Greek Histories Translated and Compiled for Juan Fernández de Heredia, Master of Rhodes, 1377-1396

Abstract

THE cosmopolitan Aragonese Hospitaller, Juan Fernandez de Heredia, who closed a long and extremely active military and diplomatic career as Master of the Knights of St John of Rhodes, was responsible for the first mediaeval translations from the Greek into a Western tongue of Plutarch's Lives and of other Greek texts until then unknown in the West. As a lifelong friend of Pedro IV of Aragon, Heredia was at home in the Aragonese court and probably imbibed something of Pedro's remarkably developed awareness of the importance of the past and the need to record it. That Pedro's son, Juan I, was perhaps the earliest of the mediaeval princes to be interested in Greek literature was largely due to Heredia, his mentor. Heredia spent much of his life at Avignon, the intellectual capital of his age, where he enjoyed the company of popes, bishops, and scholars, and came into contact with men and ideas from every part of Christendom and beyond. Avignon was important as an early center of humanism; it was there, for example, that in 1373 a convert from the Greek to the Roman church, Simon Atumanus, archbishop of Thebes, completed his translation from the Greek of Plutarch's De cohibenda ira. From Heredia's library at Avignon, so extensive that Coluccio Salutati flatteringly declared that it contained any book one might require, he sent to the Aragonese court a series of manuscripts which profoundly influenced the development of Catalan humanism, while it was through Heredia's Aragonese version that Plutarch's Lives first reached Italy.' Heredia was closely connected with Pedro IV from about 1345, and probably shared his historical enthusiasms from around that time; he himself was having books compiled at least from 1362 onwards2 and by 1377 already possessed a collection of historical works.' Yet, while Catalunya-Aragon had maintained