Allatius, Leo

**Leo Allatius** (c. 1586 – January 19, 1669) (Greek: Λέων Αλλάτιος, *Leon Allatios*, Λιωνής Αλάτζης, *Lionis Allatzis*; Italian: *Leone Allacci, Allacio*; Latin: *Leo Allatius, Allacius*) was a Greek scholar, theologian, and keeper of the Vatican library.

## Leo Allatius

Λέων Αλλάτιος

Leo Allatius, portrait in the Collegio Greco of Rome, Italy

### Birthdate

b. 1586 d. January 19, 1669

Greek RC theologian. He was custodian of the Vatican library from 1661. In various books he tried to show the unity in essential doctrine of the Orthodox and RC Churches.

Leo Allatius was a Greek, born on the island of Chios (then part of the Ottoman Empire and known as Sakız) in 1586. His father was Niccolas Allatzes (from Orthodox religion) and his mother was Sebaste Neurides, both of Greek extraction (Allatius soon converted himself to Catholicism from Greek Orthodoxy). He was taken by his maternal uncle Michael Nauridis to Italy to be educated at the age of nine, first in Calabria and then in Rome where he was admitted into the Greek college. A graduate of the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius in Rome, he spent his career in Rome as teacher of Greek at the Greek college, devoting himself to the study of classics and theology. He found a patron in Pope Gregory XV.

In 1622, after the capture of Heidelberg by Tilly, when the Protestant Elector of Bavaria Frederick V was supplanted by a Catholic one, the victorious elector Maximilian of Bavaria presented the Palatinate library composed of 196 cases containing about 3500 manuscripts to Pope Gregory. Allatius supervised its transport by a caravan of 200 mules across the Alps to Rome, where it was incorporated in the Vatican library. All but 39 of the Heidelberg manuscripts, which had been sent to Paris in 1797 and were returned to Heidelberg at the Peace of Paris in 1815, and a gift from Pope Pius VII of 852 others in 1816, remain in the Vatican Library to this day.

Allatius was "passed over" for the position of Vatican librarian and instead became librarian to Cardinal Lelio Biscia who had an extensive private library. On the Cardinal's death, Allatius became librarian to Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Pope Alexander VII appointed him custodian of the Vatican Library in 1661, a post he held until his death.

His cultural background, embracing the Greek and Roman worlds, afforded him a unique view of the age-old question of union to heal the Great Schism. Better than any western scholar of his day he knew the religious, historical and artistic traditions of the Orthodox world, struggling under Ottoman domination. More passionately than any other 17th century theologian, he believed that familiarity with these traditions would enable the two churches to bridge their theological and ecclesiastical divide.

Thus in 1651, when he published the first printed edition of the works of George Acropolites, the 13th century emissary of the Byzantine Emperor who acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman pontiff and thus had become something of a celebrity, at least in the West, the Latin essay that formed the preface to this volume, De Georgiis eorumque Scriptis, gained fame itself as a learned plea for the commonalities between the two churches.

Allatius was a natural apologist for the Eastern communions in Eastern Europe, convinced as he was in himself that in the acts of union neither reasons of faith nor of doctrine were fundamental to the succession of the bishops, only a transfer of jurisdictions, and he seems really to have believed that the "Latin faith" and the "Greek faith" were identical and that under "Roman obedience" they could still be Orthodox. So he argued in his contribution to the mid-17th century Uniate pamphlet De Ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione libri tres ("The Western and Eastern Churches in perpetual Agreement, in Three Books") (1648). Such notions led to the final stipulations that the Eastern Churches were not to be merged with the Catholic Church but would retain their own hierarchical independence and traditional rituals.

Allatius was trained as a physician. In 1645 he included the first methodical discussion of vampires, in De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus ("On certain modern opinions among the Greeks"). In his later years he collected Greek and Syrian manuscripts to add to the late Pope Gregory XV's Eastern Library at the Vatican.

A member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, he knew many of the figures who wrote Venetian operas. His Drammaturgia (1666), a catalogue of Italian musical dramas produced up to that year, is indispensable for the early history of opera. A new edition, carried down to 1755, appeared at Venice in that year.

His works are listed by Johann Albert Fabricius, in Bibliotheca Graeca (xi. 437), where they are divided into four classes:

* editions, translations and commentaries on ancient authors
* works relating to the dogmas and institutions of the Greek and Roman Churches
* historical works
* miscellaneous works.

His manuscripts (about 150 volumes) and his voluminous scholarly correspondence are held in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana (referred to by some sources as the "Library of the Oratorians") in Rome. The number of his unpublished writings is very large; the majority of them are included in the manuscripts of the Vallicellian Library.

Allatius died in Rome on 18 (or 19) January 1669.

### Vampireology:

The earliest mention of the *vrykolakas* is made by Leo Allatius in 1645.

*De quorundam Graecorum Opinationibus*, 1645: According to Allatius, the word *vrykolakas* derives from words meaning cesspool. The *vyrkolakas* is an evil and wicked person who may have been excommunicated by a bishop. Its body swells up so that all its limbs are distended, it is hard, and when tapped it thrums like a drum. For this reason it is called *tympaniaois*, "drumlike". The devil animates such bodies and causes them to roam about at any time of day or night. On Chios, residents will not answer until a caller has called their name twice, because the *vrykolakas* is believed to only be able to call once, and if it is answered, its victim will die within twenty-four hours. If seen during the day, the *vrykolakas* is so horrible that witnesses die of fright--unless they speak to the monster, which immediately disappears. If a village has an epidemic of deaths or illness, the inhabitants open graves searching for a body in the "drumlike" condition described. If one is found, it is cremated. Allatius claims to have witnessed the discovery of such a body in a tomb while a boy in Chios, but he does not say what was done with the body.

It may be remarked here that although in the course of this book there will be occasion to deal with many ghosts of the vampire family and to treat of cognate superstitions and traditions the essential feature of the Vampire proper lies in the fact that he is a dead body re-animated with an awful life, who issues from his tomb to prey upon the living by sticking their blood which lends him new vitality and fresh energies. Since he is particularly found in Greece it is to a Greek writer we may go for a description of this pest. One of the earliest--if indeed he were not actually the first--of the writers of the seventeenth century who deals with vampires is Leone Allacci, (Alacci), more commonly known as Leo Allatius. This learned scholar and theologian was born on the island of Chios in 1586, and died at Rome 19th January, 1669. At the age of fourteen he entered the Greek College in Rome, and when he had finished his academic course with most honourable distinction, returned to Chios where he proved of the greatest assistance to the Latin Bishop Marco Giustiniani. In 1616 Allacci received the degree Doctor of Medicine from the Sapienza, and a little later, after having been attached to the Vatican library, be professed rhetoric at the Greek College. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV sent him to Germany to superintend the transportation to Rome of the Palatinate library of Heidelberg, which Maximillian I had presented to the Pope in return for large subsidies that enabled the war to be carried on against the federation of Protestant Princes. This important task, which owing to a disturbed state of the country was one of immense difficulty, Allacci accomplished most successfully, and during the reigns of Urban VIII and Innocent X he continued his work in the Vatican library, especially concentrating upon the Palatinate manuscripts. In 1661 Alexander VI, as a recognition of his vast researches and eminent scholarship, appointed him custodian of the Library. He was an earnest labourer for reunion, in which cause he wrote his great work De Ecclesiae Occidentalis atque Orientalis perpetua consensione, published at Cologne in 1648, a dissertation wherein all points of agreement are emphasized, whilst the differences are treated as lightly as possible.

Allacci, in his treatise De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, Cologne, 1645, discusses many traditions, and amongst others he deals at some length with the vampire, concerning whom he says: "The vrykolakas is the body of a man of wicked and debauched life, very often of one who has been excommunicated by his bishop. Such bodies do not like other corpses suffer decomposition after burial nor fall to dust, but having, so it seems, a skin of extreme toughness become swollen and distended all over, so that the joints can scarcely be bent; the skin becomes stretched like the parchment of a drum, and when struck gives out the same sound, from which circumstance the vrykolakas has received the name τυμπανιαῖος ('drum-like ')." According to this author a demon takes possession of such a body, which issues from the tomb, and, generally at night, goes about the streets of a village, knocking sharply upon doors, and summoning one of the household by name. But if the person called unwittingly answers he is sure to die on the following day. Yet a vrykolakas never cries out a name twice, and so the people of Chios, at all events, always wait to hear the summons repeated before they reply to anyone who raps at their door of a night." This monster is said to be so fearfully destructive to men, that it actually makes its appearance in the daytime, even at high noon, nor does it then confine its visits to houses, but even in fields and in hedged vineyards and upon the open highway it will suddenly advance upon persons who are labouring or travellers as they walk along, and by the horror of its hideous aspect it will slay them without laying hold on them or even speaking a word." Accordingly a sudden death from no obvious cause is to be regarded with the gravest suspicion, and should there be any kind of molestation, or should any story of an apparition be bruited abroad they hasten to exhume the corpse which is often found in the state that has been described. Thereupon without any delay "it is taken up out of the grave, the priests recite the appointed prayers, and it is thrown on to a fiercely blazing pyre. Before the orisons are finished skin will desquamate and the members fall apart, when the whole body is utterly consumed to ashes." Allacci proceeds to point out that this tradition in Greece is by no means new nor of any recent growth, for he tells us "in ancient and modern times alike holy men and men of great piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to disabuse them of such superstitions and to root this belief out of the popular imagination." Indeed a nomocanon or authoritative ordinance of the Greek church is cited to the following effect: "Concerning a dead man, if he be found whole, the which they call vrykolakas.

"It is impossible that a dead man should become a vrykolakas, unless it be by the power of the Devil who, wishing to mock and delude some that they may incur the wrath of Heaven, causeth these dark wonders, and so very often at night he casteth a glamour whereby men imagine that the dead man whom they knew formerly, appears and holds converse with them, and in their dreams too they see strange visions. At other times they may behold him in the road, yea, even in the highway walking to and fro or standing still, and what is more than this he is even said to have strangled men and to have slain them.

"Immediately there is sad trouble, and the whole village is in a riot and a racket, so that they hasten to the grave and they unbury the body of the man . . . and the dead man--one who has long been dead and buried--appears to them to have flesh and blood . . . so they collect together a mighty pile of dry wood and set fire to this and lay the body upon it so that they burn it and they destroy it altogether."

What is exceedingly curious is that after so emphatically declaring these phenomena to be a superstition and an idle fantasy, the nomocanon continueth as follows: "Be it known unto you, however, that when such an incorrupt body shall be discovered, the which, as we have said is the work of the Devil, ye must without delay summon the priests to chant an invocation to the All Holy Mother of God . . . and solemnly to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral-meats." This provision is at any rate pretty clear evidence that the author or authors of this ordinance must have had some belief in the vrykolakas, and it appears to me that they would not have added so significant a cautel unless they had deemed it absolutely necessary, and having salved their consciences by speaking with rigid officialism, they felt it incumbent upon them to suggest precautions in case of the, expected happening and the consequence of difficulties and mistrust. In fact, they were most obviously safeguarding themselves.

Allacci, at any rate, had no hesitation about declaring his own views, and he thoroughly believed in the vampire. He says, and says with perfect truth: "It is the height of folly to attempt to deny that such bodies are not infrequently found in their graves incorrupt and that by use of them the Devil, if God permit him, devises most horrible complots and schemes to the hurt and harm of mankind." Father François Richard, reference to whose important work has been made above, distinctly lays down that particularly in Greece the devil may operate by means of dead bodies as well. as by sorcerers, all this being allowed by some inscrutable design of providence. And there can be no doubt that the vampire does act under satanic influence and by satanic direction. For the wise words of S. Gregory the Great, although on another occasion, may most assuredly be applied here: "Qui tamen non esse incredibilia ista cognoscimus, si in illo et alia facta pensamus. Certe iniquorum omnium caput diabolus est: et huius capitis membra sunt omnes iniqui." All this, of course, under divine permission. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum in the First Part teach us how there are "Three Necessary Concomitants of Witchcraft, which are the Devil, a Witch, and the Permission of God." So are these three necessary concomitants of Vampirism, to wit, the Devil, the Dead Body, and the Permission of God." Father Richard writes: "The Devil revitalizes and energizes these dead bodies which he preserves for a long time in their entirety; he appears with the actual face and in the likeness of the dead, stalking abroad up and down the streets, and presently he will parade the country roads and the fields; he bursts his way into men's houses, filling many with awful fear, leaving others dumb with horror, whilst others are even killed; he proceeds to acts of violence and blood, and strikes terror into every heart." The good Father proceeds to say that at first he believed these appearances to be merely ghosts from Purgatory returning to ask for help, masses and pious prayers"; but on learning the details of the case he soon found that he had to deal with something very other, for such ghosts never commit excesses, violent assaults, wreaking the destruction of cattle and goods, and even causing death. These appearances then are clearly diabolical, and the matter is taken in hand by the priests who assemble on a Saturday, that being the only day of the week on which a vrykolakas rests in his grave and cannot walk abroad.

### Works Cited on this Site:

#### De Graecorum Hodie Quorundam Opinationibus Σήμερα, μερικές από τις ελληνικές θέσεις

On Certain Modern Opinions Among the Greeks (Letter) to Dr. Paulus Zacchias 1645

Coloniæ Agrippinæ, Apud Joducum Kalcovium & socios

* Chicago: Allacci, Leone. De Graecorum Hodie Quorundam Opinationibus. Ad Paullum Zacchiam. Coloniae Agrippinae: Apud I. Kalcovium & Socios, 1645.
* APA: Allacci, L. (1645). De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus. Ad Paullum Zacchiam. Coloniae Agrippinae: Apud I. Kalcovium & socios.
* MLA: Allacci, Leone. De Graecorum Hodie Quorundam Opinationibus. Ad Paullum Zacchiam. Apud I. Kalcovium & Socios, 1645.

### Links:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo\_Allatius
2. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095403256#
3. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01317b.htm
4. http://bylightunseen.net/vrykolak.htm
5. http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/vkk/vkk02.htm
6. http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/vkk/vkk03.htm

### References:

1. ↑ ttp://bylightunseen.net/vrykolak.htm
2. ↑ http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/vkk/vkk02.htm
3. ↑ http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/vkk/vkk03.htm