Mirrors (22 page)

While the Crusades leveled Ma’arrat, Trotula di Ruggiero was dying in Salerno.

Since History was busy recording the feats of Christ’s warriors, not much is known of her. We know that a cortege forty blocks long accompanied her to the cemetery, and that she was the first woman to write a treatise on gynecology, obstetrics, and child development.

“Women do not dare uncover their intimate parts before a male doctor, due to shame and innate reserve,” wrote Trotula. Her treatise distilled her experience as a woman helping other women in delicate matters. They opened up to her, body and soul, and told her secrets that men would neither understand nor deserve to know.

Trotula taught women how to face widowhood, how to simulate virginity, how to get through childbirth and its troubles, how to avoid bad breath, how to whiten skin and teeth, and “how to repair the irreparable abuse of time.”

Surgery was in fashion, but Trotula did not believe in the knife. She preferred other therapies: hands, herbs, ears. She gave gentle massages, prescribed infusions, and knew how to listen.

SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

The crusaders laid siege to the Egyptian city of Damietta. In the year 1219, in the midst of the assault, Father Francis left his post and began walking, barefoot, alone, toward the enemy bastion.

The wind swept the ground and buffeted the earth-colored tunic of this skinny angel, fallen from heaven, who loved the earth as if from the earth he had sprouted.

From afar they saw him coming.

He said he had come to speak of peace with the sultan, Al-Kamil.

Francis represented no one, but the walls parted.

The Christian troops were of two minds. Half thought Father Francis was crazy as a loon. The other half thought he was dumb as an ass.

Everybody knew that he talked to birds, that he liked to be called “God’s minstrel,” that he preached and practiced laughter, and that he told his brother monks:

“Try not to look sad, stern, or hypocritical.”

People said that in his garden in the town of Assisi the plants grew upside down, their roots pointing up. And people knew that the opinions he voiced were upside down too. He thought war, the passion and profession of kings and popes, was good for winning riches, but useless for winning souls, and that the Crusades were launched not to convert Muslims, but to subdue them.

Moved by curiosity or who knows what, the sultan received him.

The Christian and the Muslim crossed words, not swords. In their long dialogue, Jesus and Mohammed did not come to terms. But they listened to each other.

ORIGIN OF SUGAR

King Darius of Persia praised “this cane that makes honey without bees,” and long before him the Indians and the Chinese knew of it. But Christian Europeans only discovered sugar when the crusaders saw cane fields on the plains of Tripoli and tasted the flavorful juices that saved the besieged Arab populations of Elbarieh, Marrah, and Arkah from hunger.

Mystical fervor did not blind their good eye for business, so the crusaders seized plantations and mills in the lands they conquered, from the kingdom of Jerusalem all the way to Akkra, Tyre, Crete, and Cyprus, including a place near Jericho named for good reason Al-Sukkar.

From that point forward, sugar became “white gold,” sold by the gram in the apothecaries of Europe.

THE LITTLE CRUSADE AGAINST DOLCINO

In the archives of the Inquisition lies the story of the final Crusade, launched at the beginning of the fourteenth century against a heretic named Dolcino and his initiates:

Dolcino had a girlfriend named Margarita who accompanied him and lived with him. He claimed he behaved toward her with utter chastity and honesty, treating her like a sister in Christ. And when she was found to be in a state of pregnancy, Dolcino and his men pronounced her with child by the Holy Ghost.

The inquisitors of Lombardy, according to the bishop of Verceil, recommended a Crusade with absolute dispensation for any sins committed therein, and they organized a significant expedition against the abovementioned Dolcino. The subject, after contaminating numerous disciples and initiates with his sermons against the faith, retreated with them to the mountains of Novarais.

There, as a consequence of the inclement temperature, it occurred that many grew weak and perished from hunger and cold, thus they died not disabused of their mistaken ways. Moreover, by scaling the mountains, the army captured Dolcino and about forty of his men. Those killed and those dead of cold and hunger numbered more than four hundred.

Along with Dolcino, the heretic and charmer Margarita was likewise captured on Holy Thursday of the year 1308 of the incarnation of Our Lord. Said Margarita was sliced up before Dolcino’s eyes, and then he too was cut to pieces.

SAINTS VISITED FROM HEAVEN

Saint Mechtilde of Magdeburg: “Lord, love me with strength, love me long and often. Ablaze with desire, I call to you. Your ardent love enflames me night and day. I am just a naked soul, and You within it are a guest richly adorned.”

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque: “One day when Jesus lay on me with all his weight, he responded to my protests thusly: ‘I want you to be the object of my love, without any resistance on your part, so that I can take pleasure in you.’”

Saint Angela of Foligno: “It was as if I were possessed by a device that penetrated me and withdrew, scraping my entrails. My members were aching with desire . . . And by this time God wished my mother, who for me was a huge impediment, to die. Soon my husband and all my children died. I felt great solace. God did this for me, so that my heart could be in his heart.”

SAINTS PORTRAY THE DAUGHTERS OF EVE

Saint Paul: “The head of woman is man.”

Saint Augustine: “My mother blindly obeyed the one designated to be her spouse. And when women came to the house with the scars of marital anger on their faces, she told them, ‘You are to blame.’”

Saint Jerome: “Woman is the root of all evil.”

Saint Bernard: “Women hiss like snakes.”

Saint John Chrysostom: “When the first woman spoke, it caused the original sin.”

Saint Ambrose: “If women are allowed to speak again, it will bring ruin once more to man.”

FORBIDDEN TO SING

In the year 1234, the Catholic religion prohibited women from singing in churches.

Women, impure thanks to Eve, befouled sacred music, which only boys or castrated men could intone.

The pain of silence lasted seven centuries, until the beginning of the twentieth.

A few years before their mouths were shut, back in the twelfth century, the nuns of Bingen convent on the banks of the Rhine still sang freely to the glory of paradise. Luckily for our ears, the liturgical music Abbess Hildegard created to rise on the wings of female voices has survived intact, unblemished by time.

In her convent at Bingen and in others where she preached, Hildegard did more than make music. She was a mystic, a visionary, a poet, and a physician who studied the personality of plants and the curative powers of waters. She also worked miracles to carve out space where her nuns could be free, despite the masculine monopoly of the faith.