Corruet in feudum dissimulando vivet.
Venecia aperiet venas, percutiet undique Regem.
Infra millenos ducenos sexque decennos
Erunt sedata immensa turbina mundi
Morietur Gripho, aufugient undique pennae.’
It would be difficult to determine how much of the original composition of Scot these verses preserve, and how much they owe to later hands. We cannot be mistaken, however, in remarking their uniform tone of melancholy and apprehension, with the burden of its constantly recurring ‘corruet,’ or in taking this as a true index to the state of the author’s mind.
Pipini records two other prophecies of Michael Scot which serve to confirm this observation in a high degree.[246] The astrologer, he says, forecast the manner of the Emperor’s death, which was to take place ad portas ferreas, at certain gates of iron, in a town named after Flora. This prediction was generally understood of Florence; the rather perhaps that the church of Santo Stefano there was called ad portam ferream; and Frederick accordingly avoided coming to that city.[247] During his last campaign in 1250, however, he fell sick at the town of Fiorentino or Firenzola in Apulia, and lay in a chamber of the castle. His bed stood against a wall recently built to fill up the ancient gateway of the tower, while within the wall there still remained the iron staples on which the gate had been hung. Uneasy at the progress of his disease, and hearing something of these particulars, the Emperor fell into deep thought and then exclaimed, ‘This is the place where I shall make an end, as it was told me. The will of God be done; for here I shall die,’ and soon afterwards he breathed his last.
The other prediction which the chronicler attributes to Scot relates to the occasion of his own death. This, he said, would take place by the blow of a stone falling on his head. His calculations were so exact as even to furnish him with the precise weight of this instrument of fate. Being in church one day, with head uncovered at the sacring of the Mass, a stone, agreeing in all particulars with his prediction, was shaken from the tower by the motion of the bellrope and wounded Scot to death.
There is much in these tales which lies apart from the course of a sober biography; belonging rather to that legendary and mystic fame of the philosopher which we shall immediately proceed to consider. Something, however, in which all these prophecies agree deserves our attention here, and that is their sombre and menacing character. ‘Ruinam predixit,’ says Pipini, referring to Scot’s verses on the Italian cities, and his thoughts, whether engaged with Frederick’s fate or his own, seem at this time to have followed the same dark and ominous course. Death and destruction now filled all his mind, much as if he had been a Highlander gifted with the fatal power of the Taisch: a seer to whom all things looked darkly, and all men wore a shroud, longer or shorter, to mark the time and the manner of their end.
With Michael Scot’s account of his own fate Pipini joins another curious matter, that of the cervilerium.[248] This was a plate or cap of steel meant to be worn under the ordinary covering of the head as an additional defence, and the chronicle says that Scot invented and wore it that he might be safe from the danger he foresaw. Taking this together with the prophecies, both general and personal, we can find no better explanation than that which bids us see in the whole what indicates a case of ecstatic melancholy such as would seem to be the sad heritage of not a few finer natures sprung of the stock from which Michael Scot descended. We hear the same sad note in the strange jingle he wove so long before in the preface of his Physionomia: ‘Nos ibimus ibitis, ibunt. Omnia pereunt, praeter amare Deum,’ and one would fain hope that in his frequent fits of depression Scot may have indeed found rest in what he thus declares to be the only abiding portion of the soul. The wild account of his illness at Cordova, and of the dreams which then visited him is not to be neglected in this connection. Perhaps the cloud then first fell which in after-years returned upon him with such redoubled gloom. Thus the traits of Scot’s youth fit well the picture we are now constrained to form, and the whole gives promise that here at last we may have touched upon the man himself as he was, physically, mentally, and spiritually. A slight worn body spent with arduous study, like a sheath which the sword has almost broken through; a soul possessed with the sense of Divine things, yet sad, and subject to strange illusions; a conscience morbidly awake and painfully scrupulous; a mind to which almost every branch of knowledge was familiar, and not incapable of striking out here and there in a path of its own: if these be not Michael Scot, scholar in the court and courtier in the schools, then it may safely be said that no indications exist which can ever reveal to us this striking personality as he lived and moved in the world.