ARTICLE IV.
When your altar of Victory had been destroyed, the barbarians came and finished the work of the priests. Rome became the prey and the sport of nations that it had so long ruled, if not repressed.
It is true that you still had consuls, a senate, municipal laws; but the popes have robbed you of what the Huns and Goths had left you.
It was in earlier times unheard of that a priest should set up royal rights in any city of the Empire. It is well known all over Europe, except in your chancellery, that, until the time of Gregory VII., your pope was but a metropolitan bishop, subject to the Greek, then the Frankish, emperors, and then to the house of Saxony; receiving investiture from them, compelled to send a profession of faith to the bishops of Ravenna and Milan, as we read expressly in your Diarium Romanum. His title of “patriarch of the west” gave him much prestige, but no sovereign rights. A priest-king was a blasphemy in a religion of which the founder expressly says in the gospels: “There shall be no first and last among you.” Weigh well, Romans, these other words that are put in the mouth of Jesus: “To sit on my right hand and on my left it is not mine to give, but for whom it is prepared of my father.”[49] Know, moreover, that the Jews meant, and still mean, by “son of God” a just man. Inquire of the eight thousand Jews who sell old clothes, as they ever have done, in your city, and pay close attention to the following words: “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.”[50]
Do these clear and precise words mean that Boniface VIII. was bound to crush the Colonna family; that Alexander VI. was bound to poison so many Roman barons; or that the bishop of Rome received from God, in a time of anarchy, the duchy of Rome, Ferrara, Bologna, the March of Ancona, Castro, and Ronciglione, and all the country from Viterbo to Terracina, which have been wrested from their lawful owners? Think you, Romans, that Jesus was sent on earth by God solely for the Rezzonico?