Two for Cyriaco

Two documents for Cyriaco of Ancona, one new, one ignored, that contribute to his portrait.

* * * * * * * * * *

Cyriaco  is conventionally thought to have died in 1452 or 1555: I find authors fairly evenly divided on that.  I'm quite sure 1452 is wrong, as I have found the document above which certainly has him alive on 8 March 1454 when he was granted Venetian citizenship at the age of 62. This is not a very exciting or important piece of information, but it was a surprise and raises the question of why Venetian citizenship at this point?  He was 63 and had been going to Venice since he was 10.

This document is available on-line at ASV Senato Privilegi 1425-October 1560.

* * * * * * * * * *

In 1431 Francesco Filelfo, a fellow citizen of Ancona, wrote Cyriaco a letter.  Cyriaco had been studying Greek for five years or so -- we don't know what that means -- but apparently Cyriaco had written a letter in Greek to Filelfo who was teaching Greek in Florence.  To my mind, Filelfo was a bit of a charlatan, and this letter demonstrates it.  His quotation of Homer bears no resemblance to anything Homer ever wrote, thought it seems to refer to Aphrodite and Diomedes in Iliad 5.  And his compliments of Cyriaco's Greek make me wonder what the Florentines were paying to learn from him: Cyriaco's Latin was not so good, his Greek was unlikely to have been any better.  Pierre MacKay translated the letter for me.

Francesco Filelfo to Cyriaco, greetings,

I have for a long time admired your capabilities in language, and now I would have no way of doing so adequately; so much has the beauty of your letters written in Greek astonished me; it informs me vividly that you did not learn it in Constantinople but there in Athens. The grace inherent in your composition is from there. I believe that the first of the Muses, if you were to meet her in person, on experiencing and marveling at the charm of your words would utter that Homeric phrase:

Who and from where are you, where is the city that bore you, For I shall tell you that I, most distinguished of goddesses, am envious At being so utterly defeated by a mortal

Be in good health, therefore, so that you may be able to enchant us and all those others who are similarly disposed toward you with your God-given talent from the Muses. I wish for you also that you may reach the age of Nestor, since you yield in wisdom in no way whatsoever not only to our contemporaries, but even to the outstanding figures of those in the past. Stay well, shrine of the Muses, and love your Filelfo as always, who would for your sake and for the sake of all who support you, jump into the fire, metaphorically, with great eagerness.

From Florence, on the nones of March, in the year 1431 from the birth of Christ. 

This letter can be found on-line as #8 in Cent-Dix Lettres Grecques de Francois Filelfe.

Cyriaco's Mycenae

Cyriaco's Mycenae, at Ag. Adrianos near Nauplion, 2 November 2014.

Nearly three years ago I wrote about Cyriaco's visit to what he thought was Mycenae,  to a small, elegant fortification near Nauplion.  At the time I inquired of various discussion lists “What did Mycenae mean in the Renaissance?” That question was too general and no response was ever offered, but a couple of weeks ago in Athens, Stella Chrysochoou, a scholar of cartography, brought up the topic from another angle.

She has found, in Plethon's copy of Ptolemy, annotations of the "modern" -- fifteenth-century -- names of Greek cities. For examples, Mt. Taygetos is Pentadaktylon, Stymphalos is Zaraka, Sikyon is Vasilika, and Kleonai and Nauplia are "the same".   Mycenae, however, Plethon had identified as "Polyphengos". Had he been there or did someone offer him the identification?   Polyphengos is actually to the NW of Mycenae, near Nemea.  Cyriaco's Mycenae is in the opposite direction, SE at Ag. Adrianos.

This means that at least two different sets of Cylopean stones were identified as Mycenae, neither of them accurately, and makes one wonder what was visible at Mycenae when Cyriaco was shown Ag. Adrianos in 1448.  Why did Cyriaco care about Mycenae? He doesn't say.

Before Mycenae, Cyriaco had been in Mistra with Plethon between August 1447 and April 1448 for at least two extensive visits, as well as exploring Mani.  He had with him a newly commissioned copy of Strabo which he had had received in Constantinople on 26 January.

Mycenae is to be found in Strabo 8.6.10 and Cyriaco was visiting in the general neighborhood.  Strabo gives Mycenae a page of attention, after Argos, and after mentioning the statues of Polykleitos at the Heraion.  Cyriaco was extremely enthusiastic about his discoveries of those very statues from the Heraion in the walls of a church. But what did his Venetian friends in Nauplion,  Pietro Rangano the scribe, and Joannes Bendramon, know about Mycenae?  Did Cyriaco pique their interest with his Strabo?  Of the three places Strabo mentioned in the immediate area -- Argos, Mycenae, the Heraion -- Cyriaco did not go to Argos.  Anyone from Nauplion would have told him that there was nothing there worthy of consideration.  But if he had known Plethon's identification of Mycenae, wouldn't he have gone there?  He doesn't mention Polyphengos. He never hesitated to travel several more days if he thought he might see something interesting.

Homer himself was not much interested in Mycenae, barely mentioning it in the Iliad as one of a cluster of cities under Agamemnon in the Catalog of Ships, and in the Odyssey as a place ruled by Aigisthos after he killed Atreides. It is Argos in the Agamemnon that gets the full benefit of the spectacular deaths.  It seems that Plethon and Cyriaco were more interested in Greek geography than in Greek literature and that is probably where Mycenae took on a little importance in the early Renaissance -- as one of a list of classical place names.

The Cretan bowman

Archer. Detail from Mantegna, St. Sebastian. Louvre. ca. 1475.

From Cyriaco of Ancona, 5 July 1445, Cydonia, Crete.

To Niccolò Zancarolo, son of A., the outstanding Cydonian archer and excellent victor over bowmen. Today, the fifth of July, the favorable, fair and celebrated day of quiver-bearing Delian Diana, he defeated, by his vogorous courage and worth, not only the outstanding Parthian, Scythian and Hyrcanian archers as well as others from foreign parts, but also proved superior to the expert Cydonian bowmen in an athletic contest held on the sand before the city walls, here in Cydonia, once the noblest of the Cretan coastal cities, now the illustrious Venetian colony of Khania . . . under the gaze of the distinguished citizens and colonists.  A unique prize was proposed for the contestant who would be victorious with the flying arrow.  Bending the mighty bow with his arms set apart, propelling the arrow through the pierced air from the string drawn to his ear, he aimed at the center of the target, which was the long distance of a stade* away, and struck it.  To him Cyriac of Ancona, lover of antiquity, gave a silver coin engraved with the image of the sacred head of Pythian Apollo, the quiver-and-bow-bearing god [one one side] and the Rhodian prince Anthaeus [on the other]. He did this to commemorate and honor him.

[Cyriaco gives quotations from Isidore, Pindar, Lucan, Vergil, Ovid, Apuleius on Cretan archers.]

Cyriac of Ancona, lover of Hermes, chose all these brilliant and famous sayings of the ancinet writers and poets to record here as a proof of the ancient worth of all the Cydonian and Cretan archers.  Done this day, the seventh of July, the glorious and venerable day of my protecting deity, Mercury, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Pope Eugene, one thousand and twenty-four years after the foundation of Venice.




From Edward W. Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona: Later Travels, Letter 23. (2003).


* Stade = 184+ metres, or 605 ft.
Archery distances, Wikipedia.

For a 1440 round, known until 2014 as 'FITA Round', standard indoor distances are 18m and 25m. Outdoor distances range from 30m to 90m for senior Gentlemen archers, and 30m to 70m for Ladies. The juniors have shorter targets to shoot at. In Olympic archery, 70m is the standard range.

A masque for Cyriaco

Dancers, based on a drawing by Cyriaco. 
He may have been trying to draw these Samothraki dancers.

In August 1446, Cyriaco of Ancona wrote letters to his friends, Franzesco di Drapieri, and Baldassare Maruffo, the podestà* of the Genoese colony of Galata, or Pera, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople.  Cyriaco's editor, Edward W. Bodnar, SJ, believes that the Maruffo letter describes a fantasy.  I am not so sure.  Such masques as he describes were popular back in Italy, a way for respectable women to perform in public, and a nice way to exhibit girls eligible for marriage.  

Early in the letter Cyriaco compliments Maruffo for rebuilding and extending the walls of Galata, and gives him an inscription to be inscribed in marble and attached to the walls.  The inscription survives in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.  It begins:

ΑΓΑΘΗΙ ΤΥXΗΙ

BALTASARI B. F. MARVFO GALATEAE

HVIVS BIZANTINAE PERAE THREICIO

IN BOSPHORO CL. GENVENSIVM COLO
NIAE B. M. PRAETOR

and continues for nine more lines.  Translated, this reads: "Good Fortune.  To Baldassare Maruffo, son of Baldassare, well-deserving podestà of this illustrious Genoese colony, Galata Pera, on the Thracian Bosporus . . .." 

Then Cyriaco describes the long day of August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin (or the Dormition of the Theotokos) which the Genoese observed at the Galata church of St. Francis.  Cyriaco himself went to services at Agia Sophia before taking the ferry to Pera to a celebration. 

In both letters, Cyriaco wrote: "First of all, among the distinguished, celebrated golden-haired nymphs of Galata I saw your beautiful daughter (the comely, beautiful, beloved daughter of Franczesco di Drapieri, the elegant market inspector for Thrace and Asia,) Elisabetta Maria, conspicuous in gold and a cloak the color of the sky, walking just as once the chaste, quiver-bearing goddess Diana was seen gloriously leading her band."
 

Both letters say that he saw her later in the day at the Umbriaci house with friends, relatives, and in-laws, "clothed in her father's divine, golden gifts, speaking with gracious joy during a decent (honesto) drinking party and replying to me most becomingly." Cyriaco pronounced her husband, Tomasso Spinola, most fortunate, because apparently Elisabetta Maria had been wooed by a number of highly-placed men, and a few rulers.

I think Cyriaco was carried away enough to write his description of Elisabetta Maria first, and only then then describe where he had seen her, thus giving the passage the fantasy quality Bodnar identifies.  Several days later, on August 21, the young Gerolimo Franchi took Cyriaco up to the top of the Galata hill -- quite a climb, really -- to the grand house of Benedetto Selvatico where "noble fellow-guests, especially eminent citizens, and colonists and their wives, as well as their married and unmarried daughters."  Notice how the young women are daughters first, even if they are married. 

In the Maruffo letter, he writes that while he was admiring the young women and their wardrobes, he saw descending from heaven "three divine, radiant nymphs" who moved into the crowd and took on human identities. Now for a very long time, churches and stages had been able to show divine descents from heaven, and there is no reason not to think that the wealthy citizens of Galata couldn't manage the same kind of show.  Particularly as the event turned out to be given in honor of Cyriaco who had been a guest of the Byzantine emperor, and who chatted with the Holy Roman Emperor, and was an agent for the Medici, and who knew absolutely everyone.

The first nymph, Pohyhymnia, became Lisabella Selvatico, "an upright, modest, and most charming widow dressed in a dark-blue cloak and wearing a snowy-white veil." She began a public address to Cyriaco, describing the grandeur and history of Genoese colonies -- something with which Cyriaco was familiar.  There was nothing unusual about a woman's giving a formal public address.  Battista Malatesta de Montefeltro gave one to a visiting pope, and in Latin.  Cyriaco writes in Latin anyway, so it is not clear whether Lisabella was declaiming in Latin.

When Lisabella-Polyhymnia finished, Urania became the "deeply modest maiden" Moisetta Catania," radiant in white.  She spoke about the emblems of Genoese triumph: weapons collected in battle, bolts of gates, beaks of ships, a great bowl of green stone from Syria, the body of St. John the Baptist (except for the head), and then moved to a discussion of the decay of contemporary Genoese in comparison to their ancestors' nobility.  This does sound quite unlikely and certainly contributes to a judgement of fantasy.

Then the nymph Calliope became Elisabetta Maria who was apparently wearing the gold and blue she had on last week.  She tossed her gold-tressed head and told Urania she would speak to Cyriaco about Galata.  She began:

"I heard a voice from heaven saying to him, 'Alas, flee the weakness of the Thracians' land.  Flee this rapacious shore and its citizens, no longer Genoese, but degenerates, leave them behind, colonists in a barbarous, motley land . . ..'"

That is where the document ends.  It is difficult to know what to think.  How likely is it that Cyriaco would write an imaginative theatrical performance criticizing his hosts? He did, a year later, at Mistra, write a dismal Latin poem for Constantine Palaiologos about how modern Sparta was not up to the standards of Lykourgos.

Still, there was surely a party for him on the Galata hill, and a masque with those pretty daughters.


Wasn't there?

* podestà = governor.  

The translations are mostly from Edward W. Bodnar, SJ, Cyriaco of Ancona: Later Travels (HUP, 2003).  Review here.

More Cyriaco:
Cyriaco of Ancona Website

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-galley-by-lamplight.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/01/along-with-bishop-and-huntsmen.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/09/genio-vrbis-johannes-darivs.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/02/roosters.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/02/cyriacos-kore.html 

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/06/cyriaco-discovers-polykleitos.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/12/silver-candlesticks-and-cyriacos-angry.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-very-good-friends.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/01/to-tell-you-something-special.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/08/visiting-with-palaiologues.html

Silver candlesticks and Cyriaco's angry dolphin

There are four dolphins on each of two candlesticks in this household. They were made in Athens about seventy years ago -- Renaissance-style candlesticks that continue a long tradition of finishing off feet with dolphins.  These are large candlesticks, and look massively heavy, but they are all repoussé and no interior. You will notice the green-man effect given the dolphins by waves that have become leaves.

Every year when I bring the dolphins out for the Christmas celebrations, and polish up their snouts, I am happily reminded of Cyriaco's angry dolphins: 

Cymadocea, detail.

This is Cymadocea, the nymph whom Cyriaco was pleased to fancy as speeding his ship across the Aegean -- you can just see her holding his ship in her left hand.  She is more or less riding on a dolphin, wearing one as a hat, and with a particularly irritated dolphin firmly clamped under her arm.

 . . . while Cymodocea, the most glorious of all the nymphs, swam and made music from the depths of the sea, from time to time bedewed me sweetly with her kisses, and carried the iron keel from below. (Letter 19, January 1445, from Ainos)

With his classical interests, Cyriaco must have already known this dolphin from Roman carvings in Italy, but it is my particular fancy that he was taken by the dolphin in Ag. Demetrios at Mistra.  Under the circumstances, you would expect it to look angrier than it does, and its eye quite denies that it is simply a carved post to support an angel's book.

Detail, Angel and dolphin, Ag. Demetrios, Mistra

The Byzantines had used dolphins in the service of books for a long time, as in this Gospel manuscript illustration from the 11th (?) century:

This dolphin is barely a support at all -- the tail makes an unconvincing prop -- more of a weary companion, curled around the post as if trying to act like a cat.  It, too, has the eye of a living creature.

Rethymnon, by G. Gerola.

The Mediterranean dolphin has a nice snout but it takes a great deal of creativity to get any angry expression on its face.  These Rethymnon dolphins photographed by Gerola look positively ferocious.

Cyriaco and the Little Metropolis

 Watercolor of the Little Metropolis by Mary Hogarth, ca. 1910.

When I was first in Athens in 1977, I was given to understand that the Little Metropolis was dated to the 11th century. I have seen that date floated back to the 9th and forward to the 13th, and find that the 12th is preferred on Google.  I didn't mind this at all.  I was, and have been, enchanted by its exuberance and utter charm.  In fact, it was the first "Byzantine" church I ever saw, and for the next year, until I went to Thessaloniki, other Byzantine churches were a great disappointment.

However, a graceful work of scholarship a few years ago by Bente Kiilerich (below) shows definitively that it had to have been built after Cyriaco of Ancona visited Athens in 1436.  The reasoning works like this:  Cyriaco collected inscriptions.  These inscriptions were mapped and numbered by Edward Bodnar.  The Metropolis, and Cyriaco #36 which is built into the Metropolis to the right, are marked on Bodnar's map.  (click to enlarge)

But Cyriaco's #34, #35, and #37 are on the left, just inside the modern entrance to the Agora and near those large statues of men with snakes' tails.  

  Drawing by Cyriaco of statue in Agora

Kiilerich reasoned that Cyriaco would not have interrupted his notes to go across Athens for one inscription, and then go back to take up where he had left off.  And if he had, he certainly would have noted other inscriptions on the church, easier to spot and more interesting.  Thus, the inscription mapped to the Metropolis must have been in the Agora when Cyriaco saw it.

It is not an exciting inscription and even Kiilerich had trouble photographing it: 

ΗΡΑΚΛΕΩΝ ΗΡΑΚΛΕΩΝΑΣ ΚΗΦΕΙΣΙΕΥΣ ΔΩΡΟΘΕΑ ΙΣΙΓΕΝΟΥΣ
ΜΥΡΡΙΝΟΥΣΙΟΥ ΘΥΓΑΤΗΡ

 

Southwest corner.

So this charming lace-covered chapel was built after 1436.  Kiilerich would have it built after the Ottoman take-over in 1456, but I find that unlikely.  I have posted here twice about Florentine houses in Athens, and given images of Florentine houses on the Acropolis, and of one built into the Lantern of Lysicrates.

Mid-century Florence was enthralled with graceful ornamentation -- think Alberti's architecture, Donatello's Cantoria, Fra Angelico.  Florence was also enthralled with things Greek, and Athenian.  Two of the wealthiest Florentine merchants and collectors of art and Greek manuscripts -- Palla Strozzi and Piero de Medici -- bankrolled Cyriaco. This building of the Little Metropolis has a completely different attitude from "Byzantine" churches with spolia.  In them, spolia seems, for the most part, very specifically placed -- look at the other spoliated Byzantine churches in the Plaka area.  For this building, spolia is the whole purpose of its existence.

Eastern apse.

West wall. 

Olga Palagia (below) has already suggested, en passant, a Florentine origin for the construction, and I hope she will go further with this.  I would add the suggestion that it was built as a private chapel by a wealthy Florentine merchant-collector.  Cyriaco gives us much evidence for Italians in the islands putting up spolia on the walls of their buildings, though almost nothing they were finding was up to the quality of most of the pieces here. (I note, on the map above, that the Little Metropolis and below it, on the semi-circle, the Lantern of Lysicrates to which a Florentine house was attached, were both outside the old city walls, and so possibly in areas with space for surrounding grounds.)

Eastern apse.

This is work for another scholar, and I hope someone looking for a dissertation topic will take up the question of Florentine Athens and what remnants may be still recoverable.

 

South wall.

Bente Kiilerich. "Making sense of the spolia in the Litte Metropolis in Athens," Arte Medievale n.s.4 (2005) 95-114.

Olga Palagia. "The date and iconography of the calendar frieze on the Little Metropolis, Athens," Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 123 (2008) 215-237  Download at .http://uoa.academia.edu/OlgaPalagia/Papers

More on Cyriaco:

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-galley-by-lamplight.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/01/along-with-bishop-and-huntsmen.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/09/genio-vrbis-johannes-darivs.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/02/roosters.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/02/cyriacos-kore.html 

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2011/06/cyriaco-discovers-polykleitos.html

Misunderstanding Mistra

 Late fifteenth-century Florentine painting from a series concerning 

Jason and the Argonauts that makes great use of gilt and Byzantine headgear.
Immediately after 1453 the West decided that Byzantine meant serious status.

I want to talk about some Mistra-related assertions that have come my way.

1.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2. Manuel II Paleologo, (1350-1425), Emperor of the Byzantine Empire, (r. 1391-1425), married 1392 to Jelena Dragas, with issue.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2.1. John VIII Paleologo, (1392-1448), Co-Emperor of the Byzantine Empire, (r. 1421-25), Emperor of the Byzantine, (r. 1425-48), married (1) 1409 to Princess Anna of Moscow, married (2) 1421 to Sophia di Montferrat, married (3) 1427 to Princess Maria Komnene of Trapezunt, dsp.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2.2. Prince Constantine Paleologo, (1393-1405), dunm.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2.3. Prince Theodore Paleologo, (1394-1448), Despot of Achaia, (Cr 1407) Despot of Mistra , (Cr 1443 Principe di Selimbria), married 1421 to Cleofa Malatesta di Pesaro e Fano, with issue.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2.3.1. Princess Helena Paleologo, (1428-58), married 1441 to John III de Lusignan, King of Cyprus.

1.1.2.1.1.1.2.3.2. Prince Emanuele Peter Paleologo, (1425-75), Titular 2nd Despot of Mystra and Prince of Selimbria, married at Messina 1447 to Isabella di Lotto, with issue.

Number 1.1.2.1.1.1.2.7.2.1.3.1.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.2.1.2.2.1 who designates himself as "Prince" and "Barone" sent me -- at my request -- this proof of his descent from Manuel Palaiologos. It took me two years to get around to looking at the genealogy because it is so very very long with so very many of those numbers, and I found the first problem precisely at the point where I have been doing research these past two years.

It should be easy enough to identify: the genealogy gives Theodoros and Cleofe a son, two years before they began a sexual relationship, and it gives him the name of Manuel Peter. Manuel is fine: the first son gets the name of the father's father, but there is no family source for the name Peter either with the Malatesti or the Palaiologoi for the name, and the chance of a Greek rite imperial family employing the name is -- I'm guessing here -- highly unlikely.

The next problem is the daughter, Theodora, assigned to Constantine XI, but neither Theodora nor Manuel Peter need have been mentioned at all since 1.1.2.1.1.1.2.7.2.1.3.1.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.2.1.2.2.1 claims descent through another Constantine, a grandson of Thomas Palaiologos, and a son of Andrea.  There is debate among reliable historians as to whether Andrea actually had a son.  Now, the non-existent Manuel Peter and this possibly non-existent Constantine both -- according to this list -- married Sicilians.  It is at this point that I begin to sense an ancient and fishlike smell and I am not giving credence to the claims of 1.1.2.1.1.1.2.7.2.1.3.1.1.2.1.1.1.1.1.2.1.2.2.1.  I could be wrong.

In the years after the Fall of the City, it would have been easy for any well-spoken Greek to have invented a new name in Italy, and given the laxity in the Byzantine system of names someone who already had Palaiologos as one of his names could have given the wrong impression to someone.

PS.  Do NOT make use of this site for Palaiologan genealogy. A massive number of erroneous details just in the names I checked -- sons of Manuel II -- and no way to submit corrections.

* * * * *

The other Battista, and her husband, Frederigo de Montefeltro


2.

Battista Malatesta de Montefeltro was not one of Cleofe's ladies-in-waiting. She was the wife of Galeazzo Malatesta, Lord of Pesaro; daughter of the Count of Urbino; niece of Pope Martin V; correspondent of Leonardo Bruni, and one of the most literate and respected women of her generation. She was the aunt of Frederigo de Montefeltro, condottiere and great patron of Piero della Francesca, and the great-grandmother of Frederigo's fragile wife who was named Battista for her.

Despite the abundance of material on Battista (summed up here) to be found in writings on 15th-century humanism, she was curiously identified as Cleofe's "dame d'honneur" by Denis Zakythinos . Everyone else has mindlessly copied from Zakythinos: Runciman says,"one of her ladies-in-waiting", and elsewhere he adds "a cousin"; Ronchey, "dama di compagnia"; most recently, "μιά κυρία της ακολουθίας (πιθανώς εξαδέλφης την δέσποινας)" in Zēsēs Tsiopas dissertation, and in Dabrowska who goes so far as to say that Cleofe was "spied on by one of her ladies-in-waiting, her cousin Battista."

Possibly Zakythinos made his assumption based on the fact that Battista wrote a letter to Pope Martin V about the marriage problems of Cleofe and Theodoros. (He found the letter in Iorga.  The letter has been carelessly dated to 1421 or 1425.  It was certainly written in January 1427, at the same time as Paola's letter to the Pope on the same topic.)   It seems never to have occurred to anyone that the information might have been transmitted from Cleofe in Mistra to Battista in Pesaro by letter, or messenger, or gossip.  No one had a basis for assuming Battista's presence in Mistra. Zakythinos is a giant in the pantheon of Greek historians and can be forgiven. Information on Battista may not have been available in the 1930s had Zakythinos wanted to investigate Battista. The others cannot because they did not check out their source. 


A letter by Battista on the death of Cleofe's and Paola's father can be found here. Letters by Battista, Cleofe and Paola can be found here.  

Cyriaco discovers Polykleitos

Roman copy, Polykleitos, Diadumenos

National Archaological Museum, Athens 

Cyriaco has not been a guest here for too long so I have invited him back for a brief visit.  I think we make a great many assumptions about Cyriaco and his friends when it comes to antiquities. He -- and they -- were making discoveries with great excitement, but they were not seeing what we see when we look at the same things.

Take Polykleitos. 

Polykleitos was a sculptor from Argos of the late-fifth, early-fourth century.  A bit too ripe for my taste, but the Romans loved him and fortunately made a great many copies so we have some idea of what his work looked like, even if what we see has an Italian accent.

On 23 March 1448, Cyriaco's very good friends, the Nauplion merchants Pietro Rangano and Joannes Bendramon, took him to Merbaka to see "images of outstanding beauty that had been removed in the past by Christians from a very old temple of Juno, thought to be from among the masterpieces of Polyclitus, to adorn later churches of our religion."

The church under consideration is the lovely 13th-century Church of the Dormition of the Virgin at Ag. Triada, which is the modern choice for a non-colonial name to replace that of Merbaka. This is what Cyriaco saw, rather, his drawings and what we now see.

 

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Copenhagen

Cyriaco and his very good friends seem to have been blissfully under the assumption that any sculpture found near Argos must have been carved by Polykleitos, the great sculptor from Argos.  Therefore, Cyriaco pronounced, these late, conventional Roman tombstones are images of outstanding beauty.

Discovering Polykleitos made him very happy, and that is good.  

But, seriously, he had by that time seen hundreds of Roman tombstones, he had seen some pretty good sculpture on Samothraki and Paros, and he had seen the metopes, triglyphs, and most of the west pediment of the Parthenon several times, and those really should have figured into his estimate of what he was looking at on the church at Merbaka.

Cyriaco's Kore

In the early spring of 1430, in Adrianople, Cyriaco of Ancona purchased Chaeonia who had been taken in an Ottoman raid.  Chaeonia may not have been what she thought her name was: it means "woman from Epiros" in a literary sort of way and that is exactly the kind of name Cyriaco was capable of making up. I am sure she was beautiful: he bought beautiful things. He had spent that winter in Adrianople and that is when he had his first lessons in Greek. He wrote that he began Greek with the Iliad, but he may have begun Greek with Chaeonia.

Later he renamed her Clara, but soon after he bought her, he took her to Gallipoli where in March he sent her to his mother in Ancona, along with bundles of skins and carpets, under the care of his cousin, Ciucio. (Cyriaco constantly writes "we" in his letters and diaries: might his cousin have been part of the "we"?)  Then he and his black freedman, Niccolino, went down to look at the lovely ruins of Philippi, and then Thessaloniki.

Freeing a slave in the medieval Mediterranean did not necessarily mean what we would like to assume it meant.  Often, documents have a condition: "You will nurse my child for three years." "You will stay with my mother until she dies."  "You will work for me for two -- or five -- years."  "You will stay with my daughter until she marries." One record of a woman's emancipation, at Methoni -- I treasure this one -- was followed on the next day by the record of her marriage to her "owner."

So what was Chaeonia/Clara in Cyriaco's life?  It is, I think, impossible to saturate yourself in his writings and then think of him in terms either of love or lust.  One biography of Cyriaco fills out this part of his life with several pages of discussion of the functions of slave girls in the medieval household, and calls her Cyriaco's concubine.  And it could well have been that way. He was 39 years old when he bought her.  He was a person to be kind, and he also -- let us take this a little further -- though not a handsome man, would have had better personal hygiene than most: he dealt in mastic from Chios, valued everywhere as a breath freshener.

But.

Cyriaco, the man who collected epigraphs wrote one for the tomb in which he intended to be buried in Ancona.  He was buried instead in a plague grave in Cremona, but when he was able to plan ahead he wrote:

D. I. S.
MASIELLAE. K. F.
SILVATICAI
MODESTAI MVLIERI
KYRIACVS  PH.F.
PICENICOLLES
PARENTI PIENTISS.
ET SIBI
CLARAEQ. L. KORE
H.M.H.N.S.

Roughly translated, this reads:

To the immortal god(s).
[This is the tomb of]
Masiella Cyriaco,
daughter of the Silvaticai,
chaste mother,
Cyriaco  son
of Philippo Pizzicoli
 most pius parent
and his
kore, Clara, freedwoman.

Was he thinking in terms of a family tomb, and including Clara because she had become an integral member of their household?  Surely, if a man is planning on mingling his bones with his lover's in the tomb he does not include his mother . . . 

Kore. It means "maiden." Had Cyriaco collected a kore the way he collected manuscripts, damascened ware, and the occasional sculptured head, as a lovely possession among his other possessions? Or was she much more? Think: was possession of a kore -- one he had freed from the Turks -- in whatever way you interpret possession -- the way he could most truly possess his beloved Greece?

Was she actually buried in the tomb, with his mother long dead and after Cyriaco had died away from home?

Houses

 

Detail from a view of the Acropolis, before 1680, from a drawing in Bonn.

 Pierre A. MacKay spoke at the Archaeological Institute of America on 7 January about Evliya's view of the Parthenon and the Acropolis.  He gives here one detail of that talk, his discovery of an extraordinary and previously unnoticed detail of early modern Athens written down by Evliya alone.  

 * * * * * *

An earlier blog, using a larger expanse of this image of the Acropolis, discussed Evliya Çelebi's description of the Parthenon from his visit to Athens in 1668. This is the best, and it may even be the only 17^th century drawing of the Acropolis to represent what the artist saw, rather than what he thought he ought to see. It is uniquely important for our understanding of the Parthenon's appearance before the disastrous explosion of 1687, but it shows us more than that. Between the Parthenon and the edge of the fortress is a cluster of smaller buildings, which correspond with the private residences Evliya Çelebi described:  

There are three hundred houses built like those of Sheddad, fine masonry palaces, roofed all over with tile, houses like castles in their own right.  They have no gardens, but from the arches over the seats in the windows and screened balconies of all the houses, the gardens and orchards of the plain, and all the cultivated fields and trellised melon patches can be seen.

At least two of the houses in that image have balconies, most have arched windows, and the artist has indicated the tiled roof on one. 

Evliya also notes that:

There are . . . hundreds of thousands of kinds of pictorial creation of marvels and wonders, images in the Frankish taste, which leave the viewer amazed and distraught, his brain in a boil, and his body without senses. The pupils of his dear eyes are dazzled and filled with tears, as if each of these representations were a living thing causing a dread confusion in a man’s mind. These images laugh and smile at the man who views them and some, which are depicted as being caught up in anger and rage, look off askance at a man. 

 This could be an advance summary of what he says a bit later about the Parthenon, but it is more likely to refer to paintings and frescos on the walls of some of the richer houses, painted at the latest 210 years earlier.  The grand rooms built into the Propylaea to serve as a palace for the original Frankish lords are supposed to have been frescoed, and the same sort of decoration could have been applied to private houses. 

 Model of Frankish-Florentine palace in the Propylaea.

Evliya writes about houses in the lower town:

There are 7,000 tile-roofed houses, of both Muslims and Christians. They are sturdy houses, like castles with battlements and loopholes, and built completely of stone---there are no wooden houses or houses with earthen roofs or mud-brick walls, but only splendid houses with stone walls set with mortar and lime.

Evliya is quite clear that these houses are distinct from others in Greece, and in comparison with his descriptions of neighboring cities in regions both north and south of Athens, the specific features such as cut stone construction and battlements stand out sharply.  Among the possible models for these Athenian houses, the closest similarities are with Florentine private residences of the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Cyriaco of Ancona would have stayed in these houses with Florentine friends on his visits to Athens.

The Duchy of Athens, officially established under Neapolitan sovereignty in 1395, remained in the hands of the Florentine Accaiuoli family until Mehmed II suppressed the duchy and removed the last duke, Francesco, in 1458. The duchy left a considerable cultural memory in western Europe ("A Midsummer Night's Dream," Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" for two examples), perhaps more than it deserved, but we have had little evidence until now of the cultural influence of the Dukes on Athens.  The Accaiuoli are known to have fostered close commercial relations with Florence, even when they were subject to rival powers, such as Venice, but this evidence suggests that they reinforced these relations by recruiting Florentines into Athens, probably by offering them significant privileges in the administration of the city and its territory. 

The number of houses, whether on the acropolis or in the lower town is a typical Evliya exaggeration. Except in rare instances, numbers have a flavor, rather than a factual content in his style. The Accaiuoli seem to have got along rather well with Greeks, at least with better-off Greeks, so there is no reason to think that Greeks were disposessed to make room for Florentines. On the other hand, there is little reason for Greeks to have abandoned their own styles of housing to adopt a foreign style. Evliya remarked on the houses he found most interesting, and simply passed over the remainder which were probably in the majority.

Our one slight hope of finding proof of this is in the lower city, where there might still be a fragment of Florentine wall built into a surviving structure. It will be an interesting challenge for the next generation of archaeologists to see whether anything remains.

House with double-fold windows
surviving in 1765-66, which can be compared with a typical Turkish house, below.

W. Pars, Museum Worsleyanum, 1794.

Look for An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi,

translated by Robert Dankoff.

My Very Good Friends

Cyriaco wrote about seeing these dancers on Samothraki,
built into the new palace.

In working on my talk for the AIA last week, I became fascinated with the particular culture of the eastern Mediterranean in which Cyriaco moved.  He had the wealth and status -- and the personal appeal -- to be the guest of local rulers, so when he was in Mistra he stayed with Constantine Palaiologos; Manuel Asan, governor of Imbros, gave him a boat to go to Samothraki, he had Christmas with Francesco Gattilusi, prince of Thasos; he stayed with Francesco Nani, governor of Mykonos, who took him to see Delos; and he got rides on the galley of Giovanni Delfino, Captain General of the Venetian fleet.

What is more interesting, and more important, is that all of these men had some degree of interest in antiquities, showed him what they owned personally, and took him out to see interesting things in the area. Not just the rulers: farmers and fishermen took him to see carvings and sites and caves all over Mani; a Cretan fisherman, Phantasios, showed him the mole near Maroneia made of shattered sarcophagi. Monks in several monasteries on Athos brought out their oldest manuscripts for him.

I find it highly significant that Cyriaco was shown the antiquities on Imbros by Michael Kritoboulos, and in Sparta by Laonikos Chalcocondyles.  These are two of the three historians of the period.  And he would have known Doukas, too, who was secretary to several Genoese governors of Galata, including Cyriaco's friend Baldassare Maruffo. Maruffo rebuilt and extended the walls of Galata. Cyriaco wrote and had carved a Latin inscription commemorating this, and the inscription survives now in the Istanbul museum.

In Nauplion, Pietro Rangano and Joannes Bendramon, took him to see what they thought was Mycenae. (What did Italians think they knew about Mycenae in 1448?) They were off by 1000 years, but they were interested, and had made an effort to look.

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri as drawn by Cyriaco

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri
 Cyriaco drew the stones to the right of the doorway.

[For a context for Ag. Adrianos-Katsingri, look at this entry on 3rd-century watchposts.]

[NOTE: This seems to have posted itself before I finished.  I will just leave it as it is and save the rest for another Cyriaco post.]


Much of this talk is taken from Cyriaco of Ancona: Later Travels.  Edward W. Bodnar with Clive Foss. I Tatti Renaissance Library,  HUP, 2003.