Simone Atumano: Monaco di Studio, arcivescovo latino di Tebe. Secolo XIV (review)

Officially first published in 1968 (although the publisher's Web site gives the date as 1969), Fedalto's book has long been the best study available of this most interesting and, in some ways, still mysterious fourteenth-century churchman. Despite the omission of the photographs and map that appeared in the first edition, the new edition is, as its subtitle advertises, a substantially revised and enlarged version of the original book.

Most Anglophones know of Simon Atumanos from Kenneth Setton's discussion in "The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100.1 (1956). But, in fact, Atumanos's significance extends far beyond his modest connection to the Italian Renaissance. Born between 1310 and 1318 in a family of Turkish extraction (his father's or his family's name was Othman), Simon took his monastic name (his baptismal name is unknown, although Byzantine monastic practice makes it virtually certain that it started with "S") when at an uncertain date he entered the famous monastery "of the Studion" in Constantinople dedicated to St. John the Baptist. Since in 1348 Simon succeeded the celebrated anti Hesychast Barlaam of Calabria as the bishop of Gerace in Calabria, Fedalto reasonably supposes that both met in Constantinople. On the basis of the phrase "litterarum scientia praeditum" in the papal appointment document, Fedalto also supposes that Simon knew Latin by the time he became bishop of Gerace. In 1359–62, Simon was back in Constantinople, where he had an interview with Emperor John V, to which the great Demetrius Cydones referred in 1364 in the first of his three letters to Simon. Two years later, when Simon was probably in the papal Curia in Avignon, Pope Urban V transferred him from Gerace to the Latin bishopric of Thebes (to be distinguished from the Greek Orthodox bishopric of the same locale). Simon took up residence in Thebes and remained there until 1380, apart from a mission to the West in 1372 and another to Constantinople in 1374–75. The last years of his life in exile from Thebes are murky. About 1381 he was in Rome, where he taught Greek to the Dutch ecclesiastic Radulph de Rivo. There also survives a papal safe-conduct of May 1383 for him to go "ad partes Constantinopolitanas. "Given that the pope appointed a new bishop of Thebes in 1387, Simon must have died that year or the year before.

As Mercati demonstrated in 1916, Simon himself was responsible for the Greek translation from the Hebrew found in the fragment of a trilingual Bible in MS Marc. 7 (= 377) (Fedalto fails to supply the required collocazione number). Simon also made a translation into Latin of Plutarch's De Cohibenda Ira that attracted the attention of the important humanist Coluccio Salutati. We do not know as to where, when, and how Simon learned Hebrew and Latin, but when these linguistic skills are combined with his religious and diplomatic endeavors at the highest levels, Simon clearly emerges as one of the more interesting and intriguing figures of the fourteenth century. It is regrettable that so little information about him has survived.

Fedalto, a most distinguished historian of the Greek and Latin Churches in the East, has filled in the blank spots as best he could. In the process, we learn a good deal from a master about the sees of Gerace and Thebes, Barlaam of Calabria and the Hesychast controversy, and the political-ecclesiastical politics of the fourteenth century. In the appendices Fedalto also supplies the best list available today of the Latin bishops of Thebes, a collection of documents relevant for Simon, and a detailed analysis of Demetrius Cydones's three letters to Simon.