APRIL 4TH, 1492
April morning sunlight falls on Girolamo’s desk as he makes notes for his next sermon. The heady fragrance of blossoming hazel wafts in through the window. He has been chosen to preach the Lenten sermons in San Lorenzo this year—a great honour, and a tribute to his powers of oratory. He has to admit that producing and delivering sermons daily for forty days does put a strain on him. Lent follows Carnival and goes on until Easter. It is the end of winter and the beginning of spring; it always feels like the longest season of the church’s year. He smothers a yawn. After the exorcisms he went straight to Dawn Praise, then slept for three hours before First Prayer at six in the morning. Then at nine he was preaching to a packed church in San Lorenzo. Now he needs to write another sermon for tomorrow. He has to force himself to concentrate on his work.
He has been taught how to put a sermon together—it was literally beaten into him at Bologna. Yet time after time God speaks to him in the pulpit and he finds himself extemporising. He knows it is a sin—and yet he wonders. How can it be a sin to speak of the future without premeditation when God shows it to him so clearly? He sometimes wishes God would reveal what is to come at quiet times, when he could better consider when or whether to share the vision. In the pulpit, speaking, it is easy to be carried away by his own emotion, and the emotion of the enthusiastic congregation. It isn’t easy to be politic. He has a reprimand on his desk from Brother Vincenzo, First of the Lombard Congregation of Dominicans, his direct superior. It is a letter which he must answer, humbly, once the sermon for tomorrow is written. And tomorrow he should definitely read his sermon as written, and not get into more pulpit dialogues with God. Yet the people like it, and God obviously likes it or He wouldn’t encourage it.
Girolamo sighs. He is First Brother of San Marco, in Florence, and Brother Vincenzo, who hates him, is far away in Bologna, up in Lombardy. But someone, probably one of the lazy Dominican brothers at the rival monastery of Santa Maria Novella, is writing to inform Vincenzo of every lapse Girolamo makes. In any case, he shouldn’t defy his superiors, however much he feels the matter of his sermons should be between him and his conscience, between him and God. He has taken a vow of obedience. He prays to Saint Mark for help observing it as he dips his quill. He thinks of the demon the night before, speaking from the lips of the poor bruised nun, the twistings of his name, the crude rhymes: “Other brother, burn and smother…”
Domenico comes bursting in, red in the face. Girolamo puts down his pen and turns. “Thanks be to God.”
“Thanks be to God,” Domenico says, hastily, and goes on without pause, “Brother, the Count is here! He insists on seeing you immediately. I told him you were working, but I can’t keep him out.”
“That’s all right, Domenico, I’ll see him.” He sets his quill down carefully, then stands and stretches. He is glad of the interruption. Is that a sin? He looks guiltily at the unfinished sermon and prays to the Virgin to intercede for him for forgiveness.
“Should I bring him here?” Domenico looks around Girolamo’s room. As First Brother, Girolamo has two cells, in addition to the office through which they are reached. His inmost cell is as austere as those of his brothers, but this outer cell has a writing desk and two wooden chairs made by a carpenter to Girolamo’s own design. Here he can work in private, or see one of his brothers. There is a fresco on the wall, painted by the late Brother Angelico. It shows St Dominic embracing the foot of the cross. Every cell has one, each different, and used in the right way they are a fine aid to guide each brother to a true understanding of the sacrifice and the redemption. It is one of Girolamo’s more pleasant tasks to consider which brother should have which cell, how the painting of the Garden of Gethsemane might help Brother Tomasso lift his mind from the quotidian details of running the monastery, while the fresco of how the crucifixion was experienced by senses other than sight might help calm Domenico’s exuberance. He redistributes the cells every year at Pentecost.
“I’ll come down and see him in the parlour.” He walks through the outer office, where Brother Tomasso and Brother Silvestro have their heads bent over the accounts, then down through the monastery, quiet at this hour. His brothers are working or praying. Some of the cell doors stand open, showing the frescoes on the walls within, others are closed. Brother Benedetto is scrubbing the floor in the corridor, as he does every day at this time, to help him develop a proper humility. Girolamo nods to him as he passes.
The Count is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concordia, scholar and Platonist, presently under city arrest in Florence, far from his own domain. What does he want with Girolamo today? Could the Count have managed to get into trouble again? It isn’t much more than a year since Girolamo had to write to Pope Innocent on the Count’s behalf, after he’d been arrested in France for heresy. The theses he had written were heretical, of course, technically, but Girolamo agrees with the Count that the proper response of the Church was to engage with his arguments critically, not to try to pretend they hadn’t been made. The Count’s Nine Hundred Theses might indeed be riddled with error and far too much Plato and Origen—but he is a young man and ready to learn. He has amended several of them already, though the Holy Father, Pope Innocent VIII, has been assured by both Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo himself that the Count is doing nothing in Florence but translating Psalms. Girolamo smiles. In this case, what the Holy Father doesn’t know won’t hurt. There is no harm in the Count. He is vastly learned in both sacred and secular matters. He has read everything. He has even taught himself Arabic and Hebrew the better to inquire into the nature of God. His errors come not from wickedness or ignorance but from moving too fast. And in some cases he is right and the Inquisition was wrong—on apocatastasis, for instance, which doctrine was endorsed by St Gregory of Nyssa. The Count is a good man. They are friends. Girolamo wants him to become a Dominican, and the Count wants Girolamo to become a Platonist, so they often disagree. But how much joy there is in their disagreement, how much meeting of minds! The Count can follow Girolamo’s full thought, as so few can. What a Dominican he will make, one day, Girolamo thinks, smiling, as he walks down the stairs.
He finds the Count sitting on the cloister wall, playing with one of the monastery kittens, letting it pounce on the edge of his embroidered sleeve, which he is trailing on the dirt, where the shoots of vegetables are already poking through. The Count is, naturally, dressed as a nobleman with parti-coloured tights and a doublet with a short green riding cloak tossed back over his shoulder. This is quite an unusual sight in Florence, which has no real nobility, and where the rich and the rulers proudly display their merchant origins in guildsmen’s red gowns. Cosimo de’ Medici once said that three yards of red cloth make a gentleman. Count Pico, however, was born in a castle in Mirandola, between Venice and Milan, and is a hereditary lord. It’s very unusual for someone like him to become a scholar and a philosopher. If he becomes a Dominican it will be even more unusual, but then he will wear a habit like all the brothers.
The Count jumps up when he sees Girolamo and stops smiling. “Brother Girolamo, I come to ask you a favour,” he says at once.
Girolamo hesitates. “Shall we sit down and take refreshment and talk about it?” he asks, gesturing towards the door to the parlour, where the brothers entertain visitors.
The Count smiles again, brushing dirt off his sleeve. “No more of your Lenten refreshment, thank you. Let’s speak here for a moment, and then if you will, we can talk as you accompany me.”
“Accompany you?” Girolamo’s heart sinks. It will be hard for him to refuse the Count a favour. In addition to the sums of money the Count has often donated to San Marco, he has this last year personally dowered Girolamo’s sister Chiara, back in Ferrara, allowing her to make a good marriage. True, the Count owes Girolamo for his letter to the Pope. But in the web of friendship and alliance and worldly ties that bind everyone together, Girolamo stands deep in the Count’s debt, and they both know it. Before God, things are different. It is only God, only Girolamo’s status as a Dominican and First Brother of San Marco, that allows the two men to be friends at all. The Count is a scholar, yes, but he is also and always a Count, a rich and powerful nobleman, while Girolamo is no more than the son of a Ferrarese doctor. In the normal way of things, he wouldn’t be coming to ask Girolamo a favour, he’d be commanding that he attend on him. And if he did that, it would be much easier, because Girolamo would of course refuse such a command. It is not God but reason that tells Girolamo now what the Count has come to ask. “You want me to visit Magnificent Lorenzo?”
“He’s dying,” the Count says, bluntly. “There’s no doubt now, failing a miracle. His father and grandfather died the same way, Ficino says.”
“He has his own confessor.” Girolamo feels churlish as soon as the words are out.
“He does, and he has seen him and been given the last rites and been absolved. But I want him to see you. I’m asking you, Girolamo. Please come and bring comfort to a dying man. It isn’t about currying favour with the master of Florence, I know how you feel about that. This is about the soul of my friend. He wants to see you.”
“I can’t refuse you,” he says, heavyhearted. “I’ll come.”
“Thank you! I knew you would.”
“Are you sure he wants to see me?” he asks, summoning young Brother Leonardo from his weeding with a snap of his fingers.
“Yes, I am sure.”
“But he said—” Girolamo breaks off and gives rapid instructions to Brother Leonardo. He makes excuses to God as he does it. He’ll be back by Twilight Prayer. Silvestro can oversee things until then. He’ll finish the sermon before morning, and the letter to Brother Vincenzo can wait another day. Visiting the dying is a more urgent duty.
“It was you who refused to see Lorenzo,” the Count says, as they walk out of San Marco’s gates together.
“God is my master.”
“Yes. All Lorenzo said was that a stranger had come to live in his house and didn’t want to visit him.”
“San Marco isn’t his house,” Girolamo says, angry again at hearing the words. He prays God’s forgiveness for the sin of wrath.
“Fifty years ago, Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo de’ Medici, paid to have San Marco rebuilt, and had the Pope give it to the Dominicans from the order who had it before,” the Count says, shrugging. “And he had a cell in San Marco, where he would come to pray.”
“Cosimo de’ Medici had himself painted as Saint Cosmas in the most overdecorated cell in the monastery,” Girolamo says. “And if he paid for the monastery, he also put his balls all over it, like a dog spraying every street corner. And for all his famed piety, he said the city can’t be governed by saying Our Father.”
The Count glanced up at where they were passing under a Medici crest featuring the eight circular balls that were their symbol. “Well, whatever Cosimo did, all of Florence is Lorenzo’s house.”
“He thinks it is. Florence is a free commonwealth still, ruled by the Senate, the elected lords. Lorenzo isn’t a king or a duke. Florence isn’t a tyranny.” Girolamo scowls as they come out into the sunlight.
“Lorenzo could have had himself made duke, or king, if he’d wanted to. He didn’t because he too values the forms of the commonwealth. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t both despise him for being nobility and then throw it in his teeth that he isn’t!”
A pair of horses are saddled and waiting, with one of the young boys who hang around the city hoping for work holding their bridles. He grins at the Count, showing a gap in his teeth. The Count flips him a coin, which he catches deftly before it falls into the dirt of the street, whose usual stink is made worse by the fresh droppings of the horses, not yet trodden in.
“We’re riding to Careggi?” Girolamo asks. “It’s what, an hour’s walk?”
“Don’t worry, they’re my horses,” the Count says. “I know you don’t want to take favours from the Medici.”
“I don’t want to be bought by them,” he says, swinging himself up into the saddle of the nearest, a roan mare. The skirts of his black robe ride up his hairy thighs, and he adjusts it hastily. It is a long time since he has ridden. “It’s simony.”
“Three days after Leo de’ Medici celebrated his consecration as cardinal at sixteen isn’t a good time for me to pretend the Medici don’t know anything about simony.” The Count, whose clothes are designed with riding in mind, mounts gracefully, clucks to his horse, and they set off. “But Lorenzo wasn’t trying to buy you, or pay for your office. He just wanted to know you. He’s not what you think.”
“He thinks Florence is his house, and that he owns everyone and everything in it. He has you all jessed with silken chains, but you belong to him all the same. You’re a rich man, a titled man, and he captured you with favours—Pope Innocent didn’t agree to free you because I wrote to him on your behalf, but because Magnificent Lorenzo did, and guaranteed to keep you safely mewed here.” The Count screws up his face in silent protest, but does not speak, so Girolamo goes on. “Your friend Angelo Poliziano he bought more openly, with patronage, a villa, a job as a tutor, money to live on while he writes his poetry. It’s true Lorenzo doesn’t rule with soldiers like the Bentivoglios in Bologna or the Sforza in Milan—except when he hires their soldiers for his wars, the way he did after the Pazzi Conspiracy. He doesn’t rule with laws like Trajan or Solomon, either. He rules with favours and patronage and gold coins—buying a man’s freedom here, giving another work there. Writing ribald songs for Carnival and drinking in the streets with the wool workers. Having a Platonic symposium in his villa with the scholars. Paying for the education of an orphan who will be his man when he grows up. Giving donations to monasteries and priests to buy influence in the church. Commissioning work from poets and painters and sculptors and then using the results to reflect his glory and show how magnificent he is until everyone is bound up together in his net.”
“You say that as if it’s a terrible thing, but what’s the alternative? Everyone lonely and lost and alone? No help for me when I cross the Church? Angelo to starve to death when he loses his parents at age ten? The poets and painters to work dying wool or carrying bricks because they have no patron? Yes, Lorenzo looks out for his people, as his father and grandfather did. He rules with a gentle hand. If he wants something in return, all right. If he wants the dedication of my book, or Angelo’s, so that it reflects his glory as well as ours, what harm? He is magnificent. He gives so much to the city. He cares about Florence. The city is his house, and we are his family who live in it.”
Girolamo is suddenly aware they are talking about a dying man, and that whatever Lorenzo has been and done, he will be doing it no more. “I don’t deny that he cares about Florence, but—”
A sudden loud clatter of hammering on stone interrupts him. A church is being rebuilt. Florence is a perpetual building site. People are always pulling down old houses to build new workshops and palaces, restoring churches that have fallen into disrepair, and of course, adding to the cathedral. Brunelleschi’s huge dome has been in place for sixty years, but cathedrals are never truly complete. The façade is still rough and unfinished, and of course there is endless decoration to be done. The Office of Works is always commissioning something, or unveiling something. If it isn’t the cathedral, there’ll be a new chapel or a restoration or a new altarpiece at one of the neighbourhood churches, or the guilds will be setting up a new statue in a niche at the Guild church of Orsanmichele. Girolamo has sometimes questioned the purpose of these ceaseless building works. Are they for the glory of God, or the glory of the donors? When Giovanni Rucellai builds a new palace, it exalts his family, in addition to the practical purpose of giving them somewhere to sleep and work. When he pays to put a new façade on this neighbourhood church, with the family coat of arms prominently displayed, is his purpose the same? Girolamo doesn’t know. It’s the same with Cosimo’s motives in restoring San Marco. William of Ockham wrote that going to church to display yourself and your piety was a sin, while going to church out of love of God was a moral act, but the two are indistinguishable to any Earthly witness. Old Giovanni Rucellai wants to give to God, and to save his usurious soul from Hell, and to make people think well of his family, all at the same time. Only God can judge the complex motives of a human soul.
The beautification of churches certainly does raise souls towards God. Many among Girolamo’s flock have told him how a particular picture or statue has touched their hearts, spurring their devotion. As so often, Girolamo wants lines as straight and clean as a birch sapling, where human motives turn out to be as tangled as a bramble thicket. He wants sacred art to be more devotional and less self-aggrandizing. And he wants it to be displayed in churches for the benefit of everyone, there to stir up souls, as his words stir them. But only the rich can afford to pay for it, and he distrusts them and their motives. They put naked goddesses on their walls at home, and Madonnas on the altars. Still, he wants the churches and monasteries restored and beautified, not left to crumble disregarded.
They ride past the building work and are soon at the city gates, which are standing open. The single guard is sitting comfortably eating a bowl of soup. The breeze brings Girolamo the scent of it, leek and barley, good Lenten fare. It makes him hungry, but he is fasting until evening, and will then take only bread. The guard glances up from his meal and waves a hand casually at the Count, barely glancing at Girolamo as they go through and out into the countryside beyond the walls.
Whenever he sees the Tuscan countryside Girolamo is freshly struck by how beautiful and well cultivated it is, compared to Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. Here vines and olives grow in orderly profusion, with wheat and vegetables and fruits in their proper places. Each little farm has its pigs, sheep graze on the hillsides, cows in the meadows along the river. This is country that has not known war in his lifetime, unlike the lands further north. What wars Florence has fought she has kept away from her own farmland. But war is coming, God has told him so. A cloud passes over the sun, and the shadow of war and cloud together darken his vision.
“Did God speak to you?” the Count asks, turning around and looking into his face.
Girolamo nods, realising he had pulled his mount to a halt without thinking.
“Was it about Lorenzo?”
Girolamo shakes his head and jerks the reins for his horse to catch up. “No. It was the war. War is coming, the Sword of the Lord sweeping over the Alps, soldiers settling like a plague of locusts across this pleasant countryside.”
“Soon?” the Count asks.
“Soon, yes, but not immediately.”
“In our lifetimes?”
“I will see it, but you—” He nudges his mare to a trot.
“I won’t?” The Count’s horse keeps up easily.
Girolamo is ten years older than the Count. “I don’t know why I said that, but God was speaking through me. You won’t see it. But death can lie anywhere, in any chance. Plagues and other sickness, accident, war, riots. It doesn’t mean the Pope will burn you.”
“An angry husband is what has come closest to killing me so far,” the Count says, smiling, though Girolamo can see he is making an effort to keep his voice light. “Lorenzo cleared that up for me too, though she had to go back to the dolt, more’s the pity.”
“Yes, crossing the rich and powerful, that’s a shortcut to the grave.” They pass a little church and start to ride uphill, through beech and chestnut trees leafing out in spring green. Under them, the rough ground is sprouting poppies and blue anemones. They have to ride in single file now, the Count ahead.
“You did say soon, though,” the Count says, his voice raised to reach Girolamo over the sound the horses make clopping through last year’s leaves.
“Soon in God’s time. I never know the world’s timing of these things, unless they are pressing on me, imminent, like a summer storm. This wasn’t imminent. You could have ten years.” He means to sound reassuring, but he realises as he speaks that a promise of ten years wasn’t much to a man not yet thirty. “You should take the habit now. I would like to call you Brother Giovanni while I can. And—”
“Always back to that.” The Count’s voice floats back, light. “You can call me Giovanni and brother as much as you choose. I have asked you and asked you, but always you stick to Count, as if you loved titles instead of hating them as you say.”
“They all call you Pico,” he says, sounding peevish even to himself.
“It’s because I’m tall,” the Count says, still lightly.
“Do penance, and return to God, become a Dominican and put your talents in God’s hand, as I have,” Girolamo says, getting back to what is important, not his friend’s form of address but the eternal safety of his soul.
“I should finish my book, and we should work together on our project against the astrologers.” They ride on in silence for a moment. “One wastes so much time. I must try to sort things out with my family in Mirandola too, get things straightened up there. And there’s Isabella. She’s a good girl. I know you don’t think so, but she is. I’d have to make arrangements for her. I couldn’t just abandon her to take vows.”
It isn’t a promise, but it is the closest he has come. “I don’t disapprove at all of you making arrangements for your doxy,” Girolamo says, meaning it. “Too many men ruin young girls and then abandon them with nothing to turn to but prostitution. It’s one reason why there are so many whores. But what can a poor girl do, when she can’t go home and no one will marry her? There are not enough convents for Magdalens. Everyone rails against fallen women, as if they have been sinning on their own. It is the men who lead them astray, and what are they supposed to do afterwards? It would be better if you’d never taken up with her, but since you have, it’s much better for you to do something for her.”
“Maybe I could set Isabella up with a shop, selling ribbons and cloth,” the Count muses. “Maybe she’d enjoy running a business. She’s certainly smart enough. But it would take time, and bribes, and she’ll cry if she thinks I don’t love her anymore.”
“We know not the day or the hour,” Girolamo reminds him.
“You’ve told me that—no, you’re right, all that was just as true before. And surely if I am to take vows, I should do it for the love of God and because I think it right, not from fear of death?”
“Yes,” he says, uncompromisingly. “But you do love God, and we both know it.”
The Medici villa comes into in sight now as they come out of the trees. With its white walls, red roof, and large windows, it is very much a villa in the ancient Roman style; not a castle, but it is defensible. There are no windows in the lower floors. Again, he is aware that an army will be coming, a huge army, and after them another army. God is showing him another vision of the future. “The Sword of the Lord,” he says. “The New Cyrus will come over the Alps. He will unsheathe the Sword of the Lord. Rome will fall, be sacked, blood will run in the streets. Books will burn and bones of saints be ground underfoot. Florence too—” He stares at the Count, who has reined in beside him. “Florence will be sacked too, unless I can prevent it. So many dead, so many innocents.”
“Will God let us change what you see?” the Count asks.
Girolamo slides down from his horse, simply to feel the comfort of the ground beneath his feet. “Yes,” he says. The dry leaves crunch under his sandals and the scent of them fills his nostrils. The roan snuffles at his shoulder. “Yes. The future is like a great river sweeping down on us inexorably, but there are eddies. Little things can turn them one way or another. We have free will. There are times where our actions can make a difference. I can save Florence, I know it.” He pushes the mare’s nose away and takes the reins to lead her on.
“And Rome?” The Count is still mounted, and seems to be looking down from a great height.
“I have never seen Rome. I will try to save it. But I think whatever I do, that sack can only be postponed. I can hear those cries very loudly. All the currents of the river sweep on to that destruction.”
The Count dismounts now, and they walk on together, leading the horses. They jostle together, and the stirrups clang. “So could you stop the Sword of the Lord from coming?” the Count asks.
“No. I don’t think so. I don’t think I could or anyone could. I don’t think there’s anything I could possibly do that would stop that now. That’s the floodtide. But once he comes to purify Italy, I can stop him burning Florence. That’s an eddy. Perhaps I can lead Florence to the path of righteousness.” Girolamo is trembling with the force of the vision. He can see boys in white processing around the Palazzo della Signoria singing hymns, men and women in plain clothes praying in the familiar streets.
“Who is it that you call the Sword? The Emperor? The King of France?”
Girolamo shakes his head. “I don’t know. A king from the north. One barbarian leader is the same as another to prophecy. This is the new Cyrus, sweeping down over the Alps with his forces, all Italy falling down before like ripe wheat to a sickle.”
“But you could prevent him destroying Florence, though it lies in his path?”
“Perhaps.” He is suddenly aware how rich and tempting Florence is, and how vulnerable to the kind of great army he knows is coming. The city is a valuable prize, one of the richest cities in Europe, but he can protect her. “If enough will listen to me. Perhaps I can lead the city to righteousness. I have seen the city given into my charge.”
“Then could you lead Jerusalem to righteousness?” the Count asks.
Girolamo laughs aloud, jolted out of his vision. “You always have the most extravagant ideas!”
“It’s a real place in the world. Our crusading ancestors went there. You and I could go to Venice and take ship. I have the money, and I can’t imagine a better use for it. We’d be in the city of Jerusalem less than a month from now. You could lead it to righteousness, and the whole world would follow.” The Count is so enthusiastic he is almost bouncing on the soles of his feet, scattering dead leaves and bruising the wildflowers.
Girolamo is sorry to have to shake his head. “God has put Florence into my hand. I am First Brother of San Marco. I can’t just leave. God wants me here. Here is where I can make a difference. It’s so hard for any one man to make a difference. You’ve found that already. You were young, brilliant, rich, and a count, with solid scholarship and innovative ideas, but what could you do but put your head into a noose?”
The Count sighs and kicks at a white stone, which rolls a few paces and then sticks in the mud. “Could you win back Constantinople from the Turk?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I’d be just one more madman raving on a street corner. Here—this is where God wants me, Giovanni.” Sure of himself and filled with fervour, he dares to take the Count’s free hand. The Count squeezes his hand in return, and lets go.
“Then maybe you will make Florence the New Jerusalem,” the Count says.
“Yes,” he says, thrilled to hear this deepest dream spoken aloud by another. “Maybe I will. The City of God. There is a way from here to there. I do not know if I have strength to take it.”
Then they come into the courtyard and a groom takes the horses. They scrape the mud off their shoes at the door, and another servant bows them inside.