He saved this letter to write yesterday evening, but in the end, exhaustion overcame him, and so he must begin his day with this unpleasant task. His secretary is still half asleep; he stifles a yawn. He’s toying with the quill, testing out different thicknesses of lines when the bishop begins his dictation:
Bishop Kajetan So?tyk, coadjutor of Kiev, to papal nuncio Niccolò Serra, Archbishop of Mitylene
Then the boy tasked with the stoves enters the room and starts raking out ash. The scraping of the dustpan is unbearable to the bishop, and all the thoughts in his head go flying into thin air like a cloud of that same ash. And of ash smacks the matter at hand.
“Come back and do this later, son,” he says to him, softly, and then he takes a moment to regather his scattered thoughts. Then the pen goes on the attack against the innocent paper:
Once more I congratulate Your Excellency upon this new station in Poland, in the hopes that it will be an occasion for the comprehensive fortification of faith in Jesus Christ in lands so particularly cherished by Him, for here in the Commonwealth we are the most faithful of His stable, the most devoted to Him in our hearts . . .
But Bishop So?tyk has no idea how to get to the point. First, he wanted to deal with the matter more generally—he didn’t expect an explicit request for a report, even less from the nuncio. He is surprised by this because the nuncio has spies everywhere, and though he himself does not poke his Italian nose in others’ affairs, he does take advantage of other, zealous people’s noses.
The secretary waits with raised pen, its end having already collected a sizable drop. But that man, very experienced, knows perfectly the habits of a drop of ink, and he waits until the very last moment before he shakes it back into the inkwell.
How to describe it, thinks Bishop So?tyk, and what comes to mind are fine sentences like: “The world is quite a perilous pilgrimage for those who sigh after eternity,” which would show the bishop’s uncomfortable and exhausting situation as he is now called upon to explain his actions, his righteous but unfortunate actions, when he ought to be dedicating his thoughts to prayer and the spiritual needs of his flock. Where to begin? Perhaps when the child was found, which happened just outside ?ytomierz, in the village of Markowa Wolica, this very year, not long ago?
“Studziński, right?”
The secretary nods and adds the boy’s first name: Stefan. He was eventually found, but as a corpse, bruised and covered in wounds, seemingly from pricking. In the bushes by the road.
Now the bishop brings his focus to within himself. He starts his dictation:
. . . some peasants, having found the child, carried him to their Orthodox church, passing near that inn where he must have been tortured and where the blood from the very first wound on his left side must have been let, and due to this suspicion, and others, too, two innkeeping Jews were taken in that village, along with their wives, and they confessed to everything and informed on others. Thus the matter resolved itself, thanks to divine justice.
I was immediately alerted to the whole business and did not neglect to enter into it with all that was in my power, and right away in crastinum I ordered the heads of the neighboring properties and the lords to give up other guilty parties, and whenever they appeared sluggish on that account, I undertook myself to go around the properties and persuade their lordships to arrest. So were thirty-one men and two women arrested, and brought in shackles to ?ytomierz, they were placed in pits dug especially for this purpose. After holding an inquisitio I sent the accused to the municipal court. For these most vile murderers unworthy of further investigation, the court determined to proceed to the strictissime examination of the Jews appearing then before them, all the more so since some of them changed the testimonies they had given to the consistory court and had been utterly destroyed by damning evidence given against them by Christians. Then the accused were taken to be tortured and were burnt three times by the minister of holy justice. From these corporal confessions it soon became apparent that Yankiel and Ela, the innkeepers at Markowa Wolica, talked into it by Shmayer, the rabbi of Paw?ocz, somehow kidnapped this child, took him into the inn, made him drink vodka, and then the rabbi cut into his left side with a pair of shears, and then they read their prayers from their books as others among the Jews stuck him with pins and big needles, and from all his veins they squeezed out all his innocent blood into a bowl, the which blood the rabbi then distributed amongst those present, pouring it into vials for them.
The bishop takes a little break in his dictation and has some Tokay brought to him, which always does him good—good for the blood. It is fine that it is on an empty stomach. He can also tell that breakfasting time is about to turn into lunching time, and he is starting to get hungry. And therefore angry. But what can he do. The letter has to go out today. So he goes on:
So when the accuser in the matter of young Stefan, describing his dolenda fata, according to procedure made his oath with seven witnesses that the aforementioned Jews were the cause of the bloodletting and death of the child, the court sentenced them to a cruel death.
The seven engines of this crime and ringleaders of this Pagan cruelty were to be tied together with hemp rope, both hands covered in pitch, and this having been lit, taken by the master of the pillory from the market square in the town of ?ytomierz through the town up to the gallows. There they were to be flayed alive, then quartered, their heads stuck on stakes, the quarters hung up. Six were sentenced to quartering, while one—since he joined the holy Catholic faith along with his wife and children at the last moment—was given a lighter sentence, to merely be beheaded. The remainder were acquitted. The successors of those sentenced to death were required to pay a fine to the victim’s father of 1,000 Polish zlotys under penalty of eternal banishment.
Of the initial seven, one managed to escape, and a second accepted conversion and was, along with the one sentenced to beheading, removed by me from death.
As for the rest, their sentence was executed justly. Three of the guilty, hardened in their evil, were quartered, while three who had converted had their punishment commuted to beheading, and their bodies I myself took with many of the clergy to the Catholic cemetery.