Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 23

Protinus Introitum spazzant talqualiter omnem, Ad Chyrios veniunt, quos miro dicere sentis c.u.m contrappunto, veluti si cantor adesset Master Adria.n.u.s, Constantius atque Jachettus.

Hic per dolcezzam scorlabant corda vilani Quando de quintis terzisque calabat in unam Musicus octavam noster Jacopinus et ipsas Providus octavas longa c.u.m voce tirabat.

Gloria in excelsis pa.s.sat, jam Credo propinquat; Oh si Josquinus Cantorum splendor adesset!

[Footnote 431: _Mac._ vii. p. 212. Folengo seems to have been fond of music. See the whimsical description of four-part singing, _Mac._ xx.

p. 139, followed by the panegyric of Music and the malediction of her detractors.]

Meanwhile Baldus has been left in prison, and it is time for Cingar to undertake his rescue. He effects this feat, by stripping two Franciscan monks, and dressing himself up in the frock he had just filched from one of them, while he coaxes the unfortunate Zambellus to a.s.sume the other. Then he persuades the people of Mantua that he has seen himself a.s.sa.s.sinated on the high road; gains access to Baldus in the dungeon, on the plea of hearing his confession; and contrives to leave Zambellus there in the clothes of Baldus, after disguising his friend in one of the friar's tunics. The story is too intricate for repet.i.tion here.[432] Suffice it to say that Baldus escapes and meets a knight errant, Leonardus, at the city gate, who has ridden all the way from Rome to meet so valorous a Paladin. The swear eternal friendship. The three henchmen of the hero muster round the new comrades in arms; and the party thus formed set forth upon a series of adventures in the style of Astolfo's journey to the moon.

[Footnote 432: This episode of Cingar's triumph over the enemies of Baldus, his craft, his rhetoric, his ready wit, his infinite powers of persuasion, his monkey tricks and fox-like cunning, is executed with an energy of humor and breadth of conception, that places it upon a level with the choicest pa.s.sages in Rabelais.]

This part of the epic is a close copy of the chivalrous romances in their more fantastic details. The journey of the Barons, as they are now invariably styled, is performed in a great ship. They encounter storms and pirates, land on marvelous islands, enter fairy palaces, and from time to time recruit their forces with notable rogues and drunkards whom they find upon their way. The parody consists in the similarity of their achievements to those of knight-errantry, while they are themselves in all points unlike the champions of chivalry.

One of their most cherished companions, for example, is Boccalus, a Bergamasque buffoon, who distinguishes himself by presence of mind in a great storm:[433]

Ille galantus h.o.m.o, qui nuper in aequora bruttam Jecerat uxorem, dicens non esse f.a.gottum Fardellumque homini plus laidum, plusque pesentum Quam sibi mojeram lateri mirare tacatam Quae sit oca ingenio, quae vultu spazzacaminus.

[Footnote 433: _Mac._ xii. p. 296.]

The tale of adventures is diversified, after the manner of the romantic poets, by digressions, sometimes pathetic, sometimes dissertational. Among these the most amusing is Cingar's lecture on astronomy, in which the planetary theories of the middle ages are burlesqued with considerable irony.[434] The most affecting is the death of Leonardus, who chooses to be torn in pieces by bears rather than yield his virginity to a vile woman. This episode suggests one of the finest satiric pa.s.sages in the whole poem. Having exhibited the temptress Muselina, the poet breaks off with this exclamation:[435]

Heu quantis noster Muselinis...o...b..s abundat!

[Footnote 434: In the course of this oration Folengo introduces an extraordinarily venomous invective against _contadini_, which may be paralleled with his allegory in the _Orlandino_. It begins (_Mac._ xiii. p. 11):

Progenies maledicta quidem villana vocatur,

and extends through forty lines of condensed abuse.]

[Footnote 435: _Mac._ xvi. p. 66.]

He then enumerates their arts of seduction, and winds up with a powerful dramatic picture, painted from the life, of a _mezzana_ engaged in corrupting a young man's mind during Ma.s.s-time:

Dum Missae celebrantur, amant cantonibus esse, Postque tenebrosos mussant chiachiarantque pilastros; Ah miserelle puer, dic.u.n.t, male nate, quod ullam Non habes, ut juvenes bisognat habere, morosam!...

Numquid vis fieri Frater Monachusve, remotis Delitiis Veneris, Bacchi, Martisque, Jovisque, Quos vel simplicitas, vel desperatio traxit?...

Nemo super terram sanctus; stant aethere sancti: Nos carnem natura facit, quo carne fruamur.

As the epic approaches its conclusion, Baldus discovers his true father, Guido, under the form of a holy hermit, and learns that it is reserved for him by destiny, first to extirpate the sect of witches under their queen Smirna Gulfora, and afterwards to penetrate the realms of death and h.e.l.l. The last five books of the _Maccaronea_ are devoted to these crowning exploits. Merlin appears, and undertakes the guidance of the Barons on their journey to Avernus.[436] But first he requires full confession of their sins from each; and this humorous act of penitence forms one of the absurdest episodes, as may be easily imagined, in the poem. Absolved and furnished with heroic armor, the Barons march to the conquest of Gulfora and the destruction of her magic palace. Folengo has placed it appropriately on the road to h.e.l.l; for under Gulfora he allegorizes witchcraft. The s.p.a.ce allotted to Smirna Gulfora and the importance attached to her overthrow by Baldus and his Barons, call attention to the prevalence of magic in Italy at this epoch.[437] It may not, therefore, be out of place, before engaging in this portion of the a.n.a.lysis, to give some account of Italian witchcraft drawn from other sources, in order to estimate the truth of the satire upon which Folengo expended his force.

[Footnote 436: _Mac._ xx. p. 152. From this point onward the poet and Merlin are one person:

Nomine Merlinos dicor, de sanguine Mantus, Est mihi cognomen Cocajus Maccaronensis.]

[Footnote 437: The _Novella_ of Luca Philippus, who kept a tavern at the door of Paradise, and had no custom, since no one came that way so long as Gulfora ruled on earth, forms a significant preface to her episode. See _Mac._ xxi. p. 180. The altercation between this host and Peter at the rusty gate of heaven is written in the purest Italian style of pious parody.]

"Beautiful and humane Italy," as Bandello calls his country in the preface to one of his most horrible _Novelle_, was, in spite of her enlightenment, but little in advance of Europe on the common points of medieval superst.i.tion. The teaching of the Church encouraged a belief in demons; and the common people saw on every chapel wall the fresco of some saint expelling devils from the bodies of possessed persons, or exorcising domestic utensils which had been bewitched.[438] Thus the laity grew up in the confirmed opinion that earth, air, and ocean swarmed with supernatural beings, whom they distinguished as fiends from h.e.l.l or inferior sprites of the elements, called _spiriti folletti_.[439] While the evil spirits of both degrees were supposed to lie beneath the ban of ecclesiastical malediction, they lent their aid to necromancers, witches and wizards, who, defying the interdictions of the Church, had the audacity to use them as their slaves by the employment of powerful spells and rites of conjurations.

There was a way, it was believed, of taming both the demons and the elves, of making them the instruments of human avarice, ambition, jealousy and pa.s.sion. Since all forms of superst.i.tion in Italy lent themselves to utilitarian purposes, the necromancer and the witch, having acquired this power over supernatural agents, became the servants of popular l.u.s.ts. They sold their authority to the highest bidders, undertaking to blast the vines or to poison the flocks of an enemy; to force young men and maidens to become the victims of inordinate appet.i.tes; to ruin inconvenient husbands by slowly-wasting diseases; to procure abortion by spells and potions; to confer wealth and power upon aspirants after luxury; to sow the seeds of discord in families--in a word, to open a free path for the indulgence of the vain desires that plague ill-regulated egotisms. A cla.s.s of impostors, half dupes of their own pretensions, half rogues relying on the folly of their employers, sprang into existence, who combined the Locusta of ancient Rome with the witch of medieval Germany. Such was the Italian _strega_--a loathsome creature, who studied the chemistry of poisons, philtres, and abortion-hastening drugs, and while she pretended to work her miracles by the help of devils, played upon the common pa.s.sions and credulities of human kind.[440] By her side stood her masculine counterpart, the _stregone_, _negromante_ or _alchimista_, who plays so prominent a part in the Italian comedies and novels.

[Footnote 438: Aretino's _Cortigiana_ contains a very humorous exorcism inflicted by way of a practical joke upon a fisherman.]

[Footnote 439: See above, Part i, p. 453, note 2, for the distinction between the fiends and the sprites drawn by Pulci.]

[Footnote 440: See Lasca's _Novella_ of _Zoroastro_; Bandello's novels of witchcraft (Part iii. 29 and 52); Cellini's celebrated conjuration in the Coliseum; and Ariosto's comedy of the _Negromante_. These sources may be ill.u.s.trated from the evidence given by Virginia Maria Lezia before her judges, and the trial of witches at Nogaredo, both of which are printed in Dandolo's _Signora di Monza_ (Milano, 1855).

Compare the curious details about Lombard witchcraft in Cantu's _Diocesi di Como_.]

Witchcraft was localized in two chief centers--the mountains of Norcia, and the Lombard valleys of the Alps.[441] In the former we find a remnant of antique superst.i.tion. The witches of this district, whether male or female, had something of the cla.s.sical Sibyl in their composition and played upon the terrors of their clients. Like their Roman predecessors, they plied the trades of poisoner, quack-doctor and bawd. In Lombardy witchcraft a.s.sumed a more Teutonic complexion.

The witch was less the instrument of fashionable vices, trading in them as a lucrative branch of industry, than the hysterical subject of a spiritual disease. l.u.s.t itself inflamed the victims of this superst.i.tion, who were burned by hundreds in the towns, and who were supposed to hold their revels in the villages of Val Camonica. Like the hags of northern Europe, these Lombard _streghe_ had recourse to the black art in the delirious hope of satisfying their own inordinate ambitions, their own indescribable desires. The disease spread so wildly at the close of the fifteenth century that Innocent VIII., by his Bull of 1484, issued special injunctions to the Dominican monks of Brescia, Bergamo and Cremona, authorizing them to stamp it out with fire and torture.[442] The result was a crusade against witchcraft, which seems to have increased the evil by fascinating the imagination of the people. They believed all the more blindly in the supernatural powers to be obtained by magic arts, inasmuch as this traffic had become the object of a b.l.o.o.d.y persecution. When the Church recognized that men and women might command the fiends of h.e.l.l, it followed as a logical consequence that wretches, maddened by misery and intoxicated with ungovernable l.u.s.ts, were tempted to tamper with the forbidden thing at the risk of life and honor in this world and with the certainty of d.a.m.nation in the other. After this fashion the confused conscience of illiterate people bred a formidable extension of this spiritual malady throughout the northern provinces of Italy. Some were led by morbid curiosity; others by a vain desire to satisfy their appet.i.tes, or to escape the consequences of their crimes. A more dangerous cla.s.s used the superst.i.tion to acquire power over their neighbors and to make money out of popular credulity.

[Footnote 441: It may be remembered that the necromancer in Cellini sent his book to be enchanted in the Apennines of Norcia. Folengo alludes to this superst.i.tion:

Qualiter ad stagnum Nursae sacrare quadernos.

With regard to Val Camonica, see the actual state of that district as reported by Cantu. Folengo in the _Orlandino_ mentions its witches.

Bandello (iii. 52) speaks of it thus: "Val Camonica, ove si dice essere di molte streghe."]

[Footnote 442: Witchcraft in Italy grew the more formidable the closer it approached the German frontier. It seems to have a.s.sumed the features of an epidemic at the close of the fifteenth century. Up to that date little is heard of it, and little heed was paid to it. The exacerbation of the malady portended and accompanied the dissolution of medieval beliefs in a population vexed by war, famine and pestilence, and vitiated by ecclesiastical corruption.]

Born and bred in Lombardy at the epoch when witchcraft had attained the height of popular insanity, Folengo was keenly alive to the hideousness of a superst.i.tion which, rightly or wrongly, he regarded as a widespread plague embracing all cla.s.ses of society. It may be questioned whether he did not exaggerate its importance. But there is no mistaking the verisimilitude of the picture he drew. All the uncleanliness of a diseased imagination, all the extravagances of wanton desire, all the consequences of domestic unchast.i.ty--incest, infanticide, secret a.s.sa.s.sination, concealment of births--are traced to this one cause and identified by him with witchcraft. The palace of the queen Gulfora is a pandemonium of lawless vice:

Quales hic reperit strepitus, qualemque tumultum, Quales mollities turpes, actusque salaces, Utile nil scribi posset, si scribere vellem.

Her courts are crowded with devils who have taken human shape to gratify the l.u.s.ts of her votaries:

Leggiadros juvenes, bellos, facieque venustos, Stringatos, agiles, quos judicat esse diablos, Humanum pilia.s.se caput moresque decentes, Conspicit, innumeras circ.u.m scherzare puellas, Quae gestant vestes auri brettasque veluti.

The mult.i.tude is made up of all nations, s.e.xes, ages, cla.s.ses:

Obstupet innumeros illic retrovare striones, Innumerasque strias vecchias, modicasque puellas.

Non ea medesimo generatur schiatta paeso; At sunt Italici, Graeci, Gallique, Spagnoles, Magnates, poveri, laici, fratresque, pretesque, Matronae, monighae per forzam claustra colentes.

Some of them are engaged in preparing love-potions and poisonous draughts from the most disgusting and noxious ingredients. Others compound unguents to be used in the metamorphosis of themselves on their nocturnal jaunts. Among these are found poets, orators, physicians, lawyers, governors, for whose sins a handful of poor old women play the part of scapegoats before the public:

Sed quia respectu legis praevert.i.tur ordo, Namque solent grossi pisces mangiare minutos, Desventuratae quaedam solummodo vecchiae Sunt quae supra asinos plebi spectacula fiunt, Sunt quae primatum multorum crimina celant, Sunt quae sparagnant madonnis pluribus ignem.

Some again are discovered compiling books of spells:

Quomodo adulterium uxoris vir noscere possit, Quomodo virgineae cogantur amare puellae, Quomodo non tumeat mulier cornando maritum, Quomodo si tumuit fantinum mingat abortum, Quomodo vix natos vitient sua fascina puttos, Quomodo desiccent odiati membra mariti.

The elder witches keep a school for the younger, and instruct them in the secrets of their craft. Among these Baldus recognizes his own wife, together with the princ.i.p.al ladies of his native land.

It is clear that under the allegory of witchcraft, in which at the same time he seems to have believed firmly, Folengo meant to satirize the secret corruption of society. When Gulfora herself appears, she holds her court like an Italian d.u.c.h.ess:

Longa sequit series hominum muschiata zibettis, Qui cortesanos se vantant esse tilatos, Quorum si videas mores rationis ochialo, Non homines maschios sed dicas esse baga.s.sas.

The terrible friar then breaks into a tirade against the courtiers of his day, comparing them with Arthur's knights:

Tempore sed nostro, proh dii, saecloque dadessum, Non nisi perfumis variis et odore zibetti, Non nisi, seu sazarae petenentur sive tosentur, Brettis velluti, nec non scufiotibus auri, Auri cordiculis, impresis, atque medallis, Millibus et frappis per calzas perque giupones, Cercamus carum merdosi germen amoris.

Baldus exterminates the whole vile mult.i.tude, while Fraca.s.sus pulls Gulfora's palace about her ears. After this, the Barons pursue their way to Acheron, and call upon Charon to ferry them across. He refuses to take so burdensome a party into his boat; but by the strength of Fraca.s.sus and the craft of Cingar they effect a pa.s.sage. Their entry into h.e.l.l furnishes Folengo with opportunities for new tirades against the vices of Italy. Tisiphone boasts how Rome, through her machinations, has kept Christendom in discord. Alecto exults in her offspring, the Guelph and Ghibelline factions:

Unde fides Christi paulatim lapsa ruinet, Dum gentes Italae bastantes vincere mundum Se se in se stessos discordant, seque medesmos Va.s.sallos faciunt, servos, vilesque famejos His qui va.s.salli, servi, vilesque fa meji Tempore pa.s.sato n.o.bis per forza fu ere.