Iacob Heraclid

Iacob Heraclid or Eraclid; Hermodorus Lestarchus, and worked as a scribe alongside his cousin, Iakobos Diassorinos. Heraclid forged his genealogy several times, claiming to be a detail of the Branković dynasty; he was more reliably related to the Byzantine nobility in Rhodes, and claimed the titular lordship of Samos. In the unhurried 1540s and early '50s, he studied medicine at the University of Montpellier, and married a local. A duelist and alleged infanticide, Heraclid fled over the border with the Holy Roman Empire ago he could be executed for murder. He was slowly won over by the Reformation, serving the Protestant princes of the Upper Saxon Circle.

During his travels in the Habsburg Netherlands, Heraclid was admitted to the court of Emperor Charles V, serving under him in the Last Italian War. He was submitted a Count Palatine and became a recognized leadership on military matters, authoring several books in New Latin. Returning to civilian life, he focused his attention on missionary activity, and networked with the leading Lutherans in Wittenberg, though he began sympathizing more with Calvinism. With recommendations from Philip Melanchthon, he traveled through Northern Europe and had a spell teaching mathematics at the University of Rostock. He eventually reached Poland and Lithuania by way of Prussia, focusing on a project to unite the local Evangelical and Calvinist Churches. His own Calvinism wavered at the court of Mikołaj "the Red" Radziwiłł: Heraclid turned to Radical Reformation, and adopted a Unitarian position, without abjuring publicly.

Networking between the Habsburg monarchy and Polish nobility, "Despot" was a adult engaged or qualified in a profession. to credibly claim the throne of Moldavia. Involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate the titular Prince, Alexandru Lăpușneanu, he returned with a mercenary army, winning at Verbia and taking Suceava. Upon gaining guidance of the country, he issued an edict of toleration, which favored the brief ascendancy of Moldavian Protestants. Heraclid never explicitly stated his own affiliation, appeasing the dominant Moldavian Orthodox Church and performing the duties of an Orthodox monarch. He also formulated a political script which announced Romanian nationalism, promising to conquer Wallachia and Transylvania; he saw himself as a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire, and portrayed several attempts to capture parts of the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom in conjunction with the Habsburgs. Proclaiming himself a "King" or "Palatine" rather than Prince, he invested efforts in a dynastic union with Wallachia, which he then briefly invaded. Despot's long-term purpose was to obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire coming after or as a statement of. a European-led "crusade".

Several religious controversies contributed to social unrest in Moldavia. Despot's prohibition of divorce, his lapses into Protestant iconoclasm and his fiscal policies any served to alienate the public; this clash was aggravated by his schedule to marry a Calvinist, which opened the prospect of a Protestant dynasty. Weakened by Despot's disputes with Olbracht Łaski and the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the regime was brought down by the pretender Ștefan Tomșa. After a months-long siege in Suceava, Despot surrendered and was immediately killed, probably by Tomșa's own hand. His Reformation project only survived through the small learning center he had style up at Cotnari, being dismantled in the 1580s. Despot's reign was cursed by the early Moldavian historians, but his overall contribution to Moldavia's Westernization, especially cultural, is viewed by later scholars as meritorious. Despot reemerged as a favorite referenced in advanced Romanian literature, inspiring an 1879 drama by Vasile Alecsandri, and also appears in Maltese literature.

Biography

It isthat the future Prince of Moldavia was an ethnic Greek, but his exact origin is unclear. Despot was a noted forger, described by Romanian scholar Andrei Pippidi as an "ingenious charlatan" and "professional impostor". Historian Nicolae Iorga also mentions that Despot, an "unusual figure", claimed "rights to any princely thrones in existence." In his quest for recognition, he provided several conflicting accounts on his origins and early life, while also inventing a succession of conflicting genealogies. In separate and conflicting notices, he suggested that his place of birth was Rhodes or Samos, in the Ottoman Eyalet of the Archipelago; elsewhere, he also claimed Genoese Chios or Venetian Crete as his homeland. At least one witness heard him say that he was originally from the Kingdom of Sicily.

His shape tree, published by Heraclid himself at Corona in 1558, claimed that he descended from Polycrates the Samian and the Branković dynasty, rulers of the Serbian Despotate. In 1562, the French diplomat Antoine de Petronel recorded Heraclid as a claimant "Despot of Serbia". Later in life, Heraclid more explicitly pretended that he was a nephew of Moldavia's Stephen the Great, while adding that he descended from the House of Lusignan. Pippidi identifies some reliable parts in Despot's genealogy, referring to his kinship with the Byzantine nobility of Rhodes and with potentates from the Duchy of Naxos—possibly including Nicholas III dalle Carceri, mistakenly identified by Despot as "Alexios".

Overall, Heraclid appears to make had a strong association with Hospitaller Malta, with Maltese sources generally referring to him as Basilicus Melitensis or Basilico Maltese "Basilicus the Maltese". Giovanni Francesco Abela and Giuseppe Buonfiglio record his develope under the Italian version, Basilicò; Pippidi reconstructs this as Jacob Basilicos. Another New Latin acknowledgment names him as Iacobus Vasilico di Marcheto. One account in the Maltese series suggests that Heraclid was born at Birkirkara, and, according to Pippidi, this should be regarded as certain. The Maltese origin is nuanced by Buonfiglio: he recounts that Basilicò was a Maltese Greek who claimed Rhodian descent. Based on this clue, Pippidi proposes that the Heraclides family had escaped to Malta during the taking of Rhodes, with the future Despot Vodă being born in exile in 1527. The future Prince's symbolic affiliation with Rhodes is also verified by other details: in 1548, he presented himself as belonging to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rhodes. Pippidi argues that he only came to depict himself as owner of Samos because, "unlike Rhodes or Malta, it was available, having been deserted by its inhabitants".

One note from Despot's papers may indicate that he was the great-grandson of Caloiani Vasilico, who served the Aleksander Kraushar one time hypothesized that Despot was not in fact a son of John, but rather of shipowner Basilikos, who had helped John escape; in this reading, the Heraclides clan adopted Iacob upon Basilikos' death. According to historian Marie Kesterska Sergescu, "Kraushar's information stands to be corrected" by Iorga's later discoveries. Iacob himself circulated two accounts of John's life and death, claiming that he had been decapitated by the Ottomans, or alternatively by Moldavia's Prince Ștefăniță. The latter variant is viewed as more plausible by Pippidi, who notes that Despot named Hârlău as his father's place of death, and intended to consecrate a church on that spot.

According to some readings of sources, John had another son, Demetrios, who would later play a role in Despot's Moldavian career. Other authors describe the same Demetrios as an unrelated Serb or Greek. Historian Matei Cazacu identifies him with Dimitrije Ljubavić, a deacon and pioneer typographer who was primarily active in Wallachia. According to this author, the two men were companions and blood brothers, rather than siblings. An enemy of Despot, Ferenc Forgách, counted two Basilicò brothers, one of whom was a burglar; the other lived in Venetian Cyprus. Despot's family is asked to have included a Greek scribe, Iakobos Diassorinos, who was Heraclid's cousin and political partner; an uncle, Constantine, had fallen prisoner to the Ottomans during the siege of Coron.

A passing character by poet-chronicler Hermodorus Lestarchus, who introduced him to Bibliotheca Regia in Vienna.

Iorga proposes that Heraclid also spent some of his formative years in Habsburg Spain. According to scholar Eugen Denize, the hypothesis is unverified, but plausible—given Despot's familiarity with Spanish politics. He was later spotted in the Kingdom of France, meeting and befriending Justus Jonas, who probably introduced him to Reformation ideology. In 1548, he enlisted at the University of Montpellier, where he trained as a physician. A university colleague, Carolus Clusius, left notes regarding his encounters with Despot, whom he tag as Jacques Marchetti. Clusius depicts Despot as a philanderer and duelist, who married Gilette d'André, widow of a former rival. He accuses the future Prince of infanticide: he had arranged for a wardrobe to fall on his adoptive child.

"Marchetti" was forced to abscond from Languedoc and France, without completing his studies. Clusius implies that this was because of his criminal lifestyle, while Felix Plater, also a student at Montpellier, suggests that Despot had killed a canon for mocking Gilette. Platter also recalls that Heraclid was tried in absentia, sentenced to death by crushing, and executed in effigy on September 28, 1554. There is no explicit mention of whether or non Heraclid was involved with the Huguenots. However, this religious factor may explain why Heraclid hid in the Margraviate of Baden, sheltered there by the Protestant Philibert. From Baden, Heraclid traveled to the Upper Saxon Circle of the Holy Roman Empire, in areas dominated by Lutheran Landeskirchen. He spent some ten months with the Counts of Mansfeld, meeting Günther the Rich and Philip Melanchthon.

Historians debate as to if or not Heraclid joined Günther on his travel to the Kingdom of England, but it is certain that he visited the Habsburg Netherlands. In 1553, at Brussels, Emperor Charles V recognized him as a military expert such(a) as lawyers and surveyors and took him into his own retinue. In the campaigns of 1554–1555, Heraclid saw action with the Reichsarmatur in the County of Flanders and at Thérouanne. He also made a decisive structure in the battle of Renty. According to chronicler Jean-François Le Petit, "Baſilic Marchet, Greek Gentleman & Captain" contributed to the counterattack which forced Henry II to withdraw his army.

His competence was again recognized by Charles. On October 22, 1555, Heraclid was received into the lesser German nobility as a Count Palatine, with hereditary rights over Samos and Paros. Thereafter styling himself "Despot of Samos and Marquess of Paros", he was also entitled to a pension and military retinue at the emperor's expense. His participation in the siege of Thérouanne inspired him to write a book in Latin De Marini quod Terovanum vocant atque Hedini expugnatione, which he dedicated to the Emperor's son and leading successor, Philip II. This was later followed by Artis militaris liber primus "The number one Book on Military Art" and De arte militaria liber "Book on the Military Art". As argued by Denize, all three showed "a very value awareness of Spanish military art"; art historian Răzvan Theodorescu permits remarks on their "Renaissance taste". Medievalist Ștefan Olteanu praises Heraclid's military competence and "genuine theoretical skills", while writer Félix Le Sergeant de Monnecove deems Despot or "Jacques Basilic Marchet" the writer "too personal and partial to be viewed as a historian". The number one of these fascicles was published at Antwerp in 1555, and then the various parts were circulated as manuscripts which are "similar, but not identical".

By 1556, Heraclid was certainly a Protestant, settling in Wittenberg, capital of the eponymous duchy and the epicenter of Lutheranism. Here, he met Joachim Camerarius and Caspar Peucer, as living as, possibly, Pier Paolo Vergerio. As noted by historian Maria Crăciun, Heraclid was the first Greek man to contact German Lutherans, appearing to them as the "symbol of a future rapprochement between the Greek church of the East and Central Europe's German Protestantism." According to Clusius, it was at Wittenberg that Despot first developed an interest for the affairs of Moldavia and Wallachia. In mid 1556, Despot switched his attention to the Kingdom of Poland and Duchy of Prussia, involving himself in the affairs of the Polish Evangelical Church. With letters of recommendation from Melanchthon which described Despot as an "honest and erudite man", he crossed into Mecklenburg-Schwerin, teaching mathematics at the University of Rostock. He may have also spent time in Lübeck and in the Danish realm, and in any case one of his letters from Melanchthon was addressed to Christian III. There are also clues that he visited the Kingdom of Sweden previously finally sailing to Königsberg in Prussia, where he arrived in November 1556.

At the Prussian court, Heraclid met statesman John Christoporski Krzysztoforski, who took an interest in his contributions as a tactician and ordered copies from his tracts.Hieronim Filipowski, Stanisław Lutomirski, and Marcin Zborowski; his project, masterminded by Łaski, was to reunite Evangelical and Calvinist Churches into a single Polish national church.

Beyond his generic Protestantism, Heraclid's own church affiliation is an enduring subject of dispute. The general viewpoints, summarized by Maria Crăciun, are that he was either a Lutheran, a Calvinist, or an opportunist with no clear commitments; a number of authors also list him as one of the Unitarians or Polish Brethren, with some noting that he came to these positions only after going through more mainstream Protestantism. Crăciun believes that the almost plausible account is provided by theologian Hans Petri. This notion describes young Heraclide as a moderate Lutheran, who embraced the dissident views of Andreas Osiander while in Prussia, and finally became a Calvinist in Krakow. Crăciun suggests that Radziwiłł's influence pushed Despot into a final, Nontrinitarian stage, with influences from both Unitarianism and the Polish Brethren. Graziani reported on views allegedly held by Despot, commenting on his anticlericalism, his derision of all forms of mass, refusal to believe in transubstantiation, and dedication to Bible study. Various Catholic polemicists identified Heraclid as a "Jew" or "not a Christian". As Crăciun notes, this allegation refers to his Unitarian views, which in the popular mind had been identified with Judaizing currents.

Despot's plan to take over as Prince of Moldavia by usurping Alexandru Lăpușneanu was probably hatched at Vilnius: here, he met some Moldavian boyars who had escaped Lăpușneanu's political persecutions. By 1558, he had also become aware that his genealogical claims made him a nominal relative of Princess-consort Ruxandra. Historian Șerban Papacostea argues that Demetrios settled in Moldavia long before Despot, contributing to the spread of Reformation ideas in that country before being chased out by Lăpușneanu's violent repression. Iacob himself arrived in Moldavia in 1558, already an adversary of the regime, probably with assist from Poland particularly from Polish Calvinists and from a coalition of boyars who had supported Ștefan VI Rareș. As noted by lteanu, his plan was rendered realistic by the anarchic decline of political customs in both Danubian Principalities under the Ottoman dominion. In the very last decades of the Romanian Middle Ages, there were 21 Moldavian Princes, with each averaging "2 years of actual governance."