SALIMBENE OF PARMA. - Chronicler, Franciscan, b. at Parma in 1221, d. after 8 Sept. 1287.
Son of a certain Guido de Adam of the town nobility, his vocation, urged on by an environment wholly pervaded by the great thirteenth-century movement of Christian revival, by his deeply religious mother, and by his brother, who preceded him in the Order, into which he entered in 1238, was bitterly opposed by his father, who tried everything to turn him from it, even appealing to Brother Elias and to the emperor Frederick. His life falls into three distinct periods: the journey from city to city, from convent to convent, from Fano, where he hid from his father's threats, to Lucca, Siena, Pisa, and to Parma in 1247, during the siege in which the Empire failed in its last attempt against the communal liberties; then a stay in France, whither he was probably sent by his fellow citizens to seek aid, where he saw and came to know the protagonists of the great events of the century, and his frequenting, after returning in 1249, of the Joachimite circles; finally, having detached himself from them after 1260, which was the year of the great movement of the Flagellants stirred up by Ranieri Fasani, his last years were devoted to recollection. And if in his youth he naively trusted in that magic cipher of the times to which certain Joachimite currents reduced the expectation of the third kingdom of the Spirit, now he looks back as if astonished at the countless things and persons he has seen, and understands that the time is a providential succor for an inexhaustible gift of life.
His Cronica, the only one that has come down to us and mutilated of the many he composed, runs through an age in turmoil. He observes and remembers with open eyes and vivid memory, curious about everything because everything is created life. And thus it reveals itself as an indirect but wondrous fruit of the efficacy of Franciscan spirituality. It unfolds alongside the great debates that stirred contemporary thought and politics; but he never stiffens into a doctrinal or political abstraction either the protagonists of that life — pontiffs and emperors, friar Giovanni da Parma and friar Gerardo da Borgo S. Donnino, and crusaders and imperial feudatories — or the anonymous figures of the alleluia-bearing crowds, the combatants of the communal wars, the townsmen and the peasants, into an economic and practical abstraction. The chronicler descends with impetus toward the innumerable multiplicity of historical life. His gaze circumscribes things in their wondrous evidence, but does not imprison them; and every creature has a right to life, even that which expresses itself in his affectionate and curious gaze. If the canon of an intellectualistic historiography is to understand without love and without hatred, the Franciscan invades even the horrendous scenes of that turmoil with a fervent, loving succor. And his Latin tongue, steeped in vernacular forms, is the ductile and powerful instrument of this fervid, ingenuous and bold manner of his. A monument of thirteenth-century Italian life, the Cronica arranges and foreshadows the new arts, the new literature, the new customs.
Bibliography2 works
Mario Apollonio