1892 697

Ferdinand Gregorovius

"FERDINAND GEEGOEOVIUS, who died at on 1 May of Downloaded from J. last year and was cremated at Gotha a few days later, was mourned by two nations, the Italian and the German. A citizen of Neidenburg, in , where he was born in 1821, and also of the Eternal City, which had conferred on him the dignity of civi$ Romania, Gregorovius was a cosmopolite. The mind which http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ produced the ' History of Medieval '' and the ' History of Medieval .'a had an equally comprehensive grasp of its sub- ject in dealing with the Mediterranean world. In 1854, at the age of thirty-three, he published his first work, on ' Corsica,' of which three English translations speedily appeared, in London, in Edin- burgh, and in America. Cosmopolitan as he was by nature, Gregorovius was peculiarly fitted to ingratiate himself and his writings with the greater nations at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 of Europe. He soon, however, came to look upon as his second home. His subjects are principally Italian ; and even before he had crossed the Alps he was already in spirit in Rome. In 1857 he published a history of the emperor , and shortly after a drama entitled ' The Death of .' In these youthful pro- ductions may be detected all the characteristics of his later works— a noble striving after freedom, a tendency to humanism, and an artistic perception drawing inspiration from the Greeks. Once in Italy, he felt himself to be in his proper element. Rome affected him as it did Gibbon. Gibbon, seated amidst the ruins of ancient Rome, and listening to the vesper chants of the monks of Aracoeli, was stirred with the desire of describing how the cross was planted on the temples of antiquity. Instead, however, of carrying out this idea, and writing on medieval Rome, Gibbon wrote the history of the ' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Gregorovius took up the task which Gibbon abandoned. Standing one evening on the Ponte San Bartolommeo, the island bridge leading to Traste- vere, he saw before him a prospect such as Rome alone can offer— ' a picture,' to use his own words, ' evolved from centuries of union between two epochs of civilisation, the classic and the Christian.'

1 GetehichU der Stadt Bom im MitttlaHer. ' GuchichU der Stadt Athen im MUUlalter. 698 FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS Oct. The sight of the city, wrapped in medieval slumber, gave the idea of writing its history daring the middle ages. Borne had kept herself so completely isolated from the modernising tendencies of Europe, and even of Italy, that the political life on the banks of the Tiber was entirely subservient to the ecclesiastical. In the Borne of Pins IX, still a vast, ruin-bestrewn necropolis, the turbu- lent spirit of the young Prussian, dissatisfied with the internal con- ditions of his own country, found a resting-place. From 1855 to 1872 Gregorovius was engaged upon his 'History of Medieval Borne.' In a letter addressed by him to the writer of this article he says:— Downloaded from My history of the city of Rome is a record of the middle ages, written during a period which witnessed the extinction of the temporal power of the papacy, and produced among those very monuments which reflect this great epoch in the history of mankind. The idea of writing the history

of Rome in the middle ages was then suggested to my mind, and I was http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ enabled by a fortunate inspiration to grasp the phantom and give it shape. For years I toiled in libraries and among archives, accumulating the mass of materials requisite for the task. This conception of medieval Rome as a city originated with me. I gave it a literary form and carried out Gibbon's first idea ; for it is well known that he had originally intended to write the history of the city of Rome during the middle ages. In furtherance of this work, which became the purpose of his life,

Gregorovius made a point of seeing every spot connected with medi- at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 eval times, visiting even the most insignificant places which had formerly been seats of local administration, and discerning in the architectural features of each town the spirit of its history. Gre- gorovius had to contend with many difficulties, both material and personal, while engaged upon his great work. Material difficulties were pressing, for having no fortune, he was compelled to depend upon the very slender income which his writings produced. A German writer's lot in those days was anything but enviable. Some of his embarrassments were, however, removed by the inter- vention of Bunsen, who employed his influence on behalf of the young historian, and succeeded in obtaining from the Prussian government a yearly pension which freed him from pecuniary anxiety, and enabled him to devote himself wholly to his work. But personal difficulties had also to be combated. Gregorovius was a protestant, and moreover a freethinker, and papal Borne was disposed at first to regard him with suspicion. Gradually, however, this was overcome. He. was allowed access to archives hitherto unexplored, and even the manuscripts in the Vatican library were placed at his disposal. He counted among his friends in Borne both the Veronese Count Paolo Perez (an enthusiastic a

volume. His work is less to be regarded as a consecutive whole Downloaded from than as a succession of historical paintings instinct with descriptive power, and a series of portraits of popes, heroes, and women. They are drawn with vigour and enthusiasm by a writer who is at home in the historical relations between popes and emperors, but

whose sympathies are specially enlisted in the scenic effects of history, http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ and who cares little for the more ordinary aspects of life, its prin- ciples of administration and of domestic economy. Gregorovius's vivid imagination carries him far beyond the dry text of documents; his facts and characters are apt to be too strongly impregnated with his own energetic temperament. He writes con amort, but love is often blind. His German nationality asserts itself when recording the vicissitudes of medieval Rome; and he can never forget the

painful relations ono.e subsisting between Italy and his own father- at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 land, to whose emperors the road to Rome was often a veritable via crucit. He certainly misjudged his own character when he con- sidered the scientific element in it to be more developed than the artistic. In his charming little book ' Corfu: an Ionian Idyll' he sets forth his own estimate of the historian's vocation. All the works of Gregorovius abound in somewhat fantastic hypotheses. He launches out into suppositions, not only about events, but as to the sentimentB of prominent historical personages. His monograph ', based upon Documents and Letters of her own Day,' is an example of this. It is an artist's account of the times of Pope Alexander VI; the interest centres in the person of the beautiful Lucrezia, the daughter of Alexander and of his mistress Vannozza Catanei; but it is replete with conjectures, and the suppositions occupy almost more space in the volume than the actual facts. Yet, notwithstanding its weak points, the book is a fascinating one. Not only the spirit interests the author, but also the flesh; and even the costume of the day has its attractions for him. In his pages we seem to hear the rustle of silk and satin, of purple .and gold brocade. He never loses his admiration for the great moral characters which stand out in history, though he often lets mere magnificence stand abreast of virtue. He could scarcely make a vestal virgin out of Lucrezia Borgia, nor beatify a woman 700 FERDINAND GKEGOROVIUS Oct. who in the dim light of tradition appears as a poisoner. Never- theless he succeeds in rehabilitating her to some extent; and rightly observes that the contrast between the sanctity of the office held by Alexander VI, the head of the Borgias, and the evil deeds of the whole family causes their crimes to appear more terrible to us than they were in reality. Perhaps his vindication of Lucrezia may account for the favour which the historian found in the eyeff of Italian women. His portraits of the women of the Renaissance are drawn with warmth and energy. The duchess of Urbino, for instance, or the duchess of Mantua, proud and beautiful dames, enthroned in princely state, appear glittering with jewels, awaiting their cavaliers beneath golden baldacchinos.8 Downloaded from ' Athenais: the History of a Byzantine Empress,' which appeared in 1882,4 is a companion picture to ' Lucrezia Borgia.' In dealing with the history of that empress Gregorovius leads his readers to the three great centres of ancient culture, Athens, Constantinople, http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ and Jerusalem, where the life of his heroine was passed. A daughter of Leontius, the pagan philosopher, and by birth a heathen, Athenais later embraced Christianity and became the wife of the emperor Theodosius II. Her romantic story fascinated Gregorovius, who regarded her as typical of the twofold metamor- phosis of Greece—the transition from paganism to Christianity, and the merging of the Hellenic in the Byzantine. He had, after

completing ' Athenais,' republished in an enlarged form his early at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 work upon the emperor Hadrian, under the title 'Der Kaiser Hadrian : Gemalde der romisch-hellenischen Welt zu seiner Zeit.' The book gives an attractive description of the second century and its eclectic character, an epoch which Gregorovius regards as the ' middle ages of Roman-Hellenic times,' a period in which the most heterogeneous forms of culture are represented and approximated. "While employed on this volume the attention of Gregorovius was again directed to Athens, and the last ten years of his life were devoted to researches into the history of that city. In Greece his merits were fully appreciated, all his works in which Greece plays any part having been translated into Greek. His sympathies are undisguisedly Hellenic; he held with Paparrigo- pulos, the eminent modern Greek historian, that the Greeks of to- day are the true descendants of the Hellenes of antiquity, and he was strongly opposed to the theory, started some thirty or forty years ago by Fallmerayer, that the original race of ancient Greeks • Gregorovius was himself no dancer. The present queen of Italy, then wife of the heir to the crown, once invited the German historian to dance, thinking that one whose heart and pen kept time so merrily would surely he a proficient in this accomplishment. Gregorovius, abashed, was forced to acknowledge that he had never learned the art. ' Then,' said the princess, • we will dance a quadriglia parlata.' 4 The third edition, prepared by Gregorovius before his death, has just been published by Professor Bahl of Kfinigsberg (Leipzig, 1892). 1892 FERDINAND QREGOROVIUS 7G1 had become extinct in the middle ages. The brilliant intellectual qualities of Gregorovius enabled him to invest with interest the driest details, which in other hands might have become a mere chronicle of events. This is peculiarly striking in his work on ' Medieval Athens.' For seven years he laboured unceasingly in its preparation. He visited Athens, and had subjected the archives of Venice, Naples, and Palermo to a searching investiga- tion, being thereby enabled to publish facts hitherto unknown relating to the great city which, for several centuries during the middle ages, never rose above the level of a mere provincial town. At one time he had feared that he might lose himself ' among the tangled genealogical mazes of the dynasties and petty states of Downloaded from medieval Hellas, a veritable Cretan labyrinth of difficulties;' but in the end he surmounted all obstacles. An instance of his power in drawing characters is his sketch of Michael Akominatos, arch- bishop of Athens, a hero and a humanist in the middle ages. In an appendix to his work Gregorovius gives a short summary of the http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ fortunes of the city of Pericles, and of Greece in general, down to the present day. As an ardent Philhellene he considers that' the boundaries of the new kingdom have been drawn by the powers with a jealous and grudging hand;' yet he is confident that time will bring about some extension of the territory of Greece. He holds the possibility of the Greek cross being one day planted on St. Sophia, and of Constantinople becoming the rallying-point of modern Greek culture. ' No question of the day,' he observes, at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 ' is more absorbing than that of the future of Constantinople, now the most important and the most mysterious of all the cities of the earth, on whose fate depends not only the destiny of AthenB and Greece, but perhaps the future shaping of two continents.' Gregorovius, as he once confessed, was always disposed to consider the development of states and nations in the framework of their historic towns. Had not death prevented him, he would have written the history of Jerusalem. The work of Gregorovius received but tardy recognition in Ger- many, where learning was and still is regarded as the exclusive monopoly of professors. He never accepted a professorship at any German university, and this fact is quite sufficient to account for the ungenerous criticism bestowed upon him by some of bis academic' fellow-countrymen. Gregorovius declined all such posts in , in order that he might be free to devote himself to his studies. Had he accepted a professorship, he felt that he would have been debarred in that capacity from giving utterance to bis opinions with his wonted freedom and candour—a necessity to a man of his tem- perament. Eesearch for its own sake was his passion and delight. His heart and soul were in his writing. In Germany the historian of medieval Borne was often compared with Mommsen, the eminent 702 FERDINAND OREGOROVIUS Oct. author of the 'History of Ancient Rome/ and the comparison usually resulted unfavourably for the former. It is difficult to compare two men so dissimilar in character. The judicial, spirit is far more developed in Mommsen than in Gregorovius. Mommsen directs his studies primarily to the practical side of state institu- tions, to political organisation and administration; Gregorovius, on the other hand, devotes himself by preference to the considera- tion of the mental culture of a race and its artistic and religious attitudes. Mommsen's scathing criticism is sometimes destructive; Gregorovius with his finer feeling and enthusiasm is always recon- structing. Gregorovius as a writer is envious of the painter, because

the brush, as an interpreter of nature, is necessarily superior to the Downloaded from pen; but the German historian, who in his subjectivity absorbed so much of the colouring of real life, was himself a very painter among writers, though his manner of expression may not be the ideal cf the historian's art.

Gregorovius spent a great part of his life in Home; from 18C8 http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ to 1874 he was permanently established there. His love for the Eternal City was romantic, like the love which Virgil once bore to her, and which Carducci, Italy's best known living poet, feels for her in the present day. But he had known the city in the days when the glamour of medieval melancholy still overshadowed her; and the transformation, which took place after Rome became the capital of Italy, was distasteful to him in the extreme. In the conflict between Italy and the holy see Gregorovius espoused the cause of the former; at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 but his artistic sense was outraged when he saw Italians sacrificing venerable buildings in Rome to the demon of speculation and parcelling out the stately Villa Ludovisi into building-lots, while day by day a whole world of poetry was swept away by the ruth- less hands of builders and engineers. In a letter written by him in 1885 to the author of these lines he says:—

On 1 .April I set out from Munich on my annual pilgrimage to Mecca. I started later than usual this year, and somewhat reluctantly, I must admit, for this yearly visit to Rome is prompted now by little else than a feeling of regard for my second home. The violent transformation which Rome has undergone affords me no pleasure ; the city appears to me like a gorgeous carpet of ancient date, which during the process of beating goes to pieces amid clouds of dust. All the traces of my past life here have been obliterated,' destroyed, and built over; and the majestio calm of former days has been superseded by the tumult of modern life, which iB still seeking definite shape, but will hardly succeed in attaining to it for a generation to come.

Gregorovius was Bincerely attached to Italy, but he was keenly alive to its weak points. "When the present writer was about to visit Italy for the first time, the historian wrot9 to him as followB:— 1892 FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS. 708 Italy is no more what it was in bygone years, when the difficulties of locomotion caused foreigners to regard it as a very distant land of promise ; bat the artistio, historic, and ideal richness of the country must ever re- main unchanged, and the fault certainly lies in the traveller if these fail to appeal to him in a high degree. Italy is no longer the seat of learning, but simply the school of humanity. The whole atmosphere of the country, the boundlessness of its aesthetic horizon, the obviousness of all facts, the distinctness of all forms, the magnitude of its whole being, these all tend to awaken a more intelligent perception in every cultivated mind. But in our German fatherland the wave of progress is mightier and more universal than it is in Italy, that land which even to-day may be desig- nated 'the land of the dead,' though in the highest sense of the term. You will find young Italy still very feeble, but constantly experimenting; Downloaded from possessed of much talent but little character or knowledge. Shortly after the downfall of papal Rome in 1870, an event •which the German historian hailed with satisfaction, he was made a citizen of the Italian capital; yet, notwithstanding his connexion http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ with Italy and his long absences from Germany, Gregorovius had always remained a staunch patriot at heart, and when the Franco- German war broke out he joined his countrymen before the walls of Metz, though only as a spectator of the operations. The magni- tude of the German victories did not, however, dazzle him. Only a few months before his death the venerable historian touched npon the year 1870 and upon the duties and responsibilities entailed upon

the empire by the recently achieved unity of Germany. The address at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015 which he then delivered before the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, was entitled ' The Great Monarchies, or the Empires of the World in History/ and dealt with the subject from the broad standpoint of a universal historian. He pointed out that the Saxon races, more especially the English and the German, were still eminently qualified to be the representatives of the idea of individual liberty in our hemisphere. Of Great Britain he says:— England, having established the freedom of her constitution, raised herself by the marvellous growth of her commercial enterprise to the rank of a great naval power, far surpassing in size the empire of ancient Borne. It is remarkable that in the interests of India England should in the present day have taken up the idea of the empire which is histori- cally connected with universal monarchy. What Pliny said of the Romans, that they had made the earth more human, may equally be England's boast. Germany, he anticipates, will not seek self-aggrandisement at the expense of other nations, and he applies to her the words which Isocrates applied to Greece: she must become the ' school of the nations.' Yet at the same time he warns her against chauvinism, against supposing that she alone may become the leader of civi- lisation, and against giving heed to the vain words of those who prophesy that Germany will eventua'ly become the intellectual 704 FERDINAND QREQOROVIUS Oct. ruler of the world, for no nation in these days is ever likely to . , monopolise supremacy in the political or the scientific world. ' And in reference to the victories of 1870 he exhorts his country- j men to believe that' Mars is a perfidious deity.' ' A nation,' he - adds, ' which seeks its greatness in warfare alone is foolish indeed, I for every country at some period of its career has achieved military j success, but has forfeited it again,' and he considers that the Saxon \ races, more especially the English and the German, ' are destined j to represent moral freedom, truth, duty, and industry under the most progressive form of civilisation.' j SlGMUND MttNZ. Downloaded from http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Winnipeg on August 27, 2015