The condemned man scarcely took notice of these preparations, even though the chains must have been cold to the touch, and they were rough and rusty. He was still busy searching the crowd. His agitation had increased visibly, and his eyes were darting about.
Gaburra finally attached the hook at the end of the chain that hung from the top of the pole. This part of his job finished, he turned and climbed the ladder. At the top, he drew a thick leather belt around his torso and clamped himself to the pole for better leverage. Bracing himself with his feet resting on two thick spikes, he began to heave. As he pulled on the chain, hand over hand, with his knotty arms, the prophet began to rise up, up into the air in short, quick jerks.
It took the executioner only a few minutes to get his man to the top. He had to stop once for breath. In that time, Pagolo had concluded that the rescue attempt was not going to be made. What had happened? Did they lack the courage? Had the prophet’s supporters underestimated the number of soldiers? Had they been betrayed?
Gaburra secured the chains and descended the ladder. The most difficult part of his job was done. As he stepped back to admire his handiwork, the soldiers brought bundles of wood and piled them high under the friar. Now twenty feet in the air, and tightly bound in chains, Savonarola dangled from the top of the pole, swaying slightly in the warm May breezes. But still his incessant, nervous eyes scanned the swarms of upturned faces that filled the square. And then he froze. He had found what he was looking for.
A hunchback, for there is always a hunchback when grim work needs doing, came out of the Signoria with a torch and handed it to Gaburra. A flame lit in hell. The executioner walked over to the bundled branches, the wood piled now to a height of almost fifteen feet, and thrust the torch into the center, where kindling had been placed to feed the fire. When he was sure that the flames had caught, he turned and walked back into the Signoria, certain of the result of his labors, the quality of his work, and not at all curious to see the grim ending of the spectacle he had created. His job was done.
The fire caught quickly. Although it had rained the night before, Gaburra had had the foresight to insist that the bundles of wood be stored inside and kept dry. In no time, the flames were soaring, almost licking at the heels of the man hanging in chains. But he was oblivious to them and gave no indication of feeling the first bursts of heat that were now rising. All the anxiety that Fra Pagolo had seen on his face was gone. It had been replaced by a look of grim intensity, and the prophet had fixed his gaze on one face in the crowd. The terrible power he had possessed and wielded was there again! It had welled up screaming from the depths behind his fierce green eyes. The cords of his neck were strained. Veins stood out on his forehead.
The flames had reached his feet now, but he did not flinch. The only movement he betrayed was a trembling as his eyes bored into those of an ordinary-looking young man standing in front of the Loggia della Signoria, to one side of the piazza. He was the man Savonarola had been looking for.
The man whose eyes met and held Savonarola’s frightening gaze did not turn away. By prearrangement, this young man had agreed to deliver an answer here today. As he looked into the desperate, screaming eyes of the dying prophet, he knew what they were demanding of him. He knew the awful burden they were asking him to assume.
The fire had reached the prophet now, and suddenly his hair burst into flames. He had long, silken hair that would shake in great black waves when he preached. But now, even as that fine hair erupted into a flaming crown, he did not move or avert his eyes.
It took Pagolo several minutes to comprehend. Startled by the prophet’s savage single-mindedness, taken aback and confused by the roar of the sacrificial flames, he came to himself only when the acrid smoke filled his nostrils, choking him. Pagolo turned and followed the direction of the holy man’s gaze until his eyes too came to rest on the unremarkable young man at the far end of the piazza. And his heart caught in his throat.
He watched in disbelief as the young man returned the prophet’s stare. And then he saw him finally, slowly, give a solemn nod of assent.
With that nod, Savonarola knew what he had to know before dying. His work would be carried on. The mission had been accepted. Completely sheathed in flames now, he turned away from the young man. With one last, tremendous effort, he lifted his eyes to heaven. There was a look of triumph on his face as the smoke and flames engulfed him.
As the fire raged, a hymn started, low at first, but soon everyone was singing with so much emotion that the strains of their song could be heard above the roar and crackle of the unholy blaze. They sang of the final days, of last things, of the world dissolving into ashes:
Dies irae, dies illa . . .
Days of anger, days of wrath . . .
What happened after that is unclear. The thick black smoke swallowed up both prophet and scaffold and filled the city. No one could see clearly. When the fire had burned itself out, and the smoke cleared, a set of empty chains was hanging at the top of the gallows.
The hunchback had been instructed to stir up the ashes under the chains to be sure that the body of the dangerous heretic was completely consumed. A relic, no matter how small—a piece of bone—might be enough to fan the flames of insubordination among his followers and keep their hopes alive. And their seditious movement.
The hunchback knew that no matter how tightly binding the chains were, something was likely to slip through as the body disintegrated—an arm, a leg—sometimes the head falls off. He knew because he and Gaburra had experimented the day before with the good brother Domenico and the madman Maruffi, accomplices of this one they burned today. They hadn’t hoisted them up quite so high. That wasn’t necessary. They just wanted to make sure that the method worked, that nothing went wrong. Gaburra was a professional, and he took pride in his craft.
“Yesterday,” the hunchback remembered, “after the fires went out, there were still parts of the bodies hanging in the chains. Stubborn. We had to throw stones up there to knock them down.” But today as he searched through the ashes—nothing. “That’s odd,” he thought, “usually there’s bones. Bones are tough. Never burn all the way through. I guess the fire was hotter than we thought.”
It was almost dark when the crowds, numbed by the spectacle they had witnessed, finally began to leave the piazza. Gaburra returned to finish the job. With the help of his assistant, he chopped down the post from which the chains had been suspended and laid it on the scaffolding. Huge piles of brush were placed under the platform, and the entire structure burned to the ground. Carters were later called in, and they loaded the ashes into deep, two-wheeled carts. Accompanied by soldiers armed with maces and clubs, they hauled every bit of dust and ash to the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio, and threw it into the river.
Returning to the convent of San Lorenzo, Fra Pagolo was uncharacteristically thoughtful. People were talking. They had seen things. An old woman swore that when she looked up, she saw not the miserable, naked monk hanging in chains, but a glorious figure clothed in a white robe trimmed with gold. The chains had slipped away. He was free. Through the thick smoke, she swore she saw him rise up, up, transfigured. Angels carried him up to heaven. She swore.
Others had seen things too. Moses and Jesus figured prominently in their excited accounts. The angel Gabriel. Saint Dominic. And no one could deny that, in the stillness that followed the roaring conflagration, a lone white dove had sailed across the wide, open space of the piazza and had come to rest on the windowsill of the Alberghettino, the tiny, isolated prison cell where Savonarola had spent his last night on earth.
But what had Pagolo seen? Angels and a white robed figure? The soul of a sacrificial victim in the form of a dove? “No, none of that,” he thought, for his eyes were unworthy. Or at least they were stinging from the smoke. He hadn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but something very troubling, nonetheless. Or had he merely imagined it?
No, he had seen what he had seen. He had seen the eyes of one man seek out t
hose of another. At first, he thought of a curse, the curse of a dying monk or something like that—some treachery or betrayal repaid with the undying enmity of a doomed man. But it was something entirely different. A plea? A commission? Had there even been an element of tenderness or pity in that wordless exchange? To Pagolo’s way of thinking, it resembled nothing so much as the injunction of a dying father to his only son to honor his last request. But, of course, concluded the befuddled Pagolo, that was impossible, utterly impossible.
No act of intuition on Pagolo’s part could have brought him any closer to the truth. There were too many things he had no way of knowing. He could not even have guessed that one man had agreed to become the other’s successor and accomplice in an act of terrifying destruction. The terms of that agreement had been spelled out between them in stark and vivid detail, prophetic terms that only thirty years hence would bear fruit. Would Pagolo have even believed that, as a consequence of that agreement, one day a pope would be brought to his knees and the very foundations of Christendom shaken? That the fury of hell would be unleashed on all of Italy? That fire and the sword would come, and in the end, in a last devastating gasp of destruction, Rome, the eternal city, would be overrun by the armies of the new barbarians?
Pagolo had no way of knowing these things. And so, on that balmy spring night he was puzzled. He wondered why this strange monk, this prophet and heretic, had been staring with such grim intensity at that young man. In his last minutes on earth, the fire already ablaze in his hair and giving him the aura of some ancient god, Girolamo Savonarola had inexplicably singled out one man in a crowd of many thousands. And although Pagolo had not seen him in over eight years, he was certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that that unremarkable young man was his boyhood friend—Niccolo Machiavelli.
Bartolommea was in labor for over twelve hours. The birth had been difficult, but fortunately, without serious complications. She was a frail and pious woman, and it occurred to her more than once in the course of her travails that the pain being visited upon her was just punishment for her having actually enjoyed the embraces of her husband.
The infant, washed and wrapped in swaddling clothes, was nestled comfortably in the arms of its exhausted mother. It was just after dawn, and the two attending midwives had retreated to the kitchen, where they were rewarding themselves with huge plates of fried eggs, swimming in fruity, green oil.
Bernardo, the weary but exuberant father, had climbed up to the wide balcony that spanned the front of his house. He wanted to be alone for a few minutes to take in the cool morning air and to congratulate himself on the birth of his second child.
Even at this early hour, the city below him was already seething with activity. It was 1469, and Florence was one of the world’s five largest cities. A haphazard and unsystematic census taken several years earlier recorded the existence of over fifty thousand “mouths of men, women, and children,” within her walls. Three other Italian cities—Naples, Venice, and Milan—boasted slightly larger populations. Outside the peninsula, only Paris was larger. London, by comparison, was a squalid provincial town.
Merchants’ records of the time indicate that, every day, the 50,000 Florentine mouths consumed 2,300 bushels of grain, 20,000 pounds of cheese, and in excess of 70,000 liters of wine. Each year, 4,000 cattle and over 100,000 assorted sheep, goats, and pigs were slaughtered to supply the hungry city with meat.
From his vantage point, Bernardo looked calmly down at his cluttered and disorderly city. Only two buildings stood out plainly in the general jumble of brick, stone, and stucco—the Signoria and the Duomo, Florence’s seat of government and her cathedral, the centers of her political and spiritual lives. All the rest seemed welded together in a solid block of masonry, a tangle of fortresslike palaces, crowded tenements with spiny roofs, churches, abbeys, convents, nunneries, shops, sheds, mills, and manufactories. From this incoherent mass of building material, ancient towers with tiny windows jutted out everywhere, cocked at odd angles.
Irregularity bordering on chaos might be an apt description of Florentine architecture at the time. But there was more to the city than a welter of odd, often ugly shapes. The true measure of her beauty lay in the harmony of her colors—burnt orange and umber, mustard yellow, the bleached red of the terra-cotta roofs. Suffused with the morning sun, Florence was a city of gold.
Despite the cramped character of her urban landscape, Florence was not entirely without breathing room. Empty spaces, gardens, orchards, and vineyards served as a buffer zone between the dense core of the city’s center and the massive stone walls that surrounded it. A hundred and twenty years ago, the city had filled these walls near to bursting. But the Black Death that swept through Europe in 1348 and again in 1400 carried off over two-thirds of the Florentine population. The city contracted, pulled in on itself. Tracts of wooden houses on the periphery were burned and were not rebuilt. Now with her diminished population, Florence, although prosperous, floated within the circle of her walls like a small child in the armor of a giant.
Bernardo was roused from his reverie by a terrifying sight. A bright red stain was spreading on the surface of the muddy Arno, as if the blood of an entire army had flowed into the river. “Sangue di Cristo! What an omen!” he cried. His right hand moved to make the sign of the cross. And a second later, he burst out laughing at himself. It was only a group of cloth dyers on the northern bank, flushing out their vats to begin the day’s work.
Bernardo had already decided that the birth of a child was a momentous occasion and more than enough of an excuse to take a few days off from his work. He went back down the cool stone stairway to the second-floor bedroom where Bartolommea had recently given birth. Both mother and child were sleeping when he looked in—the ruddy, wrinkled face of a newborn baby in the arms of a pale woman. He retreated noiselessly, a broad smile of satisfaction on his face.
It was midmorning, and the sun was already high in the sky when Bernardo stepped out into the Via Romana and darkness. In Florence, even at high noon the street was almost pitch black. Little air and less light filtered down to ground level, due to the sporti, the ubiquitous balconies that projected from the facades of the Florentine houses out over the streets. Three stories up, and running the entire length of the house, Bernardo’s balcony loomed, reaching out and nearly touching its counterpart across the street. Recently, the city had been waging an aggressive campaign against the sporti. Arguing, correctly, that the balconies hampered communication and blocked out air and light, officials banned them and began levying heavy fines on their owners. But this action in no way influenced the thinking of Bernardo, even though he was a jurisconsul and sworn to uphold the law. He preferred to break it and pay the fines. Like many other Florentines, he was not willing to sacrifice the pleasures afforded him and his family by the balcony—dining out in the cool evening breezes, sitting under the stars at night, watching the sunrise. “Besides,” he argued, “There’s a positive side. So the street’s a little dark. At least you don’t get wet when it rains.”
Bernardo made his way slowly up the clogged and noisy street. Animals were everywhere—barking and grunting and quacking and snorting. Every imaginable variety of dog roamed freely, mangy, starving dogs and pampered, manicured little dogs with silver collars. Tiny mice skipped through the dirty straw and rats lurched into dark drains. Pigs and geese rooted in the doorways. Peasants drove cattle and sheep to the Mercato Vecchio. Oxen drew heavy carts loaded with produce. “Animals and animal shit,” thought Bernardo, “Dogshit, horseshit, catshit, and pigshit.” He crushed and sniffed the laurel leaf that he always carried with him, perfume to alleviate the stench. Not for the first time, he envied Lorenzo de’ Medici his nose. Long and flat and bent in the middle, Lorenzo’s nose, although extraordinarily ugly, was the envy of all Florence. It had no sense of smell.
Still, Bernardo reflected, it could be worse. The tanning factories and slaughterhouses, two of the most filthy-smelling industries known to man, had been jud
iciously outlawed within the city walls. He had been to cities where this was not the case, and the stench was considerably more intense. Then too, Florence had one great advantage over the Tuscan hilltop towns when it came to hygiene—the Arno. Sooner or later, most of the dirt and the shit was pushed into the river and carried off, a gift to the people of Pisa, downstream. Another whiff of laurel.
Bernardo squinted in the bright sun as he emerged on the south bank of the river near the old stone bridge, the Ponte Vecchio. The banks of the river were wide and still grassy in spots, providing a swath of rustic relief in the heart of the clogged city. A merciful breeze blew from the hills in the south, and Bernardo was able to tuck his laurel away for the time being. He made his way across the bridge, the oldest in Florence, oldest because it was the first bridge to be built of stone. The wooden ones had all been burned. The Ponte Vecchio crossed the Arno at its narrowest point, and both sides of the bridge were lined with an odd collection of houses and shops. “Why would anyone want to live on a bridge?” thought Bernardo. In his boyhood, he remembered, the shops were occupied by pursemakers, but now they’d been taken over by butchers. And butcher shops meant one thing—dogs. More dogs here than anyplace else in the city. Bernardo hated dogs. And dogshit.
Bernardo’s first stop that day was the Old Market, where, among other things, barbers shaved their customers out in the open air. He sat contentedly, eyes half shut, as the razor did its work. The barber’s skilled hands had to stretch the soft, puffy skin of his jowls to shave them cleanly. Ten years ago, that flesh was firm. Still, as a man of forty, a successful man, he was entitled to his indulgences.
A voice more strident than most managed to make itself heard over the general din of the marketplace and attracted Bernardo’s attention. It belonged to one of the many professional criers who marched about the town, calling out the news or gossip or whatever. This particular one was enthusiastically touting the virtues and the low prices of some fat, fresh carp caught only moments ago by Nello the fisherman and available, while it lasted, at the far end of the market near the candle makers’ houses. Nello paid the crier a penny for each carp he sold. Bernardo, always highly suggestible, made a mental note to inspect the carp. Carp and artichokes would make a splendid dinner to celebrate the arrival of his newborn baby.
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 4
