106. The two noble families of Verona, the Montagues and Capulets, whose quarrels have been made familiar to the English-speaking world by Romeo. and Juliet: towards Siena. He rode still, seemingly the nations, all the free Italian cities, in in full vigour and activity. But the fatal possession of their rights and old muniair of Rome had smitten his strength. cipal institutions." A carbuncle had formed under his knee; injudicious remedies inflamed his vitiated blood. He died at Buonconvento, in the midst of his awe-struck army, on the festival of St. Bartholomew. Rumours of foul practice, of course, spread abroad; a Dominican monk was said to have administered poison in the Sacrament, which he received with profound devotion. His body was carried in sad state, and splendidly interred at Pisa. "So closed that empire, in which, if the more factious and vulgar Ghibellines beheld their restoration to their native city, their triumph, their revenge, their sole administration of public affairs, the nobler Ghibellinism of Dante foresaw the establishment of a great universal monarchy necessary to the peace and civilization of mankind. The ideal sovereign of Dante's famous treatise on Monarchy was Henry of Luxembourg. Neither Dante nor his time can be understood but through this treatise. The attempt of the Pope to raise himself to a great pontifical monarchy had manifestly ignominiously failed: the Ghibelline is neither amazed nor distressed at this event. It is now the turn of the Imperialist to unfold his noble vision. 'An universal monarchy is absolutely necessary for the welfare of the world;' and this is part of his singular reasoning: 'Peace,' (says the weary exile, the man worn out in cruel strife, the wanderer from city to city, each of those cities more fiercely torn by faction than the last,) 'universal Peace is the first blessing of mankind. The angels sang, not riches or pleasures, but peace on earth: peace the Lord bequeathed to his disciples. For peace One must rule. Mankind is most like God when at unity, for God is One; therefore under a monarchy. Where there is parity there must be strife; where strife, judgment; the judge must be a third party intervening with supreme authority.' Without monarchy can be no justice, nor even liberty; for Dante's monarch is no arbitrary despot, but a constitutional sovereign; he is the Roman law impersonated in the Emperor; a monarch who should leave all "Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word, 107. Families of Orvieto. III. Santafiore is in the neighbour. hood of Siena, and much infested with banditti. 112. The state of Rome in Dante's time is thus described by Mr. Norton, Travel and Study, pp. 246-248: "On the slope of the Quirinal Hill, in the quiet enclosure of the convent of St. Catherine of Siena, stands a square, brick tower, seven stories high. It is a conspicuous object in any general view of Rome; for there are few other towers so tall, and there is not a single spire or steeple in the city. It is the Torre delle Milizie. It was begun by Pope Gregory the Ninth, and finished near the end of the thirteenth century by his vigorous and warlike successor, Boniface the Eighth. Many such towers were built for the purposes of private warfare, in those times when the streets of Rome were the fighting-places of its noble families; but this is, perhaps, the only one that now remains undiminished in height and unaltered in appearance. was a new building when Dante visited Rome; and it is one of the very few edifices that still preserve the aspect they then presented. The older ruins have been greatly changed in appearance, and most of the structures of the Middle Ages have disappeared, in the vicissitudes of the last few centuries. The Forum was then filled with a confused mass of rums and miserable dwellings, with no street running through their intricacies. The Capitol was surrounded with uneven battlemented walls, and bore the character and look of an irre It 118. This recalis Pope's Universal Prayer,— "Father of all! in every age, In every clime, adored, 125. Not the great Roman general gular citadel. St. Peter's was a low was building her Cathedral and her basilica; the Colosseum had suffered Campanile, and Orvieto her matchless little from the attacks of Popes or princes, Duomo,-while Pisa was showing her neither the Venetian nor the Farnese piety and her wealth in her Cathedral, palace having as yet been built with her Camposanto, her Baptistery, and stones from its walls; and centuries were her Tower,-while Siena was beginning still to pass before Michael Angelo, a church greater and more magnificent Bernini, and Borromini were to stamp its in design than her shifting fortune would present character upon the face of the permit her to complete, -Rome was modern city. The siege and burning of building neither cathedral nor campanile, Rome by Robert Guiscard, in 1084, may but was selling the marbles of her ancient be taken as the dividing-line between temples and tombs to the builders of the city of the Emperors and the city of other cities, or quarrying them for her the Popes, between ancient and modern own mean uses. Rome. Rome was in a state of too deep depression, its people were too turbulent and unsettled, to have either the spirit or the opportunity for great works. There was no established and recognized authority, no regular course of justice. There was not even any strong force, rarely any overwhelming violence, which for a time at least could subdue opposition, and organize a steady, and consequently a beneficent tyranny. The city was continually distracted by petty personal quarrels, and by bitter family feuds. Its obscure annals are full of bloody civil victories and defeats,victories which brought no gain to those who won them, defeats which taught no lesson to those who lost them. The breath of liberty never inspired with life the dead clay of Rome; and though for "It was not the simple movement a time it might seem to kindle some vital of one great body against another; not heat, the glow soon grew cold, and the force of a government in opposition speedily disappeared. The records of to the people; not the struggle of Florence, Siena, Bologna, and Perugia privilege and democracy, of poverty are as full of fighting and bloodshed as and riches, or starvation and repletion; those of Rome; but their fights were but one universal burst of unmitigated not mere brawls, nor were their triumphs anarchy. In the streets, lanes, and always barren. Even the twelfth and squares, in the courts of palaces and thirteenth centuries, which were like the humbler dwellings, were heard the coming of the spring after a long winter, clang of arms, the screams of victims, making the earth to blossom, and glad- and the gush of blood: the bow of dening the hearts of men,--the centuries the bridegroom launched its arrows which elsewhere in Italy, and over the into the very chambers of his young rest of Europe, gave birth to the noblest bride's parents and relations, and the mediaval Art, when every great city was bleeding son, the murdered brother, or adorning itself with the beautiful works the dying husband were the evening of the new architecture, sculpture, and visitors of Florentine maids and mapainting, -even these centuries left trons, and aged citizens. Every art scarcely any token of their passage over was practised to seduce and deceive, Rome. The sun, breaking through the and none felt secure even of their clouds that had long hidden it, shone nearest and dearest relatives. In the everywhere but here. While Florence, morning a son left his paternal roof 127. Of the state of Florence, Napier writes, Flor. Hist., I. 122: with undiminished love, and returned their statutes and ordinances, a weedat evening a corpse, or the most bitter ing out, as it were, of the obsolete and enemy! Terror and death were tri- contradictory, and a substitution of umphant; there was no relaxation, no those which were better adapted to peace by day or night: the crash of existing circumstances and the forward the stone, the twang of the bow, the movement of man. There are certain whizzing shaft, the jar of the trembling fundamental laws necessarily permanent mangonel from tower and turret, were and admitted by all communities, as the dismal music of Florence, not only there are certain moral and theological for hours and days, but months and truths acknowledged by all religions; years. Doors, windows, the jutting but these broad frames or outlines are galleries and roofs, were all defended, commonly filled up with a thick netand yet all unsafe: no spot was sacred, work of subordinate regulations, that no tenement secure in the dead of cover them like cobwebs, and often night, the most secret chambers, the very impede the march of improvement. hangings, even the nuptial bed itself, The Florentines were early aware of were often known to conceal an enemy. this, and therefore revised their laws and institutions more or less frequently and sometimes factiously, according to the turbulent or tranquil condition of the times; but in 1394, after forty years' omission, an officer was nominated for that purpose, but whether permanently or not is doubtful." "Florence in those days was studded with lofty towers; most of the noble families possessed one or more, at least two hundred feet in height, and many of them far above that altitude. These were their pride, their family citadels; and jealously guarded; glittering with arms and men, and instruments of war. Every connecting balcony was alive with soldiers; the battle raged above and below, within and without; stones rained in showers, arrows flew thick and fast on every side; the seraglj, or barricades, were attacked and defended by chosen bands armed with lances and boar-spears; foes were in ambush at every corner, watching the bold or heedless enemy; confusion was everywhere triumphant, a demon seemed to possess the community, and the public mind, reeling with hatred, was steady only in the pursuit of blood. Yet so accustomed did they at last become to this fiendish life, that one day they fought, the next caroused together in drunken gambols, foe with foe, boasting of their mutual prowess; nor was it until after nearly five years of reciprocal destruction, that, from mere lassitude, they finally ceased thus to mangle each other, and, as it were for relaxation, turned their fury on the neighbouring states." 147. Upon this subject Napier, Flor. Hist., II. 626, remarks: "A characteristic, and, if discreetly handled, a wise regulation of the Florentines, notwithstanding Dante's sarcasms, was the periodical revision of 34. The three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. 36. The four Cardinal Virtues, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. 44. John xii. 35: "Then Jesus said unto them, Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth." 70 In the Middle Ages the longing for rest and escape from danger, which found its expression in cloisters, is expressed in poetry by descriptions of flowery, secluded meadows, suggesting the classic meadows of Asphodel. Dante has given one already in the Inferno, "Now, almost in the opening of and gives another here. the Purgatory, as at the entrance of the Inferno, we find a company of great ones resting in a grassy place. But the idea of the grass now is very different. The word now used is not enamel,' but 'herb,' and instead of being merely green, it is covered with flowers of many colours. With the usual mediæval accuracy, Dante insists on telling us precisely what these colours were, and how bright; which he does by naming the actual pigments used in illumination.-‘Gold, and fine silver, and cochineal, and white lead, and Indian wood, serene and lucid, and fresh emerald, just broken, would have been excelled, as less is by greater, by the flowers and grass of the place.' It is evident that the 'emerald' here means the emerald green of the illuminators; for a fresh emerald is no brighter that one which is not fresh, and Dante was not one to throw away his words thus. Observe, then, we have here the idea of the growth, life, and variegation of the 'green herb,' as opposed to the smalto of the Inferno; but the colours of the variegation are illustrated and defined by the reference to actual pigments; and, observe, because the other colours are rather bright, the blue ground (Indian wood, indigo?) is sober; lucid, but serene; and presently two angels enter, who are dressed in the green drapery, but of a paler green than the grass, which Dante marks, by telling us that it was 'the green of leaves just budded.' "In all this, I wish the reader to observe two things: first, the general carefulness of the poet in defining colour, distinguishing it precisely as a painter would (opposed to the Greek carelessness about it); and, secondly, his regarding the grass for its greenness and variegation, rather than, as a Greek would have done, for its depth and freshness. This greenness or brightness, and variegation, are taken up by later and modern poets, as the things intended to be chiefly expressed by the word enamelled; and, gradually, the term is taken to indicate any kind of bright and interchangeable colouring; there being always this much of propriety about it, when used of greensward, that such sward is indeed, like enamel, a coat of bright colour on a comparatively dark ground; and is thus a sort of natural jewelry and painter's work, different from loose and large vegetation. The word is often awkwardly and falsely used, by the later poets, of all kinds of growth and colour; as by Milton of the flowers of Paradise showing themselves over its wall; but it retains, nevertheless, through all its jaded inanity, some halfunconscious vestige of the old sense, even to the present day." 82. The old church hymn attributed to Arminius or Hermann, Count of Vehringen, in the eleventh century, beginning : "Salve Regina, mater misericordiæ, Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.' 94. Rudolph of Hapsburg, first Emperor of the house of Austria. was crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1273. "It is related," says Voltaire, Annales de l'Empire, I. 303, "that, as the imperial sword, which they pretended was that of Charlemagne, could not be found, several lords made this defect in the formalities a pretext for not taking the oath of allegiance. He seized a crucifix; This is my sceptre, he said, and all paid homage to him. This single act of firmness made him respected, and the rest of his conduct showed him to be worthy of the Empire." He would not go to Rome to be crowned, and took so little interest in Italian affairs, that Italy became almost independent of the Empire, which seems greatly to disturb the mind of Dante. He died in 1291. of Kamberg in the middle of the Danube, under a tent whose curtains should be closed to spare him public mortification. Ottocar presented himself covered with gold and jewels; Rudolph, by way of superior pomp, received him in his simplest dress; and in the middle of the ceremony the curtains of the tent fell, and revealed to the eyes of the people and of the armies, that lined the Danube, the proud Ottocar on his knees, with his hands clasped in the hands of his conqueror, whom he had often called his maître d'hôtel, and whose Grand-Seneschal he now became. This story is accredited, and it is of little importance whether it be true or not.' But the wife was not quiet under this humiliation, and excited him to revolt against Rudolph. He was again overcome, and killed in battle in 1278. 66 101. This Winceslaus, says the Ottimo, was most beautiful among all men; but was not a man of arms; he was a meek and humble ecclesiastic, and did not live long." Why Dante accuses him of living in luxury and ease does not appear. 103. Philip the Third of France, surnamed the Bold (1270-1285). Having invaded Catalonia, in a war with Peter the Third of Aragon, both by land and sea, he was driven back, and died at Perpignan during the retreat. 104. He with the benign aspect, who rests his cheek upon his hand, is Henry of Navarre, surnamed the Fat, and brother of "Good King Thibault," Inf. XXII. 52. An old French chronicle quoted by Philalethes says, that, "though it is a general opinion that fat men are of a gentle and benign nature, nevertheless this one was very harsh." 109. Philip the Fourth of France, surnamed the Fair, son of Philip the Third, and son-in-law of Henry of Navarre (1285-1314). 100. Ottocar the Second, king of Bohemia, who is said to have refused the imperial crown. He likewise refused to pay homage to Rudolph, whom 112. Peter the Third of Aragon (1276he used to call his maître d'hôtel. de-128), the enemy of Charles of Anjou claring he had paid his wages and owed and competitor with him for the kinghim nothing. Whereupon Rudolph at-dom of Sicily. He is counted among tacked and subdued him. According to the Troubadours, and when Philip the Voltaire, Annales de l'Empire, I. 306, "he consented to pay homage to the Emperor as his liege-iord, in the island Bold invaded his kingdom, Peter launched a song against him, complaining that the "Hower-de-luce kept |