RENEWAL OF THE LOMBARD LEAGUE
[1225-1233 A.D.]
Meanwhile the Guelf party again raised their standard in Lombardy; the republics of Milan, Bologna, Piacenza, Verona, Brescia, Faenza, Mantua, Vercelli, Lodi, Bergamo, Turin, Alexandria, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso assembled their consuls in council at San Zenone in the Mantuan territory, on the 2nd of March, 1226. They renewed the ancient league of Lombardy for twenty-five years; and engaged to defend in concert, their own liberty and the independence of the court of Rome. Three years afterwards, they sent succour to Gregory IX, when he was attacked by Frederick II on his return from the Holy Land; and they were included in the treaty of peace between the pope and the emperor in 1230.
The pope, however, though defended by the arms of the Lombards, made them pay dearly for the favour which he showed in naming them to the emperor as his allies. He consented to protect their civil liberty only so far as they sacrificed to him their liberty of conscience. The same spirit of reformation which animated the Albigenses had spread throughout Europe; many Christians, disgusted with the corruption and vices of the clergy, or whose minds revolted against the violence on their reason exercised by the church, devoted themselves to a contemplative life, renounced all ambition and the pleasures of the world, and sought a new road to salvation in the alliance of faith with reason. They called themselves cathari, or the purified; paterini, or the resigned. The free towns had, till then, refused permission to the tribunals of the Inquisition, instituted by Innocent III, to proceed against them within their walls; but Gregory IX declared the impossibility of acknowledging as allies of the holy see republicans so indulgent to the enemies of the faith; at the same time, he sent among them the most eloquent of the Dominicans, to rouse their fanaticism. Leo da Perego, whom he afterwards made archbishop of Milan, had an only too fatal success in that city, where he caused a great number of paterini to be burned. St. Peter Martyr, and the monk Roland of Cremona, obtained an equal triumph in the other cities of Lombardy.
The monk John of Vicenza had the cities of the march assigned to him as a province, where the heretics were in still greater numbers than in Lombardy, and included in their ranks some of the most powerful nobles in the country; among others, Ezzelino II, of Romano. The monk John announced himself the minister of peace, not of persecution. After having preached successively in every town, he assembled, on the plain of Paquara, the 28th of August, 1233, almost the whole population of the towns of the march; he exhorted them to peace in a manner so irresistible, that the greatest enemies, setting aside their animosities, pardoned and embraced each other; and all, with tears of joy, celebrated the warm charity of this man of God. This man of God, however, celebrated the festival of this reconciliation by judging and condemning to the flames sixty cathari in the single town of Verona, whose sufferings he witnessed in the public square; and afterwards obtained full power from the towns of Vicenza and Padua to act there in the like manner.