land was divided by the kings among the new territorial lords. The Lombard nobility was thus landed, military in function, and usually characterized by ties of clientship to the royal court. The Lombard laws prove to be of little help in defining the Lombard nobility, since "noble" and "freeman" are often used interchangeably. Except in the Apennines, Lombard nobles tended to settle in or near towns, which were usually governed by dukes (duces), who provided their own patronage. This no doubt reinforced the urban nature of northern Italian society and sustained southern seaports like Amalfi, Salerno, and Naples. Nonetheless, as the fabric and society of the northern towns decayed, the Lombard nobility, along with many commoners, established themselves in the countryside. Although, or perhaps because, they practiced partible inheritance, lordship over Lombard properties was held collectively by all brothers in a family, an arrangement known as a fraterna or consorzio.
The impact of the Carolingian conquest on the Italian nobility was minimal, as Frankish colonization was limited to a few cities such as Asti and Piacenza and the region between Pavia and Verona. Franks held positions of authority under the king, but they rarely dispossessed Lombards of their land. In addition, the later Carolingians often placed old Lombard families back in positions of local power as vassals or clients with huge estates. The fraterna system proved enduring as noble families consolidated local power bases, first in the countryside and then in the slowly reviving cities. Rural clans controlled both ecclesiastical and secular fiefs, and sometimes formed rural communes of many families, or branches of families, who drew up statutes, met in an assembly, and elected a leader or podestà. In the late and post-Carolingian anarchy, nobles served a wide range of lay and ecclesiastical administrative and especially military functions, usually with only rudimentary central coordination. Bishops often replaced counts as territorial lords, and church lands were often handed over as benefices to powerful laymen. These capitanei further enfeoffed valvassores, who in turn took on knights (milites) as vassals as northern Italy underwent feudalization.
During the later tenth century, as urban life redeveloped in northern Italy, markets for the goods of noble estates and opportunities in the increasingly powerful church drew many members of noble families to towns. Others, who were defeated in their bids to resist the new urban centers, were forced to swear allegiance to the dominant town, build a townhouse and live there several months of each year, pay tribute to the magistrates, serve in the town's militia, and not obstruct commercial traffic. While no single pattern or model is valid for all areas, in general the nobles retained their rural ties, both social and economic, and their clan identities after settling in towns. Unlike the nobility elsewhere in Europe, Italian nobles of the High Middle Ages generally accepted commercial activities as legitimate for members of their class, and by the later thirteenth century only a relatively few noble families disdained trade. It appears that nobles, with their martial traditions, were leaders in most of the urban revolts against episcopal and ducal power that established the communes. In the early communal period, nobles usually served in the highest offices and took much of the responsibility for defense. Representation in public matters was often by family or clan, later replaced by the more class-neutral guilds. Urban nobles constituted a privileged class in early communal Italy.
Clan members tended to be located in the same urban neighborhoods, and they created enclaves around great tower structures, which often had to be defended from rivals or from the commune itself. "Tower societies" (consorteria) that emerged between 1160 and 1260 were collections of male family members and allies who saw their interests as tied to those of the clan. Their houses physically surrounded the stronghold, as those of vassals and retainers did in the contado (countryside). In the later thirteenth century and the early fourteenth century, these enclaves were broken up and the towers were truncated, either by political rivals or by the commune. Nonetheless, coats of arms continued to mark the range of influence of the noble families and decorated houses and walls, chapels and church plate, banners, books, and armor. The trappings as well as the status of the noble lifestyle attracted rich urban parvenus, who built and acted like the older seigneurial nobles, adopted coats of arms, took over patronal roles in the secular and ecclesiastical life of the towns, and married into noble families. Frederick I Barbarossa had been forced to give Lombard cities the power of lordship, and during the thirteenth century it was not unusual for towns to create knights lor military service and thus "ennoble" them. As early as 1173, Genoa knighted more than 100 men, and in 1211 it knighted 200 more.
With the rise of the popolo, city governments often reacted harshly against nobles because the noble lifestyle often resulted in a disruption of normal civil life. Tension developed between old and new nobility, but by the later thirteenth century communal governments often lumped the two together, and lumped both with some rich popolani, for the purposes of so-called anti-magnate legislation, which strictly curtailed most of the special privileges and even some basic rights of the rich and powerful and violent. Economic stresses, pressure from the upwardly mobile borghesi, competition for communal magistracies, old rivalries, and simple restlessness often led to conflict between families and their gangs of retainers. Competition for the papacy was an impetus for feuding between the Roman Crescentii (Crescenzi) and Tuscolani families from 940 to 1050, and later between the Orsim and Colonna. "Insults, assassinations or wounds, affronts to blood and honor, and even petty jealousies thus incited deep hatreds between families or rival branches of the same house. Inimical groups grew into opposed political factions" (Heers 1977, 106). In Florence, the Cerchi and Donati; in Siena, the Tolomei and Salimbeni, and the Malavolti and Piccolomini; in Bologna, the Lambertazzi and Geremei; and in Pistoia, two branches of the Cancellieri battled one another and often involved large sectors of the city and contado. Popolani and nobles (magnati) also clashed in the streets—for example, in Piacenza in 1219, 1221, 1223, 1225, 1232, 1233, 1234, and 1235. By the end of the century in most northern Italian cities, however, the popolani had gotten the upper hand.
With a devaluation of the nobles themselves through legislation, destruction of towers, ennoblement of popolani, miscegenation, and exile, by the later thirteenth century the conceptualization of nobility began to shift away from lineage and martial prowess toward a morally determining element that was found not in the clan or family but in the heart of the individual. Dante bemoaned the extinction of many great families, and foreign observers belittled the urbanized nobles as unworthy of true chivalry. Indeed, Italian nobles began to ape their French counterparts by cultivating a chivalric culture of court life, romances, and even jousting. Nonetheless, a world in which Lapo da Castiglionchio could claim that a noble is simply "anyone whom a prince or people accept as such" needed a redefinition of nobility. Bartolo the jurist conservatively vested nobility in heredity, but Dante and other stilnovisti poets ascribed nobility to the man with virtue: the noble man ennobles his family, not vice versa; nobility is planted by God and cultivated by the individual of merit. The argument would continue into the Renaissance.
The Venetian nobility evolved in a manner independent of many of these concerns. From early on, the aristocratic families were urban, involved in maritime commerce and warfare, and detached from the land. The serrata of 1297—a definitive listing of those who could serve on the grand council—closed the ranks of the nobility. Early in the fifteenth century Venice began to expand on the mainland, creating new opportunities for Renaissance noble resources and leadership.
Rural southern Italy before the Norman conquest was dominated by clans of Lombard maiores who controlled villages and agriculture, owed allegiance to more or less powerful urban counts and dukes, and had strong social and commercial ties to seaports such as Amalfi and Salerno. The Byzantines' control was fitful and normally required payment of taxes and tribute by existing landlords. The Arabs' influence was insignificant. The Normans' conquest and their introduction of northern feudalism slowly replaced the existing local nobility with northern Europeans whom the kings tried to keep on a short leash, later in part by the development of a magnetic court life in Naples.
Sicily had been lost by Rome to the Vandals after 440, reconquered by Justinian, and lost again to Muslim invaders beginning in 827. Muslim landlords constituted a rather weak nobility that feuded constantly and practiced partible inheritance. Nonetheless, the Normans took thirty years to subjugate Sicily and impose northern feudalism along with Norman, Lombard, and French vassals as new landlords. These practiced both partible inheritance and primogeniture and held the land as restricted fiefs rather than freeholds. The monarchy's use of crown officials and a professional military contingent helped to keep the nobility weak. In the later twelfth century, baronial uprisings were put down, but they resulted in a short-lived reinforcement of the elective principal of kingship.
Hohenstaufen rule introduced to Sicily many new German barons who seized land and upset the old noble order. Under Frederick II (d. 1250) nobles played important administrative and political roles, but they ignored commerce, which was quickly dominated by Italian city-states. Angevin rule (1268-1282) substituted French vassals for many local nobles, leading to feuding between the Hohenstaufen and the Angevins in the wake of the Sicilian Vespers. Intervention by the Aragonese added new Spanish nobles to the mix. From this political turmoil emerged a new feudalization in which matters of blood and social ties, honor, and a warrior ethic fueled ninety years of internal war during the fourteenth century. Beginning in the 1390s, powerful Aragonese harnessed one faction, destroyed the other, and established a firm grip over the traditionally unruly Sicilian nobility.
See also Bartolus of Sassoferrato; Dolce Stil Nuovo; Prankish Kingdom; Hohenstaufen Dynasty; Lombards; Ostrogoths; Popolo; Theodoric; Urban Development
JOSEPH P. BYRNE
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Butler, W. F. The Lombard Communes. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1969. (Originally published 1906.)
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Cristiani, Emilio. Nobiltà e popolo nel comune di Pisa dalla origine del podestariato alla signoria dei Donoratico. Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Napoli, 1962.
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Jakobs, Hermann. "Sul sorgere d'una nobiltà urbana." Quellen und Forschungen, 54, 1974, pp. 471-482.
Lansing, Carol. The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Larner, John. Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch. New York: Longmans, 1980.
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Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Salvemini, Gaetano. Magnati e popolani in Firenze dal 1280 al 1295. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972.
Sheedy, Anna T. Bartolus on Social Conditions in the Fourteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.
Stahl, B. Adel und Volk im Florentiner Dugento. Cologne-Graz: Bohlau Verlag, 1965.
Tabacco, Giovanni. "Nobiltà e potere ad Arezzo in età comunale." Studi Medievali, 3(15), 1974, pp. 1-24.
—. "Nobili e cavalieri a Bologna e a Firenze tra XII e XIII secolo." Studi Medievali, 3(17), 1976, pp. 41-79.
—. "Vassali, nobili, e cavalieri nell'Italia precomunale." Rivista Storica Italiana, 99, 1987, pp. 247-268.
—. The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Waley, Daniel P. Medieval Orvieto. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.
—. The Italian City-Republics. New York: McGraw Hill, 1969.
—. Siena and the Sienese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400—1000. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.
The monastery of Nonantola (dedicated to All Saints and Saint Silvestro) is in the region of Emilia, not far from Modena. It was founded during the Lombard period—exactly when is not known, but it was definitely organized by 753, when the Lombard king Aistulf bestowed it on Anselm, duke of Friuli, who then retired to the religious life as abbot of the monastery. Nonantola was the beneficiary of numerous gifts from Aistulf, but it received little royal attention during the reign of the next king, Desiderius. Anselm may have been exiled for a time to Monte Cassino, whence he returned with manuscripts that became the foundation of Nonantola's famous monastic library. Following the Prankish conquest, the monastery enjoyed favor again, and it was extremely wealthy in the ninth century.
Nonantola's growth was abruptly halted in 899, when the Hungarians burned the monastery and destroyed many of its charters and manuscripts. The monastery was rebuilt in the tenth century, reclaimed its former lands, and received occasional grants from the later Italian and German rulers of Italy. It was beginning to lose much of its old independence, however, and was becoming more and more enmeshed in feudal entanglements. These entanglements caused it for a time to be part of the feudal domain of the bishop of Modena, then later of the bishop of Parma, and finally, in the early fourteenth century, brought it into the hands of the d'Este family, where it would remain for some time.
The abbey was organized according to the Benedictine rule from the time of its founding until 1514, when it became a Cistercian monastery. It was dissolved in the late eighteenth century, briefly restored in the nineteenth century, secularized again in the late nineteenth century, and again restored in the twentieth. Today, the monastery at Nonantola is still a place of considerable interest for its Romanesque and pre-Romanesque buildings as well as for the archives—mostly charters—that are preserved there.
Nonantola was an important monastic center not only because of its wide holdings, which included scattered possessions throughout much of northern Italy and beyond, but also because of the scriptorium and music center that developed there. The scriptorium was important in the copying of manuscripts; it also provided the means whereby the charters of the monastery were restored following destruction by the Hungarians and later by fire. The monks proved adept not only in re-creating a number of the documents that had been lost but also in creating a number of new ones to justify real or imaginary monastic claims.
Nonantola's buildings are important architecturally and artistically, especially those sections that survive from an early twelfth-century rebuilding, work either done by or influenced by the Lombard Romanesque master builder Lanfranco and the sculptor Guglielmo (Wiligelmus).
See also Aistulf; Benedictine Order; Desiderius; Modena; Monasticism; Monte Cassino, Monastery; Palaeography; Wiligelmus
KATHERINE FISCHER DREW
Commune of Modena. Lanfranco e Wiligelmo: Il duomo di Modena. Modena: Panini, 1984.
Gaudenzi, A. "Il monastero di Nonantola, il ducato di Persiceta, e la chiesa di Bologna." Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano, 22, 1901.
Gullotta, Giuseppe. Gli antichi cataloghi e i codici della Abbazia di Nonantola. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1955.
Porter, Arthur Kingsley. Lombard Architecture, Vol. 3. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1917.
Tiraboschi, Girolamo. Storia dell'augusta Badia di San Silvestro di Nonantola, 2 vols. Modena: Presso la Societa Tipografica, 1784-1785.
In addition to their famous conquest of England in 1066, the Normans also established a kingdom in southern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Until relatively recently, the kingdom of southern Italy and Sicily (also known as the Regno) was little studied by Anglo-American scholars, but it was one of the most dramatic examples of cultural intersection and "state-building" in the Mediterranean during the medieval period.
As early as c. 1000, the region from the Abruzzi southward through Sicily (including Molise, Campania, Apulia, and Calabria) was remarkable for its interplay of Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Muslim cultures. In the early decades of the eleventh century, another piece was added to this cultural mosaic when small bands of Norman soldiers, mercenaries, and pilgrims settled in the south. The descendants of these Normans united the territories south of Rome to create the Regno, a political unit that some scholars have rather rashly called the "first modern state." Unlike the Normans who conquered England under the leadership of Duke William (the Conqueror), those in southern Italy and Sicily settled in a piecemeal fashion. They perhaps appeared first in the late tenth century, and they were still immigrating in the 1080s and 1090s. The Normans gradually insinuated themselves into the highest levels of southern Italian society through military prowess and clever intermarriage. Because of their small numbers, they could not attempt a full-scale "Normanization" of the south. Rather, they assimilated and adapted, thus preserving the religious, linguistic, political, and social diversity of the south.
The sources do not agree about why the first Normans came to the south. According to one account, Pope Benedict VIII (r. 1012—1034) enlisted Norman mercenaries to aid Meles of Bari, a Lombard, in defeating Byzantine forces in southern Italy. Another account suggests that Norman pilgrims, on their way home from the Holy Land, encountered Meles and entered his employ. According to another narrative, a small group of brave Normans, returning from a pilgrimage, arrived in Salerno and helped defeat thousands of Saracens. Despite the enticements of this land of "milk and honey," these Normans returned to their homeland; nevertheless, their tales of riches and exotic novelties no doubt persuaded others to go south to seek fortune and adventure.
Once in southern Italy, the Normans quickly gained a reputation for being ruthless and predatory. Charters of the early period sometimes mention widows and orphaned children forced to sell whatever remained of their belongings after a vicious Norman attack. Normans in the south quickly transformed themselves from mercenaries to political and military leaders with the establishment of the first Norman principality at Aversa, just north of Naples, in 1030. The territory was a gift from the duke of Naples to Rainulf the Norman for his service against a Lombard prince, Pandulf of Capua. The 1030s and 1040s saw the arrival of more Normans, most significantly the younger sons of Tancred of Hauteville—a minor Norman lord—who went south to seek their fortunes. According to one chronicler, "no member of the house of Hauteville ever saw a neighbor's lands without wanting them for himself."
Foremost among the sons of Hauteville was Robert Guiscard, or "the cunning." Tall, blond, ruddy, and tyrannical, Robert Guiscard arrived in 1047. Together with his half brother, Roger (sometimes called great Count Roger), he launched a campaign in 1061 to conquer Sicily. Robert Guiscard came to control much of Apulia, Calabria, and Campania. Politically practical, Guiscard repudiated his Norman wife, Alberada, on the grounds of suddenly acknowledged consanguinity, to marry Sichelgaita, the sister of the Lombard prince of Salerno. However, as the Normans accumulated territorial possessions in the south, they did not "conquer" or "invade" the peninsula with a predetermined plan to create a kingdom.
Robert Guiscard and the Normans contended not only with Lombards, Muslims, and Greeks during the eleventh century. Coincident with this period of Norman expansion were the reform efforts of the eleventh-century papacy, often called the Gregorian reform movement after Pope Gregory VII. As early as the mid-eleventh century, the papacy grew concerned about the spread of the Normans' power in the south. In 1053, Pope Leo IX led a papal army of Germans and northern Italians against the Normans at Benevento. The Normans defeated the papal forces at the battle of Civitate and took Leo IX prisoner during the clash. Following this setback, the papacy pursued a different strategy in dealing with the Normans: in 1059, Pope Nicholas II recognized Richard the Norman and Robert Guiscard as vassals of Saint Peter. Richard became the prince of Capua, and Robert was named duke of Apulia and Calabria and future duke of Sicily. The pope thus granted legitimacy to the Normans' domination of the south; in return, the Normans pledged to support and to defend the possessions of Saint Peter. The papacy benefited from the diversion of the Nomans' attentions away from Rome and toward Bari (conquered in 1071), Salerno (1076-1077), and Sicily (1091). In addition, the Normans helped the papacy to check the Byzantines' and Muslims' expansion in southern Italy and in Sicily. The agreement between the papacy and the Normans did not prevent Gregory VII from forming an alliance with Prince Robert of Capua in 1074 against Robert Guiscard. Guiscard, however, came to the aid of Gregory VII a decade later: when Emperor Henry IV lay siege to Rome in 1085, Guiscard rushed to Rome from his own siege at Durazzo to rescue the pope from Castel Sant'Angelo, where he had barricaded himself. The Normans inflicted the worst sack of Rome since the fifth century as Gregory escaped with Robert Guiscard to Salerno. The pope died in Salerno later that year.
The Normans contributed to the Latin church in southern Italy in other ways as well. They established new monasteries, supported older foundations such as Monte Cassino and La Cava, and were influential in the selection of bishops—despite the papacy's opposition to lay investiture. In spite of the Normans' support for Latin Christendom, Muslim and Jewish communities survived, owing to the political necessity of religious tolerance.
By the end of the eleventh century, most of the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy) was in Norman hands. Power, however, was largely decentralized. No evidence suggests that the idea of a unified kingdom had yet taken shape. Indeed, several Norman rulers controlled various regions in the period following Robert Guiscard's death. Of Guiscard's two sons, the younger, Roger, also called Borsa, son of Sichelgaita, was the favored heir. He became duke of Apulia and was succeeded by his son William of Apulia (r. 1111-1127). The elder, Bohemond, son of Alberada, though initially overlooked, was named prince of Taranto and later became involved in the crusades. Capua, meanwhile, remained independent, under the control of Prince Richard's heirs. Finally, Roger I, Guiscard's brother, having completed the conquest of Sicily in 1091, ruled the island and was succeeded in 1101 by his young son, Roger II, who ultimately shaped the future of the Norman kingdom in the south.
Roger II reached his majority and ended his mother Adelaide's regency in 1112. By 1127, Roger had acquired the principality of Capua from Robert of Capua by force and the duchy of Apulia through a contentious inheritance claim. On Christmas day 1130, in the cathedral of Palermo, Roger was crowned king of Sicily by a representative of the antipope, Anacletus II. Because this was a time of schism, Roger's royal title did not become official until it was recognized in 1139 by Pope Innocent II in the treaty of Mignano. His full title became Roger, king of Sicily, duke of Apulia, and Prince of Capua.
Roger II's titles reflect the character and strategy of his rule. As king of Sicily, he was not "king of Italy," because other powers laid claim to Italy. The German emperor considered himself the ruler of the regnum Italicum. Moreover, Roger was king of the territory that the pope had commissioned his ancestors to subjugate decades earlier. As prince of Capua and duke of Apulia (the Duchy of Apulia by now consisted of the Principality of Salerno), Roger acknowledged that he held those lands as a vassal of the church. Roger's titles also reflect the ethnic and religious diversity of his territories. Roger recognized his limitations: practicality and geography did not permit him to be an "absolute" ruler. His authority rested on a recognition of the traditions and practices of the people he ruled. The Duchy of Apulia and the Principality of Capua continued to exist, though they were part of the Regno.
Roger's laws, like his titles, reflect the variety of influences and customs that characterized his state. The preamble to a law code attributed to Roger reads: "We order that the laws newly promulgated . . . should be fully observed by all. Because of the variety of different people subject to our rule, the usages, customs and laws which have existed among them up to now are not abrogated unless what is observed in them is clearly in contradiction to our edicts here." Roger was clear: his state was an amalgam of many peoples whose customs he would continue to tolerate, so long as they did not contradict the royal will.
Roger died in 1154, having earlier appointed his son William I (r. 1154—1166) as his successor. William I—called "the Bad," though Loud (1999) suggests that "the Unlucky" might be more appropriate—and his son William II, "the Good" (r. 1166-1189), sustained the tradition of strong monarchical government established by Roger II. The power of the monarchy diminished during their reigns, however, perhaps because they lacked Roger's personal charisma and political skill. An unsuccessful coup attempted against William I in 1161 and the anarchy incited by his chief minister, Maio of Bari, exposed undercurrents of discontent among top officials and barons. William II made efforts to appease his barons, especially those on the mainland. His true legacy was a marriage he negotiated in 1184 between Roger II's daughter Constance (William's aunt and only heir) and Henry (later Emperor Henry VI, r. 1194—1197), the son of his great rival, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. The relationship between the empire and the Regno was complex: on the one hand the Sicilian monarchs were seen as usurpers of imperial sovereignty, but on the other hand they were bound together through marriage.
Following William II's death, there was a struggle between the supporters of his chosen heir, Constance, and his illegitimate son, Tancred of Lecce. Tancred ruled the kingdom until his own death in 1194, at which point Henry VI assumed the title he acquired through marriage, king of southern Italy and Sicily—a title long desired by his German forebears. The dynasty that originated with the Normans produced a new heir: Frederick Roger, later King Frederick II, called Stupor Mundi. Frederick II would inaugurate a new kingdom that rested on foundations created by his Norman ancestors.
Historians of the medieval Mezzogiorno debate the extent to which the Regno actually reflected the mixture of cultures it contained. How to characterize the monarchy—was it "absolute" or "composite," "Byzantine" or "western"?—is frequently discussed. Roger II and his successors had extensive contacts with or knowledge of the Holy Land, Egypt, and Byzantium. They also knew something of their Norman heritage, and possibly had notions of feudal relationships and the evolving feudal monarchy in England. The king of southern Italy and Sicily, in theory, was the ultimate feudal lord in the kingdom. All lands were held ultimately by the king. The Catalogus baronum (Register of the Barons, c. 1150) offers an accounting of the kingdom's wealth for Apulia and Capua and lists the obligations of the king's vassals. This document clearly supports the image of an absolute feudal king. Furthermore, the crown tightly controlled its natural resources (including grain, salt, steel, pitch, and wood) and small industry (the renowned silk production in Palermo). Some products had military value; others contributed to the splendor of the royal court. An intriguing aspect of Norman kingship is the management of the southern Italian economy. Commercial activity, however, was not as developed as might be expected, given the promise and potential of resources and seaports. In the pre-Norman period, cities such as Amalfi and Bari had been prosperous commercial centers. During the Norman period, commercial privileges were increasingly granted to northern Italian cities.
Kingship in twelfth-century southern Italy, however absolute, was strongly supported by a permanent administration and royal court at Palermo. This underclass of officials who oversaw the complex running of the kingdom reveals a medley of cultural influences. The titles of officials at court—emirs, justiciarii, strategoi—reflect the Muslim, Latin, and Greek institutions in the Norman kingdom. A French-style chancery issued documents in Greek, Arabic, and Latin. Many of the laws owed their origin to Justinian. Roger II's kingdom was so different from anything else in Europe at the time that scholars studying the iconography of the royal chapel and Martorana in Palermo have argued for both Byzantine and Ottoman influences. Roger II's court had a harem; William I's palace included a zoo with exotic animals. The most obvious example of cultural intersection is found in the art and architecture of the Regno. Churches with Arab workmanship and Latin architecture were spectacularly adorned with mosaics in the Greek style. Magnificent examples include the cathedrals at Monreale and Cefalu and the Palatine Chapel in Palermo. A mosaic in the Martorana in Palermo is one of the most famous images of absolute, divine-right kingship. In this mosaic, Christ crowns King Roger II, and the facial similarity between the two figures is unmistakable.
Recent scholars urge restraint in giving the Normans credit for discovering the secret of the "modern state" through their seemingly forward-thinking approach to multicultural rule. Perhaps ironically, a mosaic might be the best metaphor for the Regno, acknowledging the variety of influences in the Norman kingdom but connoting separation and coexistence, rather than a fusion or a mélange. The terms "united" and "homogeneous" are currently giving way to "heterogeneous" as scholars recognize the Normans' achievement but suggest that its origins lay in the necessity and expediency involved in managing diverse peoples. Moreover, current discussions of the Mezzogiorno during the medieval period focus on the articulation of local powers (family, governance, ecclesiastical) against the backdrop of the Norman kingdom. The extent of practical governmental authority—especially on the mainland—is a fruitful topic for future research.
The sources and essential critical studies on southern Italian medieval history are not always easy to access, and they represent many different languages. The general studies by Norwich (1967, 1970) and Matthew (1992), in English, are a good place to start. For current bibliography see Matthew (1992), Loud and Wiedemann's edition (1998) of Falcandus, and Abulafia (1977, 1987, 1989). The sources listed below represent a sampling of the major works to which scholars refer in various languages, but English-language studies are emphasized.
See also Anacletus II, Antipope; Aversa; Bari; Benevento; Bohemond of Taranto; Capua; Cefalù; Frederick II Hohenstaufen; Gregory VII, Pope; Henry VI Hohenstaufen; Leo IX, Pope; Monreale; Nicholas II, Pope; Palatine Chapel; Palermo; Pandulf I, Prince of Capua-Benevento; Rainulf, Count of Aversa; Robert Guiscard; Roger I; Roger II; Roger Borsa; Salerno; Sicily; Tancred of Hauteville, Sons of; Tancred of Lecce and Roger III, Kings of Sicily; William, Duke of Apulia; William I; William II
JOANNA H. DRELL
Alexander of Telese. Alexandri Telesim Abbatis Ystoria Rogerii Regis Sicilie Calabrie atque Apulie, ed. Ludovica de Nava. Fonti per la Storia d'ltalia, 112. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1991.
The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1969.
Amatus of Monte Cassino. Ystoire de li Normani. In Storia dei Normani di Amato di Montecassino, ed. Vincenzo de Bartholomaeis. Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1935.
Falco of Benevento. Chronica de Falcone Benevento, ed. Giuseppe Del Re. In Cronisti e Scrittori Sincroni della Dominazione Normanna nel Regno di Puglia e Sicilia, 2 vols. Naples: Stamperia dell'Iride, 1868.
Geoffrey Malaterra. De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comites et Roberti Guiscardi ducis, fratris eius, ed. Ernesto Pontieri. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 5(1), 1928.
The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by "Hugo Falcandus," 1154-1169, trans, and ed. Graham A. Loud and Thomas Wiedemann. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
William of Apulia. Le geste de Robert Guiscard, trans. Marguerite Mathieu. Testi, 4. Palermo: Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, 1961.
Brandileone, F. Il diritto romano nelle leggi normanne e sveve del regno di Sicilia. Rome: Bocca, 1884.
Briihl, Carlrichard. Rogerii II: Regis diplomata Latina. Köln, 1987. Codex Diplomaticus Regni Siciliae, Series 1, Diplomata Regum et Principum e Gente Normannorum, 2(1). (See also Codice diplomaticus regni Siciliae, Series 1, Vol. 5, Tancredi et Willelmi regum diplomata, ed. Herbert Zielinski. Koln-Wien, 1982.
Series 2, Vol. 1 (2), Constantiae imperatricis et reginae Siciliae diplomata, ed. Theo Kölzer. Köln-Wien, 1983.)
Cassese, L. Le pergamene del monastero benedettino di San Giorgio (1038-1698). Salerno, 1950.
Catalogus baronum, ed. Evelyn Jamison. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1972.
Cherubini, Paolo. Le pergamene di San Nicola di Gallucanta (secc. IX-XII). Altavilla Silentina: Edizioni Studi Storici Meridionali, 1990.
Codex Diplomaticus Cavensis, 8 vols., ed. Michaela Morcaldi, et al. Milan and Naples: Hoepli, 1873-1893.
Codex Diplomaticus Cavensis, Vols. 9-10, ed. Giovanni Vitolo and Simeone Leone. Badia di Cava, 1984, 1990.
Codice Diplomatico Verginiano, 10 vols., ed. P. M. Tropeano. Montevergine, 1981-1992.
Galante, Maria. Nuove pergamene del Monastero Femminile di San Giorgio di Salerno (993-1256). Altavilla Silentina: Edizioni Studi Storici Meridionali, 1984.
Garufi, C. A. I documenti inediti dell'epoca Normanna in Sicilia. Documenti per Servire alia Storia di Sicilia; Societa Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Series 1, Vol. 18. Palermo: Lo Statuto, 1899.
—. Necrologio del Liber Confratrum di S. Matteo di Salerno. Fonti per la Storia d'Italia, 56. Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1922.
Inguanez, Mauro. Regesto di San Angelo in Formis. Monte Cassino, 1925.
Mattei-Cerasoli, L. Vitae Quatuor Priorum Abbatum Cavensium. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 2nd ed. Bologna, 1941.
Mazzoleni, I. Le pergamene degli Archivi Vescovili di Amalfi e di Ravello, Vol. 1. Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1972, pp. 998-1264.
Menager, L. R. "Les foundations monastiques de Robert Guiscard, due de Pouille et de Calabre." Quellen und Forschungen aus Italienishcen Archiven und Biblioteken, 39, 1959, pp. 1-116.
—. "Recueil des actes des dues normands d'ltalie, 1046-1127." In Società di Storia Patria per la Puglia, 45, 1980 (Bari).
Pennacchini, L. E. Pergamene Salernitane (1008-1784). Salerno, 1941.
Powell, James, trans. The Liber Augustalis or Constitutions of Melfi Promulgated by the Emperor Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily in 1231. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1971.
Regii Neapolitani Archivii monumenta edita ac illustrata, 6 vols. Naples, 1845-1861. (See especially vols. 5 and 6.)
Taviani-Carozzi, Hugette. Les archives du diocese de Campagna dans la province de Salerne. Documents Inédits des XI et XII Siècles. Rome: Il Centro di Ricerca Editore, 1974.
Trinchera, Francesco. Syllabus Graecarum membranarum. Naples: Cattaneo, 1865.
Ughelli, Ferdinando. Italia sacra sive de episcopis Italiae et insularum adiacentium, 2nd ed. (with Nicolai Coleti), 10 vols. Venice: Sebastiano Coleti, 1717-1721. (See especially vols. 6-10.)
Von Heinemann, L. Normannische Herzogs- und Königsurkunden aus Unteritalien und Sicilien. Tübingen, 1899.
White, Lynn Townsend. Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1938.
Abulafia, David. The Two Italics: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
—. Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean, 1100—1400. London: Variorum Reprints, 1987.
—. The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms 1200-1500: The Struggle for Dominion. London: Longman, 1997.
Amari, Michele. Storia dei musulmani di sicilia, 2nd ed., 3 vols., ed. Carlo Alfonso Nallino. Catania: R. Prampolini, 1933-1939.
Capitani, O. "Specific Motivations and Continuing Themes in the Norman Chronicles of Southern Italy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." In The Normans in Sicily and Southern Italy. The Lincei Lectures 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 1-46.
Caspar, E. Roger II 1101—1154 und die Griindung der normannischsicilischen Monarchie. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1904. (See also Italian version: Ruggero II, 1101—1145, e la fondazione della monarchia normanna di Sicilia, intro. Ortensio Zecchino. Rome, 1999.)
Chalandon, Ferdinand. Histoire de la domination normande en Italie et en Sicile, 2 vols. Paris: A. Picard, 1907. (Reprint, 1991.)
—. "The Conquest of South Italy and Sicily by the Normans" and "The Norman Kingdom of Sicily." In Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 5, 1926, pp. 167-207. (See also a revised article on the Normans by Graham A. Loud, in New Cambridge Medieval History, forthcoming.)
Clementi, Dione. "Stepping-Stone in the Making of the Regno." Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 90, 1983, pp. 227-292.
Cowdrey, H. E. J. The Age of Abbot Desiderius: Montecassino, the Papacy, and the Normans in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
Croce, Benedetto. History of the Kingdom of Naples, trans. F. Frenaye. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1970. (Originally published as Storia del regno di Napoli. Bart: Laterza, 1925.)
Cuozzo, Errico. Commentario di Catalogus Baronum. Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 101. Rome: Nella Sede dell'Istituto, 1984.
—. "Quei Maledetti Normanni": Cavalieri e organizzazione militare nel mezzogiorno normanno. Naples: Guida, 1989.
Delogu, Paolo. I Normanni in Italia: cronache delta conquista e del regno. Naples: Liguori, 1984.
Del Treppo, Mario, and Alfonso Leone. Amalfi Medioevale. Naples: Giannini, 1977.
Demus, O. The Mosaics of Norman Sicily. London: Routledge and Paul, 1950.
Douglas, D. C. The Norman Achievement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
—. The Norman Fate 1100-1154. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Drell, Joanna. "Family Structure in the Principality of Salerno under Norman Rule." Anglo-Norman Studies, 18, 1996, pp. 79-103.
—. "Cultural Syncretism and Ethnic Identity: The Norman 'Conquest' of Southern Italy and Sicily." Journal of Medieval History, 25(3), 1999, pp. 187-202.
Falkenhausen, V. von. "I ceti dirigenti prenormanni al tempo della costituzione degli stati normanni nell'Italia meridionale e in Sicilia." In Forme di potere e struttura sociale in Italia nel Medioevo, ed. Gabriella Rossetti. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977, pp. 321-377.
—. "I gruppi etnici nel regno di Ruggero II e la loro partecipazione al potere." In Societa, potere, e popolo nell'età di Ruggero II: Atti delle terze Giornate normanno-sveve—Bari, 23—25 maggio 1977. Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1979, pp. 133-156.
Galasso, G. "Social and Political Developments in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." In The Normans in Sicily and Southern Italy: The Lincei Lectures 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Haskins, C. H. "England and Sicily in the Twelfth Century." English Historical Review, 26, 1911, pp. 433-447, 461-465.
Houben, H. "Barbarossa und die Normannen: Tradionelle Züge und neue Perspektiven imperialer Süditalienpolitik." In Friedrich Barbarossa Handlungsspielräume und Wirkungsweisen des Staufischen Kaisers, ed. A. Haverkamp. Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1992, pp. 109-128.
—. "Möglichkeiyrn und Grenzen religiöser Toleranz im normannisch-staufischen Königreigh Sizilien." Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 1, 1994, pp. 159-198.
Jamison, Evelyn. "The Norman Administration of Apulia and Capua, More Especially under Roger II and William I." Papers of the British School at Rome, 6, 1913, pp. 211-481. (2nd ed., 1987, as a separate monograph, ed. D. R. Clementi and T. Kolzer.)
—. "The Administration of the County of Molise in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries." English Historical Review, 44, 1929, pp. 529-539; 45, 1930, pp. 1-34.
—. "The Sicilian Norman Kingdom in the Mind of Anglo-Norman Contemporaries." Proceedings of the British Academy, 24, 1938, pp. 237-285.
Kehr, Karl A. Die Urkunden der normannishc-sizilischen Könige. Innsbruck, 1902. (Reprint, 1962.)
Kitzinger, Ernst. The Mosaics of Monreale. Palermo: S. F. Flaccovio, 1960.
Kreutz, Barbara M. Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
Loud, Graham A. "How 'Norman' Was the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy?" Nottingham Medieval Studies, 25, 1981, pp. 3-34.
—. Church and Society in the Norman Principality of Capua 1058—1197. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
—. "The Abbey of Cava: Its Property and Benefactors in the Norman Era." Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1985, 14, 1986, pp. 143-177.
—. "Churches and Churchmen in an Age of Conquest: Southern Italy, 1030-1130." Haskins Society Journal, 4, 1992, pp. 39-55.
—. "Continuity and Change in Norman Italy: The Campania during the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." Journal of Medieval History, 22(4), 1996, pp. 313-343.
—. Conquerors and Churchmen in Norman Italy. London: Variorum Reprints, 1999a. (Includes most of Loud's essays listed here.)
—. "William the Bad or William the Unlucky? Kingship in Sicily, 1154-1166." Haskins Society Journal, 8, 1999b, pp. 99-113.
Marongiu, Antonio. "A Model State in the Middle Ages: The Norman-Hohenstaufen Kingdom of Sicily." Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4, 1963-1964, pp. 307-321.
—. Byzantine, Norman, Swabian, and Later Institutions in Southern Italy. London: Variorum Reprints, 1972.
Martin, Jean-Marie. "Città e Campagna: Economia e Società (sec. VTI-XIII)." In Storia del Mezzogiorno, Vol. 3, Alto Medioevo. Rome: Edizioni del Sole, 1990, pp. 259-381.
—. La Pouille du VIe au XIIe siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1993.
Matthew, Donald. The Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Ménager, L. R. Hommes et institutions de l'Italie Normande. London: Variorum Reprints, 1981.
Norwich, John Julius. The Other Conquest. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. (Also published as The Normans in the South 1016-1130. London: Longman, 1967 and 1981.)
—. The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194. London: Longman, 1970.
Ramseyer, Valerie. "Ecclesiastical Reorganization in the Province of Salerno." Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1994, 17, 1995, pp. 203-222.
Skinner, Patricia. Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta and Its Neighbours, 850-1139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
—. Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Takayama, Hiroshi. The Administration of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily. Leiden: Brill, 1993.
Taviani-Carozzi, Huguette. La principautè Lombards de Salerne (IXe-XIe s.): Étude sur le pouvoir. Rome: École Française de Rome, 1991.
Travaini, Lucia. La monetazione nell-Italia normanna. Rome: Istituto Scorico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1995.
In medieval Italian society, the notary served vital functions in both public and private life. Usually invested with authority ultimately derived from the emperor, he served popes, bishops, monasteries, the emperor, kings, princes, civic governments, courts, and offices, and the needs of common citizens. The notary composed official correspondence, recorded deliberations and decisions, and drew up the documents that these generated. Often the only literate member of local society, the notary recorded private transactions such as contracts, deeds, donations, and wills. The notaries' guilds, usually organized with lawyers and judges, were among the earliest and most powerful in northern and central Italian cities. Notaries were crucial in the transmission of Roman law after its revival and were instrumental in establishing civic archives and early chronicles. With their access to official papers, they were pioneers in creating document-based secular histories; and their literary interests, with roots in classical Roman culture, spurred developments in both medieval and Renaissance humanism. Steinhoff has noted, "Excluding the profession of the sword, that of the notary was among the earliest, the most self-conscious and certainly the largest in the medieval world" (1976, 1).
The medieval Italian notary was the direct descendant of the later imperial Roman notarius, exceptor, and tabellio. Earlier, scribes (scribae) acted as court recorders and copyists of private and official acts, while the notarius took raw notes (notae) of proceedings in a kind of shorthand. By the fourth century, notarius was a label attached to secretaries in the imperial service. The exceptor had emerged as the official clerk attached to all bureaus and courts and required at all municipal meetings of curiae, whereas tabelliones handled private matters such as wills and contracts without holding any public office. Apparently both exceptors and tabelliones were organized into civic guilds (collegia, scholae), headed by aprimicerius, to ensure the official recording of both public and private acts. Though the tabellio was generally of lower social status, his was a position with potentially high mobility; and the official positions often drew young nobles.
The earliest known regulation of the acts of tabelliones was in the forty-fourth and seventy-seventh novellae of Emperor Justinian's law code (Corpus juris civilis, 536—538). These required the actual presence of the tabellio as a witness to the proceedings, as well as the recording of the names of other witnesses, dating by regnal and consular year and indiction, inclusion of a completio in which the tabellio claimed responsibility for the document, and signatures by witnesses. These requirements were soon ignored in the non-Byzantine western empire, but they were resurrected and reapplied along with much of the rest of Justinian's code in the eleventh century.
In the early Christian church, notaries served bishops and monasteries and were important as correspondents in the doctrinal battles of the third and fourth centuries. Constantine himself created scholae of notaries under primicerii for bishops and their courts. In Rome, perhaps as early as the first century, seven subdeacons were chosen "faithfully to collect the deeds of the martyrs," according to Liber pontificalis. Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604) organized papal notarii or scrmarii into a schola; Gregory's registers demonstrate that they were responsible for recording correspondence, ordinations, privileges, donations, synodal acta, and matters relating to the patrimonium of Saint Peter, as well as serving as papal advisers, diplomats, and envoys. At about this time, the papal chancery, archive, and library were organized around their efforts.
In the wake of the Germanic invasions, Roman law and its roles for notaries remained intact in Byzantine areas, though bishops usually inherited even the civil aspects of administration and the Greek language often replaced Latin. The notarius ecclesiae came to fill private and ecclesiastical functions, both drawing up and recording documents. The dramatic shifts in civic culture and government certainly reduced the supply of and demand for notarial services. By the eighth century, the terms tabellio and exceptor had disappeared in Germanic northern Italy, though in the Ostrogothic and Lombard periods these functions were continued by scriptores and notaries. The notarius civitatis ("of the city") served Lombard kings and nobles in their courts; notarii ecclesiae continued to aid bishops, abbots, and some of the public. These two kinds of notaries attended the same episcopal schools, and Petrucci (1958) believes that the existence of ecclesiastical notaries led to the demand for secular ones. Unorganized and unregulated "lay notaries" (publici notarii) handled private matters, since the Lombards did not practice insinuation, the official recording of private notarial acts. From the late 600s on, significant organizations of notaries (and probably notarial education) existed in Pavia, Cremona, Milan, Lucca, and, of course, Rome and Ravenna.
The Carolingians' taste for order and uniformity dictated changes during the ninth and tenth centuries. Under Charlemagne, church notaries were raised in status to the diaconate or priesthood, and the notariate became a stepping-stone to higher church office. These men also continued to serve as public notaries until the twelfth century and the full emergence of a lay notariate. Charlemagne mandated that every bishop, abbot, and count employ a notary, appointed by himself if necessary. He thus accepted and altered Lombard practice, formalized it, and spread it to the rest of his empire. His own secretaries were the cancellarii; and notaries, such as Paul the Deacon, served him in other ways. Paul was trained at Pavia, was chancellor to the Lombard king Desiderius, wrote the History of the Lombards, taught at the Prankish palace school (782—787), and may have been responsible for reform of the notarial system. The famous missi dominici oversaw the work of comital (counts') and episcopal notaries, who, under Louis the Pious, were drawn specifically from the noble class. Under Lothair I, imperial law regulated notarial practice of both cancellarii (now episcopal or comital) and private notaries, and limited the geographic jurisdiction within which one could operate.
Imperial Ravenna, and perhaps other Byzantine sectors in Italy, retained separate scholae of imperial notaries, ecclesiastical notaries, and tabelliones. With the fall of the Exarchate, imperial notaries all but disappeared until the revival of Roman law, with nonauthorized tabelliones absorbing most of their legal jurisdiction and function. During the eleventh century and the early twelfth century, attempts to bring the tabellionate under imperial purview were resisted and failed at Ravenna, though by the thirteenth century many professionals styled themselves notarius et tabellio, combining both functions in their practice. By the thirteenth century, even the Ravennati adopted the title "notary by imperial authority," and the retrograde tabellionate slowly dissolved. The ecclesiastical notariate in Ravenna retained its position until the twelfth century, but it did not interfere in the sphere of the secular notariate. During the 1100s, the lay tabellionate absorbed most of the functions of the church notary, even running Ravenna's episcopal chancery by 1127. Elsewhere in Italy, where it had survived, the independent ecclesiastical notariate likewise slowly disappeared; in Lucca, the comital notariate replaced it during the Carolingian period; and in Bologna, home of the revived imperial legal tradition, the bishop's last clerical notary died in 1133. Even in Rome, lay notaries gained in importance, and in 1211 Pope Innocent III declared that no notary in a church court could hold major orders (a restriction much argued against afterward).
In southern Italy, many areas that fell to the Arabs lost the Latin notarial tradition; and some—such as Puglia, Calabria, and Lucania—held to Greco-Byzantine practice. Areas retaining Latin-Lombard traditions used the notarius, but he may have drawn his authority from the palace, church, monastery, or even city; or he may have been itinerant, without official authority. During the tenth century, Naples mantained a clear organization of curiali (notaries) in a collegio under a primarius aided by a talndarius. Documents were often drawn up by discipuli, who may have been apprentices, but only the curiale could apply the completio. Amalfi, under the Neapolitan duke, followed a similar though looser pattern of organization. Scribae civitatis, as they were originally denoted, became curiali by c. 1000. Many may have worked only part time, as most surviving documents are dated the first or the fifteenth of the month; and, though persons who were not curiali did draw up documents, there was no clear caste of discipuli. Gaeta retained the scriba civitatis, though mixing Greek with Latin traditions and clerical with secular functions and statuses. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, titles included presbyter (priest) et notarius civitatis and Leo greco-latinus presbyter et scriba civitatis, though by the early twelfth century a simple notarius civitatis would do.
The Normans initially left much intact in the southern Latin areas, while trying to impose Latin forms and practice in the Greco-Byzantine and Arab-dominated regions. Gradually, the king, and later the emperor (from Henry IV to Frederick II), was recognized as the source of notarial authority. Norman kings also regularized disparate practices in handwriting, the use and registration of professional notarial insignia (signum), and the presence of signatory witnesses. As a result, the prestige and position of the notary were enhanced. The Constitutions of Melfi, promulgated by Frederick II, went further, requiring clear handwriting (communem et legibilem), the use of long-lasting parchment, and clear signatures by witnesses (preferably "with knowledge of letters") and the notary; Frederick II also, however, required the signature of a judge on each document. This might be considered a check to the notary's professional evolution, though the practice waned, especially by the fourteenth century, when many judges could sign only X or +. The Angevins and Aragonese introduced essentially minor changes and refinements.
In the north, late and post-Carolingian anarchy led to a localized notariate that operated under scant official authorization until the mid-tenth century. Two kings—Hugh and Berengar—recentralized the profession, and the Ottonians (963-1024) further standardized and organized it. The source of notarial authority remained an issue, however, and in Pistoia as late as 940 there were both royal notaries (notaii domni regis) and imperial notaries (notaii domni imperatoris). With the eclipse of Italian kingship, the formula imperiali auctoritate notarius ("notary by imperial authority") became standard (also in the south during Frederick II's reign); it remained in force until the modern era. The emperor's authority flowed through the counts palatine and eventually through lesser nobles, civic governments (e.g., Parma in 962), monasteries, and bishops (who were his vassals). With the Gregorian reform movement and the clashes between the papacy and the emperors during the later eleventh century, popes also claimed ultimate authority over ecclesiastical and Roman notaries, which flowed through the apostolic protonotary to the notaries or bishops. The notary thus took on a fully public role, acting as a third party to private acts with "magistrate's authority" and giving "public faith" to the acts thus recorded; this representative of public authority (not merely local but ultimately imperial) wrote up, dated, signed, and sealed the documents that regulated an enormous range of personal as well as official interactions. These documents came to have the essential force of statute in reference to the individuals involved.
This development proceeded with the revival of Roman law and organized civic life in the eleventh century. Gregorian reform sought to clarify the lines between secular and ecclesiastical matters; e.g., keeping lay notaries away from church business, and maintaining papal authority over church notaries. The "rediscovery" of Corpus juris civilis and its application to the legal and notarial professions laid the foundation for uniform practice in civil matters, just as the roughly contemporary development of canon law did for ecclesiastical legal business. Notaries had always retained certain elements of official or ceremonial rhetoric for use in their documents, but there now began to emerge from ars dictamini—or literature on the art of letter writing—a branch devoted to typically notarial matters known as ars notariae. A book containing models for use in constructing documents—salutations, forms of address, legalistic formulae, phrasing of the completio—came to be known as a "formulary" (formularium instrumentorum notariorum). The earliest example may have been the papal Liber diurnus (late seventh century—eighth century), which contained 100 canonical formulae. The civil law, as adjusted and applied by such legal scholars as Guarnerius and Irnerius, who wrote the earliest civil formulary (Formularium tabellionum), and as adopted by reforming cities, required uniform verbal expression by men trained in this art, and training required more than simply models. The earliest secular manuals with wide circulation date from the thirteenth century: twenty-four formularies survive from 1200-1250; and Boncompagno da Signa (died c. 1235) wrote treatises on wills, statutes, and privileges. But the earliest summa artis notarii that combined elements of both, covering all aspects of notarial practice, was by Ranieri da Perugia (1223-1245), and the best and longest-lasting was by Rolandino de' Passeggeri (1255), who defined the notarial art as simply "the writing down in authentic form of the lawful business of men in a finished and rational document."
From the eleventh century on, as cities reemerged and grew, notaries played major roles in their "elaboration of government and ordering of social life." From the beginnings of the communal movements, notaries were leaders in challenging older feudal and ecclesiastical authorities and establishing new governments. Their literacy, legal expertise, close connections with lawyers and judges, and traditional roles in Roman municipal governments ensured that they would occupy high civic positions. Communal regimes and their offices required the services of notaries as letter writers, record keepers, and statute framers. When factions of the popolo overthrew the older civic oligarchies in the thirteenth century, the generally lower-class notaries—often the best-educated and most articulate laymen in the movement—played vital parts, as illustrated by the later career of Rolandino de' Passeggeri. Later, however, the notary's conservatism often shone through in his support of the stablizing one man rule that characterized the northern and central Italian signorie of the fourteenth century.
A city's chief notary was the chancellor (cancelliere), who had authority over all lesser notaries and who served the needs of the civic executive. Every level of government, every office with official functions, every court, and every guild employed at least one notary, as did ecclesiastical and quasi-public institutions such as hospitals and universities. Notaries recorded the minutes of meetings, carried on correspondence, and handled virtually all routine legal matters. In Florence, the notaio delle riformagioni authenticated and attested to all communal legislation, and every ambassador relied on a notary to draw up official documents. In maritime mercantile cities such as Genoa and Pisa, notaries tended to be fewer per capita than elsewhere, perhaps owing to higher rates of general literacy, but they played key roles in both commerce and diplomacy. In Genoa, they served as scribes for commanders of galley fleets; as companions for ambassadors; on the staffs of the city's creditor organizations, the compere; and as officials for the Genoese colonies in the eastern Mediterranean. For both communes and signorie, they formed essentially a civil service that was vital to urban government and provided continuity whatever the changes in regimes. In 1327, the city government ofModena employed fifty-one notaries, and Perugia had 108 on its payroll in 1381.
Part of their power in society stemmed from their organization into guilds, often combined with the very highly regarded judges and lawyers. In cities with law schools, such as Bologna and Padua, however, the guilds were kept separate. Lawyers and judges were products of university training and often came from noble families, whereas notaries were usually commoners who had attended local schools or merely served apprenticeships. In either case, their guilds regulated all aspects of notarial life, from training and entry into the profession to the collection of a deceased notary's books. They established uniform procedures, protocols, fees, examinations, forms for records, and ethical standards, and set them down in their statutes.
Guild organization reflected communal organization (or perhaps vice versa), as demonstrated by the case of Florence. The guild of judges and notaries was established by 1212, though it may have existed as early as 1190 or even 1150. The head of the guild was the proconsul, at times necessarily a notary. He had to be at least thirty-six-years old and a guild member for at least ten years. He served for six months, during which time he lived in his own palazzo in Via del Proconsolo. Eight consuls—at one time two judges and six notaries, at another time all judges—aided the proconsul and arbitrated disputes. During their four-month terms, they lived in a modest residence in Via de' Pandolfini. At the end of their terms, they underwent an audit or scrutinio to ensure that they had carried out their duties honestly and ethically. A treasurer and provisor, both notaries elected to four-month terms, handled guild funds and guild property, respectively, and were likewise scrutinized. There was also an advisor)' council of ten notaries and six judges, and a larger council for special matters. In the later thirteenth century, notaries and judges voted on major issues first as separate groups and then as a body, in the church of San Piero Scheraggio.
In many, perhaps most, cases, the Italian notary had a notary for a father. Some notaries employed private tutors while others sent their sons to monastic school for a basic education. By the thirteenth century, many cities had both grammar and notarial schools supported by the commune. Bologna alone required university courses (directed by the arts faculty rather than the law faculty). Apprenticeship might replace formal education, with a quick trip through grammar and concentration on ars dictaminis and then on ars notariae. Pisa's guild required a four-year apprenticeship including at least four years of Latin. Both Siena and Florence mandated a minimum of two years of formal training or apprenticeship. Bergamo required only one year and a minimum age of eighteen. In Florence, one could enter the guild between the ages of seventeen and twenty with a dispensation but would normally enter after age twenty. A Florentine candidate was examined by four notaries and a lawyer in separate tests on Latin and vernacular Italian, handwriting, and knowledge of legal documents. Induction cost eight florins, and the new notary had to post a "guarantee" worth 200 lire. In the Romagna, the imperial representative presented the new notary with a deed of authority, they exchanged a "kiss of peace," and the initiate swore an oath of fidelity over the Gospels. The notary also registered his personal signum and adopted the formal title ser.
In 1291, the Florentine guild had some 575 members, with 376 working in the city itself. At about the same time, Milan had roughly 1,500; Padua 600; and Genoa only 200; but Bologna had nearly 2,000 active notaries. In Prato in 1339, of 139 heads of households whose professions were listed, 102 were notaries. In Florence's catasto of 1427, notary is the largest professional class. The mere numbers suggest the importance of the occupation, and also that it was highly competitive. In fact, many notaries held other jobs as well, the most important of which, arguably, was teacher of grammar. The typical notary, as notary, made a meager living from drawing up documents (sometimes fees were based on the value of the transaction), which he could augment in a number of ways both legal-ethical and not. He could forge documents or gain inside knowledge of "deals"—for example, when an institution was about to sell rather cheaply land that it held. As frequent communal officeholders, notaries could benefit from the perquisites of their positions and from the political connections they made. Cities that used tax farming, like Lucca, often awarded these lucrative contracts to notaries. Wealthy merchants and bankers made excellent clients who exploited their notary's social and professional connections, and sometimes became excellent patrons who shared valuable information or opportunities with their notaries. Some notaries purposely relocated: when a city had a large colony of merchants elsewhere—as Florence and Siena had in Avignon during the fourteenth century, or Genoa had in Pera or Caffa, or Venice had in Constantinople—one could always find notaries from the home city there.
Legal formulizations increasingly encroached on most aspects of private life, and these were controlled by the notaries. As Larner (1965) puts it, "all economic life flowed through the pages of his cartulary": agreements for dowry, marriage, wet-nursing, house painting, commercial partnerships, mercantile insurance arrangements, large donations to churches—virtually any written arrangement between two unrelated people required or was strengthened by the services of a notary. Not least important was a person's testamento (last will), whose terms could conceivably have been shaped by the notary (who could not, however, draw up any document that benefited himself).
The importance of the notary in Italian culture is immeasurable, not least in shaping its literary elements. Nearly all the earliest civic chronicles were begun and maintained by notaries who had the requisite verbal skills and access to the highest levels of government and society. This advanced the sense of civic identity and pride that led directly to the "civic humanism" of the late fourteenth century and its foundation in accurate historical reconstruction. By the thirteenth century, many chroniclers were illustrating their works with official documents from their civic archives, a practice that expanded to include large numbers of charters, letters, and statutes as a basis for expounding a city's history. The notary's early exposure to and continual use of classical rhetoric sometimes developed into literary interests in Roman writers, eventuating in a rehabilitation of Cicero the rhetorician (and lawyer, to Petrarch's horror). The emphasis on facts rather than fantasy, on lay civic culture rather than courtly or ecclesiastical culture, and on classical rhetoric rather than scholastic philosophy led directly to the Renaissance. The list of Florentine notaries with notable literary achievements is long indeed and includes Latini, Salutati, Bruni, and Machiavelli.
From the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) on, church court sessions required the presence of a notary (clerk) as a neutral third party, and copies of relevant documents were given to both parties "to protect the innocent party against judges who are imprudent and dishonest," as the council stated. The notaries went by various titles—notarius, tabellio, clericus, mandatus curie—and the permanent register of court documents was kept by the notarius deputatus ad acta scribenda. The Avignonese period saw the establishment of the Rota appeals court, with its demand for notaries; and the first official ecclesiastical Fortnularium notariorum (1327), the ultimate source for all later church formularies.
See also Albertino Mussato; Brunetto Latini; Guilds; Law: Roman; Rolando de' Passeggeri; Rolandino of Padua
JOSEPH P. BYRNE
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Leicht, Pier Silverio. "Formulari notarili nell'Italia settentrionale." In Melanges Fitting. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1969, pp. 49—59.
Lombardo, A., ed. Nicola di Boateriis; notaio in Famagosta e Venezia (1355—1365). Venice: Il Comitato, 1973. (Commentary and a transcription of his protocol book.)
Lori Sanfilippo, Isa. "I protocolli notarili romani del trecento." Archivio della Societa Romana di Storia Patria, 110, 1988, pp. 99-150.
Masi, G,, ed. Formularium florentinum artis notariae (1220-1242). Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1943.
Orlandelli, Gianfranco. "Genesi dell'ars notariae nel secolo XIII." Studi Medievali, 3(6), 1965, 329-366.
Petrucci, A. Notarii: Documenti per la storia del notariato italiano. Milan: Giuffrè, 1958.
Pilone, Rosaria, and Cristina Carbonetti, eds. Amalfi: Sergio de Amoruczo 1361-1398. Cartulari Notarili Campani. Naples: Edizioni Athena, 1994.
Sighinolfi, Lino. "Salatiele e la sua ars notariae." Studi e Memorie per la Storia dell'Università di Bologna, 4, 1920, pp. 67-149.
Sparti, Aldo, ed. Il registro del notaio ericino Giovanni Maiorano, 1297-1300. Palermo: Accademia di Scienze, Lettere, e Arti, 1982. (Sicily.)
Zaccaro, Adele. Il cartulario di Benetto da Fosdinovo (1340-1341). Genoa, 1970.
Betto, Bianca, "Un statuto del collegio notarile di Treviso del 1324." In Contributi dell'Istituto di storia medioevale. Milan: Publicazioni dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1968, pp. 10-59.
Calleri, S. L'arte dei giudici e notai di Firenze nell'età comunale e nel suo statuto del 1344. Milan: Giuffrè, 1966.
Catoni, Giuliano. Statuti senesi dell'arte dei giudici e notai del secolo XIV. Rome: Il Centra di Ricerca, 1972.
Faccioli, Giovanni. Della corporazione dei notai di Verona e il suo codice statutario del 1268. Verona: Lesinia, 1953.
Pecorelli, Corrado. Statuti notarilipiacentini del XIVs ecolo. Milan: Giuffrè, 1971.
Sarti, Nicoletta. Gli statuti della Società dei notai di Bologna dell'anno 1336: Contributo alia storia di una corporazione cittadina. Milan: Giuffrè, 1988.
Scarazzini, Giuseppi. Statuti notarili di Bergamo (sec. XIII). Rome: Consiglio Nazionale del Notariato, 1977.
Tamba, Giorgio. La Società dei notai di Bologna. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1988.
Zabbia, Marino. "Notariato e memoria storica: Le scritture storiografiche notarile nella città nell'Italia settentrionale (sec. XII-XIV)." Bullettino dell'Istituto Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, 97, 1991, pp. 75-122.
Novara is the name of a city, diocese, and province in the Po valley (today Piedmont), west of Milan. Ancient Novaria, founded by the Romans during the second century B.C., lay on a road from Milan by way of Vercelli to Ivrea. Of the original Roman walls built in the first century after Christ, a few remains still exist.
The legend of the first bishop of the city, Saint Gaudentius, reflects the Christianization of Novara during the fourth century. Novara is the only diocese in northwestern Italy which has a complete register of all bishops since the introduction of Christianity. Therefore, one may assume that Novara remained an episcopal see even in the confusion of late antiquity and of the Lombard kingdom. Bishop Adalgisus (r. 830—848) founded the cathedral-of Santa Maria and the collegiate church of San Gaudenzio. Privileges of Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian emperors protected the position of the bishops of Novara. The existence of a cathedral school in Novara and cultural contacts with the realm north of the Alps (Reichenau, Wurzburg) are proved for the tenth century. Today, the library of the cathedral chapter still has an important collection of medieval manuscripts.
The long supremacy of the bishops over the city and province of Novara was gradually replaced by the rule of the commune in the twelfth century (in 1139 we find the first reference to consules). The cityscape was also modified considerably in this century. After the destruction of Novara in 1110 by the emperor Henry V, the city entered a time of economic prosperity. The city walls were rebuilt first, followed by several ecclesiastical buildings and the first communal palace (domus consulum, 1178). Moreover, numerous channels were excavated in the countryside surrounding Novara. In the major political conflicts, Novara was initially on the side of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa; however, in 1168, the city joined the Lombard League under the leadership of Milan. Thereafter, the connection with its immediate and predominant neighbor, Milan, remained a constant factor in Novarese politics. Equally permanent was the antagonism of Novara toward the city of Vercelli—after the counts of Biandrate had lost their position as the most important feudal power in that region—which was caused by competing territorial interests in the Sesia valley. After the Milanese were defeated by the troops of Frederick II at Cortenuova (1237), Novara was associated with the Swabian emperor for a short period. In the long term, however, the city came inexorably under the influence of Milanese expansionist politics. The various podestà, who ruled in Novara from 1185 on (initially sporadically, but after 1200 regularly), came almost exclusively from Milan. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the estimated population of Novara was approximately 3,000 to 5,000. In that period, the internal conflicts over supremacy in Milan (among the Delia Torre and Visconti) spread to Novara as well. The codification of the statutes of Novara dates from this time (1277). In 1332, bishop Giovanni Visconti incorporated the city into Milanese territory, and Novara thus became part of the late medieval and early modern territorial state of Milan.
See also Milan
THOMAS BEHRMANN
Andenna, Giancarlo. Andar per castelli: Da Novara tutto intorno. Turin, 1982.
—. "Honor et ornamentum civitatis: Trasformazioni urbane a Novara tra XIII e XVI secolo." In Museo Novarese: Documenti studi e progetti per una nuova immagine delle collezioni civiche, ed. Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli. Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1987, pp. 50-73.
Behrmann, Thomas. Domkapitel und Schriftlichkeit in Novara (11-13. Jahrhundert): Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte von Santa Maria und San Gaudenzio im Spiegel der urkundlichen Überlieferung. Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 77. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994.
Bullough, Donald A. "Le scuole cattedrali e la cultura dell'Italia settentrionale prima dei Comuni." In Vescovi e diocesi in Italia nel Medioevo (sec. IX-X1II): Atti del II Convegno di storia della Chiesa in Italia. Italia Sacra, 5. Padua: Antenore, 1964, pp. 111-143.
Cau, Ettore. "Scrittura e cultura a Novara, secoli VIII-X." Ricerche Medievali, 6-9, 1971-1974, pp. 1-87.
Cognasso, Francesco. Storia di Novara. Novara: Libreria Lazzarelli, 1971.
Hermes, Raimund. "Totius libertatis patrona": Die Kommune Mailand in Reich und Region während der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999.
Keller, Hagen. "Origine sociale e formazione del clero cattedrale dei secoli XI e XII nella Germania e nell'Italia settentrionale." In Le istituzioni ecclesiastiche della "Societas Christiana" dei secoli XI—XII: Diocesi, pievi, e parrocchie—Atti della sesta Settimana internazionale di studio, Milano, 1-7 settembre 1974. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1977, pp. 136-186.
—. Adelsherrscbafi und städtische Gesellschaft in Oberitalien, 9-12. Jahrbundert. Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, 52. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979. (See also Italian version: Signori e vassalli nell'Italia delle città, secoli IX-XII. Turin, 1995.)
Motta, Maria. "Novara medioevale: Problemi di topografia urbana tra fonti scritte e documentazione archeologica." Memorie dell'Istituto Lombardo—Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, 38, 1983-1987, pp. 167-348.
Novara e la sua terra nei secoli XI e XII: Storia, documenti, architettura, ed. Maria Laura Gavazzoli Tomea. Milan, 1980.
Framed collections of tales from the orient (Kalileh and Dimnah or Directorium humanae vitae, Disciplina dericalis, The Panchatantra or History of the Seven Sages) and collections of exemplary anecdotes for use by preachers were circulating in Europe before 1300; but the novella as an Italian literary genre came to prominence with Boccaccio's Decameron (1350—1351). The popularity of this collection of tales, with its framing narrative and its appealing combination of popular and literary elements, encouraged many imitators throughout the following centuries. By c. 1400, the novelle of Sacchetti, Sercambi, and ser Giovanni Fiorentino, all influenced by Boccaccio, had appeared.
Novelle could mean "news," as in Sacchetti's anecdotes of recent events, or "new and strange things" as in the more fantastic tales of ser Giovanni Fiorentino. Thus novelle include both historically true and fabulous material. Within the variety of topics—and variety was one of the aesthetic principles of these collections—several themes, often humorous or satirical, predominate: the hypocrisy, lust, and avarice of friars and other clergy; the clever deceitfulness of women; practical jokes or witty replies; and love stories, realistic or romantic, tragic or comic, moralizing or wish-fulfilling.
Not all collections were bound by a narrative frame, but many were. The framing tale is often a "disaster"—a plague, flood, snowstorm, or exile—during which a small group of people cheer each other up with stories. Recreation through tales and songs was recommended by doctors to maintain the balance of humors important for health, and thus especially as an antidote during times of plague or distress. Even Sacchetti, who does not use a frame, offers his tales as a recreative moment for people living in stress or sorrow.
Oral and popular sources remain important for the genre, which never aspires to anything beyond a modest literary status. Even within the written books there remains at least a fiction of orality, as the tales are told aloud by members of a group to one other. We know from other descriptions of social gatherings and street-corner entertainers that such stories were indeed often read or told aloud and commented on by the audience, just as happens within the book.
See also Boccaccio, Giovanni; Pecorone Il; Sacchetti, Franco; Sercambi, Giovanni
JANET LEVARIE SMARR
Battaglia, Salvatore. Contributi alia storia delta novellistica. Naples: R. Pironti, 1947.
Besthorn, Rudolf. Urspmng und Eigenart der dlteren italienischen Novelle. Halle: Niemeyer, 1935.
Borlenghi, Aldo. La struttura e il carattere delta novella italiana dei primi secoli. Milan: La Goliardica, 1958.
Clements, Robert, and Joseph Gibaldi. Anatomy of the Novella. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
Di Francia, Letterio. Novellistica. Milan: F. Vallardi, 1924.
Keightley, Thomas. Tales and Popular Fictions: Their Resemblance and Transmission from Country to Country. London: Whittaker, 1834.
Leeker, Joachim. "Zwischen Belehrung und Unterhaltung: die Erzahlung in der italienischen Literatur des Duecento." Romantisches Jahrbuch, 41, 1990, pp. 79-97.
Nelson, William. Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Neuschäfer, Hans-Jorg. Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle: Strukturen der Kurzerzählung auf der Schwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969.
Olson, Glending. Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Porcelli, Bruno. Novellieri italiani dal Sacchetti al Basile. Ravenna: Longo, 1969.
Rotunda, Dominic Peter. Motif Index of the Italian Novella in Prose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1942.
Smarr, Janet, Italian Renaissance Tales. Rochester, N.Y.: Solaris, 1983, pp. xiii-xxxiv.
Stewart, Pamela. "Boccaccio e la tradizione retorica: La definizione della novella come genere letterario." Stanford Italian Review, 1, 1979, pp. 67-74.
Svmonds. John Addington. "The Novellieri." In Renaissance in Italy, Vol. 2. New York: Modern Library, 1935, pp. 199-229.
Il novellino, an anonymous collection of tales, untitled in most manuscripts, was written in Florence between 1280 and the early 1300s. Its stories are drawn from a wide range of sources including the Bible; classical mythology; Persian and Arabic collections of stories; medieval chivalric stories; miracle legends and lives of saints; and historical anecdotes from Valerius Maximus, Vincent de Beauvais, and the History of Charlemagne. In Il novellino. Narcissus, Lancelot, Jesus, Cato, Nebuchadnezzar, Frederick II, Saladin, Trajan, and Saint Gregory mingle with courtiers, lawyers, servants, and street vendors in brief but lively anecdotes, witticisms, and moral tales. The preface suggests that they are offered to enliven the conversation of people who do not know good stories of their own; and one manuscript and an edition of 1572 call the work "the book of tales and fine gentle speech." The various fourteenth- to sixteenth-century manuscripts and sixteenth-century editions differ in the number, selection, and order of tales. The first printed edition (1525) was encouraged by Pietro Bembo, who owned a manuscript (now in the Vatican) and liked comparing it to Boccaccio's Decameron. Thus, its first printed title was The Hundred Old Tales (Le cento novelle antiche), with reference to Boccaccio's later hundred stories. The collection must have been popular before then, for tales from it appear in the writings of Dante (Purgatory, 10.73-93), Boccaccio (Decameron, 1.3 and 1.9), Chaucer ("Pardoner's Tale"), and others.
See also Boccaccio, Giovanni; Novella
JANET LEVARIE SMARR
The Hundred Old Tales, trans. Edward Storer, New York: Dutton, 1925.
Il novellino, ed. Guido Favati. Genoa: Fratelli Bozzi, 1970.
The Novellino, or, One Hundred Ancient Tales, ed. and trans. Joseph P. Consoli. New York: Garland, 1997.
Battaglia, Salvatore. "Premesse per una valutazione del Novellino." Filologia Romanza, 2.4(8), 1955, pp. 259-336.
Cuomo, Luisa. "Sillogizzare mottegiando e motteggiare sillogizzando: Dal Novellino alia VI giornata del Decameron." Studi sul Boccaccio, 13, 1981-1982, pp. 217-265.
D'Ancona, Alessandro. "Del Novellino e delle sue fonti." In Studi di critica e storia letteraria, Vol. 2. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912, pp. 2-163.
Genot, Gérard, and Paul Larivaille. Etude du Novellino, Vol. 1, Répertoires des structures narratives. Nanterre: Université de Paris, 1987.
Hall, Joan. "The Organization of the Novellino." Italian Studies, 39, 1984, pp. 6-26.
—. " 'Bel Parlare' and Authorial Narration in the Novellino." Italian Studies, 44, 1989, pp. 1-18.
Lo Nigro, Sebastiano. "Per il testo del Novellino." Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 141, 1964, pp. 1-102.
Monteverdi, Angelo. "Che cos'è il Novellino." In Studi e Saggi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli. Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1954, pp. 127-165.
Paolella, Alfonso. "Modi e forme del Witz nel Novellino." Strumenti Critici, 12, 1978, pp. 213-235.
Throughout the Middle Ages, numbers were deemed to possess a symbolic order of meaning, having the power to reveal divine truths by means of a rational calculus. Because numbers supposedly contained the hidden truths of God's creation, medieval philosophers and theologians sought in their writings to show precisely how the structure of the universe and the course of human events through time revealed God's shaping hand. In the Bible, numbers were mystical signs that pointed to eternal truths and at the same time served to demonstrate to the intelligent mind the perfection and order of God's plan (Isidore, Liber numerorum). A compelling form of allegoresis or symbolism, numerology, in reality more an art than a science, had the power to induce delight in divine creation and belief in the creator's purpose. Theologians cited the Bible in support of the notion that numbers symbolized eternal truths, the fundamental passage in this regard being Wisdom 11:21—omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti ("thou hast ordered all things in measure, number, and weight"). Augustine, who did more to endorse the acceptance of numerology in the west than any other theologian, adverts to these verses approvingly in The City of God (11.30). By the High Middle Ages, number science had become fully established by the biblical exegesis of numerous theologians, foremost among them Hugh of Saint Victor, who defined the symbolic computational properties of numbers in Exegetica 15 (Patrologia Latina, 175.22); and by the arithmology of Martianus Capella (De nuptiis), Isidore of Seville (Liber numerorum), and Rabanus Maurus (De nurnero). This tradition was familiar to those who wrote in the vernacular as well as in Latin and for secular as well as religious purposes, but all writers shared a belief in the power of numbers to endorse and reinforce acceptance of ethical values. Numbers, then, were signs of good and evil; and the perceptive reader of world of nature (res) or the fictive realm of a written text (verba) could take from them both moral instruction and aesthetic delight in deciphering God's truths or a poet s vision. Number symbolism was virtually a sacred science.
Ail numbers, in theory, were thought capable of expressing symbolic meaning, but some more than others acquired special and enduring significance, to the extent that their symbolic properties became conventional among medieval thinkers and writers. The symbolic significance of the numbers 1 through 10 is virtually universal, with 1, 3, 7, 8, and 10 having special value. The primal number 1 signifies unity, which is God the creator; 3 signifies the Trinity; 7 is the number of creation and by extension life and the world itself, thereby symbolizing completeness and perfection, because God created the universe in seven days; 8 is the number of resurrection and salvation, because it goes one beyond the number of terrestrial life; and 10 is the number of perfection, because it is the base on which all numbers are built.
If the creator ordered his universe according to numerical patterns, the writer can express and endorse these truths in writing by imitating his procedure. Numbers have not simply aesthetic import but philosophical and theological significance: they have the power to convey hidden truths. Hence all aspects of the form of a literary work have potential meaning: the number of books in a work, verses in a stanza, or characters in a scene; the relation of any part to the whole; the time that events take place; etc. Number symbolism works by analogy, symmetry, and association; consequently, identifying the presence of a numerical feature in a literary work has the power to invoke a full set of ideas and ethical values.
Systematic use of numerological significance in medieval Italy is most evident in the works of the tre corone—Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch—and it reaches its most complex and highly developed form of expression, as is well known, in Dante. For all three writers, numerological patterns prevail in their vernacular rather than their Latin works, and each uses numbers to create or reinforce a particular symbolic order of meaning.
Dante's love of numbers begins with his love for Beatrice. Vita nuova establishes her identity with the number 9, the square of 3. The poet-lover repeatedly discovers that important moments in her life and their relationship are related to the number 9. He first sees her when both are in their ninth year; he does not see her again until another nine years have passed; she dies in 1290, the ninth decade of the century. In chapter 29, Dante discloses that she is related to the number 9 because she is related to the harmony of the creation itself, which has nine heavens, and to the Trinity, which is fattore per sé medesimo del nove ("the sole factor of nine," Vita nuova, 29.3). This association, which makes her a miracolo ("miracle"), affiliates her directly with the divinity. The term miracolo should be understood in its theological sense, as an external demonstration or sign of divine revelation. The root of the number 9 is, moreover, a structural feature of the book. As Charles Norton noticed more than a century ago, the placement of the thirty-one poems of Vita nuova reveals a conscious pattern based on the number 3. There are three and only three complete canzoni, so arranged that the second occupies the precise numerical center of the work and defines a chias tic (i.e., characterized by chiasmus) ordering of all the poems: ten poems, first canzone, four poems, second canzone, four poems, third canzone, ten poems. This symmetrical arrangement, which places the poet's vision of Beatrice's death at the poetic center, thematically relating it to Christ's death and resurrection, turns on the number 3, the number of the Trinity. This pattern underwent some refinement in the hands of Singleton (1965), who argued that it was better to view the first set of ten poems as 1 + 9 and the last set as 9 + 1, and the center pane! of four poems, the second canzone, and four succeeding poems as a 9. His eventual pattern, 1 + 9 + 1 + 9 + 1 + 9 + 1, had its own elegance and suggestiveness, but the logic for such a division lacks the kind of strong internal evidence that one finds in Norton's pattern. Gorni (1990) has proposed an entirely different structure based on a revised edition of the text that posits three sequences oi nine chapters (novene), followed by a coda of four chapters. This pattern stresses the centrality and interrelation of both 3 and 9, the numbers of the Trinity and of Beatrice, in a poetic context that has numerous thematic symmetries. The point of all such numerological patterning is, of course, that Beatrice's relation to Christ as the divinity is inescapable and the work of the divinity itself, not the poet.
The Convivio, which Dante wrote a decade after Vita nuova, appears to be little indebted to number symbolism, although the structure is clearly governed by the number 5 and its multiple 15. There were to have been fifteen trattati (treatises, or books): an introduction and fourteen others. Interestingly, all books except the first are based on the number 15. The second and third each have fifteen chapters; the fourth has thirty and is clearly divided thematically into two halves of fifteen each.
It is in the Cominedia that we find the most sustained symbolic use of numerological principles. Its 100 cantos, symbolizing the totality and perfection of the universe (the perfect number 10 multiplied by its own perfection), break down into three major parts, or canticles (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), which in turn divide into cantos (nearly) equally distributed among them (34 + 33 + 33). Critics traditionally view the slightly greater number of cantos in Inferno as 1 + 33, the first canto being a prologue or introduction recounting events that take place before the journey through the other world has begun. Indeed, its last line, Allor si mosse, e io li tenni dietro ("Then he moved, and I followed after him," 1.136), seems to define the moment of departure. Further support for isolating the first canto is the fact that the invocation to the muses, which is placed in the first canto of each of the other two realms, appears only in Canto 2 of Inferno (2.7-9), thereby creating a precise numerical correspondence among the three realms.
The number 33, which invests the formal structure of the cantos, reappears in the next lower level of poetic division, the terza rima, a stanzaic form invented by Dante and based on a triple rhyme that binds each of the 14,233 hendecasyllabic verses of the poem. Just as each canticle contains thirty-three canti (plus the prologue of Inferno), so each terzina contains thirty-three syllables (3 X 11). The constituent parts of the Commedia, then, give a privileged place to the numbers 3 and 33—the sign of the Trinity and one of its most important multiples, since Christ died at the age of thirty-three. The poem marks the presence of Christ's death in every succeeding terzina, a death that signals the possibility of resurrection and eternal salvation. The poem's length—14,233 verses—itself records the presence of Christ's sacrifice in the last two digits. (Dante even divides his Letter to Cangrande, conceived as an introduction to Paradiso, into thirty-three sections.) It has often been observed that Christ's name is never spoken in hell and does not appear in the text of Inferno, as if to call attention to his triumph over evil and his dissociation from the realm of Lucifer, as well as to the sinners' utter ignorance of the power of redemption. But the text secretly records his tacit omnipresence, the imprint of his being, for the crucifixion is the central event of history on which all meaning hinges.
Dante's poem begins in medias res, in the middle of the journey of life, net mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (Inferno, 1.1). In a literal sense, that moment occurs at the arc of life, in the thirty-fifth year, half of the three score and ten that the Bible gives as the norm for human life (Psalms 90:10; Isaiah 38:10). In Dante's reasoning it was therefore proper that Christ should die in his thirty-fourth year, before reaching the point of perfection: "Christ had a perfect nature and desired to die in the thirty fourth year of his life, because it would not have been fitting for a divinity to enter into such a decline as [represented by passing beyond maturity into old age]" (Convivio, 4.23.10). By a stroke of numerological luck, Dante happens to be precisely in the thirty-fifth year of his own life at the time he undertakes his journey through the otherworld. His journey, then, takes Christ as its model, which is the model for all who would be saved, an analogy further reinforced by the date assigned for the journey, Good Friday 1300.
Number symbolism governs not only the overall formal structure of the poem but the structure of the otherworld realms as well. Critics are not entirely in agreement about how the three realms divide into parts and subsections. Several models have been proposed, and it is possible that, to some extent, these models can coexist. All seem to agree that each realm divides into three major parts, by which each realm mirrors and corresponds to the others, although how and where such divisions occur has occasioned disagreement. For some, hell separates into the ante-Inferno (the Neutrals), upper hell, and lower hell (the city of Dis). For others, the three categories of sin (Incontinence, Violence, Fraud) define the division. Purgatory divides into the ante-Purgatory (balancing ante-Inferno), Purgatory proper, and the earthly paradise. Paradise divides its ten heavens into either 3 (lower heaven, virtue deficient) + 6 (higher heaven, virtue proficient) + 1 (Empyrean), or 7 (planetary) + 2 (heavens of glory) + 1 (Empyrean). In every pattern, however, 3 is the operative number.
Each realm simultaneously divides into ten subdivisions. Hell has nine circles of sinners plus one for the Neutrals; Purgatory has two levels in ante-Purgatory, seven terraces on which sinful disposition is purged, and the earthly paradise, for a total of ten; and paradise has nine physical heavens and a tenth that lies beyond time and space (the empyrean). Other critics stress 9 as the proper number of circular divisions, however, discounting the ante-Inferno altogether as lying outside hell proper, defining the ante-Purgatory as an undivided area, and excluding the empyrean because it is beyond the claims of time and space. The fact that the number of circles, terraces, or spheres in the three realms can be counted as nine or ten is probably due to the fact that originally there were ten orders of angels (10 being a perfect number), until Lucifer and the rebellious angels fell, leaving nine orders, until man was created to make up the perfect ten (Bonaventure, Sentences, 2.9.7). In Convivio (2.5.12) Dante associates the number of the heavens with the angels: Li numeri, li ordini, le gerarchie narrano i cieli mobili, che sono none, e lo decimo annunzia essa unitade e stabilitade di Dio ("The moving heavens, which are nine, declare the numbers, the orders, and the hierarchies, and the tenth proclaims the very unity and stability of God"). Because the number 10 symbolizes perfection (lo perfetto numero, "the perfect number," Vita nuova, 29.1) and the law (the Ten Commandments), one beyond, 11, came to signify transgression of the law and hence sin (Augustine, City of God, 15.20). It therefore appears significant that Dante should present the moral structure of sin in Inferno 11 and expressly give the ninth and tenth pouches of Malebolge at the bottom of hell circumferences of precisely 22 and 11 miles, respectively (Inferno, 29.9 and 30.86). If each verse of the poem figures forth the number of sin in its eleven syllables, Christ, whose number is 33, might be said to redeem that sin in each terzina (thirty-three syllables) through his sacrifice.
Numerology is one means by which Dante establishes hell as the symmetrical inversion of paradise. Just as all goodness derives from a triune God (the Trinity), so evil, being but a perversion of that goodness, echoes the number 3 in its forms. Dante is attacked by three beasts (lonza, leone, lupa) in the dark wood; three ladies (Mary, Lucy, Beatrice) set his journey in motion; his journey is challenged by a three-headed Cerberus, the three Furies, and a tripartite Geryon; there are three categories of sin, three rivers feeding into Cocytus, three faces of Lucifer, and three archtraitors. The three attributes of the deity inscribed on the gate of hell (divina potestate, somma sapienza, primo amore. "divine power, highest wisdom, primal love," Inferno, 3.5—6) find their inversion in the negative attributes of Lucifer; the colors of his three faces symbolize impotence, ignorance, and malice. The symbolism of 3 attaches to Purgatory (the subdivision into three areas, the three steps at Saint Peter's gate in Purgaory 9, the three nights spent there) as well as to paradise, where, in addition to the overwhelming presence of the Trinity throughout (especially in the sphere of the sun), the final image of the divine essence is of a triple rainbow: tre giri/di tre colori e d'una contenenza ("three circles of three colors and one circumference," Paradise, 33.116-117). And Beatrice herself is seated in the third tier of the celestial rose (Paradise, 32.7-9).
For virtually all medieval theologians, the most sacred number, 7, is the number of humanity, the fullness and wholeness of life on earth, and universality. It is the number of man, as the sum of the soul and body (3 + 4), and the number of time, because God created the universe in six days, resting on the seventh. While 6 also symbolizes time, it is traditionally taken to represent the number of distinct historical eras from Adam and Eve to the present. At the close of his City of God Augustine posits a final, future era of peace and tranquillity on earth, a seventh age, which in turn heralds the age of eternal repose in the afterlife. Consequently, 7 symbolizes the fullness or completeness of earthly life. There are the seven days of week, seven ages, seven planets, seven tones in the Gregorian mode, seven diurnal canonical hours (lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, compline), and seven sciences (the trivium and quadrivium). The moral structure of Purgatory is based on the traditional opposition between the seven virtues and the seven capital vices. The seven virtues are balanced by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and the seven beatitudes. So significant is the mysterious power of 7 that Peter Lombard, at the suggestion of Hugh of Saint Victor and Roland of Parma, established in his Sentences that the holy sacraments should be seven because seven was a mystical number (La Monte 1949, 395). Among modern critics, Singleton has argued that Dante contrived to feature the number 7 at the very center of the Commedia, by arranging the length of the central canto and of the three cantos on either side of it so as to create a pattern of chiasmus. The fact that the central canto, Purgatorio 17, containing 139 verses, was preceded by cantos of 151, 145, and 145 verses, and followed by cantos of precisely 145, 145, and 151 verses, seemed to him part of a conscious design to depict the idea of "conversion," since chiasmus reverses the previous order of things, and to disclose a correspondence with the seven terraces of Purgatory. Moreover, Singleton believed that summing the digits of these verse numbers held further significance: the number of the framing cantos, 151, broke down into 1 + 5 + 1 = 7, highlighting the number 7 yet again; and 145 became 1 + 4 + 5 = 10, where 10 is the perfect number. But it should be observed that taking into account all canto lengths, from the shortest (the 130 verses of Inferno 7) to the longest (the 160 verses of Purgatory 32), summing the digits produces only four different numbers (4, 7, 10, and 13); and each of these numbers, except, perhaps, 4 (which occurs only four times), can be viewed as possessing symbolic meaning (13 being conceived, following tradition, as 10 + 3). In the last analysis, because summing the digits virtually always produces an inevitable number, this kind of calculation may not be of special importance. Furthermore, symmetrical patterns like the one Singleton noted can be found elsewhere in the poem (e.g., Purgatory 3-9: 145, 139, 136, 151, 136, 139, 145).
Because 7 symbolized the fullness of life on earth, the succeeding number, 8, came to express the idea of resurrection and salvation, as being one beyond 7; Christ's resurrection took place on an eighth day of the week; for that reason, Sunday became the lord's day and all major feasts are celebrated for eight days. It is also the number of baptism, because that rite establishes the possibility of the salvation of the soul. Consequently, a large majority of baptismal fonts and baptisteries in Europe are octagonal. On the closing page of the City of God, as noted earlier, Augustine speaks of a final eighth day of eternal rest in the otherworld following the seventh age in this world. The number 8 was also seen as expressing the idea of renewal in music, where the eighth tone renewed the first at the octave. In mathematics the symbol for infinity, called the lemniscate, is the number eight placed on its side; it was chosen because of the association between eternity and infinity, as well as because one could trace the number in writing continuously ad infinitum without lifting pen from paper. (The first documented use of this symbol is by the mathematician John Wallis, in Arithmetica infinitorum in 1656.) Significantly, Dante's earthly paradise—the garden on the summit of Purgatory that was the original site of the garden of Eden where man fell, now the locus of redemption—is placed on the eighth tier of the mountain. In paradise, the eighth sphere, that of the fixed stars, is the heaven in which the triumph of Christ and the church triumphant are manifested, thereby establishing a symmetrical correspondence with the appearance of the church militant in the procession in the earthly paradise.
Numbers may possess inherent, culturally assigned symbolic properties, as the preceding examples illustrate. But Dante also creates his own numerical symbolism on at least one salient occasion: his prophetic reference to the coming of the slayer of the Antichrist of his day, the papacy prostituted at the hands of the French king, Philip the Fair, who removed the papal court from Rome to Avignon. This mysterious figure is known only by the code name cinquecento diece e cinque (Purgatory, 33.43), or 515, a number formulated to echo in reverse the number of the Antichrist, 666, the beast of the Book of Revelation (13: 18). Despite a wealth of proposed solutions, some reasonable, others far-fetched, the identity of Dante's political redeemer remains shrouded in mystery. Or perhaps it would be better to say that while the identity of Dante's hero is widely believed to be Henry VII of Luxembourg, no one is quite able to prove this numerologically. It has been suggested that the number expressed in Roman numerals, DXV, signifies Henry because those letters, rearranged, spell out the Latin word for "leader" (DUX, where V in Latin is the letter U). Edward Moore offered a suggestion that relied on gematria, or the numerical values of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, to generate the name Arrico (a variant of Arrigo, or Henry). This suggestion may be the most ingenious, but it has not proved any more convincing than other interpretations. In fact, no attempt at decoding the conundrum of 515 can be said to have gained overwhelming favor: its significance remains a mystery.
Boccaccio almost certainly had Dante's Commedia in mind when he assigned 100 tales to the Decameron, although his title derives from another work based on the temporal scheme of a sequence of days—Saint Ambrose's Hexameron, written almost 1,000 years earlier. By his title, Boccaccio sought to champion a new secular vision of human affairs that would shift the focus from the intensely spiritual and doctrinal attitude of his models to an emancipated celebration of life as it is lived, in its bounteous diversity, and of the virtues of saper vivere. Ten storytellers each tell one tale on each of ten days, making a total of 100 stories, a number that expresses universality within multiplicity and harmony within diversity. Critics have tried to decipher the moral and allegorical identities of the storytellers, and to explain Boccaccio's choice of three male and seven female protagonists. The most suggestive reading has been proposed by Kirkham (1978), who discerns a pattern based on the seven virtues (four cardinal and three theological) and three faculties of the soul (reason, the concupiscible appetite, and the irascible appetite). She finds support for this pattern in several other of Boccaccio's vernacular works that likewise make use of numerological symbolism. Her analysis of Caccia di Diana, Amorosa visione (comprising 50 cantos), and Teseida suggests that if any number is most dear to Boccaccio, it is 5, which symbolizes marriage—2 (female) + 3 (male) = 5 (perfect union)—as well as the opposite, sensuality or adulter)'. (Dante may well have had a similar reason in mind for assigning his tale of Francesca da Rimini to the fifth canto of Inferno.) The Teseida comprises twelve books, in clear imitation of the epic convention that Virgil established when he evoked a proportional connection with the twenty-four books of the Odyssey and the twenty-four of the Iliad in his own twelve-book Aeneid. The association of the number 12 (or a multiple of twelve) with the structure of an epic became so compelling that both Milton and Tasso would extend their poems to proper epic length: Paradise Lost went from ten to twelve books, and the Gerusalemme liberata was expanded from twenty books to twenty-four in the Gerusalemme conquistata. After all, Statius had divided his Thebaid into twelve books, as Valerius Flaccus had intended for his Argonautica. Although Lucan's Pharsalia has only ten books, the poem, left unfinished, preserves signs that he intended to write twelve: Book 6, following Virgil, contains the underworld scene in which the future ruin of Pompey and Roman rule is prophesied.
It is clear that Petrarch intended his epic Africa to reach twelve books, even though he abandoned work in the ninth, for in Book 6 he inserts the mandatory underworld scene. His Bucolicum carmen, a collection of pastoral poems in Latin, contains twelve eclogues, but their topic has little to do with the epic world. His large collection of letters, Rerum familiarum libri, was originally divided in twelve, then twenty, and finally twenty-four books. The last division occurred at the time Petrarch was studying Greek with Leonzio Pilato, the first person to teach Greek in Italy. Since the last letter in the collection is addressed to Homer, it seems inescapable that Petrarch meant to pay homage to the greatest poet of antiquity, the father of the epic, by evoking the Homeric number.
If Boccaccio chooses 5 as his personal number, Petrarch embraces the number 6. It is the senhal of his beloved, Laura, as 9 was for Dante's Beatrice. Petrarch's love for Laura, which informs the lyric collection known as the Canzoniere, is born on 6 April 1327, and Laura dies on 6 April 1348, dates that Petrarch makes coincide with Good Friday. The fact that in 1327 Good Friday fell on 10 April and that Laura died on 18 April indicates the degree to which Petrarch sought to fashion and preserve Laura's symbolic identity in poetic form. The number 6 had a long-standing connection in Biblical commentary: the birth of man takes place on the sixth day of creation, and the death of Christ on the sixth day of the week—both Fridays. One tradition, moreover, held that Christ died at the sixth hour of the day, at noon, just before the sun began its decline. Moreover, 6 symbolized the caducity of human life, the fleeting beauty of temporal joy, the vanity of human dreams, the imperfection of an earthly existence destined to pass away, and the inescapability of human mortality, a complex of attitudes the poet summed up in the figure of Laura. For Petrarch, Friday must have held etymological and nominative significance as well: venerdì is the day of Venus, goddess of love and sensuality, whose son Cupid is the formal cause of Petrarch's experience of love. Petrarch would also divide his only other vernacular work, the Trionfi, into six parts, although he ultimately left it unfinished.
The Canzoniere underwent multiple textual revisions at the hand of the poet, but in its final form it contained 366 lyrics, a number that has suggested to many critics a connection with the number of days in a year, symbolizing the course of life on a smaller scale, and the cyclic nature of the poet's love for Laura, which alternates between periods of exuberant joy and recriminatory contrition. Leaving aside those who consider the number entirely adventitious, there are three ways in which it has been interpreted symbolically. Some critics argue that it represents simply a leap year. Others are persuaded that it represents a year of 365 days, and that the first poem, which provides a retrospective judgment of the poet's amatory experience, functions as an introduction or prologue to the collection (hence a total of 1 + 365 = 366). Still others accept the equivalence of 365 with the passage of a single complete earthly year but see the last poem, the canzone dedicated to the Virgin Mary, as representing life beyond death (Zottoli 1928). Hence the pattern is expressed as 365 + 1, where the first number expresses a solar year on earth, under the aegis of the sun, and the second symbolizes the perfection and uniqueness of eternity, which triumphs over earthly existence. Such a pattern not only is typical of medieval numerology—Augustine thought of 11 as the number of evil because it transgressed the number 10, which embodied the ten commandments—but has a corollary in Trionfi, which comprises a series of triumphs ending in the triumph of eternity.
Roche (1974) was the first to trace out an actual connection between the 366 lyrics and the day-by-day progress of the year. He discovered that if the first poem represents the first day, and if the first day is Good Friday, 6 April, then the beginning of the second part of the work, as defined by canzone 264, falls on Christmas, 25 December. The linking of the birth of the poet's love for Laura with Christ's death and the death of Laura with Christ's birth has seemed to many too precise to be mere happenstance, despite the presence of several complicating factors. Roche's groundwork for even more detailed connections with the liturgical calendar has received less attention, but any pattern that becomes excessively complex invariably invites a higher degree of skepticism on the part of readers.
See also Boccaccio, Giovanni; Dante Alighieri; Petrarca, Francesco
RICHARD LANSING
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