The gibbets collapsed with the hanged. Upon the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome, the timbers and the corpses had to be hoisted back into place, so that the cardinals, returning from the papal palace, might view the punishment in the exact order wherein it had been devised. Johannes Burchard records this mishap under the date of the 27th of May 1500, the eve of the Ascension. Eighteen men had been ranged along either flank of the crossing: nine to the right, nine to the left. The spectacle was intended to prove that the city knew how to safeguard her visitors. A few days earlier, brigands had furnished her, by plundering an ambassador of the King of France, with an uncommonly embarrassing reason to demonstrate it.
The Traveller Who Represented a King
In that Jubilee year, the highways to Rome carried pilgrims, but likewise merchants, retainers, and envoys charged with matters far less spiritual. The promise of indulgences in no way lightened the baggage; nor did it disarm those who lay in wait along the verges. As early as February, a papal bull had commanded that the roads and hostleries be made more secure. Local authorities were enjoined to watch the roads, forestall attacks, and answer for damages whenever their negligence suffered travellers to be despoiled.
The text preserved by Burchard does not rest content with recommending vigilance. It threatens governors, lords, and communes: the injury sustained by wayfarers might be imputed to them, and restitution exacted from their own coffers. Security thus became an obligation ascending from the highway up to the holders of temporal power. It no longer sufficed to plead that thieves were elusive. Whosoever governed the soil whereupon they operated was bound to aid in their apprehension, under pain of feeling the loss in his own estates.
On the 12th of May, René d’Agrimont, the French ambassador, was drawing near to Rome with his retinue, his baggage, and a train of horses. In the vicinity of Viterbo, armed men fell upon him. Burchard numbers the brigands at two-and-twenty; a Florentine dispatch would describe a far more numerous troop. The tallies differ, yet the result remained unaltered: coin, personal effects, and mounts were carried off; two members of the suite were grievously wounded. The representative of a sovereign had been treated like any ordinary wayfarer whose purse was judged heavier than his escort.
The dispatch sent by Antonio Malegonnelle to Florence, and reprinted by the editor of Burchard’s diary, adds a detail that renders the assault yet more disquieting. The assailants were said to have bidden the Italian passers-by continue upon their way, signifying that the business did not concern them. This reported remark suggests a deliberate selection of the victim; it does not prove who may have commissioned the stroke. Yet it forbade reducing the robbery, without deeper scrutiny, to a chance collision between a laden convoy and rapacious cutpurses.
Fifteen Prisoners to Efface an Affront
The ambassador entered Rome on the morrow, destitute of the expected pomp. Alexander VI reacted with vigour. He dispatched the chief officer of justice beyond the walls and sent urgent mandates to those whose lands might harbour the aggressors. Fabrizio Colonna, in particular, was solicited. According to Burchard, several of the robbers hailed from domains under his authority; the Pope demanded that they be brought straightway to Rome. Fifteen men were captured and conveyed to the capital.
For a brigand, the boundary between two jurisdictions may serve as a sanctuary. For him who seeks to pursue him, it turns into a petition addressed to a feudatory, an order to be formally acknowledged, a liability to be enforced. The couriers sent forth after the ambush reveal this geography of power. Justice did not merely track the prints of horses; it had to reach men shielded by distance, by local custom, or by the vacillations of the lords who commanded the territory.
Rumour, for its part, traversed jurisdictions without hindrance. The crime was laid at the door of outlaws from Todi, men of Viterbo, Corsicans, and retainers bound to the Colonna. Malegonnelle enumerates these suspicions while remarking that no single band had yet been identified with certainty. He notes as well the direction taken by the spoil and the surmises it provoked. In the meantime, the first captures afforded the government the means of exhibiting, without delay, a visible result.
This outcome was soon to exceed the mere circle of the prisoners. On the 24th of May, an edict was proclaimed against all Corsicans residing within the territories of the Church. Men and women, clerks and layfolk, were enjoined to depart with their families within ten days. The wording of the decree confounded an entire people with the menace imputed to certain of its members. The pursuit of an armed robbery was transmuted into a measure of collective banishment, accompanied by forfeitures, penalties, and bounties promised to informers or to such as should deliver up offenders.
Lords and communes were forbidden to harbour them. Mariners fell under the same interdict; commercial exceptions were hedged about with registrations and inspections. One recognises in these extensive injunctions the intent to bar every successive avenue of retreat: the road, the hamlet, the sheltering hearth, and finally the vessel at sea. Brigandage supplied the immediate pretext. Yet those compelled to sell their worldly goods and abandon their abodes had not all stood trial for the ambush of the ambassador.
The Physician Among the Eighteen
Three days after the proclamation, eighteen men were hanged around the hour of noon. Burchard connects thirteen of them with the band that had despoiled the Frenchman. The five others proceeded from entirely distinct causes. Four receive in his diary only a cursory notice of their crimes. The last, by contrast, arrests his pen by virtue of his station: he was a physician and surgeon attached to the Hospital of San Giovanni in Laterano.
The chronicler accuses him of issuing forth in the early morn with a crossbow, clad in a short tunic, to murder and rob such travellers as he might conveniently assault. The contrast between his calling and the alleged misdeeds suffices to lend the figure his sinister power. A man sworn to heal stood accused of ordering his excursions around victims marked for plunder. Yet Burchard assigns him here no name, no sequence of depositions, no circumstantial account of his arrest. The image is vivid; the legal dossier remains hidden from our view.
He relates, furthermore, a darker charge, which he expressly introduces as mere rumour. The hospital’s confessor was alleged to have forewarned the physician whenever a sick man declared himself possessed of monies; a potion designed to hasten his end was then said to have enabled the two confederates to divide the estate. This tale transmutes holy confession and medicine into an engine of death. It was then current in Rome. Its presence in the journal does not suffice to substantiate such a criminal league, much less to supply the names and dying words of its supposed victims.
Upon the bridge, however, all distinctions between the causes were obliterated. The physician, the men hunted down after the diplomatic robbery, and the four other felons were marshalled into one identical arrangement. The symmetry of the nine corpses on either parapet turned diverse proceedings into a single demonstration of sovereignty. It bespoke less what each individual trial had established than what the spectators were expected to retain: the prince punished, and the highways now displayed their dead as an example.
Re-erecting the Scaffolding
Then the timbers gave way. The journal dwells neither upon the outcries nor upon the stir of the multitude; it records merely the fall and the prompt re-erection of the gibbets with the corpses. For the cardinals returning from Saint Peter’s, all the condemned were required to appear suspended aloft. The mishap might have impaired the lesson. The stage-setting was repaired without delay.
Burchard then resumes the ordinary course of ceremonial: vespers, an official visit, the solemn feast of the morrow. This continuity is striking. What constituted for eighteen human beings the end of all earthly history becomes, within the register of a master of ceremonies, merely one day among others, its material disorder set to rights before the return of the great. The robbery at Viterbo had humiliated Rome; the gibbets were to restore her credit. Between the two, the wounded men of the escort, the captives, and the banished families had endured consequences far greater than the orderly symmetry of the bridge could ever comprehend.
The journey toward the Holy City went on. Pilgrims, as they drew near Saint Peter’s, might henceforth behold the most palpable proof of the care taken to reassure them. It remained only for them to pass between the dead.