“Martyrs for our cause! But this time they were wrong, because the gods so willed it.”
Now there was a change in the scene. Under the tower a band of soldiers made a passage through the crowd of people. Pope John XVI came riding backwards on an ass. His ears and nose had been cut off, and his eyes had been dug out. It was a gruesome sight. A wine-bladder, waving over his head in the wind, made it worse. The people were silent, and shuddered simultaneously, for he was, after all, Christ’s representative and St. Peter’s successor, although no martyr.
A Sicilian stood on the bridge close to a Jew.
The Sicilian was a Muhammedan, for Sicily was then in the possession of the Saracens, and had been so for about two hundred years.
“He must be suffering for his predecessors’ sins,” said the Jew; “that is the Christian belief: satisfactio vicaria.”
“Suffering is necessary,” answered the Moslem; “and I do not grieve at such an end to the pornocracy. For a hundred years the Popes have lived like cannibals. You remember Sergius III, who lived with the harlot Theodora and her daughters. John X continued with Marozia, who with her own hand first killed her brother and then suffocated the Pope with a cushion. John XII was only nineteen when he became Pope. He took bribes, and consecrated a ten year-old boy as bishop in a stable. He committed incest, and turned the Lateran into a brothel. He played cards, drank and swore by Jupiter and Venus.... You know it well.”
“Yes,” answered the Jew, “the Christians live in hell since they have abandoned the one true God. The fools have, however, stolen from us the Messianic promise; but the promise to Abraham we still possess. Rome is a mad-house, Germany a slaughter-house, and France a brothel. It is a matter to rejoice at, to see how they destroy each other.”
He placed himself by the balustrade of the bridge, in order to be able to see better what now followed.
Between the twelve patriots, who writhed on their crosses like worms on hooks, appeared five men dressed in red, who began to construct a platform.
“Those are the executioners—on the Emperor’s grave!” said the Jew. “Against Crescentius I have nothing; he was a noble man who fought for the Roman State. But there is one Christian the less!”