CHAPTER VII
MASKS AND MUMMERS
Amid the ruin of cities and the din of strife during the tenth centurydarkness closed in upon the Romans, while the figures of strangedespots emerged from obscurity only to disappear as quickly into thenight of oblivion. Little of them is known, save that they ruled thepeople and the pope with merciless severity, and that the first one ofthem was a woman.
The beautiful Theodora the older was the wife of Theophylactus, Consuland Patricius of Rome, but the permanence of her power seemed to havebeen due entirely to her own charm and personality.
Her daughter Marozia, with even greater beauty, greater fascinationand greater gift of daring, played even a more conspicuous part inthe history of her time. She married Alberic, Count of Spoleto, whosedescendants, the Counts of Tusculum, gave popes and mighty citizens toRome. One of their palaces is said to have adjoined the Church of S. S.Apostoli, and came later into the possession of the powerful house ofColonna.
Alberic of Spoleto soon died and Marozia, as the chronicles tellus, continued as the temporal ruler of the city and the arbitressof pontifical elections. She held forth in Castel San Angelo, theindomitable stronghold of mediaeval Rome.
In John X. who, in the year 914, had gained the tiara through Theodora,she found a man of character, whose aim and ambition were the dominionof Rome, the supremacy of the Church.
By the promise of an imperial crown, the pope gained Count Ugo ofTuscany to his party, but Marozia outwitted him, by giving her hand tohis more powerful half-brother Guido, then Margrave of Tuscany.
John X., after trying for two years, in spite of his enemies, tomaintain his regime from the Lateran, at last fell into their hands andwas either strangled or starved to death in the dungeons of Castel SanAngelo.
After the death of Guido, Marozia married his half-brother Ugo. Thestrange wedding took place in the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian,where a bridal hall and nuptial chamber had been arranged and adornedfor them.
From the fortress tomb of the Flavian Emperor, Ugo lorded it over thecity of Rome, earning thereby the hatred of the people and especiallyof young Alberic, his ambitious step-son, the son of Marozia and CountAlberic of Spoleto.
The proud youth, forced one day to serve him as a page, withintentional awkwardness, splashed some water over him and in returnreceived a blow. Mad with fury, Alberic rushed from Castel San Angeloand summoned the people to arms. The clarions sounded and the fortresstomb was surrounded by a blood-thirsty mob. In no time the actorschanged places. Ugo escaped by means of a rope from a window in thecastello and returned to Tuscany, leaving behind him his honor, hiswife and his imperial crown, while the youth Alberic became master ofRome, cast Marozia into a prison in Castel San Angelo and kept hishalf-brother, John XI., a close prisoner in the Lateran.
But the imprisonment of Marozia, and her mysterious disappearance fromthe scenes of her former triumphs and baleful activity did not end thestory of the woman regime in Rome.
There lived in a palace, built upon the ruins of nameless templesand sanctuaries, and embellished with all the barbarous splendor ofByzantine and Moorish arts, in the remote wilderness of Mount Aventine,a woman, who, in point of physical charms, ambition and daring had nother equal in Rome since the death of Marozia. Theodora the younger, asshe is distinguished from her mother, the wife of Theophylactus, bycontemporary chroniclers, was the younger sister of Marozia.
The boundless ambition of the latter had left nothing to achieve forthe woman who had reached her thirtieth year when Alberic's revolutionconsigned her sister to a nameless doom.
Strange rumors concerning her were afloat in Rome. Strange things werewhispered of her palace on Mount Aventine, where she assembled abouther the nobility of the city and the surrounding castelli, and soonher court vied in point of sumptuousness and splendor with the mostsplendid and profligate of her time.
Her admirers numbered by thousands, and her exotic beauty caused newlovers to swell the ranks of the old with every day that passed downthe never returning tide of time.
Some came openly and some came under the cover of night, heavilymuffled and cloaked: spendthrifts, gamblers, gallants, men of fashion,officers of the Senator's Court, poets, philosophers, and the feudallords of the Campagna.
Wealthy debauchees from the provinces, princes from the shores ofthe Euxine, Lombard and Tuscan chiefs, Northmen from Scandinavia andIceland, wearing over their gnarled limbs the soft silken tunics ofRome, Greeks, sleek, furtive-eyed, rulers from far-off Cathay, wearingcoats of crimson with strange embroidery from the scented East, menfrom the isles of Venetia and the stormy plains of Thessaly, men withnarrow slanting eyes from the limitless steppes of Sarmatia, blondwarriors from the amber coasts of the Baltic, Persian princes whoworshipped the Sun, and Moors from the Spanish Caliphate of Cordova;chieftains from the Lybian desert, as restive as their fiery steeds;black despots from the hidden heart of Africa, with thick lips andteeth like ivory, effete youths from Sicily and the Ionian isles,possessed of the insidious beauty of the Lesbian women, adventurersfrom Samarkand and Bokhara, trading in strange wares and steeped inodor of musk and spices; Hyperboreans from the sea-skirt shores of anever frozen unimaginable ocean;--from every land under the sun theycame to Rome, for the sinister fame of Theodora's beauty, the balefulmystery that surrounded her, and her dark repute proved powerfulincentives to curiosity, which soon gave way to overmastering passion,once the senses had been steeped in the intoxicating atmosphere of thewoman's presence.
And, indeed, her physical charms were such as no mortal had yetresisted whom she had willed to make her own. Her body, tall as acolumn, was lustrous, incomparable. The arms and hands seemed to havebeen chiselled of ivory by a master creator who might point with prideto the perfection of his handiwork--the perfection of Aphrodite, Laisand Phryne melted into one. The features were of such rare mould andfaultless type that even Marozia had to concede to her younger sisterthe palm of beauty. The wonderful, deep set eyes, with their everchanging lights, now emerald, now purple, now black; the straight,pencilled brows, the broad smooth forehead and the tiny ears, hidden inthe wealth of her raven hair, tied into a Grecian knot and surmountedby a circlet of emeralds, skillfully worked into the twining bodies ofsnakes with ruby eyes; the satin sheen of the milk-white skin whoseivory pallor was tinted with the faintest rose-light that never changedeither in heat or in cold, in anger or in joy: such was the womanwhose long slumbering, long suppressed ambition, coupled with a daringthat had not its equal, was to be fanned into a raging holocaust afterMarozia's untimely demise.
Concealing her most secret hopes and ambitions so utterly that evenAlberic became her dupe, Theodora threw herself into the whirl of lifewith a keen appreciation of all its thrilling excitement. Vitallyalive with the pride of her sex and the sense of its power, she foundin her existence all the zest of some breathlessly fascinating game.Men to her were mere pawns. She regarded them almost impersonally, ascreatures to taunt, to tempt, to excite, to play upon. Deliberately andunstintingly she applied her arts. She delighted to see them at herfeet, but to repel them as the mood changed, with exasperating disdain.Love to her was a word she knew but from report,--or, from what she hadread. She knew not its meaning, nor had she ever fathomed its depths.
To revel through delirious nights with some newly-chosen favoriteof the moment, who would soon thereafter mysteriously disappear, tobe tossed from the embrace of one into the arms of another; in therestless, fruitless endeavor to kill the pain of life, the memoryof consciousness, to fill the void of a heart, that, alive to theshallowness of existence, clutches at the saving hope of power, torule and to crush the universe beneath her feet, a dream, vague, vain,unattainable: this desire filled Theodora's soul.
Her soul was burning itself to cinders in its own fires,--those balefulfires that had proven the undoing of her equally beautiful sister.
Alone she would pace her gilded chambers, feverishly, unable to think,driven hither and thither by the demons of unrest, by the di
squietudeof her heart. Desperately she threw herself into whatever excitementoffered.
But it was always in vain.
She found no respite. Ever and ever a reiterant, restless cravinggnawed, like a worm, at her heart.
As she approached the thirtieth year of her life, Theodora had grownmore dazzling in beauty. Her body had assumed the wonderful plasticityof marble. Her eyes had become more unfathomable, more wondrouslychangeful in hues, like the iridescent waters of the sea.
Living as she did in an age where a morbid trend pervaded the world,where the approach of the Millennium, though no one of the presentgeneration would see the day, was heralded as the End of Time; livingas she did in the darkest epoch of Roman history, Theodora felt theutter inadequacy of her life, a hunger which nothing but power couldassuage.
Slowly this desire began to grow and expand. She wished to wield herwill, not only on men's emotions, but upon their lives as well. Perhapseven the death of Marozia, with its paralyzing influence over her soul,the captivity in the Lateran of her sister's son, and the hateful ruleof Alberic, would not have brought matters to a focus, had not theappearance upon the stage of a woman, who, in point of beauty, spiritand daring bade fair to constitute a terrible rival, roused all thedormant passions in Theodora's soul and when Roxana openly boastedthat she would wrest the power from the hands of her rival and rule inthe Emperor's Tomb in spite of the Pontiff, of Alberic and Marozia'sblood-kin, the soul of Theodora leaped to the challenge of the otherwoman and she craved for the conflict as she had never longed foranything in her life, save perchance, a love of which she had butpossessed the base counterfeit.
No one knew whence Roxana had come, nor how long she had been in Rome,when an incident at San Lorenzo in Lucina had brought the two womenface to face. Both, with their trains, had simultaneously arrivedbefore the portals of the sanctuary when Roxana barred Theodora's way.Some mysterious instinct seemed to have informed each of the personand ambition of the other. For a moment they faced each other whiteto the lips. Then Roxana and her train had entered the church, and asshe passed the other woman, a deadly challenge had flashed from herblue eyes into Theodora's dark orbs. The populace applauded Roxana'sdaring, and, in order to taunt her rival, she had established her courton desert Aventine, assembling about her the disgruntled lovers ofTheodora and others, whom her disdain had driven to seek oblivion andrevenge.
The land of Roxana's birth was shrouded in mystery. Some reported herfrom the icy regions of the North, others credited her with being thefugitive odalisque of some Eastern despot, a native of Kurdistan, thebeauty and fire of whose women she possessed to a high degree.
Such was Roxana, who had challenged Theodora for the possession of theEmperor's Tomb.
Under the Witches' Moon: A Romantic Tale of Mediaeval Rome Page 9
