Lucius refused to bear any longer the humiliation to which his predecessors had tamely submitted. Himself in arms, and accompanied by such followers as he could collect, the Pope made a desperate attempt to dislodge the Senate and their guards from the Capitol, and at the head of the storming party he endeavoured to ascend the old road, known then as Fabatosta. But the Pierleoni and their men were well prepared for the assault, and made a desperate and successful resistance. The Pope fell at the head of his soldiers, struck by a stone on the temple, mortally wounded, but not dead. In hasty retreat, the dying man was borne by his routed soldiers to the monastery of Saint Gregory on the Cœlian, under the safe protection of the trusty Frangipani, who held the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum. Of all the many Popes who died untimely deaths he was the only one, I believe, who fell in battle. And he got his deathblow on the slope of that same Capitol where Gracchus and Manlius had died before him, each in good cause.
It has been wrongly said that he had all the nobles with him, and that the revolution was of the people alone, aided by the Pierleoni. This is not true. So far as can be known, the Frangipani were his only faithful friends, but it is possible that the Count of Tusculum, seventh in descent from Theodora, and nephew of the first Colonna, at that time holding a part of the Aventine, may have also been the Pope's ally. Be that as it may, the force that Lucius led was very small, and the garrison of the Capitol was overwhelmingly strong.
Some say also that Arnold of Brescia was not actually in Rome at that time, that the first revolution was the result of his unforgotten teachings, bearing fruit in the hearts of the nobles and the people, and that he did not come to the city till Pope Lucius was dead. However that may be, from that time forward, till the coming of Barbarossa, Arnold was the idol of the Romans, and their vanity and arrogance knew no bounds. Pope Eugenius the Third was enthroned in the Lateran under the protection of the Frangipani, but within the week he was forced to escape by night to the mountains. The Pierleoni held Sant' Angelo; the people seized and fortified the Vatican, deprived the Pope's Prefect of his office, and forced the few nobles who resisted them to swear allegiance to Jordan Pierleone, making him in fact dictator, and in name their 'Patrician.' The Pope retorted by excommunicating him, and allying himself with Tivoli, but was forced to a compromise whereby he acknowledged the Senate and the supremacy of the Roman people, who, already tired of their dictator, agreed to restore the Prefect to office, and to express some sort of obedience, more spiritual than temporal, to the Pope's authority. But Arnold was still supreme, and after a short stay in the city Eugenius was again a fugitive.
It was then that he passed into France, when Lewis the Seventh was ready armed to lead the Second Crusade to the Holy Land; and through that stirring time Rome is dark and sullen, dwelling aloof from Church and Empire in the new-found illusion of an unreal and impossible greatness. Seven hundred years later an Italian patriot exclaimed, 'We have an Italy, but we have no Italians.' And so Arnold of Brescia must many times have longed for Romans to people a free Rome. He had made a republic, but he could not make free men; he had called up a vision, but he could not give it reality; like Rienzi and the rest, he had 'mistaken memories for hopes,' and he was fore-destined to pay for his belief in his country's life with the sacrifice of his own. He had dreamed of a liberty serene and high, but he had produced only a dismal confusion: in place of peace he had brought senseless strife; instead of a wise and simple consul, he had given the Romans the keen and rapacious son of a Jewish usurer for a dictator; where he had hoped to destroy the temporal power of Pope and Emperor, he had driven the greatest forces of his age, and two of the greatest men, to an alliance against him.
So he perished. Eugenius died in Tivoli, Anastasius reigned a few months, and sturdy Nicholas Breakspeare was Adrian the Fourth. Conrad the Emperor also died, poisoned by the physicians King Roger sent him from famous Salerno, and Frederick Barbarossa of Hohenstauffen, his nephew, reigned in his stead. Adrian and Frederick quarrelled at their first meeting in the sight of all their followers in the field, for the young Emperor would not hold the Englishman's stirrup on the first day. On the second he yielded, and Pope and Emperor together were invincible. Then the Roman Senate and people sent out ambassadors, who spoke hugely boasting words to the red-haired soldier, and would have set conditions on his crowning, so that he laughed aloud at them; and he and Adrian went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to its factions and its parties.
Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him. The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge.
The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river, lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year 1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted.
He was a martyr—whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all patriot leaders, of all preachers of liberty, past and living, it is not too much to say that Arnold of Brescia was the truest, the bravest and the simplest.
To them all, the Capitol has been the central object of dreams, and upon its walls the story of their failure has often been told in grotesque figures of themselves. When Rienzi was first driven out, his effigy was painted, hanged by the heels upon one of the towers, and many another 'enemy of the state' was pictured there—Giuliano Cesarini, for one, and the great Sforza, himself, with a scornful and insulting epigraph; as Andrea del Castagno, justly surnamed the 'Assassin,' painted upon the walls of the Signoria in Florence the likeness of all those who had joined in the great conspiracy of the Pazzi, hung up by the feet, as may be seen to this day.