Pietro Ranzano

Most Reverend Pietro Ranzano
Bishop of Lucera
Italian humanist, Pietro Ranzano before King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and Queen Beatrice (Epitome rerum Hungarorum, 1490)
Church	Catholic Church
In office	1476–1492
Predecessor	Ladislao Dentice
Successor	Giambattista Contestabili

Pietro Ranzano (

Ranzano and his Works

Ranzano would study

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 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.^[5] 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 "Chaldean" characters which were inscribed on a tower which stood above the Porta Patitelli in Palermo.^[6] 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.^[7] Correlating with Augustinian tradition, Ranzano would perceive the Jews as custodians of the past who could corroborate the writings in the inscription.

Activity in Hungary

In 1488 he was sent to Hungary, to the court of Matthias Corvinus as the envoy of the Kingdom of Naples. The queen, Beatrice of Naples commissioned him to write a history of Hungary. Pietro Ranzano has finished the work in a year under the title Epitome rerum Hungarorum. The heroic history treated the Hungarians as the direct descendants of the Huns and the king as the second Attila.^[8]

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

Bibliography

• 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.
• Figliuolo, Bruno (2016). "RANZANO, Pietro".
  ISBN 978-8-81200032-6
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