Pietro Ranzano
Encyclopedia
Pietro Ranzano was a Dominican
Dominican Order
The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

 friar, historian, humanist
Renaissance humanism
Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...

 and scholar who is best known for his work, De primordiis et progressu felicis Urbis Panormi, a history of the city
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...

 of Palermo
Palermo
Palermo is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...

 from its beginnings up until the contemporary period in which Ranzano was writing. The composition is influenced to some extent by humanistic conceptions of historical research, offers glimpses into the world view of a Sicilian
Sicily
Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

 intellectual of the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 period on Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 and Jewish culture, as well as Sicily’s past.

Ranzano and his Works

Ranzano would study Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 at the school of humanist Antonio Cassarino, who at the time was a teacher of young children (magister scholae parvulorum) in Palermo. Like other scholars of his era, he would study at various institutions which were headed by various masters such as Pietro Arentino in Florence, Tommaso Pontano in Perguia, and Vitaliano Borromeo and Pietro Candido Decembro in Milan and Pavia. Ranzano would go on to join the Dominican Order at the age of sixteen and by the time he was twenty-eight, he had become Provincial of the Dominicans in Sicily. Around the year 1464, Ranzano would be appointed papal nuncio in the kingdom of Sicily and he would be entrusted with the organization of the crusade against the Turks
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

 in conjunction with preaching and collecting funds for the aforementioned crusade. While in Palermo, Ranzano taught at the Domincan College. Ranzano’s personality and education influenced his work, creating a particular mixture of secular and religious learning that arguably can be perceived as the hallmark of Sicilian humanism.

History of Palermo

Pietro Ranzano’s works were very popular in the time in which they were written. However, his account of Palermo’s history served as a model for later Sicilian historians. The composition was written in first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

 and it includes various personal earmarks such as Ranzano illustrating his own ideas and spending a great deal of time on his search for ancient sources and his efforts to pursue his story by all possible means. The writing utilizes foundation legends which epitomize the way in which narratives on the origins of cities were formulated. Ranzano’s investigations with regards to attempting to learn of the origins of Palermo (circa quista origini di la mia patria), place him in the context of the prevailing quest in the Renaissance era for sources (ad fontes) and his quest would lead him to an inscription which he would assume to be "Chaldea
Chaldea
Chaldea or Chaldaea , from Greek , Chaldaia; Akkadian ; Hebrew כשדים, Kaśdim; Aramaic: ܟܐܠܕܘ, Kaldo) was a marshy land located in modern-day southern Iraq which came to briefly rule Babylon...

n" characters which were inscribed on a tower which stood above the Porta Patitelli in Palermo. The inscription would later be discovered to be a forgery therefore rendering Ranzano’s deduction that the city of Palermo originated from the Chaldeans as erroneous. However, the writing he composed is still important as it gives an insight as to the views held by Sicilian intellectual elite’s near the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Sicily.

The Dominican Friar and the Jews

If looking at Ranzano’s writings of the Jews on the surface, one would conclude that it presents an image of positive relations between Jews and Christians in Palermo. However, looking deeper into his descriptions reveals that he perceives local Jews as holding an ancestral memory of the Chaldean inscription but not having historical evidence to back up their ‘memories’ of the past; they told Ranzano about the existence of an ancient book but they had no copy of it. In contrast, a Pisan Jew, Isaac Guglielmo, who owned the book which the local Jews where referring to and showed it to Ranzano. Correlating with Augustinian
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...

 tradition, Ranzano would perceive the Jews as custodians of the past who could corroborate the writings in the inscription.

Death and legacy

Ranzano’s History of Palermo remains the only Sicilian historical account which takes a significant look at the Jews as well as Jewish culture. The composition offers a look at Jews and Christians with regard to cultural encounters in fifteenth-century Sicily. The story of Palermo exhibits many of the facets of the Renaissance culture of that period. In addition, the history illustrates the sophistication of an area which was at a cultural crossroads between Italy and the Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...

 world along with facing adversity with regard to various ethnic groups presence; most notably the Muslims and the Jews. Ranzano’s death in 1492 marks the end of an era, that being of multicultural Sicily as that year would coincide with expulsion of the Jews from Sicily
Expulsion of the Jews from Sicily
The expulsion of the Jews from Sicily began in 1493 when the Spanish Inquisition reached the island of Sicily and its Jewish population of more than 30,000 Jews.-History of the Sicilian Jews:...

.

Further reading

Zeldes, Nadia. 2006. "The Last Multi-Cultural Encounter in Medieval Sicily: A Dominican Scholar, an Arabic Inscription, and a Jewish Legend." Mediterranean Historical Review 21 (2): 159-91., 160.

Birkenmajer, Alexander. Notes and Correspondence. Abbé A. Rome; Gino Loria; George Sarton; Edward Kremers; A. Pogo; Lynn Thorndike; Eduard Färber; F. M. Feldhaus Isis, Vol. 20, No. 2. (Jan., 1934), pp. 440-449.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28193401%2920%3A2%3C440%3ANAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

Daniels, John & Daniels, Christian. The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill. Technology and Culture, Vol. 29, No. 3. (Jul., 1988), pp. 493-535. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0040-165X%28198807%2929%3A3%3C493%3ATOOTSR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W

Reynolds, Beatrice R. Latin Historiography: A Survey, 1400-1600.Studies in the Renaissance, Vol. 2. (1955), pp. 7-66.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0081-8658%281955%292%3C7%3ALHAS1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1
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