Filelfo and the Byzantines

John Monfasani

Francesco Filelfo is inescapable to anyone studying Byzantine émigrés in Renaissance . Thus, understanding his relationship with the Byzantines has become important to me and, I hope, would also be to anyone interested in Filelfo or the Byzantines. Because of his fluency in Greek and virtuosity in , one might be tempted to apply to Filelfo the characterization that Lorenzo Valla used speaking of Cardinal Bessarion: “inter Graecos Latinissimus, inter Latinos Graecissimus”;1 but Filelfo himself would refuse the compliment. Immediately after he returned from in 1427, he firmly asserted his basic “Latinness.”2 Nonetheless, his correspondence in Greek remains unmatched in size and importance by anyone in the fifteenth century who was not himself Greek. Furthermore, because of his marriage to the daughter of John Chrysoloras, his nearly seven years in Greece, and his four years in the service of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII,3 Filelfo anointed himself, as is well known,4 an expert on Greek affairs, proffering, seemingly at a drop of a hat, for over forty years, until his death in 1481, unsolicited advice to the great and good on strategies for a crusade against the Turk.5 He also made himself an unofficial clearing house for intellectually and politically prominent Greek visitors to Quattrocento Italy, second only to Cardinal Bessarion in this capacity. Finally, Filelfo took it upon himself to serve as a one-man lobbying and job agency for refugee Greeks after the fall of Constantinople. He not only successfully rescued his former mother-in-law and sister-in-laws from slavery, but also appealed to the chancellor of the King of France to aid some Greek nobles heading northward, pleaded with the Ferrarese courtier Ludovico Casella to help the Greek abbot Dionysius collect funds to ransom the monks of his monastery (PhE·12.60),

1 Now the title of a volume of essays on him: see Märtl 2013. 2 See his letter of 15 October 1427 (PhE·01.04): “Et sum Latinus et fui semper,” as noted by Ganchou 2005, at 198, and Cortassa 2001, at 347, n. 13. 3 For the amount of time in Constantinople itself, see Ganchou 2005, at 225–233; for his service to John VIII, ibid., at 249–253. 4 See now Meserve 2010 and De Keyser 2012. 5 On this literature as a whole, see Hankins 1995 (on Filelfo, see at 138); and on a more gen- eral level, Cavallarin 1980. Ironically, Filelfo’s son Gian Mario wrote on commission from a businessman a poem in four books the first three of which glorified Mehmet the Conqueror before reversing field and in the last calling for a crusade; see Cavallarin 1980, at 63–74.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004382190_003 14 Monfasani wrote to Marchese Ludovico III Gonzaga of Mantua to aid various Greek noblemen (PhE·12.75 and 12.76), and even tried to help John Argyropulus find a refuge in France before the latter landed in (PhE·13.23). Filelfo’s correspondence is telling for what it lacks almost as much as for what it contains. Nowhere does Filelfo express an opinion on the theological issues separating the Greeks and the , references to which one easily finds in the writings of Bessarion, George of Trebizond, Theodore Gaza, John Argyropulus, George Gemistus Pletho, and George Scholarius, all Greek cor- respondents of Filelfo. The main reason, I believe, is that Filelfo simply was not interested in the theological issues. In none of his writings did Filelfo ever address a substantive theological question. This theological allergy caused him already in 1428 to excuse himself from accepting an invitation from the Greek Dominican theologian Andrew Chrysoberges to come to , to par- ticipate, it seems, in some sort of ecumenical project (PhE·01.55).6 But a second reason was also in play. In Filelfo’s correspondence with Byzantine scholars, whether in Latin or in Greek, we do not find a hint of polemic. In contrast with the nasty criticism and conflicts he famously engaged in with various Latin intellectuals and public figures, Filelfo’s relations with Greeks were uniformly complimentary and gracious. The Greeks were neither rivals nor opponents. Rather, they were assets. To be sure, some were friends going back decades; others were newer acquaintances whom Filelfo genuinely liked and admired. But all together they constituted a special class of contacts that allowed him to remain one of the hubs of Greek intellectual activity in fifteenth-century Italy. A constant refrain in Filelfo’s correspondence with Greeks was the demand for more correspondence. He wanted to build a large epistolario. It was impor- tant for him to keep tabs on his Greek acquaintance and know what they were doing. At times he clearly was collecting Greek correspondents as one gathers flowers for a bouquet. For instance, having learned from George Scholarius in 1439 that he, Scholarius, had defended against the attacks of Pletho in Florence, and having fulsomely praised him for this right action (PhE·03.06 (Φ·012)), Filelfo then made it his business to meet Pletho soon after in Bolo- gna and present him with an autograph copy of a treatise on the soul that he had written, and then, two years later beg Pletho to become his correspondent (PhE·04.45 (Φ·023)). Similarly, on 28 July 1465, he wrote George of Trebizond telling him that he had heard that George had composed something against Plato in defense of Aristotle, no small accomplishment (non parva res) and that he would very much like to read the work. The same day he wrote to

6 However, I could not find anything specific to 1428 in Loenertz 1939, nor in Delacroix-Besnier 2002.