Innocent was, of course, a very powerful Pope, and the historians of Perugia gloat over the fact that he did their city the honour to die in it, devoting whole pages of their books to this important subject.
Urban IV. is another remarkable figure in the Church of Rome, and it was during his stay at Perugia that he threw his mighty bomb which was to explode with such disastrous results upon the land of Italy. He was probably staying in the monastery of S. Pietro with his friend S. Thomas Aquinas when he sent the fatal letter which summoned Charles of Anjou down to Rome. “A terrible comet preceded Urban’s death which occurred in 1264,” says Mariotti. There was a report that Urban had been done to death by eating poisoned figs, but this is unfounded. The Pope lived in constant terror of poison, and by his incessant talk and letters on the subject had infected the minds of those around him.
Martin IV. is the last Pope buried in the Duomo. He often came to Perugia, and in 1285 he returned with the full intention of making a considerable stay there. But he died on Easter morning, having eaten a surfeit of eels; (it appears that Martin IV. was greedy of this particular delicacy). Dante records the fact in the “Purgatorio” (canto xxiv.), where Forese points the Pope out seated among the gluttons:
“ ... e quella faccia
Di là da lui, più che l’altre trapunta,
Ebbe la Santa Chiesa in le sue braccia:
Dal Torso fu: e purga per digiuno
L’anguille di Bolsena e la vernaccia.”
The following inscription is said to have been written over Martin’s tomb:
“Gaudent anguillae quod mortuus hic jacet ille,
Qui quasi morte reas excruciabat eas.”
Perhaps it was with a view to expiate this very insulting epitaph that the Perugians, in spite of the canons of S. Lorenzo, who refused to contribute to the fund, erected a magnificent tomb for Martin later on. They employed G. Pisano for the purpose, but only a few fragments of his work remain. Mommaggiore pulled it down, as he pulled so many other things, and used its priceless ornaments to adorn his own palace at Porta Sole. The two small pulpits on either side of the high altar screen were made, it is said, from the fragments of the tomb, and also, perhaps, the marble Pietà with the blue background which hangs on the right as you pass back down the church.[62]
The bones of the three Popes have been terribly pulled about: buried and then unearthed, buried again, and changed. Innocent, according to most authorities, was buried in the cathedral. About 1376, when Martin’s tomb was destroyed by Mommaggiore, the bones of Innocent III. were taken from their resting-place and laid along with those of the other two popes in a sort of chest, on the top of a cupboard, in the sacristy of the new cathedral. Thence, in 1605, the chest was removed to another chapel by order of Bishop Comitoli. When it was opened the bodies of Martin and of Urban were found intact, with their mitres and their chasubles; but of the powerful Innocent III. only a few broken bones remained, wrapped up in a little packet. It is probable that when the three Popes were removed from their different tombs in 1376 and stuffed into the chest, the memory of Innocent III. in connection with the temporal dominion of the popes in Perugia which he was the first to found, induced some persons present to violate his tomb. Be this as it may, all the bones of the Popes now rest together in the dull little porphyry urn, crowned with a brass tiara.[63]
In leaving the cathedral it would be well to glance at the tomb of Bishop Giovanni Andrea Baglioni, a beautiful bit of low relief in marble. Very lovely are the three small angels with the ribbons in their heavy hair, guarding the Baglioni arms, very alien from the spirit of that bloody race of men, the gentle figures of the women in the panels.