John the Pupil

by David Flusfeder

  A mechanical bird, that will enable a Christian to fly over the armies of his enemy.

  Is it ready? Has your master constructed it?

  Not yet, my Lord. But he will. And he will tell you the recipe for the fire and brimstone of the Lord that rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah.

  The attention of the Vicar of Rome, exiled here in Viterbo, falls away. He does not desire possibilities. He is so old, so grey, most of him that is mortal has been purified by illness, the soul preparing itself to quit the body, he is overrun with disease, a besieged citadel stormed by invaders.

  And what does he desire, your master? England resists. Germany will not obey. France sighs and complains. Italy pays nothing, but devours. My treasury is empty.

  He only wishes to serve you. He would be Aristotle to your Alexander.

  Alexander was young. I do not require a tutor.

  He would wish to show you the greatest secrets. He would teach the dignities of Astrology and Alchemy.

  Which some call blasphemous novelties.

  They are operative and practical; they teach how to make noble metals and many other things better and more abundantly by artifice than they are made by nature. Outside, I saw a colourist painting a vermilion rose. One does not call him a blasphemer for mixing vermilion, which is made from fire and water, sulphur and mercury, which are the components of all metals.

  The quickness of my tongue was a marvel to me. I was pleading your case, my master, but there was an ease of companionship between me and this old man, who was the Pope.

  Let us eat, said the Pope.

  We gave thanks for the food that the servants brought us, which was unbearable, too rich. There were hacks of beef pastured on thyme which clogged my throat with their sinews. Even the white-fleshed bread and the meat of the fish from Lake Bolsena tasted like butter and blood.

  Pope Clement hardly ate at all.

  And what does your master say about the philosopher’s stone? He has discovered this too?

  Like the stones that build mountains and palaces, they have contained within themselves all the elements and are called the lesser world. The stone of man, our lesser world, is not a gem or a jewel but blood. This is the secret of the philosopher’s stone, as my master will teach you.

  And I tried to tell some of what my master has taught about the philosopher’s stone, and I included some of his lessons from the book that Daniel was carrying.

  Aristotle said to Alexander, I wish to show you the greatest secret, and indeed it is the greatest secret, for not only would it procure the good of the republic and something desired by all by providing enough gold, but what is infinitely greater, it would prolong human life. For that medicine which would take away all dirtiness and corruptions of a base metal, so that it become very pure silver and gold, is considered by the wise to be able to take away the corruptions of the human body to the degree that life would be prolonged through many centuries.

  Such a subject has the power to impart its own incorruptibility to other matter – metal or flesh – and to end the incessant warfare among the unequally powerful elemental qualities hitherto resident therein.

  As Aristotle has taught us, art can perfect what nature has left incomplete. This is the secret of the philosopher’s stone. My master shows how the humours are to be separated. When they have been led back to their pure simplicities by the operations of many difficult works, they are mixed in a recipe that my master has uncovered. He uses quicksilver and calx and blood, incorporated together to make one body.

  I had said too many words, I was losing the attention of my listener. He shrank into his throne and closed his eyes. I thought he might be sleeping, but he spoke,

  The Psalm tells us, Thy youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s … When the eagle grows old, its eyes dim, its wings become too heavy, he seeks out a fountain in which he plunges three times and his wings are light and powerful again, his eyesight restored. He is made new again. Does your master know the whereabouts of this fountain?

  As I am still trying to form an answer, he goes on,

  Or the bird called the hoopoe. When its father and mother are growing old, it pulls out their feathers, feeds them and warms them under its own wings, until the feathers are grown back, their eyes revived, and they can see and fly as before.

  I had not expected a man of such learning as the Pope to believe in this story. It is a fable: Honour your father and your mother. But he is old, and failing, his eyes are dim. Or maybe it is true, it is not a fable, all wonders are true.

  My master has enumerated some of the accidents of old age, grey hair and pallor and wrinkled skin and excess mucus and stinking stool, the sickly bleariness of eyes, low blood and low spirits, crabbiness and absent-mindedness, and Pope Clement seems to exhibit them all.

  My master, I told him, is hoping to concoct the gloria inestimabilis. Pliny knew of it, as did the saints, prophets and patriarchs. The secret that God told Adam, who lived over nine hundred years. Aristotle tells us that God offers a remedy to temper the humours, conserve health, and defer the sufferings of old age.

  You have this? No, you said he was hoping.

  It is the medicine of immortality that Homer wrote about. He would concoct it for you and tell you which foods to avoid and which to eat. He would feed you rhubarb and rue, and saffron and gold and coral, and the bone of a stag’s heart.

  Perfection does not require sustenance, Pope Clement said; and I think he was talking about death.

  This holy man, chilled by the accidents of old age and an empty treasury, required consolation, and I had tried to give it to him and we both knew that I had failed.

  We had prayed before our meal, thanking God for his foresight, and we prayed again afterwards, Pope Clement’s voice profound and wise, stepping out the words like a traveller choosing where to place the stones to make a path over a river. My voice joined with his, softly, without announcement, and it was like being with my master again, the closest I have been with him since I began this journey, music brings us closer than dreams. First he carried my voice along with his, but then I struck out more boldly, found my own path beside his, sometime moving ahead, sometime falling behind, and then hopping forward to join him. I sang without forethought or reason, the habits I formed when I was younger; and his voice moved in response to mine, testing it, finding out how far it could fly ahead or behind, and my voice pulled away ahead of his, because I am young and he is dying, and then I waited for him to catch up with me so we could sing the final verse in step.

  Which we did, louder now, obliterating any unhappiness or vexation or sorrow so all that existed was the glory of God, and His creation, manifest.

  And then the door was opened and the Pope’s Secretary was with us again, and the building of sound that we had built was toppled and Pope Clement was coughing.

  The Secretary kneeled before Pope Clement. He held out a goblet of water.

  When his coughing was over, Pope Clement pleaded with his Secretary to permit me a little more time with him. He asked me to tell him more about myself and my origins, and I told him about the secrecy of our preparations, the hostage scribe, the suspicion of my master from the other friars, and about my master’s goats. And it was only after I had spent some time telling him about the character of each one, and how my master favoured the buck over the wether, and how I had once had to intercede, thrust my body between the she-goat and my master’s stick, that I knew I had not been talking about my master at all, that I had never seen my master outside the friary walls, that I had been talking about the man whose face and smell I could no longer remember, who had been my father.

  You have warmed me, the Pope said. Where is your book?

  In all of this, our fellowship, this brief belonging, I had forgotten the task that had brought me and which had fallen away.

  I told him that I had placed it for safe-keeping not far from here. And this was a lie, for I had it in my bag, beside Daniel’s. I was crafty in my deceit. I did no
t reach out a hand towards the bag or even look upon it. I made my great refusal, and my face did not redden.

  As it is written, the end of all things will be hastened by the spread of knowledge; and I wished, in my small way, to save my master from his pride that will be the engine of the end times. But he is not my master; I am not his pupil anymore. In this act of treachery I have renounced who I used to be.

  You will return tomorrow?

  I promised that I would.

  And you will give me your master’s book. You can remain with us to direct us through the practicalities.

  I agreed that I would and my soul was cast into hell with the liars and the perjurers.

  I will bring it tomorrow, I said and I knew that I would not. This book is not what the Pope wants or needs. Oh Clement, this book will not save your life, it will not rout your enemies.

  In its stead I gave him the strange flower I had found in the mountains that might be moly. I advised him to drink it, the white dried petals, the folded leaves, the black seeds and root, powdered into wine. He took it. I do not think he believed in its efficacy.

  Lord, the master of all things, who taught the cock to crow and the cow to milk, listen to my prayer and tell me what I am for.

  And I may keep this picture of this beast of yours? And the reading glass?

  He picked up the glass again. He held it far away from his face and inspected me.

  I bowed my head. I wept.

  I do not have to hear your confession. I absolve you, Pope Clement said.

  He went out with me, with his arm on my shoulder until the Secretary intervened and performed the office of support to his master. We walked out through the Conclave, and he stood at the doorway as I went out on to the Loggia. He shielded his old eyes against the light.

  Forgive me.

  • • •

  … and in this solitude I have cast off my pupillage and my chronicling, which is, as the saintly girl prophesied, a kind of death. So go, little shreds, and beg your pardon of the Pope, and may you travel safely through Italy and climb mountains and go across the mountains into France, and offer genuflections to the saints, and with safe passage over the water to England, may you make pilgrimage to Oxford and bow your knee and offer greetings from unworthy John, who is no longer a Pupil, and seek the pardon of Master Roger and under his blessed eye there abide.

  Afterword

  Of the personages within the chronicle:

  Brother Bernard’s subsequent career is well known and we do not need to rehearse its details here.

  Brother Andrew has left behind no mark on the historical record, and, sadly, we suspect his evident frailty did not allow him to live much beyond the time covered by the chronicle.

  Of John, we have a little more to go on. He has been identified with the mathematician John of London and the theologian John of Paris. These are plausible but unlikely: John of London was almost certainly born earlier than John the Pupil; and John of Paris was most likely born later, and was a Dominican. It has also been suggested that he might be identified with John of Peckham, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was definitely a pupil of Roger Bacon’s, or have become the explorer to the east known as John Pontecorvo. John of Peckham is much more likely to be the inhospitable former pupil whom our John encountered in Paris. It is possible of course that the truth of Aude’s prophecy was actual rather than metaphorical, and that John did meet his end in Viterbo. But, the identification with John Pontecorvo is the one that we would favour. He might even, after his visit to the Pope, have made his way to Venice to join the expeditioners he had met at Cavalcante’s; but that is speculation.

  The sickly Clement IV died the following year. His successor was not as indulgent with Friar Bacon or so curious about his researches. In 1272, because of ‘suspect novelties’, Bacon’s teaching was condemned by the Franciscan Order. He was imprisoned. His inventions, discoveries, and rediscoveries – gunpowder, spectacles, the corrected calendar among many others – would have to wait for centuries to be rediscovered. His writings were nailed to the shelves of the friary library: spines turned inwards, they were covered in white cloth and left to rot.

  Notes

  The page references in this notes correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the notes, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  page xii

  grouped together by … Yelverton

  It is still a mystery through what agency the fragments had found their way into the hands of Yelverton, but he was famous for his avarice for old manuscripts; John the Pupil’s chronicle might well have been among the 2,100 codices and codicils collected at the abbey at Bury St Edmunds before being moved by Simon Bozoun in the early 1340s to the (largely uncatalogued) collection at Norwich Cathedral, an unparalleled store of literary treasures, which the rapacious Yelverton was known to plunder. Or, it might have been part of a ‘job lot’ sold to Yelverton by, probably, a Venetian dealer. This is speculation that offers two contrasting possibilities: in the second, John’s chronicle remained in Italy; in the first, the Pupil, or at least his writing, had found a way home.

  page 3

  … and see your face

  This fragment might have strayed from its place in a later passage, the episode of John’s lonely reminiscing. However, in the interests of coherence, I have retained its (possibly dubious) place in the narrative.

  the friary

  The friary here, given its evident rural location, is not the famous Greyfriars at St Ebbe’s in Oxford, established in 1224, where Roger Bacon had formerly resided. We do know that four subsequent buildings or tracts of land were given to the Franciscan Order in and around the city. This friary might have been the one for which the Minorites paid an annual rent of one pound of cummin to a certain Walter Goldsmith. Its location and subsequent history are unknown. Contrary to the speculations of most Bacon scholars (see, for example, works by Stuart Easton, 1952, and Amanda Power, 2012), here is proof that Roger Bacon was in England, not France, during this period.

  page 5

  … Qusta ibn Luqa … Averroes …

  These names are significant to an understanding of the transmission of knowledge and philosophy in the medieval period: it was Islamic scholars from the eighth century onwards who had rediscovered Aristotle and the Greeks. The renaissance in learning and investigation in the Christian world of Roger Bacon was reliant on Latin retranslations of Arabic versions of the classical Greeks (and ascribed inventions: the ‘pseudo-Aristotle’ is one of the most prolific Arabic authors of the period).

  page 8

  His eyes are the colour of the sea

  In the original this is aqua maris, that is ‘sea water’; but this is problematic, as John surely at this time had never seen the sea. One assumes that he is still following the classical models that had been given him in the schoolroom. One is tempted to write ‘blue’, but John the Pupil, with his gaze fixed so certainly, behind, on his master, and ahead, on the celestial city, saw the world mostly, I think, in multiple shades of grey.

  At the time that John the Pupil was writing, the sky was grey, the sea was green. Blue was just losing its barbarian connotations: Caesar and Tacitus had noted that it was the colour that the Germans and the Celts used for dyeing their bodies to terrify their enemies in battle. And, if Pliny is to be believed, Breton women painted their bodies dark blue in preparation for orgiastic rites. It was the colour the Romans associated with death and the underworld. Blue eyes were a deformity, a mark of bad character.

  The three primary Christian colours before the high medieval period were white, which represented purity and innocence; red, the blood spilled by and for Christ, hence martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine love; and black, which signified abstinence, penance, and suffering.

  We could go on. We could discuss the Abbot Suger’s cathedral of Saint-Denis (completed in 1144), where blue first became the colour of celestial and divine light, and
the Virgin Mary’s robes, and stained-glass windows and enamelled miniatures, the techniques of woad-dyeing. But if we include these, shouldn’t we then mention the trade of the pastel merchants?, and the industry of blue in Lincoln and Glastonbury and Picardy and Normandy and Lombardy and Thuringia and Seville? And the madder merchants who tried to besmirch the growing blue industry by employing stained-glass makers to depict blue devils and artists to paint blue hells in their frescoes?

  We’re not drawing a full-scale map: the notes cannot be as long as the chronicle. (What does it matter that we’ve done our research?) This is the story of John the Pupil.

  page 14

  And now, he said …

  In the original, as we might expect, there is no separation of speech from the main body of the text. Indeed, each chronicle entry is a single undivided paragraph. A more modern usage has been adopted, so as not to deter the contemporary reader.

  page 15

  Ten plus seven.

  This refers to the proposed date of John’s departure, 17 May.

  page 17

  Saint Brendan

  He is the saint later known as ‘The Navigator’. One assumes that this first time that John has given us a summary of the acts of the saint whose day it is represents a youthful ambition: he writes of adventures that he hopes will prefigure his own.

  page 24

  The wood of the cross …

  The opening of this passage has undeniable echoes of Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, the early-thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints, as do some subsequent passages in the Chronicle. This should not surprise us: in the scholastic era, as the historian Jacques Le Goff reminds us (see, for example, Les Intellectuels au Moyen ge, 1957), the idea of authorship was very different to ours; God was the only true author; texts, pace Barthes avant la lettre, were tissues of quotations from Scripture, from the commentators, from oral and written fables, from the classics of the ancient world (see the Papers from the Annual Proceedings of the 10th Intertextuality Conference, Canterbury, 2011, particularly those contributions from Miller Bovey, Thomas Sackville, Amanda Novillo-Corvalán, et al.). As for lawyers at the very highest court, all was precedent, in the wait for Judgement at the end of time.