The originality of Paul’s conception was manifest, in the early centuries of the Church, by the struggle to find a word for it. Nothing existed in either Greek or Latin, nor in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Conveniently to hand, though, was the story of Sodom. Christian scholars, noting the city’s fate, could not help but wonder what its inhabitants might have been up to, that God had felt called to obliterate them. ‘That we should understand sulphur as signifying the stench of the flesh,’ opined Gregory the Great, ‘the history of the holy Scriptures itself testifies, when it narrates that God rained down fire and sulphur upon Sodom.’33 Nevertheless, it was only amid the convulsions of that revolutionary period, the age of Gregory VII, that the word ‘sodomy’ itself gained widespread currency34 – and even then its definition remained imprecise. Same-sex intercourse, although its primary meaning, was not its only one. Moralists regularly used the word to describe a broad range of sinister deviancies. Inevitably, perhaps, it was left to Thomas Aquinas to offer clarity. ‘Copulation with a member of the same sex, male with male, or female with female, as stated by the Apostle – this is called the vice of sodomy.’
The effect of this clarification, among those charged with the moral stewardship of the Christian people, was to give a new and sharper definition to their anxieties about angering God. In Italy especially, where cities were both wealthier and more numerous than in the rest of Christendom, the shadow of the doom that had claimed Sodom and Gomorrah lay particularly dark. By 1400, amid recurrent bouts of plague, dread that the failure to cleanse a city of sodomy might risk the annihilation of its entire population was general across the peninsula. In Venice, a succession of spectacular sex scandals saw the establishment in 1418 of the Collegium Sodomitarum: a magistracy specifically charged with the eradication of ‘a crime which threatens the city with ruin’.35 Whether in dancing schools or in fencing classes, its agents sought to sniff out sodomites wherever they might consort. Six years later, in Florence, the greatest preacher of his day was invited to mark the approach of Easter by giving three consecutive sermons on sodomy – a commission which he accepted with alacrity. Bernardino, a Franciscan from Siena, was a master in the art of working a crowd, ‘now sweet and gentle, now sad and grave, with a voice so flexible that he could do with it whatever he wished’36 – and the evils of sodomy were a theme on which he waxed particularly hot.
Walking the streets of his native city, he would sometimes hear the spectral calling-out of unborn infants against the sodomites who were denying them existence. One night, waking with a start, he listened to them make the whole of Siena – the courtyards, the streets, the towers – echo to their cries: ‘To the fire, to the fire, to the fire!’37 Now, preaching in Florence, Bernardino had come to a city so notorious for its depravities that the German word for sodomite was, quite simply, Florenzer. The friar, making play with his listeners’ emotions as only he could, roused them to repeated climaxes of shame, disgust and fear. When he warned his congregation that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah threatened to be theirs, they swayed, and moaned, and sobbed. When he urged them to show what they thought of sodomites by spitting on the floor, the din of expectorations was like that of a thunderstorm. When, in the great square outside the church, he set fire to a massive pile of the fripperies and fashions to which sodomites were notoriously partial, the crowds stood reverently, feeling the heat of the flames against their cheeks, gazing in awe at the bonfire of the vanities.
Seventy years previously, in 1348, as Florence was reeling before the first devastating impact of the plague, and its streets were choked by piles of the dead, a man named Agostino di Ercole had been consigned, like Bernardino’s vanities, to fire. A ‘dedicated sodomite’,38 he had been wallowing in sin for years. Nevertheless, at a time when the most terrifying proof of God’s anger imaginable was devastating Florence, he had refused to show repentance. Indeed, he had barely acknowledged his guilt. It was quite impossible, so Agostino had insisted, for him to extinguish the furnace of his desires. He had been unable to help himself. Naturally, this excuse had cut no ice with his judges. No one committed sin except by choice. The possibility that a man might sleep with other men, not out of any perverse inclination to evil, but simply because it was his nature, was too much of a paradox for any decent Christian to sanction. Even Bernardino, despite his obsession with rooting out sodomy, struggled to keep Aquinas’ definition of it clearly before him. At various times, he might use the word to describe bestiality, or masturbation, or anal sex between a man and his wife. Aquinas and Agostino, the saint and the sinner, the celibate and the sodomite, were both of them ahead of their times. Almost fifteen hundred years after Paul, the notion that men or women might be defined sexually by their attraction to people of the same gender remained too novel, too incomprehensible for most to grasp.
In matters of the flesh – as in so much else – the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.
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* According to her confessor, the ring was a gold band; but Catherine herself in her letters states otherwise.
XII
APOCALYPSE
1420: T
ABOR
There had never been anywhere quite like it. The castle, perched on a rock above the Lužnice river, had been abandoned decades before, and the blackened ruins of the settlement that had once surrounded it were choked by weeds. It was not an obvious place to seek shelter. The site had to be cleared, and a new town built from scratch. There was an urgent need of fortifications. The nights were bitterly cold. Yet still the refugees came. All March they had been making the trek, drawn from every class of society, from every corner of Bohemia. By the end of the month, camped out in tents within the half-built perimeter walls, there were contingents of men who had been blooded in battle while making their journey there, and women with their children, in flight from burning villages; tavern-keepers from Prague and peasants armed with flails; knights, and clerics, and labourers, and vagrants. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.’1 As it had been in the Acts of the Apostles, so it was now. All shared in the common danger – and all shared a common status. Every man was called brother, and every woman sister. There were no hierarchies, no wages, no taxes. Private property was illegal. All debts were forgiven. The poor, it seemed, had inherited the earth.