Chapter 11 The Bishop
The Bishop
“Your Grace.” The accountant’s finger shakes as he reaches the figure at the base of the page.
“This last venture, well, it was not as profitable as usual, though . . .” His finger steadies as it moves to another column.
“As you see here, they did retrieve some relics we could sell.” The accountant taps a list of plunder from the recent crusade: saints’ bones and splinters from the cross.
The cross, if you’re gullible. His accountant is right.
The relics could bring in some cash, as long as the buyers believe they’re genuine.
The bishop knows better. If you added up every holy bone that a knight has pulled from a dusty saddlebag, you’d deduce that Saint Peter had four legs and two heads.
The cross must have been the size of three longships.
The bishop retains the best relics for his cathedrals.
Long bones of saints attract tithing tourists.
The rest—well, the bishop views the sale of minor relics as a sort of holy lottery.
Some buyers take home miracle-working bits and ends of martyrs.
Others will be praying to the knuckles of sheep farmers. Their coin is the same.
“Your Grace,” murmurs the accountant, “it is not enough.”
It never is. Crusades have their charms, but they’ve been growing ever more expensive and less and less productive.
“Well?” he says. “You’re my accountant. What do you suggest?”
“Sir, there are always indulgences.” As if he’s read the bishop’s mind, he adds, “We could pardon the blasphemers and moneylenders.”
“Perhaps.” Taxing the blasphemers who complain about the Church is satisfying, but not especially profitable.
Lofty morals, shallow pockets. Better to tap the moneylenders.
“What’s the going penalty for usury?” The Church runs a brisk trade in pardons to men who lend with interest. Notorious usurers, as the pope calls them, are forbidden communion or a Christian burial.
Unless they obtain his, the bishop’s, forgiveness.
The solution is simple: The Church sells its indulgence, and the moneylenders hike interest rates and count the price of pardon as one more cost of business.
“Three guilders, Your Grace.” The accountant hesitates. “But you may want to lower that, sir. The market is growing a bit . . . restless.”
Jan already knows this. His men on the street have told him that the mood toward the clergy has shifted.
They should have seen it coming, but the Church was looking the other way.
The pope insisted that the threat was from Acre, from Constantinople, from Moors at the gate.
While they were busy raising levies and armies, funding knights under Christian banners—Deus vult!
—they failed to see the quiet threat festering at home.
It came back from the Holy Land in bolts of silk, in jars of spices.
The hubbub and babel of markets and ports, of couriers and tutors.
The bishops looked up from the crusades and suddenly, merchants were everywhere.
And merchants must read, and reading, they question.
The bishop sighs. “The merchants are demanding we repay their loans.”
The accountant nods quickly. “Yes, Your Grace. They see that the knights are almost all come back. The patrons hope to recoup their investments.”
“We are unable to pay them.” The bishop states a fact he already knows.
The accountant stares hard at the ledger as if a miracle might change the bottom line.
Then he adds, reluctantly, “Your Grace, this morning someone asked to return his relic. He complained it didn’t cure his gout.
He wants his money back.” The accountant looks up at the bishop, eyes worried. “He doesn’t believe it’s real.”
“Who doesn’t believe?” The bishop puts up his hand as soon as he speaks.
It doesn’t matter. It could be any of them.
Half the town is challenging the legitimacy of the Church, grousing about corruption.
Meanwhile, the other half grows ever more pious, wailing about the coming apocalypse and looking for his clergy to grant miracles on demand, as if it were in their power to conjure favorable winds and healing waters.
He’s not sure which half is worse, the doubters or the believers.
The bishop gives a puff of exasperation. “Never mind. Just exchange it.”
“For?”
“Give him one of Ursula’s kneecaps.” There are half a dozen in the storeroom.
The bishop runs his hands through his thick curls.
When did everything become so difficult?
It used to be manageable, just the monasteries that run themselves and send lovely fruit brandies at Christmas and joints of lamb at Easter.
A handful of quiet nunneries for spare daughters of the nobility.
And, of course, the diocesan parishes he oversees, with their biddable priests whose names he can never recall.
Jan Smet supervises all of it, a scarlet-clad king with a peaked cloth crown.
Clerks scurry at his whims. Sovereigns weigh his opinions.
He has spiritual dominion over a city of nearly forty thousand souls, or so his friend the mayor brags.
Granted, they’re not as cultured as Paris or as powerful as Venice, but men call Brugge the market of Europe for good reason.
Wool. Most of Europe’s wool is made or sold in his diocese.
The city may be laced with canals, but it is built on wool.
Fleece comes in on barges, wool goes out in carts.
The cloth of Flanders is famous for a weave so dense and a nap so soft that it draws merchants from Germany, Genoa, France.
In Brugge, they sell to princes. Shame he can’t tax them.
The bishop squints into the dimly lit chamber.
He should have had them light the candles.
Even at noon, the manor is in permanent twilight.
He looks toward the window. No, it’s not so simple anymore.
Everyone is questioning the Church. Everyone wants something from him.
He taps his ring on the table before him, impatient.
Just the other day, his own brother was in here asking for money.
Lukas, head of the Franciscans of Brugge, one of those new preaching orders that shuffle around in their robes and sandals, flaunting their vita apostolica, claiming to live as Christ’s apostles.
The friars’ gaudy poverty makes even his most impoverished clergy look flush.
They tell his people it’s not enough to have nuns pray for their salvation, not enough to be baptized, to tithe regularly and confess rarely.
No, they must actually live like Christ. Extremists.
If their father had lived, he’d have bought Lukas a bishopric, and that would have been the end of that.
The banker had intended to seed two bishops, buying a promise of heaven and permission on earth in one fell swoop.
No sooner had he secured Jan’s seat than he dropped dead.
From an excess of blood. Too sanguine. Cheerful as a chicken.
Who dies of sanguinity? Jan knows his own humors are tempered by choler.
He lifts a glass to himself; his ruby winks in the light.
Choler makes the sun go round. Too bad Lukas lacks any spice to balance all that damp melancholia.
No fun at a banquet. Not much of a preacher.
Mother always treated Lukas like she’d birthed a saint, fawning over his prayers.
“How lovely,” she’d sigh, and raise her chin to heaven, while Jan burned in a furious boyish hell beside her.
Mother, with her soft eyes and hard glances, had made perfectly plain which son she preferred.
No matter. He had his father’s approval and his purse.
It irks him how Lukas wants it both ways now, how he parades his poverty, then comes calling with his hand out.
He loves his brother, but it’s too much.
Those ghastly open sandals. You can see the man’s toes. Jan curls his feet within his slippers.
He’s not alone. All the bishops of Europe are plagued with wandering preachers.
Friars are suddenly everywhere, sprung from nowhere, like weevils in a sack of grain.
There are not just one, but two sects infesting all of Europe: the Franciscans and the Dominicans.
The pope finds them useful. They make good inquisitors, since the people see them as honest brokers.
If the pope tolerates them, then his bishops must, too.
But the friars stir up the people with their notions of apostolic poverty, with the idea that they, too, might get close to God.
That the Church has grown too fat. And then Rome expects its bishops to tamp down the religious fervor and raise money at the same time.
The pope wants it both ways. Friars to keep the Church honest, bishops to keep the Church profitable. Bless him.
The accountant looks at him with blinking eyes.
“Go on, then. Tax some moneylenders. Just not the wool merchants.” The mayor won’t like that. “And send Willems in.”
The accountant lifts the books and nearly trips over his feet in his haste to leave.
Jan rubs his temples. He could have gone to a monastery and lived a life of ease as a monk.
He pictures a sleepy abbey, with vineyards and pigs, a library, busy bursars counting rents.
Though the monasteries are poor in theory, he knows he would have been comfortable.
A monk may not own the cup he drinks from, but he will never want for wine.
They own plenty of property, communally, and live long lives far from town and plague.
They can pull shut their doors when God’s hand gets too near.
It’s not a bad life. Guaranteed a place in heaven, better fed than most on earth.
The monks are God’s field hands. It’s not for Jan, the humble life.