Anna Palaeologina Notará: the first female publisher
This text is a faithful translation of an original article from protagon.gr. The image is from the creative team of protagon.gr.
Representation of Anna Notara with the church of San Giorgio dei Greci in the background, 1824, in watercolor | CreativeProtagon
"The first female publisher in history was called Anna," writes Silvia Ronchey in La Repubblica. However, the distinguished Italian writer and Byzantinologist (professor at the Università Roma Tre) is not referring to Anna Rügerin of Augsburg (who is considered the first female printer to print her name on the colophon of a book in 1484) nor to Anna Fabri, her colleague in Stockholm, but to Anna Palaeologina Notará.
"Few know her story, but this was her own choice: the conscious decision to conceal her identity was the noblesse oblige of a Byzantine woman on the run, who in this very identity embodied the ultimate summary of the highest aristocracy of an empire that had collapsed behind her," writes the Italian expert.
As she summarizes in her article, the Notarádes were the most aristocratic and powerful family of the Palaeologos dynasty. Her father Loukás Notarás was the last Grand Duke of the Byzantine Empire, practically the prime minister of the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos, whom Anna was allegedly destined to marry, so that she could become empress, if he survived the siege of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453. This, however, did not happen, while in the context of the Fall of Constantinople, Anna also lost her father, who was martyred a few days later, after refusing (according to the prevailing version) to consent to the inclusion of his youngest minor son to the harem of Mehmed II the Conqueror.
However, before all this happened, before the City fell and Byzantium ended, "Mr. Loukás", as the Italian Byzantium scholar characteristically writes, had taken care to whisk off to the West the most intelligent of his daughters. In addition to a part of the treasures of his palaces, he also entrusted her with the family capital: assets abroad, mainly Genoese and Venetian bonds based on investments in Italian commercial enterprises, in which her grandfather, Nikólaos, had already bought shares and given loans. Loukás Notarás' influence in Genoa and Venice was so great that he had been declared an honorary citizen in both.
Through these "offshore" assets, the young Byzantine aristocrat managed – initially with the help of Bessaríon(*note: Vissaríon in the pronunciation of the time and the present), one of the most important Byzantine scholars of the 15th century, and then with complete autonomy – to finance a series of cultural and religious projects that would make Venice the privileged refuge of Greek refugees and fugitives from the East, the so-called ¨graeculi¨.
Anna Notará settled permanently there, after a wander in Italy and some initial difficulties, where she channeled her energy, utilizing not only the financial resources she had at her disposal but also the political acumen she inherited from her father, in order to consolidate the Greek community.
In 1479, the permanent Greek residents in the Republic of Venice numbered between four and five thousand. Many of them were soldiers, called in Venetian "stradioti" (from the Greek word στρατιώτες - stratiótes) who had been placed in the service of the Most Serene Republic, seeking to continue fighting, in the name of their lost homeland, the Turkish enemies. Several would later occupy important positions, offering their services to Venice, even though it bore a significant share of responsibility for the fall of Constantinople and the fall of the Byzantine Empire, as the Italian expert recalls, referring to the systematic (for centuries) economic undermining of Byzantium by the Venetians and the Genoese.
“This political trauma and a kind of collective guilt fueled, at least among the cultural elite of Venice, the desire to keep alive (…) the memory of Byzantine culture and Byzantine wisdom that were in danger of being erased from History”, writes Silvia Ronchey. Hence the characterization of the Serenity, just 15 years after the Fall, as “quasi alterum Byzantium,” meaning “almost another Byzantium,” by Bessarion.
In this context, Anna Notará developed her rich communal and cultural activity, first assisting in the establishment of the Greek brotherhood of Venice, at the end of the 15th century, for whose religious needs, the church of Saint George of the Greeks (San Giorgio dei Greci) would later be erected, with her own bequests, among whose treasures, three precious icons that the Byzantine noblewoman had brought from Constantinople are included.
The Italian academic notes that even today, the complex of Saint George, consisting of the cathedral, the adjacent museum and the Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies, in addition to being the seat of the Orthodox Archdiocese of Italy, also remains the global reference point for philhellenism.
Returning to the topic of Anna Notará, she writes that she fought for the freedom of Orthodox worship, but above all, she fought for the salvation of Byzantine culture through books, inheriting this difficult mission from Bessarion, who throughout his life, in addition to being a servant of God and a man of letters and spirituality, was also a copyist and collector of valuable Greek manuscripts.
Anna Notará contributed not only to the rescue but also to the revival and further dissemination of the Byzantine spirit, taking advantage of the enormous potential (which Bessarion had already realized) of typography. “Not only did she preserve and enrich a large library in her residence, but she also became a publisher, earlier and better than the Annas of the West, who are still considered the first female publishers, although they were simply printers, like the various widows of printers who simply continued the work of their deceased husbands,” notes Silvia Ronchey.
Anna Notará financed and practically directed the pioneering printing house of Zacharias Kalliergis, a Cretan Greek scholar who had set up a printing house/publishing house in Venice dedicated exclusively to the publication of Greek works. However, unlike Anna Rügerin, the printer of Augsburg, and Anna Fabri of Stockholm, the Byzantine Anna did not want her name to appear on the colophon of the books whose publication she decided on and controlled: there was only the name of Kalliergis and of Nikólaos Vlastós, the administrator of Anna Notará's estate. Only in the famous Etymologicum Magnum (Great Etymological Dictionary) published by Kalliergis in 1499, was there a reference to the "most brilliant and prudent lady Anna, daughter of the most venerable and most honest lord Loukás Notarás, once Grand Duke of Constantinople."
Happy February 9th, the World Greek Language Day!
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