Man of Genius — CHAPTER IV. Part 2. POLITICAL AND RELIGIOS LUNATICS AND MATTOIDS. Francis of Assisi, Luther, Savonarola, Cola da Rienzi.

Analogous phenomena may be observed in the lives of George Fox and the early Quakers.

[386] _Francis of Assisi.

_[387]--The son of a religious woman, Francis of Assisi was forced to devote himself to business after receiving only the elements of education from the priests of S. Giorgio.

Being rich, and able to spend money as he pleased, he became the life and soul of the joyous companies of young men, whose custom it was to go about the city by day and night, singing and diverting themselves.

He seemed to be the son of a great prince rather than of a merchant.

The citizens of Assisi called him “the flower of youths,” and his companions deferred to him as to their leader.

He excelled in singing, his biographers praise his sweet and powerful voice; and he was also dexterous in feats of arms.

When taken prisoner, in a skirmish between the burghers of Perugia and those of Assisi, he encouraged his companions in prison, and exhorted them to cheerfulness both by word and example.

His naturally refined and noble disposition was shown both in his person and manners, and in a liberality which delighted in giving to the poor.

It is said that, in his twenty-fourth year, a severe illness confined him for a long time to his bed.

At the beginning of his convalescence, he left the house, leaning on a stick, and stood still to gaze at the beautiful country which surrounds Assisi, but could find no pleasure in it, as he had once done.

From that day forward, he was sad and thoughtful.

He often left his companions, and retired to a cave, where he spent hours in meditation.

In order to relieve his sufferings, he had recourse to prayer, and prayed so fervently that one day he thought he saw before him Christ nailed to the cross, and felt “the passion of Christ impressed even upon his bowels, upon the very marrow of his bones, so that he could not keep his thoughts fixed upon it without being overflowed with grief.

” He was then seen wandering about the fields with his face bathed in tears; and when asked whether he felt ill, he replied, “I am weeping for the passion of my Lord Jesus.

” His friends said to him, “Think of choosing a wife,” and he replied, “Yes, I am thinking of a lady--of the noblest, the richest, the most beautiful, that was ever seen!

” Who was the lady of his thoughts, he revealed on the day when, laying aside the dress of his rank, he threw a beggar’s mantle over his shoulders, to the unbounded anger of his father, who in vain tried to imprison him, and to the great scandal of every one.

By many, we read in the _Fioretti_, he was thought a fool; and as a madman he was mocked and driven away with stones, by his relations and by strangers; and he suffered patiently all mockery and harsh treatment, as though he had been deaf and dumb.

Francis of Assisi, however, was original and great, not through those qualities which he had in common with the vulgar herd of ascetics--abstinences, mortifications, prayers, ecstasies, visions--but on account of something which was, without his knowing it, the very negation of asceticism--the affirmation and the triumph of the gentlest and sweetest feelings of humanity.

The ascetic abhorred, condemned, and fled from nature, life, all human affections, in order to steep himself in solitary contemplation: Francis, by example and precept, preached the love of nature, concord, mutual affection between human beings, and work.

The ascetic called everything beautiful in the world the work of Satan: Francis brought about a true revolution by calling it the work of God, praising and thanking God for it.

It was a new kind of loving and passionate Pantheism which inspired him with the _Song of the Sun_, in which all creatures, animate and inanimate, are joined in fraternal embrace, in which the beautiful and radiant sun, the bright and precious moon and stars, the wind, the clouds, the clear sky--water, “useful, humble, precious, and chaste,”--fire, shining, joyous, “hardy and strong,” Mother Earth, who sustains and feeds us, together with man, who up to that time had been taught to despise everything that might distract him from the selfish thought of his fate in the next world--all these are called upon to sing the glory of the Lord _who is good_, to bless Him for having made the universe so rich, varied, and beautiful, so worthy to be loved.

[388] If we think of this bold and far-reaching change, we shall no longer smile in reading the _Song_; remembering, too, that it was the first attempt made by the Italian people to express their religious feelings in the vulgar tongue.

For such a song to burst from the impassioned heart of Francis, the germs of universal love which he cherished there must already have come to perfect growth.

He must have freed himself entirely from the ancient terror, which, in the common superstitious belief, peopled woods, mountains, air and water, with hidden enemies.

As also, in order to bring men back to mutual love, in an age when “those whom one wall and one ditch confined, gnawed one another,” he had, through the natural tendency to extremes, to include, not only Brother Sun and Sister Moon, but even Brother Wolf.

Having composed the _Song_, Francis was so well pleased with it that he adapted to it a musical melody, taught it to his disciples, and thought of choosing among his followers some who should go about the world singing the praises of God, and “asking, as their only recompense that their listeners should repent, should call themselves just ‘God’s jesters’--_Joculatores Domini_.

” Thus he gave the first and most vigorous impulse to religious poetry in the vulgar tongue.

_Luther.

_--Luther[389] attributed his physical pains and his dreams to the arts of the devil, though all those of which he has left us a description are clearly due to nervous phenomena.

He often suffered, _e.

g. _, from an anguish which nothing could lighten, caused, according to him, by the anger of an offended God.

At 27, he began to be seized with attacks of giddiness, accompanied by headaches and noises in the ears, which returned at the ages of 32, 38, 40, and 52, especially when he was on a journey.

At thirty-eight, moreover, he had a real hallucination, perhaps favoured by excessive solitude.

“When, in 1521,” he writes, “I was in my Patmos, in a room which was entered by no one except two pages who brought me my food, I heard, one evening, after I was in bed, nuts moving inside a sack, and flying of themselves against the ceiling and all round my bed.

Scarcely had I gone to sleep, when I heard a tremendous noise, as if many berries were being thrown over; I rose, and cried, ‘Who art thou?

’ commended myself to Christ,” &c. In the church at Wittenberg, he had just begun explaining the Epistle to the Romans, and had reached the words, “The just shall live by faith,” when he felt these ideas penetrate his mind, and heard that sentence repeated aloud several times in his ear.

In 1507, he heard the same words when on his journey to Rome, and again in a voice of thunder, as he was dragging himself up the steps of the Scala Santa.

“Not seldom,” he confesses, “has it happened to me to awake about midnight, and dispute with Satan concerning the Mass,” and he details the many arguments adduced by the Devil.

_Savonarola.

_--But the illustration in every respect most apposite (if it did not seem almost a national blasphemy to say so) is that offered us by Savonarola.

Under the influence of a vision, he believed himself, even from his youth, sent by Christ to redeem the country from its corruption.

One day, while speaking to a nun, it seemed to him that heaven suddenly opened; and he saw in a vision the calamities of the Church, and heard a voice commanding him to announce them to the people.

The visions of the Apocalypse and of the Old Testament prophets passed in review before him.

In 1491 he wished to leave off treating of politics in his sermons.

“I watched all Saturday, and the whole night, but at daybreak, while I was praying, I heard a voice say, ‘Fool, dost thou not see that God will have thee go on in the same way?

’” In 1492, while preaching during Advent, he had a vision of a sword, on which was written, “_Gladius Domini super terram_.

” Suddenly, the sword turned towards the earth, the air was darkened, there was a rain of swords, arrows, and fire, and the earth became a prey to famine and pestilence.

From this moment, he began to predict the pestilence which, in fact, afterwards came to pass.

In another vision, becoming ambassador to Christ, he makes a long journey to Paradise, and there holds discourse with many saints and with the Virgin, whose throne he describes, not forgetting the number of the precious stones with which it is adorned.

[390] We shall see how a similar scene was described by Lazzaretti.

Savonarola was continually meditating on his dreams; and he tried to distinguish which among his visions were produced by angels, and which were the work of demons.

Scarcely ever is he touched by a misgiving that he may possibly be in error.

In one of his dialogues he declares that “to feign one’s self a prophet in order to persuade others, would be like making God Himself an impostor.

Might it not be,” continues the objector, “that you were deceiving yourself?

No,” is the reply, “I worship God--I seek to follow in His footsteps; it cannot be that God should deceive me.

”[391] Yet, with the contradiction peculiar to unhinged minds, he had written a short time before, “I am not a prophet, neither the son of a prophet; it is your sins that make me a prophet perforce.

” Moreover, in one page he says that his prophetic illumination is independent of grace, whereas, a few pages back, he had declared that the two were one and the same thing.

Villari justly remarks that “this is the singularity of his character, that a man who had given to Florence the best form of republic, who dominated an entire people, who filled the world with his eloquence and had been the greatest of philosophers--should make it his boast that he heard voices in the air, and saw the sword of the Lord!

” “But,” as the same author well concludes, “the very puerility of his visions proves that he was the victim of hallucinations; and a still stronger proof is their uselessness, even hurtfulness, as far as he himself was concerned.

“What need was there, if he wished to cheat the masses, to write treatises on his visions, to speak of them to his mother, to write reflections on them on the margins of his Bible?

Those things which his admirers would have been most eager to hide, those which the simplest intelligence would never have allowed to get into print, these very productions he continued to publish and republish.

The truth is that, as he often confessed, he felt an inward fire burning in his bones, and forcing him to speak; and as he was himself swept away by the force of that ecstatic delirium, so he succeeded in carrying with him his audience, who were moved by his words in a way we find it hard to understand when we compare the impression produced with the text of the sermons themselves.

” This helps us to understand how--exactly in the same manner as Lazzaretti--he propagated his divine madness among the people, not only epidemically, by the contagion of ideas, but producing actual insanity in persons, who, being nearly or quite without education, preached and wrote extempore in consequence of their madness.

Thus Domenico Cecchi[392] was the author of a work entitled _Sacred Reform_, which contains the very just suggestions of relieving the Great Council from minor business, taxing church property, imposing a single tax, and creating a militia, also that of fixing the amount of girls’ dowries.

In his preface, he writes: “I set myself with my fancy to make such a work, and I can make no other, and by day and night methinks I have made such efforts that I might call them miraculous; but it has come to pass that I myself stand amazed thereat.

” A certain Giovanni, a Florentine tailor, seized with morbid enthusiasm, wrote _terzine_ in which he extolled the future glories of Florence, and produced verses worthy of Lazzaretti,[393] and prophecies like the following, “Yet it must needs be that the Pisan shall descend, with irons on his feet, into the sewer, since he has been the cause of so much woe.

” If I were asked whether, in our asylums, we often meet with types analogous to these, I should reply that there is, perhaps, not an asylum in Italy which has not received one of these strange lunatics.

_Cola da Rienzi.

_--In 1330, Rome was sinking into chaos.

Historians have left us an appalling picture of the disorders of the time, the absence of any regular government, and the lawless tyranny of the robber barons.

The general conditions of the age were favourable to popular movements.

King Robert, the protector of the barons was dead; and Todi (1337), Genoa (under Adorno, in 1367), and Florence (1363), had initiated a democratic _régime_, which ushered in the terrible _Ciompi_ revolution of 1378. A premature thrill of revolt ran through Europe, and was felt even in feudal and monarchical France, where the movement was organized, for a short time, at Paris, under Marcel.

[394] Under these circumstances, Cola--a young man, born in the Tiber district, in 1313, the son of an innkeeper and a washerwoman, or water-seller, who though at first little better than a field-labourer, had studied as a notary, and acquired a considerable knowledge of the history and antiquities of his country--saw his brother murdered by the wretches who formed the government, or rather the misgovernment of Rome.

Then he--who, as the anonymous historian tells us, always had “a fantastic smile” on his lips, and already, when meditating on ancient books and the ruins of Rome, had often wept, exclaiming, “Where are the good Romans of the old time?

Where is their justice?

”--was seized, as he afterwards acknowledged,[395] by an irresistible impulse to put into action the ideas which he had acquired from books.

In his capacity of notary, he devoted himself to the protection of minors and widows, and assumed the curious title of their Consul, just as there were, in his time, consuls of the carpenters, cloth-workers, and other guilds.

In 1343, in one of the numerous small revolutions of the period, the people had attempted to overthrow the Senate, creating the government of the Thirteen, under the papal authority.

On that occasion, Cola was sent as spokesman of the people, to Avignon, where he vividly depicted the evils prevalent in Rome, and, by his bold and powerful eloquence, amazed and won over the cool-headed prelates, from whom he attained the appointment of notary to the Urban Chamber, in 1344. On his return to Rome, he continued to exercise this office with exaggerated zeal, and got himself called Consul no longer _of the widows_, but _of Rome_.

He excelled others in courtesy, was also inflexible in the administration of justice, and never failed to involve himself in long harangues against those whom he called the dogs of the Capitol.

One day, in a moment of exaggerated fanaticism, he cried to the barons, in full assembly, “Ye are evil citizens--ye who suck the blood of the people.

” And, turning to the officials and governors, he warned them that it was their place to provide for the good of the State.

The result of this was a tremendous buffet dealt him by a chamberlain of the House of Colonna.

He then took matters more calmly, and began to depict the former glories and present miseries of Rome, by means of paintings, in which the homicides, adulterers, and other criminals were represented by apes and cats, the corrupt judges and notaries by foxes, and the senators and nobles by wolves and bears.

On another day, he exhibited the famous table of Vespasian, and invited the public, including the nobles, to a dramatic explanation of it.

He appeared, arrayed in a German cloak with a white hood, and a hat also white and surrounded by many crowns, one of which was divided in the midst by a small silver sword.

The interpretation of these grotesque symbols, which already indicate his madness (the continual use of such being, as already stated, characteristic of monomaniacs, till they end by sacrificing to their passion for symbols the very evidence of the things which they wish to represent), is unknown.

Thus, applying--somewhat after his own fashion--the decree of the Senate which granted to Vespasian the right of making laws at his pleasure, of increasing or diminishing _the gardens of Rome and of Italy_ (if he had been a scholar, he would have said the area of the Roman district), and of making and unmaking kings, he called on them to consider into what a state they had fallen.

“Remember that the jubilee is approaching, and that you have made no provision of food or other necessaries.

Put an end to your quarrels,” &c. But along with these, he delivered other discourses which were, to say the least, eccentric; _e.

g. _, “I know that men wish to find a crime in my speeches, and that out of envy; but, thanks to heaven, three things consume my enemies--luxury, envy, and fire.

”[396] These two last words were greatly applauded; I do not understand them, however, especially the last.

I believe that they were applauded, precisely because the audience did not understand them, as happens to many street orators, with whom resonant and meaningless words supply the place of ideas, and are even greeted with greater enthusiasm.

The fact is, that, among the upper classes, he passed for one of those persons of unsound mind who were then in great request for the amusement of society.

[397] The nobles, especially the Colonna, disputed the pleasure of his company with each other, and he would tell them of the glories of his future government.

“And when I am king or emperor, I will make war on all of you.

I will have such an one hanged, and such another beheaded.

” He spared none of them, and mentioned them by name, one by one, to their faces; and, all the time, both to nobles and commons, he continued to speak of the good state, and of how he was going to restore it.

Here I insert a parenthesis.

It has been said (by Petrarch in particular) that he feigned madness, and was a second Brutus; but when we see his love for pomp, luxury, strange symbols, and garments, gradually increasing as he advanced in his political career, and after his rise to power, we no longer have any doubt as to the reality of his madness.

He continued to put forth new symbolical pictures, among others one with this inscription: “_The day of justice is coming--Await this moment_.

” Be it noted that this picture represented a dove bringing a crown of myrtle to a little bird.

The dove stood for the Holy Spirit (as we shall see, one of the favourite objects of his delirium) and the bird was himself, who was to crown Rome with glory.

At last, on the first day of Lent, 1347, he affixed to the door of San Giorgio another placard: “_Before long, the good State of Rome shall be restored_.

” Not being feared by the nobles, who thought him mad, he was able to conspire secretly, or rather to keep up the ferment of public opinion, by taking apart, gradually, one by one, the men who seemed to him best adapted for the purpose, and assigning them their posts on Mount Aventine, towards the end of April, on a day when the governor was to be absent.

In this assembly, the only one which, up to that time, had been held in secret, the mode of bringing about the Good State was deliberated on.

Here he showed the eloquence of a man who speaks from conviction, and of things which are too true not to produce a deep impression.

He described the discord of the great, the debasement of the poor, the armed men roaming about in quest of plunder, wives dragged from their marriage-beds, pilgrims murdered at the gates, priests drowned in sensual orgies, no strength or wisdom among those who held the reigns of power.

From the nobles there was everything to fear and nothing to hope.

Where were they, in the midst of all these disorders?

They were leaving Rome, to enjoy a holiday on their estates, while everything was going to wreck and ruin in the city.

As the members of the popular party were hesitating for want of funds, he gave them a hint that these might be obtained from the revenues of the Apostolic Chamber, reckoning 10,000 florins for the tax on salt alone, 100,000 for the hearth-tax, figures which Sismondi (chapter xxxviii.

) declares to be absolutely erroneous.

He also gave them to understand that he was acting in accordance with the wishes of the Pope (_which was false_), and that he was able with the consent of the latter, to seize upon the revenues of the Holy See.

On May 18, 1347, in Colonna’s absence, he had proclamation made through the streets, by sound of trumpet, that all citizens were to assemble in the night of the day following, in the church of Sant’ Angelo, to take measures for the establishment of the Good State.

On the 19th, Rienzi was present at the meeting, in armour, guarded by a hundred armed men, and accompanied by the Papal Vicar, and by three standards covered with the most extraordinary symbols--one of them representing Liberty, one Justice, and one Peace.

Among the measures which he caused to be adopted by this improvised assembly were some which would be well suited to our own times; the following, for instance:-- All lawsuits were to be terminated within fifteen days.

The Apostolic Chamber was to provide for the support of widows and orphans.

Every district of Rome was to have a public granary.

If a Roman were killed in the service of his country, his heirs to receive a hundred _lire_ if he were a foot soldier, and a hundred _florins_ if a horseman.

The garrisons of cities and fortresses to be formed of men chosen from among the Roman people.

Every accuser who could not make good his accusation, to be subject to the penalty which his victim would have incurred.

The houses of the condemned not to be destroyed (as was then the case in all communities), but to become the property of the municipality.

Cola received from this popular assembly entire lordship over the city;

he associated the Papal Vicar with himself as a harmless assistant, entitled himself Tribune, and performed an actual miracle in restoring peace where there had been chaos.

He saw the proud barons--even the rebellious and powerful prefect of Vico--prostrate at his feet.

He executed severe justice upon the most powerful nobles as well as the populace.

Members of the Orsini, Savelli, and Gaetani families were hanged by him, for violation of the laws; and, what is more, even priests, such as the monk of St. Anastasius who was accused of several murders.

By means of the so-called Tribunal of Peace, he reconciled with each other 1800 citizens, who had previously been mortal enemies.

He abolished, or, more accurately speaking, tried to abolish, the servile use of the title _Don_, which is still rampant among us in the south; he prohibited dicing, concubinage, and fraud in the sale of provisions--which last was the measure which conduced most to his popularity.

Finally, he created a true citizen militia, a real national guard.

He caused the escutcheons of the nobles to be erased from all palaces, equipages, and banners, saying that there was to be in Rome no other lordship than the Pope’s and his own.

He re-established a tax on every hearth, in all the towns and villages of the Roman district, and was obeyed even by the Tuscan communities, who might have claimed exemption.

The collectors were not sufficient for the work.

All the governors, except two, submitted; and he finally appointed a kind of justice of the peace, to decide even criminal cases.

He did even more.

He was the first to conceive, what even Dante had not thought of, an Italy neither Guelf nor Ghibelline, under the headship of the Roman municipality, in which like Marcel of Paris, he attempted to assemble a true national Parliament.

[398] He was the first man in Italy to think of this, and was only understood by thirty-five communes.

At Avignon, finally, he was able to achieve what I consider his greatest enterprise: to get himself pardoned, after a course of speech and action so hostile to the Papal Court, by those who never pardon--the clergy of that ferocious and implacable age; and not only pardoned, but sent back, though for a short period and in an inferior capacity, to a position fraught with the greatest dangers to that order.

But all these miracles, alas!

lasted for a few days only.

The man who in his political ideas surpassed not only his contemporaries, but many modern thinkers, and preceded Mazzini and Cavour in the idea of unity, was in fact a monomaniac, as is recorded by the historians, Re and Papencordt; if he was great in conception, he was uncertain and incapable in practical matters.

This was fully shown, _e.

g. _, when, though he had his greatest enemy, the prefect of Vico, in his hands, he let him go, keeping his son as a hostage; and when he failed to profit by his unexpected victory over the barons.

Always incapable of taking any resolution which was not merely theoretical, he believed that everything he did was done by the grace of the Holy Spirit,[399] under whose auspices we have seen that he began his enterprize.

He was still further confirmed in his delusion by a heresy which had then recently sprung up, according to which the Holy Spirit was to regenerate the world, and especially by the fact, very insignificant in itself, that a dove alighted near him while he was showing the people one of his allegorical pictures.

To this dove he attributed his successful beginning, as he ascribed to his prophetic inspiration the victory over the Colonna[400] and that over the Prefect.

[401] In the most important affairs, he believed that he heard in himself, through the medium of a dream or other sign, the voice of God, with whom he took counsel, and to whom he referred everything.

Sustained by the _prestige_ of this inspiration, he furthermore enacted religious laws, _e.

g. _, one compelling confession once a year, under pain of confiscation to the extent of one-third of a man’s property.

He did not fail to exhibit the usual contradictions peculiar to the insane.

Very religious himself, he had no hesitation in comparing himself to Christ, only on account of the coincidence implied in his having gained a victory at the age of thirty-three.

After his defeat, he again compared himself to him, in a play upon numbers such as is common among the insane, because he was for thirty-three months an exile in the Majella, in a wild and lonely hermitage, surrounded by several persons subject to hallucinations, followers of the Holy Spirit, who prophesied that he would once more be victorious, and even rule over the whole world.

The megalomaniac delirium which usually prevailed in his case, explains the greater part of these contradictions.

He believed that in his own person were centred all the hopes of a Messiah of Italy, who was to restore the Roman Empire, nay, even redeem the world.

[402] At a moment when he must have thought himself near death, in the prison at Prague,[403] he thought himself the victim of diabolical imaginations, or believed that he was obeying the will of heaven.

Thus he wrote, “I kiss the key of the prison, as it were the gift of God.

” One day he arose from the throne and, advancing towards his faithful followers, said in a loud voice, “We command Pope Clement to present himself before our tribunal, and to live at Rome; and we give the same command to the College of Cardinals.

We cite to appear before us the two claimants, Charles of Bohemia and Ludwig of Bavaria, who take upon themselves the title of Emperors.

We command all the electors of Germany to inform us on what pretext they have usurped the inalienable right of the Roman people--the ancient and legitimate sovereign of the empire.

” Then he drew his sword, waved it three times towards the three divisions of the known world, and said, three times, in a transport of ecstasy, “This, too, belongs to me!

” All this because he had bathed in the porphyry basin of Constantine--to the great scandal of his followers--and believed that he had thus succeeded to the power of that emperor.

While he was going on this course the Papal Legate, by whose concurrence alone all these eccentricities could, up to a certain point, be justified, protested with all the force his slight degree of energy would allow.

It would be pretty much as if the Consul of San Marino were to take it into his head, on the strength of a majority of votes, or because he had worn a hat belonging to Napoleon I. , that he could summon before his tribunal the emperors of Austria, Germany, and Russia, with a few dukes into the bargain.

And if this would appear ridiculous in our own times, when, in theory at least, right is esteemed above might, what must it have seemed in that age?

Nor was this a mere momentary aberration.

We still possess the diplomatic communication (dated Aug.

12th), destined for the emperors, after that mad theatrical ceremony.

I extract some passages:[404] “In virtue of the same authority, and of the favour of God, the Holy Spirit, and the Roman people, we say, protest, and declare that the Roman Empire, the election, jurisdiction, and monarchy of the Sacred Empire belong, by full right, to the city of Rome, and to all Italy, for many good reasons which we shall mention at the proper place and time, and after having summoned the dukes, kings, &c. , to appear between this day and that of Pentecost next following, before us in St. John Lateran, with their titles and claims; failing which, on the expiry of the term, _they will be proceeded against_ according to the forms of law, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

” Moreover, he adds, as though he had not yet expressed himself clearly enough, “Besides what has been heretofore said, in general and in particular, we cite in person the illustrious princes, Louis, Duke of Bavaria, and Charles, Duke of Bohemia, _calling themselves_ emperors, or elected to the empire; and, besides these, the Duke of Saxony, the Marquis of Brandenburg, &c. , that they may appear in the said place before us in person, and before other magistrates, failing which we shall proceed against them, as contumacious,” &c. This was too much.

The mutual animosity of the Colonna and the Orsini was momentarily suspended.

They united their forces to combat him openly and conspire against him in secret.

An assassin, sent by them to attempt the tribune’s life, was arrested, and, when put to the torture, accused the nobles.

From that instant Rienzi incurred the fate of a tyrant, and adopted a tyrant’s suspicions and rules of conduct.

Shortly afterwards, under various pretexts, he invited to the capital his principal enemies, among whom were many of the Orsini and three of the Colonna.

They arrived, believing themselves called to a council or banquet; and Rienzi, after inviting them to take their places at table, had them arrested; innocent and guilty had to undergo this terror alike.

After the people had been summoned to the spot, by the sound of the great bell, they were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Rienzi, and not a single voice or hand was raised to defend the heads of the nobility.

They passed the night in separate rooms; and Stefano Colonna, battering at his prison door, several times entreated that he might be freed by a swift death from so humiliating a position.

The arrival of a confessor, and the sound of the funeral bell, showed them what was awaiting them.

The great hall of the Capitol, where the trial was to take place, was hung with white and red, as was usual when a death-sentence was about to be pronounced.

All seemed ready for their condemnation, when the tribune, touched by fear or pity, after a long speech to the people, _in their defence_, caused them to be acquitted, and even granted them some offices (such as the Prefecture of arms), which could not fail to be formidable weapons against him.

It was not the sort of thing which was done in those days; and even Petrarch thought he had been too lenient, while the lower classes expressed their sense of his folly in a coarser and more energetic fashion.

Such was his madness, says the anonymous historian, that he allowed his enemies to entrench themselves afresh, and then sent a messenger to summon them to his presence.

The messenger was wounded, whereupon he summoned them a second time, and then had two of them painted, hanging head downward.

They, in their turn, took the town of Nepi from him, for which he could devise no other retribution than the drowning of two dogs, supposed to represent them.

After some bloodless and useless marches, he returned to Rome, and, having put on the _dalmatica_(_!

_) of the emperors, had himself crowned for the third time.

Worse still, he at the same time expelled the Papal legate, Bertrando,[405] thus throwing away his last anchor of safety at the moment when he needed it most.

Besides the eccentricity of his consecration as Knight of the Holy Spirit, preceded by the bath in the vase of Constantine (which, though it can readily be explained by the ideas of the period, did him serious injury in the estimation of the majority, and especially the religious, as being an act of profanation), he was guilty of the egregious political folly of declaring that, after that ceremony, the Roman people had returned to the full possession of their jurisdiction over the world; that Rome was the head of the world, that the monarchy of the empire and the election of the emperor were privileges of the city, of the Roman people, and of Italy.

This was clearly a declaration of war against both pope and emperor.

Later on, on August 15th, with his usual monomaniac tendency to symbolism, he crowned himself with six wreaths of different plants--ivy, because he loved religion; myrtle, because he honoured learning; parsley, because of its resistance to poison (as the emperor was supposed to resist the malevolence of his enemies).

To these he added, for no discoverable reason, the mitre of the Trojan king, and a silver crown!

All this proves, says Gregorovius, that it was his intention to get himself crowned emperor.

And, as it was the custom of the Roman emperors to promulgate edicts after their coronation, so he, immediately after this ceremony, by political decrees confirmed to the whole of Italy the right of Roman citizenship.

Alberto Argentaro[406] adds that he threatened Pope Clement with deposition, if he did not return to Rome within the year, and that he would have elected another pope.

Villani says,[407] that he wished to reform the whole of Italy in the ancient manner, and subject it to the dominion of Rome.

To understand how truly insane was this project, it must be remembered that his sacred militia--that which he believed most faithful--numbered no more than 1600 men, and that the whole army, counting both horse and foot, did not, on an outside calculation, exceed 2000. After defeating the nobles, without any merit on his part, he, who had formerly been so generous, forbade the widows to weep for the dead; and was guilty of words and actions which, even in that ferocious age, struck his _Sacred Knights_ (as he called them) as so barbarous and foolish, that they refused to bear arms for him any longer.

From this moment date, on the one hand, his undoubted insanity, on the other, the contempt of all honourable men, vigorously expressed by Petrarch himself in a well-known letter.

It can now be understood why he was, even from the time of his first exploits, so fond of pompous titles.

After calling himself “Consul of the Widows,” and “Consul of Rome,” he adopted the title of Tribune, which afterwards became “Clement and Severe Tribune,” the contradiction being nothing to him, so long as he could suggest the name of Severinus Boethius, whose arms he had also adopted; and, not long after this (referring, with that kind of play upon words so dear to the insane and to idiots, to his nomination in August), “August Tribune.

”[408] We can also comprehend that, stripped of all his power, an exile and a prisoner, he should have turned to the prosaic Emperor Charles IV.

, telling him his dreams, as we shall see, with complete confidence in their reality.

At Rome, after his first fall (which was, perhaps, one cause of the indulgence with which he was treated by the pope), there had been a new outburst of disorder, which a tribune who has remained almost unknown--one Baroncelli--in vain endeavoured to stem.

Nor did Rienzi himself meet with any better success on his return, shorn of his ancient _prestige_, and without that youthful audacity which, united to a maniacal erethism, had increased the strength of the poor scholar a hundredfold; and he was overthrown by the populace themselves.

For men, whether madmen of genius or complete geniuses, have no power against the natural force of things.

Marcel had no success at Paris, though he had far greater forces at his disposal, and was allied with the Jacquerie of the country districts.

But Rienzi could not even succeed in realizing the prodigies of insane genius, since he had by this time fallen into true dementia.

It appears that in the early stages of his government he was a sober and temperate man, so much so that he had to make an effort to find time to eat.

From this he passed to the opposite extreme of continued orgies and actual dipsomania, which he excused by alleging the effects of a poison which he believed to have been administered to him in prison.

[409] I

believe, on the contrary, that this phenomenon was occasioned by the progress of his malady, since we see that it began in the early months of his first tribunate,[410] and since slow poisons produce emaciation, not obesity, in their victims.

“At every hour he was eating dainties and drinking; he observed neither time nor order; he mixed Greek with Flavian wine; he drank new wine at any hour.

He used to drink too much.

” “Moreover he had now become enormously stout, he had a face like a friar, round and jovial as that of a bonze, a ruddy complexion, and a long beard.

His eyes were white, and suddenly he would turn red as blood, and his eyes would become inflamed.

” In short, as is usually the case with persons inclining to dementia, his body became enormous, and his eyes were often bloodshot, while his face acquired an entirely brutal cast of expression.

His mind was much less active, and his temper fundamentally changed, while the fickleness, restlessness, and oddity, which had served to excite great admiration for him in the mind of the populace, now had so degenerated as to redound to his injury.

Those who saw most of him said that he changed his mind, as well as his expression of face, from one minute to the next, and was never constant to the same thought for a quarter of an hour together.

Thus he began the siege of Palestrina, and then abandoned it; he would appoint a skilful commander, and then cashier him.

In later times, when he was forced to impose taxes on wine and salt, even for the poor, he restrained his luxurious tendencies, and became apparently temperate; but his other evil propensities did not change.

To the intermittent generosity of which he had given proofs in his early period succeeded a cold selfishness, which excited horror even in that cruel age--when, for instance, he had Fra Monreale beheaded, for not repaying a sum of money which Rienzi had lent him.

His friend Pandolfo Pandolfini, respected by all Rome as the model of an honourable man, was beheaded by him, without the shadow of a reason, merely from envy of his reputation.

Thus he sacrificed, or despoiled of their property, the best men in the country, and passed from the extreme of timidity to that of ferocity.

He was seen to laugh and weep almost at the same time, and in both cases without sufficient cause; his paroxysms of joy were followed by sighs and tears.

But it is chiefly in his letters that the whole of his genius and of his madness is revealed.

The letters of Cola da Rienzi were sought for and collected with singular curiosity, as though (Petrarch several times writes to him) “they had fallen from the Antipodes, or the sphere of the moon.

” Four collections of his letters are extant--at Mantua, at Turin (twenty-two closely written pages), at Paris, and at Florence (the last-named being autographs).

They have been published and republished by Gaye, De Sade, Hobhouse, Hoxemio, Pelzel, and Papencordt,[411] and would by themselves be sufficient material on which to base a diagnosis.

In fact, there is not one of them which does not bear the impress, either of a morbid vanity, or of those trivial repetitions and plays upon words especially characteristic of the insane.

The first point to note is their great abundance, in an age when very little was written.

When his residence in the Capitol was sacked, after his first flight, what most surprised those who entered his private office was the mass of letters which had been drafted and never sent.

It was well known that the numerous staff of clerks employed by him could not keep pace with the amount of matter he dictated, and that he was continually sending couriers not only to friendly republics, but to indifferent or hostile potentates, like the King of France, who sent a jesting reply by an archer--a functionary somewhat analogous to a modern policeman.

Thus, too, the lords of Ferrara, Mantua, and Padua returned him his letters.

Add to this their style, their exaggerated length, the addition of postscripts longer than the letter itself, and the singular signature, richer in laudatory titles than was ever used except by Oriental princes.

These letters have, indeed, a flavour of their own, a vivacity breaking loose from the restraints of the classical writers who served as his models, an exuberant self-confidence which, at first sight, obliged the reader to put faith in the falsehoods with which they swarmed.

Nay, it seems that--as happens with some lunatics, and some incorrigible liars--he ended by himself believing in his own fictions.

Leaving aside many strange blunders, surprising in a Latin scholar,[412] and the prolixity already mentioned, without dwelling on the very undiplomatic want of delicacy, present to a morbid extent, and all the more surprising in a statesman of that age, when reserve was more general than at present, one fact particularly strikes me--an inveterate habit of punning, a symptom of extreme frivolity, which was certainly not a characteristic of mediæval diplomacy.

What man in his senses would, even in the depths of the Dark Ages, have written as he did to Pope Clement, in the letter dated August 5, 1347?

-- “The grace of the Holy Spirit having freed the Republic under my rule, and my humble person having been, at the beginning of _August_, promoted to the militia, there is attributed to me, as in the signature, the name and title of _August_.

“Given as above on the 5th of August, “HUMBLE CREATURE, “Candidate of the Holy Spirit, Nicolò the Severe and Clement, Liberator of the City, Zealous for Italy, Lover of the World, who kisses the feet of the blessed.

” Note that, after all this signature, the letter goes on for three pages more, on much more serious topics, which he had postponed to the pun on “August.

” In this respect, a clear proof of his insanity is to be found in the letter which he wrote in the elation of his victory over the barons.

Not to dwell on the strange familiarity with the Deity which he shows, when he writes “that God formed to war those fingers which had been trained to the use of the pen” (whereas, as a matter of fact, he had no knowledge whatever of the art of war), it is well to note that, among his gravest charges against the Colonna was that of their having sacked a church where _he had deposited his golden crown_.

Still more strange is the following claim to prophecy, addressed to the clergy--who, as dealing in such matters, are likely to be most sceptical concerning them: “We should not forget to tell you that, two days before these occurrences, we had a vision of Pope Boniface, who foretold our triumph over those tyrants.

We made a report thereof in full season, and in the presence of the assembled Romans, and going into St. Peter’s, to the altar of St. Boniface, we presented to him a chalice and a veil.

“The vision, at last, thanks to Heaven, was fulfilled, thanks to the help of the Blessed Martin, His tribune.

” (Here he forgets that, two pages previously, in the same letter, he had attributed his victories to St. Laurence and St. Stephen.

) “As those traitors,” he continues, “had plundered the pilgrims on the day of his festival, that Saint took vengeance on them, by the hand of a _tribune_, _three_ days afterwards, that is to say, on the day of _St.

Columba_, who glorified the dove (_colomba_) of our flag.

” Note the puns in the above.

He concludes with some of those postscripts which are so frequent in the letters of monomaniacs, and are found in nearly all of his: “Given at the Capitol, on the very day of the victory--the 3rd of November, on which day there perished six tyrants of the house of Colonna, and none remained but the unhappy old man Stefano Colonna, who is half dead.

He is the seventh, and this is how Heaven was willing to make the number of the slain Colonna equal the crowns (_sic_) of our coronation,[413] and to the branches of the fruit-bearing tree which recall the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

” Absolute insanity is here shown, both in the idea and the word, in which he makes the Deity intervene to extinguish a family of heroes for the sake of a sinister freak of language, in honour of the man who, a few pages previously--with a hypocrisy soon belied by facts--had written, “Consistently with our character, we were not willing to employ the severity of the sword--however just--against those whom we might bring back to grace without injury to freedom, justice, and peace.

” Both comic and insane is the way in which, in another letter to Rinaldo Orsini (Sept.

22, 1347), he tries to disguise, by a number of useless fictions, the enormous error of which he had been guilty in setting at liberty the nobles arrested shortly before.

“We wish that Your Paternity should know how, having judged certain nobles, lawfully suspected by the people and by us, it pleased God that they should fall into our hands” (We see, on the contrary, that he had expressly invited them).

“We caused them to be shut up in the dungeons of the Capitol; but, finally (our scruples and suspicions having been removed), we made use of an innocent artifice (_sic_) to reconcile them not only with ourselves, but with God, wherefore we procured them the happy opportunity of making a devout confession.

It was on the 15th of September that we sent confessors to each one of them, in prison, and as the latter were ignorant of our good intentions, and believed that we were going to be severe, they said to the nobles, ‘The Lord Tribune will condemn you to death.

’ Meanwhile the great bell of the Capitol tolled without ceasing for the assembly, and thus the terrified nobles gave themselves up for lost; and, in the expectation of death, confessed devoutly and with tears....

I then made a speech in praise of them,” &c. Let the reader judge of the condition of the moral sense in a man who could write thus.

It should be noted, besides, that, diplomatically, an excuse of this sort (especially in dealing with priests, who, being in the trade, so to speak, would know its exact value), would not only be useless, but even constitute a serious accusation.

Nor is his conclusion less strange, “Withal their hearts are so united to ours and to those of the people, that this union must last for the good of our country;

because thus they see that we are impartial, and do not wish to be as severe as we might be.

” But his useless hypocrisies did not end there; the confusion of the patricians probably suggested the order, already mentioned, that all citizens were to confess and receive the communion at least once a year, under pain of losing a third of their goods--half the forfeited property to go to the parish church of the defendant, the other to the city.

And the notaries were obliged to act as spies for every testator.

Now, Rienzi, in a postscript to the above letter (and I repeat that I have frequently observed in monomaniacs this fad of postscripts occurring at the end of letters), gives notice of his new edict, adding, “It seemed to us fitting that, as a second Augustus provides for the temporal profit of the Republic, he should also seek to favour and promote its spiritual welfare.

” This, if one thinks about it, was a usurpation of the special rights and duties of the pontiff, even according to the most modern view of them, as also when he prescribed to the clergy special ceremonies and ecclesiastical processions of his own invention, and enacted decrees against the members of religious orders who should fail to return to Rome.

This, in fact, was one of the principal accusations--and a just one--levelled against him at Prague and at Avignon, and one which he only rebutted by false statements.

Elsewhere he speaks of being inspired by the Holy Spirit, with a confidence which would be altogether unintelligible except in a man who was perfectly sincere, and therefore under the influence of hallucination.

A glance at other letters explains at once that the bath in the vase of Constantine was for him what the tattooed marks on his forehead were to Lazzaretti--one of those symbolic freaks to which the insane attach a peculiar significance; in fact, a kind of imperial investiture.

A long letter to Charles IV.

, written from prison in July, 1350, dwelling on a supposed intrigue of his mother with the Emperor Henry VII.

, bears, in subject-matter and style, the unmistakable impress of insanity.

[414] A little later (Aug.

15, 1350), we find him writing to the emperor another letter full of senseless puns, in which he tells him, with doubly absurd freaks of thought and language, how, in the idea that the mother of Severinus Boethius was descended from the kings of Bohemia (!

) he had called Boethius the younger and himself, the _Severe_; and how he had adopted from them the device of the seven stars--matters which could neither interest the emperor nor be of advantage to himself, but have all the characteristics of insanity.

So also, when he wrote that he was persuaded by the prophecies of the Majella hermits already mentioned, that his second exaltation should be much more glorious than the first, as the sun long hidden by the clouds appears more beautiful to the eye of the beholder: Perhaps the Lord, justly indignant at the wicked and unheard-of murder of Rienzi’s illustrious grandfather, Henry VII.

, and the losses in souls and bodies suffered by the world during the Interregnum, had raised up Cola for the advantage of Charles, chosen him to re-establish the empire, and ordained that he should be _baptized in the Lateran_, in the Church of the Baptist, and in the _bath of Constantine_, that he might be the forerunner of the emperor, as John the Baptist was of Christ.

Charles, it is true, had said that the empire could only be restored by a miracle; but was not this a miracle, that one poor man should be able to succour the falling empire, as St. Francis had succoured the Church?

Let him awake, and gird on his sword--let him not count for anything the revelation of the friars, since the whole Old and New Testaments were full of revelations: he alone could become master of Rome.

If he did not do so at once, Charles would lose at least one hundred thousand gold florins from the tax on salt and the other revenues of the city which had been increased by the approach of the Jubilee....

Within a year and a half, the pope should die, and many cardinals be slain....

In fifteen years there should be but one shepherd and one faith, and the new pope, the Emperor Charles, and Cola should be, as it were, a symbol of the Trinity on earth.

Charles should reign in the west, the Tribune in the east.

For the present, he was content with supporting the emperor in his journey to Rome--he was willing to open the way for him with the Romans and the other peoples of Italy, who would otherwise be averse to the empire; so that Charles might come among them peaceably and without bloodshed, and his arrival should not be the signal for mourning to the city and the whole nation, as had that of former emperors.

So far did he go, that the Archbishop of Prague wrote to him, “that he wondered how the Tribune, who had done things which at first appeared to come from God, could be so far from exercising the virtue of humility as to consider his own elevation the work of the Holy Spirit, and to call himself the candidate of the latter”--words which may well be noted by those who see in his madness only the effect of the superstitions of the period.

The emperor replied, with much common sense, advising him to “cease from ignorant hermits, who think themselves to be walking in the spirit of humility, without being able even to resist their sins and save their own souls, and who speak fantastically of knowing hidden things and governing in the spirit all that is under heaven ...

” and telling him that, out of love to God and his neighbours, he has “caused thee to be imprisoned as a sower of tares, and, withal, out of love for thine own soul, to cure it.

” Later on, he counsels him to “lay aside all these vagaries, and, whatever his origin may have been, to remember that we are all God’s creatures, sons of Adam, made out of the earth,” &c. A curious lesson in democracy, given by a king of Bohemia to the ex-tribune of an Italian republic!

But all was useless, and when, after many vicissitudes, he once more acquired a shadow of his former power--by the aid of money obtained by sheer trickery--he announced the fact at Florence, in a pompous proclamation, adding that “women, men, boys, priests, and lay-folk had gone to meet him with palms and olive-branches, and trumpets, and cries of welcome.

” These speeches seemed so very extravagant that their genuineness has been doubted by Zeffirino Re, on the ground of the extreme improbability of Petrarch’s having defended him, or the emperor regarded him with favour for a single moment, had he really entertained ideas so eccentric and heretical.

But that, however improbable, such is the fact is already evident _à priori_ to any one who--even without examining these strange letters and still stranger circulars--has observed the progressive development of insanity in Cola’s career, and knows that it was just through his unheard-of audacity that he triumphed, and that the Bohemians were not so much scandalized as struck dumb by his eloquence,[415] and afterwards astonished and deeply moved by his recantations.

Moreover, these writings were refuted by the Bohemian bishops, in a document which is still extant, and afterwards retracted by himself.

With a delicacy of which historians have not taken sufficient account, they were not consigned in their entirety to the Papal Court along with the person of the Tribune, whose condemnation, indeed, could bring neither pleasure nor profit to the host who had been already forced by political considerations to betray the confidence reposed in him.

He remained, meanwhile, an isolated phenomenon, an enigma to historians, since it was not so much history as the science of mental pathology which could succeed in completely explaining him.

That science has pointed out to us in Rienzi all the characteristics of the monomaniac: regular features and handwriting, exaggerated tendency to symbolism and plays upon words--an activity disproportioned to his social position, and original even to absurdity, which entirely exhausted itself in writing--an exaggerated consciousness of his own personality, which at first aided him with the populace, and supplied the want of tact and practical ability, but afterwards led him into absurdities--a defective moral sense--a calm marking the approach of dementia, which was only disturbed by the abuse of alcohol, or by a spirited opposition.

[416] _Campanella.

_--If Cola da Rienzi was a strange problem for historians until resolved by the modern psychiatric studies on monomania, not less strange has been the problem presented by Campanella, who, from being a humble and disdained monk in a forgotten district of Calabria, claimed to be a monarch and, as it were, a demi-god against the power of Spain and of the Pope, and then suddenly became and died a zealot for both, contradicting himself, even against his own advantage, certainly against that of his fame.

At last, it seems to me, the problem is approaching solution, after the classical works of Baldacchino, of Spaventa, of Fiorentino, but, above all, of Amabile, especially since Carlo Falletti[417] has passed those powerful works through the alembic of his synthetic criticism and removed from this strange medal the stains deposited by legends and historical prejudices.