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This is a story about Florentine manuscript hunters, a group of people who travelled across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries in search of lost ancient works of philosophy and literature. In this episode Vashik Armenikus speaks to Ross King, the author of the brilliant book ‘The Bookseller of Florence’ which illuminates the stories behind some of the greatest intellectuals who became manuscript hunters in Renaissance Italy.
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This is a story about Florentine manuscript hunters, a group of people who travelled across Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries in search of lost ancient works of philosophy and literature. In this episode Vashik Armenikus speaks to Ross King, the author of the brilliant book ‘The Bookseller of Florence’ which illuminates the stories behind some of the greatest intellectuals who became manuscript hunters in Renaissance Italy.
Listen to Manuscript Hunters - Ross King by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. Manuscript Hunters - Ross King song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 56:14. This high-quality MP3 track has 256 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download Manuscript Hunters - Ross King by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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If we could go back in time to the 1400s, anywhere in Europe, and ask people what they knew of the Florentines, they wouldn't necessarily talk about the visual art or even the architecture. They would talk about heroic figures who were recapturing the glories of ancient Rome by recovering ancient manuscripts. And it's a wonderful story of manuscript hunters, of these people crossing the Alps and going into German and French monasteries and trying to find ancient manuscripts that no one has looked at for centuries. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the RTDO Podcast. I'm your host, Vaso Karmenikas, and my guest today is Ross King. He's the author of a book called The Bookseller of Florence, which focuses on the life of Vespasiano da Bistici, who is often referred to as Michelangelo of bookselling. Vespasiano and other manuscript hunters traveled across Europe to Germany and France to retrieve lost works of the ancient wisdom that were subject to decay or destruction, and they brought it back to their native Florence to preserve it for the future generations. They are people who enabled Renaissance as we know it today. It was such a pleasure to speak with Mr. King and to ask him more questions to find out in detail about all the heroes of this book. I hope you will enjoy this podcast as much as I enjoyed reading his book and speaking to him. Such a pleasure to meet you because I really enjoyed reading your book. I'm so glad that the bookshops are opening up again here in the UK where we are right now. I discovered your book on the shelf, and I just opened it and started flicking, and your writing was captivating from the first pages. For the listeners and readers who might not know you yet, could you introduce yourself in a couple of words? Well, first of all, thank you. Great to meet you, and thank you so much for the compliments about the book. The book really was a labor of love for about four years. I lived with Vespasiano, who we'll talk about, for the last four or five years, and so it's good that he finally saw the light of day. But yes, in some ways, I don't know what to call myself. I once arrived back at Heathrow, and they asked me what my job was, and I said I was a writer, and he said, just that, as if that somehow wasn't enough. I must have another sort of job on the side. But I am just a writer, I write full-time, and I guess I'm a non-fiction writer, although I actually began my career as a novelist. I wrote, once I left academia, I spent 14 years in university studying, 14 very happy years. But then ultimately, I had to go off into the real world and find something to do, which I decided would be writing. And I published two novels back in the 1990s, the mid to late 90s. But since then, I've written non-fiction, which in many ways is what I was trained to do in university, I suppose, and I've published, I'm not even sure how many books now, probably about eight books, eight non-fiction books, which are on primarily art history, architectural history, cultural history, for the most part, in the Italian 15th and early 16th century, so sort of the classic Italian Renaissance period. But also I've done books on French art of the 19th century, books on Impressionism and Claude Monet. So I've thrown my net quite widely to catch all of these, you know, catch up all these beautiful stories that are out there, waiting to be told. When I was recommending your book to my friends and readers, I tried to summarize kind of in one sentence, something like that is impossible to do with a work like that. But I said that there are kind of two forces in this world, those who try to preserve works of literature and those who kind of, for whatever reason, destroy it, whether it is because of indifference or direct hatred and censorship. So your book, I summarized as this, about the people who tried to preserve the ancient works and spread the knowledge. And you focused your book on a person called Vespasiano, although your book is not entirely about him. It's about the whole kind of humanistic tradition. Could you please tell when you were embarking on this journey, as you said, of four years, if I'm not mistaken, of living with Vespasiano, how did you, why did you decide to focus on him and not any other figure of that time? Well, this is a story I had wanted to tell for a long time. I wanted somehow to tell the story of what happened in Florence in the 1400s. And a couple of times or through a couple of books, I've explored the artistic excellence of Florence, the way in which Florence through the 1400s and into the 1500s was the artistic capital of Europe. And I was trying to explore some of the reasons for that, looking at people like Filippo Brunelleschi in my book, Brunelleschi's Dome, or looking at Leonardo da Vinci, or Michelangelo. But I was always aware that that was half of the story. And that if we could go back in time to the 1400s, say the mid 1400s, anywhere in Europe, and ask people what they knew of the Florentines, they wouldn't necessarily talk about the visual art or even the architecture. They would talk about their philosophers and writers, who were these heroic figures who were recapturing the glories of ancient Rome and to a lesser extent, ancient Greece, by recovering ancient manuscripts and putting to use in the present for the sake of the future, the wisdom of the past. And it's a wonderful story of manuscript hunters of these people going out into crossing the Alps and going into German and French monasteries and trying to find ancient manuscripts that no one has looked at for centuries, bringing them back to Florence and having them produced in beautiful handwritten manuscripts. And so, and in many ways, that really is what the beginning of the Renaissance is this recovery of ancient knowledge that, as you alluded to, is something that was continually being lost and ultimately forgotten. And here it's being recovered. So I wanted to tell the story, but I knew that to make it accessible and interesting, and maybe to do justice to it, I needed a figure, someone who bound everything together. And that's how I discovered Vespasiano. I had often come across his name, Vespasiano da Bisticci. I come across his name, you know, if you read about 15th century Florence, you'll sometimes see him quoted because he wrote a series of biographies towards the end of his life in the 1480s and 1490s, about all of the people he knew, Cosimo de' Medici, Pope Nicholas V, Federico de Montefeltro, the various kings of Naples, he knew all of them, and wrote biographies of him. So anyone working on these people often will cite Vespasiano and say that he was a bookseller. And I just got very interested in what it meant to be a bookseller in Florence in the 1400s. How did you sell books? How did you find the books that you sold? How did you produce books? Because for the most part, Vespasiano was working before the advent of the printing press. And so I was just interested in manuscript culture at that point in the production of knowledge. And so and so that's really where this inquiry led me into his life. As you say, it's a, he's the central character, but it's a cast of many people in it, because it's in many ways, all of the people that he knew, he's this wonderful name dropping bookseller who really from his shop in Florence next to what is today the Bargello, the great sculpture museum, his shop in the heart of Florence became this nexus for intellectual activity and cultural production over the course of five decades. And so he seemed to be to be the perfect person to open up a window on this world of the humanist in Florence. I started appreciating certain books on my shelves even more after reading your book on Vespasiano, because he saved many manuscripts, many books that I have on my shelves, like I have works of Cicero, for example, and you mentioned how many books he copied and was like, given the task to recover those works. Also Plato, although I'm not as familiar with Plato, but it is I it made me take those books and kind of appreciate that it could have been lost. It's I mean, that's one of the remarkable things. It's easy for us to forget we talk about Plato, but Plato was studied today, quite understandably as someone who has always existed. But it's very easy to for us to forget. Over 600 years later that in 1400 of Plato's 36 dialogues, there were only four known at all in the West. And they, four of them had been translated into Latin, two of them only partially. And so Plato was a blank in the West, and it wasn't until the Florentines taught themselves Greek and sort of committed themselves, they said that, you know, we know Aristotle, and we love Aristotle, but Plato was the teacher of Aristotle, therefore, we want to know what Plato says, and, and they noticed that writers like Cicero said that a lot of men praise Aristotle, but the best men praise Plato and hold him to be the best. So they had this appetite for learning, going back and taking apart ancient literature, taking apart to try to figure out what made it work and what made the societies in which these works were written work. So I think one of my hopes is that people will appreciate some of these authors. And I mean, a couple of people have told me, they started reading Plato, in some cases again, after reading the book, because Plato is a central character in the book. And one of the great achievements of the 1400s, and it happened in Florence was the recovery of the complete works of Plato and the distribution of them. Today, we talk a lot about democratization of education of that knowledge is so accessible, but the fact that Vespasiano came from a very poor family, and he didn't have access to the books, and he had to abandon his studies to go and pursue knowledge. Could you please tell like how this poor man, how he came to be a person who wrote biographies of the most influential people of his time? Right. It's a very interesting story. And in some ways, it's a very Florentine story and tells us something about why Florence became such a successful, cultural and political artistic entity. Because what Vespasiano's story shows us is two things, the democratization of knowledge, and also a certain kind of social mobility, that you would not have found a lot of places, a lot of other places, in fact, most other places in Europe, you wouldn't have found this Vespasiano could not have become Vespasiano in most other places. He was, as you say, from a poor family, the family might not have been so poor had his father not died when Vespasiano was only four years old, the family fell into poverty at that point. Vespasiano was born in 1422. And so his father died in 1426. And in 1434, early 1434, when he was 11, Vespasiano had to leave school and go to work in a bookstore. And that's an intriguing, just something intriguing and something the reason for which is lost and we won't ever know because he doesn't tell us why he went to work in a bookshop. It might simply have been utterly random that the family needed money. And one of the things we have to consider about Florence is that they had child labor, and he was child labor at that time. And so at 11, he went to work like a lot of other kids in Florence at that age, 11 or 12. But it might have been the case that someone's talent spotted him and recognized this poor boy, maybe his schoolmaster, maybe the bookshop, the man who ran the bookshop, a man named Michele Guarducci. Someone noticed that there was something special about this boy. And truly there was, he, you know, I was thinking, you were talking about a way to sum up the book. I was thinking last week that I should have come up with a strapline like Vespasiano was the Michelangelo of manuscripts, or something like that, because he truly like Michelangelo like Leonardo da Vinci was someone who developed early and rose up very quickly to the top of his profession. Because what happens, excuse me, is that he goes to work at 11. And really within a decade, by the time he's in his 20s, takes over that really takes over the shop becomes the guiding spirit of it, and becomes an expert on ancient literature. And in the book, I quote a remarkable statement from 1446, when Vespasiano was 24, when someone, an abbot in Arezzo wants to get a copy of Pliny's Natural History, which is one of the most popular works of the ancient world. But there are some 250-300 manuscripts of it. And the abbot wants a copy for his abbey. And he writes a letter to Florence saying, or Vespasiano is the best guide for such things. In other words, the greatest expert on Pliny the Elder's Natural History is gargantuan, incredibly complex, very fascinating work from ancient Rome that the world expert on it is this 24 year old in Florence. He's the one in other words, who can find the best manuscript of it with the least errors or he can make a judgment about its quality. And then crucially, and this is really what won Vespasiano his fame, he was the one who would turn it into a beautiful manuscript for you. So he would borrow the manuscript from wherever he got it from a library, another abbey, something like that. And then he would hire a scribe to write it out, write out a fresh copy of it, and also then to have it decorated with beautiful illuminations. Because of course, he produced high end books in the days before the printing press. When I read, I really love that period of time that you write your books about and one common thing among all those great people is the whether they are artists or scientists is the fact that they started really from the early age and by the time they were 20s, they were fully kind of formed and parallel with Vespasiano and Michelangelo of bookkeeping, it's a really lovely parallel. There must be a secret there, why so many Florentines became so like from early age so developed in the craft they were making. What was the atmosphere of the Florence at that time? I think there were two things that made Florence special in Europe, and I think two things that contributed more than anything else to its success. And one of the things that we have to consider is that Florence, even the Florentines themselves are especially the Florentines recognized themselves as exceptional, but other people did as well. It would be with this sort of miraculous city of only 35 40,000 people that produced all of these great artists and thinkers. And so we have to wonder, looking back at it from 600 years later, what was special about it, it can't simply have been the water from the Arno that they were drinking or something like that, there had to be something else. And the two things that I think are most significant are one, the literacy rate, the Florentines were valued education, and were highly literate. The adult male population has been estimated its adult literacy in the vernacular, in other words, in the Florentine tongue was subsequently become Italian, that has been adult male literacy has been estimated at 70%, which is very high when you consider that in London or Paris at that time, the literacy rate was probably 20 to 25%. cities in Germany, likewise. And in fact, once you've gone out of the cities, especially the university cities, literacy falls off a cliff, and it's probably in the countryside, about will probably less than 5%. So you have this city of, of readers, people who read in the vernacular, but also in Latin, they're also, you know, valued Latin learning, and a lot of students learned Latin as well, primarily after the age of 11, when they went on to basically a middle school, something like that. The second thing is related to it. And that's their system of government, which was a democracy. I mean, when we look at that, back at it now, 600 years later, we think that it doesn't quite fulfill the requirements, because of the fact that 35 or 40,000 people, only three or 4000 had the right to vote, and the right to hold political office. However, and so we can get very sniffy about it. However, that is very favorable compared to virtually everywhere else, Milan, for example, which is run by Dukes. And so you had a tyrant who was in control of the political situation, and representation among the people was very minimal. So in Florence, you had a kind of active participation in the political life among a certain elite in the city, at least. But it's what, how that fed into, I guess, the intellectual culture at the time is that they were interested in debate and public public debates and things like that. And in the book, I described their interest in authors such as Cicero and Quintilian, who were the two greatest Roman writers on rhetoric, because the Florentines thought that the ancient Romans, especially the Roman Republic had been the greatest society that ever existed, and they wanted to recreate it. And in order to do so, they had to find the playbook or the template for the ancient Romans. And so they went back to Cicero, what would Cicero say about a republic? What would Cicero say about making a speech? And how can we become like Cicero, these great citizen patriots? And those sorts of questions would not be asked in a kingdom or a dukedom or a princedom, in which the political leader or leaders had no interest in having public participation in decision making. In Florence, though, that was really the raison d'etre of the republic. Florence as a republic had this much wider participation. And so those things come together, the literacy and the political system that they have to enhance, I think, sort of raise up the city, culturally, politically and intellectually, and begin bearing the fruit that we then see over the course of the 1400s. You mentioned Quintilian, and I highlighted the story that you tell, how his work in full was discovered in one of the monasteries, I think, in Saint-Gaul, if I'm not mistaken, by Borgio. If I can ask you, could you please tell how that lost work on raising a decent person to the society, with elements of rhetoric in it, could you please tell how this long lost work was discovered? First of all, why was there a desire to find that work and how it was discovered by Borgio? Sure. I mean, it's a remarkable story. Quintilian was the most famous rhetorician, the most famous teacher of the first century AD, ACE. He lived up until about year 100. He probably taught between 70 and 90, the year 70 and 90, during the empire. And he wrote a book, the Institutio Oratorio, often translated as On the Education of an Orator. And it survived only in fragments, as far as was known, because if you think about it, it originally would have been written on papyrus scrolls, because the Romans did not, for the most part, write on parchment, in codices, in books. They had papyrus scrolls, and papyrus has a shelf life of maybe a couple of hundred years, maybe 500 years, unless it's taken care of incredibly well. So Quintilian had to be recopied at some point in 500, 600 AD in order to survive. Fortunately it was, but then those books get lost after a couple of hundred years, and there may only be 20 of them maximum, maybe even only four or five of them across Europe. And so knowledge is dependent on this transmission from one platform, one medium to another, from a papyrus to parchment, and then from the parchment of 600 AD to the parchment of 1200 AD, when it has to get passed on like a baton to the next 500 years. And so Quintilian, like so many other works, had just naturally begun disappearing over the course of the centuries, and the Florentines desperately wanted it, a lot of people wanted to read it, but the Florentines in particular, because it is a book on education. And the Florentines said, this is how, it has the secret to how the Romans educated their students, educated their young, raised their children, and it taught about rhetoric and political citizenship. What Quintilian wanted to create was what he called the good man speaking well. In other words, someone who's eloquent, someone who's a great speaker, but he's also good, he's virtuous. And this, and I think we would all agree that what we want in our politicians are articulate people who are virtuous, or who have personal and political virtues, and this is what the Florentines wanted. So they're desperate to get their hands on Quintilian. And they hoped, hope sprung eternal that there was a complete copy of it somewhere. And in 1416, Poggio Bracciolini, who was a Florentine, he grew up just outside of Florence, spent most of his career in Florence, Poggio Bracciolini, who was a scholar and manuscript collector, went on a mission, originally a mission from the Pope, when he went to a council of the church in Constance, but that was his excuse to get across the Alps or into the Alps to begin looking in German and Swiss monasteries for manuscripts. And he was encouraged by his friends in Florence, who said, go, you know, go to St. Gall and try to find what they have in their library. And he went to St. Gall ultimately, and despaired, he went with two friends, two other Italian friends, and despaired at what he saw, because the library was in a dreadful state, and the monks weren't especially helpful in in helping look for anything. But he did then find in what he said was a foul dungeon, a complete and whole copy of Quintilian, which he then copied out in his own very beautiful handwriting, and had it sent to Florence so that Quintilian could be revived. It's really interesting the way in which this became a kind of cultural sensation, because Poggio was celebrated for bringing Quintilian back to life. They really spoke of this as a kind of resuscitation or revival. And there was a Venetian humanist who wrote to Poggio congratulating him and saying, thanks to you, we'll be able to live better. And you've done a favor for your city and ultimately for all mankind, because they not know that they had Quintilian, they could find out how to educate their children, how to raise them, how to give good speeches and so forth. Before we continue, I would like to tell you that there are more episodes of Artidote podcast available on my website, which you can find in the description of this episode. Also this episode will be available on my YouTube channel very soon, which you can find also in the description of this episode. I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast and let's continue. I think he wanted to buy the manuscript that he discovered from the priests there, but they refused to sell him that. So he copied in 32 days or something like that, to give an image of what kind of work it is. To our listeners, it is approximately 600 or 700 pages long in current publication. I have it on my shelf, it's approximately like that. It's difficult to read, let alone copy in 32 days that amount of work. And what we also have to recognize is that we have it now in beautiful type. But what Poggio was dealing with was a handwriting that was a couple of hundred years old, because the manuscript that he found was probably done around the year 1000. And therefore, by the time he got it was 400 years old. And I think, you know, handwriting changes over the course of 400 years, so he would have to puzzle out the abbreviations that were used and figure out the the linguistics of it. And so it was no easy task. It really was a kind of Herculean feat on his on his part. The story of him not being able to get it from the monks is sort of typical of what he I mean, he did not think much of monks, he called them two legged donkeys. And I was very disparaging, because he blamed them for neglect, and in some ways that he was quite right to do so, blaming them for neglecting the books they had in their collection and not taking care of them. But you know, he, in some ways, we have to thank the monks, at least for having copied them, because what he would have had was something copied hundreds of years earlier, by a monk. And so the transmission of knowledge did come through Christianity. But one of the other manuscript hunters who had difficulty with monks was Boccaccio, who were going a few decades earlier, back into the 1300s. The author of the Cameron, who was besides a writer of smutty stories, also a great scholar and manuscript hunter. And he went to the Abbey of Monte Cassino, where he discovered a copy of Marcus Varro's work on the Latin language, Varro was Julius Caesar's librarian, a very learned man. And Boccaccio, this is the is still the only copy of that age that survived. And the monks wouldn't give it to Boccaccio, and so he stole it and took it back to Florence. You know, I wouldn't condone theft, especially from libraries. However, the manuscript of Varro probably would have perished had Boccaccio not taken it back to Florence at that time. Yeah, it's phenomenal to when I read your book, you mentioned several times of how many manuscripts perhaps have perished due to decay or like just simple indifference and kind of causes pain in the heart when, for example, you open a classical book published by Penguin today and it says like, most of the letters of this author have been lost, this is what is preserved. And it is thanks to some people like Boccio and Boccaccio who discovered them. Why did people come exactly to Vespasiano? Was it because he had good manuscript hunters? Is it because he produced good copies of the of the works? Was there? What was the reason? It was really twofold. It was the fact that he was the I mean, if you consider, and I should point out that most of his clients, not all of them, but most of his clients were at the, you know, the 1%, he, you know, the Pope, for example, Pope Nicholas Cosimo de' Medici, Cosimo's sons, and then Cosimo's son, Lorenzo de' Medici, he did work for all of them. And so for the most part, what he was doing was creating manuscripts for, in many cases, quite well educated people, but also the same people were very wealthy, and they were putting together elaborate libraries for to sort of burnish their reputations. Many of them were warlords. They got their money, they became wealthy by being soldiers of fortune, the greatest example of which is the Duke of Urbino, Federico de Montefeltro, who was highly educated in his own right. But he was also the greatest soldier of the age, and he earned vast sums of money as a mercenary. And he spent vast sums of money on books. And so what Vespasiano, why he went to Vespasiano, as did so many of these other people, was quality, quality, both of the text itself, because, as the abbot said, Vespasiano was the best guide for such things, he'll get the best copy. Because if you can imagine, if you want to get a book, let's say, the Cicero's Letters to Atticus, there are probably quite a few manuscripts of it kicking around in Florence and elsewhere at this time, but they're going to have all sorts of errors in them, they'll be sloppily copied, pages will be missed out, words will be transposed, all of these things. And Vespasiano seems to have been an example of what today is called a codicologist, in other words, someone who looks at manuscripts side by side by side, and compares them and contrast them, and then collates them into a perfect copy, or as perfect as can be known. So there's that sort of scholarly value to it. And then secondly, was the beauty of his productions, because if you're the Duke of Urbino, and you're building what is billed as the greatest library since antiquity, you want to have gorgeous books in it. So yes, you want Cicero's Letters to Atticus, but you want the most beautiful edition of Cicero's Letters to Atticus. And so you have Vespasiano's scribes, you get Vespasiano to hire one of his top guys to do the writing it out for you. And then he would hire, Vespasiano would hire an illuminator to do the decorations on it. And so these were high end products that cost, in many cases, they could cost 50 florins or 50 ducats, the coins were roughly equivalent in value at this time. So a 50 ducat book would be the wage of a craftsman in Florence. In fact, Vespasiano probably earned, he didn't make a lot of money, sadly enough. In some cases, he could not have earned in the course of a year, what one of the books that he made cost. He probably earned, I've calculated, in a good year, he might earn 70 or 75 florins per year. But he easily produced books that cost 75 florins, books then that in a sort of classic Marxist alienation of labor, he couldn't afford to buy back from the person that he sold it to. The books at this time were very expensive commodities, and he was the leading producer of them. And it was a very tumultuous time on every front possible. There were three popes, I think, at that time, the fall of Constantinople happened in 1453, if I'm not mistaken. And also like for Vespasiano, particularly the invention of printing press started back then. If it is possible, like, can we talk about the popes at the beginning, because he was friends with some of them and produced really good manuscripts. I'm curious, first of all, about the story, what was happening in the church. And I wonder what kind of works did popes appreciate? You know, what did they read, these deeply religious people? Sure, it well, and not all of them were deeply religious either. Yeah. I said that. And I realized. Yes. Well, the situation that people found themselves in, in, in the, as the 1400s began was a very dire one, because they had come out of what a famous book, the famous book published in about 1980, I think, by Barbara Tuchman, the American historian, her book is called A Distant Mirror. And she her subtitle is the turbulent 14th century. And that is an apt term for it. Because if you think of what happened in the 14th century, there were things like the Black Death of 1347 to 49. And also the 100 Years War broke out at that time. And the Black Death would return every 10 or 12 years. And so there was a lot of political turbulence, including in 1309, the move of the papacy to Avignon in the south of France, the French kings really took control of the papacy at that point. And Rome was abandoned for many decades until the 1370s. And but when a pope finally went back to Rome in the late 1370s, and then subsequently died, the next one went down to went back to Avignon, another pope was elected in Rome. And so we once, you know, there were two rival popes. And after 1410, there were three, because they held a council in Pisa in 1410, trying to decide which one was going to be Pope is it Avignon, is it Rome, they elected someone in Pisa. And but the ones in Rome and Avignon didn't step down, and nor did the one in Pisa. So there were three popes at that time. Ultimately, the situation was was resolved at the Council of Constance and by the 1420s. And on after that, we've got just one pope. But some of the popes were fairly effective in terms of, I guess, because they're making Rome great again, because the papacy really, for the better part of a century, had not occupied Rome, and the city was falling apart at that time. And so when Nicholas V became Pope in the 1440s, he decided that he was going to make it a seat of learning, as it had not been since the days of the ancient Romans. And he himself was a great scholar, his name was Tommaso Parentucelli. And he was a very good friend of Vespasiano, and so Vespasiano went to Rome and acted as a kind of consultant for the founding of the Vatican Library. And so Vespasiano began putting together the collection at this point. And ultimately, that would then be continued and reinforced by later popes, Sixtus IV, in the 1470s. And so the Vatican Library begins to grow up at that point. And so it's an interesting question, then, what books do they have in the Vatican Library? They have what you would expect to have, such as the Church Fathers, copies of the Bible, things like that, writings of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and so forth. But Nicholas V, as a great classical scholar, wanted to have the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans as well. And his great dream was to have copies translated from Greek into Latin of Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey. And so one of his great projects was to find a translator, someone who could render Homer's mighty hexameters into Greek hexameters into Latin. And so the Vatican Library then, as now, has a lot of works of classical literature in it. Because, of course, the papacy wasn't just a religious institution at this time. You were a temporal prince as well, if you were a pope, because you ruled over as many as a million people through central Italy, up through cities like Bologna and Perugia, which were normal, you know, these were vassal states of the papacy. And so you were as interested in how to rule states as were the people in Florence at that time. Vespasiano took part in building the Vatican Library. And also, as we mentioned, that Constantinople has fallen to Ottoman Turks at the time. And when Mehmed, I think it was Mehmed II, he saw that his soldiers are destroying the city and like some of the libraries, rich libraries are being destroyed. He just stopped it immediately. What kind of impact did it have in Florence, which was not too far, but at the same time, quite distant with its own problems? How did it impact Vespasiano's work? In many ways, it helped him, because what people realized with the fall of Constantinople, which some scholars called the fall of Greece, because Constantinople was the last bastion of Greek culture in the West. So that's the way for people in the West. Constantinople was the last bastion of ancient Greece. And it really was a continuation as well of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire didn't necessarily fall in 476 A.C.E. You could argue that it fell in 1453, because the Byzantine Empire was a continuation of the Roman Empire in the East. And so this was an ending, a crashing end to a lot of history. What the scholars in the West saw is that ancient Greece has been defeated and ancient Rome has been defeated. And so all of this history is being lost. And they, I think, probably exaggerated the scale of the destruction of manuscripts that occurred in Constantinople at that time. Certainly, some books were probably looted for the jewels that were in them. But Mehmed himself was a very erudite, well-read man who was interested in classical writings, and he never would have countenanced the destruction of a library. But nevertheless, what became obvious to people in the West is that knowledge is extremely precarious. And what we have happening in the East could easily happen here, not least because of the fact that Mehmed openly spoke about wanting to invade Rome. And so they realized that we must preserve knowledge and make it so that the works of the ancients are not going to be scattered and lost through cataclysmic events such as the fall of Constantinople. And so initially, that was of assistance to Vespasiano, because people like Cardinal Bessarion, who was originally from Constantinople, or from the East, a great Greek scholar who converted to the Latin Church and became a cardinal in the late 1430s. Cardinal Bessarion came to Vespasiano as soon as he heard about the fall of Constantinople and began commissioning works from him and making his own library. So Cardinal Bessarion decided that I'm going to safeguard all ancient knowledge by creating a library for myself, which ultimately then he gave to the city of Venice, and it's now part of the Marciano library in Venice. But ultimately, then you could say Vespasiano was hurt by this cataclysmic event, because, of course, a year or two after the fall of Constantinople, something appears at the Frankfurt Fair. In fact, in the autumn of 1454, something is unveiled at the Frankfurt Fair by what is called a miraculous man, who is, of course, Johannes Gutenberg, and Gutenberg shows his 42-line Bible, the Gutenberg Bible. And people suddenly realize if we really want to safeguard knowledge, it's not good enough just hand copying a manuscript here and there and putting them in a library that could be burned down in 20 years. What we need to do is create many copies of these books and disperse them widely. And the printing press was celebrated initially by a lot of people for that reason, because they had just come through these decades, where they had recovered, often at great cost and made aware of even greater losses of the works of the ancient world. And they now realized we do have a way of safeguarding the works of the past, which is to make copies of them, hundreds of copies, thousands of copies of them. And Vespasiano didn't particularly like this invention, and he didn't adopt, which is, for some, might seem surprising. What was the reason for such reluctance? Well, I think if he were sat here to explain it to you, he would say that it's sloppy scholarship. You know, if what he was known for was A, the quality of the text, the correctness of the text, and B, the fact that he produced very beautiful works, he would say in the first place, the printed book is, you know, often contains a lot of errors. And that's extremely dangerous because of the fact that if you print hundreds of copies of it, the biggest print runs were about 1000 copies at that time. If you print 1000 copies of that book, that's 1000 copies with errors going out there. And that's a big problem, he thought. And not just Vespasiano worried about that. A lot of scholars said that stupid ideas and mistakes can now be multiplied exponentially. And you don't have a chance to get those back and correct them. And then secondly, he thought, and in many ways, he was wrong about if he was partially right about his first point, he wasn't necessarily right about his second, which was that the books were not as beautiful as his. He said about Vespasiano, about Federico de Montefeltro's library, which he put together, all of which were handwritten and beautifully bound. He said a printed book would be ashamed to be among them, because he thought a printed book could not possibly be as beautiful as one of his handwritten manuscripts. And there might be a certain truth to that. But I think there are incredibly beautiful books done, the Gutenberg Bible, maybe first and foremost, that were illuminated, they printed books were often hand illuminated, you could buy, you know, the 300 pages that it was printed on, and sometimes it would be printed on parchment, and about a third of the Gutenberg Bibles were printed on parchment. So you could buy the parchment or paper, and then give it to an illuminator and have it personalized for you, hand decorated throughout with rubrications, marginalia, all of these sorts of things, all of which made them as beautiful as manuscripts. But yes, you're absolutely right. Vespasiano never embraced it. He never sold a printed book. They never dared cross the threshold of his shop. And ultimately, that was to his detriment, because he probably left his business prematurely. He retired in 1480. Having decided that he simply couldn't keep up with the printing press, because the presses, if he what he was known for, were copies of ancient writers, such as Plato, he did a beautiful set of the complete works of Plato in the early 1480s. But within a year or two, the printed version of the complete works of Plato in Latin came out. And he simply couldn't compete with this sort of quantity. And also, to some extent, with the quality of these productions. And so he closed his door, door to his bookshop and retired to his place in the country, and began writing books himself, which, of course, he didn't publish. He only had written out in manuscript. What was the most surprising discoveries for you while you were researching the book? I suppose part of it is just the sort of precarious, I was always aware of how precarious knowledge was. But in some ways, what is shocking that you that, say 1200 1400 years after the death of a writer after Cicero was a writer like that, one copy of the work still existed. And something like on Cicero's on the Republic was desperately sought by writers because they wanted to know how to set up a republic. They did ultimately after 1400 have Plato's Republic. But as I discussed, that was extremely controversial. And in many ways, Plato was a very controversial writer, which is maybe one of the other surprises I encountered, because we now think of Plato was so essential to Western philosophy and Western culture. But the two surprising things about him in the 1400s are a that initially he was unknown. And then secondly, when he began to be translated into Latin, so people could read him, people were shocked by what he said. And some translators would begin working on his material people like George of Trebizond or Leonardo Bruni, these great Greek scholars, the scholars of Greek literature, and they would turn away in revulsion because Plato, they found Plato so shocking. And they thought it would undermine Western culture was now we find Plato is one of the pillars of Western culture. But at that time, he was regarded as a great threat to it. So I think it's, it's, it's things like that, that are the way we receive people today, and we turn up at a philosophy 100 class, and we read these things, and we puzzle through the text, which is my introduction to them. We just take the text for granted, and don't necessarily have a complete understanding of the historical evolution of the text and why it survived, why Plato survived so many years before getting to us in a Penguin edition or an Oxford Classics edition in the year 2021. And so it's just fascinating to sort of reverse engineer these works of literature and find out that what survived is the fact that any of it survived is a miracle and be down to people like Poggio Bracciolini or Vespasiano. When I was preparing for the interview, I've read somewhere that of that you are people domain, of course, as a writer, yeah, you love books. But I, but it also mentioned that you collect books. And I was wondering, what would be like the, let's say, the most treasured that mark the closest to your heart book that you have on the shelf of your library? Oh, good question. It's, I suppose, well, I suppose what the one that I treasure the most is not a Lassa complete copy. Again, it's one of these fragments. It's a parchment of an antiphonary, a hymnal that was copied out in Florence in the 1470s. And I was hoping it would be one of the Vespasiano scribes who did it, but he didn't really do hymn books and liturgical works like that. So it was, that was a fairly slim chance. But it is just, it's just a leaf of parchment, large parchment. It's about 15 inches high by maybe eight or nine inches wide, because it had to be read by many, the many eyes in the choir. And so I think that's my most valuable one. And again, it's one of these things that the rest of it, as far as I know, doesn't exist. And so I just have this leaf of something that's been very beautifully worked on by a scribe and illuminator, you know, 550 years ago, and just survives in this one little piece. That's wonderful. And towards the end of the interview, I always ask my guests to share what are your future projects, perhaps a book you're working on right now or events or what occupies you right at this time? I haven't yet started another book. But what I've done is maybe not unlike what you're doing is I've started a YouTube channel. Just last month, I decided that I would, there were so many offshoots to the book. I mean, there's so many stories in the book that I couldn't do full justice to without it becoming 3000 pages long. And so I have a lot of notes and ideas on things that, you know, I couldn't shoehorn into the book, it wouldn't be fair to the reader to do it. And so I've got, I just tell a lot of stories in this, these YouTube videos, I've sort of made this foray into filmmaking or making videos, which I illustrate with, with images as much as possible. It's called Renaissance discoveries, because it really is about the 15th century as a time of discovery and what they're discovering, and what they're rediscovering. So I do have one on Quintilian, another one on Plato, one on the printing press and things like that, where I can sort of enhance what, what I write on the book. And someone wrote to me and said, this is like a study guide for the book or like some background to the book. And so that's been a lot of fun. It's a lot of work. And it's a different skill set than writing a book, I have to say, but it's been a lot of fun. It was my pandemic project, I really started it around the time that we went into lockdown last year, and have, which is around the time I finished the book. And so I've been working on that since and hopefully, maybe out of one of these offshoots, one of these videos, I'll come up with the idea for what my next book is going to be. That's a great place to go. Because as you said, your book covers so much and we would need another two or three hours to touch upon everything that you said, mentioned in your book. So I would urge everyone to go and check your YouTube channel. I've seen your videos. They are very wonderful, wonderful stories you tell there. So thank you so much for your time and for answering questions. It's a lovely book. It's one of my favorites this year that I've read. Thank you so much, Mr. King. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thank you. I had so many other questions to Mr. King that this podcast could have lasted around three, four hours, if not longer, and could have become an audio book. But I hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast. Please check the other episodes of Our Today Podcast. You can follow me on Instagram. Subscribe to my newsletter, which I send monthly, and I share books in it. And you can also get an audible free trial if you follow the link below. You will be able to get any audiobook for free. Thank you once again for listening, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
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