He had scarcely fixed himself at Arqua, when he put his last hand to a work which he had begun in the year 1367.  To explain the subject of this work, and the circumstances which gave rise to it, I think it necessary to state what was the real cause of our poet’s disgust at Venice.  He appeared there, no doubt, to lead an agreeable life among many friends, whose society was delightful to him.  But there reigned in this city what Petrarch thought licentiousness in conversation.  The most ignorant persons were in the habit of undervaluing the finest geniuses.  It fills one with regret to find Petrarch impatient of a liberty of speech, which, whatever its abuses may be, cannot be suppressed, without crushing the liberty of human thought.  At Venice, moreover, the philosophy of Aristotle was much in vogue, if doctrines could be called Aristotelian, which had been disfigured by commentators, and still worse garbled by Averroes.  The disciples of Averroes at Venice insisted on the world having been co-eternal with God, and made a joke of Moses and his book of Genesis.  “Would the eternal architect,” they said, “remain from all eternity doing nothing?  Certainly not!  The world’s youthful appearance is owing to its revolutions, and the changes it has undergone by deluges and conflagrations.”  “Those free-thinkers,” Petrarch tells us, “had a great contempt for Christ and his Apostles, as well as for all those who did not bow the knee to the Stagirite.”  They called the doctrines of Christianity fables, and hell and heaven the tales of asses.  Finally, they believed that Providence takes no care of anything under the region of the moon.  Four young Venetians of this sect had attached themselves to Petrarch, who endured their society, but opposed their opinions.  His opposition offended them, and they resolved to humble him in the public estimation.  They constituted themselves a tribunal to try his merits:  they appointed an advocate to plead for him, and they concluded by determining that he was a good man, but illiterate!

This affair made a great stir at Venice.  Petrarch seems at first to have smiled with sensible contempt at so impertinent a farce; but will it be believed that his friends, and among them Donato and Boccaccio, advised and persuaded him to treat it seriously, and to write a book about it?  Petrarch accordingly put his pen to the subject.  He wrote a treatise, which he entitled “De sui ipsius et aliorum Ignorantia—­” (On his own Ignorance, and on that of others).

Petrarch had himself formed the design of confuting the doctrines of Averroes; but he engaged Ludovico Marsili, an Augustine monk of Florence, to perform the task.  This monk, in Petrarch’s opinion, possessed great natural powers, and our poet exhorts him to write against that rabid animal (Averroes) who barks with so much fury against Christ and his Apostles.  Unfortunately, the rabid animals who write against the truths we are most willing to believe are difficult to be killed.