A Criminal History Of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-15T20:40:20+00:00

‘send me good deliverance’.

The handwritten manuscript might well have found its way on to some library shelf and been forgotten. (In fact, such a manuscript - its beginning and end pages missing - was found in the library of Winchester school in 1934.) But fortunately, in 1485 - fourteen years after Malory’s death - it fell into the hands of the English printer William Caxton. He launched it on the world, and it instantly became almost as popular as the Bible. The rapist and cattle rustler had achieved a belated immortality. But, more important, the Morte d’Arthur carried the ideals of knightly chivalry to the far corners of Europe. The great explorers gave man a taste for romance and adventure; it was Malory who carried it into every literate household.

For the Church, this liberation of the human imagination would eventually prove more dangerous than any number of heretics and infidels. But that day had not yet arrived.

THE CHURCH OVER-TRIUMPHANT

In the week before Easter 1478, a group of would-be assassins arrived in Florence: their intended victims were two of the Medici family: Lorenzo - already called the Magnificent - and his younger brother Giuliano. The plotters included the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, and two leading bankers of Florence, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli. And in Rome, providing moral support for the plot, was the pope, Sixtus IV.

The notion of a pope and an archbishop being involved in a murder plot strikes us as startling: in the fifteenth century it was almost commonplace. The pope was, in effect, the Roman emperor, the Caesar. With enormous revenues flowing in from all over the civilised world, he built palaces, employed great artists, hired armies, poisoned rivals, fathered bastards and gave away important Church appointments to members of his family. Italy was full of rival cities that tried to gobble up all the small towns in their area; the popes made sure that Rome did her share of the gobbling. This is partly what had caused the present coolness between the pope and Lorenzo de’ Medici. They both wanted a little town called Imola, which happened to be under the protection of the duke of Milan; the duke had promised it to Lorenzo. Then the pope bribed the duke with an advantageous marriage between his own nephew and the duke’s bastard daughter; so Imola became part of the Papal States. Lorenzo took it philosophically - he was that kind of a man. But he got his own back when the Archbishop of Florence died and the pope wanted to appoint one of his favourites, Francesco Salviati. Lorenzo blocked the appointment and gave it to his own brother-in-law; Salviati had to be contented with a second best - Pisa.

The Medicis were, of course, the leading family of bankers in Florence, although their chief rivals were the Pazzis. The Pazzis were popular with the common people of Florence, but not quite as popular as the Medicis, who were naturally friendly and democratic. When the pope

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.