The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books

"As to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain, I should not refuse to drink the cup of suffering, were it presented to me, for the defence of the Catholic Church, for the deliverance of the Holy Land, or for the freedom of the Church, even although my desire had been to live in the flesh until the work that has been begun should be accomplished. Notwithstanding not my will, but the will of God be done! This is why I say, 'With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.'"

These words sound in our ears as if the preacher who uttered them was on the verge, if not of martyrdom, at least of death and the premature end of his work. And so he was: although there was as yet no sign in heaven or earth, or so far as appears in his own consciousness, that this end was near.

The discourse which followed was remarkable in its way, the way of the schoolmen and dialecticians so far as its form went. He began by explaining the word Passover, which in Hebrew he said meant passage – in which sense of the word he declared himself to desire to celebrate a triple Passover, corporal, spiritual, and eternal, with the Church around him.

"A corporal Passover, the passage from one place to another to deliver Jerusalem oppressed: a spiritual Passover, a passage from one situation to another for the sanctification of the universal Church; an eternal Passover, a passage from one life to another, to eternal glory." For the first, the deliverance of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre, after a solemn description of the miseries of Jerusalem enslaved, he declares that he places himself in the hands of the brethren.

"There can be no doubt that it ought to be the first object of the Church. What ought we now to do, dear brethren? I place myself in your hands. I open my heart entirely to you, I desire your advice. I am ready, if it seems good to you, to go forth on a personal mission to all the kings, princes, and peoples, or even to the Holy Land – and if I can to awaken them all with a strong voice that they may arise to fight the battle of the Lord, to avenge the insult done to Jesus Christ, who has been expelled by reason of our sins from the country and dwelling which He bought with His blood, and in which He accomplished all things necessary for our salvation. We, the priests of the Lord, ought to attach a special importance to the redemption of the Holy Land by our blood and our wealth; no one should draw back from such a great work. In former times the Lord seeing a similar humiliation of Israel saved it by means of the priests; for he delivered Jerusalem and the Temple from the infidels by Matthias the son of the priest Maccabæus."

He goes on to describe the spiritual passage by the singular emblem to be found in the prophecies of Ezekiel, of the man clothed in white linen who inscribed a Tau upon the foreheads of all those who mourned over the iniquities committed around them, the profanations of the temple and the universal idol worship – while the executors of God's will went after him, to slay the rest. There could be no doubt of the application of this image. It had already been seen in full fulfilment in the streets of Beziers, Carcassone, and Toulouse, and many of those present had taken part in the carnage. It is true that the rumour went that the men marked with a mark had not even been looked for, and one of the wonderful sayings which seem to spring up somehow in the air, at great moments, had been fathered upon a legate —Tuez les tous. Dieu reconnaîtra les siens– a phrase which, like the "Up, Guards, and at them!" of Waterloo, is said to have no historical foundation whatever. Innocent was, however, clear not only that every good Catholic should be marked with the Tau– but that the armed men whom he identifies with the priests, his own great army, seated there round him, men who had already seen the blood flow and the flames arise, should strike and spare not.

"You are commanded then to go through the city; obey him who is your supreme Pontiff, as your guide and your master – and strike by interdict, by suspension, by excommunication, by deprivation, according to the weight of the fault. But do no harm to those who bear the mark, for the Lord says: 'Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, neither the trees till we have sealed on their foreheads the servants of God.' It is said in other places, 'Let your eye spare no man, and let there be no acceptance of persons among you,' and in another passage, 'Strike in order to heal, kill in order to give life.'"

These were the Pope's sentiments, and they were those of his age; how many centuries it took to modify them we are all aware; four hundred years at least, to moderate the practical ardour of persecution – for the theory never dies. But there is at the same time something savage in the fervour of such an address to all these men of peace. It is perhaps a slight modification that like Ezekiel it is the priests themselves, the dwellers in the Temple, who fill it with false gods and abominations, that he specially threatens. There were, however, so far as appears, few priests among the slaughtered townsfolk of those unhappy cities of Provence.

The Council responded to the uncompromising directions of their head by placing among the laws of the Church many stringent ordinances against heretics; their goods were to be confiscated, they were to be turned out of their houses and possessions; every prince who refused to act against them was to be excommunicated, his people freed from their vow of allegiance. If any one ventured to preach without the permission of the Pope he also was subject to excommunication. A great many laws for the better regulation of the Church itself followed, for Innocent had always acknowledged the fact that the worldliness of the Church, and the failure of the clergy to maintain a high ideal of Christian life, was the great cause of heresy. The Council was also very distinct in refusing temporal authority to the priests. The clergy had their sphere and laymen theirs; those spheres were separate, they were inviolable each by the other. It is true that this principle was established chiefly with the intention of freeing the clergy from the necessity of answering before civil tribunals; but logically it cuts both ways. The Jews, to whom Innocent had been just and even merciful, were also dealt with and placed under new and stringent disabilities, chiefly on account, it seems, of the extortions they practised on needy Crusaders, eager at any price to procure advances for their equipment. Various doctrinal points were also decided, as well as many questions of rank and precedence in the hierarchy, and the establishment of the two new monastic orders of St. Francis and of St. Dominic. It is needless to add a list of who was excommunicated and who censured throughout the world. Among the former were the barons of Magna Charta and Louis of France, the son of Philip Augustus, who had gone to England on their call and to their relief, a movement set on foot by Innocent himself before the submission of King John. As usual, neither of them took any notice of the anathema, though other combinations shortly arose which broke their alliance.

The great event of the Council, however, was the appeal of the forfeited lords of Provence against the leaders of the late Crusade. Raymond of Toulouse, accompanied by the Counts of Foix and of Comminges, appeared before the Pontiff and the high court of the Church to make their plaint against Simon de Montfort, who had deprived all three of their lands and sovereignties. A great recrimination arose between the two sides, both so strongly represented. The dethroned princes accused their conquerors with all the vehemence of men wronged and robbed; and such a bloodstained prelate as Bishop Fulk of Toulouse was put forth as the advocate on the other side. "You are the cause of the death of a multitude of Catholic soldiers," cried the bishop, "six thousand of whom were killed at Montjoye alone." "Nay, rather," replied the Comte de Foix, "it is by your fault that Toulouse was sacked and 10,000 of the inhabitants slain." Such pleas are strange in any court of justice; they were altogether new in a Council of the Church. The princes themselves, who thus laid their wrongs before the Pope, were not proved to be heretics, or if they had ever wavered in the faith were now quite ready to obey; and Innocent himself was forced to allow that: "Since the Counts and their companions have promised at all times to submit to the Church, they cannot without injustice be despoiled of their principalities." But the utterance, it may well be understood, was weak, and choked by the impossibility of denouncing Simon de Montfort, the leader of a Crusade set on foot by the Church, the Captain of the Christian army. It might be that he had exceeded his commission, that the legates had misunderstood their instructions, and that all the leaders, both secular and spiritual, had been carried away by the horrible excitement and passion of bloodshed: but yet it was impossible to disown the Captain who had taken up this enterprise as a true son of the Church, although he had ended in the spirit (not unusual among sons of the Church) of an insatiable raider and conqueror. The love of gain had warped the noble aims even of the first Crusade: what wonder that it became a fiery thirst in the invaders of lands so rich and tempting as those of the fertile and sunny Provence. And the Pope could not pronounce against his own champion. He would fain have preserved Raymond of Toulouse and Simon de Montfort too – but that was impossible. And the Council decreed by a great majority that Raymond had been justly deprived of his lands, and that Simon, the new Count, was their rightful possessor. The defender of Innocent can only say that the Pope yielded to and sanctioned this judgment in order that the bishops of France might not be alienated and rendered indifferent to the great Crusade upon which his heart was set, which he would fain have led himself had Providence permitted it so to be.

There is a most curious postscript to this bloody and terrible history. Young Raymond of Toulouse, whose fate seemed a sad one even to the members of the Council who finally confirmed his deprivation, attracted the special regard – it is not said how, probably by some youthful grace of simplicity or gallant mien – of Innocent, who bade him take heart, and promised to give him certain lands that he might still live as a prince. "If another council should be held," said the Pope with a curious casuistry, "the pleas against Montfort may be listened to." "Holy Father," said the youth, "bear me no malice if I can win back again my principalities from the Count de Montfort, or from those others who hold them." "Whatever thou dost," said the Pope piously, "may God give thee grace to begin it well, and to finish it still better." Innocent is scarcely a man to tolerate a smile. We dare not even imagine a touch of humour in that austere countenance; but the pious hope that this fair youth might perhaps overcome his conqueror, who was the very champion and captain of the army of the Lord as directed by the Pope, is remarkable indeed.

The great event of the Council was over, the rumour of the new Crusade which the Pope desired to head himself, and for which in the meantime he was moving heaven and earth, began to stir Europe. If, perhaps, he had accomplished little hitherto of all that he had hoped, here remained a great thing which Innocent might still accomplish. He set out on a tour through the great Italian towns to rouse their enthusiasm, and, if possible, induce them, in the first place, to sacrifice their mutual animosities, and then to supply the necessary ships, and help with the necessary money for the great undertaking. The first check was received from Pisa, which would do whatever the Pope wished except forego its hatred against Genoa or give up its revenge. Innocent was in Perugia, on his way towards the north, when this news arrived to vex him: but it was not unexpected, nor was there anything in it to overwhelm his spirit. It was July, and he was safer and better on that hillside than he would have been in his house at the Lateran in the heats of summer: and an attack of fever at that season is a simple matter, which the ordinary Roman anticipates without any particular alarm. He had, we are told, a great love for oranges, and continued to eat them, notwithstanding his illness, though it is difficult to imagine what harm the oranges could do. However, the hour was come which Innocent had perhaps dimly foreseen when he rose up among all his bishops and princes in the great Lateran church, and, knowing nothing, gave forth from his high presiding chair the dying words of our Lord, "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." One wonders if his text came back to him, if he asked himself in his heart why his lips should have uttered those fateful words unawares, and if the bitterness of that withdrawal, while still full of force and life, from all the hopes and projects to which he had set his hand, was heavy upon him? He had proclaimed them in the hush and breathless silence of that splendid crowd in the ruddy days of the late autumn, St. Martin's festival at Rome: and the year had not gone its round when, in the summer weather at Perugia, he "suffered" – as he had – yet had not, perhaps foreseen.

Thus ended a life of great effort and power, a life of disappointment and failure, full of toil, full of ambition, the highest aims, and the most consistent purpose – but ending in nothing, fulfilling no lofty aim, and, except in the horrible episode of bloodshed and destruction from which his name can never be dissociated, accomplishing no change in the world which he had attempted, in every quarter, to transform or to renew. Never was so much attempted with so little result. He claimed the power to bind and loose, to set up and to pull down, to decide every disputed cause and settle every controversy. But he succeeded in doing only one good deed, which was to force the king of France to retain an unloved wife, and one ill one, to print the name of Holy Church in blood across a ruined province, to the profit of many bloody partisans, but never to his own, nor to any cause which could be considered that of justice or truth. This, people say, was the age of history in which the power of the Church was highest, and Innocent was its strongest ruler; but this was all which, with his great powers, his unyielding character and all the forces at his command, he was able to achieve. He was in his way a great man, and his purpose was never ignoble; but this was all: and history does not contain a sadder page than that which records one of the greatest of all the pontificates, and the strongest Pope that history has known.

During the whole of Innocent's Popedom he had been more or less at war with his citizens notwithstanding his success at first. Rome murmured round him never content, occasionally bursting out into fits of rage, which, if not absolute revolt, were so near it as to suggest the withdrawal of the Pope to his native place Anagni, or some other quiet residence, till the tumult calmed down. The greatest of these commotions occurred on the acquisition of certain properties in Rome, by the unpopular way of foreclosure on mortgages, by the Pope's brother Richard, against whom no doubt some story of usury or oppression was brought forth, either real or invented, to awaken the popular emotion: and in this case Innocent's withdrawal had very much the character of an escape. The Papa-Re was certainly not a popular institution in the thirteenth century. This same brother Richard had many gifts bestowed upon him to the great anger and suspicion of the people, and it was he who built, with money given him, it is said, from "the treasury of the Church," the great Torre dei Conti, which for many generations stood strong and sullen near the Baths of Titus, and within easy reach of the Lateran, "for the defence of the family," a defence for which it was not always adequate. Innocent afterwards granted a valuable fief in the Romagna to his brother, and he was generally far from unmindful of his kindred. All that his warmest defenders can say for him indeed in this respect is that he made up for his devotion to the interests of the Conti by great liberality towards Rome. On one occasion of distress and famine he fed eight thousand people daily, and at all times the poor had a right to the remnants left from his own table – which however was not perhaps any great thing as his living was of the simplest.

What was still more important, he built or perhaps rather rebuilt and enlarged, the great hospital, still one of the greatest charitable institutions of the world, of the Santo Spirito, which had been first founded several centuries before by the English king Ina for the pilgrims of his country. The Ecclesia in Saxia, probably forsaken in these days when England had become Norman, formed the germ of the great building, afterwards enlarged by various succeeding Popes. It is said now to have 1,600 beds, and to be capable, on an emergency, of accommodating almost double that number of patients, and is, or was, a sort of providence for the poor population of Rome. It was Innocent also who began the construction, or rather reconstruction, for in that case too there was an ancient building, of the Vatican, now the seat and title of the papal court – thinking it expedient that there should be a house capable of receiving the Popes near the church of St. Peter and St. Paul the tomb and shrine of the Apostles. It is not supposed that the present building retains any of the work of that early time, but Innocent must have superintended both these great edifices, and in this way, as also by many churches which he built or rebuilt, and some which he decorated with paintings and architectural ornament, he had his part in the reconstruction and embellishment of that mediæval Rome which after long decay and much neglect, and the wholesale robbery of the very stones of the older city, was already beginning to lift up its head out of the ashes of antiquity.

Thus if he took with one hand – not dishonestly, in the interest of his family, appropriating fiefs and favours which probably could not have been better bestowed, for the safety at least of the reigning Pope – he gave liberally and intelligently with the other, consulting the needs of the people, and studying their best interests. Yet he would not seem ever to have been popular. His spirit probably lacked the bonhomie which conciliates the crowd: though we are told that he loved public celebrations, and did not frown upon private gaiety. His heart, it is evident, was touched for young Raymond of Toulouse, whom he was instrumental in despoiling of his lands, but whom he blessed in his effort to despoil in his turn the orthodox and righteous spoiler. He was neither unkind, nor niggardly, nor luxurious. "The glory of his actions filled the great city and the whole world," said his epitaph. At least he had the credit of being the greatest of all the Popes, and the one under whom, as is universally allowed, the papal power attained its climax. The reader must judge how far this climax of power justified what has been said.

BOOK III.

LO POPOLO: AND THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE

CHAPTER I.

ROME IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

When the Papal Seat was transferred to Avignon, and Rome was left to its own devices and that fluctuating popular government which meant little beyond a wavering balance of power between two great families, the state of the ancient imperial city became more disorderly, tumultuous and anarchical than that of almost any other town in Italy, which is saying much. All the others had at least the traditions of an established government, or a sturdy tyranny: Rome alone had never been at peace and scarcely knew how to compose herself under any sway. She had fought her Popes, sometimes desperately, sometimes only captiously with the half-subdued rebelliousness of ill-temper, almost from the beginning of their power; and her sons had long been divided into a multiplicity of parties, each holding by one of the nobles who built their fortresses among the classic ruins, and defied the world from within the indestructible remnants of walls built by the Cæsars. One great family after another entrenched itself within those monuments of the ancient ages. The Colosseum was at one time the stronghold of the great Colonna: Stefano, the head of that name, inhabited the great building known as the Theatre of Marcellus at another period, and filled with his retainers an entire quarter. The castle of St. Angelo, with various flanking towers, was the home of the Orsini; and these two houses more or less divided the power between them, the other nobles adhering to one or the other party. Even amid the tumults of Florence there was always a shadow of a principle, a supposed or real cause in the name of which one party drove another fuori, out of the city. But in Rome even the great quarrel of Guelf and Ghibelline took an almost entirely personal character to increase the perpetual tumult. The vassals of the Pope were not on the Pope's side nor were they against him,

non furon rebelliNè fur fedeli a Dio, mà per sé foro.

The community was distracted by mere personal quarrels, by the feuds of the great houses who were their lords but only tore asunder, and neither protected nor promoted the prosperity of that greatest of Italian cities, which in its miserable incompetence and tumult was for a long time the least among them.

The anonymous historian who has left to us the story of Cola di Rienzi affords us the most lively picture of the city in which, in his terse and vivid record, there is the perpetual sound of a rushing, half-armed crowd, of blows that seem to fall at random, and trumpets that sound, and bells that ring, calling out the People – a word so much misused – upon a hundred trifling occasions, with little bloodshed one would imagine but a continual rushing to and fro and disturbance of all the ordinary habits of life. We need not enter into any discussion of who this anonymous writer was. He is the only contemporary historian of Rienzi, and his narrative has every appearance of truth. He narrates the things he saw with a straightforwardness and simplicity which are very convincing. "I will begin," he says, "with the time when these two barons (the heads of the houses of Colonna and Orsini) were made knights by the people of Rome. Yet," he adds, with an afterthought, "I will not begin with an account of that, because I was then at too tender an age to have had clear knowledge of it." Thus our historian is nothing if not an eye-witness, very keenly aware of every incident, and viewing the events, and the streams of people as they pass, with the never-failing interest of a true chronicler. We may quote the incident with which he does begin as an example of his method: his language is the Italian of Rome, a local version, yet scarcely to be called a patois: it presents little difficulty after the first moment to the moderately instructed reader, who however, I trust, will kindly understand that the eccentricities are the chronicler's and not errors of the press.

"With what new thing shall I begin? I will begin with the time of Jacopo di Saviello. Being made Senator solely by the authority of King Robert, he was driven out of the Capitol by the Syndics, who were Stefano de la Colonna, Lord of Palestrina, and Poncello, and Messer Orso, lord of the Castle of St. Angelo. These two went to the Aracœli, and ringing the bell collected the people, half cavalry and half on foot. All Rome was under arms. I recollect it well as in a dream. I was in Sta. Maria del Popolo (di lo Piubbico). And I saw the line of horsemen passing, going towards the Capitol: strongly they went and proudly. Half of them were well mounted, half were on foot. The last of them (If I recollect rightly) wore a tunic of red silk, and a cap of yellow silk on his head, and carried a bunch of keys in his hand. They passed along the road by the well where dwell the Ferrari, at the corner of the house of Paolo Jovenale. The line was long. The bell was ringing and the people arming themselves. I was in Santa Maria di lo Piubbico. To these things I put my seal (as witness). Jacopo di Saviello, Senator, was in the Capitol. He was surrounded on all sides with fortifications: but it did him no good to entrench himself, for Stefano, his uncle, went up, and Poncello the Syndic of Rome, and took him gently by the hand and set him on his horse that there might be no risk to his person. There was one who thought and said, 'Stefano, how can you bring your nephew thus to shame?' The proud answer of Stefano was: 'For two pennyworth of wax I will set him free, – but the two pence were not forthcoming."