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BOTTIGELLA, Giovanni Matteo; & Roberto Sanseverino.
Viaggio in Terra Santa.
EXCEPTIONALLY IMPORTANT ITALIAN/LOMBARD LANGUAGE MANUSCRIPT of a little-known pilgrimage to the Holy Land made from Venice to Jaffa by sea in 1458-9, containing "the most comprehensive and accurate documentation on seamanship and navigation in the middle ages that has come to light to date … [in particular illustrating] how seamanship and navigation were intertwined before the era of scientific navigation and how the resulting art was carried out just before the time when European sailors ventured to cross the oceans of the world" (Vidoni). This is the third known copy made in the fifteenth century, and the sole luxury copy on vellum. The others reside at the Biblioteca Palatina, Parma (fragment only) and the University of Bologna (on paper. The Bologna manuscript is undated; it has all the emendations found in this codex, and may well have been copied from it.) This copy is from the family of one of the voyage's participants and possibly the text's author, Giovanni Matteo Bottigella (1410-1486). Though traditionally ascribed to Roberto Sanseverino (1418-1487) on the basis of his humanist credentials and his editorship of another Holy Land travelogue, Zaggia and others have argued that the principle author was actually Bottigella. The Bottigella provenance of the present manuscript offers important new evidence for that attribution. Believed lost since the nineteenth century, its reappearance constitutes a significant event for the corpus of fifteenth-century travel and navigation. It is the most important contemporary travel manuscript to appear in commerce since the appearance of The Book of Michael Rhodes (Sotheby's London, 5 Dec. 2000, lot 54). For the study of navigational techniques employed in subsequent voyages of discoveries east and west, it is arguably even more important. The manuscript is unusual, even unique, among fifteenth-century pilgrimage accounts on a number of counts. As suggested by Noonan's recent survey, pilgrimage to the Holy Land was the major catalyst for European travellers during the middle ages and early Renaissance. But the usual polemical purpose of Holy Land travel narratives was to inspire devotion and piety among an audience of armchair pilgrims. Any discussion of seafaring was usually limited to complaints about the bad language of sailors. By contrast, this manuscript is unique for the wealth of practical information found in it concerning the progress of the voyage at sea and the techniques of seamanship. Why they are included remains a topic for research, but historians of the subject must be grateful for their inclusion, as the practicalities of navigation were closely guarded secrets. The manuscript also includes a colourful diversion to Egypt, complete with descriptions of the pyramids and a giraffe, which, while not unique, is unusual. Thirdly, the trip almost certainly had a covert political component, as Sanseverino's uncle, the Sforza duke of Milan, was contemplating the formation of a new crusade at this time, and the pilgrims' correspondence may have included reconnaissance of Ottoman military strength and dispositions. A final point of difference with other pilgrimage accounts of comparable importance is that the text was never printed in the incunable era or the sixteenth century. It remained undiscovered until 1888, and was printed at that date in a limited edition of 200 copies only. The nineteenth-century editor, Giochino Maruffi, transcribed the University of Bologna paper manuscript. He was aware of the existence of the present manuscript but never saw it. Subsequently, the manuscript has remained unknown to Noonan and virtually all students of Holy Land voyages as well as historians of fifteenth-century navigation, until its analysis in an outstanding doctoral dissertation by Tullio Vidoni at the University of British Columbia in 1993. Vidoni's dissertation was supervised by Richard Unger, a leading historian of medieval maritime studies, and since reviewed and ratified by Dr Alan Stahl of Princeton University, co-editor of the recently published The Book of Michael of Rhodes (3 volumes, 2009). Although Vidoni persisted in the former attribution of the manuscript to Sanseverino, his account of the manuscript's technical significance is unsurpassed: "The most startling contribution that [the author] makes to our knowledge of medieval seamanship is the demonstration that ships and galleys of the fifteenth century were already impossible to hold on a course simply by exertions on the rudder (or rudders), their considerable displacements being responsible for the creation of forces of such intensity that, in crucial circumstances, no amount of human muscle applied to the tiller bar could alone counteract. From [the author]'s descriptions it becomes evident that by his time a complex style of sail management had been developed, through the struggles of previous generations, that was essential in providing the means of controlling progressively larger craft independently from the capabilities of the current steering gear. This … enabled sailors to turn heavy craft around and to hold them on the desired courses with little or no help from the rudder. … [Here] is the first writer to provide comprehensive and detailed evidence of this method of sailing, that, once developed and learned, became basic on the ships of the geographical discoveries and never was to be improved upon during the rest of the history of sailing ships." (pp. 2-3) "Finally, [the] journal offers some unique depictions of the activities on board a ship that was holed up in a harbour, waiting for a storm to blow itself out. These depictions reflect effectively on the level of medieval technology in rope-making and anchor design. Perhaps as many as twenty anchors plus a number of shore lines were required to hold a ship safely at the peak of a storm and it is astonishing to read of the back-breaking toil with anchors and shore lines that went on almost incessantly, sometimes day and night, as a result of the limitations on the strength of materials." (p. 10) Stahl's review of Vidoni's dissertation confirms his views about the singularity and importance of the text, and adds a number of details unknown to Vidoni, treating such topics as authorship, place and importance of the present codex in the text's manuscript tradition, its inestimable value for the constitution of a critical edition, and promising lines for future research in the wider context of fifteenth-century navigation. Copies of Vidoni's dissertation and Stahl's review are supplied with the manuscript. PROVENANCE: 1) Giovanni Matteo Bottigella, with his illuminated arms, by descent to; 2) his son Filippo Bottigella (d. 1507), professor of civic and canon law (inscription); 3) Conte Ercole Silva (1756-1840), patron of the arts, designed one of the first English gardens in Italy, author of Dell'arte dei giardini inglesi (1801), with the bookplate of the Biblioteca Silva in Cinisello; his library sale, Paris, 15-16 Feb. 1869, lot 263, to; 4) Gian Martino Arconati Visconti; still in the possession of Marie-Louise Peyrat, Marchesa Arconati Visconti (1840-1923) in 1888 (binding).
Quarto (220 × 155 mm), 133 unnumbered leaves written in a professional scribal hand in ink, about 29 lines per page on lined vellum, with contemporary annotations in 3 different hands, both marginal and interlinear. Bound in late nineteenth-century red pebble-grain morocco, covers with double rules in gilt with monogram surmounted by crown of the Arconati-Visconti at corners, spine in six compartments, titled in gilt and with additional monogram; turn-ins decorated in gilt. Protective guard leaf, most likely added at time of rebinding, verso with stamped seal of the Silva Library and bibliographical note; second guard leaf with ownership inscription of the pilgrim's son, Filippo Bottigella, verso with stamped seal of the Silva Library, second leaf with list of pilgrims and illuminated Bottigella arms at foot, verso has a single illuminated initial where the account proper begins; text dated 1459 at foot of last leaf verso, presumably the date of copying. First guard leaf much abraded, with minor repair, elsewhere some staining from humidity at front and back, but overall very clean, in an excellent state of preservation.
