Chapter 5.VI. The Fall of the Temple
It was as a thunderbolt in a serene day—the reverse of the Tribune in the zenith of his power, in the abasement of his foe; when, with but a handful of brave Romans, determined to be free, he might have crushed for ever the antagonist power to the Roman liberties—have secured the rights of his country, and filled up the measure of his own renown. Such a reverse was the very mockery of Fate, who bore him through disaster, to abandon him in the sunniest noon of his prosperity.
The next morning not a soul was to be seen in the streets; the shops were shut—the churches closed; the city was as under an interdict. The awful curse of the papal excommunication upon the chief magistrate of the Pontifical City, seemed to freeze up all the arteries of life. The Legate himself, affecting fear of his life, had fled to Monte Fiascone, where he was joined by the Barons immediately after the publication of the edict. The curse worked best in the absence of the execrator.
Towards evening a few persons might be seen traversing the broad space of the Capitol, crossing themselves, as the bull, placarded on the Lion, met their eyes, and disappearing within the doors of the great palace. By and by, a few anxious groups collected in the streets, but they soon dispersed. It was a paralysis of all intercourse and commune. That spiritual and unarmed authority, which, like the invisible hand of God, desolated the market-place, and humbled the crowned head, no physical force could rally against or resist. Yet, through the universal awe, one conviction touched the multitude—it was for them that their Tribune was thus blasted in the midst of his glories! The words of the Brand recorded against him on wall and column detailed his offences:—rebellion in asserting the liberties of Rome—heresy in purifying ecclesiastical abuses;—and, to serve for a miserable covert to the rest, it was sacrilege for bathing in the porphyry vase of Constantine! They felt the conviction; they sighed—they shuddered—and, in his vast palace, save a few attached and devoted hearts, the Tribune was alone!
The staunchest of his Tuscan soldiery were gone with Irene. The rest of his force, save a few remaining guards, was the paid Roman militia, composed of citizens; who, long discontented by the delay of their stipends, now seized on the excuse of the excommunication to remain passive, but grumbling, in their homes.
On the third day, a new incident broke upon the death-like lethargy of the city; a hundred and fifty mercenaries, with Pepin of Minorbino, a Neapolitan, half noble, half bandit, (a creature of Montreal’s) at their head, entered the city, seized upon the fortresses of the Colonna, and sent a herald through the city, proclaiming in the name of the Cardinal Legate, the reward of ten thousand florins for the head of Cola di Rienzi.
Then, swelled on high, shrill but not inspiring as of old, the great bell of the Capitol—the people, listless, disheartened, awed by the spiritual fear of the papal authority, (yet greater, in such events, since the removal of the see,) came unarmed to the Capitol; and there, by the Place of the Lion, stood the Tribune. His squires, below the step, held his war-horse, his helm, and the same battle-axe which had blazed in the van of victorious war.
Beside him were a few of his guard, his attendants, and two or three of the principal citizens.
He stood bareheaded and erect, gazing upon the abashed and unarmed crowd with a look of bitter scorn, mingled with deep compassion; and, as the bell ceased its toll, and the throng remained hushed and listening, he thus spoke:—
“Ye come, then, once again! Come ye as slaves or freemen? A handful of armed men are in your walls: will ye who chased from your gates the haughtiest knights—the most practised battle-men of Rome, succumb now to one hundred and fifty hirelings and strangers? Will ye arm for your Tribune? You are silent!—be it so. Will you arm for your own liberties—your own Rome? Silent still! By the saints that reign on the thrones of the heathen gods! are ye thus fallen from your birthright? Have you no arms for your own defence? Romans, hear me! Have I wronged you?—if so, by your hands let me die: and then, with knives yet reeking with my blood, go forward against the robber who is but the herald of your slavery; and I die honoured, grateful, and avenged. You weep! Great God! you weep! Ay, and I could weep, too—that I should live to speak of liberty in vain to Romans—Weep! is this an hour for tears? Weep now, and your tears shall ripen harvests of crime, and licence, and despotism, to come! Romans, arm! follow me at once to the Place of the Colonna: expel this ruffian—expel your enemy (no matter what afterwards you do to me):” he paused; no ardour was kindled by his words—“or,” he continued, “I abandon you to your fate.” There was a long, low, general murmur; at length it became shaped into speech, and many voices cried simultaneously: “The Pope’s bull!—Thou art a man accursed!”
“What!” cried the Tribune; “and is it ye who forsake me, ye for whose cause alone man dares to hurl against me the thunders of his God? Is it not for you that I am declared heretic and rebel! What are my imputed crimes? That I have made Rome and asserted Italy to be free; that I have subdued the proud Magnates, who were the scourge both of Pope and People. And you—you upbraid me with what I have dared and done for you! Men, with you I would have fought, for you I would have perished. You forsake yourselves in forsaking me, and since I no longer rule over brave men, I resign my power to the tyrant you prefer. Seven months I have ruled over you, prosperous in commerce, stainless in justice—victorious in the field:—I have shown you what Rome could be; and, since I abdicate the government ye gave me, when I am gone, strike for your own freedom! It matters nothing who is the chief of a brave and great people. Prove that Rome hath many a Rienzi, but of brighter fortunes.”
“I would he had not sought to tax us,” said Cecco del Vecchio, who was the very personification of the vulgar feeling: “and that he had beheaded the Barons!”
“Ay!” cried the ex-gravedigger; “but that blessed porphyry vase!”
“And why should we get our throats cut,” said Luigi, the butcher, “like my two brothers?—Heaven rest them!”
On the face of the general multitude there was a common expression of irresolution and shame, many wept and groaned, none (save the aforesaid grumblers) accused; none upbraided, but none seemed disposed to arm. It was one of those listless panics, those strange fits of indifference and lethargy which often seize upon a people who make liberty a matter of impulse and caprice, to whom it has become a catchword, who have not long enjoyed all its rational, and sound, and practical, and blessed results; who have been affrayed by the storms that herald its dawn;—a people such as is common to the south: such as even the north has known; such as, had Cromwell lived a year longer, even England might have seen; and, indeed, in some measure, such a reaction from popular enthusiasm to popular indifference England did see, when her children madly surrendered the fruits of a bloody war, without reserve, without foresight, to the lewd pensioner of Louis, and the royal murderer of Sydney. To such prostration of soul, such blindness of intellect, even the noblest people will be subjected, when liberty, which should be the growth of ages, spreading its roots through the strata of a thousand customs, is raised, the exotic of an hour, and (like the Tree and Dryad of ancient fable) flourishes and withers with the single spirit that protects it.
“Oh, Heaven, that I were a man!” exclaimed Angelo, who stood behind Rienzi.
“Hear him, hear the boy,” cried the Tribune; “out of the mouths of babes speaketh wisdom! He wishes that he were a man, as ye are men, that he might do as ye should do. Mark me,—I ride with these faithful few through the quarter of the Colonna, before the fortress of your foe. Three times before that fortress shall my trumpets sound; if at the third blast ye come not, armed as befits ye—I say not all, but three, but two, but one hundred of ye—I break up my wand of office, and the world shall say one hundred and fifty robbers quelled the soul of Rome, and crushed her magistrate and her laws!”
With those words he descended the stairs, and mounted his charger; the populace gave way in silence, and their Tribune and his slender train passed slowly on, and gradually vanished from the view of the increasing crowd.
The Romans remained on the place, and after a pause, the demagogue Baroncelli, who saw an opening to his ambition, addressed them. Though not an eloquent nor gifted man, he had the art of uttering the most popular commonplaces. And he knew the weak side of his audience, in their vanity, indolence, and arrogant pride.
“Look you, my masters,” said he, leaping up to the Place of the Lion; “the Tribune talks bravely—he always did—but the monkey used the cat for his chestnuts; he wants to thrust your paws into the fire; you will not be so silly as to let him. The saints bless us! but the Tribune, good man, gets a palace and has banquets, and bathes in a porphyry vase; the more shame on him!—in which San Sylvester christened the Emperor Constantine: all this is worth fighting for; but you, my masters, what do you get except hard blows, and a stare at a holyday spectacle? Why, if you beat these fellows, you will have another tax on the wine: that will be your reward!”
“Hark!” cried Cecco, “there sounds the trumpet,—a pity he wanted to tax us!”
“True,” cried Baroncelli, “there sounds the trumpet; a silver trumpet, by the Lord! Next week, if you help him out of the scrape, he’ll have a golden one. But go—why don’t you move, my friends?—‘tis but one hundred and fifty mercenaries. True, they are devils to fight, clad in armour from top to toe; but what then?—if they do cut some four or five hundred throats you’ll beat them at last, and the Tribune will sup the merrier.”
“There sounds the second blast,” said the butcher. “If my old mother had not lost two of us already, ‘tis odds, but I’d strike a blow for the bold Tribune.”
“You had better put more quicksilver in you,” continued Baroncelli, “or you will be too late. And what a pity that will be!—If you believe the Tribune, he is the only man that can save Rome. What, you, the finest people in the world—you, not able to save yourselves!—you, bound up with one man—you, not able to dictate to the Colonna and Orsini! Why, who beat the Barons at San Lorenzo? Was it not you? Ah! you got the buffets, and the Tribune the moneta! Tush, my friends, let the man go; I warrant there are plenty as good as he to be bought a cheaper bargain. And, hark! there is the third blast; it is too late now!”
As the trumpet from the distance sent forth its long and melancholy note, it was as the last warning of the parting genius of the place; and when silence swallowed up the sound, a gloom fell over the whole assembly. They began to regret, to repent, when regret and repentance availed no more. The buffoonery of Baroncelli became suddenly displeasing; and the orator had the mortification of seeing his audience disperse in all directions, just as he was about to inform them what great things he himself could do in their behalf.
Meanwhile the Tribune, passing unscathed through the dangerous quarter of the enemy, who, dismayed at his approach, shrunk within their fortress, proceeded to the Castle of St. Angelo, whither Nina had already preceded him; and which he entered to find that proud lady with a smile for his safety,—without a tear for his reverse.
Chapter 5.VII. The Successors of an Unsuccessful Revolution—Who is to
Blame—the Forsaken one or the Forsakers?
Cheerfully broke the winter sun over the streets of Rome, as the army of the Barons swept along them. The Cardinal Legate at the head; the old Colonna (no longer haughty and erect, but bowed, and broken-hearted at the loss of his sons) at his right hand;—the sleek smile of Luca Savelli—the black frown of Rinaldo Orsini, were seen close behind. A long but barbarous array it was; made up chiefly of foreign hirelings; nor did the procession resemble the return of exiled citizens, but the march of invading foes.
“My Lord Colonna,” said the Cardinal Legate, a small withered man, by birth a Frenchman, and full of the bitterest prejudices against the Romans, who had in a former mission very ill received him, as was their wont with foreign ecclesiastics; “this Pepin, whom Montreal has deputed at your orders, hath done us indeed good service.”
The old Lord bowed, but made no answer. His strong intellect was already broken, and there was dotage in his glassy eye. The Cardinal muttered, “He hears me not; sorrow hath brought him to second childhood!” and looking back, motioned to Luca Savelli to approach.
“Luca,” said the Legate, “it was fortunate that the Hungarian’s black banner detained the Provencal at Aversa. Had he entered Rome, we might have found Rienzi’s successor worse than the Tribune himself. Montreal,” he added, with a slight emphasis and a curled lip, “is a gentleman, and a Frenchman. This Pepin, who is his delegate, we must bribe, or menace to our will.”
“Assuredly,” answered Savelli, “it is not a difficult task: for Montreal calculated on a more stubborn contest, which he himself would have found leisure to close—”
“As Podesta, or Prince of Rome! the modest man! We Frenchmen have a due sense of our own merits; but this sudden victory surprises him as it doth us, Luca; and we shall wrest the prey from Pepin, ere Montreal can come to his help! But Rienzi must die. He is still, I hear, shut up in St. Angelo. The Orsini shall storm him there ere the day be much older. Today we possess the Capitol—annul all the rebel’s laws—break up his ridiculous parliament, and put all the government of the city under three senators—Rinaldo Orsini, Colonna, and myself; you, my Lord, I trust, we shall fitly provide for.”
“Oh! I am rewarded enough by returning to my palace; and a descent on the Jewellers’ quarter will soon build up its fortifications. Luca Savelli is not an ambitious man. He wants but to live in peace.”
The Cardinal smiled sourly, and took the turn towards the Capitol.
In the front space the usual gapers were assembled. “Make way! make way! knaves!” cried the guards, trampling on either side the crowd, who, accustomed to the sedate and courteous order of Rienzi’s guard, fell back too slowly for many of them to escape severe injury from the pikes of the soldiers and the hoofs of the horses. Our friend, Luigi, the butcher, was one of these, and the surliness of the Roman blood was past boiling heat when he received in his ample stomach the blunt end of a German’s pike. “There, Roman,” said the rude mercenary, in his barbarous attempt at Italian, “make way for your betters; you have had enough crowds and shows of late, in all conscience.”
“Betters!” gulped out the poor butcher; “a Roman has no betters; and if I had not lost two brothers by San Lorenzo, I would—”
“The dog is mutinous,” said one of the followers of the Orsini, succeeding the German who had passed on, “and talks of San Lorenzo!”
“Oh!” said another Orsinist, who rode abreast, “I remember him of old. He was one of Rienzi’s gang.”
“Was he?” said the other, sternly; “then we cannot begin salutary examples too soon;” and, offended at something swaggering and insolent in the butcher’s look, the Orsinist coolly thrust him through the heart with his pike, and rode on over his body.
“Shame! Shame!” “Murder! Murder!” cried the crowd: and they began to press, in the passion of the moment, round the fierce guards.
The Legate heard the cry, and saw the rush: he turned pale. “The rascals rebel again!” he faltered.
“No, your Eminence—no,” said Luca; “but it may be as well to infuse a wholesome terror; they are all unarmed; let me bid the guards disperse them. A word will do it.”
The Cardinal assented; the word was given; and, in a few minutes, the soldiery, who still smarted under the vindictive memory of defeat from an undisciplined multitude, scattered the crowd down the streets without scruple or mercy—riding over some, spearing others—filling the air with shrieks and yells, and strewing the ground with almost as many men as a few days before would have sufficed to have guarded Rome, and preserved the constitution! Through this wild, tumultuous scene, and over the bodies of its victims, rode the Legate and his train, to receive in the Hall of the Capitol the allegiance of the citizens, and to proclaim the return of the oppressors.
As they dismounted at the stairs, a placard in large letters struck the eye of the Legate. It was placed upon the pedestal of the Lion of Basalt, covering the very place that had been occupied by the bull of excommunication. The words were few, and ran thus:
“TREMBLE! RIENZI SHALL RETURN!”
“How! what means this mummery!” cried the Legate, trembling already, and looking round to the nobles.
“Please your Eminence,” said one of the councillors, who had come from the Capitol to meet the Legate, “we saw it at daybreak, the ink yet moist, as we entered the Hall. We deemed it best to leave it for your Eminence to deal with.”
“You deemed! Who are you, then?”
“One of the members of the Council, your Eminence, and a stanch opponent of the Tribune, as is well known, when he wanted the new tax—”
“Council—trash! No more councils now! Order is restored at last. The Orsini and the Colonna will look to you in future. Resist a tax, did you? Well, that was right when proposed by a tyrant; but I warn you, friend, to take care how you resist the tax we shall impose. Happy if your city can buy its peace with the Church on any terms:—and his Holiness is short of the florins.”
The discomfited councillor shrank back.
“Tear off yon insolent placard. Nay, hold! fix over it our proclamation of ten thousand florins for the heretic’s head! Ten thousand? methinks that is too much now—we will alter the cipher. Meanwhile Rinaldo Orsini, Lord Senator, march thy soldiers to St. Angelo; let us see if the heretic can stand a siege.”
“It needs not, your Eminence,” said the councillor, again officiously bustling up; “St. Angelo is surrendered. The Tribune, his wife, and one page, escaped last night, it is said, in disguise.”
“Ha!” said the old Colonna, whose dulled sense had at length arrived at the conclusion that something extraordinary arrested the progress of his friends. “What is the matter? What is that placard? Will no one tell me the words? My old eyes are dim.”
As he uttered the questions, in the shrill and piercing treble of age, a voice replied in a loud and deep tone—none knew whence it came; the crowd was reduced to a few stragglers, chiefly friars in cowl and serge, whose curiosity nought could daunt, and whose garb ensured them safety—the soldiers closed the rear: a voice, I say, came, startling the colour from many a cheek—in answer to the Colonna, saying:
“TREMBLE! RIENZI SHALL RETURN!”
BOOK VI. THE PLAGUE
“Erano gli anni della fruttifera Incarnazione del Figliuolo di Dio al numero pervenuti di mille trecento quarant’otto, quando nell’ egregia citta di Fiorenza oltre ad ogni altra Italica bellissima, pervenna la mortifera pestilenza.”– Boccaccio, “Introduzione al Decamerone”.
“The years of the fructiferous incarnation of the Son of God had reached the number of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, when into the illustrious city of Florence, beautiful beyond every other in Italy, entered the death- fraught pestilence.”– “Introduction to the Decameron”.
Chapter 6.1. The Retreat of the Lover
By the borders of one of the fairest lakes of Northern Italy stood the favourite mansion of Adrian di Castello, to which in his softer and less patriotic moments his imagination had often and fondly turned; and thither the young nobleman, dismissing his more courtly and distinguished companions in the Neapolitan embassy, retired after his ill-starred return to Rome. Most of those thus dismissed joined the Barons; the young Annibaldi, whose daring and ambitious nature had attached him strongly to the Tribune, maintained a neutral ground; he betook himself to his castle in the Campagna, and did not return to Rome till the expulsion of Rienzi.
The retreat of Irene’s lover was one well fitted to feed his melancholy reveries. Without being absolutely a fortress, it was sufficiently strong to resist any assault of the mountain robbers or petty tyrants in the vicinity; while, built by some former lord from the materials of the half-ruined villas of the ancient Romans, its marbled columns and tesselated pavements relieved with a wild grace the grey stone walls and massive towers of feudal masonry. Rising from a green eminence gently sloping to the lake, the stately pile cast its shadow far and dark over the beautiful waters; by its side, from the high and wooded mountains on the background, broke a waterfall, in irregular and sinuous course—now hid by the foliage, now gleaming in the light, and collecting itself at last in a broad basin—beside which a little fountain, inscribed with half-obliterated letters, attested the departed elegance of the classic age—some memento of lord and poet whose very names were lost; thence descending through mosses and lichen, and odorous herbs, a brief, sheeted stream bore its surplus into the lake. And there, amidst the sturdier and bolder foliage of the North, grew, wild and picturesque, many a tree transplanted, in ages back, from the sunnier East; not blighted nor stunted in that golden clime, which fosters almost every produce of nature as with a mother’s care. The place was remote and solitary. The roads that conducted to it from the distant towns were tangled, intricate, mountainous, and beset by robbers. A few cottages, and a small convent, a quarter of a league up the verdant margin, were the nearest habitations; and, save by some occasional pilgrim or some bewildered traveller, the loneliness of the mansion was rarely invaded. It was precisely the spot which proffered rest to a man weary of the world, and indulged the memories which grow in rank luxuriance over the wrecks of passion. And he whose mind, at once gentle and self-dependent, can endure solitude, might have ransacked all earth for a more fair and undisturbed retreat.
But not to such a solitude had the earlier dreams of Adrian dedicated the place. Here had he thought—should one bright being have presided—here should love have found its haven: and hither, when love at length admitted of intrusion, hither might wealth and congenial culture have invited all the gentler and better spirits which had begun to move over the troubled face of Italy, promising a second and younger empire of poesy, and lore, and art. To the graceful and romantic but somewhat pensive and inert, temperament of the young noble, more adapted to calm and civilized than stormy and barbarous times, ambition proffered no reward so grateful as lettered leisure and intellectual repose. His youth coloured by the influence of Petrarch, his manhood had dreamed of a happier Vaucluse not untenanted by a Laura. The visions which had connected the scene with the image of Irene made the place still haunted by her shade; and time and absence only ministering to his impassioned meditations, deepened his melancholy and increased his love.
In this lone retreat—which even in describing from memory, for these eyes have seen, these feet have trodden, this heart yet yearneth for, the spot—which even, I say, in thus describing, seems to me (and haply also to the gentle reader) a grateful and welcome transit from the storms of action and the vicissitudes of ambition, so long engrossing the narrative;—in this lone retreat Adrian passed the winter, which visits with so mild a change that intoxicating clime. The roar of the world without was borne but in faint and indistinct murmurings to his ear. He learned only imperfectly, and with many contradictions, the news which broke like a thunderbolt over Italy, that the singular and aspiring man—himself a revolution—who had excited the interest of all Europe, the brightest hopes of the enthusiastic, the profusest adulation of the great, the deepest terror of the despot, the wildest aspirations of all free spirits, had been suddenly stricken from his state, his name branded and his head proscribed. This event, which happened at the end of December, reached Adrian, through a wandering pilgrim, at the commencement of March, somewhat more than two months after the date; the March of that awful year 1348, which saw Europe, and Italy especially, desolated by the direst pestilence which history has recorded, accursed alike by the numbers and the celebrity of its victims, and yet strangely connected with some not unpleasing images by the grace of Boccaccio and the eloquence of Petrarch.
The pilgrim who informed Adrian of the revolution at Rome was unable to give him any clue to the present fate of Rienzi or his family. It was only known that the Tribune and his wife had escaped, none knew whither; many guessed that they were already dead, victims to the numerous robbers who immediately on the fall of the Tribune settled back to their former habits, sparing neither age nor sex, wealth nor poverty. As all relating to the ex-Tribune was matter of eager interest, the pilgrim had also learned that, previous to the fall of Rienzi, his sister had left Rome, but it was not known to what place she had been conveyed.
The news utterly roused Adrian from his dreaming life. Irene was then in the condition his letter dared to picture—severed from her brother, fallen from her rank, desolate and friendless. “Now,” said the generous and high-hearted lover, “she may be mine without a disgrace to my name. Whatever Rienzi’s faults, she is not implicated in them. Her hands are not red with my kinsman’s blood; nor can men say that Adrian di Castello allies himself with a House whose power is built upon the ruins of the Colonnas. The Colonna are restored—again triumphant—Rienzi is nothing—distress and misfortune unite me at once to her on whom they fall!”
But how were these romantic resolutions to be executed—Irene’s dwelling-place unknown? He resolved himself to repair to Rome and make the necessary inquiries: accordingly he summoned his retainers:—blithe tidings to them, those of travel! The mail left the armoury—the banner the hall—and after two days of animated bustle, the fountain by which Adrian had passed so many hours of revery was haunted only by the birds of the returning spring; and the nightly lamp no longer cast its solitary ray from his turret chamber over the bosom of the deserted lake.