* till their retreat to

Six-and-thirty of his successors, Avignon, maintained an unequal contest with the Romans; their age and dignity and dignity were often violated; and the churches, in the solemn rites of religion, were polluted with sedition. and murder. A repetition + of such capricious brutality, without connection or design, would be tedious and disgusting; and I shall content myself with some events of the twelfth century, which represent the state of the popes and the city. On Holy Thursday, while Paschal officiated before the altar, he was interrupted by the clamours of the multitude, who imperiously demanded the confirmation of a favourite magistrate. His silence exasperated their fury; his pious refusal to mingle the affairs of earth and heaven was encountered with menaces and oaths, that he should be the cause and the witness of the public ruin. During the festival of Easter, while the bishop and the clergy, barefoot and in procession, visited the tombs of the martyrs, they were twice assaulted, at the bridge of St. Angelo and before the Capitol, with volleys of stones and darts. The houses of his adherents were levelled with the ground; Paschal escaped with difficulty and danger; he levied an army in the patrimony of St. Peter; and his last days were imbittered by suffering and inflicting the calamities of civil war. The scenes that followed the election of his successor, Gelasius the Second, were still more scandalous to the church and city. Cencio Frangipani,‡ a potent and

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 Aragon, Pandulphus Pisanus, Bernard Guido, &c., is inserted in the Italian Historians of Muratori (tom. iii, p. 1, p. 277-685), and has been always before my eyes.

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 twenty-eight volumes; and as that treasure is in my library, I have thought it an amusement, if not a duty, to consult the originals.

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 ecclesiac

factious baron, burst into the assembly, furious and in arms; the cardinals were stripped, beaten, and trampled under foot; and he seized, without pity or respect, the vicar of Christ by the throat. Gelasius was dragged by his hair along the ground, buffeted with blows, wounded with spurs, and bound with an iron chain in the house of his brutal tyrant. An insurrection of the people delivered their bishop; the rival families opposed the violence of the Frangipani; and Cencio, who sued for pardon, repented of the failure, rather than of the guilt, of his enterprise. Not many days had elapsed, when the pope was again assaulted at the altar. While his friends and enemies were engaged in a bloody contest, he escaped in his sacerdotal garments. In this unworthy flight, which excited the compassion of the Roman matrons, his attendants were scattered or unhorsed; and, in the fields behind the church of St. Peter, his successor was found alone and half-dead with fear and fatigue. Shaking the dust from his feet, the apostle withdrew from a city in which his dignity was insulted and his person was endangered; and the vanity of sacerdotal ambition is revealed in the involuntary confession, that one emperor was more tolerable than twenty.* These examples might suffice; but I cannot forget the sufferings of two pontiffs of the same age, the second and third of the name of Lucius. The former, as he ascended in battle-array to assault the Capitol, was struck on the temple by a stone, and expired in a few days. The latter was severely wounded in the persons of his servants. In a civil commotion, several of his priests had been made prisoners; and the inhuman Romans, reserving one as a guide for his brethren, put out their eyes, crowned them with ludicrous mitres, mounted them on asses with their faces to the tail, and extorted an oath, that, in this wretched condition, they should offer themselves as a lesson to the head

acriter calcaribus cruentavit; et latro tantum dominum per capillos et brachia, Jesú bono interim dormiente, detraxit ad domum, usque deduxit, inibi catenavit et inclusit. *Ego coram Deo

et ecclesia dico, si unquam possibile esset, mallem unum imperatorem quam tot dominos. (Vit. Gelas. II. p. 398.) [Such was the "affection' of the Roman people for their sovereign pontiff! This domestic disrespect exposes the real impotence of those spiritual arms, before which distant nations crouched in terror. (See p. 344. 348.)-ED.]

of the church. Hope or fear, lassitude or remorse, the characters of the men, and the circumstances of the times, might sometimes obtain an interval of peace and obedience; and the pope was restored with joyful acclamations to the Lateran or Vatican, from whence he had been driven with threats and violence. But the root of mischief was deep and perennial; and a momentary calm was preceded and followed by such tempests as had almost sunk the bark of St. Peter. Rome continually presented the aspect of war and discord; the churches and palaces were fortified and assaulted by the factions and families; and, after giving peace to Europe, Calistus the Second alone had resolution and power to prohibit the use of private arms in the metropolis. Among the nations who revered the apostolic throne, the tumults of Rome provoked a general indig nation; and, in a letter to his disciple, Eugenius the Third, St. Bernard, with the sharpness of his wit and zeal, has stigmatized the vices of the rebellious people.* "Who is ignorant," says the monk of Clairvaux, "of the vanity and arrogance of the Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, cruel, untractable, and scorning to obey, unless they are too feeble to resist. When they promise to serve, they aspire to reign; if they swear allegiance, they watch the opportunity of revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors or your councils are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one they are beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern; faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their refusals. Lofty in promise, poor in execution; adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason, are the familiar arts of their policy.' Surely this dark

* 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. 1. 4, c. 2, p. 441.) The saint takes breath, and then

portrait is not coloured by the pencil of Christian charity;* yet the features, however harsh and ugly, express a lively resemblance of the Romans of the twelfth century.t

The Jews had rejected the Christ when he appeared among them in a plebeian character; and the Romans might plead their ignorance of his vicar when he assumed the pomp and pride of a temporal sovereign. In the busy age of the crusades, some sparks of curiosity and reason were rekindled in the Western world; the heresy of Bulgaria, the Paulician sect, was successfully transplanted into the soil of Italy and France; the Gnostic visions were mingled with the simplicity of the Gospel; and the enemies of the clergy reconciled their passions with their conscience, the desire of freedom with the profession of piety. The trumpet of Roman liberty was first sounded by Arnold of Brescia,§ whose promotion in the Church was confined to the lowest rank, and who wore the monastic habit rather as a garb of poverty than as a uniform of obedience. His adversaries could not deny the wit and eloquence which they severely felt; they confess with reluctance the specious purity of his morals; and his errors were recommended to the public by a mixture of important and beneficial truths. In his theological studies, he had been the disciple of the famous and unfortunate Abelard,¶ who was likewise involved in the sus begins again: Hi, invisi terræ et coelo, 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 Petrarque, tom. i. p. 330.)

+ Baronius, in his index to the twelfth 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 twelfth century may be found in Mosheim (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 419-427), who entertains a favourable opinion of Arnold of Brescia. In the sixth 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. 1. 7, c. 31, de Gestis Frederici I. 1. 1, c. 27; 1. 2, c. 21), and in the third book of the Ligurinus, a poem of Gunther, who flourished A.D. 1200, in the monastery of Paris near Basil. (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. med. et infimæ Etatis, tom. iii. p. 174, 175.) The long passage that relates to Arnold is produced by Guilliman (de Rebus Helveticis, 1. 3, c. 5, p. 108).

The wicked wit of Bayle was amused in composing, with much

picion of heresy; but the lover of Eloisa was of a soft and flexible nature; and his ecclesiastical judges were edified and disarmed by the humility of his repentance. From this master, Arnold most probably imbibed some metaphysical definitions of the Trinity, repugnant to the taste of the times; his ideas of baptism and the eucharist are loosely censured; but a political heresy was the source of his fame and misfortunes. He presumed to quote the declaration of Christ, that His kingdom is not of this world; he boldly maintained, that the sword and the sceptre were intrusted to the civil magistrate; that temporal honours and possessions were lawfully vested in secular persons; that the abbots, the bishops, and the pope himself must renounce either their state or their salvation; and that after the loss of their revenues, the voluntary tithes and oblations of the faithful would suffice, not indeed for luxury and avarice, but for a frugal life in the exercise of spiritual labours. During a short time, the preacher was revered as a patriot; and the discontent, or revolt, of Brescia against her bishop was the first-fruits of his dangerous lessons. But the favour of the people is less permanent than the resentment of the priest; and after the heresy of Arnold had been condemned by Innocent the Second,* in the general council of the Lateran, the magistrates themselves were urged by prejudice and fear to execute the sentence of the church. Italy could no

levity and learning, the articles of ABELARD, FOULQUES, HELOISE, in his Dictionnaire Critique. The dispute of Abélard and St. Bernard, of scholastic and positive divinity, is well understood by Mosheim. (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 412-415.) [Abelard and Arnold were symptoms of the ferment that was working in the mass of society. The rising agitation had been perceived by Gregory VII. and Urban II. ; and by turning it off to expend itself on the East, they averted the present danger. Fifty years had passed since that great effort, when the daring heresies of Arnold of Brescia warned Innocent II. that the spirit was not extinct, but proclaiming itself with more animation and boldness than ever. On this the monk Bernard was immediately employed to preach up a second crusade, which was synchronous with Arnold's ascendancy at Rome. Succeeding popes did not forget the lesson. See notes, ch. 58, 59, and 61.-ED.]

Damnatus ab illo

Præsule, qui numeros vetitum contingere nostros
Nomen ab innocua ducit laudabile vitâ.

We may applaud the dexterity and correctness of Ligurinus, who turns the unpoetical name of Innocent II. into a compliment.

VOL. VII.

2 A