Perugia and Foligno had always regarded each other with undisguised dislike, skirmishing about and exchanging insults wherever they happened to meet. Once the people of Foligno had come bare-footed, and with a sword and knife hung round their necks, to implore pardon of Perugia, but they revolted again, and the Perugians continued to attack and to molest them. Three times in a single year (1282) their lands were devastated, and finally the town was taken, and the walls demolished, and imperative orders were issued absolutely forbidding these to be rebuilt on the western side. At last Pope Martin IV., amazed and disgusted by the behaviour of a people to whom he was honestly attached, interfered, but Perugia continued to molest her unhappy neighbour with a quite peculiar animosity, whereupon the Pope, angered beyond measure by their disobedience, excommunicated them. “Into such a passion did the Pope fall with the people of Perugia,” says Mariotti, “that he issued a most severe excommunication against them.” It was just at the time of the Sicilian Vespers. The Perugians, irritated by their sentence of excommunication, determined to celebrate a kind of mock vespers on their own account. Gregorovius says that this is the first instance recorded in history of this strange form of popular demonstration. “They made a Pope and Cardinals of straw, and dragged them ignominiously through the city and up to a hill, where they burned the effigies in crimson robes, saying, as the flames leapt up, “That is such-and-such, a Cardinal; and this is such-and-such, another.”
A strange scene, truly, in a half-civilised city! But political and religious causes came between and put an end to these half childish squabbles. A little later the Pope forgave the Perugians, and they continued their evil ways, and persisted in destroying the peace of the Umbrian towns.
Arezzo had the satisfaction of a victory over Perugia in 1335, and in defiance and derision she hanged her Perugian prisoners with a tabby cat hung beside them, and a string of lasche dangling from their braces.[7] But pranks like these were not allowed to pass unnoticed, and Perugia did not fail to grasp her finest banner with the lion of the Guelph all rampant on a field of gules, and hurry out to subdue her insolent neighbours. The people of Arezzo were humbled to the dust, but by means too barbaric to be here described.
Thus one by one the cities of Umbria became sufficiently impressed by this forcible fashion of dealing with insurrection, and they recognised that it would be wise, though it might not be pleasant, to swear allegiance to the imperious city. Gualdo next gave up her keys, together with Nocera, but the latter found it impossible to suppress a few oaths whilst signing the documents, and there was a loud wail over the laws imposed upon them.
“ ... e diretro le piange
Per grave giogo Nocera con Gualdo,”
says Dante, referring to the subject in the “Paradiso.”
Perugia’s culminating success seems to have been at Torrita in 1358, when the Sienese were defeated, and forty-nine banners brought back tied to the horses’ tails, and the chains of the Palace of Justice torn away and hung in triumph at the feet of the Perugian griffin. Even the powerful Florence accepted Perugia’s help in the Guelph cause, and so early as 1230 arbitrations had been exchanged for the purpose of settling all questions of commerce between the two cities.[8]
All these victories, these repeated successes, tended
