Teucri: Costantinopoli, Troia e il ms. Riccardiano 492

This essay analyses the symbolic and ideological connections between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the memory of Troy, examining the iconographic programme of the Virgilio Riccardiano (ms. Ricc. 492), preserved in Florence. At the time, a paretimology was circulating in the West whereby the Turks were referred to as “Teucrians” by scholars and literati. Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II, categorically rejected this equivalence, arguing that the true Teucrians were the Byzantines, whose Roman descent via his namesake Aeneas he emphasized. In the years that followed, the Troy/Constantinople transfer was employed in poetry, chronicles and visual texts. The Virgilio Riccardiano, illustrated by Apollonio di Giovanni’s workshop between 1464 and 1465, is its ultimate visual expression. Its miniatures depict the fall of Troy with explicit references to Constantinople, superimposing Roman, Byzantine, and Florentine topographies and iconographies. The manuscript appears to be linked to Thomas Palaiologos, the brother of the last Byzantine emperor, welcomed in Rome by Pius II and Bessarion as a potential heir to a restricted form of Byzantine sovereignty that would arise in the West. Like a new Aeneas, Thomas brought a Christian "palladium”: the relic of St Andrew. However, the political project was doomed to failure. The codex’s incompleteness may reflect Thomas’s death and the end of the papacy’s crusading ambitions following Enea Silvio’s passing. Beyond these political circumstances, the manuscript conveys a deeper message: just as Rome was born from the fall of Troy, so humanistic culture was regenerated from the fall of Constantinople, transforming imperial loss into cultural heritage.