I wonder what turns of fate have protected it

A story of a remarkable life and the survival of a book across seven centuries. The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript is reviewed by Anna Marie Gillis in her article, Sailor of Fortune in Humanities magazine.

Michael of Rhodes wrote down that he had signed on as an oarsman with a Venetian galley in Manfredonia on the coast of Apulia, in southern Italy, before arriving in his new home city in June 1401. From then until 1443, he served on forty-three voyages and reached the highest ranks attainable to a man not born of Venice's noble families. He fought the Turks and the Genoese, served in a fleet that carried a papal delegation, and navigated the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to Flanders and England. His private life too was eventful: He lost two wives and at least one child while he was away at sea.

Other men who advanced in the Venetian fleet would have also fought, traded goods, and observed the pomp displayed for papal personages; some certainly would have had wives and children to mourn in the age before medical miracles. But the contrast between Michael being a man of war and a scribe has completely hooked me in a way that the imagined stories of his peers cannot. He must have had remarkable patience first to study and then to make a book, draw and paint its illustrations, and write page after page in a tiny, neat hand on unlined paper during 'wet winters.

I'm also captivated by the life of his manuscript. I wonder what turns of fate have protected it and who has touched it. Prior to the Dibner's efforts, the manuscript had never undergone scholarly dissection, although its existence was well known. Federico Patetta, a collector and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin, had held it in the early twentieth century, and the manuscript sold at Sotheby's in 1966 and again in 2000 to private collectors.