Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  SITE OF EXCAVATIONS ON THE PALATINE

  If Pope John had persuaded Otto to be crowned at once, such things might not have taken place. It was many years before the young Emperor came to Rome at last, and he had not reached the city when he was met by the news that Pope John was dead. He lost no time, designated his private chaplain, the son of the Duke of Franconia, ‘a young man of letters, but somewhat fiery on account of his youth,’ to be Pope, and sent him forward to Rome at once with a train of bishops, to be installed in the Holy See. In so youthful a sovereign, such action lacked neither energy nor wisdom. The young Pontiff assumed the name of Gregory the Fifth, espoused the cause of the poor citizens against the tyranny of the nobles, crowned his late master Emperor, and forthwith made a determined effort to crush Crescenzio and regain the temporal power.

  But he had met his match at the outset. The blood of Theodora was not easily put down. The Consul laughed to scorn the pretensions of the young Pope; the nobles were in arms, the city was his, and in the second year of his Pontificate, Gregory the Fifth was driven ignominiously from the gates in a state of absolute destitution. He was the third Pope whom Crescenzio had driven out. Gregory made his way to Pavia, summoned a council of Bishops, and launched the Major Excommunication at his adversary. But the Consul, secure in Sant’ Angelo, laughed again, more grimly, and did as he pleased.

  At this time Basil and Constantine, joint Emperors in Constantinople, sent ambassadors to Rome to Otto the Third, and with them came a certain John, a Calabrian of Greek race, a man of pliant conscience, tortuous mind, and extraordinary astuteness, at that time Archbishop of Piacenza, and formerly employed by Otto upon a mission to Constantinople. Crescenzio, as though to show that his enmity was altogether against the Pope, and not in the least against the Emperor, received these envoys with great honour, and during their stay persuaded them to enter into a scheme which had suddenly presented itself to his ambitious intelligence. The old dream of restoring Rome to the Eastern Empire was revived, the conspirators resolved to bring it to realization, and John of Calabria was a convenient tool for their hands. He was to be Pope; Crescenzio was to be despot, under the nominal protection and sovereignty of the Greek Emperors, and the ambassadors were to conclude the treaty with the latter. Otto was on the German frontier waging war against the Slavs, and Gregory was definitely exiled from Rome. Nothing stood in the way of the plot, and it was forthwith put into execution. Certain ambassadors of Otto’s were passing through Rome on their return from the East and on their way to the Emperor’s presence; they were promptly seized and thrown into prison, in order to interrupt communication between the two Empires. John of Calabria was consecrated Pope, or rather antipope, Crescenzio took possession of all power, and certain legates of Pope Gregory having ventured to enter Rome were at once imprisoned with the Emperor’s ambassadors. It was a daring stroke, and if it had succeeded, the history of Europe would have been different from that time forward. Crescenzio was bold, unscrupulous, pertinacious and keen. He had the Roman nobles at his back and he controlled such scanty revenues as could still be collected. He had violently expelled three Popes, he had created two antipopes, and his name was terror in the ears of the Church. Yet it would have taken more than all that to overset the Catholic Church at a time when the world was ripe for the first crusade; and though the Empire had fallen low since the days of Charles the Great, it was fast climbing again to the supremacy of power in which it culminated under Barbarossa and whence it fell with Frederick the Second. A handful of high-born murderers and marauders might work havoc in Rome for a time, but they could neither destroy that deep-rooted belief nor check the growth of that imperial law by which Europe emerged from the confusion of the dark age — to lose both law and belief again amid the intellectual excitements of the Renascence.

  Otto the Third was young, brave and determined, and before the treaty with the Eastern Emperors was concluded, he was well informed of the outrageous deeds of the Roman patricians. No sooner had he brought the war on the Saxon frontier to a successful conclusion than he descended again into Italy ‘to purge the Roman bilge,’ in the chronicler’s strong words. On his way, he found time to visit Venice secretly, with only six companions, and we are told how the Doge entertained him in private as Emperor, with sumptuous suppers, and allowed him to wander about Venice all day as a simple unknown traveller, with his companions, ‘visiting the churches and the other rare things of the City,’ whereby it is clear that in the year 998, when Rome was a half-deserted, half-ruined city, ruled by a handful of brigands living in the tomb of the Cæsars, Venice, under the good Doge Orseolo the Second, was already one of the beautiful cities of the world, as well as mistress of the Adriatic, of all Dalmatia, and of many lovely islands.

  Otto took with him Pope Gregory, and with a very splendid army of Germans and Italians marched down to Rome. Neither Crescenzio nor his followers had believed that the young Emperor was in earnest; but when it was clear that he meant to do justice, Antipope John was afraid, and fled secretly by night, in disguise. Crescenzio, of sterner stuff, heaped up a vast provision of food in Sant’ Angelo, and resolved to abide a siege. The stronghold was impregnable, so far as any one could know, for it had never been stormed in war or riot, and on its possession had depended the long impunity of Theodora’s race. The Emperor might lay siege to it, encamp before it, and hem it in for months; in the end he must be called away by the more urgent wars of the Empire in the north, and Crescenzio, secure in his stronghold, would hold the power still. But when the Roman people knew that Otto was at hand and that the antipope had fled, their courage rose against the nobles, and they went out after John, and scoured the country till they caught him in his disguise, for his face was known to many. Because the Emperor was known to be kind of heart, and because it was remembered also that this John of Calabria, who went by many names, had by strange chance baptized both Otto and Pope Gregory, the Duke of Franconia’s son, therefore the Romans feared lest justice should be too gentle; and having got the antipope into their hands, they dealt with him savagely, put out his eyes, cut out his tongue and sliced off his nose, and drove him to prison through the city, seated face backwards on an ass. And when the Emperor and the Pope came, they left him in his dungeon.

  Now at Gaeta there lived a very holy man, who was Saint Nilus, and who afterwards founded the monastery of Grottaferrata, where there are beautiful wall paintings to this day. He was a Greek, like John of Calabria, and though he detested the antipope he had pity on the man and felt compassion for his countryman. So he journeyed to Rome and came before Otto and Gregory, who received him with perfect devotion, as a saint, and he asked of them that they should give him the wretched John, ‘who,’ he said, ‘held both of you in his arms at the Font of Baptism,’ though he was grievously fallen since that day by his great hypocrisy. Then the Emperor was filled with pity, and answered that the saint might have the antipope alive, if he himself would then remain in Rome and direct the monastery of Saint Anastasia of the Greeks. The holy man was willing to sacrifice his life of solitary meditation for the sake of his wretched countryman, and he would have obtained the fulfilment of his request from Otto; but Pope Gregory remembered how he himself had been driven out penniless and scantily clothed, to make way for John of Calabria, and his heart was hardened, and he would not let the prisoner go. Wherefore Saint Nilus foretold that because neither the Pope nor the Emperor would have mercy, the wrath of God should overtake them both. And indeed they were both cut off in the flower of their youth — Gregory within one year, and Otto not long afterwards.

  Meanwhile they sent Nilus away and laid siege to the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, where Crescenzio and his men had shut themselves up with a good store of food and arms. No one had ever taken that fortress, nor did any one believe that it could be stormed. But Pope and Emperor were young and brave and angry, and they had a great army, and the people of Rome were with them, every man. They used such engines as they had, — catapults, and battering-rams, a
nd ladders; and yet Crescenzio laughed, for the stone walls were harder than the stone missiles, and higher than the tallest ladders, and so thick that fire could not heat them from without, nor battering-ram loosen a single block in a single course; and many assaults were repelled, and many a brave soldier fell writhing and broken into the deep ditch with his ladder upon him.

  When the time of fate was fulfilled, the end came on a fair April morning; one ladder held its place till desperate armed hands had reached the rampart, and swift feet had sprung upon the edge, and one brave arm beat back the twenty that were there to defend; and then there were two, and three, and ten, and a score, and a hundred, and the great castle was taken at last. Nor do we know surely that it was ever taken again by force, even long afterwards in the days of artillery. But Crescenzio’s hour had come, and the Emperor took him and the twelve chief nobles who were with him, and cut off their heads, one by one, in quick justice and without torture, and the heads were set up on spikes, and the headless bodies were hung out from the high crenellations of the ramparts. Thus ended Crescenzio, but not his house, nor the line of Theodora, nor died he unavenged.

  CHURCH OF SANT’ EUSTACHIO

  From a print of the last century

  It is said and believed that Pope Gregory perished by the hands of the Crescenzi, who lived in the little street behind the Church of Saint Eustace. As for Otto, he came to a worse end, though he was of a pious house, and laboured for the peace of his soul against the temptations of this evil world. For he was young, and the wife of Crescenzio was wonderfully fair, and her name was Stefania. She came weeping before him and mourning her lord, and was beautiful in her grief, and knew it, as many women do. And the young Emperor saw her, and pitied her, and loved her, and took her to his heart in sin, and though he repented daily, he daily fell again, while the woman offered up her body and her soul to be revenged for the fierce man she had loved. So it came to pass, at last, that she found her opportunity against him, and poured poison into his cup, and kissed him, and gave it to him with a very loving word. And he drank it and died, and the prophecy of the holy man, Nilus, was fulfilled upon him.

  The story is told in many ways, but that is the main truth of it, according to Muratori, whom Gibbon calls his guide and master in the history of Italy, but whom he did not follow altogether in his brief sketch of Crescenzio’s life and death, and their consequences. The Crescenzi lived on, in power and great state. They buried the terrible tribune in Santa Sabina, on the Aventine, where his epitaph may be read today, but whither he did not retire in life, as some guide-books say, to end his days in prayer and meditation. And for some reason, perhaps because they no longer held the great Castle, they seem to have left the Region of Saint Eustace; for Nicholas, the tribune’s son, built the small palace by the Tiber, over against the Temple of Hercules, though it has often been called the house of Rienzi, whose name was also Nicholas, which caused the confusion. And later they built themselves other fortresses, but the end of their history is not known.

  In the troubles which succeeded the death of Crescentius, a curious point arises in the chronicle, with regard to the titles of the bishops depending from the Holy See. It is certainly not generally known that, as late as the tenth century, the bishops of the great cities called themselves Popes — the ‘Pope of Milan,’ the ‘Pope of Naples,’ and the like — and that Gregory the Seventh, the famous Hildebrand, was the first to decree that the title should be confined to the Roman Pontiffs, with that of ‘Servus Servorum Dei’— ‘servant of the servants of God.’ And indeed, in those changing times such a confusion of titles must have caused trouble, as it did when Gregory the Fifth, driven out by Crescentius, and taking refuge in Pavia, found himself, the Pope of Rome, confronted with Arnulf, the ‘Pope’ of Milan, and complained of his position to the council he had summoned.

  The making and unmaking of Popes, and the election of successors to those that died, brings up memories of what Rome was during the vacancy of the See, and of the general delight at the death of any reigning Pontiff, good or bad. A certain monk is reported to have answered Paul the Third, that the finest festival in Rome took place while one Pope lay dead and another was being elected. During that period, not always brief, law and order were suspended. According to the testimony of Dionigi Atanagi, quoted by Baracconi, the first thing that happened was that the prisons were broken open and all condemned persons set free, while all men in authority hid themselves in their homes, and the officers of justice fled in terror from the dangerous humour of the people. For every man who could lay hands on a weapon seized it, and carried it about with him. It was the time for settling private quarrels of long standing, in short and decisive fights, without fear of disturbance or interference from the frightened Bargello and the terrorized watchmen of the city. And as soon as the accumulated private spite of years had spent itself in a certain amount of free fighting, the city became perfectly safe again, and gave itself up to laying wagers on the election of the next Pope. The betting was high, and there were regular bookmakers, especially in all the Regions from Saint Eustace to the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, where the banks had established themselves under the protection of the Pope and the Guelph Orsini, and where the most reliable and latest news was sure to be obtained fresh from the Vatican. Instead of the Piazza di Spagna and the Villa Medici, the narrow streets and gloomy squares of Ponte, Parione and Sant’ Eustachio became the gathering-place of society, high, low and indiscriminate; and far from exhibiting the slightest signs of mourning for its late ruler, the city gave itself up to a sort of Carnival season, all the more delightful, because it was necessarily unexpected.

  Moreover, the poor people had the delight of speculating upon the wealth of the cardinal who might be elected; for, as soon as the choice of the Conclave was announced, and the cry, ‘A pope, a pope!’ rang through the streets, it was the time-honoured privilege of the rabble to sack and plunder the late residence of the chosen cardinal, till, literally, nothing was left but the bare walls and floors. This was so much a matter of course, that the election of a poor Pope was a source of the bitterest disappointment to the people, and was one of their principal causes of discontent when Sixtus the Fifth was raised to the Pontificate, it having been given out as certain, but a few hours earlier, that the rich Farnese was to be the fortunate man.

  REGION IX PIGNA

  THERE USED TO be a tradition, wholly unfounded, but deeply rooted in the Roman mind, to the effect that the great bronze pine-cone, eleven feet high, which stands in one of the courts of the Vatican, giving it the name ‘Garden of the Pine-cone,’ was originally a sort of stopper which closed the round aperture in the roof of the Pantheon. The Pantheon stands at one corner of the Region of Pigna, and a connection between the Region, the Pantheon and the Pine-cone seems vaguely possible, though altogether unsatisfactory. The truth about the Pine-cone is perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa’s artificial lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter’s by Pope Symmachus about fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon.

  No one, so far as I am aware, — not even the excellent Baracconi, — offers any explanation of the name and device of the Ninth Region. Topographically it is nearly a square, of which the angles are the Pantheon, the corner of Via di Caravita and the Corso, the Palazzo di Venezia, and the corner of the new Via Arenula and Via Florida. Besides the Pantheon it contains some of the most notable buildings erected since the Renascence. Here are the palaces of the Doria, of the Altieri, and the ‘Palace of Venice’ built by Paul the Second, that Venetian Barbo, whose name may have nicknamed the racing horses of the Carnival. Here were the strongholds of the two great rival orders, the Dominicans and the Jesuits, the former in the Piazza della Minerva, the latter in the Piazza del Gesù, and in the Collegio Romano; and here at the present day, in the buildings of the old rivals, significantly connected by an arched passage, are collected the greatest librari
es of the city. That of the Dominicans, wisely left in their care, has been opened to the public; the other, called after Victor Emmanuel, is a vast collection of books gathered together by plundering the monastic institutions of Italy at the time of the disestablishment. The booty — for it was nothing else — was brought in carts, mostly in a state of the utmost confusion, and the books and manuscripts were roughly stacked in vacant rooms on the ground floor of the Collegio Romano, in charge of a porter. Not until a poor scholar, having bought himself two ounces of butter in the Piazza Navona, found the greasy stuff wrapped in an autograph letter of Christopher Columbus, did it dawn upon the authorities that the porter was deliberately selling priceless books and manuscripts as waste paper, by the hundredweight, to provide himself with the means of getting drunk. That was about the year 1880. The scandal was enormous, a strict inquiry was made, justice was done as far as possible, and an official account of the affair was published in a ‘Green Book’; but the amount of the loss was unknown, it may have been incalculable, and it was undeniably great.

  The names visibly recorded in the Region have vast suggestions in them, — Ignatius Loyola, the Dominicans, Venice, Doria, Agrippa, and the buildings themselves, which are the record, will last for ages; the opposition of Jesuit and Inquisitor, under one name or another, and of both by the people, will live as long as humanity itself.

  The crisis in the history of the Inquisition in Rome followed closely upon the first institution of the Tribunal, and seventeen years after Paul the Fourth had created the Court, by a Papal Bull of July twenty-first, 1542, the people burned the Palace of the Inquisition and threatened to destroy the Dominicans and their monastery.

  THE PANTHEON

  So far as it is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious, utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head ‘might be compared to the Vesuvius of his native city, since he was ardent in all his actions, wrathful, hard and inflexible, undoubtedly moved by an incredible zeal for religion, but a zeal often lacking in prudence, and breaking out in eruptions of excessive severity.’ On the other hand, his lack of perception was such that he remained in complete ignorance of the outrageous deeds done in his name by his two nephews, the one a cardinal, the other a layman, and it was not until the last year of his life that their doings came to his knowledge.