Cheilas' Cleofe

Mistra in shrouds. Photo by Stella Chrysochoou.

The monody by Nikiforos Cheilas is the last of the four monodies delivered at the mnemosyne for Cleofe in late May of 1433. I have used them frequently in entries here for information, and have looked individually at those by Plethon, Pepagomenos, and Bessarion. This by Cheilas was the third delivered that day, and the one that probably would have been most remembered by those who heard him. On first reading, it appears to rush from one high point of emotion to the next, at times almost near hysteria, but it is the most literary of the four, and demonstrates the most concern for rhetoric.

Cheilas begins, and ends, with a justification for mourning (and includes a dig at Plethon and Pepagomenos, accusing them of showing off), both times bringing the mourning directly home by listing the mourners: the godly despot, the despots, his relatives, her most dear daughter, the priests, the monastic orders, the senators, the others, and the cities and villages.  These at the beginning are all present at the mnemosyne, while at the conclusion, he gives a shorter and different list, more poetic and more poignant: all kingdoms, groves and meadows, the Graces, widows, orphans, captives, the impoverished, and your subjects.

This identification with the listeners carries throughout as he talks about Cleofe and their grief in ways that they would wish they could have thought of, moving back and forth between factual statements about her life, and then rhapsodical images of what they have lost.  The image of light is preeminent: it is one of the oldest and most persistent of the topoi of Greek mourning. "The land of Hesperia sent her, a light flowing out from a golden race, but she shone back with a radiance that made all the brilliance of that race seem less." "O ornament of queens, or rather, queen among all queens, as you shown out, surpassing them in all your virtues."  (Here he used βασιλὶς βασιλίδων in a graceful recognition of the Palaiologos βασιλεὺς or βασιλέως βασιλεων.) "You, our sun, have set." Then inverting the metaphor he says, "What a change has come to hide away what was sweetest and best, igniting the entire flame of griefs and wretchedness."

Earlier he inverts a metaphor to great effectiveness: "You gave us then a celebration, showing us all something new, a reason to sing sweetly, songs worthy of your goodness and of the good fortune that came to us from you, . . . But now you set us to deep grieving, to uttering long cries of pain, to weaving a tragic song, antiphonal to our former hymns, singing farewell to the hopes we had in better times."

He inverts another metaphor, working with κιβωτὸς, ark: "O, bitter ark, that made away with such beauty. The psalmist of old even danced before the ark, when it was returning whence it came, but before this bitter ark which carries off our great queen to the tomb, it is entirely right for us to stand and wail continuously, and to mourn, and do everything short of trying to exhume her from it."

Cheilas reminds his listeners of Cleofe's intelligence, of her quiet and effective assistance in council, of her diligence in Bible study, and her self-discipline.  He indicates a more intimate knowledge when he tells of her standing in prayer all night, and that she had said quietly to a few that she would not live through this childbirth. He is the source for the information that she died on Good Friday at noon, and was buried almost immediately.  He confirms and supplements information in Pepagomenos and Bessarion.

Towards the end, Cheilas lets loose a cascade of metaphors: "She departed leaving behind amazement . . . O, shell of our common existence, what a change has come to hide away what was sweetest and best . . . O, who was it that did not spare this loveliest and most beautiful eye for us, cutting it out? Who was it that made this loveliest object and image of all the virtues and graces vanish? O, what a thing has been looted from us in her beauty, what loveliness has been destroyed? What light is now hidden under the bushel? O, what a sun has abruptly gone down into the tomb and is now miserably concealed? What a tongue full of grace has been imprisoned in final silence. Where has such loveliness ever before been extinguished? When has a flower so utterly withered, how has that precious gem been shattered?"

His conclusion is quiet, gentle, after the summary of the mourners: "Accept these words offered by us to you, O, in all things for us best and most holy, and most regal lady, they are entirely insufficient, but we could not mourn our loss in silence."

Just before his conclusion, Cheilas said: "Therefore I think that for all time and among all nations, this account, both as a written and as unwritten message will be sent out, and you will be remembered among all men until day and night yield to one another." As far as survivals are concerned, they never mentioned her again.

 

Translation by Pierre A. MacKay.

The doctor and his patient

Demetrios Pepagomenos was the second of the four speakers at Cleofe's memorial. I have written about these monodies at other times, in detail about those by Bessarion, the last speaker, and George Gemistos Plethon, the first. (The order of the speakers has to be deduced: Plethon was the oldest and certainly of the highest status of the four, Bessarion the youngest and, being a monk, of the lowest status. Cheilas probably has to follow Pepagomenos as he makes a comment about him.)

Pepagomenos was a doctor specializing in gout. We do not have an absolute statement that he was Cleofe's doctor, but there is enough evidence to allow us to deduce it. For example, in his monody he said, “There is need for all of us, and for myself especially, to let our voices loose in the intensity of our suffering.” I read that as a comment on his sense of involvement in, if not responsibility for her death. Later he spoke of “the body of our holy queen, so well-formed, so harmonious as to bring future happiness to the race.” As the daughter of an obstetrician, I read that as saying her body was suited for child-bearing, and so something he would be the only man, other than her husband, in a position to know.

But when Cleofe died at noon on Good Friday, she had been fasting for nearly forty days, and there is strong evidence to suggest that she would have followed the most severe fast. She spent nights standing in prayer. She had, unintentionally, prepared her body for a massive hemorrhage. Pepagomenos called it a cataclysm, a deluge over the whole race – ἄλλον τινὰ καταχλυσμὸν τοῦ γένους παντὸς, and said it had come on suddenly. Bessarion also refers to blood, saying that her husband (like Zeus) had wept tears of blood (and, like Zeus, at the loss of a son in addition to his wife).

I think the dead child was a son, because Pepagomenos said this birth was to have been such an even that “all good and decent things might come to settle not only among us present here but among all the entire race . . . that there might be skipping and dancing . . . the singing of festival chants, the display of general happiness.”

“All the best for us came,” he said to her – sometimes he spoke to the assembled mourners, and sometimes to Cleofe – “with your settling among us. . . . But now everything goes the other way.” He mentions first her husband, “our holy ruler,” and then “her dear daughter . . . all her blood relations, her servants and cities.” Pepagomenos speaks of her daughter three different times, and then again of the loss to her subjects.

He becomes more specific about her subjects: “But the bellies of the poor mourn especially the hands of our queen, which worked as it were to one purpose throughout her life, to nourish those in want, not merely through instruction, and through those of others', as might have been expected of such a queen, but themselves performing the service of cookery, collecting wood from wherever they had to, and lighting the fire, even roasting the food of the poor over it and serving it to them, nourishing them daily, taking no account of the heat of the fire, the intense burden of the smoke, and the inescapable duration of this service. This is an exceptional description. It was conventional for Renaissance and Byzantine ladies of good families to feed the poor, but nowhere, I think, do we learn that they carried firewood and cooked in the smoke.  Though I do wonder where she had learned to cook.  All the speakers spoke of Cleofe's character: Pepagomenos spoke more than the others of what she actually did in her life.

He specified other groups whom she nurtured: “The orphaned children of her household mourn her, who acted as a mother to all, sharing out to each of them what was right, and neglecting nothing of their care; she made it possible for the women to live together with husbands and men with wives, to act openly and to practice another way of life, something that had in many periods over the years been neglected. but was rightly and properly fostered during the reign of our most holy queen, with all attention and concern, as one might say. Widows, too mourn their protector, and strangers the source of consolation from which they often benefited--- all, in short, for whom she offered a respite from loss.”

It is possible that Pepagomenos himself knew the pain of losing a wife. The cleaving of the one flesh that is a marriage was an easy topos for the Byzantines, but he went further: “The cleaving apart of a bodily union brings the unbearable pain of an amputation when a mother dies in childbirth. This, more than anything else makes the pain of the cut intense and presents the suffering as ever new in the eyes of the husband, and becomes an inexhaustible fuel for the fire, always displaying the newness of the loss, and never ceasing. But the severing of spiritual attachment has an intense bite and makes the pain even more unbearable, inasmuch as it is carried on in the the present life, while the former pain, although it is, so to speak, undying, continues to be associated with that material, though now lost, companionship.

He went on to raise topics that might have been considered better unmentioned and, as with Plethon and Bessarion, the frankness of subjects towards their ruler is striking. There were aspects of the earlier relationship between Cleofe and Theodoros that nearly led to his rejection of her, and we might wonder if Theodoros had been repenting to Pepagomenos of his stubborness. “When the time was right, even before your marriage, you lighted the brand of self-mastery with a little spark and disregarding paternal pride, canceling maternal agreements, the petitioning of your sisters, and the native innovations in religion of your homeland, you were pliant in everything to your husband and lord, putting this before all else, to follow his beliefs throughout your life and to practice them as fully as you were able. (Had she confided to Pepagomenos the real facts of her "conversion"?) All of this scorches him the more intensely and causes greater agony as he thinks of what consolation, aid and assistance against this greater and more final loss he has lost.”

Theodoros had apparently insisted that she change her style of dress as well as convert, things directly opposed to the agreements he had made for the marriage. “The wearing of clothes outside our habits of dress, beyond our temperament and sense of what, so to speak, is naturally required, was a matter of her unmaterial and spiritual nature, one unassociated with worldly passion or any kind of bodily necessity, because she aimed, in her unconcern with such matters, at what seemed to her always to be a more perfect order and self-governance. Not that there might ever be perfection more perfect than perfection, or that clothing will change character, but nonetheless, there was some length of time before the end, when, unless she was constrained by official ceremonies, she wore the fashion of those who live monastically, so that what was earlier unappreciated by outsiders, was now obvious to all.”

Toward the end of his monody, Pepagomenos embarked on a series of thirteen “O”s: "O dwelling-place of virtues . . . O all those dreams . . . O charms of that holiest body . . . O lady, death loved you . . . O terrible and lightless day.”  These Os formed a transition from the main body of his monody to his conclusion, addressed directly to her, speaking to her as the representative of all of them there listening: 

“You, most divine, pious and holy queen, who have made this translation only under the instructions of God. . . you have flown from us through the approval of the almighty . . . Do not withdraw into this new world but, even before us, watch over our most holy despot of the Romans, your co-worker utterly cast down by so great strife, and by the onslaught of disasters, brought on him by your death. For you were the best co-worker -- συνεργόν --urging him toward the good, and consoling him for what was incurable, a good counselor, a guide for action, and a harbor for all that is good, and all of this is gone, flown away with you. (Here it is clear that Pepagomenos had read the poem Theodoros had written for her in which he had called her his ξυνεργὸς, his co-worker, though in the poem I have preferred “fellow poet.”)

“This was not a good thing, and not how it should have been. Οὐ καλῶς μὲν οὐδ’ ὡς ἐχρῆν γέγονε δ’ οὖν.

“It would be in your power, either with your prayers to the divine, as you stand immediately beside God, to alleviate the distress of our ruler, and through this the misfortune of the entire Roman people---you can do this, I know, with a mere nod of assent-- δύνασαι γὰρ τοϋτ’, εὖ οἶδα, εἰ κατανεύσειας μόνον -- or to leave us to mourn and lament throughout life, as long as the sun sends its rays over the earth.”

This is astounding: he has put Cleofe in the position of the Panagia, and has given her the nod – and so the authority – of Zeus.

Pierre MacKay made the translation. Greek text available at http://nauplion.net/CL-Pepagomenos (3).pdf

Plethon's Cleofe

Angel, Ag. Nicholas, Mistra.

I recently discussed Bessarion's monody, one of four given at the μνημόσυνον for Cleofe Malatesta Palaiologina.  The memorial would likely have been held at Ag. Sophia, where she had been buried. There was a thunderstorm that day, and crowds of people -- family members, officials, clergy, women of the court, townspeople -- had shoved their way into the little church and its burial chapels and porches. There was a newly-painted portrait of Cleofe and her husband over her tomb, and some of the speakers gestured toward it and said, "You," as they spoke.  But we don't know which chapel the tomb was in.  

I spent some time in Ag. Sophia at the end of October, standing in each chapel, trying to envision the circumstances, trying to consider how well a speaker could be heard from various positions. Most of the people present wouldn't have heard the speakers, and most would not have understood the Greek the speakers used: what was important to them was that they were there.

Hints in the monodies allow us to work out the order in which they were given. Bessarion's was the last. The first was by George Gemistos Plethon. What we have is probably not quite the speech that he gave, but his edited written text.

The magic name of Plethon has preserved this monody in twenty or so copies (one is bound with the only copies of the Bessarion and Cheilas): the other monodies survive in one copy each. Plethon's has been used, or parts of it, a number of times by a number of writers, for what it says about the soul. What has been completely overlooked is that Plethon's discussion of the soul comes from his portrayal of a very specific soul, Cleofe's soul, and then from his portrayal of her husband's.

Gemistos began quietly, speaking of Solon's idea of goodness, and how one could not be sure of human fortune until death. "For this reason," he said, "one would consider epitaphs and funeral addresses to be more reliable than any other encomia . . . for they are concerned with matters already securely established . . . The Athenians . . . thought it right to use these addresses."  Gemistos anchored the storm-blown mourners firmly in the Athenian tradition: "We, likewise, have come forward in this commemoration, not only to speak for our most holy ruler's now-departed wife who achieved a good ending to life . . . but expressing thanks for the reverence and understanding she always exhibited."

He then reminded them that Cleofe had come from Italy whose Romans had ruled the best part of the settled world, from the Danube to the Tigris to Libya to the Atlantic, and that she came from heroic ancestors.  "She came here, lovely and good, to dwell with our most holy ruler . . . bringing with her shining adornment of body and soul, for she was tall and lovely, and had matured into every sort of goodness. . . She, however, exhibited, in addition to the beauty of her body, which was radiant, an even more radiant and holy quality of soul, and showed that her body was a sort of image of the beauty of her soul."

This is an extraordinary emphasis on Cleofe's body, however beautiful, and it should be remembered that Plethon believed that physical desire was a divine gift, and that it was through the body that we become like the gods.

He went on to list the qualities of her soul and then followed them with a brief statement about each: "For she adorned it with every sort of complete goodness: judgement, discretion (illustrated by her “sober prudence in putting off her leisurely Italian ways and taking up the decorous restraint of our women”) , clemency, honesty, piety (illustrated by her worship with prayers and continuous fasting according to our custom"), married affection, and nobility, and having naturally acquired each from birth, she increased each through study and practice and proved herself a glory among women. (This discussion of qualities suggests that Plethon was working on Περι αρετων, "On virtues," earlier than generally thought.) 

"Living in this manner, and with such occupations, practicing and studying, always adding more good to good things . . . and I would add that she recently took part in the most sacred of our feasts and our mysteries." He would have known as well as any of Cleofe's anguished "conversion" to the Eastern rite.  "She departed this life from an affliction beyond the powers of all medicine, so that she seems so dear to God from all these to have been taken up by God, and she left despair in her subjects . . .." 

Leaving the subject of Cleofe specifically, Plethon went on to say that there is a part of us that is mortal, and a part that is immortal, the most important part. The body is a kind of garment, and when we take off this garment, it is wrong to mourn when the important part has moved into a better life. It is the life we live here that prepares us for that life, as did Cleofe's life, while a person who takes no care for the divine in this life will have no contact with it in the next.  Almost all people believe in this continuing life.  The creator, as a good master, would not have given us the longing for eternity unless there was an eternity to long for. Non-rational animals do not because they do not understand cause or infinity. The one who knows something about God must have something in common with him, and we could not know this everlasting life without a desire for it.   

Then Plethon moves to suicide, a peculiar topic in the circumstances, unless he knew something that made this topic relevant.  Many of us who have been widowed have had the experience of being carried along at first, perhaps by shock, but with the sense that we are managing remarkably well.  Then about a month along, there is a great crash and an all-devouring depression.  It is clear, from Bessarion's monody, and particularly from Plethon's conclusion, that Theodoros had fallen deep into a depression, to the point that it had become a political as well as a personal problem.  He had earlier written a poem to Cleofe that looked forward to a radiant reunion in the presence of God.  Had he mentioned to Plethon the possibility of anticipating this?  

It is difficult to think why Plethon would have otherwise brought up the subject, particularly in such public circumstances.  He explained that non-rational animals do not commit suicide because they cannot envision their non-existence.   Nothing seeks its own destruction, so a human would not consider suicide if it would have that result.  A person who is suicidal must feel that suicide just allows it to move out of the body.  Plethon clearly allows more understanding of someone who is suffering, than did -- and does -- church teachings.

Plethon concluded with a firm statement of comfort, correction, and encouragement.   Who else at Mistra could have spoken to the ruler so critically in public?  "If the belief is established as certain within us that the soul is immortal, we shall be nobler and better, and shall bear such losses more gently. And so, most holy ruler, consoling yourself with these words, give up despair, considering again that you were born to preserve the common good in the face of troubles, but despair will stand always in the way of such action. You see how the menace has progressed and requires great concern for recovery and return to safety. This rests on you, and only if you will take care of it appropriately will all the rest follow you so that, if God wills, we shall be saved. 

"But, if you are indifferent, our danger will increase. Consider that if some mischief occurs—may that not happen—all will place the burden of it onto you, while if something happens to rescue us you will carry off the fame of it. So, understanding that you will in either of these cases have the greatest credit and, as your duty to God, who entrusted you with governance over us, stand before us, stronger and more attentive, and God will give you the diligence to be the rescuer of our community and provide you with whatever is necessary. And it has to be that, since your actions bringing us toward salvation will be great, and never trivial that, as well as by us, among all the rest of humanity you will be held in high esteem.  

My thanks to Pierre MacKay for his work on the translation.

Bessarion's missing manuscript

Bessarion's index to Marciana Gr Z 533 (coll 778).

Five-thirty-three, as we call it here in this house (feeling that “Gr Z” and “coll. 778” are just plain pedantic in normal conversation), is a collection of Bessarion's writings that he put together himself and for which he wrote the index and an introduction.  His introduction to 533 says, in part, 

Of the writings included here, some were produced while I was still young and setting myself to the practice of writing for the first time, while I still had no ecclesiastical rank, since I was still tender in my years . . . Others in this collection, going on as time allowed, were published, some at the time of my ordination as I was brought into holy orders, others when I became patriarch . . . in addition a long letter to the Despot Constantine when I had already been raised to the rank of cardinal -- these letters which, even if they are not worthy of deep thought, I have an affection for as my own children, and I have put them in the book as a reminder for ourselves, rather than of value for others.

Bessarion's Introduction.

Despite the fact that Bessarion was well into his forties when he wrote the letter to Constantine in 1444, this collection in 533 is persistently called his “juvenalia,” which gives a completely incorrect expectation of its contents. Here are the contents of 533 (I am trying here to read the text above):

* Encomium

* Monody for Manuel II.

* Discourse to the emperor Alexis of Trebizond.

* Legal act in the name of the archbishop of Sophia.

* Monody for the empress Theodora of Trebizond.

* Another monody for her.

* Another monody for her.

* Epitaph to ??? (crossed out)

* Epitaph for George Amiroutzes. (crossed out)

* Canon to S. Pantaleon.

* Letter to ???

* Letter to the same.

* Another letter to Amiroutzes.

* Epitaph for the basilissa Cleofe.

* Epitaph for the basilissa Theodora.

* Verses for a tapestry for the tomb of Manuel and Helena.

* Letter to Theodoros II.

* Letter to the same

* Letter to Paul Sophianos.

* Letter to Demetrios Pepagomenos.

* Letter to Nikephoros Cheilas.

* Letter to the monk Dionisios.

* Letter to John Eugenikos.

* Letter to the monks Matthaios and Isidoros.

* Address to the synod of Constantinople in the name of the archbishop of Trebizond.

* Description of Trebizond.

* Homily

* Monody to John VIII on the death of his wife Maria of Trebizond.

* Another monody for her.

* Another monody for her.

* Speech made at the opening of the Council of Union in Ferrara.

* Discourse on Union.

* Letter to Constantine, Despot of Mistra.

Notice that the contents include 7 monodies -- 7 formal funeral laments which were sent as gifts to the family of the dead and read out at formal memorial services. One monody was for Manuel II, but the other 6 monodies are for women -- for two women, actually.

Which brings us to the missing manuscript. A monody.

His monody for Cleofe Malatesta Palaiologina is missing.  533 has a number of document from his Mistra period -- letters, and three poems for members of the imperial family, one of them Cleofe.  Why would he have omitted this monody?  Granted, it is fairly tedious and even incoherent in places, but so are the other monodies listed (except for Manuel's). It could not have been later removed from 533: all the pages are accounted for in his index.

I can speculate (with no evidence) as to why he would have decided to omit this document from 533, but the monody is missing from all the other manuscripts of his writings as well. The sole copy is to be found -- or was found ninety-some years ago -- in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and printed in volume 4 of Spyridon Lampros' Παλαιολόγεια καὶ Πελοπονησιακά in 1924/30, along with other monodies for Cleofe.  The monody  by Cheilas follows Bessarion's in the Paris manuscript.  The Pepagomenos monody is in the Vatican.  There are several copies of the Plethon monody -- thanks to his magic name -- in Madrid, Bucharest, Belgrade, the Escorial, Leiden, with two in Milan. 

The other three monodies for Cleofe seem unique.  The Bessarion monody is a brief rewriting of the three monodies in the list above for the empress Theodora of Trebizond who died before she could become the mother-in-law of John VIII.  Pierre MacKay has made a collation of the monodies, which shows -- among other things -- that the tedious and incoherent parts were for Theodora, while the parts written newly for Cleofe are specific to her:

This disaster  -- her death -- has touched every race.  She cared for them from her own resources.  Her work was impossible to conceal, even if she avoided incense and lighted torches. She was a city founded on a mountain, impossible to hide (a reference to Mistra).  

She flew out of her husband's hands, leaving him crying tears of blood.  He was cut in two, and we see see that the high-born suffer as do the humble. The reasons must be left in the hands of God.

Who that knew her could not mourn her?  She accepted respect from the ladies of the court, but she did not compete with them.  She knew she was beautiful, but she had no concern about it  She wanted to go beyond it and be good.  She had the intelligence to chose the good, and the ability to follow through on what she had chosen.  She was quick to select the best solution to an argument.

Who can adequately express what we have lost?  We could have lost anyone else without hurt, but she was our guardian, our benefactress, our protector, and our enjoyment of her goodness was never satisfied.  No one has been left unwounded.

Bessarion concluded Cleofe's monody with an apparent criticism of Theodoros whose inability to deal with his grief has contributed to a sense of disorder.  This reflects the opening sentence, first written for Theodora, "O, the passage of disordered time," and then Bessarion mentioned the order Cleofe had brought to them.

So I wonder why this manuscript is missing.  Was Bessarion, more than ten years later, still unable to face so tangible a reminder of the disorder, of the loss of Cleofe?

The photographs of 533 are by John Burke.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Eleven

Possibly Guillaume Dufay.

Cleofe probably never had a pavane –it was a slightly later development of a dance form she knew -- but at least two pieces of music were written for her wedding by two composers whom her father, Malatesta “di Sonnetti” Malatesta employed at his court. Guillaume Dufay, just beginning his career, wrote a motet. Hugo de Lantins wrote a ballata. These were written in 1419 or 1420, before Cleofe left in August for the Morea.

Listen to Vasilissa ergo gaude here or here or here. The performances differ greatly. My own recording, and the performance I heard of Vasilissa one week ago, is by Capella Romana, but I cannot find this one on the internet. However, you can hear it in person with Capella Romana in their extraordinary program of music around the Fall of Constantinople, if you can get to Utrecht for the afternoon of Sunday, 7 September.  Here is my translation of Dufay's motet for Cleofe, and then his Latin.:

Vasilissa, therefore rejoice,
worthy are you of all praise,
Cleofé, glorious from the deeds
of your family Malatesta
princes in Italy,
great and noble.

More glorious from your husband,

for he is nobler than all;
Despot of the Rhômaioi,
whom the whole world reveres;
born in the purple,
sent by God from heaven.

Radiant in youthful bloom
and in beauty,
fecund in your wits,
eloquent in both languages,
more glorious for your virtues
before other human beings.

The ruler has desired your beauty;

now that he is your Lord.

* * * * * *

Vasilissa, ergo gaude,
quia es digna omni laude,
Cleophe, clara gestis
a tuis de Malatestis,
in Italia principibus
magnis et nobilibus

Ex tuo viro clarior,

quia cunctis est nobilior:
Romeorum est despotus,
quem colit mundus totus;
in porphyro est genitus,
a deo missus celitus.

Junvenili estate

polles et formositate
ingenio multum fecunda
et utraque lingua facunda
ac clarior es virtutibus
prae aliis hominibus.

Concupivit rex decorem tuum

quoniam ipse est dominus tuus.

Text from Capella Romana: 
The Fall of Constantinople

I find the use of vasilissa fascinating – it suggests that the marriage arrangements included information as to her title. In the four letters that survive in Cleofe's hand, she uses the title only once, after the birth of her daughter Helen, when she is desperately depressed. I like the motet's suggestion that she knew Greek, and I particularly like the comment about her fertile wits. (Compositions in honor of brides never make a point of intelligence.)  Her family and friends commented on her cleverness, as did Bessarion. The last lines are ironic, given what we know about her husband's six-year refusal of a sexual relationship.

Hugo de Lantins' ballata for Cleofe seems not to have ever been recorded. I would appreciate being corrected on this. Here is my translation of Hugo, and then his version. Hugo was Franco-Flemish, working in a Pesaro where they used a variant of the Venetian dialect. Spelling was quite flexible in 1419  or so.

Across how many regions, does the sun so moving
turn and view with absolute confidence,
and see, O Sparta, none so happy as you.

You were the home of Queen Helen,
who through everything she did
drained the strength of all who ever wrote.

Now you possess something more divine,
Madonna Cleofe,
born of the Malatesta, as you well know.

These are the glories and powers
you have added to the empire of Constantinople
with its many lords, so great and noble

************

Tra quante regione el sol si mobele

Gira e reguarda cum intiera fede

Quanti ti, Sparta, beata non vede.

To fosti albergo di Elena regina,

Che per tanto che fe

Stancho le force de che scripse may

Ora possedi cosa piu divina

Madona Cleophe

De Malatesti, mata come say.

Quest'en le lode e le possance c'hay

Gionto a l'impero de Constantinopele

Cum tanta baronia si grande e nobele.

Text from Wikipedia.

It is not, I think, as interesting as the first, but it does show that he knows of Helen of Sparta, and he knows that Mistra is at Sparta. Both songs suggest that her family line is more than adequate to be matched with the imperial family of Constantinople.

Dufay also wrote a short composition for Cleofe's brother, Pandolfo, to celebrate his restoration of the cathedral of St. Andrew when he was Archbishop of Patras. You can hear Apostolo glorioso here. It is called an “isorhythmic motet” and is written for five voices. This will also be in the Utrecht concert.

Glorious Apostle, chosen by God

to preach to the Greek people

His incarnation, for it was blind to it,

and (who) did so without any blame,

and chosest Patras for thy resting-place

and for thy tomb this holy cave;

I pray thee, pray that I may find myself with thee,

by thy mercies, in the sight of God.

With thy teaching thou didn't convert to Christ the

whole country, and with the passion and death that

thou borest here on the cross above the olive tree.

Now it hath slipped into error and is made evil;

wherefore win grace for it again by prayer so strong

that they may recognize the true and living God.

****************

Apostoloso glorioso, da Dio electo

A evangelegiare al populo greco

La sua incarnacion, ché v'era ceco,

Et cusí festi senza alcu suspecto,

Et elegisti Patrasso per tuo lecto,

Et per sepulcro questo sancto specco:

Prego te, preghi me retrove teco,

Per li tuoi merci, nel devin conspecto.

Cum tua doctrina convertisti a Cristo

Tuto el paese, et cum la passione et morte

Che qui portasti in croce in su lo olivo,

Mo' è prolasso in errore et facto tristo,

Si che rempetraglie gracia sí forte

Che recognoscano Dio vero et vivo.

Andrea Christi famulus.

Text and translation, Capella Romana.  The second

 The second section is not politically correct, but Pandolfo's appointment, and Cleofe's marriage, had been arranged by Pope Martin V as part of his effort to bring about Church Union.  This piece was certainly heard in Patras, and was probably written in Venetian-Italian rather than Latin as that would have been the main language heard in Patras other than Greek.

A page of Dufay's music. The West had not yet agreed
on the number of lines to a staff.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Ten

Text of the 1433 poem to Cleofe, in Marciana Gr Z 533 (coll. 778) f. 48b,
a collection of personal documents put together by Bessarion.  Photo, John Burke.

I have written about this poem in the past, and for a few this entry may be repetitive, but it is an important poem to me and, I think, important historically. When Cleofe Malatesta Palaiologina died in childbirth "the shattering of a precious crystal," said Cheilas, on Good Friday of 1433, her husband Theodoros was devastated. Testimony from his friends -- Gemistos, Bessarion, Pepagomenos -- gives a portrait of a man completely incapacitated by grief. But at some time in that first month of her absence, he constructed a love poem to her, bringing together passion and loss in a structure informed by his own scholarship, and by the new world she had opened to him.

Although, my dearest, we were once united,
being one flesh, the word of God claims
that it is better now to be together in the spirit,
you, living in thought, looking down from Heaven
upon my life, my words, my ways, and thought,

seeing all clearly as it is your right,
I, alas, torn apart, living in pain,
calling out for you with scalding tears,
for me, one thing is left, one good thing, song.

And so, portraying you in this image,

I have put myself beside you in every sense
wishing to be united in a third form of union.
so as to quench the terrible fire of longing
and to empty out the agony from my soul.

But, you who have died but live with God, deservedly,
when in the same tomb necessity brings
my bones together with yours in the fourth way
then, showing me what lies beyond the five senses
unite with me in the fifth and greater way
to share in delight and in the sight of God
my courage lies with you, who possess and indeed
give me, as my fellow-poet, this song.

Cleofe, his fellow-poet, made it possible for him to write. Before he was able to work, he was driven back in his grief to a poem she had showed him, one her father had written when her own mother died in childbirth.  It is written in the tradition of the family friend Petrarch:

The holy lady is dead, who used to hold
my spirit with hers, quiet and content;
Now she lives in heaven, and I in torment
am left, another man from what I was:

     not man, but brute, so that I should have
followed her body, life extinguished,
never to leave the side of her tomb
but burned myself where her heart lies.

     Then perhaps my soul might follow her
in celestial triumph, where all live
eternally by divine power.

    Yet if I with all my force were to be kept
from following her, at least
my body would be buried with her sacred bones

The fifth line -- "non huom ma bruto" -- and its verse described his condition to himself. Pepagomenos may have given him opium to calm him, and the ideas of "brute" and "drug" may have driven his tangles of thought to the Theocritean idyll about the brute, Cyclops, grieving for the loss of a lady:

There is no other drug for love . . . nor salve, nor poultice,

except the Muses, and this is something sweet and gentle

for men, yet it is not easy to discover it.

And this was then the crystal about which his poem grew.   Several things are happening in his poem.  The first, perhaps the least important is that there are two bits of information about imperial lives in Mistra.  For one, he expected to be buried in the same tomb with her at the palace chapel of Ag. Sophia.  For another, he had arranged for a double portrait to be painted over the tomb.

Theodoros may originally have set out to structure the poem on the five senses, a reasonable Byzantine and Renaissance approach, paralleling the senses to five ways in which he and Cleofe might achieve union.  He managed Touch, Sight, and Hearing, before he wisely gave up on Taste and Smell, and realized that he had to go beyond the senses, yet, if this what what he had planned, there is no sense of incompleteness of intent.

He enumerates forms of union, beginning with the union of one flesh, a union of which he had been frighted for the first six years of legal marriage, and a union which had clearly brought him joy.  He tests the idea that God's will for a spiritual union might be better, a second form of union, but the great distance between Cleofe in Heaven and him on earth reduces him to scalding tears -- tears only too familiar to those of us who have survived the loss of a partner.  But the idea of song, of poetry, remains.

He now has a portrait of her, of the two of them together, a third form of union which has not brought the comfort he expected, and he does anticipate an eventual burial with her, a forth form which he knows is beyond their senses.

There is a fifth way to find union, the ultimate union in a shared delight in the presence of God, a Dantean expression of the beatific vision, to which Cleofe must have introduced him in their shared examination of poetry.  It is a rare poet who can bring the Cyclops into the Paradisio, but Theodoros concludes with Cleofe as sharer and Muse -- ξυνεργὸς -- in this work of song -- μέλος

The original languages of these poems will be found here.  The translations from the Greek are by Pierre A. MacKay.

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Nine

This image is the underdrawing, sinopia, for the fresco that I selected for an image of Cleofe  Malatesta Palaiologina.  I selected the fresco in part because it is of the right date, in part because it is on a wall of her sister's palace in Mantua, in part because it shares features with portraits of other members of the family.  I also selected it because it seemed to illustrate Bessarion's description that she knew she was beautiful, but that she didn't take particular care about it, and Pepagomenos' statement that she didn't pay much attention to what she was wearing.

Paola Malatesta Gonzaga and her husband Gianfrancesco had hired the young artist Pisanello to fresco the four walls of the great hall of the palace with an Arthurian tournament.  This is a map of the walls of the great hall with indications of the surviving frescos.  

The sinopie have been removed and are on exhibit in another room: there are surviving parts of the sinopie that have not survived in the frescos, and vice versa.  The fresco/sinopia of my interest is from Wall 2, at the right-hand end.  This is what survives of the fresco, and you can compare it with the image at the beginning. 

The frescos have been dated anywhere from 1425 to 1457, and each art historian can give good reasons for the chosen dates. Joanna Marsden-Woods, whose work on the frescos I have found most useful, prefers 1443-1444. I have my own preferred dates. JM-W also gives the Arthurian story behind these frescos, which concerns an important tournament.  The lady in question is under a canopy to the left of the image below. Indistinctly, there are some of the tournament figures to the right, on Wall 1.  If you compare the heads of the figures with the bricks in the wall at the bottom, you will begin to get an idea of how small and dense the figures are.

And Wall 1 more distinctly here:

The tournament was given by a King Brangoire. The daughter of King Brangoire -- nameless in the story -- seduced Bohort, one of the three knights who accomplished the quest for the Holy Grail, at a tournament at her father's court, and by him had a son, Helain, who would become Emperor of Constantinople. Marsden-Woods does not explain what significance this story might have had for the Gonzagas of Mantua, or for her date of 1443-1444.  My date is 1428-1429, a good 15 years earlier.

But consider:  in February 1428, Cleofe -- after six years of a marriage in which her husband had refused a sexual relationship -- had  given birth to a daughter, Helena, the heir to the throne of Constantinople. None of the five living sons of Manuel II would father a son for twenty years. Might not Paola Malatesta Gonzaga enjoy having this painted reminder that she was the aunt of the possible future ruler of Constantinople?  The co-incidence of names -- Helain and Helena (Eleni) -- surely cannot be accidental.

I would like to see another element of the story as significant: Marsden-Woods says: "The love affair between Bohort and the princess, with its glorification of sexual passion, implied that a union between princes in real life could involve mutual passion and love." The sexual implication in the fresco is striking. If this Arthurian imagery effectively represented Cleofe's family's view of the sexual relationship, it is in fine apposition to the view of George Gemistos Plethon.

This is the sinopia with ladies of many and wondrous hair styles watching the tournament.  I cannot say if the nameless princess is one of the ladies in the lower tier, or the upper.  I cannot say if the fresco was intended to portray Cleofe.  I cannot say if Pisanello ever saw her, though dates and routes of his various travels would have given him several opportunities.  I can say that I do most intensely hope so.

Some material and the black-&-white images are taken from Joanna Marsden-Woods' book,  The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello’s Arthurian Frescoes (1998). The color images are from Luke Syson & Dillon Gordon, Pisanello: Painter to the Renaissance Court (2001).  

Bonus picture: Compare the sinopia drawing of the lady's wreath with the hat worn by Camilla Parker Bowles on her wedding day to Prince Charles who is quite knowledgeable about art.

Previous entries about Cleofe:  

Pavane for a Dead Princess, I
Pavane for a Dead Princess, II
Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V 
Pavane for a Dead Princess, VI

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VII

Pavane for a Dead Princess, VIII

Her Most Dear Daughter, Helena
Glory Days
Theodoros' Poem to Cleofe 
Theodoros II Palaiologos  
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti 

Bessarion to Theodoros, I
Bessarion to Theodoros, II

Scholarios talks about Theodoros