[23] Two. The First Image: The Warriors
For the first image in his memory palace, Ricci decides to build on the Chinese ideograph for war, pronounced wu. To present wu in the form of a memory image that the reader will remember, he first cuts the ideograph into two sections on a diagonal axis running from upper left to lower right. This dissection yields two separate ideographs, the upper one of which represents the word for spear, the lower a word with the sense of "to stop" or "to prevent." In dividing the ideograph in this fashion Ricci follows-whether wittingly or not-a tradition among Chinese scholars reaching back almost two millennia, a tradition that allowed one to see, buried inside the word for war, the possibilities, however frail, of peace.1
Ricci draws from these two ideas and recombines them into one interconnected image: A warrior, the very picture of martial vigor, holds a spear, poised to strike at his enemy; that second warrior grasps the first by the wrist, striving to stop the blow from falling. [24]
Ricci describes to the Chinese, in his memory book, how such images should be formed, placed, and lighted if they are truly to help our human memory. In the rules for the images themselves, he explains [25] that they must be lively and not too static, that they must arouse strong emotions, that the figures must wear clothes or uniforms which clearly show their social station and the nature of their business or occupation. The differences between figures in a composite image must be exaggerated, their features distorted by joy or pain; they may even be ridiculous or laughable, if that seems advisable; and they must be kept separate and distinct.2
As for the location where a given image is to be stored, Ricci gives the Chinese a number of further rules. The place should be spacious, but not so crowded with images that a single one gets lost: a magistrate's yamen, a busy market, or a school jammed with students would all be unsuitable. The light must be clear and even, though not bright enough to dazzle. The spaces must be clean and dry, and kept covered lest the images be streaked with rain or dew. They should be at floor level or just above, not balanced on a beam or perched on the roof, which would make them inaccessible. The mental eye should be able to roam completely from one image to the next, so they should never be closer to their neighbor than three feet nor farther than six feet. They should be firmly planted, not fixed in unstable attitudes susceptible to sudden movement-for example, they should never be suspended from a pulley or balanced on a wheel.3
So Ricci constructs the reception hall of his memory palace along these lines and orients it so that it faces south, in deference to the Chinese tradition that gives greatest honor to that direction. He enters the door and turns at once to the right. It is here, in the southeast corner of the building, that he puts the two warriors. Once they are securely placed, he can forget about them for a while. The two men will stay there locked in combat, one striving to kill and the other not to be killed, for as long as he chooses to leave them.
[26] Ricci's childhood world of Macerata was encircled by war and suffused with violence. In the narrow stone streets that he walked to school during the 1550s and 1560s the young men of the Alaleona and Pellicani families had been stalking each other for years, pursuing a feud that reached back to the 1520s: some had been stabbed in broad daylight, others cut down as they said Mass. And those two families had their bloody company, for other noblemen fell to masked killers, or fled to other cities after wreaking their acts of vengeance, there to wait or fight as soldiers until their long terms of exile were up.4
Ricci was three years old when three members of the Ciminella family gave a new dimension to this violence by killing Francesco Ciappardelli with a rain of pistol bullets; he was five when a Benedictine friar killed a member of the Floriani family in Macerata; and he was eleven at the time the city resounded to the story that a sixteen-year-old from the same Floriani clan had knifed a young man who had taken a bite out of his ear. In the spate of murders and fights, at least one man and one woman bearing the Ricci name lost their lives, though we do not know if they were close relatives of Matteo. Despite recurrent efforts of the clergy and the city fathers to end the violence, such murders were still commonplace when Matteo Ricci left Macerata in 1568 to study law in Rome.5
Outside the walls of Macerata the rural poor, refugees from the war-ravaged cities to the north, and deserters from the myriad mercenary armies that had been fighting on Italian soil coalesced into bandit groups that roamed the countryside almost with impunity. Every kind of bounty was offered to local troops who could kill or capture the bandits, and the Macerata city records show a steady increase in the need for jail space as well as for interrogation rooms where torture could be used to extract further information from the captives.6 Yet these local initiatives were not enough, and general order was restored only after 1568, when the papal legates who had jurisdiction over the area hired armies to conduct sweeps of the countryside and house-to-house searches and registration drives.7 (Macerata was within the belt of territory in central Italy that constituted the papal domain, and the [27] Vatican's legates shared power with Macerata's own government.) Even so, for years after, travel in the Macerata countryside remained unsafe, and despite the impressive speeds of the couriers claimed in some sources, communication with Rome was slow and uncertain.8
The bleakness of the situation was compounded by military officers of the Macerata commune who gave illicit sanctuary to robbers and killers and provided storage bases for stolen goods. If, like Captain Francesco De Vico in 1554, they were exposed, arrested, and condemned to death, they could regain their life, freedom, and even the profits of their crimes by skillful use of a local statute offering freemen of the city pardon in exchange for bandits they or their friends had killed. So, wrote Macerata's historian, Libero Paci, could "De Vico become once again an honored citizen, living for the longest span of years on the fruits of his rapine." Indeed, De Vico lived prosperously in Macerata for all the years of Ricci's upbringing there and finally died in 1584, by which time Ricci had been a year in China.9
Being a key city in the administration of the papal domain, Macerata could not hope to stay free from papal politics, whether international or local. There had been war scares in the city during 1555 when the struggles between Pope Paul IV and the powerful Colonna family threatened to spread to Macerata, but these faded to insignificance the following year when Pope Paul's mounting troubles with the Spaniards, who controlled southern Italy from their base in the Kingdom of Naples, brought the Spanish general the duke of Alva into papal territory. Macerata was assessed for military levies by Pope Paul, and the citizens rather belatedly saw to the town's defense, buying up one hundred arquebuses to swell the armory, distributing pikes to local militia, converting an old mill tower on the nearby river into a fort, and hiring a military architect to draw up a master plan for the city's fortifications.10 Pope Paul sought to counter Spanish power through a French alliance, and the Maceratans were ordered to prepare supplies for the French army as well as to repair the roads over which the troops would be traveling and to send draft animals and supplies to the front. The French troops, under the command of the duke of Guise, reached [28] central Italy in March 1557 with an army consisting of twelve thousand infantry and six thousand cavalry. Guise was in Macerata during early April, and the visit was uneventful. More alarming was his return in May, after he had failed to capture the strategic Spanish-held fortress of Civitella, southeast of Rome, for now it was believed that Alva's Spanish troops were on his heels. But peace came in December, and Macerata was spared an attack by one of Philip II's greatest generals, whose reputation for military terror in the Netherlands two decades later was to be as great as the duke of Guise's for intolerance and duplicity in the religious wars of France.11
Enmeshed with these local manifestations of the current European drama lay the Muslim forces of the Ottoman Empire. Macerata, a town that looked for trade and economic life as much to the east through its nearby outlet to the sea, the rich Adriatic harbor of Ancona, as west to the markets of Rome, was constantly aware of the dangers of Turkish attack. During the 1540s the Maceratans had to provide money to strengthen Ancona's defenses as well as their own, and in 1551, the year before Ricci was born, new threats of Turkish coastal attacks led the papal legate to order a complete listing of those in Macerata aged eighteen to forty and eligible for military service, a list from which members of the clergy were not to be excluded.12 Such musterings of Catholics against the Muslim menace call to mind the passions aroused by the Crusades four centuries before, even though in the mid-sixteenth century religious passions did not always transcend international diplomacy. Thus the French,...
