Manuel Chrysoloras

Abstract

Manuel Chrysoloras (b. c. 1350–d. 1415) was a Byzantine diplomat and influential teacher of early Italian humanists. Leonardo Bruni claimed that the study of Greek had been dead in Italy for seven hundred years until Chrysoloras revived it singlehandedly. While certainly exaggerated, such claims underscore the enthusiasm with which Chrysoloras was embraced by his pupils. A friend of the emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos, he left Constantinople to take up a professorship in Florence (1397 to 1400) at the behest of Coluccio Salutati. It was his diplomatic missions, however, that first brought Chrysoloras to Italy (Venice in the 1390s): he sought to win western military support for Byzantium against the rising Ottoman tide. He visited Venice, Padua, Genoa, Paris, London, Salisbury, Barcelona, and Bologna (1406–1411). Subsequently he settled in Rome (1411–1413) seeking to persuade the pope to convene a church council; he died at (or on the way to) the Council of Constance on 15 April 1415. Ultimately he converted to Catholicism. His pupils included Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, Guarino da Verona, Carlo Marsuppini, Niccolò Niccoli, Palla Strozzi, and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder. His influence lies chiefly in the enthusiasm for Greek scholarship which he instilled in his prominent pupils. His literary output, however, was rather small. He left behind a Comparison of the Old and New Rome in which he compared Constantinople and Rome. He wrote a textbook on Greek grammar, his Erotemata (Questions), which circulated widely and was the first Greek grammar to be printed (c. 1471). It was later used by Erasmus and Reuchlin; Guarino translated it into Latin. Chrysoloras was, unquestionably, a key figure in bringing Greek scholarship to Italy.