‘To the Fire! They are all Sodomites!’ - Bernardino of Siena

 


 During the Renaissance, Florence had a notorious reputation throughout Europe; in Germany, for instance, the word ‘florenzen’ became slang for male-to-male sexual congress, while a sodomite was known as a Florenzer. The reasons for the extraordinarily high instances of sodomy in the city may have been due to the late average age for men to marry.

…Florentine men normally put off marriage until the average age of thirty or thirty-one, and a large proportion never took a wife. Among other social consequences, the abundance of virile and not-so-young bachelors denied legitimate sexual outlets tended to foster an environment in which unauthorised sexual activity of all sorts flourished. - (Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, 1966, Oxford University Press, pp. 28-29).

The vast majority of these men were not ‘homosexual’ in the modern sense of the word, and they were not involved in anything like a modern gay subculture as we would recognise it today. Many men, whom we would never consider homosexual, regularly engaged in male-to-male sexual contact since it was such a pervasive part of the drinking, gambling and open sexuality of the single-male culture. But some men did have a lifelong preference for sex with other males. Some men pursued young men throughout their lives, sometimes developing relationships lasting two, three or even four years. If they were single, that was usually their primary sexual outlet. If they were married, some still preferred young men to their wives. Many of these sexual relationships were tolerated and even encouraged by parents who understood that they could gain protection, political advancement and financial gain from a son's well-placed lover. But the authorities were keen to correct this ‘anomaly’ and, in 1432, the Office of the Night was established in Florence. Its duty was to investigate and charge those accused of sodomy. It existed for seventy years and over this period it is estimated that, in the small city of just 40,000 people, 17,000 men were incriminated on charges of sodomy; that is, nearly half the male population over two generations.

During the seventy-year tenure from 1432 to 1502, this magistracy, with the limited participation of other courts, carried out the most extensive and systematic persecution of homosexual activity in any pre-modern city. Yet in doing so the courts also brought to light a thriving and multifaceted sexual culture that was solidly integrated into the broader male world of Florence. - (Rocke p. 4.)

Sex between males was so integral a part of Florentine life that sodomites (and the legal system) used specialised vocabulary to describe various activities. Common amongst which were: sodimitare (to sodomise), abbracciare (to embrace), buggerare (to bugger), fottere (to fuck), servire (to serve), usare or adoperare (to use), fare (to do), cagna (bitch) and bardassuola or bardassa (rent-boy, in modern parlance). Legal descriptions also used verbs in the active or passive forms, depending on the actions of the defendants. - (Katherine Crawford, ‘Deviancy and the Cultures of Sex’ in European Sexualities, 1400-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 201.) The pervasive general climate of male to male sexual activity was obvious. It was written about extensively:

Attacks on notorious sodomites appeared regularly, suggesting that their actions were broadly public. Poems such as ‘La buca di Montmorello’ and ‘Il gagno’, probably composed between 1407 and 1412 by Stephano Finiguerri, included obvious allusions to Florentine institutions and individuals associated with sodomy. Other works presented sodomy in a positive light. Antonio Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus (1425) celebrated pleasure for the passive partner, as did Antonio Rocco’s L’Alcibiade fianciullo a scola (c. 1630). Francesco Beccuti of Perugia rejected sex with women in favour of sodomy in his ‘In lode della pederastia’ (In Praise of Pederasty). - (Crawford, p. 201.)

 Boxes were set up in the city, where people could lodge anonymous accusations of sodomy. There were interrogations and men would implicate others in order to have their own penalty remitted. The extensive data collected by the Office of the Night reveals that sodomy was mainly a crime of young men. Passive partners were usually aged from 12 to 20 (only 3 percent were over 20). Of active partners, 82.5 percent were 19 or older. It was considered particularly degrading for someone to remain a passive partner once he was a grown man, but that is not to say that this did not happen. It was expected that a shift would occur, from the passive to the active partner, in the late teenage years. This activity would usually taper off in the late-twenties to mid-thirties, when typically a Florentine man would marry. - (Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2005, Routledge, pp.139-40.) The firebrand priest, Bernardino of Siena, vilified both Jews and sodomites, but it was the latter that particularly incensed him.

The sermons of Bernardino of Siena are probably the most extensive and vivid commentary on sodomy in late medieval Italy that we possess by a single contemporary. ...Bernardino was an astute observer and critic who was highly sensitive to the social and political problems of his culture. And few activities aroused more concern and provoked more repression in fifteenth-century Tuscany than did male homosexuality. - (‘Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena’, in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, eds: Kent Gerard & Gert Hekma, Haworth Press, 1988, p.8.)

Bernardino’s sermons attracted huge crowds. He told of a sodomite in Verona who had been hacked into quarters and his limbs hung on the city gates, and another in Venice who had been smothered in flaming pitch and burnt to death; he exhorted the crowd to do the same, even if they had to burn every man and youth in the city. Authorities in Venice had also called for barber surgeons to report anyone seeking treatment for anal injuries. On the 7th of April 1424, he told the congregation at Sante Croce, Florence:

Whenever you hear sodomy mentioned, each and every one of you spit on the ground and clean your mouth out as well. If they don't want to change their ways by any other means, maybe they will change when they're made fools of. Spit hard! Maybe the water of your spit will extinguish their fire.

The scribe recorded that the great mass of people then spat disgustedly on the stone floor, with a noise that sounded like thunder. Two days later Bernardino staged a (literally) more inflammatory piece of public theatre. Shouting ‘To the fire!’ and ‘They are all sodomites!’ he led the revved-up congregation out of Sante Croce and into the piazza, where his assistants had piled a mountain of clothing, wigs, cosmetics and other effeminate vanities. The preacher set the pile alight, to the roar of the cheering horde. Bernardino loudly declaimed what he viewed as the increasingly relaxed attitude to sodomy in Florence. He was attempting to revive the vociferous prosecution and brutal punishment of sodomites that had existed in the city just sixty years before. One example of this is as follows: in 1365, fifteen-year-old Giovanni di Giovanni was arrested for allowing himself to be buggered by a number of young men. He was labelled a ‘public and notorious passive sodomite’. Dragged outside the city walls on an ass, he was then castrated in front of the crowd and branded with a red hot iron ‘in that part of his body where he allowed himself to be known in sodomitical practice’. - (Robert Mills, ’Eliminating Sodom’ in Suspended Animation, p. 95) 

It is a telling point that the young men, the active partners in the various sexual acts with Giovanni, were not subjected to this brutality; which goes to illustrate how sexual politics of the time were intricately linked to masculine power politics and the clear distinction between, and tacit acceptance of, the masculine ‘do-er’ and the feminised ‘done to’.

Bernardino also had grave concerns about much religious imagery and how it could be interpreted lasciviously by those so inclined.

Certainly the medieval ideal was to rise above the corporeal contemplation of images, and…images were not the ultimate goal of spiritual meditation. But that does not mean that viewers always, then or now, perceived representations in terms of those ideals. Bernardino of Siena, for instance, expresses the concern that images of Christ’s passion are potentially corrupting and warns of the dangers of viewing human flesh in sacred art, even the flesh of Christ himself. As he announces, in his treatise De inspirationibus, ‘I know a person who, while contemplating the humanity of Christ suspended on the cross (I am ashamed to say and it is terrible even to imagine), sensually and repulsively polluted and defiled himself.’ - (Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture, 2006, Reaktion.)

Bernardino does not indicate whether the onanist in question indulged himself in his private chambers or in a public venue.

The seeking of erotic potential in holy images was not restricted to this one single example.

Erotic responses to images of female saints were documented in the writings of German iconoclasts; reformers such as Zwingli likewise reproved the sexual arousal elicited by images of male religiosity. The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, indeed, decreed with respect to the veneration of relics and the sacred use of images, that ‘all superstition shall be removed, all the filthy quest for gain eliminated, and all lasciviousness avoided, so that images shall not be painted and adorned with a seductive charm’. Sexuality is not simply something that modern beholders ‘read into’ the texts and images of times past. Regulations such as this bear witness to the zeal with which authorities attempted to read it out. - (Mills, p. 193)

From the late Middle Ages, throughout Europe, there was a perceived complicity of the sacred and the erotic in Christian representation. As early as 1402, the bishop of Paris, Jean Gerson, wrote a treatise on the ‘corruption of the youth’ in which he demanded laws against the sale of dirty pictures. At one point he laments ‘the filthy corruption of boys and adolescents by shameful nude pictures offered for sale at the very temples and sacred places’. It should be remembered that during this period it was the norm for stalls to be set up within churches and cathedrals with items for sale, and even for meat and other food to be cooked within them and sold to pilgrims, who may have journeyed over many miles. Creating a festive atmosphere was also undoubtedly a way of ensuring a regular attendance by the masses. That proto-pornography was also being sold within churches, cathedrals and elsewhere, is perhaps surprising to us today; it is often commonly assumed that pornography is a fairly recent phenomenon, one that has quickly moved from ‘underground’ to mainstream, thanks to its ubiquity on the Internet. But it is clear that people of the distant past also had access to and desired to see erotic material. These were not the unsophisticated, pious innocents of popular imagination, and they were certainly capable of, and willing to, imbue a holy Christian image with baser, earthly meanings; ‘visual images of the tortured body of Christ and the saints are not [and were not] devoid of the capacity to signify erotically, or even homoerotically.’ - (Robert Mills, in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, 2002, Routledge) 

A useful example of this ability of ordinary people to link the sacred and the profanely erotic is given in Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, (University of Chicago Press, p.264.) and a fuller version appears in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France by Natalie Zemon Davis. The incident occurred in 1530 in the town of Senlis, France. A twenty-year-old barber, Guillaume Caranda, on the day of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, played the role of Christ and placed himself in a tomb, ‘in record and representation of his holy resurrection’. His neighbours were playing other roles. Later that evening, the local toolmaker, Claude Caure, approached Caranda and sarcastically said, ‘I see the god on earth. Did you keep your big cock stiff while playing God?’

uttering these dishonest words arrogantly and against the honour of Christianity. To which the supplicant responded that ‘[Caure’s cock] was neither very hard nor heated up’, and that he was gelded, and after these words he and his company went on their way. - (Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France, 1990, Stanford University Press, pp. 30 - 31).

Later in the evening, as Caranda and his friends were returning home, they passed by Caure’s door, who again began insulting Caranda, giving him ‘two slaps on his head and face and made his bonnet for to fall to the ground.’ In self-defence, Caranda drew his knife and struck Caure in the left eye. Caure later died, but the court noted that Caranda had been provoked, and he was pardoned. The bawdy connection between the rising of Christ and the rising of Caranda’s putative erection was clearly inferred by Caure and clearly understood by Caranda. A ‘lewd linkage of phallic erection with bodily resurrection must have been broadly vernacular since the 14th century, endemic in stews and taverns, if not the Schools.’ - (Steinberg, p. 316.)

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