iWtiij I 'II I. <' lmw:::iNTHE !rEENTH CENTURY tilii #i ft i i 111 11 imNKV DWIGHT SEDGWICK, CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 924 082 154 604 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924082154604 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY A SHORT HISTORY OF POLITICS, RELIGION, LITERATURE AND ART IN THE TIMES OF INNOCENT III ST. FRANCIS, NICCOLA PISANO GIOTTO, AND DANTE IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME I i^ya^/i'le/ S''-^-u-aA^..'€'/''i' ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY BY HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK Voi credete f OTse che siamo esperti d' esto loco ; ma noi siam peregrin, come voi siete. PuRG, II, 61-63. VOLUME I BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY eSiie Vii)att0iDe ^rti^ <[ambniise 1912 S COPYRIGHT, I9I2, BY HENRY l^WIGHT SEDGWICK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November iqis TO S. M. S. PEEFACE The thirteenth century has always held its head high among its fellows. Ernest Renan calls it "le plus grand siecle du moyen age," and John Fiske "the glorious century." Its predecessors, the eleventh and twelfth, have their devotees and rightly, for one is the morning twilight, the other the dawn, of our modern civilization ; but in the thirteenth the sun is high in heaven, Europe resounds with happy anima- tion, the day's work has begun. Each country con- tributes to the riches of the century : England brings Magna Charta, the beginnings of Parliament, Bishop Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and Simon of Montfort ; France, the cathedrals of Paris, Rheims, and Amiens, her university, her literature, her gentlemen advent- urers, and St. Louis ; the Iberian Peninsula adds the culture of Moor and Jew at Cordova and Seville, Alphonso the Wise of Castile, James of Aragon the Conqueror, and St. Dominic ; Germany, her victories over the heathen of the East, the Hanseatic towns, Walther von der Vogelweide, Albertus Magnus, Ru- dolph of Habsburg. But Italy shows more energy, more productive power, more many-sided genius than any of them; no other country can produce a list of men to match Innocent III, Frederick II, St. Fran- cis, Ezzelino da Romano, Thomas Aquinas, Niccola Pisano, Giotto, and Dante, nor matters of such world-wide concern as the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, or the Franciscan movement. VIU PKEFACE The history of Italy in this century is so crowded with affairs of moment, and with memorable men, original documents are so abundant, histories, bio- graphies, monographs are so numerous, that it is dif- ficult to present in mere outline a true picture of men and events. Lack of agreement among scholars ag- gravates this difficulty ; controversies are thick as blackberries, and prickly as their thorns. In a book such as this is, I have been obliged to state many doubtful facts as if they were free from doubt, and to omit many things of interest. The reason that there is little uniformity as to grammar and spelling in the Italian poetry that I quote is that the editors of different poets have adopted different systems, and I take the verses as I find them in print without going on a laborious quest of the original manuscripts ; in such original manuscripts I should probably find still less uni- formity. And as an excuse for the apparent patch- work of the book, I plead the variety of matters that I have put together, politics, secular and ecclesi- astical, rehgion, literature, painting, sculpture, trade guilds and other subjects not of a piece. I may add, that I have introduced, so far as I could, the person- ages of the Divina Commedia in order that the book may serve after a fashion as an historical in- troduction to Dante ; that I have laid stress on those matters that seem to me most interesting ; that where scholars are at odds I follow those whom I judge most learned or wisest ; and that I have tried to write without bias. Henry Dwight Sedgwick. New Yoek, March 13, 1912. CONTENTS I. An Introductory Chapter 1 11. Innocent III, the Priest (1160?-1216) .... 12 III. Innocent, the Preacher 24 IV. Joachim, the Prophet (1132?-1202) 36 V. Papal Jurisprudence 48 VI. Innocent, Dominus Dominantium (1198-1316) . . 60 VII. St. Francis (1182-1226) 74 VIII. The First Disciples (1209-1226) 86 IX. The Emperor Frederick II (1194^1250) .... 97 X. Gregory IX and Frederick II (1227-1230) . . 109 XI. Provencal Poetry in Italy 131 XII. The Sicilian School of Poetry (1225-1266) . . 144 XIII. The Lombard Communes 162 XIV. Bologna 182 XV. The Constitution of Bologna 194 XVI. The University of Bologna 210 XVII. On Some University Professors 227 XVIII. The Nobles of the North (1230-1243) .... 245 XIX. Early Art 268 XX. Painting and Mosaic (1200-1250) 278 XXI. The Decorative Arts (1200-1250) 289 XXII. Innocent ly (124a-1245) 302 XXIII. The End op Frederick's Life (1245-1250) . . ,315 XXIV. Gothic Architecture in Italy 338 X CONTENTS XXV. The Progress of the Franciscan Order (1226— 1247) 359 XXVI. The Disciples of Joachim (1247-1257) . . .371 XXVII. Manfred (1250-1260) 387 XXVIII. Tuscany (1200-1260) 408 XXIX. Florence 426 ILLUSTRATIONS Dante Alighieei {photogravure) From the bronze bust at Naples Frontispiece Innocent III Sacro Speco, Subiaco 12 St. Francis Sacro Speco, Subiaco 74 Gregory IX Sacro Speco, Subiaco 110 Lady Hawking Giovanni Pisano 160 Panel from Fountain at Perugia S. GiMIGNANO 174 Cathedral Modena Lanfranc 188 Garisenda and Asinelu Bologna 192 St. Paul's Cloister Rome The Vassalletti 290 San Lorenzo Rome 294 Cloister of St. John Lateran r Rome The Vassalletti 298 Baptistery Parma Benedetto Antelami 320 Basilica of St. Francis Assist 338 Lower Church Assisi 350 Church of Sant ' Antonio Padua 366 Map of Italy 440 ITALY I]^ THE THIRTEE:^fTH OENTUEY CHAPTER I AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER " Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere. " Henry IV. The history of Italy in the thirteenth century is, for us of European descent, the main current of the ■world's history and full of matters of great moment that barely allow themselves to be sketched in a short book, much less to be defined in a few open- ing sentences ; but for convenience' sake a sort of finger post may be set up to show where our way leads. We shall find at the opening of the century a strong tendency in society to become ecclesiastical, to cause church polity to take precedence of civil pol- ity, to shape conduct and interpret human experience in accordance with a religious view of life ; and then, that this tendency, embodied in two very different forms, the ecclesiastical organization and the mendi- cant orders, abruptly reaching the summit of its course, begins to weaken and fall away. We shall also see the opposition to that sacerdotal tendency; both conscious, as it was on the part of the secular order, and unconscious, as it was on the part of new interests and new ideas. And, looking at the prospect from another point of vision, we shall see the lusty 2 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY boyhood of our modern civilization, the early stir- rings of new powers, the fresh leaven of new life at work, and all the young efforts of a newer order to throw off the hindrances and restraints imposed by an older order. Ecclesiastically, it is the story of the imperial pol- ity of the Roman Church confronted by new religious thought. Politically, it is the story of the downfall of the mediseval Empire. Economically, it is the story of the struggles of agriculture, manufacture, and trade to overcome the feudal system and such politi- cal conceptions and institutions of the ancient world as had survived the feudal system. In art and in lit- erature, it is a tale of the birth of Italian genius, of its christening, as it were, amid blessings showered by Nature and the Spirit of the Roman Past, its fairy godmothers. Taken all in all, it is a tale of youth, hot and bold, overthrowing crabbed age. The old order and the new measured strength in Eng- land, France, and Germany, as well as in Italy ;»but in Italy the issue was presented most sharply, and there the new ideas bore themselves most brilliantly and won the greatest success. At this time Italy was merely a name for the Italian peninsula. There was no political unity ; even the great bond of language was imperfect, as Italian had emerged irregularly from dog Latin, and every province, almost every town, spoke its own dialect. In the valley of the river Po and its tributaries, a succession of truculent, independent cities — Pavia, Milan, Cremona, Piacenza, Bologna, and their sisters — followed one another, with no bond except their AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 3 common profession of allegiance to the Empire and such treaties as they themselves chose to make with one another. In the highlands and foothills all along under the Alps, feudal barons maintained their old dominion. The province of Tuscany was wholly dismembered : Florence, Siena, Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa, had become self-governing communes, each with its patch of subject country roundabout. In the middle of Italy were situate the provinces claimed by the Church : a strip of territory along the Mediterranean near Rome (known as St. Peter's Patrimony), the duchy of Spoleto, now the province of Umbria, and the region on the Adriatic from Ravenna to Ancona. St. Peter's Patrimony was held by title immemorial, and the other states had been bestowed on the Church by Charlemagne, by his father Pippin, and by Louis the Pious, at least so the traditions of the papal chancery said. To the south lay the Norman king- dom of southern Italy and Sicily. That kingdom acknowledged the suzerainty of the Papacy, but no imperial authority whatever; whereas the cities, as well as the feudal barons, of Tuscany and of the North fully acknowledged in theory their allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, and even the Papal States admitted a vague shadow of imperial author- ity. The Holy Roman Empire was a most singular political system. A German king, elected by Ger- man princes and prelates, acquired by such election the right to be crowned Emperor of the Roman Empire, Romanorum Imperator, semper Augustus, Mundi totius Dominus. Germany, Burgundy, and 4 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY all Italy, excepting the Norman kingdom, acknow- ledged him as monarch ; Denmark, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, recognized him as suzerain ; even the King of England acknowledged his precedence. This amazingr situation was the result of the tradition of the Roman Empire working upon the imagination of the young forces of mediaeval Europe. At the end of the twelfth century the memory of ancient Rome still bestrode the world like a Colos- sus. Across the blackness of the dark ages men discerned a vast outline of peace and order. Dimly seen and vaguely apprehended, Imperial Rome loomed up in superhuman majesty. Matched with the ranged arches of Roman government the make- shifts of feudalism were as lath and plaster. Roman law shone with the light of a golden age. Latin lit- erature looked the work of heroic beings ; Cicero's rhetoric was revered as the embodiment of human wisdom, and Virgil's verses were credited with a deeper meaning than met the ear. In short, the civilization of the ancient world was like the memory of day to sailors sailing in a starless sea. This great tradition was the bond that held the Empire together, it was the principle of life that animated and main- tained the cumbersome and ill-joined members in one body pohtic. Nobody considered the question of expediency. The Roman Empire continued to be, as the Alps continued to lift their tops skyward or the Po to seek peace with its confluents in the Adriatic. Germany derived no benefit from her milit- ary forays across the Alps, none from her precarious sovereignty in the peninsula; Italy derived none AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 6 from the spasmodic efforts of the Emperors to estab- lish their authority ; but the great Roman tradition had united them for better or worse, and no man could entertain the idea of putting them asunder. The Holy Roman Empire, however, was not the only claimant to the traditions of ancient Rome. Church and State were not then recognized as sep- arate entities. There was no definite division of so- ciety into lay and religious ; archbishops and bishops were both civil and military personages, abbots were soldiers. The Church performed great civil functions. Christendom was a unity, not by virtue of civil soci- ety, but because the new life of Christianity had been poured into the old body of the Roman Empire. The ecclesiastical constitution of society was better contrived, and closer knit, than the lay constitution. The organization of the Holy Roman Empire could not compare with the organization of the Holy Roman Church. Germany, Italy, and Burgundy recognized the Emperor as their sovereign lord, but they and all Latin Europe to boot bowed to the Pope as the head of Christendom. It was the Chris- tian religion, not civil interdependence, that held Europe together. It is no wonder that the ecclesi- astical tendency, in a society still raw and undevel- oped, became strong and high aspiring. The Roman Church was of divine origin ; there was nobody to dispute that. " Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ; . . . and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt 6 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." " Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis ; et conculabis leo- nem et draconem. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder ; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot." And Peter, thus chosen to found and maintain God's Church, had founded it, not without divine direction, in Rome. There lay his sacred bones and there stood the venerable basilica that marked their resting-place. All Chris- tendom knew that history. If the Roman conquest of the world had been so marvellous that no man could doubt that the Roman eagles had flown under divine guidance, another fact in history was no less marvellous, the conversion of the heathen Empire to Christ. Had not the military glory been a mere indirect means to this end ? Was not the universal Empire but a carefully prepared chrysalis for the universal Church? And when the wild barbarians were shouting in triumph over the prostrate rem- nants of the Roman Empire, had not the Roman Church achieved a nobler conquest over them ? To the more devout Italians there was no doubt on these matters; and their beliefs were confirmed by the few dim facts of history that raised themselves above the flood of forgotten things. When Pope Silvester cured the Emperor Constantine of leprosy and baptized him in the great porphyry font that stood in the baptistery of St. John Lateran, Con- stantine in pious gratitude had bestowed upon Sil- vester and his successors " the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places, and cities of Italy and the western regions " ; as might be seen (so men said) AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 7 in the charter preserved in the Papal Chancery. The Emperor Theodosius had bowed before the re- buke of St. Ambrose, in token of the duty of mon- archs to bow to the. commands of the clergy. The Emperor Charlemagne had received the insignia of office, yes, the imperial office itself, from Pope Leo. And Charlemagne, as well as his father, Pippin, had granted the middle provinces of Italy to the Holy See. But the devout Italian at the end of the twelfth century did not rest his arguments on human documents, even when those were charters granted by the greatest Emperors, for all that is human is susceptible of quibbling interpretation ; in the nature of things, the head of the Church is the highest authority on earth, he is God's vicegerent and his commands are the utterance of God's will. The Papacy and the Empire were rival heirs to the mighty tradition of universal empire; they could not lie down side by side in peace. The theory of the gentle-minded, that the two powers, secular and ecclesiastic, should walk hand in hand and do God's will together, could not succeed. One empire could not brook the double reign of pope and em- peror. The eleventh century witnessed the cruel struggle of Hildebrand with Henry IV, rendered dramatically memorable at Canossa; the twelfth, that between Alexander III and Frederick Bar- barossa. Those who were present at the meeting be- tween Barbarossa and Pope Alexander, under the glorious portal of St. Mark's basilica in Venice, might perhaps have supposed that the struggle be- tween the Empire and the Papacy had been settled, 8 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUKY and that the treaty which adjusted the matters in dispute — rights of the Empire, rights of the Papacy, rights of the Lombard cities, rights of the Norman Kingdom — would end all rivalries and animosities between the two, at least as far as Italy was con- cerned ; but they would have been mistaken. Frederick Barbarossa loyally obeyed the treaty he had agreed to, but he was not a man to submit lightly to defeat. He looked ahead and hoped to gain more for the Empire by diplomacy than he had lost by the sword. At that time the King of Sicily and southern Italy, The Kingdom as I shall call it following the Italian custom, was William the Good, who was childless. His aunt, Constance, the last legitimate member of the conquering Norman house, was next in succession. The Emperor proposed that his son and heir, Henry, should marry Constance. Their marriage would be of the greatest political consequence. It would not only deprive the Papacy of its strongest ally, but also by the union of The Kingdom and the Empire would enclose the Papacy within a ring of Hohenstaufen dominion, reduce it to its proper place of subordination to the Empire, and render it, as it had been in the good old days of Frederick's predecessors, a subservient bishopric. By means of a subservient Papacy the Empire would force the rebellious Lombard cities to their knees, and then it might look forward to swelling up to the fulness of Charlemagne's boundaries, or even reach out to Constantinople and beyond. King Wil- liam had been an enemy to the Empire, but he con- sented ; he probably thought that this Hohenstaufen AN INTRODUCTOEY CHAPTER 9 marriage was the best if not the only way to keep the crown in his family. Had the sturdy Pope, Alex- ander III, who for twenty years maintained the con- test against Barbarossa, been Hving, he would not have sat quietly by while a project fraught with such danger to the Papacy was being arranged; but Alexander's immediate successors were not com- petent to cope with the situation. The marriage took place, and a death grapple with the House of Hohen- staufen was the result. In 1189 Prince Henry succeeded to the throne of Sicily and southern Italy by right of his wife, Con- stance, and in the following year to the imperial dignity. He was then twenty-five years old. Of all the brilliant house of Hohenstaufen, Henry VI pos- sessed the greatest political capacity. He lacked the nobility and magnanimity of his father, and he lacked the versatility and breadth of mind that character- ized his famous son, Frederick II; but had he lived to the age that either of them did, he would have left a greater empire and a greater name than they. Cruel, thorough, inflexible in the pursuit of his ends, he united the qualities of a practical politician, a far- sighted statesman, and a competent if not a remark- able soldier. He saw with greater clearness than his father the possibilities that lay in the Sicilian marriage, and went to work patiently and skilfully to make them real. In Germany by mingling policy and force he brought to terms the rebellious Guelfs, the great rivals of the House of Hohenstaufen. Peace in Germany left his hands free to deal with his south- 10 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ern kingdom, where his title was disputed. The nobles, whose Norman blood and Italian prejudices resented a German master, had raised Tancred, a royal bastard, to the throne. Three campaigns were necessary to establish Henry's authority. After crushing the last outbreak, he erected a wall of fear round his throne. His cruelty was hideous. Some of the rebels were bhnded, some hanged, some flayed alive, some roasted over a slow fire. Henry accomplished his purpose; he was in no danger of another revolt. Securely seated on his Sicilian throne he asserted his imperial authority to the north in total disregard of papal claims. He created one of his followers Duke of Spoleto, another Duke of Romagna and the Marches ; he enfeoffed his brother, Philip Hohen- staufen, with the marquisate of Tuscany. By these measures all Italy south of the valley of the Po was reduced to obedience ; and the Lombard cities might safely be left to undo by internal dissensions all that their confederate efforts had achieved against Barbarossa. The Pope had neither spirit nor ability to stir up opposition. The time was therefore ripe for Henry to give rein to his ambitious plans for conquest of the Greek Empire. Munitions of all sorts — soldiers, sailors, transports, galleys of war — were collected in the ports of Apulia and Sicily. Henry's design was not devoid of pretexts. As King of Sicily he had inherited an enmity of long stand- ing with the Greek Empire. For a hundred years the Normans of Italy had been fighting the Greeks. They had driven the Greeks out of Apulia and AN INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 11 Calabria, and Robert Guiscard had even set a pre- cedent by crossing the Adriatic and invading Al- bania. As Emperor, Henry had additional causes for quarrel; the Greek Emperor had joined the Italian league against his father ; and also at the time of the crusades the Greeks had dealt treacher- ously with the German crusaders. Pretexts, how- ever, were of little consequence ; vaulting ambition justified itself. His plans were well laid, his hopes good.' Had he lived he would no doubt have achieved his goal ; but a sudden fever cut short his life in the full vigour of early manhood. He died at the age of thirty-two, on September 28, 1197, leav- ing his widow, Constance, and his son Frederick, not yet three years old. CHAPTER II INNOCENT III, THE PRIEST (H60?-1216) "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.'' — Matt. XVI, 18. It is at this point that the first great figure of the thirteenth century comes on the stage; on January 8, 1198, within four months from the death of Henry VI, Cardinal Lothair was elected pope and given the name Innocent III. Under him the Papacy attained the full meridian of its greatness. The ideal of the Church ruling an obedient world was never, either before or after, so nearly attained. Society appeared, at least superficially, to have received an ecclesiastical character ; Latin Christendom became a kind of ecclesiastical monarchy. The good of such a system was at its best under a high-minded pope like Innocent ; and its evils were at their least, be- cause the Church was better educated, better organ- ized, better administered, and more concerned for the good of its subjects than the secular govern- ments. Lothair came of a baronial family which possessed estates at or near Segni and Anagni. These little towns, separated by a narrow valley, lie opposite each other on the rugged slopes of the mountains of Latium, about forty miles to the southeast of Rome. Lothair's father was of Lombard descent ; his mother belonged to a Roman family of distinction. If we -3NT»or<^NTIVS fPS S^RVVSS€RVORV Dl.'DILeCTlS filfl i' SF€CV B<^ATl B^MeDICnReeyme VltA SeRVANTlBVS fn *4 INNOCENT III Saaro Speco, Subiaco INNOCENT III, THE PRIEST 13 may speculate concerning the gifts of inheritance, the son received from his father a high-spirited, im- perious temper, and from his mother those traits of political sagacity and dogged determination that characterized the great Romans of classical times. There are two rude portraits of him, done as seems likely in his lifetime, that bring out these two dis- tinct inheritances. One, a mosaic, now in the villa Catena, near Poll, depicts a fierce, keen-eyed, hawk- nosed, impetuous face, such as would befit a robber noble ; the tiara and pallium produce the effect of helmet and hauberk. One fancies that one sees in this effigy a long line of fighting Lombards, whose sole recreation was war and whose only art was sculpture of savage beasts. The other portrait is a fresco in one of the churches of the Sacro Speco at Subiaco. This portrait, painted in an archaic, rather Byzantine manner, presents the visage of a deep- revolving, circumspect Roman, tenacious of purpose, secret in counsel, used to attaining his ends by far- reaching contrivance. And yet there is a certain re- semblance between the two pictures ; both have a round, smooth, almost childish, outline for the curve of cheeks and chin, and a downward bend to the corners of the mouth. One imagines that the two artists were severally attracted by the two aspects of Innocent's character, and only agreed as to certain contours of the face. His biographer, a contemporary, describes him thus: "Pope Innocent III was a man of keen in- tellect and tenacious memory, learned in theology and in literature, eloquent with tongue and with pen, 14 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY skilled in singing and psalmody, of medium height and handsome face, of a character midway between niggardliness and prodigality, very generous in alms- giving and hospitality, but in other respects very close unless there was need of spending. He was stern with rebels and the impenitent, but kind to the lowly and the pious, strong and steadfast, high- minded and subtle, a defender of the Faith, a foe to heretics, stiff-necked in justice but Christian in mercy, meek in prosperity, patient in adversity; of a nature somewhat quick-tempered, but also quick to forgive." And another contemporary, King James of Aragon, says: "That Apostohc Pope Innocent was the best of popes. For a hundred years before the time that I am writing this book there had not been so good a pope in all the Church of Rome, for he was a good clerk in that sound learning that a pope should have; he had a good natural sense, and great knowledge of the things of this world." Even Aimeric de Pegulhan, the troubadour of Toulouse, although he was driven from his native land by the Albigensian crusades, calls him "lo bos pap' Inno- cens — the good Pope Innocent." Destined for the Church, Lothair received the best education in law and theology that Christian Europe could give. He went to school in Rome, and then attended the universities of Paris and Bologna. On his return he was soon recognized to be a master of canon law, and aided by powerful friends at the papal court took a leading part in important ecclesi- astical causes, and was made cardinal. In spite of a temporary eclipse, during which he devoted himself INNOCENT III, THE PKIEST 15 to literature, Lothair proved himself the most able man in the Roman Curia, and on the death of Celest- ine III his election was a foregone conclusion. Innocent was above all things theocratic. He be- lieved to the full in the political doctrines which the great Hildebrand, or some one connected with the Papal Chancery, had formulated a hundred years before and which the Roman Curia had accepted as logical inferences from the books of revealed religion and the facts of history : The Church of Rome was founded by God alone. The Roman pontiff alone is of right called the universal pontiff. All princes shall kiss his feet. No synod shall be deemed general without his sanction. He has the right to install a priest in any parish whatever. He has authority, if need be, to transfer bishops from one see to another. He alone has authority to depose bishops and to re- instate them. His decree may be annulled by none, but he of himself may annul the decrees of all. He may be judged by no man. The more important causes concerning any church whatever shall be re- ferred to the Apostolic See. No man shall dare con- demn any one who appeals to it. The Roman pontiff has authority to depose emperors. He has authority to release the subjects of the wicked from their alle- giance. The Roman Church has never erred, and according to Holy Writ never will err. No man shall be deemed a Catholic who is not in accord with the Roman Church. In Innocent's time such ideas were not without justification. The organization of all Europe as one civil state was an idle fancy ; the clumsy imperial 16 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY union of Germany, Burgundy, and Italy was hardly more than a name ; nothing but the mighty Roman tradition could give a decent plausibility to its bald pretense of being the continuation of the Caesarian Empire. Whatever power it had beyond the magic of a name was due to the support given by the feudal system which had sprung up on the ruins of the Carlovingian Empire, and the feudal system had long since outlived its usefulness. In Italy at its best it had been capable of but very feeble social efficiency, and now that the trading cities had grown strong and wealth had multiplied, it had degenerated into a mere network of baronial privileges that hampered merchants, artisans, and farmers. On the other hand, the spirit of nationality was in its infancy ; the authority of kings depended far more on their personal abilities and resources than on national sentiment or national wealth. Patriotism^ — the senti- ment of affection, loyalty, and dependence, towards something greater than oneself, — where it existed, was for a town, a family, an order, or a liege lord. Between the decrepit feudal system and the new order of independent nations yet to come, the Church found her opportunity. Ecclesiastical patriotism, fostered by the celibacy of the clergy, by the pride, the privileges, the wealth of the sacerdotal order, was at the flood. The Papacy stood erect on the founda- tions laid by Hildebrand and the reformers of Cluny ; it had been strengthened by St. Bernard and Alex- ander III, by martyrs and missionaries ; it was but- tressed by the monastic orders of Chartreuse and Citeaux. It had indeed, during the pontificate of INNOCENT III, THE PRIEST 17 weak popes, been brought low by the energy and vigour of Henry VI; for in that unstable and con- fused period of society a strong individuality obtained its fullest effectiveness. Now, however, the imperial office was vacant, the succession was disputed, and on the papal throne sat a man of political genius and tireless activity, who was determined to establish, so far as might be possible, an ecclesiastical mon- archy over Christendom. Innocent recognized no dividing line between re- ligion and theology, nor between theology and ec- clesiastical affairs, and none between the Church and secular politics. Religion entered into and permeated all life as wine mingles with water. The priest, the scholar, the canon lawyer were not to be set apart from the ordinary concerns of men ; rather, it be- longed to them to be in the midst of affairs and to guide. The ecclesiastical organization of society was a necessary deduction from the very fact that God had created the world, and man in His own image. The conception of the State apart from the Church was unthought of and unthinkable. The Church was a divinely appointed means to accomplish God's will on earth; the Bible was the revelation of God's will, not merely for a certain class of men, nor for certain sea- sons and places, but for all men at all times. God's will, however, was not legible to all who could read. The words of the Bible could not always be literally ac- cepted, they were fraught with inner meanings, often they were mere symbols ; and those symbols and inner meanings were to be interpreted by theologians and canonists. It was obvious that if God's will was to be 18 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY done, secular rulers, military and civil, must be guided and governed by the interpreters. Parts of the Bible, indeed, needed no interpretation, they were written large for all the world to read. Christ had established the Church ; He had set Peter at the head of it to be His representative on earth, and He gave to Pe- ter certain tremendous powers. The popes were Peter's successors, charged with his duties and armed with his prerogatives. The duty and responsibility of the Church were absolute : " Peter, feed my sheep "; and so the power of the Church must be absolute. All this was obvious ; no man could plead ignor- ance as excuse for disobedience. Such and similar ideas rendered the theory that the priesthood should guide and govern well-nigh axiomatic, at least for persons favourably disposed toward the priesthood ; more particularly as the theory was confirmed by the fact that the upper priesthood was far better educated than the common run of barons. And these ideas marked the course to be taken by the Roman pontiff and members of the Curia. As head of the ecclesiastical monarchy. Innocent, both in matters of administration and of jurisprudence, was to follow the imperial principles laid down by Hildebrand ; and in the exercise of his other function, as teacher, it was incumbent upon him to expound the fundamental constitution of the Church (which indeed was rather a political than a religious matter), and also to justify and render easy of comprehension all that the Church was and all that she did ; for example, her liturgy and ritual. By seeing what Innocent did we shall learn the po- INNOCENT III, THE PRIEST 19 litical character of the Church, and by giving heed to what Innocent said we shall better understand what the Church, as a sacerdotal institution, meant ; for he summed up in himself the master qualities of the Church. He might almost say, "L'Eglise, c'est moi, — I am the Church of Rome," so thoroughly had he absorbed its spirit, so admirably did he un- derstand and feel its aims, ambitions, and beliefs. For him, as much as for Hildebrand or for Thomas Becket, the head of the Church was the guide of con- duct, the expounder of revealed truth, the guardian of ritual, the rightful director of the conscience of Europe and, through the conscience, of the actions of Europe, a lord of lords, a king of kings. We must not hope to find in the official exposi- tion of a mighty corporate body the zeal and heat of youth; on the contrary, we shall see the delineation of ideas and practices that had become cold and formal. Innocent does not describe growth and high strivings, but a constitution, a mechanism, that is metallic and fixed. During the preceding hundred years the religious spirit of the Church had dwindled. The enthusiasm that carried Godfrey of Bouillon ■ in triumph to the Holy Sepulchre had ebbed away ; the passion of Cluny and St. Bernard had lost its fire ; the pulse of religious idealism beat all too tem- perately. The Church had drifted from her high ideal state, had let her soul starve, and was little more than an ecclesiastical organism, animated, un- consciously, instinctively, by a vast ambition to sacerdotalize the whole fabric, social and political, of European civilization. 20 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY In his treatise, De Contemptu Mundi, Innocent sets forth the old ascetic ideas which the Church, in the teeth of her ambition and her worldliness, continued to profess. He dwells upon the wretched condition of man at birth, the vile clay of which he is compounded, the baseness of our physical functions, the weariness of old age, the burden of labour, the worries of both rich and poor, the pitiful state of celibates and married men, and so on through the list of evils that old men mumbled in decadent monas- teries. " The poor," he says, " are oppressed by want, tormented by hunger, thirst, cold, and nakedness ; they degenerate, their bodily powers fail, they are scorned and confounded ! Oh, wretched plight of the beggar! If he seeks help, he is overcome by shame, if he does not, he wastes away in want, and in the end need forces him to beg. He cries out that God is unjust and has not made a fair division, he complains of his neighbour because he does not fill all his wants. He is angry, he grumbles, he curses. Hear what the Wise Man says : ' It is better to die than to be in want ' (Eccles. XL, 29), and ' The poor is hated even of his own neighbour' (Prov. xiv, 20)." Yet Innocent had hardly uttered these monastic platitudes, when a young man of Assisi discovered in Lady Poverty a glorious vision of delight, and was on his knees to her, exultantly singing songs in her honour, for she, he said, taketh her lover by the hand and leadeth him near unto God. In the same treatise there are chapters on Hell, which are little more than an exposition of pains and penalties in a penal code; no one would dream that from such INNOCENT III, THE PRIEST 21 conceptions — from this rock of criminal jurisprud- ence, smitten by the rod of genius — the poetry of the Inferno would gush forth. But between Inno- cent's dry, legal chapters, and the immortal cantos of Dante, the whole spiritual life of the thirteenth century intervenes. Innocent also wrote a treatise on The Sacred Mystery of the Altar, the special purpose of which was to explain how ecclesiastical ritual is an alle- gorical presentation of facts and doctrines contained in the Bible. The first book concerns itself with vestments and ornaments, and their meanings; the other books deal with the respective duties of officiat- ing priests, of deacons and subdeadons, and with the several observances prescribed for the celebration of the mass. It is hard for us to appreciate how com- pletely churchmen regarded the Bible as the rock on which all matters ecclesiastical were founded, and therefore I shall quote certain passages from this treatise ; for example, those that concern the read- ing of the epistle and the gospel. Without the help of Innocent's explanations most of us would discover little in the rubrics for the ordinary and canon of the mass, except a pagan or a Hebraic heritage of pontifical and religious ritual. In the celebration of the mass the epistle (which includes readings from the Old Testament) is read before the gospel. The explanation is that the epistle represents the law, which Moses gave to the Jews, and so precedes the gospel of Christ. When it is time for the gospel, the deacon carrying the gospel goes to the reading-desk followed by the subdeacon. 22 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY The deacon goes first because he is the teacher ; the subdeacon follows for the singular reason that the Lord commanded, " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn." The deacon pro- ceeds in silence because, when the Lord sent his disciples to teach, He commanded, "Ye shall salute no man"; and then he mounts the reading-desk by one stairway whereas the subdeacon goes up by the other stairway, in order to mark the difference in their ways of profiting by the reading, for the dea- con increases in knowledge by teaching and the sub- deacon by learning. But on the return from the reading-desk they both go down by the same stair- way, this time the subdeacon preceding and carrying the gospel; by his patient listening the subdeacon has deserved this reward, because, as the Lord says, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved." Or, another interpretation may be held: the deacon is the teacher, and the subdeacon is the doer, of good works, and as teaching is not sufficient without works, a joining of the two is necessary, and there- fore both go down by the stairway that the doer of works went up. Or, another explanation of the reason why the deacon goes up one way and goes down another may be held : he takes first one way and then a different way, because the apostles preached first to the Jews and afterwards to the Gentiles. In like manner the movements of the officiating priest, his sitting down and his standing up, his shifting his position at the altar, are explained as a sort of interpretation by dumb show of certain great facts and teachings in the Bible. All this, both INNOCENT III, THE PEIEST 23 ceremony and interpretation, is remote from most of us, but we cannot understand the history of this time unless we realize that for those men the Bible was the encyclopaedia of truth. Texts that we lightly pass by are for them like axioms in Euclid. Start from any one of them and follow the gleam of ortho- dox interpretation and the Christian will travel from truth to truth. To Peter Bell the yellow primrose by the river brim is nothing more than a yellow primrose, but to the eye of the poet the yellow prim- rose is radiant with the divine presence. CHAPTER III INNOCENT, THE PREACHER " Simon, son of Jonas, loveat thou me ? Feed my sheep." — John xxi, 17. In the way set forth in the foregoing chapter all the forms in the celebration of the mass are survej'ed, explained, and justified. It is obvious that the writer finds an established practice and seeks to justify it, not because there has been attack and dissent, but for the greater edification of the congregation and for the general solidification of the ecclesiastical fabric. Even for the sympathetic reader it is hard to see the close application of the texts cited; but one must remember that those generations accepted the doctrine of an allegorical interpretation of the words of God as set forth in the Vulgate, and be- lieved that every text was packed with spiritual meanings. The significance of it all for us lies in the spirit of freedom that pervades this doctrinal exe- gesis. Interpretation was free, as Innocent's treatise shows ; its freedom was secure because there were four kinds of interpretation, and of the four kinds not one had been fettered or cramped by authority. Innocent explains them in his treatise On the Four Kinds of Marriage : " Holy Writ teaches us that there are four kinds of marriage according to the four theological interpretations — historical, alle- gorical, tropological, and anagogical. The first kind INNOCENT, THE PREACHER 25 is that between a man and his wife, the second be- tween Christ and Holy Church, the third between God and the just soul, and the fourth between the Word and human nature. Of the first marriage Pro- toplasmus (Adam) said, ' Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.' Of the second marriage the angel of the Apocalypse said to John, * Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb's wife' (Rev. xxi, 9). Of the third the Lord says by the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, ' I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness and in mercies ' (Hosea ii, 19). Of the fourth marriage the Spouse says in the song of Solomon, ' Go forth, ye daughters of Zion, and behold King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals' (Song of Sol. in, 11)." These passages suffice to show how even the sacer- dotal mind, trained in canonical exegesis, could start pilgrim-like from any random text in the Bible, and, taking a stafE tipped with imagination and sandals winged with poetry, could follow what path of reason- ing it pleased. The pilgrim's road, to be sure, in the explanation of the rites of the mass, was straight because the pilgrim knew exactly the point he wished to arrive at. But the individual mind, with these four winged steeds, history, allegory, trope, and anagoge, hitched to its car, could soar aloft in the empyrean or roll over the solid earth, as it chose. It was not till rebellion frightened the ecclesiastical hierarchy with the prospect of obedience refused, reverence 26 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY denied, churches abandoned, offerings neglected, and taxes unpaid, that rigidity of belief closed in like a contracting cage upon the faithful. Innocent's attitude towards the Bible is not so exalted as that of the earlier generations of Cluny, when men accepted Holy Writ emotionally and felt a divine thrill from contact with God's revealed self, and indeed his interpretations of the holy texts are rather dry ; but even in his day the Church let fancy loose (as we shall see in the ease of Abbot Joachim of the Flower), and every man, so long as he did not infringe the accepted doctrine of the Trinity or the canonical interpretation of the creed, might take any text and discover therein the light that would illu- mine all the world for him. Imagination was not banished, poetry was not forbidden, individuality of understanding and of need was not denied and dis- owned; in fact, the Bible, as a sort of divine con- stitution, could be interpreted to meet the criticism of every new accession of knowledge and the needs of every new generation. The Church had become sacerdotal, political, worldly, but in this respect she still encouraged the liberty of the soul to interpret truth for itself. Nevertheless, in spite of this liberty, the inevitable result of the Church's policy to sacerdotalize the social fabric of Europe was to secularize the Church, to cause the Church to do as the world does, and therefore to stir up to unfriendliness and hostility those devout souls for whom the Church must stand in opposition to the world or forfeit their loyalty. But it would be unfair to assume that the Church, INNOCENT, THE PREACHER 27 though worldly-minded, was indifferent to conduct. The Church was conscious that she was the guardian of morals and was not unmindful of her task ; hut her solicitude for right conduct has been thrown into the shade by the more brilliant success of her politi- cal ambitions. The sermons that Innocent has left show how little time and effort he could spare to foster personal righteousness. " I am not suffered," he says, " to contemplate, nor even to stop to take breath ; I am so given over to others, that I am al- most taken away from myself. But that I may not, through solicitude for things temporal which in the exigency of these evil times weigh heavily upon me, altogether neglect the care of things spiritual (which is the more incumbent upon me owing to my duty of apostolic service), I have prepared certain sermons for the clergy and the people • . ." These sermons, to the modern reader, are dry as remainder biscuit, barren collections of texts strung on fantastic threads of sacerdotal doctrine; the preacher weaves the Biblical passages together, like a devout man nobly striving to make ropes of sand. His preaching shows how scholastic influences had turned the Bible from a book of emotional and ethi- cal truth into a book of scientific truth, and how a vast and minute ecclesiastical polity was hardening and drying the living tissue of the great religious organism. But, perhaps, Innocent selected for pre- servation those sermons that seemed to him most creditable, that bore the fullest testimony to his skill in gleaning difficult texts and threshing their mean- ing out. Other discourses of his would have shown, 28 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY no doubt, the same good sense in ethics that marks his pohtical actions and his judicial decisions, and perhaps a more evangelical Christianity. Of his hor- tatory manner there are some specimens in the small collection of sermons that has come down to us. On a Good Friday he preached upon the text, " Whom will ye that I release unto you? Baijabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ ? " ". . . Now, dear friends, why do I discuss Pilate's question and the Jews' answer with such great interest ? For this rea- son, that I wish to put a question like that question ; for that question was put to the Jews in order that my question should be put to Christians. But as there are among Christians both good and bad, in this sermon I do not put the question to the good, but rather to those who are not good, whom the Psalmist calls the sons of men. Therefore before them do I exhibit two things, Sin and Christ. Say, therefore, ye sons of men, which of the twain do ye choose that I shall release unto you. Sin or Christ, Good or Evil ? ... ye sons of men, why do ye hesitate, why do ye not make haste to answer ? Why, indeed, except that ye are sons of men. Are ye not those of whom it is written : ' ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame ? How long will ye love vanity and seek after leasing?'" And then the preacher goes on, in the very plainest lan- guage to attack the sins of the flesh. And, again, at the service of the dedication of an altar, Innocent preached upon the text, "Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" (1 Cor. vr, 19). " If ye desire really to take part in INNOCENT, THE PREACHER 29 this solemnity to which ye have come, ye must exert yourselves so that whatever rites are performed in the consecration of this temple shall find their ful- filment in us. ' For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are ' (1 Cor. Ill, 17). . . . Let us therefore dedicate the temple of our body in abstinence, that it may be purified from base appetites; let it be dedi- cated in continence, let it be cleansed from sins of the flesh. . . . Give heed, oh, my brethren, my children, how grievous a sin it is to violate the tem- ple of the Holy Ghost." In like manner here and there in random places he lets the glint of his spirit shine through the bushel underwhich itishid. " Alleluia ( Praise ye Jehovah)," he says, " signifies the ineffable joy of angels and men rejoicing in eternal bliss. That bliss is to praise God forever. We, poor creatures of this present life, in no wise deserve to have this unspeakable joy; but tasting it beforehand in hope, we hunger and thirst for what we have tasted until hope shall be changed into substance and faith into vision. Wherefore the Hebrew word remains not translated, so that a for- eign word, a kind of pilgrim word, may suggest rather than express that this joy does not belong to this life, but passes through it like a pilgrim." And again, in a description of the house of grace, he says : " In the house of grace faith is the founda- tion, charity the roof, obedience the door, humility the floor, justice, fortitude, prudence, and temper- ance are the four walls, and the windows are good cheer, joy, compassion, and generosity. This is the house of which God speaks : ' If a man love 30 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY me, he will keep my words : and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.' " Except for such random escapes here and there, Innocent's tenderer side has been hidden by history; and there is no trace, I believe, of any woman's in- fluence in his life, of such a friend as might have been to this solitary, sacerdotal spirit what Monica was to Augustine, what Scholastica was to Benedict, or Clare to Francis. The only demonstration of a need of feminine sympathy is a hymn to the Virgin ; and one is left to conjecture whether this demon- stration is real or conventional. Many and many a lonely priest and monk cherished in his heart of hearts a passionate devotion for this ideal of maid and mother ; and Innocent, too, very likely, felt the great emotional impulse of her worship. Into the monk's cell and into the prelate's palace she shed her light like the full-orbed moon, "pale for too much shining " ; she, the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, cold with the frosty radiance of maidenhood and yet tender with more than a mother's tenderness and compassionate with more than a mother's compassion. His poor Latin verses, like the syllables of a child, tell perhaps more than they say : Ave mundi spes Maria, Ave mitis, ave pia, Ave charitate plena, Virgo dulcis et serena. Sancta parens Jesu Christi, Electa sola fuisti. Esse mater sine viro Et lactare modo miro. Angelorum imperatrix ! INNOCENT, THE PREACHEE 31 But if the mediaeval records have buried under their ashes his tenderer side, they portray his jus- tice, his tolerance, his kindness, and his high pur- poses. He permitted the Greek schismatics in south- ern Italy to use their own rites ; he decreed that no man should try to convert Jews by force, or lay vio- lent hands on them or their goods without lawful warrant from the podesta of the town ; he strove valiantly to reform abuses. His biographer says : " Among all evils he hated venality with a special hatred, and considered deeply how he could eradi- cate it from the Roman Church. Immediately upon his consecration he issued an edict that none of the officials of the Curia should exact any fee [except the scriveners and copyists, and for them he fixed a tariff], enjoining all to perform their duties for nothing ; but that they might accept a gratuity vol- untarily offered. -He removed the doorkeepers from the notarial chambers, so that access to them should be perfectly free, and he banished the money-changers from the courts of the Lateran Palace." He built the hospital of San Spirito for sick folk and pau- pers, on the street beside the Tiber on the way to St. Peter's, and richly endowed it; but, he enter- tained no foolish notions of a virtue in indiscrimi- nate charity. He laid down four principles for alms- giving : the motive should be love, the purpose to attain Heaven, the manner cheerful, and the method "according to rules." He was simple in his personal habits, and in order to set a good example gave up his dishes of gold and silver for others of glass and wood, and exchanged his costly furs for sheepskin. 32 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUKY His virtues, however, were not primarily Christian but Roman ; he had the resolute courage and the steadfast ambition of the old Roman senators, of whom he was a worthy successor. He, too, would have bought at a high price the field of Cannae the day after the great defeat, or have sent Regulus back to captivity. And he strove to make the title, a Roman Catholic, as stout a protection as Civis Romanus in the days of Trajan : " I have vowed a vow," he writes, "from which neither life nor death can sever me, to love those who with pure heart, clean conscience, and faith unfeigned, are loyal to the Church, and to defend them against the malig- nant insolence of the oppressor with the shield of the Apostolic Protection." If Innocent tainted his religion with sacerdotal and political alloy, he also ennobled his political and sacerdotal views with a religious purpose. His inau- gural sermon makes this plain. It was preached upon the text : " Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season?" " The steward must be faithful and wise — faith- ful to give the household their portion of meat and wise to give it in due season. The lord of the par- able is God, the household is His Church. The Lord Himself established His church on the Apostolic See so that no power, however audacious, could prevail against it. ' Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church ; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' I am the steward. Oh, may I be INNOCENT, THE PREACHER 33 faithful and wise that I shall give them of the house- hold meat in due season ! Three things above all doth God require of me : Faith in my heart, Wis- dom in my actions, Meat from my lips. Without faith it is impossible to please God, and unless I am steadfast iu the Faith, how can I confirm others in the Faith ? That duty pertaineth in especial to my office ; the Lord Himself protesteth — ' Peter, I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not : and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.' There- fore the faith of the Apostolic See has never failed in any troubles, but has remained whole and un- shaken. The grant to Peter subsists in its integrity. So much is faith essential to me that although in other sins I have God only for judge, in this one sin against the Faith I may be judged by the Church. I believe, indeed ; I most surely believe in the Cath- olic creed, in confidence that my faith will save me. " So now you see who is the steward placed over the household, the vicar of Jesus Christ, the succes- sor of Peter, intermediate between God and man, this side of God, but beyond man. This steward judges all men, but is judged of none. From him to whom more is committed, more shall be exacted ; and he will have more to make him ashamed than to make him boastful. He shall render an account to God, not only of himself, but of all those that have been committed to his care; and all they that are of the household of the Lord have been committed to his care. . . . " The steward is placed over the household that he should give them meat in due season. To Peter 34 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the Lord said: 'Lovest thou me? Feed my sheep/ The steward is bound to give meat, that is, of exam- ple, of the word and of the sacrament, just as if the Lord hgd said, ' Peed with the example of conduct, with preaching the doctrine, and with the sacrament of the Lord's supper.' " And now, my brethren and my children, behold the meat of the word from the table of Holy Writ which I have set before you ; expecting from you this recompense, that without disputation ye shall lift up pure hands to the Lord and ask in prayer, believing, that even this office of Apostolic service, which is too great a burden for my weak shoulders, I shall be enabled to fill to the glory of His holy name, to the salvation of my own soul, to the advant- age of the Church Universal, and to the profit of all Christian people, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who is God over all things, blessed from everlasting to everlasting." The doctrines that God Himself had set Peter at the head of the Church, that Peter's successors had inherited his duties and powers, that they stood above all men and must judge all men were ancient tenets of the Church ; but like most political doc- trines and phrases, whether novel or familiar, they derived their importance from the character and power of the speaker. Innocent passionately desired to fulfil his duty of judging the world; and as a judge is a mere idle show unless he has power to enforce his judgments, he also passionately desired to put the Papacy in such a position that he should be able to execute his judgments. Spiritual means, it INNOCENT, THE PREACHER 35 is fair to suppose, would have been more attractive to him; and, according to modern ideas, moral sua- sion and ecclesiastical censures should have been the limit of his endeavours. But he conceived his duty difEerently. His duty as he saw it was not to coax, to argue, or to threaten, but to compel. And in order to compel the princes of the world to obey his judg- ments, he must have power ; power to enforce spirit- ual laws, power to keep the Church free from the oppression and meddlings of the world. "Ecclesiast- ical liberty," he said, " is never better taken care of than when the Roman Church has full power in things temporal as well as in things spiritual." CHAPTER IV JOACHIM, THE PEOPHET (1132P-1202) Lucemi da lato il Calabrese abate Gioaccbino, di spiiito profetico dotato. Paradiso, xii, 139-41. By my side sliiDes Abbot Joacbim of Calabria With prophetic soul endowed. Organization, system, policy are great factors in a body corporate, but they are not everything. The power that enabled Innocent to play so large a part in the affairs of Europe was not merely the organiza- tion of the Chui'ch, its policy, its jurisprudence, or its administration. The strength of the ecclesiastical system lay in the spirit within. The world was re- ligious-minded; it believed that God the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints took an active part in the concerns of men. In the general ignorance of the workings of nature, imagination had free rein; superstition abounded, but apart from the supersti- tious multitude, men of subtle intellects and high souls sought an explanation of life in religious terms, a bettering of life by religious means; they felt that by searching and endeavour they should find a way to bring all life into harmony with God's will. It was a period of restlessness and discontent. The very gains of the last hundred and fifty years, the increase of wealth, the growth of knowledge, the JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 37 addition to security o£ person and property, the greater solidity of society awakened new appetites. The hopelessness of the dark ages had gone, the glimmer of day shone in the east, and a hunger for better things had grown out of all proportion to the increase in the means of satisfaction. The con- trast between what life was and what life might be was more vivid than it ever had been, so great had hope grown. Hope bred discontent, and discontent stirred the spirit of man to speculation and strange dreams. Men took life seriously. If this was God's world, as indubitably it was, then something among men was wrong, for there was much abroad that had no smack of heaven in it. The feudal system was brutal and stupid. The Church had rotten spots ; bishops, though decked out with mitre and cope, too often were men of the world, mere soldiers and re- vellers ; priests were too often ignorant, lewd fellows, and monks good-for-nothings. The realities of heaven and hell required something different in the machin- ery of salvation. The life of the rich was easy and luxurious. To them the world was fresh and. young and existence justified itself. It was not necessary to drag in re- ligion, to explain the meaning of it all. A lovelorn young noble might say to his love, as Aucassin of Provence said to Nicolette : " What should I do in Paradise ? I don't want to go there unless I have Nicolette, my sweetest love. To Paradise no one goes but old priests, old cripples, old maimed fellows who go bobbing day and night before altars and in crypts, dressed in ragged old cloaks, all in tatters, naked. 38 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY barefoot, all sores, "who die of hunger, thirst, cold, and misery. Those go to Paradise. I have nothing to do "with them ; but to hell I prefer to go. For to hell go the fine scholar and the gallant knight, the good soldier and the free-born. I "want to go with them. There go the lovely, high-bred ladies that have two or three lovers besides their lords ; there go gold and silver, ermine and sable, there go harp- ers and poets and the kings of the "world. With those I wish to go, if only I have Nicolette, my sweetest love." But the burghers and the peasants had no such ideas. Poverty, disease, taxes, feudal exactions, ser- vile obligations, wars, freebooters, rendered such light jesting impossible. The hard lot of common men weighed upon them. Many, indeed, began to seek better things outside the Church ; but the Church was still ample enough to ofEer wide room for thirsty souls, it had not yet become the rigid system of dogmas that the Council of Trent and the stagnant policy of the Vatican have since made it. Many doctrines were still undetermined, many great wastes of theology were still to be explored and mapped. And in this perplexity, in this twilight of dogma, inquiring spirits took themselves to the book of truth. The one source of knowledge, for things human as well as of thino^s divine, knowledge both of the end and of the way, was Holy Writ. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the Bible at this time. The leaders of thought pored over its pages; the whole fabric of the Church jus- tified itself by two or three famous texts, the canon JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 39 law was built upon random verses. The great religious awakening of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was founded on the gospels. All agreed that the Bible was God's AYord, but all did not find the light in the same parts. Priests looked to the books of the law and to such verses as supported ecclesiastical pretensions ; the lowly looked to the stories about Jesus, to his sayings and his doings ; and men of solitary lives and mystical leanings found a special fascination in the Book of Eevelation. That weird book, with its wild rhetoric, its mysterious imagin- ings, and its passionate anger, touched and quick- ened the hopes and fears of a burdened and super- stitious generation. Centuries before, in the midst of the downfall of Roman civilization, St. Augustine had endeavoured to find in the visions of the Hebrew seer an explanation of the evils that surrounded him. Others had followed in Augustine's steps. They read therein how the Apostle John, the best beloved, had foreseen the dreadful happenings of the times in which they were living. In the evils that crowded round them, — war, pestilence, famine, injustice, vice, brutality, — they recognized the fulfilment of his wild words ; they felt the presence of the rider on the white horse, of the seven seals, of blazing stars, of locusts, of horned beasts, of a scarlet woman, of Antichrist himself. These apocalyptic visions fur- nished a fiery drama for the lonely souls who looked out from their monasteries in bewilderment upon the world. One of these lonely souls, in whom hope out- weighed fear, and love triumphed over hate, was Joachim, a Cistercian monk of Calabria. From the 40 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY name of the place where he founded a new monas- tic order he is called Joachim of the Flower. This longing, hungry man had undergone in his youth the great religious experience of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Bred to luxury he had begun life as a young man of fashion; he was fastidious about his clothes and dyed his hair, which was naturally black, the yellow colour affected by German dandies. But during his pilgrimage the sight of a plague at Constantinople and the holy memories in Judea wrought powerfully upon his sensitive spirit. He re- turned to Calabria, renounced the world and became a monk. The monks of Calabria inherited the Greek mo- nastic traditions of ascetism,and Joachim outdid his fellows. He wore the shabbiest clothes ; he paid no heed to what he ate and drank ; during Lent he hardly tasted food at all ; in fact, he was indifferent to hunger and thirst, heat and cold. And yet he was not a fanatic. He was very hospitable and always treated his guests with distinguished courtesy, es- pecially at table; and when he dined abroad partook of any suitable dish put before him. If a brother was ill, in spite of the rules he bade him eat and drink whatever he had a mind for. He was always kind to the sick and needy. When he was abbot, he used to wash the hospital himself and inspect the food for the patients. He was merciful to his servant, and on a journey, if he saw him tired, would make him ride the mule, turn and turn about. He was very strict in the matter of morals and in enforcing the monastic vow of obedience, as well as in rendering JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 41 obedience himself. He took a high view of the priestly office. Once in Palermo the Empress Con- stance sent for him to come to the palace. He found her in the chapel sitting in her usual seat and a little chair beside her set for him. When the Em- press said that she wished to confess, he rebuked her : " I," said he, " am now in the place of Christ, and you are in the place of the penitent Magdalene ; get down, sit on the floor, and then confess; or I will not hear you." The Empress got down on the floor and there humbly confessed her sins, to the edification of her attendants. Joachim's one great interest was to study the pro- phecies ; his one great pleasure to celebrate mass. During mass he was in a sort of ecstasy, his face (usually the colour of a dry leaf) became like that of an angel, and sometimes he wept. When he preached, the young monks gazed on his face as if he were an angel presiding over them, and when he knelt in prayer his countenance was aglow as if he looked upon Christ face to face. Even when he spent the whole night writing, he was punctual at vigils, and " I never," says Bishop Lucas, his biographer, then a young monk, "saw him go to sleep during the singing." Joachim was abbot only for a short time ; he re- signed his office in order that he might devote him- self wholly to studying the Scriptures. He applied himself principally to the Book of Revelation. Like St. Augustine in his time, Joachim was intensely conscious of the evil in the world. He had lived throusrh the strife between Frederick Barbarossa and 42 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Pope Alexander III, and through the cruel war be- tween Henry VI and the Norman claimants to the Sicilian throne; he had seen the triumph of Saladin and the fall of Jerusalem; he had witnessed the heresy that raged in southern France and was fast spreading in Italy. He had wondered in terror at malignant diseases that came no one knew how and swept away families and towns. In the midst of these ills he looked for comfort to the consecrated servants of God, and found worldliness, simony, vulgarity. The professed followers of Christ had failed : " We," he said, "who call ourselves Christians and are not." These awful perturbations in nature must have some mighty significance, the world must be approaching some tremendous crisis. The sacred book would show ; and Joachim laboured day after day, night after night, in search of a hypothesis that should reveal the truth. One can imagine this strange, sen- sitive man, who lived more in a world of fantastic im- agination than on the earth, rapt in transcendental thoughts and wrestling with the mystery of evil in prayer, in contemplation, in fasts and vigils, or seek- ing an explanation of this unintelligible world in the wild ravings of the Hebrew seer. Two texts gave him his clue ; and he followed it patiently, laboriously, in the light of St. Paul's say- ing : " The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life." One text was : " I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever " ; the other was : " I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel." This clue led him to the following hypothesis. JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 43 The three persons of the Trinity were equal, co- essential, consubstantial, co-eternal, and co-omnipo- tent. That was a fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion. From this truth it followed logic- ally that the Holy Ghost must exercise as great a share of divine and directing providence in the affairs of men as the Father or the Son. Both of them had had their dispensations. The Father had had His Gospel, the Old Testament ; the prophets and patriarchs had been His ministers. The Son had had His Gospel, the New Testament ; the priests were His ministers. Therefore the Holy Ghost, also, must have His dispensation. His gospel, and His minis- ters. Surely the " everlasting gospel " that St. John had seen in the hands of the angel — not a tang- ible book of parchment, but a spiritual emanation from the Old and New Testaments (as the Holy Ghost emanated from the Father and the Son) — was the Gospel of the Holy Ghost, and monks, holy men living far from the world in psalmody and prayer, must be His ministers. By assiduous study, by comparing text with text, by hammering, twist- ing, and rending the reluctant letter, Joachim broke through bark and resisting integument, and got at the spirit within. This ascetic visionary studied his facts with minute and loving care; and as his hy- pothesis developed, it grew clearer and clearer, until texts clustered about it with the very fulness of proof and conviction. Parallels between the Old and New Testaments, concord between remote passages, allusions plain as day when once the veil was rent, texts of all kinds, shed a flood of light on the hidden 44 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY truth, and at last the three dispensations of the three Godheads stood fully revealed. In the first the Father reigned ; He was God of law and of punishment; men were afraid before Him like slaves before their master ; old age was the type of the indwelling spirit ; the light of His reign was dim like that of the stars, and there was old Decem- ber bareness everywhere. In the second the Son reigned ; He was the God of wisdom and knowledge, in whom severity was tempered by grace ; men were no longer slaves but sons ; and youth was the type of the spirit therein ; the light of His reign was like the light of dawn, and signs of spring were abroad. In the third the Holy Ghost was to reign ; He was God of love, of grace in its plenitude ; His service was perfect freedom ; love imbued everything ; little children were the type of the spirit ; the light therein was like that of high noon, and summer splendour reigned ; it was the time of harvest, the season of lilies; holy men were aglow with divine fire, un- touched by the grossness of earth they floated in mystic contemplation like birds in air ; and all men were absorbed in love, in prayer, and psalmody. To Joachim's mystic spirit this monastic period of love, peace, and purity was almost at hand ; and the letter of Scripture — beaten, tortured, racked into confession — revealed, though not perhaps with final certainty, the time of its coming. The key to this question of time lay in the equality between the Persons of the Godhead. The temporal duration of the reign of the Father must by virtue of their equal majesty find a parallel in the reign of the Son. The JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 45 length of the first period was known. There were sixty-three generations from Adam to Christ ; there must therefore he sixty-three generations from the beginning of Christ's reign to the beginning of the reign of the Holy Ghost. But when did Christ's reign begin? Various reasons showed that it could not be calculated from the date of His birth. The problem was very difficult. It was necessary to sub- ject the letter that killeth to further torture — peine forte et dure — in order to get at the truth. The second period began, not with the life of Christ on earth, which was rather a fulfilment, a season of harvest as it were, than a commencement, but with Uzziah, King of Judea, who (as was proved by sundry analogies of more or less cogency) represented the beginning, the sowing of seed. As King Uzziah pre- ceded Christ by twenty-one generations, the second period had still forty-two more generations to ruu after the Nativity, that is, reckoning thirty years to a generation, it would end in 1260 a.d. It is wrong to render Joachim's passionate inter- pretation of a moral crisis in this bald arithmetical manner. The high-strung, emotional Calabrian flew at the sacred text like Michelangelo at a block of marble, hacking, cutting, chiselling, shaping, until he forced the cold material to set free the imprisoned truth within. He cared little or nothing about dates. and times ; his soul was swept along on the whirl of St. John's tremendous vision ; he saw again the pale horse ridden by Death with hell following after, he saw the fearful beasts and the stars of heaven falling to earth as the fig tree casts her fruit ; he felt the 46 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY mighty, mystic import of the end of one era and the beginning of another, and his soul flushed with expectation and passion. Joachim lived, while he was finishing his books, in a remote place, Pietralata, in the southern part of Calabria ; but his reputation as a holy man, as a great scholar, as a mystic, spread far and wide. This lonely, austere, loving soul was thought to have read the book of fate. Men attributed supernatural powers to him. Disciples flocked around, and he was con- strained to remove to a still more remote spot, Fiore, in Sila, a mountainous part of Calabria, and there he built a monastery. This stood high above the plain, with mountain-tops for neighbours, in perfect quiet, except for the winds in the hills and the noise of running waters rising from the valleys. By reason of his fame the monastery flourished, and became the parent of new houses ; but the cares of manage- ment, even in a monastery of his own creation, were an irksome restraint. They shut out the free air of the spirit. So he renounced Fiore and went back to his little hermitage at Pietralata, where he died (1202). Some of Joachim's doctrines were doubtless very near heresy, and indeed some of his remarks on the Trinity were condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council ; but the condemnation went no further, and seems to have been due less to his errors than to the anger of the monastic bodies which he de- nounced for their irreligious practices. In spite of this condemnation Joachim's fame grew and grew ; he became prophet, saint, worker of miracles, and his books were read far and wide. Soon all sorts of JOACHIM, THE PROPHET 47 spurious prophecies and denunciations were foisted upon him. Stories circulated among pious monks how Joachim had foretold evil of the Hohenstauf ens, and when the great struggle between the Church and Frederick grew fiercer and fiercer, men remem- bered his anticipations of Antichrist and looked forward with a wild surmise to the fatal year 1260. CHAPTER V PAPAL JURISPRUDENCE Tu reg'ere imperio populos, Romaue, memento ; Hae tibi erunt artes ; pacisque imponere moiem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos. JEneid, vi, 852-64. These arts, mark tliou, Roman, shall be thine ; To rule the nations with thy ordered law. To impose the usages of peace, the conquered spare, And overthrow the proud. Abbot Joachim represents the rebellious spirit of the anchorite, indignant with the compromises that the soul makes with the body, that the Church makes with the world. But however far he is from the typical churchman, however little he may seem to couiit in the Church's doings, nevertheless he is in the Church and of the Church ; in the crypt of her holy edifice he and his followers ceaselessly chant their litanies, and in moments of trial or penitence she listens to them. And we must not forget the strain of those litanies — Miserere Domine — while we consider the political part of the Church, her legal structure, and the methods and procedure of her supreme pontifE. It might seem, as indeed it has seemed to oppon- ents of the Papacy who approach the question either from the standpoint of the gospels or of a purely civil state, that Innocent exercised a usurped, unjus- tifiable, and irregular dominion over Europe, that his government was autocratic, the assertion of his PAPAL JUEISPEUDENCE 49 personal will. On the contrary, the principles of his authority are nearly or quite as clear and well defined as the equitable jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor. Their multiform character gives them an autocratic appearance. Where Innocent had political rights he acted like any feudal lord ; where he had ecclesiast- ical rights he acted according to canon law and the practice of the papal chancery. The political rights of the Papacy extended, in different manners and in different degrees, to the papal provinces of central Italy, to the dependent kingdom of Sicily, and to the component parts of the Holy Koman Empire ; the ecclesiastical rights of the Papacy extended through- out Christendom, and if they appear strange and exaggerated to our modern eyes, we must always re- member that at this time civil'and ecclesiastical con- ceptions of society were confusedly struggling with one another for the mastery. These ecclesiastical rights or pretensions extended to the sphere of diplomacy and politics as well as of law ; and naturally were less explicit in diplomacy and politics than they were in law. In law the juris- diction claimed by the Church was perfectly definite, although it was by no means always admitted by sec- ular governments; so definite that we are wont to think of it as we think of civil jurisdiction, as the creature of positive law, as a body of enactments by oecumenical councils and other ecclesiastical author- ities. But this way of thinking is misleading. The legal jurisdiction of the Church was, of course, laid down and defined by venerable authorities, by coun- cils, synods. Fathers, and popes; but these authorities 50 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY were mere interpreters of Holy Writ. All the canons, directly or by logical inference, depend upon the Bible ; and we shall not understand ecclesiastical pre- tensions, whether in law or diplomacy, unless we re- gard them, as the great churchmen did, as corollaries from the very words of God. The Church's legal jurisdiction may be broadly divided into two branches, one where ecclesiastical persons are concerned, the other where the subject- matter is ecclesiastical or religious; but it will be easier for us to understand the pohcy and actions of the Papacy, as well as more germane to our purpose, if we do not limit ourselves to a strictly legal point of view, but give to the term, ecclesiastical jurisdic- tion, a significance wide enough to include matters that range beyond courts of law and concern diplo- macy and politics, and classify the heads of that jurisdiction as a papal legate might propound them to a foreign court. (1) Unity of the Church : The texts that speak of a single fold with a single shepherd, and of the seamless garment of Christ, are clear. They leave no doubt upon the right to take all measures that may be necessary to maintain the unity of the Church. Heresy must be put down. No sovereign can admit the right of rebellion ; no union can permit secession ; no government can allow anarchy. The existence of the Holy Catholic Church depended on this principle. (2) Defence of the Faith : A very wide jurisdic- tion ; including the right to set on foot a crusade to the Holy Land, to legislate for Jews and Saracens, to exterminate heretics, etc. PAPAL JURISPRUDENCE 61 (3) The Clergy: The Church had sole ciimiual jurisdiction of all persons in orders, jurisdiction of their appointment or election, of their rights and duties, and of church property, excepting feuds, and even feuds when held of the Church or in frank- almoin, and also of tithes and ecclesiastical dues. The mere announcement of an intention to take orders was enough to confer jurisdiction. For in- stance, the case of Pier Bernadone may be cited. He summoned his son before a civil tribunal, the con- suls of Assisi, but Francis asserted that he was a servant of God, whereupon the consuls refused to entertain the cause and the father was obliged to betake himself to the bishop's court. (4) Investiture : Complete authority over the clergy necessarily involves the right of installing pre- lates in ecclesiastical of&ces. This right of investiture was the particular point at which the Church and the civil power had clashed under Hildebrand and Henry IV. The struggle had ended in the compromise of the Concordat of Worms (1122). A similar settle- ment was made in England under Henry I. The election of a prelate belonged to the clergy according to the canons of the Church, and the investiture to the sacred office must be made by ecclesiastical hands; but the civil power had the right to be represented at the election and also to confer upon the newly elected prelate the temporalities pertaining to his office, and those temporalities remained subject to civil obliga- tions. (5) Matrimony, Divorce, etc. : In modern times marriage is looked upon as a contract sui generis 52 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY to which the State is a party ; in the Middle Ages it was regarded as a contract to which God is a party. God joins a man and his wife (Gen. ii, 24). Marriage was a sacrament, and so within the special care of the Church, and the Church unhesitatingly asserted her jurisdiction. The most famous matri- monial cause during Innocent's pontificate was the divorce between Philip Augustus, King of France, and Ingelberg, his Danish queen. He had married her for considerations of policy ; but immediately or almost immediately after the ceremony, he took a violent dislike to her and repudiated her. At his bidding a provincial council granted a divorce, but the poor queen in her broken French appealed to the Pope — " Mala Francia, Mala Francia, Eoma, Eoma ! " — and the Pope entertained her appeal, reversed the judgment, and enforced it by the ban of the Church. As a corollary, all questions con- cerning promises to marry, right of dower, and sim- ilar matters came within ecclesiastical jurisdiction. For example, King John withheld the dower due to Queen Berengaria, widow of King Eichard. She applied to the Pope for aid ; he assumed cognizance of the matter, and in the end John was obliged to give way. (6) Wills, Intestacy, Legitimacy: As a conse- quence of the jurisdiction over marriage, ecclesiasti- cal tribunals judged questions concerning legitimacy as well as wills and rights of succession to chattels. Jurisdiction of wills began in the duty to see that the testator's bequests for the good of his soul were carried out, and of intestacy perhaps in the idea PAPAL JURISPRUDENCE 53 that the omission to have made such bequests was a sin. The Bible afforded ample justification for this jurisdiction (Num. xxvii, 6-11). (7) Widows and Orphans: These were specially under God's protection : " He doth execute the judg- ment of the fatherless and the widow " (Deut. x, 18). " Ye shall not aflBict any widow or fatherless child "(Ex. XXII, 22). "A father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows is God in His holy habita- tion " (Ps. LXVIII, 5). (8) Voios, Oaths, Pledges: A vow was calling upon God to witness. " Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain (Ex. xx, 7). . . . When thou shalt vow a vow unto the Lord thy God, thou shalt not slack to pay it ; for the Lord thy God will surely require it of thee; and it would be sin in thee. . . . That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform " (Deut. xxiii, 21, 23; Num. XXX, 2, etc.). This was the main ground for the Church's claim to guide and control crusades as well as individual crusaders, and also the ground for her claims of jurisdiction over contracts. (9) Criminal Jurisdiction over Ecclesiastical and Moral Offences: This included offences against faith, morality, or the Church, such as simony, blas- phemy, sacrilege, adultery, perjury, heresy, slander, libel, usury, and offences committed against the clergy. For simony Peter's dealing with Simon the sorcerer was ample warrant (Acts viii) ; and for usury there were many texts, " Do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again" (Luke vi, 35; Ezek. xviii, 17; Lev. XXV, 36, etc.). The presence of sin always con- 54 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY f erred jurisdiction, very much as fraud confers juris- diction on a court of chancery. (10) Universities : The Pope exercised jurisdic- tion over universities because they were managed by clerks and because theology was taught there. For instance, Innocent confirmed the rules and regula- tions of the University of Paris, and threatened to remove the University from Bologna. (11) A General Jurisdiction for the Common Welfare : This was a sort of general jurisdiction, based upon the public weal, over such matters as highways and tolls, perhaps for the sake of pilgrims coming to Rome, coinage, weights and measures, and other things, such as offences against persons under the protection of the Church. This general papal jurisdiction was perhaps a development of the early episcopal jurisdiction, which had been conferred on bishops by the Emperors when the latter pursued their policy of raising up the bishops as a counter- poise to the disobedient barons. But the papal juris- diction reached out far beyond the warrant of its origin. Innocent says in his inaugural sermon : "All they that are of the household of the Lord have been committed to my care." The text, " Peter, feed my sheep," was always on the tip of the ecclesiastical tongue. (12) International Peace: This is part of the general jurisdiction of the Pope as the executive charged to administer the precepts of the Bible, " Seek peace and pursue it " (Ps. xxxiv, 14). "And into whatsoever house ye enter first say. Peace be to this house " (Luke x, 5). " My peace I give unto you " PAPAL JURISPEUDENCE 55 (John XIV, 27). The Pope had the right to impose peace in the interest of a crusade or simply in order to prevent the evils and wickedness of war. (13) Conscience : The Papacy asserted a sort of chancery jurisdiction over all matters that touched the conscience. The Pontiff of Christendom, as the Vicar of Christ, must see that men do the things that conscience and fair dealing prescribe. This gen- erous warrant for interposition ekes out the minor departments of his jurisdiction, and is the real base for the ecclesiastical claim to control the civil power. As Innocent wrote to the King of France, the juris- diction of the Church embraced " all that pertains to the salvation or damnation of the soul." Such authority flowed from the power of the Keys. (14) Appellate Jurisdiction: The principle of unity required that all Christendom should regard Rome as the source of ecclesiastical authority. As Rome could not, owing to the size of Christendom and the nature of hierarchical organization, give direct commands to all her flock, the most ejfficient means to attain unity of law, of authority, of policy, of administration, was to secure as large an appellate jurisdiction for the Roman See as possible. Innocent was extremely jealous of this right of appeal, and fostered the practice of turning to Rome for redress in all possible cases. He looked on Papal Rome as the successor to Imperial Rome, believing that to him, as the spiritual heir of the Caesars, the Appello ad Ccesarem was addressed. The most famous case concerns the election to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury and was the cause 56 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY of the great quarrel between the Pope and King John. The case involved the respective rights o£ the monks of Canterbury, the suffragan bishops of the province, and the King, in the election of an arch- bishop. On the death of Archbishop Hubert in 1205 the monks, in great haste and secrecy and without notice to the King, elected to the vacant see one of themselves, Reginald, the sub-prior. Apprehensive of the consequences of what they had done, they swore the archbishop-elect not to divulge his election until it should be confirmed by the Pope, and sent him with a small company of monks post-haste to Rome. Hardly had he crossed the English Channel when he began boasting that he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. His brethren at home, provoked at his breach of secrecy and fearful of the King's anger, promptly asked permission of the King to elect another archbishop. The King suggested the Bishop of Norwich, one of his familiars. The monks were glad to obey ; they immediately elected and installed the bishop, and the King put him in pos- session of the temporal properties of the see. Mean- while the suffragan bishops had sent envoys to Rome to deny the validity of an election without their con- currence, claiming a right to participate, and yet ac- quiescing in the election of the Bishop of Norwich. The King also sent a committee of monks to Rome, and openly pledged himself to accept whomsoever they should elect, but he had exacted an oath from them to elect no one but the Bishop of Norwich. There were therefore two candidates before the Pope : Reginald, who rested his claim on the first PAPAL JURISPRUDENCE 57 election by the monks, and the Bishop of Norwich, who, supported by the King and the suffragan bish- ops, claimed that the first election was invalid as it had been held without the King's presence or per- mission. The Pope, in order to have full power to make an end of the whole matter and perhaps foreseeing his decision, bade the monks of Canterbury delegate their powers of election to a committee, and send that committee to Rome. He then heard the evi- dence and the arguments. He decided, first, that the election lay with the monks and that the suffragan bishops had no right to take part ; next, that both elections by the monks, that of Reginald and that of the Bishop of Norwich, were irregular and invalid. He therefore quashed what had been done, and bade the plenipotentiary committee proceed to a new election. Probably at his suggestion, or perhaps upon his insistence, the committee elected Cardinal Langton. Stephen Langton was an Englishman of noble birth and high character, learned, wise, able, reso- lute, and fearless ; in fact he was admirably fitted for the position, but the King regarded him as an enemy and his election as an infringement upon his royal rights, and refused to accept him. A bitter quarrel arose. The King drove the monks from Eng- land; the Pope laid England under an interdict. The King persecuted the Pope's partisans ; the Pope ex- communicated tbe King. The King still resisted; the Pope released the English from their allegiance, declared the throne of England vacant, and charged 58 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the King of France to execute his decree. The com- bination of enemies, Pope, rebellious barons, and foreign invaders, forced John to yield ; he knelt be- fore the papal legate, surrendered his crown and received it back as liegeman to the Pope. Next to the episode at Canossa, this royal humiliation is the most spectacular triumph of the sacerdotal order throughout the whole history of Europe. The authority of the Church was enforced by in- terdict, excommunication absolute or temporary, by penance, by degradation, by deprivation of church property, by boycott, by confiscation, by imprison- ment, by whipping, by recourse to the secular arm, by " the bread of tribulation arid the water of an- guish," and various other ecclesiastical penalties; and in the case of offending monarchs, even by deposition, as in the cases of King John, of Count Raymond of Toulouse, and of the Emperor Otto. This vast ecclesiastical jurisprudence, though it traced its origin to the revealed word of God, de- pended upon the organization of the Church. With- out that organization any claim to a universal juris- diction would have been as idle as a beggar's dreams. Christendom was divided into archiepiscopal pro- vinces, each province into dioceses, each diocese into parishes; archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons rose in an ordered hierarchy; codes of law, rules of procedure, regulated all affairs; meetings, synods, councils knit the great system together, member to member ; and over all the Pope, from the throne of Peter, held up the shield of apostolic protection and the power of the two swords, spiritual and temporal, PAPAL JURISPRUDENCE 59 the first to be wielded by him, the second at his bidding. It was this system, this imperial order, this arrangement for the due dispatch of business, this copy of ancient Roman government, that gave reason and justification to those ecclesiastical claims. And the policy that animated and shaped this vast ecclesi- astical jurisprudence was to oblige every person in orders to render absolute obedience to his superiors in office; to make every member of the Church feel that he was the object of a paternal solicitude; to encourage high and low to carry their grievances, their questions of rights and duties, of law and con- duct, to the Papal See ; to render the appeal to Rome as potent as in the days of Paul and Festus; and to make the Pope as universal a monarch as ever were the Caesars. CHAPTER VI INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM (1198-1216) " I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant.' — Jer. i, 10. The task of bringing the whole household of faith to obedience was not easy. Far and near, from the threshold of the Lateran to the Hebrides, from the Hellespont to the Pillars of Hercules, the Church's authority was flouted, her precepts disobeyed, her priests pushed aside, her property withheld. The city of Eome was in the hands of republicans and im- perialists, the Roman Campagna was divided among the Roman barons, the provinces of the Church were fiefs of German soldiers, the marquisate of Tuscany was in the hands of Philip Hohenstaufen, the late Emperor's brother. The Kingdom was usurped by German rebels. In the Empire there was a disputed succession, in France Philip Augustus was flatly contumacious, Richard of England was not as pious as he should be, the kings of Navarre, Castile, and Leon were refractory, in Constantinople the schis- matic Greeks rent the seamless garment of Christ, and in Provence the little foxes of heresy gnawed the tender vines of Holy Church. Nothing disheart- ened, Innocent girded himself for the task. The political task fell under several heads : first, control of the city of Rome; second, sovereignty in INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 61 the papal provinces ; third, expulsion of the German freebooters from The Kingdom; fourth, selection of an Emperor not inimical to the Papacy; fifth, the imposition on all western Christendom of the will of the Church. And in each several matter, as I have said, Innocent did not act arbitrarily, but either in accordance with a fixed, well-established, legal claim, or under definite principles of ecclesiastical juris- prudence that may almost be termed international law. Rome was a little shrunken city. Some thirty or forty thousand people were housed within the wide circuit of the Aurelian walls. With scanty commerce and no industries beyond those of the money-lenders, the artisans, and tradesfolk, it possessed little except its sacred basilicas and its mighty ruins. Its import- ance was due to being the seat of the Papacy and the home of the ancient Empire. Abandoned by Pope and Emperor it would have become a mere cockpit for quarrelling nobles and a lawless mob. Like other Italian cities it claimed the right to muni- cipal self-government, and owing to the discord be- tween Pope and Emperor often succeeded in enforc- ing the claim. At the time of Innocent's accession, Rome was under the rule of a senator chosen by the city and of a prefect appointed by the Emperor; all papal authority was suspended. The city, how- ever, was turbulent, tenure of office was highly in- secure, those out of power were always ready to revolt, and the Papacy lay watching its opportunity to enforce its claims to dominion. Innocent himself has stated the ground of those claims : "Constantino, 62 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the famous Emperor, after a divine revelation, was cleansed from leprosy by St. Silvester in baptism. He handed over to Silvester the city of Rome and the Senate, together with the people and dignities and all the kingdom of the West; he withdrew to Byzantium and retained for himself the kingdom of the East. Constantine, indeed, wished to confer on Silvester the crown from his own head, but Silvester, out of respect for the - priestly crown or rather out of humility, was unwilling to accept. Instead of the royal diadem the Pope wears the gold embroidered circlet. By his pontifical authority the Pope appoints patriarchs, primates, metropolitans, and prelates ; by his royal authority he appoints senators, prefects, judges, and notaries." More effective to enforce papal dominion than Constantine's charter was papal gold, great prop of the political power of the Papacy. The private estates of the Church, her feudal dependencies, the contributions of the clergy, the offerings of the faith- ful, redemptions of penance, Peter's pence, and vari- ous ecclesiastical taxes levied throughout Latin Christendom, maintained the papal purse ; and where its enemies used force, the Papacy made no scruple to defend itself with gold. In a short time Innocent succe^ed in making both senator and prefect ac- knowledge his authority, and so, but not peacefully or durably until after years of riot and disorder, re-established the papal dominion in Home. In the papal provinces — Spoleto (Umbria), Ro- magna,and the March of Ancona — Innocent adopted another method. It was one thing to buy over the INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 63 feudal nobles o£ Rome and of the Roman Campagna, and another thing to buy back whole provinces from foreign usurpers. The tradition of the Roman Curia, however, to rely on gold was strong, and at first Innocent was willing to bargain ; but he soon laid hold of a nobler weapon. Up to that time the notion of Italy as a country for Italians had not arisen in men's minds ; for centuries she had been a down- trodden partner in the strange partnership of the Holy Roman Empire, and now, split into pieces, Italy was a mere name for the peninsula. Unity was undreamt of; but there had gradually been grow- ing, in different ways, that complexity of individual peculiarities which constitute a national type. The speech of Italians had ceased to be dog Latin and was fashioning itself into the Italian language, and a national sentiment against foreigners had sprung up. "I will act," cried Innocent, " ad prof ectinn Italice," for the good of Italy; and when he smote this patriotic chord, an Italian revolt against the German tyrants answered him, and the intruders were driven out of Tuscany and the papal pro- vinces with a rush. In The Kingdom a hard fight was needed. Inno- cent acted under a double right : he was lord suzerain, and by the appointment of the Empress Constance he had become on her death guardian of Frederick II. The Germans were strongly set in town and castle, and a desperate struggle was maintained for years. One of these Teuton freebooters, when he was bid- den to obey the papal general, said that " if the Apostle Peter, sent by Christ himself, should bid 64 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY him do so, he would not obey, even were he to be damned in hell for it." In the end Innocent pre- vailed and seated his ward upon the throne. In Germany there were two claimants: Philip Hohenstaufen, the late Emperor's brother, and Otto of Brunswick, nephew of Richard Coeur de Lion, and head of the House of Guelf. Young Frederick had been elected heir to the Empire in his father's lifetime, but both Guelfs and Hohenstaufens set him aside, fearing the dangers involved in a long minority. Civil war broke out between the two claimants; England supported Otto, and France, out of enmity for England, supported Philip. Both sides sought the Pope's help. But this appeal of both parties was not, according to settled doctrines of the papal chancery, in the least necessary in order to give Innocent a right to interfere. In Rome and in the provinces included in the Carlovingian charters, the Pope had political rights and acted as a feudal lord. In The Kingdom he was both suzerain and guardian of the sovereign. In the Empire, according to the papal theory, he had political rights of a sovereign character. According to this theory, the Papacy was, in certain respects at least, the controlling power in the Empire, and especially during an interregnum. The reasons for this were plain. The Papacy had created the Holy Roman Empire, for it had taken the imperial office from the Greek line at Constantinople and trans- ferred it to Charlemagne and his successors. And before a German king could become Emperor, it was necessary that the Pope should anoint him and crown INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 65 him, as Samuel had anointed Saul and David. The power to anoint included the power to choose. Inno- cent said: "As God the creator of all things has set two great lights in the firmament of the heavens, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, so in the firmament of the Church Universal God hath set two great dignitaries, the greater to rule souls, the lesser to rule bodies. These are the papal and imperial powers. Moreover, as the moon derives its light from the sun, and in truth is less than the sun in quantity and quality as well as in place and effect, so the imperial power derives the splendour of its dignity from papal authority ; the closer it clings to that the more it shines, the further it recedes the paler it becomes." There were many texts from the Old Testament, as well as from the New, to support this doctrine ; one alone was sufficient. It was to Peter and his successors that God had said : " I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build and to plant." Therefore, when Innocent hesitated after his help was asked both by the Hohenstaufens and by the Guelfs, it was not from any doubt as to his right to interfere. The policy of Rome was to proceed judi- cially, to assume a deliberative attitude, to enter into no rash partisanship. In such cases motives are usually of a mixed character. Innocent, as lawyer, as statesman, as head of Christendom, did not wish to decide wrong, either according to the principles of ecelesiastico-political jurisprudence or according to the interests of the Church. Hostile German 66 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY poets, like Walther von der Vogelweide, or over- taxed English monks, like Matthew Paris, would have said that he was waiting to see which way the cat would jump. However that may be, he waited for three years and then announced his judgment. It must be remembered that the course of royal and imperial procedure was this : upon election by the great German nobles, the successful candidate was crowned at Aachen by the Archbishop of Co- logne, and so became " King of the Romans, always Augustus " ; he then received the iron crown of Lombardy from the Archbishop of Milan at Monza; and last, the imperial crown at Rome from the hands of the Pope in St. Peter's basilica. Here is Innocent's judgment : " In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It is the duty of the Apostolic See diligently and wisely to take counsel as to how she shall provide for the Roman Empire, since, as is well known, the Empire depends upon the Apostolic See for its very origin and for its final authority : for its very origin be- cause hy her means and for her sake the Empire was transferred from Greece, hy her means because she was the power which effected the transference, for her sake in order that the Empire might the better defend her ; for final authority, because the Emperor receives the final or ultimate laying on of hands for his promotion from the Chief Pontiff, when he is by him blessed, crowned, and invested with the Empire. . . . There are now three who have been elected king, the boy [Frederick], Philip, and Otto ; and there are three matters to be considered con- INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 67 cerning each candidate : what is lawful, what is right, and what is expedient. . . ." Innocent first enumerates the arguments in favour of little Fred- erick, including the oaths of allegiance to him taken hy the great nobles ; he then proceeds to the reasons that make it lawful, right, and expedient to oppose Frederick's election. " It is right because those oaths were wrong and his election improper; for the nobles elected a person unfit, not only for the Em- pire but for any office, a boy scarce two years old and not yet regenerate by the water of Holy Bap- tism. Such oaths could not be kept without grave hurt to the Church and detriment to Christendom; the nobles had in mind that he should reign when he came to man's estate, not when he was a baby ; they expected his father to reign during his minority. As that expectation failed, the oath fails too. He is too young to reign either in person or by attorney. And as the Church must not and will not do without an Emperor, it is plain that it is lawful to seek else- where for an Emperor. It is equally obvious that it is right to look elsewhere, for how can a baby, who needs a guardian himself, rule over an Empire? 'Woe to thee, land, when thy king is a child' (Eccles. x). That it is not expedient to have Fred- erick Emperor is plain because by this the kingdom of Sicily would be united with the Umpire and by that union the Church would be confounded." Innocent then takes up the arguments against Philip. A Hohenstaufen election would convert the Empire from its inherent character of an elective empire into an hereditary empire. Philip had been 68 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY excommunicated and his absolution had been irregu- larly conferred ; Philip had sworn allegiance to his nephew, Frederick, and having broken that oath was a perjured man ; Philip belonged to a family which persecuted the Church, witness Henry, his brother, and Frederick Barbarossa, his father ; and he him- self, as Lord of Tuscany, had despoiled the Church and arrogated to himself a claim of dominion up to the very gates of Rome. "If he did so in the dry, what would he not do in the green ? If up to now, dry and sapless, or rather as one whose harvest is in the blade, he persecuted us and the Roman Church, what would he not do — God forbid it — if he should become Emperor ? " Frederick and Philip thus disqualified. Otto was taken next into consideration. The arguments in his favour were, that he was devoted to the Church and was a scion of two families both devoted to the Church, that of Saxony and of England, and grand- son to the good and pious Emperor Lothair, also devoted to the Church. Innocent's conclusion needed little exposition. Otto was manifestly the candidate to be elected (March, 1201). Otto, however, did not receive Innocent's support for nothing. On his part he renounced imperial jurisdiction, and acknowledged papal sovereignty, over the ecclesiastical states of central Italy ; he swore to preserve The Kingdom under the suzerainty of the Church, and to do the Pope's bidding with regard to the Lombard and Tuscan leagues. Despite the efforts of the Guelfs and the Papacy, Philip's party prevailed. More and more adherents INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 69 attached themselves to him, and his ultimate tri- umph rose clearer and clearer into view. Innocent prepared to make the best of a bad situation, and was bargaining to obtain such concessions as he could from Philip, when, in the nick of time, almost as if by divine interposition, Philip was murdered (1208). Otto was then accepted by all, and Innocent triumph- antly crowned him with the imperial crown (1209). No sooner, however, was Otto crowned than, Gaelf though he was, the imperial office forced him to play the renegade. As candidate he had lavished courtesy on Innocent, and, at the Pope's demand, had reduced the imperial rights in Italy almost to a shadow ; but as Emperor it was his duty to maintain all imperial rights in their full integrity. He could not follow two mutually inconsistent policies. He clave to the Empire, broke his oaths to Innocent, laid hands on the papal provinces, and even in- vaded The Kingdom. Innocent promptly excom- municated him (1210). Encouraged by this, the Hohenstaufen party in Germany rose in revolt, de- clared Otto deposed, and chose young Frederick for Emperor. England remained faithful to the Guelf cause ; but France and the Church carried victory to the Hohenstaufens. Otto's cause was crushed on the field of Bouvines, and with the papal benedic- tion young Frederick received the German crown at Aachen. For the second time the cause that Inno- cent cursed had fallen and the cause that he blessed had prospered. Outside the limits of the Empire, Innocent ob- tained a spectacular if not a solid success. The King TO ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY of England became a tributary vassal. The King of Aragon travelled to Eome and accepted his kingdom as a papal fief. The King of France bowed his head, and at least pretended to obey the Pope's command. The kings of Portugal, Castile, and Leon were rated like schoolboys. The kings of Norway, Hungary, and Armenia were admonished and advised. In Lan- guedoc and Provence the army, blessed by the Church, trampled down heresy. In Constantinople the schismatic Greeks professed obedience to the Ro- man See. The clerks in the Roman chancery might well believe that the Church had conquered the world, that the reign of God's saints on earth had begun. No doubt this splendid ecclesiastical dominion was far from stable. Kings and princes obeyed less from wish to please the Pope than for fear of partisan ambitions, domestic rebellion, and foreign invasion ; their submission was time-serving and specious. But in those days all obedience was tribute paid to force, and kings were less obeyed than Innocent. He stands out as the greatest political figure in Europe since Charlemagne, the steward of the Lord triumphantly ruling over the household of Faith. The Fourth Lateran Council furnished a fitting cli- max to Innocent's great career. At his summons the Church militant assembled. Patriarchs, ambassadors from emperors and kings, envoys from cities and princes, scores of archbishops, hundreds of bishops and abbots, thronged to do him honour. All the notables of Christendom, near three thousand men, in solemn council assembled, approved and ratified all he had done. One thing, however, was lacking. INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 71 The Holy Land was in the hands of the infidels ; and with that thought ever uppermost, Innocent could not he at peace. Throughout his pontificate he had hoped to chase the infidels from those blessed acres. The crusade of Philip Augustus and Kich- ard Coeur de Lion (1190-92) had been fruitless. The crusade of the French and the Venetians (1204) had been worse than fruitless, for they had turned aside from their goal to conquer and divide the feeble remnant of the Greek Empire. Innocent had urged, pleaded, and threatened in vain. Now, feeling that his life could not last long, he made his last appeal. On St. Martin's Day he preached in the Lateran : " With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer" (Luke xxii, 15). "I shall not refuse, if God so disposes, to drink the cup of passion when it shall be handed to me, whether for the defence of the Catholic Faith, for the deliverance of the Holy Land, or for the liberty of the Church ; but I do desire to remain in the flesh until the work begun shall be finished. The desires of men are of two sorts, spiritual and earthly ; and I call on God to witness that I have desired to eat this passover with you, not for the good things of life, not for earthly glory, but for the good of the Church Universal, and most of all for the deliver- ance of the Holy Land. . . . Passover has two mean- ings : in Hebrew it meaneth a passing over, in Greek it meaneth to sufEer, because we must pass through suffering to glory ; for if we are to reign joint heirs with Christ we must sufEer with him. In this sense I have desired to eat the passover with you. 72 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY " Would that in this the eighteenth year of our pontificate the Temple of the Lord, our Holy Church, should be restored, and that this solemn council should be the celebration of a passover, a passing from wrongdoing to righteousness ! The passover I desire to celebrate with you is of three kinds, a bodily, a spiritual, and an eternal. A corporeal pass- over that shall be a passing over to deliverance of miserable Jerusalem ; a spiritual passover that shall be a passing over from one condition to a better for the Church Universal ; an eternal passover so that there may be a passing over from life to life in order to obtain heavenly glory. " Concerning the corporeal passover, Jerusalem cries out to us in her misery with the lamentations of Jeremiah : ' All ye that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary ! ' The holy places are dishonoured, the glorious sepulchre of the Lord has lost its glory. There where men used to worship Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, men now worship Mohammed, the son of Per- dition. Oh, what disgrace, what shame, what a con- founding, that the children of the handmaid, vile Ishmaelites, should hold our mother in bondage ! What shall we do ? Behold, dear brethren, I put my- self wholly in your hands, I open my heart, ready, if ye in council shall deem it expedient to undertake this labour myself, to go to kings, peoples, nations, yea, I would do more, if by mighty clamour I might arouse them to get up and fight God's battle, that INNOCENT, DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM 73 they may avenge the insult to the Crucified, who for our sius has been cast out of His land, His home, which He redeemed with His blood, and where He wrought the act of our salvation. " Whatever others may do, let us, priests of the Lord, specially undertake this business, with our- selves and our possessions coming up to serve the needs of the Holy Land ; so that there shall not be one but shall bear his part in this great work and shall have his share in the great reward." The council said " amen," the date was fixed, the places of assemblage were chosen ; but the ebb tide of mediaeval Christianity had already set in, there was hesitation and delay, and before prepara- tions could be made, the great Pope died (July 16, 1216). In spite of his glorious pontificate Innocent's death showed (at least to Jacques de Vitry, a pious pilgrim who came from afar to attend the papal court) " how brief and vain is the deceitful glory of the world " ; for in Perugia, where he died, his body being left in the church unwatched, as was the cus- tom, thieves got in by night, stripped off the rich garments in which it had been wrapped, and left it " almost naked and stinking." So base an outrage committed at the very moment that the Pope's strong hand was still, reveals a fatal weakness in the papal government. CHAPTER VII ST. FRANCIS (1182-1226) If thon mlt be peifect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, . . . and come and follow me. — Matt, xix, 21. In his lightness Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue To nourish some far desert. ShEIiLET. ■ Even with the spoken words o£ God as the great blocks for the base of the ecclesiastical fabric, even with the strong cement of Roman organization that bound the stones of it each to each, the vast edifice of the Universal Church, under its ill-poised roof flung heavenward by ascetic visionaries, would have fallen of its own excessive weight (as it appeared to fall in Innocent's prophetic dream), had there been nothing more than organization and the Vulgate to bear it up. The cement would have been rent asunder, the stones would have fallen in a ruined mass, had not the builders of that greatest of Gothic structures, the mediaeval Church, found a new system of vaulting ; and the new vaults lightly carried the noble edifice for further centuries. This new support came none too soon. Religious movements were stirring everywhere. Interest in life expressed itself in all sorts of religious speculation. The northern parts of Italy were honeycombed with new doctrines. Strange beliefs came down from ST. FRANCIS Sacro Speco, Subiaco ST. FRANCIS 75 France, across the Alps, along the coast, and over the sea. In Lombardy, in Tuscany, in Umbria, men and women, especially the poor, turned against the Church and her ways. Some of the more eager, of untrained mind and ardent temperament, ignorant and superstitious, seized upon wild doctrines that came from afar no one knew how. Eastern thought murmured its weird conceits ; and the poor peasants of Languedoc and Lombardy heard and believed. The very strangeness of the teachings drew them like a magnet. The more fantastic the ideas, the more they appeared true and august. /'According to these ideas, the world is a battle-^ field of two contending powers. Good and Evil ; spirit, emanating from God, struggles with matter, the soul fights against the flesh. Jehovah of the Old Testament is no other than Satan, and the Christ of the gospel is a mere phantom spirit. There is neither hell nor purgatory ; priesthood and sacraments are useless; the souls of men progress through many incarnations back to God. Matter is bad, flesh is bad, marriage is bad ; the Devil enters into all propagated life. No man sh ould beget children, nor eat meat, eggs, milk, nor anything derived from animal life. Thus these strange, austere, obstinate puritans wandered far from the path of common sense ; and their evil- thinking neighbours, suspicious of what they did not understand, whispered foul stories of their doings. ^ A second current of religious sentiment expressed itself in an evangelical movement. Once more the Bible showed its power. Men read in the gospels how Jesus and his disciples lived together in brother- 76 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY hood and poverty ; how, by example more than by precept, they taught men to love one another and to pray to God in simple words with pure hearts ; then, lifting their eyes from the sacred pages, they beheld a great political and administrative empire that called itself Christ's Church, with a monarch at the head, with great feudal lords, who called them- selves bishops and archbishops, with priests, deacons, archdeacons, subdeacons, acolytes, doorkeepers, exor- cists, and choristers, with mighty temples, withliturgy, ritual, and ceremonies, with unintelligible, muttered formulas that sounded far more like magical incanta- tions than like the Lord's Prayer. These men did not wish to leave the Church, still less to attack her, they wished to return to primitive Christianity and to bring the Church with them. Their leader, Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, read the counsel of perfection, sold his goods, distributed the money among the poor, and went about preaching the gos- pel. His disciples followed his example and meant at first to do no more, but they could not stop there. As they were not for the Church, they were obliged to be against her. They adopted religious usages of their own, they read the New Testament in the ver- nacular, they preached and they prayed, all in a very simple, evangelical fashion. They rejected the worship of saints, the doctrine of transubstantiation, tae ordination of priests, and the whole hierarchy. So they became heretics. They had originally little in common with the fanatical puritans ; but, pressed together by the persecution of the Church, the two bodies mingled in sects that differed on minor points ST. FKANCIS 77 from one another, and blended their doctrines in various heterogeneous creeds. The Church made no distinction between Cathari, Patarini, Speronists, Leonists, Arnaldists, Circumcised, or Vaudois; she branded them all as secessionists, rebels, traitors, heretics. Rage as the Church might, hers was the fault. She had not offered food meet for hungry sheep. She had neglected her duties, and worse. Her bishops were worldlings, they extorted money for perform- ing their sacred functions, they abandoned their dioceses. Mere absentee landlords, they followed their ambitions and their pleasures far from the lands that paid them rents. Priests toadied to the rich and were arrogant to the poor ; many of them were illiterate, bad in manners and worse in morals ; sometimes priests refused to bury a man unless he had bequeathed to them a third of his goods. A familiar expression of disgust at a bad action was, " I 'd rather be a priest than do that " ; and no less severe than the common tongue were high-minded prelates, like Innocent, who said himself that "the corruption of the people has its chief source in the clergy," and in a noble sermon spoke out in bold rebuke : " The lust of the flesh pertaineth to volup- tuousness, the lust of the eyes to riches, the pride of life to honours ; and by these three bonds are we clergy especially bound. The rope of voluptuousness holds us so that we do not blush to harbour openly dishonourable women in our houses, of whom lately some were arrested, taken out by force, and severely flogged, to the infamy of the clergy and the great 78 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY shame of the Church. To us the prophet spoke: 'Be ye clean that bear the vessels o£ the Lord.' Foul to speak of, most foul to do ; but it is right to speak out, that appetite to do may be cut off: there are some who worship the son of Venus by night in the bedchamber and in the morning offer up the Son of the Virgin on the altar. . . . And also the rope of avarice holds us so tight that many of us do not blush to buy and sell and practise usury ; from the prophet even unto the priest they are given to covetousness, and from the least of them even to the greatest of them, every one dealeth falsely. . . . And thirdly, the rope of pride holds us so fast that we had rather appear proud than humble, and we walk head high, with eyes uplifted and neck erect ; we make broad our phylacteries and enlarge the borders of our garments, and we love the highest places at the feasts and the chief seats in the synagogues. We dress so showily that we seem rather bridegrooms than clergymen, . . . and we are far from imitating Him who said, 'Learn of me for I am meek and lowly in spirit.' " Innocent speaks without mincing words, but he does not exaggerate. Other motives besides evangelical longings or aver- sion to the faults of the clergy were at work as well : a moral restlessness, a love of novelty, an impatience with the actual, an appetite for ,the strange and the mysterious, a superstitious inclination towards self- sacrifice, a distrust of nature. No doubt, too, local oppression by priest and prelate produced its effect. From good motives and bad, from hope and from folly, men abandoned the Church in great numbers. ST. FRANCIS 79 In all northern Italy heresy flourished. It found its opportunity in communal independence, in communal jealousy, and in the constant antagonism between the Papacy and the Empire. Verona, Rimini, Faenza, Modena, Piacenza, Treviso, Ferrara, Florence, Prato, Orvieto, Viterbo, and Assisi swarmed with noncon- formists and strange sectarians. Milan, the great city of Lombardy, was a very den of dissent. , If some pious soul ventured to expostulate with these disbe- lievers, he was mocked at in the streets. The danger to the Church was great. She had prestige, power, an organized hierarchy, feudal rights, political influence ; but this was not enough. She had more ; on the whole ska stood for common sense, for a sane view of life, in contrast with the wild, oriental ideas of the fanatical nonconformists. But even though the Church possessed these advantages, so long as the heretics had the enthusiasm born of the gospel on their side, they were too strong to be overcome. The ecclesiastical warriors from the north, who had trampled down revolt in Languedoc and Provence, or other pious folk of the same kind, might, indeed, be invited down ; but such allies did not always act in the interest of religion, they had their own axes to grind ; and as regards the situation in the valley of the Po, it was very different from what it had been in the valley of the Rhone. The Church did not wish a crusading army to destroy the Lombard cities, for they constituted her main bulwark against the Emperors. Their subjection to crusaders from the north would mean her undoing. So she could not coerce the heretics by violence. Her hands were tied. 80 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY This falling away from the Church and the dif- ficulties that hedged her about weighed heavily upon Innocent, According to the legend, he beheld in a dream the Lateran Church, the Mother Church of Christendom, tottering to a fall, and a man of mean aspect propping it up with his shoulder. There is much truth in the legend. This man of mean aspect, St. Francis, put the gospels to the service of the Church, and cut the ground from under the heretics. He was not aware of being a partisan in the struggle. The doctrines of Peter Waldo from the north and of Abbot Joachim from the south — return to prim- itive Christianity, the renunciation of riches, the distrust of learning — were spread over Italy, and Francis, like other men, breathed them in ; but he did not criticise the Church. He had no rebellious spirit in his blood ; he was humble-minded and de- voutly believed that Christ had created her. His way was not to attack evil with denunciation and invect- ive, but to plant good seed and foster it, to cause the light of the gospels to shine everywhere. The Church was not to him what she appeared to the heretics. She had come to Umbria as a giver of freedom. Her power had liberated Assisi from the German men-at-arms who had been wont to swagrgfer down from the Rocca on the hill and make free with the women in the market-place. She did not appear as a rich and arrogant corporation; she was poor; her churches were neglected, her chapels dilapidated, the cathedral of St. Rufinus was stern and simple, and the bishop was neither an absentee nor arrogant. The evangelical ideas that had blazed hot and im- ST. FRANCIS 81 patient beyond the Alps had lost their heat and impatience and had become temperate and gentle ■with the temperate gentleness of Umbria by the time Francis's father, Bernadone the merchant, had brought them back with his French wares from foreign trafficking. Or, if it was his mother that in- stilled into him his evangelical ideas, she, true to her Provengal origin, taught him gospel stories, French songs, and tales of Roland and Oliver, in all gentle- ness. Whatever the cause, evangelical religion came to Francis not as the creed of a sect, not as a criticism upon the Church, but as a great enthusiasm, in whose light the wickedness of the world seemed matter for compassion and not for punishment. He was no slave to the word of the gospel; he was filled with its spirit. To him it was still full of youth, the Testament was a New Testament, Christianity was a new order ; his hope, his faith, were young. He loved with the passion of youth, and the world looked young and beautiful. The presence of God shone roundabout him, and he longed to bring all men into the radiant fellowship of love. His was a passionate idealism, a love for Christ that made Christ's words, Christ's least actions, inefEably dear ; and so he passed into a passionate literalism, to a complete obedience, to imitation to the uttermost, to a perfect self-abne- gation. After Francis's death, legend shaped and coloured his Ufe so that it should seem a repetition of Christ's life, or even as if in Francis Christ had lived again ; and in doing so legend merely interpreted Francis's will, for, as Dante says, fu tutto serafico 82 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY in ardore, he burned with seraphic ardour to walk close to Christ. Being a lover, Francis believed that the one remedy for all evil is love. If men would only look upon Christ, they would love him too ; but in most men the power of attention is untrained, it flutters help- lessly towards the bits of glass and glittering sand that strew the paths of life. He must set their atten- tion free and turn it there where their souls might hang "like fruit"; he must take from them the coloured glass and the shining mica. Men were but children, their possessions toys. So Francis preached his doctrine of poverty, not for all men, but for those able and willing to forsake the world and dedicate themselves to God. Poverty is beautiful because she sets men free from tawdriness and tinsel; she is lovable because she puts them face to face with truth ; she is holy because she brings them near to God. Not being a great intellectual genius, not having a philosophical mind, Francis taught no new ideas, he founded no new school, no new system of life; but his radiant love so warmed the frosty earth that, as Dante says, he should rightly be called a sun. He held the cup of life to the lips of the thirsty, and many found peace for their souls. Uneducated, un- acquainted with the studies that busied the lawyers of Bologna or the clerks of Paris, ignorant of Aris- totle, of the Fathers, of comment and gloss on the New Testament, he was untramelled in his love. He believed in the creed and doctrines of the Church ; if one may call his profound indifference to creed and doctrine, belief. He lived his life of worship ST. FEANCIS 83 and service, not from hope of reward, but for the joy of doing something for the Beloved. His delight was to commune with the Beloved, to sing His praise, to minister to lepers in remembrance of Him, to give to the needy, and to gather to- gether loving souls like himself. His power lay in his transparent love. He was eloquent because he unpacked the dearest of his heart; and he founded a great order simply because he drew crowds of men to him. Everybody felt in him the breath of a new spring, the dawn of a beautiful day, the coming of peace and happiness, of a time when men should love one another, when birds and beasts and men should recognize one another as fellow creatures and friends, when poetry and music should be the familiar means of expressing familiar thoughts ; in short, Francis was the harbinger of that Kingdom of God, in which Love is an unerring light, And joy its own security. Ernest Eenan says that he did not really under- stand the story of Jesus until he went to Palestine and saw the places hallowed by His memory, the stark mountains of Judea, the flowery fields of Gal- ilee ; so it is necessary to wander about in Umbria in order to understand Francis, for the simple, inno- cent beauty of the country there is the symbol in landscape of his soul. Behind Assisi, Mount Sub- asio descends in steep, stern slopes to the plain ; the olive groves glitter and shimmer when the wind blows down from the Apennines on its way to the purple horizon ; the little rivers, the Topino and the 84 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTUEY Chiascio, flow through green fields (in Francis's time covered with forests) down to the tawny Tiber ; gentle, well-mannered peasants, with sad eyes and soft voices, drive glorious silvery oxen from furrow to furrow. And all things, in lowland and upland, on earth and in the sky, the glory of the morning, the beauty of the sunset, the bells of the churches, the larks, the swallows, and the wayside flowers, unite in an unwritten melody of good will toward men. Francis began life as a jolly careless boy, singing Provengal songs in the piazza and playing with his comrades, the gayest of the gay. The world likes to beheve that its best-beloved saints had the charm of naughtiness as well as the comeliness of virtue, and Francis's biographers say that he trod the primrose path of dalliance, as others do ; but one cannot be- lieve that he smirched his white spirit. His most intimate friends. Brothers Leo, Angelo, and Rufino, say in their life of him : " He was naturally high- bred in behaviour and in speech, and by the instincts of his heart never spoke a rude or coarse word to anyone; even when he was a jocund and riotous young man he made a resolve not to answer people who said coarse things" ; and they delight to speak of him as " the Knight of Christ." Whatever his boyhood may have been, when he reached adolescence, that period when gifted young men seek peace for their restlessness in poetry, in melancholy, in visions, various influences wrought upon him: illness, captivity (for Assisi and Peru- gia were at war for a time and he was taken prisoner). ST. FRANCIS 85 and perhaps his mother's evangelical ideas. He be- came solitary and moody. His friends bantered him : " Are you thinking of getting married, Francis ? " He replied : " You have guessed aright, for I am thinking of taking a wife nobler, richer, and more beautiful than you have ever seen." And they jeered at him, but he spoke the truth, not of himself, but under the inspiration of God, for the bride he chose was true Religion, nobler, richer, and more beautiful in her poverty than all the rest. He renounced his family, lived by himself, and worked with his own hands at restoring dilapidated chapels, and, groping, gradually found his way to his life's task of calling simple souls to forsake the world of pleasure and of vanity and to minister to the world of sorrow, illness, and sin. His doctrine of absolute poverty does not com- mend itself to the world now, nor did it then, for the world has never had faith or love. It is only the lover who rejoices in the noble freedom of poverty; and, even in this, Francis was no fanatic. The Bishop of Assisi said to him : " Your life seems to me hard and rough — to possess nothing at all in this world." Francis replied: "My lord, if we had any possessions we should need weapons for our defence. For from possessions come contention and law-suits, and by that in many ways the love of God and of one's neighbour is hindered ; so we do not wish to own anything at all in this world." CHAPTER VIII THE FIRST DISCIPLES (1209-1226) Eant sains Fransois f nt si espeiis Ce 1' amoT dou saint esperis, Ces cuera aloit en paradis Per disiiier et par amour ; Aimons sains Fransoia. When St. Francis was so rapt By the love of the Holy Ghost, His heart went into Paradise By desire and through lore ; Let us love St. Francis. One can best understand the burning fire of Francis's spirit by the illumination it cast on the countenances of his companions. These men lived in bliss, in a world of adoration, worshipping Christ in His ser- vant Francis. A story told of Brother Giles in the Fioretti, shows the feelings of the first disciples. St. Louis, King of France, was on a pilgrimage to visit sanctuaries through the world, and hearing the very great fame of the holiness of Brother Giles, who had been among the first companions of St. Francis, got it into his heart at all cost to visit him personally. And therefore he went to Perugia, where Brother Giles was then living, and coming to the door of the Brother's abode with a few companions, like a poor unknown pilgrim, asked for Brother Giles with great insistence, not saying anything to the porter as to who it was that asked for him. The porter then went and said to Brother Giles that THE FIRST DISCIPLES 87 there was a pilgrim at the door who asked for him; and it was revealed to Giles's spirit by God that it was the King of France. At that on a sudden with great fervour Giles left his cell and ran to the door; and without ashing anything, although they had never seen one another before, with very great de- voutness down on their knees, they embraced and kissed each other with as much familiarity as if for a long time they had had a great friendship be- tween them. And for all this neither spake a word to the other, but they stayed so in one another's arms with those marks of loving affection in silence. And after they had stayed for a long space in that way without saying a word together, they parted from one another, and St. Louis went away on his travels and Brother Giles went back to his cell. When the King was gone, a brother asked one of his fellows who it was that had been so enclasped with Brother Giles, and the other answered that it was King Louis of France, who had come to see Brother Giles. When he repeated this to the other brothers, they were much cast down that Brother Giles had not said a word to the King, and they complained to him and said : " Brother Giles, why were you so rude that, to such a King, who came from France in order to see you and to hear a good word from you, you did not say a single thing ? " Brother Giles answered : " Dear brothers, do not marvel at this, that neither I to him, nor he to me, could utter a word, because as soon as we clasped one another in our arms the light of divine wisdom revealed and made manifest his heart to me and my 88 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY teart to him, and so, looking into one another's hearts by this divine working, we knew what I wished to say to him and what he wished to say to me much better than if we had spoken to one another with our lips, and with much greater comfort ; and if we had wished to express by voice what we felt in our hearts, owing to the defect of human speech, which cannot clearly express the mysterious secrets of God, it would rather have been a discomfort than a com- fort ; and so, know for sure that the King went away wonderfully comforted." After Francis had heard the divine call to live in and yet not of the world, and had gathered his lit- tle band about him, — Bernard^ Peter, Giles, Sab- batinus, John, Philip, Angelo, and others, — he felt that the time had come to receive ecclesiastical ap- probation. There were so many irregular movements abroad that he and his friends might well be uneasy lest they fall under a suspicion of indifference to the Church, or worse. Therefore they journeyed to Rome and asked for approval of their vows of pov- erty and their purpose to preach. The Bishop of Assisi introduced them to a cardinal, and the car- dinal undertook to speak on their behalf to the Pope. " I have found," said he, " a most perfect man who wishes to live according to the Holy Gospel and to observe evangelical perfection in all things ; I be- lieve that by him the Lord purposes to reform the Holy Church throughout all the world." Innocent hesitated. His predecessors had approved Peter Wal- do's vow of poverty ; but they had refused a license for preaching, and evidently they had done well. THE FIRST DISCIPLES 89 They had approved the order founded hy Joachim, but Joachim, though a good man, a great Biblical scholar and perhaps a prophet, had not turned out very orthodox. Innocent himself had given a rule to the "Humble Men "which sanctioned poverty and preaching, and likewise a similar rule to the " Poor Catholics," fpr he saw that the Church must make use of weapons like those that had been so successfully used against her. But this was danger- ous ground, wariness was very necessary. He tried to compromise, and suggested that Francis should join some order already established, but Francis affirmed that he had received a mission from Christ for this particular life and not for another. The Pope proceeded cautiously ; an idealist himself, he saw the spiritual power in the insignificant-looking man before him and he wished to secure that power for the Church, but he also wished to run no risks. Perhaps a nobler motive governed him : " Go," he said to Francis, "and pray God to reveal to you if what you ask proceeds from His will, so that we may know the Lord's will and grant your request." It was then, according to the story, that Innocent dreamed his dream of Francis propping up the fall- ing chiu:ch. By the dream, by the friendly cardinal, or more likely by Francis's spirit, he was persuaded. " Go, Brethren," he said ; " God be with you ; preach repentance to all as He shall see fit to inspire you. And when Almighty God shall make you multiply in numbers and in grace, come back to us and we will entrust you with greater things." Nevertheless, the wind of the spirit could not be allowed to blow 90 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY ■where it listed, its business was to belly out the sails o£ St. Peter's bark ; the tonsure was imposed on the friars as a badge of ecclesiastical obedience, and a protector at the Roman Curia was assigned to them who should see that they did not stray from the strait path (1210). In this way the Franciscan Order began, with its founder as the first minister general. From this beginning the Order rapidly spread and multiplied. Women, too, impelled by the same spirit, cut off their hair, put on the religious dress untouched by the dyer's hands, bade the world farewell, and fol- lowed the lead of St. Clare. Others still — fathers, mothers, breadwinners, high and low, whose duties kept them in the world — were swept along by the rushing enthusiasm, and banded together in the third branch of the holy Order. Not content with preaching in the cities and villages of Italy, the friars swarmed to foreign lands. Some went to France, Germany, England, Hungary, and others oversea to convert the infidels in Spain and Syria. Francis's passion inspired all the brethren. "Let us all with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our thoughts, with all our strength, with all our mind, with all our vigour, with all our power, with all our affection, with all our bowels, with all our desires, with all our wills, love the Lord God, who has given us all His body, all His soul, all His life, and gives them still to us all every day. Let us desire no- thing else, wish for nothing else, let nothing else please us or have any attraction for us, except the Creator, the Redeemer, the Saviour, the one and true God." THE FIEST DISCIPLES 91 Success, however, brought the seeds of evil with it. It could not be otherwise. While the band was small, the brethren warmed themselves at the fire of their master's love ; they were content to beg day by day their daily bread, and let to-morrow take heed for to-morrow's needs; they were free and independent. When they became numerous, when their members were reckoned by hundreds and thou- sands, their monasteries by scores, when they had parcelled Europe into provinces, the Order necessa- rily became so changed in degree as to be different in kind. The first disciples were all zeal, enthusiasm, and devotion, all imbued with their founder's spirit; but afterwards men of all kinds flocked in — shallow men moved by the crackle of their own passing emo- tions, worldlings and ambitious men self-forgetful for the moment only, insignificant men swept up on the great wave of hope. These later comers were ennobled during a month, two months, or perhaps three ; for the moment a hush came over their triv- ial lives, and they breathed the air of the mountain- tops, but then the feeble zeal died down, and they became once more their common selves, frocked, ton- sured and girt with cords, but with the old appe- tites in their bellies and their souls again set on the things of this world. Francis might have anticipated this danger, he might have seen that his rule was for a chosen few, not for the many; but, being a lover, he hoped all things and believed all things. After Francis's death the inner history of the Order is the struggle between the enthusiasts and the worldly-minded, or, if you will, between the 92 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY fanatics and the practical men. The Church did not hold her hands off. She had her traditions, she had her own long worked at and hard achieved stability, she had outlived many passionate outbursts of re- nunciation, she was skeptical of dreams, and looked upon the doctrine of absolute poverty as moonshine. In aln^ost all things she had learned to temporize with the world J and, at the same time, she fully be- lieved in herself and she was conscious of her own high aims. She saw that the Franciscan movement was a great spiritual force ; and she proposed to make it serve her, for she had great need of service. Little by little she assumed control. Even in Francis's lifetime the changes in the Order began. Obviously a vast monastic order with provincial generals, with missions far and wide, needed at its head a man of administrative ability; a poet, a dreamer, a lover can inspire men with enthusiasm, but he does not know how to govern. Francis perceived this, and ap- pointed, first, Peter of Catania, and next, the cele- brated Elias of Cortona, to be acting minister gen- eral in his stead. But a change of minister general, a more meth- odical administration in the affairs of the Order could not avail against the assaults of the world. The three points of attack were the three human instincts — for privileges, for learning, and for pos- sessions. Francis himself, the Knight of Christ, rushed foremost to the defence. Once some of the brethren expressed a wish for a special privilege from the Pope to preach without episcopal license, for the bishops sometimes refused it or kept the friars THE FIRST DISCIPLES 93 idly waiting for days. Francis rebuked them with great indignation : " You, Brothers Minor, do not know the will of God and you do not let me convert the whole world according to God's will ; for I wish to convert the bishops by humility towards them, and when they see our holy life and our humility towards theiji, they will invite you to preach and to convert the people, and they will bid them attend the preach- ing — better than your privileges that would lead you to vainglory. If you were free from greed, — if you induced the people to render to the Church all her dues, then the prelates would invite you to hear confession of their people — though you need not vex yourselves about that, for if the people were converted they would soon find confessors. For my part, I want this privilege from God, that I never have any privilege from man. My desire is to do reverence to all, and in obedience to our holy rule convert the whole world more by example than by words." On another occasion, at a meeting of the chapter general at Santa Maria of the Portiuncula, where five thousand brethren were assembled, some of the scholarly and mundane friars went to Cardinal Ugo- lino and asked him to persuade Francis to take counsel of the learned brothers and to be guided sometimes by them, and they cited the rules of St. Benedict, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard. "When the cardinal had repeated. all this to Francis as a sort of admonition, Francis took him by the hand and led him to the brethren assembled in chapter, and cried out passionately by the power of the Holy 94 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Ghost : " My brethren, my brethren, the Lord has called me to follow the way of simplicity and hu- mility ; verily He points out the way for me and for those who wish to do as I do. And therefore I don't wish you to name to me any other rule, not St. Benedict's, nor St. Augustine's, nor St. Bernard's, nor any way or manner of living except that which God in His mercy has pointed out and given to me. For God said to me that he wished me to be a new covenant in this world ; and He did not wish to guide us by any knowledge except by that. But by your learning and your knowledge God will confound you, and I trust in God's ministering devils, that He will punish you by them, so that you shall re- turn to your post in shame, willing or unwilling." In the matter of property, too, Francis never veered from his earliest purpose. To a questioner he answered : "I tell you, brother, this both was and is my first intention and my final will (if the brethren will hearken to me), that no brother should possess aught except his frock, as the rule allows, with gir- dle and drawers." As for their habitation, he said: " Let them have little huts out of clay and boards, and little cells in which the brothers can pray or work for the sake of greater propriety and to avoid illness. And they shall have little churches (they must not have large churches made for the sake of preaching to the people or for any other pretext), for so there is greater humility, and it sets a better example to go to other churches to preach. Because if at any time prelates or clergy, religious or secular, come to our abodes, the poor huts, the little cells, THE FIRST DISCIPLES 95 and the small churches will preach to them, and they ■will be more edified by these than by any words." And in every way Francis (unless indeed it is a negation of reason to follow the divine call to one's own worldly abasement) followed his ideal with rea- sonableness. Especially was he on his guard against creating a hive of drones. In the solemn clauses of his testament he says : " I used to work with my hands and I wish to continue to do so, and I want all the other brothers to work at some honourable trade. Those who have none should learn one, not for the sake of getting pay for their work, but in order to set a good example and to avoid idleness." But in spite of his example and his efforts, in spite of his passionate exhortations, Francis saw the glorious vision, once so clear and definite, of a band of pure-hearted, high-souled, self-consecrated men, joyously working together to establish God's king- dom on earth, fade before his eyes ; yet even in this he had the holy joy of sharing his master's cup: " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " In the course of nature ideal hopes share the fate of transitory beauty that must die, but there is some- thing tragic beyond ordinary measure in this poet's powerlessness to give permanence to his beautiful dream, as in the impotence of a mother to save the life of her only child. Francis yearned over his young ideal dream, but even his passion could not save it. Nevertheless Francis's boyish gayety of spirit never wholly left him ; on the very day of his death, as his poor, starved, emaciated body lay on its pallet, he admitted " that he had greatly sinned against brother 96 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ass." And then, with great joy o£ body and mind, as his friends say, he stretched his hands towards God and said, " Welcome, Sister Death," and passed from the shipwreck of this world to God. His true disciples maintained his cause and fought hard against the rising tide of worldliness ; but per- haps they, too, were partly to blame, for they forgot the saying of their master's Master : " My kingdom is not of this world." CHAPTER IX THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II (1194-1250) Whatever in those climes he found Irregular in sight or sound Did to his mind impart A kindred impulse, seem'd allied To his own powers, and justified The workings of his heart. WOKDSWOBTH. Qua entro 6 lo secondo Federioo. Inferno, x, 119. Here within is the Second Frederick. Ik that aspect of society which the preceding chap- ters dwell upon, the foundation on which society stands is the Bible, and Innocent, Joachim, and Francis, priest, prophet, and saint, represent three constituent parts of it, — the Law, the Apocalypse, the Gospels, — and these three types (if I may speak generally) are severally affected each by its own part only and are blind to the others ; but society at large was affected mainly by the Bible as a whole. It of- fered a common spiritual country, a common patriot- ism of the soul to all Christian men. It was the one great common possession that united the Christian world. The Bible impressed itself with authority, for it contained the truth ; and truth demands not reason, not discussion, not the free play of a mind that goes round and round an hypothesis, not ex- amination and criticism, but obedience. The Bible was the basis of Christianity ; and Christianity pro- 98 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY fessed to look upon life as a short stretch of road through a vale of tears with an everlasting heaven or hell at the end of it. The Bible stood over against the world; it was the witness to the divine constitu- tion of the Church, whose sacraments alone could open the door to salvation. To the devoutly ortho- dox, to hermits on mountain-tops, to elderly monks in comfortable monasteries, to bishops when in the pulpit, the world swarmed with temptations. Pleas- ure, beauty, charm, gayety, knowledge, riches, and, above all, woman, were so many snares to catch the unwary. In short, a man's duty was to kneel before the Bible, to accept the theological explanation of the universe, to shun worldly pleasures and intel- lectual curiosity, to honour those by whose hands the sacraments of salvation were administered, and to render obedience to the Church. Eternally opposed to this Christian theory is what we loosely are wont to call the epicurean or pagan conception of life. The piety of an epicurean pa- gan is to revel in beauty, to enjoy pleasure, to woo lovely woman, to drink from the vine-wreathed cup, to be fleet of foot, muscular and skilful in body, to pursue the threads of thought as far as the mind can reach, and to be grateful to what- ever gods may be. Such paganism regards life as a glorious opportunity for happiness and intel- lectual adventure. In its eyes human society is not a theological affair, but an organization of mankind on the basis of force and the principles of expediency, with the object of giving the human will-to-live its fullest scope. Paganism has no sacred books; the THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II 99 universe is its bible, and the obedience it exacts is that men shall seek, shall explore, shall inquire. Its creed consists of the current hypotheses of science. During the nine centuries of triumphant Christian- ity in western Europe since Constantine had pro- claimed his conversion, the pagan idea of life had gone out of fashion, it had become soiled, distorted, mutilated; but its spirit still existed, and still upheld the principle of life for life's sake. Nowhere prob- ably did it exist in its plenitude, but here and there in patches and bits it asserted itself, and at one point or another its disciples raised their heads. Poets, bohemians, students praised wine, woman, and song, — AveBaccJte! Ave Venus ! Militemus Venerif . . . Dum vivimus vivamus ! philosophers asserted the rights of reason ; kings and princes struggled to maintain the idea of the civil administration of so- ciety. Out of all such pagan protestants, the man who in the thirteenth century most completely embodies their conception of life, is the Emperor Frederick II. This much-admired and much-hated man made a deep impression upon his contemporaries, and even after he has been dead hundreds of years, scholars take sides for and against him with passions worthy of Guelfs and Ghibellines in their most truculent mood. In the eyes of his admirers he flies before his generation like Lucifer guiding the day ; and in the eyes of his enemies he is a self-indulgent Epicurean struggling to shake off all the restraints that Christ- ianity and civilization sought to impose upon him. His character is explained by his birth and education. He inherited the cruelty, the energy, the vigour, and 100 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the ambition of his father, Henry VI ; but these qual- ities were neutralized and in many respects overborne by his Italian inheritance. By birth, through his mother Constance, he was a Sicilian, and by temper- ament he was essentially a Sicilian in the somewhat melodramatic sense which we of English traditions give to that word. He was adroit, dissembling, lux- urious, self-indulgent, impetuous, passionate, and false. At the time of his imperial coronation, 1220, Fred- erick was twenty-five years old. He was then a man of maturity and experience. Even at seventeen it was said of him that " the fruits of maturity had antici- pated the flowers of youth." From babyhood he was bred in the midst of intrigue, treachery, and the alarms of war. From six to fourteen his boyhood was passed under the care of Sicilian prelates or in the custody of German adventurers. From the former he learned that one may be a priest, even an arch- bishop, and yet be double-dealing ; from the latter that bluff and brutal soldiers can be as false as the most slippery priest. From both he must have learned that the usual resources of statecraft are brib- ery and mendacity. In matters of less moment — grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, astronomy — Fred- erick probably had lessons from Arabic masters. Sicily had been for centuries a borderland between different civilizations, different religions, different races. Italians and Greeks, Romans and Carthagin- ians, Byzantines and Arabs, Christians and Mussul- mans, Normans and Saracens, had fought, had com- promised, had stamped, one after the other, their THE EMPEROR FREDERICK II 101 marks on the lovely island. The Saracens, during their long dominion, had not been intolerant ; and the Norman conquerors coming from afar, finding contrasting opinions, contrasting customs, contrast- ing creeds, had been tolerant, politic, skeptical. Ital- ians, Greeks, Arabs, and Jews lived cheek by jowl in peace. The Normans vrere a small military caste who imposed order, levied taxes, directed affairs, and maintained the feudal system. Within these limits they let their subjects follow their own tastes and usages, both in civil matters and religious. Greek, Latin, and Arabic were the official languages ; French remained for a time the language spoken at court, while Greek and Arabic continued to be the common speech of the people side by side with the young Italian. Saracens held important civil positions; Saracen workmen were employed in the royal service ; Saracen physicians and astrologers frequented the court. In intellectual development the Arabs were supe- rior to the Latins. They were the great students of Greek philosophy. On their conquering path through Syria and Egypt they found all philosophers deep in Aristotle, and they adopted Aristotle as the source of knowledge. They translated him from Syriac texts. Averroes, who " made the great commentary " on Aristotle, was well known to the scholars in Pa- lermo, and learned Arabs of Cordova and Seville were in familiar intercourse with their brethren at the Norman court. Among these philosophers, dis- creetly concealed from the Mussulman bigots, there was much skepticism of current religious beliefs. 102 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Some denied the resurrection of the body, some doubted the immortality of the soul, some, anticipat- ing David Hume, maintained that the phenomena of cause and efEect are merely sequences. Many thought most meanly of women ; some intimated that all religion was the result of imposture. Such M^ere the ideas that circulated among learned men with whom the precocious lad must have been on familiar terms. The physical aspect of Palermo also played its part in Frederick's education. A sensitive, emotional, intellectual boy could not have been untouched by the prodigal beauty about him. Nature had been bountiful, and the Norman kings, especially Fred- erick's clever, cultivated grandfather. King Roger, had done their best to make their capital exquisite. On the curving shore, where the beautiful green gar- den of the Conca d'Oro, encircled by austere hills and guarded by Monte Pellegrino to the north, meets the gaudy blue of the bay, Palermo sat like a coquette, glittering and gracious, tempting all comers to stay. Travellers from Cordova and even from Bag- dad, found in her everything good and beautiful to heart's desire. Within the city, castles, palaces, churches, mosques, shops, and houses, gay in oriental colours and shapes, ranged in picturesque succession ; each quarter of the town showed an individual come- liness. The streets were spacious, the alleys broad ; and the king's palaces, gardens, and parks, strung in long sequence, beautified the city. The decorations within the churches were unrivalled, excepting only by those of St. Mark's in Venice. Santa Maria, a THE EMPEKOE FEEDERICK II 103 Greek church, was rich as an emperor's reliquary ; its walls were lined with coloured marbles, decorated with gold, and garlanded with foHage o£ green mo- saics. Nevertheless the Royal Chapel strove to outdo it ; below and above, floor, walls, arches, vaults, pul- pit, and dome, according to their several dignities, were overlaid with mosaics of marble and golden glass, with porphyry and serpentine. All sorts of colours — red, white, cream, buff, black, blue, pink, indigo, cobalt, green, and gray — blended and contrasted in soft, luxurious, loveliness. Hard-by, the cathedral of Palermo raised her noble dimensions ; and yet, in spite of her magnificence, she was excelled by her sister at Monreale. Attached to these cathedrals were great monasteries and cloisters where the denizens of paradise might wander and deem themselves at home. ' The city itself was all life and bustle, colour and gayety. On a fete day the ladies, cloaked in their elegant mantles of silk enriched with gold em- broidery, artfully veiled, odorous with sweet per- fumes, their shoes worked in gold, their finger tips rosier and eyebrows blacker than in nature, rendered the inside of the churches still more gorgeous and interesting. Fountains and springs freshened the air and greeted the thirsty. Oranges and lemons scat- tered their fragrance to the breeze ; palm trees shook their murmurous leaves ; stone pines contemplated their own solitary shadows; fruit trees and blos- soming bushes decked the gardens; and outside the town, beyond the straggling suburbs, wild flowers filled the fields, and here and there bloomed 104 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm, Others whose fruit burnish'd with golden rind Hung amiable, Hesperian fables true. If true, here only, and of delicious taste. Oa the banks of the brooks and canals Persian cane rustled in the wind, while plump squashes dozed in the sun ; and along the river Oreto the lazy mill-wheels turned. The poet said truly that Palermo was " Altera mellifluens paradisus," another Eden flowing with honey. Frederick was essentially a child of Palermo. Precocious in body and in mind, he learned early to enjoy the grace and delicacy of oriental ways, the refinement and charm of Arabian civilization, while familiarity with Greek dissent and Moslem disbelief taught him religious tolerance and skepticism. In- timacy with a race inferior in strength and social position if superior in delicacy, whose usages con- cerning women were very different from those approved by the Latin Church, naturally gave him loose notions abont morality of sex. The Norman court had always been censured by the austere, both Mohammedans and Christians, but the sinners were powerful and the moralists weak ; and though Fred- erick's ecclesiastical preceptors may have attempted to teach him the professed morality of the Church, they could not change the ideas that prevailed among the fashionable nobles of Palermo. The royal palace instinctively drew back from any ascetic theory. To keep Frederick in the path of virtue they married him at fourteen to a Spanish lady, much older than he, a sister of the King of Aragon. THE EMPEKOR FREDERICK II 105 At seventeen he became a father; he was then already a man, old far beyond his years. By the time of his imperial coronation his experience of life had been wide and hard ; he had become quite skep- tical of truth, loyalty, or honesty, but he was full of youthful self-reliance, vigour, and resolution. In person Frederick was of middle height, rather square of figure, comely of face, at least in youth, blond like all the Hohenstaufens, and he had the reddish hair so notable in his grandfather, Barba- rossa. With his quick intelligence, his agreeable southern manners, and his rare personal charm, he readily attached friends to him ; but, like other clever, skeptical men, he relied too much on his wits and underrated the value of character, and by his perfidy inspired his enemies with such fear, dis- trust, and hatred that they fought him and his sons and his sons' sons to the death. A man of this character, independent and self- reliant by nature, bred in the borderland between opposing civilizations, accustomed from earliest boy- hood to differing religions, none of which apparently exercised complete control over conduct, when seated on the imperial throne and acknowledged to be titular head over secular Christendom, could not possibly live at peace with an ecclesiastico-political corporation, which was built upon the sacred books of the Jews, and claimed supremacy even in secular affairs. A clash between the two was inevitable. At what time and under what circumstances would be a matter of accident. When Frederick in 1212 went upon his adventur- 106 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ous expedition across the Alps to oust the Guelf Otto from the throne of Germany, he needed Inno- cent's help, and promised with alacrity everything that Innocent asked. He avowed that he owed life and land to the Papacy, acknowledged papal suzer- ainty over the Sicilian kingdom and papal sover- eignty over the provinces of central Italy, swor§ to keep the Empire and his southern kingdom separate, agreed to do the Pope's bidding with regard to the Lombard League, and finally'assumed the cross. All his life long he was enmeshed in this web of vows of his own spinning. The immediate cause of the rupture between him and the Papacy was the prom- ised crusade. Throughout the German campaigns Frederick had the full support of the Papacy, ♦nd when the war was over and Germany pacified, he received the imperial crown from Honorius, Inno- cent's successor. The Papacy had paid the consid- eration, it had amply fulfilled its side of the bargain, and now demanded that Frederick should fulfil his. According to the usages among honest men, the Papacy was clearly within its right. It was irrelev- ant to the matter in hand whether the Papacy was governed by religious motives or whether it was thinking of the advantages that would accrue from a crusade, or merely calculating that it would be well to let the Emperor spend his money and strength across the seas remote from what might be a dan- gerous proximity to the papal provinces. A bargain is a bargain. All the world was agreed that it was Freder- ick's duty to go on a crusade. The troubadour Elia THE EMPEROR FREDERICK' II 107 Cairel expressed the general sentiment -when he ■wrote : — Emperaire Frederic, ieu vos man, que de son dan faire s'es entremes vassals, quand a a son seignor promes so, don li faill a la besoigna gran ; per qu'ieu chantan — vos voill pregar e dir que passetz lai on Ihesus vole morir, e noill siatz a cest besoing bauzaire. Emperor Frederick, I tell you, That a vassal is busy at work on his own harm, When he has made a promise to his lord And does not keep it when the need is great ; Wherefore I sing — I wish to beg you and to say That you cross thither where Jesus willed to die, And do not prove false to this need. 1 Frederick first assumed the cross in 1215 ; other crusaders went, but he did not go. He promised, pro- crastinated, and postponed, he alleged reasons, pre- texts, excuses, — he was making ready, he was nearly prepared, his ships were laying in provisions, his soldiers buckling on their belts and whetting their swords, he was on the brink of starting, — but this, that, and the other thing, to his vexation, consterna- tion, and despair, barred his way, like an abyss. From 1215 to 1220 he busied himself with establish- ing his authority in Germany ; from 1220 to 1227 he was engaged in doing the same thing in Sicily. It was true that the cause of civil government stood in great need of Frederick's presence. In Germany there was the Guelf faction to be put down, malcon- tents to be appeased, partisans to be rewarded; in Sicily there were Moslem revolts to be crushed, de- 108 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY fiant barons to be reduced to obedience, and rebel- lious cities to be brought under the royal rule. But the fact remained that during all these years Fred- erick was occupied about his own affairs and neg- lected the cause of God and the Church. The gentle Honorius was a man of peace, and contented himself with exhortations, prayers, scold- ings, and menaces ; to which Frederick continued to reply — os ingentia loquens — in his flowery Sicil- ian fashion : " The sepulchre of Our Lord is in the hands of Infidels ! Oh, horrible wickedness, oh, pite- ous spectacle ! Touched to the heart by grief and shame, day and night we think of speedy succour and we are preparing right royally the ships and galleys that the crusade needs." At last, moved by a sense that public opinion was beginning to run against him and by knowledge that the dissensions among the Saracens would smooth his path, he had an interview at San Germano in July, 1225, with ambassadors from the Pope, and, sealing the treaty with his golden seal, pledged himself to sail in Au- gust, 1227, under penalty of calling down upon him- self and upon his realm the ban of the Church. And as he was now a widower, his first wife having died three years before, in earnest of his bargain he mar- ried lolande, titular queen of Jerusalem, a daugh- ter of the doughty French soldier of fortune, John of Brienne, and assumed the crown and royal title. CHAPTER X GREGORY IX AND FREDERICK H (1227-1230) Draw, if you be men. Gregory, lemember thy swashing blow. — Borneo and Juliet, Aet i, So. 1. The gentle Honorius died, an infirm old man, in March, 1227. Clouds were rolling up thick on the horizon, and it was evident that St. Peter's bark must take on a new pilot without wasting a mo- ment. The very next day the cardinals elected Ugolino, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, a near relation to Innocent III, and gave him the pontifical title of Gregory IX. Ugolino had been elevated to the cardinalate by Innocent, and had long held important positions in the Curia. He had conducted delicate diplomatic missions to the German adventurers " of damnable memory " in Apulia, and had won a high reputation for personal bravery. For eighteen years he had been accustomed to Innocent's bold, dictatorial, far- reaching policy ; he had been used to see Rome ex- alt and depose emperors and kings as well as meaner men, and he chafed sorely under the timid, peace-lov- ing gentleness of Honorius. His biographer says that he was a " dignified, handsome man, of keen mind and tenacious memory, learned in the liberal arts as well as in civil and canon law, and endowed with a copious, Ciceronian eloquence, a zealot for the Faith, a school of virtue, a lover of chastity, and an exam- 110 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY pie of holiness." Honorius said of him that he "was set up by God's hand in the Church's garden like a cedar of Lebanon, upright with the height of con- templation, sweet with the fragrance of virtue, sound with the sincerity of honesty, and that he not only held up by his strength the house of God but also beautified its outside by the purity of his good re- pute." Frederick, also, had paid him compliments in earlier days when he was appointed papal legate in Lombardy: "Let the Roman Church rejoice," he said, "let us rejoice, because a man of honour, true-sighted in religion, pure in life, most eloquent, endowed with virtues and with learning, has been appointed." Gregory was primarily a statesman, a man of af- fairs, and though a devout man did not disdain methods purely political. That could not have been otherwise, for the Roman Curia was not the chapter of a rural cathedral ; the cardinals were not free to wander in a bird-haunted garden, to listen to the bells calling to matins and vespers, or to discuss the controversy between St. Bernard and Abelard ; they had to transact the business of Christendom. Pious people like Jacques of Vitry, who visited the Roman Curia, were scandalized: "he found many things that went against his soul, for the cardinals were occupied with business and the affairs of this world, with kings and kingdoms, with law-suits and quarrels, to such a degree that they scarce suffered anything to be said about spiritual matters." Yet these same car- dinals had religious feelings ; they had a great respect for men of true religion. Gregory, in a special way, Alinun, pliot. GREGORY IX Sacro Speco, Subiaco GREGORY IX AND FREDERICK II 111 reverenced Francis ; on the death of Cardinal Colonna, the first protector of the Order, he took the vacant place, and became a very father to the brethren, especially to Francis, who was young enough to be his son. He used to urge Francis to take care of him- self : "Brother, you do wrong not to take better care of yourself, for your life and your health are very useful to the brethren, as well as to others and the whole Church. When your brethren are sick you have pity on them, and you are always kind and tender to them, so you ought not to be cruel to yourself in your own great need. I therfefore com- mand you to get yourself taken care of and looked after." It was Gregory who canonized Francis and bade Thomas of Celano write his life ; and he even thought of entering the Order. For Clare, the first of the Franciscan sisters, he entertained sentiments of tenderness, reverence, and affection. In his troubles he turned to her for comfort : " Such bitterness of heart " (he writes to her), " such tears, such immense sorrow has come upon me that if I could not find the consolation of worship at the feet of Jesus my spirit would fail and my soul melt away." Never- theless, in spite of his admiration for sanctity and unworldliness, Gregory was at heart a proud prelate ; and a long life had not cooled his courage or lowered his pride. His pulse beat as quick, his anger flashed as fierce, as if he had lived all his life in the saddle with harness on his back. At the opening of his pontificate Gregory found the political situation very unsatisfactory. Under Honorius's feeble management the towering fabric 112 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY of papal power had weakenedand disintegrated. The Emperor, and not the Pope, was now the central figure in European politics, and he was assuming more and more the domineering policy of his father, Henry; more and more he was encroaching on the rights of the Church, more and more ominous were his actions. At every point of contact between the eccle- siastical and imperial systems, the Pope felt a pressure full of menace. The two heirs of Imperial Rome, the two claimants for the primacy over Europe, stood face to face, like two fencers with crossed swords, each feeling the other's guard and trying to divine and anticipate the other's meditated thrust. The main matter that confronted Gregory on his accession was the crusade. For that Innocent had planned and prayed ; for that Honorius had spent years of pious and inefficient labour; for that Greg- ory himself had preached and exhorted. The crusade now depended wholly on Frederick. The expeditions to Syria and Damietta (1217-1221) had been fail- ures because Frederick had not gone in person ; and another attempt without his personal presence would have been madness. Frederick's tongue had robbed the Hybla bees of their sweetest honey, but his actions were extremely suspicious. His delays had put the Church in a worse and worse position, and himself in a better and better. Before his imperial coronation he had delayed for three years and had seated himself firmly on his German throne; after the coronation he had delayed over five years and had made him- self absolute monarch in his Sicilian kingdom. From smooth and sugared speech, flowery as the meadows GEEGORY IX AND FREDERICK II 113 round Palermo, he had changed to a saucy demean- our and acts of insolence. In other matters, too, be- sides the crusade, he had shown hostility to the Church. Of these matters one was the investiture of bishops in the kingdom of Sicily. Frederick had sworn to install all bishops canonically elected; but he vio- lated this oath in the case of a half-dozen sees. He had sworn that the clergy should not be taxed; and now he levied taxes or exacted forced loans. He had confirmed the Pope's title to the papal provinces of central Italy, nevertheless, in the duchy of Spoleto he was, to say the least, oblivious of his covenant: he continued to call the German pretender to the duchy by the ducal title, and treated his family with marked consideration. In the march of Ancona he demanded military service; and, finally, in Viterbo, within St. Peter's Patrimony, barely a day's ride from the Lateran Palace, he commanded the com- mune to furnish knights, equipped and on horse- back, to attend him. In these papal territories the Emperor had, perhaps, the imperial right to demand provisions for his troops on the march, but he had no further rights. If he were to continue to extend his exercise of sovereign prerogatives, who could say whether he would stop short of absolute dominion ? Of still more ominous significance was the prac- tical union of the Empire and the kingdom of Sicily. The Papacy felt itself ringed round by levelled spears. Frederick had pledged himself to keep the two separate and apart; he had sworn that on re- ceiving the imperial diadem he would resign the 114 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Sicilian crown to his eldest son, Henry. But upon inauguration to the imperial office he not only did not resign the Sicilian crown, but by vote of the German princes he secured for that son the inherit- ance to the Empire. When the Pope protested, Frederick replied that the election to the imperial succession had taken place " while we were absent and ignorant of what was going on." He was not, it is true, present at the moment of the election, but he had expressed his wishes beforehand, he had con- voked the diet that elected Henry, and he rewarded the princes who voted for Henry. His protestation of ignorance was flimsy to the point of insolence. One other important matter further strained the relations between the two potentates. The Eoman Curia was not an easy gull; on the contrary, it was prone to err on the side of over-ready suspicious- ness. It suspected Frederick's ambition. Gregory and the older cardinals well remembered the fears excited by the Emperor Henry thirty years before; and Frederick certainly seemed, at least to suspicious eyes, to be treading in his father's footsteps. He was master in Germany, he was master in Sicily; if he were to be master in Lombardy, too, the Pa- pacy would be lost, and, therefore, the churchmen in Home were always vigilant to mark any possible menace to Lombardy. At first Frederick had re- frained from touching the very delicate matter of the relations of the Lombard cities to the Empire. But immediately after the agreement with Honorius in 1225, in which he had muzzled the Church by his promise that he would start upon the crusade at GEEGOKY IX AND FREDERICK II 115 the end of two years, he published a summons throughout the Empire to attend an imperial diet at Cremona in March, 1226, for the purpose (so it was said) of considering ways and means for the crusade. This convocation of an imperial diet at Cremona was a clever move. To all outward appearances the Eifiperor was but doing his bounden duty. The Lom- bard cities had no right to protest, because Lombardy was indisputably a province of the Empire, and the crusade was a matter of public and universal concern. Nor could the Papacy protest with decency, for the Papacy was continually urging the Emperor to make ready for the crusade. Nor could any one object to the selection of Cremona as the meeting-place, al- though Cremona was the most passionately imperial city in Lombardy (not even excepting Pa via), because the city was most conveniently situated, midway be- tween Germany and Sicily. Nevertheless, the anti- imperial cities did not hesitate to put themselves nominally in the wrong, because it was clear to the blindest that, underneath this fair show of prepara- tion to carry out his crusading vow, Frederick was stretching out his hands to lay hold of Lombardy. Milan, Piacenza, Brescia, Mantua, Verona, Bologna, and their fellows pledged themselves to mutual de- fence, and renewed in its essential character the old Lombard League that fifty years before had with- stood and vanquished Frederick Barbarossa. The confederate cities adopted a bold and rebellious plan ; they seized and fortified the narrow Alpine valleys north of Verona, near the Brenner Pass, through 116 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY •which the high-road to Germany led, and refused to let Prince Henry, the imperial heir, and his attendant German barons and prelates, proceed upon their way to Cremona. This rebellious act prevented Germany, the main member of the imperial union, from taking part in the diet. Some skirmishes followed ; acts of wanton violence were committed ; and angry passions on both sides seemed to threaten civil war. The Em- peror raged, but he could do nothing ; he put the rebellious cities under the ban of the Empire, and the maimed and impotent diet broke up. The League had gained its end ; the Emperor had been foiled in his project, he might lay his ban, but he could not enforce it. There was nothing for him to do but go home and plot revenge as best he might. He went home and devised a crafty stroke. He sub- mitted his quarrel with the Lombards to the arbitra- tion of the Pope and cardinals. It was familiar history that Barbarossa's defeat was due to the alliance be- tween the Papacy and the Lombard League, and here Frederick thought he saw a way to start a rift in that alliance. By papal authority (granted indeed merely for use against the malevolent generally, and before the confederate cities had committed any re- bellious act), the bishops attendant upon Frederick at the diet had excommunicated the Lombard League. That excommunication necessarily involved a con- demnation of their conduct ; and, indeed, no one could deny that the League had committed an overt act of rebellion. If the Pope acted as arbitrator, he would be morally obliged to give judgment in Fred- erick's favour, and thereby endanger his friendly GREGORY IX AND FREDERICK II 117 relations with the Lombards ; if he refused to act, he abdicated the high office of universal mediator which the popes had always loudly claimed as theirs, and cut himself off from the privilege of intermeddling in international affairs. The craftiness of the offer of arbitration was enhanced because the Lombard League was constrained to accept the Pope as arbi- trator ; he was the proper international judge, he had always been their friend, and they could not repudi- ate him now. The Roman Curia was on its guard, it saw the predicament into which Frederick wished to put it, and rose to the occasion. Honorius refused to act. Frederick was persistent and urged him again. But by that simple move the Pope's position had been materially strengthened. He had refused to act (all men would agree), in order to avoid the possible criticism that he could not be an impartial arbitra- tor. Now the duty was forced upon him ; and Fred- erick would be estopped by his own act from disput- ing the justice of the award whatever it might be. Honorius accepted the office, and rendered a decision singularly like that of the arbitrator in La Fontaine's fable, who gave a shell of the disputed oyster to each of the two litigants and swallowed the oyster him- self. Both sides should put away all ill-will, grant full pardon, release prisoners and restore captured pro- perty; the cities of the League should revoke all laws against the Church or to the detriment of eccle- siastical liberties; they should swear to observe the decrees of the Lateran Council ; they should estab- lish and enforce statutes against heretics ; and they 118 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY should, at their own cost, provide and maintain four hundred knights for the Emperor's service upon the coming crusade during a period of two years, but these four hundred knights should be under the pro- tection of the Apostolic See. The full significance of this last phrase appears in the sequel. Frederick thus came out of Jiis first tentative ex- ercise of imperial authority in Lombardy balked and outwitted. The Lombards had renewed their league and had learned their strength. The Papacy had behaved with propriety; it had authorized the ex- communication of the Lombards when they appeared as a hindrance to the crusade (but in so general a way as to give them no ground of offence) ; and in deciding the quarrel between them and the Emperor it had adjudged everything in its own favour. Fred- erick had been forced to take the position that his expedition to Lombardy had been solely for the bene- fit of the crusade ; and now that he had the promise of four hundred knights he could not but admit that he had got just what he wanted, and he had no ex- cuse left for not going on the crusade. Everything indicates that at this point Frederick felt that he must go on the crusade or lose authority at home and prestige abroad. Such was the political situation when Gregory ascended St. Peter's chair. And the political situation was only a part of a greater complexity, in which moral factors made the most dangerous element; behind the inherent in- compatibility of Papacy and Empire, behind their respective ambitions, lay the absolute contradiction of the ideas for which the two men stood. Under the GREGOEY IX AND FREDEEICK II 119 most favourable circumstances, a gaunt, ascetic, re- ligious, spiritual-minded priest, like Gregory, and a skeptical, intellectual man of the world, of refined tastes and gross appetites, like Frederick, could not understand one another ; and as the two were en- throned as chieftains of opposing conceptions of society and both were covetous of the debatable future, they faced each other as rival warders do on hostile borders. Their respective partisans were as furious as they. The poets and wits at Frederick's court assailed the Church with lampoons and epi- grams, they scribbled scurrilous prose and verse against priests and monks, high and low. Pier della Vigna, a judge, a diplomat, and a poet, was not ashamed to write a long jingle of angry denunciation to gratify his royal master : — Est abominabilis prselatorum vita quibus est cor f elleum linguaque mellita ; dulce canit fistula eornm, et ita propinant ypomenis, miscent aconita. The life of holy prelates is abominably funny, Their hearts are full of venom while their tongues are dropping honey ; They pipe a pretty melody, and so approach discreetly. And offer you a cordial, mixed with poison, very sweetly. The translation is about as good as the original; the only stab that the poet has omitted is to attribute his Latin to the teachings of the clergy. And even in these abominable verses, Pier della Vigna admits that Gregory is a good, holy, apostolic man. No such concessions to Frederick's character were made by the Church party; between fact and fancy 120 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUKY they depict a figure to be shuddered at. Followers of Joachim crossed theniselves and prayed to be saved from Antichrist. Part of this Frederick brought upon himself, for he snapped his fingers in the face of respectable Christendom. He kept a harem, " am- ator amplexorum." Even on his military campaigns a band of pretty women accompanied him in palan- quins. They were guarded by eunuchs, and their wardrobes were taken care of by Saracen officials. Other customs, innocent in themselves, but damnable because of their origin, he got from his Arabian education. He had a menagerie of wild beasts, lions, leopards, panthers, and such. He made use of camels and dromedaries as beasts of burden. He possessed an elephant given him by the Soldan of Egypt. Dancing-girls were installed at his court. At an en- tertainment he gave in honour of the Earl of Corn- wall, two young Saracen girls of great beauty, balancing upon large, round globes, rolled them in every direction, clapping their hands and singing the while, taking postures like our ballet dancers, and beating cymbals in a duet, one girl striking the cymbal that the other held, or playing castanets, and whirling about with amazing agility. Here was matter to keep monastic gossip busy for a year. He kept Saracen troops in his pay ; he liked them be- cause they were out of reach of excommunication. He had ambassadors from the Soldan to dinner, and invited the Sicilian bishops to meet them. He em- ployed Arabian physicians, and by their advice for long periods of time he would eat only one meal a day, but he ate that meal without regard to Lent or GREGOEY IX AND FREDERICK II 121 fast days, and he took a bath every day, not except- ing Sundays : *' From this [the Roman priests said] it is plain that he holds at naught the commands of God and the sacraments of the Church." He used to search the Scriptures for passages such as Psalm XLix, 12, Man is like the beasts that perish, to show that the soul does not survive the body ; and he would threaten to bring the Church to a state of apostolic poverty, so that pope and cardinals should be beggars and go on foot. Worse even than his licentiousness and heathen- ish ways were his blasphemies : " If the God of the Jews had seen my Sicily he would not have chosen this beggarly Palestine for his kingdom, . . . Only fools believe that the God who created nature and all things was born of a virgin ; nobody can be born except by conception preceded by the union of man and woman ; ... no man ought to believe anything except what he can prove by natural reason ; . . . There have been three impostors who sought to gain power over their fellows by religion, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, and one of them was hanged " ; and of the viaticum, " When will this tomfoolery stop ? " Such stories, whether true or false, had much to give them colour, and in the time of the death grapple with the Church did Frederick more hurt than the defection of ten thousand men. The second day after his consecration, Gregory wrote to Frederick bidding him, with "a pure heart and faith unfeigned," make ready for the crusade, and a week later wrote a second letter; and again, as the date fixed by Frederick's pledge drew near. 122 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY he wrote a third time, in a style that showed great familiarity with the Apocalypse, and exhorted him to a life of aspiration and virtue. The Emperor showed every outward mark of obedience. He gath- ered together ships, provisions, and troops at Brin- disi. He took advantage of the papal insistence to include the clergy in a new tax levy, and then went to Brindisi himself. The crusaders, principally Ger- mans, had already assembled. It was a motley company, there was lack of organization, and, in con- sequence, delay. Owing to great heat, bad air, and ignorance of sanitary measures, disease broke out, and many fell ill and died. At last, however, the army set sail, and a little later, on September 8, the Emperor himself. He had sailed, however, barely fifty miles, when he shifted his course, and put into the harbour of Otranto, and there disembarked. News of the Emperor's defection spread from Syria to England, carrying dismay. On the Syrian coast most of the crusaders hurried back aboard the ships on which they had just come and sailed for Europe. In England men shook their heads, and re- minded one another how, on the night of St. John Baptist's Nativity, the Crucified God had shown himself in the heavens ; how they had seen his body stretched upon a shining cross, spattered with blood and marked with the thrust of the lance and the print of the nails. At the time they had judged it a sign that God was propitiated by the devotion of His people, now they perceived it bore witness against the Emperor for the insult he had done to God. 1^^ The Pope was at Anagni when the news caae. - GREGOEY IX AND FEEDERICK II 123 Fourscore years could not stay his sudden wrath. He waited neither for explanation nor excuse. He was no graven image, like the marble lions of the episcopal chair in the cathedral, that showed their fangs but could not use them; with alert step he mounted the pulpit and cursed Frederick with the curse of the Church. It was a grave moment for Christendom ; its two heads, to whom were com- mitted the care of bodies and the care of souls, were avowed enemies. Both sides appealed to Europe, sending letters to kings and princes. Gregory re- counted Frederick's repeated promises and his re- peated delays, his solemn oath at San Germano and the excommunication which he had invoked on his head in case of the breach of a single item in his promised performance, and then the make-believe start at Brindisi ; " How [shrieked the excited priest] — his promises mocked, the ties that bound him broken, the fear of God trodden under foot, the reverence due Jesus Christ despised, ecclesiastical censures flouted, the Christian army abandoned, the devotion of Christendom flung away, the Holy Land thrown back to infidels — to his own shame and the shame of Christianity, he had gone back, lured and charmed, to the wonted delights of his kingdom, trying to palliate, I am told, the abjectness of his heart by frivolous excuses." Frederick answered by a long defence of his con- duct. He went into elaborate explanations of the alleged breach of his San Germano oath; he had kept, he said, his promises at all points; he had started from Brindisi in good faith and had put 124 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY back into the harbour of Otranto for this reason only, that he was very ill, and his nobles, as well as the pilgrims who had just returned from the East, had advised him, in view of the serious calamity his death would be, not to run the risk. He asserted that he had never abandoned his purpose of going on the crusade, and that he should start in the fol- lowing May. Frederick perceived, however, that the narrow issue between him and the Pope, as to whether he had kept his San Germano oath, was badly framed for him. The Pope had chosen the issue on which to make his attack and he had chosed shrewdly. On that issue Frederick was not only on the defensive, but also he was in the wrong on his own showing, as all the world could see. He had not kept the letter of his oath ; he stood in the predicament of having invoked the ban of excommunication on his own head. So he boldly dropped the petty question of that particular issue and proclaimed that the real issue between the Pope and him was between secular and ecclesiastical dominion. Was the Church or was she not to be the universal mistress ? No sentimental pity concerning the Holy Land, no dissatisfaction over ecclesiastical affairs in Sicily and Apulia, no question of usurped jurisdiction in Eomagna or St. Peter's Patrimony, set the two powers at odds (he said), but the fundamental question whether the civilization of Europe should stand on a secular or an ecclesiastical base. If Frederick had kept his temper, he would have done better, for all the sovereigns in Christendom were jealous of the Papal pretensions; GKEGORY IX AND FREDERICK II 125 but he fell into a mighty passion, hot-blooded Sicilian that he was, and attacked the Roman Church bitterly. He charged her with greed, usury, simony, and hy- pocrisy. He said that her speech was smoother than oil, sweeter than honey, but that she was a blood- sucker. The Curia was the root and origin of all evil; the Roman prelates were wolves in sheep's clothing. He bade all. kings and princes be on their guard against the avarice and wickedness of the Church. In order, however, to get his case fairly be- fore the public opinion of Europe on the broad issue of civil or ecclesiastical sovereignty, and to escape the narrow issue on which he was sure to be condemned, it was absolutely necessary to go on the crusade. Only by so doing would it be possible to deprive the Papacy of its vantage-ground. He, therefore, sailed ' for Acre in June, 1228. Frederick was above all things a politician. All his actions as a crusader were determined by policy. He thought no better of Christianity than of Mo- hammedanism, if as well; and on the whole pre- ferred the Arab civilization to the Latin. He never had any intention of fighting his way to Jerusalem. A knight-errant like Richard Cceur de Lion, or a saint like Louis IX, might follow mad fantasies if they chose ; but Frederick conducted his expedition solely with reference to his fortunes in Europe. He re- garded the pilgrims to Jerusalem as fools (the Mohammedans reported that he spoke of them as pigs), and he did not propose to play the fool himself for their sakes. He recognized that the public senti- ment in Europe required the head of the Holy Roman 126 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Empire to go on a crusade, and so, under the political exigencies of his situation, he had assumed the cross ; but he meant to go at a happy juncture when his affairs at home were in a favourable condition and when affairs in Syria were such that Jerusalem could be won by diplomacy. Frederick did not propose to go to war with his friends for the sake of his enemies. Some thirty years before, on the death of the great Soldan Saladin,the hero of Walter Scott's Talisman, the Saracen Empire had split in pieces, and now, as was to be expected, the states of Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo were at hostilities. Al Malik al Kamil, the Soldan of Cairo, or, as the Christians called him, the Soldan of Babylon, had marched into Syria and taken possession of Jerusalem, which was a part of the dominions of the Soldan of Damascus. Wishing to strengthen himself, he made overtures to Frederick, and invited him to come to Syria, offering under certain conditions to cede Jerusalem. It was doubt- less for some such opportunity that Frederick had been waiting. Now it had come. Diplomacy, as he had hoped, was going to accomplish his ends. Under these circumstances a large army would have been a detriment, as it would have aroused the Soldan's sus- picions. So he took but a scanty force with him. On his arrival in Syria he found the Church party bent on thwarting him. Franciscan friars, the Knights of the Temple, the Knights of St. John, the clergy, and finally the Patriarch of Jerusalem, all opposed him. Frederick, however, kept on excellent terms with the Soldan and the two arranged matters be- tween them. Frederick's shrewdness, his suavity, GEEGORY IX AND FEEDEEICK H 127 his care not to ofEend Mohammedan sensibilities, aided by the pressing political needs of the Soldan, smoothed the way for a treaty of peace. The Sol- dan was in a situation somewhat analogous to Fred- erick's; he had to face a bigoted party among the Saracens which was opposed to any treaty with the Christians and especially to the surrender of Jeru- salem, a holy city, second only in their eyes to Mecca; and he, too, was denounced and reviled for friend- ship with infidel dogs. Sailing in the same boat the two came speedily to terms. The Soldan ceded Jeru- salem (but with the reservation of free access for Mohammedans to the Temple, known to them as the Mosque of Omar), Nazareth, Bethlehem, and 'sundry villages along the route from Jerusalem to the sea, for a period of ten years. The Emperor thereupon hastily entered Jerusalem, clapped the crown on his own head, turned round, and hurried back to Italy. Frederick had accomplished his purpose ; and he had done so in the teeth of clerical opposition. The Church had condemned him at every step : she had denounced his going upon a crusade while he was under the ban of excommunication, she had de- nounced his friendship with the Soldan, she had denounced him for leaving the Temple open to Mohammedans, she had denounced any treaty with the infidels. Nevertheless, he had redeemed his pro- mise, he had delivered Jerusalem, and he had shifted the issue between him and the Papacy from the petty question of an unperformed vow to the broad ques- tion of secular or clerical domination. 128 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Meanwhile, in Italy matters were getting far beyond denunciation. Immediately after his excom- munication the Emperor vented his anger in revenge- ful acts. He levied taxes on the clergy of his king- dom. He intrigued with Roman nobles, so that at their instigation the mob insulted the Pope in St. Peter's and drove him out of Rome. He revoked his grants confirming to the Papacy the Italian pro- vinces, which not only he but also Otto IV, Charle- magne, and Pippin had granted, and reclaimed them for the Empire. He appointed the pretender to the duchy of Spoleto his imperial vicar during his absence; and this vicar led an army of invasion into the March of Ancona. The Pope retaliated to the best of his power. He forbade the Sicilian clergy to pay taxes; he excommunicated the imperial in- vaders; he preached a crusade against the enemies of religion, collected money from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Spain, obtained troops from Lombardy, including, according to Frederick, the four hundred knights adjudged by Honorius to go on the crusade, and sent an army under John of Brienne, the Emperor's father-in-law, across the Neapolitan border. The Emperor's return arrested at once the tide of papal success. His army of crusaders from the Holy Land, with a Saracen contingent from The Kingdom, easily drove back the papal troops and reconquered the invaded districts. Nevertheless Frederick did not wish to carry the war further. Such a war was certain to find no favour in the eyes of Europe. He was the aggressor, his partisans had GEEGOKY IX AND FKEDERICK II 129 invaded papal territory ; and though he denied that he had given them authority, appearances were against him. The Pope was a very old man and would not live long, and a new pope could not be more inimical and might well be more friendly. More than all, Frederick knew that before he came to a decisive struggle with the Papacy he must re- duce Lombardy to obedience. Lombardy was the key to the situation; whichever side could control the riches and fortunes of Lombardy would conquer. The Pope, too, had good reasons for not continuing the war. Hostilities against a crusader, begun while he was away in Syria for the liberation of Jerusalem, seemed irreconcilable with such a text as, " I say unto you, love your enemies." Besides, the war was horribly expensive; Rome was disloyal; and the Emperor's army was better than his. So peace was made in the summer of 1230. The Pope readmitted Frederick to communion with the Church, and all his men, except such as had invaded papal territory. That was an unpardonable sin. Frederick, on his part, swore to give satisfaction to the Church, to for- give the Lombards, to restore confiscated property, to recall banished prelates, to levy no taxes on the clergy, and to let alone ecclesiastical elections. In fact, Frederick practically accepted the Pope's conditions. Such a treaty shows the power of the Church. A pope with the ecclesiastical organization of Europe at his back was a dangerous enemy. He could levy taxes from Rome to Edinburgh, from Lisbon to Prague ; he could send out a swarm of friars to dissolve the ties of allegiance, to bribe friends, to suborn traitors, 130 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY to stir up old enmities. Few clerks and no monks could be trusted. The lessons of Barbarossa and of Henry IV were not lost on Frederick ; he "would not enter on a death grapple until he should first be master of Lombardy. CHAPTER XI PROVENgAL POETRY IN ITALY Qdoj qu'on tient belles langagiires, Florentines, Yeniciennes, Assez pour estrs messaigiires, £t mesmement les anciennes ; Mais, soient Lombardes, Rommaines, Geneyoises, k mes perilz, Piemontoises, Savoysiennes, II n'est bou bee qne de Paris. Francois Villom. Although one speaks fine languages, Florentine, Venetian, Enough to be ambassador, And Latin, too, and Grecian ; But be it Lombard or of Rome, Genevan (so hold me in derision) Or Piedmontese or Savoyard, There 's nothing like Parisian. Peace with the Pope left Frederick free to busy himself with the civil affairs of his kingdom, and gives us leisure to turn from politics and the alarms of war to our real concern, to the first dawn of that new life of the Italian spirit which in its maturity filled Europe with its glory and still draws all the world to Italy. Frederick's court was the home, or rather the hostelry, of this new spirit, the candle- stick on which the night-dispelling candle first was set. While the Eoman Curia held that aU thought not based upon the Bible was hurtful or superfluous, and St. Francis condemned all learning on the ground that it leads men away from God and salva- 132 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY tion, Frederick and his courtiers cultivated the state of mind necessary to catch the intellectual sparks that flew upward at Toledo and Cordova and in the sunny chateaux from Avignon to Carcassonne, as Achates, when the Trojan hand was shipwrecked on the Libyan shore, caught in tinder the sparks struck from the flint and fed the nascent flame with leaves and twigs till a camp-fire warmed their wet and weary limbs, — Suscepitque ignem foliis, atque arida circum Nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam. The intellectual influences that came to Italy — I speak of those that have no direct concern with theology or law — were of two sorts : one, the love of philosophy and science, came from the Moors and Arabs, the other, the love of poetry, from Langue- doc and Provence. Up to this time the Arabs had been superior to the Christians in civilization. At Cordova a number of enlightened princes had en- couraged astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy; but orthodoxy among the Mussulmans as well as among the Christians was opposed to free- dom of thought, and Averroes was the last of the distinguished scholars of Cordova. He died in the year of Innocent's accession to the Papacy. The fanatics, conscious perhaps of a need of sterner qualities in the struggle of Islam with Christendom, quenched the light. In Egypt, as well, Frederick's friend the Soldan Malik al Kamil, was a patron of learning and poetry; but in Egypt, also, the inva- sions and menaces of the Christians were ruinous to culture. East and west, storms and darkness lowered. PKOVENCAL POETRY IN ITALY 133 At this juncture Frederick stepped forward and grasped the torch which the soldans and emirs, spent runners, had carried as far as they could. He, as the Mohammedans perceived, was "a man o£ acute intelligence, and of learning, fond of philo- sophy, logic, and medicine, who (so sympathetic did they find him) professed Christianity as a blind." Certainly in his tastes for things intellectual he re- sembled these Mohammedan princes more than he did Henry III of England or St. Louis of France. He knew Italian, French, German, Latin, Greek, and Arabic ; he could write, and he was interested in everything. Even his enemies acknowledged his native wit and rare intellect. Naturally he welcomed scholars, whether Arabs, Moors, or Jews, to his court. He had a special liking for philosophy and metaphysics; and these foreign scholars were the only men with whom free discussion was possible. A set of questions which he propounded to an Arabic scholar, Ibn Sab'in, has come down to us: "Aristotle states the existence of the world ah eterno, what are his arguments? What is the goal of theology ; and what preliminary sciences are ne- cessary? Supposing that the soul is immortal, what evidence is there of its immortality?" It appears from a Mohammedan source that Frederick himself accepted the hypothesis, approved by Aristotle, that the world hadalways existed, that there never had been a creation; and the Christians said that he denied the immortality of the soul. He undoubtedly be- lieved in astrology, and perhaps he took an interest in occult sciences. In those days such interests spoke 134 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the free play of the mind. For a time he had Michael Scott at his court. This mysterious person- age had acquired at Toledo a reputation for scholar- ship by translating Aristotle; but rumour asserted that " of a truth he knew the trick of necromantic frauds " and his fame as a wizard so outdid his fame as a scholar that he found his way to a lower depth of Dante's hell than his imperial patron. The torch of free thought, however, was doomed to be quenched for a time; but the torch of poetry was passed on, and, the winds of heaven favouring, kindled the fire of Italian poetry. There were, un- fortunately, reasons enough why speculative thought that came from a hostile civilization should be re- jected; but, fortunately, there were also prevailing reasons why one southern land should teach a neigh- bour its first lessons in poetry, why one Romance tongue should hand on to a sister her stock of forms, her ways of saying pretty things. And so it was that the spirit and form of Provengal poetry passed on to Frederick's court. Provengal is the generic name given to the dia- lects (for these were several) spoken in southeastern France and in the adjacent country south of the Pyrenees. The language was derived very directly from Latin, and differed markedly at many points from French. It was the " langue d'oc," in distinc- tion to the " langue d'oil " of northern France and to the " lingua di si" of Italy. Its poetical literature had begun several generations before, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century was the most considerable in Europe. It had attained so high PROVENCAL POETRY IN ITALY 13^ an excellence and was so abundant that there was enough at home and to spare ; and full of youth and health, it went abroad to try its fortune in another land. Ever since the days of Julius Caesar, Provence and Languedoc had been in close relations with Lom- bardy and Liguria. Vessels plied between Marseilles and Genoa; sturdy traffickers crossed the Alpine passes or skirted the gulf by way of the riviera. Italian merchants and money-dealers frequented the cities of southern France; usurers passed between Asti, Turin, and Cahors ; ecclesiastics and monks went to and fro. Where traders and bales could go, poetry could go, too. The names of famous trouba- dours became household words in Lombardy. Even in Dante's time they were freshly remembered : Bertran de Born, Folquet of Marseilles, Arnaut Daniel, Giraut de Bornehl. Bertran de Born, lover of war and singer of martial songs, by malicious in- stigation stirred up the quarrel between Henry II of England and his eldest son, — " Ahitophel did not do more between Absalom and David," — and so in the infernal pit of the sowers of discord his headless trunk swings his head at arm's length like a lantern. Folquet, at first an over-amorous boy, abandoned his rhymes and his lady-loves to become a monk, a bishop, and a leader of the crusade against the Albigensian heretics ; and at last in Paradise (such different fates befell these poets) " shone like a ruby smitten by the sun . . . and gladdened Heaven with his voice." Giraut de Bornehl is esteemed by critics to-day the best of all the troubadours, while Arnaut, 136 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY whose sentences are obscure and rhymes difficult, is abased by these same critics, but all in vain ; for Dante met Arnaut in Purgatory, — leu sui Arnaut, queplor e vau cantan, — and Dante, whose little fin- ger is thicker than the loins of all the critics, says : " Arnaut surpassed them all, poets of love or writers of romance ; let the fools talk who think that Giraut de Bornehl was better than he." These Provencal poets, even to-day with our stores of English and Italian poetry, have a certain aro- matic, far-away fragrance (like flowers in a prim, old-fashioned garden), enhanced perhaps by our sympathy with their brief and romantic flowering- time. No doubt if one were to read many of them to-day they would seem monotonous and insipid ; but nobody does read them except Mistral and the young poets of Aries and Avignon, and, maybe, a scholar here and there. By the world at large they would all have been suffered to drift into the for- gotten past, were it not for Dante, who carries them into the haven of immortality, as a great ship, sailing securely over a waste of waters, picks up wrecked mariners by the way and takes them safe aboard. Preceded by the fame of Provengal poetry, it was natural that the troubadours should cross the Alps into Lombardy, especially when the storms of perse- cution swept over Languedoc. Peire Vidal, Raimbaut deVaqueiras, Guilhem Figueira, Aimeric dePehulgan, and others, frequented the courts of the politer nobles. Like honey bees they came smeared from the flowery fields of Toulouse and Roussillon, and scattered the fructifying pollen along the banks of PROVENCAL POETRY IN ITALY 137 the Po and the Adige. These troubadours and their poetry so stirred the young ItaHans to emulation that it became the fashion for them to write in Pro- vencal, a canso or a sirventes, or even the Italian- born sonnet. Of these provenzaleggianti, twenty- five have been counted. Among them was Percivalle Doria of Genoa ; but the most famous by far is Sordello, whose haughty and disdainful soul Dante and Virgil saw in Purgatory watching them after the manner of a couchant lion. Sordello, compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years, — was born near Mantua — io son Sordello della tua terra, he says to Virgil — about the year 1200. He first emerges from mediaeval darkness in the city of Verona among the gay courtiers in attendance upon Count Riccardo di San Bonifazio, one of the great nobles of that region, who with the aid of his friends had driven the Montagues and their partisans from the city. Here, in his salad days, Sordello took some part in the elopement of Count Riccardo's wife, Cunizza, who was sister to the black-haired, black- hearted, Ezzelino da Romano. Whether the elope- ment was due to politics or love is not certain; but Cunizza's marriage had certainly been political. Three of the principal noblemen of the March of Treviso had attempted to establish peace, like a tripod, on three marriages ; Ezzelino da Romano and Salinguerra of Ferrara married sisters of Count Riccardo, and he married Cunizza. The plan failed. The ties of affinity snapped like dry withes, and the brothers-in-law were soon at war again. Cunizza's 138 ITALY m THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY position was difficult ; apparently she sided with her brother and fled from her husband to his protection. Oblivion, dimly lighted by beggarly biographers and Dante's starry references, hangs over both Cunizza and Sordello. The situation was romantic. She was a high-spirited, devil-may-care lady, as became her lineage; he was a poet, young and impressionable. And it is probable that, either at the time of the elopement or a little later, they fell in love with one another; but neither was constant. Sordello married another lady, and Cunizza started on an adventurous career (shared with divers husbands) that ended in repentance, pity, and generosity. Her last recorded act is the making her wiU at Florence in the pal- ace of Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, April 1, 1265. Cavalcante's son, Guido, was then a little boy, and as the family palace was not far from the baptistery (il mio bel San Giovanni) it may be that, some weeks later on the eve of Pentecost, the distinguished old Ghibelline lady and the young poet-to-be went in there (either to say their prayers or to see the celebration of baptismal rites) at the very moment when the priest was making the sign of the cross and blessing a little baby nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, while the proud parents, Messer Alighiero 3i Bellincione di Alighiero and his wife, stood by, and perhaps Cunizza heard the inarticulate voice that was to carry her name throughout the world from century to century. However that may be. Lady Cunizza da Romano makes a link between the Provengal poets, both of Languedoc and Lom- bardy, and the two most famous poets of the dolce PEOVENCAL POETKY IN ITALY 139 stil nuovo of Tuscany, Dante and his friend, Guido Cavalcanti ; and perhaps this association in Dante's mind served as the ladder by which she cHmbed into the Paradiso, where she shines next to Folquet of Marseilles. As to Sordello, it seems that the terrible Ezzelino took his conduct in ill part, so he fled west- ward across the Alps. There he wandered from court to court, composing Provencal poetry, and falling under the spell of many a " doussa enemia." His friends reckoned them to be a hundred. You can believe Sordello foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from her mass Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility ; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half germinating spices. Most men who write in a language not their own by right of birth pay the penalty by being soon for- gotten ; but one poem of Sordello's pleased Dante, and Dante presented Sordello to Robert Browning and the world. Commentators dispute whether this was a long didactic poem on right living or a short elegiac poem on the death of a friend. The first discourses on ideal conduct (which to Sordello is con- duct pleasing both to God and man, " qui a Dieu et al segle platz "), on the origin of evil, on keeping good company, on the respect due to ladies, poor knights and minstrels, and on kindred matters. The other poem is a short lament on Lord Blacatz, a Provengal patron of troubadours, and is famous for its main conceit : " Let all who wish for valour eat 140 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY of Blacatz's heart; let. the Emperor Frederick, if he would conquer the Milanese, let Louis of France, if he would enforce his claim to Castile, let Henry of England, if he would recover Normandy." What- ever the cause Sordello interested Dante and lives immortal in the Purgatorio. This influence of Proven9al poetry, so overpower- ing in many respects, was due not merely to its own richness and high development, but in part to the low estate of poetry in Italy. The fountains of the Provencal Helicon flowed down into the plains of Lombardy as the waters of Lake Como flow down- ward to the Po. In fact, thirst for poetry had little to quench it in Italy. There was some Latin poetry. Latin had the authority of ancient Rome and the weight of the Church at its back ; it was the lan- guage of all prose worth writing. But the dignity, got from these high uses, prevented a poet from being natural. Who could write a ballad in Latin to his mistress's eyebrow ? For love or friendship Latin was already a dead language. Sundry hymns of the Church were the only tolerable Latin poems, written at least in Italy, since Boethius. On the other hand, it was difficult, if not impossible, to be grave and dignified in the young, unfledged Italian. Men who had in mind ecclesiastical ritual or official ceremony kept in the old Latin close, and shunned the fresh woods and new pastures of the vernacular idiom. Pietro da Eboli, a courtier poet of southern Italy, wrote a Latin epic in Tionour of the Emperor Henry VI. Literary monks, like Abbot Joachim of the Flower, wrote stray verses. One of Joachim's poems, PROVENCAL POETRY IN ITALY 141 ■written a hundred years before the Divine Comedy, tells of going down into hell and of ascending to paradise. It is poor enough ; and yet two lines of it enable the imagination to conjure up the vision of peace that floated round the old man's head as he wrestled with the wild texts of Eevelation : — Ibi loca spatiosa illustrata lumine £t in ipsis gens beata fruens pacis reqnie ; There are spacious places illustrious with light And in them blessed people enjoy the quietness of peace. And churchmen, such as Innocent III, for example, wrote hymns to the Virgin. But these men were not poets. No inner compulsion obliged them to sing. They wrote Latin verses, because it was the fashion. If we look for beauty, passion, imagination, or a poet's dreaming, in these poems, we shall come away empty-handed ; and it would hardly be worth while to mention them, except that Latin poetry straggled on through the century and produced at the end that beautiful and touching poem, Stabat mater dolorosa. In Italian itself at the beginning of the century there was no poetry of any kind. This barrenness was due for the most part to the tardy development of the language. Loyalty to her ancient tongue, the exponent of religion and law in all Christendom, clogged Italy's advance. The spoken language had long ceased to be Latin ; it was a degenerate speech, slowly shaping its rude forms to fit nice ideas and polite usage, but its progress was slow. In fact, Ital- ian could hardly be called a national language, but 142 ITALY m THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY rather a group of idioms differing among themselves, and none strong enough to assert a mastery. Dante, near a hundred years later, describes how even then Italy was divided into dialects. He reckoned fourteen different provinces, each with its own speech. Lom- bardy, Tuscany, the Marches of Treviso, Ancona, and Genoa, Eome, Apulia, Spoleto, and the rest, had severally their individual characteristics. Even in the same province cities differed from each other. In Tuscany, Arezzo had one patois, Siena another ; in Lombardy, the cities of Ferrara and Piacenza had different dialects, and Milan differed from Ve- rona. No two cities really spoke alike, and all spoke in an uneducated way. The Genoese thrust the let- ter z into all their words ; the Forlivesi spoke a soft, simpering speech, like women ; the Veronese dropped the last syllable ; the people of Treviso pronounced f in place of v ; those of Parma said monto instead of multo. Sometimes there were different dialects in different quarters of the same city, as in Bologna, where the inhabitants of Borgo San Felice and those of the Strada Maggiore did not speak alike. The idioms of the towns near the frontier, like Trent, Turin, and Alessandria, were so interlarded with foreign borrowings as not to be really Italian ; and mountaineers and remote peasants were unintelli- gible. And among all these there was no command- ing dialect that could claim the right to precedence and impose itself on all Italy, as a common language for the learned and the elegant. If this was true in Dante's time, it must have been vastly worse at the beginning of the century. Naturally poets who fre- PKOVENCAL POETRY IN ITALY 143 queuted the nobility and \rished to express refined sentiments, nice metaphors, or gross compliments in befitting words, turned to a language, developed for these very purposes, in which princes and even kings had written poetry. These dialects that Dante enu- merates so scornfully could not render the artificial forms and subtle conceits that courtiers aspired to. And so, from many reasons, it came about that the poetry of chivalry, of courts, of lords and ladies and their hangers-on, which proceeded from the feudal organization of society, moved on triumphantly and made the Provengal tongue and its ways fashionable in Italy, while the native language was still unripe to produce a poetry of its own. CHAPTER XII THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY (1225-1266) E i Siciliani, Che for gi& pciini. Fetbabcb. And the Sioiliana Who were once the first. With a puling infant's force, They swayed al)OUt upon a rocking horse, And thonght it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-sonled I The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering wares — ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom. But ye were . . . . . . wed to musty laws. Eeats. The poets and poetry of Provence had prepared the way so well that, when Simon de Montfort, Folquet of Marseilles (the renegade troubadour), and their myrmidons had trampled down the blithe careless- ness of Toulouse and Beziers, overthrown the gai saber, and driven out the Muse of Poetry, Italy of- fered her a refuge and a home at the court of the Emperor; and there she dwelt (in Italian dress but with " Provencal blood in her veins ") all the time that " fortune remained favourable to the illustrious heroes, Frederick Caesar and his noble son Manfred." And with the fall of the Hohenstaufens, — for she too had accomplished her destiny, — the Muse of Provencal poetry died. The Emperor himself, his sons Enzio and Man- fred, — pulcherrimus et cantor et inventor cantio- THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETKY 145 num, — Pier della Vigna his especial favourite, Ja- copo da Lentino the notary, Guido delle Golonne the judge, Rinaldo d' Aquino, and many a gallant noble- man, wrote poetry; and so famous did the royal court become as the home of Italian poetry that poets from north and south, from Tuscany, Apulia, and Sicily are accounted a school of the court ; and as the court was the court of the Sicilian kingdom, — though the Emperor in fact passed his time on the mainland, at Capua or at Foggia, and not in Sicily, — it was known as the Sicilian court, and these Ital- ian troubadours as the Sicilian school, and their poems as Sicilian poetry. The word Sicilian conjures up too much — nature enriched by art, asphodels, wild yellow blooms, roses that yield their dearest scent to love-sick winds from across the sea, shep- herds piping rival songs, and the death-defying echoes of Theocritus; but none of these fanciful imaginings apply to the Sicilian school. The name is Sicilian, the language Italian, the spirit and the form all Provencal ; nature finds no place. There was, indeed, some verse written outside the influence of the court, in places remote from fashion, where nobody knew Provencal poetry. Rhymesters of local fame, bards of the village or the town, wrote after their rustic fashion to please unlettered audi- ences. These poets composed communal verses, reli- gious ditties, didactic rhymes, or love-songs. They had no sops to throw to oblivion ; and there are none but a scanty band of scholars to remember that they ever existed. But there is a single exception, which makes it necessary to mention them. A Sicilian poet, 146 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Cielo dal Camo, wrote a poem of alternate strophes, in which a lover woos a lass and she feigns to deny. The poem begins with the lover speaking : — Rosa fresca aulentisima c' apar' in ver la state, le donne ti disiano pulzelle, maritate ; trami d' este focora, se t' este a bolontate. Thou sweetly-smelling fresh red rose That near thy summer art, Of whom each damsel and each dame Would feign be counterpart ; Oh ! from this fire to draw me forth Be it in thy good heart. (Dante Gabriel Bossetti.) Throughout, the lady protests too much, and in the end, after the bold lover has plighted his troth on a Bible (stolen from the village church), she yields. The reason that this poem should outlive the life allotted to its fellows is hardly to be locked for in itself, or in the unprudish touch of nature in it, or even in the pretty floral syllables, — " rosa fresca au- lentisima," — but in Dante's treatise On the Vernao- ular Speech, for there he quotes the third line of the poem. And here the imp of irony may grin, for Dante cites the line as an instance of the drawling defects in the popular Sicilian dialect ; but Dante's touch was instinct with life and communicated im- mortality. There is one poem, however, that needed neither the fame of the royal court nor the touch of Dante to preserve it. Its own charm and pathos bear it down the centuries, the earliest of Italian poems and the only one written before Dante that the world stops THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETKY 147 to read ; its writer was a man of genius, as high of soul as Dante himself, and even larger of heart. St. Francis wrote his canticle at a time when he was ill at San Damiano, the nunnery outside Assisi, where St. Clare and her sisters lived (1225). Her spirit kindled his ; her presence filled his heart so to over- flowing that he felt the divine need to express his great love of God and of God's works. And yet, though the poem proceeds from nature (if, indeed, it be natural to have a passionate heart and to speak from it), St. Francis had in his mind, or at least in his memory, the great canticle of the Three Holy Children: — Benedicite, omnia opera Domini, Domino : Laudate et superexaltate eum in secala. Benedicite, sol et luna, Domino : Laudate et superexaltate earn in secula. St. Francis's canticle is less magnificent but far more tender : — Altissimu, onnipotente, bon signore, tue so le laude la gloria e Tonore et onne benedictions. Ad te solo, altissimo, se konfano et nulla homo ene dignu te mentovare. Laudato sie, mi signore, cum tucte le tue creature epetialmente messor lo frat^ sole, lo quale jorna, et allumini per lui ; et ellu h bellu e radiante cum grande splendors ; de te, altissimo, porta significatione. Laudato si, mi signore, per sora luna e le stelle, in celu I'ai formate clarite et pretiose et belle. Laudato si, mi signore, per sor acqua, la quale h multo utile et humele et pretiosa et casta. 148 ITALY m THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Laudato si, mi signore, per frate focu, per lo quale ennallumini la nocte, ed ello h bello at jucundo et robustoso et forte. Laudate et benedicite mi signore et rengratiate et serviteli cum grande humilitate. Most Highest, almighty, good Lord, Thine are the praises, the glory and the honour and all blessedness ; To thee alone. Most Highest, they belong. And no man is worthy to utter thy name. Praised be my Lord, with all thy creatures. Especially Sir Brother the Sun, Who brings the day and gives the light ; And he is beautiful and radiant with great shining ; Of the Most Highest he tells the tale. Praised be my Lord for Sister Moon and the Stars, In heaven thou hast wrought them bright and precious and beautiful. Praised be my Lord for Sister Water, Who is very useful, and lowly and precious and pure. Praised be my Lord for Brother Fire, By whom Thou dost illuminate the night, And he is beautiful and jocund and robust and strong. Praise and bless my Lord and give thanks And serve Him with great, humility. If St. Francis's hymn has neither the majesty nor the high ecclesiastical quality that renders the Latin canticle worthy to be chanted in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres, it bears witness to a holy and humble heart, such as is only found in rare poets, as (to choose an English instance) in William Cowper. THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 149 With this exception, or with these exceptions (if we are to include the poem of Cielo dal Camo) Ital- ian poetry in its first period is SiciUan (1225-1266), and it owes substantially everything, name and all, to the Emperor and his court. The ecclesiastical pur- itan. Pope Gregory, in his anger against Frederick, uncharitably fixed his eyes on the misbeheving Jews from Cordova, on the dancing-girls from Egypt, on the harem and the eunuchs ; but had he been more true to the memory of St. Francis and the first breth- ren, joculatores Dei, who were wont to go singing like happy boys along the way, he would have got a different notion of Frederick. He would have seen lords and ladies gay on Arab horses, their hounds straining in the leash, and the Emperor's falconers, with falcons on their wrists, awaiting the signal to let slip. Arid after the chase along the banks of the Volturno or across the plains near Foggia, a sym- pathetic ear would have listened with delight to the nymph Echo sweetly waked, after a sleep of near a thousand years, by courtly songs sung to the viol and the lute. Frederick's court was the cradle of Italian poetry ; and yet one must not expect the passion or the high romance of amorous youth, one must not hope to hear such songs as Burns wrote to Mary Morison, or Heinrich Heine sang to " Liebchen traut," or as Palgrave collected in the Golden Treasury. Car- ducci, the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, says : " But those courtly verses ! Those verses of the so- called Sicilian school founded by Frederick II, those verses, oh ! what wretched stuff they are ! " Their 150 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY defects, he says, are not the defects of youth, but the senile stammerings of decrepitude. A poet is hard to please. Dabblers in history must be more just. One must banish from memory all the poetry one has ever heard ; and then, the mind all blank, remembering only the musty chronicles and the mel- ancholy monastic poetasters, listen to the songs of these Italian troubadours, and one may think, with Dante Rossetti, that they are worth the while, that their imperfections are coupled with merits, that indeed, "these poems possess beauties of a kind which can never again exist in art." At any rate this is the upper reach of the main stream of Italian poetry. Of Manfred's poems little has come down to us ; and as both he and his brother Enzio, and Pier deUa Vigna, too, shall play their tragic parts later on, and take all the space that I can spare to them, I pass them by, and content myself with calling the roll of minor poets: Jacopo da Lentino, Guido delle Colonne, Einaldo d' Aquino, Arrigo Testa, Jacopo Mostacci, Mazzeo di Rico, Giacomino Pugliese, Rosso da Messina, Percivalle Doria, Ruggero de Amicis, Folco di Calabria, Tiberto Galliziani, Ranieri di Pal- ermo, all of whom are best remembered because they wrote poetry. For all these poets of the Sicilian school a foreigner had better accept but one stand- ard of dignity : the notice of Dante. Two, Pier della Vigna and Manfred, have great places in the Divine Comedy; two, Frederick himself and Jacopo da Lentino, are also named there, and so named as never to be forgotten j and three, Jacopo da Len- Giovanni I'lBano Aliuuri, phot. LADY HAWKING Panel from Fountain at Peiugia THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETEY 151 tino, Guido delle Colonne, and Rinaldo d' Aquino, are cited in the treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia. The rest of them must remain — for they would take us too far afield — enwrapped in their own trailing syllables. Some of these poets were of noble family, others not: the more important, Pier della Vigna, Jacopo da Lentino, and Guido delle Colonne, were all law- yers; others, such as Arrigo Testa and Percivalle Doria, were what may be called podestas by profes- sion, and led bustling political careers. But, except- ing the Emperor, Manfred, and Pier della Vigna, Dante is only interested in these men as poets. In his treatise On the Vernacular Speech he is in quest of an Italian, fit for literature, and more especially for poetry (such as, after generations of writers, the slowly achieved classics of a language furnish), an Italian, "illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial," or, as we should say, sanctioned by the usage of persons of the highest cultivation, correct and ele- gant ; and on his quest he examines the local dialects of Italy, criticises them, and, in order the better to illustrate his meaning, refers to these poets. For in- stance, in speaking of the dialect of Apulia he cites Rinaldo d' Aquino and Jacopo da Lentino: "But though the natives of Apulia commonly speak in a hideous manner, some of them have been distin- guished by their use of polished language, inserting nicely chosen (curial) words into their canzoni, as clearly appears from an examination of their works ; for instance, 'Madonna, dir vi voglio' ('Lady, I will tell you,') by Jacopo, and 'Per fino amore vo si 152 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY letamente' ('for pure love I go so joyfully') by Rinaldo." Rinaldo, it seems, was a member of the celebrated family of Apulia to ■which St. Thomas Aquinas be- longed, and was one of the falconers to the Emperor, as young noblemen sometimes were. As such he must have gone on the imperial hawking parties, and perhaps even helped the Emperor in the pre- paration of his book on hawking, De arte venandi cum avihus. Einaldo, following the fashion then in use among poets, exchanged poems with Jacopo da Lentino, Ruggero de Amicis, Tiberto Galliziani, and with the Emperor himself. Here is a stanza of the poem that Dante quotes : — Per fino amore vao si allegramente, k' io non agio veduto omo k' en gioja mi possa aparilgliare, e paremi ke falli malamente omo k' k ricieputo ben da sengnore e poi lo vol cielare. Perk' 60 nol cielaragio com altamente amor m' h, meritato : ke m' h, dato a servire a la fiore di tucta canoscienza e di valenza, ed k belleze piii k'eo non so dire. amor m' k sormontato lo core in mante guise e gran gioja n' agio. For pure love I go so joyfully That I have not seen A man that in joy can equal me, And methinks that badly fails The man who has received Benefice from a lord and will then conceal it. THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 153 Therefore I will not conceal How highly Love has favoured me : For he has granted me to serve The flower of all that 's known And of excellence, And beauties more than I can say. Love has overcome My heart in many a way and great joy I have of it. Guido delle Colonne, judge, of Messina, is also referred to in the De Vulgari Eloquentia ; " Let us examine the genius of the Sicilian vernacular. . . because we find that very many natives of Sicily have written weighty poetry, as in the canzoni, 'Ancor chel' aiguaper lofocho lassi' {' Even though through fire water forsakes its coldness') and 'Amor, che lungiamente m' hai menato' (' love, who long hast led me')." The second of these begins: — Amor, che lungiamente m' hai menato a freno stretto senza riposanza, allarga le tue redini in pietanza, chb soverchianza m' ha vinto e stancato : ch' ho pih durato ch' io non ho possanza, per voi, Madonna, a cui porto lianza, piu che non far Assassino in suo cuitato, che si lascia morir per sua credanza. Ben ^ste affanno dilettoso, amare e dolce pena ben si pu6 chiamare. Ma voi. Madonna, della mia travaglia, che si mi squaglia, — prendavi mercide, chb bene h dolce il mal se non m' ancide. Love, who all this while hast urged me on, Shaking the reins, with never any rest, — Slacken for pity somewhat of thy haste ; 1 am oppress'd with languor and f oredone, — Having outrun the power of sufferance, — 154 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY Having mach more endured than who, through faith That his heart holds, makes no account of death. Love is assuredly a fair mischance, And well may it be called a happy ill : Yet thou, my lady, on this constant sting. So sharp a thing, have thou some pity still, — Howbeit a sweet thing too, unless it kill. {Dante Gabriel Mossetti.) Jacopo da Lentino, of Apulia, from his ofi&ce commonly called the Notary, besides the reference to him in De Vulgari Eloquentia, is mentioned in the Paradiso as one of the earlier poets who, caught and tangled in an artificial manner (in contrast to the school of the dolce stil nuovo, the sweet new style, to which Dante belonged), did not express the natural sentiments that well up in the human heart. Apparently the Notary was regarded as the best of his school, and was therefore chosen by Dante to represent it. Nothing of his life is known except that he exchanged poems with Pier della Vigna and others, and that he executed notarial acts in the year 1233. He is a mere shadow, living a dim hfe in the meagre allusions of Dante, and yet some of his verses seem to deserve remembrance for their own sake. lo m' aggio posto in core a Dio servire Com' io potesse gire in Paradiso, Al santo loco, ch' aggio audito dire, 0' si mantien sollazzo, gioco e riso. Senza Madonna non vi vorrfa gire, Quella ch' ha bionda testa e chiaro viso, Che senza lei non poterfa gaudire, Istando da la mia donna diviso. Ma non lo dico a tale intendimento THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 155 Perch' io peccato ci volesse fare ; Se nou veder lo suo bel portamento, E lo bel viso, e '1 morbido sguardare : Ch^ '1 mi terria in gran consolamento Yeggendo la mia donna in gioia stare. I have it in my heart to serve God so That into Paradise I shall repair, — The holy place through the which everywhere I have heard say that joy and solace flow. Without my lady I were loath to go, — She who has the bright face and the bright hair ; Because if she were absent, I being there, My pleasure would be less than nought, I know. Look you, I say not this to such intent As that I there would deal in any sin : I only would behold her gracious mien, And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face, That so it should be my complete content To see my lady joyful in her place. (Danfe Gabriel Eossetti.) His canzoni have variety of measure and are so ob- viously written to music that in spite of their arti- ficiality, they seem to come nearer to a natural form of expression than the sonnets do : — Madonna mia, a vol mando in gioi li mei sospiri ; ca lungiamente amando non vi volsi mai dire com' era vostro amante 6 lealmente amava, e perb k' eo dottava non vi facea sembiante. Tanto set' alta e grande, k' eo v' amo pur dottando ; non ao per cui vi_ mande, per messaggio parlando ; 156 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY und' eo prego 1' amore, a cui pregha ogni amanti, li mei sospiri e pianti vi pungano lo core. My Lady mine, I send These sighs in joy to thee ; Though, loving till the end. There were no hope for me That I should speak my love ; And I have loved indeed, Though, having fearful heed. It was not spoken of. Thoa art so high and great That whom I love I fear ; Which thing to circumstate I have no messenger : "Wherefore to Love I pray, On whom each lover cries. That these my tears and sighs. Find unto thee a way. {Dante Gabriel Rossetti.) So far, in spite of all his airs and graces, there is a certain charm, almost a sort of eighteenth-century courtliness in his verse, and nothing more artificial or stilted than appears to modern readers in the first English sonneteers, Wyatt and Surrey, or in Cowley, for instance. But the desire to outdo his rival poets, to show how dexterous he could be in interweaving rhymes and juggling with words, leads the Notary to a pass where he draws down on him- self the criticism that Alceste gives to Oronte : — Vous vous etes r%M sur de m^chants modMes, Et vos expressions ne sont point naturelles. THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETEY 157 Ce style figur^, dont on fait vanitd, Sort du bon caractbre et de la v&it^ ; Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu' affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature. ladeed, the Notary at his worst outdoes Oronte : — Lo vise e son diviso da lo viso, e per aviso credo ben visare ; perb diviso viso da lo viso, ch' altr'h lo viso che lo divisare ; e per aviso viso in tale viso, del quale me non posso divisare. It is impossible in English, even letting sense (if there is any) go by the board, to reproduce the play on the unfortunate words, viso, diviso, aviso; but the sonnet serves to show that the goal applauded by Dante, to sing as the heart bids, was not the goal set up by the Sicilian school. And, indeed, to ex- press passion in poetry so that it shall seem to be nature's doing is not to be expected from first comers, for it is the highest achievement of art. But it is not fair to leave the Notary with such dis- paragement. Here is the beginning of another son- net, whose sentiment if not its form connects the SiciHan poet, through some roundabout inheritance of poetical imagining, with the sovereign of Eng- lish poetry : — Amore h un disio che vien dal core, per r abbondanza di gran piacimento ; e gli occhi in prima generan 1' Amore e lo core li dk nutrieamento. Fancy in the heart is bred, When great contentment therein lies ; 158 ITALY m THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY It is engendered in the eyes, And by the heart is nourished. The Emperor, though he played the sun among these satellites and deserves the chief credit for welcoming the Muse of Provence to his court, and though Dante Rossetti says that one of his poems has "great passionate beauty," seems to me much less interesting as a poet than many of the others, and I choose my specimen of his poems, not because it is the best, but because it has quite a different form from those that I have given. It has the rhapsodical quality of the improvisatore that brings to mind a mandolin, dark eyes, and the sweet smiles of the fair and fickle South : — Tuttora gaudiosa, Always lovely, tuttora bella, Always gay, amore, Rosella, RoseUa's face col viso gioiosa ; Shines like the day ; occhi fere Her cruel eyes guerrere Soldier-wise che fere That strike a guisa di ladrone ; Robber like, in guardare, Glancing, mostrare. Entrancing, e amare Dazzling us all mett' elli intenzione. She uses to enthrall. It is easy to play the critic with these poets, to deride and to be bored ; there is little trace, or none, of truth in them, nothing of the amplitude of na- ture, or the dignity of human passion. No song is sung as the bird sings, itself its own reward. It is easy to side with Dante and the school of the sweet new style, to point the finger at the Notary, to scoff THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 159 at his artificial numbers, and to agree when Lorenzo dei Medici criticises him as heavy and graceless, or when Carducci cries, " what wretched .stuff." The Notary and Oronte are obviously in the wrong; the song Alceste quotes is worth all the poetry o£ the whole Sicilian school : — Si le roi m'aTait donn^ Paris, sa grand' ville Et qu'il me fallQt quitter L'amour de ma mie, Je dirais au roi Henri ; Beprenez votre Paris, J'aime mieux ma mie, o gu^, J'aime miens ma mie. But let us imagine ourselves having come down from the North, from the castle of some rude Tuscan baron, where for entertainment & jongleur has sung out of his stale repertory, for instance, the lady's reply to a wooer: — Vo' ti cavillar con mego ? se lo sa lo meo mari, male piato avrai con sego, bel meser, vero ve di. So you wish to practise blarney ? If my husband hears, I warn ye, Pretty sir, I tell you true. He '11 have a bone to pick with you. Then, let us say that we endure the hospitality of the monks of Monte Cassino, where the poet of the monastery has mingled edification with his monstrous verses: — Eo, sinjuri, s' eo fabello, lo bostru audire compello ; 160 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY de questa bita interpello e dell' altra bene spello. Seigneurs, for my fable Your attention I compel ; Of this Uf e I shaU tell And the other interpret well. And, after matins and monastic rations, we ride at last along the banks of the Volturno into Capua and dismount at the king's palace. Young nobles, of great name, Riccardo Filangieri, Ruggero di Porcastrella, Landolfo Caracciolo, clatter through the streets, glancing up at windows where the shut- ters stand ajar ; the royal falconers, perhaps Einaldo of Aquino and Jacopo Mostacci, poets both, see that the hooded falcons return to their perches in the royal mews ; the splendour of the setting South- ern sun falls on the castle walls ; the beautiful Bi- anca Lancia gathers about her cavaliers and high- born dames; minstrels play, and then Jacopo da Lentino, his notarial duties done, sings to the viol : — Madonna dir vi voglio como 1' amor m' a preso, My lady, I will tell you how love has taken me. Surely, in comparison with what had gone before them, these poets are to be commended ; and if we turn to what came after them, they did one worthy thing : they worked the young language, rendered it more easy and pliant, freed it from the grossness of provincial usages, purged it of its Latin remnants, and handed it on to Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, to Dante and Petrarch, capable of nobler melody than Europe had heard for fifteen hundred years. Who THE SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY 161 can say but that Dante would have written the Divine Comedy in Latin, had not these poets ren- dered the Italian tongue nice, elegant, refined, and correct? The hon's share of this praise is due to the Emperor ; and if one becomes impatient with his dupHcity, his savage temper, and his grosser pleas- ures, one must remember the happy days when he and his courtiers weeded and planted in the garden of Italian poetry. CHAPTER Xm THE LOMBAKD COMMUNES Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair. Shelley. This royal garden of poetry, philosophy, and pleasure was too delightful to last. The Sicilian court, with its trovatori, its cavaliers, its melodious lawyers, its falconers, would have been well content to be let alone, but that could not be. Life of all sorts was springing up everywhere ; sprouts and shoots, com- mercial, municipal, religious, and intellectual, were raising their heads in the fresh spring air, each forc- ing its way to the light amid the furrows turned up by the ploughshare of material prosperity. Guilds, religious orders, communes, tyrannies were pushing and jostling one another in fierce competition to de- termine which should take and keep the larger share of desirable things. In this conflict the luxuriant civilization of south- ern Italy, too much like that of Provence and Lan- guedoc, was not of a temper to hold its own; and, in particular, it was burdened by two causes of weak- ness. In the first place, it was pleasure-loving, and so became enervated and idle; in the second place, it was based on a paternal government. Frederick was by nature and policy a tyrant. Setting before THE LOMBAED COMMUNES 163 himself the example of his ancestors, and of his friend the Soldan of Egypt, he claimed absolute power as his right. He wished, indeed, to establish peace, order, and justice, but he meant to do so in his own way. His subjects were not to think and act for themselves, to feel personal responsibility or enjoy the exertion of individual effort. He would determine what was best for them to do, and they must obey. Here Fred- erick squarely confronted the great movement of the thirteenth century, which was a stirring of individual life, an endeavour to shake off the yoke of imme- morial usage, an awakening consciousness of individ- ual rights, as opposed to the unthinking acceptance of feudal and corporate ideas which had prevailed in the dark ages. This movement of the thirteenth century may be compared with that at the end of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth, in its passion for per- sonal freedom. St. Francis and his companions were as free in spirit as Lord Byron or the sansculottes of Paris, and daffed the world aside with its creed and conventions as recklessly as they. And the re- solve of the middle classes to take their share of po- litical power, if less fiery than that of the Jacobins, was as determined and as successful as that of the partisans of the Reform Bill. This disposition of these Italians to live their lives according to their own ideas, to manage their own affairs, to express their thoughts and sentiments in their own way, em- bodied itself in widely different forms ; in Umbria it found its fullest expression through religion and became incorporate in the first band of Franciscans; 164 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY but in Lombardy it turned to politics, and took de- finite shape in guilds and in communal governments. A little later the same spirit, breathing the breath of life into art, took up the sculptor's chisel in Pisa and the painter's brush at Siena, Florence, and Rome. For various reasons this movement met a cold re- ception in the South. The race or races of Sicily and Apulia lacked then, as they have lacked ever since, the capacity to unite love of liberty and law ; the incongruous ideals and habits of mind of ItaHans, Greeks, Saracens, Normans, and Germans gave a mon- grel cast to the spirit of the people and prevented their happy cooperation in any arduous enterprise; the civil disorder during Henry's reign and Freder- ick's minority hindered material development (for working together successfully in little things enables men to work together in great matters) and begot a skepticism of generous effort ; and with these adverse causes must be reckoned the fierce opposition of the Emperor. For such reasons, whenever the love of liberty, of self-assertion, of self-expression appeared in the South, it was but here and there, and with fitful energy ; all real achievement, social and intel- lectual, was accomplished in the North. The honour of occupying the van in this march forward is due to Lombardy. The great cities of the seacoast — Pisa, Genoa, Venice — indeed, had as- serted their independence long before, and by their adventurous exploits across the seas had stirred and quickened individual effort. They had opened a way and offered a career to energy and self-reliance. But it was in the cities of the North, and first of all in THE LOMBARD COMMUNES 165 ' Lombardy, that this sense of personal rights was put to use in common action to secure political independ- ence. It was this spirit that brought the Lombard cities into conflict with the Emperor. At first sight these cities seem indifferent to the individual and interested only in corporate life ; and yet, though these corporations, the guilds and so- cieties, were arbitrary, conventional, and narrow, they afforded room for far greater personal liberty than was possible under the earlier organization of society. If they did not champion personal liberty or the good of the humble citizens, they asserted the claims of the middle classes against the nobles, and the right of the commune to govern itself. In particular, they were resolute to maintain the prerogative, wrung from Barbarossa, of choosing their own gov- ernors. Frederick II made no open declaration of a purpose to take this prerogative from them ; but his notions of government were well known. His edict for The Kingdom was a challenge to communal lib- erty everywhere : " Since there are enough officials appointed by Our Majesty that every man may ob- tain justice in both civil and criminal matters, We aboUsh the illegal usurpation that has grown up in some parts of Our Kingdom, and We command that henceforth no podestas, consuls, or rectors shall be created anywhere, and that no one, either by author- ity of custom or conferment of the people, shall usurp any office or jurisdiction." To such a theory of royal despotism the com- munes were unalterably opposed. They did not wish, in short, to be ruled, guided, or governed by any 166 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY outsider, be he bishop, prince, or emperor; they did not wish to have their affairs cramped or tied down by the outworn customs of the feudal system; they wished to manage their own business and take their own road to wealth and happiness. These Lombard cities had grown to independence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, during the wars between the Empire and the Papacy. Petted by the contending parties, each ready to pay in charters and privileges whatever price was necessary to win a city to its side, the communes succeeded in estab- lishing a position of virtual independence. Naturally the Empire felt itself aggrieved by this change, and under Barbarossa made a spirited attempt to restore the old order. The appeal to arms, however, had re- sulted in a decisive victory for the cities. After a long and desperate struggle they had received full recognition of their municipal independence in the Treaty of Constance (1183). Independence of the Empire set the cities free to develop and grow in their own way ; but this free- dom of development and growth did not take the path of peace. Nor did freedom mean respect of one another's rights. The moment the common danger was removed the cities fell foul of one another. Each city, surrounded by its little patch of territory, constituted a separate republic; and each republic coveted its neighbour's things. Mere neighbourhood was the prolific mother of quarrels. Milan fought with Pavia, Cremona with Brescia, Piacenza with Parma, Bologna with Modena ; every commune with its next neighbour. Not large theories upon THE LOMBAED COMMUNES 167 civil and ecclesiastical government but conflicting interests and mutual jealousies brought to birth the two great political parties in North Italy. Little enough any of these cities cared for Emperor or Pope as the embodiment of principles; but each city hated its neighbour, and where a city hoped to re- ceive support against a neighbour from the Emperor it professed allegiance to the Empire, where it hoped for support against a neighbour from the Pope, it proclaimed loyalty to the Church. Common hatred of a common enemy furnished the binding force that held alternate neighbours in federal leagues. One of these rival leagues we may call the party of the Em- pire, the other the party of the Church, or to employ terms that did not come into use till the century was half over, the Ghibelline party and the Guelf party; but we must always remember that these large names are hardly more than cloaks to cover local animosi- ties and provincial ambitions. Every city, also, was divided against itself. During the course of political evolution, imperial counts, bishops, and feudal nobility, in turn, had been lopped, trimmed, and dispossessed, and in their stead the trading and artisan classes had stepped into author- ity and control. And the pretensions of trade and manufacture did not stop at the city gates. They needed elbow room. They could not endure the tolls and imposts laid by every robber baron whose castle commanded a high road or a ford ; so in the coun- try roundabout the embattled burghers destroyed castle and stronghold, and forced the barons to live within the city walls and be hostages for their own 168 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY "good behaviour. This policy removed a danger from without, but introduced a new leaven of turbulence within. The city inevitably split into two factions. One, aristocratic and conservative, looked upon the old imperial constitution as its foundation and to the Emperor for support; the other, democratic and lib- eral, turned to the Church. But although this is true in the main, it is not always true ; in some cities the aristocracy turned to the Church and the hourgeoisie to the Empire. Sometimes two noble families divided the city — in Verona, Montagues and Capulets (for Shakespeare has decreed that the Capulets lived in Verona, whether or no), in Orvieto, Monaldi and Filippeschi, in Bologna, Lambertazzi and Geremei, and so on ; and then a chance accident swung one faction to the imperial side and its rival into opposi- tion. Each faction entered into relations — alliance, understanding, or mere sympathy — with the fac- tions of its way of thinking in other cities. In this manner division and hate were lodged in every province and in every city throughout all Upper Italy. Confederates shifted allegiance from time to time, for loyalty beyond the limits of self -advan- tage was little practised. But, on the whole, inter- ests remained constant and the two parties main- tained a fairly definite continuity. The usual matter of party politics was some such question as how the Guelfs of Bologna could aid the kindred faction in Modena to dispossess its ene- mies, or how the Imperialists of Cremona could help a Ghibelline lord establish his rule in Verona. The mass of citizens were never really aroused except on THE LOMBARD COMMUNES 169 questions of trade, as for tolls imposed by a neigh- bour on the right of transit, or for interference with a canal, or when competition threatened some pros- perous monopoly. Then, if one city lost its temper with another, it forbade the passage of the other's merchandise over its territories. The injured rival, seeing prices rise in oil, salt, cotton, wool, fresh fish, and steel, rang the bells, called out the trainbands, dragged forth the carroccio, hoisted the gonfalon, and raided its enemy's territory. These wars between little towns scarce twenty-five or thirty miles apart are difficult to understand. A campaign lasted but a few weeks, and was conducted in the summer-time after the swollen waters of the spring had subsided. The raiders were ill-disciplined bands of militia : city trainbands, spirited fellows from the guilds, apprentices tired of warehouse and counting-room, young gentlemen with nothing to do, and politicians hoping to win prestige. The mer- chants, on the other hand, were too busy for such fol- lies, so it sometimes happened that a city would be lost and won, while counting-rooms and factories kept at work, just as they do to-day when one band of politicians ousts another from the government. Sometimes the marauders captured an outlying castle, more often they merely destroyed crops, vines, and orchards. The municipal chroniclers are full of tales of alarums and excursions, of castles razed and prisoners captured ; but the more destructive vic- tories must be skeptically regarded, for in spite of these annual raids and counter-raids, trade flour- ished, wealth grew, and population increased. Walls 170 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY became too narrow and were carried out in larger circles. Streets were paved, thatched roofs replaced by tiles, brick and stone substituted for wood, and commercial enterprises of great cost were under- taken. Nevertheless, making all allowances for ex- aggeration on the part of patriotic chroniclers, these petty wars must have been an immense hindrance to civilization, and it is probable that they became more cruel and bloody as the century advanced. The people of Lombardy had very much in com- mon, they came from the same Italian stock crossed by Lombards and other invaders and immigrants ; and yet each city had its own life, its own history, its own strongly marked individuality, just as each had its own dialect. Even to-day, for example, the type of the women of Pavia is markedly different from that of the women of Piacenza. And in out- ward aspect the cities were individual ; the piazza, the cathedral, and the town-hall, even where they share a common style with those of another city, have their own individual traits. The piazza, always in the heart of the town, was the meeting-place where the enfranchised citizens assembled when matters concerning the common weal were submitted to them. There the peasants from the country round sold their butter, eggs, fruit, and vegetables ; there the trainbands drilled ; there the burghers met and chatted after mass ; there elderly couples sauntered on summer evenings ; and there rowdy nobles shouted their war cries and set the match to civil discord. On one side of the piazza stood the cathedral, built in the pleasant, THE LOMBAED COMMUNES 171 round-arched fashion of the Romanesque builders of Lombardy. Even to-day the cathedrals in Verona, Cremona, Ferrara, and the cities strung like beads along the Via Emilia, show the traveller at a glance that they were built before the arrogant Gothic of the North had come down to impose its pointed arches upon an alien land. Arcades under the eaves follow the rake of the roof or run straight across the front in a smiling, almost jolly, way ; column-borne porticoes mark the entrance ; over the central door of the western front one porch stands upon another's shoulders, as if caught by Medusa playing at leap- frog and turned to roseate stone. Even the great reddish beasts out of whose backs the columns rise, by the very contrast of their Lombard ferocity, con- tribute to the pleasant serenity of the whole. On the roof above the intersection of nave and transept the arched octagonal lantern lifts its gracious head. Within, the ribbed and groined vaults and clustered piers show from what instruction the glorious vaulting of the Gothic North was derived. Even the barn-like shape of the western front, as at Parma or Piacenza, is due less to peculiarity of taste than to an unwill- ingness of the architects to forsake the tradition es- tablished by those venerable monuments of Lom- bard power and piety, the churches of San Michele at Pavia and Sant' Ambrogio at Milan. That tra- dition, set up in disregard or defiance of the Roman basilicas (just as the successors of St. Ambrose had resisted the domination of the Roman See), was the distinguishing trait of Lombard architecture. Hard-by the cathedral stood the campanile, its 172 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY stately height marked off into storeys by the hori- zontal bands of arched corbel tables, and divided into panels by vertical pilasters, according to the very rigid requirements of the Lombard ateliers. A few steps away, the baptistery sheltered the sacred font, where every baby in the city and from the country roundabout was signed VFith the sign of the cross and admitted into the ranks of the Church mil- itant. Grown men, remembering how they and all their kin and all their friends had been at that font dedicated to God, carried in their hearts a special love of the holy place even into exile, as Dante did, for the baptistery was to the city what the hearth is to the home. These Lombards had strong feelings, but they were not a very religious people. You cannot com- pare their cathedrals with those which the pious French of the Ile-de-France built in honour of Mary, Queen of Heaven. That Northern sensibility to awe and majesty is not to be found in Italy. No Lombard windows reveal the glory of heaven ; no emaciated, tender, and beautiful images of stone show forth the ideal of aspiration and self-sacrifice. The citizens of Milan or Bologna did not take the theological world so seriously. Besides, this generation had had no share in building the cathedrals ; to it they were part and parcel of a world outworn, a cold inheritance from the past. Cathedrals represented an old order, a time when the bishop was the great personage and dictated his will. The trader and the artisan looked upon the cathedral as a place where they and their friends could attend mass in company with all the THE LOMBARD COMMUNES 173 wealth and fashion of the town, where ladies dis- played those extravagant gowns and trinkets that caused austere fathers and husbands to enact inef- fectual sumptuary laws, where the podesta brought foreign ambassadors in hope that the high altar might give an additional sanction to their oaths, and where the captured banners of the enemy were hung triumphantly. If the Lombards lacked a taste for the nobler poetry of religion, they had their own conceptions of grace and beauty. Look at the cathedral of Modena, and there you will see what those architects liked who were just out of the main current of the archi- tectural traditions of Pavia and Milan. They gave loose rein to their gay inventiveness, to their ir- regular and wayward humour. Eoofs, projections, arcades, inner arches, pilasters, porticoes, like a straggling troop of singing boys, proclaim a happy, prosperous, stirring life. And just to the left of the apse rises the great solemn tower, La Ghirlandina, warlike, beautiful, austere, fit emblem of the spirit of a valiant city. The cathedrals represented the earlier stage of civic development ; they were the product of the gen- erations that built while the clergy were in the saddle and directed the physical as well as the intellectual growth of the city. The generations of the ascend- ancy of the guilds embodied their political and social ideas in a different form. In contrast, almost in op- position, to the cathedrals stand the town-halls — hroletti, palazzi communali, palazzi della ragione, palazzi delpodesfh — massive and rectangular, stern 174 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY representations of vigilance and law. Here abode the city government, here the podesta issued his orders, here the consuls of the year had their offices, here the executive council and its governing committee? sat, and here the tribunals of justice heard causes. The ground floor, arcaded and vaulted, was often open, ready to be the market-place in winter or bad weather; while the upper storey held a noble hall, where under fluttering banners citizens of weight and consequence debated the policy of the city. These buildings were the habitations of self-govern- ment; they expressed the spirit, the self-reliance, and the power of the guilds. All over the city, high above the house-tops, lordly towers lifted their threatening heads. One strong door at the base admitted a handful of bowmen, who climbed up the dark, narrow, spiral stair to the battlemented roof, or to the little chamber beneath, where two or three had room to shoot their arrows through the splayed slits. These towers were the signs of power and fashion. All the aristocracy of the city coveted them. If one family was not rich enough, several banded together and built a tower for their common glory. Time, fire, pubhc and pri- vate enemies, and the rigorous, levelling justice of the podestas, have laid them low ; but here and there a few lonely survivors, such as the Asinelli and the Garisenda at Bologna, or the little group at San Gimignano, indicate what a towered city was, when a hundred towers and more rose like a sheaf of spears from within the narrow circuit of the walls. Beneath these high slim fortresses, crooked streets THE LOMBAKD COMMUNES 175 wound past rows of houses, built like ours, wall to wall. The lowest levels of the streets served for gut- ters. Little, black-haired, barelegged boys and girls, their radiant faces smouched and smutty, their noses unhandkerchiefed, laughed and giggled as they splashed through the wet and filth. There was little place for grass or trees, excepting here and there, before prosperous houses that fronted on an open space, where an elm or a linden might be growing. The houses of the poor were huddled together, little, dirty, and in earlier times wholly without chimneys. Distinctions of rank and property were as plain to the passer-by then as now. Yet, except for leprosy and random pests, the people were healthy; parents reared good-sized families and the population in- creased everywhere. Milan, the richest and the most powerful of all the northern cities, was said to hold thirteen thousand houses and two hundred thousand people. The no- taries were reckoned in number at four hundred, the butchers and bakers also at four hundred severally, the physicians at two hundred, the mastersmiths at one hundred, schoolmasters at eighty, public scrive- ners at fifty, and (but here the imagination or pride of the statistician must have waxed too eloquent) the taverns at one thousand. Pavia, which ranked next to Milan in importance, until by shifting for- tune Cremona and Bologna passed her, could put fifteen thousand foot and three thousand horse into the field. But all thirteenth-century statistics are the offspring of sympathetic imaginations. With population increasing rapidly, manufactures 176 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY growing, trade pushing out in all directions, and the development of the guilds keeping even pace, the political constitution of a city necessarily changed frequently. Shifting needs prompted new experi- ments. In Milan, for instance, after the Peace of Constance, the constitution was roughly as follows : The archbishop (in ecclesiastical dignity inferior only to the Pope) was recognized as the honorary head of the city. Sentences were pronounced in his name; and he had the prerogatives of coining money, and of levying tolls on merchandise brought into the city. Next in dignity, but greater in power, came the podesta. He was an officer originally appointed by Frederick Barbarossa, but since the Peace of Constance elective. His qualifications were definitely determined. He must be noble, a man of distinction, and must come from another city. He was com- mander-in-chief of the troops and the head of crim- inal justice ; and had a great variety of administra- tive duties. The consuls, who were elected annually by that small portion of the community that held the franchise, were charged with the other ordinary duties of administration. In other cities the executive power was entrusted to a podesta or to consuls, and the legislative powers, with respect to ordinary matters, were lodged in two councils and, for special matters of supreme impor- tance, in a large council composed of all the en- franchised citizens. The history of the period between the Treaty of Constance (1183) and the renewal of the Lombard League (1226), as Dante read it by the kindly light THE LOMBAED COMMUNES 177 of flattering memory, was a tale of worth and cour- tesy:— In sul paese ch' Adige e Po riga solea valore e cortesia troyarsi, prima che Federico avesse briga ; Over the land which the Adige and the Po water Used worth and courtesy to be found, Before Frederick met opposition ; — but as that history is told by the chroniclers, men of mean curiosity and meagre imaginations, it is a story of petty wars, of castles captured, of terms of peace and oaths of concord, of barons brought to their knees, of compacts concerning canals, of licenses to build mills, of slaves manumitted, and such odds and ends of municipal life. It is also the story, sometimes told in brick and stone, sometimes vm- recorded except by inference, of bold merchants gathered together over plans and projects, of ener- getic manufacturers devising new methods of pro- duction and new means for securing to themselves the benefits thereform, of scheming bankers run- ning great risks for greater gains, and of all the economic machinery of a prosperous community. The main thread of politics begins again when Frederick comes on the scene. His proclamation of a diet at Cremona recalled the Lombard League into life. The League prevented Prince Henry and his Germans from coming into Italy. This was an act of rebellion, but it had excuse if not justification. The League had not acted merely from vague fear and timid imaginings. When the Emperor's grand- father, Frederick Barbarossa, returned to Lombardy 178 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY after the Peace o£ Constance, Milan had opened her gates and welcomed him loyally, for she and her con- federate cities trusted him. But Barbarossa's grand- son was quite a different person. According to common report, Frederick II was not a man of his word. The Lombards knew the story of his crusad- ing vows, of his covenants against the union of the crowns of the Empire and The Kingdom, of his pledges regarding ecclesiastical elections in Sicily; and in what manner those vows and covenants had been kept. The Church had taken good care to put her side of these quarrels in the most vivid light. They knew, too, of other instances of Frederick's double- dealing. When Frederick, after his first wife's death, betrothed himself to lolande, heiress to the crown of Jerusalem, her father, John of Brienne, was wear- ing the crown by courtesy, and Frederick's ambassa- dor in arranging the marriage promised King John that he should continue to wear the crown during his lifetime; but on the very day of the wedding Frederick compelled John to lay down crown and kingly title and assumed both himself. When Fred- erick was besieging the fortress of two rebels, the Counts of Celano and Aversa, he plighted his faith by solemn treaty that if the defenders would sur- render they should enjoy complete personal safety; but on surrender some were tortured and some put to death. Another time he called on some Apulian barons, whose loyalty he doubted, to aid him in Sicily against the revolted Saracens; when he got them within reach he clapped them into prison. And there was another instance nearer home. When THE LOMBAKD COMMUNES 179 Frederick was passing through northern Italy on the -way to Eome for his imperial coronation, he en- camped near Faenza, a Guelf city, that had been put under the imperial ban. Frightened by his presence, Faenza paid him fifteen hundred silver marks to be released from the ban and also for leave to hold a neighbouring castle (the title to which was in dispute) until a decision as to her rights over the castle should be decided by the proper tribunal. The Emperor accepted the bargain and sealed his grant with his own seal ; and yet, within a day or two, he author- ized Forli, a Ghibelline city and Faenza's bitter enemy, to destroy the castle and take the garrison prisoners. It is not to be wondered at, that the Lombard cities distrusted the Emperor and renewed the League. As subjects they committed a technical act of rebellion, but as men an act of prudence ; their real error was that they did not effect a more stable union. Mutual jealousies, local patriotism, and vari- ous time-honoured causes of division kept them apart. They produced no statesman of constructive ability. Nobody thought of permanent articles of confedera- tion with a federal constitution, a federal govern- ment, and federal taxation. The union was a mili- tary alliance, and its provisions were almost wholly of a negative character: *'No confederate city shall exact toUs for the passage of men or provisions through one another's territory;" "Nobody shall receive anything from the Emperor directly or in- directly, nor from any citizen of Cremona, Pavia or of the Imperial party, under pain of confiscation and 180 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY banishment;" "No judge, no soldier (mercenary or volunteer), no student, no retainer, belonging to any city of the League, either in person or by agent, shall have any dealings with the Imperial Court or with anybody connected with the court." In this league were Milan, Piacenza, Bergamo, Verona, Brescia, Mantua, Vercelli, Lodi, Turin, Alessandria, Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Bologna, and Faenza; but they could not remain a confederate body for any pur- pose but defence against the Emperor. After that prop of combined action was taken out, instead of trying to frame terms of civic confederacy that should lead to closer union and prepare the way for a common government, they came to blows each with its neighbour for the same petty causes as before, and the League tumbled to pieces like a house of cards. Milan fought Cremona, Piacenza divided in two and went to buffets against itself, Verona turned Ghibel- line and fought Brescia and Mantua, Padua fought Treviso, Bologna fought Modena and Parma, and anarchy again reigned in lo dolce piano, che da Vercelli a Marcabb dichina. It was this anarchy that made the strength of the Emperor's position. He, at least, had great plans of universal law emanating from the Emperor; he dreamed of a highly centralized power appointing governors, justiciaries, judges, bailiffs for all Italy, of equality before the law for all subjects according to their several degrees, of peace, of order, of uni- formity. And though the potent grounds for Grhib- elline loyalty were selfish ambitions, yet here and THE LOMBAED COMMUNES 181 there were nobler spirits who espoused the imperial cause for the sake of the ideals that the Emperor saw in vision, who dumbly felt what Dante expressed in the De Monarchia, that peace and unity were necessary in order that men should attain to their fullest development and highest achievement, and that peace and unity could only be obtained under a monarch. If the communes deserve our sympathy because they stood for independence and self-government, the Emperor, too, deserves sympathy because he raised the standard of peace, unity, law, and order. By these conflicting and one-sided ideals Italy was accomplishing her destiny. CHAPTER XIV BOLOGNA Surge nel chiaro inTerno la fosca turrita Bologna. CARD0CCI. In the clear \rinter rises dark, towered Bologna. The power and vigour of the Lombard cities are, however, ill-expressed by a record of wars or a sketch of poHtics. It is necessary to look closer at their life and constitution, and to do so in short space one must choose a single city ; but which ? Milan, walled and moated, — "urbs honor Italia, nota et felix, longoque Celebris ab evo " (the glory of Italy, happy, famous from of old) — by her preeminence in wealth and power, by her leadership in the national cause, might well seem entitled to be chosen. Within her walls the noblest basilica in Lombardy guarded the bones of St. Ambrose. The great atrium, round whose sides ran Romanesque arcades, if it could not boast such memories as sanctified the atria in the Roman basilicas, was sacred with the bones of good men long dead, and imposed a solemn hush before the entrance ; the central doors, carved in the late days of Roman art before the long eclipse, still ex- celled the doors cast by Barisano di Trani for the cathedral of Benevento or those by Bonanno da Pisa for the cathedral of Monreale, or even those of the oratory of St. John in theLateran baptistery. Within the church vaulted bays, resting on clustered pillars, BOLOGNA 183 ranged up the nave, doing honour to the Lombard builders ; at the crossing of the transept stood the high altar resplendent in gold, silver, and jewels ; over the altar on its porphyry columns rose the fantastic canopy, upon which in deep relief Christ gives the keys to Peter and the Book of Revelation to John ; and high above the canopy hung the cupola, whose octagonal top, light and graceful, crowned the edifice. At the back of the tribune, in Byzantine mosaics, Christ sat upon his throne, with ministering angels to right and left ; and on his lap an open book with the words, " Ego Lux Mundi." But the skill of architect, sculptor, and mosaist, could not, with all their accomplishment, enhance the real glory of the basilica. There, in that very place, though time had compelled the Romanesque builders to re- build the old Roman church, stood the font at which St. Ambrose had baptized St. Augustine, greatest of all the Fathers ; and at that threshold, perhaps beside those very doors, Ambrose had rebuked the Roman Emperor, Theodosius, and denied him admittance. And when, having made amends for the wrong he had done, Theodosius had received permission to enter, he had prostrated himself upon that floor and repeated the psalm, " Adhsesit pavimento anima mea" (my soul cleaveth unto the dust, quicken thou me according to thy word). No church in Italy, outside of Rome, not the basilica of San Marco at Venice, all glorious within, nor the pictured cathedral of Mon- reale, nor that at Pisa, which shines like alabaster in the light of the setting sun, could rival that proud eminence of glory. 184 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY In addition to her claim as the home of St. Am- brose, Milan had another of more tangible interest. She was the seat of the archbishop ; and her see had dared set itseK up against the See of Rome. She already dominated her neighbour cities, Como and Lodi, and was plainly marked out as the future ruler of the province. Her poet had reason for his boasts : Urbibus et reliquis solita est prebere ducatum Frudentum, ingentes et opes effundere sumptu Magnifico, cuius victricia signa rebelles Auditis tremuere minis, aciemque coruscam Armis innumero consertam milite. Florens Gaudebat. To other cities she is wont to give Sagacious leaders, and her riches spend Magnificently free ; the rebels quake To hear her threats, to see her conquering standards, Her serried ranks, with glittering arms And soldiers numberless. And in her own Prosperity doth she exult. As leader in resistance to the Empire, Milan, beyond all competitors, stands the first; but other cities have other honours to boast of, and political preeminence does not of itself deserve the palm. Next to the claims of Milan come those of many- towered Pavia, "urbs bona,flos urbium, clara,potens, pia," once the capital city of the Lombard kings. She, too, had her famous monuments. In the church of San Michele, founded (so the legend ran) by Con- stantine and cherished by the Lombard kings, the noblest of the Hohenstaufens, Frederick Barbarossa, had received the iron crown of Lombardy. In the sweet-syllabled church, San Pietro in Ciel d' Oro, lay BOLOGNA 185 the bones of Boethius, magniis et omnimodo miri- ficandus homo, -who, as Dante says, laid bare this deceitful world to him that hath ears to hear, and da martiro e da esilio venne a questa pace ; — and in a tomb near by lay the bones of a greater than he, St. Augustine. In Pavia, also (so patriotic citizens said), rested the ashes of St. Crispin, of the lovely St. Cecilia and of Valerian, doubly blessed, for he was both her husband and a saint, and other holy bones numerous enough to have hallowed a meaner eity. In those days, at least, only a jealous Roman tradition contested these priceless possessions. The beauty of Pavia made her a worthy shrine to encase the holiest relics. Decked with an hundred churches, crowned with towers, and girdled with encircling walls, she stood romantic and charming beside the river Ticino, and so tall and resplendent that, though a city of the plain, she could be seen from the distance of a day's journey. She had the air of a mistress among the cities, and, opposing Milan with a fierce loyalty not surpassed even by that of Cremona, maintained the honour of the Empire in Lombardy. Here the Ticino, as it sweeps downward to the Po on its joyous pilgrimage from Lago Maggiore, measures two hundred yards across. Now its yellow waters roll and swirl past low trees and green bushes, but then the water was so clear that in spite of its depth fishes could be seen dart- ing to and fro, and crabs crawling backward on th« bottom. And even in those days, on the shore next the city, the women of Pavia, erect, straight-backed, 186 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ■with their classic features, ripe complexions, and winsome looks, brighter in their gaudy kerchiefs even than the tiled city, washed their linen, sang their songs, and made eyes at the sunburnt fishermen. Milan could not boast of any such picturesque and endearing aspect; but in all the practical capacities that create wealth and maintain arms, Milan outdid her rival. East of Milan, halfway to the sea, on the banks of the impetuous Adige, Verona sits enthroned, the warder of the passes of the north ; and might without arrogance urge her claims to be our paradigm. She could show a mightier memorial of her Roman de- scent than any city north of Rome. Here Theodoric the Ostrogoth, in punishment for the death of good Boethius, mounted the coal-black horse from hell and started on the chase that ended down the crater of Lipari. Here King Alboin the Lombard forced Queen Rosamund, his wife, to drink out of a cup made from her father's skull; and here he paid a dreadful reckoning. Here Capulets and Montagues " from ancient grudge broke to new mutiny." Here young Sordello first saw Lady Cunizza. And, as for monuments, San Zeno in its noble purity might challenge comparison with the proudest churches of Italy. Verona, indeed, lay outside Lombardy, in the March of Treviso ; but that should not exclude her from our choice if she had been Lombard at heart, but she was not. She was no city of traders and artisans ; she was proud of her brawling nobility, and drew herself back from the common throng. With Azzo of Este, Richard of San Bonifazio, or BOLOGNA 187 the haughty Ezzelino at her head, she stood like Coriolanus, despising the mercantile classes, " things created to buy and sell with groats." Only Guelf sentiment, mounting to its flood, had been able to make her join the Lombard League; and at the first ebb she fell away. She cannot serve as the type of trading and manufacturing city that raised Lom- bardy to greatness. Some twenty-five miles south, and a little to the west, on the " honoured flood, smooth-sliding Min- cius," that carries the waters of Lago di Garda giu per verdi paschi — down through green pastures — to the river Po, the marsh-encompassed Mantua had little of singular excellence excepting memories of Virgil. Her people told wild stories of her founder, the virgin Man to {Inferno, xx), and were already beginning to create a legend of Sordello, how he became a knight such as those of the Eound Table, how he unhorsed his challengers in the lists, married Ezzelino's sister, and lived in Mantua to a ripe old age, honoured by all the world. And they also said that in Sant' Andrea's church, quite forgotten and miraculously revealed, were the sacred drops that flowed at Golgotha when the centurion Longinus (destined to belief and glorious martyrdom) had thrust his spear into his Saviour's side. Too credu- lous by far, the citizens of Mantua cannot furnish the type of the quick-witted, practical, shrewd, money-loving Lombards. Nor could Cremona, seated on the north bank of the Po, some twenty miles below Piacenza, challenge comparison with Milan in wealth or power, with Pavia in dignity, or with 188 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Verona in charm ; only in her unconquerable loyalty to the Empire is she inferior to none. South of the river Po, on the Via Emilia, there are several cities, any one of which might serve to show what Lombardy was, Piaceuza, Borgo San Donnino, Parma, Reggio, each with its own char- acter, each looking on life as primarily a matter of industry and finance, each resolved to be its own master and not to submit, like a schoolboy, to ways fashioned and determined by others. But there are good reasons for riding by and going on at least as far as Modena. Here one is tempted to stop by the charm of the cathedral and the noble dignity of the belfry ; and, having stopped, one is tempted to stay. In Modena are memories of Anthony and Octavian, demi- Atlases of the earth preparing to dispute its ownership, and of the great Countess Matilda, Hil- debrand's strong support ; but more persuasive than these is the fragrance of mediaeval piety that hangs about the cathedral, and teaches us to remember that the sentiment of the Lombards for the Church was not all due to policy. " After long centuries [to tell the tale as a citi- zen, who had the privilege to be present, tells it] the church that housed the sacred bones of San Gimignano, the patron saint of Modena, cracked and threatened to fall; the congregation, people, nobles, and clergy, decided to build a new church worthy of such a saint. Needless to say, it was really Christ, the originator of all good things, the great giver of all good gifts, that inspired this decision ; and to Him is due the honour. Need more be said ? Aimari, phot. CATHEDRAL Modena BOLOGNA 189 For Christ's help makes the story plain. The people asked one another where a man could be found able to design and build so great an edifice ; and at last by God's grace a man, by name Lanfranc, was found, mirabilis artifex, mirificus cedificator (a most won- derful artist and architect). Acting under his coun- sel and direction the citizens of Modena and all the congregation of the basilica began digging the foundations, to the glory of God, the Father Al- mighty, of Jesus Christ, His only Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and also to the honour of the Virgin Mary and of our father, San Gimignano ; and, a little later, in the presence of a great throng, with lauds, hymns, and canticles, with lamps and candles, with book and with cross, they laid the corner stone ; and God's right hand prospered the building from the foundation to the roof. Quis queat immensa tua, Deus, numerare heneficia? (Who can tell the tale of thy gracious gifts, God?) What fountain of speech, what flood of eloquence, can recount thy mighty deeds? The walls rise, the building mounts, thy unutterable loving kindness, God, receives its praise and its extolling. "After seven years came the day for transferring the saint's body. Pope, cardinals, bishops, the Count- ess Matilda, the wonderful Lanfranc, soldiers and citizens, a mighty multitude, gather about the tomb. Then a great question arises: Shall the tomb be opened ? Those present were of many minds. At last six knights and twelve burgesses swear to keep watch and ward lest some one overbold should dare to vio- late the sacred relics ; then, with exceeding reverence. 190 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY the stone slab was lifted, and a second slab was dis- covered underneath. At this a great many people were of opinion that nothing more should be done; but by God's mercy (that no colour of doubt should be left to a disbeliever or to any one befogged by blindness of heart) these dissentient opinions turned about into one harmonious accord. Why spin the story out? While the Pope was preaching to the people, granting remission of sins and bringing the divine mysteries down to the hearts of all, and the cardinals, bishops, clergy, and laymen were pray- ing and singing psalms, the most blessed body of our holy father San Gimignano was uncovered by the hands of Bishop Buonsignore of Reggio and of Lan- franc, the architect. Oh ! what exultation, what odour of sweetness, what fragrance came forth ! All stretch their hands to heaven and give thanks to the Saviour, the Founder of all holy things, because he deigned to keep the relics of our father inviolate to our time." But though the cathedral by its picturesque and childlike charm keeps fresh the memory of San Gi- mignano and of Lanfranc, and by its story reveals how much religious feeling had survived from an earlier generation and still abode in Modena, and so gives her title to special remembrance ; yet we must remember that no piety but a habit of interpret- ing life in terms of yardstick and gold coin is the distinguishing trait of the Lombards, as may be learned not only in Lombardy, but abroad, for if we go to London we do not look for traces of them in Westminster Abbey but in Lombard Street. Mo- dena's role is to reiterate that the mediaeval way of BOLOGNA 191 regarding religion and things from of old deemed holy still maintained its power over many people, — ■women, perhaps, the aged, the sick, the bereaved, the unprosperous, the clergy, and the friars, — and tempered, if it could not control, the dominant trait of the Lombards, money-getting. Our choice must fall where the spirit of industry finds expression in associations of traders and artisans, where democracy develops and grows until traders and artisans con- trol the state, for that, though often, even usually, thwarted by adverse forces, was the normal tendency of an Italian city in the thirteenth century. To the south of the Po lay a city equal in charm to Modena or Verona, greater in wealth and power than Pavia, and more renowned than Milan ; whose university excelled the proud university at Oxford and rivalled that at Paris. If a student in those days on his way to the University of Bologna, were to travel from Milan, he would ride southward to Pavia or Lodi, and from there to the ferry across the Po at Piacenza. From Piacenza he would turn to the southeast and follow all the rest of his way the great Roman road built fourteen hundred years be- fore by Marcus ^milius Lepidus. He must cross a dozen little rivers flowing north into the Po, which in the summer are mere rivulets trickling through wastes of sand, but in the spring, swollen by melt- ing snows, turn into impassable torrents. He would ride past vineyards and olive groves, grainfields and orchards, past sombre forests tenanted by deer, wolves, and wild boar, past rough farms, and here and there a fortified castle, bastioned and turreted. 192 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY One night he would lodge at Parma, the next at Modena, and the following day at sundown he would reach the river Reno, and from there he had barely a mile or two before riding up to the gates of Bo- logna ; in all, five days of easy going from Milan. The road was picturesque but monotonous. To the north the great Lombard plain stretches flat as a bowUng green all the way to the Alps ; to the south, some dozen miles off, rise the foothills of the "olive sandall'd" Apennines. At the Reno, accord- ing to Dante, Lombardy ended and Romagna be- gan, but Bologna was not commonly deemed a city of Romagna, she shared the general fortunes of the Lombard cities, and for all our purposes she may be reckoned among them. She is the paradigm we have been looking for. The city of Bologna was not marked by any spe- cial monument. The palace of the podesta was destined to become more famous from an illustrious prisoner than from its architectural proportions, good though they were. The church of San Domenico, built in honour of the great saint, who had passed his last years and had died in Bologna, was just be- ginning, and though there were two hundred towers, of which the Asinelli and Garisenda only are left, yet there were many other towered cities as much coronated as she. The cathedral of San Pietro, crowded about by little churches, chapels, and clois- ters in confused intimacy, was more memorable for tombs, relics, and memories than for its beauty. But Bologna did not interest herself in the past, she was an intensely modern city. Perhaps more than any Aliotin, phot. GARISENDA AND ASINELLI BologDa BOLOGNA 193 other city in Italy she represented that liberty of thought and action, that impatience with the yoke of past customs and old privileges, which were the mainsprings of communal life in Italy. Bologna's foreign policy, if that name may be given to her extra-mural politics, was very simple. She first fought the nobles in the country round and compelled them to become citizens and live within the city walls ; then she fought her nearest neigh- bours, Modena to the west, Imola to the east, Ferrara to the north, and Fistoia, whose territories met hers somewhere on the crest of the Apennines, to the south. In the larger matters that divided all Italy into Guelf and Ghibelline she sided with the Church, and took a leading part in action for the common good. She was always antagonistic to the Emperor Frederick. She had tried to stop him on his advent- urous expedition north to win the German crown. In 1222 she made war on Imola against his express com- mands. For punishment Frederick attempted to close her university and founded a rival at Naples. Bo- logna's retort was to furnish two hundred and fifty knights and fifty slingers to the Lombard League. This anti-imperial policy had a near connection with the city's internal politics ; for the popular faction was intimately related to the Guelf party and each victory, each gain, of that party strengthened the position of the popular faction. CHAPTER XV THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA La santa Libert^ non 6 f ancinlla Da poco rame ; Dnra virago ell' 6, dure domanda Di perigli e d' amor pruove f amose : In mezzo al sangue de la sua ghirlanda Crescon le rose. Cabducci. Sacred Liberty is not a girl Of little cost ; An Amazon is she ; she demiands Of perils and of love proofs hard and glorious : In the midst of blood the roses Of her garlands grow. At the opening of the century the constitution of Bologna was somewhat after this fashion. The gen- eral powers of government were lodged in three councils : a small advisory council, that may be called the cabinet ; a special council of six hundred mem- bers ; and a general council, to which were eligible all citizens between the ages of eighteen and seventy years, excepting those belonging to the inferior crafts or engaged in the baser occupations. The two larger councils were elective. Each year members for the succeeding year were elected by a committee chosen by lot from among the members of the general and special councils. Doctors of law were ex officio al- lowed to attend meetings of the special council and of the cabinet. These councils were convoked by au- thority of the podesta, and met separately or together according to the nature of the business to be trans- THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 195 acted. If one were to judge only from the consti- tution and character of these councils, one might suppose that the middle class, or at least the upper middle class, was in power ; but the fact was that at this time the nobility constituted the governing body. The nobles held themselves apart, built towers, forti- fied their houses, leagued with one another, inter- married, gathered dependants and retainers about them; and succeeded in lording it over the city. The causes that enabled them to do so are not far to seek. In the first place, all the nobles were citi- zens (and this was not their doing, they had been given no choice, they had been enfranchised by force) ; they were the landowners ; they had social prestige ; they had greater knowledge of affairs than the lower classes ; and public opinion probably sup- ported their view that they should be at the head of the government. Their control was secured in two ways : by help of the podesta, and by narrowly limiting through indirect means the powers of the councils. The podesta, always a noble, naturally sym- pathized with his class, and exercised the powers of his ofice for their benefit, not by particular acts of injustice done in their favour against members of the lower classes, but by treating them as entitled to the positions of authority and dignity. Secondly, before the podesta called a meeting of either of the great councils, the questions to be submitted for de- cision were required to be written down in a book kept for that purpose at the chancery. This, of course, was an extreme limitation ; and not only that, but the right to speak in the council was hedged 196 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTUEY about with the narrowest rules. At the raeeting the chancellor read out the questions ; when he had fin- ished, four selected orators (undoubtedly appointed by the governing body) got up, took their stand be- side the tribune of the magistrates, and delivered their speeches. Then the magistrates spoke, but only upon questions that concerned their offices. No pri- vate member was allowed to speak at all except upon matters of very grave importance, and even then he was not allowed to stand where the official orators stood, but he got up on a rostrum apart, so that it should be obvious that he was expressing his personal opinion and not that of the government. The chief reason for this restriction upon the right to speak in a public meeting was undoubtedly to keep control of the business in the hands of the ruling clique; yet the restriction finds some justification in the quick tempers, the sharp tongues, and ready fists of the Bolognese. In all the codes of the Trainband Companies there are elaborate provisions for punish- ing breaches of the peace at a meeting of the society, and an especial prohibition against giving the lie. The statutes of one company open with : " No mem- ber shall say to another member, * You are a liar.' " After the orators and magistrates had finished speak- ing, the vote was taken, and then the resolutions adopted were formally drawn up by notaries. The power of the councils was thus practically confined to voting "aye" or "no" upon the questions sub- mitted to them. The executive head of the commune was the po- desta. He was elected by a committee chosen by lot THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 197 from the special and general councils. His qualifica- tions were definitely prescribed : he must be a noble, a foreigner to Bologna, and over thirty-six years of age ; he must own no real property in the city or its territory ; he must be no relative to any elector, nor to the last podesta ; and he must not come from the same place as the last podesta. He was expected to be a man of note and well qualified for the office ; and before his election it was the custom for the councils to designate the city from which he was to be chosen. These rules were adopted in order to se- cure an impartial governor free from connections with local politics. Similar rules prevailed every- where. To further this purpose of an impartial ad- ministration, the podesta brought four judges with him. His term, like that of all elective office-holders in Bologna, was for one year. He was commander- in-chief of the army, and in conjunction with the cabinet conducted foreign affairs and important matters that involved great cost, and it was usually his duty to enforce all laws, even such minute laws as we should call police regulations. The office of podesta was an honour, but it had its hazards. For example, in 1257, Beno de Gozza- dini of Bologna was podesta of Milan. At that time a canal already existed from the river Ticino nearly halfway to Milan. To extend the canal all the way to the city would certainly be of great advantage, both for carrying merchandise to and fro, and for supplying this tract of land with water during the dry season. The Podesta decided in favour of the plan and began the work ; to meet the expense, which 198 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY was very great, he proposed to levy a new tax and not to exempt the clergy. The people resented the tax, the clergy bitterly resented their enforced con- tribution. Malicious rumours and accusations were spread abroad. The Podesta, unjustly and illegally, was haled to trial and condemned in a sum of money too great for one man to pay ; and not content with this, the mob attacked him, dragged him in derision through the streets, and when they had killed him flung his battered corpse into the new canal. The magistrates of the city were of two kinds. Ordinary magistrates, such as judges of the various courts, the sherifE, the law of&cers of the commune, and the treasurer, were elected in the same manner as members of the councils. The special magistrates, such as ambassadors and officials for extraordinary services, were appointed by the podesta. Each mag- istrate had his notaries, his attendants, and his po- lice. The country districts were governed by officials, also known as podestas, while the subject villages elected their own chief magistrates, called consuls. The clergy were subject only to the canonical juris- diction of the bishop. The podesta was the commander-in-chief of the army; but the chief officers, known as the military magistrates, were elected like the other magistrates. The military forces of the city were organized by districts. Bologna had four districts, one for each of the four gates, — Porta Stiera, Porta San Pietro, Porta San Procolo, and Porta Eavegnana. Each quarter had its own gonfaloniere, and the horse and foot when they took the field followed him. The THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 199 whole military force was only called out on very seri- ous occasions. Commonly a campaign was no more than the raid of a small band over the border. When the expedition was more important, the troops of one or two quarters were ordered out. The army was very far from being a regular army ; the nobles were from their youth trained to military exercises, but the rank and file were civihans armed with helmet, breastplate, shield, sword, spear, and bow. The car- roccio, which was a stately cart with a mast from which the banner of the republic hung, was taken on the more important campaigns and served as the rallying-point for the army. Such a constitution as that of Bologna, both for civil and military matters, must have depended on customs and regulations that are now lost in the waste places of oblivion. The one clear fact is that under an apparently democratic form of government, the aristocracy was in power. But the centre of po- litical gravity was shifting all the time; there was a steady tendency to substitute the upper middle class in place of the aristocracy as the chief power in the state. Bologna was prosperous, business flourished, and wealth rapidly increased ; and almost all the in- crease in wealth, except what accrued to the nobles and to the Church by the rise in value of land, went to the middle classes. The rich merchants, great dealers in silks and wool, had long been associated in the "Society of Merchants," the bankers and brokers in the " Society of Exchange " ; these soci- eties had already before this time secured special political privileges. Merchants and bankers were rec- 200 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTUEY ognized to be the top layer, as it were, of the middle class, and no doubt their daughters married into the nobility. The trades and crafts were also organized into guilds. The purpose of a guild was to unite men of the same occupation in common action for the common good, such as to perform religious rites to- gether, to enforce contracts, to collect debts, and supplement as best they might the inadequate legal machinery of the state. The lesser guilds contracted closer relations with one another in order that they might the better assert their rights against the arro- gant and turbulent nobility. They had their share in the general prosperity ; and there was a special source of well-being for shopkeepers, pedlars, and small dealers in the presence of the students, who thronged in thousands to the famous university. In one generation so great an economic change took place that it was impossible for the political constitution to remain as it was ; it was merely a question of time as to when the political constitution should conform to the new economic conditions ; and yet it was not to be expected that the conservative classes should give way and a political revolution take place without turmoil. The gradually increas- ing dissatisfaction of the middle classes was brought violently to the surface in 1228. The nobles grossly mismanaged a war, either through incompetence or treachery. The people rose in wrath ; merchants, artisans, discontented gentlemen, and the mob made common cause. The rectors of the guilds and a rich merchant named Joseph, one of the Tuscan immi- grants to Bologna, led them on. The people crowded THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 201 up to the palace of the podesta and demanded sur- render of the government and of the city's gonfalon. On refusal the doors were broken down, the palace ransacked, public books and registers torn up, the records of banishments and criminal sentences ut- terly destroyed, and Joseph, the merchant, put at the head of the government. This revolt was really a revolution, rendered inevitable by the economic changes. One result of it was a radical amendment to the constitution which, by the creation of a "Board of Ancients," granted to the mercantile classes a greater share in the administration of the government. This board was composed of the con- suls of the " Society of Merchants " and of the "Society of Exchange," and the heads of the lesser guilds, seventeen or eighteen in number. Just what powers these Ancients had is not clear. St. Thomas Aquinas says, that they were like the tribunes of old Rome, charged with the defence of the people's rights. A far more radical consequence of this revolution was the creation of a popular party, which organ- ized itself vrith the Board of Ancients at its head, and two councils after the manner of the communal government, and called itself " The People." It was, in substance, a political confederation of the guilds. This body had its own separate business as guardian of popular rights, and, in addition, was set, or rather set itself, by the side of the existing communal gov- ernment as a coordinate branch, taking a share (the amount of which it is hard now to determine) in legislation and in the administration of public affairs. 202 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY The old government, shrunken from sole master to be a mere partner, and known as " The Commune," remained in the hands of the nobles, except that the Board of Ancients constituted a part of it as well as a part of the new body. The new constitution, in short, was an attempt to put in double harness the conflicting interests of nobles and commons. How peace was kept it is hard to see. But then it is equally hard to see how a great university with sev- eral thousand students, cooped up cheek by jowl with these warring elements within walls scarce half a mile across, could proceed tranquilly with the study of Roman law. The rise to power of the middle class was greatly aided by divisions in the ranks of their adversaries. The nobility was split in halves. Rivalry, jealousy, inherited quarrels, set them at odds in Bologna, as well as in every other city. The Geremei were at the head of one faction, the Lambertazzi of the other. The Geremei, in order to strengthen themselves courted popular support and took the people's side against their own order. One of the Geremei was next in command to Giuseppe Toschi during the revolution of 1228. And as the interests of the pop- ular party coincided with those of the Church in opposition to their common enemies, the Imperial- ists, the people and the Church made common cause, and in the chronicles of the time go together under the name of the Church party, the Geremei being called the leaders of the Church party. The Lam- bertazzi, either outmanoeuvred by their rivals in seeking the wind of popular favour, or less bend- THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 203 ing, were pushed by the coalition against them and by the force of events first into sympathy and then into union with the imperial party, until finally, to- wards the end of the century, they were regarded as pure Ghibellines and public enemies, and driven from the city. Another important consequence or accompaniment of the revolutioii of 1228 was the creation of the Trainband Companies. These companies were framed on the model of the guilds ; their purpose was to supply the popular party with disciplined fighting men who should hold the nobility in check, and who should also constitute the main strength of the army in time of war. In form these companies were mu- tual benefit societies with special provisions for the maintenance of certain religious observances. There were twenty-four of them. Each company was usually composed of men living in the same quarter of the town, and each had its own emblem, a lion, an eagle, a griffin, or a dolphin. But there were a few com- panies composed of men whose fathers, if not they themselves, had been born in some other city or province, as, for example, the Company of the Tus- cans. There were a good many of these immigrants who for one reason or another — the capture of their city by enemies, the destruction of their houses by an earthquake or a fire — had come and settled in Bologna. For instance, many families came from Brescia, after that city had suffered great damage from an earthquake. Each of these companies, like the guilds, had its own statutes ; and these statutes really tell us more 204 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY of what was going on in Bologna than the chroni- clers do. The latter are dry as sand of the desert, and give little hint that they record what were once the actions of living men ; whereas, though the statutes are dry, Hfe transpires through their ill- written Latin, and the imaginative reader can see that Bologna was once a breathing, panting, passionate place. The preamble usually begins in a stately way, as, for instance, the ordinances of the Tuscan Com- pany : " In the name of God, amen. These are the statutes and ordinances of the Fraternity and Society of the Tuscans living in Bologna, made to the honour of God, of blessed Mary the Virgin, of Saint John the Baptist and of all the saints, and to the honour and good estate of the rulers of the Commune of Bologna and to the honour and good estate of the Society aforesaid." These ordinances provide for the qualification of members, procedure at meetings, election of officers, performance of religious rites, helping poor mem- bers, ministering to the sick, attendance at funerals, fees, salaries, and fines, but principally for the spe- cial objects of the society : the organization of its members into miUtary squads, the election and ap- pointment of officers, their duties in time of civil disturbances, their duties in time of war, and with special provisions to prevent members taking part in quarrels between nobles. The chief officers were a captain (the gonfaloniere), a treasurer and four ministers, besides the military officers ; there were a number of officials, such as nuncios, notaries, inquis- itors to examine accounts, proctors to see that mem- THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 205 bers performed their duties, a committee to revise the statutes, and a council of twenty-four who were chosen by the ministers. Out from among these ordinances, though written between the lines, stands in capital letters the reason why the Lombard Confederacy failed to establish a united state and why these little commonwealths failed to maintain themselves for long, namely, lack of confidence of one man in another. Nobody wholly trusts anybody else. The offices are for terms of one year or for six months, and no official, except the podesta, is eligible for reelection until after a year's interval. The gonfaloniere has twelve officers, yet they are not appointed by him, but by the ministers; whenever he carries forth the banner, his aides, ad- jutants, and quartermasters must go with him, but he must carry his banner where his aides direct, and the adjutants have authority to give orders to the men as they see fit. These statutes also show lack of broad-mindedness ; for instance, the ordinances of the Company of Tuscans provide that in case of any election to any city office by the Board of Ancients, the representative of the Tuscans on the Board shall vote for the appointment of a fellow member of his society. This suspiciousness and this pettiness were both a cause and a result of perfidy and disloyalty. 1 Certainly the inability of the communes to carry out any large policy was due to the political incoherence born of mutual distrust, and led to their ultimate ruin. The constitution of Bologna, as it stood after the revolution of 1228, had one obvious and very serious 206 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY defect. This was the relation of the People's party to the podesta. He represented the rival party of the nobiUty, and yet the people's trainbands were under his orders as commander-in-chief. This ar- rangement inevitably offered occasion for misunder- standing and discord. It was plain that some remedy must be found ; and in the course of another gener- ation the middle classes had increased their relative importance in the state to such a degree that they were able to effect another important change in the constitution. They created a new office of the high- est consequence (1255). The holder was called the captain of the People. He was the head of the People's party very much as the podesta was head of the Commune, and presided over its councils just as the podesta presided over the councils of the Commune. The captain of the People, however, was exalted above the podesta, for while the podesta remained governor within the walls of the city, out- side the walls the captain of the People was com- mander-in-chief. This amendment was one of those irresolute compromises, due half to conflicting inter- ests, half to timidity, in which the Italian communes experimented during this century. It shows that the guilds had thriven and consolidated their power, and that production and trade were undergoing a rapid expansion comparable, though in far less de- gree, to that caused by the introduction of machin- ery in the nineteenth century. As a constitutional measure, however, the experiment was far from being a complete success. This rise of the upper bourgeoisie to political THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 207 power was by no means confined to Bologna. A similar movement went on in all the trading towns of Italy, north of the Emperor's dominions. Bologna is preeminent in democracy among her sister cities, because she excelled them all either in point of time or of thoroughness. But her political changes were no triumph for democratic ideas as such; they effected no more than the substitution of the trading class for the landed nobility. The guilds were nar- row corporations of master workmen, they excluded apprentices and persons dependent upon others, as well as vassals, freedmen, and serfs. They had little flavour of genuine democracy about them except in one particular, they favoured the liberation of serfs ; but there they acted from a mixture of politi- cal and religious motives. For one reason their alli- ance with the Church naturally led them to adopt the Church's policy in this respect. The Church, faithful to her doctrine of the equal- ity of souls, had consistently used her influence to secure the freedom of serfs. Churchmen had liber- ated their own, and had taught that manumission was an offering acceptable to God. Many landholders, moved by repentance or the fear of death, executed deeds or wills changing the status of their serfs to that of tenants. The burghers of the trading towns were not unaffected by these motives, but they had another quite as forcible. Serfs constituted a great part of the wealth of the feudal nobility; if serfs were set free the wealth and power of the nobility were to that extent diminished. Also, the greater the population of a town the greater were its wealth 208 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY and power. So, there was a steady effort on the part of the towns to liberate the serfs of their feu- dal neighbours and induce them to live within their walls. Sometimes, unwilling to take the position of openly encouraging runaway serfs, a town would pass a law that all serfs who had resided in the town for a year without being claimed, were free. Some- times the towns purchased a serf's liberty. In Bo- logna, the year after the revolution in which the office of captain of the People was originally estab- lished, the popular party enfranchised over five thousand serfs. The captain of the People called together the Ancients, the heads of the guilds, and the members of the councils, and asked the meeting if it were their pleasure that the serfs in the territory of Bologna should be bond or free. The meeting was eager for enfranchisement; and a plan of redemption was adopted which was afterward carried out by the podesta and the captain of the People. The masters received ten Bolognese pounds for serfs over fourteen years of age and eight pounds for those under. The prompt execution of such a measure shows how absolute was the power of the popular party, and how completely its democratic policy worked in harmony with the Christian policy of the Church. In fact, the similarity and almost identity of interests and policy between the popular party and the Church (in spite of quarrels over their respective titles to little towns of the neighbourhood, which ended in an interdict and the submission of Bologna) already foreshadow the ultimate incorporation of the commune within the territories of the Church. THE CONSTITUTION OF BOLOGNA 209 The abolition of serfage was part of the demo- cratic movement and shows how flatly the spirit that animated the little Lombard commonwealths was opposed to the ideas of government entertained by Frederick II. The clash between their spirit and his ideas was as inevitable as the clash between the Papacy and the Empire; and it was the Lombard cities quite as much as the Papacy that thwarted and brought low Frederick's imperial plans. CHAPTER XVI THE UNIVEESITY OF BOLOGNA Et noi facciamo prego a M. Domenedio Che tolla delli nostri quori ogne tenebrio, Che possiamo tal savere et scienza appreudere, Che possiamo havere sua grasia et amore, Et gustare si della scienza che n' habbiamo honore. Bkunetto Latini. And we make prayer to the Lord God : That he take from our hearts all darkness, That we may acquire knowledge and learning, That we may have His grace and loTe, And so drink of learning that we shall gain honour. Bologna is famous as a republican commonwealth, and her democracy serves to teach us the general pattern of democracy in the trading cities of Italy; but the glory of Bologna is not due to what she had in common with other cities but to what she alone possessed, her University. There were, to be sure, several universities in Italy, the University of Naples, founded by the Em- peror Frederick in 1224, the University of Padua, founded in 1222, and others at Arezzo, Reggio, Vicenza, Vercelli, and Siena, but the University of Bologna was by far the most famous of all. At Bologna, as elsewhere, all the liberal arts were taught, but the study of law, both the civil and the canon law, wholly outdistanced other studies ; the law school was the principal department of the Uni- versity. The liberal arts were grouped together with THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA 211 medicine in a separate school. Each school was com- posed of students and of professors, or as they called themselves, doctors or masters. The most striking difference between a modern university or law school and the schools of Bologna is, that in a modern university the professors constitute the governing body, whereas at Bologna the students constituted the governing body. The Emperor Fred- erick Barbarossa, who was endowed with scant demo- cratic sympathies, had tried to put the government of the University in the hands of the professors, but his system did not succeed. Little by little, and not without struggles, the students got the upper hand ; before the end of our century their domination was well established, and the professors were obliged to take an oath of obedience to them. The University was very large, students came from all western Europe ; it was computed that the number in residence at one time was as high as ten thousand. They were of all ages from sixteen to forty ; some of them were men of wide experience, many were beneficed clergymen. In order to secure civic rights (which in the Middle Ages were not accorded to ahens) the foreign students organized themselves into guilds. There was one guild of the students who came from beyond the Alps, and one of the Itahan students not citizens of Bologna. Each guild was subdivided into clubs, according to the country or province from which the members came. There were fourteen clubs in the ultramontane guild, Frenchmen, Normans, Picards, Burgundians, Poite- vins, Tourangeaux, Gascons, Provengaux, Catalans, 212 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUKY Spaniards, Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Englishmen ; and three in the cismontane guild, Lombards, Tus- cans, and Romans. Each guild elected an academic podesta, called the rector, who, together with a council composed of representatives from the several clubs, administered the affairs of the guild. In im- portant matters the whole student body, except paupers, met in general assembly, deliberated and decided. This simple organization constituted the government of the school. The rector had civil juris- diction over members of the guild, which he enforced by means of their oaths of obedience as well as by authority of the statutes of the guild ; he acquired jurisdiction over the professors when they took the oath of obedience, and virtual authority before that owing to the students' power of withholding fees or of putting a ban on any set of courses ; he also ex- ercised authority over tradesmen and lodging-house keepers by a simple refusal to deal with them. The rectors were persons of great consequence ; on cere- monial occasions they took precedence of cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, excepting the Bishop of Bologna ; they were attended by liveried servants, and wore robes of scarlet with hoods, fur-trimmed. In dealing with the municipal government the power of the University lay in its complete freedom of habitation. It had no buildings, no property, and could leave Bologna on a day's notice. Several times it forced the town to terms by emigration. Lectures were held in a professor's house or in a hired apart- ment. For great ceremonies, such as the installation of a rector, the cathedral was used. Students lodged THE UNIVEESITY OF BOLOGNA 213 where they could, or clubbed together and took a house, bought or hired furniture, and engaged ser- vants. Lectures were held in the morning and the afternoon. The long vacation came in September and October, and there were short vacations at Christmas and at Easter, and a few holidays for the carnival. The course was long : after five years a student was permitted to lecture on one title of the civil law, after six years on a whole booh, and on the comple- tion of such a course of lectures he became a bache- lor. To become a doctor, and eligible to the college of professors, the bachelor was obliged to study six years longer in canon law, or seven or eight years in civil law. Although the government of the University was in the hands of the students, the professors were persons of consequence. They wore purple robes, they were addressed in terms of respect, they were exempt from military duty, they were ex-officio mem- bers of the credenza, the city council of six hundred, and they were often entrusted with important affairs of state. Like other groups of men belonging to a common craft, they united in a society, called a col- lege. The college decided the qualifications of its own members, subject however to the approval of the archdeacon of Bologna; for the Church had taken advantage of its general authority over clerks and over learning, to lay its hand on the great law school. Perhaps the Curia, which had a long mem- ory, recollected the time when the professors of Bo- logna espoused the cause of Frederick Barbarossa against Pope Alexander III, and meant to guard 214 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY against any repetition of that offence. The professors were paid either by the students who attended their courses, or, according to a system adopted towards the end of the century, by the city, which attached salaries to certain chairs ; but the professors acquired no greater freedom by the new system, for they were elected to the endowed chairs by the students from year to year. The range of studies at the University was not, according to our ideas, very ample. There was little besides civil law, canon law, medicine, and the seven liberal arts. The Corpus Juris Civilis, put together under the command of the Emperor Justinian (527- 565) had been recovered from forgetfulness and dis- use and was laid before students in all its antique majesty: the Institutes, an elementary and introduct- ory work, the Code and the Novels which are a compilation of imperial edicts, and the Digest (or Pandects) which is a systematic collection of the opinions of the great Roman lawyers of antiquity. On this vast body of law a vast mass of gloss and comment had been composed. The celebrated jur- ist, Irnerius, who is reputed to be the founder of the University, led the way, and a long line of eminent scholars had followed him. Every title and chapter of the Corpus Juris Civilis was expounded, and every professor added his load of comment. The canon law was a close rival to the civil law. For centuries it had lain uncodified, uncollected, scattered in many miscellaneous writings, but in the beginning of the twelfth century, a monk of the Order of the Camaldoli, Brother Gratian, applied THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA 215 himself to the laborious task of putting this miscel- laneous mass of authorities into order. He was not content to have the canon law less well arranged than the civil law. Apparently all alone, in the monastery of St. Felix at Bologna, he brought order out of chaos. He took the ecclesiastical authorities — de- crees of Church councils, statements by the Fathers, edicts of Popes, laws of the early Christian Empe- rors — and arranged them systematically; where au- thorities were at variance, he tried to show which was the better and therefore the true doctrine of the Church. His book is called Concordantia dis- cordantium Canonum, the Concord of discordant Canons, or more briefly, the Decretum. The book was a mere digest, but it was universally accepted as an authoritative exposition of the law. To this Pope Gregory IX added the papal decretals issued since Gratian's time. All this was set before stu- dents of the canon law, as the Corpus Juris Civilis was set before students of the civil law. While the school of law as well as the school of medicine were similar to our postgraduate schools, the courses in the liberal arts corresponded to the academic department of an American university ; they were the final instruction in the subjects which boys studied at school, they formed the completion of a literary education, and also fitted young men for practical service in many walks of life. We shall understand better the study of the liberal arts in the University of Bologna, if we treat them as a part of ordinary education. First of all, children heard the romantic tales of ill-fated Troy and of all-conquering 216 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Rome, and studied their letters at home in an A B C book, an abecedarium, which served for both Latin and Italian ; next they learned, perhaps without un- derstanding the meaning, to recite psalms in Latin and to sing Latin hymns. A little older, boys went to school. Girls commonly received no literary edu- cation, unless they were admitted to a nunnery. There were many schools ; some were attached to monasteries, some to cathedrals, some were taught by professional grammarians, some by clerks who kept school for a time in order to support themselves until some occupation more to their taste should pre- sent itself. The schools were grammar schools and started boys in the study of the liberal arts. There were seven liberal arts, three grouped together as the tri- ple path, trivium, grammar, rhetoric and logic, and four, grouped as the fourfold path, quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music ; but in the lower schools, little was taught beside grammar and some rhetoric. Grammar was Latin grammar. Latin was the language of the Church, of the law, of learning, of all formal and ceremonious affairs, as well as of literature; Latin grammar was the only door for those who wished to have any education, and every schoolboy had to study Latin grammar. There were almost as many Latin grammars then as there are now, all based on the old Roman grammars of Priscian and of Donatus — quel Donato ch' alia prim' arte degn6 por la mano. That of Donatus was a little book of a few pages, THE UNIVEESITY OF BOLOGNA 217 — De octo partibus orationis — which described the eight parts of speech. Priscian's grammar was much more advanced ; it aimed to make the study of Latin a science, and cited so many classical quota- tions that it served in a manner for an anthology. Priscian's method of teaching grammar was to take the first line of each book of the iEneid and discuss each word in all its grammatical relations. Gram- mar, however, had a wider scope than the subject matter of our Latin grammars. Boys read extracts from the Latin classics, prose and poetry, fables, proverbs and suchlike. In fact the study of gram- mar was the elementary study of Latin literature. For beginners there were many school-books written in brief sentences, full of wise saws and moral pre- cepts, which the boys learned by heart or translated into the vernacular. Such a book was the Distichs of Goto, written nobody knows just when and as- cribed to the famous old Roman, Cato Major. This book exists both in Latin and Italian. It is a mere string of pious counsels : " Say your prayers to God, love your parents, be dutiful to your relations, obey the law, walk with the good, do not ofEer your ad- vice before you are asked, be pure, be polite, give way to your elders, respect your teacher, avoid dice, learn your lessons, do good to the righteous, be modest, diligent," etc. By such books the schoolboy advanced to the study of the classics, Cicero, Vir- gil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Statins, Pliny the Elder, Sallust, Livy, Boethius, and to the study of Chris- tian authors as well. The dictionaries were few and of slender merit: 218 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY there was, for instance, an old one of an earlier cen- tury written by Papias, a Lombard, or that by Uguc- cione, of Pisa, at one time a professor at Bologna and afterward Bishop of Ferrara, which bore the title Huguitionis Pisani Magnae Derivationes sive Dictionariicm Etymologicum. Dante cites it in the Convivio for the derivation of " auctor, author " ; he is also indebted to it for the title of his great poem, Commedia. He states in his celebrated letter which proffers the dedication of the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala : " The title of the work is, ' Here beginneth the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Floren- tine by birth, not by character.' To understand which, be it known that comedy is derived from comus ' a village,' and odd, which is ' song' ; whence comedy is, as it were, 'rustic song.'" Uguccione's dictionary says : " Oda, that is, song or hymn, is compounded with comus, that is, a village, and makes comedia, that is, a village song or village hymn, be- cause it treats of village and rustic matters, and is like daily speech." And in many other cases Dante uses this dictionary to obtain the derivation of words, as, for instance, in his description of the hypocrites in Malebolge {Inf. xxiii, 61) who wear mantles all gold on the outside and lead within, Uguccione says : " Crisis, a Greek word, meaning . . . gold; so by composition from crisis comes hypocrite (a dissembler, a cheat, a person who coun- terfeits another, and is called hypocrite) from ypos, which means under, and crisis, which means gold ; as if gilded on the outside, because on the outside he seems to be good, while inwardly he is bad." THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA 219 Rhetoric in old Roman days had meant the art of the orator; Cicero and Quintilian wrote famous treatises upon it, and their treatises served for later writers to quarry from. To-day rhetoric commonly means the art of writing. In the thirteenth century it had larger purposes as we see if we open the text- books written then, for instance the treatise on rhetoric by Fra Guidotto of Bologna, a book com- posed about the year 1260 and dedicated to Man- fred, son of the Emperor Frederick. Guidotto's prologue gives a brief account of Cicero : " When the great and high-born Julius Caesar, first Emperor of Rome, held sway, Marcus TuUius Cicero was born, * maestro et trovatore de la grande scienza di rethor- ica, cioe de ben parlare,' a master and inventor of the great science of speaking well ; he was a man full of life, amiable, and steadfast in kindness and in the right, tall of stature, of well knit limbs, and in feats of arms a maraviglioso cavaliere, of tempered cour- age, endowed with great wit, and furnished with knowledge and good sense." After he has intro- duced us to Cicero, Guidotto says that " this science is the most important of all branches of knowledge, owing to the need of speaking daily on matters of importance, as in making laws, in civil and criminal suits, in municipal affairs, in carrying on war and leading troops, in ministering comfort to knights who undergo chances and changes in empire, king- dom, or barony, and in governing peoples, cities and towns." It seems odd to us to ascribe so wide a scope to the benefits to be got from rhetoric, but we must remember the tremendous prestige of Roman 220 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY oratory, the legendary fame of Cicero and Julius Csesar, and that for those who were not to study law, rhetoric was the main part of a civil education. Be- sides, the art of speaking was important. On cere- monious occasions, such as an embassy to another city, the reception of a new podesta, the funeral of a great personage, a speech in Latin was necessary ; in the municipal councils, in the guild meetings, only three or four were allowed to speak, and the audience no doubt expected and demanded a certain kind of formal speech ; in fact, the capacity to make a formal speech was the badge of an educated man. For such reasons, though the orator had no such opportunity as in the Roman courts of law or before the conscript fathers, a training in rhetoric was a necessary part of education. A much more distinguished person than Guidotto, Brunetto Latini of Florence, who had been ambas- sador to the highly cultivated court of Alphonso the Wise, king of Castile, and knew something of public and official life, devotes a part of his encyclo- paedia, lA Livres dou Tr^sor (1262-66), to rhetoric. He says it is a science that teaches us to speak fully and perfectly both in public and in private, and that the aim of the art is to teach the speaker to speak in such a way that those who hear him shall believe what he says. He follows Cicero, De Oratore, in dividing the subject into five divisions : the first thing is to find out what you are going to say ; the second, to marshal your arguments; the third, to suit your words to the matter ; the fourth, to culti- vate the memory so that you can learn your speech THE UNIVEKSITY OF BOLOGNA 221 by heart ; and last, to study bearing, gesture, diction and the whole subject of delivery. Brunetto also says, citing the great names of Aristotle, Cicero and Boethius, that rhetoric is the art of governing; but though he includes his chapters on the govern- ment of cities in the same division of his encyclo- paedia with his chapters on rhetoric, he makes a separate section of them. Sometimes the text-book on rhetoric was specially adapted for training an advocate or a preacher, as the Ars Loquendi et Tacendi, the Art of Speaking and of Holding the Tongue, written by Albertano of Brescia, somewhere about 1245, who was an ad- vocate himself. He begins with a distich : — Quis, quid, cui dicas, Cur, quomodo, quando, requiras, "Who, what, to whom to speak, "Why, how, and when, be sure to seek, — and then expounds the ideas suggested by each of these questions. Like most men of his time, Alber- tano appeals to authority rather than to reason, and stufEs his treatise full of quotations taken, often no doubt at second hand, from the classics of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, as well as from the Old and New Testaments. His treatise is as much ethical as rhetorical; "Finally," he says, " I give you this as a general rule, that we must not think that we are at liberty to do or say things which wound piety, charity, or modesty, or (to speak in a large sense) which go counter to good morals." He is very sententious, and the. justice of his rules is be- 222 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY yond all cavil. But if his book seems a little prig- gisli, it is because education (owing, perhaps, to the fact that, for better or worse, it had been shaped by ecclesiastical hands) was intended to have an ethical purpose, and perhaps Albertano had learned piety in adversity, for he was imprisoned in Cremona for many years by Frederick 11. While in prison he wrote several moral treatises, two of which had the honour of furnishing material to Chaucer for Mel- ibeus and The Merchant's Tale. If rhetoric, as the art of the orator, did not really play so large a part in education at the University of Bologna, as one might infer from the text-books on the subject, it became, as the art of the writer, a matter of great consequence in preparing young men for practical affairs. This branch of rhetoric was known as the art of composition, ars dictaminis ; it, indeed, had always existed, but with the Komans it had played a very subordinate part. The art of composition had two divisions : it taught the proper way of writing letters, and of drawing up documents, especially legal documents. The accepted text-book at the opening of the century had been written over a hundred years before by Alberich, a Benedictine monk of Monte Cassino. Perhaps he was at the monastery at the time of Abbot Desiderius, famous in the history of art. Alberich divides a letter into five parts : the greeting, the benevolentice captatio (that is, the endeavour to engratiate oneself with one's correspondent), the narration of facts, the petition, and the ending; and gives counsels and rules, and many models, some taken from archives, THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA 223 for official letters on political matters. The object of a course in Latin composition was to train young men to fill the position of secretary or clerk in the Papal Chancery, in a bishop's court, or in the office of a podesta, or to become notaries, clerks in busi- ness houses, factors for merchants, and bailiffs for nobles. The demand for such an education was so great that the celebrated Doctor Boncompagno devoted his courses in rhetoric at Bologna almost entirely to Latin composition. The rest of the seven liberal arts — logic, arith- metic, music, geometry and astronomy — belong no more to the University of Bologna than to the schools and universities of other cities ; nevertheless I will repeat what Brunetto Latini says about them in lA Livres dou Tresor, because we may feel sure that Dante read it. "Logic [Brunetto states] is the science that teaches us to adduce reasons and to demonstrate why we should do some things and not others; this demonstration can only be made by means of words ; therefore logic is the science by which we can explain and prove why and how a prop- osition is as true as we allege it to be. There are three ways of doing this, and so there are three divisions of the science : dialectic, efidique (?), and sophistry. The first of these is dialectic, which teaches us to discuss, argue and debate with one another, and ask questions and frame answers. The second is efidique, which teaches us how to prove that what we have said is true, that is, by right, by reason, and sound arguments. The third branch of logic is sophistry, which teaches how to prove that 224 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY what we have said is correct, but by perverse ingen- uity, by false reasons and sophisms, that is by argu- ments that have the appearance and outside of truth, but in which there is nothing but falsehood." In other words, logic, according to Brunetto Latini, is the science that teaches how to distinguish good from bad reasoning. The main text-books were transla- tions from Aristotle, and treatises by Boethius. Of the quadrivium, the mathematical sciences, Brunetto says : " The first is arithmetic which teaches us to count, to compute, to add, to subtract, multiply and divide ; it also includes teaching the use of the abacus [a Roman instrument for counting by means of beads strung on wires which were stretched across a. frame] and algorism. The second is music, which teaches us how to make tunes and songs, and sounds in accord with one another on zithers, organs and other instruments, for the pleasure of the listeners or for divine worship in church. The third is geom- etry, by which we know the measures and propor- tions of things in length, breadth and thickness ; by the subtilities of geometry the Seven Sages succeeded in finding the size of the heavens and the earth, the distance between them, and many other wonderful measurements. The fourth science is astronomy, which teaches us the order of the heavens, of the firmament and of the stars, and the courses of the seven planets through the twelve signs of the zodiac, and how weather changes to hot or cold, or to dry time, or to wind, according to a law that is estab- lished in the stars." It is evident that these studies were very rudi- THE UNIVEESITY OF BOLOGNA 226 mentary. Arithmetic, besides its practical value in the counting-room, mainly served to compute the date of Easter, a bit of knowledge necessary in a priest's education. About the opening of the century the Hindu-Arabic system of notation was adopted, with the use of the zero, and some elements of alge- bra, to all of which Brunetto probably refers under the term algorism, but it is obvious that at the time he wrote the use of the primitive abacus had not yet been discarded. By this time a knowledge of Euclid had come in, chiefly from Arabian sources, and also a knowledge of the Ptolemaic system through Ptol- emy's astronomical work, known as the Almagest, and through the treatises of Alfraganus, an Arabian astronomer, with whom Dante was very familiar. Medicine was studied by aid of books written or complied by Arabian physicians, and of treatises derived or purporting to come from Galen and Hip- pocrates. But in order to study medicine to best advantage students did not go to the University of Bologna; they went to the medical school at Salerno in Frederick's kingdom, where the wisdom of Arabia and Persia supplemented the knowledge of anatomy and of medicinal herbs that had come down from Greece. The University of Bologna, with its professors, its students, its school of law, its courses on grammar and rhetoric, seems like a pleasant resting-place with- drawn from the highroad of conventional mediaeval history, a road frequented chiefly by kings, princes, prelates, soldiers, podestas and friars ; and yet almost everybody goes by vdthout a word about this se- 226 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY eluded spot. Dante, who studied all branches of knowledge, who was eagerly interested in philosophy and poetry as well as in politics, has no reference to the University, or but one of a most veiled character. Salimbene, the Franciscan friar, whose memoirs cor- respond in a way to Horace Walpole's letters, barely alludes to it, once by mention of a master of gram- mar, and once by repeating a sibylline prophecy — nidus scholasticus minorabitur, the scholars' nest shall be brought low ; and yet he speaks of Bologna a hundred times. The chroniclers of Bologna talk of battles and forays, of castles lost and won, of marches and countermarches, and they sometimes record the freezing of the river Po, the high price of vegetables, eclipses, floods or falling towers, but they regard the University as beneath the dignity of history ; or, perhaps, for they have recorded the attempt made by the Emperor Frederick to suppress the University, they regard it as part of the estab- lished order of things, like the river Po or the Apen- nines. However this may be, the University of Bo- logna was one of the moulding forces, not merely of Italian history but also of European history. CHAPTER XVII ON SOME UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS See ! Here they come I More proad than pursuivants, sly as confesaorB, With step scholastic and with time-worn gowns, The underpaid, sweet, spectacled Frofessois. Anonymous. The great University of Bologna drew students to itself from many foreign lands, because it taught and expounded the jurisprudence of a civilization very much superior to the civilization of the thirteenth century. As peoples became more civilized, both north and south of the Alps, as the science of gov- ernment grew, as business expanded, as property increased, a knowledge of Roman law became of greater and greater value ; and to clerks hoping for advancement in the Church knowledge of the canon law was of prime necessity. Naturally students of both branches of jurisprudence flocked to Bologna. The University of Bologna also offered the best edu- cation in the liberal arts that there was to be had in Italy. But the study of law and of the liberal arts would not have flourished there as it did, had it not been for the learning and talents of the professors of the University. It was they who gave to their University its great renown. Ever since the famous Irnerius had lectured on the civil law at Bologna (1100-1130 ?) a series of 228 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY learned professors had honourably maintained the reputation of the University. At the beginning of our century Professor Azo had been the acknow- ledged head of the legal faculty. After his death, about 1220, two very distinguished scholars disputed the preeminence, Accursius and Odofredus. Accur- sius was a Florentine by birth, of humble origin, but, his biographer says, of refined tastes and habits. He went to Bologna to study law rather older than was usual, perhaps because of straitened circumstances. He studied under Azo, took his doctor's degree, and taught at the University for forty years. He was very successful, and made so much money from his classes that he bought a large estate of many acres with a charming villa, a few miles east of Bologna by the little river Idice. He also owned a fine house in the centre of the city. His chief fame, however, was not as a lecturer but as a commentator. He con- ceived the idea of winning a name for himself and of lightening the burden of students, by making a kind of general digest of all previous comments, glosses, notes and expositions upon the Koman law, together with his own criticisms and explanations, so that this one vast comment should supplant all that had gone before, and the student have nothing to consult but the Corpus Juris Civilis itself and his comprehensive commentary. It is said that in order to have leisure for this herculean task he gave up his lectures for a long time. But there is another ver- sion of the story. Accursius learned that his rival Odofredus entertained a similar plan of combining and fusing all prior glosses into one, and became ON SOME UNIVEESITY PROFESSOES 229 very apprehensive lest Odofredus should execute the plan first. He shut himself up in his house, sent for the physician, ordered prescriptions from the apothe- cary, and stayed indoors, as if he were seriously in- disposed, until he had completely finished his task. Odofredus dawdled, thinking that while Accursius was sick in bed he might take his time, and had the mortification to find himself outwitted by his Floren- tine rival. Perhaps, however, this story is due to Bolognese jealousy. The gloss of Accursius was a triumphant success ; old sects of disputing commen- tators were reconciled ; young men were bidden to hold to his interpretation, as a pilot clings to his tiller or as Bolognese soldiers stand fast by their car- roccio ; and in course of time the gloss itself was glossed by admiring scholars. Accursius, like many professors of civil law at Bologna, was an imperialist in politics. The old Koman doctrine that the will of the Emperor is law was firmly lodged in his conservative mind. His po- litical theories, however, did not interfere with his loyalty to Bologna, and on his death his body was buried in a noble sarcophagus near the Franciscan church. His four sons became professors of law, and the eldest, Francis Accursius (1225-1293), acquired a reputation almost equal to his father's. When King Edward I stopped at Bologna on his homeward way from Syria, he invited Francis to go with him to England. Francis accepted and went ; he served the king in important matters, lectured at Oxford and also in France, at Toulouse. Like his father he was a Ghibelline. During his absence the popular party 230 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY expelled the imperial party from the city, and a de- cree of confiscation was rendered against his prop- erty; but on his return he obtained a revocation of the decree, and lived and died in general esteem. Odofredus (1200 ?-1265), "mundi sensus, ju- risque profundi lux, fcedus pacis, doctorum flos, — the wit of the world, the light of the law, the bond of peace, the flower of learned men," was a native of Bologna, and somewhat younger than Accursius senior. In his youth he travelled in France and Apulia, apparently in the capacity of judge attend- ant upon a podesta; at the age of thirty-two or thirty-three he returned to Bologna and devoted himself to lectures and comments on the civil law. Vanquished as a commentator by the shrewd Floren- tine, Accursius, he held his own not only as a lec- turer but also as a debater in the contests of learning and wit which the professors held with one another. He, too, became rich, and pleasant things are told of his generosity in his dealings with the students. Odofredus and Accursius were great men in their day and acquired reputations such as Sir William Blackstone or Chancellor Kent have with us ; and although their figures are dim and their subject does not touch history dramatically or emotionally, yet we understand them. They do not show in any con- spicuous way the stamp of the thirteenth century. They might have lived in the reign of Justinian or uttered their opinions side by side with Ulpian and Papinian ; or they might have lectured at the Har- vard Law School with Story and Greenleaf. They fit easily into our own experience ; and for that rea- ON SOME UNIVEKSITY PROFESSORS 231 son do not teach us what traits, what individual characteristics, distinguish the thirteenth century from those that went before or those that have come since. If, however, we turn to another study popular at Bologna, ars dictaminis, the art of composition, and foUow the career of one of its professors, such as Doctor Boncompagno, whom we know better than the others, or read one of his text-books, we find our- selves at once in a strange, primitive world, in the midst of children, as it were, who toil heroically over the rudiments of knowledge. Boncompagno was born a few miles out of Flor- ence at Signa, a place which seemed to him " endowed with indescribable pleasantness on account of its running waters and its abundance of olives." He was a contemporary of his learned countryman, the elder Accursius, and at about the same time as he, went to the University of Bologna. There he devoted himself to the liberal arts, took his doctor's degree, and wrote a book on rhetoric so highly esteemed that it was crowned with laurel, amid great ceremonies, first at Bologna and afterwards at Padua. He was very clever and very successful ; Salimbene calls him "a great master of grammar." He wrote several books on the art of composition to which he gave, as appropriate to rhetorical treatises, what seem to us rather fanciful and flowery names. The Olive, The Cedar, Myrrh. They teach business rather than literature, how to draw up legal documents, to draft statutes and to prepare testaments, and were prima- rily intended for students who meant to become no- taries. Boncompagno was ingenious, active-minded, 232 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY and full of plans for new ways of doing things; he was a typical Florentine. He proposed a radical change in the character of the University, — that (as it were) this learned mind should have a body, that the schools should have an appropriate building. Such a plan was utterly subversive of all accepted ideas, and no doubt was regarded as scandalous and revolutionary. "The building devoted to university studies," he says, "should be built in a place where the air is fresh and pure ; it should be far from the neighbourhood of women, from the bustle of the market-place, from the noise of horses and of bark- ing dogs, from the canal, from disturbing sounds of all kinds, from the creaking and smells of carts. The building should be square. The windows should be ar- ranged in such a way that there should be neither too much nor too little light; and two or three should be placed so that the professor may look out in summer time and see the trees, gardens and orchards; for the sight of pleasant things strengthens the mind. The dormitories should be upstairs, with rooms of proper height. Everything should be very clean. The walls of the lecture room should be painted green, and there should be no pictures except such as stimulate the mind to intellectual things. The stairs should not be too steep, and there should be but one en- trance. In the lecture-room the professor's chair should stand on some kind of platform, and be high enough to enable him to see who come in. The seats for the students should all be on the floor, and so placed that no one could interfere with the profes- sor's range of vision. The older and better scholars ON SOME UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 233 should have front seats; and students of the same country or province should sit together. Regard should be had to their office, rank and merit. Stu- dents should always keep the same seats." The time ■was not ripe for the plan. Such an edifice would have been a hostage to the Commune of Bologna, and the rectors would have been obliged to obey the city magistrates. Boncompagno himself did not expect to see it adopted ; one inclines to the suspicion that he merely wished to irritate his conservative colleagues. In his courses he did introduce innovations; the consequence was a serious quarrel. Before his com- ing the professors of grammar and rhetoric had fol- lowed undisturbed an old-fashioned method of teach- ing which enjoyed the prestige of being taught in the well-known school at Orleans in Trance. This method, at least according to Boncompagno's think- ing, was cringingly deferential to ancient models, full of affectations, elegant quotations and stale saws; whereas he, in his own mind, represented ori- ginality, patriotism, and good sense. He expressed his opinions freely; he even said that these old- fashioned professors sold to raw ignorant youths gilded copper for gold. They resented his criticism ; this made him see (so he says) that their impudent attacks on him could only be stopped by putting them publicly to shame. To accomplish this he gave loose rein to his Florentine love of practical jokes. A letter was received by the faculty of rhetoric, purporting to come from one Robert, a French pro- fessor, which in grandiloquent phrases announced 234 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY that he would come and confute Boncompagno, "the prince of Italian professors." On the day set everybody, professors and students, crowded into the cathedral. The adverse faction felt sure that they should see Boncompagno utterly confounded; but Boncompagno sat in the tribune smiling and asking, "Where is Robert?" "Why does he not come?" The others answered, "He has been delayed a little, he will come soon, just wait a moment;" while some of the audience pointed at a stranger and said, "Perhaps that is Robert." Finally, when pa- tience could hold out no longer, Boncompagno got up, and after derisively demanding, "Where is Robert? Let him step forth," announced that it was he who had written the letter and tricked them all. The hoax was a complete success; Boncompagno's enemies were dumbfounded while his supporters, wild with delight, lifted him on their shoulders and car- ried him away in triumph. What delicacy of wit must have graced the jokes of the students, if this joke scored an intellectual triumph among the pro- fessors! One shudders at the thought. Boncompagno sets forth in several books his the- ories concerning the proper way to teach the art of composition. His method may be better than the method he attacked, but his books are very primitive. When these early men follow a great highway of knowledge, built by the ancients, as in law or the- ology, they deal with questions after a fashion not very different from our own ; but where they make their own paths, as in painting, for instance, or in the art of writing, they are like ignorant children. ON SOME UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 235 Boucoinpagno's treatise, The Palm, which, so he says, enjoyed great success at the University and put his enemies to rout, seems to us as primitive as the paintings or sculpture of contemporary artists. It is a little book of some twenty pages, intended rather for teachers in the preparation of their lectures than for students ; it deals briefly with various mat- ters in the art of writing : composition itself, prose, a grant of privilege, a testament, the parts of a letter, — salutation, narration, petition, conclusion, — punc- tuation, minor clauses and parables. It reveals to us the difficulties that beset the men who dig the foundations of knowledge. " I admit," he says, " that I do not know where the epistolary art was discov- ered. In Greece I was told that when the Israelites were under Pharaoh's yoke they did not dare speak to one another, and therefore Moses invented writing and communicated with them in that way. Others say that the art was invented in Noah's ark. I am wholly ignorant whether these explanations are true or false." His self-confidence and his love of humour, how- ever, enliven the book. He gives but one example of the proper form for beginning a letter : " Suppose," he says, "that the Pope writes to the Emperor on one matter or on several. If it is on one matter the writer may begin in this way : Since We are bound by our office to be assiduous in admonishing all the sons of the Church lest they be caught in the snares of earthly temptation, much more attentively We ought to counsel your Imperial Majesty by apostolic letters, so that you may pass through the things of 236 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY this -world in such a way as not to lose those of eternity, etc. But if in the same letter the Pope •wishes to touch upon a second matter he may pro- ceed thus : Moreover We commend most heartily to your Excellency our beloved son, Doctor B., whom We and our brethren from an intimate knowledge of his piety and learning love most dearly, begging your Excellency that on account of our request you will treat him with every consideration and give a favourable answer to his requests." To whom can he refer under this discreet initial ? Perhaps the most original of Boncompagno's books is the Wheel of Venus. He hits upon the in- genious plan of combining a tale of gallantry and an epistolary form-book. As a story-teller he is much more modern than the authors of the tales in the Novellino and points the way to Boccaccio ; but he cannot lay aside his professional method of writing a text-book. He tries most unwisely to kill two birds with one stone. If he had devoted himself wholly to story-telling, with his wit, his inventiveness, his fancy, he might have been the originator of a branch of belles-lettres, of light literature, and have won for himself part of the fame that has fallen to Boccaccio. The story begins, after a pretty introduction in which Venus bids him write, with a letter from a lover to the lady of his admiration : " To the noble and wise Lady G., beautiful by elegance and breed- ing." Here the professor interrupts the story-teller with notes and bits of advice for his students : Do not use countrified expressions such as — " To my ON SOME UNIVEESITY PEOFESSORS 237 Sweetest friend, as many greetings as there are leaves on the trees, stars in the sky, sands on the shore," that is bad form ; and, remember, that all women like to be flattered for their beauty, be ful- some. Then he makes a digression to consider the station of the lover, high or low ; this he does ap- parently for the sake of a gibe at the clergy, for he intimates that there should be a difference between the love-letter of a bishop and that of a mere priest. Then follows another digression to consider the three periods for falling in love: before an introduc- tion, after an introduction, and before the lover has ever seen the lady. After these interruptions the letter proceeds : " When I beheld you among a glor- ious company of girls, the fire of love flared up in my heart, all of a sudden I was a new man. No wonder, you shone among them like the morning star that flies before Aurora to herald the day ; hair like spun gold hanging about delicately rosy ears ; eyebrows like strings of pearls ; ruby lips with ivory teeth," etc. More notes follow, and then comes the heroine's answer. She is complaisant. How shall a meeting be contrived ? Shall it be in church, or shall his falcon fly into her father's garden and he pursue it ? In this way the letters carry one through a love affair of a very frank and pagan character. Besides the annotations and bits of advice, the author has inserted a variety of paradigms for love letters, which according to our more prudish notions, should not be presented to young men under any circumstances. And at the end Boncompagno says that, if he has been rather too free of speech, the reader should 238 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY remember the Song of Solomon, in which are many things that, if taken according to the letter, are more likely to stir the lower nature than the higher ; but let the reader adopt for The Wheel of Venus the same wise rule of interpretation applied to the Song and he will perceive the really moral purpose in it. In this hybrid book the reference to Venus, the description of the lady, the outspoken fling at the Church's interpretation of the Song of Solomon, in- dicate the first blossoming of that kind of taste which became so pronounced a feature of the Renaissance. Boncompagno has been rightly called a humanist of the thirteenth century ; not because he had a great love of the classics, but because he shared the state of mind of the humanists of the fifteenth century. At the same time he undoubtedly wished to draw students away from the courses of his unfriendly colleagues, and perhaps the Wheel of Venus is less a serious attempt to write a tale of gallantry than to attract the more frivolous young men to his own classes. At any rate it is plain that the University of Bologna was not the monastic and ascetic place that the glosses of Accursius and Odofredus might lead us to suppose. Boncompagno in several ways is typical of his century and of Bologna, if not of the conservative University. He had great admiration for the Roman past ; and that was the cause of his respect for classical literature rather than a result of that re- spect. It is true that Boncompagno's sentiment for the classics is somewhat obscured by his conceited insistence upon his own originality, but it comes to ON SOME UNIVEESITY PROFESSORS 239 light here and there, as in the pretty description of the appearance of the goddess in the prologue to The Wheel of Venus, in two little books one On Friendship and one On the Evils of Old Age, ■which show that he had Cicero's De Amicitia and De Senectute in mind, and more clearly in a history of the siege of Ancona, conducted by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, in which he models himself on Sallust and Livy. Respect for the Latin classics he shared with all the educated world ; but in Bon- compagno respect for classical literature unites and mingles with an almost passionate patriotism. All his countrymen were full of local pride and of loy- alty to their city ; only a few shared his patriotism for Italy. " Italy," he says, " cannot and must not be tributary, for Freedom has chosen to make its home in Italy ; she is no tributary province but a queera^ong provinces. . . . All the provinces of the worlo^ught to be subject to the people of Italy," Tjfe was the sentiment to which Innocent III ap- pealed when he drove the German freebooters from Umbria and the March of Ancona. And with Bon- compagno this love of liberty shows itself in unex- pected places. For instance, in one of his books he takes advantage of a grammatical disquisition on clauses to gibe at all the nations he has heard of. The Armenians and the Greeks, he says, let their beards grow long so that they may appear of a seri- ous disposition; the Slavs, though they have human forms, are more properly classed as beasts than as men; the Bohemians are handsome and fierce in battle, but they eat meat half-cooked and get dis- 240 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY gustingly drunk ; the Germans are a laughing-stock for their fury, the AUobrogi (Savoyards?) for their thievery, the French for their arrogance ; the men of the March are simpletons, the Komagnuols double- tongued cheats ; the people of Provence are liars, the Calabrians timid, the Apulians pusillanimous ; the Tuscans manage their affairs well, and if it were not for fraud and their envious disposition, their virtues would shine out. But when he speaks of the Lombards, he says, " they are the patrons of liberty, noble defenders of their rights, and as they have fought most often for liberty they are deserv- edly the senators of Italy." Boncompagno's love of freedom did not confine itself to politics ; it was broader than that and op- posed what seemed to him the tyranny of fanaticism. He has a touch of the spirit that animated Voltaire or Heinrich Heine, and like them his weaA^was satire. For instance, while he was at Bol^^a a Dominican friar, John of Vicenza, came to pre^^B John was an eloquent, impassioned orator, wun great power over his audiences; wonderful stories are told how he moved all kinds of people to tears, drovevsinners to repentance, and persuaded enemies to embrace and swear eternal friendship. His meet- ings were somewhat like those of the Salvation Army ; but he was not a spiritual-minded man. He used his religious influence to obtain political power. Other friars, also eager to acquire influence with their congregations, resorted to absolute trickery. Boncompagno, in defence of reason, resented what he regarded as an appeal to superstition, and wrote ON SOME UNIVERSITY PEOFESSOES 241 satirical doggerel on Brother John. It was a brave thing to do, as John at the time was a great person. Here is the stanza that Salimbene remembered : Et Johannes Johannijat et saltando choreizat. Modo salta, modo salta, qui celorum petit alta ! Saltat iste, saltat ille, resaltant eohortes mille, saltat chorus dominarum saltat dux Venetiarum ! Brother Johnny johnnies it o'er us And while dancing sings a chorua. Dance up high, dance up high, Ye who wish to reach the sky ! Dance now here-y, dance now there-y, Dance now all the military, Dance, ye ladies, like the Grecians, Dance, you doge of the Venetians ! :\0L . ThWatter part of Boncompagno's life is not well kJ^n. He left the University from time to time -^perhaps that was the only way of establishing peace with his colleagues^- and travelled ; he went to Germany, to Greece, to the Holy Land. He was not prudent, like Accursius and Odof redus ; he laid up no riches, but danced and sang in the summer season, and when old age came on he had nothing. At the suggestion of his friends he went to Eome, hoping that the Curia would give him some office. The time was unfavourable, the Curia was at war with the Emperor ; and perhaps it did not entertain the high opinion of his piety that Boncompagno had put so flippantly into his epistolary form for use by 242 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY the Papal Chancery. He was refused, and ■went at last to Florence where he died in a hospital. The last book he wrote, On the Emls of Old Age, is a sad little book. Cicero, he says, has spoken well of old age, but " for my part I can see no good in it, ex- cept indeed that an old man has a chance to repent." There is a cynical element in the book, and but one bright spot, where he speaks of Venice, and then his rhetoric flares up with a final flash : " Her floor is the sea, her roof the heavens, and her walls are the courses of the waters — she takes away the power of speech." Poor old man ! It was long since he had played his pranks on sober professors of the Uni- versity, or listened to the nightingales sing on the blossoming hill outside the walls of Bologna. Another professor of grammar, Guido Faba, taught at the University a little later than Boncom- pagno. He wrote a book of epistolary forms ta serve for all sorts of people and all kinds of occasions. In those days people were exceedingly ceremonioulSto their forms of address, and little differences that we should hardly notice were weighted with signifi- cance ; and students were obliged to learn the con- ventions of epistolary etiquette. For a form of intro- duction to a request, he gives : "I am obliged to ask favours of you so often that I am ashamed, and you would not have to bear the asking, M'^ere not friend- ship of so true a temper that it endureth all things with patience," or, more humbly, " My littleness in all devotion supplicates your lordship." And, for a love letter to a lady : " When I behold your radiant person, from my exceeding joy methinks I am in ON SOME UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 243 Paradise ; " or, more formally : " To the noble and ■wise lady, P. [it was well understood that nothing of a lady's name except the initial should be written in a love letter] — adorned with the elegance of vir- tues, greeting, and the utmost fidelity and service. Love of your shining qualities has so taken me, Maiden splendid, rose-like and serene, that day and night I am thinking of nothing but your beauty. When I behold it, my soul is glorified as if I were rapt to the joys of Paradise." It is evident that the study of the ars dictaminis embraces matters not included in a modern curriculum. Another letter shows that the ordinary student at a university then was very much like an ordinary student at a univer- sity now, although his forms of expression are dif- ferent ; it is a letter from a son to his father : " I have come to the beautiful, delectable, and glorious meadow of philosophy, and I want to gather flow- ers of divers colours to make a wreath of wonderful beauty that shall shine round my head in our city, and give forth to my friends and relations an agree- able odour, but the custodian of the garden says no, unless I make him pleasant and suitable gifts. I have nothing to pay. If your generosity wishes me to arrive at such honour, be pleased to send me money at once, so that I may stay and gather pre- cious fruit in the garden which I have entered." What father could refuse so fragrant a petition? As such forms were common in the books compiled by university professors, one can hardly help a per- haps mean suspicion that the professors were inter- ested in the weight of the student's purses. 244 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY These professors of grammar and rhetoric did not enjoy the dignified esteem that attended the profes- sors of civil law ; they did not die at their country- places in delectable villas, nor in their own town- houses ; and no monumental tombs mark where their bones lie. Nevertheless a Boncompagno had this advantage over an Accursius : he lived more keenly the fleeting life of the time, he enjoyed more its sunshine and its shadows, he understood and ex- pressed its moods better. And if monuments were to be put up to men because they tell us the history of their own times, two men of the thirteenth cent- ury that should have them are Professor Boncom- pagno and Friar Salimbene, surprised though each might be to find a statue erected to the other. CHAPTER XVIII THE NOBLES OF THE NOETH (1230-1243) Say, Muse, their Barnes then known, who first, who last, At their great emperor's call, as nest in worth. Came singly where he stood on the bare strand. While the promiscuous crowd stood yet aloof ? Paradise Lost, Bk. i. The peace patched up between the Pope and Em- peror at San Germano in 1230 could be but tempor- ary. The opposition between their ideals of society was fundamental; and the several endeavours of each to attain nearer to what he regarded as the noblest goal of his ambition were so many blows at the other. The Pope openly proclaimed the supremacy of the ecclesiastical power over the civil ; the Em- peror, though he only dared to say that the ecclesi- astical power and the civil power should act together, desired in his heart to put the Church under his heel. Everywhere the two were in opposition. In The Kingdom the Pope regarded the clergy as pri- marily his subjects ; in the papal provinces of central Italy Frederick still regarded himself as sovereign. The Pope was resolved to uphold the independence of the Lombard cities; Frederick was resolved to reduce them to obedience. Everywhere contrary in- terests were straining to break the peace ; and sooner or later it was sure to give way. For the moment, however, these destructive forces were counteracted ; 246 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Pope Gregory desired passionately to extend Christ- ian rule in the Holy Land and he knew that this could only be accomplished with the Emperor's help, and he also had need of that help at home against the troublesome Romans ; and Frederick, on his part, was most anxious to keep the Pope neutral while he adjusted his relations with the Lombards. The Lombard question was simply this : the Lom- bards desired to stay as they were, whereas Frederick found the actual situation intolerable. The Lombard League cut the Empire in two ; it closed the passes over the Alps to imperial troops coming from Ger- many ; it tried to tyrannize over loyal cities ; it en- abled the Pope to maintain a haughty front against imperial rights. For the members of the League to call themselves loyal subjects seemed to Frederick both fanciful and impudent. They, on their side, declared that the rights they enjoyed had been sol- emnly confirmed by the Treaty of Constance, and that the seeming acts of disloyalty were but the pre- cautions of ordinary prudence to safeguard those rights in the face of obvious danger. The League, however, sincerely desired to avoid war; nor did Frederick, who had great confidence in his own power of overreaching his opponents, intend to re- sort tp hostilities untU he had exhausted the resources of ingenuity. His plans had a double object in view, first, to detach by threats or bribes some members of the League, and secondly, to secure to himself the moral support of public opinion. Perhaps the clear- est evidence of Frederick's shrewdness is the court that he paid to public opinion. He was always busy THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 247 writing to princes and potentates, in order both to put his side of a quarrel before them and to flatter them by showing that he wished for their good opinion. This ambition of Frederick's to reunite the sev- ered members of the Empire, like a call to battle, roused all the north of Italy into active partisanship for one side or the other. As a rule, the feudal no- bles were for the Empire and most cities for the League and the Church. But except in the case of a few cities on both sides, it is not safe to assume with either commune or baron that partisan loyalty re- mains unchanged from one year to the next. The cities of Cremona, Pavia, Eeggio, and Modena were devoted to the Emperor ; Romagna, except Faenza, was strongly imperial ; so was the city of Ferrara under Salinguerra, but otherwise the cities of the north were almost all against him. In the northwest of Italy the feudal nobles, such as the Counts of Savoy or the Marquises of Montferrat were some- times on the Emperor's side and sometimes not. In the northeast, in the March of Treviso, what is now the province of Veneto, the political parties were fiercely divided. There the cities were not as power- ful as they were in Lombardy. The country was much less fertile than the valley of the Po, and the mountainous character of a great part of it hin- dered trade and furnished admirable points of vant- age for the castles of the nobility. Of these nobles three or four were preeminent. Ambitious to enlarge their domains, they quarrelled with one another, and, according as envy, jealousy, or interest directed, took sides with the Empire or the Church. These feudal 248 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY nobles play dramatic parts on the stage of history and deserve to have their lineage and their exploits separately heralded. The most distinguished family was the world- renowned House of Este. Some hundred years earl- ier one member of the family had emigrated to Germany, and from him descend the Dukes of Brunswick and the royal family of England. His brother, the " magnificent Marquis Fulke," remained in Italy, and from him descended the Italian branch, destined to become lords of Ferrara, Reggio, and Modena. The castle of Este lay at the southern foot of the Euganean Hills, some fifteen miles southwest of Padua, and the family possessed estates in all the country roundabout. Marquis Azzo VI (1170-1212), "a nobleman full of wisdom, who found grace with* God and man," steered with singular dexterity through the troubled times of Innocent III and stood well with both the Empire and the Papacy. He was high-spirited, astute, and very ambitious; but history tells little about him. The chronicler of the House of Este gathered what records he could — " so that posterity reading them shall be taught what to choose and what to avoid for the present and the future, and since everybody knows that 'by concord little things grow great and by discord even the greatest things fall away,' it is obvious that concord is to be chosen with all one's might and discord avoided." Unfortunately there was no vestige of concord for him to chronicle, and he has left but scanty accounts of the superabundant discord. There were raids and forays to and fro in the March of THE NOBLES OF THE NOETH 249 Treviso; Verona and Ferrara were lost and won; castles and farmhouses were captured and burned. Nevertheless, out of the misty records rises an image of Azzo VI, a gay and gallant figure of a mediaeval noble, a grand seigneur, " handsome in person, hand- somer in feats of arms," who did his duty as he saw it to the honour of his house and of his order, the worthy scion of an illustrious race. Once he and his friend, the Count of San Bonifazio (father of Cunizza's husband), fought Ezzelino II and the Montagues in the meadow just beyond the Roman Arena in Verona : " Knight charges knight, foot soldiers fight hand to hand, enemy grapples with enemy, till at last, after knight and horse had shed their blood, after many had been struck down and some killed, the Marquis stood victor in the field. Towers and strongholds throughout the city surrendered; and Ezzelino II was taken prisoner. The Marquis treated him with courtly consideration, bade the lords and ladies and all the quality of Verona do him honour, and then sent him with an escort of knights to Bassano, where he lived ; and there in return the lords and ladies of the town showed great hospitality to Azzo's knights. Ha ! Deus ! in those days there was war, good war (if I may call it so). If a man bravely fighting his enemy was made prisoner, he was not put to death, or sent to prison, or condemned to horrible mutila- tion ; on the contrary, he was sent away in honour whither he wished to go." But then, as so often through the centuries, the brave days of old gave way to meaner modern times. A year or two after the capture of Verona, Azzo 250 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY drove Salinguerra from Ferrara, and then, at the height of fortune, died, followed to the grave a few days later by his friend and companion in arms, San Bonifazio : " Glorious princes of the earth, since in life they loved one another greatly, so in death they were not divided." Azzo left two sons. The elder soon died, and the younger, Azzo VII (1205-1264) succeeded to the family honours and estates. This marquis played a notable part as captain of the Guelf party in the northeast, and maintained with varying fortune the cause of the League and of the Church against the Ghibellines and the House of the Ez- zelini. The most successful of his military operations was the final recapture of Ferrara from old Salin- guerra. But the capture does not redound to the honour of the Marquis Azzo, or of the Doge of Ven- ice, his ally, or of the Apostolic legate who fought at his side, or of the Bishop of Ferrara, to whose boldness and sagacity the capture was in great meas- ure due. After a four months' siege they offered the doughty old Ghibelline terms, which he, in spite of his craft, accepted ; but when they had got him in their power, they clapped him into prison and kept him there till he died. In their defence it must be said that a dozen years before Salinguerra had captured Richard of San Bonifazio by a similar trick. Trickery was one of the weapons in the game of war. From that day for more than three hundred and fifty years the city of Ferrara belonged to the House of Este, until, crowned with the glory of Ariosto and Tasso, the last duke of the main line of this illustrious family died childless. THE NOBLES OF THE NOETH 251 The other great family of the March of Treviso ■was that of the Ezzelini, hereditary rivals of the House of Este. Their castle of Romano was at the foot of the outlying Alps midway between Feltre and Bassano [Par. ix, 25-30) : — In quella parte della terra prava Italica, che siede tra Rialto e le fontane di Brenta e di Piava, si leva un colle, e non surge molt' alto, \k donde scese gik una facella, che f ece alia contrada un grande assalto. In that part of the wicked land Of Italy, that lies between Kialto And the springs of Brenta and Piave, Up rears a hill, but no great height doth reach, From thence came down a firebrand That to the country round gave great offence. The family traits were courage and craft; all its members were ready at any time to lay hold of any means to increase their power. The family probably came down from Germany in the train of some Emperor. Ezzelino I, the Stam- merer, the grandfather of Ezzelino III, Frederick's lieutenant, was a man of unusually strong character. He was a partisan of the Lombard League against Frederick Barbarossa. Cut off from any hope of pro- viding for his family by imperial favour, Ezzelino I cast about to better his son's fortunes by marriage. The first wife chosen for Ezzelino II was a daughter of the Marquis Azzo VI ; she died childless. The second, a bold, reckless, amorous, much-marrying woman was divorced; and the son was again single 252 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY •when his father heard, through a channel that might have deterred a less resolute man, of a most eligible match. A young lady of the March, Donna Cicilia, at the age of fourteen was left an orphan and a great heiress. The Stammerer's daughter, the Countess of Sampiero, who had her share of the family zeal for ac- quisition, was quick to hear of this chance and quick to act. She promised Donna Cicilia's guardian fifty gold pounds to arrange a marriage between her son, the young Count of Sampiero and the heiress. But before the wedding Sampiero senior consulted his father-in-law as to the wisdom of the match. Old Ezzelino, in the subtle way of which he was past- master, fobbed off his son-in-law, sent privily to the guardian, gave him a hundred pounds, and married the girl to his own son, Ezzelino II. The Sampieri were very angry, got possession of Cicilia, and took a terrible revenge. Cicilia, no longer fit to be young Ezzelino's wife, was divorced, and the young man married a fourth time. The affair created a feud between the families of Ezzelino and of Sampiero, and betrays the fact that the quarrels between the nobles were often not over questions of large policy, but about mere matters of personal hatred and jeal- ousy. Ezzelino II lived to prosper ; but as life went on he experienced a change of heart. He turned to religious things. His enemies said that he became a heretic. At any rate, he forsook the world, trans- ferred his baronies to his sons, Ezzelino III da Eo- mano and Alberic, and retired to a monastery. From this monastic life he got the name, Ezzelino the Monk. THE NOBLES OF THE NOKTH 253 Ezzelino III da Romano, whose name has become a synonym for cruelty, was the Hfelong rival of Marquis Azzo VII. We have already made his ac- quaintance as brother of Cunizza. Short, swarthy, black-haired, Ezzelino III was a high-strung, resolute, dare-devil of a man. In the beginning of his career he sided with the Lombard League and was podesta of Verona when that city barred the Brenner Pass against Prince Henry: but in 1232 he turned his coat and for nearly thirty years maintained the Ghibelline cause with brilliant success against the Church, the Lombard League, and Azzo d' Este. Azzo, indeed, with his allies captured Ferrara; but Ezzelino made himself master of Padua, Verona, Vicenza, and almost all the March of Treviso. He received the office of imperial lieutenant and married the Emperor's bastard daughter, Selvaggia. In his youth Ezzelino was regarded merely as a brilliant and ambitious young GhibelKne leader; his dreadful reputation belongs to later years and, though firmly built on acts of savage cruelty, it is indebted for the infernal glare that lights it up to the dread with which he inspired his enemies. The Guelf chroniclers cannot satiate themselves with epithets: "limb of Satan," "son of iniquity," "worst of men," "poisonous snake," "Antichrist," "basilisk thirsting for blood " ; and legend whispered that no human father but a fiend from hell had begotten him. The change in Ezzelino's nature, or at least in his reputation, seems to have taken place after the capture of Padua. Once in possession he feared to 254 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY lose the city and sought to prop his dominion by fear. This rich and prosperous town, though it had joined the Lombard League, was divided against itself, and its rulers were distraught in their counsels. On the one hand, there was the bond with the League ; on the other, the Emperor was dangerously near, Vicenza had fallen, and the Imperialists were full of energy and daring. The leaders of the Ghibel- line faction, taking advantage of the general per- plexity and confusion, intrigued with Ezzelino and by specious representations and promises induced the city to open her gates, as a loyal subject, to the Emperor ; some among them asserted with confidence that Lord Ezzelino desired the good and honour of Padua more than the fulfilment of all his other wishes. "So, on the very next day, February 25th, 1237, Count Gebhard and Ezzelino (the imperial envoys) with their troops entered Padua peaceably. And many people saw — and I [Rolandino, the historian of these affairs] particularly saw it — that as Ezzelino was going through the city gate, he pushed back his iron helmet, and, leaning over from his palfrey toward the gate, kissed it. . . . Then the city was handed over to Count Gebhard, who received it in the name of the Emperor and in his stead. And afterwards at the general assembly of the councils. Lord Ezzelino made a speech and said — but nobody understood the full significance of what he said — that it was true that Padua had been given to Lord Gebhard for the Emperor, but to the envoys of the Emperor as well; and therefore whatever was done or considered thereafter on behalf of the Commune THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 255 of Padua was of no value, unless it should be done with the advice and consent of Lord Ezzelino." Not for two years, however, did Ezzelino's cruelty show itself. Then some of the Guelf faction were suspected of intrigues with the enemy. A knight was arrested and executed in the courtyard without trial. A little later another gentleman of rank and consequence was executed; on the same day one of the canons of Padua was burnt at the stake, and eighteen burghers and villagers were hanged. Others were imprisoned on vague surmises. One gentleman was overheard saying to another: " We ought to take arms and not permit the nobles and gentlemen of Padua to be so cruelly, so vilely, put into prison." Both were beheaded. Three others, bred to a life of ease and luxury, were kept in jail several years, and then the doors were barricaded and the poor wretches left to cry in vain, " Bread ! Bread ! " After thirty days their bodies, all skin and bones, black and hor- rible, were taken out. Vanitatum vanitas ineffdbilis, vita mortifera,m,undus fallax! The poor historian, Eolaudino, had fallen on evil days. Fond of study and peace and of the Latin poets, — Horace, Ovid, Lucan, — he naturally regarded the tyranny of Ezzelino as the visible presence of Antichrist. So matters went. When Lord Ezzelino shifted his residence to Verona, he made his sister's son, Anse- disius, podesta of Padua. Ansedisius remained in power for nearly seven years, a nephew worthy of his uncle. B ut as he was a man of pleasant manners, ready with promises, the family traits did not show them- selves at once; moreover, even when living in Verona, 256 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Ezzelino, either by visits or by his Utterce mortifercB, death-dealing letters, kept control. On one occasion a company of gentlemen was assembled in the large hall of the podesta's house. On a perch was a sparrow- hawk, and one of those present, a man of some read- ing, litteratus, quoted one of ^sop's fables: — To repulse the attacks of a kite, the doves chose a hawk for their king. The king does more harm than the foe ; the doves begin raising the question, Whether it might not be well to endure the attacks of the kite, Rather than die, one by one, without declaration of war. Somebody liked the verses and asked for a copy; others spoke of them to people outside. The inci- dent came to the ears of the Podesta, who "night and day was cogitating how he could destroy the people of Padua, for that was what he was charged to do." All concerned were immediately arrested. Soon afterwards Ezzelino came to Padua. On his arrival the friends and relations of the gentlemen arrested went in a body to his house, to ask that the accused be let out on bail. They were waiting below, when Ezzelino attended by his men-at-arms came down in so great a fury that all but two fled incon- tinently. These two, foolishly trusting in their inno- cence, were arrested. Ezzelino hurried to the palace, called out the guards, both knights and foot sol- diers, and, haranguing all the company, charged various persons of wealth and position with circulat- ing these verses on purpose: "He was no hawk, he said, that wished to devour the doves, but the father of a family who intended to clean out his house, THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 257 cast out the scorpions, sweep out the toads, and bruise the heads of the snakes." This house-cleaning he carried out thoroughly; some of the persons con- cerned in the affair of ^Esop's fable were beheaded in the public square, others, both men and women, fettered and thrown into the deepest dungeon. As time went on, Ezzelino's cruelty became still more barbarous. And yet there is something in his deviltry that hfts him high above the common run of cruel men of his time (for all that progeny of dragon's teeth was cruel), and gives him the mag- nanimous quality that we attribute to Satan at his best. Ezzelino is like Shakespeare's Richard III, but of a purer clay: — Because I cannot flatter and speak fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive and cog. Duck with French nods and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live and think no harm ? Rolandino ascribes to him a sentiment, written not to an enemy or to be read by the world, but in a letter to crafty Salinguerra, his brother-in-law: " There are two things out of all others in this life with which men are bound chiefly to concern them- selves, to wit, to keep faith with friends and live with honour." And this same terrible tyrant, at the very time of the affair of jEsop's fable, " had set his heart on love and on a beautiful young lady, if it is possible to believe that love and extremest cruelty can exist in one heart." On betrothal he pledged her his service and his honour, and after his mar- riage (so it was said by some) he entertained a 258 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY dream, when once he should become sole master in the March, to pass his life in love and bliss in the palace that he was building in Padua at the head of the Millers' Bridge. Pope Alexander IV thought it by no means impossible to transform him from a menibrum diaboli into ajilius Dei. Another of the principal nobles of the March was Count Riccardo di San Bonifazio, head of the Church party in Verona, the patron of Sordello, and for a brief time husband of Ezzelino's celebrated sister, Cunizza. Between them these bold barons kept the March in great turmoil. They come clatter- ing down the decades of the century with their knights, their men-at-arms, and their foot soldiers, like the heroes of the Iliad, rejoicing in battle, fighting one another under the push of primitive passions, — covetousness, revenge, jealousy, — or, at tiines, as it seems, merely in order to drive dull care away. They strove to maintain the feudal system against the rising tide of modern civilization, and though they ranged themselves for the Empire or for the communes, they really embodied a theory of what is desirable in a body politic remote from either of the theories represented by those two ad- versaries. They remained true to feudal confusion, to the loose system of mutual ties existing between inferiors and superiors all along the scale from slave to emperor. That system had no place for the economical development of industry, it took no account of manufacture or of trade ; it was based on agriculture. It had the vaguest and most wayward idea of law and order. But, if on the economic side THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 259 of things the feudal system was all weakness, on the side of sentiment it had great strength. It repre- sented the recent past, the past within the memory of living men, and therein lay its power, for the recent past is the home of sentiment. Peasants, from their boyhood up, had lived within a bow-shot of the great castle, they had looked upon it as part of the eternal order, they had been bred upon stories of the old lord, and of the young lord when a mad- cap boy; they had seen the pennants fly and the lances glitter as the men-at-arms rode away on a foray, they had shared the triumph of victory and the pinch of defeat. Their fathers, and their fathers' fathers, had been loyal to the master; and for them to desert that allegiance and adopt the communal motto of service of self was a kind of detestable free-thinking, rank lay atheism. And so the mag- nificent Marquis of Este and the terrible Lord of Romano inspired their followers with a doglike and not ignoble fidelity. The communes represented economic growth, the union of men for the sake of greater productiv- ity, the expansion of relations between guilds, be- tween town and town, between country and country, in short the cause of commerce; they were the crea- tors of our modern world, the champions of the fu- ture. If, judged by our standards, they accomplished little, they at least were pioneers and swung their axes to clear away the choking heritage of the past. Their duty was to make a beginning, and this they did ; Milan, Bologna, Piacenza, and Brescia, the only cities that remained steadfast in the darkest days. 260 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY are the real heroes of the struggle with the Empire. The communes may not have for us the picturesque charm of the bold barons, but they presented an ideal to the men of their time ; they did not appeal to memory and the past, but they appealed to self- interest and the improvement of humanity. The Empire represented a third ideal, as high as the other two, or, indeed, higher still. It dreamed of universal peace and order, of law and even-handed justice, of violence chained and things of the mind set free to bourgeon and to blow. This vision of le- gitimate sovereignty gilding the sullen earth, dis- pelling the clouds of force, fraud, and fear, lights up with perhaps an undeserved illumination the Empire as it hastens to its setting. The Empire cer- tainly regarded itself as the heir to the divinely con- stituted empire of ancient Rome, its Emperors as the successors to Trajan and Augustus, and in its extraor- dinary self-deception believed that it could blazon upon its banner the Pax Romana once more restored to a troubled world. In short, the struggle between the Empire, the communes, and the feudal nobles was a struggle between ideals fighting among them- selves to prove which of the three was most in ac- cordance with the needs of men. Frederick's mind was possessed by this ideal of legitimate sovereignty ; and he realized to the full the advantage that it afforded him in his contest with the undutiful province ; his policy, therefore, was to act strictly within his rights and to crowd the Lom- bards more and more into a position of open rebel- lion. His first step, as before, was to summon a diet, THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 261 to be held this time at Eavenna. The Pope, eager for a new crusade, forbade the League to oppose it. The Lombards, as before, drew close together and a second time prevented the Emperor's son and his troops from crossing the Alps. The diet was a fail- ure. A second time the controversy was left to the Roman Curia ; a second time the Roman Curia laid the blame on the Lombards and adjudged that they should equip and maintain several hundred knights for the proposed crusade. Frederick, remember- ing the outcome of the former award, was highly incensed ; and the case was reopened. It is probable that Frederick was not seeking a peaceful issue, but rather that he hoped to start a rift between the Pope and the Lombards, and wished to take before the world the position of a pacific sovereign who has exhausted all the resources of diplomacy and arbi- tration before he draws the sword. Matters hung on. The Emperor was obliged to go to Germany to suppress a rebellion raised by his eldest son, Prince Henry ; and he stayed to marry Isabella of England, sister to King Henry III, for he was now a widower for the second time. But Ez- zelino, realizing that the situation in north Italy was intolerable, urged the Emperor to come back. It was high time ; the Church had dropped her role as peacemaker and war was afoot. Fortune favoured the Empire. Frederick, by a rapid march, surprised and captured Vicenza; Ezzelino got possession of Padua and Treviso ; Mantua surrendered ; Azzo of Este came in to make his peace. And, at last, after manoeuvring for some time in vain, Frederick sue- 262 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ceeded in bringing on a general engagement in the open field. At Corte Nuova, November 27, 1237, the army of the League was cut to pieces, the carroccio of Milan captured, and ten thousand men killed or taken prisoners. The Emperor was exultant. Pier della Vigna, who shared his master's taste for Sicilian rhetoric, pub- lished the news abroad : " Let the might of the Eo- man Empire be lifted up, let the whole world rejoice at the victory of the great King. Let the rebel Lom- bard League blush for shame, let the insurgent mad- ness be confounded, let all our enemies tremble before this great slaughter. More than all others let hapless Milan groan and grieve, let her shed bitter tears at the heaps of her slain, at the number of her captive citizens. Let her now learn obedience to the lord of the world; for at last God, the just judge, has looked down upon the rights of the Empire, and has overthrown the pride of the Lombard rebels. In a single day woe-stricken Milan with her confeder- ates has lost the flower of her soldiers and her citi- zens, her carroccio and her podesta. Every man on our side killed or made prisoner whom he would. On that day Caesar showed himself more valiant than all his soldiers and with his own hand smote the casques of the enemy. Then the Germans dyed their swords in red blood; then the loyal knights of Apulia fought gloriously by the side of their king ; then the gallant men of Pavia revenged themselves on the soldiers of Milan ; then faithful Cremona with her allies sated their battle-axes in blood; then the Saracens emptied their quivers . . ." Indeed, it was a THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 263 great victory. The allies of the League melted away. Only Milan, Bologna, Piacenza, and Brescia stood firm ; and even Milan offered terms, but Frederick haughtily demanded unconditional surrender. Frederick's power was higher than ever before, and he gave free rein to ambition and revenge ; he intrigued again with his partisans in Rome, and married his son Enzio to Adelasia, the heiress of the northern half of Sardinia, and, although the Papacy claimed Sardinia as a papal province, dubbed him king. But the Emperor's success and his high-aspir- ing ambition roused his enemies to new efforts. Genoa and Venice made common cause with the League. The papal legate, Gregory of Montelungo, whose ecclesiastical powers were not diminished by his military rank as general of the allied army in Lombardy, solemnly excommunicated the Emperor. Both sides published their grievances to the princes of Europe. Frederick excused himself and inveighed against the Roman Curia. Gregory wrote: "There has arisen out of the sea a Beast full of the words o£ blasphemy," and repeated all his old charges against the Emperor. The rights and wrongs of the quarrel were dis- cussed from Sicily to Scotland ; wherever there was a cathedral or parish church, wherever there was a monastery, men took sides. If Frederick had been less of a Sicilian, if he had had more prudence or less bad temper, he might, by the sheer force of public opinion, which was beginning to turn in his favour, have forced the Church to abandon its un- christian enmity to him. But the defects of Fred- 264 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY crick's character told heavily against him, and now that his faithful friend Hermann von Salza was dead, he had no independent counsellors about him to ad- vise him honestly. Men like Pier della Vigna buttered their own bread by flattering him, Unguided, except by his own passion, the Emperor made two great mis- takes. The first was to march down through Peter's Patrimony and threaten Rome. He made no assault upon the city, either because he knew that he could not storm the Aurelian walls, or because he only meant to frighten the Pope ; but the memory of this menacing attitude was not without its influence on the conduct of Gregory's successor. The second mis- take was still more grave. The Roman Curia wished to consolidate the forces of the Church in the face of the enemy. They were well aware that their cause needed bolstering. Even in the Lateran Palace the Emperor had partisans ; Cardinal Colonna was justly suspected of being an Imperialist at heart. The spectacle of papal legates leading armies in the field, of friars swarming every- where, not to spread the gospel but to disseminate stories against Frederick, was not edifying; the mem- ory of St. Francis was still too fresh to permit such sights to go uncriticised. In England oppressive ec- clesiastical taxation was causing daily complaints. In France the nobles resented papal interference in what they deemed their national affairs; the young king, Louis IX, whose piety no man could question, was thoroughly out of sympathy with the papal pol- icy. In Italy discontent was not confined to the Ghibelline party ; even among the Franciscans there THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 265 •were friars of imperial leanings. Lampoons spread from mouth to mouth ; Pope, priests, and monks were jeered at and ridiculed. To support their cause and beat down opposition, the Papal Curia made their strongest move ; Gregory convoked an oecumenical council at Rome. The Church Universal would be able to throw a cloak of propriety over all the misbehaviour, true or false, that had been charged; and at Rome, in the halls and chambers of the Lateran Palace, at the source of ecclesiastical promotion, the assembled clergy could be counted on to confirm and ratify, or, if need be, to excuse all that the Curia and its adherents had done. The date was fixed for Easter, 1241. Fred- erick was no fool; he foresaw how greatly such a council could strengthen and give comfort to his enemies. It might confirm the ban of excommuni- cation laid on him by the legate ; it might even dare to talk of deposing him. So he forestalled the pro- ject. He gave notice that he could not permit the council to be held, and therefore would give no safe- conduct through his dominions. This was treading on dangerous ground ; the civil power had no right whatever to interfere with matters purely eccle- siastical, least of all to prevent the assembling of the Christian Church Universal, for that was tantamount to preventing Christendom from consulting the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the purpose of the council was primarily political, and had Fred- erick contented himself with stopping the clergy on their way to Rome and turning them back, he might well have kept public sympathy on his side. Unf or- 266 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY tunately for him, his temper got the better of his prudence. In spite of the Emperor's proclamation, the Ro- man Curia persisted. The clergy from Germany and Sicily were afraid to go, but some prelates from England and Spain, and many from France started, and as the route by land was barred by the Em- peror's soldiers, they went to Genoa to take ship there for Rome. Galleys of transport had been prepared, and Genoese vessels of war were ready to escort them. Meanwhile the imperial fleet had been ordered to hold itself in readiness, and lay off Pisa on the watch ; and when the Genoese ships sailed on their way to the mouth of the Tiber, it put out, intercepted them near the island of Monte Cristo, and won a complete victory. Twenty-five Genoese ships were taken or sunk, and four thousand men made pris- oners. The Spanish prelates escaped, but those from France and Lombardy were captured. Two cardi- nals, three archbishops, the abbots of Citeaux, Clairvaux, and Cluny, half a dozen bishops and scores of clergy of less note, were among the pris- oners. Their treatment was very severe, even cruel ; they were lodged in filthy prisons, they were given bad food, and subjected to all kinds of indignity. Frederick was exultant ; " God looks down from on high," he cried, " and gives His judgment." But he had gone too far. His ill-treatment of the pris- oners roused general indignation. Christendom felt that it was an outrage to punish innocent priests, whose only fault had been to obey their superior ; and the whole Church now took up the quarrel of THE NOBLES OF THE NORTH 267 the Pope with the Emperor as its quarrel. Poor old Gregory was broken-hearted. He wrote a noble and touching letter of sympathy to the prisoners, but he could do nothing to help them ; indeed, he him- self could not bear up under the blow; that summer he died in sorrow and apprehension. The bark of Peter was in stormy waters. The cardinals, reduced to a handful, had no leader and no policy. Frederick raided the countryside around Rome, and raged or affected to rage at their inaction. They elected a poor old man, a compromise candidate, who died in a week or two, and then they could not agree at all. After two years, frightened perhaps by the threats of Frederick, or by hints at schism from France, and by the universal complaints of a headless Church, they elected Cardinal Sinibaldo dei Fieschi, Innocent IV. The accession of a new pope offers a favourable point to break off the political thread and to turn for a little to other interests. CHAPTER XIX EARLY AET When earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest ; and, faith, we shall need it. Kipling. Politics have always flaunted themselves on the pages of history. The chroniclers, like children eager for tales of pirates and ogres, care for little else ; they take popes, kings, and other great person- ages at their own estimate, and pass by the rest of the world, its happiness, its sufferings, its endeavour to express itself, its pride of life, its strivings for better things, as star-gazers disregard the ant-hills at their feet. So, when we concern ourselves with early stirrings in the art of painting or of mosaic, we have almost nothing to guide us except ruined remains. Random wayfarers strolling through the thirteenth century are apt to think that in these matters the chroniclers are right ; but on our more methodical pilgrimage we must assume, upon one ground or another, a justification for loitering and looking a few minutes at the poor remains. Early Italian art has for its admirers the charm of the first crocuses in spring ; and for such admir- ers all feeble beginnings are interesting. As others might read anecdotes about the infancy of famous men, how the dimpled and cooing Napoleon toddled EARLY ART 269 from his mother to his nurse and back again, so they look at the primitive pictures — despitef uUy treated by time, by careless generations and painstaking re- storers — which still linger on the walls and ceilings of old Italian churches. They are right. The poor remains are well worth the descent into the crypt, the halting conversation with the sacristan, and the sad sense of old mortality laid upon us, for they show how painters struggled, often apparently against great odds, with the difficulties of representing the third dimension by means of line and colour, and with all the elementary problems of draughtsmanship. This early art has a double aspect : in one it is old, formal, fixed ; in the other it is infantile, with all its lessons to be learned. It wears this double aspect because it has proceeded from a great past and advances forward to a great future; and its two aspects correspond to its two branches, mosaic and painting. Both these arts are branches of decorative art, but except for their common object of creating pictures, their purposes are so different that they must be regarded as quite distinct from one another. Mosaic presents images, not as likenesses of objects seen in nature, but as symbols of ideas. The Christ of the Roman mosaics, for instance, is not a picture of the Jesus of the New Testament, but a religious symbol of power and majesty. In this art defect of draughtsmanship (if it may be so called) is compara- tively venial, for the artist is first concerned with the ideas which he wishes to represent, and next with symbols as matters of decorative value, as pleas- ant or impressive arrangements of fcolour. On the 270 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY other hand, the chief purpose of the primitive paint- ers is to tell a story ; they narrate legends of saints to people who cannot read, and by a dramatic ap- peal to the eye seek to stir the dull sentiments of peasants more effectively than words could through the ear. Painters painted both in tempera and in fresco, but most of the Italian painting that has come down to us is in the latter, and I shall speak of painting, at least upon the walls of churches, as synonymous with fresco. ' The two arts, differing in purpose as much as in material, served different functions, and were differ- ently employed according to the will of the patron and the space to be decorated. The great patron was the Church ; and she was interested only in the- ological ideas and scenes from the Bible or from lives of saints. If a prelate wished to impress upon his people some moral tale, or if he had wall space at his command, he employed a painter; if he wished to arouse sentiments of awe and grandeur, or if he had the dome of a choir to decorate, he employed a mo- saist. Each art has its special virtue. The merits of mosaic are determined in great measure by its ma- terials ; the little cubes of niany-coloured glass ne- cessitate rigidity of form and impose conventional treatment, but they render possible a glorious splen- dour of colour, so that though little apt for the ex- pression of the artist's personality, they are admirable for solemn decoration. The concave half dome in the tribune of a basilica, being the roof that covers and protects the altar, is the very home and shrine of the mosaic art; it is no place for the artist's fancy. EARLY ART 271 but rather an airy pulpit to set forth the sacred dogmas of Christianity. And when mosaics are laid over all the walls and ceilings of a church, as in St. Mark's at Venice, their decorative beauty is unriv- alled, except by the " storied windows richly dight" of the Gothic cathedrals. On the other hand, fresco is the embodiment of liberty; the quick movements of the brush follow the momentary fancy of the painter, and the very need of putting on the colours before the plaster dries rouses him to his utmost grace, delicacy, and naturalness. As mosaic is primarily an ecclesiastical art, which abases the individual before authority and tradition, so fresco is primarily a personal art, and ennobles the individual to the height of full personal freedom. During the centuries that preceded the in- tellectual stirrings of the thirteenth century, the mosaic art was much the more important of the two, and has left beyond comparison the more interesting monuments. In fact, painting during those centuries was so poor and so much under the influence of mosaic that it was as much a matter of conventional decoration as the mosaic art itself, and very little superior as a story-telling art; so it will not be necessary to keep the two apart in the few words I have to say of their history prior to the thirteenth century. The great school of European art in the Middle Ages, the Christian art par excellence, is the Byzan- tine school. Compounded of qualities and influences, part Greek, part Oriental, this school took definite complexion in the time of Justinian (527-565). It 272 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY was not the product o£ a nation but of an empire. Various provinces, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, themselves affected by Persia, wove as it were their several contributory strands into one fabric ; and Constantinople, the imperial capital, once Byzan- tium, conferred her ancient name upon the com- posite whole. The name is just, for Constantinople was the great meeting-place for Eastern peoples, their commerce, their ideas, their arts. From the time of Justinian to the thirteenth century Constantinople was the most civilized city of the Christian world ; by her commerce, her situation, and her tradition she exerted great influence over Europe. Her pro- sperity was unstable ; she had her ups and downs. And Byzantine art, dependent upon political pro- sperity, had its corresponding seasons, fat and lean ; under Justinian it enjoyed one prosperous period and then underwent a long depression, till in the ninth century, inspired by the vigorous rule of the Macedonian dynasty, it rose to its second golden age. As every healthy art must do, this art exhibited dif- ferent traits in different countries, but everywhere it preserved a common character. During the Middle Ages, Byzantine art exercised its chief influence in Italy in those provinces that belonged to the Eastern Empire, and an important influence in other provinces ; but besides the Byzan- tine school there was also an indigenous school, of which the principal remains are in and near Kome. This Roman school was based on classical art, and followed in a halting and degenerate manner the models and traditions of ancient Rome. Naturally EARLY ART 273 it kept even pace with the course of Eoman civiliza- tion, and went down, down, in the dim centuries and mounted again in the twelfth. This school maintained a loyalty, stronger in will than in deed, to the antique, and on the whole bore itself in a more friendly manner than the Byzantine school towards individuality and liberty ; although, to tell the truth, the uninstructed observer finds little trace of individuality or liberty in either school. Outside of Rome, there were scattered about, in various places, local artists who painted according to local traditions ; perhaps they were employed because there was no Byzantine artist to be had, or because the spot was remote from Byzantine influence, or from local pride, or maybe merely for convenience' sake. None of these local schools or traditions were of much consequence. Eome is the only place where art had a continous history from classic times ; and in Rome both Byzantine and native schools main- tained themselves side by side through the centuries. But while the Roman school persisted steadily, though feebly, the Byzantine school rose and fell according as it did or did not receive accessions of strength from Greece. For the most part the influence of Byzantine art in Italy was in close dependence on Byzantine dominion and Byzantine trade. Prior to the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, southern Italy was a province of the Eastern Empire ; and after political dominion had ended, trade continued to maintain close relations between Constantinople and the coast cities of Italy and Sicily. In consequence of politi- 274 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY cal and commercial relations Byzantine art reigned supreme at Ravenna, Venice, Palermo, and Cefalii; and from those cities its influence spread roundabout. Even inland towns accepted it; for instance, the mosaics in the tribune of Sant' Ambrogio at Milan are Byzantine. Ecclesiastical bonds also united Greece and southern Italy ; in Apulia and Calabria many Greek monks and many of the country-folk practised Greek rites, and in decorating their hermitages, ora- tories, and churches, remained true to Byzantine art. This art, as it appears in Italy, was essentially a religious art, and under the control of the clergy. Religion, that is, the religion of public worship, was ecclesiastical and formal ; dogmas, ritual, liturgy were definitely formulated ; and art, following religion was stiff, monotonous, symbolic. Artists abandoned the noble attitudes and large simplicity of antiquity ; they made their figures rigid, absurdly long, insip- idly symmetrical; they surcharged drapery with ori- ental luxury and ornament. All attempts to turn towards nature were overcome by the weight of au- thority. The Church sanctioned definite ways of re- presenting sacred personages and scenes ; and artists did as they were bidden. Religious pictures became more and more sacred from familiarity. Tradition dominated the ateliers. Christ, the Virgin, saints, elders, the great biblical and legendary episodes, be- came stereotyped, each new picture was a copy of the last. In this way individuality was sacrificed, and art inevitably degenerated; nevertheless it would be highly unjust to think that Byzantine art cast a EARLY ART 275 blight. On the contrary, remote as it appears from nature, indifferent as it appears to life, it came as a beneficent stimulant to Roman art. It had its own grand manner, its own monumental character, and has left works of art in Italy, that nothing produced by the native art of Italy during those centuries can pretend to rival. Byzantine art came to the sea-coast towns by rea- son of political or commercial relations, but to Rome through a variety of shifting channels. In early times its influence was transmitted by Ravenna, a half oriental city; at a later period by a long succession of Greek and Syrian popes ; and, afterwards, by im- migrant bands of Greek monks or Greek artists, who fled before the iconoclastic uprising in the Eastern Empire. Works of Eastern art — carvings in ivory, vessels of gold and silver, miniatures painted in missals — made many proselytes. But of the various means by which Byzantine influence made its way to Rome, one deserves special mention. High on a hill, midway between Rome and Naples, stands the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Here, among other crafts, painting took a firm foot- hold. Benedictine monks acquired a local reputation for their pictorial skill. At first, perhaps in conse- quence of the close ecclesiastical relations between the Order and Rome, their art was more akin to Ro- man art than to the Byzantine ; but in the year 1066 Abbot Desiderius, afterwards Pope Victor III, who had rebuilt the abbey and wished to decorate it in a manner worthy of the greatness of the Order, sent to Constantinople to get Greek artists. He really had 276 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY no choice, for the art of mosaic had utterly died out in Rome two hundred years before. Greek artists came to Monte Cassino, and brought with them the Byzantine art of mosaic both in enamel and in marble, and taught it to Italian workmen. In this way a Benedictine school, part Byzantine, part Italian, was founded, which followed the manner of the Greeks in the selection of their materials and in their methods of applying those materials in mosaics both of en- amel and marble, but in design and composition in- clined to the classical Roman fashion. The records of these successive waves of Byzan- tine influence are still to be traced in the mosaics and paintings of Rome. In Sant' Agnese fuori le mura, in the catacombs, in Sancta Maria Antiqua (the church recently unearthed at the foot of the Pala- tine HUl), in San Saba, Santa Prassede, and in various famous Roman churches, down to the very end of the thirteenth century, we find the impress of the Byzantine style. On the other hand, although the classic Roman tradition grew very faint in the sixth century, although the art of mosaic perished utterly, the Roman school of fresco-painting maintained it- self throughout this long period ; nevertheless, to tell the truth, it produced little of consequence. In the lower church of San Clemente it lifts its languid head to tell a tale of miracles, but the interest in these frescoes is purely historical. In Italy, therefore, during the long centuries since the fall of the ancient world, there had been two schools, in one of which a set of rules and tra- ditions, derived directly from Greece and the East, EAELY AET 277 prevailed, and in the other a set of practices and traditions that traced their descent from the art of ancient Rome. But we must not imagine that the distinction between the two schools is readily per- ceived by the uninitiated ; even the critics disagree as to their boundary lines, and argue with great spirit over attitudes, dresses, ornaments, and technique, and draw boldly divergent inferences from damaged frescoes and mutilated mosaics. Such was the general condition of decorative art when the thirteenth century opens. The prospect of freedom, of personal expression, of a return to the antique, of learning from nature, seems dark in- deed. Roman art clings valiantly, but very feebly, to antique tradition, and accomplishes little ; while Byzantine art blazes in formal splendour at Venice and Palermo. Yet the hope of the future lies in Rome. CHAPTER XX PAINTING AND MOSAIC (1200-1250) Rome disappoints me much ; I hardly as yet understand, but Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it. A. H. Glough. With the accession of Innocent III the Papacy was approaching its highest point of power and glory. Innocent's purpose was to turn Rome from an independent commune into a papal city; both as sovereign and as bishop he cherished an ambition to make the ecclesiastical capital worthy of its position as head of the Christian world, and so he began by adorning the two great basilicas that commemorated the two great fathers of Christian Rome. He deco- rated the tribune of St. Peter's with mosaics, and appropriated a large sum for the decoration of St. Paul's without the walls. The old basilica of St. Peter's was entirely pulled down in the sixteenth century to make way for the great Renaissance basilica, and its mosaics are gone; but those set in the tribune of St. Paul's out- side the walls, though they have been subject to many catastrophies, still remain in place. Innocent was too busy with the political afEairs of Christendom to do much more than make a beginning; but his successor, Honorius III, following in Innocent's mighty footsteps as best he could, continued the PAINTING AND MOSAIC 279 •work of embellishing the ecclesiastical capital. Ho- norius was confronted by the same difficulty that confronted Abbot Desiderius at Monte Cassino in 1066; there were no competent Roman mosaists. Honorius could not turn to Constantinople, because the recent capture and sack of the city by the cru- saders had dealt a ruinous blow to the artists gathered there; but Venice, the ungrateful daugh- ter and triumphant rival of Constantinople, had availed herself of the conquest to lay hands on artis- tic spoils, and had gathered together a community of Greek artists and artisans round the church of St. Mark's. Honorius therefore applied to Venice for Greek masters in mosaic. His letter to the Doge is still preserved : — "January 23, 1218. "Thanking your Nobility for the master whom you sent us to do the mosaics in the Church of St. Paul's we ask your Devout Signory, — since the work is of such great magnitude that it could not be completed by him within a long space of time, — to take measures to send to us two other men skilled in the same art; we shall be most indebted to you for your liberality and you will gain the most desirable protection of the glorious Apostle." Probably Innocent had had to make a similar re- quest for workmen to execute the mosaics in the basilica of St. Peter's ; since, had there been Roman workmen competent for so important a work, there would surely have been artists left sufficiently trained to do the mosaics in St. Paul's. The picture in the 280 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, tribune of St. Paul's is an old subject. Christ sits enthroned in the centre with Peter and Paul, An- drew and Luke to right and left ; and underneath these great figures is a row of apostles, angels, and evangelists. The mosaics are skilfully put together and speak well for the workmanship of the Venetian school, but the figures are not attractive, and the whole work is Byzantine in the unflattering sense of the word. Except for these mosaics in St. Paul's, there is very little pictorial art in Kome in this half-century. Honorius built the new nave to the church of San Lorenzo, and decorated it both with frescoes and mosaics, but time and the restorer have left little of thirteenth-century art. The only other pictures of the first half of the century at Rome are in the chapel of San Silvestro, just outside the deserted church of the Quattro Coronati. They are frescoes that represent the story of St. Silvester and the Emperor Constantine, and also the familiar scene of Christ enthroned between the Virgin and St. John the Baptist ; but they tell more plainly still the story of neglect and disrepute into which the painter's art had fallen during the struggles between the Papacy and Frederick II. They are awkward and feeble in the unpleasing Byzantine manner ; in fact they are no better than the paintings in San Clemente's lower church, two or three hundred years earlier, which if boyish have at least some elements of independ- ence and freedom. Indeed, the survey of pictorial art in Rome in this first half-century is depressing. It is necessary to go about twenty-five miles east- PAINTING AND MOSAIC 281 •ward, up in the outlying ranges of the Apennines, to catch a first faint tinge of dawn. Here, near the town of Subiaco, the brawling Anio runs fast between high melancholy hills on its way towards the Tiber. The steep slopes, the outlines of successive mountains, rising in higher ranges, the stern moulding of the land, the noble gloom of the scene, awaken thoughts that wander far from daily cares and trivial happenings; and when the flowers of spring carpet the hills, when white clouds drift across the bright blue sky and sunshine flickers on the glancing ilex leaves, the place is crowned with a large and happy serenity. The gay nymphs of the brawling river, the solemn spirits of the hills, and the merry elves of the spring, sing an inspiring cho- rus together. Here the Wordsworthian feels himself at home, and with a special inward rapture declaims his favourite passages. Long ago, poor, mad, poetic Nero felt the charm and went to sojourn there. Remains of his villa are still to be seen ; and the lake that he made by damming the river was still there in St. Francis's time. But the mad, pagan Emperor is but dimly remembered at Subiaco; the place owes its repute to the great Christian monk, St. Benedict, who sought in this solitude refuge from a corrupting world. Around his cave legends clustered; thither pilgrims went; there veneration grew; and on the sacred spot a monastery was built. In the course of centuries the old buildings fell to decay, or perhaps they were removed to make way for new buildings better fitted to honour the saint and to satisfy a newer taste. However that may be, 282 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY in the beginning of the thirteenth century the Bene- dictine Order, encouraged by its powerful friends, such as Cardinal Ugolino, built a series of chapels and churches about the cave. The rambling sanctuary seems to crawl up the steep hillside on hands and knees, pausing at differ- ent levels to set up altars and oratories. The chief parts built at this time are the chapel of St. Greg- ory and the lower church. Of the earlier buildings nothing remains ; and since then many changes have taken place. In those days the path led up the hill and the entrance was from below; so that pilgrims made their way to the lower church by the holy stairs and through St. Gregory's chapel. The archi- tecture reveals the early Gothic influences that spread north from the Cistercian monasteries at Fos- sanova and Casamari ; whereas the upper church, which was built a hundred years afterwards, shows that influence triumphant. In St, Gregory's chapel are the paintings that in- terest us. There are a number painted about 1227 and 1228, soon after the chapel was completed ; some are in the chapel itself, others in the atrium that leads to it, and others still painted on the wall at the entrance to the holy stairs. Of these paintings two are of especial importance because they are por- traits of two great historical personages, St. Francis and Cardinal Ugolino, afterwards Pope Gregory IX. The portrait of St. Francis is probably the oldest likeness of the saint that there is ; it has neither the stigmata nor the aureole, therefore it was painted almost certainly before he was canonized in 1228. PAINTING AND MOSAIC 283 The face has something in common with the tradi- tional type of masculine face, as formulated by the Byzantine school and accepted by the Roman paint- ers, but there are also signs in it of an efEort to de- pict a living man. The seriousness of the face may be merely reminiscent of the solemn saints in By- zantine mosaics; but it befits what we imagine to have been the expression of Francis's features. Pro- bably the painter thought it quite as important to preserve the traditional type, the way a man ought to look, as to present a picture of the way he actu- ally looked. Francis stands erect in his frock, cowl on head, and girded with his knotted cord. He holds his right hand across his body with a sort of ex- planatory gesture; and in his left hand he has a scroll with his habitual greeting — "Pax huic domo." The face is formal, the eyes are large, the nose is long and thin, the ears are conspicuous and very ugly, lips narrow; a slight beard fringes his chin and a scanty moustache shades his mouth. It cannot have been painted from life ; probably in those days nobody expected to sit for a painter. A portrait was a symbol, to indicate a man's rank and calling, and his special title to be painted, and was not supposed to counterfeit his personal peculiarities or the idio- syncrasies of his features. This picture, however, indicates the awakening of the idea of copying na- ture, and furnishes the little ray of light that shines with an undeserved lustre in that dim world of art. As a portrait it has some points in common with the portrait at San Francesco a Ripa in Rome, or that in the church of San Francesco at Pescia, painted 284 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY by Bonaventura Berlingheri in 1235. An odd fact about these three portraits is that the beard is fair, whereas the biographer, Thomas of Celano, says that Francis's beard was black. This awakening to nature, hinted at by the Subi- aco portrait of St. Francis, is a tribute to the saint and to the sensitiveness of the painter. He must have seen Francis and he must have known that he was not like other holy men. Francis could not be represented by a symbolic image ; frock, cowl, and cord were enough to mark another monk, but not him. Francis was felt to be a man apart, and por- traiture only could fairly represent him. There is nothing of the sort in the case of the portrait of Cardinal Ugolino ; and yet Ugolino was a very emi- nent personage, raised to a position second only to the Pope by kinship, character, and services. In paint- ing him the artist made no attempt to delineate nature ; he contented himself with the traditional re- presentation of a great prelate. Ugolino is painted in the act of bending forward to consecrate the chapel. His big eyes, hawk nose, fringing beard, formal moustache, and well-defined ears repeat the features of eminent prelates both in mosaic and fresco. He is the ecclesiastical type, and much less eminent per- sons dutifully look very much like him; for instance, the attendant who stands next to Ugolino and holds his crozier, might be his younger brother. And yet it is commonly believed that the two portraits, St. Francis and Ugolino, were painted by the same hand. South of Subiaco, a dozen miles across the moun- tains as the crow flies, on the summit of one of the PAINTING AND MOSAIC 285 outlying hills of the Sabine range, stands the little town of Anagni ; a fief of the great House of Conti to which Innocentlll, Gregory IX, and Alexander IV belonged. To the south the ViaLatina passes through the plain on its way from Rome to Monte Cassino and Capua. Within a girdle of massive walls the lit- tle city lies along the summit of the hill ; and on the very ridge the main street winds its way between two serried files of palaces and houses from the west gate of Ceres to Porta Santa Maria at the east. On the height, some one hundred and fifty yards from the Porta Santa Maria, stands the cathedral. This stern, gray, Romanesque building, — half church, half fortress, — which is arrogantly indifferent to the gentler aspects of ecclesiastical architecture, and plainly asserts that its bishop shall be more a soldier than a priest, has even to-day a rude, impe- rious dignity of its own. Hard by the church was the palace, now no more. The town was very strong, and therefore a favourite place of refuge for the Popes when threatened by the Hohenstaufens or by the citizens of Rome. Very famous scenes had been en- acted in the cathedral; here Alexander III excom- municated Frederick Barbar ossa, and here Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick II and began the great strife that ended at last with the destruction of the Hohenstaufens. Here also a still more famous scene was destined to take place, when the lay spirit, in its hatred against ecclesiastical domination, took a bitter revenge on Boniface VIII. The crypt of the cathedral is honoured by the bones of St. Magnus, which were brought there 286 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY from the neiglibouring town -where the saint had suffered a glorious martyrdom. As the church stands on a sharp slope, the crypt is high and makes almost a second church. The walls and ceilings of the crypt are covered with frescoes. These frescoes represent figures of saints, of Hippocrates and Galen, episodes from the Old Testament, from Revelation, and the story of the translations of the body of St. Magnus. Here, as well as at Subiaco, the critics see two paint- ers and more, as there well may have been, for the crypt is large and the paintings are unequal. One of these painters gets the personality assigned him by the critics from the frescoes that depict the transla- tions of the body of St. Magnus. This painter evi- dently had great respect for Byzantine traditions, and felt that there was something sacred in conventional rigidity; perhaps he learned his art in some of the Benedictine ateliers. The second, to whom are as- cribed the figures of the saints, resembles in various matters of style one of the artists who painted at Su- biaco, and shows the freer hand of the Roman school. Criticism of this hind comes from Italians chiefly and has a patriotic bias ; it ascribes to Byzantine art a rigid, monotonous manner, and to Roman art what- ever is in a freer, bolder, more independent style, and then assigns the painter to this school or that, according as he inclines one way or the other. The optimistic pilgrim, who is cheered by any touches of freedom, whether or not they are properly attributed to the native art of Italy rather than to the Byzan- tine tradition, feels vaguely that these dim, dull, smoked, restored frescoes in the crypt at Anagni, PAINTING AND MOSAIC 287 are the best of their day, that in them are signs of a coming change, encouraging indications that an old chrysalis is falling away from a living spirit within. The old nurse Tradition, and the headstrong child, Genius, must quarrel sooner or later; but in the earliest years the one lovingly tends the other, and there is no need to take sides or painfully distin- guish whether the nurse has or has not guided the baby fingers here or there. Necessarily ItaUan art was encumbered by the great Greek tradition that had flowed down steadily, if, indeed, in a sadly dimin- ished stream, from the greatest of all periods of art ; and, necessarily, as Italy grew in wealth and civiliza- tion while Constantinople waned, native artists be- gan to assert their individuality, their Italian way of seeing things and of depicting them. The two systems jostled one another, as old tradition and young life do. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together, and youth is fated to triumph. Whether or not the critics can assign these frescoes to the old Greek school or to the younger Eoman school, Eoman art was still, as it always had been, the pupil of the elder. It was altogether fitting that the infant genius of Italian art should exhibit its first signs of awakening life in the reign of the great Innocent. The causes of the birth of genius are always obscure ; but here at least we know that the cradle for the divine in- fant was prepared by the Roman Curia. Innocent led the way in St. Peter's and St. Paul's; Gregory IX, as patron, encouraged by his sympathy, and doubt- less with his purse, the work at Subiaco ; and 288 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY ' either he or some member of the House of Conti must have given the necessary impulse for the de- coration in the crypt of the cathedral at Anagni. Thus we get the first clear view of the fact, which stands out so brilliantly at the end of the cen- tury, that under a normal development Italian art would have borne its brightest blossoms and its fair- est fruit, during all its growth, in Roman territory , under the patronage of the Popes. The great ba- silicas, doubly sacred now that Jerusalem was lost to Christendom, the monasteries in and around the city from Anagni and Subiaco to Assisi, offered endless opportunities for the decorative arts; and artists would have been drawn to Rome, as the centre, from all Italy. But politics, always reckless of civil- ization, wars with the Hohenstaufens, quarrels with the Roman Commune, prevented the smooth progress of art. Nevertheless, throughout the century and until the fatal exile of the Papacy to Avignon, ec- clesiastical Rome is the real staff and stay of young Italian art. CHAPTER XXI THE DECORATIVE ARTS (1200-1250) Tout pasae. — L'art robuste Seul a I'^ternit^, Le busts SuTvit k la cit^, Et la m^daille austere Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre R^T^e un empeieur. THioPHiLE Gautieb. Other arts in the first half of our century were at very much the same stage as painting ; if they appear to have succeeded better, it is because the tasks they attempted were simpler and demanded less skill. They, too, depended upon the great patron, the ecclesiastical order, and shared its fortunes. In most little towns, where a cathedral or an im- portant church was building, there were artisans, — artists perhaps I should say, — either in the town itself or in the neighbourhood, capable of building and of decorating in a simple fashion. In one town there would be a guild, in another a family, devoted to the decorative art; but as the demand for such work was far greater in Rome than elsewhere, so in Rome we find far the most famous school of decor- ators. These Roman artists, who proudly added to their names the title " Magister et civis Romanus," worked not only in Rome, but also in the towns 290 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY near Rome. Sometimes they were architects and built porches, cloisters, or the ornamental fronts of churches ; at other times they were decorators in marble or glass, and designed pulpits, reading- desks, episcopal thrones, Easter candlesticks, tombs, and pavements. The purely ecclesiastical character of their work shows how large a space the Church occupied in social life. The Church was straining to give an ecclesiastical cast to all society ; she sought to gather to herself in the domain of art the young ambitions and activi- ties then afoot, just as she sought to gain complete control over education, and just as, more obviously, she was striving to lay hold on political power. The process was the result of an unconscious purpose, such as pushes great organisms on their paths ; and essential parts of the process were to centralize power in the Papacy and make Rome a great ecclesiastical capital. With an imagination worthy of old Rome, the Papacy trusted in a time ahead when society should become theocratic, and Rome be not merely the ecclesiastical capital but also the political capital of the world. Among the immediate obstacles to this grandiose scheme were the feudal nobility and the Commune of Rome. The nobles of Rome and of the country round, headed by the Anibaldi, Frangipani, Orsini, Colonna, Savelli, Conti and others, fiercely asserted their feudal rights and fortified themselves within their castles. In the city itself, dotted about within the wide circuit of the Aurelian walls, in among vineyards, market gardens, cattle paddocks, and rubbish, the ruined THE DECORATIVE ARTS 291 monuments of the ancient city had been transformed into fortresses. The Colosseum, the triumphal arches, the palaces of the Caesars, were the keeps and donjons of rude barons who scarcely knew the majestical origin of their strongholds. More intract- able still than the nobles, was the Commune. Like the cities of the north, the Commune of Rome, in- toxicated by its ancient glory, asserted its independ- ence and claimed to treat on even terms with Pope and Emperor; and yet it was forced again and again to realize that its prosperity depended on the Papacy, so that though it chased out the popes repeatedly and refused to acknowledge their authority, it repeat- edly begged them to come back. An Innocent III might enforce his dominion and wield the right to appoint the Roman senators ; but lesser popes were glad to escape to Anagni, Viterbo or Perugia, and dwell among more obedient people. To meet these adversaries and convert turbulent Rome into a religious capital, the Papacy had not merely to establish a political party in the city, but also to create an ecclesiastical atmosphere — a custom of deference to priests, a habit of mind that associated prosperity with the coming of pilgrims and the dominion of the Church. One appropriate means was to strengthen the city churches. They were the ecclesiastical strongholds that should out-face the castles of the nobles and the Palace of the Senators on the Capitol. Preeminent among the Roman churches were the great basilicas, dedicated to St. Peter and to St. Paul; hardly second to these were St. John Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and in 292 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUKY solemn succession of dignity followed San Lorenzo, San Clemente, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, San Giorgio in Velabro, San Giovanni e Paolo, San Gregorio Magno, Santi Quattro Coronati, Santa Croce in Ge- rusalemme, and their fellows. The way to strengthen these churches was to make them rich and beautiful. Art (so the Curia determined) should be the hand- maid of theocracy. This connection of the decorat- ive arts with the great ecclesiastical movement of the pontificate of Innocent III bespeaks our atten- tion for these arts, as much as do the arts them- selves. Of all this ecclesiastical decorative work, the pave- ments are the most familiar. Every traveller knows the marble pavements in the great Roman churches, the formal geometrical patterns, the round disks of red and green marbles, the curves and rectangles of mosaic. This fashion for pavements spread over Rome in the twelfth century. At that time, for one reason and another, there was a great deal of re- building or repairing, and many of the noted churches adopted what is essentially the same pattern in their marble decoration. A possible excuse for this monotony is that their marble quarries de- termined the shapes of the materials; the walls and floors of antique temples furnished slabs of rect- angular shapes, and a column sawed across yielded disks of the same diameter. Yet excuses are idle; the fact was that the artists lacked all inventiveness. Each generation adopted the design taught in the ateliers; the craftsmen who paved one basilica copied the pavement in another. But in those days THE DECORATIVE ARTS 293 current notions on art were very different from what they are now. To-day we cry out for new things and our main fault-finding charges lack of origin- ality; then the opposite was true, the cultivated public demanded obedience to authority. In reading-desks, as in the pavements, there is monotony of form and ornament. The model which descends from the old rostrum came by way of Con- stantinople ; it was adopted in Campania, and from there was carried north to Rome in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There are a goodly number of these reading-desks in the old Roman churches. The practice was to set the ambone for the gospel on the south side of the nave, in order, as Innocent III says, that the reader shall speak towards the north against Lucifer, who said " he would sit in the sides of the north " (Is. xiv, 13). This was the more stately of the two, and was approached by two sets of steps and flanked by the paschal candle. The ambone in- tended for the epistle was placed across the nave opposite to it, on the north side. The most notable of all these reading-desks is that for the gospel in San Lorenzo. It was probably put there somewhere about 1249, in late execution of Honorius's plan for adorning the church. This reading-desk is about eleven or twelve feet long, and originally had, ac- cording to custom, two little stairways, one approach- ing the standing-place from one end, the other from the other. The front and the back are covered with marble panels of divers colours, ranged in formal pattern. Slabs of porphyry and verde antico alter- nate in squares and rounds j and in the spaces between 294 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY these squares and rounds and along the borders run fantastic patterns in red, white, gold, and black. As usual an eagle, with wings half spread, forms the support for the holy book. It is handsome, but it follows the earlier models, such as the pulpit in San Clemente or Santa Maria in Cosmedin, with obse- quious fidelity. The canopies over the high altars display the same conventionality and conservatism. These, however, are of old Boman origin. They are little ornamental roofs, held up by four pillars and surmounted by pretty rows of pigmy columns ; and on top is an oc- tagonal dome, with a little lantern to crown it. This canopy is neither very solemn nor very noble, but it is light and graceful, and on its miniature scale has a charm comparable to that of Tuscan Romanesque architecture. The one point in which Roman craftsmen of our century ventured to diverge from the practice of their predecessors was in the use of glass mosaics. The twelfth century decorators contented themselves with porphyry, serpentine, and other marbles of vari- ous colours ; but as the ecclesiastical power became consolidated under Innocent III and felt the invig- orating influence of the new mendicant orders, it demanded more luxury and ostentation. In order to meet this demand the Roman artisans adopted a gay mosaic embroidery compounded of enamel, gold, and many-coloured glass. The art of glass mosaics, lost in Rome during the dark ages, had been learned again from the monks at Monte Cassino, and from the artists of Sicily, where it had long been in familiar Andereon, phot. SAN LORENZO Rome THE DECOKATIVE ARTS 295 use or from the master mosaists of Venice ; yet, loyal to the great classic past, the Roman artisans, like the painters of the Roman school, got their ideas of decoration chiefly from classical remains. Of greater consequence than ecclesiastical furni- ture is the decorative architecture of this period. Here as elsewhere fashion required imitation of what had been done before. For instance, at San Giorgio in Velabro, the front porch, resting on Ionic columns, followed an earlier model; and in its turn determined the porch of San Lorenzo. More interesting than the church porches are the monastic cloisters. The little square garden of the monastery, shut in by dormitory, refectory, and church, was bordered by a covered walk. A colonnade held up the roof ; carv- ing or mosaic enriched the entablature. Within the enclosure, grass, trees, shrubs, creepers, flowers, and singing-birds made the seclusion fresh and agree- able. Here the brethren walked and talked about the prophecies of Abbot Joachim, or discussed politics and the affairs of the great world ; and here (after the church itself was filled with graves or reserved for abbots and the departed great), beneath the pave- ment, on the side next the church, that they might be gathered under its wing even in death, their bodies were buried. Roman artisans grouped themselves in ateliers and workshops ; and their craft, like other crafts, usually descended from father to son. There are traces of various families that devoted themselves to decorative art; but one family is so much better known than the others that it has given a name to 296 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the whole school, not its family name, for artisans commonly had none, but the Christian name of that member of the family most prominently mentioned in the inscriptions which have come down to us. His name was Cosmas, or, in Latin, Cosmatus, which is the equivalent of the Tuscan Cosimo. From him the whole school of Roman decorators has been called the Cosmati. The genealogy of this family, though not free from doubt, for some critics think that there were two families, is usually given as follows : — Lawrence James the Elder I Cosmas I I I . I I Luke James, Junior Adeodato John The founder of the family, Lawrence, belongs to the twelfth century and merely appears across the threshold of the thirteenth. He, his son James, and his grandson Cosmas, all worked as architects at Civita Castellana, a little town to the north of Mount Soracte. The two younger men finished their labours there in 1210; and about the same time they were at work in Rome, where they designed decorative bits of architecture, such as the ornamental doorway for the Society for the Liberation of Christian Slaves, that still stands hard by San Tommaso in Formis. Lawrence and James also made the reading-desk for the gospel and probably that for the epistle in the church of Aracoeli. These desks (much altered now) follow the familiar Roman model, both in form and THE DECOEATIVE AETS 297 decoration, except that here, perhaps for the first time in Rome, glass mosaics are used for ornament. By this time the family stood in such high repute that when the Benedictine monks of Santa Scolas- tica at Subiaco were rebuilding their monastery about the year 1235, they employed several of its members. The. monastery of Sacro Speco, a little higher up on the steep ravine above the river Anio, had been recently rebuilt and decorated with frescoes of popes and saints ; and the pious brethren of Santa Scolastica wished to possess a cloister which should enable them, in one respect at least, to outdo their neighbours. James the Elder designed one side of the new cloister, and after his death Cosmas, with his sons, Luke and James, Junior, completed the work. There is no special merit to distinguish this cloister from others; except that there is a touch of classic feeling in the design and decoration, which testifies to the strength of the classic tradition among Roman craftsmen, and confers an artistic justification to their title, " Gives Romani." At Anagni, too, when the bishop undertook to render the crypt of his cathedral worthy of its holy relics, some ten or maybe twenty years before the nameless painters were at work there painting the frescoes of St. Mag- nus and others, Cosmas and his same two sons were employed to lay the pavement. They followed the usual Roman ecclesiastical pattern both in the crypt and in the upper church. Another family, the Vassalletti, though less well known than the Cosmati, was more richly endowed with genius. Inscriptions that bear the family name 298 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY extend over a hundred years ; it is therefore reason- able to infer that members of the family were decora- tive artists for at least three generations. The most famous work of the Vassalletti is the cloister of St. John Lateran, built mainly during the pontificate of Honoriiis III. Both in architecture and in decora- tion this cloister is a masterpiece : the delicate, grace- ful columns, the arches that follow one another like the melodious notes of a happy song, the well-pro- portioned entablature, the profusion of mosaic, the fanciful and charming decoration, the skilful carving, and the bewitching variety which seems to shift from hour to hour as sun and shade play upon the cloistered walks, unite to make it the chief glory of this Roman school and one of the loveliest spots in Italy. These exquisite Lateran cloisters mark the high- est accomplishment of art during the first half of our century ; and though there is nothing organic- ally new in them, by their lightness, their grace, and decoration, they constitute not merely a continuation of certain principles of classic tradition, but also a revival of art in Rome, a dawn, which but for un- toward circumstances would have broken into a glo- rious day some threescore years or more before it actually did so. It seems likely that two Vassalletti, father and son, had worked upon the cloister of St. Paul's, which was built a little earlier than that of St. John Late- ran's, and there had learned their art, disciplined their faculties, and perfected their taste ; and it is also likely that they were the artists employed by The Vaesalletti Alinari, pliot. CLOISTER OF ST. JOHN LATEEAN Rome THE DECORATIVE ARTS 299 Honorius III to erect the new portico in front of San Lorenzo and to make the rich panelling, that •was once part of the chancel screen and is now set against the wall on either side of the episcopal chair. These brilliant artists had their atelier and assist- ants, and sometimes a poor bit of work was turned out like the little tabernacle in the church of St. Francis at Viterbo; but there must have been a number of excellent workmen, trained and refined by the work on the Lateran cloister, who would have carried on the admirable traditions of the atelier, had it not been for the evil fate that befell Rome. The Lateran cloister was finished about 1235 ; then came the long series of untoward circumstances, the atelier broke up, its artisans were dispersed. Nothing further bears the name Vassallettus except a paschal candle in the cathedral of Anagni carved in 1262. These men and their fellows are less interesting to us, perhaps, for what they actually did than for their relations to the larger movements that encircle them. In one aspect they are soldiers of the Roman- esque cause, diligently at work, digging trenches and throwing up redoubts as it were, to defend Italy from the mighty Barbarian style of the North that was threatening invasion. They had little chance to display their talents in architecture, for there were more churches than enough in Rome already and few other buildings were erfected there, but in what they did, like the builders of the town halls in the communes of Lombardy, they upheld the cause of reason and moderation. In ecclesiastical furniture, 300 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY they did not make pulpits, canopies, and chairs like the gables o£ a cathedral; they followed precedents, and preserved touches of Eastern colour, of Arabian fancy, elements of the better influences that had come from Constantinople as well as traditions of ancient Rome. If their art had been able to open and expand in the orderly sequence of favouring seasons, if it had proceeded unvexed until the moment was reached when Italy, ripe in wealth, in technical know- ledge, in love of antiquity, could produce what we call the art of the Renaissance, with its architecture, its painting, its sculpture, its schools of decoration, then Cosmatus and Vassallettus would have been household words, and Rome an even greater treasure- house of beauty than she is. At the beginning of the century such a prospect was within the bounds of reasonable expectation. The popes had adopted a policy that called for the generous employment of artists and artisans, and Roman art quickened under the stimulus. An artis- tic atmosphere was forming ; artists were becoming men of consideration ; there was an exciting sense that art was rapidly advancing, that Rome was to exhibit once more the magnificence of the Caesars. With such a stimulating masterpiece as the cloister of St. John Lateran before their eyes, Roman crafts- men would soon have thrown off their timid habits of imitation, and then, going for schooling to an- tique remains, would have anticipated the general liberation of the arts that came at the end of the century. But the strife between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufens stopped short this movement. Wars, THE DECOEATIVE AETS 301 rumours o£ wars, the general disturbance of society, produced their disastrous effect. All Italy suffered, but Rome suffered most. Papal patronage, such as was given by Innocent III and his immediate suc- cessors, came to an abrupt end. Innocent IV was forced to live in exile; Alexander IV was shut out of Rome by a Ghibelline podesta; and the French pontiffs, Urban and Clement, were indifferent to the policy of making Rome beautiful. Not till the end of the century did Roman art lift up its drooping head. Then — Quali i fioretti dal notturno gelo chinati e chiusi, poi che il sol gl' imbianca, si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo, -r- under the fostering hand of Roman-born pontiffs, the flowers of art began to spread their fair corollas in the sunshine of prosperity. RigoUtto. CHAPTER XXII INNOCENT IV (1243-1245) Si, vendetta, tremenda vendetta Di quest' anima h solo dbio, Di punirti gi^ 1' ora a' afEretta Che fatale per te tuouer^. Yes, revenge, fearful revenge Of this soul is the only desire. Already to punish thee hastens the hour That shall fatally blast thee. As I have said, the wars between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufens cut short, almost as fatally as Atropos, the flowering of art ; and chief among the destructive spirits who shut their eyes, perhaps rightly, to all except the political issue and trod under foot religion as well as the arts, stands Inno- cent IV. The Fieschi were a noble family of Genoa and the country near, and, if one may judge from the career of its most illustrious member, more given to the pursuit of tangible advantages than of dreams divine. Indeed, the fall from the magnanimous am- bition of Innocent III to the fierce passions of Inno- cent IV, shows clearly how ill an effect this worldly strife was producing upon the Church. Innocent IV studied law at Bologna, and for a time was one of the canons of the cathedral at Parma under his uncle, the bishop. Going to Rome he held important offices during the pontificates of Honorius and Greg- ory, and won so brilliant a reputation as a canon INNOCENT IV 303 lawyer that he earned the sobriquet, " The Enlight- euer of the World." He had a high temper, but otherwise he was quite different from Gregory ; he had no piety, no love of religion, no sympathy for monks or mystics. He was a brave and haughty patrician, of crafty disposition and tenacious will. His personal morals were without fault. Although the Genoese were for the most part strongly adverse to the Emperor, Innocent had always been on good terms with him ; and Fred- erick was greatly pleased by the news of his election. He said of him : he is " one of the noblest men in the Empire, ... a man who in word and deed has always acted with kindness and courtesy towards me. I have great hopes of peace; I shall reverence him as a father, and he will embrace me as a son." He also wrote to congratulate Innocent upon his election, as an old friend whose new name was a happy augury. The causes of mutual distrust between the Church and the Empire were so deep that it was of little moment what a Pope's or an Emperor's sympathies were before election; afterwards, the two became unjust and hostile towards one another. Both Fred- erick and Innocent made a great parade of negoti- ating. Ambassadors went to and fro. One cannot help the suspicion that this diplomacy was so much jockeying for position. If peace had been the sole aim of each, the choice of ambassadors was, to say the least, singular ; for the Emperor sent to the Pope the admiral who had captured the poor prelates off Monte Christo on their way to the council at Eome, 304 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY and the Pope sent to the Emperor one of the very prelates who had been taken prisoners. Evidently there were reasons under the surface that induced them to make such choices. Each was playing a game; and the players were well matched. The Emperor proposed either to frighten the Pope into easy terms or to lay hands on him ; the Pope man- oeuvred to bring affairs to such a pass that he should be able to put the Emperor in an unfavourable light before the world. Frederick was quick-witted and his counsellors were astute, but they had an excessive confidence in their ability to overreach the Eoman Curia. This disposition to underrate the sagacity of the Curia was part of Frederick's general contempt for the priesthood, and it was not justified. The Curia was well able to play the game of politics. In the deeper matters that concerned the religious spirit of Europe, and through that spirit the ultimate prosperity of the Church, the Curia sometimes behaved itself in an ignorant or reckless way; but in the fence of superficial politics, in the thrust, the passado, the puncto reverso, it was an accomplished master. The wary antagonists circled about one another, each feeling the other's guard. There was talk of a meeting. Innocent went part-way to meet Frederick, but not beyond a day's ride from the coast, and dispatched an urgent prayer to his Genoese com- patriots to send a fleet to his rescue. To capture the Pope might have served Frederick's purpose; to make the world believe that Frederick wished to lay sacrilegious hands on the high priest of Christendom INNOCENT IV 305 would certainly serve Innocent's purpose. The Gen- oese fleet cast anchor within reach. Then Innocent made his lunge. He took horse by night and with a handful of men rode in hot haste across mountain and moor to the shore, got on board one of the Gen- oese ships, and sailed away. To make the insidious machinations of the Emperor look still more black, he hurried away from Italy across the Alps and took refuge in the city of Lyons, under the wing of France. The journey was severe, and on the way, Innocent nearly died. From this flight to the last day of his life, whether it was because he believed Frederick meant to seize him, whether he laid his proximity to death at Frederick's door, or whether he saw that the struggle was in its nature a outrance, Innocent hated Frederick with an implacable hatred, and, confounding the cause of the Church with his own thirst for revenge, made use of all her resources to bring about Frederick's ruin. Once safely lodged in Lyons the Pope returned to the plan that Frederick had frustrated, and summoned an oecumenical council. It was a critical period in the history of Europe ; for it was the first time that a council of the Church Universal had been convoked solely for a political purpose. Gregory IX was a good man, — even his adversaries admitted that he was " apostolicus, sanctus et bonus," — and in con- voking a council at Rome, though he wished to trans- act business of state rather than of religion, he had cherished the hope of making peace ; Innocent en- tertained no such idea, — he called the Church to- gether as a war measure in order to condemn his 306 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY enemy. The Council of Lyons is a summing-up of the consequences of the long rivalry between the Papacy and the Empire. Innocent's excuse for this misuse of his sacred office is that he really believed •without a momentary doubt that the Emperor enter- tained the purpose, and strove directly and indirectly, by force and by fraud, to overthrow the Papacy and the whole ecclesiastical fabric. The scene at Lyons was highly dramatic. The old quarters of the city lie in the plain, with the Rhone on one side and the Saone on the other; but St. John's quarter is on the right bank of the Saone between the river and the steep hill of the Fourviere. Here stood the new cathedral of St. John and a monastery, protected, together with the surrounding buildings, by a fortified wall. The whole quarter wore the grim and stern aspect of a fortress. The cathedral was not yet finished. The choir and the transepts, built be- fore the architecture of the Ile-de-France had im- posed its taste upon Burgundy, are Romanesque, the nave is Gothic. So the building shows the particular charm and grace that bursts into flower when Gothic and Romanesque meet and mingle. In the cathedral of Lyons they meet and kiss by the triumphal arch, so that this seems a sort of Golden Gate where two intimately sympathetic aspirations unite in a common purpose of worship. The nave, rising above the ceil- ing of the choir, nobly shows the triumph of the Gothic. The walls were then majestic in their bare- ness ; and the glorious glass of the windows gave a many-coloured splendour to the dark and solemn interior. It would be hard to imagine a spot better INNOCENT IV 307 adapted for the meeting-place of pure-hearted men bent upon holy things. On June 28, 1245, patriarchs, cardinals, arch- bishops, bishops, abbots, ambassadors fi-om kings, envoys from cities, Baldwin, the Emperor of Con- stantinople, and various nobles, gathered in the great church. Thaddeus of Suessa was present as proctor for the Emperor. Nevertheless, the meeting repre- sented the Church Universal in a lame and mutilated fashion ; there were few prelates from Germany, none from The Kingdom, for fear of Frederick, and none from the Holy Land, as there had not been time enough for them to come. The Pope said mass and mounted his throne ; Baldwin sat on his right hand. The choir sang Ve7ii Creator ; the Pope him- self preached the sermon, taking as his text : " Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by ? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the^ Lord hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger." He then enumerated the five wounds of Christ : the invasion of Europe by the Tartars, the Greek schism, the spread of heresy, the new hordes of heathen invad- ing the Holy Land, and for the climax, the wicked- ness of the Emperor. He described Frederick's wrongdoings point by point; he produced Fred- erick's letters to prove his charges, speaking with evident animosity. In fact. Innocent acted as prose- cuting attorney and made no pretence at all of ju- dicial impartiality. Thaddeus of Suessa spoke on behalf of his master; he denied or excused the various counts in the indictment, and asked for an 308 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY adjournment in order that Frederick might have an opportunity to attend and plead his own cause. " God forbid," cried the Pope ; " I fear his tricks ; if he comes, I shall go, I am neither ready nor fit for martyrdom." It is unlikely that the Emperor had any intention of attending, for he had already written to the cardinals that he had given his envoy full power to appeal from the unjust trial by the Pope, to God, to a future pope, or to a future council. The request for an adjournment was prob- ably made either to gain time, or else to get the advantage that would accrue from a refusal of the common right, which every accused man had, of appearing in person to defend himself. However, at the request of the ambassadors from the Kings of England and France, first one and then another brief adjournment was granted. Frederick did not come ; Thaddeus of Suessa conducted his defence. The Pope presented the case for the prosecution with great fulness. The evidence was marshalled to prove three distinct charges; first, that Frederick had violated his duty as a Christian and therefore deserved excommunication ; second, that as King of Sicily he had been false to his feudal allegiance to the Papacy; and, third, that as Emperor he had failed in his fundamental duties, such as pro- tecting the Church ; and for these causes deserved to be deprived of his royal and imperial crowns. Cer- tain witnesses testified against Frederick ; but, as Frederick's acts were notorious, the Pope chiefly confined himself to documentary evidence to prove the existence of those papal rights which Frederick INNOCENT IV 309 had infringed. He introduced letters and charters, written or granted by Frederick from the time of his imperial coronation, which related to the temporal domains of the Church ; letters and covenants written or sworn to by Frederick which related to The King- dom from a time before he went to Germany ; char- ters to the Church granted by former Emperors ; and various letters from the Kings, of England, France, Aragon, and Bohemia. ■ The proofs furnished were not a matter of great consequence ; the verdict of the Council was not to be determined by the weight or the relevancy of the evidence produced in court. There was a fact out- side the record of charters and grants that told fatally against the defendant. Everybody present was thinking of their unfortunate brethren who had set out to attend the council in Rome. Excepting the cardinals who had been released to attend this council, and the French prelates set free after eighteen months at the urgent insistence of King Louis, the captive clergy were still in prison ; some of them had died from privation and ill-treatment. Condem- nation was a foregone conclusion. Thaddeus's defence was shouted down ; he appealed to a future pope and a future council. Innocent pronounced sentence. He repeated the excommunication against Frederick, he released all his subjects from their allegiance, he proclaimed that those to whom the imperial election pertained should proceed to the election of an Em- peror, and that he and the cardinals would choose a successor for The Kingdom. Thaddeus cried out, " This day is a day of wrath, calamity, and misery " j 310 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY but the Pope was inflexible; he said, "My parti have done, let God bring his will in this matter to fulfilment " ; the clergy chanted, " We praise thee, Lord," and in tragic sign that hope was extin- guished quenched their torches on the floor. The sentence, which reverberated through Europe, raised three questions: Did the council have juris- diction? Did the evidence justify the verdict? Did the offences charged warrant the punishment im- posed? The ecclesiastical and the civil decrees stand on their several footings. As to the excom- munication the Church was fully in its right. An oecumenical council had plenary jurisdiction over the admission or exclusion of Christians from com- munion with the Church. It is true that all Christ- endom was not represented at the council ; but as to Germany and Sicily, Frederick was estopped from taking that objection, for his commands and menaces had kept the clergy of the Empire from attending ; and at any rate, the Pope had no need of a consent- ing council before imposing the ban. Jurisdiction to depose an Emperor was a different matter. The Popes had claimed such a right ever since the days of Hildebrand ; they asserted that it was incident to their office. It was undeniable that an Emperor-elect did not become Emperor until he had received his crown from the Pope ; on the other hand, the Popes certainly had no right to appoint an Emperor. The truth was that the relative rights of Pope and Emperor had never been settled ; their respective claims to power had none of the certainty that attaches to modern ideas of legal rights, and INNOCENT IV 311 there was nothing that could be called law to decide between them. The members of the council, how- ever, had full confidence in their own authority ; it seemed reasonable that there should be some power in Christendom to depose its elective head ; and it would seem that Frederick admitted their jurisdic- tion. He appealed to a future council; and in com- plaining of the sentence took technical objections that did not touch the competency of the tribunal. From an ecclesiastical point of view the offence de- served the punishment meted to it. The Emperor had not only failed in his duty to defend the Church, but he had even persecuted her ; he had prevented the meeting of the Church militant ; he had put in prison prelates whose only offence was that they at- tempted to obey the Pope's summons. Moreover, as an excommunicated man, and perhaps a misbeliever, he was not a fit person to be monarch of a Christian empire and secular head of Christendom. The deposition from the Empire was a grave mat- ter, but as events turned out, the deposition from The Kingdom was a still graver matter. Upon that part of the council's judgment turns the whole ques- tion of right or wrong in the destruction of the Hohenstaufens and in the coming of Charles of Anjou. And it has been so common for sympathy to range itself against the Church in these affairs that the matter deserves special consideration. The deposition from The Kingdom was a question of feudal law. The relation of lord and vassal existed between the Papacy and the King ; nobody disputed this. The Papacy was the lord suzerain of The King- 312 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY dom by universal consent. The whole world believed, as a definite historical fact, that the papal title orig- inated in the grant of Constantine to Pope Silvester ; but the origin of the title was immaterial, the Nor- man kings had acknowledged it, Frederick II him- self had most solemnly avowed it. The Pope was his lord, he was the Pope's vassal. By feudal law and feudal custom the obligations inherent in that rela- tion were clear and definite. Among the vassal's duties to his lord were these : to do him homage, to acknowledge his rights, to do him no wrong, and to pay the tribute that had been fixed. On the vassal's fidelity depended his title to his fief. If he turned heretic or if he turned traitor, his fief was forfeit. These rules were well settled wherever the feudal system prevailed. Count Raymond of Toulouse had been dispossessed for heresy, and the sentence had been confirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council, at which representatives from all Christendom, clerical and lay, attended. In a famous case from Greece brought before the King of France and his court, it was decided that if the relation of liegeman and lord had been fully constituted, and the liegeman then made war on his lord, the fief was forfeit. Every code based on the feudal system accepted and confirmed these principles. It is provided by the Assises of Jerusalem, the body of feudal laws codi- fied for the Latin Kingdom in the Holy Land, that a fief is forfeit if a liegeman turns heretic, if he de- nies his lord or lays violent hands on him, or takes the field against him, or fails to meet an accusation of treason in his lord's court when summoned. In INNOCENT IV 313 such cases the feudal ties were broken, the fief re- verted to the suzerain, and he had the right to grant it anew to a loyal subject. Bracton, the great com- mentator of English law, the predecessor of Coke, Blackstone, and Kent, in De Legihus et Consuetudini- hus AnglicB (circa 1250) says : " Homage is the bond of law . . . reciprocal ... by which the tenant in his turn is obliged and constrained to keep faith with his lord and render service due. • . . The tenant for- feits his fief if he does any grave injury to his lord, or sides with his enemy, in counsel or comfort, against him ... or if he does aught to divest him of his inheritance, or if he lays violent hands on his lord." In Frederick's own code of laws, promulgated at Melfi in 1231, it is laid down : "Vassals must safe- guard their lords in life and limb, from bodily cap- ture and from injury to their honour. . . . Vassals shall not be privy in plot, consent, or knowledge, to their lord's losing his land, rather they shall warrant and defend it to the utmost of their power against everybody. ... If a vassal shall commit a felony against his lord, ... or having been thrice sum- moned shall not render service due . . . the lord may disseize him" (Constitutiones Regni Sicilice, liber 3, titles 18, 19). Such was the law ; not even Thaddeus of Suessa or Pier della Vigna could dispute this. The ques- tion before the council was whether the King had violated his feudal duty toward his sovereign in so grave a particular as to justify disseizin; and the council was to judge the case on its own knowledge and belief. It was not limited, like our petty jury, to 314 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY judge according to sworn testimony only, but rather like a jury of the vicinage to judge according to common knowledge. Most of the offences charged against Frederick were matters of common know- ledge. He had not paid his feudal tribute for years ; he had interfered with the ecclesiastical rights of his suzerain in Sicily ; he had usurped the province of Benevento ; he had prevented an oecumenical coun- cil; he had imprisoned Koman cardinals; he had made war on the Pope and invaded the Patrimony of St. Peter ; and, according to dark reports, if he was not a heretic or a misbeliever, he was far more in sympathy with Mohammedanism than with Christ- ianity. These charges the Emperor's proctors might meet with excuse and avoidance, with explanation and extenuation, with denials here and there on outlying matters, but at the core, by consent of all, the King of Sicily was guilty of fatal breaches of duty toward his suzerain lord. In this condem- nation ended Frederick's long course of double- dealing, with the gentle Honorius, with the noble and fiery Gregory IX and with the hard-headed, hard-hearted Innocent IV; and from this condem- nation flowed bitter consequences to Frederick, to his children, and his children's children. CHAPTER XXIII THE END OF FREDERICK'S LIFE (1245-1250) Zens, the high God ! — whate'er be dim in donbt, Tliia can our thought track out — The blow that fells the sinner is of God, And as he wills, the rod Of vengeance smiteth sore. One said of old, " The Gods list not to hold A reckoning with him whose feet oppress The grace of holiness " — An impious word ! for whenso'er the sire Breathed forth rebellious fire — What time his household oyerflowed the measure Of bliss and health and treasure — His children's children read the reckoning plain. At last, in tears and pain I Agamemnon — E. D. A. Morshead. The affair of the Council was badly conducted by Frederick. The assembled prelates were not an im- partial body, they had not been convened for an impartial purpose; Frederick knew this, and he should have addressed himself over their heads to the outside world, for all western Europe was eag- erly attending to what was said and done within the walls of St. John's cathedral. With England, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy for audience, Frederick might well have hoped to win the prize of popular sympathy. That public, true to human nature, wa3 vulgarly interested in the criminal charges against the Emperor, his violated vows, his breaches of cove- nants, convention, and morality, but it was also deeply interested in two fundamental matters, its own 316 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY material well-being and its spiritual well-being. The Emperor might have lifted the issues between him and the Pope up to the noblest concerns of body and soul ; but the crafty, strong-willed Pope suc- ceeded in keeping them down to the truth or falsity of the criminal charges against the Emperor. Economic development was necessarily lay. Mam- mon, if one may so call the single-purposed spirit of gain, had no interest in ecclesiastical matters; its one desire was for order, for the removal of feudal exactions and of the feudal barons who stood like retiarii in the way, ready to enmesh the young limbs of trade in their fatal nets ; it would give its sympathy to either power that would best procure order. The Church was no real friend of economic progress, and the Emperor might well have put her in the wrong in the eyes of Mammon. He might have professed to represent the cause of imperial order as it had been in the days of the Antonines, when all the world enjoyed the peaceful enforce- ment of law. But instead he insisted on obsolete prerogatives against the Lombard communes, ranged himself on the side of feudalism, and let the Church pose as the friend of manufacture and trade. In spiritual matters, too, the Emperor wholly failed to rise to the height of the occasion. The Church, indeed, as all the world knew, had been false in many respects to her own professed doctrines, but she had some meritorious achievements to her credit in the popular mind: she sanctioned and upheld the Franciscan Order, and with all her faults anfl short- comings she still proclaimed a reign of peace and THE END OF FREDEEICK'S LIFE 317 good will on earth. To this ideal the Emperor pre- sented no alternative, except so far as he practised an Epicurean freedom from all irksome restraints. This was the fault of the Emperor and of his law- yers ; they misread the signs of their time ; satisfied, themselves, with poetry, they cared little for visions beatific. It was not a fault inherent in the ideal of empire. Had Dante been living to put his passionate beliefs into words, he might not have modified the verdict of the council, but he would have affected the judgment of Christendom ; for the judgment of Christendom upon Frederick, and even the judg- ment of the council, was based on things spiritual. The old issue between an ecclesiastical and a lay organization of society had already been decided. In the time of Innocent III the clerical power had reached its flood, it was now on the ebb ; modern Europe had been born and modern Europe was opposed to civil government administered by priests. Even by the time of Innocent IV the growth of manufacture and trade had rendered any such issue obsolete. Europe was stirring with productive en- ergies, and on the question whether the Church or the Empire should hold the supreme temporal power, her sympathy was with the Empire. But as it is the wont of judicial tribunals, as well as, generally speaking, the wont of society at large, to decide questions according to old ideas and old customs, and not according to the exigencies of the present or the needs of the future, economic arguments would have been out of place. The council would not have listened to them, Europe might not have 318 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY listened to them; but Europe, if not the council, would have given respectful attention to an argu- ment to prove that the spiritual interests of Christ- endom would not be endangered by the triumph of the Emperor. For this the lawyers of Frederick's court were of no avail; and when Dante published his De Monarchia, the Empire had already been relegated to the limbo of antiquated things. Nevertheless the De Monarchia shows the moral forces that might have been marshalled upon the imperial side. The value of empire, Dante says, must be judged by its bearing upon the goal of human civilization, which is to bring all blossomings of the human spirit to the fullest fruitage. For such fruit- age universal peace is necessary, and unity under a single head, and the cooperation of all parts for the welfare of the whole. The independent parts cannot adjust their mutual relations unless they have some supreme court before which to bring them ; and justice needs a judge furnished with supreme powers. And all through the argument in favour of a universal monarch Dante keeps in mind the final goal of hu- man civilization : " Ripeness is all." Such arguments as Dante uses might seem to apply as well to the Church as to the Empire ; but they do not, because the power of the sword is necessary to enforce peace and justice, and because (as he says) the history of the rise and culmination of the Roman Empire is proof that by God's will the Emperor is to be the universal monarch and that he derives his powers from God. But Dante wrote two generations too late, and the THE END OF FREDERICK'S LIFE 319 decision of the council may be taken as the real end of the mediaeval Empire. Men's minds were divided, and according to place, condition, rank, and circum- stance, some men thought one way and some another, but on the whole the spirit of the age came to the opinion that the Empire was unfitted for the modern world then beginning, and the Council of Lyons gave rude expression to this opinion. In later gen- erations Emperors came down into Italy, but never again in the gallant, masterful manner of their pred- ecessors; and from the date of the decree of depo- sition Frederick himself was fighting for his crowns. So harsh was his punishment that it seemed as if a spirit of retribution were pursuing him to take ven- geance for his wanton disregard of the spiritual beliefs of his time. Blow upon blow fell upon him. The first was a blow to his power and to his pride. Parma, on a sudden, turned from him and joined the Guelfs. Parma, like most of her high-spirited sister cities, had been a member of the Lombard League against Barbarossa ; but ever since Frederick II had raised his standard as a claimant to the Empire, she had inclined to his side. In the old days, before he had received the imperial crown, while he was still pro- claiming that he owed his victorious career to God and to his venerable mother, the Roman Church, he had rewarded the city's loyalty by confirming her independent rights and privileges : " Our Serene and Royal Clemency is wont to dispense favours to its subjects and to confer abundant benefits on those ■whose faith and devotion to the Empire has always 320 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY been found sincere and true ; . . . So, We, mindful of the honest faith and devoted service which our be- loved and loyal citizens of Parma have always shown to the Empire and, as We hope, will always show," ... do grant and confirm, in due legal terms, upon the city a communal bill of rights. From that time on, side by side with Pavia, Cremona, and Modena, Parma had remained loyal to the Empire ; and Frederick had continued his favour except for a momentary suspension at the time of his imperial coronation when the podesta had been disobedient to the Church. Parma was a prosperous town, renowned for her cloth and wool ; her trade was brisk, her citizens industrious. Set in a flat plain, her situation was not picturesque ; but she had her share of civic pride and had striven to make her public buildings beau- tiful. Her cathedral, if not to be compared to that at Modena for charm or grace, was distinctly su- perior to its rival at Piacenza ; and the marble bap- tistery was one of the finest in Italy. The population was not altogether pacific. The nobles, as elsewhere, were divided into two factions; one held for the Empire, the other inclined to the Church. The peo- ple, however, were generally indifferent to these quarrels. Society was undergoing a gradual trans- formation towards democracy. The guilds, fifteen in number, with the cloth-merchants, the money- changers, and the butchers at their head, had organ- ized a people's party, very much as the guilds had done in Bologna ; and they were more interested in trade than in the rivalry between Pope and Em- Banedetto Antelai AUnari, phot. BAPTISTERY Parma .THE END OF FEEDERICK'S LIFE 321 peror, and kept aloof attending to their business, though force of circumstances was pushing them more and more to the Guelf side. The Pope had friends and relations in the city ; his uncle had been bishop, and he himself had lived there ; three of his sisters and a niece had married into the nobility ; and the people's party, in their efforts to strengthen themselves against the nobility who were chiefly Ghibelline, had chosen his nephew as their leader.) The Emperor' s-adhereats, feeling the growing ten- sion, behaved tyrannically ; they took possession of the bishop's palace and of his revenues, imposed heavy taxes on the churches, and put guards in all the towers. The Guelf leaders took alarm and fled to Piacenza or Milan. In those cities, with the help of the papal legate, Gregory of Montelungo, they made ready an expedition to force their way back, and set forth on a Sunday. At that time, Arrigo Testa, a poet of the Sicilian school, who had, how- ever, given far more of his time to his political career than to poetry, was podesta of Parma. On that very Sunday a gay wedding was going on, and there had been too much eating and drinking. In the midst of the revels word came that the " out- siders " (as a banished faction was called) were on the march to Parma. The wedding guests started from the table and, following Arrigo, sallied forth to meet the enemy : — Ah ! then and there was hurrying to and fro, And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago Blush'd at the praise of their own loveliness. 822 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Perhaps the roistering young cavaliers sang Ar^ rigo's song as they saddled and galloped away : — Di me fermanza avete, k' eo so in vostra tenuta ; per6 meo cor non muta di far leale omagio. You hold me bond, Your vassal true am I, And, 80, voy fixed heart Doth pay all fealty. The Ghibellines met the enemy a little beyond the river Taro ; but the banquet had been a fatal prepa- ration for the fight, wine had tamed their muscles if not their spirits, and they were driven back to the Taro and put to rout ; Arrigo and other noblemen were killed, and the Church party swept on victori- ous into the city. Parma was important strategically because it com- manded both the Via Emilia and the road over the Apennines by Pontremoli into Tuscany; moreover, the revolt sorely wounded the Emperor's pride. He had gone to Turin, making ready for a dash over the Alps to Lyons, and was considering the risk of a war with France in case he should do so, when news of the defeat reached him. He turned round, sum- moned the Ghibellines from far and near, and laid siege to the town. Like circling hawks they stooped to his lure : his sons, the fighting Enzio, imperial legate in all Italy, Frederick of Antioch, imperial vicar in Tuscany, and young Manfred, still a boy, child of the beautiful Bianca Lancia; the swart Ezzelino, imperial vicar in the March of Treviso ; THE END OF FREDEKICK'S LIFE 323 Uberto Pelavicini, imperial vicar in the Lunigiana ; the brave Marquis Lancia^, uncle to Bianca and cap- tain of the Empire from Pavia to Asti ; and his two most trusted counsellors, Thaddeus of Suessa and Pier della Vigna, were there. Loyal barons brought their troops, loyal cities sent contingents. On the other side the Guelf s answered battle-cry with battle- cry. Their two notable generals, Gregory of Monte- lungo, the papal legate, and the Marquis of Este, hurried with their forces to the defence of the city. Milan sent a thousand of her best knights, Piacenza sent four hundred, the Count of San Bonifazio came with a troop from Mantua, Ferrara too dispatched her quota. The defences of the town were too strong to be carried by assault, it was necessary to lay siege ; and as it was impossible to construct the besieging Hues all around the town, the Emperor built an elaborately fortified camp, which he named " Victory," and maintained as close a blockade as he could. The siege lasted six months. The cruelty on both sides was very great. Frederick adopted a plan of exe- tN, cuting two or four prisoners every day in full sight of the garrison, but desisted at the prayer of his Pavian allies. And when imperial spies, many of whom were women, came into the town hidden in loads of hay or in carts with false bottoms, and were caught by the garrison, they were tortured and burnt to death. Nevertheless the siege was tedious, and Frederick became careless. One day he weakened his lines by sending a detachment of troops to build a bridge across the Po which should be of service in 324 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY the blockade, and he himself went hunting. The garrison took advantage of this chance ; they made a sortie, carried the besiegers' lines, drove the im- perial troops pell-mell, captured and burned the fort, got possession of the Emperor's crown and his royal insignia, and returned in triumph to the city. Thad- deus of Suessa was among the killed. The Ghibel- lines scattered in all directions and Frederick himself fled to Cremona. He wrote letters to belittle his defeat and explain how it had happened, and talked of renewing the siege ; but it was a vain attempt to save appearances. The victory had been complete ; Parma was lost, and what was worse, the Emperor's prestige was irretrievably hurt. The cardinal legate, Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, ignorant that an avenging destiny would consign him to hell by the side of Frederick II, marched triumphantly at the head of an army from Bologna through Romagna ; and city after city — Imola, Faenza, Forli, Forlimpopoli, Cesena — opened its gates and ranged itself on the side of the Church. A year later a more personal and a more tragic blow fell on the Emperor; at Parma he had lost Thaddeus of Suessa, now he lost his other most trusted counsellor. Pier della Vigna. In the second round of the seventh circle of hell the souls of those who with violent hand have taken their own lives, miserably deformed into stunted trees, take root and put forth twigs. One of these plants spoke to Dante : — I am he, who held both the keys Of Frederick's heart, and turned them, Locking and unlocking, so softly THE END OF FREDERICK'S LIFE 325 That from his hosom counsel I shut out almost every man. I bore such great loyalty to the glorious office That for its sake I lost both sleep and life. The strumpet, that never from Caesar's house Has turned her wanton eyes, (Common bane and vice of courts,) Inflamed all minds against me ; And they, all flaming, set Augustus aflame So that my happy honours turned to grievous woe. My soul in disdainful disgust Thinking by death to escape disdain, Made me unjust to my just self. By the new roots of this tree I swear to you I never broke my faith To my lord, who was so worthy of honour. {Inferno, xiii.) Pier dellaVigna (1190-1249), miserably destined to become this lost soul, came from Capua. His father was in narrow circumstances, and Pier got his edu- cation as best he could. He became a notary, gave signal proof of his abilities, and was presented to the Emperor. A year or two later he was made judge, and after the treaty of peace with the Pope (1230), when the Emperor was able to give his attention to civil affairs at home. Pier rose to be one of his close counsellors, and took part in matters of the highest consequence. It was in these earlier years that he wrote poetry, exchanging sonnets with the Notary, with Jacopo Mostacci, and perhaps with the unlucky podesta, Arrigo Testa. He undoubtedly took an im- portant part in codifying the Constitutions of Sicily (1231) ; and after that he was engaged in diplomacy. He went to England to arrange the Emperor's marriage with Princess Isabella, sister of King 326 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY Henry III ; he was sent on embassies to the Pope and to the King of France. He was in intimate consul- tation with the Emperor about the proceedings at the Council of Lyons. It was he who wrote most important state papers for Frederick ; it was he who was chosen to deliver official orations on the Em- peror's behalf ; it was he who composed street bal- lads to lampoon the friars. His star was always in the ascendant. In 1247 he was raised to be proto- notary of the Empire and logothete of The Kingdom, high honours wrapped in the obscurity of obsolete titles. He had become the model for princes' favour- ites to fashion themselves upon. He was not only the Emperor's familiar friend, but he was or had been in intimate relations with the imperial family. He ar- gues at length to the Empress that rose is a colour to be preferred to violet ; he thanks Prince Conrad for the gift of a ring ; he writes to King Enzio. He is on terms of very kindly intercourse with the most distinguished men in The Kingdom, such as the Archbishops of Capua and Palermo, as well as with the professors at Bologna and Naples. His praises were on the lips of all who hoped for preferment : " Nature, teeming mother," — so writes Nicolas de Rocca, — " has given birth to brilliant nurslings far and wide throughout the world ; she has distilled a portion of her rich essence into the hearts of very many, but, outdoing expectation, she has brought together into one body what she had distributed among all, and produced Magister Pier della Vigna, more brilliant than all. . . . For the genius of happy knowledge, in its search for a resting-place, THE END OF FREDEEICK'S LIFE 327 wandered all over, in the sweep of the heavens, in the depths of the abyss, and at last fixed its, tents and circumscribed the bounds of its activity in him. . . . He is a second Joseph, to whom as a faithful interpreter Great Caesar has committed the rule of the round world ; he is the heybearer of the Em- pire, he shuts and no man opens, he opens and no man shuts ; the tuneful trumpet of his eloquence, in speech sweet as honey, soothes the hearts of all that hear him, yea, as if by divine intuition he re- veals whatever lies hid under the sun, excepting the seven seals of the closed book [Rev. v, 1-3]. . . . He is a Peter founded on a rock so that he shall establish others by the firmness of his faith ; fixed in solid sincerity he shall be a foundation to others. Peter, the insignificant fisherman, prince of the apostles, having left his nets followed God ; but this Peter does not leave his master at all. The old shep- herd tended the Lord's flock ; but the new athlete by the Emperor's side, planting virtues and extir- pating errors, weighs whatever he says in the scales of justice. Peter of Galilee thrice denied his Lord ; but God forbid that Peter of Capua one single time should deny his. happy Vine . . . even the tongue of TuUy would find it hard to set forth thy manifold virtues." And the learned Doctor Accursius wrote : " In the whole world there is no man alive who has a will more prompt to serve you than I, or takes more thought for your honour." Fed upon phrases such as these, Pier floated on the full-blown bladder of imperial favour over a sea of glory; in January, 1249, he was with the 328 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY Emperor at Cremona, and no sign gave warning of impending danger. All of a sudden, in February, he was arrested on the charge of high treason, and his eyes were put out. With all light quenched, did he then remember his joyous youth and the lady to whom he wrote his love-songs? Ch' eo non euro s' io dollio od 6 martiro membrando 1' ora ched io vengno a voi ; I care not if I suffer pain or martyrdom Remembering the hour in which I come to thee. What Pier did to incur Frederick's suspicion is not clear. Various stories got abroad. One was to the effect that he had had treasonable dealings with the Pope, but there is no evidence now to support that theory ; another, that he had amassed a great fortune and that Frederick coveted his wealth, but this supposition is merely an amplification of the saying attributed to Frederick : " I fatten pigs in order to feed on them." The third charged Pier with having instigated the Emperor's physician to poison him. Frederick him- self seems to have believed this accusation. But Frederick was in no judicial mood. From nature he had received a passionate temperament, and ever since the Council of Lyons he was in a highly overwrought state. His wrath at being defied and foiled by church- men, whom he loathed and despised, amounted to frenzy. When he first heard of Innocent's sentence of deposition, he behaved like a madman. He put his crown on his head, defied the Pope to take it off, and ranted like a third-rate actor. He had himself been treacherous all his life, and now the same cup was THE END OF FREDERICK'S LIFE 329 commended to his own lips. Many courtiers had already abandoned him. The Bishop of Katisbon, Chancellor of Germany, went over to the enemy ; so did Richard of Montenero, Master Judiciary of Sicily ; the Bishop of Bamberg also, who had filled the high office of protonotary of the Imperial Court ; and still others, like the Duke of Lorraine. In The Klingdom several nobles plotted to murder him ; even his falconer, Ruggero de Amicis, the poet, was false j and after the defeat at Parma, Frederick felt that he could trust nobody. Envy, " the strumpet that never from Caesar's dwelling turns her wanton eyes," stirred up enemies against Pier. However it may be, he was thrown into prison, blinded, and condemned to be paraded through The Kingdom and then put to death. He escaped this final ignominy by dashing his brains out against a stone. Dante believed that Pier was innocent, and though he puts him in hell as a self-murderer, he does not condemn him to the circle of traitors ; and perhaps Pier della Vigna, as a stout partisan of the Empire, and as a poet, would rather have had his reputation cleared in Dante's judgment than in any tribunal whatsoever. In the Divina Commedia he is forever innocent. In May of the same year another blow fell upon Frederick. His well-beloved son, the gallant, fair- haired, fighting Enzio, was made prisoner by the Bolognese. Enzio had been imperial lieutenant in all Italy, as such he had had chief command of the im- perial forces in Lombardy, while Ezzelino da Romano was head of the Ghibelline party in the east, and the Marquis Lancia and Uberto Pelavieini to the 330 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ■west. Enzio is, perhaps, the most picturesque figure of all the gallant House of Hohenstaufen. Twenty- nine years old, he had long proved his abilities; he had won several victories on land, and he had been on board the imperial fleet which captured the unfortunate prelates. He had married Adalasia, heiress to the counties of Turris and Gallura in Sar- dinia, and his father had crowned him king. This performance added fuel to the quarrel with the Pope, for the Pope claimed the island as part of the papal domain and had expressly forbidden Adalasia to marry any man disloyal to the Holy See. A charm- ing creature like Enzio, an Emperor's son, a con- queror and a poet, with " a lightsome eye, a soldier's mien, a feather of the blue," was not well fitted for strait-laced matrimony ; or it may be that some father confessor or a friar got Adalasia's ear. At any rate, in a few years she returned to the Church party and received forgiveness from the Pope ; and Enzio married a niece of Ezzelino's. On May 26, 1249, the Bolognese, according to their annual custom, sent an expedition against Modena. Enzio rushed to the defence and attacked the enemy at Fossalta, a little place near where the river Panaro crosses the Via Emilia, a few miles southeast of Modena. The Bolognese were in greater numbers than he thought ; his men were routed, and he was taken prisoner, together with four hundred knights and twelve hundred foot soldiers. There was great excitement and rejoicing in the Bolognese camp. The Council of Credenza and the General Council (for the regular political usages were observed THE END OF FREDERICK'S LIFE 331 in the field) assembled at the call of heralds and trum- peters, and a vote was taken as to what should be done with the prisoners. The question, put by direction of the podesta, was whether or not the prisoners should be turned over to the Commune; and the councils voted unanimously in the affirmative. Arrangements were then made for a triumphal entry into the city. The bishop and all the citizens turned out to hail the conquerors. The gonfalonieri cleared the way, and the procession marched in military order through the gate and up the main street. First came the trumpeters, next a squadron of light horse, next foot soldiers, five abreast, crowned with oak leaves, then drummers and banner-men, after them the carroccio decked in scarlet, the standard of Bologna fluttering at the masthead, and round it a troop of picked men in armour with long swords, and follow- ing these King Enzio riding on a mule. It was a great day for the trainband guilds of Bologna. The other prisoners sooner or later went free ; some were liberated at the command of the Pope, others bought their ransom ; but, proud of having an Emperor's son for prisoner, Bologna never let Enzio go. He lived and died and was buried in Bologna. For twenty- three years he was lodged in the new palace of the podesta, in that part now occupied by the archivio notarile (for the building has been remodelled), whose windows look out on the Piazza di Nettuno. He had a hall above for exercise, and chambers below. He was treated kindly, though always under strict supervision. One of his poems stiU preserves the memory of his imprisonment : — 332 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY Ya, canzonetta mia, e saluta messere, dilli lo mal ch' i' aggio : quelli che m' k 'n bailia, si distretto mi tene, ch' eo viver non poraggio. Salatami Toscana, quella ched' fe sovrana, in cui regna tutta cortesia; e vanne in Puglia piana, la magna Capitana, la dov' h lo mio core nott' e dia. Go, my little song And greet my lord, Tell him the ill I have : He that has me in custody Holds me so tight That I cannot live. Greet Tuscany for me, A very queen is she, In whom all courtesy reigns ; And get thee to flat Apulia, To great Capitanata, There where my heart is night and day. The Emperor tried hard to effect Eazio's release; he begged and threatened, but in vain. The spokes- man for Bologna, the celebrated lawyer, Roland Passegieri, whose tomb near the church of St. Dom- inic is one of the sights of the city, wrote back: "Your blustering words do not frighten us ; we are not reeds of the swamp to be shaken by a puny breeze, nor shall we dissolve like a mist in the sun's rays. We will hold Enzio. A cane non magno scepe tenetur aper — a little dog sometimes holds the wild boar." THE END OF FEEDERICK'S LIFE 333 The Emperor, in spite of these misfortunes, showed no signs of flinching. In Germany, his oldest living son, Conrad (for Henry, the rebel, had already died), fought the imperial pretenders whom the papal subsidies enabled to take the field, first Henry Easpe of Thuringia and then William, Count of Holland; in Italy, his son, Frederick of Antioch, the imperial lieutenant in Tuscany, and the Ghibelline chiefs, Ezzelino da Romano, Uberto Pelavicini, and the Marquis Lancia, maintained the war vigorously. Not- withstanding occasional victories Frederick was in a savage mood, and the Saracens, his most devoted soldiers, gave it full expression. A single instance will show their temper. They captured and took prisoner a zealous partisan of the Pope, the Bishop of Arezzo. They bade him publicly excommunicate the Pope, the cardinals, and other prelates, and swear fealty to the Emperor, and promised him if he would do this, not only immunity but riches. Yet strengthened by God's spirit, he answered that he had often excom- municated Frederick as a son and pupil of Satan, and on the spot he reiterated his anathema against him. Then they bound him to an ass, face down by the tail, and beat the ass in order to drive him through the streets to the gallows. Women and children wept at the sight, and the poor bishop sang Te Deum laudamus; the ass — so the report of the murder runs — would not budge, in spite of the goad, until the bishop had finished the hymn. When they reached the gallows a Franciscan friar shrived him, and he confessed that, though when free he had desired the glory of martyrdom, now the weak- 334 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ness of the flesh made him shrink from it. He was hanged Kke a common malefactor. The friars came by night and buried his body ; the next day the Sar- acen soldiers dug it up and hung it on high as a warning to the Emperor's enemies. The civil war, for such it was, though the fact that the Emperor had Saracens, Germans, and other foreign troops in his pay disguised its nature, con- tinued in raids and devastations. It is hard to see how the cities fed themselves, and stiU harder to understand how they prospered, as some of them did. There was, of course, great difEerence in their circum- stances. In Padua, which had fallen into the hands of Ezzelino da Romano, things went badly, the university dwindled, the new church in honour of St. Anthony, the miracle-working disciple of St. Francis, was left barely begun; whereas in Bologna, the guilds flour- ished, and the friars, both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were able to keep busily at work build- ing churches in honour of their respective saints. The balances of victory did not dip very markedly either way between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. Each merely succeeded in harrying the other. Fred- erick himself, though he maintained a haughty front, felt the effect of his misfortunes. His health was poor; he went back to his kingdom, and there on his death-bed (so, at least it seems) he married Bianca Lancia, the mother of Manfred. This tardy marriage should have made Manfred legitimate; but the Church, either because she did not believe the report, or because Frederick was under excommuni- cation, would not acknowledge his legitimacy. Fred- THE END or FREDERICK'S LIFE 335 erick died on December 13, 1250. Manfred was with him at the last ; and, according to Manfred's statement, his father received the rites of the Church. Perhaps Frederick yielded to the influence of Bianca Lancia, perhaps he wished to pave the way for a reconciliation of his sons with Innocent, perhaps in physical weakness he felt an emotional yearning for the religion of his boyhood, perhaps he had not freed himself wholly from the beliefs of his contempo- raries ; however that may be, it seems certain that during his life he was a disbeliever. His body was taken back to Sicily, as was most fitting : from Sicily he had drawn his strength and his weakness, his intellectual curiosity, his love of poetry, his irascible temper, his oriental sympathies, and his misconception of the Christian sentiment of Europe. There, in the cathedral of Palermo, the body, wrapped in a rich cloth which was embroid- ered with inscriptions in the Arabic tongue, was laid in a porphyry tomb, vrith crown and sword beside it, near to the tombs of Frederick's father and mother and of his grandfather. King Roger. So ended the career of this remarkable man. Frederick II was less a man ahead of his time than out of sympathy with it. The main impulses of the awakening world were economic, and the main need of economic development was the need of peace and order. An Emperor's task was to adjust the im- perial system to these new forces. Had Frederick II been a great man, had he been endowed with a statesman's foresight, he would have perceived that the communes were admirably fitted to be the 336 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY foundation stones of modern empire. The two powers, Empire and Church, — Imperium et Sacerdotium, — great disputants of the world's sovereignty, were evenly matched, the Empire striving to make the form of European civilization lay, the Church striving to make it ecclesiastical; and here, in manufacture and trade, were mighty secular forces, but the Em- pire, instead of opening its arms to them and wel- coming them as allies, hoisted the old, outworn standard of feudalism and treated them as hostile, leaving the shrewd Curia at Eome to profit by its blunder. The fault of getting into so hopelessly wrong a situation lay with Frederick. He should have ac- cepted the communal spirit, he should have encour- aged the growth of trade and the development of local self-government. His course was plain enough. The proper imperial function was to impose order along the high-road, over mountain pass, by river and by canal, to lay a strong hand on robber barons, on highwaymen and pirates, so that trade might travel whither it would without peril and bind all parts of the Empire together. The imperial duty towards cities was to protect them from foreign enemies and to sit in judgment upon their quarrels among them- selves. It was not a proper function of Empire to impose a centralized authority on independent cities, to appoint their podestas, and to stamp out all natural inclination for self-government; that was the function of tyranny. The regulation and manage- ment of local policy and city government constituted an important part of the conditions upon which THE END OF FREDEEICK'S LIFE 337 trade and manufacture depended, and belonged of right to the citizens, to merchants, manufacturers, and artisans ; the cities never disputed their duty of allegiance, all they insisted upon was the right of local self-government. Frederick laboured under a gross misconception of empire and its functions; he looked back and not forward; he had a just conception of order and of the king's peace, but he wished to restore the old regime as it had been in the golden days before manufacture and trade dared raise their heads. So he set out to teach the young upstarts their place. And not only did he fail to understand the new spirit abroad in the valley of the Po, but he was equally blind to the power of the Church ; he mis- managed the whole affair to such an extent that he drove these two separate bodies, which had no na- tural sympathy for one another, to make common cause against him. And so, his talents, capacities, and accompUshments wasted, he brought ruin upon his house. Cakducci. CHAPTER XXIV GOTHIC AECHITECTUEE IN ITALY Sorgono e in agili file dilungano gl' immani ed ardui steli manuorei, e ne la tenebra sacra somigliano di giganti un esercito che g^erra mediti con 1' inTisibile : le arcate salgono chete, si slanciano qnindi a yol rapide, poi si rabbracciano prone per 1' alto e pendule. In quick succession rise and march The huge steep marble pillars, And in the sacred darkness seem A band of giants That meditate war upon the invisible : The noiseless arches leap, dart hence In rapid flight, then meet and kiss Prone b; the roof and pendnlous. Now that Frederick — versipellis, vipera, turncoat and viper, as he appeared to the Roman Curia, or stupor mundi, wonder of the world, as he was to the enemies of the Curia — has left the stage, politics may again withdraw for a time and give place to other threads that do their part, also, in weaving the pat- tern of history. And as the approaching fall of the Hohenstauf ens now heralds the coming of the French, it is interesting to remark how for two generations and more events, that in themselves seem very re- mote from the shock of battle, have been gradually preparing the way for the substitution of France in o o CO cq GOTHIC ARCHITECTUEE IN ITALY 339 place of Germany as the foreign nation of control- ling influence in Italy. For several hundred years, ever since the days of Otto the Great, Germany, of all foreign countries, had exercised the greatest influence on Italy. This was the necessary result of their political union. The Emperors, their lieutenants and imperial func- tionaries, brought with them the feudal "system and its attendant usages; the soldiers of fortune and gentlemen adventurers, who followed their masters across the Alps and settled on territories given to them or conquered by their own swords, introduced German ways and habits of thought. Most of these immigrants, indeed, such as the Ezzelini of the March, or the Uberti of Florence, in the course of a few generations became Italians ; but in the process they modified the society about them, and kept their aristocratic blood and aristocratic customs as distinct from the Italian bourgeoisie as possible. Under Henry VI fresh swarms of needy Germans settled in southern Italy and established themselves in stronghold and castle as the feudal nobility. In fact, including the earlier Lombard stock, the aristocracy of Italy, outside of Rome, was almost altogether of Teutonic descent. In Sicily and the extremity of Italy other in- fluences had been far stronger than that of Ger- many; the Byzantine Greeks, the Arabs, and the Normans had each in turn remodelled the country, but they did not go north of the river Garigliano. Venice, too, had been moulded and shaped by the civilization of Constantinople, but Venice can hardly 340 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY be deemed an integral part of Italy before the be- ginning of the fourteenth century. As a whole, Italy had been seriously affected only by Ger- many. But this influence was not the natural sympa- thetic influence of vigorous minds and characters upon minds and characters of the same or a similar kind. On the contrary, it was an influence derived wholly or almost wholly from the unnatural political union between two very dissimilar nations. This union between the two had been imposed on both by a long course of events; and they were a singu- larly ill-mated pair. The two peoples were different in character, temperament, taste, and habits. The Germans were a fighting people and despised the Italians, and the Italians, who were more refined, more subtle, more delicate than the Germans, hated them in return. The bond, however, was too strong to be broken by Italy alone, and Italy, even if she had been strong enough, was far from prepared for so revolutionary a project as the dissolution of the Empire. Nevertheless some Italians coquetted with the idea of playing off a rival against their master, and naturally turned to their neighbour to the north- west. In the days of Pippin and Charlemagne, when the Lombards were persecuting the Church, the Popes had called in the Pranks; at the beginning of the century Innocent III called in a French baron, Walter of Brienne, to fight the German ad- venturers in Apulia; and, two generations later, In- nocent's successors acted upon these precedents with sonorous effect. From that time on down to 1870, GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 341 French interference was one of the controlling fac- tors in Italian politics. But politics was not the only- tie between Italy and France. French civilization had already made its mark on Italy. For fifty years the poetry of Provence, as we have seen, had been a bond of union between the two countries. Troubadours had sung their Proven- gal verses from Verona to Palermo ; and Italian imi- tators had crossed the Alps to attend upon the princes and ladies of Languedoc and Dauphiny. Other influences, less outwardly charming but more pervasive, were the various heresies that went to and fro, like moles working underground, joining to- gether the Patarini of Milan, the Poor Men of Lyons, and their fellow sects in one common hos- tility to orthodoxy. Merchants, too, like Peter Ber- nadone, St. Francis's father, travelled habitually to France, and money-lenders from Asti and Vercelli plied their trade in rivalry with the usurers of Cahors. There was every reason for intimacy. The two were Latin peoples; their sister languages had not di- verged very far from the parent tongue; close ties, whether of politics, commerce or literature, had ex- isted from the time when the Romans made the southeastern corner of Gaul Provincia Nostra. If any foreign influence was to be dominant in Italy, it would be natural to suppose that it should be French rather than German. And now, at the close of the twelfth century, a fresh intermediary, quite different from politics, from classical memories, or poetical association, wrought a new link between France and Italy. The monks of Citeaux crossed 342 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the Alps and descended from Burgundy into Italy, bringing Gothic architecture with them. It seems odd, if one looks at the old Lombard churches in North Italy, that the Lombard archi- tects did not devise a Gothic system of construction for themselves They had long used grouped piers, groined vaults, and transverse arches; they divided nave and aisles into bays; they constructed their vaulting with ribs; they built heavy buttresses to support the weight of the upper walls and roof. Time out of mind they had employed pointed arches to strengthen the foundation of their towers. But they did not take the necessary steps that eu' abled the architects of the Ile-de-France to develop the System of thrust and buttress by which piers and ribs uphold a mountain of stone. The genius of Italy never fully accepted, and certainly never mastered, the principles of Gothic architecture. There was reason for this. The authority of ancient Rome, still visible in many a majestic edifice, laid the heavy hand of its mighty tradition upon architect and builder. The great basilicas of Rome, the Byzantine churches at Ravenna, the Norman monuments at Palermo, the cathedral at Pisa, Sant' Ambrogio at Milan, San Michele at Pavia, San Zeno at Verona, San Marco at Venice, and the Romanesque churches in the cities of Emilia, had trained the Italian eye to the beauties of rounded arch and horizontal line, to calm, to tranquillity, to self-possession. But in the pause between the Romanesque schools of Lom- bardy, Tuscany, and Sicily and the birth of the Re- naissance, in the two intervening centuries, from GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 343 1200 to 1400, a poor, shivering, inadequate Gothic established itself almost all over Italy. The Cistercian monks, men attached to what was familiar and sacred to them at home in Burgundy, brought with them into Italy their method of building churches, just as they brought the rule of their Order and their frock. The monastery of Citeaux was founded about 1100 in what was the old province of Burgundy. This new Order was the expression of discontent with the conditions in existing monasteries, where St. Bene- dict's rule was no longer strictly observed; it re- turned to the primitive idea of monastic life and renounced the more worldly ways that marked the rich abbeys of Cluny, Its aspirations woke echoes of sympathy everywhere ; it prospered and multiplied ; it sent forth colonies, daughters as it loved to call them ; and they, in their turn, sent out many daugh- ters far and wide, east, south, and north. Of all the colonies that went forth from Citeaux, that of Clair- vaux, founded by St. Bernard in 1115, was the best known and had the greatest influence. St. Bernard dominated the Church during the middle of the twelfth century, and the immense success of the Order was due to his world-wide renown. The first Cistercian monastery outside France was established in the northwest of Italy, not very far from Genoa ; others soon followed, and St. Bernard himself founded that of Chiaravalle (Clear Valley) a few miles from Milan. Within two hundred years there were some fourscore Cistercian monasteries in Italy ; and from the very beginning there was much coming and going between the Italian monasteries and the 344 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY mother abbeys at Citeaux and Clairvaux, more espe- cially as the Cistercian monks were very loyal to the Papacy. Before the beginning of the thirteenth century the Italian houses of the Order had been recognized by the Papacy as bodies to be encouraged and cherished. The Popes were glad to have such faithful servants near at hand, and by papal influence various troops of Cistercian monks were lodged in aban- doned or half -abandoned monasteries on the borders of St. Peter's Patrimony. Some of these monasteries, were in ruins and had to be rebuilt. Such was that at Fossanova, which is about seventy miles south- east of Rome, not far from the town of Piperno; the rebuilding took about twenty years, and the church was consecrated by Innocent III in 1208. Already before this time the great architecture of the Ile-de- France, which was carrying all before it in the north, had affected the Burgundian style; and the Cistercian architects were touched with its spirit. It was one thing, however, to build a Gothic church in northern France, or even in Burgundy, and another to build a Gothic church south of Rome. Neverthe- less the interior of the church at Fossanova, with its lancet windows, its ogival arches, its vaulting, and its clustered piers from which the ribs run up, shows at a glance the familiar Gothic forms. The outside makes a feeble pretence, with some buttresses and gables, to support the effect of the interior ; but the chapter house both in its plan and in detail is pure French Gothic. Another Cistercian monastery, at Casamari (so called because the villa of Marius had GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 345 once stood there), barely twenty miles north of Fos- sanova, was founded by Innocent III, and conse- crated by Honorius III in 1217. The church there, with its pointed arches, its clustered columns, its vaulted bays groined and ribbed, is in the interior to all appearance a Gothic church. As early, or perhaps earlier than either of these churches, is Santa Maria a Fiume, a Gothic church in Ceccano, a little hillside town near by. But it is necessary to keep repeating that the Gothic architecture in Italy is merely Gothic to the careless eye ; it has little or none of the or- ganic structure of "the true Gothic style; it is an afEair of decoration, of finish, of hypocritical con- formity, and fundamentally has but very slight and casual relations with the scientific construction of the Gothic builders. The monks of Casamari in 1208 founded the abbey of Santa Maria d'Arbona, which is across the Apennines, in the Abruzzi, near Chieti. Farther nonth in the Marches, near Ancona, is a second Chiaravalle, with a church also in the Gothic style, and near Siena the monastery of San Galgano. These Cistercian monasteries set the fashion for church building in their neighbourhoods ; perhaps they provided the architects. And churches, little and big, showed, in pier, vault, gable, and arch, the pervading influence of the Northern architecture. In the north the first church that shows Gothic forms is Sant' Andrea at Vercelli, a small town near the border of Lombardy and Piedmont, midway be- tween Milan and Turin, on the road towards the Mont Cenis Pass. One story is that its founder, 346 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Cardinal Guala Bicchieri of Vercelli, a famous dip- lomat who had been sent by Innocent III to France on the matter of King Philip's divorce, and to Eng- land to crown King Henry III, brought an architect back with him from England ; another, that he went to the canons of the monastery of St. Victor at Paris and asked them to help him. A third theory de- clares that the design is merely a natural outgrowth of the Lombard Romanesque. However that may be, the first abbot was a Frenchman, Tommaso Gallo, "eunctis in artibus peritus," and it may be that he ordered the plans and had a finger in them him- self. The fagade, except for the two slim towers, has the barn front, the single gable, the blind arcade, the round arched doors, the pilasters, that charac- terize the Lombard churches ; but the choir is very like that of the cathedral of Laon, the interior is Gothic, and there are flying buttresses. At best, Sant' Andrea, though related to the great cathedrals of the North, is a very poor relation ; and it is omly fair to remember that at the time it was built the cathedrals of Paris, Rheims, and Amiens were all unfinished. So far the Gothic style was virtually limited to Cistercian churches and chapter houses, and to such parish churches as were near enough to succumb to their prestige. But after St. Francis's death, his Order, which had supplanted the Cistercian Order in popularity and importance, also adopted, in the timid Italian way, the Gothic style as the accepted monas- tic ecclesiastical architecture. The first Franciscan church was built at Assisi and marks the first great GOTHIC ARCHITECTUEE IN ITALY 347 ecclesiastical step which the young Order took. Francis had entertained the same ideas on the sim- plicity becoming a house of prayer that the founders of the Cistercian Order had had, only he pushed his ideas further still. The early Cistercians made scanty concessions to the human taste for beauty in architecture; but Francis wanted no concession at all. All his life he denounced show, worldliness, vanity, and whatever could betray the worshipping spirit into a momentary infidelity of inattention. Bare walls, a bare floor, a bare altar, and the ineffa- ble presence of God flooding His house, were what Francis demanded. Nevertheless, out from the hill at Assisi, stands the mighty Franciscan monument, one great mass — churches, campanile, monastery, and supporting masonry — in bold defiance of diffi- culty and danger and of the creed of the saint in whose honour they were built. That the new Order dedicated to holy poverty should become the great Gothic builder in Italy shows how quickly the waters of the spirit had flowed down from their mountain height to the level plain of common men. Indeed, a great change had come over the Order. While it consisted of Francis, Brother Leo, Brother Angelo, Brother Rufino, Brother Bernard, and their fellows, the little band was animated solely by the spirit of love and wor- ship ; but when high and low came trooping in to take the vows, the spirit of vanity, pride, luxury, and ostentation entered also. Two men are mainly responsible for the rapid triumph of the spirit of the world, yet both were loving and admiring friends of 848 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY Francis, Gregory IX and Brother Elias. The Pope was a good man, religious, ascetic even, but he was absorbed in his ecclesiastical empire and its affairs; to him the Order had become an instrument to be used to maintain and extend the power of his em- pire. Brother Elias was a man of somewhat similar character ; energetic, masterful, capable, confident in himself, he was sure that he knew what would be best for the Order. To him Francis was utterly un- practical, a visionary, a saint; and regardless of Francis's ideas and wishes, he determined to build a monument that should do honour to the memory of the saint and worthily represent the power and influ- ence of the Franciscan body. He had been made vicar-general of the Order during Francis's lifetime, and though after Francis's death another brother was elected minister-general, nevertheless he contin- ued to act as the Pope's lieutenant and to govern affairs at Assisi. Elias was in charge of the build- ing at the time of making the plans and during the first ten years of construction. Francis died on October 3, 1226. On July 16, 1228, the Pope canonized him ; and the very next day laid the corner-stone of the new basilica. The architect is unknown. Vasari states that a German, one Jacob of Meran, was the original architect, but Vasari's narrative is confused and highly improb- able ; besides, there is no trace of German architec- ture in the building. Herr Henry Thode has made an excellent argument to prove that Jacob of Meran is a mythical person. Filippo di Campello, mentioned in connection with the church in 1232 and 1253, GOTHIC ARCHITECTUKE IN ITALY 349 has been thought to be the architect, but the notices are not definite, and the church of Santa Chiara at Assisi, which he built afterwards, is so vastly infe- rior that it is difficult to believe that he could have designed the great basihca. Another name suggested is that of Brother John of Penna, but there is little to support this theory. Others, drawing their infer- ence from the Gothic elements in the upper church, think that there must have been a French architect. The question is not very important, because the construction of this noble edifice, with whatever praise or blame attaches to it, is due to the energy and ability of Brother Elias. The basilica of St. Francis consists of two churches, one built over the other. The land falls away so rapidly that while the eastern door of the upper church opens on the terrace above, the south door of the lower church opens on a lower level. The reasons for the double church are tolerably clear. First, the plot of land was given, a site which ofEered an incomparable opportunity for a bold builder like Elias; and the steepness of the hill rendered neces- sary either a large crypt or a lower church. Second, a double church had a special significance. The mon- astery of Sacro Speco, at Subiaco, built in honour of St. Benedict, the founder of the whole monastic system of the West, had two churches, one above the other. To follow that same plan would proclaim a happy parallel between St. Francis, the founder of a new great order, and his illustrious predecessor. The cathedral at Anagni, also, had a crypt so large as virtually to be a lower church ; and Pope Gregory, 350 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY a native of Anagni, who took the keenest interest in the new basilica, may have insisted upon follow- ing this precedent, especially as such a plan met the needs of the site. The lower church is dark, solemn, and majestic ; its vaults, austerely noble, even beautiful, impose si- lence and reverence. Its architecture, except where later bays and chapels have been added, is pure Lombard Eomanesque. In the upper church, on the contrary, the nave lifts exultingly its pointed vault- ing; shafts, ribs, windows, and, more than all, the apse, proclaim the triumph of the Northern ideas of ecclesiastical architecture. The exterior of the building has little of the Gothic about it, and the campanile is wholly in the Lombard style. The church is, in truth, far more Italian than French, and yet the French element is there, so that perhaps the most appropriate word to describe its architec- ture, one that asserts its Italian spirit, yet does not forget its relation with France, and at the same time serves to distinguish it from the Cistercian Gothic which preceded it, is Franciscan. The bold position of the church, its noble unity, its harmonious combination of certain minor Gothic attributes with the fundamental character of Lom- bard construction, its beauty, and its dignity, make it most impressive. Time has expiated Brother Elias's infidelity to Francis's memory, and we may be per- mitted to be unreservedly grateful to that stirring spirit for erecting a monument which has helped perpetuate the name of the saint. It will not let his own name pass unremembered. GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY 351 The Franciscan churches certainly followed the lead of the Cistercian churches. They exhibit vari- ous points of resemblance, just as the ideas and practice of the Franciscans resembled in certain matters the ideas and practice of the Cistercians. And there was perhaps some other obscure influence at work iu favour of the Northern fashion of con- struction ; for the primitive churches which Francis, in the first passion of his conversion, rebuilt with his own hands, have the pointed vault. This may have been due to the general French prestige that radiated from the civiUzation of ProvencQ, or, in- deed, to some Cistercian monks, or even to the chance presence of some Cistercian builder, for it is hard to suppose that Francis had an intuitive capacity to build in a strange style. The basilica itself owes its noble effect to the dar- ing use of a difficult situation, and could serve as model but to few churches. The main current of Franciscan architecture adopted a different system; in fact, it divided into two styles, of which one pre- vailed in Tuscany and Umbria, and the other in the northern part of Italy. The former, truer to Francis's idea of poverty, aimed at the simplest and most economical form of church. These churches were simple oblong buildings with wooden roofs: their transepts, which projected more or less, resembled the top bar of the letter T; the apse, which was barely more than a chapel, was vaulted, and on each side of it, to right and left, lesser chapels opened on the transepts like little booths ranged on one side of a street. Such was the type of the church which 352 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Brother Elias built at Cortona, as well as of those at Prato, Volterra, Pistoia, Peseia, Pisa, and Siena, and also of various Dominican churches in the same region. In almost every city and town in Italy both orders began to build; both built in rivalry, and both followed the same general architectural designs. This Tuscan-Umbrian style attained its best in the church of Santa Croce at Florence, which Arnolfo di Cambio, the great Florentine architect, began in 1294. The vast size of the church, which is near four hundred feet long, the plain, flat wooden roof over the central nave, and the stern simple pillars, express dignity and solemnity. The huge space is so obviously due to the mere desire to provide room for a worshipping throng and not to any vainglory, and the quiet space and noble amplitude are so soberly adapted to induce peace, contemplation, and prayer, that the ideal of St. Francis suffers less here, in his largest church, than in many another. Santa Croce is commonly called a Gothic church, but the adjec- tive has strayed far from the meaning it bears in France or England ; this Franciscan Gothic has a vault over the apse, a gable at the end, some pointed arches, a few Northern decorations, and no more, to entitle it to the name. Indeed, the main body of Santa Croce follows the traditional form of the Roman basilica. In North Italy all the cities built churches to St. Francis and to St. Dominic. In among the trading guilds and brawling nobles, as early as 1220, the monks, barefoot, frocked, and corded, went about GOTHIC AECHITECTUKE IN ITALY 353 founding missions and making proselytes. At first the Franciscans built little chapels or accepted bor- rowed churches ; then, as the Order grew, they built new churches of their own. In general trend this architecture follows the Cistercian model and pre- serves in one way or another certain characteristics of the Gothic style, but some Franciscan churches struggled for simplicity and followed a sort of mod- ified basilican type. One of the first cities to build a great church to St. Francis was Bologna. St. Francis had been in Bologna more than once ; there, in the piazza before the palace of the Commune, " shabbily dressed, mean in station, ugly of face," but shining in the glory of his enthusiasm, he had preached a notable sermon on angels, men, and demons. His disciples went to Bologna in the very beginning of the movement, and built a monastery larger than the parent model at the Portiuncula; they even dared to name a cell in which Francis had slept, "Francis's cell," as if he had had a place which he called his own. When Francis heard of it, in great indignation he ordered the brethren out and forbade them to live in such " sumptuous palaces." The second experiment in establishing a house for the friars was more successful. A short distance out of the town, Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, the earliest disciple, took up his abode in a little monas- tery beside a little church that had been given to him and his bretbren, and there he lived for twenty- five years ; but now that all of Bologna, not devoted to St. Dominic, was devoted to St. Francis, this church was both too little and too inconvenient for 354 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY the citizens and students. The Commune gave a new site hard by the city, just outside the walls, opposite the western gate. Porta Stieri, The new church, built of brick, was begun in 1236, and Innocent IV consecrated the high altar on his return from Lyons, although the roof had not been finished ; in 1263, thanks to an annual con- tribution from the Commune, the whole edifice was completed. The architect was from Brescia, Marco by name ; and the church is not Italian, but Trench. Marco da Brescia followed the models of the famous Cistercian churches at Clairvaux and Pontigny, and he went beyond them in real Gothic construction. Nave and aisles, pillared and vaulted, carving within and flying buttress without, follow the usual Gothic style ; and the choir has round it, in the fashion specially characteristic of northern France, a half- circle of radiating chapels. The church, which has undergone the most degrading vicissitudes of for- tune, gives little of the feehng of noble simplicity which it must have had in its first youth ; on the contrary, it leaves the impression of having suc- cumbed to the misadventures of life, and presents a bald, dull, dejected appearance to the visitor. After the church was erected the usual buildings gradually grew up beside it, a monastery, an hostelry for strangers, an infirmary, a cloister; and close by these buildings, all enclosed in the monastery wall, were the courts, the garden with its fruit trees and cypresses, the graveyard with its graves. Here many of the great jurists of the University were buried, sometimes in stately tombs raised high on GOTHIC AECHITECTURE IN ITAI.Y 355 columns and canopied after the Gothic fashion. There lay the bones of the learned Accursius, the great interpreter of Roman law, and in the same tomb was buried his son, Francesco. Hard by Odo- f redo was buried ; and close beyond Odofredo's tomb lies that of Eolandino dei Eomanzi, author of the first treatise on criminal law, De origine maleflci- oriim. Doctor Rolandino Passegieri, the spirited statesman, who in the name of the Commune of Bologna answered the Emperor's threats and refused to set Enzio free, belonged to the third order of St. Dominic, and his bones were buried in a canopied tomb near St. Dominic's church. These tombs are now in the heart of the city, for patriotism taking the fragments that remain, has reconstructed the old memorials and set them among the famous sights of Bologna. On the whole, the Cistercian French tradition made itself felt in all important ecclesiastical archi- tecture of the thirteenth century ; and yet the Fran- ciscan churches share the charming characteristic of .almost all Italian architecture, a self-indulgence in personal taste and a sacrifice of principle to caprice. They prefer to carry out the idea of the moment rather than the rules of orthodox practice. The Franciscan church erected at Padua in honour of St. Anthony is immoderately eclectic; it takes its choir from the French style and its cupolas from St. Mark's at Venice. But its irregular aspect is perhaps due to the various periods of its construction. Begun shortly after St. Anthony's canonization in 1232, it: was soon interrupted by the wars of the ferocious 356 ITALY m THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY Ezzelino, and afterwards straggled on through cent- uries. Perhaps the fantastic influence which the saint exercised on the popular imagination also touched the architects. This ardent young Portuguese, after having spent eight years over his books of theology, was suddenly aroused by the news of the martyrdom of some Franciscan friars in Morocco ; profoundly moved, he travelled to Assisi, and there he underwent the usual experience of those who listened to Francis preach the love of Jesus. He abandoned theology and the world. But the new spirit in the Franciscan Order, fanned by Gregory, then Cardinal Ugolino, and Brother Elias, was flaring up ; men of theologi- cal learning were necessary for the new purposes of the Order.' Anthony's genius for oratory was dis- covered, and he was sent about from city to city preaching peace, excepting in the south of Prance where his religion obliged him to hammer the here- tics. In this respect Anthony is the great link be- tween the Dominicans and the Franciscans. For a time he was a reader at the University of Bologna ; but preaching was his vocation. At last he settled in Padua, where old Salinguerra was lording it, and there after two years he died. Miracles immediately proved his sanctity, and later, as years went by, more and more marvellous stories clustered about his memory until legend, which in the stories about St. Francis is refined and delicate, passed into a degenerate baroque, and lost all human lineaments. If St. Anthony's legend, however, does not explain the wayward, fantastic, architecture of his church, ADdersoD, phot. CHURCH OF SANT ANTONIO Padua GOTHIC ARCHITECTUEE IN ITALY 357 his career helps justify the ecclesiastical exploitation of the Franciscan movement. The extraordinary emotional effects of his preaching before enormous crowds was the ecclesiastical answer to the Ghibel- line allegation that only the authority of the Empire could establish peace and maintain order. The Church, through Anthony and other friars both Franciscan and Dominican, said, in effect : we ap- peal for order to a higher principle, we ask for a more secure and a nobler basis for socials-regenera- tion, we call upon men to obey God and to love one another ; then, and not till then, will peace flourish in Italy. Both orders of mendicant friars most successfully appealed to the emotions, and the results are appar- ent to this day in the numberless churches that sprang up everywhere. The most important church that followed those at Bologna and Padua before the end of the century is the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence. In Milan a large Franciscan church was built which no longer exists. Everywhere the mendicant orders preserved the great French monastic traditions of church building. Even at Rome, in the very presence of the mighty basiUcas, the pointed arches and the dark solemn vaults of Santa Maria sopra Minerva show how firmly the Dominican monks held their architectural faith. In this way, throughout the greater part of Italy, the monastic churches, by their deferential accept- ance of the architectural ideas of Burgundy and the Ile-de-France, indicate how the deeper social forces 358 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUKY ■were gradually preparing the way for French policy to play its decisive part. The pointed arches of the Cistercian monks, like the songs of the troubadours and the heresies of the Cathari, lead to the battlefields of Benevento and Tagliacozzo, to the French ten- ancy of St. Peter's chair, to the outrage at Anagni, and to the Babylonish captivity at Avignon. CHAPTER XXV THE PROGRESS OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER (1226-1247) O that thon hadst hearkened to my commandments ! Then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness aa the waves of the sea. — Isaiah XLVin, 18. The course of pointed architecture from the Cister- cian monasteries at Fossanova and Casamari to the basilica at Assisi and the Franciscan churches in Bologna, Florence, Rome, and elsewhere, is interest- ing as a movement in architecture, a foreign inva- sion; but its significance is as the outward em- bodiment of the great unrest in religious life, the discontent of the human heart with what it had and a desire for something new and strange ; and the very in- congruity between the Italian and the Gothic elements seems to typify a fundamental discord. The amaz- ing vigour of the two new orders — for the Domin- icans pressed hard on the heels of the Franciscans in public favour — is proved by many things besides the churches, which, big and little, rose up in city, town, and village; and this vigour bears pathetic testimony to a widespread desire for peace, for calm, for security, for freedom to live in amity with the people of the next city and with one's own neigh- bours shut in by the same walls. But one head, one organization, one rule, cannot compel unity of spirit. Many joined the orders from a love of religion or from some other strong emotional impulse, but many 360 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY more from mixed motives. In fact, it became almost the fashion to belong to the third order in one of these two fraternities. The consequences of rapid growth were disastrous, at least to the Franciscan Order. Differences were emphasized, contrary be- liefs were magnified, dissension prospered, and the two parties, the worldly-wise and the zealots, the right and the extreme left, as we should say, became more and more estranged. St. Francis had recognized the need of greater worldly wisdom than he himself possessed in the government of the Order, and several years before his death had entrusted Brother Elias with the du- ties of minister-general; and Brother Elias acted as minister until the general chapter held in the spring of the year following Francis's death. By that time the zealots had begun to express their dissatisfaction and to organize a political campaign against the worldly-wise. Perhaps it was then that Brother Leo wrote his recollections of St. Francis, now called Speculum Perfectionis, for in some respects the book seems to be a partisan tract written to expose the contrast between the ideals of the saint and the ideals of Elias. At any rate the brethren who were of the same way of thinking as Leo were strong enough to defeat Elias and to elect their candidate for minister-general, John Parenti, a man, however, of no great force of character. The defeated party did not rest idle. Gregory IX was behind them, and at his request, one of the brothers, Thomas of Celano, a man of literary edu- cation, composed a biography of St. Francis, which PROGRESS OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER 361 may be considered a sort o£ official biography, writ- ten, but by no means unworthily, from a point o£ view favourable to the worldly-wise party. The new life displayed a strong bias towards Brother Elias ; for instance, according to Thomas of Celano, St, Francis gave his special blessing to Brother Elias, while according to Leo's biography he gave his special blessing to Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, the first disciple and one of the zealots. The success of this book, as well as the Pope's support, and the general feeling that executive talents of a high order, such as Elias notoriously possessed, should not lie unused, kept Brother Elias in his office as head of the works at Assisi, and at the chapter of 1232 caused his elec- tion as minister-general. Elias was a very gifted man. If one were to pro- long the parallel between the stories of St. Francis and of Christ, which the Franciscans have always loved to draw, one might almost compare the role of Elias to that of St. Paul, so powerfully did he influence the Order during a few years, and so in- sistent was he on missions to foreign lands. Elias was born hard by Assisi, his mother's city. His father came from near Bologna. In early manhood Elias earned his living as a mattress-maker, and then as a schoolmaster. He was eager to get a good education, and managed to go to Bologna, where he obtained the post of scriptor, a special officer charged appar- ently with certain duties of a notary or of a reader. He acquired a reputation for learning; even his enemies admitted his knowledge, which the zealots no doubt regarded as one sin the more. 362 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY The election of Elias marked the complete triumph of the worldly-wise and the discomfiture of the spiritual-minded. The only element in his policy which received the approbation of the whole Order was that he supported and advocated foreign mis- sions with all the native energy of his character. Dur- ing his administration the doctrine of poverty was radically changed, or rather it was thrown overboard. The Order not only accepted property, but begged for it. The legal distinction between the ownership of land and the use of land, by which the technical property of land is vested in a trustee and all the beneficial use of it in the cestui que trust, was em- ployed to evade the fundamental principle of the Order. Gregory IX sanctioned this device, and In- nocent IV confirmed it. The title to land was taken in the name of the Pope, and the brethren occupied the land and acted in every respect as owners except in accepting the name of property-owners. The same contrivance was resorted to for personal property. The title was taken in the name of some trustee, who was declared by papal edict responsible to the Order. In this way a veil was thrown over the violated vow. The rule also was remodelled in the interest of the world and of the Church, and the passionate testament of the founder was left to be cherished by the scanty band who persisted obstinately in their belief that it is possible to realize a kingdom of heaven on earth. The little chapel of the Portiuncula was no longer suffered to retain the name given it by St. Francis, Caput et Mater Ordinis; that title was taken from it and be- stowed upon the great, new basilica rapidly building PROGRESS OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER 363 under the energetic control of the minister-general. It would be unjust to think either Pope Gregory or Brother Elias indifferent to Francis's memory; they could not act otherwise than they did because they entertained an unshakable belief in the impractica- bility of Francis's ideas. Besides this, the Pope could not have been blind to the very great importance of the wandering friars in his struggle with the Emperor. Not only in Italy, but also through all Christendom, the friars pleaded and preached the papal cause ; and the most capable and distinguished members of the Order, Brother Elias, Brother Anthony, — St. An- thony of Padua, as he is now called, — and John Parenti, who for a short time was the minister-gen- eral, were employed on political errands. The zealots did not accept with meekness the tri- umph of the worldly-wise. A little incident shows the temper on both sides. At the beginning of the work upon the basilica, Elias put up a marble box in a conspicuous place for public offerings ; Leo, scan- dalized and indignant, broke it, and Elias had Leo beaten. Feeling ran high. The zealots endured as best they could several years of Elias's administra- tion, and then the most fervent disciples of the Franciscan ideal — Leo, Angelo, Masseo, Caesar of Spires — disregarded his authority and agitated openly against him. Things came to such a pass that Elias asked for special authority to punish them, and the Pope granted his request. Caesar of Spires was put in prison ; and his gaoler, mistaking or pretending to mistake his stepping out of doors for an attempt to escape, struck him with a club and 364 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY killed him. Elias put others also in prison, some he unfrocked, and some, under pretence of missionary work, he exiled. But at last the tide turned ; different motives affected different men, and there were so many motives at work that a majority of those who had a right to attend a chapter-general ranged themselves in opposition. The clerks, jealous of their clerical prerogatives, were ofEended because Elias admitted laymen to the Order and, more offended, because he appointed them to important posts as readily as he did clerks. Others were displeased by his overbearing manners or his neglect of the com- mon conventionalities of monastic life ; for Elias lived in comfort and in luxury, he had pages to wait upon him, he went about on horseback and never on foot, he neglected to make his ministerial rounds from monastery to monastery, he dined alone, and kept one brother, with a special gift for cooking, as chief cook. But more than other faults, his arbitrary conduct irritated the brothers. Under Elias the Order was not a fraternal, demo- cratic body, but a monarchy, in which Elias's single will was law. He did not convoke the chapters-gen- eral ; he appointed and removed provincial ministers at his good pleasure ; and he was always demanding money for the basilica. Some suspected that the moneys contributed were ill-used ; others, who would not go so far as to entertain that evil suspicion, thought that without gifts a petitioner got no hear- ing. Others gossiped that Elias meddled with al- chemy. But of all the measures and doings that brought him unpopularity, one in chief caused his PEOGKESS OF THE FEANCISCAN OEDER 365 fall. This was his system of visitors. He appointed a set of officials for each province to go about and inspect the monasteries. These visitors sometimes stayed for weeks at a monastery; they heard com- plaints, changed regulations, and made a report to Elias. Naturally the heads of the monastic houses got angry, and were quite ready to join the oppo- sition to the minister-general. The ministers across the Alps were especially hostile. A chapter-general was held in Rome in May, 1239 ; and charges against the minister-general were laid before the Pope himself. The leader of the malcon- tents was Brother Aymon, an Englishman, professor at the University of Paris; a strong majority sup- ported him. The moment was critical for the Papacy; the desperate struggle with the House of Hohen- staufen had begun, not two months before the Pope had excommunicated the Emperor, and he could not afford to disregard the will of an angry majority. Besides, Elias had been a somewhat lukewarm par- tisan of the Papacy, he was even on friendly terms with Frederick. Whatever force, much or little, was to be given to the charges against Elias, Pope Greg- ory, under the pressure of political exigency, could come to but one conclusion. He stated that " he had put in Elias as minister-general because he thought the whole Order wanted him, and now that Elias displeased them, he relieved him of his charge." The Pope's statement shows how complete was the papal control over the Order. That the fall of Elias was not due in the main to the zealots, but to the opponents of autocratic rule, 366 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTUEY appears from the fact that the new minister-general Albert of Pisa (1239-124:0), and his immediate suc- cessors, Aymon, chief of the malcontents (1240- 1244), and Crescentius of Jesi (1244^1247), all belonged to the practical party, and that under In- nocent IV the rule was not stiffened, but on the contrary still further relaxed. Nevertheless the true disciples of St. Francis continued to struggle, and in the end their time came. In 1247 they elected Brother John of Parma minister-general. > Elias, after his deposition, retired to Cortona, on the southern borders of Tuscany, where he founded another churchin honour of the saint whom he loved in his own way; but he quarrelled still further with the brothers opposed to him, and in fear or anger or hope of revenge, fled to the Emperor Frederick, who had always liked him, finding something sym- pathetic perhaps in his energetic and authoritative character. The Emperor received him warmly, and employed him on a diplomatic mission of importance. To consort with a man under the ban of the Church was an act of ecclesiastical rebellion, and Gregory ex- communicated him as a renegade. Nevertheless Elias still had faithful partisans, and after the election of Innocent IV to the Papacy, a movement was set on foot to reinstate him in the Order. John of Parma, a noble and generous person, begged him to come back, but in vain. He was recalcitrant, and his enemies were unforgiving. He died in 1253 in enmity to the Order, but reconciled to the Church. At his last communion he asked to hear the peni- tential psalms, and after hearing them exclaimed, PROGRESS OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER 367 "God have mercy upon me, for I am a sinner." One month later, on May 25, Innocent IV consecrated the Upper Church of Assisi, the great memorial to Brother Elias as well as to St. Francis, John of Parma, the new minister-general elected in 1247, was a very different sort of person. He was a holy man, and believed with all his heart in the ideals of St. Francis. On his election Brothers Egidio, Masseo, Angelo, and Leo burst into trans- ports of joy because they thought that in him the spirit of St. Francis had returned to triumph upon - earth : " Bene et opportune venisti sed venisti tarde — You have come well and opportunely, but you have come late." And John of Parma did his best to fulfil their hopes. He went about from monastery to monastery urging the brethren to return to the teachings of their founder; he comforted the sor- rowful, rescued the wicked from their wickedness, ministered to the sick, cherished the weak, and gladly taught the ignorant. Best of all, he was as enthusi- astic in his acceptance of the doctrine of poverty as Francis himself. He wrote a little book entitled, The holy commerce between St. Francis and Lady Poverty. He says: "Among the shining virtues that prepare in man a dwelling-place for God and show him the most excellent and expeditious way to come to God, Holy Poverty stands preeminent, and by a special grace surpasses in desert all other virtues, since she is the foundation and guardian of them all. Among evangelical virtues she comes first in place and in honour. They that build upon this rock need not fear the fall of rain, the beating of 368 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY waves, or the blasts of wind that threaten ruin. And she deserves her honour, since the Son of God, the Lord of righteousness, the King of glory, working His work of salvation in the world sought her, found her, and clave unto her with an especial love." The triumph of the spiritual-minded in the Fran- ciscan Order did not mean the triumph of peace. Per- haps these zealots were not without a touch of spir- itual pride. They were now free to extol poverty to their hearts' content, they were free to live, like »the old Greek hermits of Calabria, in remote places, singly or in twos and threes, and to do whatever mia:ht seem best to conduce to a direct communion with God; but they could not help noticing that their doctrines and practices, which they had received from St. Francis, and he had had from the Gospels, were markedly different, if not from the doctrines at least from the practices of the worldly-wise part of the Order and also from the practice of the Church. They professed humble obedience to established au- thority, but their notions were fatally at odds with the orthodox ecclesiastical system, and they did not forbear to lay stress on the disagreement. Here were irreconcilable elements doomed to rend the Order for hundreds of years. It almost seemed as if St. Francis had followed the footsteps of his master even to the point of bringing not peace, but a sword into the world. Aspirations to realize a kingdom of God on earth as St. Francis understood it, and the prac- tical sense of sagacious men, and the greed and de- sires of ambitious men, strove and struggled with one another. Not only within the Order was there PROGRESS OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER 369 dissension ; but also without, between the Order and the ecclesiastical world. The enormous popularity of the Order had, as it were, shifted the centre of gravity in religious mat- ters. The parochial congregations were diminished, the priests' revenues fell off, their privileges tumbled in value. Almost everybody went to hear the friars preach, almost everybody gave offerings and alms to the friars, almost everybody wished to be shrived and buried by them. The secular clergy were injured in their immemorial fees and perquisites. Besides this, the more fiery monks, like Anthony of Padua, de- nounced in unmeasured terms the riches of the priest- hood, their sensuality, and their lust of power. The secular clergy were not only hurt in property and in their dignity, but they were insulted besides. A shriek of indignation went up from Sicily to Eng- land; the friars thundered back counter-denuncia- tions. The secular priests, the Benedictine monks, the Emperor's courtiers, vied with one another in reproaches, making little or no distinction between the zealots and the unscrupulous, worldly-minded men, who had joined the Order in such large num- bers. They accused the friars of avarice, rapacity, hypocrisy, of insinuating themselves into the confi- dence of simple women, of superstitious sinners on their death-beds, of credulous kings; they charged them with the seven deadly sins; they likened them to wolves in sheeps' clothing, to whitened sepulchres, fair on the outside, but within fuU of dead men's bones. It is hard to say what truth, and how much, lies under these angry words. On the one hand, there 370 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY were men like John of Parma, true, pure, honour- able, devoted ; on the other, there were many men in the Order utterly devoid of principle, who had joined it from vulgar motives. And there were many, who, whether they were men of principle or not, brought down upon themselves and their Order all kinds of op- probrium because they were tax-gatherers, employed by the papal court to collect, in disregard of precedent, by stretch of power, by hook and by crook, enough money to supply the swelling needs of the papal ex- chequer. Naturally the popes inclined to back the friars through thick and thin, not merely because they found the friars serviceable tax-gatherers and news-bearers (or, as their enemies said, scandal-mon- gers), but because they recognized the immense importance of keeping the friars' genuine religious fervour tightly harnessed to the papal car. In this way currents and counter-currents troubled the re- ligious waters, rendered turbid enough already by the war between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufens. CHAPTER XXVI THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM (1247-1257) As ships, becalm'd at eve, that lay With canvas droopii^, side by side. Two towers of sail at dawn of day Are scarce long leagues apart descried ; At dead of night their sails were fill'd. And onward each rejoicing steer'd — Ah, neither blame, for neither will'd. Or wist, what first with dawn appear'd ! A. H. Clough. Dissension did not confine itself to disputes as to whether the ideas and practices of the Franciscans conformed with the ideas and practices of St. Fran- cis, but reached out to the more serious question as to whether the doctrines of the Order conformed with the doctrines of the Church, The outside world, censorious and jealous, as I have said, — the secular clergy, the Benedictine monks, the univer- sity professors, — did not stop to discriminate be- tween the spiritual and the worldly-wise parties in the Order ; wherever they found a cause or an ex- cuse for an accusation, they flung the accusation at the whole Order. It was absurd to charge the spir- itual-minded brethren with avarice, and it was ab- surd to charge the worldly-wise with false doctrine ; but jealousy blindly threw her calumnies at the whole Order without discrimination. The spiritual- minded, it is true, laid themselves open to a cer- 372 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY tain suspicion of deviation from orthodoxy ; in their desperate hopes to find a world more in sympathy with their ascetic ideals, some of the brethren, here and there, laid hold of the old ideas of Abbot Joachim. This was dangerous ground. Nobody could pretend ignorance of the fundamental ortho- dox belief. The Lateran Council, under the guid- ance of the great Innocent III, had stated this belief explicitly : — " We firmly believe and unfeignedly acknowledge that the very God is one only, eternal, immeasurable, unchangeable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and ineffable, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost ; three persons, indeed, but one essence, substance, or nature; the Father unbegotten, but the Son begot- ten by the Father, and the Holy Ghost proceeding equally from both, without beginning and without end ; the Father begetting, the Son begotten, and the Holy Ghost proceeding ; of one substance, co- equal, co-omnipotent and co-eternal; one source of all things ; the creator of all things, visible and invisi- ble, spiritual and corporeal, who by His omnipotent power in the beginning of time out of nothing created both the spiritual and the corporeal creature, to wit, the angelic and the earthly, and afterward the human, made of the spiritual and the corporeal. The Devil and other demons were created by God naturally good, and of themselves they became bad. Man sinned at the suggestion of the Devil. " The Holy Trinity, individual according to its common essence and separate as to its personal qualities, by Moses first, and in the due order of time THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 373 by the holy prophets and its other servants, laid the foundation of the doctrine of salvation for the human race. "And finally, Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, incarnate by the Holy Trinity acting as one, conceived by the Virgin Mary through the opera- tion of the Holy Ghost, made very man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh, o;ie person in two natures, pointed out the way of life more mani- festly ; who the while according to His divine nature was immortal and unsusceptible of death and pain, and yet He himself according to His human nature subject to pain and to death; who, also, for the human race suffered upon the cross and died. He descended into hell. He rose again in the flesh, and ascended both in the spirit and in the flesh, to come at the end of the world to judge the quick and the dead and to reward each according to his works, the evil as well as the good, who shall all rise again with their own bodies which they now wear that they may receive according to their works, whether they shall have been good or evil, the latter with the Devil to everlasting punishment, the former with Christ to glory everlasting. " There is one Universal Church of the Faith out- side of which none shall be saved, in which Jesus Christ, the sacrifice, is the priest, whose body and blood are verily contained in the sacrament on the altar under the form of bread and wine, the bread by divine power transubstantiate into His body and the wine into His blood so that for the fulfilment of the mystery of union we may ourselves receive from 374 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY His Nature what He Himself received from ours. And therefore none can celebrate this sacrament ex- cept the priest who was duly ordained according to the keys of the Church, which Jesus Christ Himself gave to the apostles and their successors. " The sacrament of baptism, which both for child- ren and adults shall be celebrated in water with in- vocation to God and to the undivided Trinity, to wit, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, by whatever rite conferred according to the forms of the Church, avails for salvation. And if after bap- tism any one shall fall back into sin, he can always reinstate himself by true penitence." This definite creed of the Church was obviously out of accord with Joachim's somewhat fantastic doctrine ; the creed was eminently Christian and re- volved upon the part played by Christ in the scheme of salvation and not upon that played by the Holy Ghost. The doctrine of the Trinity in itself was a nice matter, and for person^ not endowed with a special gift for theological orthodoxy it was better to let it alone ; Abbot Joachim had been condemned by the Lateran Council for his attempt to meddle with it. But the peril of meddling with orthodox truth became vastly more perilous when practical consequences began to flow from this meddling; and the peril was insidious because it was easy for a credulous mind, with a will to believe in happier things, to slip and slide from Joachim's less unortho- dox theories to his more unorthodox speculations. In John of Parma's time Joachim's ideas, distorted, and mingled with many spurious additions, took THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 375 definite heretical shape. For years strange prophe- cies, fantastic interpretations of prophets curiously classed together, — Jer^iah, Ezekiel, Merlin, the Erythraean Sibyl, — had been passed round under Joachim's name ; wandering friars had carried these notions from monastery to monastery ; and many of the spiritual-minded began to think that the time was at hand which Joachim had foretold, when An- tichrist should come, and after Antichrist the new dispensation of the Holy Ghost. Some went into the matter of exact fulfilment and applied the verses of Isaiah or of Revelation to local events then happen- ing, to the Emperor Frederick, to the length of his life, to the manner in which he should die, and so forth. Brother Salimbene, of Parma (the Franciscan monk whose memoirs are the most famous of the century) records how widespread these ideas were and what a strong hold they had taken. For instance, he draws the following picture of a Franciscan monk of the Joachimite faction in 1248. Brother Hugo, of Digne, a famous preacher, was sojourning at Hyeres, a little town in Provence on the Mediterranean coast. Several other monks of different orders were there at the same time ; some had gone on purpose to see him, others were there in the course of their journeyings. One day these monks were chatting together after breakfast, and one of them. Brother Johnny, a chorister from Naples, a Joachimite, said to a Dominican : " Brother Peter, what do you think of Abbot Joachim's doc- trine ? " Brother Peter answered : " I care as much 376 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY for Joachim as I do for the fifth wheel of a coach." At this Johnny ran off to Brother Hugo's room, and cried, in the hearing of all : " There 's a Do- minican monk here who does n't believe in Joachim's doctrine ! " To this Hugo answered : " What 's that to me ? If he does n't believe, that is his lookout. When troubles provide his eyes with powers of sight, they will open. But bid him come and discuss. Let 's hear what he doesn't believe." The Dominican con- sented, but reluctantly, partly because he thought meanly of Joachim, and partly because he did not think there was anybody in the house who was his equal in knowledge either of the humanities or of Holy Scripture. When Brother Hugo saw him, he said : " Are you the man who does n't believe in Joachim's ideas?" Brother Peter : "Yes." Brother Hugo : " Have you ever read Joachim ? " Brother Peter : " Yes, I 've read him carefully." Brother Hugo : " I believe you 've read him as a woman reads the psalter ; when she 's come to the end she does n't know what she read at the begin- ning. There are many who stand over a book and do not understand it, either because they despise what they read, or because their foolish hearts are in the dark. Now, tell me what you want to hear about Joachim, so that we may know what you don't believe." Brother Peter : " I want you to prove to me out of Isaiah, according to Joachim, that the life of the Emperor Frederick will end at the age of seventy, THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 377 and also that he cannot die except by the hand of God, — I mean by a natural death." Brother Hugo : " Very good. Only listen patiently and don't interrupt with vexatious questions, for it is necessary to approach Joachim's doctrine with an open mind. " Abbot Joachim was a holy man and he said that the future events which he prophesied had been re- vealed to him by God for the good of men. As re- gards the true sanctity of Joachim's life, besides what we are told in his biography, I can cite one instance, which shows his extraordinary patience. When he was a simple monk, before he was made abbot, the brother in charge of the refectory was angry with him, and for a whole year always put water in his cup for him to drink, in order to serve him with the bread of tribulation and the water of anguish. Joachim bore this patiently without a complaint. At the end of the year, however, he sat next the Abbot at table, and the Abbot said to him, 'Why do you drink white wine and not give me any? Is that your good manners?' The blessed Joachim answered, 'I was ashamed. Father, to offer it to you, because my secret is my secret.' Then the Abbot took Joachim's cup to try the wine and took a sip, and perceived that it was a pretty poor affair. So when he had tasted the water (not converted into wine) he said, ' What is water, but water ? ' and turning to Joa- chim, ' By whose authority do you drink this drink ? ' and Joachim answered, ' Father, water is a very tem- perate drink, it does not impede the tongue, nor cause intoxication, nor babbling.' But when the 378 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY Abbot learned from the other brothers that this wrong had been done Joachim out of malice and spite by the brother in charge of the refectory, he wished to expel him from the Order; but Joachim flung himself at the Abbot's feet and besought him so earnestly that the Abbot forbore to expel the wrong-doer. Nevertheless, he scolded him good and hard: 'You have violated the rule and so I impose this penance, that for a whole year you shall drink nothing but water, because you have despitefuUy used your neighbour and your brother.' "Now about the life of the Emperor Frederick, that it shall end according to Isaiah, you have it in the place where he speaks of the burden of Tyre, Isaiah, chap, xxiii, vv. 13-15: 'Behold the land of the Chaldeans; this people was not, till the As- syrian founded it . . . And it shall come to pass in that day, that Tyre shall be forgotten seventy years according to the days of one king.' . . . Re- mark that in this passage Joachim understands the 'land of the Chaldeans' to be the Roman Em- pire and by ' the Assyrian ' Frederick himself, and by ' Tyre ' Sicily ; he understands by * the days of one king' the whole life of Frederick, and he takes seventy years as the term of life fixed by Merlin. "As to the prophecy that Frederick cannot be killed by man, but only by God, Isaiah says, chap- ter XXXI, 'the Assyrian shall not fall by the sword of a hero, nor shall the sword of man devour him. And he shall not flee from the face of the sword, and his young men shall be tributary. And for fear THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 379 his strength shall pass, and his princes flying shall tremble. The Lord hath spoken, -whose fire is in Zion and his furnace in Jerusalem.' All this was fulfilled in regard to Frederick, especially at Parma, where he was routed by the garrison and his fort * Victory' was destroyed ; and [afterwards], for the barons of his kingdom often wanted to kill him, but they could not." Brother Peter: "You can tell all that to those who believe you; but you can never persuade me to believe you." Brother Hugo : " Why not ? Don't you believe the prophets ? " Brother Peter : " Of course I do, but tell me is what you expound to me Isaiah's original meaning, or is it an inference, twisted and distorted, or in- terpreted, so as to apply?"" Brother Hugo : " That's a sensible question. I an- swer that it is an application of Isaiah's statement. ... In Holy Writ besides the literal or matter of fact meaning, there are allegorical, analogical, trop- ological, moral, and mystical meanings ; and there- fore the matter is judged more useful and more noble than if, squeezed and compressed into one meaning only, it could only have a single significa- tion. Do you believe this, or does your skepticism go so far as to deny that ? " Brother Peter : "I believe that and I have often taught it, because that is the teaching of the theolo- gians; but I should like you to explain a little more clearly about the seventy years that Isaiah predicates under the allegory of * Tyre,' and about the days of 380 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY * one king ' that he predicates under the figure of the Emperor," Brother Hugo : [avoiding the question] " The things that Merlin, the inspired English prophet, prophesied about Frederick I, and about Henry VI, his son, and about Frederick II, will be found to be true. But let us leave side issues and stick to those with which our discussion began. Let us, therefore, take up the four periods which Merlin predicates in speaking of Frederick II. First he stated, ' In thirty- two years he will fall ' ; that may be understood to be from his coronation as Emperor to the end of his life, because he reigned thirty years and eleven days [21] and then was not believed to be dead, so that the prophecy of the Sibyl should be fulfilled which says, 'It shall be rumoured among the people, he lives and he does not live.' [This conversation took place in 1248, and Frederick died December 13, 1250. The passage is very obscure ; perhaps Salimbene al- tered and botched it at a later date.] " Merlin's second period is : * He shall live in pros- perity seventy-two years.' As Frederick is still living those who survive him will see how that comes out. " Merlin's third period is : * And two times quin- quagenarian he will be treated gently.' That must not be understood as twice a quinquagenarian, as that would make him a hundred years old, but as fifty and then two, that is fifty-two years old. That num- ber may be reckoned from the year in which his mother was married [1185] up to the eighteenth year of his reign [1237, the date of Frederick's defeat at Parma], which makes fifty-two years. . . THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 381 " Merlin's fourth period for Frederick is : ' Aud after the eighteenth year from his anointment, he will hold his kingdom in spite of envy.' This is fulfilled in respect to Gregory IX with whom Frederick quarrelled so that the Pope excommunicated him, and yet he still holds his realm in spite of the Pope, the cardinals, and the princes of the Empire." When Brother Peter heard this he began to mut- ter ambiguously : " Many foods are in the Tillage of the Fathers; but one kind is better than another." Brother Hugo answered : " Don't tamper with Holy Writ; but give your authority as it stands in the texts; you have left out the end of one verse and the beginning of the other. Give the first verse as the Wise Man gives it in the Proverbs, chapter xiii." [" Many foods are in the Tillage of the Fathers ; and some mix them together with lack of judgment." Prov. XIII, 23.J Brother Peter, hearing this, did as some do when they are getting the worst of an argument, he began to upbraid and said, " It would be hereti- cal to take the words of infidels for testimony ; I mean Merlin, whose testimony you have quoted." At this Brother Hugo got very much provoked, and said to him : "You lie, and I will prove that you have lied ever so many times." Hugo then began to quote poetry, and Peter, hoping to better his side of the argument, had recourse to the texts of the saints and the sayings of philosophers ; but Brother Hugo, who was most learned in all those matters, quickly got him entangled and shut him up. Such disputes must have taken place in many a monastery ; they do not, as we look through the haze 382 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY of time and changed ideas, seem edifying, but, at least in those cases where one of the disputants was as amiable as Brother Peter, no harm was done. At other times, speculations with very little savour of orthodoxy were whispered about in northern Italy and in Provence, old homes of heresy ; and, at last, these whisperings took definite shape. One of the believers in Joachim's prophecies. Brother Gerard, of Borgo San Donnino (a little town on the Via Emilia nearly midway between Piacenza and Parma), wrote a book called The Introduction to the Eter- nal Evangile. Nothing could have been more radi- cal, more revolutionary, than this book. It flung down a challenge to orthodox Christianity. Brother Gerard's plan was to publish Joachim's authentic works, The Concord between the Old and New Testaments, The Commentary on the Apocalypse, and The Psalter of Ten Chords ; and by way of preface he wrote an introduction of his own, in which he not only explained Joachim's doctrine, but went so far as to assert that these treatises of Jo- achim's actually constituted The Eternal Evangile which was destined to supersede the previous two evangiles, the Old and New Testaments. This sub- stitution of a new. regime for the Christian regime, this revolutionary coming of the Holy Ghost, neces- sarily overtoppled the whole fabric of ecclesiastical Christianity. Under the new dispensation the Fran- ciscan friars would supersede the priests and all the official hierarchy ; bishops, cardinals, the Pope him- self, would follow the Levites of the Old Testament into the limbo of cast-off things. Even the revered THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 383 name of Joachim could not veil the awful nakedness of this heresy. The doctors of the University of Paris, the great centre of theology, shared to the full the dislike which the secular clergy entertained towards the friars. Both Franciscans and Dominicans, having Already forced their way into every diocese and par- ish, were also forcing their way into chairs of public instruction in Paris. The doctors were jealous and angry. They had now an opportunity of revenge. No doubt they persuaded themselves, as persons an- imated by righteous indignation often do, that they acted from a sentiment of impartial justice. The cause of scholasticism was threatened by mysticism, the cause of the Church was challenged by a new heresy ; and the professors of the University girded themselves as champions of orthodoxy. William of Saint Amour, a noted professor of philosophy, a doctor of the Sorbonne, and rector of the University, preached against the book and sent a committee to lay charges before the Pope. Brother Gerard had not put his name to the book, but it was obviously written by a Franciscan friar of the spiritual-minded party. This was the main reason that induced the Univer- sity of Paris to attack the book; they could not attack the Order directly, for it was too strongly en- trenched in the good graces of the Papacy, and had not exposed itself to any legal complaint, but they could attack it indirectly through this extravagant book, that showed itself, like the heel of Achilles, defenceless to a well-directed shaft. Feeling ran high. The hate of the accusers was so strong that, accord* 384 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ing to the papal bull which judged the charges, they falsely and maliciously altered the meaning of the text. The Pope appointed a committee of cardinals to examine the charges ; the committee acted pru- dently and reasonahly, they found nothing heretical in the text of Joachim's books, but they condemned the introduction. The Pope confirmed their findings; but though he condemned the heresy, he was care- ful not to let the condemnation hurt the Brothers Minor. " We wish," the bull says, " to keep the name and fame of the Poor of Christ, the Order of the be- loved Brothers Minor, always unhurt and untouched, . . . therefore we command you by these presents to proceed so prudently, so cautiously, in the execution of this apostolic mandate that these Brothers shall incur no opprobrium, no ill-repute, and that their rivals and detractors shall not find means to speak ill of them." Brother Gerard was deposed from his office of lector, deprived of the rights to preach and to hear confession, and of other sacerdotal prerogatives, also. His book was condemned to be burnt. This punish- ment satisfied the demands of ecclesiastical justice ; but the worldly-wise party in the Order were not ap- peased. They thought that the fanaticism or stupid- ity of Brother Gerard in propounding a heresy, with which they had no sympathy, brought the Order into disrepute, and they punished him on their own ac- count. He was put in prison, set in the stocks, and served with " the bread of tribulation and the water of anguish " ; and finally when he died his body was denied consecrated ground and the rites of ecclesi- astical burial. THE DISCIPLES OF JOACHIM 385 Brother Gerard was not the only one to suffer. William of Saint Amour, the professor, also went too far. Encouraged by his success against poor Gerard, he published a very violent book against the mendicant orders. The Pope would not tolerate such a plain breach of his command. The professor was turned out of his chair ; he was stripped of his rights to preach and to teach, and even banished from France. And the quarrel did not stop there. The two wings of the Order clashed again ; the seeds of discord sown even in Francis's lifetime brought forth a fresh harvest of docks and darnels. The heresy of the Eternal Evangile was too useful a weapon to be lightly abandoned. The worldly-wise party at- tacked the minister-general, John of Parma. With- out doubt a majority of the brethren, probably a large majority, was opposed to him. Many found his strict observance of the rule irksome. They had asked for relaxation, and he had refused to grant it. Some, under pretext of serving a bishop or other prelate, had attempted to shirk prescribed duties; some had tried to organize independent groups within the Order ; some had wanted to establish new provin- cial districts in foreign parts; but John of Parma had sternly held them to obedience. In retaliation they charged him with sundry misbehaviours : that he had rejected all interpretations of the rule, even those that had received papal sanction ; that he had added to the rule, as if they were a part of it, the provisions of St. Francis's testament ; that he had predicted (poor man) a division in the Order ; that be shared certain heretical opinions held by the dis- 386 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ciples of Joachim ; and they demanded his removal. The poor minister-general, conscious as he must have been of the contrast between the ascetic ideal of St. Francis and the practical duties incumbent upon the minister-general of a great order, just as Francis him- self had felt it, and not wishing to retain the office if he did not fill it acceptably, yielded to the clam- our against him and resigned. The Pope, Alexan- der IV, who doubtless regarded the resignation as desirable under the circumstances, accepted it; and Brother Bonaventura, the saintly scholar, who had already made a great reputation at the University of Paris, was elected in his stead. Brother J'ohn, once again a simple friar, found greater pleasure in his freedom than he had ever done in his high office. He betook himself to the hermitage at Greccio, the spot where his beloved mas- ter, St. Francis, had celebrated the manger scene in memory of their common Master, and there lived as a hermit; but, though he refused high honours that were afterwards offered him, he did not wholly forsake the world, and he was greatly beloved by the highest dignitaries. Innocent IV, hard hater that he was, loved Brother John like his own soul, and was wont to kiss him when they met. Other popes, cardinals as well, and even the Emperor of the Greeks, Vataces, to whom John went upon an em- bassy, entertained great affection for him. He died a very old man in 1298. CHAPTER XXVII MANFRED (1250-1260) Biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto, Purgatorio, m, 107. Fair he was, and beautiful, and of noble aspect. Lo cavalero piil fine, Ch'^ fiore gibellino Soyr' ogn' altro latino Old Sienese Rhymes. The cavalier most fine, He is the flower Ghibelline Beyond every other Latin. It is necessary to return to the poKtical situation. The last act of the great drama of the Hohenstaufens in Italy draws to its close. On Frederick's death, his son Conrad IV, who had already been crowned King of the Romans, was confronted in Germany by the pretender, William of Holland ; but Conrad's title was generally acknowledged. His life, however, was short, and he played but a brief part in the his- tory of Italy. Manfred is the last notable Hohenstau- fen champion, and there are few more dashing and charming figures than he. As gallant as his brother Enzio, as well endowed perhaps with intellectual gifts as his father and less treacherous than he, Manfred doughtily maintained the high Hohenstaufen tradition; and the verses of Dante, who met him " fair and beautiful and of noble aspect" at the foot of the Mount of Purgatory, 388 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY have given an immortal glamour and pathos to his name. Elsewhere Dante speaks of those " two illus- trious heroes, the Emperor Frederick and his high- born son Manfred, who showed the nobility and rectitude of their characters, and, while fortune re- mained loyal to them, attached themselves to the higher pursuits of man and scorned what was un- worthy." Besides what Dante says there is abundant testi- mony from both Guelf and Ghibelline to Manfred's rare and attractive qualities. In person he was of medium height and agreeable presence, with light hair like all the Hohenstaufens ; his face was comely, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes sparkling, and his complexion very fair. According to a Guelf chronicler : " He was proficient in the liberal arts, the first among the nobility in courage and dili- gence, and he was handsomer and more gifted than his brothers ; he might well be called the Lucifer of his family." And a Ghibelline says : " Nature en- dowed him with all the graces, and fashioned all parts of his body in such well-according beauty that there was no part that could be bettered." This same Ghibelline historian, partly out of senti- ment and partly, unless I do him wrong, to show his own literary talents, adds : " He was so like his father that he was well called Manfred, Manens Fredericks, as if Frederick still remained in him, or Manus Frederici, the hand of Frederick, or Men- f red, mens Frederici, the mind of Frederick, or mons Fredirici, the monument of Frederick." But for a dearth of vowels he would have gone on further; MANFRED 389 yet he has said enough to show that in the opinion of Manfred's contemporaries Frederick had left a worthy son. Even the court poet of his successful rival cannot forbear to praise him : Biaua chevaliers et preus et sages fu M'ainfrois, De toutes bonnes teches entechies els courtois ; En lui ne faloit riei^s fors que seulement fois, Mais ceste faut.e est laid en contes et en rois. A handsome cavalier, knightly and \rise was he, With all good qualities endowed, and courtesy ; He had no lack, except one single thing, — True faith, — an ugly fault in count or king. The poet spoke, truly. Manfred's lack of faith, in its larger sense of submission to the papal creed, politi- cal as well aS; theological, cost him his crown and his life. Manfred was but nineteen years pld when his father died, but even then he showed that he had inherited his father's suppleness and readiness of resource. During Conrad's stay in Germany he acted as royal lieutenant in The Kingdom ; and there was much to do, for, as soon as Frederick's strong hand was still, revolts broke out in many places. There were various reasons for these revolts. The population of Sicily and southern Italy was ignorant, fickle, passionate, and without perseverance or en- durance; it was cowardly, and yet eager for ven- geance ; it was neither homogeneous, nor steadied by the inheritance of a common tra,dition ; and the more turbulent spirits always hoped for better things from a change of masters, Frederick's government 390 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY had been a personal one, based on his power to main- tain it, and not upon any loyalty in his subjects ; and he had not had many friends. The clergy with a few exceptions, and the monastic orders, were his enemies. The cities resented his refusal to let them have the communal franchises that the North ItaUan cities enjoyed. The barons bore with ill-will the loss of ancient feudal privileges, and hated his plan of a strong central bureaucratic government. All feared him, and all suffered under his heavy taxation. Naples, the chief city of the mainland, faithful to its old traditions of independence, and Capua as well, always inclined to the anti-Hohenstaufen cause. On the other hand, Frederick had saved the peasantry from the tyranny of the barons, he had given the mercantile cities peace and therefore better trade, and he had established a code of laws that was a marked improvement on the heterogeneous legisla- tion that preceded it. But among the forces work- ing for or against the Hohenstaufens there was one factor steadily at work stirring the people to hostility and revolt. The Papacy, during Frederick's lifetime, had not been idle, and now that he was dead it did not sit with folded hands ; Innocent IV believed that his opportunity had come and proposed to make the most of it. Manfred, however, was personally popular ; he had two sets of soldiers on whom he could rely, his Sara- cens and his German mercenaries; and by the time that affairs north of the Alps permitted his brother Conrad, the new king, to come down into Italy, he had already reduced almost all The Kingdom to obe- MANFRED 391 dience. Conrad completed the task and then tried to come to terms with the Pope. Both Conrad and Manfred realized the power of papal hostility, and by diplomacy, blandishments, and proffers of submis- sion, strove to appease it, but in vain. The Pope pretended to entertain Conrad's propositions for peace, but he cherished an implacable hatred in his heart against the Hohenstaufens, and held fast to his resolve to execute the sentence of the Council of Lyons and drive them from The Kingdom. To this end he sought help from France and England; as suzerain with an empty fief on his hands, he of- fered the Sicilian crowu in turn to Charles of Anjou, brother to King Louis IX of France, to Richard of Cornwall, brother to Henry III of England, and to Henry's son, Prince Edmund. The terms of the offer provided that the recipient was first to conquer the crown and then receive it from the Pope. Charles of Anjou was not at the time free to consider the offer; Eichard of Cornwall remarked that his Holi- ness had graciously granted him the moon with per- mission to go and get it, but foolish King Henry was delighted to make his second son a king, and accepted. On Conrad's death two years later, the whole face of affairs was changed. There was no soldier king to be fought ; the heir, Conrad the younger, was a little baby ; and Innocent altered his plans accord- ingly. Without communicating any change of plans to England (for it was well to have two strings to one's bow), he secretly decided not to confer the vacant kingdom upon a new vassal, but to enter into 392 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY possession himself as suzerain and annex it to the Papal States. The prospect looked very favourable because Conrad, who out of jealousy had become estranged from Manfred, had appointed by his tes- tament a German baron, Berthold of Hohenberg, re- gent during the minority of his son Corradino, and, following thfe example of his grandfather Henry VI, had put Corradino under the protection of the Church. With this situation before him. Innocent perfected his plans, and when he felt ready to put them into execution, announced that the kingdom had devolved upon its suzerain, but that when Cor- radino came of age he would consider his claims; and with fresh energy the double-dealing priest continued to push his intrigues with the disaffected barons. The situation was serious for the Hohenstaufen cause. Berthold of Hohenberg, timid, incompetent, and treacherous, gave up the regency to Manfred, who, with the suppleness so characteristic of his father, bent to the storm and accepted the claim of the Pope, on condition that he should become the Pope's vicar. The Pope came down in triumph and entered Capua. Manfred was ill at ease ; he felt that he was encompassed by enemies and traitors, but trusting in his own adroitness he hoped to come out unscathed. Chance or fate abruptly ended the sit- uation. The Pope certainly played false. Manfred had plighted fealty to the Pope " saving the rights of Corradino,*' and then he was abruptly asked to take the oath with no saving clause; besides this, the Pope, after he had confirmed, or promised to MANFRED 393 confirm, Manfred in some disputed barony, juggling •with words, granted the barony to a nobleman sub- servient to himself. This caused bad feelings between Manfred and his rival; and, as ill luck would have it, Manfred and his men while riding on a narrow road came suddenly upon the usurper. Manfred probably was not to blame, he was too prudent to be guilty of so dangerous an act ; but his men raised a shout, set upon the nobleman, and killed him. The Pope affected great displeasure, and summoned Manfred to appear before him for trial at Capua. Manfred hesitated ; he stopped a little way out of the town, and asked for some modifications of the Pope's summons and an assurance of fair play ; he got an unsatisfactory answer. His friends were frightened, and counselled flight. He had to act promptly. He made ostensible preparations to obey the Pope, and then, with a scanty train, galloped off by night. His flight remained unequalled for adven- ture and romance in Italian history until Garibaldi's flight from Kome in 1849. His goal was the town of Lucera, in Apulia, across the Apennines, and about seventy-five miles northeast of Naples, as the crow flies. This town was famous in papal diatribes and a scandal to Christendom, for there, a genera- tion before, Prederick had stationed the Saracens whom he had removed from Sicily. Ever since then the town had been a Saracen stronghold and de- voted to the Hohenstaufens. John the Moor, a henchman of the old Emperor, was governor. There, more than anywhere else, Manfred felt that he would be safe. Troops of the Pope, or men-at-arms 394 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY in the service of Berthold of Hohenberg, -who now made common cause with the Pope, infested the high-roads. It was impossible to say what the peas- ants would do. Two young noblemen, familiar with the road to Lucera, for it led past their paternal estates, volunteered to act as Manfred's guides. The fugitives passed the town of Nola (where Augustus Caesar died), and then they were obliged to take a circuitous course to avoid strongholds and towns held by enemies. Even so their road ran directly un- der one of the hostile castles, and they were obliged to strike into the woods. The peaks of the Apen- nines are here over four thousand feet high, and the climbing is hard for horse or man. The moon shone clear but its light gave a spectral look to the precipitous rocks, and in the darker recesses added to the difficulty of the way. In one place they were nearly forced to abandon their horses. At day- break they came again on a road, but it led them directly to an enemy's castle. Challenged, they an- swered that they were Hohenberg's men, and they were permitted to go in single file by a narrow path around under the walls. The pack-mules, which were ahead, balked, and the men in the rear thought that the garrison had ambushed them. It was a false alarm, the garrison suspected nothing; and the little band kept on till it reached the estates of the two young noblemen. Here their two wives, handsome, high-bred ladies, welcomed the Prince with great loyalty, and he did them the honour, in his chivalrous way, to seat one on his right hand and one on his left, during breakfast. The meal MANFRED 395 was hasty ; and Manfred hurried on to the house of other friends, where he passed the night. At sun- rise the next morning he was in the saddle again, keeping his company in fighting array and sending out scouts. Enemies were all about. One town re- ported that the papal army in the neighbourhood had given it till the day after to-morrow to surren- der; the next had already sworn allegiance to the Pope. In the third, Manfred's scout found the townsmen in an uproar; the papal and the national parties were fighting for the mastery. The national faction, hearing that Manfred was near, sent a mes- senger to beg him come to secure the town for his cause. Manfred's men were delighted to have an opportunity to strike a blow at their enemies, but the sudden report that five hundred of Hohenberg's soldiers, barely five miles away, were coming up, obliged them to take another direction. Manfred then made his way eastward past Monte Volture, where, some thirteen hundred years before, the pi- geons had covered with fresh green leaves a little boy, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who had fallen asleep on the mountain-side tired with play. And from Monte Volture he pushed on to Venosa, the town in which that little boy had been born. From here he meant to go due north to Lucera, where he ex- pected to be received by John the Moor with open arms. John the Moor had been bred in the Emperor's palace, he had been loaded with favours by the Hohenstaufens, and had protested that he would do all he could for the Emperor's son; but when he 396 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY heard that Manfred was a fugitive, and that fortune smiled upon the papal cause, he put one of his household, another Saracen, Marchisio, in his place as custodian of the town, made him swear that he would let no one, not even Prince Manfred, enter during his absence, and posted off to make terms with the Pope, sending false word to Manfred that he was going on his account. There seemed to be no loyalty to a losing cause anywhere in the Hohen- staufen dominions. Nevertheless, even after Man- fred heard of John the Moor's treachery, he still entertained a hope of getting Lucera, That was his only chance. In Lucera was his father's treasure; and there, if anywhere, were friends, for the Sara- cens could hope for but httle from the Pope. He sent scouts to learn what the feelings of the garri- son were toward him. The scouts reported that they entertained great good will and marvelled that he had not gone there sooner. On hearing this, for security's sake, as he could not tell whether to trust the peasants of the country, he gave out that he was going south, and with very few attendants rode north at night toward Lucera. It was dark and rainy, the little band could not even see one another, and had to ride side by side and keep calling out, in order to stay together. They lost the road and wan- dered off into the fields. Luckily one of the party had been a master of the hunt for the late Emperor and recognized familiar ground. He managed to lead them to a deserted hunting-lodge, where, somewhat imprudently, they made a big fire, dried their clothes, and spent the rest of the night, both man and beast MANFKED 397 thankful for repose. Hostile troops, some belonging to the papal army, some in th« pay of Hohenberg, were only a little way to the right and to the left. Before dawn they were off again and rode to within a mile or two of Lucera. Here Manfred stationed his troop, while he and three soldiers, one of whom spoke Arabic, rode on to the town. The guards were on the alert ; so Manfred halted and the soldier who knew Arabic rode alone to the gate. There he called up: "Your Prince, the Emperor's son, is here, open the gate." The guards hesitated, and Manfred rode up. Still they were doubtful, and sent a man to notify Marchisio, the castellan. Then one of them spoke up : " Marchisio was charged by John the Moor not to let any one, even the Prince, enter the city, and he will not give the keys, but on the con- trary, he will do all he can to keep the Prince from coming in. The best thing is for the Prince to get in any way possible, for once in, all will be easy." It happened that there was a gutter under the gate to carry away the rain-water ; and when the gate was shut there was just space for a man to crawl in on his belly. The same guard called down : " Let the Prince come in by the hole under the gate ; let us get him in any way we can." Manfred dis- mounted, and was about to lie down and crawl in, when the guards, mortified at" the sight, cried : " Never shall our Prince enter the city like that." They broke open the gate, picked Manfred up in their arms, and carried him triumphantly into the town. Marchisio rushed out to stop them, but the crowd would not tolerate disrespect; they forced the 398 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY castellan off his horse, down upon his knees, and made him kiss Manfred's feet ; they then conducted Manfred with cheers into the royal palace. Prom this time Manfred's fortunes rose. His pos- session of the royal treasure enabled him to hire troops and to seduce detachments of the enemy. He gained a victory over one division of the papal army, and frightened the cardinal in command so badly that he fled in terror. This must have been bitter news to the Pope, who lay dying in Naples in the palace that had once belonged to Pier della Vigna. He had spent all his pontificate in one prolonged endeavour to break the House of Hohenstaufen, and just as he thought he had attained his dearest wish and was about to annex The Kingdom to the dominions of St. Peter came the report of Manfred's victory. Innocent IV was succeeded by Alexander IV, a member of the great House of Conti and nephew of Gregory IX, but he was not in the least like his fiery and magnanimous uncle. Alexander was a man of peace, a simple man, unequal to his great task. He attempted to follow Innocent's deep policy and tan- gled himself in intrigues. He entertained diplomatic relations with Manfred, asserted his kind regard for Corradino, but at the same time he was doing all he could to persuade the King of England to fit out an expedition for the conquest of Sicily. In spite of the efEorts of Alexander IV, Manfred proceeded successfully. As regent in his nephew's name he established his authority throughout The Kingdom; but that title was not satisfactory, either MANFEED 399 to himself or to the realm. A king's vicar never has an authority as imposing as that of the king himself, and it vyas no time for a child to be at the head of a distracted state. Besides, Corradino was a German, and Manfred an Italian. The perplexities of the sit- uation, the avowed hostility of the Pope, were co- gent arguments that Manfred should assume the crown ; the barons urged him. A rumour spread abroad that the young king was dead, and Manfred profited by the occasion. He was crowned King at Palermo August 10, 1258, to the apparent satisfac- tion of The Kingdom. The Guelfs said that Manfred himself started the report that Corradino was dead. The accusation, in- deed, wears the badges of probability ; the Emperor Frederick would not have hesitated. But Manfred's reputation suffers sorely from his final defeat. His enemies had not only opportunity, but every motive to send the grossest slanders current through Italy. They accused him of murdering his father, his brother Conrad, his younger brother Henry, and Henry's sons. The noble Dante believed that his sins were horrible, but not bad enough to condemn him to the pains of hell. However the usurpation may be judged morally, its political wisdom was abundantly proved. Manfred became a power throughout Italy. The new sovereign, as arch enemy to the Papacy, was the natural head of the Ghibelline party from his kingdom to the Alps, and Manfred, half from his own volition and half dragged on by the current of events, gradually took that position. He cher- 400 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ished a secret ambition to become King of Italy, and perhaps higher yet ; therefore he strove to rise above the limitations of party leader and to play the part of supreme moderator between the contending fac- tions. He affected to regard himself as his father's heir and assumed imperial prerogatives. His first step was to appoint Percivalle Doria, the troubadour, vicar-general in the Dnchy of Spoleto, in the March of Ancona, and in Romagna. His next step in this policy, and the most difficult, was to take part in the affairs of Lombardy ; and by singular caprice the goddess of circumstance seemed to foster his high ambition. For the moment in all the northeast of Italy ordinary political ties were broken, and a great movement was afoot animated by a single purpose to a common end. For years Ezzelino da Romano had been growing more fierce and terrible. The death of the Emperor seemed to stir him to greater suspicion and to still bloodier deeds. Perhaps some homicidal mania touched his restless brain. His energy became fu- rious, and though he took precautions to guard himself from sudden attack, he displayed a satanic recklessness in creating enemies. His creatures, An- sedisius, the worthy nephew, and others, fulfilled his slightest wish, " desiring more to please him than to please God." Conspiracies, or rumours of con- spiracies, against him were horribly punished. "It is impossible," says Rolandino, " to make mention of all and singular of those in Verona and Padua who were beheaded, or broken on the rack, or dragged on the ground, or burned to death, or blinded or MANFEED 401 horribly mutilated. Lord Figura de Belludis, a wise and worthy gentleman, was tortured to death in the castle at Padua, and then his head was struck off in the public square. The like was done to Otho de Zambo; the like to Monriale de Plebe. Bonifaciuus de Robegano, who had been one of the knights in the service of the podesta, was dragged through the city at a horse's tail by the podesta's creatures, his head was cut off and his body burned in the court- yard. The next month seventeen men in one day, almost in one hour, were flogged to death in the public square of Padua, then fires were lighted all about and their bodies burned piece by piece. . . . Where now are the innumerable, the laudable, mul- titude of citizens, cruelly scattered and killed before their time? Where is the abundance of riches ? Where are the towers and edifices of Padua, its houses and places, its palaces and pleasant habita- tions? By wicked deeds they have been swept out of Padua, out of the whole March of Treviso, and not by barbarians or Jews, not by Medes or Sara- cens, not by Scythians or Britons, not by Tartars or Chaldeans." If Ezzehno's cruelty stirred the people to revolt, his treatment of the clergy and his protection of heretics aroused the Papacy. On the death of the Emperor, Innocent IV had fondly hoped that all Lombardy would welcome the Church and make sub- mission; on the contrary, Ezzelino and Pelavicini showed themselves stronger than before, and there was danger that all Lombardy would be lost to the Church, not only politically, but also in matters of 402 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY religion. These Ghibelline chiefs laid heavy hands on churchmen and church property, they chased away unwelcome bishops and priests, they refused to repress heresy, protected heretics, and would not suffer the inquisition to take its ferret ways. They did not propose to persecute subjects who would never desert them for the Church. Pelavicini was bad, but Ezzelino was far worse. Ezzelino refused the last rites to persons condemned to death; he parted husbands from their wives and forced them to marry other women ; he himself believed only in astrology. Under him the fair region from Verona to Padua was become a second Languedoc, a refuge and breeding-place of heresy : and to the Church heresy was far more dangerous than the Hohenstau- f ens ; they attacked her walls from without, but her- esy sapped them silently and secretly within. Matters had become too fearful to be borne. Pope Innocent IV had proclaimed a crusade, and Alexan- der IV took up the cry. He called on the cities and no- bles of the north to take the field against this devil incarnate, bade them assume the cross, and promised the indulgences granted to crusaders that crossed the sea. The faithful of the regions roundabout banded together, nobles and gentles, burghers and peasants, Brothers Minor, Dominicans, Benedictines, Cister- cians, priests, all took the cross : — Vexilla regis prodeunt Fulget crucis mysterium, — and they set forth "like the Children of Israel against the Philistines." Success blessed their first campaign ; MANFRED 403 they captured Padua. The messenger who bore the evil tidings to Ezzehno was hanged on the spot ; and of eleven thousand Paduans, whom he got into his clutches, not two hundred ever went home to Padua. This was not all ; Ezzelino and Uberto Pelavicini having joined forces, defeated the crusaders and made themselves masters of Brescia. This was a sad blow ; but it may be, as Rolandino says, " the part of divine mercy to remedy monstrous evils gradually, to send deserved punishment in due time, and after long waiting to allay grave anxiety almost as it were by surprise." His theory found justification in the immediate sequel. Ezzelino, too domineering to share with Pelavicini, turned him out and kept the prize for himself. In his exasperation Pelavicini made com- mon cause with the Church party. Every man's hand was now against Ezzelino, and King Manfred could safely approve the confederates. Ezzelino still bore himself as dauntlessly as the day on which he struck down with his own sword one of the Emperor's German knights who had laid violent hands on an Italian lady ; he gathered his soldiers together and watched the heavens. Then when the signs were propitious, Sagittarius in the ascendant, the sun in Virgo, the moon in Scorpio, Saturn in Aquarius, Jupiter retroguardus in Libra, he started his campaign, and the rival armies marched and countermarched in the pleasant land through which the Adda runs down from Lake ,Como to the Po. During a skirmish an arrow struck Ezzelino in the left foot. His soldiers were frightened, but not he : "He hid the pain of his wound in his stout heart, 404 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY like a strenuous athlete who comes back hurt from the arena and puts on a brave and spirited demean- our so that those who have staked their hopes on him shall not lose confidence." But nothing was of avail, for " the hour was at hand which God himself had provided from eternity for the safety of Lom- bardy." Ezzelino marched to the fatal crossing of the Adda. If men could but foresee the future, says Ro- landino (who, like the men of his time, saw strange affinities between ideas where we can only see wretched puns upon words), all Italy would have longed for that crossing as all good men had longed for the redemption of the first man Adam by the cross of Christ; and he also discovered a coincidence of good omen in the names Adam and Adda. The two armies joined battle ; fortune went against Ezze- lino. His soldiers were scattered, and all his enemies converging pressed towards the spot where he was, "as all ponderable things converge and press towards the centre of the earth." In such straits, with his own people round him, the old warrior tried to make his way to Bergamo, not as if in flight, but rather as if the horses were proceeding hither or thither careless of direction. But the Marquis of Este, feel- ing that the end of a lifelong rivalry was at hand, together with Uberto Pelavicini, Buoso da Dovara, and all the chivalry of the Lombard plain, eager for revenge, rushed in like dogs upon the quarry. One soldier, burning with revenge, though Ezzelino was defenceless, dealt him two or three blows upon the head; and "whoever it was [for Eolandino cannot MANFRED 405 forbear his admiration of the old man's mettle] de- served no praise, but rather the shame of a caitiff act." The crowd pressed about, like birds of the night, chattering, shrieking, threatening, to gaze upon this man, horrible, terrible, and famous above all the other princes of the world ; but Azzo of Este, Uberto Pelavicini, Buoso da Dovara, and all the knights assembled, would not permit so renowned a man to be maltreated by the actions or words of the insist- ent crowd. Thej bore him honourably to the tent of Lord Buoso and gave him in charge of the best phy- sicians. But in vain; Ezzelino, wounded or not, could not have lived in captivity ; he died in a few days and was buried with due honour. As the Empire ended with Frederick, so the old feudal sentiment of dependence upon the Empire ended in Italy with Ezzelino. The other party chiefs, like Uberto Pelavicini, Buoso da Dovara, Martino della Torre of Milan, Ghiberto da Gente of Parma, belong to the newer period coming in, when the Empire had become an idea for the imagination to play about rather than a practical political factor, and petty tyrants set up their dynasties in the Lom- bard cities not as integral parts of a great system culminating in the Empefor, but as local seigneurs each for himself. Ezzelino had much in common with the men of this new type ; they were self-dependent, individual, and he was the extreme type of individu- ality pushed, except for this one tie with the Empire, to its loneliest terms, a hero for Nietzsche. But with this attitude towards the Empire, Ezzelino had a touch of the romantic feelings that we associate with 406 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTURY the chivalric side of the feudal system. He had ideas of honour, however hard it may be to trace them in his doings; "it behooves us, he said, to live with honour — vivere cum honor e," whereas such an idea never seriously crossed the minds of the men of the newer type. He has a touch of kinship with the spirit of Frederick Barbarossa; they belong to the school summed up by Machiavelli. Curiously enough, on Ezzelino's overthrow Uberto Pelavicini established a redoubtable power in Lom- bardy, stronger even than that which the Emperor Frederick had exercised; he held dominion over Milan, Cremona, Piacenza, Brescia, and Tortona. Nothing could show better than this union of Milan and Cre- mona under one lordship what strange bed-fellows the course of Italian politics fl ung togeth er. Nevertheless, taking matters on a large sweep as we must, the sym- pathies and general policy of the Lombard cities, Guelf and Ghibelline, look comparatively stable. Though lord of Milan, Pelavicini must certainly rank as a Ghibelline chief. He was excommunicated by the Church and on the best of terms with Manfred. Man- fred wished him to bar the way against any invader — Prince Edmund, perhaps — who should come to claim the crown of Sicily, ai>d Pelavicini wished Manfred's aid against the Pope and Alphonso of Castile or any possible Emperor who might invade Italy at the Pope's bidding. The two were bound by the only bond that held strong men in those days, the bond of common interest. The Ghibelline star was in the ascendant ; and Manfred's hopes shone bright. Through his friend- MANFRED 407 ship with Pelavicini he was a power ia Lomhardy; he had strong friends in Piedmont; he had made an alliance with Genoa, and a treaty with Venice. And to crown his prosperous career came the great Ghibelline victory at Montaperti, which compelled the proud city of Florence to receive his royal lieuten- ant and all Tuscany to submit to his will as if he were Emperor. It is now high time to turn to Tuscany, a province which at about the end of Frederick's reign comes forward into the main current of events. Ktsa £tizio. CHAPTER XXVm TUSCANY (1200-1260) Salntami Toscana, queUa ched k sovrana, in cui regna tutta corte^ia. Greet Tuscany for me, A Very queen is she, And in her reigns all conrtesy. In early days Tuscany had been a marquisate. The last marquis was the father of the Great Count- ess Matilda ; and she inherited from him this pro- vince and much broad territory besides. Matilda died (1115) a few years after she had attended the cere- monies at the duomo of Modena ; and on her death the cities that had been under her dominion became to all intents and purposes free and independent. The Papacy and the Empire both claimed to be the rightful heir of her scattered domains; and in the disputes between the two, the cities found their op- portunity. The marquisate continued, nominally at least, to be a fief of the Empire, and imperial govern- ors rode down across the Apennines into the valley of the Arno, but they accomplished little. Under the stimulus of self-government, manufacture and trade grew apace, and their growth shaped and de- termined Tuscan history. Economic forces, pushing their way to sunshine and air, displaced the old order. Produce demanded a safe road to market. TUSCANY 409 The country barons, perched on hilltops, hke eagles in their eyries, treated high-road, ford, and moun- tain pass as opportunities to levy what tolls they pleased. As soon as trade reached adolescence, the old system became intolerable. The early history of the cities is little more than a record of feats of arms against these barons ; every spring or of tener the citizens sallied forth to lay siege to a castle or scale the walls of a fortified grange. In the course of time the barons of the country roundabout were compelled to take up their abode within the walls, for part of the year at least, and become citizens. These unwilling immigrants natur- ally contracted friendships with the aristocracy of the city ; together they made the patrician class, and clung to the feudal system. Next in the social scale, the principal burghers — bankers and merchants — made common cause with the lesser nobility, and constituted the upper middle class; below them came the bulk of the middle class ^ artisans, craftsmen and the lesser traders; at the bottom were the labour- ing class which possessed little or no political rights. While these distinctions of rank and wealth di- vided society horizontally, as it were, into classes, a political division cut athwart class distinctions and divided each city into two political parties. It is hard to say what started political disagreements; nobles fell out with nobles, neighbours with neigh- bours. They were all quick in quarrel. Men joined this party or that for local or personal reasons, but having become members of a party they adopted all its cries and shibboleths. Politics were based on 410 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY appetite. A sea-coast city, like Pisa, which had re- ceived generous charters from the Emperor and hoped for special privileges in the Sicilian ports, professed loyalty to the Empire. An inland city, like Florence, that feared lest she should be forced to give up imperial territory which she had seized upon during the Empire's weakness, turned to the Pope for support. The smaller towns sided with either power that would aid them against their am- bitious neighbours. The baronage, always at enmity with the cities, naturally inclined to the Empire. And so in Tuscany, very much after the same manner as in Lombardy, two great political parties ranged themselves against one another. All the cities, however, as well as all the barons, recognized that as a matter of political theory they were parts of the Empire, and in times of peace rendered lip service to imperial authority. The Empire not only claimed ultimate sovereignty over the cities, but an immediate jurisdiction over the small places and the country districts in between them; and during Frederick's reign the imperial lieutenants exercised authority over these domains, as well as certain sovereign rights over the cities, such, for instance, as imposing podestas of the Em- peror's choice. When, however, the imperial power was in abeyance, as after Frederick's death or during his wars with the Papacy, the cities at once forgot all memory of feudal allegiance, fought one another for the strips of imperial possessions that lay between them, and the loveliest province in the garden of the Empire was rent into angry pieces. From the TUSCANY 411 mountains to the sea a score of petty sovereignties spent blood and treasure in heroic efforts to increase their territories. The province of Tuscany is separated from Lom- bardy by the curving chain of the Apennines. After the traveller has crossed the pass near Pontremoli on the way southwest from Parma, he has done with waveless plains and descends into a lovely land of mountains, hills, and valleys, of bank and brae. Here the Arno for a hundred miles and more winds its many-coloured way westward to the sea. In those days it ran by noble forests as well as castles and towered cities. Dante thought but ill of the people it passed by: for, according to him, from the sources of the Arno in the Apennines until the river renders up its waters to the Mediterranean, all men shun virtue as they shun a snake. The Tuscans are so vile that it seems as if Circe had foully metamor- phosed them. The river first flows past the inhabit- ants of the Casentino, " dirty hogs more worthy of acorns than of food made for human use ; " lower down it comes upon the people of Arezzo, " curs that snarl more than their power warrants," and turns its course westward to avoid them; it then passes the accursed town of the Florentines, " dogs that behave like wolves," and descends at last to the citizens of Pisa, " foxes so full of cunning that they are afraid of nothing " {Purg. xiv). But the outside of things, whether created by nature or the hand of man, from the leaning tower of Pisa to the gracious foothills of the Apennines, tell nothing of this depravity ; sunshine and cloud, 412 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY stone pine and flowing river, are in conspiracy to make us think that even in the thirteenth century Tuscany was not wholly unlike the earthly paradise; and every Tuscan city has now, and probably had then, her own way o£ making the traveller believe that it was for him rather than for any one else that she had built her churches and her palaces, her fountains and her towers. In all the Empire there was no fairer province, and we should be far from the truth if we accepted Dante's angry words with- out qualification. Arezzo, once one of the old Etruscan cities, is memorable to sonneteers and lovers as the birthplace of Petrarch, and to school-boys as that of Maecenas " descended from ancestral kings," the friend and patron of Horace. In the first half of our century she had no permanent political relations ; she took podestas from Florence, Pisa, Perugia, Orvieto, Vi- terbo, Eome, Milan, Bologna, and Modena. And, though she opened her gates to the Emperors that came. Otto IV and Frederick II, she exhibited rather scant loyalty. When Frederick left after a brief visit in the troubled year, 1240, he railed against her: " Store-house of honey ! — bitter as gall ; a new people shall come and possess this land." Of her sister cities the nearest, as usual, were her worst foes. During the reign of the Emperor Frederick Siena was her chief enemy, but after Frederick's death Florence took Siena's place. And with regard to internal politics, in Arezzo, as in every other city, there were always two quarrelling parties ; sometimes one, sometimes the other, was in power. TUSCANY 413 But Arezzo has a special interest as a place where the arts were cultivated. Margheritone, celebrated in his day, who painted many portraits of St. Francis, as well as Fra Guittone, head o£ the Tuscan school of poetry that succeeded the Sicilian school, was born there. Fra Ristoro, a learned man of scientific tastes who wrote a kind of encyclopaedia on the Composition of the World (1282) was another citizen. So was the alchemist. Griff olino {Inf. xxix- xxx). And there was a group of virtuosi in ArezzOj whose enthusiasm for art tells us more about the first dawn of the Renaissance than all the chroniclers. Fra Ristoro has left an account of them in connec- tion with a discovery of antique vases: "These are made of terra cotta, delicate as wax, perfect in form and of every variety. And on them are drawn or engraved all sorts of plants, with leaves and flowers, all kinds of animals that you can think of, wonderful in every respect, and so perfect that they surpass the work of nature. Two colours were used, blue and red, chiefly red ; and these colours were luminous and very delicate, and so excellent, that though they were under- ground, the earth did them no hurt. They were found as fresh in colour as if but recently made. . . . I ex- amined many of these vases ; some of the figures on them were slim, some fat, one laughed, another cried, one was old, another a baby, one nude, one draped, one in armour, another not, one afoot, one on horseback ; and there were battles and attacks, admirable in every detail; combats of fishes, birds and other creatures, all wonderful. There were scenes of hunting, hawking, and fishing, so good in every re- 414 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY spect that one cannot imagine it. ... A large part of a vase came into my possession on ■which the designs were so natural and delicate, that when the connois- seurs saw them they screamed and shouted aloud for joy, and were quite beside themselves, and became perfectly dumbfounded ; but the ignoramuses would have broken it to pieces, and flung them away. When such fragments came into the possession of a sculptor, a designer, or of some one who knew about them, he preserved them as if they were sacred, wondering how any men could in a vase, by colour and design, have wrought such delicate art. They all said, 'These artists were divine, or else these vases came down from heaven ' ; for they could not understand how such vases could be made. It was surmised that this noble delicacy in art had been divinely granted to the city, on account of the noble situation in which the city stood, because noble artists delight in a noble land and a noble land de- mands noble artists." Pisa, at the Arno's mouth, was one of the three great seaboard towns of Italy, and in the common judgment she and Florence were the two noblest cities of Tuscany. Her fame spread wherever traf- fickers sailed, from the Phoenician coast — To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits. Her merchant galleys and her fighting ships were familiar sights o£B the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Sicily, or riding at anchor in the ports of Tripoli, Constantinople and Acre. Powerful abroad she made herself beautiful at home. She, too, cultivated the TUSCANY 415 arts. Several Pisans belonged to the Sicilian school of poetry. Giunta Pisano is one of the earliest paint- ers whose names have come down to us. Bonanno, a worker in bronze, had been chosen to cast the doors of the cathedral at Monreale. And when the Do- minicans at Parma wished for a bell that should be heard as far as Reggio, they employed a bell-maker of Pisa. But neither in excellence nor in renown could any of these arts match with Pisan architect- ure. There is no group of sister buildings in all Europe, — cathedral, baptistery, and bell-tower, — comparable with hers ; nor is there any building west of the Parthenon that fetches its colour from fairy- land so direct as they, when their marble walls shine in the setting sun with a tender golden glow, as if the imprisoned genius of light were trying to force his way through alabaster doors. One thinks of Pisa as once a mermaiden, combing her golden hair with a golden comb upon a summer's day on the banks of the Arno, and metamorphosed by some enamoured god into a beautiful city out of revenge for her dis- dain. Pisa, like Siena, was steadfastly loyal to the Empire, not from sentiment, but because she desired privileges in Sicily, and because her rivalry with Genoa constrained her to take the side opposed to that which Genoa took. While the Hohenstaufens prospered she prospered, but after their overthrow her fortunes sank before the rising power of Florence and the fierce enmity of Genoa; for, as Bro. Salim- bene says in his memoirs, " There is a natural hatred between men and snakes, dogs and wolves, horses and griffins, and so there is between Pisa and Genoa, 416 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY between Pisa and Lucca, and between Pisa and Florence." To the north of Pisa, barely ten miles in a straight line, but separated by Monte Giuliano {Inf. xxxiii, 30),- per che i Pisan veder Lucca non ponno, — lies Lucca, a city that casts a particular spell upon the traveller. The cathedral of St. Martin's is not beautiful like that at Pisa, but its picturesque, irreg- ular fagade, with its great arches cramped and squeezed by the massive campanile, and its pretty arcades that rise in tiers from the portico to the roof, have a familiar, friendly air, not untouched by sim- ple nobility, and with a special persuasiveness induce one to linger. The round apse, too, is full of charm. In fact the building is well worthy, in its simplicity and dignity, to house H Santo Volto, the sacred cru- cifix carved in wood by Nicodemus, so the story ran, on which the people of Lucca called for help in time of trouble. No other church in Lucca has as much exterior charm as the duomo; but San Frediano, if on the outside it lacks in grace and in the noble effect of good proportions, has a serene and massive solemnity within that no church in Tuscany and few churches elsewhere can match. There is a stoic nobleness in the long nave that runs, unvexed by transept, to the apse, and in the walls that mount solid and severe from the arcades of the nave to the roof, broken only by small clerestorey windows; and these stark, bald, walls in their archaic simplicity are of so stern a grandeur that the church would seem the habita- tion of some unmerciful deity, if it were not that TUSCANY 417 the arcades themselves are light and full of grace, and that the floor as it approaches the altar mounts one step, then, farther on, four more, and then three and three again, as if, gathering courage as it •wentj it rose in adoration under the mystical impulse of a great yearning, To'day the cathedral, San Frediano, San Michele, and their sister churches, seem what they are, mere monuments; but in those days they were places of social gathering. All Lucca was sociable, fond of seeing what was going on. And the churches were the indoor places for people to meet, just as the piazza was the outdoor place. Almost the only music was heard in the churches, and the people of Lucca were very fond of music. At the Franciscan monas- tery there, Bro. Vita made a great reputation as a singer. He sang most sweetly. " When he wished to sing [I quote Bro. Salimbene again] the nightingale, trilling in the hedge or on the blackberry bush, gave way, listened intently, and would not stir from its place ; afterwards it would resume its song, and so the two, nightingale and monk, sang in turn their sweet, enchanting songs." The churches were the art galleries, for all the sculpture and painting were there ; they were the theatres, for such theatrical performances as there were — little plays on sacred subjects, — were given in them under the charge of the priests. Magistrates, for lack of a public hall, sometimes exercised their functions there; guilds often met in them ; and general meetings of the citizens were held in the cathedral. Ecclesiastical festivals brought the churches familiarly into do- 418 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY mestic life ; and the common people spent more than half their summer evenings on the piazza in front of the duomo. Patriotism, pride, and a fond affec- tion for familiar things, clustered about the famous churches of every town, and made them more than home to the citizens. Pistoia, halfway between Lucca and Florence, but a little to the north, sitting at the feet of the Apen- nines, was GhibeUine, for the simple reason that her two neighbours, Lucca and Florence, were Guelf. In those days, when her monuments were young, — her cathedral, her mighty tower, Sant' Andrea, San Bartolommeo in Pantano and San Giovanni Fuor- civitas, — the city, so far as the builder's art could make it, must have been, if not charming, at least picturesque ; and the zest for life and fierce power of hate of her people in those keen days gave her a quality of her own. Dante, whose judgments often seem so harsh to us, for our dull consciences are seldom roused to more than placid disapprobation, is at least just and true in his measure of the thrills of life ; his fine spirit was tuned to the electrical animation of mere living and his records of life's intensity are the truest we have. But, except in his measures of the vibration of passion, he was as un- just to Pistoia as he was to Arezzo, Florence, and Pisa, and all the country through which the Arno runs. In the circle of thieves, beset with serpents, most horrible, Dante met — and the meeting was for the sake of an opportunity to berate Pistoia — a soul who in life had stolen the treasure of a church {Inf. XXIV, 124-26) : — TUSCANY 419 " Vita bestial mi piacque, e non umana, si come a mul ch' io f ui ; son Vanni Fucci bestia, e Pistoia mi f u degna tana ; " " Bestial life pleased me, not human, Like the mule that I was ; I am Vanni Fucci, A beast, and Pistoia was a fit den for me." Dante was so passionately sensitive to passing emo- tion that each moment of life came before him as part of eternity, charged with the awful seriousness of everlasting things, and every petty sin dragged at its heels an infinite consequence of evil and woe. Ahi Pistoia, Pistoia, che non stanzi d' incenerarti, si che piii non duri ! (Inf. XSY, 10-11.) Ah, Pistoia, Pistoia, why dost thou not resolve To turn thyselE to ashes, so that thou shalt exist no more ! It would be fanciful to suppose that all thirteenth century Italy shared Dante's passion ; but it would be equally wrong to suppose that Dante was wholly apart from other men and that their pulses beat as temperately as ours. The world was young, life was running strong, every to-morrow was big with possi- bilities, energy seemed to hold all glory in its hand; and the people in these little towns were aquiver with excitement. The Divine Comedy is not merely the summing-up of mediaeval religion, or the expres- sion of mediaeval belief in moral law, it is the index of the human passions of thirteenth century Italy ; beyond comparison, it is the most important histori- cal record of the time. West of Arezzo and about thirty-five miles due 420 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY south of Florence lay Siena, the most gifted and most charming of all the hill towns of Italy, as loyal to the Empire as Cremona or Pavia, and as proud as the proudest city of them all. She, too, in those days was the gayest of the gay. There the Brigata Spender eccia, the Company of Spendthrifts, — Stricca {Inf. xxix), " who knew how to make his expenses moderate" Niccolo, the gourmet, whb in- vented a famous dish flavoured with cloves, Caccia of Asciano, who squandered vineyard and forest, Abbagliato, proud of his wit, Lano {Inf. xiii), who finally took his own life, and their comrades, — sowed the wild crop of golden oats that brought forth a harvest to be reaped in hell. Or fa giammai gente si yana come la sanese ? certo non la francesca s\ d'assai. {Inf. XXIX, 121-23.) Now was there ever People so light-minded as the Sienese ? Certainly the French not near so much. Siena had her serious side as well, and she meant to prove it to the world by her new cathedral. In ancient times, so the story went, on the top of one of the hilly summits of the city, there had been a temple dedicated to Minerva. When Siena became Christian a church built in honour of the Virgin Mary had succeeded to the temple. This church had long been too small to hold all the people of the city, and it was determined to build in its stead a new cathedral. This was begun before 1245. There is no record of any definite design and none of any TUSCANY 421 architect. The cathedral was the work of the city very much as the basilica at Assisi, begun at about the same time, was the work of Bro. Elias. There was a master in charge of the works, there was a committee of nine elected by the several districts of the city to consult with the master and determine what had best be done, there was a committee of three, appointed by the great council, to act as treasurer; the administrative officers of the city were charged with making all needful provisions for the work, and the podesta was sworn to see that the master of the works and the committees performed their duties. The cost was to be met by various means : the city itself should pay the salaries of ten master workmen, and carry the marble from the quarry ; owners of beasts of burden should fetch two loads of marble every year ; subject towns, vil- lages and barons were to make offerings of money, candles or wax; and every inhabitant, between the ages of eighteen and seventy, must offer a wax candle on the vigil of the Madonna of the Assumption. These candles were sold and the proceeds paid into the church treasury. Besides the receipts from these imposts, the bishop and clergy contributed, while the faithful made oblations or bequeathed legacies. The people, urged on by zeal for the glory of the Virgin and by desire to rival Pisa and outdo Flor- ence, pushed the work apace, and by 1259 the nave was finished. The organic construction follows the general method of Lombard ecclesiastical architect- ure ; but in the ornamental details a touch of the Gothic style shows itself. This Gothic influence, 422 ITALY IN THE THIKTEENTH CENTUKY feeble as it was, could not have come in any direct channel from France, for the staunch imperial city would have rejected any such interference of an alien race. It probably came by way of the neighbouring monastery of San Galgano, for the Gothic style had been brought there from the southern monastery of Fossanova by Cistercian monks; and at this time, when the main structure of the cathedral was definitely determined, a monk from San Galgano, Fra Melano, was master of the works, and later other monks from there succeeded to his office. However that may be, while Fra Melano was in charge the Gothic influence must have been hardly perceptible ; the decoration of fin- ials and gables belongs to a later date. The building was not very well done; perhaps there were too many committees of citizens with a right to intermeddle. Some critics said that the vaults were cracking and would fall. All the master workmen were consulted; they reported that the alarm was unfounded, that the vaults need not be taken down, because the new adjoining vaults would strengthen them. By this time Florence and her Guelf allies menaced the city, so that the building must have been delayed for a time ; but the war was quickly ended by the victory of Montaperti, and the work went on again. A couple of years later there are records of work done on the roof, and in 1264 the cupola was finished. The interior seems to testify to the agitated times through which the city was passing, for there are many little irregularities in the piers, in the curves and angles of the vaulting TUSCANY 423 ribs, and most of all in the cupola itself. These fre- quent irregularities may be due to subtle art, per- haps to carelessness, or perhaps to the changing tastes of the citizens' committees that succeeded one another rapidly; they give a picturesque and fanci- ful appearance, but the alternate courses of black and white marble require a special and peculiar taste. The front of the cathedral was a plain brick wall, awaiting marble decoration, for according to the Italian fashion the f agade was mere ornament and had no organic part in the construction of the edifice. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, the cathedral of Siena was proof of a rich and proud commonwealth and of the character and energy of its citizens. Though devoted to the Empire, Siena was no friend to the feudal baronage : she was a commercial town, her aristocracy was chiefly composed of bank- ers and traders. The Buonsignori, Cacciaconti, Squarcialupi, Tolomei, and Piccolomini had financial and commercial relations of great consequence with France and England. During the pontificate of Gregory IX, some of her bankers, for instance Solafica Angiolieri, grandfather of the poet Cecqo Angiolieri, handled part of the papal funds ; and in England, representatives of the great Sienese houses received and transmitted revenues collected for the popes, and incidentally obtained large gains by put- ting their own money out at usury, for in England the rate was high. With Siena, as with all other trading towns, the first great need had been to sweep away from the neighbourhood of her gates the feudal barons who 424 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY infested the roads and laid toll on passing merchants. Chief of these feudal barons were the Aldohran- deschi, whose seat was to the south at Santa Fiora, in the Tuscan Apennines. Their dominion extended westward past Campagnatico and Grosseto to the sea, and eastward commanded the high-road to Rome. They reckoned their castles and strongholds by the hundred, and maintained the predatory habits of medijBval nobles in all pristine simplicity. By con- stant guerilla war these turbulent barons to the south were muzzled ; but the warfare to the north against the rising greatness of Florence was more serious. Disagreements as to dominion, rivalry in trade, con- tention for control of the high-road that led to Rome, the leaning of one to the Empire and of the other to the Church, maintained a state of mutual hatred and of frequent war. In domestic affairs at Siena, as elsewhere, wealth determined political power ; little by little traders raised themselves to an equality with the landed baronage. By 1240 the chief body in the govern- ment, the Council of Twenty-four, was evenly divided between nobles and burghers. The two political par- ties were called the Milites, Knights, and the Popolo, the People; but these names are misleading, for political divisions did not coincide with class dis- tinctions. It often happened that aristocrats, like Provenzano Salvani who rose to almost supreme power, were on the People's side, and that rich burghers and many men of the lower classes sided with the Knights. A year or two after the battle of Montaperti the government stood on a broader base TUSCANY 425 than before, but it remained staunchly aristocratic. The Council of the Bell, a large body of three hun- dred members or more, became the main organ of administration and legislation ; while two great guilds, the Bankers and the Retail Traders, had a special share in the government, their consuls being ex offi- cio members of the Council of the Bell, and of the Committee on Legislation. Siena has been called a city of shop-keepers, but the government was in the hands of the aristocracy of finance. Siena was a bold and proud city ; both she and Pisa would have laughed with incredulous scorn at any prophecy that they should both become tribu- tary to their hated neighbour. CHAPTER XXIX FLORENCE Ai doize e gaja terra fiorentina ! fontana di yalore e di piagenza, fiore de 1' altre, Fiorenza ! qualnnque k piil savere ti tene reina ; formata fue di Koma tua semenza, e da Dio solo data la dotriiia. Chiaro Davanzati, Alas ! Sweet and gaj Florentine land ! Fountain of valour and of pleasantness, Flower of all others, Florence ! Whoever hath most wit holds thee for queen ; Thy origin was wrought by Kome, And thy genius given by God himself. None of the Tuscan cities, not Siena crowned with towers, nor Pisa with her marble beauty and her adventurous traffickers, can hope to rival Florence, Rome's most famous and most beautiful daughter. Her leadership was not in the arts. The baptistery and San Miniato, with all their feminine charm, can- not be put in the same rank with the edifices at Pisa; she had no painters, and no sculptors, of note. She had, indeed, produced poets in abundance, but none of conspicuous talents. Her virtue lay in her energy, her industry, her intellectual curiosity, her self-con- fidence, her optimism, and her large ambitions. Her people were shrewd, quick-witted, gay and jovial. Friar Salimbene, who was well acquainted with half the cities of Italy and France, can never say enough of their gibes and bursts of merriment. FLORENCE 427 But notwithstanding her joy in living, her intel- lectual curiosity and her interest in poetry, the most significant circumstance in Florence was the growth o£ wealth. Production increased, the population mul- tiplied ; many new processes in manufacturing were devised ; efficiency and economy were introduced ; the system of banking was improved and expanded. Experiments of many kinds, many happy inventions, preceded so much success. But little record of all this industry, of the lives of merchants, artisans, and inventors, remains. There are a few feudal grants, a few deeds of conveyance, books of mercantile ac- counts, minutes of expenses, that bear witness to the daily affairs of bargain and sale, of warehouse and counting-room ; but for the most part the chroniclers and historians are taken up -with war, and in partic- ular with the strife between the two great political parties. Politics were almost synonymous with war. In the city of Florence this division into parties was suddenly lighted up, at least according to Giovanni Villani, the historian, by a romantic tragedy. In the year 1215, about the time when young Frederick II was on his way to be crowned King of the Komans at Aachen, and King John of England was in mo- mentous conference with his barons at Runnymede, a young gentleman of Florence, Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti, was betrothed to a girl of the Amidei family, who were of kin to the renowned Uberti, the most powerful family in the city. Unluckily for Florence, a match-making mother. Lady Gualdrada Donati, persuaded the fickle young fellow to jilt the girl and marry her own beautiful daughter. It was a 428 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY churlish and dangerous act on his part. The Amidei were people of consequence : — La casa di che nacque il vostro fleto, per lo giusto disdegno che v' ha morti e posto fine al vostro viver lieto, era onorata ed essa e suoi consorti. Buondelmonte, quanto nial fuggisti le nozze sue per gli altrui comf orti ! {Par. XVI, 136-41.) The house of which was born your weeping, (Because of the righteous indignation which slew you And put an end to your joyous life) Was honoured, both it and its allies. Oh Buondelmonte, how wrongfully thou fledst Marriage into it at the persuasion of another ! The kinsmen of the jilted girl took great offence, and met together to decide what should be done. Mosca de' Lamberti said, "a thing done is finished." Down in the eighth circle of Hell, where lie Mo- hammed, Bertran de Born and other sowers of dis- cord, Dante met a ghost, with both hands cut off, waving his bloody stumps, who cried : — " Ricordera' ti anche del Mosca, che dissi, lasso ! ' Capo ha cosa fatta', che fu il mal seme della gente tosca." (Inf. xxvm, 106-08.) " Thou wilt also remember Mosca, Who said (alas !) ' A thing done is finished ' Which was the seed of evil for the Tuscan people." The others assented to what Mosca said, and on Easter morning they lay in wait by the statue of Mars at the head of the Ponte Vecchio] and when FLORENCE 429 young Buondelmonte, dressed like a bridegroom all in -white, came riding across on his white palfrey, they dashed out. Schiatta degli Uberti struck him from his horse, Mosca and Lambertuccio degli Amidei threw themselves upon him, and others be- sides shared in the murder. So, anger and vengeance "widened the split between the political factions. The Buondelmonti and their friends ranged themselves with the Church party, while the Uberti and other patrician families drew closer together on the side of the Empire. It was in Florence, according to Salimbene, that the names Guelf and Ghibelline were adopted. He says : " In Florence the Church party was called Guelf and the imperial party Ghibelline ; and from these two factions the parties in all Tus- cany have been named and are so named up to the present time, and all have drunk from the cup of the wrath of God, and have drunk it to the dregs." It must be remembered that political parties then, as political parties do now, found their active mem- bers among those whom we call politicians, or else among the men who profited by the success of the party, and that the term Guelf party, for instance, usually refers to the active members of the party and not to all : when we read a statement in Vil- lani's history that the Guelfs were expelled from a certain city, it simply refers to the men of political consequence in the party. From the time of the Buondelmonte murder till after the Council of Lyons (1245), when the Em- peror turned his attention to the city, the politics of Florence both at home and abroad concerned them- 430 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY selves mainly with manufacture and commerce. Feuds between families, jealousies between ambi- tious noblemen, glitter with dramatic glamour and divert the attention from the workings of economic forces, but those forces pursued their course steadily both within the walls and without. The guilds grew in wealth and power ; the bankers extended their financial operations far and wide ; the wool mer- chants imported raw woollen cloth from Holland and Flanders, dressed it, dyed it, and sent it out again east, west, and north; other trades followed their lead. Little by little these guilds grew to be the main strength of the state, and more and more gave an anti-feudal complexion to the city's policy. Florence's two principal antagonists were Siena and Pisa. To the south Siena was her competitor for the possession of various castles and villages that lay between them. To the west, Pisa was mistress of the sea and wished to add to her maritime commerce the command of inland trade ; whereas Florence, mis- tress of the Inland trade, wished free access to the sea. Pistoia, too, from jealousies bred of neighbour- hood and conscious inferiority, was hostile to Flor- ence. The consequence was a long series of petty wars. The headings of Giovanni Villani's chapters read : How the first war began between the Pisans and the Florentines ; How the Pisans were defeated by the Florentines at Bosco castle; How the Flor- entines sent an army against Pistoia and took the castle of Carmlgnano ; How the Florentines went to war with the Slenese; and so on. These wars ter- minated to the honour of Florence, for though the FLORENCE 431 political parties in the city were sharply marked, and there was no love lost between the patrician fam- ilies and the trading class, nevertheless all acted to- gether as fellow-citizens against a common enemy. The course of Florentine history was rudely dis- turbed at the beginning of 1248. The Emperor, furious with the Pope, and wishing to strike a hard blow at the Church party in Tuscany, intrigued with the Uberti, urged them to seize the city, and promised aid. The Uberti, ever ready for a fray, gave the signal to the Ghibellines, and attacked the Guelfs in every district of the city. For three days the fighting kept up ; mangonels discharged bolts and stones from the towers, archers shot their ar- rows from window and roof, and round the barri- cades in the streets men fought on foot with sword and pike. At last the promised imperial forces came, Frederick of Antioch, one of the Emperor's bastard sons, brought up sixteen hundred German horse, and decided the victory. The Guelfs fled and left the city in possession of their enemies. But the rule of the Ghibelline nobles was short; on the Emperor's death the people opened the gates to the exiled Guelfs, and, for the moment making common cause with them, set up a government known as the Primo Popolo, the first popular government, be- cause the people, or rather the upper middle class, shared the power with the nobility. The constitution of the Primo Popolo was some- what like the constitution of Bologna after the pop- ular revolt in 1228, but Florence preceded Bologna by several years in the appointment of a captain of 432 ITALY IN THE TfflRTEENTH CENTURY the People. As in Bologna, the government was a sort of partnership between the commune and the confederated guilds. The podesta with his two coun- cils, representing the aristocratic party of the old regime, formed the Commune; while the captain of the People, with his two councils, representing the men of business, constituted the People. Control of the soldiery was divided. The podesta commanded the cavalry, composed of knights and gentlemen, who for convenience may be called the regular army, while the captain of the People commanded the trainbands. To complete the government, there was a board of Ancients, and a privy council; and finally a parliament of the enfranchised citizens, which sometimes had the privilege of voting aye or no on important matters. The Primo Popolo made a great name for itself. The new government drew upon the energies and abilities of the trading classes as well as of the no- bility, and raised Florence to the first place among Tuscan cities. It extended its dominion over castles and towns near and far; it brought Pisa and Siena to terms. It began the palace of the podesta, now the Bargello, it built the bridge, Ponte alia Trinita, it erected walls to defend the district across the Arno ; and achieved its most enduring title to fame by coining the florin, a new coin of pure gold, with the lily of Florence stamped on one side and St. John Baptist on the other. The swelling trade of Florence soon sent these florins far and wide. Commerce needed such a coin and even rival cities made use of it, to the proud satisfaction of all patriotic Floren- FLORENCE 433 tines, as this anecdote, told by Giovanni Villani, shows : " Some florins were brought to the King of Tunis, who was a wise and worthy man ; he was much pleased with them, tested them, found them of the finest gold and praised them very much. He had his interpreters explain to him the stamp and the words, and learned that they were 'St. John Baptist' and, on the lily side, 'Florentia.' Seeing that it was the money of Christians, he sent for Pisan merchants and asked them, what rank this Florentia, which had coined these florins, held among Christian cities. The Pisans answered contemptuously : ' They are our inland Arabs,' which was tantamount to saying, * Our men of the wilderness.' The king remarked shrewdly: 'It does not seem money of Arabs; and you, Pisans, what gold coins have you? ' At that they were ashamed and had nothing to say. Then he asked if there was any merchant from Florence about, and a man from Oltrarno [the district across the Arno] was found, Perla Balducci, a very intelligent man. The king questioned him concerning the condition and position of Florentines, whom the Pisans made out to be their Arabs; and he answered, sensibly, describing the greatness and magnificence of Flor- ence, and how Pisa in comparison was not half of Florence in power and in people, that the Pisans did not have any gold money, and that the florin was a sign of the superiority of the Florentines and of the many victories they had won against the Pisans. At this the Pisans were put to shame, and the king, on account of the florins and of what our intelligent citizen had said, gave the Florentines free entry and 434 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY permitted them to have business houses and a church in Tunis and the same privileges as the Pisans. And I learned this fact from Perla aforesaid, a trustworthy man, whom I met in the office of the Priory in the year of Our Lord, 1316, he being ninety years old, and in good health and possession of his faculties." Indeed the florin at this time sums up the history of Florence. The city was nothing like as large as it is now. The walls ran well within the sites of Santa Croce to the east, of the Palazzo Riccardi to the north, and of Santa Maria Novella to the west ; the main city, excluding Oltrarno, measured about a thousand yards east and west by eight hundred north and south. In poca piazza fa mirabil cose: within this little space the people of Florence were destined to achieve a glory second only to the glory of Athens. For ten years the Primo Popolo ran its brilliant career. Then the see-saw of politics shifted its bal- ance under the rising fortunes of King Manfred. The bold Uberti, restless intriguers, and their fellow nobles, conspired to overthrow the popular govern- ment; the plot was discovered, one of the Uberti was killed in fight, another caught and beheaded, and the rest with their adherents fled to Siena. Here, in contravention of a treaty between Florence and Siena, they were hospitably received by the haughty Ghi- belline leader, Provenzano Salvani. This provocation was hardly needed to prick the two cities to a quar- rel, for war was the normal relation between them. Each side raided the territories of the other. The Florentines in one foray captured the royal banner FLOEENCE 435 of King Manfred, who had sent some troopers to Siena. The Sienese gave back as good as they got, at least so their report went. A member of the rich mercantile house of the Cacciaconti wrote to his fac- tor in France that the Florentines were afraid : " We wish you to know, Giacomo [he writes], that we are put to great expense and ado, on account of the war with Florence. It will make a big hole in our purse, but we will scotch Florence so that we shall never have to pay attention to her again, if God will only keep King Manfred from harm, God bless him. ... In the city are eight hundred horsemen to bring death and destruction to Florence. And know that they are so afraid of us and of our cavalry that they all disap- pear, and no matter where they are never wait to meet us. When we marched to CoUe, they withdrew horse and foot as far as Barberino ; but when we had com- pleted our devastations and had returned to Siena, they advanced again. As soon as we heard this, all went out, cavalry and infantry and marched against them. We proceeded as far as Poggibonsi ; there we learned that they had fled and gone away. We sent our in- fantry back to Siena, but our cavalry went in pursuit, and chased them like cowards from hill to hill, and we went burning and ravaging within four miles of Florence. So you can see that they are afraid of us, and you may be sure that this year, please God, we will give them the malanno [a fearful curse]." These forays were of little military consequence; both sides prepared for a great battle. The Sienese obtained reinforcements from Pisa and other friendly towns, together with the eight hundred German 436 ITALY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY cavalry sent by King Manfred. The burgkers of Florence called on all the Guelf towns of Tuscany to send aid. Two Guelf nobles, Count Guido Guerra, almost the only member of his house to espouse the Guelf cause, and Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, spoke loudly against the expedition, for they understood the great superiority of the German mercenaries and the Ghibelline Knights over the Florentine militia; but in vain. Every city of Tuscany under Guelf dominion, — Lucca, Pistoia, Prato, Volterra, San Miniato, San Gimignano, — sent up its tale of men; Perugia from Umbria, Orvieto from St. Peter's Patrimony, and even Bologna from beyond the Apennines, furnished troops. There was scarce a family in Florence that did not contribute one or two men at the least. Dante's uncle, Brunetto di Bellincione, Coppo di Marcovaldo, the painter, the poets Chiaro Davanzati and Pallamidesse fought in the battle. There were said to be three thousand horse and thirty thousand foot. The Ghibellines were greatly outnumbered, but Count Aldobrandino of Santa Flora, Count Giordano, King Manfred's cousin, Farinata degli Uberti, head of the family, and Provenzano Salvani, was each a host in himself, and the Ghibelline nobles were far better disciplined than the Florentine troops. The Guelf army marched on Siena with the gay gonfalons of the trainbands fluttering over each company and the great red and white banner of Florence flying at the flagstaff of the carroccio; everybody felt confident of victory. In Siena there was much alarm. Within the FLOEENCE 437 duomo the clergy, led by the bishop, barefoot, walked round in solemn procession, singing hymns and praying that as God had been pleased to deliver Nineveh through the fasting and prayer of her people, so might He now be pleased to deliver Siena from the maUgnant wrath of the Florentines. And outside, through the city streets, the head of the council, the venerable Buonaguida, barefoot, bare- headed and in his shirt, led a great crowd to the duomo, saying : " Virgin Mary, aid us in our great need and rescue us from the paw of these lions that seek to devour us." At the door the bishop met Buonaguida, and the two marched in front of the procession to the altar of the Virgin, where they knelt and prayed. Buonaguida prostrated himself at full length and said : " Virgin, glorious queen of heaven, mother of sinners, I a miserable sinner give, grant and enfeoff thee with this city of Siena and its territory; and I pray thee, sweetest mother, that it may please thee to accept it, although our frailty is great and our sins are many. Consider not our offences. Guard the city, I beseech thee. Defend and save her from the hands of the perfidious Flor-? entine hounds, and from all who would oppress her or subject her to suffering and ruin." The bishop then mounted the pulpit and preached a most beau- tiful sermon, admonishing the people by good ex- amples; and he begged and commanded that all should embrace one another, forgive all injuries, go to confession, take communion, and all be good friends, and that they commend the city to the protection of the saints. 438 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTUEY When the bishop had finished his discourse, the crowd fell into line, — the crucifix at the head, a band of monks, the cross of the duomo, a company of priests, the red banner, the bishop barefoot and Buonaguida in his shirt, the canons of the duomo barefoot and bareheaded, a multitude of women also barefoot, many with their hair dishevelled, — and so the procession wound through the city, all sing- ing hymns or repeating paternosters. Other means were not neglected. A very rich banker, Messer Salimbene dei Salimbeni, lent 118,000 gold florins to the state without interest, in order to enable it to pay the soldiers. He brought the money on a cart covered with scarlet and decked with olive branches. Attempts also were made, not without success, to stir up treason in the Guelf army. The German mer- cenaries were given double pay and bidden make mince meat of the malignant Florentines; the Italian troops were marshalled and harangued ; all feasted upon many kinds of roast dishes and excel- lent sweets, and drank good wines most abundantly. Thus fortified, in the name of God, of the Virgin Mary and of St. George they marched to the fray. The Florentine army had halted four or five miles east of Siena, near the heights of Montaperti and not far from the river Arbia. The stories of the battle disagree. The victors ascribe the victory to their valour and to that of their allies; the van- quished attribute it to the defection of their own men. According to Villani, as the Sienese drew near, many men of Ghibelline sympathies in the Floren- tine army, both horse and foot, went over to join FLORENCE 439 them ; and at the onset, when the German cavalry were charging, some of the Florentines, Ghibellines at heart, turned traitors and one of them, Bocca degli Abati, smote off the hand of the horseman who was carrying the banner; the banner fell, no man knew whom to trust, all was confusion. The Florentine cavalry fled first; the foot-soldiers fol- lowed. The rout was complete; the slaughter was so great that the Arbia ran red with blood. Florence lost " the flower of her youth," and her allies were scattered far and wide. No attempt was made to defend the city ; the exiles returned triumphantly, and established their own government with Count Guido Novello (a kinsman of Guido Guerra) as po- desta on behalf of King Manfred. The Ghibelline chiefs held a council of war, and all were of the opinion that Florence, their arch enemy, should be razed to the ground, excepting only Farinata degli Uberti, who said that he would defend her with his sword, even if he had to fight alone {Inf. x, 91- 93): — " Ma fu' io sol oolk, dove sofferto fa per ciascuno di torre via Fiorenza, colui che la difesi a vise aperto." But I was the only man there, where it was agreed By every one to do away with Florence, Who defended her openly face to face. By his opposition the city was saved, but she was obliged to give up her conquests ; and all Tuscany, even Lucca, became subject to Ghibelline dominion. King Manfred's star was in the ascendant. Uberto Pelavicini and Buoso da Dovara upheld his cause in 440 ITALY IN THE THIETEENTH CENTURY the north J his daughter Constance married Prince Peter of Aragon ; the rival candidates for the Empire, Richard of Cornwall and Alphonso of Cas- tile did nothing to assert their titles ; Corradino was still a little boy, too young to set up any claim to the Sicilian crown ; the Eang of England was so busy with his rebellious barons that he had no thought or means to spare for the furtherance of his son Edmund's claim ; and Pope Alexander IV was a mild old man of small danger to anybody. Turn in what direction he would King Manfred found the sky blue and cloudless. He hunted with his hounds, he followed his hawks, he smiled his winning smile at many a lovely lady, he wrote sonnets, and in the cool of day he rode out into the country with his Sicilian minstrels, singing canzoni and strambotti. Like his father he encouraged the things of the mind. Clad always in green, with his fair hair and his merry blue eyes, he was in his epicurean way as charming a person as any in Europe, excepting only the noble, religious. King Louis of France. These two, 3ven in their charm, were as unlike as men can be; in their youth, while the gay Italian boy Tvas singing his songs to the ladies of Apulia, with dusky Saracens on guard at the castle gates. King Louis was sacri- ficing health, wealth and the lives of innumerable Frenchmen in the deserts of Egypt to the glory of God. And destiny, or rather the Church, dealt a poetical judgment of her own kind to each. Manfred she cursed, dethroned, and hounded to death ; Louis she blessed and canonized. END OP VOLUME I ITALY Scnle of Miles CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A iiilllilli-i!! miii ■ii! Ill I ■! III I II !iiii!i!19ii!!!l!