Biography

The Byzantine author, professor, and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was born in Constantinople around 1350 in a noble family. Very little is known about the first half of his life until he came to Venice in 1390-1391 with a diplomatic mission. Later he was invited to teach Greek in Florence where he started professing in 1397 with a contract of 5 years. But he was not to spend all this time in Florence because in 1400 he left his position probably in order to join the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos who came to the West seeking help to save the Byzantine Empire from the ottoman threat. For the rest of his life, Chrysoloras will carry out mainly diplomatic missions, traveling in the service of his country, and only secondarily will assume scholarly and teaching work. In late 1405 or in 1406 he will ask the papal permission to be converted to the Latin dogma and perform the Latin rite; the permission was granted but Chrysoloras never undertook any priestly duties. He died in 1415 while attending the Council of Constance in Switzerland in a last effort to convince the Westerners to help Byzantium.

His fame rests principally on his teaching activity in Florence as the first Greek to hold public teaching office in Italy. Neither Barlaam the Calabrian nor Leonzio Pilato, who preceded him and taught Petrarch and Boccaccio, could equal him in importance and fame. As it has been noted, ‘‘from at least the eighteenth century, when scholars first began to discuss the ‘Italian Renaissance’ as a cultural phenomenon, the importance of Manuel Chrysoloras, the first notable professor of Greek in

Henrik Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9729-4, © Springer Science+Business Media B. V., 2011

Western Europe, has been widely recognized. Writers such as Carlo Rosmini, Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington Symonds, and Remigio Sabbadini have given him, deservedly, honorable mention as the teacher of a number of influential humanists’’ (Thomson 1966:63). But it was a monograph by Cammelli published in 1941 that permitted the modern evaluation and scholarly appreciation of his life and activity. Chrysoloras’ coming to Italy marks the real beginning of Greek studies in Italy.  to him, the Italian humanists of various scholarly interests were able to focus on the rich classical tradition of Byzantium. Among his famous pupils and those attending his lessons we can name Guarino da Verona, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, Coluccio Salutati, Roberto Rossi, Niccolir Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Uberto Decembrio, Poggio Bracciolini et al. Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia described Chrysoloras as ''eruditissimus (et) suavissimus literarum Graecarum... praeceptor’.’

It has been said that the teaching activity of Chrysoloras was auxiliary to his principal mission and that it had a political motive. His very first voyage to Italy was of diplomatic nature and his invitation to a teaching position may have been a response to a need for a more profound rapprochement than the establishment of good diplomatic relations between the East and the West. As professor of Greek he was always related to influential people and his subsequent career was clearly that of a diplomat. His conversion to Catholicism must also be seen as part of the Byzantine politics of reconciliation with the West. In Andrea Giuliano’s funeral oration on Chrysoloras we read that his true task was rather “to save his country from danger than give delight to Italy’’ (Thomson 1966:81).