Niccolò Sagundino

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Niccolò Sagundino[a] (1402 – March 1464) was a Greek-born Venetian secretary, diplomat and humanist. He wrote numerous letters, as well as religious and philosophical treatises, mostly in Latin.

Originally from Euboea, he was in Venetian service when he was wounded and captured by the Ottomans at the fall of Thessaloniki in 1430. He favoured the union between the Catholic and Orthodox churches and worked for the Papacy. He undertook several Venetian missions to the Ottoman court and to Greek lands, on one of which he suffered a shipwreck that killed several of his immediate family. He died in Venice.

Onesander "translated by Niccolò Sagundino from Greek into Latin", from a Neapolitan manuscript of 1494–1495

Life[edit]

Sagundino was born in 1402 to a Greek family in Chalkis, the capital of the Venetian kingdom of Negroponte. His father's name was Manuel. His mother's name is unknown.[1] His family was originally from Constantinople, where they are attested since the 13th century.[2] It had two branches, one at Chalkis and another at Thessaloniki.[1] They were citizens of Venice.[3] His sister or aunt, R. Sagundino, married a Venetian citizen of the Aurelio family. Her three sons, Marco, Paolo and Pietro, also entered service in the Venetian government; Marco's son, Nicolò Aurelio, eventually rose to the supreme non-patrician office, that of grand chancellor.[4]

Sagundino received a classical education.[5] He was at Thessaloniki, possibly already in the employ of the Venetian state, when the Ottomans captured the city in 1430. He was wounded in the assault and taken prisoner with his family, remaining in captivity for 13 months.[6][3] After his release, he returned to Chalkis, where from 1434 until 1437 he served Venice as advocatus curiae.[5][7] Possibly already in 1437 he left Greece for Italy, staying either in Venice or Rome;[7] in 1438, because of his fluency in both Greek and Latin, Sagundino was sent to the Council of Ferrara as an official translator. He remained through 1439, impressing the assembled clergy by his grasp of theology.[8][3] He favoured the cause of church union.[5]

At the conclusion of the council, the Venetian-born Pope Eugene IV employed Sagundino as an apostolic secretary and from 1441 on as an envoy (nuncio) on missions in Italy and Greece.[9][3] His activity from 1441 to the end of Eugene's pontificate is not documented, but he is still attested as an apostolic secretary under Pope Nicholas V in December 1452, which means he likely served in the same post throughout the period in question.[10] At the same time, however, he is also attested since 1440 for a ten-year-tenure as chancellor (cancelliere) to the bailo of Negroponte, the Venetian governor of Chalkis; and he was confirmed in office for another decade in 1450.[11] Sagundino was certainly in Chalkis in 1453, where he received the news of the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.[11]

From Chalkis he was sent to accompany the Venetian ambassador, Bartolomeo Marcello, who was sent to Constantinople for negotiations with Sultan Mehmet II.[12] His stay in Constantinople was apparently brief,[13] and he returned to Venice in autumn, bearing letters from Marcello to the Venetian Senate, but then immediately sent to Rome on the express wish of Pope Nicholas V to inform him on Ottoman intentions, and from there to Alfonso V of Aragon, the King of Naples, for the same purpose.[1][14] In January 1454 Sagundino, while still in Naples, wrote a report on his observations of the Ottomans (Oratio Nicolai Sagundini édita in Urbe Neapoli ad Serenissimum principem et novissimum regem Alfonsum).[15]

At some point thereafter, Sagundino became a secretary to the Doge of Venice.[3][16] In this capacity he returned to Naples in late 1455 to convey letters from the Venetian government to Alfonso, and stayed there until August 1456, making contact with the numerous humanist scholars resident in the city.[17] In summer 1456, as the plague raged in Venice, he sent his wife and children back to Chalkis.[18] In spring 1457 Sagundino was again sent on diplomatic missions on behalf of the Venetian government, first to Siena, and then to the Pope in Rome and the King of Naples, where he remained for several months, reporting on Alfonso's Italian policies and military preparations, before returning to Venice in early 1458. An envisaged extension of his mission to the King of Navarre did not come to pass.[19]

These embassies lasted until 1458, when he was appointed chancellor to the Duke of Crete. He set sail for Crete in July 1460, but the journey was cut short by a shipwreck that took the lives of his pregnant wife, two sons and a daughter and destroyed his books and many other possessions. He resigned his Cretan appointment, but was again appointed secretary to the doge, in which capacity he visited Methoni. He also undertook diplomatic missions to Constantinople and the Empire of Trebizond in 1460.[3]

Sagundino died at Venice in March 1464, the exact day being uncertain.[5] It is variously reported as 22 or 23 March, with a surviving notice of his death bearing a date of either 22 or 24 March. His son Giovanni having predeceased him, his heir was his son Ludovico and grandson Niccolò.[3]

Works[edit]

Most of Sagundino's writings are in Latin. Few have been published.[5] He left behind 66 letters to his family and other Italian humanists, one of them describing the shipwreck to Cardinal Bessarion, a fellow Greek Catholic.[3][5] Among his notable correspondents were Ulisse degli Aleotti, Bishop Ermolao Barbaro, Antonio Beccadelli Panormita, Andrea Contrario, George of Trebizond and Zaccaria Trevisan.[3] He wrote a consolatio on the death of Valerio Marcello, the young son of Jacopo Antonio Marcello.[3][20]

Sagundino made Latin translations of the ancient Greek writers Arrian, Demosthenes, Onesander and Plutarch. He also wrote treatises on philosophy, theology and rhetoric.[5] He dedicated a work on the doctrine of the Trinity, De deo, de unitate essentiae eius et de trinitate personarum,[b] to Febo Cappella, and another on philosophy, De origine et sectis philosophorum,[c] to Fantino Coppo.[3] In 1456, he was commissioned by Enea Silvio Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius II) to write a history of the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in his De familia otumanorum.[d][5]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Greek: Νικόλαος Σεκουνδινός, Nikolaos Sekoundinos. Latin: Nicolaus Secundinus or Sagundinus. His given name may be anglicized Nicholas. His surname is sometimes spelled Segundino in Italian.
  2. ^ "On God, the Unity of His Essence and of the Persons of the Trinity".
  3. ^ "On the Origins and Sects of the Philosophers".
  4. ^ "On the Family of the Ottomans". This is the manuscript's title. There are printed versions with variant titles.[3] Talbot 1991 gives Othomanorum familia.

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Caselli 2017.
  2. ^ Babinger 1961, p. 11.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l King 2014, pp. 427–429.
  4. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 26–27.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h Talbot 1991.
  6. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 11–12.
  7. ^ a b Babinger 1961, p. 12.
  8. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 12–13.
  9. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 14–15.
  10. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 15–16.
  11. ^ a b Babinger 1961, p. 16.
  12. ^ Babinger 1961, p. 17.
  13. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 18–19.
  14. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 17–20.
  15. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 19–20.
  16. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 20–21.
  17. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 20–22.
  18. ^ Babinger 1961, p. 28.
  19. ^ Babinger 1961, pp. 29–32.
  20. ^ King 1994, p. 24.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Babinger, Franz (1961). Johannes Darius (1414 - 1491), Sachwalter Venedigs im Morgenland, und sein griechischer Umkreis (in German). Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. OCLC 54905371.
  • Caselli, Cristian (2017). "Sagundino, Niccolò". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 89: Rovereto–Salvemini (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
  • Caselli, Cristian (2019). "Interpreter, Diplomat, Humanist: Nicholas Sagundinus as a Cultural Broker in the 15th-Century Mediterranean". In Daniëlle Slootjes; Mariette Verhoeven (eds.). Byzantium in Dialogue with the Mediterranean: History and Heritage. Brill. pp. 226–244.
  • Di Franco, Matteo (2023). "Greek philosophical miscellany (Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.4.16)". Cambridge Digital Library. Cambridge University Library. doi:10.17863/CAM.99438.
  • King, Margaret L. (1994). The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello. University of Chicago Press.
  • King, Margaret L. (2014) [1985]. Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance. Princeton University Press.
  • Philippides, Marios (2007). Mehmed II the Conqueror and the Fall of the Franco-Byzantine Levant to the Ottoman Turks: Some Western Views and Testimonies. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
  • Talbot, Alice-Mary (1991). "Sekoundinos, Nicholas". In Kazhdan, Alexander (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 1865. ISBN 0-19-504652-8.
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