‘On 1 October 1518, Cardinal Cornaro and Cardinal Pisani left Venice for Rome; they went by water to Chioggia, then set out on horseback.’ Thus begins the diary entry of a young Venetian patrician, Marcantonio Michiel, who was himself a member of the travelling party. Twenty-five days later they arrived in Rome, where Michiel was to stay for two years. During this period he noted in his diary both political events in Rome and news from Venice, but – unlike many diarists – he was keenly interested in art and music, and he also recorded detailed descriptions of Roman festivities. Having been brought up in Venice, with its magnificent state pageantry, he was prepared to appreciate Roman ceremonial, both civic and religious, and, with his entrée to the papal court, he was privileged to be present at private entertainments. For some of these occasions we have eye-witness accounts by other observers, but for several Michiel seems to be the only source known so far. He enlarges our picture of the music-loving pope and highlights the activities of Leo's private musicians. His reports of musical performances add new information to our meagre knowledge of early sixteenth-century instrumentation.

Musicians have recognised distinct national styles of musical composition and performance for centuries, and even today our understanding of the development of musical style in virtually every period rests in large part on observations of the contact and melding of national idioms. From the suppression and absorption of Gallic chant by Roman plainsong during the time of Charlemagne, through the wedding of French, Italian and German styles accomplished by Bach, to the joining of north Indian classical musical elements with modern avant-garde music by Philip Glass and other minimalist composers, our telling of music history is in large part analysis of a continuing process of musical colonialisation.

The city of Lyons enjoyed its heyday in the sixteenth century. Favourably situated along the great trade routes connecting Italy and the north, Lyons was a busy commercial centre that saw a constant flow of goods and people through its marketplaces and fairs. Its large population was polyglot and cosmopolitan: many of its most prominent citizens were recent immigrants or members of one of the foreign ‘nations’ that wielded so much financial power through their connections with banks in Italy. The city boasted a flourishing book trade and an active cultural life, and its culture was in many ways as international as its citizenry. Trade links with other great economic centres of the time were often mirrored in art and music. Although artistic ties with Italian cities were perhaps the strongest, connections with Antwerp and other northern cities existed as well. A newly identified set of manuscript partbooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale is an example of one such economic and cultural link. Commissioned by a young merchant of Lyons from a composer in Antwerp, they testify to the vitality of cultural exchange along the major trade routes of the Renaissance. Furthermore, they shed new light on the careers of the copyist Jean Pollet, who worked at the Bavarian court with Lassus, and the Netherlands composer Jean de Castro, and provide a unique and fascinating view into the life of Justinien Pense, the patron who commissioned them.

The medieval chant traditions of the Eastern and Western churches can generally be traced back to about the tenth century, when the earliest surviving notated manuscripts were created. In these earliest sources, the various traditions are already distinct from each other and fully formed, each with thousands of chants that are assigned to at least eight modes and belong to dozens of melody types or families, carefully distributed across the daily, weekly and annual cycles of a complicated liturgical calendar. Yet we have hardly any information at all as to how these traditions evolved into the highly complex state in which we first find them. Where did they come from and when did they originate? How and when did they achieve the relatively fixed form in which we know them? Questions such as these have been important in chant research during the last thirty years, ever since Willi Apel outlined what he called ‘the “central” problem of the chant, that is, the question concerning its origin and development’. But attempts to investigate these questions have often been conceived too narrowly, overlooking as much evidence as they include or more. For instance, many scholars have written about ‘the central problem’ as if it belonged mainly to Gregorian chant and its close relative, the Old Roman or special Urban repertory, when in fact the origins and early history of almost every tradition of Eastern and Western chant are equally obscure.

The Brussels manuscript 5557 is one of the most important sources of the later fifteenth century. Not only is it the one northern manuscript from the period to have survived largely intact, but it was apparently compiled for the chapel of no less a magnate than Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Presiding over one of the most opulent courts of Europe, Charles was more than just a great patron of the arts: he was an active composer himself. The sophisticated taste of his establishment is reflected in the extraordinary quality of the music in the Brussels manuscript: great masses by Dufay and Regis rub shoulders with most of the surviving motets of Charles's great employee, Antoine Busnoys, while the original nucleus of the manuscript boasts a clutch of English masses rivalled only by that in Trent 93/90.

In 1450 Giovanni Rucellai, a Florentine visitor to Rome, counted 1022 inns ‘with signboards’, and a quantity of other hostelries. For centuries, Rome had been a magnet that drew the faithful by the tens of thousands to its venerable walls. The reason, of course, was that it was the ancestral home of the Holy See – the centre of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Although urbs Roma could not boast of this honour throughout the entire Middle Ages, by the middle of the fifteenth century, with the reign of Nicholas V, the Holy See was securely re-established at Rome, never to depart again.

The flood of religious pilgrims to the Holy City, during Jubilee years and at other times, certainly accounted for a large part of the crowds of visitors to Rome. It is not, however, the Rome of the pilgrim that will concern us here, but the city that housed the papal Curia, the vast bureaucracy established to assist the pontiff with the temporal and spiritual responsibilities of his office. Thousands of petitioners came to Rome not to seek plenary indulgence but to secure for themselves a particular and specific papal Grace.

The manuscript Montpellier, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire, Section Médecine, H 196 (hereafter called Mo) has long claimed a place as one of the musical monuments of the thirteenth century. It is one of the most comprehensive sources of the early motet and is by far the largest anthology of French three-voice motets. It has long been thought that Mo was compiled in a number of stages that reflect gradual changes in musical notation and style during the second half of the thirteenth century. This assumption has been used to date repertory, theorists and composers.