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violence. But the root of mischief was deep and perennial; and a momentary calm was preceded and followed by such tempests as had almost sunk the bark of St. Peter. Rome continually presented the aspect of war and discord; the churches and palaces were fortified and assaulted by the factions and Calixtus II. families; and, after giving peace to Europe, Calixtus the Second alone had resolution and power to prohibit the use of private Innocent arms in the metropolis.24 Among the nations who revered the

A.D. 1119

1124

II. A.D.

1130-1143

apostolic throne, the tumults of Rome provoked a general indignation; and, in a letter to his disciple Eugenius the Third, St. Bernard, with the sharpness of his wit and zeal, has stigmatized the vices of the rebellious people.25 "Who is ignorant," Character says the monk of Clairvaux, "of the vanity and arrogance of the Romans by Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, cruel, untractable, and

of the

St. Ber

nard

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 learned 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 25a 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." Surely this dark portrait is not coloured by the pencil of Christian charity;

26

23 [As Gregorovius puts it (iv. 609): "The spirit of Arnold still survived in Rome, and each Pope was obliged to win toleration for himself or else to live in exile".] 24 [Calixtus also forbade the fortification of churches. See Mansi, Concilia, xxi. 285. He restored the Lateran.]

25 Quid tam notum seculis quam protervia et cervicositas Romanorum? Gens insueta paci, tumultui assueta, gens immitis et intractabilis usque adhuc, subdi nescia, nisi cum non valet resistere (de Considerat. 1. iv. c. 2, p. 441). The saint takes breath, and then begins again: Hi, invisi terræ et cælo, utrique injecere manus, &c. (p. 443).

258 [I have inserted not, which is omitted in the quarto and subsequent editions. St. Bernard's words are, præesse non norunt (De Consid. iv. 2, in Migne, Patr. Lat. 182, p. 774.)]

26 As a Roman citizen, Petrarch takes leave to observe that Bernard, though a saint, was a man; that he might be provoked by resentment, and possibly repent of his hasty passion, &c. (Mémoires sur la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. i. p. 330).

yet the features, however harsh and ugly, express a lively resemblance of the Romans of the twelfth century.27

heresy of

Brescia,

The Jews had rejected the Christ when he appeared among Political them in a plebeian character; and the Romans might plead Arnold of their ignorance of his vicar when he assumed the pomp and A.D. 1140 pride of a temporal sovereign. In the busy age of the crusades, some sparks of curiosity and reason were rekindled in the Western world; the heresy of Bulgaria, the Paulician sect, was successfully transplanted into the soil of Italy and France; the Gnostic visions were mingled with the simplicity of the Gospel; and the enemies of the clergy reconciled their passions with their conscience, the desire of freedom with the profession of piety.28 The trumpet of Roman liberty was first sounded by Arnold of Brescia,29 whose promotion in the church was confined to the lowest rank, and who wore the monastic habit rather as a garb of poverty than as an uniform of obedience. His adversaries could not deny the wit and eloquence which they severely felt; they confess with reluctance the specious purity of his morals; and his errors were recommended to the public by a mixture of important and beneficial truths. In his theological studies, he had been the disciple of the famous and unfortunate Abelard,30 who was likewise involved in the suspicion of heresy;

27 Baronius, in his index to the xiith volume of his Annals, has found a fair and easy excuse. He makes two heads, of Romani Catholici and Schismatici; to the former, he applies all the good, to the latter all the evil, that is told of the city.

-28 The heresies of the xiith century may be found in Mosheim (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 419-427), who entertains a favourable opinion of Arnold of Brescia. In the 6th volume, I have described the sect of the Paulicians, and followed their migration from Armenia to Thrace and Bulgaria, Italy and France.

The original pictures of Arnold of Brescia are drawn by Otho bishop of Frisingen (Chron. 1. vii. c. 31, de Gestis Frederici I. 1. i. c. 27, l. ii. c. 21), and in 1. iii. of the Ligurinus [composed in A.D. 1186-7], a poem of Gunther, who flourished A.D. 1200, in the monastery of Paris [not Paris, but Päris, in Elsass], near Basil (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. med. et infimæ Etatis, tom. iii. p. 174, 175). The long passage that relates to Arnold, is produced by Guilliman (de Rebus Helveticis, 1. iii. c. 5, p. 108). [Gibbon does not seem to know of the attack made on the genuineness of the poem "Ligurinus" by Senckenberg in his Parerga Gottingensia, i. (1737). Up to the year 1871, the orthodox view of critics was that the work was a forgery. But the authorship of Gunther was proved by Pannenborg in the Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, xi. p. 163 sqq. (1871). Cp. his Programm "Der Verfasser des Ligurinus," 1883. There is a German translation of the poem by T. Vulpinus, 1889. On Arnold of Brescia, see Giesebrecht's monograph, Arnold von Brescia.]

30 The wicked wit of Bayle was amused in composing, with much levity and learning, the articles of ABELARD, FOULQUES, HELOISE, in his Dictionnaire Critique. The dispute of Abelard and St. Bernard, of scholastic and positive divinity, is well understood by Mosheim (Institut. Hist. Eccles. p. 412-415).

but the lover of Eloisa was of a soft and flexible nature; and his ecclesiastic judges were edified and disarmed by the humility of his repentance. From this master Arnold most probably imbibed some metaphysical definitions of the Trinity, repugnant to the taste of the times; his ideas of baptism and the eucharist are loosely censured; but a political heresy was the source of his fame and misfortunes. He presumed to quote the declaration of Christ that his kingdom is not of this world: he boldly maintained that the sword and the sceptre were entrusted to the civil magistrate; that temporal honours and possessions were lawfully vested in secular persons; that the abbots, the bishops, and the pope himself must renounce either their state or their salvation; and that, after the loss of their revenues, the voluntary tithes and oblations of the faithful would suffice, not indeed for luxury and avarice, but for a frugal life in the exercise of spiritual labours. During a short time the preacher was revered as a patriot; and the discontent, or revolt, of Brescia against her bishop was the first-fruits of his dangerous lessons. But the favour of the people is less permanent than the resentment of the priest; and, after the heresy of Arnold had been condemned [A.D. 1139] by Innocent the Second 31 in the general council of the Lateran, the magistrates themselves were urged by prejudice and fear to execute the sentence of the church. Italy could no longer afford a refuge; and the disciple of Abelard escaped beyond the Alps, till he found a safe and hospitable shelter in Zurich, now the first of the Swiss cantons. From a Roman station, 32 a royal villa, a chapter of noble virgins, Zurich had gradually increased to a free and flourishing city, where the appeals of the Milanese were sometimes tried by the Imperial commissaries.33 In an age less

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Præsule, qui numeros vetitum contingere nostros
Nomen ab innocua ducit laudabile vitâ.

We may applaud the dexterity and correctness of Ligurinus, who turns the un-
poetical name of Innocent II. into a compliment. [For the acts of the Lateran
Council see Mansi, Concil. xxi. p. 523 sqq.]

32 A Roman inscription of Statio Turicensis has been found at Zurich (d'Anville, Notice de l'ancienne Gaule, p. 642-644); but it is without sufficient warrant that the city and canton have usurped and even monopolized the names of Tigurum and Pagus Tigurinus. [See Otto of Freisingen, Gesta Frederici, ii. 29.]

33 Guilliman (de Rebus Helveticis, l. iii. c. 5, p. 106) recapitulates the donation (A.D. 833) of the emperor Lewis the Pious to his daughter the abbess Hildegardis. Curtim nostram Turegum in ducatu Alamanniæ in pago Durgaugensi, with villages, woods, meadows, waters, slaves, churches, &c., a noble gift. Charles the Bald gave the jus monete, the city was walled under Otho I., and the line of the bishop

ripe for reformation, the præcursor of Zuinglius was heard with applause; a brave and simple people imbibed, and long retained, the colour of his opinions; and his art, or merit, seduced the bishop of Constance, and even the pope's legate, who forgot, for his sake, the interest of their master and their order. Their tardy zeal was quickened by the fierce exhortations of St. Bernard; and the enemy of the church was driven by persecution to the desperate measure of erecting his standard in Rome itself, in the face of the successor of St. Peter.

the Ro

store the

A.D. 1144

Yet the courage of Arnold was not devoid of discretion: he He exhorts was protected, and had perhaps been invited, by the nobles and mans to repeople; and in the service of freedom his eloquence thundered republic, over the seven hills. Blending in the same discourse the texts 1154 of Livy and St. Paul, uniting the motives of gospel and of classic enthusiasm, he admonished the Romans how strangely their patience and the vices of the clergy had degenerated from the primitive times of the church and the city. He exhorted them to assert the inalienable rights of men and Christians; to restore the laws and magistrates of the republic; to respect the name of the emperor; but to confine their shepherd to the spiritual government of his flock. Nor could his spiritual government escape the censure and control of the reformer; and the inferior clergy were taught by his lessons to resist the cardinals, who had usurped a despotic command over the twenty-eight regions or parishes of Rome. The revolution was not accomplished without rapine and violence, the effusion of blood, and the of Frisingen,

Nobile Turegum multarum copia rerum,

is repeated with pleasure by the antiquaries of Zurich.

34 Bernard, epistol. cxcv. cxcvi. tom. i. p. 187-190. Amidst his invectives, he drops a precious acknowledgment, qui utinam quam sanæ esset doctrinæ quam districtæ est vitæ. He owns that Arnold would be a valuable acquisition for the church. [Bernard himself-though he opposed Arnold as a heretic-strongly condemned the temporal dominion of the Pope, in his De Consideratione. He observes, for instance: nemo militans Deo implicet se negotiis secularibus. Cp. Gregorovius, op. cit. iv. p. 483-4.]

35 He advised the Romans,

Consiliis armisque sua moderamina summa
Arbitrio tractare suo: nil juris in hâc re
Pontifici summo, modicum concedere regi
Suadebat populo. Sic læsâ stultus utrâque
Majestate, reum gemine se fecerat aula.

Nor is the poetry of Gunther different from the prose of Otho.

36 See Baronius (A.D. 1148, No. 38, 39) from the Vatican Mss. He loudly condemns Arnold (A.D. 1141, No. 3) as the father of the political heretics whose influence then hurt him in France.

II. A.D.

1130-43]

[Anas

tasius IV.

A.D. 1153-4] [Nicholas Break

spear, A.D. 1154-9]

37

demolition of houses; the victorious faction was enriched with the spoils of the clergy and the adverse nobles. Arnold of Brescia enjoyed or deplored the effects of his mission; his reign continued [Innocent above ten years, while two popes, Innocent the Second and Anastasius the Fourth, either trembled in the Vatican or wandered as exiles in the adjacent cities. They were succeeded by a more vigorous and fortunate pontiff, Adrian the Fourth, the only Englishman who has ascended the throne of St. Peter; and whose merit emerged from the mean condition of a monk, and almost a beggar, in the monastery of St. Albans. On the first provocation, of a cardinal killed or wounded in the streets, he cast an interdict on the guilty people; and, from Christmas to Easter, Rome was deprived of the real or imaginary comforts of religious worship. The Romans had despised their temporal prince they submitted with grief and terror to the censures of their spiritual father; their guilt was expiated by penance, and the banishment of the seditious preacher was the price of their absolution. But the revenge of Adrian was yet unsatisfied, and the approaching coronation of Frederic Barbarossa was fatal to the bold reformer, who had offended, though not in an equal degree, the heads of the church and state. In their interview [A.D. 1155] at Viterbo,38 the pope represented to the emperor the furious ungovernable spirit of the Romans; the insults, the injuries, the fears, to which his person and his clergy were continually exposed; and the pernicious tendency of the heresy of Arnold, which must subvert the principles of civil as well as ecclesiastical [Frederick subordination. Frederic was convinced by these arguments, or tempted by the desire of the Imperial crown; in the balance of ambition, the innocence or life of an individual is of small account; and their common enemy was sacrificed to a moment of political concord. After his retreat from Rome, Arnold had been protected by the viscounts of Campania, from whom he was extorted by the power of Cæsar: the præfect of the city His execu- pronounced his sentence; the martyr of freedom was burnt alive in the presence of a careless and ungrateful people; and his ashes were cast into the Tiber, lest the heretics should collect and worship the relics of their master.39 The clergy triumphed in

crowned,

June 18,

1155]

tion, A.D.

1155

37 The English reader may consult the Biographia Britannica, ADRIAN IV., but our own writers have added nothing to the fame or merits of their countryman. 38 [The meeting was close to Nepi. See Muratori, Antiq. Ital. i. 117.] 39 Besides the historian and poet already quoted, the last adventures of Arnold are related by the biographer of Adrian IV. (Muratori, Script. Rerum Ital. tom.

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