Historiaru[m] ab inclinatio[n]e Romanoru[m] imperii liber primus [Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades]

by Flavio Biondo (Flavius Blondus) | with additions by Johannes Antonius Campanus

Venice: Octavianus Scotus, 16 July 1483

[370] of [372] leaves (without a1 blank and s8 text) | Folio | a^8(-a1 blank) b-l^8 m-r^10 s^10(-s8) t-z^10 A-C^10 D-E^8 F-M^10 N-S^8

First edition of the Italian humanist's ground-breaking history of Italy, his most acclaimed work, in which he "introduced the notion of the middle ages to European historiography" (Campbell). Biondo opens with the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 and takes the story up to his own time. It was something of a lifelong work in progress, begun in the late 1430s and evolving over the course of many years. At the time of his death in 1463, it was still considered unfinished (something noted in our colophon). Unfinished though it might have been, it marked a watershed moment in Western historiography. "Biondo originated the treatment of the medieval period as a historical epoch, and we still use his term" (Castner). ¶ And by defining the Middle Ages, Biondo lent a vital assist to the historiographical conceptualization of the Renaissance, too, though credit for that typically goes to Biondo's contemporary Leonardo Bruni for his History of the Florentine People. Prior to Bruni and Biondo, taking their cue from Petrarch, the historically inclined recognized just two historical periods: the brilliant classical age celebrated so much by the humanists, and the dark age that followed. Bruni and Biondo offered their own age as a third period, a new age of light—the Renaissance. Despite their shared historiographical approach, it would hardly be unfair to call Bruni and Biondo rivals. Biondo began his career by calling into question some of Bruni's work. Here, for example, Biondo exposed Bruni's De Bello Italico as a wholesale regurgitation of Procopius (which was more or less true). Biondo may have bested Bruni not just in the ethics of research, such as they were at the time, but in the scope of his history. Bruni's history was rather limited to Florence, while Biondo's treated the whole of Italy, an approach that proved influential across the continent. "Biondo's lead (if not his Romanism) was followed by many national historians writing in the Italian style, most notably Paolo Emilio in France, Polydore Vergil in England and Beatus Rhenanus and others in Germany" (Kelley). ¶ It's an important book, with provenance more compelling still.

PROVENANCE: From the library of Cesare Borgia, with his arms as Duke of Romagna and Duke of Valentinois on leaf a2r. To quote biographer Sarah Bradford, "Cesare Borgia's name has been a byword for evil for over five centuries." He was by all reasonable accounts a terrible human being, benefactor of the papacy's worst abuses, and yet his singular geopolitical genius (in)famously made him the object of analysis in Machiavelli's Prince. "Wielding the sword and backed by the power, wealth and prestige of the Papacy itself, Cesare at twenty-seven became the most feared, hated and envied man in Italy." Machiavelli found himself face to face with the murderous phenom in 1502, when tasked with defending the interests of Florence. "At twenty-six, six years younger than Machiavelli, Cesare represented the greatest single threat to the Florentine state, yet such was his skill and the force of his personality that the envoys [Machiavelli included] found themselves arguing his case to their government, whose true interest it was that he should be destroyed." It's been suggested that Machiavelli perhaps saw something of himself in Borgia, having come to his own tragic end, cast aside by the Medici. "Machiavelli, at the end of his life, having known the principal kings, emperors, princes and soldiers of his time, considered Julius II and Cesare Borgia as the two most able and exemplary political figures of the age." ¶ Cesare was born in 1475 as the illegitimate son of Rodrigo Borgia, vice-chancellor to the pope and thus in control of the Vatican's vast financial apparatus. He set his son on the path to power at a very early age. He was just six years old, for example, when Sixtus IV appointed him apostolic protonotary. He was elevated to cardinal at eighteen, after Rodrigo himself became Pope Alexander VI in 1493. And a few years later, to facilitate Cesare's more secular ambitions, his father orchestrated the extraordinary step of having him give up that cardinalship. In pursuit of an alliance with the French, whose new King Louis XII had trained his sights on Naples, Rodrigo coordinated plans for a French marriage. When Jeanne de France rebuffed Cesare, it was Cesare who found himself a new French match. And so he cut his geopolitical teeth early in life. Alliances shifted over the years, crises came and went, yet Cesare's ambition never wavered from unifying the whole of Tuscany under his command—of making an Italian state capable of rivaling the age's great powers of France and Spain. While his good fortune was the stuff of legend, it quickly changed after his father's death. Cesare found himself imprisoned in Spain, orchestrated an improbable escape, and died in battle. He charged an armed group alone, perhaps thinking his men were behind him, and was unceremoniously dispatched. His enemies didn't even know his identity at the time of attack. "All that can be certain about Cesare's end is that he died as he had lived, violently, alone, fighting against the odds." ¶ Ruthlessness aside, Cesare was reportedly an excellent student. As a child, the Latinist Lorenz Behaim would have seen to his education, one steeped in the classics, typical of any humanist prince at the time. "This emphasis on classical studies was not merely an academic exercise; the passion for classical antiquity which characterized the Renaissance was of very real significance in Rome, once the centre of the Roman Empire, where the Romans were rediscovering their great past. The classical authors were regarded as sources of knowledge and as patterns for human behaviour; Cesare's contemporaries took the great figures of classical times as models to be followed." The ancient Roman concept of power "would have become deeply ingrained in Cesare's mind, as he identified himself with his famous namesake Julius Caesar." Biondo's Roman history was just the kind of worthwhile reading someone in Cesare's shoes should have pursued. After all, Biondo helped lay the philosophical groundwork for the imperialist policies of Alexander VI and his contemporaries. "Martin V, Flavio Biondo, Nicholas V, and Pius II had all prepared the soil for the expansion of real papal political and military power. Alexander VI was simply following their lead in his attempt to restore ancient Roman and papal power" (Dandelet). The Roman celebrations of Cesare's military success "demonstrated very clearly that Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia...had been listening to and reading the literature of the Roman humanists during his decades in Rome prior to being elected pope." We can't say whether Cesare or his father actually cracked the spine of this copy. Cesare was certainly known to hole up in his chambers for prolonged periods, and must have occasionally occupied himself with reading, and his father was known to have a well-stocked library. At the same time, Cesare doubtless received books as gifts accepted with little thought, and of course the entire Borgia family was well known for its conspicuously acquisitive spirit. Illuminated, finely bound books were simply another trapping of wealth. ¶ This copy with scattered early marginalia on some 120 pages, in perhaps three or four different hands. Annotations are largely of the wayfinding, nota bene variety, generally brief, copying key words and phrases from the printed text to function as topical headings, presumably to facilitate recall. This type of marginalia is quite common, but we love it all the more when paired with printed marginal notes, as here, for its capacity to underscore the differences between what an editor thought important and what readers found important. Setting aside the fact that an individual's handwriting could change depending on the context, none of the hands strikes us as a clear match for Cesare's (or his father's). ¶ Cesare would not have used this coat of arms until 1498, when Louis XII of France named him Duke of Valentinois, and he perhaps would have added the crossed keys in 1500 once named Captain General of the Church. The illumination is likely Roman work, very similar to that found two Borgia books at the library in Macerata: a 1494 Venice Strabo (Inc. 177) and a 1494 Reggio Emilia Appianus (Inc. 61), both with the same garland-encircled arms, and the Strabo in a binding nearly identical to the surviving fragment retained by our front cover (the Appianus binding is similar, too, also with a Julius Caesar medallion on the front cover). To be sure, our illumination must have been done by the very same studio as Macerata's Strabo, as they clearly used the same model for the bottom border. ¶ Macerata's Borgia books came to them via the Castiglioni family of Cingoli, whose notoriety culminated in the elevation of Pope Pius VIII, if only briefly, 1829-1830. Macerata acquired the Castiglioni collection in 1935. If our book did belong to the Castiglioni, it certainly left the family years earlier. We have on the front paste-down a 1908 ownership inscription by Swedish book collector Per Hierta, noting Cesare's arms and the medallion of Julius Caesar on the front cover. A Swedish inscription penciled on the verso appears to describe the binding. From Hierta, we expect it passed to Otto Smith, (1864-1935), son of the Absolut Vodka founder, who purchased most (all?) of Hierta's incunabula. Smith kept a handful of these for himself, but donated most to the Swedish National Library. Since the library had already received a copy of this 1483 Biondo in 1864, from the collection of Lars von Engeström (current shelfmark Inkunabel 231), we'd understand if neither party thought it a necessary acquisition. We purchased it from a German auction house. As always, we welcome inquiries about export documentation, which we diligently maintain.

CONDITION: Rebound ca. 1908 by Gustaf Hedberg of Stockholm, with his binder's ticket on the rear paste-down; edges sprinkled red. The binding preserves the central portion of the original front cover, which features a Julius Caesar medallion, as found on Macerata's two Cesare bindings—no coincidence for a man whose ambitious motto was Aut Caesar aut nihil, "Either Caesar or nothing." The original binding, along with the illumination, was likely done in Rome, though Cesare also spent a good deal of time in the Marche region of Italy. With initials and pilcrows in blue and red throughout. Occasional lightly inked impression of hollow marginal quads (e.g., b4v, d3v, z1v). ¶ Lacking a1 blank and s8 text leaf. Scattered dampstaining, usually mild and marginal, but worsening in in the last four gatherings (where many fore margins have been repaired, not affecting text); some marginalia trimmed; 3" closed tear in lower margin of d5, repaired, affecting text; lower corner of C9 restored; a few leaves in the m gathering quite soiled; scattered foxing. Bottom edges of the boards a trifle worn; leather surrounding the Caesar medallion distressed from removal, affecting some tool impressions, but still intact.

REFERENCES: ISTC ib00698000; Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum, v. 5, p. 277-278; Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries, B-698 ¶ On the content: Gordon Campbell, "Biondo, Flavio," The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (2005), accessed online (cited above); Carlos Eire, Reformations (Yale, 2016), p. 71 ("By attributing the collapse of Rome to the barbarian invasions, and by dealing with the rise of Christian Europe in the succeeding millennium as a continuous event, or a single epoch, Biondo contributed significantly to the conceptualization of the interval between Rome and his own day as a distinct period, or ‘middle age.' It could be said, then, that Biondo might have unintentionally invented not only the Middle Ages, but also the Renaissance.”); Robert Black, "Biondo, Flavio," The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature (2005), accessed online ("Biondo became one of the earliest genuine medievalists"); Gary Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past (2012), p. 20 (a bit on the Biondo-Bruni rivalry), 282 (for Bruni's use of Procopius; on the present work: "Book IV, in particular, opened with a scathing attack on Bruni, whose De bello italico, according to Biondo, contained nothing from beginning to end but Procopius."); Sjoerd Levelt, Jan van Naaldwijk's Chronicles of Holland (2011), p. 103 ("Biondo has been called 'the first medieval historian', because he recognized a 'medium aevum, even if not using the phrase'"); Winston Black, The Middle Ages: Facts and Fiction (2019), ch. 1 ("Where Petrarch imagined only two periods of history (light and darkness), his followers elevated their own period as a third age in a tripartite vision of history, defined by the promotion of Roman culture: classical, medieval, Renaissance (light, dark, light)"); Donald R. Kelley, "The theory of history," The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (1988), p. 752 (“Humanist historians tried not only to record and to explain but also to give shape to the accessible past on a European as well as a national level. Most influential was the work of Flavio Biondo, who like Petrarch lamented the corruption of the present (praesens tempus) but who, unlike him, tried to recapture the contours of the 'Middle Age' in terms of the civilising mission of the Roman Church."); Catherine J. Castner, Biondo Flavio's Italia Illustrata: Text, Translation, and Commentary (2005), v. 1, p. xxiii (compared to Bruni, Biondo's "new concept of historiography can be characterized as more objective as it involved the exercise of critical judgment upon a variety of sources. Unlike Bruni, whose history of Florence involved a highly national view but one which is Florentine, not Italian, Biondo expanded the frame of reference and took in his Decades a national view of Italy.") ¶ On Borgia: Sarah Bradford, Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times (1976), p. 1 (cited above), 3 ("Cesare Borgia was a dangerous man, with one quality above all which made him so: a driving ambition which was the key to his whole life, the underlying theme of his complex character. He was one of those rare men born with a superlative ambition to which all else was subordinated, a quality which makes a man a maverick among his fellows, and a threat to the normal tenor of their lives. Moreover Cesare deliberately created his own myth by calculated acts of terror, veiling his life in a secrecy which gave his sudden brutalities and lightning moves added impact.), 19 ("In character he inherited his father's intelligence and great ambition, his deviousness and his skill in diplomacy and intrigue, but although he could exert the famous Borgia charm when it suited him and was capable of outbursts of boisterous high spirits like his father, he did not share Rodrigo's outgoing nature. While appearing outwardly frank, he was inwardly secretive, controlled; his bouts of hectic enjoyment were often followed by periods of apparent lethargy and depression...He was self-sufficient, with an almost superstitious belief in himself, that 'high confidence' which Machiavelli later noted in him."), 20-21 (cited above, on his classical education), 24 ("Cesare was a brilliant student"), 26 (Jacopo da Volterra remarked on Cesare's father: "his books in every department of learning are very numerous"), 104 ("A Florentine cardinal who knew both Alexander and Cesare well once remarked of them that, among the attributes of great men which they shared was the supreme ability to recognize an opportunity and to make the best possible use of it. The guiding spirit of Borgia policy was a planned opportunism. Alexander and Cesare were experts in the art of political camouflage, at concealing their real aims while making use of others."), 178 (cited above, on meeting with Machiavelli), 250 (cited above, on Machiavelli's esteem at the end of his life), 287-288 ("Cesare was only thirty-one when he died, and in those brief years he had achieved the most brilliant successes and known the most stunning reversals of fortune"), 289 (for his attempt to unite Italian dukedoms to create a state capable of competing with France and Spain, "historians at the time of the Italian Risorgimento saw Cesare as the symbol of Italy united against the barbarians"), 291 (cited above, on his death), 292 ("Cesare was ruthless, amoral, in many ways a political gangster, if a brilliant one, but the single-minded drive and ability with which he pursued his destiny gave him the qualities of genius"); Alex, p. 17 ("Machiavelli set himself up as an authoritative figure, capable of offering military and governmental advice to a ruler through his analysis of other historical commanders, most famously Cesare Borgia"), 36 (summary of Borgia's presence in The Prince); Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (2014), p. 60-61 (cited above; "Although the brutality of the Borgia military campaigns shocked some contemporary observers, their determination to build a real state was not surprising when viewed in light of the political, literary, and artistic agenda of the previous decades in Italy"); Thomas James Dandelet, "The Imperial Renaissance," The Renaissance World (2007), p. 310 ("Nor surprisingly, the dream of imperial revival first took root in Renaissance Rome where humanists, artists, and a number of popes began to cultivate the memory and knowledge of ancient Roman grandeur. Renaissance popes of the fifteenth century, particularly Eugenius IV, Pius II, Nicholas V, Sixtus IV, Paul II, and Alexander VI, nurtured humanists who revived ancient Roman learning and classical Latin. Some of these humanists, like Flavio Biondo in his treatise Roma triumphans, promoted the idea that Rome was destined from its earliest pagan beginnings to be the sacred center of the world.") ¶ On the binding: Anthony Hobson, "Plaquette and Medallion Bindings: A Second Supplement," 'For the Love of the Binding' (2000), p. 73 ("The plaquette of Julius Caesar used on Cesare Borgia's books and derived from two intaglios in the Medici collection was one of the most popular in Italy"), 75 (describing Macerata's two bindings, considering them of Rome or Marche craftsmanship); E.P. Goldschmidt, The Printed Book of the Renaissance (1950), p. 74/76 (“Just like the antique column, it would seem, the Roman medal was looked upon as representing the essence and epitome of antique beauty. As the most beautiful thing par excellence the Roman imperial coin in thousands of examples was copied and applied to adorn any and every object susceptible of ornamentation.”); Anthony Hobson, Humanists and Bookbinders (1989), p. 94 ("Some of the finest and most distinctive works of applied art of the Italian Renaissance are its bindings deorated with medals or plaquettes...Although they enjoyed a long vogue, they can never have been common." They were difficult to do well and "were thus normally reserved for special copies or special clients."), 122 (“Plaquette ornament on bindings had been conceived by the Paduan antiquaries probably as early as the mid-1460s. At the beginning the stamps were inspired by antique gems. Then followed portraits of reigning princes or, slightly later, of poets, classical or allegorical scenes illustrating moral precepts, antique subjects imbued with an aura of Hellenism by Valerio Belli, and personal imprese.”)

Item #797