Brunetto Latini

Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–1294)

Brunetto Latini was born in Florence around 1220, the son of a notary, Bonaccorso Latini. The name by which he is remembered, a diminutive of Bruno, appears in the documents of his own city as Burnectus or Brunetto, and he is sometimes called Ser Brunetto, the honorific of a notarial family. He died in Florence in 1294. The dates of his birth is inferred rather than recorded; what survives is a notary's paper trail, and it is from that trail that his life has to be reconstructed.

He trained for the law, though the details of his schooling are not documented. He appears in Florentine records from the 1250s as a notary and a figure of growing standing in the commune, and he rose to a place among the city's Guelf partisans, the faction aligned with the papacy against the imperial Ghibellines. In the Florence of those decades such loyalties were not an ornament of character but a condition of survival. Latini served the commune in writing as much as in speech, drafting its letters and recording its decisions, and his public usefulness lay in just that command of Latin and of rhetoric.

In 1260 he was sent as an ambassador to the court of Alfonso X of Castile, seeking support for the Guelf cause against Manfred of Sicily. The mission coincided with catastrophe. On his return journey, passing through the pass of Roncesvalles, he met a scholar from Bologna who told him that the Guelfs had been routed at the battle of Montaperti and had been driven from Florence. Latini had become an exile before he reached home. He later recalled that he was so stunned by the news that he lost the road and wandered into a wood before coming to himself.

The years that followed, roughly 1260 to 1266, he spent in France, much of it at Bar-sur-Aube and in Paris. Exile cost him his office and his property, but it gave him leisure and a new language. He wrote in French as well as in Italian, and it was in these years that he composed the greater part of his major work, the encyclopedic Li Livres dou Tresor, along with an Italian poem, the Tesoretto. He also turned his attention to Cicero, translating and commenting on parts of his rhetorical writing, work that reflected his conviction that eloquence and civic responsibility belonged together.

The Guelfs returned to Florence after Charles of Anjou defeated Manfred at Benevento in 1266, and Latini came home with them. His fortunes recovered quickly. He held a succession of offices in the restored commune, serving as secretary to the city council and later as a prior, and he took part in the deliberations that shaped its policy. His name appears at the head of documents of state across the 1270s and 1280s. He was, by any measure, a man who lived for his city, and who understood learning as an instrument of its good government.

He is remembered also as a teacher, and in this role his legacy touched writers far beyond the chancery. The young Guido Cavalcanti is often counted among those who learned from him, and Dante Alighieri, born in 1265, speaks of him in the Commedia with unmistakable affection. In the seventh circle of the Inferno, among those condemned for sins against nature, Dante meets his old master, takes his hand, and addresses him with filial tenderness, recalling how Brunetto taught him "how man makes himself eternal." Dante's placement of him in hell is a judgment on a point of conduct that no surviving document of Latini's own life confirms or explains; the affection with which the encounter is written is unmistakable.

Latini died in 1294 and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence.

The Treasure and Its Afterlife

Latini's reputation rests on Li Livres dou Tresor, composed in French during his exile. He gave his reasons plainly: French was the most delightful and the most widely spoken of the vernaculars. The work is an encyclopedia in three books. The first gathers history, from the Creation and the Old Testament through the classical world, together with natural science, geography and the lore of animals. The second treats ethics, drawing heavily on a Latin abridgment of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and on Cicero and Seneca. The third is a handbook of rhetoric and of civic government, offering counsel on how a podestà should rule a free city. Latini was a compiler and made no claim to be an original philosopher, but the shape of the work is his own. Its premise, that rhetoric and statecraft are the highest practical arts because they bind a community to justice, is the conviction of a notary who spent his life writing for a commune. Latini also composed the Tesoretto, an unfinished allegorical poem in Italian couplets, which recounts his loss of the road after the news from Montaperti and his instruction by Nature, Virtue and the god of Love. Many scholars have seen in it a precedent for Dante's journey, though the debt is a matter of interpretation. With his translations of Cicero, such as the Rettorica on the De inventione, he helped bring classical rhetoric into the vernacular.

The Tresor survives in a large number of manuscripts, which attests to its wide use. It was translated into Italian, perhaps within Latini's own lifetime, and into Spanish and other languages, and it circulated across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a reference work for merchants, jurists and magistrates.

His importance to Christian writers is largely indirect, and it runs chiefly through Dante. Latini is not a devotional author, and his Tresor works within an ordinary medieval Catholic frame, with the Creation story, the Bible and the saints taking their place beside Aristotle and Cicero, but its purpose is civic rather than contemplative. What he transmitted was a Christian reception of classical ethics and rhetoric, the idea that pagan learning, rightly ordered, serves the common good. Dante inherited that idea and also tested it. In Inferno XV the old master walks beside his pupil, anxious that his book should live on, and entrusts the Tresor to him with the words "in which I still live." The scene is among the most debated in the poem. Readers have taken it as tribute, as rebuke, or as a mixture of both, an acknowledgment of what the student owed and of how far the ambition of a purely civic fame falls short of what the Commedia itself pursues. Later commentators have found in the passage a lesson that eloquence and learning, however admirable, are not the same as salvation.

Latini's reception has shifted with the study of Dante. Long read as a quarry of sources and an episode, he has been reassessed as a figure of real significance for Florentine civic humanism, a forerunner of the fourteenth-century return to Cicero. Modern editions of the Tresor and the Tesoretto have kept him in view for medievalists.

Who should read Latini: Readers of this library who want to understand the intellectual world that shaped Dante, and with it a good part of late medieval Christian thought on virtue, rhetoric and public life. He is useful for those who ask how Christians learned to use pagan ethics, and what is gained and lost when civic usefulness and fame are made the measure of a life. He is not for readers seeking prayer, contemplation or spiritual direction, and the Tresor is a reference work more than a book to be read straight through. He is for those who want to meet the master whom Dante loved, and to understand why Dante, loving him, still wrote the scene as he did.