“A bit like a tired, old beagle – one with white hair - that is smelling something foul.”
This is one of the many efforts historians have made in struggling to describe members of the Famiglia de Mugogello, the wealthy political dynasty that ruled the Spinone region for more than four centuries. Over the years, it became clear to all that the family’s inbreeding and isolation had taxed its collective countenance and capacity to reason.
Yet no one dared point out the failings in their faces and their decisions until the arrival of Angelo the First. Angelo broke the flow of defective blood lines.
He was the illegitimate son of Marco Mugogello and a beautiful servant girl from an island in the southern seas. Angelo was raised on the Mugogello estate and given access to literature, and because of the duality of his birth, he learned two languages. Yet he was relentlessly mocked by his half-sisters and half-brothers because of his straight nose, symmetrical features, smooth dark hair, glowing clear skin, and lisp-free way of talking.
“Angelo funny face,” his semi-siblings would say.
The House of Mugogello had no place for such an abnormal creature, and Angelo was sent away to military school as soon as he could lift a sword. At the academy, the boy not only excelled in military arts and leadership, he made many friends through his linguistic skills and drew admirers from within the school walls and beyond. When he graduated, Angelo was offered commissions in any district of his choosing, but he asked if he could return to his family’s hereditary estate and assume duty as the humble captain of the guards.
Again, the partly royal family ridiculed their odd relation, whose training in warfare had made him strangely useful as well as comely.
“Perhaps, I should take the guards on a training exercise in the countryside,” Angelo suggested one day. “I sense that my presence on the estate is causing my birth father discomfort.”
With the family’s approval, Angelo and his troops rode off for an excursion that lasted many weeks. Unknown to the Mugogello clan, the illegitimate one was carrying their standard and flag into the adjacent duchies and principalities where he and his men overturned statues, burned down public buildings, and bared their backsides to all they encountered.
When Angelo returned home with his men, he found the members of the sort-of-royal family cowering in the grand hall where they were being advised of a steady flow of declarations of war from their normally gracious neighbors. Seeing the commanding Angelo, sword at his side, his relations shouted with one voice that he should leave the palace and instead take up a position for its defense.
“Well, I might do that or I might just ride off forever,” Angelo said.
The Mugogello tribe gasped, snorted through their bent noses, and then one-by-one pleaded with their once mocked brother to stay.
“Maybe, for a price,” he replied setting the stage for his ascension to the head of the family and Lordship over all of Spinone.
After calling on his many military school friends, Angelo quickly routed the invaders and negotiated lasting peace agreements with rich tributes to his new administration.
He married a woman whose father had come from the south seas and whose mother was a member of another long-standing noble line. Angelo was determined to rid his realm of the debilitations of inbreeding as his highest priority, and, by decree, he made the crossing of noble families with servants from the south seas the only acceptable form of marriage and paternity in his regal house.
Within a generation, all family members bore some resemblance to Angelo and his Queen and could speak in both of the family tongues. This effect evolved as the ordained pattern took hold under Angelo’s insistence that all generations model his unambiguous definition of diversity and mixture.
The great leader was able to see his grand family vision all unfold as he lived to the age of 104, just long enough to witness the birth of his great-great-grandson and heir, Angelo V, and to overhear the royal midwife remark.
The great leader was able to see his grand family vision all unfold as he lived to the age of 104, just long enough to witness the birth of his great-great-grandson and heir, Angelo V, and to overhear the royal midwife remark.
“A bit like a tired, old beagle - one with dark hair - that is smelling something foul.”
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