CHAPTER VII. ROME UNDER RIENZI
He is accused not of betraying but of defending liberty; he is guilty not of surrendering but of holding the Capitol. The supreme crime with which he is charged, and which merits expiation on the scaffold, is that he dared affirm that the Roman Empire is still at Rome, and in possession of the Roman people. Oh, unpious age! Oh, preposterous jealousy, malevolence unprecedented! What dost thou, O Christ, ineffable and incorruptible judge of all? Where are thine eyes with which thou art wont to scatter the clouds of human misery? Why dost thou turn them away? Why dost thou not, with thy forked lightning, put an end to this unholy trial?—Petrarch.[i]
[1347-1354 A.D.]
The story of Cola di Rienzi furnishes a unique chapter in Italian history. It is the story of a patriot and reformer, whose early enthusiasm was not supported by true moral greatness, and whose efforts were thus foredoomed to failure, after a momentary semblance of success.
The date of the accession of Charles IV is coincident with that of the first and greatest rise of Rienzi to power in Rome. To disengage Rienzi from the atmosphere of romance into which he has been cast for the reader of to-day by the unguarded rhetoric in Lord Lytton’s novel, and its offspring the libretto of an opera by Richard Wagner, is a task which could serve little by its accomplishment. In whatever light we regard the tribune we are bound to admit that his history is an eloquent memorial of the sudden extinction of what at least appeared to be the most brilliant possibilities. Who can refuse an ear to the story that captivated the attention of Petrarch—that story whose fantastic glamour the poet never entirely shook from him even when his faith in the power of his friend was being rudely shaken? It is through Petrarch that the romantic vision of Rienzi’s career has been transmitted to us, and though we may smile at the poet’s unreal sense of government, we are left to wonder at his great imaginative sympathy with the dreams of the young Nicholas from the moment when he first heard them from the lips of his friend at Avignon (in 1343) to the time when it needed all his eloquence with the pope to save Rienzi from execution (in 1352). Against such a story, illustrated in numerous glowing letters of Petrarch, Hallam’s cold sense of justice rebels. He quotes the words of the staunch republican Giovanni Villani,[b] a contemporary of Rienzi. “The design he formed was a fantastic work and one of short duration.” He reminds us of the passage in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, in which Oswald, Lord Nelvil, and the heroine happen upon the castle of St. Angelo in their intellectual perambulations through Rome. Nelvil is a descendant, in the direct line, of another English hero in French fiction, Edward, Lord Bumpton—the saddened English peer with beautiful manners and a heart all Rousseau. Corinne attacks the monuments with a conscientious zeal worthy of Baedeker and with more than Baedeker’s tenderness for the general spirit of reflection which such sights are wont to raise. But her critical faculty is never dormant. She couples Rienzi with Crescentius and Arnold of Brescia, calling them “those friends of Roman liberty who so often mistook their memories for hopes.” The phrase strikes a note of enthusiasm from Hallam which all the rhetoric of Rienzi himself fails to produce in the historian. Could Tacitus have excelled this, he asks?
But even robbed of the setting by which Petrarch has made it forever memorable, the story of Rienzi’s attitude towards the institutions of his time is in itself picturesque. Sismondi[c] says of him, “He rejected with deep indignation the usurpation of two barbarians, the one German, calling himself Roman emperor; the other a Frenchman who called himself the pontiff of Rome.” In the disruption into which Rome was thrown by the contests of the noble families, Rienzi saw a possible foundation for creating a powerful sovereignty. The removal of the popes to Avignon made his designs appear all the more feasible. The people of Rome were to be the backbone of his strength. He won them by a singular eloquence to which Petrarch bears evidence even at that period when he is tempted to minimise the wisdom of his early enthusiasm for Rienzi. Rome was the prey of feudal anarchy: the municipal government was reduced to impotence. Seizing the opportune moment Cola di Rienzi (Nicola Gabrini), the son of an innkeeper, makes a brilliant coup d’état and becomes tribune elect of the people in 1347. The feuds of the families of Colonna, Orsini and Savelli have served the ends of the ambitious youth who at the age of thirty-four found himself in a position of power all the greater that it was comparatively undefined and absolutely unparalleled in the annals of history. We can hardly be surprised that the success of his endeavours, the material realisation of what even to Rienzi himself must have clearly possessed some of the attributes of a dream, should have misled him into the most extravagant abuses of power. He had dreamed even at that early period of the unification of Italy, and now it seemed as if he were the divine agent to bring about this unification. Sovereign princes became his allies. He surrounded himself with all the tokens of magnificence that occurred to a fertile and greedy imagination. He bathed in the porphyry font of Constantine; he assumed the dalmatic worn by the ancient emperors at their coronation, took the sceptre of government in his hand and placed seven crowns on his head symbolising the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; he even compared himself to Christ.
The novel of Lord Lytton is a genuine attempt to convey a picture of an achievement that offered an attractive subject for romantic treatment. It lacks the sincere ring of the silver eloquence of Petrarch—its main source of inspiration. It has little of the critical faculty revealed in the phrase quoted from Madame de Staël; it is a curious combination of diligent research, sympathetic insight, and a passion for high talk. In the case of one to whom contemporaries affix the epithet “fantastic” with noticeable frequency, the difficulties of precise delineation are more than usually great. But such a chapter as that describing the climax of Rienzi’s power during his first and greatest tribunate is a valuable contribution towards that truth of narrative which lies midway between the barren enumeration of facts and the perfervid rhapsodies of those whom the facts have dazzled. For the main narrative of Rienzi’s picturesque career, however, we shall trust to the more prosaic, yet still appreciative, account of a recent Italian historian.[a]