The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books

by Mrs. Oliphant

Cola's absence from Rome lasted for seven years; of which time there is no mention whatever in the Vita, which concerns itself exclusively with things that happened in Rome; but his steps can be very clearly traced. We never again find our enthusiast, he who first ascended the Capitol in a passion of disinterested zeal and patriotism, approved by every honest visionary and every suffering citizen, a man chosen of God to deliver the city. That his motives were ever ill motives, or that he had begun to seek his own prosperity alone, it would be hard to say: but he appears to us henceforward in a changed aspect as the eager conspirator, the commonplace plotter and schemer, hungry for glory and plunder, and using every means, by hook or by crook, to recover what he has lost, which is a far more familiar figure than the ideal Reformer, the disinterested revolutionary. We meet with that vulgar hero a hundred times in the stormy record of Italian politics, a man without scruples, sticking at nothing. But Rienzi was of a different nature: he was at once a less and a greater sinner. It would be unjustifiable to say that he ever gave up the thought of the Buono Stato, or ceased to desire the welfare of Rome. But in the long interval of his disappearance from the scene, he not only plotted like the other, but used that higher motive, and the mystic elements that were in the air, and the tendency towards all that was occult, and much that was noble in the aspirations of the visionaries of his time, to further the one object, his return to power, to the Capitol, and to the dominion of Rome. A conspirator is the commonplace of Italian story, at every period: and the pretender, catching at every straw to get back to his unsteady throne, besieging every potentate that can help him, pleading every inducement from the highest to the lowest—self-interest, philanthropy, the service of God, the most generous and the meanest sentiments—is also a very well known figure; but it is rare to find a man truly affected by the most mystic teachings of religion, yet pressing them also into his service, and making use of what he conceives to be the impulses of the Holy Spirit for the furtherance of his private ends, without, nevertheless, so far as can be asserted, becoming a hypocrite or insincere in the faith which he professes.

This was the strange development to which the Tribune came. After some vain attempts to awaken in the Roman territory friends who could help him, his heart broken by the fickleness and desertion of the Popolo in which he had trusted, he took refuge in the wild mountain country of the Apennines, where there existed a rude and strange religious party, aiming in the midst of the most austere devotion at a total overturn of society, and that return of a primeval age of innocence and bliss which is so seductive to the mystical mind. In the caves and dens of the earth and in the mountain villages and little convents, there dwelt a severe sect of the Franciscans, men whose love of Poverty, their founder's bride and choice, was almost stronger than their love of that founder himself. The Fraticelli were only heretics by dint of holding their Rule more strictly than the other religious of their order, and by indulging in ecstatic visions of a renovated state and a purified people—visions less personal though not less sincere or pious, than those which inflicted upon Francis himself the semblance of the wounds of the Redeemer, in that passion of pity and love which possessed his heart. The exile among them, who had himself been aroused out of the obscurity of ordinary life by a corresponding dream, found himself stimulated and inspired over again by the teaching of these visionaries. One of them, it is said, found him out in the refuge where he thought himself absolutely unknown, and, addressing him by name, told him that he had still a great career before him, and that it should be his to restore to Rome the double reign of universal dominion, to establish the Pope and the Empire in the imperial city, and reconcile for ever those two joint rulers appointed of God.

It is curious to find that what is to some extent the existing state of affairs—the junction in one place of the two monarchs of the earth—should have been the dream and hope of religious visionaries in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Emperor to them was but a glorified King of Italy, with a vague and unknown world behind him; and they believed that the Millennium would come, when that supreme sovereign on the Capitol and the Holy Father from the seat of St. Peter should sway the world at their will. The same class, in the same order now—so much as confiscation after confiscation permits that order to exist—would fight to its last gasp against the forced conjunction, which its fathers before it thus thought of as the thing most to be prayed for, and schemed for, in the whole world.

When others beside the Fraticelli discovered Rienzi's hiding-place, and he found himself, or imagined himself, in some danger, he went to Prague to seek shelter with the Emperor Charles IV., and a remarkable correspondence took place between that potentate on one side and the Archbishop of Prague, his counsellor, and Rienzi on the other, in which the exile promised many splendours to the monarch, and offered himself as his guide to Rome, and to lend him the weight of his influence there with the people over whom Rienzi believed that he would yet himself preside with greater power than ever. That Charles himself should reply to these letters, and reason the matter out with this forlorn wanderer, shows of itself what a power was in his words and in the fervour of his purpose. But it is ill talking between a great monarch and a penniless exile, and Charles seems to have felt no scruple in handing him over, after full exposition of his views, to the archbishop as a heretic. That prelate transferred him to the Pope, to be dealt with as a man already excommunicated under the ban of the Church, and now once more promulgating strange doctrines, ought to be; and thus his freedom, and his wandering, and the comparative safety of his life came to an end, and a second stage of strange development began.

The fortunes of Rienzi were at a very low ebb when he reached Avignon and fell into the hands of his enemies, of those whom he had assailed and those whom he had disappointed, at that court where there was no one to say a good word for him, and where all that was best in him was even more greatly against him than that which was worst. In the dungeons of Avignon, in the stronghold of the Pope who had so much cause to regret having once sanctioned and patronised the Tribune, his cause had every appearance of being lost for ever. It was fortunate for him that there was no longer a Cardinal Colonna at that court; but there was, at the same time, no champion to take up his cause. Things indeed went so badly with him, that he was actually condemned to death as a heretic, himself allowing that he was guilty and worthy of death in some moment of profound depression, or perhaps with the hope of touching the hearts of his persecutors by humility as great as had been the pretensions of his brief and exciting reign. For poor Cola after all, if the affair at Porta San Lorenzo is left out—and that was no fault of his—had done nothing worthy of death. He had been carried away by the passion and madness of an almost impossible success; but he had scarcely ever been rebellious to the Church, and his vagaries of doctrine were rather due to the mingling together of the classical with the religious, and the inflation of certain not otherwise unorthodox ideas, than any real rebellion; but he carried his prevailing sentiment and character into everything, being lower than any in the depths of his downfall as he had been higher than any on the heights of his visionary pride and short-lived triumph.

He was saved from this sentence in a manner as fantastical as himself. It may be believed that it was never intended to be carried out, and that, especially after his acknowledgment of the justice of his sentence, means would have been found of preserving him from its execution; very likely, indeed, the curious means which were found, originated in some charitable whisper that a plausible pretence of a reason for letting him off would not be disagreeable to the Pope. He was saved by the suggestion that he was a poet! We have the story in full detail from Petrarch himself, who is not without a perception of its absurdity, and begins his letter by an indignant description of the foolish and pretended zeal for poetry of which this was so strange an example. "Poetry," he says, "divine gift and vouchsafed by heaven to so few, I see it, friend, if not prostituted, at least made into a vulgar thing.

"I feel my heart rise against this, and you, if I know you well, will not tolerate such an abuse for any consideration. Neither at Athens, nor at Rome, even in the lifetime of Horace, was there so much talk of poets and poetry as at the present day upon the banks of the Rhone—although there never was either time or place in which men understood it less. But now I will check your rising bile by laughter and show how a jest can come in the midst of melancholy.

"There has lately come to this court—or rather has not come but has been brought—a prisoner, Niccola di Lorenzo, once the formidable Tribune of Rome, now of all the men the most unhappy—and what is more, not perhaps worthy of the compassion which the misery of his present state calls forth. He might have ended his days gloriously upon the Capitol, but brought himself down instead, to the great shame of the Republic and of the Roman name, into the condition of a prisoner, first in Bohemia and now here. Unfortunately, many more than I now like to think of are the praises and encouragements which I myself have written to him. Lover of virtue as I am, I could not do less than exalt and admire the generous undertaking of the strong man: and thankful on account of Italy, hoping to see the Empire of Rome arise again and secure the peace of the whole world, my heart was inundated by such joy, on account of so many fine events, that to contain myself was impossible; and it seemed to me that I almost took part in his glory by giving encouragement and comfort to his enterprise: by which as both his messengers and his letters showed, he was himself set on fire—and always more and more willingly I set myself to increase this stimulus with every argument I could think of, and to feed the flame of that ardent spirit, well knowing that every generous heart kindles at the fire of praise and glory. For this reason with an applause which to some seemed extravagant but to me very just, I exalted his every act, encouraging him to complete the magnanimous task which he had begun. The letters which I then wrote went through many hands: and since I am no prophet and still less was he ever a prophet I am not ashamed of what I wrote: for certainly what he did in those days and promised to do, not in my opinion alone but to the praise and admiration of the whole world, were very worthy, and I would not abolish the memory of these letters of mine from my memory solely because he prefers an ignoble life to a glorious death. But it is useless to discuss a thing which is impossible; and however much I might desire to destroy them I could not do it. As soon as they come into the hands of the public, the writer has no more power over them. Let us return to our story.

"This man then, who had filled the wicked with terror, the good with expectation, and with joyful hope the universe, has come before this Court humiliated and abject; and he whom the people of Rome and all the cities of Italy exalted, was seen passing through our streets between two soldiers, affording a miserable spectacle to the rabble eager to see face to face one whose name they had heard to sound so high. He came from the King of Rome (a title of the Emperor) to the Roman Pontiff, oh marvellous commerce! As soon as he had arrived the Pope committed to three princes of the Church the charge of examining into his cause, and judging of what punishment he was guilty who had attempted to free the State."

The letter is too long to quote entire, and Petrarch, though maintaining the cause of his former friend, is perhaps too anxious to make it clear that, had Rienzi given due attention to his own letters, this great reverse would never have happened to him; yet it is on the whole a noble plea for the Tribune. "In this man," the poet declares, "I had placed the last hope of Italian liberty, and, having long known and loved him from the moment when he put his hand to this great work, he seemed to me worthy of all veneration and honour. Whatever might be the end of the work I cannot cease to hold as magnificent its beginning:" and he regrets with great indignation that it was this beginning which was chiefly brought against him, and that his description of himself as Nicolas, severe and clement, had more weight with his judges than his good government or the happy change that took place in Rome during his sway. We must hasten, however, to the irony of the Tribune's deliverance.