The Enchantress of Florence (27 page)

And before anybody could stop them, before anybody could warn them that they had to block their ears with mud before attempting such a thing, the two ladies had run over to the mass of impossible plants and commenced to uproot them. “The screaming,” Ago shrieked, with much flapping of incompetent hands. “Stop, stop! It will drive us all mad! Or deaf! Or else we’ll all be…”
Dead,
he was going to say, but the two ladies were looking at him with puzzled expressions on their faces, with an uprooted mandrake in each hand, and there was no deadly scream to be heard. “It is poisonous if taken in excess, of course,” Qara Köz said reflectively, “but there’s no need to be afraid.” When they saw that they were in the presence of women for whom the mandrake root would give up its life without protest the two men marveled mightily. “Well, just don’t use it on me,” Ago blustered, trying to cover up his fear of a few moments earlier, “or I’ll just have to be in love with you forever, or at least until one of us dies.” Then he blushed brightly, the redness going all the way down the collar of his shirt and emerging from his sleeves to change the color of his hands as well; which went to show, of course, that he was already hopelessly and forever amorous. No occult plant’s power was necessary to ensure his love.

By the time Argalia and the Swiss giants returned to escort Qara Köz to her new home in the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero, the entire village of Sant’Andrea in Percussina had fallen under her spell, down to the last man, woman, and child. Even the hens seemed happier, and were certainly laying more eggs. The princess did nothing, by all accounts, to encourage the growth of this adoration; yet it grew. During the six days of her sojourn at the Machiavelli home, she walked in the woods with the Mirror, she read poetry in a variety of languages, she met and befriended the children of the household, and was not above offering to help in the kitchen, an offer which Marietta refused. In the evenings she took pleasure in sitting with il Machia in his library and allowing Niccolò to read to her divers passages from the works of Pico della Mirandola and Dante Alighieri, and also many cantos from the epic poem
Orlando in Love,
by Matteo Boiardo of Scandiano. “Ah,” she cried as she learned of Boiardo’s heroine’s many vicissitudes, “poor Angelica! So many pursuers, so little power with which to resist them, or to impose her own will upon them all.”

In the meanwhile the village as one person began to sing her praises. The woodcutter Gaglioffo no longer crudely referred to Qara Köz and the Mirror as “witches” to “fuck” and spoke of them instead with a wide-eyed, deferential awe that plainly did not permit him even to dream of having carnal relations with the great ladies. The Frosino brothers, the village gallants, daringly declared that they were suitors for her hand, it being unclear whether she and Argalia the Turk were actually legally married—and of course if that proved to be the case then the two millers conceded that they would not challenge his rights in the matter—but on the chance that she was single they were definitely interested, and had even agreed, in the interests of brotherly love, that they would be prepared to share her and her lady-in-waiting between them, turn and turn about. Nobody else was quite as foolish as Frosino Uno and Due, but the general opinion of Qara Köz was high, and women as well as men declared themselves “enchanted.”

But if this was sorcery it was of the most benign kind. All Florentines were conversant with the rapacious procedures of the dark enchantresses of the period, their invocations of demons to force chaste men to engage in libidinous acts, their use of effigies and pins to torment their enemies, their ability to make good men abandon their home and work, just to be their willing slaves. In the household of il Machia, however, neither Qara Köz nor her lady-in-waiting gave any indication of practicing the black arts, or, at least, for some reason those indications they did give were not considered problematic. Witches liked wandering in woods, everybody knew that, but the sylvan perambulations of Qara Köz and the Mirror were, in the opinion of the good people of Percussina, no more than “charming.” The incident of the mandrake bed did not become widely known, and, strangely enough, il Machia never found it again, nor were the plants uprooted by the two ladies ever displayed by them, so that it was easy for Niccolò and Ago to doubt whether the incident had ever happened.

Witches were widely held to possess strong Sapphic inclinations, but nobody, not even Marietta Corsini, was at all perturbed by the two ladies’ decision to share a bed. “Why, it’s only for companionship,” Marietta told her husband in a sluggish voice, and he nodded heavily, as if under the soporific influence of an excess of afternoon wine. As for the celebrated enthusiasm of witches for copulating with the Devil, why, there were simply no devils to be found in Percussina, and none rose up from the inferno to cackle in fireplaces or to sit like gargoyles on the roofs of the tavern or the church. It was an age of witch-hunts and in the courts of the city women were heard confessing to dire deeds, of capturing the hearts and minds of good citizens by the use of wine, frankincense, menses, and water drunk from the skulls of the dead. But while it was true that everyone in Percussina was in love with the Princess Qara Köz, the adoration she inspired—except, perhaps, in the highly sexed Frosino twins—was entirely chaste. Not even Ago Vespucci, the romantic moon-calf who would love her, as he had said, “until one of them was dead,” at that time entertained any thoughts of becoming her carnal lover. To worship her was delightful enough.

Those who afterward charted and analyzed the career of the enchantress of Florence, most notably Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola, the great philosopher Giovanni’s nephew and the author of
La strega ovvero degli inganni dei demoni
(“The Witch, or the Deceptions of Demons”), concluded that the miasma of approval which Qara Köz created around Percussina, and which quickly spread throughout the neighborhood, across San Casciano and Val di Pesa, Impruneta and Bibbione, Faltignano and Spedaletto, had been the product of a deliberate enchantment of immense potency, its purpose being to test her powers—those same powers she subsequently proceeded to use to such remarkable effect in and upon the city of Florence itself—and to smooth her entry into what might otherwise have been hostile surroundings. Gian Francesco records that when Argalia the Turk returned with the Swiss giants he found a substantial crowd gathered outside the Machiavelli residence, as if a miracle had occurred, as if the Madonna had materialized in Percussina and everyone had assembled to see her. And when Qara Köz and the Mirror emerged from the house, arrayed in their finest brocades and jewels, the assembled populace actually fell to its knees, seemingly asking for her benediction; which, without words, with a smile and a gently raised arm, she gave them. Then she was gone, and Marietta Corsini, as if awaking from a dream, yelled at the people trampling on her property to be off about their business. In the words of Gian Francesco, “the rustics came to their senses and were amazed to discover where they found themselves. Scratching their heads in wonder, they returned to their homes, fields, mills, woods, and kilns.”

Andrea Alciato, who believed that witches and their adherents should be treated with herbal remedies, ascribed the mysterious “Percussina event” to the locals’ bad eating habits, which rendered them vulnerable to fantasies and hallucinations, while Bartolomeo Spina, author of
De Strigibus,
written a decade after these manifestations, went so far as to suggest that Qara Köz might have whipped up the villagers into a Satanic frenzy and led them in a large-scale, orgiastic Black Mass, a defamatory supposition for which there is no evidence whatsoever in the historical records of the time.

The entry into Florence of the new
condottiere
of the city and commander of the Florentine militia, Antonino Argalia, called “the Turk,” was greeted by the excessive, hedonistic celebrations for which the city was renowned. A wooden castle was constructed in the Piazza della Signoria, and a mock-siege was staged, with one hundred men defending the edifice and three hundred attacking it. Nobody wore armor, and they fought so ferociously, stabbing one another with lances and hurling unbaked bricks at one another’s heads, that many of the actors had to go to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where some of them unfortunately died. There was also a bull-hunt in the Piazza, and the bulls, too, sent many revelers to the hospital. Two lions were released to hunt a black stallion, but the horse responded so nobly to the first lion’s attack, kicking him hard all the way from outside the Mercantantia, the home of the Tribunal of the Merchants’ Guild, to the center of the Piazza, that the king of the beasts ran away and hid in a shadowed corner of the square, and after that neither lion was prepared to rejoin the affray. This was interpreted as a grand omen, the horse being Florence, obviously, and the lions her foes from France, Milan, or any other damnable place.

After these preliminaries the procession entered the city. Eight
’dfici,
or platforms on wheels, came first, with actors upon them portraying scenes from the victories of the great warrior of antiquity, Marcus Furius Camillus, Censor and Dictator, the so-called Second Founder of Rome, depicting the many prisoners he had taken at the siege of Veii almost two thousand years ago, and suggesting how rich had been the spoils of war, weaponry and clothing and silver. And then there were men singing and dancing down the streets, and four caparisoned squadrons of men-at-arms, with their lances at the ready. (The Swiss giants, Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan, had been put in charge of pike training, for all the world feared the Swiss infantry’s skill with pikes, and the improvement of the militia’s lancework even after one or two preliminary training sessions was already plain for all to see.) Finally, Argalia entered through the great gate, flanked by the four Swiss gossips, with Konstantin the Serb immediately behind, riding between the two foreign ladies, and then the hundred Janissaries whose appearance struck terror into the hearts of all who saw them.
Now our city is safe,
the cry went up,
for our invincible protectors are come.
That was the name—
Invincibles
—that stuck to the new guardians of the city. Duke Giuliano, waving from the balcony of the Palazzo Vecchio, seemed pleased that his appointment had gone down so well with the public; by contrast Lorenzo, his nephew, was sullen and resentful. Argalia, looking up at the two Medici potentates, understood that the younger one would need careful watching.

Duke Giuliano at once recognized Qara Köz as the woman in the magic mirror, the object of his incipient obsession, and his heart leapt for joy. Lorenzo de’ Medici saw her too, and in his concupiscent heart at once began to dream of possessing her. As for Argalia, he knew the dangers of bringing his beloved into the city so flamboyantly, right under the nose of the Duke whose namesake his uncle had shamelessly stolen the city’s previous great beauty from her husband, Horned Marco Vespucci, whose selfhood had been so eroded by her loss that when she died he sent all her clothes and all the paintings of her he possessed across to the Palazzo Medici so that the Duke could have what remained of her, after which he went down to the Bridge of the Graces and hanged himself. But Argalia was not the suicidal type and calculated that the Duke would not wish to antagonize the military strongman whom he had only just appointed and whose entry to the city he was at this moment celebrating. “And if he does try to take her from me,” Argalia thought, “he’ll find me waiting with all my men, and to capture her against that kind of opposition he’ll have to be a Hercules or Mars, which, as anyone can see, this sensitive soul is not.”

In the meantime, he was happy to show her off.

As the crowds caught sight of Qara Köz a whisper began to spread through the city, becoming a murmur that had the effect of hushing all the riotous sounds of the day, so that by the time Argalia and the ladies arrived at the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero an extraordinary silence had fallen, as the people of Florence contemplated the arrival in their midst of physical perfection, a dark beauty to fill the hole left in their hearts by Simonetta Vespucci’s death. Within moments of her coming she had been taken to the city’s heart as its special face, its new symbol of itself, the incarnation in human form of that unsurpassable loveliness which the city itself possessed. The Dark Lady of Florence: poets reached for their pens, artists for their brushes, sculptors for their chisels. The common people, the noisiest and most rambunctious forty thousand souls in all Italy, honored her in their own fashion, by becoming still and silent as she passed. As a result everyone heard what happened when Duke Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici met Argalia’s party at the entrance to their new four-story home, three high arched doorways in a façade of
pietra forte.
Above the doorway, in the center of the façade, was the coat of arms of the Cocchi del Nero family, which had lately fallen on hard times and sold the place to the Medici. It was the greatest architectural masterpiece on that street of masterpieces, which also boasted the grand residences of some of the city’s oldest families, the Soldanieri, the Monaldi, the Bostichi, the Cosi, the Bensi, the Bartolini, the Cambi, the Arnoldi, and the Davizzi. Duke Giuliano wanted to make clear to Argalia and to everyone else exactly how generous he was being, and chose to do so by addressing his remarks, with many flourishes and even a little bow, not to Argalia but to Qara Köz.