The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages by Brown Nancy Marie

Author:Brown, Nancy Marie [Brown, Nancy Marie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

After his dazzling performance, the new abbot of Bobbio accompanied the emperor and Archbishop Adalbero to Rome. There, at an Easter synod, Gerbert saw his Catalan friend Miro Bonfill, bishop of Girona.

Leaving Rome after the synod to return to their churches, Adalbero and Miro could have kept company with Gerbert north to Piacenza—where Count Gerald the Good had once bribed the ferryman to take him across the Po River. There Gerbert left the group and turned west toward Bobbio, a day’s journey away. The glowing green fields gave way to hills, a blue haze hinted of higher mountains beyond. A castle on a hill—ramparts and a round tower stacked up from yellow stone—looked down on the river Trebbia, wide and low and stony. The road wound into the narrow river valley: The tops of the hills turned to bare rock; the river now sported rapids. Crossing a ridge of rugged hills, he finally reached Bobbio.

The town huddled beside the Trebbia, between two round knolls. Its humpbacked Roman bridge, the ten gray-stone arches each a different size, spanned a rocky narrows. The same gray stone was laid up into a drystone wall ringing the town. It paved the narrow streets and lined the channels by which a hilltop cascade was steered downhill to a water-wheel. The monastery, the cathedral, the blocky castle on the hill—all were made of the same gray stone. Bobbio was a fortress of a town—organized, protected, safe, strong, a center of administration in this untamed corner of Italy.

At first Gerbert reveled in the immense library of 690 books. He found there Boethius’s On Astrology, “some beautiful figures of geometry,” and other volumes “no less worthy of being admired,” he wrote. But Bobbio was more than its books: It was the largest landowner in northern Italy. Its holdings stretched from Genoa on the Mediterranean north to the lake region, south into Tuscany, and east along the valley of the Po. Gerbert’s task here was not to enlarge minds. He was an administrator. As abbot and count, he was required to provide soldiers and support for Otto’s wars. He was not up to the task.

Gerbert was bitterly aware of his failure. Writing to a former student, he riffed ironically on a phrase of Cicero’s that Otto had quoted in the diploma appointing him abbot: “In proportion to the greatness of my mind, my lord has enriched me with very extensive properties. For what part of Italy does not contain blessed Columban’s possessions? This, indeed, our Caesar’s generous beneficence provided. But fortune decreed otherwise. For, in proportion to the greatness of my mind, she has honored me with enemies everywhere.”

He was lost in a world of intrigue. It was at Bobbio that Gerbert first began saving copies of his correspondence, to protect himself from the “foxes” who crawled the imperial palace at Pavia, flattering Otto, whispering and plotting, shamelessly slandering the new abbot as a stud horse, “as if I had a wife and children, because of the part of my household brought from France.

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