Thanks to that little book, we went south, skirted the marches of Florentine territory, and arrived on the coast. The road wasn’t bad and the people were delighted; they had pilgrims in summer, but winter was a hard time. Twice we heard of brigands, but they were elsewhere or thought better of an armed party.
At the southern extent of the Ligurian coast, we caught a small trading ship, a Pisan, and he dropped us on a wharf in Genoa, unannounced and safe.
Genoa is a very different city from Venice. Perhaps the principle difference is in the people. In Venice, the small trades share the prosperity of the city. Our grocers were prosperous people; the guildsmen were rich, by English standards, and not just the Masters; the men who owned ropewalks were rich, and so were the men who owned boatyards.
In Genoa, only the rich are rich. A handful of men own everything, just thirty or forty families. The caste of workers derives no benefit whatsoever from the riches of Genoa’s overseas empire. Let me give you the simplest example. On a Venetian merchant ship, all sailors, even the oarsmen, are allowed a space to ship their own cargoes, even if that space is only a single small chest as long as your arm and as wide as the span of a man’s hand. But fill that chest with spice at Alexandria, the richest city in the world, and sail it home to Venice or to England or Flanders, and an oarsman might make ten years wages in an afternoon.
Genoese oarsmen are not allowed anything. Their masters feel that to allow them to trade might cost the owners some profit. The guilds derive little profit from the sea trade, because their wages and their products have set values: values set by the men who rule the city. They call themselves a republic, but they have fewer men involved in government than the Savoyards, who call themselves a feudal state.
I think my dislike — nay, hatred — of Genoa began on the docks. Par dieu, docks are heartless places. The same vices rule every set in the world, from Southwark in London to the stews in Constantinople: prostitution of girls and boys too young to even know what their trade is about, drunkenness and dangerous drugs that rob a man of his senses, and thieves to take the rest; sheer greed, so that workers are underpaid and merchants are fat. Lust, gluttony, greed, pride — dockyards are, in most cities, nastier places than battlefields, and that’s saying something.
Venice’s docks had Moslem slaves and tired stevedores. But the stevedores were mostly citizens and the slaves — well, they ate.
The Genoese docks were peopled by men and women at the end of despair. It was the middle of winter, and there were beggars in women’s cast-off shifts and no shoes, backs hunched to carry bundles of rags. They looked as bad as the poorest French peasants, or refugees from the height of our war in France, when our armies burned a hundred hamlets a day and drove the villeins to the fields and forests.
Father Pierre stopped on the quay, in a cold wind and light rain that cut through my harness and my arming clothes and froze the marrow in my bones. He began by blessing the poor, and to my great shame, I shifted from one foot to another, worried about my warhorse and wishing he would move on, my eyes scanning the crowd.
I needn’t have feared the poor and the desperate. They were not my foes or his.
The Pisan captain got our horses unloaded with professional competence, and I paid him with the legate’s money, having almost none of my own. He spat. Pisans hate Genoa, for good reason, and we had been lucky with him. ‘I may have to jump in the ocean to get clean,’ he said, when my Jacques was out of the cradle of the winch. ‘You would do well not to linger here.’
Indeed, as soon as he had our florins in his purse and a small cargo of hides he picked up on the foreshore, he was away, his sons poling his small ship off the quay. I’d only known him two days, and I felt as you do when you have a sortie outside the walls in a siege and you see them lock the gate behind you.
Father Pierre was saying Mass for the beggars on the docks.
I gathered my knights and ordered them out into the crowd. In full harness, with a longsword, every knight was worth any ten attackers. Marc-Antonio and Nerio’s squire Davide held the horses. Sabraham nodded to me and vanished with his two henchmen, and I was, if anything, more comfortable for knowing that I didn’t know where he was.
The legate’s religious retinue helped him with Mass. They were steady, reliable men. Father Antonio was another Carmelite from Naples; Father Hector was an Scottish Isleman, and there were nigh on a dozen others, mostly servants, all of whom had religious offices as deacons and sextons and the like. Sister Marie had by that time acquired an assistant secretary, a young Frenchman from the University of Paris named Adhemar. He never spoke; his eyes were always downcast, and I scarcely noticed him, but he was clearly well born and he wrote beautifully.
At any rate, we got through Mass. I dare say it was beautiful, to the clerics, but to me it was a nightmare, as I was all too aware by then that the legate’s life was threatened, and there he was surrounded by riff-raff. Truly, I tried to see them as men and women. I have heard the sermons, that there is Christ in every man — but I looked into the open sores, the missing teeth, the black rot, and the hard, closed faces, the malignant cunning that comes of a life lived at the edge of death, the false humility of the professional beggar and I knew Christ was there, because Father Pierre had told me many times. But I saw a thousand criminals, any one of who could be bought for a copper, close enough to put a dagger in my lord.
No one did, however.
We did create a bread riot. The podesta turned out his army of thugs and drove the poor back under the piers and into the chicken coops and barns and sewers where they lived. I met him in person; I had mounted my friends and our squires and we made a living wall of armour and horseflesh that covered the legate and his people as they served Mass to the last stragglers of the poor.
‘Who the devil are you?’ he swore.
I pointed to the man in a brown habit, apparently impervious to the vicious wind. ‘This is the papal legate for the Crusade. He has come to negotiate with your lords.’
The podesta’s horse was nervous. It was the smell of blood that was worrying the animaclass="underline" the podesta’s men-at-arms had killed a dozen of the beggars. Just behind the podesta, a small woman was pounded to the ground by a man in armour with a steel mace, the sort I grew accustomed to seeing in the hands of Turks, later.
She was fifty, or even older, with no teeth and wisps of white hair and he caved in her skull with a whoop.
‘This thing is fucking perfect!’ he shouted, and tossed his bloody mace in the air.
Some of the other men-at-arms had the good grace to look away.
Some laughed.
At my back, Marc-Antonio had the legate mounted.
‘I’d thank you for an escort through the streets,’ I said to the podesta. In powerful Italian cities, the officer who commands the garrison is usually a foreigner. That way, he can’t get mixed up in the endless internal quarrels of house against house that divide the Italians as much as money unites them. Looking at this man’s hat, his gleaming harness and his sword, I guessed he was Milanese.
He frowned. ‘Papal legate? Never heard of him, but if he makes another riot …’
One of Sabraham’s men appeared by my left boot, on foot. He tugged at my stirrup to get my attention. When I looked at him, he gave me the Order’s sign for a direction and I nodded.