by Judith Tarr
“Take me,” she said.
His hands moved for him. Wrapped her in the cloth which waited beside her, and lifted her, cradling her against his chest. His body thrummed with the power of her. She was too strong. He could not — he dared not —
“Take me,” she said again, relentless. “Take me home.”
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The pope’s procession had wound chanting through the gate. A tang of incense lingered still, an echo of the hymn, a servant or two idling in the master’s absence. As Richer paused, dizzy with the power in his arms, beginning very dimly to understand what Gerbert and the Jinniyah had done to him, he heard the servants’ voices, faint but bitterly clear.
“Where is he singing mass today?”
“Santa Croce.”
“Holy Cross? Where’s that?”
“What, Roman born and you don’t know it? But there — they call it something else round about. It’s a famous sanctuary. Visio Pacis, that’s the name of it. Vision of Peace.”
“Ah,” said the Roman with an air of great enlightenment. “I know it now. It has another name in our part of the city.
“We call it Jerusalem.”
Author’s Note
Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945-1003)
All events in the life of Gerbert of Aurillac, except those which relate to his use of magic, are portrayed essentially as they happened. I have taken authorial license in a number of instances, most notably in the location of Bishop Hatto’s see. He was bishop not of Barcelona (of which Count Borel was in fact lord) but of Vich, somewhat north and inland of the count’s city. Gerbert did indeed study the Quadrivium under his tutelage, although the majority of his three years in Spain were probably spent in the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, the library of which was justly famous.
The struggle for Rheims is based closely on the account of Richer of St.-Rémi in the Historia Francorum, and on the letters of Gerbert himself (available in Harriet Pratt Lattin’s English translation, New York, 1961). Richer was not in fact in Rheims at the time of its betrayal to Duke Charles, but was tracking down his copy of Hippocrates in Chartres. It was Arnulf and not Gerbert who was found and captured atop the tower, to which Arnulf had ascended not to make astronomical observations but to barricade himself against his uncle’s soldiers. I have simplified the quarrel over the archbishopric considerably, streamlined the very confusing sequence of events, and omitted the part played by Hugh Capet’s son and heir, Robert, who had in fact been crowned co-king with his father — and who had indeed been Gerbert’s pupil in the cathedral school of Rheims. Arnulf’s deposition at the beginning of chapter 14 is translated verbatim from Richer’s history.
Gerbert’s misfortunes in Rheims after Arnulf’s deposition were, in turn, considerably more complicated than I have shown them to be. After his meeting with the Emperor Otto III in Pavia, he did in fact return to Rheims, to face the interdict and to be driven out by the ostracism which it entailed. He rejoined his emperor in Germany, was given an estate near Sasbach which brought him nothing but trouble, and stayed with Otto until the resolution of the conflict over Rheims by the naming of Gerbert to the archbishopric of Ravenna.
His relationship with his emperor was much as I have portrayed it; likewise the dream which they shared. Lattin’s volume includes a very touching pair of letters (pp. 294-97) in which Otto invites Gerbert to become his teacher and encloses a rather clumsy but quite appealing verse of his own composition, and Gerbert responds with Ciceronian eloquence. Otto is always addressed as Caesar, as Emperor of the Romans.
The details of Gerbert’s election and coronation as Pope Sylvester II are as accurate as possible; I am indebted to Nikolaus Gussone, Thron und Inthronization des Papstes von den Anfangen bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1978). Election of the pope by the College of Cardinals in secret conclave was first prescribed in the latter half of the eleventh century. At the time of Gerbert, election was officially by the clergy and the notables of Rome, actually by the will of the Holy Roman Emperor; or by whichever strongman was currently ruling Rome. The office itself was as much secular as spiritual, and Gerbert’s actions during his reign, in accepting from his emperor a number of fiefs in southern Italy, laid the foundation for the Papal States of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Gerbert was probably not present at Otto’s deathbed in Paterno, thirty miles from Rome.
The custom of a pope’s taking a new name on election was very recent in Gerbert’s time — he was in fact the second pope to do so as a matter of course. He refers to himself in his letters and papal privileges as “Sylvester, who is also Gerbert, bishop.”
oOo
The magical elements in this novel are, of course, invented — but not, in general, by myself. The legend of Sylvester Magus is almost as old as Sylvester himself. It seems that a certain schismatic cardinal, an enemy of the great Pope Saint Gregory VII (1073-85), attempted to prove in polemic that all the popes since Gregory V were unworthy of their position. The charge against Sylvester II was that of sorcery and of service to the devil, and of founding and supporting a school of the black arts in Rome. William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, in a long digression in his Gesta Regum Anglorum (“Deeds of the English Kings”), brings the legend to its fullest flower. Here is the Saracen magician and his daughter, the head of bronze with its oracular gifts, the magical golden treasure — of Octavian, William attests, and discovered not in Ravenna but in Rome — and the death of the pope after singing mass in the Roman church called Jerusalem.
I have translated almost verbatim William’s wonderful description of the treasure as Gerbert found it, all gold and lit by the great carbuncle. The oracular head, it is said, was passed down through the Middle Ages to the Franciscan alchemist and experimental scientist, Roger Bacon.
The magic which Gerbert is alleged to have practiced would have been the high learned magic of the medieval scholars. The incantation with which he summons the spirit, in chapter 13, is taken (somewhat facetiously) from the Grimoire of Pope Honorius III, quoted in E. M. Butler, Ritual Magic (Cambridge, England, 1949, rpt. 1980).
The Year 1000
Contrary to popular belief, there was no exceptional outpouring of millennarian fervor at the end of the tenth century. Gerbert, who was pope in the year 1000, seems to have regarded it as simply another year; likewise the secretaries of the imperial chancery. There was no apparent expectation of the end of the world. Gerbert at least was much too preoccupied with establishing his papacy, reforming a Church which stood in sore need of it, and playing Sylvester to Otto’s Constantine. If they dreamed of any Second Coming, it was that not of Christ but of the Roman Empire.
Publication Information
Ars Magica
First published by Bantam Books
Copyright © 1989 Judith Tarr
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Copyright © 2010 Judith Tarr
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