Such were the depraved spirits, and such the ignoble tyranny, which
oppressed the Holy See on the demise of Eugenius III.; an oppression
which, if its violence seemed to slumber during the short career of
Anastasius IV., whose patriarchal age and paternal goodness to the
poor in a famine which desolated the country under his pontificate,
commanded respect and won all hearts, yet woke up again with fresh
vigour on the accession of his successor, the English Pope Adrian IV.
Adrian, however, was as well by nature as by the experience of his
past life, a character not likely to be daunted by the threatening
prospect before him; and behaved with such courage and decision, as
for the time to confound his rebellious subjects, and reduce them to
obedience. For when, on his assumption of the tiara, the
senate,--which by this time seems to have arrived at the last pitch of
insolence, under the training of Arnold of Brescia,--made a formal
proposition to the new pope, to renounce once for all his right to the
government of the state; he no sooner heard it than he sternly
rejected it, and drove the deputation through whom it came with
ignominy out of his presence. Hereupon the mob, worked upon by the
orators and other agents of the republic, flew to arms, and led by
Arnold of Brescia himself,--who had been fetched out of the country on
purpose,--gave in to every disorder; and, among other excesses,
murdered Cardinal Gerard, a well known adherent of the pope, as he was
passing along the Via Sacra to an audience. Adrian declared this
atrocity tantamount to high treason, and at once resolved to punish it
by striking a blow such as till his time had not been struck at Rome
at all. This was to lay the city under an interdict. No calamity in
the middle ages was more dreaded, more cruelly felt by society, than
an interdict. This naturally arose out of that profound religious
faith, which in those times pervaded all classes of men alike, in the
midst of the greatest crimes and disorders. The interdict, which Pope
Adrian thus fulminated against Rome, lasted from Palm Sunday till
Maunday Thursday. It will not be uninteresting here to briefly
describe an interdict. It was usually announced at midnight by the
funeral toll of the church bells; whereupon the entire clergy might
presently be seen issuing forth, in silent procession, by torch light,
to put up a last prayer of deprecation before the altars for the
guilty community. Then the consecrated bread, that remained over, was
burnt; the crucifixes and other sacred images were veiled up; the
relics of the saints carried down into the crypts. Every memento of
holy cheerfulness and peace was withdrawn from view. Lastly, a papal
legate ascended the steps of the high altar, arrayed in penitential
vestment, and formally proclaimed the interdict. From that moment
divine service ceased in all the churches; their doors were locked up;
and only in the bare porch might the priest, dressed in mourning,
exhort his flock to repentance. Rites in their nature joyful, which
could not be dispensed with, were invested in sorrowful attributes: so
that baptism could only be administered in secret; and marriage
celebrated before a tomb instead of an altar. The administration of
confession and communion was forbidden. To the dying man alone might
the viaticum, which the priest had first consecrated in the gloom and
solitude of the morning dawn, be given; but extreme unction and burial
in holy ground were denied him. Moreover, the interdict, as may
naturally be supposed, seriously affected the worldly, as well as
religious cares of society: so that trade suffered, and even the
proprieties of men's personal appearance fell into neglect.
At first, the Romans seemed as if they would not flinch under the
novel and terrible blow dealt at them. But this was a passing bravado.
They soon began to feel uneasy, and then horrified at the cessation of
the divine offices, and the refusal of the sacraments in Holy Week,--a
season of all others when the most lukewarm piety bestirs itself. The
consequence was, that they assembled tumultuously before the Capitol,
where the seriate was sitting; and demanded that measures should be
directly taken to bring about such an arrangement with the pope as
would relieve the city from the interdict.
Negotiations were accordingly entered upon by that body with Adrian at
Viterbo; whither he had retired to wait the issue of events. To the
overtures made, he answered that he was ready to come into them,
provided the senate would first banish Arnold of Brescia out of Rome,
abolish the republic, and, together with the citizens, return to their
duty. After much hesitation, and some attempts to procure a
modification of such sweeping terms,--attempts which the inflexibility
of the pope entirely frustrated,--those terms were accepted. On their
completion, Adrian revoked the interdict, held his triumphant entry
into Rome, and celebrated in the church of St. John Lateran, with
great pomp and jubilee, his coronation.
In the meantime Frederic Barbarossa, who had succeeded his uncle
Conrad III. on the German throne two years before, and had lately
undertaken his first expedition into Italy to restore his fallen power
in that country, and suppress its newly roused spirit of freedom, was
advancing, flushed with his conquest of Tortona, and his coronation as
king of Lombardy, at Pavia, with his army towards Rome, where he
proposed to give the last finish to his brilliant successes, by
receiving the crown of empire from the pope. Frederic and Adrian had
both sent forward ambassadors to each other, who crossed on the road
without knowing it: the king, to treat about the imperial crown; the
pope, to sound the intentions of a visitor, who was approaching in
such warlike array. The papal envoys encountered Frederic at St.
Quirico, in Tuscany; and, on being told that he meant nothing hostile
to the rights of the Church,--but, on the contrary, that he was ready
to act as her champion, and, therefore, came simply to ask the
imperial crown,--they promised the pope's acquiescence in his views,
provided, among other services required of him, he would procure the
delivery of Arnold of Brescia into the hands of justice.
This was all the more insisted upon, as that indefatigable demagogue,
having, after his banishment, obtained the protection of certain
counts of the Campagna, still continued to exercise from his place of
refuge the most pernicious influence over the popular mind in Rome.
Frederic readily undertook to do a service, which agreed as well with
his personal feeling as with his policy. For Arnold of Brescia, on the
election of the Duke of Swabia to the German throne, had written him a
letter, inviting him to come and receive the imperial crown from the
senate in contempt of the pope, but couched in such arrogant and
fanatical terms, as highly to incense the king, who refused to listen
to it; whereupon, Arnold aggravated his offence, by announcing that he
would persuade the Romans to choose an emperor of their own, and throw
up their allegiance to foreign ones.
The plan which Frederic took to seize Arnold, was, first of all, to
send a body of troops to waylay and capture one of the chiefs of the
lawless counts of the Campagna, who had been mainly instrumental in
liberating the arch-republican out of the hands of the papal officers,
into which he had shortly fallen before at Oriculum; and then to
threaten the speedy execution of the prisoner, unless Arnold were
given up as a ransom. This plan succeeded. The other Campagnian
counts, frightened at the resolute conduct of Frederic, and trembling
at the consequences of his further anger, if the ransom demanded were
not given, soon brought their client, whose revolutionary doctrines so
much promoted those disorders by which they thrived, to the feet of
the king, and received back their brother in exchange. Arnold was
forthwith remanded in chains to Rome, there to await the arrival of
Frederic, who intended to have the culprit tried before his own
tribunal.
But Peter, the prefect of Rome, and commandant of the Castle of St.
Angelo, a devoted servant of the pope, into whose custody Arnold was
delivered, fearful lest his prisoner should escape by means of a
popular riot,--as he had once done before in the same
circumstances,--resolved to execute him on his own account; and, without
waiting forfurther instructions either from Frederic or Adrian, but
secretly abetted by several cardinals on the spot, had the unhappy man
led out early on the morning of the 18th of June, 1155, before the popular
or people's gate; where he was fastened to a cross projecting from the
midst of a pile of faggots, which, being fired, soon enveloped their
victim in the flames. His cries and the tumult of the execution roused
the citizens, dwelling hard by, from their beds, who presently ran up
lamenting and furious to the rescue; but, in vain; as they were thrust
back on all sides by the soldiers who kept the ground. Nevertheless,
such was the infatuated reverence which the people manifested for
their late tribune, that it was found expedient after his execution to
throw his ashes into the Tiber, to prevent them being enshrined as
holy relics. Arnold of Brescia was about fifty years old, when he thus
met his fate.
However shocking such cruel executions as he suffered may be to the
more enlightened benevolence, or more sensual refinement of the
present day; yet, from the point of view of the middle ages,--that the
visible punishment of a crime should be commensurate with, and, as it
were, symbolise its moral enormity,--there can be no doubt but that in
the present case the criminal received only what he deserved. Few men
ever did worse mischief to society in their day, than Arnold of
Brescia. Private ambition was his ruling passion, and his hopes of
gratifying it were set on the realization of dreams and fancies,
engendered of an unbridled imagination, which an admixture of
mysticism further distempered. A false scandal which he took at the
discrepancy between the lives and doctrines of the clergy, in his time
widely corrupted, heightened by his Pharisaical pride,--which a bodily
temperament, naturally disinclined to sensual excess, inflated all the
more--as, by means of such bodily temperament, he was enabled with so
little merit of his own, to keep up an exterior severity of demeanour
closely resembling a holy asceticism,--led him at last to confound the
abuse of religion with religion itself; and, under the further
influence of his insatiable thirst for notoriety, to broach
schismatical views, and then a plan of ecclesiastical as well as
political reform for the world, of which, he persuaded himself, he was
marked out to be the apostle.
That reform, as we have seen, was simply the return of society,
politically, under the republican institutions of pagan Rome; and,
spiritually under the religious government of the apostolic ages. A
fanatic of this description, endowed in an extraordinary manner with
eloquence to announce his views, and with boldness and energy to
pursue the career of carrying them out,--as was Arnold of Brescia's
case,--may well be imagined to have seduced the multitude, at all
times giddy,--but in his day oppressed and shocked by many gross
abuses,--in the way he did; and so to have elicited the stern
hostility of the constituted authorities in church and state, who,
naturally perceiving in the progress of such a man only "confusion
worse confounded," and ruin to the temporal and eternal interests of
society, were in duty bound to eradicate the evil before it was too
late, and, in doing so, not to shun harsh means where gentle ones
failed; but, if words proved fruitless, to use the sword. The
obstinacy, the infatuated obstinacy of Arnold of Brescia in the face
of so many warnings, as from time to time were given to him, plainly
proved that he was incorrigible; and that, therefore, as it was no
more possible for society to prosper, as it should do, while he
continued to infect it with his wild theories, than for the bodily
health to nourish while eaten into by a cancer, to extirpate him, like
it, was the only course left,--a course which thus became morally as
much a duty in his case, as it would physically become so in that.