A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

the house of one Hugh Smyth, and ‘feloniously raped Joan, wife of the said Hugh’; a few months
later he went back and raped her again. Several accounts of his extorting money ‘by threats and
oppression’ make it clear that he could be regarded as a predecessor of some of the gangsters we
shall later consider in the chapter on the Mafia. He was also, according to the records, a cattle
rustler and horse thief.
Back in Newgate prison in 1463 - for the third or fourth time - he whiled away the hours compiling
the Morte d”Arthur, possibly with the aid of the nearby library of Grey Friars. That he was still in
prison when he finished it seems to be proved by the words in the final chapter praying God to
‘send me good deliverance’.
The handwritten manuscript might well have found its way on to some library shelf and been
forgotten. (In fact, such a manuscript - its beginning and end pages missing - was found in the
library of Winchester school in 1934.) But fortunately, in 1485 - fourteen years after Malory’s
death - it fell into the hands of the English printer William Caxton. He launched it on the world,
and it instantly became almost as popular as the Bible. The rapist and cattle rustler had achieved a
belated immortality. But, more important, the Morte d’Arthur carried the ideals of knightly chivalry
to the far corners of Europe. The great explorers gave man a taste for romance and adventure; it
was Malory who carried it into every literate household.
For the Church, this liberation of the human imagination would eventually prove more dangerous
than any number of heretics and infidels. But that day had not yet arrived.
THE CHURCH OVER-TRIUMPHANT
In the week before Easter 1478, a group of would-be assassins arrived in Florence: their intended
victims were two of the Medici family: Lorenzo - already called the Magnificent - and his younger
brother Giuliano. The plotters included the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati, and two leading
bankers of Florence, Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli. And in Rome, providing moral
support for the plot, was the pope, Sixtus IV.
The notion of a pope and an archbishop being involved in a murder plot strikes us as startling: in
the fifteenth century it was almost commonplace. The pope was, in effect, the Roman emperor, the
Caesar. With enormous revenues flowing in from all over the civilised world, he built palaces,
employed great artists, hired armies, poisoned rivals, fathered bastards and gave away important
Church appointments to members of his family. Italy was full of rival cities that tried to gobble up
all the small towns in their area; the popes made sure that Rome did her share of the gobbling. This
is partly what had caused the present coolness between the pope and Lorenzo de’ Medici. They
both wanted a little town called Imola, which happened to be under the protection of the duke of
Milan; the duke had promised it to Lorenzo. Then the pope bribed the duke with an advantageous
marriage between his own nephew and the duke’s bastard daughter; so Imola became part of the
Papal States. Lorenzo took it philosophically - he was that kind of a man. But he got his own back
when the Archbishop of Florence died and the pope wanted to appoint one of his favourites,
Francesco Salviati. Lorenzo blocked the appointment and gave it to his own brother-in-law; Salviati
had to be contented with a second best - Pisa.
The Medicis were, of course, the leading family of bankers in Florence, although their chief rivals
were the Pazzis. The Pazzis were popular with the common people of Florence, but not quite as
popular as the Medicis, who were naturally friendly and democratic. When the pope was trying to
raise the cash to buy Imola, Lorenzo de’ Medici asked the Pazzis not to lend him any money. He