took refuge in the Ghibelline township of Arezzo; and it was
here, on the very night when his father, in company with other
members of the White party, made an unsuccessful attempt to
enter Florence by force, the Francesco first saw the light. He
did not remain long in his birthplace. His mother, having
obtained permission to return from banishment, settled at
Incisa, a little village on the Arno above Florence, in February
1305. Here Petrarch spent seven years of boyhood, acquiring
that pure Tuscan idiom which afterwards he used with such
consummate mastery in ode and sonnet. Here too, in 1307, his
brother Gherardo was born. In 1312 Petracco set up a house
for his family at Pisa, but soon afterwards, finding no scope there
for the exercise of his profession as jurist, he removed them all in
1313 to Avignon. This was a step of no small importance for
the future poet-scholar. Avignon at that period still belonged
to Provence, and owned King Robert of Naples as sovereign.
But the popes had made it their residence after the insults offered
to Boniface VIII. at Anagni in 1303. Avignon was therefore
the centre of that varied society which the high pontiffs of
Christendom have ever gathered round them. Nowhere else
could the youth of genius who was destined to impress a cosmopolitan
stamp on medieval culture and to begin the modern era
have grown up under conditions more favourable to his task.
At Incisa and at Pisa he had learned his mother-tongue. At Carpentras,
under the direction of Convennole of Prato, he studied
the humanities between the years 1315 and 1319. Avignon,
at a distance from the party strife and somewhat parochial
politics of the Italian commonwealths, impressed his mind with an ideal of civility raised far above Provincial prejudices.
Petrarch’s real name according to Tuscan usage was Francesco di Petracco. But he altered this patronymic, for the sake of euphony, to Petrarca, proving by this slight change his emancipation from usages which, had he dwelt at Florence, would most probably have been imposed on him. Petracco, who was very anxious that his eldest son should become an eminent jurist, sent him at the age of fifteen to study law at Montpellier. Like Ovid and many other poets, Petrarch felt no inclination for his father’s profession. His intellect, indeed, was not incapable of understanding and admiring the majestic edifice of Roman law, but he shrank with disgust from the illiberal technicalities of practice. There is an authentic story of Petracco’s flinging the young student’s books of poetry and rhetoric upon the fire, but saving Virgil and Cicero half-burned from the flames at his son’s passionate entreaties. Notwithstanding Petrarch’s firm determination to make himself a scholar and a man of letters rather than a lawyer, he so far submitted to his father’s wishes as to remove about the year 1323 to Bologna, which was then the headquarters of juristic learning. There he stayed with his brother Gherardo until 1326, when his father died, and he returned to Avignon. Banishment and change of place had already diminished Petracco’s fortune, which was never large; and a fraudulent administration of his estate after his death left the two heirs in almost complete destitution. The most precious remnant of Petrarch’s inheritance was a MS. of Cicero. There remained no course open for him but to take orders. This he did at once on his arrival in Provence; and we have good reason to believe that he advanced in due time to the rank of priest. A great Roman noble and ecclesiastic, Giacomo Colonna, afterwards bishop of Lombez, now befriended him, and Petrarch lived for some years in partial dependence on this patron.
On the 6th of April 1327 happened the most famous event of Petrarch’s history. He saw Laura for the first time in the church of St Clara at Avignon. Who Laura was remains uncertain still. That she was the daughter of Audibert de Noves and the wife of Hugh de Sade rests partly on tradition and partly on documents which the abbé de Sade professed to have copied from originals in the 18th century. Nothing is now extant to prove that, if this lady really existed, she was the Laura of the Canzoniere, while there are reasons for suspecting that the abbé was either the fabricator of a romance flattering to his own family, or the dupe of some previous impostor. We may, however, reject the sceptical hypothesis that Laura was a mere figment of Petrarch’s fancy; and, if we accept her personal reality, the poems of her lover demonstrate that she was a married woman with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.
Petrarch’s inner life after this date is mainly occupied with the passion which he celebrated in his Italian poems, and with the friendships which his Latin epistles dimly reveal to us. Besides the bishop of Lombez he was now on terms of intimacy with another member of the great Colonna family, the cardinal Giovanni. A German, Ludwig, whom he called Socrates, and a Roman, Lello, who received from him the classic name of Laellius were among his best-loved associates. Avignon was the chief seat of his residence up to the year of 1333, when he became restless and undertook his first long journey. On this occasion he visited Paris, Ghent, Liége, Cologne, making the acquaintance of learned men and copying the manuscripts of classical authors. On his return to Avignon he engaged in public affairs, pleaded the cause of the Scaligers in their lawsuit with the Rossi for the lordship of Parma, and addressed two poetical epistles to Pope Benedict XII. upon the restoration of the papal see to Rome. His eloquence on behalf of the tyrants of Verona was successful It won him the friendship of their ambassador, Azzo di Correggio—a fact which subsequently influenced his life in no small measure. Not very long after these events Petrarch made his first journey to Rome, a journey memorable from the account which he has left us of the impression he received from its ruins.
It was some time in the year 1337 that he established himself at Vaucluse and began that life of solitary study, heightened by communion with nature in her loneliest and wildest moods, which distinguished him in so remarkable a degree from the common herd of medieval scholars. Here he spent his time partly among books, meditating on Roman history, and preparing himself for the Latin epic of Africa. In his hours of recreation he climbed the hills or traced the Sorgues from its fountain under those tall limestone cliffs, while odes and sonnets to Madonna Laura were committed from his memory to paper. We may also refer many of his most important treatises in prose, as well as a large portion of his Latin correspondence, to the leisure he enjoyed in this retreat. Some woman, unknown to us by name, made him the father of a son, Giovanni, in the year 1337; and she was probably the same who brought him a daughter, Francesca, in 1343. Both children were afterwards legitimized by papal bulls. Meanwhile his fame as a poet in the Latin and the vulgar tongues steadily increased, until, when the first draughts of the Africa began to circulate about the year 1339, it became manifest that no one had a better right to the laurel crown than Petrarch. A desire for glory was one of the most deeply-rooted passions of his nature, and one of the points in which he most strikingly anticipated the humanistic scholars who succeeded him. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that he exerted his influence in several quarters with the view to obtaining the honours of a public coronation. The result of his intrigues was that on a single day in 1340, the 1st of September, he received two invitations, from the university of Paris and from King Robert of Naples respectively. He chose to accept the latter, journeyed in February 1341 to Naples, was honourably entertained by the king, and, after some formal disputations on matters touching the poet’s art, was sent with magnificent credentials to Rome. There, in the month of April, Petrarch assumed the poet’s crown upon the Capitol from the hand of the Roman senator amid the plaudits of the people and the patricians. The oration which he delivered on this occasion was composed upon these words of Virgil:—
“Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis
Raptat amor.”
The ancient and the modern eras met together on the Capitol at Petrarch’s coronation, and a new stadium for the human spirit, that which we are wont to style Renaissance, was opened.
With the coronation in Rome a fresh chapter in the biography of Petrarch may be said to have begun. Henceforth he ranked as a rhetorician and a poet of European celebrity, the guest of princes, and the ambassador to royal courts. During the spring months of 1341 his friend Azzo di Correggio had succeeded in freeing Parma from subjugation to the Scaligers, and was laying
