4.1 The history and geographical reach of neo-Latin Literature
From Dante and Petrarch to our times, neo-Latin literature is among the most important indicators of the reception of the classical tradition in its national and regional diversity. Interdisciplinary studies on this huge store of prose and poetry are only just beginning (IJsewijn 1990; IJsewijn and Sacre 1997; Ludwig 1997; Ludwig 2004-5). Neo-Latin literature emerged on the foundation of the ideas and linguistic principles of the Italian humanists, as an expression of the will to return to ancient Rome’s moral magnitude and to a revival of ancient standards in Latin style. Expanding geographically and developing over time (within the Respublica Litteraria [Republic of letters]), it addressed a much broader audience and created a dialogue between the language communities of its authors and the educated public all over Europe.
This literature functioned on several levels. Writing poems and telling the histories of their states and nations in Latin according to western models, the Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and Lithuanian elites declared themselves to be part of Europe, translating their cultural experience into the universal code of ancient signs. This resulted in the rapid spread of all the literary genres developed by humanism according to ancient models, and also the ability to imitate the poetic works not only of Ovid and Vergil, but also Horace, and in prose, not only of Cicero and Livy, but also Tacitus. The use of neo-Latin literature as a tool for expressing one’s cultural identity in international dialogue gradually moved eastwards, also enabling the communities that wanted to emphasize their autonomy from the dominant cultures in the central-eastern European region to make similar declarations. This is best seen in the example of the Ruthenians in the Polish Commonwealth and Croats in the Hungarian kingdom (with the Croatian relationship to the Mediterranean and Slavic traditions, however, going beyond the geographical range of our study). Meanwhile, along the border between Catholicism and the Orthodox religion, and between Christianity and Islam, neo-Latin literature acted as a particularly useful medium for formulating ideas of antemurale Christianitatis (‘‘bulwark of Christendom’’) as well as expressing one’s stand in the dispute between Slavia Latina (Latin Slavdom) and Slavia Graeca (Greek Slavdom). These changes involved a search for identity in the language of humanism.
4.2 Ethnogenetic myths
The problem of identifying what separated the ‘‘younger Europe’’ (to use Kioczowski’s conception) both from the west and from the east, and what linked the ‘‘younger Europe’’ both to the west and to the east, revealed itself fully between the Middle Ages and humanism. For the people of this time the point was to define one’s place in world history and to translate this awareness into Renaissance anthropological language, which used signs of the classical tradition. That is, the goal was to include local states and peoples on the map of ancient Mediterranean space-time as a way of consolidating their internal integration and international position in fifteenth - and sixteenth-century Europe.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the earlier search for the place of the peoples of this region in Europe’s cultural and political reality was interpreted within the framework of the idea of nation-states. The national-socialist ideology, then the communist system, transformed into various forms of national communism, drew from various myths of origin to carry out ‘‘ethnic purges’’ in the historical memory. A more fruitful interpretive approach takes into account the multitude of communication communities functioning here in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the fact that many people belonged to several of them simultaneously. From this perspective, the strongest information carriers are language, symbols, and semiotics of behavior. This approach increases the importance of Latin texts and signs referring to the classical tradition. Naming the border between central-eastern Europe and the Germanic Holy Roman empire and making the border between Latin and Byzantine Slavs less impermeable were fundamental problems for translating one’s identity into the new language.
The Polish, Hungarian, and Lithuanian declarations were the clearest. In the Polish republic, the Sarmatian origins of Poland and the name of Sarmatia for the state became popular from the late sixteenth century, a reference to fourteenth-century genealogical constructions legitimizing the restored Polish kingdom (1320) by introducing themes of military victories over the ancient rulers, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great. Presenting the emerging concept of the Polish Commonwealth, Krakhw humanists translated the Ptolemic formula differentiating between European and Asian Sarmatia into contemporary political geography, identifying Poland, Ruthenia, Lithuania, and Moscow right up to the Don as Sarmatia Europaea. Beyond that was Sarmatia Asiatica vel Scithia. In the west, the treatise of Miechowita and the map of Wapowski popularized this image of central-eastern Europe’s place in Mediterranean civilization. Soon Muscovy was moved to Scithia, and together with the Tartars formed the hostile border of the Polish-Lithuanian community of Jagiellonian states.
The Hungarians chose a genealogical identification with the Huns. Attila, vanquisher of the ancient west, became a precursor of the Hungarians’ acculturation in this world. At Matthias Corvinus’ court, the Italian humanist Antonio Bonfini wrote the history of the kingdom, linking ancient Hun genealogy with the Huns’ subsequent kinship with the Slavs and turning the monarch into the creator of a Mediterranean-central-eastern European power, distinct from Germanic and Romanic models. This claim was strengthened by the use of Latin by the community of noblemen as the language of the emerging nation that united the three peoples it contained (unio trium nationum, 1438).
After their late baptism, the Lithuanians hastily worked on their particular myth of origin. Their non-Slavic language was a major factor. At the court of the Polish and Lithuanian branch of the Jagiellons, an idea began to form, with some Italian inspiration, that Lithuania was created by emigrants led by the Roman commander Palemon, who reached the Baltic coast by escaping from Nero’s persecution (or from Sulla’s, or from Caesar’s civil wars). By the end of the sixteenth century the myth was firmly in place, and in popular awareness it built a continuous genealogy of the Lithuanian nobles and rulers stretching back to antiquity. Lithuania thus became the Third Rome - an excellent argument in the rivalry with Moscow and an important asset in competing with the Polish nobility within the Commonwealth.
Much less clear are the Czechs’ myths of origin, probably because their state was bound to the empire from the twelfth century (chronicles of the time place the Czechs in ancient Germany; they also tried to trace their origin to Celtic Bohemia). In terms of the reception of ancient culture, the main point was that the Czech identity was linked to a certain anti-antiquity - a folk, local, and Slavic identity serving as an alternative to the Latin (meaning the imperial and German) one.
Today’s Ukraine was in a special situation. On the one hand, the Polish concept of two Sarmatias recognized the Ukrainians as Roxolani, one of the peoples forming the Sarmatian confederation in late antiquity. On the other, it was felt that they belonged to the tradition of another community, one that also had an ancient genealogy: the Byzantine church and the mythical Tsargorod. Ruthenian elites opposed Poloniza-tion by bonding with Kievan Rus, an older heir to Byzantium than Moscow.
In their dialogue with western intellectuals, the Polish elites unhesitatingly recognized the Hussite and Protestant Czechs (together with Orthodox Moscow) as alien, despite their Slavic origins. The decisive consideration was loyalty to the Holy See, as the only depository of ancient Roman tradition, to which Poland acceded - this was always emphasized - not from weakness but as a sovereign partner. In 1467 Jan Ostrordg presented the pope with proof: Julius Caesar had been crushed three times on the Polish plains.
The Hungarians in the fifteenth century saw Moldova as ancient Moesia. As for the Romanians in Wallachia, the Italians suggested the usefulness of their identifying themselves as Romans by origin, descendants of the conquerors of Dacia from Trajan’s time. This viewpoint was convenient for Corvinus (a ruler of Wallachian origin, who could thus consider himself a Roman aristocrat by direct descent) and for the idea of including the Wallachians, and the Romanians from Transylvania, in the Latin community. Circles linked to the Wallachian hospodars’ court, on the other hand, were inclined to seek autonomy in the anti-Latin Orthodox-Slavic-Byzantine tradition.
An analysis of the results of translating the sense of national identity into the language of new Renaissance humanism, the language of ancient tradition, seems to confirm the distinctness of the region enclosed between the borders of the west, identified with Imperium Romanum, of the east, with its mission of restoring Byzantium, and of the Turkish empire’s militant Islam. The task itself stemmed from preparations for a direct meeting with a west beyond Germany, with states and nations whose ethnogenetic myths enjoyed a Vergilian patronage (France, England) or a Vergilian-Dantean one (Italy). In this territory, the space-time of Troy and the legendary beginnings of Rome were superimposed on the tradition of barbarian kings and kingdoms that had directly adopted the heritage of the Roman empire. Central-eastern Europe had to take up the dialogue in the same language.
4.3 Humanism
At the Hungarian-Croatian court, Latin-language humanism flourished thanks to its ties to Italy, which were strengthened in the fourteenth century during the d’Anjou dynasty’s rule, and then under Sigismund of Luxembourg. There were many eminent Italians in Croatia (e. g., Vergerio, Giustiniani, and Feliciano).
A magnificent development of humanist culture in the second half of the fifteenth century took place during Matthias Corvinus’ reign. This was the time of the archbishop of Esztergom and the royal chancellor Vitez, who established the Academia Istropolitana in Presburg as well as a printing house in Buda, and his nephew Pannonius, a translator from Greek into Latin and an excellent poet. The ideal of the orator-poet that developed at the royal court in Hungary led to the conjunction of poetry and epistolography, characteristic for early humanism; this was considered the tool of diplomacy.
Hungarians working with Italians largely bypassed the stage of imitating Italian artists and intensively absorbed the works of Roman as well as Greek authors directly. The Bibliotheca Corviniana was founded (1485), and historiography developed to consolidate the Hungarian identity by presenting King Matthias as the synthesis of Roman, Greek, and Hun traditions (Bonfini). Florentine Neoplatonism flourished through the influence of Ficino in Buda. The greatness of Italian-Hungarian humanism waned after the brief reign of the Jagiellon dynasty, when it seemed as if all of central-eastern Europe would unite under one dynasty capable of rivaling the Habs-burgs. The Turkish victory at Mohacs (1526) resulted in the disintegration of the kingdom into three parts (1541): the west and north came under Habsburg rule, Transylvania became an independent duchy ruled by Hungarian noble families, and the rest was occupied by Turkey. Humanist culture survived at the court of the Transylvanian dukes.
In sixteenth-century Hungary, Italian influences were replaced by German, and Neoplatonism by Erasmianism and the Reformation. Latin-language historiography and epic poetry became the dominant literary forms, both closely linked to the country’s dramatic history: Schesaeus’ Ruinae Pannoniae (Decline of Pannonia), Istvanffy’s Historiarum de rebus Hungaricis libri (Books on the history of Hungary), and Olahus’ Athila and Hungaria (Bene 2006; Conley forthcoming).
Bohemia went a different way. Its situation was more similar to France’s than to that of neighboring countries, with poetry and prose in the national language, both religious and lay, emerging as early as the fourteenth century (Goleniscev-Kutuzov).
Bohemian humanism was always closely connected to that of Germany and Hungary. The same universities (Prague, Vienna, Wittenberg, and Krakhw) and the same courts (Prague, Vienna, and KrakcSw) influenced all three. The strong ties linking the Czechs to European humanism were created as early as the fifteenth century, with Hassensteinius as the leading figure; philologists of high quality, like Pisecky and his pupil Gelenius, appeared. Olomouc became an excellent humanist center. Right up to the early seventeenth century, thousands of people in Bohemia created works in Latin. Czechs, Moravians, and Germans (e. g., Bruschius, Cropacius, and Bartholdus) wrote an impressive amount of lyrical, religious, and historical poetry of a very high standard, at home and abroad, and around 1600 Prague was still one of the greatest cultural centers in Europe. Latin-language theater flourished, and outstanding academic treatises were written (e. g., the Jesuit Balbinus wrote a defense of the Czech language). Czechs participated intensively in the Respublica Litteraria Europaea, and Comenius, a philosopher and educational theorist active mainly as an emigre (in Poland, Sweden, Hungary, and the Netherlands), gained fame.
The Hussite wars in the fifteenth century ended the effort to build an ‘‘open society’’ in Bohemia. The defeat of the Czech Protestants at White Mountain (1620) meant that the attempt to give the Czech state a sovereign form of the nobleman-nation’s republic failed. From that time up to the national revival (early nineteenth century), the Czech reception of antiquity in terms of academic thought and higher culture can be viewed as a reflection of the changes occurring in the German-speaking part of the Austrian empire.
Things were different in the Jagiellons’ ‘‘core’’ countries, in Lithuania and Poland. From the mid-fourteenth century, the Polish kingdom included Ruthenian lands in the southeast. At the end of the century, it was united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania through a personal union (with the Jagiellons accepting baptism from the west and assuming the Krakdw throne). This union was transformed in 1569 into a federation, with the commonwealth encompassing the Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands right up to Kiev and the Black Sea. It adopted the name Respublica, and in its ‘‘Golden Age’’ (sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) was an example of a tolerant, open, multiethnic, and multidenominational culture (Axer and Kieniewicz 1999). The coexistence of Catholic and Protestant cultures was guaranteed by the Warsaw Confederation (1573). With regard to the Orthodox culture, various forms of osmosis took place: Gothic art shifted the border of western Europe to the line connecting Vilnius and Lviv, while Byzantine painting traveled westward to the churches of Lublin, Sandomierz, and KrakcSw. Generally, though, the Commonwealth kept moving the borders of Latinity eastward.
The beginnings of humanism in Poland may be seen as derivative. The visit of Sigismund I, when he was heir to the throne, to his brother Ludwik’s court in Buda led to the conversion of Wawel castle into a Renaissance residence designed by Italian architects, a process in which the king’s wife Bona Sforza also played an important role. At that time the Polish Renaissance involved copying Italian artists, not imitating ancient models directly, not only in architecture, sculpture, and painting, but initially also in Latin-language literature, which imitated the prose and poetry of Italian neo-Latinists, then only through them the works of ancient authors. Such were the beginnings of Latin oratory, which subsequently became a Polish specialty on a European scale.
The ‘‘golden age’’ in Polish culture did not start until the late fifteenth century. Earlier Dlugosz had offered his independent interpretation of the country’s history (Annales seu Cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae [Annals or chronicles of the celebrated Kingdom of Poland]). The arrival at the Krakdw court (via Buda) of Buonaccorsi and Conrad Celtis brought first-rate models. In the sixteenth century the university and court in Krakdw brought in great humanists (Cox, Roisius) and hundreds of students from Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy.
Neo-Latin poetry (Hussovianus, Dantiscus, Cricius, and Janicius) dominated until the 1540s. After that, bilingual writers began appearing. The greatest of these, Jan Kochanowski, experimented with transferring ancient forms and genres into the national language, competing with the latest experiments of Italian poets and philologists (e. g., his Threnodies, Aratea, Trifles). Szymonowic was another excellent poet in both languages. In the next century the Jesuit Sarbiewski, ‘‘Horatius Sarmaticus,’’ gained European fame; Lubomirski, a poet, prose writer, and playwright, wrote in the spirit of Lipsius’ neo-Stoicism. In some fields Polish neo-Latinists were ahead of Europe: as Kochanowski had written the complete Latin version of Cicero’s Aratea before Grotius, so Fredro published his collection of Latin aphorisms in Gdarisk (1664) before La Rochefoucauld. Western Europe learned about eastern Europe from the historical works of Kromer, Miechowita, and Pastorius. Coialovicius’ Latin translation of Stryjkowski’s Chronicle was particularly important for Lithuanian identity. Major political treatises were written by Modrevius, Orechovius, and Zamoyski, and oratory and epistolography developed vigorously. Scientific literature was less prolific, but it did include Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres).
Until the end of the eighteenth century, Latin was the only language enabling a broader European audience to access Polish culture and literature.
4.4 The region’s place within Respublica Litteraria Europaea
The community of scholars and artists that functioned from the time of Erasmus for almost three hundred years reached the eastern part of the continent, encompassing the Czech and Hungarian kingdoms and Poland-Lithuania early on, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The ideal of a ‘‘republic of letters’’ was implemented by means of intensive contacts among its citizens. ‘‘Networking’’ took place primarily through the exchange of letters, the main language being Latin, with the auxiliary languages (Italian, German, Spanish, and French) depending on the region. This correspondence was conducted largely over and above ethnic and religious divisions, and without political control. Outstanding humanists being visited by followers and enthusiasts; preparing examples of the Album amicorum (book of friends), showing the range and intensity ofcontacts within the Republic; including testimonials from friends in the introductions to books; inviting famous scholars to academic centers; opening libraries and book collections for foreigners; establishing academic societies involving foreigners (from Celtis’s Sodalitas Litteraria Vistulana [Vistula Society of Letters] to the academies of London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg) - all these practices manifested the existence of Respublica Litteraria. To this one may add a system of awards, competitions, and scholarships. Scientific periodicals and a new literary form, the review, emerged in the seventeenth century (Burke 1999).
Representatives of the central-eastern European region formed a not-very-numer-ous group in the Republic, but were perceived by the community as an important and attractive circle. If we look at the ‘‘networking’’ by letter within this community, we can see that the intensive participation of Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Croatians, Ruthenians, Czechs, Germans from Prussia and Transylvania, Slovaks, and so on proves not only the existence of outstanding individuals capable of holding dialogue on equal terms with the Italians, French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, and English, but also shows the strategy of the leading personalities and the strongest national communities in Respublica Litteraria Europaea, who documented their authority and success by identifying the greatest possible number of partners in regions they considered exotic.
The extraordinary popularity of loannes Dantiscus (1485-1548), whose volume of correspondence (around 6,300 letters) is more than two times that of Erasmus and one and half times that of Lipsius (including his unpublished letters), is explained not only by the broad range of his roles in life, but also by the readiness of princes and kings, poets and philologists, merchants and conquistadors, to maintain an epistolary conversation with a man thanks to whom the Respublica Litteraria Europaea itself stretched to the eastern and northern frontiers of Christian Europe (Skolimowska 2004). Up to the mid-seventeenth century the Respublica did not include the Scandinavian peninsula, nor up to the first half of the eighteenth century, Russia, nor up to the end of the eighteenth century, the Balkans (except for the multinational elite of the seventeenth-century Osman court). Thus the region of central-eastern Europe was valuable for its experiences and contacts with those cultures, from both political and academic viewpoints. The great kindness with which humanists from central-eastern Europe were treated by their western partners, as well as the opinions voiced in the letters of their correspondents, which local scholars often treat as proof of the exceptional quality of humanism in these various areas, have to be viewed from this perspective as well.
For the reception of classical culture in central-eastern Europe, the participation of citizens of the countries of this region in the Respublica Litteraria Europaea had a dual importance: it consolidated the sense of belonging to the west and facilitated contacts with the highest-quality academic and artistic use of classical cultures, as applied in the leading centers of humanism. At the same time, it awakened an interest in the eastern fringes of Latin culture among European elites. The Latin language facilitated such interaction, as Latin was the language of the Hungarian and the Polish political nations. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, this gave representatives of the region a certain asset in their contacts with the west, where Latin was being withdrawn from public life. The replacement of Latin by French and the institutionalization of the activity of the Republique des Lettres (Republic of letters) coincided with the final partition of the region.
World History
