A Distant Mirror (61 page)

To one chronicler it seemed “
as if these times are under the rule of a planet which produces strife and quarreling.” In an Augustinian monastery near Siena, he recorded, “the monks murdered their Prior with a knife,” and in a neighboring abbey, after intramural fighting, “six brethren were turned out.” Because of quarreling among the Carthusians, the General of the order came and moved them all to other houses. “It was no better among kinsfolk by blood.… The whole world was fighting. In Siena there was no one who kept his word, the people disagreed with their leaders and agreed with no one, and truly the whole world was a valley of shadows.”

The revolt brought into action an individual destined to be the catalyst of new calamity. Robert of Geneva, the Pope’s Legate in Italy, was a cardinal of 34 who shrank from no force to regain control of the papal patrimony. A brother of the Count of Geneva, a descendant of Louis VII and cousin of Charles V, a relative of the Counts of Savoy and of half the sovereign houses of Europe, he shared the lack of inhibition characteristic of so many princes. He was lame and squinting, and described as either squat and fat or handsome and well formed, depending on partisanship in the coming schism. Imposing and autocratic in manner, he was sonorous of voice, eloquent with tongue and pen, cultivated and well read in several languages, sophisticated and artful in his management of men.

To reconquer the Papal States, he persuaded Gregory XI to hire the Bretons, worst of the mercenary bands, with the extra incentive of
removing them from the vicinity of Avignon. Crossing the Alps into Lombardy in May 1376, they spread terror across Italy with swords blessed and consecrated by the Cardinal Legate. They failed, however, to take Bologna, keystone of the Papal States, and suffered several defeats by the Florentines, to the wrath of their employer. With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, including Hawkwood, from a nearby town, he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying,
“Sangue et sangue!”
(Blood and more blood!), which was what he meant by justice.

He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what could not be carried away, they burned, made unfit for use or spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500 and 5,000. From the sacked city, 8,000 refugees fled to Rimini begging for alms. A generation later the great preacher Bernardino of Siena still made audiences tremble with the tale of horror.

“Not to be held entirely infamous,” Hawkwood, it was said, sent a thousand women to safety in Rimini and allowed some men to escape. Carrying out the solution threatened by Solomon, he was also reported to have cleft in half a nun over whom two of his soldiers were fighting. On the whole, however, he had more relish for money than for killing, and shortly after the massacre of Cesena he abandoned the papal employ, where pay was slack, for more lucrative contracts offered by Florence and Milan. To make employment of the great mercenary permanent, Bernabò Visconti gave one of his illegitimate daughters by a favorite mistress in marriage to Hawkwood with a dowry of 10,000 florins. The political resources of a prince with 36 living children were far-reaching.

For his remaining two decades Hawkwood lived in riches and respect,
elected Captain of Florence by the Signoria, and paid for his services, or for immunity, by almost all the city-states of central and northern Italy. He bequeathed to Italy an example of successful rapine to inspire Italian
condottieri
—Jacopo del Verme, Malatesta, Colleoni, Sforza—who were soon to replace the foreign captains.

Robert of Geneva, who became for Italy the “
Man of Blood” and “Butcher of Cesena,” never attempted to excuse or extenuate his action. As far as he was concerned, the citizens were rebels like those of Limoges to the Black Prince. His resort to terror, resounding through Italy, did not enhance the authority of the Church. “People no longer believe in the Pope or Cardinals,” wrote a chonicler of Bologna on the massacre, “for these are things to crush one’s faith.”

Meanwhile, Florence was excommunicated by the Pope, who invited non-Florentines to prey upon the commerce of the outlaw. Her caravans could be seized, debts could not be collected, clients were not bound to keep their contracts. Florence retaliated by expropriating ecclesiastical property and forcing local clergy to keep churches open in defiance of the ban. Popular sentiment was so aroused that the Committee of Eight who directed strategy were called the Eight Saints, and the conflict with the papacy came to be known in Italian annals as the War of the Eight Saints.

By now both sides had reason to want to end the war. Besides drastic effect on Florentine commerce, the excommunication had divisive effects on the league. To hold the multiple rivalries of Italian city-states in cohesion for long was impossible. For the papacy to maintain control of the Papal States from Avignon was equally impossible, and a new danger was added when Florence offered inducements to Rome to join the league. It was as apparent to Gregory as to his predecessor that necessity was calling the papacy home. A clamorous voice at his elbow was adding force to the summons.

Since June 1376, Catherine of Siena, who was to be canonized within a century of her death and ultimately named patron saint of Italy along with Francis of Assisi, had been in Avignon exhorting the Pope to signal reform of the Church by returning to the Holy See. Already at 29 a figure with an ardent following and an insistent voice, she was revered for her trances and raptures and her claim to have received, while in ecstasy after communion, the stigmata of the five wounds of Christ on hands, feet, and heart. While these remained visible only to her, such was her repute that Florence commissioned
her as ambassador to negotiate reconciliation with the Pope and a lifting of the interdict. Catherine’s larger mission in her own mind was apostleship for all humanity through her own total incorporation with God and Jesus, and through a cleansing and renewing of the Church. Her authority was the voice of God speaking directly to her, and preserved in the
Dialogues
dictated to her secretary-disciples and believed by them to have been “given in person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious and holy virgin, Catherine of Siena … she being the while entranced and actually hearing what God spoke in her.”

Behind the trances were extreme austerities of fasting and deprivations of sleep and comfort. The more extreme in such practices, the more a person was removing himself from material life. (According to La Tour Landry, “To eat once a day is the life of an angel; twice a day the right life of men and women; more than that the life of a beast”). Catherine was reported to have lived on hardly more than a little raw lettuce, and if forced to eat, to turn her head away and spit out what she had chewed or cause herself to vomit lest any food or liquid remain in her stomach. She had practiced asceticism since the age of seven, when she saw her first visions, perhaps not unconnected with being the youngest of 23 children. Thereafter she stubbornly secluded herself from the worldly commotion of a large family in a dyer’s household, and dedicated her virginity to Christ.

The ecstasies of the union were very real to Catherine, as they were to many women who escaped the marital bond by entering religious life. Christ confirmed her betrothal, Catherine wrote, “not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy flesh, for when he was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his holy body.” Taught to read at the age of twenty by a Dominican sister of noble family, Catherine read the Song of Songs over and over, repeating in her prayers the sigh of the bride, “May he kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” and was rewarded when Jesus appeared to her and bestowed upon her “a kiss which filled her with unutterable sweetness.” After her prolonged prayers to be fixed in “perfect faith” and to become an instrument for the salvation of erring souls, Jesus took her for his bride in a ceremony performed by his Holy Mother and attended by St. John, St. Paul, and St. Dominic, with music from David’s harp.

As a tertiary or non-cloistered member of the Dominicans, Catherine threw herself into the care of humanity, seeking out prisoners, the poor, and the sick, tending the plague victims of 1374 among whom two of her siblings and eight nieces and nephews died. In an extreme
episode she sucked pus from the cancerous sore of a hospital patient as if acting out the mystics’ insistence on direct contact with the wounds of Christ as the source of spiritual experience.

In the words of the German mystic Johannes Tauler, Catherine’s contemporary, it was necessary “to press one’s mouth to the wounds of the crucified.” The blood that flowed from the wounds, from the thorns, from the flagellation, obsessed religious fanatics. It was a sacred bath to cleanse sin. To drink it, to wash the soul with it was salvation. Tauler dwelt on the subject for so long in his thoughts that he felt he must have been present at the source. He calculated the number of lashes and knew that Jesus had been tied so tightly to the column that the blood spurted from his nails; that he had been whipped on the back and then on the chest until he was one great wound. St. Brigitta in her revelations saw his bloody footsteps when he walked and how, when crowned with thorns, “his eyes, his ears, his beard ran with blood; his jaw distended, his mouth open, his tongue swollen with blood. His stomach was pulled in so that it touched his spine as if he had no more intestines.”

Catherine herself hardly ever spoke of Christ, her bridegroom, without mentioning blood—“blood of the Lamb,” “the keys of the blood,” “blood filled with eternal divinity,” “drinking the blood of the heart of Jesus.”
Sangue
was in every sentence;
sangue
and
dolce
(blood and sweet) were her favorite words. Words poured from her in a torrent unhindered by need of pen. Even her devoted confessor, Raymond of Capua, a cultivated nobleman and future General of the Dominican Order, sometimes fell asleep under the redundant flow. That so much of Catherine’s talk was preserved was owed to the astonishing capacity of medieval scribes to record verbatim the prolix speech of the period. Speech was customarily filled with repetition to allow time for the listener to absorb what was being said. Information and learning were still largely acquired through listening to heralds, sermons, orations, and reading aloud, and for that very reason, scribes, before the age of printing, were far better trained to take down the spoken word than at any time since.

As word spread of Catherine’s visions and fasting, people came to see her in her trances. Between raptures, in moods of earthly and warmhearted common sense, she settled civil quarrels and converted notorious rascals to penitence and faith. She acquired fame and worshipful disciples to whom she felt as a mother, calling them to her, as she put it, “as a mother calls a child to her breast.” They in turn called her
Mamma
. From 1370 on, she took an increasing part in public life,
exhorting rulers, prelates, town councils, and individuals in effusive letters of political and spiritual advice.

Her influence lay in her absolute conviction that God’s will and hers were one. “Do God’s will and mine!” she commanded Charles V in a letter urging crusade, and to the Pope in the same tone she wrote, “I demand … that you set forth to fight the infidels!” Next to reform, “holy sweet crusade” was her incessant theme. Gregory himself, in all the letters of his pontificate, was an advocate of crusade, not only for defensive war against the Turks, but as a means of reconciling France and England and draining the mercenaries from Europe. While Catherine pleaded for peace at home, crying, “Woe, woe, peace, peace, for God’s sake …,” she implored all the potentates no less heartily to visit war upon the infidel. For her, crusade had an exalted religious value in itself. This was Christians’ work for the greater glory of God, and the more earnest its advocates, like Catherine and Philippe de Mézières, the more ardent their summons to war.

“Be a man, Father, arise!… No negligence!” she hectored the Pope. Hawkwood was likewise exhorted to rise against Christ’s enemies instead of tormenting Italy with misery and ruin. In a letter addressed to “Messer Giovanni condottiere,” delivered in person by Father Raymond, she wrote, “Therefore I pray you sweetly, since you delight so much in making war and fighting, make no more war upon Christians because it offends God.” Rather, she told him, go to fight the Turks so that, “from being the servant and soldier of the Devil, you might become a manly and true knight.”

Catherine’s favorite admonition was “Be manly!” In her devotions, the Virgin Mary hardly appeared, all Catherine’s passion being absorbed by the Son. Yet in worldly affairs she often appealed to feminine influence, writing not to Bernabò Visconti but to his strong-minded wife, Regina; not to the King of Hungary but to his dominant mother, Elizabeth of Poland. Of the Duc d’Anjou, whom she envisioned as leader of the crusade, she begged that he (of all people) despise the pleasures and vanities of this world and unite himself to the cross and the passion of Jesus in holy war. When she visited him and the Duchess in person, the Duke, who among his other ambitions was quite prepared to lead a crusade, accepted the mission.

In Avignon she was oppressed by the atmosphere of sensuality and “stench of sin,” and by the curiosity of the grand ladies who poked and pinched her body to test her trances after communion or even pierced her foot with a long needle. To the Pope, whom she addressed in a familiar version of Holy Father as “my sweet papa”
(dolce babbo
mio)
, she poured out all her themes in endless letters and in public and private audiences in which Raymond of Capua acted as interpreter because Catherine spoke in the Tuscan dialect and the Pope in Latin. Let him begin reform through the appointment of worthy priests, she demanded, let him pacify Italy not by arms but by mercy and pardon, let him return to Rome not with armed guard and sword but with cross in hand like the Blessed Lamb, “for it seems to me that Divine Goodness is preparing to change furious wolves into lambs … and I will bring them humiliated to your bosom.… Oh, Father, peace for the love of God!”