The Medici secret

by Michael White

  Roberto put his arm around Edie as they stared out at the water. 'It's not hard to imagine Cosimo and Contessina standing on this very spot six centuries ago, is it?' he said. 'Puts things into perspective.' 'They must have been very much in love.' She turned to look at him, surprised.

  'Contessina didn't just create this whole thing to hide the vial,' Roberto said, his eyes fixed on the incredible view. 'This place obviously meant a great deal to them. It was their special place and she wanted them to be here together for eternity.'

  'I didn't realise that the Visconte was such a terrible romantic'

  'Maybe,' he replied with a sly smile. 'But I was also thinking what a sacrifice they made.' 'How do you mean?'

  'In the fifteenth century people believed that the body was sacrosanct. Just think of their obsession with Holy relics. Yet they allowed their beautiful tomb to be destroyed just to stop anyone unworthy taking the vial.' 'Did they though?'

  'Of course they did. I think the Medici Secret is safe, at least for a while. I don't intend telling anyone about it. And I get the feeling our friend Luc Fournier is going to be locked away for a very long time. Naturally, there will always be people like Fournier. But there will also be people like Cosimo and Contessina…' 'It was understanding what made them tick that got us out of there.' 'A lucky break.'

  Edie gave him a doubting look and they were silent for a moment, savouring the peerless atmosphere of the place.

  'And at the very least they certainly looked peaceful before the roof came down, did they not?' Roberto said finally.

  'They weren't really there though were they, Roberto?'

  'Perhaps not, but we were, so their legacy lives on. Perhaps in another six hundred years someone else will learn of the Medici Secret. And, who knows? They may even live in more enlightened times. It would be nice to think that one day there might be no place for people like Fournier and nothing to be gained from trying to sell death to the highest bidder.' 'What? You mean the Humanist ideal?'

  'Something like that,' he whispered, pulling her close and lowering his lips to hers. 'Something like that'

  The Facts Behind the Fiction The Medici Secret is of course a work of fiction but, as with my first novel Equinox, many elements of this story are also based in fact. What follows is a summary of those elements and the truth behind them.

  Ancient Manuscripts

  The Greeks and Romans were great chroniclers. Unfortunately for human civilisation much of what was written in ancient times has been lost. The magnificent store of knowledge destroyed when the library at Alexandria was razed was one of the worst losses. But many texts disappeared in other, less dramatic ways.

  Some of the vast literature of Greek and Roman civilisation was preserved in the monasteries and royal libraries of Europe and Asia Minor, and many documents survived the Dark Ages. It was largely thanks to the Florentines that this knowledge was retrieved by Europeans and used as the basis for the tremendous blossoming of civilisation we call the Renaissance.

  The great fourteenth-century Italian philosopher, Petrarch, gathered about him a collection of like-minded adepts who shared a fascination with the Classical tradition. They believed there were perhaps thousands of manuscripts and documents in the original Latin and Greek secreted away in private collections and in isolated monasteries. Many of these men made it their life's work to seek out such treasures.

  A generation after Petrarch, some of the most significant finds in the area of ancient 'scientific' studies were made. One of the most important figures in this quest was Niccolo Niccoli. During the second decade of the fifteenth century, Niccoli discovered Astronomica by the Roman writer Manilius, along with Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and several books about mining and agriculture including Silvae by Statius and De Re Rustica by Columella. A few years later, Bracciolini found Cassio Frontinus' On Aqueducts, which had provided the cornerstone of Roman architectural technique, and Cicero's Brutus, a book that soon became politically controversial because of its portrayal of the virtues of a monarchical form of government.

  What was significant about these finds was that they were written in the original Latin and were mostly unadulterated. This meant that for the first time the Florentine elite of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries could read the words of the great thinkers of the Classical era exactly as they had been written.

  This was a tremendous advance. But perhaps even more important is the fact that, when these works were translated and interpreted, it was soon realised just how much the scientific thinking of Roman scholars was actually based upon an older source: the ideas of the Greeks, and in particular, such figures as Archimedes, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato from the golden era of Greek learning between 500 and 250 BC.

  The inevitable result of this was a new and intensified search for the original Greek sources of scientific knowledge. Inspired by what had already been found, many of the richest people in Florence began to send emissaries abroad to locate and to purchase on their behalf anything they could find in the original Greek.

  Until this time, the only original Greek manuscripts in Western European hands consisted of a few fragments of Aristotle and scraps of Plato along with some tracts of Euclid, all jealously guarded by monks or in the hands of a few devotees. Petrarch himself was reputed to have owned an original manuscript of Homer, but could not read a word of it. On the authority of the Roman writers to whom he referred, he accepted that Homer was a great poet and would kiss the book every night before retiring.

  During the first three decades of the fifteenth century, several hundred original manuscripts found their way to Florence, largely from the East; where once Crusaders fought for Christendom, Western emissaries now bartered and purchased intellectual capital from the Turk. A single Florentine agent, Giovanni Aurispa returned after one particularly fruitful voyage in 1423 with 238 complete manuscripts.

  In this way, the intellectual community of Florence acquired complete versions of Aristotle's Politics, the histories of Herodotus, the dialogues of Plato, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the plays of Sophocles, along with the medical writings of Hippocrates and Galen.

  With accurate translations of a growing collection of Greek texts came the startling realisation that everything the Florentines had achieved culturally so far had been surpassed almost two millennia earlier by the Greeks. But this discovery did not act as a destructive force. It inspired them not only to emulate but to dare consider improving upon what the ancients had achieved.

  In 1428, a committee was organised to instigate a series of changes to the education system of Florence. One of the trustees of the Studium, which lay at the cultural heart of the city, was Cosimo de' Medici, then a young banker living in Rome. He persuaded the clerical institutions of Florence to provide an annual 1,500 florins to add two new chairs to the rostrum of subjects. The existing curricula consisted of medicine, astrology, logic, grammar and law, and to these were added moral philosophy and a professorship of rhetoric and poetry. This provided a new syllabus for every student in Florence, and formed the foundation of the system adopted throughout Europe that remained in place within the universities of England, France and Italy until the eighteenth century.

  Biochemical Weapons

  The biochemical at the centre of the novel – the Medici Secret itself – is Ropractin. This is a fictional chemical but its structure and properties are very close to a real biochemical agent called Sarin. This biochemical is also known by its NATO designation of 'GB'. Sarin is an extremely toxic substance and its sole application is as a nerve agent. It has been classified a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations, and its production and stockpiling was outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.

  Sarin became famous in 1994 when it was used by the Japanese religious sect Aum Shinrikyo whose fanatical members released an impure form of the biochemical during several connected incidents, which together resulted in the deaths of more than a score of people and injured hundreds of other
s.

  Biochemical and biological weapons have been known for centuries. The earliest example of a biological weapon comes from a time predating the story of Cosimo and his associates in The Medici Secret. In 1346, the bodies of Tartar soldiers who had died of the plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged city of Kaffa (now Fedossia in the Crimea) to infect those within. Four centuries later, during the French and Indian War in North America in the 1760s, the English gave blankets contaminated with smallpox virus to the natives.

  Chemical weapons were used on several occasions during the First World War, and, in more recent times, the late leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, is known to have gassed thousands of Kurds and used biochemical weapons during the decade-long war with Iran that began in 1980.

  Today, the use of biochemical and biological agents by terrorist groups is a very real fear for Western governments. Huge resources are deployed in an ongoing effort to stop such substances falling into the wrong hands, but many believe that it is only a matter of time before some nihilistic individual or organisation somewhere obtains sufficient quantities of a deadly agent to cause mass murder in a Western city. It is sobering to realise that there may well be a Luc Fournier out there now formulating such a nefarious plan. Further Reading: Biochemical Weapons: Limiting the Threat, Joshua Lederberg, MIT Press, Boston, 1999.

  Giordano Bruno

  Giordano Bruno was a mystic and a philosopher who rejected both the priesthood and orthodox religion to become a man abhorred by the Inquisition. Born in Nola near Naples in 1548, he joined the Dominican order. But, after discovering a wider philosophical outlook through the work of Copernicus and other unorthodox thinkers, he turned his back on religious dogma. He wrote many books of radical philosophy, the most famous of which was The Ash Wednesday Supper.

  Bruno lived in London for a short time and is believed to have worked as a spy for Queen Elizabeth I. He associated with many of the mystics of the day, including John Dee, and he may have met William Shakespeare who is known to have become interested in many of Bruno's ideas.

  Early in 1592 Bruno moved back to Italy at the invitation of a nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo. Ostensibly, this was so he would become a tutor to this wealthy patron. While in Venice, he taught in Padua and made the acquaintance of Galileo and other thinkers of the time. However, the invitation from Mocenigo was a trap, and in May 1592 Bruno was arrested in Venice and put on trial before the Venetian Inquisition. He was then transferred to Rome. There he remained in a filthy cell for seven years. He endured terrible torture at the hands of the Pope's right-hand man, Robert Bellarmine and was burned at the stake in Campo de' Fiori in Rome on 17 February 1600.

  Although Giordano was murdered by the Inquisition, today he is considered to be the first martyr of science and philosophy, a man who refused to back down from his opinions about the nature of the universe. Galileo was well aware of Bruno's treatment at the hands of the Roman Curia and did not want to share the same fate. Bruno's legacy has grown as the Catholic Church has diminished, but he remains anathema to orthodoxy and even now, over four centuries after his death, he has not been pardoned for his so-called heretical views. Further Reading: The Pope and the Heretic, Michael White, Abacus, London, 2002.

  Cosimo and the Medici

  My drawing of the character and early biography of Cosimo de' Medici in The Medici Secret are as accurate as I could make them. He was born in Florence in 1389. His family did live in a house on Piazza del Duomo, his father was named Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici who did found what was by 1410 already a great bank.

  In reality, Cosimo had two younger siblings, Lorenzo and Pierfrancesco. Lorenzo was sixteen in 1410 and Cosimo's half-brother Pierfrancesco was not born until 1431, twenty-one years after the events described in the novel. However, the essential fact that differentiates the fictional and the actual Cosimo is that, in reality, he never did make a voyage of discovery to Macedonia, or anywhere else. However, intriguingly, he did come very close to it. His intimate friend Niccolo Niccoli tried to persuade him to join him on a journey to the East, but Cosimo's father refused to allow it, and Cosimo acceded to his father's wishes.

  Cosimo was a Humanist. He was extremely interested in culture and learning and he did a great deal to spark the Renaissance. Although he did not actually travel far himself, he paid others to retrieve anything they could from far-flung places, including Macedonia.

  Cosimo was, like his father, a great businessman and he did much to further expand the horizons of the family bank. Most importantly, he handled papal finances. This was crucial in the evolution of the Medici dynasty and it made him the wealthiest man of his time.

  But of course, the Medici had enemies – not the Tommasini family – and there were constant rivalries between them and other great Italian families. One, the Albizzi tried to have him assassinated, and when this failed they succeeded in having him imprisoned in 1433. But within a year, Cosimo was back in Florence and had acquired greater power and influence. For the next thirty years he was, in all but name, leader of Florence.

  Cosimo was married to Contessina de' Bardi in 1416 and they had two children, Piero and Giovanni. Upon his death in 1464, Cosimo was indeed named Pater Patriae, Father of his Country. His eldest son, Piero then became the Florentine leader. Known as Piero the Gouty, he was plagued with bad health and died in 1469, just five years after his illustrious father. His son Lorenzo became, after Cosimo, the most highly regarded and successful Medici of them all. Known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, he was, like his grandfather and father, the first citizen of Florence, and for twenty-three years he was effectively the political leader of the city state, guiding Florence through a period of unprecedented stability and growth.

  The character of Contessina as portrayed in the novel bears almost no relationship to the real-life wife of Cosimo de' Medici. According to official histories, she had no special physical powers and was not educated by a magus such as Valiani, but she was certainly a very intelligent and loyal woman, who was devoted to Cosimo and supportive of his endeavours. Further Reading: The Rise and Fall of the House of the Medici, Christopher Hibbert, Allen Lane, London, 1974. Da Ponte Antonio da Ponte was the designer of the Rialto Bridge in Venice which was completed in 1591. The story about the Devil and da Ponte's wife and child has been adapted from an old Venetian fable in which the site supervisor at the bridge, Sebastiano Bortoloni, was the person visited by Lucifer.

  Florence Flood

  On the night of 3 November 1966 Florence suffered the worst natural disaster in its long history. At about 4 a.m. a huge volume of water from the Valdarno Dam caused the Arno to burst its banks. The water swept away cars and trees, crashed into churches and ancient palaces and burst into steel-lined vaults. Gas, electricity and water supplies were cut off and the city's electric clocks stopped at 7.26 a.m. At its highest, the water reached over six and a half metres in areas around Santa Croce.

  At least thirty people died, and 50,000 families were made homeless by the flood. In addition, 15,000 wrecked cars were strewn about the streets and 6,000 shops were put out of business. According to the best estimates, in the space of a few hours, some 14,000 works of art were damaged along with three to four million books and manuscripts.

  Golem Korab

  This is not an Indian pudding but the tallest mountain in Macedonia, rising to almost 10,000 feet above sea level. The area is dotted with lakes but there is no Lake Angja and no monastery on the mountain. If there was ever a castle close by, it has completely vanished.

  Humanism

  As Europe was dragged from the bleakness of the Dark Ages, an awareness of what could be achieved and a conviction that humanity could do better than it had done already was a tremendous spur to adventurism, both in word and in deed. It led to the age of discovery, and to the beginnings of modern scientific thinking as well as providing a fertile ground for the artistic endeavours we see as emblematic of the Renaissance.

  The importance of this shift in perception can
not be overestimated. With a few notable exceptions, such as Roger Bacon, people since the fall of Rome had been paralysed by a deep-rooted sense of unworthiness. Central to their thinking and encouraged by Christian dogma, was the notion that humans were mere creatures of God, pawns in a world where the forces of nature and the will of the Lord were everything, a world in which the individual was totally without significance. Such thinking could only lead to a stagnant society, and although the belief that God controlled the universe and was directly involved in all aspects of human existence dominated mainstream thinking until the Darwinian revolution, some Renaissance figures thought differently.

  Some of the greatest intellects of the Renaissance believed whole-heartedly in the idea that human intellect should be treasured and nourished. In this paradigm shift, we may see the impact of Platonic philosophy evolving into what has been called human virtue, a central tenet of Active Humanism. At the heart of Platonic philosophy is the concept that humanity can find God through unravelling the secrets of Nature. For Plato this was the foundation of 'inspiration', and it became a crucial element in the thinking of many of the best minds of the Renaissance. A number of great and influential figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, Machiavelli and Cosimo de' Medici understood this Platonic ideal.

  Many Humanists subscribed to the view that virtue stood apart from conventional religion and saw it as an entirely human quality that could bring the individual closer to the essence of Nature. Indeed, the early Humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti once wrote that those who possessed virtue were 'capable of scaling and possessing every sublime and excellent peak'.