The great hall of the Capitol, where the trial was to take place, was hung with white and red, as was usual when a death-sentence was about to be pronounced. All seemed ready for their condemnation, when the tribune, touched by fear or pity, after a long speech to the people, in their defence, caused them to be acquitted, and even granted them some offices (such as the Prefecture of arms), which could not fail to be formidable weapons against him. It was not the sort of thing which was done in those days; and even Petrarch thought he had been too lenient, while the lower classes expressed their sense of his folly in a coarser and more energetic fashion.
Such was his madness, says the anonymous historian, that he allowed his enemies to entrench themselves afresh, and then sent a messenger to summon them to his presence. The messenger was wounded, whereupon he summoned them a second time, and then had two of them painted, hanging head downward. They, in their turn, took the town of Nepi from him, for which he could devise no other retribution than the drowning of two dogs, supposed to represent them. After some bloodless and useless marches, he returned to Rome, and, having put on the dalmatica(!) of the emperors, had himself crowned for the third time. Worse still, he at the same time expelled the Papal legate, Bertrando,[405] thus throwing away his last anchor of safety at the moment when he needed it most.
Besides the eccentricity of his consecration as Knight of the Holy Spirit, preceded by the bath in the vase of Constantine (which, though it can readily be explained by the ideas of the period, did him serious injury in the estimation of the majority, and especially the religious, as being an act of profanation), he was guilty of the egregious political folly of declaring that, after that ceremony, the Roman people had returned to the full possession of their jurisdiction over the world; that Rome was the head of the world, that the monarchy of the empire and the election of the emperor were privileges of the city, of the Roman people, and of Italy. This was clearly a declaration of war against both pope and emperor. Later on, on August 15th, with his usual monomaniac tendency to symbolism, he crowned himself with six wreaths of different plants—ivy, because he loved religion; myrtle, because he honoured learning; parsley, because of its resistance to poison (as the emperor was supposed to resist the malevolence of his enemies). To these he added, for no discoverable reason, the mitre of the Trojan king, and a silver crown!
All this proves, says Gregorovius, that it was his intention to get himself crowned emperor.
And, as it was the custom of the Roman emperors to promulgate edicts after their coronation, so he, immediately after this ceremony, by political decrees confirmed to the whole of Italy the right of Roman citizenship. Alberto Argentaro[406] adds that he threatened Pope Clement with deposition, if he did not return to Rome within the year, and that he would have elected another pope. Villani says,[407] that he wished to reform the whole of Italy in the ancient manner, and subject it to the dominion of Rome. To understand how truly insane was this project, it must be remembered that his sacred militia—that which he believed most faithful—numbered no more than 1600 men, and that the whole army, counting both horse and foot, did not, on an outside calculation, exceed 2000.
After defeating the nobles, without any merit on his part, he, who had formerly been so generous, forbade the widows to weep for the dead; and was guilty of words and actions which, even in that ferocious age, struck his Sacred Knights (as he called them) as so barbarous and foolish, that they refused to bear arms for him any longer. From this moment date, on the one hand, his undoubted insanity, on the other, the contempt of all honourable men, vigorously expressed by Petrarch himself in a well-known letter.
It can now be understood why he was, even from the time of his first exploits, so fond of pompous titles. After calling himself “Consul of the Widows,” and “Consul of Rome,” he adopted the title of Tribune, which afterwards became “Clement and Severe Tribune,” the contradiction being nothing to him, so long as he could suggest the name of Severinus Boethius, whose arms he had also adopted; and, not long after this (referring, with that kind of play upon words so dear to the insane and to idiots, to his nomination in August), “August Tribune.”[408] We can also comprehend that, stripped of all his power, an exile and a prisoner, he should have turned to the prosaic Emperor Charles IV., telling him his dreams, as we shall see, with complete confidence in their reality.
At Rome, after his first fall (which was, perhaps, one cause of the indulgence with which he was treated by the pope), there had been a new outburst of disorder, which a tribune who has remained almost unknown—one Baroncelli—in vain endeavoured to stem. Nor did Rienzi himself meet with any better success on his return, shorn of his ancient prestige, and without that youthful audacity which, united to a maniacal erethism, had increased the strength of the poor scholar a hundredfold; and he was overthrown by the populace themselves. For men, whether madmen of genius or complete geniuses, have no power against the natural force of things. Marcel had no success at Paris, though he had far greater forces at his disposal, and was allied with the Jacquerie of the country districts.
But Rienzi could not even succeed in realizing the prodigies of insane genius, since he had by this time fallen into true dementia.
It appears that in the early stages of his government he was a sober and temperate man, so much so that he had to make an effort to find time to eat. From this he passed to the opposite extreme of continued orgies and actual dipsomania, which he excused by alleging the effects of a poison which he believed to have been administered to him in prison.[409] I believe, on the contrary, that this phenomenon was occasioned by the progress of his malady, since we see that it began in the early months of his first tribunate,[410] and since slow poisons produce emaciation, not obesity, in their victims.