An Unpublished English Translation
of Justinian's Life of Columbus

JOSEPH L. BLAU
 

A GOSTINO GIUSTINIANI, O. P. (better known as
/--\ Justinian), Bishop of Nebbio in Corsica, was a human-
^4_ _I\_ ist scholar of parts. Born of a noble family at Genoa
in 1470, he entered holy orders in 1487. In 1514 he was elevated
to the episcopate. His see of Nebbio was an ancient town in
Corsica; the town itself contains little but the ruins of a Romano-
Byzantine Church of the Assumption and a palace, but the name
is used, by extension, to refer to the district surrounding the old
town. Giustiniani probably spent no more time in Corsica than
was absolutely necessary. He participated, in 1516-17, in the last
two sessions of the Fifth Lateran Council. He wrote and pub¬
lished a number of books that could not have been produced in
Corsica. For five years he served as the first professor of Hebrew
in the chair of Oriental Languages established by Francis I in the
Royal College of the University of Paris. He traveled widely
through Europe and was friendly with such Christian Humanists
as Pico della Mirandola, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and
Thomas Linacre. There is an ironic twist to his fate: he died, in
1536, in a shipwreck on the Ligurian Sea while traveling from the
mainland of Italy to Corsica.

Whatever interest the career of Agostino Giustiniani may
hold for scholars in other fields, his particular appeal to bookmen
is that he was the editor of the first printed Polyglot version of
any part of the Bible. Even before rhe end of the fifteenth century,
Aldus had proposed the production of a Polyglot Bible; his inten¬
tion, mentioned in the preface to the undated Greek text of the
Book of Psalms, generally assigned to 1497, was to print a version