Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2
by F. Marion Crawford · English · Gutenberg #28600 · 503,019 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2
Author: F. Marion Crawford
Release date: April 25, 2009 [eBook #28600]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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[Illustration]
AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS
STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME
BY
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1899
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November,
December, 1898; January, 1899.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_
_Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME II
PAGE
REGION VII REGOLA 1
REGION VIII SANT' EUSTACHIO 23
REGION IX PIGNA 44
REGION X CAMPITELLI 64
REGION XI SANT' ANGELO 101
REGION XII RIPA 119
REGION XIII TRASTEVERE 132
REGION XIV BORGO 202
LEO THE THIRTEENTH 218
THE VATICAN 268
SAINT PETER'S 289
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
VOLUME II
Saint Peter's _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Palazzo Farnese 18
The Pantheon 46
The Capitol 68
General View of the Roman Forum 94
Theatre of Marcellus 110
Porta San Sebastiano 130
The Roman Forum, looking west 154
The Palatine 186
Castle of Sant' Angelo 204
Pope Leo the Thirteenth 228
Raphael's "Transfiguration" 256
Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" 274
Panorama of Rome, from the Orti Farnesiani 298
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
VOLUME II
PAGE
Region VII Regola, Device of 1
Portico of Octavia 3
San Giorgio in Velabro 11
Region VIII Sant' Eustachio, Device of 23
Site of Excavations on the Palatine 31
Church of Sant' Eustachio 39
Region IX Pigna, Device of 44
Interior of the Pantheon 49
The Ripetta 53
Piazza Minerva 55
Region X Campitelli, Device of 64
Church of Aracoeli 70
Arch of Septimius Severus 83
Column of Phocas 92
Region XI Sant' Angelo, Device of 101
Piazza Montanara and the Theatre of Marcellus 106
Site of the Ancient Ghetto 114
Region XII Ripa, Device of 119
Church of Saint Nereus and Saint Achilleus 125
The Ripa Grande and Site of the Sublician Bridge 128
Region XIII Trastevere, Device of 132
Ponte Garibaldi 137
Palazzo Mattei 140
House built for Raphael by Bramante, now torn down 145
Monastery of Sant' Onofrio 147
Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius 159
Interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli 175
Palazzo dei Conservatori 189
Region XIV Borgo, Device of 202
Hospital of Santo Spirito 214
The Papal Crest 218
Library of the Vatican 235
Fountain of Acqua Felice 242
Vatican from the Piazza of St. Peter's 251
Loggie of Raphael in the Vatican 259
Biga in the Vatican Museum 268
Belvedere Court of the Vatican 272
Sixtine Chapel 279
Saint Peter's 289
Mamertine Prison 294
Interior of St. Peter's 305
Pietà of Michelangelo 318
Tomb of Clement the Thirteenth 321
Ave atque Vale. Vignette 327
[Illustration]
Ave Roma Immortalis
REGION VII REGOLA
'Arenula'--'fine sand'--'Renula,' 'Regola'--such is the derivation of
the name of the Seventh Region, which was bounded on one side by the
sandy bank of the Tiber from Ponte Sisto to the island of Saint
Bartholomew, and which Gibbon designates as a 'quarter of the city
inhabited only by mechanics and Jews.' The mechanics were chiefly
tanners, who have always been unquiet and revolutionary folk, but at
least one exception to the general statement must be made, since it was
here that the Cenci had built themselves a fortified palace on the
foundations of a part of the Theatre of Balbus, between the greater
Theatre of Marcellus, then held by the Savelli, and the often mentioned
Theatre of Pompey. There Francesco Cenci dwelt, there the childhood of
Beatrice was passed, and there she lived for many months after the
murder of her father, before the accusation was first brought against
her. It is a gloomy place now, with its low black archway, its mouldy
walls, its half rotten windows, and its ghostly court of balconies; one
might guess that a dead man's curse hangs over it, without knowing how
Francesco died. And he, who cursed his sons and his daughters and
laughed for joy when two of them were murdered, rebuilt the little
church just opposite, as a burial-place for himself and them; but
neither he nor they were laid there. The palace used to face the Ghetto,
but that is gone, swept away to the very last stone by the municipality
in a fine hygienic frenzy, though, in truth, neither plague nor cholera
had ever taken hold there in the pestilences of old days, when the
Christian city was choked with the dead it could not bury. There is a
great open space there now, where thousands of Jews once lived huddled
together, crowding and running over each other like ants in an anthill,
in a state that would have killed any other people, persecuted
occasionally, but on the whole, fairly well treated; indispensable then
as now to the spendthrift Christian; confined within their own quarter,
as formerly in many other cities, by gates closed at dusk and opened at
sunrise, altogether a busy, filthy, believing, untiring folk that
laughed at the short descent and high pretensions of a Roman baron, but
cringed and crawled aside as the great robber strode by in steel. And
close by the Ghetto, in all that remains of the vast Portico of Octavia,
is the little Church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria where the Jews were
once compelled to hear Christian sermons on Saturdays.
[Illustration: PORTICO OF OCTAVIA
From a print of the last century]
Close by that church Rienzi was born, and it is for ever associated with
his memory. His name calls up a story often told, yet never clear, of a
man who seemed to possess several distinct and contradictory
personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of
fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero,
a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan.
The Buddhist monks of the far East believe today that a man's individual
self is often beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentary
personalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may in reality
be better or worse than they are. The Eastern belief may serve at least
as an illustration to explain the sort of mixed character with which
Rienzi came into the world, by which he imposed upon it for a certain
length of time, and which has always taken such strong hold upon the
imagination of poets, and writers of fiction, and historians.
Rienzi, as we call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son
of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo'
and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by
which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a
wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems
to have belonged to Anagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer of the
Colonna, and his wife was a washer-woman. Between them, moreover, they
made a business of selling water from the Tiber, through the city, at a
time when there were no aqueducts. Nicholas Rienzi's mother was
handsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and feature for
which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many, varied
and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineage rarely
transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged to that order
which is never far removed from madness and always akin to folly. The
greatest of his talents was his eloquence, the least of his qualities
was judgment, and while he possessed the courage to face danger
unflinchingly, and the means of persuading vast multitudes to follow him
in the realization of an exalted dream, he had neither the wit to trace
a cause to its consequence, nor the common sense to rest when he had
done enough. He had no mental perspective, nor sense of proportion, and
in the words of Madame de Staël he 'mistook memories for hopes.'
He was born in the year 1313, in the turbulent year that followed the
coronation of Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg; and when his vanity had
come upon him like a blight, he insulted the memory of his beautiful
mother by claiming to be the Emperor's son. In his childhood he was sent
to Anagni. There it must be supposed that he acquired his knowledge of
Latin from a country priest, and there he lived that early life of
solitude and retirement which, with ardent natures, is generally the
preparation for an outburst of activity that is to dazzle, or delight,
or terrify the world. Thence he came back, a stripling of twenty years,
dazed with dreaming and surfeited with classic lore, to begin the
struggle for existence in his native Rome as an obscure notary.
It seems impossible to convey an adequate idea of the confusion and
lawlessness of those times, and it is hard to understand how any city
could exist at all in such absence of all authority and government. The
powers were nominally the Pope and the Emperor, but the Pope had obeyed
the commands of Philip the Fair and had retired to Avignon, and no
Emperor could even approach Rome without an army at his back and the
alliance of the Ghibelline Colonna to uphold him if he succeeded in
entering the city. The maintenance of order and the execution of such
laws as existed, were confided to a mis-called Senator and a so-called
Prefect. The Senatorship was the property of the Barons, and when Rienzi
was born the Orsini and Colonna had just agreed to hold it jointly to
the exclusion of every one else. The prefecture was hereditary in the
ancient house of Di Vico, from whose office the Via de' Prefetti in the
Region of Campo Marzo is named to this day; the head of the house was at
first required to swear allegiance to the Pope, to the Emperor, and to
the Roman People, and as the three were almost perpetually at swords
drawn with one another, the oath was a perjury when it was not a farce.
The Prefects' principal duty appears to have been the administration of
the Patrimony of Saint Peter, in which they exercised an almost
unlimited power after Innocent the Third had formally dispensed them
from allegiance to the Emperor, and the long line of petty tyrants did
not come to an end until Pope Eugenius the Fourth beheaded the last of
the race for his misdeeds in the fifteenth century; after him the office
was seized upon by the Barons and finally drifted into the hands of the
Barberini, a mere sinecure bringing rich endowments to its fortunate
possessor.
In Rienzi's time there were practically three castes in Rome,--priests,
nobles, and beggars,--for there was nothing which in any degree
corresponded to a citizen class; such business as there was consisted
chiefly in usury, and was altogether in the hands of the Jews. Rome was
the lonely and ruined capital of a pestilential desert, and its
population was composed of marauders in various degrees.
The priests preyed upon the Church, the nobles upon the Church and upon
each other, the beggars picked the pockets of both, and such men as were
bodily fit for the work of killing were enlisted as retainers in the
service of the Barons, whose steady revenues from their lands, whose
strong fortresses within the city, and whose possession of the coat and
mail armour which was then so enormously valuable, made them masters of
all men except one another. They themselves sold the produce of their
estates and the few articles of consumption which reached Rome from
abroad, in shops adjoining their palaces; they owned the land upon which
the corn and wine and oil were grown; they owned the peasants who
ploughed and sowed and reaped and gathered; and they preserved the
privilege of disposing of their own wares as they saw fit. They feared
nothing but an ambush of their enemies, or the solemn excommunication of
the Pope, who cared little enough for their doings. The cardinals and
prelates who lived in the city were chiefly of the Barons' own order and
under their immediate protection. The Barons possessed everything and
ruled everything for their own profit; they defended their privileges
with their lives, and they avenged the slightest infringement on their
powers by the merciless shedding of blood. They were ignorant, but they
were keen; they were brave, but they were faithless; they were
passionate, licentious and unimaginably cruel.
Such was the city, and such the government, to which Rienzi returned at
the age of twenty, to follow the profession of a notary, probably under
the protection of the Colonna. That the business afforded occupation to
many is proved by the vast number of notarial deeds of that time still
extant; but it is also sufficiently clear that Rienzi spent much of his
time in dreaming, if not in idleness, and much in the study of the
ancient monuments and inscriptions upon which no one had bestowed a
glance for generations. It was during that period of early manhood that
he acquired the learning and collected the materials which earned him
the title, 'Father of Archæology.' He seems to have been about thirty
years old when he first began to speak in public places, to such
audience as he could gather, expanding with ready though untried
eloquence the soaring thoughts bred in years of solitary study.
Clement the Sixth, a Frenchman, was elected Pope at Avignon, a man who,
according to the chronicler, contrasted favourably by his wisdom,
breadth of view, and liberality, with a weak and vacillating
predecessor. Seeing that they had to do with a man at last, the Romans
sent an embassy to him to urge his return to Rome. The hope had long
been at the root of Rienzi's life, and he must have already attained to
a considerable reputation of learning and eloquence, since he was chosen
to be one of the ambassadors. Petrarch conceived the highest opinion of
him at their first meeting, and never withdrew his friendship from him
to the end; the great poet joined his prayers with those of the Roman
envoys, and supported Rienzi's eloquence with his own genius in a Latin
poem. But nothing could avail to move the Pope. Avignon was the Capua of
the Pontificate,--a vast papal palace was in course of construction, and
the cardinals had already begun to erect sumptuous dwellings for
themselves. The Pope listened, smiled, and promised everything except
return; the unsuccessful embassy was left without means of subsistence;
and Rienzi, disappointed in soul, ill in body, and almost starving, was
forced to seek the refuge of a hospital, whither he retired in the
single garment which remained unsold from his ambassadorial outfit. But
he did not languish long in this miserable condition, for the Pope heard
of his misfortunes, remembered his eloquence, and sent him back to Rome,
invested with the office of Apostolic Notary, and endowed with a salary
of five golden florins daily, a stipend which at that time amounted
almost to wealth. The office was an important one, but Rienzi exercised
it by deputy, continued his studies, propagated his doctrines, and by
quick degrees acquired unbounded influence with the people. His hatred
of the Barons was as profound as his love of his native city was noble;
and if the unavenged murder of a brother, and the unanswered buffet of a
Colonna rankled in his heart, and stimulated his patriotism with the
sting of personal wrong, neither the one nor the other were the prime
causes of his actions. The evils of the city were enormous, his courage
was heroic, and after profound reflection he resolved upon the step
which determined his tragic career.
To the door of the Church of Saint George in Velabro he affixed a
proclamation, or a prophecy, which set forth that Rome should soon be
restored to the 'Good Estate'; he collected a hundred of his friends in
a meeting by night, on the Aventine, to decide upon a course of action,
and he summoned all citizens to appear before the church of Sant' Angelo
in Pescheria, towards evening, peacefully and without arms, to provide
for the restoration of that 'Good Estate' which he himself had
announced.
[Illustration: SAN GIORGIO IN VELABRO]
That night was the turning-point in Rienzi's life, and he made it a
Vigil of Arms and Prayer. In the mysterious nature of the destined man,
the pure spirit of the Christian knight suddenly stood forth in
domination of his soul, and he consecrated himself to the liberation of
his country by the solemn office of the Holy Ghost. All night he kneeled
in the little church, in full armour, with bare head, before the altar.
The people came and went, and others came after them and saw him
kneeling there, while one priest succeeded another in celebrating the
Thirty Masses of the Holy Spirit from midnight to early morning. The sun
was high when the champion of freedom came forth, bareheaded still, to
face the clear light of day. Around him marched the chosen hundred; at
his right hand went the Pope's vicar; and before him three great
standards displayed allegories of liberty, justice, and peace.
A vast concourse of people followed him, for the news had spread from
mouth to mouth, and there were few in Rome who had not heard his voice
and longed for the 'Good Estate' which he so well described. The nobles
heard of the assembly with indifference, for they were well used to
disturbances of every kind and dreaded no unarmed rabble. Colonna and
Orsini, joint senators, had quarrelled, and the Capitol was vacant;
thither Rienzi went, and thence from a balcony he spoke to the people of
freedom, of peace, of prosperity. The eloquence that had moved Clement
and delighted Petrarch stirred ten thousand Roman hearts at once; a
dissatisfied Roman count read in clear tones the laws Rienzi proposed to
establish, and the appearance of a bishop and a nobleman by the
plebeian's side gave the people hope and encouragement. The laws were
simple and direct, and there was to be but one interpretation of them,
while all public revenues were to be applied to public ends. Each Region
of the city was to furnish a contingent of men-at-arms, and if any man
were killed in the service of his country, Rome was to provide for his
wife and children. The fortresses, the bridges, the gates, were to pass
from the custody of the Barons to that of the Roman people, and the
Barons themselves were to retire forthwith from the city. So the Romans
made Rienzi Dictator.
The nobles refused to believe in a change which meant ruin to
themselves. Old Stephen Colonna laughed and said he would throw the
madman from the window as soon as he should be at leisure. It was near
noon when he spoke; the sun was barely setting when he rode for his life
towards Palestrina. The great bell of the Capitol called the people to
arms, the liberator was already the despot, and the Barons were already
exiles. Rienzi assumed the title of Tribune with the authority of
Dictator, and with ten thousand swords at his back exacted a humiliating
oath of allegiance from the representatives of the great houses. Upon
the Body and Blood of Christ they swore to the 'Good Estate,' they bound
themselves to yield up their fortresses within the city, to harbour
neither outlaws nor malefactors in their mountain castles, and to serve
the Republic loyally in arms whenever they should be called upon to do
so. The oath was taken by all, the power that could enforce it was
visible to all men's eyes, and Rienzi was supreme.
Had he been the philosopher that he had once persuaded himself he was;
had he been the pure-hearted Christian Knight of the Holy Spirit he had
believed himself when he knelt through the long Office in the little
church; had he been the simple Roman Tribune of the People that he
proclaimed himself, when he had seized the dictatorship, history might
have followed a different course, and the virtues he imposed upon Rome
might have borne fruit throughout all Italy. But with Rienzi, each new
phase was the possession of a new spirit of good or evil, and with each
successive change, only the man's great eloquence remained. While he was
a hero, he was a hero indeed; while he was a philosopher, his thoughts
were lofty and wise; so long as he was a knight, his life was pure and
blameless. But the vanity which inspired him, not to follow an ideal,
but to represent that ideal outwardly, and which inflamed him with a
great actor's self-persuading fire, required, like all vanity, the
perpetual stimulus of applause and admiration. He could have leapt into
the gulf with Curtius before the eyes of ten thousand grateful citizens;
but he could not have gone back with Cincinnatus to the plough, a
simple, true-hearted man. The display of justice followed the assumption
of power, it is true; but when justice was established, the unquiet
spirit was assailed by the thirst for a new emotion which no boasting
proclamation could satisfy, and no adulation could quench. The changes
he wrought in a few weeks were marvellous, and the spirit in which they
were made was worthy of a great reformer; Italy saw and admired,
received his ambassadors and entertained them with respect, read his
eloquent letters and answered them with approbation; and Rienzi's court
was the tribunal to which the King of Hungary appealed the cause of a
murdered brother. Yet his vanity demanded more. It was not long before
he assumed the dress, the habits, and the behaviour of a sovereign and
appeared in public with the emblems of empire. He felt that he was no
longer in spirit the Knight of the Holy Ghost, and he required for
self-persuasion the conference of the outward honours of knighthood. He
purified himself according to the rites of chivalry in the font of the
Lateran Baptistry, consecrated by the tradition of Constantine's
miraculous recovery from leprosy, he watched his arms throughout the
dark hours, and received the order from the sword of an honourable
nobleman. The days of the philosopher, the hero, and the liberator were
over, and the reign of the public fool was inaugurated by the most
extravagant boasts, and celebrated by a feast of boundless luxury and
abundance, to which the citizens of Rome were bidden with their wives
and daughters. Still unsatisfied, he demanded and obtained the ceremony
of a solemn coronation, and seven crowns were placed successively upon
his head as emblems of the seven spiritual gifts. Before him stood the
great Barons in attitudes of humility and dejection; for a moment the
great actor had forgotten himself in the excitement of his part, and
Rienzi again enjoyed the emotion of undisputed sovereignty.
But Colonna, Orsini and Savelli were not men to submit tamely in fact,
though the presence of an overwhelming power had forced them to outward
submission, and in his calmer moments the extravagant tribune was
haunted by the dream of vengeance. A ruffian asserted under torture that
the nobles were already conspiring against their victor, and Rienzi
enticed three of the Colonna and five of the Orsini to the Capitol,
where he had taken up his abode. He seized them, held them prisoners all
night, and led them out in the morning to be the principal actors in a
farce which he dared not turn to tragedy. Condemned to death, their sins
confessed, they heard the tolling of the great bell, and stood
bareheaded before the executioner. The scene was prepared with the art
of a consummate playwright, and the spectators were delighted by a
speech of rare eloquence and amazed by the sudden exhibition of a
clemency that was born of fear. Magnanimously pardoning those whom he
dared not destroy, Rienzi received a new oath of allegiance from his
captives and dismissed them to their homes.
The humiliation rankled. Laying aside their hereditary feud, Colonna and
Orsini made a desperate effort to regain their power. By a
misunderstanding they were defeated, and the third part of their force,
entering the city without the rest, was overwhelmed and massacred, and
six of the Colonna were slain. The low-born Rienzi refused burial for
their bodies, knighted his son on the spot where they had fallen, and
washed his hands in water that was mingled with their blood. It was his
last triumph and his basest.
His power was already declining, and though the people had assembled in
arms to beat off their former masters, they had lost faith in a leader
who had turned out a madman, a knave, and a drunkard. They refused to
pay the taxes he would have laid upon them, and resisted the measures he
proposed. Clement the Sixth, who had approved his wisdom, punished his
folly, and the so-called tribune was deposed, condemned for heresy, and
excommunicated. A Neapolitan soldier of fortune, an adventurer and a
criminal, took possession of Rome with only one hundred and fifty men,
in the name of the Pope, without striking a blow, and the people would
not raise a hand to help their late idol as he was led away weeping to
the Castle of Sant' Angelo, while the nobles looked on in scornful
silence. Rienzi was allowed to depart in peace after a short captivity
and became a wanderer and an outcast in Europe.
In many disguises he went from place to place, and did not fear to
return to Rome in the travesty of a pilgrim. The story of his adventures
would fill many pages, but Rome is not concerned with them. In vain he
appealed to adventurers, to enthusiasts, and to fanatics to help in
regaining what he had lost. None would listen to him, no man would draw
the sword. He came to Prague at last, obtained an audience of the
Emperor Charles the Fourth, appealed to the whole court, with
impassioned eloquence, and declared himself to be Rienzi. The attempt
cost him his freedom, for the prudent emperor forthwith sent him a
captive to the Pope at Avignon, where he was at first loaded with chains
and thrown into prison. But Clement hesitated to bring him to trial, his
friend Petrarch spoke earnestly in his favour, and he was ultimately
relegated to an easy confinement, during which he once more gave himself
up to the study of his favourite classics in peaceful resignation.
Meanwhile in Rome his enactments had been abolished with sweeping
indifference to their character and importance, and the old misrule was
reëstablished in its pristine barbarity. The feud between Orsini and
Colonna broke out again in the absence of a common danger. The plague
appeared in Europe and decimated a city already distracted by internal
discord. Rome was again a wilderness of injustice, as the chronicle
says; every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes, the Papal and
the public revenues devoured by marauders, the streets full of thieves,
and the country infested by outlaws. Clement died, and Innocent the
Sixth, another Frenchman, was elected in his stead, 'a personage of
great science, zeal, and justice,' who set about to reform abuses as
well as he could, but who saw that he could not hope to return to Rome
without long and careful preparation. He selected as his agent in the
attempt to regain possession of the States of the Church the Cardinal
Albornoz, a Spaniard of courage and experience.
[Illustration: PALAZZO FARNESE]
Meanwhile Rienzi enjoyed greater freedom, and assumed the character of
an inspired poet; than which none commanded greater respect and
influence in the early years of the Renascence. That he ever produced
any verses of merit there is not the slightest evidence to prove, but
his undoubted learning and the friendship of Petrarch helped him to
sustain the character. He never lacked talent to act any part which his
vanity suggested as a means of flattering his insatiable soul. He put on
the humility of a penitent and the simplicity of a true scholar; he
spoke quietly and wisely of Italy's future and he obtained the
confidence of the new Pope.
It was in this way that by an almost incredible turn of fortune, the
outcast and all but condemned heretic was once more chosen as a means of
restoring order in Rome, and accompanied Cardinal Albornoz on his
mission to Italy. Had he been a changed man as he pretended to be, he
might have succeeded, for few understood the character of the Romans
better, and there was no name in the country of which the memories
appealed so profoundly to the hearts of the people.
The catalogue of his deeds during the second period of power is long and
confused, but the history of his fall is short and tragic. Not without a
keen appreciation of the difference between his former position as the
freely chosen champion of the people, and his present mission as a
reformer supported by pontifical authority, he requested the Legate to
invest him with the dignity of a senator, and the Cardinal readily
assented to what was an assertion of the temporal power. Then Albornoz
left him to himself. He entered Rome in triumph, and his eloquence did
not desert him. But he was no longer the young and inspired knight,
self-convinced and convincing, who had issued from the little church
long ago. In person he was bloated with drink and repulsive to all who
saw him; and the vanity which had so often been the temporary basis of
his changing character had grown monstrous under the long repression of
circumstances. With the first moment of success it broke out and
dictated his actions, his assumed humility was forgotten in an instant,
as well as the well-worded counsels of wisdom by which he had won the
Pope's confidence; and he plunged into a civil war with the still
powerful Colonna. One act of folly succeeded another; he had neither
money nor credit, and the stern Albornoz, seeing the direction he was
taking, refused to send him assistance. In his extremity he attempted to
raise funds for his soldiers and money for his own unbounded luxury by
imposing taxes which the people could not bear. The result was certain
and fatal. The Romans rose against him in a body, and an infuriated
rabble besieged him at the Capitol.
It has been said that the vainest men make the best soldiers. Rienzi was
brave for a moment at the last. Seeing himself surrounded, and deserted
by his servants, he went out upon a balcony and faced the mob alone,
bearing in his hand the great standard of the Republic, and for the last
time he attempted to avert with words the tempest which his deeds had
called forth. But his hour had come, and as he stood there alone he was
stoned and shot at, and an arrow pierced his hand. Broken in nerve by
long intemperance and fanatic excitement, he burst into tears and fled,
refusing the hero's death in which he might still have saved his name
from scorn. He attempted to escape from the other side of the Capitol
towards the Forum, and in the disguise of a street porter he had
descended through a window and had almost escaped notice while the
multitude was breaking down the doors of the main entrance. Then he was
seen and taken, and they brought him in his filthy dress to the great
platform of the Capitol, not knowing what they should do with him and
almost frightened to find their tyrant in their power.
They thronged round him, looked at him, spoke to him, but he answered
nothing; for his hour was come, the star of his nativity was in the
house of death. In that respite, had he been a man, courage might have
awed them, eloquence might have touched them, and he might yet have
dreamed of power. But he was utterly speechless, utterly broken, utterly
afraid. A whole hour passed, and no hand was lifted against him; yet he
spoke not. Then one man, tired of his pale and bloated face, silently
struck a knife into his heart, and as he fell dead, the rabble rushed
upon him and stabbed him to pieces, and a long yell of murderous rage
told all Rome that Rienzi was dead.
They left his body to the dogs and went away to their homes, for it was
evening, and they were spent with madness. Then the Jews came, who hated
him also; and they dragged the miserable corpse through the streets; and
made a bonfire of thistles in a remote place and burned it; and what was
left of the bones and ashes they threw into the Tiber. So perished
Rienzi, a being who was not a man, but a strangely responsive
instrument, upon which virtue, heroism, courage, cowardice, faith,
falsehood and knavery played the grandest harmonies and the wildest
discords in mad succession, till humanity was weary of listening, and
silenced the harsh music forever. However we may think of him, he was
great for a moment, yet however great we may think him, he was little in
all but his first dream. Let him have some honour for that, and much
merciful oblivion for the rest.
[Illustration]
REGION VIII SANT' EUSTACHIO
The Eighth region is almost symmetrical in shape, extending nearly north
and south with a tolerably even breadth from the haunted palace of the
Santacroce, where the marble statue of the dead Cardinal comes down from
its pedestal to pace the shadowy halls all night, to Santa Maria in
Campo Marzo, and cutting off, as it were, the three Regions so long held
by the Orsini from the rest of the city. Taking Rome as a whole, it was
a very central quarter until the development of the newly inhabited
portions. It was here, near the churches of Saint Eustace and Saint
Ives, that the English who came to Rome for business established
themselves, like other foreigners, in a distinct colony during the
Renascence. Upon the chapel of Saint Ives, unconsecrated now and turned
into a lecture room of the University, a strange spiral tower shows the
talents of Borromini, Bernini's rival, at their lowest ebb. So far as
one can judge, the architect intended to represent realistically the
arduous path of learning; but whatever he meant, the result is as bad a
piece of Barocco as is to be found in Rome.
As for the Church of Saint Eustace, it commemorates a vision which
tradition attributes alike to Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to Saint
Felix, and to Saint Hubert. The genius of Flaubert, who was certainly
one of the greatest prose writers of this century, has told the story of
the first of these in very beautiful language, and the legend of Saint
Hubert is familiar to every one. Saint Eustace is perhaps less known,
for he was a Roman saint of early days, a soldier and a lover of the
chase, as many Romans were. We do not commonly associate with them the
idea of boar hunting or deer stalking, but they were enthusiastic
sportsmen. Virgil's short and brilliant description of Æneas shooting
the seven stags on the Carthaginian shore is the work of a man who had
seen what he described, and Pliny's letters are full of allusions to
hunting. Saint Eustace was a contemporary of the latter, and perhaps
outlived him, for he is said to have been martyred under Hadrian, when a
long career of arms had raised him to the rank of a general. It is an
often-told story--how he was stalking the deer in the Ciminian forest
one day, alone and on foot, when a royal stag, milk-white and without
blemish, crashed through the meeting boughs before him; how he followed
the glorious creature fast and far, and shot and missed and shot again,
and how at last the stag sprang up a steep and jutting rock and faced
him, and he saw Christ's cross between the branching antlers, and upon
the Cross the Crucified, and heard a still far voice that bade him be
Christian and suffer and be saved; and so, alone in the greenwood, he
knelt down and bowed himself to the world's Redeemer, and rose up again,
and the vision had departed. And having converted his wife and his two
sons, they suffered together with him; for they were thrust into the
great brazen bull by the Colosseum, and it was made red hot, and they
perished, praising God. But their ashes lie under the high altar in the
church to this day.
The small square of Saint Eustace is not far from Piazza Navona,
communicating with it by gloomy little streets, and on the great night
of the Befana, the fair spreads through the narrow ways and overflows
with more booths, more toys, more screaming whistles, into the space
between the University and the church. And here at the southeast corner
used to stand the famous Falcone, the ancient eating-house which to the
last kept up the Roman traditions, and where in old days, many a famous
artist and man of letters supped on dishes now as extinct as the dodo.
The house has been torn down to make way for a modern building. Famous
it was for wild boar, in the winter, dressed with sweet sauce and pine
nuts, and for baked porcupine and strange messes of tomatoes and cheese,
and famous, too, for its good old wines in the days when wine was not
mixed with chemicals and sold as 'Chianti,' though grown about Olevano,
Paliano and Segni. It was a strange place, occupying the whole of two
houses which must have been built in the sixteenth century, after the
sack of Rome. It was full of small rooms of unexpected shapes,
scrupulously neat and clean, with little white and red curtains, tiled
floors, and rush bottomed chairs, and the regular guests had their own
places, corners in which they had made themselves comfortable for life,
as it were, and were to be found without fail at dinner and at supper
time. It was one of those genial bits of old Rome which survived till a
few years ago, and was more deeply regretted than many better things
when it disappeared.
Behind the Church of Saint Eustace runs a narrow street straight up from
the Square of the Pantheon to the Via della Dogana Vecchia. It used to
be chiefly occupied at the lower end by poulterers' shops, but towards
its upper extremity--for the land rises a little--it has always had a
peculiarly dismal and gloomy look. It bears a name about which are
associated some of the darkest deeds in Rome's darkest age; it is called
the Via de' Crescenzi, the street and the abode of that great and evil
house which filled the end of the tenth century with its bloody deeds.
There is no more unfathomable mystery in the history of mediæval Rome
than the origin and power of Theodora, whose name first appears in the
year 914, as Lady Senatress and absolute mistress of the city. The
chronicler Luitprand, who is almost the only authority for this period,
heaps abuse upon Theodora and her eldest daughter, hints that they were
of low origin, and brands them with a disgrace more foul than their
crimes. No one can read their history and believe that they were
anything but patrician women, of execrable character but of high
descent. From Theodora, in little more than a hundred years, descended
five Popes and a line of sovereign Counts, ending in Peter, the first
ancestor of the Colonna who took the name; and, from her also, by the
marriage of her second daughter, called Theodora like herself, the
Crescenzi traced their descent. Yet no historian can say who that first
Theodora was, nor whence she came, nor how she rose to power, nor can
any one name the father of her children. Her terrible eldest child,
Marozia, married three sovereigns, the Lord of Tusculum, the Lord of
Tuscany, and at last Hugh, King of Burgundy, and left a history that is
an evil dream of terror and bloodshed. But the story of those fearful
women belongs to their stronghold, the great castle of Sant' Angelo. To
the Region of Saint Eustace belongs the history of Crescenzio, consul,
tribune and despot of Rome. In the street that bears the name of his
family, the huge walls of Severus Alexander's bath afforded the
materials for a fortress, and there Crescenzio dwelt when his kinswoman
Marozia held Hadrian's tomb, and after she was dead. Those were the
times when the Emperors defended the Popes against the Roman people. Not
many years had passed since Otto the First had done justice upon Peter
the Prefect, far away at the Lateran palace; Otto the Second reigned in
his stead, and Benedict the Sixth was Pope. The race of Theodora hated
the domination of the Emperor, and despised a youthful sovereign whom
they had never seen. They dreamed of restoring Rome to the Eastern
Empire, and of renewing the ancient office of Exarch for themselves.
Benedict stood in their way and was doomed. They chose their antipope, a
Roman Cardinal, one Boniface, a man with neither scruple nor conscience,
and set him up in the Pontificate; and, when they had done that,
Crescenzio seized Benedict and dragged him through the low black
entrance of Sant' Angelo, and presently strangled him in his dungeon.
But neither did Boniface please those who had made him Pope; and,
within the month, lest he should die like him he had supplanted, he
stealthily escaped from Rome to the sea, and it is recorded that he
stole and carried away the sacred vessels and treasures of the Vatican,
and took them to Constantinople.
So Crescenzio first appears in the wild and confused history of that
century of dread, when men looked forward with certainty and horror to
the ending of the world in the year one thousand. And during a dozen
years after Benedict was murdered, the cauldron of faction boiled and
seethed in Rome. Then, in the year 987, when Hugh Capet took France for
himself and for his descendants through eight centuries, and when John
the Fifteenth was Pope in Rome, 'a new tyrant arose in the city which
had hitherto been trampled down and held under by the violence of the
race of Alberic,'--that is, the race of Theodora,--'and that tyrant was
Crescentius.' And Crescenzio was the kinsman of Alberic's children.
The second Otto was dead, and Otto the Third was a mere boy, when
Crescenzio, fortified in Sant' Angelo, suddenly declared himself Consul,
seized all power, and drove the Pope from Rome. This time he had no
antipope; he would have no Pope at all, and there was no Emperor either,
since the young Otto had not yet been crowned. So Crescenzio reigned
alone for awhile, with what he called a Senate at his back, and the
terror of his name to awe the Roman people. But Pope John was wiser than
the unfortunate Benedict, and a better man than Boniface, the antipope
and thief; and having escaped to the north, he won the graces of
Crescenzio's distant kinsman by marriage and hereditary foe, Duke Hugh
of Tuscany, grandson of Hugh of Burgundy the usurper; and from that
strong situation he proceeded to offer the boy Otto inducements for
coming to be crowned in Rome.
He wisely judged from what he had seen during his lifetime that the most
effectual means of opposing the boundless license of the Roman
patricians was to make an Emperor, even of a child, and he knew that the
name of Otto the Great was not forgotten, and that the terrible
execution of Peter the Prefect was remembered with a lively dread.
Crescenzio was not ready to oppose the force of the Empire; he was
surrounded by jealous factions at home, which any sudden revolution
might turn against himself, he weighed his strength against the danger
and he resolved to yield. The 'Senate,' which consisted of patricians as
greedy as himself, but less daring or less strong, had altogether
recovered the temporal power in Rome, and Crescenzio easily persuaded
them that it would be both futile and dangerous to quarrel with the
Emperor about spiritual matters. The 'Consul' and the 'Senate'--which
meant a tyrant and his courtiers--accordingly requested the Pope to
return in peace and exercise his episcopal functions in the Holy See.
Pope John must have been as bold as he was wise, for he did not
hesitate, but came back at once. He reaped the fruit of his wisdom and
his courage. Crescenzio and the nobles met him with reverence and
implored his forgiveness for their ill-considered deeds; the Pope
granted them a free pardon, wisely abstaining from any assertion of
temporal power, and sometimes apparently submitting with patience to the
Consul's tyranny. For it is recorded that some years later, when the
Bishops of France sent certain ambassadors to the Pope, they were not
received, but were treated with indignity, kept waiting outside the
palace three days, and finally sent home without audience or answer
because they had omitted to bribe Crescenzio.
[Illustration: SITE OF EXCAVATIONS ON THE PALATINE]
If Pope John had persuaded Otto to be crowned at once, such things might
not have taken place. It was many years before the young Emperor came to
Rome at last, and he had not reached the city when he was met by the
news that Pope John was dead. He lost no time, designated his private
chaplain, the son of the Duke of Franconia, 'a young man of letters, but
somewhat fiery on account of his youth,' to be Pope, and sent him
forward to Rome at once with a train of bishops, to be installed in the
Holy See. In so youthful a sovereign, such action lacked neither energy
nor wisdom. The young Pontiff assumed the name of Gregory the Fifth,
espoused the cause of the poor citizens against the tyranny of the
nobles, crowned his late master Emperor, and forthwith made a determined
effort to crush Crescenzio and regain the temporal power.
But he had met his match at the outset. The blood of Theodora was not
easily put down. The Consul laughed to scorn the pretensions of the
young Pope; the nobles were in arms, the city was his, and in the second
year of his Pontificate, Gregory the Fifth was driven ignominiously from
the gates in a state of absolute destitution. He was the third Pope whom
Crescenzio had driven out. Gregory made his way to Pavia, summoned a
council of Bishops, and launched the Major Excommunication at his
adversary. But the Consul, secure in Sant' Angelo, laughed again, more
grimly, and did as he pleased.
At this time Basil and Constantine, joint Emperors in Constantinople,
sent ambassadors to Rome to Otto the Third, and with them came a certain
John, a Calabrian of Greek race, a man of pliant conscience, tortuous
mind, and extraordinary astuteness, at that time Archbishop of Piacenza,
and formerly employed by Otto upon a mission to Constantinople.
Crescenzio, as though to show that his enmity was altogether against the
Pope, and not in the least against the Emperor, received these envoys
with great honour, and during their stay persuaded them to enter into a
scheme which had suddenly presented itself to his ambitious
intelligence. The old dream of restoring Rome to the Eastern Empire was
revived, the conspirators resolved to bring it to realization, and John
of Calabria was a convenient tool for their hands. He was to be Pope;
Crescenzio was to be despot, under the nominal protection and
sovereignty of the Greek Emperors, and the ambassadors were to conclude
the treaty with the latter. Otto was on the German frontier waging war
against the Slavs, and Gregory was definitely exiled from Rome. Nothing
stood in the way of the plot, and it was forthwith put into execution.
Certain ambassadors of Otto's were passing through Rome on their return
from the East and on their way to the Emperor's presence; they were
promptly seized and thrown into prison, in order to interrupt
communication between the two Empires. John of Calabria was consecrated
Pope, or rather antipope, Crescenzio took possession of all power, and
certain legates of Pope Gregory having ventured to enter Rome were at
once imprisoned with the Emperor's ambassadors. It was a daring stroke,
and if it had succeeded, the history of Europe would have been different
from that time forward. Crescenzio was bold, unscrupulous, pertinacious
and keen. He had the Roman nobles at his back and he controlled such
scanty revenues as could still be collected. He had violently expelled
three Popes, he had created two antipopes, and his name was terror in
the ears of the Church. Yet it would have taken more than all that to
overset the Catholic Church at a time when the world was ripe for the
first crusade; and though the Empire had fallen low since the days of
Charles the Great, it was fast climbing again to the supremacy of power
in which it culminated under Barbarossa and whence it fell with
Frederick the Second. A handful of high-born murderers and marauders
might work havoc in Rome for a time, but they could neither destroy that
deep-rooted belief nor check the growth of that imperial law by which
Europe emerged from the confusion of the dark age--to lose both law and
belief again amid the intellectual excitements of the Renascence.
Otto the Third was young, brave and determined, and before the treaty
with the Eastern Emperors was concluded, he was well informed of the
outrageous deeds of the Roman patricians. No sooner had he brought the
war on the Saxon frontier to a successful conclusion than he descended
again into Italy 'to purge the Roman bilge,' in the chronicler's strong
words. On his way, he found time to visit Venice secretly, with only six
companions, and we are told how the Doge entertained him in private as
Emperor, with sumptuous suppers, and allowed him to wander about Venice
all day as a simple unknown traveller, with his companions, 'visiting
the churches and the other rare things of the City,' whereby it is clear
that in the year 998, when Rome was a half-deserted, half-ruined city,
ruled by a handful of brigands living in the tomb of the Cæsars, Venice,
under the good Doge Orseolo the Second, was already one of the beautiful
cities of the world, as well as mistress of the Adriatic, of all
Dalmatia, and of many lovely islands.
Otto took with him Pope Gregory, and with a very splendid army of
Germans and Italians marched down to Rome. Neither Crescenzio nor his
followers had believed that the young Emperor was in earnest; but when
it was clear that he meant to do justice, Antipope John was afraid, and
fled secretly by night, in disguise. Crescenzio, of sterner stuff,
heaped up a vast provision of food in Sant' Angelo, and resolved to
abide a siege. The stronghold was impregnable, so far as any one could
know, for it had never been stormed in war or riot, and on its
possession had depended the long impunity of Theodora's race. The
Emperor might lay siege to it, encamp before it, and hem it in for
months; in the end he must be called away by the more urgent wars of the
Empire in the north, and Crescenzio, secure in his stronghold, would
hold the power still. But when the Roman people knew that Otto was at
hand and that the antipope had fled, their courage rose against the
nobles, and they went out after John, and scoured the country till they
caught him in his disguise, for his face was known to many. Because the
Emperor was known to be kind of heart, and because it was remembered
also that this John of Calabria, who went by many names, had by strange
chance baptized both Otto and Pope Gregory, the Duke of Franconia's son,
therefore the Romans feared lest justice should be too gentle; and
having got the antipope into their hands, they dealt with him savagely,
put out his eyes, cut out his tongue and sliced off his nose, and drove
him to prison through the city, seated face backwards on an ass. And
when the Emperor and the Pope came, they left him in his dungeon.
Now at Gaeta there lived a very holy man, who was Saint Nilus, and who
afterwards founded the monastery of Grottaferrata, where there are
beautiful wall paintings to this day. He was a Greek, like John of
Calabria, and though he detested the antipope he had pity on the man
and felt compassion for his countryman. So he journeyed to Rome and came
before Otto and Gregory, who received him with perfect devotion, as a
saint, and he asked of them that they should give him the wretched John,
'who,' he said, 'held both of you in his arms at the Font of Baptism,'
though he was grievously fallen since that day by his great hypocrisy.
Then the Emperor was filled with pity, and answered that the saint might
have the antipope alive, if he himself would then remain in Rome and
direct the monastery of Saint Anastasia of the Greeks. The holy man was
willing to sacrifice his life of solitary meditation for the sake of his
wretched countryman, and he would have obtained the fulfilment of his
request from Otto; but Pope Gregory remembered how he himself had been
driven out penniless and scantily clothed, to make way for John of
Calabria, and his heart was hardened, and he would not let the prisoner
go. Wherefore Saint Nilus foretold that because neither the Pope nor the
Emperor would have mercy, the wrath of God should overtake them both.
And indeed they were both cut off in the flower of their youth--Gregory
within one year, and Otto not long afterwards.
Meanwhile they sent Nilus away and laid siege to the Castle of Sant'
Angelo, where Crescenzio and his men had shut themselves up with a good
store of food and arms. No one had ever taken that fortress, nor did
any one believe that it could be stormed. But Pope and Emperor were
young and brave and angry, and they had a great army, and the people of
Rome were with them, every man. They used such engines as they
had,--catapults, and battering-rams, and ladders; and yet Crescenzio
laughed, for the stone walls were harder than the stone missiles, and
higher than the tallest ladders, and so thick that fire could not heat
them from without, nor battering-ram loosen a single block in a single
course; and many assaults were repelled, and many a brave soldier fell
writhing and broken into the deep ditch with his ladder upon him.
When the time of fate was fulfilled, the end came on a fair April
morning; one ladder held its place till desperate armed hands had
reached the rampart, and swift feet had sprung upon the edge, and one
brave arm beat back the twenty that were there to defend; and then there
were two, and three, and ten, and a score, and a hundred, and the great
castle was taken at last. Nor do we know surely that it was ever taken
again by force, even long afterwards in the days of artillery. But
Crescenzio's hour had come, and the Emperor took him and the twelve
chief nobles who were with him, and cut off their heads, one by one, in
quick justice and without torture, and the heads were set up on spikes,
and the headless bodies were hung out from the high crenellations of the
ramparts. Thus ended Crescenzio, but not his house, nor the line of
Theodora, nor died he unavenged.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SANT' EUSTACHIO
From a print of the last century]
It is said and believed that Pope Gregory perished by the hands of the
Crescenzi, who lived in the little street behind the Church of Saint
Eustace. As for Otto, he came to a worse end, though he was of a pious
house, and laboured for the peace of his soul against the temptations of
this evil world. For he was young, and the wife of Crescenzio was
wonderfully fair, and her name was Stefania. She came weeping before him
and mourning her lord, and was beautiful in her grief, and knew it, as
many women do. And the young Emperor saw her, and pitied her, and loved
her, and took her to his heart in sin, and though he repented daily, he
daily fell again, while the woman offered up her body and her soul to be
revenged for the fierce man she had loved. So it came to pass, at last,
that she found her opportunity against him, and poured poison into his
cup, and kissed him, and gave it to him with a very loving word. And he
drank it and died, and the prophecy of the holy man, Nilus, was
fulfilled upon him.
The story is told in many ways, but that is the main truth of it,
according to Muratori, whom Gibbon calls his guide and master in the
history of Italy, but whom he did not follow altogether in his brief
sketch of Crescenzio's life and death, and their consequences. The
Crescenzi lived on, in power and great state. They buried the terrible
tribune in Santa Sabina, on the Aventine, where his epitaph may be read
today, but whither he did not retire in life, as some guide-books say,
to end his days in prayer and meditation. And for some reason, perhaps
because they no longer held the great Castle, they seem to have left the
Region of Saint Eustace; for Nicholas, the tribune's son, built the
small palace by the Tiber, over against the Temple of Hercules, though
it has often been called the house of Rienzi, whose name was also
Nicholas, which caused the confusion. And later they built themselves
other fortresses, but the end of their history is not known.
In the troubles which succeeded the death of Crescentius, a curious
point arises in the chronicle, with regard to the titles of the bishops
depending from the Holy See. It is certainly not generally known that,
as late as the tenth century, the bishops of the great cities called
themselves Popes--the 'Pope of Milan,' the 'Pope of Naples,' and the
like--and that Gregory the Seventh, the famous Hildebrand, was the first
to decree that the title should be confined to the Roman Pontiffs, with
that of 'Servus Servorum Dei'--'servant of the servants of God.' And
indeed, in those changing times such a confusion of titles must have
caused trouble, as it did when Gregory the Fifth, driven out by
Crescentius, and taking refuge in Pavia, found himself, the Pope of
Rome, confronted with Arnulf, the 'Pope' of Milan, and complained of his
position to the council he had summoned.
The making and unmaking of Popes, and the election of successors to
those that died, brings up memories of what Rome was during the vacancy
of the See, and of the general delight at the death of any reigning
Pontiff, good or bad. A certain monk is reported to have answered Paul
the Third, that the finest festival in Rome took place while one Pope
lay dead and another was being elected. During that period, not always
brief, law and order were suspended. According to the testimony of
Dionigi Atanagi, quoted by Baracconi, the first thing that happened was
that the prisons were broken open and all condemned persons set free,
while all men in authority hid themselves in their homes, and the
officers of justice fled in terror from the dangerous humour of the
people. For every man who could lay hands on a weapon seized it, and
carried it about with him. It was the time for settling private quarrels
of long standing, in short and decisive fights, without fear of
disturbance or interference from the frightened Bargello and the
terrorized watchmen of the city. And as soon as the accumulated private
spite of years had spent itself in a certain amount of free fighting,
the city became perfectly safe again, and gave itself up to laying
wagers on the election of the next Pope. The betting was high, and there
were regular bookmakers, especially in all the Regions from Saint
Eustace to the Ponte Sant' Angelo, where the banks had established
themselves under the protection of the Pope and the Guelph Orsini, and
where the most reliable and latest news was sure to be obtained fresh
from the Vatican. Instead of the Piazza di Spagna and the Villa Medici,
the narrow streets and gloomy squares of Ponte, Parione and Sant'
Eustachio became the gathering-place of society, high, low and
indiscriminate; and far from exhibiting the slightest signs of mourning
for its late ruler, the city gave itself up to a sort of Carnival
season, all the more delightful, because it was necessarily unexpected.
Moreover, the poor people had the delight of speculating upon the wealth
of the cardinal who might be elected; for, as soon as the choice of the
Conclave was announced, and the cry, 'A pope, a pope!' rang through the
streets, it was the time-honoured privilege of the rabble to sack and
plunder the late residence of the chosen cardinal, till, literally,
nothing was left but the bare walls and floors. This was so much a
matter of course, that the election of a poor Pope was a source of the
bitterest disappointment to the people, and was one of their principal
causes of discontent when Sixtus the Fifth was raised to the
Pontificate, it having been given out as certain, but a few hours
earlier, that the rich Farnese was to be the fortunate man.
[Illustration]
REGION IX PIGNA
There used to be a tradition, wholly unfounded, but deeply rooted in the
Roman mind, to the effect that the great bronze pine-cone, eleven feet
high, which stands in one of the courts of the Vatican, giving it the
name 'Garden of the Pine-cone,' was originally a sort of stopper which
closed the round aperture in the roof of the Pantheon. The Pantheon
stands at one corner of the Region of Pigna, and a connection between
the Region, the Pantheon and the Pine-cone seems vaguely possible,
though altogether unsatisfactory. The truth about the Pine-cone is
perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa's artificial
lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up
in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter's by Pope Symmachus about
fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon.
No one, so far as I am aware,--not even the excellent Baracconi,--offers
any explanation of the name and device of the Ninth Region.
Topographically it is nearly a square, of which the angles are the
Pantheon, the corner of Via di Caravita and the Corso, the Palazzo di
Venezia, and the corner of the new Via Arenula and Via Florida. Besides
the Pantheon it contains some of the most notable buildings erected
since the Renascence. Here are the palaces of the Doria, of the Altieri,
and the 'Palace of Venice' built by Paul the Second, that Venetian
Barbo, whose name may have nicknamed the racing horses of the Carnival.
Here were the strongholds of the two great rival orders, the Dominicans
and the Jesuits, the former in the Piazza della Minerva, the latter in
the Piazza del Gesù, and in the Collegio Romano; and here at the present
day, in the buildings of the old rivals, significantly connected by an
arched passage, are collected the greatest libraries of the city. That
of the Dominicans, wisely left in their care, has been opened to the
public; the other, called after Victor Emmanuel, is a vast collection of
books gathered together by plundering the monastic institutions of Italy
at the time of the disestablishment. The booty--for it was nothing
else--was brought in carts, mostly in a state of the utmost confusion,
and the books and manuscripts were roughly stacked in vacant rooms on
the ground floor of the Collegio Romano, in charge of a porter. Not
until a poor scholar, having bought himself two ounces of butter in the
Piazza Navona, found the greasy stuff wrapped in an autograph letter of
Christopher Columbus, did it dawn upon the authorities that the porter
was deliberately selling priceless books and manuscripts as waste paper,
by the hundredweight, to provide himself with the means of getting
drunk. That was about the year 1880. The scandal was enormous, a strict
inquiry was made, justice was done as far as possible, and an official
account of the affair was published in a 'Green Book'; but the amount of
the loss was unknown, it may have been incalculable, and it was
undeniably great.
The names visibly recorded in the Region have vast suggestions in
them,--Ignatius Loyola, the Dominicans, Venice, Doria, Agrippa, and the
buildings themselves, which are the record, will last for ages; the
opposition of Jesuit and Inquisitor, under one name or another, and of
both by the people, will live as long as humanity itself.
The crisis in the history of the Inquisition in Rome followed closely
upon the first institution of the Tribunal, and seventeen years after
Paul the Fourth had created the Court, by a Papal Bull of July
twenty-first, 1542, the people burned the Palace of the Inquisition and
threatened to destroy the Dominicans and their monastery.
[Illustration: THE PANTHEON]
So far as it is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa
Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious,
utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to
folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head
'might be compared to the Vesuvius of his native city, since he was
ardent in all his actions, wrathful, hard and inflexible, undoubtedly
moved by an incredible zeal for religion, but a zeal often lacking in
prudence, and breaking out in eruptions of excessive severity.' On the
other hand, his lack of perception was such that he remained in complete
ignorance of the outrageous deeds done in his name by his two nephews,
the one a cardinal, the other a layman, and it was not until the last
year of his life that their doings came to his knowledge.
This was the man to whom Queen Elizabeth sent an embassy, in the hope of
obtaining the Papal sanction for her succession to the throne. Henry the
Second of France had openly espoused the cause of Mary Queen of Scots,
whom Philip the Second of Spain was also inclined to support, after the
failure of his attempt to obtain the hand of Elizabeth for the Duke of
Savoy. With France and Spain against her, the Queen appealed to Rome,
and to Paul the Fourth. In the eyes of Catholics her mother had never
been the lawful wife of Henry the Eighth, and she herself was
illegitimate. If the Pope would overlook this unfortunate fact and
confirm her crown in the eyes of Catholic Europe, she would make an act
of obedience by her ambassador. She had been brought up as a Catholic,
she had been crowned by a Roman Catholic bishop, and on first ascending
the throne she had shown herself favourable to the Catholic party; the
request and proposition were reasonable, if nothing more. Muratori
points out that if a more prudent, discreet and gentle Pope had reigned
at that time, and if he had received Elizabeth's offer kindly, according
to the dictates of religion, which he should have considered to the
exclusion of everything else, and without entering into other people's
quarrels, nor into the question of his own earthly rights, England might
have remained a Catholic country. Paul the Fourth's answer, instead, was
short, cold and senseless. 'England,' he said, 'is under the feudal
dominion of the Roman Church. Elizabeth is born out of wedlock; there
are other legitimate heirs, and she should never have assumed the crown
without the consent of the Apostolic See.' This is the generally
accepted account of what took place, as given by Muratori and other
historians. Lingard, however, whose authority is undeniable, argues
against the truth of the story on the ground that the English Ambassador
in Rome at the time of Queen Mary's death never had an audience of the
Pope. It seems probable, nevertheless, that Elizabeth actually appealed
to the Holy See, though secretly and with the intention of concealing
the step in case of failure.
A child might have foreseen the consequences of the Pope's political
folly. Elizabeth saw her extreme danger, turned her back upon Rome
forever, and threw herself into the arms of the Protestant party as her
only chance of safety. At the same time heresy assumed alarming
proportions throughout Europe, and the Pope called upon the Inquisition
to put it down in Rome. Measures of grim severity were employed, and the
Roman people, overburdened with the taxes laid upon them by the Pope's
nephews, were exasperated beyond endurance by the religious zeal of the
Dominicans, in whose hands the inquisitorial power was placed.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON]
Nor were they appeased by the fall of the two Carafa, which was
ultimately brought about by the ambassador of Tuscany. The Pope enquired
of him one day why he so rarely asked an audience, and he frankly
replied that the Carafa would not admit him to the Pope's presence
unless he would previously give a full account of his intentions, and
reveal all the secrets of the Grand Duke's policy. Then some one wrote
out an account of the Carafa's misdeeds and laid it in the Pope's own
Breviary. The result was sudden and violent, like most of Paul's
decisions and actions. He called a Consistory of cardinals, made open
apology for his nephews' doings, deprived them publicly of all their
offices and honours, and exiled them, in opposite directions and with
their families, beyond the confines of the Papal States.
But the people were not satisfied; they accused the Pope of treating his
nephews as scapegoats for his own sins, and the immediate repeal of many
taxes was no compensation for the terrors of the Inquisition. There were
spies everywhere. No one was safe from secret accusers. The decisions of
the tribunal were slow, mysterious and deadly. The Romans became the
victims of a secret reign of terror such as the less brave Neapolitans
had more bravely fought against and had actually destroyed a dozen years
earlier, when Paul the Fourth, then only a cardinal, had persuaded their
Viceroy to try his favourite method of reducing heresy. Yet such was the
fear of the Dominicans and of the Pope himself that no one dared to
raise his voice against the 'monks of the Minerva.'
The general dissatisfaction was fomented by the nobles, and principally
by the Colonna, who had been at open war with the Pope during his whole
reign. Moreover, the severities of his government had produced between
Colonna and Orsini one of those occasional alliances for their common
safety, which vary their history without adorning it. The Pope seized
the Colonna estates and conferred them upon his nephews, but was in turn
often repulsed as the fighting ebbed and flowed during the four years of
his Pontificate, for the Colonna as usual had powerful allies in the
Emperor and in his kingdom of Naples. Changeable as the Roman people
always were, they had more often espoused the cause of Colonna than that
of the Pope and Orsini. Paul the Fourth fell ill in the summer, when the
heat makes a southern rabble dangerous, and the certain news of his
approaching end was a message of near deliverance. He lingered and died
hard, though he was eighty-four years old and afflicted with dropsy. But
the exasperated Romans were impatient for the end, and the nobles were
willing to take vengeance upon their oppressor before he breathed his
last. As the news that the Pope was dying ran through the city, the
spell of terror was broken, secret murmuring turned to open complaint,
complaint to clamour, clamour to riot. A vast and angry multitude
gathered together in the streets and open places, and hour by hour, as
the eager hope for news of death was ever disappointed, and the hard
old man lived on, the great concourse gathered strength within itself,
seething, waiting, listening for the solemn tolling of the great bell in
the Capitol to tell them that Paul the Fourth had passed away. Still it
came not. And in the streets and everywhere there were retainers and
men-at-arms of the great houses, ready of tongue and hand, but friendly
with the people, listening to tales of suffering and telling of their
lords' angry temper against the dying Pope. A word here, a word there,
like sparks amid sun-dried stubble, till the hot stuff was touched with
fire and all broke out in flame.
Then words were no longer exchanged between man and man, but a great cry
of rage went up from all the throng, and the people began to move, some
knowing what they meant to do and some not knowing, nor caring, but
moving with the rest, faster and faster, till many were trampled down in
the press, and they came to the prisons, to Corte Savella and Tor di
Nona, and even to Sant' Angelo, and as they battered at the great doors
from without, the prisoners shouted for freedom from within, and their
gaolers began to loose their chains, fearing for their own lives, and
drew back the bolts to let the stream of riot in. So on that day four
hundred condemned men were taken out and let loose, before the Pope was
dead.
[Illustration: THE RIPETTA
From a print of the last century]
Yet the people had not enough, and they surged and roared in the
streets, quivering with rage not yet half spent. And again words ran
along, as fire through dry grass, and suddenly all men thought of the
Inquisition, down by the Tiber at the Ripetta. Thought was motion,
motion was action, action was to set men free and burn the hated prison
to the ground. The prisoners of the Holy Roman Office were seventy-two,
and many had lain there long unheard, for the trial of unbelief was
cumbrous in argument and slow of issue, and though the Pope could
believe no one innocent who was in prison, and though he was violent in
his judgments, the saintly Ghislieri was wise and cautious, and would
condemn no man hastily to please his master. When he in turn was Pope,
the people loved him, though at first they feared him for Pope Paul's
sake.
When they had burned the Inquisition on that day and set free the
accused persons, and it was not yet night, they turned back from the
Tiber, still unsatisfied, for they had shed little blood, or none at
all, perhaps, and the people of Rome always thirsted for that when their
anger was hot. Through the winding streets they went, dividing where the
ways were narrow and meeting again where there was room, always towards
Pigna, and the Minerva, and the dwelling of the learned black and white
robed fathers into whose hands the Inquisition had been given and from
whose monastery the good Ghislieri had been chosen to be cardinal. For
the rabble knew no difference of thought or act between him and the
dying Pope. They bore torches and weapons, and beams for battering down
the doors, and they reached the place, a raging horde of madmen.
Suddenly before them there were five men on horseback, who were just and
did not fear them. These men were Marcantonio Colonna and his kinsman
Giuliano Cesarini, and a Salviati, and a Torres and Gianbattista
Bernardi, who had all suffered much at the hands of the Pope and had
come swiftly to Rome when they heard that he was near death. And at the
sight of those calm knights, sitting there on their horses without
armour and with sheathed swords, the people drew back a moment, while
Colonna spoke. Presently, as he went on, they grew silent and
understood his words. And when they had understood, they saw that he
was right and their anger was quieted, and they went away to their
homes, satisfied with having set free those who had been long in prison.
So the great monastery was saved from fire and the monks from death. But
the Pope was not yet dead, and while he lived the people were restless
and angry by day and night, and ready for new deeds of violence; but
Marcantonio Colonna rode through the city continually, entreating them
to wait patiently for the end, and because he also had suffered much at
Paul's hands, they listened to him and did nothing more.
[Illustration: PIAZZA MINERVA]
The rest is a history which all men know: how the next Pope was just,
and put the Carafa to their trial for many deeds of bloodshed; how the
judgment was long delayed that it might be without flaw; how it took
eight hours at last to read the judges' summing up; and how Cardinal
Carafa was strangled by night in Sant' Angelo, while at the same hour
his brother and the two who had murdered his wife were beheaded in Tor
di Nona, just opposite the Castle, across the Tiber--a grim tragedy, but
the tragedy of justice.
Southward a few steps from the Church of the Minerva is the little
Piazza della Pigna, with a street of the same name leading out of it.
And at the corner of the place is a small church, dedicated to 'Saint
John of the Pine-cone,' that is, of the Region. Within lies one of the
noble Porcari in a curious tomb, and their stronghold was close by,
perhaps built in one block with the church itself.
The name Porcari calls up another tale of devotion, of betrayal, and of
death, with the last struggle for a Roman Republic at the end of the
Middle Age. It was a hopeless attempt, made by a brave man of simple and
true heart, a man better and nobler than Rienzi in every way, but who
judged the times ill and gave his soul and body for the dream of a
liberty which already existed in another shape, but which for its name's
sake he would not acknowledge. Stephen Porcari failed where Rienzi
partially succeeded, because the people were not with him; they were no
longer oppressed, and they desired no liberator; they had freedom in
fact and they cared nothing for the name of liberty; they had a ruler
with whom they were well pleased, and they did not long for one of whom
they knew nothing. But Stephen, brave, pure and devoted, was a man of
dreams, and he died for them, as many others have died for the name of
Rome and the phantom of an impossible Republic; for Rome has many times
been fatal to those who loved her best.
In the year 1447 Pope Eugenius the Fourth died, after a long and just
reign, disturbed far more by matters spiritual than by any worldly
troubles. And then, says the chronicler, a meeting of the Romans was
called at Aracoeli, to determine what should be asked of the Conclave
that was to elect a new Pope. And there, with many other citizens,
Stephen Porcari spoke to the Council, saying some things useful to the
Republic; and he declared that Rome should govern itself and pay a
feudal tribute to the Pope, as many others of the Papal States did. And
the Archbishop of Benevento forbade that he should say more; but the
Council and the citizens wished him to go on; and there was disorder,
and the meeting broke up, the Archbishop being gravely displeased, and
the people afraid to support Stephen against him, because the King of
Spain was at Tivoli, very near Rome.
Then the Cardinals elected Pope Nicholas the Fifth, a good man and a
great builder, and of gentle and merciful temper, and there was much
feasting and rejoicing in Rome. But Stephen Porcari pondered the
inspired verses of Petrarch and the strange history of Rienzi, and
waited for an opportunity to rouse the people, while his brother, or his
kinsman, was the Senator of Rome, appointed by the Pope. At last, after
a long time, when there was racing, with games in the Piazza Navona,
certain youths having fallen to quarrelling, and Stephen being there,
and a great concourse of people, he tried by eloquent words to stir the
quarrel to a riot, and a rebellion against the Pope. The people cared
nothing for Petrarch's verses nor Rienzi's memory, and Nicholas was kind
to them, so that Stephen Porcari failed again, and his failure was high
treason, for which he would have lost his head in any other state of
Europe. Yet the Pope was merciful, and when the case had been tried, the
rebel was sent to Bologna, to live there in peace, provided that he
should present himself daily before the Cardinal Legate of the City. But
still he dreamed, and would have made action of dreams, and he planned a
terrible conspiracy, and escaped from Bologna, and came back to Rome
secretly.
His plan was this. On the feast of the Epiphany he and his kinsmen and
retainers would seize upon the Pope and the Cardinals as prisoners, when
they were on their way to High Mass at Saint Peter's, and then by
threatening to murder them the conspirators would force the keepers of
Sant'Angelo to give up the Castle, which meant the power to hold Rome in
subjection. Once there, they would call upon the people to acclaim the
return of the ancient Republic, the Pope should be set free to fulfil
the offices of religion, while deprived of all temporal power, and the
vision of freedom would become a glorious reality.
But Rome was not with Porcari, and he paid the terrible price of
unpopular fanaticism and useless conspiracy. He was betrayed by the
folly of his nephew, who, with a few followers, killed the Pope's
equerry in a street brawl, and then, perhaps to save himself, fired the
train too soon. Stephen shut the great gates of his house and defended
himself as well as he could against the men-at-arms who were sent to
take him. The doors were closed, says the chronicler, and within there
were many armed men, and they fought at the gate, while those in the
upper story threw the tables from the windows upon the heads of the
besiegers. Seeing that they were lost, Stephen's men went out by the
postern behind the house, and his nephew, Battista Sciarra, with four
companions, fought his way through, only one of them being taken,
because the points of his hose were cut through, so that the hose
slipped down and he could not move freely. Those who had not cut their
way out were taken within by the governor's men, and Stephen was dragged
with ignominy from a chest in which he had taken refuge.
The trial was short and sure, for even the Pope's patience was
exhausted. Three days later, Stephen Infessura, the chronicler, saw the
body of Stephen Porcari hanging by the neck from the crenellations of
the tower that used to stand on the right-hand side of Sant' Angelo, as
you go towards the Castle from the bridge; and it was dressed in a black
doublet and black hose--the body of that 'honourable man who loved the
right and the liberty of Rome, who, because he looked upon his
banishment as without good cause, meant to give his life, and gave his
body, to free his country from slavery.'
Infessura was a retainer of the Colonna and no friend of any Pope's, of
course; yet he does not call the execution of Porcari an act of
injustice. He speaks, rather, with a sort of gentle pity of the man who
gave so much so freely, and paid bodily death and shame for his belief
in a lofty vision. Rienzi dreamed as high, rose far higher, and fell to
the depths of his miserable end by his vanity and his weaknesses.
Stephen Porcari accomplished nothing in his life, nor by his death; had
he succeeded, no one can tell how his nature might have changed; but in
failure he left after him the clean memory of an honest purpose, which
was perhaps mistaken, but was honourable, patriotic and unselfish.
It is strange, unless it be an accident, that the great opponents, the
Dominicans and the Jesuits, should have established themselves on
opposite sides of the same street, and it is characteristic that the
latter should have occupied more land and built more showy buildings
than the former, extending their possessions in more than one direction
and in a tentative way, while the rigid Dominicans remained rooted to
the spot they had chosen, throughout many centuries. Both are gone, in
an official and literal sense. The Dominican Monastery is filled with
public offices, and though the magnificent library is still kept in
order by Dominican friars, it is theirs no longer, but confiscated to
the State, and connected with the Victor Emmanuel Library, in what was
the Jesuit Roman College, by a bridge that crosses the street of Saint
Ignatius. And the Jesuit College, on its side, is the property of the
State and a public school; the Jesuits' library is taken from them
altogether, and their dwelling is occupied by other public offices. But
the vitality which had survived ages was not to be destroyed by such a
trifle as confiscation. Officially both are gone; in actual fact both
are more alive than ever. When the Jesuits were finally expelled from
their College, they merely moved to the other side of the Dominican
Monastery, across the Via del Seminario, and established themselves in
the Borromeo palace, still within sight of their rivals' walls, and they
called their college the Gregorian University. The Dominicans, driven
from the ancient stronghold at last, after occupying it exactly five
hundred years, have taken refuge in other parts of Rome under the
security of title-deeds held by foreigners, and consequently beyond the
reach of Italian confiscation. Yet still, in fact, the two great orders
face each other.
It was the prayer of Ignatius Loyola that his order should be
persecuted, and his desire has been most literally fulfilled, for the
Jesuits have suffered almost uninterrupted persecution, not at the hands
of Protestants only, but of the Roman Catholic Church itself in
successive ages. Popes have condemned them, and Papal edicts have
expelled their order from Rome; Catholic countries, with Catholic Spain
at their head, have driven them out and hunted them down with a
determination hardly equalled, and certainly not surpassed at any time,
by Protestant Prussia or Puritan England. Non-Catholics are very apt to
associate Catholics and Jesuits in their disapproval, dislike, or
hatred, as the case may be; but neither Englishman nor German could
speak of the order of Ignatius more bitterly than many a most devout
Catholic.
To give an idea of the feeling which has always been common in Rome
against the Jesuits, it is enough to quote the often told popular legend
about the windy Piazza del Gesù, where their principal church stands,
adjoining what was once their convent, or monastery, as people say
nowadays, though Doctor Johnson admits no distinction between the words,
and Dryden called a nunnery by the latter name. The story is this. One
day the Devil and the Wind were walking together in the streets of Rome,
conversing pleasantly according to their habit. When they came to the
Piazza del Gesù, the Devil stopped. 'I have an errand in there,' he
said, pointing to the Jesuits' house. 'Would you kindly wait for me a
moment?' 'Certainly,' answered the Wind. The Devil went in, but never
came out again, and the Wind is waiting for him still.
When one considers what the Jesuits have done for mankind, as educators,
missionaries and civilizers, it seems amazing that they should be so
judged by the Romans themselves. Their devotion to the cause of
Christianity against paganism has led many of them to martyrdom in past
centuries, and may again so long as Asia and Africa are non-Christian.
Their marvellous insight into the nature and requirements of education
in the highest sense has earned them the gratitude of thousands of
living laymen. They have taught all over the world. Their courage, their
tenacity, their wonderful organization, deserve the admiration of
mankind. Neither their faults nor their mistakes seem adequate to
explain the deadly hatred which they have so often roused against
themselves among Christians of all denominations. All organized bodies
make mistakes, all have faults; few indeed can boast of such a catalogue
of truly good deeds as the followers of Saint Ignatius; yet none have
been so despised, so hated, so persecuted, not only by men who might be
suspected of partisan prejudice, but by the wise, the just and the
good.
[Illustration]
REGION X CAMPITELLI
Rome tends to diminutives in names as in facts. The first emperor was
Augustus, the last was Augustulus; with the Popes, the Roman Senate
dwindled to a mere office, held by one man, and respected by none; the
ascent to the Capitol, the path of triumphs that marked the subjugation
of the world, became in the twelfth century 'Fabatosta,' or 'Roast Beans
Lane'; and, in the vulgar tongue, 'Capitolium' was vulgarized to
'Campitelli,' and the word gave a name to a Region of the city. Within
that Region are included the Capitol, the Forum, the Colosseum and the
Palatine, with the palaces of the Cæsars. It takes in, roughly, the land
covered by the earliest city; and, throughout the greater part of Roman
history, it was the centre of political and military life. It merited
something better than a diminutive for a name; yet, in the latest
revolution of things, it has fared better, and has been more respected,
than many other quarters, and still the memories of great times and
deeds cling to the stones that are left.
In the dark ages, when a ferocious faith had destroyed the remnants of
Latin learning and culture, together with the last rites of the old
religion, the people invented legend as a substitute for the folklore of
all the little gods condemned by the Church; so that the fairy tale is
in all Europe the link between Christianity and paganism, and to the
weakness of vanquished Rome her departed empire seemed only explicable
as the result of magic. The Capitol, in the imagination of such tales,
became a tower of wizards. High above all, a golden sphere reflected the
sun's rays far out across the distant sea by day, and at night a huge
lamp took its place as a beacon for the sailors of the Mediterranean,
even to Spain and Africa. In the tower, too, was preserved the mystic
mirror of the world, which instantly reflected all that passed in the
empire, even to its furthest limits. Below the towers, also, and
surmounting the golden palace, there were as many statues as Rome had
provinces, and each statue wore a bell at its neck, that rang of itself
in warning whenever there was trouble in the part of the world to which
it belonged, while the figure itself turned on its base to look in the
direction of the danger. Such tales Irving tells of the Alhambra, not
more wonderful than those believed of Rome, and far less numerous.
There were stories of hidden treasure, too, without end. For, in those
days of plundering, men laid their hands on what they saw, and hid what
they took as best they might; and later, when the men of the Middle Age
and of the Renascence believed that Rome had been destroyed by the
Goths, they told strange stories of Gothmen who appeared suddenly in
disguise from the north, bringing with them ancient parchments in which
were preserved sure instructions for unearthing the gold hastily hidden
by their ancestors, because there had been too much of it to carry away.
Even in our own time such things have been done. In the latter days of
the reign of Pius the Ninth, some one discovered an old book or
manuscript, wherein it was pointed out that a vast treasure lay buried
on the northward side of the Colosseum within a few feet of the walls,
and it was told that if any man would dig there he should find, as he
dug deeper, certain signs, fragments of statues, and hewn tablets, and a
spring of water. So the Pope gave his permission, and the work began.
Every one who lived in Rome thirty years ago can remember it, and the
excited curiosity of the whole city while the digging went on. And,
strange to say, though the earth had evidently not been disturbed for
centuries, each object was found in succession, exactly as described, to
a great depth; but not the treasure, though the well was sunk down to
the primeval soil. It was all filled in again, and the mystery has never
been solved. Yet the mere fact that everything was found except the
gold, lends some possibility to the other stories of hidden wealth, told
and repeated from generation to generation.
The legend of the Capitol is too vast, too varied, too full of
tremendous contrasts to be briefly told or carelessly sketched.
Archæologists have reconstructed it on paper, scholars have written out
its history, poets have said great things of it; yet if one goes up the
steps today and stands by the bronze statue in the middle of the square,
seeing nothing but a paved space enclosed on three sides by palaces of
the late Renascence, it is utterly impossible to call up the past.
Perhaps no point of ancient Rome seems less Roman and less individual
than that spot where Rienzi stood, silent and terrified, for a whole
hour before the old stone lion, waiting for the curious, pitiless rabble
to kill him. The big buildings shut out history, hide the Forum, the
Gemonian steps, and the Tarpeian rock, and in the very inmost centre of
the old city's heart they surround a man with the artificialities of an
uninteresting architecture. For though Michelangelo planned the
reconstruction he did not live to see his designs carried out, and they
fell into the hands of little men who tried to improve upon what they
could not understand, and ruined it.
The truth is that half a dozen capitols have been built on the hill,
destroyed, forgotten, and replaced, each one in turn, during successive
ages. It is said that certain Indian jugglers allow themselves to be
buried alive in a state of trance, and are taken from the tomb after
many months not dead; and it is said that the body, before it is brought
to life again, is quite cold, as though the man were dead, excepting
that there is a very little warmth just where the back of the skull
joins the neck. Yet there is enough left to reanimate the whole being in
a little time, so that life goes on as before. So in Rome's darkest and
most dead days, the Capitol has always held within it a spark of
vitality, ready to break out with little warning and violent effect.
[Illustration: THE CAPITOL]
For the Capitol, not yet the Capitol, but already the sacred fortress of
Rome, was made strong in the days of Romulus, and it was in his time,
when he and his men had carried off the Sabine girls and were at war
with their fathers and brothers, that Tarpeia came down the narrow path,
her earthen jar balanced on her graceful head, to fetch spring water for
a household sacrifice. Her father kept the castle. She came down, a
straight brown girl with eager eyes and red lips, clad in the grey
woollen tunic that left her strong round arms bare to the shoulder.
Often she had seen the golden bracelets which the Sabine men wore on
their left wrists, and some of them had a jewel or two set in the gold;
but the Roman men wore none, and the Roman women had none to wear, and
Tarpeia's eyes were eager. Because she came to get water for holy things
she was safe, and she went down to the spring, and there was Tatius, of
the Sabines, drinking. When he saw how her eyes were gold-struck by his
bracelet, he asked her if she should like to wear it, and the blood came
to her brown face, as she looked back quickly to the castle where her
father was. 'If you Sabines will give me what you wear on your left
arms,' she said--for she did not know the name of gold--'you shall have
the fortress tonight, for I will open the gate for you.' The Sabine
looked at her, and then he smiled quickly, and promised for himself and
all his companions. So that night they went up stealthily, for there was
no moon, and the gate was open, and Tarpeia was standing there. Tatius
could see her greedy eyes in the starlight; but instead of his bracelet,
he took his shield from his left arm and struck her down with it for a
betrayer, and all the Sabine men threw their shields upon her as they
passed. So she died, but her name remains to the rock, to this day.
It was long before the temple planned by the first Tarquin was solemnly
dedicated by the first consuls of the Republic, and the earthen image of
Jupiter, splendidly dressed and painted red, was set up between Juno and
Minerva. Many hundred years later, in the terrible times of Marius and
Sylla, the ancient sanctuary took fire and was burned, and Sylla rebuilt
it. That temple was destroyed also, and another, built by Vespasian,
was burned too, and from the last building Genseric stole the gilt
bronze tiles in the year 455, when Christianity was the fact and Jupiter
the myth, one and twenty years before the final end of Rome's empire;
and the last of what remained was perhaps burned by Robert Guiscard
after serving as a fortress for the enemies of Gregory the Seventh.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ARACOELI]
But we know, at last, that the fortress of the old city stood where the
Church of Aracoeli stands, and that the temple was on the other side,
over against the Palatine, and standing back a little from the Tarpeian
rock, so that the open square of today is just between the places of the
two. And when one goes up the steps on the right, behind the right-hand
building, one comes to a quiet lane, where German students of archæology
live in a little colony by themselves and have their Institute at the
end of it, and a hospital of their own; and there, in a wall, is a small
green door leading into a quiet garden, with a pretty view. Along the
outer edge runs a low stone wall, and there are seats where one may rest
and dream under the trees, a place where one might fancy lovers meeting
in the moonlight, or old men sunning themselves of an autumn afternoon,
or children playing among the flowers on a spring morning.
But it is a place of fear and dread, ever since Tarpeia died there for
her betrayal, and one may dream other dreams there than those of peace
and love. The vision of a pale, strong man rises at the edge, bound and
helpless, lifted from the ground by savage hands and hurled from the
brink to the death below,--Manlius, who saved the Capitol and loved the
people, and was murdered by the nobles,--and many others after him, just
and unjust, whirled through the clear air to violent destruction for
their bad or their good deeds, as justice or injustice chanced to be in
the ascendant of the hour. And then, in the Middle Age, the
sweet-scented garden was the place of terrible executions, and the
gallows stood there permanently for many years, and men were hanged and
drawn and quartered there, week by week, month by month, all the year
round, the chief magistrate of Rome looking on from the window of the
Senator's palace, as a duty; till one of them sickened at the sight of
blood, and ordained that justice should be done at the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo, and at Tor di Nona, and in the castle itself, and the summit of
the fatal rock was left to the birds, the wild flowers, and the merciful
purity of nature. And that happened four hundred years ago.
Until our own time there were prisons deep down in the old Roman vaults.
At first, as in old days, the place of confinement was in the Mamertine
prison, on the southeastern slope, beneath which was the hideous
Tullianum, deepest and darkest of all, whence no captive ever came out
alive to the upper air again. In the Middle Age, the prison was below
the vaults of the Roman Tabularium on the side of the Forum, but it is
said that the windows looked inward upon a deep court of the Senator's
palace. As civilization advanced, it was transferred a story higher, to
a more healthy region of the building, but the Capitoline prison was not
finally given up till the reign of Pius the Ninth, at which time it had
become a place of confinement for debtors only.
Institutions and parties in Rome have always had a tendency to cling to
places more than in other cities. It is thus that during so many
centuries the Lateran was the headquarters of the Popes, the Capitol
the rallying-place of the ever-smouldering republicanism of the people,
and the Castle of Sant' Angelo the seat of actual military power as
contrasted with spiritual dominion and popular aspiration. So far as the
latter is concerned its vitality is often forgotten and its vigour
underestimated.
One must consider the enormous odds against which the spirit of popular
emancipation had to struggle in order to appreciate the strength it
developed. A book has been written called 'The One Hundred and Sixty-one
rebellions of papal subjects between 896 and 1859'--a title which gives
an average of about sixteen to a century; and though the furious
partiality of the writer calls them all rebellions against the popes,
whereas a very large proportion were revolts against the nobles, and
Rienzi's attempt was to bring the Pope back to Rome, yet there can be no
question as to the vitality which could produce even half of such a
result; and it may be remembered that in almost every rising of the
Roman people the rabble first made a rush for the Capitol, and, if
successful, seized other points afterwards. In the darkest ages the
words 'Senate' and 'Republic' were never quite forgotten and were never
dissociated from the sacred place. The names of four leaders, Arnold of
Brescia, Stefaneschi, Rienzi and Porcari, recall the four greatest
efforts of the Middle Age; the first partially succeeded and left its
mark, the second was fruitless because permanent success was then
impossible against such odds, the third miscarried because Rienzi was a
madman and Cardinal Albornoz a man of genius, and the fourth, because
the people were contented and wanted no revolution at all. The first
three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do
so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to
ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from
Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls. Its
solemn knell announced the death of a Pope, or tolled the last hour of
condemned criminals, and men crossed themselves as it echoed through the
streets; but at the tremendous sound of its alarm, rung backward till
the tower rocked, the Romans ran to arms, the captains of the Regions
buckled on their breastplates and displayed their banners, and the
people flocked together to do deeds of sudden violence and shortlived
fury. In a few hours Stefaneschi of Trastevere swept the nobles from the
city; between noon and night Rienzi was master of Rome, and it was from
the Capitol that the fierce edicts of both threatened destruction to the
unready barons. They fled to their mountain dens like wolves at sunrise,
but the night was never slow to descend upon liberty's short day, and
with the next dawn the ruined towers began to rise again; the people
looked with dazed indifference upon the fall of their leader, and
presently they were again slaves, as they had been--Arnold was hanged
and burned, Stefaneschi languished in a dungeon, Rienzi wandered over
Europe a homeless exile, the straight, stiff corpse of brave Stephen
Porcari hung, clad in black, from the battlement of Sant' Angelo. It was
always the same story. The Barons were the Sabines, the Latins and the
Æquians of Mediæval Rome; but there was neither a Romulus nor a
Cincinnatus to lead the Roman people against steel-clad masters trained
to fighting from boyhood, bold by inheritance, and sure of a power which
they took every day by violence and held year after year by force.
In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings
on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and
Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even
pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It
was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of
Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar
which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God.
To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's
Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old
triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron
chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north
wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main
door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron
balustrade--the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the
standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and
battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a
desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a
holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points
between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with
many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above
underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of
far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in
which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of
nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long
continued by Arnold of Brescia.
Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by
saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely
hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of
the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli
had so long rebelled against the Popes. The fact remains, astonishing
and ridiculous,--in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was
at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the
Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the
inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces,
seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to
ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome;
and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed.
Now for many years, Rome had been in the hands of a family of converted
Jews, known as the Pierleoni, from Pietro Leone, first spoken of in the
chronicles as an iniquitous usurer of enormous wealth. They became
prefects of Rome; they took possession of Sant' Angelo and were the
tyrants of the city, and finally they became the Pope's great enemies,
the allies of Roger of Apulia, and makers of antipopes, of whom the
first was either Pietro's son or his grandson. They had on their side
possession, wealth, the support of a race which never looks upon
apostasy from its creed as final, the alliance of King Roger and of Duke
Roger, his son, and the countenance, if not the friendship, of Arnold of
Brescia, the excommunicated monk of northern Italy, and the pupil of the
romantic Abelard. And the Pierleoni had against them the Popes, the
great Frangipani family with most of the nobles, and Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux, who has been called the Bismarck of the Church. Arnold of
Brescia was no ordinary fanatic. He was as brave as Stefaneschi, as
pure-hearted as Stephen Porcari, as daring and eloquent as Rienzi in
his best days. The violent deeds of his followers have been imputed to
him, and brought him to his end; but it was his great adversary, Saint
Bernard, who expressed a regretful wish 'that his teachings might have
been as irreproachable as his life.' The doctrine for which he died at
last was political, rather than spiritual, human rather than
theological. In all but his monk's habit he was a layman in his later
years, as he had been when he first wandered to France and sat at the
feet of the gentle Abelard; but few Churchmen of that day were as
spotless in their private lives.
He was an agitator, a would-be reformer, a revolutionary; and the times
craved change. The trumpet call of the first Crusade had roused the
peoples of Europe, and the distracted forces of the western world had
been momentarily concentrated in a general and migratory movement of
religious conquest; forty years later the fortunes of the Latins in the
East were already waning, and Saint Bernard was meditating the inspiring
words that sent four hundred thousand warriors to the rescue of the Holy
Places. What Bernard was about to attempt for Palestine, Arnold dreamed
of accomplishing for Rome. In his eyes she was holy, too, her ruins were
the sepulchre of a divine freedom, worthy to be redeemed from tyranny
even at the price of blood, and he would have called from the tomb the
spirit of murdered liberty to save and illuminate mankind. Where
Bernard was a Christian, Arnold was a Roman in soul; where Bernard was
an inspired monk, Arnold was in heart a Christian, of that first
Apostolic republic which had all things in common.
At such a time such a man could do much. Rome was in the utmost
distress. At the election of Innocent the Second, the Jewish Pierleoni
had set up one of themselves as antipope, and Innocent had been obliged
to escape in spite of the protection of the still powerful Frangipani,
leaving the Israelitish antipope to rule Rome, in spite of the Emperor,
and in alliance with King Roger for nine years, until his death, when it
required Saint Bernard's own presence and all the strength of his fiery
words to dissuade the Romans from accepting another spiritual and
temporal ruler imposed upon them by the masterful Pierleoni. So Innocent
returned at last, a good man, much tried by misfortune, but neither wise
nor a leader of men. At that time the soldiers of Rome were beaten in
open battle by the people of Tivoli, a humiliation which it was not easy
to forget. And it is more than probable that the Pierleoni looked on at
the Pope's failure in scornful inaction from their stronghold of Sant'
Angelo, which they had only nominally surrendered to Innocent's
authority.
From a distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace
and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint
Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in
Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the picture of the times.
'Who,' asks Bernard, 'is ignorant of the vanity and arrogance of the
Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, untractable, and scorning to obey,
unless they are too feeble to resist. When they promise to serve, they
aspire to reign; if they swear allegiance, they watch the opportunity of
revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors,
or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they
have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven,
impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours,
inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and
while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual
apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern;
faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to
their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their
refusals. Lofty in promise, poor in execution: adulation and calumny,
perfidy and treason, are the familiar arts of their policy.'
Fearless and in earnest, Arnold came to Rome, and began to preach a
great change, a great reform, a great revival, and many heard him and
followed him; and it was not in the Pope's power to silence him, nor
bring him to any trial. The Pierleoni would support any sedition
against Innocent; the Roman people were weary of masters, they listened
with delight to Arnold's fierce condemnation of all temporal power, that
of the Pope and that of the Emperor alike, and the old words, Republic,
Senate, Consul, had not lost their life in the slumber of five hundred
years. The Capitol was there, for a Senate house, and there were men in
Rome to be citizens and Senators. Revolution was stirring, and Innocent
had recourse to the only weapon left him in his weakness. Arnold was
preaching as a Christian and a Catholic. The Pope excommunicated him in
a general Council. In the days of the Crusades the Major Interdiction
was not an empty form of words; to applaud a revolutionary was one
thing, to attend the sermons of a man condemned to hell was a graver
matter; Arnold's disciples deserted him, his friends no longer dared to
protect him under the penalty of eternal damnation, and he went out from
Rome a fugitive and an outcast.
Wandering from Italy to France, from France to Germany, and at last to
Switzerland, he preached his doctrines without fear, though he had upon
him the mark of Cain; but if the temporal sovereignty against which he
spoke could not directly harm him, the spiritual power pursued him
hither and thither, like a sword of flame. A weaker man would have
renounced his beliefs, or would have disappeared in a distant obscurity;
but Arnold was not made to yield. Goaded by persecution, divinely
confident of right, he faced danger and death and came back to Rome.
He arrived at a moment when the people were at once elated by the
submission of Tivoli, and exasperated against Innocent because he
refused to raze that city to the ground. The Pierleoni were ever ready
to encourage rebellion. The Romans, at the words Liberty and Republic,
rose in a body, rushed to the Capitol, proclaimed the Commonwealth, and
forthwith elected a Senate which assumed absolute sovereignty of the
city, and renewed the war with Tivoli. The institution then refounded
was not wholly abolished until, under the Italian kings, a
representative government took its place.
The success and long supremacy of Arnold's teaching have been unfairly
called his 'reign'; yet he neither caused himself to be elected a
Senator, nor at any time, so far as we can learn, occupied any office
whatsoever; neither did he profit in fortune by the changes he had
wrought, and to the last he wore the garb of poverty and led the simple
life which had extorted the reluctant admiration of his noblest
adversary. But he could not impose upon others the virtues he practised
himself, nor was it in his power to direct the force his teachings had
called into life. For the time being the Popes were powerless against
the new order. Innocent is said to have died of grief and humiliation,
almost before the revolution was complete. His successor, Celestin the
Second, reigned but five months and a half, busy in a quarrel with King
Roger, and still the new Senate ruled the city.
[Illustration: ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS]
But saving that it endured, it left no mark of good in Rome; the nobles
saw that a new weapon was placed in their hands, they easily elected
themselves to office, and the people, deluded by the name of a Republic,
had exchanged the sovereignty of the Pope, or the allegiance of the
Emperor, for the far more ruthless tyranny of the barons. The Jewish
Pierleoni were rich and powerful still, but since Rome was strong enough
to resist the Vatican, the Pontificate was no longer a prize worth
seizing, and they took instead, by bribery or force, the Consulship or
the Presidency of the Senate. Jordan, the brother of the antipope
Anacletus, obtained the office, and the violent death of the next Pope,
Lucius the Second, was one of the first events of his domination.
Lucius refused to bear any longer the humiliation to which his
predecessors had tamely submitted. Himself in arms, and accompanied by
such followers as he could collect, the Pope made a desperate attempt to
dislodge the Senate and their guards from the Capitol, and at the head
of the storming party he endeavoured to ascend the old road, known then
as Fabatosta. But the Pierleoni and their men were well prepared for the
assault, and made a desperate and successful resistance. The Pope fell
at the head of his soldiers, struck by a stone on the temple, mortally
wounded, but not dead. In hasty retreat, the dying man was borne by his
routed soldiers to the monastery of Saint Gregory on the Coelian,
under the safe protection of the trusty Frangipani, who held the
Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum. Of all the many Popes
who died untimely deaths he was the only one, I believe, who fell in
battle. And he got his deathblow on the slope of that same Capitol where
Gracchus and Manlius had died before him, each in good cause.
It has been wrongly said that he had all the nobles with him, and that
the revolution was of the people alone, aided by the Pierleoni. This is
not true. So far as can be known, the Frangipani were his only faithful
friends, but it is possible that the Count of Tusculum, seventh in
descent from Theodora, and nephew of the first Colonna, at that time
holding a part of the Aventine, may have also been the Pope's ally. Be
that as it may, the force that Lucius led was very small, and the
garrison of the Capitol was overwhelmingly strong.
Some say also that Arnold of Brescia was not actually in Rome at that
time, that the first revolution was the result of his unforgotten
teachings, bearing fruit in the hearts of the nobles and the people, and
that he did not come to the city till Pope Lucius was dead. However that
may be, from that time forward, till the coming of Barbarossa, Arnold
was the idol of the Romans, and their vanity and arrogance knew no
bounds. Pope Eugenius the Third was enthroned in the Lateran under the
protection of the Frangipani, but within the week he was forced to
escape by night to the mountains. The Pierleoni held Sant' Angelo; the
people seized and fortified the Vatican, deprived the Pope's Prefect of
his office, and forced the few nobles who resisted them to swear
allegiance to Jordan Pierleone, making him in fact dictator, and in name
their 'Patrician.' The Pope retorted by excommunicating him, and allying
himself with Tivoli, but was forced to a compromise whereby he
acknowledged the Senate and the supremacy of the Roman people, who,
already tired of their dictator, agreed to restore the Prefect to
office, and to express some sort of obedience, more spiritual than
temporal, to the Pope's authority. But Arnold was still supreme, and
after a short stay in the city Eugenius was again a fugitive.
It was then that he passed into France, when Lewis the Seventh was ready
armed to lead the Second Crusade to the Holy Land; and through that
stirring time Rome is dark and sullen, dwelling aloof from Church and
Empire in the new-found illusion of an unreal and impossible greatness.
Seven hundred years later an Italian patriot exclaimed, 'We have an
Italy, but we have no Italians.' And so Arnold of Brescia must many
times have longed for Romans to people a free Rome. He had made a
republic, but he could not make free men; he had called up a vision, but
he could not give it reality; like Rienzi and the rest, he had 'mistaken
memories for hopes,' and he was fore-destined to pay for his belief in
his country's life with the sacrifice of his own. He had dreamed of a
liberty serene and high, but he had produced only a dismal confusion: in
place of peace he had brought senseless strife; instead of a wise and
simple consul, he had given the Romans the keen and rapacious son of a
Jewish usurer for a dictator; where he had hoped to destroy the temporal
power of Pope and Emperor, he had driven the greatest forces of his age,
and two of the greatest men, to an alliance against him.
So he perished. Eugenius died in Tivoli, Anastasius reigned a few
months, and sturdy Nicholas Breakspeare was Adrian the Fourth. Conrad
the Emperor also died, poisoned by the physicians King Roger sent him
from famous Salerno, and Frederick Barbarossa of Hohenstauffen, his
nephew, reigned in his stead. Adrian and Frederick quarrelled at their
first meeting in the sight of all their followers in the field, for the
young Emperor would not hold the Englishman's stirrup on the first day.
On the second he yielded, and Pope and Emperor together were invincible.
Then the Roman Senate and people sent out ambassadors, who spoke hugely
boasting words to the red-haired soldier, and would have set conditions
on his crowning, so that he laughed aloud at them; and he and Adrian
went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman
crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the
summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as
they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed
a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on
in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the
winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to
its factions and its parties.
Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no
man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the
northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the
people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico
judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him.
The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed
Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge.
The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was
just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands
to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when
he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river,
lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of
revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most
surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year
1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted.
He was a martyr--whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those
judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in
him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon
his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are
better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to
die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as
the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of
faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was
put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the
prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his
words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause
of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and
vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate
it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and
Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all
patriot leaders, of all preachers of liberty, past and living, it is not
too much to say that Arnold of Brescia was the truest, the bravest and
the simplest.
* * * * *
To them all, the Capitol has been the central object of dreams, and upon
its walls the story of their failure has often been told in grotesque
figures of themselves. When Rienzi was first driven out, his effigy was
painted, hanged by the heels upon one of the towers, and many another
'enemy of the state' was pictured there--Giuliano Cesarini, for one, and
the great Sforza, himself, with a scornful and insulting epigraph; as
Andrea del Castagno, justly surnamed the 'Assassin,' painted upon the
walls of the Signoria in Florence the likeness of all those who had
joined in the great conspiracy of the Pazzi, hung up by the feet, as may
be seen to this day.
It has ever been a place of glory, a place of death and a place of
shame, but since the great modern changes it is meant to be only the
seat of honour, and upon the slope of the Capitol the Italians, in the
first flush of victorious unity, have begun to raise a great monument to
their greatest idol, King Victor Emmanuel. If it is not the best work of
art of the sort in existence it will probably enjoy the distinction of
being the largest, and it is by no means the worst, for the central
statue of the 'Honest King' has been modelled with marvellous skill and
strength by Chiaradia, whose name is worthy to be remembered; yet the
vastness of the architectural theatre provided for its display betrays
again the giantism of the Latin race, and when in a future century the
broad flood of patriotism shall have subsided within the straight river
bed of sober history, men will wonder why Victor Emmanuel, honest and
brave though he was, received the greater share of praise, and Cavour
and Garibaldi the less, seeing that he got Italy by following the advice
of the one, if not by obeying his dictation, and by accepting the
kingdom which the other had destined for a republic, but was forced to
yield to the monarchy by the superior genius of the statesman.
That day is not far distant. After a period of great and disastrous
activity, the sleepy indifference of 1830 is again settling upon Rome,
the race for imaginary wealth is over, time is a drug in the market,
money is scarce, dwellings are plentiful, the streets are quiet by day
and night, and only those who still have something to lose or who
cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial
affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all
the clocks were set once a fortnight to follow the sun.
Rome is restoring to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's. They are much
bigger and finer things than the symmetrical, stuccoed cubes which have
lately been piled up everywhere in heaven-offending masses, and one is
glad to come back to them after the nightmare that has lasted twenty
years. Moreover, one is surprised to find how little permanent effect
has been produced by the squandering of countless millions during the
building mania, beyond a cruel destruction of trees, and a few
modifications of natural local accidents. To do the moderns justice,
they have done no one act of vandalism as bad as fifty, at least,
committed by the barons of the Middle Age and the Popes of the
Renascence, though they have shown much worse taste in such new things
as they have set up in place of the old.
The charm of Rome has never lain in its architecture, nor in the beauty
of its streets, though the loveliness of its old-fashioned gardens
contributed much which is now in great part lost. Nor can it be said
that the enthralling magic of the city we used to know lay especially in
its historical association, since Rome has been loved to folly by
half-educated girls, by flippant women of the world and by ignorant
idlers without number, as well as by most men of genius who have ever
spent much time there.
[Illustration: COLUMN OF PHOCAS, LOOKING ALONG THE FORUM]
In the Middle Age one man might know all that was to be known. Dante
did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediæval
scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We
cannot all be archæologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum
we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old
buildings; we know the Portico of the Twelve Gods in Council, the Temple
of Concord, the Basilica Julia, the Court of Vesta, the Temple of Castor
and Pollux; we have a more vague notion of the Senate Hall; the hideous
arch of Septimius Severus stares us in the face; so does the lovely
column of evil Phocas, the monster of the east, the red-handed
centurion-usurper who murdered an Emperor and his five sons to reach the
throne. And perhaps we have been told where the Rostra stood, and the
Rostra Julia, and that the queer fragment of masonry by the arch is
supposed to be the 'Umbilicus,' the centre of the Roman world. There is
no excuse for not knowing these things any more than there is any very
strong reason for knowing them, unless one be a student. There is a plan
of the Forum in every guide book, with a description that changes with
each new edition.
And yet, without much definite knowledge,--with 'little Latin and less
Greek,' perhaps,--many men and women, forgetting for one moment the
guide book in their hands, have leaned upon a block of marble with
half-closed, musing eyes, and breath drawn so slow that it is almost
quite held in day-dream wonder, and they have seen a vision rise of past
things and beings, even in the broad afternoon sunshine, out of stones
that remember Cæsar's footsteps, and from walls that have echoed
Antony's speech. There they troop up the Sacred Way, the shock-headed,
wool-draped, beak-nosed Romans; there they stand together in groups at
the corner of Saturn's temple; there the half-naked plebeian children
clamber upon the pedestals of the columns to see the sights, and double
the men's deep tones with a treble of childish chatter; there the noble
boy with his bordered toga, his keen young face, and longing backward
look, is hurried home out of the throng by the tall household slave, who
carries his school tablets and is answerable with his skin for the boy's
safety. The Consul Major goes by, twelve lictors marching in single file
before him--black-browed, square-jawed, relentless men, with their rods
and axes. Then two closed litters are carried past by big, black, oily
fellows, beside whom walk freedmen and Greek slaves, and three or four
curled and scented parasites, the shadows of the great men. Under their
very feet the little street boys play their games of pitching at tiny
pyramids of dried lupins, unless they have filberts, and lupins are
almost as good; and as the dandified hanger-on of Mæcenas, straining his
ear for the sound of his patron's voice from within the litter,
heedlessly crushes the little yellow beans under his sandal, the
particular small boy whose stake is smashed clenches his fist, and with
flashing eyes curses the dandy's dead to the fourth generation of
ascendants, and he and his companions turn and scatter like mice as one
of the biggest slaves threateningly raises his hand.
[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE FORUM]
Absurd details rise in the dream. An old crone is selling roasted
chestnuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy
soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side
foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high
caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little
bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns--the men who
mourned for Cæsar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn
Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring
were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people
boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's
parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the
fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm.
All about stretches the vast humming city of low-built houses covering
the short steep hills and filling all the hollow between. Northeastward
lies the seething Suburra; the yellow river runs beyond the Velabrum and
the cattle market to the west; southward rise the enchanted palaces of
Cæsar; due east is the Esquiline of evil fame, redeemed and made lovely
with trees and fountains by Mæcenas, but haunted even today, say modern
Romans, by the spectres of murderers and thieves who there died bloody
deaths of quivering torture. All around, as the sun sinks and the cool
shadows quench the hot light on the white pavements, the ever-increasing
crowds of men--always more men than women--move inward, half
unconsciously, out of inborn instinct, to the Forum, the centre of the
Empire, the middle of the world, the boiling-point of the whole earth's
riches and strength and life.
Then as the traveller muses out his short space of rest, the vision
grows confused, and Rome's huge ghosts go stalking, galloping, clanging,
raving through the surging dream-throng,--Cæsar, Brutus, Pompey,
Catiline, Cicero, Caligula, Vitellius, Hadrian,--and close upon them
Gauls and Goths and Huns, and all barbarians, till the dream is a medley
of school-learned names, that have suddenly taken shadows of great faces
out of Rome's shadow storehouse, and gorgeous arms and streaming
draperies, and all at once the sight-seer shivers as the sun goes down,
and passes his hand over his eyes, and shakes himself, and goes away
rather hastily, lest he should fall sick of a fever and himself be
gathered to the ghosts he has seen.
It matters very little whether the day-dream much resembles the reality
of ages long ago, whether boys played with lupins or with hazel-nuts
then, or old women roasted chestnuts in the streets, or whether such
unloving spirits should be supposed to visit one man in one vision. The
traveller has had an impression which has not been far removed from
emotion, and his day has not been lost, if it be true that emotion is
the soul's only measure of time. There, if anywhere, lies Rome's secret.
The place, the people, the air, the crystal brightness of winter, the
passion-stirring scirocco of autumn, the loveliness of the long spring,
the deep, still heat of summer, the city, the humanity, the memories of
both, are all distillers of emotion in one way or another.
Above all, the night is beautiful in Rome, when the moon is high and all
is quiet. Go down past the silver Forum to the Colosseum and see what it
is then, and perhaps you will know what it was in the old days. Such
white stillness as this fell then also, by night, on all the broad space
around the amphitheatre of all amphitheatres, the wonder of the world,
the chief monument of Titus, when his hand had left of Jerusalem not one
stone upon another. The same moonbeams fell slanting across the same
huge walls, and whitened the sand of the same broad arena when the great
awning was drawn back at night to air the place of so much death. In the
shadow, the steps are still those up which Dion the Senator went to see
mad Commodus play the gladiator and the public fool. On one of those
lower seats he sat, the grave historian, chewing laurel leaves to steady
his lips and keep down his laughter, lest a smile should cost his head;
and he showed the other Senators that it was a good thing for their
safety, and there they sat, in their rows, throughout the long
afternoon, solemnly chewing laurel leaves for their lives, while the
strong madman raved on the sand below, and slew, and bathed himself in
the blood of man and beast. There is a touch of frightful humour in the
tale.
And one stands there alone in the stillness and remembers how, on that
same night, when all was over, when the corpses had been dragged away,
it may have been almost as it is now. Only, perhaps, far off among the
arches and on the tiers of seats, there might be still a tiny light
moving here and there; the keepers of that terrible place would go their
rounds with their little earthen lamps; they would search everywhere in
the spectators' places for small things that might have been lost in the
press--a shoulder-buckle of gold or silver or bronze, an armlet, a
woman's earring, a purse, perhaps, with something in it. And the fitful
night-breeze blew now and then and made them shade their lights with
their dark hands. By the 'door of the dead' a torch was burning down in
its socket, its glare falling upon a heap of armour, mostly somewhat
battered, and all of it blood-stained; a score of black-browed smiths
were picking it over and distributing it in heaps, according to its
condition. Now and then, from the deep vaults below the arena, came the
distant sound of a clanging gate or of some piece of huge stage
machinery falling into its place, and a muffled calling of men. One of
the keepers, with his light, was singing softly some ancient minor
strain as he searched the tiers. That would be all, and presently even
that would cease.
One thinks of such things naturally enough; and then the dream runs
backward, against the sun, as dreams will, and the moon rays weave a
vision of dim day. Straightway tier upon tier, eighty thousand faces
rise, up to the last high rank beneath the awning's shade. High in the
front, under the silken canopy sits the Emperor of the world,
sodden-faced, ghastly, swine-eyed, robed in purple; all alone, save for
his dwarf, bull-nosed, slit-mouthed, hunch-backed, sly. Next, on the
lowest bench, the Vestals, old and young, the elder looking on with hard
faces and dry eyes, the youngest with wide and startled looks, and
parted lips, and quick-drawn breath that sobs and is caught at sight of
each deadly stab and gash of broadsword and trident, and hands that
twitch and clutch each other as a man's foot slips in a pool of blood,
and the heavy harness clashes in the red, wet sand. Then grey-haired
senators; then curled and perfumed knights of Rome; and then the people,
countless, vast, frenzied, blood-thirsty, stretching out a hundred
thousand hands with thumbs reversed, commanding death to the
fallen--full eighty thousand throats of men and women roaring, yelling,
shrieking over each ended life. A theatre indeed, a stage indeed, a play
wherein every scene of every act ends in sudden death.
And then the wildest, deadliest howl of all on that day; a handful of
men and women in white, and one girl in the midst of them; the clang of
an iron gate thrown suddenly open; a rushing and leaping of great, lithe
bodies of beasts, yellow and black and striped, the sand flying in
clouds behind them; a worrying and crushing of flesh and bone, as of
huge cats worrying little white mice; sharp cries, then blood, then
silence, then a great laughter, and the sodden face of mankind's drunken
master grows almost human for a moment with a very slow smile. The wild
beasts are driven out with brands and red-hot irons, step by step,
dragging backward nameless mangled things in their jaws, and the
bull-nosed dwarf offers the Emperor a cup of rare red wine. It drips
from his mouth while he drinks, as the blood from the tiger's fangs.
"What were they?" he asks.
"Christians," explains the dwarf.
[Illustration]
REGION XI SANT' ANGELO
The Region of Sant' Angelo, as has been already said, takes its name
from the small church famous in Rienzi's story. It encloses all of what
was once the Ghetto, and includes the often-mentioned Theatre of
Marcellus, now the palace of the Orsini, but successively a fortress of
the Pierleoni, appropriately situated close to the Jews' quarter, and
the home of the Savelli. The history of the Region is the history of the
Jews in Rome, from Augustus to the destruction of their dwelling-place,
about 1890. In other words, the Hebrew colony actually lived during
nineteen hundred years at that point of the Tiber, first on one side of
the river, and afterwards on the other.
It is said that the first Jews were brought to Rome by Pompey, as
prisoners of war, and soon afterwards set free, possibly on their paying
a ransom accumulated by half starving themselves, and selling the
greater part of their allowance of corn during a long period. Seventeen
years later, they were a power in Rome; they had lent Julius Cæsar
enormous sums, which he repaid with exorbitant interest, and after his
death they mourned him, and kept his funeral pyre burning seven days and
nights in the Forum. A few years after that time, Augustus established
them on the opposite side of the Tiber, over against the bridge of
Cestius and the island. Under Tiberius their numbers had increased to
fifty thousand; they had synagogues in Rome, Genoa and Naples, and it is
noticeable that their places of worship were always built upon the shore
of the sea, or the bank of a river, whence their religious services came
to be termed 'orationes littorales'--which one might roughly translate
as 'alongshore prayers.'
They were alternately despised, hated, feared and flattered. Tacitus
calls them a race of men hated by the gods, yet their kings, Herod and
Agrippa--one asks how the latter came by an ancient Roman name--were
treated with honour and esteem. The latter was in fact brought up with
Drusus, the son of the Emperor Tiberius, his son was on terms of the
greatest intimacy with Claudius, and his daughter or grand-daughter
Berenice was long and truly loved by Titus, who would have made her
Empress had it been possible, to the great scandal of the Emperor's many
detractors, as Suetonius has told. Sabina Poppæa, Nero's lowly and evil
second wife, loved madly one Aliturius, a Jewish comic actor and a
favourite of Nero; and when the younger Agrippa induced Nero to imprison
Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Josephus came to Pozzuoli, having
suffered shipwreck like the latter, this same Josephus, the historian of
the Jews, got the actor's friendship and by his means moved Poppæa, and
through her, Nero, to a first liberation of those whom he describes as
'certain priests of my acquaintance, very excellent persons, whom on a
small and trifling charge Felix the procurator of Judæa had put in irons
and sent to Rome to plead their cause before Cæsar.' It should not be
forgotten that Josephus was himself a pupil of Banus, who, though not a
Christian, is believed to have been a follower of John the Baptist. And
here Saint John Chrysostom, writing about the year 400, takes up the
story and tells how Saint Paul attempted to convert Poppæa and to
persuade her to leave Nero, since she had two other husbands living; and
how Nero turned upon him and accused him of many sins, and imprisoned
him, and when he saw that even in prison the Apostle still worked upon
Poppæa's conscience, he at last condemned him to die. Other historians
have said that Poppæa turned Jewess for the sake of her Jewish actor,
and desired to be buried by the Jewish rite when she was dying of the
savage kick that killed her and her child--the only act of violence Nero
seems to have ever regretted. However that may be, it is sure that she
loved the comedian, and that for a time he had unbounded influence in
Rome. And so great did their power grow that Claudius Rutilius, a Roman
magistrate and poet, a contemporary of Chrysostom, and not a Christian,
expressed the wish that Judæa might never have been conquered by Pompey
and subdued again by Titus, 'since the contagion of the cancer, cut out,
spreads wider, and the conquered nation grinds its conquerors.'
And so, with varying fortune, they survived the empire which they had
seen founded, and the changes of a thousand years, they themselves
inwardly unchanged and unchanging, while following many arts and many
trades besides money-lending, and they outlived persecution and did not
decay in prosperity. In their seven Roman synagogues they set up models
of the temple Titus had destroyed, and of the seven-branched candlestick
and of the holy vessels of Jerusalem which were preserved in the temple
of Peace as trophies of the Jews' subjection; they made candlesticks and
vessels of like shape for their synagogues, nursing their hatred,
praying for deliverance, and because those sacred things were kept in
Rome, it became a holy city for them, and they throve; and by and by
they oppressed their victors. Then came Domitian the Jew-hater, and
turned them out of their houses and laid heavy taxes upon them, and
forced them for a time to live in the caves and wild places and
catacombs of the Aventine, and they became dealers in spells
and amulets and love philtres, which they sold dear to the
ever-superstitious Romans, and Juvenal wrote scornful satires on them.
Presently they returned, under Trajan, to their old dwellings by the
Tiber. Thence they crept along the Cestian bridge to the island, and
from the island by the Fabrician bridge to the other shore, growing rich
again by degrees, and crowding their little houses upon the glorious
portico of Octavia, where Vespasian and Titus had met the Senate at dawn
on the day when they triumphed over the Jews and the fall of Jerusalem,
and the very place of the Jews' greatest humiliation became their
stronghold for ages.
Then all at once, in the twelfth century, they are the masters. The
Pierleoni hold Sant' Angelo, and close to their old quarters fortify the
Theatre of Marcellus, and a Pierleone is antipope in name, but a real
and ruling Pope in political fact, while Innocent the Second wanders
helplessly from town to town, and later, while Lewis the Seventh of
France leads the Second Crusade to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, the
'Vicar of Christ' is an outcast before the race of those by whom Christ
was crucified. That was the highest point of the Jews' greatness in
Rome.
[Illustration: PIAZZA MONTANARA AND THE THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
From a print of the last century]
But it is noticeable that while the Hebrew race possesses in the very
highest degree the financial energy to handle and accumulate money, and
the tenacity to keep it for a long time, it has never shown that sort of
strength which can hold land or political power in adverse
circumstances. In the twelfth century the Pierleoni were the masters of
Rome; in the thirteenth, they had disappeared from history, though they
still held the Theatre of Marcellus; in the fourteenth they seem to have
perished altogether and are never heard of again. And it should not be
argued that this was due to any overwhelming persecution and destruction
of the Jews, since the Pierleoni's first step was an outward, if not a
sincere, conversion to Christianity. In strong contrast with these facts
stands the history of the Colonna. The researches of the learned Coppi
make it almost certain that the Colonna descend from Theodora, the
Senatress of Rome, who flourished in the year 914; Pietro della Colonna
held Palestrina, and is known to have imprisoned there, 'in an empty
cistern,' the governor of Campagna, in the year 1100; like the Orsini,
the Colonna boast that during more than five hundred years no treaty was
drawn up with the princes of Europe in which their two families were not
specifically designated; and at the time of the present writing, in the
last days of the nineteenth century, Colonna is still not only one of
the greatest names in Europe, but the family is numerous and
flourishing, unscathed by the terrible financial disasters which began
to ruin Italy in 1888, not notably wealthy, but still in possession of
its ancestral palace in Rome, and of immense tracts of land in the
hills, in the Campagna, and in the south of Italy--actively engaged,
moreover, in the representative government of Italy, strong, solid and
full of life, as though but lately risen to eminence from a sturdy
country stock--and all this after a career that has certainly lasted
eight hundred years, and very probably nearer a thousand. Nor can any
one pretend that it owes much to the power or protection of any
sovereign, since the Colonna have been in almost constant opposition to
the Popes in history, have been exiled and driven from Italy more than
once, and have again and again suffered confiscation of all they
possessed in the world. There have certainly not been in the same time
so many confiscations proclaimed against the Jews.
The question presents itself: why has a prolific race which, as a whole,
has survived the fall of kingdoms and empires without end, with singular
integrity of original faith and most extraordinary tenacity of tradition
and custom, together with the most unbounded ambition and very superior
mental gifts, never produced a single family of powerful men able to
maintain their position more than a century or two, when the nations of
Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand
years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit
and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce
degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not
a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle
for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition
and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men
necessarily into a closer contact with nature, and therefore induce a
healthier life, tending to increase the vitality of a race rather than
to diminish it. Whether this be true or not, it is safe to say that no
great family has ever maintained its power long by the possession of
money, without great lands; and by 'long' we understand at least three
hundred years.
With regard to the Jews in Rome it is a singular fact that they have
generally been better treated by the religious than by the civil
authorities. They were required to do homage to the latter every year
in the Capitol, and on this occasion the Senator of Rome placed his foot
upon the heads of the prostrate delegates, by way of accentuating their
humiliation and disgrace, but the service they were required to do on
the accession of a new Pope was of a different and less degrading
nature. The Israelite School awaited the Pope's passage, on his return
from taking possession of the Lateran, standing up in a richly hung
temporary balcony, before which he passed on his way. They then
presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch, which he blessed on the
spot, and took away with him. That was all, and it amounted to a
sanction, or permission, accorded to the Jewish religion.
As for the sumptuary laws, the first one was decreed in 1215, after the
fall of the Pierleoni, and it imposed upon all Jews, and other heretics
whomsoever, the wearing of a large circle of yellow cloth sewn upon the
breast. In the following century, according to Baracconi, this mark was
abolished by the statutes of the city and the Jews were made to wear a
scarlet mantle in public; but all licensed Jewish physicians, being
regarded as public benefactors, were exempted from the rule. For the
profession of medicine is one which the Hebrews have always followed
with deserved success, and it frequently happened in Rome that the
Pope's private physician, who lived in the Vatican and was a personage
of confidence and importance, was a professed Israelite from the
Ghetto, who worshipped in the synagogue on Saturdays and looked with
contempt and disgust upon his pontifical patient as an eater of unclean
food. There was undoubtedly a law compelling a certain number of the
Jews to hear sermons once a week, first in the Trinità dei Pellegrini,
and afterwards in the Church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and it
was from time to time rigorously enforced; it was renewed in the present
century under Leo the Twelfth, and only finally abolished, together with
all other oppressive measures, by Pius the Ninth at the beginning of his
reign. But when one considers the frightful persecution suffered by the
race in Spain, it must be conceded that they were relatively well
treated in Rome by the Popes. Their bitterest enemies and oppressors
were the lower classes of the people, who were always ready to attack
and rifle the Ghetto on the slightest pretext, and against whose
outrageous deeds the Jews had no redress.
[Illustration: THEATRE OF MARCELLUS]
It was their treatment by the people, rather than the matter itself,
which made the carnival races, in which they were forced to run after a
hearty meal, together with a great number of Christians, an intolerable
tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not
abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the
Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without
provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a
friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly
that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised
against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children
by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, so
that he only went out late in the evening. Things were no better in Rome
under Paul the Fourth, but they were distinctly better in Rome than in
Berlin at the time of Mendelssohn's writing.
Paul the Fourth, the Carafa Pope, and the friend of the Inquisition,
confined the Jews to the Ghetto. There can be no doubt but that the act
was intended as a measure of severity against heretics, and as such Pius
the Ninth considered it indefensible and abolished it. In actual fact it
must have been of enormous advantage to the Jews, who were thus provided
with a stronghold against the persecutions and robberies of the rabble.
The little quarter was enclosed by strong walls with gates, and if the
Jews were required to be within them at night, on pain of a fine, they
and their property were at least in safety. This fact has never been
noticed, and accounts for the serenity with which they bore their
nightly imprisonment for three centuries. Once within the walls of the
Ghetto they were alone, and could go about the little streets in perfect
security; they were free from the contamination as well as safe from the
depredations of Christians, and within their own precincts they were not
forced to wear the hated orange-coloured cap or net which Paul the
Fourth imposed upon the Jewish men and women. To a great extent, too,
such isolation was already in the traditions of the race. A hundred
years earlier Venice had created its Ghetto; so had Prague, and other
European cities were not long in following. Morally speaking their
confinement may have been a humiliation; in sober fact it was an immense
advantage; moreover, a special law of 'emphyteusis' made the leases of
their homes inalienable, so long as they paid rent, and forbade the
raising of the rent under any circumstances, while leaving the tenant
absolute freedom to alter and improve his house as he would, together
with the right to sublet it, or to sell the lease itself to any other
Hebrew; and these leases became very valuable. Furthermore, though under
the jurisdiction of criminal courts, the Jews had their own police in
the Ghetto, whom they chose among themselves half yearly.
It has been stated by at least one writer that the church and square of
Santa Maria del Pianto--Our Lady of Tears--bears witness to the grief of
the people when they were first forced into the Ghetto in the year 1556.
But this is an error. The church received the name from a tragedy and a
miracle which are said to have taken place before it ten years earlier.
It was formerly called San Salvatore in Cacaberis, the Church of the
'Saviour in the district of the kettle-makers.' An image of the Blessed
Virgin stood over the door of a house close by; a frightful murder was
done in broad day, and at the sight tears streamed from the statue's
eyes; the image was taken into the church, which was soon afterwards
dedicated to 'Our Lady of Tears,' and the name remained forever to
commemorate the miraculous event.
Besides mobbing the Jews in the streets and plundering them when they
could, the Roman populace invented means of insulting them which must
have been especially galling. They ridiculed them in the popular
open-air theatres, and made blasphemous jests upon their most sacred
things in Carnival. It is not improbable that 'Punch and Judy' may have
had their origin in something of this sort, and 'Judy' certainly
suggests 'Giudea,' a Jewess. What the Roman rabble had done against
Christians in heathen days, the Christian rabble did against the Jews in
the Middle Age and the Renascence. They were robbed, ridiculed,
outraged, and sometimes killed; after the fall of the Pierleoni, they
appear to have had no civil rights worth mentioning; they were taxed
more heavily than the Christian citizens, in proportion as they were
believed to be more wealthy, and were less able to resent the
tax-gatherer; their daughters were stolen away for their beauty, less
consenting than Jessica, and with more violence, and the Merchant of
Venice is not a mere fiction of the master playwright. All these things
were done to them and more, yet they stayed in Rome, and multiplied, and
grew rich, being then, as when Tacitus wrote of them, 'scrupulously
faithful and ever actively charitable to each other, and filled with
invincible hatred against all other men.'
[Illustration: SITE OF THE ANCIENT GHETTO]
The old Roman Ghetto has been often described, but no description can
give any true impression of it; the place where it stood is a vast open
lot, waiting for new buildings which will perhaps never rise, and the
memory of it is relegated to the many fast-fading pictures of old Rome.
Persius tells how, on Herod's birthday, the Jews adorned their doors
with bunches of violets and set out rows of little smoky lamps upon the
greasy window-sills, and feasted on the tails of tunny fish--the meanest
part--pickled, and eaten off rough red earthen-ware plates with draughts
of poor white wine. The picture was a true one ten years ago, for the
manners of the Ghetto had not changed in that absolute isolation. The
name itself, 'Ghetto,' is generally derived from a Hebrew root meaning
'cut off'--and cut off the Jews' quarter was, by walls, by religion, by
tradition, by mutual hatred between Hebrews and other men. It has been
compared to a beehive, to an anthill, to an old house-beam riddled and
traversed in all directions by miniature labyrinths of worm-holes,
crossing, intercommunicating, turning to right and left, upwards and
downwards, but hardly ever coming out to the surface. It has been
described by almost every writer who ever put words together about Rome,
but no words, no similes, no comparisons, can make those see it who were
never there. In a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of five
hundred yards, and little, if at all, larger than the Palazzo Doria,
between four and five thousand human beings were permanently crowded
together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and
vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and
always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced,
crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of
foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold
apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled,
toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing
of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into
corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold
nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would
not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags;
a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the
city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's
gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague
themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly,
labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday
night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the
darkening alleys--'The Sabbath has begun.'
And all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung
like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops,
flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and
brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed
antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish
and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the
slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the
half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old
rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them.
Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its
gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats
and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their
eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the
men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their
fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and
their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their
antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of
the Messiah.
And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and
crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly
veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were
more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews
concerning the future--even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in
Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against
witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to
save Christian souls from the hell which no Jew could escape save by
conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto
were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit
the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization.
They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews
who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome,
or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where
lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of
irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are
living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in
Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new
homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no
longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the
old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer
Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very
distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar
people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in
many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have
begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one
great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the
last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies
since Titus destroyed the Temple and brought thousands of them, in the
train of Pompey's thousands, to build the Colosseum; and the wisest
among them, if they be faithful and believing Jews, as many are, ask
themselves whether this great change, which looks so like improvement,
is really for good, or whether it is the beginning of the end of the
oldest nation of us all.
[Illustration]
REGION XII RIPA
In Italian, as in Latin, Ripa means the bank of a river, and the Twelfth
Region took its name from being bounded by the river bank, from just
below the island all the way to the Aurelian walls, which continue the
boundary of the triangle on the south of Saint Sebastian's gate; the
third side runs at first irregularly from the theatre of Marcellus to
the foot of the Palatine, skirts the hill to the gas works at the north
corner of the Circus Maximus, takes in the latter, and thence runs
straight to the gate before mentioned. The Region includes the Aventine,
Monte Testaccio, and the baths of Caracalla. The origin of the device,
like that of several others, seems to be lost.
The Aventine, ever since the auguries of Remus, has been especially the
refuge of opposition, and more especially, perhaps, of religious
opposition. In very early times it was especially the hill of the
plebeians, who frequently retired to its heights in their difficulties
with the patricians, as they had once withdrawn to the more distant Mons
Sacer in the Campagna. The temple of Ceres stood in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Circus, on the line of approach to the Aventine,
and contained the archives of the plebeian Ædiles. In the times of the
Decemvirs, much of the land on the hill was distributed among the
people, who probably lived within the city, but went out daily to
cultivate their little farms, just as the inhabitants of the hill
villages do today.
If this were not the case, it would be hard to explain how the Aventine
could have been a solitude at night, as it was in the time of the
Bacchic orgies, of which the discovery convulsed the republic, and ended
in a religious persecution. That was when Scipio of Asia had been
accused and not acquitted of having taken a bribe of six thousand pounds
of gold and four hundred and eighty pounds of silver to favour
Antiochus. It was in the first days of Rome's corruption, when the
brilliant army of Asia first brought the love of foreign luxury to Rome;
when the soldiers, enriched with booty, began to have brass bedsteads,
rich coverlets and curtains, and other things of woven stuff in their
magnificent furniture, and little Oriental tables with one foot, and
decorated sideboards; when people first had singing-girls, and
lute-players, and players on the sharp-strung 'triangle,' and actors, to
amuse them at their feasts; when the feasts themselves began to be
extravagant, and the office of a cook, once mean and despised, rose to
be one of high estimation and rich emolument, so that what had been a
slave's work came to be regarded as an art. It was no wonder that such
changes came about in Rome, when every triumph brought hundreds and
thousands of pounds of gold and silver to the city, when Marcus Fulvius
brought back hundreds of crowns of gold, and two hundred and eighty-five
bronze statues, and two hundred and thirty statues of marble, with other
vast spoils, and when Cnæus Manlius brought home wealth in bullion and
in coin, which even in these days, when the value of money is far less,
would be worth any nation's having.
And with it all came Greek corruption, Greek worship, Greek vice. For
years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Mænads were
celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that
riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol,
from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa
for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first come
to Rome from Etruria, and had then turned Greek, as it were, in the days
of the Asian triumphs; and first it was an orgy of drunken women only,
as in most ancient times, but soon men were admitted, and presently a
rule was made that no one should be initiated who was over twenty years
of age, and that those who refused to submit to the horrid rites after
being received should perish in the deepest cave of the hill, while the
noise of drums and clashing cymbals and of shouting drowned their
screams. And many boys and girls were thus done to death; and the
conspiracy of the orgies was widespread in Rome, yet the secret was well
kept.
Now there was a certain youth at that time, whose father had died, and
whose mother was one of the Mænads and had married a man as bad as
herself. He and she were guardians of her son's fortune, and they had
squandered it, and knew that when he came of age they should not be able
to give an account of their guardianship. They therefore determined to
initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they
knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to
pieces by the Mænads, and they might escape the law in their fraud. His
mother called him, and told him that once, when he had been ill, she had
promised the gods that she would initiate him in the Bacchanalia if he
recovered, and that it was now time to perform her vow. And doubtless
she delighted his ignorance with an account of a beautiful and solemn
ceremony.
But this youth was dearly loved by a woman whose faith to him covered
many sins. She had been a slave when a girl, and with her mistress had
been initiated, and knew what the rites were, and how evil and terrible;
and since she had been freed she had never gone to them. So when her
lover told her he was to go, thinking it good news, she was terrified,
and told him that it were better that both he and she should die that
night, than that he should be so contaminated. When he knew the truth,
he went home and told his mother and his stepfather boldly that he would
not go; and they, being beside themselves with anger and disappointment,
called four slaves and threw him out into the street. For which deed
they died. For the young man went to his father's sister, and told all;
and she sent him to the Consul to tell his story, who called the woman
that loved him, and promised her protection, so that at last she told
the truth, and he brought the matter before the Senate. Then there was
great horror at what was told, and the people who had been initiated
fled in haste by thousands, and the city was in a turmoil, while the
Senate made new and terrible laws against the rites. Many persons were
put to death, and a few were taken and imprisoned on suspicion, and
many, being guilty, killed themselves. For it was found that more than
seven thousand men and women had conspired in the orgies, and the
contamination had spread throughout Italy.
As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for
him, the Senate and the people made a noble and generous decree. For
him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the
fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from
military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever
furnishing a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been
evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that
she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling
property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as
if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at
liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her
was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and prætors in the
future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long
as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and
perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man
she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not,
no one knows.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLÆUS
From a print of the last century]
This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so
called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to
that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a
host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the
fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the
Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca
stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German
Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the
Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of
the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and
thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint
Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint
Achillæus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on
the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on
the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines,
beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas
family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On
the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught
rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great
Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a
follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a
future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two
hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an
exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great,
once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce
Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he
was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life
and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.
Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long
since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies;
and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third--a famous
chronicler in his day--and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the
restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were
brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the
Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between
Colonna and Orsini.
It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of
Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed
the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine.
So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had
taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of
their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of
crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at
any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and
without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which
Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see
one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole
by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose
name was 'of the oak'--for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one
please.
Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of
piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little
above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last
vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure
which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last
trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days
there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the
bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the
procession on the Ides of May,--the fifteenth of that month,--when the
Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men
who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies,
and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and
hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was
believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once
sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere
thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to
prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber
for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise
sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnæus Cornelius
Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a
law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for
scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark
superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the
frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more
barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.
[Illustration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE]
Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John
Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It
was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from
the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity
belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the
rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and
unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in
the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in
gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were
not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood
upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite
out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke
of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had
been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by
their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in
Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of
Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the
day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went
back to their daily life in silence.
But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from
death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope,
while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment--a right perhaps asked
for by him, as one of the brothers, and granted for his sake. Baracconi
has discovered an account of the ceremony. At the first meeting in
August, the governor of the confraternity appointed three brethren to
visit all the prisons of Rome and note the names of the prisoners
condemned to death, drawing up a precise account of each case, but
ascertaining especially which ones had obtained the forgiveness of those
whom they had injured. At the second meeting in August, the reports were
read, and the brethren chose the fortunate man by ballot.
[Illustration: PORTO SAN SEBASTIANO]
Then the whole dark company went in procession to the prison. The beadle
of the order marched first, bearing his black wand in one hand, and in
the other a robe of scarlet silk and a torch for the pardoned man; two
brothers followed with staves, others with lanterns, more with lighted
torches, and after them was borne the crucifix, the sacred figure's arms
hanging down, perhaps supposed to be in the act of receiving the
pardoned man, and a crown of silvered olive hung at its feet--then more
brothers, and last of all the Governor and the chaplain. The prison
doors were draped with tapestries, box and myrtle strewed the ground,
and the Governor received the condemned person and signed a receipt for
his body. The happy man prostrated himself before the crucifix, was
crowned with the olive garland, the Te Deum was intoned, and he was led
away to the brotherhood's church, where he heard high mass in sight of
all the people. Last, and not least, if he was a pauper, the brethren
provided him with a little money and obtained him some occupation; if a
stranger, they paid his journey home.
But the Roman rabble, says the writer, far preferred an execution to a
pardon, and would follow a condemned man to the scaffold in thousands.
If he was to be hanged, the person who touched the halter was the most
fortunate, and much money was often paid for bits of the rope; and at
night, when the wretched corpse was carried away to the church by the
brethren, the crowd followed in long procession, mumbling prayers, to
kneel on the church steps at last and implore the dead man's liberated
spirit to suggest to them, by some accident, numbers to be played at the
lottery--custom which recalls the incantations of the witches by the
crosses of executed slaves on the Esquiline.
[Illustration]
REGION XIII TRASTEVERE
All that part of Rome which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is
divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of
these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth
from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the
bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the
thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the
so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and
a standard of its own.
The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other
Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small
ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their
neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the
south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language.
There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese,
which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from
French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of
amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country.
It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality,
cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences
which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their
quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open
places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old
fashioned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and
not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the
contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity
in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod
publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The
contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region,
has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome
is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was
trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In
the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the
Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and
mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation
they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of
altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's
traditional skill in modelling stucco has covered vast surfaces of
unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of
all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account
would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the
existence of a quantity of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of
which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather.
It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of
houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the
building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and
never to be inhabited--landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of
dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have
fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant
to be the homes of a rich middle class, and given over at derisory rents
to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the
face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage.
But Trastevere escaped, being despised by the builders on account of its
distance from the chief centres. It has even preserved something of the
ancient city in its looks and habits. Then, as now, the wine shops and
cook shops opened directly upon the street, because they were, as they
still often are, mere single, vaulted chambers, having no communication
with the inner house by door or stairway. The little inner court, where
the well is, may have been wider in those days, but it must always have
been a cool, secluded place, where the women could wrangle and tear one
another's hair in decent privacy. In the days when everything went to
the gutter, it was a wise precaution to have as few windows as possible
looking outward. In old Rome, as in Trastevere, there must have been an
air of mystery about all dwelling-houses, as there is everywhere in the
East. In those days, far more than now, the head of the house was lord
and despot within his own walls; but something of that power remains by
tradition of right at the present time, and the patriarchal system is
not yet wholly dead. The business of the man was to work and fight for
his wife and children, just as to fight and hunt for his family were the
occupations of the American Indian. In return, he received absolute
obedience and abject acknowledgment of his superiority. The
government-fed Indian and the Roman father of today do very little
fighting, working, or hunting, but in their several ways they still
claim much of the same slavish obedience as in old times. One is
inclined to wonder whether nowadays the independence of women is not due
to the fall in value of men, since it is no longer necessary to pursue
wild beasts for food, since fighting is reduced to a science, taught in
three months, and seldom needed for a long time, and since work has
become so largely the monopoly of the nimble typewriter. Women ask
themselves and others, with at least a show of justice, since man's
occupation is to sit still and think, whether they might not, with a
little practice, sit quite as still as he and think to as good a
purpose. In America, for instance, it was one thing to fell big trees,
build log huts, dam rivers, plough stony ground, kill bears, and fight
Indians; it is altogether another to sit in a comfortable chair before a
plate-glass window, and dictate notes to a dumb and skilful
stenographer.
But with the development of women's independence, the air of privacy,
not to say of mystery, disappears from the modern dwelling. In
Trastevere things have not gone as far as that. One cannot tread the
narrow streets without wondering a little about the lives of the grave,
black-haired, harsh-voiced people who go in and out by the dark
entrances, and stand together in groups in Piazza Romana, or close to
Ponte Sisto, early in the morning, and just before midday, and again in
the cool of the evening.
It seems to be a part of the real simplicity of the Italian Latin to put
on a perfectly useless look of mystery on all occasions, and to assume
the air of a conspirator when buying a cabbage; and more than one gifted
writer has fallen into the error of believing the Italian character to
be profoundly complicated. One is too apt to forget that it needs much
deeper duplicity to maintain an appearance of frankness under trying
circumstances than to make a mystery of one's marketing and a profound
secret of one's cookery. There are few things which the poor Italian
more dislikes than to be watched when he is buying and preparing his
food, though he will ask any one to share it with him when it is ready;
but he is almost as prone to hide everything else that goes on inside
his house, unless he has fair warning of a visit, and full time to make
preparation for a guest. In the feeling there is great decency and
self-respect, as well as a wish to show respect to others.
[Illustration: PONTE GARIBALDI]
To Romans, Trastevere suggests great names--Stefaneschi, Anguillara,
Mattei, Raphael, Tasso. The story of the first has been told already.
Straight from the end of the new bridge that bears the name of
Garibaldi, stands the ancient tower of the great Guelph house of
Anguillara that fought the Orsini long and fiercely, and went down at
last before them, when it turned against the Pope. And when he was dead
the Orsini bought the lands and strongholds he had given to his
so-called nephew, and set the eel of Anguillara in their own escutcheon,
in memory of a struggle that had lasted more than a hundred years. The
Anguillara were seldom heard of after that; nor does anything remain of
them today but the melancholy ruins of an ancient fortress on the lake
of Bracciano, not far from the magnificent castle, and the single tower
that bears their name in Rome.
But Baracconi has discovered a story or a legend about one of them who
lived a hundred years later, and who somehow was by that time lord of
Cære, or Ceri, again, as some of his ancestors had been. It was when
Charles the Fifth came to Rome, and there were great doings; for it was
then that the old houses that filled the lower Forum were torn down in a
few days to make him a triumphal street, and many other things were
done. Then the Emperor gave a public audience in Rome, and out of
curiosity the young Titta dell' Anguillara went in to see the imperial
show. There he saw that a few of the nobles wore their caps, and he,
thinking himself as good as they, put on his own. The Grand Chamberlain
asked him why he was covered. 'Because I have a cold,' he answered, and
laughed. He was told that only Grandees of Spain might wear their caps
in the Emperor's presence. 'Tell the Emperor,' said the boy, 'that I,
too, am a Grandee in my house, and that if he would take my cap from my
head, he must do it with his sword,' and he laid his hand to the hilt of
his own. And when the Emperor heard the story, he smiled and let him
alone.
Many years ago, before the change of government, the Trasteverine
family, into whose possession the ancient tower had come, used to set
out at Christmas-tide a little show of lay figures representing the
Nativity and the Adoration of the Kings, in the highest story of the
strange old place, and almost in the open air. It was a pretty and a
peaceful sight. The small figures of the Holy Family, of the Kings, of
the shepherds and their flocks, were modelled and coloured with
wonderful skill, and in the high, bright air, with the little landscape
as cleverly made up as the figures, it all stood out clearly and
strangely lifelike. There were many of these Presepi, as they were
called, in Rome at that season, but none so pretty as that in the gloomy
old tower, of which every step had been washed with blood.
Of all tales of household feud and vengeance and murder that can be
found in old Rome, one of the most terrible is told of the Mattei, whose
great palace used to stand almost opposite the bridge of Saint
Bartholomew, leading to the island, and not more than two hundred yards
from the Anguillara tower. It happened in the year 1555, about the time
when Paul the Fourth, of inquisitorial memory, was elected Pope, thirty
years before the sons of the Massimo murdered their father's unworthy
wife, and Orsini married Victoria Accoramboni; and the deeds were done
within the walls of the old house of which a fragment still remains in
the Lungaretta, with a door surmounted by the chequered shield of the
Mattei.
[Illustration: PALAZZO MATTEI
From a print of the last century]
At that time there were four brothers of the name, Marcantonio, Piero,
Alessandro, and Curzio; and the first two quarrelled mortally, wherefore
Piero caused Marcantonio to be murdered by hired assassins. Of these
men, Alessandro, who dearly loved both his murdered brother and his
younger brother Curzio, slew one with his own hand, but the rest
escaped, and he swore a blood feud against Piero. Yet, little by little,
his anger subsided, and there was a sort of armed peace between the two.
Then it happened that Piero, who was rich, fell in love with his own
niece, the beautiful Olimpia, the dowerless daughter of his other
brother Curzio; and Curzio, tempted by the hope of wealth, consented to
the match, and the dispensation of the Church was obtained for the
marriage. It is not rare, even nowadays, for a man to marry his niece in
Europe, whether they be Catholics or Protestants, but the Italians are
opposed to such marriages; and Alessandro Mattei, pitying the lovely
girl, whose life was to be sold for money, and bitterly hating the
murderer bridegroom, swore that the thing should not be. Yet he could
not prevent the wedding, for Piero was rich and powerful, and of a
determined character. So Piero was married, and after the wedding, in
the evening, he gave a great feast in his house, and invited to it all
the kinsmen of the family, with their wives.
And Alessandro Mattei came also, with his son, Girolamo, and bringing
with him two men whom he called his friends, but whom no one knew. These
were hired murderers, but Piero smiled pleasantly and made a pretence
of being well satisfied. The company feasted together, and drank old
wine, with songs and rejoicings of all sorts. Then Alessandro rose to go
home, for it was late, and Piero led him to the door of the hall to take
leave of him courteously, so that all the kinsfolk might see that there
was peace, for they were all looking on, some sitting in their places
and some standing up out of respect for the elder men as they went to
the door. Alessandro stood still, exchanging courtesies with his
brother, while his servants brought him his cloak, and the arquebuse he
carried at night for safety; for he had his palace across the Tiber,
where it stands today. Then taking the hand-gun, he spoke no more words,
but shot his brother in the breast, and killed him, and fled, leaving
his son behind, for the young man had wished to stay till the end of the
feast, and the two hired assassins had been brought by his father to
protect him, though he did not know it.
When they heard the shot, the women knew that there was blood, so they
sprang up and put out the lights in an instant, that the men might not
see to kill one another; therefore Curzio, the bride's father, did not
see that his brother Alessandro had gone out after the killing. He crept
about with a long knife, feeling in the dark for the embroidered doublet
which Alessandro wore, and when he thought that he had found it, he
struck; but it was Girolamo who was dressed like his father, and the
two who were to watch him were on each side of him, and one of them
feeling that Curzio was going to strike, and knowing him also by the
touch of what he wore, killed him quietly before his blow went home, and
dragged out Girolamo in haste, for the door was open, and there was some
light in the stairs, whence the servants had fled. But others had sought
Alessandro, and other blows had been dealt in the dark, and the bride
herself was wounded, but not mortally.
Girolamo and the man who had killed Curzio came to the Bridge of Saint
Bartholomew, where Alessandro was waiting, very anxious for his son; and
when he saw him in the starlight he drew a long breath. But when he knew
what had happened and how the murderer had killed Curzio to save the
boy, Alessandro was suddenly angry, for he had loved Curzio dearly. So
he quickly drew his dagger and stabbed the man in the breast, and threw
his body, yet breathing, over the bridge into the river. But that night
he left Rome secretly and quickly, and he lived out his days an outlaw,
while Girolamo, who was innocent of all, became the head of the Mattei
in Rome.
It is no wonder that the knife is a tradition in Trastevere. Even now it
is the means of settling difficulties, but less often by treachery than
in the other regions. For when two young men have a difference it is
usual for them to go together into some quiet inner court or walled
garden, and there they wind their handkerchiefs round their right wrists
and round the hilt of the knife to get a good hold, and they muffle
their left arms in their jackets for a shield, and face each other till
one is dead. If it be barbarous, it is at least braver than stabbing in
the dark.
Raphael is remembered in Trastevere for the beautiful little palace of
the Farnesina, which he decorated for the great and generous banker,
Agostino Chigi, and for the Fornarina, whose small house with its Gothic
window stands near the Septimian gate, where the old Aurelian wall
crosses Trastevere and the Lungara to the Tiber. And he has made
Trastevere memorable for the endless types of beauty he found there,
besides the one well-loved woman, and whom he took as models for his
work. He lived at the last, not in the house on the Roman side, which
belonged to him and is still called his, but in another, built by
Bramante, close to the old Accoramboni Palace, in the Piazza Rusticucci,
before Saint Peter's, and that one has long been torn down.
[Illustration: HOUSE BUILT FOR RAPHAEL BY BRAMANTE, NOW TORN DOWN]
We know little enough of that Margaret, called the Fornarina from her
father's profession; but we know that Raphael loved her blindly,
passionately, beyond all other thoughts; as Agostino Chigi loved the
magnificent Imperia for whom the Farnesina was built and made beautiful.
And there was a time when the great painter was almost idle, out of love
for the girl, and went about languidly with pale face and shadowed eyes,
and scarcely cared to paint or draw. He was at work in the Vatican then,
or should have been, and in the Farnesina, too; but each day, when he
went out, his feet led him away from the Pope's palace and across the
square, by the Gate of the Holy Spirit and down the endless straight
Lungara towards the banker's palace; but when he reached it he went on
to the Fornarina's house, and she was at the window waiting for him. For
her sake he refused to marry the great Cardinal Bibbiena's well-dowered
niece, Maria, and the world has not ceased to believe that for too much
love of the Fornarina he died. But before that, as Fabio Chigi tells,
Pope Leo the Tenth, being distressed by the painter's love sickness,
asked Agostino Chigi if there were not some way to bring him back to
work. And the great banker, as anxious for his Farnesina as the Pope was
for his Vatican, spirited away the lovely girl for a time, she
consenting for her lover's sake. And Chigi then pretended to search for
her, and comforted Raphael with news of her and promises of her return,
so that after being half mad with anxiety he grew calmer, and worked for
a time at his painting. But soon he languished, and the cure was worse
than the evil; so that one day Chigi brought the girl back to him
unawares and went away, leaving them together.
Of the end we know nothing, nor whether Margaret was with him when he
died; we know nothing, save that she outlived him, and died in her turn,
and lies in a grave which no one can find. But when all Rome was in
sorrow for the dead man, when he had been borne through the streets to
his grave, with his great unfinished Transfiguration for a funeral
banner, when he had been laid in his tomb in the Pantheon, beside Maria
Bibbiena, who had died, perhaps, because he would not love her, then
the pale Margaret must have sat often by the little Gothic window near
the Septimian gate, waiting for what could not come any more. For she
had loved a man beyond compare; and it had been her whole life.
[Illustration: MONASTERY OF SANT' ONOFRIO
From an old engraving]
If one comes from the Borgo by the Lungara, and if one turns up the
steep hill to the right, there is the place where Tasso died,
seventy-five years after Raphael was gone. The small monastery of Sant'
Onofrio, where he spent the last short month of his life, used to be a
lonely and beautiful place, and is remembered only for his sake, though
it has treasures of its own--the one fresco painted in Rome by Lionardo
da Vinci, and paintings by Domenichino and Pinturicchio in its portico
and little church, as well as memories of Saint Philip Neri, the
Roman-born patron saint of Rome. All these things barely sufficed to
restrain the government from turning it into a barrack for the city
police a few years ago, when the name of one of Italy's greatest poets
should alone have protected it. It was far from the streets and
thoroughfares in older times, and the quiet sadness of its garden called
up the infinite melancholy of the poor poet who drew his last breath of
the fresh open air under the old tree at the corner, and saw Rome the
last time, as he turned and walked painfully back to th
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