FRANCESCO FILELFO came, in an age of aristocratic ideals, from the bottom of the social ladder.¹ He was born in the provincial Italian town of Tolentino in 1398, of parents so unassuming he never thought to speak of them in his autobiographical letters. Yet the flamboyant Filelfo—who took pleasure in advertising himself as the “bard with three testicles”—rose to a position of power and influence almost unheard of in the fifteenth century for a man of his background.² As a young man, he had studied abroad for several years, in Constantinople; when he returned to Italy, he moved...

BY HIS OWN testimony, Filelfo was already in his fifty-third year when he began to toy with the idea of publishing his epistolary autobiography.¹ He had not wanted to publish his private correspondence earlier, but his public was beginning to hound him for it—this was his claim at any rate.² In February 1451 he had first approached his friend Niccolò Ceba, asking him to return the letters he had sent Ceba, so that he could include them in his forthcomingEpistolae familiares.³ He was still finding it difficult to think about undertaking a major project that year, though the...

IN MAY 1453 the Turks sacked Constantinople, the city the humanists regarded as the last bastion of Greco-Roman culture, nostalgically calling itnova Roma.¹ In Italy that year, continuing wars between the great territorial states threatened to destroy everything those cities sought to defend. In the first four years of his signory, Duke Francecso Sforza spent what little was left in Milan’s treasury after the civil war, fighting the Venetians. In the early fifties, a great number of the duke’s creditors, from his armorers and military architects to the professors at the university in Pavia, began to send notices to...

MILAN’S WARS with Venice came to an end on 9 April 1454 at Lodi, with the signing of a treaty that would keep peace between the great Italian city-states for the next four decades. All the Peace of Lodi did for Filelfo, however, was dispel his last illusions about his future in Milan. So long as the duke was fighting against Venetian troops or the king of Naples, he could be patient. When he was still having difficulty drawing his university salary in 1455, he began to cast about for other opportunities. Later that same year he wrote his former...

NOW, DURING the years 1458–1464, the Kingdom of Naples bled from the same wounds of war that Milan and her client cities suffered in the late forties and early fifties in the wake of Filippo Maria Visconti’s death. In July 1458 Filelfo’s recent host and patron, King Alfonso of Naples died, leaving his vast kingdom to his son Ferrante.¹ Within the year, Duke René d’Anjou’s son, Jean, marched into the Campagna with the full support of his kinsman Charles VII of France. There Jean routed the armies of both King Ferrante and the pope in a series of engagements,...

FRANCESCO SFORZA’S death brought an end to whatever security Filelfo once enjoyed at the Milanese court.¹ Though during his sixteen-year rule the duke had not paid him with any regularity, Filelfo felt his presence was valued. Sforza had repeatedly refused him permission to absent himself from court for any length of time—not even, to Filelfo’s great regret, when King Charles VII invited him to Paris in the late fifties. But when Sforza’s twenty-two year old son, Galeazzo Maria, succeeded his father as the fifth duke of Milan, the aging poet found that his position at court was no longer...