Sunday, April 21, 2019

BOOK: Biondo Flavio, "Italy Illuminated" (Vol. 2)

Biondo Flavio: Italy Illuminated. Vol. 2: Books V–VIII. Edited and translated by Jeffrey A. White. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 75. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674054950. vi + 627 pp.

The publishing arc of the I Tatti Renaissance Library is long, but it bends towards finishing the things they start. Volume 2 of their edition of Biondo's Italy Illuminated appeared in 2016, eleven years after the first volume. I mostly remember that first volume because it occasioned some of the most grotesquely hostile comments that I ever received on this blog. In my post about vol. 1, I admitted that I found the book very boring and didn't quite see what sort of person could possibly want to read it (or write it, for that matter), and some people reacted as if the book was obviously immensely valuable and that, if this wasn't clear to me, it must obviously be because I'm completely stupid. Nobody, of course — as is usual in such situations — deigned to provide any sort of explanation as to why or how we're supposed to see that book as anything but a pointless accumulation of dry, boring facts. Oh well.

After that unpleasant experience, I approached vol. 2 with greatly reduced expectations on the one hand, and with a certain fear on the other hand, in case it turns out to be boring again and I'll receive even more hostile comments for saying so. I can now say, with some relief, that this volume wasn't as boring as I had feared. I suspect this is due to a combination of reasons; partly it's because of the aforementioned reduced expectations, partly it's because I'm more inured to boring ITRL volumes now, having read so many of them since then; partly it's because some parts of this volume deal with regions a little closer to home, and thus a little more interesting to me; and partly I suspect it's due to the manner of reading: I read this volume quickly and could thus easily get past many boring details while still noticing the odd interesting factoid here and there. And I think there were more odd and pleasantly bizarre factoids here than in volume 1, so overall I enjoyed this volume a good deal better than the first one.

The overall structure of this volume is, unsurprisingly, the same as in vol. 1. Biondo describes the geography of Italy from region to region (Lombardy, Veneto, March of Treviso, Friuli, Istria, Abruzzo, Campania, Apulia); for each region, he usually starts with an overview of its history, then goes through the major rivers and lists the towns along each of them. For the more important towns, he also writes a little about their history and about famous people from that town, both ancient and his own contemporaries. In fact these sections about history were the most interesting parts of the volume, in my opinion; see e.g. 7.38–42 on Milano, 8.5–28 on Venice, 9.32–6 on Padua and 12.2–18 on the Kingdom of Naples.

There's also an interesting appendix at the end of the book, in the form of a letter from Biondo to Pope Pius II. Biondo explains that he lent the unfinished manuscript of his book to a certain bishop, who secretly had a copy made and was about to publish the whole thing in a mutilated and incomplete form, so Biondo had to rush his own version to publication to forestall this (pp. 363–5). As a result, the book is not entirely finished, e.g. the region of Puglia is covered very briefly.

Incidentally, it turns out that there is another recent English translation of Italy Illuminated, by Catherine J. Castner, the first volume of which came out in 2005 (the same as the first volume of the ITRL edition), with the second volume in 2011. According to this very interesting review of Castner's vol. 1, it seems that the ITRL translation is a bit more readable while Castner's is a little more literal, and her notes are more thorough and extensive.

Miscellaneous

Biondo mentions a few reports, from Pliny, of unusually long-lived people: 120 years (7.7), 125 years (7.8) and even 130 years (7.10). According to the translator's notes, this is from Pliny's Natural History, 7.163.

“Almost all of the region of Monferrato is subject to the noblest marquises of Italy, descendants of the Paleologi emperors of Constantinople, who have held the region for the last 150 years.” (7.14) I found this very intriguing and wondered how a descendant of the Byzantine emperor ends up ruling a small region of Italy, but judging by the wikipedia, the explanation is fairly prosaic: one of the marquises died without heirs, but his sister had been married to one of the Byzantine emperors, so her descendants from that marriage inherited the marquisate.

A nice contribution to the catalogue of curious relics: “In the time of Charlemagne, Christ's miraculous blood was displayed at Mantua” (7.18).

In 7.47 he mentions “Alpine ridges, the very ones that Hannibal split open with vinegar as he descended into Italy”. His authority is Livy 21.37.2, but I wonder how this is supposed to have worked. Sure, limestone corrodes easily, but vinegar?... And where would he get so much vinegar?

Biondo says (8.15) that “the first bells seen in Greece” were sent as a present by the Venetians in 870; I remember encountering this factoid before (e.g. in Pius' autobiography), and I still don't know if I should believe it.

He has some interesting remarks on the Lombards, a Germanic people who settled in present-day Lombardy and “laid down new laws [. . .], customs, and rituals, and changed the words for peoples and institutions”; in the laws of the Lombards “there are entries and discussions on the many things whose name was changed. The Lombards in fact quite deliberately transformed the usages of public administration, and of private life too, reaching such a height of madness that they abandoned the very letters of the Roman alphabet.” (9.3) I wonder what the truth behind these things is. Perhaps they simply tried to create a combination of Latin laws and terminology with their own native Germanic ones? Frankly, considering that they conquered the area and settled into it, Biondo should be thankful that they assimilated at all, instead of complaining that they changed a few words here and there in the process. I always thought that these Germanic tribes (Franks, Ostrogoths, Lombards etc.) were rather pathetic for settling in Roman territory and then assimilating into Roman culture, instead of forcing the existing population to assimilate into theirs. That's not how conquest is supposed to work, you numpties :] But then I suppose the same thing might have happened to us if the territory we settled in had been more thoroughly Romanized to begin with.

Zevio is “a town that abounds in great quantities of succulent cabbage” (9.9). Biondo goes on to discuss Pliny's preferences on the subject of cabbages.

A glorious anecdote about the Cimbrians, a Germanic or Celtic tribe that was defeated by Gaius Marius: “The wives of the Cimbrians, who were captured in the fierce fighting and denied release, smothered or crushed their babies to death and killed themselves by hacking at one another or strangling themselves with ropes made from their own hair.” (9.10)

I liked this effort by the translator: “Palaemon, who when he was asked the difference between a drop and a drip, said that ‘a “drop” [gutta] is motionless, but a “drip” [stilla] falls.’ ” It still doesn't quite work, though; in English, it's hard not to associate the noun “drop“ with motion, since the verb “drop” obviously describes a kind of motion. FWIW, the wiktionary translates both gutta and stilla as “drop”.

Biondo quotes an epigram of Catullus poking fun at another poet; it concludes with: “into the fire with you, Annals of Volusius, full of smoke and dullness, fecal folios” (9.35). I love the phrase “fecal folios”, and it's a nice translation that preserves the alliteration of the original (“cacata charta”).

“Aquileia lies to the left of the river Natisone, now known as the Isonzo.” (10.9) This struck me as odd, as surely those are two different rivers. Now I see in the wikipedia and on google maps that the Natisone flows into the Torre, which then flows into the Isonzo about 15 km later, and Aquileia lies just around 6 km from this latter confluence. Perhaps in Biondo's time they had a different idea of which of these rivers is the main one and which is the tributary? But what's even more odd is that he says “to the left”, when according to the map Aquileia is obviously to the right of these rivers (they flow south, and Aquileia is to the west of them). Now I wonder how many other dubious geographical statements there are in Biondo's book in areas that I'm less familiar with.

I was interested to learn that the town we now know as Koper used to be called Justinopolis (10.12). “The son of Justinian I and his successor as emperor, Justinus, built it on the island then called Capraria, which was earlier known as Pullaria.” (11.3) He mentions Justinus as the builder of the town again in 11.10. FWIW, the wikipedia says that Justinus was Justinian's nephew, not son, and that the town was named after a later Byzantine emperor, Justinian II.

The English translation in this volume mostly uses Italian names of towns and rivers, so I was surprised to see Izola spelled (11.3) as in Slovenian, instead of Isola as in Italian.

In 11.1, Biondo mentions “the Gulf of Fanaticus, or Quarnaro as it is now called”. I didn't know about the name Fanaticus before and was curious about its etymology, but it seems to have been simply a mistake in the manuscripts of Pliny that were available to Biondo (translator's note 2, p. 500); the correct spelling is Flanaticus. It seems to have been named after the town of Flanone and its inhabitants [link].

Biondo mentions that Roger II obtained, from Antipope Anacletus, “the absurd title to the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’ ”. The idea obviously is that one Sicily is the island and the second one consists of the mainland territories of the kingdom, but I guess Biondo didn't like to see the name stretched out like that. Interestingly, the way the wikipedia describes these things makes it seem as if the title didn't come into use until much later: “The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies resulted from the re-unification of the Kingdom of Sicily with the Kingdom of Naples (called the Kingdom of Peninsular Sicily), by King Alfonso V of Aragon in 1442.” They call Roger's state simply the Kingdom of Sicily (even though it also included Naples and southern Italy).

Near Cantalupo there is “a petroleum spring that gushes all year long. The oil is collected and exported more industriously by the Germans and Hungarians than by the Italians.” The translator's note 89 (p. 507) says that petroleum was believed to have medicinal properties.

I hadn't heard of the Atellan farces before; they seem to have been a low genre of theatre that was very popular in ancient Rome. Biondo describes them in the most delightfully exasperated terms: “Boys and girls and old men in a lather of debauchery would declaim in troupes and at the tables of the shameless a play composed in meter and set to music and melody, in filthy language and words expressing every sort of disgraceful behavior in word and deed, with bodily movements and gestures of every sort, even laid out on their backs, and would gesticulate in such a way that nothing was left to the imagination save an explicit act of sexual intercourse.” (13.21) Woo hoo! As usually when moralists complain about something, they probably make it sound much more fun than it really was.

About a certain spring of mineral water: “Pliny says it was at Liternum and that its water made men tipsy like wine.” (13.23) This totally sounds like a lame excuse invented by stereotypical drunken husbands. ‘Of course I'm not drunk, honey! It's the mineral water, I swear!!’ :)) Anyway, Biondo goes on to report that he tried it and it didn't make him tipsy.

An implausible tale from Livy, quoted by Biondo in 14.2: “The praetor Lucius Postumius [. . .] carried out a strict investigation into a conspiracy of shepherds who had endangered the highways and public grazing spaces by their banditry. He found about seven thousand men guilty”. I have a hard time imagining that highwaymen would form conspiracies involving seven thousand people, as opposed to operating as much smaller standalone gangs... I wonder what really happened there, and I can't help suspecting that the praetor must have been abusing his powers a bit.

An even more bizarre story from Augustine, quoted by Biondo in 14.6: on the Island of Diomedes there are birds that are friendly towards people of Greek descent, but “if they see non-Greeks, they fly at their heads with such forceful blows that they say the birds actually cause them physical harm.”

A grisly hunting anecdote from Biondo's appendix, 3.12–15: a wild boar was harassing the monks of a certain monastery, and they hired a hunter to shoot it with his arbalest. But as he was about to do so, a wolf turned up and “suddenly seized the scrotum of the beast with a great bite and held on tight. [. . .] the boar twisted back on itself in a frenzied but vain attempt to bite back [. . .] The wolf for its part bore down on the boar's scrotum”. This went on for half an hour, until the boar “collapsed lifeless when the membrane holding his innards together gave way.” The hunter who had been engaged to kill the boar then killed the wolf instead. The translator's note 29 (p. 530) suggests that this gruesome story “seems a kind of Curial allegory difficult to decipher”.

I was interested to hear that the Latin name of Milano, Mediolanum, “is in fact one of the commonest and oldest Celtic place-names: thirty-six are recorded, mostly within modern France” (translator's note 169, p. 476).

I liked the description of Queen Joanna I of Naples as an “intriguer and much married” (translator's note 45, p. 505). According to the wikipedia, she was married four times.

The Slavs, a German people

There's an interesting discussion of Jerome, the famous 4th-century saint and translator of the Bible into Latin, and in particular of whether his birth place, Stridon, is in Dalmatia or in Istria. Biondo considers Istria to be a part of Italy but Dalmatia not, so he's keen to claim Jerome as an Italian (11.7–8).

In Biondo's time, the invention of the Glagolitic alphabet was attributed by some people to Jerome, even though it had in reality been invented by Greek missionaries more than four centuries after Jerome's time. Many people, Biondo says, claim “that St. Jerome was a Dalmatian, because he invented for them characters that differed from Latin and Greek, and composed works in them. These later came to be called ‘Slavonic’ characters after the Slavs, once a German people but now known as Bohemians.” :)))))) Hitler, eat your heart out :))

I remember reading somewhere that, at a time when the Catholic church was very keen not to allow anyone to use anything other than Latin for liturgical purposes, the Croatians managed to get an exception and were allowed to keep using the Old Church Slavonic language and the Glagolitic alphabet. The claim that the alphabet had been invented by so prestigious a person as Jerome perhaps helped them with the lobbying. Anyway, what was new to me is that apparently Biondo was also involved in this: “Not only did Jerome devise and give to the Dalmatians these Slavonic characters, but he translated the Holy Office used by Catholic Christians out of Greek into this new tongue as well. The glorious Pope Eugenius IV confirmed this Office for them through my doing.” (11.8)

Argonauts of the Western Balkan Region

Biondo mentions the legend that the Argonauts, on their voyage back to Greece, sailed up the Danube and eventually carried their ship overland part of the way: “Pliny [. . .] added that the ship Argo sailed down by river into the Adriatic not far from Trieste, but there was no agreement about which river it was. The more careful authors affirm that the Argo was carried on shoulders across the Alps, but then first came up the Ister, then the Sava, then the Nauportus, a river that rises between Emona and the Alps and takes its name from this event.” (11.2)

Here he is quoting from Pliny's Natural History, book 3, chap. 22. This last link goes to the Perseus website, where the notes explain Emona as the ancient town on the site of present-day Ljubljana, and Nauportus as one on the site of present-day Vrhnika and also as the name of the Ljubljanica river that flows through both of these towns. These are also the only definitions of Nauportus in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (by William Smith, 1854) on the same Perseus website.

This is as I expected, and in fact Vrhnika nowadays even goes so far as to include the Argo an unnamed “Greek ship” on their modern-day coat of arms. But now comes the surprising thing. Here in Biondo's text, Nauportus is the name of the river Quieto or Mirna in Istria, and Emona is the name of Cittanova or Novigrad, where that river flows into the Adriatic (11.3): “The city of Emona, now known as Cittanova, is a further five miles from Umago. At Cittanova is the mouth of the river Nauportus, now called the Quieto, which rises in the Alps and down which, Pliny tells us, the ship Argo was launched.” (11.3) FWIW, the wikipedia confirms that there was an Emona on the site of present-day Novigrad, but doesn't mention Nauportus as an ancient name for the Mirna river (it mentions the names Aquilis and Ningus, however).

So I wonder if Biondo's identification of Nauportus with Mirna/Quieto is simply a misunderstanding because he thought that Pliny's Emona refers to the one at the site of present-day Novigrad instead of the one at the site of present-day Ljubljana.

[Let me also add in passing that I can't find Emona in the index here in the ITRL edition of Biondo, so I'm wondering what else is missing in it ><]

Intriguingly, the wikipedia says that the Emona in Istria was actually founded by inhabitants of the one in Slovenia after the latter had been destroyed by the Huns in 452; but this statement, as so many others in the wikipedia, is marked “[citation needed]”.

Translator's note 4 on p. 500 here in the ITRL edition of Biondo points out two passages in Martial's epigrams (book 4, epigram 25, and book 8, epigram 28), which show that in Martial's opinion the Argonauts passed by the Timavus, which is a very short stream that flows into the Adriatic about 20 km northwest of Trieste.

Incidentally, until now I have always been half afraid that this whole crazy idea of the Argonauts carrying their ship overland was invented by some early modern intellectual from the area of present-day Slovenia in a desperate attempt to connect his home region to ancient mythology — much like e.g. Englishmen used to claim that England was populated by Brutus and other refugees from the fall of Troy — but at least they made those claims in the middle ages, which makes them less embarrassing than they would be if made in the early modern period. Anyway, so it was a big relief to me to see that there is support in the ancient sources for the Argonauts sailing up the Danube and overland into the Adriatic.

I now had a look at Peter Green's translation the Argonautika, an epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes, who lived in the 3rd century BC. Apollonius writes about these things in book IV (pp. 158–9), but quite vaguely. The idea there seems to be that the Danube somehow “divides” itself into two streams, one flowing into the Black Sea and one into the Adriatic, so that the Argonauts sailed up one and down the other. (This is presumably a garbled memory of the confluence of the Sava and Danube, combined with the mistaken belief that the Sava flows out of the Danube rather than into it.) There is no talk of dismantling the ship and carrying it overland. A little later on they repeat the same feat by sailing up the Eridanus (Po) and down the Rhône (p. 167)!

This just goes to show that for all Apollonius knew or cared, they might just as well have been sailing on the moon. I guess that these areas were at the very outermost limits of the Greek geographical knowledge of his day, so his geography here seems to be largely speculative and phantastical; he probably just wanted to tell a good story, and if there were any other similarly early sources of the Argonaut legend they were likely just as inaccurate in terms of geography. It must have been later authors like Pliny and Martial, who were somewhat better informed, that tried to fill in the details.

Pliny's idea of reaching the sea near Trieste seems reasonable; looking at Google Maps, if you start carrying your ship at Vrhnika, the closest point on the Adriatic shore will be about 55 km away, a little northwest of Trieste. By contrast it would be about 90 km in a straight line to Novigrad, or 70 km to the source of the Mirna river, so Biondo's plan seems less convenient. Another idea that comes to mind is that you could leave the Sava river at Sisak and go up the Kupa/Kolpa; I'm not sure how far it's navigable, but its source is barely 30 km away from the sea (at Rijeka) as the crow flies.

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