Biondo, Flavio

Biondo, Flavio 

Born 1392 in Forlì; died June 4, 1463, in Rome. Italian humanist and historian.

Biondo was the first to distinguish the Middle Ages as a particular period of history. In his main work, Three Decades of History After the Fall of the Roman Empire, Biondo begins with Alaric’s conquest of Rome and ends with the year 1440, characterizing this period as a special epoch, different from antiquity and from the Renaissance. In Three Decades …, Biondo presents the history of medieval Europe in chronological order. He was one of the first who sought to establish criteria for the credibility of historical sources, and he criticized earlier medieval historiography from the standpoint of humanism. He is the author of the first work on the historical geography of Italy, Italy Illustrated.

WORKS

Roma instaurata et Italia illustrata. Venice, 1542.
Le decadi (Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum decades). Forlì, 1964.

REFERENCE

Vainshtein, O. L. Zapadno-evropeiskaia srednevekovaia istoriografiia. Moscow-Leningrad, 1964. Pages 261-64.