fied for your safe passage; and your army may enter the city without being annoyed from the castle of St. Angelo. All that we have done, and all that we design, is for your honour and service, in the loyal hope, that you will speedily appear in person, to vindicate those rights which have been invaded by the clergy, to revive the dignity of the empire, and to surpass the fame and glory of your predecessors. May you fix your residence in Rome, the capital of the world: give laws to Italy, and the Teutonic kingdom; and imitate the example of Constantine and Justinian," who, by the vigour of the senate and people, obtained the sceptre of the earth." But these splendid and fallacious wishes were not cherished by Conrad the Franconian, whose eyes were fixed on the Holy Land, and who died without visiting Rome soon after his return from the Holy Land.

the unfortunate Conradin; and a powerful avenger, | bridge, which they had broken, is restored and fortiwho reigned in the capitol, alarmed the fears and jealousy of the popes. The absolute term of his life was superseded by a renewal every third year; and the enmity of Nicholas the third obliged the Sicilian king to abdicate the government of Rome. In his bull, a perpetual law, the imperious pontiff asserts the truth, validity, and use, of the donation of Constantine, not less essential to the peace of the city than to the independence of the church; establishes the annual election of the senator; and formally disqualifies all emperors, kings, princes, and persons of an eminent and Pope Martin IV. conspicuous rank. This prohibitory A. D. 1281. clause was repealed in his own behalf by Martin the fourth, who humbly solicited the suffrage of the Romans. In the presence, and by the authority, of the people, two electors conferred, not on the pope, but on the noble and faithful Martin, the dignity of senator, and the supreme administration of the republic, to hold during his natural life, and to exercise at pleasure by himself or his deputies. About fifty years afterwards, the same title was granted to the emperor Lewis of Bavaria; and the liberty of Rome was acknowledged by her two sovereigns, who accepted a municipal office in the government of their own metropolis.

The emperor
Lewis of Ba-

varia,

A. D. 1328.

A. D. 1144. style of their ambassadors to Conrad the third and Frederic the first, is a mixture of flattery and pride, the tradition and the ignorance of their own history.s After some complaint of his silence and neglect, they exhort the former of these princes to pass the Alps, and assume from their hands the imperial crown. "We beseech your majesty, not to disdain the humility of your sons and vassals, not to listen to the accusations of our common enemies, who calumniate the senate as hostile to your throne, who sow the seeds of discord, that they may reap the harvest of destruction. The pope and the Sicilian are united in an impious league to oppose our liberty and your coronation. With the blessing of God, our zeal and courage has hitherto defeated their attempts. Of their powerful and factious adherents, more especially the Frangipani, we have taken by assault the houses and turrets: some of these are occupied by our troops, and some are levelled with the ground. The Milvian

e The high-sounding bull of Nicholas III, which founds his temporal sovereignty on the donation of Constantine, is still extant; and as it has been inserted by Boniface VIII. in the Sexte of the Decretals, it must be received by the catholics, or at least by the papists, as a sacred and perpetual law.

f I am indebted to Fleury (Hist. Eccles. tom. xviii. p. 306.) for an extract of this Roman act, which he has taken from the Ecclesiastical Anuals of Odericus Raynaldus, A. D. 1281, No. 14, 15.

These letters and speeches are preserved by Otho bishop of Frisin'gen, (Fabric. Bibliot. Lat. med. et. infim. tom. v. p. 186, 187.) perhaps the noblest of historians: he was son of Leopold marquis of Austria;

Frederic I.

His nephew and successor, Frederic Barbarossa, was more ambitious of the A. D. 1155. imperial crown; nor had any of the successors of Otho acquired such absolute sway over the kingdom of Italy. Surrounded by his ecclesiastical and secular princes, he gave audience in his camp at Sutri to the ambassadors of Rome, who thus addressed him in a free and florid oration: "Incline your ear to the queen of cities; approach with a peaceful and friendly mind the precincts of Rome, which has cast away the yoke of the clergy, and is impatient to crown her legitimate emperor. Under your auspicious influence, may the primitive times be restored. Assert the prerogatives of the eternal city, and reduce under her monarchy the insolence of the world. You are not ignorant, that, in former ages, by the wisdom of the senate, by the valour and discipline of the equestrian order, she extended her victorious arms to the east and west, beyond the Alps, and over the islands of the ocean. By our sins, in the absence of our princes, the noble insti tution of the senate has sunk in oblivion: and with our prudence, our strength has likewise decreased. We have revived the senate, and the equestrian order; the counsels of the one, the arms of the other, will be devoted to your person and the service of the empire. Do you not hear the language of the Roman matron? You were a guest, I have adopted you as a citizen; a Transalpine stranger, I have elected you for my sovereign; and given you myself, and all that is mine. Your first and most sacred duty, is to swear and subscribe, that you will shed your blood for the republic; that you maintain in peace and justice the laws of the city and the charters of your predecessors; and that you

will

his mother, Agnes, was daughter of the emperor Henry IV. and he was half-brother and uncle to Conrad III. and Frederic I. He has left, in seven books, a Chronicle of the Times; in two, the Gesta Frederici 1. the last of which is inserted in the sixth volume of Muratori's his torians.

h We desire (said the ignorant Romans) to restore the empire in em statum, quo fuit tempore Constantini et Justiniaui, qui totum orbem vigore senatus et populi Romani suis tenuere manibus.

Otho Frising, de Gestis Frederici I. 1. i. c. 28. p. 662-664. k Hospes eras, civem feci. Advena fuisti ex Transalpinis partibusį principem constitui.

will reward with five thousand pounds of silver, the faithful senators who shall proclaim your titles in the capitol. With the name, assume the character, of Augustus." The flowers of Latin rhetoric were not yet exhausted; but Frederic, impatient of their vanity, interrupted the orators in the high tone of royalty and conquest. "Famous indeed have been the fortitude and wisdom of the ancient Romans; but your speech is not seasoned with wisdom, and I could wish that fortitude were conspicuous in your actions. Like all sublunary things, Rome has felt the vicissitudes of time and fortune. Your noblest families were translated to the east, to the royal city of Constantine; and the remains of your strength and freedom have long since been exhausted by the Greeks and Franks. Are you desirous of beholding the ancient glory of Rome, the gravity of the senate, the spirit of the knights, the discipline of the camp, the valour of the legions? you will find them in the German republic. It is not empire, naked and alone; the ornaments and virtues of empire have likewise migrated beyond the Alps to a more deserving people. They will be employed in your defence, but they claim your obedience. You pretend that myself or my predecessors have been invited by the Romans: you mistake the word; they were not invited; they were implored. From its foreign and domestic tyrants, the city was rescued by Charlemagne and Otho, whose ashes repose in our country; and their dominion was the price of your deliverance. Under that dominion your ancestors lived and died. I claim by the right of inheritance and possession, and who shall dare to extort you from my hands? Is the hand of the Franks and Germans enfeebled by age? Am I vanquished? Am I a captive? Am I not encompassed with the banners of a potent and invincible army? You impose conditions on your master; you require oaths: if the conditions are just, an oath is superfluous; if unjust, it is criminal. Can you doubt my equity? It is extended to the meanest of my subjects. Will not my sword be unsheathed in the defence of the capitol? By that sword the northern kingdom of Denmark has been restored to the Roman empire. You prescribe the measure and the objects of my bounty, which flows in a copious but a voluntary stream. All will be given to patient merit; all will be denied to rude importunity." Neither the emperor nor the senate could maintain these lofty pretensions of dominion and liberty.

1 Non cessit nobis nudum imperium, virtute sua amictum venit, ornamenta sua secum traxit. Penes nos sunt consules tui, &c. Cicero or Livy would not have rejected these images, the eloquence of a barbarian born and educated in the Hercynian forest.

Otho of Frisingen, who surely understood the language of the court and diet of Germany, speaks of the Franks in the twelfth century as the reigning nation; (Proceres Franci, equites Franci, manus Francorum ;) he adds, however, the epithet of Teutonici.

Otho Frising, de Gestis Frederici I. I. ii. c. 22. p. 720-723. These original and authentic acts I have translated and abridged with freedom, yet with fidelity.

From the Chronicles of Ricobaldo and Francis Pepin, Muratori (dissert. XXVI. tom. ii. p. 492.) has transcribed this curious fact with the doggrel verses that accompanied the gift.

Ave decus orbis, ave! victus tibi destinor, ave!
Currus ab Augusto Frederico Cæsare justo.

Væ Mediolanum! jam sentis spernere vanum
Imperii vires, proprias tibi tollere vires.

:

United with the pope, and suspicious of the Romans, Frederic continued his march to the Vatican his coronation was disturbed by a sally from the capitol; and if the numbers and valour of the Germans prevailed in the bloody conflict, he could not safely encamp in the presence of a city of which he styled himself the sovereign. About twelve years afterwards, he besieged Rome, to seat an antipope in the chair of St. Peter; and twelve Pisan galleys were introduced into the Tiber; but the senate and people were saved by the arts of negociation and the progress of disease; nor did Frederic or his successors reiterate the hostile attempt. Their laborious reigns were exercised by the popes, the crusades, and the independence of Lombardy and Germany; they courted the alliance of the Romans; and Frederic the second offered in the capitol the great standard, the Caroccio of Milan. After the extinction of the house of Swabia, they were banished beyond the Alps; and their last coronations betrayed the impotence and poverty of the Teutonic Cæsars.P

Wars of the the neighbouring cities.

Romans against

amused the

Under the reign of Adrian, when the
empire extended from the Euphrates
to the ocean, from mount Atlas to the
Grampian hills, a fanciful historian
Romans with the picture of their infant wars.
"There was a time," says Florus," when Tibur and
Præneste, our summer retreats, were the objects of
hostile vows in the capitol, when we dreaded the
shades of the Arician groves, when we could tri-
umph without a blush over the nameless villages of
the Sabines and Latins, and even Corioli could
afford a title not unworthy of a victorious general.”
The pride of his contemporaries was gratified by
the contrast of the past with the present; they would
have been humbled by the prospect of futurity; by
the prediction, that after a thousand years, Rome,
despoiled of empire and contracted to her primæval
limits, would renew the same hostilities, on the same
ground which was then decorated with her villas
and gardens. The adjacent territory on either side
of the Tiber was always claimed, and sometimes
possessed, as the patrimony of St. Peter; but the
barons assumed a lawless independence, and the
cities too faithfully copied the revolt and discord of
the metropolis. In the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, the Romans incessantly laboured to reduce
or destroy the contumacious vassals of the church
and senate; and if their headstrong and selfish am-

Ergo triumphorum urbs potes memor esse priorum
Quos tibi mittebant reges qui bella gerebant,

Ne si dee tacere (I now use the Italian Dissertations, tom. i. p. 444.) che nell' anno 1727, una copia desso Caroccio in marmo dianzi ignoto si Scopri, nel Campidoglio, presso alle carcere di quel luogo, dove Sisto V. l'avea falto rinchiudere. Stava esso posto sopra quatro colonne di marmo fino colla sequente inscrizione, &c. to the same purpose as the old inscription.

p The decline of the imperial arms and authority in Italy is related with impartial learning in the Annals of Muratori; (tom. x. xi. xii.) and the reader may compare his narrative with the Histoire des Allemands (tom. iii. iv.) by Schmidt, who has deserved the esteem of his country

men.

q Tibur nunc suburbanum, et æstivæ Præneste deliciæ, nuncupatis in Capitolio votis petebantur. The whole passage of Florus (1. i. c. 11.) may be read with pleasure, and has deserved the praise of a man of genius. (Euvres de Montesquieu, tom. iii. p. 634, 635. quarto edition.)

but the English prelate must have indulged the vanity of a pilgrim, if he multiplied their numbers to one

men. Had the policy of the senate and the discipline of the legions been restored with the capitol, the divided condition of Italy would have offered the fairest opportunity of a second conquest. But in arms the modern Romans were not above, and in arts, they were far below, the common level of the neighbouring republics. Nor was their warlike spirit of any long continuance; after some irregular sallies they subsided in the national apathy, in the neglect of military institutions, and in the disgraceful and dangerous use of foreign mercenaries.

The election of

bition was moderated by the pope, he often encouraged their zeal by the alliance of his spiritual arms. Their warfare was that of the first consuls and dic-hundred, and their loss in the field to thirty, thousand tators, who were taken from the plough. They assembled in arms at the foot of the capitol; sallied from the gates, plundered or burnt the harvests of their neighbours, engaged in tumultuary conflict, and returned home after an expedition of fifteen or twenty days. Their sieges were tedious and unskilful; in the use of victory, they indulged the meaner passions of jealousy and revenge; and instead of adopting the valour, they trampled on the misfortunes, of their adversaries. The captives, in their shirts, with a rope round their necks, solicited their pardon the fortifications, and even the buildings, of the rival cities were demolished, and the inhabitants were scattered in the adjacent villages. It was thus that the seats of the cardinal bishops, Porto, Ostia, Albanum, Tusculum, Præneste, and Tibur or Tivoli, were successively overthrown by the ferocious hostility of the Romans. Of these, Porto and Ostia, the two keys of the Tiber, are still vacant and desolate; the marshy and unwholesome banks are peopled with herds of buffalos, and the river is lost to every purpose of navigation and trade. The hills which afford a shady retirement from the autumnal heats, have again smiled with the blessings of peace; Frescati has arisen near the ruins of Tusculum; Tibur or Tivoli has resumed the honours of a city, and the meaner towns of Albano and Palestrina are decorated with the villas of the cardinals and princes of Rome. In the work of destruction, the ambition of the Romans was often checked and repulsed by the neighbouring cities and their allies: in the first siege of Tibur, they were driven from their camp; and the battles of Tusculum" and Viterbo * might be compared in their relative state to the memorable fields of Thrasymene and Cannæ. In the first of these petty wars, thirty thousand Romans were overthrown by a thousand German horse, whom Frederic Barbarossa had detached to the relief of Tusculum; and if we number the slain at three, the prisoners at two, thousand, we shall embrace the most authentic and moderate account. Sixty-eight years afterwards they marched Battle of Viterbo, against Viterbo in the ecclesiastical A. D. 1234. state with the whole force of the city: by a rare coalition the Teutonic eagle was blended, in the adverse banners, with the keys of St. Peter; and the pope's auxiliaries were commanded by a count of Thoulouse and a bishop of Winchester. The Romans were discomfited with shame and slaughter;

Battle of Tus culum,

A. D. 1167.

Ne a feritate Romanorum, sicut fuerant Hostienses, Portuenses, Tusculanenses, Albanenses, Labicenses, et nuper Tiburtini destruerentur. (Matthew Paris, p. 757.) These events are marked in the Annals and Index (the eighteenth volume) of Muratori.

For the state or ruin of these suburban cities, the banks of the Tiber, &c. see the lively picture of the P. Labat, (Voyage en Espag. et en Italie,) who had not long resided in the neighbourhood of Rome: and the more accurate description of which P. Eschinard (Roma, 1750. in octavo) has added to the topographical map of Cingolani.

t Labat (tom. iii. p. 233.) mentions a recent decree of the Roman government, which has severely mortified the pride and poverty of Tivoli in civitate Tiburtinâ non vivitur civiliter.

"I depart from my usual method, of quoting only by the date the

Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of the popes. Christ. Under the first christian princes, the chair of St. Peter was disputed by the votes, the venality, the violence, of a popular election; the sanctuaries of Rome were polluted with blood; and, from the third to the twelfth century, the church was distracted by the mischief of frequent schisms. As long as the final appeal was determined by the civil magistrate, these mischiefs were transient and local: the merits were tried by equity or favour; nor could the unsuccessful competitor long disturb the triumph of his rival. But after the emperors had been divested of their prerogatives, after a maxim had been established, that the vicar of Christ is amenable to no earthly tribunal, each vacancy of the holy see might involve Christendom in controversy and war. The claims of the cardinals and inferior clergy, of the nobles and people, were vague and litigious: the freedom of choice was overruled by the tumults of a city that no longer owned or obeyed a superior. On the decease of a pope, two factions proceeded in different churches to a double election: the number and weight of votes, the priority of time, the merit of the candidates, might balance each other: the most respectable of the clergy were divided; and the distant princes, who bowed before the spiritual throne, could not distinguish the spurious, from the legitimate, idol. The emperors were often the authors of the schism, from the political motive of opposing a friendly to an hostile pontiff; and each of the competitors was reduced to suffer the insults of his enemies, who were not awed by conscience; and to purchase the support of his adherents, who were instigated by avarice or ambition. A peaceful and perpetual Right of the succession was ascertained by Alex- cardinals esta blished by Alexander the third, who finally abolished ander III. the tumultuary votes of the clergy and

A. D. 1179.

Annals of Muratori, in consideration of the critical balance in which he has weighed nine contemporary writers who mention the battle of Tusculum, (tom. x. p. 42-44.)

Matthew Paris, p. 345. This bishop of Winchester was Peter de Rupibus, who occupied the see thirty-two years, (A. D. 1206-1238) and is described, by the English historian, as a soldier and a statesman, (p. 178. 399.)

y See Mosheim, Institut. Histor. Ecclesiast. p. 401. 403. Alexander himself had nearly been the victim of a contested election; and the doubtful merits of Innocent had only preponderated by the weight of genius and learning which St. Bernard cast into the scale. (See his life and writings.)

cese.

Had the election been always held in the Vatican, the rights of the senate popes from and people would not have been violated with impunity. But the Romans forgot, and were forgotten, in the absence of the successors of Gregory the seventh, who did not keep as a divine precept their ordinary residence in the city and dioThe care of that diocese was less important than the government of the universal church; nor could the popes delight in a city in which their authority was always opposed, and their person was often endangered. From the persecution of the emperors, and the wars of Italy, they escaped beyond the Alps into the hospitable bosom of France; from the tumults of Rome they prudently withdrew to live and die in the more tranquil stations of Anagni, Perugia, Viterbo, and the adjacent cities. When the flock was offended or impoverished by the absence of the shepherd, they were recalled by a stern admonition, that St. Peter had fixed his y vecut toujours ensemble avec le même respect, et la même civilité que l'on observe dans le cabinet des rois, avec la même politesse qu'on avoit dans la cour de Henri III avec la même familiarité que l'on voit dans les noviciats; et avec la même charité, du moins en apparence, qui pourroit être entre des freres parfaitement unis.

On

d Rechiesti per bando (says John Villani) sanatori di Roma, e 52 del popolo, et capitani de' 25 e consoli, (consoli?) et 13 buone huomini, uno per rione. Our knowledge is too imperfect to pronounce, how much of this constitution was temporary, and how much ordinary and permanent. Yet it is faintly illustrated by the ancient statutes of Rome.

e Villani (l. x. c. 68-71. in Muratori, Script. tom. xiii. p. 641-645.) relates this law, and the whole transaction, with much less abhorrence than the prudent Muratori. Any one conversant with the darker ages must have observed how much the sense (I mean the nonsense) of superstition is fluctuating and inconsistent.

f In the first volume of the popes of Avignon, see the second original Life of John XXII, p. 142-145. the confession of the antipope, p. 145 152. and the laborious notes of Baluze, p. 714, 715.

chair, not in an obscure village, but in the capital | pride; nor has the courage of a martyr promoted