Certain times and places were favourable or unfavorable, or even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions.The Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened.Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street has been already mentioned.At Perugia one of the gates, the 'Porta Eburnea,' was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out to fight through it.Meteors and the appearance of the heavens were as significant in Italy as elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and the popular imagination saw warring armies in an unusual formation of clouds, and heard the clash of their collision high in the air.The superstition became a more serious matter when it attached itself to sacred things, when figures of the Virgin wept or moved the eyes, or when public calamities were associated with some alleged act of impiety, for which the people demanded expiation.In 1478, when Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said that there would be no dry weather till a certain usurer, who had been lately buried in San Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth.As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up the young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it down the streets amid frightful confusion, and at last threw it into the Po.Even Politian accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the chiefs of the conspiracy of 1478, In Florence, which is called after his family.
When he was put to death, he devoted his soul to Satan with fearful words; here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the harvest;here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone--'so gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people,' adds the great scholar.The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the next day dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city thrown into the Arno.
These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have occurred in the tenth, just as well as in the sixteenth century.But now comes the literary influence of antiquity.We know positively that the humanists were peculiarly accessible to prodigies and auguries, and instances of this have been already quoted.If further evidence were needed, it would be found in Poggio.The same radical thinker who denied the rights of noble birth and the inequality of men, not only believed in all the mediaeval stories of ghosts and devils, but also in prodigies after the ancient pattern, like those said to have occurred on the last visit of Pope Eugenius IV to Florence.'Near Como there were seen one evening four thousand dogs, who took the road to Germany;these were followed by a great herd of cattle, and these by an army on foot and horseback, some with no heads and some with almost invisible heads, and then a gigantic horseman with another herd of cattle behind him.' Poggio also believes in a battle of magpies and jackdaws.He even relates, perhaps without being aware of it, a well-preserved piece of ancient mythology.On the Dalmatian coast a Triton had appeared, bearded and horned, a genuine sea-satyr, ending in fins and a tail; he carried away women and children from the shore, till five stout-hearted washerwomen killed him with sticks and stones.A wooden model of the monster, which was exhibited at Ferrara, makes the whole story credible to Poggio.Though there were no more oracles, and it was no longer possible to take counsel of the gods, yet it became again the fashion to open Virgil at hazard, and take the passage hit upon as an omen ('Sorted Virgilianae').Nor can the belief in daemons current in the later period of antiquity have been without influence on the Renaissance.The work of Iamblichus or Abarnmon on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, which may have contributed to this result, was printed in a Latin translation at the end of the fifteenth century.The Platonic Academy at Florence was not free from these and other neoplatonic delusions of the Roman decadence.A 'few words must here be given to the belief in demons and to the magic which was connected with this belief.
The popular faith in what is called the spirit-world was nearly the same in Italy as elsewhere in Europe.In Italy as elsewhere there were ghosts, that is, reappearances of deceased persons; and if the view taken of them differed in any respect from that which prevailed in the North, the difference betrayed itself only in the ancient name 'ombra.'
