THE RENAISSANCE
WHILE Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for
the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian
people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud
between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved
Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late
to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to
act as they pleased were _a fortiori_ ready to vindicate their right
to think what they pleased. Thus free thought, which was stunted by
the Popes of Rome in the far-off lands of the North, flourished under
the very shadow of St. Peter’s throne. It was natural that it should
be so. They who sit nearest the stage are least liable to be duped by
scenic devices. The Italians were too near the Holy See to be impressed
by its tricks or to be terrified by its theatrical thunder. They had
seen Gregory VII. as an illiterate Tuscan lad playing in his father’s
workshop, and they had known Innocent III. as plain Signor Lothario,
son of the Count of Segni. No one is a demigod to his own parishioners.
Hence the lofty pretensions of the Popes were nowhere less respected
than in their immediate neighbourhood. The spiritual autocrats, whose
anathemas made foreign princes and peoples tremble with superstitious
terror, found many severe critics among their own countrymen. The
Italian chronicler Salimbene (1221–1288), though himself a monk, in
his vivid and varied picture of thirteenth century life, does not
hesitate to comment freely on the greed, profligacy, gluttony, heresy
and other sins of many a contemporary pope, cardinal and bishop.
Even more significant is the attitude of the author of the _Divina
Commedia_. There the judges are judged, and they who doomed others to
everlasting torture are themselves consigned to a similar fate by the
stern Florentine poet, the spokesman of the Middle Ages. Celestine
V., who, yielding to base fear, abdicated St. Peter’s chair in 1294,
is sentenced by Dante to wander in hell naked, his face bedewed with
blood and tears, and beset by wasps and hornets; one of the dolorous
tribe of trimmers--“Wretches who never lived”; sinners whose very
disembodied shades are “both to God displeasing and to His foes.”[74]
Pope Anastasius is condemned to an even worse plight, as a heretic.
Nicholas III. is found planted with his heels upwards, waiting to be
succeeded in that uncomfortable position by Boniface VIII., “the chief
of the new Pharisees,” who, in his turn, is to be followed by Clement
V., “the lawless pastor,” who, besides many other sins of omission and
commission, abetted Philip the Fair in the suppression of the Templars,
and with him divided the guilt, if he were defrauded of the fruits, of
the atrocious crime. To an equally sad eternity are doomed popes and
cardinals “over whom Avarice dominion absolute maintains”; the monks
of Cologne; and the “Joyous Friars” (_Frati Godenti_), notorious for
things worse than joyousness.
Nor did the great religious upheavals of the Middle Ages which helped
to tighten the Papal grip on the European mind produce any injurious
effects in Italy. Far otherwise. The most serious of those movements,
the Crusades, proved of signal benefit to the Italian republics. The
campaigns that drained other countries of men and money, opened new
sources of profit and power to Venice and Genoa, Florence, Milan
and Pisa; they invigorated their maritime trade, and increased their
knowledge of foreign lands. While the kings and knights of Northern
and Central Europe dreamed dreams of military glory, of victory for
the Cross, and of conquest for themselves, the commonwealths of Italy
realised the more solid, if less splendid, boons of extensive commerce,
and even more extensive credit. When Bayezid, surnamed the Lightning,
towards the end of the fourteenth century, threatened to carry war into
the heart of holy Christendom and boasted that his horse should eat
his oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome, it was not the Romans who
resented the impious insolence of the infidel. Nor were they moved when
the King of Hungary, Sigismund, panic-stricken, sent a bishop and two
knights with letters to King Charles VI. of France, the eldest son of
the Church, imploring him to ward off the evils that menaced it. The
Italians saw with calm unconcern the young Count de Nevers, heir of the
Duke of Burgundy, and cousin of the French monarch, accompanied by four
other princes, lead his brilliant host of knights and squires against
the “enemies of God.” It was the villeins of Burgundy and the burgesses
of Flanders who paid the expenses of the ruinous campaign undertaken to
save Rome from the Turk. And if the honest, but credulous, Froissart
is to be believed, the Italians, so far from sympathizing with the aim
of the expedition, actually assisted the infidels by information and
advice. Bayezid, on hearing that the Christian forces had crossed the
Danube, is reported by the Chronicler to have said: “My wishes are now
accomplished. It is now four months since I heard of the expedition
from my good friend the Duke of Milan, who advised me to draw up my men
with prudence.”
♦1396 Sept. 28♦
Furthermore, when the champions of the Cross met those of the Crescent
on the fatal field of Nicopolis, and left upon it the flower of their
chivalry, the Italians were the only people who had no reason to mourn
the disaster. All useless prisoners were put to death; but the young
Count de Nevers, and a score other princes and barons of France,
were held by Bayezid to ransom. After a long and painful captivity
the survivors obtained their liberty for 200,000 florins. But, while
this immense sum and the costs of the negotiations and embassies, as
well as the means for the prisoners’ return home in a manner befitting
their high estate, were laboriously raised by extraordinary taxes
levied by the Duke of Burgundy upon all towns under his obedience, and
more especially upon those of Flanders--Ghent, Bruges, Mechlin, and
Antwerp--the merchants of Genoa showed their enterprising genius, no
less than their prosperity, by giving prompt security to the Sultan
for five times the amount stipulated. Lastly, when the French lords,
on their arrival at Venice, found themselves hardly able to defray the
expenses of their sojourn in “one of the dearest towns in the world
for strangers,” as Sir John sensibly observes, they met with scant
courtesy at the hands of the Venetians. The King of Hungary, though
the revenues of his realm were “ruined for this and the ensuing year,”
volunteered to assist the princes by “offering for sale to the rulers
of Venice the rents he received from that town, which amounted to 7000
ducats yearly”; but the Venetians, on hearing of the proposal, “coldly
replied that they would consider the matter,” and after a fortnight’s
consideration answered, “as I was told by one who heard it,” that
“if the King of Hungary was disposed to sell his whole kingdom, the
Venetians would willingly make the purchase, and pay the money down;
but as for such a trifle as 7000 ducats of yearly revenue, which he
possessed in the city of Venice, it was of so little value that they
could not set a price on it either to buy or sell, and that they would
not trouble themselves about so small an object.”
The narrative brings into vivid, if somewhat unpleasant, prominence
the contrast between the Italians and their neighbours over the Alps:
their wealth, their pride, their eagerness to draw profit from other
people’s enthusiasms, and their utter want of interest in the questions
which agitated so deeply the rest of mediaeval Christendom. The sons
of Italy were too much engrossed in the affairs of this world to make
any sacrifices to the next. Already sensuous bliss was all the bliss
they knew or cared for. Undistracted by celestial chimeras, they
would gladly have exchanged all the dreams of eternity for one day’s
enjoyment of earthly realities. But, if their worldly prosperity and
their practical wisdom made the Italians selfish, they also made them
tolerant. To them the prejudice of feudalism was as unprofitable as its
idealism.
The Jews reaped the fruit of Italian tolerance. By one of those
wonderful paradoxes with which history loves to surprise the student,
the people that had crucified Christ, the people that was held guilty
of the sufferings of His disciples at the hands of the Pagans, the
people that was execrated as a perpetual source of heresy, had from the
first dwelt and prospered in the very city which had witnessed the most
terrible of those sufferings, and which had early claimed to be revered
as the capital of Christendom and the Supreme Court of orthodoxy. While
their brethren in France, Germany, and England underwent martyrdom,
the Jews of Rome enjoyed comparative, if not uninterrupted, peace.
The fury of the Crusades, which stained the waters of the Rhine and
the Moselle with Hebrew blood, found no parallel on the banks of the
Tiber. The calumnies which stirred up a tempest against the Jews in
Norwich, aroused no responsive echo in Rome. The Bulls which doomed
the “accursed people” to persecution in those distant realms remained
unheeded in the very place where they were framed and signed. The
Popes, who denounced and proscribed the “unclean and perfidious
race” abroad, with few exceptions, cherished, protected, and trusted
individual members of it at home.
♦1162–1165♦
Pope Alexander III., the great antagonist of the German Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa and of Henry II. of England, had a Jewish Minister
of Finance, or treasurer of the household, and on his return to
Rome, after his voluntary exile in France, he was met by a jubilant
procession of Jewish Rabbis. The Roman Jews were not subject to any
special tax, nor was their evidence against Christians considered
invalid. Even greater was the liberty enjoyed by the Jews of Southern
Italy and Sicily, where they chiefly abounded. The Norman Kings
confirmed to them the ancient privilege of trial according to their own
laws. ♦1198–1250♦ In Sicily, under Frederick II., there were Jewish
administrators and Jewish landowners. A favourite minister of King
Roger of Sicily frequented the Jewish synagogues and contributed to the
expenses of the Jewish community. Broadly speaking, until the end of
the fifteenth century, such ill-feeling as existed towards the Jews in
Italy proceeded entirely from their own aloofness and eccentricity, and
was in no way fostered by priests or pontiffs. Nothing is more eloquent
of the general prosperity of the Italian Jews in those days than the
silence of history concerning any religious activity amongst them.
Besides the absence of ecclesiastical fanaticism, there were other
reasons to account for the Jew’s normal immunity from persecution
in mediaeval Italy. The Italians had no cause to envy the Jew his
commercial success. In Italy the sons of Israel found keen competitors
in the native Christians. The financial genius of the Florentine and
the Venetian was more than a match for that of the Jew. The Italians,
therefore, did not exclude the Jews from their municipal and industrial
organizations, but, by making the entrance to their Guilds less
difficult for non-Christians, enabled the latter to engage in various
trades elsewhere closed to them. Nor was the Holy See strong enough
to ban usury in Italy and to fan the superstitious antipathy towards
money-lenders as it did in other countries. Among the Italians the
interests of the market counted for more than the interests of the
Church, and canonical prohibitions were easily set at naught for the
sake of convenience. Furthermore, the division of the peninsula into a
number of States politically sundered, and often hostile to each other,
but geographically connected, enabled the Jews to seek refuge in one
place from persecution in another, and as soon as the tempest was over
to return to their homes.
For all these reasons we find the relations between Jews and Christians
in Italy more cordial than in any other part of mediaeval Europe. The
foreign origin and foreign connections of the Jew, far from being a
source of prejudice, proved an attraction to the educated Italian. It
is easy to imagine those old schoolmen, with their alert curiosity and
unquenchable thirst for knowledge--in an age when books were rare,
travel perilous, and all that was distant in space or time a desert,
dimly known or utterly unknown--eagerly seizing at every chance of
enlarging their mental horizon and of enriching their intellectual
stores. A chance of this kind offered itself in the Jewish Rabbis,
physicians, and scholars, and the Italians did not neglect it.
Friendships between learned Hebrews and Christian divines were not
uncommon.[75] In the tenth century we hear of a Jewish doctor Donnolo
being on intimate terms with the Lord Abbot Nilus. One of the fruits
of such friendships was the indirect transmission to the West of a few
rays of Hellenic light long before the dawn of the Renaissance, through
translations of the Arabic versions of the Greek classics into Hebrew,
and from Hebrew into Latin. The most illustrious of these literary
connections between followers of the new and the old Hebrew prophet was
the tender affection which, towards the end of the thirteenth century,
bound Immanuel, “the Heine of the Middle Ages,” with Dante, the poet
of old Catholicism, and the embodiment of all that was true and pure
and truly noble in mediaeval Christianity. The two friends must have
formed a pair of extraordinary incongruity. Dante, grand, stern, and
sombre, couching the gloomiest conceptions in the light and graceful
language of Italy; Immanuel, witty and caustic, venting his frolicsome
sarcasms in the solemn tongue of the Hebrew prophets. The contrast is
brought home to us with almost deliberate vividness by the works of the
two friends. They both wrote visits to the land of the dead. Dante’s is
a tragedy; Immanuel’s a satirical comedy--almost a parody. But in one
respect the Jew shows himself superior to the Christian. His paradise
includes the great shades of the pagan world.
And yet it would be an error to imagine that the Jew, even in those
halcyon days of Italian freedom, was wholly exempt from the penalty
which pursues dissent. Whatever the feelings of the cultured and the
thoughtful might be, to the populace of Italy the Jew was a pestilent
heretic. As early as 1016 we hear of a massacre of the Jews in Rome
owing to an earthquake which wrought great havoc in the city. The
calamity occurred on Good Friday, and it was ascertained that at the
time of its occurrence the Jews were worshipping in their synagogue. A
coincidence to the mediaeval mind was tantamount to conclusive proof
of cause and effect. The Roman rabble, under the influence of panic
and superstition, wreaked a terrible vengeance on the supposed authors
of the misfortune, and Pope Benedict VIII. sanctioned a crime which he
was probably unable to prevent. Innocent III. proved his consistency
by oppressing the “enemies of Christ” in Italy as scrupulously as
elsewhere, and the Jews were also expelled from Bologna in 1171. In
1278--when Dante was a precocious youth of twelve years of age, already
devoted to his mystic adoration of Beatrice; when Thomas Aquinas, the
tolerant of Judaism, had been dead only four years; and two years
after the birth of the great painter Giotto, to whom we owe the one
portrait of Dante that has escaped the deluge of the centuries--at that
period at which the rosy morn of the Renaissance was faintly gilding
the eastern firmament, we find the Jews compelled to attend Christian
services and to submit to sermons preached against their own religion.
But, with few exceptions, no bloody persecution soiled the canvas of
Italian history. In the ensuing century synagogues, plain, gaunt, and
ungainly, might still be seen in close proximity to gorgeous Christian
churches in Rome, and the congregations which thronged the latter on
Sundays had not yet discovered that it was their duty to punish their
neighbours for worshipping their god on Saturday. But the discovery was
not far distant.
In 1321 the Jews of Rome were charged with insulting the crucifix as
it was carried through the streets in a procession. The accuser is
said to have been a sister of John XXII., a pope among whose principal
claims to distinction love of gold ranked high. Several priests
corroborated the charge, and the Pope decided to drive the Jews out of
the Roman state. The details of the occurrence are uncertain; but the
reality of the danger to which the Jews found themselves exposed is
proved by the extraordinary fast instituted that year. While fervent
prayers were offered up in the synagogues, messengers were despatched
to the Pope at Avignon and to King Robert of Naples, his patron, who
also was a great friend of the Jews, imploring that the decision might
be cancelled. King Robert pleaded their cause successfully, for, it is
said, his eloquence was supported by twenty thousand ducats presented
by the Roman Jews to the Pope’s sister.
In the middle of the same century we find the Jews of Rome obliged
to contribute towards the expenses of the popular amusements in the
Roman circus--a form of entertainment which was an abomination unto
the Lord of the Jews--12 gold pieces a year; a small matter in itself,
yet indicative of the direction in which the current flowed. But a new
power came to stem for a while this current.
We are in the heart of the fourteenth century. Dante died in 1321,
and his obsequies were sumptuously performed at Ravenna. The tomb
which closed over Dante’s remains on that July day received more than
the spokesman of Mediaeval Faith. In it was buried Mediaeval Faith
itself. Catholicism, and all that it had meant to Dante, was already
a thing of the past. “One Church and one Empire for all men,” the
idols of the Middle Age, were to be deposed by the ideal of “A Church
and an Empire for each race of men,” gradually to develop into “No
Church and no Empire for any man.” The last of the Catholics was
carried to his grave, as the first of the Humanists appears on the
scene. Dante’s censures of popes and cardinals were the rebukes of a
brother; Petrarch’s denunciations are the assaults of an enemy. Dante,
while condemning individual churchmen, sincerely reveres the Church
which their malpractices disgraced. To him the Papal Court may be a
home of hypocrisy, a nursery of shame, a cradle of crime, and he will
have nothing to do with it; but that does not lead him to question
the spiritual authority of that Court. His hero still is Gregory
Hildebrand, _della fede cristiana il santo atleta_--the saintly athlete
of the Christian Faith.[76] To Petrarch the Papal Court is all that
and more. It is the mother of human slavery and the fount of human
misery--a “Western Babylon,” as he calls it in one of his sonnets. It
fills him with unutterable abhorrence. Petrarch died in 1374, but the
new spirit of which he was the exponent did not die with him. It was
transmitted to his disciple Boccaccio, in whose hands the keen weapon
of indignation was replaced by the keener one of ridicule. Boccaccio’s
popular tales spread the infamy of the monasteries and nunneries, and
the hatred towards their inmates, far and wide. Henceforth contempt
shall be the portion of the Church which had inspired his predecessors
with mere horror. Poggio, Pulci, Franco, and others followed in the
footsteps of the master, and though they could not rival Boccaccio in
wit, they surpassed him in virulence.
The real importance of these attacks lies in the circumstance that
they were levelled not at persons but at institutions. The warfare was
not waged so much against the body as against the soul of Catholicism.
It is true that Italian Christianity had very early divested itself
of some of the Oriental austerity of the cult, and that great part of
its original colour had been toned down, or touched up, in accordance
with Occidental taste. After twelve centuries of Roman practice very
little, indeed, was left of the gospel preached on the shores of the
Sea of Galilee. The self-sacrifice of the prophet had been replaced
by the self-indulgence of the priest, the simplicity and humility of
the saint by the purple splendour of the ecclesiastical prince, and
the spirit of the Word had long been stifled beneath the mummeries
and pageants of Roman ritual. But still there remained more than
the Latin temperament, under the influence of the pagan revival,
could bear with equanimity. The young Italian mind had had enough
of the creed of abstinence, renunciation, and sacrifice; it panted
for enjoyment. The litanies and the agonies of the Church repelled
it; her self-mortifications and self-mystifications revolted it. The
classic love for form was to oust again the Christian veneration for
the spirit. Virgil ceased to be regarded as a heathen prophet of
Christianity. Scholars ceased to scan his pages for predictions of the
advent of Jesus, and began to revel in the charm of his paganism. In a
former generation Dante had found in the poet of Mantua a ghostly guide
to the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Catholicism; the new school saw
in him a mellifluous minstrel of sensuous joys: a singer of the beauty
of flocks and flowers, of the humming bees, of the trilling birds, of
the murmuring rivulets, of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses.
The muse of Theocritus had risen from her enchanted sleep of a thousand
years and brought back with her the sanity and the light that were
to banish the phantoms and the mists of the mediaeval hell. Italy
celebrated the resurrection of Pan.
Self-abasement was superseded by self-reverence; and abstinence by
temperance. The dignity of the individual, long lost in the mediaeval
worship of authority, was restored; the glorification of man succeeded
to the glorification of the Kingdom of God on earth. The beauty of
the naked human body was once more recognised and its cult revived.
Fecundity and not chastity became the ideal virtue. And what the poets
described in warm, impassioned melody, the artists of a later day
depicted in no less warm and impassioned colour. Dante’s ethereal love
for Beatrice would have been shocked at Raphael’s Madonna: Madonna the
mother; no longer Madonna the maiden.
Nor was the new cult confined to profane poets, artists, and
scholars. The divines of the Roman Church were also carried away by
it. Rationalism invaded the Vatican, was petted by the priests, and
promulgated from the pulpit. In sermons preached before the Pope
and his cardinals the dogmas of Christianity were blended with the
doctrines of ancient philosophy, and Hebrew theology was identified
with heathen mythology. Christ’s self-sacrifice was compared to that
of Socrates and of other great and good men of antiquity who had laid
down their lives for the sake of truth and the benefit of mankind.
Pontifical documents were couched in pagan phraseology; the Father and
the Son appeared as Jupiter and Apollo; and the Holy Virgin as Diana,
or even as Venus with the child Cupid; while sacred hymns were solemnly
addressed by pious Catholics to the deities of Olympus. These and
other vagaries were seriously indulged in, after a fashion abundantly
grotesque, but none the less instructive. When pruned of its absurd
extravagances and picturesque ineptitudes, this enthusiasm for paganism
can be regarded both as the fruit and as the cause of an essentially
healthy growth. The Italians of the fifteenth century succeeded where
Julian the Apostate had failed in the fourth; and to that success may
be traced all the subsequent developments of European culture.
How this revolution came about has been explained at great length by
historians: how, partly through Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s influence,
the nobles and merchant princes of the Italian republics took the new
learning under their generous patronage; how young Italian pupils
repaired to Constantinople to study the language and literature
of ancient Greece at the feet of men to whom that language was a
living mother tongue; how Greek teachers were encouraged to bring
their treasures to Italy; how they were received by a public as
eager to fathom the mysteries of Greek grammar as a modern public
is to fathom the mysteries of a detective story; and how the stream
gradually swelled into the mighty flood that followed on the fall
of Constantine’s city in 1453. But all this was only a period of
gestation. Modern Europe was really born on the day on which an obscure
Dutch chandler made known to the world the marvellous invention which
was to supersede the scribe’s pen, and to draw forth the torch of
knowledge from the monk’s cell, and from the wealthy merchant’s study
to the crowds in the street.
By a coincidence, apparently strange, the century which opened the
prison-gates of the Christian condemned the Jew to a new dungeon.
The age of the revival of learning and of the printing press is also
the age of vigorous persecution of Israel in Italy. The compulsory
attendance of Jews at divine service now began to be enforced in a
manner more rigid at once and more stupid. Officials posted at the
entrance to the church examined the ears of the Jews, lest the inward
flow of the truth should be stemmed by cottonwool. Other officials,
inside the church, were charged with the duty of preventing the
wretched congregation from taking refuge in sleep. A Bull of Benedict
XIII., issued at Valencia in 1415, decrees that at least three public
sermons a year should be inflicted on the Jews, and prescribes the
arguments that are to be employed for their conversion: proofs
of Christ’s Messianic character drawn from the Prophets and the
Talmud, exposure of the errors and vanities of the latter book, and
demonstration of the fact that the destruction of the Temple and the
woes of the Jews are due to the hardness of their hearts.
In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV., impelled by the son of an apostate Jew,
ordained that the Jews of Rome should keep their doors and their
windows shut during Easter Week. By 1443 the modest annual sum of
12 gold pieces, originally contributed by the Jews to the sports in
the Roman circus, had grown to 1130 pieces. Nor were the Romans any
longer content with the extortion of money, but they now insisted
on a personal participation of the Jews in the detested joys of the
arena. The descendants of Titus, and of the Romans who gazed at the
savage spectacle of Jewish captives torn to pieces by wild beasts,
or forced to kill one another for the delectation of the victors,
revived the taste of their remote ancestors for sportful homicide. The
fifteenth-century Carnival in Rome opened with a foot-race, which was
in every respect worthy of its pagan prototype of the first century.
Eight Jews were compelled to appear semi-naked, and, incited by blows
and invectives, to cover the whole of the long course. Some reached the
goal exhausted, others dropped dead on the way. On the same day the
secular and religious chiefs of the Jewish community were obliged to
walk at the head of the procession of Roman Senators across the course,
amidst a tempest of execration and derision on the part of the mob;
while the eccentricities of the Jew and the prejudices of the Gentile
found similar scope for display upon the stage. In the Carnival plays
and farces of Rome the Jew supplied a stock character that never failed
to provoke the contemptuous merriment of the audience.
And yet, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, we find the
Popes, in defiance of their own decrees, employing Jewish physicians.
Nor does the lot of the Jew appear to have grown unbearable for some
time after. Sixtus IV., whose intolerance towards the Jews of Spain has
been recorded in a previous chapter, died in 1484, and was succeeded
by Innocent VIII., a man of many superstitions and many children,
but a feeble and ineffectual pontiff, the most interesting year of
whose reign, to us, is the year of his death, 1492. In that year, in
which the Renaissance reached its zenith, the Jewish population of
Italy was augmented by the influx of large numbers of refugees from
Spain. One party of them landed at Genoa; and a heart-rending sight
they presented, according to an eye-witness, as they emerged from
the hulls of the vessels and staggered on to the quay: a host of
spectres, haggard with famine and sickness; men with hollow cheeks
and deep-sunken eyes; mothers scarcely able to stand, fondling their
famished infants in their skeleton arms. On that mole the hapless
exiles, shivering under the blasts of the sea, were allowed to tarry
for a short time in order to refit their vessels, and to recruit
themselves for further trials. The law of the Republic forbade Jewish
travellers to remain longer than three days in the country.
The Genoese monks hastened to make spiritual capital out of the
wanderers’ desolate condition: children, starving, were baptized in
return for a morsel of bread. Those who survived want, illness, and
conversion, and finally left the mole of Genoa, were doomed to fresh
distress. Their own co-religionists declined to receive them at Rome
for fear of competition, and attempted to procure a prohibition of
entry from Innocent’s successor by a bribe of one thousand ducats. The
Pope, however, though not remarkable for tenderness of heart, was so
shocked at the supreme barbarity of the exiles’ brethren that he issued
a decree banishing the latter from the city. The Roman Jews, in order
to obtain the repeal of the edict, were obliged to pay two thousand
ducats, and to receive the refugees into the bargain.
Another contingent reached Naples under equally ghastly conditions.
Their voyage from Spain had been a long martyrdom. A great many,
especially the young and the delicately reared, had succumbed to hunger
and to the foul atmosphere of the narrow and overcrowded vessels.
Others had been murdered by the masters of the ships for the sake of
their property, or were forced to sell their children in order to
defray the expenses of the passage. Those who escaped the terrors of
the sea, and reached the two harbours mentioned, brought with them an
infectious disease, derived from the privations which they had endured.
The infection lurked in Genoa and Naples through the winter; but when
Spring came, it burst forth into a frightful plague, which spread with
terrible rapidity, swept off upwards of twenty thousand souls in the
latter city in one year, and then extended its wasting arms over the
whole of the peninsula.
There can be little doubt that the people, who had elsewhere been made
the scapegoats for epidemics with the origin of which they had nothing
to do, would have been subjected to severe persecution for a visitation
which could certainly be traced to their agency. But it so happened
that the attention of the Italians was this year, and for many years
after, absorbed by other calamities.
On Innocent’s death, Alexander VI. had been raised to St. Peter’s
throne, which he strengthened by his own political genius, adorned
by his magnificent liberality to the artistic genius of others, and
disgraced by his monstrous depravity. ♦1494♦ Under Alexander’s reign
Italy witnessed the invasion of Charles VIII. of France, an event
which inaugurated a period of turmoil, and turned the country into a
battle-ground for foreign princes. Rome alone escaped the consequences
of this deluge. The Pope, alarmed at the king’s approach, offered terms
of peace, which the French monarch finally accepted. Independence
was secured at the cost of dignity, and Alexander VI. was enabled
to steer safely amid the storms that raged over the rest of the
peninsula. He died in 1503, regretted by a few, execrated by most of
his contemporaries. Pius III. reigned for a few months, and was, in
his turn, succeeded by Julius II., who proved himself one of the most
energetic, warlike, and worldly statesmen that had ever wielded St.
Peter’s sceptre. He died in 1513, and in his stead was elected Giovanni
de Medici, under the name of Leo X. Born in 1475, a year after Ariosto,
Giovanni was the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, chief of the Italian
Platonists of the time. In his father’s house and among his father’s
friends young Giovanni heard a great deal more of Pagan poetry and
philosophy than of Christian theology. But while his contemporary,
Ariosto, nourished in a similar school of thought, denounced the
rapacity of the Roman Court and derided the papal pretensions to
temporal power--laughingly dismissing the fabled gift of Constantine
the Great to Pope Silvester to the realms of the moon--Giovanni
devoted his life to the service of a Church whose doctrines he did
not believe, and to her defence against heresies which he did not
detest. His pontificate, accordingly, was distinguished by the elegant
frivolities of a cultured gentleman far more than by the piety of a
clergyman. Leo’s artistic taste and genial sense of the ludicrous were
among his chief virtues; his love of the chase his greatest vice.
Abstemious in his own diet, he delighted in providing for, and laughing
at, the gluttony of others. But Leo’s principal title to the grateful
remembrance of posterity lies in his munificent encouragement of art
and letters. He died in 1521.
Most of these pontiffs, refined, intelligent, and irreligious, in
fighting the reformers fought enemies to their own power, not the
enemies of Christ. While opposing the spirit of rebellion which the
licentiousness of some of them had brought into existence and the
literary culture of others to maturity, they seem to have ignored the
eternal heretics, the Jews. Under their rule Israel enjoyed one of
those Sabbaths of rest which invariably preceded a new reign of terror.
When an academic feud rent the learned world of the University of Padua
into two factions, instead of the philosophical question under dispute
being, after the fashion of the times, settled at the point of the
rapier, it was submitted to the arbitration of a Jew, the great scholar
Elias del Medigo. This worthy, vested in the professorial robes,
addressed the students of Padua and Florence, and his decision was
accepted as final. Lastly, the gulf between Jew and Gentile in Italy
was bridged by a common philosophical faith.
The Italians of the period, in their eager search after truth, often
strayed into strange paths. Many of them, weary of groping their way
amid the darkness of the scholastic wilderness, rashly ran after
any will-of-the-wisp that held out the promise of light and rest.
Among these aberrations from commonsense was the rage for the Hebrew
mysticism of the Cabbala, which found many susceptible disciples among
the _literati_ of Padua and Florence, and led to close and cordial
relations between representatives of the two creeds. The omniscient
youth Count Giovanni Pico de Mirandola, who had been initiated into
the mysteries of the Cabbala by a Jew, maintained that these mysteries
yielded the most effective proof of the divinity of Christ, and, what
is more remarkable still, he had even converted Pope Sixtus IV. to his
way of thinking. Pico de Mirandola placarded Rome with a list of nine
hundred theses, and invited all European scholars to come to the city
at his own expense that they might be convinced of the infallibility of
the Cabbala, while the Pope took great pains to have the Cabbalistic
writings translated into Latin for the enlightenment of divinity
students. Innocent VIII. was far too old-fashioned to favour new
absurdities; and, while he persecuted witches and magicians in Germany
and preached abortive crusades against the heretics of the West and the
infidels of the East, he prohibited the reading of Pico’s nonsense.
But the craze seized Leo X. and the early Reformers, and not only
theologians but also men of affairs and men of war fell captives to
it. Statesmen and soldiers devoted themselves to the study of Hebrew,
in the pathetic belief that they had at last secured the magic key to
universal wisdom.
Contrariwise, many Hebrew Cabbalists, filling high places in the
Synagogue, found in these theosophic hallucinations a proof of the
divine origin of Christianity and openly embraced it. But apart
from mysticism, the genius of the Renaissance overstepped the iron
circle of Judaism. The charm of Hellenism which had in old times
attracted the Jews of Alexandria, once more prevailed against the
Hebrew hatred of Gentile culture. Jewish youths gladly attended
the Italian universities; the philosophy of Aristotle, the elegant
Latinity of Cicero and the subtle criticism of Quintilian met with keen
appreciation among them; and, though painting and sculpture continued
to be regarded with suspicion, we find Italian Rabbis, like their
Christian colleagues, drawing from pagan mythology illustrations for
their sermons, and even paying, in full synagogue, rhetorical homage to
“that holy goddess Diana.”
Thus Jew and Gentile were drawn near to each other by many intellectual
forces. Even theologians succumbed to the mollifying influence of the
new spirit. Too enlightened to persecute, not sufficiently in earnest
to proselytise, they engaged in friendly and witty arguments with the
Jews on the matter of their religion. ♦1523–1534♦ Pope Clement VII.
even conceived the plan of a Latin translation of the Old Testament to
be brought about by a collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars.
Under such illusory auspices was ushered in the century that was to
open to the Jews the blackest chapter in their black history.