Prologue - Florence, April 1378

"Life is a hard and weary journey towards the eternal home for which we look, or if we neglect our salvation, an equally pleasureless way to eternal death." Francesco Petrarca

Spring of this year finds me withered and fruitless, come full circle and returned once more to the city of my youth. I sit here in my room, surrounded by my few books and my earthly possessions, mouldering in the autumn of my life, feeling in every way, in every fibre of my being more feeble than at winter's last passing. And yet, I find – as though it has come about by some miracle - that I am still alive. For this small blessing I know I should and must be grateful but in such knowledge my heart is suffused neither with pride nor joy. Of the many and varied dreams of immortality I once harboured in my foolishness, in my youth, all have long since been thwarted; not one of them remains.

Others I have known on this journey have been far less fortunate in the allocation of their days. I have seen many pass, friends and enemies, young and old, and still it seems to me the events of the world (the world of men that is) turn their fickle and unfathomable patterns around me. Today, for instance, it has not escaped my vague, old man's attention that the whole city is cloaked in mourning: all around bells ring out the slow cadenza they assume to announce the coming of Death, and in the street below the proud and pious are making silently to their churches, there supposedly to pray.

I will say here only that I am sceptical of their motives, though perhaps it is I who moves with ungracious spirit, and that they go indeed to offer prayers for the one whose soul has departed this earthly existence, not - as I surmise of them - in the vain hope of salvation of their own. Nevertheless, my curiosity having been aroused by the uncommon stillness in the streets (and once awoken curiosity being a restless and insatiable thing), I asked of the old widow who is mistress of this house and who for a small consideration keeps my table and tends to my needs, whose death it was that had brought about this halt in the commerce of our normally busy little street. Absent, the familiar creak and clack of carriage wheels upon cobbles, the cackle and bleating of beasts, of fish-wives braying; the barks and cries of vendors piercing the air, vying for the citizen's coin; absent too the perpetual stridor of voices and footsteps rising from the street below to enter through my window as accompaniment to the silent and solitary studies I now pursue to occupy my days. Missing all of these small yet necessary and comforting facets of God's Creation, I asked the old woman when she came to bring my morning provender what was amiss.

"Have you not heard the news, Messer di Buoninsegna? The Holy Father; He is dead," she informed me breathlessly, for she seemed to find the matter to be cause for excitement, or perhaps it was merely that she had been winded by the climb to this attic, high above the traffic of the world, where I abide.

“Taken of a sudden by some affliction of which no-one knows the cause, though there is much rumour of poisoning or the like,” she added. “Everyone is shocked and saddened by it.”

I cannot say that I shared in her excitement, nor in the outward sorrow of my fellow citizens, if this singular death was indeed its cause. My hardened heart no longer has it in it to grieve at such inconsequential news as her words conveyed.

“Is that all? Then there has been no great loss to the world at large, nor to any of us in particular,” I offered in reply, to the woman’s palpable consternation.

“Soon enough another will be found and elevated in his place, in whom equal qualities will doubtless have been fortuitously discovered.” It amuses me sometimes to provoke her in this way. She is always too concerned for the future redemption of the souls of others, particularly so of mine. As is usually the case, she was less amused than I by my heresy.

“But it is the Holy Father. He is dead,” she repeated, as though I had not heard her, a tactic I have observed she uses frequently when she does not want to hear the things I have said, and then she turned and scurried away, huffing and tutting, and muttering some words to the floor about perfidy and my assured eternal damnation.

“He is still but a man, and to be mourned neither more nor less than any other,” I taunted at her retreating back. She made no reply, at least, none I could hear, though I could still make out her agitated footfalls shuffling about on the floor below.

And what of this news, be it sad or not, that pious Pope Gregory XI, Pierre-Roger de Beaufort is dead? Can it really be so, and that within but a month of his return to Rome in triumph, having freed the Holy Church, or so he proclaimed (and with it of course his own precious crown), from the combined tyranny of his fellow Frenchmen, and from the maws of that infamous place, the Papal court of Avignon, a place the poet Petrarca described, and rightly so, as the Babylon of the West? A high-testing ground for every kind of lust he called it - as I have seen and can also give witness - where prelates feasted at banquets, clad in silks and jewels and fineries, served by half-naked whores and catamites, and rode on horses white as snow and shod in gold.

Must I mourn then for such a man, who sat in high residence condoning such laxity, when I believe his heart to have been cloaked in the same gaudy cloth? Should we not be glad for him, not mourn and regret his passing? Should we not celebrate his assumption into the higher realms, there to take his allotted place at his blessed Saviour’s side? Unless, of course, he has been sent more rightly to suffer and to redeem his perjuries in the hot, steaming kitchens of Hell.

But enough! Of what significance is that to him or to me now, or of my spiteful conjectures? Better then, that like those who proceed solemnly below my window I should simply pray to God to rest his soul. Then perhaps my own corrupted soul might likewise accrue some late and small redemption through such an effortless act of grace.

You see the comings and goings of my fellow men no longer touch me. I have seen so many souls brought into this world only to perish - sometimes peacefully, more often than not locked in the agonies of a most dreadful, awesome death - that I can no longer impel my soul to regret each individual passing. Long have I ceased to try to fit such futile suffering into some great and providential pattern. In the course of my life, I have seen the bodies of countless men, women and children too, lying twisted and sore-ridden, littering the way-side where they had fallen, lying beside the rotted corpses of dogs and sheep; or their flesh pierced by arrows, or their bodies hacked limb from limb, or swinging senseless from rows of make-shift gibbets stretched along the road as far as the eye could see. I have seen them too, burning at the windows and thresholds of their homes, their flesh peeling, their exposed entrails steaming, their eyes boiling in their sockets, their choking voices crying out to their God for mercy as they were offered up as sacrifice to the one thing which in my divers journeying I have seen always to shape and govern the lives of mortal men.

I speak, my friends, not of the ways of the just and vengeful God of which the Good Book and the scholars rightly tell us, and in whose name, perversely, so many of those atrocities had been perpetrated. I speak, not of God, nor of His laws and strictures, but of something far more human in its workings - that passion to which all mortal things are diversely subject. Mortal fear, in all its devious machinations, and which base passion drives us in our ignorance of its hold upon us to commit every one of our numberless acts of shame.

Yes, in my time on Earth I have seen and known well the touch of Death. Reflecting on my life, it seems to me now that I have felt his presence as accompaniment to almost my every doing, although - as my continued existence will testify - his business has been always with those numberless others about me, not with my own ever-anticipating self. Now though, I too wait for him to greet me personally, and as do my fellow men, I too await his coming with dread.

From experience of his ways, I do not expect his visit to be conducted either with sympathy or politeness. I know he will be impatient to meet me. I have kept him waiting long.

But tarry a while longer I pray thee, gentle and silent Death. Go visit some unfortunate and less needy other; be not too impatient to embrace me in your wings. For I am not yet done with this flesh that I have borrowed, nor with this other death, which our time on Earth undoubtedly is. Grant me then but a few days more that I might complete what I have come to see as my mortal purpose. I promise I will not resist you when I deem my proper time is come.

In this I would make one last demand of my already protracted days. Being now so decayed in the flesh, and subject too to the vagaries of a replete yet failing memory, grant me the grace to set down a chronicle of my days, both for Posterity, and for the greater glory of God. So it is that I intend (taking up this onerous task where others would be more content perhaps to accept the approach of blissful oblivion), to record here some few of my many travels, and the meagre lessons I learned while embarked upon them; to tell of the strange omens which visited me in my youth, and of the time I spent in Florence and Padua, assisting there in the great works of my master, and of the terrible journey which events, and indeed my own fear and ignorance, forced me to undertake in the middle of my fifty-seventh year; to relate too some of that which happened on that journey, both concerning the passage I made from Pisa to Genoa by sea, going then willingly in search of reward and honour, and of how I eventually came from there to Nurnberg, driven against reason and desire by passions much less worthy, and in which city I arrived some two years later, wearied and touched for all eternity by the train of events, both curious and frightful, that I had witnessed.

Thus saying, and being equipped at least with the wit to know where a thing must commence if not the prescience to know where it will end, I must take you back in time, to place you and my story at the point where it begins. Thus, will you discover me first in the nonage of the trecento, in the autumn of the year of Our Lord thirteen hundred and one. When, as a child of ten (though one acknowledged by all to be bright and precocious and more than a little capricious in his childish ways and miens), and finding myself full of the curiosity and enthusiasm which only the short-sighted ignorance of youth can bring, I would run each evening as darkness fell, and would hurry through the alleys and passage-ways of the town to join in the heavy chorus of footsteps echoing through the timber joists and frames as the whole populace of the town - the dogs and children, the mothers with babes-in-arms, the hawkers and peddlers, the traders, the sottoposti, the guildsmen and aged scholars, the layabouts and ne'er-do-wells, forsaking for once the more worldly pleasures of the inns and hostelries, and even the proud Priors and gastaldi and other officers of the commune who deigned to join us, drawn too by their vain curiosity - bustled together across the old wooden bridge which spanned the turbid waters of the river Arno to stand and watch and wonder at the strange new visitor which had come that year to illuminate the night skies above my native Florence.