[hprints-00683151, v2] Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II ... - Hprints.org

hprints-00683151, version 2 - 19 Mar 2013
fathers, Archbishop Pizzolpasso of Milan 52 who became a friend and mentor of
Piccolomini, helped him to obtain a prebend in Milan, and asked him to give his
second oration at the Council of Basle, i.e. a sermon on the feastday of Saint
Ambrose. Piccolomini may actually have met both Bruni and Guarino when, as a
student, he visited Firenze and Ferrara. In a letter of 1434, two years before he gave
the oration Audivi, he mentions them, together with Ambrogio Traversari, as
contemporary luminaries of scholarship 53 , and he praises both of them in later
writings 54 . Keeping in touch with the humanist network in Italy was not easy for
someone living North of the Alps, but these early quotations show that it mattered
to Piccolomini.
Piccolominis rhetorics have been studied by Johannes Helmrath in his impressive
work on oratory at the German diets 55 and by Albert Baca 56 . A major study on the
subject is, however, still outstanding.
4.4 Minor themes
A number of minor themes in the text may be highlighted here.
4.4.1 The origins of the Turks
The conception of the Turks as descendants of the Troians goes back to the Middle
Ages, in particular to a genealogy of the Frankish kings in the Chronicles of Fredegar
from the 7 th century and to a note in the Gesta Francorum of the 12 th century. 57
It was picked up in a text from 1345 purporting to be a letter from Umur Pasha
(Morbisanus) to Pope Clement VI as a reaction to a crusade attack on Izmir. The
letter was written in Italian and later translated into Latin and other languages. Over
52 Iaria, p. 5, 23
53 Piccolomini: Der Briefwechsel, I/1, 28-29 (ep. 16)
54 I.e. in the section on Leonardo Bruni in his De Viris Illustribus, where he even directly mentions Guarino’s translation
of Plutarch’s work, De alendis liberis, p. 35, cf. Iaria, p. 5, and in his Commentarii
55 Helmrath: Reichstagsreden
56 Baca
57 Meserve: Empire, p. 23; Meserve: Medieval
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