BOOK: Cyriac of Ancona, "Life and Early Travels"

Cyriac of Ancona: Life and Early Travels. Edited and translated by Charles Mitchell, Edward W. Bodnar and Clive Foss. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 65. Harvard University Press, 2015. 9780674599208. xxii + 375 pp.

Cyriac was an early-15th-century author who travelled widely through Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, partly for business but partly also because he made a hobby of recording and sketching the ancient inscriptions and monuments that he found in the places he visited. This is the second book about him in the I Tatti Renaissance Library; I read the previous one, the Later Travels, many years ago (resulting in one of the first posts I have made on this blog). I enjoyed that book quite a bit, but had no idea that more volumes about Cyriac's travels would be forthcoming. It's probably just as well, otherwise I would have become impatient considering that 12 years passed between the previous volume and the current one. According to the translator's introduction (p. xviii and note 26), they are hoping to eventually publish a third volume as well, covering the middle part of Cyriac's life.

The Life of Cyriac

About half of the present volume is taken up by a biography of Cyriac written by his friend and fellow citizen of Ancona, Francesco Scalamonti (p. viii). Much of it is based on Cyriac's own diaries. It covers only the earlier parts of Cyriac's life, reaching up to 1435 before ending unusually abruptly; perhaps the biographer lost interest or something like that. In any case, I found this biography fairly interesting, especially as I didn't remember anything much of Cyriac's life from the previous volume, the Later Travels (either because not that much is said about his life there, or because I have forgotten everything about it anyway).

His interest in travels started early, and his grandfather took him along to some of his journeys to Venice, Naples and the like (¶5–11). Cyriac clearly had quite an aptitude for business; he got apprenticed to a rich merchant from Ancona (¶14) as a child and eventually became his trusted assistant that basically ran his whole business for a while. He was also entrusted with some fairly notable administrative roles in the city government at an unusually early age, and occasionally held similar posts in later years as well (¶14–15, 47, 61).

It is always delightful and impressive when someone manages to transcend a commercial background and take up more intellectual interests, and Cyriac is a wonderful example of that. His upbringing had been so practical that they hadn't even taught him Latin, and he ended up learning it by himself, mostly it seems by sheer stubborness, studying Virgil's poetry until it started to make sense (¶53; see also p. xiii). I guess he did have an advantage in the fact that Italian is a fairly closely related language to Latin, and I suppose this method wouldn't work so well for speakers of non-Romance languages. Anyway, judging by the occasional remarks by the translators, his Latin was perhaps a bit shaky but otherwise functional enough. Later he also learned Greek. He also had an interest in Italian poetry, and the earlier parts of the biography include a sort of correspondence in verse, numerous sonnets written to and by Cyriac, mostly in Italian (¶24–30, 49–52).

Most of the travels we see in the Life of Cyriac in this book are around Italy, rather than to the more distant and exotic countries that we saw him visiting in the Later Travels. Nevertheless he also travels to Byzantium in the present book, ¶37–43; to Syria and Cyprus, ¶63–73, and then to Greece again ¶74–90. We find him hunting panthers with the king of Cyprus (¶70; I didn't think there were still panthers there at the time), lobbying pope Eugenius for an “expedition against the Turks” (¶92), and sightseeing in Rome with emperor Sigismund, whom Cyriac harangued on the importance of preserving ancient monuments (¶99).

He has the same antiquarian zeal as in the previous volume, and the Life includes numerous ancient inscriptions that he collected in Rome (¶93–4), Milan (¶105–50), Brescia (¶152–64), Verona (¶167–89), Mantua (¶194–7), and so on. A considerable proportion of them are funerary inscriptions, though for the most part I didn't find them terribly touching. Many of them exhibit a curious obsession with preventing the heirs from reusing the memorial, which struck me as a somewhat narrow-minded thing to worry about when designing an inscription for someone's grave; but I suppose it must have made sense to the ancient Romans.

Among the ancient Roman funerary inscriptions recorded by Cyriac there is one from Verona (¶181) that was dedicated by a man to “his well-deserving freedwoman and wife”. This struck me as an intriguing combination; I was glad to see that he freed her and married her, instead of keeping her as a slave and raping her. It's nice to see that these things occasionally have a reasonably happy outcome. Speaking of slavery, we find Cyriac buying “a very intelligent servant girl from Epirus” on “the Turkish slave market in Adrianople” (¶76), intending to send her home to his mother in Ancona, but we don't learn anything about her subsequent fate.

Cyriac's letters

This book also contains a few letters to and from Cyriac on various subjects, which I found much more interesting than I had expected. There's an interesting exchange between Cyriac and Leonardo Bruni (pp. 187–95) commenting on the practice of the Holy Roman (i.e. German) Emperors to get themselves crowned as “King of the Romans” first and then ask the pope to proclaim them Emperor. Our two worthy correspondents take no small joy in sneering at these barbarous and ignorant habits, with Bruni pointing out that the ancient Roman kings and emperors did not even wear crowns (Letter III, ¶9), and, more importantly, that the title of emperor (imperator) is strictly inferior to that of king (rex).

In principle, he has some reasonable arguments for this: an imperator received some sort of military powers, acting under the laws and while many of the other offices of the government continued functioning; and there could be several imperators at the same time. On the other hand, a king was above the law and held all the power to himself, and there could be only one per country at any given time (¶5–7). There is also an argument from transitivity (¶4): a king is higher than a dictator (because Julius Caesar wanted to become a king at a time when he was already a dictator) and that a dictator is higher than an imperator (because the people were offering to make Augustus a dictator at a time when he was already an imperator).

The problem, of course, is that the meaning of words can change over time, so demonstrating that an imperator was an inferior title in the time of Caesar and Augustus doesn't mean that it's the same in the middle ages or the renaissance, so the whole debate struck me as somewhat silly. It's obvious that due to the size of the Roman empire and the power of some of its rulers, the concept of the emperor gradually developed into some sort of claim to almost universal rule, in which an emperor was clearly superior to those other rulers that were just plain old kings. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that one of the reasons why someone like Augustus had little interest in calling himself a king was that the Romans used the same word, rex, for every hairy barbarian chieftain, every Roman client princeling, every tyrant of a city-state, i.e. the sort of rulers that could be found by the dozen in the areas bordering on Augustus' empire. So if anything, Augustus' prestige would be taking a step backwards if he had adopted such a title for himself (not to mention that it would pointlessly provoke some of the Roman public, who still had bad memories of the Etruscan kings that used to rule in Rome in its early years).

There is an interesting letter in which Cyriac defends himself from people who criticized his intense interest in pagan literature and history (pp. 175–85). He mostly does this by pointing out numerous passages in Virgil's poetry that can, if you squint a little, be interpreted in ways that are compatible with christianity. (He also points out that notable early christian authors such as Augustine thought highly of Virgil.) I'm not normally too keen on this sort of after-the-fact interpretation, which could easily degenerate into tendentious quote-mining, but in fact Cyriac does it moderately and playfully, so it was all in good fun. And it is indeed nice to see the easy blend of christian and pagan motifs in his thinking and writing, evidently without the slightest idea that there could be anything objectionable about this (a nice example: he regarded Mercury as “his divine and catholic genius”, i.e. a sort of patron saint;; Life, ¶14 and n. 8 on p. 316).

There are also a couple of letters involving an apparently very heated debate on who was better, Scipio Africanus or Julius Caesar (pp. 197–231). Cyriac's view is that they are both equally good as military commanders, but Caesar gets more merit for his political accomplishments, especially the introduction of monarchy. This provoked a grotesquely insulting letter from Poggio Bracciolini, who seems to have favoured Scipio. This whole thing struck me as gloriously silly — it must have been the renaissance equivalent of comic-book nerds arguing about whether Superman is better than Batman or vice versa. (The translator's preface has a wonderful phrase for it: “the pettiest of antiquarian squabbles”, p. xvi.)

Naval battle of Ponza

This is Cyriac's account of the naval battle of Ponza , in 1435, in which the forces of Milan defeated those of Aragon. As usual with such things, I found the account of the battle somewhat confusing and not particularly interesting. I do, however, like the magnanimous treatment of the captuerd leaders of the defeated side, who were apparently treated very well in Milan and were soon allowed to return home (10.2–3).

*

As an appendix, the book contains a useful chronology of Cyriac's life; some notes of his that accompanied his sketches of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (the drawings themselves unfortunately do not seem to have survived); Cyriac's notes on the traditional Greek classification of six forms of government; and a few letters to Cyriac from Francesco Filelfo. One is a fairly long discussion of the Aeneid, the others are mostly shorter replies to Cyriac's inquiries, but as they cover a period of several years, they give us a nice look at the progress that Cyriac was making in his classical studies (eventually they reach a point where Filelfo writes to him in Greek instead of Latin, p. 289).

This was a surprisingly interesting book and I'm definitely looking forward to the third one, hopefully in less than 12 years :)