Dearest Francesca,
I have as you know been lately traveling abroad in Europe, not on business but in an earnest desire to take pleasure in her repose before she is ravaged once more by tempestuous fate. What I have seen dazzles my imagination and fills my heart almost to bursting with the natural wonder of Christendom, and with those splendid manmade edifices that I have beheld in Paris and the ancient Roman capital of Constantinople. I am Apelius stricken almost to blindness by the beauty of the land and the Christian people, by the wide flowing Rhine and the palaces of King Philip and even those imposing citadels of Louis the Excommunicate. I cannot express to you my joy in the black forest or in the great libraries that have so recently been resurrected. And I have yet already tried, and described to you all of these things as best my poor words are able.
This letter I write for a different purpose, in hopes that you will read in it what I am meaning to say and not merely what I have said, and that you shall share it with your husband and with Cardinal Vicenza. I dare purport that I now know more than even he of what is transpiring, and its meaning for our cause. Do not think me rash to trouble you with such matters so distant and trivial for a woman-I know full well that you wish as fervently as I do to see the fruition of our hopes, and in the fullness of time what I write to tell you shall I think decide them.
We shall begin where I began, in my beloved Italia, in the vineyards and orchards of my country house where you have taken up residence to the great chagrin of the Cardinal’s brethren. And lo, how I wish I had happier tidings of it! It is this impediment more than any other that obstructs the return, and that dashes our prayers and our dreams roughly and without mercy. And for other reasons too, for my patriot’s heart, I wish that my country had more pride! Had more than a woman’s courage, to scheme and to lie and yet lay passive for those Men of Europe, for the Emperor and the King of France. Yet it is not so, and I must tell you! Do not look away, as saddened as you are by this news. It has always been so and will always be so, for what God unmade cannot be re-erected by our tears.
Italy is fractious, a hundred feuding cities that have cast out their lords but done nothing to further the cause of Italy herself. From Bologna to Florence to Verona and Napoli and to Rome itself, there is nothing but violent argument, betrayal and plots so thick they shame the spiders. No government exists in the countryside, and how luck they are! For Rome has governments to spare! Two, three, four a day, all toppled the next and returned the following week. It is the same everywhere, my lovely Francesca, on the slopes of the Apennines to the slopes of the Alps. Frederick’s descendants remain in Sicily, despite their vows, and they are the luckiest. Only in the east, in that despicable Republic, is there any true evidence of Italian manhood remaining, and it is as they say a splendid city. I traveled its canals and I beheld its churches and its monuments, and the beautiful works of art, the paintings and even, I whisper, I whisper, its poetry.
Were those the only solid creatures in Venice! Were there only no Venetians to spoil her greatness. From they lofty, impenetrable lagoon they amass riches from the Mediterranean, the islands of which they have brutally conquered, and whose people they have enslaved on their massive galleys. They are men, Francesca, but Midas and like Crassus of old they are men who care for nothing but money. They would sell their own mothers for a single gold piece. They would sell the Mother Mary for two. It is a rat’s hole, and it stinks with greed. In all of my conversing, I found not one who cared for the Church or for the Holy Father or for the deprivations of the rebels and of the Emperor, or of Italy at all. But as soon as they caught a glint of coin in my purse, they were shouting to heaven to march on Rome and place the Pope in his throne with their own hands.
It is the sorriest state of Christendom my poor eyes have ever see, excepting that one further city that I had compulsion to visit. I boarded a Venetian galley and I was carried down the coast and into the famed Aegean and in that rocky, white capped sea I felt the whole sweep and grandeur of the Ancients lift my high, high into the heavens. It is still a mystical place, and you must see it. But I forbid you to go further, as I should not have done, for when we landed at the Venetian dock in Constantinople it was as though we were returned to Venice. Twenty thousand of her people live in a quarter of the city where we fell, and they are worse! They treat the Romans like dogs, they whip them in the street. And I was ashamed, for they sound like Italians and they dress like Italians, but they are truly not Italians. They have helped to reduce this citadel of Christendom to nothing. To its barest scraps. And all the Romans do is bicker over the scraps the Venetians allow them. They are arrogant in their ignorance, seemingly blind to their enslavement and to the advance of the Mohammedans who will destroy them. These same ones, Francesca, are the Turks, who struck down the mantle of God at Manzikert and are even now rowing their ships within a mile of shore and scoffing at this relic of a dead Empire. I do not expect Constantinople to be even a free city when I die, and then Rome shall be no more, and never a chance did we have to heal the Schism between us, to unify the Church again. What a lesson it is for us, Francesca!
In Constantinople I met a Polish Bishop who had come to deliver a letter from his King, and who encouraged me to journey to his country on the frontiers of the mighty Rus, where, I learned, a great Prince of Muscowy seeks to restore the glory of Kiev and Novgorod and to turn back the insolent Tartars, to return them to the frozen Steppes where God cursed them. It is the one fragment of good and righteous news that I heard in the East. Poland itself was like a jewel on the plains, rising up to the clouds from the unworthy dirt. The city of Krakow is like Paris or Florence or Rome, my dear, but it is united, it is proud and it is more convicted of the Catholic faith than any city I have ever seen. Perhaps it is because they are newly found children of God, but their fire burns bright whatever its source and I believe that they shall keep the Covenant even as we forget it.
In Krakow, I heard much of the Vikings, who themselves had settled the mighty Volga river of the Rus but are good and loyal Catholics. A wondrous thing! Vikings at Mass! I could not have conceived and written such a thing, not in the wildest of my fantasies. I almost crossed the frozen Baltic to the court of the Swedish King, who, it is rumored, seeks to unify the Scandinavian people into one sovereign Christian Kingdom. It was a temptation I could only just refuse, mindful of my task and tiring of the north, where it requires a much hardier race than my own to thrive. I traveled instead to Germany, where I had intended to go to the Court of Louis IV and demand in person that he forget his differences with the Holy Father and help in his return to his rightful palace, but I was waylaid, Francesca, waylaid! by a brilliant young Duke of Austria, Albrecht II, whom they have taken to calling the Wise. In his castle of Vienna, which I will concede was not the most splendid I encountered but was the site of my greatest excitement, he read to me of the Book of Habsburg, their legacy and their ambitions. It is his belief that the Empire has become so weak, and so fractious, that even if Louis were willing to forgive the Pope, and the Pope Louis, he would not have sufficient power to wrest the See from France. It will take, he tells me, a hereditary Emperor, a man of Habsburg, to force the bickering Princes into their proper place as loyal servants of the Empire.
It is not merely his purposes that excited me, but his evident ability to make them fact. There is fire in his eyes, and he is rumored to be an exceptional leader of men in his own right. I departed Vienna with great hope for the future of Germany, but I knew even then, in my heart, that it was incidental to my Italy and to the Pope and to you. Whatever the future holds for the Holy Roman Empire, it is this Holy Roman Emperor to whom I had to appeal. But when I visited his capital, I was rebuffed. It seems that in my journeys, the Pope under the pressure of Philip of France had refused to repudiate the excommunication of His Majesty, and so he would not, fairly, I should say, entertain any notion of restore the one and whole Christian Church to Rome.
This left me with no choice but to cross the mighty Rhine and seek audience with the King of France. I had already intended to visit Paris, as you know, but now I visited with a purpose. I stood in awe of the city’s glory, but not of the King, who had already departed for his castles in Picardy. It seems that, in January of this year, France and England went again to war over the province of Gascony and the undying question of French succession. The English King Edward III, may God bless him and his holy hosts, has already landed on the coast and makes quickly for Paris itself. Meanwhile, his cousin, the Duke of Lancaster, seeks to defend Gascony. It promises to be a short conflict, and I suspect the English to win it decisively and settle the question by 1339.
In my discussions with the Parisian Bishops and those few noble Knights left to keep order in the city, I learned much I had never guessed of our situation. It would seem that the King prefers the Pope where he may influence him as the Emperor does in Italy. He, and the French Bishops, shall not permit a return to Rome nor forgiveness of the Emperor Louis, who it is rumored prepares to march on France under arms.
We are, therefore, at an impasse. If the English triumph quickly, and put an end to this conflict once and for all, as I suspect they shall, the pressures exerted on His Holiness to remain ensconced at Avignon shall pass and he shall at once return to glorify Italy. And none too soon, my dearest one, for I fear that the Turks shall overrun the Roman Empire, and that Venice shall seek advantage over its sisters yet again, with the Genovese now hopelessly overmatched. I have heard news that the Kingdoms of Castile, Portugal and Aragon have commenced a new reconquista to drive the Mohammedans from the shores of Iberia, but this is the one glad tiding of crusade for Christendom.
But I am too much a cynic. Do not trouble yourself. Only know that we are closer to our purpose than we had imagined, and that in Vienna and in London and in Lisbon and in the distant, frozen city of Muscowy, there is yet hope. Art gleams, rivers flow, the plague has abated, I should say for good in this enlightened era, and we may hope for peace and unity in Christendom within ten years. Against all arising challenges, we are arrayed. It is merely a question of when, not if.
Whatever our outcome, you remain my dutiful daughter and I your loving father, always,
Francesco Petrarcha
I have as you know been lately traveling abroad in Europe, not on business but in an earnest desire to take pleasure in her repose before she is ravaged once more by tempestuous fate. What I have seen dazzles my imagination and fills my heart almost to bursting with the natural wonder of Christendom, and with those splendid manmade edifices that I have beheld in Paris and the ancient Roman capital of Constantinople. I am Apelius stricken almost to blindness by the beauty of the land and the Christian people, by the wide flowing Rhine and the palaces of King Philip and even those imposing citadels of Louis the Excommunicate. I cannot express to you my joy in the black forest or in the great libraries that have so recently been resurrected. And I have yet already tried, and described to you all of these things as best my poor words are able.
This letter I write for a different purpose, in hopes that you will read in it what I am meaning to say and not merely what I have said, and that you shall share it with your husband and with Cardinal Vicenza. I dare purport that I now know more than even he of what is transpiring, and its meaning for our cause. Do not think me rash to trouble you with such matters so distant and trivial for a woman-I know full well that you wish as fervently as I do to see the fruition of our hopes, and in the fullness of time what I write to tell you shall I think decide them.
We shall begin where I began, in my beloved Italia, in the vineyards and orchards of my country house where you have taken up residence to the great chagrin of the Cardinal’s brethren. And lo, how I wish I had happier tidings of it! It is this impediment more than any other that obstructs the return, and that dashes our prayers and our dreams roughly and without mercy. And for other reasons too, for my patriot’s heart, I wish that my country had more pride! Had more than a woman’s courage, to scheme and to lie and yet lay passive for those Men of Europe, for the Emperor and the King of France. Yet it is not so, and I must tell you! Do not look away, as saddened as you are by this news. It has always been so and will always be so, for what God unmade cannot be re-erected by our tears.
Italy is fractious, a hundred feuding cities that have cast out their lords but done nothing to further the cause of Italy herself. From Bologna to Florence to Verona and Napoli and to Rome itself, there is nothing but violent argument, betrayal and plots so thick they shame the spiders. No government exists in the countryside, and how luck they are! For Rome has governments to spare! Two, three, four a day, all toppled the next and returned the following week. It is the same everywhere, my lovely Francesca, on the slopes of the Apennines to the slopes of the Alps. Frederick’s descendants remain in Sicily, despite their vows, and they are the luckiest. Only in the east, in that despicable Republic, is there any true evidence of Italian manhood remaining, and it is as they say a splendid city. I traveled its canals and I beheld its churches and its monuments, and the beautiful works of art, the paintings and even, I whisper, I whisper, its poetry.
Were those the only solid creatures in Venice! Were there only no Venetians to spoil her greatness. From they lofty, impenetrable lagoon they amass riches from the Mediterranean, the islands of which they have brutally conquered, and whose people they have enslaved on their massive galleys. They are men, Francesca, but Midas and like Crassus of old they are men who care for nothing but money. They would sell their own mothers for a single gold piece. They would sell the Mother Mary for two. It is a rat’s hole, and it stinks with greed. In all of my conversing, I found not one who cared for the Church or for the Holy Father or for the deprivations of the rebels and of the Emperor, or of Italy at all. But as soon as they caught a glint of coin in my purse, they were shouting to heaven to march on Rome and place the Pope in his throne with their own hands.
It is the sorriest state of Christendom my poor eyes have ever see, excepting that one further city that I had compulsion to visit. I boarded a Venetian galley and I was carried down the coast and into the famed Aegean and in that rocky, white capped sea I felt the whole sweep and grandeur of the Ancients lift my high, high into the heavens. It is still a mystical place, and you must see it. But I forbid you to go further, as I should not have done, for when we landed at the Venetian dock in Constantinople it was as though we were returned to Venice. Twenty thousand of her people live in a quarter of the city where we fell, and they are worse! They treat the Romans like dogs, they whip them in the street. And I was ashamed, for they sound like Italians and they dress like Italians, but they are truly not Italians. They have helped to reduce this citadel of Christendom to nothing. To its barest scraps. And all the Romans do is bicker over the scraps the Venetians allow them. They are arrogant in their ignorance, seemingly blind to their enslavement and to the advance of the Mohammedans who will destroy them. These same ones, Francesca, are the Turks, who struck down the mantle of God at Manzikert and are even now rowing their ships within a mile of shore and scoffing at this relic of a dead Empire. I do not expect Constantinople to be even a free city when I die, and then Rome shall be no more, and never a chance did we have to heal the Schism between us, to unify the Church again. What a lesson it is for us, Francesca!
In Constantinople I met a Polish Bishop who had come to deliver a letter from his King, and who encouraged me to journey to his country on the frontiers of the mighty Rus, where, I learned, a great Prince of Muscowy seeks to restore the glory of Kiev and Novgorod and to turn back the insolent Tartars, to return them to the frozen Steppes where God cursed them. It is the one fragment of good and righteous news that I heard in the East. Poland itself was like a jewel on the plains, rising up to the clouds from the unworthy dirt. The city of Krakow is like Paris or Florence or Rome, my dear, but it is united, it is proud and it is more convicted of the Catholic faith than any city I have ever seen. Perhaps it is because they are newly found children of God, but their fire burns bright whatever its source and I believe that they shall keep the Covenant even as we forget it.
In Krakow, I heard much of the Vikings, who themselves had settled the mighty Volga river of the Rus but are good and loyal Catholics. A wondrous thing! Vikings at Mass! I could not have conceived and written such a thing, not in the wildest of my fantasies. I almost crossed the frozen Baltic to the court of the Swedish King, who, it is rumored, seeks to unify the Scandinavian people into one sovereign Christian Kingdom. It was a temptation I could only just refuse, mindful of my task and tiring of the north, where it requires a much hardier race than my own to thrive. I traveled instead to Germany, where I had intended to go to the Court of Louis IV and demand in person that he forget his differences with the Holy Father and help in his return to his rightful palace, but I was waylaid, Francesca, waylaid! by a brilliant young Duke of Austria, Albrecht II, whom they have taken to calling the Wise. In his castle of Vienna, which I will concede was not the most splendid I encountered but was the site of my greatest excitement, he read to me of the Book of Habsburg, their legacy and their ambitions. It is his belief that the Empire has become so weak, and so fractious, that even if Louis were willing to forgive the Pope, and the Pope Louis, he would not have sufficient power to wrest the See from France. It will take, he tells me, a hereditary Emperor, a man of Habsburg, to force the bickering Princes into their proper place as loyal servants of the Empire.
It is not merely his purposes that excited me, but his evident ability to make them fact. There is fire in his eyes, and he is rumored to be an exceptional leader of men in his own right. I departed Vienna with great hope for the future of Germany, but I knew even then, in my heart, that it was incidental to my Italy and to the Pope and to you. Whatever the future holds for the Holy Roman Empire, it is this Holy Roman Emperor to whom I had to appeal. But when I visited his capital, I was rebuffed. It seems that in my journeys, the Pope under the pressure of Philip of France had refused to repudiate the excommunication of His Majesty, and so he would not, fairly, I should say, entertain any notion of restore the one and whole Christian Church to Rome.
This left me with no choice but to cross the mighty Rhine and seek audience with the King of France. I had already intended to visit Paris, as you know, but now I visited with a purpose. I stood in awe of the city’s glory, but not of the King, who had already departed for his castles in Picardy. It seems that, in January of this year, France and England went again to war over the province of Gascony and the undying question of French succession. The English King Edward III, may God bless him and his holy hosts, has already landed on the coast and makes quickly for Paris itself. Meanwhile, his cousin, the Duke of Lancaster, seeks to defend Gascony. It promises to be a short conflict, and I suspect the English to win it decisively and settle the question by 1339.
In my discussions with the Parisian Bishops and those few noble Knights left to keep order in the city, I learned much I had never guessed of our situation. It would seem that the King prefers the Pope where he may influence him as the Emperor does in Italy. He, and the French Bishops, shall not permit a return to Rome nor forgiveness of the Emperor Louis, who it is rumored prepares to march on France under arms.
We are, therefore, at an impasse. If the English triumph quickly, and put an end to this conflict once and for all, as I suspect they shall, the pressures exerted on His Holiness to remain ensconced at Avignon shall pass and he shall at once return to glorify Italy. And none too soon, my dearest one, for I fear that the Turks shall overrun the Roman Empire, and that Venice shall seek advantage over its sisters yet again, with the Genovese now hopelessly overmatched. I have heard news that the Kingdoms of Castile, Portugal and Aragon have commenced a new reconquista to drive the Mohammedans from the shores of Iberia, but this is the one glad tiding of crusade for Christendom.
But I am too much a cynic. Do not trouble yourself. Only know that we are closer to our purpose than we had imagined, and that in Vienna and in London and in Lisbon and in the distant, frozen city of Muscowy, there is yet hope. Art gleams, rivers flow, the plague has abated, I should say for good in this enlightened era, and we may hope for peace and unity in Christendom within ten years. Against all arising challenges, we are arrayed. It is merely a question of when, not if.
Whatever our outcome, you remain my dutiful daughter and I your loving father, always,
Francesco Petrarcha
).
