In early April of the same year that Columbus discovered the New World, an itinerant Greek scholar returned to Florence to the fabulous court of Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo il Magnifico, as everyone called him—with a weighty cache of precious Greek manuscripts. The riches the scholar—Ianos Lascaris (also known as Giovanni Rhyndacenus)—meant to lay at the feet of his patron did not represent the start of the Renaissance, which had broken through Italian soil almost simultaneously with the Black Death. Rather, Lascaris’s great gift was a sure sign that the Renaissance was now close to blooming in all its racy perfection.
It should never be forgotten that, despite its eventual influence across Europe, the Renaissance (as we call it, following the historic French influence on English letters), il Rinascimento (as it was called in Florence), the great Rebirth, was, to begin with, an entirely homegrown northern Italian phenomenon.
Francesco Petrarca, known to the English-speaking world as Petrarch, is credited with being the first figure of the Renaissance. Son of a banished White Guelph—the same party Dante had once taken a prominent part in—Petrarch grew up, not in his ancestral Florence, but in the south of France at papal Avignon, a very Italian town. By the time he was sixteen, however, Petrarch was studying law at Bologna at the insistence of his father, who was concerned about his son’s peculiar intellectual interests and wanted to make sure the boy would eventually be able to earn a living. Long before he was packed off to Bologna, Petrarch was collecting (and reading appreciatively) the works of Cicero, consummate orator and philosopher of ancient Rome, and of Virgil, greatest of all Latin poets. Petrarch’s other early literary hero was the late Latin rhetorician and theologian Augustine of Hippo, a Christian bishop and a man solidly on Plato’s team (as we saw in the Prologue). Old Petrarch, alarmed at his son’s bizarre interests, even burned some of the boy’s precious books but at length, like the good Italian papà he was, threw up his hands and relented.
What Petrarch discovered in his reading was an ancient literary and philosophical tradition that, though once vigorous, had been rent and left in tatters by subsequent ages. These ages—from the death of Augustine, the last great Latinist, in the early fifth century, to the time of Petrarch—the young man labeled “the Dark Ages,” a label that would stick. Now in the mid-fourteenth century, thought Petrarch, the time had come to renew the once vibrant tradition, so full of exploratory jaunts, surprising divagations, and delicious subtleties.
On the one hand, there were the dreary methods of the schools and universities, which, in part because of a lack of books, relied on much memorization. Even at so august an institution as the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest institution of higher learning, chartered in the mid-twelfth century, the amount of rote learning was enough to crush the spirit of the keenest student. And the content of what had to be memorized was even worse: proofs of this and that, set in the unalterable form of thesis statement, list of authorities backing the thesis, objections to the thesis (in the form of straw men, easily vanquished), proof demonstration relying on Aristotelian logic, and wham! that was the end of that subject, whether science, law, or philosophy.15
On the other hand, classical writers such as Cicero, Virgil, and even Augustine offered not numbing rote but pleasure—the pleasure of minds exploring, embracing, revising, and even loving ideas for their own sake. Thus did the first shoot of the Renaissance poke its way through the seemingly inhospitable ground of the mid-fourteenth century, the same period as that of Petrarch’s friend Boccaccio and of the leveling horrors of the Black Death. But while Boccaccio looked back on Dante with supreme admiration, Petrarch did no such thing. Dante, in Petrarch’s estimation, belonged to the insufferable Dark Ages, just another whimpering breast-beater caught in a trap of his own phantasmagoric fears.
In Petrarch’s mistaken demotion of Dante we may easily read an instance of Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence,” an example of the pattern by which a new age so often sneers at even the most timeless influences of the age that went before. Petrarch was indeed a very limited man, only somewhat talented and somewhat learned. He was a somewhat good, if somewhat boring, poet and a somewhat good scholar, though he never set himself the task of learning the language of the ancient Greeks—in the catalogue of whose authors he would have discovered the ultimate sources of the Latin writers he so admired. For Petrarch, his Latin-speaking ancestors from the Italian peninsula supplied all needed inspiration. He collected books—in his day an unusual activity and probably the contribution we have the most to thank him for. In 1345 he even discovered a previously unknown collection of Cicero’s letters, Ad Atticum.
The collection of books—crumbling old manuscripts, many with titles and contents long lost to scholarship, many in languages other than Latin, in Greek especially, but also in Hebrew, Arabic, and what was then called Chaldean (Aramaic)—was the great enterprise on which the Renaissance was built. Or rather, it was the satiating pleasure that Petrarch and, after him, so many others derived from their collections, from their loving attention to the great writers of the past, to the thoughts and feelings of the classical authors of the Golden and Silver Ages, and from their resolve to bring about a splendid new age in imitation of what once had been.
This pleasure—in collecting, understanding, savoring, imitating (and even surpassing)—becomes the essential hallmark of the Renaissance and its rich abundance of activities. Combined with what we may call the “new realism” (or the “new detachment” or even the “new selfishness”) consequent upon the Black Death, this new sense of pleasure will make for a new age. Men like Petrarch came to be called humanists, that is, people interested in human subjects rather than in the divine or theological subjects that had so enticed the previous age. This did not mean that they were irreligious or antireligious. (Petrarch himself was a Catholic priest, though openly in love with a married woman, Laura, about whom he wrote obsessively.) It did mean that, like the ancient authors, their chief interest was in the lives and fates of human beings, not in the unknowable life of God, certainly not in the highly artificial philosophical and theological structure called scholasticism, supposedly inspired by Aristotelian logic, which had come to dominate university instruction throughout Europe. For those who had suffered in adolescence under the oppressive, unpalatable dominion of the scholastics, the activities encouraged by the Renaissance seemed welcome as a scented spring after a long, lugubrious winter.
These humanists might better be called philologists. Though these scholars spoke, to begin with, a simplified, late-medieval Latin, their intensive and extensive reading enabled them to create new dictionaries, new grammars, and new manuals in the art of rhetoric, modeled especially on the Latin and Greek classics. Appreciation of ancient Greek, knowledge of which had very nearly died out in Western Europe, was markedly reinvigorated by the flight of Greek scholars from the Byzantine Empire, now overwhelmed by the Turks. Many, probably most, of these scholars came to Italy, where they felt exceedingly comfortable and were received with high enthusiasm.
One of the Greeks was Ianos Lascaris, who found in Lorenzo the Magnificent the patron whom many an intellectual in need could only dream of attracting. Lorenzo, scion of the Medici banking family, whose tremendous lending institution dominated not only its hometown of Florence but much of capitalist Europe, was a supremely gracious if hard-driving athlete of immense appetite and, it must be admitted, impeccably good taste. The only thing he seemed to lack was physical beauty—he had a large, skewed nose and bumpy brows, if a face pulsing with life and vigor—but he certainly appreciated beauty beyond himself, especially in music, the plastic arts, literature, and young women. His poems, at least in the opinion of this reader, were a lot better than those of Petrarch, who wrote mostly in bland, imitative Latin. Lorenzo fashioned lapidary verses in the simple, open Tuscan of his time, yet tacking close to the immaculately chosen subjects of Horace and the invigoratingly lyrical dash of Catullus:
Quanto sia vana ogni speranza nostra,
Quanto fallace ciaschedun disegno,
Quanto sia il mondo d’ignoranza pregno,
La maestra del tutto, Morte, il mostra.
How vain is every hope, each breath.
How false is every single plan.
How full of ignorance is man
Against the monstrous mistress, Death.
So begins one of Lorenzo’s sonnets. But often, such meditation only impels him to urge his reader to take whatever pleasure the moment may offer, as in the opening verse of his “Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,” written for a public pageant of the same title:
Quant’è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:
Di doman non c’è certezza.
How very beautiful is youth
That slips our grasp and flies away!
So if you like, be merry, gay:
Uncertainty’s tomorrow’s only truth.16
These lines, repeated throughout the poem, gain force with each restatement. And though this sentiment had never disappeared entirely from European literature, it had hardly been heard with such intensity since pagan Horace in the first century BC had raised the famous cry “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!” (Seize the day, trust little in tomorrow!) Though the humanists were Christians, their adherence to their religion—certainly by the end of the fifteenth century—was often more formal than deeply felt.
Lorenzo himself loved nothing so much as a good party. “The early years” of his inheritance, writes Christopher Hibbert,
were notable in Florence for a succession of entertainments: pageants, tournaments, masques, spectacles and parades; musical festivals, revels, dances and amusements of every kind. For generations, indeed, Florence had been famous all over Europe for such festivities. No city had more spectacular nor more numerous entertainments.… There were carnivals, horse races and football games, dances in the Mercato Vecchio [Old Market], mock battles in the Piazza Santa Croce and water displays beneath the bridges of the [River] Arno. Sometimes the Piazza della Signoria would be turned into a circus or hunting-field; wild animals would be let loose; boars would be goaded by lances; and the Commune’s lions would be brought out of their cage behind the Palazzo and incited—rarely successfully—to set upon dogs. On one occasion at least these escapades got out of hand: three men were killed by a rampaging buffalo, and afterwards a mare was set loose among stallions, a sight which one citizen thought the “most marvelous entertainment for girls to behold,” but which in the opinion of another, more respectable diarist, “much displeased decent and well-behaved people.”
Into all such displays there entered processions of gaily clad gentlefolk, knights and their ladies, “heralds, standard-bearers, fifers, trumpeters,” pages, and men-at-arms, all magnificently decked out in colorful costumes, none more resplendent than Lorenzo himself, who at the citywide celebration of his engagement to the Roman heiress Clarice Orsini wore “a cape of white silk, bordered in scarlet, under a velvet surcoat, and a silk scarf embroidered with roses, some withered, others blooming [to symbolize the sorrows and joys of life], and emblazoned with the spirited motto, worked in pearls: LE TEMPS REVIENT.17 There were pearls also in his black velvet cap as well as rubies and a big diamond framed by a plume of gold thread. His white charger, which was draped in red and white pearl-encrusted velvet, was a gift from the King of Naples”—and on runs the account, describing the armor Lorenzo wore in the jousting and the prize he won, “a helmet inlaid with silver and surmounted by a figure of Mars.”
The openhanded Medici knew how to enjoy their good fortune and to include as many of their fellow citizens as possible in their celebrations. The Medici, as well as their (often envious) imitators among the other wealthy families of Italy, became patrons of the arts to a degree so lavish that we may say unreservedly that no one had ever seen their like before nor have we seen it since. The young Michelangelo sat at Lorenzo’s table and slept under his roof, treated by Lorenzo as a boon companion and by others as a young god. But many artists were similarly entertained, and Lorenzo’s court shone with such attendants as the brothers Pollaiuolo, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Not a few of these also attended sessions of Lorenzo’s Platonic Academy, where they found themselves locked in intense conversation with the famous humanistic scholars of the day, men such as Marsilio Ficino, Agnolo Poliziano, and the great and good Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. All were welcome to peruse the vast collection of books in the eponymously named Laurentian Library.
The high spirits of Renaissance Italy spilled over into other European lands, though the waves set off by so much gaiety sometimes landed elsewhere with a shock and might even be received with contempt. The Renaissance, as it appeared elsewhere, could at times look and sound quite different from its lively Italian manifestation. And though the humanists of Italy were generous in sharing their artistic and intellectual riches with other Europeans, they were quite certain that the great classical tradition was a uniquely Italian treasure and that Italians had nothing to learn from anyone else (except—when they remembered—from the Greeks, of course).
This attitude militated against the dissemination through Italy of the art of printing, where it was for years considered something concocted “among the Barbarians in some German city.” Duke Federigo of Urbino, an important collector, dismissed the invention out of hand, admitting that he “would have been ashamed to own a printed book.” No printing press was set up at Florence till Bernardo Cennini established one at last in 1477, a full quarter century after its invention in Germany.
So the multiplication of copies of individual books in Italy continued to depend for decades on the ancient traditions of the scriptorium. But it was at such scriptoria as Lorenzo’s that many scribes were employed for the sake of making many copies of manymanuscripts, so that these might be distributed widely. (Even in their self-imposed cultural isolation, the Italians remained generous.) And it is thanks to these last scriptoria of Europe that you, dear Reader, can today read the book in your hands (or on your screen) so easily.
The thing that most put off the Italians from adopting printing was the monstrous appearance of the Gothic letters employed by German printers. Thick, heavy, overweight, very nearly sludgy, unattractive to the modern eye, these letters (whether in movable type or in earlier manuscript examples) reminded Italians of everything they disliked about the Barbarians.18 (Madre di Dio, those letters looked like overweight people with inert bowels!) Instead, the Italians invented calligraphy, beautiful—and eminently readable—script. From this calligraphy, lean and swift, balanced and shapely, full of sweeping slides and lovely loops—rather than the stolid shapes of Gothic—were born the typefaces we still use today, roman, italic, and their derivatives.
Lascaris was only one of several agents Lorenzo employed to scour libraries far and wide for forgotten treasures, many of which would be copied in multiples by Lorenzo’s scribes. Lascaris returned to Florence with more than two hundred separate manuscripts from the impoverished libraries of formerly Byzantine lands (soon to be known as the Middle East). But the lavish reception he had imagined for himself and his extraordinary number of finds was not to be, for Lorenzo was dead—at forty-three a victim perhaps of his own lifestyle, more likely a casualty of the immense forces that had been ranged against him for years.
Fourteen years before Lascaris’s return to Florence, Lorenzo and his beloved younger brother Giuliano had been attacked while at mass in Florence’s grand Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower. Both were knifed, but whereas lightning-quick Lorenzo had escaped death with a minor wound to his neck, Giuliano was cut down viciously. The anti-Medici conspirators were a rival family, the Pazzi, who had been urged to these assassinations by none other than Sixtus IV, the reigning pope, who had had quite enough of the Medici. They’d refused to loan him everything he wanted for his campaigns to refashion the power dynamics of northern Italy to his advantage (and to the concomitant disadvantage of Florence and the Medici). The pope was particularly outraged at the effrontery of Lorenzo’s careful diplomacy in several northern cities, all in the service of preserving a league that would keep the peace—not one of Sixtus’s goals. Though Lorenzo was in fact an indifferent banker, whose enormous fortune had been amassed in the time of his grandfather, Cosimo, and his father, Piero the Gouty, he was a skilled peacemaker and a gracious and warmhearted diplomat who found welcome practically everywhere.
But Lorenzo, though the central citizen of Florence, was not its ruler. The sovereignty of Florence, as of many other Italian city-states, lay in the hands of a corporation, a board of elected citizens. As in the ancient Greek city-states, the Italians never went so far as to extend anything approaching universal suffrage. Their republican governments were oligarchies, formed by the leading citizens, who offered wider suffrage to adult males of some financial consequence at those crucial moments when broader participation was required to ensure that the ordinary citizenry would support a special undertaking, such as going to war.
But given the Medicis’ power and prominence within Florence, Lorenzo was able (and virtually expected) to act as dictator in moments of crisis. In the words of the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, “He had a reputation such as probably no private citizen has ever enjoyed from the fall of Rome to our own day.” And “if Florence was to have a tyrant, she could never have found a better or more delightful one.”19 We should not, however, underestimate the negative long-term effect on the individual of having the game without the name—of always bearing the responsibility of the role without being able to assume the title—or the personal consequences of finding oneself the pope’s implacable enemy (to such a degree that he is willing to have you bumped off while attending mass), or the political consequences of watching while this evil man attempts to align all Italy against you and your city. For a time, Lorenzo was even excommunicated, as was his entire family, and all Florence placed under interdict.20 The bishops allied with Florence responded in turn by excommunicating the pope. The consequent dustup would be pacified only by the death of Sixtus and the election of a pontiff even more worldly, if more conciliatory. But by then Lorenzo’s health had suffered.
One further actor must be brought onto the great open stage that was Florence: the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. Born at Ferrara in 1452, grandson of a quack doctor who recommended imbibing large quantities of alcohol to ensure longevity and who saw to Savonarola’s education, such as it was, Savonarola was one of the ugliest men ever to gain such an impassioned following and to reach such heights of fame. He was known to sleep on a comfortless straw mattress over a wooden board. He made it a practice not to speak to women, except to upbraid them, though it was rumored that in youth his suit had been firmly rejected by a young woman he had fallen in love with. (He himself insisted that he had always intended to serve God alone and not to marry.) Ghostly pale, consumptive-looking in the extreme thinness that could be discerned beneath his white habit and black cloak and hood, Savonarola was further distinguished by an enormous hooked nose set between hollow cheeks, a tightly pursed but smiling mouth, and twitching, green irises that resembled the merciless orbs of a bird of prey.
The friar first came to Florence in Lent of 1481 as a guest preacher at the Church of San Lorenzo. He was not well received. His voice was harsh, his gestures abrupt and graceless. But he practiced and improved. By 1491 his devoted congregation had grown so large that his sermons had to be delivered in the Cathedral, where Savonarola revealed to the assembled Florentines that, after much fasting and prayer, he had been granted the gift of foreknowledge by God. “It is not I who preach,” the friar shouted to the surprised crowd, “but God who speaks through me!”
What sort of future did Savonarola foresee? One of great calamity and divine punishment for the church, for Italy, and especially for Florence, unless Christians returned to their former simplicity.21 They must forget about the classical authors of Greece and Rome, who were all at this very moment burning in Hell. They must renounce all the terrible pleasures—gaming, festivals, fashionable clothes—that were destroying their souls. They must get rid of all this new art, the cleverly made, lasciviously conceived paintings that made even “the Virgin Mary look like a harlot.” It was especially important to bring an end to prostitution—ladies of the evening (“pieces of meat with eyes,” Savonarola called them) must be whipped till they reformed—and all sodomites must shortly be burned alive. God would see to it that Lorenzo de’ Medici would die soon, as would the pope and the king of Naples, after which the entire political process must be transformed and brought under his rule. Florence needed a new constitution, one that did away with the current tyranny and replaced it with … with … Here Savonarola grew vague. It was clear that God wanted to replace Lorenzo with something new. But with what, exactly?
One by one, the great humanists caved. Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, Botticelli, perhaps Michelangelo spoke of Savonarola with respect, even with awe. When Savonarola’s name was advanced to be Prior of San Marco, a friary funded with Medici money, Lorenzo made no objection. After all, Lorenzo encouraged variety everywhere and was never one to interfere unnecessarily. We can almost see him shrugging his muscular shoulders in the very Italian gesture of “Live and let live.” As he lay dying, Lorenzo even asked to see the fiery friar. Though no one knows exactly what was said in this final meeting, we may well imagine that Savonarola heard Lorenzo’s confession, gave him absolution, and applied the anointing chrism of the church’s last rites to Lorenzo’s dying body. The tradition that holds that the friar cursed Lorenzo is certainly mistaken. At the least, Savonarola blessed the dying man and left him consoled.
Once Lorenzo was gone, however, the friar’s preaching became ever more intense and admonitory. He pointed to the sky, where he claimed to see the Sword of the Lord hanging over the city. “Repent, O Florence, while there is still time!” intoned the preacher, sounding ever more like Isaiah. (Indeed, it seems fairly obvious that he was imitating language to be found in Isaiah 21 and elsewhere in the Hebrew Prophets.) “The Lord has placed me here: ‘I have put you here as a watchman in the center of Italy that you may hear my words and announce them to the people.’ ” Foreign enemies were about to cross the Alps, like “barbers armed with gigantic razors,” and they would fall upon the people. Then would the Turks turn Christian.
Prophets are exciting people, natural celebrities. Here was a man who could never have cut a figure or raised a response at one of Florence’s storied celebrations; rather, one who had refashioned himself as Isaiah to Florence’s Jerusalem and Italy’s Judea. And his predictions were all coming true! Lorenzo was dead, so were the pope and the king of Naples! French armies were crossing the Alps, soon to subject Italy—and especially recalcitrant Florence—to ghastly penalties. Soon, too, no doubt, the Turks would submit themselves to baptism, as the whole world is remade by God.
To prepare for these events the Florentines altered their constitution, creating a virtual theocracy with Savonarola in charge. Clutching a crucifix high above his head, Savonarola pressed on, as his fellow Blackfriars swarmed about the city’s streets: the people must now fast continually; they must denude their churches of all unnecessary ornament—gold plate, silver cups, precious candelabra, jewel-encrusted sacred objects, beautifully illuminated books—all of which must be set afire or melted down, for these were nothing more than diabolic temptations to vanity. Opposite the Palazzo della Signoria in the very center of Florence an enormous scaffold was erected and upon it people placed their collections of fine clothing and the beautiful adornments that had once made Florence famous. Atop this mountain of finery, the citizens piled profane books they had but lately treasured, as well as any drawings or paintings that could possibly lead a viewer to impure thoughts. Even famous artists, such as Botticelli, were seen to sacrifice their pictures to the pile. As the great mound was set afire—the original “Bonfire of the Vanities”—a children’s choir sang, trumpets were blown, and bells were sounded.
Children were mustered, and not only for singing: the friars organized what Savonarola called “Blessed Bands” of such children, their hair trimmed short, who went throughout the city collecting donations for the poor and seeking out whatever vanities had eluded the flames. These children were instructed to root out all remaining vice, which included informing on anyone caught gambling, behaving unsuitably, wearing an ostentatious costume, or harboring some undivulged treasure. The Blessed Bands were especially encouraged to inform on family members.
What are we to make of this volte-face on the part of the previously partying people of Florence? Why did they submit themselves to Savonarola and to such a revolution in their way of life? For simple people, there was undoubtedly the prophetic dimension: what he predicted came true! (Well, yes, though predicting the deaths of dying people is not so amazing, nor is predicting an invasion when the threat is already at your door. Now, the conversion of the Turks—I guess if he’d got that one right, he’d be worth a second look.)
Beyond finding an explanation for the celebrity awarded Savonarola by simple souls, it must be said that we are presented here with a conundrum: the enthusiasm of the cultivated and the learned—the most cultivated and learned (and, till now, the most joyful) people in all of Europe—for an unpleasant, unsympathetic, unbelievable windbag. Why did they not resent their Garden of Love being invaded by these “Priests in black gowns … walking their rounds,/And binding with briars [their] joys and desires,” as William Blake would one day express it? Is this just an instance of the lemming rule, of crowds following crowds? If everyone’s going over the cliff, I might as well go with them?
No doubt Lorenzo’s calling Savonarola to his deathbed helped precipitate the transformation. If Lorenzo il Magnifico himself submitted to the friar, who am I to hold out? The age-old reliance of Italians—as well as not a few other nations—on charismatic leaders (now Lorenzo, now Savonarola) may also have figured in the equation. But beyond these partial explanations there lies the Christian faith of Italy, where—even today after centuries of secularism—supposed unbelievers generally call a priest to their deathbeds and arrange for a church funeral. This is, to some extent, an aspect of Italian canniness—of the impulse to place bets on both horses. As one exceedingly agnostic Italian friend said to me recently when he refused to cross the path of a black cat, “Better to be cautious.” And I’m sure the same man, when his time comes, will welcome a priest to his deathbed. Better to be cautious.
But it is also possible at this point in our consideration to part the curtains of cynicism and to look out the window in the morning light: to admit that, for all his admiration of Horace and Catullus, for all his lifelong meditations on Plato, Lorenzo was a Christian, at least of a kind, and a Christian who believed deeply enough that he did not wish to enter into Eternity without having properly closed his life on this earth. Certainly, he was the son of an intelligent but deeply pious woman;22 and in our deaths we must in some manner recapitulate, even reintegrate, our lives by returning to the scenes of our earliest days. He could not have foreseen that his private deathbed conversation would help to usher in the Age of Savonarola.
The age did not, in any case, last long. Savonarola proved far less talented at politics than at preaching. He quickly lost the confidence of the invading French, antagonized the new Borgia pope (a serious mistake), and sent Florentines out to die in skirmishes for which they were ill prepared. Finally, Pope Alexander excommunicated the obstreperous, interfering cleric and threatened to put the Florentines under interdict once more if they did not give him up. Savonarola continued defiantly to preach in the Cathedral but to dwindling audiences. The Roman Church, he now claimed, had become a satanic institution, a whore promoting whoredom and all manner of vice.
Florentines had other matters on their minds: meager harvests; hungry, even starving people haunting the city’s streets; plague breaking out. At last, the oligarchs acted: Savonarola was arrested and paraded through the streets while citizens lined the route to jeer at him. He was horribly tortured, confessed to everything he was asked to confess to, retracted his confession when he was removed from the strappado,23 was tortured again, convicted of heresy and schism, and finally burned at the stake, the very end he had wished upon all sodomites lurking in Florence’s midst. The date was May 23, 1498, just seven years after the man had preached his first sermon in the Cathedral.
France, a kingdom for untold centuries, exhibited a stability that was denied the independent city-states of Italy. The Italian communes, by their very nature, were more subject to the fickleness of crowds, otherwise known as voters, than were political entities that traced their legitimacy to a long tradition of sacred kingship. As nationality continued to grow in importance, a nation with a king found expansion easier and more natural. The league of city-states that Lorenzo tried to hold together in northern Italy (or any similar alliance) would always suffer from a weakness of unity not so characteristic of a country with an anointed king (or an empire with a Holy Roman Emperor). As nationalistic consciousness waxed ever stronger in Europe, Italy would continue to find itself at a disadvantage.
More than this, religion was primed to stoke new political conflicts everywhere. Would our Christianity be like that of Lorenzo or of Savonarola? Like that of Columbus or of Las Casas? Would we be humanists or firebrands? Imperialists or peacemakers? Tyrants or republicans? (There were no democrats, as yet.) Dictators or colleagues? Torturers or nurturers? Would we build pyres or throw parties? Would we read books and view pictures or poke our noses into other people’s affairs and tell them how to live? Would we be relaxed24 or reformed? And if reformed, what sort of reformers would we make?
The stage was now set for two kinds of expansiveness: the expansiveness of humanism, issuing in the easeful gorgeousness of the Renaissance, and the expansiveness of the Reformation, which would seek moral improvement both personal and institutional, as well as the abandonment of error. Neither Tomás de Torquemada nor Girolamo Savonarola could be strictly called Reformation figures; but both were reformers of the strictest sort, Counter-Reformation figures of Catholic Europe long before the Counter-Reformation, or even the Reformation itself, had properly got under way. Their ghostly presences will necessarily haunt some of the pages to come.
1 No one who knew anything thought the Earth was flat. This was an anti-Catholic fable created by a nineteenth-century Frenchman named Jean Antoine Letronne and disseminated widely to English speakers by Washington Irving in his unreliable biography of Columbus.
2 Valencia, Naples, and Sicily.
3 Insincere Jewish converts were labeled Marranos. Discovering and ejecting them from society became a Spanish obsession. An American friend recalls that when he applied to become a Jesuit in 1959, he had to sign a statement attesting that he had no Jewish blood. (My friend, as it turned out, did have a Jewish grandfather, though he did not know this at the time, and therefore responded falsely.) He was accepted into the order and began his training but left to pursue a secular career five years later.
The Jesuits were founded by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish nobleman, toward the middle of the sixteenth century. When, or if, the question about Jewish blood was removed from their application I have not been able to ascertain to my satisfaction. But I would guess it was removed on or about December 16, 1968, which is when the Alhambra Decree was at last revoked! In late 2012 the Spanish government began to offer repatriation to descendants of expelled Jews, but not to the descendants of expelled Muslims.
4 Others fled to England (despite the royal ban), the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, and especially tolerant Italy. Still others, probably more than half of all Spanish Jews, migrated to Portugal, which would soon prove an unstable refuge.
5 The phrase auto de fe is Spanish; auto-da-fé, the more usual phrase in English, is Portuguese.
6 The torturers employed a considerable variety of devices. According to the incomplete list of Eduardo Galeano, these included “the barbed collar; the hanging cage; the iron gag that stifled unwanted screams; the saw that cut you slowly in two; the finger-stretching tourniquet; the head-flattening tourniquet; the bone-breaking pendulum; the seat of pins; the long needle that perforated the devil’s moles; the iron claw that shredded flesh; the pincer and tongs heated to fiery red; the sarcophagus lined with sharp nails; the iron bed that extended until arms and legs got pulled out of their sockets; the whip with a nail or knife at the tip; the barrel filled with shit; the shackles, the stocks, the block, the pillory, the gaff; the ball that swelled and tore the mouths of heretics, the anuses of homosexuals, and the vaginas of Satan’s lovers; the pincer that ground up the tits of witches and adulterers; the fire on the feet; among other weapons of virtue.” But some of these tortures, especially the sexual ones, may owe more to Victorian fantasy than to historical accuracy.
7 Humor can occasionally give us as just a perspective on such characters as do more stern-faced assessments. The Jewish comedian Mel Brooks played Torquemada in the film History of the World: Part I, in which he is introduced by another inquisitor with a New York accent: “Torquemada—do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada—do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada—do not ask him for mercy. Let’s face it, you can’t Torquemada [tawk ’im outa] anything!”
8 This passage, intended to serve as a direct quotation from Columbus (who wrote of himself in the third person), is taken from Samuel Eliot Morison’s biography of Columbus. Columbus’s original log is lost, so Morison “fit together” two surviving passages, one from a partial transcript of the log by Bartolomé de las Casas, the other from the biography of Columbus by his son Ferdinand, who also had before him a copy of the then-extant log.
9 Juana, a fluent linguist and graceful athlete, much loved and well tended by her mother, became after Isabella’s death a political chess piece in the twitching fingers of her father, who married her to Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Burgundy and son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Juana was crazy about Philip, who was indeed very handsome, but he, after a hot romance with the pouty teenage Juana, embarked upon the common practice among his peers of bedding all the beautiful ladies-in-waiting. Juana responded with fury, punishing the ladies severely and replacing them with ugly ones. In one case, she had an inamorata’s lustrous locks sheared off and left them on Philip’s pillow. After Philip removed himself to his native Flanders, Juana became progressively unhinged, screaming for hours one night at her castle gate in the freezing cold. Philip’s unexpected death by typhus (or, some said, by poison supplied by his father-in-law, who had come to find him too threatening a rival) seems to have rendered Juana permanently unstable. She kept Philip’s corpse beside her long beyond what was customary, perhaps even for months. Queen in name only, she spent the last three and a half decades of her long life in a locked, windowless room at the order of her young son, who would reign as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and whom we shall meet as a leading figure in the coming drama of Reformation. The shocking ill use of Juana at the hands of father, husband, and son may supply us with some reason to modify the contemporary diagnosis of madness. Despite her later confinement, Juana lived for a time at the center of European events, giving birth to a second emperor and to four queens. One of her younger sisters was the ill-used Catherine of Aragon, queen (for a time) of England.
10 In 1493, Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, solemnly affixed a line of global longitude between Spanish and Portuguese zones of exploration and conquest, the Spanish to have whatever “new” lands lay west of the line, the Portuguese whatever lay east. A year later, the line had to be modified somewhat because the original was too obviously drawn in Spain’s favor. It is to this demarcation that we may attribute the Portuguese overlay of the culture of Brazil (whose territory lies to the east of the line), as well as the lasting Portuguese influence on parts of Africa, whereas almost all of the rest of the Americas south of the Rio Grande owe their cultural overlay to Spain.
Many were the gifts from Alexander to the Spanish Monarchs. Perhaps as important as the line of longitude was the perpetual gift of the so-called Royal Third by which the Spanish kings were awarded two-ninths of all papal tithes to assist them in their wars against the Moors.
11 Columbus also had a letter from the Monarchs to Prester John, a legendary version of John the Apostle, the supposedly undying Christian ruler of some African or Asian country. (Europeans were unsure of its whereabouts, though certain of its existence.) And Columbus had on board an Arabic speaker, because it was thought that with knowledge of Arabic one could communicate in any Oriental tongue. Though no one thought it necessary to learn the languages of the unimpressive American natives, everyone was eager to address possible foreign potentates properly.
12 One might have expected that the Spaniards, encountering complex Indian cultures, would have approached them more or less as they had intended to approach the Chinese. But the superiority of European firepower easily persuaded the Spaniards that conquest, not diplomacy, was the obvious route to take. Moreover, the discovery of garish rituals of human sacrifice at the heart of these cultures meant that the Spaniards could easily convince themselves that their conquests were wars against anti-human evil. Once again, the Europeans were on God’s side.
13 A case can be made for the American seizure of the Philippine archipelago at the end of the nineteenth century as being one of the outermost waves of “European” conquest of “American” natives. The Americans certainly imagined themselves as bringing European civilization to benighted savages. The American president William McKinley, who initially thought the Philippines were Caribbean islands, proclaimed (according to one report) that there was nothing to be done but to “take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them.” The Filipinos had been evangelized by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and had a system of universal free public education from 1863, a year when such a system was still lacking in the United States. More than one million Filipinos, however, many of them civilians, would be killed in the course of the American occupation.
14 This assertion is an arresting twist on Platonic philosophy, which looks forward to the human soul’s achievement of true bliss by casting off its earthly body in death. In the same way, claims Donne, the human body (which Plato despised) finds its true bliss by casting off all its clothing. To those who catch Donne’s reference, this may be judged a humorous conceit.
15 The author acknowledges that, as a philosophy student at a Catholic seminary in the early 1960s, he was forced to swallow scholastic philosophy by means of this antiquated, enervating method and, therefore, knows far more about it than he might wish.
16 The English translations, which are mine, are necessarily inadequate. Robert Frost once defined poetry as what is lost in translation. Without being quite so absolute, I confess that the natural rhythm and expansiveness of Italian have no easy English equivalents. Rather, the natural terseness of English militates against its usefulness in word-for-word translation of Italian. Nor is there any way to successfully imitate feminine rhyme scheme (in which stress is laid on the penultimate, rather than on the last, syllable in each line). So read the Italian, if you can make any sense of it at all.
17 In French “the time returns,” meaning the Great Time.
18 See Volume I of the Hinges of History, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Chapter I, for the original confrontation of taste between Italians and Germans in the early fifth century.
19 Guicciardini is considered the father of modern history because of his use of official documents. He was, however, only nine when Lorenzo died.
20 Interdict was, in effect, the excommunication of everyone living in a particular city or country. Strictly speaking, it meant that all religious services were forbidden and no sacraments could be conferred. The consequence of this was that children could die without baptism and end up, therefore, in Hell, at least according to conservative theologians; and a similar fate awaited anyone who died without priestly absolution. But the interdict had been overused by the papacy, and so was no longer experienced as the extreme punishment it once had been. Often enough, local bishops and priests simply ignored it and continued their ministries.
21 Predicting divine vengeance for sin is a standard refrain of reproachful types, as is confirming that a current calamity has been imposed by God in response to sin—a favorite ploy of the American preacher Pat Robertson, who explained (along with Jerry Falwell) that the 9/11 attack had been meted out by God because Americans were allowing abortions to be performed and homosexuality to thrive. More recently, Robertson was able to enlighten us on the parlous state of the people of Haiti, who are being punished because they made a pact with Satan two centuries ago. God’s vengeance, in the estimation of such personalities, is remarkably lacking in discrimination, since those being punished so often have had little or nothing to do with the supposed crime.
22 “Lucrezia Tornabuoni was a remarkable woman, charming and spirited, profoundly religious and highly accomplished.… She was a poet of more than moderate ability. Since her interests were largely theological, most of her poems were hymns or translations into verse of Holy Writ. But they displayed a depth of feeling as well as a literary quality rarely to be found in such compositions.… Both her husband and her children, as well as her father-in-law, all seem to have adored her.” From Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici.
23 A method of torture whereby the victim’s hands are tied behind his back, after which his arms are lifted behind him by rope and pulleys and he hangs suspended in midair. The procedure causes terrible pain, normally dislocating both arms.
24 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a friend and publishing colleague, once described her family’s religious outlook by saying “We’re relaxed Catholics,” this in the midst of a public denunciation that I, as Doubleday’s director of religious publishing, had received from Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, because he disapproved of a book I had published. Her description was a play on words, the condemnatory phrase “lax Catholic” being well known to anyone brought up Catholic in the years prior to the partial relaxation of oppressive norms by the Second Vatican Council. I confess I find her description, offered as a sign of solidarity with me in my conflict with the archbishop, appealing.