Veritas

Day the Second

FRIDAY, 10^TH APRIL 1711

3 of the clock, when the night guard raises his cry: “Now rise O Servant, praise God this morn, the light now gleams of new day’s dawn.”

The following day I woke up brimming with robust optimism, eager to return to the Place with No Name to start the job that had been awaiting me far too long, my fingers tingling with the anticipation of curiosity.

As the bell of the Lauds announced the start of the day for the humble classes, I clambered into the cart with my little apprentice and Simonis.

“This time, Signor Master, I’ll take the southern road. Let’s enter by the side of the gardens, away from the lions, heh heh!” said the Greek, who had been greatly amused by the account of my flight the previous evening.

While we were on our way, dawn broke. We passed a large church and then shortly afterwards we began to make out a white building in the distance, so white that the stones were dazzling in the sunlight.

When my pupils had adjusted to the glare, I saw a long set of crenellated walls punctuated with small towers with pinnacled roofs. They could have been military constructions, watchtowers or something similar, had they not been so minute and graceful, and so unusually rich in decorations that hinted at some indefinable oriental influence. Behind the wall, in the middle distance, were more buildings of imposing appearance. As we approached, I realised that the outer wall, which was of truly Cyclopic proportions, was quadrangular in form. On the longer side, the one facing the road from Vienna which we had just travelled along, the wall was interrupted by an impressive gateway, surmounted by a triple keep. We stopped and got out.

We walked through the gateway. Immediately beyond it was an open space. My little boy, who had been greatly excited on hearing about the lion and the Flying Ship the previous evening, kept asking where such marvels were and insisted on going to see them at once. Simonis followed us rather absent-mindedly.

I was amazed to find myself in an enormous open space, dotted with trees and bushes, containing another set of protective walls, once again with towers but only at the four corners. These towers were much larger than the ones on the outer walls; at least twice as high, like great bell towers, and not cylindrical but hexagonal. Each had a large domed roof, resting on a drum with windows. At the top of each dome was a hexagonal pinnacle, culminating in a large peak, also hexagonal. Around the dome were six more pinnacles, corresponding to each corner of the tower, and identical to the one on the top. On each of the six façades of the hexagon were two series of windows, on as many levels, which suggested that the towers were compartmented and habitable.

The exotic form of the pinnacles, of their tips and of the dome reminded me of the graceful minarets and roofs of Constantinople, as I had seen them in the books bequeathed to me by my father-in-law of blessed memory. I remembered that the previous afternoon, when I had arrived at the Place with No Name, I had spotted the top of one of these towers, and that in itself had surprised me; but I would never have imagined the wonders that extended beyond the crenellated wall surrounding the gardens.

Why on earth, I began to ask myself, had this place been abandoned? Our beloved Emperor Joseph I now intended to restore it to its original splendour, but why had his predecessors condemned it to oblivion?

I was on the point of sharing these questions with Simonis, when I decided not to break the silence, so rare in my garrulous assistant.

A little avenue, flanked by a double line of trees, led towards the interior quadrangle. The moment I entered it my jaw dropped.

Watched over by large Turkish-style towers set at the four corners, there lay before me a marvellous Mediterranean garden. The space was subdivided by flower beds and lawns into four equal quadrants, each of which was in turn composed of four smaller sectors, each one patterned with delightful geometrical compositions. In the middle, where the four quadrants met, was a splendid fountain in the form of a bowl, supported by a large decorated pedestal. The enclosure, which from the outside appeared to be a simple wall, on the inside proved to be a magnificent loggia in dazzling white stone, with imposing columns of exquisite workmanship.

My mind was still taking in this vision when my eyes darted into the distance, towards the wall at the far side of the open space. There in front of me the colonnade opened up to reveal — sturdy and powerful — an enormous and princely castle.

Dazed by all these wonders, it took me a few moments to focus on some important details. The outer wall, the first one I had passed through, surrounded a garden that was luxuriant but uncultivated: trees and vegetation of all kinds throve in generous disorder. The interior garden — the one within the porticoed walls — still maintained the graceful forms of the beds and ornamental lawns, but they were in a state of neglect. The beds had no flowers, nor was there a single blade of grass in the former lawns. Not a drop of water danced in the air above the beautiful bowl-shaped fountain, and the walls and vaults of the portico showed the heavy marks of time.

I began to walk towards the castle. As I approached it, I thought of the name — or rather the non-name — of this place: Neugebäu, “New Building”. The Place with No Name known as “New Building”: a strange appellative for a complex that had been disused for years, perhaps even decades. The day before, when we had entered on the northern side, I had sensed nothing of the marvels that the place concealed. My fellow chimney-sweeps were right: what was the Place with No Name? A villa? A garden? A hunting lodge? A bird enclosure?

I studied the castle in front of me, if I could call it that. It was really a free and original work of fantasy. It had an enormous frontage hundreds of yards in length, all of it gazing triumphantly on the oriental-style gardens, but it was by no means deep; all in all it was not as large as it had first seemed, but narrow and long, like a stone serpent.

I halted. I wanted to visit the towers and I began with the one in the north-east. Inside, I found to my amazement, traces of beautiful marble and exotic mosaics, and fragments of large baths, which showed there had once been a thermal system, maybe with tanks of spiced waters and medicinal vapours. Surprised by this further marvel, I promised that I would visit the other towers later and returned towards the castle.

Curiously the building showed no oriental features, except for a gable roof, glittering with strange coruscations that made me think of the gilded coverings of Turkish pavilions. I noticed that the roof was covered with tiles of a strange, flickering colour, very different from the usual burnished brown of Viennese roofs. As I observed, my eyeballs were suddenly struck by a kind of piercing dart — then by another — and then by countless more. I shielded my eyes with my hand and peered through the slits between my fingers. What I saw astonished me: the roof of the castle, struck by the rays of the sun, glittered like gold. Yes, because the tiles of the castle of the Place with No Name were not of terracotta but of fine gilded copper. When I looked closer I could see that actually very little was left of the original covering, a prey to the ravages of time or perhaps to human greed. But what little copper remained was enough to refract the fair and blessed sunlight into sharp and powerful shafts.

The far ends of the building were closed by two semicircular keeps, which very closely resembled the apses of our churches — unexpected shapes in that generally Turkish context. It was from the eastern keep, to my right, that we had ventured into the cellars the previous day, where I had quite literally bumped into the bleeding carcass of the ram.

At the centre of the castle was the entrance staircase, which crossed a little ditch and led into the main body of the building. This was overlooked by a stone balustrade, behind which I could make out a long panoramic terrace. This main body was about a fifth of the length of the whole building; the way in was through a large doorway flanked by windows and ornamented on both sides by two graceful pairs of columns with capitals.

The castle, with its classical forms and its Christian echoes, seemed to stand in deliberate opposition, like a magniloquent northern barrier, to the pointed minarets of the towers and the warm southern air that rose from the gardens.

I looked around myself: how come no one had ever mentioned this grandiose complex to me? Was it not considered worthy to figure among the marvels of the Caesarean city?

Often, as I passed in front of the Hofburg, His Caesarean Majesty’s winter residence, I had been surprised by the extreme modesty and simplicity of the building. And the summer residences were not much better: the Favorita, Laxenburg and Ebersdorf. Not to mention the extremely modest hunting pavilion at Belfonte — Schönbrunn as the Viennese call it, which had only been given the appearance of a villa since its enlargement by beloved Joseph I.

And often, as I gazed at the small graceful casini in the Italian style that the nobility possessed in the Josephina — Casino Strozzi, Palazzo Schönborn or Villa Trautson — I was puzzled by their architectural superiority with respect to the imperial residences! It was as if the Caesars had elected severity as the hallmark of their greatness, leaving pomp to the nobility.

And yet there had once been a time when the Habsburgs had enjoyed the marvels of the Place with No Name, a time when one of the Caesars, Maximilian II, had cultivated this Levantine dream on Teutonic land. A brief dream, so brief as not even to be honoured with a name — then nothing more. Who had left it to rot? And why?

I caught Simonis gazing absorbedly at me. Had the Greek guessed my cogitations? Did he, perhaps, have an answer to them?

“Signor Master, I have to piss and shit. Urgently. May I?”

“Yes, but not here in front of me,” I answered ruefully.

“Of course not, Signor Master.”

7 of the clock: the Bell of the Turks, also called the Peal of the Oration, rings.

As Simonis walked away, wholly absorbed in his primordial needs, I heard the nearby church echo the Bell of the Turks in the Cathedral of St Stephen, inviting the distant suburbs to prayer as well. I went into a corner with my little apprentice and we knelt down for our morning prayers.

Whatever the fate of the Place with No Name till now, I meditated as I made the sign of the cross, His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I was of a different opinion from his ancestors, and rightly wanted to restore the place to its former splendour. A real stroke of luck, not only for Neugebäu, but also for me and my family, I said to myself with a satisfied smile, which I changed into a prayer of fervent gratitude to the Most High.

When the Greek returned we were spotted by Frosch. The keeper greeted us with a grunt only a shade more cordial than his usual surly facies. We announced that our work was about to begin and I expressed a wish to start from the service buildings; if the Emperor really wanted to make use of the place again, it was those buildings he would need even before the castle itself.

Frosch invited us to follow him, bringing our barrow with all its tools of the trade, and Simonis immediately went off to get it.

As we followed Frosch, shading our eyes with our hands against the dazzling shafts from the copper on the roofs and slowing our pace as the spectacle both enchanted and blinded us, with the cart full of tools creaking along behind us, we were greeted by a distant noise. It arose from behind the towers, behind the walls of the garden and behind the castle itself, almost as if it came from an afterworld that belonged only to the Place with No Name: the stillness of the morning was broken by the cavernous roar of the lions.

We headed to the right and passed through the service building which, as was explained to us, had in the past been a Meierei, or what was known in Latin as a maior domus, the house of the land-agent. This little building was also in a state of total neglect; through the windows, mostly shattered, we could see that weeds had invaded the interior and the roof had partly collapsed.

Passing through the archway that led out of the maior domus we found ourselves in the courtyard by which we had entered the previous afternoon. To the left I saw the little door that gave onto the spiral staircase. Behind it one could make out the roofs of other buildings, set lower down.

I marvelled again at the unusual nature of the place, almost like a little town with its outer walls, interior avenues, gardens and various buildings of the most singular and diverse kinds. Far different from — and far more than — a villa with its park.

Frosch led us down the spiral staircase. I noticed for the first time that it had been placed between two other buildings, set against the little upland on which the castle rose, which enabled it to dominate the surrounding grasslands. As we descended, I finally discovered, peering through the little windows that opened in the stairwell towards the exterior, the rear of the Place with No Name, facing north: there was a graceful garden in the Italian style. A central avenue led towards a large fishpond, in which waterfowl and marsh birds floated peacefully. There was nothing Levantine about those gardens; on the other side of the fishpond they opened out into Teutonic meadows, the kind loved by hunters, which stretched away in the distance towards Nordic woods, green cathedrals whose silence was punctuated by occasional bird cries, dusky spaces teeming in game, in funghi, resins and scented mosses. Far off, powerful and motionless, we could make out Vienna with its unbreached walls.

With a grunt of farewell, the keeper left us to get on with our work.

We started with a building that Frosch told us had once been the kitchen. Without too much difficulty we found the old fireplaces.

What contrasts the Place with No Name offered, hidden within its walls! So I reflected as, with my head wrapped in its canvas bag, I made my way up the first of the ducts. What mind had conceived all of this? Had it been Emperor Maximilian II, about whom I knew nothing, or a brilliant architect of his? What did this crucible of contrasts mean, supposing it meant anything? Or was it all just a mere caprice? And why, I asked myself yet again, had it been abandoned?

After carrying out a first perfunctory examination, I climbed back down to my two boys.

“There’s a good deal of work to be done; it’s all cracked up there,” I reported to Simonis and the little one. “If the whole place is in the same condition, we had better make a map of the flues first and draw up a report on their condition. That way we’ll be able to work out how many reinforcements we’ll need for the job. Let’s have a bite to eat now. And then we’ll go on with the survey.”

Having said this I sent my little boy to the cart to fetch the bag of provisions.

“Revenge.”

“Sorry, Simonis?”

“Revenge is the answer to your questions, Signor Master. The Place with No Name was built for revenge, and it was revenge that destroyed it. This place is steeped in inextinguishable hatred, Signor Master.”

A shiver ran down my spine at these unexpected words, which answered my unspoken questions.

“He was a follower of Christ, quite simply. And imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, was the inspiring principle of his life. But it was his fate to be born and to reign in an age when Luther’s false teachings had divided the Christians, their hearts, their minds and the nations themselves,” said Simonis.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Christian fought against Christian, both armed with the word of the Lord,” continued the Greek, paying no heed to me, “and the greed of both camps kindled the fire of war. To the great joy of the Infidels, the Alemannic and Flemish lands were lacerated by the divisions between Catholics and Protestants, while His Sacred Caesarean Majesty — whose authority for centuries had rested on the assembly of the princes of the Empire, but also on the investiture conferred by the Pope — struggled to defend the orthodox Christian Faith.”

While I opened the bag my boy had brought me and drew out our meal, I began to understand who Simonis was referring to.

“He should not even have ascended to the Caesarean throne. Emperor Charles V, brother of his father Ferdinand I, had divided his lands before retiring to a monastery: Ferdinand I was to receive the Spanish territories, his son Philip II, Austria and the imperial crown. But the German prince-electors did not want an emperor who was so resolutely Catholic and they resoundingly called for the young Maximilian to return from Spain and be crowned. They harboured ambitious plans and believed him to be the right man.”

Simonis had read on my face all the queries and cogitations that were gnawing at me; and now, while we consumed the small but restorative meal of rye, boiled eggs, sauerkraut and sausages, he talked to me of Emperor Maximilian II, the man who, one and a half centuries earlier, had been behind the building of the Place with No Name, known as Neugebäu.

From early youth Maximilian, abhorring the corruption of the Church of Rome, had been well disposed to the arguments of the Protestants. He had summoned Lutheran preachers, counsellors, doctors and men of science to the court, so that it was feared that sooner or later he himself would defect to them. His clashes with his father Ferdinand I, a fervent Catholic, had become so bitter that his august parent had threatened to block his ascent to the throne. Pressure from Catholic Spain and from the Holy See grew so strong that Maximilian had to declare publicly that he would always adhere to the official creed of Rome. But this did not prevent him from continuing to meet in private with the followers of Luther.

This aroused the hopes of the Protestant princes and of all those in the Empire who abominated the Church of Peter: would Maximilian fulfil their dream of having an Emperor no longer faithful to the Pope?

“But more pernicious than heresy itself — so thought Maximilian, who loved peace — was the war that it had unleashed. More cruel than the betrayal of a religion is the betrayal of one’s own kind; and far more scandalous than the sword is the wound that it has opened.”

And so, once he had ascended to the imperial throne, he chose a new path: instead of actively aligning himself with the Church of Rome, and taking part in the struggle against the heretics, he decided to serve peace and tolerance. His predecessors had been Catholics, while most of the princes of the Empire were friends of the Protestants, was that not the case? He would align himself with neither side, nor would he make any profession of faith; he would simply be Christian — of course — but neither Catholic nor Lutheran. Neither party would be able to say: “He is one of us.” In the astute and ruthless century of Machiavelli, he chose to be cunning in his own way: instead of professing, he would remain silent; instead of acting, he would hold still.

And so Maximilian the Just became Maximilian the Mysterious: nobody, in the two opposing camps, could read into his heart, nobody could count him among their friends. He already knew that the Protestant princes would call him a traitor, an idler and a hypocrite. He had disappointed all those who had hoped he would inflict a hard blow against Catholicism. And yet he had not yielded, and he had preferred to carry forward his own desire for peace.

“He left all his supporters confounded,” concluded Simonis.

I was confounded myself: my Greek assistant, who seemed a touch cracked, could be perfectly lucid when he chose. It was disconcerting to hear his vaguely foolish voice narrating events with such acumen! As with the Emperor he was talking about, it was never clear to which party Simonis belonged: that of the sane or that of the retarded. And it was even less clear where his talk was heading.

“Simonis, you talked of revenge earlier,” I reminded him.

“All in good time, Signor Master,” he answered without a trace of deference, biting into his loaf.

Maximilian’s ascent to the throne, continued the Greek, had aroused great expectations throughout Europe. The ambassadors from Venice, always the most reliable in their reports home, gave assurances that he was of robust stature, well proportioned, and of good disposition. His appearance suggested a greatness and majesty that were truly regal and imperial, since his face was full of gravitas, but tempered by such grace and amiability that those who saw him were filled with reverence but also with a sense of his inestimable inner gentleness.

Those who had managed to get close to him declared that he was gifted with a lively intelligence and wise judgement. When he received someone, even for the first time, he immediately grasped their nature and their hidden temper, and as soon they addressed him, he at once understood what they were leading up to. Alongside his intelligence he also had a very sharp memory; if someone was presented to him after a long time, even a humble subject, he would immediately recognise him. All his thoughts were turned to great things, and it was clear that he was not content with the present state of the Empire. Greatly skilled in matters of state, he talked about them nonetheless with the utmost prudence. In addition to German he spoke Latin, Italian, Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian and even a little French. The court that he had formed around himself was truly splendid; furthermore, his open and sociable character, and the competence with which he followed public affairs, had at once made him extremely popular.

“Everyone expected a long and successful reign,” commented Simonis.

Maximilian the Mysterious loved beautiful things, and the sublime fruits of intellect and doctrine. His trusted counsellor Kaspar von Nidbruck, together with a host of scholars, travelled around Europe collecting valuable books and manuscripts, with which the Centuriators of Magdeburg would later write their monumental history of the Church. He had raised the University of Vienna from its decadence, and had summoned the most prestigious names of European learning to teach there: the botanist Clusius, for example, or the doctor Crato von Krafftheim, and it mattered not whether they were for the Pope or the heretic Luther.

Although he favoured peace and concord, Maximilian the Mysterious had to face war. At that time, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Turkish threat loomed ominously in the east. The burden of defending the borders of Christendom fell on the Empire, and more especially on Vienna, dangerously exposed to the east. Only Maximilian appeared fully aware of the dreadful task facing the West, while his friends and allies proved recalcitrant: Spain shilly-shallied, the Pope promised money that never arrived, and Venice, jealous of its trade and its possessions in the East, actually made a separate peace with the Turks. The Christian and Ottoman armies finally clashed in 1566. And Maximilian was defeated; but without even fighting.

“His father, Ferdinand I, had drawn up a peace treaty with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that lasted eight years. In exchange for non-belligerence, however, the Empire had to pay the Sublime Porte a tribute of 30,000 ducats a year.”

On Ferdinand’s death, all Maximilian had been able to do was propose an extension of the agreement. But in 1565 hostilities had broken out in Hungary. Suleiman’s fearsome army began to arm itself.

At the end of our meal, we continued our survey in the kitchens. Then we went upstairs again and inspected the maior domus. Here, as the rooms appeared to have been abandoned for a long time, we would carry out the usual test in such cases: lighting a little fire at the base of the flue and checking if any trace of smoke emerged from the chimney on the roof.

“It was then that Maximilian’s destiny was fulfilled,” Simonis began again, with a wry grimace as, puffing and sweating, we removed piles of rubble from the fireplace so as to be able to carry out the smoke test. “One of his diplomats, David Ungnad, informed him that in Constantinople an army of a hundred thousand soldiers had been assembled. The Emperor then bade the Imperial Paymaster, the collector of financial reserves, to spare no expense and to gather an army of equal strength.”

Shortly afterwards the Deputy Imperial Paymaster, Georg Ilsung, presented himself personally to Maximilian with surprising results: thanks to his close contacts with the most powerful German bankers, such as the Fuggers, and also to his personal patrimony, he had assembled an army of eighty thousand soldiers, of whom fifty thousand were infantry and thirty thousand cavalry. He had also been promised reinforcements by the Medici in Florence, by Philibert of Savoy, Alfonso of Ferrara, by the Duke of Guise and the German electors. In Germany, Ilsung had collected great sums to pay for equipment, provisions and weapons. Innsbruck would supply locally produced helmets for defence and attack, together with Savoy horses and Italian infantry; he had negotiated with the Duke of Wüttemberg for supplies of gunpowder; and finally from Augsburg and Ulm he had obtained rifles and other weapons. Ilsung even announced that he would receive considerable financial aid from the Pope and from the King of Spain.

“Maximilian was radiant,” remarked the Greek. “He promoted Ilsung to the post of Chief Imperial Paymaster, unceremoniously removing his superior. Under Ferdinand I, Maximilian’s father, Georg Ilsung had already laid his hands on a great number of offices, and in this way he became the key figure in the imperial finances.”

The Caesarean army left Vienna on 12th August 1566, and twelve days later pitched camp in the little town of Raab, on the Danube.

Maximilian was a man of peace, but he was not afraid to fight for a just cause, and had decided to place himself personally at the head of his troops, as Suleiman himself did, even though the Sultan was on his seventeenth campaign and he on his first.

Once they were encamped, however, the imperial army waited for events to evolve. Maximilian did not want to move. He stayed in his tent, talking to nobody. All the good cheer of their departure had vanished from his face. No one knew why. The soldiers and officers were in good spirits and were looking forward to fighting; this long wait would only depress them, and trigger off the diseases and infections typical of large camps — and sure enough they began to break out among the soldiers.

Suleiman lost no time and attacked the fortress of Szigeti, which he had long set his sights on. The imperial army at first rushed to assist the besieged city. Then, incredibly, they fell back.

The fate of Szigeti was sealed. The besieged troops launched themselves in a heroic and suicidal sortie and were massacred. The commander, Count Zriny, was beheaded and his head sent to the imperial camp.

Szigeti fell on 9th September. Then the fortress of Gyula fell. It was a disaster. All eyes were on the Emperor: a golden opportunity to triumph over the Turks and to recapture the lands of Hungary had been wasted, mountains of money had been dissipated in equipping the army, and two important fortresses had been destroyed.

Meanwhile, since the Turks seemed to have no desire to pursue hostilities, there was nothing to do but return home, just as the enemy themselves would do soon enough. Who was to blame for this failure if not the Emperor, who had refused to stir? They had long been calling him Maximilian the Mysterious; now it seemed that behind the mystery lay nothing but incompetence.

In the meantime we had almost completed our smoke test in the maior domus. Most of the flues had responded positively: none of them was seriously blocked, so it only remained to clean them. The story continued.

Back in Vienna, Maximilian finally broke his silence. He decided, something unheard of for an Emperor, to justify himself publicly. And he explained the mystery: when he personally examined the forces at his disposal in the Christian camp, he realised that Ilsung had lied to him: the eighty thousand men he had been promised at the beginning of the campaign were no more than twenty-five thousand, not even a third of what he had been led to believe. And the equipment was wretched: nothing like what had been promised. Not to mention the expected reinforcements, no trace of which had been seen. That was why the Emperor had chosen not to attack. Twenty-five thousand against a hundred thousand: it would have been a massacre, with the additional risk that the Ottomans, after exterminating the Christian army, would have been able to advance on to Vienna and, finding it undefended, take it in an instant.

But there were more surprises. Ungnad too had lied: some Ottoman soldiers who had been captured by the imperial troops on their way back had revealed that the Ottoman army was not especially large or well armed. Among the Turks there were many soldiers with no weapons and, above all, great numbers of young boys, terrified of their Christian enemies.

This explained Maximilian’s total silence: Ilsung had betrayed him, and so had Ungnad. Whom could he trust?

“Betrayed by his own men,” I remarked, surprised and intrigued by this strange story, paying no attention to the soot that was falling all around me in large clumps while I thrust my head into one of the flues to see how much stuff needed removing. “But why?”

“Wait, Signor Master, it’s not over yet,” Simonis stopped me. “Something else had been hidden from Maximilian, with Luciferian cunning.”

This was the most important event of the whole war. It had happened even before the fall of Szigeti, on 5th September. At the age of seventy-five and suffering grievously from gout, Suleiman the Magnificent had unexpectedly left his followers in the lurch right in the middle of the military campaign: he had died.

“Died? And the Emperor knew nothing about it?”

“Nothing at all. For two whole months. And this despite the fact that David Ungnad was continually travelling back and forth between the Turks and the Christians.”

The news of the Sultan’s death was concealed by such an opaque veil of secrecy that Maximilian learned nothing of it until the end of October. And to tell the truth, it was this fact, even more than the fall of Szigeti, that was his ruin. If they had heard at once about the Sultan’s death, the Christian army could have taken advantage of the enemy’s inevitable confusion, launched a sudden attack before they could organise themselves and almost certainly they would have achieved a great victory. Instead, Maximilian’s intelligence network had kept silent. In the end Suleiman’s death was revealed to him by a foreigner: the Ambassador of the Republic of Venice. Even in distant Innsbruck they had heard the news three days before the imperial camp, which was just a stone’s throw from the Ottoman one.

Suleiman had actually been moribund when he set out from Constantinople; but this was something David Ungnad had not reported.

“And just think, the trick the Turks used was a puerile one: they put an old man in Suleiman’s bed who imitated his voice and issued orders, following the ministers’ instructions,” sneered Simonis with bitter sarcasm.

The Greek was growing heated over this two-century-old tale; he may have looked like an idiot but he had a keen mind and fervent heart and this betrayal of the old emperor filled him with indignation. However, he still had not explained the reason for all this and, above all, what on earth it had to do with the Place with No Name.

“I imagine,” I cut in, “that after Maximilian’s public speech, the men who had betrayed him came to a bad end.”

“Far from it, Signor Master, far from it. His justifications were ignored. Ilsung, Ungnad and their acolytes held the same power as before. It was as if the Emperor had never spoken. Everyone continued to blame him for the defeat. Although only whispered, condemnations of him were bandied about, and Maximilian could see them written on his own friends’ faces.”

“Absurd,” I remarked.

“The heart of the public and of the court was too heavy with disappointment and anger to weigh the rights and wrongs of the situation calmly, or even just to listen to the facts. Maximilian’s enemies knew this and took advantage of it. They subtly stirred up the people’s feelings.”

“But who organised it? And why?”

“Who? All of his most trusted men. Why? For revenge; the first of the long series of acts of hatred and deception that led to the building of this place, then to its repudiation, and which finally bore the Emperor to his grave.”

Maximilian, Simonis went on, had become emperor only thanks to the support of the forces opposed to the Church of Rome, led by the heretical Princes. He had surrounded himself with Lutheran spirits and intellects, but only because he felt an affinity with their open and innovative minds, certainly not out of any desire to oppose or to weaken the Vicar of Christ. However, the people in whom the Emperor had placed his trust were by no means so high-minded in their intentions: they were all waiting for him to give a clear sign of rupture with Rome, something that would mark the decline and fall of the papacy once and for all. And so, the imitatio Christi contemplated by Maximilian went beyond his own intentions: he was betrayed and destroyed, just as the Jews had had Jesus crucified when they realised he was never going to take up the sword against Rome.

“And so the war against the Turks provided an opportunity for the heretics to avenge themselves and get rid of him,” I concluded, sneezing and wiping from my face a cloud of filthy dust, released by the fall of a large piece of soot.

“It was all too easy for them: a huge number of heretical Princes supported and financed the Sublime Porte just out of hatred for the Church of Rome!”

I had already heard something similar: many years earlier, guests at the inn where I worked had told me of secret intelligence between the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the Ottoman Porte. In that case it was even worse: it was not a case of Protestant princes but of the Most Christian Sovereign of France, Only Begotten Son of the Church. The Pope had behaved no better himself, and purely for personal profit had financed the heretics. This experience had taught me that just about anything could be expected from monarchs.

“After the defeat in battle everything changed,” explained Simonis, “starting with Maximilian himself.”

He felt surrounded by spies, by enemies plotting to finish him off. But Georg Ilsung had been his counsellor for years, and his father’s before him. He was very powerful: he had started his career working for the Fuggers of Augsburg, the family of bankers that had financed Charles V and had enabled him to become emperor by bribing the prince-electors. The Fuggers were behind Ilsung’s every move. They not only lent money but even paid the Emperor in advance the tributes that the prince-electors had promised but not yet paid; and they did this at an interest rate equal to zero.

The Habsburgs were up to their eyes in debt to the Fuggers. And so Maximilian could not get rid of Ilsung that easily.

“Georg Ilsung was the fountain from which the gold of the emperors flowed,” said Simonis in no uncertain terms. “If they needed money for the war against the Turks, he was the one that found it. If there was a revolt in Hungary and arms were needed, or money to pay off the leaders of the uprising, he would see to it. If a loan had to be bargained from the Fuggers, offering as guarantee the income from customs duties or the revenue of the imperial mercury mines in Idria, he was the one they turned to. If there were debts to pay, Ilsung would contact other financial backers to spread the payment of interest. If he could not find anyone, he would pay from his own pocket and patiently wait for the Emperor or his treasurers to find the time and means to pay him back.”

“So he had the Emperor under his thumb.”

“He could do whatever he wanted with him. In the meantime the other powerful counsellor, David Ungnad, travelled to and fro between Constantinople and Vienna, on the pretext of ambassadorial missions.”

“A spy of the Sublime Porte,” I guessed, without much difficulty.

“In close contact with Suleiman’s financial backers,” my assistant concluded.

Maximilian, he went on, felt he was in their power and wondered when they would finally cast him off. He watched with concern as his son Rudolph gradually fell into their clutches, wanting to do something about it but unable to trust anyone. He was divested of all authority, a corpse on the throne.

He had been a brilliant conversationalist, lively and sociable, full of ideas and projects. Just as the Empire had placed its hopes in him, he had placed his hopes in the future. Now he grew withdrawn, surly, and enigmatic. He no longer opened up to the pleasure of conversation; his eyes, once so lively and penetrating, had become melancholy, his voice dull and flat. The ambassadors of foreign powers reported regularly to their masters that the Emperor was no longer himself, that the reversal he had suffered at Suleiman’s hands had marked him forever. A dead man, the Turkish Sultan, had defeated a living one, and had transformed him into the semblance of a dead man.

The courageous decision not to persecute the Protestant heretics, and even to accept many of them as counsellors, together now with this sad and impenetrable character, made him unpopular with his own people. By now there were those who suspected that behind this complicated man, behind his tormented nature and his incomprehensible policies, there was nothing but a confused mind.

Maximilian had never had a strong physique; now he seemed in steep decline. On the way back from the military campaign to Vienna, his old affliction of palpitations had resurfaced. He had fallen out of love with so many things that only one project now seemed close to his heart.

“He dreamed of a new building,” explained Simonis, “and we are right inside that dream of his: the Place with No Name.”

He was too conscientious to neglect affairs of State. But every free moment was devoted to the project of his new castle. As time went by he spent ever greater sums on it, and it was said that it became a compulsion, a sort of sweet torment: was it better to use this stone or that marble? This cornice or that frieze? In the façade, was a serliana better than a porch? And in the garden, what trees, what hedges, what rare varieties of roses? The indecision he had been criticised for in the war against Suleiman was now his sweet companion. The Venetian ambassador wrote to his compatriots that the Emperor had just one concern, to which he devoted himself wholeheartedly, a real obsession: creating a garden and a villa, half a league from Vienna, which when completed would be a truly regal and imperial palace.

Curiously enough, at the planning stage he turned to the same Italian architects he had summoned years ago to reinforce Vienna in view of the war against the Turks. But for the Place With No Name, these ingenious Italians did not design ramparts, ravelins and counterscarps: instead, they planned towers like minarets, oriental half-moons and Ottoman-style seraglios.

The court and the people were flabbergasted. What on earth was driving the Emperor to pay such sumptuous homage to the architecture of Mahomet?

But it was no mere caprice, no whim of a melancholy and confused spirit.

“In 1529, more than thirty years before the defeat of Maximilian, Suleiman the Magnificent had besieged Vienna. It was the first of the two great — and unsuccessful — sieges that the Infidels laid to the Caesarean city. Suleiman had set out from Constantinople accompanied by immense resources of men and money, which he had received from the many people who were hoping, either from greed or from resentment or just out of personal hatred, to see the powerful throne of Peter fall at last. The fortunes of entire families, accumulated from generation to generation, had flowed into the Sultan’s coffers to finance his campaign against the Giaours, as they call us Christians. Suleiman spared no expense: during the siege he chose as his lodgings, not a military tent, but a rich and gigantic camp, almost a reconstruction of his palace in Constantinople, with fountains, water-games, musicians, animals and a harem.”

To conquer Vienna, and with it the whole Christian world, did not seem an impossible enterprise, explained the Greek: just a hundred years earlier had not Constantinople itself, the New Rome, the Byzantium of the most pious Empress Theodora, Justinian’s beloved consort, fallen into Turkish hands?

“That ‘lascivious dancer’ — as the treacherous and mendacious scribbler of Caesarea apostrophised her behind her back — with her fervent and shrewd monophysitism had won her place in paradise, and on her premature death had left a lofty testament in political and religious terms: the only unconquerable pockets of the Christian faith in Asia, against which even today the Infidels are powerless. But even Theodora had been unable to save her Byzantium from Mahomet, the Prophet who would be born less than thirty years after her death. And now the basilica of Saint Sophia, erected by Theodora herself, had been raped by the minarets of Allah. Could not the same thing happen to Vienna, the ‘Rome of the Holy Roman Empire’? And then, why not, to Rome itself?”

My assistant narrated all this with some vehemence, while doing his best, with uncoordinated and awkward (but not inept) movements, to light a bundle of damp wood that stubbornly refused to ignite; and the sharpness of his voice testified to all the suffering the Greeks had undergone at the hands of their Ottoman masters.

“Instead it all went up in smoke,” concluded the Greek. “Suleiman had not yet managed to overcome the resistance of the besieged city when God hurled against him a colder winter than had ever been seen before, and the Sultan had to go back empty-handed, and, what was worse, with the great risk of perishing amidst the ice storms and floods, as on the Day of Judgement. For his financial backers it spelt ruin.”

It was the end of the dream. Henceforth there would be less pride and confidence in the cry, “We’ll meet again at the Golden Apple!”, which every new Sultan, at the end of his investiture, launches as a promise to the commander of the janissaries.

“The Golden Apple?”

“It’s the name the Ottomans have used since time immemorial for the four capitals of the Giaours: Constantinople of Saint Theodora, Buda of Matthias Corvinus, Vienna of the Holy Roman Emperor and Rome of the Successors of Peter.”

The Golden Apple, the allegorical name designating the four forbidden fruits of Ottoman yearning, found its incarnation alternately in the gilded domes of Constantinople, in the scintillating orbs atop the roofs of Buda, in the golden sphere surmounted by the cross of Christ that dominated Vienna from the imposing tower of St Stephen’s, and finally in the mighty sphere of pure gold on the dome of the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, whose golden glow was visible even to sailors off the coast of Latium.

“And so the sultans, as soon as they ascend the throne,” remarked the Greek sarcastically, “solemnly promise to lead the janissaries very soon to the conquest of those cities, almost as if this were Islam’s very reason for living: to defeat the Christian world.”

The first Golden Apple, Constantinople, had been conquered by the followers of Mahomet, but now Vienna had transformed the situation.

“Transformed it entirely!” I laughed. “It was a century and a half before the Sublime Porte could put together enough money to threaten Vienna again. And yet again in vain. I know the story of the siege of Suleiman in 1529: last Monday I watched the annual procession of the brotherhood of bakers, which crossed the city with music and banners, in memory of the service they rendered the city during that siege. But what does the 1529 siege have to do with your story? Is it because the families of the ruined backers were the same ones for whom Ungnad would later betray Maximilian?”

“You’ve guessed it, but only in part. Because there was more to it than that, much more. Do you know where Suleiman’s tent was pitched during the siege, with its fountains, water-games, musicians, animals and all the other luxuries he had brought with him?”

I looked at Simonis, waiting for the answer.

“Here, on the plain of Simmering, right where the Place with No Name now stands.”

At these words, I thought back to the Levantine forms of the pinnacles and domes, to the fountain, the thermal tower and the Mediterranean gardens. Still clutching a bundle of firewood, I went outside, leaving my assistant and apprentice. I gazed upwards. With the story of Maximilian’s drama still echoing in my mind, my eyes roamed the sky and the towering roofs of the Place with No Name. Now I saw what had had been right in front of my eyes all this time but which I had failed to notice before: the roofs reproduced the coruscating glow of the sumptuous pavilion of Suleiman. The tiles of gilded copper once again tormented my eyeballs with their glare, and I almost felt I was admiring the sinister glitter of the Bosphorus and the glint of the scimitars that struck off the head of Count Zriny and the golden reflections of the oriental domes of St Mark’s, which gazed down upon the treacherous city of Venice, which had abandoned Maximilian in the struggle against the Infidel.

Now I saw what it was, the Place with No Name, known as Neugebäu, or “New Building”: not a hunting lodge, nor an aviary, nor a garden, nor a villa — no: it was an Ottoman seraglio. The towers held the treasure room, the storeroom, the small parlour and large parlour, the inner room, the walls of white marble and porphyry columns, the pages’ rooms and the court guards’ quarters. In each of the towers there was a reproduction of one of the areas into which Suleiman’s camp had been subdivided, including the Turkish bath. And it also included the audience chamber and the law pavilion and the great room of the divan.

With this grandiose, secret parody of a sultanesque palace it almost seemed as if Maximilian, smiling ruefully, had wished not only to create a masterpiece, but above all quietly to settle the score with his Eastern enemies. At Szigeti he had been defeated by a dead sultan. At Neugebäu he had avenged himself.

Only then did I recognise the place for what it was: a castle with gleaming roofs like Suleiman’s pavilion, but caged in by classical arcades and flanked on either side by two semicircular keeps, the sign of Christian apses flanking their prisoner like gendarmes. Gathered together in the main building of the Place with No Name were the two cornerstones of Europe: the heritage of the classical world and the Christian faith. They not only besieged Suleiman’s pavilion, but to the south they kept watch over the gardens and the Turkish-style towers, and barred the road to the north; just so the Infidels had never succeeded in overpowering the Christian West. The boreal meadows and woods to the north of the Place with No Name offered no scope for Levantine allusions, eloquently opening out onto a view of the Caesarean city and its ramparts, which the Infidels had never succeeded in conquering.

“This was how he got his own back on Suleiman,” said Simonis, who had come up behind me with my boy, “but even more on those who had lavished gold on him so that he might move against Europe; the same ones who out of hatred for the Church had led Maximilian to the throne, and had then ditched him, laying the basest of traps for him. It was the masterly revenge of a disempowered Emperor, who did the only thing he still could do: erect an eternal monument to that original defeat of Suleiman, the wound that will never heal.”

Ilsung sought with every means in his power to deprive Maximilian of funding for Neugebäu, the New Building. Already in 1564 he had got a pupil of his own hired as Court Paymaster: David Hag, who was also related to Ungnad. And so Hag became the brooding presence responsible for every single penny dispensed to the Emperor, and hence to the New Building. Every request for funding for the project met with the reply that there was not enough money, or there were other difficulties. When Maximilian managed by some stratagem to go ahead with the construction, Hag would unsettle the artisans with rumours that they would never be paid, and if they were not convinced he would stir up rivalry and jealousy among them. He also arranged for shoddy materials to be sent instead of the stuff ordered by the Emperor, so that during the construction work parts of the building collapsed. When he died, in 1599, twenty years after Maximilian, it was discovered that Hag had confined himself to marking only the Emperor’s expenses in the accounts books, without ever listing the revenue destined for him.”

“Not exactly the most faithful way of handling his sovereign’s funds,” I said ironically.

“Maximilian was probably deprived of large sums of his own money in this way,” the Greek confirmed. “But even so he always found some expedient to carry on with the work, even if slowly and laboriously. And the Place with No Name, the New Building, although incomplete, became the eighth wonder, astonishing every visitor.”

Failing to grasp the allegorical aims, the Turks loved and venerated the Place with No Name: for them it was nothing other than a faithful reproduction of their glorious Sultan’s camp.

When Vienna was besieged again in 1683, they even took care not to damage it. There was no ambassadorial mission to Vienna that failed to visit the Place with No Name at least once. Some even pitched camp there, on the plain in front of it, the night before entering the city, in adoration of that sacred place, tearfully caressing and kissing its walls as if it were a sacred relic. When they gazed upon the seraglio, four thousand paces wide, and the sixteen corners with their towers, which dazed and confused the senses, they were moved by what they saw as a perfect imitation of Suleiman’s camp.

A very different treatment, unfortunately, was meted out to the Place with No Name by the European allies of the Sublime Porte. The Kurucs, the infamous Hungarian rebels, in one of their shameless incursions six or seven years earlier, vented their rage on those poor walls. The castle was looted, defaced and burned down. That which had held out against neglect for over a century was destroyed in just a few minutes.

“After all those years! Couldn’t it have just been sheer chance? Do you really think the Kurucs destroyed the Place with No Name for its symbolic value?” I asked.

“As long as there are enemies of Christianity, there will be enemies of this place, Signor Master. The hatred against the Place with No Name still rages.”

I would have liked to ask him how this hatred was manifested and by whom; but at that moment Frosch arrived to see what point we had reached.

We told him that the chimneys of the maior domus were not in a disastrous condition, and we would be able to fix some of them immediately. But it would take us some time to draw up a map of all the flues of Neugebäu, and we could not return the next day, I said, on account of some urgent repair work that I had to carry out for clients back in the city.

After the maior domus we inspected some of the service buildings. We worked hard all day armed with wire brushes, butchers’ brooms, ropes and counterweights, inspecting and cleaning the flues of Neugebäu; we were filthy and exhausted. But in my legs I could still feel the force that was required to satisfy my curiosity, or rather my sense of unfulfilled duty. I almost felt that the strange being, the most bizarre in the whole castle, was expecting (if an inanimate object can ever be said to expect) my visit.

I looked around myself; Frosch was nowhere to be seen. I made my way to the ball stadium.

It was still there, vigilant and motionless, but its threatening beak, so sharp and warlike, looked as if it hoped one day to cleave the cold air of the skies above Vienna again. The Flying Ship, imposing in its guise as bird of prey, rested as ever on its great belly of wooden planks, its wings spread out uselessly. Simonis walked around it several times and then leaped up inside it, taking with him my boy, who was bursting with curiosity.

Having finished his account of the Place with No Name and its builder, the Greek had reverted to his usual self, asking a host of banal questions not worth answering. Could the ship have flown up into the air thanks to its bird-like shape? And why was it a bird of prey? And if it flew again, would it not scare the lions and the other animals of Neugebäu? And could it float as well? Or would it have to be shaped like a seabird or, even better, a fish in that case?

I gave only monosyllabic answers. The discovery of the magniloquent symbolism of the Place with No Name and the Greek’s story had filled me with doubts and questions, stirring me to a state of inward excitement, so that my work tired me out earlier than usual. In my heart there was little room left that day for the other host of riddles that made up the feathered sailing ship.

While I worked in the ball stadium with brushes and counterweights, beginning to clean one of the half-blocked flues, I thought back to Simonis’s story of the Place with No Name. He had referred to its state of neglect. And so even before the devastating raid of the Kurucs, it had been abandoned. Did that mean Ilsung and Hag had won out over Maximilian? In what way? And why had no emperor taken any interest in that wonderful place since then? I put this question to the Greek.

“To tell the truth, some Caesars, including Emperor Leopold of august memory, father of our beloved Joseph I, did plan some rather limited restoration work. But when you get down to it, no emperor has ever carried anything through, or hardly anything.”

“And why not?” I asked in wonder.

“Lack of money,” my assistant said with a wink, vigilant and lucid once again. “Their imperial paymasters and court paymasters always found a thousand pretexts not to finance the restoration of the Place with No Name. All of them, just like Ilsung and Hag — ”

“. . because the great financial families pulling the strings behind the paymasters were still the same ones,” I concluded before him.

“Exactly, Signor Master. Do you want proof? Even the tutor of the infant Leopold I, father of the present emperor, was a Fugger. They’re the same as ever. And for generations they’ve hated the Place with No Name.”

“So are they really far more powerful than the emperors?”

“It’s a question of fear, Signor Master. All the Most August Caesars who reigned between Maximilian and his Caesarean Majesty Joseph I the Victorious kept well away from the Place with No Name for fear of ending up like Maximilian.”

“Why, what happened to him?”

But Simonis seemed not to hear me. He had stepped outside and was examining the fading light of day.

“We must hurry, Signor Master,” he exclaimed, running back in. “It’s very late; soon they’ll be closing the city gates!”

18.30 of the clock: the ramparts close. Latecomers must pay 6 kreutzer. The beer bell rings, the wine shops close and no one can wander the streets now bearing arms or without a lantern.

Lashing the poor mule mercilessly, we managed to get through the city gates just in time to avoid paying the 6-kreutzer fine. Money saved, and immediately lost: our dinner at the eating house, because we were so late, cost us 24 kreutzer each instead of the usual 8.

On our way home, curled up as usual in the cart while Simonis and the boy sat on the box seat, with my guts churning to the jolts of the careering wheels, I thought back to the Greek’s bizarre tale.

Now that I knew the story of the Place with No Name, the decision of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I struck me in a new light and raised urgent questions: why on earth had Joseph decided to break the chain of oblivion that his predecessors had bound around Neugebäu? He must know well the sad story of his ancestor Maximilian II and the series of grudges and vendettas that had generated and undermined the parody of Suleiman’s camp. He must have easily guessed, if he had not indeed learned with his own ears, that it was this murky affair that had kept his prudent predecessors away from the Place with No Name. What had given Joseph the Victorious the impulse to intervene in a centuries-old struggle which, according to Simonis, was far from over?

I considered our beloved Emperor. What did I know of him?

Ever since my arrival I had tried to collect information on the new Sovereign’s character, fame and actions, and on the expectations that the people had of him. After a life spent as the subject of popes, all of a certain age, I had found it a welcome novelty to become the subject of a young monarch with no cassock or crosier.

Numerous writings existed on Joseph I, known as the Victorious. They were all panegyrics, or stories of his infancy, of his education entrusted to the Prince of Salm (he was the first emperor not to be educated by the Jesuits, his father Leopold having yielded to the hatred that his subjects nurtured for the Company of Jesus). Then there were detailed descriptions of his marriage to Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Lunenburg, of his triumphal appointment as King of the Romans, which is the title by which the crown prince is designated in the Empire. There were also accounts of his military campaigns, first of all the siege and conquest of the fortress of Landau in the Palatinate: Joseph himself had seized it from French hands at the age of just twenty-four, in 1702 and 1704. In 1703 the French had reconquered it only because Emperor Leopold, for reasons unknown to me, had not wanted to send his son into battle.

These were the first things I remembered from all that I had read about my Sovereign, but more particularly from what I had learned at first hand from my sharp-witted fellow chimney-sweeps, who had been happy to satisfy my curiosity about the royal family with lively details, instilling in me a profound devotion to my new Sovereign.

However, I could remember nothing of any connection with the Place with No Name or its history. Or perhaps there was something: the bold beauty of the young Emperor (something truly unique in the ill-favoured Habsburg line), a mirror to his impetuous and dominating character (equally rare in that stock); Joseph’s desire to impose himself on the family traditions and the consequent clashes with his father, parvus animus educated by the Jesuits, and the conflicts with his brother Charles, of a recondite and indecisive temperament, another product of a Jesuit education.

But I vowed that I would rummage among the various books and writings on the Emperor that I had acquired on my arrival in Vienna. I would look there for the answers to my questions.

On returning to the convent, after gulping down our sumptuous dinner at meteoric speed, I was already looking forward to immersing myself in the papers I had collected on Joseph, in search of an answer to the puzzles of the Place with No Name.

“Here I am. This evening we shall do a lesson on strolling, and on eating and drinking.”

It was like a blow to the head. The person who addressed me in this fashion, just as I turned into the corridor of the guest house, was Ollendorf, the German tutor. I had forgotten: it was the feared hour of our language lesson. As he had just announced, that evening we were going to try out a conversation to learn the terms connected with walking and with food. Very unwillingly I bade farewell to my research into Joseph I and the Place with No Name.

My lack of talent for foreign idioms was exposed all the more clearly by the state of exhaustion in which I faced each lesson. That evening I was afraid that I would appear to even greater disadvantage than I had at the previous lesson, when, in an attempt to describe the best way to pay homage to a woman (kissing the back of her hand), instead of the word hand I had said hund (dog), to the great mirth of my wife and my son, and the deep disappointment of Ollendorf.

Cloridia was still at Prince Eugene’s palace. I was so eager to get on with my readings on Joseph I and my cogitations on the Place with No Name that, after apologising to the teacher and offering as pretext my weariness, I begged him to teach my son by himself that evening.

I retired to my bedroom and prepared to wash, pouring water from a jug into the pot on the fireplace. As I did so I listened to my son, taking delight in his skills in German.

“Deß Herrn Diener mein Herr, wie gehets dem Herrn?”, which is to say “Servant of your Lordship my patron, how is your Lordship?” asked the teacher, pretending that his little pupil was a gentleman.

“Wohl Gott lob, dem Herrn zu dienen, was für gute Zeitungen bringt mir der Herr?” “Praise be to God, to serve your Lordship: what good news does your Lordship bring?” answered the boy diligently.

I cleaned myself and was just settling down to read the heap of papers — pamphlets and other publications concerning the life and deeds of our Most August Caesar — when I heard a key rattle in the door. My wife had returned.

“My darling,” I greeted her, resigning myself to a postponement of my research.

For nearly two days my wife and I had had no chance to talk, and I was curious to hear about the audience that the Agha had had with Prince Eugene. But then I saw her dejected face and dull complexion, features that clearly indicated trepidation and anxiety.

She kissed me, took off her cloak and lay down on the bed.

“So, how did it go yesterday?”

“Oh, what do you expect. . Those Turkish soldiers, all they can do is drink. And act licentiously.”

Exalted by the hospitality and courtesy extended to the Agha, the lower-ranking Ottomans had thought they could claim equal dignities, and had plied Cloridia with absurd requests.

“Unfortunately,” sighed my wife, “of all the virtues that honour Christian society, the only one the Turks feel obliged to practise is hospitality. When they enter someone else’s home, they think they have a right to whatever they want, because they are muzafir, guests, and in their religion it is God Himself who has sent them, and no matter what they do, they must always be welcome.”

A virtue that contents itself with appearances, said Cloridia, is very quickly debased; and that is what happens to oriental hospitality as practised by the boorish multitude. Under the pretext of the duty of hospitality, the Ottomans, not content with the rough Stockerau wine, had raided the larder, exhausted the supplies of coffee and acquavite, overturned carpets, mattresses and cushions, and even broken the crockery in their debauches, taking advantage of Prince Eugene’s magnanimity and the pay of the imperial chamber.

“And they stank too!” my wife said wearily. “In the Ottoman Empire no one undresses for bed, and because of the cold they’re wearing the same furs they’ve been travelling in for months. Remember that for the Turks there’s nothing more elegant than a fur coat and so they think they’re cutting a fine figure dressed like this.”

In Constantinople, added Cloridia, there’s nothing they fear so much as the cold and so they do all they can to protect themselves from it even when for us Europeans the problem is to withstand the heat. Even in the warm rooms of the Savoy Palace the Ottomans remained wrapped up in their stinking furs and on the lookout for the slightest draught from windows and doors, which they then wanted to stop up with pieces of waxed paper. And so, while the Agha was being received with all honours by Prince Eugene, the Ottomans were bustling to and fro all over the place, making the palace servants complain; and the two groups, like hammer and tongs, had driven poor Cloridia mad, she being the only linguistic intermediary.

The last straw had come when some Armenians in the retinue had decided to light a tandur to sit around, with the risk of starting a fire or seriously damaging the Most Serene Prince’s furnishings.

“A tandur?”

“A little stove full of embers and burning coal which you put under a table covered with woollen drapes that hang down to the ground. They all pull the cover over themselves, bury their hands and arms under it, and keep their bodies at a temperature that we would consider feverish. Of course this custom leads to a great many horrible accidents. And they insisted on lighting one in the palace, repeating that they’re muzafir and so on.”

That was not the end of it, continued Cloridia. When the Great Court Marshal called to greet the Agha’s train, some of the Turks, wanting to show that they were perfectly familiar with the customs of us Giaours, did nothing but drink from the bottle, burping all the while, and sprawled all over the divans, believing that this was what we consider elegant behaviour. But when the Great Marshal, during the visit, spat into a spittoon on the carpet, the Ottomans gestured wildly and turned up their eyes to show how amazed they were at such barbarous conduct.

“However,” I said, in an attempt to sweeten her temper, “this idea that guests are sent by God does honour to the Infidels.”

“It’s all show, my dear: if you call on one of them and then, when you leave, fail to pay twenty times the value of what you’ve consumed, your host will wait for you to step outside, losing the sacred title of muzafir, and stone you,” she concluded.

“My poor wife,” I sympathised, embracing her.

“And I haven’t yet told you what happened when they heard my mother was Turkish: they pulled out a tambourine, a drum and a shepherd’s whistle, and beat time faster and faster, wanting me to dance that dance of theirs with wooden spoons, all a twisting of hips and bellies, with nothing graceful about it that I can see, while what’s indecent is all too clear,” added Cloridia, still overcome by disgust.

“I hope at least they didn’t show you any disrespect.”

“Don’t worry, despite all the wine I’d supplied them with, they haven’t forgotten what the Sultan will do to anyone who molests a woman. And in any case that dervish of theirs, Ciezeber, was ready to remind them of it,” smiled Cloridia, noticing a flicker of fear in my eyes.

“I saw him in the procession. But what’s he doing in the Agha’s retinue?”

“He’s his imam, his priest. I just wonder why he isn’t Turkish.”

“I’ve read that he’s Indian.”

“So they say. At any rate he’s not like the others, he behaves most worthily.”

I asked her what the palace looked like inside, if she had attended the official talks, or if she had at least bumped into Prince Eugene. She told me that, as soon as he set foot inside the palace of the Most Serene Prince, the Agha was led by the master of the palace to the great staircase, and then upstairs. Here, surrounded by a great crowd of noblemen, people of rank and imperial functionaries, the Ottoman ambassador was received by two officials of the War Chancellery, who led him through the famous great hall, decorated throughout in frescoes, and then through the antechamber to the audience chamber. The Agha must have been greatly impressed by the great gathering of people, remarked Cloridia, as well as by the abundance of red velvets with ornamental gold writing that covered the walls and the armchairs. The spectacle of the great hall, of the luxurious wall-hangings and the eager bystanders reached its climax when the door of the audience hall was finally thrown open to reveal the severe face of His Imperial Eminence the President of the Aulic Council of War, His Highness the Most Serene Prince Eugene of Savoy.

Eugene was dazzling in his gold-embroidered garments, his hat decorated with a cockade studded with diamonds of incalculable value, and also displaying the Golden Fleece and his sword. He sat awaiting the Agha in an armchair underneath a baldachin of red velvet, flanked by Count Herberstein, Vice-President of the Aulic Council of War and a secret referendary and surrounded by numerous generals. The room had now filled with the great throng of noblemen, courtiers and people of note, all craning their necks to catch every detail of the conference.

“Eugene is far from good-looking,” added Cloridia. “He doesn’t have fine facial features, his body is too lean, but on the whole he inspired respect and deference.”

As soon as he arrived before the Most Serene Prince, the Agha saluted in the Turkish manner, touching his turban three times, and then sat down on an armchair that had at once been placed opposite that of his host. The first thing the Ottoman did was to present his credentials. The Prince accepted them and immediately passed them to the secret referendary. After which a conversation was held, but neither of them had to make any concessions: the Agha expressed himself in Turkish, Eugene in Italian, which was not only the official court language but also the idiom of his family, he being a Savoy. Their words were made mutually intelligible by the Caesarean interpreter and the interpreter of the Sublime Porte; the former translated, the latter assured the Agha of the correctness of the translation. Only at the outset, Cloridia said, did the Agha formulate a sentence in Latin in honour of the Holy Roman Empire: “Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum!”, which is to say, “We have come to the Golden Apple all alone.” He pronounced it carefully, reading from a document. This was interpreted not only literally — the Agha had indeed come with a retinue of just twenty people or so — but above all as a declaration of honest and peaceful intent. The Turk had come to Vienna, in short, with no ulterior motive. The paper from which the Agha had read was then personally delivered into the hands of the Most Serene Prince.

During the interview, furthermore, Eugene was seen to play with a strange metal object about two inches across, which he passed incessantly from one hand to the other. At the end, after the ritual farewells, the Agha stood up, turned round and immediately headed towards the door. Only then did Eugene, who had remained seated the whole time, stand up, remove his hat by way of salutation and then, taking care to turn his back on the Agha to show his superiority, look towards his generals. The Turk was led away by the same officers of the city guard who had conducted him thither. Reseated in his carriage between two lines of onlookers, he was taken back to his lodgings, but only to satisfy the curiosity of the bystanders, since the Agha and his retinue in fact returned that very evening to the palace of the Most Serene Prince, where they were going to stay for three days, to enjoy the most lavish and splendid treatment that the duty of hospitality imposed.

“So the Turks are staying for three days as Eugene’s guests.”

“That’s what the Prince has decided, to pay them greater honour.”

“And on Monday they’ll be returning to their lodgings, at the inn of the Golden Lamb,” I deduced.

“Haven’t you heard the latest? The embassy isn’t putting up at the Golden Lamb, as the Turkish delegations have done for a hundred years now.”

“Really?” I said in surprise.

“It’s still on the Leopoldine Island, in the Jewish quarter, but at the home of Widow Leixenring, which has eleven rooms, a good kitchen and a stable with a barn.”

“A private house? But why?”

“It’s a mystery. All I know is that the rent is paid, as always, by the imperial chamber. At the Golden Lamb they’re offended, particularly because there was room for them there. And all the onlookers who were waiting for the procession outside the inn were left looking silly. The strangest thing is that Widow Leixenring’s small palace is guarded like a fortress: they told me you can’t get a peek at the windows even from a distance.”

“So it’s true that there’s something serious behind this embassy. Have they come out and declared their reason for coming here?” I said, beginning to worry that we might have come all the way to Vienna to escape from Roman poverty, but at the risk of falling victims to a new Turkish siege.

With the lightning swiftness of fear, I was already seeing myself flayed alive, my wife deported (lucky her, speaking the language of those Infidels) and my son brought up in the barracks of Constantinople to become a janissary — or, worse, made a eunuch for the Sultan’s harem. Meanwhile Cloridia had moved to the door that communicated with the next room. She was discreetly eavesdropping on the dialogue taking place at that moment between our little boy and Ollendorf:

“Gott behüte Ewer Gnaden.” “Goodbye Most Illustrious Sir,” the pupil was reciting courteously. Cloridia smiled tenderly on hearing his high-pitched voice.

“People are saying that this is a different embassy from the previous ones,” she then confirmed, returning to me as her smile faded. “Do you want to know how many people there were on previous official Turkish visits to Vienna? As many as 400. The last time they came was 11 years ago, in 1700, and they had 450 horses, 180 camels and 120 mules. And now,” she added, “arriving like this in a great hurry, almost without warning, with very few followers and a journey in the depths of winter. .”

“So does anyone know why they’ve come?” I asked, feverish with anxiety.

“Certainly they know. Officially, to confirm the peace treaty of Karlowitz. And that’s what the Agha discussed with Eugene in front of everyone.”

“The treaty signed with the Emperor twelve years ago, when the last war with the Ottomans ended?”

“Exactly.”

“And was there any need to send such an urgent embassy from Constantinople to confirm a treaty that had already been signed? They haven’t made any claims or announced any hostile intentions towards the Empire?”

“On the contrary. The Ottomans have got many other matters on their minds right now: they’re engaged against the Czar.”

“The whole thing makes no sense. Do you think they’ve come for some other reason?”

Cloridia looked at me, returning the question with her eyes.

“I’ve asked each and every one of those drunkards in the Agha’s retinue,” she said then, “but do you know what they answer? Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum! And then they laugh and they drink, so as not to say anything else. They ape their master without even understanding what they’re saying.”

“And the palace staff? Maybe they’ve picked up something from the private talks between Eugene and the Agha.”

“Ah, as for that, there’s been no private talk!”

“What?”

“You heard me. Eugene and the Agha have never gone off in private; they have always talked exclusively in front of an audience.”

“And so they’ve really never talked of anything except the old treaty of Karlowitz.”

“Truly inexplicable, don’t you think?” she answered disconsolately. “Just think,” she added, lowering her voice, “that even in the Prince’s diary, there’s nothing about this embassy except the sheet of paper the Agha gave him. And on the sheet all that’s written is that sentence: ‘Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum,’ simply that the Turks have come to Vienna all by themselves.”

“This is all absurd,” I commented.

“Maybe this sentence conceals something we don’t know,” conjectured my wife. “They’ve explained to me that the pomum aureum, or the Golden Apple, is the name the Turks give to Vienna.”

“Yes, I know; Simonis told me this just today,” I confirmed, summarising for her what I had learned from my assistant about the history of the Place with No Name, about Maximilian II and Suleiman.

“Incredible. But where does the name Golden Apple come from?”

“Ah, I’ve no idea.”

“Maybe it’s the name that holds the key to understand the sentence,” hazarded Cloridia.

Things clearly did not add up. It had been feared that the Ottomans might arrive in arms, or at any rate bringing something terrible with them. Instead, publicly emphasising that they had come all by themselves, they wanted to reassure the imperial forces as to the honesty of their intentions. But this still did not explain why they had come to Vienna in such urgent haste. And there was something else that jarred with their avowed peaceful purposes — the way they had referred to the Caesarean city, using the hardly reassuring name of “Golden Apple”. The description underlined the fact that Vienna was still a target of conquest for the Ottoman Sublime Porte. It was no accident that Prince Eugene was granting them the extraordinary honour of hosting them for three days in his palace.

“And how do you know what’s in your master’s personal diary?” I asked with my eyes bulging, suddenly thinking of Cloridia’s words.

“That’s obvious: I was told by his personal manservant’s wife, the one I promised to help give birth for free.”

My wife, although she could not practise as a midwife, a profession which required a regular licence (like everything else here), never stopped helping women who were pregnant, in childbed or in puerperium. Her help was gratefully received, since the best obstetricians in the city, those on the same level as Cloridia, cost a fortune.

“But hurry up now,” she exhorted me, “Camilla is waiting for us.”

20 of the clock: eating houses close their doors.

“Before I got married, there was nothing interesting about my life,” began the Chormaisterin.

We were in the august imperial chapel, at the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, during a break. Since only our little boy and I belonged to the troupe of extras, Cloridia did not need to be there, but Camilla de’ Rossi had been so skilful in overcoming my wife’s initial diffidence that she now happily accompanied us to our evening engagements, and during the break it was not rare for her to pass the time conversing with the Chormaisterin.

The breaks during the oratorio rehearsals were, for the moment, the only chances that the two women had for such chats, and the Chormaisterin seemed to value them greatly. Cloridia and I were always busy with our daily work, and for this reason could not make use of the convent’s kitchen, unless we were ill. Furthermore, by the rules of Porta Coeli the nuns were not allowed to sit at table with strangers. Camilla, who was only a lay sister, was not subject to this prohibition, and was very disappointed that we did not share her meals, all based on spelt; and so she consoled herself by preparing delicious dainties of spelt for our son, which had also had the beneficial effect of restoring him to full health. This had greatly endeared our gentle hostess to my wife.

In every conversation Camilla had the amiable gift of delicately introducing the subjects Cloridia most enjoyed, in primis that of assisting pregnant women and looking after new mothers and babies, obviously, but also occult teachings like the interpretation of dreams and of numbers, or the art of the ardent rod or diviner’s wand or whatever it is called: disciplines that Cloridia was highly skilled at, and which she had practised in her youth. Gifted with almost prophetic intuition, the Chormaisterin almost seemed to know from the outset Cloridia’s tastes and inclinations, and with discreet but unfailing adroitness led the talk towards those themes.

These amiable attentions succeeded in loosening my sweet consort’s tongue, so that when Camilla went on to ask her about her past, Cloridia did not bridle as she usually did but willingly proceeded to satisfy her curiosity.

That evening the conversation between the two women was in full flow when Cloridia for the first time put a few questions to the Chormaisterin: what had driven a young Roman woman, from Trastevere no less, all the way to Vienna? Did she not miss Trastevere, her rione? Where exactly was the house she had been born in and had grown up in? Cloridia, who knew most of Rome from her days as a midwife, had suddenly remembered a certain Camilla de’ Rossi, a well-to-do shopkeeper in Trastevere, daughter of a certain Domenico da Pesaro and mother of a Lucretia Elisabetta, whom she had assisted in giving birth to her son Cintio. Cloridia would have been happy to discover that she already knew some of Camilla’s relatives: you know how it is, it’s such a small world. .

“Before I got married, there was nothing interesting about my life,” Camilla cut her short, showing little desire to delve into her origins, too obscure perhaps for one who now enjoyed the confidence of His Caesarean Majesty.

“Married?” asked Cloridia in wonder.

“Yes, before entering Porta Coeli I was married. But excuse me, the rehearsal has to start,” she said, moving towards the orchestra players.

And thus it was we learned that Camilla, although only twenty-nine years old, was a widow.

The music began. Sweet violin strokes softly filled the vault of the Caesarean chapel, supported by the warm breath of the organ, the silvery tinkling of the lute, and the tawny tints of the violone. The soprano, in the role of the betrothed bride just abandoned by Alessio, gave voice to a mournful lament:

Cielo, pietoso Cielo. .⁴

But immediately an angry burst of chords broke from the orchestra. The bride inveighed against her old love, and asked heaven for a weapon to punish him:

Un dardo, un lampo, un telo

Attenderò da te

Ferisci arresta esanima

Chi mi mancò di fé. .⁵

Since the extras were not required during that passage, I had sat down to listen with Cloridia and our son on the chapel pews. Swept away by the energy of the music, I suddenly realised that with one hand I was clutching my consort’s arm, and with the other the back of the bench in front of us. While Camilla’s notes and the soprano’s silvery voice swelled in the volutes of the chapel, I thought back to the strange coincidence that had struck me the evening before: music and singing had come back into my life, and once again were associated with the name Rossi. In Rome I had come to know the arias of Atto’s master, Luigi Rossi; here, the Chormaisterin Camilla de’ Rossi. Could it just be pure chance? Perhaps names bring events and experiences along with them? And if so, can words therefore govern things?

While I brooded over these fleeting questions, the piece came to an end. Camilla began to instruct the singer and the players on how best to perform the passage, and to go over individual parts again; as always, the Chormaisterin was extremely eloquent and thorough in explaining just what tones she expected from the singing, what sighs from the sweet flutes, what grumblings from the gruff bassoons.

During the next pause, Camilla rejoined us. I at once urged her to continue her story. She carried on, explaining that when still very young she had married a royal court composer, a musician in the service of the Emperor’s eldest son, who was the then young Joseph I.

The court composer was Camilla’s music teacher, as she was already in Vienna at that time with her mother. He was Italian, and was called Francesco.

“But here in the Empire,” Camilla explained, “where all names are Germanised, they called him Franz. Franz Rossi.”

“Rossi? So your surname is Rossi, and not de’ Rossi?” I asked.

“Actually it was. The noble patronymic de’ was a generous concession of His Majesty Joseph I, just before Franz died.”

Her husband, Camilla went on, had trained her in the art of singing, and more particularly in that of composition, and taken her around the various courts of Europe, where they learned the most recent musical fashions, which they would introduce into the Caesarean court on their return. In Italy they went more or less everywhere: Florence and Rome, Bologna and Venice. During the day they visited the workshops of master-lutists, explored theatres to test their acoustics, approached virtuoso singers or harpsichord players to learn their secrets, and paid homage to princes, cardinals and persons of note in return for their benevolence. At night, by candlelight, they fought against sleep, copying music to take back to Vienna for the delectation of His Caesarean Majesty’s highly refined ears. Then she left us again, to go on rehearsing the orchestra.

While the Chormaisterin made the musicians try the passage over and over again, and the music swirled around the chapel, I was carried away on a sweet silent surge of memories.

Rossi! So that was the original surname of Camilla’s deceased husband. Not just similar, as I had first thought, but identical to the surname of Seigneur Luigi, Atto’s beloved master in Rome, the mentor of his youthful years. Luigi Rossi: the man who had taken the young castrato Atto Melani with him to Paris, conferring glory on him as the protagonist of Orfeo, the great melodrama requested by Cardinal Mazarin to celebrate his own greatness, second only to the supreme powers of heaven.

Almost as if in mockery of me, the soprano recited:

Cielo, pietoso cielo. .

And once again my mind went back to those events of twenty-eight years earlier, to the Inn of the Donzello, in Rome. Not a day had gone by in Abbot Melani’s company, between the four walls of the inn where I had first met him, without my hearing at least a line of Seigneur Luigi Rossi, modulated by Atto’s etiolated but still passionate voice.

Meanwhile the voice of the abandoned bride trembled with anger:

Un dardo, un lampo, un telo

Attenderò da te

Ferisci arresta esanima

Chi mi mancò di fé. .

In the parallel world of my memories, marvellous notes quivered in Abbot Melani’s throat, as he sang to the poignant memory of his master (and of other things that I could not even imagine), and I, an ignorant servant boy, wondered at the sound of those ineffable melodies, never heard before or since.

“Finally we went to France, to Paris,” Camilla began again at the end of the rehearsal, as we all walked back to the convent of Porta Coeli.

Since it was such a short journey to Carinthia Street from the Caesarean chapel and from there to the convent, we walked slowly to give her time to tell her story.

“But the court of France is in Versailles,” objected Cloridia.

Here Camilla smiled with a touch of embarrassment.

“We didn’t go to court. More than anything else Franz wanted to visit someone, the only person still alive who could tell him about a relative of his, a great-uncle, also a composer. He was very famous in his day, but he died prematurely. And times have changed so quickly that he’s now forgotten. In Rome Franz couldn’t find anyone who remembered him. It was only in Paris that he finally — ”

“You mean Maestro Luigi Rossi, don’t you? He’s your relative? And it was Atto Melani that you visited in Paris, wasn’t it? And that’s how you met the Abbot?” I asked in an excited series of questions that already had their answer.

Just at that moment we were interrupted as we encountered a great flock of people, mostly very young.

I should have guessed it from the beginning, I reflected as I stepped around the crowd: Camilla had known Atto. It could not have been otherwise. That was why the Abbot had sent us to stay at Porta Coeli: in Paris he had met Camilla, and then they had remained in touch. Thanks to this acquaintance, despite the war between France and the Empire, he had succeeded in finding a trusted person in Vienna, the enemy capital. Had not Atto also written a letter to the Chormaisterin, expressly commending us to her care, as she herself had mentioned when we arrived? And furthermore: Franz, Camilla’s deceased husband, was Luigi Rossi’s nephew.

Meanwhile the group of young people were swarming into the courtyard of a house: it was an Andacht, one of those pious prayer meetings in front of the statues of saints and patrons, which took place everywhere in Vienna after sunset. They would sing, recite the rosary and litanies, listen to sermons and then round things off by gorging on cold meat and bread, washed down with wine; after which the couples would go off to engage in encounters of a less spiritual nature.

“When did you see Melani?” Cloridia and I asked in unison, anxious to hear about our benefactor.

“It was eleven years ago, in August 1700. The excellent Abbot welcomed us like a father, showing us incomparable benevolence and magnanimity during our whole stay in Paris. When we told him our story, he displayed a touching and delicate sensibility that won me over. I have never known anyone who can equal Abbot Melani in nobility of spirit!”

Camilla lavished praise on Atto. Well, she had been lucky, I told myself, to have seen only the Abbot’s nobler sides.

“Melani told us that he had just returned from Rome, where he had attended the marriage of the nephew of the Cardinal Secretary of State. He was supposed to stay until the conclave, but a bad injury to his arm forced him to return to Paris.”

As we walked on, Cloridia and I looked at each other without a word. We knew that story all too well, having lived through it with Atto — or rather, having endured it as a result of his shady intrigues. He had been stabbed in the arm, it was true, but that was certainly not why he had fled from Rome! But we let the matter drop. We certainly had no wish to fill Camilla in on the less honourable aspects of the man who, after deceiving and exploiting us for his own ends, had now become our benefactor.

“The Abbot talked to us of his master Luigi Rossi, Franz’s relative.”

Melani, plucking sprigs of memory from the vast wildernesses of his remembrance, with touching diligence had almost brought back to real life the figure of Seigneur Luigi for Camilla and Franz. At several points Atto had been on the verge of tears, and only the respect he bore her, a sweet fresh young lady, had restrained him. He had recounted the glory that Luigi Rossi had achieved many years ago in Rome in the service of the Barberini, and then his success at the court of the King of France; he had told them how his famous cantata for the death of King Gustave of Sweden had won him the admiration of all Europe, and how his Orfeo, in which for the first time the arias lasted longer than the recitatives, had renewed and transformed opera. Luigi Rossi had been a gentle spirit of fine intellect, an inexhaustible source of fresh poetry and inspired music; he had received more applause in both Rome and Paris than any Italian musician before him.

Atto, proceeded the Chormaisterin, pursuing the train of memories, shared with them not only the successes and joyous occasions from half a century ago but also the tragic ones. He told them how Seigneur Luigi had heard, while he was with Atto in France in the service of Cardinal Mazarin, that his young wife Costanza, the beautiful harpist of the Barberini, was ill. He had rushed back to Rome, and on the journey he had set to music the noble lines “Speranza, al tuo pallore / so che non speri piu’, /eppur non lasci tu / di lusingari il core”⁶ — but all in vain.

While he was still en route news reached him of his wife’s death, and it was then that he composed the elegiac passacaglia, “Poi che manco’ la speranza”⁷.

“And this loss was to lead him slowly to the grave,” concluded the Chormaisterin sadly.

She added that Atto had even shown her the handwritten intavolature with his master’s arias. “Franz then told Abbot Melani that we were thinking of settling either in Rome or in Paris, the cities where Luigi Rossi had lived, but he advised against it strongly. He urged us to return to Vienna, saying that it was now the capital of Italian music, that in Rome and in Paris music was finished. In Rome it had been killed years before by Pope Innocent XI, who had closed the theatres and forbidden the carnival; and in addition the power of the papacy was now in decline. In Paris, now that the Sun King was in thrall to that self-righteous old plebeian Madame de Maintenon, everything, even music, had become grey and bigoted.”

Abbot Melani, I reflected as the Chormaisterin spoke, knew perfectly well what was going to happen just a few months after he gave that advice. The King of Spain Charles II was close to death, and when he died his will would be opened (whose contents — O Fates! — Atto was already familiar with). He well knew that thanks to that will the throne of Spain would immediately become an object of contention, sparking off the terrible war that was to leave the whole of Europe starving, especially Italy, theatre of its operations, and France, bled dry by its own king. The Abbot’s counsel, therefore, was a very shrewd one: Vienna, the blessed Caesarean city kissed by the Goddess of Opulence, was the only safe refuge.

And then, if I knew him well, it would not have escaped the attention of the Sun King’s old spy just how useful it would be to have two trusted friends like Camilla and Franz in an enemy capital in wartime.

“It’s been such a long time,” I sighed, “since I last saw the Abbot!”

“But around that time Franz fell ill,” Camilla went on. “He suffered continually from fluxions of the chest. Returning to Vienna could have been fatal to him. So we went back to Italy, wandering from one court to another. My poor husband, while fearing for his own future, was worried about my fate. For this reason, in 1702, when the war of succession broke out, he decided in the end to follow Atto Melani’s advice and we came back to Vienna where, if some misfortune were to condemn me to solitude, it would be easier for me to make a living.”

Franz de’ Rossi, her story proceeded, had immediately gone back into Joseph’s service and had introduced his wife into the ranks of the royal musicians, where she swiftly earned the confidence of the future Emperor.

“Of the Emperor?” I said in admiration.

“As everyone knows, His Caesarean Majesty is a musician of considerable discernment and appreciates all those who show zeal and love in their endeavours to serve him and to satisfy his passion for the art of sounds,” replied Camilla. “Timore et amore.”

“What?”

“It’s his motto. It explains the weapons he likes to govern with: with fear and with love, timore et amore,” the Chormaisterin spelt out clearly, with the tone of one who intends to say no more. Then she went back to the story of her marriage.

Franz de’ Rossi, descendant of Seigneur Luigi, had passed away on the foggy morning of 7th November 1703 in the Niffisch Home on the Wollzeile, the Wool Street, just behind the Cathedral of St Stephen. He was only forty years old.

“I was left all alone. I had never known my father, and sadly my dear mother,” she added, with a change in her voice, “whom I longed to re-embrace on my return, had died while I was away.”

“My mother died far away as well,” said Cloridia.

I started, and so did Camilla. My wife was referring spontaneously to her mother.

“Or at least I imagine she has died by now; who knows when, who knows where,” she concluded, her voice slightly husky.

The Chormaisterin clasped Cloridia’s hand tightly between her own.

“I used to have a pendant,” Camilla said slowly, “a little heart in gold filigree with miniatures of my mother and my sister as a child, but unfortunately it got left behind in the house where my mother died, and there’s no way to get it back, alas.”

“And your sister? Where is she now?” I asked.

“I’ve never met her.”

Although we had been walking with slow, dragging paces, and had taken every possible by-way, we had now reached Porta Coeli.

“I beg of you, don’t torment yourselves with sad memories,” she urged us with a smile before we separated, “there are happy things in store for you in the days to come!”

While Camilla disappeared in the direction of the dormitory, two figures emerged from the evening gloom: a young gentleman and his servant. They were heading towards the wing of the convent which held a second guest house for foreigners. The gentleman was saying to the servant:

“Remember: crows fly in flocks, the eagle flies alone.”

I started. I knew that expression. I had learned it from Atto, many years ago. For the whole evening I had been thinking of him, and now he seemed to be responding. Perhaps Abbot Melani had learned that expression from Cardinal Mazarin, and so it was known to many people. Maybe that gentleman knew Camilla and had simply heard the expression from her, and she, in turn, may have learned it from Atto Melani. Enough, I was brooding too much. One thing was perfectly clear: it was one of those eternal maxims that one never forgets and is happy to repeat.

Once we were in our room, while Cloridia got ready for bed, I hastened to satisfy that longing I had had ever since I returned from the Place with No Name: to rummage among the books and various writings on Joseph I that I had acquired on arrival in Vienna, to seek the answer to my doubts. Why on earth did the Most August Caesar wish to restore the Place with No Name, heedless of the chain of vendettas that surrounded the place? The sad affair of his predecessor Maximilian II and the struggles between Christians and anti-Christians that had broken out around Neugebäu had meant that for a century and a half the Habsburgs had yielded to the powerful pressure of all those who wanted this monument to Suleiman’s defeat to fall into ruin. But not Joseph the Victorious. Why? What was spurring him on?

Once I had discarded the writings in abstruse German, I quickly unearthed a pair of panegyrics in Italian. I opened the first: Applause of Fame and the Danube on the Day of the glorious Name of the Most August Emperor Joseph. Poetry for music consecrated to His Excellency the Lord Count Joseph of Paar, Great Seneschal of His Imperial Majesty, composed by the academician Acceso Gelato on the occasion of the Sovereign’s name day in 1706. I dipped into the work, which was a dialogue between the Danube and Fame:

Danube: Misery

Tyranny

From Austria are banned;

Thoughts of woe

Spirits low

Leave Austria’s fair land:

Glory’s voice

Shall sing so gay:

And all rejoice

On this great day.

In the woods’ dim shades

On hills and in glades

Let the birds raise a song

Of joy and delight that shall sound all day long.

Fame: Twixt these banks JOSEPH’s fame

Shall echo and sound

And the waves at that name

And the breeze

In the trees

Shall whisper their bliss all around.

The mawkish panegyric, despite its awkward rhymes, reminded me how the devotion that had arisen in my breast for Joseph I had gradually turned into affection as I learned further details of his worth: he was naturally endowed with great clemency, heartfelt generosity, open-handed liberality and a love of justice; he was understanding, mature, resolute and made pronouncements with prudence and grace; he was unequalled in courage, and would go out hunting heedless of the weather, the season or the danger, so that even the boldest courtiers would excuse themselves from accompanying him, and he would often abandon his guards and present himself at the city gates all alone or with a single companion.

As time passed, talking to clients whose chimneys I swept, or to customers in eating houses and coffee shops, I heard more and more stories about His Caesarean Majesty’s good heart. He was so open-handed, they said, that the first to ask him for a favour was the first to receive it: Joseph was incapable of turning down anyone in need. He gave everything to everyone regardless, drawing not on the imperial treasury, but on his own private coffers, so that he was often reduced to great personal privations.

But no story could outweigh the impression that I had received directly, when I saw him for the first time with my own eyes.

It was just two months earlier, in February. For the carnival celebrations they had revived the old custom of Prachtschlittenfahrt, the solemn sledge-ride of the Emperor and his court. In the Caesarean procession, led by Joseph himself, there were 51 sledges and over 130 people, between noblemen in sledges and servants on foot or on horseback.

The sledges were carved in marvellous shapes of swans, shells, bears, eagles and lions, but the most splendid, which had been taken on a long ride that morning with no passengers so that the people could admire it, was the one for Joseph and his consort. At the front was a wonderful piece of marquetry representing branches, an amazing work jointly created by goldsmiths, cabinet-makers and gilders; on the sides were two fauns with flutes, wonderfully lifelike; to keep the imperial couple warm there were gold-embroidered ermine blankets, and at the rear were gilded standards with the Habsburg and imperial coat of arms. In the cortège there were other vehicles with likenesses of Venus, Fortune, Hercules and Ceres, concealing noble couples covered with shawls and quilts, perhaps intent on some warm, secret embrace.

After a long journey along Carinthia Street and the neighbouring thoroughfares, the procession halted in front of the Cathedral of St Stephen. Joseph got out to pray and to offer thanks to Our Lord, accompanied by his mother the widow queen Eleanor Magdalen Therese, his wife the reigning queen Wilhelmina Amalia, his two daughters Mary Josephine and Mary Amalia and his sisters Mary Elizabeth and Mary Magdalen. The imperial family, in slow procession towards the front door, graciously presented themselves to the crowd. The Caesars of the House of Habsburg consider it their duty, but also their pleasure, to gratify the people’s desire to admire, approach and study them. This is another reason why the imperial family often attend public mass in one of the churches in the city or the suburbs, or march in processions, or, in Lent, follow the traditional Via Crucis along the so-called Kalvarienberg — which is to say, Mount Calvary — in the suburb of Hernals, where there is a church of that name.

Cloridia and I had tried to elbow our way through the crowd in the great square before the Cathedral of St Stephen, but the throng was so tightly packed we could make no headway. And so, before the imperial crowd left St Stephen’s, we ran to the Hofburg, as we knew the procession would end up in its great courtyard.

Here the more far-sighted spectators had already taken up their positions: clustered together in little groups in the great open space, clinging onto columns or, if children, perched on their fathers’ shoulders. I chose, at the risk of enjoying only the most fleeting glimpse, to squat down opposite the jaws of the dark portal from which the Caesarean convoy would emerge into the open space.

In the great courtyard of the palace the snow fell thickly but lightly, the roofs of the Hofburg glimmered with a spectral candour. Squeezed in among the shivering crowd of onlookers, sheltering my face from the wind, I awaited the arrival of the procession.

At last the moment came: from the great portal I heard the tinkling of the sledge bells, then there appeared a pair of footmen bearing the imperial banners, escorting the head of the parade, followed by more, and yet more. At last there emerged the first pair of white horses with fiery-red trappings, their backs adorned with imitation eagle wings, pulling the sledge where he himself, the Emperor, stood upright, heedless of the cold.

I saw him for just a few fleeting moments but they seemed endless: his august figure, just a few paces from me, impressed itself delectably and indelibly on my heart and my spirit.

The high well-shaped forehead, tawny hair, firm nose, beautiful complexion ruddied by the stinging cold, the large fleshy mouth open in a broad smile that was bestowed generously upon us, the formless crowd: all this I saw at once, and it struck my heart, already inclined to devotion, to the core. As I gazed upon him, his large eyes, glinting with the sweet azure of youth beneath the laughing curve of his eyebrows, embraced us all in a single glance. In those few instants I was able to appreciate his figure, which was not tall but perfectly proportioned, his strong shoulders and his open, decisive posture.

I was captivated, and so was Cloridia. From that moment my affection for the young Sovereign turned into passionate attachment and fidelity. Even as I gazed on him, I repeated to myself that so illustrious an heir was the perfect idea of the most heroic virtues, such as Egypt had never had in its Vexor, nor Assyria in its Ninus, Persia in its Cyrus, Greece in its Epaminondas, or Rome in its Pompey. In his reign of less than six years he had achieved twenty-nine victories in war. And with what unstinting ardour had he engaged in the famous sieges of Landau! The daring of his boldest followers appeared mediocre alongside his courage, the ferocity of the veteran soldiers seemed like inertia, and in his character there blazed a keen desire for glory, which, when instilled into the warlike breasts of the Germans, had twice hastened a victory over so considerable a fortress, defended by the obstinate courage of the most heroic French troops. Not even the Most Serene Prince Eugene had ever succeeded in conquering it! The victories of the Most August Joseph the First could only be compared with those of antiquity: of Cyrus against Croesus, in which not only had the latter been captured but the vast Kingdom of Lydia conquered; of Themistocles against Xerxes, in which he had avenged the cruel servitude of Greece oppressed by a million armed barbarians; of Hannibal against the Romans at Cannae, which had made the battlefield synonymous with defeat for centuries to come; and finally the bloody victory of Charles the Fifth on the fields of Pavia, in which Francis the First had been taken prisoner, the most courageous of that century. On closer consideration, I said to myself, now soaring to the heights of adoration, the successes of Joseph the Victorious were superior to these. After all, which of the Romani Imperadori could boast within the space of his Imperium such prodigious victories as those he had attained in just three years? His victories could only be compared with those of Caesar against Pompey, of Vespasian against Vitellius, of Constantine against Maxentius, memorable and bloody battles, exemplary for the valour of the soldiers, the multitude of legions and the overpowering force of the factions.

While I lost myself in these thoughts, the long procession of sledges had all entered the courtyard of the Hofburg, illuminated by hundreds of torches, and was weaving solemn serpentines from one side of the square to the other while the people applauded and gave voice to their jubilation.

Elated with our new life in the opulent northern capital, enchanted by the snow, which did not bring in its train (as it would in Rome) the wailing figures of Indigence and Famine, and delighted by the splendour of the Caesarean court, which — unlike those of Versailles and the Papal State — was not an insult to the poverty of the people, since every pauper in Vienna received two pounds (two pounds!) of meat a week, my wife and I embraced one another.

Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia!

So resounded the aria of the magnificent Regina Coeli composed by Joseph I, which we often heard in the churches of Vienna; and so chanted our soul, in its joy at this unexpected resurrection to new life.

Holding back tears of enthusiasm and exaltation, we impetuously gave our hearts that day to the young Caesar, incarnation of our own rebirth, in the great and unsuspected cornucopia, surrounded by hills and fertile vineyards, that was the Caesarean city.

I had given myself up to divagations and sweet memories. I returned distractedly to the panegyric:

DANUBE: At the flash of his Arms,

FAME: At the splendour of his Glories

DANUBE AND FAME: Pale flowers wither. .

DANUBE: And in spite of those Flowers

To the emulous Ruler’s distress

The Pride of the stubborn Bavarians

And Pannonians now languishes.

FAME: Caesar, you who with Jove

Have divided the Empire

And with Mars the laurels,

In the flower of your Years

Now, that the Trumpet’s sound

Invites you to rejoice,

Open your heart to Joy, and wipe away all tears. .

Even in these tedious rhymes there was a kernel of truth. In order to be feared, Joseph had chosen Mars, because the thought of war, whose harsh clangour was never too far from Vienna, had been a constant companion for him from his earliest years. But another divinity had to be added to the Mars of the panegyric, and that was Venus.

Joseph had encountered the Goddess of Love at a precocious age, and it could not have been otherwise, as Mother Nature had endowed him most generously. At the age of twenty-four he was handsome, strong and well-proportioned, like his robust German mother. He had no trace of the horrid jutting chin and pendulous mouth that for generations had disfigured his ancestors, including his father Leopold and his brother Charles, the current pretender to the Spanish throne. Surrounded by the deformities of the House of Habsburg, Joseph stood out like a swan among ducks.

Women (princesses, ladies of the court, simple serving wenches) appreciate a man of distinction, and he was happy to reward them at night, one by one, with the appropriate means.

And how gifted he was! Eloquent, sparkling and imaginative: he lacked for nothing. The Muses themselves had done their part, lavishing their talents on him. The King of France did not know a single foreign language; Joseph spoke six like a native. At the age of seven he wrote correctly in French, at eleven in Latin, at sixteen he could speak both languages fluently, in addition to Italian, with good pronunciation. Two years later he had mastered Czech and Hungarian. He was skilled in music and composition, and played the flute expertly. He developed his muscles with physical exercise, hunting and the military disciplines.

I picked up the second panegyric, penned by Gian Battista Ancioni: “To Gioseppe I. King of Germany, and Roman Emperor, August conqueror. Vienna of Austria, printed by Gio. Van Ghelen, Italian Printer of the Court of his Caesarean Majesty, Year 1709”. Underneath an engraving depicting a fine bust of Joseph were the words: Tibi militat Aether, “Heaven fights by your side.”

I flicked through it quickly and soon found a list of the military deeds of Joseph and of his generals and confederates. The author addressed the Emperor:

Comparable with those of ancient days are the present great victories achieved over the French in the fields of Hecstette by Your undefeated armies, and by those allied with You captained by those two thunderbolts of Mars, Eugenio and Marleburghio. Thanks to that undefeated Hero of Great Britain most of Flanders was conquered in the great feat of arms of Judogne, and thanks to the magnanimous spirit of Charles the Third the most extreme and arduous dangers of the siege of Barcelona were sustained with great intrepidity, and with a rare example of victory Catalonia was liberated with the precipitous flight of the terrified enemies.

But in the prodigious liberation of Turin the insuperable valour of Your armies manifested itself and the light of Your felicity blazed most clearly. Equal to the memorable constancy of the Saguntines was the great defence of that noble City, manfully sustained against French arms for a term of many months; but the fierce vigour of the repeated assaults, the multitude of troops that surrounded it, the lack of ammunition, the paucity of defenders and the difficulty of all foreign assistance, brought the defence of that strong amp; august City to an extreme pass. When the most sagacious Eugene, descending with Your fierce Legions to avenge like a new Belisarius with the besieged Turin all of Italy in liberty, crossing not only the horrid mountains of Germany and of Italy, but traversing with long marches the Adige, the Po, the Dora, amp; the most impervious regions of all Italy, forever pursued by a numerous army of the French, came with incredible dispatch within sight of Turin, and joining forces with the most valorous Duke of Savoy assaulted the entrenched armies of the French with such courage, that the ferocious assault of the Germans seemed to herald a massacre not a battle, and the confusion, fear and death were so terrible in that great deed that headlong flight, retreat and dispersion were the enemies’ common thought; hence with the immense massacre and imprisonment of the French was Turin liberated, and the French troops scattered throughout Italy within the space of a few months, and with the capture of Milan all of Lombardy was taken under Caesarean arms, amp; very soon with incredible celerity Your arms took possession of the flourishing Kingdom of Naples, and Italy returned to its erstwhile state of long-desired liberty.

I closed the panegyric. What did these pompous writings tell me about the Most August Caesar? That the differences between Maximilian the Mysterious and Joseph the Victorious were enormous. On the one hand mildness, on the other military ardour; the elder was of a reflective temperament, the younger of a resolute nature. Joseph’s life up to this point seemed all a matter of military campaigns and victories.

And yet something connected the two emperors, the young Caesar and his ancestor: after a century of oblivion the former was now disinterring his forebear and the Place with No Name, in what almost seemed a new military campaign, conducted by architects instead of generals. Looking benevolently on Maximilian’s creation, Joseph was proceeding fully armed against timeless enemies, defying age-old rancour against the Empire of the Christians — rancour that had never died down, as was clear from the vandalistic raids of the Kurucs at Neugebäu just a few years earlier.

I could almost see him, spurred by the pusillanimity of his fathers, announcing to the astonished architects that, after enlarging the hunting lodge at Schönbrunn, he wished to restore the Place with No Name to its former splendour. Perhaps he would even give it a name at last.

It was at that point in my thoughts that it struck me that in my two visits to the Place with No Name I had never come across any traces of anyone else engaged in restoration work. Frosch had never mentioned the subject either, and had indeed seemed completely in the dark about the Emperor’s plans. Maybe, I told myself, the architects and carpenters also preferred to wait for the thaw. Maybe over the next few days they too would turn up and start working.

Overcome by the late hour and by weariness, I promised myself that I would finish reading the papers on Joseph the First over the next few days. I did not know why, but I felt that among those old newspapers and tattered documents there may well lie the answer to my questions on the Place with No Name.

23 of the clock, when Vienna sleeps (while in Rome the foulest traffickings are just beginning).

I had been under the blankets for some hours and had not yet managed to fall asleep. I had been unable to tear my thoughts away from the Place with No Name and the Most August Sovereign, and from here my exhausted spirit had passed on to the Flying Ship and its mysterious helmsman and, finally, to Seigneur Luigi, to the arias of Luigi Rossi trilled by Atto, which I had never forgotten, and which, like nimble-footed prey, I was now tracking down, one by one, in the forest of my memories. How did that arpeggio sound, that bold modulation, and that line?

Ahi, dunqu’è pur vero. .

Then, when memory had brought me back a full game bag, and I was already savouring an immaterial banquet of notes, rhymes and chords, my imaginary repast was whisked away by something quite unforeseen.

A noise. It came from the corridor of the cloisters. Someone seemed to have tripped up badly. It could not have been one of the nuns of Porta Coeli: the dormitory was on the opposite side from the guest house. The only thing nearby was Simonis’s little room. But, as the Greek knew perfectly well, the rules stipulated that apprentices had to be in by nine or at the very latest ten o’clock, on pain of a large fine. And Simonis had always been punctual. That very evening, on returning from the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio I had paid him a brief visit to make arrangements for the next day, and I had found him in his room, bent over his books. The following Monday the Easter holidays would be over and the Alma Mater Rudolphina, the University of Vienna, would reopen its doors.

Another noise. Taking care not to waken my dear ones, I got dressed and stepped outside. I had not yet reached the cloisters when I recognised him by his voice.

“And the laurel crown. . there it is!” I heard him whisper nervously. He was picking up a few objects, which must have fallen from a large canvas bag he was holding.

“Simonis! What are you doing out here at this hour?”

“Er. . uh. .”

“At this hour you’re supposed to be in your room, you know the rules,” I reproched him.

“Pardon Signor Master, I must go.”

“Yes, to bed, and quickly,” I replied in irritation.

“This evening there’s a Deposition.”

“Deposition?”

“I’m the barber, I must be there.”

“Barber? What are you blathering about?”

“Please, Signor Master, I have to be there.”

“What have you got in there?” I said, pointing at his bag, which had something moving inside it.

“Mm. . a bat.”

“A bat? Just what are you doing with that?” I asked, more and more astounded.

“It stops me falling asleep.”

“Are you making fun of me? Do you want to get a fine? You know very well — ”

“I swear, Signor Master, if you take a bat with you, you never fall asleep. Or you can catch some toads before dawn and dig out their eyes, then hang a flask of deer-hide round your neck with the toads’ eyes inside together with nightingale meat. That works just as well, but the bat is easier. .”

“That’s enough,” I said, dismayed and disgusted, dragging my bizarre assistant by his arm.

“I beg you, Signor Master. I must go. I must. Otherwise they’ll expel me from the university. If you come with me you’ll understand.”

For the first time since I had met him, Simonis’s tone was distressed. I realised that it must be something of the utmost importance. I decided that for no reason in the world could I run the risk of seeing him expelled from the Alma Mater Rudolphina through my own fault. And I knew very well that at that point in the night I would not get back to sleep; curiosity did the rest.

The place was an old apartment near the Scottish Monastery. According to Simonis, it was being rented by a group of his study companions. As soon as we entered I felt as if I had been hurled by a Sorcerer of Time into the wrong century. The room was full of young men dressed as ancient Romans; they wore togas and mantles, laurel crowns around their temples and leather leggings. Some of them were holding scrolls of paper, in imitation of ancient parchment. The only detail that connected the great crowd with the present day were the countless tankards of beer they were all swigging merrily. The Beer Bell, which announces the end of legal drinking time, had rung long ago, but this strange toga-clad mob seemed not to care.

Simonis emptied the bag he had brought with him, gave me some robes and took some for himself. At that moment he was spotted by a few of them and I heard a feverish murmur run round the room.

“The Barber, the Barber’s here!” they all repeated, elbowing one another and pointing at Simonis.

Some of the students made towards him and embraced him enthusiastically. Simonis greeted everyone with an expansive wave, to which the crowd responded with applause. With all those swishing togas, it was like being in the Roman Senate after a speech by Cicero.

I suddenly felt bewildered: Simonis the Greek, my apprentice, my underling, was the king of the evening. I thought back to his account that morning of the history of the Place with No Name and its creator, Emperor Maximilian II. My bizarre assistant undoubtedly possessed hidden talents.

As soon as he was dressed and decked out as a Roman senator himself, he was accompanied to a wooden stage in the middle of the room.

I myself had just finished putting on a toga and leggings, far too capacious for my slight build, when another excited murmur broke out. A door giving onto an adjoining room had just opened. A platoon of young men entered, apparently escorting a prisoner. In the middle of the group was a very odd individual, if only for the way he had been rigged out. He was a timid, skinny young man, who looked around himself hesitantly. He wore a hat with two enormous donkey’s ears, probably made of cloth, and an even larger pair of cow horns. From his mouth hung two huge boar fangs, which must have been fixed to his teeth with some sort of paste. Otherwise he was draped in a large black cloak, which made him look both sad and awkward. He had been driven into the room by a stick, with which he was regularly beaten on the back like a beast of burden.

“The Beano, the Beano!” the bystanders all cried out, as soon as the young man appeared at the door.

At once they burst into a choral song, ragged and powerful:

Salvete candidi hospites

Conviviumque sospites,

Quod apparatu divite

Hospes paravit, sumite.

Beanus iste sordidus

Spectandus altis cornibus,

Ut sit novus scholastichus,

Providerit de sumtibus.

Mos est cibus magnatibus. .

Feeling lost amidst this seditious rabble, I went up to Simonis. I noticed at that moment that he had hung a gut string from his belt, like the ones used to play lutes, guitars or theorbos.

“It’s a song to welcome the novice, telling him that they will make a real student out of him,” he explained, shouting into my ear so that I could hear him over his friends’ drunken voices.

“What does Beano mean?” I asked Simonis.

“Italian, I speak your language too!” butted in a tall, paunchy student, with large bright eyes, an affable face, round ruddy cheeks, and the thick dark hair of Eastern peoples.

“This is Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov,” said Simonis. “He’s from Bulgaria, but he studied for a long time in Bologna.”

“Well yes, I quenched my thirst for knowledge by imbibing at the Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna,” he confirmed, raising his tankard.

“Now he’s gone on to another kind of thirst,” joked another, gesturing at Hristo’s tankard. This was a lanky fellow with shoulders like a wardrobe, who introduced himself as Jan Janitzki Count Opalinski, a Pole. “Before that he was thirsty for my sister Ida, who’s a dancer.”

“Shut up, you drunkard. The Beano, whom others call Bacchant,” explained Hristo, after draining his beer, “is not yet a student, and so not a man either. He has asked to be admitted to the university, but his nature is still bestial, like that of a pig, a cow or a donkey. He has to show he can rise above animal passions. He’s admitted into the human consortium only if he can pass the Deposition test.”

“The Deposition?”

“The depositio cornuum,” interposed another, a boy with a flowing mane of corvine hair, a fine moustache and two sharp nut-brown eyes. “This evening he’ll remove his animal horns and will finally become a human being!”

“This brilliant explanation has just been given to you by a dear friend of mine,” Simonis announced. “Let me introduce Baron Koloman Szupán. He comes from Varaždin, in Hungary, and has a large farm with over eighteen thousand pigs.”

“Yes, and I’ve got eighty thousand,” mocked a plump, half-bald fellow, who was introduced to me as Prince Dragomir Populescu, from Romania. “Koloman has the same name as Saint Koloman, the patron of students, but blasphemes him with his lies, and he’s as much a baron as I’m the pope. Gypsy-baron, that’s what he is, ha ha! If he really has eighteen thousand pigs, as he tells us, why has he never brought us a ham?”

The group of friends burst into loud laughter, but Koloman did not give up: “And what about you, Populescu, who claim to be a prince only when you’re on the prowl for women?”

“Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm,” muttered Populescu to himself, flushing with rage and looking upwards.

“Worked up? You’re as drunk as a donkey!” interjected Hristo, the Bulgarian.

“And you’re a sponge in a beer barrel,” retorted a good-looking man with the air of one who enjoys life, who was introduced to me as Count Dànilo Danilovitsch and who came from Pontevedro, a little state I had never heard of.

“Sorry, but how come you all speak my language so well?” I asked in wonder.

“It’s obvious: we’ve all studied in Bologna!” answered Hristo, “and some of us in Venice as well.”

“Ah, for a night in Venice!” said Opalinski wistfully.

“Ah yes, and the Italian. . women, women, women!” sighed Dànilo Danilovitsch, winking.

“The Italian women. . Don’t get worked up, Dragomir!” stuttered Populescu, with dreamy eyes.

“Then came that freezing winter, two years ago, along with the war and the famine,” Hristo continued, “and we all came here.”

“And we’ve not regretted it!” Koloman concluded. “O Austria! Excellent land, irrigated with running waters, planted with vineyards, teeming with fruits and fish, and abounding in timber! And you, O mighty Danube, mightiest river in Europe, nobly born among the Swabians of the Black Forest, you make your powerful way through Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, vigorously cleave through Serbia and Bulgaria, and emerge with sixty broad arms into the Black Sea, and with your sublime waters bring grace to many superb cities, none of which is richer, more populous or more comely than Vienna!”

This was greeted with applause and, of course, a toast, which was followed by several more. From the talk and the familiar tones the students used in addressing one another, it was clear that they were all a group of comrades, accustomed to mixing beer and chatter, gross pranks and the gay joie de vivre of twenty-year-olds. God only knew what these fun-lovers had got up to in Bologna and Vienna. But observing the gusto with which they knocked back their beer and engaged in jokes and tricks, passing themselves off as counts, barons and even princes, I doubted that they had ever achieved anything sensible. And if one looked carefully under their Roman togas at their clothes and shoes, they all had the same blackened collars, the same patches, the same holes in their shoes. Like my assistant, they were simply Bettelstudenten, cheerful penniless time-wasters, much more skilled in the art of getting by than in the doctrines of science.

“Pleasant companions you have, Simonis,” I said.

“You’re very kind, Signor Master. Some of them come from great distances, beyond the borders of the Empire, from Halb’Asien, ‘Half-Asia’,” the Greek whispered to me, as if to excuse them.

“Half-Asia?” I repeated, not understanding.

“Oh, that’s my own definition of some of the lands east of Vienna, beyond Silesia and the Carpathians, like Pontevedro, for example; lands set between cultivated Europe and the squalid steppes traversed by nomads, and I don’t mean only geographically. .” answered Simonis, laying heavy emphasis on the last words.

“They all seem normal boys, just like you,” I answered, still not understanding.

“Don’t be fooled by appearances, Signor Master. I’m Greek,” he affirmed with pride. “Some of them are divided from our Europe not only by language and borders. The broad plains and gentle hills of their native lands, which extend as I said beyond Silesia, beyond the Carpathians, not only look like the landscape of the lands of the Urals or deepest Central Asia. The similarity with those worlds so different from our own goes much deeper.”

I had no idea what the Urals or Central Asia were like, and not having grasped the sense of these unexpected words, I kept quiet.

The comradely atmosphere encouraged me to change the subject and ask Simonis another question.

“Why did they all call you Barber when you arrived?”

“Now you’ll see, Signor Master.”

“Silence, friends!”

This command, shouted by one of the students accompanying the Beano, hushed the whole assembly. The Greek climbed onto the wooden platform. The Beano was escorted towards him, and he announced in a severe voice:

“Previously you were a being without reason, an animal, an unclean school-fox; now you will become a man. Your filthy tusks prevented you from eating and drinking moderately, obscuring your intellect. Now you will be led back to reason.”

“Simonis is playing the part of the Deposer this evening,” whispered Koloman to me with his sing-song Hungarian accent, “the one who leads the ceremony. He compared the Beano to a fox because it hides in holes in the ground like schoolchildren who huddle together among the school desks. That’s why the Deposition is also called the Baptism of the Fox. To become men we have to come out into the open, seeking knowledge by going to university and forgetting the world of vice and its distractions. This evening’s Beano chose his Barber himself; he’s often heard about him and admires him. He’s sure to benefit from many of Simonis’s virtues.”

That may be, I thought, but the whole merry mob of students looked as if the last thing they were seeking was virtue and knowledge. Meanwhile they passed Simonis an object wrapped in a piece of cloth. It was a piece of black fat, with which he began to paint a fine pair of moustaches and a beard on the Beano’s face. Applause and laughter broke out, while the Beano endured it all in silence. Simonis immediately began a short speech in German, in which the poor Beano was exhorted to abandon his dissolute life, to turn from vice to virtue and to abandon the darkness of ignorance by means of study.

“Now comes the Latin exam,” whispered the Hungarian Koloman Szupán into my ears with a snigger.

The Beano was asked to decline the noun cor, which in Latin means “heart”. He began to decline it correctly — nominative, genitive, dative and so on — all in the singular.

“Cor, cordis, cordis, cor, corde, cor,” said the Beano, spluttering awkwardly on account of the boar tusks that obstructed his mouth.

“Numerus pluralis,” pressed Simonis, ordering him to decline the plural.

“Corda, cordarum, cordis. . ow!”

As soon as the poor Beano pronounced corda, which in Latin means “hearts” but also “rope”, Simonis had begun to lash him with the gut string that I had seen earlier.

“So may your Beano whims and your old importunate nature perish!” he thundered as he lashed the poor wretch, who tried to cover his face and neck with his arms.

The spectators were shaking with laughter, clapping and raising their tankards to the ceiling.

Further questions and answers ensued, with crude puns that inevitably led to more whippings, and yet more guffawing from the assembly. Then they put the candidate’s musical abilities to the test, forcing him to sing a students’ song, which he spluttered and stammered as best he could through his boar tusks, leading to more whippings and jeering whistles.

The Beano was made to lie on the floor. Some of the students began to comb his hair cruelly, using a rough wooden brush, while others tried to force an enormous spoon into his ears, as if to clean them.

“And so will you shun all foulness along with haughtiness, and keep your ears ever open to the virtues of Wisdom,” recited Simonis emphatically in his role as Deposer, “while you free yourself from the filthy sound of all idiocy and malice.”

From somewhere a carpenter’s plane, a hammer and a drill were produced. Three hulking brutes leaped onto the poor examinee’s back, still sore from the brushing he had just been given, and began to hammer him, plane him and drill him, first on the back and then on the stomach. I prayed that it would not end in blood.

“And so may Art and Science forge and mould your body,” recited Simonis solemnly while the rest of the band fell about laughing.

They made the victim stand up. They set a large bowl of water in front of him and made him soap his head, wash and dry himself with a shred of wool, swearing that he would pass to a new and more virtuous life.

But his sufferings were not over yet. Now they placed him on a chair and removed his enormous boar’s fangs, tearing them from him like the most brutal of tooth-wrenchers.

“And so may your words never be too mordant,” pronounced the Deposer.

Meanwhile two students were cleaning the Beano’s nails with a rough file. This, it was explained to me, was so that he should always steer clear of weapons and duels, and his fingers only consult books and manuscripts. The file was so primitive that it was really the Beano’s fingertips that were being filed, causing him to beg feebly for mercy. Then they shaved the beard that had been painted on him at the beginning, but instead of soap, razor and a towel they used a brick, a piece of wood and an old canvas rag, so that at the end of the operation the poor wretch’s face looked as if it had been ploughed. They then made him sit at a table and set dice and paper in front of him, to see if his immediate reaction revealed a natural propensity for the vice of gambling. The poor boy did not even move, battered as he was. They set a music book in front of him, inviting him, whenever tired from excessive study, to lighten the burden of his spirit with the art of sounds, and with nothing else. Finally the Beano was made to take off his hat with its ass’s ears and horns. With a pair of old shears Simonis, performing the functions of Barber, trimmed his hair, leaving the Beano with nothing but a few scrawny, spinach-like tufts. Then they shoved his hat on again.

At that moment an elderly individual entered the room, stiff and measured in his gait, arousing an immediate murmur of deferential attention.

“It’s the Dean of Philosophy,” explained Koloman Szupán.

“The Dean? A professor?” I said in surprise.

“Of course! It’s always the most senior professor of the Faculty of Philosophy that confers the Certificate of Deposition.”

“It’s an official act: if he doesn’t pass the Deposition exam, the Alma Mater Rudolphina cannot accept the Beano,” added Hristo.

Simonis came forward and gave a rapid account to the Dean of how the exam had gone and asked that the candidate should be awarded the Certificate. The Beano rose respectfully to his feet, swaying a little.

The Dean gave a slight nod, recited a few Latin formulas and gave the Beano some paternal advice. The young man was brought a glass full of dark liquid, which he drained at once, and a small pot containing white powder, which was sprinkled on his bare head, causing him to whimper in pain.

“Wine and salt,” explained Hristo the Bulgarian. “They serve to flavour the Beano’s words and actions with doctrine and wisdom, and to make him receptive to advice, corrections and warnings.”

At this point it was a miracle the Beano was still alive. Goaded by his torturers he found the strength to recite to Simonis, in a faint voice, the ritual formula that concluded the ceremony.

“Accipe Depositor pro munere numera grata, et sic quaeso mei sis maneasqe memor.”

While the Deposer and the Beano embraced amid renewed applause, some of them took the hat with horns from the examinee’s head and symbolically placed it on the ground: the Deposition was over. His black cloak was removed as well, and his face was finally degreased with a clean handkerchief. Amid the outburst of shouting and exultation that followed I was just able to hear Hristo’s explanation.

“Now the Beano has become a Pennal. He’s not a real student yet but soon will be. The Deposer from now on is his Barber.”

“What does that mean?”

“If the Barber is hungry, the Pennal will fetch him something to eat. If he’s thirsty, he’ll get him a drink. If he’s sleepy, he’ll help him sleep. Whatever the Barber asks, the Pennal gives him.”

I did not dare ask any further; the answer made me suspect that the poor aspiring student, despite having risen in rank, was in for a good deal more suffering and humiliation. Meanwhile a mob of spectators clustered around the neophyte, Simonis and the Dean, dispensing compliments and witty remarks.

“And when will he become a real student?”

“Oh, quite soon. The waiting time is defined by the university rules: from this evening it’ll be one year, six months, six weeks, six days, six hours and six minutes.”

A few moments later I was finally able to approach the poor wretch who had gone through the whole absurd performance. He was a skinny boy, whose face was contracted in a bewildered, defensive smile. A pair of glasses, with lenses steamed up by the heat of the room, concealed two round eyes, which flickered sharply, only momentarily confused by the festive hubbub to which he had been subjected. But it was only when I saw him walking that I noticed his most obvious feature: he was crippled.

Just at that moment I was distracted by the noise as the students bade farewell to the man who had honoured the Deposition with the solemnity of his presence, and who was now preparing to leave.

“Was that really the Rector?” I asked Hristo, who had come back to my side.

“Yes, of course. We’re not at the philosophy faculty of Bologna! In Vienna everything is more familiar.”

“What he means by ‘familiar’,” intervened Dragomir Populescu, taking Hristo under the arm, “is that here the university is in no better shape than this son of a bitch’s family, ha ha!”

“Shut up, you old perverts, your brains are befuddled by wanking as usual,” interrupted Koloman Szupán. “I’m explaining to our friend how things work in Vienna.”

The university of the Caesarean city had been founded by the illustrious Emperor Rudolph IV, in the year of grace 1365; hence its name, Alma Mater Rudolphina. It was in the glorious early days of universities; Paris and Bologna were flooded by students eager for knowledge, ready to make any sacrifice to hear the lessons of the great scholars who taught there.

The Alma Mater Rudophina was no less important: such great, divinely inspired minds as Henry of Hessia, Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl and Thomas Hasselbach (whom some accused of having for over twenty years commented on the first chapter of Isaiah without ever having understood it) had taught there.

Unfortunately, halfway through the sixteenth century, a period of decadence had set in throughout Europe: as a consequence of the Protestant schism, the favourite activity of universities was to form teams for or against the Church of Rome and to bash each other with nit-picking theological treatises.

“On Luther’s side,” Koloman enumerated, “if I remember rightly, there were the prestigious universities of Altdorf in Franconia, Erfurt and Jena in Thuringia, Giessen and Rinteln in Hessia, Gripswalde in Pomerania, Halle in the Duchy of Magdeburg, Helmstadt in Brunswick, Kiel in Holstein, Königsberg in Prussia, Leipzig in Meissen, Rostock in Mecklenburg.”

“You’ve left out Strasburg in Alsatia, Tubingen in Württenberg and Wittenburg in Saxony, animal,” criticised Populescu.

“And also Loden and Uppsala in Sweden, and Copenhagen in Denmark,” added Hristo.

“You’re as pedantic as two frigid spinsters,” answered Koloman, stealing a half-empty tankard of beer from a nearby table and lifting it greedily to his lips.

“With Calvin,” Koloman went on, “were Duisburg, Frankfurt on the Oder; Heidelberg in the Palatinate; Marburg in Hessia; Cantabrigum and Oxfurth in England; Douai, Leiden and Utrecht in Holland; Franeker and Groningen in Friesland; and in Switzerland, Basel.”

“You’ve left out Dole in Burgundy, animal,” said Populescu.

“For the Pope, as I was saying, the only ones still faithful were a handful of universities in Germany: Breslau in Silesia, Cologne on the Rhine, Dillingen in Swabia, Freiburg in Breisgau, Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Mainz on the Rhine, Molzheim, Paderborn, Würzburg in Franconia. But in France there were Aquae Sextiae, Anjou, Avignon, Bordeaux, Bourges, Cadruciensis, Caen, Cahors, Grenoble, Montpellier, Nantes, Orleans, Paris, Poitiers, Reims, Saumur, Toulouse, Valence. In Portugal Coimbra; in Spain, Complutum, Granada, Seville, Salamanca and Taraco; in Italy Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Naples, Padua, Pavia, Perugia, Pisa.”

“You’ve forgotten Krakow in Poland.”

“And Prague in Bohemia.”

“And Leuven in Brabant,” added Hristo.

“I omitted it out of pity, because in Leuven they’re impotent bigots like you two. My poor spinsters, your flaming twats have made you acid,” answered Koloman, grasping Populescu, pulling out his trouser belt and pouring the rest of his beer into his codpiece. A savage brawl broke out among the three of them, which soon died down as they were all laughing too much to fight.

In the days of the religious disputes, continued Koloman as soon as the three had returned to a semblance of restraint, Vienna was no longer listed among the seats of universal wisdom. The Caesarean city had to fight other enemies: the constant threat of the plague, the Turkish danger forever at their gates and above all the chronic penury of the public coffers, which was reflected in the niggardly endowments of the university. The professors were paid late, sometimes not for months, and with letters of exchange rather than cash. The best teachers had begun to abandon the Viennese university, their places being taken by mediocre or even third-rate colleagues. These latter did not even use the title of professor, and often had never even earned it, but were simple doctores. The continual to and fro of teachers, always on the lookout for a more tempting post, year after year had ended up throwing the whole system into chaos. The courses were watered down, the textbooks grew shoddier by the year and everywhere knowledge was considered worthless. During the Thirty Years’ War, which about half a century earlier had brought the whole continent to its knees, the culture and good behaviour of the students had suffered too. In 1648 the heir to the throne, Ferdinand, son of Emperor Ferdinand III and child prodigy, had decided to give a good example by matriculating at the Alma Mater Rudolphina: and so, at the age of just fifteen, he became the first Habsburg to enrol at the university. But it did not last long: six years later Ferdinand was to die suddenly of smallpox, leaving the throne to his younger brother, Emperor Leopold, who was much less gifted than him. And so the students soon went back to their coarse, shameless ways, abandoning themselves to revels and dissipation rather than the pursuit of doctrine and intellect. Fights and duels were the order of the day; showing no fear of God the young scholars smashed up inns, manhandled guards, attacked and robbed harmless passers-by — and, of course, persecuted Jews. The university and its members nonetheless preserved many of the privileges that the Empire had granted them from time immemorial, and so students who had been found guilty of murder and other grave crimes would be pardoned, or would easily manage to escape trial. Even in peaceful Vienna, it was not unusual to stumble across the corpses of students.

They had learned little from the good example given ten years earlier by Emperor Joseph I himself, who — no less gifted in intelligence and learning than his predecessor Ferdinand, his father’s brother — had chosen to matriculate at the Alma Mater Rudolphina.

There was only thing that counted at the university of the Caesarean capital: pleasure.

“When we organise the Depositions and other feasts, everything works perfectly. The Rector always comes and respects all the ancient traditions,” concluded Koloman, now completely drunk. “He’s a great man, the Rector, honest, sincere and upright.”

“You’ve forgotten that he’s very likeable,” Populescu butted in, raising his tankard for the umpteenth time.

“And that he’s a jolly good fellow,” concluded Hristo, failing to stifle a fine hops-scented burp.