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Collected Orations of Pope Pius II. Edited and Translated by Michael Von Cotta-Schönberg

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Collected Orations of Pope Pius II. Edited and Translated by Michael Von Cotta-Schönberg Collected Orations of Pope Pius II. Edited and translated by Michael von Cotta-Schönberg. Vol. 1: Introduction. 6th version Michael Von Cotta-Schönberg To cite this version: Michael Von Cotta-Schönberg. Collected Orations of Pope Pius II. Edited and translated by Michael von Cotta-Schönberg. Vol. 1: Introduction. 6th version. Scholars’ Press. 2019, 9786138885719. hal-01707661 HAL Id: hal-01707661 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01707661 Submitted on 17 Sep 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Collected orations of Pope Pius II. Vol. 1 0 Collected Orations of Pope Pius II. Edited and translated by Michael von Cotta-Schönberg Vol. I: Introduction 2019 1 Abstract During his career as official at the Council of Basel, as secretary and later top diplomat at the imperial court, as papal envoy, as cardinal, and as pope, Enea Silvio Piccolomini / Pope Pius II gave a number of orations as well as responses to ambassadors which taken together document his literary and oratorical gifts and throw valuable light on the political and ecclesiastical processes of the second third of the 15th century. Today, 80 of his orations and diplomatic responses are known to be extant, in a quite considerable number of manuscripts kept in European libraries. Of these 50 were published collectively by G.D. Mansi in 1755-1759, the only previous comprehensive edition. In the present edition, nine of Pius’ orations are published for the first time. Keywords Enea Silvio Piccolomini; Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini; Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini; Pope Pius II; Papa Pio II; Renaissance orations; Renaissance oratory; Renaissance rhetorics; Council of Basel; Holy Roman Empire; Papacy; 15th century; 1436-1464; Crusades; Turks; Hussites; Poetry; Women; Marriage; Sexuality; Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges; Papal supremacy Editor/translator Michael von Cotta-Schönberg Mag. Art. (University of Copenhagen) Bachelier en Philosophie (Université de Louvain) Emeritus Deputy Director / The Royal Library, Copenhagen Emeritus University Librarian / University of Copenhagen ORCID identity: 000-0001-8499-4142 e-mail: [email protected] 2 Foreword My fascination with Pius II and my studies of his works go back more than 20 years and have been most rewarding both in terms of intellectual pleasure and in terms of output. In 2007, I published a Danish translation of his Commentarii on Wikisource,1 and in the period from 2007 to 2016 five papers in peer-reviewed publications: Two texts by Eneas Silvius Piccolomini on Denmark (2007)2; De Daniae regno aliqua non indigna cognitu: A picture of Denmark as seen by an Italian renaissance humanist, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) (2010)3; Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini and the Development of Cardinal Protectors of Nations (2012, partly based on a manuscript in the Royal Library, Copenhagen)4; Nicholas V’s only surviving oration, the Nihil est of 24 March 1447 (2016, together with Professor Anna Modigliani, Rome)5; and [Pius II and the Turks] (2016).6 Pius II’s7 literary work is a rich source of knowledge about the Renaissance in Europe, its secular and religious history, its politics (both European, imperial and Italian), diplomacy, geography and culture. It is therefore completely justified that scholarly work on Pius II has intensified greatly over the last generation, resulting in a considerable number of editions, translations and monographs. However, until recently, apart from his crusades speeches at the German imperial diets in 1454 and 1455, Pius’ orations seem not have received the scholarly attention they merit.8 9 Piccolomini 1 https://da.wikisource.org/wiki/Af_en_renaissancepaves_erindringer 2 Available in HAL Archives: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-00457736. Rev. translation of: Michael von Cotta- Schönberg: To tekster af Æneas Silvius Piccolomini om Danmark. In: Umisteligt – Festskrift til Erland Kolding Nielsen. Red. John T. Lauridsen and Olaf Olsen. Copenhagen. København, 2007, pp. 55-74 3 Available in HAL Archives: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-00492242. Rev. translation of: Michael von Cotta- Schönberg: De Daniae regno aliqua non indigna cognitu : Danmarksbilledet hos en italiensk renæssancehumanist Æneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II). In: Renæssancen i svøb : dansk renæssance i europæisk belysning 1450-1550. Red. Lars Bisgaard, Jacob Isager and Janus Møller Jensen. Odense, Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2008, pp. 83-110 4 Michael von Cotta-Schönberg: Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini and the Development of Cardinal Protectors of Nations. In: Fund of Forskning, 51 (2012), 49-76. Slightly rev. version available in HAL Archives: https://hal- hprints.archives-ouvertes.fr/hprints-00827914. 5 Michael von Cotta-Schönberg & Anna Modigliani: Nicholas V’s only surviving oration the Nihil est of 24 March 1447. In: Roma nel Rinascimento, (2016), 271-288. The oration, extant in a manuscript in Florence and erroneously attributed to Pius II, in some respects served as model for passages in Pius’ papal orations 6 (Translated title) Michael von Cotta-Schönberg: Pius II og tyrkerne. In: Turban og Tiara. Renæssancehumanisternes syn på Islam og Tyrkerne. Red. Pia Schwartz Lausten. København, 2016 7 “Pius (II)” will be used throughout for the period covering Pius’ whole life and his pontificate, and “(Enea Silvio) Piccolomini” for the period of his life before the pontificate 8 Helmrath: Pius, p. 86: Fast alle Reden erstmals gesammelt ediert hat Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bereits … Mansi, genau untersucht sind hingegen wenige 9 Another group of Piccolomini’s writings, his poems, has not been studied much by scholars, even though they provide valuable insights into his personal and professional development, cf. Carson-Bird. One reason for this relative neglect may be that posterity has not thought highly of his poetical works 3 was one of the foremost speakers of his day, and his orations on the crusade against the Turks were masterpieces of rhetorical persuasion, although at the end of the day they could not change the fundamental political realities of his age, which certainly did not favour yet another Christian crusade against the infidels, or – more prosaically – a coordinated European military response to the Turkish war of aggression against Europe. One of the reasons for the relative neglect of Piccolomini’s orations in scholarly work may be that they have not been translated previously.1 In 2010, I therefore undertook a project to make them available to researchers in an English translation, based on Mansi’s edition from 1755-1759. I soon discovered, however, that Mansi had based his edition mainly on a single, rather late manuscript, written in 1493, the Lucca / Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana / 544, containing the collected orations first compiled under Pius’ direct supervision in 1462 and supplemented with a collection of his papal responses to ambassadors 1459-1460. This manuscript, however, is at least twice removed from the original manuscript from 1462 with the papal orations, and it therefore contains a number of cumulated errors of transcription and bears the possible traces of a later stylistic revision (syntax). Moreover, Mansi’s edition excluded a number of orations which were not available at the time of the first comprehensive compilation in 1462, or were delivered afterwards, or were for reasons unknown deliberately excluded. A couple of them have been published after Mansi by later scholars, and others have not been published previously.2 I therefore decided to prepare a new and complete critical edition of all the orations available today, with English translations, brief introductions, and notes – providing, however, only a “light’ edition 1) of the above-mentioned crusade orations from the imperial diets in 1454/55, since these have been edited by Helmrath in 1994 and in the Deutsche Reichstagsakten,3 and 2) of the oration “Sentio” from 1452, since it has been announced that Dr. Julia Knödler is preparing her own edition of this oration.4 The project does not comprise an in-depth study of Pius’ oratorical activity, nor of the individual orations, nor of the themes treated by Pius in his orations, nor of his rhetorics, though a brief sketch of the last two has been included in the present volume. Also, a codicological study of the manuscripts collated for the edition is outside the scope of the project: for such information, the reader must consult other research works and catalogues of manuscript collections. 1 Except those which were included in Pius’ Commentarii 2 And some, presumably, are actually extant, but unrecognized as orations of Pius II 3 Deutsche Reichstagsakten, 19, 1, 1969, and 19, 2-3, 2013 4 Märtl: Anmerkungen, p. 10, n. 31. See also Piccolomini: Historia Austrialis (Wagendorfer), I, p. xii 4 A word of caution: the orations provide quite valuable information about the subjects covered by Pius, but these cannot be studied on the basis of the orations alone. It will always be necessary to study any subject in the orations in the context of Pius’ other writings in order to get a comprehensive picture of his views on the matter. My own university degrees are in philosophy (University of Louvain) and psychology (University of Copenhagen) supplemented with studies of theology (Conception Seminary, Missouri), and Tibetan, Sanskrit and Pali (University of Copenhagen) - with a study of the vocabularies in the Sanskrit original and the Tibetan translation of Kambala’s Alokamala.1 These studies were obviously not directly relevant to this project, but in my early youth, during my studies in Louvain, I did undertake a comparative study of a certain group of medieval liturgical manuscripts, under the benevolent guidance of Dom Bernard Botte O.S.B.
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