THE BITTER, UNREMITTING COLD OF the high Andes had worked a kind of miracle on some of those frozen in their snowy tombs. It had gone far beyond the crude mechanics of preservation and the mere attenuation of a physical existence, salvaging something rarer still—the semblance of life. It had kept flesh golden, lips carmine, skin supple, eyes moist. Indeed, all that seemed lacking was the flush of warmth, the moist exhalation of breath, and the flutter of motion. In preserving those frozen children, nature had demonstrated its mastery over time, performing feats of eternity that made human morticians look feeble and sick. I was amazed by those lost Andean children and I was very moved. But I can’t say I was terribly surprised. Nature, I had come to realize, is highly inventive when it comes to staving off corruption. She does not always need the remote Andean cold to preserve the eerie appearance of vitality.
I first began to appreciate this during a visit I paid one sunny spring morning to the Necropolis Company in England. Hidden away discreetly behind a concealed door and up a narrow winding staircase in an old funeral parlor in the London suburb of Kingston upon Thames, the Necropolis Company did little to advertise its peculiar trade. Founded in 1852, the same year that Charles Dickens began writing Bleak House, the Victorian firm was in the business of exhumation, namely digging up the dead and moving them someplace more convenient. It was, according to its staff, an important trade in Great Britain: there were simply too many old cemeteries lurking in too many high-priced neighborhoods, especially in London where virtually every block seemed to harbor some ancient burial ground or another. The Necropolis Company specialized in trundling off the ancient dead with dignity and, in the last two decades alone, had carried them away from more than 125 old churchyards, hospital grounds, cemeteries, and prison yards. During one removal alone, in Islington, they had exhumed 15,000 people.
Over the years, the firm’s operations manager, Roger Webber, had seen virtually everything in the moldering bodies and skeletons line. A somber, melancholy fellow in late middle age, he had gazed on the bodies of young women reduced to mounds of grayish-white grave wax, the soaplike substance that formed as fat decomposed in water. He had seen caskets slopping with coffin liquor, the dark liquid that pools from rotting flesh. He had smelled the reek of putrefaction and seen skeletons grinning shamelessly as they trailed tatters of clothes and rags of human flesh. He had witnessed a lot of things he didn’t want to talk about. But the thing that had really impressed him was not the festering dead, but the centuries-old preserved bodies that he and his crews sometimes stumbled upon in rain-soaked English burial grounds.
So taken was Webber with these ancient cadavers that he offered to show me pictures of them. The Necropolis Company, as I learned, made a practice of photographing each of its projects, carefully documenting its grim work. Webber had some of these photos at hand in his dark, wood-paneled office. He didn’t know if I wanted to see them, but of course I did, so I moved my chair around the big mahogany table and edged closer to him to see the photos.
He had not been exaggerating. The album he produced contained several haunting photos. The most amazing was of a middle-aged Victorian matron who had perished in 1839. Dressed for the tomb in a white cotton bonnet, white winding sheet, and shroud, she gazed out at the world with weary eyes, a look of pinched annoyance on her face. Death, it seemed, had not been a welcome visitor. But it had treated her kindly nonetheless, preserving her almost intact. Webber and I studied her face, and a note of awe crept into his voice as he recalled finding similar bodies. “Sometimes you see coffins that have been buried for two hundred and fifty years,” he told me. “You look into the viewing plate and the body’s been perfectly preserved—no deterioration at all, still color to the eyes and the skin a sort of pinkish color.”
Such mummies, he conceded, were rather rare in England. When he and his colleagues exhumed the Islington cemetery with its fifteen thousand bodies, they found only two such mummies. I asked Webber why he thought this pair had been spared the fate of everyone else in that damp cemetery, and he mulled it over before replying. During Victorian times, he explained, wealthy families had often splurged on heavy oak or elm caskets caulked with Swedish pitch and sheathed on the outside and lined on the inside with heavy lead. Such coffins were intended to be indestructible, but in most cases, the lead linings had merely oxidized and corroded, exposing their contents to all the usual agents of corruption. But if one of these caskets happened to be interred in heavy clay soil, a vacuum sometimes formed about it, sealing off the corpse from water, bacteria, and insects, everything that customarily nibbles away at a cadaver.
It was a good, sound scientific explanation, but I sensed that try as Webber did to rationalize such finds, he found them at heart mysterious and rather wonderful. These bodies were just so unlike the general rule of thumb in exhumation, with all its grave wax and coffin liquor and terrible putrefaction: they seemed to be ruled by some other dispensation. A practical, down-to-earth man, Webber carefully avoided using words like miracle, but he couldn’t help but feel astonished in the company of such cadavers. And as I sat beside him, gazing at the photos, I felt a shiver of awe. I wondered who these people were and what kinds of lives they had lived and why they had been singled out for this strange form of immortality when so many others of their age had rotted into the ground.
It struck me later that this sense of awe was similar to that of the medieval European villagers who had exhumed the preserved bodies of famous martyrs or devout nuns centuries after their deaths. The medieval Catholic Church had regarded their preservation as miraculous and it had given these bodies a special name—the Incorruptibles. The Church had often beatified or canonized them and great cults of the faithful had grown up around them. After seeing Webber’s photo album, my curiosity was aroused. I wanted to know how much of the saintly incorruptibility in medieval Europe was due to conditions readily explained and scientifically understood, and how much fell into the realm of something far less explicable—the world of miracles and divine grace.
SELDOM IN HUMANITY’S long history has the body been held in such pitifully low esteem as it was in medieval Europe. It was the body, after all, that deceived and betrayed the soul, that tempted and sinned and craved and desired, that lusted after the soft breasts of the neighbor’s wife or ached for the sweet beauty of the gardener’s boy, that struck an innocent child in anger or beat a importunate beggar in wrath, that hungered greedily for rich pastries and stealthily hoarded sacks of gold, that coveted rich jewels and schemed for another’s land, that puffed up with pride in public and slept all day long while others toiled. It was the body that led the way to the fires of damnation and suffered the eternal torments of hell. For all these reasons and many more, pious Catholics heartily despised the body and treated it accordingly. They fasted. They self-flagellated. They wore hair shirts. They mortified the flesh. The body was, after all, the root of all evil.
But amid all this abnegation, there was one striking exception. Not all bodies were reviled by the medieval clergy in Europe. Among dutiful Catholics, hundreds of cults sprang up around the corporeal remains of saints. Such bodies—or rather, what remained of them—were deemed sanctified, for the Holy Ghost, it was said, once lived within them, healing the sick, dispensing words of wisdom, and embracing the humble and poor. This had forever left its mark on frail human flesh and bone. These had been transmuted by the alchemy of faith into something holy and, as such, the remains of saints possessed great powers for the good. “God Himself fittingly honors such relics by working miracles in their presence,” observed the great thirteenth-century Italian philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. The bodies of saints, in other words, were divine lightning rods, capable of attracting miracles.
Over the years, hagiographers recorded many tales of such miracles. Those performed by St. Zita, a humble Tuscan servant and a contemporary of Aquinas, were a case in point. When church officials exhumed her body years after her death, sight reputedly returned to the blind, movement to the paralyzed, health to the fevered, life to the withered, fertility to the sterile, and speech to the mute. Moreover, the miracles did not end there. St. Zita’s body revealed no trace of decay: she had been preserved whole and intact, an Incorruptible, and so she remains today, as I discovered while paying my respects to the wizened saint in a medieval church in the small Tuscan city of Lucca. In the glass-sided reliquary, her gaunt face was smooth and her hands soft and supple-looking. Her lustrous nails gleamed. But for the dark color of her skin and the antique style of her dress, she looked as if she could easily have risen from her brocade bed and strolled the streets of fashionable Lucca, attracting hardly a second glance from passersby.
The Roman Catholic Church has unearthed many such Incorruptibles in its long history. During the 1970s, American writer Joan Carroll Cruz set about trying to count them, combing the hagiographies of hundreds of Catholic saints for any mention of physical preservation. When she found one, she wrote to the saint’s shrine for confirmation. By such means, she tallied 102 Incorruptibles, from Saint Cecilia, the second-century Roman martyr, to Saint Charbel Makhlouf, the nineteenth-century Lebanese monk whose body continued to exude blood and perspiration more than sixty years after his death. Almost certainly other Incorruptibles exist, their bodies encased in dusty reliquaries in forgotten country churches. But they have been sadly forsaken over the years, even by the faithful. “I don’t think that any count is possible,” explained Ezio Fulcheri in his office at the University of Genoa. “Not even the bishops know how many there are. You see, there are so many churches that have been closed and are neglected now.”
Fulcheri is an authority on the Incorruptibles, or, as he prefers to put it, the mummies of saints. A pathologist by profession, he runs a rooftop lab at one of Europe’s largest and busiest hospitals, San Martin, where he teaches a score of young residents in blue jeans and trendy miniskirts how to detect cancer cells in surgical biopsies and how to diagnose birth defects in the cells of fetal tissue. For most people, this would be a depressing line of work. But Fulcheri, as I discovered during my stay in Genoa, is a jolly, happy man beneath all his responsibilities. Brisk and energetic in the lab, with a tendency to talk in succinct point form, he is an expansive bon vivant in the after hours. More Teutonic than Italian-looking, with short, neatly combed blond hair and austere steel-rimmed glasses, he loves amusing gossip, five-course meals, and an abundance of Liguria’s finest wine, preferably all together.
The son of a country doctor from the neighboring Piedmont region, Fulcheri takes his work seriously, but not himself. In his aging lab with its spectacular view of all Genoa spread below, he has chosen to dispense with much of the customary medical hierarchy, creating the warm, cheery atmosphere of a treetop nest. Fulcheri likes to put people at their ease, and just a half hour after we met, he had casually introduced me to most of his staff and students, made me an espresso himself in the lab’s cluttered closet-sized kitchen, and generally helped me feel right at home. He had also, unknown to me at that moment, sent a welcoming bouquet of flowers to my hotel room.
Married to a fellow pathologist and the father of two-year-old twins, the forty-seven-year-old physician was in constant motion. He seldom sat long and drove far too fast, narrowly missing a pedestrian the day he took me out on a tour of local saints. But despite the chaotic whirlwind he lives in, Fulcheri manages to radiate a sunny energy that knits together his staff, students, and even strangers into a moveable extended family. At a lunch bar one day, I watched in amazement as he instinctively went to the rescue of a young stranger with a furiously wailing baby. The other patrons had studiously ignored the ear-splitting din. Not Fulcheri. He walked over and began playing unself-consciously with the shrieking infant. He made silly faces. He cooed and gurgled. He lifted the baby out of its mother’s remarkably yielding arms and rocked it gently. Before long just about everyone in the cafe was smiling—even the baby. Somehow, Fulcheri had done it: he had tuned in to the baby’s wavelength. When mother and child finally left, he saw them to the door, waving after them like a proud grandfather.
With his zest for life and his delight in all its trimmings, Fulcheri seems very much a man of the here and now. But as a young high school student, he had been fascinated by classical history and literature, and when he finally finished his medical training, he began dabbling in research on the splendid collection of Egyptian mummies at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. He loved studying their ancient diseases, for this combined two of his great loves—medicine and history. It was while moving in the circles of Italian Egyptologists that he received a peculiar, irresistible phone call in 1986 from Monsignor Gianfranco Nolli.
A prominent Egyptologist, Nolli was the inspector emeritus of the Vatican’s Egyptian Museum, which houses many of the antiquities that ancient Roman travelers had plundered from Egypt. But Nolli also served the Vatican in a lesser-known capacity—as a consultant to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. This august body, composed of nearly two dozen cardinals, archbishops, and bishops and assisted by a small core of ecclesiastical investigators and scientific consultants, works out of a brick and stone building near St. Peter’s Square. Its chief duty is to examine the lives, writings, and purported miracles of people of extraordinary holiness, referring those it deemed most worthy of recognition as saints, blesseds, and martyrs to the pope for his final decision.
Nolli had been given an unusual project by the Congregation. He was looking for a pathologist to assist him in some of its more difficult aspects. Fulcheri, a devout Catholic, agreed to meet him in Rome. Nolli lived in a three-story house whose aging rooms were filled to the ceilings with books. With alert, darting eyes that seemed to take in everything, the elderly priest explained to Fulcheri that he had long made a study of the ancient connections between the Holy Land and Egypt and Egyptian mummies, and it was on account of this latter speciality that the Congregation had approached him with an unusual request. They wanted him to preserve the body of the dissident Ukrainian cardinal Josef Slipyj, who had recently died. And they wanted him to do so with an Egyptian-style embalming.
Slipyj, it transpired, was a strong candidate for canonization. A vocal opponent to Communism in Ukraine, the cardinal had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor in the Siberian Gulag at the end of the Second World War. After eighteen years of privation, Slipyj had been exiled to Rome, where he died in 1984. Fulcheri had never heard this story before, but he understood at once why the Vatican wanted the prelate preserved. “Sometimes there is a man or woman that the people love, and for this reason they want to preserve the body for a cult and in many cases for political reasons,” he explained to me. “Some people spend a lot of time in church and there was an idea to have the body there to remind them.” The Vatican worried that as Communism faded in Ukraine and a new era of religious tolerance dawned, other religions might gain a strong new foothold in the country. The Roman Catholic Church did not want Ukrainians to forget its long history in Eastern Europe, nor its bitter opposition to the old Communist regimes. If Slipyj were canonized, his splendidly preserved body could help jog Ukrainian memories.
Already Nolli had recruited several other prominent Italian scientists for the project, including Nazzareno Gabrielli, the director of scientific research at the Vatican Museum. A chemist by training, Gabrielli had devised a variety of solutions to replace the traditional resins and oils favored by Egyptian embalmers. But Nolli still needed a pathologist skilled in histology, the science of cellular composition and structure. Fulcheri offered his services. So, a few weeks later, the Genoese pathologist joined Nolli and the others in the underground crypt of St. Sophia in Rome, where Slipyj’s body had been buried.
Turning the crypt into a makeshift lab, Fulcheri and his colleagues lifted the prelate’s body from its coffin and laid it out on a rough table. The cadaver was still intact, but the flesh had begun to darken appreciably with decay. Following the methods of the ancient Egyptians, the team removed the brain and viscera and cleansed the cardinal’s internal cavities. Then they immersed the body in a chemical bath designed to switch off enzymatic decay. All the while the team took detailed photos of the body and scribbled copious notes. “We recorded how we began to work, what we did, what substance we employed, what the concentration was and why,” recalled Fulcheri, “because it’s mandatory to preserve the body for the future.”
Over the next four months, the team immersed the cardinal in a series of chemical solutions, each slightly different from the other and each designed to advance the process of mummification. At the end of a year, Fulcheri collected tissue samples, embedding them in protective paraffin wax and slicing them thinly to make slides. Slipping these under the microscope, he compared them to those he had prepared before the mummification began. He was terribly pleased: the processes of cellular decay had slowed almost to a standstill. Nolli and Fulcheri declared the mummification a success, and they immediately informed the Congregation of their results. Shortly after, the Vatican flew Slipyj’s mummified corpse to the capital of western Ukraine, Lviv, where it was buried in the crypt of a cathedral, pending canonization.
Fulcheri was fascinated by the work. It was the start of a strange new career for him as an expert on the mummies of saints.
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CATHOLIC Church had not hesitated in calling on science for help in preserving a future saint. But Fulcheri had little idea whether it had done so in earlier times. There had been many times in its history when the Church had regarded science suspiciously as a rival orthodoxy. Moreover, it was unclear how much the Church could have benefited from science in an earlier age. The popular European and North American tradition of embalming, with its chemicals and cosmetics and short-term preservation, developed quite late. Indeed, it was not until the seventeenth century that European anatomists and chemists began experimentally injecting substances as diverse as wine, turpentine, alcohol, vermilion, lavender, and rosemary into the arteries of animal and human cadavers. And such short-term forms of preservation did not become widely available to the public until the late nineteenth century, when American enterpreneurs began embalming thousands of Confederate and Union soldiers slaughtered on the battlefields of the Civil War.
Still, Fulcheri was intensely curious about the Incorruptibles. Soon after finishing the work with Slipyj, he received another call from Nolli. After exchanging pleasantries, the priest asked Fulcheri for his help once again, this time with an official examination of an important medieval Tuscan saint, Saint Margaret of Cortona. Such an examination, known in church circles as a canonic recognition, was intended to root out fake relics—which had once abounded and which medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer had once satirized—and to help conserve real remains. It was also conceived as a miniature fact-finding mission to learn more about the life of a saint. Hagiographies were notoriously unreliable, for they were often penned by uncritical admirers and laced with legends and literary conventions.
The saint in question was a thirteenth-century Italian mystic, St. Margaret of Cortona. According to the history, St. Margaret had been the daughter of a simple Tuscan farmer. As a farm girl, she had attracted the eye of a wealthy young man. Living openly as his mistress, she flaunted his finery and bore him a son, scandalizing the countryside. After nine years of this affair, her lover suddenly went missing, and she discovered his body in a shallow grave. Regarding this as a sign of God, she asked public pardon, then devoted her life to good works. In 1279, when the army of Charles of Anjou threatened to lay waste to Cortona, the citizens appealed to her to pray for their deliverance. St. Margaret reassured them—correctly as it turned out—that their city was in no danger. Charles signed an armistice soon after.
After death, the body of St. Margaret resisted decay. As one of the Incorruptibles, she attracted thousands of devout Catholics every year to her magnificent Gothic tomb in the cathedral in Cortona. She was the source of much wonder. Her body, noted Joan Carroll Cruz in The Incorruptibles, “is light in color and dry, but completely whole. Even the eyes are full and all the nails of the feet and hands are still in place—truly a miraculous preservation which has existed for almost seven hundred years.”
To examine such a body, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints needed a medical specialist: Fulcheri readily volunteered. In Cortona, he joined the other examiners, taking the oath required of all participating at such proceedings: he vowed to respect the saint’s remains, to take nothing from them, and to tell the truth about his findings. Only then were he and his colleagues permitted to break the reliquary seals and carry the saint’s body to a private area in the cathedral. As a representative of the bishop looked on, Fulcheri gently removed the saint’s clothing. As he lifted the hem of her dress up over her legs, all those assembled began to murmur. Several long incisions streaked along her thighs; other, deeper cuts ran along her abdomen and chest. Clearly made after death, they had been sewn shut with a whipstitch in coarse black thread. St. Margaret, it seemed, had been artificially mummified.
Fulcheri pored over the historical and ecclesiastical records. At the time of her death in 1297, Margaret was a beloved figure in Cortona, the founder of an important hospital and the worker of many miracles of healing. Cortona’s citizens were sure that she was a saint and they were determined to see her body preserved so that their city might benefit from the miracles that God might choose to perform in its presence. “So at the time of her death, the people asked the Church to embalm her,” observed Fulcheri. According to the records, they made this request publicly, yet over the centuries knowledge of it had been lost. People assumed, given the state of her body, that she had been preserved by an act of God. Earlier canonical recognitions performed on her body had done little to set the record straight. The examiners had detected the fragrance of unguents and spices about her, but they had been too embarrassed to give her a full physical examination. “They had drawn back her vest, but just a little to be modest,” said Fulcheri.
Those who preserved St. Margaret had done so remarkably thoroughly, excising her internal organs and drenching her skin in fragrant lotions. Their handiwork reminded Fulcheri of the techniques employed by the ancient embalmers of Egypt. Mulling this over, the pathologist wondered whether the resemblances were merely coincidental—the results of independent invention by two different cultures at two different moments in time—or whether at some point in the distant past, the Catholic Church had borrowed something from the great Egyptian tradition of mummification, adapting it to its own purposes.
The Bible, after all, had established an important precedent. In the Old Testament, Joseph, the church patriarch who was sold into slavery in Egypt as a youth and rose to become the governor of Egypt, had commanded his servants to embalm the body of his father. Elements of this practice had likely lingered in Palestine for more than a millennium. The New Testament relates how mourners at the holy sepulchre anointed the body of Christ with natural preservatives made of plants. Indeed, Nicodemus arrived at the tomb carrying a hundred-pound weight of myrrh, the resin of choice for Egyptian embalmers, and aloes, an antibacterial residue from the various species of Aloe that flourish in southern and eastern Africa. “Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury,” notes the Gospel of St. John. According to tradition, the stone used for this anointing still stands in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Imbued by faith, the early Christian fathers were determined to follow the example of Christ in every possible way. “If Christ, as the head of the Church, was oiled and embalmed,” said Fulcheri, “they thought that important people and holy people should be oiled and embalmed, too.” So early Christians began anointing the bodies of the holy with natural preservatives and wrapping them in linen, simple acts that greatly aided the mummification of many saints. When the first Christian missionaries journeyed to Rome, they brought these customs with them, and the use of such preservatives soon became well established in Europe. According to early historical records, fourth-century Christians in Umbria lovingly entombed the body of Saint Emiliano with “aromatic resins and precious perfumes and white linens” and Christians continued anointing their saints and martyrs with such substances for more than a millennia after this. In 1697, for example, an Italian surgeon left a list of twenty-seven powered herbs and drugs that he had employed to preserve the body of St. Gregorio Barbarigo. Myrrh, aloes, and frankincense, another favored Egyptian resin, headed the list. “So the ideas from Egypt were transferred to Palestine,” observed Fulcheri, “and then they came to Europe.”
But while some Europeans were saturating the bodies of saints and martyrs with preservatives, others, as Fulcheri discovered, were taking more extreme steps to preserve human bodies. This they did in the name of the state. Across Europe, the death of a monarch created considerable political turmoil and anxiety. To soothe doubts, royal families were forced to show their courts and foreign dignitaries that a king or queen had truly departed and that someone new could rightfully assume the vacant title. In practice, this meant placing a regal cadaver on display until it could finally be buried. But the custom posed a serious problem. It could take weeks for important foreign dignitaries to arrive for a state funeral and by that time the cadaver would be a festering mess. So in royal courts from London to Vienna, physicians were called upon to fend off rot from their sovereigns until the cadavers could be tucked safely in the tomb.
Historians are unsure just when European doctors got into this morbid business: records are scarce, and Europe’s royal families have never been terribly keen on permitting researchers to prod and poke the remains of their ancestors. But records suggest that one of the earliest cases took place in the late summer of 1087, when physicians were called in to preserve the body of one of England’s most famous kings, William the Conqueror. William had died rather unexpectedly after a riding accident while surveying the burned ruins of Mantes, the French city he had just razed. His steed had stepped on a burning ember and, as it reared up sharply, threw the obese monarch hard against the pommel of his saddle. The resulting injury did what all William’s enemies at the Battle of Hastings could not: it killed him. Shocked by this, his family and courtiers began hastily arranging a funeral. To preserve the dead king’s body, they called in physicians to cleanse it and to remove the internal organs. But even these measures proved inadequate. By the beginning of the funeral, William’s immense body was bursting at the seams with fetid gases and, to the horror of all, suddenly exploded inside the church, sending the nobles fleeing from their seats.
Fortunately, not all court physicians in Europe were such bunglers. Indeed some became so skillful at human preservation that they succeeded in keeping the bodies of their sovereigns from harm’s way for centuries. During the 1980s, Italian pathologist Gino Fornaciari had the rare opportunity of examining some of their best handiwork. An expert on mummification, Fornaciari was given permission to examine dozens of ancient bodies interred in wooden coffins in the Basilica of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, the final resting place of the royal family of Naples during the Renaissance. In all, Fornaciari and his team studied the remains of three kings and one queen, as well as the bodies of various other prominent Neapolitan princes and nobles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The pathologist was much impressed. Half of the bodies had been expertly mummified by contemporary physicians. Evisceration incisions ran down their abdomens. Holes pierced their crania for brain removal. Bits of herbs such as rosemary, laurel, wormwood, and myrtle still clung to the insides of their abdomens. Pine resins saturated their skin. “Even in the case of the coffins,” noted Fornaciari later in a paper, “preference was shown for resinous substances which were thought to favor the preservation of the body.”
The complex methods employed by the court physicians were very similar to those applied to St. Margaret. But Fulcheri could not make out the reasons for taking such drastic measures with a saint. The embalmers of Cortona had gone far beyond the traditional anointing of the holy, carving into her sacred flesh and excising and removing most of her internal organs. The church records offered no explanation, so Fulcheri began hunting elsewhere for clues, searching to see if he could find other similarly mummified saints in Italy. Perhaps, he reasoned, their histories would shed light on motives.
His research turned up only five similar cases—St. Clare of Montefalco, Blessed Margaret of Metola, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Bernadine of Siena, and St. Rita of Cascia. All had resided in the Italian provinces of Umbria and Tuscany. All had lived within a relatively short period of time, from 1297 to 1447. And all were mystics of a type fashionable in northern Italy during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Their followers were determined to preserve their bodies, but as Fulcheri could see from the records, a simple anointing had not served their purposes. Some mourners were eager to remove the internal organs for saintly relics to be sent to churches elsewhere. Others wanted to search the organs themselves for certain distinguishing marks. St. Clare of Montefalco, for example, had once told her followers, “If you seek the cross of Christ, take my heart; there you will find the suffering Lord.” The nuns who had known her so well during life took this remark literally. After she died, they cut out her viscera and began poring over it for signs of divine grace. They extricated three gallstones, which they regarded as symbols of the Holy Trinity. Inside her heart they discerned signs of cardiac disease affecting the saint’s papillary muscles and nearby valves and tendons. This abnormality, they concluded, resembled the outstretched body of Christ on the cross.
NOT ALL THE Incorruptibles, however, could be chalked up so neatly to the work of ecclesiastical surgeons. Some, such as St. Zita, the wizened saint I had admired in Lucca, revealed not a trace of human intervention. When pathologist Gino Fornaciari examined her body during the 1980s, he detected no sign of preservative unguents or resins on her skin. Nor did he find any incisions on her seven-hundred-year-old cadaver. St. Zita was whole and complete, possessed of all her internal organs. She and others like her—St. Ubald of Gubbio, Blessed Margaret of Savoy, and St. Savina Petrilli, to name only a few—had escaped decay by means of some other agency. As a scientist, Fulcheri suspected the hand of nature. He wondered whether certain environmental conditions had brought about the saints’ preservation, for many had been interred before canonization in distinctive burial vaults beneath church floors.
The peculiar design and location of these vaults had been determined early in Church history. During the first century A.D., the Roman emperor Nero had found it politic to persecute Christians. An extravagant and unpopular ruler, he had been accused of setting a great fire in Rome to clear ground for a new palace. To deflect these rumors, Nero pinned the blame on Christians. He ordered the arrest of a great multitude of them and had them dragged to the Circo Vaticano. There, in front of all Rome, he had them set ablaze, torn apart by dogs, and hung from crucifixes. As his victims cried out in agony, Nero himself mingled among the audience dressed as a charioteer. When he finally had his fill of this cruel sport, the victims’ families claimed the bodies, interring them near the circus or in the undergound tunnels of Rome’s catacombs.
Such persecutions continued sporadically at the hands of other emperors. So when the Christian convert Constantine finally assumed power in Rome in the early fourth century and gave Christians freedom of worship, they breathed an immense sigh of relief. They retrieved their martyrs from catacombs and makeshift graves and began reburying them in safer, more glorious tombs under the altars of their new churches. In Rome, Constantine himself ordered the construction of a magnificent new cathedral, the Basilica of St. Peter, whose altar capped the original tomb of the disciple, one of Nero’s victims. From that time on, the relics of a martyr or saint were tucked beneath the altar of every new Roman Catholic church that rose in Europe. Indeed, an early word for these churches was martyrium.
The new church architecture ushered in a new funerary fashion. Pious Christians were no longer content to bury their dead in ancient cemeteries and catacombs: they wanted them to lie inside the church, as close to the altar as possible. So Italian church builders came up with a simple plan. To accommodate the dead, they constructed burial vaults beneath the church floors, creating places of worship that effectively doubled as mausoleums. In these vaults, bishops were buried closest to the altar; priests and monks were entombed a short distance away from it. Kings, who ruled by divine right, were interred next to them and the nobility were inhumed a little farther off. By the medieval era, even a few wealthy merchants and their families had managed to buy their way into these vaults. Only the great unwashed were laid to rest in cemeteries outside the eaves. Christian churches had become houses of the dead, and rather exclusive ones at that.
Lying within church walls, the vaults were holy places, but some also offered another major advantage. Carved out of the cool ground or lined with alkaline stone, they had both chemical and climatic environments conducive to mummification. “They had all the right technical conditions for the preservation of mummies,” observed Fulcheri. “The temperature in these crypts is quite low, and there is little temperature difference between summer and winter, so it is very easy to keep the human body there. So for this reason, a lot of the people who are exhumed from there are well preserved.” In effect, some of the vaults served as superb natural mummifiers, preserving their trove of dessicated flesh for centuries.
Future saints were often laid to rest in these vaults until they were exhumed during beatification or canonization trials. By then, the tombs’ microclimate had dessicated their flesh, turning it to the texture of old leather. If there was any confusion among officials about which body belonged to the saint, they sometimes picked the best preserved one, for incorruptibility was taken as a sign of holiness. Ordinary Europeans had no idea that nature had such preservative power and at a time when nearly every villager or city dweller had seen rancid corpses strewn along the streets during plague years or smelled festering cadavers piled high on a battlefield after a disastrous defeat, an ancient cadaver seemed a miracle.
By the Enlightenment, however, churchmen were beginning to ask questions about incorruptibility. The most observant had noticed that some saints began decaying almost as soon as they were removed from the burial vaults. This raised uncomfortable doubts about the saints themselves, so in 1734 a particularly scholarly pope, Benedict XIV, published the first of four volumes on saints, raising the standard for incorruptibility. Only those bodies that remained soft, supple, lifelike in color, and fresh-looking for many years, ruled Benedict, without any subsequent disintegation and without any meddling by morticians, would be deemed miracles. But this didn’t solve the problem. There was still room for interpretation about who was or wasn’t incorruptible, and the devout frequently gave a favorite candidate considerable latititude. To demonstate that a saint’s arm was still supple enough to bend, some examiners fractured the limb, allowing the forearm to flop loosely. “It’s not a great sight today,” conceded Fulcheri.
On occasion, bound by love, some went further still to preserve the incorruptibility of a saint. Several years ago, explained Fulcheri, Monsignor Nolli, who is now dead, visited the convent of the Poor Clares in the Italian town of Assisi. There the priest paid his respects to St. Clare, the thirteenth-century founder of the order. As a young teenager, St. Clare had fallen under the influence of St. Francis of Assisi. Running away from home in 1212, she had taken her vows and become famous for her many miracles. Twice she saved Assisi from the swords of its enemies and it was said by the townspeople that she could see things that others couldn’t. During her final illness, an image of the Mass conducted in the Basilica of St. Francis, on the far side of town, appeared on her wall. St. Clare watched it with pleasure. In recent decades, the thirteenth-century saint became the patron saint of television.
Unknown to many, there was an irony in this. St Clare was not all that she seemed. The day that Monsignor Nolli went to visit the saint, who rested in a glass case behind a heavy ironwork grate in an Assisi church, he saw that her skin was unnaturally brown and opaque. He also noticed a sprinkling of dust gathering beneath her hands and alongside her face. She did not look at all like a seven-hundred-year-old person should. Nolli asked for permission to examine St. Clare with Fulcheri, Gabrielli, and two of their colleagues. When they opened the grate and the reliquary, they saw that St. Clare was not a mummy at all. Instead of soft supple flesh, Fulcheri and his colleagues found a silver mask and a silver mannequin of the saint. Inside it were the saint’s bones all tied together with silver wire, cloth, and pitch.
The Poor Clares intended no ruse. At some point in the distant past, St. Clare had simply gone the way of all flesh. “So considering that the saint was very much adored,” observed Fulcheri, “they took whatever bones there were and created a body around them. Instead of having an urn or reliquary made up, they made a corpus sanctos—a holy body.” Such a complete body was a much more inviting object of contemplation and love than a mere collection of bones. In this, the Poor Clares were merely following a little-known church tradition. Elsewhere in Europe, the pious fashioned similar holy bodies. Recent studies by researchers at the University of Padua suggest that as many as seventy now grace European churches.
Over the centuries, some of the devout came to believe that the silvery St. Clare was flesh and blood. But the nuns’ efforts to dress up St. Clare’s remains had been sadly misguided. Rather than protecting her bones, they had attracted hungry insects. Fulcheri and his colleagues feared that the creatures would soon devour all that was left of the saint, so they requested and received permission to conserve what remained of her in a human-shaped reliquary with a porcelain mask. It was the first time in a century that any man had stayed in the convent. The nuns, rather than objecting to such an invasion, treated Fulcheri and his colleagues with great affection. As the scientists worked, they sang the same Gregorian chants that the Poor Clares had sung seven hundred years ago when St. Clare died and her soul ascended to heaven. “It was,” said Fulcheri, “a poetic moment.”
Influenced perhaps by such discoveries, the Roman Catholic Church has now virtually abandoned the old notion of incorruptibility. It no longer accepts physical preservation as one of the two miracles required before a saint can be recognized by the pope, and in recent years incorruptibility has gone much the same way as the old Latin Mass and the medieval vision of hell as a place of brimstone, fire, and eternal physical torment. But this did not bother Fulcheri, nor diminish or alter his own personal faith a whit. “Why should I change my ideas?” he asked, a bit testy that I had even presumed to ask in the first place. “The saints are a natural phenomena. Okay. St. Clare is not a mummy, only bones. But my devotion to St. Clare is exactly the same. It hasn’t changed.”
But try as it will, the Vatican will never be able to completely quell the sense of astonishment, the strange moment of recognition we often feel in the company of one of these bodies. Blended equally of awe and desire, it is too much a part of who we are and too much a reflection of our deepest desires to relinquish easily. Such ancient flesh holds out proof of a power—whether divine or natural—so prodigious and loving that it chooses to keep our fellow humans just as they are through eternity. It is an amazing affirmation, a testimony to our significance in a universe so often stony with indifference. It holds out hope that death will not be the end of us, that there is some salvation from the final annihilation that we fear awaits us all.