Poggio Bracciolini, born at Terrranuova, near Florence, in the year 1380, was hardly more than twenty when he came to seek his fortune in Rome. He was neither a nobleman, nor a rich man: his father, a notary in Terranuova, had so completely ruined himself, that he had been obliged to take to flight, in order to escape from his creditors. But Poggio had attended in Florence the lessons of John of Ravenna for the Latin language, those of Manuel Chrysoloras for the Greek: both teachers so renowned, that the mere fact of having been their disciple was in itself recommendation; and he was soon invested by Pope Boniface IX with the office of Apostolic Secretary, it is presumed, in the year 1403: Poggio was then twenty-three, and it was only fifty years later that he definitively retired from the Roman Curia.
Notwithstanding its apparent simplicity, his life was nevertheless a remarkably troubled one. The Western Schism had begun two years before his birth; there were constantly two or three Popes at the same time, and frequently, beside them, Councils which arrogated to themselves full authority, strove to restore order, and but made confusion worse confounded. Religious disputes were entangled with political quarrels: if an Italian prince coveted a town belonging to the States of the Church, it sufficed to make him declare for the Pope of Avignon, in whose name he assailed the Roman Pontiff, thus clothing his ambition with the cloak of religious zeal. In the midst of such perturbation and of the uprisings of the Roman people, the Popes, as also the officers of their government, led a most precarious and unsettled existence. There is a passage of Poggio's, where he complains of never having spent entirely, in the same place, one single year of all those during which he served the Roman Curia. At one time, Innocent XII, besieged in his palace by the Romans, fled precipitately to Viterbo, and Poggio had to attend him during that two days' forced march, which was so harassing that several persons dropped down dead from fatigue. At another, the Italian Cardinals having met in Pisa with the French Cardinals, the Assembly formed itself into an ecumenical Council, deposed the Popes of Rome and of Avignon, and elected a third, Pietro Filardo, who assumed the name Alexander V. Poggio then laboured under the greatest perplexity, not knowing whether he should keep his allegiance to Gregory, his old master, or adhere to the new one; and he was finally under necessity of retiring to Florence, where the assistance of his friend Niccolo Niccoli was about his only means of existence; for the Pope's Secretaries had but a meagre salary, which barely allowed of their living decently. At last, after a reign of eight months, Alexander V died: Poggio made up his mind, and resumed his office under John XXIII, the new Pope elected by the Council of Pisa. But, almost immediately, Ladislas, King of Naples, invaded the States of the Church. John XXIII had to take flight, and, in the hope of obtaining assistance from the Emperor, was fain to convene the general Council of Constance, which he opened in person, toward the latter end of the year 1414.
Poggio had then just exchanged the duties of a mere Apostolic Secretary for those of private and confidential Secretary to the Pope. That office he did not long keep: John XXIII, threatened by the Council, fled in the disguise of a post-boy. The Council suspended, then deposed him, and forbade the officers of his household to continue their services; luckless Poggio vegetated in Constance, far from his friends and patrons, without any prospect of a brighter future. He tried some time to find occupation in the study of Hebrew; but the difficulties of that language, the little use it could be of to him, and also the ridiculous ways of his teacher, soon disgusted him. He then set about travelling. He went to the waters of Baden, whence he wrote one of his prettiest letters, came back to Constance, witnessed the condemnation of Jerome of Prague, of whose heroism, in the face of his accusers, he could not refrain from expressing his admiration; and then, as a diversion from such horrors, took upon himself to travel all over Germany, searching in the monasteries after the manuscripts of lost works of ancient authors. It is not easy to imagine the fervency with which he carried on his pursuit, the joy with which success filled his soul. His means not being adequate to the necessary expenses, his wealthy friends, Niccolo of Florence and Barbaro of Venice, bore the greater part. When he had found something of consequence, but involving a heavy cost, he applied to some great personage, a Prince or a Cardinal, and solicited him, even unto importunity, until he had prevailed upon him to purchase the valuable manuscripts. He thus discovered and edited many of Cicero's orations; two treatises by Lactantius; Tertullian, Lucretius, Manilius, Silius Italicus; part of Valerius Flaccus; Calpurnius, Columella, Lucius Septimius, Nonius Marcellus; the three grammarians, Caper, Eutychius and Probus; Ammianus Marcellinus, the historian; Asconius Pedianus, the commentator; Frontinus's work concerning aqueducts, and eight books of Mathematics by Firmicus. A certain Nicolas of Treves, whom he sent to search the monasteries he could not visit himself, had the good fortune of unearthing twelve new comedies by Plautus. But, of all those discoveries the most important was the one which Poggio made, at the Monastery of Saint-Gall, of a complete copy of the works of Quintilian. He ferreted it out in a sort of black hole << where one would have been loath to put a man even under sentence of death.>> So you may fancy the indignation with which he inveighs against the barbarism of the monks, the pride with which he enhances the importance of his discovery, and the praise he bestows upon Quintilian, who << has so well, so perfectly stated all that is requisite to make an excellent orator.>> But how bitter his regret when led astray by spurious information, and obliged to give up the hope of completing Livy or Tacitus!
The Western Schism, however, had come to an end. Otto Colonna, elected Pope by the name of Martin V, and acknowledged by nearly the whole of Christendom, departed from Constance and took up his residence in Mantua, until Rome should be sufficiently pacified to warrant his returning to that city. Poggio followed in his train, most likely with the hope of being reinstated in his former office. But, far from meeting with a good reception, he was, it would seem, molested on account of the freedom with which he had frequently spoken of the Council of Constance: for we see him leaving Mantua, without taking a farewell of even his best friends, and seeking a refuge with Beaufort, bishop of Winchester.
Beaufort had promised wonders, but invested him with only a scant benefice. Besides, there was no attraction for Poggio in England, where books were scarce, and Antiquity well nigh a stranger. He came back to Italy, and, in the end, recovered his office of Secretary to Martin V, towards the year 1420 or 1421.
The second part of his life was rather less disturbed. In the first period of his then residence in Rome, he wrote his Dialogue on Avarice. That first peaceful interval was, however, but of short duration. Eugenius IV (Gabriello Condolinieri), although a Venetian by birth, took sides in the Roman factions, and contrived to get himself expelled from the city. He returned but to be driven away again, and made his escape under a shower of stones. Poggio was not so fortunate: soldiers stopped him on the way, and it was only after payment of a heavy ransom that he was enabled to reach Florence.
A further deception awaited him there: Cosmo de' Medici, the patron on whom he the most relied, had just been banished by the aristocratic faction. Poggio improved his leisure-time by entering with Professor Francesco Filelfo, an enemy of the Medici, upon one of those quarrels which, at that time, were so frequent among scholars. His invectives against Filelfo are violent in the extreme: he charges him with theft and infamous morals, styles him a stinking buck-goat, a dirty cornuted beast, and so forth. Such was the amenity of polemics in the XVth Century, and Poggio's treatment of his adversaries. True, he got as good as he gave, But it was all of no consequence, and reconciliation was sure to follow in the end.
Cosmo de' Medici soon returned to Florence. Poggio was no longer very sanguine as to what he had to expect from the Pope. Without throwing up his appointment, he took steps towards settling in Tuscany. First, he secured, for himself and his children, an exemption from all taxes by the Seigniory of Florence; next, he bought a house in Valdarno, from the produce of a Livy written out with his own hand, and set about storing it with a collection of statues and antique cameos, which he hunted up as fervently as formerly manuscripts.
At about the same time, he married. He was no longer a young man, and the older he grew, the more he was upbraided for his laxity of morals; in fact, he had long been living with a mistress by whom he had had fourteen children. In the end, he yielded to the entreaties of his friends; desirous of leading thence forward a regular family-life, he took for his wife Vaggia or Selvaggia de' Buondelmonti, who might well have been his daughter: he was fifty-five, and she only eighteen. That was perhaps not quite what his friends could have wished. But he had married for himself, and never lost an opportunity of congratulating himself on his choice. << According to Petronius,>> said he, << discretion and beauty seldom go together: by especial favour of heaven, they are combined in my wife.>> He had by Vaggia five sons and one daughter, and, even in a literary point of view, his marriage brought him good luck: for it was with an eye to his justification that he wrote the Dialogue An seni sit uxor ducenda, one of his most lively tracts.
His marriage did not however prevent him from following to Bologna Pope Eugenius, who was at drawn daggers with the Council of Basle. It was even he who succeeded in reconciling to the Pope Cardinal Julian of St-Angelo, whose secession frustrated all the threats of the Council. From that day, the Popes had a more quiet time of it, and Poggio's history is little more than the enumeration of his works, and the recital of his literary quarrels. Shortly before his marriage he had edited the collection of his letters; between the years 1435 and 1447, he further wrote a Dialogue on Nobility, the Eulogies of Niccolo Niccoli, Lorenzo de' Medici and Cardinal Santa-Croce, a Treatise upon the Unhappiness of Princes, which he dedicated to Tommaso de Sarzana since a Pope by the name of Nicolas V, the funeral Oration on Leonardo Aretino, and, lastly, a Discourse to the above-mentioned Nicolas V, shortly after his election. Poggio had acquired one of the highest literary reputations in Italy, but his income did not correspond with his fame; whereof he complained bitterly at the end of his Discourse: << I am already,>> he said, << a veteran in the Curia; forty years have I spent there, and my reward has undoubtedly been less than what might have been expected by a man deficient neither in ability, nor in knowledge. It is high time that I should imitate the veterans whom the Ancients settled in their colonies after long services, and that I should go and live in retirement equally conducive to bodily rest and to brain-work. May your benevolence, most-holy Father, come to my assistance! Of whom could I more hopefully ask for support and countenance?>>
Nicolas V granted the prayer of his old friend. << Thanks to him,>> says Poggio, << I have no longer reason to complain of hard times, and I am, so to say, reingratiated with Fortune.>> Definitively shielded from want, he only worked with more earnestness. He wrote in succession Dialogues on the Vicissitudes of fortune and on Hypocrisy, an Invective against Antipope Felix V, translations of Diodorus Siculus and the Cyropedy, his collection of Facetiae, and three dialogues on divers subjects, which he put together under the title Historia disceptativa convivialis. In the year 1453, through the protection of the Medici, the Florentines sent for him to fill the office of Chancellor to the Republic, and afterwards that of Prior of arts. But his irascible temper was still unchanged: in Rome, his strictures had so vehemently incensed George of Trebizond, the Apostolic Secretary, that they one day collared each other in the presence of their colleagues; in Florence, he heard that he had been assailed in his turn; he imputed certain annotations to Lorenzo Valla, who was quite innocent of them, and immediately, without any further inquiry, he hurled at him a fierce castigation, beginning with grammatical trifles, and ending with the most outrageous abuse. Lorenzo Valla replied in the same strain. There were many rejoinders; the quarrel was envenomed by the interference of one of Valla's disciples, Niccolo Perotti, who was as roughly handled as his master; and, to put an end to it, nothing less was required than the mediation of that same Filelfo, Poggio's former adversary, lately reconciled to him.
It was Poggio's last quarrel. He spent quietly the remainder of his life-time, writing a Treatise upon the Woes of human fate, a translation of Lucian's Ass, and especially a History of Florence, the original text of which was published but in the year 1715. He died on the 30th October 1459, at the age of seventy-nine. He was buried with pomp in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence; his picture was hung in the public building called the Proconsolo, and a statue was even raised to his memory, and placed on the front of the church Santa Maria del Fiore. This statue, removed from its primitive situation, actually figures in a group of the twelve Apostles, where the narrator of the Facetiae, now more composed, keeps on good terms with narrators of the Gospel.