Introduction

Giovanni Nanni (1432–1502), a Dominican perhaps better known by the Latinized version of his name, Annius Viterbiensis, produced a collection purporting to be newly recovered ancient Near Eastern texts accompanied by an elaborate commentary. His aim was to celebrate his native Viterbo and its region, Etruria, the land of the pre-Roman Etruscans. For this purpose, he created a collection of Near Eastern sources whose authors were earlier, and hence more venerable, than Greek or Roman ones that they might then reasonably be expected to supersede.Footnote ¹ In the decades following its first appearance in 1498, this collection of spurious chronicles, the Antiquities, took on considerable importance, surprisingly not in the Italy they had been created to glorify, but across the Alps in France, where they soon became an essential and irresistible tool, refining or redefining the glory of France and celebrating its roots in the most distant past. It is that process this article will explore. The Antiquities’s relevance to France was first demonstrated by Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1525) in his Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye (Illustrations of Gaul and singularities of Troy, 1511–13), which at once established and popularized Annius and his collection as a source permitting French roots to be traced back not only to Troy but further, to biblical times, to the survivors of the Flood repopulating the earth. In the last quarter of the century, Annius’s spuria were harnessed to a similar but not identical aim in the Galliade (1578) of Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie (1541–98), where they proved vital to its thesis that all learning, having started in Gaul, would return to the place of its birth. The Antiquities’s strong relevance to France is not immediately obvious. Indeed, Annius, had he lived to see it, would probably have been equally surprised and distressed to find that he had provided the wherewithal for this shift in focus over the Alps from Etruria to France.

The editio princeps of the Antiquities rightly insists on the importance of Annius’s commentary, the opening word of the title: Commentaria Fratris Joannis Annii Viterbiensis super Opera Diversorum Auctorum de Antiquitatibus Loquentium (Commentary of Brother Giovanni Annius of Viterbo on the works of various authors of antiquity, 1498).Footnote ² The many posthumous editions’ titles vary considerably, none ever again according such primacy to the commentary. Indeed, some editions appeared entirely without Annius’s commentary, printing only the spurious chronicles in a much shorter, hence cheaper, volume. Some editions include only some of the spurious texts; the order in which they appear also varies. Annius’s work has been well studied.Footnote ³ Anthony Grafton’s masterful work contextualizes Annius’s work as spurious and examines its reception by contemporary humanists. Walter Stephens’s invaluable work explores the literary and theological reverberations of Annius’s production. My focus in this essay is on the career of Annius’s spuria in France, the claims and connections they made possible, and the nature of their sturdy resistance to learned attacks.

First, some basic facts about this collection of forgeries. The Antiquities included what Annius claimed to be newly recovered ancient chronicles, of which the most important were those putatively by Berosus the Chaldean, librarian of Babylon; the chronicles were then continued by the Egyptian Manethon and Xenophon.Footnote ⁴ These are especially important as they add directly to the spare outline Genesis provides of the repopulation of the world after the Flood, since the emphasis there was naturally on events in biblical lands. Annius’s spuria added a wealth of information concerning European history. In extending the story of the repopulation of the earth from the Near East into Europe, they provided a multitude of details making it possible to anchor the genealogies of various noble families in a past far earlier than anyone dreamed possible. Although some genuine fragments of these authors have been preserved as quotations or paraphrases in surviving ancient authorities like Josephus, all references below to authors in Annius’s collection should be understood as Pseudo-Berosus, Pseudo-Manethon, et al.Footnote ⁵

Annius’s extensive commentary was initially crucial to his project as it brought familiar and real ancient authorities to bear on what these texts had to say—either to corroborate or to dispute their evidence. In either case, as Grafton points out, the commentary cleverly makes the texts (presented as being newly discovered) all the more convincing by connecting them to names and ideas already familiar to learned readers: “The most ambitious forger imaginable, then, the one who seeks to reorient his contemporaries’ mental maps of a whole sector of the past, must apparently depict many familiar landmarks even when he insists that he is not doing so. And most literary forgery, like artistic forgery, is not creation from whole cloth but the production of free imitation, close pastiche, or a rococo frame to set off genuine fragments in a new way. Nothing else would make sense or carry conviction.”Footnote ⁶ When it included Annius’s commentary, the layout of the Antiquities created a volume that resembled a glossed bible of the period, with form echoing sense, as the purportedly newly recovered chronicles continued historical information found in the Bible. Taken as a whole, the Antiquities grounded a seamless narrative from Noah’s postdiluvian repopulation of the Mediterranean and beyond, moving through suppositious Chaldean, Egyptian, and other king lists more complete than any previously known, until it reconnected with cannonical accounts at the time of Desiderius, king of the Lombards, routed by Charlemagne in 774.Footnote ⁷

The appearance in France of several editions of the Antiquities stripped of the commentary suggests that printers judged that much of its potential audience had already been enticed by the reputation of the spurious voices themselves. Overall, its publication history is a measure of the Antiquities’s success; on closer examination, it reveals the forces prompting interest in Annius’s work.Footnote ⁸ By the end of the sixteenth century there had been about two dozen Latin editions.Footnote ⁹ In France, one finds an astonishing flurry of folio and quarto editions of parts or all of the collection (some without the commentary), printed in Paris in 1509, 1510, 1511, 1512, and 1515 and continued around the mid-century with four additional smaller-format editions in 1552, 1554, 1555, and 1560 in Lyon.Footnote ¹⁰ French interest in Annius flourished despite the Florentine humanist Petrus Crinitus (1475–1507) flagging the Antiquities, only five years after their appearance, as spurious in terms that suggest that already then Crinitus was not alone among learned contemporaries who doubted its authenticity.Footnote ¹¹ Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1455–1536) expressed reservations in his 1506 edition of Aristotle’s Politics. In his 1522 commentary on Augustine’s City of God (book 18), Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) also declared the collection to be a forgery.Footnote ¹² These works were widely read. The Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) similarly rejected the authenticity of Annius’s collection in his De Rerum Germanicarum (German matters, 1531),Footnote ¹³ and in the succeeding decades so too did the Spanish Dominican Melchor Cano (1509–60), the Portuguese Franciscan Gasper Barreiros (1515–74), and Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609).Footnote ¹⁴ The list of humanists who denounced Annius can be taken as an outline of the broad and learned readership attracted to the Antiquities only to be disappointed. However well-founded or learned these objections were, they seem to have had a limited effect on the success and afterlife of Annius’s texts. It is worth noting that while many editions of the Antiquities were printed in France, the bulk of the objections came from outside its borders.Footnote ¹⁵

Annius in France

Given the political and historical complexities of examining the distant past, the word (and the idea) France is often doubled by Gaul, an echo of Caesar perhaps, which was appealing despite the fact that it had no contemporary political referent—or, I would argue, for that very reason. It is often used by Lemaire and many others in texts seeking an elastic term extending beyond the political borders of France, generally to include other French-speaking territories. At its greatest extension, Gaul may indicate lands covering most of Western Europe (Spain and Italy south of Lombardy excepted). It was a flexible term redolent of past glory. That is the sense in which its use here should be understood, and the context in which Annius’s spuria were welcomed in early modern Gaul.Footnote ¹⁶ The rapid succession of Parisian editions of the Antiquities suggests they found eager buyers, and that France had become especially fertile ground for Annius’s concoctions. Despite their creator’s original pro-Etruscan intentions, they also contained a treasure trove of information well suited to respond to specific, current Gaulish political needs and to the long-held French desire to anchor its history in the distant past.

The flurry of editions in 1509–15 may have been further stimulated by specific political circumstances: the continued Italian wars in which the French hoped to conquer territories beyond the Alps that they believed to be theirs by inheritance and, during the same period, a clash over papal authority between Louis XII of France and Pope Julius II. The pope, who dreamed of being remembered as Pope Giulio Cesare, coveted worldly conquests.Footnote ¹⁷ The king’s response was support for the position that councils of the church had power superior to the pope’s. The Council of Pisa was convened to depose the pope. In response, the pope promptly moved to excommunicate all those associated with it. This dispute helped focus interest in France on the superiority of native, Gallican traditions. Here, Annius provided an invaluable addition, a narrative displacing Greece and Rome from the traditional translatio studii et imperii, making it possible instead to trace the path of both power and learning after the Flood from the Hebrews through Egypt and the Near East to the Gauls.Footnote ¹⁸ Although the pope soon vanquished the conciliarists, the French inclination to compete with both contemporary Italy and ancient Rome flourished and was made manifest in multiple domains. Spelling reformers sought to free French of the marks of Latin etymology—for example, by replacing scavoir with savoir, nepveu with neveu. Henri Estienne’s (1528–98) Conformité du langage françois avec le grec (Resemblance of the French language to Greek, 1565) denied the Latin roots of French, a position shared by others, including Guillaume Postel.Footnote ¹⁹ French jurists like François Hotman (1524–90) and Charles Du Moulin (1500–66) declared that Roman law had no standing in France, a land that had never been directly ruled by Rome. Others seeking French autochthonous laws in the archives also discovered long-lost French literary antiquities, proving unexpectedly that France had a vernacular literary tradition predating Italy’s. In this vein, Claude Fauchet (1530–1602) published long-forgotten, recovered, and accurately dated extracts in his Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise, ryme et romans; plus Les noms et sommaire des oeuvres de CXXVII. poetes françois, vivans avant l’an M.CCC (Collection of the origin of French language, poetry, rhymes, and romans; plus the names and a summary of the works of 127 French poets living before 1400, 1581). In it he considers texts written in what he calls Gaulois-Romain, Gallois, Wallon, or Gallon, suggesting the usefulness and breadth of Gaulois before finally adding François-Germain to englobe also the Germanic languages of Gaul.

Gaul replaces France as another marker of competition with Italy or Roman antiquity, as the descriptor of an idea encompassing Frenchness that extends beyond political borders.Footnote ²⁰ Hotman’s Franco-Gallia / La Gaule françoise (1574) combs the texts of real Roman authors (Caesar, Strabo, Ammianus Marcellinus, et al.) for evidence of pre-Roman (which in this context means Gaulish) culture, another way of declaring Gaul free of Roman hegemony. Although it is outside the domain of history, the burden of Barthélémy Aneau’s Alector, histoire fabuleuse (Alector, a fabricated story, 1560) continues these themes. A common mind-set links Lemaire, Aneau, and Postel: the author of Alector is obliged to have the same confidence in the Gaulish myths authenticated by pseudo-Berosus and pseudo-Manethon as Lemaire and Postel as his novel in all its complexity depends on this connection.Footnote ²¹

National pride had long fueled interest in a pre-Roman past couched in claims of Trojan origins whose roots extended to the mid-twelfth-century Roman de Brut (Story of Brut) and even earlier, to the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar or the eighth-century Liber historiae Francorum (Book of the history of the Franks). Annius’s claimed discoveries allowed this theme to flourish anew. The Antiquities, originally intended to redound to the glory of Viterbo, was, on examination, easily applicable to France. It was invaluable to Lemaire in constructing his magnum opus, the Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye. Lemaire’s work, in turn, was crucial to the afterlife of the Antiquities: for some it became an intermediary source; its success stimulated others to consult Annius’s collection directly. After mid-century, claims of Trojan origins tended to lose their grip as history. By the 1572 preface to the Franciade, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) was careful to explain his recourse to Trojan origins as a metaphor for French antiquity and glory, making a relatively new distinction between poetry, demanding only verisimilitude, and history, from which direct truth was to be expected.Footnote ²² Etienne Pasquier (1529–1615) in his Recherches de la France (Examinations of France, 1560–1621) denounced Trojan origins as nonsense. But historiography does not proceed in a linear fashion; the prestige of Troy had not yet been laid to rest.Footnote ²³ Thanks in part to Annius, it flourished still in the work of Postel (1510–81) and his disciple Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie in the last quarter of the century.

Faced with what seems to many (now as then) the evident and obvious fictions of Annius’s collection, one is struck by how many intelligent people based their work on these texts despite the fact that they had been greeted almost from the start with learned arguments attacking their veracity. Annius’s commentary’s clever use of genuine authorities may have reassured readers at the brink of doubt. In the last analysis, it would seem that many people, however learned, convinced themselves to trust (or to accept provisionally) what they needed to bolster their own arguments. Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin all turned to Annius for specific points, although without enthusiasm. On more worldly matters Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus, 1515–72) and Barthélémy Aneau (ca. 1510–61), among many others, consulted the Antiquities directly (although neither was fully committed either to Annius or Troy).Footnote ²⁴ That they were unwilling to declare Annius’s collection simply spurious was most likely caused by the realization that to do so would have required relinquishing the tidy connections to the prestige of the past it alone made possible.

Chronology, Etymology, and Genealogy in the Historian’s Toolbox

For many patriotic French writers, the Antiquities offered unique means of dealing with open questions vital to French cultural and political prestige. The information it contained was powerful because it wove together three fundamental notions understood as underlying historical exposition: chronology, etymology, and genealogy. The first and last are already prominent threads in the Genesis account leading up to and immediately following the Flood. Etymology, although obscured by translation, is also present there. It will be useful to consider each of the three in turn.

Chronology remained, as it had been for the ancients, the backbone of historical thought.Footnote ²⁵ Careful linear chronology made it possible to compare cultures and so to move from lists (annals) to causes (history). It was also important for establishing the start of something—the first to do, to find, or to make—which was understood to be endowed with special qualities.Footnote ²⁶ In the Judeo-Christian world, the Bible was a primary, but not always coherent source of chronological data for the early period described in Genesis. In his Chronicon (ca. 325), Eusebius (260–340 CE) added comparative dating across nine ancient kingdoms, supplementing the biblical account. The Chronicon was still without mention of Troy and left other looming gaps that could be filled using the material Annius provided, which finally offered unbroken links between the time of the Flood and the historical present. These included details that were welcome in the Kingdom of France, in Burgundy, and in Hapsburg realms, where royal houses claimed Trojan origins traced back to Hector’s less-well-documented son Francus or to Priam’s cousin Bavo. In France, as the status of Troy moved from history toward myth, early Frankish, Celtic, and Gaulish leaders acquired increasing importance, and here too Annius helped to complete the chronological picture, placing newly discovered/recovered events into a known, familiar timeline of ancient kingdoms.

Etymology was another major item in the historian’s tool kit, giving insight into vis verbi (the power of words); revealing the true nature of great men, cities, and foundations of the past; and constituting an essential attraction of the forged texts’ otherwise incomprehensible staying power and charm. It is actively present in the Bible for those who know Hebrew and are able to receive the messages contained in biblical names: Adam (formed from the earth / mud), Cain (acquisition), Abel (exhalation), Enoch (teacher), to offer a few examples. In translation, the etymological information contained in proper nouns becomes invisible. The central authorities here were Jerome on Hebrew names (Liber de Nominibus Hebraicis) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, of which there were over 100 printed editions between 1472 and 1600.Footnote ²⁷ The Etymologies purports to demonstrate the origins of things, but it is a mistake to assume that this is inherently historical. For Isidore, as for the sixteenth century, much of the strength of the argument from etymology derived from the understanding that it was ahistorical, out of time, and in the realm of the kind of eternal truths that Adam voices when he gives all living things their names (Genesis 2:20). “Isidore’s etymology is not historical. It is neither diachronic nor synchronic, rather it is achronic… . Origo should not automatically be understood in a temporal sense. ‘The matter from which the world was made preceded those things made with it by its origin, but not temporally (origine non tempore)’ (Sententiae I, 8, 6)… . The connection between a word and its ‘origin’ is atemporal.”Footnote ²⁸ This is what Le Fèvre de la Boderie means when he explains that because Noah was able to remember the names Adam gave things after the Flood, he was thereby able to restore to the regions of the earth their true and proper names, names that laid forth the essence of their nature and thereby had the further property of relieving the lands of the sterility caused by the Flood.Footnote ²⁹ Etymology might finally best be understood as a tool for revealing essence.

The functions of genealogy are not unrelated to those of etymology. Here too essence is at stake. Tracing a royal line’s ancestry declared its legitimacy and, just as important, revealed the stuff of which it was made. French kings’ descent from Trojan nobility offered a guarantee that their bloodlines transmitted the right stuff to them, as can be seen in Homeric accounts, in Virgil, and in the many other tales transmitting the Trojans’ heroic deeds. More mundane genealogical connections were important in large part because they too were understood to contain the same guide to the assessment of the essence of a person’s moral character.

Chronology, etymology, and genealogy together form a distinctive feature of Renaissance historiography. As Christopher Ligota remarks, a preoccupation with explaining how things came to be and consequently what they truly are shapes the Antiquities: “though the ancient texts Annius invented have a story to tell, their function, as the commentaries make clear, is as much to show why the story is true as to tell it, that is, to unfold the story as a demonstration of its veracity.”Footnote ³⁰ Annius was joined in this habit of interpretation by his contemporaries, many of whom were happy to apply the method to other texts as well. The truths etymology unveiled were received as serious and important. Postel, redefining what etymology had to offer, coined the related term emitology, based on the Hebrew emet (truth). His cabalistic eye noted that the word emet, אמת, is composed of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, declaring its mystically inclusive nature. History understood in these terms, while apparently recounting the past in an orderly chronological way, has just as much to say about the present and the future: inasmuch as genealogy and etymology instruct us about the essence of the things examined, they reveal what they were, what they are in the authorial audience’s present, and what is to be expected of them going forward.

Les Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye

Chronology, etymology, and genealogy structure Jean Lemaire de Belges’s masterwork, large portions of which rely on the Antiquities, especially on Annius’s commentary and on the spurious Berosus, Manethon, and Xenophon—understood as voices from the distant past making longed-for truths accessible.Footnote ³¹ The Illustrations was much read and frequently reprinted: the Universal Short Title Catalogue lists eighty-one printings of one or more volumes of this three-volume work in the four decades spanning 1511–49. Lemaire assured the success of the Antiquities in French-speaking lands by transmitting a broad outline of what he found there (selected to reflect Gaulish interests) or by drawing Annius’s collection to the attention of readers interested in French roots.Footnote ³²

Lemaire had begun his project well before he had any contact with Annius’s treasure trove of early chronicles. He makes a point of telling readers that he began working on the Illustrations in 1500.Footnote ³³ In the summer of 1508 as also two years earlier, in 1506, he had been sent to Rome on specific diplomatic missions for his patron, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), regent of the Netherlands for her nephew, the Emperor Charles V; it was likely during one of these trips that Lemaire came upon Annius’s collection.Footnote ³⁴ In February 1508—that is, before his second trip to Rome—the working title had become the “Singularitez de Troye et de Turcquie,” strongly suggesting that he had not yet begun incorporating Annius’s chronicles into his own project.Footnote ³⁵ On 20 July 1509 he was granted a privilège protecting his intellectual property for three years—for a work now called the “Singularitez de Troye et Illustrations de Gaule.” Applying for this royal protection suggests that he intended to publish it almost immediately, the better to profit from the period covered by the privilège.Footnote ³⁶ The new title telegraphs that change was underway, yet Troy retains pride of place. By the time the first volume finally appeared nearly two years later, in May 1511, the position of the two title elements, Troye and Gaule, were reversed, definitively giving Gaul pride of place in the Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye. In book 3, first published in 1513, Lemaire returns to his discovery of the Antiquities, telling readers, “I will be so bold as to claim without arrogance that I was the first to discover [Manethon] when I came upon the works of the aforesaid commentator [Annius] in Rome.”Footnote ³⁷ In 1513, Lemaire is still eager to mention Manethon, as elsewhere Berosus or Xenophon, while he now carefully avoids referring to Annius by name as he had done freely two years earlier. The latter is generally, as in the passage just quoted, simply “le commentateur” (“the author of the commentary”).

Despite the silent recognition of growing doubts connected with Annius’s name, coming upon the Antiquities constituted a serendipitous case of just-in-time delivery, vital to the construction of what became the final state of Lemaire’s broadly nationalist-Gaulish Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye in its final form. The information Lemaire found in the Antiquities was what enabled him to put Gaul first in the final title—the place earlier given Troy—and what contributed mightily to the success of the work. Other major changes in Lemaire’s situation were taking place during this time as well. Since about 1504, he had been in the employ of Margaret of Austria who became regent of the Netherlands the year following.Footnote ³⁸ Shortly after dedicating book 1 of the Illustrations to her, he came to work instead for the court of France, dedicating book 2 to Claude de France in 1512, then the presumptive future dauphine, and book 3 the next year to her mother, Anne de Bretagne, queen of France. The term Gaule served as a useful cover, bringing all three of these patrons under a single tent.

The new material the Antiquities provided allowed the Illustrations to be profoundly restructured, turning it from something primarily genealogical and focused on Troy, intended to furnish “all princes ruling today in Western nations” with a common Trojan past, into something with stronger genealogical and chronological foundations and a more pungent political message about Gaulish claims to superiority.Footnote ³⁹ Once he had access to the Antiquities, Lemaire was able to present an unbroken genealogy of rulers from Noah to the fifteenth century, documenting his patrons’ ties to Troy on the way. The better to accomplish this, he made some changes in Annius’s texts, purposefully shifting its center of gravity from Italy to Gaul.Footnote ⁴⁰ References to Gaul, Celts, or Druids are plucked like so many raisins from the Antiquities and put to work in the Illustrations. The case of Comerus Gallus may serve as an example. Throughout the French text elaborating on Annian materials, the syllable gal is a heavily charged marker pointing to Gaul. In his book 5, Berosus reports that Comerus Gallus placed his colonies in the kingdom that afterward was called Italy, and named his region after his own name.Footnote ⁴¹ Surely this cries out to be interpreted in Lemaire’s sense. Indeed, a bit later in book 5, in the section devoted to Jupiter Belus, Berosus himself responds to the etymological hint contained in Comerus Gallus’s name, declaring a connection between Gaul and the descendants of Comerus Gallus, while earlier, in his fourth book, Berosus had localized Comerus Gallus in Italy.Footnote ⁴² Lemaire gathered up such references and built on them to create a coherent account marked by etymology as the naturally ordained passage of Comerus Gallus from Italy to Gaul, his rightful home.

In the same spirit, Berosus mentions the existence of a Galatea with whom Hercules of Libya fathered Galates, whom he then left to be king of the Celts.Footnote ⁴³ The commentary places his royal seat in Annius’s Viterbo. In the Illustrations, while this is loyally reported, Hercules is pointedly married to Galatea, and the main event is the crowning of Hercules’s son, whom Lemaire calls Galateus, king of Gaul, “with a great public show and splendid majesty.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The telling syllable, gal, once again guides the tale: King Galateus, son of the “trespreux” (“most valiant”) Hercules—who is himself the son of Isis and Osiris, grandson of Cam, great-grandson of Noah—is the source of the name Gaul.

Before his discovery of Annius, Lemaire’s book must have begun with the material now in chapter 18, familiarly known as the “Roman de Pâris,” based largely on Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium and Ovid’s Heroides. Using the new information furnished by the Antiquities, Lemaire wrote what became the first eighteen chapters of book 1 and essentially all of book 3. The change of perspective that the new material imposed on Lemaire and on his project is most strongly felt at the point where the Annian-inspired conception abuts the old roman, chapters 17–19 of book 1. Using chronology to tie disparate events together in the chronicle tradition, chapter 17 describes King Paris, eighteenth king of the Gauls, contemporary of Tros, son of Erichthonius in Troy. Tros is the grandfather of Laomedon (father of Priam) and of Anchises (father of Aeneas). Genealogy and chronology are the drivers of this material. Lemaire cites Boccaccio’s Genealogia as the primary authority for the Trojan material and the Antiquities’s Archilochus and Manethon for contemporary events in Gaul. Chapter 18, still in chronicle mode, takes us to the next generation. The syllable gal again recurs regularly, etymology bespeaking meaningful connections: King Namnes in Gaul is the son of Galates the younger, according to Manethon; his conquests extended to Poland (Galicia, as Lemaire reminds his readers), Russia, Prussia, and Turkey (where, again, there were Galatians, as witnessed by the Epistles of Paul). Writing systems also connect the two because it was the Gauls who brought Greek letters to the Phoenicians and thence to the Greeks, as Annius’s Xenophon attests. The text paraphrases or cites various Annian authorities in Latin. Namnes was the contemporary of Laomedon. The latter’s story allows Lemaire to inveigh against “Greek lies and fictions” or “lying Greeks filled with empty words.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Combining genealogy and etymology, he cites Manethon, who reports that Gaulish King Namnes was the founder of Nantes.Footnote ⁴⁶ His son Rhemus would build Rheims “in our Belgian Gaul, at the place where the most Christian Kings of France are consecrated and take their crown.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Turning then from etymology to chronology, Lemaire confirms that Rhemus and Priam were indeed contemporaries.

As chapter 18 brings us to the time of the Trojan War, the focus moves from Gaul to Troy, although Lemaire promises the two threads of narration will be reconnected with the return of the Trojan diaspora to Gaul in book 3. This is the bridge between the new text facilitated by Annius and the older Trojan stratum of Lemaire’s project. Although Bavo, Priam’s cousin and founder of Bavais, is mentioned in passing in chapter 19, what follows is now dependent on another set of authorities: Boccaccio again, but then Servius (indirectly, in fact, since Boccaccio cites him), Diodorus Siculus, Dares, Jacques de Guise (d. 1398), Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505), and Virgil, with a nod to Homer. There is a pause for chronological triangulation: Priam’s reconstruction of Troy occurred 257 years after its foundation by Dardanus, 1,187 years after the Flood, 1,130 years before the birth of Christ, and 2,843 years after the creation of Adam. Chapter 19 ends in a flurry of genealogical details concerning the great families of Troy, concluding with a formulaic promise of continuity familiar to any reader of fifteenth- or sixteenth-century romans: “As we will see in what follows. But we are silent until the tale turns again to them; and will now focus on young Paris.”Footnote ⁴⁸ And so—with a sharp change in style from the reporting of relationships (genealogy), names (etymology), and dates (chronology) to the gorgeous prose poetry that marks the rest of book 1 and continues though most of book 2—begins the “Roman de Pâris.”

Lemaire regularly names the sources of his information throughout the Illustrations. In the first eighteen chapters of book 1, Berosus the Chaldean, Manethon the Egyptian, and Xenophon are cited so frequently they soon feel as familiar to readers as Jerome or Augustine, who are also cited as sources, although they are generally cited secondhand from Annius’s commentary.Footnote ⁴⁹ Annius’s name—Frère Jan de Viterbe—does appear from time to time, as well as oblique references to him as “le commentateur.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The Trojan emphasis of the rest of books 1 and 2 naturally sidelines the contents of the Antiquities. By the publication of book 3 in 1513, when Lemaire was in Paris, he would seem to be reflecting the increasing reservations of humanist circles concerning the Antiquities. In the list of authors cited that appears just before chapter 1 of book 3 of the Illustrations, Annius is now nowhere to be found, although Berosus and Manethon do still have their place.Footnote ⁵¹

Annius’s aim, to present Near Eastern civilizations as more venerable and trustworthy than the Greeks or the Romans, found sympathetic ground in Lemaire’s anti-Roman sentiments, encouraged by the contemporary political climate.Footnote ⁵² Lemaire’s Trojan sympathies further contributed to his negative vision of the Greeks (as destroyers of Troy), again bringing him closer to Annius. Where Annius sought to celebrate Etruscan Viterbo, Lemaire’s parallel intent was to verify and glorify the antiquity of the Gauls. Lemaire’s exposition of the multiple etymologies of Gallus, the word that will lead to Gaule, reproduces information found in the Antiquities. So he explains that in Greek gallus means “milk white”; in Phrygian, the language of Troy, it designates priests of Cybele, mother of the gods; in Babylonian or Hebrew, it means “on a wave,” “surmounting the waves,” which leads to ships called gallères.Footnote ⁵³ Lemaire felt no need to choose among these elements as he perceived them all to be active truths allowing insight into the nature of Gaul. He explains that he learned all this from Xenophon’s Aequivoca, Isidore’s Etymologies, and Jerome on Hebrew names. Since the latter two are quoted in Annius’s commentary and the first is Annius’s own creation, the Antiquities are very likely Lemaire’s single source here. In the same passage we learn that Gallus was another name for Noah, also known as Ogyges, whence we are led quickly to Noah’s grandson, the biblical Gomer, that is Comerus Gallus, for whom the acknowledged source is Berosus.Footnote ⁵⁴ Annius enabled the roots of Gaul to be traced far deeper into the past than was otherwise possible.

Without the Antiquities, the Illustrations would have remained a much more limited work, more closely tied to the prose-romance tradition than to history, based on familiar classical and medieval sources like the list of authors cited given at the start of book 2, largely focused on Troy with much weaker scholarly, humanist, or political pretentions. The authority of the Antiquities allowed Lemaire’s work to transmit a complex message about Gaulish unity and Gaulish superiority: politically, it was designed to help form a united front to the Turkish treat to Christendom, while culturally, it aimed to undermine the prestige of what was inherited from Greece and Rome by replacing it with even older, thereby more prestigeous, Gaulish sources.

The Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye made the Antiquities familiar to many. In all probability, the majority of references to Berosus in France can be traced to Lemaire directly or indirectly.Footnote ⁵⁵ A list of such works would include many learned names: Gilles Corrozet’s Antiques erections des Gaules (Ancient constructions of the Gauls, 1535);Footnote ⁵⁶ Guillaume Du Bellay’s Epitome de l’Antiquité des Gaules et de France (Summary of the antiquity of Gaul and France, written before his death in 1543);Footnote ⁵⁷ Guillaume Le Rouillé’s Recueil de l’antique préexcellence de Gaule et des Gaulois (Collection of the ancient excellence of Gaul and the Gauls, 1546);Footnote ⁵⁸ Jean Picard’s De Prisca Celtopaedia (Study of early Celts, 1556); and Robert Ceneau’s Gallica Historia (1557). All used Annius to prove that the Greeks and the Romans derived their learning from the Gaulish Celts.Footnote ⁵⁹ In addition to the authors named above, many others, including Jean Bouchet, Ramus, and Aneau, while not fully committed either to Annius or to Troy, were unwilling to declare Annius’s collection spurious since that would have meant giving up the whole set of connections to the past it alone made possible. Whether the Illustrations were the immediate source or the stimulus that led authors to consult the Antiquities directly, these works generally shared Lemaire’s political inclination to celebrate the grandeur of Gaul, to convince readers that Gaul had been and therefore potentially still was and would continue to be superior to Rome or to Greece.

There is also the case of Rabelais to be considered. It differs from the others in that the connection is more circumstantial. Walter Stephens examines how the satirical genealogical expositions in Rabelais’s first two books may have been influenced by Annius and by contemporary reactions to him despite the fact that Rabelais makes no direct mentions of the Dominican or of his spurious chroniclers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Lemaire himself appears in Rabelais’s underworld, presented in terms that are difficult to evaluate.Footnote ⁶¹ Stephens suggests that Rabelais may have feared that direct mockery of the Antiquities would have offended those who found them useful, including his much respected patron, Guillaume Du Bellay, and that perhaps the king himself would have been affronted.Footnote ⁶² At the same time, there is evidence scattered throughout his work strongly suggesting that Rabelais was familiar with Lemaire’s Illustrations; to know the Illustrations implied considerable familiarity with the Antiquities even in the absence of direct contact. The Annian creation, Hercules of Libya, is referred to in the “Fanfreluches antidotés” (“Foolish characters and actions”) that constitute chapter 2 of Gargantua. This Hercules is better developed and considerably more important in the Illustrations than in the Antiquities, suggesting that the former may have been Rabelais’s inspiration for this detail.Footnote ⁶³ Despite the many topical political references Rabelais’s work contains, he was free to use Annian tropes indirectly and mockingly because his own commitment to humanist principles prevented him from sharing the political commitments to the glorification of Gaul, much less to its superiority to Greece or Rome, that marks those who found firm guiding threads in the Antiquities or the Illustrations.

Annius in The Circle of Postel: The Galliade of Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie

While Lemaire was a great poet, good courtier, and moved in humanist circles, he lived at a time when access to Greek in France was extremely rare and access to Hebrew and other semitic languages all but impossible. Starting in the 1540s, there was another wave of interest in Annius’s collection that can be traced to the work and the followers of the orientalist and cabalist Guillaume Postel. It is not possible to know if Postel’s attention had been drawn to the Antiquities by the Illustrations or if he had come upon Annius’s work independently—or both.Footnote ⁶⁴ He was in any case an uncannily brilliant linguist who spent the last few decades of his life confined as a madman in the monastery of Saint-Martin des Champs. In religious matters, he was a committed Catholic who also had some startling ideas, which for present purposes can be reduced to the conviction that just as there was one God and one pope, there was also rightly a single secular, universal monarch, the king of France.Footnote ⁶⁵ As they had been for Lemaire, Annius’s spuria, especially Berosus, were essential to Postel’s project, allowing him to trace the Gaulish lineage of the king of France to Comerus Gallus and his grandfather Noah, universal sovereign after the Flood, whose universal sovereignty would become the birthright of the king of France, as revealed in part through Hebrew etymologies. Postel believed that God had created man and language: like Adam, Hebrew was a divine creation. The direct road from Adam to Noah to Gaul could be traced only with the help of the Antiquities.

Like Postel himself, his disciple Guy le Fèvre de la Boderie was an expert in Oriental languages and a student of Christian Kabbalah. Le Fèvre continued Postel’s endeavors, providing a Latin translation of a Syriac New Testament (1571) that included a translation of the Syriac text into Hebrew as well as an accompanying Dictionarium Syro-Chaldaicum (Syrian-Chaldaic dictionary) published in 1572.Footnote ⁶⁶ He was familiar with Annius’s collection and probably also knew Lemaire’s Illustrations.Footnote ⁶⁷ As some of the material in the Antiquities was vital to Postel’s worldview so also was it to the construction of Le Fèvre’s long poem, La Galliade, a celebration of Gaul by way of Hebrew etymology that, as an adept of Kabbalah, he considered to be especially revelatory of the true nature of things. What follows will again be marked by the frequent return to the syllable gal, suggestive of Gaul, just as in the Illustrations. What Lemaire presents as a linear history carrying Gaulish virtue forward, is for Le Fèvre the triumphant recapture of original virtue. The Hebrew word “Galal, meaning bending back and returning”—always already Gaul—suggests that the word itself contains the promise of return.Footnote ⁶⁸ The subtitle reinforces the idea of circular motion: “la Revolution des Arts et Sciences” (re-volution to be understood etymologically, i.e., as revolving, returning).Footnote ⁶⁹ Throughout the poem the author placed marginalia to explain the Hebrew etymology of names, often citing Berosus when he might have depended on his own linguistic skills (e.g., “For Gallim means waves of water, and thence, as Berosus bears witness, the Gauls got their name”) or to explain Galliade 1:100 (“The name of the Gauls taken from the Hebrews”).Footnote ⁷⁰ The willful evocation of Berosus in the last quarter of the century suggests the degree to which this spurious chronicle retained its charm even in the face of years of condemnation.

The Galliade, written when there was still no single, set French word like epic to describe long poems, might best be thought of under the rubric Sebillet proposes: it is a grand oeuvre.Footnote ⁷¹ Progress, being cyclical, has the capacity to restore or revivify the partially effaced powers of the past, or in Postel’s terms, its power is restitutio omnium, closing the circle.Footnote ⁷² Therefore, the poem is divided into five “Cercles” (“Circles”), stressing the circularity of Gaul’s history, starting with the growth of culture and learning after the Flood, now returning to its original glory, and also insisting that, unlike the Homeric epics, the Galliade reports historical truth. Its circular construction means that each of its five “Cercles” documents a different aspect of history from Noah to Le Fèvre’s present, detailing the recovery of Gaulish glories. Le Fèvre’s “Avertissement aux lecteurs” (Foreword) explains this structure, perhaps most clearly felt in the fifth and final circle: “[Poetry] which I have tried to bring by the turning of the ages, tracing (it) among the Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Italians to the land of our Gauls, where first the ancient Bards … furnished it with agreeable and pleasant dwellings, as they did for Music, twin-sister of Poetry. With the aim of showing that Poetry, like the other disciplines, returned, after the course of many centuries, to our Gaul, to their total and complete realization in the very place of their birth.”Footnote ⁷³ Berosus alone provides the starting point of this virtuous circle and the circular motion is seen as essential: “returned … to our Gaul,” for their final “realization in their very place of birth.”

Galal is followed by Gallim, which Le Fèvre (like Annius and Lemaire) translates as “saved from the waters and waves of the Flood whence comes the name of Gaul and the Gaulois.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Le Fèvre calls forth a barrage of authorities: “Berose Chaldé, Josephe Hebrieu, Manethon Egyptien, Metasthene ou Megasthene, Bocchus Maure, Timagene, Xenofone aux Equivoques, Mysilius Lesbien, Cato, Solin, Amian Marcellin.” This list puts real ancient authors shoulder to shoulder with six of the Antiquities’s spuria.Footnote ⁷⁵ It prepares Le Fèvre’s contention a few lines later that there were many irreproachable foreign (by which he presumably means ancient but outside the Gaulish tradition) sources available seconding the Antiquities, which he admits are considered suspect by some: “If fragments of Berosus and other authors collected and published by Annius of Viterbo are not enough evidence for what I set forth as they are neither recognized nor approved by some of the learned men of our time as legitimate offspring of the fathers whose name and family resemblance they bear, still, there will be other most convincing and irreproachable foreign witnesses for our cause; so that it should not seem that, writing verse, I wished to tell folk-tales and jokes, as if I sought to create a dance [galliarde] to pass the time pleasantly rather than writing a Galliade to shed light and glory on our shared fatherland.”Footnote ⁷⁶

For Le Fèvre in 1578, when the Galliade first appeared, Annius’s spuria remained indispensable. Sufficiently so that he, unlike what can be seen in the last book of the Illustrations, does not hesitate to name Annius himself. The second edition, published in 1582, shows no signs of change in this stance. The questionable source was counterbalanced by Le Fèvre’s own unquestionable learning and the high stakes. His project simply cannot do without the Antiquities; no other source fills the gap between the information provided by Genesis and the earliest accounts of Gaul to be gleaned from the sparse references to Druids, bards, and Celts in Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Caesar, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, and a few others.Footnote ⁷⁷ Threads of continuity are found in ancient authors like Josephus where much of what survives of the real Berosus and some of Manethon is preserved, but these all pale in comparison to the riches Annius provided.

Le Fèvre’s defense of Berosus continues the tradition of Postel, who “saw classical Greek and Roman culture as a perversion of an earlier Near Eastern revelation, best entrusted in his own day to the virtuous Gauls; he condemned Romulus as a descendant of Ham who had tried to extirpate the virtuous laws and customs established in Italy by Noah, also known as Janus.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Postel’s position is extensively set forth in his work tracing the passage of knowledge from West to East, from Gaul to Asia: Histoire memorable des expéditions depuys le Deluge faictes par les Gauloys ou Françoys depuis la France jusque en Asie (Memorable history of explorations from France as far as Asia conducted by the Gauls or French since the Flood, Reference Postel1552). In his Tresor des propheties de ce monde (Thesaurus of prophesies of this world, 1556), Postel offers the strongest possible condemnation of his critics, i.e., those who reject Berosus are atheists: “Although the text of Berosus the Chaldean is incomplete and little esteemed by atheists and enemies of Moses, nonetheless, as it has already been approved by innumerable men and authors very learned in all sorts of disciplines and languages, I grant him the credit that any faithful author ought to be given.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The Galliade is most dependent on the Antiquities in the “Premier Cercle.” Focused on astronomy and history, it surveys Gaulish culture starting with Noah, his son Japhet, and his grandson Comerus Gallus, now rendered in French simply as “Gomer le Gaulois.”Footnote ⁸⁰ These divinely appointed survivors of the Flood restored humanity and human learning to the empty earth. Le Fèvre associates the Renaissance with “le grand ROY FRANÇOIS [King François I]” closing the circle as “notable men … began to restore learning in Gaul” leading to those who revived learning in contemporary Gaul.Footnote ⁸¹

Writing six decades or more after Lemaire, Le Fèvre had easier access to printed books and was less likely to rely directly on Annius’s commentary and the authorities reproduced there.Footnote ⁸² His relative independence does very little to change the importance of the spuria themselves, especially Annius’s Berosus, as Roudaut’s invaluable notes certify. It alone allows him to show, for example, that Noah established learning on the Janiculum in Rome, named after Noah who was also known as Janus, derived from the Hebrew word for wine, of which Noah was the inventor. Annius’s commentary is peppered with Hebrew references, attributed to talmudists; he is assumed to have had local Jewish informants, although it seems clear his own command of Hebrew was minimal. In the hands of a competent Hebraicist and cabalist, these nuggets of Hebrew take on new importance. Le Fèvre, convinced that Hebrew was God’s language, was inclined to interpret Hebrew etymologies cabalistically, as revelatory of divine truths.Footnote ⁸³ Noah explained the secrets of astronomy and taught his progeny:

Le Fèvre adds a marginal note starting with the Hebrew transcription קבלה (Kabbalah), before explaining: “Kabbalah means Tradition and Reception: it is the Acroamatic science of hearing.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Annius’s commentary speaks in passing of Kabbalah, associating it with Etruscan wisdom. In Le Fèvre’s rendition, this becomes Gaulish wisdom. And in the same sense, Berosus’s declaration that “Italiam tenuit Gomerus Gallus” (“Gomerus Gallus ruled Italy”) now marks an early stage of Gaulish hegemony totally unintended by its Viterban creator.Footnote ⁸⁶ To all this, Le Fèvre adds in the margin the notion of acroamatic learning. The term usually refers to esoteric knowledge transmitted orally, as Aristotle is said to have reserved special learning intended only for his disciples, distinct from the exoteric doctrines he declaimed in public. Students of Christian Kabbalah applied this idea in a sense especially suited to Hebrew where words are normally written without vowels. Only by what Le Fèvre terms an obscure science—that is, knowledge of the sacred tongue—can the initiated “extraire en tout silence” (“silently extract”) the real meaning of a written word, which can be spoken only by those who already know it, those who are able to supply the missing sounds of the unwritten vowels.Footnote ⁸⁷ Cabalistic secrets, that is, arcane learning, are important both in the text, where the words secret and mystère appear with some frequency, and in the marginalia underscoring cabalistic etymologies by reproducing Hebrew words in Hebrew font without indication of vowels, then explaining their meaning. Earlier, in addition to having two faces, Janus is also “the father with two voices, or rather two manners”: one to write and one to speak, or, alternately, a sacred writing system (Hebrew) and a worldly one (Greek).Footnote ⁸⁸ Le Fèvre repeats what Annius claims to have taken from Jewish contacts, expanding it and turning it to his own ends.

All learning, having been saved from the Flood, is shown to have had Gaulish origins: “Therefore our ancient Gauls, not the Egyptiens / Of Mathematics, and ancient arts / Are the first inventors.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The Greeks in turn learned from the Gaulish Druids (based on Annius’s commentary on Berosus), a translatio studii traceable only using the Antiquities. Footnote ⁹⁰ Mathematics has a special place in Le Fèvre’s estimation, associated with astronomy/astrology, suspended between science and theology. It was Samothes Dis, the first king of Gaul, who transmitted knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, antediluvian knowledge coming from Noah himself:

From Samothes, this learning passed to Pythagoras, later to Plato’s Timaeus, pure knowledge again moving from Gaul to Greece.Footnote ⁹² Le Fèvre concludes,

And so, learning is once again flourishing in Gaul where it began, closing the first “Cercle.”

Conclusion

What Annius had concocted for the greater glory of Etruria and Viterbo was deliberately repurposed in France. It does not seem possible to ascertain whether Le Fèvre knew Lemaire’s Illustrations directly; if so, it might have been at most a secondary source or an additional encouragement. What is certain is that both Lemaire and Le Fèvre depended on the Antiquities without which neither the Illustrations nor the Galliade in its final state would have been possible. Their common goal in using Berosus, Manethon, Xenophon, and the accompanying commentaries was above all to glorify Gaul. Lemaire’s project aims rather straightforwardly to promote the greatness of his modern Gaul, a concept extending beyond the political divide separating the Kingdom of France and the empire just as his own career did. Only the Antiquities allowed him to trace Gaulish ruling families all the way back to Noah, including their requisite passage through Troy, which in the early decades of the sixteenth century was still at the zenith of its charm. Le Fèvre’s project, supported by much deeper learning, adds mystical underpinnings composed above all of cabalistic learning. It intends to prove that Gaul was great because it was situated at the end of a chain built of the purest of early learning, transmitted from God to Adam, from Adam to Noah, and thence, after the Flood, most particularly via Japheth, to Noah’s grandson Gomerus Gallus / Gomer le Gaulois, whose name is significantly marked by Gaul, the land where learning began and to which it returned once again in sixteenth-century France. In the later years of the sixteenth century, when Troy had largely lapsed from historical event into myth, cyclical history, or more exactly in this case circular history, the mission of the Galliade still depended as profoundly as had Lemaire on the spurious information provided by Annius of Viterbo. It was too powerful to resist, as if the glow of perceived truth outshone all doubts. Even Le Fèvre’s real erudition offered no protection from its siren call, packaging, as it could be seen to do, etymology and genealogy in terms reformulated for the greater glory of Gaul.