gates of the Leonine City?”
“Yes, although they slammed shut a moment or two after I’d run through. Where is Prior Bertrand, Brother? I must tell him!”
“No,” Thomas murmured, still thinking. What were the cardinals up to? Whether the pope had met a natural or unnatural death was now immaterial. But what the cardinals did would carry the fate of Christendom.
Were they even now meeting in conclave to elect a new and French-loyal pope? Like the Romans, but for different reasons, Thomas despised the French.
Daniel wriggled in Thomas’ grip. “Brother. I must find Prior Bertrand!”
“No. Prior Bertrand can do nothing—but you and I can.”
“Brother?”
“Daniel, the cardinals are even now likely to be meeting to elect another pope, one who will remove the papacy back to Avignon. They have shut the gates of the Leonine City so no word of Gregory’s death can reach the ears of the Roman mob. By the time the people discover the death, a new pope will have been installed, and the Romans will not be able to save their papacy.”
“But—”
“Daniel. Be as quick as you can—run to the lower marketplace and spread the word that Gregory is dead and that even now the cardinals seek to meet in secret. Do it! Now!”
“But—”
“Damn you, boy! Where are your wits? The only means to ensure the cardinals do not deliver the papacy into the French king’s hands again is the street mob. Now, run! Now!”
He let Daniel go, and the boy dashed out the door.
Thomas was directly behind him, urging him forward. Once they’d reached the street, Thomas paused only long enough to make sure that the boy was heading in the direction of the lower market before he ran, robes bunched about his knees, in the direction of the main market square.
“The pope has died! The pope has died!” he yelled whenever he came across a clump of people.
By the time Thomas reached the main square the news had been shouted ahead of him, and the square was already in furious turmoil.
The people of Rome needed no one to point out to them the implications of an immediate and secret papal election.
Within the half hour a mob ten thousand strong, and growing with each minute, besieged the gates of the Leonine City.
The guards, in dread of their lives, wasted no time in opening the gates.
The cardinals, already gathering in the Hall of Conclave, were not quick enough. Before they had even sat to cast their votes, the mob surged in the doors.
Faced with their imminent murder, the cardinals wisely agreed to defer the election until the saintly corpse of Gregory XI had been interred.
The mob, still surly, gradually dissipated once they were sure the cardinals truly meant what they had said.
Rome settled into an uneasy quiet until the conclave due in two weeks’ time. As far as the Romans were concerned, the cardinals either elected a good Italian onto the papal throne…or they died.
The Octave of the Annunciation
In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III
(Thursday 1st April 1378)
Rome waited uneasily for the election of the new pope. The Romans remained restive and distrustful: when they had left the Leonine City on the day of Gregory’s death they’d dismantled the gates and carried them away.
No cursed French cardinal was going to lock them out again.
Constantly shifting, murmuring groups of people—peasants in from the surrounding countryside, street traders, prostitutes, foreign pilgrims, elders, out of work mercenaries, lovers, thieves, wives, clerks, washerwomen, schoolmasters and their students—drifted through the precincts of St Peter’s.
The threat wasn’t even implied. The mob shouted it periodically through the windows of the buildings adjoining St Peter’s: elect a Roman pope, a good Italian, or we’ll storm the buildings and kill you.
The cardinals had caused a block and headsman’s axe to be placed in St Peter’s itself, a clear response to the mob: attack us and we’ll destroy you.
There was even a rumour that the cardinals had shifted the treasures of the papal apartments, and of St Peter’s itself, to fortified vaults in the Castel St Angelo. Certainly St Peter’s glittered with less gold and jewels than it once had.
Rome waited uneasily, the cardinals plotted defiantly, and Gregory’s corpse lay stinking before the shrine of St Peter.
Thomas, waiting as anxiously as anyone else, kept himself busy in the library of St Angelo’s friary. Gregory’s funeral mass would be held in a few days, and a few more days after that the cardinals would meet to elect their new master. Thomas imagined late at night when he lay unsleeping on his hard bunk in his cell, that he could hear the clatter of gold and silver coins being passed from hand to hand atop the Vatican hill where sprawled the Leonine City. The noise of the cardinals passing and accepting bribes, the normal procedure before the election of a pope. He even imagined he could hear the fevered rattle of horses’ hooves racing through the night, bearing ambassadors from the kings and emperors of Europe, who themselves bore in tight fists a variety of carefully couched threats and intimidations to ensure that their particular master’s man was elected to the Holy Throne.
A bad business indeed, Thomas thought. The higher clergy should be shining examples of piety and morality to the rest of Christendom. Instead the cardinals had opened their souls to corruption.
Evil?
Were the cardinals the enemy against whom he would lead the soldiers of Christ?
Thomas tossed and turned, but until the papal election—or until the blessed archangel Michael revealed more—there was nothing to do but wait, and listen, and watch.
And, during those daylight hours not spent in prayer, study the registers of St Angelo’s.
St Angelo’s had for generations been the centre of the Dominican effort to train the masters and teachers of the growing European universities, and this mission (the reason Thomas himself had been sent to the friary) was reflected in the registers. Thomas found himself curious as he saw the names of now-aged masters he’d studied under at Oxford, and the names of masters famed for their learning who currently taught, or had taught, at the universities of Paris, Bologna, Ferrara and Padua. They had all come to St Angelo’s, and Thomas traced their comings and goings: their arrival at the friary as young men, their long years spent moving from cell to chapel, to refectory, to library, to chapel and then back to cell again.
Thomas smiled to himself as his finger carefully traced over the black spidery writing in the registers. He could hear their footsteps as they trod the same
