This was the stage on which the chief personages in the history of Viterbo and the Papacy played their parts. Here came the Barbarossa to pay his unwilling homage to proud Adrian IV., who thought of lowering human dignity far more than any Latin would have done. Here came Frederick II. in peace, because Viterbo had departed from her loyalty to the Papacy for the time being, since the cause of Gregory IX. had been espoused by her ancient enemy, Rome. Here was elected Urban IV., the pope who never entered the Lateran or St. Peter's. Here Charles of Anjou, and King Philip III. of France, travelling from Tunis with the body of his father, Louis IX., waited for the election of Gregory X. in 1271; and the impatient Charles, seeing that the cardinals were in no hurry to choose a successor for Clement IV., took the roof from their council chamber, confident that discomfort would hasten the decision of those luxury-loving priests. That same year, in the presence of the King of Sicily and the King of France, Henry, son of Richard, Duke of Cornwall, who was on his way to England from the Tunisian crusade, was done to death by Guido di Montfort, Charles' vicar in Tuscany. 'The sight of the English prince awoke the fury of this bloodthirsty warrior, and impelled him to avenge himself on the royal house of England, by whom his great father, Simon of Leicester and Montfort, had been slain in battle, and his remains outraged in death. He stabbed the innocent Henry at the altar of a church, dragged the corpse by the hair, and threw it down the steps of the portal.'[29]
It is interesting to note that the murderer was not punished by Charles, and that, as Gregorovius points out, only twelve years later he was spoken of by Martin IV., who made him General in the service of the Church, as his beloved son. But Dante places his soul in hell among the tyrants who were given to blood and rapine, where he commemorates the fact that Prince Henry's heart was exposed before the sorrowing eyes of the English nation beside the waters of the Thames.
'... He in God's bosom smote the heart
Which yet is honour'd on the bank of Thames.'
But it is difficult to realise such stirring scenes in Viterbo to-day. For directly we left the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, with its cheerful provincial bustle, behind us, and crossed the sunny Piazza del Plebiscito, guarded by the lions of Viterbo, rampant on columns below their heraldic palm-trees, we found her a gentle city fallen upon sleep, full of stately mediaeval houses with outside staircases, and ancient hospices for pilgrims, Gothic and grey, with buttressed walls and cowl-like windows.
Viterbo: from a window in the Palace of the Popes.
VITERBO: THE STEMMA
OF THE CITY.