3
The Babylonian Captive
The coronation pageant descended the Capitoline and traveled the Via Sacra to the palazzo by the Castel Sant'Angelo,[1] where the Ponte women, the scribe, the barber's widow, the saddler, pruner, and goldsmith perhaps all paused to stare, and then it bridged the Tiber. The street lined with ancient tombs focused on the basilica of St. Peter, whose entrance faced east to greet the rising sun, designed so during the reign of Constantine to eclipse the Roman cult of solar Apollo with homage to the light of Christ.[2] The processional approach to the basilica was itself a triumphal route, as delineated architecturally by its monumental triple gateway and spacious atrium. Petrarch crossed the courtyard, passed the ablutionary font, and entered the royal door leading to the symbolic throne of God. He strode the long nave between twenty-two massive columns, all spoils of war, and beneath a double tier of frescoes depicting Old Testament episodes. Once in the transept, flooded with sun through huge windows and oculi, he approached the altar and hung his laurel there. The gesture repeated the traditional vernal offering of the first fruits, as he said.[3] In pentimento it recalled the fate of the wasted instrument of the desolate psalmist who refused to sing hymns in an unclean land:
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
(Ps. 137:1–2)
Petrarch hung his laurel on an abandoned altar. The See of Peter was vacant, its pope exiled in a parallel "Babylonian captivity" of the Church.
In a city teeming with processions, the most triumphal had been those marking papal coronations. The inaugurated pope, flanked by a
subdeacon with a ceremonial cloth and a servant with an umbrella, and preceded by sixteen waves of celebrants, from a caparisoned horse to the cardinals, marched from the Vatican to the Lateran, symbolically uniting the See of the Church with the See of the world. Along the route he was cheered by the faithful, who were incensed profusely and showered with coins in remembrance of Peter's reply to the paralytic beggar, "I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have" (Acts 3:6a).[4] Whether the procession of the poet rivaled that of the pope is unknown, but Petrarch's march to the Vatican had a definite papal context and significance. His vatic vocation was the restoration of the papacy to Rome for the pacification of Italy.
The term of the papacy in exile at Avignon (1305–78) virtually coincided with the span of Petrarch's life (1304–74). He witnessed its entrenchment from the age of eight when in 1312 his father, an exiled Florentine notary, settled his family with other Italian expatriates in Carpentras, a town about fifteen miles distant. In Petrarch's infancy, Clement V (1305–14), pressured by demands of the French crown for resumption of the lawsuit against his predecessor and for suppression of the Templars, and further debilitated by illness, had failed to achieve his professed intentions of returning to Rome. Late in the summer of 1308 he established court provisionally at Avignon. As the first of the exiled popes, he initiated a centralization of the Church through the selection of bishops and the granting of benefices, and he indulged the abuses of nepotism, bribery, and taxation. At his death violence erupted in Carpentras, where the Curia was quartered. As an inhabitant of the town, Petrarch must have known the brawls between the Italian nationals employed at the papal court and those of the Gascon faction, whose deaths resulted in retaliation. The French murdered Italians, burned and looted in the town, and in a mass rally in the square threatened death to the Italian cardinals then in conclave. Just after the election of John XXII (1316–34), Petrarch departed for legal studies in Montpelier, and later in Bologna. He quit the scene of a court disrupted by vacancy, a treasury depleted by extravagance, and an office compromised by the political intrigues of the French and threatened by the wars of the Italians and the Turks. On his return in 1326 at the death of his father, he encountered a papal power consolidated through the astute administration of finances and government and through the brutal intimidation of a revived Inquisition. Prompted by a diminished inheritance, Petrarch himself soon accepted the tonsure and perhaps
even minor orders. He entered the service of Giovanni Cardinal Colonna in 1330, then traveled to Paris, the Lowlands, the Rhine valley, and to Rome. In 1337 Petrarch returned to the vicinity of Avignon. The modest residence he purchased at Vaucluse contrasted with the palatial fortress the successor to the papacy, Benedict XII (1334–42), was constructing. Despite necessary and laudable reforms of the court and clergy, and decent personal conduct, this inquisitor and polemicist of a pope was determined, or resigned, to stay. Petrarch's own literary leisure there was interrupted in 1341 by the honor of the laurel, after which ceremony he lingered in Italy until political fortunes impelled his return to Provence in the spring of 1342. Those fortunes may be recorded by the letter maligning the reputation of a dying pope that is the first entry in Petrarch's Liber sine nomine, an epistolary execration of the Avignon papacy.
Benedict's successor, Clement VI (1342–52), restored papal benefices and extravagant expenditures, although he evidenced a fine diplomacy and a genuine charity, especially during the great pestilence of 1348. Although Petrarch twice pleaded with him to return to Italy, Clement built a sizeable addition to the palace. The poet protested that "the pope has deserted his proper See (against nature I do believe), and strives to act the head of the world forgetful of the Lateran and Sylvester." When missions to Italy resulted in the lucrative offer of a bishopric and secretariat, Petrarch declined these rewards for his service. It was during this period that he composed his Babylonian sonnets. At the opportunity in 1347 of being installed in a canonry in Parma, however, he departed again for Italy, where after an unsatisfactory appointment he traveled extensively. In the summer of 1351, having lived intermittently in the shadow of the Avignon papacy for about fifteen years, Petrarch returned there decisively. He had been summoned by two cardinals, he said, to a papal audience on an undisclosed topic. The enticement was likely a cardinalate. When Petrarch was again only offered a papal secretariate at an episcopal rank, he refused it. Two years later he left Avignon, this time forever.[5]
Petrarch crossed the Alps to settle in northern Italy; the papacy remained. Innocent VI (1352–62), a zealous reformer but inept diplomat, contended with rebellious friars, depleted coffers, mercenaries and marauders, and yet another plague. Urban V (1362–70) was a monk on the throne, observing the Benedictine rule strictly but liberally patronizing scholarship and art. Petrarch died halfway through the pontificate of his successor Gregory XI (137–78), aware of the
reforming impulse that had revived the Inquisition but not of that which restored the papacy to Rome.[6]
It was an act Petrarch had persistently implored. As early as the pontificate of Benedict XII he composed a metric epistle in which Rome, personified as a distraught matron weeping amid the ruins of her honor, begged for the return of her negligent spouse, the pope. As a widow Rome also importuned his successor, Clement VI.[7] Both poems imitated the first of the biblical Lamentations, a national dirge composed just after the fall of Jerusalem into Babylonian Captivity.[8] The device had been introduced into Italian poetry by Jacopone da Todi, who moralistically portrayed the Church as an abandoned, widowed matron, lamenting her bereavement of her true sons and bewailing her bastards, who earned her the epithet of "whore."[9] Dante politicized the figure as Rome the weeping widow who begged Caesar to return.[10] By the pontificate of Urban VI, an elderly Petrarch abandoned the personification for a bold plea in the name of Christ himself. Prophetically he assailed the pope as the very vicar on earth of "the sun of righteousness" and demanded justice. By this title Petrarch appealed to the ancient belief in the sun as the god of law and justice who observes everything.[11] The poetic inspiration the solar rays symbolized in his verse secured its end in justice, and the justice Petrarch required of the Apolline Christ and his vicar was a Roman papacy. "I believe that Christ Jesus our Lord is beginning to have mercy on his faithful, and I think he wills to impose an end to the evil which we have seen for these many years," he wrote the pope concerning the Avignon exile. "He wills, on behalf of the inauguration of the golden age, to recall his Church, which he has long allowed to wander on account of the sins of men, to its ancient and proper seats and to the state of its pristine faith."[12] Thus, like the oracles of old, spoke Petrarch the divine will.
His concentration on Rome was fostered by a patriotism that most famously allied him with the ill-starred revolution of Cola di Rienzo, but that was also expressed constantly in fervent literature and diplomatic mission. This patriotism had as its object the salutation of the triumphal risen Christ, which Petrarch echoed in poetry and in person: "Peace be with you."[13] The laurel was thus his fitting emblem, for symbolically it was a harbinger of peace, and to hold its branch between enemy armies was a token of the cessation of hostilities.[14] Petrarch imagined an Italy purged of strife and of vice and reunited under the Roman aegis. The vessel of this restoration he believed especially to be that son of an innkeeper whose fascination with monumental inscrip-
tions and ancient histories had inspired the revival of an idealized Rome as in the Augustan peace, Cola di Rienzo. His eloquence, which so impressed Petrarch, roused the Roman populace to such enthusiasm that he was on 20 May 1347 proclaimed master of that city. An exultant Petrarch hailed him as a liberator in the very image of Scipio and panegyrically declared that liberty was at hand. He invented a waking dream of Cola surrounded by masses of brave men in the center of the world on a peak that pierced the skies. Illumined by the sun, he was elevated on a shining throne so resplendent that he rivaled Apollo. The meaning of this marvel, Petrarch decided, was that the liberator was awaiting his fortune. As that fortune declined the poet shifted his own attitude toward the revolution from exultation to defense to rebuke to grief.[15] Yet this was only the most egregious episode of his patriotism, and however Petrarch varied that investment of hope, whether in Robert of Naples, Cola di Rienzo, Charles IV, this pope or that, he persisted in his loyalty to Rome. No matter how disheveled, neglected, and unruly it had become, it was still a regal city, "the see of the true faith, the foundation of the church and the empire of the world."[16] No phrase, he stated, struck a more responsive chord in the human heart than "the Roman republic."[17] The glorification of Rome he understood and undertook as his personal duty, an office conferred upon him at his coronation. Acknowledging his debt, he wrote, "She has bestowed on me the remarkable privilege of being called a citizen, perhaps hoping that I would not be the last defendant of her name and of her diminishing fame in these times." In response he continued, "When her welfare is involved, it is not only shameful, but inhuman and ungrateful, for me to remain silent."[18]
Petrarch's praise of Rome was established not only in his citizenship but also in his office as "historian," a title conferred at his coronation. "For what else is all history," he wrote, "other than the praise of Rome?"[19] The rules for the praise of cities formulated in the rhetoric of late antiquity, that is, the description of the site and its excellences, were extended in medieval practice to glorify its martyrs and confessors, prelates and theologians.[20] In an epistolary tour of Rome, Petrarch conventionally catalogued the marvels of the city by succeeding the pagan ruins with Christian sites. The Christian examples did not supplant the pagan ones, however, although the martyrdom of Agnes religiously surpassed that of Virginia. The Roman exploits whose memory their monuments evoked maintained their own integrity. Their func-
tion in Petrarch's rhetorical reminiscence was precisely monumental: to be impressive: to evoke, to elevate, to excite the mind and tongue, as he himself stated, so that deeds both base and noble might be considered and then judged. The aim of his peripatetic habit amid the ruins was virtue, and in this cause Roman truths might be exemplary of Christian ones.[21] As he reinforced this belief in another letter, "No eloquence could express how highly I esteem those glorious remnants of the queen city, those magnificent ruins and the many impressive signs of her virtue that afford light and point the way for those who have entered upon either the heavenly or the earthly journey."[22] Petrarch defined his vatic vocation as the service of the public morality, and he believed that this civic virtue was to be achieved through the same Apolline wisdom that inspired his personal conversion: self-knowledge.[23] As he explained his lady laurel: "She alone is a sun, not merely for my eyes, but for the blind world, which does not care for virtue."[24] And so, climaxing his epistolary praise of Rome, he lamented: "Today who are more ignorant about Roman affairs than Roman citizens? Sadly do I say that nowhere is Rome less known than in Rome. I do not deplore only the ignorance involved (although what is worse than ignorance?) but the disappearance and exile of many virtues. For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?"[25] As Petrarch assayed his poetic mission, it was to enlighten Rome with such self-knowledge as to elevate it from depravity.
If Love or Death does not cut short the new cloth that now I prepare to weave, and if I loose myself from the tenacious birdlime while I join one truth with the other,
I shall perhaps make a work so double between the style of the moderns and ancient speech that (fearfully I dare to say it) you will hear the noise of it even as far as Rome.[26]
His exaltation of Rome was religious in import. In an eloquent letter to Cola di Rienzo and the Roman populace on the initial victory of the revolution and the promulgation of the constitution, Petrarch praised Rome as not merely a secular capital but a sacred site. It was God, he declared, who willed Rome to be the supreme head of the world. Thanksgiving was to be rendered on that occasion "to God who has not yet forgotten his most Holy City, and could no longer behold enchained in slavery her in whom he placed the empire of the world."[27] The divine ordination of Rome had been declared by many
signs, by martial glory and by preeminent virtue.[28] This favor assured its citizens that, however fickle fortune might prove in debasing the city. "what she will certainly never be able to bring about is the establishment of the Roman empire in any other place than Rome, for as soon as it is found elsewhere it will cease to be Roman."[29] Petrarch subscribed to the pagan myth of an eternal and sacred Rome, as baptized by the enrollment of Christ in the census of Augustus and as hallowed by the blood of martyrs, which had been a conventional apology for its providential mission since its foundation.[30] Contemporaries of Petrarch, notably Dante,[31] also revered Rome as the mistress of the church and the world. The divine depository of imperial, papal, and communal ideals, Rome grounded Latin civilization and Christian faith. For Petrarch the city was not vaguely or vastly sacred, however, but endowed with specifically Christian meaning. It was Christ who had selected Rome as the see of his successors, and who had established it as the temporal head of the world and the foundation of religion. It was thus to Christ that Petrarch looked for compassion on the sacred city, a once noble matron now trampled in the dust and stricken down by her own sons even as she attempted to rise.[32] The papal imprisonment of Cola di Rienzo at Avignon in 1352 occasioned this cry to him: "What are you doing, oh Christ, infallible and perfect judge? Where are your eyes with which you usually dispel the shadows of human misery? Why do you turn them away? Why do they not flash out twin balls of fire to destroy this shameful trial?"[33] Yet this appeal to the very "sun of righteousness" availed no more than that to his vicar, and the Apolline light, clouded by the smoke of human vice, sank into an abysmal horizon.
It was as oppressed by evil and terrified by the threats of worse ill, Petrarch stated, "that I have entered this madness and with hard cares rave to you."[34] The gross social disorder that confuted the blessed oracles of peace once uttered by Hebrew and Roman prophets alike now impelled him to compose oracles of malediction. The yokes, chains, and nets of love that bound him to the lady of his vernacular verse were symbols of the captivity of an entire people. His miserable exile from her sweet abodes[35] was a conceit for the exile of the papacy from Rome. "Scattered rhymes" he titled his verse, a fitting summons to dispersed citizens. His vatic vocation was nowhere more stridently evident than in the doom he pronounced against the new Babylon, the Avignon papacy that was obstructing his ideal of a Roman peace.
Petrarch identified the exiled papal court as "the western Babylon (than which the sun shines on nothing more deformed)," exceeding in reputation the eponymous cities of Egypt and Assyria.[36] He referred by "Egypt" to the site between Memphis and On (Heliopolis) at the vertex of the Nile delta on the right bank opposite the pyramids of Gizeh. The strategic fortress of a Roman legion during the early empire, it became the foundation of Cairo following the Muslim invasion. Although classical geography reported its origins as a colony settled by Babylonians in revolt from their conscripted labors,[37] Petrarch identified its founder as Cambyses, the mad son of Cyrus, who murdered his brother, married his sisters, and profaned religion and custom alike.[38] By "Assyria," the latter and more ancient site, Petrarch indicated the celebrated capital of Babylonia, the fertile area of lower Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. From the beginning of history through the Creek incursions of the fifth century B.C., the civilizations of western Asia had focused their trade routes on this city, situated on the main highway between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Flourishing in the eighteenth century B.C. under the law of Hammurabi, it achieved the apex of its power and culture more than a millennium later under the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar. It was he who in a second siege devastated Jerusalem and deported most of the noble citizens of Judah into the "Babylonian Captivity" of Israel.[39] This decisive event terminated the culture and conduct of a small center of government, the Davidic dynasty, which had functioned with its officials, priests, and citizens within the political compass of that great oriental power, Babylon. Deprived of the freedom to occupy its promised land and to govern its independent institutions, the Israelite nation lamented with the hostage prophet Jeremiah, "Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens" (Jer. 5:2).[40] This exilic age, memorialized in the apocalyptic literature of the priest and prophet Ezekiel and in the oracles of Deutero-Isaiah, became a prototype for Christian political and social bondage. It furnished Petrarch with the poetic and historic symbol for his own prophetic protest.
Medieval knowledge of Babylon was derived from the itinerary of Benjamin ben Jonah, who late in the twelfth century reported that the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's once splendid palace were now inhabited by snakes and scorpions. Yet the synagogue of Ezekiel with his sepulchre was still a house of prayer for Mohammedans and Jews. A perpetual light burned over the sanctuary, and had reputedly done so
since the day the prophet himself had lit it. The traveler also reported sighting the foundation of the tower of Babel.[41] It was thus that the city had first been noted in scripture, as Babel, in the kingdom of the mighty hunter Nimrod, a descendant of Noah (Gen. 10:10).[42] As climaxing the prehistory of mankind, the Yahwist tradition narrated the etiological legend of the tower by relating the Hebrew bll, "to confound," with the Akkadian bâbilu .[43] The origin of different languages was ascribed to Yahweh's assertion of sovereignty by confounding the construction of a ziggurat (Gen. 11:1–9). With the fall of jerusalem (2 Kings 24:10–17, 2 Chron. 36:10), Babylon attained notoriety. For its arrogance it was interpreted by the prophets as the instrument of God's vengeance against Israel. Yet for its arrogance it was also interpreted as the victim of his pity for Israel.
The proverbial fertility of Babylon, which had so impressed classical travelers,[44] was debased in prophetic and apocalyptic scripture to the metaphor dominating Petrarch's own depiction, that of harlotry. The rhetorical figure derived from the allegories of Ezekiel on Jerusalem that adopted prostitution as a symbol of its cultic apostasy and of its political alliance with foreign nations. The prophet accused Jerusalem of fornication in the corporate personality of the whore. This symbolized its sin of trusting in its famed beauty, and of thus converting its ornaments into idols, its harvests and even its children into sacrifices. By this device Ezekiel accused Jerusalem of engaging in alien rituals of sacred prostitution and of rendering fees in tribute to foreign powers. For this apostasy, he pronounced, the husband Yahweh, who had once betrothed and cherished Jerusalem, would now allow his imperious whore to be stripped naked before her lovers, tried for adultery and murder, and released to the mob for justice: to be stoned to death and then hacked to pieces (Ezek. 16:15–63). The prophet attributed this wanton apostasy to the alliances of Jerusalem and Judah with the nations, especially with Babylon and Egypt, in breach of Israel's covenant with Yahweh. It was for this infatuation and defilement with aliens that Yahweh delivered Israel over to her lovers, who ravished, mutilated, and murdered her, so that she might never again play the seductress (Ezek. 23:1–49).[45]
In the New Testament, however, the author of Revelation reversed the imputation of this metaphor of harlotry from Jerusalem to Babylon (Rev. 17:1–19:10). As the new Jerusalem the Christian church was being persecuted by the new Babylon, "the great city which has do-
minion over the kings of the earth" (Rev. 17:18), that is, Rome. Its fornication was its consort with subject nations, as involving suzerainty, idolatry, and vice, all abominations to Christian believers.
Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who is seated upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and with the wine of whose fornication the dwellers on earth have become drunk." And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of blasphemous names, and it had seven heads and seven horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: "Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth's abominations." And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.
(Rev. 17:1–6)[46]
This figure prevailed in Christian poetry, as in the paraphrase of Paulinus of Nola on Ps. 137 (136 Vg.), "By the waters of Babylon." For persecuting the Church in a Babylonian manner, the poet wished the offspring of Rome to be dashed to death on the rock of Christ. He also enjoined the Christian remnant to commit to the same fate its own infantile vices of the flesh.[47] In a commentary on the same psalm, which Petrarch cited as exemplary,[48] Augustine portrayed the Christian as wandering because of sin between two cities, Jerusalem, or the vision of everlasting peace, and Babylon, or the confusion of worldly peace. The waters of Babylon he interpreted as temporal pleasures lapping the roots of barren trees, on which the Christian should mournfully hang up his instruments of salvation, scripture, the divine commandments and promises, and eschatological meditation. Evil desires, the children of Babylon, were again to be dashed against the rock of Christ. He exhorted:
Brethren, do not cease devoting yourself to the instruments; sing to one another songs of Sion. As you have readily heard, so readily do what you have heard, if you do not wish to be willows of Babylon, fed by its streams and bearing no fruit. But sigh for the heavenly Jerusalem. What your hope precedes, let your life follow: there we will be with Christ. Christ is as a head to us, for he governs us from above. He will embrace us to himself in that city where we will be equal to the angels of God. We should not dare to suppose this concerning ourselves unless Truth
had promised it. Contemplate this, therefore, brethren; think upon it day and night.[49]
Heeding this advice, Petrarch appropriated the antithesis of these heavenly and earthly cities to discourse on spiritual conflict.[50] More notably, he decided that the "prostitution" of the papal court at Avignon, or Jerusalem in exiled consort with a foreign nation, demanded its shocking equation with Babylon. And thus he pronounced:
Fountain of sorrow, dwelling of wrath, school of errors, and temple of heresy, once Rome, now false wicked Babylon, for whom there is so much weeping and sighing:
O foundry of deceits, cruel prison where good dies and evil is created and nourished, a hell for the living: it will be a great miracle if Christ does not finally show his anger against you.
Founded in chaste and humble poverty, against your founders you lift your horns, you shameless whore! And where have you placed your hopes?
In your adulterers, in your ill-gotten riches that are so great? Constantine will not come back now. But since Hell shelters him, may it carry you off, too![51]
Acerbically Petrarch criticized patristic and medieval equations of Babylon with Rome as "motivated not so much by their desire for truth as by their hatred and envy of the city."[52] He was convinced that Babylon was Avignon, and he excoriated its perversions in Liber sine nomine as the infamous whore of Revelation. Like the ancient city of Babylon, webbed by irrigation canals, Avignon too was girded by "many waters," except that the surging of the Rhône, Durance, and Sorge exceeded the swells of the Euphrates or the Nile. Petrarch suggested, following Augustine, that the waters of Avignon could be interpreted as the temporal goods on whose accumulation the papal court firmly sat, mindless of the riches of heaven. While the ancient city was so mammoth in its construction as to merit the title Babylon the Great (Rev. 17:5), the geographical circumference of Avignon only deserved the epithet Babylon the Small. Yet its corruption so surpassed its model as to have made it Babylon the Immense, he judged, for Avignon fornicated with the kings of the earth in meretricious display (cf. Rev. 17:1–2, 4). "Certainly the words that follow apply to you alone and to no other," he wrote, interpreting scripture, "'Babylon, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth' [Rev. 17:5]. You
are the impious mother of the foulest offspring, seeing that every abomination on earth, every harlot, is born of you, and that you continually give birth to them, your womb being always swollen, full and heavy with them." Petrarch alleged that Avignon, like persecutory Rome, was drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs. If the evangelist had marveled at the mere vision of Babylon, how must a Christian react to its plain sight? He must, Petrarch urged in echo of the prophets, flee.[53]
The debasement of a corrupt Church, even the corporate Roman Church, as the whore of Babylon had been a common cry of rigorist sects. The Waldensians, the Cathars, and the Apostolic Brethren all employed the metaphor.[54] Petrarch's identification was influenced by certain Joachimite polemics. Although Joachim of Fiore himself never equated the Church with Babylon, he was criticized by the Commission of Anagni for implying that it was so during the second age.[55] A prophetic brand of Joachimism preached by his disciple Peter John Olivi did condemn the carnal Church as Babylon. Olivi summoned the elect congregation, or Jerusalem, to arise; he repeated the verse of Revelation, "Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins" (Rev. 18:4). Although he did not intend by this to vilify the corporate Roman Church,[56] the Beguins, who regarded his interpretation of Revelation as authoritative, even apostolic, distorted and exaggerated the revelations of their saint to that meaning. Inquisitional depositions taken from Beguins, who flourished in Provence from 1300 to 1325, recorded a consistent identification of the Roman Church with the carnal Church, and therefore as the whore of Babylon.[57] Olivi's even more zealous disciple Ubertino da Casale also regarded the ecclesiastical hierarchy as the whore of Babylon, especially for its persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, whose emergence was revered by the Joachimites as the confirmation of the sixth age.[58] Although this critique was resolutely condemned by the papacy, it survived and flourished in Petrarch's polemics.
The vice of lust, the drunken fornication of which he accused Babylon, was phrased prophetically.[59] As he cursed the papal court:
May fire from Heaven rain down on your tresses, wicked one, since doing ill pleases you so, who after eating acorns and drinking from the river have become great and rich by making others poor,
nest of treachery, where is hatched whatever evil is spread through the world today, slave of wine, bed, and food, in whom intemperance shows its utmost power!
Through your chambers young girls and old men go frisking, and Beelzebub in the midst with the bellows and fire and mirrors.
And you were not brought up amid pillows in the shade, but naked to the wind and barefoot among the thorns; now you live in such a way—may the stink of it reach God![60]
The law of the ancient capital of Babylon requiring females to prostitute themselves with strangers in the temple of Aphrodite, and the lewd custom of prostituting wives and daughters with guests, had tainted the reputation of that city among classical authors.[61] Except for the prophetic song in which Babylon was taunted as a virgin only in its sterility (Is. 47:1), it was not indicted for such prostitution in scripture, however. It was rather Jerusalem that was condemned for playing the whore, in betrayal of its troth to the Lord. Petrarch's poetic description of the rise of Avignon from poverty, especially the final stanza of that sonnet, resonated with the oracle of Ezekiel on the origins of Jerusalem as "cast out on the open field," as "naked and bare" in its youth (Ez. 16:5, 8, 22) before Yahweh in his pity clothed it with luxury (vv. 10–13). When the author of Revelation transferred this metaphor of harlotry to Rome, he retained religious idolatry and political suzerainty as the meaning of its fornication. Petrarch's indictment of "debauchery, ravishment, incest, and adultery" at Avignon may have reflected sexual license, as his satire of the lecherous cardinal suggests.[62] Its meaning transcended any carnal fornication, however, to symbolize, as had the image of the whore in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature, consorting with foreign idols and allies. The political import of Petrarch's moralizing about the vices of the papal court was consistently his primary sense. When he cited "a torrent of the most obscene passions, an unbelievable storm of lewdness, and the foulest shipwreck of chastity"[63] he meant that the papacy was fornicating with foreign alliances and alien religion. Only its repentant return to Rome could absolve its sin and restore its integrity.
The avarice for which Petrarch excoriated the papal court[64] also was aptly portrayed by the Babylonian metaphor, for that city had since the Greeks been a proverbial monument of wealth and luxury.[65] "There is only one hope of salvation here, gold," Petrarch wrote of Avignon, and even: "Christ is sold for gold." He equated this covetousness with sheer idolatry.[66] Although the venality of the curia was a staple of medieval satire,[67] the opulence and greed of its establishment at Avignon
were corroborated by records of its excessive taxation on ecclesiastical benefices.[68] As Petrarch observed of the cardinals, "Instead of the naked feet of the apostles," there were "the prancing snow-white mounts of thieves, bedecked with gold, covered with gold, champing on gold bits, soon to be shod with gold shoes if the Lord does not curtail this debased excess. What else? You might think that they are the kings of the Persians or the Parthians, to be adored, whom it would be criminal to greet without offering a gift." He dubbed Avignon "the kingdom of Avarice" itself and deplored the arrogance this wealth fostered through the procurement of political and ecclesiastical power.[69] For such pride the Israelite prophets had especially blamed Babylon and predicted its fall (e.g., Jer. 50:29, 30–31). A source of particular grievance to Petrarch was the reason for this extortion of money through physical violence and threatened excommunication. It was not primarily the maintenance of the papal personage and palace that was depleting the coffers, but the Italian wars.[70]
Petrarch also accused the papal court of the vice of drunkenness, perhaps reflecting his personal observation of "rich feasts in place of sober fasts."[71] Traditionally, however, the intoxication of religious leaders was metaphorical, as in the biblical imagery of the priest and the prophet so reeling and staggering with foreign drink as to render fogged and erroneous judgment to the people (Is. 28:7–8). The particular symbol Petrarch appropriated was the drunkenness of fornication, which in scripture dually signified religious apostasy and political alliance.[72] When Petrarch sketched the pope as "soaked in wine,"[73] therefore, he conveyed more than the cameo of a dotty prelate dozing in his cups. Ancient Babylon had been prophetically "the golden cup from which the nations drank to madness" (Jer. 51:7), a sin for which Yahweh would induce an intoxication to perpetual sleep (51:39, 57). This drunken stupor symbolized political destruction. The cup of drink so potent that whoever drained it staggered and fell crazed was a trope for divine judgment on the nations (Jer. 25:15, 17, 27–28).[74] Petrarch repeatedly imputed such drunken stupor, even madness, to Avignon.[75]
Deploring "Oh Avignon, whose vineyard, if we may believe the prophets, will bring forth bitter grapes and bloody vintage,"[76] Petrarch alluded to the parabolic song of Isaiah in which a loving husbandman planted a vineyard on a fertile bill. Despite cultivation, it yielded only wild grapes, symbolizing bloodshed rather than justice
(Is. 51:1–7).[77] Petrarch thus recalled Yahweh's angry curse on Israel's perversions in the Song of Moses:
For their vine comes from the vine of Sodom,
and from the fields of Gomorrah;
their grapes are grapes of poison,
their clusters are bitter;
their wine is the poison of serpents,
and the cruel venom of asps.
(Deut. 32:32–33)
He also recalled the divine promise that Yahweh "avenges the blood of his servants" (v. 43). Just as ancient Babylon had proffered "the golden cup from which the nations drank to madness" (Jer. 51:7), so had pagan Rome held in her hand the "golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication" with the nations (Rev. 17:4). Her intoxication was not with wine, however, but with "the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (v. 6). So it was that Petrarch taunted Avignon, "Do you not know yourself, Babylon?"[78] Its intoxication was not merely with the vintages of Provence, but with its politics, its revenues, and even its populace. Imputing to a drunken Avignon "the blood of the saints and the martyrs,"[79] Petrarch indicted the rapacity of the court.
He may have also alluded to the notorious executions of the revived Inquisition, which had in 1319 at Marseilles burned at the stake four Franciscans of the Spiritual observance. Espousing absolute poverty, they had refused to submit to the papal ruling and to the authority of the Order, which maintained the validity of owning communal property. Their execution catalyzed the apocalyptic sect of the Beguins, the band of Provençal laymen who adhered to the Joachimite preaching of Olivi. Relics were salvaged from the charred corpses and venerated. The names of the victims were inscribed in a liturgical calendar and invoked in litanies, as if to saints and martyrs, while the executioner-pope was denounced as Antichrist. For this defiance the Beguins were themselves prosecuted. As the inquisitioner summarized their testimonies during the process of 1321–25, the Beguins accused the Church of "having become drunk with the blood of martyrs, that is of the four friars condemned and burned at Marseilles."[80] It was this indictment of a rapacious papacy that slaughtered those whose evangelical poverty bore witness against its avarice that Petrarch may have echoed in his accusation. Prudently indeed he separated this and other docu-
ments on the Avignon rule from his familiar letters and circulated them only privately.
The heinous crime by which the papacy was gorging itself on human blood Petrarch addressed and avenged by an outcry to the blood of Christ. In his plea for the divine justice of "the sun of righteousness" he assumed a prophetic posture. To the Vergilian ideal of the poet as the Apolline oracle who established the national morality, Petrarch assimilated the scriptural role of the prophet who essayed the same vocation as Yahweh's herald. His stance was egregious in his appropriation of biblical verses and images to censure the vices of Avignon. It was also emphatic in his own invention of oracles. Petrarch did cite against the practice of divination the authority of saints, philosophers, and poets. Such illusion and deceit only flourished because of the ignorance of the crowd and its rage to know the unknown, he declared. He exhorted against faith in soothsayers, advising that anxiety concerning the future would only torment the soul. The prognostication of evil events, if false, excited empty fear; if true, wretchedness before the fact. The prediction of good events induced a weariness of anticipation and a preoccupied hope that robbed one of joy. If the prediction proved false, happiness dissipated in the grief and shame of lost hope. Soothsayers should thus be dismissed in favor of Christ, who does speak of the future but from a divine prescience. "He doubtless speaks many things to us constantly through the ears of our heart," Petrarch believed. "If we were willing to listen to Him, we could easily disdain the promises of these mountebanks." This resort he considered necessary, for "until you throw aside the burden of superstition, you can desire but not pursue the blessed life."[81]
Yet Petrarch was fascinated by such superstition. In his Rerum memorandarum liber he compiled and commented on examples of providence and divinations, of oracles, of the sibyls, of enraptured prophecies, presages of death, and dreams, of the science of haruspicy and augury, of omens and portents, and of the Chaldean mathematicians and magi.[82] Both interior and exterior signs of the supernatural preoccupied him, especially dreams and portents. Petrarch confessed to being terrified by dream-visions, which wracked his sleep, a "sleep restlessly agitated by threats and ambiguities of dreams." He acknowledged this disturbance as a universal suffering of the human condition, but considered himself especially subject to its passionate stings.[83] He reported dreams as a vast subject considered by the learned and the populace, about which opinions varied. He cited several commentaries, but
agreed essentially with the judgment of Cicero's De divinatione . To the ancient lore collected in his own Rerum memorandarum liber he detailed in a letter two personal reminiscences of predictive dreams. The one was an oracle of the recovery of a dying friend, the other an oracle of a dead patron; in both the personage revealed his future to Petrarch. "I have faith in dreams," Petrarch concluded,
not because Caesar Augustus, that very great man both as a ruler and as a learned person, may be said to have been of contrary opinion, and there are many today who agree with him; nor because a dream made either my master or my friend appear before me in my anxiety, nor because one died and the other lived, for in both cases I saw either what I wished for or what I feared, and fate happens to coincide with my visions. My faith in dreams is no more than Cicero's who considered that the accidental truth of one of his dreams did not undo the ambiguities of many others.[84]
Like many of his contemporaries,[85] however, Petrarch was willing to exploit this ambiguity for the sake of art. Dream-visions were a common device in his poetry, as in the oracular vision in which Laura stole from heaven into his chamber to console him with a dialogue on the Apolline symbols of the palm and the laurel.[86]
Portents also invaded his poetry, as in Africa, where the Roman populace was terrified by:
the many portents of the gods: the sun
high in mid-heaven faded and grew dim,
losing its splendor, while the earth beneath
shook and yawned wide and swallowed in its cleft
entire vineyards: then, before men's eyes,
subsided, leaving a tremendous gulf.
The Tiber, bearing in its raging flood
uprooted trees, broke through its barriers
and with a deluge never known before
alarmed the city. On the Palatine
a sudden shower of stones came pelting down.
The ancient Italians sought the meaning of these omens by sacrificing ritually according to the Sibylline prescription.[87] So did their medieval progeny wonder, fear, and pray. Petrarch described his own experience of a Neapolitan storm and earthquake of monstrous violence and destruction that had been predicted by a local bishop-astrologer. Those who had not been terrorized into repentance before the event were soon impelled to it. As Petrarch reported his own response to the
prophecy: "1 myself was neither hopeful nor fearful, and, though favoring neither side, I inclined somewhat toward fear, for the fact seems to be that things that are hoped for come less readily than those that are feared. I had also heard and seen at that time many threatening signs in the skies which for one accustomed to living in northern climes resembled the supernatural events that occur in the cold of winter, and make one prone to turn to fear and indeed to religion." Troubled by the public alarm, which sent women running through the streets to huddle in the doorways of the churches, Petrarch long observed the aspect of the moon from his window, and then sleepily retired. With the onset of the quake, however, he awoke and hurriedly processed with the religious of the household to the church, where the night was spent "prostrate with much wailing, believing that our end was imminent and that everything around us would shortly lie in ruins,"[88] Again he vividly recounted his experience of an earthquake in Rome that he thought portended calamity to the republic, a destruction of peace and liberty to rival the fall of the Roman empire itself. He supposed it the fulfillment of Balaam's last prophecy (Num. 24:24).[89] However Petrarch may have cooly counseled a rational serenity toward the unknown, as fortified with a confident faith in Christ, he could in the grip of catastrophe share the terror of the crowd. Like his contemporaries he too observed and chronicled the apocalyptic signs "of the floods, the storms, and the fires by which entire cities have recently perished, of the wars raging throughout the world that are causing great slaughter of people, or of the plague from heaven that is unequaled through the ages. These are matters known to everyone," he stated, "witnessed by vacant cities and fields without farmers, mourned by an afflicted and nearly deserted world and by the tearful face, so to speak, of nature herself "[90]
Petrarch's own birth had been inauspicious: begotten and born in exile, through such an arduous labor that his mother was long considered dead by both the doctors and the midwives. "Thus," he wrote, "I experienced danger even before being born and I approached the very threshold of life under the auspices of death."[91] He believed himself governed by a cruel natal star, the victim of a cruel cradle and cruel exile, and of the cruel lady who wounded him with her eyes.[92] Petrarch observed his heart of melting snow and judged it "perhaps prophetic of these sorrowful dark days."[93] The failure of his poetical theology to persuade pope or emperor to civic piety seemed yet another
apocalyptic sign of the end of civilization. There appeared no favorable omen, no "crow on the right or raven on the left" to sing a happy fate.[94] On the day on which he surrendered his heart to his serious and pensive lady, divested of her usual gay ornaments of rhetoric, he left his life in doubt: "Now sad auguries and dreams and black thoughts assail me, please God may these be false!"[95] In this humor he lamented poetically, "No sparrow was ever so alone on any roof as I am."[96] The metaphor echoed the sigh of the psalmist, who pleaded that the Lord not hide his face on the day of distress, for "I am like a lonely bird on a housetop" (Ps. 102:7; 101:8 Vg.). The affliction of the psalmist was the Babylonian Captivity of Israel. Despite the taunts of the enemy, he confessed himself confident that the Lord would pity the destitute captives and rebuild Jerusalem from the dust, so that all kingdoms might praise his glory in that city (vv. 12–22). Petrarch, who described himself as "an angry exile from Jerusalem, living by the rivers of Babylon,"[97] also composed political verse in hope of a Roman restoration.[98] In his vatic role he especially imitated the prophet of the Babylonian Captivity, Ezekiel, who like the warbling psalmist on the roof had been appointed by the Lord as "a watchman for the house of Israel" (Ez. 3:17a).
In this choice of model Petrarch may have been inspired by Joachim of Fiore's very popular letter to the faithful that prominently cited this verse. Joachim had interpreted the divine injunction as entrusted in the new Babylonian captivity to all those more enlightened than the crowd, and he had justified by it his own office of interpreting scripture and prophesying judgment.[99] Yet Ezekiel was by his historical circumstance the obvious model for Petrarch's imitation. He did indeed affirm that his literature on Avignon as Babylon was from personal experience:
I speak of things I have seen, not just heard about. As a boy it was my evil fate to be carried off to that country where, despite my revulsion, I was bound until recently by what shackles of Fortune I do not know. There I passed many years in sorrow. I know from experience that there is no piety there, no charity, no faith, no reverence or fear of God, nothing sacred, nothing just, nothing reasonable, nothing serious—in a word, nothing human.[100]
Yet Petrarch believed that genius was exercised in a poetic invention that emulated ancient examples, as bees create wax and honey from the flowers they sample, then abandon. Its aspiration was "to produce in
our own words thoughts borrowed from others . . . in a style uniquely ours although gathered from a variety of sources." The more felicitous writers might imitate not bees but silkworms, which produce thought and speech from within themselves. Petrarch considered himself a bee, an emulator.[101] This apiarian metaphor was that of Seneca,[102] one of the classical models whom Petrarch imitated "to assert or discover his own cultural identity through an act of role-playing."[103] He would trace his forebears' path, he said, but not their tracks, in an imitation that is not sameness, "in a resemblance that is not servile, where the imitator's genius shines forth."[104] In an important poem on emulation alluding to the same letter Ad Lucilium, Petrarch thus distanced himself from his patron Apollo.
The son of Latona had already looked down nine times from his high balcony, seeking her who once in vain moved his sighs and now moves those of another;
when, tired with searching, he could not discover where she was dwelling, whether near or far, he showed himself to us like one mad with grief at not finding some much-loved thing.
And thus sadly remaining off by himself, he did not see that face return which shall be praised, if I live, on more than a thousand pages;
and besides, pity [piety] had changed her, so that her beautiful eyes were at that time dropping tears: therefore [but] the air retained its earlier state.[105]
The allusion was to Seneca's theory of imitation, which advised a resemblance to the original without exactness, much as a son might resemble his father. As Petrarch explained it, "While often very different in their individual features, they have a certain something our painters call an 'air,' especially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance."[106] His poetry thus resembled the classical model in that the "air" of Daphne had remained, although piety had changed her into Laura. Reverence of the Christian revelation that superseded pagan mythology required his imitation also of scriptural models, as of the prophets.
Of Petrarch's prophecies, none was more sobering or more dramatic than the series of portents uttered in his renowned visionary poem, "Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra." It was a pastiche of images presaging the death of his beloved Laura.[107] In its political sense it was also a remarkable imitation of the oracles of Ezekiel on the Babylonian
Captivity. Petrarch constructed the poem according to the Hebrew prophetic convention of an autobiographical announcement and a visionary sequence.[108] In scripture the personal announcement was typically expanded with the circumstance and date of the experience and with the prophet's state or reaction. Petrarch introduced himself as being "one day alone at the window," and as "already almost tired" from the sheer number and novelty of the visions. In biblical imagery the windows of heaven were the celestial counterparts to the fountains of earth through which the cosmic waters issued at divine will (Gen. 7:11; Is. 24:18, Gen. 8:2).[109] The window through which Petrarch saw his portents was similarly not vitreous but symbolic: the luminous eyes of Laura.[110] The eyes of the lady were in medieval poetry not only spiritual windows but even perilous mirrors.[111] Petrarch's solitary witness at the window recalled that of the prophet Daniel in Babylon, who was also exhausted by his private revelations (Dan. 10:8, 16b, 17b). Physical weakness was in Israelite prophecy a commonplace reaction of dismay to the evil content of visions.[112] Although sometimes the canonical prophets merely observed the scene of their visions, usually they participated by expressing an emotion such as grief or fear or by engaging in dialogue, or even by a dramatic action. No mere spectator either, Petrarch displayed his feelings toward the visionary sequence by a sigh, heavy grief, sorrow, then still grieving fear at the memory of the omen, ardent piety and love, persistent weeping, and finally a sweet desire for death. He interposed himself physically only into the fourth vision, in whose scene he seated himself, delighting in its atmosphere. His sole speech was a concluding address to the poem itself in which he anticipated the poem's response to him.
The scriptural types of prophetic vision involved the oracle, the dramatic word, and the revelation of mysteries. The first vision was a brief report dominated by a question-and-answer dialogue in which a simple image provided the occasion for an oracle or divine proclamation through prophetic announcement (e.g., Amos 8:1–2). The second type depicted a celestial scene or action interpreted as a portent presaging an earthly event (e.g., Amos 7:1–6, Ezek. 9:1–10). The third version conveyed in symbolic, sometimes bizarre, imagery secret activities or future events, with a dialogue deciphering the esoteric significance of the report (e.g., Zech. 2:1–2).[113] Petrarch's visionary sequence imitated this last type, but without the dialogical interpretation. When he designated the first portent as "on the right" he signaled an
evil omen. In writing of an injury to his left leg, Petrarch stated the custom of referring to what is unfortunate as left-handed or sinister. Yet "I know full well," he continued, "that in prophesying, the left is considered favorable, whence the poet says, 'It thundered on the left,' and thunder on the left is considered favorable because things on our left are on the right of heavenly beings, from whom all good fortune is to be expected."[114] In prophesying, therefore, the right is unfavorable. It was in imitation of that verse of Vergil[115] that Petrarch favored the ancient Italian preference for the right hand as representing an evil portent. What he envisioned on the right were six oracles of doom:
I
Being one day alone at the window, where I saw so many and such
strange things that from the mere seeing I was already almost tired,
a wild creature appeared to me on the right hand, with a human face
such as to enamor Jove, pursued by two hounds, one black, one white,
who at both sides of the noble creature were tearing so fiercely that
in a short time they brought it to the pass where, closed in a stone,
much beauty was vanquished by untimely death and made me sigh for
its harsh fate.
This first portent was inspired by the parable of the lioness in the nineteenth chapter of Ezekiel. In the ancient world the dead were honored by the chanting of laments or dirges that recited their virtues and deeds and bewailed their loss. The Israelite prophets adopted this form (qinâ ), in which professional mourners narrated the deceased's past, to portray future events that would also evoke bitter lamentation.[116] The wailing of the widow Jerusalem in the lamentations of Jeremiah (1 and 2; cf. Amos 5:1–2), which Petrarch adapted to Rome in his metric epistles on the new Babylonian captivity,[117] was a prime example of this poetry. Ezekiel also raised such a lament under the figure of a lioness who bore and raised many cubs in its lair. As they matured one of these learned to tear its prey, devouring men. For this carnage the nations captured it in a pit and dragged it with hooks to Egypt. Desperate and desolate at this loss, the lioness raised another of its whelps. It too prowled about, tearing its prey, devouring men, and ruining their palaces and cities. Aghast at its roar, again the nations with a hue and cry cast a net over it and caught it in a pit. With hooks they then drew it into a cage and brought it to the king of Babylon, who imprisoned it, silencing its roar forever (Ezek. 19:1–9). As an elabo-
ration of the leonine metaphor of the king of Judah (Gen. 49:9), the lioness represented in Ezekiel's parable the Davidic royal household, especially the influential queen mother Hamutal. It was she who bore the regent Jehoahaz who was deposed and captured by the pharaoh Neco and taken to Egypt, where he died in bondage. His equally awesome successor, Jehoiakin, was similarly deported to Nebuchadnezzar's palace in Babylon, and imprisoned there during the first siege of Jerusalem (597 B.C.). The deportation of the two kings to exile in the west and in the east thus intimated a universal catastrophe for Israel through its captivity by foreign nations.[118]
Petrarch's metaphor fera generically signified a wild beast, and particularly designated species as diverse as a boar, horse, stag, wolf, sea-monster, serpent, and ant. The noun also denoted a lion, as in Phaedrus's classical collection of Aesopic fables, which was widely propagated during the Middle Ages in a prose paraphrase attributed to a Romulus. This usage occurred in the tale of an aged, feeble lion who was gored, trampled, and kicked by his foes, the boar, the bull, and the ass. The dying lion complained of such insults as a double death, which moral the fabulist applied to anyone who loses prestige and thus becomes subject in his disaster to abuse by cowards.[119] This tale was appropriate for Petrareh's criticism of the debilitated condition of the Church under the Avignon papacy, its former hegemony now subject to predators. The medieval bestiaries commonly began with a lengthy and complex description of the lion as the king of the beasts. Its royal and sacred nature was underscored in the traditional opening to the first chapter of the early Latin Physiologus, from which text the genre of the bestiary evolved. This cited "Jacob's blessing" on the lion of Judah (Gen. 49:9),[120] a text whose imagery Petrarch would repeat in other portents of this visionary poem.
In Petrarch's vision this noble beast was harried by two hunting dogs that flanked it, bit it severely, and herded it into a pass, where it was enclosed.[121] The practice of hunting lions by trapping them in pits with dogs, spears, and nets was as ancient as the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh itself, a sport recorded also in Ezekiel's description of the capture of the lion cubs.[122] Petrarch's image was that of a mountainous pass or cul-de-sac, such as the valley of the Sorgue of Avignon, into which the beast was driven, rather than that of a pit dug in the ground. The fate of the lioness was nevertheless the same: capture.
Petrarch's poetic enclosure of the lioness in stone recalled the im-
prisonment of Judah's kings in the palace of Babylon. In Petrarch's verse the noble beast bore a captivatingly human appearance, an iconographical detail that resonated with the bestial image envisioned by another prophet of Babylonian Captivity. In a dream at Nebuchadnezzar's palace during that exile, Daniel saw a beast like a lioness (leaena, Vg.) with eagles' wings. As its plumage was plucked before his very eyes, the lioness was elevated and made to stand upright like a man, and it was given a human mind. This apocalyptic creature symbolized prophetically the Babylonian empire, particularly Nebuchadnezzar himself (Dan. 7:1–4).[123]
Petrarch's variant on the lioness of Judah was the Roman Church, hounded into Babylonian captivity by the dogs of war. Its harriers—one black, one white—which tore viciously at its body from either side symbolized the divisive papal (Guelph, bianci ) and imperial (Ghibelline, neri ) parties in Italian politics. A feud between the "white" and "black" factions of a Pistoian family had fomented similar hostilities in Florence at the turn of the century that also divided the Guelphs of that city. This civil strife provoked the expulsion in 1302 of the disaffected "whites," who allied with the Ghibellines.[124] Among the expatriates was Ser Petracco, who escaped with his family to Arezzo, where the poet Francesco Petrarca was born, and then to Incisa, to Pisa, and to Babylon itself.[125] The Church had been pursued to exile there, hounded to exhaustion by the dogs of war, which then devoured its body.
II
Then on the deep sea I saw a ship with ropes of silk and sails of gold,
all fashioned of ivory and ebony;
and the sea was calm and the breeze gentle and the sky such as when
no cloud veils it, and the ship was laden with rich, virtuous wares.
Then a sudden tempest from the East so shook the air and the waters
that the ship struck a rock. Oh what heavy grief! A brief hour struck
down and a small space hides those high riches second to no others.
This second portent imitated the poetic dirge for Tyre that composed the twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel. The prophet compared that prosperous and regal city to a gallant merchant vessel, constructed and outfitted with the finest materials and piloted and manned by noble and skilled mariners (Ezek. 27:1–11). An interpolated trade list, detailing the wares with which the nations of the
compass bartered for Tyre's merchandise, emphasized its commercial power and wealth (vv. 12–25a). Its crew, however, rowed the splendid vessel, overloaded with these riches, from secure harbors onto the high seas. There a treacherous tempest raised by an east wind wrecked it, so that the rare cargo sank and all hands perished (vv. 25b–28). The terrified cries of the drowning men were echoed by the shocked grief of the traders, who lamented the destruction of the proud and prestigious emporium of Tyre (vv. 29–34).[126] Petrarch's description of the lavish ship and luxurious cargo on the high seas, its sudden wreck in a tempest from the east, and his ensuing lament for its loss paralleled this prophetic allegory. The navigation of the ship of the Church through perilous waters to be crowned with garlands on its prow in the port of salvation had been a patristic commonplace.[127] Here it was destroyed. Petrarch expressed fear for the shipwreck of the Church in the first epistle of Liber sine nomine, where he portrayed the pope as its helmsman, who, overconfident of calm weather and unreliable sightings, steered the holy craft too close to the shore. Intoxicated, the pope pitched headlong into sleep, while the overladen hold of the vessel burst open, spewing men and cargo into the water. Petrarch himself, fearing lest the storm drive him into the clutches of pirates or dash him on the reefs, beseeched God to steer the errant vessel, as he cast about for a plank on which to swim to dry land.[128]
No such rescue appeared in this vision. Petrarch preserved from Ezekiel's dirge the significant detail of the east wind, symbolically Yahweh's agent of destruction (Ps. 48:7, Is. 27:8, Ezek. 17:10, 19:12, Jer. 18:17, Hos. 13:15, John 4:8). He introduced the detail of the rock on which the ship shattered its hull, as implied in the verb contero (Ezek. 27:26 Vg), which means "to grind, pound, or pulverize," and as suggestive of the very etymology of "Tyre" itself (cf. Ezek. 26:4, 14). The navigation of the ship onto the "high seas" alluded to Babylon, for Petrarch's phrase was equivalent to the designation of that capital in ancient mythology. The primordial deep that claimed the ship of state in Ezekiel's prophecy (Ezek. 27:26, cf. 26:19) was the mythological "many waters." This phrase denoted the chaos of the primeval sea against which Yahweh had triumphed in his decisive victories as the Creator brooding over the watery abyss (Gen. 1:2) and as the deliverer of Israel from inundation in the Sea of Reeds (Ex. 14:21–29). In scripture Babylon was situated on these "many waters" (Jer. 51:13, Rev. 17:15). It was, therefore, a monument of the insur-
gent cosmic elements hostile to Yahweh and disastrous to men.[129] Its very etiology from the tower of Babel as the city of "confusion" repeated the primordial chaos. Now in Petrarch's vision the bark of Peter was recklessly steered onto its high seas to destruction.
The divine agency of the east wind in stirring up these turbulent waters provided Petrarch with the imaginative transition to his third and fourth portents, for the east wind also uprooted plants (Ezek. 17:10, 19:12) and dried up fountains (Hos. 13:15).
III
In a young grove were flowering the holy boughs of a laurel,
youthful and straight, that seemed one of the trees of Eden,
and from its shade came forth such sweet songs of divers birds and so
much other delight that it had me rapt from the world.
And as I gazed on it fixedly the sky around was changed and, dark
to sight, struck with lightning and suddenly tore up by the roots that
happy plant, whereat my life is sorrowful, for such shade is never
regained.
This third portent was inspired by the parable of the cedar in the thirty-first chapter of Ezekiel that prophesied the defeat of the relief column sent by the pharoah Hophra to aid Israel in the final desperate months of its struggle against its Babylonian captor, Nebuchadnezzar, during the siege of Jerusalem (587 B.C.). Paralleling the metaphor of the magnificent ship for the beauty, wealth, and power of Tyre, was this image of the magnificent tree for the same attributes of Egypt. Ezekiel compared that nation to a mighty cedar, fair and lush in foliage, abundantly watered, and towering to such a height that its crown protruded into the clouds. Its strong boughs provided leafy bowers for the birds of the air; its ample shade sheltered the beasts and people of the land. Exquisite in its stately beauty, it rivaled all the trees of Eden, to their envy (Ezek. 31:1–9). For its pride, as symbolized in its height, it was hewn down by foreign power. As the splendid tree, crashing in its fall into the mountains, valleys, and streams, descended to the underworld in death, the birds and beasts preyed on its ruined branches. The deep that had once watered it mourned; the other trees of the forest fainted; the nations quaked at the sound of its fall. The prophet concluded with a warning of divine judgment on all trees that envied its greatness (vv. 10–18).
This mythopoeic cedar of Lebanon was identical to the great
world-tree, which extended from the zones of high heaven to the primal deep and was situated at the navel or center of the earth. As a common ancient symbol of inexhaustible life in diverse mythologies—Mesopotamian, Teutonic, Indian, Chinese, and Arctic—it represented the cosmos as a haven for aerial and terrestrial creatures and as a garden for the gods. In Ezekiel's prophecy this tree, which in the traditional mythologies survived all catastrophes, was felled by the judgment of Yahweh. The Lord delivered Egypt to his instrument, the ruler of Babylon, who executed sentence on its wicked pride and laid it low, so that the nations once under its sway fled and cursed it. The symbolic warning served notice to all rulers who indulged ambitions of world-empire or who aspired to be worshiped as gods that they existed only by divine permission. Yahweh could snap their power by death, as he had uprooted the trunk of the massive cedar.[130]
This third portent also resonated with the parable of the vine in the nineteenth chapter of Ezekiel. In a predictive lamentation on the ruin and exile of Israel's royal house, the prophet had compared the queen mother to a vigorous vine planted by a watercourse. Fruitful and luxuriant, it bore stout branches fit for sceptres, emblems of the kingly succession, and it grew so tall that it was conspicuous for its height and its trailing boughs. The vine was then furiously uprooted and thrown to the ground. An east wind dried it up, blowing off its fruit and withering its strong branches. A fire consumed it. Transplanted to an arid wilderness, a fire bursting from its own branches burned its shoots (Ezek. 19:10–13). The vine was a particular sign in scripture for the fullness of blessing in the messianic age (Gen. 49:11), an image perpetuated in the gospel parables of the vineyard. Fruitful and luxuriant (Hos. 10:1), it was an honorable plant worthy of kingship (Ju. 9:12–13), and a metaphor for the beloved of Yahweh (Is. 5:1–5, Song 7:13, 8:11–12). Ezekiel's prophecy of its uprooting from the fertile soil and its transplantation to the wilderness, where the once lush foliage became mere brushwood fit for burning, also concerned Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. and the deportation to Babylon of Judah's king, Zedekiah. Like the parables of the lioness and the ship, it was poetically a funereal lament (qinâ ), as its final verse emphasized.[131]
Substituting his own symbol of the laurel for the scriptural cedar, Petrarch similarly detailed its planting in fertile soil; its flourishing boughs, so young and straight that it seemed a paradisiacal tree; its
shade, which harbored diverse song birds. The sudden agent of its destruction was neither the political force that felled the cedar nor the east wind that uprooted the vine, however, although the fire that consumed the branches was imitated. Lightning was the punishment. This was also a cosmic agent of Yahweh's power (e.g., Ex. 19:16, 20:18), and, as the universal weapon of the sky-god, it was a common omen in classical literature. Petrarch had employed it in Africa as revelatory of the heavenly realms and as symbolic of Jupiter's justice and punishment.[132] In classical and medieval lore the laurel tree alone was immune from this bolt.[133] Petrarch had praised in his coronation speech this extraordinary privilege, arguing that since the thunderbolt of temporal diurnity that consumed human labor and fame was not feared by the brave bough, the laurel crown was rightly bestowed on those whose glory did not fear the devastation of the ages.[134] In this portent his security was devastated, as the poet's rapturous gaze upon the laurel, imitating the prophet's admiring vision of the cedar and the vine, was altered under a darkening sky. Like the lamentation of Ezekiel, Petrarch's verse expressed his grief at the demise of the happy plant, struck by lightning and uprooted, its shade forever lost.
The dessication of the cedar and the vine in the prophecies of Ezekiel provided Petrarch with a further imaginative transition to the fourth portent. In the prophetic parable of the cedar, the roots of that mythopoeic tree were fed by the abundant waters of the cosmic deep, whose rivers flowed about its plantation and streamed to the other trees of the forest (Ezek. 31:4, 7b). Upon the descent of the tree to the underworld, the deep mourned for it, restraining its rivers and checking its streams, so that the entire forest fainted in gloom for lack of watering (v. 15). Then cast also into the pit, all the trees of Eden, the fairest and the best, all that drank that water, were comforted in the netherworld (vv. 16b, 18b). In the parable of the vine, the east wind that uprooted it also dried it up. It was thus stripped bare of its fruit, and its strong stem withered; then its refuse was blown to a futile transplantation in a dry and thirsty desert (Ezek. 19:12–13). Petrarch's fourth portent also prophesied the desiccation of a water-source.
IV
A clear fountain in that same wood welled from a stone, and fresh
and sweet waters it scattered forth, gently murmuring;
to that lovely, hidden, shady, and dark seat neither shepherds came
nor kine, but nymphs and muses, singing to that burden.
There I seated myself, and when I took most sweetness from that harmony and that sight, then I saw a chasm open and carry away with it the fountain and the place, whereat I still grieve, and I am stricken with fear by the very memory.
Although like the metaphors of the beast, the ship, and the tree, water was a universal and polysemous symbol in ancient and medieval cultures, Petrarch's location of the fountain in the very same woods—Eden—as the laurel of his third portent specified a scriptural inspiration. This was the final vision of Ezekiel, that of the temple spring and the river of paradise in the forty-seventh chapter. The prophet, guided by a divine messenger, saw a spring issuing from beneath the terrace of the Jerusalem temple and trickling eastward. As the brook flowed it increased miraculously in depth and volume into such a broad, swift stream that it irrigated the barren desert of Judah and freshened the saline waters of the Dead Sea. Its promise of life to a society threatened by droughts was detailed in an abundance of food from the river's swarming fish and from the fertile trees along its watered banks (Ezek 47:1–12). The stream thus revived the paradisiacal river that had flowed primordially (Gen. 2:4–10), symbolizing the transformation of Israel after its Babylonian exile into a new Eden.
This oracle, which dated from the Babylonian Captivity following the siege of Jerusalem, envisioned a restored theocracy in which the temple of that city would be the source of Israel's blessings (cf. Ps. 46:4). The image of regenerative waters flowing from Yahweh's sanctuary recurred in later prophecies of the post-exilic restoration of Jerusalem: the fountain welling from Yahweh's house to water the mythical valley (Joel 3:18) and flowing in the time of salvation to cleanse the people from sin (Zech. 13:1, 14:8).[135] It was also the climax of the New Testament book of Revelation, from whose final chapter Petrarch also tapped his crystalline fountain. In its celebrated vision of the new heaven and the new earth, the Apocalypticist was transported to a mountain from whose height he saw the holy city of Jerusalem descending like a bride from heaven (Rev. 21). Through the middle of that city coursed the crystal-clear river of the water of life that flowed from the throne of God and of the Lamb, who slaked the thirst of the righteous (22: 1–2a; 21:6b, 22:7b). On either bank of this river grew the tree of life, which bore monthly fruit and medicinal leaves (22:2b). In this prophecy the Lamb himself replaced the temple as the unique source of the water of life (cf. 7:17, Ps. 36:7), which flowed primor-
dially in the garden of Eden (Gen. 2:10–14) and now watered the fruitful and healing tree of the eschatological city. [136]
Petrarch's metaphor of the fountain springing from a stone also repeated the symbol of the water flowing from the rock Moses had struck during the sojourn of the Israelites in the wilderness (Ex. 17:6). That miraculous sign that quenched the thirst of the parched and disbelieving people became typological for Christ, as the supernatural rock from whom the forefathers in faith had drunk (1 Cor. 10:4). Christ revealed himself to the Samaritan woman at the well as the living water from whom they had drunk, a bottomless spring welling up to eternal life and satisfying the thirst of all men (John 4:11, 14). At the feast of Tabernacles he promised the thirsty who would believe in him a river of living water springing from his own heart (John 7:37). Petrarch's metaphor also had an ecclesial connotation, in the derivation of the Church from the rock who was Peter, according to the saying of Christ (Matt. 16:18), which was commonly argued to be the establishment of the Petrine primacy and hence the papacy.
In Ezekiel's vision the spring welling from the Jerusalem temple had issued in a flood of new life and hope at the return of Yahweh's glory after the Babylonian exile (Ezek. 47:1–12, cf. 43:1–12). In Petrarch's portent this symbol of regeneration was destroyed. He prophesied the devastation of any life or hope for a new Jerusalem by an earthquake. In Hebrew symbolism an earthquake signaled Yahweh's advent as warrior, ruler, or judge, as during the celebrated theophany on Sinai (Ex. 19:18). While in Ezekiel's prophecy of divine combat against Gog it retained this traditional heraldic function (Ezek. 38:19–23), in the book of Revelation the earthquake became an instrument of the judgment and fall of Babylon (Rev. 16:17–21, cf. 11:13). This Apocalyptic image imitated the Sibylline Oracles, which paraphrased and expanded Ezekiel's prophecy on Gog by reflecting the Roman attitude toward earthquakes as omens of divine displeasure. The earthquake was a standard expression in those oracles of God's judgment on the cities, and Babylon was specifically predicted to be leveled by one. In the Apocalyptic vision, however, the divine intervention signaled by the cosmic earthquake would also vindicate the people of God through the resurrection and ascension of its witnesses (Rev. 11:12–13).[137]
Petrarch experienced no such consolation. The stream that had transformed the barren landscape of Ezekiel's vision into a forest of
trees so fruitful that they were harvested monthly (Ezek. 47:7, 12) was now swallowed up in his fourth portent into the bowels of the earth. With the disappearance of the fountain went the verdant woods and the lofty laurel it had watered, and the poet at the site who depended upon its inspiration. With the descent of the fountain to the underworld, the living water of Christ himself, which had sustained the Israelites in the desert and had since flowed from the rock of Peter, the papacy, symbolically vanished. Petrarch envisioned that the Church that streamed spiritually from the temple of the new Jerusalem and its Lamb would not return there to Rome from its Babylonian captivity, but would instead descend catastrophically to death. This vision grieved and frightened him, as he testified. The jubilant prophecies of Ezekiel and the Apocalypticist were reversed into an oracle of doom. The desiccation of the streams that had once gladdened the city of God so grieved and frightened Petrarch that he disregarded the psalmist's injunction not to fear though the earth should change, shake, and tremble with the tumult of roaring waters (Ps. 46:1–4).
V
A wondrous phoenix, both its wings clothed with purple and its
head with gold, I saw in the forest, proud and alone,
and at first I thought it a form celestial and immortal, until it came to
the uprooted laurel and to the spring that the earth steals away.
Everything flies to its end; for, seeing the leaves scattered on the earth
and the trunk broken and that living water dry, it turned its beak on
itself as if in scorn, and in an instant disappeared, whereat my heart
burned with pity and love.
Ezekiel's prophecy of the trees whose leaves never withered because they were fed by the stream of the Jerusalem temple (Ezek. 47:12, cf. Ps. 1:3) was fulfilled in the Apocalyptic vision of the tree of life as vivified by the water of life streaming from Christ in the heavenly Jerusalem. Like the groves that flourished in the desert of Judah, the heavenly tree of life yielded abundant fruit and medicinal leaves (Rev. 22:1–2).[138] Petrarch's fifth portent elaborated the fate of this arboreal symbol, already struck by the lightning-bolt of divine justice in the third portent. Petrarch's juxtaposition of the third and fourth portents—the destruction of the tree and the desiccation of the fountain—was symbolically coherent. In the fifth portent he prophesied a
devastation extending from the laurel's aerial branches to its underground roots, binding heaven and hell in catastrophe. In this portent the poet introduced to his private bucolic scene another witness and mourner: a phoenix, who in his proud, solitary flight spied the uprooted tree and the arid spring. Observing the leaves of the laurel scattered, its trunk broken, and its water supply exhausted, the celestial bird bit himself scornfully and vanished.
This portent, substituting classical for biblical imagery, imitated the parable of the cedar and the eagles in the seventeenth chapter of Ezekiel. In that fable adopted from Wisdom literature, a great and richly plumaged eagle pucked the highest twig from the cedar of Lebanon and carried it in its beak to a commercial land, where it planted it in a mercantile city. Next it planted some native seed in a fertile nursery by abundant waters, where it sprouted into a vine, inclining its branches toward the eagle while its roots grew beneath it. The vine then twisted toward another great eagle, however. For this act it was uprooted, its fruit was plucked off, and its leaves withered (Ezek. 19:1–10). Ezekiel interpreted the prized cedar as the house of David, whose uppermost branch, which the eagle stole, was its heir, Jehoiachin. The preying eagle represented Nebuchadnezzar, who deported the young king into Babylonian exile during the first siege of Jerusalem (597 B.C.). The vine was his scion, Zedekiah, who was enthroned by Nebuchadnezzar in favorable circumstances and who depended obediently on him for sustenance. The second great eagle represented the pharaoh, either Psammeticus II or Hophra, with whom Zedekiah conspired for political independence. For this defection from his Babylonian lord in breach of covenant Ezekiel prophesied the king's death in Babylon and the failure of Egyptian military support for Israel in the second siege of Jerusalem (vv. 11–21). In an oracular sequel Yahweh himself promised to pluck a slip from the crown of the cedar and plant the tender shoot on the highest mountain in Israel. There he would foster its growth into such a noble tree that birds would roost in its sheltering branches and the entire forest would acknowledge that the Lord alone governed the course of history (vv. 22–24). This oracle prophesied "the Branch," a scion from David's royal lineage, the Messiah who would reign on Zion, bringing peace to the earth (cf. Is. 11:1, Jer. 23:5, Zech. 3:8, 6:12). This allegory became the foundation for the gospel parable of the kingdom of God
as a mustard seed that developed into the greatest tree, so that all the birds nested in its shady branches (Matt. 13:31–32, Mk. 4:30–32, Lk. 13:18–19).[139]
In biblical symbolism the eagle was the king of birds; in Ezekiel's fable it specified the royal power of the Babylonian empire. The prophet's description of it as broad in wingspan, with long pinions and full plumage of brightly colored feathers was paralleled in Petrarch's portrayal of the phoenix as cloaked on both wings with purple plumage and hooded with gold. Petrarch's substitution of the eagle with the phoenix, also a proud and noble bird, replaced biblical with classical imagery, as the laurel had supplanted the cedar in the third and fourth portents. Petrarch's substitution was supported by Herodotus's account of the phoenix as purple and gold in plumage and as in outline and bulk very much like an eagle.[140] The royal and solar associations of both the eagle and the phoenix prompted such common comparisons of the birds and interlacings of their traditions.[141] It was appropriate for Petrarch to introduce the phoenix to his Eden, for the province of that bird in classical mythology was the Elysian Fields or the Isles of the Blessed. Christian literature elaborated this glorious theme, as in Lactantius's poetic description of its abode in a sacred grove, resplendant with eternal foliage, at whose center was a living spring of clear, gentle, and sweet water in abundance.[142] It was to such a site that the phoenix flew in Petrarch's verse, only to portend the ruin of paradise.
The portent resonated with the fable of the phoenix in the bestiary of Pierre de Bauvais, the most notable of the French examples, and in the Image du monde of Gauthier, or Gossouin, de Metz. These described the phoenix as flying to a mountain called "Liban" where it found a high tree and an excellent fountain. The version of the Physiologus from which the principal Latin bestiaries developed similarly told of the Indian phoenix flying to the frankincense tree (in lignis libani ), where it filled its wings with spices. These allusions to the prophetic cedar of Lebanon were explicated in the earliest Latin drawing in a bestiary of a phoenix, which portrayed that bird as nesting in a tree labeled cedrus libansi .[143] Such identification of the phoenix's abode as Lebanon derived from the prophetic imagery of scripture, which associated that location with its fragrant, imperishable cedars with the eschatological bliss of paradise (Hos. 14:5–8, Ezek. 27:22–24). In rabbinical and Christian exegesis the cedars of Lebanon sym-
bolized a realized eschatology, the Jerusalem temple and the Church. This theological symbol was thus fitting for the phoenix as the bird of immortality.[144] The biblical and bestiary traditions, together with classical descriptions of the phoenix as very similar to the eagle, supported Petrarch's variation on Ezekiel's imagery.
There was no apparent precedent, however, for his description of the phoenix biting itself and vanishing. It was rather the pelican that pierced its own breast with its beak, either to feed its young with its blood or to sprinkle it upon them to restore them to life. This was a common medieval allegory for the crucified Christ from whose pierced side flowed the blood of salvation that nourished the living and resurrected the dead. Certain motifs associated with the pelican did appear in the fifth portent, indicating Petrarch's poetic license in ascribing its manner to the phoenix. These were notably the pelican's solitude, its inhabiting of wasted locales, and its unselfish sacrifice. Its representation of charity (pietas et amor )[145] was replicated precisely in Petrarch's response to the voluntary death of the phoenix (pietà et amor ). The phoenix was described in the bestiaries as striking its beak on a rock, however, and so was the eagle. In these fables the ancient phoenix ignited its funereal pyre by striking its beak on a stone. Consumed in the conflagration, it was then reborn from its own ashes, a tale symbolic of the resurrection of Christ.[146] The growth of the eagle's beak to such proportions that it could not eat was legendary. Upon being struck against a rock, the beak would be broken, enabling the eagle to stave off starvation. This rock upon which the eagle struck its beak was interpreted allegorically as Christ. There was also a motif of resurrection in lore about the eagle. Like the senescent phoenix it was said to seek a fountain and then to fly above it into the region of the sun. There its heavy wings were burned and the mist shrouding its eyes was consumed. Descending, it plunged three times into a fountain where it was wholly renewed. This was interpreted as an allegory of a man burdened and dulled by sin. He was exhorted to raise the eyes of his heart to Christ as "the sun of righteousness" and to be baptized in spiritual waters, just as the eagle soared to gaze at the physical sun and then plunged for its rebirth into a physical fountain.[147]
In Petrarch's portent the phoenix flew to the cedar of Lebanon, here the laurel, and to the fountain, as was its legendary custom. Observing the desiccation of the tree from whose twigs it used to build its pyre and of the fountain into whose waters it descended, both for its res-
urrection, it struck its beak against itself and vanished. This phoenix symbolized Christ, as he was commonly portrayed in patristic and medieval literature and art. In Petrarch's verse he struck his beak against himself, the true Rock, and vanished in the fire thus ignited in his heart. At this spiritual vision the poet's own heart burned with piety (pietà ) and love. It was also consumed with pity (pietà ), however, for Christ had been dashed against the Petrine rock of the papacy. The phoenix had discovered Eden made desolate by the removal to Avignon.
VI
Finally I saw walking thoughtful amid the flowers and the grass a
Lady so joyous and beautiful that I never think of it without burning
and trembling,
humble in herself, but proud against Love; and she wore a white
garment so woven that it appeared gold and snow together,
but her highest parts were wrapped in a dark mist. Pierced then in
the heel by a little snake, as a plucked flower languishes she departed
happy, not merely confident: ah, nothing but weeping endures in the
world!
Song, you may well say: "These six visions have given my lord a
sweet desire for death."
This sixth portent imitated the oracle of the death of the prophet's wife in the twenty-fourth chapter of Ezekiel. Climaxing the initial phase of his mission, the pericope related Ezekiel's last utterance just before the news of the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon reached the hostages already deported during the earlier siege. The prophet was abruptly informed by Yahweh that the delight of his eyes, his wife, would suddenly be snatched from him in death. He was then forbidden any external expression of grief at this event, specifically the customary lamentation and weeping, the ceremonial baring of head and feet, and the funereal feast (Ezek. 24:15–18). This prohibition of mourning, which permitted the prophet only silent groans of desolation, was to serve as a sign to the nation. Ezekiel's symbolic inaction anticipated the paralysis of the influential elders who were captive in Babylon before the immense suffering about to befall the remaining citizens in Jerusalem. Just as the prophet was deprived of the delight of his eyes, his wife, so would the captives be deprived of the delight of theirs. The invading army of Nebuchadnezzar would profane the temple and slay the youths of the nation, thus destroying any hope of reunion for the
captives. The prophet's obedience to this grievous injunction underscored his office as a messenger of divine judgment, one who personally shared in the suffering of Israel (vv. 19–27).[148]
Petrarch paralleled the death of the prophet's wife with that of Eurydice,[149] in classical mythology the wife of Orpheus. Medieval allegorizations of Orpheus as Christ[150] allowed Petrarch the license of identifying Eurydice, his spouse, as the Church. Such nuptial imagery, a commonplace of ecclesiology, was fostered by the Pauline injunction that husbands were to love their wives as Christ loved the Church (Eph. 6:25). It was explicated and elaborated by the Apocalyptic vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven as the bride of the Lamb (Rev. 21:9–22:5), a metaphor itself derived from the oracles of Ezekiel (Ezek. 40–48). This opposition of Jerusalem the bride to Babylon the whore was adapted by reformers, as in Petrarch's metric epistles to the exiled popes that confronted these symbolic women. Such allegorization of the papacy and Rome as husband and wife varied the scriptural roles of Christ and the Church in their mystical marriage.
In Petrarch's sixth portent the ecclesial bride, bitten by a snake in the grass, succumbed to death, just as the Church had perished in her other guises as the lioness of Judah, the ship of Tyre, the cedar of Lebanon, and the fountain sprung from a rock. All of these figures Petrarch adapted from the oracles of Ezekiel, the prophet of the Babylonian Captivity, to symbolize the destruction of the Church in its repetition of Israel's political exile. The effectiveness of Ezekiel's dirges had depended on their allusions to the collection of aphorisms traditionally misnamed "Jacob's blessing" (Gen. 49:1–28a).[151] In that patriarchal testament on the twelve tribes of Israel, the imagery of Petrarch's visionary poem was catalogued: Judah was like a regal lioness (v. 9); Zebulun, a harbor for ships (v. 13); Dan, a serpent in the path who bit the heels of raiders (vv. 17, 19); Joseph, a fruitful bough by a spring (v. 22). Just as the prophet Ezekiel had proclaimed the reversal of these promises through the Babylonian Captivity of Israel, so the prophet Petrarch announced them for the Church.
Petrarch's definitive composition of this song in October 1368[152] was not fortuitous. It coincided with the solemn entry on the nineteenth of that month of Charles IV into Rome. "Nothing," it has been judged, "could have been more nicely calculated to bring home to Petrarch the impracticability of his grandiose schemes for an Italy
reborn." In May he had twice met with the emperor as a mediator for Milan, whose Visconti had patronized the poet as enthusiastically as they ruthlessly controlled territory. Petrarch's ideal of civic, national, and imperial renewal, which he successively invested in Robert of Naples, Cola di Rienzo, and Charles IV, now foundered in ambiguity. The poet had importuned the emperor to hasten to Rome to compose the Italian disorder. "Enter victoriously and undaunted!" he had insisted. "Move rapidly and cross the Alpine passes amidst the inhabitants' rejoicing. Rome summons her bridegroom, Italy summons her deliverer and desires to be trampled by your feet."
After a decade Charles IV had finally heeded Petrarch's persistent exhortations. Yet he was now intervening, with a formidable army, as the declared enemy of the Visconti dynasty, to which Petrarch was obligated for patronage.[153] The pope, allied with Joanna of Naples and twelve Tuscan communes against Ambrogio Visconti and the leaders of the condottieri , had requested the emperor's assistance. Of all the imperial lineage Charles was the most subject to papal policy and ideals, so much so as to earn the epithet "the priests' emperor." This incursion was in fulfillment of a vow he had sworn in 1355 at his coronation in Rome to defend the papal rights against the Visconti. Although his primary objective was the companies, he changed plans when Mantua was attacked by the Visconti. His army was joined by the papal and Neapolitan forces in hostility to Milan. The emperor nevertheless made overtures of peace. The Visconti promised through messengers to obey. Barnabò Visconti absolved some papal debts, agreed to respect the rights of the clergy in his territories, to return sites captured from Mantua, to join the league against the companies, to serve the emperor while in Italy with five hundred troops, and to renounce private alliances with papal subjects. Charles IV in turn reinstated the Visconti as imperial vicars and enjoined the Gonzaghi and della Scala to respect the treaty. Although the pope was dissatisfied with the agreement, the emperor continued his journey, and together they entered Rome triumphantly, with the emperor reviving the ancient etiquette of holding the stirrup by which the pope mounted his horse. The subsequent alliance of the pope, the emperor, Barnabò Visconti, and the Tuscan cities succeeded in defeating the companies at Arezzo on 15 June 1369. But the Visconti shortly after again hired the companies against the pope. He returned to Avignon, prompted by the discontent of the French cardinals at Rome and by the threat of an English invasion of France.[154]
This political scene was the context of Petrarch's climactic portent in which the Church in the guise of Eurydice was bitten in the heel by a snake in the grass. Whether the poet envisioned this agent to be the emperor who entered Rome, the pope who soon quit it, or perhaps the Visconti, whose emblem was a snake, the victim's demise was certain. Like Orpheus mourning the death of his spouse, Petrarch memorialized his grief in the poetic lament of Rime 323. The scriptural signs he appropriated from the prophet Ezekiel conveyed political import from their historical association with the sieges of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Captivity of its nation. They were, moreover, specifically royal symbols. The lion, the eagle, and the cedar, which Petrarch paralleled with the lioness, the phoenix, and the laurel, were regents of the animal, avian, and arboreal realms. Tyre was a queenly city and its ship had kings for oarsmen.[155] The advent of the phoenix, substituting in the fifth portent for the Israelite and the Roman eagle, especially signaled an imperial omen. As sharing the sky with the very gods, birds had been revered since antiquity for celestial and divinatory qualities. Avian flight, cry, and behavior were universal auspices, and prophecy was associated with drinking the blood of birds of prey. As the confidant of Apollo, the phoenix was singularly associated with prophecy.[156] In classical literature the advent of the phoenix on earth always presaged an important turn in universal history, such as the subjection of Egypt to Persia or the eight hundredth anniversary of the founding of Rome. It coincided particularly with the inauguration of a new political ruler, such as that of the Roman emperor Tiberius. Initiating a return to the Golden Age, the presence of the phoenix at imperial triumphs ensured a paradisiacal reign, like that of the Elysian Fields or the Isles of the Blessed that were the provenance of that bird.[157] Just as the phoenix had appeared auspiciously in legend to celebrate the founding and perpetuity of Rome, so it now appeared ominously in Petrarch's portent to lament the ruin of that city. Eden was wasted. The tree from which the phoenix used to gather aromatic branches for its resurrectional pyre was withered, its leaves scattered. The fountain into which it traditionally plunged for rebirth was desiccated. At this profanation the phoenix contemptuously sacrificed its life and vanished, without bequeathing to the nation either peace or progeny.
This imperial omen, devastating Petrarch's hopes for the inauguration at Rome of a new Golden Age, suggests that the snake in the grass of the final portent may have been the emperor himself. Al-
though Petrarch had as late as 1361 assured Charles IV that his Bohemian birth was no impediment to claiming an Italian hegemony,[158] mistrust developed. The once effusive letters and enthusiastic meetings dwindled to utter silence, as the emperor triumphantly entered the city in which each, poet and Caesar, had been crowned a citizen. Such a vision of the German emperor or nation as a scourge of the Church was common among the French and Italian adherents of Joachim of Fiore, even until the sack of Rome in 1527. Applying politically the implications of that prophet's third estate, that of the Spirit, they identified the cosmic evil that afflicted the Church in its final tribulation as the Hohenstaufen rule.[159] In Joachim's complex interpretation of history, the Germans, to whom the Roman imperium had been transferred, played a significant role. Extrapolating from the Apocalypic symbol of the sealed book (Rev. 5:1), he developed a parallel pattern of seven seals and seven openings that corresponded to the eras of conflict in Israelite and Christian history.[160] Just as under the sixth seal the Babylonians had oppressed the Jews, so under the sixth opening the Germans persecuted the Christians. For inflicting on the Church the investiture controversy, the emperor Henry IV was paralleled with Nebuchadnezzar. He was, moreover, censured as the fifth head of an apocalyptic dragon breathing tribulation and schism. Although the German nation had been entrusted with the Roman rule for the exercise of peace, because of its prideful transgressions it had now inherited its scriptural condemnation as the new Babylon. When the angel of the sixth seal poured his phial of wrath into the Euphrates, it was prophesied to dry up, allowing the infidel hordes to cross over and seize the German territories. This act was already presaged in the disaster that had befallen the army of Frederick Barbarossa. In Joachim's scheme the fall of the new Babylon, as ushering in the final Sabbath, was the collapse of the Roman empire caused by the Germans.[161] While Petrarch's visionary sequence reversed this hope by predicting a perpetual Babylon, it was political prophecy and not merely romantic reverie. It incited the poet to crave death rather than exile, for, with the end of "the sun of righteousness," Babylon would indeed be "no light anywhere . . . but only gloom on all sides . . . a night of eternal darkness, I may add, devoid of stars, in which dawn never comes, and where deeds, moreover, are performed in deep and perpetual shadows."[162]