I'm reading Will Durant - something I always wanted to do for a long time, but the time was never right. A few days ago, at Blossoms, I stumbled on the series and bought two books - Our Oriental Heritage and The Renaissance. I started with the latter - my distaste for Indian history a fallout of having to swot up large chunks of it in school, I suppose. Plus, I value the time I spent in Italy a great deal, and so ...
The book is very well written, so much so that I would have loved it as a textbook. Take this sample, early on.
The book is very well written, so much so that I would have loved it as a textbook. Take this sample, early on.
Robert the Wise had just died, and his granddaughter Joanna I had inherited his throne and dominions, including Provence and therefore Avignon. To please her father she had married her cousin Andrew, son of the king of Hungary. Andrew thought he should be king as well as consort;Joanna's brother, Louis of Taranto, slew him(1345) and married the Queen. Andrew's brother Louis, succeeding to the throne of Hungary, marched his army into Italy, and took Naples (1348). Joanna fled to Avignon, and sold that city to the papacy for 80,000 florins ($2,000,000?); Clement declared her innocent, sanctioned her marriage, and ordered the invader back to Hungary. King Louis ignored the order, but the Black Death (1348) so withered his army that he was compelled to withdraw. Joanna regained her throne (1352), and ruled in splendor and vice util deposed by Pope Urban VI (1380); a year later she was captured by Charles, Duke of Durazzo, and in 1382 she was put to death.
So there are so many stories in that little paragraph - tragedies and histories, love, murder, politics, bribery, passion, war and death, all in one paragraph about the life of one forgotten queen. Joanna is not mentioned again, but there are so many stories like hers.
There's Petrarch, pudgy and passionate; Boccaccio, earthy and amorous and Giotto, who Dante called "The lord of painting's field". There is Cola di Rienzo, the son of a tavern keeper and a washerwoman, elected Dictator of Rome, who administered the city state so well that the church and the Italian nobles conspired to over throw him. They succeeded but Rienzo made his return, only to be stabbed a hundred times by the same peasant's whose cause he had championed. His corpse was dragged through the streets and hung up like carrion at a butcher's stall. "It remained there for two days, a target for public contumely and urchin's stones," writes Durant.
All this happens in just the first chapter, called "The Age of Petrarch and Boccaccio." There are stories of the writing of The Decameron, speculation on who Petrarch's Laura could have been, descriptions of the bubonic plague that was still doing its work, the manipulations of Pope Clement IV, the beginning of Florence's wealth and much more. And in the background, influencing and being influenced are Petrarch and Boccaccio, one wealthy and respected in his own time, all but forgotten now, the other immortalized because of The Decameron - which lives on through Chaucer and others, even finding new life as an Italian porn film (starring the amazingly endowed Sarah Young)
The book collector
One of the most endearing things about Petrarch is that he was crazy about books. He began his first book collection as a student in Bologna. Then his dad visited him and thought it would be a good idea to burn all the parchments that Petrarch had collected. His dad wanted Petie to become a lawyer and not muck about with books and parchments.
But Petrarch couldn't. When he wasn't writing besotted poems to a woman he never spoke to (why does that sound familiar?), he spent all his time and money collecting books. He was a great traveller, and wherever he went, he had to hire a retinue to carry his book collection. He would go foraging in Flemish monasteries and the back alleys of Paris and bemoan the fact that Brit and French merchants regularly plundered Rome of its books.
He would read while at the barber and at dinner, even while riding. I'm pretty sure he was the first great bathroom reader.
And in this world of blogs and self absorption, his words seem particularly appropriate: "All the world is taking up the writer's part, which ought to be confined to a few andthe number of the sick increases and the disease becomes daily more virulent...yet it might have been better to have been a labourer or a weaver at the loom. There are several kinds of melancholia: and some madmen will write books, just as others toss pebbles in their hands.As for literary fame, it is but a harvest of thin air and it is only fit for sailors to watch a breeze and to whistle for a wind."
Petrarch is the hero - so to speak of the first chapter. But he is also a character moving across the tapestry of the Italian city states. Siena, where the Palazzo Publico rose against a backdrop of nobles and peasantry uniting to fight against a corrupt and wealthy merchant class; Milan, under the Viscontis, "seldom scrupulous, often cruel, sometimes extravagant, never stupid"; Genoa, the birthplace of double entry bookkeeping and maritime insurance; Venice, Verona and so many others.
The second chapter is about the popes at Avignon - but more on them later. The third chapter is the best - so far - and it profiles one one of the coolest people I've ever read about. The chapter is called "Rise of the Medici," but the person the next post will be about is not called Lorenzo.
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| Petrarch |
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| Cola Di Rienzo |
The book collector
One of the most endearing things about Petrarch is that he was crazy about books. He began his first book collection as a student in Bologna. Then his dad visited him and thought it would be a good idea to burn all the parchments that Petrarch had collected. His dad wanted Petie to become a lawyer and not muck about with books and parchments.
But Petrarch couldn't. When he wasn't writing besotted poems to a woman he never spoke to (why does that sound familiar?), he spent all his time and money collecting books. He was a great traveller, and wherever he went, he had to hire a retinue to carry his book collection. He would go foraging in Flemish monasteries and the back alleys of Paris and bemoan the fact that Brit and French merchants regularly plundered Rome of its books.
He would read while at the barber and at dinner, even while riding. I'm pretty sure he was the first great bathroom reader.
And in this world of blogs and self absorption, his words seem particularly appropriate: "All the world is taking up the writer's part, which ought to be confined to a few andthe number of the sick increases and the disease becomes daily more virulent...yet it might have been better to have been a labourer or a weaver at the loom. There are several kinds of melancholia: and some madmen will write books, just as others toss pebbles in their hands.As for literary fame, it is but a harvest of thin air and it is only fit for sailors to watch a breeze and to whistle for a wind."
Petrarch is the hero - so to speak of the first chapter. But he is also a character moving across the tapestry of the Italian city states. Siena, where the Palazzo Publico rose against a backdrop of nobles and peasantry uniting to fight against a corrupt and wealthy merchant class; Milan, under the Viscontis, "seldom scrupulous, often cruel, sometimes extravagant, never stupid"; Genoa, the birthplace of double entry bookkeeping and maritime insurance; Venice, Verona and so many others.
The second chapter is about the popes at Avignon - but more on them later. The third chapter is the best - so far - and it profiles one one of the coolest people I've ever read about. The chapter is called "Rise of the Medici," but the person the next post will be about is not called Lorenzo.
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