The Name of the Rose (27 page)

He told of a man who came to the village selling cooked meat for a few pence, and nobody could understand this great stroke of luck, but then the priest said it was human flesh, and the man was torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd. That same night, however, one man from the village went and dug up the grave of the murdered victim and ate the flesh of the cannibal, whereupon, since he was discovered, the village put him to death, too.

But Salvatore did not tell me only this tale. In broken words, obliging me to recall what little I knew of Provençal and of Italian dialects, he told me the story of his flight from his native village and his roaming about the world. And in his story I recognized many men I had already known or encountered along the road, and I now recognize many more that I have met since, so that after all this time I may even attribute to him adventures and crimes that belonged to others, before him and after him, and which now, in my tired mind, flatten out to form a single image. This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.

Often during our journey I heard William mention “the simple,” a term by which some of his brothers denoted not only the populace but, at the same time, the unlearned. This expression always seemed to me generic, because in the Italian cities I had met men of trade and artisans who were not clerics but were not unlearned, even if their knowledge was revealed through the use of the vernacular. And, for that matter, some of the tyrants who governed the peninsula at that time were ignorant of theological learning, and medical, and of logic, and ignorant of Latin, but they were surely not simple or benighted. So I believe that even my master, when he spoke of the simple, was using a rather simple concept. But unquestionably Salvatore was simple. He came from a rural land that for centuries had been subjected to famine and the arrogance of the feudal lords. He was simple, but he was not a fool. He yearned for a different world, which, when he fled from his family's house, I gathered, assumed the aspect of the land of Cockaigne, where wheels of cheese and aromatic sausages grow on the trees that ooze honey.

Driven by such a hope, as if refusing to recognize this world as a vale of tears where (as they taught me) even injustice is foreordained by Providence to maintain the balance of things, whose design often eludes us, Salvatore journeyed through various lands, from his native Montferrat toward Liguria, then up through Provence into the lands of the King of France.

Salvatore wandered through the world, begging, pilfering, pretending to be ill, entering the temporary service of some lord, then again taking to the forest or the high road. From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers' exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.

Long after the events I am narrating, along the course of the Danube I saw many, and still see some, of these charlatans who had their names and their subdivisions in legions, like the devils.

It was like a mire that flowed over the paths of our world, and with them mingled preachers in good faith, heretics in search of new victims, agitators of discord. It was Pope John—always fearing movements of the simple who might preach and practice poverty—who inveighed against the mendicant preachers, for, he said, they attracted the curious by raising banners with painted figures, preaching, and extorting money. Was the simoniacal and corrupt Pope right in considering the mendicant monks preaching poverty the equivalent of bands of outcasts and robbers? In those days, having journeyed a bit in the Italian peninsula, I no longer had firm opinions on the subject: I had heard of the monks of Altopascio, who, when they preached, threatened excommunications and promised indulgences, absolved those who committed robberies and fratricides, homicides and perjury, for money; they let it be believed that in their hospital every day up to a hundred Masses were said, for which they collected donations, and they said that with their income they supplied dowries for two hundred poor maidens. And I had heard tales of Brother Paolo Zoppo, who in the forest of Rieti lived as a hermit and boasted of having received directly from the Holy Spirit the revelation that the carnal act was not a sin—so he seduced his victims, whom he called sisters, forcing them to submit to the lash on their naked flesh, making five genuflections on the ground in the form of a cross, before he presented them to God and claimed from them what he called the kiss of peace. But was it true? And what link was there between these hermits who were said to be enlightened and the monks of poor life who roamed the roads of the peninsula really doing penance, disliked by the clergy and the bishops, whose vices and thefts they excoriated?

From Salvatore's tale, as it became mingled with the things I already knew from my own experience, these distinctions did not emerge clearly: everything looked the same as everything else. At times he seemed to me one of those cripples of Touraine who, as the story goes, took flight at the approach of the miraculous corpse of Saint Martin, for they feared the saint would restore the use of their limbs by a miracle and thus deprive them of their source of income, and the saint mercilessly saved them before they reached the border. At times, however, the monk's ferocious face brightened with a sweet glow as he told me how, when living among those bands, he listened to the word of the Franciscan preachers, as outcast as he was, and he understood that the poor and vagabond life he led should be taken, not as a grim necessity, but as a joyous act of dedication, and he joined penitential sects and groups whose names he could not pronounce properly and whose doctrine he defined in highly unlikely terms. I deduced that he had encountered Patarines and Waldensians, and perhaps Catharists, Arnoldists, and Umiliati, and that, roaming about the world, he had passed from one group to another, gradually assuming as a mission his vagrant state, and doing for the Lord what he had done till then for his belly.

But how, and for how long? As far as I could tell, about thirty years before, he had joined a convent of Minorites in Tuscany, and there he had assumed the habit of Saint Francis, without taking orders. There, I believe, he learned that smattering of Latin he spoke, mixing it with the speech of all the places where he had been as a poor homeless wanderer, and of all the vagabond companions he had encountered, from the mercenaries of my lands to the Bogomils of Dalmatia. In the convent he had devoted himself to a life of penance, he said (Penitenziagite, he quoted to me, with eyes shining, and I heard again the expression that had aroused William's curiosity), but apparently also the monks he was staying with had confused ideas, because, scandalized by the canon of the neighboring church, who was accused of thefts and other wickedness, they looted his house one day and sent him flying down the steps, and the sinner died. For which the bishop sent his armed guards, the monks were dispersed, and Salvatore roamed at length in northern Italy with a band of Fraticelli, or mendicant Minorites, at this point without any law or discipline.

From there he took refuge in the Toulouse region and a strange adventure befell him, for he was inflamed by hearing the story of the crusaders' great enterprises. A horde of shepherds and humble folk in great numbers gathered one day to cross the sea and fight against the enemies of the faith. They were called the Pastoureaux, the Shepherds. Actually, they wanted to escape their own wretched land. There were two leaders, who filled their heads with false theories: a priest who had been dismissed from his church because of his conduct, and an apostate monk of the order of Saint Benedict. This pair drove ignorant men so mad that they came running after the two in throngs, even boys of sixteen, against their parents' wishes, carrying only knapsack and stick, all without money, leaving their fields, to follow the leaders like a flock, and they formed a great crowd. At this point they would no longer heed reason or justice, but only power and their own caprice. Gathered together and finally free, with a dim hope of promised lands, they were as if drunk. They stormed through villages and cities, taking everything, and if one of their number was arrested, they would attack the prison and free him. When they entered the fortress in Paris to release some of their companions whom the lords had had arrested, the provost tried to resist, and they threw him down the prison steps. Then they lined up in battle in the meadow of Saint-Germain, but no one had the courage to face them. So they moved on toward Aquitaine, and pillaged and slaughtered all the Jews in the ghettoes they passed.

“Why the Jews?” I asked Salvatore. He answered, “And why not?” He explained to me that all his life and from all the pulpits they had been told that the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated those possessions that they had been denied. I asked him, however, whether it was not also true that lords and bishops accumulated possessions through tithes, so that the Shepherds were not fighting their true enemies. He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are. The lords did not want the Shepherds to jeopardize their possessions, and it was a great good fortune for them that the Shepherds' leaders spread the notion that the greatest wealth belonged to the Jews.

I asked him who had put into the crowd's head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when too many people gather together, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks. I recalled that their leaders had been educated in convents and cathedral schools, and they spoke the language of the lords, even if they translated it into terms that the Shepherds could understand. The Shepherds did not know where the Pope was, but they knew where the Jews were. Anyway, they laid siege to a high and massive tower of the King of France, where the frightened Jews had run in a body to take refuge. And the Jews sallying forth below the walls of the tower defended themselves courageously, hurling wood and stones. But the Shepherds set fire to the gate of the tower, and the Jews, finding themselves barricaded with smoke and flames, and preferring to kill themselves rather than die at the hand of the uncircumcised, asked one of their number, who seemed the most courageous, to put them all to the sword. And he killed almost five hundred of them. Then he came out of the tower with the children of the Jews, and asked the Shepherds to baptize him. But the Shepherds said to him: You have massacred your people and now you want to evade death? And they tore him to pieces; but they spared the children, whom they then baptized.

Then they headed for Carcassonne, carrying out many bloody robberies along the way. Then the King of France warned them that they had gone too far and ordered that they be resisted in every city they passed through, and he proclaimed that even the Jews should be defended as if they were the King's men. . . .

Why did the King become so considerate of the Jews at that point? Perhaps because he was beginning to realize what the Shepherds might do throughout the kingdom, and he was concerned because their number was increasing too rapidly. Further, he was moved to tenderness for the Jews, both because the Jews were useful to the trade of the kingdom, and because now it was necessary to destroy the Shepherds, and all good Christians had to have a good reason to weep over their crimes. But many Christians did not obey the King, thinking it wrong to defend the Jews, who had always been enemies of Christ the Lord. And in many cities the humble people, who had had to pay usury to the Jews, were happy to see the Shepherds punish them for their wealth. Then the King commanded, under pain of death, that no aid be given the Shepherds. He gathered a considerable army and attacked them, and many of them were killed, while others saved themselves by taking flight and seeking refuge in the forests, but there they died of hardship. Soon all were annihilated. The King's general captured them and hanged them, twenty or thirty at a time, from the highest trees, so the sight of their corpses would serve as an eternal example and no one would dare to disturb the peace of the realm again.