Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  While I opened the bag my boy had brought me and drew out our meal, I began to understand who Simonis was referring to.

  “He should not even have ascended to the Caesarean throne. Emperor Charles V, brother of his father Ferdinand I, had divided his lands before retiring to a monastery: Ferdinand I was to receive the Spanish territories, his son Philip II, Austria and the imperial crown. But the German prince-electors did not want an emperor who was so resolutely Catholic and they resoundingly called for the young Maximilian to return from Spain and be crowned. They harboured ambitious plans and believed him to be the right man.”

  Simonis had read on my face all the queries and cogitations that were gnawing at me; and now, while we consumed the small but restorative meal of rye, boiled eggs, sauerkraut and sausages, he talked to me of Emperor Maximilian II, the man who, one and a half centuries earlier, had been behind the building of the Place with No Name, known as Neugebäu.

  From early youth Maximilian, abhorring the corruption of the Church of Rome, had been well disposed to the arguments of the Protestants. He had summoned Lutheran preachers, counsellors, doctors and men of science to the court, so that it was feared that sooner or later he himself would defect to them. His clashes with his father Ferdinand I, a fervent Catholic, had become so bitter that his august parent had threatened to block his ascent to the throne. Pressure from Catholic Spain and from the Holy See grew so strong that Maximilian had to declare publicly that he would always adhere to the official creed of Rome. But this did not prevent him from continuing to meet in private with the followers of Luther.

  This aroused the hopes of the Protestant princes and of all those in the Empire who abominated the Church of Peter: would Maximilian fulfil their dream of having an Emperor no longer faithful to the Pope?

  “But more pernicious than heresy itself – so thought Maximilian, who loved peace – was the war that it had unleashed. More cruel than the betrayal of a religion is the betrayal of one’s own kind; and far more scandalous than the sword is the wound that it has opened.”

  And so, once he had ascended to the imperial throne, he chose a new path: instead of actively aligning himself with the Church of Rome, and taking part in the struggle against the heretics, he decided to serve peace and tolerance. His predecessors had been Catholics, while most of the princes of the Empire were friends of the Protestants, was that not the case? He would align himself with neither side, nor would he make any profession of faith; he would simply be Christian – of course – but neither Catholic nor Lutheran. Neither party would be able to say: “He is one of us.” In the astute and ruthless century of Machiavelli, he chose to be cunning in his own way: instead of professing, he would remain silent; instead of acting, he would hold still.

  And so Maximilian the Just became Maximilian the Mysterious: nobody, in the two opposing camps, could read into his heart, nobody could count him among their friends. He already knew that the Protestant princes would call him a traitor, an idler and a hypocrite. He had disappointed all those who had hoped he would inflict a hard blow against Catholicism. And yet he had not yielded, and he had preferred to carry forward his own desire for peace.

  “He left all his supporters confounded,” concluded Simonis.

  I was confounded myself: my Greek assistant, who seemed a touch cracked, could be perfectly lucid when he chose. It was disconcerting to hear his vaguely foolish voice narrating events with such acumen! As with the Emperor he was talking about, it was never clear to which party Simonis belonged: that of the sane or that of the retarded. And it was even less clear where his talk was heading.

  “Simonis, you talked of revenge earlier,” I reminded him.

  “All in good time, Signor Master,” he answered without a trace of deference, biting into his loaf.

  Maximilian’s ascent to the throne, continued the Greek, had aroused great expectations throughout Europe. The ambassadors from Venice, always the most reliable in their reports home, gave assurances that he was of robust stature, well proportioned, and of good disposition. His appearance suggested a greatness and majesty that were truly regal and imperial, since his face was full of gravitas, but tempered by such grace and amiability that those who saw him were filled with reverence but also with a sense of his inestimable inner gentleness.

  Those who had managed to get close to him declared that he was gifted with a lively intelligence and wise judgement. When he received someone, even for the first time, he immediately grasped their nature and their hidden temper, and as soon they addressed him, he at once understood what they were leading up to. Alongside his intelligence he also had a very sharp memory; if someone was presented to him after a long time, even a humble subject, he would immediately recognise him. All his thoughts were turned to great things, and it was clear that he was not content with the present state of the Empire. Greatly skilled in matters of state, he talked about them nonetheless with the utmost prudence. In addition to German he spoke Latin, Italian, Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian and even a little French. The court that he had formed around himself was truly splendid; furthermore, his open and sociable character, and the competence with which he followed public affairs, had at once made him extremely popular.

  “Everyone expected a long and successful reign,” commented Simonis.

  Maximilian the Mysterious loved beautiful things, and the sublime fruits of intellect and doctrine. His trusted counsellor Kaspar von Nidbruck, together with a host of scholars, travelled around Europe collecting valuable books and manuscripts, with which the Centuriators of Magdeburg would later write their monumental history of the Church. He had raised the University of Vienna from its decadence, and had summoned the most prestigious names of European learning to teach there: the botanist Clusius, for example, or the doctor Crato von Krafftheim, and it mattered not whether they were for the Pope or the heretic Luther.

  Although he favoured peace and concord, Maximilian the Mysterious had to face war. At that time, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Turkish threat loomed ominously in the east. The burden of defending the borders of Christendom fell on the Empire, and more especially on Vienna, dangerously exposed to the east. Only Maximilian appeared fully aware of the dreadful task facing the West, while his friends and allies proved recalcitrant: Spain shilly-shallied, the Pope promised money that never arrived, and Venice, jealous of its trade and its possessions in the East, actually made a separate peace with the Turks. The Christian and Ottoman armies finally clashed in 1566. And Maximilian was defeated; but without even fighting.

  “His father, Ferdinand I, had drawn up a peace treaty with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that lasted eight years. In exchange for non-belligerence, however, the Empire had to pay the Sublime Porte a tribute of 30,000 ducats a year.”

  On Ferdinand’s death, all Maximilian had been able to do was propose an extension of the agreement. But in 1565 hostilities had broken out in Hungary. Suleiman’s fearsome army began to arm itself.

  At the end of our meal, we continued our survey in the kitchens. Then we went upstairs again and inspected the maior domus. Here, as the rooms appeared to have been abandoned for a long time, we would carry out the usual test in such cases: lighting a little fire at the base of the flue and checking if any trace of smoke emerged from the chimney on the roof.

  “It was then that Maximilian’s destiny was fulfilled,” Simonis began again, with a wry grimace as, puffing and sweating, we removed piles of rubble from the fireplace so as to be able to carry out the smoke test. “One of his diplomats, David Ungnad, informed him that in Constantinople an army of a hundred thousand soldiers had been assembled. The Emperor then bade the Imperial Paymaster, the collector of financial reserves, to spare no expense and to gather an army of equal strength.”

  Shortly afterwards the Deputy Imperial Paymaster, Georg Ilsung, presented himself personally to Maximilian with surprising results: thanks to his close contacts with the most powerful German bankers, such as the Fuggers, and also to his
personal patrimony, he had assembled an army of eighty thousand soldiers, of whom fifty thousand were infantry and thirty thousand cavalry. He had also been promised reinforcements by the Medici in Florence, by Philibert of Savoy, Alfonso of Ferrara, by the Duke of Guise and the German electors. In Germany, Ilsung had collected great sums to pay for equipment, provisions and weapons. Innsbruck would supply locally produced helmets for defence and attack, together with Savoy horses and Italian infantry; he had negotiated with the Duke of Wüttemberg for supplies of gunpowder; and finally from Augsburg and Ulm he had obtained rifles and other weapons. Ilsung even announced that he would receive considerable financial aid from the Pope and from the King of Spain.

  “Maximilian was radiant,” remarked the Greek. “He promoted Ilsung to the post of Chief Imperial Paymaster, unceremoniously removing his superior. Under Ferdinand I, Maximilian’s father, Georg Ilsung had already laid his hands on a great number of offices, and in this way he became the key figure in the imperial finances.”

  The Caesarean army left Vienna on 12th August 1566, and twelve days later pitched camp in the little town of Raab, on the Danube.

  Maximilian was a man of peace, but he was not afraid to fight for a just cause, and had decided to place himself personally at the head of his troops, as Suleiman himself did, even though the Sultan was on his seventeenth campaign and he on his first.

  Once they were encamped, however, the imperial army waited for events to evolve. Maximilian did not want to move. He stayed in his tent, talking to nobody. All the good cheer of their departure had vanished from his face. No one knew why. The soldiers and officers were in good spirits and were looking forward to fighting; this long wait would only depress them, and trigger off the diseases and infections typical of large camps – and sure enough they began to break out among the soldiers.

  Suleiman lost no time and attacked the fortress of Szigeti, which he had long set his sights on. The imperial army at first rushed to assist the besieged city. Then, incredibly, they fell back.

  The fate of Szigeti was sealed. The besieged troops launched themselves in a heroic and suicidal sortie and were massacred. The commander, Count Zriny, was beheaded and his head sent to the imperial camp.

  Szigeti fell on 9th September. Then the fortress of Gyula fell. It was a disaster. All eyes were on the Emperor: a golden opportunity to triumph over the Turks and to recapture the lands of Hungary had been wasted, mountains of money had been dissipated in equipping the army, and two important fortresses had been destroyed.

  Meanwhile, since the Turks seemed to have no desire to pursue hostilities, there was nothing to do but return home, just as the enemy themselves would do soon enough. Who was to blame for this failure if not the Emperor, who had refused to stir? They had long been calling him Maximilian the Mysterious; now it seemed that behind the mystery lay nothing but incompetence.

  In the meantime we had almost completed our smoke test in the maior domus. Most of the flues had responded positively: none of them was seriously blocked, so it only remained to clean them. The story continued.

  Back in Vienna, Maximilian finally broke his silence. He decided, something unheard of for an Emperor, to justify himself publicly. And he explained the mystery: when he personally examined the forces at his disposal in the Christian camp, he realised that Ilsung had lied to him: the eighty thousand men he had been promised at the beginning of the campaign were no more than twenty-five thousand, not even a third of what he had been led to believe. And the equipment was wretched: nothing like what had been promised. Not to mention the expected reinforcements, no trace of which had been seen. That was why the Emperor had chosen not to attack. Twenty-five thousand against a hundred thousand: it would have been a massacre, with the additional risk that the Ottomans, after exterminating the Christian army, would have been able to advance on to Vienna and, finding it undefended, take it in an instant.

  But there were more surprises. Ungnad too had lied: some Ottoman soldiers who had been captured by the imperial troops on their way back had revealed that the Ottoman army was not especially large or well armed. Among the Turks there were many soldiers with no weapons and, above all, great numbers of young boys, terrified of their Christian enemies.

  This explained Maximilian’s total silence: Ilsung had betrayed him, and so had Ungnad. Whom could he trust?

  “Betrayed by his own men,” I remarked, surprised and intrigued by this strange story, paying no attention to the soot that was falling all around me in large clumps while I thrust my head into one of the flues to see how much stuff needed removing. “But why?”

  “Wait, Signor Master, it’s not over yet,” Simonis stopped me. “Something else had been hidden from Maximilian, with Luciferian cunning.”

  This was the most important event of the whole war. It had happened even before the fall of Szigeti, on 5th September. At the age of seventy-five and suffering grievously from gout, Suleiman the Magnificent had unexpectedly left his followers in the lurch right in the middle of the military campaign: he had died.

  “Died? And the Emperor knew nothing about it?”

  “Nothing at all. For two whole months. And this despite the fact that David Ungnad was continually travelling back and forth between the Turks and the Christians.”

  The news of the Sultan’s death was concealed by such an opaque veil of secrecy that Maximilian learned nothing of it until the end of October. And to tell the truth, it was this fact, even more than the fall of Szigeti, that was his ruin. If they had heard at once about the Sultan’s death, the Christian army could have taken advantage of the enemy’s inevitable confusion, launched a sudden attack before they could organise themselves and almost certainly they would have achieved a great victory. Instead, Maximilian’s intelligence network had kept silent. In the end Suleiman’s death was revealed to him by a foreigner: the Ambassador of the Republic of Venice. Even in distant Innsbruck they had heard the news three days before the imperial camp, which was just a stone’s throw from the Ottoman one.

  Suleiman had actually been moribund when he set out from Constantinople; but this was something David Ungnad had not reported.

  “And just think, the trick the Turks used was a puerile one: they put an old man in Suleiman’s bed who imitated his voice and issued orders, following the ministers’ instructions,” sneered Simonis with bitter sarcasm.

  The Greek was growing heated over this two-century-old tale; he may have looked like an idiot but he had a keen mind and fervent heart and this betrayal of the old emperor filled him with indignation. However, he still had not explained the reason for all this and, above all, what on earth it had to do with the Place with No Name.

  “I imagine,” I cut in, “that after Maximilian’s public speech, the men who had betrayed him came to a bad end.”

  “Far from it, Signor Master, far from it. His justifications were ignored. Ilsung, Ungnad and their acolytes held the same power as before. It was as if the Emperor had never spoken. Everyone continued to blame him for the defeat. Although only whispered, condemnations of him were bandied about, and Maximilian could see them written on his own friends’ faces.”

  “Absurd,” I remarked.

  “The heart of the public and of the court was too heavy with disappointment and anger to weigh the rights and wrongs of the situation calmly, or even just to listen to the facts. Maximilian’s enemies knew this and took advantage of it. They subtly stirred up the people’s feelings.”

  “But who organised it? And why?”

  “Who? All of his most trusted men. Why? For revenge; the first of the long series of acts of hatred and deception that led to the building of this place, then to its repudiation, and which finally bore the Emperor to his grave.”

  Maximilian, Simonis went on, had become emperor only thanks to the support of the forces opposed to the Church of Rome, led by the heretical Princes. He had surrounded himself with Lutheran spirits and intellects, but only because he felt an affinity with their open and inno
vative minds, certainly not out of any desire to oppose or to weaken the Vicar of Christ. However, the people in whom the Emperor had placed his trust were by no means so high-minded in their intentions: they were all waiting for him to give a clear sign of rupture with Rome, something that would mark the decline and fall of the papacy once and for all. And so, the imitatio Christi contemplated by Maximilian went beyond his own intentions: he was betrayed and destroyed, just as the Jews had had Jesus crucified when they realised he was never going to take up the sword against Rome.

  “And so the war against the Turks provided an opportunity for the heretics to avenge themselves and get rid of him,” I concluded, sneezing and wiping from my face a cloud of filthy dust, released by the fall of a large piece of soot.

  “It was all too easy for them: a huge number of heretical Princes supported and financed the Sublime Porte just out of hatred for the Church of Rome!”

  I had already heard something similar: many years earlier, guests at the inn where I worked had told me of secret intelligence between the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the Ottoman Porte. In that case it was even worse: it was not a case of Protestant princes but of the Most Christian Sovereign of France, Only Begotten Son of the Church. The Pope had behaved no better himself, and purely for personal profit had financed the heretics. This experience had taught me that just about anything could be expected from monarchs.

  “After the defeat in battle everything changed,” explained Simonis, “starting with Maximilian himself.”

  He felt surrounded by spies, by enemies plotting to finish him off. But Georg Ilsung had been his counsellor for years, and his father’s before him. He was very powerful: he had started his career working for the Fuggers of Augsburg, the family of bankers that had financed Charles V and had enabled him to become emperor by bribing the prince-electors. The Fuggers were behind Ilsung’s every move. They not only lent money but even paid the Emperor in advance the tributes that the prince-electors had promised but not yet paid; and they did this at an interest rate equal to zero.