The headsman of Florence did not at first see the stone. He merely heard the dull crack it made against the timber, beside his boot. His gaze dropped, lingered upon that shard of hardened earth, then rose toward the crowd. No one appeared to have cast it. Every man was pointing, shouting, turning to his neighbour. He sought an adversary; he found before him only faces that henceforth refused to let him finish his work.
A few moments earlier, these very people had been awaiting the exercise of his craft. On the twenty-ninth of May, 1503, a lad of some twenty years had been led to the place of justice, outside the city walls. He followed the trade of a banderaio, a maker of banners, and had slain a man of his own guild. Landucci attributes the killing to a professional rivalry. Now the young convict arrived in his turn before death. His victim was no longer there to draw the eye; it was he who commanded every gaze, with his evident youth and his body still quick with life.
The executioner had caught sight of that youthful face amidst the men charged with escorting him. He had uttered no word. He was not asked to fathom the origins of a quarrel nor to weigh the balance of wrongs: judgment had been rendered. His part began precisely where the speech of others ceased. He was well acquainted with this division of labour, which allowed every participant to believe he was executing only a fragment of the misfortune. The magistrates had pronounced; the guards had conducted; he was to strike.
He had surveyed the clearing about him. The onlookers were already pressing too close. The brethren of the confraternity—those hooded battuti come to comfort the condemned—ministered to the lad; the officer watched over the proceedings. The headsman made a sign for the circle to widen. They yielded a few paces, with that sullen reluctance peculiar to folk who have come to watch and will not willingly forfeit their ground. For his part, he would have preferred that his person be forgotten. A well-conducted execution rendered him who performed it almost invisible. Men spoke of the culprit, of the crime, of the sentence. He would then depart.
The youth took his position. He obeyed, yet his eyes darted from one man to another, still striving to comprehend what words were being addressed to him. The headsman corrected his posture with a curt gesture. A stir of impatience arose from the foremost ranks, as yet without a definite object. Men awaited the end, dreaded it, perhaps regretted having come at all, even as they craned their necks to see the better. The young man bowed his head. That single motion silenced several voices.
The first blow failed.
The headsman instantly perceived the shift in the air about him. He had no leisure to examine it. The condemned man lay there, the task half-done, the officer’s eyes fixed upon his hands. He must begin anew. He took up his stance once more, with an application that had suddenly grown ponderous. What he had wished to dispatch swiftly now exacted from all present an intolerable waiting. A cry broke out, quickly drowned by a shouted command. The executioner struck again. The second stroke ended the business no more than the first.
Whereupon the youth ceased, in the eyes of the spectators, to be the felon who had slain a fellow craftsman. He became that tender body abandoned to a clumsy butchery that merely prolonged his agony. The sentence, whether debated or approved before their coming, vanished behind the spectacle before them. The headsman caught insults hurled at his head. He recognized the vile words sometimes spat after him in the streets, but here they gathered a terrible new force: they no longer dogging his footsteps after the fact, but attempting to halt him in the very exercise of his office.
A third blow failed yet again. The officer intervened; the chronicles preserve the memory of two blows from a stave dealt amidst the gathering confusion. Around the condemned man, authority could no longer impart even the semblance of order to the scene. Those who had watched in silence began to clamour in outrage. The front ranks were thrust backward; those behind surged forward to see. A roar rippled from group to group. Then the first stone struck the wood.
The executioner raised his hand, as though so slight a gesture might reclaim the ground he had lost. Another stone whizzed past. A voice shouted to gather more. The earth, hitherto merely the floor of the theatre, furnished weapons to all who stood upon it. Men who had harboured no such thought a moment before now bent down in their turn. They acted less from any command than from the license afforded by their neighbour. There was no longer any need to lead the way; others had already begun for them.
The officer attempted to make himself heard. His rank afforded him no shield. The missiles rained down likewise upon the brothers of the confraternity, whose presence had no other aim than the salvation of the dying man. They sought to cover their heads, to retreat, to force an opening. The headsman saw these holy men seek flight and understood that none remained to ensure his own egress. The mob had stripped from his person the mantle of justice, without waiting for any other justice to take its place.
He turned toward the wall. A press of people already leaned against it, seeking shelter from the flying stones. A bystander who had watched him at his craft but minutes before did not offer him a hand; he himself was desperate for support. The headsman recoiled, stumbled, sought a gap between two shoulders. Terror now made him clumsy in his turn. He thought no longer of the sentence, nor of his office, nor of the orders he had received. He wished only to gain a few paces in any direction whence the stones did not come.
He was slain. The pity that had stirred the people for the young convict had not sufficed to stay their arms before a second defenceless man. After the adults, children took possession of the corpse and dragged it through the mud toward Santa Croce. The execution had burst the bounds of its scaffold. It now traversed the city in a guise no magistrate had ever spoken from the bench.
Certain minds soon affixed to this death an older explanation than the affair of the banner-maker. The executioner, they whispered, was paying the reckoning for having put to death Savonarola and his companions in 1498. The memory of the friar still divided Florence. By linking the two spectacles, they transformed a brutal lynching into a chastisement awaited for five years. The stone cast amidst the riot was thus endowed, after the fact, with a providential mission.
Landucci set down the disaster in his ledger, then returned to the ordinary news of the commonwealth. On the morrow, the price of salt troubled the poor. The war against Pisa dragged on. Florence had other rages to feed and other affairs to conduct. A craftsman had been led to the scaffold by decree of the law; the man appointed to dispatch him had been murdered by the onlookers. The crowd had assembled to witness the death of a convict. It dispersed with the blood of a headsman upon its hands.