On our return to Villa Spada, we found a letter for Abbot Melani: the usual one. Atto's reaction upon opening and reading it was no different from the times before: he became sombre and dismissed me hastily, on the pretext that he wanted to take a rest. In reality, he had to reply to the letter, in which the Connestabilessa announced her latest delay.
In the hours that followed, I was unable to enjoy so much as one moment of rest. The programme for the day consisted of a rather demanding entertainment, and Cardinal Spada had repeatedly insisted to Don Paschatio that he was counting on him to ensure its complete success, informing him that any servants who failed to fulfil their duties would be most severely punished. Don Paschatio had for his part ensured that, this time, none would dare absent themselves: he had, of course, sworn as much on all previous occasions, without being proved right. This time, too, a pair of waiters had let the Major-Domo down, on the pretext that they were ill (whereas they had in fact gone fishing on the island of San Bartolomeo, as I had gleaned from their conversation the day before).
There was indeed a great deal of work to be done, nor was it easy to carry out. For the guests' entertainment, there had been laid on a shooting party, the game being birds. This outing was open not only to the gentlemen and cavaliers present but to ladies too, since the hunt for fowls involves no dangers, only joyous recreation. This was, in other words, to be a pleasure party, consisting of many and various kinds of hunting merriment, as had been announced to the guests the day before by no less than Cardinal Spada in person.
The territory of Villa Spada was, however, too small for the beat, which would require much space in which to hide, set up ambuscades and entrap birds. It had therefore been agreed with the excellent Barberini household that the entertainment could also take place in the plot of land adjoining the Spada estate (where, two days before, the falconer had tried in vain to catch Caesar Augustus with his hawk).
The guests were to be organised into groups, according to the means they would be employing. The first squad, consisting of about ten people in all, was to be issued with special bird traps: sham bushes within which had been set a Y-shaped wooden stick. This stuck out from the top of the bush and at either extremity were placed two pieces of iron rather like scissor blades which, operated from a short distance by means of a long, thick cord, would snap shut, crushing the bird's legs.
The second group of huntsmen received a number of artificial trees, to be planted in the earth with the sharp point at the base of their trunk. At the top of these little trees was fixed a horizontal stick which would look quite inviting to birds seeking a perch. At the base of the bush was hidden a great crossbow, pointing upwards, into which was notched a sort of big rake with many sharp points. If fired at the right moment (even from a short distance, by activating the trigger of the crossbow with a stout brown string) the bizarre mechanism would shoot up and impale any unlucky fowl perching on top of the tree.
For other participants, special arquebuses had been prepared, to be set into the ground (by means of a handle with an iron point) to be aimed at some clearly visible branch and fired the moment some passing bird came to rest there. Here too, the arquebuses were to be operated at a distance by means of an invisible thread.
Those cavaliers gifted with sharp eyesight were given fine crossbows of the highest quality with which to shoot at birds in flight.
The most able-bodied gentlemen were equipped with real portable trees, capable of concealing a whole man and his arquebus. These were made from papier maché covered with bits of bark and mounted on an iron frame. They were furnished with false branches covered with an abundance of twigs. So that these could be worn, they were equipped internally with leather belts which made it possible to carry the simulacrum of a tree on one's shoulders while leaving the arms free. The guest could look through two little apertures and freely approach his victim, take aim with his arquebus, slowly pointing the barrel through the appropriate slit, and fire with assured success. This ingenious invention, designed on the basis of the advice of Gioseffo Maria Mitelli, from Bologna, son of an artist and painter of frescoes who had done much work at Palazzo Spada, gave rise to such praise and wonderment that I am providing a drawing of it here:
Others, who were more adventurous, were to attempt the so-called hunt with an ox. In other words, they used imposing sham cows, painted in oils with the greatest verisimilitude on canvases mounted on wooden frames, to be used as screens behind which to stalk the prey without frightening it off, and then shoot it with an arquebus. To paraphrase more noble examples, one might call these real Trojan cows. I have also provided a drawing of this expedient, but I have other reasons for so doing:
In fact, the cow, as soon as it was set up in the field, scared all the animals on the Barberini estate, and some ladies too. This was because the bovine effigy, being painted in oils, shone with such lucent splendour in the sun that it seemed almost like a burning mirror. It had therefore to be rapidly withdrawn, otherwise all the birds would have flown off in terror.
Of course, in order to be able to attract a sufficient prey, it was necessary to stock the area of the merry hunt with a great number of song birds, so that their warbling would attract their fellows. For this purpose, many cages had been purchased full of chaffinches and goldfinches. Given my occasional role as Master of the Fowls, Don Paschatio had entrusted me with the important task of placing these cages at strategic points on the Barberini estate, making sure that each group of hunters should have the same number of these baits and that they should be uniformly positioned throughout the hunting grounds. To reinforce the effect, I was also to tie other song birds to the stems of plants and to trees, securing their legs with thread.
As I was gathering the cages and carrying them two by two to the Barberini estate, I encountered Don Tibaldutio. As often happened, he felt like conversing a little with me. I have already mentioned that he lived apart from the rest of the villa in a little room behind the chapel, and often felt somewhat lonely. I therefore proposed that he should keep me company while I laid out on the ground, on the trees and in the midst of bushes and shrubs the cages containing the birds which were to serve as bait.
Hardly had the chaplain begun to speak of this and of that when his upright and chaste presence revived like an invisible flame the burning memory of the night before.
Atto's memoir was, I thought once more, to be brought "ad Albanum": thus, behind all these shady affairs there was a cardinal, no less! What malign force, what infernal ladle was capable of mixing in the cauldron of the Holy City a highly placed cardinal, the right-hand man of His Holiness, and the diabolical sects of the cerretani. I then remembered that the cerretani had originally been defrocked priests. How was that possible? Only an ecclesiastic could enlighten me on this point.
As a good pastor, Don Tibaldutio listened to my questions without batting an eyelid. I pretended that I had heard rumours in the street concerning the religious origins of the sects of mendicants.
"Age-old is the scourge, and wrapped in mystery, its origins," the Carmelite began gravely.
It all began after the barbarian invasions which put an end to nine centuries of Roman domination of the world. In those days, men were for the most part poor peasants and lived in small, isolated rural communities. The roads were unsafe, many the bandits and masterless soldiers, and the bears and wolves on the lookout for prey. Friars and monks remained in the safety of their monasteries, often built on inaccessible heights. Apart from the merchants, who had to travel for their trade, everyone lived in villages, working the land and praying God for the next harvest. But they were not alone: regularly, visitors would arrive.
They were dressed in rags, haggard and dirty, and they asked for charity. They came from obscure places on the edge of villages, abandoned lazarets, little gaggles of hutments, almost a parallel civilisation devoted to filth. They were known as vagrants, degenerates, knaves, rascals, or tricksters and swindlers, if you prefer. But they were not poor: th
eir poverty was only a disguise. They knew well how to profit from the words of the Evangelist, which call on all good Christians to practise charity: "Give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you."
"Some, perhaps, had been priests," said Don Tibaldutio, "but instead of honouring the Lord with prayer, they had given their souls to the Evil One."
They would choose the humblest among the peasantry, ignorant of the world and its snares, and present themselves to them in unusual guises, with wild eyes halfway between folly and wisdom. They pretended to be all at once healers, magi and prophets, saviours of body and soul. They sold talismans, relics, miraculous orations, magic spells against the evil eye, ointments and panaceas; they announced miracles or divine punishments; they interpreted dreams; they miraculously found hidden treasures and rich inheritances which had been concealed; they exorcised and cast anathemas, thundering against sinners and promising heaven to the just. In the course of all this, they asked for and invariably received offerings in money.
Begging for alms (which was thus both their purpose and their method) they were past-masters of suggestion, illusion and swindling, as the learned Gnesius Basapopi tells so well. When they practised flagellation, from their wounds gushed false blood - that of cats and chickens. But invariably they took alms and tribute in plenty from the credulous and simple, who were legion. Besides, did not the Sophists, too, have a reputation for being jugglers and charlatans, and, moving beyond them, even Socrates and Plato? None of those peasants remembered the admonition of the Bishop of Hippo, that one should give to the poor, but. not to play-actors.
"But were they never unmasked?" I objected, as I took a goldfinch from a cage, tied its foot to a piece of twine and secured this with a nail to the trunk of a young acacia.
"Of course, from time to time, a victim would react. But this was rare, and in any case, when it did happen, those rascals would change their skins like serpents and return to their former trades as tumblers, rebeck players, even tooth-pullers because, as that verse ofTheocritus puts it, paupertas sola est artes quae suscitat omnes: poverty alone gives rise to invention.
Then he sang:
By lies and by tricks You can live half a year; By tricks and by lies, Live the other half too.
"What's that?" I asked, as we moved on to the area where the arquebuses had been placed.
"An old rhyme of false beggars: just to help you understand how corrupted their minds are."
But there was more to it. Insistent rumours had it that the cerretani had all united in a single sect. Following this, their high priest had founded the various subdivisions, not so much in order to organise them according to their specialisations as for a Satanic purpose: the imitation of the religious orders of the Catholic Church.
This hypothesis was not to be underestimated, for Bernardino of Siena tells how one day Lucifer, surrounded by all his demons, manifested to them his desire to start a church in contraposition to that of Christ, an Ecclesia malignantium wherewith to cancel out or at least mitigate the effectiveness of the other, celestial Church, upon which it was modelled. Even Agrippa of Nettesheim, who did not much believe in witches' spells, was so certain of the malefic powers of the canters that he went so far as to accuse them of practising black magic.
With time, matters got worse, explained the chaplain, as I checked on one of the arquebuses planted in the ground, to make sure that it was indeed well aimed. Even the genuine religious orders were infected by the scandal. The monasteries got wind of the freedoms enjoyed in the world: it was necessary only to serve up a little nonsense to the ingenuous. The body came then to prevail over the spirit, eating and drinking over prayer, sloth over works consecrated to the Lord.
"Wearing black vestments, as Libanius writes in Pro Templis, the monks ate more than elephants. They were men in appearance, yet they lived like pigs, and they publicly tolerated and committed acts of the foulest, most unspeakable turpitude. As Saint Augustine well knew, the enclosed orders of friars were reduced to an ignoble, muddy Gehenna," he exclaimed, casting a compassionate glance at a robin I had found dead in one of the cages, perhaps killed by the strain of being carted around thus.
Monks and pseudo-monks, excommunicated by their own bishop, swarmed out from the cloister and began to wander unpunished on the highways, perturbing the peace of the Church and spreading further corruption amongst the good people. They joined the multitudes of true and false tramps, ragamuffins, layabouts, lepers, gypsies, vagabonds, cripples and paralytics lying in front of church doors, and made them their impure flocks.
Now all doors were open to their cunning. Yet none could do anything about them, because they were poor, or at least, so they seemed and, as Domingo de Soto teaches in his Deliberatio in causa pauperum, in case of doubt, one should nonetheless give one's coin to those who beg. In dubio pro paupere.
"Not only does the practice of charity cancel out sin but, as Saint John Chrysostom puts it: the poor beggars piled one on another in church porches are the physicians of the soul. Indeed, Peter Chrysologos preached that, when the poor man stretches out his hand to ask for charity, it is Christ Himself who does so."
"But, if it is as you say, then roguery is the daughter of compassion and thus, indirectly, of the Church itself," I deduced with no little surprise as I placed a few crumbs in a cage.
"Oh, come now. . ." Don Tibaldutio stumbled, "I really did not intend to say such a thing."
There was, he nonetheless admitted, something disquieting about all this. The Hospitalier Friars of Altopascio, for instance, who begged unrestrictedly at castles and in villages, were an official grouping authorised by the Church of Rome. By their preaching they frightened the people, threatening excommunication or promising indulgences. And, in exchange for money, they would absolve anyone.
Had not the pontiffs too succumbed to the ambiguous fascination of superstition and charlatanry? Boniface VIII always wore a talisman against the urinary calculus, while Clement V and Benedict XII were never separated from the cornu serpentinum, an amulet in the shape of a serpent which John XXII even went so far as to keep on his table, stuck into a loaf of bread and surrounded by salt.
"But, some say," he added, lowering his voice by an octave, "that even the cerretani themselves originally enjoyed official sanction."
"Really? And what kind of sanction?"
"There's a tale that I heard from a brother originating in those parts. It would appear - but beware, there is no proof of this - that at the end of the fourteenth century, the cerretani had a regular authorisation to beg, at Cerreto itself, on behalf of the hospitals of the Order of the Blessed Antony. A permit, in other words, emanating from the ecclesiastical authorities."
"But then the cerretani were officially tolerated. Perhaps they still are to this day."
"If such a permit ever existed," said he, prudently, "it would have had to be registered in the statutes of the city of Cerreto."
"And is it?"
"The pages concerning this begging for alms were torn out by someone," he remarked impassively.
Besides, he added in the same breath, if one really wished to pay attention to gossip, it was even said that they had a friend in the Vatican.
"In the Vatican? And who could that be?" I exclaimed, matching my intonation to my incredulity.
On his face, I read regret at having pronounced one word too many, and displeasure at being unable to row back.
"Well. . . They speak of someone from the Marches. But perhaps it is all a matter of envy because he has an important post in Saint Peter's factory, so they slander him behind his back."
So, I thought in astonishment, someone at Saint Peter's Factory (the permanent workshop for the repair and restoration of the most important church in Christendom) was in contact with the cerretani. This was obviously a matter to be looked into, but not with the chaplain, who had given himself away and would certainly provide me with no further details.
It was time for us to part. I
had completed my task of setting out the birds which were to act as bait, and I had checked on the fixed arquebuses; furthermore Don Tibaldutio had answered quite exhaustively my questions concerning the links between the Church and the cerretani.
How much like the skilled and crafty trade of scoundrels and swindlers was all that proliferation of Holy Years, decade after decade, which had reduced the Jubilees from a rare act of collective devotion falling only every hundred years to a vehicle for constant money-making! Was this not perhaps a consequence, however distant, of the errors and misdeeds committed or tolerated when the cerretani first came into the world, even before the first Jubilee, born from a rib of Holy Mother Church and fed with the sacred milk of pity and charity? Sfasciamonti was right, said I to myself, we were surrounded. The seat of the papacy was a fortress into which the Trojan horse had long since been introduced.
Don Tibaldutio blew his nose in conclusion, staring at me thoughtfully through the folds of his handkerchief. He understood that I had on my mind something that I did not mean to reveal to him.
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