The contribution of Florence's humanist chancellors to Renaissance culture is well known: not only were Salutati and his successors preeminent scholars in their own right but as leaders of the Florentine humanist movement they deserve much credit for making Florence one of the great centres of Renaissance civilization. Of these humanist chancellors, least recognition has gone to the Aretine, Benedetto Accolti, whose term of office lasted from 1458 until his death in 1464. This neglect goes back to the fifteenth century. After a successful career as a lawyer, Accolti devoted only the last few years of his life to the humanities, and when he died at the age of forty-nine, he was just beginning to establish himself in the first rank of humanists; his sudden death prevented him from circulating his two recently completed Latin compositions, which, to judge from surviving manuscript copies, were not widely read in the fifteenth century. His history became a standard work on the first crusade only in the sixteenth century when it was printed in several editions and translated into Italian, French, German and Greek, whereas his dialogue comparing antiquity and modern times was not generally known before the end of the seventeenth century, when interest in the querelle des anciens et des modernes led to its publication in several editions. Adequate recognition may also have been denied to Accolti because little has been known of his life. He did not collect his own letters, so that the usual principal source for the biography of humanists, their Latin correspondence, has not been available for the study of Benedetto Accolti; indeed, only two private letters, both brief and informal compositions in Italian, have survived.