Renaissance Murders

by Michael Hone

  When Magellan exited the straits he is said to have cried for joy. He was now in the Pacific, a stretch of water, in his mind, less in width than the Atlantic. He would discover that, in reality, it covered half the world, and he was already nearly out of food. Thanks to the Trade Winds, they made it to Guam three months later, although many men were dead from scurvy. They reached Cebu several months after that. Here Magellan became blood brothers with the Prince, both of whom mingled their blood in a bowl mixed with wine that they drank. Ravishing young girls were offered, virgins who had their vaginas enlarged from birth in order to accommodate men who inserted gold bolts through their penises, just under the glans. The tube of the bolts had a hole through which urine passed. The bolted penises were difficult to insert and they didn’t allow rapid movements, meaning that intercourse lasted a very long time, even an entire day, and the men could pull out only when soft. The women claimed the bolts gave them ultimate pleasure.

  So friendly was Magellan with the Prince that he offered to wage the Prince’s battles for him, certain of his superiority thanks to firearms. All the Prince had to do was convert to Christianity, which he did, along with 2,500 of his subjects. Magellan went after those who didn’t, so numerous that their poisoned arrows and spears, aimed at the crew’s unarmored legs, proved fatal to Magellan and many others.

  One ship made it back to Spain, three years after having left, its sails and rigging rotting. Of the original 260 only 18 men had survived, among them the ship’s greatest treasure, Antonio Pigafetta, an historian who gave us such a detailed account of the voyage that books, based on his observations, have been published, from the time of his arrival to our own day.

  Magellan, about whom the reader can discover much more thanks to Laurence Bergreen’s wonderful book Over the Edge of the World, 2003.

  HERNÁN CORTÉS

  1485 – 1547

  Hernán Cortés landed off the coast of the New World in 1519 with a fleet of 11 ships, 500 men and 13 horses, plus harquebusiers, crossbows and small cannons. Commandeering sand dunes on which he and his men built shacks for shelter and shade, many immediately fell ill to the foul water which provoked diarrhea, the first, and most humiliating, cause of death among warriors. Then came oppressive heat, humidity that rusted a man’s joints and brought on cramps, sand flies and clouds of mosquitoes that tortured the skin and sun that burned it. Imprisoned in their stifling armor for fear of native arrows and spears, their faces masked behind beards and their bodies stinking with sweat, this was the destiny of the conquerors until they eventually vanquished the Aztecs.

  They were greeted by some natives, while others attacked after searching out their weak points. The Spaniards, thanks to their firearms, armor and expertise in wielding swords, and their unequaled military discipline, shot and stabbed their way through the hundreds of naked bodies that presented themselves in wave after wave.

  In his capital of Tenochtitlán, Montezuma followed the invaders’ progress thanks to daily messages from his spies. Climbing to the top of his pyramid temple, dedicated to the hummingbird god of war and sacrifice Huitzilopochtli, he spent the nights in prayer, undecided as to the provenance of the invaders, whether they were the promised god Quetzalcoatl or others, while the hearts of twelve boys, freshly sacrificed, extracted from their chests while still alive, their screams as habitual as the blood caked hair of Montezuma’s priests, sizzled on an adjoining brazier.

  The first shock awaiting Cortés as he left the beach for the interior was the discovery of a temple where fifty boys had been fleshly sacrificed, their blood and viscera forming huge puddles, the walls of the temple blackened from the splatter, the hearts, now silent, on a nearby ledge.

  In another village, one that had welcomed the Spaniards after learning of their mysterious weapons that expulsed lightening and thunder, Cortés came upon his first veritable Aztecs, nobility sent to collect taxes and boys for sacrifices, girls for Montezuma and his court. The Aztecs wandered past the Spaniards as if they were invisible, holding roses to their noses against the men’s stench, their shoulders caped with magnificent bird feathers, sign of their nobility. Cortés had them imprisoned by the natives who had gone over to his side, happy to no longer be obliged to pay taxes and surrender their youths. Cortés told the natives that he would take the captured Aztecs to his ships from which they could not escape, but once they reached the beach he freed them with presents for themselves and for Montezuma.

  In another town Cortés had their temple gods--that his men shoved down the stairs of the pyramid--replaced by a cross once the floor and walls had been washed. The natives looked on in disbelief, which was nothing in comparison with their surprise to see the sun rise the next morning without the aid of human sacrifices the day before.

  Once the Spanish had harvested a good amount of gold, jewels and feathered finery, the men wished to return home. With revolt in the air, Cortés had a ship loaded and sent to Spain with every ounce of accumulated wealth, a bribe for Charles V to win his goodwill. Then potential leaders of revolt were ferreted out and executed, and Cortés had all his remaining ships scuttled to make retreat impossible.

  Cortés made a ‘’blood and tears’’ speech which gave courage to his soldiers, and then they entered the interior of a world that we, with all our science, scarcely comprehend to this day. How can one understand the incredible courage of these men who set off into the unknown, just as, years later, other men, of equal courage, led civilization to the moon? At the same time, how is it possible to justify the thousands who found immediate death at the end of the Spaniards’ swords and, later on, the hundreds of thousands more who were disfigured and massacred by the diseases brought to these newly discovered lands by the discoverers? Cortés faced tribes of thousands, tribes he incredibly, mysteriously vanquished when one considers the handful of Spaniards on one side and the Aztecs who numbered at least a million warriors on the other. He passed near active volcanoes, so close that some of his men’s shirts caught fire. They knew nights well below zero, where some froze to death in their sleep, cols deep with snow, days of feverish heat, yet they were always fully armed and armored in case of enemy attack. At one location Cortés came across a temple surrounded by thousands of human skulls and strewn with the still warm bodies of disemboweled sacrificial victims, ready to be eaten, blood and blood-stink everywhere. At another village he was welcomed by a priest who allowed him to admire their ceremony, the young boy pinned down, men holding firm each arm and his legs, while another put a collar around the boy’s throat to lessen his squirming. The priest held high an obsidian knife he plunged into the young heaving chest, slitting it open, extracting the warm, beating heart he held toward the sun, assurance that the sun would rise the following day. Buddy Levy, in his wonderful Cortés, tells us that there were other rituals involving ‘’the slashing open of the throats of infants, the beheading of young women and the dressing of teenagers in recently flayed human skin.’’

  At Tlaxcala his group of less than 400 men met and defeated 40,000 Tlaxcalan warriors, battle after battle as the Tlaxcalan chiefs tried every possible way that would lead to victory over the Spaniards, after which the white devil would be sacrificed and eaten. Yet not one single Spaniard was killed (the wounded were carefully hidden from Tlaxcalan eyes), and in the end the Tlaxcalans brought hundreds of turkeys and baskets of maize cakes to feed their new masters. They then put their whole army at Cortés’s disposal.

  When Montezuma heard about the victory he was amazed, as the Tlaxcalans were the only tribe he himself had failed to subdue.

  From a distance Cortés could see Montezuma’s capital, Tenochtitlán, that seemed to float in Lake Texcoco, moored in place by extremely narrow causeways made of stone, in places as long as five miles. The city was so magnificent Cortés named it the City of Dreams. It was perhaps also the most populated city in the world at that time. After much prayer Montezuma decided to receive Cortés. He sent an impersonator to great him, accompanied by sorcerers who
se task it was to make the Spanish fall ill and die. Cortés was offered feathers and gold, the sight of which made his men so mad with gold lust that they literally drooled at the mouth. For the Aztecs gold was of far less importance than jade and their beautiful feathers, and so the Spaniards’ reactions were incomprehensible.

  The city consisted of multistory buildings and villas, terraces, gardens, trees and flowers everywhere. The lake was full of fish, ducks and other birds, canoes and small embarkations. It had taken the Spanish only three months--and countless battles, adventures and adversity--to get there after arriving on the coast.

  As the Tlaxcalans had made clear that the impersonator was not Montezuma, the real Montezuma made his appearance, enrobed in feathers and a marvelous jeweled headdress, his ears and nose ornamented with jade. Cloaks were laid at his feet so he would never touch the ground, and his subjects lowered their eyes. Cortés was 34, Montezuma, whom he considered a boy--especially after his capture when he would break into crying jags, or when he would follow Cortés around with doglike fidelity--was older by seven years.

  Cortés and his men were provided with comfortable quarters and offered endless gifts. Cortés was astonished by the splendor surrounding the king. He had a thousand servants and daily virgins were brought to him for his pleasure. Three hundred dishes were prepared for him each day, from which he would take a single bite. He drank cocoa and smoked tobacco. He had an enormous menagerie with everything from jaguars to crocodiles, that he fed with the remains of human sacrifices. The market was thought to be visited by sixty thousand people daily, who could buy anything from medicinal herbs to butchered body parts.

  Cortés and Montezuma were both mass murders, no matter what their reasons. Montezuma was responsible for the horrible deaths of thousands of innocent boys, and Cortés caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands killed through war and diseases, like smallpox that some historians say was the real reason the Spanish finished by conquering the Aztecs. Cortés and Montezuma became fast friends. The picnicked in the woods, boated on the lake, played various kinds of games, often with dice, some Aztec games, some Spanish. Cortés would apparently cheat, sending Montezuma into paroxysms of laughter. The stakes were jewels, and what Cortés won he kept, what Montezuma won he gave to his captors, his captors because Cortés had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: remain with him as his guest or, as one of his lieutenants chimed in, ‘’Die like a dog.’’ Hours passed in talk, Montezuma always trying to learn as much as he could about every aspect of Spanish culture and weaponry. Then one of Montezuma’s sons returned from the coast where he had been sent on a secret punitive raid against the Spanish. Cortés requested that the boy be put in his hands for questioning, which Montezuma agreed to. The lad was tortured until he admitted that he had been responsible for the death of Spanish soldiers, under the orders of his father. He and a score of chiefs were taken to a public square and burned at the stake, in front of Montezuma and the city’s inhabitants. The sight and screams literally obliterated Montezuma. From then on nothing but the shell of the man remained. Like Pizarro with Atahualpa, Cortés obliged Montezuma to call in gold from every corner of his empire.

  That Cortés could carry out such atrocities in the midst of a million city dwellers is a total mystery. But the force of his willpower was not only victorious against the Aztecs. Word came from the coast that 18 Spanish ships had arrived carrying five times the number of Cortés’s troops. Cortés left Montezuma in the hands of a trusted lieutenant and went to meet the commander of the forces. He sent ahead gold to bribe those who could be bribed and, arriving at night in the midst of a deluge, he attacked the Spanish camp and succeeded in partially blinding and capturing the commander. Thanks to the bribes and his incomparable authority and verbal eloquence, he brought the new troops over to his side.

  In the meantime his lieutenant, in the Aztec capital, learned that during an upcoming festival, the most important of the year, in which a virgin boy would have his heart cut out and displayed, still beating, to the sun, the Aztecs planned to capture the Spanish, imprison them, sacrifice them and then eat them. The cream of Aztec society, its nobles and its finest warriors, said to have been several thousand in number, gathered in a central square where, in the middle of one of their ceremonies, the Spanish massacred them all. They then returned to the palace and barricaded themselves inside.

  Cortés returned and made the fatal mistake of freeing Montezuma’s brother who promised to negotiate a truce between Cortés and the Aztecs sieging the palace. Instead he deposed Montezuma, the first time in Aztec history, and continued the siege. After weeks of battle, with Cortés’s men reduced to literally sucking black groundwater from holes they made in the palace gardens, Cortés had Montezuma led to the roof where he was ordered to calm the Aztecs. Instead, he was pelted with stones. Three days later he died, from his wounds according to the Spanish, garroted say the descendants of the Aztecs.

  What followed is known, in Spanish history, as La Noche Triste. Cortés decided to run for it. He had had the Aztec treasures in sculptures melted into gold bars. At midnight, after mass, he and his men bolted. While crossing the causeways they were sitting ducks, and although the Aztecs lost thousands, Cortés lost 600 of his men, and all the gold, now at the bottom of the lake surrounding the City of Dreams. Cortés’s skull was fractured in two places, two fingers were crushed, and his body badly wounded. Many Spaniards had been left behind, wounded. They now had their hearts cut out and their flesh eaten. The Aztecs didn’t follow those who made it to the jungles, a terrible mistake, for Cortés, armed with his courage and brain, would return to see most of them into an early grave, and their wealth flow into Spanish, Medici and Papal banks.

  Hernán Cortés

  JULIUS III

  1487 – 1555

  Julius III (Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte) replaced Paul III. He was a lucky pope in that during his reign Queen Mary returned to the English throne and Catholicism was restored in England, all of which led to his glorification and allowed him to live the lazy, dissolute existence he favored. Added to this was the fact that he possessed great administrative talent, and as he had been named governor of Rome twice, he had that center too in his corner. He built a luxurious palace, the Villa Giolia, adorned by Michelangelo, Vasari and lesser artists who decorated it with Ganymedes and other soft-core pornographic satyrs and naked angels--for which Julius emptied the papal treasury.

  Like da Vinci and his Salaì, Julius had fulfilled his erotic fantasies thanks to a youngster, Santino, a streetwise urchin of 14 he saw and lusted for. He had his brother adopt the lad who then became his nephew, on whom he showered benefices and named a cardinal, ennobled under the title of Innocenzo Ciocchi del Monte. He boasted of the boy’s prowess in bed, Julius being the bottom to ‘’his hung boy’’.

  Of Julius the governor of Milan wrote, ‘’They say many bad things about this pope, that he is vicious, arrogant and crazy.’’ Thomas Beard, a Puritan bishop, wrote: ‘’He makes a cardinal only of those who bugger him.’’ The Venetian ambassador to the Vatican, Matteo Dandolo, wrote home to say that ‘’the pope shared his bed with a boy cardinal.’’ Cardinal Jean du Bellay wrote a sonnet about Santino, the pope’s catamite ‘’with the red hat of a cardinal on his head,’’ and the pope’s entourage complained that Julius didn’t have a head for business while impatiently awaiting the boy as one does one’s mistress.

  After the pope’s death Innocenzo killed two men who had insulted him in some unrecorded way. The newly elected Pope Pius IV had him arrested and imprisoned for several years. He was again arraigned for raping two women but was released thanks to Julius’s friends. Innocenzo died in obscurity and was buried, without a funeral, in the del Monte chapel next to his benefactor who had preceded him in death at age 68, from fever.

  Julius III and Michelangelo were about the same age and Michelangelo was even closer to him than he had been with Paul III because Julius had more of an aesthetic sense than Paul, and then, b
oth men shared the same erotic interests.

  His election as pope took ten weeks, one of the longest in papal history. Sources say that during this time not only did the air in the Vatican become more fetid because the cardinals were literally walled in, but their usual meeting place for secret negotiations, the latrines, stunk so badly that they were hardly approachable. In addition, the food supply was lessened and made coarser in an attempt to encourage a result. The cardinals were split in factions, and del Monte turned out to be the least offensive candidate, a perfect choice in that he did nothing to rock the boat politically.

  Once elected he spent his time in supervising the building of his villa, in hunting, in banquets and the theater. Only his known preference for boys caused a stir, a scandal that was welcome fodder for Protestants. His nurturing of a killer-lover is the reason for Julius’s inclusion among Renaissance murderers.

  Julius III

  CELLINI

  1500 - 1571

  PERSIUS

  Giovanni, Cellini’s father, was Cellini’s first great love, and no son was more adored by his dad than was Benvenuto. He loved the man and the man loved his boy with every fiber of their souls. This was Cellini’s first great luck in life. When Cellini went off, they both had tears in their eyes. When he returned, they both wept with joy. In (nearly) the same way, Cellini loved his lovers, boys and men to whom he was fiercely loyal. When Cellini returned to Florence from his first adventures, he came across a former friend who greeted him with kisses and an open bed, and when Cellini went off again, the boy plucked a few nascent whiskers from Cellini’s chin to keep in memory.