An exile’s hopes: the search for a liberator in Michael Marullus

Abstract

Michael Marullus, fifteenth-century Greek, soldier and Latin poet, lived almost all his life in exile. In his earliest poetry revanchist thoughts directed at his country's Ottoman conquerors are hardly present, and superhuman powers are held responsible for the catastrophe. Later, Byzantine reliance on foreign forces is blamed. With time however and political developments in central and western Europe, a crusade or Tiirkenzug seemed to become more likely, and Marullus turned to the Habsburg Maximilian I and Charles VIII of France as possible liberators. This paper attempts to describe the poet's developing treatment of the themes of defeat and exile and his response in the last decade of the fifteenth century to the possibility of military action against the Ottomans. Who was responsible-gods, Ottomans or the Genoese protostratort When Michael Marullus published, probably around 1489, his first collection of poems, Epigrammaton... libri duo, 1 he could look back on a life that had been drastically shaped by the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine empire. He was a native of the Morea and gives us to understand that he was conceived very shortly before the conquest of his patria. If this is understood to be the Morea, his birth would fall in the early 1460s. 2 1 The book lacks any indication of place or date of publication. It is however generally agreed that it was printed in Rome by Eucharius Silber. A. Perosa, 'Studi sulla formazione delle raccolte di poesie del Marullo, Rinascimento 1 (1950) 125-56; 257-79 (henceforth Perosa, 'Studi') at 131-3 (= Studi di filologia umanistica [Rome 2000] [henceforth Perosa, Stud. fit. uman.] Ill 203-43 at 208-09), dates its publication to between June 1488 and July 1489 and in his edition, Michaelis Marulli carmina (Zurich [1951]) p. IX and n. 6, to early 1489. Its contents were subsequently re-edited as books I and II of the four books of Epigrammata in Hymni et Epigrammata (Florence 1497). The two editions will be referred to by Perosa's sigla of s and c respectively. The text of his edition is used throughout this paper, with E standing for Epigrammata, HN for Hymni naturales, N for Neniae, £ V for Epigrammata varia and P for Institutiones principales. References to material other than textual in his edition will henceforth be to Perosa, Edition. 2 'Still unformed seed, I was still scarcely implanted properly in my mother's womb when my defeated country suffered the weight of enslavement') Vix bene adhuc fueram matris rude semen in alvo, I cum grave servitium patria victa subit), E 2.32.65-6. Place and date of birth are matters of debate. The communis