Leo Allatius - Biography

Biography

Leo Allatius was a Greek, born on the island of Chios in 1586, his father was Niccolas Allatzes and his mother was Sebaste Neurides, both of Greek extraction. He was taken by his maternal uncle Michael Nauridis to Italy to be educated at the age of nine, first in Calabria and then in Rome where he was admitted into the Greek college. A graduate of the Pontifical Greek College of St. Athanasius in Rome, he spent his career in Rome as teacher of Greek at the Greek college, devoting himself to the study of classics and theology. He found a patron in Pope Gregory XV.

In 1622, after the capture of Heidelberg by Tilly, when the Protestant Elector of Bavaria Frederick V was supplanted by a Catholic one, the victorious elector Maximilian of Bavaria presented the splendid Palatinate library composed of 196 cases containing about 3500 manuscripts to Pope Gregory. Allacci supervised its transport by a caravan of 200 mules across the Alps to Rome, where it was incorporated in the Vatican library. All but 39 of the Heidelberg manuscripts, which had been sent to Paris in 1797 and were returned to Heidelberg at the Peace of Paris in 1815, and a gift from Pope Pius VII of 852 others in 1816, remain in the Vatican Library to this day.

Allacci became librarian to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and Pope Alexander VII appointed him custodian of the Vatican Library in 1661, which post he held until his death.

His cultural background, embracing the Greek and Roman worlds, afforded him a unique view of the age-old question of union to heal the Great Schism. Better than any western scholar of his day he knew the religious, historical and artistic traditions of the Orthodox world, struggling under Ottoman domination. More passionately than any other 17th century theologian, he believed that familiarity with these traditions would enable the two churches to bridge their theological and ecclesiastical divide.

Thus in 1651, when he published the first printed edition of the works of George Acropolites, the 13th century emissary of the Byzantine Emperor who acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman pontiff and thus had become something of a celebrity, at least in the West, the Latin essay that formed the preface to this volume, De Georgiis eorumque Scriptis, gained fame itself as a learned plea for the commonalities between the two churches.

Allatius was a natural apologist for the Eastern communions in Eastern Europe, convinced as he was in himself that in the acts of union neither reasons of faith nor of doctrine were fundamental to the succession of the bishops, only a transfer of jurisdictions, and he seems really to have believed that the "Latin faith" and the "Greek faith" were identical and that under "Roman obedience" they could still be Orthodox. So he argued in his contribution to the mid-17th century Uniate pamphlet De Ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione libri tres ("The Western and Eastern Churches in perpetual Agreement, in Three Books") (1648). Such notions led to the final stipulations that the Eastern Churches were not to be merged with the Catholic Church but would retain their own hierarchical independence and traditional rituals.

Allatius was trained as a physician. In 1645 he included the first methodical discussion of vampires, in De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus ("On certain modern opinions among the Greeks"). In his later years he collected Greek and Syrian manuscripts to add to the late Pope Gregory XV's Eastern Library at the Vatican.

His Drammaturgia (1666), a catalogue of Italian musical dramas produced up to that year, is indispensable for the early history of opera. A new edition, carried down to 1755, appeared at Venice in that year.

His works are listed by Johann Albert Fabricius, in Bibliotheca Graeca (xi. 437), where they are divided into four classes:

• editions, translations and commentaries on ancient authors
• works relating to the dogmas and institutions of the Greek and Roman Churches
• historical works
• miscellaneous works.

His manuscripts (about 150 volumes) and his voluminous scholarly correspondence are in the library of the Oratorians in Rome. The number of his unpublished writings is also very large; the majority of them are included in the manuscripts of the Vallicellian library.

Although undoubtably learned, Allatius held some odd ideas. One of his works, De Praeputio Domine Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba (A Discussion of the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ) contended that the rings observed around Saturn were the prepuce of Jesus Christ.

Allatius died in Rome on 18 (or 19) January 1669.