Étiquette : Cicero
Debunking Renaissance Fakenews — Part I: Fake Platonist Marsilio Ficino
by Karel Vereycken, august 2026
This article is the first of a three-part series:
I. Fake Platonist Marsilio Ficino and his Florentine “Platonic Academy” (below)
II. The Medici dynasty and Cosimo de’ Medici’s (coming)
III. Georgios Gemistos Plethon, his life and ambitions (coming)
As it is well known, I’m a passionate researcher and admirer of what goes under the label of “Renaissance.” I’ve researched quite extensively and over many years, creative artists such as Ghiberti, Verrocchio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
This summer, I read Alma Palmer‘s inspiring book “Inventing the Renaissance, Myths of the Golden Age.” 1 That title is in reality a wake-up call. Yes, there was a splendid unprecedented explosion of Greek and Latin studies combined with painting, sculpture and architecture invented by idealistic humanists that anybody visiting Italy, and Florence more particularly, can admire.
However there are also powerful myths invented (created out of hot air) by powerful factions of the oligarchy out to claim their own legitimacy (it was all me) and play down that of others.
As a starter, let’s examine the very common narrative about the Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos, who added the name “Plethon” (Plato) to his own name, who traveled in 1438, at the age of at least seventy-eight, to the Council of Ferrara–Florence, the ecumenical gathering that sought to heal the schism between the Orthodox and Latin churches. Plethon, it goes, brought with him the full works of Plato and inspired Cosimo de’ Medici to set up a “Platonic Academy” and have Plato’s works made available to the West.
“This is clearly one of those stories too good to be examined closely, and it has been repeated by nearly every scholar who has written on Florentine culture or Renaissance Platonism,” writes James Hankins who spent years trying to document the case. 2
Here is a rough sketch of the various points of the official narrative followed by my remarks and interrogations:
1) In 1438-39, at the Council of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici made acquaintance with the “Neoplatonic” philosopher George Gemistos Plethon.
Conclusive proof lacking. The sole and unique source of information for this supposed encounter of 1438-39 is Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the son of Cosimo’s physician. Ficino was not an eyewitness to the event. He was born in 1433 and was 5 years old when the Council of Florence started and reports on it only twice, the first time 24 years and the second time 52 years later. Admittedly, he could have gotten the story from his father, who was Cosimo’s medical doctor.
Complicating such an encounter would have arisen from the fact that Plethon spoke nothing but Greek, while Cosimo had zero command over Greek and very poor command over Latin. Cosimo, while reportedly admiring ancient Greek knowledge, never wrote poetry, orations or treatises. The only surviving letters are in Italian.
To understand Plethon, Cosimo would have required a good translator on top of Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy. But Bessarion, Plethon’s erudite pupil, was organizing, directing and managing on a day to day basis, together with Traversari and Cusa, the Ecumenical council.
Other than Ficino, not one single source of that period, even among the most ardent defenders and lackey’s of the Medicis, praises or even mentions Cosimo’s encounter with Plethon and his supposed plan to set up a Platonic Academy. Even Bessarion doesn’t spent a line on the subject.
The only rhetorical hints to a supposed encounter between Cosimo and Plethon, as well as his project to create a Platonic Academy appear in two writings of Ficino:
- 24 years after the Council of Florence in a letter to Cosimo de’ Medici written in September 1462;
- 52 years after the Council of Florence in Ficino’s preface to 1490 translation of the Enneads, the main work of the (evil neo-Platonic) Plotinus (who Roman Emperor Julien the Apostate tried to impose as a state religion at the end of the Roman Empire as an alternative to Christianity). The aim of that preface, was to please Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo the magnificent (1449-1492), and beg him to continue financing Ficino and his translations of Plotinus, which according to the latter, was nearly as ardently requested by Cosimo as that of the works of Plato.
Here is the critical passage of Ficino’s 1490 introduction to Plotinus’ Enneads :
“The Great Cosimo, the Father of his Country by senatorial decree, at the time when a council was being negotiated among the Greeks and Latins in Florence under Eugene IV [1438], frequently heard a Greek philosopher by the name of Gemistus Plethon disputing like another Plato on the Platonic mysteries. From his fervid lips Cosimo was straightway so inspirited, so ensouled, that from that time forth he conceived deep in his mind a kind of Academy, to give birth to it at the first opportune moment. Then, while that great Medici was intending in some sense to give birth to the great thing he had conceived, he destined me, the son of his favorite doctor Ficino, while still a boy, to [undertake] the labor, educating me from that day forth to this very thing.”
“Moreover, he labored that I should not only have all the books of Plato in Greek, but also the books of Plotinus. After this, in the year 1463, in the thirtieth year of my life, he commissioned me to translate, first, Thrice-Great Hermes, and thereafter Plato. Mercury I finished in a few months while Cosimo was still alive; Plato I had also begun at that time [1463]. Although he was also eager for Plotinus, he said nothing to me about translating it, lest he should appear to be weighing me down with too great a burden all at once. Such was the great man’s clemency to his own, such was his modesty towards all. Thus, I never thought, either in the manner of an inspired poet or in my own person, to approach Plotinus. But in the meantime Cosimo at length expressed-or rather impressed from on high-that which he had kept silent about while living on the earth.”
“At the moment when I was giving Plato to the Latin world to read, Cosimo’s heroic soul incited the heroic mind of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in some unknown way-Pico himself almost did not know how-to come to Florence. Pico, born in the very year [1463] I was starting on Plato, and coming to Florence the same day-almost the same hour-I was publishing him, after greeting me asked me immediately about Plato. To him I said, ‘Our Plato has today emerged onto our thresholds.’ Then he heartily congratulated [me] on this, and straightway-and neither I nor he knows whence the words came-he led, or rather impelled me to translate Plotinus. Surely a divine cause brought it to pass that the hero Pico should be born while Plato was being, as it were, reborn-Saturn being then in the house of Aquarius as it was when I was born thirty years previously-and that he should come to Florence on the very day our Plato was published, and that he should inspire me in a marvelous fashion with Cosimo’s vow about Plotinus which had been quite hidden from me, but which was revealed by heavenly means to him.” 3
What is a proven fact is that Plethon (c. 1355-1452) did meet with Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), the chancellor of Florence at that time, who had translated himself several Greek manuscripts including Aristotle and Plato. Leonardo Bruni’s translations of the Phaedo, Apology, Crito, and Phaedrus were made only shortly before Gemistos visit. Bruni had studied Greek under the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415) who had been invited to teach Greek in Florence by Coluccio Salutati (1341-1406), a friend and admirer of Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375).
Thanks to Chrysoloras’ activity a number of new Latin of Platonic writings began to appear under the name of his students, Bruni, Umberto Decembrio, and Cencio de’ Rustici, who translated between them ten Platonic dialogues, including the Gorgias, Crito, Apology, Phaedo and the Republic.
According to historian N.G. Wilson, Plethon, during his stay in Florence acquainted the Italian geographer Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1482) with the extensive travels, writings and mapping of the Greek geographer Strabo (1st century BC/AD), hitherto unknown in Italy but crucial for elaborating his famous map that later fell in the hands of Columbus. What is known is that Strabo’s works became an integral part of Bessarion’s library.
2) At the invitation of his humanist friends, including Cosimo, Plethon engaged in private lectures explaining the difference between Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Plato was far more compatible with Christian doctrine.
Conclusive proof lacking. During the Council, Gemistos found that he had free time because much of the counciliar discussion concerned theological minutiae that did not require the presence of a secular sage. Even if Ficino claims Cosimo assisted “frequently” at Plethon’s lectures, there is close to zero evidence they ever took place. What is known is that Plethon wrote a treaty on the difference between Aristotle and Plato, commonly known as De Differentiis. A decade later, Plethon described the circumstances in which he composed his book without ever mentioning it was a follow-up to his lectures:
“That work was not composed as a result of thorough research . . . but at a time when I had been indisposed at Florence and was unable for several days to go out of the house where I was staying; perhaps, too, because I was bored, and was trying at one and the same time to relieve my boredom and to do a favor to those who were interested in Plato. Thus I wrote that work in the briefest form…” 4
C. M. Woodhouse, author of the 416 pages book “George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes” (1986) 5 writes that most claims about this event should be considered as pure speculation. For him:
“The impact of Plethons lectures on the Italians remains hard to assess. Very few of them left any record of their impressions; none of them is more than superficial and secondhand. The case of Cosimo de’ Medici, recorded by Ficino, is the only major exception; an additional but minor one is Grigorio Tifernate. Although De Differentiis was written for the benefit of Italian humanists,‘ none can be named who read it in Plethons life-time. But there is a strong tradition that Plethon impressed many westerners by his personality and learning.” 6
3) Plethon brought with him to Florence a manuscript with all of Plato’s works
Yes. Plethon carried with him many Greek manuscripts. They included the entire works of Plato but also those of the (toxic neoplatonists) Plotinus and Porphyry as well as the Chaldean Oracles (more on that in Part III).
4) Captivated, Cosimo bought the Plato manuscripts from Plethon
No. There is no proof Cosimo was given or bought these manuscripts from Plethon. The latter took many books back with him to Mystras, Greece, after having allowed scribes in Florence to copy them. His most famous student, Cardinal Bessarion, later collected Plethon’s original autographs and manuscripts. Bessarion, not trusting Medici rule over Florence and demanding very precise conditions for conservation, donated his vast collection to the Republic of Venice, forming the foundation of the famous Biblioteca Marciana.
5) Cosimo gave manuscripts of Plato’s works to Marsilio Ficino to have them translated into Latin
Yes, but. 24 years after the Council of Florence, in 1462, Cosimo, seeing his life coming to an end, supplied the 29 years old Ficino with various Greek manuscripts of Plato’s work, whereupon Ficino started translating the entire corpus into Latin. The draft translation of the entire set of dialogues was finished six to seven years later, around 1468–69. In December 1473, Ficino, age 40, is ordained a priest and gave priority to writing and getting printed his own writings, among which the Platonic Theology and On the Christian Religion.
Plato had to wait and Ficino’s translation of the Complete Works of Plato (Platonis Opera Omnia), thirty-six in all, will only be printed in Florence in 1484 –46 years after the Council of Florence– by the press of the Dominican monastery of San Jacopo di Ripoli, the first printshop to employ women (Dominican nuns) as typesetters. The cost of printing 1,025 copies was not financed by Lorenzo de’ Medici (who passed away in 1492) to whom the translation was dedicated, but by two prominent Florentine patrons and humanists: Filippe Valori and Francesco Berlinghieri. Once produced, Lorenzo did circulate the books in which he appeared prominently. A much-improved second edition was printed in Venice in 1491 by Bernardinus de Choris de Cremona and Simon de Luere for Andreas Torresanus de Asula.
Since the Medici’s wanted to keep the spread of ideas under their control. Therefore they favored handmade codices crafted by professional scribes over mass-produced print. At that time, the price of a manuscript varied wildly—from a few florins for a simple, unadorned text to hundreds of florins or the equivalent of several months to years of wages for an elaborately illuminated luxury volume. With that Medici policy, Florence, the epicenter of the Renaissance, ended up as being one of the last ones in Italy to have modern printing shops !
Paul Oskar Kristeller, who spend years researching on Ficino, gives the following account about why the entire process took so many years:
“Marsilio Ficino, born in 1433, did not begin to learn Greek until 1456 (at age 23 years) and we have no specific information on the content and progress of his studies during the following years. We have a number of Greek manuscripts owned and annotated by Ficino, and a number of translations from the Greek surely or probably made by him, and some of them may belong to this early period, but none of them is dated. At the time when Cosimo de’ Medici gave Ficino a house in Careggi which the latter chose to call his Academy, in September, 1462, he celebrated the event with the translation of an Orphic hymn.” 7
Kristeller confirms that Cosimo asked Ficino to put on hold his translations of Plato, and translate first the writings of Hermes Trismegistus:
“In April, 1463, Ficino completed his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, after having spent only a few months on it. We know from Ficino’s own words that he began his translation of Plato at that time, after having finished the version of the Hermetica, that he did so at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici, and that he had at his disposal, since 1462, two Greek manuscripts of Plato, a complete one which belonged to Cosimo, and a partial one owned by Amerigo Benci. » 8
As suggested by Kristeller in this paragraph, at the demand of Cosimo, Ficino translated first a collection of Hellenistic Greek documents brought to Pistoia in 1460 by Leonardo da Pistoia later called Hermetica (texts attributed to the legendary Hellenistic figure Hermes Trismegistus). Later, Ficino will also translate the writings of many of the (toxic) Neoplatonists, including Porphyry, Iamblichus, and especially Plotinus.
When Cosimo died on August 1, 1464, Ficino had translated ten Platonic dialogues, nine of them before January 11, and by April 1, 1466, twenty-three dialogues were ready.
After that date, we have no specific information on the progress of the translation, but it is probable that Ficino had completed the first draft of the entire work by 1468 or 1469. However, he wanted to subject the translation to a thorough revision, and hence refused to have it circulate.
Occupied with his Platonic Theology and several other writings, Ficino did not attend to the revision of his Plato translation for several years. He probably began to revise it around 1477, and had finished the revision in 1482 when he allowed it to be copied for others.
In 1483, Ficino sent the entire translation to the printer, apparently after having revised it once more, and finally the first printed edition of Plato appeared in October 1484. Although it had been carefully seen through the press by Ficino, it was necessary to append to it a long list of corrections.
The second edition, printed in Venice 1491, was not supervised by Ficino, but inserted the corrections in the text and hence is considered more accurate. From these two early editions all later ones are derived, although they may have been altered by some of the editors.” 9
The story goes that while other companions at Cosimo’s sickbed read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (with humanist commentaries) during his prolonged illness, Ficino read some of his newly made Latin translations of Plato’s works to comfort and entertain Cosimo in his final hours. But Cosimo’s Latin, as said before, was poor.
6) Plato’s works were largely unknown till then in the West.
Yes and No. Ficino was far from being the first translator of Platonic dialogues, he rather represents the culminating point of translation activity during the fifteenth century. The Greek text has come down to us in a number of manuscripts, and it was printed for the first time by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1513.
Before the Renaissance, the Western world was very limited in its access to Plato’s writings. It inherited from Roman antiquity only two partial renderings of the Timaeus made by Cicero and Calcidius, and a number of shorter testimonia in Cicero’s philosophical writings, St. Augustine, and other works of Latin philosophy. During the 12th and 13th centuries, when most works of Aristotle were translated into Latin, the reader acquired only the nearly unintelligible versions of the Phaedo and the Meno, translated by Henricus Aristippus, and a partial version of the Parmenides, translated with Proclus’ commentary by William of Moerbeke. This was all that a Latin student was able to read of Plato up to about 1400, including Petrarch, who owned sixteen Greek manuscripts of Plato that reached the West in modern times, but who was not able to read them.
7) Cosimo asked Ficino to set up a “Platonic Academy”
Conclusive proof lacking. Historian James Hankins is very skeptical about that:
“We may begin by pointing out the general implausibility of the thesis that Cosimo ever founded or wanted to found a new Platonic Academy. It is striking, in the first place, that in none of the numerous works in laudem Cosmi written by humanists during the last decade of his life and after his death is Cosimo ever praised for having re-founded the Platonic Academy in Florence. A volume of ricordanze about Cosimo put together by his son Piero, for instance, though it includes dozens of consolatory letters from various princes, prelates, humanists and fellow citizens praising Cosimo’s magnificence, does not mention even once his project to re-found the Platonic Academy or his collations with Pletho.
Even the letter of Cardinal Bessarion, Plethons student, does not mention the creation of the new Academy. At least four of the poets commonly identified as members of the Florentine Academy wrote poems in praise of Cosimo-indeed, Amerigo Corsini wrote an epic poem in three books of which the third was devoted to praising Cosimo’s cultural patronage-but none of these poets mentions his founding of a Florentine Academy.” 10
Another way to understand Ficino and his « academy » is to examine the various ways he uses the word “academy” and its variants. What one finds is that Plato’s dialogues themselves could be referred to as an “academy,” rich with precious teachings as they were. An “academy” could be a private school organized to teach youths, though not necessarily located in one specific place or devoted to one doctrinal tradition. And the word “academy” could refer to regular meetings of literary men. Ficino’s “academy” seems to have been more associated with the first two meanings of the word. Rather than leading a regular gathering in a specific place, Ficino preferred to teach Florence’s elite youth when he could and, as a Socratic, philosophical friend, to try to draw out of his associates the better part of their natures in conversation.
8) For that purpose, Cosimo offered funding and a part of his private villa in Carregi close to Florence
Unclear. Cosimo in 1463 gave Ficino a small property in Careggi with a domicile (“cum domo pro laboratore et hoste et terris laboratis,”) as the document in the State Archive of Florence puts it. There is also a letter from Ficino to Cosimo from September of 1462, in which Ficino writes: “spiritedly do I devote myself to the Academy you arranged for us on the estate in Careggi, as if I worship rightly at a kind of shrine of contemplation”
These two sources allow the inference that, while the specific gift of property did not occur until 1463, Ficino and his cohort met at least once on Medici property in the hills outside Florence. There is another document, again from 1462, which shows that he received a house in the city of Florence as a gift from Cosimo, which was then rented out, so that Ficino received the income from the rent.
9) The activities of Ficino’s “Platonic Academy” promoted Platonism in the West and kicked of the Renaissance.
Not by intention. The fact that the arrival of real Platonic ideas were a key incentive in the birth of the Renaissance, is indisputable. But the Renaissance started three generations BEFORE Ficino publishing his translations. The reason that the Plethon/Cosimo/Ficino narrative became dominant is because the Medici family compound, by history books and intense propaganda called their fake claim pretending that THEY were the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and authors of the Renaissance.
In reality, what the Medici mafia wants us to forget is the fact that Plato and Classical Greek wisdom were injected in Italy and Europe by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and their immediate followers Salutati, Bruni, Traversari and Nicholas of Cusa. It were the latter who motivated and paid the main collectors of Greek manuscripts, mostly over the entire period leading up to the Council of Florence:
- Manuel Chrysoloras (1350-1415), a greek scholar, humanist, philosopher and translator of ancient Greek texts. Serving as the ambassador for the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, he became a renowned teacher of Greek literature and history in Florence and Venice. In 1396, Coluccio Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence invited Chrysoloras to teach Greek grammar and literature. In a letter to Poggio Bracciolini, quoting the Roman lawyer and statesman Cicero, Salutati wrote: « The verdict of our own Cicero confirms that we Romans either made wiser innovations than theirs by ourselves or improved on what we took from them, but of course, as he himself says elsewhere with reference to his own day: « Italy is invincible in war, Greece in culture. » For our part, and we mean no offence, we firmly believe that both Greeks and Latins have always taken learning to a higher level by extending it to each other’s literature
- Guarino da Verona (1374-1460), a student of Chrysoloras who spent years studying in Constantinople and returned to Italy with numerous Greek codexes, founding a major educational system based on classical Greek and Latin learning.
- Niccolò Niccoli (1364-1437): Niccoli rarely left Florence. Instead, he stayed behind to fund Poggio’s expeditions, receive the recovered texts, and painstakingly transcribe them into his beautiful, efficient handwriting—a style that directly invented modern Italic script. Noteworthy is the fact that when Niccoli had spent so much on books that he was close to bankruptcy, Cosimo de’ Medici bailed him out. In exchange, Cosimo got a hand on Niccoli’s collection of manuscripts which he used for the first public library in Europe, an idea first conceptualized by Pala Strozzi, the richest man of Italy before Cosimo but exiled by the latter.
- Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), a Sicilian humanist who traveled to the East and returned to Italy in 1423 with a massive haul of 238 Greek manuscripts, among which all the works of Plato and work of Proclus, and various Greek historians and poets.
- Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459): As a papal secretary, Poggio used his travels to church councils to gain access to remote monasteries. He famously rediscovered Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things, which preserved ancient Greek Epicurean philosophy, though written in Latin), as well as lost works by Cicero, Quintilian, and Vitruvius;
- Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), a diplomat and scholar who collected a substantial library of Greek manuscripts while living in Constantinople before bringing them back to Italy.
- Cardinal Bessarion (1403-1472), a Byzantine scholar who was a close friend of Cusa and who later converted to Catholicism and gathered a vast library of over 500 Greek manuscripts (which eventually formed the core of the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice), saving countless philosophical and scientific texts from destruction.
Conclusion
Finally, looking at what was produced by the “Platonic Academy”, it has to be noted that both Ficino and even more his most important pupil Pico della Mirandola, became fervent supporters of the Dominican priest Savonarola. The latter called the Florentines to burn all their luxury goods leading them to sin. The books of the Plato-loving Boccaccio were thrown into the fire. Renaissance paintings were burned with Sandro Botticelli himself throwing some of his works in the giant fire burning, both as a spiritual catharsis and carnaval. It was Ficino’s favorite pupil Pico della Mirandola which convinced Lorenzo de Medici to allow Savonarola to enter Florence and present his doom day speeches.
Once it became clear that Savonarola was captivating growing anti-Medici sentiment, Ficino, to preserve his financial backing from the Medicis, retracted and felt obliged to criticize Savonarola who was violently attacking Medici rule. Savonarola criticized Ficino’s heavy reliance on magic and astrology.
Ficino only escaped from the Inquisition, who didn’t like Ficino’s mixture of Platonism, magic and Christianity, because Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wife, a scion of the Roman Orsini family and as such a part of the deep state ruling from above, intervened to prevent him getting sentenced. Savonarola was burned at the stake, not for theological heresy, mut for creating political uproar. But the extremism he unleashed was so threatening that Lorenzo’s successor, Piero the unfortunate (1472-1503), according to recent research, most likely poisoned by arsenic Pico della Mirandola and the poet Politiano, another pupil and friend of Ficino, both considered too much related to the wild Dominican.
Main points of argument:
- Yes, real Platonism, together with augustinian christianity, promoted the image of « Renaissance » man, a free creative being as created as a living image of the creator.
- Thanks to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Bruni, Traversari and Cusa, studies of Greek and Latin bloomed in Florence and kiscked off a “Renaissance” at the beginning of the 15th century (construction of the gates of the Baptistry by Ghiberti) an elan that culminated with the construction of the Dome and the 1438 Council of Florence.
- Plethon was not the first to bring the full works of Plato to the West, they arrived in 1423 thanks to a collaborator of Nicholas of Cusa, Giovanni Aurispa.
- The translations of Plato’s work by the neo-Platonist (Plotinist) Marsilio Ficino, requested by Cosimo de’ Medici, only arrived at the end of the century (1484), that is AFTER the “Golden” Renaissance. They were not causing what happened before.
- Ficino and his loyal follower Pico della Mirandola ended up backing the Renaissance book and art burning dominican monk Savonarola.
- The Medici family fabricated a fairy tale (storytelling, propaganda, narrative) pretending it was them (Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici) which initiated the Renaissance whose splendor they mainly wanted to appropriate for their own dynastic glory. But yes, without spending too much money, through various channels, and for their own reasons, the Medicis did keep financially afloat Ghiberti, Uccello, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli and Michelangelo. But one should remember: the amount of money spent for the golden frames of paintings was at least five times higher than that received by the artist. And, Leonardo da Vinci, the archetype of the creative Renaissance genius said: « The Medici created and destroyed me. » (Li medici mi crearono e distrussono) (see part II coming soon)
Works consulted:
- Debolt, Darien C. George Gemistos Plethon on God: Heterodoxy in Defense of Orthodoxy, University of Oklahoma:
- Diller, Aubrey. The autographs of Georgius Gemistus Pletho. Scriptorium, Tome 10 n°1, 1956. pp. 27-41;
- Hankins, James, The Myth of the Florentine Academy, Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3, 1991;
- Hankins, James, Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 53 (1990), pp. 144-162. Published by the Warburg Institute;
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Marsilio Ficino as a beginning student of Plato. Scriptorium, Tome 20 n°1, 1966. pp. 41-54;
- Palmer, Ada, Inventing The Renaissance, Myths of a Golden Age, Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury Publishing 2025;
- Papacostas A., George, George Gemistos-Plethon, an overview of his life and thought with a comprehensive bibliography, Harrisburg, PA, 1979;
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Marsilio Ficino, 2024
- Vanhaelen Maude. Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Eutyphro. In Scriptorium, Tome 56 n°1, 2002. pp. 20-47;
- Vereycken Karel, The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance, Artkarel.com, 2021;
- Vereycken Karel, Albrecht Dürer’s Fight Against Neo-Platonic Melancoly, Artkarel.com, 2005;
- Vereycken Karel, How Neo-Platonism gave Plato a Bad Name, Artkarel, 2005;
- Wilson, N. G., From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Bloomsbury Publishing.
- Woodhouse, C.M., George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes, Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1986;
Footnotes:
- Palmer, Ada, Inventing The Renaissance, Myths of a Golden Age, Head of Zeus, Bloomsbury Publishing 2025; ↩︎
- Hankins, James, Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 53 (1990), pp. 144-162. Published by the Warburg Institute; ↩︎
- As quoted by James Hankins, Ibid; ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., George Gemistos Plethon, The Last of the Hellenes, Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1986. ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., Ibid.; ↩︎
- Woodhouse, C.M., Ibid.; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Marsilio Ficino as a beginning student of Plato. In: Scriptorium, Tome 20 n°1, 1966. pp. 41-54; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Ibid.; ↩︎
- Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Ibid.; ↩︎
- Hankins, James, Ibid.; ↩︎
The ancient practice of debt cancellation
This article in RUSSIAN (pdf)
Cet article en FRANCAIS (en ligne)
While anyone with a modicum of rationality knows that a huge proportion of the world’s debts are absolutely unpayable, it’s a fact that today any debt cancellation, however odious or illegitimate, remains taboo.
By Karel Vereycken, December 2020.
Debt repayment is presented by heads of state and government, central banks, the IMF and the mainstream press as imperative, inevitable, indisputable, compulsory. Citizens have elected their governments, so they must resign themselves to paying the debt. For not to pay is more than violating a symbol: it is to exclude oneself from civilization, and to renounce in advance any new credit that is granted only to « good payers ». What counts is not the effectiveness of the act, but the expression of one’s « good faith », i.e. one’s willingness to submit to the strongest. The only possible discussion is how to modulate the distribution of the necessary sacrifices.
It seems that the ultra-liberal, monetarist model that has been surreptitiously imposed on us is that of the Roman Empire: zero debt for states and cities, and no debt forgiveness for citizens!
In his treatise on Duties (De officiis), written in 44-43, Cicero, who had just quelled a revolt by people demanding a debt remission, justifies the radical nature of his policy towards indebtedness:
« What does the establishment of new debt accounts [i.e., remission] mean, if not that you buy land with my money, that you have this land, and that I don’t have my money? That’s why we have to make sure there are no debts, which can harm the state. There are many ways of avoiding it, but if there are debts, not in such a way that the rich lose their property and the debtors acquire the property of others. Indeed, nothing maintains the State more strongly than good faith (fides), which cannot exist if there is no need to pay one’s debts. Never has anyone acted more forcefully to avoid paying their debts than under my Consulate. It was attempted by men of all kinds and ranks, with weapons in hand, and by setting up camps. But I resisted them in such a way that this entire evil was eliminated from the State. »
What has been carefully concealed is that another human practice has also existed: moratoria, partial and even generalized debt cancellations have taken place repeatedly throughout history and were carried out according to different contexts.
Often, proclamations of generalized debt cancellation were the initiative of self-preservation-minded rulers, aware that the only way to avoid complete social breakdown was to declare a « washing of the shelves » – those on which consumer debts were inscribed – cancelling them to start afresh.
The American anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt, the first 5000 years (2011), pointed out that the first word we have for « freedom » in any human language is Sumerian amargi, meaning freed from debt and, by extension, freedom in general, the literal meaning being « return to the mother » insofar as, once debts were cancelled, all debt slaves could return home.
Debt cancellations were sometimes the result of bitter social struggles, wars and crises. What is certain is that debt has never been a detail of history.
David Graeber sums it up:
« For millennia, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors – disputes over the justice or injustice of interest payments, peonage, amnesty, property seizure, restitution to the creditor, confiscation of sheep, seizure of vineyards and the sale of the debtor’s children as slaves. And over the last 5,000 years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun in the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt registers – tablets, papyri, ledgers or other media specific to a particular time and place. (After which, the rebels generally attacked cadastres and tax registers.) »
And as the great ancient scholar Moses Finley was fond of saying,
« All revolutionary movements have had the same program: cancellation of debts and redistribution of land. »
Let us now examine some historical precedents for voluntary debt forgiveness.
Debt cancellation in Mesopotamia
The earliest known debt cancellation was proclaimed in Mesopotemia by Entemena of Lagash c. 2400 BCE.
One of his successors, Urukagina, who was the last ruler of the 1st Dynasty of Lagash, is known for his code of rules that includes debt cancelation.
Urukagina’s code is the first recorded example of government reform, seeking to achieve a higher level of freedom and equality by limiting the power of priesthood and a usurous land-owner oligarchy. Usury and seizure of property for debt payment were outlawed. « The widow and the orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful man ».
Similar measures were enacted by later Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian rulers of Mesopotamia, where they were known as « freedom decrees » (ama-gi in Sumerian).
This same theme exists in an ancient bilingual Hittite–Hurrian text entitled « The Song of Debt Release ».
The reign of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (located in present-day Iraq), began in 1792 BC and lasted 42 years.
The inscriptions preserved on a 2-meter-high stele in the Louvre are known as the « Hammurabi Code ». It was placed in a public square in Babylon. If it is a long, very severe code of justice, prescribing the application of the law of retaliation (« an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth »), its epilogue nevertheless proclaims that « the powerful cannot oppress the weak, justice must protect the widow and the orphan (…) in order to render justice to the oppressed ».
Hammurabi, like the other rulers of the Mesopotamian city-states, repeatedly proclaimed a general cancellation of citizens’ debts to public authorities, their high officials and dignitaries.
Thanks to the deciphering of numerous documents written in cuneiform, historians have found indisputable evidence of four general debt cancellations during Hammurabi’s reign (at the beginning of his reign in 1792, in 1780, in 1771 and in 1762 BC).
Babylonian society was predominantly agricultural. The temple and palace, and the scribes and craftsmen they employed, depended for their sustenance on a vast peasantry from whom land, tools and livestock were rented.
In exchange, each farmer had to offer part of his production as rent. However, when climatic hazards or epidemics made normal production impossible, producers went into debt.
The inability of peasants to repay debts could also lead to their enslavement (family members could also be enslaved for debt).
The Hammurabi Code obviously wanted to change this. Article 48 of the Code of Laws states:
« Whoever owes a loan, and a storm buries the grain, or the harvest fails, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, need not give any grain to the creditor that year, he wipes the tablet of the debt in the water and pays no interest for that year. »
This ideal of justice is notably supported by the terms kittum, « justice as the guarantor of public order », and « justice as the restoration of equity. » It was asserted in particular during the « edicts of grace » (designated by the term mîsharum), a general remission of public and private debts in the kingdom (including the release of people working for another person to repay a debt).
Thus, to preserve the social order, Hammurabi and the ruling power, acting in their own interests and in the interests of society’s future, periodically agreed to cancel all debts and restore the rights of peasants, in order to save the threatened old order in times of crisis, or as a kind of reset at the beginning of a sovereign’s reign.
Proclamations of general debt cancellation are not confined to the reign of Hammurabi; they began long before him and continued afterwards. There is evidence of debt cancellations as far back as 2400 BC, six centuries before Hammurabi’s reign, in the city of Lagash (Sumer); the most recent date back to 1400 BC in Nuzi.
In all, historians have accurately identified some thirty general debt cancellations in Mesopotamia between 2400 and 1400 BC.
These proclamations of debt cancellation were the occasion for great festivities, usually during the annual spring festival. Under the Hammurabi dynasty, the tradition of destroying the tablets on which debts were written was established.
In fact, the public authorities kept precise accounts of debts on tablets kept in the temple. Hammurabi died in 1749 BC after a 42-year reign. His successor, Samsuiluna, cancelled all debts to the state and decreed the destruction of all debt tablets except those relating to commercial debts.
When Ammisaduqa, the last ruler of the Hammurabi dynasty, acceded to the throne in 1646 BC, the general cancellation of debts he proclaimed was very detailed. The aim was clearly to prevent certain creditors from taking advantage of certain families. The annulment decree stipulates that official creditors and tax collectors who have expelled peasants must compensate them and return their property, on pain of execution.
After 1400 BC, no deeds of debt cancellation have been found, as the tradition has been lost. Land was taken over by large private landowners, and debt slavery returned.
In Egypt
In Ancient Egypt interest-bearing debt did not exist for most of its history. When it started spreading in the Late Period, the rulers of Egypt regulated it and a number of debt remissions are known to have occurred during the Ptolemaic era, including the one whose proclamation was inscribed on the Rosetta Stone.
Now on display at the British Museum in London, the « Rosetta Stone » was discovered on July 15, 1799 at el-Rashid (Rosetta) by one of Napoleon’s soldiers during the Egyptian campaign. It contains the same text written in hieroglyphs, demotic (Egyptian cursive script) and Greek, giving Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) the key to the passage from one language to another.
This was a decree issued by Pharaoh Ptolemy V on March 27, 196 BC, announcing an amnesty for debtors and prisoners. The Greek Ptolemy dynasty that ruled Egypt institutionalized the regular cancellation of debts.
It was perpetuating known practices, since Greek texts mention that Pharaoh Bakenranef, who ruled Lower Egypt from c. 725 to 720 BC, had promulgated a decree abolishing debt slavery and condemning debt imprisonment.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THE PHARAOH’S DECREE
ON THE ROSETTA STONE:
Assembled the Chief Priests and Prophets there and those who enter the inner temple to worship the gods, and the Fanbearers and Sacred Scribes and all the other priests of the temples of the earth who have come to meet the king at Memphis, for the feast of the Assumption of PTOLEMEE, THE LIVING FOREVER, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS, the successor of his father, All assembled in the temple of Memphis on this day when it was declared:
“that King PTOLEMEE, THE LIVING FOREVER, THE BELOVED OF PTAH, THE GOD EPIPHANES EUCHARISTOS, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoe, the Philopator Gods, both benefactors of the temple and those who dwell therein, as well as their subjects, being a god from a god and the goddess loves Horus the son of Isis and Osiris who avenged his father Osiris by being favorably disposed towards the gods, delivered to the revenues of the temples silver and corn and undertook much expenditure for the prosperity of Egypt, and the maintenance of the temples, and was generous to all out of his own resources ;
“and exempted them from some of the revenues and taxes levied in Egypt and alleviated others so that his people and all others could be in prosperity during his reign ;
“and that he cleared the debts to the crown for many Egyptians and for the rest of the kingdom; ”
The existence of this decree therefore confirms that the practice had existed for many centuries.
The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (Ist Century BC) provides the following rationale for abolishing the debt bondage by Pharaoh Bakenranef:
« For it would be absurd… that a soldier, at the moment perhaps when he was setting forth to fight for his fatherland, should be haled to prison by his creditor for an unpaid loan, and that the greed of private citizens should in this way endanger the safety of all »
As one can see here, one of the very pragmatic reasons for debt cancellation was that the Pharaoh wanted to have a peasantry capable of producing enough food and, if need be, able to take part in military campaigns. For both of these reasons, it was important to ensure that peasants were not expelled from their lands under the thumb of creditors.
In another part of the region, the Assyrian emperors of the 1st millennium BC also adopted the tradition of debt cancellation.
In Greece: Solon of Athens
In Greece, the Athenian lawmaker Solon (c. 638 BC–558 BC), in order to rectify the widespread serfdom and slavery that had run rampant by the 6th century BCE, introduced a set of laws nown as the Seisachtheia introducing debt relief.
Before Solon, according to the account of the Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Aristotle, debtors unable to repay their creditors would surrender their land to them, then becoming hektemoroi, i.e. serfs who cultivated what used to be their own land and gave one sixth of produce to their creditors. However, should the debt exceed the perceived value of debtor’s total assets, then the debtor and his family would become the creditor’s slaves as well. The same would result if a man defaulted on a debt whose collateral was the debtor’s personal freedom. The fight for debt relief and the fight to abolish slavery were in practice identical.
Solon’s seisachtheia laws immediately cancelled all outstanding debts, retroactively emancipated all previously enslaved debtors, reinstated all confiscated serf property to the hektemoroi, and forbade the use of personal freedom as collateral in all future debts. The laws instituted a ceiling to maximum property size – regardless of the legality of its acquisition (i.e. by marriage), meant to prevent excessive accumulation of land by powerful families.
In the Torah and Old Testament
Social justice, particularly in the form of forgiving debts that shackle the poor to the rich, is a leitmotif in the history of Judaism. It was practiced in Jerusalem in the 5th century BC.
The writing of the Torah was completed at this time. Deuteronomy, 15 states:
The Year for Canceling Debts
15 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.
2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.
3 You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you.
4 However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you,
5 if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.
6 For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.
7 If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them.
8 Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need.
9 Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.
10 Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to.
11 There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.
Thus, the Israelites were obliged to free Hebrew slaves who had sold themselves to them for debt, and to offer them some of the produce of their small livestock, their fields and their wine presses, so that they would not return home empty-handed.
As the law is too rarely applied, Leviticus reaffirms it by modulating it:
The Year of Jubilee
8 “‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years.
9 Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land.
10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.
11 The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines.
12 For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.
13 “‘In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.
14 “‘If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other.
15 You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops.
16 When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops.
17 Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the Lord your God.
Today, some will tell you that under these conditions, a year before the jubilee date, credit would necessarily be scarce and expensive, and that debt would thus find its limit!
This is a mistake, because to ensure that the law is followed, the codes describe in detail how purchases and sales of goods between private individuals must be carried out according to the number of years elapsed since the previous jubilee (i.e., the number of years remaining before the goods must be returned to their previous owner).
Another passage, this time from the prophet Jeremiah, vividly illustrates the scope of the law on the remission of debts.
Faced with the advance of enemy armies towards Jerusalem in 587 B.C., Jeremiah supports, in God’s name, the undertaking of King Zedekiah (then ruler of the Kingdom of Judea), who demands the immediate release of all those enslaved for debt from the powerful forces of his kingdom (Jer. 34:8-17).
Jeremiah forcefully recalls the ancient demand for the freeing of slaves… which the king, in fact, needs to patriotically reunite the social classes before the battle, and give himself sufficient troops free of all servile obligations!
A passage in the Book of (the prophet) Nehemiah (447 BC), the governor of Persian Judea under Artaxerxes I of Persia (465–424 BC), influenced by the ancient Mesopotamian tradition, also proclaims the cancellation of debts owed by indebted Jews to their rich compatriots.
The social situation Nehemiah discovered in Judea was appalling. To remedy the problem, Nehemiah placed the law of debt relief within a religious framework, the Covenant with Yahweh. From then on, it was God himself who commanded the forgiveness of debts and the liberation of slaves and their land, for the land belonged to God alone.
Nehemiah Helps the Poor
« Now the men and their wives raised a great outcry against their fellow Jews.
2 Some were saying, “We and our sons and daughters are numerous; in order for us to eat and stay alive, we must get grain.”
3 Others were saying, “We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards and our homes to get grain during the famine.”
4 Still others were saying, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards.
5 Although we are of the same flesh and blood as our fellow Jews and though our children are as good as theirs, yet we have to subject our sons and daughters to slavery. Some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but we are powerless, because our fields and our vineyards belong to others.”
6 When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry.
7 I pondered them in my mind and then accused the nobles and officials. I told them, “You are charging your own people interest!” So I called together a large meeting to deal with them
8 and said: “As far as possible, we have bought back our fellow Jews who were sold to the Gentiles. Now you are selling your own people, only for them to be sold back to us!” They kept quiet, because they could find nothing to say.
9 So I continued, “What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?
10 I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let us stop charging interest!
11 Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the money you are charging them—one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.”
12 “We will give it back,” they said. “And we will not demand anything more from them. We will do as you say.”
If we add to these passages the countless verses forbidding the lending of interest to fellow human beings and the taking of property as collateral, we get an idea of what the Israelites in the land of Canaan had put in place to try and maintain a certain social equilibrium.
Alas, in the first century AD, debt forgiveness and the freeing of slaves from debt were swept away from all Near Eastern cultures, including Judea.
The social situation there had deteriorated to such an extent that Rabbi Hillel was able to issue a decree requiring debtors to sign away their right to debt forgiveness.
In the Bible and New Testament
What happened to debt forgiveness in the New Testament?
While the Acts of the Apostles and the writings of the Fathers of the Church sometimes express a great docility, Jesus’ position on the forgiveness of debts, as reported repeatedly and most forcefully in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 4:16-21, appears to be marked by a revolutionary prophetic breath.
Luke places the passage at the beginning of Jesus’ public life. He makes it a key to everything that follows.
16 Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read,
17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.
21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Let’s not forget that the « year of the Lord’s favor (Jubilee Year) » to which he called, demanded at once rest for the land, forgiveness of debts and the liberation of slaves.
In the midst of the slave-owning Roman Empire, which fiercely rejected the concept of debt forgiveness, Jesus’ declaration could only be seen as a declaration of war on the ruling system.
Before he was arrested, Jesus made a highly symbolic material gesture: he forcefully overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Jerusalem temple. For the Jewish high priests and the Roman authorities, this was too much.
Peace of Westphalia of 1648
In 1648, after five years of negotiations, led by the French diplomat Abel Servien on the instructions of Cardinal Mazarin, the “Peace of Westphalia” was signed, putting an end to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).
Long before the UN Charter, 1648 made national sovereignty, mutual respect and the principle of non-interference the foundations of international law.
But there was more. As we have documented, the peace deal also included the cancelation of debts that had become the very reason for continuing the war.
Unpayable, unsustainable and illegitimate debts, interests, bonds, annuities and financial claims, explicitly identified as fueling a dynamic of perpetual war, were examined, sorted out and reorganized, most often through the cancellation of debts (articles 13 and 35, 37, 38 and 39), through moratoria or debt rescheduling according to specific timetables (article 69).
Article 40 concludes that debt cancellations will apply in most cases, “and yet the Sums of Money, which during the War have been exacted bona fide, and with a good intent, by way of Contributions, to prevent greater Evils by the Contributors, are not comprehended herein. » (Implying that these debts would have to be honored.)
Finally, looking to the future, for Commerce to be “reestablished”, the treaty abolished many tolls and customs established by “private” authorities for they were obstacles to the exchange of physical goods and know-how and hence to mutual development. (Art. 69 and 70).
TREATY OF WESTPHALIA (1648)
Art. 13:
“Reciprocally, the Elector of Bavaria renounces entirely for himself and his Heirs and Successors the Debt of Thirteen Millions, as also all his Pretensions in Upper Austria; and shall deliver to his Imperial Majesty immediately after the Publication of the Peace, all Acts and Arrests obtain’d for that end, in order to be made void and null.”
Art. 35:
“That the Annual Pension of the Lower Marquisate, payable to the Upper Marquisate, according to former Custom, shall by virtue of the present Treaty be entirely taken away and annihilated; and that for the future nothing shall be pretended or demanded on that account, either for the time past or to come.”
In the United States
It is poorly known that in the United States, on three separate occasions, governments have successfully repudiated public debts owed to private bankers?
First, in the 1830s, four States repudiated their debts – Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida and Michigan. The creditors were mainly British.
The Russian born Alexander Nahum Sack (1890-1955), a professor of Russian law specialized in international financial legislation, wrote in this regard: “One of the main reasons justifying these repudiations was the squandering of the sums borrowed: they were usually borrowed to establish banks or build railways; but the banks failed and the railway lines were never built. These questionable operations were often the result of agreements between crooked members of the government and dishonest creditors.” (Les effets des transformations des États sur leurs dettes publiques et autres obligations financières : traité juridique et financier, Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1927, p. 158).
Second, and more importantly, following the American Civil War (1861-1865), the US Federal government summoned the Confederate States to repudiate the debts they had contracted in order to carry on the war.
In an article titled « The Rebel Debt », the New York Times, on Nov. 9, 1865, wrote the following:
« The debts of the Confederate Government, contracted for the purposes of war, and for all other purposes, were swept away when the Confederacy fell. All its currency, bills, bonds, treasury notes, and « promises to pay » of every kind, became worthless to the holders, even though those holders had given for them real property or services of a positive value. After the fall of Richmond, hundred-dollar bills, based on the faith and credit of the Confederacy, were sold for a nickel cent a piece, and thousand-dollar notes were exchanged evenly for three-cent shinplasters. There is little if any talk in any part of the South about assuming any part of this debt. Its magnitude is appalling, and the States of the South did not become responsible for it in their individual capacity. On its face it was declared to be payable upon the establishment of the independence of the Southern Confederacy — thus linking its fortunes with that of the rebel government; and it was but logical that the Confederacy’s credit should cease to have a value when the Confederacy itself ceased to have an existence. »
The creditors had purchased securities issued by European bankers on behalf of the Confederate States, mainly in London and Paris. Among the creditors was the German Banque Erlanger of Paris and its London subsidiary. The risk was remunerated by an interest rate of 7% per annum, relatively high for the period.
The Civil War debt held by individual Confederate states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) at the end of the war has been estimated at close to $67 million. Even larger, the debt of the Confederate States of America, which was reported to be $1.4 billion on October 1, 1864. And, if one adds in compensation for freed slaves (which was a rumored demand of Southerners), valued at $1.75 billion in 1860, the total bill the South might have presented to the North amounted to $3.2 billion.
And the The New York Times continued:
« But there has appeared in many of the States, and still appears in some of them, a strong party desirous of assuming the payment of the debts contracted by the various States individually, in aid of rebellion, and while members of the Confederacy.
« It is the repudiation of these which has been effected in Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and, as appears by this morning’s telegrams, also in Georgia, at the suggestion of the President; and it is the failure to repudiate this debt by South Carolina, which has disappointed the intelligent supporters of the President’s policy of reconstruction. This debt has been the subject of earnest debate in the Georgia State Convention now in session at Milledgeville; and it was in reference to this debate that the President (Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865) sent a dispatch to the Provisional Governor of Georgia, in which was pointedly and vigorously set forth the course that ought to be followed by the convention.
« He remarked: ‘The people of Georgia should not hesitate one single moment in repudiating every single dollar of debt created for the purpose of aiding the rebellion against the Government of the United States. It will not do to levy and collect taxes from a State and people that are loyal and in the Union to pay a debt that was created to aid in taking them out and subverting the Constitution of the United States. I do not believe the great mass of the people of the State of Georgia, when left uninfluenced, will ever submit to the payment of a debt which was the main cause of bringing on their past and present suffering, the result of the rebellion. Those who invested their capital in the creation of this debt must meet their fate, and take it as one of the inevitable results of the rebellion, though it may seem hard to them. It should at once be made known, at home and abroad, that no debt contracted for the purpose of dissolving the Union can or ever will be paid by taxes levied on the people for such purpose.’
« There was nothing in the Constitution preventing the United States from repudiating its own debt. Numerous individual states had done this in the past. In the 1840s, and within the memory of many, a number of states had defaulted on or totally repudiated their debts because of the stresses brought on by the panic of 1837. Now, twenty years later, after a civil war, why should not the United States follow their example and wipe the slate clean?«
In 1868, following the Civil War, Congress submitted to the states three amendments as part of its Reconstruction program to guarantee equal civil and legal rights to Black citizens.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, among its provisions, grants citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” thereby granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people.
And relevant for our discussion, section four of the 14th amendment stipulates that while the debt of the Union are considered legitimate and should be honored, those of the Confederacy are what one could call an « odious debt » and shouldn’t be paid.
“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion [by the Union], shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.«
As a result, the bondholders of Confederate debt were never repaid due to the repudiation decreed by the Federal government and the application of Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, since loans had served to finance the rebellion of the Southern States. It was the purpose of the loans, and above all the fact that they had been contracted by rebel forces, that was cited as justification. The reality was that imposing debt repayment would prevent any successful reconstruction policy, considered far more important.
Finally, a third wave of repudiations took place in the USA after 1877, when eight Southern States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee) repudiated their debts on the grounds that the bonds issued during the period between the end of the American Civil War and 1877 had been used for illicit loans to corrupt politicians (including former slaves) who were supported by the Northern States. This repudiation was decided by (racist) government officials (often members of the Democrat party) who had returned to power in the South after the withdrawal of the federal troops who occupied the South until 1877.
During the Cold War
In the United States, Eisenhower was elected in November 1952.
His Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, otherwise an evil man, noted that, despite the Marshall Plan, Europe, still burdened by a mountain of debt dating from before the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, was unable to regain momentum.
So much so that it is in danger of turning to the USSR!
Action was called for. In 1953, under the leadership of German banker Hermann Abs, a former Deutsche Bank executive, a major conference was organized in London.
It was decided to write off 66% of Germany’s 30 billion marks in debt.
It was wisely agreed that annual repayments of German debt should never exceed 5% of export earnings. Those wishing to have their debts repaid by Germany should instead buy its exports, enabling it to honor its debts.
In other words, nothing like the madness recently imposed on Greece to « save » the euro!
Although this was done in the name of geopolitical principles, i.e. « in favor of some » but « against others », once again, it was in the name of a better future, i.e. a Europe capable of being the showcase of capitalism in the face of Moscow, that we were able to shed the weight of the past.
The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance
By Karel Vereycken
Some friends asked me to elaborate on the following:
It is sometimes said that the introduction of Plato in the context of the Councils of Ferrara and Florence (1439) “triggered the explosion of the Italian Renaissance”.
And of the great humanist, the German Cardinal-philosopher Cusanus, it is said that he “brought to Florence Bessarion and Plethon, who were both Greek scholars of Plato and brought the entire works of Plato which had been lost in Europe for centuries”.
At the same time, goes the narrative, “the Medicis financed a crash program to translate the works of Plato. This excitement made the Italian Renaissance what it became”.
While Plato’s ideas and the renewal of greek studies did play a major role in triggering the European Renaissance, the preceding affirmations, as we shall document here, require some refinement.
Was the Italian Renaissance “triggered” by the Council of Florence?
Not really. It was rather –40 years earlier–, the “Greek language revival project” project of Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406), who would become the chancellor of Florence and invite the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to his city, that “triggered” a revival of Greek and Hebrew studies, which in return lead to the unification of the churches at the Council of Florence (1439).
The idea had regained interest from Petrarch and Boccaccio, which Salutati admired. Along with Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), it is undoubtedly the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) who best embodies the ideals guiding the humanists of the Renaissance.
All his life, it is said, Petrarch tried to
« rediscover the very rich teaching of classical authors in all disciplines and, starting from this sum of knowledge, most often scattered and forgotten, to revive and pursue the research that these authors had begun. »
After following his parents to Avignon, Petrarch studied in Carpentras where he learned grammar, then in Montpellier, rhetoric, and finally in Bologna, where he spent seven years at the school of jurisconsults.
However, instead of studying law, which in those days paved the way to a brilliant career, Petrarch secretly read all the classics hitherto known, including Cicero and Virgil, despite the fact that his father occasionally burned his books.
Petrarch and Barlaam of Samara
Under the pontificate of Benedict XII, Petrarch tried to learn Greek language with the help of a learned monk of the Order of St. Basil, Barlaam of Seminara (1290-1348), known as Barlaam the Calabrian, who came to Avignon in 1339 as ambassador of Andronic III Paleologus in an unsuccessful attempt to put an end to the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
A philosopher, theologian and mathematician, Barlaam, while having limited knowledge of Greek and Latin, was one of the first to wish that the study of the Greek language and philosophy be reborn in Europe.
In his Treatise On my own ignorance and that of many others (1367), Petrarch declared himself proud of his Greek manuscripts – and of his library in general – and expressed his deep admiration for Barlaam:
« I have at home sixteen works of Plato. I don’t know if my friends have ever heard the titles […]. And this is only a small part of Plato’s work, for I have seen, with my own eyes, a large number of them, especially in possession of the Calabrian Barlaam, a modern model of Greek wisdom who began to teach me Greek while I was still ignorant of Latin, and who might have done so successfully if death had not taken him away from me and hindered my honest plans, as usual.«
In 1350, two years after Barlaam’s death, Petrarch met the son of a banker, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). The latter, like Petrarch, fell in love with the Greek culture and language. In his youth, in Naples, he too had met Barlaam and learned a few words of Greek, meticulously copying alphabets and verses, adding the Latin translation and pronunciation indications.
Boccaccio and Leontius Pilatus
To increase his mastery of Greek, Boccaccio then called from Thessaloniki a disciple of Barlaam, Leontius Pilatus (died in 1366), an austere, ugly and very bad-tempered character. But this Calabrian lectured him on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and translated sixteen of Plato’s dialogues. How could one get angry with him?
Boccaccio offered him shelter and food for three years in his home and had a chair of Greek created for him in Florence, the first time ever!
Unfortunately, Pilatus did not really master this language. Although posing as a native Greek, the man had poor knowledge of ancient Greek and his translations never got beyond the level of word-for-word. As for the lessons he gave Petrarch, they were so brutal that he disgusted him forever.
This did not prevent Pilatus, at the insistence of Boccaccio, from translating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into Latin from a Greek manuscript sent to Petrarch by Nicolaos Sigeros, the Byzantine ambassador to Avignon.
Hence, history being what it is, it was thanks to this highly imperfect translation that Europe rediscovered one of the great founding works of its culture!
And on this fragile ground will rise a flame that will revolutionize the world.
« Was it not I, » writes Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods, « who had the glory and honor of employing the first Greek verses among the Tuscans? Was it not I who, through my prayers, led Pilatus to settle in Florence and who housed him there? I brought at my own expense copies of Homer and other Greek authors when none existed in Tuscany. I was the first of the Italians to whom Homer, in particular, was explained, and then I had him explained in public.«
The hunt for manuscripts
What is important is that during these encounters Petrarch created a cultural network covering the whole of Europe, a network reaching into the East.
He then asked his relations and friends, who shared his humanist ideals, to help him find in their respective country or province, the Latin texts of the ancients that the libraries of abbeys, individuals or cities might possess. In the course of his own travels, he found several major texts that had fallen into oblivion.
It is in Liege (Belgium) that he discovered the Pro Archia and in Verona, Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum and Ad Brutum, all by Cicero. During a stay in Paris, he got his hands on the elegiac poems of Propertius, then, in 1350, on a work by Quintilian. In a constant concern to restore the most authentic text, he subjected these manuscripts to meticulous philological work and made corrections by comparing them with other manuscripts. This is how he reconstructed the first and fourth decades of the Roman History of Titus Livius from fragments and restored some of Virgil’s texts.
These manuscripts, which he kept in his own library, later came out in the form of copies and thus became accessible to the greatest number of people. While acknowledging that the pagans lacked the « true faith, » Petrarch believed that when one speaks of virtue, the old and new worlds are not at war.
The « Circolo di Santo Spirito »
From the 1360s onwards, Boccaccio gathered a first group of humanists known as the « Circolo di Santo Spirito » (Circle of the Holy Spirit), whose name was borrowed from the 13th century Florentine Augustinian convent.
An embryonic form of a university, its Studium Generale (1284) was then at the heart of a vast intellectual center including schools, hospices and refectories for the needy.
Before his death in 1375, Boccaccio, who had recovered part of Petrarch’s library, bequeathed to the convent his entire collection of precious ancient books and manuscripts.
Then, in the 1380s and early 1390s, a second circle of humanists met daily in the cell of the Augustinian monk Luigi Marsili (1342-1394). The latter, who had studied philosophy and theology at the universities of Paris and Padua, where he already established contact with Petrarch in 1370, became friends with Boccaccio. Hence, by attending the Cercle Santo Spirito from 1375 onwards, Coluccio Salutati in turn fell in love with Greek studies.
By inviting the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to Florence to teach Ancient Greek, it was Salutati who gave the decisive impulse leading to the end of the schism between East and West and thus to the unification of the Churches, consecrated at the Council of Florence in 1439.
Roger Bacon
A century before Salutati, the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk residing in Oxford, author of one of the first Greek grammars, already called for such a « linguistic revolution ».
As wrote Dean P. Lockwood in Roger Bacon’s Vision of the Study of Greek (1919):
« Obviously, Greek was the master-key to the great storehouse of ancient knowledge, Hebrew and Arabic to lesser chambers. Furthermore, we must not forget that in Bacon’s day the superiority of the ancients was an indisputable fact. The modern world has outstripped the Greek and the Romans in countless ways; the medieval thinkers were still climbing toward the Hellenic standard.
« Three things were clear to Roger Bacon: the need of Greek, the contemporary ignorance of Greek, and the feasibility of acquiring Greek. The same may be said of Hebrew, but Bacon rightly put Greek first. Bacon’s program was simple:
« 1. Seek out the native Byzantine Greeks resident in Europe, preferably grammarians. The latter were very few, of course, but might be found in the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.
« 2. From these and from any other available sources let Greek books be sought. If this program were to be carried out, Bacon confidently prophetized that results would not be long in forthcoming.«
Leonardo Bruni
Manuel Chrysoloras, arrived in winter 1397, an event remembered by one of his most famous pupils, the humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) and later chancellor of Florence at the time of the Council of Florence, as a great new opportunity: there were many teachers of law, but no one had studied Greek in northern Italy for 700 years.
Thanks to Chrysoloras, Bruni and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder were able to read Aristotle and especially Plato in the original Greek version.
Until then, in Europe, Christians knew the names of Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato by their reading of the church fathers Origen, St. Jerome and St. Augustine.
The latter, in his City of God, did not hesitate to affirm that the « Platonists », that is Plato and those who assimilated his teaching (Plato et qui eum bene intellexerunt), were superior to all other pagan philosophers.
As we have demonstrated elsewhere, in particular in our study on Raphael and the School of Athens, it is to a large extent Plato’s optimistic and Promethean philosophical approach, for whom knowledge comes above all from the capacity for hypothesis and not from the mere testimony of the senses as Aristotle claims, that clearly provided the sap that allowed the Renaissance tree to offer humanity so many wonderful fruits.
Traversari’s humanist circle
The most famous pupil of Chrysoloras was Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), who became general of the Camaldolese order. Today honored as a saint by his order, Traversari was one of the first to conceptualize the type of “Christian Humanism” that would be promoted by Nicolaus of Cusa (Cusanus) and later Erasmus of Rotterdam (who framed the concept of “Saint-Socrates”) and the latter’s admirer Rabelais, uniting Plato with the Holy Scriptures, and the fathers of the Church.
Traversari, a key organizer of the Council of Florence, was also the personal protector of the great Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and of the architect of the Dome Filippo Brunelleschi.
According to Vespasiano de Bisticci, the court historian of the Court of Urbino, Traversari had weekly working sessions on Plato and Greek philosophy at the Santa Maria degli Angeli convent with the crème de la crème of European humanism in the fields of literature, theology, science, politics, architecture, infrastructure, urban planning, education and the fine arts. Among those :
- The German cardinal-philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus);
- Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the great physician and cartographer, also friend and protector of Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci.
- The erudite manuscript collector Niccolò Niccoli, adviser to Cosimo the Elder, heir to the Medici’s industrial and financial empire. Considered at the time to be the richest man in the West, Cosimo was one of the patrons of the sculptor Donatello;
- Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future humanist pope Pius II;
- Leonardo Bruni, the apostolic secretary of Pope Innocent VII and his three successors. He succeeded Coluccio Salutati at the chancellery of Florence (1410-1411 and 1427-1444).
- The Italian statesman Carlo Marsuppini, passionate about Greek Antiquity, and successor of Bruni as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence after the latter’s death in 1444.
- The philosopher, antiquarian and writer Poggio Bracciolini. After having advised no less than nine popes (!), he was appointed Chancellor of the Republic of Florence following the death of Marsuppini in 1453;
- The politician and ambassador Gianozzi Manetti. In love with ancient Greek and Hebrew, his circle includes the éducator Francesco Filelfo, the banker Palla Strozzi and the founder of the Vatican library Lorenzo Valla ;
Chrysoloras in Florence
Chrysoloras remained only a few years in Florence, from 1397 to 1400, teaching Greek, starting with the rudiments. He moved on to teach in Bologna and later in Venice and Rome. Though he taught widely, a handful of his chosen students remained a close-knit group, among the first humanists of the Renaissance. As said before, among his pupils one could count some of the foremost figures of the revival of Greek studies in Renaissance Italy.
Aside from Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari, they included Guarino da Verona and the Florentine banker Palla Strozzi (1372-1462), later the friend and protector of the sculptor and translator Lorenzo Ghiberti. It is worth noting that Strozzi paid part of Chrysoloras’ salary and had the books necessary for the new teaching brought from Constantinople and Greece.
Chrysoloras went to Rome on the invitation of Bruni, who was then secretary to Pope Gregory XII. In 1408, he was sent to Paris on an important mission from the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425). In 1413, he went to Germany on an embassy to the emperor Sigismund, the object of which was to decide on the site for the church council that assembled at Constance in 1415. Chrysoloras was on his way there, having been chosen to represent the Greek Church, when he died that year.
Chrysoloras translated the works of Homer and Plato’s Republic from Greek into Latin. His Erotemata (Questions-answers), which was the first basic Greek grammar in use in Western Europe, circulated initially as a manuscript before being published in 1484.
Widely reprinted, it enjoyed considerable success not only among his pupils in Florence, but also among later leading humanists, being immediately studied by Thomas Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus when he resided at Cambridge. It’s text became the basic manual used by pupils of the Three Language College set up by Erasmus in Leuven (Belgium) in 1515.
Traversari meets Chrysoloras during his two stays in Florence in the summer of 1413 and in January-February 1414, and the old Byzantine scholar is impressed by the bilingual culture of the young monk; he sends him a long philosophical letter in Greek on the theme of friendship. Ambrogio himself expresses in his letters the highest consideration for Chrysoloras, and emotion for the benevolence he showed him.
It should also be noted that the rich humanist scholar Niccolò Niccoli, a great collector of books, opened his library to Traversari and put him in constant contact with the scholarly circles of Florence (notably Leonardo Bruni, and also Cosimo de Medici, of whom he was advisor), but also of Rome and Venice.
In 1423, Pope Martin V sent two letters, one to the prior of the Convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Father Matteo, and the other to Traversari himself, expressing his support for the great development of patristic studies in this establishment, and especially for the work of translation of the Greek Fathers carried out by Traversari.
The Pope had in mind the negotiations he was conducting at the time with the Greek Church: at the beginning of 1423, his legate Antonio de Massa returned from Constantinople and brought back with him several Greek manuscripts which were to be entrusted to Traversari for translation: notably the Adversus Græcos by Manuel Calécas, and for the classics the Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, a text which circulated for a long time only in Traversari’s Latin translation.
It was following these undertakings that Traversari expressed his great interest in seeing the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches resolved. At the end of 1423, Niccolò Niccoli provides Traversari with an old volume containing the entire corpus of the ancient ecclesiastical canons, and the learned monk expresses in his correspondence with the humanist his enthusiasm for being able to immerse himself in the life of the then united ancient Christian Church, and in the process, he translates into Greek a long letter from Pope Gregory the Great to the prelates of the East.
Arrival of Plato’s mind
Were Bessarion and Plethon the first to bring the entire works of Plato to Europe?
Not really. While John Bessarion did indeed bring his own collection of the “complete works of Plato” in 1437 to Florence, they had already been brought to Italy earlier, most notably in 1423 by the Sicilian Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), who was the teacher of Lorenzo Valla (another collaborator with whom Cusanus exposed the fraud of the “Donation of Constantine” and a major source of inspiration of Erasmus).
In 1421 Aurispa was sent by Pope Martin V to act as the translator for the Marquis Gianfrancesco Gonzaga on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos.
After their arrival, he gained the favor of the emperor’s son and successor, John VIII Paleologus (1392-1448), who took him on as his own secretary. Two years later, he accompanied his Byzantine employer on a mission to the courts of Europe.
On 15 December 1423, 16 years prior to the Council of Florence of 1439, Aurispa arrived in Venice with the largest and finest collection of Greek texts to reach the west prior to those brought by Bessarion. In reply to a letter from Traversari, he says that he brought back 238 manuscripts.
These contained all of Plato’s works, most of them hitherto unknown in the West.
Plato’s works so far were only known very partially. In Sicily, Henry Aristippus of Calabria (1105-1162) had translated into Latin Plato’s Phaedo and Meno dialogues as early as 1160.
Evil neo-Platonist
Platonists (such as Petrarch, Traversari, Cusanus or Erasmus), have nothing to do and even violently opposed “Neo-platonist” (such as Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblicus, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola) whose influence would create what could and should be called a “counter-Renaissance”.
Already Leibniz strongly warned against the “neo-Platonists” and demanded Plato be studied in his original writings rather than through his commentators, however brilliant they might be:
“non ex Plotino aut Marsilio Ficino, qui mira semper et mystica affectantes diceren tanti uiri doctrinam corrupere.”
[In English: Plato should be studied, but “Not from Plotinus nor Marsilio Ficino, who, by always striving to speak wonderfully and mystically, corrupt the doctrine of so great a man. »]
George Gemisthos « Plethon »
Now, let us enter Plethon, who thought Plato and Aristotle could each one play their own role. George Gemistos « Plethon » (1355-1452), was a follower of the radical “neo-Platonist” Michael Psellos (1018-1080). Around 1410 Gemistos created a “neo-Platonic” academy in Mistra (near the site of ancient Sparta) and added “Plethon” to his name to make it resemble to « Plato ». He was also an admirer of Pythagoras, Plato, and the “Chaldean Oracles”, which he ascribed to Zoroaster.
Gemistos came for the first time to Florence when he was fifteen years old and became an authority in Mistra. So at the time of the Council, the Emperor, John VIII Paleologus, knew they were going to face some of the finest minds in the Roman Church on their own soil; he therefore wanted the best minds available in support of the Byzantine cause to accompany him. Consequently, the Emperor appointed George Gemistos as part of the delegation. Despite the fact that he was a secular philosopher — a rare creature at this time in the West — Gemistos was renowned both for his wisdom and his moral rectitude. Among the clerical lights in the delegation were John Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus. Both had been students of Gemistos in their youth. Another non-clerical member of the delegation was George Scholarios: both a future adversary of Gemistos and a future Patriarch of Constantinople as Gennadios II. Initially, Gemistos was opposed to the unity of the western and eastern churches.
Not assisting at every theological debate during the Council of Florence of 1439, he went in town to give lectures to intellectuals and nobles on the essence of Plato and Neo-platonic philosophy. Plethon also brought with him the text of the “Chaldean Oracles” attributed to Zoroaster.
While most of Plethon’s writing were burned, since he was suspected of heresy, a large number of Plethon’s autograph manuscripts ended up in the hands of his former student Cardinal Bessarion. On Bessarion’s death, he willed his personal library to the library of San Marco in Venice (where over 4000 Greeks resided). Among these books and manuscripts was Plethon’s Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato. This Summary was a summary of the Book of Laws, which Plethon wrote inspired by Plato’s laws. The Summary is a mixture of polytheistic beliefs with neo-Platonist elements.
While John Bessarion (1403-1472), a real humanist, took part in the Council in Ferrara (1437) and Florence (1439), and as the representative of the Greek, signed the decree of the Florentine Union, he held nevertheless to the principle: “I honor and respect Aristotle, I love Plato” (colo et veneror Aristotelem, amo Platonem). For him Platonic thought would have the right of citizenship equal to Aristotelian thought in the Latin world only when it appeared in an irenic interpretation to Aristotelianism and as not in contradiction with Christianity, since only such an interpretation of Platonism could succeed at that time.
Cosimo di Medici and Ficino
Did the Medicis finance a crash program to translate the works of Plato?
In 1397, Giovannni « di Bicci » de’ Medici (1360-1429) set up the Medici Bank. Giovanni owned two wool factories in Florence and was a member of two guilds: the Arte della Lana and the Arte del Cambio.
In 1402, he was one of the judges on the jury that selected Lorenzo Ghiberti’s design for the bronzes for the doors of the Baptistery of Florence.
In 1418, Giovanni di Bicci, wishing to endow his family with their own church, entrusted Filippo Brunelleschi, future architect of the famous dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fioro, the Duomo, with the task of radically transforming the basilica church of San Lorenzo and ordered Donatello to execute the sculptures.
Politically, the Medici family did not come to power until 1434, three years before the Council of Florence and at a time when the Renaissance was already in full swing.
Admittedly, Giovanni’s son and inheritor of his financial empire, Cosimo di Medici (1389-1464), known as the richest man of his epoch, became so inspired by Plethon that he acquired a complete library of Greek manuscripts. He bought a copy of the Platonic Corpus (24 dialogues) from Plethon, and a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, acquired in Macedonia by an Italian monk, Lionardo of Pistoia. Cosimo also decided to initiate a project to translate from the Greek into Latin, the totality of Plato’s works.
However, as said before, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444), who after having been papal secretary became chancellor of the Florentine republic from 1427 till 1444, had already translated close to all of Plato’s works from Greek into Latin.
It should be underlined that the translator chosen by Cosimo was Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the son of his personal physician and only five years old at the time of the Council of Florence in 1439. Cosimo had some severe doubts concerning Ficino’s capacities as translator. When the latter offers in 1456 his first translation, The Platonic Institutions, Cosimo asks him kindly not to publish this work and to learn first the Greek language… which Ficino learns then from Byzantine scholar John Argyropoulos (1415-1487), an Aristotelian pupil of Bessarion who rejected the Council of Florence’s epistemological revolution.
But seeing his age advancing and despite his unfortunate descent into corruption, Cosimo finally gave him the post. He allocates him an annual stipend, the required manuscripts and a villa at Careggi, close to Florence, where Ficino would set up his “Platonic Academy” with a handful of followers, among which Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498).
Ficino’s “Academy”, taking up the ancient neo-platonic tradition of Plotinus and Porphyry (as Ficino states himself) would organize each year a ceremonial banquet “neglected since one thousand two hundred years” on November 7, thought to be simultaneously the birthday of Plato and the day of his death.
After the dinner, the attendants would read Plato’s Symposium and then each of them would comment on one of the speeches. The comments are demonstrations, without any real dialogue and void of the essence of real platonic thinking: irony. On top of that it is remarkable that most gatherings of Ficino’s academy were attended by the ambassador of Venice in Florence, notably the powerful oligarch Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519), father of “poet” cardinal Pietro Bembo, later special advisor to the evil Genovese “Warrior Pope” Julius II.
It was this alliance of the increasingly more degenerated Medici family, the Venetian Empire’s maritime slave trade and the anti-Platonic neo-Platonists that gained dominant influence over the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church. The Medici’s clearly disliked Da Vinci (who never got an order from the Vatican and subsequently left Italy), and through their propaganda man Vasari made the world belief that the Renaissance was exclusively their baby.
But before translating Plato, and at the specific demand of Cosimo, Ficino translated first (in 1462) the Orphic Hymns, the Sayings of Zoroaster, and the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus the Egyptian (between 100 and 300 after BC).
It will be only in 1469 that Ficino will finish his translations of Plato after a nervous breakdown in 1468, described by his contemporaries as a crisis of “profound melancholy”.
In 1470, and with a title plagiarized from Proclus, Ficino wrote his “Platonic Theology or on the immortality of the Soul.” While completely taken in by esoteric neo-Platonism, he became a priest in 1473 and wrote “The Christian Religion” without changing his neo-platonic pagan outlook, producing an entire new series of translations of the neo-Platonists of Alexandria: he translated the fifty-four books of Plotinus “Enneads”, Porphyry and Proclus.
Ficino, in his “Five Questions Concerning the Mind” explicitly attacks the Promethean conception of man:
« Nothing indeed can be imagined more unreasonable than that man, who through reason is the most perfect of all animals, nay, of all things underheaven, most perfect, I say, with regard to that formal perfection that is bestowed upon us from the beginning, that man, also through reason, should be the least perfect of all with regard to that final perfection for the sake of which the first perfection is given. This seems to be that of the most unfortunate Prometheus. Instructed by the divine wisdom of Pallas, he gained possession of the heavenly fire, that is, reason. Because of this very possession, on the highest peak of the mountain, that is, at the very height of contemplation, he is rightly judged most miserable of all, for he is made wretched by the continual gnawing of the most ravenous of vultures, that is, by the torment of inquiry…” (…) “What do the philosophers say to these things? Certainly, the Magi, followers of Zoroaster and Hostanes, assert something similar. They say that, because of a certain old disease of the human mind, everything that is very unhealthy and difficult befalls us…«
The Florentine Neo-Platonic Academy, backed by the libido-driven Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) “The Magnificent”, will serve as a “Delphic” operation: defend Plato to better destroy him; praise him in such terms that he becomes discredited. And especially destroying Plato’s influence by opposing religion to science, at a point where Cusanus and his followers are succeeding to do exactly the opposite. Isn’t it bizarre that Cusa’s name doesn’t appear a single time in the works of Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, so overfed with all-encompassing knowledge?
Lorenzo did protect artists such as Sandro Botticelli, whose Birth of Venus exemplifies Lorenzo’s neo-platonic symbolism.
Infected with this evil neo-Platonism, Thomaso Inghirami (1470-1516), the chief librarian of pope Julius II, will accomplish nothing but this when dictating to the painter Raphaël the content of the Stanza in the Vatican some decades later.
Neo-platonic “melancholy”, which Albrecht Dürer went after in his famous engraving, will become the matrix for the romantics, the destructive virus affecting the symbolists and the so-called modern school. As for the revolution that Greek studies will bring about in the sciences, I refer you to our article on this website: 1512-2012: From Cosmography to Cosmonauts, Gerard Mercator and Gemma Frisius.
To conclude, here is a short list of translators, and I certainly forgot some of them, and their mastery of foreign languages. Even if some of them can’t be called « humanists », let’s thank them for everything they allowed us to discover. I’m profoundly convinced that without them, man would certainly not have set foot on the Moon!
- Marcus Tullius Cicero 106-43 BC: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Philo of Alexandria 20 BC – 40 AD: hebrew, Greek;
- Origen of Alexandria 184 – 253: Greek and Latin;
- Jerome of Stridon 342-420: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Boethius 477-524: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Bede the Venerable 672-735: English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Charlemagne 742-814, spoke Latin and understood Greek, Hebrew and Slavonic;
- John Scotus Eriugena 800-876: Irish, Greek, Arab and Hebrew;
- Ḥunayn ibn Isḥaq 809-873: Arabic, Syriac, Persian and Greek;
- Thābit ibn Qurra 826-901: Syriac, Arabic and Greek;
- Al-Fârâbi 872-950: Farsi, Sogdian and Greek;
- Al–Biruni, 973-1048: Chorasmian, Farsi, Frabic, Syriac, Sanskrit, Hindi, Hebrew and Greek ;
- Adelard of Bath 1080-1152: English, Latin and Arabic;
- Héloïse 1092-1141: French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Hugh of Saint Victor 1096-1141: French, Latin, Greek;
- Constantine the African XIth Cent: Arabic, Latin, Greek and Italian;
- John Sarrazin XIIth Cent: Latin and Greek;
- Henricus Aristippus 1105-1162: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Gerard of Cremona 1114-1187: Italian, Latin and Arabic;
- Robert Grosseteste 1168-1253: English, Latin and Greek;
- Michael Scot 1175-1232: Scottish, Latin, Greek, Arab and Hebrew;
- Moses of Bergamo (XIIth Century): Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Burgundio of Pisa (XIIth Century): Italian, Latin and Greek;
- James of Venice (second half IIth Century, dies after 1147): Italian, Latin and Greek ;
- Roger Bacon 1214-1294: English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean ;
- William of Moerbeke 1215-1286: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- Raymond Lull 1232-1315: Catalan, Latin and Arabic;
- Arnaldus de Villa Nova 1240-1311: Catalan, Latin, Greek and Arabic;
- Dante Alighieri 1265-1321: Italian and Latin;
- Francesco Petrarch 1304-1375: Italian and Latin;
- Giovanni Boccaccio 1313-1375: Italian and Latin;
- Coluccio Salutati 1331-1406: Italian and Latin;
- Geert Groote 1340-1384: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Florens Radewijns 1350-1400: Dutch and Latin;
- Manuel Chrysoloras 1355-1415: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Georgius Gemistus « Pletho » 1360-1452: Greek;
- Jacopo d’Angelo 1360-1410, Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Pier Paolo Vergerio (the Elder) 1370-1445: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Leonardo Bruni 1370-1441: Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic;
- Guarino Guarini 1370-1460: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Palla di Onofrio Strozzi 1372-1462: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Giovanni Aurispa 1376-1459: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Vittorino da Feltre 1378-1446: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Poggio Bracciolini 1380-1459: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Ambrogio Traversari 1386-1439: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Gianozzo Manetti 1396-1459: Italian, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Georges of Trebizond 1396-1472: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Tommaso Perentucelli (Pope Nicolas V) 1397-1494: Italian and Latin;
- Francesco Filelfo 1398-1481: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Carlo Marsuppini 1399-1453: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Theodorus Gaza 1400-1478: Greek and Latin;
- John Bessarion 1403-1472: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Lorenzo Valla 1407-1457: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Nicolas of Cusa 1401-1464: German and Latin;
- John Wessel Gansfoort 1419-1489: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Georg von Peuerbach 1423-1461: German, Latin and Greek;
- Demetrios Chalkokondyles 1423-1511: Greek and Latin;
- Marcilio Ficino 1433-1499: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Constantine Lascaris 1434-1501: Greek, Latin and Italian;
- Regiomontanus 1436-1476: German, Latin and Greek;
- Alexander Hegius 1440-1498: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- Rudolf Agricola 1444-1485: Dutch, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Janus Lascaris 1445-1535: Greek and Latin;
- William Grocyn 1446-1519,: English, Latin and Greek;
- Poliziano 1454-1494: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Johannes Reuchlin 1455-1522: German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;
- Thomas Linacre 1460-1524: English, Latin and Greek;
- Erasmus of Rotterdam 1467-1536: Dutch, Latin and Greek;
- William Latimer 1467-1545 : English, Latin and Greek;
- Guillaume Budé 1467-1540: French, Latin and Greek;
- Marcus Musurus 1470-1517: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Willibald Pirckheimer 1470-1530: German, Latin and Greek;
- Pietro Bembo 1470-1547: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Thomas More 1478-1535: English, Latin and Greek;
- Girolamo Aleandro, 1480-1542: Italian, Latin and Greek;
- Germain de Brie 1490-1538: French, Latin and Greek;
- Juan Luis Vivès 1492-1540: Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew;