Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  Watching them guzzling and snorting between guzzles in their uncouth Roman speech, Niccolo was forced to summon up some of his deep Florentine disdain for the peoples of the south. However, when they began buying rounds of drink for all present, he revised his opinion and condescended to commend their generosity. They were, after all, only woodsmen and could be forgiven a little roughness around the edges. It was Pagolo who first began joking with them, but Niccolo, always eager for news and gossip of papal doings, soon joined in the conversation.

  “His Holiness, he likes to hunt now. He’s got a great passion for hunting,” said the man who seemed to be the leader of the group. “And we’re going on ahead to arrange things to his satisfaction, so he can hunt up here.”

  “Whereabouts?” asked Niccolo.

  “In the Bugello? Mugello? Some land his family’s got outside of town.”

  “What’s there to arrange for a hunt?” asked Pagolo.

  The Romans all guffawed and exchanged knowing looks, and the leader said, “His Holiness don’t hunt like other men. Special arrangements have to be made to accommodate his, ah, his unique tastes.”

  “What do you mean?” said Niccolo.

  “Well, His Holiness has got some trouble riding, especially for any length of time.” Some of the men made blatting, farting sounds to the great amusement of all, then the explanation resumed, “And his little bow-legs, they don’t carry his big body far without collapsing under him. It’s these, ah, disadvantages, that need to be taken into account when His Holiness goes hunting. Since His Holiness has trouble getting to the game, it’s our job to bring the game to him.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “First we gotta pick a site that can be enclosed—a valley, a depression between some hills, a piece of land that borders on a river or marsh. We fence it round as good as we can, and usually, if we have the manpower, we’ll put soldiers or peasants or beaters all along the fence to keep the animals from getting out.”

  “Where do the animals come from in the first place?”

  “Oh, we bring ’em in. We stock it. Everything you can imagine: little stuff like rabbits and hares, but the pope mostly likes the bigger game best—deer, boars, rams, goats. You name it. Wolves.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we’re ready to go. The pope goes into the enclosure first to a platform we’ve built up in the middle, and he gets up there with his spyglass ready and drops a white handkerchief. Then all hell breaks loose. The trumpets and horns go off. We release the animals and drive ’em into the big pen. They’re screaming and braying and howling. The dogs get all excited and start to bark. The horses are snorting and whinnying. The hunters are yelling and whooping. The pope is jumping up and down with excitement on his platform with his spyglass.”

  “I understand he likes to watch,” said Niccolo.

  “Yeah,” the man acknowledged the characterization with a leer. “He likes to watch all right. And when the hunters hit the field, there’s plenty to see. The enclosure isn’t that big, and you’ve got hundreds of panicked, half-crazy animals running around, with no way to get out, nowhere to go. And when the hunters start hacking and gouging, and the beasts smell blood it gets a whole lot worse. Swords are flying all over the place. The pope, he whoops and hollers. He loves it—all the confusion, all the slaughter. And because there’s so much confusion, there’s always a lot of accidents.”

  “Yeah,” interjected one of the other gamekeepers. “Especially with the dwarves.”

  “Yeah, God the dwarves! Those little bastards are the most crazy of the lot. And they’re always getting gored by a boar or gouged by mistake trying to make the pope laugh. Anyway, we’ll set up snares and nets near where the pope is, and when something gets caught and it’s safe, His Holiness’ll come down with a long spear and run the animal through. Then everybody’ll cheer and applaud at that point.”

  “So Pope Leo doesn’t just watch. He participates in the manly exercise of the hunt,” said Niccolo.

  “Yeah, some, but mostly he watches. His favorite thing is to plant charges of powder in certain spots and then have the animals driven over them when they explode. Then he’s up there with that spyglass following a boar carcass sailing through the air. He loves it. They all love it. Christ, these Florentines. Strange tastes. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” said Niccolo, imitating the man’s speech. “I know what you mean.”

  The next day was the day set for the arrival of the supreme pontiff. Since he was traveling from the south along the main road from Rome, it was inevitable that he pass through the little village of San Casciano on his way to Florence, and the villagers, seldom treated to so rare a spectacle as the passage of a reigning pontiff—one of local origin no less—had already lined the road for miles in both directions, eager for a glimpse of him, perhaps a blessing. Niccolo had sworn that he didn’t care a fig for the pope, that he had already seen him and that he certainly wasn’t going to go out of his way to do so again. But curiosity got the better of him, and when the cheering started, he stepped out of the tavern for a look. The first thing he saw was the elephant. Vettori had written about him. He was a gift from the king of Portugal. The pope’s favorite elephant. Did he have others, less favored?

  As the procession passed in review, nothing escaped Niccolo’s sardonic eye and cynical evaluation. He counted eighteen cardinals in the train—all Leo’s men, all newly created, no doubt, and not a one had had the purple for a ducat under 100,000. He saw the lavishly equipped troops and the exquisite corps of hangers-on and the carts full of enthusiastically waving dwarves and jesters and fools.

  At first Niccolo thought it was the woman in front of him. It was that heavy, cloying smell of cheap perfume that you get when standing downwind of a less than savory prostitute. He moved a little, but the smell stayed with him. He took a couple of steps, and it still didn’t go away. It was then that he realized that it wasn’t coming from the crowd. It was coming from the procession. They were all perfumed—cardinals, courtiers, soldiers, dwarves. The elephant was probably perfumed! The entire procession was exuding the sweet smell of a cheap whore.

  And then came the pope. He was in some sort of vehicle drawn by two white Arabian stallions. Propped upright and a little flushed from his exertions, he was lazily waving his hands in that uniquely papal wave. It was as though he were languidly gathering in the praise and admiration that rose up from the crowd and wafting it into his face, all the better to smell it, to appreciate it. That slow wave. That chubby, placid, cherubic face ending in a succession of chins too numerous to count. That bobbing red skullcap. Reaching down into the folds of his white silk robes, Leo pontifically drew out hands full of coins and flung them into the crowds, showering them with his largess. Niccolo stooped to retrieve one of the coins that landed at his feet. “Spiccoli,” he thought, small change. Upon examination, he saw that it was coined by the Florentine mint, and he knew that the money supply of Florence was flowing slowly out of the Florentine treasury and into the papal coffers. Before pocketing the coin, he held it up to his face for one last look. It, too, was perfumed.

  The procession swept by and left Niccolo standing there, just the way life was sweeping past him. History was a parade, and he wasn’t marching in it anymore. It was a river, and he was standing on the banks, just watching. Once he had been in a boat, a fragile boat, risking the rapids swirling and raging around him. Once he had been knee deep in the water, laboring to build containment walls, dikes, and channels to control the crushing, rushing torrents. Now he was perched on a hilltop far away, and the river flowed on—sometimes placidly, sometimes boiling, but always indifferent to the presence of this lonely observer.

  Unaware of Niccolo’s dilemma, the country people cheered the procession lustily. Their beaming pontiff serenely took up his spyglass to survey these faithful, grateful sons and daughters of the church, his church. He swung the optical instrument in a slow arc and everywhere he saw happy upturned f
aces. Everywhere except over there near that tavern. He stopped his sweep of the crowd for a minute, because he thought he might have recognized someone. It was a gawky middle-aged man in a threadbare cloak and a cloth cap scowling in the way only Florentines can scowl. For a moment, Leo searched that high forehead and long, straight nose. No, he finally said to himself, just another one of those flinty, defiant self-righteous Florentines. Really! And with that, the happy pontiff moved on, drinking in the adulation of the crowd, bestowing his blessings upon them along with the money he had appropriated from their own treasury.

  When he entered Florence several days later—the pope had to delay his triumphal entry to give the city time to complete the lavish decorations erected in his behalf by two thousand workmen at a price of over 70,000 florins—Leo did so through a breach in the city wall that had been opened especially in his honor, to allow his magnificent train and his beloved elephant to pass in state. After remaining there several weeks, allowing himself to be pampered and feted around the clock and putting the affairs of his relatives in order, however, he proceeded on to his real destination, the real object of his northward journey—Bologna. There he was received with little ceremony, and as he made his way through the empty streets, he was greeted only by occasional shouts of derision. He had come to meet with Francis I, the energetic new king of France. Put more bluntly, he had come to grovel at the feet of Francis I, to cede territory, to make monetary concessions, and to implore the goodwill of the French sovereign. The armies of France, after having dealt a humiliating blow to a shilly-shallying Papal Army of hastily assembled mercenary forces at Marignano, were now lords of Milan and most of northern Italy. Even all the perfume of Leo’s court could not hide the stench of the barbarian dominion that had reasserted itself so forcefully on Italian soil.

  Niccolo suffered through several more years of Leo’s mismanagement of the Holy See. His hopes were raised and dashed by circumstances more than once. There was word of a plot to assassinate Leo by poisoning the bandages that were applied to his anal fistula, but the plot failed and the conspirators—all cardinals—were rounded up and executed. The entire episode worked to Leo’s advantage by opening up several positions in the College of Cardinals, lucrative positions that could be sold at a handsome profit to the papacy. Fortune seemed to be smiling on Pope Leo X. Everything seemed to fall his way.

  When the pope decided to begin selling indulgences in Germany to replenish the papal coffers and the choleric, idiot monk Luther began to shriek again, Leo could not be less concerned. “Another voice crying in the desert,” he sighed, another grating, tiresome voice that he wished would just go away. And so, while Luther raved, the pope spent his days playing chess and cards and improvising little Latin melodies with his poets and fellow literati.

  In Florence, the young snippet Lorenzo had been steadily incurring the wrath of his fellow citizens with his arrogant ways. Surrounded only by a court of like-minded dandies, he attempted to rule the city from the secret recesses of the Medici Palace. When he sought the advice of the council—which was seldom—he convened it at his home, not in the public chambers of the Signoria. When he succumbed to a deadly combination of tuberculosis and syphilis at the age of twenty-eight, he was not mourned. Another Medici drawn from the endless supply of Medici was quickly sent to replace him.

  Through all this, Niccolo had only his work in which to find solace. Outside of his conversations and disquisitions with the ancients, there were only the intervals of idleness and tedium and restless despair that filled his days. Since the term of his exile had expired, he was free to return to Florence once more, but he rarely did so. When he was in need of a book he did not own, he would occasionally venture into the city, but he found few friends there. Most of his former colleagues, especially those who had managed to retain their positions in the chancery and curry some favor with their Medici overlords, were loath to appear over-friendly with the former secretary. When he moved among them, he was like a ghost, an embarrassing apparition that everyone could see but nobody wanted to acknowledge. So he would consult the records he wanted to consult and borrow the books he needed for his research and lug them back to the lonely little villa and lose himself in scholarship and speculation.

  Niccolo’s visits to Florence only aggravated the sense of sadness and loss with which his life was now imbued. When he saw men hurrying out of the Signoria and brush past him, he thought of them as men on errands, bustling men with someplace to go, something important to do. Once he himself had come hurtling out of that building on his way to the camp at Pisa, to Caesar Borgia, to Rome, to France and now? Now he felt inconspicuous, almost invisible. His clothes were shabby and neglected, but it didn’t matter. Who could see him? Who was looking? He felt diminished. He had lost hair. He had lost weight. Had he grown shorter too? Was he old enough to start shrinking? Actually? Physically?

  On one such visit to Florence, he had stopped to rest in the Piazza della Signoria. He had sought the shade of the Loggia della Signoria, the old, porticoed structure that offered shelter from sun and rain and in years past, a lively market in ideas and opinions. Here so many times in the past he had debated and discussed the great issues of his day, from Savonarola to Soderini, and the debates had been heated and the discussions contentious. Now the Loggia was nearly deserted. Isolated groups of old men with nothing to do straggled here and there. They knew each other so well and had so little to communicate that nods and arched eyebrows sufficed in the place of words. Much to his annoyance, an idiot had seated himself next to Niccolo and engaged him in an animated conversation. The idiot spoke eloquently in a deep baritone voice. He used his graceful hands to advantage to emphasize his points and draw attention to his conclusions, but the words that issued from his mouth were utter nonsense. He kept up a steady stream of gibberish, most beguiling, most thoughtfully nuanced and cadenced, but still incomprehensible gibberish. From a distance, one would have mistaken him for a consummate speaker, a philosopher. One would have believed Niccolo deep in thought, reflecting on the words of this street-corner sage.

  And he was deep in thought. The idiot, he realized, did not require any response or stimulation to keep on talking. He just did it. Niccolo was convinced that when he got up and walked off, the animated little man would still be jabbering away, cajoling his imaginary audience, patiently going over this or that difficult concept and explaining it as often as need be. It was not pity that crept into his heart for the man’s dilemma, but a sad sense of recognition. He, too, was like the idiot speaking a language that nobody else understood, addressing his imaginary audience, day in and day out, writing this immense, comprehensive analysis of history and politics that no one would ever read.

  Someone clapped him on the back and gave him good day. Niccolo was aware that the comprehensible syllables in plain Florentine did not come from the idiot, and he looked up.

  “Messer Machiavelli!”

  “Michelozzi. Salve.”

  “Such enthusiasm. I didn’t know you were in town. Why didn’t you come to see me?”

  “Oh, you know . . .” said Niccolo weakly. He didn’t want to say that he was embarrassed to see anyone he knew anymore. “I feel like a leper when I come to town. I feel like I should be wearing a bell around my neck to warn people off.”

  “I’ve never shunned you, oh leprous one. Look, I’m even willing to touch you and risk infection.” He put an arm around Niccolo’s shoulder. It was true that Michelozzi had been a good friend, but in the days and weeks after Niccolo’s banishment, as the former secretary became more sullen and difficult to be with, and as Michelozzi’s fortunes began to rise, the two of them had gradually drifted apart.

  “Thanks, Michelozzi. Would you like to meet my friend here?” He jerked his head in the direction of the idiot. “I’m finding we have quite a bit in common.”

  Michelozzi settled in on the other side of Niccolo. “So, what’s new with you?”

  “New? Let me see.” Niccolo paused to think
. “Well, I saw the pope.”

  “You were in Rome?”

  “No, when he passed through here.”

  “Niccolo, that was three years ago!”

  “Well, that’s the last thing I can remember that was new or out of the ordinary.”

  “No women?” Michelozzi hoped to turn the conversation in another, less morose, direction.

  “Women.”

  “Niccolo, a woman would cheer you up. I myself am . . . well, let’s say I’m watering two gardens, have one foot in two shoes. You know what I mean. And I’m enormously cheerful. Look at me!”

  “Women! You sound like an old friend in San Casciano. She’s intent on finding me a woman, and she claims to be some kind of a witch. She says if I give her a few little pieces of my hair and nails she can boil them in holy oil that she stole from a church lamp and make a potion for me. Any young woman, upon being administered this potion, will fall madly in love with me.”

  “You should give it a try! What have you got to lose?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.” Niccolo said it with conviction.

  Ever friendly, ever buoyant, Michelozzi pressed on: “If you’re not chasing women, then what are you doing these days?”

  “I sit at a table. I write. When I can’t think of anything to write, I stare at the walls. When I’m finished for the day, I get drunk. It’s a fascinating life. You should try it.”

  “Are you still working on the Livy commentary?”

  “Yes, I’m still working on the Livy commentary.”

  “Niccolo, it wasn’t an accusation.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not in a very good mood today. What have you been up to lately? Are you still in the chancery?”