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Ave Roma Immortalis
AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS
STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME
BY
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November,
December, 1898.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_
_Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PAGE
THE MAKING OF THE CITY 1
THE EMPIRE 22
THE CITY OF AUGUSTUS 57
THE MIDDLE AGE 78
THE FOURTEEN REGIONS 100
REGION I MONTI 106
REGION II TREVI 155
REGION III COLONNA 190
REGION IV CAMPO MARZO 243
REGION V PONTE 274
REGION VI PARIONE 297
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
VOLUME I
Map of Rome _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Wall of Romulus 4
Palace of the Cæsars 30
The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct 50
Temple of Castor and Pollux 70
Basilica Constantine 90
Basilica of Saint John Lateran 114
Baths of Diocletian 140
Fountain of Trevi 158
Piazza Barberini 188
Porta San Lorenzo 214
Villa Borghese 230
Piazza del Popolo 256
Island in the Tiber 280
Palazzo Massimo alle Colonna 306
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
VOLUME I
PAGE
Palatine Hill and Mouth of the Cloaca Maxima 1
Ruins of the Servian Wall 8
Etruscan Bridge at Veii 16
Tombs on the Appian Way 22
Brass of Tiberius, showing the Temple of Concord 24
The Tarpeian Rock 28
Caius Julius Cæsar 36
Octavius Augustus Cæsar 45
Brass of Trajan, showing the Circus Maximus 56
Brass of Antoninus Pius, in Honour of Faustina, with
Reverse showing Vesta bearing the Palladium 57
Ponte Rotto, now destroyed 67
Atrium of Vesta 72
Brass of Gordian, showing the Colosseum 78
The Colosseum 87
Ruins of the Temple of Saturn 92
Brass of Gordian, showing Roman Games 99
Ruins of the Julian Basilica 100
Brass of Titus, showing the Colosseum 105
Region I Monti, Device of 106
Santa Francesca Romana 111
San Giovanni in Laterano 116
Piazza Colonna 119
Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 126
Santa Maria Maggiore 134
Porta Maggiore, supporting the Channels of the Aqueduct
of Claudius and the Anio Novus 145
Interior of the Colosseum 152
Region II Trevi, Device of 155
Grand Hall of the Colonna Palace 162
Interior of the Mausoleum of Augustus 169
Forum of Trajan 171
Ruins of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli 180
Palazzo del Quirinale 185
Region III Colonna, Device of 190
Arch of Titus 191
Twin Churches at the Entrance of the Corso 197
San Lorenzo in Lucina 204
Palazzo Doria-Pamfili 208
Palazzo di Monte Citorio 223
Palazzo di Venezia 234
Region IV Campo Marzo, Device of 248
Piazza di Spagna 251
Trinità de Monti 257
Villa Medici 265
Region V Ponte 274
Bridge of Sant' Angelo 285
Villa Negroni 292
Region VI Parione, Device of 297
Piazza Navona 303
Ponte Sisto 307
The Cancelleria 316
WORKS CONSULTED
NOT INCLUDING CLASSIC WRITERS NOR ENCYCLOPÆDIAS
1. AMPÈRE--Histoire Romaine à Rome.
AMPÈRE--L'Empire Remain à Rome.
2. BARACCONI--I Rioni di Roma.
3. BOISSIER--Promenades Archéologiques.
4. BRYCE--The Holy Roman Empire.
5. CELLINI--Memoirs.
6. COPPI--Memoire Colonnesi.
7. FORTUNATO--Storia delle vite delle Imperatrici Romane.
8. GIBBON--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
9. GNOLI--Vittoria Accoramboni.
10. GREGOROVIUS--Geschichte der Stadt Rom.
11. HARE--Walks in Rome.
12. JOSEPHUS--Life of.
13. LANCIANI--Ancient Rome.
14. LETI--Vita di Sisto V.
15. MURATORI--Scriptores Rerum Italicarum.
MURATORI--Annali d'Italia.
MURATORI--Antichità Italiane.
16. RAMSAY AND LANCIANI--A Manual of Roman Antiquities.
17. SCHNEIDER--Das Alte Rom.
18. SILVAGNI--La Corte e la Società Romana.
[Illustration: PALATINE HILL AND MOUTH OF THE CLOACA MAXIMA]
Ave Roma Immortalis
I
The story of Rome is the most splendid romance in all history. A few
shepherds tend their flocks among volcanic hills, listening by day and
night to the awful warnings of the subterranean voice,--born in danger,
reared in peril, living their lives under perpetual menace of
destruction, from generation to generation. Then, at last, the deep
voice swells to thunder, roaring up from the earth's heart, the
lightning shoots madly round the mountain top, the ground rocks, and the
air is darkened with ashes. The moment has come. One man is a leader,
but not all will follow him. He leads his small band swiftly down from
the heights, and they drive a flock and a little herd before them,
while each man carries his few belongings as best he can, and there are
few women in the company. The rest would not be saved, and they perish
among their huts before another day is over.
Down, always downwards, march the wanderers, rough, rugged, young with
the terrible youth of those days, and wise only with the wisdom of
nature. Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling
land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the
river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those
hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and
they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives
her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the
village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River,
the Man of the Village by the River; and to our own time the
twenty-first of April is kept and remembered, and even now honoured, for
the very day on which the shepherds began to dig their trench on the
Palatine, the date of the Foundation of Rome, from which seven hundred
and fifty-four years were reckoned to the birth of Christ.
And the shepherds called their leader King, though his kingship was over
but few men. Yet they were such men as begin history, and in the scant
company there were all the seeds of empire. First the profound faith of
natural mankind, unquestioning, immovable, inseparable from every daily
thought and action; then fierce strength, and courage, and love of life
and of possession; last, obedience to the chosen leader, in clear
liberty, when one should fail, to choose another. So the Romans began to
win the world, and won it in about six hundred years.
By their camp-fires, by their firesides in their little huts, they told
old tales of their race, and round the truth grew up romantic legend,
ever dear to the fighting man and to the husbandman alike, with strange
tales of their first leader's birth, fit for poets, and woven to stir
young hearts to daring, and young hands to smiting. Truth there was
under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of
Alba Longa slew his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars,
mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus,
father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to
kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in
storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught
by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears for her royal
adept, and his earthen cup, jealously guarded, was worshipped for more
than a thousand years; legends of the first Arval brotherhood, dim as
the story of Melchisedec, King and priest, but lasting as Rome itself.
Tales of King Tullus, when the three Horatii fought for Rome against
the three Curiatii, who smote for Alba and lost the day--Tullus
Hostilius, grandson of that first Hostus who had fought against the
Sabines; and always more legend, and more, and more, sometimes misty,
sometimes clear and direct in action as a Greek tragedy. They hover upon
the threshold of history, with faces of beauty or of terror, sublime,
ridiculous, insignificant, some born of desperate, real deeds, many
another, perhaps, first told by some black-haired shepherd mother to her
wondering boys at evening, when the brazen pot simmered on the
smouldering fire, and the father had not yet come home.
But down beneath the legend lies the fact, in hewn stones already far in
the third thousand of their years. Digging for truth, searchers have
come here and there upon the first walls and gates of the Palatine
village, straight, strong and deeply founded. The men who made them
meant to hold their own, and their own was whatsoever they were able to
take from others by force. They built their walls round a four-sided
space, wide enough for them, scarcely big enough a thousand years later
for the houses of their children's rulers, the palaces of the Cæsars of
which so much still stands today.
Then came the man who built the first bridge across the river, of wooden
piles and beams, bolted with bronze, because the Romans had no iron yet,
and ever afterwards repaired with wood and bronze, for its sanctity, in
perpetual veneration of Ancus Martius, fourth King of Rome. That was the
bridge Horatius kept against Porsena of Clusium, while the fathers hewed
it down behind him.
[Illustration: WALL OF ROMULUS]
Tarquin the first came next, a stranger of Greek blood, chosen, perhaps,
because the factions in Rome could not agree. Then Servius, great and
good, built his tremendous fortification, and the King of Italy today,
driving through the streets in his carriage, may look upon the wall of
the King who reigned in Rome more than two thousand and four hundred
years ago.
Under those six rulers, from Romulus to Servius, from the man of the
River Village to the man of walls, Rome had grown from a sheepfold to a
town, from a town to a walled city, from a city to a little nation,
matched against all mankind, to win or die, inch by inch, sword in hand.
She was a kingdom now, and her men were subjects; and still the third
law of great races was strong and waking. Romans obeyed their leader so
long as he could lead them well--no longer. The twilight of the Kings
gathered suddenly, and their names were darkened, and their sun went
down in shame and hate. In the confusion, tragic legend rises to tell
the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history,
turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals
upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my
hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of
unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her
husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed
done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the
Republic was born. While father, husband and friend were stunned with
grief, Brutus held up the dripping knife before their eyes. 'By this
most chaste blood, I swear--Gods be my witnesses--that I will hunt down
Tarquin the Proud, himself, his infamous wife and every child of his,
with fire and sword, and with all my might, and neither he nor any other
man shall ever again be King in Rome.' So they all swore, and bore the
dead woman out into the market-place, and called on all men to stand by
them.
They kept their word, and the tale tells how the Tarquins were driven
out to a perpetual exile, and by and by allied themselves with Porsena,
and marched on Rome, and were stopped only at the Sublician bridge by
brave Horatius.
Chaos next. Then all at once the Republic stands out, born full grown
and ready armed, stern, organized and grasping, but having already
within itself the quickened opposites that were to fight for power so
long and so fiercely,--the rich and the poor, the patrician and the
plebeian, the might and the right.
There is a wonder in that quick change from Kingdom to Commonwealth,
which nothing can make clear, except, perhaps, modern history. Say that
two thousand or more years hereafter men shall read of what our
grandfathers, our fathers and ourselves have seen done in France within
a hundred years, out of two or three old books founded mostly on
tradition; they may be confused by the sudden disappearance of kings, by
the chaos, the wild wars and the unforeseen birth of a lasting republic,
just as we are puzzled when we read of the same sequence in ancient
Rome. Men who come after us will have more documents, too. It is not
possible that all books and traces of written history should be
destroyed throughout the world, as the Gauls burned everything in Rome,
except the Capitol itself, held by the handful of men who had taken
refuge there.
So the Kingdom fell with a woman's death, and the Commonwealth was made
by her avengers. Take the story as you will, for truth or truth's
legend, it is for ever humanly true, and such deeds would rouse a nation
today as they did then and as they set Rome on fire once more nearly
sixty years later.
But all the time Rome was growing as if the very stones had life to put
out shoots and blossoms and bear fruit. Round about the city the great
Servian wall had wound like a vast finger, in and out, grasping the
seven hills, and taking in what would be a fair-sized city even in our
day. They were the last defences Rome built for herself, for nearly nine
hundred years.
Nothing can give a larger idea of Rome's greatness than that; not all
the temples, monuments, palaces, public buildings of later years can
tell half the certainty of her power expressed by that one fact--Rome
needed no walls when once she had won the world.
But it is very hard to guess at what the city was, in those grim times
of the early fight for life. We know the walls, and there were nineteen
gates in all, and there were paved roads; the wooden bridge, the Capitol
with its first temple and first fortress, the first Forum with the
Sacred Way, were all there, and the public fountain, called the
Tullianum, and a few other sites are certain. The rest must be imagined.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE SERVIAN WALL]
Rome was a brown city in those days, when there was no marble and little
stucco: a brown city teeming with men and women clothed mostly in grey
and brown and black woollen cloaks, like those the hill shepherds wear
today, caught up under one arm and thrown far over the shoulder in dark
folds. The low houses without any outer windows, entered by one rough
door, were built close together, and those near the Forum had shops
outside them, low-browed places, dark but not deep, where the cloaked
keeper sat behind a stone counter among his wares, waiting for custom,
watching all that happened in the market-place, gathering in gossip from
one buyer to exchange it for more with the next, altogether not unlike
the small Eastern merchant of today.
Yet during more than half the time, there were few young men, or men in
prime, in the streets of Rome. They were fighting more than half the
year, while their fathers and their children stayed behind with the
women. The women sat spinning and weaving wool in their little brown
houses; the boys played, fought, ran races naked in the streets; the
small girls had their quiet games and, surely, their dolls, made of
rags, stuffed with the soft wool waste from their mothers' spindles and
looms. The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when
fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in
the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the
Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each
other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons,
fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more
possession. Meanwhile the maidens went in pairs to the springs to fetch
water, or down to the river in small companies to wash the woollen
clothes and dry them in the shade of the old wild trees, lest in the sun
they should shrink and thicken; black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned
maids, all of them, strong and light of foot, fit to be mothers of more
soldiers, to slay more enemies, and bring back more spoil. Then, as in
our own times, the flocks of goats were driven in from the pastures at
early morning and milked from door to door, for each household, and
driven out again to the grass before the sun was high. In the old wall
there was the Cattle Gate, the Porta Mugonia, named, as the learned say,
from the lowing of the herds. Then, as in the hill towns not long ago,
the serving women, who were slaves, sat cross-legged on the ground in
the narrow court within the house, with the hand-mill of two stones
between them, and ground the wheat to flour for the day's meal. There
have been wonderful survivals of the first age even to our own time.
But that which has not come down to us is the huge vitality of those men
and women. The world's holders have never risen suddenly in hordes; they
have always grown by degrees out of little nations, that could live
through more than their neighbours. Calling up the vision of the first
Rome, one must see, too, such human faces and figures of men as are
hardly to be found among us nowadays,--the big features, the great,
square, devouring jaws, the steadily bright eyes, the strongly built
brows, coarse, shagged hair, big bones, iron muscles and starting
sinews. There are savage countries that still breed such men. They may
have their turn next, when we are worn out. Browning has made John the
Smith a memorable type.
Rome was a clean city in those days. One of the Tarquins had built the
great arched drain which still stands unshaken and in use, and smaller
ones led to it, draining the Forum and all the low part of the town. The
people were clean, far beyond our ordinary idea of them, as is plain
enough from the contemptuous way in which the Latin authors use their
strong words for uncleanliness. A dirty man was an object of pity, and
men sometimes went about in soiled clothes to excite the public
sympathy, as beggars do today in all countries. Dirt meant abject
poverty, and in a grasping, getting race, poverty was the exception,
even while simplicity was the rule. For all was simple with them, their
dress, their homes, their lives, their motives, and if one could see the
Rome of Tarquin the Proud, this simplicity would be of all
characteristics the most striking, compared with what we know of later
Rome, and with what we see about us in our own times. Simplicity is not
strength, but the condition in which strength is least hampered in its
full action.
It was easy to live simply in such a place and in such a climate, under
a wise King. The check in the first straight run of Rome's history
brought the Romans suddenly face to face with the first great
complication of their career, which was the struggle between the rich
and the poor; and again the half truth rises up to explain the fact.
Men whose first instinct was to take and hold took from one another in
peace when they could not take from their enemies in war, since they
must needs be always taking from some one. So the few strong took all
from the many weak, till the weak banded themselves together to resist
the strong, and the struggle for life took a new direction.
The grim figure of Lucius Junius Brutus rises as the incarnation of that
character which, at great times, made history, but in peace made
trouble. The man who avenged Lucretia, who drove out the Tarquins, and
founded the Republic, is most often remembered as the father who sat
unmoved in judgment on his two traitor sons, and looked on with stony
eyes while they paid the price of their treason in torment and death.
That one deed stands out, and we forget how he himself fell fighting for
Rome's freedom.
But still the evil grew at home, and the hideous law of creditor and
debtor, which only fiercest avarice could have devised, ground the poor,
who were obliged to borrow to pay the tax-gatherer, and made slaves of
them almost to the ruin of the state.
Just then Etruria wakes, shadowy, half Greek, the central power of
Italy, between Rome and Gaul. Porsena, the Lar of Clusium, comes against
the city with a great host in gilded arms. Terror descends like a dark
mist over the young nation. The rich fear for their riches, the poor for
their lives. In haste the fathers gather great supplies of corn against
a siege; credit and debt are forgotten; patrician and plebeian join
hands as Porsena reaches Janiculum, and three heroic figures of romance
stand forth from a host of heroes. Horatius keeps the bridge, first with
two comrades, then, at the last, alone in the glory of single-handed
fight against an army, sure of immortality whether he live or die.
Scævola, sworn with the three hundred to slay the Lar, stabs the wrong
man, and burns his hand to the wrist to show what tortures he can bear
unmoved. Cloelia, the maiden hostage, rides her young steed at the
yellow torrent, and swims the raging flood back to the Palatine.
Cloelia and Horatius get statues in the Forum; Scævola is endowed with
great lands, which his race holds for centuries, and leaves a name so
great that two thousand years later, Sforza, greatest leader of the
Middle Age, coveting long ancestry, makes himself descend from the man
who burned off his own hand.
They are great figures, the two men and the noble girl, and real to us,
in a way, because we can stand on the very ground they trod, where
Horatius fought, where Scævola suffered and where Cloelia took the
river. They are nearer to us than Romulus, nearer even than Lucretia, as
each figure, following the city's quick life, has more of reality about
it, and not less of heroism.
For two hundred years the Romans strove with each other in law making;
the fathers for exclusive power and wealth, the plebeians for freedom,
first, and then for office in the state; a time of fighting abroad for
land, and of contention at home about its division. In fifty years the
poor had their Tribunes, but it took them nearly three times as long,
after that, to make themselves almost the fathers' equals in power.
Once they tried a new kind of government by a board of ten, and it held
for a while, till again a woman's life turned the tide of Roman history,
and fair young Virginia, stabbed by her father in the Forum, left a name
as lasting as any of that day.
Romance again, but the true romance, above doubt, at last; not at all
mythical, but full of fate's unanswerable logic, which makes dim stories
clear to living eyes. You may see the actors in the Forum, where it all
happened,--the lovely girl with frightened, wondering eyes; the father,
desperate, white-lipped, shaking with the thing not yet done; Appius
Claudius smiling among his friends and clients; the sullen crowd of
strong plebeians, and the something in the chill autumn air that was a
warning of fate and fateful change. Then the deed. A shriek at the edge
of the throng; a long, thin knife, high in air, trembling before a
thousand eyes; a harsh, heartbroken, vengeful voice; a confusion and a
swaying of the multitude, and then the rising yell of men overlaid,
ringing high in the air from the Capitol right across the Forum to the
Palatine, and echoing back the doom of the Ten.
The deed is vivid still, and then there is sudden darkness. One thinks
of how that man lived afterwards. Had Virginius a home, a wife, other
children to mourn the dead one? Or was he a lonely man, ten times alone
after that day, with the memory of one flashing moment always undimmed
in a bright horror? Who knows? Did anyone care? Rome's story changed its
course, turning aside at the river of Virginia's blood, and going on
swiftly in another way.
To defeat this time, straight to Rome's first and greatest humiliation;
to the coming of the Gauls, sweeping everything before them, Etruscans,
Italians, Romans, up to the gates of the city and over the great moat
and wall of Servius, burning, destroying, killing everything, to the
foot of the central rock; baffled at the last stronghold on a dark night
by a flock of cackling geese, but not caring for so small a thing when
they had swallowed up the rest, or not liking the Latin land, perhaps,
and so, taking ransom for peace and marching away northwards again
through the starved and harried hills and valleys of Etruria to their
own country. And six centuries passed away before an enemy entered Rome
again.
But the Gauls left wreck and ruin and scarcely one stone upon another in
the great desolation; they swept away all records of history, then and
there, and the general destruction was absolute, so that the Rome of the
Republic and of the Empire, the centre and capital of the world, began
to exist from that day. Unwillingly the people bore back Juno's image
from Veii, where they had taken refuge and would have stayed, and built
houses, and would have called that place Rome. But the nobles had their
own way, and the great construction began, of which there was to be no
end for many hundreds of years, in peace and war, mostly while hard
fighting was going on abroad.
[Illustration: ETRUSCAN BRIDGE AT VEII]
They built hurriedly at first, for shelter, and as best they could,
crowding their little houses in narrow streets with small care for
symmetry or adornment. The second Rome must have seemed but a poor
village compared with the solidly built city which the Gauls had burnt,
and it was long before the present could compare with the past. In haste
men seized on fragments of all sorts, blocks of stone, cracked and
defaced in the flames, charred beams that could still serve, a door
here, a window there, and such bits of metal as they could pick up. An
irregular, crowded town sprang up, and a few rough temples, no doubt as
pied and meanly pieced as many of those early churches built of odds and
ends of ruin, which stand to this day.
It is not impossible that the motley character of Rome, of which all
writers speak in one way or another, had its first cause in that second
building of the city. Rome without ruins would hardly seem Rome at all,
and all was ruined in that first inroad of the savage Gauls,--houses,
temples, public places. When the Romans came back from Veii they must
have found the Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but
blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with
charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household
furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and
pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost
heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner
air of Veii. Their little houses were lost and untraceable in the
universal chaos. But the rich man's ruins stood out in bolder relief; he
had his lands still; he still had slaves; he could rebuild his home; and
he had his way.
But ever afterwards, though the Republic and the Empire spent the wealth
of nations in beautifying the city, the trace of that first defeat
remained. Dark and narrow lanes wound in and out, round the great
public squares, and within earshot of the broad white streets, and the
time-blackened houses of the poor stood huddled out of sight behind the
palaces of the rich, making perpetual contrast of wealth and poverty,
splendour and squalor, just as one may see today in Rome, in London, in
Paris, in Constantinople, in all the mistress cities of the world that
have long histories of triumph and defeat behind them.
The first Rome sprang from the ashes of the Alban volcano, the second
Rome rose from the ashes of herself, as she has risen again and again
since then. But the Gauls had done Rome a service, too. In crushing her
to the earth, they had crushed many of her enemies out of existence; and
when she stood up to face the world once more, she fought not to beat
the Æquians or the Etruscans at her gates, but to conquer Italy. And by
steady fighting she won it all, and brought home the spoils and divided
the lands; here and there a battle lost, as in the bloody Caudine pass,
but always more battles won, and more, and more, sternly relentless to
revolt. Brutus had seen his own sons' heads fall at his own word; should
Caius Pontius, the Samnite, be spared, because he was the bravest of the
brave? To her faithful friends Rome was just, and now and then
half-contemptuously generous.
The idle Greek fine gentlemen of Tarentum sat in their theatre one day,
overlooking the sea, shaded by dyed awnings from the afternoon sun,
listening entranced to some grand play,--the Oedipus King, perhaps, or
Alcestis, or Medea. Ten Roman trading ships came sailing round the
point; and the wind failed, and they lay there with drooping sails,
waiting for the land breeze that springs up at night. Perhaps some rough
Latin sailor, as is the way today in calm weather when there is no work
to be done, began to howl out one of those strange, endless songs which
have been sung down to us, from ear to ear, out of the primeval Aryan
darkness,--loud, long drawn out, exasperating in its unfinished cadence,
jarring on the refined Greek ear, discordant with the actor's finely
measured tones. In sudden rage at the noise--so it must have been--those
delicate idlers sprang up and ran down to the harbour, and took the
boats that lay there, and overwhelmed the unarmed Roman traders, slaying
many of them. Foolish, cruel, almost comic. So a sensitive musician,
driven half mad by a street organ, longs to rush out and break the thing
to pieces, and kill the poor grinder for his barbarous noise.
But when there was blood in the harbour of Tarentum, and some of the
ships had escaped on their oars, the Greeks were afraid; and when the
message of war came swiftly down to them from inexorable Rome, their
terror grew, and they sent to Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had set up to be a
conqueror, to come and conquer Rome for the sake of certain æsthetic
fine gentlemen who could not bear to be disturbed at a good play on a
spring afternoon. He came with all the pomp and splendour of Eastern
warfare; he won a battle, and a battle, and half a battle, and then the
Romans beat him at Beneventum, famous again and again, and utterly
destroyed his army, and took back with them his gold and his jewels, and
the tusks of his elephants, and the mastery of all Italy to boot, but
not yet beyond dispute.
Creeping down into Sicily, Rome met Carthage, both giants in those days,
and the greatest and last struggle began, with half the known world and
all the known sea for a battle-ground. Round and round the
Mediterranean, by water and land, they fought for a hundred and eighteen
years, through four generations of men, as we should reckon it, both
grasping and strong, both relentless, both sworn to win or perish for
ever, both doing great deeds that are remembered still. The mere name of
Regulus is a legion of legends in itself; the name of Hannibal is in
itself a history, that of Fabius Maximus a lesson; and while history
lasts, Cornelius Scipio and Scipio the African will not be forgotten. It
is the story of many and terrible defeats, from each of which Rome rose,
fiercely young, to win a dozen terrible little victories. It is strange
that we remember the lost days best; misty Thrasymene and Cannæ's
fearful slaughter rise first in the memory. Then all at once, within ten
years, the scale turns, and Caius Claudius Nero hurls Hasdrubal's
disfigured head high over ditch and palisade into his brother's camp,
right to his brother's feet. And five years later, the battle of Zama,
won almost at the gates of Carthage; and then, almost the end, as great
heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ruined and exiled, drinks up the poison
and rests at last, some forty years after he led his first army to
victory. But he had been dead nearly forty years, when another Scipio at
last tore down the walls of Carthage, and utterly destroyed the city to
the foundations, for ever. And a dozen years later than that, Rome had
conquered all the civilized world round about the Mediterranean sea,
from Spain to Asia.
[Illustration: TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY]
II
There was a mother in Rome, not rich, but of great race, for she was
daughter to Scipio of Africa; and she called her sons her jewels when
other women showed their golden ornaments and their precious stones and
boasted of their husbands' wealth. Cornelia's two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, lost their lives successively in a struggle against the avarice
of the rich men who ruled Rome, Italy and the world; against that
grasping avarice which far surpassed the greed of any other race before
the Romans, or after them, and which had suddenly taken new growth as
the spoils of the East and South and West poured into the city. Yet the
vast booty men could see was but an earnest of the wide lands which had
fallen to Rome, called 'Public Lands' almost as if in derision, while
they fell into the power of the few and strong, by the hundred thousand
acres at a time.
Three hundred and fifty years before the Gracchi, when little conquests
still seemed great, Spurius Cassius had died in defence of his Agrarian
Law, at the hands of the savage rich who accused him of conspiring for a
crown. Tiberius Gracchus set up the rights of the people to the public
land, and perished.
He fell within a stone's throw of the spot on which the great tribune,
Nicholas Rienzi, died. The strong, small band of nobles, armed with
staves and clubs, and with that supremacy of contemptuous bearing that
cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng,
murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles
against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in
air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the
body into the Tiber lest the people should make a revolution of its
funeral.
Next came Caius, a boy of six and twenty, fighting the same fight for a
few years. On his head the nobles set a price--its weight in gold. He
hides on the Aventine, and the Aventine is stormed. He escapes by the
Sublician bridge and the bridge is held behind him by one friend, almost
as Horatius held it against an army. Yet the nobles and their hired
Cretan bowmen force the way and pursue him into Furina's grove. There a
Greek slave ends him, and to get more gold fills the poor head with
metal--and is paid in full. Three hundred died with Tiberius, three
thousand were put to death for his brother's sake. With the goods of the
slain and the dowries of their wives, Opimius built the Temple of
Concord on the spot where the later one still stands in part, between
the Comitium and the Capitol. The poor of Rome, and Cornelia, and the
widows and children of the murdered men, knew what that 'Concord' meant.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TIBERIUS, SHOWING THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD]
Then followed revolution, war with runaway slaves, war with the
immediate allies, then civil war, while wealth and love of wealth grew
side by side, the one, insatiate, devouring the other.
First the slaves made for Sicily, wild, mountainous, half-governed then
as it is today, and they held much of it against their masters for five
years. Within short memory, almost yesterday, a handful of outlaws has
defied a powerful nation's best soldiers in the same mountains. It is
small wonder that many thousand men, fighting for liberty and life,
should have held out so long.
And meanwhile Jugurtha of Numidia had for long years bought every Roman
general sent against him, had come to Rome himself and bought the laws,
and had gone back to his country with contemptuous leave-taking--'Thou
city where all is sold!' And still he bought, till Caius Marius,
high-hearted plebeian and great soldier, brought him back to die in the
Mamertine prison.
Then against wealth arose the last and greatest power of Rome, her
terrible armies that set up whom they would, to have their will of
Senate and fathers and people. First Marius, then Sylla whom he had
taught to fight, and taught to beat him in the end, after Cinna had been
murdered for his sake at Ancona.
Marius and Sylla, the plebeian and the patrician, were matched at first
as leader and lieutenant, then both as conquerors, then as alternate
despots of Rome and mortal foes, till their long duel wrecked what had
been and opened ways for what was to be.
First, Sylla claims that he, and not Marius, took Jugurtha, when the
Numidian ally betrayed him, though the King and his two sons marched in
the train of the plebeian's triumph. Marius answers by a stupendous
victory over the Cimbrians and Teutons, slays a hundred thousand in one
battle, comes home, triumphs again, sets up his trophies in the city and
builds a temple to Honour and Courage. Next, in greed of popular power,
he perjures himself to support a pair of murderous demagogues, betrays
them in turn to the patricians, and Saturninus is pounded to death with
roof tiles in the Capitol. Then, being made leader in the war with the
allies, already old for fighting, he fails at the outset, and his rival
Sylla is General in his stead.
Then riot on riot in the Forum, violence after violence in the struggle
for the consulship, murder after murder, blood upon blood not yet dry.
Sylla gets the expedition against Mithridates; Marius, at home,
undermines his enemy's influence and forces the tribes to give him the
command, and sends out his lieutenants to the East. Sylla's soldiers
murder them, and Sylla marches back against Rome with six legions.
Marius is unprepared; Sylla breaks into the city, torch in hand, at the
head of his troops, burning and slaying; the rivals meet face to face in
the Esquiline market-place, Roman fights Roman, and the plebeian loses
the day and escapes to the sea.
The reign of terror begins, and a great slaying. Sylla declares his
rival an enemy of Rome, and Marius is found hiding in the marshes of
Minturnæ, is dragged out naked, covered with mud, a rope about his neck,
and led into a little house of the town to be slain by a slave. 'Darest
thou kill Caius Marius?' asks the old man with flashing eyes, and the
slave executioner trembles before the unarmed prisoner. They let him go.
He wanders to Africa and sits alone among the ruins of Carthage, while
Sylla fights victoriously in the East. Rome, momentarily free of both,
is torn by dissensions about the voting of the newly enfranchised.
Instead of the greater rivals, Cinna and Octavius are matched for plebs
and nobles. Knife-armed the parties fight it out in the Forum, the
bodies of citizens lie in heaps, and the gutters are gorged with free
blood, and again the patricians win the day. Cinna, fleeing from wrath,
is deposed from office. Marius sees his chance again. Unshaven and
unshorn since he left Rome last, he joins Cinna, leading six thousand
fugitives, seizes and plunders the towns about Rome, while Cinna encamps
beneath the walls. Together they enter Rome and nail Octavius' head to
the Rostra. Then the vengeance of wholesale slaying, in another reign of
terror, and Marius is despot of the city for a while, as Sylla had been
before, till spent with age, his life goes out amid drunkenness and
blood. The people tear down Sylla's house, burn his villa and drive out
his wife and his children. Back he comes after four years, victorious,
fighting his way right and left, against Lucanians and Samnites, back to
Rome still fighting them, almost loses the battle, is saved by Crassus
to take vengeance again, and again the long lists of the proscribed are
written out and hung up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third
Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of
Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first
known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices
to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber.
[Illustration: THE TARPEIAN ROCK]
Sylla, cold, aristocratic, sublimely ironical monster, was Rome's first
absolute and undisputed military lord. Tired of blood, he tried reform,
invented an aristocratic constitution, saw that it must fail, and then,
to the amazement of his friends and enemies, abdicated and withdrew to
private life, protected by a hundred thousand veterans of his army, and
many thousands of freedmen, to die at the last without violence.
Of the chaos he left behind him, Cæsar made the Roman Empire.
The Gracchi, champions of the people, were foully done to death. Marius
and Sylla, tearing the proud Republic to pieces for their own greatness,
both died in their beds, the one of old age, the other of disease. There
is no irony like that which often ended the lives of great Romans.
Marcus Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls, was hurled to his
death from the same rock, by the tribunes of the people, and Rome's
citadel and sanctuary was desecrated by the blood of its preserver.
Scipio of Africa breathed his last in exile, but Appius Claudius, the
Decemvir, died rich and honoured.
One asks, naturally enough, how Rome could hold the civilized nations in
subjection while she was fighting out a civil war that lasted fifty
years. We have but little idea of her great military organization, after
arms became a profession and a career. We can but call up scattered
pictures to show us rags and fragments of the immense host that
patrolled the world with measured tread and matchless precision of
serried rank, in tens and scores and hundreds of thousands, for
centuries, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank, learning its own
strength by degrees, till it suddenly grasped all power, gave it to one
man, and made Caius Julius Cæsar Dictator of the earth.
The greatest figure in all history suddenly springs out of the dim
chaos and shines in undying glory, the figure of a man so great that the
office he held means Empire, and the mere name he bore means Emperor
today in four empires,--Cæsar, Kaiser, Czar, Kaisár,--a man of so vast
power that the history of humanity for centuries after him was the
history of those who were chosen to fill his place--the history of
nearly half the twelve centuries foretold by the augur Attus, from
Romulus, first King, to Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor. He was a man
whose deeds and laws have marked out the life of the world even to this
far day. Before him and with him comes Pompey, with him and after him
Mark Antony, next to him in line and greatness, Augustus--all dwarfs
compared with him, while two of them were failures outright, and the
third could never have reached power but in his steps.
[Illustration: PALACE OF THE CÆSARS]
In that long tempest of parties wherein the Republic went down for ever,
it is hard to trace the truth, or number the slain, or reckon up account
of gain and loss. But when Cæsar rises in the centre of the storm the
end is sure and there can be no other, for he drives it before him like
a captive whirlwind, to do his bidding and clear the earth for his
coming. Other men, and great men, too, are overwhelmed by it, dashed
down and stunned out of all sense and judgment, to be lost and forgotten
like leaves in autumn, whirled away before the gale. Pompey, great
general and great statesman, conqueror in Spain, subduer of Spartacus
and the Gladiators, destroyer of pirates and final victor over
Mithridates, comes back and lives as a simple citizen. Noble of birth,
but not trusted by his peers, he joins with Cæsar, leader of all the
people, and with Crassus, for more power, and loses the world by giving
Cæsar an army, and Gaul to conquer. Crassus, brave general, too, is
slain in battle in far Parthia, and Pompey steals a march by getting a
long term in Spain. Cæsar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's
friends. Then the storm breaks and Cæsar comes back from Gaul to cross
the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious,
ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in
Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Cæsar stands alone, master of Rome and of
the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them
that struck him died a natural death.
Creation presupposes chaos, and it is the divine prerogative of genius
to evolve order from confusion. Julius Cæsar found the world of his day
consisting of disordered elements of strength, all at strife with each
other in a central turmoil, skirted and surrounded by the relative peace
of an ancient and long undisturbed barbarism.
It was out of these elements that he created what has become modern
Europe, and the direction which he gave to the evolution of mankind has
never wholly changed since his day. Of all great conquerors he was the
least cruel, for he never sacrificed human life without the direct
intention of benefiting mankind by an increased social stability. Of all
great lawgivers, he was the most wise and just, and the truths he set
down in the Julian Code are the foundation of modern justice. Of all
great men who have leaped upon the world as upon an unbroken horse, who
have guided it with relentless hands, and ridden it breathless to the
goal of glory, Cæsar is the only one who turned the race into the track
of civilization and, dying, left mankind a future in the memory of his
past. He is the one great man of all, without whom it is impossible to
imagine history. We cannot take him away and yet leave anything of what
we have. The world could have been as it is without Alexander, without
Charlemagne, without Napoleon; it could not have been the world we know
without Caius Julius Cæsar.
That fact alone places him at the head of mankind.
In Cæsar's life there is the same matter for astonishment as in
Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and
climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous
magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the
impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and
how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in
politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century
to be the world's conqueror, lawgiver and civilizer. The daily miracle
of genius is the incalculable speed at which it simultaneously thinks
and acts. Nothing is so logical as creation, and creation is the first
sign as well as the only proof that genius is present.
Hitherto the life of Cæsar has not been logically presented. His youth
appears almost always to be totally disconnected from his maturity. The
first success, the conquest of Gaul, comes as a surprise, because its
preparation is not described. After it everything seems natural, and
conquest follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to
think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing
clearly, or we find Cæsar an insignificant unit in a general disorder,
as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the
lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the
lives of the so-called 'great,'--those born, not to power, but in
power,--there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be
called the Hour of Fate--the time when in the suddenly loosed play of
many circumstances, strained like springs and held back upon themselves,
a man who has been known to a few thousands finds himself the chief of
millions and the despot of a nation.
Things which are only steps to great men are magnified to attainments in
ordinary lives, and remembered with pride. The man of genius is sure of
the great result, if he can but get a fulcrum for his lever. What
strikes one most in the careers of such men as Cæsar and Napoleon is the
tremendous advance realized at the first step--the difference between
Napoleon's half-subordinate position before the first campaign in Italy
and his dominion of France immediately after it, or the distance which
separated Cæsar, the impeached Consul, from Cæsar, the conqueror of
Gaul.
It must not be forgotten that Cæsar came of a family that had held great
positions, and which, though impoverished, still had credit,
subsequently stretched by Cæsar to the extreme limit of its borrowing
power. At sixteen, an age when Bonaparte was still an unknown student,
Cæsar was Flamen Dialis, or high priest of Jupiter, and at one and
twenty, the 'ill-girt boy,' as Sylla called him from his way of wearing
his toga, was important enough to be driven from Rome, a fugitive. His
first attempt at a larger notoriety had failed, and Dolabella, whom he
had impeached, had been acquitted through the influence of friends. Yet
the young lawyer had found the opportunity of showing what he could do,
and it was not without reason that Sylla said of him, 'You will find
many a Marius in this one Cæsar.'
Twenty years passed before the prophecy began to be realized with the
commencement of Cæsar's career in Gaul, and more than once during that
time his life seemed a failure in his own eyes, and he said scornfully
and sadly of himself that he had done nothing to be remembered at an age
when Alexander had already conquered the world.
Those twenty years which, to the thoughtful man, are by far the most
interesting of all, appear in history as a confused and shapeless medley
of political, military and forensic activity, strongly coloured by
social scandals, which rested upon a foundation of truth, and darkened
by accusations of worse kind, for which there is no sort of evidence,
and which may be safely attributed to the jealousy of unscrupulous
adversaries.
The first account of him, which we have in the seventeenth year of his
age, evokes a picture of youthful beauty. The boy who is to win the
world is appointed high priest of Jove in Rome,--by what strong
influence we know not,--and we fancy the splendid youth with his tall
figure, full of elastic endurance, the brilliant face, the piercing,
bold, black eyes; we see him with the small mitre set back upon the dark
and curling locks that grow low on the forehead, as hair often does that
is to fall early, clad in the purple robe of his high office, summoning
all his young dignity to lend importance to his youthful grace as he
moves up to Jove's high altar to perform his first solemn sacrifice with
his young consort; for the high priesthood of Jove was held jointly by
man and wife, and if the wife died the husband lost his office.
He was about twenty when he cast his lot with the people, and within the
year he fled from Sylla's persecution. The life of sudden changes and
contrasts had begun. Straight from the sacred office, with all its
pomp, and splendour, and solemnity, Cæsar is a fugitive in the Sabine
hills, homeless, wifeless, fever-stricken, a price on his head. Such
quick chances of evil fell to many in the days of the great struggle
between Marius and Sylla, between the people and the nobles.
Then as Sylla yielded to the insistence of the young 'populist'
nobleman's many friends, the quick reverse is turned to us. Cæsar has a
military command, sees some fighting and much idleness by the shores of
the Bosphorus, in Bithynia--then in a fit of sudden energy, the
soldier's spirit rises; he dashes to the attack on Mytilene, and shows
himself a man.
[Illustration: CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR
After a statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori]
One or two unimportant campaigns, as a subordinate officer, a civic
crown won for personal bravery, an unsuccessful action brought against a
citizen of high rank in the hope of forcing himself into notice, a trip
to Rhodes made to escape the disgrace of failure, and an adventure with
pirates--there, in a few words, is the story of Julius Cæsar's youth, as
history tells it. But then suddenly, when his projected studies in quiet
Rhodes were hardly begun, he crosses to the mainland, raises troops,
seizes cities, drives Mithridates' governor out of the province, returns
to Rome and is elected military tribune. The change is too quick, and
one does not understand it. Truth should tell that those early years had
been spent in the profound study of philosophy, history, biography,
languages and mankind, of the genesis of events from the germ to the
branching tree, of that chemistry of fate which brews effect out of
cause, and distils the imperishable essence of glory from the rougher
liquor of vulgar success.
What strikes one most in the lives of the very great is that every
action has a cumulative force beyond what it ever has in the existence
of ordinary men. Success moves onward, passing through events on the
same plane, as it were, and often losing brilliancy till it fades away,
leaving those who have had it to outlive it in sorrow and weakness.
Genius moves upward, treading events under its feet, scaling Olympus,
making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a
final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really
great man gathers power in action, the average successful man expends
it.
And so it must be understood that Cæsar, in his early youth, was not
wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous,
half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by
absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact,
exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own,
learning everything simultaneously, forgetting nothing he learned till
he could use all he knew to the extreme limit of its value.
There is something mysterious in the almost unlimited credit which Cæsar
seems to have enjoyed when still a very young man; and if the control of
enormous sums of money by which he made himself beloved among the people
explains, in a measure, his rapid rise from office to office, it is, on
the other hand, hard to account for the trust which his creditors placed
in his promises, and to explain why, when he was taken by pirates, the
cities of Asia Minor should have voluntarily contributed money to make
up the ransom demanded, seeing that he had never served in Asia, except
as a subordinate. The only possible explanation is that while there, his
real energies were devoted to the attainment of the greatest possible
popularity in the shortest possible time, and that he was making himself
beloved by the Asiatic cities, while his enemies said of him that he was
wasting his time in idleness and dissipation.
In any case, it was the control of money that most helped him in
obtaining high offices in Rome, and from the very first he seems to have
acted on the principle that in great enterprises economy spells ruin,
and that to check expenditure is to trip up success. And this is
explained, if not justified, by his close association with the people,
from his very childhood. Until he was made Pontifex Maximus he seems to
have lived in a small house in the Suburra, in one of the most crowded
and least fashionable quarters of Rome; and as a mere boy, it was his
influence with the common people that roused Sylla's anxiety. To live
with the people, to take their part against the nobles, to give them of
all he had and of all he could borrow, were the chief rules of his
conduct, and the fact that he obtained such enormous loans proves that
there were rich lenders who were ready to risk fortunes upon his
success. And it was in dealing with the Roman plebeian that he learned
to command the Roman soldier, with the tact of a demagogue and the
firmness of an autocrat. He knew that a man must give largely, even
recklessly, to be beloved, and that in order to be respected he must be
able to refuse coldly and without condition, and that in all ages the
people are but as little children before genius, though they may rise
against talent like wild beasts and tear it to death.
He knew also that in youth ten failures are nothing compared with one
success, while in the full meridian of power one failure undoes a score
of victories; hence his recklessness at first, his magnificent caution
in his latter days; his daring resistance of Sylla's power before he was
twenty, and his mildness towards the ringleaders of popular
conspiracies against him when he was near his end; his violence upon the
son of King Juba, whom he seized by the beard in open court when he
himself was but a young lawyer, and his moderation in bearing the most
atrocious libels, to punish which might have only increased their force.
Cæsar's career divides itself not unnaturally into three periods,
corresponding with his youth, his manhood and his maturity; with the
absorption of force in gaining experience, the lavish expenditure of
force in conquest, the calm employment of force in final supremacy. The
man who never lost a battle in which he commanded in person, began life
by failing in everything he attempted, and ended it as the foremost man
of all humanity, past and to come, the greatest general, the greatest
speaker, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest writer of Latin prose whom
the great Roman people ever produced, and also the bravest man of his
day, as he was the kindest. In an age when torture was a legitimate part
of justice, he caused the pirates who had taken him, and whom he took in
turn, to be mercifully put to death before he crucified their dead
bodies for his oath's sake, and when his long-trusted servant tried to
poison him he would not allow the wretch to be hurt save by the sudden
stroke of instant death; nor ever in a long career of conquest did he
inflict unnecessary pain. Never was man loved of women as he was, and
his sins were many even for those days, yet in them we find no
unkindness, and when his own wife should have been condemned for her
love of Clodius, Cæsar would not testify against her. He divorced her,
he said, not because he knew anything, but because his family should be
above suspicion. He plundered the world, but he gave it back its gold in
splendid gifts and public works, keeping its glory alone for himself. He
was hated by the few because he was beloved by the many, and it was not
revenge, but envy, that slew the benefactor of mankind. The weaknesses
of the supreme conqueror were love of woman and trust of man, and as the
first Brutus made his name glorious by setting his people free, the
second disgraced it and blackened the name of friendship with a stain
that will outlast time, and by a deed second only in infamy to that of
Judas Iscariot. The last cry of the murdered master was the cry of a
broken heart--'And thou, too, Brutus, my son!' Alexander left chaos
behind him; Cæsar left Europe, and it may be truly said that the
crowning manifestation of his sublime wisdom was his choice of
Octavius--of the young Augustus--to complete the carving of a world
which he himself had sketched and blocked out in the rough.
The first period of his life ended with his election to the military
tribuneship on his return to Rome after his Asian adventures, and his
first acts were directed towards the reconstruction of what Sylla had
destroyed, by reëstablishing the authority of tribunes and recalling
some of Sylla's victims from their political exile. From that time
onward, in his second period, he was more or less continually in office.
Successively a tribune, a quæstor, governor of Farther Spain, ædile,
pontifex maximus, prætor, governor of Spain again, and consul with the
insignificant Bibulus, a man of so small importance that people used to
date documents, by way of a jest, 'in the Consulship of Julius and
Cæsar.' Then he obtained Gaul for his province, and lived the life of a
soldier for nine years, during which he created the army that gave him
at last the mastery of Rome. And in the tenth year Rome was afraid, and
his enemies tried to deprive him of his power and passed bills against
him, and drove out the tribunes of the people who took his part; and if
he had returned to Rome then, yielding up his province and his legions,
as he was called upon to do, he would have been judged and destroyed by
his enemies. But he knew that the people loved him, and he crossed the
Rubicon in arms.
This second period of his life closed with the last triumph decreed to
him for his victories in Spain. The third and final period had covered
but one year when his assassins cut it short.
Nothing demonstrates Cæsar's greatness so satisfactorily as this, that
at his death Rome relapsed at once into civil war and strife as violent
as that to which Cæsar had put an end, and that the man who brought
lasting peace and unity into the distracted state, was the man of
Cæsar's choice. But in endeavouring to realize his supreme wisdom,
nothing helps us more than the pettiness of the accusations brought
against him by such historians as Suetonius--that he once remained
seated to receive the whole body of Conscript fathers, that he had a
gilded chair in the Senate house, and appointed magistrates at his own
pleasure to hold office for terms of years, that he laughed at an
unfavourable omen and made himself dictator for life; and such things,
says the historian, 'are of so much more importance than all his good
qualities that he is considered to have abused his power and to have
been justly assassinated.' But it is the people, not the historian, who
make history, and when Caius Julius Cæsar was dead, the people called
him God.
Beardless Octavius, his sister's daughter's son, barely eighteen years
old, brings in by force the golden age of Rome. As Triumvir, with Antony
and Lepidus, he hunts down the murderers first, then his rebellious
colleagues, and wins the Empire back in thirteen years. He rules long
and well, and very simply, as commanding general of the army and by no
other power, taking all into his hands besides, the Senate, the chief
priesthood, and the Majesty of Rome over the whole earth, for which he
was called Augustus, the 'Majestic.' And his strength lay in this, that
by the army, he was master of Senate and people alike, so that they
could no longer strive with each other in perpetual bloodshed, and the
everlasting wars of Rome were fought against barbarians far away, while
Rome at home was prosperous and calm and peaceful. Then Virgil sang, and
Horace gave Latin life to Grecian verse, and smiled and laughed, and
wept and dallied with love, while Livy wrote the story of greatness for
us all to this day, and Ovid touched another note still unforgotten.
Then temple rose by temple, and grand basilicas reared their height by
the Sacred Way; the gold of the earth poured in and Art was queen and
mistress of the age. Julius Cæsar was master in Rome for one year.
Augustus ruled nearly half a century. Four and forty years he was sole
monarch after Antony's fall at Actium. About the thirtieth year of his
reign, Christ was born.
All men have an original claim to be judged by the standard of their own
time. Counting one by one the victims of the proscription proclaimed by
the triumvirate in which Augustus was the chief power, some historians
have brought down his greatness in quick declination to the level of a
cold-blooded and cruel selfishness; and they account for his subsequent
just and merciful conduct on the ground that he foresaw political
advantage in clemency, and extension of power in the exercise of
justice. The death of Cicero, sacrificed to Antony's not unreasonable
vengeance, is magnified into a crime that belittles the Augustan age.
Yet compared with the wholesale murders done by Marius and Sylla, and by
the patricians themselves in their struggles with the people, the few
political executions ordered by Augustus sink into comparative
insignificance, and it will generally be seen that those who most find
fault with him are ready to extol the murderers of Julius Cæsar as
devoted patriots, if not as glorious martyrs to the divine cause of
liberty.
[Illustration: OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS CÆSAR
After a bust in the British Museum]
It is easier, perhaps, to describe the growth of Rome from the early
Kings to Augustus, than to account for the change from the Rome of the
Empire at the beginning of our era to the Rome of the Popes in the year
eight hundred. Probably the easiest and truest way of looking at the
transition is to regard it according to the periods of supremacy,
decadence and ultimate disappearance from Rome of the Roman Army. For
the Army made the Emperors, and the Emperors made the times. The great
military organization had in it the elements of long life, together with
all sudden and terrible possibilities. The Army made Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius and Nero, the Julian Emperors; then destroyed Nero and set up
Vespasian after one or two experiments. The Army chose such men as
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and such monsters as Domitian and Commodus;
the Army conquered the world, held the world and gave the world to
whomsoever it pleased. The Army and the Emperor, each the other's tool,
governed Rome for good and ill, for ill and good, by fear and bounty and
largely by amusement, but ultimately to their own and Rome's
destruction.
For all the time the two great adversaries of the Empire, the spiritual
and material, the Christian and the men of the North, were gaining
strength and unity. Under Augustus, Christ was born. Under Augustus,
Hermann the German chieftain destroyed Varus and his legions. By sheer
strength and endurance, the Army widened and broadened the Empire,
forcing back the Northmen upon themselves like a spring that gathers
force by tension. Unnoticed, at first, Christianity quietly grew to
power. Between Christians and Northmen, the Empire of Rome went down at
last, leaving the Empire of Constantinople behind it.
The great change was wrought in about five hundred years, by the Empire,
from the City of the Republic to what had become the City of the Middle
Age; between the reign of Augustus, first Emperor, and the deposition of
the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, Rome's hired
Pomeranian general.
In that time Rome was transubstantiated in all its elements, in
population, in language, in religion and in customs. To all intents and
purposes, the original Latin race utterly disappeared, and the Latin
tongue became the broken dialect of a mixed people, out of which the
modern Italian speech was to grow, decadent in form, degenerate in
strength but renascent in a grace and beauty which the Latin never
possessed. First the vast population of slaves brought in their
civilized and their barbarous words--Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, or
Celtic, German and Slav; then came the Goth, and filled all Italy with
himself and his rough language for a hundred years. The Latin of the
Roman Mass is the Latin of slaves in Rome between the first and fifth
centuries, from the time of the Apostles to that of Pope Gelasius, whose
prayer for peace and rest is the last known addition to the Canon,
according to most authorities. Compare it with the Latin of Livy and
Tacitus; it is not the same language, for to read the one by no means
implies an understanding of the other.
Or take the dress. It is told of Augustus, as a strange and almost
unknown thing, that he wore breeches and stockings, or leg swathings,
because he suffered continually with cold. Men went barelegged and
wrapped themselves in the huge toga which came down to their feet. In
the days of Augustulus the toga was almost forgotten; men wore leggings,
tunics and the short Greek cloak.
In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private
and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household,
with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to
a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the
first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and
result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present
time.
In the lives of men, the terror of one man, as each despot lost power,
began to give way to the fear of half-defined institutions, of the
distant government in Constantinople and of the Church as a secular
power, till the time came when the title of Emperor raised a smile,
whereas the name of the Pope--of the 'Father-Bishop'--was spoken with
reverence by Christians and with respect even by unbelievers. The time
came when the army that had made Emperors and unmade them at its
pleasure became a mere band of foreign mercenaries, who fought for wages
and plunder when they could be induced to fight for Rome at all.
So the change came. But in the long five hundred years of the Western
Empire Rome had filled the world with the results of her own life and
had founded modern Europe, from the Danube to England and from the Rhine
to Gibraltar; so that when the tide set towards the south again, the
Northmen brought back to Italy some of the spirit and some of the
institutions which Rome had carried northwards to them in the days of
conquest; and they came not altogether as strangers and barbarians, as
the Huns had come, to ravage and destroy, and be themselves destroyed
and scattered and forgotten, but, in a measure, as Europeans against
Europeans, hoping to grasp the remnants of a civilized power. Theodoric
tried to make a real kingdom, Totila and Teias fell fighting for one;
the Franks established one in Gaul, and at last it was a Frank who gave
the Empire life again, and conquests and laws, and was crowned by the
Christian Pontifex Maximus in Rome when Julius Cæsar had been dead more
than eight hundred years.
One of the greatest of the world's historians has told the story of the
change, calling it the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire,' and describing
it in some three thousand pages, of which scarcely one can be spared for
the understanding of the whole. Thereby its magnitude may be gauged, but
neither fairly judged nor accurately measured. The man who would grasp
the whole meaning of Rome's name, must spend a lifetime in study and
look forward to disappointment in the end. It was Ampère, I believe, who
told a young student that he might get a superficial impression of the
city in ten years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know
anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of
the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital
of the Empire to the mediæval seat of ecclesiastic domination.
And, indeed, nothing in all history is more extraordinary than the rise
of Rome's second power under the Popes. In the ordinary course of human
events, great nations appear to have had but one life. When that was
lived out, and when they had passed through the artistic period so often
coincident with early decadence, they were either swept away, or they
sank to the insignificance of mere commercial prosperity, thereafter
deriving their fashions, arts, tastes, and in fact almost everything
except their wealth, from nations far gone in decay.
[Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA
And Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct]
But in Rome it was otherwise. The growth of the faith which subjected
the civilized world was a matter of first importance to civilization,
and Rome was the centre of that growing. Moreover, that development and
that faith had one head, chosen by election, and the headship itself
became an object of the highest ambition, whereby the strength and
genius of individuals and families were constantly called into activity,
and both families and isolated individuals of foreign race were
attracted to Rome. It was no small thing to hold the kings of the earth
in spiritual subjection, to be the arbiter of the new Empire founded by
Charlemagne, the director of the kingdoms built up in France and
England, and, almost literally, the feudal lord over all other temporal
powers. The force of a predominant idea gave Rome new life, vivifying
new elements with the vitality of new ambitions. The theatre was the
same. The actors and the play had changed. The world was no longer
governed by one man as monarch; it was directed by one man, who was the
chief personage in the vast and intricate feudal system by which strong
men agreed to live, and to which they forced the weak to submit.
The Barons came into existence, and Rome was a city of fortresses and
towers, as well as churches. Orsini and Colonna, Caetani and
Vitelleschi, Savelli and Frangipani, fought with each other for
centuries among ruins, built strongholds of the stones of temples, and
burned the marble treasures of the world to make lime. And fiercely they
held their own. Nicholas Rienzi wanders amid the deserted places,
deciphers the broken inscriptions, gathers a little crowd of plebeians
about him and tells them of ancient Rome, and of the rights of the
people in old times. All at once he rises, a grand shadow of a Roman, a
true tribune, brave, impulsive, eloquent. A little while longer and he
is half mad with vanity and ambition, a public fool in a high place,
decking himself in silks and satins, and ornaments of gold, and the
angry nobles slay him on the steps of the Aracoeli, as other nobles
long ago slew Tiberius Gracchus, a greater and a better man, almost on
the same spot.
Meanwhile the great schism of the Church rages, before and after Rienzi.
The Empire and its Kingdoms join issue with each other and with the
Barons for the lordship of Christendom; there are two Popes, waging war
with nations on both sides, and Rome is reduced to a town of barely
twenty thousand souls. Then comes Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh,
friend of the Great Countess, humbler of the Emperor, a restorer of
things, the Julius Cæsar of the Church, and from his day there is
stability again, as Urban the Second follows, like an Augustus; Nicholas
the Fifth, the next great Pontiff, comes in with the Renascence. Last of
destroyers Charles, the wild Constable of Bourbon, marches in open
rebellion against King, State and Church, friend to the Emperor,
straight to his death at the walls, his work of destruction carried out
to the terrible end by revengeful Spaniards who spare only the churches
and the convents. Out of those ashes Rome rose again, for the last time,
the Rome of Sixtus the Fifth, which is, substantially, the Rome we see
today; less powerful in the world after that time, but more beautiful as
she grew more peaceful by degrees; flourishing in a strange, motley
way, like no other city in the world, as the Empire of the Hapsburgs and
the Kingdoms of Europe learned to live apart from her, and she was
concentrated again upon herself, still and always a factor among
nations, and ever to be. But even in latter days, Napoleon could not do
without her, and Francis the Second of Austria had to resign the Empire,
in order that Pius the Seventh might call the self-crowned Corsican
soldier, girt with Charlemagne's huge sword, the anointed Emperor of
Christendom.
Once more a new idea gives life to fragments hewn in pieces and
scattered in confusion. A dream of unity disturbs Italy's sleep. Never,
in truth, in all history, has Italy been united save by violence. By the
sword the Republic brought Latins, Samnites and Etruscans into
subjection; by sheer strength she crushed the rebellion of the slaves
and then forced the Italian allies to a second submission; by terror
Marius and Sylla ruled Rome and Italy; and it was the overwhelming power
of a paid army that held the Italians in check under the Empire, till
they broke away from each other as soon as the pressure was removed, to
live in separate kingdoms and principalities for thirteen or fourteen
hundred years, from Romulus Augustulus--or at least from Justinian--to
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, in whose veins ran not one drop of
Italian blood.
One asks whence came the idea of unity which has had such power to move
these Italians, in modern times. The answer is plain and simple. Unity
is the word; the interpretation of it is the name of Rome. The desire is
for all the romance and the legends and the visions of supreme greatness
which no other name can ever call up. What will be called hereafter the
madness of the Italian people took possession of them on the day when
Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its
origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary
Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but
the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in
blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations,
by captives and slaves of subject races.
The Rome we see today owes its mystery, its sadness and its charm to six
and twenty centuries of history, mostly filled with battle, murder and
sudden death, deeds horrible in that long-past present which we try to
call up, but alternately grand, fascinating and touching now, as we
shape our scant knowledge into visions and fill out our broken dreams
with the stuff of fancy. In most men's minds, perhaps, the charm lies in
that very confusion of suggestions, for few indeed know Rome so well as
to divide clearly the truth from the legend in her composition. Such
knowledge is perhaps altogether unattainable in any history; it is most
surely so here, where city is built on city, monument upon monument,
road upon road, from the heart of the soil upwards--the hardened lava
left by many eruptions of life; where the tablets of Clio have been
shattered again and again, where fire has eaten, and sword has hacked,
and hammer has bruised ages of records out of existence, where even the
race and type of humanity have changed and have been forgotten twice and
three times over.
Therefore, unless one have half a lifetime to spend in patient study and
deep research, it is better, if one come to Rome, to feel much than to
try and know a little, for in much feeling there is more human truth
than in that dangerous little knowledge which dulls the heart and
hampers the clear instincts of natural thought. Let him who comes hither
be satisfied with a little history and much legend, with rough warp of
fact and rich woof of old-time fancy, and not look too closely for the
perfect sum of all, where more than half the parts have perished for
ever.
It matters not much whether we know the exact site of Virgil's
Laurentum; it is more interesting to remember how Commodus, cruel,
cowardly and selfish, fled thither from the great plague, caring not at
all that his people perished by tens of thousands in the city, since he
himself was safe, with the famous Galen to take care of him. We can
leave the task of tracing the enclosures of Nero's golden house to
learned archælogists, and let our imagination find wonder and delight in
their accounts of its porticos three thousand feet long, its game park,
its baths, its thousands of columns with their gilded capitals, and its
walls encrusted with mother-of-pearl. And we may realize the depth of
Rome's abhorrence for the dead tyrant, as we think of how Vespasian and
his son Titus pulled down the enchanted palace for the people's sake,
and built the Colosseum where the artificial lake had been, and their
great baths on the very foundations of Nero's gorgeous dwelling.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TRAJAN, SHOWING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS]
[Illustration: BRASS OF ANTONINUS PIUS, IN HONOUR OF FAUSTINA, WITH
REVERSE SHOWING VESTA BEARING THE PALLADIUM]
III
It is impossible to conceive of the Augustan age without Horace, nor to
imagine a possible Horace without Greece and Greek influence. At the
same time Horace is in many ways the prototype of the old-fashioned,
cultivated, gifted, idle, sarcastic, middle-class Roman official, making
the most of life on a small salary and the friendship of a great
personage; praising poverty, but making the most of the good things that
fell in his way; extolling pristine austerity of life and yielding with
a smile to every agreeable temptation; painting the idyllic life of a
small gentleman farmer as the highest state of happiness, but secretly
preferring the town; prudently avoiding marriage, but far too human to
care for an existence in which woman had no share; more sensible in
theory than in practice, and more religious in manner than in heart;
full of quaint superstitions, queer odds and ends of knowledge, amusing
anecdotes and pictures of personal experience; the whole compound
permeated with a sort of indolent sadness at the unfulfilled promises of
younger years, in which there had been more of impulse than of ambition,
and more of ambition than real strength. The early struggles for Italian
unity left many such half-disappointed patriots, and many less fortunate
in their subsequent lives than Horace.
Born in the far South, and the son of a freed slave, brought to Rome as
a boy and carefully taught, then sent to Athens to study Greek, he was
barely twenty years of age when he joined Brutus after Cæsar's death,
was with him in Asia, and, in the lack of educated officers perhaps,
found himself one day, still a mere boy, tribune of a Legion--or, as we
should say, in command of a brigade of six thousand men, fighting for
what he believed to be the liberty of Rome, in the disastrous battle of
Philippi. Brutus being dead, the dream of glory ended, after the
amnesty, in a scribe's office under one of the quæstors, and the
would-be liberator of his country became a humble clerk in the Treasury,
eking out his meagre salary with the sale of a few verses. Many an old
soldier of Garibaldi's early republican dreams has ended in much the
same way in our own times under the monarchy.
But Horace was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom
House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily
work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek,
acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made
him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses that ever lived;
and his character, by its eminently Italian combination of prim
respectability and elastic morality, gave him a two-sided view of men
and things that has left us representations of life in three dimensions
instead of the flat, though often violent, pictures which prejudice
loves best to paint.
In his admiration of Greek poetry, Horace was not a discoverer; he was
rather the highest expression of Rome's artistic want. If Scipio of
Africa had never conquered the Carthaginians at Zama, he would be
notable still as one of the first and most sincere lovers of Hellenic
literature, and as one of the earliest imitators of Athenian manners.
The great conqueror is remembered also as the first man in Rome who
shaved every day, more than a hundred and fifty years before Horace's
time. He was laughed at by some, despised by others and disliked by the
majority for his cultivated tastes and his refined manners.
The Romans had most gifts excepting those we call creative. Instead of
creating, therefore, Rome took her art whole, and by force, from the
most artistic nation the world ever produced. Sculptors, architects,
painters and even poets, such as there were, came captive to Rome in
gangs, were sold at auction as slaves, and became the property of the
rich, to work all their lives at their several arts for their master's
pleasure; and the State rifled Greece and Asia, and even the Greek Italy
of the south, and brought back the masterpieces of an age to adorn
Rome's public places. The Roman was the engineer, the maker of roads, of
aqueducts, of fortifications, the layer out of cities, and the planner
of harbours. In a word, the Roman made the solid and practical
foundation, and then set the Greek slave to beautify it. When he had
watched the slave at work for a century or two, he occasionally
attempted to imitate him. That was as far as Rome ever went in original
art.
But her love of the beautiful, though often indiscriminating and lacking
in taste, was profound and sincere. It does not appear that in all her
conquests her armies ever wantonly destroyed beautiful things. On the
contrary, her generals brought home all they could with uncommon care,
and the consequence was that in Horace's day the public places of the
city were vast open-air museums, and the great temples picture galleries
of which we have not the like now in the whole world. And with those
things came all the rest; the manners, the household life, the
necessaries and the fancies of a conquering and already decadent nation,
the thousands of slaves whose only duty was to amuse their owners and
the public; the countless men and women and girls and boys, whose souls
and bodies went to feed the corruption of the gorgeous capital, or to
minister to its enormous luxuries; the companies of flute-players and
dancing-girls, the sharp-tongued jesters, the coarse buffoons, the
play-actors and the singers. And then, the endless small commerce of an
idle and pleasure-seeking people, easily attracted by bright colours,
new fashions and new toys; the drug-sellers and distillers of perfumes,
the venders of Eastern silks and linens and lace, the barbers and
hairdressers, the jewellers and tailors, the pastry cooks and makers of
honey-sweetmeats; and everywhere the poor rabble of failures, like scum
in the wake of a great ship; the beggars everywhere, and the pickpockets
and the petty thieves. It is no wonder that Horace was fond of strolling
in Rome.
In contrast, the great and wonderful things of the Augustan city stand
out in high relief, above the varied crowd that fills the streets, with
all the dignity that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is
opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and
dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted,
half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck
silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed,
untainted, the incarnation of purity in an age of vice. And the old
Senator in his white cloak with its broad purple hem, his smooth-faced
clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets
the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, making the price of
short loans for the day, and discussing the assets of a famous
spendthrift, as their yellow-turbaned, bearded fathers had talked over
the chances of Julius Cæsar when he was as yet but a fashionable young
lawyer of doubtful fortune, with an unlimited gift of persuasion and an
equally unbounded talent for amusement.
Between the contrasts lived men of such position as Horace occupied, but
not many. For the great middle element of society is a growth of later
centuries, and even Horace himself, as time went on, became attached to
Mæcenas and then, more or less, to the person of the Emperor, by a
process of natural attraction, just as his butt, Tigellius, gravitated
to the common herd that mourned his death. The 'golden mean' of which
Horace wrote was a mere expression, taught him, perhaps, by his father,
a part of his stock of maxims. Where there were only great people on the
one side, and a rabble on the other, the man of genius necessarily rose
to the level of the high, by his own instinct and their liking. What was
best of Greek was for them, what was worst was for the populace.
But the Greek was everywhere, with his keen weak face, his sly look and
his skilful fingers. Scipio and Paulus Emilius had brought him, and he
stayed in Rome till the Goth came, and afterwards. Greek poetry, Greek
philosophy, Greek sculpture, Greek painting, Greek music everywhere--to
succeed at all in such society, Virgil and Horace and Ovid must needs
make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and
Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was
within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the
three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail,
with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total
failure of complete disappearance when they had been dead awhile.
Supreme of them all, for his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil,
appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the
carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not
appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened into
night, and Ovid's tales of them and their goddesses move us by their own
beauty rather than by our sympathy for them, though we feel the tender
touch of the exiled man whose life was more than half love, in the
marvellous Letters of Heroes' Sweethearts--in the complaint of Briseïs
to Achilles, in the passionately sad appeal of Hermione to Orestes.
Whoever has not read these things does not know the extreme limit of
man's understanding of woman. Yet Horace, with little or nothing of such
tenderness, has outdone Ovid and Virgil in this later age.
He strolled through life, and all life was a play of which he became
the easy-going but unforgetful critic. There was something good-natured
even in his occasional outbursts of contempt and hatred for the things
and the people he did not like. There was something at once caressing
and good-humouredly sceptical in his way of addressing the gods,
something charitable in his attacks on all that was ridiculous,--men,
manners and fashions.
He strolled wherever he would, alone; in the market, looking at
everything and asking the price of what he saw, of vegetables and grain
and the like; in the Forum, or the Circus, at evening, when 'society'
was dining, and the poor people and slaves thronged the open places for
rest and air, and there he used to listen to the fortune-tellers, and
among them, no doubt, was that old hag, Canidia, immortalized in the
huge joke of his comic resentment. He goes home to sup on lupins and
fritters and leeks,--or says so,--though his stomach abhorred garlic;
and his three slaves--the fewest a man could have--wait on him as he
lies before the clean white marble table, leaning on his elbow. He does
not forget the household gods, and pours a few drops upon the cement
floor in libation to them, out of the little earthen saucer filled from
the slim-necked bottle of Campanian earthenware. Then to sleep, careless
of getting up early or late, just as he might feel, to stay at home and
read or write, or to wander about the city, or to play the favourite
left-handed game of ball in the Campus Marius before his bath and his
light midday meal.
With a little change here and there, it is the life of the idle
middle-class Italian today, which will always be much the same, let the
world wag and change as it will, with all its extravagances, its
fashions and its madnesses. Now and then he exclaims that there is no
average common sense left in the world, no half-way stopping-place
between extremes. One man wears his tunic to his heels, another is girt
up as if for a race; Rufillus smells of perfumery, Gargonius of anything
but scent; and so on--and he cries out that when a fool tries to avoid a
mistake he will run to any length in the opposite direction. And Horace
had a most particular dislike for fools and bores, and has left us the
most famous description of the latter ever set down by an accomplished
observer.
By chance, he says, he was walking one morning along the Sacred Street
with one slave behind him, thinking of some trifle and altogether
absorbed in it, when a man whom he barely knew by name came up with him
in a great hurry and grasped his hand. 'How do you do, sweet friend?'
asks the Bore. 'Pretty well, as times go,' answers Horace, stopping
politely for a moment; and then beginning to move on, he sees to his
horror that the Bore walks by his side. 'Can I do anything for you?'
asks the poet, still civil, but hinting that he prefers his own
company. The Bore plunges into the important business of praising
himself, with a frankness not yet forgotten in his species, and Horace
tries to get rid of him, walking very fast, then very slowly, then
turning to whisper a word to his slave, and in his anxiety he feels the
perspiration breaking out all over him, while his Tormentor chatters on,
as they skirt the splendid Julian Basilica, gleaming in the morning sun.
Horace looks nervously and eagerly to right and left, hoping to catch
sight of a friend and deliverer. Not a friendly face was in sight, and
the Bore knew it, and was pitilessly frank. 'Oh, I know you would like
to get away from me!' he exclaimed. 'I shall not let you go so easily!
Where are you going?' 'Across the Tiber,' answered Horace, inventing a
distant visit. 'I am going to see someone who lives far off, in Cæsar's
gardens--a man you do not know. He is ill.' 'Very well,' said the other;
'I have nothing to do, and am far from lazy. I will go all the way with
you.' Horace hung his head, as a poor little Italian donkey does when a
heavy load is piled upon his back, for he was fairly caught, and he
thought of the long road before him, and he had moreover the unpleasant
consciousness that the Bore was laughing at his imaginary errand, since
they were walking in a direction exactly opposite from the Tiber, and
would have to go all the way round the Palatine by the Triumphal Road
and the Circus Maximus and then cross by the Sublician bridge, instead
of turning back towards the Velabrum, the Provision Market and the
Bridge of Æmilius, which we have known and crossed as the Ponte Rotto,
but of which only one arch is left now, in midstream.
[Illustration: PONTE ROTTO, NOW DESTROYED
After an engraving made about 1850]
Then, pressing his advantage, the Bore began again. 'If I am any judge
of myself,' he observed, 'you will make me one of your most intimate
friends. I am sure nobody can write such good verses as fast as I can.
As for my singing, I know it for a fact that Hermogenes is decidedly
jealous of me!' 'Have you a mother, Sir?' asked Horace, gravely. 'Have
you any relations to whom your safety is a matter of importance?' 'No,'
answered the other, 'no one. I have buried them all!' 'Lucky people!'
said the poet to himself, and he wished he were dead, too, at that
moment, and he thought of all the deaths he might have died. It was
evidently not written that he should die of poison nor in battle, nor of
a cough, nor of the liver, nor even of gout. He was to be slowly talked
to death by a bore. By this time they were before the temple of Castor
and Pollux, where the great Twin Brethren bathed their horses at
Juturna's spring. The temple of Vesta was before them, and the Sacred
Street turned at right angles to the left, crossing over between a row
of shops on one side and the Julian Rostra on the other, to the Courts
of Law. The Bore suddenly remembered that he was to appear in answer to
an action on that very morning, and as it was already nine o'clock, he
could not possibly walk all the way to Cæsar's gardens and be back
before noon, and if he was late, he must forfeit his bail, and the suit
would go against him by default. On the other hand, he had succeeded in
catching the great poet alone, after a hundred fruitless attempts, and
the action was not a very important one, after all. He stopped short.
'If you have the slightest regard for me,' he said, 'you will just go
across with me to the Courts for a moment.' Horace looked at him
curiously, seeing a chance of escape. 'You know where I am going,' he
answered with a smile; 'and as for law, I do not know the first thing
about it.' The Bore hesitated, considered what the loss of the suit must
cost him, and what he might gain by pushing his acquaintance with the
friend of Mæcenas and Augustus. 'I am not sure,' he said doubtfully,
'whether I had better give up your company, or my case,' 'My company, by
all means!' cried Horace, with alacrity. 'No!' answered the other,
looking at his victim thoughtfully, 'I think not!' And he began to move
on again by the Nova Via towards the House of the Vestals. Having made
up his mind to sacrifice his money, however, he lost no time before
trying to get an equivalent for it. 'How do you stand with Mæcenas?' he
asked suddenly, fixing his small eyes on Horace's weary profile, and
without waiting for an answer he ran on to praise the great man. 'He is
keen and sensible,' he continued, 'and has not many intimate friends. No
one knows how to take advantage of luck as he does. You would find me a
valuable ally, if you would introduce me. I believe you might drive
everybody else out of the field--with my help, of course.' 'You are
quite mistaken there!' answered Horace, rather indignantly. 'He is not
at all that kind of man! There is not a house in Rome where any sort of
intrigue would be more utterly useless!' 'Really, I can hardly believe
it!' 'It is a fact, nevertheless,' retorted Horace, stoutly. 'Well,'
said the Bore, 'if it is, I am of course all the more anxious to know
such a man!' Horace smiled quietly. 'You have only to wish it, my dear
Sir,' he answered, with the faintest modulation of polite irony in his
tone. 'With such gifts at your command, you will certainly charm him.
Why, the very reason of his keeping most people at arm's length is that
he knows how easily he yields!' 'In that case, I will show you what I
can do,' replied the Bore, delighted. 'I shall bribe the slaves; I will
not give it up, if I am not received at first! I will bide my time and
catch him in the street, and follow him about. One gets nothing in life
without taking trouble!' As the man was chattering on, Horace's quick
eyes caught sight of an old friend at last, coming towards him from the
corner of the Triumphal Road, for they had already almost passed the
Palatine. Aristius, sauntering along and enjoying the morning air, with
a couple of slaves at his heels, saw Horace's trouble in a moment, for
he knew the Bore well enough, and realized at once that if he delivered
his friend, he himself would be the next victim. He was far too clever
for that, and with a cold-blooded smile pretended not to understand
Horace's signals of distress. 'I forget what it was you wished to speak
about with me so particularly, my dear Aristius,' said the poet, in
despair. 'It was something very important, was it not?' 'Yes,' answered
the other, with another grin, 'I remember very well; but this is an
unlucky day, and I shall choose another time. Today is the thirtieth
Sabbath,' he continued, inventing a purely imaginary Hebrew feast, 'and
you surely would not risk a Jew's curse for a few moments of
conversation, would you?' 'I have no religion!' exclaimed Horace,
eagerly. 'No superstition! Nothing!' 'But I have,' retorted Aristius,
still smiling. 'My health is not good--perhaps you did not know? I will
tell you about it some other time.' And he turned on his heel, with a
laugh, leaving Horace to his awful fate. Even the sunshine looked black.
But salvation came suddenly in the shape of the man who had brought the
action against the Bore, and who, on his way to the Court, saw his
adversary going off in the opposite direction. 'Coward! Villain!' yelled
the man, springing forward and catching the poet's tormentor by his
cloak. 'Where are you going now? You are witness, Sir, that I am in my
right,' he added, turning to look for Horace. But Horace had disappeared
in the crowd that had collected to see the quarrel, and his gods had
saved him after all.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF CASTOR AND POLLUX]
A part of the life of the times is in the little story, and anyone may
stroll today along the Sacred Street, past the Basilica and the sharp
turn that leads to the block of old houses where the Court House stood,
between St. Adrian's and San Lorenzo in Miranda. Anyone may see just how
it happened, and many know exactly how Horace felt from the moment when
the Bore buttonholed him at the corner of the Julian Basilica till his
final deliverance near the corner of the Triumphal Road, which is now
the Via di San Gregorio.
[Illustration: ATRIUM OF VESTA]
There was much more resemblance to our modern life than one might think
at first sight. Perhaps, after his timely escape, Horace turned back
along the Sacred Street, followed by his single slave, and retraced his
steps, past the temple of Vesta, the temple of Julius Cæsar, skirting
the Roman Forum to the Golden Milestone at the foot of the ascent to the
Capitol, from which landmark all the distances in the Roman Empire were
reckoned, the very centre of the known world. Thence, perhaps, he turned
up towards the Argiletum, with something of that instinct which takes a
modern man of letters to his publisher's when he is in the
neighbourhood. There the 'Brothers Sosii' had their publishing
establishment, among many others of the same nature, and employed a
great staff of copyists in preparing volumes for sale. All the year
round the skilled scribes sat within in rows, with pen and ink, working
at the manufacture of books. The Sosii Brothers were rich, and probably
owned their workmen as slaves, both the writers and those who prepared
the delicate materials, the wonderful ink, of which we have not the like
today, the fine sheets of papyrus,--Pliny tells how they were sometimes
too rough, and how they sometimes soaked up the ink like a cloth, as
happens with our own paper,--and the carefully cut pens of Egyptian reed
on which so much of the neatness in writing depended, though Cicero says
somewhere that he could write with any pen he chanced to take up.
It was natural enough that Horace should look in to ask how his latest
book was selling, or more probably his first, for he had written but a
few Epodes and not many Satires at the time when he met the immortal
Bore. Later in his life, his books were published in editions of a
thousand, as is the modern custom in Paris, and were sold all over the
Empire, like those of other famous authors. The Satires did him little
credit, and probably brought him but little money at their first
publication. It seems certain that they have come down to us through a
single copy. The Greek form of the Odes pleased people better. Moreover,
some of the early Satires made distinguished people shy of his
acquaintance, and when he told the Bore that Mæcenas was difficult of
access he remembered that nine months had elapsed from the time of his
own introduction to the great man until he had received the latter's
first invitation to dinner. More than once he went almost too far in his
attacks on men and things and then tried to remove the disagreeable
impression he had produced, and wrote again of the same subject in a
different spirit--notably when he attacked the works of the dead poet
Lucilius and was afterwards obliged to explain himself.
No doubt he often idled away a whole morning at his publisher's, looking
over new books of other authors, and very probably borrowing them to
take home with him, because he was poor, and he assuredly must have
talked over with the Sosii the impression produced on the public by his
latest poems. He was undoubtedly a quæstor's scribe, but it is more than
doubtful whether he ever went near the Treasury or did any kind of
clerk's work. If he ever did, it is odd that he should never speak of
it, nor take anecdotes from such an occupation and from the clerks with
whom he must have been thrown, for he certainly used every other sort of
social material in the Satires. Among the few allusions to anything of
the kind in his works are his ridicule of the over-dressed prætor of the
town of Fundi, who had been a government clerk in Rome, and in the same
story, his jest at one of Mæcenas' parasites, a freedman, and nominally
a Treasury clerk, as Horace had been. In another Satire, the clerks in
a body wish him to be present at one of their meetings.
Perhaps what strikes one most in the study of Horace, which means the
study of the Augustan age, is the vivid contrast between the man who
composed the Carmen Sæculare, the sacred hymn sung on the Tenth
anniversary of Augustus' accession to the imperial power, besides many
odes that breathe a pristine reverence for the gods, and, on the other
hand, the writer of satirical, playfully sceptical verses, who comments
on the story of the incense melting without fire at the temple of
Egnatia, with the famous and often-quoted 'Credat Judæus'! The original
Romans had been a believing people, most careful in all ceremonies and
observances, visiting anything like sacrilege with a cool ferocity
worthy of the Christian religious wars in later days. Horace, at one
time or another, laughs at almost every god and goddess in the heathen
calendar, and publishes his jests, in editions of a thousand copies,
with perfect indifference and complete immunity from censorship, while
apparently bestowing a certain amount of care on household sacrifices
and the like.
The fact is that the Romans were a religious people, whereas the
Italians were not. It is a singular fact that Rome, when left long to
herself, has always shown a tendency to become systematically devout,
whereas most of the other Italian states have exhibited an equally
strong inclination to a scepticism not unfrequently mixed with the
grossest superstition. It must be left to more profound students of
humanity to decide whether certain places have a permanent influence in
one determined direction upon the successive races that inhabit them;
but it is quite undeniably true that the Romans of all ages have tended
to religion of some sort in the most marked manner. In Roman history
there is a succession of religious epochs not to be found in the annals
of any other city. First, the early faith of the Kings, interrupted by
the irruption of Greek influences which began approximately with Scipio
Africanus; next, the wild Bacchic worship that produced the secret
orgies on the Aventine, the discovery of which led to a religious
persecution and the execution of thousands of persons on religious
grounds; then the worship of the Egyptian deities, brought over to Rome
in a new fit of belief, and at the same time, or soon afterwards, the
mysterious adoration of the Persian Mithras, a gross and ignorant form
of mysticism which, nevertheless, took hold of the people, at a time
when other religions were almost reduced to a matter of form.
Then, as all these many faiths lost vitality, Christianity arose, the
terribly simple and earnest Christianity of the early centuries, sown
first under the Cæsars, in Rome's secure days, developing to a power
when Rome was left to herself by the transference of the Empire to the
East, culminating for the first time in the crowning of Charlemagne,
again in the Crusades, sinking under the revival of mythology and
Hellenism during the Renascence, rising again, by slow degrees, to the
extreme level of devotion under Pius the Ninth and the French
protectorate, sinking suddenly with the movement of Italian unity, and
the coming of the Italians in 1870, then rising again, as we see it now,
with undying energy, under Leo the Thirteenth, and showing itself in the
building of new churches, in the magnificent restoration of old ones,
and in the vast second growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which are
once more turning Rome into a clerical city, now that she is again at
peace with herself, under a constitutional monarchy, but threatened only
too plainly by an impending anarchic revolution. It would be hard to
find in the history of any other city a parallel to such periodical
recurrences of religious domination. Nor, in times when belief has been
at its lowest ebb, have outward religious practices anywhere continued
to hold so important a place in men's lives as they have always held in
Rome. Of all Rome's mad tyrants, Elagabalus alone dared to break into
the temple of Vesta and carry out the sacred Palladium. During more than
eleven hundred years, six Vestal Virgins guarded the sacred fire and the
Holy Things of Rome, in peace and war, through kingdom, republic,
revolution and empire. For fifteen hundred years since then, the bones
of Saint Peter have been respected by the Emperors, by Goths, by Kings,
revolutions and short-lived republics.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
IV
There was a surprising strength in those early institutions of which the
fragmentary survival has made Rome what it is. Strongest of all,
perhaps, was the patriarchal mode of life which the shepherds of Alba
Longa brought with them when they fled from the volcano, and of which
the most distinct traces remain to the present day, while its origin
goes back to the original Aryan home. Upon that principle all the
household life ultimately turned in Rome's greatest times. The Senators
were Patres, conscript fathers, heads of strong houses; the Patricians
were those who had known 'fathers,' that is, a known and noble descent.
Horace called Senators simply 'Conscripts,' and the Roman nobles of
today call themselves the 'Conscript' families. The chain of tradition
is unbroken from Romulus to our own time, while everything else has
changed in greater or less degree.
It is hard for Anglo-Saxons to believe that, for more than a thousand
years, a Roman father possessed the absolute legal right to try, condemn
and execute any of his children, without witnesses, in his own house and
without consulting anyone. Yet nothing is more certain. 'From the most
remote ages,' says Professor Lanciani, the highest existing authority,
'the power of a Roman father over his children, including those by
adoption as well as by blood, was unlimited. A father might, without
violating any law, scourge or imprison his son, or sell him for a slave,
or put him to death, even after that son had risen to the highest
honours in the state.' During the life of the father, a child, no matter
of what age, could own no property independently, nor keep any private
accounts, nor dispose of any little belongings, no matter how
insignificant, without the father's consent, which was never anything
more than an act of favour, and was revocable at any moment, without
notice. If a son became a public magistrate, the power was suspended,
but was again in force as soon as the period of office terminated. A man
who had been Dictator of Rome became his father's slave and property
again, as soon as his dictatorship ended.
But if the son married with his father's consent, he was partly free,
and became a 'father' in his turn, and absolute despot of his own
household. So, if a daughter married, she passed from her father's
dominion to that of her husband. A Priest of Jupiter for life was free.
So was a Vestal Virgin. There was a complicated legal trick by which the
father could liberate his son if he wished to do so for any reason, but
he had no power to set any of his children free by a mere act of will,
without legal formality. The bare fact that the men of a people should
be not only trusted with such power, but that it should be forcibly
thrust upon them, gives an idea of the Roman character, and it is
natural enough that the condition of family life imposed by such laws
should have had pronounced effects that may still be felt. As the Romans
were a hardy race and long-lived, when they were not killed in battle,
the majority of men were under the absolute control of their fathers
till the age of forty or fifty years, unless they married with their
parents' consent, in which case they advanced one step towards liberty,
and at all events, could not be sold as slaves by their fathers, though
they still had no right to buy or sell property nor to make a will.
There are few instances of the law being abused, even in the most
ferocious times. Brutus had the right to execute his sons, who conspired
for the Tarquins, without any public trial. He preferred the latter.
Titus Manlius caused his son to be publicly beheaded for disobeying a
military order in challenging an enemy to single combat, slaying him,
and bringing back the spoils. He might have cut off his head in private,
so far as the law was concerned, for any reason whatsoever, great or
small.
As for the condition of real slaves, it was not so bad in early times as
it became later, but the master's power was absolute to inflict torture
and death in any shape. In slave-owning communities, barbarity has
always been, to some extent, restrained by the actual value of the
humanity in question, and slaves were not as cheap in Rome as might be
supposed. A perfectly ignorant labourer of sound body was worth from
eighty to a hundred dollars of our money, which meant much more in those
days, though in later times twice that sum was sometimes paid for a
single fine fish. The money value of the slave was, nevertheless, always
a sort of guarantee of safety to himself; but men who had right of life
and death over their own children, and who occasionally exercised it,
were probably not, as a rule, very considerate to creatures who were
bought and sold like cattle. Nevertheless, the number of slaves who were
freed and enriched by their masters is really surprising.
The point of all this, however, is that the head of a Roman family was,
under protection of all laws and traditions, an absolute tyrant over his
wife, his children, and his servants; and the Roman Senate was a chosen
association of such tyrants. It is astonishing that they should have
held so long to the forms of a republican government, and should never
have completely lost their republican traditions.
In this household tyranny, existing side by side with certain general
ideas of liberty and constitutional government, under the ultimate
domination of the Emperors' despotism as introduced by Augustus, is to
be found the keynote of Rome's subsequent social life. Without those
things, the condition of society in the Middle Age would be
inexplicable, and the feudal system could never have developed. The old
Roman principle that 'order should have precedence over order, not man
over man,' rules most of Europe at the present day, though in Rome and
Italy it is now completely eclipsed by a form of government which can
only be defined as a monarchic democracy.
The mere fact that under Augustus no man was eligible to the Senate who
possessed less than a sum equal to a quarter of a million dollars, shows
plainly enough what one of the most skilful despots who ever ruled
mankind wisely, thought of the institution. It was intended to balance,
by its solidity, the ever-unsettled instincts of the people, to prevent
as far as possible the unwise passage of laws by popular acclamation,
and, so to say, to regulate the pulse of the nation. It has been
imitated, in one way or another, by all the nations we call civilized.
But the father of the family was in his own person the despot, the
senate, the magistrate and the executive of the law; his wife, his
children and his slaves represented the people, constantly and eternally
in real or theoretical opposition, while he was protected by all the
force of the most ferocious laws. A father could behead his son with
impunity; but the son who killed his father was condemned to be all but
beaten to death, and then to be sewn up in a leathern sack and drowned.
The father could take everything from the son; but if the son took the
smallest thing from his father he was a common thief and malefactor, and
liable to be treated as one, at his father's pleasure. The conception of
justice in Rome never rested upon any equality, but always upon the
precedence of one order over another, from the highest to the lowest.
There were orders even among the slaves, and one who had been allowed to
save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on
him, if he chose.
Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of
nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the
mediæval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous
subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all
over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan,
and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race.
One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building
which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can
no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of
weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of
the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it
can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking
strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles
topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in
the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of
ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept
away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up
rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their
new dwelling, if they build at all.
The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the
material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's
development or decadence at the time when the work was done.
It is only by doing something of that sort that we can at all realize
the connection between the settlement of the shepherds, the Rome of the
Cæsars, and the desolate and scantily populated fighting ground of the
Barons, upon which, with the Renascence, the city of the later Popes
began to rise under Nicholas the Fifth. And lastly, without a little of
such general knowledge it would be utterly impossible to call up, even
faintly, the lives of Romans in successive ages. Read the earlier parts
of Livy's histories and try to picture the pristine simplicity of those
primeval times. Read Cæsar's Gallic War, the marvellously concise
reports of the greatest man that ever lived, during ten years of his
conquests. Read Horace, and attempt to see a little of what he describes
in his good-natured, easy way. Read the correspondence of the younger
Pliny when proconsul in Bithynia under Trajan, and follow the
extraordinary details of administration which, with ten thousand others,
the Spanish Emperor of Rome carried in his memory, and directed and
decided. Take Petronius Arbiter's 'novel' next, the Satyricon, if you be
not over-delicate in taste, and glance at the daily journal of a
dissolute wretch wandering from one scene of incredible vice to another.
And so on, through the later writers; and from among the vast annals of
the industrious Muratori pick out bits of Roman life at different
periods, and try to piece them together. At first sight it seems utterly
impossible that one and the same people should have passed through such
social changes and vicissitudes. Every educated man knows the main
points through which the chain ran. Scholars have spent their lives in
the attempt to restore even a few of the links and, for the most part,
have lost their way in the dry quicksands that have swallowed up so
much.
'I have raised a monument more enduring than bronze!' exclaimed Horace,
in one of his rare moments of pardonable vanity. The expression meant
much more then than it does now. The golden age of Rome was an age of
brazen statues apparently destined to last as long as history. Yet the
marble outlasted the gilded metal, and Horace's verse outlived both, and
the names of the artists of that day are mostly forgotten, while his is
a household word. In conquering races, literature has generally attained
higher excellence than painting or sculpture, or architecture, for the
arts are the expression of a people's tastes, often incomprehensible to
men who live a thousand years later; but literature, if it expresses
anything, either by poetry, history, or fiction, shows the feeling of
humanity; and the human being, as such, changes very little in twenty or
thirty centuries. Achilles, in his wrath at being robbed of the lovely
Briseïs, brings the age of Troy nearer to most men in its living
vitality than the matchless Hermes of Olympia can ever bring the century
of Greece's supremacy. One line of Catullus makes his time more alive
today than the huge mass of the Colosseum can ever make Titus seem. We
see the great stones piled up to heaven, but we do not see the men who
hewed them, and lifted them, and set them in place. The true poet gives
us the real man, and after all, men are more important than stones. Yet
the work of men's hands explains the working of men's hearts, telling us
not what they felt, but how the feelings which ever belong to all men
more particularly affected the actors at one time or another during the
action of the world's long play. Little things sometimes tell the
longest stories.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM]
Pliny, suffering from sore eyes, going about in a closed carriage, or
lying in the darkened basement portico of his house, obliged to dictate
his letters, and unable to read, sends his thanks--by dictation--to his
friend and colleague, Cornutus, for a fowl sent him, and says that
although he is half blind, his eyes are sharp enough to see that it is a
very fat one. The touch of human nature makes the whole picture live.
Horace, journeying to Brindisi, and trying to sleep a little on a canal
boat, is kept awake by mosquitoes and croaking frogs, and by the
long-drawn-out, tipsy singing of a drunken sailor, who at last turns off
the towing mule to graze, and goes to sleep till daylight. It is easier
to see all this than to call up one instant of a chariot race in the
great circus, or one of the ten thousand fights in the Colosseum,
wherein gladiators fought and died, and left no word of themselves.
Yet, without the setting, the play is imperfect, and we must have some
of the one to understand the other. For human art is, in the first
place, a progressive commentary on human nature, and again, in quick
reaction, stimulates it with a suggestive force. Little as we really
know of the imperial times, we cannot conceive of Rome without the
Romans, nor of the Romans without Rome. They belonged together; when the
seat of Empire became cosmopolitan, the great dominion began to be
weakened; and when a homogeneous power dwelt in the city again, a new
domination had its beginning, and was built up on the ruins of the old.
Napoleon is believed to have said that the object of art is to create
and foster agreeable illusions. Admitting the general truth of the
definition, it appears perfectly natural that since the Romans had
little or no art of their own, they should have begun to import Greek
art just when they did, after the successful issue of the Second Punic
War. Up to that time the great struggle had lasted. When it was over,
the rest was almost a foregone conclusion. Rome and Carthage had made a
great part of the known world their fighting ground in the duel that
lasted a hundred and eighteen years; and the known world was the portion
of the victor. Spoil first, for spoil's sake, he brought home; then
spoil for the sake of art; then art for what itself could give him. In
the fight for Empire, as in each man's struggle for life, success means
leisure, and therefore civilization, which is the growth of people who
have time at their disposal--time to 'create and foster agreeable
illusions.' When the Romans conquered the Samnites they were the least
artistic people in the world; when Augustus Cæsar died, they possessed
and valued the greater part of the world's artistic treasures, many of
these already centuries old, and they owned literally, and as slaves, a
majority of the best living artists. Augustus had been educated in
Athens; he determined that Rome should be as Athens, magnified a hundred
times. Athens had her thousand statues, Rome should have her ten
thousand; Rome should have state libraries holding a score of volumes
for every one that Greece could boast; Rome's temples should be
galleries of rare paintings, ten for each that Athens had. Rome should
be so great, so rich, so gorgeous, that Greece should be as nothing
beside her; Egypt should dwindle to littleness, and the memory of
Babylon should be forgotten. Greece had her Homer, her Sophocles, her
Anacreon; Rome should have her immortals also.
Greatly Augustus laboured for his thought, and grandly he carried out
his plan. He became the greatest 'art-collector' in all history, and the
men of his time imitated him. Domitius Tullus, a Roman gentleman, had
collected so much, that he was able to adorn certain extensive gardens,
on the very day of the purchase, with an immense number of genuine
ancient statues, which had been lying, half neglected, in a barn--or, as
some read the passage, in other gardens of his.
[Illustration: BASILICA CONSTANTINE]
Augustus succeeded in one way. Possibly he was successful in his own
estimation. 'Have I not acted the play well?' they say he asked, just
before he died. The keynote is there, whether he spoke the words or not.
He did all from calculation, nothing from conviction. The artist, active
and creative or passive and appreciative, calculates nothing except the
means of expressing his conviction. And in the over-calculating of
effects by Augustus and his successors, one of the most singular
weaknesses of the Latin race was thrust forward; namely, that giantism
or megalomania, which has so often stamped the principal works of the
Latins in all ages--that effort to express greatness by size, which is
so conspicuously absent from all that the Greeks have left us. Agrippa
builds a threefold temple and Hadrian rears the Pantheon upon its
charred ruins; Constantine builds his Basilica; Michelangelo says, 'I
will set the Pantheon upon the Basilica of Constantine.' He does it, and
the result is Saint Peter's, which covers more ground than that other
piece of giantism, the Colosseum; in Rome's last and modern revival, the
Palazzo delle Finanze is built, the Treasury of the poorest of the
Powers, which, incredible as it may seem, fills a far greater area than
either the Colosseum or the Church of Saint Peter's. What else is such
constructive enormity but 'giantism'? For the great Cathedral of
Christendom, it may be said, at least, that it has more than once in
history been nearly filled by devout multitudes, numbering fifty or
sixty thousand people; in the days of public baths, nearly sixty-three
thousand Romans could bathe daily with every luxury of service; when
bread and games were free, a hundred thousand men and women often sat
down in the Flavian Amphitheatre to see men tear each other to pieces;
of the modern Ministry of Finance there is nothing to be said. The Roman
curses it for the millions it cost; but the stranger looks, smiles and
passes by a blank and hideous building three hundred yards long. There
is no reason why a nation should not wish to be great, but there is
every reason why a small nation should not try to look big; and the
enormous follies of modern Italy must be charitably attributed to a
defect of judgment which has existed in the Latin peoples from the
beginning, and has by no means disappeared today. The younger Gordian
began a portico which was to cover forty-four thousand square yards, and
intended to raise a statue of himself two hundred and nineteen feet
high. The modern Treasury building covers about thirty thousand square
yards, and goes far to rival the foolish Emperor's insane scheme.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN]
Great contrasts lie in the past, between his age and ours. One must
guess at them at least, if one have but little knowledge, in order to
understand at all the city of the Middle Age and the Rome we see today.
Imagine it at its greatest, a capital inhabited by more than two
millions of souls, filling all that is left to be seen within and
without the walls, and half the Campagna besides, spreading out in a
vast disc of seething life from the central Golden Milestone at the
corner of the temple of Saturn--the god of remote ages, and of earth's
dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid roads, where to right and
left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and
gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining
both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from
Rome to Ostia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to
Tivoli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere
business of supply to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great
harbour with its thousand vessels--and some of those that brought grain
from Egypt were four hundred feet long; remember its vast granaries and
store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola Sacra as a lovely
garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an imperial palace and park; reckon
up roughly what all that meant of life, of power, of incalculable
wealth. Mark Antony squandered, in his short lifetime, eight hundred
millions of pounds sterling, four thousand millions of dollars. Guess,
if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast city.
Then let twelve hundred years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of
Rienzi. Some twenty thousand souls, the remnant and the one hundredth
part of the two millions, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the
strongest men have fortified bits here and there. The walls of Aurelian,
broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a
desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling
heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and
decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by
time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of
Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and
threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of
odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move;
broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to
drink the muddy water of the Tiber because not a single channel remained
whole to feed a single fountain, from the distant springs that had once
filled baths for sixty thousand people every day. And round about all,
the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by fever-stricken peasants
to yield the little grain that so few men could need. The villas gone,
the trees burned or cut down, the terraces slipped away into the rivers,
the tombs of the Appian Way broken and falling to pieces, or transformed
into rude fortresses held by wild-looking men in rusty armour, who
sallied out to fight each other or, at rare intervals, to rob some train
of wretched merchants, riding horses as rough and wild as themselves.
Law gone, and order gone with it; wealth departed, and self-respect
forgotten in abject poverty; each man defending his little with his own
hand against the many who coveted it; Rome a den of robbers and thieves;
the Pope, when there was one,--there was none in the year of Rienzi's
birth,--either defended by one baron against another, or forced to fly
for his life. Men brawling in the streets, ill clad, savage, ready with
sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from
none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children
wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their
fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great
heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that
told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a
tribune's power, of the humiliation of the Barons, of a resurrection for
Italy and of her sudden return to the dominion of the world.
Rome, then, was like a field long fallow, of rich soil, but long
unploughed. Scarcely below the surface lay the treasures of ages,
undreamt of by the few descendants of those who had brought them
thither. Above ground, overgrown with wild creepers and flowers, there
still stood some such monuments of magnificence as we find it hard to
recall by mere words, not yet voluntarily destroyed, but already falling
to pieces under the slow destruction of grinding time, when violence had
spared them. Robert Guiscard had burned the city in 1084, but he had not
destroyed everything. The Emperors of the East had plundered Rome long
before that, carrying off works of art without end to adorn their city
of Constantinople. Builders had burned a thousand marble statues to lime
for their cement, for the statues were ready to hand and easily broken
up to be thrown into the kiln, so that it seemed a waste of time and
tools to quarry out the blocks from the temples. The Barbarians of
Genseric and the Jews of Trastevere had seized upon such of the four
thousand bronze statues as the Emperors had left, and had melted many of
them down for metal, often hiding them in strange places while waiting
for an opportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found,
here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the
Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already
temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the
ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples
and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and
marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the
first. Much of the old was still standing, but nothing of the old was
whole. The Colosseum had not yet been turned into a quarry. The
Septizonium of Septimius Severus, with its seven stories of columns and
its lofty terrace, nearly half as high as the dome of Saint Peter's,
though beginning to crumble, still crowned the south end of the
Palatine; Minerva's temple was almost entire, and its huge architrave
had not been taken to make the high altar of Saint Peter's; and the
triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius was standing in what was perhaps not
yet called the Corso in those days, but the Via Lata--'Broad Street.'
The things that had not yet fallen, nor been torn down, were the more
sadly grand by contrast with the chaos around them. There was also the
difference between ruins then, and ruins now, which there is between a
king just dead in his greatness, in whose features lingers the smile of
a life so near that it seems ready to come back, and a dried mummy set
up in a museum and carefully dusted for critics to study.
In even stronger and rougher contrast, in the wreck of all that had
been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the
seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation
for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of
men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of
killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new
thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living
things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with
all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in
Rome's latent power to rule the world again.
That was the beginning of the new story, for the old one was ended, the
race of men who had lived it was gone, and their works were following
them, to the universal dust. Out of the memories they left and the
departed glory of the places wherein they had dwelt, the magic of the
Middle Age was to weave another long romance, less grand but more
stirring, less glorious but infinitely more human.
Perhaps it is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to say that
Rome was masculine from Romulus to the dark age, and that with the first
dawn of the Renascence she began to be feminine. As in old days the
Republic and the Empire fought for power and conquest and got both by
force, endurance and hardness of character, so, in her second life,
others fought for Rome, and courted her, and coveted her, and sometimes
oppressed her and treated her cruelly, and sometimes cherished her and
adorned her, and gave her all they had. In a way, too, the elder
patriots reverenced their city as a father, and those of after-times
loved her as a woman, with a tender and romantic love.
Be that as it may, for it matters little how we explain what we feel.
And assuredly we all feel that what we call the 'charm,' the feminine
charm, of Rome, proceeds first from that misty time between two
greatnesses, when her humanity was driven back upon itself, and simple
passions, good and evil, suddenly felt and violently expressed, made up
the whole life of a people that had ceased to rule by force, and had not
yet reached power by diplomacy.
It is fair, moreover, to dwell a little on that time, that we may not
judge too hardly the men who came afterwards. If we have any virtues
ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of
civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the
Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden,
Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down
together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it
to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them,
and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the
hardship of having done right at all against such odds.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING ROMAN GAMES]
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE JULIAN BASILICA]
V
Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage
for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old
houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a
Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been
eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange
things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in the
escutcheon, and it would naturally occur to the stranger that the small
marble shields, still visible here and there at the corners of old
streets, must be the coats of arms of Roman families that held property
in that particular neighbourhood. But this is not the case. They are the
distinctive devices of the Fourteen Rioni, or wards, into which the
city was divided, with occasional modifications, from the time of
Augustus to the coming of Victor Emmanuel, and which with some further
changes survive to the present day. The tablets themselves were put up
by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth, who reigned from 1740 to 1758, and who
finally brought them up to the ancient number of fourteen; but from the
dark ages the devices themselves were borne upon flags on all public
occasions by the people of the different Regions. For 'Rione' is only a
corruption of the Latin 'Regio,' the same with our 'Region,' by which
English word it will be convenient to speak of these divisions that
played so large a part in the history of the city during many successive
centuries.
For the sake of clearness, it is as well to enumerate them in their
order and with the numbers that have always belonged to each. They are:
I. Monti,
II. Trevi,
III. Colonna,
IV. Campo Marzo,
V. Ponte
VI. Parione,
VII. Regola,
VIII. Sant' Eustachio,
IX. Pigna,
X. Campitelli,
XI. Sant' Angelo,
XII. Ripa,
XIII. Trastevere,
XIV. Borgo.
Five of these names, that is to say, Ponte, Parione, Regola, Pigna and
Sant' Angelo, indicate in a general way the part of the city designated
by each. Ponte, the Bridge, is the Region about the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo, on the left bank at the sharp bend of the river seen from that
point; but the original bridge which gave the name was the Pons
Triumphalis, of which the foundations are still sometimes visible a
little below the Ælian bridge leading to the Mausoleum of Hadrian.
Parione, the Sixth ward, is the next division to the preceding one,
towards the interior of the city, on both sides of the modern Corso
Vittorio Emmanuele, taking in the ancient palace of the Massimo family,
the Cancelleria, famous as the most consistent piece of architecture in
Rome, and the Piazza Navona. Regola is next, towards the river,
comprising the Theatre of Pompey and the Palazzo Farnese. Pigna takes in
the Pantheon, the Collegio Romano and the Palazzo di Venezia. Sant'
Angelo has nothing to do with the castle or the bridge, but takes its
name from the little church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and
includes the old Ghetto with some neighbouring streets. The rest explain
themselves well enough to anyone who has even a very slight acquaintance
with the city.
At first sight these more or less arbitrary divisions may seem of little
importance. It was, of course, necessary, even in early times, to divide
the population and classify it for political and municipal purposes.
There is no modern city in the world that is not thus managed by wards
and districts, and the consideration of such management and of its means
might appear to be a very flat and unprofitable study, tiresome alike
to the reader and to the writer. And so it would be, if it were not true
that the Fourteen Regions of Rome were fourteen elements of romance,
each playing its part in due season, while all were frequently the stage
at once, under the collective name of the people, in their ever-latent
opposition and in their occasional violent outbreaks against the nobles
and the popes, who alternately oppressed and spoiled them for private
and public ends. In other words, the Regions with their elected captains
under one chief captain were the survival of the Roman People, for ever
at odds with the Roman Senate. In times when there was no government, in
any reasonable sense of the word, the people tried to govern themselves,
or at least to protect themselves as best they could by a rough system
which was all that remained of the elaborate municipality of the Empire.
Without the Regions the struggles of the Barons would probably have
destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned
in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to
death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John the Thirteenth
a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorized
the Barons, and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not
have made himself dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered
the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to
the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the
Pope and the cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the
strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of mediæval Rome could not have
found a place in history. It is no wonder that to men born and bred in
the city the Regions seem even now to be an integral factor in its
existence.
There were two other elements of power, namely, the Pope and the Barons.
The three are almost perpetually at war, two on a side, against the
third. Philippe de Commines, ambassador of Lewis the Eleventh in Rome,
said that without the Orsini and the Colonna, the States of the Church
would be the happiest country in the world. He forgot the People, and
was doubtless too politic to speak of the Popes to his extremely devout
sovereign. Take away the three elements of discord, and there would
certainly have been peace in Rome, for there would have been no one to
disturb the bats and the owls, when everybody was gone.
The excellent advice of Ampère, already quoted, is by no means easy to
follow, since there are not many who have the time and the inclination
to acquire a 'superficial knowledge' of Rome by a ten years' visit. If,
therefore, we merely presuppose an average knowledge of history and a
guide-book acquaintance with the chief points in the city, the simplest
and most direct way of learning more about it is to take the Regions in
their ancient order, as the learned Baracconi has done in his
invaluable little work, and to try as far as possible to make past deeds
live again where they were done, with such description of the places
themselves as may serve the main purpose best. To follow any other plan
would be either to attempt a new history of the city of Rome, or to
piece together a new archæological manual. In either case, even
supposing that one could be successful where so much has already been
done by the most learned, the end aimed at would be defeated, for
romance would be stiffened to a record, and beauty would be dissected to
an anatomical preparation.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TITUS, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
[Illustration]
REGION I MONTI
'Monti' means 'The Hills,' and the device of the Region represents
three, figuring those enclosed within the boundaries of this district;
namely, the Quirinal, the Esquiline and the Coelian. The line encircling
them includes the most hilly part of the mediæval city; beginning at the
Porta Salaria, it runs through the new quarter, formerly Villa Ludovisi,
to the Piazza Barberini, thence by the Tritone to the Corso, by the Via
Marforio, skirting the eastern side of the Capitoline Hill and the
eastern side of the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, which it does not
include; on almost to the Lateran, back again, so as to include the
Basilica, by San Stefano Rotondo, and out by the Navicella to the now
closed Porta Metronia. The remainder of the circuit is completed by the
Aurelian wall, which is the present wall of the city, though the modern
Electoral Wards extend in some places beyond it. The modern gates
included in this portion are the Porta Salaria, the Porta Pia, the new
gate at the end of the Via Montebello, the next, an unnamed opening
through which passes the Viale Castro Pretorio, then the Porta
Tiburtina, the Porta San Lorenzo, the exit of the railway, Porta
Maggiore, and lastly the Porta San Giovanni.
The Region of the Hills takes in by far the largest area of the fourteen
districts, but also that portion which in later times has been the least
thickly populated, the wildest districts of mediæval and recent Rome,
great open spaces now partially covered by new though hardly inhabited
buildings, but which were very lately either fallow land or ploughed
fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruins rose
here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the
midst of which towered the enormous basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore
and Saint John Lateran, the half-utilized, half-consecrated remains of
the Baths of Diocletian, the Baths of Titus, and over against the
latter, just beyond the southwestern boundary, the gloomy Colosseum, and
on the west the tall square tower of the Capitol with its deep-toned
bell, the 'Patarina,' which at last was sounded only when the Pope was
dead, and when Carnival was over on Shrove Tuesday night.
It must first be remembered that each Region had a small independent
existence, with night watchmen of its own, who dared not step beyond the
limits of their beat; defined by parishes, there were separate charities
for each Region, separate funds for giving dowries to poor girls,
separate 'Confraternite' or pious societies to which laymen belonged,
and, in a small way, a sort of distinct nationality. There was rivalry
between each Region and its neighbours, and when the one encroached upon
the other there was strife and bloodshed in the streets. In the public
races, of which the last survived in the running of riderless horses
through the Corso in Carnival, each Region had its colours, its right of
place, and its separate triumph if it won in the contest. There was all
that intricate opposition of small parties which arose in every mediæval
city, when children followed their fathers' trades from generation to
generation, and lived in their fathers' houses from one century to
another; and there was all the individuality and the local tradition
which never really hindered civilization, but were always an
insurmountable barrier against progress.
Some one has called democracy Rome's 'Original Sin.' It would be more
just and true to say that most of Rome's misfortunes, and Italy's too,
have been the result of the instinct to oppose all that is, whether good
or bad, as soon as it has existed for a while; in short, the original
sin of Italians is an original detestation of that unity of which the
empty name has been a fetish for ages. Rome, thrown back upon herself
in the dark times, when she was shorn of her possessions, was a true
picture of what Italy was before Rome's iron hand had bound the Italian
peoples together by force, of what she became again as soon as that
force was relaxed, of what she has grown to be once more, now that the
delight of revolution has disappeared in the dismal swamp of financial
disappointment, of what she will be to all time, because, from all time,
she has been populated by races of different descent, who hated each
other as only neighbours can.
The redeeming feature of a factional life has sometimes been found in a
readiness to unite against foreign oppression; it has often shown itself
in an equal willingness to submit to one foreign ruler in order to get
rid of another. Circumstances have made the result good or bad. In the
year 799, the Romans attacked and wounded Pope Leo the Third in a solemn
procession, almost killed him and drove him to flight, because he had
sent the keys of the city to Charles the Great, in self-protection
against the splendid, beautiful, gifted, black-hearted Irene, Empress of
the East, who had put out her own son's eyes and taken the throne by
force. Two years later the people of Rome shouted "Life and Victory to
Charles the Emperor," when the same Pope Leo, his scars still fresh,
crowned Charlemagne in Saint Peter's. One remembers, for that matter,
that Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned in French Paris by another Pope, girt
on the very sword of that same Frankish Charles, whose bones the French
had scattered to the elements at Aix. Savonarola, of more than doubtful
patriotism, to whom Saint Philip Neri prayed, but whom the English
historian, Roscoe, flatly calls a traitor, would have taken Florence
from the Italian Medici and given it to the French king. Dante was for
German Emperors against Italian Popes. Modern Italy has driven out
Bourbons and Austrians and given the crown of her Unity to a house of
Kings, brave and honourable, but in whose veins there is no drop of
Italian blood, any more than their old Dukedom of Savoy was ever Italian
in any sense. The glory of history is rarely the glory of any ideal; it
is more often the glory of success.
The Roman Republic was the result of internal opposition, and the
instinct to oppose power, often rightly, sometimes wrongly, will be the
last to survive in the Latin race. In the Middle Age, when Rome had
shrunk from the boundaries of civilization to the narrow limits of the
Aurelian walls, it produced the hatred between the Barons and the
people, and within the people themselves, the less harmful rivalry of
the Regions and their Captains.
[Illustration: SANTA FRANCESCA ROMANA]
These Captains held office for three months only. At the expiration of
the term, they and the people of their Region proceeded in procession,
all bearing olive branches, to the temple of Venus and Rome, of which a
part was early converted into the Church of Santa Maria Nuova, now known
as Santa Francesca Romana, between the Forum and the Colosseum, and just
within the limits of 'Monti.' Down from the hills on the one side the
crowd came; up from the regions of the Tiber, round the Capitol from
Colonna, and Trevi, and Campo Marzo, as ages before them the people had
thronged to the Comitium, only a few hundred yards away. There, before
the church in the ruins, each Region dropped the names of its own two
candidates into the ballot box, and chance decided which of the two
should be Captain next. In procession, then, all round the Capitol, they
went to Aracoeli, and the single Senator, the lone shadow of the
Conscript Fathers, ratified each choice. Lastly, among themselves, they
used to choose the Prior, or Chief Captain, until it became the custom
that the captain of the First Region, Monti, should of right be head of
all the rest, and in reality one of the principal powers in the city.
And the principal church of Monti also held preëminence over others. The
Basilica of Saint John Lateran was entitled 'Mother and Head of all
Churches of the City and of the World'; and it took its distinctive name
from a rich Roman family, whose splendid house stood on the same spot as
far back as the early days of the Empire. Even Juvenal speaks of it.
Overthrown by earthquake, erected again at once, twice burned and
immediately rebuilt, five times the seat of Councils of the Church,
enlarged even in our day at enormous cost, it seems destined to stand on
the same spot for ages, and to perpetuate the memory of the Laterans to
all time, playing monument to an obscure family of rich citizens, whose
name should have been almost lost, but can never be forgotten now.
Constantine, sentimental before he was great, and great before he was a
Christian, gave the house of the Roman gentleman to Pope Sylvester. He
bought it, or it fell to the crown at the extinction of the family, for
he was not the man to confiscate property for a whim; and within the
palace he made a church, which was called by more than one name, till
after nearly six hundred years it was finally dedicated to Saint John
the Baptist; until then it had been generally called the church 'in the
Lateran house,' and to this day it is San Giovanni in Laterano. Close by
it, in the palace of the Annii, Marcus Aurelius, last of the so-called
Antonines, and last of the great emperors, was born and educated; and in
his honour was made the famous statue of him on horseback, which now
stands in the square of the Capitol. The learned say that it was set up
before the house where he was born, and so found itself also before the
Lateran in later times, with the older Wolf, at the place of public
justice and execution.
In the wild days of the tenth century, when the world was boiling with
faction, and trembling at the prospect of the Last Judgment, clearly
predicted to overtake mankind in the thousandth year of the Christian
era, the whole Roman people, without sanction of the Emperor and without
precedent, chose John the Thirteenth to be their Pope. The Regions with
their Captains had their way, and the new Pontiff was enthroned by
their acclamation. Then came their disappointment, then their anger.
Pope John, strong, high-handed, a man of order in days of chaos, ruled
from the Lateran for one short year, with such wisdom as he possessed,
such law as he chanced to have learnt, and all the strength he had.
Neither Barons nor people wanted justice, much less learning. The Latin
chronicle is brief: 'At that time, Count Roffredo and Peter the
Prefect,'--he was the Prior of the Regions' Captains,--'with certain
other Romans, seized Pope John, and first threw him into the Castle of
Sant' Angelo, but at last drove him into exile in Campania for more than
ten months. But when the Count had been murdered by one of the
Crescenzi,'--in whose house Rienzi afterwards lived,--'the Pope was
released and returned to his See.'
Back came Otto the Great, Saxon Emperor, at Christmas time, as he came
more than once, to put down revolution with a strong hand and avenge the
wrongs of Pope John by executing all but one of the Captains of the
Regions. Twelve of them he hanged. Peter the Prefect, or Prior, was
bound naked upon an ass with an earthen jar over his head, flogged
through the city, and cruelly put to death; and at last his torn body
was hung by the hair to the head of the bronze horse whereon the stately
figure of Marcus Aurelius sat in triumph before the door of the Pope's
house, as it sits today on the Capitol before the Palace of the Senator.
And Otto caused the body of murdered Roffredo to be dragged from its
grave and quartered by the hangman and scattered abroad, a warning to
the Regions and their leaders. They left Pope John in peace after that,
and he lived five years and held a council in the Lateran, and died in
his bed. Possibly after his rough experience, his rule was more gentle,
and when he was dead he was spoken of as 'that most worthy Pontiff.' Who
Count Roffredo was no one can tell surely, but his name belongs to the
great house of Caetani.
[Illustration: BASILICA OF ST JOHN LATERAN]
It is hard to see past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy
the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely
armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like
demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing
upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the
Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and
with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his
frightened priests cower together within, expecting death. Down goes the
oak with a crash like artillery, that booms along the empty corridors; a
moment's pause, and silence, and then the rush, headed by the Knight and
the leaders who mean no murder, but mean to have their way, once and for
ever, and buffet back their furious followers when they have reached the
Pope's room, lest he should be torn in pieces. Then, the subsidence of
the din, and the old man and his priests bound and dragged out and
forced to go on foot by all the long dark way through the city to the
black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river.
[Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]
It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid
with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at
what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces,
and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing
through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years
ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and
there was a smell of blood in the air.
But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an
atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor
perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery
in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from
niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity
of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from
the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week,
towards evening at the Tenebræ, the divine tenor voice of Padre
Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver
bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with
a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed
his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned
by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man.
Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is
high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air--one of those voices
which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which,
perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times.
Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing
streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as
one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place
and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or
the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is
not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are
thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all
theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own
taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in
Rome even such as they might condescend to the romantic for an hour,
because in Rome such deeds have been dared, such loves have been loved,
such deaths have been died, that any romance, no matter how wild, has
larger probability in the light of what has actually been the lot of
real men and women. So going alone through the winding moonlit ways
about Tor de' Conti, Santa Maria dei Monti and San Pietro in Vincoli, a
man need take no account of modern fashions in sensation; and if he will
but let himself be charmed, the enchantment will take hold of him and
lead him on through a city of dreams and visions, and memories strange
and great, without end. Ever since Rome began there must have been just
such silvery nights; just such a voice rang through the same air ages
ago; just as now the velvet shadows fell pall-like and unrolled
themselves along the grey pavement under the lofty columns of Mars the
Avenger and beneath the wall of the Forum of Augustus.
[Illustration: PIAZZA COLONNA]
Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a
thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than
those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all
the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each
other--one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most
crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone,
which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the
Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway
station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage
can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot
pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a
measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in
Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the
city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street,
which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not
manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed
to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were
daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent
equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and
dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable
cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough,
booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits;
even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each
side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between
Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of the Holy Roman Empire
pushes past a troop of dirty school children, and is almost driven into
an open barrel of salt codfish, in the door of a poor shop, by a
black-faced charcoal man carrying a sack on his head more than half as
high as himself. A party of jolly young German tourists in loose
clothes, with red books in their hands, and their field-glasses hanging
by straps across their shoulders, try to rid themselves of the
flower-girls dressed in sham Sabine costumes, and utter exclamations of
astonishment and admiration when they themselves are almost run down by
a couple of the giant Royal Grenadiers, each six feet five or
thereabouts, besides nine inches, or so, of crested helmet aloft,
gorgeous, gigantic and spotless. Clerks by the dozen and liveried
messengers of the ministries struggle in the press; ladies gather their
skirts closely, and try to pick a dainty way where, indeed, there is
nothing 'dain' (a word which Doctor Johnson confesses that he could not
find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful);
servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the
Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their
heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests,
friars, venders of boot-laces and thread, vegetable sellers pushing
hand-carts of green things in and out among the horses and vehicles with
amazing dexterity, and yelling their cries in super-humanly high
voices--there is no end to the multitude. If the day is showery, it is a
sight to see the confusion in the Tritone when umbrellas of every age,
material and colour are all opened at once, while the people who have
none crowd into the codfish shop and the liquor seller's and the
tobacconist's, with traditional 'con permesso' of excuse for entering
when they do not mean to buy anything; for the Romans are mostly civil
people and fairly good-natured. But rain or shine, at the busy hours,
the place is always crowded to overflowing with every description of
vehicle and every type of humanity.
Out of Babel--a horizontal Babel--you may turn into the little church,
dedicated to the 'Holy Guardian Angel.' It stands on the south side of
the Tritone, in that part which is broader, and which a little while ago
was still called the Via dell' Angelo Custode--Guardian Angel Street. It
is an altogether insignificant little church, and strangers scarcely
ever visit it. But going down the Tritone, when your ears are splitting,
and your eyes are confused with the kaleidoscopic figures of the
scurrying crowd, you may lift the heavy leathern curtain, and leave the
hurly-burly outside, and find yourself all alone in the quiet presence
of death, the end of all hurly-burly and confusion. It is quite possible
that under the high, still light in the round church, with its four
niche-like chapels, you may see, draped in black, that thing which no
one ever mistakes for anything else; and round about the coffin a dozen
tall wax candles may be burning with a steady yellow flame. Possibly, at
the sound of the leathern curtain slapping the stone door-posts, as it
falls behind you, a sad-looking sacristan may shuffle out of a dark
corner to see who has come in; possibly not. He may be asleep, or he may
be busy folding vestments in the sacristy. The dead need little
protection from the living, nor does a sacristan readily put himself out
for nothing. You may stand there undisturbed as long as you please, and
see what all the world's noise comes to in the end. Or it may be, if the
departed person belonged to a pious confraternity, that you chance upon
the brothers of the society--clad in dark hoods with only holes for
their eyes, and no man recognized by his neighbour--chanting penitential
psalms and hymns for the one whom they all know because he is dead, and
they are living.
Such contrasts are not lacking in Rome. There are plenty of them
everywhere in the world, perhaps, but they are more striking here, in
proportion as the outward forms of religious practice are more ancient,
unchanging and impressive. For there is nothing very impressive or
unchanging about the daily outside world, especially in Rome.
Rome, the worldly, is the capital of one of the smaller kingdoms of the
world, which those who rule it are anxious to force into the position of
a great power. One need not criticise their action too hardly; their
motives can hardly be anything but patriotic, considering the fearful
sacrifices they impose upon their country. But they are not the men who
brought about Italian unity. They are the successors of those men; they
are not satisfied with that unification, and they have dreamed a dream
of ambition, beside which, considering the means at their disposal, the
projects of Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon sink into comparative
insignificance. At all events, the worldly, modern, outward Italian
Rome is very far behind the great European capitals in development, not
to say wealth and magnificence. 'Lay' Rome, if one may use the
expression, is not in the least a remarkable city. 'Ecclesiastic' Rome
is the stronghold of a most tremendous fact, from whatever point of view
Christianity may be considered. If one could, in imagination, detach the
head of the Catholic Church from the Church, one would be obliged to
admit that no single living man possesses the far-reaching and lasting
power which in each succeeding papal reign belongs to the Pope. Behind
the Pope stands the fact which confers, maintains and extends that power
from century to century; a power which is one of the hugest elements of
the world's moral activity, both in its own direct action and in the
counteraction and antagonism which it calls forth continually.
It is the all-pervading presence of this greatest fact in Christendom
which has carried on Rome's importance from the days of the Cæsars,
across the chasm of the dark ages, to the days of the modern popes; and
its really enormous importance continually throws forward into cruel
relief the puerilities and inanities of the daily outward world. It is
the consciousness of that importance which makes old Roman society what
it is, with its virtues, its vices, its prejudices and its strange,
old-fashioned, close-fisted kindliness; which makes the contrast between
the Saturnalia of Shrove Tuesday night and the cross signed with ashes
upon the forehead on Ash Wednesday morning, between the careless
laughter of the Roman beauty in Carnival, and the tragic earnestness of
the same lovely face when the great lady kneels in Lent, before the
confessional, to receive upon her bent head the light touch of the
penitentiary's wand, taking her turn, perhaps, with a score of women of
the people. It is the knowledge of an always present power, active
throughout the whole world, which throws deep, straight shadows, as it
were, through the Roman character, just as in certain ancient families
there is a secret that makes grave the lives of those who know it.
The Roman Forum and the land between it and the Colosseum, though
strictly within the limits of Monti, were in reality a neutral ground,
the chosen place for all struggles of rivalry between the Regions. The
final destruction of its monuments dates from the sacking of Rome by
Robert Guiscard with his Normans and Saracens in the year one thousand
and eighty-four, when the great Duke of Apulia came in arms to succour
Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh, against the Emperor Henry the
Fourth, smarting under the bitter humiliation of Canossa; and against
his Antipope Clement, more than a hundred years after Otto had come back
in anger to avenge Pope John. There is no more striking picture of the
fearful contest between the Church and the Empire.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]
Alexis, Emperor of the East, had sent Henry, Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire, one hundred and forty-four thousand pieces of gold, and one
hundred pieces of woven scarlet, as an inducement to make war upon the
Norman Duke, the Pope's friend. But the Romans feared Henry and sent
ambassadors to him, and on the twenty-first of March, being the Thursday
before Palm Sunday, the Lateran gate was opened for him to enter in
triumph. The city was divided against itself, the nobles were for
Hildebrand, the people were against him. The Emperor seized the Lateran
palace and all the bridges. The Pope fled to the Castle of Sant' Angelo,
an impregnable fortress in those times, ever ready and ever provisioned
for a siege. Of the nobles Henry required fifty hostages as earnest of
their neutrality. On the next day he threw his gold to the rabble and
they elected his Antipope Gilbert, who called himself Clement the Third,
and certain bishops from North Italy consecrated him in the Lateran on
Palm Sunday.
Meanwhile Hildebrand secretly sent swift riders to Apulia, calling on
Robert Guiscard for help, and still the nobles were faithful to him, and
though Henry held the bridges, they were strong in Trastevere and the
Borgo, which is the region between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and Saint
Peter's. So it turned out that when Henry tried to bring his Antipope in
solemn procession to enthrone him in the Pontifical chair, on Easter
day, he found mailed knights and footmen waiting for him, and had to
fight his way to the Vatican, and forty of his men were killed and
wounded in the fray, while the armed nobles lost not one. Yet he reached
the Vatican at last, and there he was crowned by the false Pope he had
made, with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The chronicler apologizes
for calling him an emperor at all. Then he set to work to destroy the
dwellings of the faithful nobles, and laid siege to the wonderful
Septizonium of Severus, in which the true Pope's nephew had fortified
himself, and began to batter it down with catapults and battering-rams.
Presently came the message of vengeance, brought by one man outriding a
host, while the rabble were still building a great wall to encircle
Sant' Angelo and starve Hildebrand to death or submission, working day
and night like madmen, tearing down everything at hand to pile the great
stones one upon another. Swiftly came the terrible Norman from the
south, with his six thousand horse, Normans and Saracens, and thirty
thousand foot, forcing his march and hungry for the Emperor. But Henry
fled, making pretext of great affairs in Lombardy, promising great and
wonderful gifts to the Roman rabble, and entrusting to their care his
imperial city.
Like a destroying whirlwind of fire and steel Robert swept on to the
gates and into Rome, burning and slaying as he rode, and sparing neither
man, nor woman, nor child, till the red blood ran in rivers between
walls of yellow flame. And he took Hildebrand from Sant' Angelo, and
brought him back to the Lateran through the reeking ruins of the city in
grim and fearful triumph of carnage and destruction.
That was the end of the Roman Forum, and afterwards, when the
blood-soaked ashes and heaps of red-hot rubbish had sunk down and
hardened to a level surface, the place where the shepherd fathers of
Alba Longa had pastured their flocks was called the Campo Vaccino, the
Cattle Field, because it was turned into the market for beeves, and rows
of trees were planted, and on one side there was a walk where ropes were
made, even to our own time.
It became also the fighting ground of the Regions. Among the strangest
scenes in the story of the city are those regular encounters between the
Regions of Monti and Trastevere which for centuries took place on feast
days, by appointment, on the site of the Forum, or occasionally on the
wide ground before the Baths of Diocletian. They were battles fought
with stones, and far from bloodless. Monti was traditionally of the
Imperial or Ghibelline party; Trastevere was Guelph and for the Popes.
The enmity was natural and lasting, on a small scale, as it was
throughout Italy. The challenge to the fray was regularly sent out by
young boys as messengers, and the place and hour were named and the word
passed in secret from mouth to mouth. It was even determined by
agreement whether the stones were to be thrown by hand or whether the
more deadly sling was to be used.
At the appointed time, the combatants appear in the arena, sometimes as
many as a hundred on a side, and the tournament begins, as in Homeric
times, with taunts and abuse, which presently end in skirmishes between
the boys who have come to look on. Scouts are placed at distant points
to cry 'Fire' at the approach of the dreaded Bargello and his men, who
are the only representatives of order in the city and not, indeed,
anxious to face two hundred infuriated slingers for the sake of making
peace.
One boy throws a stone and runs away, followed by the rest, all
prudently retiring to a safe distance. The real combatants wrap their
long cloaks about their left arms, as the old Romans used their togas on
the same ground, to shield their heads from the blows; a sling whirls
half a dozen times like lightning, and a smooth round stone flies like a
bullet straight at an enemy's face, followed by a hundred more in a
deadly hail, thick and fast. Men fall, blood flows, short deep curses
ring through the sunny air, the fighters creep up to one another,
dodging behind trees and broken ruins, till they are at cruelly short
range; faster and faster fly the stones, and scores are lying prostrate,
bleeding, groaning and cursing. Strength, courage, fierce endurance and
luck have it at last, as in every battle. Down goes the leader of
Trastevere, half dead, with an eye gone, down goes the next man to him,
his teeth broken under his torn lips, down half a dozen more, dead or
wounded, and the day is lost. Trastevere flies towards the bridge,
pursued by Monti with hoots and yells and catcalls, and the thousands
who have seen the fight go howling after them, women and children
screaming, dogs racing and barking and biting at their heels. And far
behind on the deserted Campo Vaccino, as the sun goes down, women weep
and frightened children sob beside the young dead. But the next feast
day would come, and a counter-victory and vengeance.
That has always been the temper of the Romans; but few know how
fiercely it used to show itself in those days. It would have been
natural enough that men should meet in sudden anger and kill each other
with such weapons as they chanced to have or could pick up, clubs,
knives, stones, anything, when fighting was half the life of every grown
man. It is harder to understand the murderous stone throwing by
agreement and appointment. In principle, indeed, it approached the
tournament, and the combat of champions representing two parties is an
expression of the ancient instinct of the Latin peoples; so the Horatii
and Curiatii fought for Rome and Alba--so Francis the First of France
offered to fight the Emperor Charles the Fifth for settlement of all
quarrels between the Kingdom and the Empire--and so the modern Frenchman
and Italian are accustomed to settle their differences by an appeal to
what they still call 'arms,' for the sake of what modern society is
pleased to dignify by the name of 'honour.'
But in the stone-throwing combats of Campo Vaccino there was something
else. The games of the circus and the bloody shows of the amphitheatre
were not forgotten. As will be seen hereafter, bull-fighting was a
favourite sport in Rome as it is in Spain today, and the hand-to-hand
fights between champions of the Regions were as much more exciting and
delightful to the crowd as the blood of men is of more price than the
blood of beasts.
The habit of fighting for its own sake, with dangerous weapons, made the
Roman rabble terrible when the fray turned quite to earnest; the deadly
hail of stones, well aimed by sling and hand, was familiar to every
Roman from his childhood, and the sight of naked steel at arm's length
inspired no sudden, keen and unaccustomed terror, when men had little
but life to lose and set small value on that, throwing it into the
balance for a word, rising in arms for a name, doing deeds of blood and
flame for a handful of gold or a day of power.
Monti was both the battlefield of the Regions and also, in times early
and late, the scene of the most splendid pageants of Church and State.
There is a strange passage in the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus, a
pagan Roman of Greek birth, contemporary with Pope Damasus in the latter
part of the fourth century. Muratori quotes it, as showing what the
Bishopric of Rome meant even in those days. It is worth reading, for a
heathen's view of things under Valens and Valentinian, before the coming
of the Huns and the breaking up of the Roman Empire, and, indeed, before
the official disestablishment, as we should say, of the heathen
religion; while the High Priest of Jupiter still offered sacrifices on
the Capitol, and the six Vestal Virgins still guarded the Seven Holy
Things of Rome, and held their vast lands and dwelt in their splendid
palace in all freedom of high privilege, as of old.
'For my part,' says Ammianus, 'when I see the magnificence in which the
Bishops live in Rome, I am not surprised that those who covet the
dignity should use force and cunning to obtain it. For if they succeed,
they are sure of becoming enormously rich by the gifts of the devout
Roman matrons; they will drive about Rome in their carriages, as they
please, gorgeously dressed, and they will not only keep an abundant
table, but will give banquets so sumptuous as to outdo those of kings
and emperors. They do not see that they could be truly happy if instead
of making the greatness of Rome an excuse for their excesses, they would
live as some of the Bishops of the Provinces do, who are sparing and
frugal, poorly clad and modest, but who make the humility of their
manners and the purity of their lives at once acceptable to their God
and to their fellow worshippers.'
So much Ammianus says. And Saint Jerome tells how Prætextatus, Prefect
of the City, when Pope Damasus tried to convert him, answered with a
laugh, 'I will become a Christian if you will make me Bishop of Rome.'
Yet Damasus, famous for the good Latin and beautiful carving of the many
inscriptions he composed and set up, was undeniably also a good man in
the evil days which foreshadowed the great schism.
[Illustration: SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE]
And here, in the year 366, in the Region of Monti, in the church where
now stands Santa Maria Maggiore, a great and terrible name stands out
for the first time in history. Orsino, Deacon of the Holy Roman Catholic
and Apostolic Church, rouses a party of the people, declares the
election of Damasus invalid, proclaims himself Pope in his stead, and
officiates as Pontiff in the Basilica of Sicininus. Up from the deep
city comes the roaring crowd, furious and hungry for fight; the great
doors are closed and Orsino's followers gather round him as he stands on
the steps of the altar; but they are few, and those for Damasus are
many; down go the doors, burst inward with battering-rams, up shoot the
flames to the roof, and the short, wild fray lasts while one may count
five score, and is over. Orsino and a hundred and thirty-six of his men
lie dead on the pavement, the fire licks the rafters, the crowd press
outward, and the great roof falls crashing down into wide pools of
blood. And after that Damasus reigns eighteen years in peace and
splendour. No one knows whether the daring Deacon was of the race that
made and unmade popes afterwards, and held half Italy with its
fortresses, giving its daughters to kings and taking kings' daughters
for its sons, till Vittoria Accoramboni of bad memory began to bring
down a name that is yet great. But Orsino he was called, and he had in
him much of the lawless strength of those namesakes of his who outfought
all other barons but the Colonna, for centuries; and romance may well
make him one of them.
Three hundred years later, and a little nearer to us in the dim
perspective of the dark ages, another scene is enacted in the same
cathedral. Martin the First was afterwards canonized as Saint Martin for
the persecutions he suffered at the hands of Constans, who feared and
hated him and set up an antipope in his stead, and at last sent him
prisoner to die a miserable death in the Crimea. Olympius, Exarch of
Italy, was the chosen tool of the Emperor, sent again and again to Rome
to destroy the brave Bishop and make way for the impostor. At last, says
the greatest of Italian chroniclers, fearing the Roman people and their
soldiers, he attempted to murder the Pope foully, in hideous sacrilege.
To that end he pretended penitence, and begged to be allowed to receive
the Eucharist from the Pope himself at solemn high Mass, secretly
instructing one of his body-guards to stab the Bishop at the very moment
when he should present Olympius with the consecrated bread.
Up to the basilica they went, in grave and splendid procession. One may
guess the picture, with its deep colour, with the strong faces of those
men, the Eastern guards, the gorgeous robes, the gilded arms, the high
sunlight crossing the low nave and falling through the yellow clouds of
incense upon the venerable bearded head of the holy man whose death was
purposed in the sacred office. First, the measured tread of the Exarch's
band moving in order; then, the silence over all the kneeling throng,
and upon it the bursting unison of the 'Gloria in Excelsis' from the
choir. Chant upon chant as the Pontiff and his Ministers intone the
Epistle and the Gospel and are taken up by the singers in chorus at the
first words of the Creed. By and by, the Pope's voice alone, still clear
and brave in the Preface. 'Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and all
the company of Heaven,' he chants, and again the harmony of many voices
singing 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.' Silence then, at the
Consecration, and the dark-browed Exarch bowing to the pavement, beside
the paid murderer whose hand is already on his dagger's hilt. 'O Lamb of
God, that takest away the sins of the world,' sings the choir in its
sad, high chant, and Saint Martin bows, standing, over the altar,
himself communicating, while the Exarch holds his breath, and the slayer
fixes his small, keen eyes on the embroidered vestments and guesses how
they will look with a red splash upon them.
As the soldier looks, the sunlight falls more brightly on the gold, the
incense curls in mystic spiral wreaths, its strong perfume penetrates
and dims his senses; little by little, his thoughts wander till they are
strangely fixed on something far away, and he no longer sees Pope nor
altar nor altar-piece beyond, and is wrapped in a sort of waking sleep
that is blindness. Olympius kneels at the steps within the rail, and his
heart beats loud as the grand figure of the Bishop bends over him, and
the thin old hand with its strong blue veins offers the sacred bread to
his open lips. He trembles, and tries to glance sideways to his left
with downcast eyes, for the moment has come, and the blow must be struck
then or never. Not a breath, not a movement in the church, not the
faintest clink of all those gilded arms, as the Saint pronounces the few
solemn words, then gravely and slowly turns, with his deacons to right
and left of him, and ascends the altar steps once more, unhurt. A
miracle, says the chronicler. A miracle, says the amazed soldier, and
repeats it upon solemn oath. A miracle, says Olympius himself, penitent
and converted from error, and ready to save the Pope by all means he
has, as he was ready to slay him before. But he only, and the hired
assassin beside him, had known what was to be, and the people say that
the Exarch and the Pope were already reconciled and agreed against the
Emperor.
The vast church has had many names. It seems at one time to have been
known as the Basilica of Sicininus, for so Ammianus Marcellinus still
speaks of it. But just before that, there is the lovely legend of Pope
Liberius' dream. To him and to the Roman patrician, John, came the
Blessed Virgin in a dream, one night in high summer, commanding them to
build her a church wheresoever they should find snow on the morrow. And
together they found it, glistening in the morning sun, and they traced,
on the white, the plan of the foundation, and together built the first
church, calling it 'Our Lady of Snows,' for Damasus to burn when Orsino
seized it,--but the people spoke of it as the Basilica of Liberius. It
was called also 'Our Lady of the Manger,' from the relic held holy
there; and Sixtus the Third named it 'Our Lady, Mother of God'; and
under many popes it was rebuilt and grew, until at last, for its size,
it was called, as it is today, 'The Greater Saint Mary's.' At one time,
the popes lived near it, and in our own century, when the palace had
long been transferred to the Quirinal, a mile to northward of the
basilica, Papal Bulls were dated 'From Santa Maria Maggiore.'
It is too gorgeous now, too overladen, too rich; and yet it is imposing.
The first gold brought from South America gilds the profusely decorated
roof, the dark red polished porphyry pillars of the high altar gleam in
the warm haze of light, the endless marble columns rise in shining
ranks, all is gold, marble and colour.
Many dead lie there, great men and good; and one over whom a sort of
mystery hangs, for he was Bartolommeo Sacchi, Cardinal Platina,
historian of the Church, a chief member of the famous Roman Academy of
the fifteenth century, and a mediæval pagan, accused with Pomponius
Letus and others of worshipping false gods; tried, acquitted for lack of
evidence; dead in the odour of sanctity; proved at last ten times a
heathen, and a bad one, today, by inscriptions found in the remotest
part of the Catacombs, where he and his companions met in darkest secret
to perform their extravagant rites. He lies beneath the chapel of Sixtus
the Fifth, but the stone that marked the spot is gone.
Strange survivals of ideas and customs cling to some places like ghosts,
and will not be driven away. The Esquiline was long ago the haunt of
witches, who chanted their nightly incantations over the shallow graves
where slaves were buried, and under the hideous crosses whereon dead
malefactors had groaned away their last hours of life. Mæcenas cleared
the land and beautified it with gardens, but still the witches came by
stealth to their old haunts. The popes built churches and palaces on it,
but the dark memories never vanished in the light; and even in our own
days, on Saint John's Eve, which is the witches' night of the Latin
race, as the Eve of May-day is the Walpurgis of the Northmen, the people
went out in thousands, with torches and lights, and laughing tricks of
exorcism, to scare away the powers of evil for the year.
On that night the vast open spaces around the Lateran were thronged with
men and women and children; against the witches' dreaded influence they
carried each an onion, torn up by the roots with stalk and flower; all
about, on the outskirts of the place, were kitchen booths, set up with
boughs and bits of awnings, yellow with the glare of earthen and iron
oil lamps, where snails--great counter-charms against spells--were fried
and baked in oil, and sold with bread and wine, and eaten with more or
less appetite, according to the strength of men's stomachs. All night,
till the early summer dawn, the people came and went, and wandered round
and round, and in and out, in parties and by families, to go laughing
homeward at last, scarce knowing why they had gone there at all, unless
it were because their fathers and mothers had done as they did for
generations unnumbered.
[Illustration: BATHS OF DIOCLETIAN]
And the Lateran once had another half-heathen festival, on the Saturday
after Easter, in memory of the ancient Floralia of the Romans, which had
formerly been celebrated on the 28th of April. It was a most strange
festival, now long forgotten, in which Christianity and paganism were
blended together. Baracconi, from whom the following account is taken,
quotes three sober writers as authority for his description. Yet there
is a doubt about the very name of the feast, which is variously called
the 'Coromania' and the 'Cornomania.'
On the afternoon of the Saturday in Easter week, say these writers, the
priests of the eighteen principal 'deaconries'--an ecclesiastical
division of the city long ago abolished and now somewhat obscure--caused
the bells to be rung, and the people assembled at their parish churches,
where they were received by a 'mansionarius,'--probably meaning here 'a
visitor of houses,'--and a layman, who was arrayed in a tunic, and
crowned with the flowers of the cornel cherry. In his hand he carried a
concave musical instrument of copper, by which hung many little bells.
One of these mysterious personages, who evidently represented the pagan
element in the ceremony, preceded each parish procession, being followed
immediately by the parish priest, wearing the cope. From all parts of
the city they went up to the Lateran, and waited before the palace of
the Pope till all were assembled.
The Pope descended the steps to receive the homage of the people.
Immediately, those of each parish formed themselves into wide circles
round their respective 'visitors' and priests, and the strange rite
began. In the midst the priest stood still. Round and round him the lay
'visitor' moved in a solemn dance, striking his copper bells
rhythmically to his steps, while all the circle followed his gyrations,
chanting a barbarous invocation, half Latin and half Greek: 'Hail,
divinity of this spot! Receive our prayers in fortunate hour!' and many
verses more to the same purpose, and quite beyond being construed
grammatically.
The dance is over with the song. One of the parish priests mounts upon
an ass, backwards, facing the beast's tail, and a papal chamberlain
leads the animal, holding over its head a basin containing twenty pieces
of copper money. When they have passed three rows of benches--which
benches, by the bye?--the priest leans back, puts his hand behind him
into the basin, and pockets the coins.
Then all the priests lay garlands at the feet of the Pope. But the
priest of Santa Maria in Via Lata also lets a live fox out of a bag, and
the little creature suddenly let loose flies for its life, through the
parting crowd, out to the open country, seeking cover. It is like the
Hebrew scapegoat. In return each priest receives a golden coin from the
Pontiff's hand. The rite being finished, all return to their respective
parishes, the dancing 'visitor' still leading the procession. Each
priest is accompanied then by acolytes who bear holy water, branches of
laurel, and baskets of little rolls, or of those big, sweet wafers,
rolled into a cylinder and baked, which are called 'cialdoni,' and are
eaten to this day by Romans with ice cream. From house to house they go;
the priest blesses each dwelling, sprinkling water about with the
laurel, and then burning the branch on the hearth and giving some of the
rolls to the children. And all the time the dancer slowly dances and
chants the strange words made up of some Hebrew, a little Chaldean and a
leavening of nonsense.
Jaritan, jaritan, iarariasti
Raphaym, akrhoin, azariasti!
One may leave the interpretation of the jargon to curious scholars. As
for the rite itself, were it not attested by trustworthy writers, one
would be inclined to treat it as a mere invention, no more to be
believed than the legend of Pope Joan, who was supposed to have been
stoned to death near San Clemente, on the way to the Lateran.
An extraordinary number of traditions cling to the Region of Monti, and
considering that in later times a great part of this quarter was a
wilderness, the fact would seem strange. As for the 'Coromania' it seems
to have disappeared after the devastation of Monti by Robert Guiscard in
1084, and the general destruction of the city from the Lateran to the
Capitol is attributed to the Saracens who were with him. But a more
logical cause of depopulation is found in the disappearance of water
from the upper Region by the breaking of the aqueducts, from which alone
it was derived. The consequence of this, in the Middle Age, was that the
only obtainable water came from the river, and was naturally taken from
it up-stream, towards the Piazza del Popolo, in the neighbourhood of
which it was collected in tanks and kept until the mud sank to the
bottom and it was approximately fit to drink.
In Imperial times the greater number of the public baths were situated
in the Monti. The great Piazza di Termini, now re-named Piazza delle
Terme, before the railway station, took its name from the Baths of
Diocletian--'Thermæ,' 'Terme,' 'Termini.' The Baths of Titus, the Baths
of Constantine, of Philippus, Novatus and others were all in Monti,
supplied by the aqueduct of Claudius, the Anio Novus, the Aqua Marcia,
Tepula, Julia, Marcia Nova and Anio Vetus. No people in the world were
such bathers as the old Romans; yet few cities have ever suffered so
much or so long from lack of good water as Rome in the Middle Age. The
supply cut off, the whole use of the vast institutions was instantly
gone, and the huge halls and porticos and playgrounds fell to ruin and
base uses. Owing to their peculiar construction and being purposely made
easy of access on all sides, like the temples, the buildings could not
even be turned to account by the Barons for purposes of fortification,
except as quarries for material with which to build their towers and
bastions. The inner chambers became hiding-places for thieves, herdsmen
in winter penned their flocks in the shelter of the great halls, grooms
used the old playground as a track for breaking horses, and round and
about the ruins, on feast days, the men of Monti and Trastevere chased
one another in their murderous tournaments of stone throwing. A fanatic
Sicilian priest saved the great hall of Diocletian's Baths from
destruction in Michelangelo's time.
[Illustration: PORTA MAGGIORE, SUPPORTING THE CHANNELS OF THE AQUEDUCT
OF CLAUDIUS AND THE ANIO NOVUS]
The story is worth telling, for it is little known. In a little church
in Palermo, in which the humble priest Antonio Del Duca officiated, he
discovered under the wall-plaster a beautiful fresco or mosaic of the
Seven Archangels, with their names and attributes. Day after day he
looked at the fair figures till they took possession of his mind and
heart and soul, and inspired him with the apparently hopeless desire to
erect a church in Rome in their honour. To Rome he came, persuaded of
his righteous mission, to fail of course, after seven years of
indefatigable effort. Back to Palermo then, to the contemplation of his
beloved angels. And again they seemed to drive him to Rome. Scarcely had
he returned when in a dream he seemed to see his ideal church among the
ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, which had been built, as tradition
said, by thousands of condemned Christians. To dream was to wake with
new enthusiasm, to wake was to act. In an hour, in the early dawn, he
was in the great hall which is now the Church of Santa Maria degli
Angeli, 'Saint Mary of the Angels.'
But it was long before his purpose was finally accomplished. Thirty
years of his life he spent in unremitting labour for his purpose, and an
accident at last determined his success. He had brought a nephew with
him from Sicily, a certain Giacomo Del Duca, a sculptor, who was
employed by Michelangelo to carve the great mask over the Porta Pia.
Pope Pius the Fourth, for whom the gate was named, praised the stone
face to Michelangelo, who told him who had made it. The name recalled
the sculptor's uncle and his mad project, which appealed to
Michelangelo's love of the gigantic. Even the coincidence of appellation
pleased the Pope, for he himself had been christened Angelo, and his
great architect and sculptor bore an archangel's name. So the work was
done in short time, the great church was consecrated, and one of the
noblest of Roman buildings was saved from ruin by the poor
Sicilian,--and there, in 1896, the heir to the throne of Italy was
married with great magnificence, that particular church being chosen
because, as a historical monument, it is regarded as the property of the
Italian State, and is therefore not under the immediate management of
the Vatican. Probably not one in a thousand of the splendid throng that
filled the church had heard the name of Antonio Del Duca, who lies
buried before the high altar without a line to tell of all he did. So
lies Bernini, somewhere in Santa Maria Maggiore, so lies Platina,--he,
at least, the better for no epitaph,--and Beatrice Cenci and many
others, rest unforgotten in nameless graves.
From the church to the railway station stretch the ruins, continuous,
massive, almost useless, yet dear to all who love old Rome. On the south
side, there used to be a long row of buildings, ending in a tall old
mansion of good architecture, which was the 'Casino' of the great old
Villa Negroni. In that house, but recently gone, Thomas Crawford,
sculptor, lived for many years, and in the long, low studio that stood
before what is now the station, but was then a field, he modelled the
great statue of Liberty that crowns the Capitol in Washington, and
Washington's own monument which stands in Richmond, and many of his
other works. My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time
gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and
the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses
and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now. Beyond, a wild
waste of field and broken land led up to Santa Maria Maggiore; and the
grand old bells sent their far voices ringing in deep harmony to our
windows; and on the Eve of Saint Peter's day, when Saint Peter's was a
dream of stars in the distance and the gorgeous fireworks gleamed in the
dark sky above the Pincio, we used to climb the high tower above the
house and watch the still illumination and the soaring rockets through a
grated window, till the last one had burst and spent itself, and we
crept down the steep stone steps, half frightened at the sound of our
own voices in the ghostly place.
And in that same villa once lived Vittoria Accoramboni, married to
Francesco Peretti, nephew of Cardinal Montalto, who built the house, and
was afterwards Sixtus the Fifth, and filled Rome with his works in the
five years of his stirring reign. Hers also is a story worth telling,
for few know it, even among Romans, and it is a tale of bloodshed, and
of murder, and of all crimes against God and man, and of the fall of the
great house of Orsini. But it may better be told in another place, when
we reach the Region where they lived and fought and ruled, by terror and
the sword.
Near the Baths of Diocletian, and most probably on the site of that same
Villa Negroni, too, was that vineyard, or 'villa' as we should say,
where Cæsar Borgia and his elder brother, the Duke of Gandia, supped
together for the last time with their mother Vanozza, on the night of
the 14th of June, in the year 1497. There has always been a dark mystery
about what followed. Many say that Cæsar feared his brother's power and
influence with the Pope. Not a few others suggest that the cause of the
mutual hatred was a jealousy so horrible to think of that one may hardly
find words for it, for its object was their own sister Lucrezia. However
that may be, they supped together with their mother in her villa, after
the manner of Romans in those times, and long before then, and long
since. In the first days of summer heat, when the freshness of spring is
gone and June grows sultry, the people of the city have ever loved to
breathe a cooler air. In the Region of Monti there were a score of
villas, and there were wide vineyards and little groves of trees, such
as could grow where there was not much water, or none at all perhaps,
saving what was collected in cisterns from the roofs of the few
scattered houses, when it rained.
In the long June twilight the three met together, the mother and her two
sons, and sat down under an arbour in the garden, for the air was dry
with the south wind and there was no fear of fever. Screened lamps and
wax torches shed changing tints of gold and yellow on the fine linen,
and the deep-chiselled dishes and vessels of silver, and the tall
glasses and beakers of many hues. Fruit was piled up in the midst, such
as the season afforded, cherries and strawberries, and bright oranges
from the south. One may fancy the dark-browed woman of forty years, in
the beauty of maturity almost too ripe, with her black eyes and hair of
auburn, her jewelled cap, her gold laces just open at her marble throat,
her gleaming earrings, her sleeves slashed to show gauze-fine linen, her
white, ring-laden fingers that delicately took the finely carved meats
in her plate--before forks were used in Rome--and dabbled themselves
clean from each touch in the scented water the little page poured over
them. On her right, her eldest, Gandia, fair, weak-mouthed, sensually
beautiful, splendid in velvet, and chain of gold, and deep-red silk, his
blue eyes glancing now and then, half scornfully, half anxiously at his
strong brother. And he, Cæsar, the man of infamous memory, sitting there
the very incarnation of bodily strength and mental daring; square as a
gladiator, dark as a Moor, with deep and fiery eyes, now black, now red
in the lamplight, the marvellous smile wreathing his thin lips now and
then, and showing white, wolfish teeth, his sinewy brown hands direct
in every little action, his soft voice the very music of a lie to those
who knew the terrible brief tones it had in wrath.
Long they sat, sipping the strong iced wine, toying with fruits and
nuts, talking of State affairs, of the Pope, of Maximilian, the jousting
Emperor,--discussing, perhaps, with a smile, his love of dress and the
beautiful fluted armour which he first invented;--of Lewis the Eleventh
of France, tottering to his grave, strangest compound of devotion,
avarice and fear that ever filled a throne; of Frederick of Naples, to
whom Cæsar was to bear the crown within a few days; of Lucrezia's
quarrel with her husband, which had brought her to Rome; and at her name
Cæsar's eyes blazed once and looked down at the strawberries on the
silver dish, and Gandia turned pale, and felt the chill of the night
air, and stately Vanozza rose slowly in the silence, and bade her evil
sons good-night, for it was late.
Two hours later, Gandia's thrice-stabbed corpse lay rolling and bobbing
at the Tiber's edge, as dead things do in the water, caught by its silks
and velvets in wild branches that dipped in the muddy stream; and the
waning moon rose as the dawn forelightened.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE COLOSSEUM]
If the secrets of old Rome could be known and told, they would fill the
world with books. Every stone has tasted blood, every house has had its
tragedy, every shrub and tree and blade of grass and wild flower has
sucked life from death, and blossoms on a grave. There is no end of
memories, in this one Region, as in all the rest. Far up by Porta Pia,
over against the new Treasury, under a modern street, lie the bones of
guilty Vestals, buried living, each in a little vault two fathoms deep,
with the small dish and crust and the earthen lamp that soon flickered
out in the close damp air; and there lies that innocent one, Domitian's
victim, who shrank from the foul help of the headsman's hand, as her
foot slipped on the fatal ladder, and fixed her pure eyes once upon the
rabble, and turned and went down alone into the deadly darkness. Down by
the Colosseum, where the ruins of Titus' Baths still stand in part,
stood Nero's dwelling palace, above the artificial lake in which the
Colosseum itself was built, and whose waters reflected the flames of the
great fire. To northward, in a contrast that leaps ages, rise the huge
walls of the Tor de' Conti, greatest of mediæval fortresses built within
the city, the stronghold of a dim, great house, long passed away,
kinsmen of Innocent the Third. What is left of it helps to enclose a
peaceful nunnery.
There were other towers, too, and fortresses, though none so strong as
that, when it faced the Colosseum, filled then by the armed thousands of
the great Frangipani. The desolate wastes of land in the Monti were ever
good battlefields for the nobles and the people. But the stronger and
wiser and greater Orsini fortified themselves in the town, in Pompey's
theatre, while the Colonna held the midst, and the popes dwelt far aloof
on the boundary, with the open country behind them for ready escape, and
the changing, factious, fighting city before.
The everlasting struggle, the furious jealousy, the always ready knife,
kept the Regions distinct and individual and often at enmity with each
other, most of all Monti and Trastevere, hereditary adversaries,
Ghibelline and Guelph. Trastevere has something of that proud and
violent character still. Monti lost it in the short eruption of
'progress' and 'development.' In the wild rage of speculation which
culminated in 1889, its desolate open lands, its ancient villas and its
strange old houses were the natural prey of a foolish greediness the
like of which has never been seen before. Progress ate up romance, and
hundreds of acres of wretched, cheaply built, hideous, unsafe buildings
sprang up like the unhealthy growth of a foul disease, between the
Lateran gate and the old inhabited districts. They are destined to a
graceless and ignoble ruin. Ugly cracks in the miserable stucco show
where the masonry is already parting, as the hollow foundations subside,
and walls on which the paint is still almost fresh are shored up with
dusty beams lest they should fall and crush the few paupers who dwell
within. Filthy, half-washed clothes of beggars hang down from the
windows, drying in the sun as they flap and flutter against pretentious
moulded masks of empty plaster. Miserable children loiter in the
high-arched gates, under which smart carriages were meant to drive, and
gnaw their dirty fingers, or fight for a cold boiled chestnut one of
them has saved. Squalor, misery, ruin and vile stucco, with a sprinkling
of half-desperate humanity,--those are the elements of the modern
picture,--that is what the 'great development' of modern Rome brought
forth and left behind it. Peace to the past, and to its ashes of romance
and beauty.
[Illustration]
REGION II TREVI
In Imperial times, the street now called the Tritone, from the Triton on
the fountain in Piazza Barberini, led up from the Portico of Vipsanius
Agrippa's sister in the modern Corso to the temple of Flora at the
beginning of the Quattro Fontane. It was met at right angles by a long
street leading straight from the Forum of Trajan, and which struck it
close to the Arch of Claudius. Then, as now, this point was the meeting
of two principal thoroughfares, and it was called Trivium, or the
'crossroads.' Trivium turned itself into the Italian 'Trevi,' called in
some chronicles 'the Cross of Trevi.' The Arch of Claudius carried the
Aqua Virgo, still officially called the Acqua Vergine, across the
highway; the water, itself, came to be called the water 'of the
crossroads' or 'of Trevi,' and 'Trevi' gave its name at last to the
Region, long before the splendid fountain was built in the early part of
the last century. The device of the Region seems to have nothing to do
with the water, except, perhaps, that the idea of a triplicity is
preserved in the three horizontally disposed rapiers.
The legend that tells how the water was discovered gave it the first
name it bore. A detachment of Roman soldiers, marching down from
Præneste, or Palestrina, in the summer heat, were overcome by thirst,
and could find neither stream nor well. A little girl, passing that way,
led them aside from the high-road and brought them to a welling spring,
clear and icy cold, known only to shepherds and peasants. They drank
their fill and called it Aqua Virgo, the Maiden Water. And so it has
remained for all ages. But it is commonly called 'Trevi' in Rome, by the
people and by strangers, and the name has a ring of poetry, by its
associations. For they say that whoever will go to the great fountain,
when the high moon rays dance upon the rippling water, and drink, and
toss a coin far out into the middle, in offering to the genius of the
place, shall surely come back to Rome again, old or young, sooner or
later. Many have performed the rite, some secretly, sadly, heartbroken,
for love of Rome and what it holds, and others gayly, many together,
laughing, while they half believe, and sometimes believing altogether
while they laugh. And some who loved, and could meet only in Rome, have
gone there together, and women's tears have sometimes dropped upon the
silvered water that reflected the sad faces of grave men.
The foremost memories of the past in Trevi centre about the ancient
family of the Colonna, still numerous, distinguished and flourishing
after a career of nearly a thousand years--longer than that, it may be,
if one take into account the traditions of them that go back beyond the
earliest authentic mention of their greatness; a race of singular
independence and energy, which has given popes to Rome, and great
patriots, and great generals as well, and neither least nor last,
Vittoria, princess and poetess, whose name calls up the gentlest
memories of Michelangelo's elder years.
The Colonna were originally hill men. The earliest record of them tells
that their great lands towards Palestrina were confiscated by the
Church, in the eleventh century. The oldest of their titles is that of
Duke of Paliano, a town still belonging to them, rising on an eminence
out of the plain beyond the Alban hills. The greatest of their early
fortresses was Palestrina, still the seat and title estate of the
Barberini branch of the family. Their original stronghold in Rome was
almost on the site of their present palace, being then situated on the
opposite side of the Basilica of the Santi Apostoli, where the
headquarters of the Dominicans now are, and running upwards and
backwards, thence, to the Piazza della Pilotta; but they held Rome by a
chain of towers and fortifications, from the Quirinal to the Mausoleum
of Augustus, now hidden among the later buildings, between the Corso,
the Tiber, the Via de' Pontefici and the Via de' Schiavoni. The present
palace and the basilica stood partly upon the site of the ancient
quarters occupied by the first Cohort of the Vigiles, or city police, of
whom about seven thousand preserved order when the population of ancient
Rome exceeded two millions.
The 'column,' from which the Colonna take their name, is generally
supposed to have stood in the market-place of the village of that name
in the higher part of the Campagna, between the Alban and the Samnite
hills, on the way to Palestrina. It is a peaceful and vine-clad country,
now. South of it rise the low heights of Tusculum, and it is more than
probable that the Colonna were originally descended from the great
counts who tyrannized over Rome from that strong point of vantage and,
through them, from Theodora Senatrix. Be that as it may, their arms
consist of a simple column, used on a shield, or as a crest, or as the
badge of the family, and it is found in many a threadbare tapestry, in
many a painting, in the frescos and carved ornaments of many a dim old
church in Rome.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI]
In their history, the first fact that stands out is their adherence to
the Emperors, as Ghibellines, whereas their rivals, the Orsini, were
Guelphs and supporters of the Church in most of the great contests of
the Middle Age. The exceptions to the rule are found when the Colonna
had a Pope of their own, or one who, like Nicholas the Fourth, was of
their own making. 'That Pope,' says Muratori, 'had so boundlessly
favoured the aggrandizement of the Colonna that his actions depended
entirely upon their dictates, and a libel was published upon him,
entitled the Source of Evil, illustrated by a caricature, in which the
mitred head of the Pontiff was seen issuing from a tall column between
two smaller ones, the latter intended to represent the two living
cardinals of the house, Jacopo and Pietro.' Yet in the next reign, when
they impeached the election of Boniface the Eighth, they found
themselves in opposition to the Holy See, and they and theirs were
almost utterly destroyed by the Pope's partisans and kinsmen, the
powerful Caetani.
Just before him, after the Holy See had been vacant for two years and
nearly four months, because the Conclave of Perugia could not agree upon
a Pope, a humble southern hermit of the Abruzzi, Pietro da Morrone, had
been suddenly elevated to the Pontificate, to his own inexpressible
surprise and confusion, and after a few months of honest, but utterly
fruitless, effort to understand and do what was required of him, he had
taken the wholly unprecedented step of abdicating the papacy. He was
succeeded by Benedict Caetani, Boniface the Eighth, keen, learned,
brave, unforgiving and the mortal foe of the Colonna; 'the magnanimous
sinner,' as Gibbon quotes from a chronicle, 'who entered like a fox,
reigned like a lion and died like a dog.' Yet the judgment is harsh, for
though his sins were great, the expiation was fearful, and he was brave
as few men have been.
Samson slew a lion with his hands, and the Philistines with the jaw-bone
of an ass. Men have always accepted the Bible's account of the
slaughter. But when an ass, without the aid of any Samson, killed a lion
in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Priori, in Florence, the event was
looked upon as of evil portent, exceeding the laws of nature. For Pope
Boniface had presented the Commonwealth of Florence with a young and
handsome lion, which was chained up and kept in the court of the palace
aforesaid. A donkey laden with firewood was driven in, and 'either from
fear, or by a miracle,' as the chronicle says, at once assailed the lion
with the utmost ferocity, and kicked him to death, in spite of the
efforts of a number of men to drag the beast of burden off. Of the two
hypotheses, the wise men of the day preferred the supernatural
explanation, and one of them found an ancient Sibylline prophecy to the
effect that 'when the tame beast should kill the king of beasts, the
dissolution of the Church should begin.' Which saying, adds Villani, was
presently fulfilled in Pope Boniface.
For the Pope had a mortal quarrel with Philip the Fair of France whom he
had promised to make Emperor, and had then passed over in favour of
Albert, son of Rudolph of Hapsburg; and Philip made a friend and ally of
Stephen Colonna, the head of the great house, who was then in France,
and drove Boniface's legate out of his kingdom, and allowed the Count of
Artois to burn the papal letters. The Pope retorted by a Major
Excommunication, and the quarrel became furious. The Colonna being under
his hand, Boniface vented his anger upon them, drove them from Rome,
destroyed their houses, levelled Palestrina to the ground, and ploughed
up the land where it had stood. The six brothers of the house were
exiles and wanderers. Old Stephen, the idol of Petrarch, alone and
wretched, was surrounded by highwaymen, who asked who he was. 'Stephen
Colonna,' he answered, 'a Roman citizen.' And the thieves fell back at
the sound of the great name. Again, someone asked him with a sneer where
all his strongholds were, since Palestrina was gone. 'Here,' he
answered, unmoved, and laying his hand upon his heart. Of such stuff
were the Pope's enemies.
Nor could he crush them. Boniface was of Anagni, a city of prehistoric
walls and ancient memories which belonged to the Caetani; and there, in
the late summer, he was sojourning for rest and country air, with his
cardinals and his court and his kinsmen about him. Among the cardinals
was Napoleon Orsini.
[Illustration: GRAND HALL OF THE COLONNA PALACE]
Then came William of Nogaret, sent by the King of France, and Sciarra
Colonna, the boldest man of his day, and many other nobles, with three
hundred knights and many footmen. For a long time they had secretly
plotted a master-stroke of violence, spending money freely among the
people, and using all persuasion to bring the country to their side, yet
with such skill and caution that not the slightest warning reached the
Pope's ears. In calm security he rose early on the morning of the
seventh of September. He believed his position assured, his friends
loyal and the Colonna ruined for ever; and Colonna was at the gate.
Suddenly, from below the walls, a cry of words came up to the palace
windows; long drawn out, distinct in the still mountain air. 'Long live
the King of France! Death to Pope Boniface!' It was taken up by hundreds
of voices, and repeated, loud, long and terrible, by the people of the
town, by men going out to their work in the hills, by women loitering on
their doorsteps, by children peering out, half frightened, from behind
their mothers' scarlet woollen skirts, to see the armed men ride up the
stony way. Cardinals, chamberlains, secretaries, men-at-arms, fled like
sheep; and when Colonna reached the palace wall, only the Pope's own
kinsmen remained within to help him as they could, barring the great
doors and posting themselves with crossbows at the grated window. For
the Caetani were always brave men.
But Boniface knew that he was lost, and calmly, courageously, even
grandly, he prepared to face death. 'Since I am betrayed,' he said, 'and
am to die, I will at least die as a Pope should!' So he put on the great
pontifical chasuble, and set the tiara of Constantine upon his head,
and, taking the keys and the crosier in his hands, sat down on the papal
throne to await death.
The palace gates were broken down, and then there was no more
resistance, for the defenders were few. In a moment Colonna in his
armour stood before the Pontiff in his robes; but he saw only the enemy
of his race, who had driven out his great kinsmen, beggars and wanderers
on the earth, and he lifted his visor and looked long at his victim, and
then at last found words for his wrath, and bitter reproaches and taunts
without end and savage curses in the broad-spoken Roman tongue. And
William of Nogaret began to speak, too, and threatened to take Boniface
to Lyons where a council of the Church should depose him and condemn him
to ignominy. Boniface answered that he should expect nothing better than
to be deposed and condemned by a man whose father and mother had been
publicly burned for their crimes. And this was true of Nogaret, who was
no gentleman. A legend says that Colonna struck the Pope in the face,
and that he afterwards made him ride on an ass, sitting backwards, after
the manner of the times. But no trustworthy chronicle tells of this. On
the contrary, no one laid hands upon him while he was kept a prisoner
under strict watch for three days, refusing to touch food; for even if
he could have eaten he feared poison. And Colonna tried to force him to
abdicate, as Pope Celestin had done before him, but he refused stoutly;
and when the three days were over, Colonna went away, driven out, some
say, by the people of Anagni who turned against him. But that is
absurd, for Anagni is a little place and Colonna had a strong force of
good soldiers with him. Possibly, seeing that the old man refused to
eat, Sciarra feared lest he should be said to have starved the Pope to
death. They went away and left him, carrying off his treasures with
them, and he returned to Rome, half mad with anger, and fell into the
hands of the Orsini cardinals, who judged him not sane and kept him a
prisoner at the Vatican, where he died soon afterwards, consumed by his
wrath. And before long the Colonna had their own again and rebuilt
Palestrina and their palace in Rome.
Twenty-five years later they were divided against each other, in the
wild days when Lewis the Bavarian, excommunicated and at war with the
Pope, was crowned and consecrated Emperor, by the efforts of an
extraordinary man of genius, Castruccio degli Interminelli, known better
as Castruccio Castracane, the Ghibelline lord of Lucca who made Italy
ring with his deeds for twenty years, and died of a fever, in the height
of his success and glory, at the age of forty-seven years. Sciarra
Colonna was for him and for Lewis. Stephen, head of the house, was
against them, and in those days when Rome was frantic for an Emperor,
Stephen's son Jacopo had the quiet courage to bring out the Bull of
Excommunication against the chosen Emperor and nail it to the door of
San Marcello, in the Corso, in the heart of Rome and in the sight of a
thousand angry men, in protest against what they meant to do--against
what was doing even at that moment. And he reached Palestrina in safety,
shaking the dust of Rome from his feet.
But on that bright winter's day, Lewis of Bavaria and his queen rode
down from Santa Maria Maggiore by the long and winding ways towards
Saint Peter's. The streets were all swept and strewn with yellow sand
and box leaves and myrtle that made the air fragrant, and from every
window and balcony gorgeous silks and tapestries were hung, and even
ornaments of gold and silver and jewels. Before the procession rode
standard-bearers, four for each Region, on horses most richly
caparisoned. There rode Sciarra Colonna, and beside him, for once in
history, Orsino Orsini, and others, all dressed in cloth of gold, and
Castruccio Castracane, wearing that famous sword which in our own times
was offered by Italy to King Victor Emmanuel; and many other Barons rode
there in splendid array, and there was great concourse of the people. So
they came to Saint Peter's; and because the Count of the Lateran should
by right have been the Emperor's sponsor at the anointing, and had left
Rome in anger and disdain, Lewis made Castruccio a knight of the Empire
and Count of the Lateran in his stead, and sponsor; and two
excommunicated Bishops consecrated the Emperor, and anointed him, and
Sciarra Colonna crowned him and his queen. After which they feasted in
the evening at the Aracoeli, and slept in the Capitol, because they
were all weary with the long ceremony, and it was too late to go home.
The chronicler's comment is curious. 'Note,' he says, 'what presumption
was this, of the aforesaid damned Bavarian, such as thou shalt not find
in any ancient or recent history; for never did any Christian Emperor
cause himself to be crowned save by the Pope or his legate, even though
opposed to the Church, neither before then nor since, except this
Bavarian.' But Sciarra and Castruccio had their way, and Lewis did what
even Napoleon, master of the world by violent chance, would not do. And
twenty years later, in the same chronicle, it is told how 'Lewis of
Bavaria, who called himself Emperor, fell with his horse, and was killed
suddenly, without penitence, excommunicated and damned by Holy Church.'
It is a curious coincidence that Boniface the Eighth, Sciarra's
prisoner, and Lewis the Bavarian, whom he crowned Emperor, both died on
the eleventh of October, according to most authorities.
The Senate of Rome had dwindled to a pitiable office, held by one man.
At or about this time, the Colonna and the Orsini agreed by a compromise
that there should be two, chosen from their two houses. The Popes were
in Avignon, and men who could make Emperors were more than able to do as
they pleased with a town of twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, so
long as the latter had no leader. One may judge of what Rome was, when
even pilgrims did not dare to go thither and visit the tomb of Saint
Peter. The discord of the great houses made Rienzi's life a career; the
defection of the Orsini from the Pope's party led to his flight; their
battles suggested to the exiled Pope the idea of sending him back to
Rome to break their power and restore a republic by which the Pope might
restore himself; and the rage of their retainers expended itself in his
violent death. For it was their retainers who fought for their masters,
till the younger Stephen Colonna killed Bertoldo Orsini, the bravest man
of his day, in an ambush, and the Orsini basely murdered a boy of the
Colonna on the steps of a church. But Rienzi was of another Region, of
the Regola by the Tiber, and it is not yet time to tell his story. And
by and by, as the power of the Popes rose and they became again as the
Cæsars had been, Colonna and Orsini forgot their feuds, and were glad to
stand on the Pope's right and left as hereditary 'Assistants of the Holy
See.' In the petty ending of all old greatnesses in modern times, the
result of the greatest feud that ever made two races mortal foes is
merely that no prudent host dare ask the heads of the two houses to
dinner together, lest a question of precedence should arise, such as no
master of ceremonies would presume to settle. That is what it has come
to. Once upon a time an Orsini quarrelled with a Colonna in the Corso,
just where Aragno's café is now situated, and ran him through with his
rapier, wounding him almost to death. He was carried into the palace of
the Theodoli, close by, and the records of that family tell that within
the hour eight hundred of the Colonna's retainers were in the house to
guard him. In as short space, the Orsini called out three thousand men
in arms, when Cæsar Borgia's henchman claimed the payment of a tax.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MAUSOLEUM OF AUGUSTUS
From a print of the last century]
Times have changed since then. The Mausoleum of Augustus, once a
fortress, has been an open air theatre in our time, and there the great
Salvini and Ristori often acted in their early youth; it is a circus
now. And in less violent contrast, but with change as great from what it
was, the palace of the Colonna suggests no thought of defence nowadays,
and the wide gates and courtyard recall rather the splendours of the
Constable and of his wife, Maria Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin,
than the fiercer days when Castracane was Sciarra's guest on the other
side of the church.
The Basilica of the Apostles is said to have been built by Pelagius the
First, who was made Pope in the year 555, and who dedicated it to Saint
Philip and Saint James. Recent advances in the study of archæology make
it seem more than probable that he adapted for the purpose a part of the
ancient barracks of the Vigiles, of which the central portion appears
almost to coincide with the present church, at a somewhat different
angle; and in the same way it is likely that the remains of the north
wing were rebuilt at a later period by the Colonna as a fortified
palace. In those times men would not have neglected to utilize the
massive substructures and walls. However that may be, the Colonna dwelt
there at a very early date, and in eight hundred years or more have only
removed their headquarters from one side of the church to the other. The
latter has been changed and rebuilt, and altered again, like most of the
great Roman sanctuaries, till it bears no resemblance to the original
building. The present church is distinctly ugly, with the worst defects
of the early eighteenth century; and that age was as deficient in
cultivated taste as it was abhorrent of natural beauty. Some fragments
of the original frescos that adorned the apse are now preserved in a
hall behind the main Sacristy of Saint Peter's. Against the flat walls,
under the inquisition of the crudest daylight, the fragments of Melozzo
da Forli's masterpiece are masterpieces still; the angelic faces,
imprisoned in a place not theirs, reflect the sadness of art's
captivity; and the irretrievable destruction of an inimitable past
excites the pity and resentment of thoughtful men. The attempt to outdo
the works of the great has exhibited the contemptible imbecility of the
little, and the coarse-grained vanity of Clement the Eleventh has
parodied the poetry of art in the bombastic prose of a vulgar tongue.
Pope Pelagius took for his church the pillars and marbles of Trajan's
Forum, in the belief that his acts were acceptable to God; but Clement
had no such excuse, and the edifice which was a monument of faith has
given place to the temple of a monumental vanity.
[Illustration: FORUM OF TRAJAN]
It is remarkable that the Colonna rarely laid their dead in the Church
of the Apostles, for it was virtually theirs by right of immediate
neighbourhood, and during their domination they could easily have
assumed actual possession of it as a private property. A very curious
custom, which survived in the sixteenth century, and perhaps much later,
bears witness to the close connection between their family and the
church. At that time a gallery existed, accessible from the palace and
looking down into the basilica, so that the family could assist at Mass
without leaving their dwelling.
On the afternoon of the first of May, which is the traditional feast of
this church, the poor of the neighbourhood assembled within. The windows
of the palace gallery were then thrown open and a great number of fat
fowls were thrown alive to the crowd, turkeys, geese and the like, to
flutter down to the pavement and be caught by the luckiest of the people
in a tumultuous scramble. When this was over, a young pig was swung out
and lowered in slings by a purchase of which the block was seized to a
roof beam. When just out of reach the rope was made fast, and the most
active of the men jumped for the animal from below, till one was
fortunate enough to catch it with his hands, when the rope was let go,
and he carried off the prize. The custom was evidently similar to that
of climbing the May-pole, which was set up on the same day in the Campo
Vaccino. May-day was one of the oldest festivals of the Romans, for it
was sacred to the tutelary Lares, or spirits of ancestors, and was kept
holy, both publicly by the whole city as the habitation of the Roman
people, and by each family in its private dwelling. It is of Aryan
origin and is remembered in one way or another by all Aryan races in our
own time, and it is not surprising that in the general conversion of
Paganism to Christianity a new feast should have been intentionally made
to coincide with an old one; but it is hard to understand the lack of
all reverence for sacred places which could admit such a scene as the
scrambling for live fowls and pigs in honour of the twelve Apostles, a
pious exercise which is perhaps paralleled, though assuredly not
equalled, in crudeness, by the old Highland custom of smoking tobacco in
kirk throughout the sermon.
At the very time when we have historical record of a Pope's presence as
an amused spectator of the proceedings, Michelangelo had lately painted
the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, and had not yet begun his Last
Judgment; and 'Diva' Vittoria Colonna, not yet the friend of his later
years, was perhaps even then composing those strangely passionate
spiritual sonnets which appeal to the soul through the heart, by the
womanly pride that strove to make the heart subject to the soul.
The commonplace romance which has represented Vittoria Colonna and
Michelangelo as in love with each other is as unworthy of both as it is
wholly without foundation. They first met nine years before her death,
when she was almost fifty and he was already sixty-four. She had then
been widowed twelve years, and it was long since she had refused in
Naples the princely suitors who made overtures for her hand. The true
romance of her life was simpler, nobler and more enduring, for it began
when she was a child, and it ended when she breathed her last in the
house of Giuliano Cesarini, the kinsman of her people, whose descendant
married her namesake in our own time.
At the age of four, Vittoria was formally betrothed to Francesco
d'Avalos, heir of Pescara, one of that fated race whose family history
has furnished matter for more than one stirring tale. Vittoria was born
in Marino, the Roman town and duchy which still gives its title to
Prince Colonna's eldest son, and she was brought up in Rome and Naples,
of which latter city her father was Grand Constable. Long before she was
married, she saw her future husband and loved him at first sight, as
she loved him to her dying day, so that although even greater offers
were made for her, she steadfastly refused to marry any other man. They
were united when she was seventeen years old, he loved her devotedly,
and they spent many months together almost without other society in the
island of Ischia. The Emperor Charles the Fifth was fighting his
lifelong fight with Francis the First of France. Colonna and Pescara
were for the Empire, and Francesco d'Avalos joined the imperial army; he
was taken prisoner at Ravenna and carried captive to France; released,
he again fought for Charles, who offered him the crown of the kingdom of
Naples; but he refused it, and still he fought on, to fall at last at
Pavia, in the strength of his mature manhood, and to die of his wounds
in Milan when Vittoria was barely five and thirty years of age, still
young, surpassingly beautiful, and gifted as few women have ever been.
What their love was, their long correspondence tells,--a love passionate
as youth and enduring as age, mutual, whole and faithful. For many years
the heartbroken woman lived in Naples, where she had been most happy,
feeding her soul with fire and tears. At last she returned to Rome, to
her own people, in her forty-ninth year. There she was visited by the
old Emperor for whom her husband had given his life, and there she met
Michelangelo.
It was natural enough that they should be friends. It is monstrous to
suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together,
and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating
man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great
princess in her perpetual sorrow the greatest of creative minds was a
solace and a constant intellectual delight. Their friendship was mutual,
fitting and beautiful, which last is more than can be said for the
absurd stories about their intercourse which are extant in print and
have been made the subject of imaginary pictures by more than one
painter. The tradition that they used to meet often in the little Church
of Saint Sylvester, behind the Colonna gardens, rests upon the fact that
they once held a consultation there in the presence of Francesco
d'Olanda, a Portuguese artist, when Vittoria was planning the Convent of
Saint Catherine, which she afterwards built not very far away. The truth
is that she did not live in the palace of her kinsfolk after her return
to Rome, but most probably in the convent attached to the other and
greater Church of Saint Sylvester which stands in the square of that
name not far from the Corso. The convent itself is said to have been
originally built for the ladies of the Colonna who took the veil, and
was only recently destroyed to make room for the modern Post-office, the
church itself having passed into the hands of the English. The
coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint
doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great
women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine
Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the
ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal,
laid at her feet the homage of a sexagenarian's friendship.
In the battle of the archæologists the opposing forces traverse and
break ground, and rush upon each other again, 'hurtling together like
wild boars,'--as Mallory describes the duels of his knights,--and when
learned doctors disagree it is not the province of a searcher after
romance to attempt a definition of exact truths. 'Some romances
entertain the genius,' quotes Johnson, 'and strengthen it by the noble
ideas which they give of things; but they corrupt the truth of history.'
Professor Lanciani, who is probably the greatest authority, living or
dead, on Roman antiquities, places the site of the temple of the Sun in
the Colonna gardens, and another writer compares the latter to the
hanging gardens of Babylon, supported entirely on ancient arches and
substructures rising high above the natural soil below. But before
Aurelian erected the splendid building to record his conquest of
Palmyra, the same spot was the site of the 'Little Senate,' instituted
by Elagabalus in mirthful humour, between an attack of sacrilegious
folly and a fit of cruelty.
The 'Little Senate' was a woman's senate; in other words, it was a
regular assembly of the fashionable Roman matrons of the day, who met
there in hours of idleness under the presidency of the Emperor's mother,
Semiamira. Ælius Lampridius, quoted by Baracconi, has a passage about
it. 'From this Senate,' he says, 'issued the absurd laws for the
matrons, entitled Semiamiran Senatorial Decrees, which determined for
each matron how she might dress, to whom she must yield precedence, by
whom she might be kissed, deciding which ladies might drive in chariots,
and which in carts, and whether the latter should be drawn by
caparisoned horses, or by asses, or by mules, or oxen; who should be
allowed to be carried in a litter or a chair, which might be of leather
or of bone with fittings of ivory or of silver, as the case might be;
and it was even determined which ladies might wear shoes adorned only
with gold, and which might have gems set in their boots.' Considering
how little human nature has changed in eighteen hundred years it is easy
enough to imagine what the debates in the 'Little Senate' must have been
with Semiamira in the chair ruling everything 'out of order' which did
not please her capricious fancy: the shrill discussions about a
fashionable head-dress, the whispered intrigues for a jewel-studded
slipper, the stormy divisions on the question of gold hairpins, and the
atmosphere of beauty, perfumes, gossip, vanity and all feminine
dissension. But the 'Little Senate' was short-lived.
Some fifty years after Elagabalus, Aurelian triumphed over Zenobia of
Palmyra, and built his temple of the Sun. That triumph was the finest
sight, perhaps, ever seen in imperial Rome. Twenty richly caparisoned
elephants and two hundred captive wild beasts led the immense
procession; eight hundred pairs of gladiators came next, the glory and
strength of fighting manhood, with all their gleaming arms and
accoutrements, marching by the huge Flavian Amphitheatre, where sooner
or later they must fight each other to the death; then countless
captives of the East and South and West and North, Syrian nobles, Gothic
warriors, Persian dignitaries beside Frankish chieftains, and Tetricus,
the great Gallic usurper, in the attire of his nation, with his young
son whom he had dared to make a Senator in defiance of the Empire. Three
royal equipages followed, rich with silver, gold and precious stones,
one of them Zenobia's own, and she herself seated therein, young,
beautiful, proud and vanquished, loaded from head to foot with gems,
most bitterly against her will, her hands and feet bound with a golden
chain, and about her neck another, long and heavy, of which the end was
held by a Persian captive who walked beside the chariot and seemed to
lead her. Then Aurelian, the untiring conqueror, in the car of the
Gothic king, drawn by four great stags, which he himself was to
sacrifice to Jove that day according to his vow, and a long line of
wagons loaded down and groaning under the weight of the vast spoil; the
Roman army, horse and foot, the Senate and the people, a million,
perhaps, all following the indescribable magnificence of the great
triumph, along the Sacred Way, that was yellow with fresh strewn sand
and sweet with box and myrtle.
[Illustration: RUINS OF HADRIAN'S VILLA AT TIVOLI]
But when it was over, Aurelian, who was generous when he was not
violent, honoured Zenobia and endowed her with great fortune, and she
lived for many years as a Roman Matron in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. And
the Emperor made light of the 'Little Senate' and built his Sun temple
on the spot, with singular magnificence, enriching its decoration with
pearls and precious stones and with fifteen thousand pounds in weight of
pure gold. Much of that temple was still standing in the seventeenth
century and was destroyed by Urban the Eighth, the Pope who built the
heavy round tower on the south side of the Quirinal palace, facing Monte
Cavallo.
Monte Cavallo itself was a part of the Colonna villa, and its name, only
recently changed to Piazza del Quirinale, was given to it by the great
horses that stand on each side of the fountain, and which were found
long ago, according to tradition, between the Palazzo Rospigliosi and
the Palazzo della Consulta. In the times of Sixtus the Fifth, they were
in a pitiable state, their forelegs and tails gone, their necks broken,
their heads propped up by bits of masonry. When he finished the Quirinal
palace he restored them and set them up, side by side, before the
entrance, and when Pius the Sixth changed their position and turned them
round, the ever conservative and ever discontented Roman people were
disgusted by the change. On the pedestal of one of them are the words,
'Opus Phidiae,' 'the work of Phidias,' A punning placard was at once
stuck upon the inscription with the legend, 'Opus Perfidiae Pii
Sexti'--'the work of perfidy of Pius the Sixth.'
The Quirinal palace cannot be said to have played a part in the history
of Rome. Its existence is largely due to the common sense of Sixtus the
Fifth, and to his love of good air. He was a shepherd by birth, and it
is recorded that the first of his bitter disappointments was that the
farmer whom he served set him to feed the pigs because he could not
learn how to drive sheep to pasture; a disgrace which ultimately made
him run away, when he fell in with a monk whose face he liked. He
informed the astonished father that he meant to follow him everywhere,
'to Hell, if he chose,'--which was a forcible if not a pious
resolution,--and explained that the pigs would find their way home
alone. Later, when he had quarrelled with all the monks in Naples,
including his superiors, he came to Rome, and, being by that time very
learned, he was employed to expound the 'Formalities' of Scotus to the
'Signor' Marcantonio Colonna, abbot of the Monastery of the Apostles;
and there he resided as a guest for a long time till his brilliant pupil
was himself master of the subject, as well as a firm friend of the
quarrelsome monk; and in their intercourse the seeds were no doubt sown
of that implacable hatred against the Orsini which, under the great and
just provocation of a kinsman's murder, ended in the exile and temporary
ruin of the Colonna's rivals. No doubt, also, the abbot and the monk
often strolled together in the Colonna gardens, and the future Pope
breathed the high air of the Quirinal hill with a sense of relief, and
dreamed of living up there, far above the city, literally in an
atmosphere of his own. Therefore, when he was Pope, he made the great
palace that crowns the eminence, completing and extending a much smaller
building planned by the wise Gregory the Thirteenth, and ever since
then, until 1870, the Popes lived there during some part of the year. It
is modern, as age is reckoned in Rome, and it has modern associations in
the memory of living men.
It was from the great balcony of the Quirinal that Pius the Ninth
pronounced his famous benediction to an enthusiastic and patriotic
multitude in 1846. It will be remembered that a month after his
election, Pius proclaimed a general amnesty in favour of all persons
imprisoned for political crimes, and a decree by which all criminal
prosecutions for political offences should be immediately discontinued,
unless the persons accused were ecclesiastics, soldiers, or servants of
the government, or criminals in the universal sense of the word.
The announcement was received with a frenzy of enthusiasm, and Rome went
mad with delight. Instinctively, the people began to move towards the
Quirinal from all parts of the city, as soon as the proclamation was
published; the stragglers became a band, and swelled to a crowd; music
was heard, flags appeared and the crowd swelled to a multitude that
thronged the streets, singing, cheering and shouting for joy as they
pushed their way up to the palace, filling the square, the streets that
led to it and the Via della Dateria below it, to overflowing. In answer
to this popular demonstration the Pope appeared upon the great balcony
above the main entrance; a shout louder than all the rest burst from
below, the long drawn 'Viva!' of the southern races; he lifted his
hand, and there was silence; and in the calm summer air his quiet eyes
were raised towards the sky as he imparted his benediction to the people
of Rome.
Twenty-four years later, when the Italians had taken Rome, a detachment
of soldiers accompanied by a smith and his assistants marched up to the
same gate. Not a soul was within, and they had instructions to enter and
take possession of the palace. In the presence of a small and silent
crowd of sullen-looking men of the people, the doors were forced.
The difference between Unity under Augustus and Unity under Victor
Emmanuel is that under the Empire the Romans took Italy, whereas under
the Kingdom the Italians have taken Rome. Without pretending that there
can be any moral distinction between the two, one may safely admit that
there is a great and vital one between the two conditions of Rome, at
the two periods of history, a distinction no less than that which
separates the conqueror from the conquered, and the fruits of conquest
from the consequences of subjection. But thinking men do not forget that
they look at the past in one way and at the present in another; and that
while the actions of a nation are dictated by the impulses of contagious
sentiment, the judgments of history are too often based upon an all but
commercial reckoning and balancing of profit and loss.
When Sixtus the Fifth was building the Quirinal palace, he was not
working in a wilderness resembling the deserted fields of the outlying
Monti. The hill was covered with gardens and villas. Ippolito d'Este,
the son of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and of Lucrezia Borgia, had built
himself a residence on the west side of the hill, surrounded by gardens.
It was in the manner of his magnificent palace at Tivoli, that Villa
d'Este of which the melancholy charm had such a mysterious attraction
for Liszt, where the dark cypresses reflect their solemn beauty in the
stagnant water, and a weed-grown terrace mourns the dead artist in the
silence of decay.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DEL QUIRINALE]
Further on, along the Via Venti Settembre, stretched the pleasure
grounds of Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, who is remembered as the man who
first recognized the merits of the beautiful mutilated group
subsequently known as 'Pasquino,' and set it upon the pedestal which
made it famous, and gave its name a place in all languages, by the witty
lampoons and stinging satires almost daily affixed to the block of
stone. Many other villas followed in the same direction, and in those
insecure days not a few Romans, when the summer days grew hot, were
content to move up from their palaces in the lower parts of the city to
breathe the somewhat better air of the Quirinal and the Esquiline,
instead of risking a journey to the country.
Sixtus the Fifth died in the Quirinal palace, and twenty-one other Popes
have died there since, all following the curious custom of bequeathing
their hearts and viscera to the parish Church of the Saints Vincent and
Anastasius, which is known as the Church of Cardinal Mazarin, because
the tasteless front was built by him, though the rest existed much
earlier. It stands opposite the fountain of Trevi, at one corner of the
little square; the vault in which the urns were placed is just behind
and below the high altar; but Benedict the Fourteenth built a special
monument for them on the left of the apse, and a tablet on the right
records the names of the Popes who left these strange legacies to the
church.
In passing, one may remember that Mazarin himself was born in the Region
of Trevi, the son of a Sicilian,--like Crispi and Rudinì. His father was
employed at first as a butler and then as a steward by the Colonna,
married an illegitimate daughter of the family, and lived to see his
granddaughter, Maria Mancini, married to the head of the house, and his
son a cardinal and despot of France, and himself, after the death of his
first wife, the honoured husband of Porzia Orsini, so that he was the
only man in history who was married both to an Orsini and to a Colonna.
In the light of his father's extraordinary good fortune, the success of
the son, though not less great, is at least less astonishing. The
magnificent Rospigliosi palace, often ascribed by a mistake to Cardinal
Scipio Borghese, was the Palazzo Mazarini and Mazarin's father died
there; it was inherited by the Dukes of Nevers, through another niece of
the Cardinal's, and was bought from them between 1667 and 1670, by
Prince Rospigliosi, brother of Pope Clement the Ninth, then reigning.
Urban the Eighth, the Barberini Pope, had already left his mark on the
Quirinal hill. The great Barberini palace was built by him, it is said,
of stones taken from the Colosseum, whereupon a Pasquinade announced
that 'the Barberini had done what the Barbarians had not.' The
Barbarians did not pull down the Colosseum, it is true, but they could
assuredly not have built as Urban did, and in that particular instance,
without wishing to justify the vandalisms of the centuries succeeding
the Renascence, it may well be asked whether the Amphitheatre is not
more picturesque in its half-ruined state, as it stands, and whether the
city is not richer by a great work of art in the princely dwelling which
faces the street of the Four Fountains.
Among the many memories of the Quirinal there is one more mysterious
than the rest. The great Baths of Constantine extended over the site of
the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and the ruins were in part standing at the end
of the sixteenth century. It is related by a writer of those days and an
eye-witness of the fact, that a vault was discovered beneath the old
baths, about eighty feet long by twenty wide, closed at one end by a
wall thrown up with evident haste and lack of skill, and completely
filled with human bodies that fell to dust at the first touch, evidently
laid there all at the same time, just after death, and probably
numbering at least a thousand. In vain one conjectures the reason of
such wholesale burial--one of Nero's massacres, perhaps, or a plague. No
one can tell.
The invaluable Baracconi, often quoted, recalls the fact that Tasso,
when a child, lived with his father in some house on the Monte Cavallo,
when the execrable Carafa cardinal and his brother had temporarily
succeeded in seizing all the Colonna property; and he gives a letter of
Bernardo, the poet's father, written in July to his wife, who was away
just then.
[Illustration: PIAZZA BARBERINI]
'I do not wish the children to go to the vineyard because they get too
hot, and the air is bad there this summer, but in order that they may
have a change, I took steps to have the use of the Boccaccio Vineyard
[Villa Colonna], and the Duke of Paliano [then a Carafa, for the latter
had stolen the title as well as the lands] has let me have it, and we
have been here a week and shall stay all summer in this good air.'
The words call up a picture of Tasso, a small boy, pale with the heat of
a Roman summer, but restless and for ever running about, overheated and
catching cold like all delicate children, which brings the unhappy poet
a little nearer to us.
Of those great villas and gardens there remain the Colonna, the
Rospigliosi and the Quirinal, by far the largest of the three, and
enclosing between four walls an area almost, if not quite, equal to the
Pincio. The great palace where twenty-two popes died is inhabited by the
royal family of Italy and crowns the height, as the Vatican, far away
across the Tiber, is also on an eminence of its own. They face each
other, like two principles in natural and eternal opposition,--Rome the
conqueror of the world, and Italy the conqueror of Rome. And he who
loves the land for its own sake can only pray that if they must oppose
each other for ever in heart, they may abide in that state of civilized
though unreconciled peace, which is the nation's last and only hope of
prosperity.
[Illustration]
REGION III COLONNA
When the present Queen of Italy first came to Rome as Princess Margaret,
and drove through the city to obtain a general impression of it, she
reached the Piazza Colonna and asked what the column might be which is
the most conspicuous landmark in that part of Rome and gives a name to
the square, and to the whole Region. The answer of the elderly officer
who accompanied the Princess and her ladies is historical. 'That
column,' he answered, 'is the Column of Piazza Colonna'--'the Column of
Column Square,' as we might say--and that was all he could tell
concerning it, for his business was not archæology, but soldiering. The
column was erected by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose equestrian
statue stands on the Capitol, to commemorate his victory over the
Marcomanni.
[Illustration: ARCH OF TITUS]
It is remarkable that so many of the monuments still preserved
comparatively intact should have been set up by the adoptive line of the
so-called Antonines, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, and that the two
monster columns, the one in Piazza Colonna and the one in Trajan's
Forum, should be the work of the last and the first of those emperors,
respectively. Among other memorials of them are the Colosseum, the Arch
of Titus and the statue mentioned above. The lofty Septizonium is
levelled to the ground, the Palaces of the Cæsars are a mountain of
ruins, the triumphal arches of Marcus Aurelius and of Domitian have
disappeared with those of Gratian, of Valens, of Arcadius and of many
others; but the two gigantic columns still stand erect with their
sculptured tales of victory and triumph almost unbroken, surmounted by
the statues of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, whose memory was sacred to
all Christians long before the monuments were erected, and to whom,
respectively, they have been dedicated by a later age.
There may have been a connection, too, in the minds of the people,
between the 'Column of Piazza Colonna' and the Column of the Colonna
family, since a great part of this Region had fallen under the
domination of the noble house, and was held by them with a chain of
towers and fortifications; but the pillar which is the device of the
Region terminates in the statue of the Apostle Peter, whereas the one
which figures in the shield of Colonna is crowned with a royal crown, in
memory of the coronation of Lewis the Bavarian by Sciarra, who himself
generally lived in a palace facing the small square which bears his
name, and which is only a widening of the Corso just north of San
Marcello, the scene of Jacopo Colonna's brave protest against his
kinsman's mistaken imperialism.
The straight Corso itself, or what is the most important part of it to
Romans, runs through the Region from San Lorenzo in Lucina to Piazza di
Sciarra, and beyond that, southwards, it forms the western boundary of
Trevi as far as the Palazzo di Venezia, and the Ripresa de' Barberi--the
'Catching of the Racers.' West of the Corso, the Region takes in the
Monte Citorio and the Piazza of the Pantheon, but not the Pantheon
itself, and eastwards it embraces the new quarter which was formerly the
Villa Ludovisi, and follows the Aurelian wall, from Porta Salaria to
Porta Pinciana. Corso means a 'course,' and the Venetian Paul the
Second, who found Rome dull compared with Venice, gave it the name when
he made it a race-course for the Carnival, towards the close of the
fifteenth century. Before that it was Via Lata,--'Broad Street,'--and
was a straight continuation of the Via Flaminia, the main northern
highway from the city. For centuries it has been the chief playground of
the Roman Carnival, a festival of which, perhaps, nothing but the memory
will remain in a few years, when the world will wonder how it could be
possible that the population of the grave old city should have gone mad
each year for ten days and behaved itself by day and night like a crowd
of schoolboys let loose.
'Carnival' is supposed to be derived from 'Carnelevamen,' a 'solace for
the flesh.' Byron alone is responsible for the barbarous derivation
'Carne Vale,' farewell meat--a philological impossibility. In the minds
of the people it is probably most often translated as 'Meat Time,' a
name which had full meaning in times when occasional strict fasting and
frequent abstinence were imposed on Romans almost by law. Its beginnings
are lost in the dawnless night of time--of Time, who was Kronos, of
Kronos who was Saturn, of Saturn who gave his mysterious name to the
Saturnalia in which Carnival had its origin. His temple stood at the
foot of the Capitol hill, facing the corner of the Forum, and there are
remains of it today, tall columns in a row, with architrave and frieze
and cornice; from the golden milestone close at hand, as from the
beginning of time, were measured the ways of the world to the ends of
the earth; and the rites performed within it were older than any others,
and different, for here the pious Roman worshipped with uncovered head,
whereas in all other temples he drew up his robes as a veil lest any
sight of evil omen should meet his eyes, and here waxen tapers were
first burned in Rome in honour of a god. And those same tapers played a
part, to the end, on the last night of Carnival. But in the coincidence
of old feasts with new ones, the festival of Lupercus falls nearer to
the time of Ash Wednesday, for the Lupercalia were celebrated on the
fifteenth of February, whereas the Carnival of Saturn began on the
seventeenth of December.
Lupercus was but a little god, yet he was great among the shepherds in
Rome's pastoral beginnings, for he was the driver away of wolves, and on
his day the early settlers ran round and round their sheepfold on the
Palatine, all dressed in skins of fresh-slain goats, praising the Faun
god, and calling upon him to protect their flocks. And in truth, as the
winter, when wolves are hungry and daring, was over, his protection was
a foregone conclusion till the cold days came again. The grotto
dedicated to him was on the northwest slope of the Palatine, nearly
opposite the Church of Saint George in Velabro, across the Via di San
Teodoro; and all that remains of the great festival in which Mark Antony
and the rest ran like wild men through the streets of Rome, smiting men
and women with the purifying leathern thong, and offering at last that
crown which Cæsar thrice refused, is merged and forgotten, with the
Saturnalia, in the ten days' feasting and rioting that change to the
ashes and sadness of Lent, as the darkest night follows the brightest
day. For the Romans always loved strong contrasts.
Carnival, in the wider sense, begins at Christmas and ends when Lent
begins; but to most people it means but the last ten days of the season,
when festivities crowd upon each other till pleasure fights for minutes
as for jewels; when tables are spread all night and lights are put out
at dawn; when society dances itself into distraction and poor men make
such feasting as they can; when no one works who can help it, and no
work done is worth having, because it is done for double price and half
its value; when affairs of love are hastened to solution or catastrophe,
and affairs of state are treated with the scorn they merit in the eyes
of youth, because the only sense is laughter, and the only wisdom,
folly. That is Carnival, personified by the people as a riotous old
red-cheeked, bottle-nosed hunchback, animated by the spirit of fun.
In a still closer sense, Carnival is the Carnival in the Corso, or was;
for it is dead beyond resuscitation, and such efforts as are made to
give it life again are but foolish incantations that call up sad ghosts
of joy, spiritless and witless. But within living memory, it was very
different. In those days which can never come back, the Corso was a
sight to see and not to be forgotten. The small citizens who had small
houses in the street let every window to the topmost story for the whole
ten days; the rich whose palaces faced the favoured line threw open
their doors to their friends; every window was decorated, from every
balcony gorgeous hangings, or rich carpets, or even richer tapestries
hung down; the street was strewn thick with yellow sand, and wheresoever
there was an open space wooden seats were built up, row above row, where
one might hire a place to see the show and join in throwing flowers, and
the lime-covered 'confetti' that stung like small shot and whitened
everything like meal, and forced everyone in the street or within reach
of it to wear a shield of thin wire netting to guard the face, and thick
gloves to shield the hands; or, in older times, a mask, black, white, or
red, or modelled and painted with extravagant features, like evil beings
in a dream.
[Illustration: TWIN CHURCHES AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE CORSO
From a print of the last century]
In the early afternoon of each day except Sunday it all began, day after
day the same, save that the fun grew wilder and often rougher as the
doom of Ash Wednesday drew near. First when the people had gathered in
their places, high and low, and already thronged the street from side to
side, there was a distant rattle of scabbards and a thunder of hoofs,
and all fell back, crowding and climbing upon one another, to let a
score of cavalrymen trot through, clearing the way for the carriages of
the 'Senator' and Municipality, which drove from end to end of the Corso
with their scarlet and yellow liveries, before any other vehicles were
allowed to pass, or any pelting with 'confetti' began. But on the
instant when they had gone by, the showers began, right, left, upwards,
downwards, like little storms of flowers and snow in the afternoon
sunshine, and the whole air was filled with the laughter and laughing
chatter of twenty thousand men and women and children--such a sound as
could be heard nowhere else in the world. Many have heard a great host
cheer, many have heard the battle-cries of armies, many have heard the
terrible deep yell that goes up from an angry multitude in times of
revolution; but only those who remember the Carnival as it used to be
have heard a whole city laugh, and the memory is worth having, for it is
like no other. The sound used to flow along in great waves, following
the sights that passed, and swelling with them to a peal that was like a
cheer, and ebbing then to a steady, even ripple of enjoyment that never
ceased till it rose again in sheer joy of something new to see. Nothing
can give an idea of the picture in times when Rome was still Roman; no
power of description can call up the crowd that thronged and jammed the
long, narrow street, till the slowly moving carriages and cars seemed to
force their way through the stiffly packed mass of humanity as a strong
vessel ploughs her course up-stream through packed ice in winter. Yet no
one was hurt, and an order reigned which could never have been produced
by any means except the most thorough good temper and the determination
of each individual to do no harm to his neighbour, though all respect of
individuals was as completely gone as in any anarchy of revolution. The
more respectable a man looked who ventured into the press in ordinary
clothes, the more certainly he became at once the general mark for
hail-storms of 'confetti.' No uniform nor distinguishing badge was
respected, excepting those of the squad of cavalrymen who cleared the
way, and the liveries of the Municipality's coaches. Men and women were
travestied and disguised in every conceivable way, as Punch and Judy, as
judges and lawyers with enormous square black caps, black robes and
bands, or in dresses of the eighteenth century, or as Harlequins, or
even as bears and monkeys, singly, or in twos and threes, or in little
companies of fifteen or twenty, all dressed precisely alike and
performing comic evolutions with military exactness. Everyone carried a
capacious pouch, or a fishing-basket, or some receptacle of the kind for
the white 'confetti,' and arms and hands were ceaselessly swung in air,
flinging vast quantities of the snowy stuff at long range and short. At
every corner and in every side street, men sold it out of huge baskets,
by the five, and ten, and twenty pounds, weighing it out with the
ancient steelyard balance. Every balcony was lined with long troughs of
it, constantly replenished by the house servants; every carriage and car
had a full supply. And through all the air the odd, clean odour of the
fresh plaster mingled with the fragrance of the box-leaves and the
perfume of countless flowers. For flowers were thrown, too, in every
way, loose and scattered, or in hard little bunches, the 'mazzetti,'
that almost hurt when they struck the mark, and in beautiful nosegays,
rarely flung at random when a pretty face was within sight at a window.
The cars, often charmingly decorated, were filled with men and women
representing some period of fashion, or some incident in history, or
some allegorical subject, and were sometimes two or three stories high,
and covered all over with garlands of flowers and box and myrtle. In the
intervals between them endless open carriages moved along, lined with
white, filled with white dominos, drawn by horses all protected and
covered with white cotton robes, against the whiter 'confetti'--everyone
fighting mock battles with everyone else, till it seemed impossible that
anything could be left to throw, and the long perspective of the narrow
street grew dim between the high palaces, and misty and purple in the
evening light.
A gun fired somewhere far away as a signal warned the carriages to turn
out, and make way for the race that was to follow. The last moments were
the hottest and the wildest, as flowers, 'confetti,' sugar plums with
comet-like tails, wreaths, garlands, everything, went flying through the
air in a final and reckless profusion, and as the last car rolled away
the laughter and shouting ceased, and all was hushed in the expectation
of the day's last sight. Again, the clatter of hoofs and scabbards, as
the dragoons cleared the way; twenty thousand heads and necks craning to
look northward, as the people pushed back to the side pavements;
silence, and the inevitable yellow dog that haunts all race-courses,
scampering over the white street, scared by the shouts, and catcalls,
and bursts of spasmodic laughter; then a far sound of flying hoofs, a
dead silence, and the quick breathing of suppressed excitement; louder
and louder the hoofs, deader the hush; and then, in the dash of a
second, in the scud of a storm, in a whirlwind of light and colour and
sparkling gold leaf, with straining necks, and flashing eyes, and wide
red nostrils flecked with foam, the racing colts flew by as fleet as
darting lightning, riderless and swift as rock-swallows by the sea.
Then, if it were the last night of Carnival, as the purple air grew
brown in the dusk, myriads of those wax tapers first used in Saturn's
temple of old lit up the street like magic and the last game of all
began, for every man and woman and child strove to put out another's
candle, and the long, laughing cry, 'No taper! No taper! Senza moccolo!'
went ringing up to the darkling sky. Long canes with cloths or damp
sponges or extinguishers fixed to them started up from nowhere, down
from everywhere, from window and balcony to the street below, and from
the street to the low balconies above. Put out at every instant, the
little candles were instantly relighted, till they were consumed down to
the hand; and as they burned low, another cry went up, 'Carnival is
dead! Carnival is dead!' But he was not really dead till midnight, when
the last play of the season had been acted in the playhouses, the last
dance danced, the last feast eaten amid song and laughter, and the
solemn Patarina of the Capitol tolled out the midnight warning like a
funeral knell. That was the end.
The riderless race was at least four hundred years old when it was given
up. The horses were always called Bárberi, with the accent on the first
syllable, and there has been much discussion about the origin of the
name. Some say that it meant horses from Barbary, but then it should be
pronounced Barbéri, accented on the penultimate. Others think it stood
for Bárbari--barbarian, that is, unridden. The Romans never misplace an
accent, and rarely mistake the proper quantity of a syllable long or
short. For my own part, though no scholar has as yet suggested it, I
believe that the common people, always fond of easy witticisms and
catchwords, coined the appellation, with an eye to the meaning of both
the other derivations, out of Barbo, the family name of Pope Paul the
Second, who first instituted the Carnival races, and set the winning
post under the balcony of the huge Palazzo di Venezia, which he had
built beside the Church of Saint Mark, to the honour and glory of his
native city.
He made men run foot-races, too: men, youths and boys, of all ages; and
the poor Jews, in heavy cloth garments, were first fed and stuffed with
cakes and then made to run, too. The jests of the Middle Age were savage
compared with the roughest play of later times.
The pictures of old Rome are fading fast. I can remember, when a little
boy, seeing the great Carnival of 1859, when the Prince of Wales was in
Rome, and the masks which had been forbidden since the revolution were
allowed again in his honour; and before the flower throwing began, I saw
Liszt, the pianist, not yet in orders, but dressed in a close-fitting
and very fashionable grey frock-coat, with a grey high hat, young then,
tall, athletic and erect; he came out suddenly from a doorway, looked to
the right and left in evident fear of being made a mark for 'confetti,'
crossed the street hurriedly and disappeared--not at all the
silver-haired, priestly figure the world knew so well in later days. And
by and by the Prince of Wales came by in a simple open carriage, a thin
young man in a black coat, with a pale, face and a quiet smile, looking
all about him with an almost boyish interest, and bowing to the right
and left.
Then in deep contrast of sadness, out of the past years comes a great
funeral by night, down the Corso; hundreds of brown, white-bearded
friars, two and two with huge wax candles, singing the ancient chant of
the penitential psalms; hundreds of hooded lay brethren of the
Confraternities, some in black, some in white, with round holes for
their eyes that flashed through, now and then, in the yellow glare of
the flaming tapers; hundreds of little street boys beside them in the
shadow, holding up big horns of grocers' paper to catch the dripping
wax; and then, among priests in cotta and stole, the open bier carried
on men's shoulders, and on it the peaceful figure of a dead girl,
white-robed, blossom crowned, delicate as a frozen flower in the cold
winter air. She had died of an innocent love, they said, and she was
borne in through the gates of the Santi Apostoli to her rest in the
solemn darkness. Nor has anyone been buried in that way since then.
[Illustration: SAN LORENZO IN LUCINA]
In the days of Paul the Second, what might be called living Rome, taken
in the direction of the Corso, began at the Arch of Marcus Aurelius,
long attributed to Domitian, which stood at the corner of the small
square called after San Lorenzo in Lucina. Beyond that point, northwards
and eastwards, the city was a mere desert, and on the west side the
dwelling-houses fell away towards the Mausoleum of Augustus, the
fortress of the Colonna. The arch itself used to be called the Arch of
Portugal, because a Portuguese Cardinal, Giovanni da Costa, lived in the
Fiano palace at the corner of the Corso. No one would suppose that very
modern-looking building, with its smooth front and conventional
balconies, to be six hundred years old, the ancient habitation of all
the successive Cardinals of Saint Lawrence. Its only other interest,
perhaps, lies in the fact that it formed part of the great estates
bestowed by Sixtus the Fifth on his nephews, and was nevertheless sold
over their children's heads for debt, fifty-five years after his death.
The swineherd's race was prodigal, excepting the 'Great Friar' himself,
and, like the Prodigal Son, it was not long before the Peretti were
reduced to eating the husks.
It was natural that the palaces of the Renascence should rise along the
only straight street of any length in what was then the inhabited part
of the city, and that the great old Roman Barons, the Colonna, the
Orsini, the Caetani, should continue to live in their strongholds, where
they had always dwelt. The Caetani, indeed, once bought from a
Florentine banker what is now the Ruspoli palace, and Sciarra Colonna
had lived far down the Corso; but with these two exceptions, the
princely habitations between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di
Venezia are almost all the property of families once thought foreigners
in Rome. The greatest, the most magnificent private dwelling in the
world is the Doria Pamfili palace, as the Doria themselves were the most
famous, and became the most powerful of those many nobles who, in the
course of centuries, settled in the capital and became Romans, not only
in name but in fact--Doria, Borghese, Rospigliosi, Pallavicini and
others of less enduring fame or reputation, who came in the train or
alliance of a Pope, and remained in virtue of accumulated riches and
acquired honour.
Two hundred and fifty years have passed since a council of learned
doctors and casuists decided for Pope Innocent the Tenth the precise
limit of his just power to enrich his nephews and relations, the
Pamfili, by an alliance with whom the original Doria of Genoa added
another name to their own, and inherited the vast estates. But nearly
four hundred years before Innocent, the Doria had been high admirals and
almost despots of Genoa. For they were a race of seamen from the first,
in a republic where seamanship was the first essential to distinction.
Albert Doria overcame the Pisans off Meloria in 1284, slaying five
thousand, and taking eleven thousand prisoners. Conrad, his son, was
'Captain of the Genoese Freedom,' and 'Captain of the People.' Lamba
Doria vanquished the Venetians under the brave Andrea Dandolo, and
Paganino Doria conquered them again under another Andrea Dandolo; and
then an Andrea Doria took service with the Pope, and became the greatest
sailor in Europe, the hero of a hundred sea-fights, at one time the ally
of Francis the First of France, and the most dangerous opponent of
Gonzalvo da Cordova, then high admiral of the Empire under Charles the
Fifth, a destroyer of pirates, by turns the idol, the enemy and the
despot of his own city, Genoa, and altogether such a type of a
soldier-sailor of fortune as the world has not seen before or since. And
there were others after him, notably Gian Andrea Doria, remembered by
the great victory over the Turks at Lepanto, whence he brought home
those gorgeous Eastern spoils of tapestry and embroideries which hang in
the Doria palace today.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DORIA PAMFILI]
The history of the palace itself is not without interest, for it shows
how property, which was not in the possession of the original Barons,
sometimes passed from hand to hand, changing names with each new owner,
in the rise and fall of fortunes in those times. The first building
seems to have belonged to the Chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, which
somehow ceded it to Cardinal Santorio, who spent an immense sum in
rebuilding, extending and beautifying it. When it was almost finished,
Julius the Second came to see it, and after expressing the highest
admiration for the work, observed that such a habitation was less
fitting for a prince of the church than for a secular duke--meaning, by
the latter, his own nephew, Francesco della Rovere, then Duke of Urbino;
and the unfortunate Santorio, who had succeeded in preserving his
possessions under the domination of the Borgia, was forced to offer the
most splendid palace in Rome as a gift to the person designated by his
master. He died of a broken heart within the year. A hundred years
later, the Florentine Aldobrandini, nephew of Clement the Eighth, bought
it from the Dukes of Urbino for twelve thousand measures of grain,
furnished them for the purpose by their uncle, and finally, when it had
fallen in inheritance to Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, Innocent the Tenth
married her to his nephew, Camillo Pamfili, from whom, by the fusion of
the two families, it at last came into the hands of the Doria-Pamfili.
The Doria palace is almost two-thirds of the size of Saint Peter's, and
within the ground plan of Saint Peter's the Colosseum could stand. It
used to be said that a thousand persons lived under the roof outside of
the gallery and the private apartments, which alone surpass in extent
the majority of royal residences. Without some such comparison mere
words can convey nothing to a mind unaccustomed to such size and space,
and when the idea is grasped, one asks, naturally enough, how the people
lived who built such houses--the people whose heirs, far reduced in
splendour, if not in fortune, are driven to let four-fifths of their
family mansion, because they find it impossible to occupy more rooms
than suffice the Emperor of Germany or the Queen of England. One often
hears foreign visitors, ignorant of the real size of palaces in Rome,
observe, with contempt, that the Roman princes 'let their palaces.' It
would be more reasonable to inquire what use could be made of such
buildings, if they were not let, or how any family could be expected to
inhabit a thousand rooms, and, ultimately, for what purpose such
monstrous residences were ever built at all.
The first thing that suggests itself in answer to the latter question as
the cause of such boundless extravagance is the inherited giantism of
the Latins, to which reference has been more than once made in these
pages, and to which the existence of many of the principal buildings in
Rome must be ascribed. Next, we may consider that at one time or
another, each of the greater Roman palaces has been, in all essentials,
the court of a pope or of a reigning feudal prince. Lastly, it must be
remembered that each palace was the seat of management of all its
owner's estates, and that such administration in those times required a
number of scribes and an amount of labour altogether out of proportion
with the income derived from the land.
At first sight the study of Italian life in the Middle Age does not seem
very difficult, because it is so interesting. But when one has read the
old chronicles that have survived, and the histories of those times, one
is amazed to see how much we are told about people and their actions,
and how very little about the way in which people lived. It is easier to
learn the habits of the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the ancient Romans,
or the Assyrians, than to get at the daily life of an Italian family
between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, from such books as we
have. There are two reasons for this. One is the scarcity of literature,
excepting historical chronicles, until the time of Boccaccio and the
Italian storytellers. The other is the fact that what we call the Middle
Age was an age of transition from barbarism to the civilization of the
Renascence, and the Renascence was reached by sweeping away all the
barbarous things that had gone before it.
One must have lived a lifetime in Italy to be able to call up a fairly
vivid picture of the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. One
must have actually seen the grand old castles and gloomy monasteries,
and feudal villages of Calabria and Sicily, where all things are least
changed from what they were, and one should understand something of the
nature of the Italian people, where the original people have survived;
one must try also to realize the violence of those passions which are
ugly excrescences on Italian character even now, and which were once the
main movers of that character.
There are extant many inventories of lordly residences of earlier times
in Italy, for the inventory was taken every time the property changed
hands by inheritance or sale. Everyone of these inventories begins at
the main gate of the stronghold, and the first item is 'Rope for giving
the cord.' Now 'to give the cord' was a torture, and all feudal lords
had the right to inflict it. The victim's hands were tied behind his
back, the rope was made fast to his bound wrists, and he was hoisted
some twenty feet or so to the heavy iron ring which is fixed in the
middle of the arch of every old Italian castle gateway; he was then
allowed to drop suddenly till his feet, to which heavy weights were
sometimes attached, were a few inches from the ground, so that the
strain of his whole weight fell upon his arms, twisted them backwards,
and generally dislocated them at the shoulders. And this was usually
done three times, and sometimes twenty times, in succession, to the same
prisoner, either as a punishment or by way of examination, to extract a
confession of the truth. As the rope of torture was permanently rove
through the pulley over the front door, it must have been impossible not
to see it and remember what it meant every time one went in or out. And
such quick reminders of danger and torture, and sudden, painful death,
give the pitch and key of daily existence in the Middle Age. Every man's
life was in his hand until it was in his enemy's. Every man might be
forced, at a moment's notice, to defend not only his honour, and his
belongings, and his life, but his women and children, too,--not against
public enemies only, but far more often against private spite and
personal hatred. Nowadays, when most men only stake their money on their
convictions, it is hard to realize how men reasoned who staked their
lives at every turn; or to guess, for instance, at what women felt whose
husbands and sons, going out for a stroll of an afternoon, in the
streets of Rome, might as likely as not be brought home dead of a dozen
sword-wounds before evening. A husband, a father, was stabbed in the
dark by treachery; try and imagine the daily and year-long sensations of
the widowed mother, bringing up her only son deliberately to kill her
husband's murderer; teaching him to look upon vengeance as the first,
most real and most honourable aim of life, from the time he was old
enough to speak, to the time when he should be strong enough to kill.
Everything was earnest then. One should remember that most of the
stories told by Boccaccio, Sacchetti and Bandello--the stories from
which Shakespeare got his Italian plays, his Romeo and Juliet, his
Merchant of Venice--were not inventions, but were founded on the truth.
Everyone has read about Cæsar Borgia, his murders, his treacheries and
his end, and he is held up to us as a type of monstrous wickedness. But
a learned Frenchman, Émile Gebhart, has recently written a rather
convincing treatise, to show that Cæsar Borgia was not a monster at all,
nor even much of an exception to the general rule among the Italian
despots of his day, and his day was civilized compared with that of
Rienzi, of Boniface the Eighth, of Sciarra Colonna.
In order to understand anything about the real life of the Middle Age,
one should begin at the beginning; one should see the dwellings, the
castles, and the palaces with their furniture and arrangements, one
should realize the stern necessities as well as the few luxuries of that
time. And one should make acquaintance with the people themselves, from
the grey-haired old baron, the head of the house, down to the scullery
man and the cellarer's boy and the stable lads. And then, knowing
something of the people and their homes, one might begin to learn
something about their household occupations, their tremendously tragic
interests and their few and simple amusements.
[Illustration: PORTA SAN LORENZO]
The first thing that strikes one about the dwellings is the enormous
strength of those that remain. The main idea, in those days, when a man
built a house, was to fortify himself and his belongings against attacks
from the outside, and every other consideration was secondary to that.
That is true not only of the Barons' castles in the country and of their
fortified palaces in town,--which were castles, too, for that
matter,--but of the dwellings of all classes of people who could afford
to live independently, that is, who were not serfs and retainers of the
rich. We talk of fire-proof buildings nowadays, which are mere shells of
iron and brick and stone that shrivel up like writing-paper in a great
fire. The only really fire-proof buildings were those of the Middle Age,
which consisted of nothing but stone and mortar throughout, stone walls,
stone vaults, stone floors, and often stone tables and stone seats. I
once visited the ancient castle of Muro, in the Basilicata, one of the
southern provinces in Italy, where Queen Joanna the First paid her life
for her sins at last, and died under the feather pillow that was forced
down upon her face by two Hungarian soldiers. It is as wild and lonely a
place as you will meet with in Europe, and yet the great castle has
never been a ruin, nor at any time uninhabited, since it was built in
the eleventh century, over eight hundred years ago. Nor has the lower
part of it ever needed repair. The walls are in places twenty-five feet
thick, of solid stone and mortar, so that the embrasure by which each
narrow window is reached is like a tunnel cut through rock, while the
deep prisons below are hewn out of the rock itself. Up to what we should
call the third story, every room is vaulted. Above that the floors are
laid on beams, and the walls are not more than eight feet
thick--comparatively flimsy for such a place! Nine-tenths of it was
built for strength--the small remainder for comfort; there is not a
single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within
the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved space, barely big
enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the
crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding
steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that
echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea
caves to the tramp of armed men. And so it was in the cities, too. In
Rome, bits of the old strongholds survive still. There were more of them
thirty years ago. Even the more modern palaces of the late Renascence
are built in such a way that they must have afforded a safe refuge
against everything except artillery. The strong iron-studded doors and
the heavily grated windows of the ground floor would stand a siege from
the street. The Palazzo Gabrielli, for two or three centuries the chief
dwelling of the Orsini, is built in the midst of the city like a great
fortification, with escarpments and buttresses and loop-holes; and at
the main gate there is still a portcullis which sinks into the ground by
a system of chains and balance weights and is kept in working order even
now.
In the Middle Age, each town palace had one or more towers, tall, square
and solid, which were used as lookouts and as a refuge in case the rest
of the palace should be taken by an enemy. The general principle of all
mediæval towers was that they were entered through a small window at a
great height above the ground, by means of a jointed wooden ladder. Once
inside, the people drew the ladder up after them and took it in with
them, in separate pieces. When that was done, they were comparatively
safe, before the age of gunpowder. There were no windows to break, it
was impossible to get in, and the besieged party could easily keep
anyone from scaling the tower, by pouring boiling oil or melted lead
from above, or with stones and missiles, so that as long as provisions
and water held out, the besiegers could do nothing. As for water, the
great rainwater cistern was always in the foundations of the tower
itself, immediately under the prison, which got neither light nor air
excepting from a hole in the floor above. Walls from fifteen to twenty
feet thick could not be battered down with any engines then in
existence. Altogether, the tower was a safe place in times of danger. It
is said that at one time there were over four hundred of these in Rome,
belonging to the nobles, great and small.
The small class of well-to-do commoners, the merchants and goldsmiths,
such as they were, who stood between the nobles and the poor people,
imitated the nobles as much as they could, and strengthened their houses
by every means. For their dwellings were their warehouses, and in times
of disturbance the first instinct of the people was to rob the
merchants, unless they chanced to be strong enough to rob the nobles, as
sometimes happened. But in Rome the merchants were few, and were very
generally retainers or dependants of the great houses. It is frequent in
the chronicles to find a man mentioned as the 'merchant' of the Colonna
family, or of the Orsini, or of one of the independent Italian princes,
like the Duke of Urbino. Such a man acted as agent to sell the produce
of a great estate; part of his business was to lend money to the owner,
and he also imported from abroad the scanty merchandise which could be
imported at all. About half of it usually fell into the hands of
highwaymen before it reached the city, and the price of luxuries was
proportionately high. Such men, of course, lived well, though there was
a wide difference between their mode of life and that of the nobles, not
so much in matters of abundance and luxury, as in principle. The chief
rule was that the wives and daughters of the middle class did a certain
amount of housekeeping work, whereas the wives and daughters of the
nobles did not. The burgher's wife kept house herself, overlooked the
cooking, and sometimes cooked a choice dish with her own hands, and
taught her daughters to do so. A merchant might have a considerable
retinue of men, for his service and protection, and they carried staves
when they accompanied their master abroad, and lanterns at night. But
the baron's men were men-at-arms,--practically soldiers,--who wore his
colours, and carried swords and pikes, and lit the way for their lord at
night with torches, always the privilege of the nobles. As a matter of
fact, they were generally the most dangerous cutthroats whom the
nobleman was able to engage, highwaymen, brigands and outlaws, whom he
protected against the semblance of the law; whereas the merchant's
train consisted of honest men who worked for him in his warehouse, or
they were countrymen from his farms, if he had any.
It is not easy to give any adequate idea of those great mediæval
establishments, except by their analogy with the later ones that came
after them. They were enormous in extent, and singularly uncomfortable
in their internal arrangement.
A curious book, published in 1543, and therefore at the first
culmination of the Renascence, has lately been reprinted. It is entitled
'Concerning the management of a Roman Nobleman's Court,' and was
dedicated to 'The magnificent and Honourable Messer Cola da Benevento,'
forty years after the death of the Borgia Pope and during the reign of
Paul the Third, Farnese, who granted the writer a copyright for ten
years. The little volume is full of interesting details, and the
attendant gentlemen and servants enumerated give some idea of what
according to the author was not considered extravagant for a nobleman of
the sixteenth century. There were to be two chief chamberlains, a
general controller of the estates, a chief steward, four chaplains, a
master of the horse, a private secretary and an assistant secretary, an
auditor, a lawyer and four literary personages, 'Letterati,' who, among
them, must know 'the four principal languages of the world, namely,
Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Italian.' The omission of every other living
language but the latter, when Francis the First, Charles the Fifth and
Henry the Eighth were reigning, is pristinely Roman in its contempt of
'barbarians.' There were also to be six gentlemen of the chambers, a
private master of the table, a chief carver and ten waiting men, a
butler of the pantry with an assistant, a butler of the wines, six head
grooms, a marketer with an assistant, a storekeeper, a cellarer, a
carver for the serving gentlemen, a chief cook, an under cook and
assistant, a chief scullery man, a water carrier, a sweeper,--and last
in the list, a physician, whom the author puts at the end of the list,
'not because a doctor is not worthy of honour, but in order not to seem
to expect any infirmity for his lordship or his household.'
This was considered a 'sufficient household' for a nobleman, but by no
means an extravagant one, and many of the officials enumerated were
provided with one or more servants, while no mention is made of any
ladies in the establishment nor of the numerous retinue they required.
But one remembers the six thousand servants of Augustus, all honourably
buried in one place, and the six hundred who waited on Livia alone; and
the modest one hundred and seven which were reckoned 'sufficient' for
the Lord Cola of Benevento sink into comparative insignificance. For
Livia, besides endless keepers of her robes and folders of her
clothes--a special office--and hairdressers, perfumers, jewellers and
shoe keepers, had a special adorner of her ears, a keeper of her chair
and a governess for her favourite lap-dog.
The little book contains the most complete details concerning daily
expenditure for food and drink for the head of the house and his
numerous gentlemen, which amounted in a year to the really not
extravagant sum of four thousand scudi, or dollars, over fourteen
hundred being spent on wine alone. The allowance was a jug--rather more
than a quart--of pure wine daily to each of the 'gentlemen,' and the
same measure diluted with one-third of water to all the rest. Sixteen
ounces of beef, mutton, or veal were reckoned for every person, and each
received twenty ounces of bread of more or less fine quality, according
to his station; and an average of twenty scudi was allowed daily as
given away in charity,--which was not ungenerous, either, for such a
household. The olive oil used for the table and for lamps was the same,
and was measured together, and the household received each a pound of
cheese, monthly, besides a multitude of other eatables, all of which are
carefully enumerated and valued. Among other items of a different nature
are 'four or five large wax candles daily, for his lordship,' and wax
for torches 'to accompany the dishes brought to his table, and to
accompany his lordship and the gentlemen out of doors at night,' and
'candles for the altar,' and tallow candles for use about the house. As
for salaries and wages, the controller and chief steward received ten
scudi, each month, whereas the chaplain only got two, and the 'literary
men,' who were expected to know Hebrew, Greek and Latin, were each paid
one hundred scudi yearly. The physician was required to be not only
'learned, faithful, diligent and affectionate,' but also 'fortunate' in
his profession. Considering the medical practices of those days, a
doctor could certainly not hope to heal his patients without the element
of luck.
The old-fashioned Roman character is careful, if not avaricious, with
occasional flashes of astonishing extravagance, and its idea of riches
is so closely associated with that of power as to make the display of a
numerous retinue its first and most congenial means of exhibiting great
wealth; so that to this day a Roman in reduced fortune will live very
poorly before he will consent to exist without the two or three
superfluous footmen who loiter all day in his hall, or the handsome
equipage in which his wife and daughters are accustomed to take the
daily drive, called from ancient times the 'trottata,' or 'trot,' in the
Villa Borghese, or the Corso, or on the Pincio, and gravely provided for
in the terms of the marriage contract. At a period when servants were
necessary, not only for show but also for personal protection, it is not
surprising that the nobles should have kept an extravagant number of
them.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DI MONTE CITORIO
From a print of the last century]
Then also, to account for the size of Roman palaces, there was the
patriarchal system of life, now rapidly falling into disuse. The
so-called 'noble floor' of every mansion is supposed to be reserved
exclusively for the father and mother of the family, and the order of
arranging the rooms is as much a matter of rigid rule as in the houses
of the ancient Romans, where the vestibule preceded the atrium, the
atrium the peristyle, and the latter the last rooms which looked upon
the garden. So in the later palace, the door from the first landing of
the grand staircase opens upon an outer hall, uncarpeted, but crossed by
a strip of matting, and furnished only with a huge table and
old-fashioned chests, made with high backs, on which are painted or
carved the arms of the family. Here, at least two or three footmen are
supposed to be in perpetual readiness to answer the door, the lineally
descended representatives of the armed footmen who lounged there four
hundred years ago. Next to the hall comes the antechamber, sometimes
followed by a second, and here is erected the 'baldacchino,' the
coloured canopy which marks the privilege of the sixty 'conscript
families' of Rome, who rank as princes. It recalls the times when,
having powers of justice, and of life and death, the lords sat in state
under the overhanging silks, embroidered with their coats of arms, to
administer the law. Beyond the antechamber comes the long succession of
state apartments, lofty, ponderously decorated, heavily furnished with
old-fashioned gilt or carved chairs that stand symmetrically against the
walls, and on the latter are hung pictures, priceless works of old
masters beside crude portraits of the last century, often arranged much
more with regard to the frames than to the paintings. Stiff-legged
pier-tables of marble and alabaster face the windows or are placed
between them; thick curtains that can be drawn quite back cover the
doors; strips of hemp carpet lead straight from one door to another; the
light is dim and cold, half shut out by the window curtains, and gets a
peculiar quality of sadness and chilliness, which is essentially
characteristic of every old Roman house, where the reception rooms are
only intended to be used at night, and the sunny side is exclusively
appropriated to the more intimate life of the owners. There may be
three, four, six, ten of those big drawing-rooms in succession, each
covering about as much space as a small house in New York or London,
before one comes to the closed door that gives access to the princess'
boudoir, beyond which, generally returning in a direction parallel with
the reception rooms, is her bedroom, and the prince's, and the latter's
study, and then the private dining-room, the state dining-room, the
great ballroom, with clear-story windows, and as many more rooms as the
size of the apartment will admit. In the great palaces, the picture
gallery takes a whole wing and sometimes two, the library being
generally situated on a higher story.
The patriarchal system required that all the married sons, with their
wives and children and servants, should be lodged in the same building
with their parents. The eldest invariably lived on the second floor, the
second son on the third, which is the highest, though there is generally
a low rambling attic, occupied by servants, and sometimes by the
chaplain, the librarian and the steward, in better rooms. When there
were more than two married sons, which hardly ever happened under the
old system of primogeniture, they divided the apartments between them as
best they could. The unmarried younger children had to put up with what
was left. Moreover, in the greatest houses, where there was usually a
cardinal of the name, one wing of the first floor was entirely given up
to him; and instead of the canopy in the antechamber, flanked by the
hereditary coloured umbrellas carried on state occasions by two lackeys
behind the family coach, the prince of the Church was entitled to a
throne room, as all cardinals are. The eldest son's apartment was
generally more or less a repetition of the state one below, but the
rooms were lower, the decorations less elaborate, though seldom less
stiff in character, and a large part of the available space was given up
to the children.
It is clear from all this that even in modern times a large family might
take up a great deal of room. Looking back across two or three
centuries, therefore, to the days when every princely household was a
court, and was called a court, it is easier to understand the existence
of such phenomenally vast mansions as the Doria palace, or those of the
Borghese, the Altieri, the Barberini and others, who lived in almost
royal state, and lodged hundreds upon hundreds of retainers in their
homes.
And not only did all the members of the family live under one roof, as a
few of them still live, but the custom of dining together at one huge
table was universal. A daily dinner of twenty persons--grandparents,
parents and children, down to the youngest that is old enough to sit up
to its plate in a high chair, would be a serious matter to most European
households. But in Rome it was looked upon as a matter of course, and
was managed through the steward by a contract with the cook, who was
bound to provide a certain number of dishes daily for the fixed meals,
but nothing else--not so much as an egg or a slice of toast beyond
that. This system still prevails in many households, and as it is to be
expected that meals at unusual hours may sometimes be required, an
elaborate system of accounts is kept by the steward and his clerks, and
the smallest things ordered by any of the sons or daughters are charged
against an allowance usually made them, while separate reckonings are
kept for the daughters-in-law, for whom certain regular pin-money is
provided out of their own dowries at the marriage settlement, all of
which goes through the steward's hands. The same settlement, even in
recent years, stipulated for a fixed number of dishes of meat daily,
generally only two, I believe, for a certain number of new gowns and
other clothes, and for a great variety of details, besides the use of a
carriage every day, to be harnessed not more than twice, that is, either
in the morning and afternoon, or once in the daytime and once at night.
Everything,--a cup of tea, a glass of lemonade,--if not mentioned in the
marriage settlement, had to be paid for separately. The justice of such
an arrangement--for it is just--is only equalled by its inconvenience,
for it requires the machinery of a hotel, combined with an honesty not
usual in hotels. Undoubtedly, the whole system is directly descended
from the practice of the ancients, which made every father of a family
the absolute despot of his household, and made it impossible for a son
to hold property or have any individual independence during his
father's life, and it has not been perceptibly much modified since the
Middle Age, until the last few years. Its existence shows in the
strongest light the main difference between the Latin and the
Anglo-Saxon races, in the marked tendency of the one to submit to
despotic government, and of the other to govern itself; of the one to
stay at home under paternal authority, and of the other to leave the
father's house and plunder the world for itself; of the sons of the one
to accept wives given them, and of the other's children to marry as they
please.
Roman family life, from Romulus to the year 1870, was centred in the
head of the house, whose position was altogether unassailable, whose
requirements were necessities, and whose word was law. Next to him in
place came the heir, who was brought up with a view to his exercising
the same powers in his turn. After him, but far behind him in
importance, if he promised to be strong, came the other sons, who, if
they took wives at all, were expected to marry heiresses, and one of
whom, almost as a matter of course, was brought up to be a churchman.
The rest, if there were any, generally followed the career of arms, and
remained unmarried; for heiresses of noble birth were few, and their
guardians married them to eldest sons of great houses whenever possible,
while the strength of caste prejudice made alliances of nobles with the
daughters of rich plebeians extremely unusual.
It is possible to trace the daily life of a Roman family in the Middle
Age from its regular routine of today, as out of what anyone may see in
Italy the habits of the ancients can be reconstructed with more than
approximate exactness. And yet it is out of the question to fix the
period of the general transformation which ultimately turned the Rome of
the Barons into the Rome of Napoleon's time, and converted the
high-handed men of Sciarra Colonna's age into the effeminate fops of
1800, when a gentleman of noble lineage, having received a box on the
ear from another at high noon in the Corso, willingly followed the
advice of his confessor, who counselled him to bear the affront with
Christian meekness and present his other cheek to the smiter. Customs
have remained, fashions have altogether changed; the outward forms of
early living have survived, the spirit of life is quite another; and
though some families still follow the patriarchal mode of existence, the
patriarchs are gone, the law no longer lends itself to support household
tyranny, and the subdivision of estates under the Napoleonic code is
guiding an already existing democracy to the untried issue of a
problematic socialism. Without attempting to establish a comparison upon
the basis of a single cause, where so many are at work, it is
permissible to note that while in England and Germany a more or less
voluntary system of primogeniture is admitted and largely followed from
choice, and while in the United States men are almost everywhere
entirely free to dispose of their property as they please, and while the
population and wealth of those countries are rapidly increasing, France,
enforcing the division of estates among children, though she is
accumulating riches, is faced by the terrible fact of a steadily
diminishing census; and Italy, under the same laws, is not only rapidly
approaching national bankruptcy, but is in parts already depopulated by
an emigration so extensive that it can only be compared with the
westward migration of the Aryan tribes. The forced subdivision of
property from generation to generation is undeniably a socialistic
measure, since it must, in the end, destroy both aristocracy and
plutocracy; and it is surely a notable point that the two great European
nations which have adopted it as a fundamental principle of good
government should both be on the road to certain destruction, while
those powers that have wholly and entirely rejected any such measure are
filling the world with themselves and absorbing its wealth at an
enormous and alarming rate.
[Illustration: VILLA BORGHESE]
The art of the Renascence has left us splendid pictures of mediæval
public life, which are naturally accepted as equally faithful
representations of the life of every day. Princes and knights, in
gorgeous robes and highly polished armour, ride on faultlessly
caparisoned milk-white steeds; wondrous ladies wear not less wonderful
gowns, fitted with a perfection which women seek in vain today, and
embroidered with pearls and precious stones that might ransom a rajah;
young pages, with glorious golden hair, stand ready at the elbows of
their lords and ladies, or kneel in graceful attitude to deliver a
letter, or stoop to bear a silken train, clad in garments which the
modern costumer strives in vain to copy. After three or four centuries,
the colours of those painted silks and satins are still richer than
anything the loom can weave. In the great fresco, each individual of the
multitude that fills a public place, or defiles in open procession under
the noonday light, is not only a masterpiece of fashion, but a model of
neatness; linen, delicate as woven gossamer, falls into folds as finely
exact as an engraver's point could draw; velvet shoes tread without
speck or spot upon the well-scoured pavement of a public street;
men-at-arms grasp weapons and hold bridles with hands as carefully
tended as any idle fine gentleman's, and there is neither fleck nor
breath of dimness on the mirror-like steel of their armour; the very
flowers, the roses and lilies that strew the way, are the perfection of
fresh-cut hothouse blossoms; and when birds and beasts chance to be
necessary to the composition of the picture, they are represented with
no less care for a more than possible neatness, their coats are combed
and curled, their attitudes are studied and graceful, they wear
carefully made collars, ornamented with chased silver and gold.
Centuries have dimmed the wall-painting, sunshine has faded it, mould
has mottled the broad surfaces of red and blue and green, and a later
age has done away with the dresses represented; yet, when the frescos in
the library of the Cathedral at Siena, for instance, were newly
finished, they were the fashion-plates of the year and month, executed
by a great artist, it is true, grouped with matchless skill and drawn
with supreme mastery of art, but as far from representing the ordinary
scenes of daily life as those terrible coloured prints published
nowadays for tailors, in which a number of beautiful young gentlemen, in
perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an
equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and
pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the
æsthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of
the same room. In the comparison there is all the brutal profanity of
truth that shocks the reverence of romance; but in the respective
relations of the great artist's masterpiece and of the poor modern
lithograph to the realities of each period, there is the clue to the
daily life of the Middle Age.
Living was outwardly rough as compared with the representations of it,
though it was far more refined than in any other part of Europe, and
Italy long set the fashion to the world in habits and manners. People
kept their fine clothes for great occasions, there was a keeper of robes
in every large household, and there were rooms set apart for the
purpose. In every-day life, the Barons wore patched hose and leathern
jerkins, stained and rusted by the joints of the armour that was so
often buckled over them, or they went about their dwellings in long
dressing-gowns which hid many shortcomings. When gowns, and hose, and
jerkins were well worn, they were cut down for the boys of the family,
and the fine dresses, only put on for great days, were preserved as
heirlooms from generation to generation, whether they fitted the
successive wearers or not. The beautiful tight-fitting hose which, in
the paintings of the time, seem to fit like theatrical tights, were
neither woven nor knitted, but were made of stout cloth, and must often
have been baggy at the knees in spite of the most skilful cutting; and
the party-coloured hose, having one leg of one piece of stuff and one of
another, and sometimes each leg of two or more colours, were very likely
first invented from motives of economy, to use up cuttings and leavings.
Clothes were looked upon as permanent and very desirable property, and
kings did not despise a gift of fine scarlet cloth, in the piece, to
make them a gown or a cloak. As for linen, as late as the sixteenth
century, the English thought the French nobles very extravagant because
they put on a clean shirt once a fortnight and changed their ruffles
once a week.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DI VENEZIA]
The mediæval Roman nobles were most of them great farmers as well as
fighters. Then, as now, land was the ultimate form of property, and its
produce the usual form of wealth; and then, as now, many families were
'land-poor,' in the sense of owning tracts of country which yielded
little or no income but represented considerable power, and furnished
the owners with most of the necessaries of life, such rents as were
collected being usually paid in kind, in oil and wine, in grain, fruit
and vegetables, and even in salt meat, and horses, cattle for
slaughtering and beasts of burden, not to speak of wool, hemp and flax,
as well as firewood. But money was scarce and, consequently, all the
things which only money could buy, so that a gown was a possession, and
a corselet or a good sword a treasure. The small farmer of our times
knows what it means to have plenty to eat and little to wear. His
position is not essentially different from that of the average landed
gentry in the Middle Age, not only in Italy, but all over Europe. In
times when superiority lay in physical strength, courage, horsemanship
and skill in the use of arms, the so-called gentleman was not
distinguished from the plebeian by the newness or neatness of his
clothes so much as by the nature and quality of the weapons he wore when
he went abroad in peace or war, and very generally by being mounted on a
good horse.
In his home he was simple, even primitive. He desired space more than
comfort, and comfort more than luxury. His furniture consisted almost
entirely of beds, chests and benches, with few tables except such as
were needed for eating. Beds were supported by boards laid on trestles,
raised very high above the floor to be beyond the reach of rats, mice
and other creatures. The lower mattress was filled with the dried leaves
of the maize, and the upper one contained wool, with which the pillows
also were stuffed. The floors of dwelling rooms were generally either
paved with bricks or made of a sort of cement, composed of lime, sand
and crushed brick, the whole being beaten down with iron pounders, while
in the moist state, during three days. There were no carpets, and fresh
rushes were strewn everywhere on the floors, which in summer were first
watered, like a garden path, to lay the dust. There was no glass in the
windows of ordinary rooms, and the consequence was that during the
daytime people lived almost in the open air, in winter as well as
summer; sunshine was a necessity of existence, and sheltered courts and
cloistered walks were built like reservoirs for the light and heat.
In the rooms, ark-shaped chests stood against the walls, to contain the
ordinary clothes not kept in the general 'guardaroba.' In the deep
embrasures of the windows there were stone seats, but there were few
chairs, or none at all, in the bedrooms. At the head of each bed hung a
rough little cross of dark wood--later, as carving became more general,
a crucifix--and a bit of an olive branch preserved from Palm Sunday
throughout the year. The walls themselves were scrupulously whitewashed;
the ceilings were of heavy beams, supporting lighter cross-beams, on
which in turn thick boards were laid to carry the cement floor of the
room overhead.
Many hundred men-at-arms could be drawn up in the courtyards, and their
horses stalled in the spacious stables. The kitchens, usually situated
on the ground floor, were large enough to provide meals for half a
thousand retainers, if necessary; and the cellars and underground
prisons were a vast labyrinth of vaulted chambers, which not
unfrequently communicated with the Tiber by secret passages. In
restoring the palace of the Santacroce, a few years ago, a number of
skeletons were discovered, some still wearing armour, and all most
evidently the remains of men who had died violent deaths. One of them
was found with a dagger driven through the skull and helmet. The hand
that drove it must have been strong beyond the hands of common men.
The grand staircase led up from the sunny court to the state apartments,
such as they were in those days. There, at least, there were sometimes
carpets, luxuries of enormous value, and even before the Renascence the
white walls were hung with tapestries, at least in part. In those times,
too, there were large fireplaces in almost every room, for fuel was
still plentiful in the Campagna and in the near mountains; and where the
houses were practically open to the air all day, fires were an absolute
necessity. Even in ancient times it is recorded that the Roman Senate,
amidst the derisive jests of the plebeians, once had to adjourn on
account of the extreme cold. People rose early in the Middle Age, dined
at noon, slept in the afternoon when the weather was warm, and supped,
as a rule, at 'one hour of the night,' that is to say an hour after 'Ave
Maria,' which was rung half an hour after sunset, and was the end of the
day of twenty-four hours. Noon was taken from the sun, but did not fall
at a regular hour of the clock, and never fell at twelve. In winter, for
instance, if the Ave Maria bell rang at half-past five of our modern
time, the noon of the following day fell at 'half-past eighteen o'clock'
by the mediæval clocks. In summer, it might fall as early as three
quarters past fifteen; and this manner of reckoning time was common in
Rome thirty-five years ago, and is not wholly unpractised in some parts
of Italy still.
It was always an Italian habit, and a very healthy one, to get out of
doors immediately on rising, and to put off making anything like a
careful toilet till a much later hour. Breakfast, as we understand it,
is an unknown meal in Italy, even now. Most people drink a cup of black
coffee, standing; many eat a morsel of bread or biscuit with it and get
out of doors as soon as they can; but the greediness of an Anglo-Saxon
breakfast disgusts all Latins alike, and two set meals daily are thought
to be enough for anyone, as indeed they are. The hard-working Italian
hill peasant will sometimes toast himself a piece of corn bread before
going to work, and eat it with a few drops of olive oil; and in the
absence of tea or coffee, the people of the Middle Age often drank a
mouthful of wine on rising to 'move the blood,' as they said. But that
was all.
Every mediæval palace had its chapel, which was sometimes an adjacent
church communicating with the house, and in many families it is even now
the custom to hear the short low Mass at a very early hour. But
probably nothing can give an adequate idea of the idleness of the Middle
Age, when the day was once begun. Before the Renascence, there was no
such thing as study, and there were hardly any pastimes except gambling
and chess, both of which the girls and youths of the Decameron seem to
have included in one contemptuous condemnation when they elected to
spend their time in telling stories. The younger men of the household,
of course, when not actually fighting, passed a certain number of hours
in the practice of horsemanship and arms; but the only real excitement
they knew was in love and war, the latter including everything between
the battles of the Popes and Emperors, and the street brawls of private
enemies, which generally drew blood and often ended in a death.
It does not appear that the idea of 'housekeeping' as the chief
occupation of the Baron's wife ever entered into the Roman mind. In
northern countries there has always been more equality between men and
women, more respect for woman as an intelligent being, and less care for
her as a valuable possession to be guarded against possible attacks from
without. In Rome and the south of Italy the women in a great household
were carefully separated from the men, and beyond the outer halls in
which visitors were received, business transacted and politics
discussed, there were closed doors, securely locked, leading to the
women's apartments beyond. In every Roman palace and fortress there was
a revolving 'dumb-waiter' between the women's quarters and the men's,
called the 'wheel,' and used as a means of communication. Through this
the household supplies were daily handed in, for the cooking was very
generally done by women, and through the same machine the prepared food
was passed out to the men, the wheel being so arranged that men and
women could not see each other, though they might hear each other speak.
To all intents and purposes the system was oriental and the women were
shut up in a harem. The use of the dumb-waiter survived the revolution
in manners under the Renascence, and the wheel itself remains as a
curiosity of past times in more than one Roman dwelling today. It had
its uses and was not a piece of senseless tyranny. In order to keep up
an armed force for all emergencies the Baron took under his protection
as men-at-arms the most desperate ruffians, outlaws and outcasts whom he
could collect, mostly men under sentence of banishment or death for
highway robbery and murder, whose only chance of escaping torture and
death lay in risking life and limb for a master strong enough to defy
the law, the 'bargello' and the executioner, in his own house or castle,
where such henchmen were lodged and fed, and were controlled by nothing
but fear of the Baron himself, of his sons, when they were grown up,
and of his poorer kinsmen who lived with him. There were no crimes which
such malefactors had not committed, or were not ready to commit for a
word, or even for a jest. The women, on the other hand, were in the
first place the ladies and daughters of the house, and of kinsmen,
brought up in almost conventual solitude, when they were not actually
educated in convents; and, secondly, young girls from the Baron's
estates who served for a certain length of time, and were then generally
married to respectable retainers. The position of twenty or thirty women
and girls under the same roof with several hundreds of the most
atrocious cutthroats of any age was undeniably such as to justify the
most tyrannical measures for their protection.
There are traces, even now, of the enforced privacy in which they lived.
For instance, no Roman lady of today will ever show herself at a window
that looks on the street, except during Carnival, and in most houses
something of the old arrangement of rooms is still preserved, whereby
the men and women occupy different parts of the house.
One must try to call up the pictures of one day, to get any idea of
those times; one must try and see the grey dawn stealing down the dark,
unwindowed lower walls of the fortress that flanks the Church of the
Holy Apostles,--the narrow and murky street below, the broad, dim space
beyond, the mystery of the winding distances whence comes the first
sound of the day, the far, high cry of the waterman driving his little
donkey with its heavy load of water-casks. The beast stumbles along in
the foul gloom, through the muddy ruts, over heaps of garbage at the
corners, picking its way as best it can, till it starts with a snort and
almost falls with its knees upon a dead man, whose thrice-stabbed body
lies right across the way. The waterman, ragged, sandal-shod, stops,
crosses himself, and drags his beast back hurriedly with a muttered
exclamation of mingled horror, disgust and fear for himself, and makes
for the nearest corner, stumbling along in his haste lest he should be
found with the corpse and taken for the murderer. As the dawn
forelightens, and the cries go up from the city, the black-hooded
Brothers of Prayer and Death come in a little troop, their lantern still
burning as they carry their empty stretcher, seeking for dead men; and
they take up the poor nameless body and bear it away quickly from the
sight of the coming day.
Then, as they disappear, the great bell of the Apostles' Church begins
to toll the morning Angelus, half an hour before sunrise,--three
strokes, then four, then five, then one, according to ancient custom,
and then after a moment's silence, the swinging peal rings out, taken up
and answered from end to end of the half-wasted city. A troop of
men-at-arms ride up to the great closed gate 'in rusty armour marvellous
ill-favoured,' as Shakespeare's stage direction has it, mud-splashed,
their brown cloaks half concealing their dark and war-worn mail, their
long swords hanging down and clanking against their huge stirrups, their
beasts jaded and worn and filthy from the night raid in the Campagna, or
the long gallop from Palestrina. The leader pounds three times at the
iron-studded door with the hilt of his dagger, a sleepy porter,
grey-bearded and cloaked, slowly swings back one half of the gate and
the ruffians troop in, followed by the waterman who has gone round the
fortress to avoid the dead body. The gate shuts again, with a long
thundering rumble. High up, wooden shutters, behind which there is no
glass, are thrown open upon the courtyard, and one window after another
is opened to the morning air; on one side, girls and women look out,
muffled in dark shawls; from the other grim, unwashed, bearded men call
down to their companions, who have dismounted and are unsaddling their
weary horses, and measuring out a little water to them, where water is a
thing of price.
The leader goes up into the house to his master, to tell him of the
night's doings, and while he speaks the Baron sits in a great wooden
chair, in his long gown of heavy cloth, edged with coarse fox's fur, his
feet in fur slippers, and a shabby cap upon his head, but a manly and
stern figure, all the same, slowly munching a piece of toasted bread and
sipping a few drops of old white wine from a battered silver cup.
Then Mass in the church, the Baron, his kinsmen, the ladies and the
women kneeling in the high gallery above the altar, the men-at-arms and
men-servants and retainers crouching below on the stone pavement; a
dusky multitude, with a gleam of steel here and there, and red flashing
eyes turned up with greedy longing towards the half-veiled faces of the
women, met perhaps, now and then, by a furtive answering glance from
under a veil or hoodlike shawl, for every woman's head is covered, but
of the men only the old lord wears his cap, which he devoutly lifts at
'Gloria Patri' and 'Verbum Caro,' and at 'Sanctus' and at the
consecration. It is soon over, and the day is begun, for the sun is
fully risen and streams through the open unglazed windows as the maids
sprinkle water on the brick floors, and sweep and strew fresh rushes,
and roll back the mattresses on the trestle beds, which are not made
again till evening. In the great courtyard, the men lead out the horses
and mount them bareback and ride out in a troop, each with his sword by
his side, to water them at the river, half a mile away, for not a single
public fountain is left in Rome; and the grooms clean out the stables,
while the peasants come in from the country, driving mules laden with
provisions for the great household, and far away, behind barred doors,
the women light the fires in the big kitchen.
Later again, the children of the noble house are taught to ride and
fence in the open court; splendid boys with flowing hair, bright as gold
or dark as night, dressed in rough hose and leathern jerkin,
bright-eyed, fearless, masterful already in their play as a lion's
whelps, watched from an upper window by their lady mother and their
little sisters, and not soon tired of saddle or sword--familiar with the
grooms and men by the great common instinct of fighting, but as far from
vulgar as Polonius bade Laertes learn to be.
So morning warms to broad noon, and hunger makes it dinner-time, and the
young kinsmen who have strolled abroad come home, one of them with his
hand bound up in a white rag that has drops of blood on it, for he has
picked a quarrel in the street and steel has been out, as usual, though
no one has been killed, because the 'bargello' and his men were in
sight, down there near the Orsini's theatre-fortress. And at dinner when
the priest has blessed the table, the young men laugh about the
scrimmage, while the Baron himself, who has killed a dozen men in
battle, with his own hand, rebukes his sons and nephews with all the
useless austerity which worn-out age wears in the face of unbroken
youth. The meal is long, and they eat much, for there will be nothing
more till night; they eat meat broth, thick with many vegetables and
broken bread and lumps of boiled meat, and there are roasted meats and
huge earthen bowls of salad, and there is cheese in great blocks, and
vast quantities of bread, with wine in abundance, poured for each man by
the butler into little earthen jugs from big earthenware flagons. They
eat from trenchers of wood, well scoured with ashes; forks they have
none, and most of the men use their own knives or daggers when they are
not satisfied with the carving done for them by the carver. Each man,
when he has picked a bone, throws it under the table to the house-dogs
lying in wait on the floor, and from time to time a basin is passed and
a little water poured upon the fingers. The Baron has a napkin of his
own; there is one napkin for all the other men; the women generally eat
by themselves in their own apartments, the so-called 'gentlemen' in the
'tinello,' and the men-at-arms and grooms, and all the rest, in the big
lower halls near the kitchens, whence their food is passed out to them
through the wheel.
After dinner, if it be summer and the weather hot, the gates are barred,
the windows shut, and the whole household sleeps. Early or late, as the
case may be, the lords and ladies and children take the air, guarded by
scores of mounted men, riding towards that part of the city where they
may neither meet their enemies nor catch a fever in the warm months. In
rainy weather they pass the time as they can, with telling of many
tales, short, dramatic and strong as the framework of a good play, with
music, sometimes, and with songs, and with discussing of such news as
there may be in such times. And at dusk the great bells ring to
even-song, the oil lamp is swung up in the great staircase, the windows
and gates are shut again, the torches and candles and little lamps are
lit for supper, and at last, with rushlights, each finds the way along
the ghostly corridors to bed and sleep. That was the day's round, and
there was little to vary it in more peaceful times.
Over all life there was the hopeless, resentful dulness that oppressed
men and women till it drove them half mad, to the doing of desperate
things in love and war; there was the everlasting restraint of danger
without and of forced idleness within--danger so constant that it ceased
to be exciting and grew tiresome, idleness so oppressive that battle,
murder and sudden death were a relief from the inactivity of sluggish
peace; a state in which the mind was no longer a moving power in man,
but only by turns the smelting pot and the anvil of half-smothered
passions that now and then broke out with fire and flame and sword to
slash and burn the world with a history of unimaginable horror.
That was the Middle Age in Italy. A poorer race would have gone down
therein to a bloody destruction; but it was out of the Middle Age that
the Italians were born again in the Renascence. It deserved the name.
[Illustration]
REGION IV CAMPO MARZO
It was harvest time when the Romans at last freed themselves from the
very name of Tarquin. In all the great field, between the Tiber and the
City, the corn stood high and ripe, waiting for the sickle, while Brutus
did justice upon his two sons, and upon the sons of his sister, and upon
those 'very noble youths,' still the Tarquins' friends, who laid down
their lives for their mistaken loyalty and friendship, and for whose
devotion no historian has ever been brave enough, or generous enough, to
say a word. It has been said that revolution is patriotism when it
succeeds, treason when it fails, and in the converse, more than one
brave man has died a traitor's death for keeping faith with a fallen
king. Successful revolution denied those young royalists the charitable
handful of earth and the four words of peace--'sit eis terra
levis'--that should have laid their unquiet ghosts, and the brutal
cynicism of history has handed down their names to the perpetual
execration of mankind.
The corn stood high in the broad field which the Tarquins had taken from
Mars and had ploughed and tilled for generations. The people went out
and reaped the crop, and bound it in sheaves to be threshed for the
public bread, but their new masters told them that it would be impious
to eat what had been meant for kings, and they did as was commanded to
them, meekly, and threw all into the river. Sheaf upon sheaf, load upon
load, the yellow stream swept away the yellow ears and stalks, down to
the shallows, where the whole mass stuck fast, and the seeds took root
in the watery mud, and the stalks rotted in great heaps, and the island
of the Tiber was first raised above the level of the water. Then the
people burned the stubble and gave back the land to Mars, calling it the
Campus Martius, after him.
There the young Romans learned the use of arms, and were taught to ride;
and under sheds there stood those rows of wooden horses, upon which
youths learned to vault, without step or stirrup, in their armour and
sword in hand. There they ran foot-races in the clouds of dust whirled
up from the dry ground, and threw the discus by the twisted thong as the
young men of the hills do today, and the one who could reach the goal
with the smallest number of throws was the winner,--there, under the
summer sun and in the biting wind of winter, half naked, and tough as
wolves, the boys of Rome laboured to grow up and be Roman men.
There, also, the great assemblies were held, the public meetings and the
elections, when the people voted by passing into the wooden lists that
were called 'Sheepfolds,' till Julius Cæsar planned the great marble
portico for voting, and Agrippa finished it, making it nearly a mile
round; and behind it, on the west side, a huge space was kept open for
centuries, called the Villa Publica, where the censors numbered the
people. The ancient Campus took in a wide extent of land, for it
included everything outside the Servian wall, from the Colline Gate to
the river. All that visibly bears its name today is a narrow street that
runs southward from the western end of San Lorenzo in Lucina. The Region
of Campo Marzo, however, is still one of the largest in the city,
including all that lies within the walls from Porta Pinciana, by Capo le
Case, Via Frattina, Via di Campo Marzo and Via della Stelletta, past the
Church of the Portuguese and the Palazzo Moroni,--known by Hawthorne's
novel as 'Hilda's Tower,'--and thence to the banks of the Tiber.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SPAGNA]
From the Renascence until the recent extension of the city on the south
and southeast, this Region was the more modern part of Rome. In the
Middle Age it was held by the Colonna, who had fortified the tomb of
Augustus and one or two other ruins. Later it became the strangers'
quarter. The Lombards established themselves near the Church of Saint
Charles, in the Corso; the English, near Saint Ives, the little church
with the strange spiral tower, built against the University of the
Sapienza; the Greeks lived in the Via de' Greci; the Burgundians in the
Via Borgognona, and thence to San Claudio, where they had their Hospice;
and so on, almost every nationality being established in a colony of its
own; and the English visitors of today are still inclined to think the
Piazza di Spagna the most central point of Rome, whereas to Romans it
seems to be very much out of the way.
The tomb of Augustus, which served as the model for the greater
Mausoleum of Hadrian, dominated the Campus Martius, and its main walls
are still standing, though hidden by many modern houses. The tomb of the
Julian Cæsars rose on white marble foundations, a series of concentric
terraces, planted with cypress trees, to the great bronze statue of
Augustus that crowned the summit. Here rested the ashes of Augustus, of
the young Marcellus, of Livia, of Tiberius, of Caligula, and of many
others whose bodies were burned in the family Ustrinum near the tomb
itself. Plundered by Alaric, and finally ruined by Robert Guiscard, when
he burnt the city, it became a fortress under the Colonna, and is
included, with the fortress of Monte Citorio, in a transfer of property
made by one member of the family to another in the year 1252. Ruined at
last, it became a bull ring in the last century and in the beginning of
this one, when Leo the Twelfth forbade bull-fighting. Then it was a
theatre, the scene of Salvini's early triumphs. Today it is a circus,
dignified by the name of the reigning sovereign.
Few people know that bull-fights were common in Rome eighty years ago.
The indefatigable Baracconi once talked with the son of the last
bull-fighter. So far as one may judge, it appears that during the
Middle Age, and much later, it was the practice of butchers to bait
animals in their own yards, before slaughtering them, in the belief that
the cruel treatment made the meat more tender, and they admitted the
people to see the sport. From this to a regular arena was but a step,
and no more suitable place than the tomb of the Cæsars could be found
for the purpose. A regular manager took possession of it, provided the
victims, both bulls and Roman buffaloes, and hired the fighters. It does
not appear that the beasts were killed during the entertainment, and one
of the principal attractions was the riding of the maddened bull three
times round the circus; savage dogs were also introduced, but in all
other respects the affair was much like a Spanish bull-fight, and quite
as popular; when the chosen bulls were led in from the Campagna, the
Roman princes used to ride far out to meet them with long files of
mounted servants in gala liveries, coming back at night in torchlight
procession. And again, after the fight was over, the circus was
illuminated, and there was a small display of Bengal lights, while the
fashionable world of Rome met and gossiped away the evening in the
arena, happily thoughtless and forgetful of all the spot had been and
had meant in history.
The new Rome sinks out of sight below the level of the old, as one
climbs the heights of the Janiculum on the west of the city, or the
gardens of the Pincio on the east. The old monuments and the old
churches still rise above the dreary wastes of modern streets, and from
the spot whence Messalina looked down upon the cypresses of the first
Emperor's mausoleum, the traveller of today descries the cheap metallic
roof which makes a circus of the ancient tomb.
For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's
great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat
drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages
laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate
dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls
up a tragedy of shades. Less than thirty years after Augustus had
breathed out his old age in peace, Rome was ruled again by terror and
blood, and the triumph of a woman's sins was the beginning of the end of
the Julian race. The great historian who writes of her guesses that
posterity may call the truth a fable, and tells the tale so tersely and
soberly from first to last, that the strength of his words suggests a
whole mystery of evil. Without Tiberius, there could have been no
Messalina, nor, without her, could Nero have been possible; and the
worst of the three is the woman--the archpriestess of all conceivable
crime. Tacitus gives Tiberius one redeeming touch. Often the old Emperor
came almost to Rome, even to the gardens by the Tiber, and then turned
back to the rocks of Capri and the solitude of the sea, in mortal shame
of his monstrous deeds, as if not daring to show himself in the city.
With Nero, the measure was full, and the world rose and destroyed him.
Messalina knew no shame, and the Romans submitted to her, and but for a
court intrigue and a frightened favourite she might have lived out her
life unhurt. In the eyes of the historian and of the people of her time
her greatest misdeed was that while her husband Claudius, the Emperor,
was alive she publicly celebrated her marriage with the handsome Silius,
using all outward legal forms. Our modern laws of divorce have so far
accustomed our minds to such deeds that, although we miss the legal
formalities which would necessarily precede such an act in our time, we
secretly wonder at the effect it produced upon the men of that day, and
are inclined to smile at the epithets of 'impious' and 'sacrilegious'
which it called down upon Messalina, whose many other frightful crimes
had elicited much more moderate condemnation. Claudius, himself no
novice or beginner in horrors, hesitated long after he knew the truth,
and it was the favourite Narcissus who took upon himself to order the
Empress' death. Euodus, his freedman, and a tribune of the guard were
sent to make an end of her. Swiftly they went up to the gardens--the
gardens of the Pincian--and there they found her, beautiful, dark,
dishevelled, stretched upon the marble floor, her mother Lepida
crouching beside her, her mother, who in the bloom of her daughter's
evil life had turned from her, but in her extreme need was overcome
with pity. There knelt Domitia Lepida, urging the terror-mad woman not
to wait the executioner, since life was over and nothing remained but to
lend death the dignity of suicide. But the dishonoured self was empty of
courage, and long-drawn weeping choked her useless lamentations. Then
suddenly the doors were flung open with a crash, and the stern tribune
stood silent in the hall, while the freedman Euodus screamed out curses,
after the way of triumphant slaves. From her mother's hand the lost
Empress took the knife at last and trembling laid it to her breast and
throat, with weakly frantic fingers that could not hurt herself; the
silent tribune killed her with one straight thrust, and when they
brought the news to Claudius sitting at supper, and told him that
Messalina had perished, his face did not change, and he said nothing as
he held out his cup to be filled.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DEL POPOLO]
She died somewhere on the Pincian hill. Romance would choose the spot
exactly where the nunnery of the Sacred Heart stands, at the Trinità de'
Monti, looking down De Sanctis' imposing 'Spanish' steps; and the house
in which the noble girls of modern Rome are sent to school may have
risen upon the foundations of Messalina's last abode. Or it may be that
the place was further west, in the high grounds of the French Academy,
or on the site of the academy itself, at the gates of the public garden,
just where the old stone fountain bubbles and murmurs under the shade of
the thick ilex trees. Most of that land once belonged to Lucullus, the
conqueror of Mithridates, the Academic philosopher, the arch feaster,
and the man who first brought cherries to Italy.
[Illustration: TRINITÀ DE' MONTI]
The last descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian
race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was
condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by
his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a
thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a
woman who had loved him. And during ten centuries the people believed
that his terrible ghost haunted the hill, attended and served by
thousands of demon crows that rested in the branches of the trees about
his tomb, and flew forth to do evil at his bidding, till at last Pope
Paschal the Second cut down with his own hands the walnut trees which
crowned the summit, and commanded that the mausoleum should be
destroyed, and the ashes of Nero scattered to the winds, that he might
build a parish church on the spot and dedicate it to Saint Mary. It is
said, too, that the Romans took the marble urn in which the ashes had
been, and used it as a public measure for salt in the old market-place
of the Capitol. A number of the rich Romans of the Renascence afterwards
contributed money to the restoration of the church and built themselves
chapels within it, as tombs for their descendants, so that it is the
burial-place of many of those wealthy families that settled in Rome and
took possession of the Corso when the Barons still held the less central
parts of the city with their mediæval fortresses. Sixtus the Fourth and
Julius the Second are buried in Saint Peter's, but their chapel was
here, and here lie others of the della Rovere race, and many of the
Chigi and Pallavicini and Theodoli; and here, in strange coincidence,
Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the Popes, erected a high altar on the
very spot where the worst of the Emperors had been buried. It is gone
now, but the strange fact is not forgotten.
Far across the beautiful square, at the entrance to the Corso, twin
churches seem to guard the way like sentinels, built, it is said, to
replace two chapels which once stood at the head of the bridge of Sant'
Angelo; demolished because, when Rome was sacked by the Constable of
Bourbon, they had been held as important points by the Spanish soldiers
in besieging the Castle, and it was not thought wise to leave such
useful outworks for any possible enemy in the future. Alexander the
Seventh, the Chigi Pope, died, and left the work unfinished; and a folk
story tells how a poor old woman who lived near by saved what she could
for many years, and, dying, left one hundred and fifty scudi to help the
completion of the buildings; and Cardinal Gastaldi, who had been refused
the privilege of placing his arms upon a church which he had desired to
build in Bologna, and was looking about for an opportunity of
perpetuating his name, finished the two churches, his attention having
been first called to them by the old woman's humble bequest.
As for the Pincio itself, and the ascent to it from the Piazza del
Popolo, all that land was but a grass-grown hillside, crowned by a few
small and scattered villas and scantily furnished with trees, until the
beginning of the present century; and the public gardens of the earlier
time were those of the famous and beautiful Villa Medici, which Napoleon
the First bestowed upon the French Academy. It was there that the
fashionable Romans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used to
meet, and walk, and be carried about in gilded sedan-chairs, and flirt,
and gossip, and exchange views on politics and opinions about the latest
scandal. That was indeed a very strange society, further from us in many
ways than the world of the Renascence, or even of the Crusades; for the
Middle Age was strong in the sincerity of its beliefs, as we are
powerful in the cynicism of our single-hearted faith in riches; but the
fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was founded upon the
abuse of an already declining power; it was built up in the most
extraordinary and elaborate affectation, and it was guarded by a system
of dissimulation which outdid that of our own day by many degrees, and
possibly surpassed the hypocrisy of any preceding age.
No one, indeed, can successfully uphold the idea that the high
development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong
growth of religion or moral conviction. Perugino made no secret of being
an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an
amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted
pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of
free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of
a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of
Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation,
lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to
ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result
of a faith that has been, since although it is possible to conceive of
religion without art, it is out of the question to think of art as a
whole, without a religious origin; and as the majority of writers find
it easier to describe scenes and emotions, when a certain lapse of time
has given them what painters call atmospheric perspective, so the
Renascence began when memory already clothed the ferocious realism of
mediæval Christianity in the softer tones of gentle chivalry and tender
romance. It is often said, half in jest, that, in order to have
intellectual culture, a man must at least have forgotten Latin, if he
cannot remember it, because the fact of having learned it leaves
something behind that cannot be acquired in any other way. Similarly, I
think that art of all sorts has reached its highest level in successive
ages when it has aimed at recalling, by an illusion, a once vivid
reality from a not too distant past. And so when it gives itself up to
the realism of the present, it impresses the senses rather than the
thoughts, and misses its object, which is to bring within our mental
reach what is beyond our physical grasp; and when, on the other hand, it
goes back too far, it fails in execution, because its models are not
only out of sight, but out of mind, and it cannot touch us because we
can no longer feel even a romantic interest in the real or imaginary
events which it attempts to describe.
The subject is too high to be lightly touched, and too wide to be
touched more than lightly here; but in this view of it may perhaps be
found some explanation of the miserable poverty of Italian art in the
eighteenth century, foreshadowed by the decadence of the seventeenth,
which again is traceable to the dissipation of force and the
disappearance of individuality that followed the Renascence, as
inevitably as old age follows youth. Besides all necessary gifts of
genius, the development of art seems to require that a race should not
only have leisure for remembering, but should also have something to
remember which may be worthy of being recalled and perhaps of being
imitated. Progress may be the road to wealth and health, and to such
happiness as may be derived from both; but the advance of civilization
is the path of thought, and its landmarks are not inventions nor
discoveries, but those very great creations of the mind which ennoble
the heart in all ages; and as the idea of progress is inseparable from
that of growing riches, so is the true conception of civilization
indivisible from thoughts of beauty and nobility. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Italy had almost altogether lost sight of these;
art was execrable, fashion was hideous, morality meant hypocrisy; the
surest way to power lay in the most despicable sort of intrigue, and
inward and spiritual faith was as rare as outward and visible devoutness
was general.
That was the society which frequented the Villa Medici on fine
afternoons, and it is hard to see wherein its charm lay, if, indeed, it
had any. Instead of originality, its conversation teemed with artificial
conventionalisms; instead of nature, it exhibited itself in the disguise
of fashions more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those
of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly
nonsensical 'pastoral' verses which we find too silly to read; and in
place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of
worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the
French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor
the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical
austerity which marked England's ascent, from the death of Edward the
Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any
of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her
long struggle for life. It had little which we are accustomed to respect
in men and women, and yet it had something which we lack today, and
which we unconsciously envy--it had a colour of its own. Wandering under
the ancient ilexes of those sad and beautiful gardens, meeting here and
there a few silent and soberly clad strangers, one cannot but long for
the brilliancy of two centuries ago, when the walks were gay with
brilliant dresses, and gilded chairs, and servants in liveries of
scarlet and green and gold, and noble ladies, tottering a few steps on
their ridiculous high heels, and men bewigged and becurled, their
useless little hats under their arms, and their embroidered coat tails
flapping against their padded, silk-stockinged calves; and red-legged,
unpriestly Cardinals who were not priests even in name, but only the lay
life-peers of the Church; and grave Bishops with their secretaries; and
laughing abbés, whose clerical dress was the accustomed uniform of
government office, which they still wore when they were married, and
were fathers of families. There is little besides colour to recommend
the picture, but at least there is that.
The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all
kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that
once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward,
and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator
Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association
of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house
which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the
Trinità de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little
temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls
uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged.
Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the
Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there,
calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle,
full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant
reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge
built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the
abbé's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed
from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and
madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that
extinct world.
[Illustration: VILLA MEDICI]
Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty
tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and
accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a
moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we
know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always
sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be.
Ignorance, tradition, imagination, romance,--call it what you will,--has
chosen the long-closed Pincian Gate for the last station of blind
Belisarius. There, says the tale, the ancient conqueror, the banisher
and maker of Popes, the favourite and the instrument of imperial
Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and
lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave
him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a
feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his
life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and
gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer
the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened
the gates of Rome to Belisarius; and how he was led into the great hall
where the warrior's wife, Theodora's friend, the beautiful and evil
Antonina, lay with half-closed eyes upon her splendid couch, while
Belisarius sat beside her feet, toying with her jewels. There the
husband and wife accused the Pope, and judged him without hearing, and
condemned him without right; and they caused him to be stripped of his
robes, and clad as a poor monk and driven out to far exile, that they
might set up the Empress Theodora's Pope in his place; and with him they
drove out many Roman nobles.
And it is said that when Silverius was dead of a broken heart in the
little island of Palmaria, Belisarius repented of his deeds and built
the small Church of Santa Maria de' Crociferi, behind the fountain of
Trevi, in partial expiation of his fault, and there, to prove the truth
of the story, the tablet that tells of his repentance has stood nearly
fourteen hundred years and may be read today, on the east wall, towards
the Via de' Poli. The man who conquered Africa for Justinian, seized
Sicily, took Rome, defended it successfully against the Goths, reduced
Ravenna, took Rome from the Goths again, and finally rescued
Constantinople, was disgraced more than once; but he was not blinded,
nor did he die in exile or in prison, for at the end he breathed his
last in the enjoyment of his freedom and his honours; and the story of
his blindness is the fabrication of an ignorant Greek monk who lived six
hundred years later and confounded Justinian's great general with the
romantic and unhappy John of Cappadocia, who lived at the same time, was
a general at the same time, and incurred the displeasure of that same
pious, proud, avaricious Theodora, actress, penitent and Empress, whose
paramount beauty held the Emperor in thrall for life, and whose
surpassing cruelty imprinted an indelible seal of horror upon his
glorious reign--of her who, when she delivered a man to death,
admonished the executioner with an oath, saying, 'By Him who liveth for
ever, if thou failest, I will cause thee to be flayed alive.'
Another figure rises at the window of the Tuscan Ambassador's great
villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much
to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science
has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance have wrongly
crowned as a martyr--Galileo Galilei. Tradition represents him as
languishing, laden with chains, in the more or less mythical prisons of
the Inquisition; history tells very plainly that his first confinement
consisted in being the honoured guest of the Tuscan Ambassador in the
latter's splendid residence in Rome, and that his last imprisonment was
a relegation to the beautiful castle of the Piccolomini near Siena, than
which the heart of man could hardly desire a more lovely home. History
affirms beyond doubt, moreover, that Galileo was the personal friend of
that learned and not illiberal Barberini, Pope Urban the Eighth, under
whose long reign the Copernican system was put on trial, who believed in
that system as Galileo did, who read his books and talked with him; and
who, when the stupid technicalities of the ecclesiastic courts declared
the laws of the universe to be nonsense, gave his voice against the
decision, though he could not officially annul it without scandal. 'It
was not my intention,' said the Pope in the presence of witnesses, 'to
condemn Galileo. If the matter had depended upon me, the decree of the
Index which condemned his doctrines should never have been pronounced.'
That Galileo's life was saddened by the result of the absurd trial, and
that he was nominally a prisoner for a long time, is not to be denied.
But that he suffered the indignities and torments recorded in legend is
no more true than that Belisarius begged his bread at the Porta
Pinciana. He lived in comfort and in honour with the Ambassador in the
Villa Medici, and many a time from those lofty windows, unchanged since
before his day, he must have watched the earth turning with him from the
sun at evening, and meditated upon the emptiness of the ancient phrase
that makes the sun 'set' when the day is done--thinking of the world,
perhaps, as turning upon its other side, with tired eyes, and ready for
rest and darkness and refreshment, after long toil and heat.
* * * * *
One may stand under those old trees before the Villa Medici, beside the
ancient fountain facing Saint Peter's distant dome, and dream the great
review of history, and call up a vast, changing picture at one's feet
between the heights and the yellow river. First, the broad corn-field of
the Tarquin Kings, rich and ripe under the evening breeze of summer that
runs along swiftly, bending the golden surface in soft moving waves from
the Tiber's edge to the foot of the wooded slope. Then, the hurried
harvesting, the sheaves cast into the river, the dry, stiff stubble
baking in the sun, and presently the men of Rome coming forth in
procession from the dark Servian wall on the left to dedicate the field
to the War God with prayer and chant and smoking sacrifice. By and by
the stubble trodden down under horses' hoofs, the dusty plain the
exercising ground of young conquerors, the voting place, later, of a
strong Republic, whither the centuries went out to choose their consuls,
to decide upon peace or war, to declare the voice of the people in grave
matters, while the great signal flag waved on the Janiculum, well in
sight though far away, to fall suddenly at the approach of any foe and
suspend the 'comitia' on the instant. And in the flat and dusty plain,
buildings begin to rise; first, the Altar of Mars and the holy place of
the infernal gods, Dis and Proserpine; later, the great 'Sheepfold,' the
lists and hustings for the voting, and, encroaching a little upon the
training ground, the temple of Venus Victorious and the huge theatre of
Pompey, wherein the Orsini held their own so long; but in the times of
Lucullus, when his gardens and his marvellous villa covered the Pincian
hill, the plain was still a wide field, and still the field of Mars,
without the walls, broken by few landmarks, and trodden to deep white
dust by the scampering hoofs of half-drilled cavalry. Under the
Emperors, then, first beautified in part, as Cæsar traces the great
Septa for the voting, and Augustus erects the Altar of Peace and builds
up his cypress-clad tomb, crowned by his own image, and Agrippa raises
his triple temple, and Hadrian builds the Pantheon upon its ruins, while
the obelisk that now stands on Monte Citorio before the House of
Parliament points out the brass-figured hours on the broad marble floor
of the first Emperor's sun-clock and marks the high noon of Rome's
glory--and the Portico of Neptune and many other splendid works spring
up. Isis and Serapis have a temple next, and Domitian's race-course
appears behind Agrippa's Baths, straight and white. By and by the
Antonines raise columns and triumphal arches, but always to southward,
leaving the field of Mars a field still, for its old uses, and the tired
recruits, sweating from exercise, gather under the high shade of
Augustus' tomb at midday for an hour's rest.
Last of all, the great temple of the Sun, with its vast portico, and the
Mithræum at the other end, and when the walls of Aurelian are built, and
when ruin comes upon Rome from the north, the Campus Martius is still
almost an open stretch of dusty earth on which soldiers have learned
their trade through a thousand years of hard training.
Not till the poor days when the waterless, ruined city sends its people
down from the heights to drink of the muddy stream does Campo Marzo
become a town, and then, around the castle-tomb of the Colonna and the
castle-theatre of the Orsini the wretched houses begin to rise here and
there, thickening to a low, dark forest of miserable dwellings threaded
through and through, up and down and crosswise, by narrow and crooked
streets, out of which by degrees the lofty churches and palaces of the
later age are to spring up. From a training ground it has become a
fighting ground, a labyrinth of often barricaded ways and lanes, deeper
and darker towards the water-gates cut in the wall that runs along the
Tiber, from Porta del Popolo nearly to the island of Saint Bartholomew,
and almost all that is left of Rome is crowded and huddled into the
narrow pen overshadowed and dominated here and there by black fortresses
and brown brick towers. The man who then might have looked down from the
Pincian hill would have seen that sight; houses little better than those
of the poorest mountain village in the Southern Italy of today, black
with smoke, black with dirt, blacker with patches made by shadowy
windows that had no glass. A silent town, too, surly and defensive; now
and then the call of the water-carrier disturbs the stillness, more
rarely, the cry of a wandering peddler; and sometimes a distant sound of
hoofs, a far clash of iron and steel, and the echoing yell of furious
fighting men--'Orsini!' 'Colonna!'--the long-drawn syllables coming up
distinct through the evening air to the garden where Messalina died,
while the sun sets red behind the spire of old Saint Peter's across the
river, and gilds the huge girth of dark Sant' Angelo to a rusty red,
like battered iron bathed in blood.
Back come the Popes from Avignon, and streets grow wider and houses
cleaner and men richer--all for the Bourbon's Spaniards to sack, and
burn, and destroy before the last city grows up, and the rounded domes
raise their helmet-like heads out of the chaos, and the broad Piazza del
Popolo is cleared, and old Saint Peter's goes down in dust to make way
for the Cathedral of all Christendom as it stands. Then far away, on
Saint Peter's evening, when it is dusk, the great dome, and the small
domes, and the colonnades, and the broad façade are traced in silver
lights that shine out quietly as the air darkens. The solemn bells toll
the first hour of the June night; the city is hushed, and all at once
the silver lines are turned to gold, as the red flame runs in magic
change from the topmost cross down the dome, in rivers, to the roof, and
the pillars and the columns of the square below--the grandest
illumination of the grandest church the world has ever seen.
[Illustration]
REGION V PONTE
The Region of Ponte, 'the Bridge,' takes its name from the ancient
Triumphal Bridge which led from the city to the Vatican Fields, and at
low water some fragments of the original piers may be seen in the river
at the bend just below Ponte Sant' Angelo, between the Church of Saint
John of the Florentines on the one bank, and the Hospital of Santo
Spirito on the other. In the Middle Age, according to Baracconi and
others, the broken arches still extended into the stream, and upon them
was built a small fortress, the outpost of the Orsini on that side. The
device, however, appears to represent a portion of the later Bridge of
Sant' Angelo, built upon the foundations of the Ælian Bridge of
Hadrian, which connected his tomb with the Campus Martius. The Region
consists of the northwest point of the city, bounded by the Tiber, from
Monte Brianzo round the bend, and down stream to the new Lungara bridge,
and on the land side by a very irregular line running across the Corso
Vittorio Emanuele, close to the Chiesa Nuova, and then eastward and
northward in a zigzag, so as to take in most of the fortresses of the
Orsini family, Monte Giordano, Tor Millina, Tor Sanguigna, and the now
demolished Torre di Nona. The Sixth and Seventh Regions adjacent to the
Fifth and to each other would have to be included in order to take in
all that part of Rome once held by the only family that rivalled, and
sometimes surpassed, the Colonna in power.
As has been said before, the original difference between the two was
that the Colonna were Ghibellines and for the Emperors, while the Orsini
were Guelphs and generally adhered to the Popes. In the violent changes
of the Middle Age, it happened indeed that the Colonna had at least one
Pope of their own, and that more than one, such as Nicholas the Fourth,
favoured their race to the point of exciting popular indignation. But,
on the whole, they kept to their parties. When Lewis the Bavarian was to
be crowned by force, Sciarra Colonna crowned him; when Henry the Seventh
of Luxemburg had come to Rome for the same purpose, a few years earlier,
the Orsini had been obliged to be satisfied with a sort of second-rate
coronation at Saint John Lateran's; and when the struggle between the
two families was at its height, nearly two centuries later, and Sixtus
the Fourth 'assumed the part of mediator,' as the chronicle expresses
it, one of his first acts of mediation was to cut off the head of a
Colonna, and his next was to lay regular siege to the strongholds of the
family in the Roman hills; but before he had brought this singular
process of mediation to an issue he suddenly died, the Colonna returned
to their dwellings in Rome 'with great clamour and triumph,' got the
better of the Orsini, and proceeded to elect a Pope after their own
hearts, in the person of Cardinal Cibo, of Genoa, known as Innocent the
Eighth. He it is who lies under the beautiful bronze monument in the
inner left aisle of Saint Peter's, which shows him holding in his hand a
model of the spear-head that pierced Christ's side, a relic believed to
have been sent to the Pope as a gift by Sultan Bajazet the Second.
The origin of the hatred between Colonna and Orsini is unknown, for the
archives of the former have as yet thrown no light upon the subject, and
those of the latter were almost entirely destroyed by fire in the last
century. In the year 1305, Pope Clement the Fifth was elected Pope at
Perugia. He was a Frenchman, and was Archbishop of Bordeaux, the
candidate of Philip the Fair, whose tutor had been a Colonna, and he
was chosen by the opposing factions of two Orsini cardinals because the
people of Perugia were tired of a quarrel that had lasted eleven months,
and had adopted the practical and always infallible expedient of
deliberately starving the conclave to a vote. Muratori calls it a
scandalous and illicit election, which brought about the ruin of Italy
and struck a memorable blow at the power of the Holy See. Though not a
great man, Philip the Fair was one of the cleverest that ever lived.
Before the election he had made his bishop swear upon the Sacred Host to
accept his conditions, without expressing them all; and the most
important proved to be the transference of the Papal See to France. The
new Pope obeyed his master, established himself in Avignon, and the King
to all intents and purposes had taken the Pontificate captive and lost
no time in using it for his own ends against the Empire, his hereditary
foe. Such, in a few words, is the history of that memorable transaction;
and but for the previous quarrels of Colonna, Caetani and Orsini, it
could never have taken place. The Orsini repented bitterly of what they
had done, for one of Clement the Fifth's first acts was to 'annul
altogether all sentences whatsoever pronounced against the Colonna.'
But the Pope being gone, the Barons had Rome in their power and used it
for a battlefield. Four years later, we find in Villani the first record
of a skirmish fought between Orsini and Colonna. In the month of
October, 1309, says the chronicler, certain of the Orsini and of the
Colonna met outside the walls of Rome with their followers, to the
number of four hundred horse, and fought together, and the Colonna won;
and there died the Count of Anguillara, and six of the Orsini were
taken, and Messer Riccardo degli Annibaleschi who was in their company.
Three years afterwards, Henry of Luxemburg alternately feasted and
fought his way to Rome to be crowned Emperor in spite of Philip the
Fair, the Tuscan league and Robert, King of Naples, who sent a thousand
horsemen out of the south to hinder the coronation. In a day Rome was
divided into two great camps. Colonna held for the Emperor the Lateran,
Santa Maria Maggiore, the Colosseum, the Torre delle Milizie,--the brick
tower on the lower part of the modern Via Nazionale,--the Pantheon, as
an advanced post in one direction, and Santa Sabina, a church that was
almost a fortress, on the south, by the Tiber,--a chain of fortresses
which would be formidable in any modern revolution. Against Henry,
however, the Orsini held the Vatican and Saint Peter's, the Castle of
Sant' Angelo and all Trastevere, their fortresses in the Region of
Ponte, and, moreover, the Capitol itself. The parties were well matched,
for, though Henry entered Rome on the seventh of May, the struggle
lasted till the twenty-ninth of June.
Those who have seen revolutions can guess at the desperate fighting in
the barricaded streets, and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of
the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days
and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment.
Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle
of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed
the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it
all again--the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, nobles and
bishops, with visors down, and long swords and maces in their hands, the
high, fierce cries of the light-armed footmen, the bowmen and the
slingers, the roar of the rabble rout behind, the shrill voices of women
at upper windows, peering down for the face of brother, husband, or
lover in the dashing press below,--the dust, the heat, the fierce June
sunshine blazing on broad steel, and the deep, black shadows putting out
all light as the bands rush past. Then, on a sudden, the answering shout
of the Orsini, the standard of the Bear, the Bourbon lilies of Anjou,
the scarlet and white colours of the Guelph house, the great black
horses, and the dark mail--the enemies surging together in the street
like swift rivers of loose iron meeting in a stone channel, with a
rending crash and the quick hammering of steel raining desperate blows
on steel--horses rearing their height, footmen crushed, knights reeling
in the saddle, sparks flying, steel-clad arms and long swords whirling
in great circles through the air. Foremost of all in fight the Bishop of
Liège, his purple mantle flying back from his corselet, trampling down
everything, sworn to win the barricade or die, riding at it like a
madman, forcing his horse up to it over the heaps of quivering bodies
that made a causeway, leaping it alone at last, like a demon in air, and
standing in the thick of the Orsini, slaying to right and left.
In an instant they had him down and bound and prisoner, one man against
a thousand; and they fastened him behind a man-at-arms, on the crupper,
to take him into Sant' Angelo alive. But a soldier, whose brother he had
slain a moment earlier, followed stealthily on foot and sought the joint
in the back of the armour, and ran in his pike quickly, and killed
him--'whereof,' says the chronicle, 'was great pity, for the Bishop was
a man of high courage and authority.' But on the other side of the
barricade, those who had followed him so far, and lost him, felt their
hearts sink, for not one of them could do what he had done; and after
that, though they fought a whole month longer, they had but little hope
of ever getting to the Vatican. So the Colonna took Henry up to the
Lateran, where they were masters, and he was crowned there by three
cardinals in the Pope's stead, while the Orsini remained grimly
intrenched in their own quarter, and each party held its own, even after
Henry had prudently retired to Tivoli, in the hills.
[Illustration: ISLAND IN THE TIBER]
At last the great houses made a truce and a compromise, by which they
attempted to govern Rome jointly, and chose Sciarra--the same who had
taken Pope Boniface prisoner in Anagni--and Matteo Orsini of Monte
Giordano, to be Senators together; and there was peace between them for
a time, in the year in which Rienzi was born. But in that very year, as
though foreshadowing his destiny, the rabble of Rome rose up, and chose
a dictator; and somehow, by surprise or treachery, he got possession of
the Barons' chief fortresses, and of Sant' Angelo, and set up the
standard of terror against the nobles. In a few days he sacked and
burned their strongholds, and the high and mighty lords who had made the
reigning Pope, and had fought to an issue for the Crown of the Holy
Roman Empire, were conquered, humiliated and imprisoned by an upstart
plebeian of Trastevere. The portcullis of Monte Giordano was lifted, and
the mysterious gates were thrown wide to the curiosity of a populace
drunk with victory; Giovanni degli Stefaneschi issued edicts of
sovereign power from the sacred precincts of the Capitol; and the
vagabond thieves of Rome feasted in the lordly halls of the Colonna
palace. But though the tribune and the people could seize Rome,
outnumbering the nobles as ten to one, they had neither the means nor
the organization to besiege the fortified towns of the great houses,
which hemmed in the city and the Campagna on every side. Thither the
nobles retired to recruit fresh armies among their retainers, to forge
new swords in their own smithies, and to concert new plans for
recovering their ancient domination; and thence they returned in their
strength, from their towers and their towns and fortresses, from
Palestrina and Subiaco, Genazzano, San Vito and Paliano on the south,
and from Bracciano and Galera and Anguillara, and all the Orsini castles
on the north, to teach the people of Rome the great truth of those days,
that 'aristocracy' meant not the careless supremacy of the nobly born,
but the power of the strongest hands and the coolest heads to take and
hold. Back came Colonna and Orsini, and the people, who a few months
earlier had acclaimed their dictator in a fit of justifiable ill-temper
against their masters, opened the gates for the nobles again, and no man
lifted a hand to help Giovanni degli Stefaneschi, when the men-at-arms
bound him and dragged him off to prison. Strange to say, no further
vengeance was taken upon him, and for once in their history, the nobles
shed no blood in revenge for a mortal injury.
No man could count the tragedies that swept over the Region of Ponte
from the first outbreak of war between the Orsini and the Colonna, till
Paolo Giordano Orsini, the last of the elder branch, breathed out his
life in exile under the ban of Sixtus the Fifth, three hundred years
later. There was no end of them till then, and there was little
interruption of them while they lasted; there is no stone left standing
from those days in that great quarter that may not have been splashed
with their fierce blood, nor is there, perhaps, a church or chapel
within their old holding into which an Orsini has not been borne dead or
dying from some deadly fight. Even today it is gloomy, and the broad
modern street, which swept down a straight harvest of memories through
the quarter to the very Bridge of Sant' Angelo, has left the mediæval
shadows on each side as dark as ever. Of the three parts of the city,
which still recall the Middle Age most vividly, namely, the
neighbourhood of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the first Region, the by-ways
of Trastevere and the Region of Ponte, the latter is by far the most
interesting. It was the abode of the Orsini; it was also the chief place
of business for the bankers and money-changers who congregated there
under the comparatively secure protection of the Guelph lords; and it
was the quarter of prisons, of tortures, and of executions both secret
and public. The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the
Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were
hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were
just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the
place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the 'Church
of the Gallows'; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello
Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other
words, the Executioner himself. Before the Castle of Sant' Angelo stood
the permanent gallows, rarely long unoccupied, and from an upper window
of the dark Torre di Nona, on the hither side of the bridge, a rope hung
swinging slowly in the wind, sometimes with a human body at the end of
it, sometimes without. It was the place, and that was the manner, of
executions that took place in the night. In Via di Monserrato stood the
old fortress of the Savelli, long ago converted into a prison, and
called the Corte Savella, the most terrible of all Roman dungeons for
the horror of damp darkness, for ever associated with Beatrice Cenci's
trial and death. Through those very streets she was taken in the cart to
the little open space before the bridge, where she laid down her life
upon the scaffold three hundred years ago, and left her story of
offended innocence, of revenge and of expiation, which will not be
forgotten while Rome is remembered.
Beatrice Cenci's story has been often told, but nowhere more clearly and
justly than in Shelley's famous letter, written to explain his play.
There are several manuscript accounts of the last scene at the Ponte
Sant' Angelo, and I myself have lately read one, written by a
contemporary and not elsewhere mentioned, but differing only from the
rest in the horrible realism with which the picture is presented. The
truth is plain enough; the unspeakable crimes of Francesco Cenci, his
more than inhuman cruelty to his children and his wives, his monstrous
lust and devilish nature, outdo anything to be found in any history of
the world, not excepting the private lives of Tiberius, Nero, or
Commodus. His daughter and his second wife killed him in his sleep. His
death was merciful and swift, in an age when far less crimes were
visited with tortures at the very name of which we shudder. They were
driven to absolute desperation, and the world has forgiven them their
one quick blow, struck for freedom, for woman's honour and for life
itself in the dim castle of Petrella. Tormented with rack and cord they
all confessed the deed, save Beatrice, whom no bodily pain could move;
and if Paolo Santacroce had not murdered his mother for her money before
their death was determined, Clement the Eighth would have pardoned them.
But the times were evil, an example was called for, Santacroce had
escaped to Brescia, and the Pope's heart was hardened against the Cenci.
[Illustration: BRIDGE OF SANT' ANGELO]
They died bravely, there at the head of the bridge, in the calm May
morning, in the midst of a vast and restless crowd, among whom more than
one person was killed by accident, as by the falling of a pot of flowers
from a high window, and by the breaking down of a balcony over a shop,
where too many had crowded in to see. The old house opposite looked down
upon the scene, and the people watched Beatrice Cenci die from those
same arched windows. Above the sea of faces, high on the wooden
scaffold, rises the tall figure of a lovely girl, her hair gleaming in
the sunshine like threads of dazzling gold, her marvellous blue eyes
turned up to Heaven, her fresh young dimpled face not pale with fear,
her exquisite lips moving softly as she repeats the De Profundis of her
last appeal to God. Let the axe not fall. Let her stand there for ever
in the spotless purity that cost her life on earth and set her name for
ever among the high constellated stars of maidenly romance.
Close by the bridge, just opposite the Torre di Nona, stood the 'Lion
Inn,' once kept by the beautiful Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of
Rodrigo Borgia's children, of Cæsar, and Gandia, and Lucrezia, and the
place was her property still when she was nominally married to her
second husband, Carlo Canale, the keeper of the prison across the way.
In the changing vicissitudes of the city, the Torre di Nona made way for
the once famous Apollo Theatre, built upon the lower dungeons and
foundations, and Faust's demon companion rose to the stage out of the
depths that had heard the groans of tortured criminals; the theatre
itself disappeared a few years ago in the works for improving the
Tiber's banks, and a name is all that remains of a fact that made men
tremble. In the late destruction, the old houses opposite were not
altogether pulled down, but were sliced, as it were, through their roofs
and rooms, at a safe angle; and there, no doubt, are still standing
portions of Vanozza's inn, while far below, the cellars where she kept
her wine free of excise, by papal privilege, are still as cool and
silent as ever.
Not far beyond her hostelry stands another Inn, famous from early days
and still open to such travellers as deign to accept its poor
hospitality. It is an inn for the people now, for wine carters, and the
better sort of hill peasants; it was once the best and most fashionable
in Rome, and there the great Montaigne once dwelt, and is believed to
have written at least a part of his famous Essay on Vanity. It is the
Albergo dell' Orso, the 'Bear Inn,' and perhaps it is not a coincidence
that Vanozza's sign of the Lion should have faced the approach to the
Leonine City beyond the Tiber, and that the sign of the Bear, 'The
Orsini Arms,' as an English innkeeper would christen it, should have
been the principal resort of the kind in a quarter which was
three-fourths the property and altogether the possession of the great
house that overshadowed it, from Monte Giordano on the one side, and
from Pompey's Theatre on the other.
The temporary fall of the Orsini at the end of the sixteenth century
came about by one of the most extraordinary concatenations of events to
be found in the chronicles. The story has filled more than one volume
and is nevertheless very far from complete; nor is it possible, since
the destruction of the Orsini archives, to reconstruct it with absolute
accuracy. Briefly told, it is this.
Felice Peretti, monk and Cardinal of Montalto, and still nominally one
of the so-called 'poor cardinals' who received from the Pope a daily
allowance known as 'the Dish,' had nevertheless accumulated a good deal
of property before he became Pope under the name of Sixtus the Fifth,
and had brought some of his relatives to Rome. Among these was his well
beloved nephew, Francesco Peretti, for whom he naturally sought an
advantageous marriage. There was at that time in Rome a notary, named
Accoramboni, a native of the Marches of Ancona and a man of some wealth
and of good repute. He had one daughter, Vittoria, a girl of excessive
vanity, as ambitious as she was vain and as singularly beautiful as she
was ambitious. But she was also clever in a remarkable degree, and seems
to have had no difficulty in hiding her bad qualities. Francesco Peretti
fell in love with her, the Cardinal approved the match, though he was a
man not easily deceived, and the two were married and settled in the
Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of
Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains
to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and
to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome
and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal,
devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife
and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever
men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having been deceived in
his judgment of a girl's character. So far, there is nothing not
commonplace about the tale.
At that time Paolo Giordano Orsini, the head of the house, Duke of
Bracciano and lord of a hundred domains, was one of the greatest
personages in Italy. No longer young and already enormously fat, he was
married to Isabella de' Medici, the daughter of Cosimo, reigning in
Florence. She was a beautiful and evil woman, and those who have
endeavoured to make a martyr of her forget the nameless doings of her
youth. Giordano was weak and extravagant, and paid little attention to
his wife. She consoled herself with his kinsman, the young and handsome
Troilo Orsini, who was as constantly at her side as an official
'cavalier servente' of later days. But the fat Giordano, indolent and
pleasure seeking, saw nothing. Nor is there anything much more than
vulgar and commonplace in all this.
Paolo Giordano meets Vittoria Peretti in Rome, and the two commonplaces
begin the tragedy. On his part, love at first sight; ridiculous, at
first, when one thinks of his vast bulk and advancing years, terrible,
by and by, as the hereditary passions of his fierce race could be,
backed by the almost boundless power which a great Italian lord
possessed in his surroundings. Vittoria, tired of her dull and virtuous
husband and of the lectures and parsimony of his uncle, and not dreaming
that the latter was soon to be Pope, saw herself in a dream of glory
controlling every mood and action of the greatest noble in the land. And
she met Giordano again and again, and he pleaded and implored, and was
alternately ridiculous and almost pathetic in his hopeless passion for
the notary's daughter. But she had no thought of yielding to his
entreaties. She would have marriage, or nothing. Neither words nor gifts
could move her.
She had a husband, he had a wife; and she demanded that he should marry
her, and was grimly silent as to the means. Until she was married to him
he should not so much as touch the tips of her jewelled fingers, nor
have a lock of her hair to wear in his bosom. He was blindly in love,
and he was Paolo Giordano Orsini. It was not likely that he should
hesitate. He who had seen nothing of his wife's doings, suddenly saw his
kinsman, Troilo, and Isabella was doomed. Troilo fled to Paris, and
Orsini took Isabella from Bracciano to the lonely castle of Galera.
There he told her his mind and strangled her, as was his right, being
feudal lord and master with powers of life and death. Then from
Bracciano he sent messengers to kill Francesco Peretti. One of them had
a slight acquaintance with the Cardinal's nephew.
They came to the Villa Negroni by night, and called him out, saying that
his best friend was in need of him, and was waiting for him at Monte
Cavallo. He hesitated, for it was very late. They had torches and
weapons, and would protect him, they said. Still he wavered. Then
Vittoria, his wife, scoffed at him, and called him coward, and thrust
him out to die; for she knew. The men walked beside him with their
torches, talking as they went. They passed the deserted land in the
Baths of Diocletian, and turned at Saint Bernard's Church to go towards
the Quirinal. Then they put out the lights and killed him quickly in the
dark.
His body lay there all night, and when it was told the next day that
Montalto's nephew had been murdered, the two men said that they had left
him at Monte Cavallo and that he must have been killed as he came home
alone. The Cardinal buried him without a word, and though he guessed the
truth he asked neither vengeance nor justice of the Pope.
[Illustration: VILLA NEGRONI
From a print of the last century]
Gregory the Thirteenth guessed it, too, and when Orsini would have
married Vittoria, the Pope forbade the banns and interdicted their union
for ever. That much he dared to do against the greatest peer in the
country.
To this, Orsini replied by plighting his faith to Vittoria with a ring,
in the presence of a serving woman, an irregular ceremony which he
afterwards described as a marriage, and he thereupon took his bride and
her mother under his protection. The Pope retorted by a determined
effort to arrest the murderers of Francesco; the Bargello and his men
went in the evening to the Orsini palace at Pompey's Theatre and
demanded that Giordano should give up the criminals; the porter replied
that the Duke was asleep; the Orsini men-at-arms lunged out with their
weapons, looked on during the interview, and considering the presence of
the Bargello derogatory to their master, drove him away, killing one of
his men and wounding several others. Thereupon Pope Gregory forbade the
Duke from seeing Vittoria or communicating with her by messengers, on
pain of a fine of ten thousand gold ducats, an order to which Orsini
would have paid no attention but which Vittoria was too prudent to
disregard, and she retired to her brother's house, leaving the Duke in a
state of frenzied rage that threatened insanity. Then the Pope seemed to
waver again, and then again learning that the lovers saw each other
constantly in spite of his commands, he suddenly had Vittoria seized and
imprisoned in Sant' Angelo. It is impossible to follow the long struggle
that ensued. It lasted four years, at the end of which time the Duke and
Vittoria were living at Bracciano, where the Orsini was absolute lord
and master and beyond the jurisdiction of the Church--two hours' ride
from the gates of Rome. But no further formality of marriage had taken
place and Vittoria was not satisfied. Then Gregory the Thirteenth died.
During the vacancy of the Holy See, all interdictions of the late Pope
were suspended. Instantly Giordano determined to be married, and came to
Rome with Vittoria. They believed that the Conclave would last some time
and were making their arrangements without haste, living in Pompey's
Theatre, when a messenger brought word that Cardinal Montalto would
surely be elected Pope within a few hours. In the fortress is the small
family church of Santa Maria di Grotta Pinta. The Duke sent down word to
his chaplain that the latter must marry him at once. That night a
retainer of the house had been found murdered at the gate; his body lay
on a trestle bier before the altar of the chapel when the Duke's message
came; the Duke himself and Vittoria were already in the little winding
stair that leads down from the apartments; there was not a moment to be
lost; the frightened chaplain and the messenger hurriedly raised a
marble slab which closed an unused vault, dropped the murdered man's
body into the chasm, and had scarcely replaced the stone when the ducal
pair entered the church. The priest married them before the altar in
fear and trembling, and when they were gone entered the whole story in
the little register in the sacristy. The leaf is extant.
Within a few hours, Montalto was Pope, the humble cardinal was changed
in a moment to the despotic pontiff, whose nephew's murder was
unavenged; instead of the vacillating Gregory, Orsini had to face the
terrible Sixtus, and his defeat and exile were foregone conclusions. He
could no longer hold his own and he took refuge in the States of Venice,
where his kinsman, Ludovico, was a fortunate general. He made a will
which divided his personal estate between Vittoria and his son,
Virginio, greatly to the woman's advantage; and overcome by the
infirmity of his monstrous size, spent by the terrible passions of his
later years, and broken in heart by an edict of exile which he could no
longer defy, he died at Salò within seven months of his great enemy's
coronation, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
Vittoria retired to Padua, and the authorities declared the inheritance
valid, but Ludovico Orsini's long standing hatred of her was inflamed to
madness by the conditions of the will. Six weeks after the Duke's death,
at evening, Vittoria was in her chamber; her boy brother, Flaminio, was
singing a Miserere to his lute by the fire in the great hall. A sound of
quick feet, the glare of torches, and Ludovico's masked men filled the
house. Vittoria died bravely with one deep stab in her heart. The boy,
Flaminio, was torn to pieces with seventy-four wounds.
But Venice would permit no such outrageous deeds. Ludovico was besieged
in his house, by horse and foot and artillery, and was taken alive with
many of his men and swiftly conveyed to Venice; and a week had not
passed from the day of the murder before he was strangled by the
Bargello in the latter's own room, with the red silk cord by which it
was a noble's privilege to die. The first one broke, and they had to
take another, but Ludovico Orsini did not wince. An hour later his body
was borne out with forty torches, in solemn procession, to lie in state
in Saint Mark's Church. His men were done to death with hideous tortures
in the public square. So ended the story of Vittoria Accoramboni.
[Illustration]
REGION VI PARIONE
The principal point of this Region is Piazza Navona, which exactly
coincides with Domitian's race-course, and the Region consists of an
irregular triangle of which the huge square is at the northern angle,
the western one being the Piazza della Chiesa Nuova and the southern
extremity the theatre of Pompey, so often referred to in these pages as
one of the Orsini's strongholds and containing the little church in
which Paolo Giordano married Vittoria Accoramboni, close to the Campo
dei Fiori which was the place of public executions by fire. The name
Parione is said to be derived from the Latin 'Paries,' a wall, applied
to a massive remnant of ancient masonry which once stood somewhere in
the Via di Parione. It matters little; nor can we find any satisfactory
explanation of the gryphon which serves as a device for the whole
quarter, included during the Middle Age, with Ponte and Regola, in the
large portion of the city dominated by the Orsini.
The Befana, which is a corruption of Epifania, the Feast of the
Epiphany, is and always has been the season of giving presents in Rome,
corresponding with our Christmas; and the Befana is personated as a
gruff old woman who brings gifts to little children after the manner of
our Saint Nicholas. But in the minds of Romans, from earliest childhood,
the name is associated with the night fair, opened on the eve of the
Epiphany in Piazza Navona, and which was certainly one of the most
extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and make
children of grown people, a sort of foreshadowing of Carnival, but
having at the same time a flavour and a colour of its own, unlike
anything else in the world.
During the days after Christmas a regular line of booths is erected,
encircling the whole circus-shaped space. It is a peculiarity of Roman
festivals that all the material for adornment is kept together from year
to year, ready for use at a moment's notice, and when one sees the
enormous amount of lumber required for the Carnival, for the fireworks
on the Pincio, or for the Befana, one cannot help wondering where it is
all kept. From year to year it lies somewhere, in those vast
subterranean places and great empty houses used for that especial
purpose, of which only Romans guess the extent. When needed, it is
suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, ready to be
put together and regilt or repainted, or hung with the acres of
draperies which Latins know so well how to display in everything
approaching to public pageantry.
At dark, on the Eve of the Epiphany, the Befana begins. The hundreds of
booths are choked with toys and gleam with thousands of little lights,
the open spaces are thronged by a moving crowd, the air splits with the
infernal din of ten thousand whistles and tin trumpets. Noise is the
first consideration for a successful befana, noise of any kind, shrill,
gruff, high, low--any sort of noise; and the first purchase of everyone
who comes must be a tin horn, a pipe, or one of those grotesque little
figures of painted earthenware, representing some characteristic type of
Roman life and having a whistle attached to it, so cleverly modelled in
the clay as to produce the most hideous noises without even the addition
of a wooden plug. But anything will do. On a memorable night nearly
thirty years ago, the whole cornopean stop of an organ was sold in the
fair, amounting to seventy or eighty pipes with their reeds. The
instrument in the old English Protestant Church outside of Porta del
Popolo had been improved, and the organist, who was a practical
Anglo-Saxon, conceived the original and economical idea of selling the
useless pipes at the night fair for the benefit of the church. The
braying of the high, cracked reeds was frightful and never to be
forgotten.
Round and round the square, three generations of families, children,
parents and even grandparents, move in a regular stream, closer and
closer towards midnight and supper-time; nor is the place deserted till
three o'clock in the morning. Toys everywhere, original with an
attractive ugliness, nine-tenths of them made of earthenware dashed with
a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers
the taste for life; and old and young and middle-aged all blow their
whistles and horns with solemnly ridiculous pertinacity, pausing only to
make some little purchase at the booths, or to exchange a greeting with
passing friends, followed by an especially vigorous burst of noise as
the whistles are brought close to each other's ears, and the party that
can make the more atrocious din drives the other half deafened from the
field. And the old women who help to keep the booths sit warming their
skinny hands over earthen pots of coals and looking on without a smile
on their Sibylline faces, while their sons and daughters sell clay
hunchbacks and little old women of clay, the counterparts of their
mothers, to the passing customers. Thousands upon thousands of people
throng the place, and it is warm with the presence of so much humanity,
even under the clear winter sky. And there is no confusion, no
accident, no trouble, there are no drunken men and no pickpockets. But
Romans are not like other people.
In a few days all is cleared away again, and Bernini's great fountain
faces Borromini's big Church of Saint Agnes, in the silence; and the
officious guide tells the credulous foreigner how the figure of the Nile
in the group is veiling his head to hide the sight of the hideous
architecture, and how the face of the Danube expresses the River God's
terror lest the tower should fall upon him; and how the architect
retorted upon the sculptor by placing Saint Agnes on the summit of the
church, in the act of reassuring the Romans as to the safety of her
shrine; and again, how Bernini's enemies said that the obelisk of the
fountain was tottering, till he came alone on foot and tied four lengths
of twine to the four corners of the pedestal, and fastened the strings
to the nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at
that time that he modelled four grinning masks for the corners of his
sedan-chair, so that they seemed to be making scornful grimaces at his
detractors as he was carried along. He could afford to laugh. He had
been the favourite of Urban the Eighth who, when Cardinal Barberini, had
actually held the looking-glass by the aid of which the handsome young
sculptor modelled his own portrait in the figure of David with the
sling, now in the Museum of Villa Borghese. After a brief period of
disgrace under the next reign, brought about by the sharpness of his
Neapolitan tongue, Bernini was restored to the favour of Innocent the
Tenth, the Pamfili Pope, to please whose economical tastes he executed
the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent
as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an
account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of
his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful
only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo's
universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan's universal
facility. He could do something of everything, circumstances gave him
enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not
attempt, from classic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint
Peter's and the fortifications of Sant' Angelo. He was afflicted by the
hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of
petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the
statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has
recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed
in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste
of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the
sculptor's prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have
represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the
spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find
words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the
Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish
enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the
other, and the space of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the
Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art.
[Illustration: PIAZZA NAVONA]
The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who
built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his
nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives
stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when
he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged
blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his
pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in
concealing to the end. A brass candlestick with a single burning taper
stood beside him in his last moments, and before he was quite dead, a
servant stole it and put a wooden one in its place. When he was dead at
the Quirinal, his body was carried to Saint Peter's in a bier so short
that the poor Pope's feet stuck out over the end, and three days later,
no one could be found to pay for the burial. Olimpia declared that she
was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a
place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the
workmen, out of charity or superstition, lit a tallow candle beside it.
In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni
gave five scudi--an English pound--to have the body taken away and
buried. It was slung between two mules and taken by night to the Church
of Saint Agnes, where in the changing course of human and domestic
events, it ultimately got an expensive monument in the worst possible
taste. The learned and sometimes witty Baracconi, who has set down the
story, notes the fact that Leo the Tenth, Pius the Fourth and Gregory
the Sixteenth fared little better in their obsequies, and he comments
upon the democratic spirit of a city in which such things can happen.
Close to the Piazza Navona stands the famous mutilated group, known as
Pasquino, of which the mere name conveys a better idea of the Roman
character than volumes of description, for it was here that the
pasquinades were published, by affixing them to a pedestal at the corner
of the Palazzo Braschi. And one of Pasquino's bitterest jests was
directed against Olimpia Maldachini. Her name was cut in two, to make a
good Latin pun: 'Olim pia, nunc impia,' 'once pious, now impious,' or
'Olimpia, now impious,' as one chose to join or separate the syllables.
Whole books have been filled with the short and pithy imaginary
conversations between Marforio, the statue of a river god which used to
stand in the Monti, and Pasquino, beneath whom the Roman children used
to be told that the book of all wisdom was buried for ever.
In the Region of Parione stands the famous Cancelleria, a masterpiece of
Bramante's architecture, celebrated for many events in the later history
of Rome, and successively the princely residence of several cardinals,
chief of whom was that strong Pompeo Colonna, the ally of the Emperor
Charles the Fifth, who was responsible for the sacking of Rome by the
Constable of Bourbon, who ultimately ruined the Holy League, and imposed
his terrible terms of peace upon Clement the Seventh, a prisoner in
Sant' Angelo. Considering the devastation and the horrors which were the
result of that contest, and its importance in Rome's history, it is
worth while to tell the story again. Connected with it was the last
great struggle between Orsini and Colonna, Orsini, as usual, siding for
the Pope, and therefore for the Holy League, and Colonna for the
Emperor.
Charles the Fifth had vanquished Francis the First at Pavia, in the year
1525, and had taken the French King prisoner. A year later the Holy
League was formed, between Pope Clement the Seventh, the King of France,
the Republics of Venice and Florence, and Francesco Sforza, Duke of
Milan. Its object was to fight the Emperor, to sustain Sforza, and to
seize the Kingdom of Naples by force. Immediately upon the proclamation
of the League, the Emperor's ambassadors left Rome, the Colonna retired
to their strongholds, and the Emperor made preparations to send Charles,
Duke of Bourbon, the disgraced relative of King Francis, to storm Rome
and reduce the imprisoned Pope to submission. The latter's first and
nearest source of fear lay in the Colonna, who held the fortresses and
passes between Rome and the Neapolitan frontier, and his first instinct
was to attack them with the help of the Orsini. But neither side was
ready for the fight, and the timid Pontiff eagerly accepted the promise
of peace made by the Colonna in order to gain time, and he dismissed the
forces he had hastily raised against them.
[Illustration: PALAZZO MASSIMO ALLE COLONNA]
[Illustration: PONTE SISTO
From a print of the last century]
They, in the mean time, treated with Moncada, Regent of Naples for the
Emperor, and at once seized Anagni, put several thousand men in the
field, marched upon Rome with incredible speed, seized three gates in
the night, and entered the city in triumph on the following morning. The
Pope and the Orsini, completely taken by surprise, offered little or no
resistance. According to some writers, it was Pompeo Colonna's daring
plan to murder the Pope, force his own election to the Pontificate by
arms, destroy the Orsini, and open Rome to Charles the Fifth; and when
the Colonna advanced on the same day, by Ponte Sisto, to Trastevere, and
threatened to attack Saint Peter's and the Vatican, Clement the Seventh,
remembering Sciarra and Pope Boniface, was on the point of imitating
the latter and arraying himself in his Pontifical robes to await his
enemy with such dignity as he could command. But the remonstrances of
the more prudent cardinals prevailed, and about noon they conveyed him
safely to Sant' Angelo by the secret covered passage, leaving the
Colonna to sack Trastevere and even Saint Peter's itself, though they
dared not come too near to Sant' Angelo for fear of its cannons. The
tumult over at last, Don Ugo de Moncada, in the Emperor's name, took
possession of the Pope's two nephews as hostages for his own safety,
entered Sant' Angelo under a truce, and stated the Emperor's conditions
of peace. These were, to all intents and purposes, that the Pope should
withdraw his troops, wherever he had any, and that the Emperor should be
free to advance wherever he pleased, except through the Papal States,
that the Pope should give hostages for his good faith, and that he
should grant a free pardon to all the Colonna, who vaguely agreed to
withdraw their forces into the Kingdom of Naples. To this humiliating
peace, or armistice, for it was nothing more, the Pope was forced by the
prospect of starvation, and he would even have agreed to sail to
Barcelona in order to confer with the Emperor; but from this he was
ultimately dissuaded by Henry the Eighth of England and the King of
France, 'who sent him certain sums of money and promised him their
support.' The consequence was that he broke the truce as soon as he
dared, deprived the Cardinal of his hat, and, with the help of the
Orsini, attacked the Colonna by surprise on their estates, giving orders
to burn their castles and raze their fortresses to the ground. Four
villages were burned before the surprised party could recover itself;
but with some assistance from the imperial troops they were soon able to
face their enemies on equal terms, and the little war raged fiercely
during several months, with varying success and all possible cruelty on
both sides.
Meanwhile Charles, Duke of Bourbon, known as the Constable, and more or
less in the pay of the Emperor, had gathered an army in Lombardy. His
force consisted of the most atrocious ruffians of the time,--Lutheran
Germans, superstitious Spaniards, revolutionary Italians, and such other
nondescripts as would join his standard,--all fellows who had in reality
neither country nor conscience, and were ready to serve any soldier of
fortune who promised them plunder and license. The predominating element
was Spanish, but there was not much to choose among them all so far as
their instincts were concerned. Charles was penniless, as usual; he
offered his horde of cutthroats the rich spoils of Tuscany and Rome,
they swore to follow him to death and perdition, and he began his
southward march. The Emperor looked on with an approving eye, and the
Pope was overcome by abject terror. In the vain hope of saving himself
and the city he concluded a truce with the Viceroy of Naples, agreeing
to pay sixty thousand ducats, to give back everything taken from the
Colonna, and to restore Pompeo to the honours of the cardinalate. The
conditions of the armistice were forthwith carried out, by the
disbanding of the Pope's hired soldiers and the payment of the
indemnity, and Clement the Seventh enjoyed during a few weeks the
pleasant illusion of fancied safety.
He awoke from the dream, in horror and fear, to find that the Constable
considered himself in no way bound by a peace concluded with the
Emperor's Viceroy, and was advancing rapidly upon Rome, ravaging and
burning everything in his way. Hasty preparations for defence were made;
a certain Renzo da Ceri armed such men as he could enlist with such
weapons as he could find, and sent out a little force of grooms and
artificers to face the Constable's ruthless Spaniards and the fierce
Germans of his companion freebooter, George of Fransperg, or Franzberg,
who carried about a silken cord by which he swore to strangle the Pope
with his own hands. The enemy reached the walls of Rome on the night of
the fifth of May; devastation and famine lay behind them in their track,
the plunder of the Church was behind the walls, and far from northward
came rumours of the army of the League on its way to cut off their
retreat. They resolved to win the spoil or die, and at dawn the
Constable, clad in a white cloak, led the assault and set up the first
scaling ladder, close to the Porta San Spirito. In the very act a bullet
struck him in a vital part and he fell headlong to the earth. Benvenuto
Cellini claimed the credit of the shot, but it is more than probable
that it sped from another hand, that of Bernardino Passeri; it matters
little now, it mattered less then, as the infuriated Spaniards stormed
the walls in the face of Camillo Orsini's desperate and hopeless
resistance, yelling 'Blood and the Bourbon,' for a war-cry.
Once more the wretched Pope fled along the secret corridor with his
cardinals, his prelates and his servants; for although he might yet have
escaped from the doomed city, messengers had brought word that Cardinal
Pompeo Colonna had ten thousand men-at-arms in the Campagna, ready to
cut off his flight, and he was condemned to be a terrified spectator of
Rome's destruction from the summit of a fortress which he dared not
surrender and could hardly hope to defend. Seven thousand Romans were
slaughtered in the storming of the walls; the enemy gained all
Trastevere at a blow and the sack began; the torrent of fury poured
across Ponte Sisto into Rome itself, thousands upon thousands of
steel-clad madmen, drunk with blood and mad with the glitter of gold, a
storm of unimaginable terror. Cardinals, Princes and Ambassadors were
dragged from their palaces, and when greedy hands had gathered up all
that could be taken away, fire consumed the rest, and the miserable
captives were tortured into promising fabulous ransoms for life and
limb. Abbots, priors and heads of religious orders were treated with
like barbarity, and the few who escaped the clutches of the bloodthirsty
Spanish soldiers fell into the reeking hands of the brutal German
adventurers. The enormous sum of six million ducats was gathered
together in value of gold and silver bullion and of precious things, and
as much more was extorted as promised ransom from the gentlemen and
churchmen and merchants of Rome by the savage tortures of the lash, the
iron boot and the rack. The churches were stripped of all consecrated
vessels, the Sacred Wafers were scattered abroad by the Catholic
Spaniards and trampled in the bloody ooze that filled the ways, the
convents were stormed by a rabble in arms and the nuns were distributed
as booty among their fiendish captors, mothers and children were
slaughtered in the streets and drunken Spaniards played dice for the
daughters of honourable citizens.
From the surrounding Campagna the Colonna entered the city in arms,
orderly, silent and sober, and from their well-guarded fortresses they
contemplated the ruin they had brought upon Rome. Cardinal Pompeo
installed himself in his palace of the Cancelleria in the Region of
Parione, and gave shelter to such of his friends as might be useful to
him thereafter. In revenge upon John de' Medici, the Captain of the
Black Bands, whose assistance the Pope had invoked, the Cardinal caused
the Villa Medici on Monte Mario to be burned to the ground, and Clement
the Seventh watched the flames from the ramparts of Sant' Angelo. One
good action is recorded of the savage churchman. He ransomed and
protected in his house the wife and the daughter of that Giorgio
Santacroce who had murdered the Cardinal's father by night, when the
Cardinal himself was an infant in arms, more than forty years earlier;
and he helped some of his friends to escape by a chimney from the room
in which they had been confined and tortured into promising a ransom
they could not pay. But beyond those few acts he did little to mitigate
the horrors of the month-long sack, and nothing to relieve the city from
the yoke of its terrible captors. The Holy League sent a small force to
the Pope's assistance and it reached the gates of Rome; but the
Spaniards were in possession of immense stores of ammunition and
provisions, they had more horses than they needed and more arms than
they could bear; the forces of the League had traversed a country in
which not a blade of grass had been left undevoured nor a measure of
corn uneaten; and the avengers of the dead Constable, securely fortified
within the walls, looked down with contempt upon an army already
decimated by sickness and starvation.
At this juncture, Clement the Seventh resolved to abandon further
resistance and sue for peace. The guns of Sant' Angelo had all but fired
their last shot, and the supply of food was nearly exhausted, when the
Pope sent for Cardinal Colonna; the churchman consented to a parley, and
the man who had suffered confiscation and disgrace entered the castle as
the arbiter of destiny. He was received as the mediator of peace and a
benefactor of humanity, and when he stated his terms they were not
refused. The Pope and the thirteen Cardinals who were with him were to
remain prisoners until the payment of four hundred thousand ducats of
gold, after which they were to be conducted to Naples to await the
further pleasure of the Emperor; the Colonna were to be absolutely and
freely pardoned for all they had done; in the hope of some subsequent
assistance the Pope promised to make Cardinal Colonna the Legate of the
Marches. As a hostage for the performance of these and other conditions,
Cardinal Orsini was delivered over to his enemy, who conducted him as
his prisoner to the Castle of Grottaferrata, and the Colonna secretly
agreed to allow the Pope to go free from Sant' Angelo. On the night of
December the ninth, seven months after the storming of the city, the
head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church fled from the
castle in the humble garb of a market gardener, and made good his escape
to Orvieto and to the protection of the Holy League.
Meanwhile a pestilence had broken out in Rome, and the spectre of a
mysterious and mortal sickness distracted those who had survived the
terrors of sword and flame. The Spanish and German soldiery either fell
victims to the plague or deserted in haste and fear; and though Cardinal
Pompeo's peace contained no promise that the city should be evacuated,
it was afterwards stated upon credible authority that, within two years
from their coming, not one of the barbarous horde was left alive within
the walls. When all was over the city was little more than a heap of
ruins, but the Colonna had been victorious, and were sated with revenge.
This, in brief, is the history of the storming and sacking of Rome which
took place in the year 1527, at the highest development of the
Renascence, in the youth of Benvenuto Cellini, when Michelangelo had not
yet painted the Last Judgment, when Titian was just fifty years old, and
when Raphael and Lionardo da Vinci were but lately dead; and the
contrast between the sublimity of art and the barbarity of human nature
in that day is only paralleled in the annals of our own century, at once
the bloodiest and the most civilized in the history of the world.
The Cancelleria, wherein Pompeo Colonna sheltered the wife and daughter
of his father's murderer, is remembered for some modern political
events: for the opening of the first representative parliament under
Pius the Ninth, in 1848, for the assassination of the Pope's minister,
Pellegrino Rossi, on the steps of the entrance in the same year, and as
the place where the so-called Roman Republic was proclaimed in 1849. But
it is most of all interesting for the nobility of its proportions and
the simplicity of its architecture. It is undeniably, and almost
undeniedly, the best building in Rome today, though that may not be
saying much in a city which has been more exclusively the prey of the
Barocco than any other.
[Illustration: THE CANCELLERIA
From a print of the last century]
The Palace of the Massimo, once built to follow the curve of a narrow
winding street, but now facing the same great thoroughfare as the
Cancelleria, has something of the same quality, with a wholly different
character. It is smaller and more gloomy, and its columns are almost
black with age; it was here, in 1455, that Pannartz and Schweinheim, two
of those nomadic German scholars who have not yet forgotten the road to
Italy, established their printing-press in the house of Pietro de'
Massimi, and here took place one of those many romantic tragedies which
darkened the end of the sixteenth century. For a certain Signore
Massimo, in the year 1585, had been married and had eight sons, mostly
grown men, when he fell in love with a light-hearted lady of more wit
than virtue, and announced that he would make her his wife, though his
sons warned him that they would not bear the slight upon their mother's
memory. The old man, infatuated and beside himself with love, would not
listen to them, but published the banns, married the woman, and brought
her home for his wife.
One of the sons, the youngest, was too timid to join the rest; but on
the next morning the seven others went to the bridal apartment, and
killed their step-mother when their father was away. But he came back
before she was quite dead, and he took the Crucifix from the wall by the
bed and cursed his children. And the curse was fulfilled upon them.
Parione is the heart of Mediæval Rome, the very centre of that black
cloud of mystery which hangs over the city of the Middle Age. A history
might be composed out of Pasquin's sayings, volumes have been written
about Cardinal Pompeo Colonna and the ruin he wrought, whole books have
been filled with the life and teachings and miracles of Saint Philip
Neri, who belonged to this quarter, erected here his great oratory, and
is believed to have recalled from the dead a youth of the house of
Massimo in that same gloomy palace.
The story of Rome is a tale of murder and sudden death, varied,
changing, never repeated in the same way; there is blood on every
threshold; a tragedy lies buried in every church and chapel; and again
we ask in vain wherein lies the magic of the city that has fed on terror
and grown old in carnage, the charm that draws men to her, the power
that holds, the magic that enthralls men soul and body, as Lady Venus
cast her spells upon Tannhäuser in her mountain of old. Yet none deny
it, and as centuries roll on, the poets, the men of letters, the
musicians, the artists of all ages, have come to her from far countries
and have dwelt here while they might, some for long years, some for the
few months they could spare; and all of them have left something, a
verse, a line, a sketch, a song that breathes the threefold mystery of
love, eternity and death.
Index
A
Abruzzi, i. 159; ii. 230
Accoramboni, Flaminio, i. 296
Vittoria, i. 135, 148, 289-296, 297
Agrarian Law, i. 23
Agrippa, i. 90, 271; ii. 102
the Younger, ii. 103
Alaric, i. 252; ii. 297
Alba Longa, i. 3, 78, 130
Albergo dell' Orso, i. 288
Alberic, ii. 29
Albornoz, ii. 19, 20, 74
Aldobrandini, i. 209; ii. 149
Olimpia, i. 209
Alfonso, i. 185
Aliturius, ii. 103
Altieri, i. 226; ii. 45
Ammianus Marcellinus, i. 132, 133, 138
Amphitheatre, Flavian, i. 91, 179
Amulius, i. 3
Anacletus, ii. 295, 296, 304
Anagni, i. 161, 165, 307; ii. 4, 5
Ancus Martius, i. 4
Angelico, Beato, ii. 158, 169, 190-192, 195, 285
Anguillara, i. 278; ii. 138
Titta della, ii. 138, 139
Anio, the, i. 93
Novus, i. 144
Vetus, i. 144
Annibaleschi, Riccardo degli, i. 278
Antiochus, ii. 120
Antipope--
Anacletus, ii. 84
Boniface, ii. 28
Clement, i. 126
Gilbert, i. 127
John of Calabria, ii. 33-37
Antonelli, Cardinal, ii. 217, 223, 224
Antonina, i. 266
Antonines, the, i. 113, 191, 271
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, i. 46, 96, 113, 114, 190, 191
Appian Way, i. 22, 94
Appius Claudius, i. 14, 29
Apulia, Duke of, i. 126, 127; ii. 77
Aqua Virgo, i. 155
Aqueduct of Claudius, i. 144
Arbiter, Petronius, i. 85
Arch of--
Arcadius, i. 192
Claudius, i. 155
Domitian, i. 191, 205
Gratian, i. 191
Marcus Aurelius, i. 96, 191, 205
Portugal, i. 205
Septimius Severus, ii. 93
Valens, i. 191
Archive House, ii. 75
Argiletum, the, i. 72
Ariosto, ii. 149, 174
Aristius, i. 70, 71
Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73, 76-89
Arnulf, ii. 41
Art, i. 87; ii 152
and morality, i. 260, 261; ii. 178, 179
religion, i. 260, 261
Barocco, i. 303, 316
Byzantine in Italy, ii. 155, 184, 185
development of taste in, ii. 198
factors in the progress of art, ii. 181
engraving, ii. 186
improved tools, ii. 181
individuality, i. 262; ii. 175-177
Greek influence on, i. 57-63
modes of expression of, ii. 181
fresco, ii. 181-183
oil painting, ii. 184-186
of the Renascence, i. 231, 262; ii. 154
phases of, in Italy, ii. 188
progress of, during the Middle Age, ii. 166, 180
transition from handicraft to, ii. 153
Artois, Count of, i. 161
Augustan Age, i. 57-77
Augustulus, i. 30, 47, 53; ii. 64
Augustus, i. 30, 43-48, 69, 82, 89, 90, 184, 219, 251, 252, 254, 270;
ii. 64, 75, 95,102, 291
Aurelian, i. 177, 179, 180; ii. 150
Avalos, Francesco, d', i. 174, 175
Aventine, the, i. 23, 76; ii. 10, 40, 85, 119-121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129,
132, 302
Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 6, 9
B
Bacchanalia, ii. 122
Bacchic worship, i. 76; ii. 120
Bajazet the Second, Sultan, i. 276
Baracconi, i. 104, 141, 178, 188, 252, 264, 274, 304; ii. 41, 45, 128, 130,
138, 323
Barberi, i. 202
Barberini, the, i. 157, 187, 226, 268, 301; ii. 7
Barbo, i. 202; ii. 45
Barcelona, i. 308
Bargello, the, i. 129, 293, 296; ii. 42
Basil and Constantine, ii. 33
Basilica (Pagan)--
Julia, i. 66, 71, 106; ii. 92
Basilicas (Christian) of--
Constantine, i. 90; ii. 292, 297
Liberius, i. 138
Philip and Saint James, i. 170
Saint John Lateran, i. 107, 112, 117, 278, 281
Santa Maria Maggiore, i. 107, 135, 139, 147, 148, 166, 208, 278; ii. 118
Santi Apostoli, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213
Sicininus, i. 134, 138
Baths, i. 91
of Agrippa, i. 271
of Caracalla, ii. 119
of Constantine, i. 144, 188
of Diocletian, i. 107, 129, 145-147, 149, 289, 292
of Novatus, i. 145
of Philippus, i. 145
of public, i. 144
of Severus Alexander, ii. 28
of Titus, i. 55, 107, 152
Befana, the, i. 298, 299, 300; ii. 25
Belisarius, i. 266, 267, 269
Benediction of 1846, the, i. 183
Benevento, Cola da, i. 219, 220
Bernard, ii. 77-80
Bernardi, Gianbattista, ii. 54
Bernini, i. 147, 301, 302, 303; ii. 24
Bibbiena, Cardinal, ii. 146, 285
Maria, ii. 146
Bismarck, ii. 224, 232, 236, 237
Boccaccio, i. 211, 213
Vineyard, the, i. 189
Bologna, i. 259; ii. 58
Borghese, the, i. 206, 226
Scipio, i. 187
Borgia, the, i. 209
Cæsar, i. 149, 151, 169, 213, 287; ii. 150, 171, 282, 283
Gandia, i. 149, 150, 151, 287
Lucrezia, i. 149, 177, 185, 287; ii. 129, 151, 174
Rodrigo, i. 287; ii. 242, 265, 282
Vanozza, i. 149, 151, 287
Borgo, the Region, i. 101, 127; ii. 132, 147, 202-214, 269
Borroinini, i. 301, 302; ii. 24
Botticelli, ii. 188, 190, 195, 200, 276
Bracci, ii. 318
Bracciano, i. 282, 291, 292, 294
Duke of, i. 289
Bramante, i. 305; ii. 144, 145, 274, 298, 322
Brescia, i. 286
Bridge. See _Ponte_
Ælian, the, i. 274
Cestian, ii. 105
Fabrician, ii. 105
Sublician, i. 6, 23, 67; ii. 127, 294.
Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded, ii. 129, 131
Brothers of Prayer and Death, i. 123, 204, 242
Brunelli, ii. 244
Brutus, i. 6, 12, 18, 41, 58, 80; ii. 96
Buffalmacco, ii. 196
Bull-fights, i. 252
Burgundians, i. 251
C
Cæsar, Julius, i. 29-33, 35-41, 250; ii. 102, 224, 297
Cæsars, the, i. 44-46, 125, 249, 252, 253; ii. 224
Julian, i. 252
Palaces of, i. 4, 191; ii. 95
Caetani, i. 51, 115, 159, 161, 163, 206, 277
Benedict, i. 160
Caligula, i. 46, 252, ii. 96
Campagna, the, i. 92, 94, 158, 237, 243, 253, 282, 312; ii. 88, 107, 120
Campitelli, the Region, i. 101; ii. 64
Campo--
dei Fiori, i. 297
Marzo (Campus Martius), i. 65, 112, 271
the Region, i. 101, 248, 250, 275; ii. 6, 44
Vaccino, i. 128-131, 173
Canale, Carle, i. 287
Cancelleria, i. 102, 305, 312, 315, 316; ii. 223
Canidia, i. 64; ii. 293
Canossa, i. 126; ii. 307
Canova, ii. 320
Capet, Hugh, ii. 29
Capitol, the, i. 8, 14, 24, 29, 72, 107, 112, 167, 190, 204, 278, 282;
ii. 12, 13, 21, 22, 52, 64, 65, 67-75, 84, 121, 148, 302
Capitoline hill, i. 106, 194
Captains of the Regions, i. 110, 112, 114
Election of, i. 112
Caracci, the, i. 264
Carafa, the, ii. 46, 49, 50, 56, 111
Cardinal, i. 186, 188; ii. 56, 204
Carnival, i. 107, 193-203, 241, 298; ii. 113
of Saturn, i. 194
Carpineto, ii. 229, 230, 232, 239, 287
Carthage, i. 20, 26, 88
Castagno, Andrea, ii. 89, 185
Castle of--
Grottaferrata, i. 314
Petrella, i. 286
the Piccolomini, i. 268
Sant' Angelo, i. 114, 116, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 259, 278, 284, 308,
314; ii. 17, 28, 37, 40, 56, 59, 60, 109, 152, 202-214, 216, 269
Castracane, Castruccio, i. 165, 166, 170
Catacombs, the, i. 139
of Saint Petronilla, ii. 125
Sebastian, ii. 296
Catanei, Vanossa de, i. 287
Catharine, Queen of Cyprus, ii. 305
Cathedral of Siena, i. 232
Catiline, i. 27; ii. 96, 294
Cato, ii. 121
Catullus, i. 86
Cavour, Count, ii. 90, 224, 228, 237
Cellini, Benvenuto, i. 311, 315; ii. 157, 195
Cenci, the, ii. 1
Beatrice, i. 147, 285-287; ii. 2, 129, 151
Francesco, i, 285; ii. 2
Centra Pio, ii. 238, 239
Ceri, Renzo da, i. 310
Cesarini, Giuliano, i. 174; ii. 54, 89
Chapel, Sixtine. See under _Vatican_
Charlemagne, i. 32, 49, 51, 53, 76, 109; ii. 297
Charles of Anjou, i. ii. 160
Albert of Sardinia, ii. 221
the Fifth, i. 131, 174, 206, 220, 305, 306; ii. 138
Chiesa. See _Church_
Nuova, i. 275
Chigi, the, i. 258
Agostino, ii. 144, 146
Fabio, ii. 146
Christianity in Rome, i. 176
Christina, Queen of Sweden, ii. 150, 151, 304, 308
Chrysostom, ii. 104, 105.
Churches of,--
the Apostles, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213
Aracoeli, i. 52, 112, 167; ii. 57, 70, 75
Cardinal Mazarin, i. 186
the Gallows, i. 284
Holy Guardian Angel, i. 122
the Minerva, ii. 55
the Penitentiaries, ii. 216
the Portuguese, i. 250
Saint Adrian, i. 71
Agnes, i. 301, 304
Augustine, ii. 207
Bernard, i. 291
Callixtus, ii. 125
Charles, i. 251
Eustace, ii. 23, 24, 26, 39
George in Velabro, i. 195; ii. 10
Gregory on the Aventine, ii. 129
Ives, i. 251; ii. 23, 24
John of the Florentines, i. 273
Pine Cone, ii. 56
Peter's on the Janiculum, ii. 129
Sylvester, i. 176
Saints Nereus and Achillæus, ii. 125
Vincent and Anastasius, i. 186
San Clemente, i. 143
Giovanni in Laterano, i. 113
Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192
Miranda, i. 71
Marcello, i. 165, 192
Pietro in Montorio, ii. 151
Vincoli, i. 118, 283; ii. 322
Salvatore in Cacaberis, i. 112
Stefano Rotondo, i. 106
Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, i. 102; ii. 3, 10, 110
Santa Francesca Romana, i. 111
Maria de Crociferi, i. 267
degli Angeli, i. 146, 258, 259
dei Monti, i. 118
del Pianto, i. 113
di Grotto Pinta, i. 294
in Campo Marzo, ii. 23
in Via Lata, i. 142
Nuova, i. 111, 273
Transpontina, ii. 212
della Vittoria, i. 302
Prisca, ii. 124
Sabina, i. 278; ii. 40
Trinità dei Pellegrini, ii. 110
Cicero, i. 45, 73; ii. 96, 294
Cimabue, ii. 156, 157, 162, 163, 169, 188, 189
Cinna, i. 25, 27
Circolo, ii. 245
Circus, the, i. 64, 253
Maximus, i. 64, 66; ii. 84, 119
City of Augustus, i. 57-77
Making of the, i. 1-21
of Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
of the Empire, i. 22-56
of the Middle Age, i. 47, 78-99, 92
of the Republic, i. 47
today, i. 55, 92
Civilization, ii. 177
and bloodshed, ii. 218
morality, ii. 178
progress, ii. 177-180
Claudius, i. 46, 255, 256;
ii. 102
Cloelia, i. 13
Coelian hill, i. 106
Collegio Romano, i. 102;
ii. 45, 61
Colonna, the, i. 51, 94, 104, 135, 153, 157-170, 172, 176, 187, 206, 217,
251, 252, 271, 272, 275-283, 306-315;
ii. 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 37, 51, 54, 60, 106, 107, 126, 204
Giovanni, i. 104
Jacopo, i. 159, 165, 192
Lorenzo, ii. 126, 204-213
Marcantonio, i. 182; ii. 54
Pietro, i. 159
Pompeo, i. 305, 310-317; ii. 205
Prospero, ii. 205
Sciarra, i. 162-166, 192, 206, 213, 229, 279, 275, 281, 307
Stephen, i. 161, 165; ii. 13, 16
the Younger, i. 168
Vittoria, i. 157, 173-177; ii. 174
the Region, i. 101, 190-192; ii. 209
War between Orsini and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315;
ii. 12, 18, 126, 204-211
Colosseum, i. 56, 86, 90, 96, 106, 107, 111, 125, 152, 153, 187, 191, 209,
278; ii. 25, 64, 66, 84, 97, 202, 203, 301
Column of Piazza Colonna i. 190, 192
Comitium, i. 112, 257, 268
Commodus, i. 46, 55; ii. 97, 285
Confraternities, i. 108, 204
Conscript Fathers, i. 78, 112
Constable of Bourbon, i. 52, 259, 273, 304, 309-311; ii. 308
Constans, i. 135, 136
Constantine, i. 90, 113, 163
Constantinople, i. 95, 119
Contests in the Forum, i. 27, 130
Convent of Saint Catharine, i. 176
Convent of Saint Sylvester, i. 176
Corneto, Cardinal of, ii. 282, 283
Cornomania, i. 141
Cornutis, i. 87
Coromania, i. 141, 144
Corsini, the, ii. 150
Corso, i. 96, 106, 108, 192, 196, 205, 206, 229, 251
Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275
Corte Savella, i. 284; ii. 52
Cosmas, the, ii. 156, 157
Costa, Giovanni da, i. 205
Court House, i. 71
Crassus, i. 27, 31;
ii. 128
Crawford, Thomas, i. 147
Crescentius, ii. 40, 41
Crescenzi, i. 114; ii. 27, 40, 209
Crescenzio, ii. 28-40
Stefana, ii. 39
Crispi, i. 116, 187
Crusade, the Second, ii. 86, 105
Crusades, the, i. 76
Curatii, i. 3, 131
Customs of early Rome, i. 9, 48
in dress, i. 48
religion, i. 48
D
Dante, i. 110; ii. 164, 175, 244
Decameron, i. 239
Decemvirs, i. 14; ii. 120
Decrees, Semiamiran, i. 178
Democracy, i. 108
Development of Rome, i. 7, 18
some results of, i. 154
under Barons, i. 51
Decemvirs, i. 14
the Empire, i. 29, 30
Gallic invasion, i. 15-18
Kings, i. 2-7, 14-45
Middle Age, i. 47, 92, 210-247
Papal rule, i. 46-50
Republic, i. 7-14
Tribunes, i. 14
Dictator of Rome, i. 29, 79
Dietrich of Bern, ii. 297
Dionysus, ii. 121
Dolabella, i. 34
Domenichino, ii. 147
Domestic life in Rome, i. 9
Dominicans, i. 158; ii. 45, 46, 49, 50, 60, 61
Domitian, i. 45, 152, 205; ii. 104, 114, 124, 295
Doria, the, i. 206; ii. 45
Albert, i. 207
Andrea, i. 207
Conrad, i. 207
Gian Andrea, i. 207
Lamba, i. 207
Paganino, i. 207
Doria-Pamfili, i. 206-209
Dress in early Rome, i. 48
Drusus, ii. 102
Duca, Antonio del, i. 146, 147
Giacomo del, i. 146
Dürer, Albert, ii. 198
E
Education, ii. 179
Egnatia, i. 75
Elagabalus, i. 77, 177, 179; ii. 296, 297
Election of the Pope, ii. 41, 42, 277
Electoral Wards, i. 107
Elizabeth, Queen of England, ii. 47
Emperors, Roman, i. 46
of the East, i. 95, 126
Empire of Constantinople, i. 46
of Rome, i. 15, 17, 22-28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 72, 99
Encyclicals, ii. 244
Erasmus, ii. 151
Esquiline, the, i. 26, 106, 139, 186; ii. 95, 131, 193
Este, Ippolito d', i. 185
Etruria, i. 12, 15
Euodus, i. 255, 256
Eustace, Saint, ii. 24, 25
square of, ii. 25, 42
Eustachio. See _Sant' Eustachio_
Eutichianus, ii. 296
Eve of Saint John, i. 140
the Epiphany, 299
F
Fabius, i. 20
Fabatosta, ii. 64, 84
Farnese, the, ii. 151
Julia, ii. 324
Farnesina, the, ii. 144, 149, 151
Fathers, Roman, i. 13, 78, 79-84
Ferdinand, ii. 205
Ferrara, Duke of, i. 185
Festivals, i. 193, 298
Aryan in origin, i. 173
Befana, i. 299-301
Carnival, i. 193-203
Church of the Apostle, i. 172, 173
Coromania, i. 141
Epifania, i. 298-301
Floralia, i. 141
Lupercalia, i. 194
May-day in the Campo Vaccino, i. 173
Saturnalia, i. 194
Saint John's Eve, i. 140
Festus, ii. 128
Feuds, family, i. 168
Field of Mars. See _Campo Marzo_
Finiguerra, Maso, ii. 186-188
Flamen Dialis, i. 34
Floralia. See _Festivals_
Florence, i. 160
Forli, Melozzo da, i. 171
Fornarina, the, ii. 144, 146
Forum, i, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 64, 72, 111, 126, 129, 194;
ii. 64, 92-94, 97, 102, 294, 295
of Augustus, i. 119
Trajan, i. 155, 171, 172, 191
Fountains (Fontane) of--
Egeria, ii. 124
Trevi, i. 155, 156, 186, 267
Tullianum, i. 8
Franconia, Duke of, ii. 36, 53
Francis the First, i. 131, 174, 206, 219, 304
Frangipani, i. 50, 94, 153;
ii. 77, 79, 84, 85
Frederick, Barbarossa, ii. 34, 85, 87
of Naples, i. 151
the Second, ii. 34
Fulvius, ii. 121
G
Gabrini, Lawrence, ii. 4
Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308
Gaeta, ii. 36
Galba, ii. 295
Galen, i. 55
Galera, i. 282, 291
Galileo, i. 268
Gardens, i. 93
Cæsar's, i. 66, 68
of Lucullus, i. 254, 270
of the Pigna, ii. 273
Pincian, i. 255
the Vatican, ii. 243, 271, 287
Gargonius, i. 65
Garibaldi, ii. 90, 219, 220, 228, 237
Gastaldi, Cardinal, i. 259
Gate. See _Porta_
the Colline, i. 250
Lateran, i. 126, 154
Septimian, ii. 144, 147
Gebhardt, Émile, i. 213
Gemonian Steps, ii. 67, 294
Genseric, i. 96; ii. 70
George of Franzburg, i. 310
Gherardesca, Ugolino della, ii. 160
Ghetto, i. 102; ii. 2, 101, 110-118
Ghibellines, the, i. 129, 153, 158; ii. 6
Ghiberti, ii. 157.
Ghirlandajo, ii. 157, 172, 276
Giantism, i. 90-92, 210, 302
Gibbon, i. 160
Giotto, ii. 157, 160-165, 169, 188, 189, 200
Gladstone, ii. 231, 232
Golden Milestone, i. 72, 92, 194
Goldoni, i. 265
Goldsmithing, ii. 156, 157, 186, 187
"Good Estate" of Rienzi, ii. 10-12
Gordian, i. 91
Goths, ii. 297, 307.
Gozzoli, Benozzo, ii. 190, 195
Gracchi, the, i. 22, 28
Caius, i. 23; ii. 84
Cornelia, i. 22, 24
Tiberius, i. 23; ii. 102
Gratidianus, i. 27
Guards, Noble, ii. 241, 243, 247, 248, 309, 310, 312
Palatine, ii. 247, 248
Swiss, ii. 246, 247, 310
Guelphs, i. 159; ii. 42, 126, 138
and Ghibellines, i. 129, 153, 275; ii. 160, 162, 173
Guiscard, Robert, i. 95, 126, 127, 129, 144, 252; ii. 70
H
Hadrian, i. 90, 180; i. 25, 202, 203
Hannibal, i. 20
Hasdrubal, i. 21
Henry the Second, ii. 47
Fourth, i. 126, 127; ii. 307
Fifth, ii. 307
Seventh of Luxemburg, i. 273, 276-279; ii. 5
Eighth, i. 219; ii. 47, 274
Hermann, i. 46
Hermes of Olympia, i. 86
Hermogenes, i. 67
Hilda's Tower, i. 250
Hildebrand, i. 52, 126-129; ii.
Honorius, ii. 323, 324
Horace, i. 44, 57-75, 85, 87;
ii. 293
and the Bore, i. 65-71
Camen Seculare of, i. 75
the Satires of, i. 73, 74
Horatii, i. 3, 131
Horatius, i. 5, 6, 13, 23;
ii. 127
Horses of Monte Cavallo, i. 181
Hospice of San Claudio, i. 251
Hospital of--
Santo Spirito, i. 274; ii. 214, 215
House of Parliament, i. 271
Hugh of Burgundy, ii. 30
of Tuscany, ii. 30
Huns' invasion, i. 15, 49, 132
Huxley, ii. 225, 226
I
Imperia, ii. 144
Infessura, Stephen, ii. 59, 60, 204-213
Inn of--
The Bear, i. 288
Falcone, ii. 26
Lion, i. 287
Vanossa, i. 288
Inquisition, i. 286; ii. 46, 49, 52, 53, 54
Interminelli, Castruccio degli, i. 165
Irene, Empress, i. 109
Ischia, i. 175
Island of Saint Bartholomew, i. 272; ii. 1
Isola Sacra, i. 93
Italian life during the Middle Age, i. 210, 247
from 17th to 18th centuries, i. 260, 263, 264
J
Janiculum, the, i. 15, 253, 270; ii. 268, 293, 294, 295
Jesuit College, ii. 61
Jesuits, ii. 45, 46, 61-63
Jews, i. 96; ii. 101-119
John of Cappadocia, i. 267, 268
Josephus, ii. 103
Juba, i. 40
Jugurtha, i. 25
Jupiter Capitolinus, ii. 324, 325
priest of, i. 80, 133
Justinian, i. 267
Juvenal, i. 112; ii. 105, 107, 124
K
Kings of Rome, i. 2-7
L
Lampridius, Ælius, i. 178
Lanciani, i. 79, 177
Lateran, the, i. 106, 112-114, 129, 140-142
Count of, i. 166
Latin language, i. 47
Latini Brunetto, ii. 163
Laurentum, i. 55, 93
Lazaret of Saint Martha, ii. 245
League, Holy, i. 305, 306, 313, 314
Lentulus, ii. 128
Lepida, Domitia, i. 255, 256
Letus, Pomponius, i. 139; ii. 210
Lewis of Bavaria, i. 165, 167, 192, 275
the Seventh, ii. 86, 105
Eleventh, i. 104, 151
Fourteenth, i. 253
Library of--
Collegio Romano, ii. 45
Vatican, ii. 275, 276, 282
Victor Emmanuel, ii. 45, 61
Lieges, Bishop of, i. 280
Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 231, 236
Lippi, Filippo, ii. 190, 191, 192-195, 200
Liszt, i. 185, 203; ii. 176
Livia, i. 220, 252
Livy, i. 44, 47
Lombards, the, i. 251
Lombardy, i. 309
Lorrain, i. 264
Loyola, Ignatius, ii. 46, 62
Lucilius, i. 74
Lucretia, i. 5, 12, 13
Lucullus, i. 257, 270
Lupercalia, i. 194
Lupercus, i. 194
M
Macchiavelli, ii. 174
Mæcenas, i. 62, 69, 74, 140; ii. 293
Mænads, ii. 122
Maldachini, Olimpia, i. 304, 305
Mamertine Prison, i. 25; ii. 72, 293
Mancini, Maria, i. 170, 187
Mancino, Paul, ii. 210
Manlius, Cnæus, ii. 121
Marcus, i. 29; ii. 71, 84
Titus, i. 80
Mantegna, Andrea, ii. 157, 169, 188, 196-198
Marcomanni, i. 190
Marforio, i. 305
Marino, i. 174
Marius, Caius, i. 25, 29
Marius and Sylla, i. 25, 29, 36, 45, 53; ii. 69
Mark Antony, i. 30, 93, 195, 254
Marozia, ii. 27, 28
Marriage Laws, i. 79, 80
Mary, Queen of Scots, ii. 47
Masaccio, ii. 190
Massimi, Pietro de', i. 317
Massimo, i. 102, 317
Mattei, the, ii. 137, 139, 140, 143
Alessandro, ii. 140-143
Curzio, ii. 140-143
Girolamo, ii. 141-143
Marcantonio, ii. 140, 141
Olimpia, ii. 141, 142
Piero, ii. 140, 141
Matilda, Countess, ii. 307
Mausoleum of--
Augustus, i. 158, 169, 205, 251, 252, 270, 271
Hadrian, i. 102, 252; ii. 28, 202, 270. See _Castle of Sant' Angelo_
Maximilian, i. 151
Mazarin, i. 170, 187
Mazzini, ii. 219, 220
Mediævalism, death of, ii. 225
Medici, the, i. 110; ii. 276
Cosimo de', i. 289; ii. 194
Isabella de', i. 290, 291
John de', i. 313
Messalina, i. 254, 272; ii. 255, 256, 257
Michelangelo, i. 90, 146, 147, 173, 175, 177, 302, 303, 315;
ii. 129, 130, 157, 159, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 188, 200, 276-281,
284, 317-319, 322
"Last Judgment" by, i. 173; ii. 171, 276, 280, 315
"Moses" by, ii. 278, 286
"Pietà" by, ii. 286
Middle Age, the, i. 47, 92, 210-247, 274; ii. 163, 166, 172-175, 180, 196
Migliorati, Ludovico, i. 103
Milan, i. 175
Duke of, i. 306
Milestone, golden, i. 72
Mithræum, i. 271
Mithras, i. 76
Mithridates, i. 26, 30, 37, 358
Mocenni, Mario, ii. 249
Monaldeschi, ii. 308
Monastery of--
the Apostles, i. 182
Dominicans, ii. 45, 61
Grottaferrata, ii. 37
Saint Anastasia, ii. 38
Gregory, ii. 85
Sant' Onofrio, ii. 147
Moncada, Ugo de, i. 307, 308
Mons Vaticanus, ii. 268
Montaigne, i. 288
Montalto. See _Felice Peretti_
Monte Briano, i. 274
Cavallo, i. 181, 188, 292, 293; ii. 205, 209
Citorio, i. 193, 252, 271
Giordano, i. 274, 281, 282, 288; ii. 206
Mario, i. 313; ii. 268
Montefeltro, Guido da, ii. 160
Monti--
the Region, i. 101, 106, 107, 111, 112, 125, 133, 134, 144, 150, 185,
305; ii. 133, 209
and Trastevere, i. 129, 145, 153; ii. 133, 209
by moonlight, i. 117
Morrone, Pietro da, i. 159
Muratori, i. 85, 132, 159, 277; ii. 40, 48, 76, 126, 324
Museums of Rome, i. 66
Vatican, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287
Villa Borghese, i. 301
Mustafa, ii. 247
N
Naples, i. 175, 182, 307, 308
Napoleon, i. 32, 34, 53, 88, 109, 258; ii. 218, 221, 298
Louis, ii. 221, 223, 237
Narcissus, i. 255
Navicella, i. 106
Nelson, i. 253
Neri, Saint Philip, i. 318
Nero, i. 46, 56, 188, 254, 257, 285; ii. 163, 211, 291
Nilus, Saint, ii. 36, 37, 40
Nogaret, i. 162, 164
Northmen, i. 46, 49
Numa, i. 3; ii. 268
Nunnery of the Sacred Heart, i. 256
O
Octavius, i. 27, 30, 43, 89; ii. 291
Odoacer, i. 47; ii. 297
Olanda, Francesco d', i. 176
Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, i. 186, 188
Olympius, i. 136, 137, 138
Opimius, i. 24
Orgies of Bacchus, i. 76; ii. 120
Orgies of the Mænads, ii. 121
on the Aventine, i. 76; ii. 121
Orsini, the, i. 94, 149, 153, 159, 167-169, 183, 216, 217, 271, 274,
306-314; ii. 16, 126, 138, 204
Bertoldo, i. 168
Camillo, i. 311
Isabella, i. 291
Ludovico, i. 295
Matteo, i. 281
Napoleon, i. 161
Orsino, i. 166
Paolo Giordano, i. 283, 290-295
Porzia, i. 187
Troilo, i. 290, 291
Virginio, i. 295
war between Colonna and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315;
ii. 18, 126, 204
Orsino, Deacon, i. 134, 135
Orvieto, i. 314
Otho, ii. 295
the Second, ii. 304
Otto, the Great, i. 114; ii. 28, 30
Second, ii. 28
Third, ii. 29-37
Ovid, i. 44, 63
P
Painting, ii. 181
in fresco, ii. 181-183
oil, ii. 184-186
Palace (Palazzo)--
Annii, i. 113
Barberini, i. 106, 187
Borromeo, ii. 61
Braschi, i. 305
Cæsars, i. 4, 191; ii. 64
Colonna, i. 169, 189; ii. 205
Consulta, i. 181
Corsini, ii. 149, 308
Doria, i. 207, 226
Pamfili, i. 206, 208
Farnese, i. 102
Fiano, i. 205
della Finanze, i. 91
Gabrielli, i. 216
the Lateran, i. 127; ii. 30
Massimo alle Colonna, i. 316, 317
Mattei, ii. 140
Mazarini, i. 187
of Nero, i. 152
della Pilotta, i. 158
Priori, i. 160
Quirinale, i. 139, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 304
of the Renascence, i. 205
Rospigliosi, i. 181, 187, 188, 189
Ruspoli, i. 206
Santacroce, i. 237; ii. 23
of the Senator, i. 114
Serristori, ii. 214, 216
Theodoli, i. 169
di Venezia, i. 102, 192, 202
Palatine, the, i. 2, 13, 67, 69, 194, 195; ii. 64, 119
Palermo, i. 146
Palestrina, i. 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 243, 282; ii. 13, 315
Paliano, i. 282
Duke of, i. 157, 189
Palladium, i. 77
Pallavicini, i. 206, 258
Palmaria, i. 267
Pamfili, the, i. 206
Pannartz, i. 317
Pantheon, i. 90, 102, 195, 271, 278; ii. 44, 45, 146
Parione, the Region, i. 101, 297, 312, 317; ii. 42
Square of, ii. 42
Pasquino, the, i. 186, 305, 317
Passavant, ii. 285
Passeri, Bernardino, i. 313; ii. 308
Patarina, i. 107, 202
Patriarchal System, i. 223-228
Pavia, i. 175
Pecci, the, ii. 229
Joachim Vincent, ii. 229, 230.
Peretti, the, i. 205
Felice, i. 149, 289-295
Francesco, i. 149, 289, 292
Vittoria. See _Accoramboni_
Perugia, i. 159, 276, 277
Perugino, ii. 157, 260, 276
Pescara, i. 174
Peter the Prefect, i. 114; ii. 230
Petrarch, i. 161
Petrella, i. 286
Philip the Fair, i. 160, 276, 278
Second of Spain, ii. 47
Phocas, column of, ii. 93.
Piazza--
Barberini, i. 155
della Berlina Vecchia, i. 283
Chiesa Nuova, i. 155
del Colonna, i. 119, 190
Gesù, ii. 45
della Minerva, ii. 45
Moroni, i. 250
Navona, i. 102, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305; ii. 25, 46, 57
Pigna, ii. 55
of the Pantheon, i. 193; ii. 26
Pilotta, i. 158
del Popolo, i. 144, 206, 259, 273
Quirinale, i. 181
Romana, ii. 136
Sant' Eustachio, ii. 25
San Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192, 205, 250
Saint Peter's, ii. 251, 309
di Sciarra, i. 192
Spagna, i. 251; ii. 42
delle Terme, i. 144
di Termini, i. 144
Venezia, i. 206
Pierleoni, the, ii. 77, 79, 82, 101, 105, 106, 109, 114
Pigna, ii. 45
the Region, i, 101, 102; ii. 44
Pilgrimages, ii. 245
Pincian (hill), i. 119, 270, 272
Pincio, the, i. 121, 189, 223, 253, 255, 256, 259, 264, 272
Pintelli, Baccio, ii. 278, 279
Pinturicchio, ii. 147
Pliny, the Younger, i. 85, 87
Pompey, i. 30
Pons Æmilius, i. 67
Cestius, ii. 102, 105
Fabricius, ii. 105
Triumphalis, i. 102, 274
Ponte. See also _Bridge_
Garibaldi, ii. 138
Rotto, i. 67
Sant' Angelo, i. 274, 283, 284, 287; ii. 42, 55, 270
Sisto, i. 307, 311; ii. 136
the Region, i. 274, 275
Pontifex Maximus, i. 39, 48
Pontiff, origin of title, ii. 127
Pope--
Adrian the Fourth, ii. 87
Alexander the Sixth, i. 258; ii. 269, 282
Seventh, i. 259
Anastasius, ii. 88
Benedict the Sixth, ii. 28-30
Fourteenth, i. 186
Boniface the Eighth, i. 159, 160, 167, 213, 280, 306; ii. 304
Celestin the First, i. 164
Second, ii. 83
Clement the Fifth, i. 275, 276
Sixth, ii. 9, 17-19
Seventh, i. 306, 307, 310, 313, 314; ii. 308
Eighth, i. 286
Ninth, i. 187; ii. 110
Eleventh, i. 171
Thirteenth, ii. 320
Damascus, i. 133, 135, 136
Eugenius the Third, ii. 85
Fourth, ii. 7, 56
Ghisleri, ii. 52, 53
Gregory the Fifth, ii. 32-37
Seventh, i. 52, 126; ii. 307
Thirteenth, i. 183, 293
Sixteenth, i. 305; ii. 221, 223
Honorius the Third, ii. 126
Fourth, ii. 126
Innocent the Second, ii. 77, 79, 82, 105
Third, i. 153; ii. 6
Sixth, ii. 19
Eighth, i. 275
Tenth, i. 206, 209,302,303
Joan, i. 143
John the Twelfth, ii. 282
Thirteenth, i. 113
Fifteenth, ii. 29
Twenty-third, ii. 269
Julius the Second, i. 208, 258; ii. 276, 298, 304
Leo the Third, i. 109; ii. 146, 297
Fourth, ii. 242
Tenth, i. 304; ii. 276, 304
Twelfth, i. 202; ii. 111
Thirteenth, i. 77; ii. 218-267, 282, 287, 308, 312, 313
Liberius, i. 138
Lucius the Second, ii. 84, 85
Martin the First, i. 136
Nicholas the Fourth, i. 159, 274
Fifth, i. 52; ii. 58, 268, 269, 298, 304
Paschal the Second, i. 258; ii. 307
Paul the Second, i. 202, 205
Third, i. 219; ii. 41, 130, 304, 323, 324
Fourth, ii. 46, 47, 48-51, 111, 112
Fifth, ii. 289
Pelagius the First, i. 170, 171; ii. 307
Pius the Fourth, i. 147, 305
Sixth, i. 181, 182
Seventh, i. 53; ii. 221
Ninth, i. 76, 183, 315; ii. 66, 110, 111, 216, 221-225, 252, 253, 255,
257, 258, 265, 298, 308, 311
Silverius, i. 266
Sixtus the Fourth, i. 258, 275; ii. 127, 204-213, 274, 278, 321
Fifth, i. 52, 139, 149, 181, 184, 186, 205, 283; ii. 43, 157, 241,
304, 323
Sylvester, i. 113; ii. 297, 298
Symmachus, ii. 44
Urban the Second, i. 52
Sixth, ii. 322, 323
Eighth, i. 181, 187, 268, 301; ii. 132, 203, 298
Vigilius, ii. 307
Popes, the, i. 125, 142, 273
at Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 9
among sovereigns, ii. 228
election of, ii. 41, 42
hatred for, ii. 262-264
temporal power of, i. 168; ii. 255-259
Poppæa, i. 103
Porcari, the, ii. 56
Stephen, ii. 56-60, 204
Porsena of Clusium, i. 5, 6, 12
Porta. See also _Gate_--
Angelica, i. 120
Maggiore, i. 107
Metronia, i. 106
Mugonia, i. 10
Pia, i. 107, 147, 152; ii. 224
Pinciana, i. 193, 250, 264, 266, 269
del Popolo, i. 272, 299
Portese, ii. 132
Salaria, i. 106, 107, 193
San Giovanni, i. 107, 120
Lorenzo, i. 107
Sebastiano, ii. 119, 125
Spirito, i. 311; ii. 132, 152
Tiburtina, i. 107
Portico of Neptune, i. 271
Octavia, ii. 3, 105
Poussin, Nicholas, i. 264
Præneste, i. 156
Prætextatus, i. 134
Prefect of Rome, i. 103, 114, 134
Presepi, ii. 139
Prince of Wales, i. 203
Prior of the Regions, i. 112, 114
Processions of--
the Brotherhood of Saint John, ii. 130
Captains of Regions, i. 112
Coromania, i. 141
Coronation of Lewis of Bavaria, i. 166, 167
Ides of May, ii. 127-129
the Triumph of Aurelian, i. 179
Progress and civilization, i. 262; ii. 177-180
romance, i. 154
Prosper of Cicigliano, ii. 213
Q
Quæstor, i. 58
Quirinal, the (hill), i. 106, 119, 158, 182, 184, 186, 187; ii. 205
R
Rabble, Roman, i. 115, 128, 132, 153, 281; ii. 131
Race course of Domitian, i. 270, 297
Races, Carnival, i. 108, 202, 203
Raimondi, ii. 315
Rampolla, ii. 239, 249, 250
Raphael, i. 260, 315; ii. 159, 169, 175, 188, 200, 281, 285, 322
in Trastevere, ii. 144-147
the "Transfiguration" by, ii. 146, 281
Ravenna, i. 175
Regions (Rioni), i. 100-105, 110-114, 166
Captains of, i. 110
devices of, i. 100
fighting ground of, i. 129
Prior, i. 112, 114
rivalry of, i. 108, 110, 125
Regola, the Region, i. 101, 168; ii. 1-3
Regulus, i. 20
Religion, i. 48, 50, 75
Religious epochs in Roman history, i. 76
Renascence in Italy, i. 52, 77, 84, 98, 99, 188, 237, 240, 250, 258, 261,
262, 303; ii. 152-201, 280
art of, i. 231
frescoes of, i. 232
highest development of, i. 303, 315
leaders of, ii. 152, 157-159
manifestation of, ii. 197
palaces of, i. 205, 216
represented in "The Last Judgment," ii. 280
results of development of, ii. 199
Reni, Guido, i. 264; ii. 317
Republic, the, i. 6, 12, 15, 53, 110; ii. 291
and Arnold of Brescia, ii. 86
Porcari, ii. 56-60
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
modern ideas of, ii. 219
Revolts in Rome--
against the nobles, ii. 73
of the army, i. 25
Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73-89
Marius and Sylla, i. 25
Porcari, ii. 56-60
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8, 73
slaves, i. 24
Stefaneschi, i. 281-283; ii. 219-222
Revolutionary idea, the, ii. 219-222
Riario, the, ii. 149, 150, 151
Jerome, ii. 205
Rienzi, Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308
Rioni. See _Regions_
Ripa, the Region, i. 101; ii. 118
Ripa Grande, ii. 127
Ripetta, ii. 52
Ristori, Mme., i. 169
Robert of Naples, i. 278
Roffredo, Count, i. 114, 115
Rome--
a day in mediæval, i. 241-247
Bishop of, i. 133
charm of, i. 54, 98, 318
ecclesiastic, i. 124
lay, i. 124
a modern Capital, i. 123, 124
foundation of, i. 2
of the Augustan Age, i. 60-62
Barons, i. 50, 84, 104, 229-247; ii. 75
Cæsars, i. 84
Empire, i. 15, 17, 28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 99
Kings, i. 2-7, 10, 11
Middle Age, i. 110, 210-247, 274; ii. 172-175
Napoleonic era, i. 229
Popes, i. 50, 77, 84, 104
Republic, i. 6, 12, 16, 53, 110
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
today, i. 55
sack of, by Constable of Bourbon, i. 259, 273, 309-315
sack of, by Gauls, i. 15, 49, 252
Guiscard, i. 95, 126-129, 252
seen from dome of Saint Peter's, ii. 302
under Tribunes, i. 14
Decemvirs, i. 14
Dictator, i. 28
Romulus, i. 2, 5, 30, 78, 228
Rospigliosi, i. 206
Rossi, Pellegrino, i. 316
Count, ii. 223
Rostra, i. 27; ii. 93
Julia, i. 68; ii. 93
Rota, ii. 215
Rovere, the, i. 258; ii. 276, 279, 321
Rudinì, i. 187
Rudolph of Hapsburg, i. 161
Rufillus, i. 65
S
Sacchi, Bartolommeo, i. 139, 147
Saint Peter's Church, i. 166, 278; ii. 202, 212, 243, 246, 268, 289, 294,
295, 326
altar of, i. 96
architects of, ii. 304
bronze doors of, ii. 299, 300
builders of, ii. 304
Chapel of the Choir, ii. 310, 313, 314
Chapel of the Sacrament, ii. 274, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313
Choir of, ii. 313-316
Colonna Santa, ii. 319
dome of, i. 96; ii. 302
Piazza of, ii. 251
Sacristy of, i. 171
Salvini, i. 169, 252
Giorgio, i. 313
Santacroce Paolo, i. 286
Sant' Angelo the Region, i. 101; ii. 101
Santorio, Cardinal, i. 208
San Vito, i. 282
Saracens, i. 128, 144
Sarto, Andrea del, ii. 157, 169
Saturnalia, i. 125, 194, 195
Saturninus, i. 25
Satyricon, the, i. 85
Savelli, the, i. 284; ii. 1, 16, 126, 206
John Philip, ii. 207-210
Savonarola, i. 110
Savoy, house of, i. 110; ii. 219, 220, 224
Scævola, i. 13
Schweinheim, i. 317
Scipio, Cornelius, i. 20
of Africa, i. 20, 22, 29, 59, 76; ii. 121
Asia, i. 21; ii. 120
Scotus, i. 182
See, Holy, i. 159, 168; ii. 264-267, 277, 294
Segni, Monseignor, i. 304
Sejanuo, ii. 294
Semiamira, i. 178
Senate, Roman, i. 167, 168, 257
the Little, i. 177, 180
Senators, i. 78, 112, 167
Servius, i. 5, 15
Severus--
Arch of, ii. 92
Septizonium of, i. 96, 127
Sforza, i. 13; ii. 89
Sforza, Catharine, i. 177; ii. 150
Francesco, i. 306
Siena, i. 232, 268; ii. 229
Signorelli, ii. 277
Slaves, i. 81, 24
Sosii Brothers, i. 72, 73
Spencer, Herbert, ii. 225, 226
Stefaneschi, Giovanni degli, i. 103, 282
Stilicho, ii. 323
Stradella, Alessandro, ii. 315
Streets, See _Via_
Subiaco, i. 282
Suburra, i. 39; ii. 95
Suetonius, i. 43
Sylla, ii. 25-29, 36-42
T
Tacitus, i. 46, 254; ii. 103
Tarentum, i. 18, 19
Tarpeia, i. 29; ii. 68, 69
Tarpeian Rock, ii. 67
Tarquins, the, i. 6, 11, 12, 80, 248, 249, 269; ii. 69
Sextus, i. 5, 11
Tasso, i. 188, 189; ii. 147-149
Bernardo, i. 188
Tatius, i. 68, 69
Tempietto, the, i. 264
Temple of--
Castor, i. 27
Castor and Pollux, i. 68; ii. 92, 94
Ceres, ii. 119
Concord, i. 24; ii. 92
Flora, i. 155
Hercules, ii. 40
Isis and Serapis, i. 271
Julius Cæsar, i. 72
Minerva, i. 96
Saturn, i. 194, 201; ii. 94
the Sun, i. 177, 179, 180, 271
Venus and Rome, i. 110
Venus Victorius, i. 270
Vesta, i. 68
Tenebræ, i. 117
Tetricius, i. 179
Theatre of--
Apollo, i. 286
Balbus, ii. 1
Marcellus, ii. 1, 101, 105, 106, 119
Pompey, i. 103, 153
Thedoric of Verona, ii. 297
Theodoli, the, i. 258
Theodora Senatrix, i. 158, 266, 267; ii. 27-29, 203, 282
Tiber, i. 23, 27, 66, 93, 94, 151, 158, 168, 189, 237, 248, 249, 254, 269,
272, 288
Tiberius, i. 254, 287; ii. 102
Titian, i. 315; ii. 165, 166, 175, 188, 278
Titus, i. 56, 86;
ii. 102, 295
Tivoli, i. 180, 185; ii. 76, 85
Torre (Tower)--
Anguillara, ii. 138, 139, 140
Borgia, ii. 269, 285
dei Conti, i. 118, 153
Milizie, i. 277
Millina, i. 274
di Nona, i. 274, 284, 287; ii. 52, 54, 72
Sanguigna, i. 274
Torrione, ii. 241, 242
Trajan, i. 85, 192; ii. 206
Trastevere, the Region, i. 101, 127, 129, 278, 307, 311;
ii. 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 151
Trevi, the Fountain, i. 155, 186
the Region, i. 155, 187; ii. 209
Tribunes, i. 14
Trinità de' Monti, i. 256, 264
dei Pellegrini, ii. 110
Triumph, the, of Aurelian, i. 179
Triumphal Road, i. 66, 69, 70, 71
Tullianum, i. 8
Tullus, i. 3
Domitius, i. 90
Tuscany, Duke of, ii. 30
Tusculum, i. 158
U
Unity, of Italy, i. 53, 77, 123, 184; ii. 224
under Augustus, i. 184
Victor Emmanuel, i. 184
University, Gregorian, the, ii. 61
of the Sapienza, i. 251; ii. 24, 25
Urbino, Duke of, i. 208, 217
V
Valens, i. 133
Valentinian, i. 133
Varus, i. 46
Vatican, the, i. 127, 128, 147, 165, 189, 278, 281, 307;
ii. 44, 202, 207, 228, 243, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, 269, 271
barracks of the Swiss Guard, ii. 275
chapels in,
Pauline, ii.
Nicholas, ii. 285
Sixtine, ii. 246, 274, 275, 276, 278-281, 285
fields, i. 274
Court of the Belvedere, ii. 269
Saint Damasus, ii. 273
finances of, ii. 253
gardens of, ii. 243, 271, 287
of the Pigna, ii. 273
library, ii. 275, 276, 282
Borgia apartments of, ii. 282
Loggia of the Beatification, ii. 245
Raphael, ii. 273, 274, 276, 285
Maestro di Camera, ii. 239, 248, 250
museums of, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287
picture galleries, ii. 273-284
Pontifical residence, ii. 249
private apartments, ii. 249
Sala Clementina, ii. 248
del Concistoro, ii. 246
Ducale, ii. 245, 247
Regia, ii. 246
throne room, ii. 247
Torre Borgia, ii. 269, 285
Veii, i. 16, 17
Velabrum, i. 67
Veneziano, Domenico, ii. 185
Venice, i. 193, 296, 306; ii. 35, 205
Vercingetorix, ii. 294
Vespasian, i. 46, 56; ii. 295
Vespignani, ii. 241, 242
Vesta, i. 57
temple of, i. 71, 77
Vestals, i. 77, 80, 133, 152; ii. 99
house of, i. 69
Via--
della Angelo Custode, i. 122
Appia, i. 22, 94
Arenula, ii. 45
Borgognona, i. 251
Campo Marzo, i. 150
di Caravita, ii. 45
del Corso, i. 155, 158, 192, 193, 251; ii. 45
della Dateria, i. 183
Dogana Vecchia, ii. 26
Flaminia, i. 193
Florida, ii. 45
Frattina, i. 250
de' Greci, i. 251
Lata, i. 193
Lungara, i. 274; ii. 144, 145, 147
Lungaretta, ii. 140
della Maestro, i. 283
Marforio, i. 106
di Monserrato, i. 283
Montebello, i. 107
Nazionale, i. 277
Nova, i. 69
di Parione, i. 297
de' Poli, i. 267
de Pontefici, i. 158
de Prefetti, ii. 6
Quattro Fontane, i. 155, 187
Sacra, i. 65, 71, 180
San Gregorio, i. 71
San Teodoro, i. 195
de' Schiavoni, i. 158
Sistina, i. 260
della Stelleta, i. 250
della Tritone, i. 106, 119-122, 155
Triumphalis, i. 66, 70, 71
Venti Settembre, i. 186
Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275
Viale Castro Pretorio, i. 107
Vicolo della Corda, i. 283
Victor Emmanuel, i. 53, 166, 184; ii. 90, 221, 224, 225, 238
monument to, ii. 90
Victoria, Queen of England, ii. 263
Vigiles, cohort of the, i. 158, 170
Villa Borghese, i. 223
Colonna, i. 181, 189
d'Este, i. 185
of Hadrian, i. 180
Ludovisi, i. 106, 193
Medici, i. 259, 262, 264, 265, 269, 313
Negroni, i. 148, 149, 289, 292
Publica, i. 250
Villani, i. 160, 277; ii. 164
Villas, in the Region of Monti, i. 149, 150
Vinci, Lionardo da, i. 260, 315; ii. 147, 159, 169, 171, 175, 184, 188,
195, 200
"The Last Supper," by, ii. 171, 184
Virgil, i. 44, 56, 63
Virginia, i. 14
Virginius, i. 15
Volscians, ii. 230
W
Walls--
Aurelian, i. 93, 106, 110, 193, 271; ii. 119, 144
Servian, i. 5, 7, 15, 250, 270
of Urban the Eighth, ii. 132
Water supply, i. 145
William the Silent, ii. 263
Witches on the Æsquiline, i. 140
Women's life in Rome, i. 9
Z
Zama, i. 21, 59
Zenobia of Palmyra, i. 179; ii. 150.
Zouaves, the, ii. 216
[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 the little room
where he was to die. It is better to think of it so, when one has seen
it in those days, than to see it as it is now, standing out in vulgar
publicity upon the modern avenue.
There died the man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been
slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden
himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to
receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been
crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant
passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a
wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many
years at a work so perfectly harmonious as 'Jerusalem Freed'; and it
seems strange that the hot-headed, changeable southerner should have
stood up as the determined champion of the Epic Unity against the
school of Ariosto, the great northern poet, who had believed in
diversity of action as a fundamental principle of the Epic; it is
stranger still and a proof of his power that Tasso should have earned
something like universal glory against the long-standing supremacy of
Ariosto in the same field, in the same half-century, and living at the
same court. Everything in Tasso's life was contradictory, everything in
his works was harmonious. Even after he was dead, the contrasts of glory
and misery followed his bones like fate. He died in the arms of Cardinal
Aldobrandini, the Pope's nephew, almost on the eve of his intended
crowning in the Capitol; he was honoured with a magnificent funeral, and
his body was laid in an obscure corner, enclosed in a poor deal coffin.
It was six years before the monks of Sant' Onofrio dug up the bones and
placed them in a little lead box 'out of pity,' as the inscription on
the metal lid told, and buried them again under a poor slab that bore
his name, and little else; and when a monument was at last made to him
in the nineteenth century, by the subscriptions of literary societies,
it was so poor and unworthy that it had better not have been set up at
all. A curious book might be written upon the vicissitudes of great
men's bones.
Opposite the Farnesina stands the great Palazzo Corsini, once the
habitation of the Riario family, whose history is a catalogue of
murders, betrayals, and all possible crimes, and whose only redeeming
light in a long history was that splendid and brave Catherine Sforza,
married to one of their name, who held the fortress of Forlì so bravely
against Cæsar Borgia, who challenged him to single combat, which he
refused out of shame, who was overcome by him at last, and brought
captive to the Vatican in chains of gold, as Aurelian brought Zenobia.
In the days of her power she had lived in the great palace for a time.
It looks modern now; it was once a place of evil fame, and is said to
have been one of the few palaces in Rome which contained one of those
deadly shafts, closed by a balanced trap door that dropped the living
victim who stepped upon it a hundred and odd feet at a fall, out of
hearing and out of sight for ever. From the Riario it was bought at
last, in 1738, by the Corsini, and when they began to repair it, they
found the bones of the nameless dead in heaps far down among the
foundations.
There also lived Christina, Queen of Sweden, of romantic and execrable
memory, for twenty years; and here she died, the strangest compound of
greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the
destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing passion for
art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate
and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy,
composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini,
dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a
vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and
of engravings and medals and beautiful things of every sort--the only
woman, perhaps, who was ever like Lucrezia Borgia, and outdid her in all
ways.
Long before her time, a Riario, the Cardinal of Saint George, had like
tastes and drew about him the thinkers and the writers of his age, when
the Renascence was at its climax and the Constable of Bourbon had not
yet been shot down at the walls a few hundred yards from the Corsini
palace, bequeathing the plunder of Rome to his Spaniards and Germans.
Here Erasmus spent those hours of delight of which he eloquently wrote
in after years, and here, to this day, in the grand old halls whence the
Riario sent so many victims to their deaths below, a learned and
literary society holds its meetings. Of all palaces in Rome in which she
might have lived, fate chose this one for Queen Christina, as if its
destiny of contrasts past and future could best match her own.
Much more could be told of Trastevere and much has been told already;
how Beatrice Cenci lies in San Pietro in Montorio, how the lovely
Farnesina, with all its treasures, was bought by force by the Farnese
for ten thousand and five hundred scudi,--two thousand and one hundred
pounds,--how the Region was swept and pillaged again and again by
Emperors and nobles, and people and Popes, without end.
But he who should wander through the Regions in their order, knowing
that the greatest is last, would tire of lingering in the long Lungara
and by the Gate of the Holy Spirit, while on the other side lies the
great Castle of Sant' Angelo, and beyond that the Vatican, and Saint
Peter's church; and for that matter, a great part of what has not been
told here may be found in precise order and ready to hand in all those
modern guide books which are the traveller's first leading-strings as he
learns to walk in Rome.
* * * * *
Yet here, on the threshold of that Region which contains many of the
world's most marvellous treasures of art--at the Gate of the Holy
Spirit, through which Raphael so often passed between love and work--I
shall say a few words about that development in which Italy led the
world, and something of the men who were leaders in the Renascence.
Art is not dependent on the creations of genius alone. It is also the
result of developing manual skill to the highest degree. Without genius,
works of art might as well be turned out by machinery; without manual
skill, genius could have no means of expression. As a matter of fact, in
our own time, it is the presence of genius, without manual skill, or
foolishly despising it, that has produced a sort of school called the
impressionist.
To go back to first principles, the word Art, as every child knows, is
taken directly from the Latin ars, artis, which the best Latin
dictionary translates or defines: 'The faculty of joining anything
corporeal or spiritual properly or skilfully,' and therefore: 'skill,
dexterity, art, ability,' and then: 'skill or faculty of the mind or
body that shows itself in performing any work, trade, profession, art,
science.' From the meaning of the Latin word we may eliminate what
refers to spiritual things; not because literature, for instance, is not
art, as well as music and the rest, but because we have to do with
painting, sculpture, architecture, metal working, and the like, in which
actual manual skill is a most integral element.
Now it is always admitted that art grew out of handicraft, when
everything was made by hand, and when the competition between workers
was purely personal, because each man worked for himself and not for a
company in which his individuality was lost. That is nowhere more clear
than in Italy, though the conditions were similar throughout Europe
until the universal introduction of machinery. The transition from
handicraft to art was direct, quick and logical, and at first it
appeared almost simultaneously in all the trades. The Renascence appears
to us as a sort of glorious vision in which all that was beautiful
suddenly sprang into being again, out of all that was rough and chaotic
and barbarous. In real fact the Renascence began among carpenters, and
blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take
pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own
tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a
pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith
dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason
chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and
when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove.
The true beginning of the Renascence was the first improvement of
hand-work after an age in which everything people used had been rougher
and worse made than we can possibly imagine. Then one thing suggested
another, and each generation found some new thing to do, till the result
was a great movement and a great age. But there never was, and never
could have been, any art at all without hand-work. Progress makes almost
everything by machinery, and dreams of abolishing hand-work altogether,
and of making Nature's forces do everything, and provide everything for
everybody, so that nobody need work at all, and everybody may have a
like share in what is to cost nobody anything. Then, in the dream,
everybody will be devoted to what we vaguely call intellectual pursuits,
and the human race will be raised to an indefinitely high level. In
reality, if such things were possible, we should turn into oysters, or
into something about as intelligent. It is the experience of all ages
that human beings will not work unless they are obliged to, and
degenerate rapidly in idleness, and there have not been many exceptions
to the rule. Art grew out of hand-work, but it grew in it, too, as a
plant in the soil; when there is no more hand-work, there will be no
more art. The two belong to each other, and neither can do without the
other.
[Illustration: THE FORUM
Looking West]
Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of
centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in
Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like
the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works
were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life
in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades,
Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than
those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more
pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and
expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean
is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and
out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who
found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been
taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely
plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this
knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to
the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of
painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no
value to the old-fashioned artists who had learned them from generation
to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm.
The highest of the crafts in the Middle Age was goldsmithing. When
almost every other artistic taste had disappeared from daily life in
that rough time, the love of personal adornment had survived, and when
painters and sculptors were a small band of men, trained to represent
certain things in certain ways--trained like a church choir, in fact, to
the endless repetition of ancient themes--the goldsmiths had latitude
and freedom to their hearts' desire and so many buyers for their work
that their own numbers were not nearly so limited as those of 'artists'
in the narrow sense. One chief part of their art lay in drawing and
modelling, another in casting metals, another in chiselling, and they
were certainly the draughtsmen of an age in which the art of drawing was
practically lost among painters; and it was because they learned how to
draw that so many of them became great painters when the originality of
two or three men of genius had opened the way.
One says 'two or three,' vaguely, but the art had grown out of infancy
when they appeared, and there was an enormous distance between Cimabue,
whom people call the father of painting, and the Cosmas family, of whom
the last died about the time that Cimabue was born. But though Cimabue
was a noble, the Cosmas family who preceded him were artisans first and
artists afterwards, and men of the people; and Giotto, whom Cimabue
discovered sketching sheep on a piece of slate with a pointed stone, was
a shepherd lad. So was Andrea Mantegna, who dominated Italian art a
hundred and fifty years later--so was David, one of the greatest poets
that ever lived, and so was Sixtus the Fifth, one of the strongest popes
that ever reigned--all shepherds.
It is rather remarkable that although so many famous painters were
goldsmiths, none of the very greatest were. Among the goldsmiths were
Orcagna, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Francia,
Verrocchio, Andrea del Sarto. But Benvenuto Cellini, the greatest of
goldsmiths, was never a painter, and the very greatest painters were
never goldsmiths, for Cimabue, Giotto, Mantegna, Lionardo da Vinci,
Perugino, Raphael, Michelangelo, all began in the profession that made
them the greatest artists of their age. It is very hard to get at an
idea of what men thought about art in those times. Perhaps it would be
near the truth to say that it was looked upon as a universal means of
expression. What strikes one most in the great pictures of that time is
their earnestness, not in the sense of religious faith, but in the
determination to do nothing without a perfectly clear and definite
meaning, which any cultivated person could understand, and at which even
a child might guess. Nothing was done for effect, nothing was done
merely for beauty's sake. It was as if the idea of usefulness, risen
with art from the hand-crafts, underlay the intentions of beauty, or of
devotion, or of history, which produced the picture. In those times,
when the artist put in any accessory he asked himself: 'Does it mean
anything?' whereas most painters of today, in the same case, ask
themselves: 'Will it look well?' The difference between the two points
of view is the difference between jesting and being in earnest--between
an art that compared itself with an ideal future, and the art of today
that measures itself with an ideal past. The great painters of the
Renascence appealed to men and to men's selves, whereas the great
painters of today appeal chiefly to men's eyes and to that much of men
which can be stirred through the eye only.
It was not that those early artists were religious enthusiasts, moved by
a spiritual faith such as that which inspired Fra Angelico and one or
two others. Few of them were religious men; several of them, like
Perugino, were freethinkers. It was not, I think, because they looked
upon art itself as a very sacred matter, not to be jested with, since
they used their art against their enemies for revenge and ridicule. It
was rather because everyone was in earnest then, and was forced to be by
the nature of the times; whereas people now are only relatively in
earnest, and stake their money only where men once staked their lives.
That was one reason. Another may be that the greatest painters of those
times were practically men of universal genius and were always men of
vast reading and cultivation, the equals and often the superiors of the
learned in all other branches of science, literature and art. They were
not only great painters, but great men and great thinkers, and far above
doing anything solely 'for effect.' Lionardo da Vinci has been called
the greatest man of the fifteenth century--so has Michelangelo--so,
perhaps, has Raphael. They seemed able to do everything, and they have
not been surpassed in what they did as painters, sculptors, architects,
engineers, fortifiers of cities, mathematicians, thinkers. No one
nowadays ever thinks of a painter as being anything but a painter, and
people shrug their shoulders at the idea that an artist can do anything
of the kind called 'serious' in this age.
[Illustration: EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS]
One asks what were the surroundings, the customs, the habits, in which
these men grew to be already great at an age when modern boys are at
college. One asks whether that system of teaching or education, whatever
it may have been, was not much more likely to make great men than ours.
And the answer suggests itself: our teaching is for the many, and the
teaching of that day was for the few.
Let anyone try and imagine the childhood of Giotto as the account of it
has come down to us through almost all the authorities. He was born in
the year 1276--when Dante was about eleven years old. That was the time
when the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were at their height. That was
the year in which Count Ugolino della Gherardesca got back his lordship
over Pisa--where he was to be starved to death with his two sons and two
grandsons some twelve years later. That was the time when four Popes
died in sixteen months--the time when the Sicilian Vespers drove Charles
of Anjou from Sicily for ever--when Guido da Montefeltro was fighting
and betraying and fighting again--the time of Dante's early youth, in
which fell most of those deeds for which he consigned the doers to hell
and their names to immortality.
Imagine, then, what a shepherd's hut must have been in those days, in a
narrow valley of the Tuscan hills--the small cottage built of unhewn
stones picked up on the hillside, fitted together one by one, according
to their irregular shapes, and cemented, if at all, with clay and mud
from the river bed--the roof of untrimmed saplings tied together and
thatched with chestnut boughs, held down by big stones, lest the wind
should blow them away. The whole, dark brown and black with the rich
smoke of brushwood burned in the corner to boil the big black cauldron
of sheep's milk for the making of the rank 'pecorino' cheese. One square
room, lighted from the door only. The floor, the beaten earth. The beds,
rough-hewn boards, lying one above the other, like bunks, on short
strong lengths of sapling stuck into the wall. For mattresses, armfuls
of mountain hay. The people, a man, his wife and two or three children,
dressed winter and summer in heavy brown homespun woollen and
sheepskins. For all furniture, a home-made bench, black with age and
smoke. The food, day in, day out, coarse yellow meal, boiled thick in
water and poured out to cool upon the black bench, divided into portions
then with a thin hide thong, crosswise and lengthwise, for each person a
yellow square, and eaten greedily with unwashed hands that left a little
for the great sheep-dog. The drink, spring water and the whey left from
the cheese curds, drunk out of a small earthen pot, passed from mouth
to mouth. A silent bunch of ignorant human beings, full of thought for
the morrow, and of care for the master's sheep that were herded together
in the stone pen all round the hut; fighting the wolves in winter, and
in summer time listening for the sound of war from the valley, when
Guelph and Ghibelline harried all the country, and killed every stray
living thing for food. And among these half-starved wretches was a boy
of twelve or thirteen years, weak-jointed, short-winded, little better
than a cripple and only fit to watch the sheep on summer days when the
wolves were not hungry--a boy destined to be one of the greatest
artists, one of the greatest architects, and one of the most cultivated
men of that or any other age--Giotto.
The contrast between his childhood and his manhood is so startling that
one cannot realize it. It means that in those days the way from nothing
to much was short and straight for great minds--impossible and
impracticable for small ones. Great intelligences were not dwarfed to
stumps by laborious school work, were not stuffed to a bursting point by
cramming, were not artificially inflamed by the periodical blistering of
examinations; but average intelligences had not the chance which a
teaching planned only for the average gives them now. Talent, in the
shape of Cimabue, found genius, in the form of Giotto, clothed in rags,
sketching sheep with one stone on another; talent took genius and fed it
and showed it the way, and presently genius overtopped talent by a
mountain's head and shoulders. Cimabue took Giotto from his father, glad
to be rid of the misshapen child that had to be fed and could do nothing
much in return; and from the smoky hut in the little Tuscan valley the
lad was taken straight to the old nobleman painter's house in the most
beautiful city of Italy, was handed over to Brunetto Latini, Dante's
tutor, to be taught book-learning, and was allowed to spend the other
half of his time in the painting room, at the elbow of the greatest
living painter.
The boy was a sort of apprentice-servant, of course, as all beginners
were in those times. In the big house, he probably had a pallet bed in
one of those upper dormitories where the menservants slept, and he
doubtless fed with them in the lower hall at first. They must have
laughed at his unmannerly ways, and at his surprise over every new
detail of civilized life, but he had a sharp tongue and could hold his
own in a word-fight. There were three tables in a gentleman's house in
the Middle Age,--the master's, which was served in different rooms,
according to the weather and the time of year; secondly, the 'tinello,'
or canteen, as we should call it, for the so-called gentlemen
retainers--among whom, by the bye, ranked the chief butler and the head
groom, besides the chaplain and the doctor; thirdly, the servants' hall,
where all the lower people of the house fed together. Then, as now in
old countries, the labour of a large household was indefinitely
subdivided, and no servant was expected to do more than one thing, and
every servant had an assistant upon whom he forced all the hard work. A
shepherd lad, brought in from the hills in his sheepskin coat, sheepskin
breeches, and leg swathings of rags and leather, would naturally be the
butt of such an establishment. On the other hand, the shepherd boy was a
genius and had a tongue like a razor, besides being the favourite of the
all-powerful master; and as it was neither lawful nor safe to lay hands
on him, his power of cutting speech made him feared.
So he learned Latin with the man who had taught Dante,--and Dante was
admitted to be the most learned man of his times,--and he ground the
colours and washed the brushes for Cimabue, and drew under the master's
eye everything that he saw, and became, as the chronicler Villani says
of him, 'the most sovereign master of painting to be found in his time,
and the one who most of all others took all figures and all action from
nature.' And Villani was his contemporary, and knew him when he was
growing old, and recorded his death and his splendid funeral.
One-half of all permanent success in art must always lie in the
mechanical part of it, in the understanding and use of the tools. They
were primitive in Giotto's day, and even much later, according to our
estimate. Oil painting was not dreamt of, nor anything like a lead
pencil for drawing. There was no canvas on which to paint. No one had
thought of making an artist's palette. Not one-tenth of the substances
now used for colours were known then. A modern artist might find himself
in great difficulties if he were called upon to paint a picture with
Cimabue's tools.
But to Giotto they must have seemed marvellous after his pointed stone
pencil and his bit of untrimmed slate. Everything must have surprised
and delighted him in his first days in Florence--the streets, the
houses, the churches, the people, the dresses he saw; and the boy who
had begun by copying the sheep that were before his eyes on the
hillside, instantly longed to reproduce a thousand things that pleased
him. So, when he was already old enough to understand life and its
beauty, he was suddenly transported to the midst of it, just where it
was most beautiful; and because he instantly saw that his master's art
was unreal and far removed from truth, dead, as it were, and bound hand
and foot in the graveclothes of Byzantine tradition, his first impulse
was to wake the dead in a blaze of life. And this he did.
And after him, from time to time, when art seemed to be stiffening again
in the clumsy fingers of the little scholars of the great, there came a
true artist, like Giotto, who realized the sort of deathlike trance into
which art had fallen, and roused it suddenly to things undreamed
of--from Giotto to Titian. And each did all that he meant to do. But
afterwards came Tintoretto, who said that he would draw like
Michelangelo and paint like Titian; but he could not, though he made
beautiful things: and he was the first great artist who failed to go
farther than others had gone before him; and because art must either
advance or go backward, and no one could advance any more, it began to
go backward, and the degeneration set in.
About three hundred years elapsed between Giotto's birth and Titian's
death, during which the world changed from the rough state of the Middle
Age to a very high degree of civilization; and men's eyes grew tired of
what they saw all the time, while many of the strong types which had
made the change faded away. Men grew more alike, dress grew more alike,
thoughts grew more alike. It was the beginning of that overspreading
uniformity which we have in our time, which makes it so very easy for
any one man to be eccentric, but which makes it so very hard for any one
man to be really great. One might say that in those times humanity
flowed in very small channels, which a strong man of genius could thwart
and direct. But humanity now is a stream so broad that it is almost like
an ocean, in which all have similar being, and the big fish come to the
surface, and spout and blow and puff without having any influence at all
on the tide.
There was hardly any such thing possible as eccentricity in Giotto's
time. When the dress and manners and language of every little town
differed distinctly from those of the nearest village, every man dressed
as he pleased, behaved as he had been taught, and spoke the dialect of
his native place. There was a certain uniformity among the priesthood,
whose long cassock was then the more usual dress of civilians in great
cities in times of peace and who spoke Latin among themselves and wrote
it, though often in a way that would make a scholar's blood run cold.
But there was no uniformity among other classes of men. A fine gentleman
who chose to have his cloth tights of several colours, one leg green and
one blue, or each leg in quarters of four colours, attracted no
attention whatever in the streets; and if one noble affected simple
habits and went about in an old leathern jerkin that was rusty in
patches from the joints of his armour, the next might dress himself in
rich silk and gold embroidery, and wear a sword with a fine enamelled
hilt. No one cared, except for himself, and it must have been hard
indeed to produce much effect by any eccentricity of appearance. But
there was the enormous and constantly changing variety that takes an
artist's eye at every turn,--which might make an artist then of a man
who nowadays would be nothing but a discontented observer with artistic
tastes.
I do not think that these things have ever been much noticed as factors
in the development of European art. Consider what Florence, for
instance, was to the eye at that time. And then consider that, until
that time, art had been absolutely prohibited from painting what it saw,
being altogether a traditional business in which, as Burckhardt says,
the artist had quite lost all freedom of mind, all pleasure and interest
in his work, in which he no longer invented, but had only to reproduce
by mechanical repetition what the Church had discovered for him, in
which the sacred personages he represented had shrivelled to mere
emblems, and the greater part of his attention and pride was directed to
the rich and almost imperishable materials in which alone he was allowed
to work for the honour and glory of the Church.
In the second Council of Nicea, held in the year 787, the question of
sacred pictures was discussed, and in the acts of the Council the
following statement is found:--
'It is not the invention of the painter which creates the picture, but
an inviolable law, a tradition of the Church. It is not the painters,
but the holy fathers, who have to invent and dictate. To them manifestly
belongs the composition, to the painter only the execution.'
It would be hard to find a clearer definition of the artist's place and
work before Giotto.
Consider all these things, and then think of the sensations of the first
man upon whom it flashed all at once that he might be free and might
paint everything he saw, not as monks dictated to him, but as he saw
it, to the best of his strength and talent. He must have felt like a
creature that had been starved, suddenly turned out free to roam through
a world full of the most tempting things and with a capacity to enjoy
them all. He did not realize his freedom completely at first; it was
impossible for him to throw off at once all the traditions in which he
had been brought up and taught; but he realized enough to change the
whole direction of all the art that came after him.
Two things are remarkable about the early Italian artists. With the
solitary exception of Cimabue--the first of the Renascence--none of them
was born rich, but, on the other hand, a great many of them were not
born poor either. Giotto and Mantegna were shepherd boys, it is true;
but Michelangelo was the son of a small official of ancient family in
the provinces, the mayor of the little city of Chiusi e Caprese;
Lionardo da Vinci's father was a moderately well-to-do land-holder;
Raphael's was a successful painter, and certainly not in want. Secondly,
a very great number of them made what must have been thought good
fortunes in those days, while they were still young men. Some, like
Andrea del Sarto, squandered their money and died in misery; one or two,
like Fra Angelico, refused to receive money themselves for their work
and handed over their earnings to a religious community. None, so far as
I can find out, toiled through half a lifetime with neither recognition
nor pay, as many a great artist has done in our times--like the
Frenchman Millet, for instance, whose Angelus fetched such a fabulous
price after his death. The truth is that what we mean by art had just
been discovered, and it met with immediate and universal appreciation,
and the result was a demand for it which even a greater number of
painters could not have oversatisfied. Consequently, there was plenty to
do for every man of genius, and there were people not only willing to
pay great sums for each work, but who disputed with each other for the
possession of good paintings, and quarrelled for what was equivalent to
the possession of great artists.
Another element in the lives of these men, as in the lives of all who
rose to any eminence in those days, was the great variety that
circumstances introduced into their existence. Change and variety are
favourable to creative genius as they are unfavourable to uncreative
study. The scholar and the historian are best left among their books for
twenty years at a time, to execute the labour of patient thought which
needs perpetual concentration on one subject. If Gibbon had continued to
be an amateur soldier and a man of the world, as he began, he might have
written a history, but it would not have been the most astonishing
history of modern times. In Macaulay's brilliant and often too creative
work, one sees the influence of his changing political career, to the
detriment of sober study. For the more the creative man sees and lives
in his times, the more he is impelled to create. In the midst of his
best years of painting, Lionardo da Vinci was called off to build
canals, and Cæsar Borgia kept him busy for two years in planning and
constructing fortifications. Immediately before that time he had
finished his famous Last Supper, in Milan, and immediately afterwards he
painted the Battle of Anghiari--now lost--which was the picture of his
that most strongly impressed the men of his day.
Similarly, Michelangelo was interrupted in his work when, the Constable
of Bourbon having sacked Rome, the Medici were turned out of Florence,
and the artist was employed by the Republic to fortify and defend the
city. It was betrayed, and he escaped and hid himself--and the next
great thing he did was the Last Judgment, in the Sixtine Chapel. He did
stirring work in wild times, besides painting, and hewing marble, and
building Saint Peter's.
That brings one back to thinking how much those men knew. Their
universal knowledge seems utterly unattainable to us, with all our
modern machinery of education. Michelangelo grew up in a suburb of
Florence, to which his father moved when he was a child, at a notary's
desk, his father trying to teach him enough law to earn him a
livelihood. Whenever he had a chance, he escaped to draw in a corner, or
to spend forbidden hours in an artist's studio. He was taught Latin and
arithmetic by an old schoolmaster, who was probably a priest, and a
friend of his father's. At fourteen he earned money in Ghirlandajo's
studio, which means that he was already an artist. At twenty-five he was
probably the equal of any living man as sculptor, painter, architect,
engineer and mathematician. Very much the same might be said of
Lionardo. One asks in vain how such enormous knowledge was acquired, and
because there is no answer, one falls back upon wild theories about
untaught genius. But whatever may be said of painting and sculpture,
neither architecture nor engineering, and least of all the mathematics
so necessary to both, can be evolved from the inner consciousness.
Men worked harder then than now, and their teachers and their tools
helped them less, so that they learned more thoroughly what they learned
at all. And there was much less to distract a man then, when he had
discovered his own talent, while there was everything to spur him.
Amusements were few, and mostly the monopoly of rich nobles; but success
was quick and generous, and itself ennobled the men who attained to
it--that is, it instantly made him the companion, and often the friend,
of the most cultivated men and women of the day. Then, as now, success
meant an entrance into 'society' for those whose birth had placed them
outside of it. But 'society' was different then. It consisted chiefly of
men who had fought their own way to power, and had won it by a
superiority both intellectual and physical, and of women who often
realized and carried out the unsatisfied intellectual aspirations of
their husbands and fathers. For wherever men have had much to do, and
have done it successfully, what we call culture has been more or less
the property of the women. In those times, the men were mostly occupied
in fighting and plotting, but the beautiful things produced by newly
discovered art appealed to them strongly. Women, on the other hand, had
nothing to do. With the end of the Middle Age, the old-fashioned
occupations of women, such as spinning, weaving and embroidering with
their maids, went out of existence, and the mechanical work was absorbed
and better done by the guilds. Fighting was then a large part of life,
but there was something less of the petty squabbling and killing between
small barons, which kept their women constant prisoners in remote
castles, for the sake of safety; and there was war on a larger scale
between Guelph and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, State and State. The
women had more liberty and more time. There were many women students in
the universities, as there are now, in Italy, and almost always have
been, and there were famous women professors, whose lectures were
attended by grown men. No one was surprised at that, and there was no
loud talk about women's rights. Nobody questioned the right of women to
learn as much as they could, where-ever anything was taught. There were
great ladies, good and bad, like Vittoria Colonna and Lucrezia Borgia,
who were scholars, and even Greek scholars, and probably equal to any
students of their time. Few ladies of Michelangelo's day did not know
Latin, and all were acquainted with such literature as there was--Dante,
Macchiavelli, Aretino, Ariosto and Petrarch,--for Tasso came later,--the
Tuscan minor poets, as well as the troubadours of Provence--not to
mention the many collections of tales, of which the scenes were destined
to become the subjects of paintings in the later days of the Renascence.
Modern society is the enemy of individuality, whether in dress, taste or
criticism, and the fear of seeming different from other people is
greater than the desire to rise higher than other people by purely
personal means. In the same way, socialism is the enemy of all personal
distinction, whatever the socialists may say to the contrary, and is
therefore opposed to all artistic development and in favour of all that
is wholesale, machine-made, and labour-saving. And nobody will venture
to say that modern tendencies are not distinctly socialistic.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA DEGLI ANGELI
The Baths of Diocletian remodelled by Michelangelo]
We are almost at the opposite extreme of existence from the early
Renascence. That was the age of small principalities; ours is the day of
great nations. Anyone who will carefully read the history of the Middle
Age and of the Renascence will come to the inevitable conclusion that
the greatest artists and writers of today are very far from being the
rivals of those who were great then. Shakespeare was almost the
contemporary of Titian; there has been neither a Shakespeare nor a
Titian since, nor any writer nor artist in the most distant manner
approaching them. Yet go backward from them, and you will find Dante, as
great as Shakespeare, and at least three artists, Michelangelo, Lionardo
da Vinci and Raphael, quite as great as Titian. They lived in a society
which was antisocialistic, and they were the growth of a period in which
all the ideas of civilized mankind tended in a direction diametrically
opposed to that taken by our modern theories. This is undeniable. The
greatest artists, poets and literary men are developed where all
conditions most develop individuality. The modern state, in which
individuality is crushed by the machinery of education in order that all
men may think alike, favours the growth of science alone; and scientific
men have the least individuality of all men who become great, because
science is not creative like art and literature, nor destructive like
soldiering, but inquisitive, inventive and speculative in the first
place, and secondly, in our age, financial. In old times, when a
discovery was made, men asked, 'What does it mean? To what will it
lead?' Now, the first question is, 'What will it be worth?' That does
not detract from the merit of science, but it shows the general tendency
of men's thoughts. And it explains two things, namely, why there are no
artists like Michelangelo nor literary men like Shakespeare in our
times--and why the majority of such artists and literary men as we have
are what is commonly called reactionaries, men who would prefer to go
back a century or two, and who like to live in out-of-the-way places in
old countries, as Landor lived in Florence, Browning in Venice,
Stevenson in Samoa, Liszt in Rome,--besides a host of painters and
sculptors, who have exiled themselves voluntarily for life in Italy and
France. The whole tendency of the modern world is scientific and
financial, and the world is ruled by financiers and led by a financial
society which honours neither art nor literature, but looks upon both as
amusements which it can afford to buy, and which it is fashionable to
cultivate, but which must never for a moment be considered as equal in
importance to the pursuit of money for its own sake.
It was the great scope for individuality, the great prizes to be won by
individuality, the honour paid to individuality, that helped the early
painters to their high success. It was the abundance of material,
hitherto never used in art, the variety of that material, in an age when
variety was the rule and not the exception, it was the richness of that
material, not in quantity and variety only, but in individual quality,
that made early paintings what we see. It was their genuine and true
love of beauty, and of nature and of the eternal relations between
nature and beauty, that made those men great artists. It was the
hampering of individuality, the exhaustion and disappearance of material
and the degeneration of a love of beauty to a love of effect, that put
an end to the great artistic cycle in Italy, and soon afterwards in the
rest of the world, with Rembrandt and Van Dyck, the last of the really
great artists.
Progress is not civilization, though we generally couple the two words
together, and often confound their values. Progress has to do with what
we call the industrial arts, their development, and the consequent
increase of wealth and comfort. Civilization means, on the other hand,
among many things, the growth and perfecting of art, in the singular;
the increase of a general appreciation of art; the refinement of manners
which follows upon a widespread improvement of taste; the general
elevation of a people's thoughts above the hard conditions in which a
great people's struggles for existence, preëminence and wealth take
place.
Progress, in its right acceptation, ought also to mean some sort of
moral progress--such, for instance, as has transformed our own
English-speaking race in a thousand years or more from a stock of very
dangerous pirates to a law-abiding people--if we may fairly say as much
as that of ourselves.
Civilization has nothing to do with morality. That is rather a shocking
statement, perhaps, but it is a true one. It may be balanced by saying
that civilization has nothing to do with immorality either. The early
Christians were looked upon as very uncivilized people by the Romans of
their time, and the meanest descendants of the Greeks secretly called
the Romans themselves barbarians. In point of civilization and what we
call cultivation, Alcibiades was immeasurably superior to Saint Paul,
Peter the Hermit or Abraham Lincoln, though Alcibiades had no morality
to speak of and not much conscience. Moreover, it is a fact that great
reformers of morals have often been great enemies of art and destroyers
of the beautiful. Fra Bartolommeo, who is thought by many to have
equalled Raphael in the latter's early days, became a follower of
Savonarola, burned all his wonderful drawings and studies, and shut
himself up in a monastery to lead a religious life; and though he
yielded after several years to the command of his superiors, and began
painting again, he confined himself altogether to devotional subjects as
long as he lived, and fell far behind Raphael, who was certainly not an
exemplary character, even in those days.
In Europe, and in the Latin languages, there is a distinction, and a
universally accepted one, between education and instruction. It is
something like that which I am trying to make clear between Civilization
and Progress. An 'instructed man' means a man who has learned much but
who may have no manners at all, may eat with his knife, forget to wash
his hands, wear outlandish clothes, and be ignorant even of the ordinary
forms of politeness. An 'educated person,' on the contrary, may know
very little Latin, and no Greek, and may be shaky in the multiplication
table; but he must have perfect manners to deserve the designation, and
tact, with a thorough knowledge of all those customs and outward forms
which distinguish what calls itself civilized society from the rest of
the world. Anyone can see that such instruction, on the one hand, and
such education, on the other, are derived from wholly different
sources, and must lead to wholly different results; and it is as common
nowadays to find men who have the one without the other, as it ever was
in ancient Greece or Rome. I should like to assert that it is more
common, since Progress is so often mistaken for Civilization and tacitly
supposed to be able to do without it, and that Diogenes would not be
such a startling exception now as he was in the days of Alexander the
Great. But no one would dare to say that Progress cannot go on in a high
state of Civilization. All that can be stated with absolute certainty is
that they are independent of each other, since Progress means 'going on'
and therefore 'change'; whereas Civilization may remain at the same high
level for a very long period, without any change at all. Compare our own
country with China, for instance. In the arts--the plural 'arts'--in
applied science, we are centuries ahead of Asia; but our manners are
rough and even brutal compared with the elaborate politeness of the
Chinese, and we should labour in vain to imitate the marvellous
productions of their art. We may prefer our art to that of the far East,
though there are many critics who place the Japanese artists much higher
than our own; but no one can deny the superior skill of the Asiatics in
the making of everything artistic.
Nor must we undervalue in art the importance of the minor and special
sort of progress which means a real and useful improvement in methods
and materials. That is doubtless a part, a first step, in the general
progress which tends ultimately to the invention of machinery, but
which, in its development, passes through the highest perfection of
manual work.
The first effect of this sort of progress in art was to give men of
genius new and better tools, and therefore a better means of expression.
In a way, almost every painter of early times was an inventor, and had
to be, because for a long time the methods and tools of painting were
absurdly insufficient. Every man who succeeded had discovered some new
way of grinding and mixing colours, of preparing the surface on which he
worked, of using the brush and the knife, and of fixing the finished
picture by means of varnishes. The question of what painters call the
vehicle for colour was always of immense importance. Long before Giotto
began to work there seem to have been two common ways of painting,
namely, in fresco, with water-colours, and on prepared surfaces by means
of wax mixed with some sort of oil.
In fresco painting, the mason, or the plasterer, works with the painter.
A surface as large as the artist expects to use during a few hours is
covered with fresh stucco by the mason, and thoroughly smoothed with a
small trowel. Stucco, as used in Italy, is a mixture of slaked lime and
white marble dust, or very fine sand which has been thoroughly sifted.
If stained to resemble coloured or veined marbles, and immediately
ironed till it is dry with hot smooth irons, the surface of the mass is
hardened and polished to such a degree that it is almost impossible to
distinguish it from real marble without breaking into it. Waxing gives
it a still higher polish. But if water-colours are used for painting a
picture upon it, and if the colours are laid on while the stucco is
still damp, they unite with the lime, and slowly dry to a surface which
is durable, but neither so hard nor so polished as that produced when
the stucco is ironed. The principal conditions are that the stucco must
be moist, the wall behind it absolutely dry and the colours very thin
and flowing. Should the artist not cover all that has been prepared for
his day's work, the remainder has to be broken out again and laid on
fresh the next day. It is now admitted that the wall-paintings of the
ancients were executed in this way. As it was impossible for the artist
at any time to have the whole surface of the freshly stuccoed wall at
his disposal in order to draw his picture before painting it, he either
drew the design in red upon the rough dry plaster, and then had the
stucco laid over it in bits, or else he made a cartoon drawing of the
work in its full size. The outlines were then generally pricked out with
a stout pin, and the cartoon cut up into pieces of convenient
dimensions, so that the painter could lay them against the fresh stucco
and rub the design through, or pounce it, as we should say, with
charcoal dust, like a stencil. He then coloured it as quickly as he
could. If he made a mistake, or was not pleased with the effect, there
was no remedy except the radical one of breaking off the stucco, laying
it on fresh, and beginning over again. It was clearly impossible to
paint over the same surface again and again as can be done in oil
painting.
No one knows exactly when eggs were first used in fresco painting, nor
does it matter much. Some people used the yolk and the white together,
some only one or the other, but the egg was, and is, always mixed with
water. Some artists now put gum tragacanth into the mixture. It is then
used like water in water-colour work, but is called 'tempera' or
'distemper.' The effect of the egg is to produce an easy flow of the
colour with so little liquid that the paint does not run on the surface,
as it easily does in ordinary water-colours. The effect of the yellow
yolk of the egg upon the tints is insignificant, unless too much be
used. By using egg, one may paint upon ordinary prepared canvas as
easily as with oils, which is impossible with water-colour.
As for the early paintings upon panels of wood, before oils were used,
they were meant to be portable imitations of fresco. The wood was
accordingly prepared by covering it with a thin coating of fine white
cement, or stucco, which was allowed to dry and become perfectly hard,
because it was of course impossible to lay it on fresh every day in
such small quantities. The vehicle used could therefore not be water,
which would have made the colours run. The most common practice of the
Byzantine and Romanesque schools seems to have been to use warm melted
wax in combination with some kind of oil, the mixture being kept ready
at hand over a lighted lamp, or on a pan of burning charcoal. There are
artists in Europe, still, who occasionally use wax in this way, though
generally mixed with alcohol or turpentine, and the result is said to be
very durable. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted many pictures in this way.
With regard to using oils on a dry surface in wall painting, instead of
fresco, Lionardo da Vinci tried it repeatedly with the result that many
of his wall paintings were completely lost within thirty or forty years
after they had been painted. The greatest of those which have survived
at all, the Last Supper in Milan, has had to be restored so often that
little of the original picture remains untouched.
The enormous value of linseed oil and nut oil as a vehicle was apparent
as soon as it was discovered in Holland. Its great advantages are that,
unlike water or egg, it will carry a large quantity of colour upon the
canvas at the first stroke, that it dries slowly, so that the same
ground may be worked over without haste while it is still fresh, and
that it has a very small effect in changing the tints of the original
paints used. One may see what value was attached to its use from the
fact that those who first brought it to Italy worked in secret. Andrea
Castagno, surnamed the Assassin, learned the method from his best
friend, Domenico Veneziano, and then murdered him while he was singing a
serenade under a lady's window, in order to possess the secret alone.
But it soon became universally known and made a revolution in Italian
painting.
In the older times, when rare and valuable pigments were used, as well
as large quantities of pure gold, the materials to be employed and their
value were stipulated for in the contract made between the painter and
his employer before the picture was begun, and an artist's remuneration
at that time was much of the nature of a salary, calculated on an
approximate guess at the time he might need for the work. That was, of
course, a survival from the time of the Byzantine artists, to whom gold
and silver and paints were weighed out by the ecclesiastics for whom
they painted, and had to be accounted for in the finished picture. There
is a story told of an artist's apprentice, who made a considerable sum
of money by selling the washings of his master's brushes when the latter
was using a great quantity of ultramarine; and that shows the costliness
of mere paints at that time. As for the more valuable materials, the
great altar picture in Saint Mark's, in Venice, is entirely composed of
plates of pure gold enamelled in different colours, and fastened in a
sort of mosaic upon the wood panel as required, the lights and shades
being produced by hatching regular lines through the hard enamel with a
sharp instrument. The whole technical history of painting lies between
that sort of work and the modern painter's studio.
Before oil painting became general, artists were largely dependent on
commissions in order to do any work except drawing. Fresco needed a
wall, and work done in that manner could not be removed from place to
place. The old-fashioned panel work with its gold background was so
expensive that few artists could afford to paint pictures on the mere
chance of selling them. But the facilities and the economy of pure
tempera work, and work in oils, soon made easel pictures common.
Between the time of Giotto and that of Mantegna another means of
expression, besides painting, was found for artists, if not by accident,
by the ingenuity of the celebrated goldsmith, Maso Finiguerra, who was
the first man in Italy, and probably the first in the world, to take off
upon paper impressions in ink from an engraved plate.
[Illustration: THE PALATINE]
The especial branch of goldsmithing which he practised was what the
Italians still call 'niello' work, or the enamelling of designs upon
precious metals. The method of doing such work is this. Upon the piece
to be enamelled the design is first carefully drawn with a fine point,
precisely as in silver chiselling, and corrected till quite perfect in
all respects. This design is then cut into the metal with very sharp
tools, evenly, but not to a great depth. When completely cut, the
enamelling substance, which is generally sulphate of silver, is placed
upon the design in just sufficient quantities, and the whole piece of
work is then put into a furnace and heated to such a point that the
enamel melts and fills all the cuttings of the design, while the metal
itself remains uninjured. This is an easier matter than might be
supposed, because gold and silver, though soft under the chisel, will
not melt except at a very high temperature. When the enamel has cooled,
the whole surface is rubbed down to a perfect level, and the design
appears with sharp outlines in the polished metal.
Now anyone who has ever worked with a steel point on bright metal knows
how very hard it is to judge of the correctness of the drawing by merely
looking at it, because the light is reflected in all directions into
one's eyes, not only from untouched parts of the plate, but from the
freshly cut lines. The best way of testing the work is to blacken it
with some kind of colour that is free from acid, such as a mixture of
lampblack and oil, to rub the surface clean so as to leave the ink only
in the engraved lines, and then take an impression of the drawing upon
damp paper. That is practically what Finiguerra did, and in so doing he
discovered the art of engraving. Probably goldsmiths had done the same
before him, as they have always done since, but none of them had thought
of drawing upon metal merely for the sake of the impression it would
make, and without any intention of using the metal afterwards. Within
fifty years of Finiguerra's invention very beautiful engravings were
sold all over Italy, and many famous painters engraved their own
works--foremost among these, Mantegna and Botticelli.
Early Italian art rose thus by regular steps, from the helpless,
traditional, imitative work of the Romanesque and Byzantine artists to
its highest development. It then passed a succession of climaxes in the
masterpieces of Lionardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, and
thence descended gradually to the miserably low level of the eighteenth
century.
It is easy to trace the chief objects which painting had in view in its
successive phases. Tradition, Reality and Illusion were the three.
Cimabue was still a Traditionist. Giotto was the first Realist. Mantegna
first aimed at the full illusion which finished art is capable of
producing, and though not so great a man as Giotto, was a much greater
painter. Then came Lionardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, the men of
universal genius, who could make use of tradition without being
commonplace, who could be realistic without being coarse, and who
understood how to produce illusion without being theatrical. In the
decay of Italian art what strikes one most strongly is the combination
of the three faults which the great men knew how to avoid--coarseness,
commonplace thought and theatrical execution.
[Illustration: PALAZZO DEI CONSERVATORI
From a print of the last century]
Cimabue had found out that it was possible to paint sacred pictures
without the dictation of priests, as prescribed by the Council of Nice.
The idea discovered by Giotto, or rather the fact, namely, that nature
could be copied artistically, produced a still greater revolution, and
he had hosts of scholars and followers and imitators. But they were
nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea
to the furthest with varying success. It was realism--sometimes a kind
of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in
Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil,
Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto
of Pisa--sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as in
Masaccio, impetuous and energetic as in Fra Lippo Lippi, fanciful as in
Botticelli--but still, always realism, in the sense of using nature
directly, without any distinct effort at illusion, the figures mostly
taken from life, and generally disposed in one plane, the details
minute, the landscapes faithful rather than suggestive.
The lives of those men were all typical of the times in which they
lived, and especially the life of the holy man we call Beato Angelico,
of saintly memory, that of the fiery lay brother, Filippo Lippi, whose
astounding talents all but redeemed his little less surprising sins--and
lastly that of Andrea Mantegna.
The first two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries--the
realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the
Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist.
Beato Angelico--of his many names, it is easier to call him by the one
we know best--was born in 1387. At that time the influence of the Empire
in Italy was ended, and that of the Popes was small. The Emperors and
the Popes had in fact contended for the control of municipal rights in
the free Italian cities; with the disappearance of those rights under
the Italian despots the cause of contention was gone, as well as the
partial liberty which had given it existence. The whole country was cut
up into principalities owned and ruled by tyrants. Dante had been dead
about sixty years, and the great imperial idea which he had developed in
his poem had totally failed. The theoretical rights of man, as usual in
the world's history, had gone down before the practical strength of
individuals, whose success tended, again, to call into activity other
individuals, to the general exaltation of talent for the general
oppression of mediocrity. In other words, that condition had been
produced which is most favourable to genius, because everything between
genius and brute strength had been reduced to slavery in the social
scale. The power to take and hold, on the one hand, and the power to
conceive and execute great works on the other, were as necessary to each
other as supply and demand; and all moral worth became a matter of
detail compared with success.
In such a state of the world, a man of creative genius who chanced to be
a saint was an anomaly; there was no fit place for him but a monastery,
and no field for his powers but that of Sacred Art. It was as natural
that Angelico should turn monk as that Lippo Lippi, who had been made
half a monk against his will, should turn layman.
In the peaceful convent of Saint Mark, among the Dominican brethren,
Beato Angelico's character and genius grew together; the devout artist
and the devotional mystic were inseparably blended in one man, and he
who is best remembered as a famous painter was chosen by a wise Pope to
be Archbishop of Florence, for his holy life, his gentle character and
his undoubted learning.
He could not refuse the great honour outright; but he implored the Pope
to bestow it upon a brother monk, whom he judged far more worthy than
himself. He was the same consistent, humble man who had hesitated to eat
meat at the Pope's own table without the permission of the prior of his
convent--a man who, like the great Saint Bernard, had given up a
prosperous worldly existence in pure love of religious peace. It was no
wonder that such a man should become the realist of the angels and a
sort of angel among realists--himself surnamed by his companions the
'Blessed' and the 'Angelic.'
Beside him, younger than he, but contemporary with him, stands out his
opposite, Filippo Lippi. He was not born rich, like Angelico. He came
into the world in a miserable by-way of Florence, behind a Carmelite
convent. His father and mother were both dead when he was two years old,
and a wretchedly poor sister of his father took care of him as best she
could till he was eight. When she could bear the burden no longer, she
took him to the door of the monastery, as orphans were taken in those
days, and gave him over to the charity of the Carmelite fathers. Most
of the boys brought to them in that way grew up to be monks, and some of
them became learned; but the little Filippo would do nothing but scrawl
caricatures in his copybook all day long, and could not be induced to
learn anything. But he learned to draw so well that when the prior saw
what he could do, he allowed him to paint; and at seventeen the lad who
would not learn to read or write knew that he was a great artist, and
turned his back on the monastery that had given him shelter, and on the
partial vows he had already taken. He was the wildest novice that ever
wore a frock. He had almost missed the world, since a little more
inclination, a little more time, might have made a real monk of him. But
he had escaped, and he took to himself all the world could give, and
revelled in it with every sensation of his gifted, sensuous nature. It
was only when he could not get what he wanted that he had curious
returns of monkish reasoning. The historian of his life says that he
would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever
inclination chanced to be predominant at the moment; but if he could by
no means accomplish his wishes, he would then depict the object which
attracted his attention and he would try, by reasoning and talking with
himself, to diminish the violence of his inclination.
There was no lack of adventure in his life, either. Once, at Ancona, on
the Adriatic, he ventured too far out to sea in an open boat, and he
and his companions were picked up by a Barbary pirate and carried off to
Africa. But for his genius he might have ended his days there, instead
of spending only eighteen months in slavery. A clever drawing of the
pirate chief, made on a whitewashed wall with a bit of charcoal from a
brazier, saved him. The Moor saw it, was delighted, set him to paint a
number of portraits, in defiance of Moses, Mahomet and the Koran, and
then, by way of reward, brought him safe across the water to Naples and
gave him his liberty.
He painted more pictures, earned money, and worked his way back to
Florence. As long as he worked at all he did marvels, but a pretty face
was enough to make him forget his art, his work and the Princes and
Dukes who employed him. Cosimo de Medici once shut him up with his
picture, to keep him at it; he tore the sheets of his bed into strips,
knotted them together, escaped by the window--and was of course
forgiven. The nuns of Saint Margaret employed him to paint an
altar-piece for them; he persuaded them to let the most beautiful of
their novices sit as a model for one of the figures; he made love to
her, of course, and ran away with her, leaving the picture unfinished.
It is characteristic of him that though he never forsook her, he refused
the Pope's offer of a dispensation from his early vows which would have
enabled him to marry her--for he hated all ties and bonds alike, and a
regular marriage would have seemed to him almost as bad as slavery in
Africa.
Lippo represented one extreme of character, Beato Angelico the other.
Between them were many men of almost equal genius, but of more common
temper, such as Botticelli, who was Lippo's pupil, or Benozzo Gozzoli,
the pupil of Angelico. Of Sandro Botticelli we know at least that he
resembled his master in one respect--he positively refused to learn
anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father,
Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the
nickname of Botticello--'the little tun'--perhaps on account of his
rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy
came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the
boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. Both
Botticelli and Gozzoli, like many first-rate artists of that time, were
quiet, hard-working men, devoted to their art, and not remarkable for
anything else. The consequence is that little is known about their
lives. It is natural that we should know most about the men who were
most different from their companions, such as Michelangelo on the one
hand, and Benvenuto Cellini on the other, or Beato Angelico and Lippo
Lippi, or the clever Buffalmacco--whose practical jokes were told by
Boccaccio and Sacchetti, and have even brought him into modern
literature--and Lionardo da Vinci. Then, as now, there were two types
of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars.
Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato
Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and
Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians. As for the latter, he seems scarcely
ever to have painted a picture without playing off a practical jest upon
his employer, and he began his career by terrifying his master, who
insisted upon waking him to work before dawn. He fastened tiny wax
tapers upon the backs of thirty black beetles, and as soon as he heard
the old man stirring and groping in the dark, he lighted the tapers
quickly, and drove the beetles into the room, through a crack under the
door, and they ran wildly hither and thither on the pavement. The master
took them for demons come to carry off his soul; he almost lost his
senses in a fit, and he used half the holy water in Florence to exorcise
the house. But ever afterwards he was too much frightened to get up
before daylight, and Buffalmacco slept out the long night in peace.
Andrea Mantegna, the great painter and engraver, who made the final step
in the development of pictorial art in Italy, was a shepherd's son, like
Giotto, born about one hundred years after Giotto's death. Similar
conditions and a similar bent of genius produced different results in
different centuries. Between Giotto and Mantegna the times had changed;
men lived differently, thought differently and saw differently.
How Mantegna got into the studio of the learned master Squarcione of
Padua is not known. The shepherd lad may have strayed in on a summer's
day, when the door was open, and attracted the painter's attention and
interest. One of the greatest living painters today was a Bavarian
peasant boy, who used to walk ten miles barefoot to the city and back on
Sundays, carrying his shoes to save them, in order to go into the free
galleries and look at the pictures; and somehow, without money, nor
credit, nor introduction, he got into the studio of a good master, and
became a great artist. Mantegna may have done the same. At all events,
he became old Squarcione's favourite pupil.
But when he was inside the studio, he found there a vast collection of
antique fragments of sculpture, which the master had got together from
all sources, and which the pupils were drawing. He was set to drawing
them, too, as the best way of learning how to paint.
That was the logical manifestation and characteristic expression of
Renascence, which was a second birth of Greek and Roman art, science and
literature--one might call it, in Italy, the second birth of civilized
man. It brought with it the desire and craving for something more than
realism, together with the means of raising all art to the higher level
required in order to produce beautiful illusions. Men had found time to
enjoy as well as to fight and pray. In other words, they fought and
prayed less, and the result was that they had more leisure. The women
had begun to care for artistic things much earlier, and they had taught
their children to care for them, and the result was a general tendency
of taste to a higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but
taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but
the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but
receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown
man may learn to be a judge and a critic, but he cannot learn to have
taste after he is once a man. Taste belongs to education rather than to
instruction, and it is the mother that educates, not the schoolmaster.
That faculty of taste was what Italy had acquired between the time of
Cimabue and the time of Mantegna--roughly speaking, between the year
1200 and the year 1450--between the first emancipation of art from the
old Byzantine and Romanesque thraldom and the time when the new art had
so overspread the country that engravings of the most famous pictures
began to be sold in the streets in every important city in Italy. Only a
few years after Mantegna's death, Albert Dürer, the great painter
engraver of Nüremberg, appeared before the council of Venice to try and
get a copyright for his engravings, which were being so cleverly forged
by the famous Raimondi that the copies were sold in the Piazza of Saint
Mark as originals. In passing, it is interesting to remember that Dürer,
whose engravings now sell for hundreds of dollars each, sold them
himself at his own house for prices varying between the values of
fifteen and twenty-five cents, according to the size of the plate. The
Council of Venice refused him the copyright he asked, but interdicted
the copyist from using Dürer's initials.
The immense sale of prints popularized art in Italy at the very time
when the first great printing houses, like the Aldine, were popularizing
learning. Culture, in the same sense in which we use the word, became
preëminently the fashion. Everyone wished to be thought clever, and a
generation grew up which not only read Latin authors with pleasure,
wrote Latin correctly, and had some acquaintance with Greek, but which
took a lively interest in artistic matters, and constituted a real
public for artists, a much larger and a much more critical one than
could be found today among an equal population in any so-called
civilized country. The era of collectors began then, and Mantegna's old
master was the first of them. Every man of taste did his best to get
possession of some fragment of antique sculpture, everyone bought
engravings, everyone went to see the pictures of the great
masters--everyone tried to get together a little library of printed
books. It took two hundred and fifty or three hundred years to develop
the Renascence, but what it produced in Italy alone has not been
surpassed, and in many ways has not been equalled, in the four hundred
years that have followed it.
With its culmination, individualities, even the strongest, became less
distinctly defined, and the romantic side of the art legend was ended.
It is so in all things. The romance of the ocean belongs to those who
first steered the perilous course that none had dared before; many have
been in danger by the sea, many have perished in the desperate trial of
the impossible, but none can be Columbus again; many have done brave
deeds in untracked deserts, but none again can be the pioneers who first
won through to our West. The last may be the greatest, but the first
will always have been the first, the daring, the romantic, who did what
no man had done before them.
And so it is also in the peaceful ways of art. Giotto, Beato Angelico,
Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, never attained to the greatness of Lionardo or
Michelangelo or Raphael. Sober criticism can never admit that they did,
whatever soft-hearted enthusiasts may say and write. But those earlier
men had something which the later ones had not, both in merit and in
genius. They fought against greater odds, with poorer weapons, and where
their strength failed them, heart and feeling took the place of
strength; and their truth and their tenderness went straight to the
heart of their young world, as only the highest perfection of illusion
could appeal to the eyes of the critical, half-sceptic generation that
came after them.
And so, although it be true that art is not dependent on genius alone,
but also on mechanical skill, yet there is something in art which is
dependent on genius and on nothing else. It is that something which
touches, that something which creates, that something which itself is
life; that something which belongs, in all ages, to those who grope to
the light through darkness; that something of which we almost lose sight
in the great completeness of the greatest artists, but which hovers like
a halo of glory upon the brows of Italy's earliest, truest and tenderest
painters.
[Illustration]
REGION XIV BORGO
Borgo, the 'Suburb,' is the last of the fourteen Regions, and is one of
the largest and most important of all, for within its limits stand Saint
Peter's, the Vatican, and the Mausoleum of Hadrian--the biggest church,
the biggest palace and the biggest tomb in the whole world.
To those who know something of Rome's great drama, the Castle of Sant'
Angelo is the most impressive of all her monuments. Like the Colosseum,
it stands out in its round strength alone, sun-gilt and shadowy brown
against the profound sky. Like the great Amphitheatre, it has been
buffeted in the storms of ages and is war-worn without, to the highest
reach of a mounted man, and dinted above that by every missile invented
in twelve hundred years, from the slinger's pebble or leaden bullet to
the cannon ball of the French artillery. Like the Colosseum, it is the
crestless trunk of its former self. But it has life in it still, whereas
the Colosseum died to a ruin when Urban the Eighth showed his successor
how to tear down the outer wall and build a vast palace with a hundredth
part of the great theatre.
Sant' Angelo is a living fortress yet, and nearly a thousand years have
passed, to the certain knowledge of history, since it was ever a single
day unguarded by armed men. Thirty generations of men at arms have stood
sentry within its gates since Theodora Senatrix, the strong and sinful,
flashed upon history out of impenetrable darkness, seized the fortress
and made and unmade popes at her will, till, dying, she bequeathed the
domination to her only daughter, and her name to the tale of Roman
tyranny.
The Castle has been too often mentioned in these pages to warrant long
description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years
among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great
descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot
where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding
foundations there is but stone, again stone and more stone. From the
main entrance upwards the fortress is utterly irregular within, full of
gloomy chambers, short, turning staircases, dark prisons, endless
corridors; and above are terraces and rooms where much noble blood has
been shed, and where many limbs have been racked and tortured, and
battlements from which men good and bad, guilty and innocent, have been
dropped a rope's length by the neck to feed the crows.
Here died Stephen Porcari, the brave and spotless; here died Cardinal
Carafa for a thousand crimes; and here Lorenzo Colonna, caught and
crushed in the iron hands of Sixtus the Fourth, laid his bruised head,
still stately, on the block--'a new block,' says Infessura, who loved
him and buried him, and could not forget the little detail. The story is
worth telling, less for its historical value than for the strange
exactness with which it is all set down.
Pope Sixtus, backed by the Orsini, was at war with the Colonna to the
end of his reign; but once, on a day when there was truce, he seems to
have said in anger that he cared not whom the Colonna served nor with
whom they allied themselves. And Lorenzo Colonna, Protonotary Apostolic,
with his brothers, took the Pope at his word, and they joined forces
with the King of Naples, fortifying themselves in their stronghold of
Marino, whence the eldest son of the family still takes his title. The
Pope, seeing them in earnest and fearing King Ferdinand, sent an embassy
of two cardinals to them, entreating them to be reconciled with the
Church. But they answered that they would not, for his Holiness had
given them permission to ally themselves with whom they pleased, and
refused them money for service, and they said that they could not live
without pay--a somewhat ironical statement for such men as the Colonna,
who lived rather by taking than by giving an equivalent for anything
received.
[Illustration: CASTLE OF SANT' ANGELO]
Then the Pope made war upon King Ferdinand, and when there had been much
bloodshed, and plundering and burning on both sides, Prospero Colonna
quarrelled with the Duke of Calabria, who was on Ferdinand's side and
for whom he had been fighting, and came over to the Church, and so the
Colonna were restored to favour, and the Pope made a treaty with the
King against Venice, and so another year passed.
But after that the quarrel was renewed between Pope Sixtus and Lorenzo
Colonna, on pretext that a certain part of the agreement to which they
had come had not been executed by the Protonotary; and while the matter
was under discussion, the Cardinal of Saint George, nephew of the great
Count Jerome Riario, sent word privately to the Protonotary Colonna,
warning him either to escape from Rome or to be on his guard if he
remained, 'because some one was plotting against him, and hated him.'
Wherefore Lorenzo shut himself up in the dwelling of Cardinal Colonna,
between the Colonna palace and Monte Cavallo on the Quirinal hill, and
many young men, attached to the great house, began to watch in arms,
day and night, turn and turn about. And when this became known, the
Orsini also began to arm themselves and keep watch at Monte Giordano.
Scenting a struggle, a Savelli, siding with Colonna, struck the first
blow by seizing forty horses and mules of the Orsini in a farm building
on the Tivoli road; and immediately half a dozen robber Barons joined
Savelli, and they plundered right and left, and one of them wrote a long
and courteous letter of justification to the Pope. But Orsini retorted
swiftly, 'lifting' horses and cattle that belonged to his enemies and
making prisoners of their retainers. Among others he took two men who
belonged to the Protonotary. And the latter, unable to leave Rome in
safety, began to fortify himself in the Cardinal's house with many
fighting men, and with many strange weapons, 'bombardelle, cerobottane,'
and guns and catapults. Whereupon the Pope sent for Orsini, and
commanded him, as the faithful adherent of the Church, to go and take
the Protonotary prisoner to his house. But while Orsini was marshalling
his troops with those of Jerome Riario, at Monte Giordano and in Campo
de' Fiori, the Pope sent for the municipal officers of the city and
explained that he meant to pardon the Protonotary if the latter would
come to the Vatican humbly and of his own free will; and certain of
these officers went to the Protonotary as ambassadors, to explain this.
To them he answered, in the presence of Stephen Infessura, the
chronicler who tells the story, that he had not fortified himself
against the Church, but against private and dangerous enemies, against
whom he had been warned, and that he had actually found that his house
was spied upon by night; but that he was ready to carry out the terms of
the old agreement, and finally, that he was ready to go freely to the
Pope, trusting himself wholly to His Holiness, without any earnest or
pledge for his safety, but that he begged the Pope not to deliver him
into the hands of the Orsini. Yet even before he had spoken, the Orsini
were moving up their men, by way of Saint Augustine's Church, which is
near Piazza Navona. Nevertheless Colonna, the Protonotary, mounted his
horse to ride over to the Vatican.
But John Philip Savelli stood in the way, and demanded of the officers
what surety they would give for Colonna; and they promised him safety
upon their own lives. Then Savelli answered them that they should
remember their bond, for if Colonna did not come back, or if he should
be hurt, he, Savelli, would be avenged upon their bodies. And Colonna
rode out, meaning to go to the Pope, but his retainers mounted their
horses and rode swiftly by another way and met him, and forced him back.
For they told him that if he went, his end would be near, and that they
themselves would be outlawed; and some said that before they would let
him go, they would cut him to pieces themselves rather than let his
enemies do it. And furiously they forced him back, him and his horse,
through the winding streets, and brought him again into the stronghold,
and bade the officers depart in peace.
And the second time two of the officers returned and told the
Protonotary to come, for he should be safe. And again he mounted his
horse, and struck with the flat of his blade a man who hindered him, and
leaped the barrier raised for defence before the palace and rode away.
And again his own men mounted and followed him, and overtook him at the
cross of Trevi, near by. And one, a giant, seized his bridle and forced
him back, saying, 'My Lord, we will not let you go! Rather will we cut
you in quarters ourselves; for you go to ruin yourself and us also.'
But when they had him safe within the walls, he wrung his hands, and
cried out that it was they who, by hindering him, were destroying
themselves and him. But many answered, 'If you had gone, you would never
have come back.' And it was then the twenty-first hour of the day, and
there were left three hours before dark.
But the Pope, seeing that Colonna did not come, commanded the Orsini to
bring him by force, as they might, even by slaying the people, if the
people should defend him; and he ordered them to burn and pillage the
regions of Monti, Trevi and Colonna. And with Orsini there were some of
those fierce Crescenzi, who still lived in Rome. And they all marched
through the city, bearing the standard of the Church, and they passed by
Trevi and surrounded the house on Monte Cavallo, and proclaimed the ban
against all men who should help the Protonotary; wherefore many of the
people departed in fear. Then Orsini first leapt the barrier, and his
horse was killed under him by a bombard that slew two men also; and
immediately all the Colonna's men discharged their firearms and
catapults and killed sixteen of their enemies. But the Orsini advanced
upon the house.
Then, about the twenty-third hour, the Colonna were weary of fighting
against so many, and their powder was not good, so that they fell back
from the main gateway, and the Orsini rushed in and filled the arched
ways around the courtyard, and set fire to the hay and straw in the
stables, and fought their way up the stairs, sacking the house.
They found the Protonotary in his room, wounded in the hand and sitting
on a chest, and Orsini told him that he was a prisoner and must come.
'Slay me, rather,' he answered. But Orsini bade him surrender and have
no fear. And he yielded himself up, and they took him away through the
smoking house, slippery with blood. They found also John Philip
Savelli, and they stripped him of the cuirass he wore, and setting their
swords to him, bade him cry, 'Long live Orsini!' And he answered, 'I
will not say it.' Then they wounded him deep in the forehead and smote
off both his hands, and gave him many wounds in face and body, and left
him dead. And they plundered all the goods of Cardinal Colonna, his
plate, his robes, his tapestries, his chests of linen, and they even
carried off his cardinal's hat.
So the Protonotary, on the faith of Orsini, was led away to the Pope in
his doublet, but some one lent him a black cloak on the way. And as they
went, Jerome Riario rode beside him and jeered at him, crying out, 'Ha,
ha! thou traitor, I shall hang thee by the neck this night!' But Orsini
answered Jerome, and said, 'Sir, you shall hang me first!' for he had
given his word. And more than once on the way, Riario, drunk with blood,
drew his dagger to thrust it into Colonna, but Orsini drove him off, and
brought his prisoner safely to the Pope. And his men sacked the quarter
of the Colonna; and among other houses of the Colonna's retainers which
were rifled they plundered that of Paul Mancino, near by, whose
descendant was to marry the sister of Mazarin; and also, among the
number, the house of Pomponius Letus, the historian, from whom they took
all his books and belongings and clothes, and he went away in his
doublet and buskins, with his stick in his hand, to make complaint
before the municipality.
Then for a whole month all that part of Rome which was dominated by the
Colonna was given over to be pillaged and burned by their enemies, while
in still Sant' Angelo, the tormentors slowly tore Lorenzo Colonna to
pieces, so that the Jewish doctor who was called in to prolong his life
said that nothing could save him, for his limbs were swollen and pierced
through and through, and many of his bones were broken, and he was full
of many deep wounds. Yet in the end, lest he should die a natural death,
they prepared the new block and the axe to cut off his head.
'Moreover,' says Infessura, in his own language, 'on the last day of
June, when the people were celebrating in Rome the festivity of the most
happy decapitation of Saint Paul the Apostle, whose head was cut off by
the most cruel Nero--on that very day, about an hour and a half after
sunrise, the aforesaid Holiness of our Sovereign Lord caused the
Protonotary Colonna to be beheaded in the Castle; and there were present
the Senator and the Judge of the crime. And when the Protonotary was led
out of prison early in the morning to the grating above the Castle, he
turned to the soldiers who were there and told them that he had been
grievously tormented, wherefore he had said certain things not true. And
immediately afterwards, when he was in the closed place below, where he
was beheaded, the Senator and Judge sat down as a Tribunal, and caused
to be read the sentence which they passed against him, although no
manner of criminal procedure had been observed, since all the
confessions were extorted under torture, and he had no opportunity of
defending himself.' Therefore, when this sentence had been read, the
Protonotary addressed those present and said: 'I wish no one to be
inculpated through me. I say this in conscience of my soul, and if I
lie, may the devil take me, now that I am about to go out of this life;
and so thou, Notary who hast read the sentence, art witness of this, and
ye all are witnesses, and I leave the matter to your conscience, that
you should also proclaim it in Rome,--that those things written in this
sentence are not true, and that what I have said I have said under great
torture, as ye may see by my condition.' He would not let them bind his
hands, but knelt down at the block, and forgave the executioner, who
asked his pardon. And then he said in Latin, 'Lord, into thy hands I
commend my spirit,' and called thrice upon Christ the Saviour, and at
the third time, the word and his head were severed together from his
body.
Then they placed the body in a wooden coffin and took it to Santa Maria
Transpontina, the first church on the right, going from the Castle
toward Saint Peter's, and when none came to take it away, they sent word
to his mother. And she, white-haired and tearless, with burning eyes,
came; and she took her son's head from the coffin and held it up to the
people, saying, 'Behold the justice of Sixtus,' and she laid it in its
place tenderly; and with torches, and the Confraternities, and many
priests, the body was taken to the Church of the Holy Apostles, and
buried in the Colonna Chapel near the altar.
But before it was buried it was seen in the coffin, and taken out, and
laid in it again, and all saw the torments which the man had suffered in
his feet, which were swollen and bound up with rags; and also the
fingers of his hands had been twisted, so that the inside was turned
clean outwards, and on the top of his head was a wound, where priests
make the tonsure, as though the scalp had been raised by a knife; and he
was dressed in a cotton doublet, yet his own had been of fine black
silk. Also they had put on him a miserable pair of hose, torn from the
half of the leg downwards; and a red cap with a trencher was upon his
head, and it was rather a long cap, and the narrator believed that the
gaolers had dressed him thus as an insult. 'And I Stephen, the scribe,
saw it with my eyes, and with my hands I buried him, with Prosper of
Cicigliano, who had been his vassal; and no other retainers of the
Colonna would have anything to do with the matter, out of fear, as I
think.'
Five hundred years had passed since Theodora's day, four hundred more
are gone since Lorenzo the Protonotary laid his head upon the block, and
still the tradition of terror and suffering clings to Sant' Angelo, and
furnishes the subject of an all but modern drama. Such endurance in the
character of a building is without parallel in the history of
strongholds, and could be possible only in Rome, where the centuries
pass as decades, and time is reckoned by the thousand years.
[ILLUSTRATION: HOSPITAL OF SANTO SPIRITO
From a print of the last century]
The main and most important memories in the Region of Borgo, apart from
the Castle, and Saint Peter's and the Vatican, are those connected with
the Holy Office, the hospital and insane asylum of Santo Spirito, and
with the Serristori barracks. In Rome, to go to Santo Spirito means to
go mad. It is the Roman Bedlam. But there is another association with
the name, and a still sadder one. There, by the gate of the long, low
hospital, is still to be seen the Rota--the 'wheel'--the revolving
wooden drum, with its small aperture, corresponding to an opening in the
grating, through which many thousand infants have been passed by
starving women to the mystery within, to a nameless death, or to grow up
to a life almost as nameless and obscure. The mother, indeed, received a
ticket as a sort of receipt by which she could recognize her child if
she wished, but the children claimed were very few. Within, they were
received by nursing Sisters, and cared for, not always wisely, but
always kindly, and some of them grew up to happy lives. Modern charity,
in its philistinism and well-regulated activity, condemns such wholesale
readiness to take burdens which might sometimes be borne by those who
lay them down. But modern charity, in such condemnation, does not take
just account of a mother's love, and believes that to receive nameless
children in such a way would 'encourage irresponsibility,' if not vice.
And yet in Rome, where half the population could neither read nor write,
infanticide was unknown, and fewer children were passed in through the
Rota yearly than are murdered in many a modern city. For the last thing
the worst mother will do is to kill her child; last only before that
will she part with it. Which was more moral, the unrestricted charity of
the Rota, or the unrestricted, legal infanticide of the old-fashioned
'baby-farm,' where superfluous children were systematically starved to
death by professional harpies?
On by the Borgo Santo Spirito, opposite the old church of the
Penitentiaries, stands the Palazzo Serristori, memorable in the
revolutionary movement of 1867. It was then the barracks of the Papal
Zouaves--the brave foreign legion enlisted under Pius the Ninth, in
which men of all nations were enrolled under officers of the best blood
in Europe, hated more especially by the revolutionaries because they
were foreigners, and because their existence, therefore, showed a
foreign sympathy with the temporal power, which was a denial of the
revolutionary theory which asserted the Papacy to be without friends in
Europe. Wholesale murder by explosives was in its infancy then as a fine
art; but the spirit was willing, and a plot was formed to blow up the
castle of Sant' Angelo and the barracks of the Zouaves. The castle
escaped because one of the conspirators lost heart and revealed the
treachery; but the Palazzo Serristori was partially destroyed. The
explosion shattered one corner of the building. It was said that the
fuse burned faster than had been intended, so that the catastrophe came
too soon. At all events, when it happened, about dark, only the
musicians of the band were destroyed, and few of the regiment were in
the building at all, so that about thirty lives were sacrificed, where
the intention had been to destroy many hundreds. In the more sane
condition of Europe today, it seems to us amazing that Pius the Ninth
should have been generally blamed for signing the death warrant of the
two atrocious villains who did the deed, and for allowing them to be
executed. The fact that he was blamed, and very bitterly, gives some
idea of the stupid and senseless prejudice against the popes which was
the result of Antonelli's narrow and reactionary policy.
[Illustration]
LEO THE THIRTEENTH
We commonly speak of the nineteenth century as an age of superior
civilization. The truth of the assertion depends on what civilization
means, but there is no denying that more blood has been shed by
civilized nations during the last one hundred and twenty years than in
any equal period of the world's history. Anyone may realize the fact by
simply recalling the great wars which have devastated the world since
the American Revolution.
But the carnage was not uninterrupted. The record of death is divided in
the midst by the thirty years of comparative peace which followed the
battle of Waterloo and preceded the general revolution of 1848. Napoleon
had harried the world, from Moscow to Cairo, from Vienna to Madrid,
pouring blood upon blood, draining the world's veins dry, exhausting
the destroying power of mankind in perpetual destruction. When he was
gone, Europe was utterly worn out by his terrible energy, and collapsed
suddenly in a state of universal nervous prostration. Then came the long
peace, from 1815 to 1848.
During that time the European nations, excepting England, were governed
by more or less weak and timid sovereigns, and it was under their feeble
rule that the great republican idea took root and grew, like a cutting
from the stricken tree of the French Revolution, planted in the heart of
Europe, nurtured in secret, and tended by devoted hands to a new
maturity, but destined to ruin in the end, as surely as the parent
stock.
Those thirty and odd years were a sort of dull season in Europe--an
extraordinarily uneventful period, during which the republican idea was
growing, and during which the monarchic idea was decaying. Halfway
through that time--about 1830--Joseph Mazzini founded the Society of
Young Italy, in connection with the other secret societies of Europe,
and acquired that enormous influence which even now is associated with
his name. Mazzini and Garibaldi meant to make a republic of Italy. The
House of Savoy did not at that time dream of a united Italian Kingdom.
The most they dared hope was the acquisition of territory on the north
by the expulsion of the Austrians. England and circumstances helped the
Savoy family in their sudden and astonishing rise of fortune; for at
that time Austria was the great military nation of Europe, while France
was the naval power second to England, and through the Bourbons, Italy
was largely under the influence of Austria. England saw that the
creation of an independent friendly power in the Mediterranean would
both tend to diminish Austria's strength by land, and would check France
in her continued efforts to make the shores of the Mediterranean hers.
She therefore encouraged Italy in revolution, and it is generally
believed that she secretly furnished enormous sums of money, through Sir
James Hudson, minister in Turin, to further the schemes of Mazzini. The
profound hatred of Catholics which was so much more marked in England
then than now, produced a strong popular feeling there in favour of the
revolutionaries, who inveighed against all existing sovereignties in
general, but were particularly bitter against the government of the
Popes. The revolution thus supported by England, and guided by such men
as Mazzini and Garibaldi, made progress. The legendary nature of Rome,
as mistress of the world, appealed also to many Italians, and 'Rome'
became the catchword of liberty. The situation was similar in other
European countries; secret societies were as active, and to the
revolutionaries the result seemed as certain.
But the material of monarchic opposition was stronger elsewhere than in
Italy. Prussia had Hohenzollerns and Austria had Hapsburgs--races that
had held their own and reigned successfully for hundreds of years. The
smaller German principalities had traditions of conservative obedience
to a prince, which were not easily broken. On the other hand, in Italy
the government of the Bourbons and their relatives was a barbarous
misrule, of which the only good point was that it did not oppress the
people with taxes, and in Rome the Pontifical chair had been occupied by
a succession of politically insignificant Popes from Pius the Seventh,
Napoleon's victim, to Gregory the Sixteenth. There was no force in Italy
to oppose the general revolutionary idea, except the conservatism of
individuals, in a country which has always been revolutionary. Much the
same was true of France. But in both countries there were would-be
monarchs waiting in the background, ready to promote any change whereby
they might profit--Louis Napoleon, and the Kings of Sardinia, Charles
Albert first, and after his defeat by the Austrians and his abdication,
the semi-heroic, semi-legendary Victor Emmanuel.
Gregory the Sixteenth died in 1846, and Pius the Ninth was elected in
his stead--a man still young, full of the highest ideals and of most
honest purpose; enthusiastic, a man who had begun life in military
service and was destined to end it in captivity, and upon whom it was
easy to impose in every way, since he was politically too credulous for
any age, and too diffident, if not too timid, for the age in which he
lived. His private virtues made him a model to the Christian world,
while his political weakness made him the sport of his enemies. The only
stable thing in him was his goodness; everything else was in perpetual
vacillation. In every true account of every political action of Pius the
Ninth, the first words are, 'the Pope hesitated.' And he hesitated to
the last--he hesitated through a pontificate of thirty-two years, he
outreigned the 'years of Peter,' and he lost the temporal power.
The great movement came to a head in 1848. A year of revolutions, riots,
rebellions and new constitutions. So perfectly had it been organized
that it broke out almost simultaneously all over Europe--in France,
Italy, Prussia and Austria. Just when the revolution was rife Pius the
Ninth proclaimed an amnesty. That was soon after his election, and he
vacillated into a sort of passive approval of the Young Italian party.
It was even proposed that Italy should become a confederation of free
states under the presidency of the Pope. No man in his senses believed
in such a possibility, but at that time an unusual number of people were
not in their senses; Europe had gone mad.
Everyone knows the history of that year, when one Emperor, several
Kings, and numerous princes and ministers scattered in all directions,
like men running away from a fire that is just going to reach a quantity
of explosives. The fire was the reaction after long inactivity. Pius the
Ninth fled like the rest, when his favourite minister, Count Rossi, had
been stabbed to death on the steps of the Cancelleria. Some of the
sovereigns got safely back to their thrones. The Pope was helped back by
France and kept on his throne, first by the Republic, and then, with one
short intermission, by Louis Napoleon. In 1870, the French needed all
their strength for their own battles, and gave up fighting those of the
Vatican.
During that long period, from 1849 to 1870, Pius the Ninth governed Rome
in comparative security, in spite of occasional revolutionary outbreaks,
and in kindness if not in wisdom. Taxation was insignificant. Work was
plentiful and well paid, considering the country and the times.
Charities were enormous. The only restriction on liberty was political,
never civil. Reforms and improvements of every kind were introduced.
When Gregory the Sixteenth died, Rome was practically a mediæval city;
when the Italians took it, twenty-four years later, it was a fairly
creditable modern capital. The government of Pius the Ninth was
paternal, and if he was not a wise father, he was at all events the
kindest of men. The same cannot be said of Cardinal Antonelli, his prime
minister, who was the best hated man of his day, not only in Europe and
Italy, but by a large proportion of Churchmen. He was one of those
strong and unscrupulous men who appeared everywhere in Europe as
reactionaries in opposition to the great revolution. On a smaller
scale--perhaps because he represented a much smaller power--he is to be
classed with Disraeli, Metternich, Cavour and Bismarck. In palliation of
many of his doings, it should be remembered that he was not a priest;
for the Cardinalate is a dignity not necessarily associated with the
priesthood, and Antonelli was never ordained. He was a fighter and a
schemer by nature, and he schemed and fought all his life for the
preservation of the temporal power in Rome. He failed, and lived to see
his defeat, and he remained till his death immured in the Vatican with
Pius the Ninth. He used to live in a small and almost mean apartment,
opening upon the grand staircase that leads up from the court of Saint
Damasus.
When the Italians entered Rome through the breach at the Porta Pia,
Italy was unified. It is a curious fact that Italy was never at any time
unified except by force. The difference between the unification under
Julius Cæsar and Augustus, and the unification under Victor Emmanuel, is
very simple. Under the first Cæsars, Rome conquered the Italians; under
the House of Savoy, the Italians conquered Rome.
The taking of Rome in 1870 was the deathblow of mediævalism; and the
passing away of King Victor Emmanuel and of Pope Pius the Ninth was the
end of romantic Italy, if one may use the expression to designate the
character of the country through all that chain of big and little events
which make up the thrilling story of the struggle for Italian unity.
After the struggle for unity, began the struggle for life--more
desperate, more dangerous, but immeasurably less romantic. There is all
the difference between the two which lies between unsound banking and
perilous fighting. The long Pontificate of Pius the Ninth came to a
close almost simultaneously with the reign and the life of Victor
Emmanuel, first King of United Italy, after the Pope and the King had
faced each other during nearly a third of the century, two political
enemies of whom neither felt the slightest personal rancour against the
other. On his death-bed, the King earnestly desired the Pope's parting
blessing, but although the Pope gave it, the message arrived too late,
for the old King was dead. Little more than a month later, Pius the
Ninth departed this life. That was the end of the old era.
The disposition of Europe in the year 1878, when Leo the Thirteenth was
crowned, was strongly anti-Catholic. England had reached the height of
her power and influence, and represented to the world the
scientific-practical idea in its most successful form. She was then
traversing that intellectual phase of so-called scientific atheism of
which Huxley and Herbert Spencer were the chief teachers. Their view
seems not to have been so hostile to the Catholic Church in particular
as it was distinctly antagonistic to all religion whatsoever. People
were inclined to believe that all creeds were a thing of the past, and
that a scientific millennium was at hand. No one who lived in those days
can forget the weary air of pity with which the Huxleyites and the
Spencerians spoke of all humanity's beliefs. England's enormous
political power somehow lent weight to the anti-religious theories of
those two leading men of science, which never really had the slightest
hold upon the believing English people. Italians, for instance, readily
asserted that England had attained her position among nations by the
practice of scientific atheism, and classed Darwin the discoverer with
Spencer the destroyer; for all Latins are more or less born
Anglomaniacs, and naturally envy and imitate Anglo-Saxon character, even
while finding fault with them, just as we envy and imitate Latin art and
fashions. Under a German dynasty and a Prime Minister of Israelitish
name and extraction, the English had become the ideal after which half
of Europe hankered in vain. England's influence was then distinctly
anti-Catholic.
Germany, fresh in unity, and still quivering with the long-forgotten
delight of conquest, was also, as an Empire, anti-Catholic, and the
Kultur Kampf, which was really a religious struggle, was at its height.
Germany's religions are official at the one extreme and popular at the
other; but there is no intermediate religion to speak of--and what we
should call cultured people, scientific men, the professorial class, are
largely atheistic.
For some time after the proclamation of the Empire, Germany meant
Prussia to the rest of the world--Prussia officially evangelical,
privately sceptical, the rigid backbone of the whole German military
mammoth. The fact that about one-third of the population of the Empire
is Catholic was overlooked by Prussia and forgotten by Europe.
France--Catholic in the provinces--was Paris just then--republican
Paris. And all French Republics have been anti-Catholic, as all French
monarchies have been the natural allies of the Vatican, as institutions,
though individual Kings, like Francis the First, have opposed the Popes
from time to time. France, in 1878, was recovering with astonishing
vitality from her defeat, but the new growth was unlike the old. The
definite destruction of the old France had taken place in 1870; and the
new France bore little resemblance to the old. It was, as it is now,
Catholic, but anti-papal.
The smaller northern powers, Scandinavia and Holland, were anti-Catholic
of course. Russia has always been the natural enemy of the Catholic
Church. Of the remaining European nations, only Austria could be said to
have any political importance, and even she was terrorized by the new
German Empire.
Italy had been the scene of one of those quick comedies of national
self-transformation which start trains of consequences rather than
produce immediately great results. One may call it a comedy, not in a
depreciating sense, but because the piece was played out to a successful
issue with little bloodshed and small hindrance. It had been laid down
as a principle by the playwrights that the Vatican was the natural enemy
of Italian unity; and the playwrights and principal actors, Cavour,
Garibaldi and others, were all atheists. The new Italy of their creation
was, therefore, an anti-Catholic power, while the whole Italian people,
below the artificial scientific level, were, as they are now,
profoundly, and even superstitiously, religious. That was the state of
the European world when Leo the Thirteenth was elected.
[Illustration: POPE LEO XIII.
From the Portrait by Lenbach]
The Popes have always occupied an exceptional position as compared with
other sovereigns. There is not, indeed, in the history of any nation or
community any record of an office so anomalous. To all intents and
purposes Christianity is a form of socialism, the Church is a democracy,
and the government of the Popes has been despotic, in the proper
sense,--that is, it has been one of 'absolute authority.' It is probably
not necessary to say anything about the first statement, which few, I
fancy, will be inclined to deny. Pure socialism means community of
property, community of social responsibility, and community of
principles. As regards the democratic rules by which the Church governs
itself, there cannot be two ways of looking at them. Peasant and prince
have an equal chance of wearing the triple crown; but in history it will
be found that it has been more often worn by peasants than by princes,
and most often by men issuing from the middle classes. Broadly, the
requirements have always been those answered by personal merit rather
than by any other consideration. The exceptions have perhaps been many,
and the abuses not a few, but the general principle cannot be denied,
and the present Pope came to the supreme ecclesiastical dignity by much
the same steps as the majority of his predecessors. Since his elevation
to the pontificate the Pecci family have established, beyond a doubt,
their connection with the noble race of that name, long prominent in
Siena, and having an ancient and historical right to bear arms and the
title of count--a dignity of uncertain value in Italy, south of the
Tuscan border, but well worth having when it has originated in the
northern part of the country.
Joachim Vincent Pecci, since 1878 Pope, under the name of Leo the
Thirteenth, was born at Carpineto, in the Volscian hills, in 1810. His
father had served in the Napoleonic wars, but had already retired to his
native village, where he was at that time a landed proprietor of
considerable importance and the father of several children. Carpineto
lies on the mountain side, in the neighbourhood of Segni, in a rocky
district, and in the midst of a country well known to Italians as the
Ciociaria. This word is derived from 'cioce,' the sandals worn by the
peasants in that part of the country, in the place of shoes, and bound
by leathern thongs to the foot and leg over linen strips which serve for
stockings. The sandal indeed is common enough, or was common not long
ago, in the Sabine and Samnian hills and in some parts of the Abruzzi,
but it is especially the property of the Volscians, all the way from
Montefortino, the worst den of thieves in Italy, down to the Neapolitan
frontier. Joachim Pecci was born with a plentiful supply of that rough,
bony, untiring mountaineer's energy which has made the Volscians what
they have been for good or evil since the beginning of history.
Those who have been to Carpineto have seen the dark old pile in which
the Pope was born, with its tower which tops the town, as the dwellings
of the small nobles always did in every hamlet and village throughout
the south of Europe. For the Pecci were good gentlefolk long ago, and
the portraits of Pope Leo's father and mother, in their dress of the
last century, still hang in their places in the mansion. His Holiness
strongly resembles both, for he has his father's brow and eyes, and his
mother's mouth and chin. In his youth he seems to have been a very dark
man, as clearly appears from the portrait of him painted when he was
Nuncio in Brussels at about the age of thirty-four years. The family
type is strong. One of the Pope's nieces might have sat for a portrait
of his mother. The extraordinarily clear, pale complexion is also a
family characteristic. Leo the Thirteenth's face seems cut of live
alabaster, and it is not a figure of speech to say that it appears to
emit a light of its own.
Born and bred in the keen air of the Volscian hills, he is a southern
Italian, but of the mountains, and there is still about him something of
the hill people. He has the long, lean, straight, broad-shouldered frame
of the true mountaineer, the marvellously bright eye, the eagle
features, the well-knit growth of strength, traceable even in extreme
old age; and in character there is in him the well-balanced combination
of a steady caution with an unerring, unhesitating decision, which
appears in those great moments when history will not wait for little
men's long phrases, when the pendulum world is swinging its full stroke,
and when it is either glory or death to lay strong hands upon its
weight. But when it stops for a time, and hangs motionless, the little
men gather about it, and touch it boldly, and make theories about its
next unrest.
In the matter of physique, there is, indeed, a resemblance between Leo
the Thirteenth, President Lincoln and Mr. Gladstone--long, sinewy men
all three, of a bony constitution and indomitable vitality, with large
skulls, high cheek-bones, and energetic jaws--all three men of great
physical strength, of profound capacity for study, of melancholic
disposition, and of unusual eloquence. It might almost be said that
these three men represent three distinct stages of one type--the real or
material, the intellectual and the spiritual. From earliest youth each
of the three was, by force of circumstances, turned to the direction
which he was ultimately to follow. Lincoln was thrown upon facts for his
education; Gladstone received the existing form of education in its
highest development, while the Pope was brought up under the domination
of spiritual thoughts at a time when they had but lately survived the
French Revolution. Born during the height of the conflict between belief
and unbelief, Leo the Thirteenth, by a significant fatality, was raised
to the pontificate when the Kultur Kampf was raging and the attention of
the world was riveted on the deadly struggle between the Roman Catholic
Church and Prince Bismarck--a struggle in which the great chancellor
found his equal, if not his master.
The Pope spent his childhood in the simple surroundings of Carpineto,
than which none could be simpler, as everyone knows who has ever visited
an Italian country gentleman in his home. Early hours, constant
exercise, plain food and farm interests made a strong man of him, with
plenty of simple common sense. As a boy he was a great walker and
climber, and it is said that he was excessively fond of birding, the
only form of sport afforded by that part of Italy, and practised there
in those times, as it is now, not only with guns, but by means of nets.
It has often been said that poets and lovers of freedom come more
frequently from the mountains and the seashore than from a flat inland
region. Leo the Thirteenth ranks high among the scholarly poets of our
day, and is certainly conspicuous for the liberality of his views. As
long as he was in Perugia, it is well known that he received the
officers of the Italian garrison and any government officials of rank
who chanced to be present in the city, not merely now and then, or in a
formal way, but constantly and with a cordiality which showed how much
he appreciated their conversation. It may be doubted whether in our
country an acknowledged leader of a political minority would either
choose or dare to associate openly with persons having an official
capacity on the other side.
But the stiff mannerism of the patriarchal system which survived until
recently from the early Roman times gave him that formal tone and
authoritative manner which are so characteristic of his conversation in
private. His deliberate but unhesitating speech makes one think of
Goethe's 'without haste, without rest.' Yet his formality is not of the
slow and circumlocutory sort; on the contrary, it is energetically
precise, and helps rather than mars the sound casting of each idea. The
formality of strong people belongs to them naturally, and is the
expression of a certain unchanging persistence; that of the weak is
mostly assumed for the sake of magnifying the little strength they have.
The Pope's voice is as distinctly individual as his manner of speaking.
It is not deep nor very full, but, considering his great age, it is
wonderfully clear and ringing, and it has a certain incisiveness of
sound which gives it great carrying power. Pius the Ninth had as
beautiful a voice, both in compass and richness of quality, as any
baritone singer in the Sixtine choir. No one who ever heard him intone
the 'Te Deum' in Saint Peter's, in the old days, can forget the grand
tones. He was gifted in many ways--with great physical beauty, with a
rare charm of manner, and with a most witty humour; and in character he
was one of the most gentle and kind-hearted men of his day, as he was
also one of the least initiative, so to say, while endowed with the high
moral courage of boundless patience and political humility. Leo the
Thirteenth need speak but half a dozen words, with one glance of his
flashing eyes and one gesture of his noticeably long arm and
transparently thin hand, and the moral distance between his predecessor
and himself is at once apparent. There is strength still in every
movement, there is deliberate decision in every tone, there is lofty
independence in every look. Behind these there may be kindliness,
charity, and all the milder gifts of virtue; but what is apparent is a
sort of energetic, manly trenchancy which forces admiration rather than
awakens sympathy.
[Illustration: LIBRARY OF THE VATICAN]
When speaking at length on any occasion he is eloquent, but with the
eloquence of the dictator, and sometimes of the logician, rather than
that of the persuader. His enunciation is exceedingly distinct in Latin
and Italian, and also in French, a language in which he expresses
himself with ease and clearness. In Latin and Italian he chooses his
words with great care and skill, and makes use of fine distinctions, in
the Ciceronian manner, and he certainly commands a larger vocabulary
than most men.
His bearing is erect at all times, and on days when he is well his step
is quick as he moves about his private apartments. 'Il Papa corre
sempre,'--'the Pope always runs'--is often said by the guards and
familiars of the antechamber. A man who speaks slowly but moves fast is
generally one who thinks long and acts promptly--a hard hitter, as we
should familiarly say.
It is not always true that a man's character is indicated by his daily
habits, nor that his intellectual tendency is definable by the qualities
of his temper or by his personal tastes. Carlyle was one instance of the
contrary; Lincoln was another; Bismarck was a great third, with his iron
head and his delicate feminine hands. All men who direct, control or
influence the many have a right to be judged by the world according to
their main deeds, to the total exclusion of their private lives. There
are some whose public actions are better than their private ones, out of
all proportion; and there are others who try to redeem the patent sins
of their political necessities by the honest practice of their private
virtues. In some rare, high types, head, heart and hand are balanced to
one expression of power, and every deed is a mathematical function of
all three.
Leo the Thirteenth probably approaches as nearly to such superiority as
any great man now living. As a statesman, his abilities are admitted to
be of the highest order; as a scholar he is undisputedly one of the
first Latinists of our time, and one of the most accomplished writers in
Latin and Italian prose and verse; as a man, he possesses the simplicity
of character which almost always accompanies greatness, together with a
healthy sobriety of temper, habit and individual taste rarely found in
those beings whom we might call 'motors' among men. It is commonly said
that the Pope has not changed his manner of life since he was a simple
bishop. He is, indeed, a man who could not easily change either his
habits or his opinions; for he is of that enduring, melancholic,
slow-speaking, hard-thinking temperament which makes hard workers, and
in which everything tends directly to hard work as a prime object, even
with persons in whose existence necessary labour need play no part, and
far more so with those whose smallest daily tasks hew history out of
humanity in the rough state.
Of the Pope's statesmanship and Latinity the world knows much, and is
sure to hear more, while he lives--most, perhaps, hereafter, when
another and a smaller man shall sit in the great Pope's chair. For he is
a great Pope. There has not been his equal, intellectually, for a long
time, nor shall we presently see his match again. The era of
individualities is not gone by, as some pretend. Men of middle age have
seen in a lifetime Cavour, Louis Napoleon, Garibaldi, Disraeli,
Bismarck, Leo the Thirteenth--and the young Emperor of Germany. With
the possible exception of Cavour, who died, poisoned as some say, before
he had lived out his life, few will deny that of all these the present
Pope possesses, in many respects, the most evenly balanced and
stubbornly sane disposition. That fact alone speaks highly for the
judgment of the men who elected him, in Italy's half-crazed days,
immediately after the death of Victor Emmanuel.
At all events, there he stands, at the head of the Holy Roman Catholic
and Apostolic Church, as wise a leader as any who in our day has wielded
power; as skilled, in his own manner, as any who hold the pen; and
better than all that, as straightly simple and honest a Christian man as
ever fought a great battle for his faith's sake.
Straight-minded, honest and simple he is, yet keen, sensitive and nobly
cautious; for there is no nobility in him who risks a cause for the
vanity of his own courage, and who, in blind hatred of his enemies,
squanders the devotion of those who love him. In a sense, today, the
greater the man the greater the peacemaker, and Leo the Thirteenth ranks
highest among those who have helped the cause of peace in this century.
In spite of his great age, the Holy Father enjoys excellent health, and
leads a life full of occupations from morning till night. He rises very
early, and when, at about six o'clock in the morning, his valet, Pio
Centra, enters his little bedroom, he more often finds the Pope risen
than asleep. He is accustomed to sleep little--not more than four or
five hours at night, though he rests a short time after dinner. We are
told that sometimes he has been found asleep in his chair at his
writing-table at dawn, not having been to bed at all. Of late he
frequently says mass in a chapel in his private apartments, and the mass
is served by Pio Centra. On Sundays and feast-days he says it in another
chapel preceding the throne-room. The little chapel is of small
dimensions, but by opening the door into the neighbouring room a number
of persons can assist at the mass. The permission, when given, is
obtained on application to the 'Maestro di Camera,' and is generally
conceded only to distinguished foreign persons. After saying mass
himself, the Holy Father immediately hears a second one, said by one of
the private chaplains on duty for the week, whose business it is to take
care of the altar and to assist. Frequently he gives the communion with
his own hand to those who are present at his mass. After mass he
breakfasts upon coffee and goat's milk, and this milk is supplied from
goats kept in the Vatican gardens--a reminiscence of Carpineto and of
the mountaineer's early life.
Every day at about ten he receives the Secretary of State, Cardinal
Rampolla, and converses with him for a good hour or more upon current
affairs. On Tuesdays and Fridays the Secretary of State receives the
Diplomatic Corps in his own apartments, and on those days the Under
Secretary confers with the Pope in his chief's place. The acting prefect
of the 'Holy Apostolic Palaces' is received by the Pope when he has
business to expound. On the first and third Fridays of each month the
Maggiordomo is received, and so on, in order, the cardinal prefects of
the several Roman congregations, the Under Secretaries, and all others
in charge of the various offices. In the papal antechamber there is a
list of them, with the days of their audiences.
During the morning the Pope receives cardinals, bishops and ambassadors
who are going away on leave, or who have just returned, princes and
members of the Roman nobility, and distinguished foreigners. At ten
o'clock he takes a cup of broth brought by Centra. At two in the
afternoon, or a little earlier, he dines, and he is most abstemious,
although he has an excellent digestion. His private physician, Doctor
Giuseppe Lapponi, has been heard to say that he himself eats more at one
meal than the Holy Father eats in a week. Every day, unless indisposed,
some one is received in private audience. These audiences are usually
for the cardinal prefects of the congregations, the patriarchs,
archbishops and bishops who are in Rome at the time, and distinguished
personages.
When the weather is fine the Pope generally walks or drives in the
garden. He is carried out of his apartments to the gate in a
sedan-chair by the liveried 'sediarii,' or chair-porters; or if he goes
out by the small door known as that of Paul the Fifth, the carriage
awaits him, and he gets into it with the private chamberlain, who is
always a monsignore. It is as well to say here, for the benefit of
non-Catholics, that 'monsignori' are not necessarily bishops, nor even
consecrated priests, the title being really a secular one. Two Noble
Guards of the corps of fifty gentlemen known under that name ride beside
the carriage doors. The closed carriage is a simple brougham, having the
Pope's coat of arms painted on the door, but in summer he occasionally
goes out in an open landau. He drives several times round the avenues,
and when he descends, the officer of the Guards dismounts and opens the
carriage door. He generally walks in the neighbourhood of the Chinese
pavilion and along the Torrione, where the papal observatory is built.
Leo the Thirteenth is fond of variety--and no wonder, shut up for life
as he is in the Vatican; he enjoys directing work and improvements in
the gardens; he likes to talk with Vespignani, the architect of the Holy
Apostolic Palaces, who is also the head of the Catholic party in the
Roman municipality, to go over the plans of work he has ordered, to give
his opinion, and especially to see that the work itself is executed in
the shortest possible time. Time is short for a pope; Sixtus the Fifth,
who filled Rome and Italy with himself, reigned only five years;
Rodrigo Borgia eleven years; Leo the Tenth, but nine.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF ACQUA FELICE]
In 1893 the Pope began to inhabit the new pavilion designed and built by
Vespignani in pure fifteenth-century style. It is built against the
Torrione, the ancient round tower constructed by Saint Leo the Fourth
about the year 850. In 1894 Leo the Thirteenth made a further extension,
and joined another building to the existing one by means of a loggia, on
the spot once occupied by the old barracks of the papal gendarmes, who
are still lodged in the gardens, and whose duty it is to patrol the
precincts by day and night. Indeed, the fact that two dynamiters were
caught in the garden in 1894 proves that a private police is necessary.
During the great heat of summer the Pope, after saying mass, goes into
the garden about nine in the morning and spends the whole day there,
receiving everyone in the garden pavilion he has built for himself, just
as he would receive in the Vatican. He dines there, too, and rests
afterward, guarded by the gendarmes on duty, to whom he generally sends
a measure of good wine--another survival of a country custom; and in the
cool of the day he again gets into his carriage, and often does not
return to the Vatican till after sunset, toward the hour of Ave Maria.
In the evening, about an hour later,--at 'one of the night,' according
to the old Roman computation of time,--he attends at the recitation of
the rosary, or evening prayers, by his private chaplain, and he requires
his immediate attendants to assist also. He then retires to his room,
where he reads, studies or writes verses, and at about ten o'clock he
eats a light supper.
While in the garden he is fond of talking about plants and flowers with
the director of the gardens. He walks with the officer of the Noble
Guards and with the private chamberlain on duty. He speaks freely of
current topics, tells anecdotes of his own life and visits the gazelles,
goats, deer and other animals kept in the gardens. From the cupola of
Saint Peter's the whole extent of the grounds is visible, and when the
Pope is walking, the visitors, over four hundred feet above, stop to
watch him. He has keen eyes, and sees them also. 'Let us show
ourselves!' he exclaims on such occasions. 'At least they will not be
able to say that the Pope is ill!'
The Pope's favourite poets are Virgil and Dante. He knows long passages
of both by heart, and takes pleasure in quoting them. When Father
Michael, the apostolic prefect to Erithrea, was taking his leave, with
the other Franciscans who accompanied him to Africa, his Holiness
recited to them, with great spirit, Dante's canto upon St. Francis.
The Pope reads the newspapers, passages of interest being marked for him
by readers in order to save time. He frequently writes letters to the
bishops, and composes encyclicals in a polished and Ciceronian style of
Latin. The encyclicals are printed at the private press of the Vatican,
an institution founded by him and furnished with all modern
improvements. They are first published in the 'Osservatore Romano,' the
official daily paper of the Vatican, and then finally translated into
Italian and other languages, and sent out to the bishops abroad. Leo the
Thirteenth likes to see and talk with men of letters, as well as to read
their books. Two years ago he requested Professor Brunelli of Perugia to
buy for him the poetical works of the Abbé Zanella. The request is
characteristic, for his Holiness insisted upon paying for the book, like
anyone else.
When great pilgrimages are to be organized, the first step taken is to
form committees at the place of origin. The leader of the pilgrimage is
usually the head of the diocese, who then writes to Rome to make the
arrangements. The Committee on Pilgrimages provides quarters for the
pilgrims, at the Lazaret of Saint Martha, or elsewhere, that they may be
properly lodged and fed. On the occasion of the celebrated French
workingmen's pilgrimage, the great halls in the Belvedere wing,
including the old quarters of the engineer corps, and of the artillery
and the riding-school, were opened as dining-halls, where the pilgrims
came morning and evening to their meals; the kitchen department and the
general superintendence were in charge of Sisters, and everything was
directed by the Roman Committee of Pilgrimages. The visitors were
received by the Circolo, or Society of Saint Peter's, and by the first
Artisan Workmen's Association, the members of which waited at table,
wearing aprons. The Circolo has an office for pilgrimages which
facilitates arrangements with the railways, and provides lodgings in
hotels, inns and private houses in Rome for the well-to-do; but the
General Committee on Pilgrimages provides lodgings for the poor. The
head of the pilgrimage also makes arrangements for the mass which the
Holy Father celebrates for the pilgrims, and for the audience which
follows. If the pilgrimage is large, the mass is said in Saint Peter's;
if small, in the Vatican, either in the Loggia of the Beatification or
in the Sala Ducale. At the audience the pilgrims place their offerings
in the Pope's hands, and he blesses the rosaries, crosses and other
objects of devotion, and gives small silver medals in memory of the
occasion.
Since 1870 the Pope has not conducted the solemn services either in
Saint Peter's or in the Sixtine Chapel. The only services of this kind
in which he takes part are those held in the Sixtine Chapel on the
anniversary of the death of Pius the Ninth, and on the anniversary of
his own coronation, March 3. At these two functions there are also
present the Sacred College, the bishops and prelates, the Roman
nobility, the Knights of Malta, the Diplomatic Corps in full dress, and
any foreign Catholic royal princes who may chance to be in Rome at the
time. At the 'public' consistories, held with great pomp in the Sala
Regia, the Pope gives the new hat to each new cardinal; but there are
also 'private' consistories held in the beautiful Sala del Concistoro,
near the hall of the Swiss Guards, at the entrance to the Pope's
apartments.
Moreover, the Pope appears at beatifications and canonizations, and
during the present pontificate these have been generally held in the
Hall of Beatifications, a magnificent room with a tribune, above the
portico of Saint Peter's, turned into a chapel for the occasion, with
innumerable candles and lamps, the transparency of the beatified person,
called the Gloria, and standards on which are painted representations of
miracles. The last of these ceremonies was held in Saint Peter's, with
closed doors, but in the presence of an enormous concourse, with the
greatest pomp, the whole of the Noble Guard and the Palatine Guard
turning out, and order being preserved by the Swiss Guards, the
gendarmes, and the vergers of the basilica, known as the 'Sanpietrini.'
In Holy Week, in order to meet the wants of the many eminent and devout
Catholics who then flock to Rome, the Holy Father celebrates mass two or
three times in the Sala Ducale, which is then turned into a chapel.
During these masses motetts are sung by the famous Sixtine choir, under
the direction of the old Maestro Mustafa, once the greatest soprano of
the century, but at the same time so accomplished a musician as to have
earned the common name of 'Palestrina redivivus.' It is to be regretted
that he has never allowed any of his beautiful compositions to be
published. On such occasions as Christmas Day or the feast of Saint
Joachim, by whose name the Pope was christened, he receives the College
of Cardinals, the bishops present in Rome, many prelates, the heads of
religious bodies, some officers of the old pontifical army and of the
guards, and the dignitaries of the papal court, in his own private
library, where he talks familiarly with each in turn, and quite without
ceremony. Reigning sovereigns, princes and distinguished persons are
received in the grand throne-room, where the throne is covered with red
velvet, with coats of arms at the angles of the canopy. Upon a large
pier-table, in the rococo style, between the windows and opposite the
throne, stands a great crucifix of ivory and ebony, between two
candlesticks. The carpet used at such times was presented by Spain.
Before the Emperor of Germany's visit the Pope himself gave particular
directions for the dressing of the throne and the arrangement of the
rooms.
When great personages are received their suites are also presented,
after which the Pope retires with his guest to the small private
throne-room.
Before coming to the Pope's presence it is necessary to pass through
many anterooms, the Sala Clementina, the hall of the palfrenieri and
sediarii,--that is, of the grooms and chair-porters,--the hall of the
gendarmes, the antechamber of the Palatine Guard, that of the officers
on duty, the hall of the Arras, that of the chamberlains and Noble
Guards and at last the antechamber of the Maestro di Camera--there are
eight in all. Persons received in audience are accompanied by the
'camerieri segreti,' who do the honours in full dress, wearing their
chains and carrying their staves.
The private library is a spacious room lined with bookcases made of a
yellow wood from Brazil, some of which are curtained. Busts of several
former Popes stand upon marble columns.
To the Pope's bedroom, only his private valet and his secretaries have
access. It is of small dimensions, and contains only a bed, in an
alcove adorned with graceful marble columns, a writing-table, an
arm-chair and kneeling stool, and one wardrobe.
Besides these, there is his private study, in which the table and chair
stand upon a little carpeted platform, other tables being placed on each
side upon the floor, together with an extremely uncomfortable but
magnificent straight-backed arm-chair, which is one of the gifts offered
on the occasion of the episcopal jubilee. There is, moreover, a little
room containing only a lounge and an old-fashioned easy-chair with
'wings' and nothing else. It is here that the Holy Father retires to
take his afternoon nap, and the robust nature of his nerves is proved by
the fact that he lies down with his eyes facing the broad light of the
window.
The private apartment occupies the second floor, according to Italian
reckoning, though we Americans should call it the third; it is on a
level with Raphael's loggie. The floor above it is inhabited by Cardinal
Rampolla, the Secretary of State.
The 'pontifical court,' as it is called, consists (1898) of Cardinal
Rampolla, the Secretary of State; Cardinal Mario Mocenni, the
pro-prefect of the Holy Apostolic Palaces, a personage of the highest
importance, who has sole control of everything connected with the
Vatican palace and all the vast mass of adjoining buildings; the
Maggiordomo, who, besides many other functions, is the manager of the
museums, galleries and inhabited apartments; the Maestro di Camera, who
nearly corresponds to a master of ceremonies, and superintends all
audiences; the almoner and manager of the papal charities, assisted by a
distinguished priest, who is also a lawyer, formerly secretary to the
well-known Monsignor de Merode; a monk of the Dominican order, who
supervises the issuing of books printed at the Vatican; a chief steward;
four private secretaries, who take turns of service lasting a week for
each, and are always with the Pope, and finally the chief of the Vatican
police. Moreover, his Holiness has his private preacher, who delivers
sermons before him in Advent and Lent, and his confessor, both of whom
are always Capuchin monks, in accordance with a very ancient tradition.
It must not be supposed by the uninitiated that these few persons in any
way represent the central directive administration of the Catholic
Church. On the contrary, the only one of them who is occupied in that
larger field is Cardinal Rampolla, the Secretary of State. The others
are, strictly speaking, the chief personages of the pontifical
household, as we should say. But their offices are not sinecures. The
Pope's restless energy extracts work from the men about him as one
squeezes water from a sponge. In the days of Pius the Ninth, after the
fall of the temporal power, the Vatican was overrun and overcrowded with
useless but well-paid officials, officers and functionaries great and
small, who took refuge there against the advancing wave of change. When
Leo the Thirteenth had been on the throne only a few weeks, there was
sold everywhere a comic print representing the Pope, with a huge broom,
sweeping all the useless people pell-mell down the steps of the Vatican
into the Piazza of Saint Peter's. As often happens, the caricaturist saw
the truth. In a reign that has lasted twenty years, Leo the Thirteenth
has done away with much that was useless, worthless and old-fashioned,
and much that cumbered the narrow patch of earth on which so important a
part of the world's business is transacted. He is a great simplifier of
details, and a strong leveller of obstructions, so that his successor in
the pontificate will find it a comparatively easy thing to keep the
mechanism in order in its present state.
[Illustration: THE VATICAN FROM THE PIAZZA OF SAINT PETER'S]
The strictest economy, even to the minutest details, is practised in the
Vatican. It appears certain that the accounts of the vast household have
often been inspected by the Pope, whose prime object is to prevent any
waste of money where so much is needed for the maintenance of church
institutions in all parts of the world. In the midst of outward
magnificence the papal establishment is essentially frugal, for the
splendid objects in the Pope's apartments, even to many of the articles
of furniture, are gifts received from the faithful of all nations. But
the money which pours into the Vatican from the contributions of
Catholics all over Christendom is only held in trust, to be expended in
support of missions, of poor bishoprics, and of such devout and
charitable organizations as need help, wherever they may be. That
nothing may be lost which can possibly be applied to a good purpose is
one of Leo the Thirteenth's most constant occupations. He has that
marvellous memory for little things which many great leaders and
sovereigns have had; he remembers not only faces and names, but figures
and facts, with surprising and sometimes discomfiting accuracy.
In his private life, as distinguished from his public and political
career, what is most striking is the combination of shrewdness and
simplicity in the best sense of both words. Like Pius the Ninth, he has
most firmly set his face against doing anything which could be construed
as financially advantageous to his family, who are good gentlefolk, and
well to do in the world, but no more. All that he has as Pope he holds
in trust for the Church in the most literal acceptation of the term. The
contributions of Catholics, on being received, are immediately invested
in securities bearing interest, which securities are again sold as may
be necessary for current needs, and expended for the welfare of Catholic
Christianity. Every penny is most carefully accounted for. These moneys
are generally invested in Italian national bonds--a curious fact, and
indicative of considerable confidence in the existing state of things,
as well as a significant guarantee of the Vatican's good faith towards
the monarchy. It is commonly said in Rome among bankers that the Vatican
makes the market price of Italian bonds. Whether this be true or not, it
is an undeniable fact that the finances of the Vatican are under the
direct and exceedingly thrifty control of the Pope himself. To some
extent we may be surprised to find so much plain common sense surviving
in the character of one who has so long followed a spiritual career. We
should not have looked for such practical wisdom in Pius the Ninth. But
the times are changed since then, and are most changed in most recent
times. The head of the Catholic Church today must be a modern man, a
statesman, and an administrator; he must be able to cope with
difficulties as well as heresies; he must lead his men as well as guide
his flock; he must be the Church's steward as well as her consecrated
arch-head; he must be the reformer of manners as well as the preserver
of faith; he must be the understander of men's venial mistakes as well
as the censor of their mortal sins.
Battles for belief are no longer fought only with books and dogmas,
opinions and theories. Everything may serve nowadays, from money, which
is the fuel of nations, to wit, which is the weapon of the individual;
and the man who would lose no possible vantage must have both a heavy
hand and a light touch.
By his character and natural gifts, Leo the Thirteenth is essentially
active rather than contemplative, and it is not surprising that the
chief acts of his pontificate should have dealt rather with political
matters than with questions of dogma and ecclesiastical authority. It
has certainly been the object of the present Pope to impress upon the
world the necessity of Christianity in general, and of the Roman
Catholic Church in particular, as a means of social redemption and a
factor in political stability. This seems to be his inmost conviction,
as shown in all his actions and encyclical letters. One is impressed, at
every turn, by the strength of his belief in religion and in his own
mission to spread it abroad. In regard to forms of faith, the opinions
of mankind differ very widely, but the majority of intelligent men now
living seem to hold a more or less distinct faith of one sort or
another, and to require faith of some sort in their fellow-men. Common
atheism has had its little day, and is out of fashion. It is certainly
not possible to define that which has taken the place of the
pseudo-scientific materialism which plagued society twenty or thirty
years ago, and it is certainly beyond the province of this book to
examine into the current convictions with which we are to begin the
twentieth century.
Unprejudiced persons will not, however, withhold their admiration in
reviewing the life of a man who has devoted his energies, his
intelligence and his strength, not to mention the enormous power wielded
by him as the head of the Church, to the furtherance and accomplishment
of ends which so many of us believe to be good. For the pontificate of
Leo the Thirteenth has differed from that of his predecessor in that it
has been active rather than passive. While Pius the Ninth was the head
of the Church suffering, Leo the Thirteenth is the leader of the Church
militant. This seems to be the reason why he has more than once been
accused of inconsistency in his actions, notably in his instructions to
French Catholics, as compared with the position he has maintained
towards the Italian government. People seem to forget that, whereas the
question of temporal power is deeply involved in the latter case, it has
nothing whatever to do with the former, and as this question is the one
most often brought up against the papacy and discussed in connection
with it by people who seem to have very little idea of its real
meaning, it may be as well to state here at once the Pope's own view of
it.
'The temporary sovereignty is not absolutely requisite for the existence
of the papacy, since the Popes were deprived of it during several
centuries, but it is required in order that the pontiff's independence
may display itself freely, without obstacles, and be evident and
apparent in the eyes of the world. It is the social form, so to say, of
his guardianship, and of his manifestation. It is necessary--not to
existence, but to a right existence. The Pope who is not a sovereign is
necessarily a subject, because (in the social existence of a monarchy)
there is no mean term between subject and sovereign. A Pope who is a
subject of a given government is continually exposed to its influence
and pressure, or at least to influences connected with political aims
and interests.'
[Illustration: RAPHAEL'S "TRANSFIGURATION"]
The writer from whom these lines are quoted comes to the natural and
logical conclusion that this is not the normal position which should be
occupied by the head of the Church. I may remark here that the same view
is held in other countries besides Italy. The Emperor of Russia is the
undisputed head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Queen Victoria occupies,
by the British Constitution, almost exactly the same position towards
the Anglican Church. In practice, though certainly not in theory, it is
the evident purpose of the young German Emperor, constitutionally or
unconstitutionally, to create for himself the same dominant pontifical
position in regard to the Churches of the German Empire. It seems
somewhat unjust, therefore, that the Popes, whose right to the
sovereignty of Rome was for ages as undisputed as that of any King or
Emperor in Europe, though secondary in itself to their ecclesiastical
supremacy, should be blamed for protesting against what was undoubtedly
a usurpation so far as they were concerned, although others may look
upon it as a mere incident in the unification of a free people.
Moreover, since the unification was accomplished, the vanquished Popes
have acted with a fairness and openness which might well be imitated in
other countries. The Italians, as a nation, possess remarkable talent
and skill in conspiracy, and there is no organization in the world
better fitted than that of the Roman Catholic Church for secretly
organizing and carrying out a great political conspiracy, if any such
thing were ever attempted. The action of the Popes, on the contrary, has
been fair and above board.
Both Pius the Ninth and Leo the Thirteenth have stated their grievances
in the most public manner, and so far have they been from attempting to
exercise their vast influence in directing the politics of Italy that
they have enjoined upon Italian Catholics to abstain from political
contests altogether. Whether in so doing they have pursued a wise course
or not, history will decide, probably according to the taste of the
historian; but the fact itself sufficiently proves that they have given
their enemies more than a fair chance. This seems to have been the form
taken by their protests; and this is a fair answer to the principal
accusation brought by non-Catholics against the Pope, namely, that he is
ready to sacrifice everything in an unscrupulous attempt to regain
possession of temporal power. In other matters Leo the Thirteenth has
always shown himself to be a statesman, while Pius the Ninth was the
victim of his own meek and long-suffering character. To enter into the
consideration of the political action of the Pope during the last
fifteen years, would be to review the history of the world during that
time. To give an idea of the man's character, it would be sufficient to
recall three or four of the principal situations in which he has been
placed. A volume might be written, for instance, on his action in regard
to the German Army Bill, his position towards Ireland, his arbitration
in the question of the Caroline Islands, and his instructions to French
Catholics.
It is extremely hard to form a fair judgment from documents alone, and
especially from those documents which most generally come before the
public, namely, articles in such reviews as the _Contemporary Review_,
on the one hand, and the _Civiltà Cattolica_ on the other. Indeed, the
statements on either side, if accepted without hesitation, would render
all criticisms futile. Devout Roman Catholics would answer that matters
of faith are beyond criticism altogether; but the writers in the
_Contemporary_, for instance, will, with equal assurance, declare
themselves right because they believe that they cannot be wrong. It
would be better to consult events themselves rather than the current
opinions of opposite parties concerning them, to set aside the
consideration of the aims rightly or wrongly attributed to Leo the
Thirteenth, and to look only on the results brought about by his policy
in our time. In cases where actions have a merely negative result, it is
just to consider the motive alone, if any criticism is necessary, and
here there seems to be no particular reason for doubting the Pope's
statement of his own case. For instance, in connection with Ireland, the
Pope said, in the document known as 'The Circular Letter of the
Propaganda': 'It is just that the Irish should seek to alleviate their
afflicted condition; it is just that they should fight for their rights,
nor is it denied them to collect money to alleviate the condition of the
Irish.' In regard to the same matter, the 'Decree of the Holy Office'
reads as follows: 'The Holy See has frequently given opportune advice
and counsel to the Irish people (upon whom it has always bestowed
especial affection), whenever its affairs seem to require it, by which
counsel and advice they might be enabled to defend and vindicate their
rights without prejudice to justice, and without disturbing the public
peace.' A fairer statement of the rights of men, and a more express
injunction against public disturbance of any kind, could hardly be
expressed in two short sentences.
Outside of Italy the position of Leo the Thirteenth in Rome is not
generally understood. Most people suppose that the expression 'the
prisoner in the Vatican,' which he applies to himself, and which is very
generally applied to him by the more ardent of Italian Catholics, is a
mere empty phrase, and that his confinement within his small dominion is
purely a matter of choice. This is not the case. So far as the political
theory of the question is concerned, it is probable that the Pope would
not in any case be inclined to appear openly on Italian territory unless
he showed himself as the official guest of King Humbert, who would
naturally be expected to return the visit. To make such an official
visit and such an appearance would be in fact to accept the Italian
domination in Rome, a course which, as has already been noticed, would
be contrary to the accepted Catholic idea of the social basis necessary
for the papacy. It would not necessarily be an uncatholic act, however,
but it would certainly be an unpapal one. No one would expect the
ex-Empress of the French, for instance, to live openly in Paris, as
though the Parisians had never been her subjects, and as though she
accepted the Republic in a friendly and forgiving spirit. And the case
is to all intents and purposes exactly identical.
[Illustration: LOGGIE OF RAPHAEL IN THE VATICAN]
But this is not all. It is unfortunately true that there is another and
much better reason why Leo the Thirteenth cannot show himself in the
streets of Rome. It is quite certain that his life would not be safe.
The enthusiastic friends of Italy who read glowing accounts of the
development of the new kingdom and write eloquent articles in the same
strain will be utterly horrified at this statement, and will, moreover,
laugh to scorn the idea that the modern civilized Italian could conspire
to take the life of a harmless and unoffending old man. They will be
quite right. The modern civilized Italians would treat the Pope with the
greatest respect and consideration if he appeared amongst them. Most of
them would take off their hats and stand aside while he drove by, and a
great many of them would probably go down upon their knees in the
streets to receive his blessing. The King, who is a gentleman, and
tolerant of religious practices, would treat the head of the Church with
respect. The Queen, who is not only religious, but devout, would hail
the reappearance of the pontiff with enthusiasm. But unfortunately for
the realization of any such thing, Rome is not peopled only by modern
civilized Italians, nor Italy either. There is in the city a very large
body of social democrats, anarchists and the like, not to mention the
small nondescript rabble which everywhere does its best to bring
discredit upon socialistic principles--a mere handful, perhaps, but
largely composed of fanatics and madmen, people half hysterical from
failure, poverty, vice and an indigestion of so-called 'free thought.'
There have not been many sovereigns nowadays whose lives have not been
attempted by such men at one time or another. Within our own memory an
Emperor of Russia, a President of the French Republic and two Presidents
of the United States have been actually murdered by just such men. The
King of Italy, and the Emperor William the First, Napoleon the Third,
Queen Victoria and Alexander the Third have all been assailed by such
fanatics within our own recollection, and some of them have narrowly
escaped death. Not one of them, with the exception of Alexander the
Third, has been so hated by a small and desperate body of men as Leo the
Thirteenth is hated by the little band which undoubtedly exists in Italy
today. I will venture to say that it is a matter of continual
satisfaction to the royal family of Italy, and to the Italian
government, that the Pope should really continue to consider himself a
prisoner within the precincts of the Vatican, since it is quite certain
that if he were to appear openly in Rome the Italian authorities would
not, in the long run, be able to protect his life.
After all that has been said and preached upon the subject by the
friends of Italy, it would be a serious matter indeed if the Pope,
taking a practical advantage of his theoretic liberty, should be done to
death in the streets of Rome by a self-styled Italian patriot. No one
who thoroughly understands Rome at the present day is ignorant that such
danger really exists, though it will no doubt be promptly denied by
Italian ministers, newspaper correspondents or other intelligent but
enthusiastic persons. The hysterical anarchist is unfortunately to be
met with all over the world at the present day, side by side with the
scientific social democrat, and too often under his immediate
protection. Indeed, a great number of the acts of Leo the Thirteenth, if
not all of them, have been directed against the mass of social democracy
in all its forms, good, bad and indifferent; and to the zeal of his
partisans in endeavouring to carry out his suggestions must be
attributed some of the strong utterances of the Church's adherents upon
matters political.
The question of 'assent and obedience' to the Holy See in matters not
relating to dogma and faith is, perhaps, the most important of all those
in which the papacy is now involved. There appears to be a decided
tendency to believe that Catholics ascribe to the Holy See a certain
degree of infallibility in regard to national policy and local
elections. The Pope's own words do not inculcate a blind obedience as
necessary to the salvation of the voter, though it is expressly declared
a grave offence to favour the election of persons opposed to the Roman
Catholic Church and whose opinions may tend to endanger its position.
The idea that the Pope's political utterances can ever be considered as
ex cathedrâ is too illogical to be presented seriously to the world by
thinking men. Leo the Thirteenth is undoubtedly a first-rate statesman,
and it might be to the advantage not only of all good Catholics but of
all humanity, and of the cause of peace itself, to follow his advice in
national and party politics whenever practicable. To bind oneself to
follow the political dictation of Leo the Thirteenth, and to consider
such obedience to the Pope as indispensable to salvation, would be to
create a precedent. Pius the Ninth was no statesman at all, and there
are plenty of instances in history of Popes whose political advice would
have been ruinous, if followed, though it was often formulated more
authoritatively and more dictatorially than the injunctions from time to
time imparted to Catholics by Leo the Thirteenth. An Alexander the Sixth
would be an impossibility in our day; but in theory, if another Rodrigo
Borgia should be elected to the Holy See, one should be as much bound to
obey his orders in voting for the election of the President of the
United States as one can possibly be to obey those of Leo the
Thirteenth, seeing that the divine right to direct the political
consciences of Catholics, if it existed at all, would be inherent in the
papacy as an institution, and not merely attributed by mistaken people
to the wise, learned and conscientious man who is now the head of the
Catholic Church. But the Pope's utterances have lately been interpreted
by his too zealous adherents to mean that every Catholic subject or
citizen throughout the world, who has the right to vote in his own
country, must give that vote in accordance with the dictates of the
Church as a whole, and of his bishop in particular, under pain of
committing a very grave offence against Catholic principles. A state in
which every action of man, public or private, should be guided solely
and entirely by his own religious convictions would no doubt be an ideal
one, and would approach the social perfection of a millennium. But in
the mean time a condition of society in which society itself should be
guided by such political opinions as any one man, human and limited, can
derive from his own conscience, pure and upright though it be, would be
neither logical nor desirable. There are points in the universal
struggle for life which do not turn upon questions of moral right and
wrong, and which every individual has a preëminent and inherent right to
decide for himself.
Anyone who undertakes to speak briefly of such a personage as Leo the
Thirteenth, and of such a question as the 'assent and obedience' of
Catholics in matters not connected with morals or belief, lays himself
open to the accusation of superficiality. We are all, however, obliged
to deal quickly and decisively, in these days, with practical matters of
which the discussion at length would fill many volumes. Most of us
cannot do more than form an opinion based upon the little knowledge we
have, express it as best we may, and pass on. The man who spends a
lifetime in the study of one point, the specialist in fact, is often too
ignorant of all other matters to form any general opinion worth
expressing. Humanity is too broad to be put under a microscope, too
strong to be treated like a little child. No one man, today, in this day
of many Cæsars, can say surely and exactly what should be rendered to
each of them.
Leo the Thirteenth is the leader of a great organization of Christian
men and women spreading all over the world; the leader of a vast body of
human thought; the leader of a conservative army which will play a large
part in any coming struggle between anarchy and order. He may not be
here to direct when the battle begins, but he will leave a strong
position for his successor to defend, and great weapons for him to
wield, since he has done more to simplify and strengthen the Church's
organization than a dozen Popes have done in the last two centuries. Men
of such character fight the campaigns of the future many times over in
their thoughts while all the world is at peace around them, and when the
time comes at last, though they themselves be gone, the spirit they
called up still lives to lead, the sword they forged lies ready for
other hands, the roads they built are broad and straight for the march
of other feet, and they themselves, in their graves, have their share in
the victories that save mankind from social ruin.
[Illustration]
THE VATICAN
The Mons Vaticanus is sometimes said to have received its name from
'vaticinium,' an oracle or prophecy; for tradition says that Numa chose
the Vatican hill as a sacred place from which to declare to the people
the messages he received from the gods. It is not, however, one of the
seven hills on which ancient Rome was built, but forms a part of a ridge
beginning with the Janiculum and ending with Monte Mario, all of which
was outside the ancient limits of the city. In our day the name is
applied only to the immense pontifical palace adjacent to, and connected
with, the basilica of Saint Peter's.
The present existence of this palace is principally due to Nicholas the
Fifth, the builder pope, whose gigantic scheme would startle a modern
architect. His plan was to build the Church of Saint Peter's as a
starting point, and then to construct one vast central 'habitat' for the
papal administration, covering the whole of what is called the Borgo,
from the Castle of Sant' Angelo to the cathedral. In ancient times a
portico, or covered way supported on columns, led from the bridge to the
church, and it was probably from this real structure that Nicholas began
his imaginary one, only a small part of which was ever completed. That
small portion alone comprises the basilica and the Vatican Palace, which
together form by far the greatest continuous mass of buildings in the
world. The Colosseum is 195 yards long by 156 broad, including the
thickness of the walls. Saint Peter's Church alone is 205 yards long and
156 broad, so that the whole Colosseum would easily stand upon the
ground-plan of the church, while the Vatican Palace is more than half as
long again.
Nicholas the Fifth died in 1455, and the oldest parts of the present
Vatican Palace are not older than his reign. They are generally known as
Torre Borgia, from having been inhabited by Alexander the Sixth, who
died of poison in the third of the rooms now occupied by the library,
counting from the library side. The windows of these rooms look upon the
large square court of the Belvedere, and that part of the palace is not
visible from without.
Portions of the substructure of the earlier building were no doubt
utilized by Nicholas, and the secret gallery which connects the Vatican
with the mausoleum of Hadrian is generally attributed to Pope John the
Twenty-third, who died in 1417; but on the whole it may be said that the
Vatican Palace is originally a building of the period of the Renascence,
to which all successive popes have made additions.
The ordinary tourist first sees the Vatican from the square as he
approaches from the bridge of Sant' Angelo. But his attention is from
the first drawn to the front of the church, and he but vaguely realizes
that a lofty, unsymmetrical building rises on his right. He pauses,
perhaps, and looks in that direction as he ascends the long, low steps
of the basilica, and wonders in what part of the palace the Pope's
apartments may be, while the itinerant vender of photographs shakes
yards of poor little views out of their gaudy red bindings, very much as
Leporello unrolls the list of Don Giovanni's conquests. If the picture
peddler sees that the stranger glances at the Vatican, he forthwith
points out the corner windows of the second story and informs his victim
that 'Sua Santità' inhabits those rooms, and promptly offers photographs
of any other interior part of the Vatican but that. The tourist looks up
curiously, and finally gets rid of the fellow by buying what he does not
want, with the charitable intention of giving it to some dear but
tiresome relative at home. And ever afterward, perhaps, he associates
with his first impression of the Vatican the eager, cunning, scapegrace
features of the man who sold him the photographs.
To fix a general scheme of the buildings in the mind one must climb to
the top of the dome of the church and look down from the balcony which
surrounds the lantern. The height is so great that even the great
dimensions of the biggest palace in the world are dwarfed in the deep
perspective, and the wide gardens look small and almost insignificant.
But the relative proportions of the buildings and grounds appear
correctly, and measure each other, as it were. Moreover, it is now so
hard to obtain access to the gardens at all that the usual way of seeing
them is from the top of Saint Peter's, from an elevation of four hundred
feet.
To the average stranger 'the Vatican' suggests only the museum of
sculpture, the picture-galleries and the Loggie. He remembers, besides
the works of art which he has seen, the fact of having walked a great
distance through straight corridors, up and down short flights of marble
steps, and through irregularly shaped and unsymmetrically disposed
halls. If he had any idea of the points of the compass when he entered,
he is completely confused in five minutes, and comes out at last with
the sensation of having been walking in a labyrinth. He will find it
hard to give anyone an impression of the sort of building in which he
has been, and certainly he cannot have any knowledge of the
topographical relations of its parts. Yet in his passage through the
museums and galleries he has seen but a very small part of the whole,
and, excepting when in the Loggie, he probably could not once have stood
still and pointed in the direction of the main part of the palace.
[Illustration: BELVEDERE COURT OF THE VATICAN GALLERY
From a print of the last century]
In order to speak even superficially of it all, it is indispensable to
classify its parts in some way. Vast and irregular it is at its two
ends, toward the colonnade and toward the bastions of the city, but the
intervening length consists of two perfectly parallel buildings, each
over three hundred and fifty yards long, about eighty yards apart, and
yoked in the middle by the Braccio Nuovo of the Museum and a part of
the library, so as to enclose two vast courts, the one known as
Belvedere,--not to be confused with the Belvedere in the Museum,--and
the other called the Garden of the Pigna, from the pine-cone which
stands at one end of it.
Across the ends of these parallel buildings, and toward the city, a huge
pile is erected, about two hundred yards long, very irregular, and
containing the papal residence and the apartments of several cardinals,
the Sixtine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel, the Borgia Tower, the Stanze and
Loggie of Raphael, and the Court of Saint Damasus. At the other end of
the parallelogram are grouped the equally irregular but more beautiful
buildings of the old Museum, of which the windows look out over the
walls of the city, and which originally bore the name of Belvedere, on
account of the lovely view. This is said to have been a sort of
summer-house of the Borgia, not then connected with the palace by the
long galleries.
It would be a hopeless and a weary task to attempt to trace the history
of the buildings. Some account of the Pope's private apartments has
already been given in these pages. They occupy the eastern wing of the
part built round the Court of Damasus; that is to say, they are at the
extreme end of the Vatican, nearest the city, and over the colonnade,
and the windows of the Pope's rooms are visible from the square. The
vast mass which rises above the columns to the right of Saint Peter's is
only a small part of the whole palace, but is not the most modern, by
any means. It contains, for instance, the Sixtine Chapel, which is
considerably older than the present church, having been built by Sixtus
the Fourth, whose beautiful bronze monument is in the Chapel of the
Sacrament, in Saint Peter's. It contains, too, Raphael's Stanze, or
halls, and Bramante's famous Loggie, the beautiful architecture of which
is a frame for some of Raphael's best work.
[Illustration: MICHELANGELO'S "LAST JUDGMENT"]
But any good guide book will furnish all such information, which it
would be fruitless to give in such a work as this. In the pages of
Murray the traveller will find, set down in order and accurately, the
ages, the dimensions, and the exact positions of all the parts of the
building, with the names of the famous artists who decorated each. He
will not find set down there, however, what one may call the atmosphere
of the place, which is something as peculiar and unforgettable, though
in a different way, as that of Saint Peter's. It is quite unlike
anything else, for it is part of the development of churchmen's
administration to an ultimate limit in the high centre of churchmanism.
No doubt there was much of that sort of thing in various parts of Europe
long ago, and in England before Henry the Eighth, and it is to be found
in a small degree in Vienna to this day, where the traditions of the
departed Holy Roman Empire are not quite dead. It is hard to define it,
but it is in everything; in the uniforms of the attendants, in their
old-fashioned faces, in the spotless cleanliness of all the
Vatican--though no one is ever to be seen handling a broom--in the
noiselessly methodical manner of doing everything that is to be done, in
the scholarly rather than scientific arrangement of the objects in the
museum and galleries--above all, in the visitor's own sensations. No one
talks loudly among the statues of the Vatican, and there is a feeling of
being in church, so that one is disagreeably shocked when a guide,
conducting a party of tourists, occasionally raises his voice in order
to be heard. It is all very hard to define, while it is quite impossible
to escape feeling it, and it must ultimately be due to the dominating
influence of the churchmen, who arrange the whole place as though it
were a church. An American lady, on hearing that the Vatican is said to
contain eleven thousand rooms, threw up her hands and laughingly
exclaimed, 'Think of the housemaids!' But there are no housemaids in the
Vatican, and perhaps the total absence of even the humblest feminine
influence has something to do with the austere impression which
everything produces.
On the whole, the Vatican may be divided into seven portions. These are
the pontifical residence, the Sixtine and Pauline chapels, the picture
galleries, the library, the museums of sculpture and archæology, the
outbuildings, including the barracks of the Swiss Guards, and, lastly,
the gardens with the Pope's Casino. Of these the Sixtine Chapel, the
galleries and museums, and the library, are incomparably the most
important.
The name Sixtine is derived from Sixtus the Fourth, as has been said,
and is usually, but not correctly, spelled 'Sistine.' The library was
founded by Nicholas the Fifth, whose love of books was almost equal to
his passion for building. The galleries are representative of Raphael's
work, which predominates to such an extent that the paintings of almost
all other artists are of secondary importance, precisely as Michelangelo
filled the Sixtine Chapel with himself. As for the museums, the objects
they contain have been accumulated by many popes, but their existence
ought, perhaps, to be chiefly attributed to Julius the Second and Leo
the Tenth, the principal representatives of the Rovere and Medici
families.
On the walls of the Sixtine Chapel there are paintings by such men as
Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, as well as by a
number of others; but Michelangelo overshadows them all with his ceiling
and his 'Last Judgment.' There is something overpowering about him, and
there is no escaping from his influence. He not only covers great spaces
with his brush, but he fills them with his masterful drawing, and makes
them alive with a life at once profound and restless. One does not feel,
as with other painters, that a vision has been projected upon a flat
surface; one rather has the impression that a mysterious reality of life
has been called up out of senseless material. What we see is not
imaginary motion represented, but real motion arrested, as it were, in
its very act, and ready to move again. Many have said that the man's
work was monstrous. It was monstrously alive, monstrously vigorous; at
times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never
really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No
matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means
of carrying it to the concrete. No giantism of limb and feature was
beyond the ability of his brush; no astounding foreshortening was too
much for his unerring point; no vast perspective was too deep for his
knowledge and strength. His production was limited only by the length of
his life. Great genius means before all things great and constant
creative power; it means wealth of resource and invention; it means
quantity as well as quality. No truly great genius, unless cut short by
early death, has left little of itself. Besides a man's one great
masterpiece, there are always a hundred works of the same hand, far
beyond the powers of ordinary men; and the men of Michelangelo's day
worked harder than we work. Perhaps they thought harder, too, being more
occupied with creation, at a time when there was little, than we are
with the difficult task of avoiding the unintentional reinvention of
things already invented, now that there is so much. The latter is a real
difficulty in our century, when almost every mine of thought has been
worked to a normal depth by minds of normal power, and it needs all the
ruthless strength of original genius to go deeper, and hew and blast a
way through the bedrock of men's limitations to new veins of treasure
below.
It has been said of Titian by a great French critic that 'he absorbed
his predecessors and ruined his successors.' Michelangelo absorbed no
one and ruined no one; for no painter, sculptor or architect ever
attempted what he accomplished, either before him or after him. No sane
person ever tried to produce anything like the 'Last Judgment,' the
marble 'Moses,' or the dome of Saint Peter's. Michelangelo stood alone
as a creator, as he lived a lonely man throughout the eighty-nine years
of his life. He had envy but not competition to deal with. There is no
rivalry between his paintings in the Sixtine Chapel and those of the
many great artists who have left their work beside his on the same
walls.
The chapel is a beautiful place in itself, by its simple and noble
proportions, as well as by the wonderful architectural decorations of
the ceiling, conceived by Michelangelo as a series of frames for his
paintings. Beautiful beyond description, too, is the exquisite marble
screen. No one can say certainly who made it; it was perhaps designed by
the architect of the chapel himself, Baccio Pintelli. There are a few
such marvels of unknown hands in the world, and a sort of romance clings
to them, with an element of mystery that stirs the imagination, in a
dreamy way, far more than the gilded oak tree in the arms of Sixtus the
Fourth, by which the name of Rovere is symbolized. Sixtus commanded,
and the chapel was built. But who knows where Baccio Pintelli lies? Or
who shall find the grave where the hand that carved the lovely marble
screen is laid at rest?
[Illustration: SIXTINE CHAPEL]
It is often dark in the Sixtine Chapel. The tourist can rarely choose
his day, and not often his hour, and, in the weary traveller's
hard-driven appreciation, Michelangelo may lose his effect by the
accident of a thunder shower. Yet of all sights in Rome, the Sixtine
Chapel most needs sunshine. If in any way possible, go there at noon on
a bright winter's day, when the sun is streaming in through the high
windows at the left of the 'Last Judgment.' Everyone has heard of the
picture before seeing it, and almost everybody is surprised or
disappointed on seeing it for the first time. Then, too, the world's
ideas about the terrific subject of the painting have changed since
Michelangelo's day. Religious belief can no more be judged by the
standard of realism. It is wiser to look at the fresco as a work of art
alone, as the most surprising masterpiece of a master draughtsman, and
as a marvellous piece of composition.
In the lower part of the picture, there is a woman rising from her grave
in a shroud. It has been suggested that Michelangelo meant to represent
by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness.
The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven
above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the
dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of
a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it
was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of
ideas which made that age terrible and beautiful by turns, devout and
unbelieving, strong and weak, scholarly upon a foundation of barbarism,
and most realistic when most religious. You may see the reflected
confusion in the puzzled faces of most tourists who look at the 'Last
Judgment' for the first time. A young American girl smiles vaguely at
it; an Englishman glares, expressionless, at it through an eyeglass,
with a sort of cold inquiry--'Oh! is that all?' he might say; a German
begins at Paradise at the upper left-hand corner, and works his way
through the details to hell below, at the right. But all are inwardly
disturbed, or puzzled, or profoundly interested, and when they go away
this is the great picture which, of all they have seen, they remember
with the most clearness.
And as Michelangelo set his great mark upon the Sixtine, so Raphael took
the Stanze and the Loggie for himself--and some of the halls of the
picture-galleries too. Raphael represented the feminine element in
contrast with Michelangelo's rude masculinity. There hangs the great
'Transfiguration,' which, all but finished, was set up by the young
painter's body when he lay in state--a picture too large for the
sentiment it should express, while far too small for the subject it
presents--yet, in its way, a masterpiece of composition. For in a
measure Raphael succeeded in detaching the transfigured Christ from the
crowded foreground, and in creating two distinct centres of interest.
The frescoes in the Stanze represent subjects of less artistic
impossibility, and in painting them Raphael expended in beauty of design
the genius which, in the 'Transfiguration,' he squandered in attempting
to overcome insuperable difficulties. Watch the faces of your
fellow-tourists now, and you will see that the puzzled expression is
gone. They are less interested than they were before the 'Last
Judgment,' but they are infinitely better pleased.
Follow them on, to the library. They will enter with a look of
expectation, and presently you will see disappointment and weariness in
their eyes. Libraries are for the learned, and there are but a handful
of scholars in a million. Besides, the most interesting rooms, the
Borgia apartments, have been closed for many years and have only
recently been opened again after being wisely and well restored under
the direction of Leo the Thirteenth.
Two or three bad men are responsible for almost all the evil that has
been said and written against the characters of the Popes in the Middle
Age. John the Twelfth, of the race of Theodora Senatrix, Farnese of
Naples and Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard, who was Alexander the Sixth, are
the chief instances. There were, indeed, many popes who were not
perfect, who were more or less ambitious, avaricious, warlike, timid,
headstrong, weak, according to their several characters; but it can
hardly be said that any of them were, like those I have mentioned,
really bad men through and through, vicious, unscrupulous and daringly
criminal.
According to Guicciardini, Alexander the Sixth knew nothing of Cæsar
Borgia's intention of poisoning their rich friend, the Cardinal of
Corneto, with whom they were both to sup in a villa on August 17, 1503.
The Pope arrived at the place first, was thirsty, asked for drink, and
by a mistake was given wine from a flask prepared and sent by Cæsar for
the Cardinal. Cæsar himself came in next, and drank likewise. The Pope
died the next day, but Cæsar recovered, though badly poisoned, to find
himself a ruined man and ultimately a fugitive. The Cardinal did not
touch the wine. This event ended an epoch and a reign of terror, and it
pilloried the name of Borgia for ever. Alexander expired in the third
room of the Borgia apartments, in the raving of a terrible delirium,
during which the superstitious bystanders believed that he was
conversing with Satan, to whom he had sold his soul for the papacy, and
some were ready to swear that they actually saw seven devils in the room
when he was dying. The fact that these witnesses were able to count the
fiends speaks well for their coolness, and for the credibility of their
testimony.
It has been much the fashion of late years to cry down the Vatican
collection of statues, and to say that, with the exception of the
'Torso' it does not contain a single one of the few great masterpieces
known to exist, such as the 'Hermes of Olympia,' the 'Venus of Medici,'
the 'Borghese Gladiator,' the 'Dying Gaul.' We are told that the
'Apollo' of the Belvedere is a bad copy, and that the 'Laocoön' is no
better, in spite of the signatures of the three Greek artists, one on
each of the figures; that the 'Antinous' is a bad Hermes; and so on to
the end of the collection, it being an easy matter to demolish the more
insignificant statues after proving the worthlessness of the principal
ones. Much of this criticism comes to us from Germany. But a German can
criticise and yet admire, whereas an Anglo-Saxon usually despises what
he criticises at all. Isaac D'Israeli says somewhere that certain
opinions, like certain statues, require to be regarded from a proper
distance. Probably none of the statues in the Vatican is placed as the
sculptor would have placed it to be seen to advantage. Michelangelo
believed in the 'Laocoön,' and he was at least as good a judge as most
modern critics, and he roughed out the arm that was missing,--his sketch
lies on the floor in the corner,--and devoted much time to studying the
group. It is true that he is said to have preferred the torso of the
'Hercules,' but he did not withhold his admiration of the other good
things. Of the 'Apollo' it is argued that it is insufficiently modelled.
Possibly it stood in a very high place and did not need much modelling,
for the ancients never wasted work, nor bestowed it where it could not
be seen. However that may be, it is a far better statue, excepting the
bad restorations, than it is now generally admitted to be, though it is
not so good as people used to believe that it was. Apparently there are
two ways of looking at objects of art. The one way is to look for the
faults; the other way is to look for the beauties. It is plain that it
must be the discovery of the beauty which gives pleasure, while the
criticism of shortcomings can only flatter the individual's vanity.
There cannot be much doubt but that Alcibiades got more enjoyment out of
life than Diogenes.
The oldest decorated walls in the palace are those by Fra Angelico in
the Chapel of Nicholas. For some reason or other this chapel at one time
ceased to be used, the door was walled up and the very existence of the
place was forgotten. In the last century Bottari, having read about it
in Vasari, set to work to find it, and at last got into it through the
window which looks upon the roof of the Sixtine Chapel. The story, which
is undoubtedly true, gives an idea of the vastness of the palace, and
certainly suggests the probability of more forgotten treasures of art
shut up in forgotten rooms.
One other such at least there is. High up in the Borgia Tower, above the
Stanze of Raphael, is a suite of rooms once inhabited by Cardinal
Bibbiena, of the Chigi family, and used since then by more than one
Assistant Secretary of State. There is a small chapel there, with a
window looking upon an inner court. This was once the luxurious
cardinal's bath-room, and was beautifully painted by Raphael in fresco,
with mythological subjects. In 1835, according to Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, Passavant saw it as it had originally been, with frescoes
still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its
place in a niche painted with river gods. In one of the Vatican's
periodical fits of prudery the frescoes were completely hidden with a
wooden wainscot, the bath-tub was taken away and the room was turned
into a chapel. It is believed, however, that the paintings still exist
behind their present covering.
The walk through the Museum is certainly one of the most wonderful in
the world. There are more masterpieces, perhaps, in Florence; possibly
objects of greater value may be accumulated in the British Museum; but
nowhere in the world are statues and antiquities so well arranged as in
the Vatican, and perhaps the orderly beauty of arrangement has as much
to do as anything else with the charm which pervades the whole. One is
brought into direct communication with Rome at its best, brilliant with
the last reflections of Hellenic light; and again one is brought into
contact with Rome at its worst, and beyond its worst, in its decay and
destruction. Amid the ruin, too, there is the visible sign of a new
growth in the beginnings of Christianity, from which a new power, a new
history, a new literature and a new art were to spring up and blossom,
and in the rude sculpture of the Shepherd, the Lamb and the Fishes lies
the origin of Michelangelo's 'Moses' and 'Pietà.' There, too, one may
read, as in a book, the whole history of death in Rome, graven in the
long lines of ancient inscriptions, the tale of death when there was no
hope, and its story when hope had begun in the belief in the
resurrection of the dead. There the sadness of the sorrowing Roman
contrasts with the gentle hopefulness of the bereaved Christian, and the
sentiment and sentimentality of mankind during the greatest of the
world's developments are told in the very words which men and women
dictated to the stone-cutter. To those who can read the inscriptions the
impression of direct communication with antiquity is very strong. For
those who cannot there is still a special charm in the long succession
of corridors, in the occasional glimpses of the gardens, in the
magnificence of the decorations, as well as in the statues and fragments
which line the endless straight walls. One returns at last to the outer
chambers, one lingers here and there, to look again at something one has
liked, and in the end one goes out remembering the place rather than the
objects it contains, and desiring to return again for the sake of the
whole sensation one has had rather than for any defined purpose.
At the last, opposite the iron turnstile by which visitors are counted,
there is the closed gate of the garden. It is very hard to get admission
to it now, for the Pope himself is often there when the weather is fine.
In the Italian manner of gardening, the grounds are well laid out, and
produce the effect of being much larger than they really are. They are
not, perhaps, very remarkable, and Leo the Thirteenth must sometimes
long for the hills of Carpineto and the freer air of the mountains, as
he drives round and round in the narrow limits of his small domain, or
walks a little under the shade of the ilex trees, conversing with his
gardener or his architect. Yet those who love Italy love its
old-fashioned gardens, the shady walks, the deep box-hedges, the stiff
little summer-houses, the fragments of old statues at the corners, and
even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine
water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the
unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical
jesting of the last century.
When all is seen, the tourist gets into his cab and drives down the
empty paved way by the wall of the library, along the basilica, and out
once more to the great square before the church. Or, if he be too strong
to be tired, he will get out at the steps and go in for a few minutes to
breathe the quiet air before going home, to get the impression of unity,
after the impressions of variety which he has received in the Vatican,
and to take away with him something of the peace which fills the
cathedral of Christendom.
[Illustration]
SAINT PETER'S
We have an involuntary reverence for all witnesses of history, be they
animate or inanimate, men, animals, or stones. The desire to leave a
work behind is in every man and man-child, from the strong leader who
plants his fame in a nation's marrow, and teaches unborn generations to
call him glorious, to the boy who carves his initials upon his desk at
school. Few women have it. Perhaps the wish to be remembered is what
fills that one ounce or so of matter by which modern statisticians
assert that the average man's brain is heavier than the average woman's.
The wish in ourselves makes us respect the satisfaction of it which the
few obtain. Probably few men have not secretly longed to see their names
set up for ages, like the 'Paulus V. Borghesius' over the middle of the
portico of Saint Peter's, high above the entrance to the most vast
monument of human hands in existence. Modesty commands the respect of a
few, but it is open success that appeals to almost all mankind. Pasquin
laughed:--
'Angulus est Petri, Pauli frons tota. Quid inde?
Non Petri, Paulo stat fabricata domus.'
Which means:--
'The corner is Peter's, but the whole front Paul's.
Not being Peter's, the house is built for Paul.'
The thing itself, the central cathedral of Christendom, is so enormous
that many who gaze on it for the first time do not even notice that
hugely lettered papal name. The building is so far beyond any familiar
proportions that at first sight all details are lost upon its broad
front. The mind and judgment are dazed and staggered. The earth should
not be able to bear such weight upon its crust without cracking and
bending like an overloaded table. On each side the colonnades run
curving out like giant arms, always open to receive the nations that go
up there to worship. The dome broods over all, like a giant's head
motionless in meditation. The vastness of the structure takes hold of a
man as he issues from the street by which he has come from Sant' Angelo.
In the open space, in the square and in the ellipse between the
colonnades and on the steps, two hundred thousand men could be drawn up
in rank and file, horse and foot and guns. Excepting it be on some
special occasion, there are rarely more than two or three hundred
persons in sight. The paved emptiness makes one draw a breath of
surprise, and human eyes seem too small to take in all the flatness
below, all the breadth before, and all the height above. Taken together,
the picture is too big for convenient sight. The impression itself moves
unwieldily in the cramped brain. A building almost five hundred feet
high produces a monstrous effect upon the mind. Set down in words, a
description of it conveys no clear conception; seen for the first time,
the impression produced by it cannot be put into language. It is
something like a shock to the intelligence, perhaps, and not altogether
a pleasant one. Carried beyond the limits of a mere mistake,
exaggeration becomes caricature; but when it is magnified beyond
humanity's common measures, it may acquire an element approaching to
terror. The awe-striking giants of mythology were but magnified men. The
first sight of Saint Peter's affects one as though, in the everyday
streets, walking among one's fellows, one should meet with a man forty
feet high.
Involuntarily we conceive that Saint Peter's has always stood where it
stands, and it becomes at once, in our imaginations, the witness of much
which it really never saw. Its calm seems meant to outlast history; one
thinks that, while the Republic built Rome, and Augustus adorned it, and
Nero burned it on the other side of the Tiber, the cathedral of the
world was here, looking on across the yellow water, conscious of its own
eternity, and solemnly indifferent to the ventures and adventures of
mankind.
It is hard to reduce the great building in imagination to the little
basilica built by Constantine the sentimentalist, on the site of Nero's
circus; built by some other man perhaps, for no one knows surely; but a
little church, at best, compared with many of those which Saint Peter's
dwarfs to insignificance now. To remind men of him the effigy of that
same Constantine sits on a marble charger there, on the left, beneath
the portico, behind the great iron gate, with head thrown back, and
lifted hand, and marble eyes gazing ever on the Cross. Some say that he
really embraced Christianity only when dying. The names of the churches
founded by him in Constantinople are all sentimentally ambiguous, from
Sophia, 'wisdom,' to Anastasia, 'resurrection,' or revival, and hence
'spring.' It is strange that the places of worship built by him in Rome,
if they were really his work, should bear such exceedingly definite
designations and direct dedications as Saint Peter's, Saint John's,
Saint Paul's and the Church of the Holy Cross. At all events, whether he
believed much or little, Christianity owes him much, and romance is
indebted to him for almost as much more. But for Constantine there might
have been no Charlemagne, no Holy Roman Empire.
In old times criminals of low degree used to be executed on the
Esquiline, and were buried there, unburned, unless their bodies were
left to wither upon the cross in wind and sun, as generally happened.
The place was the hideous feeding ground of wild dogs and carrion birds,
and witches went there by night to perform their horrid rites. It was
there that Canidia and her companion buried a living boy up to the neck
that they might make philters of his vitals. Everyone must remember the
end of Horace's imprecation:--
"... insepulta membra different lupi,
Et Esquilinæ alites."
Then came Mæcenas and redeemed all that land; turned it into a garden,
and beautified it; uprooted the mouldering crosses, whereon still hung
the bones of dead slaves, and set out trees in their stead; piled thirty
feet of clean earth upon the shallow graves of executed murderers and of
generations of thieves, and planted shrubbery and flowers, and made
walks and paths and shady places.
Therefore it happened that the southern spur of the Janiculum became
after that time a place of execution and cruel death. The city had never
grown much on that side of the Tiber,--that is to say, on the right
bank,--and the southern end of the long hill was a wilderness of sand
and brushwood.
[Illustration: MAMERTINE PRISON]
In the deep Mamertine prison, behind the Tabulary of the Forum, it was
customary to put to death only political misdoers, and their bodies were
then thrown down the Gemonian steps. 'Vixerunt,' said Cicero, grimly,
when Catiline's fellow conspirators lay there dead; and perhaps the
sword that was to fall upon his own neck was even then forged. The
prison is still intact. The blood of Vercingetorix and of Sejanus is on
the rocky floor. Men say that Saint Peter was imprisoned here. But
because he was not of high degree Nero's executioners led him out across
the Forum and over the Sublician bridge, up to the heights of Janiculum.
He was then very old and weak, so that he could not carry his cross, as
condemned men were made to do. When they had climbed more than half-way
up the height, seeing that he could not walk much farther, they
crucified him. He said that he was not worthy to suffer as the Lord had
suffered, and begged them to plant his cross with the head downward in
the deep yellow sand. The executioners did so. The Christians who had
followed were not many, and they stood apart weeping.
When he was dead, after much torment, and the sentinel soldier had gone
away, they took the holy body, and carried it along the hillside, and
buried it at night close against the long wall of Nero's circus, on the
north side, near the place where they buried the martyrs killed daily by
Nero's wild beasts and in other cruel ways. They marked the spot, and
went there often to pray. Lately certain learned men have said that he
was crucified in the circus itself, but the evidence is slight compared
with the undoubted weight of a very ancient tradition, and turns upon
the translation of a single word.
Within two years Nero fell and perished miserably, scarcely able to take
his own life to escape being beaten to death in the Forum. In a little
more than a year there were four emperors in Rome; Galba, Otho and
Vitellius followed one another quickly; then came Vespasian, and then
Titus, with his wars in Palestine, and then Domitian. At last, nearly
thirty years after the apostle had died on the Janiculum, there was a
bishop called Anacletus, who had been ordained priest by Saint Peter
himself. The times being quieter then, this Anacletus built a little
oratory, a very small chapel, in which three or four persons could kneel
and pray over the grave. And that was the beginning of Saint Peter's
Church. But Anacletus died a martyr too, and the bishops after him all
perished in the same way up to Eutichianus, whose name means something
like 'the fortunate one' in barbarous Greek-Latin, and who was indeed
fortunate, for he died a natural death. But in the mean time certain
Greeks had tried to steal the holy body, so that the Roman Christians
carried it away for nineteen months to the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian,
after which they brought it back again and laid it in its place. And
again after that, when the new circus was built by Elagabalus, they took
it once more to the same catacombs, where it remained in safety for a
long time.
Now came Constantine, in love with religion and inclined to think
Christianity best, and made a famous edict in Milan, and it is said that
he laid the deep foundations of the old Church of Saint Peter's, which
afterward stood more than eleven hundred years. He built it over the
little oratory of Anacletus, whose chapel stood where the saint's body
had lain, under the nearest left-hand pillar of the canopy that covers
the high altar, as you go up from the door. Constantine's church was
founded, on the south side, within the lines of Nero's circus, outside
of it on the north side, and parallel with its length. Most churches are
built with the apse to the east, but Constantine's, like the present
basilica, looked west, because from time immemorial the bishop of Rome,
when consecrating, stood on the farther side of the altar from the
people, facing them over it. And the church was consecrated by Pope
Sylvester the First, in the year 326.
Constantine built his church as a memorial and not as a tomb, because at
that time Saint Peter's body lay in the catacombs, where it had been
taken in the year 219, under Elagabalus. But at last, in the days of
Honorius, disestablisher of heathen worship, the body was brought back
for the last time, with great concourse and ceremony, and laid where it
or its dust still lies, in a brazen sarcophagus.
Then came Alaric and the Vandals and the Goths. But they respected the
church and the Saint's body, though they respected Rome very little. And
Odoacer extinguished the flickering light of the Western Empire, and
Dietrich of Bern, as the Goths called Theodoric of Verona, founded the
Gothic kingdom, and left his name in the Nibelungenlied and elsewhere.
At last arose Charles, who was called the 'Great' first on account of
his size, and afterwards on account of his conquests, which exceeded
those of Julius Cæsar in extent; and this Charlemagne came to Rome, and
marched up into the Church of Constantine, and bowed his enormous height
for Leo the Third to set upon it the crown of the new empire, which was
ever afterwards called the Holy Roman Empire, until Napoleon wiped out
its name in Vienna, having girt on Charlemagne's sword, and founded an
empire of his own, which lasted a dozen years instead of a thousand.
So the ages slipped along till the church was in bad repair and in
danger of falling, when Nicholas the Fifth was Pope, in 1450. He called
Alberti and Rossellini, who made the first plan; but it was the great
Julius the Second who laid the first stone of the present basilica,
according to Bramante's plan, under the northeast pillar of the dome,
where the statue of Saint Veronica now stands. The plan was changed many
times, and it was not until 1626, on the thirteen hundredth anniversary
of Saint Sylvester's consecration, that Urban the Eighth consecrated
what we now call the Church of Saint Peter.
We who have known Saint Peter's since the old days cannot go in under
the portico without recalling vividly the splendid pageants we have seen
pass in and out by the same gate. Even before reaching it we glance up
from the vast square to the high balcony, remembering how from there
Pius the Ninth used to chant out the Pontifical benediction to the city
and the world, while in the silence below one could hear the breathing
of a hundred thousand human beings.
[Illustration: PANORAMA
From the Orti Farnesiani]
That is all in ghostland now, and will soon be beyond the reach of
memory. In the coachhouses behind the Vatican, the old state coaches are
mouldering; and the Pope, in his great sedia gestatoria, the bearers,
the fan-men, the princes, the cardinals, the guards and the people will
not in our time be again seen together under the Roman sky.
Old-fashioned persons sigh for the pageantry of those days when they go
up the steps into the church.
The heavy leathern curtain falls by its own weight, and the air is
suddenly changed. A hushed, half-rhythmic sound, as of a world breathing
in its sleep, makes the silence alive. The light is not dim or
ineffectual, but very soft and high, and it is as rich as floating gold
dust in the far distance, and in the apse, an eighth of a mile from the
door. There is a blue and hazy atmospheric distance, as painters call
it, up in the lantern of the cupola, a twelfth of a mile above the
pavement.
It is all very big. The longest ship that crosses the ocean could lie in
the nave between the door and the apse, and her masts from deck to truck
would scarcely top the canopy of the high altar, which looks so small
under the super-possible vastness of the immense dome. We unconsciously
measure dwellings made with hands by our bodily stature. But there is a
limit to that. No man standing for the first time upon the pavement of
Saint Peter's can make even a wide guess at the size of what he sees
unless he knows the dimensions of some one object.
Close to Filarete's central bronze door a round disk of porphyry is
sunk in the pavement. That is the spot where the emperors of the Holy
Roman Empire were crowned in the old church; Charlemagne, Frederick
Barbarossa and many others received the crown, the Chrism and the
blessing here, before Constantine's ancient basilica was torn down lest
it should fall of itself. For he did not build as Titus built--if,
indeed, the old church was built by him at all.
A man may well cast detail of history to the winds and let his mind
stand free to the tremendous traditions of the place, since so much of
them is truth beyond all question. Standing where Charles the Great was
crowned eleven hundred years ago, he stands not a hundred yards from the
grave where the Chief Apostle was first buried. There he has lain now
for fifteen hundred years, since the 'religion of the fathers' was
'disestablished,' as we should say, by Honorius, and since the Popes
became Pontifices Maximi of the new faith. This was the place of Nero's
circus long before the Colosseum was dreamed of, and the foundations of
Christendom's cathedral are laid in earth wet with blood of many
thousand martyrs. During two hundred and fifty years every bishop of
Rome died a martyr, to the number of thirty consecutive Popes. It is
really and truly holy ground, and it is meet that the air, once rent by
the death cries of Christ's innocent folk, should be enclosed in the
world's most sacred place, and be ever musical with holy song, and
sweet with incense. It needs fifty thousand persons to fill the nave
and transepts in Saint Peter's. It is known that at least that number
have been present in the church several times within modern memory; but
it is thought that the building would hold eighty thousand--as many as
could be seated on the tiers in the Colosseum. Such a concourse was
there at the opening of the Oecumenical Council in December, 1869, and
at the jubilees celebrated by Leo the Thirteenth; and on all those
occasions there was plenty of room in the aisles, besides the broad
spaces which were required for the functions themselves.
To feel one's smallness and realize it, one need only go and stand
beside the marble cherubs that support the holy-water basins against the
first pillar. They look small, if not graceful; but they are of heroic
size, and the bowls are as big as baths. Everything in the place is
vast; all the statues are colossal, all the pictures enormous; the
smallest detail of the ornamentation would dwarf any other building in
the world, and anywhere else even the chapels would be churches. The eye
strains at everything, and at first the mind is shocked out of its power
of comparison.
But the strangest, most extravagant, most incomprehensible, most
disturbing sight of all is to be seen from the upper gallery in the
cupola looking down to the church below. Hanging in mid-air, with
nothing under one's feet, one sees the church projected in perspective
within a huge circle. It is as though one saw it upside down and inside
out. Few men could bear to stand there without that bit of iron railing
between them and the hideous fall; and the inevitable slight dizziness
which the strongest head feels may make one doubt for a moment whether
what is really the floor below may not be in reality a ceiling above,
and whether one's sense of gravitation be not inverted in an
extraordinary dream. At that distance human beings look no bigger than
flies, and the canopy of the high altar might be an ordinary table.
And thence, climbing up between the double domes, one may emerge from
the almost terrible perspective to the open air, and suddenly see all
Rome at one's feet, and all the Roman mountains stretched out to south
and east, in perfect grace of restful outline, shoulder to shoulder,
like shadowy women lying side by side and holding hands.
And the broken symmetry of the streets and squares ranges below, cut by
the winding ribbon of the yellow Tiber; to the right the low Aventine,
with the dark cypresses of the Protestant cemetery beyond, and the
Palatine, crested with trees and ruins; the Pincian on the left, with
its high gardens, and the mass of foliage of the Villa Medici behind it;
the lofty tower of the Capitol in the midst of the city; and the sun
clasping all to its heart of gold, the new and the old alike, past and
present, youth, age and decay,--generous as only the sun can be in this
sordid and miserly world, where bread is but another name for blood, and
a rood of growing corn means a pound of human flesh. The sun is the only
good thing in nature that always gives itself to man for nothing but the
mere trouble of sitting in the sunshine; and Rome without sunshine is a
very grim and gloomy town today.
It is worth the effort of climbing so high. Four hundred feet in the
air, you look down on what ruled half the world by force for ages, and
on what rules the other half today by faith--the greatest centre of
conquest and of discord and of religion which the world has ever seen. A
thousand volumes have been written about it by a thousand wise men. A
word will tell what it has been--the heart of the world. Hither was
drawn the world's blood by all the roads that lead to Rome, and hence it
was forced out again along the mighty arteries of the Cæsars'
marches--to redden the world with the Roman name. Blood, blood and more
blood,--that was the history of old Rome,--the blood of brothers, the
blood of foes, the blood of martyrs without end. It flowed and ebbed in
varying tide at the will of the just and the unjust, but there was
always more to shed, and there were always more hands to shed it. And so
it may be again hereafter; for the name of Rome has a heart-stirring
ring, and there has always been as much blood spilled for the names of
things as for the things themselves.
It is wonderful to stand there and realize what every foot means,
beneath that narrow standing room on the gallery outside the lantern,
counting from the top downward as one counts the years of certain trees
by the branches. For every division there is a pope and an architect:
Sixtus the Fifth and Giacomo della Porta, Paul the Third and
Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi and Leo the Tenth, Julius the Second
and Bramante, Nicholas the Fifth and Alberti. Then the old church of
Constantine, and then the little oratory built over Saint Peter's grave
by Saint Anacletus, the third or, according to some, the fourth bishop
of Rome; then, even before that, Nero's circus, which was either
altogether destroyed or had gone to ruins before Anacletus built his
chapel.
And far below all are buried the great of the earth, deep down in the
crypt. There lies the chief Apostle, and there lie many martyred bishops
side by side; men who came from far lands to die the holy death in
Rome,--from Athens, from Bethlehem, from Syria, from Africa. There lie
the last of the Stuarts, with their pitiful kingly names, James the
Third, Charles the Third, and Henry the Ninth; the Emperor Otho the
Second has lain there a thousand years; Pope Boniface the Eighth of the
Caetani, whom Sciarra Colonna took prisoner at Anagni, is there, and
Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander the Sixth, lay there awhile, and Agnes
Colonna, and Queen Christina of Sweden, and the Great Countess, and
many more besides, both good and bad--even to Catharine Cornaro, Queen
of Cyprus, of romantic memory. In the high clear air above, it chills
one to think of the death silence down there in the crypt; but when you
enter the church again after the long descent, and feel once more the
quick change of atmosphere by which a blind man could tell that he was
in Saint Peter's, you feel also the spell of the place and its ancient
enchantment; you do not regret the high view you left above, and the
dead under your feet seem all at once near and friendly.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF SAINT PETER'S]
It is not an exaggeration or the misuse of a word to call it magic.
Magic is supposed to be a means of communication with beings of another
world. It is scarcely a metaphor to say that Saint Peter's is that. It
is the mere truth and no more, and you can feel that it is if you will
stand, with half-closed eyes, against one of the great pillars, just
within hearing of the voices that sing solemn music in the chapel of the
choir, and make yourself a day-dream of the people that go up the nave
by seeing them a little indistinctly. If you will but remember how much
humanity is like humanity in all ages, you can see the old life again as
it was a hundred years--two, three, five, ten hundred years before that.
If you are fortunate, just then, a score of German seminary students may
pass you, in their scarlet cloth gowns, marching two and two in order,
till they wheel by the right and go down upon their knees with military
precision before the gate of the Chapel of the Sacrament. Or if it be
the day and hour, a procession crosses the church, with lights and song
and rich vestments, and a canopy over the Sacred Host, which the
Cardinal Archpriest himself is carrying reverently before him with
upraised hands hidden under the cope, while the censers swing high to
right and left. Or the singers from the choir go by, in violet silk and
lace, hurrying along the inner south aisle to the door of the sacristy,
where heavy yellow cherubs support marble draperies under the monument
of Pius the Eighth. If you stand by your pillar a little while,
something will surely happen to help your dream, and sweep you back a
century or two.
And if not, and if you have a little imagination of your own which can
stir itself without help from outside, you can call up the figures of
those that lie dead below, and of those who in ages gone have walked the
dim aisles of the ancient church. Up the long nave comes Pelagius,
Justinian's pope, with Narses by his side, to swear by holy cross and
sacred gospel that he has not slain Vigilius, Pope before him: and this
Narses, smooth-faced, passionless, thoughtful, is the conqueror of the
Goths, and having conquered them, he would not suffer that a hair of the
remnant of them should be hurt, because he had given his word.
High-handed Henry the Fifth, claiming power over the Church, being
refused full coronation by Pope Paschal till he yields, seizes Pope and
College of Cardinals then and there, and imprisons them till he has
starved them to submission, and half requites the Church for Gregory's
humiliation of the father whom he himself thrust from the throne--of
that Henry whom the strong Hildebrand made to do penance barefoot on the
snow in the courtyard of Matilda's Castle at Canossa. And Matilda
herself, the Great Countess, the once all beautiful, betrayed in love,
the half sainted, the all romantic, rises before you from her tomb
below, in straight, rich robes and flowing golden hair, and once more
makes gift of all her vast possessions to the Church of Rome. Nicholas
Rienzi strides by, strange compound of heroism, vanity and high poetry,
calling himself in one breath the people's tribune, and Augustus, and an
emperor's son. There is a rush of armed men shouting furiously in
Spanish, 'Carne! Sangre! Bourbon!' There is a clanging of steel, a
breaking down of gates, and the Constable of Bourbon's horde pours in,
irresistible, ravaging all, while he himself lies stark and stiff
outside, pierced by Bernardino Passeri's short bolt, and Clement
trembles in Sant' Angelo. Christina of Sweden, Monaldeschi's murder red
upon her soul, comes next, fawning for forgiveness, to die in due time
over there in the Corsini palace by the Tiber.
A man may call up half the world's history in half an hour in such a
place, toward evening, when the golden light streams through the Holy
Dove in the apse. And, in imagination, to those who have seen the great
pageants within our memory, the individual figures grow smaller as the
magnificence of the display increases out of all proportion, until the
church fills again with the vast throngs that witnessed the jubilees of
Leo the Thirteenth in recent years, and fifty thousand voices send up a
rending cheer while the most splendid procession of these late days goes
by.
It was in the Chapel of the Sacrament that the body of the good Pope
Pius the Ninth was laid in state for several days. That was a strange
and solemn sight, too. The gates of the church were all shut but one,
and that was only a little opened, so that the people passed in one by
one from the great wedge-shaped crowd outside--a crowd that began at the
foot of the broad steps in the Piazza, and struggled upward all the
afternoon, closer and closer toward the single entrance. For in the
morning only the Roman nobles and the prelates and high ecclesiastics
were admitted, by another way. Within the church the thin stream of men
and women passed quickly between a double file of Italian soldiers. That
was the first and last time since 1870 that Italian troops were under
arms within the consecrated precincts. It was still winter, and the
afternoon light was dim, and it seemed a long way to the chapel. The
good man lay low, with his slippered feet between the bars of the closed
gate. The people paused as they passed, and most of them kissed the
embroidered cross, and looked at the still features, before they went
on. It was dim, but the six tall waxen torches threw a warm light on the
quiet face, and the white robes reflected it around. There were three
torches on each side, too, and there were three Noble Guards in full
dress, motionless, with drawn swords, as though on parade. But no one
looked at them. Only the marble face, with its kind, far-away smile,
fixed itself in each man's eyes, and its memory remained with each when
he had gone away. It was very solemn and simple, and there were no other
lights in the church save the little lamps about the Confession and
before the altars. The long, thin stream of people went on swiftly and
out by the sacristy all the short afternoon till it was night, and the
rest of the unsatisfied crowd was left outside as the single gate was
closed.
Few saw the scene which followed, when the good Pope's body had lain
four days in state, and was then placed in its coffin at night, to be
hoisted high and swung noiselessly into the temporary tomb above the
small door on the east side--that is, to the left--of the Chapel of the
Choir. It was for a long time the custom that each pope should lie there
until his successor died, when his body was removed to the monument
prepared for it in the mean time, and the Pope just dead was laid in the
same place.
The church was almost dark, and only in the Chapel of the Choir and in
that of the Holy Sacrament, which are opposite each other, a number of
big wax candles shed a yellow light. In the niche over the door a mason
was still at work, with a tallow dip, clearly visible below. The triple
coffin stood before the altar in the Chapel of the Choir. Opposite,
where the body still lay, the Noble Guards and the Swiss Guards, in
their breastplates, kept watch with drawn swords and halberds.
The Noble Guards carried the bier on their shoulders in solemn
procession, with chanting choir, robed bishop, and tramping soldiers,
round by the Confession and across the church, and lifted the body into
the coffin. The Pope had been very much beloved by all who were near
him, and more than one grey-haired prelate shed tears of genuine grief
that night.
In the coffin, in accordance with an ancient custom, a bag was placed
containing ninety-three medals, one of gold, one of silver and one of
bronze, for each of the thirty-one years which Pope Pius had reigned;
and a history of the pontificate, written on parchment, was also
deposited at the feet of the body.
When the leaden coffin was soldered, six seals were placed upon it, five
by cardinals, and one by the archivist. During the ceremony the
Protonotary Apostolic, the Chancellor of the Apostolic Chamber and the
Notary of the Chapter of Saint Peter's were busy, pen in hand, writing
down the detailed protocol of the proceedings.
The last absolution was pronounced, and the coffin in its outer case of
elm was slowly moved out and raised in slings, and gently swung into the
niche. The masons bricked up the opening in the presence of cardinals
and guards, and long before midnight the marble slab, carved to
represent the side of a sarcophagus, was in its place, with its simple
inscription, 'Pius IX, P.M.'
From time immemorial the well containing the marble staircase which
leads down to the tomb of Saint Peter has been called the 'Confession.'
The word, I believe, is properly applied to the altar-rail, from the
ancient practice of repeating there the general confession immediately
before receiving the Communion, a custom now slightly modified. But I
may be wrong in giving this derivation. At all events, a marble
balustrade follows the horseshoe shape of the well, and upon it are
placed ninety-five gilded lamps, which burn perpetually. There is said
to be no special significance in the number, and they produce very
little effect by daylight.
But on the eve of Saint Peter's Day, and perhaps at some other seasons,
the Pope has been known to come down to the church by the secret
staircase leading into the Chapel of the Sacrament, to pray at the
Apostle's tomb. On such occasions a few great candlesticks with wax
torches were placed on the floor of the church, two and two, between the
Chapel and the Confession. The Pope, attended only by a few chamberlains
and Noble Guards, and dressed in his customary white cassock, passed
swiftly along in the dim light, and descended the steps to the gilded
gate beneath the high altar. A marble pope kneels there too, Pius the
Sixth, of the Braschi family, his stone draperies less white than Pope
Leo's cassock, his marble face scarcely whiter than the living Pontiff's
alabaster features.
Those are sights which few have been privileged to see. There is a sort
of centralization of mystery, if one may couple such words, in the
private pilgrimage of the head of the Church to the tomb of the chief
Apostle by night, on the eve of the day which tradition has kept from
the earliest times as the anniversary of Saint Peter's martyrdom. The
whole Catholic world, if it might, would follow Leo the Thirteenth down
those marble steps, and two hundred million voices would repeat the
prayer he says alone.
Many and solemn scenes have been acted out by night in the vast gloom of
the enormous church, and if events do not actually leave an essence of
themselves in places, as some have believed, yet the knowledge that they
have happened where we stand and recall them has a mysterious power to
thrill the heart.
Opposite the Chapel of the Sacrament is the Chapel of the Choir. Saint
Peter's is a cathedral, and is managed by a chapter of Canons, each of
whom has his seat in the choir, and his vote in the disposal of the
cathedral's income, which is considerable. The chapter maintains the
Choir of Saint Peter's, a body of musicians quite independent of the
so-called 'Pope's Choir,' which is properly termed the 'Choir of the
Sixtine Chapel,' and which is paid by the Pope. There are some radical
differences between the two. By a very ancient and inviolable
regulation, the so-called 'musico,' or artificial soprano, is never
allowed to sing in the Chapel of the Choir, where the soprano singers
are without exception men who sing in falsetto, though they speak in a
deep voice. On great occasions the Choir of the Sixtine joins in the
music in the body of the church, but never in the Chapel, and always
behind a lattice.
Secondly, no musical instruments are ever used in the Sixtine. In the
Chapel of the Choir, on the contrary, there are two large organs. The
one on the west side is employed on all ordinary occasions; it is over
two hundred years old, and is tuned about two tones below the modern
pitch. It is so worn out that an organ-builder is in attendance during
every service, to make repairs at a moment's notice. The bellows leak,
the stops stick, some notes have a chronic tendency to cipher, and the
pedal trackers unhook themselves unexpectedly. But the Canons would
certainly not think of building a new organ.
Should they ever do so, and tune the instrument to the modern pitch, the
consternation of the singers would be great; for the music is all
written for the existing organ, and could not be performed two notes
higher, not to mention the confusion that would arise where all the
music is sung at sight by singers accustomed to an unusual pitch. This
is a fact not generally known, but worthy of notice. The music sung in
Saint Peter's, and, indeed, in most Roman churches, is never rehearsed
nor practised. The music itself is entirely in manuscript, and is the
property of the choir master, or, as is the case in Saint Peter's, of
the Chapter, and there is no copyright in it beyond this fact of actual
possession, protected by the simple plan of never allowing any musician
to have his part in his hands except while he is actually performing it.
In the course of a year the same piece may be sung several times, and
the old choristers may become acquainted with a good deal of music in
this way, but never otherwise. Mozart is reported to have learned
Allegri's Miserere by ear, and to have written it down from memory. The
other famous Misereres, which are now published, were pirated in a
similar way. The choir master of that day was very unpopular. Some of
the leading singers who had sung the Misereres during many years in
succession, and had thus learned their several parts, met and put
together what they knew into a whole, which was at once published, to
the no small annoyance and discomfiture of their enemy. But much good
music is quite beyond the reach of the public--Palestrina's best
motetts, airs by Alessandro Stradella, the famous hymn of Raimondi, in
short a great musical library, an 'archivio' as the Romans call such a
collection, all of which is practically lost to the world.
It is wonderful that under such circumstances the choir of Saint Peter's
should obtain even such creditable results. At a moment's notice an
organist and about a hundred singers are called upon to execute a florid
piece of music which many have never seen nor heard; the accompaniment
is played at sight from a mere figured bass, on a tumble-down instrument
two hundred years old, and the singers, both the soloists and the
chorus, sing from thumbed bits of manuscript parts written in
old-fashioned characters on paper often green with age. No one has ever
denied the extraordinary musical facility of Italians, but if the
outside world knew how Italian church music is performed it would be
very much astonished.
It is no wonder that such music is sometimes bad. But sometimes it is
very good; for there are splendid voices among the singers, and the
Maestro Renzi, the chief organist, is a man of real talent as well as of
amazing facility. His modernizing influence is counter-balanced by that
of the old choir master, Maestro Meluzzi, a first-rate musician, who
would not for his life change a hair of the old-fashioned traditions.
Yet there are moments, on certain days, when the effect of the great old
organ, with the rich voices blending in some good harmony, is very
solemn and stirring. The outward persuasive force of religion lies
largely in its music, and the religions that have no songs make few
proselytes.
Nothing, perhaps, is more striking, as one becomes better acquainted
with Saint Peter's, than the constant variety of detail. The vast
building produces at first sight an impression of harmony, and there
appears to be a remarkable uniformity of style in all the objects one
sees. There are no oil-paintings to speak of in the church, and but few
frescoes. The great altar-pieces are almost exclusively fine mosaic
copies of famous pictures which are preserved elsewhere. Of these
reproductions the best is generally considered to be that of Guercino's
'Saint Petronilla,' at the end of the right aisle of the tribune.
Debrosses praises these mosaic altar-pieces extravagantly, and even
expresses the opinion that they are probably superior in point of colour
to the originals from which they are copied. In execution they are
certainly wonderful, and many a stranger looks at them and passes on,
believing them to be oil-paintings. They possess the quality of being
imperishable and beyond all influence of climate or dampness, and they
are masterpieces of mechanical workmanship. But many will think them
hard and unsympathetic in outline, and decidedly crude in colour. Much
wit has been manufactured by the critics at the expense of Guido Reni's
'Michael,' for instance, and as many sharp things could be said about a
good many other works of the same kind in the church. Yet, on the whole,
they do not destroy the general harmony. Big as they are, when they are
seen from a little distance they sink into mere insignificant patches of
colour, all but lost in the deep richness of the whole.
As for the statues and monuments, between the 'Pietà' of Michelangelo
and Bracci's horrible tomb of Benedict the Fourteenth, there is the step
which, according to Tom Paine, separates the sublime from the
ridiculous. That very witty saying has in it only just the small
ingredient of truth without which wit remains mere humour. Between the
ridiculous and the sublime there may sometimes be, indeed, but one step
in the execution; but there is always the enormous moral distance which
separates real feeling from affectation--the gulf which divides, for
instance, Bracci's group from Michelangelo's.
[Illustration: PIETÀ OF MICHELANGELO]
The 'Pietà' is one of the great sculptor's early works. It is badly
placed. It is dwarfed by the heavy architecture above and around it. It
is insulted by a pair of hideous bronze cherubs. There is a manifest
improbability in the relative size of the figure of Christ and that of
the Blessed Virgin. Yet in spite of all, it is one of the most beautiful
and touching groups in the whole world, and by many degrees the best
work of art in the great church. Michelangelo was a man of the strongest
dramatic instinct even in early youth, and when he laid his hand to the
marble and cut his 'Pietà' he was in deep sympathy with the supreme
drama of man's history. He found in the stone, once and for all time,
the grief of the human mother for her son, not comforted by
foreknowledge of resurrection, nor lightened by prescience of near
glory. He discovered in the marble, by one effort, the divinity of
death's rest after torture, and taught the eye to see that the
dissolution of this dying body is the birth of the soul that cannot die.
In the dead Christ there are two men manifest to sight. 'The first man
is of earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.'
In the small chapel stands a strangely wrought column, enclosed in an
iron cage. The Romans now call it the Colonna Santa, the holy pillar,
and it is said to be the one against which Christ leaned when teaching
in the temple at Jerusalem. A great modern authority believes it to be
of Roman workmanship, and of the third century; but those who have lived
in the East will see much that is oriental in the fantastic ornamented
carving. It matters little. In actual fact, whatever be its origin, this
is the column known in the Middle Age as the 'Colonna degli Spiritati,'
or column of those possessed by evil spirits, and it was customary to
bind to it such unlucky individuals as fell under the suspicion of
'possession' in order to exorcise the spirit with prayers and holy
water. Aretino has made a witty scene about this in the 'Cortegiana,'
where one of the Vatican servants cheats a poor fisherman, and then
hands him over to the sacristan of Saint Peter's to be cured of an
imaginary possession by a ceremonious exorcism. Such proceedings must
have been common enough in those days when witchcraft and demonology
were elements with which rulers and lawgivers had to count at every
turn.
Leave the column and its legend in the lonely chapel, with the exquisite
'Pietà'; wander hither and thither, and note the enormous contrasts
between good and bad work which meet you at every turn. Up in the right
aisle of the tribune you will come upon what is known as Canova's
masterpiece, the tomb of Clement the Thirteenth, the Rezzonico pope, as
strange a mixture of styles and ideas as any in the world, and yet a
genuine expression of the artistic feeling of that day. The grave Pope
prays solemnly above; on the right a lovely heathen genius of Death
leans on a torch; on the left rises a female figure of Religion, one of
the most abominably bad statues in the world; below, a brace of
improbable lions, extravagantly praised by people who do not understand
leonine anatomy, recall Canova's humble origin and his first attempt at
modelling. For the sculptor began life as a waiter in a 'canova di
vino,' or wine shop, whence his name; and it was when a high dignitary
stopped to breakfast at the little wayside inn that the lad modelled a
lion in butter to grace the primitive table. The thing attracted the
rich traveller's attention, and the boy's fortune was made. The Pope is
impressive, the Death is gentle and tender, the Religion, with her crown
of gilded spikes for rays, and her clumsy cross, is a vision of bad
taste, and the sleepy lions, when separated from what has been written
about them, excite no interest. Yet somehow, from a distance, the
monument gets harmony out of its surroundings.
[Illustration: TOMB OF CLEMENT THE THIRTEENTH]
One of the best tombs in the basilica is that of Sixtus the Fourth, the
first pope of the Rovere family, in the Chapel of the Sacrament. The
bronze figure, lying low on a sarcophagus placed out on upon the floor,
has a quiet manly dignity about it which one cannot forget. But in the
same tomb lies a greater man of the same name, Julius the Second, for
whom Michelangelo made his 'Moses' in the Church of San Pietro in
Vincoli--a man who did more than any other, perhaps, to make the great
basilica what it is, and who, by a chain of mistakes, got no tomb of his
own. He who solemnly laid the foundations of the present church, and
lived to see the four main piers completed, with their arches, has only
a little slab in the pavement to recall his memory. The protector and
friend of Bramante, of Michelangelo and of Raphael,--of the great
architect, the great sculptor and the great painter,--has not so much as
the least work of any of the three to mark his place of rest. Perhaps he
needed nothing but his name.
After all, his bones have been allowed to rest in peace, which is more
than can be said of all that have been buried within the area of the
church. Urban the Sixth had no such good fortune. He so much surprised
the cardinals, as soon as they had elected him, by his vigorous moral
reforms that they hastily retired to Anagni and elected an antipope of
milder manners and less sensitive conscience. He lived to triumph over
his enemies. In Piacenza he was besieged by King Charles of Naples. He
excommunicated him, tortured seven cardinals whom he caught in the
conspiracy and put five of them to death; overcame and slew Charles,
refused him burial and had his body exposed to the derision of the
crowd. The chronicler says that 'Italy, Germany, England, Hungary,
Bohemia, Poland, Sicily and Portugal were obedient to the Lord Pope
Urban the Sixth.' He died peacefully, and was buried in Saint Peter's in
a marble sarcophagus.
But when Sixtus the Fifth, who also surprised the cardinals greatly, was
in a fit of haste to finish the dome, the masons, wanting a receptacle
for water, laid hands on Urban's stone coffin, pitched his bones into a
corner, and used the sarcophagus as they pleased, leaving it to serve as
a water-tank for many years afterwards.
In extending the foundations of the church, Paul the Third came upon the
bodies of Maria and Hermania, the two wives of Honorius, the Emperor who
'disestablished' paganism in favour of Christianity. They were sisters,
daughters of Stilicho, and had been buried in their imperial robes, with
many rich objects and feminine trinkets; and they were found intact, as
they had been buried, in the month of February, 1543. Forty pounds of
fine gold were taken from their robes alone, says Baracconi, without
counting all the jewels and trinkets, among which was a very beautiful
lamp, besides a great number of precious stones. The Pope melted down
the gold for the expenses of the building, and set the gems in a tiara,
where, if they could be identified, they certainly exist today--the very
stones worn by empresses of ancient Rome.
Then, as if in retribution, the Pope's own tomb was moved from its
place. Despoiled of two of the four statues which adorned it, the
monument is now in the tribune, and is still one of the best in the
church. A strange and tragic tale is told of it. A Spanish student, it
is said, fell madly in love with the splendid statue of Paul's
sister-in-law, Julia Farnese. He succeeded in hiding himself in the
basilica when it was closed at night, threw himself in a frenzy upon the
marble and was found stone dead beside it in the morning. The ugly
draperies of painted metal which now hide much of the statue owe their
origin to this circumstance. Classical scholars will remember that a
somewhat similar tale is told by Pliny of the Venus of Praxiteles in
Cnidus.
In spite of many assertions to the effect that the bronze statue of
Saint Peter which is venerated in the church was originally an image of
Jupiter Capitolinus, the weight of modern authority and artistic
judgment is to the contrary. The work cannot really be earlier than the
fifth century, and is therefore of a time after Honorius and the
disestablishment. Anyone who will take the trouble to examine the lives
of the early popes in Muratori may read the detailed accounts of what
each one did for the churches. It is not by any means impossible that
this may be one of the statues made under Saint Innocent the First, a
contemporary of Honorius, in whose time a Roman lady called Vestina
made gift to the church of vast possessions, the proceeds of which were
used in building and richly adorning numerous places of worship. In any
case, since it is practically certain that the statue was originally
intended for a portrait of Saint Peter, and has been regarded as such
for nearly fifteen hundred years, it commands our respect, if not our
veneration.
The Roman custom of kissing the foot, then bending and placing one's
head under it, signifies submission to the commands of the Church, and
is not, as many suppose, an act of devotion to the statue.
The practice of dressing it in magnificent robes on the feast of Saint
Peter is connected with the ancient Roman custom, which required
censors, when entering upon office, to paint the earthen statue of
Jupiter Capitolinus a bright red. But the connection lies in the Italian
mind and character, which cling desperately to external practices for
their hold upon inward principles. It is certainly not an inheritance of
uninterrupted tradition, as Roman church music, on the contrary, most
certainly is; for there is every reason to believe that the recitations
now noted in the Roman missal were very like those used by the ancient
Romans on solemn occasions.
The church is not only a real landmark. Astronomers say that if there
were a building of the same dimensions on the moon we could easily see
it with our modern telescopes. It is also, in a manner, one of Time's
great mile-stones, of which some trace will probably remain till the
very end of the world's life. Its mere mass will insure to it the
permanence of the great pyramid of Cheops. Its mere name associates it
for ever with the existence of Christianity from the earliest time. It
has stamped itself upon the minds of millions of men as the most vast
monument of the ages. Its very defects are destined to be as lasting as
its beauties, and its mighty faults are more imposing than the small
perfections of the Greeks. Between it and the Parthenon, as between the
Roman empire and the Athenian commonwealth, one may choose, but one
dares not make comparison. The genius of the Greeks absorbed the world's
beauty into itself, distilled its perfection, and gave humanity its most
subtle quintessence; but the Latin arm ruled the world itself, and the
imperial Latin intelligence could never find any expression fitted to
its enormous measure. That is the secret of the monstrous element in all
the Romans built. And that supernormal giantism showed itself almost for
the last time in the building of Saint Peter's, when the Latin race had
reached its last great development, and the power of the Latin popes
overshadowed the whole world, and was itself about to be humbled. Before
Michelangelo was dead Charles the Fifth had been Emperor forty years,
Doctor Martin Luther had denied the doctrine of salvation by works, the
nations had broken loose from the Popes, and the world was at war.
[Illustration]
Let us part here, at the threshold of Saint Peter's, not saying farewell
to Rome, nor taking leave without hope of meeting on this consecrated
ground again; but since the city lies behind us, region beyond region,
memory over memory, legend within legend, and because we have passed
through it by steps and by stations, very quickly, yet not thoughtlessly
nor irreverently, let us now go each our way for a time, remembering
some of those things which we have seen and of which we have talked,
that we may know them better if we see them again.
For a man can no more say a last farewell to Rome than he can take leave
of eternity. The years move on, but she waits; the cities fall, but she
stands; the old races of men lie dead in the track wherein mankind
wanders always between two darknesses; yet Rome lives, and her changes
are not from life to death, as ours are, but from one life to another.
A man may live with Rome, laugh with her, dream with her, weep with her,
die at her feet; but for him who knows her there is no good-bye, for she
has taken the high seat of his heart, and whither he goes, she is with
him, in joy or sorrow, with wonder, longing or regret, as the chords of
his heart were tuned by his angel in heaven.
But she is as a well-loved woman, whose dear face is drawn upon a man's
heart by the sharp memory of a cruel parting, line for line, shadow for
shadow, look for look, as she was when he saw her last; and line for
line he remembers her and longs for her smile and her tender word. Yet
be the lines ever so deep-graven, and the image ever so sweet and true,
when the time of parting is over, when he comes back and she stands
where she stood, with eyes that lighten to his eyes, then she is better
loved than he knew and dearer than he had guessed. Then the heart that
has steadily beaten time to months of parting, leaps like a child at the
instant of meeting again; then eyes that have so long fed on memory's
vision widen and deepen with joy of the living truth; then the soul that
has hungered and starved through an endless waiting, is suddenly filled
with life and satisfied of its faith.
So he who loves Rome, and leaves her, remembers her long and well,
telling himself that he knows how every stone of her walls and her
streets would look again; but he comes back at last, and sees her as
she is, and he stands amazed at the grandeur of all that has been, and
is touched to the heart by the sad loveliness of much that is. Together,
the thoughts of love and reverence rise in words, and with them comes
the deep wonder at something very great and high. For he himself is
grown grey and war-worn in the strife of a few poor years, while through
five and twenty centuries Rome has faced war and the world; and he, a
gladiator of life, bows his head before her, wondering how his own fight
shall end at last, while his lips pronounce the submission of his own
mortality to her abiding endurance--
AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS, MORITURUS TE SALUTAT
Index
A
Abruzzi, i. 159; ii. 230
Accoramboni, Flaminio, i. 296
Vittoria, i. 135, 148, 289-296, 297
Agrarian Law, i. 23
Agrippa, i. 90, 271; ii. 102
the Younger, ii. 103
Alaric, i. 252; ii. 297
Alba Longa, i. 3, 78, 130
Albergo dell' Orso, i. 288
Alberic, ii. 29
Albornoz, ii. 19, 20, 74
Aldobrandini, i. 209; ii. 149
Olimpia, i. 209
Alfonso, i. 185
Aliturius, ii. 103
Altieri, i. 226; ii. 45
Ammianus Marcellinus, i. 132, 133, 138
Amphitheatre, Flavian, i. 91, 179
Amulius, i. 3
Anacletus, ii. 295, 296, 304
Anagni, i. 161, 165, 307; ii. 4, 5
Ancus Martius, i. 4
Angelico, Beato, ii. 158, 169, 190-192, 195, 285
Anguillara, i. 278; ii. 138
Titta della, ii. 138, 139
Anio, the, i. 93
Novus, i. 144
Vetus, i. 144
Annibaleschi, Riccardo degli, i. 278
Antiochus, ii. 120
Antipope--
Anacletus, ii. 84
Boniface, ii. 28
Clement, i. 126
Gilbert, i. 127
John of Calabria, ii. 33-37
Antonelli, Cardinal, ii. 217, 223, 224
Antonina, i. 266
Antonines, the, i. 113, 191, 271
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, i. 46, 96, 113, 114, 190, 191
Appian Way, i. 22, 94
Appius Claudius, i. 14, 29
Apulia, Duke of, i. 126, 127; ii. 77
Aqua Virgo, i. 155
Aqueduct of Claudius, i. 144
Arbiter, Petronius, i. 85
Arch of--
Arcadius, i. 192
Claudius, i. 155
Domitian, i. 191, 205
Gratian, i. 191
Marcus Aurelius, i. 96, 191, 205
Portugal, i. 205
Septimius Severus, ii. 93
Valens, i. 191
Archive House, ii. 75
Argiletum, the, i. 72
Ariosto, ii. 149, 174
Aristius, i. 70, 71
Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73, 76-89
Arnulf, ii. 41
Art, i. 87; ii. 152
and morality, i. 260, 261; ii. 178, 179
religion, i. 260, 261
Barocco, i. 303, 316
Byzantine in Italy, ii. 155, 184, 185
development of taste in, ii. 198
factors in the progress of art, ii. 181
engraving, ii. 186
improved tools, ii. 181
individuality, i. 262; ii. 175-177
Greek influence on, i. 57-63
modes of expression of, ii. 181
fresco, ii. 181-183
oil painting, ii. 184-186
of the Renascence, i. 231, 262; ii. 154
phases of, in Italy, ii. 188
progress of, during the Middle Age, ii. 166, 180
transition from handicraft to, ii. 153
Artois, Count of, i. 161
Augustan Age, i. 57-77
Augustulus, i. 30, 47, 53; ii. 64
Augustus, i. 30, 43-48, 69, 82, 89, 90, 184, 219, 251, 252,
254, 270; ii. 64, 75, 95, 102, 291
Aurelian, i. 177, 179, 180; ii. 150
Avalos, Francesco, d', i. 174, 175
Aventine, the, i. 23, 76; ii. 10, 40, 85, 119-121, 124, 125,
126, 127, 129, 132, 302
Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 6, 9
B
Bacchanalia, ii. 122
Bacchic worship, i. 76; ii. 120
Bajazet the Second, Sultan, i. 276
Baracconi, i. 104, 141, 178, 188, 252, 264, 274, 304; ii. 41, 45,
128, 130, 138, 323
Barberi, i. 202
Barberini, the, i. 157, 187, 226, 268, 301; ii. 7
Barbo, i. 202; ii. 45
Barcelona, i. 308
Bargello, the, i. 129, 293, 296; ii. 42
Basil and Constantine, ii. 33
Basilica (Pagan)--
Julia, i. 66, 71, 106; ii. 92
Basilicas (Christian) of--
Constantine, i. 90; ii. 292, 297
Liberius, i. 138
Philip and Saint James, i. 170
Saint John Lateran, i. 107, 112, 117, 278, 281
Santa Maria Maggiore, i. 107, 135, 139, 147, 148, 166, 208, 278; ii. 118
Santi Apostoli, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213
Sicininus, i. 134, 138
Baths, i. 91
of Agrippa, i. 271
of Caracalla, ii. 119
of Constantine, i. 144, 188
of Diocletian, i. 107, 129, 145-147, 149, 289, 292
of Novatus, i. 145
of Philippus, i. 145
of public, i. 144
of Severus Alexander, ii. 28
of Titus, i. 55, 107, 152
Befana, the, i. 298, 299, 300; ii. 25
Belisarius, i. 266, 267, 269
Benediction of 1846, the, i. 183
Benevento, Cola da, i. 219, 220
Bernard, ii. 77-80
Bernardi, Gianbattista, ii. 54
Bernini, i. 147, 301, 302, 303; ii. 24
Bibbiena, Cardinal, ii. 146, 285
Maria, ii. 146
Bismarck, ii. 224, 232, 236, 237
Boccaccio, i. 211, 213
Vineyard, the, i. 189
Bologna, i. 259; ii. 58
Borghese, the, i. 206, 226
Scipio, i. 187
Borgia, the, i. 209
Cæsar, i. 149, 151, 169, 213, 287; ii. 150, 171, 282, 283
Gandia, i. 149, 150, 151, 287
Lucrezia, i. 149, 177, 185, 287; ii. 129, 151, 174
Rodrigo, i. 287; ii. 242, 265, 282
Vanozza, i. 149, 151, 287
Borgo, the Region, i. 101, 127; ii. 132, 147, 202-214, 269
Borromini, i. 301, 302; ii. 24
Botticelli, ii. 188, 190, 195, 200, 276
Bracci, ii. 318
Bracciano, i. 282, 291, 292, 294
Duke of, i. 289
Bramante, i. 305; ii. 144, 145, 274, 298, 322
Brescia, i. 286
Bridge. See _Ponte_
Ælian, the, i. 274
Cestian, ii. 105
Fabrician, ii. 105
Sublician, i. 6, 23, 67; ii. 127, 294
Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded, ii. 129, 131
Brothers of Prayer and Death, i. 123, 204, 242
Brunelli, ii. 244
Brutus, i. 6, 12, 18, 41, 58, 80; ii. 96
Buffalmacco, ii. 196
Bull-fights, i. 252
Burgundians, i. 251
C
Cæsar, Julius, i. 29-33, 35-41, 250; ii. 102, 224, 297
Cæsars, the, i. 44-46, 125, 249, 252, 253; ii. 224
Julian, i. 252
Palaces of, i. 4, 191; ii. 95
Caetani, i. 51, 115, 159, 161, 163, 206, 277
Benedict, i. 160
Caligula, i. 46, 252; ii. 96
Campagna, the, i. 92, 94, 158, 237, 243, 253, 282, 312; ii. 88, 107, 120
Campitelli, the Region, i. 101; ii. 64
Campo--
dei Fiori, i. 297
Marzo (Campus Martius), i. 65, 112, 271
the Region, i. 101, 248, 250, 275; ii. 6, 44
Vaccino, i. 128-131, 173
Canale, Carle, i. 287
Cancelleria, i, 102, 305, 312, 315, 316; ii. 223
Canidia, i. 64; ii. 293
Canossa, i. 126; ii. 307
Canova, ii. 320
Capet, Hugh, ii. 29
Capitol, the, i. 8, 14, 24, 29, 72, 107, 112, 167, 190, 204, 278, 282;
ii. 12, 13, 21, 22, 52, 64, 65, 67-75, 84, 121, 148, 302
Capitoline hill, i. 106, 194
Captains of the Regions, i. 110, 112, 114
Election of, i. 112
Caracci, the, i. 264
Carafa, the, ii. 46, 49, 50, 56, 111
Cardinal, i. 186, 188; ii. 56, 204
Carnival, i. 107, 193-203, 241, 298; ii. 113
of Saturn, i. 194
Carpineto, ii. 229, 230, 232, 239, 287
Carthage, i. 20, 26, 88
Castagno, Andrea, ii. 89, 185
Castle of--
Grottaferrata, i. 314
Petrella, i. 286
the Piccolomini, i. 268
Sant' Angelo, i. 114, 116, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 259, 278, 284, 308,
314; ii. 17, 28, 37, 40, 56, 59, 60, 109, 152, 202-214, 216, 269
Castracane, Castruccio, i. 165, 166, 170
Catacombs, the, i. 139
of Saint Petronilla, ii. 125
Sebastian, ii. 296
Catanei, Vanossa de, i. 287
Catharine, Queen of Cyprus, ii. 305
Cathedral of Siena, i. 232
Catiline, i. 27; ii. 96, 294
Cato, ii. 121
Catullus, i. 86
Cavour, Count, ii. 90, 224, 228, 237
Cellini, Benvenuto, i. 311, 315; ii. 157, 195
Cenci, the, ii. 1
Beatrice, i. 147, 285-287; ii. 2, 129, 151
Francesco, i. 285; ii. 2
Centra Pio, ii. 238, 239
Ceri, Renzo da, i. 310
Cesarini, Giuliano, i. 174; ii. 54, 89
Chapel, Sixtine. See under _Vatican_
Charlemagne, i. 32, 49, 51, 53, 76, 109; ii. 297
Charles of Anjou, i. ii. 160
Albert of Sardinia, ii. 221
the Fifth, i. 131, 174, 206, 220, 305, 306; ii. 138
Chiesa. See _Church_
Nuova, i. 275
Chigi, the, i. 258
Agostino, ii. 144, 146
Fabio, ii. 146
Christianity in Rome, i. 176
Christina, Queen of Sweden, ii. 150, 151, 304, 308
Chrysostom, ii. 104, 105
Churches of,--
the Apostles, i. 157, 170-172, 205, 241, 242; ii. 213
Aracoeli, i. 52, 112, 167; ii. 57, 70, 75
Cardinal Mazarin, i. 186
the Gallows, i. 284
Holy Guardian Angel, i. 122
the Minerva, ii. 55
the Penitentiaries, ii. 216
the Portuguese, i. 250
Saint Adrian, i. 71
Agnes, i. 301, 304
Augustine, ii. 207
Bernard, i. 291
Callixtus, ii. 125
Charles, i. 251
Eustace, ii. 23, 24, 26, 39
George in Velabro, i. 195; ii. 10
Gregory on the Aventine, ii. 129
Ives, i. 251; ii. 23, 24
John of the Florentines, i. 273
Pine Cone, ii. 56
Peter's on the Janiculum, ii. 129
Sylvester, i. 176
Saints Nereus and Achillæus, ii. 125
Vincent and Anastasius, i. 186
San Clemente, i. 143
Giovanni in Laterano, i. 113
Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192
Miranda, i. 71
Marcello, i. 165, 192
Pietro in Montorio, ii. 151
Vincoli, i. 118, 283; ii. 322
Salvatore in Cacaberis, i. 112
Stefano Rotondo, i. 106
Sant' Angelo in Pescheria, i. 102; ii. 3, 10, 110
Santa Francesca Romana, i. 111
Maria de Crociferi, i. 267
degli Angeli, i. 146, 258, 259
dei Monti, i. 118
del Pianto, i. 113
di Grotto Pinta, i. 294
in Campo Marzo, ii. 23
in Via Lata, i. 142
Nuova, i. 111, 273
Transpontina, ii. 212
della Vittoria, i. 302
Prisca, ii. 124
Sabina, i. 278; ii. 40
Trinità dei Pellegrini, ii. 110
Cicero, i. 45, 73; ii. 96, 294
Cimabue, ii. 156, 157, 162, 163, 169, 188, 189
Cinna, i. 25, 27
Circolo, ii. 245
Circus, the, i. 64, 253
Maximus, i. 64, 66; ii. 84, 119
City of Augustus, i. 57-77
Making of the, i. 1-21
of Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
of the Empire, i. 22-56
of the Middle Age, i. 47, 78-99, 92
of the Republic, i. 47
today, i. 55, 92
Civilization, ii. 177
and bloodshed, ii. 218
morality, ii. 178
progress, ii. 177-180
Claudius, i. 46, 255, 256; ii. 102
Cloelia, i. 13
Coelian hill, i. 106
Collegio Romano, i. 102; ii. 45, 61
Colonna, the, i. 51, 94, 104, 135, 153, 157-170, 172, 176, 187, 206, 217,
251, 252, 271, 272, 275-283, 306-315; ii. 2, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 37, 51,
54, 60, 106, 107, 126, 204
Giovanni, i. 104
Jacopo, i. 159, 165, 192
Lorenzo, ii. 126, 204-213
Marcantonio, i. 182; ii. 54
Pietro, i. 159
Pompeo, i. 305, 310-317; ii. 205
Prospero, ii. 205
Sciarra, i. 162-166, 192, 206, 213, 229, 275,279, 281, 307
Stephen, i. 161, 165; ii. 13, 16
the Younger, i. 168
Vittoria, i. 157, 173-177; ii. 174
the Region, i. 101, 190-192; ii. 209
War between Orsini and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315;
ii. 12, 18, 126, 204-211
Colosseum, i. 56, 86, 90, 96, 106, 107, 111, 125, 152, 153, 187, 191, 209,
278; ii. 25, 64, 66, 84, 97, 202, 203, 301
Column of Piazza Colonna, i. 190, 192
Comitium, i. 112, 257, 268
Commodus, i. 46, 55; ii. 97, 285
Confraternities, i. 108, 204
Conscript Fathers, i. 78, 112
Constable of Bourbon, i. 52, 259, 273, 304, 309-311; ii. 308
Constans, i, 135, 136
Constantine, i. 90, 113, 163
Constantinople, i. 95, 119
Contests in the Forum, i. 27, 130
Convent of Saint Catharine, i. 176
Convent of Saint Sylvester, i. 176
Corneto, Cardinal of, ii. 282, 283
Cornomania, i. 141
Cornutis, i. 87
Coromania, i. 141, 144
Corsini, the, ii. 150
Corso, i. 96, 106, 108, 192, 196, 205, 206, 229, 251
Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275
Corte Savella, i. 284; ii. 52
Cosmas, the, ii. 156, 157
Costa, Giovanni da, i. 205
Court House, i. 71
Crassus, i. 27, 31; ii. 128
Crawford, Thomas, i. 147
Crescentius, ii. 40, 41
Crescenzi, i. 114; ii. 27, 40, 209
Crescenzio, ii. 28-40
Stefana, ii. 39
Crispi, i. 116, 187
Crusade, the Second, ii. 86, 105
Crusades, the, i. 76
Curatii, i. 3, 131
Customs of early Rome, i. 9, 48
in dress, i. 48
religion, i. 48
D
Dante, i. 110; ii. 164, 175, 244
Decameron, i. 239
Decemvirs, i. 14; ii. 120
Decrees, Semiamiran, i. 178
Democracy, i. 108
Development of Rome, i. 7, 18
some results of, i. 154
under Barons, i. 51
Decemvirs, i. 14
the Empire, i. 29, 30
Gallic invasion, i. 15-18
Kings, i. 2-7, 14-45
Middle Age, i. 47, 92, 210-247
Papal rule, i. 46-50
Republic, i. 7-14
Tribunes, i. 14
Dictator of Rome, i. 29, 79
Dietrich of Bern, ii. 297
Dionysus, ii. 121
Dolabella, i. 34
Domenichino, ii. 147
Domestic life in Rome, i. 9
Dominicans, i. 158; ii. 45, 46, 49, 50, 60, 61
Domitian, i. 45, 152, 205; ii. 104, 114, 124, 295
Doria, the, i. 206; ii. 45
Albert, i. 207
Andrea, i. 207
Conrad, i. 207
Gian Andrea, i. 207
Lamba, i. 207
Paganino, i. 207
Doria-Pamfili, i. 206-209
Dress in early Rome, i. 48
Drusus, ii. 102
Duca, Antonio del, i. 146, 147
Giacomo del, i. 146
Dürer, Albert, ii. 198
E
Education, ii. 179
Egnatia, i. 75
Elagabalus, i. 77, 177, 179; ii. 296, 297
Election of the Pope, ii. 41, 42, 277
Electoral Wards, i. 107
Elizabeth, Queen of England, ii. 47
Emperors, Roman, i. 46
of the East, i. 95, 126
Empire of Constantinople, i. 46
of Rome, i. 15, 17, 22-28, 31, 45, 47, 53, 60, 72, 99
Encyclicals, ii. 244
Erasmus, ii. 151
Esquiline, the, i. 26, 106, 139, 186; ii. 95, 131, 193
Este, Ippolito d', i. 185
Etruria, i. 12, 15
Euodus, i. 255, 256
Eustace, Saint, ii. 24, 25
square of, ii. 25, 42
Eustachio. See _Sant' Eustachio_
Eutichianus, ii. 296
Eve of Saint John, i. 140
the Epiphany, 299
F
Fabius, i. 20
Fabatosta, ii. 64, 84
Farnese, the, ii. 151
Julia, ii. 324
Farnesina, the, ii. 144, 149, 151
Fathers, Roman, i. 13, 78, 79-84
Ferdinand, ii. 205
Ferrara, Duke of, i. 185
Festivals, i. 193, 298
Aryan in origin, i. 173
Befana, i. 299-301
Carnival, i. 193-203
Church of the Apostle, i. 172, 173
Coromania, i. 141
Epifania, i. 298-301
Floralia, i. 141
Lupercalia, i. 194
May-day in the Campo Vaccino, i. 173
Saturnalia, i. 194
Saint John's Eve, i. 140
Festus, ii. 128
Feuds, family, i. 168
Field of Mars. See _Campo Marzo_
Finiguerra, Maso, ii. 186-188
Flamen Dialis, i. 34
Floralia. See _Festivals_
Florence, i. 160
Forli, Melozzo da, i. 171
Fornarina, the, ii. 144, 146
Forum, i, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 64, 72, 111, 126, 129, 194;
ii. 64, 92-94, 97, 102, 294, 295
of Augustus, i. 119
Trajan, i. 155, 171, 172, 191
Fountains (Fontane) of--
Egeria, ii. 124
Trevi, i. 155, 156, 186, 267
Tullianum, i. 8
Franconia, Duke of, ii. 36, 53
Francis the First, i. 131, 174, 206, 219, 304
Frangipani, i. 50, 94, 153; ii. 77, 79, 84, 85
Frederick, Barbarossa, ii. 34, 85, 87
of Naples, i. 151
the Second, ii. 34
Fulvius, ii. 121
G
Gabrini, Lawrence, ii. 4
Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308
Gaeta, ii. 36
Galba, ii. 295
Galen, i. 55
Galera, i. 282, 291
Galileo, i. 268
Gardens, i. 93
Cæsar's, i. 66, 68
of Lucullus, i. 254, 270
of the Pigna, ii. 273
Pincian, i. 255
the Vatican, ii. 243, 271, 287
Gargonius, i. 65
Garibaldi, ii. 90, 219, 220, 228, 237
Gastaldi, Cardinal, i. 259
Gate. See _Porta_
the Colline, i. 250
Lateran, i. 126, 154
Septimian, ii. 144, 147
Gebhardt, Émile, i. 213
Gemonian Steps, ii. 67, 294
Genseric, i. 96; ii. 70
George of Franzburg, i. 310
Gherardesca, Ugolino della, ii. 160
Ghetto, i. 102; ii. 2, 101, 110-118
Ghibellines, the, i. 129, 153, 158; ii. 6
Ghiberti, ii. 157.
Ghirlandajo, ii. 157, 172, 276
Giantism, i. 90-92, 210, 302
Gibbon, i. 160
Giotto, ii. 157, 160-165, 169, 188, 189, 200
Gladstone, ii. 231, 232
Golden Milestone, i. 72, 92, 194
Goldoni, i. 265
Goldsmithing, ii. 156, 157, 186, 187
"Good Estate" of Rienzi, ii. 10-12
Gordian, i. 91
Goths, ii. 297, 307.
Gozzoli, Benozzo, ii. 190, 195
Gracchi, the, i. 22, 28
Caius, i. 23; ii. 84
Cornelia, i. 22, 24
Tiberius, i. 23; ii. 102
Gratidianus, i. 27
Guards, Noble, ii. 241, 243, 247, 248, 309, 310, 312
Palatine, ii. 247, 248
Swiss, ii. 246, 247, 310
Guelphs, i. 159; ii. 42, 126, 138
and Ghibellines, i. 129, 153, 275; ii. 160, 162, 173
Guiscard, Robert, i. 95, 126, 127, 129, 144, 252; ii. 70
H
Hadrian, i. 90, 180; ii. 25, 202, 203
Hannibal, i. 20
Hasdrubal, i. 21
Henry the Second, ii. 47
Fourth, i. 126, 127; ii. 307
Fifth, ii. 307
Seventh of Luxemburg, i. 273, 276-279; ii. 5
Eighth, i. 219; ii. 47, 274
Hermann, i. 46
Hermes of Olympia, i. 86
Hermogenes, i. 67
Hilda's Tower, i. 250
Hildebrand, i. 52, 126-129; ii.
Honorius, ii. 323, 324
Horace, i. 44, 57-75, 85, 87; ii. 293
and the Bore, i. 65-71
Camen Seculare of, i. 75
the Satires of, i. 73, 74
Horatii, i. 3, 131
Horatius, i. 5, 6, 13, 23; ii. 127
Horses of Monte Cavallo, i. 181
Hospice of San Claudio, i. 251
Hospital of--
Santo Spirito, i. 274; ii. 214, 215
House of Parliament, i. 271
Hugh of Burgundy, ii. 30
of Tuscany, ii. 30
Huns' invasion, i. 15, 49, 132
Huxley, ii. 225, 226
I
Imperia, ii. 144
Infessura, Stephen, ii. 59, 60, 204-213
Inn of--
The Bear, i. 288
Falcone, ii. 26
Lion, i. 287
Vanossa, i. 288
Inquisition, i. 286; ii. 46, 49, 52, 53, 54
Interminelli, Castruccio degli, i. 165.
Irene, Empress, i. 109
Ischia, i. 175
Island of Saint Bartholomew, i. 272; ii. 1
Isola Sacra, i. 93
Italian life during the Middle Age, i. 210, 247
from 17th to 18th centuries, i. 260, 263, 264
J
Janiculum, the, i. 15, 253, 270; ii. 268, 293, 294, 295
Jesuit College, ii. 61
Jesuits, ii. 45, 46, 61-63
Jews, i. 96; ii. 101-119
John of Cappadocia, i. 267, 268
Josephus, ii. 103
Juba, i. 40
Jugurtha, i. 25
Jupiter Capitolinus, ii. 324, 325
priest of, i. 80, 133
Justinian, i. 267
Juvenal, i. 112; ii. 105, 107, 124
K
Kings of Rome, i. 2-7
L
Lampridius, Ælius, i. 178
Lanciani, i. 79, 177
Lateran, the, i. 106, 112-114, 129, 140-142
Count of, i. 166
Latin language, i. 47
Latini Brunetto, ii. 163
Laurentum, i. 55, 93
Lazaret of Saint Martha, ii. 245
League, Holy, i. 305, 306, 313, 314
Lentulus, ii. 128
Lepida, Domitia, i. 255, 256
Letus, Pomponius, i. 139; ii. 210
Lewis of Bavaria, i. 165, 167, 192, 275
the Seventh, ii. 86, 105
Eleventh, i. 104, 151
Fourteenth, i. 253
Library of--
Collegio Romano, ii. 45
Vatican, ii. 275, 276, 282
Victor Emmanuel, ii. 45, 61
Lieges, Bishop of, i. 280
Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 231, 236
Lippi, Filippo, ii. 190, 191, 192-195, 200
Liszt, i. 185, 203; ii. 176
Livia, i. 220, 252
Livy, i. 44, 47
Lombards, the, i. 251
Lombardy, i. 309
Lorrain, i. 264
Loyola, Ignatius, ii. 46, 62
Lucilius, i. 74
Lucretia, i. 5, 12, 13
Lucullus, i. 257, 270
Lupercalia, i. 194
Lupercus, i. 194
M
Macchiavelli, ii. 174
Mæcenas, i. 62, 69, 74, 140; ii. 293
Mænads, ii. 122
Maldachini, Olimpia, i. 304, 305
Mamertine Prison, i. 25, ii. 72, 293
Mancini, Maria, i. 170, 187
Mancino, Paul, ii. 210
Manlius, Cnæus, ii. 121
Marcus, i. 29; ii. 71, 84
Titus, i. 80
Mantegna, Andrea, ii. 157, 169, 188, 196-198
Marcomanni, i. 190
Marforio, i. 305
Marino, i. 174
Marius, Caius, i. 25, 29
Marius and Sylla, i. 25, 29, 36, 45, 53; ii. 69
Mark Antony, i. 30, 93, 195, 254
Marozia, ii. 27, 28
Marriage Laws, i. 79, 80
Mary, Queen of Scots, ii. 47
Masaccio, ii. 190
Massimi, Pietro de', i. 317
Massimo, i. 102, 317
Mattei, the, ii. 137, 139, 140, 143
Alessandro, ii. 140-143
Curzio, ii. 140-143
Girolamo, ii. 141-143
Marcantonio, ii. 140, 141
Olimpia, ii. 141, 142
Piero, ii. 140, 141
Matilda, Countess, ii. 307
Mausoleum of--
Augustus, i. 158, 169, 205, 251, 252, 270, 271
Hadrian, i. 102, 252; ii. 28, 202, 270.
See _Castle of Sant' Angelo_
Maximilian, i. 151
Mazarin, i. 170, 187
Mazzini, ii. 219, 220
Mediævalism, death of, ii. 225
Medici, the, i. 110; ii. 276
Cosimo de', i. 289; ii. 194
Isabella de', i. 290, 291
John de', i. 313
Messalina, i. 254, 272; ii. 255, 256, 257
Michelangelo, i. 90, 146, 147, 173, 175, 177, 302, 303, 315;
ii. 129, 130, 157, 159, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 188, 200, 276-281, 284,
317-319, 322
"Last Judgment" by, i. 173; ii. 171, 276, 280, 315
"Moses" by, ii. 278, 286
"Pietà" by, ii. 286
Middle Age, the, i. 47, 92, 210-247, 274; ii. 163, 166, 172-175, 180, 196
Migliorati, Ludovico, i. 103
Milan, i. 175
Duke of, i. 306
Milestone, golden, i. 72
Mithræum, i. 271
Mithras, i. 76
Mithridates, i. 26, 30, 37, 358
Mocenni, Mario, ii. 249
Monaldeschi, ii. 308
Monastery of--
the Apostles, i. 182
Dominicans, ii. 45, 61
Grottaferrata, ii. 37
Saint Anastasia, ii. 38
Gregory, ii. 85
Sant' Onofrio, ii. 147
Moncada, Ugo de, i. 307, 308
Mons Vaticanus, ii. 268
Montaigne, i. 288
Montalto. See _Felice Peretti_
Monte Briano, i. 274
Cavallo, i. 181, 188, 292, 293; ii. 205, 209
Citorio, i. 193, 252, 271
Giordano, i. 274, 281, 282, 288; ii. 206
Mario, i. 313; ii. 268
Montefeltro, Guido da, ii. 160
Monti--
the Region, i. 101, 106, 107, 111, 112, 125, 133, 134, 144, 150, 185,
305; ii. 133, 209
and Trastevere, i. 129, 145, 153; ii. 133, 209
by moonlight, i. 117
Morrone, Pietro da, i. 159
Muratori, i. 85, 132, 159, 277; ii. 40, 48, 76, 126, 324
Museums of Rome, i. 66
Vatican, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287
Villa Borghese, i. 301
Mustafa, ii. 247
N
Naples, i. 175, 182, 307, 308
Napoleon, i. 32, 34, 53, 88, 109, 258; ii. 218, 221, 298
Louis, ii. 221, 223, 237
Narcissus, i. 255
Navicella, i. 106
Nelson, i. 253
Neri, Saint Philip, i. 318
Nero, i. 46, 56, 188, 254, 257, 285; ii. 163, 211, 291
Nilus, Saint, ii. 36, 37, 40
Nogaret, i. 162, 164
Northmen, i. 46, 49
Numa, i. 3; ii. 268
Nunnery of the Sacred Heart, i. 256
O
Octavius, i. 27, 30, 43, 89; ii. 291
Odoacer, i. 47; ii. 297
Olanda, Francesco d', i. 176
Oliviero, Cardinal Carafa, i. 186, 188
Olympius, i. 136, 137, 138
Opimius, i. 24
Orgies of Bacchus, i. 76; ii. 120
Orgies of the Mænads, ii. 121
on the Aventine, i. 76; ii. 121
Orsini, the, i. 94, 149, 153, 159, 167-169, 183, 216, 217, 271, 274,
306-314; ii. 16, 126, 138, 204
Bertoldo, i. 168
Camillo, i. 311
Isabella, i. 291
Ludovico, i. 295
Matteo, i. 281
Napoleon, i. 161
Orsino, i. 166
Paolo Giordano, i. 283, 290-295
Porzia, i. 187
Troilo, i. 290, 291
Virginio, i. 295
war between Colonna and, i. 51, 104, 159, 168, 182, 275-283, 306-315;
ii. 18, 126, 204
Orsino, Deacon, i. 134, 135
Orvieto, i. 314
Otho, ii. 295
the Second, ii. 304
Otto, the Great, i. 114; ii. 28, 30
Second, ii. 28
Third, ii. 29-37
Ovid, i. 44, 63
P
Painting, ii. 181
in fresco, ii. 181-183
oil, ii. 184-186
Palace (Palazzo)--
Annii, i. 113
Barberini, i. 106, 187
Borromeo, ii. 61
Braschi, i. 305
Cæsars, i. 4, 191; ii. 64
Colonna, i. 169, 189; ii. 205
Consulta, i. 181
Corsini, ii. 149, 308
Doria, i. 207, 226
Pamfili, i. 206, 208
Farnese, i. 102
Fiano, i. 205
della Finanze, i. 91
Gabrielli, i. 216
the Lateran, i. 127; ii. 30
Massimo alle Colonna, i. 316, 317
Mattei, ii. 140
Mazarini, i. 187
of Nero, i. 152
della Pilotta, i. 158
Priori, i. 160
Quirinale, i. 139, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 304
of the Renascence, i. 205
Rospigliosi, i. 181, 187, 188, 189
Ruspoli, i. 206
Santacroce, i. 237; ii. 23
of the Senator, i. 114
Serristori, ii. 214, 216
Theodoli, i. 169
di Venezia, i. 102, 192, 202
Palatine, the, i. 2, 13, 67, 69, 194, 195; ii. 64, 119
Palermo, i. 146
Palestrina, i. 156, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 243, 282; ii. 13, 315
Paliano, i. 282
Duke of, i. 157, 189
Palladium, i. 77
Pallavicini, i. 206, 258
Palmaria, i. 267
Pamfili, the, i. 206
Pannartz, i. 317
Pantheon, i. 90, 102, 195, 271, 278; ii. 44, 45, 146
Parione, the Region, i. 101, 297, 312, 317; ii. 42
Square of, ii. 42
Pasquino, the, i. 186, 305, 317
Passavant, ii. 285
Passeri, Bernardino, i. 313; ii. 308
Patarina, i. 107, 202
Patriarchal System, i. 223-228
Pavia, i. 175
Pecci, the, ii. 229
Joachim Vincent, ii. 229, 230.
Peretti, the, i. 205
Felice, i. 149, 289-295
Francesco, i. 149, 289, 292
Vittoria. See _Accoramboni_
Perugia, i. 159, 276, 277
Perugino, ii. 157, 260, 276
Pescara, i. 174
Peter the Prefect, i. 114; ii. 230.
Petrarch, i. 161
Petrella, i. 286
Philip the Fair, i. 160, 276, 278
Second of Spain, ii. 47
Phocas, column of, ii. 93
Piazza--
Barberini, i. 155
della Berlina Vecchia, i. 283
Chiesa Nuova, i. 155
del Colonna, i. 119, 190
Gesù, ii. 45
della Minerva, ii. 45
Moroni, i. 250
Navona, i. 102, 297, 298, 302, 303, 305; ii. 25, 46, 57
Pigna, ii. 55
of the Pantheon, i. 193; ii. 26
Pilotta, i. 158
del Popolo, i. 144, 206, 259, 273
Quirinale, i. 181
Romana, ii. 136
Sant' Eustachio, ii. 25
San Lorenzo in Lucina, i. 192, 205, 250
Saint Peter's, ii. 251, 309
di Sciarra, i. 192
Spagna, i. 251; ii. 42
delle Terme, i. 144
di Termini, i. 144
Venezia, i. 206
Pierleoni, the, ii. 77, 79, 82, 101, 105, 106, 109, 114
Pigna, ii. 45
the Region, i. 101, 102; ii. 44
Pilgrimages, ii. 245
Pincian (hill), i. 119, 270, 272
Pincio, the, i. 121, 189, 223, 253, 255, 256, 259, 264, 272
Pintelli, Baccio, ii. 278, 279
Pinturicchio, ii. 147
Pliny, the Younger, i. 85, 87
Pompey, i. 30
Pons Æmilius, i. 67
Cestius, ii. 102, 105
Fabricius, ii. 105
Triumphalis, i. 102, 274
Ponte. See also _Bridge_
Garibaldi, ii. 138
Rotto, i. 67
Sant' Angelo, i. 274, 283, 284, 287; ii. 42, 55, 270
Sisto, i. 307, 311; ii. 136
the Region, i. 274, 275
Pontifex Maximus, i. 39, 48
Pontiff, origin of title, ii. 127
Pope--
Adrian the Fourth, ii. 87
Alexander the Sixth, i. 258; ii. 269, 282
Seventh, i. 259
Anastasius, ii. 88
Benedict the Sixth, ii. 28-30
Fourteenth, i. 186
Boniface the Eighth, i. 159, 160, 167, 213, 280, 306; ii. 304
Celestin the First, i. 164
Second, ii. 83
Clement the Fifth, i. 275, 276
Sixth, ii. 9, 17-19
Seventh, i. 306, 307, 310, 313, 314; ii. 308
Eighth, i. 286
Ninth, i. 187; ii. 110
Eleventh, i. 171
Thirteenth, ii. 320
Damascus, i. 133, 135, 136
Eugenius the Third, ii. 85
Fourth, ii. 7, 56
Ghisleri, ii. 52, 53
Gregory the Fifth, ii. 32-37
Seventh, i. 52, 126; ii. 307
Thirteenth, i. 183, 293
Sixteenth, i. 305; ii. 221, 223
Honorius the Third, ii. 126
Fourth, ii. 126
Innocent the Second, ii. 77, 79, 82, 105
Third, i. 153; ii. 6
Sixth, ii. 19
Eighth, i. 275
Tenth, i. 206, 209, 302, 303
Joan, i. 143
John the Twelfth, ii. 282
Thirteenth, i. 113
Fifteenth, ii. 29
Twenty-third, ii. 269
Julius the Second, i. 208, 258; ii. 276, 298, 304
Leo the Third, i. 109; ii. 146, 297
Fourth, ii. 242
Tenth, i. 304; ii. 276, 304
Twelfth, i. 202; ii. 111
Thirteenth, i. 77; ii. 218-267, 282, 287, 308, 312, 313
Liberius, i. 138
Lucius the Second, ii. 84, 85
Martin the First, i. 136
Nicholas the Fourth, i. 159, 274
Fifth, i. 52; ii. 58, 268, 269, 298, 304
Paschal the Second, i. 258; ii. 307
Paul the Second, i. 202, 205
Third, i. 219; ii. 41, 130, 304, 323, 324
Fourth, ii. 46, 47, 48-51, 111, 112
Fifth, ii. 289
Pelagius the First, i. 170, 171; ii. 307
Pius the Fourth, i. 147, 305
Sixth, i. 181, 182
Seventh, i. 53; ii. 221
Ninth, i. 76, 183, 315; ii. 66, 110, 111, 216, 221-225, 252, 253, 255,
257, 258, 265, 298, 308, 311
Silverius, i. 266
Sixtus the Fourth, i. 258, 275; ii. 127, 204-213, 274, 278, 321
Fifth, i. 52, 139, 149, 181, 184, 186, 205, 283;
ii. 43, 157, 241, 304, 323
Sylvester, i. 113; ii. 297, 298
Symmachus, ii. 44
Urban the Second, i. 52
Sixth, ii. 322, 323
Eighth, i. 181, 187, 268, 301; ii. 132, 203, 298
Vigilius, ii. 307
Popes, the, i. 125, 142, 273
at Avignon, i. 167, 273, 277; ii. 9
among sovereigns, ii. 228
election of, ii. 41, 42
hatred for, ii. 262-264
temporal power of, i. 168; ii. 255-259
Poppæa, i. 103
Porcari, the, ii. 56
Stephen, ii. 56-60, 204
Porsena of Clusium, i. 5, 6, 12
Porta. See also _Gate_--
Angelica, i. 120
Maggiore, i. 107
Metronia, i. 106
Mugonia, i. 10
Pia, i. 107, 147, 152; ii. 224
Pinciana, i. 193, 250, 264, 266, 269
del Popolo, i. 272, 299
Portese, ii. 132
Salaria, i, 106, 107, 193
San Giovanni, i. 107, 120
Lorenzo, i. 107
Sebastiano, ii. 119, 125
Spirito, i. 311; ii. 132, 152
Tiburtina, i. 107
Portico of Neptune, i. 271
Octavia, ii. 3, 105
Poussin, Nicholas, i. 264
Præneste, i. 156
Prætextatus, i. 134
Prefect of Rome, i. 103, 114, 134
Presepi, ii. 139
Prince of Wales, i. 203
Prior of the Regions, i. 112, 114
Processions of--
the Brotherhood of Saint John, ii. 130
Captains of Regions, i. 112
Coromania, i. 141
Coronation of Lewis of Bavaria, i. 166, 167
Ides of May, ii. 127-129
the Triumph of Aurelian, i. 179
Progress and civilization, i. 262; ii. 177-180
romance, i. 154
Prosper of Cicigliano, ii. 213
Q
Quæstor, i. 58
Quirinal, the (hill), i. 106, 119, 158, 182, 184, 186, 187; ii. 205
R
Rabble, Roman, i. 115, 128, 132, 153, 281; ii. 131
Race course of Domitian, i. 270, 297
Races, Carnival, i. 108, 202, 203
Raimondi, ii. 315
Rampolla, ii. 239, 249, 250
Raphael, i. 260, 315; ii. 159, 169, 175, 188, 200, 281, 285, 322
in Trastevere, ii. 144-147
the "Transfiguration" by, ii. 146, 281
Ravenna, i. 175
Regions (Rioni), i. 100-105, 110-114, 166
Captains of, i. 110
devices of, i. 100
fighting ground of, i. 129
Prior, i. 112, 114
rivalry of, i. 108, 110, 125
Regola, the Region, i. 101, 168; ii. 1-3
Regulus, i. 20
Religion, i. 48, 50, 75
Religious epochs in Roman history, i. 76
Renascence in Italy, i. 52, 77, 84, 98, 99, 188, 237, 240, 250, 258, 261,
262, 303; ii. 152-201, 280
art of, i. 231
frescoes of, i. 232
highest development of, i. 303, 315
leaders of, ii. 152, 157-159
manifestation of, ii. 197
palaces of, i. 205, 216
represented in "The Last Judgment," ii. 280
results of development of, ii. 199
Reni, Guido, i. 264; ii. 317
Republic, the, i. 6, 12, 15, 53, 110; ii. 291
and Arnold of Brescia, ii. 86
Porcari, ii. 56-60
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
modern ideas of, ii. 219
Revolts in Rome--
against the nobles, ii. 73
of the army, i. 25
of Arnold of Brescia, ii. 73-89
Marius and Sylla, i. 25
Porcari, ii. 56-60
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8, 73
slaves, i. 24
Stefaneschi, i. 281-283; ii. 219-222
Revolutionary idea, the, ii. 219-222
Riario, the, ii. 149, 150, 151
Jerome, ii. 205
Rienzi, Nicholas, i. 23, 93, 103, 168, 211, 281; ii. 3-23, 308
Rioni. See _Regions_
Ripa, the Region, i. 101; ii. 118
Ripa Grande, ii. 127
Ripetta, ii. 52
Ristori, Mme., i. 169
Robert of Naples, i. 278
Rotfredo, Count, i. 114, 115
Rome--
a day in mediæval, i. 241-247
Bishop of, i. 133
charm of, i. 54, 98, 318
ecclesiastic, i. 124
lay, i. 124
a modern Capital, i. 123, 124
foundation of, i. 2
of the Augustan Age, i. 60-62
Barons, i. 50, 84, 104, 229-247; ii. 75
Cæsars, i. 84
Empire, i. 15, 17, 28, 31, 45, 47, 53. 60, 99
Kings, i. 2-7, 10, 11
Middle Age, i. 110, 210-247, 274; ii. 172-175
Napoleonic era, i. 229
Popes, i. 50, 77, 84, 104
Republic, i. 6, 12, 16, 53, 110
Rienzi, i. 93; ii. 6-8
today, i. 55
sack of, by Constable of Bourbon, i. 259, 273, 309-315
sack of, by Gauls, i. 15, 49, 252
Guiscard, i. 95, 126-129, 252
seen from dome of Saint Peter's, ii. 302
under Tribunes, i. 14
Decemvirs, i. 14
Dictator, i. 28
Romulus, i. 2, 5, 30, 78, 228
Rospigliosi, i. 206
Rossi, Pellegrino, i. 316
Count, ii. 223
Rostra, i. 27; ii. 93
Julia, i. 68; ii. 93
Rota, ii. 215
Rovere, the, i. 258; ii. 276, 279, 321
Rudini, i. 187
Rudolph of Hapsburg, i. 161
Rufillus, i. 65
S
Sacchi, Bartolommeo, i. 139, 147
Saint Peter's Church, i. 166, 278; ii. 202, 212, 243, 246, 268, 289, 294,
295, 326
altar of, i. 96
architects of, ii. 304
bronze doors of, ii. 299, 300
builders of, ii. 304
Chapel of the Choir, ii. 310, 313, 314
Chapel of the Sacrament, ii. 274, 306, 308, 310, 312, 313
Choir of, ii. 313-316
Colonna Santa, ii. 319
dome of, i. 96; ii. 302
Piazza of, ii. 251
Sacristy of, i. 171
Salvini, i. 169, 252
Giorgio, i. 313
Santacroce Paolo, i. 286
Sant' Angelo the Region, i. 101; ii. 101
Santorio, Cardinal, i. 208
San Vito, i. 282
Saracens, i. 128, 144
Sarto, Andrea del, ii. 157, 169
Saturnalia, i. 125, 194, 195
Saturninus, i. 25
Satyricon, the, i. 85
Savelli, the, i. 284; ii. 1, 16, 126, 206
John Philip, ii. 207-210
Savonarola, i. 110
Savoy, house of, i. 110; ii. 219, 220, 224
Scævola, i. 13
Schweinheim, i. 317
Scipio, Cornelius, i. 20
of Africa, i. 20, 22, 29, 59, 76; ii. 121
Asia, i. 21; ii. 120
Scotus, i. 182
See, Holy, i. 159, 168; ii. 264-267, 277, 294
Segni, Monseignor, i. 304
Sejanuo, ii. 294
Semiamira, i. 178
Senate, Roman, i. 167, 168, 257
the Little, i. 177, 180
Senators, i. 78, 112, 167
Servius, i. 5, 15
Severus--
Arch of, ii. 92
Septizonium of, i. 96, 127
Sforza, i. 13; ii. 89
Catharine, i. 177; ii. 150
Francesco, i. 306
Siena, i. 232, 268; ii. 229
Signorelli, ii. 277
Slaves, i. 81, 24
Sosii Brothers, i. 72, 73
Spencer, Herbert, ii. 225, 226
Stefaneschi, Giovanni degli, i. 103, 282
Stilicho, ii. 323
Stradella, Alessandro, ii. 315
Streets. See _Via_
Subiaco, i. 282
Suburra, i. 39; ii. 95
Suetonius, i. 43
Sylla, ii. 25-29, 36-42
T
Tacitus, i. 46, 254; ii. 103
Tarentum, i. 18, 19
Tarpeia, i. 29; ii. 68, 69
Tarpeian Rock, ii. 67
Tarquins, the, i. 6, 11, 12, 80, 248, 249, 269; ii. 69
Sextus, i. 5, 11
Tasso, i. 188, 189; ii. 147-149
Bernardo, i. 188
Tatius, i. 68, 69
Tempietto, the, i. 264
Temple of--
Castor, i. 27
Castor and Pollux, i. 68; ii. 92, 94
Ceres, ii. 119
Concord, i. 24; ii. 92
Flora, i. 155
Hercules, ii. 40
Isis and Serapis, i. 271
Julius Cæsar, i. 72
Minerva, i. 96
Saturn, i. 194, 201; ii. 94
the Sun, i. 177, 179, 180, 271
Venus and Rome, i. 110
Venus Victorius, i. 270
Vesta, i. 68
Tenebræ, i. 117
Tetricius, i. 179
Theatre of--
Apollo, i. 286
Balbus, ii. 1
Marcellus, ii. 1, 101, 105, 106, 119
Pompey, i. 103, 153
Thedoric of Verona, ii. 297
Theodoli, the, i. 258
Theodora Senatrix, i. 158, 266, 267; ii. 27-29, 203, 282
Tiber, i. 23, 27, 66, 93, 94, 151, 158, 168, 189, 237, 248, 249, 254,
269, 272, 288
Tiberius, i. 254, 287; ii. 102
Titian, i. 315; ii. 165, 166, 175, 188, 278
Titus, i. 56, 86; ii. 102, 295
Tivoli, i. 180, 185; ii. 76, 85
Torre (Tower)--
Anguillara, ii. 138, 139, 140
Borgia, ii. 269, 285
dei Conti, i. 118, 153
Milizie, i. 277
Millina, i. 274
di Nona, i. 274, 284, 287; ii. 52, 54, 72
Sanguigna, i. 274
Torrione, ii. 241, 242
Trajan, i. 85, 192; ii. 206
Trastevere, the Region, i. 101, 127, 129, 278, 307, 311;
ii. 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 151
Trevi, the Fountain, i. 155, 186
the Region, i. 155, 187; ii. 209
Tribunes, i. 14
Trinità de' Monti, i. 256, 264
dei Pellegrini, ii. 110
Triumph, the, of Aurelian, i. 179
Triumphal Road, i. 66, 69, 70, 71
Tullianum, i. 8
Tullus, i. 3
Domitius, i. 90
Tuscany, Duke of, ii. 30
Tusculum, i. 158
U
Unity, of Italy, i. 53, 77, 123, 184; ii. 224
under Augustus, i. 184
Victor Emmanuel, i. 184
University, Gregorian, the, ii. 61
of the Sapienza, i. 251; ii. 24, 25
Urbino, Duke of, i. 208, 217
V
Valens, i. 133
Valentinian, i. 133
Varus, i. 46
Vatican, the, i. 127, 128, 147, 165, 189, 278, 281, 307;
ii. 44, 202, 207, 228, 243, 245, 249, 250, 252, 253, 269, 271
barracks of Swiss Guard, ii. 275
chapels in,
Pauline, ii.
Nicholas, ii. 285
Sixtine, ii. 246, 274, 275, 276, 278-281, 285
fields, i. 274
Court of the Belvedere, ii. 269
Saint Damasus, ii. 273
finances of, ii. 253
gardens of, ii. 243, 271, 287
of the Pigna, ii. 273
library, ii. 275, 276, 282
Borgia apartments of, ii. 282
Loggia of the Beatification, ii. 245
Raphael, ii. 273, 274, 276, 285
Maestro di Camera, ii. 239, 248, 250
museums of, ii. 272, 273, 283, 286, 287
picture galleries, ii. 273-284
Pontifical residence, ii. 249
private apartments, ii. 249
Sala Clementina, ii. 248
del Concistoro, ii. 246
Ducale, ii. 245, 247
Regia, ii. 246
throne room, ii. 247
Torre Borgia, ii. 269, 285
Veii, i. 16, 17
Velabrum, i. 67
Veneziano, Domenico, ii. 185
Venice, i. 193, 296, 306; ii. 35, 205
Vercingetorix, ii. 294
Vespasian, i. 46, 56; ii. 295
Vespignani, ii. 241, 242
Vesta, i. 57
temple of, i. 71, 77
Vestals, i. 77, 80, 133, 152; ii. 99
house of, i. 69
Via--
della Angelo Custode, i. 122
Appia, i. 22, 94
Arenula, ii. 45
Borgognona, i. 251
Campo Marzo, i. 150
di Caravita, ii. 45
del Corso, i. 155, 158, 192, 193, 251; ii. 45
della Dateria, i. 183
Dogana Vecchia, ii. 26
Flaminia, i. 193
Florida, ii. 45
Frattina, i. 250
de' Greci, i. 251
Lata, i. 193
Lungara, i. 274; ii. 144, 145, 147
Lungaretta, ii. 140
della Maestro, i. 283
Marforio, i. 106
di Monserrato, i. 283
Montebello, i. 107
Nazionale, i. 277
Nova, i. 69
di Parione, i. 297
de' Poli, i. 267
de Pontefici, i. 158
de Prefetti, ii. 6
Quattro Fontane, i. 155, 187
Sacra, i. 65, 71, 180
San Gregorio, i. 71
San Teodoro, i. 195
de' Schiavoni, i. 158
Sistina, i. 260
della Stelleta, i. 250
della Tritone, i. 106, 119-122, 155
Triumphalis, i. 66, 70, 71
Venti Settembre, i. 186
Vittorio Emanuele, i. 275
Viale Castro Pretorio, i. 107
Vicolo della Corda, i. 283
Victor Emmanuel, i. 53, 166, 184; ii. 90, 221, 224, 225, 238
monument to, ii. 90
Victoria, Queen of England, ii. 263
Vigiles, cohort of the, i. 158, 170
Villa Borghese, i. 223
Colonna, i. 181, 189
d'Este, i. 185
of Hadrian, i. 180
Ludovisi, i. 106, 193
Medici, i. 259, 262, 264, 265, 269, 313
Negroni, i. 148, 149, 289, 292
Publica, i. 250
Villani, i. 160, 277; ii. 164
Villas, in the Region of Monti, i. 149, 150
Vinci, Lionardo da, i. 260, 315; ii. 147, 159, 169, 171, 175, 184,
188, 195, 200
"The Last Supper," by, ii. 171, 184
Virgil, i. 44, 56, 63
Virginia, i. 14
Virginius, i. 15
Volscians, ii. 230
W
Walls--
Aurelian, i. 93, 106, 110, 193, 271; ii. 119, 144
Servian, i. 5, 7, 15, 250, 270
of Urban the Eighth, ii. 132
Water supply, i. 145
William the Silent, ii. 263
Witches on the Æsquiline, i. 140
Women's life in Rome, i. 9
Z
Zama, i. 21, 59
Zenobia of Palmyra, i. 179; ii. 150.
Zouaves, the, ii. 216
