Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (part 5)

Continuing on from my previous posts on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". This time, I would like to focus on the gaggle of Italians to the far right of the procession...


The Italians

Ahead of the old king’s retinue, the crowd of onlookers is made up of Medici Bank managers including Diotisalvi Neroni, Luca Pitti, Bernardo Giugni, Roberto Martelli, Francesco Sassetti and Agnaldo Tani. Although these men had already been key lieutenants of Cosimo de Medici over the years, several would turn on his son Piero once the family patriarch was dead. In 1466, Neroni and Pitti plotted a coup with Angelo Acciajuoli (of the famous Florentine-Athenian family) against Piero. It failed, and the plotters were forced into exile. 

Diotisalvi Neroni

Shorn of capable hands, the fortunes of the Medici bank began to turn downward. Francesco Sassetti became more influential and appears to have taken less care in monitoring the branch managers of the bank. In particular, the Bruge branch manager, Tommaso Portinari, was an accident waiting to happen. 

Tommaso Portarini

Cosimo had never trusted him and prevented his rise above assistant manager but when his influence was removed, Sassetti promoted Portinari to general manager and later removed the ban on lending to secular offices – a sequence of events which led to the reckless lending of vast sums to the Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Too bold, Charles overplayed his hand and died in the snow outside Nancy in 1477, sending a huge bad debt onto the Medici account books that forced the Bruge branch to be dissolved and began a slow collapse of the Medici bank under Lorenzo’s profligate stewardship.

Down in the bottom corner of this gaggle of Italian bankers is Cyriaco of Ancona, known as the father of archaeology. 

The young scion of an Ancona trading family, Cyriaco became fascinated by the ruins of antiquity he saw as he toured the Eastern Mediterranean exporting mastic gum from Chios. He was blessed with the most fascinating of lives - He knew absolutely everybody: He went hunting with King James of Cyprus, attended the Council of Florence where he met Sigismund Malatesta, Plethon, Emperor John, Cosimo de'Medici, Filelfo, and just about everyone else. Having consulted for the Turks during the 1422 siege of Constantinople had gained a pass from Sultan Murad to travel anywhere in his dominions "without vexation, taxation or any other injury." He corresponded with Emperor John VIII, stayed with Constantine Palaiologos in Mystra and went to the races with him there. He discussed history and philosophy with Plethon and the Union of the Churches and crusading with Pope Eugenius IV. When the Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund, visited Rome he took Cyriaco as his tour guide among the ruins. In Florence, Brunelleschi explained to him his dome as it began to take shape and define the city skyline. The Marquis of d'Este invited him to Ferrara to see his newly-acquired "Entombment of Christ" by Rogier van der Weyden. He travelled with Memnon Tocco, bastard son of the Duke of Kephalonia, all over Anatolia and Thrace to spy on the Turk defences, and then all over the Morea to seek out antiquities. He sketched the column of Justinian in Constantinople – perhaps the last surviving record of that great marvel before it was toppled by the conquerors. He received Venetian citizenship in 1454 aged 62 – which is about the last record of his incredible life. He died peacefully in Cremona, probably in 1455.

Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (Part 4)

Continuing on from my previous posts on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". This time, I would like to focus on the Renaissance scholars and humanists included in the entourage behind the Medicis...


The Greeks
In the left-hand crowd of Gozzoli’s masterpiece we find the true wise men of the painting. Most of the recognisable figures are members of the Byzantine delegation from the council of Florence: Bessarion, Gaza, Isidore of Kiev, Argyropoulos and Plethon and mingled with them are some Italians who drank in their teachings: the Pulci brothers, Marcilio Ficino and Enea Piccolomini (Pope Pius). 

Ficino, who was commissioned by Cosimo to make the first translation of Plato from Greek into Latin, stands to the right of Plethon, the man whose lectures at Florence mark the return of Plato into the western philosophical consciousness. 

Just above Pleton’s magnificently exotic hat is the bearded face of Ioannis Argyropoulos, who returned to Italy after the Fall of Constantinople to teach Platonic philosophy at the university of Florence (Ficino was his pupil).

At the far end of Plethon’s row is the low bearded face of Theodoros Gaza. He had moved to Italy earlier, following his native Thessaloniki’s fall and was took part in the council of Florence before making a career in Rome. Like many exiles of Byzantium, in 1459 he was part of Bessarion’s retinue.

Bessarion himself is the other bookend to this eminent row and he has a rather splendid (and I think significant) hat. It appears to be a skiadion, a tall, melon-shaped hat of a type which John VIII had worn in Italy and which several artists copied into their work. Bessarion’s hat is decorated with a thistle pattern. 

The Italian word for thistle is ‘cardo’. The same word in Latin means ‘hinge’ and is the root word of Cardinal. In 1459, Bessarion – who had come to Italy in 1439 as a Byzantine monk among the Greek delegation - was probably the most significant Cardinal of the Latin church and the real impetus behind Mantua’s call for crusade for Constantinople. I think Gozzoli has chosen the hat and the thistle symbol to mark out Bessarion’s duality as the Greek-Cardinal.

Interestingly there is a similar hat with the thistle emblem further back in the crowd. If there is a code to be drawn from the ‘red hats for Italians, exotic for foreigners’ and the ‘cardo for Cardinal’, then this figure must be a non-Italian humanist cardinal, probably linked in someway to the Council of Florence. The figure who would fit that bill would be Nicholas of Cusa.

Pope Pius was at the Council of Florence as Cardinal Piccolomini, although he did not play a prominent role. When Callixtus died in 1458, Bessarion was favourite to become Pope but his Byzantine heritage appears to have weighed heavily against him (not for the last time) and Piccolomini took the triple tiara. It was the second time Bessarion was frustrated in a conclave and there would be two more disappointments to come but in Pope Pius, Bessarion at least had an ally for his campaign to reclaim Constantinople which began with the Mantua council and ended, sadly with Pius’s death at Ancona as he waited for the crusading fleet to assemble.


When the delegation returned from Florence to Constantinople, a change of heart came over many of the Greeks who had agreed to the church union. Some, such as Gennadios, became violently opposed to the measure. The new patriarch, Metrophanes, found the mob had dubbed him “mother-killer” for signing the union. Still, Florence did engender a crusade of sorts. Bessarion had read the act from the Cathedral pulpit in Greek and Cardinal Cessarini read it in Latin. But six years later Cessarini was dead in the swamps outside Varna and the crusade collapsed in disastrous defeat without achieving any sort of victory against the Turks. The Union, always unpopular, then looked utterly pointless and the Greeks quietly pretended they had never signed it. So when their situation grew even bleaker and Constantine once again appealed for help, the Latin prelates wanted something more concrete than a shaky signature to seal the bargain. 

A cardinal was dispatched to ordain Hagia Sophia into the Latin church. The man given the task, Isidore, had come to the Council of Florence as a Greek monk but, just like Bessarion, remained there to become a Latin cardinal. He seems to have been given all the tough assignments – firstly dispatched to Moscow to persuade the Rus to accept the union. They declined and imprisoned him for two years before he escaped to Lithuania and back to Rome. Then a decade later he was given the task of consecrating Hagia Sophia. He survived the siege, having the presence of mind to switch his Cardinal’s robes with a corpse as the city fell and later escaped slavery to return to once again to Rome.

Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (parts 3)

Continuing on from my previous posts on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". Last time I rejected a common theory that the 'Young King' in the painting is Lorenzo the Magnificent. Instead I made the case for all three kings being specific members of the Byzantine court, since at its core, the painting is a celebration of Cosimo Medici's triumphant diversion of the Ecumenical Council of 1439 to Florence. This time, I would like to focus on the members of the Medici family (including Lorenzo) who are to be found elsewhere in the picture...


The Medici Mosaic
At either end on the three groupings of magi entourage, the procession continues across the landscape, winding to and from the hills. One might note that the castle standing at the highest point of the painting, standing in for Jerusalem from which the wise men have come, bears a strong resemblance to the Medici family seat at Cafaggiolo, which Cosimo had redesigned by Michaelozzo in 1452.

On the west wall at the top of the painting, a group of figures is on the point of departing the picture and entering the chapel where the Adoration of the Child can be found. Most people focus on the camels and the larger group of faces closer to the old king, but close study of that vanguard group reveals something strange. There are five women in the group. The only women to be found in the entire work. 

As with the mis-attribution of Lorenzo and Giuliano into the Byzantine delegation, it is common to see people claim that Piero’s three daughters can be seen in the picture (sometimes as pages to Balthazar, sometimes as pages to Caspar) but I don’t believe that is the case. 

The pages have a uniform, almost clone-like look – they seem like idealised representatives rather than portraits and having gone to such trouble to capture the individual facial details of the other Medici, why include Bianca, Nannina and Maria as uniform non-entities and why ignore the other Medici women – for example Piero’s wife and mother? It’s reasonable to expect to find them in the painting but people miss the top corner and the women leading the entire cavalcade. The women are distinguished from one another by their headgear. Three are grouped together and appear to be young - one wears no head-covering so is presumably unmarried, the other has a red cap on her head and a shawl covering a long braid. We might note that Bianca Medici married in 1459, while Nannina was twelve years old at the time and Maria fifteen. One woman leads the group and I would speculate that this could be Countessa Bardi, the wife of Cosimo. A fifth women behind the gaggle of three looks back at the procession and may be Piero’s wife, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. It’s idle speculation but I find the case for this group of identifiable females as more likely Medici matriarchs than cross-dressing pages.

 

The Medici males are far more easily spotted heading the large group of people following the last of the magi. Giovanni de Medici, eldest son of Cosimo, leads the entourage but perhaps at the behest of his younger brother Piero - who was surprising Gozzoli’s endeavours - Giovanni’s position is on foot and seems almost that of a groom, leading the bridle of his master’s horse. And who is on that horse but Piero. Are we looking at a family joke? 

Beside Piero’s magnificent white horse is Cosimo on a donkey -a rather contrived symbol of his humility. The donkey’s bridle is absolutely festooned with the golden balls of the Medici coat of arms. There is no definitive explanation for the balls on the Medici coat of arms but bezants – Byzantine coins - is one theory, copied from the guild of moneychangers. Cosimo was notorious for having so many fingers in so many pies that one contemporary complained that in San Marco ‘he had even emblazoned the monk’s privies with his balls!’ 

Half obscured between Cosimo and Piero rides Cosimo’s bastard son Carlo de Medici. Carlo was the son of a slave girl (Circassian, the legends say). He was forced into the priesthood and had a hobby of collecting medals. Here we might remark on Carlo’s headgear, which is unremarkable except that it is blue and of a different style to the ubiquitous red cap worn by most of the men in the painting. As we shall see, progressing along the entourage, the Greek humanists are easily spotted by their range of hats in varying styles and colours. There seems to be a pattern where foreigners are marked as exotic via their headgear. Perhaps it is reading too much into a detail, but is it coincidental that Piero’s illegitimate half-brother, born of a foreign slave, should also lack the uniform red cap of the Italian gentry around him? 

The most exotic figure of all is standing in the foreground before Cosimo’s horse. His hose are red and white particolour and his tunic is green (again the Medici tricolours), so we might read him as a servant of that hose, but his face is a detailed study of West African features. Trade with that part of the world was underway already at that time. Henry the Navigator had sent his Portuguese explorers down the African coast and by the 1450s Madeira was a sugar growing colony and cruzeiro coins were being minted using gold brought back from trading with the Mali empire. The age of exploration was well underway. The presence of the African member of the Medici household in the painting is probably a symbol of the far reach of their trading empire. 

To the left of the African, two horsemen are set apart from the cavalcade. These are recognisably Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini and Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan – two important guests of Florence during that April of 1459. Malatesta, known as the Wolf of Rimini, was among the best military strategists of his day. His services as a condottiero had been used by the Medici on several occasions during the turbulent Lombardy wars. In 1459 he was at his peak and about to experience a very bad decade – excommunication in 1460, possibly an attempt to sell Italy out to the Turks in 1461, followed by an ignominious campaign for Venice in Greece against Mehmed in 1464 with nothing to show but the recovered bones of Gemistus Plethon, an aborted plot to murder the Pope and then death in 1468).

The youthful Galeazzo Maria Sforza to his left faired a little better, inheriting the duchy of Milan when his brilliant father died in 1466. He was rather less brilliant and incredibly cruel. His short reign of terror over the nobles of Milan reads like Geoffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones and ended in the much the same manner. Murdered on Saint Stephen’s day in a church in 1476, it is thought that successful assassination was the model for the Pazzi conspiracy which killed Giuliano Medici but not Lorenzo two years later. 

The young brothers Giuliano (6yrs) and Lorenzo (10yrs) hover over Sforza’s left shoulder. Close by is their cousin, Cosimino (5yrs) – Giovanni’s only son. A sickly child, Cosimino was dead by year’s end. The younger generation of Medici are accompanied by their tutor, Gentile Becchi and at their backs is the great host of humanists – some Italian but most Byzantines – who enjoyed in one way or another the patronage of the Medici. We might say these are a multitude of wise men from the east who brought to Italy – and Florence in particular – gifts of learning. The next post will explore these faces.

Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (Part 2)

Continuing on from my previous post on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". We can begin to examine the figures depicted in the painting and see how they relate to 1439's visit by the Byzantine court to Medici Florence...

The 3 Byzantine Kings 

Each Magi is accompanied by a retinue, each with a dominant colour in their garments and harnesses: white for Caspar, green for Balthazar, red for Melchior. The three retinues also adhere to chivalric norms. Each with a squad of twelve made up of three pages on horseback making up the vanguard to announce their lord, two knights carrying a sword (the symbol of authority) and the gift of their lord and finally lightly armed pages on foot who escort the lord directly. The choice of the three colours is no accident as they were the Medici family colours. 

Representing Melchior is the Greek Patriarch, Joseph II, who journeyed with the Emperor from Constantinople in 1439 (and indeed entered Florence ahead of him). Joseph aged 79 at the time of the Council, died on the 10th June shortly before the Union was signed and was buried in Florence at Santa Maria Novella. 

Representing Balthazar is the Emperor John VIII. Much has been made of his toufa-style headdress, which is almost certainly a flight of Gozzoli fancy, but John VIII did make an impression on Florentine society with his strange and elaborate hats. The feathers in the painting’s headdress are subtly red white and green, so we can say Balthazar has been crowned in Medici colours. 

The identity of the first two magi is largely agreed upon. The identity of the young king is not. Very often it is stated that this is Lorenzo di Medici, but as I said earlier, this would make little sense in 1459. Not only does a Florentine not fit with the allegory of wise men coming from the east which the first two kings clearly set out, but as mentioned before, Lorenzo was not even close to being the family’s heir apparent. Lastly, one must also consider the implications of a Medici elevated to the role of a king in a painting in the Republic of Florence. Whatever the reality of the power the Medici drew from their wealth and connections, they had no claim to kingship. 

There is a clear candidate for the Caspar king. When John VIII travelled west from Constantinople he left his brother Constantine as regent. He chose Constantine because he was the dependable brother (and would prove a worthy successor when John died in 1448). John brought with him his brother Demetrios. Demetrios was the infant terrible of the Palaiologos family. He seems to have tried to defect to the Turks when he was sixteen and it is implied in letters that his presence on the trip to Italy stemmed from fears he would use the Emperor’s absence to try and cause trouble. When the council moved to Florence, Demetrios lingered in Venice for three weeks before answering his brother’s summons (and so the order of entry of the kings nicely mirrors the historical arrival to Florence). Young, handsome and charming, Demetrios made an impression on Florentine society. 

Demetrios was an anti-unionist and left the council four days after the Patriarch’s death (along with Gennadios and Plethon) without permission of the Emperor, causing a rift which led later to an uprising (not for the last time, Demetrios called in the Turks for support against a brother). Knowing he could be trouble, Constantine made Demetrios despot of half the Morea when he took the throne in 1449. That removed him from Constantinople and meant he survived the fall in 1453. As of 1459, Demetrios might have been considered to hold the most legitimate claim to being Byzantine Emperor – and there must have been some hope that Mantua would spark a crusade that would restore the porphyry throne. 

In tackling the argument for Demetrios not Lorenzo, we should also address a fourth rider in the entourage. Leading the old king is a young man on a horse with a hunting leopard perched at his side. He is not dressed as a page and although not one of the magi, is clearly a figure of importance. His colouring and looks are very similar to the young king’s. For this reason, many interpretations say this is Giuliano Medici, younger brother of Lorenzo. But if we reject Lorenzo as the young king, this cannot be the case. 

Once again, the Byzantine delegation has a suitable candidate for this figure. A third Palaiologos brother was present at Florence. Although not originally part of the delegation, Thomas Palaiologos was dispatched by Constantine with a message for John while he was still in Florence (possibly with news that both John and Demetrios’s wives were fatally ill back home with plague). If the young king is Demetrios, then it may well be Thomas Palaiologos sitting with his hunting cat. In 1459 Thomas was in control of the other half of the Morea and his bickering with Demetrios would be the excuse Sultan Mehmed used to invade the following summer. Demetrios complied with the Sultan, handed his daughter into the harem and lived out his life on a Turkish pension. Thomas fled west and lived out his days as Pius’s guest in Rome.

There seems a very firm link between the four key figures of the magi procession and the three imperial Palaiologoi brothers and Patriarch who headed the procession to Florence of 1439. It is the only combination that holds the allegorical meaning of the work together. The idea that Lorenzo and Giuliano (but not their cousin Cosimino) would be mixed in as 'magi' with two random Greeks makes very little sense indeed. Instead we will find the male Medici gathered together to one side of the procession and that is the subject of the next post...

Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (Part 1)

Last Christmas I posted about Benozzo Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi in Florence’s the Medici Chapel and the historical figures in the painting which reveal themselves one by one, almost like a Renaissance advent calendar. This year I want to return to that thought in a little more detail (in fact it will take several long posts).

The fresco adorns the walls of the Medici-Riccardi chapel, Cosimo de' Medici chose Benozzo Gozzoli to decorate the chapel and his younger son, Piero, was tasked with supervising the project.

When looking at the figures and interpreting the painting’s message it’s very easy to allow hindsight to cloud the modern eye. The work was completed through the spring and summer of 1459, so it is important to understand the Medici family context of this moment in time. 

Firstly, as mentioned, Piero (whom history would later dub ‘the Gouty’) was the younger son of Cosimo. His older brother, Giovanni, was Cosimo’s heir. If life had proceeded as expected from this moment, Giovanni would have managed the Medici banking empire and then passed it on to his young son Cosimino. Piero’s elder son, Lorenzo, may well have still made a name for himself but perhaps been less magnificent. Fate had other plans. Cosimino died later that year and Giovanni in 1463. So by the time Cosimo died in 1464, the Medici line of succession diverted onto Piero and Lorenzo’s branc h but only at this point, four years after the paint had dried on these walls. Commentary on the painting often places Lorenzo (and his brother Giuliano) into the centre of the piece but that would have made no sense at all at the time it was commissioned. 

On the surface, the picture tells the biblical story of the 3 wise men (or 3 kings) coming to view the new-born Christ child (the Adoration of the Child is depicted in the adjoining chancel). The procession extends across three walls, with a different king on each wall: first comes the old king, Melchior, and his retinue on the west wall. The middle king, Balthazar, is on the south wall and the young king, Caspar, comes last on the east wall. But as was common with art of the time, the biblical imagery is a vehicle for a contemporary message and the message here is the glorification of the Medici.

Perhaps the great international triumph of Cosimo’s life took place in 1439. An ecumenical council had been taking place in Ferrara between representatives of the Latin church and the Byzantine Emperor John VIII and representatives of the Greek church. With the Turks threatening to overrun the Byzantine empire once and for all, John had come to Italy to beg for help and would go so far as to end the Great Schism, unifying the divided church after almost 400 years. 

Like all the great ecumenical councils, it was marked by heated debate and dragged on. The Byzantine emperor had travelled with an entourage of 700 and by the summer of 1439, the Pope was struggling to pay for their keep. Smelling opportunity, Cosimo stepped in, underwriting the costs if the council shifted to Florence. On 15 February 1439 (the Sunday of carnevale) the Emperor made his entrance into Florence, with all the glamour that the ancient imperial title still imparted, however much his material wealth had waned. Cosimo had the money but his ‘rule’ of Florence was a grey-area of legitimacy by bringing the Emperor to town as his guest he was gaining incredible cudos. Again, context is important. Cosimo had fled Florence into exile only six years previously before a banking crisis (which he in-part promulgated) allowed his return the next year in 1434. It could be said that the Council of Florence was the moment Medici rule of the city was solidified (if not wholly legitimised). The Act of Union was signed in on 6th July, then officially proclaimed the union in the form of a bull, Laetentur Coeli which was read out in Greek by Bessarion and Latin by Cardinal cessarini from the pulpit of Florence Cathedral.

It is this triumph (in both senses of the word) which we see depicted in the Magi chapel. The procession in Gozzoli’s fresco commemorates the journey of the Byzantine delegation to Florence. When this is understood, the faces in the painting become much easier to interpret.

Of note also was Gozzoli’s link to the Council of Florence. In 1439 he was an apprentice to Fra Angelico, working on the painting of San Marco, which was where the Byzantine delegation was staying. Gozzoli had first hand experience of this event and the notable members of the delegation who he would later place into his masterpiece. 

Although twenty years had passed since the Council of Florence, it would still have hung like a phantom around Gozzoli in 1459 as he etched the faces onto the wall. Another council was taking place that year up the road at Mantua. Like the council of Ferrara-Florence, this one was also prompted by what might be termed ‘The Turk problem’. Signing the Act of Union had not spared Byzantium. Constantinople fell in 1453, sending a shockwave across Christendom. Pius II made reclaiming the Holy city the central tenet of his papacy and convened the Council at Mantua to try and get the princes of Europe to commit to a crusade.

Placed almost mid-way between Rome and Mantua, Florence would have seen a lot of dignitaries passing through it on their way to the council. We know for certain Sigismondo Malatesta met Pope Pius in Florence that April and both appear in the painting. Also there that April was Galeazzo Maria Sforza, heir to Milan, who wrote a letter about his two week stay and who appears in the painting alongside Malatesta.

The wings of the procession, to the right of the old king and left of the young, is a cavalcade of figures in contemporary renaissance dress and Gozzoli’s incredible skill here means the faces are identifiable portraits. Taking each wall in turn we can find a huge number of famous 15th century faces starting out from this incredible piece of art.

Black Magic

In ancient Persia the Zoroastrian priests’ knowledge included philosophy, religion, astronomy, mathematics, and they referred to it simply as maghavan - magic.

The magician, through his scholarship and practices, knows both the forces and energies acting within the universe, but can also control them. Believing in the dogma of universal sympathy—a network of forces that constantly unifies the whole cosmic reality—the magician is fully conscious that everything is affected by everything, so he is not content simply to study these links and energies, but also wants to dominate and control them. He is also able to get in touch with the dimension of the divine in order to learn its secrets and therefore to live in harmony with it.

Porphyry of Tyre (whose book Philosophy from Oracles and Against the Christians was banned by Constantine the Great) fits perfectly into this concept and argues that the biblical Magi come from ancient Persia and are 'wise about the divine'. The access to such knowledge and the practices related to it for the management and the control of the cosmic forces, as in all priestly communities, is gradual and follows a strict timing of maturation and exercise.

Thus, the Magi are divided into three orders: the first are those who show a perfect self-control and have power on the cosmic forces, as well as exercise certain practices that cannot be disclosed to other members of the caste; the second order consists of those magicians who have less knowledge and a less powerful force of mind; the third are those who are still at an early stage.

According to Porphyry the more experienced and elderly among the Magi have the ability to get in touch with the gods thanks to their knowledge of the divine names, incomprehensible to the human ear, but indispensable for the correct invocation of the god. These names and these prayers have been disclosed by the gods directly to the Magi, who know how to invoke the deity seven times, as the wisest of them (that is Apollo) unveiled, and as the ancient magician Ostanes did.

Porphyry distinguishes six categories of gods, that can be classified into celestial, ethereal, aerial, terrestrial, marine and infernal. In De abstinentia after talking about the gods, he describes two kinds of lower spirits, i.e. the demons, the good ones and the bad ones.

On top of this hierarchy of infernal demons there are two gods: Serapis and Hecate who rule the evil demons, with whom Cerberus is also associated - the three-headed dog that symbolizes the evil demons and is threefold since the number three is the symbol of the bodily and terrestrial nature.

In 'Philosophia ex oraculis' Serapis is described with a tunic, long hair and a bushy beard, all features that are intended to confer authority, majesty and wisdom to the divinity; on his head he wears a calathos, an object used as the unit of measure for grain emphasizing the purely earthly nature of the god; he holds a sceptre with his left arm while his right arm is near Cerberus: this gesture symbolizes the control of Serapis on the three-headed dog, the emblem of all the demons and evil spirits. Clearly Serapis has evolved from Pluto, lord of the underworld.

Porphyry also talks about Hecate. He says she is queen of the demons of underworld: the virgin goddess of many faces, cruel, with three bull’s heads, holding the three symbols of the elements of nature and earth, governed by her black dogs - the demons of underworld. Hecate holds a whip with which she dominates the infernal demons. Elsewhere, the goddess can be represented with a sword to which a snake is twisted, holding a key symbolizing the control on the doors of underworld and the access or exit from Hades.

The infernal triad ends with Cerberus, the evil demon par excellence, depicted with three heads, with the tail like a snake and a myriad of snakes rising from its back. Cerberus, as stated in Philosophia ex oraculis, is the symbol of the infernal demons located in the three elements, water, earth and air. The evil demons, represented by the three-headed dog, are often depicted as black dogs: they howl at the full moon terrifying men, but tremble in the presence and vision of Hecate.

It is the infernal gods and evil demons who practice black magic and are also its recipients and use the magician to effectuate the evocative ritual and their misdeeds. And because it is accomplished by the gods and demons from underworld, and at the same time it is aimed at them, this magic is called black: black in fact is the symbolic colour of the ground and of the dark matter and therefore of the spiritual entities related to it. Black must also be the objects used during the magical ritual, the vestments used by the sorcerer during the execution of the rite, and also the animals sacrificed on the altar, and even the blood dripping from the sacrificial victims is “(similar) to the black wine"

1462: The Road Not Taken

I shall be telling this with a sigh 

Somewhere ages and ages hence: 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— 

I took the one less travelled by, 

And that has made all the difference. 

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost (1916) 

          The fall of Constantinople in 1453 might mark the end of the Roman Empire, but the imperial ambitions of Sultan Mehmed II, its young Ottoman conqueror, were just beginning. Over the following eight years the last fragments of Byzantium were methodically swept up around the Aegean and Black Sea coast, culminating in the surrender of Trebizond in the summer of 1461. At that moment, Mehmed - who had begun styling himself Cesar of the Roman Empire (Qayser-i Rum) - had a choice to make: with Anatolia and mainland Greece conquered, where would his formidable armies focus their attention during the campaign season of 1462? Hindsight tells us the answer, but in this article, I would like to look at the potential road not taken - and why.



       Sultan Mehmed II was the quintessential Renaissance man. Quite aside from his military prowess, he wrote poetry, appreciated and sponsored European painters and spoke at least seven languages. Despite impeccable ghazi credentials as conqueror of Constantinople - 'the red apple' so long desired by warriors of Islam- he showed such an interest in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity that the Patriarch wrote a homily, The Confession of Faith, specifically for him and the Latin Pope began to entertain hopes of a miraculous conversion. This was wishful thinking; far from dreaming of pilgrimage to the Vatican, Mehmed once declared that St Peter's would make a fine cavalry stable.



         It was no idle threat. Italy must have seemed the obvious target for a Turkish invasion in that first summer following Byzantium's elimination. Having conquered the eastern capital, the old western empire surely enticed a man with the deep interest in history that Mehmed repeatedly displayed. There is no doubt that many on the Italian peninsula feared it. As early as 1459, Pope Pius II had convened a counsel at Mantua to call for a crusade, but when they arrived, the princes of Europe were keener to discuss the competing Angevin and Aragonese claims on the Kingdom of Naples. Later that year war broke out in southern Italy between those two factions and sucked in armies from France, Milan and Genoa together with many famous mercenary companies. From 1459 to 1465, the southern half of Italy was in total chaos.

King Ferdinand I "Ferrante" of Naples

           Exploiting division to make strategic territorial gains had always been the modus operandi of Ottoman conquest. The Byzantine civil war of 1352-1357 allowed the first Ottoman Sultan, Orhan, to snatch Gallipoli and establish an initial Turkish toehold on the European side of the Hellespont. With an almost equally short gulf now lying between Ottoman-held Greece and the heel of Italy, might Mehmed have seen an opportunity to repeat that history and begin his march up the peninsular towards Rome? There are several pieces of evidence to suggest this was being given serious consideration.

Italy in 1494

             In his memoirs, Florentine merchant-spy Benedetto Dei recounts that while he was in Constantinople in 1460, he was summoned to an audience with the Sultan who proceeded to grill him on the political situation in Italy. In Dei's mind, it was clear that the Grand Turk was considering Italy as a target and so he says he sought to deter it by his answers, to which Mehmed replied:


             "My Florentine, I have heard all you have said...and I believe it fully...but I answer you and say that Italy could no longer perform the great deeds it performed in the past, because in those days when it did wonders, the reason was the power of the Romans, who were then sole masters of Italy...but today you are twenty states and groups of powers in your country, and you are in disagreement among yourselves and bitter enemies...and I know many things which will all be of help to me in the plan I have made; and seeing that I am young and rich and favoured by fortune, I intend to surpass Caesar and Alexander and Xerxes by far."


             The following year, while the last Byzantine jewel of Trebizond was being winkled from its Pontic enclave, a Constantinople-bound ship was stopped by Venetian authorities in Crete. On board was Matteo de Pasti, a sculptor and medalist, who had been resident at the court of Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini. He had been sent ostensibly to work as a court portrait artist to Mehmed, but the Venetians found in his possession a detailed map of the Adriatic coast. Alarmed, they hauled him off to Venice and sent him back to Rimini with stern advise not to travel east again.

                        Commemorative medal of Sigismondo Malatesta made by Matteo De Pasti


       The idea that Malatesta would sell out his countrymen is not too hard to believe. Among the most notorious of the Italian petty tyrants, he had been excommunicated the previous year by Pope Pius and suffered several setbacks in the conflicts over the crown of Naples. Shortly before De Pasti's departure, Malatesta is supposed to have threatened to send for the Turks if King Ferrante of Naples hired the famous Albanian warlord Skanderbeg. Ferrante duly did just that.

       No invasion of Italy arrived in 1462 but Ottoman landings did take place almost two decades later in July 1480. By then the war for Naples had long since ended and the invaders faced a much tougher task against a secure King Ferrante. But if the conversations with Dei, the coastal map and the convenient chaos of Neapolitan civil war made 1462 the most opportune moment to launch the invasion, what caused the crucially long delay?

      The answer might lie on the misty banks of the Danube in the winter of 1461 and an unlikely Italian saviour in the form of Vlad Dracula.

        What today is southern Romania was in the medieval era a small principality called Wallachia, sandwiched between the powerful Kingdom of Hungary and Ottoman controlled Bulgaria. It’s ruler, Vlad, was no friend of the Hungarians who by 1461 had already attempted to depose him once, but he was a staunch Christian and perhaps inspired by the efforts of Pope Pius to galvanise a crusade, ceased paying the tribute tax (jizya) to the Sultan.

         Following two years of non-tax payments and probably as an afterthought, the Turks decided to remove Vlad from Wallachia’s throne. The plan was to lure him to the Danube fortress of Giurgiu to meet and escort a diplomat back to his capital (Thomas Katabolenos, one of many Byzantines to be doing very well for himself in post-fall Constantinople). Hamza, the Ottoman bey of Nicopolis, would lie in wait at the meeting point with his men, ready to arrest or kill Vlad. But the ambush was botched. Vlad killed Hamza, Katabolenos and their men and true to his sobriquet, impaled the lot of them. With characteristic dark humour, Vlad said he had reserved the tallest stake for Hamza on account of his high-office. Then, in revenge, Vlad Dracula set off on a devastating terror raid across the frozen Danube, burning towns and killing thousands. In a letter he sent to the Hungarian king in February 1462 Vlad wrote:

          We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers...Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace with him (Sultan Mehmed II).

          Whatever Mehmed’s plan for 1462 it had to be shelved in the face of such provocation. Italy could wait. A firm answer to Vlad's provocation could not. In April that year, Mehmed led an army towards the Danube. Estimates vary on its size, but it was generally considered to be comparable to the one which had stormed Constantinople. A sledgehammer was being swung at the small nut of Wallachia.

           Results were mixed. Vlad was removed but not killed (instead he fell into Hungarian hands) and by the following year the strategic map had once again changed. The Pope now had impetus behind his call for crusade and what has become known as 'The Long War' began in 1463 - the first of many conflicts between the Venetian and Ottoman empires. It played itself out across the Levant and involved Persians, Tatars, Serbs, Hungarians, Albanians and plenty of individuals from the often-divided families of the old Byzantine order. That war concluded in 1479 with the Treaty of Constantinople. The very next summer, Mehmed launched his doomed invasion of Italy at Otranto but by then the opportunity had gone and the campaign fizzled out. Frustrated, Mehmed died in May 1481, perhaps with sentiments not dissimilar to Robert Frost's poem on his mind.

This post was subsequently published in Excvbitor magazine: https://www.excvbitor.com/road-not-taken-ottoman-invasion-italy

Aftermath

When the defenses finally fell in the early hours of 29th May 1453, the fate of those inside the wall was varied. Some, like the firebrand monk Gennadios, even profited from it - within days he had been appointed patriarch. Some, such as two of the three Bocchiardo brothers, even managed to reach the harbour from the front line and get out to safety on one of the remaining boats (the other brother, Paolo, was captured & killed in their attempted breakout). In fact a reasonable company of Genoese appear to have forced their way through the crowds and boarded the boats to escape, taking their mortally wounded leader, Giustinianni, with them. The fate of the Scotsman, John Grant, is not recorded. The Venetian Bailo, Girolamo Minotti, was captured and executed but other Venetians, such as the ships surgeon and diarist Nicolo Barbaro, were able to escape by ship.

Among the Greeks, tradition holds that the emperor threw off his purple regalia and, joined by his closest bodyguard and companions such as Andronikos Kantakuzenos, flung himself into the enemy to die. Almost from that moment, myths began to form about Constantine XI - not unlike those which surround King Arthur in Britain or Charlemagne in Germany - that he is not dead but shall return one day.

Cardinal Isidore, the Greek-born Latin cleric, managed to escape disguised as a beggar. The grand logothete, George Sphrantzes was captured but his identity remained unknown to the Turks (he would likely have been executed if they had recognised him) and he joined the many thousands of Greeks taken to Erdine and sold into slavery. He was fortunate, reasonably well treated, he was ransomed within a year and able to find and free his wife. His son and daughter, however, both died in captivity.

The most notorious incident surrounding those terrible few hours and days immediately after the fall concerns the fate of the Notaras family. The daughters of megas doux, Anna, Euphrosyne and Theodora had all at some point left the city and were safe in exile. Loukas Notaras and his sons were not so fortunate. The truth is clouded in conflicting accounts, many of them spiced for political purposes by the chroniclers. The definitive facts are that Loukas Notaras and around fifty notable Greek citizens were executed three days after the siege ended and his youngest son, Isaac, was taken into the Sultan's household, from which he escaped somewhere between 7-15 years later and made his way to his sisters in Venice. Contemporary accounts pointed the finger of treason at Loukas Notaras (so much so that his daughter Anna commissioned a humanist scholar to write a refutation of the charges) and his death was put down either to Mehmed's distrust of a proven traitor or the megas doux's objection to the Sultan's sexual advances towards his son. It is quite possible that these stories were nothing more than an attempt by Christian chroniclers to horrify their audience with the barbarity of the Turkish bogeyman but it should also be noted that Mehmed was more than likely bisexual, with the Wallachian boyar Radu cel frumos reputed to have been a long standing lover. Whatever the truth of Isaac Notaras's fate, unlike other Byzantines, he does not appear to have entered into formal Ottoman service or risen to a position of authority prior to his escape to Italy.

One of the less well known and yet most incredible stories from those first few weeks of the post-Roman world comes from that slave market in Edirne. Among the busy buyers was a Greek man by the name of Demetrios Apoukakos who would serve as imperial secretary to the Ottoman Sultan. He was not at that time working on Mehmed's behalf, however. The Sultan had enslaved these hundreds and thousands of Byzantines and his stepmothter, the Valide Sultan Mara Brankovic - herself half-Greek and horrified, we might suppose, at the destruction of her culture - used her own money to pay the ransom and free a number of the miserable souls in the slave market. We do not know how many she saved, but one of them is very clearly attested. Dionysius, a Greek nobleman, who some twenty years after the fall would become patriarch in Constantinople, backed by his guardian angel, Mara in that venture as well. His tenure as patriarch was troubled - it was a time of bitter factional fighting between the Constantinopolitan and Trepuzentine Greeks for control of their millet and faith - but on retirement, Dionysius moved to be personal confessor to Mara at her estate near Mount Athos. Following her death in 1487 he once again was elected patriarch in Constantinople, was deposed 3 years later in 1490 and died in 1492.

Nicolo Barbaro, eyewitness to armageddon

"Here begins the story of the siege of the city, and now there follows the battles from day to day, as shall be seen from what follows.

On the fifth of the month of April, one hour after daybreak, Mahomet Bey came before Constantinople with about a hundred and sixty thousand men, and encamped about two and a half miles from the walls of the city."

So begins the diary of Nicolo Barbaro, perhaps the most detailed and accurate eyewitness account of the siege and fall of Constantinople. Barbaro was a ship's surgeon and a member of a patrician family from Venice. He arrived in Constantinople as part of a Venetian military build-up led by Gabriel Trevisano, vic-captain of the gulf. Their intention was not to defend the city per-se but to escort merchant convoys back from the Black Sea after a Venetian vessel was fired upon and sunk by the Turkish cannons at Rumeli Hisari in November 1452.

There are quite a number of personal accounts surviving from the siege from a wide range of social perspectives including a Genoese bishop (Leonard of Chios), a Byzantine court minister (George Sphrantzes), a Turkish official historian (Tursun Bey), the Genoese governor (Podesta) of Pera, a Greek bureaucrat working for the Ottoman Sultan (Hermodoros Michael Kritovoulos) and even a Slavic escaped slave who crossed from the Turk lines into the city (Nestor-Iskander, the veracity of which is admittedly dubious). Each comes with its own bias and each chooses to focus on different incidents. For Barbaro, the Venetian ship's doctor, it is, unsurprisingly, the naval affairs that are afforded the most attention. Whilst this can at times be frustrating (it was the wall, after all and not the Horn, where things were won and lost), the strength of Barbaro lies in the fact that this is very much a personal diary and not written with an audience in mind as is the case with the others. Tursun Bey's account, for example, is an uncritical eulogy to his employer, while every paragraph of Sphrantzes's account contains an axe being grinded or an act being justified to posterity. Barbaro's account, written as a daily diary, is the dry factual recounting of a man whose training lay firmly in observation and analysis. It's certainly not Shakespeare and it likely contains inaccuracies of recollection and judgement but it remains a monumentally useful piece of primary source history, "the most useful of the western sources", according to Steven Runciman.
As well as a focus on the water over the wall, another of Barbaro's biases lies in his attitude to the Genoese. He's as snide and distrustful of them (particularly those from Galata/Pera) as the stereotypical Venetian of that era of maritime republican rivalry could be. He goes so far as to accuse General Giovanni Giustiniani of abandoning his post at the crisis of the siege on the 29th May. This version of events is refuted by Bishop Leonard (who says Giustiniani was mortally injured) & given the relative positions of the two witnesses (Barbaro was not at the wall, Leonard was) and the death of the General hours later from his wounds, Barbaro's account of this incident appears to be incorrect. It is instructive, however, that the Venetians would be happy to think ill of a Genoese hero, even having fought alongside him.

Barbaro was fortunate in his position afloat at the boom. When the wall broke, the Turk galleys ignored the Italian flotilla completely in their rush to land and join in the plunder. We then get Barbaro's account of the Venetian contingent's scramble to escape: something of a medieval "last helicopter out of Saigon" moment:


"Now that Constantinople had fallen, and since there was nothing further to be hoped for, our own people prepared to save themselves and our fleet, all the galleys and ships, and get them out of the harbour, breaking the boom across the entrance. So Aluvixe Diedo, officer in command of the harbour and captain of the galleys from Tana, seeing that the whole of Constantinople had been captured, at once disembarked at Pera, and went to the Podesta of Pera, and discussed with him what should be done with our fleet, whether it should make its escape, or prepare itself to do battle with all its ships and galleys. And when Aluvixe Diedo asked the advice of the Podesta of Pera, the Podesta said, “Master captain, wait here in Pera, and I shall send an ambassador to the Sultan, and we shall see whether we Genoese and Venetians shall have war or peace with him.” But while this discussion was taking place, the Podesta had the gates of his town shut, and shut the captain inside, with Bartolo Fiurian the armourer of the galleys of Tana, and Nicold Barbaro the surgeon of the galleys. We who were shut up there realised that we were in a serious position: the Genoese had done this, in order to put our galleys and our property into the hands of the Turks, and no ambassador was sent.





Now that we were shut up in their town, the galleys at once began to set up their sails and spread them out, and bring their oars inboard, with the intention of going away without their captain. But the captain, who realised that he was in danger of being imprisoned, was able by dint of fair words to persuade the Podesta to release them, and they got out of the town and boarded their galleys quickly; and as soon as they had done this, they began to kedge themselves up to the boom which was across the harbour. When we reached the boom, we could not get past it, because it stretched all the way between the two cities of Constantinople and Pera. But two brave men leaped down on to one of the wooden sections of the boom, and with a couple of axes cut through it and we quickly hauled ourselves outside it, and sailed to a place called the Columns behind Pera, where the Turkish fleet had been anchored. Here in this place we waited until midday, to see if any of our merchants could reach the galleys, but none of them were able to do so, because they had all been captured.

So at midday with the help of our Lord God, Aluvixe Diedo, the captain of the galleys from Tana, made sail on his galley, and then the galley of Jeruolemo Morexini and the galley of Trebizond with its vice-master Dolfin Dolfin did the same. This galley of Trebizond had great difficulty in getting its sails up because a hundred and sixty-four of its crew were missing, some of them drowned, some dead in the bombardment or killed in other ways during the fighting, so that they could only just manage to raise their sails. Then the light galley of Cabriel Trivixan set sail, although he himself was still in the city in the hands of the Turks. The galley of Candia with Zacaria Grioni, the knight, as master, was captured. Then behind these galleys there sailed three ships of Candia, under Zuan Venier and Antonio Filamati, “The Hen,” and we all sailed safely together, ships and galleys, out through the straits, with a north wind blowing at more than twelve miles an hour. Had there been a calm or a very light breeze, we would all have been captured. When we set sail for Constantinople, the whole of the Turkis fleet was unarmed and all the captains and crews had gone into the city to sack it. You can be sure that if their fleet had been in action, no a single vessel could have escaped, but the Turks would have had them as prizes of war, because we were shut up inside the boom, but they abandoned their fleet. Fifteen ships stayed inside the harbour, belonging to the Genoese, to the Emperor and to the people of Ancona; also all the Emperor’s galleys, numbering five, which had been disarmed, and also there stayed all the other vessels which were in the harbour, and the ships and galleys which could not escape were all captured by the Turks. But apart from these fifteen ships, seven belonging to the Genoese which were by the boom escaped, and one which was off Pera, belonging to Zorzi Doria of Genoa, of about two thousand four hundred botte, escaped with the other seven towards evening.

The fighting lasted from dawn until noon, and while the massacre went on in the city, everyone was killed; but after that time they were all taken prisoner. Our Bailo, Jeruolemo Minoto, had his head cut off by order of the Sultan; and this was the end of the capture of Constantinople, which took place in the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-three, on the twenty-ninth of May, which was a Tuesday."