‘We are confined and oppressed,’ Abelard had imagined a Jew as lamenting, ‘as if the whole world had conspired against us alone. It is a wonder we are allowed to live.’ A century on, there were few Christians ready to follow Abelard’s example and think themselves into Jewish shoes. As never before, the ambition of the Church to provide a salvation to peoples of every race and background had become a weapon to be turned against all who spurned its offer. The Jews, whose claim to the great inheritance of scripture was no less passionate than its own, and whose devotion to learning had long served Christians as a standing reproach, presented an adversary infinitely more formidable than the good men. Yet the Church, confronted by such a threat, had no need of crusaders to do its work. Clerics in the age of Aquinas could feel more confident of putting Jews in their place than ever before. With theology enthroned as the queen of sciences in universities across Europe, and with friars specifically licensed by the pope to defend and promote the faith, they were able to view Jewish pretensions with mounting contempt. It was a measure of this, perhaps, that increasingly, when referring to the scriptures that were the common inheritance of both themselves and the Jews, they no longer used the word biblia as a plural, but rather as a singular: the Bible. In other ways too, any hint of a common fellowship that Jews might once have shared with Christians was being systematically razed. No longer, it had been ordained at the Fourth Lateran Council, were they to dress as those they lived among dressed, but were instead ‘at all times to be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their clothing’.42 Christian artists, for the first time, began to represent Jewish men as physically distinctive: thick-lipped, hook-nosed, stooped. In 1267, sexual relations between Jews and Christians were banned by formal decree of a church council; in 1275, a Franciscan in Germany drew up a law code that made it a capital offence. In 1290, the king of England, pushing the logic of this baneful trend to its ultimate conclusion, ordered all the Jews in his kingdom to leave for good. In 1306, the king of France followed suit.*
A Church that proclaimed itself universal had, it seemed, no response to those who rejected it, save persecution.
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* It is equally possible that he was a Greek resident in Venice. His self-description – Iacobus Veneticus Graecus – is ambiguous.
* Recalled on and off throughout the fourteenth century, the Jews were finally expelled for good from France in 1394.
XI
FLESH
1300: M
ILAN
When the Dominicans and their agents arrived at the abbey of Chiaravalle, they headed straight for the final resting place of Guglielma. Almost twenty years had passed since her death, and in that time there had been a steady stream of pilgrims to her tomb. Although she was not a native of Milan – and indeed had only come to Italy in 1260, when she was fifty – the aura of mystery that clung to her had done much to enhance her fame. She was said to have had royal blood; to have been the daughter of the king of Bohemia; to have spent time in England married to a prince. True or not, it was certain that in Milan Guglielma had lived a life of spotless poverty. And so it was, after her death, that people had come to leave candles and offerings before her tomb. Twice a year, the monks of Chiaravalle would publicly celebrate her memory. Crowds would flock to pay their respects. Like Elizabeth of Hungary, a woman of similar miracle-working power, and quite possibly her cousin, Guglielma was hailed as a saint.
The inquisitors knew better. They had not come to light candles. Instead, taking crowbars to Guglielma’s tomb, they levered it open, and scooped out the mouldering corpse. A great fire was lit. The bones were burned to ashes, and scattered on the winds. Guglielma’s tomb was smashed to pieces. Her images were crushed underfoot. Brutal though these measures might have seemed, they were urgently required. Shocking revelations had come to light. All that summer, inquisitors had been catching on their nostrils the stench of a truly monstrous heresy. Following where it led, they had tracked it to the very summit of Milanese society. The ringleader, a nun named Maifreda da Pirovano, was the cousin of Mateo Visconti, the effective lord of the city. But once the truth was out no one – not even her cousin – had been able to save her. She was burned at the stake. Fitting punishment for a woman whose ambition could not possibly have been more subversive, more arrogant, more grotesque. In any heretic it would have been shocking – but in a woman especially so. Maifreda had taught her followers that she was destined to rule all Christendom: that she would be elected pope.
Incubating in Milan had been a cult of rare and awful daring. Guglielma, so it was reported a year after Maifreda’s execution, had come to the city ‘saying that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women; and she baptised women in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of herself’.1 This conviction, that Christendom stood on the brink of a radical new beginning, was not original to her. Back in the time of Innocent III, a monk named Joachim, brooding over the Bible in the abbey of Fiore, deep in the wilds of southern Italy, had fathomed in its pages a prophetic message. The ages of the world, so he had taught, were threefold. First, spanning the aeons that separated the Creation from the coming of Christ, had been the Age of the Father; then had come the Age of the Son. Now that too was drawing to a close. In its place was dawning the Age of the Spirit. Such a prospect was one that many found thrillingly seductive. Large numbers of Franciscans assumed that it referred to them. No one, though, had given it quite so distinctive a gloss as Guglielma: 1260, the year of her arrival in Milan, was the very date foretold by Joachim as the beginning of the new age. Whether sanctioned by Guglielma herself or not, her followers had come to believe that she was ‘the Holy Spirit and the true God’.2 Her death had done nothing to dampen this conviction. Her disciples, under the charismatic leadership of Maifreda, claimed to have seen her risen again. The Church, in the new age of the Spirit, would be scoured of its corruption. Boniface VIII, the reigning pope, and a man notorious for his cruelty, greed and corruption, would be deposed and replaced by Maifreda. The cardinals – senior officials in the Church who, from 1179 onwards, had been granted exclusive voting rights in papal elections – would all be women as well. The Age of the Spirit was to be a feminine one.
Here was a heresy that was bound to seem, to any inquisitor, almost a personal affront. Talk of female priests, let alone a female pope, was laughable. God, expelling Eve from Eden, had sentenced her not just to suffer the pains of childbirth, but to be ruled over by her husband. It was a judgement that numerous Church Fathers had upheld: ‘Do you not know that you are each an Eve?’3 Augustine especially, by embedding in his works the doctrine of original sin, had bequeathed a sombre sense of the muscle and blood of every womb as infected by the ineradicable taint of disobedience to God. Formidably though women had served as patrons of the Church – as queens, as regents, as abbesses – they had rarely thought to aspire to the priesthood. The great convulsion of reformatio, by enshrining chastity as the supreme proof of a man’s closeness to God, had only confirmed priests in their dread of women as temptresses. The monk freed from his lusts after dreaming that a man ‘ran at him with a terrible swiftness, and cruelly mutilated him with a knife’,4 was typical in his yearning to be spared any sense of dependence on women. Friars, who did not immure themselves in monasteries, but instead walked streets crowded with the opposite sex, observing their hair, their breasts, their hips, had to be even more sternly on their guard. Woman, so one Dominican thundered, was ‘the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest, a hindrance to devotion’.5 What were priests to do, confronted by such a menace, but maintain the opposite sex in its divinely sanctioned state of subordination?