Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  Now Lorenzo spoke again. He was punctilious in explaining the procedure. “Your fate is in the hands of the Lord God Almighty. He will be your judge and jury. You should feel flattered that so exalted a judge has been appointed to hear your case. The legal thinking is simplicity itself. The tradition goes back thousands of years. You will place your hand in the cauldron of molten lead. If when you withdraw it, you haven’t been burned, then it is a clear sign that God has taken you under his protection. Your innocence will be proclaimed, and you will be released.” He paused here, savoring every moment, every word of his facetious legal discourse. Then, gravely, he continued, “If, on the other hand, you should happen to burn yourself, then that is a clear sign of the Lord’s disfavor. That, unfortunately for you, would be an indication of your guilt. We would have no other choice than to enforce the sentence of execution.”

  Lorenzo smiled. His confreres smiled. The Spanish torturers smiled. Only Niccolo was not smiling. He fidgeted before the fire, his eyes riveted on the surface of that boiling metal. He cowered.

  Although it was hot, Niccolo was shivering. He clutched his clenched fists under his arms in what looked like an attempt to keep warm. His tormentors leered.

  Niccolo inched closer to the fire, mesmerized by it.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” said young Lorenzo. “And remember, if you’re innocent, you have nothing to fear.”

  Niccolo’s agitation appeared to increase as he eyed the pot of boiling, molten metal. He began to gnaw on his left hand. His torturers saw him shaking and biting at his hand, but they were unmoved. They were chortling. The Spaniards were already arguing over who would get his cloak, his boots . . . when the final indignity occurred.

  Niccolo was wearing a pair of light-brown woolen hose, and as he stood staring into that hideous fire, a dark stain began to spread in the area of his groin. One of the Spaniards saw it first. “He’s pissing himself!” There were roars of cruel laughter as Niccolo clutched the offending organ in a desperate attempt to stem the humiliating flow. His debasement was complete.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” said Lorenzo. “Get it over with. Here. Let me make it more interesting.” He pulled a small, jeweled dagger from his belt, examined it for a moment, and then tossed it into the boiling pot. “Go ahead. Retrieve it.”

  After what seemed like an eternity, Niccolo made his move. With a tremendous effort, he plunged his hand into the bubbling metal. There was a hiss and sizzle. Then he withdrew it. It was done quickly. He turned slowly to face his accusers. There was rage in his eyes. Clutched in his fist was the dagger.

  He threw the flimsy weapon on the floor, and it shattered. There were audible gasps from the little circle around him. The young hellions shrank back. The impious torturers crossed themselves. Now he held his bare hand, the hand that he had just withdrawn from the cauldron, in Lorenzo’s awe-struck face. With a sneer, Niccolo flexed his fingers, once, twice, to show that they moved, that they were unharmed, and that the hand had not become a charred, blistered mass of pulp. Slowly he curled that hand into a fist.

  “Is the verdict satisfactory? Has God spoken? Did you hear Him?”

  Niccolo stood there, glaring at the effeminate, terrified Lorenzo for a long time. When he looked around at the others, they averted their eyes. He laughed a howling, joyous, triumphant laugh. And they were sore afraid.

  He had won his release. He had saved himself. But for Giuditta, it was too late. Michelozzi was the only one who had tried, but his efforts brought only the tale of a corpse dangling from the ceiling of a prison cell, its long black hair almost brushing the floor, its face and throat already torn out, and starving dogs jumping higher, ever higher, in search of more succulent pieces of flesh.

  Alone and virtually friendless, broken in body and soul, Niccolo Machiavelli went into exile two days later. As he rode through the gates of Florence, he heard a final great resounding metallic crash. He was too numbed and too drained to feel any curiosity. It could have been the end of the world for all he cared.

  It was the vacca, that ponderous, mooing bell, that deep voice of freedom that could be heard at a distance of thirteen miles, that stentorian call that, for over three hundred years, had summoned the people of Florence into the piazza for consultation in times of great crisis. Such consultations were no longer deemed necessary in the new Florence. The ancient bronze bell had groaned her last, as she struck the hard ground at the foot of her tower. Now she lay shattered on the stones of the Piazza Maggiore.

  Nessun maggior dolore

  che ricordarsi del tempo felice

  ne la miseria

  There is no greater pain

  than to remember, in our present grief,

  past happiness

  —DANTE

  The goose was cold. The fire had died in the fireplace. Outside it was drizzling, and a damp chill had penetrated the small house and the very bones of its sole inhabitant. He sat alone at the table, cold and stiff, wrapped in a blanket. It was getting dark, but there was no point in lighting a lamp because there was nobody and nothing to see. He wanted to rekindle the fire, but walking still caused him a great deal of pain, and so, for the time being, he pulled the blanket more tightly around himself.

  A woman from the nearby village of San Casciano came in three or four times a week to prepare his meals. It was she who had prepared the goose for him—out of pity, no doubt—before rushing off about noon to spend the rest of the day with her own family. Since that time he had picked at the bird, but for want of appetite he left it largely untouched and undamaged. His right hand, which had been crushed with the screws, was still bandaged and useless. The scars on his wrists and ankles had healed, but they still bothered him. His joints, which had almost been torn asunder, ached when he moved, and they ached when he sat still. Alone with his pain and his memories and his resentments in the dying grey light, Niccolo lifted his goblet of wine to his sole companion, his dumb, mute goose of a companion. “Buon Natale,” he said bitterly. “Merry Christmas.”

  In an hour or so, he would put some embers in the warming pan, drag himself, with the aid of his cane, into the frigid bedchamber and warm the cold sheets. And then he would lie all night on that bed, scarcely more comfortable than he had been on the torturer’s rack, his mind lacerated by visions and nightmares. This was what he had to look forward to. Tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. This was his life.

  These somber ruminations were interrupted by a rattling at the outer door. If Niccolo had been paying attention, he would have heard the plodding approach of the mule and the heavy “plop” with which its rider dismounted and landed in the mud. Although he started when he first heard the noise, he soon settled back into his chair and blanket unconcerned. Maybe they were coming to take him back to prison? Maybe they were going to put him out of his misery?

  But it was a friendly voice that hailed him from the entry hall and bid him good cheer. It was Pagolo: “Che miseria! Why is it so dark in here? Niccolo, are you home?”

  Niccolo could see his generous bulk outlined in the doorway against the dim light of the fading day. “In here,” he grunted. “In the kitchen.”

  “And it’s freezing,” said the rotund friar, bumbling his way into the house. “I knew I’d find you here stewing in your misery. I came to cheer you up. Besides, it’s my duty as a monk to perform the corporal works of mercy, in this case, to visit the sick.”

  “You mean, to bury the dead,” said Niccolo resignedly.

  Pagolo squinted in the half-light and tried, not very successfully, to steer a course between the dark hulks of furniture that littered the hallway and kitchen. He had stubbed toes and a skinned shin by the time he finally reached the fireplace. “Why is the furniture all over the place like this?”

  “It’s easier for me to get around if I have things to lean on,” said Niccolo glumly. “I’ll have it moved back against the walls when I can walk again. If I ever walk again.”

  “Castrone! Buffalone! Such t
alk!”

  In no time, Pagolo had the fire going. He found a lamp and lit it. He helped his embittered friend into a chair near the hearth and helped himself to the abandoned goose. When he had “sampled” it to his satisfaction and sampled the dressing and the pudding as well—it was there on the table and would otherwise go to waste—he reached into his satchel and said, “Look what I’ve brought you. Chestnuts!”

  Niccolo smiled weakly. Pagolo was surprised at how thin he had grown and how haggard he looked. Even in the rosy glow of the fire, Niccolo’s complexion was ashen and ghastly. His eyes were sunken. Pagolo put a cast-iron griddle on the fire to roast the chestnuts. While it heated up, he busied himself puncturing each of the nuts, so they wouldn’t explode. All the while, Niccolo stared into the fire, uncommunicative and sullen. The last time Pagolo had seen Niccolo was in Florence the day after his release. In the torrent of words and anguish that had poured out of him, Pagolo found little that was coherent or substantive or informative. There was only an overwhelming, urgent, blind, desperate pain.

  Pagolo went over to the griddle and spit on it to see if it was hot enough. The little ball of spittle beaded up. It jumped and sizzled on the hot iron surface. The griddle was ready. Inexplicably, Niccolo burst into laughter.

  Pagolo shot him a questioning glance. “What’s so funny?”

  “What you just did reminded me of something. Do you want to see a trick, Pagolo?”

  “What kind of a trick?”

  “Bring me that pail of water.” Edging closer to the fire, Niccolo dipped his hand in the water and, before Pagolo could react or stop him, he placed it squarely on the hot iron grill.

  “Porco Giuda!” In that moment, Pagolo sincerely believed that his friend had gone utterly, irredeemably mad. But Niccolo was laughing at him. And obviously, miraculously, his hand appeared to be unhurt.

  “How did you . . . Why did you do that?” stammered Pagolo.

  “That’s how I got out of prison. I had to dip my hand in a bucket of molten lead.”

  “What!”

  “They subjected me to an ordeal,” explained Niccolo. “If I didn’t get burned, I was considered innocent.”

  “And you didn’t get burned?” said Pagolo incredulously.

  “The same way I didn’t get burned just now. It was something I learned when we were casting guns and cannon for the militia. In the forges, Pagolo, I used to actually see ironworkers wash their hands in streams of molten metal as it poured from the crucible. I saw a man skim the surface of a ladle of melted copper with his bare hand. Do you know what the secret is?”

  Pagolo was aghast. “No.”

  “The hands have to be wet. The water turns to vapor and cushions the skin. The hot metal never really touches the skin—just the layer of water and vapor. It’s almost like wearing a protective glove.”

  “And you stuck your hand in a bucket of molten lead on the basis of this . . . this theory?”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? I didn’t know whether or not it would work, and I had a real problem getting my hand wet enough. First I put it in my armpit, but I wasn’t sweating enough. Then I tried my mouth. They thought I was gnawing my hand in agony but I was really trying to moisten it with saliva. That didn’t work either, though, because I was so scared my mouth was bone dry.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “The final ignominious solution: I pissed myself!”

  “Good God Almighty!”

  “You should have seen the young Medici pup’s expression when I pulled my hand out of the molten lead and shook it in his face! He cringed like I was the devil himself!” Recounting his moment of triumph brought a tinge of color into Niccolo’s face and a hint of animation into his voice, but almost as soon as these signs of life appeared, they were gone, and he lapsed back into his chair and his blanket and his all-consuming despair. When they were ready, he ate one or two chestnuts almost without knowing what he was doing.

  Little news of the outside world reached the former secretary in his isolated family villa. What did reach him made little impression on his ever-brooding mind. Political problems in Florence, who was allied with France, who with Spain, what the emperor was planning—all these things that had so consumed his energy in the past meant little to him now. They were far away, even though he was only seven miles from Florence. The terms of his banishment stipulated that he was to remain outside the city but within a fifty-mile radius. They wanted to keep an eye on him, but even those assigned to watch him soon lost interest.

  As Niccolo recovered his ability to walk and the use of his right hand over the months that followed, he slowly began to emerge from his torpor. But it was a daily struggle and not without frequent setbacks. Then something happened that did jolt him out of his complacency. A piece of news arrived that even the ignorant rustics around him could not ignore. Julius II, the warrior pope, had died. As the College of Cardinals convened and began their machinations and plotting and counterplotting, Niccolo found himself starting to take an interest in the proceedings. Every day he used to hobble into the little village of San Casciano to hear the latest news and round of rumors from Rome. And then disaster struck.

  The new pope took the name of Leo X. Tonsured at seven, made an abbot at eight and a cardinal at fourteen, now at the age of thirty-seven, Giovanni de’ Medici had been elected supreme pontiff. His fleshly, immense, leaky bottom, with its anal fistula, now sat on the throne of Saint Peter.

  The Cardinal de’ Medici was not considered a likely candidate for the papacy in the early going, but as the conclave dragged on and as vehemently competing powers like France and Spain effectively neutralized one another, his name was put forward. With the resources of the entire Florentine treasury behind him, he had eventually been able to buy enough votes in the consistory to carry the day. Always scrupulously attentive to matters of ecclesiastical detail, Giovanni was solemnly ordained a priest on the day prior to his coronation. Although he had been a cardinal for over twenty-five years, he had never before taken the time to receive holy orders.

  The news hit Niccolo like a thunderbolt. With the papacy in those pudgy Medici hands, the family’s grip on power was near absolute. They ruled in Rome now, as well as in Florence. It was not long after Giovanni’s elevation that rumors began to circulate about his plans for Florence. The new pope was talking about making his nephew, the dandified, despotic Lorenzo, king of central Italy. Niccolo crawled back into his shell of torpor and despair.

  The thread on which he finally climbed out of those black depths of self-absorption and back into the sentient world was his correspondence with Francesco Vettori. Vettori was an old friend of Niccolo’s. They had been together on many a diplomatic mission in France and Germany. They understood each other.

  Vettori had survived the Medici housecleaning, in part because of his aristocratic origins, in part because his reputation for probity had made him an acceptable go-between when power was being transferred from Soderini’s regime to the new masters. Along with Niccolo, it was Vettori who had taken an active hand in arranging Soderini’s abdication and exile. While he was not a member of the Medici inner circle, he was tolerated, and even given a post in the new government, although the position itself was something of a joke. He was named Florentine ambassador to Rome, and as such he had absolutely nothing to do. Pope Leo X and a horde of Medici cousins personally saw to all Florentine business conducted in the Holy City. Despite the fact that he was infinitely better off than the disgraced secretary, Vettori too was prey to a kind of lonely isolation. Like Niccolo, he too had been at the center of things, and now he was a mere observer.

  The letters that went back and forth between these two intellects represented some of the most astute analyses of the tangled Italian political problems of the day, but nobody listened to either of them. Nobody asked either of them for his advice. Nobody cared. And it was this impotence that goaded Niccolo. He had all the answers, but how could he make himself heard? It was madde
ning, all the more so when he learned from Vettori of a letter that the pope had addressed to his coxcomb of a nephew on governing Florence: “Introduce your own men into all the principal offices of the state,” he wrote. “And whatever you do, make sure that you surround yourself with unremarkable men of little courage and talent . . .”

  For his part, the flatulent Leo’s civil methods consisted primarily of lying, cheating, and lavish expenditure. From Vettori, Niccolo learned that he ruled by whimsy when he ruled at all. But he had little taste for government, and his energies were directed into other channels. He hosted lavish dinners, and his table was always thick with dwarves and fools and jesters. He wrote verse, but it was doggerel, and he sang, although poorly. He surrounded himself with poets and musicians, although most were of a mediocre quality and none ever achieved lasting fame or recognition. In a year, he bankrupted the papal treasury and was borrowing money, sometimes at interest rates as high as 40 percent. In all things, he was faithful to the kind of excess that he had enjoyed all his life. The day he was crowned with the great, jeweled tiara, the triple crown of the head of the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, Pope Leo had turned to his cousin and was heard to have quipped, “God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it!”

  And enjoy it he did. One of the few childless popes in recent memory —Niccolo remembered he liked to watch—Leo nevertheless took care of family. The Medici and their relatives flocked to Rome, where the payoff for graft and corruption was on a scale unheard of in Florence. Meanwhile, in Germany, an obscure Augustinian friar of severe bent and reformist tendencies named Martin Luther was looking with a jaundiced eye on the excesses of the Papal Court and was working on a tract titled, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Catholic Church.

  San Casciano

  10 December 1513

  To Francesco Vettori at the Seat of the Supreme Pontiff, Rome: