Volume I Part 8 (1/2)

The first thing that suggests itself in answer to the latter question as the cause of such boundless extravagance is the inherited giantism of the Latins, to which reference has been more than once made in these pages, and to which the existence of many of the princ.i.p.al buildings in Rome must be ascribed. Next, we may consider that at one time or another, each of the greater Roman palaces has been, in all essentials, the court of a pope or of a reigning feudal prince. Lastly, it must be remembered that each palace was the seat of management of all its owner's estates, and that such administration in those times required a number of scribes and an amount of labour altogether out of proportion with the income derived from the land.

At first sight the study of Italian life in the Middle Age does not seem very difficult, because it is so interesting. But when one has read the old chronicles that have survived, and the histories of those times, one is amazed to see how much we are told about people and their actions, and how very little about the way in which people lived. It is easier to learn the habits of the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the ancient Romans, or the a.s.syrians, than to get at the daily life of an Italian family between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, from such books as we have. There are two reasons for this. One is the scarcity of literature, excepting historical chronicles, until the time of Boccaccio and the Italian storytellers. The other is the fact that what we call the Middle Age was an age of transition from barbarism to the civilization of the Renascence, and the Renascence was reached by sweeping away all the barbarous things that had gone before it.

One must have lived a lifetime in Italy to be able to call up a fairly vivid picture of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. One must have actually seen the grand old castles and gloomy monasteries, and feudal villages of Calabria and Sicily, where all things are least changed from what they were, and one should understand something of the nature of the Italian people, where the original people have survived; one must try also to realize the violence of those pa.s.sions which are ugly excrescences on Italian character even now, and which were once the main movers of that character.

There are extant many inventories of lordly residences of earlier times in Italy, for the inventory was taken every time the property changed hands by inheritance or sale. Everyone of these inventories begins at the main gate of the stronghold, and the first item is 'Rope for giving the cord.' Now 'to give the cord' was a torture, and all feudal lords had the right to inflict it. The victim's hands were tied behind his back, the rope was made fast to his bound wrists, and he was hoisted some twenty feet or so to the heavy iron ring which is fixed in the middle of the arch of every old Italian castle gateway; he was then allowed to drop suddenly till his feet, to which heavy weights were sometimes attached, were a few inches from the ground, so that the strain of his whole weight fell upon his arms, twisted them backwards, and generally dislocated them at the shoulders. And this was usually done three times, and sometimes twenty times, in succession, to the same prisoner, either as a punishment or by way of examination, to extract a confession of the truth. As the rope of torture was permanently rove through the pulley over the front door, it must have been impossible not to see it and remember what it meant every time one went in or out. And such quick reminders of danger and torture, and sudden, painful death, give the pitch and key of daily existence in the Middle Age. Every man's life was in his hand until it was in his enemy's. Every man might be forced, at a moment's notice, to defend not only his honour, and his belongings, and his life, but his women and children, too,--not against public enemies only, but far more often against private spite and personal hatred. Nowadays, when most men only stake their money on their convictions, it is hard to realize how men reasoned who staked their lives at every turn; or to guess, for instance, at what women felt whose husbands and sons, going out for a stroll of an afternoon, in the streets of Rome, might as likely as not be brought home dead of a dozen sword-wounds before evening. A husband, a father, was stabbed in the dark by treachery; try and imagine the daily and year-long sensations of the widowed mother, bringing up her only son deliberately to kill her husband's murderer; teaching him to look upon vengeance as the first, most real and most honourable aim of life, from the time he was old enough to speak, to the time when he should be strong enough to kill.

Everything was earnest then. One should remember that most of the stories told by Boccaccio, Sacchetti and Bandello--the stories from which Shakespeare got his Italian plays, his Romeo and Juliet, his Merchant of Venice--were not inventions, but were founded on the truth.

Everyone has read about Caesar Borgia, his murders, his treacheries and his end, and he is held up to us as a type of monstrous wickedness. But a learned Frenchman, emile Gebhart, has recently written a rather convincing treatise, to show that Caesar Borgia was not a monster at all, nor even much of an exception to the general rule among the Italian despots of his day, and his day was civilized compared with that of Rienzi, of Boniface the Eighth, of Sciarra Colonna.

In order to understand anything about the real life of the Middle Age, one should begin at the beginning; one should see the dwellings, the castles, and the palaces with their furniture and arrangements, one should realize the stern necessities as well as the few luxuries of that time. And one should make acquaintance with the people themselves, from the grey-haired old baron, the head of the house, down to the scullery man and the cellarer's boy and the stable lads. And then, knowing something of the people and their homes, one might begin to learn something about their household occupations, their tremendously tragic interests and their few and simple amus.e.m.e.nts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTA SAN LORENZO]

The first thing that strikes one about the dwellings is the enormous strength of those that remain. The main idea, in those days, when a man built a house, was to fortify himself and his belongings against attacks from the outside, and every other consideration was secondary to that.

That is true not only of the Barons' castles in the country and of their fortified palaces in town,--which were castles, too, for that matter,--but of the dwellings of all cla.s.ses of people who could afford to live independently, that is, who were not serfs and retainers of the rich. We talk of fire-proof buildings nowadays, which are mere sh.e.l.ls of iron and brick and stone that shrivel up like writing-paper in a great fire. The only really fire-proof buildings were those of the Middle Age, which consisted of nothing but stone and mortar throughout, stone walls, stone vaults, stone floors, and often stone tables and stone seats. I once visited the ancient castle of Muro, in the Basilicata, one of the southern provinces in Italy, where Queen Joanna the First paid her life for her sins at last, and died under the feather pillow that was forced down upon her face by two Hungarian soldiers. It is as wild and lonely a place as you will meet with in Europe, and yet the great castle has never been a ruin, nor at any time uninhabited, since it was built in the eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight feet thick--comparatively flimsy for such a place! Nine-tenths of it was built for strength--the small remainder for comfort; there is not a single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved s.p.a.ce, barely big enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea caves to the tramp of armed men. And so it was in the cities, too. In Rome, bits of the old strongholds survive still. There were more of them thirty years ago. Even the more modern palaces of the late Renascence are built in such a way that they must have afforded a safe refuge against everything except artillery. The strong iron-studded doors and the heavily grated windows of the ground floor would stand a siege from the street. The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief dwelling of the Orsini, is built in the midst of the city like a great fortification, with escarpments and b.u.t.tresses and loop-holes; and at the main gate there is still a portcullis which sinks into the ground by a system of chains and balance weights and is kept in working order even now.

In the Middle Age, each town palace had one or more towers, tall, square and solid, which were used as lookouts and as a refuge in case the rest of the palace should be taken by an enemy. The general principle of all mediaeval towers was that they were entered through a small window at a great height above the ground, by means of a jointed wooden ladder. Once inside, the people drew the ladder up after them and took it in with them, in separate pieces. When that was done, they were comparatively safe, before the age of gunpowder. There were no windows to break, it was impossible to get in, and the besieged party could easily keep anyone from scaling the tower, by pouring boiling oil or melted lead from above, or with stones and missiles, so that as long as provisions and water held out, the besiegers could do nothing. As for water, the great rainwater cistern was always in the foundations of the tower itself, immediately under the prison, which got neither light nor air excepting from a hole in the floor above. Walls from fifteen to twenty feet thick could not be battered down with any engines then in existence. Altogether, the tower was a safe place in times of danger. It is said that at one time there were over four hundred of these in Rome, belonging to the n.o.bles, great and small.

The small cla.s.s of well-to-do commoners, the merchants and goldsmiths, such as they were, who stood between the n.o.bles and the poor people, imitated the n.o.bles as much as they could, and strengthened their houses by every means. For their dwellings were their warehouses, and in times of disturbance the first instinct of the people was to rob the merchants, unless they chanced to be strong enough to rob the n.o.bles, as sometimes happened. But in Rome the merchants were few, and were very generally retainers or dependants of the great houses. It is frequent in the chronicles to find a man mentioned as the 'merchant' of the Colonna family, or of the Orsini, or of one of the independent Italian princes, like the Duke of Urbino. Such a man acted as agent to sell the produce of a great estate; part of his business was to lend money to the owner, and he also imported from abroad the scanty merchandise which could be imported at all. About half of it usually fell into the hands of highwaymen before it reached the city, and the price of luxuries was proportionately high. Such men, of course, lived well, though there was a wide difference between their mode of life and that of the n.o.bles, not so much in matters of abundance and luxury, as in principle. The chief rule was that the wives and daughters of the middle cla.s.s did a certain amount of housekeeping work, whereas the wives and daughters of the n.o.bles did not. The burgher's wife kept house herself, overlooked the cooking, and sometimes cooked a choice dish with her own hands, and taught her daughters to do so. A merchant might have a considerable retinue of men, for his service and protection, and they carried staves when they accompanied their master abroad, and lanterns at night. But the baron's men were men-at-arms,--practically soldiers,--who wore his colours, and carried swords and pikes, and lit the way for their lord at night with torches, always the privilege of the n.o.bles. As a matter of fact, they were generally the most dangerous cutthroats whom the n.o.bleman was able to engage, highwaymen, brigands and outlaws, whom he protected against the semblance of the law; whereas the merchant's train consisted of honest men who worked for him in his warehouse, or they were countrymen from his farms, if he had any.

It is not easy to give any adequate idea of those great mediaeval establishments, except by their a.n.a.logy with the later ones that came after them. They were enormous in extent, and singularly uncomfortable in their internal arrangement.

A curious book, published in 1543, and therefore at the first culmination of the Renascence, has lately been reprinted. It is ent.i.tled 'Concerning the management of a Roman n.o.bleman's Court,' and was dedicated to 'The magnificent and Honourable Messer Cola da Benevento,'

forty years after the death of the Borgia Pope and during the reign of Paul the Third, Farnese, who granted the writer a copyright for ten years. The little volume is full of interesting details, and the attendant gentlemen and servants enumerated give some idea of what according to the author was not considered extravagant for a n.o.bleman of the sixteenth century. There were to be two chief chamberlains, a general controller of the estates, a chief steward, four chaplains, a master of the horse, a private secretary and an a.s.sistant secretary, an auditor, a lawyer and four literary personages, 'Letterati,' who, among them, must know 'the four princ.i.p.al languages of the world, namely, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Italian.' The omission of every other living language but the latter, when Francis the First, Charles the Fifth and Henry the Eighth were reigning, is pristinely Roman in its contempt of 'barbarians.' There were also to be six gentlemen of the chambers, a private master of the table, a chief carver and ten waiting men, a butler of the pantry with an a.s.sistant, a butler of the wines, six head grooms, a marketer with an a.s.sistant, a storekeeper, a cellarer, a carver for the serving gentlemen, a chief cook, an under cook and a.s.sistant, a chief scullery man, a water carrier, a sweeper,--and last in the list, a physician, whom the author puts at the end of the list, 'not because a doctor is not worthy of honour, but in order not to seem to expect any infirmity for his lords.h.i.+p or his household.'

This was considered a 'sufficient household' for a n.o.bleman, but by no means an extravagant one, and many of the officials enumerated were provided with one or more servants, while no mention is made of any ladies in the establishment nor of the numerous retinue they required.

But one remembers the six thousand servants of Augustus, all honourably buried in one place, and the six hundred who waited on Livia alone; and the modest one hundred and seven which were reckoned 'sufficient' for the Lord Cola of Benevento sink into comparative insignificance. For Livia, besides endless keepers of her robes and folders of her clothes--a special office--and hairdressers, perfumers, jewellers and shoe keepers, had a special adorner of her ears, a keeper of her chair and a governess for her favourite lap-dog.

The little book contains the most complete details concerning daily expenditure for food and drink for the head of the house and his numerous gentlemen, which amounted in a year to the really not extravagant sum of four thousand scudi, or dollars, over fourteen hundred being spent on wine alone. The allowance was a jug--rather more than a quart--of pure wine daily to each of the 'gentlemen,' and the same measure diluted with one-third of water to all the rest. Sixteen ounces of beef, mutton, or veal were reckoned for every person, and each received twenty ounces of bread of more or less fine quality, according to his station; and an average of twenty scudi was allowed daily as given away in charity,--which was not ungenerous, either, for such a household. The olive oil used for the table and for lamps was the same, and was measured together, and the household received each a pound of cheese, monthly, besides a mult.i.tude of other eatables, all of which are carefully enumerated and valued. Among other items of a different nature are 'four or five large wax candles daily, for his lords.h.i.+p,' and wax for torches 'to accompany the dishes brought to his table, and to accompany his lords.h.i.+p and the gentlemen out of doors at night,' and 'candles for the altar,' and tallow candles for use about the house. As for salaries and wages, the controller and chief steward received ten scudi, each month, whereas the chaplain only got two, and the 'literary men,' who were expected to know Hebrew, Greek and Latin, were each paid one hundred scudi yearly. The physician was required to be not only 'learned, faithful, diligent and affectionate,' but also 'fortunate' in his profession. Considering the medical practices of those days, a doctor could certainly not hope to heal his patients without the element of luck.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned Roman character is careful, if not avaricious, with occasional flashes of astonis.h.i.+ng extravagance, and its idea of riches is so closely a.s.sociated with that of power as to make the display of a numerous retinue its first and most congenial means of exhibiting great wealth; so that to this day a Roman in reduced fortune will live very poorly before he will consent to exist without the two or three superfluous footmen who loiter all day in his hall, or the handsome equipage in which his wife and daughters are accustomed to take the daily drive, called from ancient times the 'trottata,' or 'trot,' in the Villa Borghese, or the Corso, or on the Pincio, and gravely provided for in the terms of the marriage contract. At a period when servants were necessary, not only for show but also for personal protection, it is not surprising that the n.o.bles should have kept an extravagant number of them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALAZZO DI MONTE CITORIO

From a print of the last century]

Then also, to account for the size of Roman palaces, there was the patriarchal system of life, now rapidly falling into disuse. The so-called 'n.o.ble floor' of every mansion is supposed to be reserved exclusively for the father and mother of the family, and the order of arranging the rooms is as much a matter of rigid rule as in the houses of the ancient Romans, where the vestibule preceded the atrium, the atrium the peristyle, and the latter the last rooms which looked upon the garden. So in the later palace, the door from the first landing of the grand staircase opens upon an outer hall, uncarpeted, but crossed by a strip of matting, and furnished only with a huge table and old-fas.h.i.+oned chests, made with high backs, on which are painted or carved the arms of the family. Here, at least two or three footmen are supposed to be in perpetual readiness to answer the door, the lineally descended representatives of the armed footmen who lounged there four hundred years ago. Next to the hall comes the antechamber, sometimes followed by a second, and here is erected the 'baldacchino,' the coloured canopy which marks the privilege of the sixty 'conscript families' of Rome, who rank as princes. It recalls the times when, having powers of justice, and of life and death, the lords sat in state under the overhanging silks, embroidered with their coats of arms, to administer the law. Beyond the antechamber comes the long succession of state apartments, lofty, ponderously decorated, heavily furnished with old-fas.h.i.+oned gilt or carved chairs that stand symmetrically against the walls, and on the latter are hung pictures, priceless works of old masters beside crude portraits of the last century, often arranged much more with regard to the frames than to the paintings. Stiff-legged pier-tables of marble and alabaster face the windows or are placed between them; thick curtains that can be drawn quite back cover the doors; strips of hemp carpet lead straight from one door to another; the light is dim and cold, half shut out by the window curtains, and gets a peculiar quality of sadness and chilliness, which is essentially characteristic of every old Roman house, where the reception rooms are only intended to be used at night, and the sunny side is exclusively appropriated to the more intimate life of the owners. There may be three, four, six, ten of those big drawing-rooms in succession, each covering about as much s.p.a.ce as a small house in New York or London, before one comes to the closed door that gives access to the princess'

boudoir, beyond which, generally returning in a direction parallel with the reception rooms, is her bedroom, and the prince's, and the latter's study, and then the private dining-room, the state dining-room, the great ballroom, with clear-story windows, and as many more rooms as the size of the apartment will admit. In the great palaces, the picture gallery takes a whole wing and sometimes two, the library being generally situated on a higher story.

The patriarchal system required that all the married sons, with their wives and children and servants, should be lodged in the same building with their parents. The eldest invariably lived on the second floor, the second son on the third, which is the highest, though there is generally a low rambling attic, occupied by servants, and sometimes by the chaplain, the librarian and the steward, in better rooms. When there were more than two married sons, which hardly ever happened under the old system of primogeniture, they divided the apartments between them as best they could. The unmarried younger children had to put up with what was left. Moreover, in the greatest houses, where there was usually a cardinal of the name, one wing of the first floor was entirely given up to him; and instead of the canopy in the antechamber, flanked by the hereditary coloured umbrellas carried on state occasions by two lackeys behind the family coach, the prince of the Church was ent.i.tled to a throne room, as all cardinals are. The eldest son's apartment was generally more or less a repet.i.tion of the state one below, but the rooms were lower, the decorations less elaborate, though seldom less stiff in character, and a large part of the available s.p.a.ce was given up to the children.

It is clear from all this that even in modern times a large family might take up a great deal of room. Looking back across two or three centuries, therefore, to the days when every princely household was a court, and was called a court, it is easier to understand the existence of such phenomenally vast mansions as the Doria palace, or those of the Borghese, the Altieri, the Barberini and others, who lived in almost royal state, and lodged hundreds upon hundreds of retainers in their homes.

And not only did all the members of the family live under one roof, as a few of them still live, but the custom of dining together at one huge table was universal. A daily dinner of twenty persons--grandparents, parents and children, down to the youngest that is old enough to sit up to its plate in a high chair, would be a serious matter to most European households. But in Rome it was looked upon as a matter of course, and was managed through the steward by a contract with the cook, who was bound to provide a certain number of dishes daily for the fixed meals, but nothing else--not so much as an egg or a slice of toast beyond that. This system still prevails in many households, and as it is to be expected that meals at unusual hours may sometimes be required, an elaborate system of accounts is kept by the steward and his clerks, and the smallest things ordered by any of the sons or daughters are charged against an allowance usually made them, while separate reckonings are kept for the daughters-in-law, for whom certain regular pin-money is provided out of their own dowries at the marriage settlement, all of which goes through the steward's hands. The same settlement, even in recent years, stipulated for a fixed number of dishes of meat daily, generally only two, I believe, for a certain number of new gowns and other clothes, and for a great variety of details, besides the use of a carriage every day, to be harnessed not more than twice, that is, either in the morning and afternoon, or once in the daytime and once at night.

Everything,--a cup of tea, a gla.s.s of lemonade,--if not mentioned in the marriage settlement, had to be paid for separately. The justice of such an arrangement--for it is just--is only equalled by its inconvenience, for it requires the machinery of a hotel, combined with an honesty not usual in hotels. Undoubtedly, the whole system is directly descended from the practice of the ancients, which made every father of a family the absolute despot of his household, and made it impossible for a son to hold property or have any individual independence during his father's life, and it has not been perceptibly much modified since the Middle Age, until the last few years. Its existence shows in the strongest light the main difference between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races, in the marked tendency of the one to submit to despotic government, and of the other to govern itself; of the one to stay at home under paternal authority, and of the other to leave the father's house and plunder the world for itself; of the sons of the one to accept wives given them, and of the other's children to marry as they please.

Roman family life, from Romulus to the year 1870, was centred in the head of the house, whose position was altogether una.s.sailable, whose requirements were necessities, and whose word was law. Next to him in place came the heir, who was brought up with a view to his exercising the same powers in his turn. After him, but far behind him in importance, if he promised to be strong, came the other sons, who, if they took wives at all, were expected to marry heiresses, and one of whom, almost as a matter of course, was brought up to be a churchman.

The rest, if there were any, generally followed the career of arms, and remained unmarried; for heiresses of n.o.ble birth were few, and their guardians married them to eldest sons of great houses whenever possible, while the strength of caste prejudice made alliances of n.o.bles with the daughters of rich plebeians extremely unusual.