The Swerve (25 page)

The fox saw that the trap was about to be sprung. Constance, he said, was not safe. He no longer felt secure. He wanted
to
move the council to some place more suitable. The king demurred, and the town council of Constance hastened to offer reassurance: “If His Holiness
¹⁴
had not sufficient security,” the burghers declared, “they would give him more and guard him against all the world, even though a disastrous fate should compel them to eat their own children.” Cossa, who had made comparably extravagant promises to Jan Hus, was evidently not appeased. On March 20, 1415,
¹⁵
at approximately 1 p.m., he fled. Wearing a gray cape with a gray cowl wrapped around him so that no one could see his face, he rode quietly through the town gates. Next to him rode a crossbowman, along with two other men, both muffled up. In the evening and all through the night, the pope’s adherents—his servants and attendants and secretaries—left town as stealthily as they could. But the word quickly spread. John XXIII was gone.

In the following weeks Cossa’s enemies, who tracked the fugitive to Schaffhausen where he had fled to an ally’s castle, drew up a bill of indictment against him. As menacing rumors circulated and his remaining allies started to crumble, he fled again, this time too in disguise, and his court—among whom, presumably, was his apostolic secretary, Poggio—was thrown into further confusion: “The members of the Curia
¹⁶
all followed him in haste and wild disorder,” one of the contemporary chroniclers puts it; “for the Pope was in flight and the rest in flight too, by night, though with no pursuers.” Finally, under great pressure from the emperor, Cossa’s principal protector gave over his unwelcome guest, and the world had the edifying spectacle of a pope put under guard as a criminal.

Seventy charges
¹⁷
were formally read out against him. Fearing their effect on public opinion, the council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges—never subsequently revealed—and accused the pontiff only of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder. He was charged with poisoning his predecessor, along with his physician and others. Worst
of
all—at least among the charges that were made public—was one that his accusers dredged up from the ancient struggle against Epicureanism: the pope was said to have maintained stubbornly, before reputable persons, that there was no future life or resurrection, and that the souls of men perish with their bodies, like brutes.

On May 29, 1415, he was formally deposed. Stricken from the roster of official popes, the name John XXIII was once again available, though it took more than five hundred years for another pope—the remarkable Angelo Roncalli—to be courageous enough in 1958 to adopt the name for himself.

Shortly after the deposition, Cossa was briefly imprisoned in Gottlieben Castle on the Rhine, where Hus, near starvation, had been chained in irons for more than two months. It is not known whether the pope and the heretic, so implausibly united in abject misery, were brought together by their captors. At this point,
¹⁸
if Poggio was still with his master—and the record does not make that clear—he would have parted from him for the last time. All of the former pope’s attendants were dismissed, and the prisoner, soon transferred to another place of confinement, was henceforward surrounded by German-speaking guards with whom he could only communicate in sign language. Effectively cut off from the world, he occupied himself by writing verses on the transitory nature of all earthly things.

The pope’s men were suddenly masterless. Some scrambled quickly to find employment with one or another of the prelates and princes in Constance. But Poggio remained unemployed, a bystander to events in which he was no longer a party. He stayed on in Constance, but we do not know if he was present when Hus was finally brought before the council—the moment the reformer had longed for and upon which he had staked his life—only to be mocked and shouted down when he attempted to speak. On July 6, 1415, at a solemn ceremony in the cathedral
of
Constance, the convicted heretic was formally unfrocked. A round paper crown, almost eighteen inches high and depicting three devils seizing a soul and tearing it apart, was placed upon his head. He was led out of the cathedral past a pyre on which his books were in flames, shackled in chains, and burned at the stake. In order to ensure that there would be no material remains, the executioners broke his charred bones into pieces and threw them all into the Rhine.

There is no direct record of what Poggio personally thought of these events in which he had played his small part, the part of a bureaucrat who helps the ongoing functioning of a system that he understands is vicious and hopelessly corrupt. It would have been dangerous for him to speak out, even had he been inclined to do so, and he was, after all, in the service of the papacy whose power Hus was challenging. (A century later, Luther, mounting a more successful challenge, remarked: “We are all Hussites without knowing it.”) But when, some months later, Hus’s associate, Jerome of Prague, was also put on trial for heresy, Poggio was not able to remain silent.

A committed religious reformer with degrees from the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Heidelberg, Jerome was a famous orator whose testimony on May 26, 1416, made a powerful impression on Poggio. “I must confess,” he wrote to his friend Leonardo Bruni, “that I never saw any one who in pleading a cause, especially a cause on the issue of which his own life depended, approached nearer to that standard of ancient eloquence, which we so much admire.” Poggio was clearly aware that he was treading on dangerous ground, but the papal bureaucrat could not entirely restrain the humanist’s passionate admiration:

It was astonishing
¹⁹
to witness with what choice of words, with what closeness of argument, with what confidence
of
countenance he replied to his adversaries. So impressive was his peroration, that it is a subject of great concern, that a man of so noble and excellent a genius should have deviated into heresy. On this latter point, however, I cannot help entertaining some doubts. But far be it from me to take upon myself to decide in so important a matter. I shall acquiesce in the opinion of those who are wiser than myself.

This prudent acquiescence did not altogether reassure Bruni. “I must advise you henceforth,” he told Poggio in reply, “to write upon such subjects in a more guarded manner.”

What had happened to lead Poggio, ordinarily careful not to court real danger, to write so unguardedly to his friend? In part, the rashness might have been provoked by the trauma of what he had just seen: his letter is dated May 30, 1416, which is the day that Jerome was executed. Poggio was writing in the wake of witnessing something particularly horrible, as we know from the chronicler Richental who also recorded what happened. As the thirty-seven-year-old Jerome was led out of the city, to the spot where Hus was burned and where he too would meet his end, he repeated the creed and sang the litany. As had happened with Hus, no one would hear his confession; that sacrament was not granted to a heretic. When the fire was lit, Hus cried out and died quickly, but the same fate, according to Richental, was not granted to Jerome: “He lived much longer
²⁰
in the fire than Hus and shrieked terribly, for he was a stouter, stronger man, with a broad, thick, black beard.” Perhaps these terrible shrieks explain why Poggio could not any longer remain discreetly silent, why he felt compelled to testify to Jerome’s eloquence.

Shortly before he was so unnerved by Jerome’s trial and execution, hoping to cure the rheumatism in his hands (a serious
concern
for a scribe), Poggio decided to visit the celebrated medicinal baths at Baden. It was not an altogether easy trip from Constance: first twenty-four miles on the Rhine by boat to Schaffhausen, where the pope had fled; then, because the river descended steeply at that point over cliffs and rocks, ten miles on foot to a castle called Kaiserstuhl. From this spot, Poggio saw the Rhine cascading in a waterfall, and the loud sound made him think of classical descriptions of the fall of the Nile.

At the bathhouse in Baden, Poggio was amazed by what he saw: “Old women
²¹
as well as younger ones,” he wrote to a friend in Florence, “going naked into the water before the eyes of men and displaying their private parts and their buttocks to the onlookers.” There was a sort of lattice between the men’s and women’s baths, but the separation was minimal: there were, he observed, “many low windows, through which the bathers can drink together and talk and see both ways and touch each other as is their usual custom.”

Poggio refused to enter the baths himself, not, he insisted, from any undue modesty but because “it seemed to me ridiculous that a man from Italy, ignorant of their language, should sit in the water with a lot of women, completely speechless.” But he watched from the gallery that ran above the baths and described what he saw with the amazement that someone from Saudi Arabia might bring to an account of the beach scene at Nice.

There were, he observed, bathing suits of some sort, but they concealed very little: “The men wear nothing but a leather apron, and the women put on linen shifts down to their knees, so cut on either side that they leave uncovered neck, bosom, arms, and shoulders.” What would cause a crisis in Poggio’s Italy and perhaps trigger violence seemed simply to be taken
for
granted in Baden: “Men watched their wives being handled by strangers and were not disturbed by it; they paid no attention and took it all in the best possible spirit.” They would have been at home in Plato’s Republic, he laughed, “where all property was held in common.”

The rituals of social life at Baden seemed dreamlike to Poggio, as if they were conjuring up the vanished world of Jove and Danae. In some of the pools, there was singing and dancing, and some of the girls—“good looking and well-born and in manner and form like a goddess”—floated on the water while the music was playing: “They draw their clothes slightly behind them, floating along the top of the water, until you might think they were winged Venuses.” When men gaze down at them, Poggio explains, the girls have a custom to ask playfully for something. The men throw down pennies, especially to the prettiest, along with wreaths of flowers, and the girls catch them sometimes in their hands, sometimes in their clothes, which they spread wider. “I often threw pennies and garlands,” Poggio confessed.

Confident, easy in themselves, and contented, these are people “for whom life is based on fun, who come together here so that they may enjoy the things for which they hunger.” There are almost a thousand of them at the baths, many drinking heavily, Poggio wrote, and yet there is no quarreling, bickering, or cursing. In the simple, playfully unselfconscious behavior before him, Poggio felt he was witnessing forms of pleasures and contentment that his culture had lost:

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or
our
bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.

He is describing the scenes at the baths, he tells his friend, “so that you may understand from a few examples what a great center of the Epicurean way of thinking this is.”

With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans, Poggio believed he glimpsed for a moment the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. He knew perfectly well that this pursuit ran counter to Christian orthodoxy. But in Baden it was as if he found himself on the threshold of a mental world in which Christian rules no longer applied.

In his reading, Poggio had frequently stood on that threshold. He never ceased to occupy himself with the pursuit of lost classical texts. Judging from a remark by Niccoli, he spent some of his time in Constance looking through library collections—there in the monastery of St. Mark he evidently found a copy of an ancient commentary
²²
on Virgil. In the early summer of 1415, probably just after his master had been formally deposed and he found himself definitively out of work, he made his way to Cluny, in France, where he found a codex with seven orations by Cicero, two of which had been unknown. He sent this precious manuscript to his friends in Florence and also made a copy in his own hand, inscribed with a remark deeply revealing of his mood:

These seven orations
²³
by Marcus Tullius had through the fault of the times been lost to Italy. By repeated searches through the libraries of France and Germany, with the greatest diligence and care, Poggio the Florentine all alone brought them out of the sordid squalor in
which
they were hidden and back into the light, returning them to their pristine dignity and order and restoring them to the Latin muses.

When he wrote these words, the world around Poggio was falling to pieces, but his response to chaos and fear was always to redouble his immersion in books. In the charmed circle of his bibliomania, he could rescue the imperiled legacy of the glorious past from the barbarians and return it to the rightful heirs.

A year later, in the summer of 1416, in the wake of the execution of Jerome of Prague and shortly after the interlude at Baden, Poggio was once again out book-hunting, this time accompanied by two other Italian friends on a visit to the monastery of St. Gall, about twenty miles from Constance. It was not the architectural features of the great medieval abbey that drew the visitors; it was a library of which Poggio and his friends had heard extravagant rumors. They were not disappointed: a few months later Poggio wrote a triumphant letter to another friend back in Italy, announcing that he had located an astonishing cache of ancient books. The capstone of these was the complete text of Quintilian’s
Institutes
, the most important ancient Roman handbook on oratory and rhetoric. This work had been known to Poggio and his circle only in fragmentary form. To recover the whole of it seemed to them wildly exciting—“Oh wondrous treasure! Oh unexpected joy!” one of them exclaimed—because it gave them back a whole lost world, a world of public persuasion.