Death and the Devil

by Frank Schätzing

  “But you live here, in the city,” said Jaspar. It didn’t sound reproachful, only surprised.

  “Only for the last few months. I’ve been away too long. Since I came back I haven’t concerned myself with what’s going on in Cologne. I just wanted to get on with my life.”

  “Have you ever really concerned yourself with anything?” asked Richmodis.

  Her remark cut him to the quick. “Perhaps,” he said coolly.

  Jaspar came over and squatted down in front of him. “Am I wrong, or could you be running away from something?”

  “You know already.”

  “No, I don’t know. I mean something you can’t escape. Always keeping your eyes closed, not facing up to things, not being interested in things, not even in your music, really, even though you play your whistle exceptionally well. There’s something wrong there.”

  Jacob looked at him. The palms of his hands were sore. He realized he had been boring his fingernails into them and forced a grin to his lips. “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Isn’t that what it says?”

  “Not in Abelard.”

  “Oh, to hell with your Abelard.”

  “Fox-cub!”

  “Why should the patricians plan a revolt?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Yes, I’m changing the subject,” Jacob snapped. “And if I am, then it’s my business alone. You said we should attack, so please enlighten me. If you can.”

  “Oh, I can enlighten you. Given your eagerness to learn, the basic principles will probably take a lifetime, though I wouldn’t guarantee you’d understand them even then.”

  “Jaspar,” said Jacob softly, “before I met you I may well have been stupid, but I never had the feeling I was.”

  “Oh, I see.” Jaspar scratched the back of his head. “Sir is sorry for himself. It’s certainly easier to be stupid.”

  “I’m not listening to this.”

  “Oh, we’re not listening to this, are we? That’s because you don’t want to. You always choose the easy option. If things get hard, you give up and take to your heels. You don’t want to learn, you don’t want to know, not even now.”

  “I want the truth.”

  “You can’t take the truth.”

  Jacob breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself down. Most of all he felt like ramming his fist between Jaspar’s mocking eyes. Suddenly he felt Richmodis’s hand ruffling his hair. “Stop that,” he snapped.

  “Jacob.”

  He tried to shake her off.

  “Jacob, your hair gets even redder when you’re angry. Did you know that?”

  He stared at the fire in silence.

  “And it sticks up like a hedgehog’s.” She giggled. “No, more like a cock. A little angry cock. A cockerel.”

  He felt his anger subside and chewed his lips. He was unhappy, and his unhappiness had nothing to do with the events of the last couple of days. “I’m the Fox,” he said weakly.

  “And the Fox is cunning,” she said with a smile. “I’m just a silly goose, but this goose has its claws in your hair, so be careful.”

  Jaspar went back to sit by the fire. Jacob had the feeling he was both irritated and amused at the same time. His face was glowing with the reflection of the fire. He poked the logs, sending up a crackling shower of sparks.

  “All right,” said Jacob, “I know nothing. I know nothing about the emperor and the pope and what the point of an archbishop is and so on and so forth. Happy now?”

  “No,” said Jaspar, staring into the flames. “You’ve told us too much for that to be true. You know a lot. You can remember astonishing details. Up to the day you ran away from home.” He turned toward him, a grin on his face. “But don’t worry, Fox-cub, we’re stuck in here for the next few hours, so I might as well give you the benefit of my historical knowledge in the hope of filling that hollow skull of yours to overflowing with wisdom. Interested?”

  Jacob sighed. “Of course.”

  “Good. Basically, it all comes down to who’s the boss. After the collapse of Rome the empire was split up. There followed a dark period of conflict and confusion, before it was reunited under the spiritual authority of the popes and the secular power of the emperors and kings. To general rejoicing, of course. But the immense empire proved too much for them, especially since the pope only actually rules the Vatican. People were needed to administer specific local territories, and among these were some I would call—just as a joke, God forgive me my vanity—secular clerics, representatives of the powers of the pope and of the king in the same person. These were the prince bishops and archbishops.”

  He paused, then went on. “Now it is in the nature of things that the powerful are constantly at each others’ throats. The pope wanted to turn the empire into an ecclesiastical state under the authority of the Church. The emperor, for his part, also claimed to be God’s representative—naturally, since God is the authority—and denied the pope any jurisdiction in political and territorial matters. Each tried to clip the other’s powers and increase his own. Thus the Crusades, for example, were not holy wars, but a conflict between the secular and spiritual authorities. They agreed on a common enemy, and had a common army, but one or the other of them always came out on top, depending on circumstances. The dilemma only became public, however, when the emperor and the pope began to attack each other openly. The archbishops, being servants of two masters, couldn’t really fight against themselves. They were in danger of being crushed between two stones. You’re still with me?”

  “Conrad von Hochstaden,” Richmodis interjected, “doesn’t look particularly crushed to me.”

  “Clever girl. That’s the way things were going. The archbishops had to become more powerful. And they did so to the point where they could side with one of their masters and leave the other in dire straits. Loyalty didn’t have much to do with it. Basically, the archbishops don’t care one bit about the emperor or pope. They’re interested in politics, not in saving souls. But their strategy worked. Over the centuries they became powerful enough to grant their support as a favor. But that led to a further dilemma. Whom does the city serve?”

  “The archbishop?”

  “On the one hand. He is its overlord. On the other, it also serves the emperor. It’s part of the empire and the citizens are his subjects.”

  Jacob risked a deduction. “So if the archbishop and the pope combined against the emperor, then the city would have to oppose the emperor, willy-nilly.”

  “Exactly! Willy-nilly. To decide for themselves, the citizens would have to make themselves independent of the archbishop. The archbishop needs them and their money. If he is to go to war, in whoever’s name, he needs well-filled coffers. So what did the archbishops do? Tried to get the cities on their side. Buttered them up. Granted privileges and promised the moon. In general they succeeded in getting absolute control over the cities. Except in Cologne.”

  “Why not here?”

  “Why?” Jaspar raised his eyebrows. “Just look around. A rich city. Wine and textiles, goldsmiths, metalworkers, armorers. Trading to the farthest boundaries of the known world and a magnet for pilgrims. Nowhere in Christendom is there such a perfect combination of religious fervor and cold calculation. A religious center and the strongest economic power in the empire. No wonder the citizens began to question the archbishops’ rule. They supported them now and again, but only when the archbishops’ aims coincided with their own interests.”

  “I still don’t understand. The archbishop rules over people who don’t obey his rule. Does he rule or not?”

  “Well.” Jaspar leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “People here have problems recognizing either the pope or the emperor when they’ve not been involved in the election. In 1198 there was a contest for the crown that Otto IV won. Why? The decisive factor was the Cologne leadership that supported England as Otto’s proposer. And why did they do that? To promote Cologne’s interests in the English trade. There you have it in a n
utshell. The citizens of Cologne are interested in profit, and their main concern is to get rid of the archbishops, who bleed them dry and dictate to them. But what should an archbishop do if not bleed his subjects dry and dictate to them? If he doesn’t rule, he’s superfluous. That’s the root of the eternal conflict, even though there were times when the archbishop was quite popular with the citizens.”

  “When they were more Christian?” Richmodis mocked.

  “Huh! The people of Cologne have always been pious, not Christian. But an archbishop like Reinhard von Dassel, who brought the bones of the Three Kings to Cologne a hundred years ago, strengthened both his own position and that of the city. Lots of pilgrims, lots of new inns, lots of money coming in. And his successor, Philip von Heinsberg, used this as a base to acquire castles, estates, and privileges. He soon became one of the most powerful princes in the empire, and everything he did increased the importance of Cologne. And once they had got that far on their archbishops’ coattails, the good citizens began to think of ways of getting rid of them. So they built the walls—partly out of fear of Philip’s enemies, since he was always waging war, but also because they knew there was bound to be armed conflict between the archbishop and the city eventually.”

  “But if Philip was so powerful,” Richmodis commented, “why couldn’t he impose his will on them?”

  “Because his power was based on money, money he had borrowed from the Cologne merchants. As everyone knew. The emperor would never have given his blessing to a subjugation of the city by force. He wanted the foremost economic power in his empire to flourish. Philip would have risked being taken to court.”

  “He could have gotten the pope to support him.”

  “Not a hope. He had even more debts in Rome. There was nothing he could do and Cologne was quietly preparing for self-government. Then it happened. The emperor decided in favor of the city—which shows just what economic strength can do. They did have to pay a kind of fine, but they were allowed to continue building the walls. From then on the archbishops lost more and more influence, leaving the city folk facing a different problem. Namely which of them was to be boss.”

  Jacob thought. “You said money is power.”

  “Precisely. In the main, the independence movement had been driven by the patricians. But then they controlled most of the city’s trade. You’ll know that the two burgomasters came from their ranks. What you perhaps didn’t know is that until recently one of them also had to be a magistrate. At some point it became established that every magistrate had to come from the great merchant houses, who were trying to occupy all official positions in the city. The magistrates, originally impartial judges, became the mouthpiece of the patricians, who started to raise taxes to pay for the administration, for example, the burgomasters.”

  “Isn’t that quite reasonable?” objected Jacob.

  “Perhaps. But the burgomasters naturally wanted to put on as imposing a show as possible. Latterly they took to giving glittering parties, which they claimed were essential for the work of the authorities. The authorities being the patricians, of course. This all made a big hole in the finances, so they increased the taxes. It had less and less to do with representing the interests of the inhabitants of Cologne, and the noble families, as they like to call themselves, did less and less to conceal their contempt for tradesmen and excluded them from all official positions. Though that didn’t stop them from dipping into everyone’s pockets and even getting themselves elected masters of the guilds.”

  “But why did the craftsmen put up with it?”

  “Ask the opposite question. Why would patricians want to be elected guildmasters?”

  “To represent the interests of the trades?”

  “And weaken them politically. They promised them protection against the archbishop’s jurisdiction, but then they controlled all appointments to the judiciary. Another step toward depriving the archbishop completely of power. Favors given and received, an incredible sink of corruption.” Jaspar sighed. “At least, that was the situation when Conrad von Hochstaden was made archbishop.”

  “And he wants the old power back?”

  Jaspar nodded.

  “I see,” said Jacob thoughtfully. It was beginning to get interesting. “But now only a few patricians are magistrates.”

  “They have been deposed, more or less.”

  “By whom?”

  Jaspar looked at him. “Can’t you guess?”

  “Conrad?”

  “Who else? Conrad’s ultimate aim was to reestablish the absolute power of the archbishop, but he went about it in a roundabout way, initially cooperating with the citizens and confirming their privileges. This lasted until he opposed the emperor and, in agreement with the pope, arranged the election of an anti-king. Cologne had always been loyal to the emperor, hardly surprising since he guaranteed its economic privileges and stability. Then, although he had recognized the city’s right to mint its own currency, Conrad suddenly brought out a coin of his own. It wasn’t worth much, but it bore his image, the vain bastard. Not content with that, he set up new customs barriers, although it didn’t lie within his powers and hit Cologne’s trade where it hurt. The city protested. Conrad, unimpressed, gathered an army and besieged it. To no avail, however, since it now had its splendid walls. He had to agree to a court of arbitration under Albertus Magnus, who found against Conrad on all counts.”

  “The Lesser Adjudication,” Richmodis murmured.

  “Yes! Conrad had to cancel all the disputed measures. A farce! Five years later he started a new dispute when he accused the citizens of Cologne of having planned to assassinate him—”

  “And had they?” Jacob asked.

  Jaspar grinned. “Who knows? Three years ago the Kleingedancks attacked one of his relatives. Right outside his palace! While he was inside dispensing justice. It was a private feud, but Conrad presented it as an attempt on his life. So we had another war, which the patricians won, and another defeat for the archbishop. Then—”

  “Richmodis!” It was Kuno whispering. All heads swung around. With great effort Kuno had raised himself a little. He was deathly pale.

  Richmodis jumped up and went to support him.

  “He should be lying down,” said Jaspar.

  Goddert smacked his lips a few times, cleared his throat, and opened his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  No one took any notice. They were standing around Kuno as Jaspar wiped the sweat from his brow. “Relax,” he said. “You’re safe here.”

  Kuno shook his head feebly. “No one’s safe.” His eyelids fluttered.

  “Water,” Jaspar commanded. He gently slapped Kuno’s cheeks. “We don’t want to lose him again.”

  “The alliance—” Kuno breathed.

  Richmodis hurried over with a damp cloth and Jaspar wiped Kuno’s face. He was seized with a fit of coughing, then sank back, breathing heavily.

  “Tell us about the alliance,” said Jaspar urgently.

  “It’s too late.”

  “It can’t be too late as long as your lot are trying to kill us.”

  “Not me.” Kuno’s chest was heaving, as if he couldn’t get his breath. “I’ve broken with them. I want the alliance to end. It—it is wrong.”

  “Gerhard’s words!” exclaimed Jacob.

  “It is wrong.”

  “Who was in the alliance?” Jaspar asked.

  They waited. For a while it seemed as if Kuno had fallen asleep again. Then they heard his hoarse voice. “Heinrich von Mainz—”

  “Married to Sophia Overstolz,” Jaspar added. “The Overstolzes again.”

  “My brothers, Bruno and Hermann.”

  “Both in exile.”

  “Johann and Daniel—and Matthias Overstolz—and…and Theoderich—”

  “So we were right. Anyone else?”

  “Leave me alone. I’m tired. I—”

  “Who?” Jaspar shouted. He took Kuno by the shoulders and started to shake him. Kuno groaned. Jacob grabbed J
aspar’s wrists and pulled him away.

  “Sorry.” Jaspar rubbed his eyes.

  “The witch,” Kuno panted.

  “Witch?”

  “Blithildis. The witch. The blind witch.”

  Jaspar looked around, dumbfounded. “Blithildis Overstolz,” he whispered. “My God, what on earth do you intend to do?”

  “It was her idea.” Kuno was having difficulty getting the words out. “All her idea. Cursed be that evening when we were sitting together in Rheingasse. We were going to celebrate. Enjoy ourselves—oh, God—water, I’m thirsty—so thirsty.”

  They handed him a mug and waited until he had drunk. It was a long time.

  “We had concluded a couple of good deals,” Kuno went on, his voice stronger, “the Overstolzes, the von Mainzes, and—”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “—and me. Deals with the English. And Johann—it was for Blithildis, to cheer her up. He said it was so long since she had been in company, sitting in her room all the time like the living dead, since God had taken her sight. I asked if I might bring Gerhard, he—he was my only friend. We were sitting there, drinking our wine when—when Blithildis suddenly sent the servants away and started to speak, full of hatred, laughing, crying, sobbing until she put a spell on us and blinded us too with bloody thoughts, and it was the evil from her lips that made us join in and—and Gerhard said—”

  “What, for God’s sake? He said it was wrong, didn’t he?”

  Kuno’s features contorted, as if he wanted to cry but couldn’t. “It was so sad. He tried to make us change our minds and we begged him to join us. Johann said he would respect Gerhard’s honest opinion as long as he would swear to remain silent.”

  “And Gerhard. Could he do that?”

  Kuno shook his head disconsolately. “He didn’t know what to do. He owed everything to the Church, but he would have had to betray his friends to—can’t you see, he had no choice?” Kuno held Jaspar tight, looking at him beseechingly, as if he could turn back the clock. “Whatever he did, in his own eyes it would have been betrayal. His honesty killed him. I pleaded with the others to trust him, without even knowing myself whether we could. He knew everything. What could have come over Blithildis, to imagine she could persuade Gerhard, the cathedral architect, to join in her plan?”