Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol. VIII-XII

APPENDIX ADDITIONAL NOTES BY THE EDITOR

SOURCES FOR THE SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE, ad 1453 — ( CHAP. LXVIII )

For the siege of Constantinople, Gibbon had only three accounts by eye-witnesses, that of Phrantzes, that of Leonardus of Chios, and that of Cardinal Isidore (see above, p. 6, note 12). Several other relations by persons who were in the city during the siege have been published during the present century.

Chief among these is the Journal of a Venetian, Nicolò Barbaro: Giornale dell’ assedio di Constantinopoli 1453, edited by E. Cornet, 1856. 1 It is invaluable for determining the diary of the siege; but it is marked by hostility and spite towards the Genoese, especially Giustiniani, and by contempt for the Greeks.

An “Informacion” sent by Francesco de Tresves to the Cardinal d’Avignon, and also by Jehan Blanchin and Jacques Tedardi (or Tedaldi) of Florence, on the capture of Constantinople. Edited in Martene and Durand, Thesaurus, i. p. 1819 sqq. (1717) and in Chartier’s Chroniques de Charles VII., iii. p. 20 sqq., 1858. Tedardi was an eye-witness. He escaped by throwing himself into the water, and was rescued by a Venetian boat.

Ubertino Pusculo of Brescia, who was also fortunate enough to escape, has left an account of the last episode of the history of the Empire in four Books of Latin hexameters. It contributes little enough to our knowledge of facts. The description of the siege does not begin till the middle of the Third book. In the First book there is an account of the battle of Varna, and much about the ecclesiastical antagonism of the Greeks and Latins. The Second begins with the death of John Palacologus and the accession of Constantine, and contains a virulent description of the moral degeneration of the people of Constantinople (v. 117 sqq. ): —

obscaena sanctae pietatis in urbe nec species nec forma fuit, nec gratia recti, nec virtutis amor (v. 141).

The work is published in Ellissen’s Analekten, vol. iii., as an appendix, 1857.

An anonymous Greek poem, in political verses, under the title of Capture of Constantinople (Ἅλωσις Κωνσταντινουπόλεος), is misnamed, for it touches only incidentally on the facts of the siege and is in this respect of little historical importance. It is really an appeal to the powers of the West —

αὐθένταις εὐγενέστατοι, τη̂ς Δύσης μεγιστα̂νες —

French and English, Spanish and Germans

Φραζζέζους καὶ Ἀγκέζιδες, Σπανιόλους, Ἀλαμάνους —

to combine and recover Constantinople from the unbelievers. The Venetians are especially encouraged and urged to set the example —

Ὧ Βενετζιάνοι ϕρόνιμοι, πρακταɩ̂οι κ’ ἐπιδέξιοι.

The Hungarians, Servians, and Walachians are incited to avenge the defeat of Varna: —

Ὦ Βλαχία πολύθλιβη, Σερβίαπονεμένη, θυμεɩ̂σθε ταɩ̂ς αἱχμαλωσιαɩ̂ς, Οὐγκρία λυπημένη.

The author, though orthodox, was not extreme in his ecclesiastical views. He probably lived within reach of Mohammad’s arm, for he will not disclose his name: —

Τώρα σκεπάζω τὄνομα καὶ κρύβω τὅνομά μου, νὰ μὴ τὸ ’ξεύρουν οἱ πολλοὶ τἱς [Editor: Illegible character] τοιαν̂τα γράψας,

but gives his friends the means of knowing his identity by mentioning two bodily marks — a black mole on the little finger of his right hand, and another of the same size on his left hand (vv. 10, 20 sqq. ). The work was first edited by Ellissen in vol. iii. of his Analekten (1857), with introduction, translation, and analysis, under the title Dirge of Constantinople (Θρη̂νος Κωνσταντινοπόλεως — a misnomer, for it is not a dirge but a tearful appeal. Legrand published an improved text in 1880 in vol. i. of his Bibl. grecque vulgairc, p. 169 sqq.

A Slavonic account, written probably by a Slav of some of the Balkan countries, is also preserved, and has been published by Sreznevski under the title: Skazaniia o vziatii Tsargrada bezbozhnym turetskym sultanom, in the Zapiski of the 2nd Division of the St. Petersburg Academy of Science, vol. i. p. 99 sqq., 1854.

We have another Slavonic account, written in a mixture of Polish and Servian, by a Janissary of Mohammad, named Michael, who took part in the siege. He was a Servian of Ostrovića, and in his later years he went to Poland and wrote his Memoirs, which were edited, as “Pamietniki Janiczara,” by Galezowsky in 1828, in vol. v. of his collection of Polish writers (Zbior Pisarzow Polskieh). This relation is especially valuable as written from outside, by one who knew what was going on in the camp of the besiegers. It has been utilised by M. Mijatovich in his account of the siege (see below).

A report by the Father Superior of the Franciscans who was at Galata during the siege was printed by Muratori in vol. 18 (p. 701) of the Scr. Rer. It.: Rapporto del Superiore dei Franciscani presente all’ assedio et alla presa di Constantinopoli. It seems to have escaped the notice of Gibbon.

An account by Christoforo Riccherio (La presa di Constantinopoli) is inserted in Sansovino’s Dell’ Historia Universale dell’ origine et imperio de Turchi (1564), p. 343 sqq.

Abraham, an Armenian monk, who was present at the siege, wrote a “Mélodie élégiaque,” which was translated into French by Brosset and printed in St. Martin’s ed. of Lebeau’s Histoire du Bas-Empire (xxi. p. 307 sqq. ) which Brosset completed.

Adam de Montaldo, of Genoa: De Constantinopolitano excidio ad nobilissimum juvenem Melleducam Cicalam, amicum optimum; edited by C. Desimoni, in the Atti della Società Ligure di storia patria, x. p. 325 sqq., 1874.

Besides these relations of eye-witnesses we have some additional contemporary accounts which were not accessible to Gibbon. The most important of these sources, Critobulus, has been spoken of in Appendix 1 of vol. xi.

Zorzi Dolphin wrote an account of the “siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453,” which was published by G. M. Thomas in the Sitzungsberichte of the Bavarian Academy, 1868. His sources were the reports of Leonardo of Chios, Philip da Rimano, and anonymous eye-witnesses. He adds little to the story.

A letter of the Genoese “Podestà of Pera,” written on June 23, 1853, giving a brief account of the capture, was published by Sylvestre de Sacy in Notices et extraits des manuscripts de la bibliothèque du Roi, xi. 1, p. 74, 1827.

Documents throwing light on the policy of the Genoese in the fatal year will be found in Vigna’s Codice diplomatico delle Colonie Tauro-Liguri, durante la Signoria dell’ uficio de S. Georgio (1453-1475), 1868.

Of little importance for the siege is the Amyris of Filelfo— on the life and deeds of Mohammad in 4 Books — published in Hopf’s Chroniques gréco-romanes. The Ἀνάκληματη̂ς Κωνσταντινόπολης (the anonymous writer of these verses was possibly a Cretan) published by Legrand, Collection de monuments, Nouv. sér., v. p. 85 sqq., and the Θρη̂νος on the capture, published by Lampros in Ἑστία, 1886, p. 821 sqq., tell us nothing. A Monody of Andronicus Callistus, in Migne’s Patr. Gr., 161, p. 1124, teaches us, as Paspates has pointed out, that there was water in the ditch outside the western wall.

The final scene of the siege is briefly described in Spandugino Cantacusino’s Della origine de principi Turchi (which is included in Bk. ii. of Sansovino’s Dell’ Historia Universale, p. 187 sqq. ), p. 195-6.

There are a number of other documents extant which have not yet been printed. C. Hopf and A. Dethier had designed and prepared the publication of these in the Monumenta Hungar. Hist., along with many sources which had been already published. Four volumes lie in MS.; a description of their contents is given by Krumbacher in his Gesch. der byzantinischen Litteratur , p. 311-12.

Brosset gathered some material from Armenian and Georgian sources; see the last vol. of St. Martin’s edit. of Lebeau’s Histoire du Bas-Empire.

The Turkish authorities are of very little value for the siege; they were utilised by Hammer. The earliest Ottoman historians belong to the end of the 15th century, viz. the History of the great-grandson of Ashīk-Pasha (who lived under Murad I.); the anonymous chronicle, Tarīkhi Ali Osmān; the World-view of Neshri. See Hammer’s Introduction to his History. These earlier works were used by the most famous of Ottoman historians, Sad ad-Dīn, in his Crown of Histories (written under Murad III., end of 16th cent.).

The following is a list of the chief modern accounts of the siege that have appeared since Gibbon wrote: —

Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, i. p. 398 sqq., 1834.

Zinkeisen, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, i. p. 811 sqq., 1840.

Stassulevich (J.), Osada i Vziatie Vizantii Turkami, 1854.

Sreznevski, Poviest o Tsargradie, 1855.

Mordtmann (A. D.), Belagerung und Eroberung Constantinopels durch die Türken im Jahre 1453; 1858. (This had two advantages over previous accounts. Mordtmann knew the ground; and he made use of the diary of Barbaro.)

Finlay, History of Greece, vol. iii. p. 503 sqq.

Broadribb and Besant, Constantinople, a sketch of its history from its foundation to its conquest by the Turks, 1879.

Vlasto (E. H.), Les derniers jours de Constantinople, 1883.

Paspatês (A. G.), Πολιορκία καὶ ἅλωσις τη̂ς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως ὑπὸ τω̂ν Ὀθωμανω̂ν ὲν ἔτει, 1453; 1890.

Mijatovich (Ch.) Constantine, Last Emperor of the Greeks, 1892.

The sources have been dealt with in an article by P. Pogodin in the Zhurnal min. narod. prosv., vol. 283, August, 1889.

A. van Millingen’s Byzantine Constantinople (1899), which appeared too late to be used in the preparation of this volume, contains much material for the study of the siege, and many difficulties in the episode are discussed. It may be observed that the author argues with considerable force from the view that the route of the Turkish ships across the hills was by the valley of Dolma Bagtchè, a distance of three miles. This is the view adopted above, p. 33, note 63.

For the character of Mahomet II. it is dangerous to trust either the Turks or the Christians. The most moderate picture appears to be drawn by Phranza (l. i. c. 33), whose resentment had cooled in age and solitude; see likewise Spondanus ( AD 1451, No. 11), and the continuator of Fleury (tom. xxii. p. 552), the Elogia of Paulus Jovius (l. iii. p. 164-166), and the Dictionnaire de Bayle (tom. iii. p. 272-279). [Cp. Critobulus, i. 5, in Müller, Frag. Hist. Gr., v. part 2; Zinkeisen, Gesch. des osmanischen Reiches, ii. 468 sqq. ]

Cantemir (p. 115), and the moschs which he founded, attest his public regard for religion. Mahomet freely disputed with the patriarch Gennadius on the two religions (Spond. AD 1453, No. 22).

Quinque linguas præter suam noverat; Græcam, Latinam, Chaldaicam, Persicam. The Latin translator of Phranza has dropt the Arabic, which the Koran must recommend to every Musulman. [The Greek text of Phranzes, i. 32 (p. 95 ed. Bonn) has Ἀραβικήν. The historian Critobulus (for whom see vol. ix. Appendix 1) gives us the means of criticising this statement of Phrantzes. He says (i. 5, 2) that Mohammad was thoroughly conversant with Arabic and Persian and had studied Greek philosophical works (Aristotelian and Stoic) that were translated into those languages. He repeats this statement, v. 10, 4, and describes the sultan studying the cosmographical diagrams of Ptolemy. Villoison (Notices et extraits des Manuscrits, vol. viii. part ii. p. 22) quotes from a description of Mohammad given by Nicolaus Sagundinus to King Alfonso of Aragon, in Jan. 1453, the statement that the sultan kept by him two physicians, one versed in Latin, the other in Greek; and they instructed him in ancient history.]

Philelphus, by a Latin ode, requested and obtained the liberty of his wife’s mother and sisters from the conqueror of Constantinople. It was delivered into the sultan’s hands by the envoys of the duke of Milan. Philelphus himself was suspected of a design of retiring to Constantinople; yet the orator often sounded the trumpet of holy war (see his Life by M. Lancelot, in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tom. x. p. 718, 724, c.). [The Letter of Philelphus to Mohammad, 11th March, 1454, is published in his biography by Rosmini (1805), vol. ii. p. 305.]

Robert Valturio published at Verona, in 1483, his twelve books, de Re Militari, in which he first mentions the use of bombs. By his patron Sigismond Malatesta, prince of Rimini, it had been addressed with a Latin epistle to Mahomet II.

According to Phranza, he assiduously studied the lives and actions of Alexander, Augustus, Constantine, and Theodosius. I have read somewhere that Plutarch’s Lives were translated by his orders into the Turkish language. If the sultan himself understood Greek, it must have been for the benefit of his subjects. Yet these Lives are a school of freedom as well as of valour. [Critobulus (i. 5, 1) says that Mohammed’s examples were Alexander, Pompey, and Cæsar — πρὸς Ἀλέξανδρον ἑώρα καὶ Πομπηΐους καὶ Καίσαρας καὶ τοὺς κατ’ ἐκείνους βασιλεɩ̂ς τε καὶ στρατηγούς.]

The famous Gentile Bellino, whom he had invited from Venice, was dismissed with a chain and collar of gold, and a purse of 3000 ducats. With Voltaire I laugh at the foolish story of a slave purposely beheaded, to instruct the painter in the action of the muscles. [Bellini painted a portrait of Mohammad, which is extant. It passed into the possession of Sir Henry Layard. For Bellini at the Sultan’s court (1479-80) see L. Thuasne, Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed II.]

[The story is an invention, and is likewise rejected by Thuasne ( op. cit. p. 53 sqq. ), who points out that a similar story was told about Parrhasius (see the elder Seneca’s Controversiae, x. 5).]

These Imperial drunkards were Soliman I., Selim II., and Amurath IV. (Cantemir, p. 61). The sophis of Persia can produce a more regular succession; and in the last age our European travellers were the witnesses and the companions of their revels.

Calapin, one of these royal infants, was saved from his cruel brother, and baptised at Rome under the name of Callistus Othomannus. The emperor Frederic III. presented him with an estate in Austria, where he ended his life; and Cuspinian, who in his youth conversed with the aged prince at Vienna, applauds his piety and wisdom (de Cæsaribus, p. 672, 673).

See the accession of Mahomet II. in Ducas (c. 33), Phranza (l. i. c. 33, l. ii. c. 2), Chalcondyles (l. vii. p. 199 [p. 376, ed. Bonn]), and Cantemir (p. 96).

Before I enter on the siege of Constantinople, I shall observe that, except the short hints of Cantemir and Leunclavius, I have not been able to obtain any Turkish account of this conquest; such an account as we possess of the siege of Rhodes by Soliman II. (Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xxvi. p. 723-769). I must therefore depend on the Greeks, whose prejudices, in some degree, are subdued by their distress. Our standard texts are those of Ducas (c. 34-42), Phranza (l. iii. c. 7-20), Chalcondyles (l. viii. p. 201-214 [p. 380 sqq., ed. Bonn]), and Leonardus Chiensis (Historia C. P. a Turco expugnatæ, Norimberghæ, 1544, in 4to, 20 leaves [more accessible in Reusner’s Epistolæ Turcicæ, i. p. 113 sqq., or in the Chronica Turcica of Lonicerus, i. p. 315 sqq. ]). The last of these narratives is the earliest in date, since it was composed in the isle of Chios, the 16th of August 1453, only seventy-nine days after the loss of the city, and in the first confusion of ideas and passions. Some hints may be added from an epistle of Cardinal Isidore (in Farragine Rerum Turcicarum, ad calcem Chalcondyl. Clauseri, Basil, 1556 [and in Reusner’s Epistolæ Turcicæ, i. 104]) to Pope Nicholas V., and a tract of Theodosius Zygomala, which he addressed, in the year 1581, to Martin Crusius (Turco-Græcia, l. i. p. 74-98, Basil, 1584). The various facts and materials are briefly though critically reviewed by Spondanus ( AD 1453, No. 1-27). The hearsay-relations of Monstrelet and the distant Latins, I shall take leave to disregard. [See for other authorities Appendix.]

The situation of the fortress, and the topography of the Bosphorus, are best learned from Peter Gyllius (de Bosphoro Thracio, l. ii. c. 13 [cp. p. 13-14]), Leunclavius (Pandect. p. 445), and Tournefort (Voyage dans le Levant, tom. ii. lettre xv. p. 443, 444); but I must regret the map or plan which Tournefort sent to the French minister of the marine. The reader may turn back to chap. xvii. [vol. iii.] of this history. [The building of the fortress is well described by Critobulus, i. 10 and 11 (p. 59-62). The place is now called Rumili Hissari, Castle of Rumelia. The village of Asomaton is the modern Arnaut kioï, a little to the north of Bebek. Compare Mordtmann, Belagerung und Eroberung Constantinopels, p. 17, 18; Paspates, Πολιορκία καὶ ἄλωσις τη̂ς Κωνστ., p. 78 sqq. ]

The opprobrious name which the Turks bestow on the Infidels is expressed Καβουρ by Ducas, and Giaour by Leunclavius and the moderns. The former term is derived by Ducange (Gloss. Græc. tom. i. p. 530) from καβουρον, in vulgar Greek a tortoise, as denoting a retrograde motion from the faith. But, alas! Gabour is no more than Gheber, which was transferred from the Persian to the Turkish language, from the worshippers of fire to those of the crucifix (d’Herbelot, Bibliot. Orient. p. 375).

Phranza does justice to his master’s sense and courage: Calliditatem hominis non ignorans Imperator prior arma movere constituit, and stigmatises the folly of the cum sacri tum profani proceres, which he had heard, amentes spe vanâ pasci. Ducas was not a privy counsellor.

Instead of this clear and consistent account, the Turkish Annals (Cantemir, p. 97) revived the foolish tale of the ox’s hide, and Dido’s stratagem in the foundation of Carthage. These annals (unless we are swayed by an antichristian prejudice) are far less valuable than the Greek historians.

In the dimensions of this fortress, the old castle of Europe, Phranza does not exactly agree with Chalcondyles, whose description has been verified on the spot by his editor Leunclavius. [Phrantzes (p. 234) gives the breadth of the towers as 25 feet, and this nearly agrees with Critobulus (i. 11, 4) who says “12 cubits,” i.e., 24 feet. Chalcondyles says 22 feet, and Ducas “30 spans,” i.e., 22½ feet. Critobulus alone gives the height of the wall, 100 feet, and adds that in size the fortress resembled not a fortress but a little town (πολίχνη).

Among these were some pages of Mahomet, so conscious of his inexorable rigour that they begged to lose their heads in the city unless they could return before sunset.

Ducas, c. 35. Phranza (l. iii. c. 3), who had sailed in his vessel, commemorates the Venetian pilot as a martyr. [Cp. Niccolò Barbaro, p. 2 (ed. Cornet). Other Venetian vessels were more successful.]

Auctum est Palæologorum genus, et Imperii successor, parvæque Romanorum scintillæ heres natus, Andreas, c. (Phranza, l. iii. c. 7). The strong expression was inspired by his feelings.

Cantemir, p. 97, 98. The sultan was either doubtful of his conquest or ignorant of the superior merits of Constantinople. A city or a kingdom may sometimes be ruined by the Imperial fortune of their sovereign.

Σύντροϕος, by the president Cousin, is translated père nourricier, most correctly indeed from the Latin version; but in his haste he has overlooked the note by which Ismael Boillaud (ad Ducam, c. 35) acknowledges and rectifies his own error.

The Oriental custom of never appearing without gifts before a sovereign or a superior is of high antiquity, and seems analogous with the idea of sacrifice, still more ancient and universal. See the examples of such Persian gifts, Ælian, Hist. Var. l. i. c. 31-33.

The Lala of the Turks (Cantemir, p. 34) and the Tata of the Greeks (Ducas, c. 35) are derived from the natural language of children; and it may be observed that all such primitive words which denote their parents are the simple repetition of one syllable, composed of a labial or dental consonant and an open vowel (des Brosses, Méchanisme des Langues, tom. i. p. 231-247).

[Orban (Ὀρβανός) was a Hungarian; no authority says that he was a Dane. Gibbon has mistaken the phrase of Chalcondyles, who pedantically describes him as a “Dacian” (Δάξ), p. 385, ed. Bonn. τηλεβολιστής is the word Chalcondyles uses for a “gunner.” Strictly Orban was a τηλεβολοποιός.]

The Attic talent weighed about sixty minæ, or avoirdupois pounds (see Hooper on Ancient Weights, Measures, c.); but among the modern Greeks that classic appellation was extended to a weight of one hundred or one hundred and twenty-five pounds (Ducange, τάλαντον). Leonardus Chiensis measured the ball or stone of the second cannon: Lapidem, qui palmis undecim ex meis ambibat in gyro. [The palma, or span, being reckoned at 8 inches, it is calculated that the ball would have weighed 1456 lbs. avoirdupois. Mordtmann, op. cit. p. 36.]

[According to Zorzo Dolfin, Assedio e presa di Cpli § 16 (Paspates, op. cit. p. 120 n.) the cannon was conveyed in pieces. ]

See Voltaire (Hist. Générale, c. xci. p. 294, 295). He was ambitious of universal monarchy; and the poet frequently aspires to the name and style of an astronomer, a chemist, c. [Mordtmann ( loc. cit. ) says that stone balls, measuring from 72 to 88 inches round, have been found in the Arsenal, in the walls of Galata, and elsewhere.]

The Baron de Tott (tom. iii. p. 85-89), who fortified the Dardanelles against the Russians, describes in a lively, and even comic, strain his own prowess and the consternation of the Turks. But that adventurous traveller does not possess the art of gaining our confidence.

Non audivit, indignum ducens, says the honest Antoninus; but, as the Roman court was afterwards grieved and ashamed, we find the more courtly expression of Platina, in animo fuisse pontifici juvare Græcos, and the positive assertion of Æneas Sylvius, structam classem, c. (Spond. AD 1453, No. 3).

Antonin. in Proœm. — Epist. Cardinal. Isidor. apud Spondanum; and Dr. Johnson, in the tragedy of Irene, has happily seized this characteristic circumstance: —

The groaning Greeks dig up the golden caverns, The accumulated wealth of hoarding ages; That wealth which, granted to their weeping prince, Had rang’d embattled nations at their gates.

[The Tower of St. Stephen, on the sea of Marmora, two hours from the city, was also stormed and the garrison beheaded. Critobulus (i. 32) mentions that Mohammad himself, after his arrival, stormed the forts of Studion and Therapeion; it is unknown where they were. He also sent his admiral Paltogles to capture the fort of the Prince’s island ( ib. 33). These facts are recorded by Critobulus alone.]

The palatine troops are styled Capiculi, the provincials, Seratculi: and most of the names and institutions of the Turkish militia existed before the Canon Nameh of Soliman II., from which, and his own experience, Count Marsigli has composed his Military State of the Ottoman empire. [Mohammad pitched his headquarters on the hill of Maltepe, a short distance from the middle part of the land wall, opposite to the gate of St. Romanus (Top Kapussi) and the part of the wall known as Myriandrion (cp. Mordtmann, Esquisse topographique de Constantinople, p. 24). The Anatolic army (under Isaac) was on his right, stretching to the sea of Marmora, the Rumeliot (under Karatzas) on his left, towards the Golden Horn. A special force was committed to Zagan Pasha, and posted behind Galata, on the ground which is now Pera, to watch the Genoese; and Zagan was also to survey the building of a bridge across the Golden Horn to the north point of Constantinople (Porta Cynegii, Aiwan Kapussi). See Critobulus, i. 27 (p. 75); N. Barbaro, p. 30. — The numbers of the besieging army are given as follows: Phrantzes, 258,000; Critobulus, over 300,000 (not counting camp followers, c.); Chalcondyles, 400,000; Ducas, over 400,000 (p. 267), but his particular items (p. 283) amount to 260,000; Leonardus, over 300,000; N. Barbaro, 160,000; the Thrênos of Constantinople, 217,000. Tedardi, a Florentine witness (for whose work see Appendix), nearly agrees with Barbaro; counting 140,000 fighting men and 60,000 traders, tailors, c., who followed the army in hope of gain (Informacion, p. 21). Mordtmann is inclined to accept the number of Barbaro; Hammer, that of Phrantzes. It is to be observed that there were a large number of Christians in the Turkish army according to Tedardi (the Thrênos gives the number at 30,000; l. 752).]

The observation of Philelphus is approved by Cuspinian in the year 1508 (de Cæsaribus, in Epilog. de Militiâ Turcicâ, p. 697). Marsigli proves that the effective armies of the Turks are much less numerous than they appear. In the army that besieged Constantinople, Leonardus Chiensis reckons no more than 15,000 Janizaries. [The usual strength of the Ottoman army on an important expedition was about 100,000.]

Ego eidem (Imp.) tabellas extribui non absque dolore et mœstitiâ, mansitque apud nos duos aliis occultus numerus (Phranza, l. iii. c. 3). With some indulgence for national prejudices, we cannot desire a more authentic witness, not only of public facts, but of private counsels. [The statement of Phrantzes as to the numbers is confirmed by Tedardi.]

[All these strangers had not come with Giustiniani; he brought 700 (Barbaro, p. 13) or perhaps only 400 (Critobulus, i. 25; Leonardus, p. 319).]

[For the chain see above, vol. iii. p. 94. A part of the chain is preserved in the court of the church of St. Irene, and may be seen figured in Mordtmann’s Esquisse Topographique, p. 49. Cp. above, vol. x. p. 363-4.]

[Since the fourth century, various emperors had improved the fortifications of the city. Heraclius had strengthened the Palace of Blachern on the west (at the time of the Avar siege) by a new wall, between the Tower of Anemas and the Xyloporta; and Leo V. had built another wall outside the wall of Heraclius. In the twelfth century Manuel Comnenus built a wall enclosing the quarter called Caligaria, from the Tower of Anemas to the gate of Xylokerkos (or Kerkoporta). The Gate of Caligaria (Egri Kapu) was in this new wall of Manuel. The ineffective siege of Constantinople by Murad in 1432 moved John Palæologus to repair and strengthen the whole outer line of wall, and inscriptions recording this are found on the towers. The fortifications on the seaside, the walls along the Golden Horn and the Propontis, were mainly the work of Theophilus in the 9th century. It is interesting to find an inscription on a tower (near the Porta Contoscali) stating that it was repaired by George Brankovič, Despot of Servia, in 1448. In 1453 George contributed troops to the army of Mohammad.]

In Spondanus, the narrative of the union is not only partial but imperfect. The bishop of Pamiers died in 1642, and the history of Ducas, which represents these scenes (c. 36, 37) with such truth and spirit, was not printed till the year 1649.

Phranza, one of the conforming Greeks, acknowledges that the measure was adopted only propter spem auxilii; he affirms with pleasure that those who refused to perform their devotions in St. Sophia, extra culpam et in pace essent (l. iii. c. 20).

His primitive and secular name was George Scholarius, which he changed for that of Gennadius, either when he became a monk [in the monastery of the Pantokrator] or a patriarch. His defence, at Florence, of the same union which he so furiously attacked at Constantinople, has tempted Leo Allatius (Diatrib. de Georgiis, in Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. x. p. 760-786) to divide him into two men; but Renaudot (p. 343-383) has restored the identity of his person, and the duplicity of his character. [Monograph by C. Sathas, Γεώργιος Σχολάριος, 1865. On “the identity of this person” cp. Dräseke, Byzant. Zeitsch. iv. p. 3 (1895). The writings of Gennadius are collected in Migne, P.G. 160.]

[Ubertinus Pusculus (ii. l. 498 sqq., ed. Ellissen, p. 36-7) narrates that Gennadius suborned a Bohemian heretic, who happened to be in the city, to stir up the people against the Union and inveigh against the Pope.]

Φακιόλιον, καλύπτρα, may be fairly translated a cardinal’s hat. The difference of the Greek and Latin habits embittered the schism.

[Niccolò Barbaro, p. 14, 15, mentions that during the last two weeks of March, a Venetian sea-captain named Diedo, with the crews of his vessels, was employed by the emperor to dig a ditch in front of a portion of the wall near the Porta Caligaria (Egri Kapu). This was a weak spot.]

We are obliged to reduce the Greek miles to the smallest measure which is preserved in the wersts of Russia, of 547 French toises, and of 104⅔ to a degree. The six miles of Phranza do not exceed four English miles (D’Anville, Mesures Itinéraires, p. 61, 123, c.). [Cp. Critobulus, i. 28; he gives 126 stadia (15¾ miles) as the circuit of the city, allowing 48 for the land wall, 35 for the side of the Golden Horn. For the walls cp. above, vol. iii. p. 100, n. 33.]

At indies doctiores nostri facti paravere contra hostes machinamenta, quæ tamen avare dabantur. Pulvis erat nitri modica, exigua; tela modica; bombardæ, si aderant incommoditate loci primum hostes offendere maceriebus alveisque tectos non poterant. Nam siquæ magnæ erant, ne murus concuteretur noster, quiescebant. This passage of Leonardus Chiensis is curious and important. [The Turks had directed twelve large cannons (apart from the fourteen batteries) against the land wall: three against the Tekfour Serai Palace, four against the Gate of Romanus, three against the Gate of Selymbria, and two against the Golden Gate. The Gate of Romanus, against which the great cannon (which was named the Basilica ) was set, is hence called Top Kapussi, “Cannon Gate.” The reader should observe that between the Golden Gate and Blachernae there were four chief gates in this order: Porta Selymbriae (or Pegana), Porta Rusii (or Rhegii), Porta S. Romani, and Porta Charisii (or Charseae: the same as the Gate of Hadrianople). The most dangerous and important post at the S. Romanus Gate was defended by 3000 men (including 500 Genoese), under the command of the Emperor and Giustiniani, who were supported by Don Francisco of Toledo, a relative of the Emperor.]

According to Chalcondyles and Phranza, the great cannon burst: an accident which, according to Ducas, was prevented by the artist’s skill. It is evident that they do not speak of the same gun.

Near an hundred years after the siege of Constantinople, the French and English fleets in the Channel were proud of firing 300 shot in an engagement of two hours (Mémoires de Martin du Bellay, l. x. in the Collection Générale, tom. xxi. p. 239).

[The Christian who gave the advice was an envoy of John Hunyady. He could not resist criticising the shooting of the inexperienced Turkish gunners.]

I have selected some curious facts, without striving to emulate the bloody and obstinate eloquence of the Abbé de Vertot, in his prolix descriptions of the sieges of Rhodes, Malta, c. But that agreeable historian had a turn for romance, and, as he wrote to please the Order, he has adopted the same spirit of enthusiasm and chivalry.

The first theory of mines with gunpowder appears in 1480, in a MS. of George of Sienna (Tiraboschi, tom. vi. p. i. p. 324). They were first practised at Sarzanella, in 1487; but the honour and improvement in 1503 is ascribed to Peter of Navarre, who used them with success in the wars of Italy (Hist. de la Ligue de Cambray, tom. ii. p. 93-97).

[Cp. Blanchin and Tedardi, Informacion, p. 22 (for this work see Appendix).]

It is singular that the Greeks should not agree in the number of these illustrious vessels; the five of Ducas, the four of Phranza and Leonardus [and Barbaro and Pusculus], and the two of Chalcondyles [and Sad ad-Dīn, ii. p. 137], must be extended to the smaller, or confined to the larger, size. Voltaire, in giving one of these ships to Frederic III., confounds the emperors of the East and West. [Critobulus does not mention the Imperial ship but only the three Italian ships, which, he says, were sent by the Pope with provisional help till he should prepare a large armament, i. 39. Ducas describes them as Genoese merchant vessels. The date of the engagement is known from Barbaro (p. 23, 24), who supplies the chronology of the siege.]

In bold defiance, or rather in gross ignorance, of language and geography, the president Cousin detains them at Chios with a south, and wafts them to Constantinople with a north, wind.

[The fleet had arrived on April 12 (a small part of it had arrived earlier, on the same day as Mohammad, April 2, according to Phrantzes, p. 237). It weighed anchor, and made its headquarters, at Diplokionion, now Beshik Tash, on the Thracian side of the Bosphorus at a short distance north of the mouth of the Golden Horn.]

[Our authorities give very various statements as to the strength of the Turkish fleet. Critobulus (i. 22) says 350 (not counting ships of freight); Phrantzes, 480 (comparing p. 237 with p. 239 ed. Bonn); Marino Sanuto (Muratori, S.R.I. xxii. 1148), 375; Leonardus, 250; Chalcondyles, 230; Pusculus (4, 332), 170; Barbaro, 145.]

The perpetual decay and weakness of the Turkish navy may be observed in Rycaut (State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 372-378), Thévenot (Voyages, p. i. p. 229-242), and Tott (Mémoires, tom. iii.); the last of whom is always solicitous to amuse and amaze his reader.

I must confess that I have before my eyes the living picture which Thucydides (l. vii. c. 71) has drawn of the passions and gestures of the Athenians in a naval engagement in the great harbour of Syracuse. [Mordtmann, Belagerung, p. 138, n. 17, thinks that the spot where Mohammad looked on at the conflict was Zeitin Burnou, at a quarter of an hour’s distance from the Seven Towers (at the Golden Gate); at this point the sea near the shore is very shallow.]

[Leonardus says 10,000. Critobulus gives more reasonable numbers, but he, writing from the Turkish point of view, may have been inclined to understate the Turkish losses. He says that a little more than 100 were killed, and more than 300 wounded.]

According to the exaggeration or corrupt text of Ducas (c. 38), this golden bar was of the enormous and incredible weight of 500 libræ, or pounds. Bouillaud’s reading of 500 drachms, or five pounds, is sufficient to exercise the arm of Mahomet and bruise the back of his admiral.

Ducas, who confesses himself ill informed of the affairs of Hungary, assigns a motive of superstition, a fatal belief that Constantinople would be the term of the Turkish conquests. See Phranza (l. iii. c. 20) and Spondanus. [The Hungarian envoy had come to announce that Hunyady had resigned the government to Ladislaus, the young king, and to return the document, in which a truce between Turkey and Hungary had been signed in 1451, and ask for the counterpart which had been signed by Hunyady. The embassy was thus a move intended to suggest to Mohammad that Hungary might come to the rescue of the Emperor.]

[N. Barbaro says that the idea was suggested to the Sultan by a Christian (p. 27).]

[Starting from Diplokionion (Beshiktash) the ship sailed up the hill of Staurodromion, and descended to the little bay of Kasimpasha in the Golden Horn. See Paspates, op. cit. 136. We do not know how long before its execution the plan had been prepared. The distance was between two and three miles. The best description of the transport of the vessels is given by Critobulus, i. 42. According to Michael the Janissary (for his Memoirs see Appendix) “the batteries kept up an incessant cannonade that night,” to distract attention (Mijatovich, Constantine, Last Emperor of the Greeks, p. 163).]

[The number of ships is given by Barbaro as 72, by Tedardi as between 70 and 80, by Critobulus as 67 (Chalcondyles 70, Ducas 80).]

The unanimous of the four Greeks is confirmed by Cantemir (p. 96) from the Turkish annals; but I could wish to contract the distance of ten miles, and to prolong the term of one night.

Phranza relates two examples of a similar transportation over the six miles of the isthmus of Corinth: the one fabulous, of Augustus after the battle of Actium; the other true, of Nicetas, a Greek general, in the xth century. To these he might have added a bold enterprise of Hannibal, to introduce his vessels into the harbour of Tarentum (Polybius, l. viii. p. 749, edit. Gronov [c. 36]). [Cp. also Thucydides, iii. 15; 81; iv. 8; and the dragging of the Syracusan fleet of Dionysius I., over the isthmus of Motya, a distance of 2½ miles, on a wooden road (Diodorus, xiv. 50; Polyaenus, v. 2).]

A Greek of Candia, who had served the Venetians in a similar undertaking (Spond. AD 1438, No. 37), might possibly be the adviser and agent of Mahomet.

I particularly allude to our own embarkations on the lakes of Canada, in the years 1776 and 1777, so great in the labour, so fruitless in the event.

[Barbaro states that the bridge was not completed till May 19; and he places this attempt to burn the vessels on April 28. Gibbon follows Phrantzes. Ducas also mentions (p. 277 ed. Bonn) an attempt to burn the Turkish ships, and attributes its failure to the treachery of the Genoese of Galata, who revealed it to Mohammad. Ducas mentions the construction of the bridge after this unlucky enterprise. Critobulus relates how Mohammad foiled a plan of the Greeks to confine his ships to the little harbour (Kasim Pasha); and he places this episode after the building of the bridge (i. 44). It seems from this that Ducas has mixed together the incident recorded by Phrantzes with that recorded by Critobulus.]

[The Turks also essayed mining operations against the Caligaria region (south of Blachernae), where the ground was most favourable. But all their mines (the first was discovered on May 16, see Barbaro, p. 41) were foiled by the skill of a German engineer, Johannes Grant, who was entrusted with the defence of this part of the wall. Cp. Phrantzes, p. 254, and Tedardi, Informacion, p. 25.]

Chalcondyles and Ducas differ in the time and circumstances of the negotiation; and, as it was neither glorious nor salutary, the faithful Phranza spares his prince even the thought of a surrender.

[The author of the Slavonic relation of the siege (see Appendix) states that a council was held on May 3, and that all the military officers, the senators, and the patriarch advised the emperor to leave the city, and attempt to create a diversion. “The emperor” (the passage is thus translated by M. Ch. Mijatovich, op. cit. p. 173) “listened to all this quietly and patiently. At last, after having been for some time in deep thought, he began to speak: ‘I thank all for the advice which you have given me. I know that my going out of the city might be of some benefit to me, inasmuch as all that you foresee might really happen. But it is impossible for me to go away! How could I leave the churches of our Lord and his servants the clergy, and the throne, and my people in such a plight? What would the world say about me? I pray you, my friends, in future do not say to me anything else but: “Nay, sire, do not leave us!” Never, never will I leave you! I am resolved to die here with you!’ And saying this, the emperor turned his head aside, because tears filled his eyes; and with him wept the patriarch and all who were there.”]

[On this mission Mohammad sent his brother-in-law Ismail Hamza, lord of Sinope and Castamboly, who was on friendly terms with Constantine. The incident is entirely omitted by Barbaro, Phrantzes, and Critobulus.]

These wings (Chalcondyles, l. viii. p. 208) are no more than an Oriental figure; but, in the tragedy of Irene, Mahomet’s passion soars above sense and reason: —

Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds, And seat him in the Pleiads’ golden chariot — Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.

Besides the extravagance of the rant, I must observe, 1. That the operation of the winds must be confined to the lower region of the air. 2. That the name, etymology, and fable of the Pleiads are purely Greek (Scholiast ad Homer, Σ 686; Eudocia in Ioniâ, p. 399; Apollodore, l. iii. c. 10; Heine, p. 229, Not. 682), and had no affinity with the astronomy of the East (Hyde ad Ulugbeg, Tabul. in Syntagma Dissert. tom. i. p. 40, 42; Goguet, Origine des Arts, c. tom. vi. p. 73-78; Gebelin, Hist. du Calendrier, p. 73), which Mahomet had studied. 3. The golden chariot does not exist either in science or fiction; but I much fear that Dr. Johnson has confounded the Pleiads with the great bear or waggon, the zodiac with a northern constellation: —

Ἅρκτον θ’ [Editor: Illegible character]ν καὶ ἅμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσι.

Phranza quarrels with these Moslem acclamations, not for the name of God, but for that of the Prophet: the pious zeal of Voltaire is excessive, and even ridiculous. [There was a great illumination in the Turkish camp on the night of the 24th May, when the Sultan first proclaimed his plan for a general assault (Barbaro, p. 46; it is mentioned also by the Slavonic chronicle). Gibbon refers to the illumination on May 27.]

I am afraid that this discourse was composed by Phranza himself; and it smells so grossly of the sermon and the convent that I almost doubt whether it was pronounced by Constantine. Leonardus assigns him another speech, in which he addresses himself more respectfully to the Latin auxiliaries.

This abasement, which devotion has sometimes extorted from dying princes, is an improvement of the gospel doctrine of the forgiveness of injuries; it is more easy to forgive 499 times than once to ask pardon of an inferior.

[So the eye-witnesses, Phrantzes and Barbaro. But Critobulus and Ducas set the beginning of the final assault on the 28th, and make the fighting go on all night.]

Besides the 10,000 guards, and the sailors and the marines, Ducas numbers in this general assault 250,000 Turks, both horse and foot.

[At 3 o’clock in the morning a breach in the outer wall near the Gate of St. Romanus had been made by a cannon, and the Turks pressed into the space between the outer and inner walls. They were repelled at last, mainly through the efforts of the Venetians (according to Barbaro); but it was soon necessary to bring up the reserves which (under Theodore Palaeologus and Demetrius Cantacuzenus) were posted at the Church of the Holy Apostles. It was at this moment, when these reserve troops were driving back the Turks, that Giustiniani was wounded (in the leg, Phrantzes; in the hand, Chalcondyles and Ducas; under the armpit, Zorzo Dolfin and Leonardus; in the arm, Pusculus; in the chest, Critobulus).]

In the severe censure of the flight of Justiniani, Phranza expresses his own feelings and those of the public. For some private reasons, he is treated with more lenity and respect by Ducas; but the words of Leonardus Chiensis express his strong and recent indignation, gloriæ salutis suique oblitus. In the whole series of their Eastern policy, his countrymen, the Genoese, were always suspected, and often guilty. [“The dialogue between Constantine and Giustiniani given in the pages of Gibbon is evidently a rhetorical invention. None of the historians were present, and who of those present could report any conversation with accuracy at such a moment?” Finlay, History of Greece, iii. p. 520 note. Barbaro, who is throughout severe on the Genoese, is markedly hostile to Giustiniani. The facts that the wound actually proved mortal, and that Giustiniani’s valour and distinguished services are extolled by all the Greek writers, are a sufficient answer to the accusations of cowardice and failure in duty.]

[In this account of the last conflict Gibbon has omitted a highly important fact which hastened the capture of the city. This fact is not mentioned by Phrantzes; it rests on the authority of Ducas (p. 280-5) and is confirmed by a short statement of Critobulus (i. 60 ad fin. ). North of the Porta Charseae, south of the Porta Caligaria, in a transverse wall which connects the inner and outer Theodosian walls, there is a small postern (found by M. Paspates) which is called the Kerkoporta by Ducas (wrongly?), and was always kept shut, but had been opened by Giustiniani’s orders for the purpose of a possible sortie. Some of the Greeks who were fighting in the space between the inner and the outer wall, pressed by the enemy, retreated through the Kerkoporta, and fifty Turks followed them, as they neglected to shut the gate. More Turks soon pressed in, and others mounted the walls, captured the tower close to the gate, and set up the Ottoman standards on the walls. The retreat of the Greeks, who were outside the inner wall, by the Kerkoporta was now cut off, and seeing the flags of the foe on the battlements they thronged back through the Porta Charseae, which was then left undefended, so that the Turks could enter by this gate too. The Turks who thus penetrated seem to have betaken themselves at first to the harbour side of the city, and some time elapsed before the combatants at the Gate of St. Romanus, where the fight was raging most hotly, learned what had happened. Phrantzes (without explaining) describes the arrival of the tidings (p. 285). A cry was heard on the harbour side: “The fort is taken, the standards of the foe are on the towers!” Then Constantine spurred his horse into the thick of the fray.]

Ducas kills him with two blows of Turkish soldiers; Chalcondyles wounds him in the shoulder, and then tramples him in the gate. The grief of Phranza carrying him among the enemy escapes from the precise image of his death; but we may, without flattery, apply these noble lines of Dryden: —

As to Sebastian, let them search the field; And, where they find a mountain of the slain, Send one to climb, and looking down beneath, There they will find him at his manly length, With his face up to heaven, in that red monument Which his good sword had digg’d.

Spondanus ( AD 1453, No. 10), who has hopes of his salvation, wishes to absolve this demand from the guilt of suicide.

Leonardus Chiensis very properly observes that the Turks, had they known the emperor, would have laboured to save and secure a captive so acceptable to the sultan. [It appears that Constantine fell in the space between the inner and outer walls (Ducas, p. 283), near the Gate of St. Romanus (Phrantzes, p. 287). Critobulus is mistaken in saying that it was near the Kerkoporta (i. 60). Theodore Spandugino Cantacusino in his work “Della origine de principi Turchi” (ed. 1564, p. 195) describes Constantine as rejecting the proposals which were made to him to flee to the harbour, and crying, “God forbid that I should live an Emperor without enjoying the Empire! I will die with my city!”]

Cantemir, p. 96. The Christian ships in the mouth of the harbour had flanked and retarded this naval attack. [Cp. Barbaro, p. 56; Critobulus, i. 65.]

Chalcondyles most absurdly supposes that Constantinople was sacked by the Asiatics in revenge for the ancient calamities of Troy; and the grammarians of the xvth century are happy to melt down the uncouth appellation of Turks into the more classical name of Teucri.

When Cyrus surprised Babylon during the celebration of a festival, so vast was the city, and so careless were the inhabitants, that much time elapsed before the distant quarters knew that they were captives. Herodotus (l. i. c. 191), and Usher (Annal. p. 78), who has quoted from the prophet Jeremiah a passage of similar import.

This lively description is extracted from Ducas (c. 39), who two years afterwards was sent ambassador from the prince of Lesbos to the sultan (c. 44). Till Lesbos was subdued in 1463 (Phranza, l. iii. c. 27), that island must have been full of the fugitives of Constantinople, who delighted to repeat, perhaps to adorn, the tale of their misery. [The terrible description of the wasting of Constantinople given by Critobulus (i. 61-63), who wrote as a friend of the Turks, proves that the other historians have not exaggerated the frightful scenes. He has an interesting notice of the destruction of books sacred and profane (c. 62, 3); some were destroyed, but “the greater number of them” were sold for small sums, cp. Ducas, p. 312.]

[So Leonardus, p. 334; according to Critobulus, 50,000, and the same authority gives the number of slain among the defenders, throughout the siege and in the final capture, as 4000.]

See Phranza, l. iii. c. 20, 21. His expressions are positive: Ameras suâ manu jugulavit . . . volebat enim eo turpiter et nefarie abuti. Me miserum et infelicem. Yet he could only learn from report the bloody or impure scenes that were acted in the dark recesses of the seraglio.

See Tiraboschi (tom. vi. p. i. p. 290), and Lancelot (Mém. de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tom. x. p. 718). I should be curious to learn how he could praise the public enemy, whom he so often reviles as the most corrupt and inhuman of tyrants.

The Commentaries of Pius II. suppose that he craftily placed his cardinal’s hat on the head of a corpse, which was cut off and exposed in triumph, while the legate himself was bought and delivered, as a captive of no value. The great Belgic Chronicle adorns his escape with new adventures, which he suppressed (says Spondanus, AD 1453, No. 15) in his own letters, lest he should lose the merit and reward of suffering for Christ.

Busbequius expatiates with pleasure and applause on the rights of war and the use of slavery among the ancients and the Turks (de Legat. Turcicâ, epist. iii. p. 161).

This sum is specified in a marginal note of Leunclavius (Chalcondyles, l. viii. p. 211), but in the distribution to Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Ancona, of 50, 20, 20, and 15,000 ducats, I suspect that a figure has been dropt. Even with the restitution, the foreign property would scarcely exceed one fourth.

See the enthusiastic praises and lamentations of Phranza (l. iii. c. 17).

See Ducas (c. 43), and an epistle, 15th July, 1453, from Laurus Quirinus to Pope Nicholas V. (Hody de Græcis, p. 192, from a MS. in the Cotton Library). [Cp. above, p. 86, note 89.]

The Julian calendar, which reckons the days and hours from midnight, was used at Constantinople. But Ducas seems to understand the natural hours from sunrise.

See the Turkish Annals, p. 329, and the Pandects of Leunclavius, p. 448.

100

I have had occasion (vol. iii. p. 104-5) to mention this curious relic of Grecian antiquity.

101

[According to the Slavonic Relation, he stooped down at the threshold of the church, took some earth, and scattered it on his head, in token of humiliation to God. In the same source it is stated that, at the prayers of the priests who met him in St. Sophia, he issued a proclamation to stay the pillage, c. 21-22.]

102

[Covered with whitewash.]

103

We are obliged to Cantemir (p. 102) for the Turkish account of the conversion of St. Sophia, so bitterly deplored by Phranza and Ducas. It is amusing enough to observe in what opposite lights the same object appears to a Musulman and a Christian eye.

104

This distich, which Cantemir gives in the original, derives new beauties from the application. It was thus that Scipio repeated, in the sack of Carthage, the famous prophecy of Homer. The same generous feeling carried the mind of the conqueror to the past or the future.

105

I cannot believe, with Ducas (see Spondanus, AD 1453, No. 13), that Mahomet sent round Persia, Arabia, c. the head of the Greek emperor; he would surely content himself with a trophy less inhuman.

106

Phranza was the personal enemy of the great duke; nor could time, or death, or his own retreat to a monastery extort a feeling of sympathy or forgiveness [iii. 9]. Ducas is inclined to praise and pity the martyr; Chalcondyles is neuter; but we are indebted to him for the hint of the Greek conspiracy.

107

[So Ducas, p. 303 sqq. Chalcondyles, p. 402. Pusculus, iv. 1071. Critobulus says generally that Notaras and his sons were put to death by the advice of the Sultan’s councillors (i. 73, 9).]

108

For the restitution of Constantinople and the Turkish foundations, see Cantemir (p. 102-109), Ducas (c. 42), with Thévenot, Tournefort, and the rest of our modern travellers. [Cp. Zinkeisen, op. cit. ii. p. 5-8.] From a gigantic picture of the greatness, population, c. of Constantinople and the Ottoman empire (Abrégé de l’Histoire Ottomane, tom. i. p. 16-21), we may learn that in the year 1586 the Moslems were less numerous in the capital than the Christians or even the Jews.

109

The Turbé, or sepulchral monument of Abu Ayub, is described and engraved in the Tableau Général de l’Empire Ottoman (Paris, 1787, in large folio), a work of less use, perhaps, than magnificence (tom. i. p. 305, 306).

110

[Subsequently 4000 Servians were settled in Constantinople; 2000 Peloponnesian families after the reduction of the Peloponnesus; two thirds of the population of Amastris, the Genoese colony on the Black Sea; also Trapezus, Sinope, Caffa, Euboea, Samothrace, c. were forced, when they were conquered, to augment the population of the capital. See Zinkeisen, loc. cit. ]

111

[The first volume of a history of the Greek Church under Turkish rule by Prof. Lebedev appeared in 1896. It is entitled: Istoriia greko-vostochnoi tserkvi pod vlastiiu Turok, ot padeniia Konstantinopolia do nastoiaschago vremeni.]

112

Phranza (l. iii. c. 19) relates the ceremony, which has possibly been adorned in the Greek reports to each other, and to the Latins. The fact is confirmed by Emanuel Malaxus, who wrote, in vulgar Greek, the history of the Patriarchs after the taking of Constantinople, inserted in the Turco-Græcia of Crusius (l. v. p. 106-184). [C. Sathas has shown that the Historia Patriarchica was not the work of Malaxus but of Damascenus Studites, to whom he also ascribes the Historia Politica, which is likewise printed in Turco-Graecia.] But the most patient reader will not believe that Mahomet adopted the Catholic form, “Sancta Trinitas quæ mihi donavit imperium te in patriarcham novæ Romæ deligit.”

113

From the Turco-Græcia of Crusius, c., Spondanus ( AD 1453, No. 21; 1458, No. 16) describes the slavery and domestic quarrels of the Greek Church. The patriarch who succeeded Gennadius threw himself in despair into a well.

114

Cantemir (p. 101-105) insists on the unanimous consent of the Turkish historians, ancient as well as modern, and argues that they would not have violated the truth to diminish their national glory, since it is esteemed more honourable to take a city by force than by composition. But 1. I doubt this consent, since he quotes no particular historian, and the Turkish Annals of Leunclavius affirm, without exception, that Mahomet took Constantinople per vim (p. 329). 2. The same argument may be turned in favour of the Greeks of the times, who would not have forgotten this honourable and salutary treaty. Voltaire, as usual, prefers the Turks to the Christians. [This fable, recorded in the Hist. Patriarch. p. 156, is connected with the reign of Sulayman, not with that of his father Selim. Finlay has pointed out that it involves a chronological mistake. The date given is 1537 and the vizir named, as interesting himself in the cause of the Greeks, is Tulphi. But the Lufti — who is meant — was vizir in 1539-1541. See History of Greece, v. p. 142.]

115

For the genealogy and fall of the Comneni of Trebizond, see Ducange (Fam. Byzant. p. 195); for the last Palæologi, the same accurate antiquarian (p. 244, 247, 248). The Palæologi of Montferrat were not extinct till the next century; but they had forgotten their Greek origin and kindred.

116

In the worthless story of the disputes and misfortunes of the two brothers, Phranza (l. iii. c. 21-30) is too partial on the side of Thomas, Ducas (c. 44, 45) is too brief, and Chalcondyles (l. viii. ix. x.) too diffuse and digressive.

117

[The misgovernment of the Peloponnesus in the 15th century is illustrated by the discourses of Gemistus Plethon addressed to the Emperor Manuel and his son the despot Theodore, proposing political reforms. They were published by Canter in his edition of the Eclogae of Stobacus (1575), and have been edited (with German translation) by Ellissen. See above, vol. xi. p. 286, note 111.]

118

See the loss or conquest of Trebizond in Chalcondyles (l. ix. p. 263-266 [p. 494 sqq. ed. Bonn]), Ducas (c. 45), Phranza (l. iii. c. 27), and Cantemir (p. 107). [The last days of the Empire of Trebizond are described by Finlay in History of Greece, iv. p. 400 sqq. ]

119

Though Tournefort (tom. iii. lettre xvii. p. 179) speaks of Trebizond as mal peuplée, Peyssonel, the latest and most accurate observer, can find 100,000 inhabitants (Commerce de la Mer Noire, tom. ii. p. 72, and for the province, p. 53-90). Its prosperity and trade are perpetually disturbed by the factious quarrels of two odas of Janizaries, in one of which 30,000 Lazi are commonly enrolled (Mémoires de Tott, tom. iii. p. 16, 17).

120

Ismael Beg, prince of Sinope or Sinople, was possessed (chiefly from his copper mines) of a revenue of 200,000 ducats (Chalcond. l. ix. p. 258, 259). Peyssonel (Commerce de la Mer Noire, tom. ii. p. 100) ascribes to the modern city 60,000 inhabitants. This account seems enormous; yet it is by trading with a people that we become acquainted with their wealth and numbers.

121

Spondanus (from Gobelin, Comment. Pii II. l. v.) relates the arrival and reception of the despot Thomas at Rome ( AD 1461, No. 3).

122

By an act dated AD 1494, 6th Sept., and lately transmitted from the archives of the Capitol to the royal library of Paris, the despot Andrew Palæologus, reserving the Morea, and stipulating some private advantages, conveys to Charles VIII. King of France, the empires of Constantinople and Trebizond (Spondanus, AD 1495, No. 2). M. de Foncemagne (Mém. de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xvii. p. 539-578) has bestowed a dissertation on this national title, of which he had obtained a copy from Rome.

123

See Philippe de Comines (l. vii. c. 14), who reckons with pleasure the number of Greeks who were prepared to rise, sixty miles of an easy navigation, eighteen days’ journey from Valona to Constantinople, c. On this occasion the Turkish empire was saved by the policy of Venice.

124

See the original feast in Olivier de la Marche (Mémoires, p. i. c. 29, 30), with the abstract and observations of M. de St. Palaye (Mémoires sur la Chevalerie, tom. i. p. iii. p. 182-185). The peacock and the pheasant were distinguished as royal birds.

125

It was found by an actual enumeration that Sweden, Gothland, and Finland contained 1,800,000 fighting men, and consequently were far more populous than at present.

126

In the year 1454, Spondanus has given, from Æneas Sylvius, a view of the state of Europe, enriched with his own observations. That valuable annalist, and the Italian Muratori, will continue the series of events from the year 1453 to 1481, the end of Mahomet’s life, and of this chapter. [The chief work on Æneas Sylvius is that of G. Voigt: Enea Silvio de’ Piccolomini als Papst Pius II. und sein Zeitalter (in 3 vols.), 1857-63. There is a special monograph by O. von Heinemann on his agitation against the Turks: Æneas Sylvius als Prediger eines allgemeinen Kreuzzuges gegen die Türken, 1855.]

127

Besides the two annalists, the reader may consult Giannone (Istoria Civile, tom. iii. p. 449-455) for the Turkish invasion of the kingdom of Naples. [See the Diarium Parmense (p. 350 sqq. ) in the xxiid volume of Muratori; the Relazione della presa di Otranto (by a commissario of the Duke of Bari) in the Archivio storico per le province Napolitane, vi. i. 74-162, 169-176 (1880); Joannis Albini Lucani de gestis regum Neap. ab Aragonia qui extant libri iv., 1689; Antonio de Ferrariis, Successi dell’ armata turchesca nella città d’Otranto nell’ anno MCCCLXXX, 1612.] For the reign and conquests of Mahomet II., I have occasionally used the Memorie Istoriche de’ Monarchi Ottomanni di Giovanni Sagredo (Venezia, 1677, in 4to). In peace and war, the Turks have ever engaged the attention of the republic of Venice. All her despatches and archives were open to a procurator of St. Mark, and Sagredo is not contemptible either in sense or style. Yet he too bitterly hates the infidels; he is ignorant of their language and manners; and his narrative, which allows only seventy pages to Mahomet II. (p. 69-140), becomes more copious and authentic as he approaches the years 1640 and 1644, the term of the historic labours of John Sagredo. [Mohammad died on 3rd May, cp. Zinkeisen, ii. p. 468.]

128

As I am now taking an everlasting farewell of the Greek empire, I shall briefly mention the great collection of Byzantine writers, whose names and testimonies have been successively repeated in this work. The Greek presses of Aldus and the Italians were confined to the classics of a better age; and the first rude editions of Procopius, Agathias, Cedrenus, Zonaras, c. were published by the learned diligence of the Germans. The whole Byzantine series (36 volumes in folio) has gradually issued ( AD 1648, c.) from the royal press of the Louvre, with some collateral aid from Rome and Leipsic; but the Venetian edition ( AD 1729), though cheaper and more copious, is not less inferior in correctness than in magnificence to that of Paris. The merits of the French editors are various; but the value of Anna Comnena, Cinnamus, Villehardouin, c. is enhanced by the historical notes of Charles du Fresne du Cange. His supplemental works, the Greek Glossary, the Constantinopolis Christiana, the Familiæ Byzantinæ, diffuse a steady light over the darkness of the Lower Empire.

[But no longer, as the Roman empire ceased to exist in 1806 (August) when Francis II. resigned the Imperial Crown. He had taken the new title of Emperor of Austria in 1804.]

The Abbé Dubos, who, with less genius than his successor Montesquieu, has asserted and magnified the influence of climate, objects to himself the degeneracy of the Romans and Batavians. To the first of these examples he replies, 1. That the change is less real than apparent, and that the modern Romans prudently conceal in themselves the virtues of their ancestors. 2. That the air, the soil, and the climate of Rome have suffered a great and visible alteration (Réflexions sur la Poésie et sur la Peinture, part ii. sect. 16). [The chief work now on the subject of this and the two following chapters is Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom in Mittelalter, which has been excellently translated into English by Mrs. Hamilton.]

The reader has been so long absent from Rome, that I would advise him to recollect or review the 49th chapter, in the viiith volume of this history.

The coronation of the German Emperors at Rome, more especially in the xith century, is best represented from the original monuments by Muratori (Antiquitat. Italiæ medii Ævi, tom. i. dissertat. ii. p. 99, c.) and Cenni (Monument. Domin. Pontif., tom. ii. diss. vi. p. 261), the latter of whom I only know from the copious extract of Schmidt (Hist. des Allemands, tom. iii. p. 255-266). [Cenni quotes the Ordo coronationis given by Cencius Camerarius, which critics variously refer to Henry III. and Henry VI. See Waitz, Die Formeln der deutschen Königs- und der römischen Kaiserkrönung vom 10ten bis 12ten Jahrhundert (in the Abhandlungen of the Göttingen Gesellschaft der Wiss., 1873, No. 18); and Schwarzer, Die Ordines der Kaiserkrönung (in Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, xxii. 161 sqq., 1882). The coronations of the 9th century have been treated by W. Sickel in his article on Die Kaiserkrönungen von Karl bis Berengar, in the Historische Zeitschrift, N. F. xlvi. 1 sqq. ]

[The emperor “first took an oath to the Romans at the little bridge on the Neronian field faithfully to observe the rights and usages of the city. On the day of the coronation he made his entrance through the Porta Castella close to St. Angelo and here repeated the oath. The clergy and the corporations of Rome greeted him at the church of St. Maria Traspontina on a legendary site called the Terebinthus of Nero” (Gregorovius, op. cit., Eng. Tr., iv. 59).]

[It may be noted that Henry V., crowned at St. Peter’s AD 1111, 13th April, was the first emperor crowned at Rome who was not crowned in the city.]

[The interesting ceremony at St. Peter’s — as it was performed in the 12th century at all events — deserves more particular notice. Gregorovius thus describes it ( ib. p. 59, 60): Having arrived at the steps, the king dismounted and “stooped to kiss the pope’s foot, tendered the oath to be an upright protector of the Church, and was adopted by him as the son of the Church. With solemn song both king and pope entered the Church of St. Maria in Turri beside the steps of St. Peter’s, and here the king was formally made Canon of the Cathedral. He then advanced, conducted by the Lateran Count of the Palace and by the Primicerius of the Judges to the silver door of the cathedral, where he prayed and the Bishop of Albano delivered the first oration. Innumerable mystic ceremonies awaited the king in St. Peter’s itself. Here a short way from the entrance was the Rota Porphyretica, a round porphyry stone inserted in the pavement, on which the king and pope knelt. The Imperial candidate here made his Confession of Faith, the Cardinal-bishop of Portus placed himself in the middle of the Rota and pronounced the second oration. The king was then draped in new vestments, was made a cleric in the sacristy by the pope, was clad with a tunic, dalmatica, pluviale, mitre and sandals, and was then led to the altar of St. Maurice, whither his wife, after similar but less fatiguing ceremonies, accompanied him. The Bishop of Ostia here anointed the king on the right arm and the neck and delivered the third oration.” After this followed the chief ceremony. The pope placed a ring on the king’s finger, girt him with a sword, and placed the crown on his head. Then the emperor, having taken off these symbols, “ministered to the pope as subdeacon at mass. The Count Palatine afterwards removed the sandals and put the red Imperial boots with the spurs of St. Maurice upon him.”]

Exercitui Romano et Teutonico! The latter was both seen and felt; but the former was no more than magni nominis umbra.

Muratori has given the series of the papal coins (Antiquitat. tom. ii. diss. xxvii. p. 548-554). He finds only two more early than the year 800; fifty are still extant from Leo III. to Leo IX. with the addition of the reigning emperor; none remain of Gregory VII. or Urban II.; but in those of Paschal II. he seems to have renounced this badge of dependence. [There are no Papal denarii between Benedict VII. (ob. AD 984) and Leo IX. But, as Gregorovius observes ( op. cit. iv. p. 78 note), this is an accident, for coins must have been struck. In the 11th century we have one coin of Leo IX. and one of Paschal II. The interval between Paschal and Benedict XI. (ob. AD 1304) is filled by the coinage of the Senate; but, after the installation of the Senate, “solidi Papae” (sous of the Pope) are still spoken of. See Gregorovius, ib. p. 498.]

See Ducange, Gloss. mediæ et infimæ Latinitat. tom. vi. p. 364, 365, STAFFA. This homage was paid by kings to archbishops, and by vassals to their lords (Schmidt, tom. iii. p. 262); and it was the nicest policy of Rome to confound the marks of filial and of feudal subjection.

The appeals from all the churches to the Roman Pontiff are deplored by the zeal of St. Bernard (de Consideratione, l. iii. tom. ii. p. 431-442, edit. Mabillon, Venet. 1750), and the judgment of Fleury (Discours sur l’Hist. Ecclésiastique, iv. and vii.). But the saint, who believed in the false decretals, condemns only the abuse of these appeals; the more enlightened historian investigates the origin, and rejects the principles, of this new jurisprudence.

Germanici . . . summarii non levatis sarcinis onusti nihilominus repatriant inviti. Nova res! quando hâctenus aurum Roma refudit? Et nunc Romanorum consilio id usurpatum non credimus (Bernard, de Consideratione, l. iii. c. 3, p. 437). The first words of the passage are obscure, and probably corrupt.

Quand les sauvages de la Louisiane veulent avoir du fruit, ils coupent l’arbre au pied et cueillent le fruit. Voilà le gouvernement despotique (Esprit des Loix, l. v. c. 13); and passion and ignorance are always despotic.

In a free conversation with his countryman Adrian IV., John of Salisbury accuses the avarice of the pope and clergy: Provinciarum deripiunt spolia, ac si thesauros Crœsi studeant reparare. Sed recte cum eis agit Altissimus, quoniam et ipsi altis et sæpe vilissimis hominibus dati sunt in direptionem (de Nugis Curialium, l. vi. c. 24, p. 387). In the next page, he blames the rashness and infidelity of the Romans, whom their bishops vainly strove to conciliate by gifts instead of virtues. It is pity that this miscellaneous writer has not given us less morality and erudition, and more pictures of himself and the times.

Hume’s History of England, vol. i. p. 419. The same writer has given us, from Fitz Stephen, a singular act of cruelty perpetrated on the clergy by Geoffrey, the father of Henry II. “When he was master of Normandy, the chapter of Seez presumed, without his consent, to proceed to the election of a bishop; upon which, he ordered all of them, with the bishop elect, to be castrated, and made all their testicles be brought him in a platter.” Of the pain and danger they might justly complain; yet, since they had vowed chastity, he deprived them of a superfluous treasure.

From Leo IX. and Gregory VII. an authentic and contemporary series of the lives of the Popes, by the Cardinal of Arragon [Nicolò Roselli (ob. AD 1362)], Pandulphus Pisanus, Bernard Guido, c. is inserted in the Italian historians of Muratori (tom. iii. p. i. p. 277-685), and has been always before my eyes. [This collection of Lives, printed by Muratori under the false title of the Cardinal of Aragon, is contained in the Liber Censuum sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae (which is noticed above, vol. x. p. 100, note 54). The Lives were also published, as Acta Vaticana, by Baronius in his Annales ecclesiastici (scattered about under the various years); and his text is said to be better than that of Muratori. There is a new edition of the Liber Censuum (put together AD 1192 by Cencius Camerarius) by P. Fabre. On the whole subject cp. Fabre’s Etude sur le Liber censuum de l’église romaine, 1892.]

The dates of years . . . may, throughout this chapter, be understood as tacit references to the Annals of Muratori, my ordinary and excellent guide. He uses, and indeed quotes, with the freedom of a master, his great Collection of the Italian Historians, in xxviii. volumes; and, as that treasure is in my library, I have thought it an amusement, if not a duty, to consult the originals.

[The magistrate meant is the Prefect of the City (cp. below, p. 89), the criminal judge of Rome. His election often caused party conflicts. Paschal wished a son of Pierleone to be chosen, and the riot was marked by an attack on the fortress of the Pierleoni near the theatre of Marcellus.]

I cannot refrain from transcribing the high-coloured words of Pandulphus Pisanus (p. 384): Hoc audiens inimicus pacis atque turbator jam fatus Centius Frajapane, more draconis immanissimi sibilans, et ab imis pectoribus trahens longa suspiria, accinctus retro gladio sine more cucurrit, valvas ac fores confregit. Ecclesiam furibundus introiit, inde custode remoto papam per gulam accepit, distraxit, pugnis calcibusque percussit, et tanquam brutum animal intra limen ecclesiæ acriter calcaribus cruentavit; et latro tantum dominum per capillos et brachia, Jesu bono interim dormiente, detraxit, ad domum usque deduxit, inibi catenavit et inclusit.

Ego coram Deo et Ecclesiâ dico, si unquam possibile esset, mallem unum imperatorem quam tot dominos (Vit. Gelas. II. p. 398). [Henry V., called in by the Frangipani, appeared in Rome on 11th March, 1119. Gelasius escaped to Gaeta. Gregorovius appropriately observes that “the flight to Gaeta was repeated 729 years later in the history of Pius IX” (iv. 383).]

[Godfrey of Viterbo, in Muratori vii. p. 461.]

[The sources for this outrage on Lucius III. (who finally sought the emperor’s protection at Verona, where he died) are: Sigebertus Gemblacensis, Auctarium Aquicinense, ad ann. 1184 (Bethmann’s ed. of Sigibert in the Monum. Germ. Hist. vi. p. 300 sqq. has superseded all others); Albertus Stadensis (= Annales Stadenses, in Mon. Germ. Hist. xvi.) ad 1183.]

[As Gregorovius puts it (iv. 609): “The spirit of Arnold still survived in Rome, and each Pope was obliged to win toleration for himself or else to live in exile.”]

[Calixtus also forbade the fortification of churches. See Mansi, Concilia xxi. 285. He restored the Lateran.]

Quid tam notum seculis quam protervia et cervicositas Romanorum? Gens insueta paci, tumultui assueta, gens immitis et intractabilis usque adhuc, subdi nescia, nisi cum non valet resistere (de Considerat. l. iv. c. 2, p. 441). The saint takes breath, and then begins again: Hi, invisi terræ et cælo, utrique injecere manus, c. (p. 443).

As a Roman citizen, Petrarch takes leave to observe that Bernard, though a saint, was a man; that he might be provoked by resentment, and possibly repent of his hasty passion, c. (Mémoires sur la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 330).

Baronius, in his index to the xiith volume of his Annals, has found a fair and easy excuse. He makes two heads, of Romani Catholici and Schismatici; to the former, he applies all the good, to the latter all the evil, that is told of the city.

The heresies of the xiith century may be found in Mosheim (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 419-427), who entertains a favourable opinion of Arnold of Brescia. In the 6th volume, I have described the sect of the Paulicians, and followed their migration from Armenia to Thrace and Bulgaria, Italy and France.

The original pictures of Arnold of Brescia are drawn by Otho bishop of Frisingen (Chron. l. vii. c. 31, de Gestis Frederici I. l. i. c. 27, l. ii. c. 21), and in l. iii. of the Ligurinus [composed in AD 1186-7], a poem of Gunther, who flourished AD 1200, in the monastery of Paris [not Paris, but Päris, in Elsass], near Basil (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. med. et infimæ Ætatis, tom. iii. p 174, 175). The long passage that relates to Arnold, is produced by Guilliman (de Rebus Helveticis, l. iii. c. 5, p. 108). [Gibbon does not seem to know of the attack made on the genuineness of the poem “Ligurinus” by Senckenberg in his Parerga Gottingensia, i. (1737). Up to the year 1871, the orthodox view of critics was that the work was a forgery. But the authorship of Gunther was proved by Pannenborg in the Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, xi. p. 163 sqq. (1871). Cp. his Programm “Der Verfasser des Ligurinus,” 1883. There is a German translation of the poem by T. Vulpinus, 1889. On Arnold of Brescia, see Giesebrecht’s monograph, Arnold von Brescia.]

The wicked wit of Bayle was amused in composing, with much levity and learning, the articles of ABÉLARD, FOULQUES, HELOISE, in his Dictionnaire Critique. The dispute of Abelard and St. Bernard, of scholastic and positive divinity, is well understood by Mosheim (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 412-415).

— Damnatus ab illo Præsule, qui numeros vetitum contingere nostros Nomen ab innocuâ ducit laudabile vitâ.

We may applaud the dexterity and correctness of Ligurinus, who turns the unpoetical name of Innocent II. into a compliment. [For the acts of the Lateran Council see Mansi, Concil. xxi. p. 523 sqq. ]

A Roman inscription of Statio Turicensis has been found at Zurich (d’Anville, Notice de l’ancienne Gaule, p. 642-644); but it is without sufficient warrant that the city and canton have usurped and even monopolised the names of Tigurum and Pagus Tigurinus. [See Otto of Freisingen, Gesta Frederici, ii. 29.]

Guilliman (de Rebus Helveticis, l. iii. c. 5, p. 106) recapitulates the donation ( AD 833) of the emperor Lewis the Pious to his daughter the abbess Hildegardis. Curtim nostram Turegum in ducatu Alamanniæ in pago Durgaugensi, with villages, woods, meadows, waters, slaves, churches, c., a noble gift. Charles the Bold gave the jus monetæ, the city was walled under Otho I., and the line of the bishop of Frisingen,

Nobile Turegum multarum copia rerum,

is repeated with pleasure by the antiquaries of Zurich.

Bernard, epistol. cxcv. cxcvi. tom. i. p. 187-190. Amidst his invectives, he drops a precious acknowledgment, qui utinam quam sanæ esset doctrinæ quam districtæ est vitæ. He owns that Arnold would be a valuable acquisition for the church. [Bernard himself — though he opposed Arnold as a heretic — strongly condemned the temporal dominion of the Pope, in his De Consideratione. He observes, for instance: nemo militans Deo implicet se negotiis secularibus. Cp. Gregorovius, op. cit. iv. p. 483-4.]

He advised the Romans,

Consiliis armisque sua moderamina summa Arbitrio tractare suo: nil juris in hâc re Pontifici summo, modicum concedere regi Suadebat populo. Sic læsâ stultus utrâque Majestate, reum geminæ se facerat aulæ.

Nor is the poetry of Gunther different from the prose of Otho.

See Baronius ( AD 1148, No. 38, 39) from the Vatican MSS. He loudly condemns Arnold ( AD 1141, No. 3) as the father of the political heretics whose influence then hurt him in France.

The English reader may consult the Biographia Britannica, ADRIAN IV., but our own writers have added nothing to the fame or merits of their countryman.

[The meeting was close to Nepi. See Muratori, Antiq. Ital. i. 117.]

Besides the historian and poet already quoted, the last adventures of Arnold are related by the biographer of Adrian IV. (Muratori, Script. Rerum Ital. tom. iii. p. i. p. 441, 442). [The circumstances of the death of Arnold of Brescia are dark; it happened near Soracte, not in the city. Cp. Gregorovius, op. cit. p. 544. A new and important source was discovered not many years ago — an anonymous Latin poem entitled Gesta Friderici imperatoris in Italia, describing the Lombard wars of Frederick Barbarossa up to the battle of Carcano in AD 1160. (It has been proposed to ascribe the authorship to Thadeus de Roma.) It was published in 1887 (Gesta di Federico I. in Italia) by E. Monaci, as vol. i. of the Fonti per la storia d’Italia. But the passage relating to Arnold of Brescia was printed in 1878 in vol. i. of the Archivio della Società Romana di storia patria.]

Ducange (Gloss. Latinitatis mediæ et infimæ Ætatis, DECARCHONES, tom. ii. p. 726) gives me a quotation from Blondus (decad. ii. l. ii.): Duo consules ex nobilitate quotannis fiebant, qui ad vetustum consulum exemplar summæ rerum præessent. And in Sigonius (de Regno Italiæ, l. vi. Opp. tom. ii. p. 400) I read of the consuls and tribunes of the xth century. Both Blondus, and even Sigonius, too freely copied the classic method of supplying from reason or fancy the deficiency of records.

In the panegyric of Berengarius (Muratori, Script. Rer. Ital. tom. ii. p. i. p. 408), a Roman is mentioned as consulis natus in the beginning of the xth century. Muratori (dissert. v.) discovers, in the years 952 and 956, Gratianus in Dei nomine consul et dux, Georgius consul et dux; and in 1015, Romanus, brother of Gregory VIII., proudly, but vaguely, styles himself consul et dux et omnium Romanorum senator. [No such body as a Senate existed at Rome from the 8th to the 12th century; and the word Senatus frequently occurring not only in chronicles but even in Acts of Councils signifies merely the Roman nobility. For example Benzo describes a meeting of the adherents of the Imperial party in AD 1062 as an “assembly of the Senate.” Thus senator meant a noble. But it was sometimes assumed as a title in a more pregnant sense, implying municipal authority, as when Alberic styled himself omnium Romanorum Senator; and his father-in-law Theophylactus had already borne the title Consul or Senator of the Romans, and the son of Theophylactus was called Son of the Consul, and his wife Theodora the Senatrix. Compare Gregorovius op. cit. iii. p. 293-5. Though there is no reason to suppose that the Romans elected consuls annually in this age (10th century), it seems that “a Consul of the Romans was elected as Princeps of the nobility from its midst; confirmed by the Pope; and placed as a Patricius at the head of the jurisdiction and administration of the city.” Gregorovius, ib. p. 253. The Counts of Tusculum used to style themselves Consuls and Senators of the Romans. Gregorovius, iv. p. 138.]

As late as the xth century, the Greek emperors conferred on the dukes of Venice, Naples, Amalfi, c. the title of ὕπατος, or consuls (see Chron. Sagornini, passim ); and the successors of Charlemagne would not abdicate any of their prerogatives. But, in general, the names of consul and senator, which may be found among the French and Germans, signify no more than count or lord ( Signeur, Ducange, Glossar.). The monkish writers are often ambitious of fine classic words. [The title consul was borne in the 12th century, denoting the judiciary and ruling magistracy. Cp. Gregorovius, op. cit. iv. 459.]

The most constitutional form is a diploma of Otho III. ( AD 998), Consulibus senatus populique Romani; but the act is probably spurious. At the coronation of Henry I. AD 1014, the historian Dithmar (apud Muratori, Dissert. xxiii.) describes him, a senatoribus duodecim vallatum, quorum sex rasi barbâ alii prolixâ mystice incedebant cum baculis. The senate is mentioned in the panegyric of Berengarius (p. 406).

[Just before this revolution the Romans had been involved in a war for the possession of Tivoli. The place had surrendered to the Pope, and they had demanded it from him. The revolution followed. “In 1143,” says Gregorovius, “Rome made an attempt to form such an association of the different classes as had been formed in Milan, Pisa, Genoa, and other cities” (iv. p. 449). The lesser nobility joined the burghers, seized the Capitoline, declared themselves the Senate. Thus a free burgher class was established, and the despotism of the nobility who were the supporters of the Pope was overthrown: this is the significance of the revolution of 1143. The first civic constitution (1144) was framed under the influence of Jordan Pierleone. — Pope Lucius II. turned to Conrad III., but got no help. Then the Senate invited Conrad to come and rule in Rome (1149 or 1150). See Otto of Freisingen, i. 28.]

In ancient Rome, the equestrian order was not ranked with the senate and people as a third branch of the republic till the consulship of Cicero, who assumes the merit of the establishment (Plin. Hist. Natur. xxxiii. 3; Beaufort, République Romaine, tom. i. p. 144-155).

The republican plan of Arnold of Brescia is thus stated by Gunther: —

Quin etiam titulos urbis renovare vetustos; Nomine plebeio secernere nomen equestre, Jura tribunorum, sanctum reparare senatum, Et senio fessas mutasque reponere leges. Lapsa ruinosis, et adhuc pendentia muris Reddere primævo Capitolia prisca nitori.

But of these reformations, some were no more than ideas, others no more than words.

After many disputes among the antiquaries of Rome, it seems determined that the summit of the Capitoline hill next the river is strictly the Mons Tarpeius, the Arx; and that, on the other summit, the church and convent of Araceli, the barefoot friars of St. Francis occupy the temple of Jupiter (Nardini, Roma Antica, l. v. c. 11-16). [This conclusion is incorrect. Both the Tarpeian Rock and the Temple of Jupiter were on the western height; the Arx was on the eastern, which is now crowned by the Church of St. Maria in Aracœli. For the determination of the site of the temple, a passage in the Graphia (a collection of ceremonial formularies which was perhaps drawn up for Otto III., in imitation of the Byzantine ceremonials) was of great importance: “On the summit of the fortress over the Porticus Crinorum was the Temple of Jupiter and Moneta.” This portico belonged to the Forum olitorium; as was shown by excavations in the Caffarelli gardens.

Pope Anaclete II. ratified to the Abbot of St. Maria the possession of the Capitoline hill.]

Tacit. Hist. iii. 69, 70.

[The old Tabularium, in the saddle between the two summits, became the Senate-house. Cp. Gregorovius, op. cit. iv. 477.]

This partition of the nobler and the baser metals between the emperor and senate must, however, be adopted, not as a positive fact, but as the probable opinion of the best antiquaries (see the Science des Médailles of the Père Joubert, tom. ii. p. 208-211, in the improved and scarce edition of the Baron de la Bastie).

In his xxviith dissertation on the Antiquities of Italy (tom. ii. p. 559-569), Muratori exhibits a series of the senatorian coins, which bore the obscure names of Affortiati [= of strong gold], Infortiati, Provisini [from Provins, in Champagne], Paparini. [Those which are perhaps earliest have ROMAN. PRICIPE round the image of St. Peter, and SENAT. POPVL. Q.R. round St. Paul.] During this period, all the popes, without excepting Boniface VIII., abstained from the right of coining. which was resumed by his successor Benedict XI. and regularly exercised in the court of Avignon.

A German historian, Gerard of Reicherspeg (in Baluz. Miscell. tom. v. p. 64, apud Schmidt, Hist. des Allemands, tom. iii. p. 265), thus describes the constitution of Rome in the xith century: Grandiora urbis et orbis negotia spectant ad Romanum pontificem itemque ad Romanum Imperatorem; sive illius vicarium urbis præfectum, qui de suâ dignitate respicit utrumque, videlicet dominum papam cui facit dominum, et dominum imperatorum a quo accipit suæ potestatis insigne, scilicet gladium exertum. [Contelorius, De præfecto Urbis.]

The words of a contemporary writer (Pandulph. Pisan. in Vit. Paschal. II. p. 357, 358) describe the election and oath of the prefect in 1118, inconsultis patribus . . . loca præfectoria . . . laudes præfectoriæ . . . comitiorum applausum . . . juraturum populo in ambonem sublevant . . . confirmari eum in urbe præfectum petunt.

Urbis præfectum ad ligiam fidelitatem recepit, et per mantum quod illi donavit de præfecturâ eum publice investivit, qui usque ad id tempus juramento fidelitatis imperatori fuit obligatus, et ab eo præfecturæ tenuit honorem (Gesta Innocent. III. in Muratori, tom. iii. p. i. p. 487).

See Otho Frising. Chron. vii. 31, de Gest. Frederic. I. l. i. c. 27.

Our countryman, Roger Hoveden, speaks of the single senators, of the Capuzzi family, c. quorum temporibus melius regebatur Roma quam nunc ( AD 1194) est temporibus lvi. senatorum (Ducange, Gloss. tom. vi. p. 191. SENATORES ).

Muratori (dissert. xlii. tom. iii. p. 785-788) has published an original treaty: Concordia inter D. nostrum papam Clementem III. et senatores populi Romani super regalibus et aliis dignitatibus urbis, c. 44° senatus. The senate speaks, and speaks with authority: Reddimus ad præsens . . . habebimus . . . dabitis presbyteria . . . jurabimus pacem et fidelitatem, c. A chartula De tenimentis Tusculani, dated in the 47th year of the same era, and confirmed decreto amplissimi ordinis senatus, acclamatione P. R. publice Capitolio consistentis. It is there we find the difference of senatores consiliarii and simple senators (Muratori, dissert. xlii. tom. iii. p. 787-789). [The transactions here touched on belong to the revolution of AD 1188, which deserved a more particular notice. Pope Clement III. (1187-91) was forced to make a formal treaty, which implied a new constitution. The Pope was recognised as overlord; he had the right of investing the Senate; the Senators took an oath of loyalty to him; he had the right of coining, and enjoyed the old revenues of the see; he was bound to supply £100 a year for the walls of the city and to pay the militia; he abandoned Tusculum to the Romans to destroy, though it was under his protection. The Pope, by this agreement, gave up all legislative authority and rights of government; his power depended on his lands and estates. It is to be noted that this constitution completely ignored the Imperial authority. See Gregorovius, iv. p. 620.]

Muratori (dissert. xlv. tom. iv. p. 64-92) has fully explained this mode of government; and the Oculus Pastoralis, which he has given at the end, is a treatise or sermon on the duties of these foreign magistrates.

In the Latin writers, at least of the silver age, the title of Potestas was transferred from the office to the magistrate: —

Hujus qui trahitur prætextam sumere mavis; An Fidenarum Gabiorumque esse Potestas. (Juvenal. Satir. x. 99.)

See the life and death of Brancaleone, in the Historia Major of Matthew Paris, p. 741, 757, 792, 797, 799, 810, 823, 833, 836, 840. The multitude of pilgrims and suitors connected Rome and St. Albans; and the resentment of the English clergy prompted them to rejoice whenever the popes were humbled and oppressed. [There had been another revolution in AD 1191. Since 1143 the majority of the Senate had been plebeian; the nobles gained admission by degrees, and after the time of Clement III. and Celestine III. it numbered more patricians of ancient lineage than burghers or knights. Hence discontent and revolution. In 1191 the populace overthrew the Constitution and made Benedict Carushomo the summus senator. Under him the first municipal statute seems to have been issued. Epp. Innocentii iii. lib. ii. n. 239. See Gregorovius, op. cit. iv. 632.]

Matthew Paris thus ends his account: Caput vero ipsius Brancaleonis in vase pretioso super marmoream columneam collocatum, in signum sui valoris et probitatis, quasi reliquias superstitiose nimis et pompose sustulerunt. Fuerat enim superborum potentum et malefactorum urbis malleus et exstirpator, et populi protector et defensor, veritatis et justitiæ imitator et amator (p. 840). A biographer of Innocent IV. (Muratori, Script. tom. iii. p. i. p. 591, 592) draws a less favourable portrait of this Ghibelline senator.

The election of Charles of Anjou to the office of perpetual senator of Rome is mentioned by the historians in the viiith volume of the Collection of Muratori, by Nicholas de Jamsilla (p. 592), the monk of Padua (p. 724), Sabas Malaspina (l. ii. c. 9, p. 808), and Ricordano Malespini (c. 177, p. 999).

The high-sounding bull of Nicholas III. which founds his temporal sovereignty on the donation of Constantine, is still extant; and, as it has been inserted by Boniface VIII. in the Sexte of the Decretals, it must be received by the Catholics, or at least by the Papists, as a sacred and perpetual law.

I am indebted to Fleury (Hist. Ecclés. tom. xviii. p. 306) for an extract of this Roman act which he has taken from the Ecclesiastical Annals of Odericus Raynaldus, AD 1281, No. 14, 15.

These letters and speeches are preserved by Otho [Otto], Bishop of Frisingen (Fabric. Bibliot. Lat. med. et infim. tom. v. p. 186, 187), perhaps the noblest of historians; he was son of Leopold, marquis of Austria; his mother, Agnes, was daughter of the emperor Henry IV.; and he was half-brother and uncle to Conrad III. and Frederic I. He has left, in seven [eight] books, a Chronicle of the Times; in two, the Gesta Frederici I., the last of which is inserted in the vith volume of Muratori’s historians. [The chronicle is edited by Wilmans in Mon. Germ. Hist. xx. p. 116 sqq., and separately in the Script. rer. Germ. 1867. (German translation by Kohl, 1881.) The Gesta is also edited by Wilmans in the same volume of the Monumenta; and by Waitz (1884) in the series of the Script. rer. Germ. (German translation by Kohl, 1883). The name of the Chronicle was originally De duabus civitatibus. It is a History of the World, and its object is to prove that, while the secular civitas or kingdom is ephemeral and transitory, the Church, or the kingdom of God, is eternal. Cp. the brief characteristic of Otto in Giesebrecht’s Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, p. 394 sqq. ]

We desire (said the ignorant Romans) to restore the empire in eum statum, quo fuit tempore Constantini et Justiniani, qui totum orbem vigore senatus et populi Romani suis tenuere manibus.

Otho Frising. de Gestis Frederici I. l. i. c. 28, p. 662-664.

[For the meeting with Pope Hadrian at Sutri, and the following events, see Giesebrecht’s Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, v. p. 60 sqq. ]

Hospes eras, civem feci. Advena fuisti ex Transalpinis partibus; principem constitui.

Non cessit nobis nudum imperium, virtute suâ amictum venit, ornamenta sua secum traxit. Penes nos sunt consules tui, c. Cicero or Livy would not have rejected these images, the eloquence of a Barbarian born and educated in the Hercynian forest.

Otho of Frisingen, who surely understood the language of the court and diet of Germany, speaks of the Franks in the xiith century as the reigning nation (Proceres Franci, equites Franci, manus Francorum); he adds, however, the epithet of Teutonici.

Otho Frising. de Gestis Frederici I. l. ii. c. 22, p. 720-723. These original and authentic acts I have translated with freedom, yet with fidelity.

[The coronation ceremony was over, when the sally was made.]

From the Chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pipin, Muratori (dissert. xxvi. tom. ii. p. 492) has transcribed this curious fact, with the doggrel verses that accompanied the gift.

Ave decus orbis ave! victus tibi destinor, ave! Currus ab Augusto Frederico Cæsare justo. Væ Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum Imperii vires, proprias tibi tollere vires. Ergo triumphorum urbs potes memor esse priorum Quos tibi mittebant reges qui bella gerebant.

Ne si dee tacere (I now use the Italian Dissertations, tom. i. p. 444) che nell’ anno 1727, una copia desso Caroccio in marmo dianzi ignoto si scopri, nel Campidoglio, presso alle carcere di quel luogo, dove Sisto V. l’avea falto rinchiudere. Stava esso posto sopra quatro colonne di marmo fina colla sequente inscrizione, c. to the same purpose as the old inscription.

The decline of the Imperial arms and authority in Italy is related with impartial learning in the Annals of Muratori (tom. x.-xii.); and the reader may compare his narrative with the Histoire des Allemands (tom. iii. iv.) by Schmidt, who has deserved the esteem of his countrymen.

Tibur nunc suburbanum et æstivæ Præneste deliciæ nuncupatis in Capitolio votis petebantur. The whole passage of Florus (l. i. c. 11) may be read with pleasure, and has deserved the praise of a man of genius (Oeuvres de Montesquieu, tom. iii. p. 634, 635, quarto edition).

Ne a feritate Romanorum, sicut fuerant Hostienses, Portuenses, Tusculanenses, Albanenses, Labicenses, et nuper Tiburtini destruerentur (Matthew Paris, p. 757). These events are marked in the Annals and Index (the xviiith volume) of Muratori.

For the state or ruin of these suburban cities, the banks of the Tiber, c. see the lively picture of the P. Labat (Voyage en Espagne et en Italie), who had long resided in the neighbourhood of Rome; and the more accurate description of which P. Eschinard (Roma, 1750, in octavo) has added to the topographical map of Cingolani.

Labat (tom. iii. p. 233) mentions a recent decree of the Roman government, which has severely mortified the pride and poverty of Tivoli: in civitate Tiburtinâ non vivitur civiliter.

I depart from my usual method of quoting only by the date the Annals of Muratori, in consideration of the critical balance in which he has weighed nine contemporary writers who mention the battle of Tusculum (tom. x. p. 42-44).

Matthew Paris, p. 345. This bishop of Winchester was Peter de Rupibus, who occupied the see thirty-two years ( AD 1206-1238), and is described, by the English historian, as a soldier and a statesman (p. 178, 399).

[Lucas Savelli, who became Senator in 1234, passed an edict claiming Tuscany and the Campagna as the property of the Roman people. Pope Gregory IX. fled from Rome, and Viterbo was his chief support. “What,” asks Gregorovius, “would have been the fate of the Papacy, had the city succeeded in becoming a civic power such as Milan or Pisa?” (v. p. 172). Frederic II. saw himself unwillingly forced to assist the Pope.]

See Mosheim, Institut. Histor. Ecclesiast. p. 401, 403. Alexander himself had nearly been the victim of a contested election; and the doubtful merits of Innocent had only preponderated by the weight of genius and learning which St. Bernard cast into the scale (see his life and writings).

The origin, titles, importance, dress, precedency, c. of the Roman cardinals, are very ably discussed by Thomassin (Discipline de l’Eglise, tom. i. p. 1262-1287); but their purple is now much faded. The sacred college was raised to the definite number of seventy-two, to represent, under his vicar, the disciples of Christ.

See the bull of Gregory X. [issued at Lyons, at the Great Council] approbante sacro concilio, in the Sexte of the Canon Law (l. i. tit. 6, c. 3), a supplement to the Decretals, which Boniface VIII. promulgated at Rome in 1298, and addressed to all the universities of Europe.

The genius of Cardinal de Retz had a right to paint a conclave (of 1665), in which he was a spectator and an actor (Mémoires, tom. iv. p. 15-57); but I am at a loss to appreciate the knowledge or authority of an anonymous Italian, whose history (Conclavi de’ Pontifici Romani, in 4to, 1667) has been continued since the reign of Alexander VII. The accidental form of the work furnishes a lesson, though not an antidote, to ambition. From a labyrinth of intrigues, we emerge to the adoration of the successful candidate; but the next page opens with his funeral.

The expressions of Cardinal de Retz are positive and picturesque: On y vécut toujours ensemble avec le même respect et la même civilité que l’on observe dans le cabinet des rois, avec la même politesse qu’on avoit dans la cour de Henri III., avec la même familiarité que l’on voit dans les collèges; avec la même modestie qui se remarque dans les noviciats; et avec la même charité, du moins en apparence, qui pourroit être entre des frères parfaitement unis.

Richiesti per bando (says John Villani) senatori di Roma, e 52 del popolo, et capitani de’ 25, e consoli ( consoli? ), et 13 buone huomini, uno per rione. Our knowledge is too imperfect to pronounce how much of this constitution was temporary, and how much ordinary and permanent. Yet it is faintly illustrated by the ancient statutes of Rome.

Villani (l. x. c. 68-71, in Muratori, Script. tom. xiii. p. 641-645) relates this law, and the whole transaction, with much less abhorrence than the prudent Muratori. Any one conversant with the darker ages must have observed how much the sense (I mean the nonsense) of superstition is fluctuating and inconsistent. [Gregorovius observes (vi. 160): “This important revolution was the consequence of the sojourn of the Popes at Avignon, the effect of the quarrel which John XXII. so foolishly invoked with the empire, and of the reforming principles of the monarchy, with which was associated the Franciscan schism. The high-handed doings of John and Lewis, their tedious actions at law, the extensive researches into the imperial and papal authority, formed the close of this mediaeval struggle, which now passed into more intellectual regions. The age of the reformation began; the ecclesiastical severance of Germany and Italy was perceptible in the distance and became inevitable as soon as the political severance was accomplished.”]

In the first volume of the Popes of Avignon, see the second original Life of John XXII. p. 142-145, the confession of the anti-pope, p. 145-152; and the laborious notes of Baluze, p. 714, 715.

Romani autem non valentes nec volentes ultra suam celare cupiditatem gravissimam contra papam movere cœperunt questionem, exigentes ab eo urgentissime omnia quæ subierant per ejus absentiam damna et jacturas, videlicet in hospitiis locandis, in mercimoniis, in usuris, in redditibus, in provisionibus, et in aliis modis innumerabilibus. Quod cum audisset papa, præcordialiter ingemuit et se comperiens muscipulatum, c., Matt. Paris, p. 757. For the ordinary history of the popes, their life and death, their residence and absence, it is enough to refer to the ecclesiastical annalists, Spondanus and Fleury.

Besides the general historians of the church of Italy and of France, we possess a valuable treatise, composed by a learned friend of Thuanus, which his last and best editors have published in the appendix (Histoire particulière du grand Différend entre Boniface VIII. et Philippe le Bel, par Pierre du Puis, tom. vii. p. xi. p. 61-82). [Tosti, Storia di Bonifacio VIII. The bulls of Boniface have been edited from the Vatican archives by Degon, Faucon and Thomas, 1884-90.]

It is difficult to know whether Labat (tom. iv. p. 53-57) be in jest or in earnest when he supposes that Anagni still feels the weight of this curse, and that the corn-fields, or vineyards, or olive trees are annually blasted by Nature, the obsequious handmaid of the popes.

See in the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani (l. viii. c. 63, 64, 80, in Muratori, tom. xiii.) the imprisonment of Boniface VIII. and the election of Clement V., the last of which, like most anecdotes, is embarrassed with some difficulties.

The original lives of the eight popes of Avignon, Clement V. John XXII. Benedict XII. Clement VI. Innocent VI. Urban V. Gregory XI. and Clement VII., are published by Stephen Baluze (Vitæ Paparum Avenionensium; Paris, 1693, 2 vols. in 4to), with copious and elaborate notes, and a second volume of acts and documents. With the true zeal of an editor and a patriot, he devoutly justifies or excuses the characters of his countrymen.

The exile of Avignon is compared by the Italians with Babylon and the Babylonish captivity. Such furious metaphors, more suitable to the ardour of Petrarch than to the judgment of Muratori, are gravely refuted in Baluze’s preface. The Abbé de Sade is distracted between the love of Petrarch and of his country. Yet he modestly pleads that many of the local inconveniences of Avignon are now removed; and many of the vices against which the poet declaims had been imported with the Roman court by the strangers of Italy (tom. i. p. 23-28).

The comtat Venaissin was ceded to the popes, in 1273, by Philip III., king of France, after he had inherited the dominions of the count of Toulouse. Forty years before the heresy of Count Raymond had given them a pretence of seizure, and they derived some obscure claim from the xith century to some lands citra Rhodanum (Valesii Notitia Galliarum, p. 459, 610; Longuerue, Description de la France, tom. i. p. 376-381).

If a possession of four centuries were not itself a title, such objections might annul the bargain; but the purchase-money must be refunded, for indeed it was paid. Civitatem Avenionem emit . . . per ejusmodi venditionem pecuniâ redundantes, c. (2da Vita Clement. VI. in Baluz. tom. i. p. 272; Muratori, Script. tom. iii. p. ii. p. 565). [Recherches historiques concernant les droits du Pape sur la ville et l’état d’Avignon, 1768.] The only temptation for Jane and her second husband was ready money, and without it they could not have returned to the throne of Naples.

Clement V. immediately promoted ten cardinals, nine French and one English (Vita 4ta, p. 63, et Baluz. p. 625, c.). In 1331, the pope refused two candidates recommended by the king of France, quod xx. Cardinales, de quibus xvii. de regno Franciæ originem traxisse noscuntur, in memorato collegio existant (Thomassin, Discipline de l’Eglise, tom. i. p. 1281). [In the year AD 1378 the college consisted of 23 cardinals, 16 of them were at Rome and included 7 Limousins, 4 French, 1 Spaniard, and 4 Italians. See Gregorovius, vi. 491.]

100

Our primitive account is from Cardinal James Caietan [= Jacopo Stefaneschi, cardinalis S. Georgii ad Velum aureum] (Maxima Bibliot. Patrum, tom. xxv.); and I am at a loss to determine whether the nephew of Boniface VIII. be a fool or a knave; the uncle is a much clearer character.

101

[“The way that led from the city across the Bridge of St. Angelo to St. Peter’s was too narrow; a new street was therefore opened in the walls along the river, not far from the ancient tomb known as the Meta Romuli. [Gregorovius reads pontem for portum in the passage in Stefaneschi which describes this.] The bridge was covered with booths which divided it in two, and in order to prevent accidents it was enacted that those going to St. Peter’s should keep to one side of the bridge, those returning to the other.” This arrangement is referred to by Dante, Inferno, xviii. v. 28 sqq.: —

Come i Roman, per l’esercito molto, L’anno del Giubbileo, su per lo ponte Hanno a passar la gente modo tolto: Che dall’ un lato tutti hanno la fronte Verso ’l castello, e vanno a Santo Pietro; Dall’ altra sponda vanno verso ’l Monte.

See Gregorovius, v. p. 560-1.]

102

See John Villani (l. viii. c. 36) in the xiith, and the Chronicon Astense in the xith, volume (p. 191, 192) of Muratori’s Collection. Papa innumerabilem pecuniam ab eisdem accepit, nam duo clerici, cum rastris, c.

103

The two bulls of Boniface VIII. and Clement VI. are inserted in the Corpus Juris Canonici (Extravagant. Commun. l. v. tit. ix. c. 1, 2).

104

The sabbatic years and jubilees of the Mosaic law (Car. Sigon. de Republicâ Hebræorum, Opp. tom. iv. l. iii. c. 14, 15, p. 151, 152), the suspension of all care and labour, the periodical release of lands, debts, servitude, c., may seem a noble idea, but the execution would be impracticable in a profane republic; and I should be glad to learn that this ruinous festival was observed by the Jewish people.

105

[It was shortly after the abdication of Rienzi (1347) and the devastations of the Black Death.]

106

See the Chronicle of Matteo Villani (l. i. c. 56), in the xivth volume of Muratori, and the Mémoires sur la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 75-89.

107

The subject is exhausted by M. Chais, a French minister at the Hague, in his Lettres Historiques et Dogmatiques sur les Jubilés et les Indulgences; la Haye, 1751, 3 vols. in 12mo: an elaborate and pleasing work, had not the author preferred the character of a polemic to that of a philosopher.

108

Muratori (Dissert. xlvii.) alleges the Annals of Florence, Padua, Genoa, c., the analogy of the rest, the evidence of Otho of Frisingen (de Gest. Fred. I. l. ii. c. 13), and the submission of the marquis of Este.

109

As early as the year 824, the emperor Lothaire I. found it expedient to interrogate the Roman people, to learn from each individual by what national law he chose to be governed (Muratori, Dissert. xxii.).

110

Petrarch attacks these foreigners, the tyrants of Rome, in a declamation or epistle, full of bold truths and absurd pedantry, in which he applies the maxims, and even prejudices, of the old republic, to the state of the xivth century (Mémoires, tom. iii. p. 157-169).

111

The origin and adventures of this Jewish family are noticed by Pagi (Critica, tom. iv. p. 435, AD 1124, No. 3, 4), who draws his information from the Chronographus Maurigniacensis [in Migne, Patr. Lat. 180, p. 131 sqq. ], and Arnulphus Sagiensis de Schismate (in Muratori Script. Ital. tom. iii. p. i. p. 423-432). The fact must in some degree be true; yet I could wish that it had been coolly related, before it was turned into a reproach against the antipope.

112

Muratori has given two dissertations (xli. and xlii.) to the names, surnames, and families of Italy. Some nobles, who glory in their domestic fables, may be offended with his firm and temperate criticism; yet surely some ounces of pure gold are of more value than many pounds of base metal.

113

[“The foundation of the house of the Savelli, which was probably German, was due to the nepotism of their member Pope Honorius [III.], and they only rose to power after his time.” Gregorovius, v. p. 118.]

114

[See the references in Gregorovius, v. p. 6.]

115

The cardinal of St. George, in his poetical, or rather metrical, history of the election and coronation of Boniface VIII. (Muratori, Script. Ital. tom. iii. p. i. p. 641, c.), describes the state and families of Rome at the coronation of Boniface VIII. ( AD 1295): —

Interea titulis redimiti sanguini et armis Illustresque viri Romanâ a stirpe trahentes Nomen in emeritos tantæ virtutis honores Intulerant sese medios festumque colebant Auratâ fulgentes togâ sociante catervâ. Ex ipsis devota domus præstantis ab Ursâ Ecclesiæ, vultumque gerens demissius altum Festa Columna jocis, necnon Sabellia mitis; Stephanides senior, Comites, Annibalica proles, Præfectusque urbis magnum sine viribus nomen. (l. ii. c. 5, 100, p. 647, 648.)

The ancient statutes of Rome (l. iii. c. 59, p. 174, 175) distinguish eleven families of barons, who are obliged to swear in concilio communi, before the senator, that they would not harbour or protect any malefactors, outlaws, c. — a feeble security! [The Anibaldi family rose to prominence c. AD 1230. See Gregorovius, v. 158.]

116

It is pity that the Colonna themselves have not favoured the world with a complete and critical history of their illustrious house. I adhere to Muratori (Dissert. xlii. tom. iii. p. 647, 648).

117

Pandulph. Pisan. in Vit. Paschal. II. in Muratori, Script. Ital. tom. iii. p. i. p. 335. The family has still great possessions in the Campagna of Rome; but they have alienated to the Rospigliosi this original fief of Colonna (Eschinard, p. 258, 259).

118

Te longinqua dedit tellus et pascua Rheni,

says Petrarch; and, in 1417, a duke of Guelders and Juliers acknowledges (Lenfant, Hist. du Concile de Constance, tom. ii. p. 539) his descent from the ancestors of Martin V. (Otho Colonna): but the royal author of the Memoirs of Brandenburg observes that the sceptre in his arms has been confounded with the column. To maintain the Roman origin of the Colonna, it was ingeniously supposed (Diario di Monaldeschi, in the Script. Ital. tom. xii. p. 533) that a cousin of the emperor Nero escaped from the city and founded Mentz in Germany.

119

I cannot overlook the Roman triumph or ovation of Marco Antonio Colonna, who had commanded the pope’s galleys at the naval victory of Lepanto (Thuan. Hist. l. vii. tom. iii. p. 55, 56; Muret. Oratio x. Opp. tom. i. p. 180-190).

120

Muratori, Annali d’Italia, tom. x. p. 216, 220.

121

Petrarch’s attachment to the Colonna has authorised the Abbé de Sade to expatiate on the state of the family in the fourteenth century, the persecution of Boniface VIII., the character of Stephen and his sons, their quarrels with the Ursini, c. (Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 98-110, 146-148, 174-176, 222-230, 275-280). His criticism often rectifies the hearsay stories of Villani, and the errors of the less diligent moderns. I understand the branch of Stephen to be now extinct.

122

Alexander III. had declared the Colonna who adhered to the emperor Frederic I. incapable of holding any ecclesiastical benefice (Villani, l. v. c. 1); and the last stains of annual excommunication were purified by Sixtus V. (Vita di Sisto V. tom. iii. p. 416). Treason, sacrilege, and proscription are often the best titles of ancient nobility.

123

— Vallis te proxima misit Appenninigenæ quâ prata virentia sylvæ Spoletana metunt armenta gregesque protervi.

Monaldeschi (tom. xii. Script. Ital. p. 533) gives the Ursini a French origin, which may be remotely true. [Cp. Gregorovius, v. p. 39 sqq. ]

124

In the metrical life of Celestin V. by the Cardinal of St. George (Muratori, tom. iii. p. i. p. 613, c.), we find a luminous and not inelegant passage (l. i. c. iii. p. 203, c.): —

— genuit quem nobilis Ursæ ( Ursi? ) Progenies, Romana domus, veterataque magnis Fascibus in clero, pompasque experta senatus, Bellorumque manu grandi stipata parentum Cardineos apices necnon fastigia dudum Papatus iterata tenens.

Muratori (Dissert. xlii. tom. iii.) observes that the first Ursini pontificate of Celestin III. was unknown; he is inclined to read Ursi progenies.

125

Filii Ursi, quondam Cœlestini papæ nepotes, de bonis ecclesiæ Romanæ ditati (Vit. Innocent. III. in Muratori, Script. tom. iii. p. i.). The partial prodigality of Nicholas III. is more conspicuous in Villani and Muratori. Yet the Ursini would disdain the nephews of a modern Pope. [Fra Salimbene of Parma said of Nicholas III. that he built Sion in his kinsfolk (ædificavit Sion in sanguinibus). The expression is quoted by Gregorovius, v. 490. Compare Dante, Inferno, xix. v. 70-2, where he is alluded to as “figliuol dell’ orsa.”]

126

In his fifty-first Dissertation on the Italian Antiquities, Muratori explains the factions of the Guelphs and Ghibelines.

127

Petrarch (tom. i. p. 222-230) has celebrated this victory according to the Colonna; but two contemporaries, a Florentine (Giovanni Villani, l. x. c. 220) and a Roman (Ludovico Monaldeschi [S. R. I. xii.], p. 533, 534), are less favourable to their arms.

128

The Abbé de Sade (tom. i. notes, p. 61-66) has applied the vith Canzone of Petrarch, Spirto Gentil, c., to Stephen Colonna the Younger.

Orsi, lupi, leoni, aquile e serpi Ad una gran marmorea colonna Fanno noja sovente e à se damno.

The Mémoires sur la Vie de François Pétrarque (Amsterdam, 1764, 1767, 3 vols. in 4to) form a copious, original, and entertaining work, a labour of love, composed from the accurate study of Petrarch and his contemporaries; but the hero is too often lost in the general history of the age, and the author too often languishes in the affectation of politeness and gallantry. In the preface to his first volume, he enumerates and weighs twenty Italian biographers, who have professedly treated of the same subject. [Körting, Petrarca’s Leben und Werke, 1878; Geiger, Petrarca, 1874. Cp. above, vol. xi. p. 277, note 92.]

The allegorical interpretation prevailed in the xvth century; but the wise commentators were not agreed whether they should understand by Laura, religion, or virtue, or the blessed Virgin, or —. See the prefaces to the first and second volumes.

Laure de Noves, born about the year 1307, was married in January 1325 to Hugues de Sade, a noble citizen of Avignon, whose jealousy was not the effect of love, since he married a second wife within seven months of her death, which happened the 6th of April 1348, precisely one and twenty years after Petrarch had seen and loved her.

Corpus crebris partubus exhaustum; from one of these is issued, in the tenth degree, the Abbé de Sade, the fond and grateful biographer of Petrarch; and this domestic motive most probably suggested the idea of his work, and urged him to inquire into every circumstance that could affect the history and character of his grandmother (see particularly tom. i. p. 122-133, notes, p. 7-58; tom. ii. p. 455-495, notes, p. 76-82).

Vaucluse, so familiar to our English travellers, is described from the writings of Petrarch, and the local knowledge of his biographer (Mémoires, tom. i. p. 340-359). It was, in truth, the retreat of an hermit; and the moderns are much mistaken if they place Laura and an happy lover in the grotto.

Of 1250 pages, in a close print, at Basil, in the xvith century, but without the date of the year. The Abbé de Sade calls aloud for a new edition of Petrarch’s Latin works; but I much doubt whether it would redound to the profit of the bookseller, or the amusement of the public. [Petrarch’s Epistolae de rebus familiaribus et variae have been edited in 3 vols. 1859-63 by G. Fracassetti and translated (with commentary) into Italian by the same scholar (in 5 vols. 1863-7), who has also translated and annotated the Epistolae seniles (Lettere senili, 2 vols. 1869). The De viris illustribus vitae has been edited by A. Razzolini, 1874, who has added in a 2nd vol. the Italian translation thereof by Donato degli Albanzani.]

Consult Selden’s Titles of Honour, in his works (vol. iii. p. 457-466). An hundred years before Petrarch, St. Francis received the visit of a poet, qui ab imperatore fuerat coronatus et exinde rex versuum dictus.

From Augustus to Louis, the muse has too often been false and venal; but I much doubt whether any age or court can produce a similar establishment of a stipendiary poet, who in every reign, and at all events, is bound to furnish twice a year a measure of praise and verse, such as may be sung in the chapel, and, I believe, in the presence of the sovereign. I speak the more freely, as the best time for abolishing this ridiculous custom is while the prince is a man of virtue and the poet a man of genius.

Isocrates (in Panegyrico, tom. i. p. 116, 117, edit. Battie, Cantab. 1729) claims for his native Athens the glory of first instituting and recommending the ἀγω̂νας καὶ τὰ [Editor: Illegible character]’θλα μέγιστα μὴ μόνον τάχους καὶ ῥώμης, ἀλλὰ καὶ λόγων καὶ γνώμης. The example of the Panathenæa was imitated at Delphi; but the Olympic games were ignorant of a musical crown, till it was extorted by the vain tyranny of Nero (Sueton. in Nerone, c. 23; Philostrat. apud Casaubon ad locum; Dion Cassius or Xiphilin, l. lxiii. p. 1032 [c. 9], 1041 [c. 20]. Potter’s Greek Antiquities, vol. i. p. 445, 450).

The Capitoline games (certamen quinquennale, musicum, equestre, gymnicum) were instituted by Domitian (Sueton. c. 4) in the year of Christ 86 (Censorin. de Die Natali, c. xviii. p. 100, edit. Havercamp), and were not abolished in the ivth century (Ausonius de Professoribus Burdegal. V.). If the crown were given to superior merit, the exclusion of Statius (Capitolia nostræ inficiata lyræ, Sylv. l. iii. v. 31) may do honour to the games of the Capitol; but the Latin poets who lived before Domitian were crowned only in the public opinion.

Petrarch and the senators of Rome were ignorant that the laurel was not the Capitoline, but the Delphic crown (Plin. Hist. Natur. xv. 39; Hist. Critique de la République des Lettres, tom. i. p. 150-220). The victors in the Capitol were crowned with a garland of oak-leaves (Martial, l. iv. epigram 54).

The pious grandson of Laura has laboured, and not without success, to vindicate her immaculate chastity against the censures of the grave and the sneers of the profane (tom. ii. notes, p. 76-82).

The whole process of Petrarch’s coronation is accurately described by the Abbé de Sade (tom. i. p. 425-435; tom. ii. p. 1-6, notes, p. 1-13), from his own writings [see Ep. Poet. ii. 1], and the Roman Diary of Ludovico Monaldeschi, without mixing in this authentic narrative the more recent fables of Sannuccio Delbene.

[Sed me Parnassi deserta per ardua dulcis Raptat amor. — Georgics 3, 291.

This address has been published by Attilio Hortis in Scritti inediti di Fr. Petrarca, 1874, p. 311 sqq. ]

The original act is printed among the Pièces Justificatives in the Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 50-53.

To find the proofs of his enthusiasm for Rome, I need only request that the reader would open, by chance, either Petrarch or his French biographer. The latter has described the poet’s first visit to Rome [ AD 1337] (tom. i. p. 323-335). But, in the place of much idle rhetoric and morality, Petrarch might have amused the present and future age with an original account of the city and his coronation.

It has been treated by the pen of a Jesuit, the P. du Cerceau, whose posthumous work (Conjuration de Nicholas Gabrini, dit de Rienzi, Tyran de Rome, en 1347) was published at Paris, 1748, 12mo. I am indebted to him for some facts and documents in John Hocsemius, canon of Liège, a contemporary historian (Fabricius, Bibliot. Lat. med. Ævi, tom. iii. p. 273; tom. iv. p. 85).

The Abbé de Sade, who so freely expatiates on the history of the xivth century, might treat, as his proper subject, a revolution in which the heart of Petrarch was so deeply engaged (Mémoires, tom. ii. p. 50, 51, 320-417, notes, p. 70-76; tom. iii. p. 221-243, 366-375). Not an idea or a fact in the writings of Petrarch has probably escaped him.

Giovanni Villani, l. xii. c. 89, 104, in Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, tom. xiii. p. 969, 970, 981-983.

In his third volume of Italian Antiquities (p. 249-548), Muratori has inserted the Fragmenta Historiæ Romanæ ab Anno 1327 usque ad Annum 1354, in the original dialect of Rome or Naples in the xivth century, and a Latin version for the benefit of strangers. It contains the most particular and authentic life of Cola (Nicholas) di Rienzi, which had been printed at Bracciano, 1627, in 4to, under the name of Tomaso Fortifiocca, who is only mentioned in this work as having been punished by the tribune for forgery, [This Life has been edited by Zeferino Re, 2nd ed. 1854.] Human nature is scarcely capable of such sublime or stupid impartiality; but whosoever is the author of thes Fragments, he wrote on the spot and at the time, and paints, without design or art, the manners of Rome and the character of the tribune. [Rienzi’s letters have been published by A. Gabrielli, Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, 1890. Monographs: Papencordt, Cola di Rienzi und seine Zeit, 1841 (and French transl. by Boré, 1845); Rodocanachi, Cola di Rienzo: histoire de Rome de 1342 à 1354, 1888.]

The first and splendid period of Rienzi, his tribunitian government, is contained in the xviiith chapter of the Fragments (p. 399-479), which, in the new division, forms the iid book of the history in xxxviii. smaller chapters or sections. [The more correct form of his name is Rienzo, from Lorenzo. In Latin documents he is called Nicolaus Laurentii.]

The reader may be pleased with a specimen of the original idiom: Fò da soa juventutine nutricato di latte de eloquentia, bono gramatico, megliore rettuorico, autorista bravo. Deh como et quanto era veloce leitore! moito usava Tito Livio, Seneca, et Tullio, et Balerio Massimo moito li dilettava le magnificentie di Julio Cesare raccontare. Tutta la [Editor: Illegible word] se speculava negl’ intagli di marmo lequali iaccio intorno Roma. Non era altri che esso, che sapesse lejere li antichi pataffii. Tutte scritture antiche vulgarizzava; quesse fiure di marmo justamente interpretava. Oh come spesso diceva, “Dove suono quelli buoni Romani? dove ene loro somma justitia? poleramme trovare in tempo che quessi fiuriano!”

[Monthly, not daily. See Cola’s petition for the office, which was granted to him by the Pope. See Gregorovius, vi. p. 231, note.]

Petrarch compares the jealousy of the Romans with the easy temper of the husbands of Avignon (Mémoires, tom. i. p. 330).

The fragments of the Lex Regia may be found in the inscriptions of Gruter, tom. i. p. 242, and at the end of the Tacitus of Ernesti, with some learned notes of the editor, tom. ii. [See C.I.L. vi. 930. Cp. above vol. i. p. 84, n. 19. “Cola had discovered this bronze tablet in the Lateran, where it had been employed in the construction of an altar in the time of Boniface VIII. The inscription had then been turned inwards, but it was restored to light either by the fall of the church in consequence of the fire or in process of rebuilding. The use to which Cola turned this monument of imperial despotism was singular and ingenious. He caused the tablet to be built into the wall behind the choir of the Lateran, and round it had the Senate painted in the act of conferring the imperial authority on Vespasian.”]

I cannot overlook a stupendous and laughable blunder of Rienzi. The Lex Regia empowers Vespasian to enlarge the Pomœrium, a word familiar to every antiquary. It was not so to the tribune; he confounds it with promarium an orchard, translates lo Jardino de Roma cioene Italia, and is copied by the less excusable ignorance of the Latin translator (p. 406) and the French historian (p. 33). Even the learning of Muratori has slumbered over the passage. [Gregorovius compares Dante’s (Purgatorio, vi. 105) chè il giardin dell’ Imperio sia deserto.]

Priori ( Bruto ) tamen similior, juvenis uterque, longe ingenio quam cujus simulationem induerat, ut sub hoc obtentu liberator ille P. R. aperiretur tempore suo . . . ille regibus, hic tyrannis contemptus (Opp. p. 536).

[This was his style: Nicholaus, Severus et Clemens, Libertatis Pacis Justitiaeque Tribunus, et sacre Romane Reipublice Liberator. (Gregorovius, vi. 249.)]

In one MS. I read (l. ii. c. 4, p. 409) perfumante quatro solli, in another quatro florini: an important variety, since the florin was worth ten Roman solidi (Muratori, dissert. xxviii.). The former reading would give us a population of 25,000, the latter of 250,000, families; and I much fear that the former is more consistent with the decay of Rome and her territory. [The population was probably not more than 50,000 in all, at this period. Cp. Gregorovius, vi. 152 note. The hearth tax ( focaticum ) is said to have been 26 denari ( ib. 256).]

Hocsemius, p. 398, apud du Cerceau, Hist. de Rienzi, p. 194. The fifteen tribunician laws may be found in the Roman historian (whom for brevity I shall name) Fortifiocca, l. ii. c. 4.

Fortifiocca, l. ii. c. 11. From the account of this shipwreck we learn some circumstances of the trade and navigation of the age. 1. The ship was built and freighted at Naples for the ports of Marseilles and Avignon. 2. The sailors were of Naples and the Isle of Oenaria, less skilful than those of Sicily and Genoa. 3. The navigation from Marseilles was a coasting voyage to the mouth of the Tiber, where they took shelter in a storm, but, instead of finding the current, unfortunately ran on a shoal; the vessel was stranded, the mariners escaped. 4. The cargo, which was pillaged, consisted of the revenue of Provence for the royal treasury, many bags of pepper and cinnamon, and bales of French cloth, to the value of 20,000 florins: a rich prize.

[It is strange that Gibbon should have made no mention of Dante’s work De Monarchia, which, though it expressed the Ghibelline ideal and looked for salvation to Germany, was nevertheless animated with the same idea which inspired Rienzi, in so far as it recognised that the rule of the world belonged to Rome. The De Monarchia is an important indication of the mediaeval ideals which moved Italians in the fourteenth century, and the reaction against the Popes. Mr. Bryce gives an account of its argument in his Holy Roman Empire, p. 265 sqq. (ed. 7). As the work appeared after the Italian expedition of Henry VII. — the last episode in the history of the Empire in Italy — Mr. Bryce describes the book as “an epitaph instead of a prophecy.” See also the observations of Gregorovius, vi. p. 19-24. It is pathetic to see how men like Petrarch looked for the regeneration of Italy to the degenerate rabble of Rome.]

It was thus that Oliver Cromwell’s old acquaintance, who remembered his vulgar and ungracious entrance into the House of Commons, were astonished at the ease and majesty of the Protector on his throne (see Harris’s Life of Cromwell, p. 27-34, from Clarendon, Warwick, Whitelocke, Waller, c.). The consciousness of merit and power will sometimes elevate the manners to the station.

See the causes, circumstances, and effects of the death of Andrew, in Giannone (tom. iii. l. xxiii. p. 220-229), and the Life of Petrarch (Mémoires, tom. ii. p. 143-148, 245-250, 375-379, notes, p. 21-37). The Abbé de Sade wishes to extenuate her guilt.

The advocate who pleaded against Jean could add nothing to the logical force and brevity of his master’s epistle. Johanna! inordinata vita præcedens, retentio potestatis in regno, neglecta vindicta, vir alter susceptus, et excusatio subsequens, necis viri tui te probant fuisse participem et consortem. Jane of Naples and Mary of Scotland have a singular conformity.

See the Epistola Hortatoria de Capessendâ Republicâ, from Petrarch to Nicholas Rienzi (Opp. p. 535-540), and the fifth eclogue or pastoral, a perpetual and obscure allegory.

In his Roman questions, Plutarch (Opuscul. tom. i. p. 505, 506, edit. Græc. Hen. Steph.) states, on the most constitutional principles, the simple greatness of the tribunes, who were not properly magistrates, but a check on magistracy. It was their duty and interest ὁμοιον̂σθαι σχήματι, καὶ στολῃ̑ καὶ διαίτῃ τοɩ̂ς ἐπιτυγχάνουσι τω̂ν πολιτω̂ν . . . καταπατεɩ̂σθαι δεɩ̂ (a saying of C. Curio) καὶ μὴ σεμνὸν εɩ̂̓ναι τῃ̑ δημάρχου ὄψει . . . ὅσῳ δὲ μα̂λλον ἐκταπεινον̂ται τῷ σώματι, τοσούτῳ μα̂λλον αὔξεται τῃ̑ δυνάμει, c. Rienzi, and Petrarch himself, were incapable perhaps of reading a Greek philosopher; but they might have imbibed the same modest doctrines from their favourite Latins, Livy and Valerius Maximus.

I could not express in English the forcible though barbarous title of Zelator Italiæ, which Rienzi assumed.

Era bell’ homo (l. ii. c. 1, p. 399). It is remarkable, that the riso sarcastico of the Bracciano edition is wanting in the Roman MS. from which Muratori has given the text. In his second reign, when he is painted almost as a monster, Rienzi travea una ventresca tonna trionfale, a modo de uno Abbate Asiano, or Asinino (l. iii. c. 18, p. 523).

Strange as it may seem, this festival was not without a precedent. In the year 1327, two barons, a Colonna and an Ursini, the usual balance, were created knights by the Roman people: their bath was of rose-water, their beds were decked with royal magnificence, and they were served at St. Maria of Araceli in the Capitol by the twenty-eight buoni huomini. They afterwards received from Robert, king of Naples, the sword of chivalry (Hist. Rom. l. i. c. 2, p. 259). [On 26th July of this year, 1347, Rienzi issued an edict, declaring the majesty and supremacy of the Roman people, and abolishing all the privileges assumed by the Popes. This edict was submitted to a council of jurists, and was issued in the name of the Italian nation. See Gregorovius, vi. p. 267.]

All parties believed in the leprosy and bath of Constantine (Petrarch, Epist. Famil. vi. 2), and Rienzi justified his own conduct by observing to the court of Avignon that a vase which had been used by a pagan could not be profaned by a pious Christian. Yet this crime is specified in the bull of excommunication (Hocsemius, apud du Cerceau, p. 189, 190).

This verbal summons of Pope Clement VI., which rests on the authority of the Roman historian and a Vatican MS., is disputed by the biographer of Petrarch (tom. ii. not. p. 70-76), with arguments rather of decency than of weight. The court of Avignon might not choose to agitate this delicate question.

The summons of the two rival emperors, a monument of freedom and folly, is extant in Hocsemius (Cerceau, p. 163-166). [Gregorovius (vi. p. 276) well observes: “The Romans, accustomed to all the spectacles of history, blunted to the distinctions between the sublime and the ridiculous . . . neither laughed at this edict nor at the figure of the crazy tribune. . . . They loudly shouted their approval. The absurd proclamation appeared as the ultimate consequence of the claims of the city to the Imperial majesty, with which she had formally confronted Conrad the first of the Hohenstaufens. . . . The errors and theories of Dante and Petrarch in their theological age explain or excuse the insane dreams of the Tribune.”]

[On the next day, 2nd August, a festival of the Unity of Italy was held. Cola assigned the banner of Italy to the Florentines, the banner of Constantine to Perugia, the banner of freedom to Siena.]

It is singular that the Roman historian should have overlooked this sevenfold coronation, which is sufficiently proved by internal evidence, and the testimony of Hocsemius, and even of Rienzi (Cerceau, p. 167-170, 229).

[Not exactly seven crowns, but six crowns (of oak, ivy, myrtle, laurel, olive, silver) and a globe, emblem of the world. Rienzi believed that the ancient tribunes were crowned with these six crowns, and thus he characteristically combined classical antiquity with Christianity. He was at once (Gregorovius, vi. p. 284) “Tribunus Augustus and Candidate of the Holy Ghost.”]

Puoi se faceva stare denante a se, mentre sedeva, li baroni tutti in piedi ritti co le vraccia piecate, e co li capucci tratti. Deh como stavano paurosi! (Hist. Rom. l. ii. c. 20, p. 439). He saw them, and we see them.

The original letter, in which Rienzi justifies his treatment of the Colonna (Hocsemius, apud du Cerceau, p. 222-229), displays, in genuine colours, the mixture of the knave and the madman.

Rienzi, in the above-mentioned letter, ascribes to St. Martin the tribune, Boniface VIII. the enemy of Colonna, himself, and the Roman people, the glory of the day, which Villani likewise (l. xii. c. 104) describes as a regular battle. The disorderly skirmish, the flight of the Romans, and the cowardice of Rienzi are painted in the simple and minute narrative of Fortifiocca, or the anonymous citizen (l. ii. c. 34-37).

In describing the fall of the Colonna, I speak only of the family of Stephen the Elder, who is often confounded by the P. du Cerceau with his son. That family was extinguished, but the house has been perpetuated in the collateral branches, of which I have not a very accurate knowledge. Circumspice (says Petrarch) familiæ tuæ statum, Columniensium domos: solito pauciores habeat columnas. Quid ad rem? modo fundamentum stabile solidumque permaneat.

The convent of St. Silvester was founded, endowed, and protected by the Colonna cardinals, for the daughters of the family who embraced a monastic life, and who, in the year 1318, were twelve in number. The others were allowed to marry with their kinsmen in the fourth degree, and the dispensation was justified by the small number and close alliances of the noble families of Rome (Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 110, tom. ii. p. 401).

Petrarch wrote a stiff and pedantic letter of consolation (Fam. l. vii. epist. 13, p. 682, 683). The friend was lost in the patriot. Nulla toto orbe principum familia carior; carior tamen respublica, carior Roma, carior Italia.

Je rends grâces aux Dieux de n’être pas Romain.

This council and opposition is obscurely mentioned by Pollistore, a contemporary writer, who has preserved some curious and original facts (Rer. Italicarum, tom. xxv. c. 31, p. 798-804).

The briefs and bulls of Clement VI. against Rienzi are translated by the P. du Cerceau (p. 196, 232), from the Ecclesiastical Annals of Rodericus Raynaldus ( AD 1347, No. 15, 17, 21, c.), who found them in the archives of the Vatican.

Matteo Villani describes the origin, character, and death of this count of Minorbino, a man da natura inconstante e senza sede, whose grandfather, a crafty notary, was enriched and ennobled by the spoils of the Saracens of Nocera (l. vii. c. 102, 103). See his imprisonment, and the efforts of Petrarch, tom. ii. p. 149-151.

[One of these cardinals asked Petrarch his opinion on the question. Petrarch’s advice was: “Snatch all this pestilential tyranny from the hands of the nobles; not only give the Plebs Romana a share of the public dignities, but deprive the unworthy Senators of the office which they have so badly administered” (Gregorovius, vi. p. 330).]

The troubles of Rome, from the departure to the return of Rienzi, are related by Matteo Villani (l. ii. c. 47; l. iii. c. 33, 57, 78) and Thomas Fortifiocca (l. iii. c. 1-4). I have slightly passed over these secondary characters, who imitated the original tribune.

[The Fraticelli of Monte Majella in the Abruzzi. Rienzi stayed there above two years, doing penance for his sins.]

These visions, of which the friends and enemies of Rienzi seem alike ignorant, are surely magnified by the zeal of Pollistore, a Dominican inquisitor (Rer. Ital. tom. xxv. c. 36, p. 819). Had the tribune taught that Christ was succeeded by the Holy Ghost, that the tyranny of the pope would be abolished, he might have been convicted of heresy and treason without offending the Roman people. [The letters of Rienzi at this time (given in Papencordt’s work cited above, p. 128, note 20) are very important. They portray the state of Rome; indict the Pope; and are thoroughly Ghibelline in spirit, expressing the need of keeping the secular and ecclesiastical powers apart. Gregorovius says (vi. 346): “The tribune in chains at Prague was more dangerous to the Papacy than he had been when at the height of his power in the Capitol. He now expressed, like the Monarchists, the necessity for mankind of a reformation; and this constitutes the serious importance of this extraordinary Roman, and secures him a place in history.”]

The astonishment, the envy almost, of Petrarch is a proof, if not of the truth of this incredible fact, at least of his own veracity. The Abbé de Sade (Mémoires, tom. iii. p. 242) quotes the vith epistle of the xiiith book of Petrarch, but it is of the royal MS. which he consulted, and not of the ordinary Basil edition (p. 920).

Ægidius or Giles Albornoz, a noble Spaniard, archbishop of Toledo, and cardinal legate in Italy ( AD 1353-1367), restored, by his arms and counsels, the temporal dominion of the popes. His life has been separately written by Sepulveda; but Dryden could not reasonably suppose that his name, or that of Wolsey, had reached the ears of the Mufti in Don Sebastian.

From Matteo Villani and Fortifiocca, the P. du Cerceau (p. 344-394) has extracted the life and death of the Chevalier Montreal, the life of a robber, and the death of an hero. At the head of a free company, the first that desolated Italy, he became rich and formidable; he had money in all the banks, 60,000 ducats in Padua alone.

The exile, second government, and death of Rienzi are minutely related by the anonymous Roman who appears neither his friend nor his enemy (l. iii. c. 12-25). Petrarch, who loved the tribune, was indifferent to the fate of the senator.

The hopes and the disappointment of Petrarch are agreeably described in his own words by the French biographer (Mémoires, tom. iii. p. 575-613); but the deep though secret wound was the coronation of Zanubi, the poetlaureat, by Charles IV.

See, in his accurate and amusing biographer, the application of Petrarch and Rome to Benedict XII. in the year 1334 (Mémoires, tom. i. p. 261-265), to Clement VI. in 1342 (tom. ii. p. 45-47), and to Urban V. in 1366 (tom. iii. p. 677-691); his praise (p. 711-715) and excuse (p. 771) of the last of these pontiffs. His angry controversy on the respective merits of France and Italy may be found (Opp. p. 1068-1085).

Squalida sed quoniam facies, neglectaque cultu Cæsaries; multisque malis lassata senectus Eripuit solitam effigiem: vetus accipe nomen; Roma vocor. (Carm. l. ii. p. 77.)

He spins this allegory beyond all measure or patience. The epistles to Urban V. in prose are more simple and persuasive (Senilium, l. vii. p. 811-827; l. ix. epist. i. p. 844-854).

[ Vinum Bennense, “Beaune.”]

I have not leisure to expatiate on the legends of St. Bridget or St. Catherine, the last of which might furnish some amusing stories. Their effect on the mind of Gregory XI. is attested by the last solemn words of the dying pope, who admonished the assistants, ut caverent ab hominibus, sive viris, sive mulieribus, sub specie religionis loquentibus visiones sui capitis, quia per tales ipse seductus, c. (Baluz. Not. ad Vit. Pap. Avenionensium, tom. i. p. 1223). [St. Bridge was the wife of a great Swedish noble, Ulf Gudmarson. Her Life by Bartholdus de Roma is published in the Acta Sanctorum, 8th October, iv. p. 495 sqq. Her Revelations have been frequently edited, most recently (Revel. Selectæ) by A. Heuser, 1851. There is also an English translation: “Certayne revelacyons of St. Brigitte,” by Th. Godfrey (London, no date). The most important monograph is by a Swede, F. Hammerich, and has been done into German by A. Michelsen: St. Birgitta die nordische Prophetin und Ordensstifterin, 1872. There is also a Danish monograph by A. Brinkmann (1893); and a French by the Comtesse de Flavigny: Sainte Brigitte de Suède, 1892. — There is an immense literature on Catherine of Siena. Chavin de Malan’s Histoire de Sainte Catherine de Sienne, 2 vols., 1846, and Augusta T. Drane’s History of St. Catherine of Siena with her companions (with a translation of her treatise on Consummate Perfection), 2 vols., 1887, may be mentioned. The letters of the saint have been edited by N. Tommaseo in 4 vols., 1860.]

This predatory expedition is related by Froissart (Chronique, tom. i. p. 230), and in the life of du Guesclin (Collection Générale des Mémoires Historiques, tom. iv. c. 16, p. 107-113). As early as the year 1361, the court of Avignon had been molested by similar freebooters, who afterwards passed the Alps (Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 563-569).

Fleury alleges, from the annals of Odericus Raynaldus, the original treaty which was signed the 21st of December 1376 between Gregory XI. and the Romans (Hist. Ecclés. tom. xx. p. 275).

The first crown or regnum (Ducange, Gloss. Latin. tom. v. p. 702) on the Episcopal mitre of the popes is ascribed to the gift of Constantine [to Pope Sylvester] or Clovis. The second was added by Boniface VIII. as the emblem, not only of a spiritual, but of a temporal, kingdom. The three states of the church are represented by the triple crown which was introduced by John XXII. or Benedict XII. (Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 258, 259). [The regnum or pointed tiara “originally consisted of white peacock’s feathers, and was later ornamented with precious stones, encircled by a gold rim, and afterwards by three diadems; the whole was surmounted by a carbuncle.” Gregorovius, v. p. 8 (where there is a description of the papal coronation). The three diadems are said to have been added by Nicholas I., Boniface VIII., and Urban V. Monograph: Zöpffel, Die Papstwahlen und die mit ihnen im nächsten Zusammenhang stehenden Ceremonien vom 11 bis 14 Jahrhundert, 1871.]

Baluze (Not. ad Pap. Avenion. tom. i. p. 1194, 1195) produces the original evidence, which attests the threats of the Roman ambassadors, and the resignation of the abbot of Mount Cassin, qui ultro se offerens respondit se civem Romanum esse, et illud velle quod ipsi vellent.

The return of the popes from Avignon to Rome, and their reception by the people, are related in the original Lives of Urban V. and Gregory XI. in Baluze (Vit. Paparum Avenionensium, tom. i. p. 363-486) and Muratori (Script. Rer. Italicarum, tom. iii. p. i. p. 610-712). In the disputes of the schism, every circumstance was severely though partially scrutinised, more especially in the great inquest which decided the obedience of Castile, and to which Baluze, in his notes, so often and so largely appeals, from a MS. volume in the Harley library (p. 1281, c.). [See the works of Theodoricus de Niem: De scismate (ed. Erler, 1890); Vitae Pontificum Romanorum a Nicolao IV. usque ad Urbanum V. with an anonymous continuation to AD 1418 (in Eccard, Corpus hist. medii aevi (i. p. 1461 sqq. ); Nemus Unionis (collection of documents for Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII.) ed. Schard (with the De scismate), 1566. Monograph: G. Erler, Dietrich von Nieheim; sein Leben und seine Schriften, 1887.]

Can the death of a good man be esteemed a punishment by those who believe in the immortality of the soul? They betray the instability of their faith. Yet, as a mere philosopher, I cannot agree with the Greeks, δν οί θεοὶ ϕιλον̂σιν ἀποθνῄσκει νέος (Brunck, Poetæ Gnomici, p. 231). See in Herodotus (l. i. c. 31) the moral and pleasing tale of the Argive youths.

In the first book of the Histoire du Concile de Pise, M. Lenfant has abridged and compared the original narratives of the adherents of Urban and Clement, of the Italians and Germans, the French and Spaniards. The latter appear to be the most active and loquacious, and every fact and word in the original Lives of Gregory XI. and Clement VII. are supported in the notes of their editor Baluze.

The ordinal numbers of the popes seem to decide the question against Clement VII. and Benedict XIII. who are boldly stigmatised as anti-popes by the Italians, while the French are content with authorities and reasons to plead the cause of doubt and toleration (Baluz. in Præfat.). It is singular, or rather it is not singular, that saints, visions, and miracles should be common to both parties.

Baluze strenuously labours (Not. p. 1271-1280) to justify the pure and pious motives of Charles V., king of France: he refused to hear the arguments of Urban; but were not the Urbanists equally deaf to the reasons of Clement, c.?

An epistle, or declamation, in the name of Edward III. (Baluz. Vit. Pap. Avenion. tom. i. p. 553) displays the zeal of the English nation against the Clementines. Nor was their zeal confined to words; the bishop of Norwich led a crusade of 60,000 bigots beyond sea (Hume’s History, vol. iii. p. 57, 58).

Besides the general historians, the Diaries of Delphinus Gentilis, Peter Antonius, and Stephen Infessura, in the great Collection of Muratori, represent the state and misfortunes of Rome.

It is supposed by Giannone (tom. iii. p. 292) that he styled himself Rex Romæ, a title unknown to the world since the expulsion of Tarquin. But a nearer inspection has justified the reading of Rex Ramæ, of Rama, an obscure kingdom annexed to the crown of Hungary.

The leading and decisive part which France assumed in the schism is stated by Peter du Puis, in a separate history, extracted from authentic records, and inserted in the seventh volume of the last and best edition of his friend Thuanus (tom. xi. p. 110-184).

Of this measure, John Gerson, a stout doctor, was the author or the champion. The proceedings of the university of Paris [of which he was chancellor] and the Gallican church were often prompted by his advice, and are copiously displayed in his theological writings, of which Le Clerc (Bibliothèque Choisie, tom. x. p. 1-78) has given a valuable extract. John Gerson acted an important part in the councils of Pisa and Constance. [The collective works of Gerson were issued several times in the 15th century. The best edition is that of Ellies Du Pin, 1706. Monographs: J. B. Schwab, Johannes Gerson, 1858; A. L. Masson, Jean Gerson, sa vie, son temps, ses œuvres, 1894.]

Leonardus Brunus Aretinus, one of the revivers of classic learning in Italy, who, after serving many years as secretary in the Roman court, retired to the honourable office of chancellor of the republic of Florence (Fabric. Bibliot. medii Ævi, tom. i. p. 290). Lenfant has given the version of this curious epistle (Concile de Pise, tom. i. p. 192-195). [The Letters of Leonardus were edited in eight books by L. Mehns, 1741.]

[Pietro Filargo was a native of Candia. The last Greek Pope was John VII. (elected AD 705).]

[Theodoric of Niem, Historia de vita Johannis XXIII., in Meibomius, Ser. rer. Germ. i. p. 5 sqq. C. Hunger, Zur Geschichte Papst Johanns, xxiii. 1876.]

I cannot overlook this great national cause, which was vigorously maintained by the English ambassadors against those of France. The latter contended that Christendom was essentially distributed into the four great nations and votes of Italy, Germany, France, and Spain; and that the lesser kingdoms (such as England, Denmark, Portugal, c.) were comprehended under one or other of these great divisions. The English asserted that the British islands, of which they were the head, should be considered as a fifth and co-ordinate nation with an equal vote; and every argument of truth or fable was introduced to exalt the dignity of their country. Including England, Scotland, Wales, the four kingdoms of Ireland, and the Orkneys, the British islands are decorated with eight royal crowns, and discriminated by four or five languages, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scotch, Irish, c. The greater island, from north to south, measures 800 miles, or 40 days’ journey; and England alone contains 32 counties, and 52,000 parish churches (a bold account!), besides cathedrals, colleges, priories, and hospitals. They celebrate the mission of St. Joseph of Arimathea, the birth of Constantine, and the legatine powers of the two primates, without forgetting the testimony of Bartholemy de Glanville ( AD 1360), who reckons only four Christian kingdoms, 1. of Rome, 2. of Constantinople, 3. of Ireland, which had been transferred to the English monarchs, and 4. of Spain. Our countrymen prevailed in the council, but the victories of Henry V. added much weight to their arguments. The adverse pleadings were found at Constance by Sir Robert Wingfield, ambassador from Henry VIII. to the emperor Maximilian I. and by him printed in 1517, at Louvain. From a Leipsic MS. they are more correctly published in the Collection of Von der Hardt, tom. v.; but I have only seen Lenfant’s abstract of these acts (Concile de Constance, tom. ii. p. 447, 453, c.).

The histories of the three successive councils, Pisa, Constance, and Basil, have been written with a tolerable degree of candour, industry, and elegance, by a Protestant minister, M. Lenfant, who retired from France to Berlin. They form six volumes in quarto; and, as Basil is the worst, so Constance is the best, part of the Collection. [See above, vol. xi. p. 253, note 40.]

See the xxviith Dissertation of the Antiquities of Muratori, and the ist Instruction of the Science des Médailles of the Père Joubert and the Baron de la Bastie. The Metallic History of Martin V. and his successors has been composed by two monks, Moulinet a Frenchman, and Bonanni an Italian; but I understand that the first part of the series is restored from more recent coins.

Besides the Lives of Eugenius IV. (Rerum Italic. tom. iii. p. i. p. 869, and [the Life by Vespasianus Florentinus] tom. xxv. p. 256), the Diaries of Paul Petroni and Stephen Infessura are the best original evidence for the revolt of the Romans against Eugenius IV. The former, who lived at the time and on the spot, speaks the language of a citizen equally afraid of priestly and popular tyranny.

The coronation of Frederic III. is described by Lenfant (Concile de Basle, tom. ii. p. 276-288) from Æneas Sylvius, a spectator and actor in that splendid scene.

The oath of fidelity imposed on the emperor by the pope is recorded and sanctified in the Clementines (l. ii. tit. ix.); and Æneas Sylvius, who objects to this new demand, could not foresee that in a few years he should ascend the throne and imbibe the maxims of Boniface VIII.

Lo senatore di Roma, vestito di brocarto con quella beretta, e con quelle maniche, et ornamenti di pelle, co’ quali va alle feste di Testaccio e Nagone, might escape the eye of Æneas Sylvius, but he is viewed with admiration and complacency by the Roman citizen (Diario di Stephano Infessura, p. 1133). [See Gregorovius, v. p. 289 sqq. ]

See, in the statutes of Rome, the senator and three judges (l. i. c. 3-14), the conservators (l. i. c. 15-17; l. iii. c. 4), the caporioni (l. i. c. 18; l. iii. c. 8), the secret council (l. iii. c. 2), the common council (l. iii. c. 3). The title of feuds, defiances, acts of violence, c. is spread through many a chapter (c. 14-40) of the second book.

[Urban V. introduced the three Conservators of the Civic Camera — “a civic council with judicial and administrative power whose office endures to the present day,” Gregorovius, v. p. 439. At the same time, Urban abolished the Council of Seven Reformatores, who had been elected in 1358 to advise the Senators, and suppressed the “Banderesi,” the heads of military companies which had been organised in 1356. These Banderesi executed justice (like the Gonfalonieri in Florence), and their power had become very tyrannical. See Gregorovius, ib. p. 403.]

Statuta almæ Urbis Romæ Auctoritate S. D. N. Gregorii XIII. Pont. Max. a Senatu Populoque Rom. reformata et edita. Romæ, 1580, in folio. The obsolete, repugnant statutes of antiquity were confounded in five books, and Lucas Pætus, a lawyer and antiquarian, was appointed to act as the modern Tribonian. Yet I regret the old code, with the rugged crust of freedom and barbarism.

In my time (1765), and in M. Grosley’s (Observations sur l’Italie, tom. ii. p. 361), the senator of Rome was M. Bielke, a noble Swede, and a proselyte to the Catholic faith. The pope’s right to appoint the senator and the conservator is implied rather than affirmed in the statutes.

Besides the curious though concise narrative of Machiavel (Istoria Florentina, l. vi. Opere, tom. i. p. 210, 211, edit. Londra, 1747, in 4to), the Porcarian conspiracy is related in the Diary of Stephen Infessura (Rer. Ital. tom. iii. p. ii. p. 1134, 1135), and in a separate tract by Leo Baptista Alberti (Rer. Ital. tom. xxv. p. 609-614). It is amusing to compare the style and sentiments of the courtier and citizen. Facinus profecto quo . . . neque periculo horribilius, neque audaciâ detestabilius, neque crudelitate tetrius, a quoquam perditissimo uspiam excogitatum sit. . . . Perdette la vita quell’ huomo da bene, e amatore dello bene e libertà di Roma. Another source: Petrus de Godis, Dyalogon de conjuratione Porcaria, was first published by M. Perlbach in 1879. See also Tommasini, Documenti relativi a Stefano Porcari, in the Arch. della Soc. rom. di storia patria, iii. p. 63 sqq. 1879; Sanesi, Stefano Porcari e la sua congiura, 1887.]

The disorders of Rome, which were much inflamed by the partiality of Sixtus IV., are exposed in the diaries of two spectators, Stephen Infessura and an anonymous citizen. See the troubles of the year 1484, and the death of the proto-notary Colonna, in tom. iii. p. ii. p. 1083, 1158.

Est toute la terre de l’église troublée pour cette partialité (des Colonnes et des Ursins), come nous dirions Luce et Grammont, ou en Hollande Houc et Caballan; et quand ce ne seroit ce différend la terre de l’église seroit la plus heureuse habitation pour les sujets, qui soit dans tout le monde (car ils ne payent ni tailes ni guères autres choses), et seroient toujours bien conduits (car toujours les papes sont sages et bien conseillés); mais très souvent en advient de grands et cruels meurtres et pilleries.

100

By the economy of Sixtus V. the revenue of the ecclesiastical state was raised to two millions and a half of Roman crowns (Vita, tom. ii. p. 291-296); and so regular was the military establishment that in one month Clement VIII. could invade the duchy of Ferrara with three thousand horse and twenty thousand foot (tom. iii. p. 64). Since that time ( AD 1597), the papal arms are happily rusted; but the revenue must have gained some nominal increase.

101

More especially by Guicciardini and Machiavel: in the general history of the former, in the Florentine history, the Prince, and the political discourses of the latter. These, with their worthy successors, Fra Paolo and Davila, were justly esteemed the first historians of modern languages, till, in the present age, Scotland arose to dispute the prize with Italy herself.

102

In the history of the Gothic siege, I have compared the Barbarians with the subjects of Charles V. (vol. v. p. 250-251): an anticipation which, like that of the Tartar conquests, I indulged with the less scruple, as I could scarcely hope to reach the conclusion of my work.

103

The ambitious and feeble hostilities of the Caraffa pope, Paul IV., may be seen in Thuanus (l. xvi.-xviii.) and Giannone (tom. iv. p. 149-163). Those Catholic bigots, Philip II. and the duke of Alva, presumed to separate the Roman prince from the vicar of Christ; yet the holy character, which would have sanctified his victory, was decently applied to protect his defeat. [For the Popes of the 16th century, see Ranke, History of the Popes, their Church and State (Eng. tr. by Kelly), 1843.]

104

This gradual change of manners and expense is admirably explained by Dr. Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, vol. i. p. 495-504), who proves, perhaps too severely, that the most salutary effects have flowed from the meanest and most selfish causes.

105

Mr. Hume (Hist. of England, vol. i. p. 389) too hastily concludes that, if the civil and ecclesiastical powers be united in the same person, it is of little moment whether he be styled prince or prelate, since the temporal character will always predominate.

106

A Protestant may disdain the unworthy preference of St. Francis or St. Dominic, but he will not rashly condemn the zeal or judgment of Sixtus V. who placed the statues of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul on the vacant columns of Trajan and Antonine.

107

A wandering Italian, Gregorio Leti, has given the Vita di Sisto-Quinto (Amstel. 1721, 3 vols. in 12mo), a copious and amusing work, but which does not command our absolute confidence. Yet the character of the man, and the principal facts, are supported by the annals of Spondanus and Muratori ( AD 1585-1590), and the contemporary history of the great Thuanus (l. lxxxii. c. 1, 2; l. lxxxiv. c. 10; l. c. c. 8). [The source of Leti was a collection of anecdotes, of apocryphal character, entitled Detti e fatti di papa Sisto V., of which the MS. is in the Corsini library at Rome. This discovery was made by Ranke. See his Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 39, pp. 59-65 (in Appendix to his Lives of the Popes).]

108

These privileged places, the quartieri or franchises, were adopted from the Roman nobles by the foreign ministers. Julius II. had once abolished the abominandum et detestandum franchitiarum hujusmodi nomen; and after Sixtus V. they again revived. I cannot discern either the justice or magnanimity of Louis XIV. who, in 1687, sent his ambassador, the marquis de Lavardin, to Rome, with an armed force of a thousand officers, guards, and domestics, to maintain this iniquitous claim, and insult Pope Innocent XI. in the heart of his capital (Vita di Sisto V. tom. iii. p. 260-278; Muratori, Annali d’Italia, tom. xv. p. 494-496; and Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV. tom. ii. c. 14, p. 58, 59).

109

This outrage produced a decree, which was inscribed on marble and placed in the Capitol. It is expressed in a style of manly simplicity and freedom: Si quis, sive privatus, sive magistratum gerens de collocandâ vivo pontifici statuâ mentionem facere ausit, legitimo S. P. Q. R. decreto in perpetuum infamis et publicorum munerum expers esto. MDXC. mense Augusto (Vita di Sisto V. tom. iii. p. 469). I believe that this decree is still observed, and I know that every monarch who deserves a statue should himself impose the prohibition.

110

The histories of the church, Italy, and Christendom have contributed to the chapter which I now conclude. In the original Lives of the Popes, we often discover the city and republic of Rome; and the events of the xivth and xvth centuries are preserved in the rude and domestic chronicles which I have carefully inspected, and shall recapitulate in the order of time.

1. Monaldeschi (Ludovici Boncomitis) Fragmenta Annalium Roman. AD 1328, in the Scriptores Rerum Italicarum of Muratori, tom. xii. p. 525. N.B. The credit of this fragment is somewhat hurt by a singular interpolation, in which the author relates his own death at the age of 115 years. [The work seems to be a forgery; and Labruzzi (Arch. della Società Romana di storia patria, ii. p. 281 sqq. 1879) ascribes it to Alfonso Ceccarélli (who was executed in 1583).] 2. Fragmenta Historiæ Romanæ (vulgo Thomas. Fortifioccæ), in Romano Dialecto vulgari ( AD 1327-1354), in Muratori, Antiquitat. medii Ævi Italiæ, tom. iii. p. 247-548; the authentic ground-work of the history of Rienzi. [See above, p. 128, note 20.] 3. Delphini (Gentilis) Diarium Romanum ( AD 1370-1410), in the Rerum Italicarum, tom. iii. p. ii. p. 846. 4. Antonii (Petri) Diarium Rom. ( AD 1404-1417), tom. xxiv. p. 969. [See Savignoni, Giornale d’Antonio di Pietro dello Schiavo, in the Arch. della Società Rom. di. stor. patr. xiii. p. 295 sqq. ] 5. Petroni (Pauli) Miscellanea Historica Romana ( AD 1433-1446), tom. xxiv. p. 1101. 6. Volaterrani (Jacob.) Diarium Rom. ( AD 1472-1484), tom. xxiii. p. 81. 7. Anonymi Diarium Urbis Romæ ( AD 1481-1492), tom. iii. p. ii. p. 1069. 8. Infessuræ (Stephani) Diarium Romanum ( AD 1294, or 1378-1494), tom. iii. p. ii. p. 1109. [New edition by O. Tommasini, 1890.] 9. Historia Arcana Alexandri VI. sive Excerpta ex Diario Joh. Burcardi, ( AD 1492-1503), edita a Godefr. Guilelm. Leibnizio, Hanover, 1697, in 4to. The large and valuable Journal of Burcard might be completed from the MS. in different libraries of Italy and France (M. de Foncemagne, in the Mémoires de l’Acad. des Inscrip. tom. xvii. p. 597-606). [Best, and only complete, edition by L. Thuasne, 3 vols. 1883-5.]

Except the last, all these fragments and diaries are inserted in the Collections of Muratori, my guide and master in the history of Italy. His country and the public are indebted to him for the following works on that subject: 1. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores ( AD 500-1500), quorum potissima pars nunc primum in lucem prodit, c. xxviii. vols. in folio, Milan, 1723-1738, 1751. A volume of chronological and alphabetical tables is still wanting as a key to this great work, which is yet in a disorderly and defective state. [After the lapse of nearly a century and a half this great Collection has been supplied with Chronological Indices by J. Calligaris and others: Indices Chronologici ad Script. Rer. Ital. 1885.] 2. Antiquitates Italiæ medii Ævi, vi. vols. in folio, Milan, 1738-1743, in lxxv. curious dissertations on the manners, government, religion, c. of the Italians of the darker ages, with a large supplement of charters, chronicles, c. [Also published in 17 quarto volumes at Arezzo, 1777-80. Chronological Indexes have been prepared to this work too by Battaglino and Calligaris, 1889, c.] 3. Dissertazioni sopra le Antiquità Italiane, iii. vols. in 4to, Milano, 1751, a free version by the author, which may be quoted with the same confidence as the Latin text of the Antiquities. 4. Annali d’Italia, xviii. vols. in octavo, Milan, 1753-1756, a dry, though accurate and useful, abridgment of the history of Italy, from the birth of Christ to the middle of the xviiith century. 5. Dell’ Antichità Estense ed Italiane, ii. vols. in folio, Modena, 1717, 1740. In the history of this illustrious race, the parent of our Brunswick kings, the critic is not seduced by the loyalty or gratitude of the subject. In all his works, Muratori proves himself a diligent and laborious writer, who aspires above the prejudices of a Catholic priest. He was born in the year 1672, and died in the year 1750, after passing near sixty years in the libraries of Milan and Modena (Vita del Proposto Ludovico Antonio Muratori, by his nephew and successor, Gian. Francesco Soli Muratori, Venezia, 1756, in 4to). [Several biographies of Muratori have appeared since; e.g. by Reina in 1819; by Brigidi in 1871. In 1872, the centenary of his birth, were published: Belviglieri, La vita, le opere, i tempi di L. A. Muratori; and Roncaglia, Vita di L. A. Mur.]

I have already (not. 58, 59, on chap. lxv.) mentioned the age, character, and writings of Poggius; and particularly noticed the date of this elegant moral lecture on the varieties of fortune. [On the subject of this chapter the following works may be consulted: Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle Ages (notices of the fortunes of the ancient monuments are scattered throughout the work; consult Index); Jordan’s Topographie der Stadt Rom im Alterthum, 1871; O. Richter’s article on the Topography of Rome in Baumeister’s Denkmäler, iii. p. 1436 sqq.; J. H. Middleton, The Remains of Ancient Rome, 2 vols., 1892; above all, the works of R. Lanciani: Pagan and Christian Rome, 1892; The Ruins and Excavation of Ancient Rome, 1897.]

Consedimus in ipsis Tarpeiæ arcis ruinis, pone ingens portæ cujusdam, ut puto, templi, marmoreum limen, plurimasque passim confractas columnas, unde magnâ ex parte prospectus urbis patet (p. 5).

Æneid, viii. 97-369. This ancient picture, so artfully introduced and so exquisitely finished, must have been highly interesting to an inhabitant of Rome; and our early studies allow us to sympathise in the feelings of a Roman.

Capitolium adeo . . . immutatum ut vineæ in senatorum subsellia successerint, stercorum ac purgamentorum receptaculum factum. Respice ad Palatinum montem . . . vasta rudera . . . cæteros colles perlustra omnia vacua ædificiis, ruinis vineisque oppleta conspicies (Poggius de Varietat. Fortunæ, p. 21).

See Poggius, p. 8-22.

[The column was moved by Paul V. to the church of S. Maria Maggiore.]

[Thermæ Neronianæ et Alexandrinæ, baths built by Nero and enlarged by Alexander Severus, were close to the Stadium (discovered in 1869), south of the Piazza Navona — south-west of the Pantheon.]

[It has been proved only quite recently (by excavations in 1895) that the Baths of Titus and Trajan were distinct; it was not a case of baths built by Titus and restored or improved by Trajan. The Propylæa of the Thermæ of Titus have been found on the north side of the Coliseum; the Baths of Trajan were to the north-east, almost adjoining. See Lanciani, Ancient Rome, p. 365-6. On the Aventine there were other large Baths, the Thermæ Decianæ. See Lanciani, ib. p. 544-6.]

[An interesting sketch of the history of this arch will be found in Lanciani, op. cit. p. 284-6.]

[He also mentions the Arch of Claudius (in the Piazza Sciarra) and the Arch of Lentulus (on the Aventine). Lanciani has shown that an old Church of St. Stephen, which was excavated in the Piazza di Pietra, was built of spoils taken from the triumphal Arch of Claudius and from the Temple of Neptune (in the Piazza di Pietra). Cp. his Pagan and Christian Rome, p. 99. Fragments of the Arch of Tiberius at the foot of the Capitoline have been discovered. Foundations of the Arch of Augustus were found in 1888. Lanciani had shown in 1882 that “this arch had been found and destroyed by the workmen of the fabbrica di S. Pietro between 1540 and 1546 exactly in that place, and that the inscription Corpus, vol. vii. no. 872, belonged to it.” Ancient Rome, p. 271.]

[See below, p. 200, note 54.]

[It is interesting to observe that in the Middle Ages it was usual to ascend the Column of Marcus Aurelius for the sake of the view, by the spiral staircase within, and a fee of admission was charged. See Gregorovius, iii. p. 549.]

[Poggio saw on the Capitol a small obelisk which is now in the Villa Mattei. And there was the obelisk in the Vatican Circus, which Sixtus V. removed to the Piazza di S. Pietro, where it now stands. Since then several obelisks have been set up again, e.g., the great red granite obelisk in the Piazza of St. John in the Lateran; the obelisks in the Piazza del Popolo, and the Piazza di Monte Citorio. See Parker’s Twelve Egyptian Obelisks. And cp. above, vol. iii. p. 245, note 48.]

[The Mausoleum of Augustus was taken as a stronghold by the Colonnas and destroyed in 1167 when they were banished. It was refortified in 1241, and it was used as a pyre for the body of Rienzi. See Lanciani, Pagan and Christian Rome, p. 177-80. The Soderini family converted it into a hanging garden in 1550. The ancient ustrinum or cremation enclosure, and a number of monuments, were found in excavations in 1777.]

Liber de Mirabilibus Romæ, ex Registro Nicolai Cardinalis de Arragoniâ, in Bibliothecâ St. Isidori Armario IV. No. 69. This treatise, with some short but pertinent notes, has been published by Montfaucon (Diarium Italicum, p. 283-301), who thus delivers his own critical opinion: Scriptor xiiimi circiter sæculi, ut ibidem notatur; antiquariæ rei imperitus, et, ut ab illo ævo, nugis et anilibus fabellis refertus: sed quia monumenta quæ iis temporibus Romæ supererant pro modulo recenset, non parum inde lucis mutuabitur qui Romanis antiquitatibus indagandis operam navabit (p. 283). [Mirabilia Romæ, ed. Parthey, 1867; The Marvels of Rome or picture of the Golden City, Eng. tr. by F. M. Nicholls, 1889. The Mirabilia is a 12th century recension of an older guide-book, probably of the 10th century, of which the Graphia aureæ urbis Romæ (publ. in Ozanam’s Documents inédits, p. 155 sqq. ) is another recension. We have a still older description, of about AD 900, in the Collection of inscriptions by the Anonymous of Einsiedeln. It is published in Jordan’s Topographie der Stadt Rom im Alterthum, vol. ii. Cp. the accounts of this topographical literature in Jordan, op. cit., and Gregorovius, iii. p. 516 sqq. ]

The Père Mabillon (Analecta, tom. iv. p. 502) has published an anonymous pilgrim of the ixth century, who, in his visit round the churches and holy places of Rome, touches on several buildings, especially porticoes, which had disappeared before the xiiith century. [The Anonymous of Einsiedeln, see last note.]

On the Septizonium, see the Mémoires sur Pétrarque (tom. i. p. 325), Donatus (p. 338), and Nardini (p. 117, 414). [The existing remains of the Palace of Severus on the Palatine are about sixty yards high. In the eighth century, two fifths of the building in the centre collapsed. The siege of Henry IV. in 1084 (see below, p. 200-1) destroyed many pillars, and in 1257 Brancaleone destroyed the larger extremity. For its use by Sixtus V. see below, p. 197.]

The age of the pyramids is remote and unknown, since Diodorus Siculus (tom. i. l. i. c. 44, p. 72) is unable to decide whether they were constructed 1000 or 3400 years before the clxxxth Olympiad. Sir John Marshman’s contracted scale of the Egyptian dynasties would fix them about 2000 years before Christ (Canon. Chronicus, p. 47). [Most of the pyramids belong to the 4th millennium BC The Great Pyramid of Gizeh was the tomb of Khufu (Cheops), the second king of the 4th dynasty said to have flourished in BC 3969-3908. See Petrie, History of Egypt, i. p. 38 sqq. For the earlier pyramid of Sneferu, ib. p. 32-3; and for the pyramids of the successors of Khufu, and the following dynasties, the same volume passim. ]

See the speech of Glaucus in the Iliad (Z, 146). This natural but melancholy image is familiar to Homer.

The learning and criticism of M. des Vignoles (Histoire Critique de la République des Lettres, tom. viii. p. 74-118; ix. p. 172-187) dates the fire of Rome from AD 64, 19th July, and the subsequent persecution of the Christians from 15th November of the same year.

Quippe in regiones quatuordecim Roma dividitur, quarum quatuor integræ manebant, tres solo tenus dejectæ; septem reliquis pauca tectorum vestigia supererant, lacera et semiusta. Among the old relics that were irreparably lost, Tacitus enumerates the temple of the Moon of Servius Tullius; the fane and altar consecrated by Evander præsenti Herculi; the temple of Jupiter Stator, a vow of Romulus; the palace of Numa; the temple of Vesta, cum Penatibus populi Romani. He then deplores the opes tot victoriis quæsitæ et Græcarum artium decora . . . multa quæ seniores meminerant, quæ reparari nequibant (Annal. xv. 40, 41).

A. U. C. 507, repentina subversio ipsius Romæ prævenit triumphum Romanorum . . . diversæ ignium aquarumque clades pene absumsere urbem. Nam Tiberis insolitis auctus imbribus et ultra opinionem, vel diurnitate vel magnitudine redundans, omnia Romæ ædificia in plana posita delevit. Diversæ qualitates locorum ad unam convenere pernicem: quoniam et quæ segnior inundatio tenuit madefacta dissolvit, et quæ cursus torrentis invenit impulsa dejecit (Orosius, Hist. l. iv. c. 11, p. 244, edit. Havercamp). Yet we may observe that it is the plan and study of the Christian apologist to magnify the calamities of the pagan world.

Vidimus flavum Tiberim retortis Littore Etrusco violenter undis Ire dejectum monumenta Regis Templaque Vestæ. (Horat. Carm. i. 2.)

If the palace of Numa and temple of Vesta were thrown down in Horace’s time, what was consumed of those buildings by Nero’s fire could hardly deserve the epithets of vetustissima or incorrupta.

Ad coercendas inundationes alveum Tiberis laxavit ac repurgavit, completum olim ruderibus, et ædificiorum prolapsionibus coarctatum (Suetonius in Augusto, c. 30).

Tacitus (Annal. i. 79) reports the petitions of the different towns of Italy to the senate against the measure; and we may applaud the progress of reason. On a similar occasion local interests would undoubtedly be consulted; but an English House of Commons would reject with contempt the arguments of superstition, “that nature had assigned to the rivers their proper course,” c.

See the Epoques de la Nature of the eloquent and philosophic Buffon, His picture of Guyana in South America is that of a new and savage land. in which the waters are abandoned to themselves, without being regulated by human industry (p. 212, 561, quarto edition).

In his Travels in Italy, Mr. Addison (his works, vol. ii. p. 98, Baskerville’s edition) has observed this curious and unquestionable fact.

Yet, in modern times, the Tiber has sometimes damaged the city; and in the years 1530, 1557, 1598, the Annals of Muratori record three mischievous and memorable inundations, tom. xiv. p. 268, 429; tom. xv. p. 99, c.

I take this opportunity of declaring that in the course of twelve years I have forgotten, or renounced, the flight of Odin from Azoph to Sweden, which I never very seriously believed (vol. ii. p. 6-7). The Goths are apparently Germans; but all beyond Cæsar and Tacitus is darkness or fable in the antiquities of Germany.

History of the Decline, c. vol. v. p. 252.

Ibid. vol. v. p. 158.

Ibid. vol. viii. p. 241-2.

Ibid. vol. vii. p. 255.

Ibid. vol. v. c. xxviii. p. 80-84.

Eodem tempore petiit a Phocate principe templum, quod appellant Pantheon, in quo fecit ecclesiam Sanctæ Mariæ semper Virginis, et omnium martyrum; in quâ ecclesiæ princeps multa bona obtulit (Anastasius vel potius Liber Pontificalis in Bonifacio IV. in Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. iii. p. i. p. 135). According to the anonymous writer in Montfaucon, the Pantheon had been vowed by Agrippa to Cybele and Neptune, and was dedicated by Boniface IV. on the kalends of November to the Virgin, quæ est mater omnium sanctorum (p. 297, 298). [It is now established that the existing Pantheon was not the work of Agrippa but of Hadrian ( AD 120-5). The original building of Agrippa was rectangular. See Lanciani, Ancient Rome, p. 476-88. Urban VIII. removed the bronze roof from the portico of the Pantheon. Raphael’s coffin and bones were discovered here in 1833.]

Flaminius Vacca (apud Montfaucon, p. 155, 156; his Memoir is likewise printed, p. 21, at the end of the Roma Antica of Nardini), and several Romans, doctrinâ graves, were persuaded that the Goths buried their treasures at Rome, and bequeathed the secret marks filiis nepotibusque. He relates some anecdotes to prove that, in his own time, these places were visited and rifled by the Transalpine pilgrims, the heirs of the Gothic conquerors.

Omnia quæ erant in ære ad ornatum civitatis deposuit: sed et ecclesiam B. Mariæ ad martyres quæ de tegulis æreis cooperta discooperuit (Anast. in Vitalian. p. 141). The base and sacrilegious Greek had not even the poor pretence of plundering an heathen temple; the Pantheon was already a Catholic church.

For the spoils of Ravenna (musiva atque marmora) see the original grant of Pope Hadrian I. to Charlemagne (Codex Carolin. epist. lxvii. in Muratori, Script. Ital. tom. iii. p. ii. p. 223).

I shall quote the authentic testimony of the Saxon poet ( AD 887-899), de Rebus gestis Caroli Magni, l. v. 437-440, in the Historians of France, tom. v. p. 180: —

Ad quæ marmoreas præstabat ROMA columnas, Quasdam præcipuas pulchra Ravenna dedit. De tam longinquâ poterit regione vetustas Illius ornatum Francia ferre tibi.

And I shall add, from the Chronicle of Sigebert (Historians of France, tom. v. p. 378), extruxit etiam Aquisgrani basilicam plurimæ pulchritudinis, ad cujus structuram a ROMA et Ravennâ columnas et marmora devehi fecit. [See above, vol. viii. p. 346.]

I cannot refuse to transcribe a long passage of Petrarch (Opp. p. 536, 537, in Epistolâ hortatoriâ ad Nicolaum Laurentium), it is so strong and full to the point: Nec pudor aut pietas continuit quominus impii spoliata Dei templa, occupatas arces, opes publicas, regiones urbis, atque honores magistratuum inter se divisos; ( habeant? ) quam unâ in re, turbulenti ac seditiosi homines et totius reliquæ vitæ consiliis et rationibus discordes, inhumani fœderis stupendâ societate convenirent, in pontes et mœnia atque immeritos lapides desævirent. Denique post vi vel senio collapsa palatia, quæ quondam ingentes tenuerunt viri, post diruptos arcus triumphales (unde majores horum forsitan corruerunt), de ipsius vetustatis ac propriæ impietatis fragminibus vilem quæstum turpi mercimonio captare non puduit. Itaque nunc, heu dolor! heu scelus indignum! de vestris marmoreis columnis, de liminibus templorum (ad quæ nuper ex orbe toto concursus devotissimus fiebat), de imaginibus sepulchrorum sub quibus patrum vestrorum venerabilis civis ( cinis? ) erat, ut reliquas sileam, desidiosa Neapolis adornatur. Sic paullatim ruinæ ipsæ deficiunt. Yet King Robert was the friend of Petrarch.

Yet Charlemagne washed and swam at Aix la Chapelle with an hundred of his courtiers (Eginhart, c. 22, p. 108, 109); and Muratori describes, as late as the year 814, the public baths which were built at Spoleto in Italy (Annali, tom. vi. p. 416).

See the Annals of Italy, AD 988. For this and the preceding fact, Muratori himself is indebted to the Benedictine history of Père Mabillon.

Vita di Sisto Quinto, da Gregorio Leti, tom. iii. p. 50.

Porticus ædis Concordiæ, quam cum primum ad urbem accessi vidi fere integram opere marmoreo admodum specioso: Romani post modum ad calcem ædem totam et porticus partem disjectis columnis sunt demoliti (p. 12). The temple of Concord was therefore not destroyed by a sedition in the xiiith century, as I have read in a MS. treatise del’ Governo civile de Rome, lent me formerly at Rome, and ascribed (I believe falsely) to the celebrated Gravina. Poggius likewise affirms that the sepulchre of Cæcilia Metella was burnt for lime (p. 19, 20).

Composed by Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II. and published by Mabillon from a MS. of the Queen of Sweden (Musæum Italicum, tom. i. p. 97): —

Oblectat me, Roma, tuas spectare ruinas: Ex cujus lapsu gloria prisca patet. Sed tuus hic populus muris defossa vetustis Calcis in obsequium marmora dura coquit. Impia tercentum si sic gens egerit annos, Nullum hinc indicium nobilitatis erit.

Vagabamur pariter in illâ urbe tam magnâ; quæ, cum propter spatium vacua videretur, populum habet immensum (Opp. p. 605; Epist. Familiares, ii. 14).

These states of the population of Rome, at different periods, are derived from an ingenious treatise of the physician Lancisi, de Romani Cœli Qualitatibus (p. 122). [Cp. above, p. 135, note 29. The population at beginning of the 16th century was 85,000; in 1663, it was 105,433. Gregorovius, op. cit. vi. p. 731.]

All the facts that relate to the towers at Rome, and in other free cities of Italy, may be found in the laborious and entertaining compilation of Muratori, Antiquitates Italiæ medii Ævi, dissertat. xxvi. (tom. ii. p. 493-496, of the Latin, tom. i. p. 446, of the Italian, work).

[Thirteen regions in the 14th century. Their names and armorial bearings in Gregorovius, vi. p. 727-8.]

As for instance, Templum Jani nunc dicitur, turris Centii Frangapanis; et sane Jano impositæ turris lateritiæ conspicua hodieque vestigia supersunt (Montfaucon, Diarium Italicum, p. 186). The anonymous writer (p. 285) enumerates, arcus Titi, turris Cartularia; arcus Julii Cæsaris et Senatorum, turres de Bratis; arcus Antonini, turris de Cosectis, c. [There is an account of these towers and fortresses in Gregorovius, v. p. 657 sqq. ]

Hadriani molem . . . magnâ ex parte Romanorum injuria . . . disturbavit: quod certe funditus evertissent, si eorum manibus pervia, absumptis grandibus saxis, reliqua moles exstitisset (Poggius de Varietate Fortunæ, p. 12). [In AD 1379, the mausoleum of Hadrian, which held out for Pope Clement, was destroyed by the Romans. It was “pulled down to the central part which encloses the vault” (Gregorovius, vi. 516). The ruins lay for about twenty years till it was restored by Boniface IX. AD 1398, with a tower. In the 14th century there was a covered passage connecting St. Angelo with the Vatican.]

Against the emperor Henry IV. (Muratori, Annali d’Italia, tom. ix. p. 147). [See above, p. 187, note 17.]

I must copy an important passage of Montfaucon: Turris ingens rotunda . . . Cæciliæ Metellæ . . . sepulchrum erat, cujus muri tam solidi, ut spatium per quam minimum intus vacuum supersit: et Torre di Bove [or Capo di Bove] dicitur, a boum capitibus muro inscriptis. Huic sequiori ævo, tempore intestinorum bellorum, ceu urbecula adjuncta fuit, cujus mœnia et turres etiamnum visuntur; ita ut sepulchrum Metellæ quasi arx oppiduli fuerit. Ferventibus in urbe partibus, cum Ursini atque Columnenses mutuis cladibus perniciem inferrent civitati, in utriusve partis ditionem cederet magni momenti erat (p. 142). [The sepulchre of Caecilia Metella still stands, a conspicuous object on the Appian Way.]

See the testimonies of Donatus, Nardini, and Montfaucon. In the Savelli palace, the remains of the theatre of Marcellus are still great and conspicuous. [The theatre of Marcellus, towards end of 11th century, was converted into a fortress by the Pierleoni. In 1712 it passed into the hands of the Orsini. “The section of the outside shell visible at present, a magnificent ruin in outline and colour, is buried 15 feet in modern soil and supports the Orsini palace erected upon its stage and ranges of seats. What stands above ground of the lower or Doric arcades is rented by the Prince for the most squalid and ignoble class of shops.” Lanciani, Ancient Rome, p. 401. The Theatre of Balbus became the fortress of the Cenci.]

James, cardinal of St. George, ad velum aureum, in his metrical life of Pope Celestin V. (Muratori, Script. Ital. tom. i. p. iii. p. 621; l. i. c. 1, ver. 132, c.).

Hoc dixisse sat est, Romam caruisse Senatu Mensibus exactis heu sex; belloque vocatum ( vocatos ) In scelus, in socios fraternaque vulnera patres: Tormentis jecisse viros immania saxa; Perfodisse domus trabibus, fecisse ruinas Ignibus; incensas turres, obscuraque fumo Lumina vicino, quo sit spoliata supellex.

Muratori (Dissertazione sopra le Antiquità Italiane, tom. i. p. 427-431) finds that stone bullets, of two or three hundred pounds weight, were not uncommon; and they are sometimes computed at xii. or xviii. cantari of Genoa, each cantaro weighing 150 pounds.

The vith law of the Visconti prohibits this common and mischievous practice; and strictly enjoins that the houses of banished citizens should be preserved pro communi utilitate (Gualvaneus de la Flamma, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. xii. p. 1041).

Petrarch thus addresses his friend, who, with shame and tears, had shown him the mœnia, laceræ specimen miserabile Romæ, and declared his own intention of restoring them (Carmina Latina, l. ii. epist. Paulo Annibalensi, xii. p. 97, 98): —

Nec te parva manet servatis fama ruinis Quanta quod integræ fuit olim gloria Romæ Reliquiæ testantur adhuc; quas longior ætas Frangere non valuit; non vis aut ira cruenti Hostis, ab egregiis franguntur civibus, heu! heu! . . . Quod ille nequivit ( Hannibal ) Perficit hic aries. . . .

The fourth part of the Verona Illustrata of the Marquis Maffei professedly treats of amphitheatres, particularly those of Rome and Verona, of their dimensions, wooden galleries, c. It is from magnitude that he derives the name of Colosseum, or Coliseum: since the same appellation was applied to the amphitheatre of Capua, without the aid of a colossal statue; since that of Nero was erected in the court ( in atrio ) of his palace, and not in the Coliseum (p. iv. p. 15-19; l. i. c. 4).

Joseph Maria Suarés, a learned bishop, and the author of an history of Præneste, has composed a separate dissertation on the seven or eight probable causes of these holes, which has been since reprinted in the Roman Thesaurus of Sallengre. Montfaucon (Diarium, p. 233) pronounces the rapine of the Barbarians to be the unam germanamque causam foraminum. [The travertine blocks were connected by iron clamps, run with lead; and the holes, as the author says, are due to the removal of these clamps in the Middle Ages. Cp. Middleton, Remains of Ancient Rome, ii. 87 note. ]

Donatus, Roma Vetus et Nova, p. 285.

Quamdiu stabit Colyseus, stabit et Roma; quando cadet Colyseus, cadet Roma; quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus (Beda in Excerptis seu Collectaneis apud Ducange Glossar. med. et infimæ Latinitatis, tom. ii. p. 407, edit. Basil). This saying must be ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims who visited Rome before the year 735, the era of Bede’s death; for I do not believe that our venerable monk ever passed the sea.

I cannot recover, in Muratori’s original Lives of the Popes (Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. iii. p. i.), the passage that attests this hostile partition, which must be applied to the end of the xith or the beginning of the xiith century.

Although the structure of the Circus Agonalis be destroyed, it still retains its form and name (Agona, [in Agona] Nagona, Navona): and the interior space affords a sufficient level for the purpose of racing. But the Monte Testaceo, that strange pile of broken pottery, seems only adapted for the annual practice of hurling from top to bottom some waggon-loads of live hogs for the diversion of the populace (Statuta Urbis Romæ, p. 186).

See the Statuta Urbis Romæ, l. iii. c. 87, 88, 89, p. 185, 186. I have already given an idea of this municipal code. The races of Nagona and Monte Testaceo are likewise mentioned in the Diary of Peter Antonius, from 1404 to 1417 (Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. xxiv. p. 1124).

The Pallium, which Menage so foolishly derives from Palmarium, is an extension of the idea and the words from the robe or cloak to the materials, and from thence to their application as a prize (Muratori, dissert. xxxiii.).

For these expenses, the Jews of Rome paid each year 1130 florins, of which the odd thirty represented the pieces of silver for which Judas had betrayed his master to their ancestors. There was a foot-race of Jewish as well as of Christian youths (Statuta Urbis, ibidem).

This extraordinary bull-feast in the Coliseum is described, from tradition rather than memory, by Ludovico Buonconte Monaldesco, in the most ancient fragments of Roman annals (Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. xii. p. 535, 536); and, however fanciful they may seem, they are deeply marked with the colours of truth and nature.

Muratori has given a separate dissertation (the xxixth) to the games of the Italians in the middle ages.

In a concise but instructive memoir, the Abbé Barthélemy (Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, tom. xxviii. p. 585) has mentioned this agreement of the factions of the xivth century de Tiburtino faciendo in the Coliseum, from an original act in the archives of Rome.

Coliseum . . . ob stultitiam Romanorum majori ex parte ad calcem deletum, says the indignant Poggius (p. 17): but his expression, too strong for the present age, must be very tenderly applied to the xvth century. [It may be inferred with tolerable certainty that the chief injury which the shell of the Coliseum sustained, the falling of the whole western half towards the Cælian Hill, happened in the great earthquake of AD 1348. These ruins were then freely used as a quarry. Cp. Lanciani, op. cit. p. 395-6. In AD 1386 the senate and people gave one third of the Coliseum to the Compagnia del Salvatore ad Sancta Sanctorum.]

Of the Olivetan monks. Montfaucon (p. 142) affirms this fact from the memorials of Flaminius Vacca (No. 72). They still hoped, on some future occasion, to revive and vindicate their grant.

After measuring the priscus amphitheatri gyrus, Montfaucon (p. 142) only adds that it was entire under Paul III.; tacendo clamat. Muratori (Annali d’Italia, tom. xiv. p. 371) more freely reports the guilt of the Farnese Pope and the indignation of the Roman people. Against the nephews of Urban VIII. I have no other evidence than the vulgar saying, “Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecere Barbarini,” which was perhaps suggested by the resemblance of the words. [The spelling Barb a rini here is intentional and should not be changed.]

As an antiquarian and a priest, Montfaucon thus deprecates the ruin of the Coliseum: Quod si non suopte merito atque pulchritudine dignum fuisset quod improbas arceret manus, indigna res utique in locum tot martyrum cruore sacrum tantopere sævitum esse.

Yet the Statutes of Rome (l. iii. c. 81, p. 182) impose a fine of 500 aurei on whosoever shall demolish any ancient edifice, ne ruinis civitas deformetur, et ut antiqua ædificia decorem urbis perpetuo representent.

In his first visit to Rome ( AD 1337; see Mémoires sur Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 322, c.), Petrarch is struck mute miraculo rerum tantarum, et stuporis mole obrutus. . . . Præsentia vero, mirum dictu, nihil imminuit: vere major fuit Roma majoresque sunt reliquiæ quam rebar. Jam non orbem ab hâc urbe domitum, sed tam sero domitum, miror (Opp. p. 605; Familiares, ii. 14; Joanni Columnæ).

He excepts and praises the rare knowledge of John Colonna. Qui enim hodie magis ignari rerum Romanarum, quam Romani cives? Invitus dico, nusquam minus Roma cognoscitur quam Romæ.

After the description of the Capitol, he adds, statuæ erant quot sunt mundi provinciæ; et habebat quælibet tintinnabulum ad collum. Et erant ita per magicam artem dispositæ, ut quando aliqua regio Romano Imperio rebellis erat, statim imago illius provinciæ vertebat se contra illam; unde tintinnabulum resonabat quod pendebat ad collum; tuncque vates Capitolii qui erant custodes senatui, c. He mentions an example of the Saxons and Suevi, who, after they had been subdued by Agrippa, again rebelled; tintinnabulum sonuit; sacerdos qui erat in speculo in hebdomadâ senatoribus nuntiavit; Agrippa marched back and reduced the — Persians (Anonym. in Montfaucon, p. 297, 298).

The same writer affirms that Virgil captus a Romanis invisibiliter exiit ivitque Neapolem. A Roman magician, in the xith century, is introduced by William of Malmesbury (de Gestis Regum Anglorum, l. ii. p. 86); and in the time of Flaminius Vacca (No. 81, 103) it was the vulgar belief that the strangers (the Goths ) invoked the demons for the discovery of hidden treasures.

Anonym. p. 289. Montfaucon (p. 191) justly observes that, if Alexander be represented, these statues cannot be the work of Phidias (Olympiad lxxxiii.), or Praxiteles (Olympiad civ.), who lived before that conqueror (Plin. Hist. Natur. xxxiv. 19).

William of Malmesbury (l. ii. p. 86, 87) relates a marvellous discovery ( AD 1046) of Pallas, the son of Evander, who had been slain by Turnus: the perpetual light in his sepulchre, a Latin epitaph, the corpse, yet entire, of a young giant, the enormous wound in his breast (pectus perforat ingens), c. If this fable rests on the slightest foundation, we may pity the bodies, as well as the statues, that were exposed to the air in a Barbarous age.

Prope porticum Minervæ, statua est recubantis, cujus caput integrâ effigie tantæ magnitudinis, ut signa omnia excedat. Quidam ad plantandas arbores scrobes faciens detexit. Ad hoc visendum cum plures in dies magis concurrerent, strepitum adeuntium fastidiumque pertæsus, horti patronus congestâ humo texit (Poggius de Varietate Fortunæ, p. 12).

See the Memorials of Flaminius Vacca, No. 57, p. 11, 12, at the end of the Roma Antica of Nardini (1704, in 4to).

In the year 1709, the inhabitants of Rome (without including eight or ten thousand Jews) amounted to 138,568 souls (Labat, Voyages en Espagne et en Italie, tom. iii. p. 217, 218). In 1740 they had increased to 146,080; and in 1765, I left them, without the Jews, 161,899. I am ignorant whether they have since continued in a progressive state.

The Père Montfaucon distributes his own observations into twenty days, he should have styled them weeks, or months, of his visits to the different parts of the city (Diarium Italicum, c. 8-20, p. 104-301). That learned Benedictine reviews the topographers of ancient Rome; the first efforts of Blondus, Fulvius, Martianus, and Faunus, the superior labours of Pyrrhus Ligorius, had his learning been equal to his labours; the writings of Onuphrius Panvinius, qui omnes obscuravit, and the recent but imperfect books of Donatus and Nardini Yet Montfaucon still sighs for a more complete plan and description of the old city, which must be attained by the three following methods: 1. The measurement of the space and intervals of the ruins. 2. The study of inscriptions and the places where they were found. 3. The investigation of all the acts, charters, diaries of the middle ages, which name any spot or building of Rome. The laborious work, such as Montfaucon desired, must be promoted by princely or public munificence; but the great modern plan of Nolli ( AD 1748) would furnish a solid and accurate basis for the ancient topography of Rome. [We have now Lanciani’s great plan in forty-six sheets: Forma Urbis Romæ (published by the Academy of the Lincei). For excavations in recent times see especially the series of the Bullettino della Commissione archeologica comunale di Roma, 1872 et sqq.; Notizie degli Scavi, 1876 et sqq.; Mittheilungen of the German archæol. Institute, Römische Abtheilung, 1886 et sqq. ]

There is a good analysis of the contents in Ellissen’s Analekten, vol. iii., Appendix, p. 84 sqq.