Meanwhile his fame as a poet in the Latin and the vulgar tongues increased, until, when the first drafts of the Africa began to circulate, about 1339, it became manifest that no one had a better right to the laurel crown than Petrarch. A desire for glory was one of his most deeply-rooted passions, and it is probable that he exerted his influence in several quarters with the view to a public coronation. On Sept. 1, 134o, he received two invitations, from the university of Paris and from King Robert of Naples respectively. He accepted the latter, journeyed in Feb. 1341 to Naples, was honourably entertained by the king, and, of ter some formal disputations on poetry, was sent with magnificent creden tials to Rome. There, in April, he assumed the poet's crown upon the Capitol from the hand of the Roman senator amid the plaudits of the people and the patricians. The oration which he delivered on this occasion was composed upon these words of Virgil :— Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis Raptat amor.
Henceforth Petrarch ranked as a rhetorician and a poet of European celebrity. During the spring of 1341 his friend Azzo di Correggio had succeeded in freeing Parma from subjugation to the Scaligers and was laying the foundations of his own tyranny in that city. He invited Petrarch to attend him when he made his triumphal entry in May, and for some time Parma and Vaucluse were his headquarters. The one he called his Transalpine, the other his Cisalpine, Parnassus.
The events of the next six years of his life may be briefly recapitulated. He lost his old friend the bishop of Lombez by death and his brother Gherardo by the entrance of the latter into a Carthusian monastery. Various small benefices were conferred upon him ; and repeated offers of a papal secretaryship, which would have raised him to the highest dignities, were rejected. In Jan. 1343 his patron Robert, king of Naples, died, and Petrarch was sent on an embassy from the papal court to his successor Joan. The notices which he has left of Neapolitan society at this epoch are interesting and, it was now, perhaps, that he met Boc caccio. The beginning of 1345 was marked by the discovery at Verona of Cicero's Familiar Letters. But Petrarch found the precious ms. after the style of his own epistles had been already modelled upon that of Seneca and St. Augustine.
In May 1347, when Cola di Rienzi accomplished the revolution which for a short space revived the republic in Rome, Petrarch, who in politics was no less visionary than Rienzi, threw himself into the republican movement and sacrificed his old friends of the Colonna family to what he judged a patriotic duty.
In 1347 Petrarch built himself a house at Parma where he hoped to pursue the tranquil avocations of a poet and of an idealistic politician. But the next two years brought a series of calamities. Laura died of the plague on April 6, 1348. Francesco
degli Albizzi, Mainardo Accursio, Roberto de Bardi, Sennuccio del Bene, Luchino Visconti, the cardinal Giovanni Colonna and several other friends died in rapid succession. Friendship with him was a passion ; he needed friends for the maintenance of his intellectual activity at the highest point of its effectiveness.
We may say with certainty that Laura's death, followed by that of so many friends, was the turning-point in Petrarch's inner life. He began to think of quitting the world and establishing a kind of humanistic convent, where he might dedicate himself, in the company of kindred spirits, to still severer studies and a closer communion with God. Though nothing came of this scheme, a marked change was henceforth perceptible in Petrarch's literary compositions. The death of Laura left him purified from passion, but able to realize his poetic mistress more clearly than he had ever done in her lifetime. The poems written In Morte di Madonna Laura are of more religious tone.
At the same time his increasing renown led to fresh relations with Italian despots. The noble houses of Gonzaga at Mantua, of Carrara at Padua, of Este at Ferrara, of Malatesta at Rimini, of Visconti at Milan, vied with Azzo di Correggio in entertaining him. In vain his correspondents pointed out the discrepancy between his zeal for Italian liberties, his recent enthusiasm for the Roman republic, and this alliance with tyrants who were destroying the freedom of the Lombard cities. Petrarch remained an incurable rhetorician ; and, while he stigmatized the despots in his ode to Italy and in his epistles to the emperor, he accepted their hos pitality. They, on their part, seem to have viewed his political theories as of no practical importance. The patronage of art and letters which distinguished Italian princes throughout the Renais sance first manifested itself in the attitude of Visconti and Carraresi to Petrarch.
In 135o Petrarch made a pilgrimage to Rome, passing through Florence, where he established a firm friendship with Boccaccio. This alone of his friendships stands out with clearness. Boccaccio carried his admiration for Petrarch to the point of worship. Petrarch repaid him with sympathy, counsel in literary studies, and moral support in his effort to conquer his over-sensuous nature. It was Boccaccio who in 1351 brought to Petrarch, then at Padua, an invitation from the seigniory of Florence to accept the rector ship of their recently founded university. This was accompanied by a diploma of restoration to his rights as citizen and restitution of his patrimony. Petrarch declined the offer, and maintained his independence and his leisure. In 1351 he was again at Vaucluse, engaged on his Epistle to Posterity.