I brought it with me, Bartolomeo replied. He produced a bundle tied with twine, unwrapped it, and drew out a silver figure in the shape of a man. And it was just exactly as he had described it, as the interrogators attested for the written record.2
There the story ends, Bartolomeo’s story at any rate. The struggles between John XXII and the Visconti continued for some time, and other witnesses raised against them describe their impiety, their heresy, their usury and other crimes. The pope believed himself subject to further magical attacks, and encouraged inquisitors to be on the lookout for sorcery. The Visconti themselves survived as a family for a long time, ruling Milan late into the fifteenth century without break. But of Bartolomeo the priest we know nothing more.
At first sight this is what one might call a very medieval tale. It involves tyrants, a pope, intrigue, torture and magical practices of a kind now usually described as ‘superstitious’. We may have a fairly vivid mental image of some of the more lurid parts of the story, not least because this kind of middle ages has inspired (directly or indirectly) various aspects of modern culture. Film, television, novels and comics have pictured a dark, grubby, bloody middle ages: The Name of the Rose, Braveheart or the various films about Joan of Arc, for example. There is a similar template for future barbarism: Mad Max, Robocop and The Hunger Games (Katniss Everdeen having distant kinship with Robin Hood) all bear the imprint of a certain kind of medievalism. ‘I’m gonna get medieval on yo’ ass’, as Marcellus Wallace threatens his erstwhile torturers in Pulp Fiction. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones famously replays the horrors of late medieval politics with added sex and dragons. So, in one sense, Bartolomeo’s experiences are familiar.
But there is more here than immediately meets the eye. Matteo Visconti’s plot against the pope may look typically ‘medieval’, but it contains elements that, on reflection, may surprise us. And it sits at an intersection of themes, lives, geographies and forces that are far more complex – and interesting – than those stereotyped depictions, which Umberto Eco once called ‘the shaggy middle ages’, would suggest.3 Take magic. Everyone ‘knows’ that the middle ages was a superstitious age, full of witches, demons, spells and the suppression of the same by the Inquisition. But the magic in this story is located not where we might expect to find it: not in the simple hut stuck at the end of the village, inhabited by a poor widow and her cat, but in learned Latin books, read and owned by clerics, right at the heart of the city and intellectual culture. This was not in fact unusual: while healers and soothsayers were found in rural medieval parishes, the kind of magic described here was very much a clerical subculture, available only to those with a Latin education. The roots of this magic were not ‘pagan’ in the sense of pre-Christian primitivism; nor was it, within medieval terms, a set of irrational ideas. Learned magic derived in part from classical scholarship, in part from ideas about hidden (‘occult’) natural forces and in part from a long tradition of Christian theology, which saw demons as constantly present – and, in certain circumstances, harnessable to good or bad ends. Learned magic and science were intimately connected, and would continue to be for several centuries to come.
Nor were ecclesiastical attitudes to this magic always quite what one might expect. The Inquisition did not automatically pursue its practitioners, not least because there was no such thing as the ‘Inquisition’ in the sense of a permanent and central tribunal until the mid-sixteenth century (with the exception of Spain, where the Spanish Inquisition began under secular direction in 1480). While inquisitors into heretical depravity were appointed directly by the papacy, their practical powers were largely dependent upon the cooperation of secular authorities in any particular area. Furthermore, local bishops, parochial priests and monastic orders could have different ideas from inquisitors and the papacy about desirable orthodox practice and the demands of the faith. The ‘Church’ was a complex and in some ways wildly heterogeneous edifice. The procedures that were used when interrogating Bartolomeo were inquisitorial in the sense of being a legal technique, and one could describe the cardinal, abbot and legate as ‘inquisitors’ only while they were engaged in interviewing the priest. Torture was involved in our story, but although it had indeed been permitted since 1252 in heresy trials, in this case, as we saw, it was the secular authorities in Milan that tortured poor Bartolomeo.
In any case, Bartolomeo’s tale is not a story about magic at all. It is really about politics and communication. Despite all the evidence alleged against them, nothing happened to Matteo or Galeazzo Visconti, because the pope simply didn’t have the power to touch them. The very reason that John XXII was in Avignon rather than Rome was that northern Italy had become too politically fraught for him to stay there (the papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, through a combination of pressure from the French monarchy and factional political fighting in Rome; there it remained until 1377). If the Visconti were attempting to assassinate the pope, it was because of political matters: a few years before Bartolomeo’s reports, John XXII had been attempting to stop conflict between Milan, Brescia and Sicily. Matteo Visconti had agreed to the terms of a peace treaty, but the pope had then, in March 1317, declared that Ludwig of Bavaria held the title of Holy Roman Emperor illegally. Since the Visconti based their right to rule Milan on claims of a past imperial appointment, this threw them back into conflict with the papacy and Milan’s neighbours; and in 1318 Matteo was excommunicated. In theory, excommunication was a very serious matter: one was removed from the community of the Christian faithful, denied the sacraments and, unless reconciled before death, denied entry into heaven. But John XXII had been a little too lavish in his use of excommunication as a political weapon, and contemporary commentators were quite clear that the political struggles going on were nothing to do with matters of faith.
So much for the politics (the complexities of which, if further explicated, could easily fill this entire book and a shelf full more). What of communication? Several forms and facets were apparent in Bartolomeo’s tale, not least the very document in which it was recorded. Inquisition was a highly textual form of inquiry, and the rich details given above – all of which are drawn directly from the evidence – demonstrate in themselves the development of a particular kind of written technology. The magic being discussed was written magic, and although this was innately arcane and specialized, the existence of books and written documents in general was far from rare. A northern Italian city such as Milan was by this period a highly literate society: some estimates suggest that the majority of adults in this kind of milieu could read and write in the vernacular. This was admittedly the likely pinnacle of medieval literacy; in other countries, in rural areas and in earlier centuries, access to texts would sometimes have been much more limited. But mechanisms of communication were always more complex than a stereotyped picture of the middle ages would suggest. As we have already seen, matters of local, national and international politics involved the flow of information across Europe. Even in the countryside, villages might well have a notary who could act as the conduit for written information. And it was not only documents that could bring news, but also people. Bartolomeo travelled with relative ease between Milan and Avignon; the Visconti were capable (presumably through spies) of discovering where he had been in advance of his return. Trade routes linked together various European centres, and indeed connected Europe to the Middle East and North Africa (a topic to which we shall return in a later chapter). Letters, reports, recorded interrogations, archives, sermons, songs, stories and images all circulated across European kingdoms. It was not as information-rich an age as the twenty-first century; but neither was it as isolated or ignorant as is often assumed.
For much of the middle ages, writing was seen as an artisanal skill, something that highly intellectual authors would not stoop to perform themselves; they would, rather, dictate their works to a scribe. Someone like Bartolomeo would have thought of himself as ‘literate’ (litteratus), but by this he would have meant particularly that he could read Latin rather than the vernacular, and that through reading Latin he was steeped in the wisdom and traditions of Christian intellectual thought. One could be fluent in writing a vernacular language – as, for example, many merchants would have been – and yet still be seen as illitteratus, lacking in Latin. However, at this very time and place, such conceptions were being challenged by a marginal figure in Bartolomeo’s story: Dante Alighieri. He appears within the tale as an alternative expert upon
