Francesco Petrarca and the search for the last Thule

The poet's adventurous journey in the footsteps of Greek and Latin geographers, in search of Thule, the lost and mythical Hyperborean homeland


di AnnaMB
article originally published on
The Measure of Things, Author's blog


First modern poet, father of Humanism, Petrarch (1304-1374) rarely remembers his passion for travel, thanks to which he acquired an uncommon knowledge of cartography and geography at the time, to the point of being apostrophized by some of his greatest scholars peregrinus ubique (pilgrim everywhere) e "The restless tourist"; otherwise, this aspect was well known to his contemporaries, for whom he was, also for this reason, an undisputed intellectual authority. Careful observer, he offers in the De lonely life a "first-hand" testimony on the (re) discovery and colonization of the Fortunata island in the mid-fourteenth century, as Boccaccio will do in From CanariaΒ [1].

Petrarch portrait_m.jpg
Portrait of Francesco Petrarca.
The poet traveling between metaphor and reality

Petrarch was anything but a passive traveler, a simple observer who limited himself to recording events attributable to the geographical birth of the New World; he possessed a high self-awareness of his own position in time and space and a full awareness of the distances that separated him from places, seen or dreamed, and he knew how to master the rhetorical side as well as the ideological one.

His poetic contribution to the perception and reorganization of the concept of space on the threshold of the fifteenth century, in particular in the Italian-French Mediterranean area with its cultural specificities and discontinuities, it is a real work of mediation: philologically made the Augustan conception of space his own, he contributes to the transition between the classical Roman political geography to a new, modern representation of space.

One of these "literary appropriations" is the interest and in-depth study, which have gradually become a frantic search, towards all the classical and contemporary testimonies concerning that mysterious and very distant island called by Virgil "latest ThuleΒ».

«… And all of you, gods and goddesses whose duty it is to protect the fields […]; and you first of all, o Caesar [divinized Octavian Augustus], [...] whether you come as god of the immense sea, so that sailors may honor you as their only god and the extreme Thule [tibi sΓ©rviat ΓΊltima ThΓΊle] will enslave you and Teti welcome you with all the waves ... "Β [2]

Without fear of immodesty, in some letters contained in the FamilyΒ Petrarch took pleasure in comparing himself and his high reputation to that of the great travelers of the past such asΒ Odysseus, explaining the desire to travel with the nobility of soul that was his. However, this noble interest is also used by Petrarch as a rhetorical cover, an expedient to deal with other issues at heart of a political-strategic nature.

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Portrait of a poet, possibly Petrarch, 1500-25, via The Walter Museum.
The flight from time, the vanity of things

An exemplary knowledge "which one is more different and newΒ»Of peoples and countries, of human and political cartography and geography he acquired it through a study and a philological rediscovery, truly in the modern sense, of Latin geographers, even so-called minor ones, from Pomponio Mela to Vibio Sequestre. From the Greeks he learned the perspective of an "other" point of view with respect to the familiar landscape, he was fascinated by the way in which, for example, in the eyes of Homer the lands of Italy were situated, exotic and remote, on the "margins" of reality : the Aeolian Islands, Lake Averno, Mount Circe ...

The whole corpus some letters Family, collected at the height of his career between 1349 and 1351, focuses on the travel theme, of knowledge and description of countries and peoples, of discoveries, of curiosity, indeed it is the main epistolary project. And also friendship and love, religion, politics, antiquity and literature, history, culture, intellectual freedom, loneliness… The matter of these letters is really very varied [3].

In this collection, youth travels go through a myth-making process, elements of fiction are added to make the memory more suggestive; the author was moreover in a phase of profound reconsideration of his experiences, the day after his definitive return to Italy between 1347 and 1353 (uncertain whether to accept the laurel wreath, the highest literary recognition, offered to him at the same time one from the Senate of Rome, the other from the University of Paris, decided to receive it in Italy and not in France).

mirabilia and long distances

Around 1350 Petrarch acquires a copy of the Natural history by Pliny the Elder, and the desire to give himself an image and earn the reputation of a great and heroic connoisseur of even very distant places seems to intensify, even at the ends of the earth. We arrive in Thule: Petrarch speaks of it in a letter, VIII of the eleventh book (Letters, familiar things, Le Monnier 1863) addressed to Andrea Dandolo of the Republic of Venice; inviting him to desist from the war with Genoa and to abandon the intention of arms, promises him a fame that will reach up to

Β«To the famous and unknown Thile, at the far end of the Hyperborean world. "

The poet had to sail towards Thule in the thirties of the fourteenth century, even if it is difficult to draw an exact map of all his travels: "he mentions, but obscurely, that he skirted the shores of Spain, that he sailed the ocean and still, as it seems, to have arrived in England but he has not left more exact knowledge of this "(G. Tiraboschi, Story of the Italian letterature.

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1024px-Vinland_Map_HiRes
Map of Vinland, now Terranova, from a 1492th century Mappa Mundi, transcription of an original from the XNUMXth. If it were really authentic, this map would be the first known in which the coast of the North Americas is sketched before Columbus' voyage in XNUMX. However, there is a doubt, confirmed by carbon tests, that it is a fake. aged parchment from the XNUMXth century. Via Brookhaven National Laboratory bnl.gov.
Extreme Thule

La letter 1 of book IIIΒ of the Family it is addressed to Tommaso di Messina and is much later than the fictitious date with which the author signed it, 1333. The poet presents himself in the act of writing from the "beach of the British sea, very close (according to what they say) to the island we seek ". It is about Thule, the remote and fascinating northern island whose identification is uncertain, between Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland.

Petrarch imagines himself there, on those shores, aiming to test the edge of the sea with his eyes. He too looks for Thule (according to his transcription, Tile or Thile): he collects information "in the field", combined with the studies of the classics that report news of it from Seneca to Virgilio, at the opening of the Georgics, and after them "Boethius and all the ranks of writers"; curiously, only scholars talk about her while the people seem to ignore even her existence, however it is agreed in placing her to the west.

When Petrarch met Richard of Bury in Avignon, who was there on behalf of King Edward III of England, he took the opportunity to ask him too, a man of renowned culture and passionate bibliophile; the bishop of Auckland promised that he would check his papers when he got home, but, to our disappointment, he never showed up again.

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And so no news about Thule helps him to know that English. Then he comes into possession of a pamphlet from a courtier Giraldo of Henry II, who claims that there are scattered islands in the boreal ocean around Brittany and the extreme western border, of which Thule would be the most distant, the "Damned Thule, under the hyperborean starΒ» - according to the opinion of Orosio confirming that of Claudiano -, between north and west, beyond Ireland and Orkney.

There is no peace, it is not explained why a place so known by the most learned since the ancient Greeks who identified it in the land ofΒ Hyperboreans (indeed he testifies to having heard of them even among the inhabitants of India) may be just as vague, yet that island does not find it, neither among the maps, nor on the horizon.

Pliny seems certain: he is six days' sailing north from Brittany, so is Pomponius Mela, in his description of winters without dawn and summers without sunset; yet, if someone had really been there, there would be more detailed and precise information on the route. The research was so vain that now Thule appears to him "hard to find as the truthΒ». With resignation he concludes:

Β« Tile remains hidden in the north, and the source of the Nile in the south, provided that the virtue that lies in the middle between the extremes does not remain hidden, and the short journey of this life on which most men throbbing and doubting with an uncertain end for ambiguous path while walking hurries, and we do not take too much trouble in the search for a place that perhaps, once found, we would be eager to leave. Β»

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Philippe-Jacques van Bree, β€œLaura and Petrarch at the Fountain of Vaucluse”, 1816. Beaux-Arts Museum, Rennes, France.

Note:

  1. See TJ Cachey jr., Petrarchan Cartograph Writing, in S. Gersh, B. Roest, Medieval and Renaissance Humanism: Rhetoric, Representation and Reform, Brill, 2003, pp. 73 ff.
  2. Virgil, Georgics, vv. 21-30, go Library of Italian Classics.
  3. The epistles of Francesco Petrarca, edited by M. Smetryns, via Ghent University Library.

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