Chapter 2

St. Bernard,--who had previously formed an ill opinion of Arnold from the reports which preceded him out of Italy,--no sooner saw him at Sens actively interested for Abailard, than he penetrated the entire duplicity of his character; at the same time that he felt fully alive to the damage, which the victory just won over error might yet suffer from a man so able and resolute. Wherefore, as it was not his custom to serve the cause of truth by halves, the saint resolved to include the scholar with the master in his denunciations to the pope; who, at his instance, ordered that Arnold too, as well as Abailard, should be incarcerated in a convent. But the crafty Italian managed to elude his doom by a timely flight; and after running many dangers by reason of the keen chace which St. Bernard gave him, found a safe retreat at Zurich.

In that age Zurich, by reason of the trade of Germany and Italy passing through it, was the most flourishing town of Switzerland. Trading communities are commonly as fond of novelty in opinion as in wares. Zurich verified this assertion in many ways; for, owing to its free government, its proximity to the republics of Lombardy, and to the settlements of the Waldenses in the Alps, the place swarmed with that motley tribe of political and religious dreamers which Liberty is ever doomed to tolerate in her train. Of course, Arnold had his clique among the rest. His reception by the citizens was enthusiastic; a public situation was given to him; and he resided in the city for the next six years. During that interval, he confined his activity to Zurich and the cantons bordering it. In these he propagated his doctrines with success, and seems to have been forgotten by the public of France and Italy. No doubt, he may be viewed as having helped to pave the way for Zwingli in the 16th, and Strauss in the 19th,--both of whom, like Arnold, spread the poison of their ideas from Zurich.

In the meantime, events were transpiring at Rome which were destined to call Arnold from his retreat, and produce him again on the great stage of the world in a part more important than ever. These were the attempts of the Romans to restore their ancient republic on the ruins of the papal government. These attempts were not peculiar to the 12th century, but had been made in preceding ages, invariably to no other purpose than anarchy to the city, and scandal to the world. Indeed, there seems always to have been a party at Rome whose adherents, more pagan than Christian in their hearts, perversely mistook the destiny of the city; and far from viewing its new spiritual empire as nobler than its old material one, held the former as something meanly inferior to the latter; wholly blind to the fact that the senate and emperors had been merely types of the hierarchy and the popes, and that in these, and not in those, God had decreed, from the time of Romulus himself, the true power and majesty of Rome should eventually reside. This party then,--who viewed the pope as the Jews viewed our Saviour, whom they would not accept as their Messias, but reviled him as an impostor because he possessed no worldly-power; this party it was that, at the end of the 8th century, treated Leo III. with such impious cruelty in their first recorded attempt to overthrow the papal government; that in the 10th century not only dethroned, but imprisoned and murdered, by the hands of the consul Crescentius, Benedict VI., and plunged the state into such disorders as to render necessary the bloody but just intervention of Otho III. Emperor of Germany, who delivered the Holy See from the oppression and indignities which overwhelmed it. About the middle of the 12th century, the example of the cities of Lombardy, roused to their struggle for freedom to a great degree by the eloquence of Arnold of Brescia, again awoke the republican faction at Rome; where other elements of lawlessness unhappily existed in the papal schism which then raged, and in which the anti-pope Anacletus drove from the Holy See Innocent II., the lawful pope. On the death of Anacletus and the return of Innocent, the sentence of the council, above mentioned, against Arnold of Brescia, still more embittered the revolutionary spirits of the city, worked up to wild enthusiasm by the temporary presence of that arch-demagogue on the spot to defend his cause. At last the pope's conduct to the citizens of Tivoli burst the storm of rebellion over his head.

During the late schism, Tivoli had sided with Anacletus, and on his death still refused to acknowledge Innocent. A Roman army was accordingly marched out to reduce the place to obedience, but was defeated by a sudden sally of the besieged. A fresh army which was shortly raised behaved better, and Tivoli was reduced. Burning with shame at the disgraceful failure of their first attempt, the Romans clamoured for the total destruction of a hated rival and the dispersion of its inhabitants. But the pope, satisfied with the triumph of his authority, would lend no countenance to so guilty a severity, and concluded with his chastised children a fatherly peace. For thus checking the bad passions of his subjects, he incurred their displeasure; whereupon, the republican leaders, perceiving their opportunity seized it at once, and, by their virulent denunciations to the mob of the pretended tyranny of priests, soon stirred up an insurrection; and got the citizens to hold a congress in the Capitol, at which the papal government was declared at an end, and the ancient republic restored. Innocent strove to counteract this revolution, and called a synod at the Lateran; before which he protested against any right of the laity to interfere with his government, much less to alter it. But his efforts were vain; and he took his ill-fortune so much to heart that he sickened and died of grief.

Celestine II., his successor, had, as papal legate in France, formerly befriended Arnold of Brescia: a circumstance that could not fail to make him popular, and conduce to give effect to his efforts at conciliation; so that he completely succeeded in allaying the revolutionary storm during his short reign, which his death terminated in the spring of the following year.

Under Lucius II., who was next elected to the papal throne, the public disorders burst forth again in an aggravated degree. Lucius deeply offended the Romans by seeking to secure himself against their fickle loyalty in an alliance with Roger, the Norman king of Sicily. In resentment of this proceeding, the newly elected senate first caused the strongholds of the Frangipani, and of other adherents of the papal party within the city, to be demolished, and then sent an embassy to Conrad III. of Germany to invite him to come and assume the imperial crown under their auspices, and act as counter-check to the king of Sicily. But Conrad, mistrusting the high-flown letter containing the invitation, and feeling moreover little sympathy with rebels against the pope, declined it.

Hereupon, Lucius thought it the proper time to strike a blow towards recovering his authority. To this end he marshalled his cardinals and other dignitaries in all their pomp; put himself at their head, and, escorted by an armed array of lay partisans, set out for Rome with the intention of besieging the Capitol.

At first the people, awed by so solemn and resolute an appearance of the Supreme Pontiff, showed signs if not of helping, at least, of not resisting his attempt. But the agents of the senate, actively at work among the crowd, succeeded in dissipating this fatal apathy, and in rousing, in its stead, so furious a spirit of hostility, that the result announced itself in a sacrilegious shower of stones, which rained cruelly on the heads of the priestly host, wholly scattering it, and hitting the pope himself on the temples; who shortly died from the effects of the contusion. This catastrophe happened January 25th, 1145.

The next day the dispersed cardinals came together again in St. Caesarius' church, and set the thorny tiara on the head of a stranger to their order. This was the abbot of the Cistercian convent of St. Anastasius in Rome, formerly a monk under St. Bernard at Clairvaux. He took the name of Eugenius III. He bore the reputation of a mild and conciliating man; which fact would probably weigh all the more with the conclave under existing circumstances, from the recollection of Celestine II., whose gentleness had tamed what it appeared sternness could not subdue.

But Eugenius now showed that he was not wanting in one set of qualities, because it had hitherto served his purpose to display another. For, rather than recognize the new senate, which the republican party wished to make him do, he quitted the city overnight with all his suite; went through the ceremony of his installation at the convent of Forsa; and then retired to Viterbo.

Here he resided some months, and vainly endeavoured through St. Bernard's agency to induce the Emperor Conrad to arm in his behalf. At last, losing all patience at the lengths to which the Romans--encouraged by his absence--had begun to carry things, he levied at Tivoli, and other well affected places, recruits in his service, took himself the command, and marched to attack his rebellious subjects.

His expedition was crowned with success; the republicans were humbled, and sued for peace. This was granted to them on the conditions, that for the future the pope should nominate the senators; that his Prefect should be restored and their Patrician abolished. Eugenius then held his triumphant entry into Rome amid demonstrations of enthusiastic loyalty, and celebrated there the Christmas of 1145. But it was not long before the clouds of disaffection gathered again as blackly as ever, and discharged such a tempest, on the refusal of Eugenius to give up Tivoli to the implacable hatred of the Romans, that he was forced to flee over the Tiber, amid a volley of darts and stones, hurled after him by the mob. Such in fact were the straits to which the unfortunate pontiff was now reduced, that he at length found it expedient to pass into France.

It was at this juncture (A. D. 1142,) that Arnold of Brescia received an invitation from the Roman senate, now wholly rid as it would seem of its great foe, to visit the eternal city, and lend his aid in completing, as far as possible, the restoration of the old republic.

Such a golden opportunity of realizing the dearest dream of his ambition was irresistible. He accepted the invitation at once; and glowing with the thought of shortly reviving in his own person a Roman tribune of the ancient stamp, he crossed the Alps at the head of a fanatical rabble of Swiss, whom, under the hopes of sharing the glories of the expedition, he had seduced to follow him as a guard amid its perils.

At his passage through Lombardy, where his name was so popular, new bands joined his march. On reaching Rome, he and his men were received in triumph. The citizens, when they heard him in his speeches, set off by quotations from Livy and St. Paul, style them "Quirites," when they heard him give his florid descriptions of the greatness of the ancient republic, and launch his thunders of denunciation at the disgrace of priestly rule, set no bounds to their enthusiasm, but forthwith invested the orator with dictatorial powers. No sooner was this done, than the indefatigable demagogue began his political reforms. These comprised, among the rest, laws for restoring the equestrian rank, and the tribunes of the people; for more strictly excluding the pope from all part in the government; and for reducing to the narrowest limits the prerogatives of the German emperors, as the first step towards shaking off their yoke entirely.

At the end of three years, Pope Eugenius returned to Italy, and addressed a letter from Brescia, in July 1148, to the Roman clergy, warning them against the proceedings of Arnold, whom he denounced as a "schismatic," and as the "main tool of the arch enemy of mankind;" calling on them to desist from abetting rebellion, and to return under the obedience of their lawful Superior: otherwise to incur excommunication.

But neither this letter of Eugenius, nor three successive attempts made by him in the course of the next four years,--at one time by negotiation, at another by arms,--to enter his capital, availed his purpose. At last, a fourth attempt towards the end of 1152, by means of a treaty, under which he agreed to acknowledge the power of the senate, succeeded.

Nevertheless he did not cease to suffer, during the short remainder of his reign, bitter mortifications from the insolence of the senate, and the dictator, Arnold of Brescia, who continued to reside in Rome in all his greatness, and shortly before the pontiff's death in 1153, aware of his repugnance to the republic, and alarmed at his growing favour with the people, defied him openly, by increasing the number of the senators, from fifty to a hundred, and by giving them as presidents, two consuls after the ancient plan, instead of the patrician till then in use.

It was for Eugenius III. that his old preceptor, St. Bernard, composed at his disciple's request, his famous book "de Consideratione;" in which the subject handled is, on the duties of a pope; and in which is given such a graphic description of the degenerate character of the Romans, as also of the Roman clergy in that age. The following extract will not be out of place here:

"What is so well known to the world as the license and pride of the Romans? They are a people opposed to peace, and ever given to sedition; wild and hard to deal with from all time; who only know how to obey when they can no longer resist; who possess understanding, only that they may do evil by it, not to do good. Detested by heaven and earth, they have impiously outraged both. They are criminals before God, profaners of his sanctuary, rebels against themselves, enviers of their neighbours, monsters towards those who do not belong to them. They love no one, and are beloved by no one. They strive after the show of being feared by all, while in fact they themselves fear every body. They cannot endure any submission; but yet know not how to rule. They are false to their superiors, and oppress their subjects. They are shameless in their demands, and reject petitions with a haughty front. With blustering and impatience they press for presents, and are thankless when they have received them. They are great talkers with the tongue, but helpless creatures when it comes to act. They are spendthrifts in promises, niggards in the performance; the most crawling sycophants, and the most venomous slanderers; who feign the most honest simplicity, and are the most malicious of deceivers." [2]

[1] Niccolini, Vita di Arnaldo da Brescia. (Prefixed to his tragedy.) Francke, Arnold von Brescia und Seine Zeit.

[2] De Consideratione, lib. iv. cap. 2. (Cited by Francke, page 190.)

III.

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.