Inhalt
The Beasts
The Beasts
1.Maimona
Alka
Cold fear and darkness still at early dawn:
fifty galleys at slow scull. Three rows of oars each
cut spurred wakes through a thousand years’ tides.
The mude surges against the waves, Malta vanishes
from coastal shallows to uncertain troughs.
L'alba part umet mar altra sol.
Here, memory lays out no seamless mould,
grasps images in flight from drying fact.
Day’s ploughshare turns darkness to quicken the sun.
Sunlight filters through rushed pelts of cloud;
coils of eel-brown rope, men crouched by bulkheads,
stiff canvas plucking at nervous gusts.
This day sought shadows thrown to action,
Poy pasa bigil mira clar tenebras!
found the black gull trembling to trim shocked flight
banking to veer beside a darkened swell.
Light shines from shadow, spills across the Alps.
Chroniclers will cast their nets, unsounded
to dredge up the ruin of those scared hours.
Living memories will die unheared.
Portolani charts enmesh chance mouthings
from scattered shipwrecks and survivors’ tales.
"Il n'est mie jours... l'alouette nous ment,"
but none can draw the acting primal sight.
Slowly the sweating mists unwrap themselves.
"It isn't daylight yet. The bird's song lies"
A thousand, two hundred years have framed
an unsure fret for the God’s City repentants.
The black prows, glistening, lunge and thrust,
turning to Genoa, while the rasping winds
disperse foamed traces of the trail laid down.
Spiculator pigris clamat 'surgere.'
The tattered, salt-starched hulks hold pilgrim's robes,
bales of paper and barrels of gall-nuts.
The watchman's warning will wake the sleepers.
Their action's trace will be etched onto stone.
Sarcophagal effigies stare naked and grey:
the Terra Incognita more unknown than Hell.
Dark fear in the navigator's steerage:
not yet time to extinguish the lanterns.
Dark fear, in the choirs and houses of faith,
founds Cologne, the Sainte Chapelle
and the Alhambra mosque.
The gull hurtles heavily to a living prey.
A chronicler's mind drops on his evidence,
which grows uncertain in discovery,
or leaves myths as charms against the real.
Quos suadet freco clamans "surgere"
to embalm fatal fact in images
which cash human eyes for the night of time,
again the watchman's voice forbidding sleep.
The flowering sea plants, brown, green
and deep red Alka, gleaming from the blades.
Now the ice sheets deliver cold cargoes
foaled from the glacier’s featureless stretch
the small ice-age, drying the Great Plains,
to populate Mexico and overrun the Toltecs.
The foaling icebergs still equatorial winds
a calm that that urged the Almoravides
over the sands to burn Kumbi
and Kublai Khan to crush the Song
resistance on the Pearl River Delta,
learning the art of the cannon,
as Europe decodes Roger Bacon’s
magic formula for black gunpowder.
Deed of Sale
You, Oberto, and you, Antonio, two humble
notaries of Genoa, would have remembered
the slave, Maimona, from Malta,
taken in the season of flowering hawthorn.
She would have lived, dumb to the world,
had you not scrawled the bill of her sale.
She had arrived on the ship that morning.
“Done in Genoa, on May the Eleventh, Twelve Forty-Eight.”
"I, Giunta sell, give and hand over to you, Raimondo.
Maimona, a slave, once of Malta.
I give you power and, physical dominion of her."
Each wild wave’s rush to the shore specifies dissent.
Maimona's event conspired, unconscious,
to make a new world of Genoan things
Can't you remember Raimondo?
She was the only known one among scores.
Reges cannot cohere.
The searching waves’ undertow specifies
the counter drag of death on love.
If the waves mismatch, much more the heart
that wrangles with fast rule
in a tide of scattered debate,
rouses a torrent that will wrest Europe
from its rooted, residual shelf
and thrust it breathless into new hells.
The Greeks said the institution was
contrary to the freedom of God,
yet modified by Biblical tradition.
Augustine said by Ham’s unhappy fault.
Ham was an infidel. The law lay down
Infidels could be enslaved as a pagan race.
Maimona was denied the privilege
of keeping silent: admission forced
from a Christian slave. "And I, Maimona
admit I am a slave and wish to be
handed over and sold to you, Raimondo."
At Terce behind the Church of St. Lorenzo.
In twelve seventy four, Aquinas died,
at Fossa Nova, a new ditch dug to name
a point, spoken by men on speechless earth,
seen as the eternal changing moment in God’s eyes.
The reliquary pointed to no clocked salvation.
Warring acolytes, regum and sacerdotum bar
the Simple Soul, his way brokered by Avignon.
Early sun strands brightly filter through.
This day the living lived. Such facts die
when men's eyes fade to die.
Three centuries fear formed a doubting
framework for personal Man,
to wake only to keep face with fear.
In early dawn light to wait for the sun
to break through darkness.
Tarbagan Fur
In Thirteen Nine, Kublai Khan
was no more and in Pistoia,
Richo was born,
son of Buonomo, butcher.
The popolo minuto
remembered
him, chopping meat for his father
in the market
place at Pistoia;
red blood
falling onto the firm stones
Yet the crust quivered.
Rocks flesh would not rest.
Stone arteries tensed.
Subsoil blood welled up, made dry flint to flow
and erupted, harsh,
against the skull strong mountains, ligaments
of the great frame.
Infertile chasms opened underground seas.
Tsincheu, the mountain
fell into the dark. At Ki-Ming Chan
one hundred leagues
of anxious water gaped wide.
While river plains
dried to dead gravel. Locusts, famine,
death, floods then
thunder heard below the earth.
Beasts fled the tremors.
By Lake Issyk-Koul,
the tarbagan arrived in great numbers
from the celestial
mountains, Tien-Shan, and pleased the hunters
who traded its skin
along with wax, alum and sandalwood.
and an enemy,
with the tarbagan fur;
Pasturella Pestis,
a plague virus
stomached in the flea's belly.
Xenopsylla Cheopis
bit men's hands
hundreds were suddenly dead with buboes.
The Tartars bought pelts
to make fur-collars for their families
bought the flea and virus,
along with male and female slaves mostly dead
within days, of terrible pain.
Then the human flea sucked deep
of infected blood
from captive wares and the trader lay dead
with his bound trade.
The celestial range had heaved endemic
fever to a rush.
The slaves transmitted
pandemic to free men.
Eighty-five thousand
were to die in Crimea, the arid land
of Cusman Tartars.
In Tana, a brawl
erupted and blazed to a seige
The besiegers
began to die.
Frustrated
they hurled
the bodies of their fellow men,
infected
over the walls of the port.
Fatigued,
stupified with crowding fear,
the Genoese
took ship to Kaffa
dying
as they sailed
then hurled themselves,
scared, westwards.
Taking secret fear
first to Sicily
then to Genoa
where Maimona
was un remembered,
shapeless,
somewhere,
placeless.
Jute Sacks
Cold fear, darkness at early dawnlight,
and a convoys row slowly.
Membranes of day filter through
pelts of fragment- fringed cloud bank.
Pink light breaks on unseen details.
Two men, Oberto and Antonio
would have forgotten the slave,
Maimonia. Holy scripture settled
just slavery, Thomas concurred:
over custom but not inheritance.
The person is led by the spirit,
as the boat is led by the pilot
and in the hold, a slave
arrived in port to-day.
Charts show surfaces. No navigator could
tell true distances from under-inked towns.
The West lay in shallows before the great cold flow.
Poor men and land, no longer distinguished,
rage, or fear, or pogroms, patterns of acts
unique to the day shaped an incomplete sense
the whole coast line guessed thought's physique.
Cold fear and darkness distilled in early dawn.
These boats know nothing of the harvest's decline.
By Thirteen Fourteen the West's corn ran dry
and Antwerp paid double that chilly year
leading to inflation in all French towns
and depression across the channel, forced ruin.
La nuech voi e'l jorns v’a a newer trade
now lay bundled below,huddled
under sacks of jute in the hold’s darkness.
Saverouse au cor gent si m'aid amours
Night vanishes to proclaim the daylight.
Sweet-tasting one, how you spur my love!
2.Fevronya.
La Mória
“Took pen, ink and vellum
and scratched all night
until an hour before dawn.”
Caroldo's chronicle
did not wish to mention
the covering of well-heads,
dead lands, ice, dead people.
On January twenty-fifth
Thirteen Forty Eight,
tremours shook him,
his cronica, citta' di Venetia
e sua edificatione.
Three bell-towers collapsed.
In the heat of later months
brought forth black death.
La moriá extinguished
fifty noble families
and two fifths of the people
according to Anonymo.
Caroldo lived on, unamused.
Those same years
saw dead lands
come alive with jackals.
'Men surrendered
to the most shameful lives,'
Villani muttered.
'No-one had known such ways
before La Moriá'
'Servants and foul girls
wore the fair fine garments
of noble dead women'
The popolo minuto told tales
of how the humours came
in the holds of Genoese galleys.
“Some are masters,
some slaves by nature,
some slaves by wartime.”
Caroldo copied from Aristotle.
Sparse labour worried
the Florentine Signoria,
but infidels were being bought
'de partibus et genere infidelium.'
The jurists said,
'Slavery was instituted
by divine law and conformed
by customary and canon law'
Three hundred and fifty seven
arrived in sixty three
thirty four puellae under twelve
and eighty five under eighteen,
'healthy and whole
in all her parts
both visible and invisible.'
Coggio whispered in Sicily
'We have as much enemies
as we have slaves.'
In Avignon, Richo played off
pagan popes,against each other
Who paid for 'bridal caskets
all of fine gold
and painted in fine azure
with figures of ladies and knights.'
He married in Avignon,
took a Florentine of sixteen,
Margherita di Domenica Bandini
of Gherandini blood and sought
to build himself a house in Pistoia,
city of his birth.
'Fourteen bracchia by fifteen,
the lesser house,
Twenty braccia by fifteen, the larger
and an orchard
thirty one by twenty.
Piero di Giunta bought the land
on the corner of Via del Fabbri.
to this was added
a flower-garden, a warehouse,
a cistern, cellars underground
and above ground, a narrow passage.
The same day in Avignon,
Richo di Buonomo,
to Monna Piera; his mother-in-law
“Tell me if you would send me
a slave or another girl...
But if you say
‘I’ll send you an old woman,’
then I like not their cooking
and they cannot bear heavy toil.
Moreover, I would not remain
dry mouthed.
Send me a fair young slave
skilled in everything.'
Birch-Bark Letters
On the Novgarod lakeside,
Fevronya's father
delivered the birch-bark message.
'Mysl's orphans have agreed
to give rent in kind
to Trofalya and his brothers.
Six koraby’a of rye,
and one of wheat,
three of malt.
The gift is three martens
and a pud of honey.
The children;
each, three squirrels
and three bundles of flax
a sheep and canvas.
By the lakeside,
they already knew
they had to move on
when the second birch bark
was sent.
“Greetings to Yuri and Maksim.'
from all Mysl's orphans
Trofalya, the one you gave us
does not take our part.
He sells us
and we are robbed by him
and does not let us leave.
If he continues here
then we have no strength
to be settled with him.”
So no more of Trofalya.
“Give us a mild man
for that we beg you.”
Mysl and his orphans
followed the Msta river
to Torzhok
then carried bales
of flax to Tver
Mysl found a new land
with Mikhail
in the village of Medna
with the hamlets
and wastes of old
relating to the village and forest.
With the meadow
beyond the river Tvertsa
near the Istar hayfields
and the bound and limit
of that meadow
is by its old gully
from the river Tvertsa
upstream
and from the old gully
by the hollow to the rock
opposite three graves
along Vyshny grave
and straight
to the river Tvertsa
and down by the Starsky arable
passing the Medna meadow
on the Tvertsa.
Trofalya's children
could not end their movements
and left the posad of Tver
on the river Tvertsa.
They disappeared in the environs
of Moscow,
took the rivers to Volokolamsk.
The good Nikon, chronicler,
probably did not see them,
as they fled into the city.
Fevonya, older now, more travelled
and strong and the others
huddled in a cart,
with baggage and wares.
Grand duke, Dmitri, fled
the city, so satisfied that
Tokhtamysh would not force
his citadel's stone walls
that he left Eudoxia, his wife,
with the boyars.
But the wealthy desired to follow him.
Fevronya had never known
such violence. The common people.
peasants, such as Trofalya,
held a veche assembly,.
to forbid the boyars to leave
on pain of death
and confiscation of property,
except Eudoxia,
who hastered to
Kastrana in the North
without her treasure,
in this they were true to their word.
The Veche elected Ostei,
grandson of Olgerd
who ordered the city
and prepared its defence,
as more refugees came in from the land
August Twenty Third, Thirteen Eighty Two,
Tokhtomysh's army
appeared before the walls of Moscow.
Nikon censured the wicked people,
even though brave defenders,
who looted the cellars of the boyars
for sparse drink,
while the good prayed to God.
The city held three days and nights
and Tokhtamysh, Bozhi batog,
the cudgel of God,
proposed a deceit.
Flanked by two Suzdal princes,
he approached Ostei
asking only 'small gifts' for
his retreat on August twentieth.
Ostei, generous, opened the city gates
and led the people out to greet Dmitri.
“Then the Mongols fell,
delivered death and others
entered the city
and put swords, pikes
and scimatar to Russian flesh.
Then fell to looting
and carried off the contents
of the ducal treasury
crosses, chalices, jewel-bedecked fabrics.”
On Nikon's word,
“Tokhtamysh,(enemy of God,
enemy of pity, and enemy of mercy)
entered the citadel and stone pasad
of Moscow, six sazhers high
one hundred and fifty sazhers long
behind which the people
of the district were hiding.
He burnt it to the ground
and when the prince returned,
left only corpses and ashes
he paid his soldiers one rouble
for eighty corpses buried
in the dead land.”
Nikon grieved, for his churches,
lectionaries and books
brought by the villagers
from scattered settlements around the town.
All were buried
when the city was fired.
"Until then the city of Moscow
had been large and wonderful
to look at, crowded as she was
with , filled with wealth
and glory
and now all at once
all her beauty perished
and her glory disappeared.
Nothing could be seen
but smoking ruins
and bare earth and heaps of corpses.”
Dmitri gave five hundred roubles,
and eightieth of one for Mysl.
The Horde had a better deal,
twenty five thousand captives,
including the maid Fevronya
'stripping them naked
without mercy or regard
of the frozen weather
tying and binding them
by three and by four
at their horses tails
dragging them all bloodying
the ways and streets
of Zalensk land.”
Fevronya passed through Riazin to Sarai
the beech leaf passing to still grass.
Writing Desks
Arrived in Pistoia with his wife,
Bita who sewed helmets in Avignon,
Richo thanked the builder
'You say you are done with building
and now would attend to your trade
and to your soul,
as to the building, it is high time'
and occupied four writing desks,
painted grass-green.
From here he conducted trade
for two decades.
(Richo di Buonomo and Co.
Avignon, Pistoia, Pisa, Florence
Genoa, Valencia, Barcelona and Majorca
in iron, wax, alum, sandalwood,
English wool, leather, slaves, silk and saffron.)
Caroldo, ‘a cinque di giugno
morte del doge Andrea Contarini
Thirteen Eighty Three.’
Venetian sequins
purchased Fevronya for Tana,
a little naked bundle
strung out in a line of ten
live corpses.
Bita pretented economic interest.
Richo to his wife
February Seventeenth
Thirteen Eighty Four
“...unable to get you a slave
from Circassia this
year as the plague has broken
out there and those
who come die on board
It would be bringing
La Moria into our own home.”
Finally the parcel was found.
August the Sixteenth Thirteen Eighty Four
“The ships from Turkey
and from Caffa
are in by now and
sometimes have good cargoes...”
Zer Alessandro Zen,
intimate of Caroldo l'humil
was reluctant to take
Russians with a reputation
for escape.
They changed Fevronya
to Orenneta, claimed her
to be Abkhaze
and she was paid for in aspres,
witnessed and signed.
And they stowed her
with twenty three others
between twelve and twenty eight years
in the ship of Gaspare Judex,
one of the Venetian mude.
Others, insured in hyperbers
went to Constantinople
and there to Ibiza,
one hundred and fifty heads
to Candia, ninety heads
and Cyprus, one hundred heads.
Seventeen bales of pilgrims robes,
one hundred and ninety one
pieces of lead
and twenty eight female heads
fell foul of the Isthmus,
Gaspare appealed to the Venetian Senate,
and Caroldo daily noting,
that the Constantinople representative
was paid fifty ducats
for twenty eight slaves dead
and Gaspare sailed on to Venice
with ten still living,
crouched filthy in his hold
along with the dead for evidence.
She was baptized at San Zaccharia,
the Pope, who had condemned all slavery.
'Item 'sold to Orenetta
the little slave who comes from Tana.
'Five ducats for a soul, plus five for tax
for her journey.’ Paraded in Venice,
frozen, shivering by the well-heads,
‘witnessed, bound and carried
across terra firma, three ducats.'
Andrea, his agent, to Richo.
December Twentieth, Thirteen Eighty Four.
“No ship has come from Venice
with any aboard, but now it
cannot be long before they come
and you and your wife
will be provided as you wish.
Those who are here now
are not worth taking
for they are second-hand wares.”
Richo wrote in searchof others;
Richo to Andrea di Bonnaio.
May Twelfth Thirteen Eighty Five.
“Pray buy me a little slave girl
young and rusticha
between eight and ten years old.
She must be of good stock,
strong enough to bear
much hard work
and of good health and temper,
so that I may bring her up
in her own way.
I would have her only
to wash the dishes
and carry wood
and bread to the oven...
for I have another here
who is a good slave
and can cook and serve well.”
Item 'A little slave girl
of thirteen from Venice
bought by Francesco di Michele and Co
'Orenetta.’
A year later,
Bita protested
'I am fully disposed to live together
as God wills... you will not
change it by shouting'
Richo, played it soft
'When you come here
and hear from all men
concerning my demeanour,
you will be satisfied,”
but could he not cover the facts
with unbleached cloth.
Before dawn
on sixth September,
Orenetta gave birth
to a male child of Richo.
Luckly il fanciullo mio died
and was buried at the feet
of Richo's tomb in San Bernardo di Pistoia.
Yet Bita,
disquieted before dawn
could not look
on chests and coffers
and lined azure cloth
and her husband late to bed,
without suspicion.
In the following year,
the slave according to omen had sired
another heir, 'a certain girl
was secretly placed
in the hospital of S.Maria Nuova'
whom Bita refused
then took back the gettatelli
resigned at least
to her upbringing.
'I have found one in Piazza delle Piero
whose milk is two months old
and she has raised that if her babe,
which is on the point of death,
dies tonight she will come as soon
as it is buried.'
Stephano to Richo da Pistoia:
« La mόria waxes in diverse places
and spreads in this direction.
In winter you will see tokens
in the fields or on our borders
and in February you begin to hear
that it has come inside the city.
It waxes all through July
and them begins to touch decent folk.
The bad air degenerates evil humours
which appear not for a while
and then in the heat burst forth”
The plague came to us
from Tana and Sorcat
Some say the plague began
when the Cumans, attacking
the Genoese traders at Caffa,
flung their brothers' infected corpses
over the walls of the city.
Others claim it began in Sicily
and arrived with the slaves
carried in the holds of Genoese ships.”
3.Caschaton.
Squirrel-Pelts
'I know you will be able
to procure me a slave
for my client Richo.
You will be solicitous
to mark and seek out
every little matter
even as if she were
to be your own.
However, I shall
consider her as any other
merchandise on which one
sometimes loses
and sometimes gains
on selling again -
Wherefore there is naught
more to be said.”
Karagu, the sparrow-hawk
dives on a field mouse
in Kirghizia.
A little child sees it, dressed
in a Circassian cap
with four silver goat’s hairs
from the top to the border.
A flaxen dress and squirrel-pelts
from her knees to the ankles.
She is four and tall for her age,
fair-haired, with strong legs.
It was Melitha, her mother, sold her
before her father, the fisherman
came back from the river;
told her to catch the wounded hawk,
the seventh mouth too hungry.
She settled her dues with the Mongol
family behind the church.
The traders carried her to the galley
Moored on the coast,
hitting her as she cried.
When the pungency of flax
choaked her once
she was allowed up
to see a deep water
and grey monotonous cliffs.
The sailors muttered the names
of places, “Tuabs, Socha…”
and then she went back to the dark
cupboard in the forward hold.
In Tana, they took her out
to march across the town
to a galley on which
she counted two masts and two sails
before the door of the prow
storage closed on her.
'Ship arriving in Genoa from Venice
on May twenty first with
seventeen bales of pilgrims robes,
one hundred and one pieces of lead,
one hundred and twenty two sacks of wood
four bales of paper
three barrels of gall nuts
Ser Giovanni Olzo of Venice
and eighty heads.
'One of them is a woman who can sew
and do everything. Too good for the people
of Ibiza for they are like dogs. Your money
will be well placed in her.
Letter to Richo,
‘The slave you wanted
has died of wasting disease.
I will look again.’
Caschaton, the little
girl-wolf at her father’s
side as he drops lines in the river..
Caschaton wakes she can smell burning
And the sound of swords
striking metal and
the screams at wounded flesh.
Too many are shouting
to hear her yells.
Then the doors open
and she clings to a sailors’
arms until she sees
blue water and
the feel of weights on her legs.
Her screams bring the
Venetians to the prow.
She falls to the deck
from dead arms.
“I am Luc Tarigo, captain
of Venice. Don’t be frightened,
or you’ll fall.”
The Fondacca’s Agent
She was sold for four thousand
aspres baricats at Kaffa.
The notary, Belignano,
writing intentions to Our Lady
between deals.
The wicked are slaves:
the good are free.
On the galley, Stella,
a month passed.
She sat at the foot
of the hold steps,
a knife at the ready,
given her by Luc.
The space thick
with captive
bodies, flax, wool, silk,
hemp, canvas, rope, metals
and wooden wares.
When the ship
docked at Pera.
She was led out
with a fever
and re-baptised
at St Theodule’s
though she knew
the Latin and processed to
through the Westgate
to the “Ave’ statue
of the virgin.
The same day
-now the Venetians
were back-
she was sold again
in hyperbers.
As the next creaking
hull departed
she looked out
at the hill of St Theodore
sinking below the horizon.
In eight months
she learned how
to be useful
above decks.
Bernardo,
the ship’s master
taught her Italian
and saw she could cook.
The Santa Martino
arrived in Palma harbour,
Majorca, under a sudden storm.
and she was taken
from another hand
Another mute
exchange
in the sunlit Plaza.
That night she walked
across the hills
with the Fondacca Richo’s
agent, Andrea,
on horseback.
She cooked for him,
but wandered at nights
among the escaped
Africans, stealing hens
and eggs and vegetables
from the fields
to save Andrea’s
housekeeping money
for seven years.
That autumn King Peter
signed the order,
Disminyuendo el numero
des esclavas en Mallorca
A year later,
the Magister Exubii’s
floggings
made Andrea
lock her in the house
despite her ‘Christian
features.’
Richo was becoming impatient
For the slaves to be cleared
‘I would not have you
take so long over the nails
that you lose the shoe.’
It was winter and the lime
trees gave them no cover
as they ran over the sand
to the rickety boat
that slipped into the current
like a gull in a storm.
When Ibiza came
into view the slave called
Aafia had to
stifle Catarina’s joy.
They made it to the camp
the same night
in the old castle.
In Majorca the slaves
rose in rebellion,
burning the stockades
and looting the warehouses.
After a night of
horses hoofs ringing
on cobblestones
and the groans
of the slaughtered,
rows of slaves
‘animated instruments’
were hanged, inanimate
in the Plaza.
A few days later,
the agents came
after the runaways.
Catarina’s money
was stolen
and she led the men
to the camp
in vengeance.
Back in Majorca
she cried when
she saw Aafia too
had been hanged
and as an escaped slave,
vicious of flight,
She was chained by
Piero da Giunta,
Richo's agent now in Ibiza,
while Andrea tried to sue.
The winter bill of sale
to Richo.
Assicurazione di Schiavi
Imbarcati Sur navi et i rische
di Morte, Tartar slave,
Catherina, from Majorca
to a Tuscan buyer insured for the sum
of fifty gold florins
against any risk
from the hand of God,
the sea, human beings
or her master.
Not against
flight, if she throws
herself into the sea
of her own accord.
In Piero da Giunta’s house
she worked in chains,
until put on a boat for Genoa.
As the boat went underway,
Catharina rushed for the gunwhale
and tried to throw herself off.
The sailors took her in to the hold
and put her back in Piero’s chains.
After landing, she was put
in a cart for Pisa, kept
under guard outside,
then taken to Pistoia
December Thirteenth, Thirteen Eighty Six
The deed of sale told all,
('healthy and whole in all her members
both visible and invisible')
'Not a thief, quarrelsome, bad tempered
vicious of (fugitiva)
'Purum et nerum dominun'
'to dispose of in his will,
judge soul and body
and do in perpetuity
whatsoever may please
him and his heirs
and no man may gain say him'
as laid by the Pisan branch
of the Florentine Signory.
Paparo’s wife complains
greatly of you that she
should suffer you
to send such a young
and fair slave
She says she would
never do such a thing
to your wife.
and women should
take heed not to do
such things to each other.
Papero’s Property
This morning when Monna Lionarda and
Monna Villana had gone to church your slave
Caterina went out and away
and we cannot find her
We have been to all
the gates and cannot find out
that she has gone
through any of them.
They say they have taken nothing
from the house
save the gown of romagnalo
wool she had on her
and a little purple gown
for feast days'
'A runaway slave is a thief,
for he steals himself
away from his master'
Returning to the house
On the dark wooden boards
The two women find Paparo,dead,
A fine dribble of red
on his hoar-white beard.
More proclamations
were made in the
market place with the name
and discription - Cave a signatis.
‘A slave of about twenty
ran away from us this eve
of dark hair and eyes
and a meet figure,
that is to say neither fat nor thin.
She is small and her face
not much like a Tartar's
but more like our fashion here.
and she speaks our language
not too incorrectly.
Her name is Catherina
She is owned by Paparo’s widow
and took with her all her clothes,
such as a a bluish shirt, quite fresh
and a gown and a towel
and other such trifles
and an old coat of lambskin
with a black belt
and she likes
to wear a little cap.
She left the house
when her master was killed.
Please send a boy
to warn the boatmen
on the Arno and
the people in the brothels
for sometimes they
are taken there.”
A list of Paparo, Richo's debtor,
deceased, his property.
'He says he had a female slave
and a horse and two donkeys
and three fifths of an ox.
Let us put them down at twenty florins.'
As Caroldo wrote;
they quarrelled with other servants.
extremely quick with their knives
Caschaton had
meant to kill him.
No-one would dare
touch her again,
Not after she had
escaped to Ibiza,
when her lover
was hanging in Majorca
from a gibbet.
and the Spaniard
who had done so
was raping her, not caring
about her bruises.
The knife went in
and left too much blood
for so cold a man.
She wiped it on her skirt
and ran into a back alley
where she saw Orenetta,
“Orri, come down here, I wants you, Babboccia”
“I'm coming, you shit; what d’you want?
I haven't drunk or eaten a mouthful
today because of Mistress Bitch.”
“Then come down and cut da chat”
‘I‘ve got the washing, six pairs of sheets,
one hundred skeins of thread from the well
to weave the linen to marry off the daughter.
I can't come. The cauldron's boiling.”
“Cottio bugata : sie pa de benzuole!’
‘I’m no devil, no slut, Catarina.”
‘Chientu, margasse dui lina pozuona!’
‘Devil face to you! ...Caterina, what’s wrong?’
The white -clad girl darted down
the wooden stairs, her bare arms steaming.
Catherina made off into the shadow
of an archway
“Aspetta, un poco...”
Catharina waited, then grabbed her friend
and drew a knife. It flashed in the dark.
‘Cassa star : io non buoglio in questata.‘
The fair-haired girl cried, fear making
her voice tremble.
Catharina held on.
“Don’t hurt me, please.”
The dark-haired
girl suddenly put her arms around Orenetta.
‘Compania, ben si la trovata. I gave
Paparo the mazata with a knife.’
“Oi mé! santa Maria, Is your master hurt.?”
Caterina fixed Orenetta with a long stare.
The other girl groaned softly.
The two girls hid beneath the arch.
“Help me just tonight. -Non posso caca
I can't shit “E, buona fe, io caca to tutta braca.”
“I’m so scared I’ve been shitting in my drawers.”
No one in the Richo household noticed
the two bundles asleep under the cellar steps.
The sentence of death,
'irato animo et malo,
scienter et dulone et appensate,’
knifing her master.
February Sixth Thirteen Eighty Nine.
The children had found her.
There were too many of them
to struggle free. A little girl,
on the way to the magistrates,
had asked her how she plaited her hair.
“The flesh was torn to pieces
of a female slave
who had poisoned her master
a Pistoiese.
She was drawn in an open cart
through the streets of Florence
while the population watched
her flesh being torn to pieces
with red hot firearms
to the place of execution
where she was burned.”
Femmine Bestiale.
Accounts Rolls
Richo wrote his daily accounts
“Cost of a slave forty-nine florins,
Orenetta, five ducats plus five ducats
purchase tax, three ducats for her journey
equals a free maid servant for eight years.”
Richo told wife that spring.
'Lock the door behind you
with three keys if you are going to Florence.”
“The old slave we have
with us is sick, or rather full of boils
so that we find none
who would have her.
We will sell or barter her
as best we can.
Furthermore I hear she is with child
two months gone or more and
therefore she will not be worth
selling.”
'Turn out and sell the evil
and guilty woman.
who brought a dead child
into the world.
Let them keep instead
an old woman or man, or boy to cook.
that because of your lenience
your boy and mine be not destroyed.
Caroldo kept up his groans
“They sometimes corrupt by their evil ways
and manners of respectable maid-servants
and even the daughters of the house
use of magic arts and poison
against their masters.”
'They are femmine bestiali.
You cannot trust the house
to such as they.
They might at any moment
rise up against you
After freeing them
they remain in their
master’s home
speaking a strange,
jargon of their own’
We have sold Orenetta because wine
was beginning to go to her head
and besides she was immoral
and the wives since they had young daughters
would not have her in the house.
July Eleventh Thirteen Ninety Eight,
Caroldo's journal:
'We do not want to buy them.
We do not want them
to sell their own flesh,
causing venereal disease.’
Thrown out in Fourteen hundred,
Orenetta worked for a priest.
One night she returned to Richo.
“No man will have her.
She says she is with
child by you and assuredly
seems to be. The father she
names so great
she might be the Queen of France.
We spoke to the chaplain
to whom your slave belonged
and he says you may
throw her into the sea
with what she has in her belly
for it is no creature of his.
And we deem he speaks the truth
for had she been pregnant by him
he would not have sent her.
Me thinks you had better send the
creature to the hospital.”
Orenetta took the long hard walk to Florence
in the blazing sun. On the gravel tracks
she met up with jesters, wizards and vagabonds.
Boccaccio's plague
waxed with the wind and sun.
In Pistoia,di Richo, a merchant, died, ,
his wife and two children.
one married, survive.
Pontano writes.
“The old liberated slave
reaching her dwelling
to give audience
to a girl and a servant boy.
Who came with
A black hen, nine eggs
laid on Friday,a duck
and white thread.
They visited the woman at night
making assignations in daytime .”
When she died the magistrates
refused her consecrated burial.
To prove their bent
they found hair, skulls, navels of children
soles of shoes, pieces of clothing
from graves, stolen pieces
of rotting flesh in a box
with pictures of knights
painted on it,
to feed to her lovers,
and figures of wax,
one wearing merchant’s clothes,
stabbed with a thorn
and written charms:
“Before the flame goes cold,
bring him to my threshold.
Let my true love stab him
as I prick this heart so trim.”
Bita went to live in a convent.
When she died, she left money for Orenetta,
if she could be found,
remembering her daughter.
'God grant her a true pardon and protect her a little.’
Morelli noted
'there were twenty people
out of a hundred in Florence
who had any bread or corn
nd even these had very little.
Many lived on herbs and roots
(bad ones which you
would not know today)
and all the countryside
was full of people
who went about
eating the grass
like cattle.”
Parceled Codices
At minus one below the sphere, the sky was black,
the brighter stars still visible and at zero, black as well,
the deck dense and huddled with sleeping life.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
As the mude from Tunis to Genoa plunged
and swayed from tired oarsmen in two rows, ,
at one degree, smoke black, all was still on deck,
those pointers to the pole-star lingering sharp,
Ursa Major, Arcas, Callisto, glowing for the astrolabe.
‘Et ades sera l’alba: soon it will be dawn.’
At two degrees, the light was conformed to blue.
At six, natural illumination flooded the galley deck.
and men began to shift and spit
and reach for dew-soaked ropes.
while some were unable to rise,
from under the foremost arbor de prova masts,
taller and heavier than the arbor de medio.
The masts carried three sails the other, two.
And the sails were lateen, not square,
steered by two long timone lateral rudders
one on each board near the stern.
‘Et ades sera l’alba: soon it will be dawn.’
At seven degrees the colours of dawn begin to shift
white to blue, at eight, blue to white
to be as lichen in the mist, at nine, yellow
at ten, gold and at eleven orange, luminous bands
washed through the clouds, then turned deep red.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
At twelve, the sun began to leave its hiddeness,
the light refrangible now, instead of spectral dark.
Stirring the castellum and supra castellum
covered with flapping sail-cloth. The skipper
was the owner, Buonsegno di Matteo, worried
about his foenus nauticum, the insurance of slaves
left in Genoa, the number being the same
as the number of mariners whose lives were down.
Blue-white rays scattered in the then impure haze
belched from the century’s volcanic dust.
At fifteen degrees, white-green, against cloud and the horizon,
at sixteen green white-banded clouds and the moist wind tugging
on seventeen degrees with white-green bars on a cloudy sea.
The cargo was lacquer, pepper, cotton cloth,
saffron, et omnes res subtiles, cotton, copper,
lead, tin, iron, canvas, hemp,
manufactured wooden wares and
parcels of codices from Constantinople.
‘Et ades sera l’alba, soon it will be dawn.’
Morning twilight began when the sun rose
eighteen degrees above the grey blue distance,
with stripes of white-green clouds ,
civil twilight being six degrees below nautical twelve.
Buonsegno’s merchants had paid naulum freight
for the cargo ad cantarum, which was the weight
of each whole cargo. He had left with sixty mariners
three mates, the nautae nauderii, eight boarders
and men at bays armed with cross bows.
He stared out at the fleet,
gave the order for prayers, then for cutting
the ropes that held the sheeted bodies.
How many more had the plague on board?
He avoided seeing them sink,
the general outline of lesser stars still visible,
those specks of light, Nashi, 'Ash, 'Ayish.
Impressum
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.10.2010
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