The Brotherhood of Book Hunters by Howard Curtis, Raphaël Jerusalmy

universities of Bologna and Parma openly ordered copies of the works of rabbis, exegeses composed in the Jewish quarters of Toledo and Prague or drawn up by the schools of Tiberias and Safed. Under the auspices of Lorenzo the Magnificent and with money from the faculties, including the Platonic Academy, as well as Cosimo de’ Medici’s secret funds, the young book hunter was able to fit out a ship for the Holy Land. Using as a pretext the purchase of Hebrew works of renown, he was in fact transporting, among the rare volumes bequeathed by Cosimo to the monastery, the final writings of the recalcitrant Cardinal de Cues, the secret notes of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino on the
Corpus Hermeticum
, an Eastern treatise on zero, and a painting by Filippo Brunelleschi, all banned by the apostolic censors.
    In Cosimo de’ Medici’s library, the young man had feverishly noted down the information he was to provide Brother Médard’s mysterious sponsors as to the immense significance of these clandestine works. “The moment has come,” Cosimo had concluded laconically before dismissing him. “Tell them they can launch the offensive.”
    Cosimo had waited serenely for the end, surrounded by his collections, mixing his last breath with the smell of the books, going to join their authors in the world where the mind of man at last roams amid the spheres, talks with the angels, and smiles for no reason in the austere shadow of the gods. It was in death that he achieved his lifelong ideal, to be a
uomo universale.
    Â 
    The news of another expected death has sent shock waves through Christendom: that of Pope Pius II, just after his final attempt to raise a crusade. The troops he had recruited in Mantua and Ancona had merely pillaged a few small towns and massacred some hundred infidels. In April, another abortive crusade left thirty bodies in the alleys of the ghetto of Krakow before breaking up in chaos. Had the Christians lost Jerusalem forever?
    The Holy Land was now nothing but a confused jumble of outcasts and fallen adventurers. Educated priests preferred to obtain a small diocese in Anjou or the Rhineland rather than a bishopric in Palestine. European monarchs saw no interest in raising armies to conquer a devastated land infested with epidemics and noxious air. Even the Emir of Judea dreamed only of being relieved of his wretched post and returning to the luxury of Alexandria or Baghdad. He cursed the hordes of pilgrims endlessly landing on the coasts, the vast caravans crossing the country in the opposite direction, toward the ports, the relentless movements of nomads fleeing famine and drought. The penitents’ donkeys, the merchants’ camels, the peasants’ goats had finally devoured what little green had still remained to cover the shame of the soil, the nakedness of the rock, the ugliness of the loose stones. This territory ruled over by a Mamluk governor was merely an inextricable intermingling of roads and tracks, a way station trapped between two worlds, East and West. Its epic battlefields had been abandoned to the weeds. The tombs of prophets and knights and Roman centurions were rotting in the sun. Only Jews and poets still turned toward Jerusalem, like the last remaining clients of a brothel who still pay their respects to the ageing madam. Most in fact had never even seen this city whose praises they sang so stoutly. And as the good whore that she was, she gave herself to all the symbols, all the rhymes, all the hopes, all the priests and all the soldiers, unflinchingly pocketing the wages of misfortune and poverty. And yet those few poets continued to venerate her with their convoluted odes and those few Jews predicted that she would be reborn from the ashes. For them, the destiny of Jerusalem was not carved in wars but in texts, in the Scriptures. She was a city not so much built of stone and bricks as fashioned out of words and dreams.

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    L eaning on the edge of the