Durant continues.
Dowered with the revenues of the papacy Nicholas V sent agents to Athens, Constantinople, and divers cities in Germany and England to seek and buy or copy Greek or Latin manuscripts, pagan or Christian.
He installed a large corps of copyists and editors in the Vatican. He called almost every prominent humanist in Italy to Rome. Wrote Vespasiano in fond exaggeration: “All the scholars in the world came to Rome in the time of Pope Nicholas, partly of their own accord, partly at his request.”
He rewarded their work with the liberality of a caliph thrilled by music or poetry. The subdued Lorenzo Valla received 500 ducats ($12,500?) for putting Thucydides into Latin dress. Guarano da Verona received 1500 ducats for translating Strabo. Nicolo Perotti 500 for Polybius. Poggio was put to translating Diodorus Siculus. Theodorus Gaza was lured from Ferrara to make a new translation of Aristotle. Filelfo was offered a house in Rome, an estate in the country and 10,000 ducats to render into Latin the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Pope’s death, however prevented the execution of this Homeric enterprise. These rewards were so great that some scholars -- mirabile dictu – hesitated to accept them. The Pope overcame their scruples by playfully warning them: “Don’t refuse. You may not find another Nicholas.”
When an epidemic drove him from Rome to Fabriano he took his translators and copyists with him, lest any of them should succumb to the plague. Meanwhile he did not neglect what might be called the Christian classics. He offered five thousand ducats to anyone who would bring him the Gospel of St. Matthew in the original tongue. He engaged Giamozzo Manetti and George of Trebizond to translate Cyaril, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and other patrological literature.
He commissioned Maneri and aides to make a new version of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek. This, too, was frustrated by his death. These Latin translations were hurried and imperfect but they for the first time opened Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophen, Polybius, Diodorus, Appian, Philom, and Theophrastus to students who could not read Greek. Referring to these translators, Filelfo wrote: “Greece has not perished, but has migrated to Italy – which, in former days was called Greater Greece.”
Manetti, with greater gratitude than accuracy, calculated that more Greek authors were translated during the eight years of Nicholas’ pontificate than iu all the preceding five centuries.
We might not be reading all this if it were not for Nicholas. And many thanks to people who are multi-kingual.
Robby
