Špoljarić, Luka.
(2015).
Politika, patronat i intelektualna kultura na ugarskom dvoru u prvim godinama vladavine Matije Korvina : Nikola Modruški i Petrova lađica : (Studija, kritičko izdanje i prijevod).
Građa za povijest književnosti hrvatske(38).
pp. 1-81.
ISSN 0351-2703
(In Press)
Abstract
Summary
The article presents a new critical edition accompanied by a facing Croatian translation of
Peter’s Barge (Navicula Petri), a theological treatise on the problem of physical evil composed
by Nicholas bishop of Modruš (ca. 1425–1480), a Croatian Renaissance prelate who enjoyed close
contacts with the court of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490) before embarking
on a successful career at the papal Curia. The edition is based on the sole extant witness of the
text, preserved as part of a fifteenth-century miscellany located in the Archive of the Croatian
Academy of Sciences and Arts (AHAZU) under shelfmark II.b.3. The two earlier editions of the
work (Veličan 1999; Hrkać 2006) are not only marred by errors in transcription, but have moreover
failed to recognize two major scribal errors and have thus included not the end of Peter’s Barge
but the end of Leonardo Bruni’s Short Oration before Pope Martin V, the work which follows
in the manuscript. The critical edition presented here corrects the transcription errors of previous
editions, includes for the first time the ending of the work which can be found two folios further in
the manuscript, and establishes the original sequence of this final portion of the text.
As a work dedicated to the archbishop of Kalocsa Stephen Várdai (ca. 1425–1471), Peter’s
Barge offers new perspectives on the political, social, and intellectual dynamics at the court of
Matthias Corvinus during the first years of his reign, which are reexamined in the introductory
study. The study first presents an overview of Nicholas of Modruš’s ecclesiastical and diplomatic
career in the context of dynamic diplomatic activities between Buda, Rome and Venice that sought
to counter the energetic Ottoman expansion in the Balkans. Owing to the influence of his earliest
patron, Stephen Frankapan (†1481) lord of Modruš, the most powerful figure in Croatia at the
time, king Matthias’ supporter and an important figure in these preparations, Nicholas entered the
circle of intellectuals and diplomats around Várdai and especially John Vitéz bishop of Oradea (ca.
1408–1472), the two chief advisors to the king. At the same time, he was appointed by pope Pius II
(1458–1464) as a legate to the Kingdom of Bosnia, only to witness its fall to the Ottomans in the
spring of 1463. Though Nicholas of Modruš and Stephen Frankapan featured prominently in king
Matthias’ autumn counteroffensive in Bosnia, during the following winter both fell out of grace
with him. In order to shed more light on these events, the study proceeds by analyzing Nicholas’
contacts with the circle of Hungarian prelates, diplomats, and other intellectuals, highlighting the
political and diplomatic roles of these figures, and interpreting their meetings not as mere idyllic
otium spent in pursuit of intellectual topics, but as meetings during which discussions on the most
important political concerns of the kingdom took fore. Having established the social hierarchy of
the group, the study continues by analyzing themes, genres, and sources behind Peter’s Barge and
Nicholas’ other work from this period, Dialogue on the Happiness of Mortals, as evidence of his
intellectual profile. It challenges an earlier interpretation according to which Nicholas of Modruš
was, much like Janus Pannonius or Galeotto Marzio, two other prominent intellectuals connected
to the circle at the time, a humanist. Instead, as is shown, the bishop’s works present him as a
scholastically educated prelate, a typical former student of Paul of Pergola’s philosophical school. Yet, rather than a product of a detached intellectual, Peter’s Barge has to be understood as part
of a Renaissance intellectual tradition which interpreted physical evils of “Turkish” conquests as God’s retribution for the moral evils of the res publica Christiana, as it was supposed to be read
against a backdrop of the dangerous political situation brought about by the fall of the Bosnian
Kingdom. The study then analyzes Nicholas’ sudden banishment from the Hungarian court in the
winter of 1464, connecting it, as earlier studies, to Stephen Frankapan’s removal from the position
of the Croatian-Dalmatian ban. However, against earlier interpretations, it presents both the
lord and bishop of Modruš not as passive victims of Matthias’ centralization efforts, but as active
players at the state level who were, much as other factions, involved in court intrigues in order to
promote their own political interests. This inglorious end of Nicholas’ Hungarian episode sheds
light on his On Consolation, a treatise on sorrow and methods of consoling he composed upon
his arrival to Italy, as an effort in self-medication that was supposed to remedy the bishop’s aegritudines
animi brought about by his exile from the royal palace in Buda to a provincial city of the
Papal States. Finally, a postscriptum to this discussion of Nicholas’ Hungarian career is devoted to
the miscellaneous paper manuscript which preserves the sole surviving witness of Peter’s Barge,
and which offers evidence of continuing circulation of Nicholas’ works at the court in the years
following his banishment. It traces the manuscript’s provenance story from the lower stratum of
the court’s intellectual milieu all the way to Dubrovnik, as yet another example of the vibrant
cultural interaction between the city on the Adriatic and the Hungarian court.
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