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. B
ut 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.
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 Cœlian, 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 libe
rty, 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.
It has ever been a place of glory, a place of death and a place of shame, but since the great modern changes it is meant to be only the seat of honour, and upon the slope of the Capitol the Italians, in the first flush of victorious unity, have begun to raise a great monument to their greatest idol, King Victor Emmanuel. If it is not the best work of art of the sort in existence it will probably enjoy the distinction of being the largest, and it is by no means the worst, for the central statue of the ‘Honest King’ has been modelled with marvellous skill and strength by Chiaradia, whose name is worthy to be remembered; yet the vastness of the architectural theatre provided for its display betrays again the giantism of the Latin race, and when in a future century the broad flood of patriotism shall have subsided within the straight river bed of sober history, men will wonder why Victor Emmanuel, honest and brave though he was, received the greater share of praise, and Cavour and Garibaldi the less, seeing that he got Italy by following the advice of the one, if not by obeying his dictation, and by accepting the kingdom which the other had destined for a republic, but was forced to yield to the monarchy by the superior genius of the statesman.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1386