MARULLO, TARCANIOTA MICHELE

MARULLO, TARCANIOTA MICHELE. — Born in Constantinople in 1453, died in 1500 after being swept away by the waters of the Cecina river. With the arrival of the Turks, he came to Italy with his family and began a dual life as a mercenary soldier and a genuine humanist. Two destinies clashed within him: that of the Greek exile, who, though from a military family, was naturally inclined to become a mercenary soldier, buoyed by the general expectation of war against the Turks; and that of the man of letters, who, once born with this vocation, could not help but aspire to live in a completely different manner. He traveled the world with armed companies and earned respect in intellectual circles. For one of the most cultured women of his time, Alessandra Scala, whom he married, he found Pontanian accents of love. His Latin verses, often diluted in slow elegiac meters, are the best that remains of him. That the clash of his two destinies is felt as an inspirational force in his poetry cannot be said, except for a few accents of acute but generic sadness and a few instances where his human disgust for war does not prevent the warrior’s courage from reasserting itself as a moral value. His attachment to Lucretius’ poem, and the tradition that among many Greeks, especially the stradioti, a certain reluctance to Christianity persisted, led him to seek traces of such a sentiment in the four books of his Hymni naturales (published in 1497), which, however, are probably nothing more than descriptions of nature enlivened (or weighed down) by mythology, in the manner of the less fortunate Pontano.