Iter Gallicum - Source-gathering trip to France

For a long time I had been planning a source-gathering trip to France due to the fact that some manuscripts of Biondo's Decades were in its libraries. The loud construction site on our building in Jyväskylä helped to set the trip on May-June 2023. Furthermore, since our seven-month-old daughter was now part of our lives, we decided it was best that she and my wife both accompanied me to France. This way we wouldn't have to spend any time apart from each other. In the next three blogs, I give some glimpses of what I have discovered on my voyage.

The aim of this journey was to consult, digitize and analyse five manuscripts, one in Besançon, three in Paris, and one in Saint-Omer. Some of the manuscripts had very scarce information online, so I was partly going in blind. The first destination was Besançon in the Eastern France, so we decided to fly to Zurich, and head to Besançon by train. The train journey took about four hours and finally Besançon was within sight.

Besançon is an ancient city as it has had occupants since Antiquity. It was called Vesontio by the Romans and Julius Caesar writes about the city in his Gallic Wars this way:

Vesontio [...] is the largest town of the Sequani, [...] and so fortified was it by the nature of the ground, as to afford a great facility for protracting the war, inasmuch as the river Doubs almost surrounds the whole town, as though it were traced round it with a pair of compasses. A mountain of great height shuts in the remaining space, which is not more than 600 feet, where the river leaves a gap, in such a manner that the roots of that mountain extend to the river's bank on either side. A wall thrown around it makes a citadel of this [mountain], and connects it with the town. (De bello Gallico 1.38).

Johannes Hinderbach (1418-1486) and his copies of Decades

For the past four months, I have been studying on a collection of Decades copies once owned by Johannes Hinderbach. These manuscripts have been really insightful as they contain several annotations of Hinderbach. I thought it useful to write something about these manuscripts as they are so fascinating.

First, few words about Johannes Hinderbach (1418-1486). He was a German-born diplomat, who had studied in Vienna and in Padova. From the latter he graduated as doctor utriusque iuris (doctor of canon and civil law) in 1447. Most of the 1450s Hinderbach worked as an ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire and visited Italian peninsula multiple times. He could be called as an expert in the Italian affairs and therefore he accompanied emperor Frederick III (1415-1493) to Rome in 1452, where the emperor was officially crowned by pope Nicholas V (r. 1447-1455). In 1465, Hinderbach was elected as prince-bishop of the alpine city of Trento, and he would hold that position the rest of his life.

Intertextuality in Biondo's works

Few days ago, I noticed a small, but quite interesting piece of information while researching a copy of the first decade of Biondo (Vat. Lat. 1936). The scribe of the copy had the habit of copying everything from the model, even marginal texts and colophons. He also copied a certain marginal note in the seventh book on f. 120r, which raised my eyebrows:

Luceolim co(e)ptum postea hui(c) et in Italia desc(ri)psi : fuisse : ubi nu(n)c pons est luceolis dictus oppido p(ro)xim(us) Canthiano, Urbinu(m) int(er) et Eugubiu(m) civitates. In vetustissima oli(m) flaminia via.

When did the decline of the Roman Empire start? Biondo's interpretation of the inclinatio

We are all familiar with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Though it is often the first book we think when discussing about the decline of Rome, it is by no means the first attempt in history that tries to explain what exactly happened to the Roman Empire in the Late Antiquity. Multiple Renaissance humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini have pondered this question as well. However, the one who truly took it to another level was Flavio Biondo. As the title of his largest historiographical work, Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (The decades of histories from the decline of the Empire of the Romans, 1453), might reveal, Biondo built his whole work (or at least the first 10 books) around the subject. But why and when did Biondo think this inclinatio started? Below, I try to present how Biondo sees this topic.

Who was Flavio Biondo (1392-1463)?

Flavio Biondo was born in the city of Forlì in Romagna in 1392. He spent his youth in Cremona, where he was educated, as was the custom, in grammar, poetry and rhetoric. After concluding his education, Biondo worked in multiple civic administrative posts around Northern Italy. These included the cities like Vicenza, Bergamo and Brescia. During this period Biondo befriended with a Venetian diplomat and humanist, named Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454). He later helped Biondo to gain the citizenship of Venice. In 1420, when Biondo was 28 years old, he met a distinguished humanist Guarino Veronese (1374-1460). Guarino would be later known especially for his work in translating Greek manuscripts into Latin and teaching the Greek language. This in mind, it surely feels odd, that though Biondo had a friend like Guarino, he never mastered the Greek language. Regardless, he and Guarino became lifelong friends. 

Majority of scholars may classify Flavio Biondo mainly as an employee of the papacy and the church. This is not farfetched due to the fact that he worked almost continuously for 29 years for the successors of Peter. In this sense, the career of Biondo truly started in 1433 when he became a notary in the papal curia under the pope Eugene IV (pope 1431-1447).