The most able-bodied gentlemen were equipped with real portable trees, capable of concealing a whole man and his arquebus. These were made from papier mache covered with bits of bark and mounted on an iron frame. They were furnished with false branches covered with an abundance of twigs. So that these could be worn, they were equipped internally with leather belts which made it possible to carry the simulacrum of a tree on one's shoulders while leaving the arms free. The guest could look through two little apertures and freely approach his victim, take aim with his arquebus, slowly pointing the barrel through the appropriate slit, and fire with assured success. This ingenious invention, designed on the basis of the advice of Gioseffo Maria Mitelli, from Bologna, son of an artist and painter of frescoes who had done much work at Palazzo Spada, gave rise to such praise and wonderment that I am providing a drawing of it here:
Others, who were more adventurous, were to attempt the so-called hunt with an ox. In other words, they used imposing sham cows, painted in oils with the greatest verisimilitude on canvases mounted on wooden frames, to be used as screens behind which to stalk the prey without frightening it off, and then shoot it with an arquebus. To paraphrase more noble examples, one might call these real Trojan cows. I have also provided a drawing of this expedient, but I have other reasons for so doing:
In fact, the cow, as soon as it was set up in the field, scared all the animals on the Barberini estate, and some ladies too. This was because the bovine effigy, being painted in oils, shone with such lucent splendour in the sun that it seemed almost like a burning mirror. It had therefore to be rapidly withdrawn, otherwise all the birds would have flown off in terror.
Of course, in order to be able to attract a sufficient prey, it was necessary to stock the area of the merry hunt with a great number of song birds, so that their warbling would attract their fellows. For this purpose, many cages had been purchased full of chaffinches and goldfinches. Given my occasional role as Master of the Fowls, Don Paschatio had entrusted me with the important task of placing these cages at strategic points on the Barberini estate, making sure that each group of hunters should have the same number of these baits and that they should be uniformly positioned throughout the hunting grounds. To reinforce the effect, I was also to tie other song birds to the stems of plants and to trees, securing their legs with thread.
As I was gathering the cages and carrying them two by two to the Barberini estate, I encountered Don Tibaldutio. As often happened, he felt like conversing a little with me. I have already mentioned that he lived apart from the rest of the villa in a little room behind the chapel, and often felt somewhat lonely. I therefore proposed that he should keep me company while I laid out on the ground, on the trees and in the midst of bushes and shrubs the cages containing the birds which were to serve as bait.
Hardly had the chaplain begun to speak of this and of that when his upright and chaste presence revived like an invisible flame the burning memory of the night before.
Atto's memoir was, I thought once more, to be brought 'ad Albanum': thus, behind all these shady affairs there was a cardinal, no less! What malign force, what infernal ladle was capable of mixing in the cauldron of the Holy City a highly placed cardinal, the right-hand man of His Holiness, and the diabolical sects of the cerretani. I then remembered that the cerretani had originally been defrocked priests. How was that possible? Only an ecclesiastic could enlighten me on this point.
As a good pastor, Don Tibaldutio listened to my questions without batting an eyelid. I pretended that I had heard rumours in the street concerning the religious origins of the sects of mendicants.
'Age-old is the scourge, and wrapped in mystery, its origins,' the Carmelite began gravely.
It all began after the barbarian invasions which put an end to nine centuries of Roman domination of the world. In those days, men were for the most part poor peasants and lived in small, isolated rural communities. The roads were unsafe, many the bandits and masterless soldiers, and the bears and wolves on the lookout for prey. Friars and monks remained in the safety of their monasteries, often built on inaccessible heights. Apart from the merchants, who had to travel for their trade, everyone lived in villages, working the land and praying God for the next harvest. But they were not alone: regularly, visitors would arrive.
They were dressed in rags, haggard and dirty, and they asked for charity. They came from obscure places on the edge of villages, abandoned lazarets, little gaggles of hutments, almost a parallel civilisation devoted to filth. They were known as vagrants, degenerates, knaves, rascals, or tricksters and swindlers, if you prefer. But they were not poor: their poverty was only a disguise. They knew well how to profit from the words of the Evangelist, which call on all good Christians to practise charity: 'Give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you.'
'Some, perhaps, had been priests,' said Don Tibaldutio, 'but instead of honouring the Lord with prayer, they had given their souls to the Evil One.'
They would choose the humblest among the peasantry, ignorant of the world and its snares, and present themselves to them in unusual guises, with wild eyes halfway between folly and wisdom. They pretended to be all at once healers, magi and prophets, saviours of body and soul. They sold talismans, relics, miraculous orations, magic spells against the evil eye, ointments and panaceas; they announced miracles or divine punishments; they interpreted dreams; they miraculously found hidden treasures and rich inheritances which had been concealed; they exorcised and cast anathemas, thundering against sinners and promising heaven to the just. In the course of all this, they asked for and invariably received offerings in money.
Begging for alms (which was thus both their purpose and their method) they were past-masters of suggestion, illusion and swindling, as the learned Gnesius Basapopi tells so well. When they practised flagellation, from their wounds gushed false blood — that of cats and chickens. But invariably they took alms and tribute in plenty from the credulous and simple, who were legion. Besides, did not the Sophists, too, have a reputation for being jugglers and charlatans, and, moving beyond them, even Socrates and Plato? None of those peasants remembered the admonition of the Bishop of Hippo, that one should give to the poor, but. not to play-actors.
'But were they never unmasked?' I objected, as I took a goldfinch from a cage, tied its foot to a piece of twine and secured this with a nail to the trunk of a young acacia.
'Of course, from time to time, a victim would react. But this was rare, and in any case, when it did happen, those rascals would change their skins like serpents and return to their former trades as tumblers, rebeck players, even tooth-pullers because, as that verse ofTheocritus puts it, paupertas sola est artes quae suscitat omnes: poverty alone gives rise to invention.
Then he sang:
By lies and by tricks You can live half a year; By tricks and by lies, Live the other half too.
'What's that?' I asked, as we moved on to the area where the arquebuses had been placed.
'An old rhyme of false beggars: just to help you understand how corrupted their minds are.'
But there was more to it. Insistent rumours had it that the cerretani had all united in a single sect. Following this, their high priest had founded the various subdivisions, not so much in order to organise them according to their specialisations as for a Satan ic purpose: the imitation of the religious orders of the Catholic Church.
This hypothesis was not to be underestimated, for Bernardino of Siena tells how one day Lucifer, surrounded by all his demons, manifested to them his desire to start a church in contraposition to that of Christ, an Ecclesia malignantium wherewith to cancel out or at least mitigate the effectiveness of the other, celestial Church, upon which it was modelled. Even Agrippa of Nettesheim, who did not much believe in witches' spells, was so certain of the malefic powers of the canters that he went so far as to accuse them of practising black magic.
With time, matters got worse, explained the chaplain, as I checked on one of the arquebuses planted in the ground, to make sure that it was indeed well aimed. Even the genuine religious orders were infected by the scandal. The monasteries got wind of the freedoms enjoyed in the world: it was necessary only to serve up a little nonsense to the ingenuous. The body came then to prevail over the spirit, eating and drinking over prayer, sloth over works consecrated to the Lord.
'Wearing black vestments, as Libanius writes in Pro Templis, the monks ate more than elephants. They were men in appearance, yet they lived like pigs, and they publicly tolerated and committed acts of the foulest, most unspeakable turpitude. As Saint Augustine well knew, the enclosed orders of friars were reduced to an ignoble, muddy Gehenna,' he exclaimed, casting a compassionate glance at a robin I had found dead in one of the cages, perhaps killed by the strain of being carted around thus.
Monks and pseudo-monks, excommunicated by their own bishop, swarmed out from the cloister and began to wander unpunished on the highways, perturbing the peace of the Church and spreading further corruption amongst the good people. They joined the multitudes of true and false tramps, ragamuffins, layabouts, lepers, gypsies, vagabonds, cripples and paralytics lying in front of church doors, and made them their impure flocks.
