The crier continued with the news of the day, and the only news for the past several months had to do with the impending marriage of the city’s foremost citizen, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Florentines were scandalized when last year it was announced that Lorenzo would wed Clarice Orsini, a non-Florentine, an outsider, and worst of all, a Roman! But the Medici were old hands at influencing public opinion, and in February they hosted a lavish tournament to quell the outraged populace. Heads of state from all over Italy were invited to compete, and 10,000 Medici ducats bought the most splendid spectacle the city had ever seen. Free food and drink for several days and magnificent entertainments ensured the wildly enthusiastic cheers of thousands of supporters. Bread and circuses.
Little was known about the bride-to-be, for she had not yet arrived in Florence. And the air was thick with rumors. She’s cross-eyed. She has a moustache! A portrait had been forwarded, as was the custom, but portraits were always flattering. But now, according to the crier, there was news of the girl. Wanting nothing left to chance, Lucrezia de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s mother, had traveled to Rome, allegedly to visit her brothers. She had actually gone to inspect the girl personally. She had just returned and made her report public. According to the crier, Lucrezia had first caught sight of her future daughter-in-law in the company of her mother on their way to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Clarice, after the Roman fashion, was wearing a lenzuola, a voluminous gown, that hung loosely and hid the body from head to toe. Lucrezia was furious. All she could determine that day was that the girl was tall.
On her second sighting, she fared little better and cursed the Roman women for covering themselves up so thoroughly. This time, she studied the girl at length, following her from the church all the way back to the Orsini palace. While the girl’s figure remained shrouded in mystery, Lucrezia was able to see that she had long and delicate hands, a round face, and a nice complexion. On the negative side, her neck was too thin, and she did not carry her head well, as Florentine girls do, but poked it out in front of her. And, horror of horrors, her hair was red!
The ambiguous report only fueled the fires of speculation, and a whole new round of rumors began to circulate. She’s a hunchback! She’s incredibly fat! She’s already pregnant!
No one was less concerned about the dimensions of Lorenzo’s intended than Bernardo. “Who gives a damn? The uglier the better,” he thought. In his heart of hearts, Bernardo harbored no love for Lorenzo or any of the Medici. He was glad that he would be taking his family away before the wedding. Before the bread and circuses.
Relying once more on his laurel, a cleanly shaven Bernardo made his way across town, through the usual dark, damp tangle of men and animals, to the Piazza della Signoria. The piazza was the largest single open space in the city and admitted light and air freely. Bernardo’s destination was the Signoria, the seat of the Florentine government, at the far eastern end of the square. The building itself was over two hundred years old, finished in the late thirteenth century. It was a massive, austere fortress that reflected the temperament of the men who had built it—hard, assertive, and suspicious. It had been conceived by these builders as a bastion of defense to protect Florence’s republican form of government and to preserve her liberty. Over the years, the forbidding palace had been attacked from many quarters, but never destroyed. The Signoria was a monument to the Florentine character, with her brooding facade and high, graceful bell tower, a sign in stone of independence—and defiance.
Adjacent to the palace was the Loggia della Signoria, a collonaded open space, often used as a dignified setting for official ceremonies. But on most days it served as a shaded place where the men of Florence gathered to discuss the two subjects with which they were passionately obsessed—politics and women. Bernardo had spent many hours there himself and had engaged in his share of lively disputes. But today he had no intention of stopping. He had no stomach for what he knew the discussion would surely be about. And indeed, as he hurried by, saluting a few friends and colleagues, his suspicions were confirmed by what he managed to overhear: “I heard she’s fat as a house and has a glass eye! She’s only seventeen, and her ass has already fallen! She’s left-handed!”
He entered the Signoria and tripped lightly up the stairs to the office of the registry. The huge carp that he was carrying weighed over ten pounds, and he was relieved to be able to put it down for a minute. His sleeve smelled like fish.
Bernardo looked around but saw no one. The entire room was lined with shelves that housed an incredible collection of massive, dusty ledgers—the history of Florence, recorded on a day-to-day basis in a thousand mundane details—taxes, property transfers, deeds, marriages, births, and deaths.
“Folco, Folco, where are you, you ancient bastard?” A wizened, bent, grey man emerged from a door at the back of the room. Folco was as old and as dusty as the books he kept.
“Bernardo! What brings you here?” Without a word, Bernardo reached deep into a pocket in his jacket and extracted two beans, one white, one black. He placed them on the counter.
“Another one, and so soon. Your Totto was born less than a year ago, wasn’t he?” queried the old man.
“Yes another one, and not the last, if Bartolommea holds up.”
“Well, what is it this time, a boy or a girl?”
“You’re a wagering man, you tell me.”
“What’ll we bet?
Bernardo considered for a minute, “I’ll bet this luscious carp, all ten pounds of it, for one of the books you keep back there and never read.”
“Which book?”
“The Caesar.”
“Done! In my expert opinion, I hazard to guess that you have just become the proud father of a baby girl, who will be a burden to you all your days, and who will be so ugly—like her father!—that you’ll never be able to raise enough money for a dowry to marry her off.”
Bernardo grinned, and played thoughtfully with the white bean, pushing it around with his finger. Then, triumphantly, he snatched the black bean and held it in front of the old man’s eyes.
“A son!” crowed Folco.
“Yes, a son. Another son.”
“Tell me, is he scrawny like his mother, or fat and ugly like his father?”
“He’s red as a beet and wrinkled. But he cries so lustily you know there’s spirit in the boy.”
“Well, let’s get him registered.” Folco pulled down a massive tome and opened it to a place marked by a ribbon.
As Bernardo supplied the necessary information, the old man wrote in a cramped but elegant script:
Machiavelli, Niccolo di Bernardo
3 May 1469
When he finished writing, Folco blotted the ink dry and slammed the book shut in a flurry of dust. Bernardo consigned the black bean to the keeper of records and watched as he dropped it into a huge clay jar. The living and the dead of Florence were tallied in that jar. Each bean represented one Florentine citizen, black for boys, white for girls. There were over fifty thousand beans in the jar. Nobody knew precisely how many. Nobody ever counted. Before going home that evening, Folco would drop three more black beans into the jar, and because of a fire that swept through the clothworkers’ shacks in the Oltarno section, he would take out a fistful, twenty-four black, seventeen white.
There was nothing extraordinary about Niccolo Machiavelli’s early childhood. As the second son, he deferred in many things to his older brother, Totto. After Niccolo, in short order, Bartolommea gave birth to two daughters, Primerana and Ginevra. The family divided their time between the city and their country house, and Niccolo felt equally at home in each. One of his earliest memories was of the bed where he slept as a child, along with his brother and two sisters. Even by adult standards, the bed was enormous, almost twelve feet across. It stood on a raised wooden platform in the center of the room. The bed was canopied, and heavy drapes hung on all sides. In the eyes of a small child, it was an impregnable fortress, a walled city all to itself.
The four little Machi
avellis slept, lined up side by side, under linen sheets. In the winter, scaldini, earthenware jars filled with hot charcoal were placed within the confines of their magic kingdom to keep the children warm. As a result of their father’s obsession with smells, the air in the room was sweetened by the scent of herbs, burning slowly in pierced globes that hung from the ceiling. Dragoncello and rosmarino were the incense of their childhood.
Bartolommea Machiavelli had always been an extremely devout woman, and as she grew older, her devotion increased. She lived in a world where Madonnas wept and statues of saints moved to signal their approval or displeasure. Not everyone could always see the movement, or the tears, but she could. Every evening, she assembled her children and said the rosary with them. She composed hymns to the Blessed Mother and taught the children to sing them. Niccolo could never carry a tune.
When the boys were old enough to understand these things, she took them to the cathedral to see the blessed relics, purchased at enormous expense by the wool merchants’ guild—a piece of the true cross, a fragment of Christ’s clothing, and a part of the cane used in the scourging at the pillar.
If Niccolo showed little enthusiasm for the pieties of his mother, he was fascinated by the stories his grandmother would tell him. Once, when she was a girl, her brother Dono had confided to her that a certain woman was a witch. Moreover, he said, every night this witch turned herself into a toad and went about the countryside on her unseemly errands.
“Your Uncle Dono was smart and not afraid of anything, Coluccio, like you. You take after him. One night, he waited outside the witch’s house. At midnight, he saw a toad hopping across the field between the house and the barn. And he caught it! He twisted the back leg of the toad and let it go.
“The next day, Coluccio, we saw the witch and she was limping!”
It was not that grandmother Machiavelli was impious or heretical. Hadn’t she explained to her grandson that fireflies were the souls of infants who had died without baptism? But she understood that there were things that Christianity did not fully explain. Older, more mysterious things. For her, the night breezes were full of malevolent things. Drafts were dangerous. Phantoms and demons and lost souls roamed the world. They had to be taken into account.
Not all the stories she told Niccolo concerned the sacred and profane mysteries that so fascinated him. Like the stories told to children all over the world, quite a few were intended to curb his rambunctiousness and make him behave and obey. Like the one about the Turk who lived in the attic. The Turk was so depraved and rabid that, on any given day, the only thought in his head was to burst out of the attic and eat little children. Only their good conduct, somehow, mysteriously, kept him at bay. A bird that had gotten trapped in the eaves or a rat scuffling across the attic floor were enough to elicit fearful cries from the children—Il Turco! It’s the Turk!
After the Turk and next to the danger of being kidnapped by gypsies and being forced to work in the carnival, steal, and drink blood, the worst specter that hung over Niccolo’s early life was Agnese. Agnese was a withered old peasant woman, dressed all in black, who lived near the Machiavelli farm in San Casciano. At first Niccolo suspected her of being a witch and transforming herself nightly into a toad. But his grandmother enlightened him. “Never go near Agnese. Hide when you see her. She has a farm and she steals little children, especially bad ones. She makes them work all day, and if they stop, she beats them with big currying combs. At night, they sleep on the floor and get only stale bread and water.” To make matters worse, Agnese raised only one crop on her dreaded farm—onions. And the children would weep all day as they worked!
Bernardo Machiavelli was a studious man, and so it was with great pleasure that he undertook the early instruction of his two sons. He taught them their letters and the numbers. Niccolo was an eager pupil and learned effortlessly. Such was not the case with Totto, and Bernardo was grudgingly beginning to admit to himself that there was a certain dullness of intellect in his firstborn son. Ah well, he could always make a banker of him.
But Niccolo, the younger son, showed such promise that, when the boy was seven years old, Bernardo thought it time to hire a professional tutor, and the very best he could afford. Due to his relatively modest means, though, he finished by engaging the services of a certain Master Matteo.
Matteo’s credentials were questionable and his past difficult to document. Rumors circulated of a brilliant future at the papal court, of some long-buried scandal, of indiscretions that had put an abrupt end to his career. But there was no question as to his abilities. Bernardo had ascertained that Matteo’s command of Latin was masterful, and that several of his ex-pupils were among the most accomplished stylists in Florence. Besides, Bernardo liked the man. There was a fire in his old, crafty eyes that was missing in the young pedants he had interviewed—doe-eyed university graduates. So what if his tastes in literature ran to the lascivious and he preferred Ovid and Catullus to Horace and the moral Seneca?
Matteo provided the boy with sound instruction, even if it was heavily colored by his own irreverence. He often teased his pupil, and like a good teacher, excited his imagination. His pedagogical methods were unorthodox, but they worked. He had a way of presenting a lesson so that it stuck in a student’s mind, like the time he taught Niccolo about the devil’s ass and the angel’s thousand black teeth.
For over a week, he had teased and tormented the boy with that phrase. “No, I don’t think you’re ready yet to learn about something as frightening as the devil’s ass and the angel’s thousand black teeth. Not just yet.”
Finally, one day he relented. “Open those two books sitting in front of you,” Matteo told the boy. “Now what do you see?”
“One is my Latin vocabulary, and the other one is a grammar,” replied the boy without hesitation.
“Yes, of course, but they’re different, aren’t they? Which one is easier to read?”
“The grammar is, the handwriting is so much bigger and it’s not as cramped.”
“That’s right. The grammar was copied only about a year ago. I did it myself, and I used the script we all use now here in Florence, the one developed by that highly revered ass, Coluccio Salutati. The vocabulary, on the other hand, was written in a different script, I would say one that was popular about a hundred years ago. Very difficult to read. And if you ever saw books copied in England or Germany, you’d find them impossible. All the letters look like tiny drawings of those great, pointed church towers they have up there. You might be reading Greek or Arabic, for all the resemblance they have to Latin characters.
“Anyway, you’ve been writing for a while now, Signor Niccolo. How long does it take to copy a page and do it respectably, so you can read it?”
“It would take me all day, but for a scribe, to do a good job, a few hours, I guess.”
“Let’s say that four or five pages a day is a decent speed, and that’s not counting for illustrations. At that rate, how long would our man require to copy a book of four hundred pages? The arithmetic is simple, come on.”
“One hundred days.”
“Right. About a hundred days, a little over three months. So you understand why books are so rare, and so expensive. And you understand why so few people can afford to learn to read. But that’s all about to change and very soon. And it’s going to be because of the angel’s thousand black teeth! Here, look at this.” He handed Niccolo a small, unpretentious-looking volume, bound in plain, cheap leather. “Open it.”
The boy started. Instead of the usual page, crammed with small, characters and tangled ligatures and endless superscriptions and abbreviations, there was a text of startling clarity. The letters were large and regular. They stood, each apart, and not all linked together in longhand. They looked like inscriptions cut boldly and cleanly in stone and not scratched on the page in ink.
“Do you know how long it took to copy that page, Niccolo? About one minute! And in the space of an hour, a hundred more, just like it, were made.
In three months, at that speed, you’ll have not one book but a thousand books! Think of it, Niccolo!”
The year was 1477, and the first printing press had just been set up in Florence. Master Matteo went on to explain to his young charge the mysteries of movable type. “These thousands of letters cast in lead, then inked, are the teeth of the angel. And they’ll bite again and again and again, until the blessings of knowledge are available to all men. It will change the world, Niccolo, make no mistake about it.”
The boy examined the book in amazement. So easy to read, so clear, and each page took less than a minute. It was a miracle. Matteo cleared his throat to bring his pupil back to attention.
“And now, young man, let me tell you about something more sinister that they say comes directly from the devil’s ass. You’ve heard of Black Brother Berthold up in Germany, and his diabolical invention?”
Niccolo had not heard of Black Brother Berthold.
“The Black Brother is said to be the man who invented explosive powder, Niccolo. It’s black, grainy powder that explodes with tremendous force when you touch a flame to it. If you use enough powder, and pack it tightly, the explosion can shatter the gates of a city and knock down her walls. The walls of Florence, twenty feet high and six feet thick, would not stand long against a blast of flame from the devil’s ass!”
Niccolo was both excited and frightened by what he had heard. That night, he slept fitfully; his dreams were full of demons and angels—demons with huge black buttocks and angels with grinning mouths full of rotten black teeth. In the years to come, he would have to carve out for himself a life in the territory defined by these two inventions, between the devil’s ass and the angel’s thousand black teeth.
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 5
