A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [209]
The clear voice of common sense spoke through the King’s adviser in philosophy, Nicolas Oresme, who despised both astrology and sorcery. A man of scientific spirit though a bishop, he was a mathematician and astronomer and translator of the Politics and Ethics of Aristotle. One of his books began with the sentence, “The earth is round like a ball,” and he postulated a theory of the earth’s rotation. Refuting the powers ascribed to sorcerers, he denied that they could invoke demons, although he did not rule out the existence of demons. Not all things, he wrote, could be explained by natural causes; some marvels or extraordinary strokes of fortune must be the work of angels or demons, but he preferred to look for a natural and rational explanation. Magicians, he pointed out, were adept at using aids to favor illusions—darkness, mirrors, drugs, or gases and fumes that could be made to give rise to visions. The basis for illusion was likely to be an abnormal state of mind induced by fasting or by frightening phenomena. A man ahead of his time, Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be the disease of melancholy. He also made the point that evidence for sorcery was derived from confessions under torture, and that many miracles were fraudulently devised by the clergy to increase offerings to their churches.
Oresme proves the frailty of generalization. He was highly esteemed by the same King in whose employ the astrologer Thomas of Pisano fashioned wax images to destroy the English.
Scientific spirit could not dispel the sense of a malign influence upon the times. As the century entered its last quarter, the reality and power of demons and witches became common belief. The theological faculty of the University of Paris in a solemn conclave at the end of the century declared that ancient errors and evils, almost forgotten, were emerging with renewed vigor to infect society. They drew up a statement of 28 articles to disprove, not the power of the black arts, but their lawfulness. No less emphatically they rejected the incredulity of those who questioned the existence and activity of demons.
Unorthodoxy, as always, made disproportionate noise. Heresy and sorcery, though increasingly significant, were not the norm. In 1378 the real danger to the Church emerged from within.
Chapter 16
The Papal Schism
In Italy the war for control of the Papal States had renewed itself in 1375. During the temporary peace, Italian hatred of the papacy’s mercenaries and French legates had not subsided but swelled. The agents of a French Pope ruled with the contempt of colonial governors for natives. When the nephew of the Abbot of Montmayeur, legate in Perugia, was seized by desire for the wife of a Perugian gentleman and, breaking into her chamber, would have ravished her by force, the lady, seeking escape by the window to an adjoining house, lost her footing, fell to the street, and was killed. In response to a delegation of outraged citizens who demanded justice against his nephew, the Abbot said carelessly, “Quoi donc! [What then!] Did you suppose all Frenchmen were eunuchs?” The tale spread from city to city, feeding the antagonism of which Florence now made herself the champion.
Establishment of a strong papal state at her borders was felt by Florence as a threat, heightened by the incursion into Tuscany of Hawkwood during a lapse in papal pay. Forced to buy him off at a huge cost of 130,000 florins, the Florentines believed he had been encouraged to come against them by the Pope. Anti-papism now pervaded Florentine politics in a wild swing of the perpetual feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Described in exasperation by a later French Governor of Genoa, this ancient roil kept Italians at each other’s throats out of inherited, witless animosity.
For with no other quarrel of land or seigneury, they have only to say, “You are Guelf and I am Ghibelline; we must hate each other,” and for this reason only and knowing no other, they kill and wound