From A Most Dangerous Book (Christopher B. Krebs, 2011) pp92-6
INDIGENOUS GERMAN WARRIORS
You have not mingled with others but bonded among yourselves. . . . You have always been the indigenous people of Germany. . . . The lifestyle that your forefathers had from the very beginning, you keep till the last.
– Giannantonio Campano, 1471
Piccolomini succeeded in his bid for the papacy in 1458, and as Pope Pius II made the Turkish threat one of his priorities. He was in the midst of his preparations for a crusade, when, feverish and ill, he died in 1464. Paul II succeeded him. The new pope was known to be ill disposed to the policies of his predecessor, whose humanistic interests had drawn his suspicion and whose protegés made him impatient. The Turkish war also held his attention rather than interest, until in I470 Negroponte fell into the hands of Sultan Mehmed II. The loss of this Venetian stronghold on the Aegean island of Euboea stirred the Venetian-born pope into action. He asked the German emperor Frederick III to convene the Imperial Diet in Regensburg. Held in this borough in the east of Bavaria in 1471, it was intended once more to enlist German military forces for a crusade.
In preparation Frederick III requested that the Sienese cardinal Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini – a nephew of Pius II who later became Pope Pius III – be the head of the papal delegation. He was recommended by his avuncular line and his connections to German leaders, who, still chafing at curial impositions, were disinclined to cooperate. In turn the cardinal needed a speaker who commanded the talents required to soothe, please, and stir an audience so that it would “seize arms and throw itself at the savage enemy for the preservation of the Christian faith?” Giannanconio Campano (1429-77), a member of the cardinal’s circle, a cleric, and an accomplished orator, was quickly chosen to fill the position. A professor of rhetoric at the University of Perugia, born, according to legend, on Campanian fields under a laurel tree, Campano owed his career to his scintillating talent, “by which,” contemporaries agreed, “he was most compelling.” His rhetorical and literary skills not only attracted the attention of Pope Pius II, whose autobiography Campano would edit, but also secured him appointments to a series of official delegations. The delegation he joined for Regensburg was special, however; for it included, among others, Tacitus. Both Cardinal Todeschini-Piccolomini and his Campanian speaker played an important role in the dissemination of the Germania, its manuscripts as well as its content. For Todeschini-Piccolomini lent the handwritten copy he had inherited from his uncle to German humanists for copying; Campano, on the other hand, made ample use of Tacitus’s text in his speech at Regensburg. While this speech failed to lead Germans to the crusade, it succeeded in bringing them to a different view of their past. Contemporaries compared Campano to Ovid, Rome’s smartest poet, and to Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator. And “of all the speeches he composed,” Campano’s editor, Michele Femo, would later write, the one at Regensburg “was the most ornate by far and the most persuasive.” It is unfortunate, then, that it was never delivered. Disagreements among the diet’s participants led to its premature dissolution. But the speech soon circulated in handwritten copies and – from around I487 – in print to work its belated influence on its German addressees. No sooner was it made public than it became a classic, considered on a par with Piccolomini’s famous oration in Frankfurt.
Composed for the diet “in order to excite the German leaders against the Turks and to praise the Germans,” the Regensburg address belongs, as its descriptive title indicates, to the deliberative genre, while containing heavily encomiastic elements. Yet it lined up its arguments neither neatly nor logically. Rather, not unlike a symphony, it sounded the major motifs — Germanic military prowess and power, glory, nobility, freedom, and fortitude – now softer, now louder, but almost through the whole of an arrangement that aimed for the arousal of an apathetic audience: “Now, now you must rise!” For nothing less was at stake than the rule of the Holy Roman Empire and the continuance of the Christian faith. Vividly Campano reminded his audience of their enemy and the atrocities already suffered: the terrified howling of men and women, gloom and anxiety, and “boys who serve as slaves to their Turkish masters – those, at least, who were not strangled in their cradles.” In the presence of such danger the Germans, more than anyone else, were obligated to step forward and fight. Their obligation was their past: “I beseech you by the most glorious shadows of your ancestors [per gloriosissima: umbms patrum vestrorum]: make sure that Germany is Germany [Germania Germania sit] and that it commands those fighters now whom it commanded then.”
For this heroic past Campano purloined persuasive details from the Germania, even though he left his source unnamed. He described men and women alike as bold warriors, whose martial devotion showed even in their marital commitment: A bridled horse, a spear, and a shield were exchanged for a dowry. The men often left to seek glory, always bringing their weapons; the women were ever ready to restore wavering spirits in battle and to attend to the injured. Jointly they protected German freedom, fighting off Roman aggressors. Campano’s speech, like Piccolomini’s, reveals the rhetorician at work: His techniques are rearrangement, exaggeration, and – where needed – fabrication. It was not enough that Germanic women, as in the Germania, participated in battle from a distance by their pleading: Campano made them seize weapons and join in the hand-to-hand combat. And not only did he omit the Germanen in his list of peoples practicing propitiatory human sacrifices – even though he found them mentioned in Tacitus – he also turned them into a beacon of religiosity, people who revered Mars, the god of war, as the highest divinity, before they, as Christians, surpassed all other peoples in faith, piety, and the erection of magnificent churches. Never mind that Tacitus had specified Mercury, the god of commerce, as the supreme ruler in the Germanic pantheon, and had made a point of the absence of religious edifices other than groves. Campano’s rhetorical task required that Germanic power and piety be emphasized; and so, while Tacitus’s Germanen simply undertake nothing unarmed, the versatile speaker played up the point by having them armed even when entering temples. Just like that, with a few strokes of a quill, the German ancestors as portrayed by Tacitus were no longer barbaric hut exemplary in their bravery and religious piety.
In the same vein Campano assured his audience of their ancestors’ concord, even though Tacitus had feasted his eyes on bloody inner-Germanic conflicts, praying for the continuation of self-hatred among Rome’s enemies, since that would protect the empire. Yet Campano needed peace among the German ancestors, because current regional leaders, obstinately disagreeing with one another, should overcome their difficulties and move jointly against the common foe. Unperturbed by all past and present evidence to the contrary, and in an attempt to emphasize their harmony, he reminded his listeners of their name: “You are called Germani because of your brotherly spirit.” Though it seems most likely that Germani was a term appropriated by Caesar in reference to all the peoples east of the Rhine, humanists (like their classical predecessors) discussed its deeper significance – as if the name said it all. The Latin Germanus can mean “related.” On the grounds of this etymology the Germans were said to be brothers – not of the neighboring Gauls, as some humanists (on ancient authority) suggested, but among themselves, as Campano (and others) affirmed. “You have not mingled with others but bonded among yourselves,” Campano insisted. “You have scorned commerce abroad and foreign marriages; born under this very sky, you have always been the indigenous people of Germany, not immigrants from elsewhere; and the lifestyle that your forefathers had from the very beginning, you keep till the last.” The ancient Germans were pure warriors. Tucked into this elaborate explanation of national union is the first quotation of Tacitus’s most dangerous paragraph: Germania, chapter 4 (with parts of chapter 2 inserted).
Geography thus guaranteed that the present audience descended from the heroes of times past. The Germanic and the German warriors, bound by the same territory and traditions, formed a continuous line. When Campano considered his German audience, he saw Germanen: the same huge bodies, threatening eyes, and terrifying voices. He did not hesitate to credit it with the glorious victories of days gone by, and he goaded it on: “Are you then going to dither about fighting the Turks, you, whose ancestors are known to have taken up arms once against the tempests of the sky and rising waters?
Tgk1946's Blog 