George of Trebizond

Abstract

George of Trebizond (born in Crete, very probably in Candia [modern Heraklion], 4/5 April 1396; died, Rome, after 28 November 1473) was one of the most significant figures of the Renaissance. He emigrated to Venice in 1416 and established himself with remarkable rapidity as a teacher of Latin and rhetoric in Venice and the Veneto. In the late 1430s he entered the papal court, then resident in Florence. In 1444, after the papacy had returned to Rome, he gained the office of papal secretary and spent the rest of his life, apart from some notable absences, in the Eternal City. Already by 1434 he had published what became one of the classic Neo-Latin texts of the Renaissance, the Rhetoricorum Libri V, to which in Florence in the late 1430s he added the Isagoge Dialectica, which in turn became a best seller to the mid-16th century. Once arrived in Rome, however, George embarked on a new career as a translator from the Greek, becoming in the end one of the greatest of Renaissance translators. Between 1442 and 1459, he translated most of the Aristotelian corpus, Plato’s Laws and Parmenides, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Demosthenes’ Oration on the Crown, and the Church Fathers Basil the Great, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebiusof Caesarea, Gregory Nyssenus, and John Chrysostom. Then, in the 1450s and 1460s, he got involved in the Renaissance Plato-Aristotle controversy, writing the first major Latin work in the controversy, the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis, which is a passionate defense of Aristotle and condemnation of Plato and the spread of Platonism in the Latin West. Underlying George’s attack on Plato was an apocalyptic vision that demonstrably motivated him from the 1430s to the 1460s, when he went to Constantinople to convert Mehmed the Conqueror to Christianity in order to save the world from the onslaught of Gog and Magog. Upon his return to Rome in 1466, his extravagant praise of Mehmed resulted in his spending four months in jail under suspicion of treason. In August 1469, his great opponent, Cardinal Bessarion (b. 1403–d. 1472), came out with the In Calumniatorem Platonis, which successfully set the parameters of the Plato-Aristotle controversy for the rest of the Renaissance. George outlived Bessarion and remained famous throughout the Renaissance, but because the unique 1523 printing of his Comparatio was so miserably done (based on an enormously flawed manuscript to which the editor added a new set of errors), in the end he lost the one great intellectual-theological battle of his life.