The Historia Pistoriensis by Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was printed for the first and only time in 1731, thanks to Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who included the work under the title Chronicon Pistoriense in volume 19 of his monumental collection of narrative sources for Italian history, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. After nearly 300 years the Edizione nazionale dei testi della storiografia italiana, as part of a larger publishing project entitled Il ritorno dei classici dell’Umanesimo, will be issuing the first critical edition of this long-neglected work, one that has been completely forgotten and whose reappearance is expected to be warmly welcomed by scholars.

Almost exclusively known for being one of the first writers to deal with the typically humanist theme of the dignity of man (De dignitate et excellentia hominis, 1452), Manetti did not hesitate to venture into the most widely varied literary genres: treatises, funeral and diplomatic orations, translations from Greek and Hebrew, letters, biographies, and historical works. Coming at a time of renewed interest in the Florentine humanist and politician, this edition is the product of a team effort and will be followed by a critical edition of another historical work of Manetti’s entitled De terraemotu. In fact, over the last twenty years Manetti has been the subject of various studies that have shed light on the events of his life and his vast literary output. The editors of the present edition of the Historia Pistoriensis, in particular Baldassari and Connell, are among the most tireless and prolific contributors to scholarship about Manetti, and in 2010 they produced an Italian translation of this work with a historical commentary but without the Latin original on the facing page.

Son of a wealthy merchant who kept him in the shop from an early age, Manetti only began to devote himself to learning as an adult and, according to a biographical note written by his friend Vespasiano da Bisticci, never ceased to pursue his studies throughout the course of his life. Cosimo de’ Medici’s return to Florence in 1434 marked the beginning of a period of intense political and diplomatic activity for Manetti in the service of his city, which ultimately led him in 1453, after some twenty years, to move to Rome as secretary of Pope Niccolò V, and two years later to the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous, where he ended his days. Manetti’s life was characterized by a constant dual vocation as a cultivator of the humanae litterae and also as a politician, and in this he was a typical exponent of so-called Florentine civil humanism.

It was while on a mission for the Republic of Florence that Manetti produced the draft of his first work of history which came to be preserved in the seven manuscripts that have come down to us: a historia of Pistoia and not a chronicle as Muratori entitled it. The work is divided into three books beginning with Pistoia’s ancient Etruscan origins until the autumn of 1446 when the author took up the post of captain in charge of the city.

Besides offering scholars a critical edition of the text accompanied by historical commentary, there is also an accurate reconstruction of the manuscript and print traditions; an appendix containing fourteen documents (one of which is unpublished) that help shed light on several phases of the composition of the work and its subsequent fortunes; an introduction explaining the origins, structure, method, sources, and reception of the text; and, finally, six indices, including one listing archival manuscripts and documents and one of classical and medieval authors.

The work was composed over a period of a few months and was undertaken on the author’s own initiative. Manetti, who also needed to defend his reputation, made the unusual choice for the time of retracing the history of a Florentine territorial dominion from the period of Pistoia’s foundation, which he dates back to the initiative of the followers of Cataline in 62 BCE (“communis et pevulgata non solum vulgi et imperitorum hominum sed et doctiorum omnium opinion est,” 111); he then weaves through the tumultuous events that began in the early Middle Ages and gradually led Pistoia, after bitter factional strife, to lose its freedom and submit to Florence in 1401. The introduction in a number of places dwells on the old question of Pistoia’s foundation at the time of the Roman Republic. This is certainly an important point, full of consequences not only for the fate of the work, but above all for its relationship with the history of Florence and especially with the illustrious tradition of Florentine historiography that Manetti was in constant dialogue with, particularly the work of Leonardo Bruni. Indeed, it is because of the intensity of this dialogue that a reedition of the Historia Pistoriensis will help us understand the reasons for the ideological and historiographical distance that separated such an important figure in Florentine culture and politics as Giannozzo Manetti from Leonardo Bruni, one of the founders of modern European historiography.