Marullo, Tarchaniota Michele

MARULLO, TARCANIOTA MICHELE. — Born in Constantinople in 1453, he died in 1500, 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 soldier of fortune and a genuine humanist. Two destinies clashed within him: that of the Greek exile who, if from a military family, was naturally inclined to end up as a soldier of fortune, even if ennobled by the general expectation of war against the Turks; and that of the man of letters who, once born with this vocation, could not fail to aspire to live in an entirely different manner. He travelled the world with armed companies and earned respect in intellectual circles. For one of the most cultivated women of his time, Alessandra Scala, whom he married, he found accents of Pontanian love. His Latin verses, too often diluted in slow elegiac metres, are the best thing that remains of him. It cannot be said that, in his poetry, the collision of his two destinies is perceived as an inspiring force, apart from certain accents of acute but generic sadness, and certain passages in which the human weariness of war does not prevent warrior courage from being felt as a moral value. His attachment to Lucretius’ poem, together with the tradition that among many Greeks, especially stradioti, there persisted some obscure resistance to Christianity, led scholars to seek traces of such a sentiment in the four books of his Hymni naturales (published in 1497). These, however, are probably nothing more than animated (or encumbered) descriptions of nature through mythology, in the manner of the less successful Pontano.