Chapter 11 The Bishop #2
And the wandering friars’ humility puts the abbey monks to shame.
It’s its own kind of pride, he thinks, humility.
Take the beguines, those self-righteous burrs beneath his saddle.
They’re as bad as spring mushrooms, popping up all over Europe, from Florence to Frankfurt.
Groups of women—the bishop shudders—unsupervised women, who form their own communes and make their own living and won’t answer to the Church.
They refuse to operate under papal rule.
What’s worse, they’re in bed with the friars, and his own brother ministers to the largest begijnhof in Brugge.
They multiply like rabbits, those holier-than-thou women who won’t answer to him.
There are more beguine colonies in Flanders than anywhere else.
Like lepers, he thinks. They ought to wear bells.
He’s surprised the pope hasn’t banned them.
He supposes Boniface already has his hands full of radicals who complain the Church is corrupt and heretics who claim it’s wrong.
Jan stretches and walks to the window looking over the cathedral square.
His blue and gold flags stand at stiff attention, announcing his dominion.
Even the secular church that he leads, all the parishes across Tournai, well, that used to be easier, too.
It’s unfortunate how shorthanded they are.
The people complain his priests are barely literate, which is true enough, but it never used to bother anyone.
Few fathers read Latin, fewer still can recite the hours.
Water on the forehead, dirt on the coffin.
These are the services they provide, for a fee.
He imagines the clink of coins in the offertory, how they slide and jostle as they gather from village to town, gathering tributaries flowing toward his cathedral.
These are streams of copper, not rivers of silver.
The parishioners complain that the required tithes are too high.
But they aren’t enough for the Church. Rome requires gold.
If only he were in Rome. All Jan needs is one more promotion, and he could join the ranks of the curia as a cardinal and spend his time choosing the next pope and sampling the wines.
He hears the Roman vineyards are extraordinary.
To be promoted, he needs the favor of the seated pope.
Money would help, but he doesn’t have it. He has other ideas, though.
A click of heels on the stone, a pause at the door, a cough. Without looking over his shoulder, Jan says, “Approach, Willems.”
Jan spotted Willems in a company of traveling players in the square outside the cathedral some years ago.
It was a chill November day and his assistant had forgotten the furs.
Jan had seen the annual mystery plays so many times that he could recite the lines of God and Lucifer and every good and evil angel.
He was required to give his annual blessing.
That year’s God was tiresome, overacting and heavy-handed.
Jan had half a notion to sweep up onto the wagon stage and banish God before he could exile Lucifer to hell. But he was too late.
“In mischief and menace ever shalt thou abide, in bitter burning fire, in pain ever to be put.” God’s grimace was comical, reaching for the back of the crowd.
But Lucifer, a dark-haired actor dressed in black, skin so ghostly pale, delivered his reply with subtle defiance and despair: “Now I am a devil full dark, that was an angel bright.”
I could use a man like that, thought Jan.
As the troupe packed the wagons for Antwerp, Jan sent for Lucifer.
“I need someone,” he told Willems, “to be my eyes and ears in the market. Someone who doesn’t call too much attention to himself, but who can deliver a chill to those who require”—he cleared his throat—“chilling.”
Willems approaches through the shadowy hall with feline grace. Cloaked in black livery with the bishop’s small golden crest on his shoulder, the man retains something of hell about him. It’s most satisfying. Willems bows beautifully. “Your Grace?”
“Willems.” He does not need to be delicate with Willems, not after all these years.
Their motives are aligned; Willems will come with him.
The bishop will enjoy the loose Roman women.
He pictures them ripe and soft as olives for the plucking.
His servant will enjoy the—well, Jan doesn’t really know what Willems prefers.
Some mysteries are best left untouched. Jan pinches the bridge of his nose.
“I’ve been contemplating the pope’s interests. The materials you apprehended.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” There is a glint in Willems’s eye.
He’s been quietly purchasing contraband from back stalls in the market, the sort of goods slid behind curtains or exchanged under bridges.
Yesterday, Willems produced several sheets of cheap parchment, set them on the table and stepped back quickly, fingers spread, as if even the devil found them godless.
The bishop looked at his man, normally so cool, then down at the pages.
Then he looked more closely. They were lettered in Dutch, the letters slanted, scrawled in haste, which was unremarkable enough—until he realized he was reading a psalm.
In Dutch. Right there, on the page, in common language. The bishop sat up.
“Where did you get this?” Rome abhorred translations.
Not without reason, the pope had written, did it please Almighty God that Holy Scripture should be secret.
It took years of training to interpret the Bible.
It was one thing to allow people their psalters and books of hours; those were carefully curated, and the people only half understood the Latin anyway.
It would be another thing entirely to give them free access to the entire Bible in their mother tongue.
People would start reading scripture on their own, without the supervision of a priest. The pope has clearly forbidden these occultis conventiculis, hidden gatherings in which people treat gospel like it was written for them.
Rome wants to strangle this movement in its cradle.
It didn’t end well for the translators in southern France and eastern Germany.
“I thought you should know,” Willems had said. “These are circulating in the Markt.”
“There are more?”
“New ones every week, apparently. And they’re being copied.”
This is what comes from whipping up devotion.
It’s the fault of men like Lukas who plant radical ideas.
He doesn’t think the friars are actually doing the translations—they live literally hand to mouth, they have no means—but they provoke unnatural desires in his people, insinuating that they, themselves, can know God. Good luck with that.
Jan has enough experience of God to know he is absentee, hardly paying attention.
His people have been kept safe from any real knowledge of God—until now, happy enough to cross themselves at Mass, never mind they don’t understand the words.
Lately devotion has been spreading like wildfire.
He shudders. The grotesqueries that people come up with.
Now they treat God as their mother or as a maiden in a castle.
They’re so full of longing. It horrifies him.
It was better when they were full of fear.
Not that the bishop fears him. God is, to the bishop, a benevolent uncle who has left a bequest and disappeared; the rituals must be observed, but he has withdrawn his gaze.
The bishop imagines an elderly God, nodding asleep at the banquet, his beard in the soup.
But his people want a young God, a handsome God. They demand a courtship with God, they want God to be their lover. They want to read scripture as if psalms were love letters.
Tracts like these could get him in trouble, if Rome were to learn of Dutch scripture circulating in his diocese.
He must quash this quickly. He pauses. He’s not the son of a banker for nothing; he can calculate his interests here.
Is there a way to flip this to his advantage?
He turns back to the window and twists his ring, letting his eyes travel beyond his fluttering flags to the Lakenhalle tower.
He adds up all the illegal parchment being passed hand to hand.
What a spectacular bonfire it would make.
No people, mind you. They don’t have to be fanatic about it.
Just heresy in print. In Lombardy, they burned pages of Saint Peter in French; in Metz, they burned Saint Paul in German.
He heard those bishops were promoted. What’s to stop him from building a bonfire in Brugge large enough to be seen from Rome?
“Willems, gather the Dutch scripture. Quietly. And find out who the translator is.”