The young priest bade Cosimo dismount. Cosimo told his bodyguard to return for him in three hours, then turned to the entrance as the mezzana filled the doorway. She was dressed splendidly. She was a blonde who had become blonde, my friend the doorkeeper told me, by cutting the crown out of a black hat, putting the brim on her head and arranging all her dark hair upon it for exposure to the sun for weeks and weeks. She was a vividly beautiful woman who had just reached thirty. She had the art, all her life, of seeming to stare directly at whatever, was the greatest strength or weakness of a man whether that be his money, his conscience, or his weariness.
`Cosimo di Medici!' she said fondly, making the name a declarative sentence and conveying a prodigious sense of reunion. She gazed at him so longingly that he could have been standing upon all the money in the world. Cosimo walked forward but the young priest was close enough behind to jostle him so Cosimo put a small gold coin into his hand. Signora Manovale curtsied as Cosimo came into her house and asked him what his pleasure would be, as my friend closed the door behind them.
`Some simple food,' he said. `Some wine. And perhaps some company.’
She took him up a marble staircase and left him with two young attendants whom she said would bathe him. She returned to the main floor and summoned a female butler, ordering supper for two for the gentleman who was waiting in her own apartment. `Send Maria Giovanna to me,' she said.
She sat and looked into the wood-fire, her bold, high cheekbones almost concealing her sea-blue eyes. Her wide, full mouth smiled the pleasure of her thoughts, showing her small, very white, cat teeth.
Upstairs, the two silent maidens eluded Cosimo when he tried to, bring them down. He was bathed, massaged and titillated, if that is possible to do to a banker. They dressed him and vanished as soon as there came a knock upon the door. Tables of food were carried in. Behind them came Signora Manovale and a young woman so startling in her beauty that Cosimo, in his elevated state, thought she must be the most thrilling woman he had ever seen. `I offer you this repast, my lord,' Manovale said, `as I offer you my daughter:'
Cosimo gaped.
`She is the jewel of my collection,' Manovale said. 'At fifteen, she is more learned in the women's arts than anyone in Rome – or in Florence. She is the perfect concubine – a concubine, not a courtesan. Do you like her?'
He nodded, flushed.
`She is for lease, my lord’
`Lease?'
'Let me tell you about her.' Manovale satin a chair beside him so as not to distract his attention from Maria Giovanna, who stood before him in the clear. `She is a linguist; which is something more than being merely a mistress of tongues,' Manovale said lewdly. `She is a musician and a profound astrologer. She can read and write in Latin, Italian, French, German and English, and converse upon all classical or current subjects, weightily or frivolously. You observe the beauty of her face. I cannot describe to you the beauty of her body. But these things are not for rent, my lord. Maria Giovanna is for lease.'
On the spot, Cosimo convinced himself that this young woman, could take over all of his important business entertaining in Florence He was betrothed to marry but it was impossible for his future wife to do what this young woman could do for the bank. This family is a secret weapon, he marvelled to himself.
'I will have this lease,' he said.
The following morning, Cosimo signed a written lease which, in return for Maria Giovanna's companionship in Florence or wherever else he might specify, provided her with a clothing and jewellery allowance of 700 florins a year, a small but elegant house to be freely held in her name as her property, with an emolument of 2000 florins a year, payable quarterly in advance; it, was agreed that the money be deposited at the Medici main bank in Florence as a joint account in the names of Maria Giovanna Toreton and Decima Manovale, payable only in, gold florins.
When the deal was struck, Cosimo said to Manovale, 'Now – perhaps you and I can come to some arrangement.'
She pretended to misunderstand him. `But I am not a courtesan, my lord,' she said. She later told Bernaba that she could not see the shape of her future just then but that she could feel, its presence and it had the thrilling smell of money. This was Cosimo di Medici who had just leased her daughter. To carry away what his family had would require more men than even she had known in her lifetime,
`After this day,' he said, 'I shall hardly need a courtesan again.'
`You don't need me to write love letters for you.'
`We can be useful to each other. It is tiresome for me to have to travel to Rome so often on banking matters, yet people I could send in my place are not sufficiently – ah – sophisticated to understand the sort of persuasion which might be required. You have a feeling for such things. I want you to be our bank's special representative in Rome.'
'Business?
'Very much so '
`Business is money.'
`How much?'
'Not possible. I don't want you to negotiate for me, I want you as a persuader.'
`Try me as a negotiator. I shall work for nothing for three months so you can measure whether I am worth a tithe.'
'Only my father has the authority to do that. Perhaps you would like to meet him at the bank in Florence.' His father took a longer view than anyone else. He went for the golden florins not for nice customs and traditions.
Mother, daughter and Cosimo left for Florence the following morning. Both Decima, Manovale and.Cosimo di Medici were part of a mutating European spirit which was turning itself away from power
by force towards the more reasonable yet deadlier channels of power through manipulation. They used force when there was no alternative. They were a century ahead of their time. That they had found each other so relatively early was an immense circumstance for both of them. For the time left to them together,; they would think in parallel, anticipating the clink of money and the exertions of power, each able to operate in places and with people whereof the other could not.
12
Pope Boniface IX believed in a one-man Church, as far as possible. He did not have the patience to be hampered by too numerous a college of cardinals, for example, and it was a pope's right to appoint as many cardinals as he wished. It was more economical and efficient not to have to provide for them than to have to haggle with them, ending by refusing them their expected shares in the Church's revenues. Of the thirteen cardinals who had elected him to the throne of St Peter in 1389, only five had still been alive for the Jubilee of 1400. To replace those who had died, he raised only four priests to the college, all able men Henricus Minutulus, whom he used constantly as a roving papal legate; Bartholomaeus de Uliarius, especially assigned to the court of King Ladislas of Naples; Cosmato de Megliorati (afterwards Pope Innocent VII), whom he used as ambassador between Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and the republics of Florence and Bologna; and Piero Spina, his bent-nose Sicilian chamberlain, who became adjudicator among the several disputed territories of the papal states.
Baldassare Cossa was awarded a red hat in 1402, in the same ceremonies which created the other new cardinals. It was very early – in the morning, shortly after dinner – when Boniface told his protege that he was to be made a cardinal. As His Holiness solemnly explained the significance of the cardinalate, Cossa told me he found himself remembering the lost beauty of the prodigiously sexual woman who had bedded him so single-mindedly in Perugia, several years before. As his influence at the Vatican had grown, he had been able to institute a series of investigations to find. her meaning that I was given the job of looking for her, but, wherever I looked no one had known her. She had vanished. It was as though Cossa had imagined he had been with her, except that I was his witness that she had once existed. She had a lovely natural perfume. I can smell her still.
Cossa despaired that she had escaped him, such a beautiful woman with long red-hair, pale skin, large green eyes so filled with eager lust as I remember them – that no one, having once seen her, could cast her f
rom memory. Cossa said he had to force himself to listen to the pope instruct him about the cardinalate.
`Because you have no knowledge of theological matters, Cossa,' Boniface said to him,- you have, not been ordained and have spent your life as a lawyer we are going to explain to you what are the duties and the rewards of our cardinals. Our work has its two arms, the curia, which is all the offices which deal with administering our papacy, and our pastoral mission – apart from running Rome and the temporal requirements of the papal states. We need this complex machinery for; as the papal monarch, we claim not only the ownership of all islands, but we are also the feudal lord of many countries. As general overseer, we are entitled to depose princes, release subjects from their oaths of allegiance, confer crowns, making kings,: and to dispose of territories. It is in our powers to order the dispatch of troops in support of a ruler, or we can prohibit further military engagements. We can order the preservation of the legal systems of invaded or conquered countries, or transfer one kingdom to another. By the same powers we are entitled to annul certain laws, such as the Magna Carta in England, on the ground of its interference with royal power. Our papacy acts as a court which ratifies treaties between kings and countries, hence we have the right to prohibit trade where necessary.
`The cardinals are, of course, a part of this – that is, and never fail to remember this, as much a part of it as we, permit them to be. Originally, it was the clergy and the people of Rome who elected the pope, but gradually the defects in that system were adjusted, until the Third Lateran Council in 1179 issued the decree which stated that all cardinals of whatever rank were to be the equal electors and that, for a valid election, a two-thirds majority of their votes was required. And there you have the only function of cardinals – to elect a new pope. And that is where their freedom of decision ends, for, at the moment of a pope's election and his own acceptance, he and he alone has the governing power. Often popes are not even ordained priests, let alone consecrated bishops. Sometimes months pass before a pope is ordained or consecrated.' Boniface leaned forward towards Cossa for emphasis. His voice grew softer. `Let that demonstrate for you the nature of the papal office. It is juristic. It is executive and it is administrative before anything else. You are about to enter the sacred college which is usually – made up of seven cardinal bishops, twenty-eight cardinal priests, and eighteen cardinal deacons. Cardinal deacon will be the rank which you will hold. The head of all the cardinals is the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, who consecrates the pope and anoints the emperor. By custom, and in varying degrees depending upon the policy of the sitting pope, the cardinals participate in all sources of curial incomes as well as sharing in Peter's Pence. This is because the cardinals form "part of the pope's body" modelled on Roman law, which laid down the same intimate connection between: Roman senators and their emperor. By constant adjustment to new contingencies, our vast machinery functions out of the resilience and continuity of a slow evolution which, reaches back across the centuries, founded upon order and based upon law.'
Thus, in February, 1402, when he was thirty-four years old, Baldassare Cossa was created Cardinal of St Eustachius, a cardinal deacon who had never taken holy orders but who was a first-class army commander, a very good canon lawyer, and who had a definite talent when it came to diverting a gold florin from the purse of the faithful.
13
Decima Manovale was born in 1371, four years after Cossa's birth, seven years before Urban VI became the vicar of Christ and slipped his leash to cause the great schism in the Church. An important figure in Manovale's story is Sir John Hawkwood, the great condotiere, who was knighted in the field by the Black Prince in 1356. Hawkwood was one of the most powerful hired lances in Italian history.
After the Treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, when he became one of the hundreds of surplus captains, he formed his own company of mercenaries and moved southward from Burgundy along the Rhone valley to the papal capital of Avignon – one free company, that is a company whose men elected their leaders, among a horde of 60,000 mercenary soldiers. They had heard about the papal riches and they had decided that, all together, they could scoop it up before moving on. Avignon, to those soldiers, was a museum displaying samples of the booty which was waiting on the other side of the Alps. Avignon was a miniature Italy which glistened with the wealth of the south. The city was packed with merchants, goldsmiths, weavers, musicians, astrologers, prelates, pickpockets, whores, and forty-three branches of Italian banking houses. The papal court was so opulent that cardinals' mules wore gold bits. You can imagine what was gold on the cardinals' whores.
A great river of money rushed into the papal palace from every corner of Christendom in the form of tribute's for annates and media friuctus, the spoilia, visitation fees, dispensations, absolutions, tithes, presents, sales of places, papal loans, taxes on bulls, and benefices. For 45 groschen the King of Cyprus secured permission for his subjects to trade with the Egyptians. There was a graduated scale of prices which permitted the laity to choose their confessor outside their regular parish. The pope could change either canon law or divine law, but the divine law was changed only if there was enough money; money could buy anything to deliver any manner of permission to the petitioner
For a king to carry his sword on Christmas Day -150 groschen
To legitimatize illegitimate children – 60 groschen
For giving a converted Jew permission to visit his parents.- 40 groschen
To free 'a bishop from an archbishop – 30 groschen
To divide a dead man and put him in two graves 30 groschen
To permit a nun to have two maids-20 groschen
To obtain immunity from excommunication-6 groschen
To receive stolen goods to the value of 1000 groschen – 50 groschen
Avignon might have been a freebooter's dream of a-city to be sacked but it had the strongest fortifications in Europe. Pope Innocent contemplated the vast encampment across the river and decided to pay the mercenary armies to persuade them to go away, preferably to Italy. He included a plenary. indulgence for all of them, as part of the price, which wiped out a teeming population of sins.
Hawkwood's White Company, so named because they kept their armour shining, was hired by Pisa to defend it. Hawkwood invented the designation 'lance' as a system of accounting for troops in Italy. Lances fought on foot. With 2000 of them in the field, 1000 page boys called ragazzi held the horses at a safe distance in the rear. Two men held each lance, standing in units of twenty or thirty lances, balled together like porcupines. When these defence/attack units broke the enemy, the ragazzi would run forward with the horses so that the men within the lance unit could take up hot pursuit, hoping to take prisoners who could be held for ransom.
The murderous complement to the lances were the archers on their flanks. A First-class archer could loose six arrows a minute, have the sixth in the air before the first hit the target, and. kill at 200 yards. It was the secret weapon of the White Company because it was exclusively an English weapon which was irreplaceable in Italy.
The administration of the White Company was organized under, the prevalent military code, an observation which is relevant to Decima Manovale's story. Hawkwood's principal lieutenants in the field were Albert Sterz and an aristocratic Englishman, Andrew de Belmonte, whom the Italians called Dubramonte. The key figure after Hawkwood was the company treasurer, William Tureton, to whom the Hawkwood clients paid over the agreed costs for defence. Toreton, as the Italians called him, ran the money, the paperwork and the intelligence system, and, he needed a large Italian staff. He was also Hawkwood's lawyer, diplomat and banker. Manovale said he was a beefy man, very tall, with very red cheeks and an insatiable lust early in the morning. She said that, if she really wanted something from him, she was always careful to ask in the afternoon – or over she'd go. He liked very young women, between the ages of ten and fourteen. – After that, it was hard for a woman to hold his attention.
Toreton acquired Decima Manovale,
tenth child of sixteen children, when she was twelve years old, from her father, for five florins and the agreement that he would teach her to read and write. She was a healthy, handsome girl, and when she was thirteen she had her first child, called Maria Giovanna Toreton then, late the same year, her second child, Maria Louise Sterz. Her third was Helene MaCloi (by Chevalier MaCloi, Chief of Staff to the Duke of Anjou), born when Decima was fourteen, and Rosa, fathered by Andrew de Belmonte, was born the following year. Decima learned to speak Latin and the languages of the four men who had fathered her children. English, German and French, which she taught to her children.
Children born out of wedlock were commonplace and accepted. Decima worked on at Toreton's headquarters while she took care of the children, learning how to run wars, conclude treaties, direct and collect intelligence, and to judge men. She developed an understanding of power and the necessity for ruthlessness when she was very young. Cossa didn't know the first things about power compared to Manovale but, as I have said, he was a passive type, a very Italian kind of a fatalist.
When Decima was seventeen, and Toreton never went near her for diddling even in the early morning but listened to her notions when it came to business, Hawkwood deserted Pisa, Decima's homeland, and sold, the company's services to Florence, Pisa's enemy. Decima took her children, five, four, three and two years old, to Rome. She knew Toreton would be glad to see her go. He had his eye on a nine-year- old girl whose father had been sending her into the camp with firewood.
Toreton was fond of Manovale and felt responsible for her (and her four children). He saw to it that each of the fathers of the children, including himself, contributed, 100 gold florins to the Manovale travelling fund and, in addition, he gave her seven cups of pure gold from the loot stores, three valuable tapestries and five good rugs. Manovale had enough capital to support her family well for the next four years.
A Trembling Upon Rome Page 7