Rienzi was now triumphant, and his letters to all the rulers of Europe announced that Rome had found peace and law, while he exhorted the other cities of Italy to throw off the yoke of tyrants and join a ‘national brotherhood’.
It would seem that Rienzi alone of his contemporaries saw a vision of a united Italy; but unfortunately the common sense and balance that are necessary to secure the practical realization of a visionary’s dreams were lacking. The Tribune was undoubtedly great, but not great enough to stand success. The child of peasants, he began to boast that he was really a son of the Emperor Henry VII, and the pageantry that he had first employed to dazzle the Romans grew more and more elaborate as he himself became ensnared by a false sense of his own dignity. Clad in a toga of white silk edged with a golden fringe, he would ride through the streets on a white horse, amid a cavalcade of horsemen splendidly equipped. In order to celebrate his accession to power he instituted a festival, where, amid scenes of lavish pomp, he was knighted in the Lateran with a golden girdle and spurs, after bathing in the porphyry font in which tradition declared that Constantine had been cleansed from leprosy.
The people, as is the way with crowds, clapped their hands and shouted while the trumpets blew, and they scrambled for the gold Rienzi’s servants threw broadcast; but long afterwards, when they had forgotten the even-handed justice their Tribune had secured them, they remembered his foolish extravagance and display, and resented the taxes that he found it necessary to impose in order to maintain his government and state.
The history of Rienzi’s later years is a tale of brilliant opportunities, created in the first place by his genius, and then lost by his timidity or lack of balance. On one occasion, when he learned that the very nobles who had sworn on oath to uphold his constitution were plotting its overthrow, he invited the leaders of the conspiracy to a banquet, arrested them, and sent them under guard to prison. The next morning the prison-bell tolled, and the nobles within were led out apparently to the death their treachery had richly deserved. At the last moment, however, when each had given up hope, the Tribune came before the scaffold, and, after a sermon on the forgiveness of sins, ordered those who were condemned to be set free.
If he had wished to win their allegiance by this act of clemency Rienzi had ill-judged his enemies. They had disliked him before as a peasant upstart; now they hated him far more bitterly as a man who had been able to humble them in the public gaze, believing, whether rightly or wrongly, that it was not forgiveness but fear of the powerful families to which they belonged that had finally moved him to mercy. From this moment the Orsini, the Colonna, and their friends had but one object in life—to pull the Tribune from his throne. By bribery and the spreading of false rumours they set themselves to undermine his influence, telling tales everywhere of his extravagance and luxury as contrasted with the heavy taxes, until at last in 1354 a tumult broke out in the city, and a mob collected that stormed the palace where Rienzi lodged, shouting ‘Death to the Traitor!’ As the Tribune attempted to escape he was seen against the flames of his burning walls and cut down.
St. Catherine of Siena
With the fall of Rienzi died the idea of a restored and reformed Italy through the medium of a Holy Roman Republic, just as Dante’s hope of a new and more perfect Roman Empire had been shattered by the death of Henry VII. Was there then no hope for Italy in mediaeval minds? The next answer that there was hope, indeed, came from Siena, one of the hill towns not far south of Florence, and its author was a peasant girl, Catherine Benincasa, who, like Jeanne d’Arc, looking round upon the misery of her country, believed that she was called by God to show her fellow countrymen the way of salvation.
St. Catherine, for she was afterwards canonized, was one of the twenty-five children of a Sienese dyer, who was at first very angry that his daughter refused to marry and instead joined the Order of Dominican Tertiaries—that is, of women who, still remaining in their own homes, bound themselves by vows to obey a religious rule.
In time, not only the dyer but all Siena came to realize that Catherine possessed a mind and spirit far above ordinary standards, so that, while in her simplicity she would accept the meanest household tasks, she had yet so great an understanding of the larger issues of life that she could read the cause of each man or woman’s trouble who came to her, and suggest the remedy they needed to give them fresh courage or hope.
During an outbreak of plague in Siena it was Catherine who, undismayed and tireless, went everywhere amongst the sick and dying, infusing new heart into the weary doctors and energy into patients succumbing helplessly to the disease.