Death and the Devil

“Oh, I can enlighten you. Given your eagerness to learn, the basic principles will probably take a lifetime, though I wouldn’t guarantee you’d understand them even then.”

“Jaspar,” said Jacob softly, “before I met you I may well have been stupid, but I never had the feeling I was.”

“Oh, I see.” Jaspar scratched the back of his head. “Sir is sorry for himself. It’s certainly easier to be stupid.”

“I’m not listening to this.”

“Oh, we’re not listening to this, are we? That’s because you don’t want to. You always choose the easy option. If things get hard, you give up and take to your heels. You don’t want to learn, you don’t want to know, not even now.”

“I want the truth.”

“You can’t take the truth.”

Jacob breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself down. Most of all he felt like ramming his fist between Jaspar’s mocking eyes. Suddenly he felt Richmodis’s hand ruffling his hair. “Stop that,” he snapped.

“Jacob.”

He tried to shake her off.

“Jacob, your hair gets even redder when you’re angry. Did you know that?”

He stared at the fire in silence.

“And it sticks up like a hedgehog’s.” She giggled. “No, more like a cock. A little angry cock. A cockerel.”

He felt his anger subside and chewed his lips. He was unhappy, and his unhappiness had nothing to do with the events of the last couple of days. “I’m the Fox,” he said weakly.

“And the Fox is cunning,” she said with a smile. “I’m just a silly goose, but this goose has its claws in your hair, so be careful.”

Jaspar went back to sit by the fire. Jacob had the feeling he was both irritated and amused at the same time. His face was glowing with the reflection of the fire. He poked the logs, sending up a crackling shower of sparks.

“All right,” said Jacob, “I know nothing. I know nothing about the emperor and the pope and what the point of an archbishop is and so on and so forth. Happy now?”

“No,” said Jaspar, staring into the flames. “You’ve told us too much for that to be true. You know a lot. You can remember astonishing details. Up to the day you ran away from home.” He turned toward him, a grin on his face. “But don’t worry, Fox-cub, we’re stuck in here for the next few hours, so I might as well give you the benefit of my historical knowledge in the hope of filling that hollow skull of yours to overflowing with wisdom. Interested?”

Jacob sighed. “Of course.”

“Good. Basically, it all comes down to who’s the boss. After the collapse of Rome the empire was split up. There followed a dark period of conflict and confusion, before it was reunited under the spiritual authority of the popes and the secular power of the emperors and kings. To general rejoicing, of course. But the immense empire proved too much for them, especially since the pope only actually rules the Vatican. People were needed to administer specific local territories, and among these were some I would call—just as a joke, God forgive me my vanity—secular clerics, representatives of the powers of the pope and of the king in the same person. These were the prince bishops and archbishops.”

He paused, then went on. “Now it is in the nature of things that the powerful are constantly at each others’ throats. The pope wanted to turn the empire into an ecclesiastical state under the authority of the Church. The emperor, for his part, also claimed to be God’s representative—naturally, since God is the authority—and denied the pope any jurisdiction in political and territorial matters. Each tried to clip the other’s powers and increase his own. Thus the Crusades, for example, were not holy wars, but a conflict between the secular and spiritual authorities. They agreed on a common enemy, and had a common army, but one or the other of them always came out on top, depending on circumstances. The dilemma only became public, however, when the emperor and the pope began to attack each other openly. The archbishops, being servants of two masters, couldn’t really fight against themselves. They were in danger of being crushed between two stones. You’re still with me?”

“Conrad von Hochstaden,” Richmodis interjected, “doesn’t look particularly crushed to me.”

“Clever girl. That’s the way things were going. The archbishops had to become more powerful. And they did so to the point where they could side with one of their masters and leave the other in dire straits. Loyalty didn’t have much to do with it. Basically, the archbishops don’t care one bit about the emperor or pope. They’re interested in politics, not in saving souls. But their strategy worked. Over the centuries they became powerful enough to grant their support as a favor. But that led to a further dilemma. Whom does the city serve?”

“The archbishop?”

“On the one hand. He is its overlord. On the other, it also serves the emperor. It’s part of the empire and the citizens are his subjects.”

Jacob risked a deduction. “So if the archbishop and the pope combined against the emperor, then the city would have to oppose the emperor, willy-nilly.”