Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

The Ambassador, as we gather, received the gift more with respect for the hand that offered it than for its own sake. He spread out his handkerchief, the Pope shed on it the handful of dust, and the courtly Pole rolled it up and put it in his pocket.

When he returned to his palace, he drew the packet out, doubtless wondering what he should do with the rather inconvenient contents. To his awe, the cambric was wet with blood. He spread it out—the earth had vanished and not a grain remained, but the handkerchief was steeped in the brave blood that had been shed for Christ under Nero and that, as one writer says, “had sprung forth again to attest, in the face of heresy and schism, that the faith of the Church under Pius was the same as the faith of the Church under Peter.”

Talking of Piazzas—the one which immediately conducted to that of St. Peter’s has always been called “Piazza Scossa Cavalli,” the place of the “shock of horses,” and this is the story of how it obtained the name. Constantine’s mother, Helena, was, like her son, somewhat tardy in openly professing Christianity, but her whole life after her baptism was devoted to the service of God, particularly in the direction of preserving and beautifying the holy places sanctified by the life and sufferings of the Redeemer. To her we owe the finding of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, and other instruments of the Passion; it was she who built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the one on Mount Calvary, spots which the pagans had marked for future identification and veneration by setting up idols to keep the Christians from praying there! Among other things she found on Mount Moriah the stone, scrupulously preserved by the ancestor-loving Jews, on which Abraham was preparing to sacrifice Isaac—the type of Christ—when the Angel staid his arm and told him that the Lord would prove his faith no further. This stone Helena conveyed to Rome, intending to place it in St. Peter’s; but when the horses dragging the wagon which contained it reached this spot, still quite distant from the Basilica, they “jibbed,” as we should say, and no power on earth could induce them to go a step further.

The Empress, her counsellors, and all the people took this as a sign that Heaven destined the consecrated stone to remain in that place, and a church, “San Giacomo a Scossa Cavalli,” was built and still stands there to shelter Abraham’s Altar.

Constantine’s Basilica rose in strength and beauty, and was consecrated in 326, thirteen years after that 13th of June, 313, when he had seen the vision. Although only half the size of the present Church, it was, until this was built, one of the three largest in Europe, the other two being those of Milan and Seville; strangely enough, the three were all of equal dimensions—three hundred and ninety-five feet long by two hundred and twelve in width. Eighty-six marble pillars divided the nave of St. Peter’s from the aisles and supported the roof; and, like all the basilicas, it had a rich portico running all along its front, also decorated with columns. The interior was gorgeous with gold and Byzantine mosaic and precious marbles, and the Church itself was the centre of a great mass of other sumptuous buildings, chapels, and offices and monasteries, for the housing of the great body of ecclesiastics charged with the service of the Church and the keeping of the archives. The Basilica of Constantine was worthy of its founder, and many another royal and imperial head was bent there in worship during the centuries that followed; yet what storms and vicissitudes assailed it before it sank away to rise again, like the phœnix of old, in the glorious pile so dear to our hearts to-day! Constantine would not have believed—what it is hard for us to accept even on the word of those who saw it—that a time would come when Rome’s rightful rulers would be constrained to withdraw not only from her, but from Italy, to govern the Church from Avignon; when the Mistress of the World would barely count thirty thousand souls within her walls, and the shepherds of the Campagna should pasture their sheep on the rank grass that covered the steps of St. Peter’s and all the ground around!

Were the spirits of the redeemed permitted to contemplate the crimes and sorrows of earth, how some of them would have wept over the apparent decay of this most sacred of fanes, the goal so eagerly sought by all pilgrims, gentle or simple, during the Ages of Faith!

Hither came Charlemagne, and many other great ones, both before and after him, some worthy of Heaven’s favour, some in the rebellious attempt to enslave the Church and make her work for them instead of for Christ. But most entered St. Peter’s with humble and sincere hearts and it is noticeable that, of the famous royal pilgrims, the larger part came from Britain. One of the first was Cadwalla, King of the Saxons, an ardent convert who travelled to Rome to be baptised at St. Peter’s tomb, and was rewarded for his faith by dying immediately afterwards, “spotless among the sheep of Christ.” Then we are told of the holy Cenred, who had renounced the throne of Mercia to become a monk in Rome and who, as a sign of his sincerity, cut off his flowing locks and laid them at the shrine of the Apostle; another Briton, good King Ina of Wessex, comes to pray, and to found a Church in honour of the Mother of God, so that his subjects who come on pilgrimage may have their own sanctuary to pray in and their own ground to receive their bodies should they die in Rome; Offa, the Saxon, comes to ask St. Peter to consider him as his vassal and Offa’s realm as a loyal tributary of his own; and, almost greatest of all, in the year 854, our Holy Father, St. Leo IV, being the reigning Pope, there walks one day into Constantine’s Basilica a big fair-haired Englishman called Ethelwulf, leading a little boy, six years old, bright of eye and sturdy of limb, by the hand.

Behind them, in awed silence, comes a group of the white and ruddy warriors of the North, gazing in wonder at the splendid Church, full of treasures from East and West, such as they have never beheld before. They voice their admiration in gruff whispers in a strange tongue, unintelligible to the scattered worshippers around them, who, doubtless, watch them with some apprehension, asking themselves whether their coming be the herald of another Gothic invasion of Rome. But the leader of the strangers goes up to the High Altar and kneels for a space, the child kneeling too, but clinging tightly to his father’s hand. Then the father stands up, and, addressing one of the attendant priests in clear Latin, asks to be taken to the Pope.

It is Ethelwulf, King of the Anglo-Saxons; he has come to ask the Holy Father to crown him; and the little boy, on whom the Pope smiles, and who receives the pontifical blessing so blithely, grows up to be Alfred the Great.

But among all the pilgrims of those ages the supreme figure is that of Charlemagne, the giant in heart and mind and body who declared that he only ruled to extend the reign of Christ on earth, and in his will left to his successors, as the most precious part of their heritage, the privilege of defending and sustaining the Church. He had passed away forty years before Ethelwulf brought his little son to Rome, but his greatness lived after him and none can doubt that Alfred pondered his wise laws and strove to imitate the wonderful combination of strength and justice and mercy of which he set the example. I saw his crown, in the Ambras collection at Vienna, a huge straight band of gold, large enough to slip over an ordinary man’s head and rest on his shoulders, heavy with barbaric jewels, big as plover’s eggs, set in its circle. This was, I think, the one he brought to Rome, when having, as he put it, “with the help of God conquered the world,” he came to ask St. Leo III to crown him and confirm his dominions. The portraits of him show us a man indeed eight feet tall, with a long face, light brown beard, and big anxious eyes—eyes that give one a glimpse of the great mind behind, ever asking itself if there were any of all the things that Heaven had asked of him left undone. One fault of his early life has been so often cast up at his memory that it is but right to mention it. When he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, his mother, Bertrade, a Greek, persuaded him, apparently on the grounds of some irregularity in the marriage, to repudiate his queen, Himiltrude, and espouse another, of her choosing, called Hermengarde. The reigning Pope, Stephen IV, on learning of this action, reprimanded Charlemagne sharply and commanded him to send away Hermengarde and recall Himiltrude, which command the monarch obeyed, the second wife having held her place barely a year. After Himiltrude’s death he made Liutgarde his queen; she also died, and Charlemagne married again, more than once, but never gave the state and title of queen to any woman after Liutgarde’s death. He has been accused of having more than one wife at a time, but the most profound and impartial students of history declare that the case of Himiltrude and Hermengarde does not constitute bigamy and that there is no shadow of support for the calumny in the contemporary chronicles.