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.”