With a surge of excitement, Joan studied the map. There was a good, wide road from here to Langres. There, the road turned south through Besançon and Orbe, descending along Lake St.-Maurice to LeValais. At the foot of the Alps, there was a monastic hostelry where pilgrims could rest and provision themselves for the hard trek across the mountains through the Great St. Bernard—the best and most frequently traveled of the Alpine passes. Once over the Alps, the wide, straight line of the Via Francigena led down through Aosta, Pavia, and Bologna into Tuscany, and beyond it to Rome.
Rome. The world’s greatest minds gathered in that ancient city; its churches held untold treasures, its libraries the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Surely there, amidst the sacred tombs of the apostles, Joan would find what she was seeking. In Rome she would discover her destiny.
SHE was settling her saddlebag on the mule—Arn had insisted she take one for the journey—when little Arnalda came running out of the cottage, her blond hair still tousled from her night’s sleep.
“Where are you going?” the cherubic little face demanded anxiously.
Joan knelt so her face was level with the child’s. “To Rome,” she replied, “the City of Marvels, where the Pope dwells.”
“Do you like the Pope better than me?”
Joan laughed. “I’ve never met him. And there is no one I like better than you, little quail.” She stroked the child’s soft hair.
“Then don’t go.” Arnalda threw her arms around Joan. “I don’t want you to go.”
Joan hugged her. The small child-body cuddled warmly against her, filling her arms and her heart. I could have had a little girl like this, if I had chosen a different path. A little girl to hold and to cuddle—and to teach. She remembered the desolation she had felt when Aesculapius had gone away. He had left her a book, so she could continue to learn. But she, who had fled from the monastery with only the clothes on her back, had nothing to give the child.
Except …
Joan reached inside her tunic and pulled out the medallion she had worn ever since the day Matthew had first placed it about her neck. “This is St. Catherine. She was very smart and very strong, just like you.” She related the story of St. Catherine.
Arnalda’s eyes grew round with wonder. “She was a girl, and she did that?”
“Yes. And so may you, if you keep working at your letters.” Joan took the medallion from her neck and hung it around Arnalda’s. “She is yours now. Look after her for me.”
Arnalda clutched the medallion, her little face contorted in a determined effort not to cry.
Joan said good-bye to Arn and Bona, who had come outside to see her off. Bona handed her a parcel of food and an oiled goatskin filled with ale. “There’s bread and cheese, and some dried meat—enough to see you through for a fortnight, by which time you will have reached the hostel.”
“Thank you,” Joan said. “I will never forget your kindness.”
Arn said, “Remember, Joan. You are welcome here at any time. This is your home.”
Joan embraced him. “Teach the girl,” she said. “She is intelligent, and as hungry to learn as you were.”
She mounted the mule. The little family stood around her, looking sad. It was her constant fate, it seemed, to leave behind those she loved. This was the price for the strange life she had chosen, but she had gone into it with eyes open, and there was no profit in regret.
Joan kicked the mule into a trot. With a last wave over her shoulder, she turned her face toward the southern road—and Rome.
19
Rome | 844
ANASTASIUS put down his quill, stretching his fingers to rid them of cramp. With pride, he studied the page he had just written— the latest entry in his masterpiece, the Liber pontificalis, or Book of the Popes, a detailed record of the papacies of his time.
Lovingly Anastasius ran his hand over the clean white vellum that lay ahead. On these blank pages the accomplishments, the triumphs, the glory of his own papacy would one day be recorded.
How proud his father, Arsenius, would be then! Though Anastasius’s family had accumulated many titles and honors over the years, the ultimate prize of the papal throne had eluded them. Once it had seemed Arsenius might achieve it, but time and circumstance had conspired against him, and the opportunity had passed.
Now it was up to Anastasius. He must, he would vindicate his father’s faith in him by becoming Lord Pope and Bishop of Rome.
Not immediately, of course. Anastasius’s overarching ambition had not blinded him to the fact that his time had not yet come. He was only thirty-three, and his position as primicerius, though one of great power, was too secular a post from which to ascend to the Sacred Chair of St. Peter.
But his situation was soon to change. Pope Gregory lay on his deathbed. Once the formal period of mourning was over, there would be an election for a new Pope—an election whose outcome Arsenius had predetermined with a skillful blend of diplomacy, bribery, and threat. The next Pope would be Sergius, cardinal priest of the Church of St. Martin, weak and corruptible scion of a noble Roman family. Unlike Gregory, Sergius was a man who understood the way of the world; he would know how to express his gratitude to those who had helped him into office. Soon after Sergius’s election, Anastasius would be appointed Bishop of Castellum, a perfect position from which to ascend the papal throne after Sergius, in his turn, was gone.
It was a pretty picture, but for one detail—Gregory still lived. Like an aging vine, roots driven deep to suck sustenance from arid soil, the old man stubbornly clung to life. Prudent and contemplative in his personal life as in his papacy, Gregory was proceeding with infuriating slowness even in this final act of dying.
He had reigned for seventeen years, longer than any Pope since Leo III of blessed memory. A good man, modest, well intentioned, pious, Gregory was well loved by the Roman people. He had been a solicitous patron of the city’s teeming population of impoverished pilgrims, providing numerous shelters and houses of refuge, seeing that alms were distributed with a generous hand on all feast days and processions.
Anastasius regarded Gregory with a complicated mix of emotion, equal parts wonder and contempt: wonder at the genuineness of the man’s piety and faith, contempt for his simplicity and slow-wittedness, which left him constantly open to deceit and manipulation. Anastasius himself had often taken advantage of the Pope’s ingenuousness, never more successfully than on the Field of Lies, when he had arranged for the betrayal of Gregory’s peace negotiations with the Frankish Emperor Louis under his very nose. That little stratagem had paid handsomely; the benefactor, Louis’s son Lothar, had known how to render gratitude into coin, and Anastasius was now a wealthy man. Even more important, Anastasius had succeeded in winning Lothar’s trust and support. For a time, it was true, Anastasius had feared that his carefully cultivated alliance with the Frankish heir might come to naught—for Lothar’s defeat at Fontenoy had been admittedly disastrous. But Lothar had managed to come to terms with his rebellious brothers in the Treaty of Verdun, a remarkable piece of political legerdemain that permitted him to retain both his crown and his territories. Lothar was once again undisputed Emperor—a fact that should prove very valuable to Anastasius in the future.
The sound of bells jolted Anastasius from his reverie. The bells tolled once, twice, a third time. Anastasius slapped his thighs jubilantly. At last!
HE HAD already donned the robe of mourning when the expected knock came. A papal notary entered on silent feet. “The Apostolic One has been gathered to God,” he announced. “Your presence, Primicerius, is requested in the papal bedchamber.”
Side by side, without speaking, they threaded their way through the labyrinthine hallways of the Lateran Palace toward the papal quarters.
“He was a godly man.” The notary broke the silence. “A peacemaker, a saint.”
“A saint, indeed,” Anastasius responded. To himself he thought, What better place for him, then, than in Heaven?
“When will come
another?” The notary’s voice cracked.
Anastasius saw the man was crying. He was intrigued by the display of genuine emotion. He himself was far too artful, too aware of the effect everything he said and did had on others, to engage in lacrimae rerum. Nevertheless, the notary’s emotion reminded him that he should prepare his own show of grief. As they approached the papal bedchamber, he drew in his breath and held it, screwing up his face until he felt a sting behind his eyes. It was a trick he had, a way of bringing forth tears at will; he used it seldom, but always to good effect.
The bedchamber stood open to the gathering crowd of mourners. Inside Gregory lay on the great feather bed, eyes closed, arms, ritually crossed, clasped round a golden cross. The other optimates, or chief officers of the papal court, ringed the deathbed: Anastasius saw Arighis, the vicedominus; Compulus, the nomenclator; and Stephen, the vestiarius.
“The primicerius, Anastasius,” the secretary announced as Anastasius entered. The others looked up to see him plunged into grief, his features etched with pain, his cheeks streaked with tears.
JOAN raised her head, letting the rays of warm Roman sun spill onto her face. She was still unaccustomed to such pleasant, mild weather in Wintarmanoth—or January, as it was called in this southern part of the Empire, where Roman, not Frankish, customs prevailed.
Rome was not what she had imagined. She had envisioned a shining city, paved with gold and marble, its hundreds of basilicas rising toward Heaven in gleaming testimony to the existence of a true Civitas Dei, a City of God on earth. The reality proved far different. Sprawling, filthy, teeming, Rome’s narrow, broken streets seemed engendered in Hell rather than Heaven. Its ancient monuments—those that had not been converted to Christian churches—stood in ruin. Temples, amphitheaters, palaces, and baths had been stripped of their gold and silver and left open to the elements. Vines snaked across their fallen column shafts; jasmine and acanthus sprouted from the crevices of their walls; pigs and goats and great-horned oxen grazed in their decaying porticoes. Statues of emperors lay strewn upon the ground; the empty sarcophagi of heroes were reemployed as wash-tubs, cisterns, or troughs for swine.
It was a city of ancient and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions: the wonder of the world, and a filthy, decaying backwash; a place of Christian pilgrimage, whose greatest art celebrated pagan gods; a center of books and learning, whose people wallowed in ignorance and superstition.
Despite these contradictions, perhaps because of them, Joan loved Rome. The seething tumult of its streets stirred her. In these teeming corridors the far corners of the world converged: Roman, Lombard, German, Byzantine, and Muslim jostling one another in an exciting mix of customs and tongues. Past and present, pagan and Christian were intertwined in a rich and diverting tapestry. The best and worst of all the world were gathered within these ancient walls. In Rome, Joan found the world of opportunity and adventure which she had sought all her life.
She spent most of her time in the Borgo, where the various scholae, or societies, of foreigners were clustered. Arriving over a year ago, she had naturally gone first to the Schola Francorum but found no admittance there, as the place was overbursting with Frankish pilgrims and immigrants. So she had gone on to the Schola Anglo-rum, where her father’s English ancestry, as well as her surname, Anglicus, had gained her a warm welcome.
The depth and breadth of her education soon earned her a reputation as a brilliant scholar. Theologians came from all over Rome to engage her in learned discourse; they went away awed by the breadth of her knowledge and her quick-witted skill in disputation. How dismayed they would have been, Joan thought with an inward smile, had they known they had been bested by a woman!
Her regular duties included assisting at daily mass in the small church close beside the schola. After the midday meal, and a short nap (for it was the custom in the south to sleep away the sweltering afternoon hours), she went to the infirmary, where she passed the rest of the day tending the sick. Her knowledge of the medical arts stood her in good stead, for the practice of medicine here was nowhere near as advanced as in Frankland. The Romans knew little of the healing properties of herbs and plants, and nothing of the study of urine to diagnose and treat disease. Joan’s successes as a healer put her services much in demand.
It was an active, busy life, one that suited Joan perfectly. It offered all the opportunities of monastic life with none of the disadvantages. She could exercise the full measure of her intelligence without check or censure. She had access to the schola library, a small but fine collection of more than fifty volumes, and no one stood over her shoulder to question her if she chose to read Cicero or Suetonius rather than Augustine. She was free to come and go as she pleased, to think as she liked, to express her thoughts without fear of flogging and exposure. The time passed quickly, measured out contentedly in the fulfillment of each day’s work.
So things might have continued indefinitely had the newly elected Pope Sergius not fallen ill.
SINCE Septuagesima Sunday, the Pope had been beset by an assortment of vague but troubling symptoms: bad digestion, insomnia, heaviness and swelling of the limbs; shortly before Easter, he was stricken with a pain so intense as to be almost unendurable. Night after night, the entire palace was kept awake by his screaming.
The society of physicians sent a dozen of its best men to attend the stricken Pope. They tried a multitude of devices to effect a cure: they brought a fragment of the skull of St. Polycarp for Sergius to touch; they massaged his afflicted limbs with oil taken from a lamp that had burned all night on the tomb of St. Peter, a measure known to cure even the most desperate of afflictions; they bled him repeatedly and purged him with emetics so strong his whole body was racked with violent spasms. When even these powerful curatives failed, they tried to dispel the pain through counter-irritation, laying strips of burning flax across the veins of the legs.
Nothing availed. As the Pope’s condition worsened, the Roman people were gripped with alarm: if Sergius should die so soon after his predecessor, leaving the Throne of St. Peter vacant again, the Frankish Emperor, Lothar, might seize the opportunity to descend on the city and assert his imperial authority over them.
Sergius’s brother Benedict was also beset by worry—not out of any fraternal sentiment but because his brother’s demise represented a threat to his own interests. Having persuaded Sergius to appoint him papal missus, Benedict had skillfully used that position to accrue the authority of the papal office for himself. The result was that, only five months into his papacy, Sergius ruled in name only; all real power in Rome was wielded by Benedict—to the considerable aggrandizement of his personal fortune.
Benedict would have preferred to have the title and honor of the papal office as well, but he had always known this to be beyond his reach. He had neither the education nor the polish for so great an office. He was a second son, and in Rome it was not the custom to divide property and title among heirs as in Frankland. As the firstborn, Sergius had been lavished with all the privileges the family could provide—the expensive clothes, the private tutors. It was terribly unfair, but there was nothing to be done about it, and after a while Benedict had left off sulking and sought consolation in worldlier pleasures, of which, he quickly discovered, Rome had no shortage. His mother had grumbled about his dissolute habits but made no serious attempt to curtail them; her interest and hopes had always been centered on Sergius.
Now, at last, the long years of being overlooked were at an end. It had not been difficult to get Sergius to appoint him papal missus; Sergius had always felt guilty about the preference he had been given over his younger brother. Benedict knew his brother was weak, but corrupting him had proved even easier than anticipated. After all the years of ceaseless study and monkish deprivation, Sergius was more than ready to enjoy life. Benedict did not try to lure his brother with women, for Sergius clung adamantly to the ideal of priestly chastity. Indeed, his feelings on this point approached obsession, so that Benedict was hard put
to keep secret his own sexual adventuring.
But Sergius had another weakness—an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the table. As he consolidated his own power, Benedict kept his brother distracted with an unending parade of gustatory delights. Sergius’s capacity for food and wine was prodigious. He had been known to consume five trout, two roast hens, a dozen meat pasties, and a whole haunch of venison in a single sitting. After one such orgy, he had come to morning mass so gorged and bloated that he vomited up the Sacred Host onto the altar, to the horror of the congregation.
Following this shameful episode, Sergius resolved to reform, resuming the simple diet of bread and greens on which he had been raised. This spartan regimen restored him; he again began to take an interest in affairs of state. This had interfered with Benedict’s profitable schemes. But Benedict bided his time. Then, when he judged Sergius had had enough of pious self-denial, he resumed tempting him with extravagant gifts: rich and exotic sweetmeats, pasties and pottages, roasted pigs, barrelfuls of thick Tuscan wine. Soon Sergius was off on another feeding binge.
This time, however, the bingeing had gone too far. Sergius became ill, dangerously ill. Benedict felt no compassion for his elder brother, but he did not want him to die. Sergius’s death would spell the end of Benedict’s own power.
Something had to be done. The physicians attending Sergius were an incompetent lot who attributed the Pope’s sickness to powerful demons, against whose malignancy only prayer could avail. They surrounded Sergius with a multitude of priests and monks, who wept and prayed beside his bed day and night, raising their voices stringently toward Heaven, but it made no difference: Sergius continued to decline.
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