Glarentza, early October 1437
The Genoese hull came round the last point in a thin wind near midday, and the city showed itself between the topsails as a long stack of red roofs along the shore. Filelfo had been on deck since they had taken in the headland an hour back, in a corner of the rail aft of the foremast where the mate had told him he would not be in the way, and he had stayed there with his hands on the rail watching the coast slowly take shape.
He had passed through Glarentza once, near ten years ago, on his way back from Constantinople to Venice. What he remembered was a quiet harbor town with very little to mark it out. What he was looking at now was not that town.
It was the smoke that did it. Tall stacks rising in five or six places at once, thicker than any chimney had business being, going up straight in the still air above the roofs before the wind aloft caught them and bent them all in the same slow direction over the harbor. He had seen stacks like these only in Venice — over the glassworks at Murano, and along the Arsenal walls. Here there were seven he could mark from the rail without moving his head.
Theodora, his wife, came up the ladder behind him and put her hands on the rail beside his without speaking, and Skleros came up a moment after her with the leather case under his arm. He looked at the smoke for some time before he said anything.
"The place has changed a great deal, master."
"Even with what they said in Italy, I had not pictured this."
The harbor opened past the breakwater as the ship slipped in: Ragusans at the inner berth, a couple of large Venetian trade ships, more small craft than he had time for, the masts a kind of forest along the shore — an unusual number for this time of year.
The captain was calling the passengers down off the deck. Filelfo took a last look at the stacks and turned to find his case.
The port officer was a Greek of about forty, with a clipped beard and ink on the side of his thumb, and he sat at a small table set up under a striped awning at the head of the quay with two clerks behind him and a basket of papers between them. He was working through a pile of way-bills from a Cretan merchant when the Genoese passengers began to come down the gangway, and he did not look up until the man at his right elbow leaned over and said something quietly in his ear; even then he marked his place with a thumb before raising his eyes.
"Name, please. And your business in the city."
Filelfo had been ready, after twelve days at sea, for an introduction by a man who would know the name and rise from his stool in a manner appropriate to it. He had not been ready for a question put to him exactly the way it had been put to the Cretan merchant in front of him, and he set his case down on the cobbles a little harder than he had meant to before he answered.
"Francesco Filelfo, of Tolentino. Most recently of Siena. I come to seek audience at the chancery."
The officer wrote it down without looking up. "And those with you?"
"My wife, the lady Theodora, of the house of Chrysoloras. My secretary, Demetrios Skleros. Three children, with their nurse."
The officer wrote that too, the clerk on his right reading down the list as it filled. "How long do you stay, signor Filelfo?"
"That is to be determined."
"Where will you be lodged?"
"I have not yet arranged it."
He set the pen down then and looked up properly for the first time. He had the eyes of a man who saw a hundred faces in a morning and remembered most of them, and Filelfo had the brief unwelcome sensation of being measured by a clerk, but the officer's voice when it came was reasonable enough.
"There is a guest-house the chancery keeps for visitors on court business, but those rooms go through the office, not through me, and they will not be placed tonight. For now there is a house called the Three Anchors, two streets up from the inner gate. The widow Eudoxia keeps it. It is clean, and the kitchen is honest. If you wish a request to be carried to the chancery, leave one with me now and one of my men will see it placed."
A guest-house run from the chancery itself. He had not heard of such a thing.
"I will write something today and bring it back."
"As you wish. The chancery does not hurry, signor. Plan for three or four days."
"I had hoped within a day or two."
"You may well be received in a day or two. Or you may not. It is not for me to say."
The officer picked the pen back up.
Filelfo stood at the edge of the table for a moment longer than he needed to. Skleros had already stepped past him to direct the porters to the chests, and Theodora had gone ahead to the shade of the customs shed with the youngest child against her shoulder, and the dock around him was loud with hooves and crates and the calling of stevedores in three languages. Over all of it came the heavy regular crack of mallets on wood from the slipway further along the curve of the harbor, where an unfinished hull stood in scaffold against the noon sky. He went after his wife.
The Three Anchors was clean enough — whitewashed rooms, real bolsters on the beds, a window in the larger room that looked over the harbor — but it was an inn by the water, and Filelfo had grown unused to inns by the water. The widow Eudoxia named her price, and Filelfo was already working out his objections, the absence of an antechamber chief among them, when Skleros paid the week in advance from the household purse, the way he did when his master's vanity was about to make a transaction more expensive.
He stood at the window for a while after the widow had gone down for hot water. Behind him Theodora and the nurse were settling the children's room in their easy Greek, and Skleros was at the middle table laying out paper from the leather case in silence. Outside, a baker's boy was pushing a handcart of loaves up the hill, the wheel squealing on the cobbles.
"Demetrios. The good paper."
He wrote the request that afternoon and gave it to Skleros, who carried it up to the chancery himself. Word came back at the inn the following morning, faster than he had expected: the Emperor would receive him the day after, at the second hour after sunrise, at Clermont.
He could not stay at the inn. The bookshop of Glarentza was well known in Italy by now, and seeing it had been at the top of what he meant to do in Glarentza. He went out toward midday with Skleros at his elbow, meaning to walk the city and end at the press. He did not walk much of the city.
The bookshop sat at the end of a wide paved street that ran back from the port quay, set as the destination of the street the way a church might be in a small Italian town. A large stone building, purpose-built. Above the door a phoenix in gold with wings spread, and beneath it the name MOREA PUBLISHING in Greek and in Latin both. Illustrated posters flanked the entrance with the new editions priced in plain numerals — five ducats for a printed Latin Bible, three for the Greek — and a steady traffic of merchants and patrons came and went, some carrying tomes under their arms, some pausing on the steps to read.
Filelfo went in. The smell of ink and parchment met him at the threshold, beneath it polished wood, and the inside was hushed — something of the library about it and something of the chapel. The shelves ran in orderly rows with every spine uniform in its printing, the sameness itself a kind of advertisement. Clerks in deep-blue tunics moved among the patrons directing readers to the sections — Bibles in two languages, histories, treatises, classics in Greek and in Latin both — and one of them stood at a polished central table demonstrating a featured book to a small gathering.
Filelfo walked the rows with Skleros at his elbow. He counted past fifty titles before he stopped counting. He weighed a printed Plato in his hand without admitting that he wanted it, turned the pages of a printed Homer and set it back, looked at three sizes of Psalter, at a printed Aristotle in two volumes. The merchants around him spoke in Greek, in Italian, and in at least two languages he could not place.
The afternoon went without his knowing it. He came away after dark with a small printed grammar he had not meant to buy.
The road up to Clermont went between two low walls of dressed stone, and Filelfo walked it in the second hour after sunrise with Skleros half a pace behind him. The guards at the gates passed him through on the chancery seal. A steward in a dark tunic was waiting at the door to the offices.
The steward stopped at a door at the end of the corridor and knocked twice. A voice from inside said come; he opened the door, stepped back, and closed it behind Filelfo as he went in.
Constantine was at a long table by the window in plain dark wool, his sleeves turned back, a stack of papers at his right hand. He was younger than Filelfo had imagined and physically larger, and he came around the table without ceremony to put out his hand in the Italian fashion.
"Signor Filelfo. I will confess I did not know you were in my city until your letter reached the chancery yesterday. Welcome."
"Majesty."
"Please sit." He pointed to the bench across from him. "Your name has been on more than one table in this court these last few years. I have read your version of the funeral oration. An honor to meet you in person."
Filelfo took the bench, and the small warm pleasure of having been recognised settled on him with a familiarity he had not felt since Florence. He let it settle for a moment before he answered.
"Majesty, you flatter the work."
"I do not. The friend who sent me the copy was the more critical reader, and he was right where he was right." He returned to his side of the table. "How do you find the city?"
"Busy port, Majesty. The bookshop more than affirms what they say of it in Italy."
"So tell me what brings you here so suddenly."
A servant came in with a tray, set down two cups and a small jug of water cut with wine, and went out, the latch catching after him with a small wooden click.
Filelfo answered without ornament.
"I have left Siena under threat to my life, Majesty. The man who hired the knife was in Florence. The one who carried it was a Sienese, and I do not yet know his name. I came east on the first ship I could find. My wife and the children came with me. I am seeking a new life, Majesty — perhaps in the service of the empire again."
"The lady your wife is well?"
"She is, Majesty."
"And the children?"
"All whole, thank you."
Constantine nodded once. He turned the wax tablet a quarter turn under his hand, and the matter of the assassin was set aside without further comment.
"You worked for my brother some years back, did you not. He even sent you to Sigismund's court, if I remember."
"I was there, Majesty. Your brother was a great man and a generous emperor. I was saddened to leave for Venice."
Constantine did not answer at once. He drew a sheet from the stack at his elbow and turned it across the table.
"Signor Filelfo, I will be plain. Your coming was ideal, and since you are seeking to serve the empire again I would like to make use of you, if you are open to being made use of. I am building a school in Constantinople. The first stones have been laid; we expect to teach our first students by next autumn. I would like you to teach there. The salary would be five hundred ducats a year, with rooms in the school's quarter for you and your family, and a study with a fire that draws properly. You would have the choosing of your own masters, subject to my secretary's countersignature on the contracts, and the use of the library that is being built."
The number was honest but it was not lavish. Filelfo had been offered seven hundred florins by Filippo Maria two years before and had turned it down for reasons that had seemed clearer at the time than they did now; five hundred ducats in Constantinople was a respectable salary and a comfortable life, and it had been put to him by a man who did not appear to be trying to dazzle him. He took up the cup in front of him, found it empty, and set it down.
"Majesty, it is a generous offer, and a serious one. Might I —"
"Wait." Constantine raised one finger. "There is more. I want you to hear the second part before you answer the first, because the second part is what I would actually like to talk about more."
He drew a second sheet across.
"I am also going to print a news-sheet of sorts. A single leaf, two sides, in Greek, once a month, distributed through the empire. Court news, official notices, the shape of foreign affairs as we have it, a few market reports for the larger cities, and a small space at the back for letters and arguments on questions of learning. I want it on the first of every month, without fail, beginning in March. I want a man to edit it who can write quickly and well, who has the standing to draw pieces out of the men whose pieces matter, and who is prepared to be cursed for what he prints. Your letters are read across Italy, signor — I am told they are copied and passed from hand to hand from Florence to Bologna, and that is the kind of pen this paper will need. The editorship would carry two hundred ducats a year on top of the school chair. You would hold both."
For a moment Filelfo did not move. Outside in the courtyard a horse was being walked across the cobbles and the shoes were very loud through the open window.
He set both palms flat on the table.
"Majesty. A leaf, every month, with news."
"Every month."
"I had not heard of the like before."
Constantine looked past him for a moment toward the window, and then back. "The world is moving faster than it was. Books that used to take a year out of a copyist's life take a few days off a press. When something happens in Florence in May we are talking about it in Constantinople in August and arguing about it in October. I would like the men who decide things to be arguing about the same things at the same time, with the same facts in front of them. A monthly leaf, well done, is a beginning. The imperial galleys will carry it on every voyage — to Glarentza, to Thessaloniki, even beyond, to whoever cares to read. It is a start, at least, on news that travels faster than the men who carry it now. I would like to see the thing exist."
Filelfo nodded slowly. The courtyard had gone quiet again, and somewhere down the corridor a door had opened and closed.
"I will think on it, Majesty. With your permission. Until tomorrow evening."
"Until tomorrow evening."
Constantine sat back and drew the sheets to his side of the table, laying one palm flat on them. "One more thing. The war in Italy. What is the shape of it as you saw it from Siena before you left."
Filelfo straightened, and his hands came back onto the table.
"Majesty, the Pope and Venice are pressing Filippo Maria hard, and from what I heard before we sailed, Milan is being squeezed from more than one quarter at once and is not finding the room to answer in any of them. Aragon is in the field for him in the south, which does him as much harm as it does good because it costs more than it earns. In Siena the talk at every table by the time we left was that Milan was losing ground steadily; the last news I had had Sforza at the gates of a town in the Cremonese."
"And Florence."
Filelfo's hand, which had been flat on the table, closed into a loose fist. "Florence calls itself neutral, Majesty. The signoria has signed nothing. But Cosimo de' Medici sits behind every door in that city, and Cosimo leans against Milan with the whole weight of his bank behind him. Where Cosimo leans, Florence goes, sooner or later. They will be in the war within the year, in everything but the name."
Constantine nodded once and rose, and Filelfo with him. The audience had run an hour, twice as long as he had thought it would.
Author's Note:
A quick word on Francesco Filelfo. He's a famous Italian humanist of the fifteenth century, one of the most prominent of his generation, a brilliant Greek scholar, a famously prolific letter-writer, and one of the vainest and most quarrelsome men of his time. As a young man he served at the court of Emperor John VIII Palaiologos in Constantinople, where he studied under Manuel Chrysoloras and went on diplomatic missions on the empire's behalf — including one to the court of Sigismund. He later taught in Florence in the early 1430s, fell out catastrophically with Cosimo de' Medici, fled to Siena under threat to his life, and historically there really was an attempt on him there that he attributed to Cosimo's hand. In our timeline he stayed in Italy and eventually went to Milan in 1440 to work for Filippo Maria Visconti. In this story, with the empire rising and Glarentza becoming what it has become, he sails east instead.
His wife Theodora was of the Chrysoloras family, the same family as Manuel Chrysoloras, the great Greek teacher who introduced classical Greek to a generation of Italian humanists. The secretary Demetrios Skleros is invented for this story.
A note on the news-sheet: this is, in essence, the first state-backed periodical in European history. Constantine is selling it to Filelfo as enlightened infrastructure, and Filelfo is hearing it as a scholarly project backed by a sovereign — but it's also, plainly, an instrument of state. It works as all three things at once: public good, scholarly journal, propaganda.
Next chapter we jump a bit forward in time: the reforms need room to prove themselves, and a few threads from this stretch of the book need to land before we pick them up again.