_PART VI._

MORALITY AND RELIGION.

CHAPTER I.

MORALITY.

The relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme

interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated

up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with

absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our

evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from

unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.

This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions

of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of

difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the

whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to

the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for

ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another

side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must

leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole

nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but

happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its

civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of

the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its

accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.

Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of

marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance

extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the

more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes,

with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any

other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy

sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming

an adequate moral estimate of the people.

What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of

nations are determined?--in which that which is inborn and that which

has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?--in

which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should

take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can

tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that

flexible activity and certainty in his whole being--that play of power

in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was

peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions,

how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate

channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring

their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of

us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these

generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick

the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear

within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will

bring forth from their hiding-place.

* * * * *

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the

Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the

political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting

serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent

immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every

age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the

time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered

works,[981] said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above

others.’ Another man had perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly

developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which

were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law,

because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers

wicked men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her

representatives set us the worst example.’

Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by antiquity was in

this respect unfavourable’? The statement can only be received with many

qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.),

especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may

perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became

familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness--the Christian

ideal of life--the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap.

iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to

consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite

of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious

of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of

doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists

like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti,

through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of

Julius Cæsar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never

stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds

and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life

necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy

with that of antiquity.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the

sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out

of which the best men saw hardly any escape.

Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then

the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day

thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic

mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man

after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and

hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great

vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet,

nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left in the wreck of a

character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new

strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed,

a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of

our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and

morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest

decisions of their lives.[983]

It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity

also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards,

in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a

particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that

conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be

better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even

our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less dimmed

by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its right

name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian

of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for

fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are

essentially different.

There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly

may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the

recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:[985] ‘He who esteems

honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears

neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case,

and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which

have not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from what

is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of

honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than

perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages.

What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the

Renaissance would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his

description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is

decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies

of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:--

‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce

que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en

compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui

toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz

nommoyent honneur.’

This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired

the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to

prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each

man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to

the people as a whole--chiefly in consequence of the national

disasters--judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the

importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the

boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the

individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the

opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and

against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot

tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the

absolute moral value of the nation.

* * * * *

A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the

morality of the more highly-developed Italian of this period, is that

of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour,

and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most

terrible shape.

The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was

the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future

wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes,

that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan

nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not

the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling

as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of

its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the

passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or

altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already,

at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova--a certain

Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as

merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and

lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant,

Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great

lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a

need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard

during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for

example, how Franceschetto Cybò, in two games with the Cardinal

Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards

complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has

since that time been the home of the lottery.

It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of

their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the

same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no

punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But

other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless

forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of

the wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according

to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty--a duty often

performed in a way to make us shudder--gives to this passion a peculiar

and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its

existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain

limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and

mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an

instance.[992]

In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one

of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how people are hung.’ While one

was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after

fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak,

a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other

hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday

his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what

had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with

a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy’s

father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was.

Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families,

and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.

And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and extending to

friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes,

but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are

full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation

of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the

‘vendetta’ was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every

conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the

savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are

told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his

enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of

which he let them out, embraced them, and entertained them sumptuously;

whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993]

Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they

can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds

already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new

ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of

religion--how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly

awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been

done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as

a peacemaker. ‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio

Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni

Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss

one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they

renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same

Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and

the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and

destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.’[994] The

oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard

themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the

parties of the ‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by

twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was

read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the

future violator of the treaty--‘an oath more astonishing and dreadful

than had ever yet been heard.’ The last consolations of religion in the

hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break

it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the

despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of

peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has

least need of it.

This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed

Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous popular custom,

naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and

receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the

works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the

case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no

redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human

law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into

his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the

satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral

humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was

held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his

sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.

The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in

order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters

of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor

others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a

necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then

most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked

simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that other men may learn to

leave us unharmed.’[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a

small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an

outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood,

which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less

within the limits of retaliation--the ‘jus talionis’--the former

necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the

sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the

laugh on its own side.

Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their

revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a combination of

circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual

ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with

heartfelt delight.

There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff

and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for

vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence

of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of

imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be

expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is

not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a

whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of

to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment,

and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are

instances of this.

This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the

Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold

calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses,

the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more

marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where

this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We

find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from

domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy.

Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows

up between parents and children.

It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other

nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a

people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a

foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of

the West are in this point equally favoured.

* * * * *

But where the imagination has exercised the most powerful and despotic

influence on morals is in the illicit intercourse of the two sexes. It

is well known that prostitution was freely practised in the Middle Ages,

before the appearance of syphilis. A discussion, however, on these

questions does not belong to our present work. What seems characteristic

of Italy at this time, is that here marriage and its rights were more

often and more deliberately trampled under foot than anywhere else. The

girls of the higher classes were carefully secluded, and of them we do

not speak. All passion was directed to the married women.

Under these circumstances it is remarkable that, so far as we know,

there was no diminution in the number of marriages, and that family life

by no means underwent that disorganisation which a similar state of

things would have produced in the North. Men wished to live as they

pleased, but by no means to renounce the family, even when they were not

sure that it was all their own. Nor did the race sink, either physically

or mentally, on this account; for that apparent intellectual decline

which showed itself towards the middle of the sixteenth century may be

certainly accounted for by political and ecclesiastical causes, even if

we are not to assume that the circle of achievements possible to the

Renaissance had been completed. Notwithstanding their profligacy, the

Italians continued to be, physically and mentally, one of the healthiest

and best-born populations in Europe,[999] and have retained this

position, with improved morals, down to our own time.

When we come to look more closely at the ethics of love at the time of

the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable contrast. The novelists

and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual

enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not

only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and

unscrupulousness. But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and

writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of

the noblest kind, whose last and highest expression is a revival of the

ancient belief in an original unity of souls in the Divine Being. And

both modes of feeling were then genuine, and could co-exist in the same

individual. It is not exactly a matter of glory, but it is a fact, that

in the cultivated man of modern times, this sentiment can be not merely

unconsciously present in both its highest and lowest stages, but may

thus manifest itself openly, and even artistically. The modern man,

like the man of antiquity, is in this respect too a microcosm, which the

mediæval man was not and could not be.

To begin with the morality of the novelists. They treat chiefly, as we

have said, of married women, and consequently of adultery.

The opinion mentioned above (p. 395) of the equality of the two sexes is

of great importance in relation to this subject. The highly developed

and cultivated woman disposes of herself with a freedom unknown in

Northern countries; and her unfaithfulness does not break up her life in

the same terrible manner, so long as no outward consequence follow from

it. The husband’s claim on her fidelity has not that firm foundation

which it acquires in the North through the poetry and passion of

courtship and betrothal. After the briefest acquaintance with her future

husband, the young wife quits the convent or the paternal roof to enter

upon a world in which her character begins rapidly to develop. The

rights of the husband are for this reason conditional, and even the man

who regards them in the light of a ‘jus quaesitum’ thinks only of the

outward conditions of the contract, not of the affections. The beautiful

young wife of an old man sends back the presents and letters of a

youthful lover, in the firm resolve to keep her honour (honesta). ‘But

she rejoices in the love of the youth for the sake of his great

excellence; and she perceives that a noble woman may love a man of merit

without loss to her honour.’[1000] But the way is short from such a

distinction to a complete surrender.

The latter seems indeed as good as justified, when there is

unfaithfulness on the part of the husband. The woman, conscious of her

own dignity, feels this not only as a pain, but also as a humiliation

and deceit, and sets to work, often with the calmest consciousness of

what she is about, to devise the vengeance which the husband deserves.

Her tact must decide as to the measure of punishment which is suited to

the particular case. The deepest wound, for example, may prepare the way

for a reconciliation and a peaceful life in the future, if only it

remain secret. The novelists, who themselves undergo such experiences or

invent them according to the spirit of the age, are full of admiration

when the vengeance is skilfully adapted to the particular case, in fact,

when it is a work of art. As a matter of course, the husband never at

bottom recognises this right of retaliation, and only submits to it from

fear or prudence. Where these motives are absent, where his wife’s

unfaithfulness exposes him or may expose him to the derision of

outsiders, the affair becomes tragical, and not seldom ends in murder or

other vengeance of a violent sort. It is characteristic of the real

motive from which these deeds arise, that not only the husbands, but the

brothers[1001] and the father of the woman feel themselves not only

justified in taking vengeance, but bound to take it. Jealousy,

therefore, has nothing to do with the matter, moral reprobation but

little; the real reason is the wish to spoil the triumph of others.

‘Nowadays,’ says Bandello,[1002] ‘we see a woman poison her husband to

gratify her lusts, thinking that a widow may do whatever she desires.

Another, fearing the discovery of an illicit amour, has her husband

murdered by her lover. And though fathers, brothers, and husbands arise

to extirpate the shame with poison, with the sword, and by every other

means, women still continue to follow their passions, careless of their

honour and their lives.’ Another time, in a milder strain, he exclaims:

‘Would that we were not daily forced to hear that one man has murdered

his wife because he suspected her of infidelity; that another has killed

his daughter, on account of a secret marriage; that a third has caused

his sister to be murdered, because she would not marry as he wished! It

is great cruelty that we claim the right to do whatever we list, and

will not suffer women to do the same. If they do anything which does not

please us, there we are at once with cords and daggers and poison. What

folly it is of men to suppose their own and their house’s honour depends

on the appetite of a woman!’ The tragedy in which such affairs commonly

ended was so well known that the novelist looked on the threatened

gallant as a dead man, even while he went about alive and merry. The

physician and lute-player Antonio Bologna[1003] had made a secret

marriage with the widowed Duchess of Amalfi, of the house of Aragon.

Soon afterwards her brother succeeded in securing both her and her

children, and murdered them in a castle. Antonio, ignorant of their

fate, and still cherishing the hope of seeing them again, was staying at

Milan, closely watched by hired assassins, and one day in the society of

Ippolita Sforza sang to the lute the story of his misfortunes. A friend

of the house, Delio, ‘told the story up to this point to Scipione

Attelano, and added that he would make it the subject of a novel, as he

was sure that Antonio would be murdered.’ The manner in which this took

place, almost under the eyes of Delio and Attelano, is thrillingly

described by Bandello (i. 26).

Nevertheless, the novelists habitually show a sympathy for all the

ingenious, comic, and cunning features which may happen to attend

adultery. They describe with delight how the lover manages to hide

himself in the house, all the means and devices by which he communicates

with his mistress, the boxes with cushions and sweetmeats in which he

can be hidden and carried out of danger. The deceived husband is

described sometimes as a fool to be laughed at, sometimes as a

blood-thirsty avenger of his honour; there is no third situation except

when the woman is painted as wicked and cruel, and the husband or lover

is the innocent victim. It may be remarked, however, that narratives of

the latter kind are not strictly speaking novels, but rather warning

examples taken from real life.[1004]

When in the course of the sixteenth century Italian life fell more and

more under Spanish influence, the violence of the means to which

jealousy had recourse perhaps increased. But this new phase must be

distinguished from the punishment of infidelity which existed before,

and which was founded in the spirit of the Renaissance itself. As the

influence of Spain declined, these excesses of jealousy declined also,

till towards the close of the seventeenth century they had wholly

disappeared, and their place was taken by that indifference which

regarded the ‘Cicisbeo’ as an indispensable figure in every household,

and took no offence at one or two supernumerary lovers (‘Patiti’).

But who can undertake to compare the vast sum of wickedness which all

these facts imply, with what happened in other countries? Was the

marriage-tie, for instance, really more sacred in France during the

fifteenth century than in Italy? The ‘fabliaux’ and farces would lead us

to doubt it, and rather incline us to think that unfaithfulness was

equally common, though its tragic consequences were less frequent,

because the individual was less developed and his claims were less

consciously felt than in Italy. More evidence, however, in favour of the

Germanic peoples lies in the fact of the social freedom enjoyed among

them by girls and women, which impressed Italian travellers so

pleasantly in England and in the Netherlands (p. 399, note 2). And yet

we must not attach too much importance to this fact. Unfaithfulness was

doubtless very frequent, and in certain cases led to a sanguinary

vengeance. We have only to remember how the northern princes of that

time dealt with their wives on the first suspicion of infidelity.

But it was not merely the sensual desire, not merely the vulgar appetite

of the ordinary man, which trespassed upon forbidden ground among the

Italians of that day, but also the passion of the best and noblest; and

this, not only because the unmarried girl did not appear in society, but

also because the man, in proportion to the completeness of his own

nature, felt himself most strongly attracted by the woman whom marriage

had developed. These are the men who struck the loftiest notes of

lyrical poetry, and who have attempted in their treatises and dialogues

to give us an idealised image of the devouring passion--‘l’amor divino.’

When they complain of the cruelty of the winged god, they are not only

thinking of the coyness or hard-heartedness of the beloved one, but also

of the unlawfulness of the passion itself. They seek to raise

themselves above this painful consciousness by that spiritualisation of

love which found a support in the Platonic doctrine of the soul, and of

which Pietro Bembo is the most famous representative. His thoughts on

this subject are set forth by himself in the third book of the

‘Asolani,’ and indirectly by Castiglione, who puts in his mouth the

splendid speech with which the fourth book of the ‘Cortigiano’

concludes; neither of these writers was a stoic in his conduct, but at

that time it meant something to be at once a famous and a good man, and

this praise must be accorded to both of them; their contemporaries took

what these men said to be a true expression of their feeling, and we

have not the right to despise it as affectation. Those who take the

trouble to study the speech in the ‘Cortigiano’ will see how poor an

idea of it can be given by an extract. There were then living in Italy

several distinguished women, who owed their celebrity chiefly to

relations of this kind, such as Giulia Gonzaga, Veronica da Coreggio,

and, above all, Vittoria Colonna. The land of profligates and scoffers

respected these women and this sort of love--and what more can be said

in their favour? We cannot tell how far vanity had to do with the

matter, how far Vittoria was flattered to hear around her the sublimated

utterances of hopeless love from the most famous men in Italy. If the

thing was here and there a fashion, it was still no trifling praise for

Vittoria that she, at least, never went out of fashion, and in her

latest years produced the most profound impressions. It was long before

other countries had anything similar to show.

* * * * *

In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other,

lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and

why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal.

There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of

weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful

natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime

seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.

The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each

individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly

emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to

respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man

believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was

committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the

case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the

murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution

excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for

what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to

this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities

which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during

times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and

society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at

Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and

Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of

the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts

recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play

to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example,

a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.

When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed

the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all

safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in

Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of

murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the

offenders, consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most

abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless

offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially

of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of

these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed

men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters,

satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in

ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more

than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred

vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of

the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what

would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and

police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the

establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in

Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which

personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which

Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great

crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be

misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here

than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a

special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be

invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps

as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year

1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better

protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights,

extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain,

that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third

parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.

So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate

provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less,

troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet

us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to

find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from

one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers.

That age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495,

the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron

cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice

celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed

murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four

people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He

afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried

others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory

of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and

shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this

implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something

tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little

supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other

malefactors--but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though

by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in

the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom

Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was

with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with

certainty.[1010]

The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the

seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline,

of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber

then took the place of the partisan.

In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little

progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who

fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote

parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where the barbarism dated probably from

the days of the Roman ‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy

(‘hospes’ and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the

same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once

appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while

making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into

his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country,

discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his

friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but

that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of

conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3)

to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times

of political confusion.

A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the

frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to

stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says

Pontano,[1012] ‘is cheaper here than human life.’ But other districts

could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course,

to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted,

since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and

revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the

Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of

this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013]

perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances

which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the

individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere

with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to

feel the incalculable consequences of a deed of blood, and to

understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of

any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty,

assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly

increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained

such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.

Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in

proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as

it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a

fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were

really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst

example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the

faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their

power. And this, without being in the same category with Cæsar Borgia.

The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and

later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited

their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so

accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was

seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly

absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons.

There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used

by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p.

116), and it is possible that it was really a ‘velenum atterminatum’

which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the

words: ‘In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante,

wished to trample upon us all.’[1017] But the poisoned letter which

Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have

caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was

warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which Cosimo de’

Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like

fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino

wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any

other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and

vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely.

The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself

(1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been

impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The

secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of

powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities.

Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the

personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural

that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur.

Many a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the

master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his

followers.

Among the means used for the secret destruction of others--so far, that

is, as the intention goes--we find magic,[1022] practised, however,

sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth, are mentioned, they

appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of

some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an

opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.

In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its

highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute

wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means

to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has

no measure.

Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the

‘Condottieri,’[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and

that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription:

‘The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.’ This class of men offers us

some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating

every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of

them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt--in the

estimate of those who record it--lay in their defiance of spiritual

threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror

with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio,

the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight

of monks at their psalms, and had thrown them down from the top of a

tower;[1024] but at the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a

great general.’ As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were

committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be

attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised.

Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it

were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as

we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance.

The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in

destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard

Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to

the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta,

tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may

also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the

verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery,

incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often.

The most shocking crime of all--the unnatural attempt on his own son

Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]--may have been

the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical

or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to

account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of

Parma, son of Paul III.

If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian

character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the

upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The

fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of

its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first

inwardly casts off the authority of a state which, as a fact, is in

most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is,

rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism

in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while

thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the

vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness.

His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality

equally developed, namely, to his neighbour’s wife. In face of all

objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the

feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his

decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or

calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own

mind.

If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root

and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this

reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of

that time.

But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault

of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come

upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon

the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher

atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but

necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil--a

sense of moral responsibility--which is essentially different from that

which was familiar to the Middle Ages.

But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging

of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most

characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of

his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human

personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which

shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor

mediævalism either could or would bestow upon it.

CHAPTER II.

RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE.

The morality of a people stands in the closest connection with its

consciousness of God, that is to say, with its firmer or weaker faith in

the divine government of the world, whether this faith looks on

the world as destined to happiness or to misery and speedy

destruction.[1028] The infidelity then prevalent in Italy is notorious,

and whoever takes the trouble to look about for proofs, will find them

by the hundred. Our present task, here as elsewhere, is to separate and

discriminate; refraining from an absolute and final verdict.

The belief in God at earlier times had its source and chief support in

Christianity and the outward symbol of Christianity, the Church. When

the Church became corrupt, men ought to have drawn a distinction, and

kept their religion in spite of all. But this is more easily said than

done. It is not every people which is calm enough, or dull enough, to

tolerate a lasting contradiction between a principle and its outward

expression. But history does not record a heavier responsibility than

that which rests upon the decaying Church. She set up as absolute truth

and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had distorted to

serve her own aggrandisement. Safe in the sense of her inviolability,

she abandoned herself to the most scandalous profligacy, and, in order

to maintain herself in this state, she levelled mortal blows against the

conscience and the intellect of nations, and drove multitudes of the

noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into the arms of

unbelief and despair.

Here we are met by the question: Why did not Italy, intellectually so

great, react more energetically against the hierarchy; why did she not

accomplish a reformation like that which occurred in Germany, and

accomplish it at an earlier date?

A plausible answer has been given to this question. The Italian mind, we

are told, never went further than the denial of the hierarchy, while the

origin and the vigour of the German Reformation was due to its positive

religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of justification by

faith and of the inefficacy of good works.

It is certain that these doctrines only worked upon Italy through

Germany, and this not till the power of Spain was sufficiently great to

root them out without difficulty, partly by itself and partly by means

of the Papacy, and its instruments.[1029] Nevertheless, in the earlier

religious movements of Italy, from the Mystics of the thirteenth century

down to Savonarola, there was a large amount of positive religious

doctrine which, like the very definite Christianity of the Huguenots,

failed to achieve success only because circumstances were against it.

Mighty events like the Reformation elude, as respects their details,

their outbreak and their development, the deductions of the

philosophers, however clearly the necessity of them as a whole may be

demonstrated. The movements of the human spirit, its sudden flashes, its

expansions and its pauses, must for ever remain a mystery to our eyes,

since we can but know this or that of the forces at work in it, never

all of them together.

* * * * *

The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the

Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of

deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward

ecclesiastical customs which entered into daily life, and of a sense of

dependence on sacraments and ceremonies. The great personal influence of

religious preachers may be added as a fact characteristic of Italy.

That hostility to the hierarchy, which displays itself more especially

from the time of Dante onwards in Italian literature and history, has

been fully treated by several writers. We have already (p. 223) said

something of the attitude of public opinion with regard to the Papacy.

Those who wish for the strongest evidence which the best authorities

offer us, can find it in the famous passages of Macchiavelli’s

‘Discorsi,’ and in the unmutilated edition of Guicciardini. Outside the

Roman Curia, some respect seems to have been felt for the best men among

the bishops,[1030] and for many of the parochial clergy. On the other

hand, the mere holders of benefices, the canons, and the monks were held

in almost universal suspicion, and were often the objects of the most

scandalous aspersions, extending to the whole of their order.

It has been said that the monks were made the scapegoats for the whole

clergy, for the reason that none but they could be ridiculed without

danger.[1031] But this is certainly incorrect. They are introduced so

frequently in the novels and comedies, because these forms of literature

need fixed and well-known types where the imagination of the reader can

easily fill up an outline. Besides which, the novelists do not as a fact

spare the secular clergy.[1032] In the third place, we have abundant

proof in the rest of Italian literature that men could speak boldly

enough about the Papacy and the Court of Rome. In works of imagination

we cannot expect to find criticism of this kind. Fourthly, the monks,

when attacked, were sometimes able to take a terrible vengeance.

It is nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular class of

all, and that they were reckoned a living proof of the worthlessness of

conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical organisation, of the system

of dogma, and of religion altogether, according as men pleased, rightly

or wrongly, to draw their conclusions. We may also assume that Italy

retained a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great mendicant

orders than other countries, and had not forgotten that they were the

chief agents in the reaction[1033] against what is called the heresy of

the thirteenth century, that is to say, against an early and vigorous

movement of the modern Italian spirit. And that spiritual police which

was permanently entrusted to the Dominicans certainly never excited any

other feeling than secret hatred and contempt.

After reading the ‘Decameron’ and the novels of Franco Sacchetti, we

might imagine that the vocabulary of abuse directed at the monks and

nuns was exhausted. But towards the time of the Reformation this abuse

became still fiercer. To say nothing of Aretino, who in the

‘Ragionamenti’ uses conventual life merely as a pretext for giving free

play to his own poisonous nature, we may quote one author as typical of

the rest--Massuccio, in the first ten of his fifty novels. They are

written in a tone of the deepest indignation, and with this purpose to

make the indignation general; and are dedicated to men in the highest

position, such as King Ferrante and Prince Alfonso of Naples. The

stories are many of them old, and some of them familiar to readers of

Boccaccio. But others reflect, with a frightful realism, the actual

state of things at Naples. The way in which the priests befool and

plunder the people by means of spurious miracles, added to their own

scandalous lives, is enough to drive any thoughtful observer to despair.

We read of the Minorite friars who travelled to collect alms: ‘They

cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they are at the end of their

resources, they set up as saints and work miracles, one displaying the

cloak of St. Vincent, another the handwriting[1034] of St. Bernadino, a

third the bridle of Capistrano’s donkey.’ Others ‘bring with them

confederates who pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal

disease, and after touching the hem of the monk’s cowl, or the reliques

which he carried, are healed before the eyes of the multitude. All then

shout “Misericordia,” the bells are rung, and the miracle is recorded in

a solemn protocol.’ Or else a monk in the pulpit is denounced as a liar

by another who stands below among the audience; the accuser is

immediately possessed by the devil, and then healed by the preacher. The

whole thing was a pre-arranged comedy, in which, however, the principal

with his assistant made so much money that he was able to buy a

bishopric from a Cardinal, on which the two confederates lived

comfortably to the end of their days. Massuccio makes no great

distinction between Franciscans and Dominicans, finding the one worth as

much as the other. ‘And yet the foolish people lets itself be drawn into

their hatreds and divisions, and quarrels about them in public

places,[1035] and calls itself “franceschino” or “domenichino.”’ The

nuns are the exclusive property of the monks. Those of the former who

have anything to do with the laity, are prosecuted and put in prison,

while others are wedded in due form to the monks, with the

accompaniments of mass, a marriage-contract, and a liberal indulgence in

food and wine. ‘I myself,’ says the author, ‘have been there not once,

but several times, and seen it all with my own eyes. The nuns afterwards

bring forth pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result.

And if any one charges me with falsehood, let him search the nunneries

well, and he will find there as many little bones as in Bethlehem at

Herod’s time.’[1036] These things, and the like, are among the secrets

of monastic life. The monks are by no means too strict with one another

in the confessional, and impose a Paternoster in cases where they would

refuse all absolution to a layman as if he were a heretic. ‘Therefore

may the earth open and swallow up the wretches alive, with those who

protect them!’ In another place Massuccio, speaking of the fact that the

influence of the monks depends chiefly on the dread of another world,

utters the following remarkable wish: ‘The best punishment for them

would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more

alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.’

If men were free to write, in the time of Ferrante, and to him, in this

strain, the reason is perhaps to be found in the fact that the king

himself had been incensed by a false miracle which had been palmed off

on him.[1037] An attempt had been made to urge him to a persecution of

the Jews, like that carried out in Spain and imitated by the

Popes,[1038] by producing a tablet with an inscription bearing the name

of St. Cataldus, said to have been buried at Tarentum, and afterwards

dug up again. When he discovered the fraud, the monks defied him. He had

also managed to detect and expose a pretended instance of fasting, as

his father Alfonso had done before him.[1039] The Court, certainly, was

no accomplice in maintaining these blind superstitions.[1040]

We have been quoting from an author who wrote in earnest, and who by no

means stands alone in his judgment. All the Italian literature of that

time is full of ridicule and invective aimed at the begging

friars.[1041] It can hardly have been doubted that the Renaissance would

soon have destroyed these two Orders, had it not been for the German

Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation which that provoked. Their

saints and popular preachers could hardly have saved them. It would only

have been necessary to come to an understanding at a favourable moment

with a Pope like Leo X., who despised the Mendicant Orders. If the

spirit of the age found them ridiculous or repulsive, they could no

longer be anything but an embarrassment to the Church. And who can say

what fate was in store for the Papacy itself, if the Reformation had not

saved it?

The influence which the Father Inquisitor of a Dominican monastery was

able habitually to exercise in the city where it was situated, was in

the latter part of the fifteenth century just considerable enough to

hamper and irritate cultivated people, but not strong enough to extort

any lasting fear or obedience.[1042] It was no longer possible to punish

men for their thoughts, as it once was (p. 290 sqq.), and those whose

tongues wagged most impudently against the clergy could easily keep

clear of heretical doctrine. Except when some powerful party had an end

to serve, as in the case of Savonarola, or when there was a question of

the use of magical arts, as was often the case in the cities of North

Italy, we seldom read at this time of men being burnt at the stake. The

Inquisitors were in some instances satisfied with the most superficial

retractation, in others it even happened that the victim was saved out

of their hands on the way to the place of execution. In Bologna (1452)

the priest Niccolò da Verona had been publicly degraded on a wooden

scaffold in front of San Domenico as a wizard and profaner of the

sacraments, and was about to be led away to the stake, when he was set

free by a gang of armed men, sent by Achille Malvezzi, a noted friend of

heretics and violator of nuns. The legate, Cardinal Bessarion, was only

able to catch and hang one of the party; Malvezzi lived on in

peace.[1043]

It deserves to be noticed that the higher monastic orders--the

Benedictines, with their many branches--were, notwithstanding their

great wealth and easy lives, far less disliked than the mendicant

friars. For ten novels which treat of ‘frati,’ hardly one can be found

in which a ‘monaco’ is the subject and the victim. It was no small

advantage to this order that it was founded earlier, and not as an

instrument of police, and that it did not interfere with private life.

It contained men of learning, wit, and piety, but the average has been

described by a member of it, Firenzuola,[1044] who says: ‘These well-fed

gentlemen with the capacious cowls do not pass their time in barefooted

journeys and in sermons, but sit in elegant slippers with their hands

crossed over their paunches, in charming cells wainscotted with

cyprus-wood. And when they are obliged to quit the house, they ride

comfortably, as if for their amusement, on mules and sleek, quiet

horses. They do not overstrain their minds with the study of many books,

for fear lest knowledge might put the pride of Lucifer in the place of

monkish simplicity.’

Those who are familiar with the literature of the time, will see that we

have only brought forward what is absolutely necessary for the

understanding of the subject.[1045] That the reputation attaching to the

monks and the secular clergy must have shattered the faith of

multitudes in all that is sacred is, of course obvious.

And some of the judgments which we read are terrible; we will quote one

of them in conclusion, which has been published only lately and is but

little known. The historian Guicciardini, who was for many years in the

service of the Medicean Popes says (1529) in his ‘Aphorisms’[1046]: ‘No

man is more disgusted than I am with the ambition, the avarice, and the

profligacy of the priests, not only because each of these vices is

hateful in itself, but because each and all of them are most unbecoming

in those who declare themselves to be men in special relations with God,

and also because they are vices so opposed to one another, that they can

only co-exist in very singular natures. Nevertheless, my position at the

Court of several Popes forced me to desire their greatness for the sake

of my own interest. But, had it been for this, I should have loved

Martin Luther as myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which

Christianity, as generally understood and explained, lays upon us, but

in order to see this swarm of scoundrels (‘questa caterva di

scellerati’) put back into their proper place, so that they may be

forced to live either without vices or without power.’[1047]

The same Guicciardini is of opinion that we are in the dark as to all

that is supernatural, that philosophers and theologians have nothing but

nonsense to tell us about it, that miracles occur in every religion and

prove the truth of none in particular, and that all of them may be

explained as unknown phenomena of nature. The faith which moves

mountains, then common among the followers of Savonarola, is mentioned

by Guicciardini as a curious fact, but without any bitter remark.

* * * * *

Notwithstanding this hostile public opinion, the clergy and the monks

had the great advantage that the people was used to them, and that their

existence was interwoven with the everyday existence of all. This is the

advantage which every old and powerful institution possesses. Everybody

had some cowled or frocked relative, some prospect of assistance or

future gain from the treasure of the Church; and in the centre of Italy

stood the Court of Rome, where men sometimes became rich in a moment.

Yet it must never be forgotten that all this did not hinder people from

writing and speaking freely. The authors of the most scandalous satires

were themselves mostly monks or beneficed priests. Poggio, who wrote the

‘Facetiae,’ was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist, held a

canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of the ‘Orlandino,’ was a

Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one; Matteo Bandello, who

held up his own order to ridicule, was a Dominican, and nephew of a

general of this order. Were they encouraged to write by the sense that

they ran no risk? Or did they feel an inward need to clear themselves

personally from the infamy which attached to their order? Or were they

moved by that selfish pessimism which takes for its maxim, ‘it will last

our time’? Perhaps all of these motives were more or less at work. In

the case of Folengo, the unmistakable influence of Lutheranism must be

added.[1048]

The sense of dependence on rites and sacraments, which we have already

touched upon in speaking of the Papacy (p. 103), is not surprising among

that part of the people which still believed in the Church. Among those

who were more emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful

impressions, and to the magical force of traditional symbols. The

universal desire of dying men for priestly absolution shows that the

last remnants of the dread of hell had not, even in the case of one like

Vitellozzo, been altogether extinguished. It would hardly be possible to

find a more instructive instance than this. The doctrine taught by the

Church of the ‘character indelibilis’ of the priesthood, independently

of the personality of the priest, had so far borne fruit that it was

possible to loathe the individual and still desire his spiritual gifts.

It is true, nevertheless, that there were defiant natures like Galeotto

of Mirandola,[1049] who died unabsolved in 1499, after living for

sixteen years under the ban of the Church. All this time the city lay

under an interdict on his account, so that no mass was celebrated and

no Christian burial took place.

* * * * *

A splendid contrast to all this is offered by the power exercised over

the nation by its great Preachers of Repentance. Other countries of

Europe were from time to time moved by the words of saintly monks, but

only superficially, in comparison with the periodical upheaval of the

Italian conscience. The only man, in fact, who produced a similar effect

in Germany during the fifteenth century,[1050] was an Italian, born in

the Abruzzi, named Giovanni Capistrano. Those natures which bear within

them this religious vocation and this commanding earnestness, wore then

in Northern countries an intuitive and mystical aspect. In the South

they were practical and expansive, and shared in the national gift of

language and oratorical skill. The North produced an ‘Imitation of

Christ,’ which worked silently, at first only within the walls of the

monastery, but worked for the ages; the South produced men who made on

their fellows a mighty but passing impression.

This impression consisted chiefly in the awakening of the conscience.

The sermons were moral exhortations, free from abstract notions and full

of practical application, rendered more impressive by the saintly and

ascetic character of the preacher, and by the miracles which, even

against his will, the inflamed imagination of the people attributed to

him.[1051] The most powerful argument used was not the threat of Hell

and Purgatory, but rather the living results of the ‘maledizione,’ the

temporal ruin wrought on the individual by the curse which clings to

wrong-doing. The grieving of Christ and the Saints has its consequences

in this life. And only thus could men, sunk in passion and guilt, be

brought to repentance and amendment--which was the chief object of these

sermons.

Among these preachers were Bernadino da Siena, and his two pupils,

Alberto da Sarteano and Jacopo della Marca, Giovanni Capistrano, Roberto

da Lecce (p. 413), and finally, Girolamo Savonarola. No prejudice of the

day was stronger than that against the mendicant friar, and this they

overcame. They were criticised and ridiculed by a scornful

humanism;[1052] but when they raised their voices, no one gave heed to

the humanists. The thing was no novelty, and the scoffing Florentines

had already in the fourteenth century learned to caricature it whenever

it appeared in the pulpit.[1053] But no sooner did Savonarola come

forward than he carried the people so triumphantly with him, that soon

all their beloved art and culture melted away in the furnace which he

lighted. Even the grossest profanation done to the cause by hypocritical

monks, who got up an effect in the audience by means of confederates (p.

460), could not bring the thing itself into discredit. Men kept on

laughing at the ordinary monkish sermons, with their spurious miracles

and manufactured reliques;[1054] but did not cease to honour the great

and genuine prophets. These are a true Italian specialty of the

fifteenth century.

The Order--generally that of St. Francis, and more particularly the

so-called Observantines--sent them out according as they were wanted.

This was commonly the case when there was some important public or

private feud in a city, or some alarming outbreak of violence,

immorality, or disease. When once the reputation of a preacher was

made, the cities were all anxious to hear him even without any special

occasion. He went wherever his superiors sent him. A special form of

this work was the preaching of a Crusade against the Turks;[1055] but

here we have to speak more particularly of the exhortations to

repentance.

The order of these, when they were treated methodically, seems to have

followed the customary list of the deadly sins. The more pressing,

however, the occasion is, the more directly does the preacher make for

his main point. He begins perhaps in one of the great churches of the

Order, or in the cathedral. Soon the largest piazza is too small for the

crowds which throng from every side to hear him, and he himself can

hardly move without risking his life.[1056] The sermon is commonly

followed by a great procession; but the first magistrates of the city,

who take him in their midst, can hardly save him from the multitude of

women who throng to kiss his hands and feet, and cut off fragments from

his cowl.[1057]

The most immediate consequences which follow from the preacher’s

denunciations of usury, luxury, and scandalous fashions, are the opening

of the gaols--which meant no more than the discharge of the poorer

creditors--and the burning of various instruments of luxury and

amusement, whether innocent or not. Among these are dice, cards, games

of all kinds, written incantations,[1058] masks, musical instruments,

song-books, false hair, and so forth. All these would then be

gracefully arranged on a scaffold (‘talamo’), a figure of the devil

fastened to the top, and then the whole set on fire (comp. p. 372).

Then came the turn of the more hardened consciences. Men who had long

never been near the confessional, now acknowledged their sins.

Ill-gotten gains were restored, and insults which might have borne fruit

in blood retracted. Orators like Bernadino of Siena[1059] entered

diligently into all the details of the daily life of men, and the moral

laws which are involved in it. Few theologians nowadays would feel

tempted to give a morning sermon ‘on contracts, restitutions, the public

debt (“monte”), and the portioning of daughters,’ like that which he

once delivered in the Cathedral at Florence. Imprudent speakers easily

fell into the mistake of attacking particular classes, professions, or

offices, with such energy that the enraged hearers proceeded to violence

against those whom the preacher had denounced.[1060] A sermon which

Bernadino once preached in Rome (1424) had another consequence besides a

bonfire of vanities on the Capitol: ‘after this,’[1061] we read, ‘the

witch Finicella was burnt, because by her diabolical arts she had killed

many children and bewitched many other persons; and all Rome went to see

the sight.’

But the most important aim of the preacher was, as has been already

said, to reconcile enemies and persuade them to give up thoughts of

vengeance. Probably this end was seldom attained till towards the close

of a course of sermons, when the tide of penitence flooded the city,

and when the air resounded[1062] with the cry of the whole people:

‘Misericordia!’ Then followed those solemn embracings and treaties of

peace, which even previous bloodshed on both sides could not hinder.

Banished men were recalled to the city to take part in these sacred

transactions. It appears that these ‘Paci’ were on the whole faithfully

observed, even after the mood which prompted them was over; and then the

memory of the monk was blessed from generation to generation. But there

were sometimes terrible crises like those in the families Della Valle

and Croce in Rome (1482), where even the great Roberto da Lecce raised

his voice in vain.[1063] Shortly before Holy Week he had preached to

immense crowds in the square before the Minerva. But on the night before

Maunday Thursday a terrible combat took place in front of the Palazzo

della Valle, near the Ghetto. In the morning Pope Sixtus gave orders for

its destruction, and then performed the customary ceremonies of the day.

On Good Friday Roberto preached again with a crucifix in his hand; but

he and his hearers could do nothing but weep.

Violent natures, which had fallen into contradiction with themselves,

often resolved to enter a convent, under the impression made by these

men. Among such were not only brigands and criminals of every sort, but

soldiers without employment.[1064] This resolve was stimulated by their

admiration of the holy man, and by the desire to copy at least his

outward position.

The concluding sermon is a general benediction, summed up in the words:

‘la pace sia con voi!’ Throngs of hearers accompany the preacher to the

next city, and there listen for a second time to the whole course of

sermons.

The enormous influence exercised by these preachers made it important,

both for the clergy and for the government, at least not to have them as

opponents; one means to this end was to permit only monks[1065] or

priests who had received at all events the lesser consecration, to enter

the pulpit, so that the Order or Corporation to which they belonged was,

to some extent, responsible for them. But it was not easy to make the

rule absolute, since the Church and pulpit had long been used as a means

of publicity in many ways, judicial, educational, and others, and since

even sermons were sometimes delivered by humanists and other laymen (p.

234 sqq.). There existed, too, in Italy a dubious class of

persons,[1066] who were neither monks nor priests, and who yet had

renounced the world--that is to say, the numerous class of hermits who

appeared from time to time in the pulpit on their own authority, and

often carried the people with them. A case of this kind occurred at

Milan in 1516, after the second French conquest, certainly at a time

when public order was much disturbed. A Tuscan hermit Hieronymus of

Siena, possibly an adherent of Savonarola, maintained his place for

months together in the pulpit of the Cathedral, denounced the hierarchy

with great violence, caused a new chandelier and a new altar to be set

up in the church, worked miracles, and only abandoned the field after a

long and desperate struggle.[1067] During the decades in which the fate

of Italy was decided, the spirit of prophecy was unusually active, and

nowhere where it displayed itself was it confined to any one particular

class. We know with what a tone of true prophetic defiance the hermits

came forward before the sack of Rome (p. 122). In default of any

eloquence of their own, these men made use of messengers with symbols of

one kind or another, like the ascetic near Siena (1429), who sent a

‘little hermit,’ that is a pupil, into the terrified city with a skull

upon a pole, to which was attached a paper with a threatening text from

the Bible.[1068]

Nor did the monks themselves scruple to attack princes, governments, the

clergy, or even their own order. A direct exhortation to overthrow a

despotic house, like that uttered by Jacopo Bussolaro at Pavia in the

fourteenth century,[1069] hardly occurs again in the following period;

but there is no want of courageous reproofs, addressed even to the Pope

in his own chapel (p. 239, note 1), and of naïve political advice given

in the presence of rulers who by no means held themselves in need of

it.[1070] In the Piazza del Castello at Milan, a blind preacher from the

Incoronata--consequently an Augustinian--ventured in 1494 to exhort

Ludovico Moro from the pulpit: ‘My lord, beware of showing the French

the way, else you will repent it.’[1071] There were further prophetic

monks, who, without exactly preaching political sermons, drew such

appalling pictures of the future that the hearers almost lost their

senses. After the election of Leo X. in the year 1513, a whole

association of these men, twelve Franciscan monks in all, journeyed

through the various districts of Italy, of which one or other was

assigned to each preacher. The one who appeared in Florence,[1072] Fra

Francesco di Montepulciano, struck terror into the whole people. The

alarm was not diminished by the exaggerated reports of his prophecies

which reached those who were too far off to hear him. After one of his

sermons he suddenly died ‘of pain in the chest.’ The people thronged in

such numbers to kiss the feet of the corpse that it had to be secretly

buried in the night. But the newly awakened spirit of prophecy, which

seized upon even women and peasants, could not be controlled without

great difficulty. ‘In order to restore to the people their cheerful

humour, the Medici--Giuliano, Leo’s brother, and Lorenzo--gave on St.

John’s Day, 1514, those splendid festivals, tournaments, processions,

and hunting-parties, which were attended by many distinguished persons

from Rome, and among them, though disguised, by no less than six

cardinals.’

But the greatest of the prophets and apostles had been already burnt in

Florence in the year 1498--Fra Giorolamo Savonarola of Ferrara. We must

content ourselves with saying a few words respecting him.[1073]

The instrument by means of which he transformed and ruled the city of

Florence (1494-8) was his eloquence. Of this the meagre reports that

are left to us, which were taken down mostly on the spot, give us

evidently a very imperfect notion. It was not that he possessed any

striking outward advantages, for voice, accent, and rhetorical skill

constituted precisely his weakest side; and those who required the

preacher to be a stylist, went to his rival Fra Mariano da Genazzano.

The eloquence of Savonarola was the expression of a lofty and commanding

personality, the like of which was not seen again till the time of

Luther. He himself held his own influence to be the result of a divine

illumination, and could therefore, without presumption, assign a very

high place to the office of the preacher, who, in the great hierarchy of

spirits, occupies the next place below the angels.

This man, whose nature seemed made of fire, worked another and greater

miracle than any of his oratorical triumphs. His own Dominican monastery

of San Marco, and then all the Dominican monasteries of Tuscany, became

like-minded with himself, and undertook voluntarily the work of inward

reform. When we reflect what the monasteries then were, and what

measureless difficulty attends the least change where monks are

concerned, we are doubly astonished at so complete a revolution. While

the reform was still in progress large numbers of Savonarola’s followers

entered the Order, and thereby greatly facilitated his plans. Sons of

the first houses in Florence entered San Marco as novices.

This reform of the Order in a particular province was the first step to

a national Church, in which, had the reformer himself lived longer, it

must infallibly have ended. Savonarola, indeed, desired the regeneration

of the whole Church, and near the end of his career sent pressing

exhortations to the great powers urging them to call together a Council.

But in Tuscany his Order and party were the only organs of his

spirit--the salt of the earth--while the neighbouring provinces remained

in their old condition. Fancy and asceticism tended more and more to

produce in him a state of mind to which Florence appeared as the scene

of the kingdom of God upon earth.

The prophecies, whose partial fulfilment conferred on Savonarola a

supernatural credit, were the means by which the ever-active Italian

imagination seized control of the soundest and most cautious natures. At

first the Franciscans of the Osservanza, trusting in the reputation

which had been bequeathed to them by San Bernadino of Siena, fancied

that they could compete with the great Dominican. They put one of their

own men into the Cathedral pulpit, and outbid the Jeremiads of

Savonarola by still more terrible warnings, till Pietro de’Medici, who

then still ruled over Florence, forced them both to be silent. Soon

after, when Charles VIII. came into Italy and the Medici were expelled,

as Savonarola had clearly foretold, he alone was believed in.

It must be frankly confessed that he never judged his own premonitions

and visions critically, as he did those of others. In the funeral

oration on Pico della Mirandola, he deals somewhat harshly with his dead

friend. Since Pico, notwithstanding an inner voice which came from God,

would not enter the Order, he had himself prayed to God to chasten him

for his disobedience. He certainly had not desired his death, and alms

and prayers had obtained the favour that Pico’s soul was safe in

Purgatory. With regard to a comforting vision which Pico had upon his

sick-bed, in which the Virgin appeared and promised him that he should

not die, Savonarola confessed that he had long regarded it as a deceit

of the Devil, till it was revealed to him that the Madonna meant the

second and eternal death.[1074] If these things and the like are proofs

of presumption, it must be admitted that this great soul at all events

paid a bitter penalty for his fault. In his last days Savonarola seems

to have recognised the vanity of his visions and prophecies. And yet

enough inward peace was left him to enable him to meet death like a

Christian. His partisans held to his doctrine and predictions for thirty

years longer.

He only undertook the reorganisation of the state for the reason that

otherwise his enemies would have got the government into their own

hands. It is unfair to judge him by the semi-democratic constitution (p.

83, note 1) of the beginning of the year 1495. Nor is it either better

or worse than other Florentine constitutions.[1075]

He was at bottom the most unsuitable man who could be found for such a

work. His ideal was a theocracy, in which all men were to bow in blessed

humility before the Unseen, and all conflicts of passion were not even

to be able to arise. His whole mind is written in that inscription on

the Palazzo della Signoria, the substance of which was his maxim[1076]

as early as 1495, and which was solemnly renewed by his partisans in

1527: ‘Jesus Christus Rex populi Florentini S. P. Q. decreto creatus.’

He stood in no more relation to mundane affairs and their actual

conditions than any other inhabitant of a monastery. Man, according to

him, has only to attend to those things which make directly for his

salvation.

This temper comes out clearly in his opinions on ancient literature:

‘The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle, is that they

brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics.

Yet they and other philosophers are now in Hell. An old woman knows more

about the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many books

that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many books and

not so many arguments (“ragioni naturali”) and disputes, religion grew

more quickly than it has done since.’ He wished to limit the classical

instruction of the schools to Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, and to supply

the rest from Jerome and Augustine. Not only Ovid and Catullus, but

Terence and Tibullus, were to be banished. This may be no more than the

expression of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a special work he

admits that science as a whole is harmful. He holds that only a few

people should have to do with it, in order that the tradition of human

knowledge may not perish, and particularly that there may be no want of

intellectual athletes to confute the sophisms of the heretics. For all

others, grammar, morals, and religious teaching (‘litterae sacrae’)

suffice. Culture and education would thus return wholly into the charge

of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the ‘most learned and the most

pious’ are to rule over the states and empires, these rulers would also

be monks. Whether he really foresaw this conclusion, we need not

inquire.

A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined. The simple

reflection that the new-born antiquity and the boundless enlargement of

human thought and knowledge which was due to it, might give splendid

confirmation to a religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never

even to have occurred to the good man. He wanted to forbid what he could

not deal with by any other means. In fact, he was anything but liberal,

and was ready, for example, to send the astrologers to the same stake at

which he afterwards himself died.[1077]

How mighty must have been the soul which dwelt side by side with this

narrow intellect! And what a flame must have glowed within him before he

could constrain the Florentines, possessed as they were by the passion

for culture, to surrender themselves to a man who could thus reason!

How much of their heart and their worldliness they were ready to

sacrifice for his sake is shown by those famous bonfires by the side of

which all the ‘talami’ of Bernadino da Siena and others were certainly

of small account.

All this could not, however, be effected without the agency of a

tyrannical police. He did not shrink from the most vexatious

interferences with the much-prized freedom of Italian private life,

using the espionage of servants on their masters as a means of carrying

out his moral reforms. That transformation of public and private life

which the iron Calvin was but just able to effect at Geneva with the aid

of a permanent state of siege necessarily proved impossible at Florence,

and the attempt only served to drive the enemies of Savonarola to a more

implacable hostility. Among his most unpopular measures may be mentioned

those organised parties of boys, who forced their way into the houses

and laid violent hands on any objects which seemed suitable for the

bonfire. As it happened that they were sometimes sent away with a

beating, they were afterwards attended, in order to keep up the figment

of a pious ‘rising generation,’ by a body-guard of grown-up persons.

On the last day of the Carnival in the year 1497, and on the same day

the year after, the great ‘Auto da Fé’ took place on the Piazza della

Signoria. In the centre of it rose a great pyramidal flight of stairs

like the ‘rogus’ on which the Roman Emperors were commonly burned. On

the lowest tier were arranged false beards, masks, and carnival

disguises; above came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among

others Boccaccio, the ‘Morgante’ of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in the

form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated manuscripts; then

women’s ornaments and toilette articles, scents, mirrors, veils, and

false hair; higher up, lutes, harps, chess-boards, playing-cards; and

finally, on the two uppermost tiers, paintings only, especially of

female beauties, partly fancy-pictures, bearing the classical names of

Lucretia, Cleopatra, or Faustina, partly portraits of the beautiful

Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina, and Maria de’Lenzi; all the pictures of

Bartolommeo della Porta, who brought them of his own accord; and, as it

seems, some female heads--masterpieces of ancient sculptors. On the

first occasion a Venetian merchant who happened to be present offered

the Signoria 22,000 gold florins for the objects on the pyramid; but the

only answer he received was that his portrait, too, was taken, and

burned along with the rest. When the pile was lighted, the Signoria

appeared on the balcony, and the air echoed with song, the sound of

trumpets, and the pealing of bells. The people then adjourned to the

Piazza di San Marco, where they danced round in three concentric

circles. The innermost was composed of monks of the monastery,

alternating with boys, dressed as angels; then came young laymen and

ecclesiastics; and on the outside old men, citizens, and priests, the

latter crowned with wreaths of olive.[1078]

All the ridicule of his victorious enemies, who in truth had no lack of

justification or of talent for ridicule, was unable to discredit the

memory of Savonarola. The more tragic the fortunes of Italy became, the

brighter grew the halo which in the recollection of the survivors

surrounded the figure of the great monk and prophet. Though his

predictions may not have been confirmed in detail, the great and

general calamity which he foretold was fulfilled with appalling truth.

Great, however, as the influence of all these preachers may have been,

and brilliantly as Savonarola justified the claim of the monks to this

office,[1079] nevertheless the order as a whole could not escape the

contempt and condemnation of the people. Italy showed that she could

give her enthusiasm only to individuals.

* * * * *

If, apart from all that concerns the priests and the monks, we attempt

to measure the strength of the old faith, it will be found great or

small according to the light in which it is considered. We have spoken

already of the need felt for the Sacraments as something indispensable

(pp. 103, 464). Let us now glance for a moment at the position of faith

and worship in daily life. Both were determined partly by the habits of

the people and partly by the policy and example of the rulers.

All that has to do with penitence and the attainment of salvation by

means of good works was in much the same stage of development or

corruption as in the North of Europe, both among the peasantry and among

the poorer inhabitants of the cities. The instructed classes were here

and there influenced by the same motives. Those sides of popular

Catholicism which had their origin in the old pagan ways of addressing,

rewarding, and reconciling the gods have fixed themselves ineradicably

in the consciousness of the people. The eighth eclogue of Battista

Mantovano,[1080] which has been already quoted elsewhere, contains the

prayer of a peasant to the Madonna, in which she is called upon as the

special patroness of all rustic and agricultural interests. And what

conceptions they were which the people formed of their protectress in

heaven! What was in the mind of the Florentine woman[1081] who gave ‘ex

voto’ a keg of wax to the Annunziata, because her lover, a monk, had

gradually emptied a barrel of wine without her absent husband finding it

out! Then, too, as still in our own days, different departments of human

life were presided over by their respective patrons. The attempt has

often been made to explain a number of the commonest rites of the

Catholic Church as remnants of pagan ceremonies, and no one doubts that

many local and popular usages, which are associated with religious

festivals, are forgotten fragments of the old pre-christian faiths of

Europe. In Italy, on the contrary, we find instances in which the

affiliation of the new faith on the old seems consciously recognised.

So, for example, the custom of setting out food for the dead four days

before the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, that is to say, on February

18, the date of the ancient Feralia.[1082] Many other practices of this

kind may then have prevailed and have since then been extirpated.

Perhaps the paradox is only apparent if we say that the popular faith in

Italy had a solid foundation just in proportion as it was pagan.

The extent to which this form of belief prevailed in the upper classes

can to a certain point be shown in detail. It had, as we have said in

speaking of the influence of the clergy, the power of custom and early

impressions on its side. The love for ecclesiastical pomp and display

helped to confirm it, and now and then there came one of those epidemics

of revivalism, which few even among the scoffers and the sceptics were

able to withstand.

But in questions of this kind it is perilous to grasp too hastily at

absolute results. We might fancy, for example, that the feeling of

educated men towards the reliques of the saints would be a key by which

some chambers of their religious consciousness might be opened. And in

fact, some difference of degree may be demonstrable, though by no means

as clearly as might be wished. The Government of Venice in the fifteenth

century seems to have fully shared in the reverence felt throughout the

rest of Europe for the remains of the bodies of the saints (p. 72). Even

strangers who lived in Venice found it well to adapt themselves to this

superstition.[1083] If we can judge of scholarly Padua from the

testimony of its topographer Michele Savonarola (p. 145), things must

have been much the same there. With a mixture of pride and pious awe,

Michele tells us how in times of great danger the saints were heard to

sigh at night along the streets of the city, how the hair and nails on

the corpse of a holy nun in Santa Chiara kept on continually growing,

and how the same corpse, when any disaster was impending, used to make a

noise and lift up the arms.[1084] When he sets to work to describe the

chapel of St. Anthony in the Santo, the writer loses himself in

ejaculations and fantastic dreams. In Milan the people at least showed a

fanatical devotion to relics; and when once, in the year 1517, the monks

of San Simpliciano were careless enough to expose six holy corpses

during certain alterations of the high altar, which event was followed

by heavy floods of rain, the people[1085] attributed the visitation to

this sacrilege, and gave the monks a sound beating whenever they met

them in the street. In other parts of Italy, and even in the case of the

Popes themselves, the sincerity of this feeling is much more dubious,

though here, too, a positive conclusion is hardly attainable. It is

well known amid what general enthusiasm Pius II. solemnly deposited the

head of the Apostle Andrew, which had been brought from Greece, and then

from Santa Maura, in the Church of St. Peter (1462); but we gather from

his own narrative that he only did it from a kind of shame, as so many

princes were competing for the relic. It was not till afterwards that

the idea struck him of making Rome the common refuge for all the remains

of the saints which had been driven from their own churches.[1086] Under

Sixtus IV. the population of the city was still more zealous in this

cause than the Pope himself, and the magistracy (1483) complained

bitterly that Sixtus had sent to Louis XI., the dying king of France,

some specimens of the Lateran relics.[1087] A courageous voice was

raised about this time at Bologna, advising the sale of the skull of St.

Dominic to the king of Spain, and the application of the money to some

useful public object.[1088] But those who had the least reverence of all

for the relics were the Florentines. Between the decision to honour

their saint S. Zanobi with a new sarcophagus and the final execution of

the project by Ghiberti nineteen years elapsed (1409-28), and then it

only happened by chance, because the master had executed a smaller order

of the same kind with great skill.[1089]

Perhaps through being tricked by a cunning Neapolitan abbess (1352), who

sent them a spurious arm of the patroness of the Cathedral, Santa

Reparata, made of wood and plaster, they began to get tired of

relics.[1090] Or perhaps it would be truer to say that their æsthetic

sense turned them away in disgust from dismembered corpses and mouldy

clothes. Or perhaps their feeling was rather due to that sense for

glory which thought Dante and Petrarch worthier of a splendid grave than

all the twelve apostles put together. It is probable that throughout

Italy, apart from Venice and from Rome, the condition of which latter

city was exceptional, the worship of relics had been long giving way to

the adoration of the Madonna,[1091] at all events to a greater extent

than elsewhere in Europe; and in this fact lies indirect evidence of an

early development of the æsthetic sense.

It may be questioned whether in the North, where the vastest cathedrals

are nearly all dedicated to Our Lady, and where an extensive branch of

Latin and indigenous poetry sang the praises of the Mother of God, a

greater devotion to her was possible. In Italy, however, the number of

miraculous pictures of the Virgin was far greater, and the part they

played in the daily life of the people much more important. Every town

of any size contained a quantity of them, from the ancient, or

ostensibly ancient, paintings by St. Luke, down to the works of

contemporaries, who not seldom lived to see the miracles wrought by

their own handiwork. The work of art was in these cases by no means as

harmless as Battista Mantovano[1092] thinks; sometimes it suddenly

acquired a magical virtue. The popular craving for the miraculous,

especially strong in women, may have been fully satisfied by these

pictures, and for this reason the relics been less regarded. It cannot

be said with certainty how far the respect for genuine relics suffered

from the ridicule which the novelists aimed at the spurious.[1093]

The attitude of the educated classes towards Mariolatry is more clearly

recognisable than towards the worship of images. One cannot but be

struck with the fact that in Italian literature Dante’s ‘Paradise’[1094]

is the last poem in honour of the Virgin, while among the people hymns

in her praise have been constantly produced down to our own day. The

names of Sannazaro and Sabellico[1095] and other writers of Latin poems

prove little on the other side, since the object with which they wrote

was chiefly literary. The poems written in Italian in the

fifteenth[1096] and at the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in

which we meet with genuine religious feeling, such as the hymns of

Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna and of

Michelangelo, might have been just as well composed by Protestants.

Besides the lyrical expression of faith in God, we chiefly notice in

them the sense of sin, the consciousness of deliverance through the

death of Christ, the longing for a better world. The intercession of the

Mother of God is only mentioned by the way.[1097] The same phenomenon is

repeated in the classical literature of the French at the time of Louis

XIV. Not till the time of the Counter-Reformation did Mariolatry

reappear in the higher Italian poetry. Meanwhile the plastic arts had

certainly done their utmost to glorify the Madonna. It may be added that

the worship of the saints among the educated classes often took an

essentially pagan form (p. 260).

We might thus critically examine the various sides of Italian

Catholicism at this period, and so establish with a certain degree of

probability the attitude of the instructed classes toward popular faith.

Yet an absolute and positive result cannot be reached. We meet with

contrasts hard to explain. While architects, painters, and sculptors

were working with restless activity in and for the churches, we hear at

the beginning of the sixteenth century the bitterest complaints of the

neglect of public worship and of these churches themselves.

Templa ruunt, passim sordent altaria, cultus

Paulatim divinus abit.[1098]

It is well known how Luther was scandalised by the irreverence with

which the priests in Rome said Mass. And at the same time the feasts of

the Church were celebrated with a taste and magnificence of which

Northern countries had no conception. It looks as if this most

imaginative of nations was easily tempted to neglect every-day things,

and as easily captivated by anything extraordinary.

It is to this excess of imagination that we must attribute the epidemic

religious revivals, upon which we shall again say a few words. They must

be clearly distinguished from the excitement called forth by the great

preachers. They were rather due to general public calamities, or to the

dread of such.

In the Middle Ages all Europe was from time to time flooded by these

great tides, which carried away whole peoples in their waves. The

Crusades and the Flagellant revival are instances. Italy took part in

both of these movements. The first great companies of Flagellants

appeared, immediately after the fall of Ezzelino and his house, in the

neighbourhood of the same Perugia[1099] which has been already spoken

of (p. 482, note 2), as the head-quarters of the revivalist preachers.

Then followed the Flagellants of 1310 and 1334,[1100] and then the great

pilgrimage without scourging in the year 1399, which Corio has

recorded.[1101] It is not impossible that the Jubilees were founded

partly in order to regulate and render harmless this sinister passion

for vagabondage which seized on whole populations at times of religious

excitement. The great sanctuaries of Italy, such as Loreto and others,

had meantime become famous, and no doubt diverted a certain part of this

enthusiasm.[1102]

But terrible crises had still at a much later time the power to reawaken

the glow of mediæval penitence, and the conscience-stricken people,

often still further appalled by signs and wonders, sought to move the

pity of Heaven by wailings and scourgings, by fasts, processions, and

moral enactments. So it was at Bologna when the plague came in

1457,[1103] so in 1496 at a time of internal discord at Siena,[1104] to

mention two only out of countless instances. No more moving scene can be

imagined than that we read of at Milan in 1529, when famine, plague, and

war conspired with Spanish extortion to reduce the city to the lowest

depths of despair.[1105] It chanced that the monk who had the ear of the

people, Fra Tommaso Nieto, was himself a Spaniard. The Host was borne

along in a novel fashion, amid barefooted crowds of old and young. It

was placed on a decorated bier, which rested on the shoulders of four

priests in linen garments--an imitation of the Ark of the Covenant[1106]

which the children of Israel once carried round the walls of Jericho.

Thus did the afflicted people of Milan remind their ancient God of His

old covenant with man; and when the procession again entered the

cathedral, and it seemed as if the vast building must fall in with the

agonised cry of ‘Misericordia!’ many who stood there may have believed

that the Almighty would indeed subvert the laws of nature and of

history, and send down upon them a miraculous deliverance.

There was one government in Italy, that of Duke Ercole I. of

Ferrara,[1107] which assumed the direction of public feeling, and

compelled the popular revivals to move in regular channels. At the time

when Savonarola was powerful in Florence, and the movement which he

began spread far and wide among the population of central Italy, the

people of Ferrara voluntarily entered on a general fast (at the

beginning of 1496). A Lazarist announced from the pulpit the approach of

a season of war and famine such as the world had never seen; but the

Madonna had assured some pious people[1108] that these evils might be

avoided by fasting. Upon this, the court itself had no choice but to

fast, but it took the conduct of the public devotions into its own

hands. On Easter Day, the 3rd of April, a proclamation on morals and

religion was published, forbidding blasphemy, prohibited games, sodomy,

concubinage, the letting of houses to prostitutes or panders, and the

opening of all shops on feast-days, excepting those of the bakers and

greengrocers. The Jews and Moors, who had taken refuge from the

Spaniards at Ferrara, were now compelled again to wear the yellow O upon

the breast. Contraveners were threatened, not only with the punishments

already provided by law, but also ‘with such severer penalties as the

Duke might think good to inflict,’ of which one-fourth in case of a

pecuniary fine was to be paid to the Duke, and the other three-fourths

were to go to some public institution. After this, the Duke and the

court went several days in succession to hear sermons in church, and on

the 10th of April all the Jews in Ferrara were compelled to do the

same.[1109] On the 3rd of May the director of police--that Zampante who

has been already referred to (p. 50)--sent the crier to announce that

whoever had given money to the police-officers in order not to be

informed against as a blasphemer, might, if he came forward, have it

back with a further indemnification. These wicked officers, he said, had

extorted as much as two or three ducats from innocent persons by

threatening to lodge an information against them. They had then mutually

informed against one another, and so had all found their way into

prison. But as the money had been paid precisely in order not to have to

do with Zampante, it is probable that his proclamation induced few

people to come forward. In the year 1500, after the fall of Ludovico

Moro, when a similar outbreak of popular feeling took place,

Ercole[1110] ordered a series of nine processions, in which there were

4,000 children dressed in white, bearing the standard of Jesus. He

himself rode on horseback, as he could not walk without difficulty. An

edict was afterwards published of the same kind as that of 1496. It is

well known how many churches and monasteries were built by this ruler.

He even sent for a live saint, the Suor Colomba, shortly before he

married his son Alfonso to Lucrezia Borgia (1502). A special

messenger[1111] fetched the saint with fifteen other nuns from Viterbo,

and the Duke himself conducted her on her arrival at Ferrara into a

convent prepared for her reception. We shall probably do him no

injustice if we attribute all these measures very largely to political

calculation. To the conception of government formed by the House of

Este, as indicated above (p. 46, sqq.), this employment of religion for

the ends of statecraft belongs by a kind of logical necessity.

CHAPTER III.

RELIGION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE.

But in order to reach a definite conclusion with regard to the religious

sense of the men of this period, we must adopt a different method. From

their intellectual attitude in general, we can infer their relation both

to the Divine idea and to the existing religion of their age.

These modern men, the representatives of the culture of Italy, were born

with the same religious instincts as other mediæval Europeans. But their

powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters,

altogether subjective, and the intense charm which the discovery of the

inner and outer universe exercised upon them rendered them markedly

worldly. In the rest of Europe religion remained, till a much later

period, something given from without, and in practical life egoism and

sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance. The latter had no

spiritual competitors, as in Italy, or only to a far smaller extent.

Further, the close and frequent relations of Italy with Byzantium and

the Mohammedan peoples had produced a dispassionate tolerance which

weakened the ethnographical conception of a privileged Christendom. And

when classical antiquity with its men and institutions became an ideal

of life, as well as the greatest of historical memories, ancient

speculation and scepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery

over the minds of Italians.

Since, again, the Italians were the first modern people of Europe who

gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and

since they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in

which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their

belief in God began to waver, and their view of the government of the

world became fatalistic. And when their passionate natures refused to

rest in the sense of uncertainty, they made a shift to help themselves

out with ancient, oriental, or mediæval superstition. They took to

astrology and magic.

Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of the

Renaissance, show, in respect to religion, a quality which is common in

youthful natures. Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet

are conscious of no sin. Every disturbance of their inward harmony they

feel themselves able to make good out of the plastic resources of their

own nature, and therefore they feel no repentance. The need of salvation

thus becomes felt more and more dimly, while the ambitions and the

intellectual activity of the present either shut out altogether every

thought of a world to come, or else cause it to assume a poetic instead

of a dogmatic form.

When we look on all this as pervaded and often perverted by the

all-powerful Italian imagination, we obtain a picture of that time which

is certainly more in accordance with truth than are vague declamations

against modern paganism. And closer investigation often reveals to us

that underneath this outward shell much genuine religion could still

survive.

* * * * *

The fuller discussion of these points must be limited to a few of the

most essential explanations.

That religion should again become an affair of the individual and of his

own personal feeling was inevitable when the Church became corrupt in

doctrine and tyrannous in practice, and is a proof that the European

mind was still alive. It is true that this showed itself in many

different ways. While the mystical and ascetical sects of the North lost

no time in creating new outward forms for their new modes of thought and

feeling, each individual in Italy went his own way, and thousands

wandered on the sea of life without any religious guidance whatever. All

the more must we admire those who attained and held fast to a personal

religion. They were not to blame for being unable to have any part or

lot in the old Church, as she then was; nor would it be reasonable to

expect that they should all of them go through that mighty spiritual

labour which was appointed to the German reformers. The form and aim of

this personal faith, as it showed itself in the better minds, will be

set forth at the close of our work.

The worldliness, through which the Renaissance seems to offer so

striking a contrast to the Middle Ages, owed its first origin to the

flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views, which transformed the

mediæval conception of nature and man. This spirit is not in itself more

hostile to religion than that ‘culture’ which now holds its place, but

which can give us only a feeble notion of the universal ferment which

the discovery of a new world of greatness then called forth. This

worldliness was not frivolous, but earnest, and was ennobled by art and

poetry. It is a lofty necessity of the modern spirit that this attitude,

once gained, can never again be lost, that an irresistible impulse

forces us to the investigation of men and things, and that we must hold

this enquiry to be our proper end and work.[1112] How soon and by what

paths this search will lead us back to God, and in what ways the

religious temper of the individual will be affected by it, are questions

which cannot be met by any general answer. The Middle Ages, which spared

themselves the trouble of induction and free enquiry, can have no right

to impose upon us their dogmatical verdict in a matter of such vast

importance.

To the study of man, among many other causes, was due the tolerance and

indifference with which the Mohammedan religion was regarded. The

knowledge and admiration of the remarkable civilisation which Islam,

particularly before the Mongol inundation, had attained, was peculiar to

Italy from the time of the Crusades. This sympathy was fostered by the

half-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes, by dislike and even

contempt for the existing Church, and by constant commercial intercourse

with the harbours of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean.[1113] It

can be shown that in the thirteenth century the Italians recognised a

Mohammedan ideal of nobleness, dignity, and pride, which they loved to

connect with the person of a Sultan. A Mameluke Sultan is commonly

meant; if any name is mentioned, it is the name of Saladin.[1114] Even

the Osmanli Turks, whose destructive tendencies were no secret, gave the

Italians, as we have shown above (p. 92, sqq.), only half a fright, and

a peaceable accord with them was looked upon as no impossibility. Along

with this tolerance, however, appeared the bitterest religious

opposition to Mohammedanism; the clergy, says Filelfo, should come

forward against it, since it prevailed over a great part of the world

and was more dangerous to Christendom than Judaism was;[1115] along with

the readiness to compromise with the Turks, appeared the passionate

desire for a war against them which possessed Pius II. during the whole

of his pontificate, and which many of the humanists expressed in

high-flown declamations.

The truest and most characteristic expression of this religious

indifference is the famous story of the Three Rings, which Lessing has

put into the mouth of his Nathan, after it had been already told

centuries earlier, though with some reserve, in the ‘Hundred Old Novels’

(nov. 72 or 73), and more boldly in Boccaccio.[1116] In what language

and in what corner of the Mediterranean it was first told, can never be

known; most likely the original was much more plain-spoken than the two

Italian adaptations. The religious postulate on which it rests, namely

Deism, will be discussed later on in its wider significance for this

period. The same idea is repeated, though in a clumsy caricature, in the

famous proverb of the ‘three who have deceived the world, that is,

Moses, Christ, and Mohammed.’[1117] If the Emperor Frederick II., in

whom this saying is said to have originated, really thought so, he

probably expressed himself with more wit. Ideas of the same kind were

also current in Islam.

At the height of the Renaissance, towards the close of the fifteenth

century, Luigi Pulci offers us an example of the same mode of thought in

the ‘Morgante Maggiore.’ The imaginary world of which his story treats

is divided, as in all heroic poems of romance, into a Christian and a

Mohammedan camp. In accordance with the mediæval temper, the victory of

the Christian and the final reconciliation among the combatants was

attended by the baptism of the defeated Islamites, and the

Improvisatori, who preceded Pulci in the treatment of these subjects,

must have made free use of this stock incident. It was Pulci’s object to

parody his predecessors, particularly the worst among them, and this he

does by those appeals to God, Christ, and the Madonna, with which each

canto begins; and still more clearly by the sudden conversions and

baptisms, the utter senselessness of which must have struck every reader

or hearer. This ridicule leads him further to the confession of his

faith in the relative goodness of all religions,[1118] which faith,

notwithstanding his professions of orthodoxy,[1119] rests on an

essentially theistic basis. In another point too he departs widely from

mediæval conceptions. The alternatives in past centuries were:

Christian, or else Pagan and Mohammedan; orthodox believer or heretic.

Pulci draws a picture of the Giant Margutte[1120] who, disregarding each

and every religion, jovially confesses to every form of vice and

sensuality, and only reserves to himself the merit of having never

broken faith. Perhaps the poet intended to make something of this--in

his way--honest monster, possibly to have led him into virtuous paths by

Morgante, but he soon got tired of his own creation, and in the next

canto brought him to a comic end.[1121] Margutte has been brought

forward as a proof of Pulci’s frivolity; but he is needed to complete

the picture of the poetry of the fifteenth century. It was natural that

it should somewhere present in grotesque proportions the figure of an

untamed egoism, insensible to all established rule, and yet with a

remnant of honourable feeling left. In other poems sentiments are put

into the mouths of giants, fiends, infidels, and Mohammedans which no

Christian knight would venture to utter.

* * * * *

Antiquity exercised an influence of another kind than that of Islam, and

this not through its religion, which was but too much like the

Catholicism of this period, but through its philosophy. Ancient

literature, now worshipped as something incomparable, is full of the

victory of philosophy over religious tradition. An endless number of

systems and fragments of systems were suddenly presented to the Italian

mind, not as curiosities or even as heresies, but almost with the

authority of dogmas, which had now to be reconciled rather than

discriminated. In nearly all these various opinions and doctrines a

certain kind of belief in God was implied; but taken altogether they

formed a marked contrast to the Christian faith in a Divine government

of the world. And there was one central question, which mediæval

theology had striven in vain to solve, and which now urgently demanded

an answer from the wisdom of the ancients, namely, the relation of

Providence to the freedom or necessity of the human will. To write the

history of this question even superficially from the fourteenth century

onwards, would require a whole volume. A few hints must here suffice.

If we take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we shall find that

ancient philosophy first came into contact with Italian life in the form

which offered the most marked contrast to Christianity, that is to say,

Epicureanism. The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and

even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided

conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase

of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in

Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar with a godless

universe. To what extent his teaching was actually understood, and

whether the name of the problematic Greek sage was not rather a

catchword for the multitude, it is hard to say. It is probable that the

Dominican Inquisition used it against men who could not be reached by a

more definite accusation. In the case of sceptics born before the time

was ripe, whom it was yet hard to convict of positive heretical

utterances, a moderate degree of luxurious living may have sufficed to

provoke the charge. The word is used in this conventional sense by

Giovanni Villani,[1122] when he explains the Florentine fires of 1115

and 1117 as a Divine judgment on heresies, among others, ‘on the

luxurious and gluttonous sect of Epicureans.’ The same writer says of

Manfred, ‘His life was Epicurean, since he believed neither in God, nor

in the Saints, but only in bodily pleasure.’

Dante speaks still more clearly in the ninth and tenth cantos of the

‘Inferno.’ That terrible fiery field covered with half-opened tombs,

from which issued cries of hopeless agony, was peopled by the two great

classes of those whom the Church had vanquished or expelled in the

thirteenth century. The one were heretics who opposed the Church by

deliberately spreading false doctrine; the other were Epicureans, and

their sin against the Church lay in their general disposition, which was

summed up in the belief that the soul dies with the body.[1123] The

Church was well aware that this one doctrine, if it gained ground, must

be more ruinous to her authority than all the teachings of the

Manichaeans and Paterini, since it took away all reason for her

interference in the affairs of men after death. That the means which she

used in her struggles were precisely what had driven the most gifted

natures to unbelief and despair was what she naturally would not herself

admit.