While Latin was not the only subject that Niccolo studied, it was the most important. Only Latin could provide access to other areas of inquiry. Everything was written in Latin. It was the gateway to all knowledge. Gradually, as the boy’s Latin improved, his tutor would introduce other subjects into the curriculum—history and philosophy and music and arithmetic. But at the beginning, it was only Latin.
After plowing fearlessly through his Latin declensions and conjugations and what seemed at times sadistic grammatical exercises, young Niccolo was ready to read his first book. His tutor had chosen a standard pedagogical text, the Liber Sanctorum, Book of the Saints. The book, and others like it, were widely used to teach beginning reading. Its sentences were written in a straightforward, unadorned style, which the older boys scornfully called “baby Latin.”
In addition to providing practice in deciphering Latin syntax and building vocabulary, the Liber Sanctorum filled another important educational function. It contained the stories of holy men and women whose lives were to serve as outstanding examples of upright Christian behavior for the book’s impressionable young readers. Niccolo read it avidly and quickly absorbed all the book had to teach on the ablative absolute and deponent verbs. But the effect of the Liber Sanctorum’s moral instruction on the young Machiavelli was more problematic.
When he had finished all the stories, Niccolo made a list:
St. John the Baptist, beheaded
St. Stephen, stoned to death
St. Sebastian, shot full of arrows
St. John the Apostle, boiled in oil
St. Lawrence, grilled
St. Paul, crucified
St. Peter, crucified upside down
Sts. Agatha, Perpetua, Lucy, Agnes, defiled by Romans
Of the thirteen lives contained in the book, Niccolo counted eleven that had ended in violent death. The saints’ mysterious desire to fling themselves into the jaws of martyrdom at any cost troubled him, and he was not at all sure he wanted to pursue sainthood as a calling when he grew up.
Puzzled by this spiritual shortcoming, Niccolo confided in his tutor. He did not dare go to his mother with his doubts. She would accuse him of blasphemy, or worse. Matteo, however, laughed heartily when he heard what his young charge had done.
“Signor Niccolo,” he said, “it seems that you are not yet ready for sainthood. Read your Augustine again, boy. Don’t you see that God is generous, reasonable? And He allows a man to enjoy a long and dissolute youth before calling him to the rigors and sacrifices of the saintly life!” And so it was that Niccolo, under the tutelage of Master Matteo, grew in wisdom and age, if not in grace.
Bernardo, enormously pleased with Niccolo’s rapid progress in both reading and composition, decided it was time to give his son the copy of The Caesar he had been saving for him. He related how he had won the book from old Folco in the registry on the day of Niccolo’s birth.
An avid reader, Niccolo settled down immediately with the prized book and the famous words that generations of students of Latin had read before him. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres—All Gaul is divided into three parts . . .” And as he proceeded into Gaul with Caesar and the Roman armies, his admiration for them turned to awe and reverence. Who were these Romans?
They were certainly not the Romans he had been prepared for, the Romans from the saints’ stories. Those Romans were awful. They were fat and debauched and gluttonous. They ate and forced themselves to vomit so they could eat more. The greatest pleasure they had in life was defiling Christian virgins. They lived for the day when they had the opportunity to desecrate the holy Eucharist. They reveled in torturing and crucifying converts, in hunting them down like dogs and killing them in their catacombs, in making them fight lions and barbarians in the Coliseum.
Caesar’s Romans were different. They were men of iron who could march fifteen leagues in a day across mountains and rough terrain. They slept in rain and snow, wrapped only in their cloaks, and ate nothing but hard biscuits and dried meat. They swept across Europe, from one end to the other, and nothing could stand in their way. In battle, they were brilliant strategists, always outwitting and outmaneuvering the enemy. And when they had to stand and fight, they fought like men possessed.
Niccolo had made his first real contact with the ancient Romans, and it struck a sympathetic nerve. It kindled in him a passion that he would carry with him to his grave. The Romans! When he finished The Caesar, he would read Justin, and move quickly on to Livy’s monumental history, Ab urbe condita. So dear to him did this book become, that later in life, he would write a thousand-page commentary on it, a meditation on the civilization and the virtues that his Romans bequeathed to the world. But, for the time being, the youngster was fascinated by the battle and the bravery, by the tales of Aeneas and Romulus, by Scipio who destroyed Carthage and Hannibal only to be treacherously poisoned by his own wife. He was mesmerized by Caesar, who became a tyrant—and by Brutus, the tyrannicide.
In the shadows just before first light, moving deftly from long practice, the city takes final precautions to conceal her nocturnal secrets. Lovers slip from each other’s grasp, and men on more ungodly errands melt away with the fleeing darkness. As Florence stirs to shake off the night’s lethargy, all that can be heard are the small, private noises of those who rise before dawn: a cough, a moan, the occasional heaving and sighing of a more determined sort, muttered prayers, and curses.
One by one, the reluctant citizens of the republic drag themselves from their beds. Sluggish feet stumble across cold stone floors; hose are laced; stubborn boots tugged on; shirts are pulled down over tousled heads, here with the whisper of silk, there the rasp of rough wool.
Before long, the shock of ice-cold water will drive off sleep, and a torrent of clanging bells will break the night’s hypnotic spell. From outside the city walls will rise a joyous cacophony of mooing and braying and bleating, barking and crowing, the spontaneous chorus that greets the daily miracle of the rising sun.
Under the massive wooden doors of the Porta San Piero Gattolino stood young Niccolo Machiavelli, waiting. The boy was dressed for the country, in woolen hose and a short leather jacket cinched with a wide belt. The quiver and bow slung over his shoulder and the leather game bag that hung at this side were indications that a day of hunting was planned.
As he stood in the dispersing darkness, his eyes darted instantly in the direction of any stray sound that filtered down to him through the maze of towers and twisted streets of the ancient city—the creak of shutters cautiously opened, the scuttling of tiny rats’ feet. With his head full of stories, even the innocent click of a latch was a powerful stimulus to his imagination. His thoughts were very much on the night’s vanishing denizens, the people with secrets moving quietly in the grey light.
Young Niccolo’s Florence was thick with thieves and populated by agile lovers climbing over balconies and down trellises. His enthusiasm for nocturnal complicity knew no bounds. Plots were hatched at night. Transgressions were punished, enemies dispatched, and wrongs avenged. Outside the laws of civilization, justice was administered according to an older code. And in that same darkness, the boy knew, lurked the glories and dangers of love! Ecstatic unions and the fear of discovery. Enraged husbands and resourceful lovers.
As his imagination boiled over with stories of cuckolds and spies, with their assignations and secret signs, Niccolo’s curiosity was aroused by a growing clatter in the direction of the Via Chiara. From a distance, it sounded like the approach of a small, noisy army. A scuffle? An arrest? With perhaps exaggerated caution, he went to have a look.
Niccolo was unprepared for the sight that greeted him when he peered around the corner into the Via del Cocomero. He burst into laughter. For, hurtling down the narrow street, off-balance, rattling and scraping against building walls and barely managing to avoid a disastrous fall with every step, was his hunting companion, Pagolo Pulci.
Pagolo’s natural lack of grace was aggravated by the heavy lea
ther armor strapped to his shins and thighs. It effectively prevented him from exerting any real control over his legs. To complicate matters, his padded leather casque, too large, had slipped down over his eyes, blinding him, and he had no way of pushing it up again. His hands were fully occupied with juggling the extensive arsenal he seemed to have brought along. Niccolo marveled at the extent of his friend’s preparations—a bow and two quivers, a heavy studded club, a spear, a short sword, a hunting knife, several coils of rope, a woodsman’s ax, and a horn. He also carried a satchel bulging with bread, cheeses, sausages, and a flask of wine. This tangle of weaponry and baggage might have been manageable, even for the clumsy Pagolo, had it not been for the most extraordinary thing of all. Dragging him along, much against his will, but completely out of his control, at the end of a long leather leash was a small but very exuberant pig!
At the corner of the Via Chiara, the pig lurched sharply to the left, pulling Pagolo completely off-balance. Only Niccolo’s quickness saved him from a fall that would have left him at the mercy of his own hardware. Finally, with the help of his friend, Pagolo succeeded in reining in the obstreperous pig. Red-faced and sweaty from his exertions, he plopped down on the pavement and sat cross-legged, catching his breath.
“Salve, Pagolo! The great knight has arrived!”
“Shut up.”
“I thought we were going hunting today, but I see you’ve come outfitted for a military campaign. Where do we strike, Pagolo? Pisa? Milano? The king of France? The Mongol hordes?”
“Shut up.”
“A Crusade maybe? Against the Turk.”
“Don’t push me, Nico, you smart-ass bastard.”
“Hey, what’s that you’ve got on your leash there, lunch? Or just a midmorning snack?” said Niccolo eyeing the piglet.
“Shut up.”
“No, don’t tell me. I’ve heard stories that in India when they hunt tiger, they tie a pig to a tree as bait. Are we after tiger today, Pagolo?”
Pagolo’s breathing had returned to normal. As his friend continued to rail at him, he struck out with surprising speed, delivering a blow across the back of Niccolo’s legs with the shaft of his spear. Caught unawares, Niccolo’s legs buckled, and he collapsed. A playful scuffle ensued. The pig eyed the two boys rolling around in the middle of the Via Chiara with profound skepticism.
A few minutes later, the bells of Florence’s fifty-seven churches and hundreds of private chapels clamorously signaled the beginning of the new day. The huge gates were thrown open, and the city sealed in upon itself for the night reestablished contact with the outside world. In no time, the streets would be surging with activity. As the heavy doors of the Porta San Piero swung slowly open, the two boys had to scurry out of the way to avoid the furious rush of a horseman on some urgent mission.
Niccolo helped his heavily laden friend with his gear. “Here, Pagolo, let me give you a hand. You know, I don’t understand what you intend to do with all this stuff.”
“It’ll come in handy, you’ll see.”
“But armor? Do you think the animals are going to shoot back?”
“Boars. Boars charge. They have tusks.”
“Oh, boars. I see. What about the leg pads?”
“Brush. Thorns. Did you know that thorns can be poisonous?”
“Thorns, eh? How come if you’re so well protected, you don’t have a pair of gauntlets?”
“They’re in the satchel.”
“What do you intend to do with the ax?”
“Wolves.”
“The spear?”
“What if a deer charges us or something? I could take him before he ran us through with his horns.”
“And the club?”
“Bears.”
“Pagolo, you disappoint me. A club for bears. What kind of strategy is that. We need artillery. Light cannon, at least. We surround the beast in his cave. Throw up a siege. Cut him off. Wait it out. You’ve got enough food in that bag for a month or two . . .”
“Stop it, Niccolo. You forced me to accompany you on this barbarous expedition for which you know I am completely unsuited. I, Pagolo Pulci, am a scholar and a gentleman. You know I’m no good with a bow. So I thought, with these other things, perhaps I’d have a better chance of not disgracing myself by coming home empty-handed.”
Niccolo persuaded Pagolo to leave the better part of his arsenal at the guardhouse, where they could pick it up on the way home. But about the pig, Pagolo was adamant.
“What does he do Pagolo? Track? Retrieve?”
“Better than that. He comes from a long line of swine, bred and trained to one end only.”
“What? Bacon? Prosciutto?”
“This pig, with the aid of his highly sensitive snout, is capable of rooting out one of the earth’s most exquisite treasures. This evening, Messer Machiavelli, we shall, with any luck, dine on truffles.”
The two hunters proceeded through the gates, cleared the crowd of carts and horses that were attempting to jam their way into the city, and set off for the hills to the south. There was a chill in the fall air. A damp mist still clung to the rough hillsides like tufts of cotton and filled the low-lying areas. As the two boys trudged to the top of a steep rise, little puffs of steam betrayed their labored breathing and their conversation.
As boys everywhere are likely to do, they spoke at great length and with exalted authority on subjects about which they knew little or nothing at all—of war and courage, and inevitably, of the mysteries of love. Neither was willing to admit that his “knowledge” of the subject was sketchy, at best, consisting of a few stray facts and some odd misconceptions. Neither would voice his doubts or tip his hand to reveal the countless nagging questions and glaring inconsistencies that troubled him. So they bragged and they swaggered and they exchanged highly colored accounts that were always suitably vague when it came to specifics. The boys’ knowledge of the mysteries and mechanics of love had not yet progressed to the point where they saw anything remarkable or mysterious in the story of the virgin birth.
By this time the sun had burned off what remained of the morning mists, and the result was a fall day of stunning clarity. The sky was a fierce, intense blue, and beneath it stood a world of sharp outlines and crisp edges. The two boys reveled in the splendid day, enjoying themselves tremendously, but finding little in the way of game. Niccolo managed a pheasant, but by the looks of it, the bird was old and tough. Roasting it was out of the question. It would have to be stewed or boiled for a long time to break down the hard, stringy meat.
The only real success of the day went to the pig. Rooting around on the damp forest floor, under its cover of dead leaves, he found several troves of the precious black fungus.
By late afternoon, the boys had crossed a considerable expanse of territory and were heading east, where they would pick up the Via Romana, the main highway between Rome and Florence. The road would take them back to town much more quickly than the tortuous paths they had followed up into the hills. Pagolo’s limited reserve of energy was all but spent, and he sorely hoped they would be able to hitch a ride on a cart and not have to walk all the way back.
The two flagging hunters were on a trail that wound down, out of the hills. About a hundred yards in front of them they saw light and could make out a break in the trees where the wide road cut through the forest. As they drew nearer, Niccolo thought he heard voices. He warned his companion, this time with a very stern look, to be quiet. After his friend’s repeated admonitions, Pagolo had finally learned his lesson. While he still did not move stealthily through the underbrush, he blundered far less obtrusively.
When the boys managed to get within about twenty yards of the road, they saw that the voices were coming from a roadside clearing, but it was an odd sight that greeted their eyes. Two men and a boy were resting while two donkeys grazed nearby. There would have been nothing unusual about travelers stopping to rest, except that the two men were dressed entirely in black, with huge square yellow hats, almost a foot
high on their heads. The boy, too, was in black. Both men wore incredibly long, full, grey beards.
“Strange monks,” whispered Pagolo. “Look at those hats, and the beards. They must be from the orient, Syria maybe?”
They boys crept closer. They could hear one of the monks issuing orders to the boy and pointing in the direction of the pack animals. The language he spoke was not Florentine, but a rough tongue full of rasping, coughing sounds.
“The monk’s talking to his son,” said Pagolo. “Well, what do we do? Go down and introduce ourselves. Salve, strange monks. Where is your country? What exotic land across the seas sends you to us here? Do you come in peace?”
“They’re not monks, Pagolo,” said his companion. “And they’re not Syrians. They’re Jews.”
Pagolo stiffened with terror. Jews! His grandmother had frightened him with stories of godless Jews. They were worse than gypsies. They stole babies and sold them. They especially liked to steal bad, chubby boys. And do you know what they do with these precious, fattened Christian babies in their infernal Jewish kitchens?
Prompted by these memories, Pagolo proposed a plan of action: “Niccolo, let’s get out of here.”
“No, wait a minute. I want to watch. They look harmless enough.” Niccolo too had heard the stories circulated by grandmothers to scare unruly children, but he was dubious.
“Nico, suppose they start doing something. Like some weird sacrifice. Or a black mass. I don’t want to be anywhere within a hundred miles of here.”
As they watched, one of the elder Jews removed the great yellow box that served him as a hat. Pagolo flinched, half expecting him to have something frightful hidden under the hat. Like horns!
“Jesus Christ, look at that! He’s got another hat on under the big one.” Pagolo’s feverish imagination was working overtime as he tried to divine the sinister implications of this new discovery. Meanwhile, the Jewish boy had retrieved a satchel from one of the donkeys and spread a cloth on the ground. The three sat, obviously preparing to eat. Pagolo cringed at the thought of what unholy victuals they might pull from the bag.
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 6
