windows; long drawn out, distinct in the still mountain air. 'Long live
the King of France! Death to Pope Boniface!' It was taken up by hundreds
of voices, and repeated, loud, long and terrible, by the people of the
town, by men going out to their work in the hills, by women loitering on
their doorsteps, by children peering out, half frightened, from behind
their mothers' scarlet woollen skirts, to see the armed men ride up the
stony way. Cardinals, chamberlains, secretaries, men-at-arms, fled like
sheep; and when Colonna reached the palace wall, only the Pope's own
kinsmen remained within to help him as they could, barring the great
doors and posting themselves with crossbows at the grated window. For
the Caetani were always brave men.
But Boniface knew that he was lost, and calmly, courageously, even
grandly, he prepared to face death. 'Since I am betrayed,' he said, 'and
am to die, I will at least die as a Pope should!' So he put on the great
pontifical chasuble, and set the tiara of Constantine upon his head,
and, taking the keys and the crosier in his hands, sat down on the papal
throne to await death.
The palace gates were broken down, and then there was no more
resistance, for the defenders were few. In a moment Colonna in his
armour stood before the Pontiff in his robes; but he saw only the enemy
of his race, who had driven out his great kinsmen, beggars and wanderers
on the earth, and he lifted his visor and looked long at his victim, and
then at last found words for his wrath, and bitter reproaches and taunts
without end and savage curses in the broad-spoken Roman tongue. And
William of Nogaret began to speak, too, and threatened to take Boniface
to Lyons where a council of the Church should depose him and condemn him
to ignominy. Boniface answered that he should expect nothing better than
to be deposed and condemned by a man whose father and mother had been
publicly burned for their crimes. And this was true of Nogaret, who was
no gentleman. A legend says that Colonna struck the Pope in the face,
and that he afterwards made him ride on an ass, sitting backwards, after
the manner of the times. But no trustworthy chronicle tells of this. On
the contrary, no one laid hands upon him while he was kept a prisoner
under strict watch for three days, refusing to touch food; for even if
he could have eaten he feared poison. And Colonna tried to force him to
abdicate, as Pope Celestin had done before him, but he refused stoutly;
and when the three days were over, Colonna went away, driven out, some
say, by the people of Anagni who turned against him. But that is
absurd, for Anagni is a little place and Colonna had a strong force of
good soldiers with him. Possibly, seeing that the old man refused to
eat, Sciarra feared lest he should be said to have starved the Pope to
death. They went away and left him, carrying off his treasures with
them, and he returned to Rome, half mad with anger, and fell into the
hands of the Orsini cardinals, who judged him not sane and kept him a
prisoner at the Vatican, where he died soon afterwards, consumed by his
wrath. And before long the Colonna had their own again and rebuilt
Palestrina and their palace in Rome.
Twenty-five years later they were divided against each other, in the
wild days when Lewis the Bavarian, excommunicated and at war with the
Pope, was crowned and consecrated Emperor, by the efforts of an
extraordinary man of genius, Castruccio degli Interminelli, known better
as Castruccio Castracane, the Ghibelline lord of Lucca who made Italy
ring with his deeds for twenty years, and died of a fever, in the height
of his success and glory, at the age of forty-seven years. Sciarra
Colonna was for him and for Lewis. Stephen, head of the house, was
against them, and in those days when Rome was frantic for an Emperor,
Stephen's son Jacopo had the quiet courage to bring out the Bull of
Excommunication against the chosen Emperor and nail it to the door of
San Marcello, in the Corso, in the heart of Rome and in the sight of a
thousand angry men, in protest against what they meant to do--against
what was doing even at that moment. And he reached Palestrina in safety,
shaking the dust of Rome from his feet.
But on that bright winter's day, Lewis of Bavaria and his queen rode
down from Santa Maria Maggiore by the long and winding ways towards
Saint Peter's. The streets were all swept and strewn with yellow sand
and box leaves and myrtle that made the air fragrant, and from every
window and balcony gorgeous silks and tapestries were hung, and even
ornaments of gold and silver and jewels. Before the procession rode
standard-bearers, four for each Region, on horses most richly
caparisoned. There rode Sciarra Colonna, and beside him, for once in
history, Orsino Orsini, and others, all dressed in cloth of gold, and
Castruccio Castracane, wearing that famous sword which in our own times
was offered by Italy to King Victor Emmanuel; and many other Barons rode
there in splendid array, and there was great concourse of the people. So
they came to Saint Peter's; and because the Count of the Lateran should
by right have been the Emperor's sponsor at the anointing, and had left
Rome in anger and disdain, Lewis made Castruccio a knight of the Empire
and Count of the Lateran in his stead, and sponsor; and two
excommunicated Bishops consecrated the Emperor, and anointed him, and
Sciarra Colonna crowned him and his queen. After which they feasted in
the evening at the Aracoeli, and slept in the Capitol, because they
were all weary with the long ceremony, and it was too late to go home.
The chronicler's comment is curious. 'Note,' he says, 'what presumption
was this, of the aforesaid damned Bavarian, such as thou shalt not find
in any ancient or recent history; for never did any Christian Emperor
cause himself to be crowned save by the Pope or his legate, even though
opposed to the Church, neither before then nor since, except this
Bavarian.' But Sciarra and Castruccio had their way, and Lewis did what
even Napoleon, master of the world by violent chance, would not do. And
twenty years later, in the same chronicle, it is told how 'Lewis of
Bavaria, who called himself Emperor, fell with his horse, and was killed
suddenly, without penitence, excommunicated and damned by Holy Church.'
It is a curious coincidence that Boniface the Eighth, Sciarra's
prisoner, and Lewis the Bavarian, whom he crowned Emperor, both died on
the eleventh of October, according to most authorities.
The Senate of Rome had dwindled to a pitiable office, held by one man.
At or about this time, the Colonna and the Orsini agreed by a compromise
that there should be two, chosen from their two houses. The Popes were
in Avignon, and men who could make Emperors were more than able to do as
they pleased with a town of twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, so
long as the latter had no leader. One may judge of what Rome was, when
even pilgrims did not dare to go thither and visit the tomb of Saint
Peter. The discord of the great houses made Rienzi's life a career; the
defection of the Orsini from the Pope's party led to his flight; their
battles suggested to the exiled Pope the idea of sending him back to
Rome to break their power and restore a republic by which the Pope might
restore himself; and the rage of their retainers expended itself in his
violent death. For it was their retainers who fought for their masters,
till the younger Stephen Colonna killed Bertoldo Orsini, the bravest man
of his day, in an ambush, and the Orsini basely murdered a boy of the
Colonna on the steps of a church. But Rienzi was of another Region, of
the Regola by the Tiber, and it is not yet time to tell his story. And
by and by, as the power of the Popes rose and they became again as the
Caesars had been, Colonna and Orsini forgot their feuds, and were glad to
stand on the Pope's right and left as hereditary 'Assistants of the Holy
See.' In the petty ending of all old greatnesses in modern times, the
result of the greatest feud that ever made two races mortal foes is
merely that no prudent host dare ask the heads of the two houses to
dinner together, lest a question of precedence should arise, such as no
master of ceremonies would presume to settle. That is what it has come
to. Once upon a time an Orsini quarrelled with a Colonna in the Corso,
just where Aragno's cafe is now situated, and ran him through with his
rapier, wounding him almost to death. He was carried into the palace of
the Theodoli, close by, and the records of that family tell that within
the hour eight hundred of the Colonna's retainers were in the house to
guard him. In as short space, the Orsini called out three thousand men
in arms, when Caesar Borgia's henchman claimed the payment of a tax.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE MAUSOLEUM OF AUGUSTUS
From a print of the last century]
Times have changed since then. The Mausoleum of Augustus, once a
fortress, has been an open air theatre in our time, and there the great
Salvini and Ristori often acted in their early youth; it is a circus
now. And in less violent contrast, but with change as great from what it
was, the palace of the Colonna suggests no thought of defence nowadays,
and the wide gates and courtyard recall rather the splendours of the
Constable and of his wife, Maria Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin,
than the fiercer days when Castracane was Sciarra's guest on the other
side of the church.
The Basilica of the Apostles is said to have been built by Pelagius the
First, who was made Pope in the year 555, and who dedicated it to Saint
Philip and Saint James. Recent advances in the study of archaeology make
it seem more than probable that he adapted for the purpose a part of the
ancient barracks of the Vigiles, of which the central portion appears
almost to coincide with the present church, at a somewhat different
angle; and in the same way it is likely that the remains of the north
wing were rebuilt at a later period by the Colonna as a fortified
palace. In those times men would not have neglected to utilize the
massive substructures and walls. However that may be, the Colonna dwelt
there at a very early date, and in eight hundred years or more have only
removed their headquarters from one side of the church to the other. The
latter has been changed and rebuilt, and altered again, like most of the
great Roman sanctuaries, till it bears no resemblance to the original
building. The present church is distinctly ugly, with the worst defects
of the early eighteenth century; and that age was as deficient in
cultivated taste as it was abhorrent of natural beauty. Some fragments
of the original frescos that adorned the apse are now preserved in a
hall behind the main Sacristy of Saint Peter's. Against the flat walls,
under the inquisition of the crudest daylight, the fragments of Melozzo
da Forli's masterpiece are masterpieces still; the angelic faces,
imprisoned in a place not theirs, reflect the sadness of art's
captivity; and the irretrievable destruction of an inimitable past
excites the pity and resentment of thoughtful men. The attempt to outdo
the works of the great has exhibited the contemptible imbecility of the
little, and the coarse-grained vanity of Clement the Eleventh has
parodied the poetry of art in the bombastic prose of a vulgar tongue.
Pope Pelagius took for his church the pillars and marbles of Trajan's
Forum, in the belief that his acts were acceptable to God; but Clement
had no such excuse, and the edifice which was a monument of faith has
given place to the temple of a monumental vanity.
[Illustration: FORUM OF TRAJAN]
It is remarkable that the Colonna rarely laid their dead in the Church
of the Apostles, for it was virtually theirs by right of immediate
neighbourhood, and during their domination they could easily have
assumed actual possession of it as a private property. A very curious
custom, which survived in the sixteenth century, and perhaps much later,
bears witness to the close connection between their family and the
church. At that time a gallery existed, accessible from the palace and
looking down into the basilica, so that the family could assist at Mass
without leaving their dwelling.
On the afternoon of the first of May, which is the traditional feast of
this church, the poor of the neighbourhood assembled within. The windows
of the palace gallery were then thrown open and a great number of fat
fowls were thrown alive to the crowd, turkeys, geese and the like, to
flutter down to the pavement and be caught by the luckiest of the people
in a tumultuous scramble. When this was over, a young pig was swung out
and lowered in slings by a purchase of which the block was seized to a
roof beam. When just out of reach the rope was made fast, and the most
active of the men jumped for the animal from below, till one was
fortunate enough to catch it with his hands, when the rope was let go,
and he carried off the prize. The custom was evidently similar to that
of climbing the May-pole, which was set up on the same day in the Campo
Vaccino. May-day was one of the oldest festivals of the Romans, for it
was sacred to the tutelary Lares, or spirits of ancestors, and was kept
holy, both publicly by the whole city as the habitation of the Roman
people, and by each family in its private dwelling. It is of Aryan
origin and is remembered in one way or another by all Aryan races in our
own time, and it is not surprising that in the general conversion of
Paganism to Christianity a new feast should have been intentionally made
to coincide with an old one; but it is hard to understand the lack of
all reverence for sacred places which could admit such a scene as the
scrambling for live fowls and pigs in honour of the twelve Apostles, a
pious exercise which is perhaps paralleled, though assuredly not
equalled, in crudeness, by the old Highland custom of smoking tobacco in
kirk throughout the sermon.
At the very time when we have historical record of a Pope's presence as
an amused spectator of the proceedings, Michelangelo had lately painted
the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, and had not yet begun his Last
Judgment; and 'Diva' Vittoria Colonna, not yet the friend of his later
years, was perhaps even then composing those strangely passionate
spiritual sonnets which appeal to the soul through the heart, by the
womanly pride that strove to make the heart subject to the soul.
The commonplace romance which has represented Vittoria Colonna and
Michelangelo as in love with each other is as unworthy of both as it is
wholly without foundation. They first met nine years before her death,
when she was almost fifty and he was already sixty-four. She had then
been widowed twelve years, and it was long since she had refused in
Naples the princely suitors who made overtures for her hand. The true
romance of her life was simpler, nobler and more enduring, for it began
when she was a child, and it ended when she breathed her last in the
house of Giuliano Cesarini, the kinsman of her people, whose descendant
married her namesake in our own time.
At the age of four, Vittoria was formally betrothed to Francesco
d'Avalos, heir of Pescara, one of that fated race whose family history
has furnished matter for more than one stirring tale. Vittoria was born
in Marino, the Roman town and duchy which still gives its title to
Prince Colonna's eldest son, and she was brought up in Rome and Naples,
of which latter city her father was Grand Constable. Long before she was
married, she saw her future husband and loved him at first sight, as
she loved him to her dying day, so that although even greater offers
were made for her, she steadfastly refused to marry any other man. They
were united when she was seventeen years old, he loved her devotedly,
and they spent many months together almost without other society in the
island of Ischia. The Emperor Charles the Fifth was fighting his
lifelong fight with Francis the First of France. Colonna and Pescara
were for the Empire, and Francesco d'Avalos joined the imperial army; he
was taken prisoner at Ravenna and carried captive to France; released,
he again fought for Charles, who offered him the crown of the kingdom of
Naples; but he refused it, and still he fought on, to fall at last at
Pavia, in the strength of his mature manhood, and to die of his wounds
in Milan when Vittoria was barely five and thirty years of age, still
young, surpassingly beautiful, and gifted as few women have ever been.
What their love was, their long correspondence tells,--a love passionate
as youth and enduring as age, mutual, whole and faithful. For many years
the heartbroken woman lived in Naples, where she had been most happy,
feeding her soul with fire and tears. At last she returned to Rome, to
her own people, in her forty-ninth year. There she was visited by the
old Emperor for whom her husband had given his life, and there she met
Michelangelo.
It was natural enough that they should be friends. It is monstrous to
suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together,
and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating
man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great
princess in her perpetual sorrow the greatest of creative minds was a
solace and a constant intellectual delight. Their friendship was mutual,
fitting and beautiful, which last is more than can be said for the
absurd stories about their intercourse which are extant in print and
have been made the subject of imaginary pictures by more than one
painter. The tradition that they used to meet often in the little Church
of Saint Sylvester, behind the Colonna gardens, rests upon the fact that
they once held a consultation there in the presence of Francesco
d'Olanda, a Portuguese artist, when Vittoria was planning the Convent of
Saint Catherine, which she afterwards built not very far away. The truth
is that she did not live in the palace of her kinsfolk after her return
to Rome, but most probably in the convent attached to the other and
greater Church of Saint Sylvester which stands in the square of that
name not far from the Corso. The convent itself is said to have been
originally built for the ladies of the Colonna who took the veil, and
was only recently destroyed to make room for the modern Post-office, the
church itself having passed into the hands of the English. The
coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint
doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great
women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine
Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the
ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal,
laid at her feet the homage of a sexagenarian's friendship.
In the battle of the archaeologists the opposing forces traverse and
break ground, and rush upon each other again, 'hurtling together like
wild boars,'--as Mallory describes the duels of his knights,--and when
learned doctors disagree it is not the province of a searcher after
romance to attempt a definition of exact truths. 'Some romances
entertain the genius,' quotes Johnson, 'and strengthen it by the noble
ideas which they give of things; but they corrupt the truth of history.'
Professor Lanciani, who is probably the greatest authority, living or
dead, on Roman antiquities, places the site of the temple of the Sun in
the Colonna gardens, and another writer compares the latter to the
hanging gardens of Babylon, supported entirely on ancient arches and
substructures rising high above the natural soil below. But before
Aurelian erected the splendid building to record his conquest of
Palmyra, the same spot was the site of the 'Little Senate,' instituted
by Elagabalus in mirthful humour, between an attack of sacrilegious
folly and a fit of cruelty.
The 'Little Senate' was a woman's senate; in other words, it was a
regular assembly of the fashionable Roman matrons of the day, who met
there in hours of idleness under the presidency of the Emperor's mother,
Semiamira. AElius Lampridius, quoted by Baracconi, has a passage about
it. 'From this Senate,' he says, 'issued the absurd laws for the
matrons, entitled Semiamiran Senatorial Decrees, which determined for
each matron how she might dress, to whom she must yield precedence, by
whom she might be kissed, deciding which ladies might drive in chariots,
and which in carts, and whether the latter should be drawn by
caparisoned horses, or by asses, or by mules, or oxen; who should be
allowed to be carried in a litter or a chair, which might be of leather
or of bone with fittings of ivory or of silver, as the case might be;
and it was even determined which ladies might wear shoes adorned only
with gold, and which might have gems set in their boots.' Considering
how little human nature has changed in eighteen hundred years it is easy
enough to imagine what the debates in the 'Little Senate' must have been
with Semiamira in the chair ruling everything 'out of order' which did
not please her capricious fancy: the shrill discussions about a
fashionable head-dress, the whispered intrigues for a jewel-studded
slipper, the stormy divisions on the question of gold hairpins, and the
atmosphere of beauty, perfumes, gossip, vanity and all feminine
dissension. But the 'Little Senate' was short-lived.
Some fifty years after Elagabalus, Aurelian triumphed over Zenobia of
Palmyra, and built his temple of the Sun. That triumph was the finest
sight, perhaps, ever seen in imperial Rome. Twenty richly caparisoned
elephants and two hundred captive wild beasts led the immense
procession; eight hundred pairs of gladiators came next, the glory and
strength of fighting manhood, with all their gleaming arms and
accoutrements, marching by the huge Flavian Amphitheatre, where sooner
or later they must fight each other to the death; then countless
captives of the East and South and West and North, Syrian nobles, Gothic
warriors, Persian dignitaries beside Frankish chieftains, and Tetricus,
the great Gallic usurper, in the attire of his nation, with his young
son whom he had dared to make a Senator in defiance of the Empire. Three
royal equipages followed, rich with silver, gold and precious stones,
one of them Zenobia's own, and she herself seated therein, young,
beautiful, proud and vanquished, loaded from head to foot with gems,
most bitterly against her will, her hands and feet bound with a golden
chain, and about her neck another, long and heavy, of which the end was
held by a Persian captive who walked beside the chariot and seemed to
lead her. Then Aurelian, the untiring conqueror, in the car of the
Gothic king, drawn by four great stags, which he himself was to
sacrifice to Jove that day according to his vow, and a long line of
wagons loaded down and groaning under the weight of the vast spoil; the
Roman army, horse and foot, the Senate and the people, a million,
perhaps, all following the indescribable magnificence of the great
triumph, along the Sacred Way, that was yellow with fresh strewn sand
and sweet with box and myrtle.
[Illustration: RUINS OF HADRIAN'S VILLA AT TIVOLI]
But when it was over, Aurelian, who was generous when he was not
violent, honoured Zenobia and endowed her with great fortune, and she
lived for many years as a Roman Matron in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. And
the Emperor made light of the 'Little Senate' and built his Sun temple
on the spot, with singular magnificence, enriching its decoration with
pearls and precious stones and with fifteen thousand pounds in weight of
pure gold. Much of that temple was still standing in the seventeenth
century and was destroyed by Urban the Eighth, the Pope who built the
heavy round tower on the south side of the Quirinal palace, facing Monte
Cavallo.