The History of the Renaissance World (80 page)

Within a decade of each other, Dante and Marsilius had given written shape and an intellectual foundation to the impulse that had pushed the Waldensians and Cathars and Pastoureaux to reject both priests and pope. It was a paradigm-shattering, society-altering argument.

John XXII, occupied with his political aspirations, did not immediately take notice. But Louis of Bavaria did. Armed with Marsilius’s arguments, depending on the goodwill of the Italians who had benefited from the visit of his imperial vicar, he marched into Italy to be crowned emperor. On Whitsunday of 1327, he had himself crowned king of Italy at Milan, with the Iron Crown of the Lombards; and on January 17, 1328, he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by two bishops, aided by the Italian nobleman Sciarra Colonna (a fast enemy of John XXII).

Before he became aware of the usurpation of his role, John XXII had been preaching a crusade against Louis. When he heard of the coronation, he declared it void on March 31; a month later, Louis in his turn declared the pope deposed. In his place, Louis installed the Franciscan priest Pietro Rainalducci in St. Peter’s Basilica, under the papal name of Nicholas V.
⁸

But before long, Louis found himself growing unpopular. His underpaid German army was looting and stealing in order to support itself; he forced Milan and the surrounding cities to hand over a total of 200,000 florins (nearly three-quarters of a ton of gold, all told) to help pay for his proposed reunification of the empire; and he unwisely threatened priests who remained loyal to John XXII with execution. Before long, he decided that it would be wiser to leave Rome.
⁹

69.1 Lands Claimed by Louis of Bavaria

Nicholas V fled the city, aware that in his patron’s absence, the goodwill of the people of Rome would not give him claim over the Christian church in Italy, let alone the world. Instead, he made his way to Avignon and asked John XXII for absolution. John XXII granted it, and Nicholas V faded gratefully into obscurity.

So far, honors in the struggle between pope and emperor were about even. But John XXII now made a theological misstep. In Avignon, on November 1, 1331, he preached a sermon giving a new interpretation of the Beatific Vision, the direct vision of God given to the righteous dead, who were traditionally thought of as being in the presence of God. Instead, the pope taught, they were in an intermediate state; protected by Christ, free from human woes, but still not in the direct presence of God. Not until the Last Judgment, the setting of all things right, would the faithful actually
see
God.
¹⁰

The sermon was preached on All Saints’ Day, when the church celebrated those who had finished the race of life and now lived on the other shore. To suggest that those faithful dead were
still
waiting, blocked from the presence of God, was more than a theological nicety. For fourteenth-century Christians, whose dead were numerous and close, who lived in the constant knowledge that they too faced the possibility of death from every accidental splinter, every sore throat, every minor burn, it was a fraught and painful message.

It took some time for the controversy over this sermon to spread, but by 1333 John XXII was defending himself against accusations of heresy from his cardinals. Louis IV seized on this theological problem and announced that he intended to call a council of his own, to make a formal accusation of heresy against the pope.

John XXII, by now nearly eighty-five, crumbled. He was ill and tired of fighting. On December 3, 1334, he retracted his teaching about the Beatific Vision, acknowledging that he had made a mistake. And on the next day, December 4, he died in Avignon.

His successor, Benedict XII, was elected with remarkable speed, thanks to the intervention of Philip VI of France. Louis offered to meet with the new pope in order to try to work out a compromise; but Philip VI demanded that a peace treaty with France be part of any German agreement with the Church, and this Louis refused to do. He remained an excommunicate Holy Roman Emperor; and the pope remained in Avignon, a servant of the French king.
¹¹

R
OME, POPE-LESS AND EMPEROR-LESS
, was in its usual chaotic and simmering state when the Italian poet Petrarch was crowned in Rome as Poet Laureate: the first time this honor had been carried out since ancient times.

Petrarch had been lobbying for the title, in a genteel and polished way, for some time. His father had been driven from Florence at about the same time as Dante; Petrarch, born afterwards, had been working in Avignon for years, writing a massive epic about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, traveling as the impulse struck him, and occasionally carrying out discreet diplomatic missions for the Avignon popes.

The Roman Senate, correctly interpreting Petrarch’s various oblique remarks as a request for the crown, invited the poet to Rome for his coronation. He chose Easter Sunday, April 18, 1341, as the day for the ceremony, and treated the assembled Romans and senators to an oration promising that the revival of the Poet Laureate position would help to bring about a new age in Rome. “I am moved also by the hope that, if God wills,” he told them, “I may renew in the now aged Republic a beauteous custom of its flourishing youth. . . . Boldly, therefore, perhaps but—to the best of my belief—with no unworthy intention, since others are holding back, I am venturing to offer myself as guide for this toilsome and dangerous path; and I trust that there may be many followers.” The path was the path of learning; the rediscovery of the truths of the past, the history and literature of Rome’s glory days. Poets and scholars, Petrarch explained, would save Italy; poets and scholars would lead the Italian cities back into peace and prosperity.
¹²

The choice of Easter Sunday was not random. Petrarch had in mind a resurrection for his beloved Rome, a return to the days when the Roman Empire had been whole and powerful, not split between squabbling rulers and priests. Italy could recover her greatness by returning to the world of Rome before Christianity, Rome in the golden age of Cicero and Virgil, Rome between the coronation of Romulus and the rule of the emperor Titus. This, he later wrote, was “a more fortunate age,” and it was time to return to its ideals. Between that golden time and the present lay “the middle,” an era of “wretches and ignominy,” centuries of
tenebrae
: of darkness.
¹³

A classical age of light and learning, followed by a Dark Age, culminating in a rebirth: a
renaissance
. Three epochs in history: antiquity, a Middle Age, and the present. Petrarch had laid out, for the first time, a scheme that would shape the next six hundred years of historical inquiry. And in doing so, he had inadvertently revealed that his hoped-for renaissance was already well underway. The twelfth-century rediscovery of Aristotle had begun it; the Christian church had fought it; by Easter Sunday of 1341, it had spread so far into the minds of the fourteenth-century multitude that Petrarch could talk of the Latin past with the assurance that the Roman crowd would understand exactly what he meant.

Chapter Seventy

The Cities in the Lake

Between 1325 and 1375,
the Mexica build two cities in Lake Texcoco,
choose two kings, and become the Aztecs

O
N THE
C
ENTRAL
A
MERICAN
land bridge, drought had rearranged the map.

Refugees from the dusty northwest were wandering farther and farther south into the more fertile valleys, searching for water and tillable ground. A certain sameness appears in the traditional tales of their journeys: Each group of refugees had left its homeland because the gods told them to go. Journeying south, they came first to the ruins of the half-mythical city of Tollan, burned in the middle of the eleventh century and deserted by its people. Tollan had been a blessed city, loved by the gods; but it too had fallen. So the exiles passed through it and traveled on to the lands where they now settled.
¹

One of these wandering tribes, the Mexica, trudged through wrecked Tollan and arrived in the valley that now bears their name: the Valley of Mexico. They told a story of being led from their faraway home, in a place called Aztlan, by their god Huitzilopochtli. After nearly a century of wandering, they had come at last to the valley. There they built their first homes on the crest of a hill called Chapultepec.

The locals were not pleased at the intrusion, and several years of destructive fighting followed. Finally the Mexica were beaten into submission, turned into slaves and servants. The surrounding tribes divided the defeated newcomers up; the largest group of Mexica was claimed by the king of Colhuacan, the city nearest to their hill, as his vassals. The Mexica had fought fiercely against their attackers, and their new master intended to use them as front-line troops in future wars.

As he didn’t really care whether or not they survived, he settled them in a barren plain south of his city; it was called Tizapan, and it was filled with rocks and poisonous snakes. But the Mexica were tough, and they survived in their inhospitable new land. For decades, they bided their time, serving the king of Colhuacan, building their strength.
²

Around 1325, they made an unmistakable gesture of defiance and independence. They told their royal master, the king Achitometl, that they wished to elevate his daughter, the princess of Colhuacan, to goddesshood, and asked that she be sent to them so that they could carry out the rituals.

The king agreed, and the princess was taken with great ceremony out to the highest point of Tizapan. An oral tradition, set down in the sixteenth century by the Spanish courtier Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, tells the rest of the story:

Then they slew the princess and they flayed her,

and after they flayed her, they dressed a priest in her skin.

Then they summoned her father, King Achitometl, to come and greet the goddess. Achitometl gathered up flowers and food to offer his daughter, and the Mexica led him into the darkened interior of their sacred building. He set the offerings down in front of the indistinct figure, but

he still did not see the person . . .

Then he made an offering of incense and the incense-burner blazed up,

and Achitometl saw a man in his daughter’s skin.

He was horror-struck.

He cried out, he shouted to his lords and to his vassals . . .

“They have flayed my daughter!

They shall not remain here, the fiends!

We shall slay them, we shall massacre them! The evil ones

shall be annihilated here!”
³

He set his warriors against the Mexica, and they were driven away from their inhospitable home in the barrens, into the waters of Lake Texcoco. Once they were splashing in the shallows, the Colhuacan soldiers drew back. “The Colhuacans thought they had perished in the water,” says Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc; more likely, the lake sat in a demilitarized zone, neutral ground that separated Colhuacan from the equally powerful city-states of Azcapotzalco and Texcoco. King Achitometl did not mind wiping out the helpless Mexica, but he did not wish to start a fight with his neighbors.
⁴