Abstract

This article traces the career path and personality of a chancery official or secretary in the service of the Gonzaga, the ruling dynasty of Mantua, in the middle years of the fifteenth century. It relates Giovanni Arrivabene to the contemporary social, political and cultural context of this secondary northern Italian power or signoria but touches the wider Italian world at many points, particularly the papal court, whether in Rome or other locations, where Giovanni’s talented younger brother served first as the secretary of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga and later as an apostolic secretary. The comparison between the two brothers and their interdependence as property owners is a recurring theme. Giovanni emerges with evident limitations which hampered the succession to his father’s superior role in the chancery, where other privileged families also tended to prevail. Humanist educated and efficient, he seems to have been a bureaucrat of routine abilities, not quite astute enough to outpace certain departmental rivals or to avoid being tainted by association with some possibly corrupt practice which caused loss of favour. His later rehabilitation, first as a provincial magistrate concerned with criminal jurisdiction and later as an estate management official, illustrates that private relationships within the narrow world of a civic quasi despotic government were all important.