It’s 1064 in the year of our most merciful, gracious Lord. I am a Cardinal in Rome and presently serving as foreign secretary, the envoy to the Christian World under Pope Urban II.
Now that the peasants—the dumb schmucks—have settled down and are convinced. once again, that the world will not end this month, they can get back to work in the fields and the barons can get back to paying their tithes.
His Holiness the Pope has finally authorized funds and men for the re-taking of Jerusalem from the Muhammedan Horde. His public oratory to the troops was most inspiring and will be remembered for all time. One couldn’t help but seeing that God truly speaks through this Pope.
On the Iberian Peninsula , we have—against my advice—aligned ourselves with the infidel Moor, El Cid, to rid Aragón of a most uncooperative renegade king. I think the loyal Ferdinand would be a nice replacement there. Next we will take Cordoba, Castile, Navarre, León, and finally we will take the jewel, Granada, from these non-Christian invaders. Once and for all, we shall hammer these kingdoms into one on God’s forge and bring them all under the protection of His earthly representative, the Pope. God is with us, but I fear we will be punished for aligning ourselves with this son of Mohammed, this ambitious traitor to his own, this mercenary—El Cid. We will pay higher than we should in blood and treasure for our doubt in the capabilities of our own Christian men under arms, and thereby doubting God.
The redheaded Roger has sailed from Normandy and taken Sicily from the Muhammedans. We’re still not sure of his political or religious affinities, but his history as a world class bandit is not encouraging. I don’t trust redheads. There was that woman, that beautiful, voluptuous banshee, ambivalent to all morals concerning good, Christian women, and wife of the ambassador from the barely civilized land of Danne Mark… she nearly drove me mad with her lustful voraciousness until I one night recognized that the spell she had put upon me was nothing less than Satan himself working through her to corrupt me—and therefore the Church itself! Only her station and the resultant political ramifications saved her from the stake and fire. Oh, her hair was as red as the fires of hell (and her rapacious passions just as hot!), her eyes as green and bright as a rampant sea-dragon. You can’t trust the redheaded race. The power this woman had over me convinced me that redheads are put here by the Devil himself to tempt God’s most faithful. But even this pirate Roger is preferable to the Muhammedans ruling an island so close and economically important to Rome.
Our sometimes ally in Wales, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, recently died and we’re not sure of his successor’s loyalties. Good Lord, that man really needed to buy a vowel.
Here I am, with my bloody hands full, and now my old friend Father Giuseppe Molina comes down the hall from the library schlepping two huge manuscripts and his astrolabe. He is the Vatican Astronomer. His excitement is palpable. He’s babbling something about the world not being flat. He has Persian manuscripts newly delivered from the so-called “Church” in Constantinople telling him that the world is actually round. This heresy is supposedly derived by an accumulation of barbarian navigational studies. He wants to demonstrate proofs using his sky charts and astrolabe. I told him this is obviously a trap, set by Satan himself through our enemies, to corrupt us in the eyes of God.
I told him that I have been all over the Catholic World and everywhere it is flat. Even the bumps we call mountains lie on flat earth. I have been upon the sea, and there is nothing flatter. I quoted scripture to him for hours, the scores of references in our Bible—written by God himself through the hand of man—where it explicitly states that the earth is flat. But my friend, who has been cloistered in libraries all his life and has never been out in the world —my friend who has been exposed to ideas both good and evil to the point that I don’t believe that he can tell the difference anymore—will not be dissuaded of this heresy.
He wants to present this crazy idea to the Curia—the college of Cardinals, our wisest men charged with finding God’s truth by sorting out the confusion of all worldly knowledge, which as we know is always tainted by the Devil. He says this new revelation will change the way we see the world and our place in it. Only when I described his short, ignominious future, his excruciating public burning upon the fires of Catholic justice—a mere taste of what is ahead for him in the afterlife—the persecution of his family, and his erasure from the book of Vatican Notables, would he promise to keep this to himself forever. I took his confession and I believed him during the penance, but I worry about my dearest old friend’s soul. I fear I will not see him in heaven after our short interlude on earth. The only reason I haven’t advised him to burn these books is that they also contain intelligence on how our enemies to the east think.
A round earth? A world of soft curves like a woman versus the strength and stability of a level foundation? Preposterous! On all sides the Evil One is attacking us, bleeding the Church, using Mohammedans, Jews and wayward Christian sects like the heretic Cathars took take our lands, our faithful, our Church, and our God away from us. And now, by using my best and oldest friend, he is attacking us from within!
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
