America was known 150 years before Christopher Columbus
On 8 October 1996, the Christie's auction house put a large lot of collectibles items up for sale in New York on behalf of the city of Omaha, in the US state of Nebraska. The pieces for sale were partly ancient books; among others, a medieval codex which the auction catalog described in detail as follows. A parchment manuscript, composed of 156 sheets of rather large dimensions (40 x 27 centimetres), laid out in two columns of 53 lines each; the text written in brown ink in an Italian Gothic script, with the chapter titles in red and occasional underlining, also in red; the initials of the chapters left blank, awaiting a decoration that was never realized; about sixty illustrations scattered throughout the text, generally crude family trees, of which two were reproduced. The catalog added other useful information to determine the commercial value of the manuscript: it was in good general condition, even if it showed some inevitable traces of woodworms, a few marginal stains, some sporadic fading of the ink, some scribbles on the last sheets; the cover, made of heavier parchment, was not valuable; the binding of the files was often loose. Interestingly the catalog made no mention of the only really interesting drawing found in the codex: a diagram of the winds drawn in pen, not particularly valuable from an artistic point of view, but far from banal in terms of what it depicted, as we will see later.
The catalog remained vague on the date of the manuscript, but provided information on its contents, in a language accessible to potential buyers, who were more likely to be collectors than scholars. It was said that the first four books of the Cronicon maius were transcribed there, a historical work in Latin attributed to the Dominican Galvagneus de la Flamma, in Italian Galvano Fiamma, active in Milan in the first half of the fourteenth century. A brief portrait of the author was then outlined ("he was a follower of the Viscontis and in particular he was a close friend of Duke Azzone, to whom he dedicated the Cronicon maius") and of his literary production ("all the historical works of Galvano - various chronicles whose interrelationships have never been precisely determined – they concern the history of Milan or the Dominican Order"). The work contained in the auction codex did not escape this definition, which - the catalog continues - «although presented as a universal chronicle, progressively focuses on the events of Milan»; not without usefulness, however, because, "despite the imaginative genealogies that accompany it, it preserves information of interest to historians". According to the auction catalogue, only two other copies of the work were known, one of them partial; the codex on sale, never studied before, was therefore an important testimony to a very rare writing, also because in the initial parts it provided previously unpublished information about the date and circumstances of the text's composition.
We don't know who won the auction, but we know the selling price: 14,950 dollars, for an item with estimated value between 5,000 and 10,000 dollars. The price had therefore risen, but not by much. Although of considerable size and well made, the codex was not particularly beautiful, it did not have any valuable decorations and it had a cheap cover; it was still only a further copy of a work already known, at least according to what was written in the catalogue. Christie's consultant was certainly an expert in ancient books and had conscientiously carried out his task of valorising the book, but he was not and could not be a specialist in the works of Galvano Fiamma or fourteenth-century Milan, and he had made some mistakes (Azzone Visconti, for example, was not a 'duke' at all). Upon closer inspection, the work contained was much more interesting, and the value of the codex, consequently, could have been much higher. The manuscript was not a further copy of an already known Cronicon maius, but the only existing example of an unknown Cronica universalis, and within it were hidden news of exceptional rarity. To realize this, however, you had to read it all, and you didn't really want to do that.
As mentioned, the city of Omaha, Nebraska, put that manuscript up for sale in 1996. To raise cash, the public administration sold some pieces - evidently considered less interesting - from the Byron Reed Collection, inherited in 1891 upon the death of the man who had founded it. Byron Reed was a typical American entrepreneur-pioneer of the 19th century. Born in 1829 in New York state, he had moved west with his family, first to Wisconsin then to Ohio; finally in 1855 he settled in Omaha, a newly founded city on the frontier of colonization. Here Reed had made his fortune buying and reselling pieces of that worthless prairie; we may suspect that he did not value native prerogatives, but we know that, at the very least, he was not a slaveholder. With the proceeds of these deals he was able to satisfy his passion as a collector: mainly coins and medals, but also ancient books, maps and documents. The Byron Reed Collection remained in the Omaha Public Library until 1985, when it was transferred to the local Western Heritage Museum. In 1995 the museum, located in the city's main historic building, the old train station, was modernized, at a considerable cost of 22 million dollars. The expense was largely supported, as always in the United States, by private financiers (in particular by the spouses Charles and Margre Durham); but the funds were evidently not enough, and the public administration intervened by selling part of the Byron Reed Collection and investing the more than 6 million dollars it received in the project. From the news of the time it is clear that the decision was anything but peaceful: the collection was passed to the museum on the condition that it was adequately preserved and made accessible to all, as it should have already been in Reed's testamentary provisions, a mandate that some believed he had been betrayed. They were right: following the sale, our book is now in private hands, it is no longer freely consultable, it is no longer a public good.
Today the Omaha museum has changed its name, certainly because the notion of western heritage, with the trail of suffering and blood that it brings with it, is less presentable than it once was: it is more aseptically called the Durham Museum, in homage to its benefactors, and its aim is «not only preserving Omaha's history», but also, more ecumenically, «educating the community on subjects related to the region, nation and world»; the old station is therefore home to exhibitions, workshops and various cultural activities. The paradox and nemesis remains whereby in 1996 the city of Omaha, believing it was getting rid of a musty piece of the Middle Ages to make room for a shinier Wild West, unwittingly renounced a unique document on America's past, as the reader soon will find out. It is a frequent and banal parable of history and the public use of history, whereby what is most important is what is most attractive, what the visitor can presumably best recognize himself in. The Omaha administration evicted the old-fashioned medieval friar - and with him the company of sailors, geographers and explorers we will meet later - in favor of some empathetic cowboy; Gawain's manuscript for John Wayne's hat. The real estate agent Reed, although equally unaware and perhaps a bit of a freebooter, had been more careful.
A manuscript is a unique object, like a painting, because it is the result of a single and specific act of copying, and not of a mechanical reproduction, as a printed book is. Each manuscript therefore has its own individual birth, and then also has its own individual history, more or less eventful, and one can attempt to reconstruct it. There are manuscripts that have remained in the same library for centuries, some read and venerated as authorities, others forgotten by all; there are manuscripts that have changed location, even many times, as a consequence of cultural dynamics, political upheavals, economic interests, patrimonial settlements. Our book, after four centuries of sedentary life in Milan, has had a more adventurous history in the last two hundred years, which has forced it to travel numerous times.
The copying of the text was done by a professional scribe, named Petrus de Guioldis (we will call him in the Italian form, Pietro Ghioldi), who worked in Milan in the last years of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century. He was a serial transcriber of the historical works of Galvano Fiamma, that friend of the 'duke' Azzone Visconti who would soon also become a friend of ours, but who had been dead for half a century when Ghioldi copied him. He transcribed at least six of them, one of them even twice; in a couple of cases at the end of the work he left his signature, and once also the date, 1396. All Galvano's manuscripts copied by Ghioldi have the same format, the same layout, the same system of headings and references, similar spaces reserved for paragraph initials and thumbnails, which in only one case were then added. Two of these codes, preserved in Milan respectively at the Ambrosiana Library (ms. A 275 lower) and at the Trivulziana Library (ms. 1438, the only one with decorations and miniatures, unfortunately only partial), are now available for free consultation online thanks to the generosity of the respective institutions; we invite the reader to browse them, at least virtually, because you cannot talk about a manuscript, like a painting, if you have not seen it (you can find the links in the last chapter). From the seriality and physical uniformity of the copies it can be deduced that Ghioldi was working for a well-defined project, and a demanding one. The parchment is always of good quality, as is used for a valuable book; the provision of a decorative apparatus, to be inserted in the appropriate spaces, suggests a refined recipient; the work required a lot of time for the copyist - none of Galvano's works are short, and some are indeed very long -, it was expensive for the client, and it would have been even more expensive if the decorations had been completed. Fifty years after Gawain's death, someone had thought of giving new luster to his texts, which risked obsolescence. A providential operation and, from this point of view, perfectly successful: we possess most of Fiamma's works today only thanks to Ghioldi's copies, without which they would have disappeared forever (a uniqueness of transmission that risks making the author and the copyist, who created and who reported, and we will have to return to this later). The Cronica universalis, the text preserved in Byron Reed's codex, is one of these.
We therefore know who wrote the code, but we also know some of his subsequent events. Apparently, the manuscript did not move from Milan for a long time; for a certain period the Cronica universalis was combined with another work by Galvano, the so-called Cronica Galvagnana, together with which it ended up bound; aroused some interest in the parts dedicated to the history of Milan, which were copied in extracts. In the seventeenth century it came into the possession of Giovanni Battista Bianchini, a Milanese notary passionate about historical studies; he understood that the text contained in the codex was by Gawain, but he made a mistake in identifying it, and placed an inappropriate title on the first page (Politia novella, the name of another work by Fiamma). After his death, in 1699, the manuscript passed to the Cistercian monks of Sant'Ambrogio, near the basilica of the same name. At Bianchini's house or in the monks' library he was consulted by various scholars, including the father of Italian Enlightenment historiography, Ludovico Antonio Muratori. None of these scholars, as far as we know, examined it very carefully, except for the sections on the Milanese topic, nor did they ever think of making a complete copy of it; the only signs of reading are sporadic and short marginal notes, simple indications of content, increasingly rare as the text progresses.
Exactly one hundred years after Bianchini's death, in 1799, the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio was suppressed, as were many other regular religious foundations, by the Napoleonic Cisalpine Republic. After four centuries of sleepy permanence in the Milanese libraries and limited but dignified scholarly attendance, new and unpredictable adventures began for our code. Following the suppression, the books of the monks of Sant'Ambrogio were dispersed, and largely found their way to the private market. Ghioldi's codex ended up in the hands of an insatiable Venetian collector, the Jesuit Matteo Luigi Canonici; he escaped the Oxford librarians, who acquired most of his books upon Canonici's death; together with others it was sold at auction in London in 1821, where a British antique dealer won it. For a few decades, traces of it were lost; it reappeared on the market in the 1880s, when it was put up for sale again, this time in the United States, and it was probably on that occasion that Byron Reed purchased it.
Known, but not much considered, by the erudite historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a mere collector's item for Canonici or Reed, the Cronica universalis was instead a flagship for its author, which at this point we will have to present to the public.
2. A monk who wastes time and ink
Perhaps this may not have been the reason that made the manuscript auctioned by Christie's relatively uninteresting, but it must be recognized that Galvano Fiamma, the author of the text, enjoyed a very bad reputation.
The great Muratori, who published one of the numerous chronicle works attributed to Gawain in 1727, treated him as a simpleton (bonus Gualvaneus, he mocked him, 'that good man Gawain') suffering from an intoleranda credulitas with respect to the news that was fed to him. Not a good judgment for a writer who has historical ambitions. Along the same lines, Francesco Novati, a learned and brilliant man of letters at the end of the 19th century, as expert as anyone in Milanese texts of the Middle Ages, defined Galvano as a «negligent and credulous compiler», and more precisely described him as «the Dominican theologian who for more than thirty years has wasted time and ink pouring from one medley into another the same indigestible congeries of historical information, collected almost everywhere and piled up without any sense of art or light of criticism". A sarcastic and merciless judgment that ends up making Gavano quite interesting. Was he really such a terrible fool?
The name of Galvano Fiamma is familiar to many Milanese today, because a non-secondary street in the city is named after him, but they don't know much more about him, except for the few who are passionate about medieval history. In reality we have various pieces of information about him, not enough to outline a complete biography, but enough to outline his environment and personality. He was Milanese, or in any case the city of Milan is his ideological and emotional space of reference, the main place of his life and the central subject of his writings. We know of his stays in Como, Pavia, Bologna, probably in Genoa (ah, Genoa!), perhaps in Venice, but there is no news that he ever left Northern Italy. When he was about fifteen years old he entered the Order of Dominicans, the Preaching Friars, at the Milanese convent of Sant'Eustorgio. It was the year 1298: to get an idea of what was happening in the world in the meantime, Giotto would soon paint the Scrovegni Chapel and Dante would take the path of exile.
At that chronological point, the Order of Friars Preachers, active and recognized by the Church for more than eighty years, had already become one of the main and most authoritative religious institutions, and belonging to it was a title of prestige; also for Gavano, who must have come from a wealthy family, is thought to be of notary rank, and who proudly flaunts his status as a friar. Already from the first decades of their existence the Dominicans had characterized themselves as a 'militant' and 'cultured' order: militant, because it was deployed on the front line to fight 'heresies'; cultured, because he promoted, alongside the statutory activity of preaching, that of study and teaching, based on the axiom according to which doctrinal training was the best guarantee against deviations. Galvano was certainly an intellectually gifted boy, and followed the path of higher education within his Milanese convent; probably, in the last phase, also in Genoa, where at the time the studium generali (the university, more or less) of the Dominicans of North-West Italy apparently had its headquarters. He achieved the academic rank of bachalarius and the role of lector sacrae theologiae, which allowed him to teach in the Order's schools; in one of his last works he declared himself, more pompously, professor. In addition to theology he studied and taught philosophy, which at the time included elements of ethics, cosmology, natural sciences, politics and economics. We find confirmation of this training and these interests in the works he wrote.
The first half of the fourteenth century in Italy, the era in which Gawain lived and worked, was a politically restless age. The glorious municipal institutions had now given way to noble governments, in the hands of powerful families who pursued dynastic stability. Galvano's years were those in which Milan saw the definitive affirmation of the Visconti family, who, starting from the last decades of the previous century, had progressively imposed their dominion over the city. In the search for the necessary alliances to consolidate the lordship, the Viscontis had mostly sided with the imperial party, which in recent times had regained its breath following the descent into Italy of the German sovereigns, first Henry VII, then Louis the Bavarian, and in this way they had entered into conflict with the papacy, which fiercely opposed imperial protection over Northern Italy. In 1323 Milan was hit by the papal interdict, and the religious who lived there were ordered to leave the city; we don't know if everyone did it, nor in particular if Gawain did it. Relations between the Dominicans, who unlike their Franciscan colleagues had always professed loyalty to the papacy without hesitation, and the lords of Milan must have remained tense for a long time; but after the ecclesiastics were allowed to return (1330) there was a move towards normalisation. The power of the Viscontis in the city was increasingly solid, and thanks to the strong military lordship of Azzone (1329-1339) it was taking on regional dimensions; the new masters no longer needed identification with the imperial party, which was in decline in Italy, and instead collaborated with the religious people of the territory.
In the last decade of his activity, approximately between 1335 and 1345, Galvano appears very close to the Viscontis: he dedicates his writings to the lords of Milan; he frequents the libraries located in the family buildings; he blesses the diarchy of the brothers Luchino and Giovanni Visconti, who took over power upon Azzone's death; he declares himself (or pretends to be) confessor of Luchino and his son Brizio; states that John chose him as his chaplain and scribe, probably a private secretary. And at the service of the ruling house Galvano lends his very prolific pen: he gives life to a crude legend that makes those parvenus of the Visconti descend from none other than Aeneas and Ascanius; he reconstructs an unlikely story that gives them an ancient royal dignity; he paints a laudatory portrait of Luchino and Giovanni, portrayed as the perfect gentlemen; he restores a new doctrinal virginity to the family, glossing over past conflicts with the Church. A courtly writer, one might say; an careerist, too, if it is true that by supporting the Visconti propaganda he favored access to the palace. Not a very nice character, seen through today's eyes, but fully in line with many writers of his time, even more famous than him.
His passion for history - the only literary genre he really practiced - was born, as he tells us, from a revenge. Still young, he finds himself teaching in Pavia for a couple of years, and gets involved in discussions with the locals, who praise the past glories of their city (the ancient Lombard capital!) In the face of paucity and obscurity from Milan. Galvano wants to know the truth and do justice, and for many years he reads, studies, notes, files: news about Milan and its history, above all, but not only. He builds or reconstructs old traditions according to which Milan was the most ancient city in Italy, given that Subres, Noah's great-grandson through Japheth the European, had founded it (a record that is difficult to beat); others he recovers or invents, according to which certain Trojan princes arrived here fleeing after the defeat; he recounts the long wars that pitted the Milanese, often victorious, against the Romans in the dark age that preceded the Empire; he exalts the antiquity and nobility of the Milanese Church, made venerable by martyrs and pastors and endowed with unique privileges in the world. He prevents possible criticisms of Milan's defects by calling into question various auctoritates and arguing through syllogisms, the scholastic method that was used at the time: there were occasional setbacks and defeats, it cannot be denied, but for Galvano the Milanese came out of it always with their heads held high, so much so that they were held up as an example of lineage nobility, of warlike heroism, of the practice of virtues, of loyalty to the Church. A parochial writer, we could define him today, who also in this does not deviate from the norm of that era and that world. A mannered writer, perfectly aligned, and therefore - one would say - a predictable writer, incapable of surprising. We will soon have to think again.
At the center of his world and his historical narrative is therefore Milan. We can reconstruct that Galvano pursued the project of a great and complete history (chronic, in the language of the time) of a Milanese topic throughout his life, and that he produced numerous subsequent versions of such a history: what he had already written was superseded by the knowledge of news further, which suggested an update. But in the last years of his life the city perspective no longer seemed enough for him. Giovanni and Luchino Visconti, of whom Galvano professes to be an intimate, have now taken power, one as archbishop, the other as lord; Galvano dedicated a broader project to the two new rulers. His direct historiographical models, such as the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo or the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais, proposed not a city history, but a universal history, which dealt with the whole world and all eras. Galvano has already read a lot, he has already compiled an infinite number of cards, he knows where to find other news; he is no longer young, but he is still curious and enthusiastic, he feels ready to broaden his horizons. If in a first version of the chronicle its aim was to narrate «the very ancient origins and triumphal victories of the noble city of Milan» (and also, when it happened, its «sad defeats»), in a subsequent version it became that of «collecting the stories of Europe", leaving aside the other continents (two: Asia and Africa), and in the most advanced version (our Cronica universalis) manages to "write the events of the whole world together, as a whole". A nice claim; but it had excellent predecessors and rich materials.
Galvano probably realized that, as much as he tried to keep Milan in the place of honor, the transition to a global dimension forced him to give up the fine-grained historical narrative about his city, which he had presented in such detail up to that point. From what we can understand, his latest project therefore involved a doubling: on the one hand a universal chronicle, on the other a Milanese history, in two different, non-competing works. A macro-history and a micro-history, with a simple difference in scale and focus, not contradictory just as a world map and a topographic plan are not contradictory. The materials already available, and the new ones that he continued to develop, he divided into two parallel containers: on the one hand a news story that talks about the world, but a world in which Milan continues to be a florentine urbs, 'the most beautiful of cities '; on the other, a new strictly Milanese chronicle. He called this second work Politia novella, The new government, to salute the unprecedented diarchy of Giovanni and Luchino: an imaginative succession of kings and battles was reconstructed - but let's say more frankly, invented - with tones taken from literature chivalrous in fashion at the time, which as a whole told the ancient history of Milan in a continuous series, from its foundation to the emperor Augustus. And then, at the point where this primordial story ends, Galvano begins another work that tells of Christian Milan, a Cronica pontificum marked by the sequence of bishops: the pagan archiflamines give way almost naturally to the Christian (archi)episcopi, and the former pass on to the latter the privilege of a higher dignity than the clergy of all other cities, with the exception - and even this somewhat obtorcollo - of Rome only.
Galvano appears to us as an ambitious, restless, never satisfied writer; also volcanic, as he was defined, with a lot of exuberance and little control. He continued to write throughout his life; the various versions of his great chronicle are all, more or less, unfinished, because new news and new ideas took over which one by one made them obsolete. When in a subsequent version he took up the same topic already covered before, he did not do so with the same words, a sign that he worked personally, and did not rely on secretaries and assistants, who would have limited themselves to transcribing what was already there. era. An unrealistic man who overestimated his own abilities and failed to complete any of his great projects. He thought he was a poet, and peppered his history texts with verses written by him, usually horrible; he thought he was a great writer, but his Latin is poor and sometimes incorrect; he thought he was a dialectician, but his reasoning is often laughable. His historical method, which proceeds by accumulation and not by selection, is disconcerting today: the sources are juxtaposed to each other, and when they report different news we avoid discussing them, accepting them all as good. (Thus, given that seven of his authoritative predecessors placed the Earthly Paradise each in a different place in the world, Galvano concludes that there must be seven earthly paradises; and since there are two different legends on the foundation of Piacenza, there must be two of Piacenza.) Poor or no discernment, which does not mean intellectual laziness or lack of courage: at the time this was generally done, only Petrarch would try to propose a critical method.
Those who study an ancient or medieval author, whose personal documents such as diaries, letters, notes and the like are not preserved, and whose image is given to us only by 'public' works, those he wrote for others to read, often asks how much this image really corresponds to the person; usually he can't understand it. What was Gawain really like? At the opening of perhaps his most 'Milanese' work, the Politia novella, he criticizes his fellow citizens because they prefer romantic stories, beautiful but futile, to solid but indigestible local history: «they go through the Punic stories, they devour those of Tito Livio, they sift the Trojan parchments, admire the Tartarian stories hanging from the mouth of those who tell them; if someone invents things beyond the confines of the world, they become passionate about studying those too." The Milanese, we would say today, love fiction: the stories of Carthage and Rome, the legends of Troy, the journeys to the East of Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone and what is found extra mundi climate (but science fiction did not yet exist; is it referring to Dante's Commedia?). Galvano speaks to the Milanese, but it seems that he speaks to himself, revealing his own sense of guilt or his own snobbery. He is the first to appreciate those readings, ancient or exotic or imaginary, which (apart from that hypothetical Dante) he stuffs liberally into his history books, so much so that imaginative details continually emerge in his pages which claim to be scientific. For example, he describes the early Milanese as follows: «They were tall in stature, frightening in appearance, strong, ferocious, and they destroyed everything they encountered with iron and fire. Their women were beautiful but cruel, robust, bold in battle; they fought with the bow, were engaged in fishing and bird hunting, and were also skilled in building houses. There was no law or right among them, there were no books or anyone who knew how to write them, there were no doctors: everyone was allowed to do what they liked best." The healthy, valiant, anarchist and slightly communist savage of the origins, one of the myths that have passed through history and have become commonplace. The austere material that the sources gave him is often reinterpreted in a novelistic dimension: holy biblical patriarchs stand as heroes, kings, emperors; brave warriors, refugees from Troy, travel the earth founding cities; primordial peoples led by mythical leaders clash in epochal battles. Perhaps he also felt a bit like a character from a novel, due to that knightly name he found himself wearing.
Even his final project Galvano left him halfway. The Cronica pontificum, the work that he had reserved for Christian Milan, only arrives in the time of Saint Ambrose. Also unfinished is his most ambitious work, the one to which he had entrusted the history of the world: the Cronica universalis contained in the manuscript that was by Giovanni Battista Bianchini and Byron Reed. The unfinished in literature can be a little disappointing, like a film that lacks the ending, but it can also be very intriguing, because it shows us the author naked, without clothing, while he is still working. If in doubt, it's worth reading.
3. Prolixitas tedalis
Of the Cronica universalis none of the scholars who had it in their hands ever thought of making a complete copy, at least as far as we know. How can you blame them? At first glance, the work was discouraging: in addition to being unfinished, it was long and cumbersome, messy and poorly written, not very original and very repetitive. It didn't seem like it could repay the effort of a transcription, or even that of an accurate reading. Galvano Fiamma was the author of several other works which, more or less, said the same things: but more concise works, which could be consulted in less time and with greater profit, if what mattered was the information contained. Old news, moreover, very old: the Cronica universalis claimed to tell the story of the whole world in all eras, but then stopped at 800 years before Christ. Nothing more recent or that wasn't already known; little or no practical use. Gawain had read and read, but only well-known books and obvious stories; from all these readings he had obtained news, sometimes the same identical news repeated several times, sometimes conflicting and irreconcilable news. He had not been able to give up any of them and he had written them all down, scrambling them as best he could. In his eyes it was probably a merit, that of having provided complete information, and a pride, that of being able to show off a boundless wealth of culture; but in this way he incurred prolixitas tedialis, as an anonymous contemporary and colleague of his suggestively calls logorrhea which causes boredom, and ended up exasperating the reader.
In truth, at first the work doesn't look too bad, at least for those who appreciate baroque antechambers. It begins with a letter of dedication to Azzone Visconti, dominus generalis of Milan, «who governs the provinces of Liguria, Emilia and Veneto»; Galvano says he wants to "present to him the ancient origins of the world and the most recent facts" and that he is now on the fourth draft of the text. A summary of the contents follows, which begins with the words «Ista chronic dividitur in quatuordecim libros», where however sixteen books are listed; then a premise contra detractores, that is, against the envious who - Galvano imagines - will criticize his work, accusing it of falsity; and to better respond he will bring the supporting pieces. These are the indications of the sources used, 72 books in total, meticulously listed, for each of which it is said where to go to read it: in the library of Azzone, or in that of Sant'Eustorgio (his convent), or at the home of this or of that citizen, even outside Milan. Finally, the actual prologue, in which Galvano calls his most illustrious predecessor as an example: Tito Livio, the last of the Lombards (the Northern Italians, in the language of the time) to have dealt extensively with history, because everyone the subsequent ones composed only «short and shriveled annalistic notes», with the result that «what they wrote is rubbish, not works of art» (potius libros deturpaverunt quam ornaverunt). He, Gawain, will remedy this thanks to a text he has been waiting for for thirty years: since the emperor Henry had been crowned in Milan, in 1311, an event which he had personally witnessed and on the occasion of which he must have felt he was , also a dignified part of history.
It seems like a serious thing, but upon closer inspection these premises are almost all recycled and a bit contradictory: one of the many signs that the work, as Ghioldi found it fifty years later, was chaotic and disorganized, as happens with those that The author left it halfway. The letter to Azzone is incompatible with the actual prologue, where he talks about maximi principalis, who will be his successors, Luchino and Giovanni; the premise contra detractores had already been used, in slightly or very different versions, in all the previous drafts of the news; the same for the list of books and libraries - a very interesting document for those who deal with such topics - which had progressively grown between one work and another. Even the discrepancy between the fourteen or sixteen books is an imbalance due to the overlapping of two alternative subdivisions, which Gawain evidently had not yet decided on (with a little reasoning one understands that the right number is probably fifteen). Then, after the antechamber, the text begins.
The title Cronica universalis sive generalis is the one we find in the Incipit of the work, and declares its genre and scope. We do not know whether this title was wanted by Gavano, or is a simple indication of content added by those who, after his death, rearranged the papers. In any case, it is a perfectly appropriate title, which corresponds to a literary genre that was very popular at the time. That it was legitimate to write a universal history, extending to every land and every era, was presupposed by the unitary vision of the world and of time typical of the Middle Ages. Everything had a beginning, with Creation, and everything will have an end, with the second coming of Christ and the final Judgment: the Bible, the set of texts to which God has entrusted Revelation once and for all, opens by telling the beginning, in the book of Genesis, and closes by announcing the end, in the book of Revelation. Humanity is the protagonist of this story, descended from that Adam created in the image and likeness of God, and who due to this characteristic is the central and dominant subject, lord of all other created beings. Christian theology states that humanity was created in one person, Adam; it was divided and dispersed among a variety of peoples after the Tower of Babel, but was redeemed in its entirety by the sacrifice of a single person, Jesus Christ, who founded a single community of his faithful, the Church. The history of humanity, and the world, which constitutes the scene of the history of humanity, are therefore unitary, and can be represented in a unitary narrative.
The 'historical' part of the Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, however only speaks of the events of the Jewish people. Christianity, however, explicitly presents itself as a universal religion, and its vision of history includes all peoples. A broader geographical dimension was therefore needed, which extended to the whole earth (i.e. the one known to the Europeans of the time and which fell within their horizon), and a synchronization of the events that took place in the various regions: for the ancient world, a grid which intersected the facts told by the Bible with those of profane Greek and Latin stories, ordering them in their correct chronological relationships. Some Christian historians of late antiquity already dedicated themselves to this expansion and synchronization; the model they created was continued throughout the Middle Ages, adapting it for recent history to the new European situation of a multiplicity of kingdoms, and became increasingly popular in the era of the first universities, when similar general histories were used as encyclopedic reference works .
This is the literary genre to which Gawain's Cronica universalis belongs; it was a very fashionable genre, many practiced it in Italy at the time, usually in Latin, but now sometimes also in the vernacular. The first book begins from the Creation and arrives at the Flood; the second starts from the Flood and reaches Abraham; the third starts from Abraham and reaches David; the fourth begins with David and had to reach the captivity of the Jews in Babylon. It had to come, because in reality this book is interrupted a few pages after the beginning, at the point where it talks about Joash, biblical king of Judah (800 years before Christ, in fact, for what it's worth). There is nothing to suggest that the work ever continued further.
The structure of the first four books clearly corresponds to the biblical-theological grid of the ages of the world, which was one of the most used methods in the Middle Ages to organize history. It was a scheme popularized by Augustine of Hippo (the one everyone knows as Saint Augustine): the world evolves over time just as a human being ages over time, so that subsequent eras of history can find a correspondent in subsequent ages of humans (according to classical anthropology: childhood, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age). For the most ancient eras the sequence was given by the main events and characters of biblical history, and the first four books of the Cronica universalis correspond faithfully to the first four ages of the world according to the most common subdivision (from Creation to Noah, childhood; from Noah to Abraham, childhood; etc.). But as time progressed, biblical information was accompanied by information relating to other civilizations, which were increasingly numerous: the scheme became too narrow and different solutions had to be adopted. This is what Gawain also had in mind: even if the work is interrupted at the fourth book, the initial summary allows us to know the plan envisaged for the subsequent ones. The fifth book was supposed to reach Julius Caesar, considered the founder of the Roman Empire and (very approximately) contemporary with the birth of Christ, when the fifth age of the world also ended; the following ten books were to deal with the 'sixth age', that is, the next 1300 years, up to his day. This 'sixth age' had an anomalous and somewhat embarrassing duration: conceived by the first Christian theologians when the end of the world was considered imminent, it was then prolonged disproportionately, becoming much broader than all the previous ones. The world of humans did not end so soon, it did not even show signs of ending, and even today it is not completely over.
An ordinary and unprepared reader who ventures to read the Cronica universalis, therefore, will first find himself presented with a story of the Creation, which in Genesis is an extraordinary tale of a few, compelling pages, but which Gawain cloyingly expands, to the point of making it unbearable, with useless digressions and futile comments. That reader will find here explained what God created day by day, in its substance and in its ornaments, how a paradisiacal place was constituted, how man was placed there, how woman was created from it, how both sinned and were cast out; and he will find all the details of these events, most of which are foreign to the Bible, some of which are apocryphal, some others completely invented. He will then read about the generation of Adam's children, the murder committed by Cain and the curse that hit him and his lineage, the birth of Seth and his descendants, the spread of perversion in the world, up to the divine punishment inflicted with the flood ; a story that the Bible tells with a few linear traits, but which here becomes a tangled mass of names in search of a personality, with which Gawain endows them by imagining them as kings and knights. And mixed in disorderly with the story, in an uncontrolled flow of notes, the reader will discover many other things that the Bible does not say, and that Gawain draws from the exegetical vulgate of his times: that the angels were the first beings created, and that their leader rebelled and was overthrown, and that the angelic hosts are divided by orders and competences, and that there are many paradisiacal places, and that Adam was kidnapped in an ecstatic celestial vision, and that the demons mated obscenely with human and with human women they obscenely generated children. If he has the patience to move on to the second book, the reader will then have news of Noah's children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, of the spread of humanity throughout the world, of the Tower of Babel; but also of the birth of the ancient kingdoms, in Assyria, Egypt, Italy, Gaul. An indigestible and messy, even annoying jumble of historical, mythological, biblical and fantastic news, mostly taken from strange and when not strange sources clearly invented, none reliable, none entertaining, none memorable
