URBAN VI
(pope, 1378-1389). Bartolomeo Prignano, archbishop of Bari, was elected pope by a badly divided college of cardinals subject (to an extent that remains debatable) to the pressure of a mob of Roman citizens who feared that if the large French majority among the cardinals chose another French pope, the papacy would move back to Avignon, where it had resided from 1309 to 1377. Although a clear majority of the cardinals voted for Prignano and attended his enthronement, his behavior in the months following his election, especially his treatment of the cardinals, was so arrogant and arbitrary, perhaps even demented, that the French majority turned against him. The French cardinals left Rome and reassembled outside Urban’s reach, charging that his election had been invalid because of pressure by the mob. They then elected one of their own number, who took the name Clement VII. The French pope did return to Avignon, while Urban remained in control of Rome. This disputed election marks the beginning of the Western Schism, during which two and even three rival popes competed for the support of the Christian community.
URBINO
Small Italian city in the Marches, a region of east-central Italy. Founded under the Roman republic, in the 12th century Urbino came under the control of the Montefeltro dynasty, who originally ruled as imperial vicars and later as vicars for the papacy. The popes claimed overlordship of the city but during the early 14th century exerted so little control that the city became a virtually independent state. The head of the dynasty, Count Antonio, had been deposed by the papal legate in 1369 but in 1375 returned as signore (lord) of the city under an agreement to share power with the citizens. In general, the council directed routine internal affairs but the prince controlled foreign policy, extended his rule over neighboring regions, and developed an effective mercenary army. By the 1380s the papacy had recognized this arrangement and legalized Antonio’s rule by again recognizing him as papal vicar.
Under Count Guidantonio (ruled 1404-1443), the ruler became one of the most important Italian condottieri, hiring himself and his army out to other Italian cities that needed effective military forces. After the aberrant reign of Oddantonio, who was assassinated during his second year in retribution for oppressive actions, his illegitimate half-brother Federico (1444-1482) succeeded to the throne and resumed his father’s successful career as a condottiere. In 1474 Pope Sixtus IV rewarded Federico’s military service by granting him the title duke of Urbino. Under Federico and his son Guidobaldo (1482-1508), Urbino reached its peak as a small but formidable Italian power and a center of Renaissance culture. The Montefeltro line became extinct with Guidobaldo’s death, and rule over the city passed into the hands of Francesco Maria della Rovere, nephew of Pope Julius II, who persuaded Guidobaldo to adopt the nephew as his heir.
During the 16th century, caught up in the great-power rivalries and ruled by the della Rovere family, which transferred the seat of government to Pesaro, Urbino declined in importance. Previously, the Montefeltro court was a significant center of patronage for artists and writers, and at its peak, a lively intellectual life developed around the person of the duchess, Elisabetta Gonzaga, since Duke Guidobaldo himself was a lifelong invalid. The intellectual life of this circle is reflected in the influential Book of the Courtier by one of its members, Count Baldassare Castiglione. The greatest figure in the artistic history of the city is the painter Raphael, who was born there and initially trained there by his father, a painter at the Montefeltro court.
URFÉ, HONORE D’
(1568-1625). French author of the late Renaissance, remembered primarily for his pastoral romance, L’Astrée, of which the first part was published in 1607 and the fourth in 1627, after the author’s death. D’Urfé’s secretary saw this fourth part through the press and later published a fifth part supposedly based on his notes. The shepherds and shepherdesses who populate the romance are aristocrats who have fled the complications of life at court and inhabit an idealized landscape modeled on the author’s native Forez region in east-central France. The action involves the dilemmas caused by the romantic attachments of the characters. Although the author adopts the conventions of Platonic love, the narratives follow the ins and outs of the characters’ romances. The work shows the influence of ancient Greek romantic tales but also of Italian pastoral authors such as Jacopo Sannazarro and Torquato Tasso.
D’Urfé was born into an aristocratic family and brought up amidst a rich environment of literary and artistic activity. He received his formal education at the Jesuit Collège de Tournon. He was deeply involved in the extremist Catholic League during the civil wars of the 1580s. His other works include Epistres morales (1598-1608), a set of philosophical meditations in letter form; a body of pastoral poems; and an unpublished epic poem.
VADIANUS, JOACHIM
(Joachim von Watt, 1484-1551). Swiss humanist, physician, and religious reformer. Born at St. Gallen into a prominent family of merchants and civic officials, he was educated at the local grammar school and then at the University of Vienna, where he associated with the humanist Conrad Celtis and received B.A. (1504) and M.A. (1508) degrees. During an episode of plague at Vienna he interrupted his studies (1506-1507) and for a time taught school at Villach in Carinthia. He also visited Venice and Padua while away from Vienna. After returning to Vienna, he taught at the university, lecturing on classical authors, especially those who wrote on geography. He produced a commentary on Book 7 of Pliny’s Natural History (1515) and another on Pomponius Mela (1518). His edition of Mela reflected a preference for authors who based their geographical writings on direct experience rather than on the reports of others. Vadianus personally visited Polish salt-mines and climbed Swiss mountains to extend his understanding of topics that today would be classed as geological. His mastery of humanistic Latin and his publications marked him out as a leading scholar.
The Emperor Maximilian I crowned Vadianus poet laureate in 1514, and he became professor of rhetoric and poetry and rector of the university in 1516, on his way to a doctorate in medicine (1517). He conducted an active correspondence with other humanists. Although the path to a successful university career was open, he chose to return to his native St. Gallen, where he settled in 1520 after an extensive journey through eastern Germany and Poland. In 1519 he married a daughter of the patrician Grebel family of Zürich. His return to St. Gallen involved his appointment as town physcian, and he succeeded his father as a member of the small council, the principal agency of local government.
Aside from practicing medicine, Vadianus’ other goal was to spread humanistic culture in his native region. He established close ties with the humanist community at Basel and in the summer of 1522 during a visit there met Erasmus. At Basel he assisted in the editorial work on a new edition of the Helvetiae descriptio /Description of Switzerland by another prominent Swiss humanist, Henricus Glareanus. He also published an enlarged version of his edition of Pomponius Mela. By the early 1520s he had also become deeply interested in the movement for religious reform. He read many of the works of Martin Luther and had long known the major Swiss Protestant leader, Huldrych Zwingli. Vadianus organized a biblical study group and lectured to its members on the early Christian creeds and the book of Acts. His interest was not so much in dogmatic disputes as in questions of practical religion.
Vadianus led the establishment of a Reformed church at St. Gallen on the pattern created at Zürich, and his election as mayor (Bürgermeister) of St. Gallen in 1526 made him a leader of both the religious Reformation and the political life of his city. When the local Benedictine abbey was secularized in 1529, he acted to preserve its valuable collection of manuscript books, and in general he pursued a moderate, though clearly Protestant, religious policy. Vadianus spent most of his later years engaged in historical work. The manuscripts of the abbey constituted the major source for a history of the abbey, a history of the city, a history of the Lake Constance region, a history of monasticism, and histories of the Roman emperors and Frankish kings. He also conducted an extensive correspondence, of which some 4,000 items survive.
VALDÉS, ALFONSO DE
(ca. 1500-1532). Spanish humanist, the leading figure among Spanish admirers of Erasmus. His family were Spanish conversos, and one of his uncles, a priest, was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1491 on charges of secretly continuing Jewish religious practices. Alfonso’s education is not well documented, but he was probably tutored by an Italian humanist attached to the royal court in Valladolid, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera. He may have studied at the new University of Alcalá. Valdés was a member of the Emperor V’s secretarial staff at Brussels and Aachen in 1520 and then at Worms in 1521, where he witnessed the hearing of Martin Luther before the Imperial Diet. He returned to Spain in 1522 and entered the service of the imperial chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara. In 1525 he edited official reports of the battle of Pavia in which Spanish troops captured King Francis I of France. By early in 1526 he was secretary for Latin correspondence in the imperial chancery. During the rapid spread of Erasmus’ popularity in Spain in the middle 1520s, Valdés was one of the Dutch humanist’s warmest supporters, helping to organize the defense of Erasmus’ orthodoxy by the court humanists against the unsuccessful attempt of the Spanish religious orders to secure a condemnation of Erasmus’ writings.
Valdés’ Diálogo de las cosas ocurridas en Roma (subtitled Lac-tantio), an exculpatory and pro-Spanish account of the notorious Sack of Rome by the imperial army in 1527, caused the papal nuncio at the imperial court, Baldassare Castiglione, to attack Valdés (and Spanish policy) as disrespectful of the Supreme Pontiff. Valdés’ other major work was his Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón / Dialogue Between Mercury and Charon, completed in 1528. It combines the Erasmian concept of the "philosophy of Christ" with sharp criticism of the clergy. This dialogue also reflects a kind of inward spirituality that is reminiscent of the contemporary popular Spanish mystics known as alumbrados (the enlightened ones).
After the death of the chancellor Gattinara in 1530, Valdés took over his role as the leading mediator at the imperial court between Catholics and Protestants. He attended the imperial diet at Augsburg in 1530, negotiated directly with Philipp Melanchthon and other Protestant leaders, and joined Melanchthon in the vain effort to seek a peaceful reunification of the church. At the emperor’s request, Valdés prepared a Spanish translation of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession. Despite the failure at Augsburg, he remained active in court service.
VALDÉS, JUAN DE
(ca. 1509-1541). Spanish humanist and religious writer, younger brother of Alfonso de Valdés. He shared his brother’s reformist religious interests but was much closer to the heretical alumbrado movement that was becoming widespread in Spain. Like Alfonso, he probably was tutored by the Italian humanist Pietro Martire d’Anghiera. Unlike his brother, he was directly involved with the mystical alumbrados ("the enlightened ones"). In 1523-1524 he attended religious meetings at Toledo that would later be defined as centers of heresy. About 1526 Juan entered the University of Alcalá, where he remained until 1531, establishing close connections with the influential circle of Erasmian humanists and reformers there. It remains uncertain whether he ever completed an academic degree at Alcalá.
Valdés’ first published book, Diálogo de doctrina cristiana (1529), led to his being summoned before the Inquisition, though he initially escaped any penalty. His opinions, however, were dangerous in the Spain of this time, and when he learned that a second set of charges was being prepared, he fled to Italy, arriving at the papal curia in Rome in August 1531. His position at Rome, unlike that in Spain, was not precarious since he was well-connected through his brother and his humanist contacts. He acted as an imperial agent while in Rome. Popes Clement VII and Paul III granted him the revenues of two churches in Spain, though he never was ordained as a priest.
Valdés settled permanently at Naples in 1535. There he became close to a former papal protonotary, Pietro Carnesecchi, who many decades later would be executed for heretical doctrines that probably derived from Valdés. Valdés’ connections in Spain and Naples brought him into the highest levels of Neapolitan intellectual society, and he became leader of a religious conventicle known as "the Kingdom of God." Some of this group became Protestants and eventually fled north of the Alps, while others became leading figures of the early Catholic Reformation. Valdés’ own beliefs upheld justification by faith and rejected good works as a way to salvation, but there is no evidence that his theology was derived from German Protestant theologians.
The conventicle included intellectuals and aristocrats of the highest rank, including the young widow Giulia Gonzaga, Bernardino Ochino (general of the new Capuchin order, who was already secretly Protestant and fled to Geneva in 1542), Pietro Martire Vermigli (who joined Ochino in his flight to Geneva), and the Roman noblewoman and poet Vittoria Colonna. Other members of the Neapolitan conventicle, including the humanist cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini, remained Catholic but inclined to an "evangelical" emphasis on justification by faith. One of the most influential spiritual books of the 16th century, the anonymous Il beneficio di Cristo / The Benefits of Christ (1543), was the work of someone in touch with the Valdesian group at Naples. It is usually attributed to an "evangelical" Benedictine monk, Benedetto da Mantova, and the text was prepared for publication by the humanist Marcantonio Flaminio, one of the members of Valdes’ conventicle at Naples.
Valdés’ Diálogo de doctrina cristiana is a catechism, perhaps the first of the century, published several months before Martin Luther’s Shorter Catechism. In it he used Erasmian terminology but went beyond Erasmus’ ideas and promoted the illuminist ideas of the Spanish alumbrados. Valdés wrote another statement of his spiritual views, his Alphabeto cristiano, which may have been published in 1536 (though no surviving copy antedates 1545). Other, shorter works on religion, published only posthumously, included a catechism for children, first published in 1544 or 1545; Le cento e dieci divine considerazioni / A Hundred Ten Divine Considerations (published by his Italian follower Celio Secondo Curione in 1550); and a collection of five short theological treatises (published in 1545). He also produced commentaries on Psalms 1-41, not published until the 19th century; on Paul’s epistle to the Romans and on 1 Corinthians (published at Geneva by a Spanish refugee in 1557); a Spanish translation of the gospel of Matthew (not published until 1880); and several short tracts. In addition, Valdés left a significant collection of unpublished letters. He probably wrote commentaries on additional books of the New Testament, but these have not survived. He also wrote Diálogo de la lengua/Dialogue on Language (ca. 1535), a pioneering linguistic study of the Spanish language.
Valdés died at Naples in August 1541; his will, of which only a summary survives, affirms his belief in the doctrines by which he has lived but does not make it clear what those doctrines are. It is probably significant, however, that his will makes no mention of papal authority, does not invoke any saints, and does not contain the pious phrases used in traditional Catholic wills.
VALLA, LORENZO
(1407-1457). Italian humanist, active mainly in Rome and Naples, often regarded as the ablest humanist scholar of the 15th century. He is remembered especially for his innovative approach to linguistic and textual criticism. He was critical of his fellow humanists, most of whom he regarded as incompetent, and engaged in many of the bitter personal feuds for which Italian humanism is notorious. Valla was born in Rome, where his father was an official in the papal curia. His early education was under the direction of private tutors, but prominent curial humanists coached him, including Leonardo Bruni, the future Florentine chancellor, and Giovanni Aurispa, a prominent Hellenist. Later, Valla studied under Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua.
From the very beginning of his career, Valla seemed to have a knack for offending people and stirring up controversy. In an age when other humanists idolized Cicero, he wrote a book (1428) comparing Cicero’s Latin style unfavorably with that of the recently rediscovered works of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. This brash act won for him the enduring hostility of the influential humanist Poggio Bracciolini. His treatise on moral philosophy, De voluptate / On Pleasure (1430) shocked readers by arguing that pleasure is the highest goal of human life, a claim that made most readers regard him as a pagan and an Epicurean. When he taught at the University of Pavia in 1431-1433, his open contempt for the leading medieval commentators on Roman law infuriated the powerful law faculty and was the probable reason why he was not reappointed. He taught briefly at Milan and Genoa and spent time in Florence, where he met some of Italy’s leading humanists. He seems to have got along well with the Florentines, but he found no enduring place there. In fact (with good justification in some cases) he regarded most earlier and contemporary humanists as incompetent, and he was not at all shy about letting his opinions become known. He became involved in several of the vicious personal feuds which are one of the least attractive characteristics of Italian humanism. Before he was 30, he had gained a reputation for arrogance and quarrelsomeness. He obviously thought himself brighter and more learned than any of his peers, and while he probably was right, making this opinion known through constant negative shots at others was not a way to promote his own ambition for recognition and reward.
Valla’s fortunes took a turn for the better when he entered the service of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, in 1435. The years he spent at Naples (1435-1448) were the most productive period of his life. About 1437-1440 he completed the work that had the greatest influence on his own contemporaries, De elegantiis linguae latinae / The Elegances of the Latin Language. This topic was a practical guide to classical Latin style, vocabulary, usage, and grammar, immensely useful to all who wanted to develop a genuinely classical style of Latin. Its method was inductive, drawing on instances of actual usage in ancient texts and basing its conclusions on ancient practice. Elegances was a huge literary success. When printing was introduced into Italy, the book was printed early (1471) and often. By the time of the death of the Dutch humanist Erasmus in 1536, 59 editions of this lengthy text had been published, not counting more than 50 editions of the widely used epitome or abridgment that Erasmus produced in 1529.
In the long run, Elegances was even more important than contemporaries realized because it was the most systematic statement of a linguistic principle that became the foundation of later Renaissance textual scholarship and all modern philology. Valla seems to have been the first person to realize clearly that language is a social product, undergoing constant change from generation to generation. This principle meant that the efforts of earlier humanists to write a vaguely "classical" Latin were inherently misguided, because they regarded the language written by authors separated by several centuries as one single language, and thus they wrote an eclectic jumble of words and usages that no ancient author had ever used. Instead, Valla insisted, the good stylist must focus attention on a single author, or at least on the authors of a single generation, and must confine vocabulary and grammatical practices to those used by the model generation. This idea of linguistic evolution, which is the foundation of all subsequent philological scholarship, explained why Valla found the Latin of his humanistic predecessors deficient.
Valla’s awareness of the constant changes that occur in any language over time made it possible for him to attain a new level of proficiency in the critical evaluation of manuscripts and the philological reconstruction of ancient texts. It also set a standard by which corrupt texts and forgeries could be detected. Valla applied this philological approach to his editions of Latin authors and to translations of Greek authors such as Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s Cyropedia, and part of Homer’s Iliad. The most famous application of Valla’s philological criticism, however, was De falso credita et ementita Constantini do-natione declamatio / A Declamation on the False and Forged Donation of Constantine (ca. 1440), a short treatise that was really intended to be a political tract defending his employer, the king of Naples, against the attempts of the pope to claim political overlord-ship over the kingdom of Naples. The papacy for centuries had cited the Donation of Constantine, which purported to record the gift of political overlordship over Rome and the whole Latin half of the Roman empire to Pope Sylvester I by the Emperor Constantine, as one of the major foundations for papal claims to political (rather than just spiritual) authority over the western half of the Roman empire. Valla’s tract subjected this document to critical examination. He easily demonstrated on grounds of law, political propriety, lack of contemporary corroborating evidence, and (most important) linguistic analysis that the Donation of Constantine is a crude forgery that has no value at all as the legal foundation of a territorial and political claim by the pope. The papacy simply ignored his tract, continuing to cite the Donation until the early 19th century as if it were valid historical evidence. Since both King Alfonso and Valla himself soon settled their political quarrel with the pope, the text was not widely circulated. It was first printed in 1519 as part of a general attack on papal authority by the humanist Ulrich von Hutten. The book thus became Protestant propaganda reflecting negatively on the spiritual as well as the political claims of the papacy, a use that Valla himself never intended.
One other product of Valla’s insights into philology was a set of textual notes on the New Testament, in which he applied his thorough mastery of Greek to clarify obscure passages in the traditional Latin Vulgate text and to suggest corrections of what he regarded as obvious errors in the Latin translation. This work attracted little attention among his contemporaries and remained unpublished. In 1504, however, the Dutch humanist Erasmus discovered a manuscript copy in a monastic library, and he published it the next year. His study of Valla’s Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum /Notes on the New Testament was one of the influences that impelled Erasmus toward the preparation of his famous edition of the Greek New Testament.
Valla was far more interested in philosophical and theological questions than most humanists of the early 15th century. His Dialec-ticae disputationes / Dialectical Disputations (1439) was an assault on the categories of Aristotle and his followers and hence a fundamental attack on the underlying assumptions of medieval scholastic philosophy. The effect of his criticism was to shift emphasis from metaphysical issues to linguistic (especially rhetorical) ones. Also in 1439 Valla addressed a more specific philosophical issue in his Dia-logus de libero arbitrio /Dialogue on Free Will. Contrary to the predominant opinion among scholastic theologians, he maintained that while humans can determine the outcome of secular affairs through reason, their actions cannot determine their eternal salvation, since this depends exclusively on faith and divine grace. In the 16 th century, Martin Luther remarked favorably on Valla’s opinions on free will and grace.
Valla was a prolific author. In 1440 he published a tract, De professione religiosorum / On the Profession of the Religious, which challenged the idea that members of monastic communities had a better claim on salvation than laypersons. Also while still at Naples, he composed a History of King Ferdinand of Aragon (1446), his royal patron, and in a rebuttal to an attack on it by a rival Neapolitan humanist, Bartolomeo Facio, he produced an Antidotum to Facio which is mostly invective but contains a remarkable reconstruction of the text of Book Four of Livy’s History of Rome.
Valla had long desired appointment as a curial official. His reputation for disputatiousness may have kept him from securing his desired position early in his career. The hostility of the influential humanist papal secretary Poggio may also have barred his way. His views on moral philosophy, assiduously misinterpreted as antiChristian by his rivals, his unwelcome criticism of the monastic life, and his critical assessment of the Donation of Constantine, to say nothing of some theological and philosophical issues that brought him to the attention of the Neapolitan Inquisition, made Pope Euge-nius IV suspicious. The accession of the humanist Pope Nicholas V (1447-1555) opened the way for Valla’s advancement. In 1448 the new pope invited him to Rome, initially as a lecturer at the pontifical university, then as a curial official. He was named a canon of St. John Lateran and in 1455 became an apostolic secretary, thus completing his rise to the upper ranks of the papal bureaucracy.
After moving to Rome in 1448, Valla composed two "antidotes" to his most persistent and dangerous critic among contemporary humanists, Poggio, and two satirical dialogues. More significant was his inaugural lecture for his course at the papal university, which emphasized the historic importance of the church as an agency in preserving Latin language and literature during the chaotic centuries after the dissolution of the western Roman Empire. One of his last works, pronounced before members of the Dominican order at Rome, was Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis / An Encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas (1457). In it, Valla praised the Dominican saint and theologian as a holy man but belittled his philosophical and theological work because it was based on the pagan philosopher Aristotle rather than on the Bible and the early Church Fathers. The most he would grant was that Aquinas was a man of great ability and had done remarkably well, considering the barbarous age into which he had the misfortune to be born.
VALOIS DYNASTY
French royal dynasty between 1328 and 1589. The last strong king of the medieval Capetian dynasty, Philip IV (1285-1314), left three sons (Louis X, Philip V) who ruled in succession between 1314 and 1328. At the death of Louis X in 1316, leaving daughters but no son, the French aristocracy accepted his younger brother rather than one of his daughters in order to avoid having a female ruler. Their legal experts justified this decision by citing an old feudal law, the "Salic Law," that forbade female succession among the Salian Franks.Count Philip of Valois, insisting that the "Salic Law" excluded not only a female heir but also any male heir descended from the female line and hence that King Edward III of England, whose mother was a daughter of Philip IV, was not entitled to the throne. Edward III lodged a legal protest but later acknowledged the Valois claimant, Philip VI, as king of France. Yet Edward never fully accepted his own exclusion, and when he declared war on France in 1337 (mainly over quite different issues), he also reasserted his claim to the French crown. The war that opened in 1337 was the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War.
After the expulsion of the English armies from France in 1453, the Valois kings consolidated their power and rebuilt the authority of the monarchy, which now had effective control over most of the territories that were legally part of France. When the duke of Burgundy,leaving only a daughter as his heir, the Valois king, Louis XI, immediately occupied the duchy of Burgundy and thus effectively completed the territorial unification of France in the form it had throughout the rest of the Renaissance period. The Valois dynasty survived two further breaks in direct father-to-son succession in 1498 and again in 1515 when rulers died without leaving a son. In each case, a male cousin of the deceased king came to the throne. The second of these, Francis I (1515-1547), is the ruler most clearly identified with the emergence of Renaissance culture in France. His son Henry II left four sons, three of whom succeeded to the throne in turn, Francis II, Henry III, and none of whom produced a male heir. These last three Valois kings ruled during the chaotic civil wars known as the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598). After the assassination of Henry III in 1589 by a Dominican friar, his Protestant cousin Henry of Navarre successfully asserted his claim to the throne, ruling as King Henry IV (1589-1610), the first king of the Bourbon dynasty.
