Surprised by Time

In the early spring of 1430, in Adrianople, Cyriaco of Ancona purchased Chaeonia who had been taken in an Ottoman raid. Chaeonia may not have been what she thought her name was: it means "woman from Epiros" in a literary sort of way and that is exactly the kind of name Cyriaco was capable of making up. I am sure she was beautiful: he bought beautiful things. He had spent that winter in Adrianople and that is when he had his first lessons in Greek. He wrote that he began Greek with the Iliad, but he may have begun Greek with Chaeonia.

Later he renamed her Clara, but soon after he bought her, he took her to Gallipoli where in March he sent her to his mother in Ancona, along with bundles of skins and carpets, under the care of his cousin, Ciucio. (Cyriaco constantly writes "we" in his letters and diaries: might his cousin have been part of the "we"?) Then he and his black freedman, Niccolino, went down to look at the lovely ruins of Philippi, and then Thessaloniki.

Freeing a slave in the medieval Mediterranean did not necessarily mean what we would like to assume it meant. Often, documents have a condition: "You will nurse my child for three years." "You will stay with my mother until she dies." "You will work for me for two -- or five -- years." "You will stay with my daughter until she marries." One record of a woman's emancipation, at Methoni -- I treasure this one -- was followed on the next day by the record of her marriage to her "owner."

So what was Chaeonia/Clara in Cyriaco's life? It is, I think, impossible to saturate yourself in his writings and then think of him in terms either of love or lust. One biography of Cyriaco fills out this part of his life with several pages of discussion of the functions of slave girls in the medieval household, and calls her Cyriaco's concubine. And it could well have been that way. He was 39 years old when he bought her. He was a person to be kind, and he also -- let us take this a little further -- though not a handsome man, would have had better personal hygiene than most: he dealt in mastic from Chios, valued everywhere as a breath freshener.

But.

Cyriaco, the man who collected epigraphs wrote one for the tomb in which he intended to be buried in Ancona. He was buried instead in a plague grave in Cremona, but when he was able to plan ahead he wrote: