This Earthly Globe E-Book

Andrea di Robilant

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 415

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A dazzling tale, brilliantly told' Peter Frankopan 'A wonderful book' Sunday Telegraph, 5* 'Triumphant' Literary Review DURING THE AGE OF DISCOVERY, in the autumn of 1550, an anonymously authored volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). This was closely followed by two further volumes that, when taken together, constituted the largest release of geographical data in history, and could well be considered the birth of modern geography. The editor of these volumes was a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio. He gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo to detailed reports from the Muslim scholar and diplomat Leo Africanus. In an enthralling narrative, Andrea di Robilant brings to life the man who used all his political skill, along with the help of conniving diplomats and spies, to democratise knowledge and show how the world was much larger than anyone previously imagined.

Leseprobe

Also by Andrea di Robilant

Autumn in Venice

Chasing the Rose

Venetian Navigators

Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon

A Venetian Affair

First published in the United States in 2024 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Andrea di Robilant, 2024

The moral right of Andrea di Robilant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 131 9

Atlantic Books

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Tommaso and Sebastiano

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE The Education of a Geographer

CHAPTER TWO Pigafetta’s Diary

CHAPTER THREE Cadamosto

CHAPTER FOUR An African Masterpiece

CHAPTER FIVE Meeting Prester John

CHAPTER SIX Indian Journeys

CHAPTER SEVEN Navagero’s Embassy

CHAPTER EIGHT In the Land of Biru

CHAPTER NINE Sailing to Hochelaga

CHAPTER TEN The Return of Marco Polo

CHAPTER ELEVEN Stealing Time from Time

POSTSCRIPT

Bibliographical Note

Index

PROLOGUE

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1550, A THICK VOLUME CONTAINING A WEALTH OF NEW GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION AND STARTLING woodcut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia was published in Venice by the house of Giunti under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The person who had assembled and edited this remarkable collection of travel narratives, journals, private letters and classified government reports remained anonymous.

Two more volumes appeared, in 1556 and 1559. They included, respectively, the most up-to-date information on what the Europeans referred to as the New World and on Asia. The combined publication of the three volumes—over two million words—constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, to use an expression of our time, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance.

The man behind this herculean effort of transparency was Giovambattista Ramusio, a highly regarded but little-known public servant who spent a lifetime in government quietly working behind the scenes. His contemporaries invariably described him as a gentle and generous man, very learned and wise yet modest to the point of self-effacement. To this day he remains an elusive figure. Rannusio, Ramusius, Rhamnusius, Rhamusius: even the spelling of his surname was not fixed.

Although he lived through the golden age of Venetian portraiture, no painting of him has come down to us. Paolo Veronese, the great Renaissance artist, included him in a large group portrait that showed him in conversation with a senator; but the canvas, which hung in the great hall of the Maggior Consiglio, in the Ducal Palace, was destroyed by a fire in 1577.

His publisher, Tommaso Giunti, who knew him well, would probably have explained the absence of a formal portrait by invoking his friend’s modesty and reserve. Ramusio, however, was a cittadino originario, not a patrician; he belonged to a caste that, although indispensable to run the sprawling government, was rarely celebrated in a public way. True, he moved with ease in certain patrician circles, but he knew his place; and he would never have allowed vanity to come in the way of his prudence.

Fortunately, a small contemporary etching of Ramusio has survived. In the Biblioteca Marciana, the very library which Ramusio took loving care of for many years, is a rare catalogue of bronze medallions depicting notable cultural and scientific figures of the Renaissance. The collection belonged to Giovanni Maria Mazzucchelli, an eighteenth-century literary figure from Brescia. The two-volume catalogue was published in 1761 under the title Museum Mazzuchellianum. It contains several hundred small portraits of famous and less famous people and is often used by scholars as an ante litteram image bank.

Ramusio’s handsome profile (medal VI, table LXIV—Io. Baptista Rhamnusius) is among the most finely executed of the lot. The broad forehead and balding head and the long, elegant nose are drawn with great precision. He appears to be in his late fifties or early sixties and looks vigorous, alert, inquisitive; and also wise—a man of definite experience. The well-groomed beard, presumably graying, adds gravitas to his expression. There is nothing elusive about him here—quite the contrary.

Ramusio was a child of the Age of Discovery. He was seven years old when Christopher Columbus made his first journey across the Atlantic, eleven when John Cabot reached Newfoundland and twelve when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In the decades that followed, Cortés landed in Mexico, Vespucci sailed down to Brazil, Balboa reached the Pacific, Magellan circumnavigated the globe, Pizarro invaded the Inca Empire and Cartier explored the Saint Lawrence River.

While the world was opening up to European navigators at an astonishing speed—often with results that were disastrous to the people who inhabited the lands they visited—the field of geography was lagging behind, stirring slowly back to life after a long slumber. During the Middle Ages the outline of the known world had faded into a disquieting vagueness. Portolan charts of the coastline along commercial routes were relatively accurate, but the contours of the world at large had blurred considerably since Roman times, generating mysterious landscapes made of myths and mariners’ tales. Even the most educated people had a very limited and fanciful notion of what the world looked like.

Portrait of Giovambattista Ramusio, eighteenth-century bronze etching published in the Museum Mazzuchellianum (1761) by Pier Antonio Gaetani

A turning point came in the mid-fifteenth century, when a Greek copy of Ptolemy’s Geography—A Guide to Drawing a World Map was dug up in a library in Byzantium. The manuscript reached the Medici court in Florence, and was translated into Italian and printed in Vicenza, on the Venetian mainland. The book circulated widely and inspired a new generation of geographers and cartographers who devoted themselves to the study of ancient maps.

According to Ptolemy, the great Alexandrian astronomer who lived in the second century A.D., the world was formed by three continents (Europe, Africa, Asia) loosely connected and surrounded by water. This notion gained new and wide currency in the early Renaissance. So much so that at the end of the fifteenth century, before Columbus’s historic voyage, Ptolemy’s Geography was still the only existing atlas of the world. Even more remarkable is the fact that the Ptolemaic world continued to hold sway during the following decades, long after the major discoveries had been reported back to Europe.

Woodcut map of 1545 based on Ptolemy’s Geography

The deference to the Ancients on the part of Renaissance humanists was partly responsible for this peculiar disconnect. Cartographers felt safer stretching and modifying Ptolemy’s old maps to extraordinary degrees in order to accommodate new discoveries rather than boldly charting a different world.

Another reason Ptolemy’s outdated vision lasted so long was the secrecy which surrounded the reports written by returning mariners. These highly classified manuscripts were so jealously guarded in Lisbon, Seville, Paris and London that while each naval power had a privileged view of the lands its explorers had visited, the overall picture remained obscure.

Ramusio realized that as long as the discoverers’ reports were locked up in the secret archives of European courts, world atlases were bound to maintain their primitive form. Acting upon that intuition, he began to collect and study all the original travel narratives he could get his hands on. He took advantage of his position at the heart of the Venetian government to pursue his objective. He used his political skill and ingenuity, not to mention the help of conniving diplomats and spies across Europe, to ferret out the manuscripts he coveted. The mild, soft-spoken official was not above resorting to trickery or even larceny if he felt this was absolutely necessary for the success of his mission: to capture accurate knowledge.

It was soon evident to Ramusio that Ptolemy’s world map was irreconcilable with the world described in contemporary narratives. Taken singly, each report offered a fascinating glimpse of distant, exotic lands. Together, they revealed a much larger world than anything previously imagined.

| CHAPTER ONE |

THE EDUCATION OF A GEOGRAPHER

IN THE SPRING OF 1505, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY, GIOVAMBATTISTA RAMUSIO PASSED A RIGOROUS EXAMINATION TO enter the Venetian Chancery and landed a position as junior clerk, with an initial salary of thirty ducats a year.

It was a momentous event not just for Giovambattista but for the entire Ramusio family, which had migrated to the Republic a generation earlier and was still finding its footing in the stratified structure of Venetian society.

The Chancery, located in the Doge’s Palace, was the central administrative body of the state. It was run by an elite corps of officials drawn from the ranks of the cittadini originari, an intermediate caste of citizens who were not allowed to rule—that was the exclusive right of the nobility—but were relied upon to manage the sprawling Venetian bureaucracy.

Giovambattista’s new job was the first step toward a prestigious career in government and an affirmation of his family’s loyalty to the Republic.

The Ramusios were originally from Rimini, a fiefdom on the Adriatic coast in what was then the northernmost region of the Papal States. Giovambattista’s father, Paolo Ramusio, emigrated to the Venetian Republic at the age of sixteen to pursue his education. He studied law at the University of Padua, which served as the Republic’s main campus at a time when there was no university in Venice proper. His younger, wilder brother, Girolamo, soon joined him.

Paolo was a brilliant, ambitious student. He obtained his Venetian citizenship and entered the ranks of the magistracy. Girolamo studied medicine and philosophy and wrote clever erotic verse in Latin. When his lover, a prominent Paduan lady, was murdered in mysterious circumstances, he was caught up in the scandal and fled to Syria. He settled in Damascus, studied Arabic and translated parts of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine; he later moved to Beirut, where, according to a family chronicle, he died around 1484, apparently from indigestion after eating too many apricots.

Paolo, meanwhile, married Tomyris Macachiò, a Venetian who, although not noble herself, was related to several patrician families. Her unusual first name reflected the fashion, in humanistic circles, of naming children after figures of antiquity. Tomyris was the strong-willed queen of the Scythes who defeated Cyrus, King of Persia; according to one narrative, she had his head cut off and wrapped in a human skin filled with the blood of dead soldiers. A rather gruesome woman to some; but Boccaccio, the early Renaissance poet, glorified Queen Tomyris in his popular book Famous Women.

Paolo and Tomyris had two boys and four girls. Giovambattista, the eldest of the children, was born in 1485 in Treviso, forty miles north of Padua, where his father was a provincial magistrate. During the following years Paolo received government assignments in different provincial towns of the Republic. While he moved from post to post, the family stayed in Padua. Tomyris raised the children in a comfortable house in via del Patriarcato. Despite his long absences, Paolo made sure his firstborn received a solid humanistic education, which meant Greek and Latin but also mathematics, physics and natural sciences.

At university, Giovambattista did not study law, like his father, but stuck to humanities in order to prepare for the entry examination at the Chancery. Junior clerks, known as secretarii, were expected to have a thorough knowledge of history, to write superior prose and to be excellent public speakers. And Venetian authorities felt that those who aspired to such a career were better served by a solid education in literature, history and the classics rather than in the dry intricacies of the law. In Padua, Ramusio studied with some of the great scholars of his time—Latin with Giovanni Calfurnio, Greek with Leonico Tomeo, history with Marco Antonio Sabellico.

Paolo also introduced his son to the star-studded circle of humanists gravitating around Aldus Manutius, a publisher who ran a flourishing press in Venice that specialized in Greek and Latin classics. In time, Aldus would have a decisive influence on Giovambattista, teaching him how to edit old manuscripts and publish fine-quality books.

Paolo used his connections to get his son onto a fast track at the Chancery, and very quickly Alvise Mocenigo, an influential senator and a strong supporter of Aldus’s publishing house, took Giovambattista on as his personal aide.

Young Ramusio had barely settled into his new position when his new boss was picked to lead a tricky diplomatic mission to the court of Louis XII, the King of France. And so, in early October, Giovambattista bid farewell to his family and joined Mocenigo on the monthlong journey to Blois, the royal residence in the Loire valley.

It was a golden opportunity for a junior clerk to immerse himself in the complexities of European politics and witness firsthand an experienced diplomat like Mocenigo try to defuse a threatening set of circumstances.

FALCONS FOR THE KING

Venice’s expansion in northern Italy had alienated its powerful neighbors. To the north, Emperor Maximilian of Austria eyed with increasing appetite the rich plains of the Po valley and was planning an invasion. To the west, Louis XII had already conquered the Duchy of Milan and was looking to consolidate his dominions in Italy. To the south, the fiery new pope, Julius II, angered by Venice’s encroachments along the border with the Papal States, was itching to teach the Republic a lesson.

Venice had a long tradition of playing foreign powers against one another to hold on to its provinces on the mainland. But this balancing act was becoming harder to maintain as French and Austrian ambitions in Italy firmed up. And if France and Austria moved together with the backing of the Pope, Venice would find itself surrounded by enemies. The consequences would be catastrophic.

The Venetians saw Louis XII as the key player—neither Emperor Maximilian nor the Pope was likely to move against Venice without the support of France. Mocenigo’s brief was to gain the French monarch’s goodwill while keeping alive the rivalry between France and Austria.

It turned out Louis XII was in no rush to meet the Venetian delegation when it arrived in Blois in early November. Mocenigo found a friendlier ear in Philippe de Commynes, a veteran diplomat brought out of retirement to help formulate France’s Italian policy. Humanist, memoirist, lover of Italian culture and a keen expert in Italian politics, de Commynes had many friends in Venice, where he had served as French ambassador a decade earlier. He enjoyed dropping by Mocenigo’s quarters to banter and reminisce.

De Commynes’s influence at court was not what it had been. Still, he was able to mollify Louis XII, who finally received the Venetian ambassador. An awkward moment occurred when Mocenigo began to read his prepared speech in Latin: the king stopped him in his tracks and ordered him to read in his own language, explaining that he was curious “to hear someone speak in Italian.”

Was it a friendly remark or a chilling allusion to the king’s plans for expansion in Italy?

After a moment of confusion, Mocenigo recovered his poise; but as he wrote in his report, a certain apprehension lingered.

The Venetian envoy was left to wait for the next summons. But a sudden, unexpected rapprochement between France and Spain shook the court and forced Mocenigo to take a back seat. Only two years before, Louis XII and King Ferdinand of Spain had gone to war over the Kingdom of Naples. But after the recent death of his wife, Queen Isabella, Ferdinand was now proposing to strengthen the ties between the two erstwhile enemies by taking a wife of French royal blood. Louis XII, realizing he could gain leverage over Austria, offered Ferdinand the hand of his niece Germaine de Foix.

Mocenigo saw the advantage of this plan: it foreshadowed a distancing of France from Austria, and therefore a possible weakening of the anti-Venetian front. Eager to have another interview with Louis XII, he urged de Commynes to speed things up. “Give him falcons” was de Commynes’s friendly advice—the king loved falconry and owned more than three hundred specimens, including the rare white falcon from Greenland. But Louis XII, bedridden with acute chest pains and high fevers, was in no mood for falcons. His condition worsened and, by the end of the year, vigils were held across France. “It is said here that he will not live long,” a worried Mocenigo reported back to Venice.

Louis XII was given last rites. His death was likely to encourage the aggressive impulses of Emperor Maximilian, who made no mystery of his desire to move swiftly against Venice and “rob it of its gold.” But after a gloomy winter the king recovered and by the early spring of 1506 he was out of danger.

During his convalescence, Louis XII softened toward the Venetians. In April, Mocenigo and his young aide Ramusio were invited to follow the king to Tours, another place of residence of the House of Orleans. The court settled there until midsummer.

Louis XII was a popular king, often referred to as the “Father of the People.” He had brought an end to the internal wars that had wracked the country during the reign of his predecessors and had presided over a long period of economic growth. But while all was relatively well at home, he was consumed by his ambitions abroad. Now that relations with Spain were on a surer footing, Louis XII let loose his impatience with Emperor Maximilian’s greedy designs on the rich territories of northern Italy.

At the end of the summer, having fully recovered, the king returned to Blois to plot his next move. Ramusio had by this point gained familiarity with the court and had established solid contacts; he spoke fluent French and could better grasp the subtleties of government policies. But as tension between France and Austria increased, news reached him that his father, Paolo, had died in Padua. Overcome with grief, he asked to go home to be with his mother and his sisters. Given the volatile political situation, his request was denied.

In the early autumn of 1506, Emperor Maximilian moved troops into northern Italy. In December, Louis XII left Blois and traveled south with his army aiming to cross the Alps and take back the port city of Genoa, where the French governor had been toppled during a local insurrection. A wary Mocenigo reported to his fellow senators that “the king is going to war with 18,000 men.” Once in Italy, he could well be tempted “to inflict damage on us” as well.

The Venetian Senate instructed Mocenigo and Ramusio to stay with the French army.

In the spring of 1507 Louis XII reached Grenoble at the head of his men, crossed the Alps, descended into Piedmont, marched through Asti and continued south to Alessandria, where the royal cortège established headquarters.

There Mocenigo took leave of the king and hurried on to Venice to provide a full report on the French advance into northern Italy. Ramusio stayed behind and followed the French army south to Genoa, where the uprising was quickly quashed. The king entered the city, installed a new French governor and by the end of the month was back in Alessandria, where Ramusio found Antonio Condulmer, the new Venetian ambassador to France, waiting to present his credentials.

It seemed that Louis XII did not intend to attack Venice—for the time being. But now the French and the Austrians both had large armies stationed in northern Italy.

Ramusio briefed Condulmer on the events in Genoa and hurried home at last.

ALDUS’S SHOP

At twenty-two, Ramusio was now the head of the family. His father left him all his properties: four houses in the coastal city of Rimini, in the Romagna, and three plots of land in the surrounding countryside; the house in Padua where the family lived; and two recently acquired properties at Paviola and Cittadella, on the Venetian mainland.*

From the start, he took an active interest in the management of the land, and over the years he was to build a sizable, well-run estate. He transformed the old farm near Cittadella into a comfortable country house, the Villa Ramusia, where he kept a well-tended garden, orchards and vegetable patches, and where he liked to experiment with new crops and plants.

All of that was in the future. Meanwhile, he resumed his clerkship at the Chancery and found a suitable arrangement with his mother: she continued to live in the big house in Padua and raise Cornelia, Livia and Faustina (Girolamo and Eugenia had died in infancy), while he took up lodgings in Venice and frequently commuted back to Padua to be with the family.

Whenever his job and his family duties allowed him, Ramusio visited Aldus Manutius. The print shop at San Paternian was a den of thriving activity. As many as thirty employees—inkers, type-setters, etchers, proofreaders, translators and editors—worked tirelessly under Aldus’s orders, surrounded by clatter and confusion.

A plaque at the entrance of the print shop made clear idlers were not welcome:

Whoever you are Aldus earnestly begs you to state your businessin the fewest possible words and be gone, unless, like Herculesto worthy Atlas, you wish to lend a helping hand. There will alwaysbe enough work for you and all those who come this way.

Ramusio, drawn to the intoxicating atmosphere of the place, was eager to lend “a helping hand.” A first-rate classicist himself, he was hardworking and reliable. Aldus took him under his wing and gave him increasing responsibilities around the shop.

Shortly before the trip to France, Aldus had learned that a precious cache of letters written by Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan during a tour of duty in Bithynia had surfaced in the library of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor in Paris. It was a sensational find: the 375 letters—known as the Codex Parisinus—were extremely old, possibly sixth-century copies.

Aldus had urged Mocenigo and Ramusio to do all they could to get their hands on the letters during their stay in France. Whether they obtained them from the resident abbot or whether they secretly smuggled them out of the Abbaye de Saint-Victor with the help of some conniving friar is unclear. But somehow they managed to bring the booty safely to Venice.

The calligraphy on the ancient parchment was so tiny that the letters were barely legible. Still, Aldus was thrilled to have them in his hands. He threw himself into the grueling editing process, “truly happy to be the first to publish these letters.”

The publication of the Codex Parisinus was an example of Aldus’s extraordinary reach in his quest for precious manuscripts and of his determination to publish them according to his own high standards—a lesson that was not lost on young Ramusio.

The colophon of the Aldine Press: a dolphin and an anchor entwined

Aldus, who is now regarded as the greatest editor of his time, came late to publishing, after living the roving life of the scholar-for-hire until he was forty. Born around 1450 in Bassiano, a mountain village in central Italy, he studied classics in Rome and made a living teaching the young sons of wealthy patrons. Later, he traveled north, settling first in Ferrara and then in nearby Carpi, a small seigneury in the Romagna ruled by the Pio family. He taught Latin and Greek to the young prince, Alberto. In recognition for his services, the Pios gave Aldus “fields and orchards” to which he remained attached for the rest of his life.

When Prince Alberto, Aldus’s young charge, left Carpi to begin his university studies in Milan around 1490, Aldus, a middle-aged tutor looking for a job, migrated to Venice. He found employment with several important families and soon made a name for himself in humanistic circles by publishing a Latin grammar that sold well. But he encouraged his students to study Greek, for he believed that the language, long neglected in Italy, deserved the same literary status as Latin. In fact, he dreamed of starting a small quality press devoted to classic Greek literature.

Venice was fast becoming the Mecca of the book business. There were more than 150 printers operating in town. Roughly half the books sold in Europe were published in the city. But most editions were poorly edited and shoddily assembled. Aldus, on the other hand, wanted his books to be paradigms of scholarly and editorial excellence. He also wanted them to be user-friendly. In the early days of publishing, books tended to be large and cumbersome and difficult to read. Aldus envisioned agile, elegant, eminently practical devices that would transform the experience of reading. In a word, the quality paperback.

In 1495 he opened up shop by a side canal in the neighborhood of San Stin, facing a bakery. Pierfrancesco Barbarigo, the wealthy nephew of the Doge and the owner of paper mills, provided most of the initial capital in exchange for a 50 percent stake in the company. The other 50 percent went to Andrea Torresano, the printer who had published Aldus’s Latin grammar; he had the publishing experience and owned the printing presses. In a separate agreement, Torresano gave Aldus one-fifth of his share, or 10 percent of the company, with full editorial responsibility.

A small press devoted to Greek literature was a risky venture, but Hellenism was becoming fashionable in literary circles. Plus, a stream of refugees had swelled the Greek community in Venice after the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Aldus and Torresano were betting the demand for books in Greek was there.

The most urgent task was to design and produce a Greek typeface because the characters available in Venice did not come close to the quality standards Aldus was aiming for. He enlisted Francesco Griffo, a talented engraver from Bologna, who set to work drawing and cutting the letters of the Greek alphabet. On the editorial side, Aldus hired Marco Musuro, a respected Greek scholar who taught at the university in Padua and whom Lorenzo de’ Medici, no less, had recruited a few years before.

Aldus drew up a list of Greek authors he wanted to publish—the core curriculum of a solid Hellenistic education. The complete works of Aristotle were the centerpiece of his editorial undertaking, and a massive one at that. But how many aspiring Hellenists would be able to read Aristotle in Greek? Or Sophocles? Or Thucydides?

First, Aldus’s readers needed to learn the language well enough to read it.

The only Greek grammar that existed in Italy at the time was an out-of-print volume by Constantin Lascaris, a Byzantine humanist who had fled Constantinople after the fall of the city. He had now retired to Messina, in eastern Sicily, where he ran a prestigious Greek academy at the monastery of San Salvatore al Faro.

Enter Pietro Bembo, the brilliant twenty-two-year-old son of Bernardo Bembo, a leading Venetian statesman and renowned collector of ancient manuscripts. In 1492 young Bembo traveled to Sicily on his father’s allowance to perfect his Greek with the great Lascaris. After two years of intense study, he brought back to Aldus a copy of Lascaris’s old Greek grammar on which the master himself had made more than 150 handwritten additions and corrections.

It was a publishing coup. The new grammar, elegantly printed with the characters cut by Griffo and with an accompanying Latin translation, was the first book to come off the presses. It sold very well and the publishing house was up and running.

Aldus started printing the works of Aristotle while he put out in quick succession books by Theocritus, Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Some volumes sold as many as two to three thousand copies—impressive numbers considering the pool of potential readers was relatively small and good books were expensive, costing the equivalent of as much as two to three hundred dollars in today’s currency.

As the new century began, Aldus and his partners sensed that they had saturated the market for Greek authors, so they expanded their range to include Latin classics: Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero and other major authors. At the urging of Bembo, a champion of Italian vernacular, Aldus also published Dante and Petrarch to give their work the literary standing of the classics.

Aldus was a hands-on editor, a perfectionist who worked ceaselessly to weed out mistakes, errors of translation and typos before he sent books out to his clients. He cared as much about the material aspect of the book as he did about the reliability of the text, and he was constantly thinking of ways to improve his product. He introduced the octavo, a pocket-sized book. He developed new, more readable letter types. He was the first to use cursive, in imitation of the stile cancelleresco, the stylish handwriting for which the Venetian Chancery was famous. His editions were elegant, polished and free of pompous commentary in the margins—just the original text in its simplest, purest, most correct form.

By the time Ramusio returned from France in 1507, the publishing house had undergone significant changes. Aldus, by then in his late fifties, had married Maria Torresano, a daughter of his business partner. To economize, the print shop had been moved from the original site in San Stin to the ground-floor building where Torresano lived with his family, in the neighborhood of San Paternian. Aldus and his young bride had settled on the top floor.

Bembo, long one of Aldus’s star writers and editors, had left town in a huff two years before. Consumed by his ambition to forge a modern Italian language, he had written an experimental novel, Gli Asolani, on the topic of love: six friends—three young men and three young women—meditate on the vagaries of the heart during a three-day-long wedding party in Asolo, a hill town in the Venetian countryside.

In the midst of writing the novel he had fallen in love with Lucretia Borgia, daughter of the infamous Pope Alexander VI and new young wife of the Duke of Este, ruler of Ferrara. The two began a passionate and very dangerous affair; at the very least, their entanglement risked sparking a diplomatic crisis between Venice and Ferrara.

During their secret relationship, Lucretia, a book lover, became closely involved in the writing of Bembo’s novel, reading and commenting on every page and urging him—an endless reviser—to finish the job and get it out to the public. Aldus probably thought Gli Asolani a frivolous departure from the classics, but he agreed to publish it at Bembo’s expense. They chose a small format that could easily be carried about (libellus portatilis). The layout was clean and easy to read; the typeface, an elegant cursive.

Against Aldus’s advice, Bembo insisted on dedicating the book to Lucretia. It was a long, loving dedication: pure folly, bound to provoke the wrath of the Duke of Ferrara. The Council of Ten, Venice’s ruling body, sent the police to stop the presses—the last thing the Venetian government wanted was a confrontation with the House of Este over an illicit love story. Bembo relented, and once the dedication had been removed the printing resumed.

The book was a hit and went into several printings. But Bembo, pressured by his father to enter public service and give up his literary career, turned his back on his family and his city and migrated south to Urbino, in those years the most scintillating Renaissance court.

The loss of Bembo was offset by the arrival of no less an erudite than Erasmus of Rotterdam. While studying at the university in Bologna, the Dutch philosopher had written to Aldus to say that he had edited two plays by Euripides—Hecuba and Iphigenia—and hoped he would publish them. “I should think my lucubrations more secure of immortality if they were printed in your type,” he added flatteringly.

Aldus opened his home and his shop to Erasmus, who shared a room with Girolamo Aleandro, a brilliant young editor; the Dutchman took his meals in the house and did his fair share of editing. “Aldus,” he later noted, “was astonished by the amount of work I could get done despite the terrible racket the workmen made at the presses.”

Erasmus got his reward: Aldus published the two plays by Euripides but also, more important, Erasmus’s own Adagia, a collection of sayings and aphorisms gleaned from the classics. The other inhouse editors—all humanists of the first rank—helped him find material and turn his initial idea for a small book into a major publishing project. “I [had] brought with me to Venice only some very confusing and indigestible material,” he later admitted with unusual candor.

Erasmus left Aldus’s shop to take a job as tutor to Alexander Stewart, the illegitimate son of James IV, the King of Scotland. Aldus never saw him again. A few years later, the philosopher wrote an ungrateful account of his stay in Venice, in which he described the Torresano/Manutius household as a wretched place where “damp roots burned in the fireplace instead of wood” and boarders were served “soup made of old cheese crusts, rotten tripe and watered down wine that tasted like acid.”

AGNADELLO

The prolonged effort to keep European powers from coalescing into a formidable anti-Venetian alliance finally collapsed in the winter and spring of 1508. Louis XII, as we have seen, was in northern Italy with his troops. He was now joined by King Ferdinand of Spain, his new ally. Emperor Maximilian, meanwhile, announced he was crossing Venetian territory with a military contingent in order to go to Rome to be crowned by the Pope. The wary Venetians replied that they would escort him across their country, but he would not be allowed to march through with his army. Furious at this rebuff, Maximilian invaded Cadore, the northernmost Venetian province, with five thousand men. Once the province was under imperial control, however, three thousand troops were sent back to their barracks in Austria. The Venetians easily took back Cadore and massacred the small Austrian contingent that had remained. Then they fatally overplayed their hand by taking two imperial cities, Trieste and Gorizia, pushing Maximilian into the arms of his rival, Louis XII.

In December 1508 Venice’s adversaries met in Cambrai, a small town now in the north of France that in the sixteenth century was part of the Holy Roman Empire ruled by Maximilian. France, Austria and Spain, joined by England, Hungary and a number of smaller states, formed an alliance known as the League of Cambrai. The purpose was to destroy the Venetian Republic and carve up its rich territories. Or as Maximilian put it, still seething after the debacle in Cadore, “to stamp out, as a commonplace fire, the insatiable greed of the Venetians and their thirst for dominion.”

The spoils were apportioned in advance. Brescia, Bergamo, Crema and Cremona would go to France. Austria was to have Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Rovereto and Treviso, plus the regions of Friuli and Istria. England, Scotland, Hungary and the city-states of Florence, Urbino and Ferrara, would all get their share for joining the alliance. Even Pope Julius II, after being promised the city of Rimini and parts of Romagna, swept aside any lingering reservations about joining the League. He also issued a papal edict excommunicating the Venetian Republic.

Venice’s fabled diplomacy had failed spectacularly. The Republic, with no friends to turn to, faced the mightiest alliance ever assembled against it. Two condottieri of great experience, Nicolò Orsini da Pitigliano and Bartolomeo d’Alviano, were hired to command the Venetian army. Andrea Gritti, an able and ambitious senator, was elected provveditore, the civilian authority that was to make sure the Senate’s guidelines were carried out in the field.

On April 14, 1509, the League declared war. The Venetians took position on the western border of the Republic, along the river Adda. There followed several skirmishes as the French advance guard made its first forays into Venetian territory. Bartolomeo d’Alviano, a brilliant but impulsive general, argued the Venetians should cross the Adda and take the French by surprise before they were joined by the bulk of the army, which was marching east under Louis XII’s command. But d’Alviano was overruled by the more cautious Pitigliano, the commanding officer, who reminded his deputy that they were under clear orders from the Senate not to provoke the French into a pitched battle at the outset. On May 14 the French advance guard crossed the Adda again, and this time d’Alviano suddenly found himself face-to-face with the enemy. Judging that he had no choice but to engage, he deployed his troops on a hill above the vineyards around the village of Agnadello and sent Pitigliano an urgent request for reinforcements. Under pouring rain, d’Alviano held back the French for several hours, but the Venetian reinforcements never came and eventually Louis XII arrived on the scene with the main army. Faced with an overwhelming force, the Venetians were quickly surrounded. Although most of the cavalry managed to escape the stranglehold, the infantry was massacred in a gruesome bloodbath. In one day, more than four thousand Venetian soldiers were killed. D’Alviano, badly wounded, was captured and taken to France as a hostage.

At ten p.m. the following day, a cluster of senators was still gathered around maps of northern Italy when a messenger arrived at the Doge’s Palace bearing the “funestissima notizia,” the most grievous news, of Agnadello. The magnitude of the disaster had some senators literally “in tears.” The initial attempt to keep the news a secret proved hopeless. Within minutes it spread through the city. During the night throngs of frightened Venetians gathered in front of the Doge’s Palace clamoring for more information and inveighing against Pitigliano and d’Alviano.

Despite the late hour, the full Senate scrambled to come up with a defensive strategy. There was no point in trying to defend Venice’s mainland possessions in the face of such a powerful coalition. A dispatch was sent out to Pitigliano ordering him to retreat all the way back to the shores of the lagoon. Meanwhile, the Council of Ten was invested with extraordinary powers to prepare the defense of the city. The Venetians had entered the war with a self-confidence that bordered on hubris; after Agnadello, the very survival of the Republic was suddenly in jeopardy.

The rapid succession of events that took place over the following days and weeks only made the threat clearer. One by one the cities of the Venetian mainland were taken by the allies, often with little or no fighting. The French took Brescia, Bergamo, Crema and Cremona in the west. The Austrians swept down from the north and gained control of Verona, Vicenza and Padua.

In only a month Venice lost all the mainland dominions it had conquered during the previous century. The only question remaining was whether Venice itself would survive or, to paraphrase Maximilian, would be stamped out for good.

The Venetians hunkered down in the lagoon, as they had always done in the face of grave danger. Over at San Paternian, Aldus scrambled to print one last book, Horace’s Odes; then he sent everyone home and closed down the print shop. He left Venice and headed south to his small land holdings in the Romagna.

In spite of the Pope’s bull of excommunication, the authorities did not cancel the celebration of the Corpus Domini (Corpus Christi), one of the Church’s holiest occasions, judging it was important, at this critical time, to seek God’s mercy and pray for survival. But Venice did not put its hopes in prayers alone. The government set up a commission to requisition and stock up food and grains. Makeshift mills were set up on barges moored along the Grand Canal. Patrol boats were sent out into the lagoon to prevent spies and enemy intruders from reaching the city.

As Venice made preparations to endure a prolonged siege, its diplomacy was busy trying to extricate the Republic from its dismal predicament. The most immediate objective was to lure Pope Julius II away from the League. Venice offered to return several cities to the Papal States while suggesting that Julius had done himself no favor by allying himself with foreign powers in Italy. At the same time emissaries were sent off to appease Emperor Maximilian with an offer to hand back territory in eastern Friuli. The beleaguered Republic even began to make overtures to its traditional enemy, the Ottoman Empire, pressing the point that if the League of Cambrai was allowed to crush Venice, it would not be long before it declared war against Constantinople.

Meanwhile, the Council of Ten made secret preparations to recapture key cities on the mainland. Venice, which had long ceased to be an exclusively maritime power, could no longer survive as a viable state without its territories in northern Italy. Padua was the gateway to those territories, and if Venice was to live, it would have to recapture that city first. Secret informants revealed the weaknesses of the Austrian defenses in Padua. A small shallow-water fleet was quickly assembled, and on July 16 the boats sailed across the lagoon and up the Brenta Canal carrying heavily armed soldiers and horses. At dawn the next day three men camouflaged as farmers drove their grain-laden carts up to the southern gate of the city. The Austrian guards lowered the drawbridge and the first two carts entered the city while the third stopped halfway through the gate. Whereupon a well-armed band of Venetian horsemen burst onto the scene, charged across the drawbridge and took the city after a short, bloody battle with the Austrian garrison. Andrea Gritti took command of the city while Venetian rule was reimposed on the small towns and villages of the Paduan countryside.

The recapture of Padua was a turning point in the war and a huge morale booster for the Venetians. But the Austrians were not about to give up such an important city. In less than a fortnight Emperor Maximilian assembled an army of forty thousand men and headed south to retake it. French and Spanish contingents soon joined, as well as smaller foreign forces. But food shortages and general disorganization slowed the allies’ progress, and the Venetians had time to prepare for the siege by mobilizing troops and building up defenses. Old Doge Loredan himself said he would gladly go off to defend Padua if he thought he could be useful. He sent his sons instead, at the head of a two-hundred-strong contingent of volunteer noblemen, each with his own well-armed retinue.

The siege began in mid-September. For two weeks the allies’ heavy artillery pounded the city walls, opening wide breaches. But each assault was turned back and by the end of the month, facing mounting casualties and with no sign of capitulation, Emperor Maximilian lifted the siege and took the bulk of his army back home, leaving only a small contingent to defend the other cities still under Austrian control. The Venetians crushed the Austrian garrison at Vicenza while other towns in the Veneto—Bassano, Feltre, Belluno, Este, Montagnana, Monselice—declared themselves for Venice.

The Republic had gained a temporary advantage but it still faced a coalition of enemies with vastly superior forces; it could not hope to be victorious if the League remained in place. Seizing the favorable moment, Doge Loredan sent to Rome a delegation to make peace with the Pope. Julius II, still furious that Venice had managed to recapture Padua and most of the Veneto, snubbed the Venetian emissaries. But the mercurial old pontiff now understood that by encouraging the major European powers to invade northern Italy in order to teach Venice a lesson, he had created a bigger problem than the one he had set out to resolve. By the end of 1509 he begrudgingly admitted to the Venetians his displeasure “at seeing your state in ruins while the number of barbarians [in Italy] continues to grow.”

Still, Julius II was not about to make peace without extracting humiliating concessions from Venice. He demanded substantial compensation for military expenses and the abolition of Venetian tariffs on his subjects in the region of Romagna. Venice was also to relinquish the traditional right to appoint bishops and clergy in its territory. The Senate felt it had no choice but to accept these conditions—to a point. Even as it instructed its emissaries to sign on, the government secretly approved a resolution declaring the agreement null on the grounds that it had been forced upon Venice. It did, however, agree to a public act of contrition to pacify the Pope and obtain an annulment of the bull of excommunication. On February 24 the Venetian envoys, clad in scarlet robes, walked up in solemn procession to the papal throne placed for the occasion in front of the main portal of Saint Peter’s. They knelt down and kissed the Pope’s feet and respectfully made their request. The Pope kept them on their knees for nearly an hour as a lengthy list of grievances was read out to them. After twelve cardinals meted out a symbolic scourge, the Venetians were at last granted a papal absolution, and again they kissed his feet in gratitude.

The worst was over. Julius II abandoned the League, and Spain soon followed. Although the war against France and Austria continued, life in Venice returned to relative normality. So much so that the Carnival of 1510 would long be remembered for the explosion of gayness and revelry.

FIELDS AND ORCHARDS

The print shop at San Paternian reopened in 1512. After his three-year-long sojourn in Romagna, Aldus felt regenerated and full of new projects. The first book off the presses, symbolic of a new beginning, was a revised edition of Lascaris’s Greek grammar, by now the house staple. Then he turned his attention to a long-delayed project: an edition of the odes of Pindar.

He assigned the project to Andrea Navagero, a distant cousin of Ramusio’s and a rising star in Aldus’s circle. Navagero was only two years older than Ramusio but was already an experienced editor and often acted as an older brother to him around the print shop. He had a natural gift for Greek verse, and in a house dedicated to Greek letters he had thrived quite naturally. He was also warm and gregarious: everyone loved Navagero, a bighearted poet with a passion for Pindar. Aldus thought him one of the finest Hellenists of the new generation: “You have a sharp mind and a sure judgment,” he told him. “And so much talent, brilliance, inventiveness, both in prose and poetry, that you are truly up there with the great authors of antiquity—you and Pietro Bembo, that other glorious erudite of our time.”

And what of Bembo? After his self-imposed exile to Urbino, where he had continued to work on his seminal book on the foundations of a modern Italian language, he had landed a plum job in Rome as assistant to the new Medici pope, Leo X, a friend to writers and artists. Bembo still kept his distance from his native city but remained in touch with Aldus’s world. Ramusio in particular kept him abreast of the publishing activity; he also ran errands for him and sent him the books he requested. But even as their friendship grew, Ramusio maintained a certain deference toward Bembo, who was fifteen years his senior and belonged to an old and respected patrician family.

Ramusio, meanwhile, was finding time outside his day job to help Aldus out as an all-around “pinch editor.” The publication of the letters of Quintilianus, a classical stylist who was much admired by humanists, is a good example of his role in the publishing house. Aldus originally assigned the project to Navagero, who was forced to interrupt the work to join Venetian forces fighting the Austrians in the north under the command of Bartolomeo d’Alviano, the commander who had been taken prisoner at Agnadello and had later been released by the French. The printers, always on a tight schedule, were soon clamoring to have the final draft. So Aldus called in Ramusio to take over the job.

Aldus, whose references were always drawn from antiquity, liked to compare Ramusio to Achates, the devoted friend that Aeneas (in this case Navagero) could always count on. Old and overworked, Aldus himself increasingly depended on Ramusio. “You always come to my aid in my difficult hours,” he told his young friend after he had completed the Quintilianus. “If there is one person to whom I should dedicate all the books I print it is you, my dearest Ramusio”—touching words that sound like a loving farewell.

On a cold winter morning in 1515 a large crowd gathered at the Church of San Paternian to mourn the passing of the great editor.

The coffin lay on a riser inside the old Romanesque church, surrounded by neat little book towers made with Aldus’s editions of his favorite Greek and Latin authors: a symbolic tribute to his success in reviving and spreading the great literature of the past.

The funeral brought together the community that had flowered around the Aldine Press in twenty years of activity. There were scholars and common readers as well as editors, printers, engravers, binders, suppliers and business associates. Raphael Regius, who held the chair for humanities at the prestigious Scuola di San Marco, pronounced the oration.

Ramusio, a mandatory of Aldus’s will, had taken time off from work to help out with funeral arrangements and attend to the last wishes of the deceased.