The trumpeter of Krakow

by Eric P. Kelly

“I will go with you,” Joseph added, kissing the cuff of the gown of the man in black as he had always been taught to do in his home.

They turned to the left past the Church of the Franciscans, to the right through a short lane, and then to the left again into the most curious street of the world of that day.

It was the Street of the Pigeons, famed throughout all Europe as the dwelling place of scholars, astrologers, magicians, students, and likewise doctors, brothers of the Church, and masters of the seven arts. In the worst end of the street, the upper end near the city wall, clustered the squalid dwelling places that were once the homes of Jewish refugees, fleeing from persecution in all parts of the world. Terrible poverty had existed there, and when the Jewish inhabitants finally moved to their own city, Kazimierz, across the river, the buildings which they left were scarcely fit for human beings to live in. They were, in the first place, very old and out of repair—they were built for the most part of wood, though the fronts on the street were sometimes of brick covered with rough cement or mortar. The upper stories usually overhung, and the roofs were covered with loose boards nailed in place, serving instead of tiles or shingles. Rickety staircases on the outsides of these buildings led from the street or from interior courts up to the dwelling places on the third and fourth floors, where, at the time of this story, lived family literally heaped upon family in terrible disorder and poverty.

Thieves and murderers crouched there in hiding during the day, bands of lawless men had their haunts there in cellar or attic or other den. A fire in the year 1407 had swept through this street and through St. Ann’s, clearing out many of these undesirable places, but unfortunately not destroying all of them.

In the lower end of the street on the side toward the University of Krakow there was more respectability since students and masters of the university inhabited there. A large students’ bursar or dormitory stood near the corner where Jagiellonska now meets the Street of the Pigeons. In this lived many students; others put up near by in groups or with private families, since it was not until late in the 1490’s that the authorities compelled the students to live in university buildings.

The prestige of the various colleges and the reputation of the men who taught there had drawn to Krakow not only genuine students but also many of the craft that live by their wits in all societies, in all ages—fortune tellers and astrologers, magicians and palmists, charlatans, necromancers, and fly-by-nights who were forever eluding the authorities of the law. Here somewhere on the Street of the Pigeons they all found lodging.

In the rooms above the street, in the kitchens beneath the street, these men plied their trades. Self-termed astrologers read in the stars the destinies of the gullible; they foretold happiness to trusting peasant girls who came to them for advice in their love matters, they prophesied disaster to merchants who, held by fear, might be induced to part with much money; they cheated, they robbed, and often on provocation they killed, until after many years they gave the street a certain unsavory reputation. Against the machinations of these men the influence of the university was ever working, and the first great blow that many of these magic crafts and black arts received was struck by Nicholas Kopernik, better known as Copernicus, many years later when Joseph Charnetski was a very old man; Copernicus, working with rough implements, even before the telescope had been invented, proved to men for the first time that the heavenly bodies, stars and planets, move in the skies according to well-fixed and definitely determined laws, subject only to the will of the Creator of the universe, and that they have nothing to do with the destinies of individuals.

All about them in the street flitted men dressed in long robes like that of the guardian of the little girl, though all the robes were not alike. Some were clerical with closed front and collar, others were open and flowing with great sleeves like a bishop’s gown, some were of blue, some were of red, some were of green. Joseph noticed one robe of ermine over which was worn a chain of heavy gold, at the end of which hung suspended a great amethyst cross.

They passed a house, part wood and part stone, where were gathered at opened doors a great group of young men in plain black robes, much less sumptuous than some others which they had seen, all the members of the group engaged in a lively altercation, as the guardian informed the boy and girl, concerning the movement of the stars. One was contending that the firmament of stars moved for one hundred years to the west—another (and this was backed by a written argument from the old Alphonsian tables from Spain) that the stars moved constantly in one direction without change.

Passing this group they came to a dwelling, the front of which was stone. The door was set back from the street and flanked by short projecting buttresses on either side, put there as if to caution the emerging inhabitant to look carefully to right and left before proceeding—a caution not unwise at night. The windows above were not only crossed by wooden shutters that opened and closed like doors, but also barred with iron. The man in black took from the folds of his gown a huge brass key, which he fitted into the outside door, turned it in the lock with some labor, and then threw the portal open.