CHAPTER 28
Annius of Viterbo and the Beginning of Etruscan Studies

Ingrid D. Rowland

Today, the Italian city of Viterbo is a provincial capital served by strictly local rail lines and a set of regional highways; the country’s main railroad line and the autostrada have passed it by. For medieval pilgrims and early modern travelers, however, Viterbo was the last important stop on the main road leading south to Rome from the rest of Europe, the Via Francigena, and, for several decades in the twelfth century, it, rather than Rome, served as the official papal residence. Viterbo’s reputation, therefore, was truly international.

Where real people traveled, so did the heroes of legend. As one striking example, the fourteenth-century English version of the King Arthur saga known as the Alliterative Morte Arthure (Benson and Forster 1994) tells how the monarch and his Knights of the Round Table threw a rousing, wine-soaked party in the Valley of Viterbo, or, as the poet calls it, the Vale of Vertennon. The poet clearly assumes that readers will recognize these names and places when Arthur and the knights turn southward after a string of conquests in Tuscany:

Toward Viterbo this valiant aveeres the reines …
In the Vertenonne vale the vines i-monges;
There sujournes this soveraign with solace in herte,
To … Revel with rich wine, riotes himselven,
This roy with his real men of the Round Table,
With mirthes and melody and manykin gamnes;
Was never merrier men made on this erthe! (lines 3169–75)

According to the poet, Arthur and his merry men partook “of Vernage and other wine and venison baken,” a bill of fare that sounds accurate enough to be drawn from real experience. In Dante’s Purgatorio (24.24), Pope Martin IV, among the gluttons, “shits eels of Bolsena and Vernaccia,” making it clear that Vernaccia vines were planted in this region in the thirteenth thirteenth century and highly regarded (their replacement by Trebbiano and Malvasia varieties dates to the twentieth century). Venison would also have been plentiful in the thick woods that still cover the slopes of Monte Cimino, the extinct volcano that looms over the city. No wonder the delights of Viterbo could make the lords of the Round Table forget all about the Holy Grail.King Arthur was only one amid a legion of legendary visitors to Viterbo, from fully mythical figures such as Hercules to legendary mortals like Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, the fourth-century Roman consul described by Livy as the first Roman to traverse the dense, menacing Ciminian Wood, as he did in 310 BCE in order to fight the Etruscans of Sutri (Livy 7.36). According to some modern scholars, Arthur himself has an Etruscan connection: they argue that his Latin name, Artorius, is itself of Etruscan origin, a derivative of the common Etruscan name Arnth (Green 2009: 3–46; Schulze 1904: 72, 333–338). Arthur, if he existed, would have been a fifth-century (CE) Romano-British chieftain engaged in fighting off Scandinavian invaders after the withdrawal of the Imperial Roman garrisons from Britannia (Green 2009).

Viterbo, of course, was intimately connected with the Etruscan past, especially in the minds of its residents, many of them direct descendants of those same Etruscans, though it is worth noting that in the Middle Ages the city also hosted a considerable English community with its own church, San Tommaso di Canterbury (Ciarrocchi 1992). Despite all the changes that have transformed Viterbo in the modern period, the city’s Etruscan heritage is clearly visible today. Although centuries of leveling and filling have smoothed out the terrain, the surviving volcanic cliffs on which Viterbo’s various neighborhoods perch reveal dozens of Etruscan tombs, many still used as storerooms for farm implements, and the decorative motifs carved in the local volcanic tufa repeat themes like lions and rosettes that go back to remote antiquity. Local cults also continued ancient traditions in a Christian vein, celebrated in works of art and architecture that themselves reflected the particularities of the city’s ancient heritage: fantastic creatures stalk the roofline of the ninth-century church of San Silvestro (Figure 28.1) in the same way that acroteria and ridgepole sculptures once decorated Etruscan temples; a head of Jupiter appears over the eleventh-century portal of the church of Santa Maria Nova (Figure 28.2) in the same position as the sculpted heads on Etruscan gates (notably the Porta dell’Arco at Volterra); the tomb of Pope John XXI in the cathedral mimics an Etruscan tomb monument; and on the night of Pentecost 1320, the Madonna stopped a demonic thunderstorm with all the expertise of the first century BCE Etruscan fulguriator Lars Cafates (the one who further specified his competence in Etruscan on a bilingual inscription from Pesaro as trvtnvt.frontac) (Turfa 2012: 48–49). This thunder-stopping Madonna, Our Lady the Liberator, performed her miracle just uphill from a convent church called Santa Maria in Volturna, the same name that appears in the Alliterative Morte Arthure as “Vertennonne,” the valley that split Viterbo in two until the mid-twentieth century, and which is probably itself an Etruscan name (Bonfante and Bonfante 2002: 99; Latte 1960: 37 n. 5).

Image described by caption and surrounding text. — **Figure 28.1** Sculpted animals on the church of San Silvestro (now Il Gesù), ninth century CE. From Viterbo.
Photo: I. Rowland.

Yet, despite this powerful physical and cultural legacy, the city of Viterbo never appeared in ancient texts, nor had it produced a famous Etruscan hero. Little Chiusi had Lars Porsenna, Corneto had its Tarquins, Rome had its Etruscan kings, but Fabius Maximus Rullianus plunged into the Ciminian Wood in search of Etruscans from the small settlement of Sutri, not the large settlement of Viterbo. Moreover, the earliest documents with the name Viterbium or Biterbium only went back to the time of Charlemagne, not of Lars Porsenna (Valtieri 1977: 32–40).

Into this yawning gap, in the late fifteenth century, stepped a Dominican friar named Giovanni Nanni (1437–1502), a native son of Viterbo whose investigations of ancient Etruria became a mixture of insightful analysis and brilliant fiction, both literary and archaeological. For a few decades in the sixteenth century, his antiquarian studies, which he published in Latin as Iohannes Annius, captivated a wide circle of European readers, inspiring painters, architects, scholars and forgers in Spain, France, Belgium, Bavaria, and Sweden as well as the Italian peninsula. Most of all, however, the man usually known as Annius of Viterbo inspired the people of Viterbo itself, in ways that still color modern life, in a city he peopled with legendary Etruscan heroes and instilled with a sense of patriotic pride that has lasted for another five centuries.

Though he is famous now as a forger, Giovanni Nanni, the man who became Iohannes Annius of Viterbo, was also an ingenious scholar in several fields, as well as an insightful observer of his surroundings and his fellow humanity. He was also far closer than we can ever be to his native terrain, in a direct physical sense as well as a sense of emotional, intellectual, or spiritual connection. Today’s Viterbo is a city whose primeval contours have been blurred by five additional centuries of progressive leveling of its volcanic hills and the filling of its vales and gullies. Many of the ancient and medieval monuments that were visible in the fifteenth century have deteriorated, or suffered more violent destruction: bombed by Allied aircraft in the Second World War, paved over, or buried under new construction. As a boy, a youth, and then again as an elderly man, therefore, Giovanni Nanni saw a much more rugged, agricultural Viterbo than the commercial city we see today, a city still governed in many respects by the ancient Etruscan rhythms of life.

However much we think we know about the Etruscans, moreover, Friar Giovanni was closer to them by half a millennium. Like his contemporaries, he had a less finely tuned sense than a modern scholar of the relative ages of things, built, painted, sculpted, and written: many medieval buildings, the ones we would call Romanesque, looked genuinely ancient not only to him, but also to fifteenth-century Italian eyes in general, and so did ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts. Yet these fifteenth-century viewers also understood something essential about antiquity and the Middle Ages: where we see (and seek out) the differences that distinguish particular periods, they saw the essential elements of continuity that create a tradition.

From the outset, therefore, the work of this forger and scholar from Viterbo combined an international reach with an intensely local focus; in this double quality, it achieved many of the same goals as the Alliterative Morte Arthure, which revived the most ancient English poetic form, alliterative verse, and rooted Arthur firmly in his traditional haunts of southwest Britain – while also sending him off to visit the Pope in Rome, drink Vernaccia in Viterbo, and fend off crack troops from Damascus. Early modern antiquarians almost always thought in this double way, on minute and macroscopic scale, whether they lived in Britain, Italy, or the places in between, because it was the way they lived their lives. Annius of Viterbo may have attributed his scholarly career to the fact that he was born in a particular neighborhood in Viterbo, but that career took him away from his native city to Genoa, Florence, Mantua, and Rome, where he met people and read books from places still more exotic: Armenia, Iberia, the world of Judaism, the ancient past. He cast his Etruscans in the same mold: cosmopolitan, yet uniquely local, with a profound sense of their own history. And he gave them names: names of people, but also names of places.

The story of the man who became Annius of Viterbo, like his own Etruscan stories, began, therefore, with his home. He describes his birthplace so precisely in one of his works that we can locate his neighborhood if not his house, and he is especially proud that he shares this origin with his cousin Tommaso Nanni, who also rose to positions of great responsibility within the Dominican order (Nanni 1515: clxiv verso):

The Metallii are the people who live on the hill of Saint Simeon and Saint Nicholas up to Sipale [Fontana Grande] … This hill gave me birth in the year of our salvation 1437 on Epiphany eve [January 5]. Just ten months earlier, my cousin was born on the same hill on the same Metallio hill in the Vetulonia district, in a house adjoining the area of Spurinella [now Via della Marrocca], certainly the Metallio Hill shines for its learning.

A notarial document in the state archive of Viterbo confirms the birth date, if not the tendency for the area of Metallio to produce scholars (Fumagalli 1980: 195). Other records of his youth and early years are scarce. Both Tommaso and Giovanni joined the Dominican convent of Santa Maria in Gradi around 1448, but whereas Tommaso went on to study at Padua, Giovanni continued his studies at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. In July of 1466 they were together again: both cousins petitioned Pope Paul II to receive their master’s degrees in theology at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome (Tavuzzi 2007: 34–35, 83, 251 (Tommaso); 104, 145, 148 (Giovanni)). Here, as Riccardo Fubini suggests, the Nanni cousins must have come into contact with the antiquarians at the University of Rome, such as Pomponio Leto, the virtual inventor of archaeology, and Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli, professor of grammar, editor of the first printed edition of Vitruvius, and director of the first modern staging of an ancient play, Seneca’s Phaedra (Fubini 2012). The Dominican convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and the university’s Palazzo della Sapienza were only a few dozen meters distant from one another, both close neighbors of the Pantheon. Another humanist residing in Rome, Gaspare da Verona, certainly met Giovanni Nanni, of whom he wrote: “I understood him to be a philosopher, and an elegant physicist at that, sharp, bold, and quick” (Fumagalli 1980: 198). And, in fact, the first work we know from Giovanni Nanni’s hand is a vernacular alchemical treatise, On Alchemy, or the Art of the Stone (Fubini 2012; Nanni n.d. Opera).

After receiving their master’s degrees, the Nanni cousins returned to Viterbo and Santa Maria in Gradi, where both taught theology and preached. Thanks to the papal legate in Viterbo, Niccolo Forteguerri, to whom he dedicated an astrological treatise entitled On the Turkish Empire according to the Astronomers, Giovanni moved to Genoa in 1471, where Forteguerri held the position of Commendatory Abbot of the convent of Santo Stefano (Fubini 2012). Here he taught grammar as an employee of the city from 1471 to 1476, and preached from the pulpit of the local Dominican convent, San Domenico. His astrological predictions about the Turks did not quite come true, but then most astronomers had trouble predicting the future successfully. His inability to predict the course of history accurately, however, did not hamper his career. Indeed, Nanni had a knack for finding patronage, and his success in Genoa was guaranteed by his ability to forge a friendship with Archbishop Paolo Fregoso. He was appointed prior of the convent of San Domenico in 1474.

In this advantageous position, Nanni drew up two horoscopes and a magical work, On the Sculpture of Gems and Rings (now lost) for the Milanese warlord Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the de facto ruler of Genoa. But when the city rebelled against Milan in 1478, both Nanni and his patron, Archbishop Fregoso, took the side of the locals against the Milanese outsider. This was when Giovanni Nanni reworked his tract On the Turkish Empire as a new visionary treatise called On the Future Triumphs of the Christians. First printed in 1480 and designed to flatter Pope Sixtus IV, the book enjoyed international success and went into multiple editions. Giovanni’s reputation flourished as well, although once again the course of events did not quite bear out the author’s astrological and prophetic predictions: the so-called Muslim Antichrist, the Sultan, continued to grow and thrive in spite of all the dire predictions leveled by Friar Giovanni from his reading of the stars (Fubini 2012).

An excruciating earache changed the course of Nanni’s life in November of 1488. The infection spread to become an abscess of the brain. Nanni recognized that his prospects for survival were slim enough to require a miracle, and so he prayed for that miracle to the Virgin Mary, but he did so by a special title: Virgin Immaculate, the name that proclaimed that she, like her son, had been born without sin. For a Dominican, the prayer was a truly desperate measure, because the order had officially rejected the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. But the miraculous healing took place in spite of doctrine: the abscess burst through Friar Giovanni’s eardrum and on Christmas Eve of 1488 he made a solemn act of devotion in church, dedicating himself in eternity to the Virgin Immaculate (Fumagalli 1980: 189–191). On one of the era’s most heated debates, this fervent upholder of Dominican doctrine had gone definitively over to the side of the Franciscans.

Giovanni Nanni was a particularly well-known cleric in Genoa, which meant that the local Dominican hierarchy responded swiftly to his change of heart. His superiors questioned him about his conversion (in other words, subjected him to an inquisition), he stood his ground, and by spring of 1489, he was back in Viterbo, his books and papers all confiscated in Genoa. Friar Giovanni Nanni had been sent, like many a troublesome professor before and since, into early retirement. But his sudden exile from Genoa was also a homecoming, to his old convent of Santa Maria in Gradi, and to his cousin Tommaso, who had returned to Viterbo in 1482 as Vicar General of the Observant Dominicans for the Province of Rome. His home, and its ancient past, now became his source of inspiration and the focus of his ever-energetic interest.

Santa Maria in Gradi, with its Gothic halls, well-stocked library, and archive, provided the platform from which Nanni launched his career as an antiquarian, the career that would bring him international fame under a new name, Iohannes Annius of Viterbo. Yet despite his disagreements with his superiors in Genoa, Nanni’s first career, as an expert Dominican theologian, was by no means over. Shortly after arriving at Santa Maria in Gradi in 1489, he supplied an opinion on the church-sponsored moneylending operations known as Monti di Pietà for Pope Innocent VIII, noting in his preface to the work that lack of access to his old books and papers meant that he would be giving the matter fresher, more thoughtful consideration (Rozelli n.d., Nanni “Questiones duo”: 2 recto).

In this same preface, Nanni also informs Pope Innocent that his time has been taken up by another job: on paper, the city council of Viterbo had engaged him to teach grammar, but the clever Dominican turned that course into one on local history. Nanni had also begun to cultivate a local private patron: Odoardo Farnese, whose clan of feudal barons owned huge lots of property around Viterbo and a palazzo in the center of town. Aristocrats were often slow to pay their protégés, but so was the city council of Viterbo: Friar Giovanni was wise to broadcast his expertise as widely as possible. As a Dominican, he did not need money to live, but he would certainly need money to print any books he intended to write.

In his new venue, Giovanni Nanni turned from writing about the prophetic future and the mysteries of alchemy and philosopher’s stones to writing and teaching about the mysteries of the past. He began with the history of Viterbo, but his antiquarian studies would eventually involve most of the ancient Mediterranean world. The first indication we have of this shift in interests is a fragmentary History of Viterbo, presumably composed shortly after Friar Giovanni’s return home; only the last chapter survives, presented as a summary of the previous six. It is not clear, however, that those other six chapters ever existed – this final summary may also have been the author’s initial sketch (Baffioni 1981).

In this Summary of the History of Viterbo, Friar Giovanni, still writing as Giovanni Nanni, begins to outline the ideas that will drive his future researches as a scholar of antiquity. During his student days in Rome in the 1460s, Greek historians had become the latest fashion, thanks to the influx of Greek manuscripts and Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Names like Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Diodorus Siculus joined Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, and Sallust on scholarly bibliographies, inspiring translators to make these texts available in Latin as well as Greek. The massive Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, for example, was composed sometime between 60 and 30 BCE, perhaps in Alexandria; he was, therefore, a contemporary of Vitruvius, Vergil, Caesar, Cleopatra, and Augustus. The last complete text must have been destroyed in the sack of Constantinople in 1453; what came to Rome in the ensuing years were complete texts of Books 1–5 and 11–20. Italian scholars were particularly interested in Chapters 24–40 of Book 5, “On Gaul, Celtiberia, Iberia, Liguria, and Tyrrhenia, and on the inhabitants of these countries and the customs they observe.” Yet for all Diodorus had to say about the Tyrrhenians in general, he had nothing at all to say about Viterbo. Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote his Roman Antiquities at virtually the same time as Diodorus, with extensive information about Etruria in his early chapters, but again, Viterbo never appeared. Giovanni Nanni had no other option than to wring history from other sources, beginning with the physical form of his native city and his own common sense.

Viterbo’s first circuit of city walls dates from 1210; before that, the city consisted of separate settlements on steep rocky outcrops, each divided from the others by streams and connected by a series of bridges. The largest of these streams, the Urcionio or Arcione, was covered over in the mid-twentieth century, its steep-walled bed filled with rubble from the Allied bombings of 1943, but other districts still occupy their own separate rocky plateaus, including the spur of rock with the cathedral and Pontifical Palace and the district known as Piano Scarano, both still linked to the rest of Viterbo by bridges that rest on Etruscan foundations (Valtieri 1977: 31–37). According to tradition, the Cathedral itself stood on the ruins of a temple to Hercle (but that tradition itself may stem from Giovanni Nanni). It was evident to Friar Giovanni that Etruscan Viterbo must have existed, because the ruins were there for all to see. He concluded, logically, that it must have been known by another name (Valtieri 1977: 34). In that case there were a plethora of local toponyms to choose from, some strange and suggestive of great antiquity, like Volturno, which sounded so much like the ancient Etruscan gods Vertumnus, the shape-shifter, and Voltumna, worshipped at the pan-Etruscan shrine called the Fanum Voltumnae – the “Vertennon” of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Volturna seemed to denote the valley of the Urcionio – another odd-sounding name. The valley’s other name, Faul, was equally mysterious and unusual. Viterbo also had plainly descriptive names, like Valle Piatta, the “flat valley” where Pope Sixtus IV built a new palazzo for the papal government in the 1470’s, the very years that Giovanni Nanni was starting his career in Genoa. There was Sonsa, the high plateau with the fort that guarded Viterbo to the north. The challenge that Nanni set for himself was to cobble all these names and places together and make a convincing story.

He started with the idea that Etruscan Viterbo, like its medieval successor, must have grown from the union of separate settlements. In 1210, that union came about by the efforts of a merchant commune, but for remote antiquity ancient authors, and hence fifteenth-century scholars, seemed to prefer referring such ambitious projects to a single heroic founder. As Viterbo’s heroic founder, Friar Giovanni’s Summary proposed the Egyptian god Osiris. As for the city’s ancient name, he suggested Volturna – the Vertennon of Arthurian fame.

In 1491, shortly after composing (or at least summarizing) this History of Viterbo, laced with compliments to the local baronial family, the Farnese, as well as to Pope Innocent VIII, Nanni dedicated a brief epigraphic work to Ranuccio Farnese, On the Famous Men and Deeds of Viterbo, which explicitly traced the family’s descent from Osiris the wall-builder (Weiss 1962). Next, writing as Iohannes Nanis Guerisci (Giovanni di Guerisco Nanni suggests that his father may have been named Guerisco), he addressed an archaeological treatise to Viterbo’s governing Council of Eight. This text he called On the Marble Tablets of Volturrhena, combining the name Volturna with Tyrrhenoi, the Greek word for the Etruscans. This pamphlet described six purportedly ancient objects with important implications for civic history. Five were inscribed tablets, three written in Etruscan, one in Greek, and one in eighth century Latin. The sixth “tablet” was actually a sculpted relief, composed of separate fragments, that he describes as having been walled into the chancel screen of Viterbo’s cathedral. The Etruscan tablets had conveniently disintegrated by the time he described them in On the Marble Tablets of Volturrhena, absolving Nanni of the need to provide and interpret their written texts; the other two inscriptions, both carved into alabaster (not marble) roundels and still preserved, assert Viterbo’s immemorial independence as a free commune (Weiss 1962; Fubini 2003: 291–331). The Latin inscription, a decree of Desiderius, King of the Lombards and dated to 776 (Figure 28.3), declares that three separate settlements – Longula, Vetulonia, and Tyrrhan Volturrhena – “called Etruria” should be encircled by a wall and called Viterbo, thus pushing back use of the name Viterbo by two centuries. The sixth, sculpted tablet he identifies as an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic text about Isis and Osiris. The horizons he had set a year of two before in his History of Viterbo had expanded rapidly.

The two surviving inscriptions of the five “marble Volturrhenian tablets,” carved into soft alabaster rather than hard marble, are clearly forgeries (see also Chapter 29). The Greek text is barely grammatical. The Desiderius Decree is written in a script known as Beneventan, a style otherwise only known in ninth-century manuscripts, its flowing, curved forms evidently suited for pen and ink rather than the chisel, or, more likely in this case, the awl (Weiss 1962). The “Egyptian” sculpture is made up of ancient and medieval marble reliefs with a backing made from a Hebrew tombstone bearing the date 1409 (exhibited in the Museo Civico, Viterbo). Nanni could have created the entire “Egyptian” pastiche, but he might also have found at least part of it where he said he found it: walled into the chancel screen of the cathedral. We will probably never know. On the Marble Tablets of Volturrhena is certainly, however, the work of a person who knows that what he has created is not really what it pretends to be: that is, a forger.

With the accession of a new pope, Alexander VI Borgia, in 1492, Friar Giovanni’s connection with the Farnese family opened a new range of career possibilities when the pope took a “Beautiful Giulia” Farnese as his latest mistress, the daughter of the same Ranuccio Farnese to whom Nanni had dedicated On the Illustrious Men and Deeds of Viterbo (Romei and Rosini 2012). When the pontiff came to Viterbo for a hunting expedition in October of 1493, however, the outing took an excitingly unexpected turn. In the rural zone of Monte Cipollara, “Onion Hill,” the hunters pursued a rabbit down a hole that led to an underground Etruscan tomb, still filled with carved and inscribed sarcophagi (Danielsson 1928; Cristofani 1979). These were brought with great pomp and excitement to the new city hall in Valle Piatta, where they may still be on display, for there is an impressive set of Etruscan sarcophagi in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Priori. The inscriptions that would confirm their identification as the Monte Cipollara sarcophagi have, however, long since weathered away (Emiliozzi 1986: 19–36; Curran 1999: 171–172).

Within a month of this discovery, Friar Giovanni produced a little study of the statues and their historical significance, informing the Pope that they commemorated the visit of the Egyptian goddess Isis to a place that was not called Onion Hill, Monte Cipollara, after all: it was Mons Cybellarius, hill of the great mother goddess Cybele (Danielsson 1928). This little Borgiana lucubratio, “Borgian study,” as the author called it, still concentrated on the illustrious history of Viterbo, where the statues and inscriptions had been found, but the friar also cast his attention farther afield, to Rome and Spain. He had already traced the pope’s lineage to ancient Egypt, identifying the bull on the Borgia coat of arms with the sacred Apis bull that was an incarnation of Osiris. The fresco decorations of the Borgia apartments in the Vatican Palace, executed by Bernardino Pinturicchio in these very years, celebrate Isis, Osiris, and the Apis bull in terms so similar to the Borgiana Lucubratio that Paola Mattiangeli has suggested Friar Giovanni’s influence in this pictorial scheme as well (Mattiangeli 1981).

In such glamorous company, Nanni was becoming restless in his convent. For a brief time in 1496, he even left the Dominicans altogether and took up residence with the Augustinian friars at Sant’Agostino in Viterbo. In 1499, however, Pope Alexander appointed him to the third-highest position in the Dominican order: Master of the Sacred Palace, the Vatican’s resident theologian and censor of published books (Fumagalli 1984: 363; Weiss 1962: 435–436).

In the years immediately before this promotion, between the Borgiana lucubratio of 1493 and 1498, when he published his last and most compendious work, Giovanni Nanni recast his ancient history yet again, deepening and expanding its range. But he also recast himself. He wrote his largest and most ambitious book as Johannes Annius Viterbiensis, no longer Nanni, which simply meant “Johnson” (or possibly Nani, “dwarf”); instead, he revealed himself as the scion of an illustrious ancient clan, the Annii, which had produced two ancient Roman emperors. “The city of Etruria,” he would write in this new volume, “was both the native region of the early kingship and of the Annii Veri, an extremely ancient Etruscan family, adorned by the august Emperors Antoninus [Pius] and Commodus” (Nanni 1515: clxxiv recto). For the grandson of a butcher, this imperial ancestry implied a considerable change in social status. To his credit, at the same time “Annius” also made a sincere effort to learn to read Etruscan script, for the Monte Cipollara inscriptions were undoubtedly genuine and can be reconstructed with fair accuracy from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century transcriptions (Danielsson 1928; CIE 5740, 5741).

Friar Giovanni’s familiarity with the pope had led to meeting other Spaniards at the papal court, notably the Spanish ambassador Garcilaso de la Vega and cardinal Bernardino de Carvajal. With their help, when Johannes Annius of Viterbo looked for a patron to sponsor the printing of his newest, longest work he was able to turn, successfully, to Their Most Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Commentaries on the Works of Various Authors who speak of Antiquities issued from the papal press of Eucharius Silber in Rome on August 3, 1498, all three hundred-odd pages of them (Nanni 1498).

The texts collected in the Commentaries range from wholly invented ones written by wholly invented people (e.g., Metasthenes the Persian) to genuine works by genuine ancient authors (e.g., Propertius Elegy 4.2), only slightly doctored to tell a new story. A chapter on “Fifty Annian Questions” is dedicated by Johannes Annius to his cousin Thomas Annius, by then long ensconced as Prior of Santa Maria in Gradi in Viterbo; here the discussions of local history are more detailed and more specific than ever. The basic aim of the Commentaries, however, was to place the Etruscans, and Viterbo with them, within a scheme of universal history, beginning with the Egyptians and the Hebrew patriarchs and taking in the world from Spain to Mesopotamia.

The idea was not new; Diodorus Siculus had followed largely the same plan in his Library of History, and medieval chroniclers often tried to place their cities into a similarly universal historical scheme. A thirteenth-century curial official who traveled throughout Europe, Godfrey of Viterbo (who may have been German rather than Italian), had already identified the first king of the Etruscans as none other than the Hebrew patriarch Noah, also known as Italus (Godfrey of Viterbo: col. 1019). At Noah’s death, the kingship, at least according to Godfrey, passed to his son Janus, whose name Godfrey’s contemporaries would have recognized as that of the Etruscan and Roman god who governed doors, openings, crossings, and beginnings (Holland 1960). Alternatively, Peter the Deacon’s twelfth-century guidebook to Rome, the Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae, claimed that Noah and Janus had been the same person rather than father and son (Valentini and Zucchetti 1946: vol. 3, 77–78). Annius of Viterbo chose to agree with Peter the Deacon that Janus had been Noah himself, adding that the name of the patriarch’s kingdom on the Italian peninsula had been called Etruria and centered on Viterbo, with an extensive province called Hetruria extending for most of the Italian peninsula. Here Isis and Osiris passed through, along with a character named Egyptian Hercules who was the first builder of Viterbo’s – Etruria’s – circuit wall. The three cities that make up Viterbo in the Desiderius Decree are expanded to four: Fanum Volturnae, Arbanum, Vetulonia, and Longula, whose initials make up the name of the valley that runs beneath the rocky outcrops of Viterbo: Faul. FAVL, Annius declares, is a sacred formula that stands for the Etruscans’ royal city and all its illustrious history.

The purpose of this collection of forged and altered texts clearly went beyond simple patriotism. Annius not only supplied Viterbo with a pedigree; he supplied the whole ancient world from Spanish West to Babylonian East with a new set of heroes and heroic exploits, complaining repeatedly about the omissions of “lying Greece” (Graecia mendax) in recording this history. Riccardo Fubini has identified “lying Greece” as the ancient Greek historians, noting the fidelity with which Annius seems to follow another detractor of Greek historiographers, the Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Fubini 2003: 3–38, 291–331). In the Borgia court, Fubini notes, Annius had come into contact with some of the Jewish refugees just expelled from Spain, including the papal physician Samuel Zarfati, whom Annius calls Samuel Talmudista (Fubini 2003: 3–38; 2012).

There are also evident parallels between the guiding scheme of the Commentaries and the universal historical scheme adopted by Diodorus Siculus, who said so disappointingly little about Viterbo and so much about Mesopotamia, Spain, and Gaul (Stephens 2013: 278–280). But the chief influence on this late stage of the Dominican's thought seems to be Flavius Josephus, who decried the inaccuracies of the Greek historians as he attempted to insert Biblical history into the history of the classical world. Annius set out to extend this scheme to include the Etruscans (Fubini 2003: 3–38; Stephens 2013). His most influential forgery was the set of texts he attributed to “Berosus the Chaldaean,” librarian of Babylon, based on the real historical figure named Berossos who is mentioned by Vitruvius among other ancient authors. Walter Stephens describes the project concisely (Stephens 2013: 280, 281):

Annius carefully designed his literary forgeries to exploit contradictions, lacunae, and cruxes in the historical records known and respected by his contemporaries. Taken as a whole, Annius’ multimedia imposture grounded a seamless revisionist narrative that began with Noah’s colonization of the Mediterranean basin and proceeded through falsified Chaldaean and Egyptian king-lists until it reconnected with canonical accounts of Roman history, and ended with Desiderius, the Longobard king routed by Charlemagne in 774. At the centre of this grand historical sweep was little Viterbo.

Having observed that Josephus invoked Berossos in order to provide independent corroboration of Hebrew history, Annius applied the same strategy to the history of Etruria. But he added an astute twist: in his day Berossos’s work resembled Etruscan history in that little or nothing was known of either besides fragments preserved by Greek and Roman authors. Thus he decided to propose a rediscovered Defloratio Berosi Chaldaica as the primary source for resurrecting the history of the Etruscans.

The success of his falsified history was immediate; no sooner had Annius published his Commentaries in Rome than a Venetian publisher extracted and printed the “ancient” documents as a separate text. But the whole story of Noah, first king of Etruria and first pope, only hung together when Annius tied it all into a package with his carefully selected fragments and carefully woven arguments, many of them less fanciful than they might seem.

Despite his peculiar slant on antiquarian research, Annius did act as a pioneering figure in the study of Etruria. He provided the Etruscans with a satisfyingly dense history, combining textual criticism with the analytical treatment of surviving ancient monuments and inscriptions; these enabled him to identify (often to create) heroic founders of civic institutions and prolific heads of ancient dynasties. His close examination of Viterbo’s physical setting had informed him about the way cities grow, and he applied that knowledge to reconstructing the process of urbanization in antiquity. He examined Etruscan script carefully and was the first to notice that the alphabet lacked the letter “o.” He understood the importance of names to human culture, both the names of places and the names of people.

The influence of the Commentaries was immediate and great. When Ferdinand and Isabella, through Cardinal Carvajal, commissioned a new “temple” in Rome in 1502 to celebrate the purported site of St. Peter’s crucifixion on the Janiculum Hill, the architect, Donato Bramante, used a combination of Doric and Tuscan architectural forms to create an “Etruscan” style of architecture. On its altar, a sculpted relief of Noah's Ark appears beneath a relief of St. Peter crucified; above them both, Peter sits enthroned in glory, bearing the keys that identify him, at least in Annian terms, as the successor to Noah/Janus, the first person to hold the title pontifex maximus – the first, Etruscan, pope (Rowland 2006).

A fellow Viterbese, an Augustinian preacher named Egidio Antonini (“Giles of Viterbo”), began to use Annian history in his own rhetoric; when he became the preferred theologian of Pope Alexander’s successor, Julius II, the continued importance of Annius and his Commentaries was guaranteed. When Julius commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508, the scheme began with the creation of the world and ended with the sacrifice that Noah made after landing the Ark. When Julius died in 1513, and was replaced by a Florentine, Leo X, Egidio da Viterbo declared, “Hail, Vatican, now truly the Janiculum!” for an Etruscan pope sat at last on Noah’s Etruscan throne (O’Malley 1969, 1972). Antiquarians in Spain and France – Garcilaso de la Vega and Jean Lemaire de Belges, respectively – also promoted Annian heroes (Stephens 1989; Grafton 1990), while civic sculpture in Viterbo began to display the letters FAVL. An Augustinian friar named Martin Luther began to use Annius of Viterbo to guide his own study of history.

Annius himself died in 1502; one rumor had him poisoned by Cesare Borgia. Another rumor says that he lost his mind and died in chains, the early modern equivalent of a straitjacket (Rowland 1998: 42). Within a generation or so, scholars began to subject his Commentaries to more critical scrutiny and found the flaws in his historical schemes and his literary style. By then, however, the Annian myths had entered so deeply into European scholarly culture that it was almost impossible to root them out entirely. Other forgers followed in his wake: Guillaume Postel in the sixteenth century, Curzio Inghirami in the seventeenth, both of whom created new Biblical and Etruscan heroes to satisfy the human craving for a stable past.

The friar’s scholarly reputation has improved with closer investigation of his methods. Nanni’s methods were both pioneering and extremely intelligent (Ligota 1987; Stephens 1989, 2013; Grafton 1990). In particular, his analysis of Viterbo’s physical development was remarkably accurate. He turned the study of Etruria into a discipline that drew from a wide variety of skills. While Giovanni Nanni’s motives, like his sources and his methods, still pose a series of enigmas, his presence in the history of Etruscan studies is still as essential as it was in the late fifteenth century.

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GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Walter E. Stephens has written about Annius of Viterbo with wit and erudition since he was a graduate student; his most recent ideas are summarized in Stephens 2013, but Stephens 1989 and Stephens 2004 are also essential reading. Anthony Grafton 1990 points up the ways in which Annius explored pioneering scholarly methods through his forgeries. Brian Curran is another witty writer who explores how Annius used Egyptian hieroglyphs in Curran 1999. For the larger issues of forgery, see Richard De Puma’s chapter (29) in this volume.