by Terry Jones
‘It is not your fault, my friend. You have served me faithfully in this business and I shall reward you.’
At this point Gian Galeazzo turned abruptly away from Tom, and spoke in a low voice to the swarthy man of about the same age as Tom who was riding on his other side. Tom recognised the man as Gian Galeazzo’s captain general, Jacopo Dal Verme. And, as Tom looked around the rest of the pilgrims, he realised that Dal Verme was by no means the only military man who had decided to go on pilgrimage. Tom was suddenly aware of Guglielmo Bevilacqua and Antonio Porro riding close behind the captain general. Gian Galeazzo was certainly taking no chances with his uncle’s malevolence while he went to make his vows on the Holy Mountain at Varese. Tom shook his head. It was as if the Lord of Pavia were afraid that the very trees were going to ambush him at every step of the journey. Little wonder if his uncle despised him . . .
As Tom was thinking all this, a murmur went up from the men surrounding Gian Galeazzo. Three riders were approaching from the direction of Milan.
Jacopo Dal Verme signalled to the troop to halt, and they waited there in the road for the riders to reach them. Tom glanced across at Gian Galeazzo. He seemed tense, as if he expected every moment to be his last, and he was watching the riders with such concentration that Tom was convinced he thought they might suddenly multiply into three thousand.
‘My cousins!’ called out Gian Galeazzo, and a smile replaced the nervous twitch to his mouth. The guards drew aside and allowed Bernabò Visconti’s two sons, Ludovico and Rodolfo, to approach Gian Galeazzo, whereupon the three dismounted and embraced.
‘You do me great honour to ride out so far to greet me,’ said Gian Galeazzo. ‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’
As the greetings continued, Tom turned to look at the third rider. He was dressed in black and his eyes were never still – darting here and there – forever assessing and calculating. They came to rest for a moment on Tom, and he shivered as he found himself under the penetrating gaze of Il Medecina.
The man did not show any sign of recognising Tom, however. He simply looked at him for a moment and then moved on to examine the rest of the company one by one.
By this time the cousins were slapping Gian Galeazzo on the back. It was obvious, thought Tom, that they shared their father’s contempt for him.
‘I see you’ve brought your entire army with you, cousin!’ smiled Ludovico.
‘I’m afraid not!’ replied Gian Galeazzo meekly. ‘I can’t afford more than this small troop for pilgrimages’.
‘Well, it’s best to be on the safe side,’ said Rodolfo. ‘They can be dangerous places, these shrines!’
‘You want to watch those crucifixes – some of them squirt blood you know!’ Ludovico slapped his thigh as if he’d said something dreadfully witty.
The two brothers eventually remounted their horses. As they did so, Tom saw Gian Galeazzo nod to Dal Verme and the latter wheeled his mount around and rode off in a hurry, back towards Pavia.
Il Medecina, who had also been watching this with great interest, now also wheeled his horse around, and he too rode off, but in the opposite direction.
Tom frowned. He might not make a great spy, but he could tell when something was going on.
A flash of concern passed over Gian Galeazzo’s face as he saw Il Medecina speeding off back the way he’d come, but then it was gone, and he was smiling and nodding at the banter of Ludovico and Rodolfo.
‘Mind that horse of yours, cousin!’ said Rodolfo. ‘He looks like he might bolt!’
‘I trust the Lord will keep me safe, for this is a holy journey,’ said Gian Galeazzo, bending his head in a brief prayer, while Ludovico raised his eyes to heaven and tried to stifle a laugh.
‘My astrologer says that Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are all in a most inauspicious conjunction in the house of Gemini,’ Gian Galeazzo confided to Rodolfo. ‘He tried to dissuade me from coming at all, since, he says, such a conjunction foretells of terrible disasters ahead – awful things will happen – dreadful calamities. But I was determined to come.’
‘Well, let’s all pray that there is nothing awful waiting for us around the corner,’ said Ludovico, and Gian Galeazzo had bent his head to pray before he seemed to realise that his cousin was being ironic.
And so they set off once more, making their way towards the city of Milan.
At the Ticinese gate, where the road from Pavia arrives at the great city, the entire party turned to the left, and instead of entering the city, it followed the path that wound around the perimeter of the walls.
The bonhomie between the cousins seemed to have subsided slightly as they circumnavigated the realm of Bernabò Visconti. It seemed to Tom that Ludovico and Rodolfo had become rather edgy.
‘Perhaps it’s the proximity to their father that makes the brothers nervous,’ thought Tom. ‘He’d make me nervous if I was his son. And Gian Galeazzo must feel a bit edgy too, since this is half his city and yet he daren’t set foot in it.’
And then, as they rounded yet another part of the city wall, suddenly there he was: Bernabò Visconti, the great Lord of Milan himself!
And yet the great man didn’t look at all like the tyrant of Lombardy he was. He didn’t even look like someone Gian Galeazzo ought to be scared of. He was sitting unaccompanied, apart from Il Medecina, on a mule, outside the humble postern gate near the church of Sant’Ambrogio. It seemed so incongruous that Tom would have laughed, had he not suddenly realised what it was all about. Bernabò did not express his contempt for his weakling nephew by laughing at him in his face – although he was quite capable of that too – but on this occasion he was showing his contempt by his casualness, by his lack of retinue, by the absence of guards. There he was, just he himself: the most powerful ruler in the whole of Italy – in the whole of Europe – the crushing tyrant who kept his people in subservience and terror, who had ruled with his rod of heavy iron for thirty years, sitting mockingly upon a sorry creature as if he were selling onions. Only his baton of office, held in the crook of his arm, betrayed the reality of his power.
Nothing could be more calculated to show his utter disregard for his nephew – unworthy to be his father’s son – who now approached him.
Gian Galeazzo took his uncle’s hand in greeting, but at the same time he called out something in German. Jacopo Dal Verme had rejoined the group, and he too had now ridden up to Bernabò. There was a slight scrape of steel against scabbard and Gian Galeazzo shouted out: ‘Now!’
And then it happened. The most extraordinary thing that anyone there had ever seen – or ever would see – happened in front of their eyes: Gian Galeazzo’s captain general, Dal Verme, quietly leaned across to Bernabò Visconti and plucked the baton of office from the tyrant’s hand.
There! That was the extraordinary, impossible thing that took place in front of the little postern gate, near the church of Sant’Ambrogio, on that May morning in the year 1385.
A shock vibrated through the air and hung there in a terrible instant of silence, as if nobody could believe what had just happened – least of all Bernabò himself. It seemed that the great tyrant – whose word had been life or death to his wretched subjects for thirty years and who, for thirty years, had been used to instant obedience whatever his command – could not quite take in the affront to his honour, to his person and to his power, that had just taken place.
And even as his sons tried to comprehend what they had just seen happen to their all-powerful father, they each found themselves silently surrounded by a dozen men-at-arms. It was all done so quickly and so efficiently that you would scarcely have noticed that anything unusual had taken place.
And before anyone had drawn another breath, Guglielmo Bevilacqua cut Bernabò’s sword belt and thus disarmed him.
‘You are a prisoner,’ Dal Verme informed the tyrant.
‘How dare you do such a thing!’ Bernabò finally managed to splutter.
‘It is my lord’s command,’ said Dal Verme, and Bernabò
turned his ferocious gaze upon his nephew. But instead of being boiled away by that look, instead of shrivelling up into a burned cinder, Gian Galeazzo simply sat impassively upon his horse staring back at his uncle.
Perhaps he was amused by the turmoil of terrible thoughts that he knew must lie behind Bernabò’s scorching gaze: ‘How could this shrimp – this pathetic little nothing – this frightened schoolboy still wet behind the ears – how could he even attempt to do something against me – his formidable uncle? Well! He’ll pay for it! He’ll suffer such torments at the hands of the torturers that he will never, ever think of challenging his betters again . . . not that he’ll get the chance of course! I’ll make sure he dies the most agonising death that can be contrived! I’ll do such dreadful things to him that . . .’
However, all that came out of Bernabò’s mouth was this:
‘My son!’ he said . . . it was actually more of a whine. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Everything I do is for your good! Everything I have is yours! Do not betray your own blood!’
Gian Galeazzo looked at the older man without emotion. ‘You will have to remain a prisoner, since you have tried to have me killed so many times,’ he said in a clear, formal voice, as if for his biographers to take note.
And before Bernabò could reply, the rest of Gian Galeazzo’s modest escort arrived. From around the curve of the city walls over a thousand men-at-arms appeared. At the same time Dal Verme rapped out an order, and the troop pricked their horses and rode at a gallop to the next gate into the city: the Porta Giovia, which led directly into Gian Galeazzo’s own palace.
Tom, who had fallen back to put his squire up behind him on his horse, arrived at the Porta Giovia in time to see the great tyrant of Milan and his two sons being put into manacles and then hurried down, presumably into some secret dungeon in the bowels of the palace.
There was one member of Bernabò’s party, however, who was neither stunned into inactivity by the turn of events, nor there to witness this abrupt cessation of his master’s power and glory. Il Medecina, Bernabò Visconti’s closest adviser for so many years, the man who had steered the tyrant of Milan through many storms and tempests of his own making, had vanished from his side.
Time and again Il Medecina had warned Bernabò not to underestimate his nephew. Hadn’t his constant refrain been: ‘He is not at all what you see!’? How many times had he warned the tyrant: ‘Do not let your nephew fool you into committing yourself to his power. He will not hesitate to destroy you!’?
But Bernabò had scoffed at him as often as he had warned him. And in those moments it was often only the restraining hand of Bernabò’s wife, Regina della Scala, that had saved the tyrant from acting rashly with regard to Gian Galeazzo. Now she was gone, and Il Medecina had been unable to persuade Bernabò that the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the house of Gemini boded calamity on a grand scale.
And this morning, when Il Medecina had accompanied Bernabò’s two sons to greet Gian Galeazzo, and when he had taken stock of Gian Galeazzo’s entourage and seen that it included no fewer than three generals, he had known that this was more than just a pilgrimage to Varese. And when he had seen one of those generals, Jacopo Dal Verme, wheel his horse around and gallop back towards the castle of Binasco, he had suddenly understood everything. He had suddenly realised, with the clarity of a conspirator’s mind, that the seemingly puny Gian Galeazzo had, in fact, a large army following at a distance, and that he had come to Milan not on his way anywhere, but specifically to challenge his uncle.
He had therefore ridden pell-mell back to his lord and master, and begged him to go back inside to the safety of the city. But Bernabò would have none of it. He was not scared of a flea bite like Gian Galeazzo. He was not about to run from the shrimp whom he was about to humiliate. And nothing Il Medecina could say would move the Lord of Milan to act with caution towards his nephew. So when the party arrived, and when that first move against Bernabò was made – when Dal Verme leaned across and snatched his baton of office – Il Medecina had turned his horse and vanished before anyone realised he had gone.
By the time the Lord of Milan and his sons were led off to their dungeons, Il Medecina was already well on the road to Padua.
Meanwhile the lances were pouring through the Porta Giovia, and as soon as they were within the city, they fanned out in every direction – galloping down the narrow streets of Milan, blowing hunting horns and shouting:
‘Long live the Count of Virtue! Down with the taxes the tyrant extorted! Long live Gian Galeazzo!’
And the good people of Milan tumbled out of their beds and workshops to stand on the street and gape and wonder at what was going on. By the time the last of Gian Galeazzo’s troops had passed under the sign of the serpent eating a man that hung above the Porta Giovia, the townspeople were cheering the fall of the man who had ruined them with his taxes, burdened them with his dogs and tortured and executed their friends and relatives.
They stood on the streets and cheered the ruler of Pavia, whose very title, ‘The Count of Virtue’, gave them hope and seemed to reflect his reputation for clemency and benevolence. They would have been disappointed to learn that ‘Virtù’ was simply the district of France that Gian Galeazzo’s mother, Isabella, had brought with her as her dowry. Her father, the king of France, had sold her for 600,000 florins to an Italian tyrant in order to raise the money to pay off his ransom to the English.
But to the good people of Milan, on that May morning, the young Count of Virtue could only live up to his title. The nightmare of Bernabò’s rule was suddenly, unexpectedly and delightfully over. What is more, the new Count of Milan promised lower taxes and more benign rule.
It may be that not a single person in that entire city was sorry for the destruction of Bernabò Visconti – except for those within his own palaces, who now found themselves fair game for whatever revenge the citizenry wished to take upon them. For one of the first benign acts of the new Lord of Milan was to have it proclaimed in the public streets that all citizens were now at liberty to pillage and plunder the palaces and homes of Bernabò and his sons.
This offer, which was nonrenewable and a one-off, was calculated to keep the law-abiding citizens of Milan pleasantly occupied while their new lord and master set about reassuring the General Council of the city as to the benevolence of his rule. This he did by making donations to various charitable causes in which they all had a financial interest.
Tom and Squire John had meanwhile ridden to the southern palace, where Bernabò had resided until that morning. They found the place in turmoil. The occupants were desperately trying to get out, while the citizens were desperately trying to get in. The result was a sort of deadlocked scrum at each available entrance and exit.
‘The servants’ entrance!’ whispered John.
‘Good thinking!’ replied Sir Thomas.
An unearthly howling had set up as they slipped round to the side of the palace. Instead of plundering the tyrant’s home, some of the more civic-minded citizens had set about slaughtering his dogs. About a dozen of the strongest men – at no small risk to themselves – were going from kennel to kennel, cutting the animals’ throats. Those animals still alive seemed to have a presentiment of their impending fate, and had set up a chorus of despair and outrage that swelled to fill the sunlit volume of the day.
Even the most enterprising citizens had not yet got round to the servants’ entrance, and Tom and John were able to slip into the palace without challenge. The guards had made themselves scarce some time before. Many servants were still trying to put their worldly possessions into carryable packs, while others were already heading off with whatever they could carry in two hands.
Squire John led Tom up a staircase towards the series of interconnecting rooms where he knew the Lady Beatrice kept her residence. They had just reached the first floor when a door opened and a serving girl with a shawl wrapped round her head hurried out. She was carrying a bag and kept her head down. Two other
heavily laden servants followed her and made for the stairs. John and Tom fell back to allow them to pass and then carried on their way towards the domestic living quarters.
They hadn’t got more than a few yards however, before a voice stopped them.
‘Gian!’
John span round and almost before he’d finished turning, he exclaimed: ‘It’s you!’ and leapt across the landing. The next second he was holding the serving girl in his arms.
‘I’m so scared . . .’ Beatrice began.
‘It’s all right,’ John replied, also in Italian. ‘We’ll protect you!’
‘Well, let’s hope we don’t have to,’ said Tom in English. ‘The sooner we get out of here the better!’
A couple of looters had already appeared in the hall below, and from elsewhere in the palace the cries of the invading citizens could be heard above the noise of splintering doors and shutters.
John grabbed Beatrice’s pack and Tom took some of the burden from the other two.
‘Your lady certainly doesn’t believe in travelling light,’ he observed. But John was too preoccupied with providing a proper escort to the lady in question to even notice that his master had spoken to him.
They hadn’t taken more than a couple of paces down the stairs, however, when a voice rang out above them.
‘Stay where you are!’
For some reason they all froze. Perhaps the voice was so effortlessly commanding that they all thought for one moment that they must be doing something wrong. Tom looked up and there was the Lady Donnina de’ Porri, standing at the head of the stairs as if she still owned the place.
‘You are not going anywhere, young lady,’ said Donnina de’ Porri.
In the confusion, Beatrice had stumbled to her knees, and as John tried to lift her to her feet he could feel she was trembling all over.
‘We are leaving here as quickly as possible,’ replied Sir Thomas English in his most un-minstrel-like voice. ‘And my advice is that you do the same.’