VENETIAN MOUNTEBANKS
Such presents were customary on a very large scale on the continent; in France they generally consisted of wine and were presented to persons of high rank only, but in Germany every gentleman received gifts of drink and food which usually cost more than their value in tips and dinners. The higher the rank of the visitor, the greater the quantity; the Infanta Clara Eugenia writes home that at the stopping-places in her passage through Switzerland the gifts require thirty or forty men to carry them, who lay them at her feet until she is surrounded by barrels and has the greatest difficulty in preserving her gravity. At Lucerne she received barley as well as wine, and two oxen, both too fat to move. Many other local customs had to be submitted to which have died out since; such as ceremonies of initiation into the freedom of Hansa League towns, which were accompanied by practical joking; the obligation on Protestants staying at Geneva to attend service at 7 A. M. whenever there was a sermon; and so on.
Among these exceptional customs and regulations should be mentioned those concerning weapons in Italy. At Lucca no knife might be carried unless blunted at the point; in the Papal States, a sword was allowed, but no short, easily hidden, weapon; in Venetian territory fire-arms only were forbidden; elsewhere a license from the local authorities had ordinarily to be obtained for wearing a sword, and in Florence the license only referred to day-time. This is Moryson's account of the regulations; before his time the regulations were laxer, and later they became stricter, which gave a great impetus to the poisoning trade; in fact, the bakers in Lombardy were mostly Germans, and those of Rome, Jews, the Italians being unwilling to trust their fellow countrymen.
Such subjects naturally suggest executions, which formed one of the commonest and principal "sights" throughout Europe. Lithgow landed at the Piazzetta at Venice just when a friar was being burnt alive there for getting fifteen nuns with child in a year. It was in Venice, too, that Moryson saw two young senators' sons, who had had too uproarious a night, have their hands cut off at the places where they had done the mischief, their tongues cut out where they had sung blasphemous songs, and finally beheaded by a sort of guillotine in the Piazza. And when he was staying at Leipzig, where, as was the custom in Germany, adultery was punishable by death, a case had recently occurred of a girl giving birth to an illegitimate child in a church, during service. It was under consideration when he left whether an ancient precedent should not be revived to meet her case, that she should be tied up in a sack with a cat, a cock, a snake, and a dog, all alive, and so drowned. To quote one more as a sample of many, there is the detailed description of a man being broken on the wheel at Hamburg, by Taylor the "water-poet." The place of execution was on a mound, so that the enormous crowd could see well; moated, to keep the people at a distance, and approached by a drawbridge which was raised during the execution; the criminal was drunk, according to custom. In Germany exceptional criminals were on view for some days before execution, nailed by the ears to posts. Torture accompanying execution was common, and branding and mutilation things that no traveller could well avoid seeing. But none seemed to want to avoid them: Evelyn went to the Châtelet prison at Paris to look on while a prisoner underwent legal torture. The only occasions that seem to have struck them as too horrible was when the headsman bungled matters: a Dutchman at Paris saw one try sixteen times and then have to be assisted. And as in the towns, so by the wayside. Gallows and wheels bearing the bodies of men and sometimes of women, dying, dead, or decaying, were continually to be seen: Taylor says he counted seven score between Hamburg and Prague, and Moryson mentions a criminal hanging in chains near Lindau, starving to death, with a mastiff at each heel, in order that he might be partially eaten before death.
PUBLIC EXECUTIONS
No less awful a sight, and no less frequent in certain places, such as Marseilles, was the galley-slave, naked except for a pair of breeches, shaven, dragging behind him when ashore the chain fixed to his feet, treated worse than a beast, and yet not necessarily criminal: at Leghorn was a tent, at Naples a certain stone, where a man might stake his liberty against a few shillings on a throw of the dice. Among the few who obtained their release by being bought out were those who, on that condition, acted as deputies in the processions of flagellants which tourists often mention: Montaigne witnessed one at Rome with five hundred persons in it. He, like others, was astonished to note their unconcern; the scourging was genuine: their backs were raw and bloody, the thongs of the scourges adhering to each other with the blood; yet so far from showing signs of pain, they marched along, careless and talkative, in an every-day mood.
Other forms of slavery were ordinarily met with: at Naples an open slave-market was held; at Lisbon, too, where men and monkeys were sold side by side. And here and there one might come across settlements of those who could not claim all the benefits of the law. Zinzerling picked up a cagot servant near Toulouse, a young man, well-informed, who told him how his brother-outcasts had just petitioned for permission to marry whom they chose, offering to have their blood tested to prove it no different from other men's. Those who did not act as servants, lived by handicraft, carpentering mostly; they were forced to dwell in the suburbs, and nothing they owned was heritable except furniture, which was looked on as sharing their taint.