"A Trembling Upon Rome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Condon Richard)

2

We rode into Latium, Fanfarone complaining about his backside all the way, through. Cisterna di Latima to Velletri and Albano to Rome. We rode through a land which had settled into four social divisions just as in Germany: knights and their retainers, who lived in castles or keeps;: merchants, artificers, tradesmen and their dependants, who filled the towns, farmers, who lived in wattled huts under the protection of their lord., spiritual and/or temporal; and the clergy. The world was divided into an uncounted but gigantic mass of Christians and Mahometans with, here and there, pockets of Jews. The knights, merchants and farmers took their places by right of birth and inheritance. The clergy had to work then way up by the devious rules of the Church.

When we reached Rome, I as leader of our party (even if Cossa wasn't aware of that, but his father had put the entire expedition in my charge, sought out the house of Cossa's uncle in the Via Artanis, off the Tiber across from Vatican hill. Rome was a collection of shanties, thieves and vermin. The Black Death had reduced its population by one third, to 17,000. The city was wracked with factional strife among -the Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Gaetani, Copocci, Stefaneschi and Annabaldi families. As we rode along the river on our first night, on a guided tour of the city by Cossa's Uncle Tomas, we saw wolves wandering near St. Peter's. `If this is Rome,' Cossa said, 'Bologna must be only a clearing in the forest.

`Bologna was a city when Rome was a, village,' his uncle said. `Rome looks like this because: it has lived off the papal interests like a mendicant. The whole population has allowed itself to depend on the hordes of pilgrims and litigants the papacy brings to Rome.'

Tomas Cossa was a one-eyed man who had been a sea captain it the family business, but whom the duke had judged to be too smart to stay at sea, there being plenty of other men to do his job. Tomas was a ruffian who was burned to dark leather by his lifetime in the sun. He had a hanging left eyelid which had frightened many people before he had killed them. His voice was coarsely hoarse from drinking Greek olive oil. He was the Cossas' chief intelligence agent and employed dozens of sub-agents in the seaports of Germany, France, England, Spain and North Africa, to locate and evaluate shipping destined for the Mediterranean. He passed this complex information to the Cossas on Procida. Knowing when and where the Cossa fleet would sail out and plunder these ships. Tomas was probably responsible for my mother's drowning, but he was a Cossa and death meant nothing to him. Baldassare Cossa was the same, throughout his life. He killed at will but he offered his own life as forfeit if he failed; The family trade must have brought all the Cossas to that view.