Demetrios Chalkokondyles

Demetrios Chalkokondyles Δημήτριος Χαλκοκονδύλης
Demetrios Chalkokondyles,[1][2][3][4][5][6] detail by Zachariah in the Temple by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Fresco. Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Tornabuoni, Florence, Italy. 1486-1490.
Born	August , 1423(1423-08-00) Athens, Duchy of Athens
Died	January 9, 1511(1511-01-09) Milan, Duchy of Milan
Occupation	Scholar, politician, diplomat, philosopher
Nationality	Greek[7]
Literary movement	Renaissance

Demetrios Chalkokondyles, latinized as Demetrius Chalcocondyles (Greek: Δημήτριος Χαλκοκονδύλης) and found variously as Demetricocondyles, Chalcocondylas or Chalcondyles (1423^[8] – 1511), was a Greek^[9] humanist, scholar and Professor who taught the Greek language in Italy for over forty years; at Padua,^[10] Perugia,^[11] Milan and Florence.^[12] Among his pupils were Janus Lascaris, Poliziano, Leo X, Castiglione, Giglio Gregorio Giraldi, Stefano Negri, and Giovanni Maria Cattaneo,^[13] he was associated with Marsilius Ficinus, Angelus Politianus, and Theodorus Gaza in the revival of letters in the Western world. One of his pupils at Florence was the famous Johann Reuchlin.^[14] Chalkokondyles published the first printed publications of Homer (in 1488), of Isocrates (in 1493), and of the Suda lexicon (in 1499).^[15] In 1463 Chalkokondyles delivered an exhortation for crusade and the recovery and liberation of his homeland Greece^[16] from the invading Ottoman Turks.^[17] He was one of the most eminent Greek scholars in the West and also contributed to Italian Renaissance literature and was the last of the Greek humanists who taught Greek literature at the great universities of the Italian Renaissance (Padua, Florence, Milan).

Contents 1 Life 2 Work 3 Notes 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Life

Demetrios Chalkokondyles was born in Athens in 1423 of Greek ancestry,^{[18][19][20][21][22]} and belonged to one of the noblest Athenian families and was a first cousin of the chronicler of the fall of Constantinople, Laonicus Chalcocondyles. He soon moved to the Peloponnisos, with his Athenian family who had migrated after its persecution by the Florentine dukes. He migrated to Italy in 1447^[23] and arrived at Rome in 1449 where Cardinal Bessarion became his patron. He became the student of Theodorus Gaza and later gained the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici, serving as a tutor to his sons. Chalkokondyles spent the rest of his life as a teacher of Greek and philosophy at Perugia, Padua, Rome, Florence, and Milan. One of Chalkokondyles' Italian pupils described his lectures at Perugia in 1450 and wrote:

“

A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak.[24]

”

In 1463 he was made professor at Padua and later, in 1479 at Francesco Philelpho's suggestion, he took over the place of Ioannis Argyropoulos, as the head of the Greek Literature department and was summoned by Lorenzo de Medici to Florence. Chalkokondyles composed orations and treatises calling for the liberation of his homeland Greece^[25] from what he called “the abominable, monstrous, and impious barbarian Turks.”^[26] In 1463 Chalkokondyles called on Venice and “all of the Latins” to aid the Greeks against the Ottomans, he identified this as an overdue debt^[27] and reminded the Latins how the Byzantine Greeks once came to Italy’s aid against the Goths in the Gothic Wars (535-53 C.E.)^[28]:

“

Just as she [Greece] had empended in their behalf [the Latins] all of her most precious and outstanding possessions liberally and without any parsimony, and had restored with her hand and force of arms the state of Italy, long ago oppressed by the Goths, they [the Latins] should in the same way now be willing to raise up prostrate and afflicted Greece and liberate it by arms from the hands of the barbarians.[29]

”

It was during his tenure at the Studium in Florence that Chalkokondyles edited Homer for publication. He assisted Marsilio Ficino with his Latin translation of Plato. Chalkokondyles got married in 1484 at the age of sixty-one and fathered ten children.^[30] His edition of Homer, dedicated to Lorenzo, Piero de' Medici's son, is his major accomplishment. Finally, invited by Ludovico Sforza, he moved to Milan (1491/1492), where he taught until he died.

Work

He wrote in Ancient Greek the grammar handbook "Summarized Questions of the Eight Parts of Word After Their Rules" (Ἐρωτήματα συνοπτικὰ τῶν ὀκτὼ τοῦ λόγου μερῶν μετὰ τινῶν κανόνων). He translated Galen's Anatomy into Latin.

As a scholar, Chalkokondyles published the editio princeps of Homer (Ὁμήρου τὰ σωζόμενα, Florence 1488), Isocrates (Milan 1493) and the Byzantine Suda lexicon (Σοῦδα, 1499).

• Greek Grammar, edited 1546 by Melchior Volmar in Basel
• Latin translation of the Anatomical Procedures of Galen, edited and published in 1529 by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi
• 1488, editio princeps of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Poiesis Hapasa, edited by Bernardus Nerlius and Chalkokondyles, appeared in Florence, not before 13 January 1489, in two folio volumes. It was the first Greek book to be printed in Florence. The Greek type used to print the 1488–1489 Homer is believed to have been cast by the Cretan Demetrius Damilas from the type that he had used to print Constantine Lascaris’ Erotemata (Milan 1476), the first book to be printed entirely in Greek, based upon the hand of Damilas’s fellow scribe Michael Apostolis.

Notes

See also

• Byzantine scholars in Renaissance

References

• Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman Turks, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 113–15. ISBN 0812219767, 9780812219760
• Deno J. Geanakoplos, `The discourse of Demetrius Chalcocondyles on the inauguration of Greek studies at the University of Padua', Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 118-44 and in Deno J. Geanakoplos, Interaction of the ‘Sibling’ Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (330-1600), New Haven and London, 1976, pp. 296-304
• Jonathan Harris, Greek Émigrés in the West, 1400-1520, Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1995. ISBN 1-871328-11-X
• Armando Petrucci: CALCONDILA (Calcocondila, Χαλκονδύλης Χαλκοκανδύλης), Demetrio. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI), vol. 16 (Caccianiga - Caluso), Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1973 (italian)
• Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth-Century, London, 1930, pp.66–9.
• Fotis Vassileiou & Barbara Saribalidou, Short Biographical Lexicon of Byzantine Academics Immigrants to Western Europe, 2007.
• N.G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy. Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, London, 1992. ISBN 0 7156 24180
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

Persondata
Name	Chalcocondyles, Demetrius
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1424
Place of birth	Athens, Duchy of Athens
Date of death	1511
Place of death	Milan, Duchy of Milan