Exil und Heimatferne in der Literatur des Humanismus von Petrarca bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts
mission to eliminate all good and learned men. In fact, you know how I have been treated and what I need to watch out for.” The next letter is dated to 11 April 1436 and addressed to Leonardo Bruni (PhE·02.67), who had informed Filelfo through his friend Lapo da Castiglionchio that he deeply regretted Filelfo’s leaving Florence: “Although I enjoyed living in Florence (for many reasons, but most of all because of you, learned and excellent man that you are), I am happier now that I have left the place, knowing as I do that many snakes lurk among the flowers, and venomous and malicious ones at that (inter istos flores multae viperae delitescunt, et eae quidem venenosae ac pestiferae). For the restraint and patience with which I always put up with the traps set by my enemies have not escaped your notice. So, in order to escape a perpetually imminent disaster, I took refuge from those continually troubled waters in the next anchorage, Siena, where I will remain until a more favorable wind takes me to a safer port. For I see that even here I cannot lead a life that is secure enough, on account of the city’s proximity to those who (as it appears to me) hate the fact that I am alive.”
Filelfo’s worst fears came through: not much later the Medici sent a mercenary to Siena in order to assassinate (or mutilate) their nemesis Filelfo. He relates the incident in a letter to his former pupil Enea Silvio Piccolomini (PhE·03.04, 28 March 1439): “As to the identity of the assassin, it is well-known; as to the identity of the person who hired him, however, although nothing is certain, the finger is being pointed at the Medici and Cosimo, not only because his clan has always opposed me, but also because his brother Lorenzo has openly acted against me on many occasions. A few months later, Cosimo himself was first imprisoned on account of the civil strife, and then banished to Venice, without any further complaint from the populace. The civil unrest calmed down for a while as a result, until Cosimo, having bribed the leaders of the republic, was invited back to the city a year later. Then all law, both human and divine, was thrown into chaos. All the aristocrats were either banished or outlawed. Plundering, mugging, and murdering ensued. I witnessed this in person and realised the danger I was in by staying in the great shipwreck that was Florence, since I had already been shipwrecked before, in a manner which had come, so to speak, like a bolt from the blue.”
The first three letters of book 4 of Filelfo’s epistolarium are closely connected, yet too long to be discussed in detail here. Strangely enough, the second and the third letter predate the first one, since PhE·04.01 is sent on 11 July 1440 to Rinaldo degli Albizzi, one of the Florentine aristocrats who had been exiled after Cosimo’s return to power in 1434. In this letter, Filelfo informs Rinaldo that Filippo Maria Visconti is willing to send troops to help the exiled Florentine aristocrats recapture their hometown. In PhE·04.02, sent on 16 June 1440 to the Senate and people of Florence, Filelfo states that he has always admired Florence and cherishes the memory of the honours bestowed on him. He condemns discord and encourages the Florentines to readmit the exiled aristocrats and to reconcile with Filippo Maria Visconti. In PhE·04.03, sent on 4 July 1440, to Cosimo de’ Medici himself, Filelfo refers to the preceding letter and urges Cosimo to follow Filelfo’s advice: he should readmit the exiled aristocrats and make peace with Filippo Maria Visconti. In both these long letters Filelfo again uses the plague imagery to convey the threat posed by factional tendencies. In PhE·04.02 Filelfo states that enhancing the presence of partisanship, factions, baleful rivalries and ambitions of the citizens (posteaquam partium studia fovere, factiones complecti, pestiferas aemulationes ambitionesque civium alere coepisset) will inevitably make the city collapse. In his concluding remarks he argues that while money and manpower can favour a city’s well-being when its citizens are living in concord, “in the presence of civil discord and factions, all those assets are quite detrimental and destructive” (haec omnia et detrimentosa admodum sunt et pestifera).
In PhE·04.03, then, Filelfo urges Cosimo to count his blessings rather than to strive for ever more power, causing shipwreck for his hometown. Indeed, he continues, people who want to dominate cause “private and public animosity, pernicious factions (pestiferae factiones), sedition, and even civil war,” bringing their fatherland down.
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This mental landscape of Filelfo’s staging Cosimo de’ Medici as a pestiferous beast that cannot contain its appetites and passions, as a ‘Cosmic plague’ threatening the city with his unreasonable ambitions and thereby with detrimental factionalism, is the background against which we see Palla Strozzi and Manuel Chrysoloras leaving a pestilential Florence to find the answer to an essential question that goes to the core of our condition humaine, and asking themselves how to cope with it. Indeed, the passage quoted above, where we saw Strozzi and Chrysoloras arrive in the Casentino, continues as follows (3, 131–132):
Et quoniam ad quietem veneramus, non ad laborem, ocio magis quam negocio studebam, idque ob eam maxime rationem, ut viro illi quem ego, ut nosti, plurimum venerabar, iucunditati essem in ea calamitate temporum, non molestiae. Tum ille postridie ex quo eo loci perveneramus, circiter meridiem, cum amota mensa simul sederemus in porticu, magno cum silentio, ad me conversus: ‘Cur non nostri, o Pallas,’ inquit, ‘similes sumus?’ Ad quod ego dictum veluti excitatus non sine pudore subdidi: ‘Cur istud, o Manuel?’ Tum ille: ‘Scis enim agere proprium esse hominis. Nam caetera animalia, quoniam ratione carent, agere non dicuntur, quemadmodum ne pueri quidem ob tenerae aetatis imbecillitatem, nec etiam ii qui sanae mentis non sunt. Solos agere dicimus, qui rationis ductu id faciunt. Nam appetitio nobis est communis cum beluis, quae mentis inopes ad sensum omnia referunt.’ Et ita vir ille doctissimus et optimus nihil omisit quod ad totius hominis vitam, quod ad bene beateque vivendum pertineret. Quare non ipse meum quicquam locutus sum, sed quae ex Manuele Chrysolora audisse memini.
(And since we had come for rest, not for work, I was eager for leisure rather than business, especially because I wished to be at that calamitous time a source of pleasure rather than a burden to that man, whom, as you know, I deeply venerated. Then, the day after our arrival, around midday, after dinner, we were seated together in the portico. Amid the deep silence he turned to me and said, “Why, Palla, are we not like ourselves?” Stimulated by this question, I replied, not without embarrassment: “How so, Manuel?” He replied: “You know that action is proper to man. For other animals, lacking reason, are not said to act, just as children are not, by reason of the weakness of their tender years, or the insane. We only say that they act who do it under the guidance of reason. For we have appetency in common with beasts, who, being devoid of mind, relate everything to the senses.” And thus that most learned and best man omitted nothing relevant to the life of the whole man, to living well and blessedly. Therefore I did not say anything of my own, but what I remember hearing from Manuel Chrysoloras).
This scene is an illumination of the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio as a whole, a miniature mirroring the nine aristocrats and Filelfo meeting for a dialogue about their condition in exile, assisting each other in their soul-searching and looking for strategies to cope with life after the doomsday that made them all – including the narrating author – leave Florence, the cradle of Humanism. It is no coincidence that in this context Manuel Chrysoloras is quoted as the ultimate auctoritas concerning how one should approach life, the vir omni humanitate humanior, by whom – as Leonardo Bruni underscores in his immediate reply to Palla’s anecdote – “eloquence, buried already for so many centuries, was called back among the Latins as if from the underworld to the light, and so too were all the cultivated disciplines of the mind.” In other words, Chrysoloras was the founding father of the studia humanitatis that came into being in the blessed city of Florence before the pestiferous Cosimo and his allies such as Niccolò Niccoli chased them away, along with the aristocrats, such as Chrysoloras’ former pupil Palla Strozzi, and their good friend Francesco Filelfo, who happened to have the founding father Chrysoloras’ niece Theodora as his wife.
In this passage we see a rare illustration of the narrator introducing himself into the text as a character relevant to the overall story. Filelfo does this only on three other occasions in the whole narrative of the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio: twice to fashion himself as a Graecus (in the first instance he has Palla Strozzi quote some verses of Hesiod “that our friend Filelfo has translated for us” (1, 23), and in the second he has Poggio admit to Manetti that he “would easily prove to you how much value Homer attached to the strength