The name lasted for some time, it seems, until the city grew and developed. Then, perhaps just through the ordinary process by which words are corrupted, or perhaps because of the wonderfully successful flowering of the city, Fluentia became Florentia." (I.1-3) Bruni thus begins with his Florentine city's founding, tracing it to Roman authority and rule, evolving chronologically and linearly from past to present, unlike the sprawling myths of the Teutonic poem. However, in Bruni's tracing of the Roman Empire's fall, an ideological agenda through the cool, factual recounting of verifiable events becomes clear. Unlike the old Rome, the Roman Empire was not a republic. Like the feudal era of the past, Bruni begins to cast the ideal state as human triumph of freedom over tyranny, republicanism over despotism and immortality -- a tale to be applied to the present state of the city of Florence, he suggests, by implication and objective authority -- an objective authority and verifiable sense of truth he creates for himself as an author.

The earlier "Nibelungenlied" too tells of a past of greatness and glory. Unlike Bruni, the "Nibelungenlied" combines elements of many different historical, legendary, and mythological tales and weaves many different stories together in a non-chronological fashion. It tells the reader from the beginning it will be a tale of bold knights, dying lovers, and vigorous battle scenes. Unlike Bruni, the author draws the reader in with a 'teaser' about excitement, not a story of relevant, factual history. But the "Nibelungenlied," too begins with a tale of conquest and division, as the heroine dreams of a tame falcon being torn apart eagles. The narrator ends the chapter by warning that the dream foretells a great tragedy.

It is assumed that Bruni's historical reader knows of the first tragedy that will transpire, the fall of the first great Roman Empire. Bruni attempts to show that ill historical actions will be avenged, if not in dreams, then in the...

The old Roman moral excess and territorial aggression is paralleled with the current remnants of a state of feudalism the author sees around him. An Italian city, to be great and to conquer, must have a clear sense of the values for which a city like Florence stands: freedom of speech, free access to political office, equality of all citizens before the law, and self-government.
Some have called Bruni's geneological and moral approach to history equally "irrational, combining a belief in divine inspiration with a further belief in its transportability," as the "Nibelungleid."

Falco writes that "the logic of Bruni" and his "remarks on the transmigration of divine poetic authority from one generation to the next," and the history of the city are more based on faith than upon history. Faith in a clear ideology, suggest Falco -- thus look to both works as a portrait of how men and women of the era thought about themselves and about history and soceity, rather than a textual reproduction of what actually transpired. But while "genealogies" of texts such as the "Niebelungleid," or "Bruni's, "inevitably strain our credulity" and "retain the marks of religiously and magically motivated behavior" in their attribution of historical events, they also paint a psychological portrait of the times.

Works Cited

Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, trans. James Hankins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Raphael Falco, "Is there a Genealogy of Cultures," Criticism, Fall 2000, 1-7. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_4_42/ai_75950975/pg_4

Nibelungenlied." Translated by a.T. Hatto. New York: Penguin Reprint, 1964

Raphael Falco, "Is there a Genealogy of Cultures," Criticism, Fall 2000.

Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, trans. James Hankins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1:ix.

Falco, p.4.