Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  the Abbess changed her tune and began to speak in a completely different tone, asserting that it was impossible to defend oneself against the promptings of the flesh; so she said that everyone there was henceforth free to enjoy herself whenever possible, so long as it be done as discreetly as it had always been done. And after Isabetta was set free, the Abbess went back to sleep with her priest and Isabetta with her lover, who continued to visit her often, despite the envy of the other nuns, who, lacking lovers, consoled themselves in secret as best they could.

  The abbess’s belated assertion—that it is “impossible to defend oneself against the promptings of the flesh”—is Boccaccio’s own rock-bottom belief, one that leads him to vilify almost all priests and religious as insufferable hypocrites. His deepest faith is expressed by Guiscardo the Page, one of Boccaccio’s more sympathetic characters, who tells his prince, whose daughter he has been sleeping with, that “against the force of Love all men, whether pages or princes, are equally helpless.” Like the pagan Greeks and Romans, whose writings were being rediscovered and newly revered in his day, Boccaccio fears that to go against “Nature” is to risk impairment, “for her laws cannot be defied without exceptional strength, and those who defy them often labor in vain or do much harm to themselves. I for one confess that I possess no such strength, nor do I wish for it.”

  Boccaccio is not just telling tales; he is pushing a point of view. “A lover’s kisses,” he points out, are often “much tastier than those of a husband.” So whatever cena d’Amore, whatever supper of love is to one’s taste, Boccaccio prays “God in his overflowing mercy quickly to bestow the same thing upon me and upon every other Christian soul inclined to enjoy such a feast.” And, please, lay aside any religious scruples: in one of Boccaccio’s later stories, a ghost returns from Purgatory to tell a living man that, though he can expect to pay for his sins in the afterlife, his sexual peccadilloes won’t be numbered among his transgressions: “Down here,” counsels the ghost, “such things don’t count for much.”

  This hardly means that Boccaccio shrugs off evil. In the story of Tedaldo, for instance, who leaves Florence when his lady love, Ermellina, turns mysteriously against him, the lover returns many years later only to find that Ermellina’s patient and forgiving husband, Aldobrandino, has been sentenced to death for the murder of Tedaldo himself.

  When Tedaldo heard this he began to reflect how easy it is for people to stuff their heads full of totally erroneous ideas, thinking first of how his brothers had mourned and buried a stranger in his stead and then how an innocent man had been accused on the basis of their false suspicions and then sentenced to death on the evidence of false witnesses, and he also pondered the blind severity of laws and magistrates who, in order to demonstrate their zealous pursuit of truth, very often use cruel tortures so as to cause falsehood to be accepted for fact, claiming the while to act as ministers of God’s justice, whereas in reality they are instruments of the Devil and all his iniquities.

  In such a reflection we feel the heat of Boccaccio’s savage indignation and his impatience with the commonly tolerated injustices of his society (which, in respect to the casual frequency of wrongful conviction at least, was not so very different from our own).

  But no societal abuse raises Boccaccio’s ire as much as the hypocrisy of churchmen, especially the Franciscan friars, the spiritual sons of Francis of Assisi, the greatest of all medieval saints, who less than a century and a half earlier had founded a religious order of poor beggars. In the intervening years, however, the friars had, er, evolved. “Is there a friar who does not act the hypocrite?” asks another of Boccaccio’s storytellers.

  Oh, scandal of this wicked world! They’re not in the least ashamed of looking fat and flushed, or effeminate in their dress and accoutrements, and they strut around not at all like the doves they think they resemble but, rather, like the cock o’ the walk with crest erect. And what’s worse—and let’s not even mention that their cells are stocked with ointments and salves, huge boxes of sweets, phials and flasks of perfume and fragrant oils, and casks overflowing with Malmsey wine and other such exotic vintages, all making their abodes look more like perfume shops or gourmet grocers than like friars’ quarters—they are not ashamed to let others know they’re suffering from gout, self-deceived that people are unaware that regular fasting, a spare and simple diet, and sober living keep a person lean and healthy; or if such a man should fall ill, it’s not from gout, for which the commonly prescribed cures are chastity and all the things befitting the life of a simple friar. They think others do not realize this … and do not know that neither Saint Dominic nor Saint Francis ever owned four cloaks each but wore clothes to keep out the cold, rather than to cut an elegant figure.… May God see to it that they and all those simpletons who supply them with these things get what they deserve in the end!

  Harrumph! If the sins of the friars seem a trifle tame compared with those of the magistrates, it must be noted that in Boccaccio the clergy come in for more criticism than do the secular authorities. It may be that in the mid-fourteenth century the well-developed structures of the church seemed far more present and oppressive than did the still-sketchy structures of the state. Whatever the case, Boccaccio never misses an opportunity to lambaste the presumptuousness of the clergy.

  In the course of telling the story of Brother Alberto of Imola—a “thief, pimp, forger, and murderer” who becomes a successful preacher and sleeps with an easily flattered merchant’s wife after convincing her that he is the Angel Gabriel—Lady Pampinea has occasion to rail against scams such as indulgences by which the clergy sucker the credulous: “And rather than earning Paradise as we all must do, [the clergy] act almost as if they were its very lords and owners, assigning to each person who dies, depending on how much money he has bequeathed to them in his will, a more or less choice perch up there, and in doing this they first of all deceive themselves (if they really believe what they say), and then they deceive everyone who trusts them.”

  Here in the early 1350s, Boccaccio is already rubbed the wrong way by a phenomenon that will continue to grate on i svegli—those who are awake—till, nearly seventeen decades later, their demur, having only gained in seriousness over the course of time, will erupt in the Reformation. And there lies in the Decameron, as if hidden in plain view, an even more portentous tale of future eruptions, if only one were to read it aright. It is a story told by Lord Panfilo, indeed the second story told on the very first day, so Boccaccio surely means to give it a sort of spotlight.

  “Once upon a time there lived in Paris a great merchant, who was also a good man, and his name was Giannotto di Civigni.” Giannotto’s best friend is another merchant, a “forthright and utterly trustworthy man,” whose name is Abraham and who is a Jew. Now Giannotto, recognizing Abraham’s “honesty and uprightness, found it most distressing that the soul of this brave, wise, and good man would end in Hell because of his lack of faith.” For in this period Christian theology did not allow non-Christians to reach Paradise. So Giannotto begins to plead with his friend to accept baptism, for “as he himself could see, the Christian faith was always growing and spreading, while Judaism was growing ever smaller.”

  In our day, this kind of badgering would almost certainly have ended the friendship (surely few faults are less attractive than the smugness of the cultural imperialist), but Abraham, who was learned in his ancestral religion, displays extraordinary patience with his well-meaning, if obtuse, friend, even finding his arguments “entertaining.” At long last Abraham weakens a little, but, first, he says, “I want to visit Rome to have a look at the man you call ‘the Vicar of God on Earth.’ I wish to study his style of life as well as that of his brother cardinals.” Hearing this, Giannotto is cast down, knowing that “I have wasted my time.… For if he visits the Roman court and sees the foul and sordid lives of the clergy, not only will he not change from Jew to Christian, but if he had already become a Christian, he would doubtless go back to being a Jew!”r />
  Abraham, as the teller of the tale informs us, is “a most perceptive man” and missed nothing on his Roman holiday. As he “carefully observed the behavior of the pope, the cardinals, and the other prelates and courtiers,” he took note that “from highest to lowest, they all without shame were steeped in lechery, not only the natural variety but also sodomy, and without the least embarrassment or remorse—so much so that the influence of whores and rent boys was of no small importance if one should wish to obtain a great favor there.” Moreover, Abraham notes that all the clergy are “great gluttons and drunks … money-grubbers … as likely to buy and sell human (even Christian) blood as to sell sacred objects or offices … and that in these commercial exchanges there was more traffic and more brokers involved than there were cloth merchants—or merchants of any kind—in all of Paris,” bustling Paris then serving, along with Florence, as one of the two great hubs of emerging European capitalism.

  On Abraham’s return to Paris, his Christian friend asks him with trepidation what he thought of the Roman court. Abraham spares Giannotto no detail, sharing his assessment that these clergy “are trying with all the talent and skill at their disposal to destroy the Christian religion and to drive it from the face of the earth.” But since they have not succeeded, but rather since Christianity “continues to spread and grow ever brighter and more radiant, I am of the opinion that it must have the Holy Spirit as its foundation and mainstay.” In conclusion, Abraham asks to be baptized forthwith and the two friends set off for the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

  Between 1353, when the Decameron was published, and 1511, the papal court did not improve. In the latter year, a little-known Augustinian monk and small-town German professor would visit Rome and find it as corrupt as did our fictional Abraham sixteen decades earlier. The friar, a less traveled and far less worldly soul than the Parisian merchant, seems to have experienced his own conversion, though not exactly to the Catholicism of the pope and the cardinals. The monk’s name was Martin Luther.

  The striking change in tone and sensibility between the Comedy and the Decameron, the two monumental masterpieces of early Italian literature, suggests a disruption in Italian life. As the Irish-English Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has cannily observed, “transformation in our language games generally reflects an upheaval in material forms of life.” In this case, the upheaval is not hard to find; indeed it is presented to us by Boccaccio at the very start of the Decameron. The most noble figures of the High Middle Ages—Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, Giotto di Bondone—had all lived and died between the late twelfth and the early fourteenth centuries. And in 1347 a terrible plague struck Europe, hitting Florence full force in late spring of 1348. Soon enough, there would be no going back to the supernal gentleness of Francis, the light-filled philosophical explorations of Aquinas, the grave vision of Dante, or the sweet playfulness of Giotto. Even the human compassion and fellow feeling that Boccaccio lauds in the very first sentence of his masterpiece, quoted at the outset of this section, will be cast aside.

  “In the face of this pestilence no human precaution or remedy was of any avail,” writes Boccaccio. “Its first symptoms in both men and women were swellings in groin or armpit,” which soon would grow to the size of an egg or apple, then spread throughout the body, turning black or sometimes livid. “Few of the sick recovered, and almost all died after the third day.… Not only did talking to or keeping company with the sick induce infection and the death that spread everywhere, but also touching the clothes of the sick or touching anything that had come in contact with them or been used by them seemed to communicate the disease.”

  Since there was as yet no accurate medical theory to explain communicable disease, people devised their own solutions. “There were those who thought that abstemious living and the avoidance of any extravagance” might do the trick. “They shut themselves up in houses where there were no sick people” and even “refused to speak to outsiders or listen to any news of the sick and the dead who lay outside.… Others thought otherwise: they believed that drinking to excess, enjoying themselves, singing their hearts out and living it up, sating all their appetites, and making light of anything that happened was the best medicine.” People abandoned their holdings; houses became common property, and “reverence for law, whether divine or human … virtually disappeared,” since the ministers of religion and the magistrates of secular law were all dying off, just like everyone else. There was plenty of alternative medicine on offer, as many thought that smelling flowers or consuming herbs might keep one safe.

  As the effects of the plague increased, “one citizen avoided another, almost no one took care of his neighbor, relatives seldom if ever visited one another … brother deserted brother, uncle forsook nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and—even worse, almost unbelievable—fathers and mothers stopped caring for their children as if they were not their own.” Servants were in short supply, to such an extent that “when a woman fell ill, no matter how elegant or beautiful or refined she might have been, she did not mind employing a manservant (whether young or old), and she had no scruple whatsoever about revealing any part of her body to him.” This practice, speculates Boccaccio, was one “cause of a certain continued lapse in the chastity of those women who survived.”

  Many of the poor and those without servants “ended their lives in the public streets” or were found dead in their homes “thanks to the stench of their rotting bodies.” Corpses would be left abandoned in the night on their own doorsteps, to be collected in daylight by gravediggers of the lowest class and thrown unceremoniously into a huge trench. As the corpses piled up, churchyards filled to capacity, the few remaining priests became negligent in their duties, and finally funerals were discontinued altogether, events having reached such a pass that “the dead were treated as we might treat a dead goat.” In the end, “more than one hundred thousand human beings are believed to have perished for certain within the walls of Florence—whereas before the plague struck, no one would even have estimated that the city contained so many inhabitants.”

  In the midst of the plague, the seven noble ladies and three noble gentlemen of Boccaccio’s masterwork set out from the city, along with their servants, to entertain one another with their tales, while living decorously and discreetly in the countryside. They are representatives of those who think moderate living may save them. But we are never told how many of these storytellers survive the plague.

  The pandemic, usually called the bubonic plague—after the buboes (or swelling lymph nodes) that were its most obvious symptom—killed off about half of Europe’s population, worldwide possibly as many as a hundred million. It would not be called the Black Death for many centuries. Its origins lie in China, from which it was carried by black rats into Europe in the wake of medieval Europe’s immensely expanded trade with Asia. The effects on Europe were not uniform: southern Europe—particularly Spain, southern France, and Italy—may have lost as much as 80 percent of its population, whereas in much of northern Europe the loss may have been as low as 20 percent, in parts of Scandinavia even lower, though the numbers were seldom uniform across large areas. Paris, Europe’s largest city, lost half its population, London a similar percentage.

  At any rate, the change in culture—from buoyant and optimistic to grasping and cynical—affected the south far more than the north. The great Ingmar Bergman film about the social consequences of the plague, The Seventh Seal, would be far more accurate historically if he had set it in Italy, rather than in Sweden. The frightening religious image of the “Dance of Death” was much more prevalent in the south than in the north; and the flagellants, the bands of men who whipped themselves publicly in reparation for the human sins that they believed had brought on the plague, were a marked feature in southern towns and in German ones, but were almost entirely unknown as far north as Scandinavia.

  Wherever the plague struck, waves of accusation and intolerance seemed to st
rike in its wake. Sinners were responsible, or heretics, or foreigners, or beggars, or lepers—whoever was Other. None suffered more from these waves than communities of Jews. In early 1349, the Jews of Strasbourg were slaughtered, later that year all the Jews of Mainz and Cologne. By 1351, more than two hundred Jewish towns and urban neighborhoods across Europe had been obliterated.

  Given the considerable regional differences in the rates of death and in the consequent cultural effects, it is not so surprising that Abraham, a cosmopolitan character of Boccaccio’s imagination, is far less scandalized by the open graft and cynical laxity of the papal court than would be a provincial German professor, who, nearly two centuries later, would have been much less influenced by the devastations of the plague. But the Decameron surely serves as a bellwether of late medieval disenchantment and presages future disjunctions within a Europe that will only grow more regionally diverse from this time forward.

  The long cultural lassitude that affected Western Europe after the fall of Rome in the late fifth century AD stretched through the so-called Dark Ages and was alleviated only toward the end of the eleventh century by a rising merchant class, greater wealth, the growth of cities, a new confidence, more leisure, and an expanding interest in education and the arts. This blossoming—often referred to as the twelfth-century renaissance—propelled Europe forward for two and a half centuries, fostering continuing cultural (and even scientific) experimentation and excitement that looked unstoppable.1 In important ways, however, this great movement was halted in its tracks in the mid-fourteenth century by the advent of an infection that appeared to be of cosmic proportions.

  1381–1451: LUTHERANS LONG BEFORE LUTHER

  Perhaps someday someone will write a history of rhyme and its impact.