The fortune of imperial history

According to traditional handbooks, all forms of imperial historiography were in decline in late-medieval Italy. As a consequence, imperial histories by Italian authors in this period have often been overlooked. Both in the vernacular and in Latin, Italians produced texts that presented the Holy Roman Emperors in one continuous line with their ancient predecessors. This contribution focuses on two Latin examples by fourteenth-century authors known as proto-humanists: Giovanni Mansionario’s Ystorie imperiales and Benvenuto da Imola’s Libellus augustalis. It shows, first, how these authors professionalised the genre of imperial history by building on ancient sources, and, second, how their histories legitimized the imperial ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperors in the Italian peninsula. Whereas Mansionario’s monumental work survives in three manuscripts only, Benvenuto’s short handbook of imperial lives had a considerable success in the fifteenth century and beyond: It survives in more than 100 manuscripts, several early editions, and was regularly attributed to Francesco Petrarch.