The Nabataeans, as we see from Diodorus, used Petra as a place of refuge and a safe storehouse for their treasures of frankincense, myrrh, and silver before they gave up their nomadic habits. But Petra was not only safe and well watered, it lay close to the most important lines of trade. The modern pilgrim-road from Damascus to Mecca, which has taken the place of the old incense-route, passes indeed a little to the east by Ma'án. But to touch Petra involves no great detour even on this line, and in ancient times, when Gaza was the great terminus of the Arabian trade, Petra was the place where the Gaza road branched off from that to Bostra, Palmyra, and north Syria. The route from Egypt to Damascus is also commanded by Petra, and from it too there went a great route direct through the desert to the head of the Persian Gulf. Thus Petra became a centre for all the main lines of overland trade between the East and the West, and it was not till the fall of the Nabataean kingdom that Palmyra (⅛ , .v.) superseded it as the chief emporium of north Arabia. Many Roman and other foreign merchants were settled here even in the time of Strabo, and he describes the caravans which passed between it and Leuce Come on the Red Sea coast as comparable to armies.

Petra is a Greek name which cannot have been that used by the Semitic inhabitants, and from Josephus (Ant., iv. 7, 1; 4, 7) and the Onomastica (ed. Lag., p. 286 sqj) it may be concluded that the natives called the place Rekem (Cpl), a designation probably derived from the variegated colours of the rocks about Wády Müsá, to which all travellers refer with admiration. But Petra had yet another ancient name familiar from the Bible. The Biblical Sela (generally with the article p⅛∏), a city of Edom (2 Kings xiv. 7; Isa. xvi. 1; also Judges i. 36, where E.V. has “the rock”; perhaps also Isa. xlii. 11), appears to be identified with Petra by the LXX., and certainly is so by the Onomastica. Petra, in fact, or the “rock,” seems to be simply a translation of Sela, but a somewhat loose one,—for the Hebrew name, corresponding to the Arabic SaΓ, is properly a hollow between rocks, just such a place as Petra is. The fortress of Edom, according to Obadiah 3, lay “in the clefts of the Sela,” and seemed impregnable. And that the name of Sela survived the Nabataean occupation is known from Yákút, who places a fortress SaΓ in Wády Músá (comp. Nöldeke in Z.Ι).MH., XXV. 259). Petra, therefore, was a city before theNabataeans, and, occupying one of the few cultivable spots in the district, probably never wholly ceased to be inhabited. This identification disposes of another which was accepted alike by the Jewish and Christian Aramaic versions of the Old Testament, and, passing from the Aramaeans to the Arabs, has given rise to the modern names Fountain and Wády of Moses (comp. Yákút, iv. 879). According to these versions Rkém, Rkám, or more precisely Rkém of Gaiá (that is, Eljí), is Kadesh Barnea, where flowed the waters of Strife or “well of judgment” (Gen. xiv. 7; Num. xx. 1 sq., xxvii. 14), where Moses struck the rock. This view is ably supported by Greene (The Hebrew Migration from EgypC)', others identify Kadesh with 'Ain Kadis (Kudais) on the south border of Judaea.

Petra survived the fall of the Nabataean kingdom, and indeed most of the buildings may be dated from the 2d and 3d centuries. It appears from coins that Hadrian took it into favour and gave it his name. But Palmyra absorbed its trade with the Persian Gulf, and long before Islam the great incense-route was deserted and left Petra, like the more southern Nabataean city of Egra (Hijr), to fall into ruin. The ruins were an object of curiosity in the Middle Ages, and were visited by Sultan Bibars (Quatremère, Z.c.). The first European to describe them was Burckhardt, and since his time they have often been visited. See the descriptions, plans, and views of Laborde and Linant, Arabie Petrée (Paris, 1830-34); the Duc de Luynes, Voyage d'exploration à la mer morte, &c., Paris, s.a.; Palmer, Desert of the Exodus, vol. ii., 1871; Stanley, Sinai and Palestine ; Guérin, Terre Sainte, 1883.

Petrarch’s real name, according to Tuscan usage, was Francesco di Petracco. But he altered this patronymic, for the sake of euphony, to Petrarca, proving by this slight change his emancipation from usages which, had he dwelt at Florence, would most probably have been imposed on him. It does not appear that lie was attached to either his father or his mother; and, though he loved his brother Gherardo dearly, we recognize in him that type of character for which the self-chosen ties of friendship are more enthralling than the piety of domestic affection. Petracco, who was very anxious that his eldest son should become an eminent jurist, sent him at the age of fifteen to study law at Montpellier. Like Ovid and many other poets, Petrarch felt no inclination for his father’s profession. His intellect, indeed, was not incapable of understanding and admiring the majestic edifice of Roman law; but he shrank with disgust from the illiberal technicalities of practice. There is an authentic story of Petracco’s flinging the young student’s books of poetry and rhetoric upon the fire, but saving Virgil and Cicero half-burned from the flames at his son’s passionate entreaties. Notwithstanding Petrarch’s firm determination to make himself a scholar and a man of letters rather than a lawyer, he so far submitted to his father’s wishes as to remove about the year 1323 to Bologna, which was then the headquarters of juristic learning. There he stayed with his brother Gherardo until 1326, when his father died, and he returned to Avignon. Banishment and change of place had already diminished Petracco’s fortune, which was never large; and a fraudulent administration of his estate after his death left the two heirs in almost complete destitution. The most precious remnant of Petrarch’s inheritance was a MS. of Cicero. There remained no course open for him but to take orders. This he did at once on his arrival in Provence; and we have good reason to believe that he advanced in due time to the rank of priest. A great Roman noble and ecclesiastic, Giacomo Colonna, afterwards bishop of Lombez, now befriended him, and Petrarch lived for some years in partial dependence on this patron.

On the 6th of April 1327 happened the most famous event of Petrarch’s history. He saw Laura for the first time in the church of St Clara at Avignon. Who Laura was remains uncertain still. That she was the daughter of Audibert de Noves and the wife of Hugh de Sade rests partly on tradition and partly on documents which the abbé de Sade professed to have copied from originals in the last century. Nothing is now extant to prove that, if this lady really existed, she was the Laura of the Canzoniere, while there are reasons for suspecting that the abbé was either the fabricator of a romance flattering to his own family, or the dupe of some previous impostor. We may, however, reject the sceptical hypothesis that Laura was a mere figment of Petrarch’s fancy; and, if we accept her personal reality, the poems of her lover demonstrate that she was a married woman with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.

Petrarch’s inner life after this date is mainly occupied with the passion which he celebrated in his Italian poems, and with the friendships which his Latin epistles dimly reveal to us. Besides the bishop of Lombez he was now on terms of intimacy with another member of the great Colonna family, the Cardinal Giovanni. A German, Ludwig, whom he called Socrates, and a Roman, Lelio, who received from him the classic name of Laelius, were among his best-loved associates. He probably owed his livelihood to the generosity of prelates, with whom he played the courtier or the secretary; for we do not hear of his having occupied any benefice at this period. Avignon was the chief seat of his residence up to the year 1333, when he became restless, and undertook his first long journey. On this occasion he visited Paris, Ghent, Liège, Cologne, making the acquaintance of learned men and copying the manuscripts of classical authors. On his return to Avignon he engaged in public affairs, pleaded the cause of the Scaligers in their lawsuit with the Rossi for the lordship of Parma, and addressed two poetical epistles to Pope Benedict XII. upon the restoration of the papal see to Rome. His eloquence on behalf of the tyrants of Verona was successful. It won him the friendship of their ambassador, Azzo di Correggio,—a fact which subsequently influenced his life in no small measure. At the same time his treatment of the papal question made him pose as an Italian patriot clinging to the ideal of Rome as the sovereign city of civilization. Not very long after these events Petrarch made his first journey to Rome, a journey memorable from the account which he has left us of the impression he received from its ruins.

It was some time in the year 1337 that he established himself at Vaucluse and began that life of solitary study, heightened by communion with nature in her loneliest and wildest moods, which distinguished him in so remarkable a degree from the common herd of mediaeval scholars. Here he spent his time partly among books, meditating on Roman history, and preparing himself for the Latin epic of Africa. In his hours of recreation he climbed the hills or traced the Sorgues from its fountain under those tall limestone cliffs, while odes and sonnets to Madonna Laura were committed from his memory to paper. We may also refer many of his most important treatises in prose, as well as a large portion of his Latin correspondence, to the leisure he enjoyed in this retreat. Some woman, unknown to us by name, made him the father of a son, Giovanni, in the year 1337; and she was probably the same who brought him a daughter, Francesca, in 1343. Both children were afterwards legitimized by papal bulls. Meanwhile his fame as a poet in the Latin and the vulgar tongues steadily increased, until, when the first draughts of the Africa began to circulate about the year 1339, it became manifest that no one had a better right to the laurel crown than Petrarch. A desire for glory was one of the most deeply-rooted passions of his nature, and one of the points in which he most strikingly anticipated the humanistic scholars who succeeded him. It is not, therefore, surprising to find that he exerted his influence in several quarters with the view to obtaining the honours of a public coronation. The result of his intrigues was that on a single day in 1340, the 1st of September, he received two invitations, from the university of Paris and from King Robert of Naples respectively. He chose to accept the latter, journeyed in February 1341 to Naples, was honourably entertained by the king, and, after some formal disputations on matters touching the poet’s art, was sent with magnificent credentials to Rome. There, in the month of April, Petrarch assumed the poet’s crown upon the Capitol from the hand of the Roman senator amid the plaudits of the people and the patricians. The oration which he delivered on this occasion was composed upon these words of Virgil: “Sect me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis

Raptat amor.”

The theme was well chosen; and the ceremony, though we cannot but regard it with a somewhat pitying smile, was symbolical of much. According to mediaeval conceptions, Rome, though abandoned by her emperor and pope, was still the mistress of the world; and the poet, who upon that April day uttered the passion for Parnassus which drew him through steep and desert regions, was destined to revive the arts and sciences in the midst of a barren age. The ancient and the modern eras met together on the Capitol at Petrarch’s coronation, and a new stadium for the human spirit, that which we are wont to style Renaissance, was opened.

With the coronation in Rome a fresh chapter in the biography of Petrarch may be said to have begun. Henceforth he ranked as a rhetorician and a poet of European celebrity, the guest of princes, and the ambassador to royal courts. During the spring months of 1341 his friend Azzo di Correggio had succeeded in freeing Parma from subjugation to the Scaligers, and was laying the foundations of his own tyranny in that city. He invited Petrarch to attend him when he made his triumphal entry at the end of May; and from this time forward for a considerable period Parma and Vaucluse were the two headquarters of the poet. The one he called his transalpine, the other his cisalpine Parnassus. The events of the next six years of his life, from May 1341 to May 1347, may be briefly recapitulated. He lost his old friend the bishop of Lombez by death and his brother Gherardo by the entrance of the latter into a Carthusian monastery. Various small benefices were conferred upon him; and repeated offers of a papal secretaryship, which would have raised him to the highest dignities, were made and rejected. Petrarch remained true to the instinct of his own vocation, and had no intention of sacrificing his studies and his glory to ecclesiastical ambition. In January 1343 his old friend and patron Robert, king of Naples, died, and Petrarch was sent on an embassy from the papal court to his successor Joan. The notices which he has left us of Neapolitan society at this epoch are interesting, and it was now, perhaps, that he met Boccaccio for the first time. The beginning of the year 1345 was marked by an event more interestingin the scholar’s eyes than any change in dynasties. This was no less than a discovery at Verona of Cicero’s Familiar Letters. It is much to be regretted that Petrarch found the precious MS. so late in life, when the style of his own epistles had been already modelled upon that of Seneca and St Augustine. No one, not even Erasmus, would have profited more by the study of those epistolary masterpieces, or would have been better able to imitate their point and ease of diction, had he become acquainted with them at an earlier period.

In the month of May 1347 Cola di Rienzi accomplished that extraordinary revolution which for a short space revived the republic in Rome, and raised this enthusiast to titular equality with kings. Petrarch, who in politics was no less visionary than Rienzi, hailed the advent of a founder and deliverer in the self-styled tribune. Without considering the impossibility of restoring the majesty of ancient Rome, or the absurdity of dignifying the mediaeval Roman rabble by the name of Populus Romanus, he threw himself with passion into the republican movement, and sacrificed his old friends of the Colonna family to what he judged a patriotic duty. To follow the meteoric course of Rienzi through those months of mock supremacy, exile, and imprisonment at Avignon does not concern Petrarch’s biographer. It will be enough to say that the poet contented himself with writing a rhetorical exhortation to the Roman people on the occasion of the tribune’s downfall, giving vent, as usual, through eloquence to emotions which men of more practical character strove to express in act.

Petrarch built himself a house at Parma in the autumn of 1347. Here he hoped to pursue the tranquil avocations of a poet honoured by men of the world and men of letters throughout Europe, and of an idealistic politician, whose effusions on the questions of the day were read with pleasure for their style. But in the course of the next two years this agreeable prospect was overclouded by a series of calamities. Laura died of the plague on the 6th April 1348. Francesco degli Albizzi, Mainardo Accursio, Roberto de’ Bardi, Sennuccio del Bene, Luchino Visconti, the cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and several other friends followed to the grave in rapid succession. All of these had been intimate acquaintances and correspondents of the poet. Friendship with him was a passion; or, what is more true perhaps, he needed friends for the maintenance of his intellectual activity at the highest point of its effectiveness. Therefore he felt the loss of these men acutely. We may say with certainty that Laura’s death, accompanied by that of so many distinguished associates, was the turning-point in Petrarch’s inner life. He began to think of quitting the world, and pondered a plan for establishing a kind of humanistic convent, where he might dedicate himself, in the company of kindred spirits, to still severer studies and a closer communion with God. Though nothing came of this scheme, a marked change was henceforth perceptible in Petrarch’s literary compositions. The poems written In Morte di Madonna Laura are graver and of more religious tone. The prose works touch on retrospective topics or deal with subjects of deep meditation. At the same time his renown, continually spreading, opened to him ever fresh relations with Italian despots. The noble houses of Gonzaga at Mantua, of Carrara at Padua, of Este at Ferrara, of Malatesta at Rimini, of Visconti at Milan, vied with Azzo di Correggio in entertaining the illustrious man of letters. It was in vain that his correspondents pointed out the discrepancy between his professed zeal for Italian liberties, his recent enthusiasm for the Roman republic, and this alliance with tyrants who were destroying the freedom of the Lombard cities. Petrarch remained an incurable rhetorician; and, while he stigmatized the despots in his ode to Italy and in his epistles to the emperor, he accepted their hospitality. They, on their part, seem to have understood his temperament, and to have agreed to recognize his political theories as of no practical importance. The tendency to honour men of letters and to patronize the arts which distinguished Italian princes throughout the Renaissance period first manifested itself in the attitude assumed by Visconti and Carraresi to Petrarch.

When the jubilee of 1350 was proclaimed, Petrarch made a pilgrimage to Rome, passing and returning through Florence, where he established a firm friendship with Boccaccio. It has been well remarked that, while all his other friendships are shadowy and dim, this one alone stands out with clearness. Each of the two friends had a distinguished personality. Each played a foremost part in the revival of learning. Boccaccio carried his admiration for Petrarch to the point of worship. Petrarch repaid him with sympathy, counsel in literary studies, and moral support which helped to elevate and purify the younger poet’s over-sensuous nature. It was Boccaccio who in the spring of 1351 brought to Petrarch, then resident with the Carrara family at Padua, an invitation from the seigniory of Florence to accept the rectorship of their recently-founded university. This was accompanied by a diploma of restoration to his rights as citizen and restitution of his patrimony. But, flattering as was the offer, Petrarch declined it. He preferred his literary leisure at Vaucluse, at Parma, in the courts of princes, to a post which would have brought him into contact with jealous priors and have reduced him to the position of the servant of a commonwealth. Accordingly, we find him journeying again in 1351 to Vaucluse, again refusing the office of papal secretary, again planning visionary reforms for the Roman people, and beginning that curious fragment of an autobiography which is known as the Epistle to Posterity. Early in 1353 he left Avignon for the last time, and entered Lombardy by the pass of Mont Genèvre, making his way immediately to Milan. The archbishop Giovanni Visconti was at this period virtually despot of Milan. He induced Petrarch, who had long been a friend of the Visconti family, to establish himself at his court, where he found employment for him as ambassador and orator. The most memorable of his diplomatic missions was to Venice in the autumn of 1353. Towards the close of the long struggle between Genoa and the republic of St Mark the Genoese entreated Giovanni Visconti to mediate on their behalf with the Venetians. Petrarch was entrusted with the office; and on 8th November he delivered a studied oration before the doge Andrea Dandolo and the great council. His eloquence had no effect; but the orator entered into relations with the Venetian aristocracy which were afterwards extended and confirmed. Meanwhile, Milan continued to be his place of residence. After Giovanni’s death he remained in the court of Bernabò and Galeazzo Visconti, closing his eyes to their cruelties and exactions, serving them as a diplomatist, making speeches for them on ceremonial occasions, and partaking of the splendid hospitality they offered to emperors and princes. It was in this capacity of an independent man of letters, highly placed and favoured at one of the most wealthy courts of Europe, that he addressed epistles to the emperor Charles IV. upon the distracted state of Italy, and entreated him to resume the old Ghibelline policy of imperial interference. Charles IV. passed through Mantua in the autumn of 1354. There Petrarch made his acquaintance, and, finding him a man unfit for any noble enterprise, declined attending him to Rome. When Charles returned to Germany, after assuming the crowns in Rome and Milan, Petrarch addressed a letter of vehement invective and reproach to the emperor who was so negligent of the duties imposed on him by his high office. This did not prevent the Visconti sending him on an embassy to Charles in 1356. Petrarch found him at Prague, and, after pleading the cause of his masters, was despatched with honour and the diploma of count palatine. His student’s life at Milan was again interrupted in 1360 by a mission on which Galeazzo Visconti sent him to King John of France. The tyrants of Milan were aspiring to royal alliances; Gian Galeazzo Visconti had been married to Isabella of France; Violante Visconti, a few years later, was wedded to the English duke of Clarence. Petrarch was now commissioned to congratulate King John upon his liberation from captivity in England. This duty performed, he returned to Milan, where in 1361 he received news...