Petrarch was born in
Arezzo the son of a merchant, and spent his early childhood in the village of
Incisa, near
Florence. His father, Ser Petracco, had been exiled from Florence in
1302 (along with
Dante) by the
Black Guelphs. Petrarch spent much of his early life at
Avignon and nearby
Carpentras, where his family moved to follow
Pope Clement V who moved there in
1309 to begin the
Avignon Papacy. He studied at
Montpellier (1316–20) and
Bologna (1320–26), where his father insisted he study the law. However, Petrarch was primarily interested in writing and Latin literature.
When his father died in
1326, Petrarch went back to
Avignon, where he worked in numerous different clerical offices. This work gave him much time to devote to his writing. With his first large scale work,
Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general
Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. In
1341 he brought back the
poet laureate tradition from antiquity, and was crowned in
Rome. He was the first man since antiquity to be given this honor. He traveled widely in Europe and served as an ambassador. He was a prolific letter writer, and counted
Giovanni Boccaccio among his notable friends.
During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. He encouraged and advised
Leontius Pilatus's translation of
Homer, from a manuscript purchased by
Boccaccio; although he was severely, and perhaps unfairly, critical of the result. Petrarch had acquired a copy, which he did not entrust to Leontius, but he knew no Greek; Homer, Petrarch said, "was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer". In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection
ad Atticum. He remarked:
:
Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offence and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.
Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited with creating the concept of a historical "
Dark Ages".
Petrarch claimed that on
April 26, 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of
Mont Ventoux (1,909 m; 6,263 ft). He wrote an account of the trip, composed considerably later as a letter to his friend
Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. The accuracy of Petrarch's account is open to question; particularly the assertion that he was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since
Philip V of Macedon, and that an aged peasant had warned him off the unclimbable mountain.
Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before, and other ascents are recorded from the Middle Ages, including
Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne. Jakob Burckhardt's rhapsody on the subject has been often repeated since.
The later part of his life he spent in journeying through northern Italy as an international scholar and poet-diplomat. Petrarch's career in the Church did not allow him to marry, but he did father two children by a woman or women unknown to posterity. A son, Giovanni, was born in Avignon in
1337, and a daughter, Francesca, was born in Vaucluse in
1343.
Giovanni died of the
plague in
1361. Francesca married
Francescuolo da Brossano (who was later named executor of
Petrarch's testament) that same year. In 1362, shortly after the birth of a daughter, Eletta, they joined Petrarch in
Venice, to flee the plague then ravaging parts of Europe. A second grandchild, Francesco, was born in 1366, but died before his second birthday. Francesco and her family lived with Petrarch in Venice for five years from 1362 - 1367 at
Palazzo Molina; although Petrarch continued to travel in those years.
About 1368 Petrarch and his daughter Francesca (with her family) moved and settled in
Padua, where he passed his remaining years in religious contemplation. He died in
Arquà in the
Euganean Hills on
July 19, 1374.
Petrarch's will (dated
April 4, 1370) leaves fifty florins to Boccaccio "to buy a warm winter dressing gown"; various legacies (a horse, a silver cup, a lute, a Madonna) to his brother and his friends; his house in Vaucluse to its caretaker; for his soul, and for the poor; and the bulk of his estate to his son-in-law, Francescuolo da Brossano, who is to give half of it to "the person to whom, as he knows, I wish it to go"; presumably his daughter, Francesca, Brossano's wife. The will mentions neither the property in Arquà, nor his library;
Petrarch's library of notable manuscripts was already promised to Venice, in exchange for the Palazzo Molina. This arrangement was probably cancelled when he moved to Padua, the enemy of Venice, in 1368. The library was seized by the lords of
Padua, and his books and manuscripts are now widely divided over Europe. Nevertheless, the
Biblioteca Marciana traditionally claimed this bequest as its founding; although it was in fact founded by
Cardinal Bessarion in 1468.
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