Bessarion on educating the imperial children

Early in 1465, Thomas Palaiologos directed that his children be sent from Corfù to Italy. He had gone to Italy in the winter of 1460. Their mother had died in August 1462. We know nothing of their circumstances in Corfù without either parent. The only individual in Corfù of whose presence we can be sure was Giorgios Sphrantzes, loyal Palaiologan courtier, but he had declined to be part of Thomas’ court in exile.

Thomas died in March of 1465. A sense of impending death may have made him send for his children. The children -- Zoe, age 17; Andreas, 12; Manuel, 7 -- arrived in Ancona in the summer. There appears to have been considerable and frantic correspondence between individuals in Ancona with some responsibility for the children, and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome whom Thomas had left as their guardian.

Bessarion wrote, or dictated, a letter to an unnamed individual in Ancona who was to be head of these young remnants of an imperial household. This person, and Dr. Kritopoulos, were to work out the details of the household and education, and send them to Bessarion. Meanwhile, the Pope, Paul II, would give 300 ducats a month for various expenses. Of this, 200 ducats were to go directly to the children’s household, for 6 or 7 servants each, for food, for 3 or 4 horses and their food, and for a little extra each month, depending on what was needed.

Bessarion, after reading the correspondence, had decided that a Greek teacher was essential. He was concerned about their understanding of Greek, concerned enough that he was not writing them directly but wanted his letter, in demotic Greek, read to them several times until they could understand it. They were to have a Latin teacher, who would certainly have taught Italian. They were to have Dr. Kritopoulos, and a translator or interpreter. This raises the question of what language they had been raised to speak in Greece, which they had left five years earlier, and what language they had been speaking in Corfù, but it is clear from Bessarion that their conversational demotic Greek was considered deficient.

Bessarion says nothing about Greek or Italian literature, mathematics, philosophy, history, swordplay, riding, hunting, or anything normally included under education. He does mention writing, but writing would be part of the language education. The rest of his instructions concern manners, behavior, how these young imperials were to present themselves to the world. The instructions give a chilling view of the world these children had entered, but Bessarion had observed Thomas for four and a half years, and he was keenly aware of what was necessary for these children without parents, without a country, and without income of their own.

They would be, he wrote, living on strangers’ money and strangers’ expectations. They could not vaunt their imperial descent. They were orphans, foreigners, beggars. Any advantages they had would come because they were pleasing. So they were to dress and live completely in the Italian style. Their diet was to be restrained, and their table manners excellent, as well as their manners toward the members of their household. They were not to be rude, but well-behaved, humble, and serene.

They were to learn to bow appropriately to each rank, to touch their hats, lift them slightly, or remove them according to the social standing of the person they encountered. They were to walk with dignity in public, speak in low voices, keep their eyes down, and not gape or giggle. When people came to pay calls, they were to learn how to make appropriate conversation and high-minded without laughing or chattering too much. They were to learn how to evaluate the Greeks who would come to their household, and the appropriate courtesies for each, particularly towards those in a difficult situation.

If they met a cardinal or the Pope, they were to kneel and not rise until told to. It would not shame them -- this was something kings and great rulers did. They should not sit in the presence of individuals of high rank -- Thomas told Bessarion he had often told them that. They were to be completely obedient and deferential to their administrator and doctor and teachers.

The household was to have one or two priests of the Latin rite who would be constantly saying the liturgy so they could become letter-perfect in it. They were to observe the Latin rite meticulously, and learn the kneelings and crossings and gestures, copying the Italians. They were not to smile at anything in the service, and not to whisper to each other. It had been reported to him that on the trip over, the children had walked out of the church some of the members of their suite had walked out of the church at the liturgical commemoration of the Pope:  this could not happen again, because if they did it it were to happen again, they the children would have to leave Italy, and then they would be beyond Bessarion's protection.

They were to come to Rome -- for this they should learn by heart little addresses they could make to the Pope -- but not until October at least, because there was plague in the city. The household should remove itself from Ancona, an old city liable to be unhealthy, and go up to the mountains to Cingoli where the Bishop of Osimo -- one of Bessarion's people -- had a house he wanted to offer them. Actually, the archons in Rome thought it might be a good idea for the children to stay there all the time.

They did go to Rome. Sphrantzes, one of those in a difficult situation, came to see them the next year and stayed for five weeks, but beyond this, we know nothing about their lives as children.

When she was 24, Zoe was finally married, to Ivan III of Moscow. Her sister and cousin had been married when they were 14. Her formal education must have been of some use. Bessarion died shortly after Zoe's marriage and so her brothers lost his protection. The boys were over-educated for what life in Italy had to offer them.   Andreas tried to auction off his title to the throne of Constantinople. Manuel left to visit the important courts, looking for a job or an allowance, but no one offered him enough to maintain the household he thought he should have. Andreas’ complicated life has been excellently described by Jonathan Harris. In 1476 Manuel went to Turkey where he was welcomed by Mehmed II and given a generous income. His own son converted to Islam.  


[More next week.]

These I have shored against my ruins

 

This is one of the five bookcases in my workroom, one of at least twenty-five or so in the house, but it is difficult to be definitive because a couple of rooms have them on three or four walls and under the windows. These are our warmth against the chill of an increasingly vulgarized culture, our tools, and our companions.

The bookcase closest to my desk hold books most used for current work -- several by friends, and the 15th-century historians: Sphrantzes, Doukas, Kritobulos, Chalkokondyles.  And of course, other things have fetched up there, like a stack of dissertations on top. The middle bookcase is books on Nauplion, Athens, Mistra, and Crete, plus 3 shelves of dictionaries, and one of other peoples' offprints. And other things.

 Some Athens, and a reminder of my roots.

The one nearest the door, the one pictured at the top, is art and architecture, while behind me and bumped when we open the door is Pierre's enormous collection of Greek texts.  The fifth is small and has more library books, books that should be shelved somewhere else, files and books for the next shared writing project.  Inter-library loan books unstack themselves on the floor among seven file boxes. There is also a bed, usually blanketed in books, so it hardly counts as a bed, though I managed to get it usable for visits from Nick Nicholas and Michael Pettinger, my authorities for medieval Greek and Latin.

My reminder from Theocritus: "It is not easy to find."
The "emeralds" are a 32-year family joke.

The floor has a very nice Persian-style carpet, though the degree of niceness is irrelevant as it is mostly covered by the boxes of files I am using for the Kladas book* which is processing slowly but surely.  Slowly, because I have been surprised by time.  Slowly, because I have written several long articles in the past year, most on material that I use in the book, and four speeches.  Slowly, because the fifteenth-century Morea was such a spirit-sucking culture that I find myself frequently drained. The accepted level of peacetime violence, the frequency of plague, the exploitations by the archon class, the corruption of a church organization that possessed one-third of the land and thus removed it from the tax base, the cultural misogyny, the evident despair of the Palaiologoi and their withdrawal from responsibility (always with the exception of Constantine), the dreariness of the Mistra intellectuals who could do little more than harp on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the Ottoman threat always present like a bad smell in the drains --these devour psychic energy and must have done so in the fifteenth century.

 Yeats wrote:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

.

 John, the Merbaka Virgin, the Palaiologoi,
a horseshoe from the barn my great-grandfather built in Alabama,

and my dear Ephraim Boms,** in a coma in Athens since September.

Nevertheless, I now know the Palaiologoi  at least as well as my own family.  Kladas I know no better than I did when I first wrote about him in my dissertation 13 years ago.  I have found previously unused information, and I have evolved ideas I have seen nowhere else, but the man himself resolutely remains a stranger to me.  I have gained no access to him through his peers though I have become admiring of Petro Bua. I have a sense of Demetrios Asan and Manuel Rallis, despite their repugnant personal activities; I have a certain sympathy, though dislike, for Demetrios Palaiologos, and a deep affection for Demetrios Pepagomenos. The great Bessarion, Cyriaco of Ancona (after all I have written about Cyriaco, I have no sense of him, either), and Giovanni Dario, have become my private Trinity.***  But there is a shell surrounding Kladas -- perhaps in compensation.

* The Knight and Death: The Kladas Affair and the Fifteenth-Century Morea.

** Ephraim Boms, after nearly a year in a coma, died on August 7, 2011. A Reader at St. Paul's Anglican Church in Athens, he had been preparing to study for ordination as a minister.  He leaves a wife, and daughter and son in Nigeria.

*** I notice that these are all people for whom I have contemporary portraits, though Cyriaco looks nothing like I had pictured him.  I wonder how much that matters?