Artificial Respiration: Trauma and the Ineffable in Cardinal Bessarion’s Exhortations Against the Turks

The problem, the difficulty or the impossibility of maintaining the breath of speech is a feature that links some of Cardinal Bessarion’s exhortations to promote a crusade against the Ottoman advance, occurring particularly at the points where the narrative touches upon the crimes that the Turks commit against the Christian people and, in particular, the Greeks. These disruptions in the discourse, far from being a spontaneous expression of trauma, are calculated artifices that reveal his zeal and commitment to the affair. Often assuming the form of aposiopesis, they have a correlation with the Classical tradition and follow models that can be traced back to the corpus of ancient oratory, so that the expression of emotion is mediated by those authors and their own contexts. As if answering the shock of the events, this device appears in the texts that are nearer in time to the catastrophe: the oration In conventu Mantuano (1459), composed some years after the capture of Constantinople, and the pieces that are part of the corpus Contra Turcos (1470), which echo the fall of Negroponte. And although the reticence to continue the speech can be related to an awareness concerning the literary representation of violence, the choice of staging silence is also a way of calling into question the rhetoric and the power of words, an attitude that coincides with a very clear positioning of Bessarion in these orations. Indeed, besides the distress that the author means to reflect, there is also the political dimension highlighted by the Classical intertexts, which can be taken as an indication of the cardinal’s disenchantment with European politics and its leaders.