Veritas (Atto Melani) (109 page)

I looked it up in various anthologies of Latin sayings, including the dated but excellent one by De Mauri published by Hoepli. I found nothing, not even a vague resemblance.

But I repeated that motto over and over again, in private, like a secret, heretical rosary, or those words of mysterious power that Tibetan monks are said to mutter monotonously for an entire
life in the silence of their monasteries.

And then that
Unicum
. . ., that truncated conclusion which alludes to something that is left: what remains in the wilderness of uncertainties to which we are condemned by the
unknowableness of truth? The answer, as I had not realised, was already dancing in the air. The song of the nuns, the music that came constantly from the stereo not far from my desk: the
Quem
queritis
, from the medieval liturgical repertoire with Russian performers, a memory of my exile in Tomi –
Mitbringsel
, as the Holy Father would say.

The title,
Quem queristi
, is not an affirmation. It is a question. The Latin text, a dialogue, goes:

Quem queritis? JESVM
. Jesum, Jesus, that sweet name whispered something to me. Something I already knew, but that was not clear to me. But what? After hours of vain
concentration, on impulse, I tried writing it down: JESVM, in the Latin form, with V instead of U.

The next step suggested itself. Underneath, I transcribed the words of the mysterious message:

It was an acrostic. And this acrostic revealed the name of Jesus, IESVM. In the accusative: it was the answer to my questions.
IESVM unicum
. “Only Jesus”;
Jesus is the only certainty.

That was what the
Quem queritis
wanted to tell me. It is one of the final scenes in the Gospels, which in the Middle Ages was simplified for the people to sing and recite. The images
are very simple, almost primitive. Mary Magdalen and Mary go to the sepulchre of Jesus. An angel, of dazzling appearance and in snow-white robes, announces himself with a tremendous commotion and
the guards of the sepulchre fall down as if dead. Then the angel (or the angels, depending on the version) reveals to the women that they will not find Jesus there, because He has risen again as he
had predicted, and he invites the women to spread the word among His disciples.

In medieval musical performances the Gospel passage (Matthew 28: 1–6; Mark 16: 1–8; Luke 24: 1–7; John 20: 1–18) is reduced to a few basic lines:

IESVM is accusative, because it is the object of something, it answers the question: whom are you seeking? We are seeking Jesus. It therefore answers
the
question, the
only real question for those who have faith. Whom are we really seeking, whom must we seek, if not Jesus? Who remains if not He?

Quem queritis?
The answer is
Jesum
, which in certain paleo-Christian epigraphs on tombs (recalling the episode of the angel announcing Christ’s resurrection) was written
ISVM
, with V to indicate U, and omitting “e” or in certain cases writing it as I
^e
SVM, with the “e” in superscript. Alongside it, on the same tomb, one
would find the symbol ATTΩ, which means that the alpha and omega of life, its beginning and end, are under the temple of God, represented by the double “T”. But it can also be
read “Atto”.

We are all Atto, or rather, ATTΩ: whether we like it or not, we are all under the great roof of the Lord.

I know that two words are missing of the seven that form the message: let us hope the whole thing is not simply the fruit of Ugonio’s frightful imagination . . .

Go in peace

Card. Lorenzo dell’Agio

N
OTES

Emperor Joseph the First’s smallpox – The Flying Ship and its inventor – Ciezeber-Palatine – The Place with No Name and its enemies – Eugene
of Savoy – Joseph the Victorious – The censored biography and the secrets of Charles – Atto Melani – Camilla de’ Rossi – Ottoman customs, embassies and legends
– Ilsung, Hag, Ungnad, Marsili – Bettelstudenten and chimney-sweeps – Free time, taverns, feasts and other details – The Viennese and their history

Emperor Joseph the First’s Smallpox

Emperor Joseph I died at 10.15 on Friday 17th April 1711. He was not yet thirty-three years old. The official diagnosis was smallpox.

A preliminary observation: smallpox, a horrific disease which has now (almost completely) disappeared, has never been overcome by any treatment. In short, there is no cure for smallpox.

If you consult the famous
Harrison’s Manual
(Dennis L. Kasper,
Harrison’s Manual of Medicine
, 16th edition, New York 2005), a basic study text for every medical
student, you will read that smallpox is, along with anthrax, one of the ten class-A (the most dangerous), “special surveillance” viruses in the struggle against bio-terrorism.

In 1996, delegates from 190 nations passed a resolution: on 30th June 1999 all smallpox samples still existing in the world would be destroyed. This did not happen. At the CDC in Atlanta, USA
(Center for Disease Control and Prevention), they still exist.

When Joseph fell ill on 7th April 1711, no one at court was sick with smallpox. Later studies (see, e.g., C. Ingrao,
Joseph I. der “vergessene Kaiser”
, Graz-Vienna-Cologne,
1982) report that at that time a smallpox epidemic was raging throughout Vienna. This is not true.

The historian Hermann Joseph Fenger, in his report on all the epidemics that affected Vienna from 1224 (
Historiam Pestilentiarum Vindobonensis
, Vienna 1817), makes no mention of a
smallpox epidemic in 1711. Neither does Erich Zöllner (
Geschichte Österreichs
, pp. 275–278).

But we wished to check this for ourselves. At the Vienna City Archives we consulted the
Totenbeschauprotokolle
, the reports compiled by the city’s medical authorities for every
death. We examined the reports for the months of March, April and May 1711 thoroughly: there was no smallpox epidemic. What is more, the number of deaths remained average for the period.

Until ten days before he died, Joseph I was a young man at the height of his powers and in a state of perfect health, an active sportsman and a great hunter.

The medical report describes the corpse’s face as covered by copious pustules. However, no mention is made of them in the printed gazette of the day, which described the Emperor’s
death and his body as put on display (
Umständliche Beschreibung von Weyland Ihrer Mayestät / JOSEPH / Dieses Namens des Ersten / Römischen Kayser / Auch zu Ungarn und Böheim
Könih / u. Erz-Herzogen zu Oesterreich / u. u. Glorwürdigsten Angedenckens Ausgestandener Kranckheit / Höchst-seeligstem Ableiben / Und dann erfolgter Prächtigsten
Leich-Begängnuß / zusammengetragen / und verlegt durch Johann Baptist Schönwetter
, Vienna 1711). Besides, a face disfigured by blisters would certainly not have been shown to
his subjects. Could this have been the work of the embalmers?

According to the medical diary kept in Latin by Doctor Franz Holler von Doblhof (Vienna State Archive, Haus-Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Familienakten, Karton 67), with the onset of the earliest
symptoms the Emperor was vomiting mucus and blood. As soon as he died, the diary reads, “from both nostrils and from the mouth blood dripped for a long while.” The neck was swollen and
“
atro livore soffuso
”: dark blue from an internal haemorrhage. At the autopsy, carried out by the same doctor, the liver and lungs are described as “blue and gangrenous,
lacking natural colour” (“
amisso colore naturali, lividum et gangrenosum
”): another haemorrhage, it would seem. On account of the unbearable smell, the autopsy was
concluded without opening the skull.

This medical description is catalogued today as “haemorrhagic smallpox”, a particularly virulent and deadly variant. The strange thing, however, is that this type of smallpox has not
always existed.

Before Joseph’s death, no medical treatise refers to smallpox having a haemorrhagic tendency.

The first to talk of smallpox was Galen, followed by the doctors of the tenth century, the Persian Rhazes, Alì Ben el Abbas and Avicenna, and then, in the eleventh century, Costantine the
African, secretary to Robert Guiscard. All of them engage in lengthy and detailed descriptions of smallpox and the possible complications and progressions, but none of them mentions the possibility
of a haemorrhage. Quite the reverse: the progress of smallpox is described as usually benign; only in a few cases where the patients are already weak does it lead to death. This remains true right
up to the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Ambroise Paré, Niccolò Massa, Girolamo Fracastoro, l’Alpinus, Ochi Rizetti, Scipione Mercuri and Sydenham, to mention just some of
the best-known names, all devote long chapters of their works to smallpox, but there is no trace of haemorrhagic smallpox. They, too, describe the illness as very common and benign: it was fatal
only in the huge pandemics unleashed by wars and famines. Smallpox is usually described in the chapters dealing with infant diseases, and is often lumped together with chickenpox and measles.
Rhazes, in his
Treatise on Smallpox and Measles
, makes a very detailed distinction between the two illnesses: “restlessness, nausea and anxiety are more frequent in measles than in
smallpox; pain in the back is more characteristic of smallpox.” Ambroise Paré (
Oeuvres
, Lyon 1664, livre XX, chap. 1–2) devotes no more than a chapter to smallpox along
with measles, expostulating on the details in order to distinguish between the two illnesses. Such clarifications seem totally incomprehensible to modern readers: today smallpox is, unfortunately,
completely different from the almost always harmless measles. The horrible pustules of smallpox and the terrible syndrome as a whole are totally unrelated to the little red spots of measles and the
accompanying discomforts. Sydenham, too, drew a differential diagnosis between smallpox and measles: a sign that from the tenth to the sixteenth century smallpox remained the same, a contagious
disease that could be confused with measles. Joseph’s own daughter, Maria Josepha, had contracted it in January 1711, three months before her father, and recovered from it: on this occasion,
too, there was no sign of any haemorrhages.

The first testimony that we have of haemorrhagic smallpox is, in fact, the medical report on Joseph I.

Two years later, in 1713, the Greek doctor (some say he was from Bologna), Emanuele Timoni, in his treatise entitled
Historia Variolarum quae per insitionem excitantur
, refers for the
first time to a new practice adopted in Constantinople: subcutaneous inoculation.

A preliminary remark: inoculation is simply the term to indicate the ancient means of immunising, before the English doctor, Edward Jenner, at the end of the eighteenth century, established the
method of vaccination that is still in use today. Inoculation consisted in taking a serum from smallpox pustules where the course of the illness was milder and more benign, and by means of a
cutaneous incision injecting it into a healthy patient, with the aim of provoking a form of smallpox that would also be mild. The patient treated in this manner should fall slightly ill for a short
time, thus protecting himself or herself permanently from the risk of contracting smallpox in a serious form. It was universally known that smallpox never struck the same individual twice.

Obviously subcutaneous inoculation can also be carried out with intentions that are not preventive but criminal – using a more lethal form of the virus.

Timoni reports the presence in Constantinople of two old female fortune-tellers of Greek origin, known as the Thessalian and the Philippoupolis, who had been carrying out inoculations in the
Ottoman capital on the “Frankish” – which is to say, non-Muslim – population since the end of the seventeenth century. The Muslims refused to be inoculated. In 1701 and
1709, a few years after this practice had begun to spread in the city, Constantinople suffered the first mass outbreaks of death from smallpox. However, the two fortune-tellers were not lynched but
acclaimed. Certain well-known doctors had arrived declaring that without the intervention of the two Greek women the epidemic would have been even worse. And very soon this notion was endorsed by
the local clergy, which opened the way for inoculation
en masse
.

The year after the events reported by Timoni, in 1714, the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople reported the practice of inoculation in his work
Nova et tuta variolas excitandi per
transplantationem methodus nuper inventa et in usum tracta
.