At first, as in old days, the place of confinement was in the Mamertine
prison, on the southeastern slope, beneath which was the hideous
Tullianum, deepest and darkest of all, whence no captive ever came out
alive to the upper air again. In the Middle Age, the prison was below
the vaults of the Roman Tabularium on the side of the Forum, but it is
said that the windows looked inward upon a deep court of the Senator's
palace. As civilization advanced, it was transferred a story higher, to
a more healthy region of the building, but the Capitoline prison was not
finally given up till the reign of Pius the Ninth, at which time it had
become a place of confinement for debtors only.
Institutions and parties in Rome have always had a tendency to cling to
places more than in other cities. It is thus that during so many
centuries the Lateran was the headquarters of the Popes, the Capitol
the rallying-place of the ever-smouldering republicanism of the people,
and the Castle of Sant' Angelo the seat of actual military power as
contrasted with spiritual dominion and popular aspiration. So far as the
latter is concerned its vitality is often forgotten and its vigour
underestimated.
One must consider the enormous odds against which the spirit of popular
emancipation had to struggle in order to appreciate the strength it
developed. A book has been written called 'The One Hundred and Sixty-one
rebellions of papal subjects between 896 and 1859'--a title which gives
an average of about sixteen to a century; and though the furious
partiality of the writer calls them all rebellions against the popes,
whereas a very large proportion were revolts against the nobles, and
Rienzi's attempt was to bring the Pope back to Rome, yet there can be no
question as to the vitality which could produce even half of such a
result; and it may be remembered that in almost every rising of the
Roman people the rabble first made a rush for the Capitol, and, if
successful, seized other points afterwards. In the darkest ages the
words 'Senate' and 'Republic' were never quite forgotten and were never
dissociated from the sacred place. The names of four leaders, Arnold of
Brescia, Stefaneschi, Rienzi and Porcari, recall the four greatest
efforts of the Middle Age; the first partially succeeded and left its
mark, the second was fruitless because permanent success was then
impossible against such odds, the third miscarried because Rienzi was a
madman and Cardinal Albornoz a man of genius, and the fourth, because
the people were contented and wanted no revolution at all. The first
three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do
so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to
ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from
Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls. Its
solemn knell announced the death of a Pope, or tolled the last hour of
condemned criminals, and men crossed themselves as it echoed through the
streets; but at the tremendous sound of its alarm, rung backward till
the tower rocked, the Romans ran to arms, the captains of the Regions
buckled on their breastplates and displayed their banners, and the
people flocked together to do deeds of sudden violence and shortlived
fury. In a few hours Stefaneschi of Trastevere swept the nobles from the
city; between noon and night Rienzi was master of Rome, and it was from
the Capitol that the fierce edicts of both threatened destruction to the
unready barons. They fled to their mountain dens like wolves at sunrise,
but the night was never slow to descend upon liberty's short day, and
with the next dawn the ruined towers began to rise again; the people
looked with dazed indifference upon the fall of their leader, and
presently they were again slaves, as they had been--Arnold was hanged
and burned, Stefaneschi languished in a dungeon, Rienzi wandered over
Europe a homeless exile, the straight, stiff corpse of brave Stephen
Porcari hung, clad in black, from the battlement of Sant' Angelo. It was
always the same story. The Barons were the Sabines, the Latins and the
AEquians of Mediaeval Rome; but there was neither a Romulus nor a
Cincinnatus to lead the Roman people against steel-clad masters trained
to fighting from boyhood, bold by inheritance, and sure of a power which
they took every day by violence and held year after year by force.
In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings
on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and
Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even
pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It
was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of
Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar
which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God.
To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's
Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old
triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron
chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north
wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main
door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron
balustrade--the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the
standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and
battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a
desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a
holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points
between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with
many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above
underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of
far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in
which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of
nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long
continued by Arnold of Brescia.
Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by
saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely
hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of
the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli
had so long rebelled against the Popes. The fact remains, astonishing
and ridiculous,--in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was
at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the
Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the
inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces,
seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to
ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome;
and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed.
Now for many years, Rome had been in the hands of a family of converted
Jews, known as the Pierleoni, from Pietro Leone, first spoken of in the
chronicles as an iniquitous usurer of enormous wealth. They became
prefects of Rome; they took possession of Sant' Angelo and were the
tyrants of the city, and finally they became the Pope's great enemies,
the allies of Roger of Apulia, and makers of antipopes, of whom the
first was either Pietro's son or his grandson. They had on their side
possession, wealth, the support of a race which never looks upon
apostasy from its creed as final, the alliance of King Roger and of Duke
Roger, his son, and the countenance, if not the friendship, of Arnold of
Brescia, the excommunicated monk of northern Italy, and the pupil of the
romantic Abelard. And the Pierleoni had against them the Popes, the
great Frangipani family with most of the nobles, and Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux, who has been called the Bismarck of the Church. Arnold of
Brescia was no ordinary fanatic. He was as brave as Stefaneschi, as
pure-hearted as Stephen Porcari, as daring and eloquent as Rienzi in
his best days. The violent deeds of his followers have been imputed to
him, and brought him to his end; but it was his great adversary, Saint
Bernard, who expressed a regretful wish 'that his teachings might have
been as irreproachable as his life.' The doctrine for which he died at
last was political, rather than spiritual, human rather than
theological. In all but his monk's habit he was a layman in his later
years, as he had been when he first wandered to France and sat at the
feet of the gentle Abelard; but few Churchmen of that day were as
spotless in their private lives.
He was an agitator, a would-be reformer, a revolutionary; and the times
craved change. The trumpet call of the first Crusade had roused the
peoples of Europe, and the distracted forces of the western world had
been momentarily concentrated in a general and migratory movement of
religious conquest; forty years later the fortunes of the Latins in the
East were already waning, and Saint Bernard was meditating the inspiring
words that sent four hundred thousand warriors to the rescue of the Holy
Places. What Bernard was about to attempt for Palestine, Arnold dreamed
of accomplishing for Rome. In his eyes she was holy, too, her ruins were
the sepulchre of a divine freedom, worthy to be redeemed from tyranny
even at the price of blood, and he would have called from the tomb the
spirit of murdered liberty to save and illuminate mankind. Where
Bernard was a Christian, Arnold was a Roman in soul; where Bernard was
an inspired monk, Arnold was in heart a Christian, of that first
Apostolic republic which had all things in common.
At such a time such a man could do much. Rome was in the utmost
distress. At the election of Innocent the Second, the Jewish Pierleoni
had set up one of themselves as antipope, and Innocent had been obliged
to escape in spite of the protection of the still powerful Frangipani,
leaving the Israelitish antipope to rule Rome, in spite of the Emperor,
and in alliance with King Roger for nine years, until his death, when it
required Saint Bernard's own presence and all the strength of his fiery
words to dissuade the Romans from accepting another spiritual and
temporal ruler imposed upon them by the masterful Pierleoni. So Innocent
returned at last, a good man, much tried by misfortune, but neither wise
nor a leader of men. At that time the soldiers of Rome were beaten in
open battle by the people of Tivoli, a humiliation which it was not easy
to forget. And it is more than probable that the Pierleoni looked on at
the Pope's failure in scornful inaction from their stronghold of Sant'
Angelo, which they had only nominally surrendered to Innocent's
authority.
From a distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace
and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint
Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in
Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the picture of the times.
'Who,' asks Bernard, 'is ignorant of the vanity and arrogance of the
Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, untractable, and scorning to obey,
unless they are too feeble to resist. When they promise to serve, they
aspire to reign; if they swear allegiance, they watch the opportunity of
revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors,
or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they
have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven,
impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours,
inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and
while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual
apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern;
faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to
their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their
refusals. Lofty in promise, poor in execution: adulation and calumny,
perfidy and treason, are the familiar arts of their policy.'
Fearless and in earnest, Arnold came to Rome, and began to preach a
great change, a great reform, a great revival, and many heard him and
followed him; and it was not in the Pope's power to silence him, nor
bring him to any trial. The Pierleoni would support any sedition
against Innocent; the Roman people were weary of masters, they listened
with delight to Arnold's fierce condemnation of all temporal power, that
of the Pope and that of the Emperor alike, and the old words, Republic,
Senate, Consul, had not lost their life in the slumber of five hundred
years. The Capitol was there, for a Senate house, and there were men in
Rome to be citizens and Senators. Revolution was stirring, and Innocent
had recourse to the only weapon left him in his weakness. Arnold was
preaching as a Christian and a Catholic. The Pope excommunicated him in
a general Council. In the days of the Crusades the Major Interdiction
was not an empty form of words; to applaud a revolutionary was one
thing, to attend the sermons of a man condemned to hell was a graver
matter; Arnold's disciples deserted him, his friends no longer dared to
protect him under the penalty of eternal damnation, and he went out from
Rome a fugitive and an outcast.
Wandering from Italy to France, from France to Germany, and at last to
Switzerland, he preached his doctrines without fear, though he had upon
him the mark of Cain; but if the temporal sovereignty against which he
spoke could not directly harm him, the spiritual power pursued him
hither and thither, like a sword of flame. A weaker man would have
renounced his beliefs, or would have disappeared in a distant obscurity;
but Arnold was not made to yield. Goaded by persecution, divinely
confident of right, he faced danger and death and came back to Rome.
He arrived at a moment when the people were at once elated by the
submission of Tivoli, and exasperated against Innocent because he
refused to raze that city to the ground. The Pierleoni were ever ready
to encourage rebellion. The Romans, at the words Liberty and Republic,
rose in a body, rushed to the Capitol, proclaimed the Commonwealth, and
forthwith elected a Senate which assumed absolute sovereignty of the
city, and renewed the war with Tivoli. The institution then refounded
was not wholly abolished until, under the Italian kings, a
representative government took its place.
The success and long supremacy of Arnold's teaching have been unfairly
called his 'reign'; yet he neither caused himself to be elected a
Senator, nor at any time, so far as we can learn, occupied any office
whatsoever; neither did he profit in fortune by the changes he had
wrought, and to the last he wore the garb of poverty and led the simple
life which had extorted the reluctant admiration of his noblest
adversary. But he could not impose upon others the virtues he practised
himself, nor was it in his power to direct the force his teachings had
called into life. For the time being the Popes were powerless against
the new order. Innocent is said to have died of grief and humiliation,
almost before the revolution was complete. His successor, Celestin the
Second, reigned but five months and a half, busy in a quarrel with King
Roger, and still the new Senate ruled the city.
[Illustration: ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS]
But saving that it endured, it left no mark of good in Rome; the nobles
saw that a new weapon was placed in their hands, they easily elected
themselves to office, and the people, deluded by the name of a Republic,
had exchanged the sovereignty of the Pope, or the allegiance of the
Emperor, for the far more ruthless tyranny of the barons. The Jewish
Pierleoni were rich and powerful still, but since Rome was strong enough
to resist the Vatican, the Pontificate was no longer a prize worth
seizing, and they took instead, by bribery or force, the Consulship or
the Presidency of the Senate. Jordan, the brother of the antipope
Anacletus, obtained the office, and the violent death of the next Pope,
Lucius the Second, was one of the first events of his domination.
Lucius refused to bear any longer the humiliation to which his
predecessors had tamely submitted. Himself in arms, and accompanied by
such followers as he could collect, the Pope made a desperate attempt to
dislodge the Senate and their guards from the Capitol, and at the head
of the storming party he endeavoured to ascend the old road, known then
as Fabatosta. But the Pierleoni and their men were well prepared for the
assault, and made a desperate and successful resistance. The Pope fell
at the head of his soldiers, struck by a stone on the temple, mortally
wounded, but not dead. In hasty retreat, the dying man was borne by his
routed soldiers to the monastery of Saint Gregory on the Coelian,
under the safe protection of the trusty Frangipani, who held the
Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum. Of all the many Popes
who died untimely deaths he was the only one, I believe, who fell in
battle. And he got his deathblow on the slope of that same Capitol where
Gracchus and Manlius had died before him, each in good cause.
It has been wrongly said that he had all the nobles with him, and that
the revolution was of the people alone, aided by the Pierleoni. This is
not true. So far as can be known, the Frangipani were his only faithful
friends, but it is possible that the Count of Tusculum, seventh in
descent from Theodora, and nephew of the first Colonna, at that time
holding a part of the Aventine, may have also been the Pope's ally. Be
that as it may, the force that Lucius led was very small, and the
garrison of the Capitol was overwhelmingly strong.
Some say also that Arnold of Brescia was not actually in Rome at that
time, that the first revolution was the result of his unforgotten
teachings, bearing fruit in the hearts of the nobles and the people, and
that he did not come to the city till Pope Lucius was dead. However that
may be, from that time forward, till the coming of Barbarossa, Arnold
was the idol of the Romans, and their vanity and arrogance knew no
bounds. Pope Eugenius the Third was enthroned in the Lateran under the
protection of the Frangipani, but within the week he was forced to
escape by night to the mountains. The Pierleoni held Sant' Angelo; the
people seized and fortified the Vatican, deprived the Pope's Prefect of
his office, and forced the few nobles who resisted them to swear
allegiance to Jordan Pierleone, making him in fact dictator, and in name
their 'Patrician.' The Pope retorted by excommunicating him, and allying
himself with Tivoli, but was forced to a compromise whereby he
acknowledged the Senate and the supremacy of the Roman people, who,
already tired of their dictator, agreed to restore the Prefect to
office, and to express some sort of obedience, more spiritual than
temporal, to the Pope's authority. But Arnold was still supreme, and
after a short stay in the city Eugenius was again a fugitive.
It was then that he passed into France, when Lewis the Seventh was ready
armed to lead the Second Crusade to the Holy Land; and through that
stirring time Rome is dark and sullen, dwelling aloof from Church and
Empire in the new-found illusion of an unreal and impossible greatness.
Seven hundred years later an Italian patriot exclaimed, 'We have an
Italy, but we have no Italians.' And so Arnold of Brescia must many
times have longed for Romans to people a free Rome. He had made a
republic, but he could not make free men; he had called up a vision, but
he could not give it reality; like Rienzi and the rest, he had 'mistaken
memories for hopes,' and he was fore-destined to pay for his belief in
his country's life with the sacrifice of his own. He had dreamed of a
liberty serene and high, but he had produced only a dismal confusion: in
place of peace he had brought senseless strife; instead of a wise and
simple consul, he had given the Romans the keen and rapacious son of a
Jewish usurer for a dictator; where he had hoped to destroy the temporal
power of Pope and Emperor, he had driven the greatest forces of his age,
and two of the greatest men, to an alliance against him.
So he perished. Eugenius died in Tivoli, Anastasius reigned a few
months, and sturdy Nicholas Breakspeare was Adrian the Fourth. Conrad
the Emperor also died, poisoned by the physicians King Roger sent him
from famous Salerno, and Frederick Barbarossa of Hohenstauffen, his
nephew, reigned in his stead. Adrian and Frederick quarrelled at their
first meeting in the sight of all their followers in the field, for the
young Emperor would not hold the Englishman's stirrup on the first day.
On the second he yielded, and Pope and Emperor together were invincible.
Then the Roman Senate and people sent out ambassadors, who spoke hugely
boasting words to the red-haired soldier, and would have set conditions
on his crowning, so that he laughed aloud at them; and he and Adrian
went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman
crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the
summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as
they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed
a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on
in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the
winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to
its factions and its parties.
Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no
man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the
northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the
people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico
judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him.
The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed
Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge.
The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was
just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands
to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when
he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river,
lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of
revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most
surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year
1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted.
He was a martyr--whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those
judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in
him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon
his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are
better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to
die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as
the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of
faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was
put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the
prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his
words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause
of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and
vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate
it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and
Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all
patriot leaders, of all preachers of liberty, past and living, it is not
too much to say that Arnold of Brescia was the truest, the bravest and
the simplest.
* * * * *
To them all, the Capitol has been the central object of dreams, and upon
its walls the story of their failure has often been told in grotesque
figures of themselves. When Rienzi was first driven out, his effigy was
painted, hanged by the heels upon one of the towers, and many another
'enemy of the state' was pictured there--Giuliano Cesarini, for one, and
the great Sforza, himself, with a scornful and insulting epigraph; as
Andrea del Castagno, justly surnamed the 'Assassin,' painted upon the
walls of the Signoria in Florence the likeness of all those who had
joined in the great conspiracy of the Pazzi, hung up by the feet, as may
be seen to this day.