His self-elected
examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would have liked to perform the
ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol
by the senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of
ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian
magistrate. Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV, whom it amused
to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant
multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Start- ing from the fiction
that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman
emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15,
1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the
great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognize this 'laurea
Pisana' as legitimate. Indeed, it might be fairly asked with what right
this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgement on the
merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors crowned poets
wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the
popes and other princes assumed the same right, till at last no regard
whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV,
the academy of Pomponius L'tus gave the wreath on its own authority.
The Florentines had the good taste not to crown their famous humanists
till after death.
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