She looked amused. “Dueling paintbrushes? Spray cans of Krylon at twenty paces?”
“Come on, be serious. I’m talking poison, a dagger, a bludgeon, whatever. Murder motivated by artistic jealousy?”
“I think character assassination is more common in cases like that,” she said. “Premeditated bitchiness.”
“What about romantic rivalry? See if you can find anything on Martini’s love life.”
“Like, self-portraits showing him in a jealous rage?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “But Petrarch left a boatload of poems about his love life.”
She gave me a skeptical look, but she humored me by scanning the rest of the bio. “Sorry,” she reported. “Looks like your man Martini was the model husband.”
“What’s your evidence for that?”
“Spotty,” she conceded. “Just before he got married, he bought a house for his bride, Giovanna—Italian for ‘Joanna’—from her dad. He also gave Giovanna two hundred twenty gold florins as a wedding present.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued.
“Okay, try this,” she said. “Martini died in Avignon in 1344; three years later, when Giovanna moved back to Siena, she was still wearing widow’s weeds. He must not have been too scummy if she was still mourning. Of course, who knows what evil lurks in the heart, right? But from the little bit of bio there is, he seems like a stand-up guy.”
“The flower of Avignon?”
She nodded. “The flower of Avignon.”
CHAPTER 28
AVIGNON
1330
THE FLOWER OF AVIGNON IS UNFURLING, BURSTING into full and glorious bloom. By now, twenty years after the papacy arrived for a “temporary” visit, Avignon has grown from a sleepy village of a few thousand souls to a bustling city ten times that size. The cobbled streets clatter with the wheels of carts bringing in wine, meats, cheeses, spices, silks. Every square inch of ground within the old perimeter has been claimed, and the noise of prosperity is deafening: carpenters’ saws rasping through framing timbers; hammers pounding pegs into newly raised posts and lintels; tiles scraping and clattering onto new roofs, occasionally slithering off to shatter in the streets below. Most of the new buildings are modest—tenements, tanneries, bakeries, butchers’ shops—but others are grand. Avignon and Villeneuve, just across the Bénézet bridge, now boast a score of cardinals’ palaces, many of which outshine the pontiff’s own makeshift quarters, which are crammed into what had been the bishop’s palace until the papacy arrived and took it over.
Pope John XXII has now worn the papal crown for fourteen years. During his reign, he has steadily refilled the papal coffers; under his watchful eye, the treasury has swelled from a paltry 70,000 florins to 17,500,000 florins—an increase of 250-fold, which must surely please our Lord. The profusion of florins is heaven-sent—“sent” in a manner of speaking, that is, for the tithes and rents and payments for offices and indulgences must always be collected, sometimes upon threat of excommunication, by God’s tireless, toiling clergy. But never before has the machinery of collection been so well oiled; Pope John has been blessed with a genius for organization and administration, and that genius has yielded a rich harvest. Still, wealth can be a heavy burden, imposing the responsibility of sound stewardship, of protecting what God has entrusted to His humble servant for safekeeping.
And really, could there be any better steward than Pope John? A banker’s son by birth, a lawyer by training, John has brought the church’s administrative and banking systems into the modern era. By consolidating and centralizing his minions and their work, he can keep watch over his flocks of clerks and accountants, his vast expenditures and vaster revenues. His eagle-eyed oversight has brought unprecedented protection against embezzlement and fraud. But administrative protection isn’t enough; the ever-richer prize of the treasury must be physically protected as well. The snake pit that is Rome, God knows, became a hotbed of assassins and thieves during the papacy’s thousand years of residence there. Now, with the papacy’s wealth and power centered here, Avignon’s gravitational pull is strong, attracting some of Europe’s finest painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. And where money and artists converge, can thieves be far behind? No, the treasury must be secured.