WEATHER UPDATE. Vienna 1597.

Don’t like the weather where you are? Let’s compare notes.

• For the last month I’ve been in Los Angeles. Fires, drought, and the brown haze on the horizon that whispers pollution.
•  Before that, I suffered through a December in Toronto. Ice storms, snow storms, minus degrees (and I’m talking Fahrenheit!).
• But all that pales by comparison with Vienna, August 1597.

According to the Fugger Newsletter, it rained blood. The cobblestones are covered with blood. Explanation: A butcher cut the tail of a stubborn ox that gave him trouble. The blood flowed into the hairs of the tail, and the ox splashed it about, whisking his tail this way and that, thus sprinkling the whole road.
Okay, if you say so. But seriously,

On 16^th September 1590, great havoc was wrought here in Vienna by an earthquake. It shook the houses in the whole of the town and lifted the people bodily into the air. Several houses collapsed and killed various people. Large pieces of masonry were hurled from the steeples of the churches. Likewise in the royal residence, bricks and chimneys split and broke off. It looked as though the Last Day of Judgment was upon us.

On the lighter side, a report on the weather in Cochin, India, 1580:

The country is equally warm in summer as in winter. There is no difference in seasons, except that it rains throughout the whole winter, which the summers are dry. The trees and grass remain verdant. Figs are picked from the trees year-round. It is a staple for rich and poor alike. Then there is another fruit on which the people live. It grows on beautiful tall trees called palms. They bear a fruit of the size and shape of a melon which contains much water. You cannot imagine all the things that can be made of this fruit.

Ah, palms! They reconcile me to the pollution in L.A. (And BTW: rain forecast today).

RENAISSANCE BEAUTY TIPS. Caution may cause undesirable side effects.

• Care of teeth. Rub with barley bread-crumbs browned with salt. To whiten teeth, grind up sage, nettle, flour, myrtle, rose buds, coriander, lemon pips, and pine cones. Steep in wine for three days. Boil with alum and rub on your teeth. FYI: Alum –  potassium aluminum sulfate – is used today in taxidermy to prevent rotting. It turns skin into a kind of leather.
• Removing unwanted hair.  Boil quicklime and arsenic sulfide. Test on a feather before applying to your legs. If the feather dissolves, the mixture is ready for use. Don’t leave it on too long. You did? Okay, treat burns with oil of roses.
• Make-up. For that fashionable white skin, apply ceruse (lead paste) to your face. Well yes, it may cause hair loss. But look at the positive side: you no longer need to go through the hassle of dying your hair.
• Bleaching your hair (a Lucrezia Borgia special). Add honey to the lees of white wine. Put on your hair and leave overnight. Then mix roots of celandine with oil of cumin seed and saffron. Leave paste on hair for 24 hours, wash off with ashes and lye of cabbage stalks.
• Bright eyes: A few drops of belladonna juice will do the trick, as long as you don’t mind the nausea, confusion, and hallucinations that go with it.  

       (Tips courtesy of polymath Giambattista della Porta)

HOW TO PUNISH CLUMSY SERVANTS. Management hints, 1502.

historiccookery.com

Rule # 1 for people with servants: stay in control at all times. Or as Machiavelli said: It’s better to be feared than loved.

Messer Ramiro d’Orco called for wine. A page brought a fresh flagon from the buffet. He stumbled among the rushes on the floor and tripped over the feet of a guard. The flagon broke and splashed wine on the ankle of his master.

If there’s anything that annoyed Messer d’Orco, it was a clumsy page. He took the lad by the belt, and slung him into the fire of the hearth, seizing the nearest halberd and pinning the twitching body to the flaming logs. The hair, in a flash, was gone. The slim legs violently writhed outward, and fell still. Hose and leather jerkin peeled, and the white flesh hissed and blackened. Then, nothing but small ash showed where the boy had died, and the smell of roasted human flesh mingled with the smell of the meats.

The quote is from Chronicles of the House of Borgia by Frederick Rolfe. Not sure I share his admiration for the Renaissance as a time when virtue and vice were extreme, passion primitive and ardent, life violent, and… respectable mediocrity of no importance whatever.

 

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THE BORGIA POPE IS DYING. A Diplomat’s Death Watch.

The demise of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, was keenly awaited. One of the jobs of the Venetian ambassador in Rome was to hang around the palace, make inquiries, listen to small talk, and fire off a bulletin to keep his government informed about what was going on. Among the pearls of his correspondence during the summer of 1503.

• 11 July: Pope inconvenienced by diarrhea.
• 14 July: Pope a little depressed.
• 7 August: Pope worried about quartan fever. Ambassador, he said to me, all these sick people in Rome, all these deaths make me afraid.
• 12 August: Pope feverish.
• 13 August: Pope vomiting after dinner.
• 14 August: Physician bleeds pope. Some speak of fourteen, some of sixteen ounces of blood…that is an enormous quantity for a man of seventy-three years.
• 15 August:  Stonewalled. Palace officials keep a lid on info about Pope’s health.
• 17 August: Pope given medicine, still feverish. Property locked down as a precaution against riots sure to break out on news of Pope’s death.
• 18 August: Barring a miracle, the pope cannot live much longer.
• 19 August: The pope is dead. The corpse was hideous and bloated beyond words…For the sake of decency, it was kept covered.

To which Frederick Rolfe, Chronicles of the House of Borgia, adds the footnote: The pope lies in state in the Chapel of the Trinity in St. Peter’s…with his feet protruding through the screen (to allow the faithful to kiss them).

I think Rolfe would have been great on Twitter.