Joseph Juste Scaliger – Part 18
~Part 1~
Joseph Juste Scaliger was an egregiously vain man, with an inflated sense of his own importance. He believed himself to be of noble birth, and never failed to take offence if he was not treated with the deference worthy of a man of his standing. His father, Julius Caesar Scaliger, instilled this sense of familial pride in him at an early age.
Joseph’s father tried to form his son’s personality as well as his mind. He impressed upon Joseph the fact that he was a nobleman―indeed, a great aristocrat, a della Scala. As it happened, he was lying. Joseph believed him, and the belief did much to form his character. Julius, paradoxically, also cautioned him again and again always to tell the truth. He insisted that a della Scala must always be intellectually as well as personally independent. ‛Neither I nor my father’, said Joseph, ‛ever wrote anything which had to our knowledge been written or said by anyone else.’ (Grafton 1983:102)
The noble house of della Scala governed the city of Verona between 1262 and 1387, and traced its lineage back to the days of Attila the Hun (Hall 87). In 1405, following eighteen years of conflict, the Scaligers were driven from the city during a popular revolt. In the same year Verona became a member of the Republic of Venice. It remained a Venetian possession until 1797, when it was ceded to Austria in the Treaty of Campo Formio. The Scaligers, having fled the city in 1405, settled eventually in Bavaria, translating their surname into German as Von Der Leiter. In Germany they played an important role in the life of the imperial court until the total extinction of their line towards the end of the 16th century.
It appears, however, that Julius Caesar Scaliger was an inveterate liar. He was actually born in Padua―then part of the Republic of Venice―in 1484. His father was a miniaturist, illuminator and cartographer called Benedetto Bordon (or Bordone). Bordon was born in Padua around 1450 and was married there in 1480. He moved to Venice in the early 1490s, where he remained until 1529. In Venice he established himself as a publisher of books and woodcuts. In his will of 1529 he left all his books to his son Giulio Cesare―one of five children. The following year he made a second will in his native Padua, where he died shortly after.
Julius Caesar had the good fortune of never having his claim to aristocracy challenged in his lifetime. His son Joseph grew up believing that he too was of noble descent, last scion of the Lords of Verona―albeit a cadet branch that traced its line through the last Lord of Verona Guglielmo della Scala, the natural son of Cangrande II della Scala. But Joseph would not share his father’s good fortune. Throughout his life he made so many enemies and became embroiled in so many quarrels that it was only a matter of time before someone started to rummage through the family linen.
Melchior Wieland, or Melchior Guilandinus, was a Prussian botanist and physician. He worked in Padua from 1561 until his death in 1589. In 1572 he published a monograph entitled Papyrus, a critical study of Pliny the Elder’s account of the papyrus plant and its uses in Book 13 of his encyclopaedic Natural History (Pliny 13:74-82). Anthony Grafton describes Papyrus as a curious book, a medley of textual criticism, detailed exegesis and nonsense (Grafton 1979:169).
Scaliger came across Wieland’s book while he was at work on his edition of the works of the Latin grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, which he completed in 1574 and published the following year. At one point in his commentary on Festus, while discussing a passage in Pliny, he writes:
The current reading of this text is corrupt, and it was also harmed by Melchior Guilandinus, who wrote on Pliny’s chapters on papyrus. But I shall write against him at greater length and expose the errors of this man who raves against all worthwhile authors. (Grafton 1979:167 : Scaliger 1576:LX:28-33)
Scaliger’s denunciation was eventually penned by him in 1579 but it was only published posthumously in Paris in 1610 as one of several Opuscula Varia (Various Small Works) collected by his colleague Isaac Casaubon. It runs to fifty-three printed pages, though Grafton describes the extant manuscript as a ten-page invective. Although it was never published in Scaliger’s lifetime, a copy was sent by his friend Claude Dupuy to the botanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli in Padua. Pinelli was a colleague of Guilandinus’s and had been taking an interest in Scaliger since first coming across his denunciation of Guilandinus in his 1575 edition of Festus. It was possibly through Pinelli that Guilandinus first learnt of Scaliger’s attack:
... his annoyance at the affront led to a curious counter-attack. He asked Antonio Riccoboni to look through the archives of the University of Padua. There Riccoboni turned up the diploma that recorded the grant of a doctorate in arts to one Giulio Bordon, a gentleman better known as Scaliger’s father Julius Caesar Scaliger. This document, showing the real family name, decisively refuted the Scaligers’ claim to be descended from the della Scala family of Verona. Catholic pamphleteers seized on this new evidence in their attempts to discredit the greatest living Protestant scholar, who ill-advisedly tried to prove that the diploma was forged. The controversy did much to embitter Scaliger’s last years. In short, his invective resulted in more harm to him than to its intended victim. (Grafton 1979:190)
According to Grafton, rumours that Scaliger’s father had been born to a humble artist called Bordon had already been circulating in Italy as early as 1573. The emergence of the diploma only lent support to these rumours. Guilandinus, however, did not respond publicly to Scaliger’s attack and the controversy died down.
The next act in the drama took place in the 1580s. In an earlier article―Scaliger in the Wilderness―we saw how Scaliger had become embroiled in another public squabble. In 1583 the Tuscan scholar Roberto Titi published a collection of Loci Controversi [Controversial Passages], in which he criticized several contemporary scholars. Scaliger published his riposte under the pseudonym Yvo Villiomarus. Titi’s counter-attack was published in Florence in 1589. In the preface of this work Titi questioned Scaliger’s aristocratic lineage:
& sunt, qui affirment Italogallum te esse, Burdonem videlicet quempiam ex agro Patauino haud ita generosum ...
and there are some who assert that you are a Gallicized Italian―to wit, somebody named Burdo, from the territory of Padua―and thus hardly well born. (Grafton 1998:385 : Bernays 262-264 : Titi iv)
Scaliger, however, did not respond, and once again the controversy died down.
The next person to be drawn into the drama was Janus Dousa, Jr, or Johan van der Does, a precocious young scholar at Leiden University, where Scaliger was working at the time. His father, Janus Dousa, Sr, was the Librarian of the University and the man who had persuaded Scaliger to come to Leiden. In 1591, when he moved to the Hague to take up a post as a Justice of the Supreme Court, the management of the library passed to his son. Janus Junior’s early death in 1596 at the age of twenty-five brought tears to Scaliger’s eyes―I wept for eight days on end like an old woman ( Desmaizeaux 298-299). Two years later he published an elegy in the young man’s honour.
In the early 1590s Janus Dousa, Jr, edited an oration by Julius Caesar Scaliger. Joseph Scaliger took this opportunity to plead his family’s case once and for all.
Joseph wrote for the occasion a long letter on the antiquity and splendour of the Scaliger family ... He went over the whole history of the Scaligers as he had learnt it from his father’s oral instruction and Latin books, making minor adjustments where the beautiful stories were contradicted by inconvenient facts. (Grafton 1998:385)
The finished work was published in Leiden in 1594:
There is much autobiographical detail between the covers of this book. It is in these pages, for example, that we first read the familiar story of how Scaliger taught himself Ancient Greek by working his way through Homer in just three weeks. But it is the Life of Julius Caesar Scaliger which argues that the Scaligers were indeed descended from a cadet branch of the della Scala family:
After the Scaligers had been driven from the lordship of Verona [in 1405] they did not cease to hope that some day they could win the city back from the Venetians. William, the last prince of Verona, died in 1404. His son Nicholas and his grandson Benedict negotiated with Matthias, King of Hungary, and with the Emperor Frederick, in an attempt to secure their aid in reconquering the Scaligers’ ancient possessions ... The Venetians hearing of their conspiracies decided that there would be no peace until no one was left alive who could claim descent from the Princes of Verona. Late in April, 1484, they attacked the castle of La Rocca at Riva, located at the entrance to Lake Garda. Here a few days before Julius Caesar had been born [on 23 April according to his son]. Alone in the castle except for servants, her new baby, and her two-year-old son Titus lay the mother, Berenice Lodronia. Warned of the enemies’ arrival by the peasants rushing to the castle for protection for themselves and their dearest possessions, she courageously rose from her bed, seized her two sons and fled. While she hastened to the castle of the Count Paris her father, the peasants stood off the Venetians. Then the castle was taken and thus was splintered “the last plank of the wrecked boat of the Scaligers.” (Hall 88 : Scaliger 1594:29-31)
It is a historical fact that the Scaligers retained the castle of La Rocca at Riva del Garda after they were driven from Verona. It is also true that in April 1484, shortly before Julius’s birth, the Venetians attacked the castle in an attempt to extinguish the line of della Scala once and for all. It is probably not true that Berenice Lodronia, the daughter of Count Paris di Lodron and the wife of Benedetto della Scala, fled from the castle with her two-year-old son Titus and her newborn baby Julius.
There is a curious connection here with the familiar story of Romeo and Juliet. In Shakespeare’s tragedy one of Juliet’s suitors is called Count (or Countie) Paris. A Count Paris of Lodrone [Il Conte Paris di Lodrone] appears in one of Shakespeare’s sources, Matteo Bandello’s Novelliere, which was published in Lucca in 1554, when Joseph Juste Scaliger was fourteen years old. In an earlier source, Luigi da Porto’s novella Giuletta e Romeo, which was written in 1524 and published in Venice in 1531, there is a Conte di Lodrone (or Ladrone in some versions, but this is probably just a printing error).
There was a noble family of Lodron (or Lodrone) from Trentino, in northern Italy. Several members of this family bore the name Paris (Paride): Paris Lodron, for example, who was born in Trentino in 1586 and ruled Salzburg from 1619 to 1653. Like the Scaligers, the Lodrons belonged to the Ghibelline faction. Trento, the capital city of Trentino, lies about 30 km northeast of Riva del Garda.
But that is not the most enigmatic thing about all of this. Matteo Bandello was not only a novelist. He was also a clergyman. Between 1550 and 1554 he was the Bishop of Agen, in southern France―the birthplace of Joseph Juste Scaliger. Joseph was ten when Bandello was translated to Agen. Bandello had been living in the vicinity of Agen since the early 1540s, writing, and cultivating the society of other learned men―including Julius Caesar Scaliger, who had settled in Agen in 1525.
So who exactly invented the story that Julius Caesar Scaliger was born to a Berenice Lodronia in La Rocca: he himself, as is commonly claimed, or his son? If Julius Caesar invented the whole story, is it just a coincidence that we have a Count Paris di Lodrone in a novella by Bandello set in Verona? Vernon Hall, in his Life of Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), writes:
Almost all of the biographical details of this chapter may be found scattered throughout J. C. Scaliger’s Poetices, Exotericarum, etc and Poemata. I have based my narrative in this chapter on Joseph’s Vita as the most complete and used the others only to add items he does not give. (Hall 88 fn 8)
And in one of Julius’s Latin poems we come across the following lines:
Lodronia, flos, muliebris splendor honoris
Comite Paride sata vetere, mea Berenicia mater.Lodron, a flower, the splendour of woman’s honour,
Begotten of old Count Paris, my mother Berenice.Julius Caesar Scaliger, De Regnorum eversionibus 335
Could it be that Bandello borrowed his il conte Paris di Lodrone from Julius, having heard the story from him in Agen?
Note that Benedetto Bordon shared the same first name with Benedetto della Scala, whom Julius claimed as his father. According to Hall, Julius Caesar was known as a young man by the name Count Burden after one of the estates of the della Scala family (Hall 89). In Pompeo Litta Biumi’s monograph on the family, Famiglie celebri di Italia: Scaligeri di Verona [Famous Families of Italy: The Scaliger’s of Verona] (Turin 1819), no descendants of Niccolò della Scala (Benedetto’s alleged father) are mentioned. Even Niccolò’s existence is doubted by Litta:
Niccolò È l’individuo imaginario da cui il celebre Giulio Cesare Scaligero fa discendere la sua famiglia.
Niccolò He is the imaginary individual from whom the famous Julius Caesar Scaliger makes his family descend. (Litta Biumi 4)
I presume, then, that Benedetto della Scala and his wife Berenice never existed.
Scaliger’s Epistola proved to be very popular in its day, but if he hoped that a meticulously detailed account of his father’s life and lineage would finally silence the doubters, he was to be sorely disappointed. Unwittingly, he had only provided his enemies with a plethora of biographical details that could now be fact-checked against historical records. But the consequences of Scaliger’s indiscretion in publishing his Epistola would not come crashing down on him for several years.
Anthony Grafton identifies Myriam Billanovich’s investigation of this controversy as the definitive treatment. Unfortunately, her paper does not appear to be available online so I have not been able to check whether any of my speculations hold water.
Itaque hic finem faciam.
