Then they owned that they were the Colonna,[3] and the king sent an ambassador to the Pope that then was, and the thing was arranged, and after a time they came back to Rome.
[1] Litta, ‘Storia delle Famiglie italiane,’ traces that from the beginning the Colonna family was always Ghibeline. The present representatives of the house, however, are reckoned Papalini. [↑]
[2] ‘Zoccolo,’ a wooden sandal kept on the foot by a leather strap over the instep. It is worn by certain ‘scalsi’ or ‘barefooted’ friars, hence called by the people ‘zoccolanti.’ The street near Ponte Sisto in Rome, called Via delle Zoccolette, received its name from a convent of nuns there who also wore ‘zoccoli.’ [↑]
[3] That Sciarra Colonna headed a band of ‘spadassini’ against Boniface VIII., and made himself the tool of Philippe le Bel, is of course true to history, as also that he held him imprisoned for a time at Anagni. The Pontiff’s biographer, Tosti, mentions however only to refute them, ‘le favole Ferretiane,’ to which Sismondi, ‘Storia delle Republiche italiane,’ gives currency, and which embody the floating tradition in the text. ‘Ferreto da Vicenza,’ writes Tosti, ‘narrates that a kind of poison was administered to this great Pontiff, which put him in a state of phrenzy; the servant who waited on him, also, was sent away, and being left alone in the room he is supposed to have gnawed at a stick (in another allusion to the same fable—at page 293—he says, ‘his fingers’ as in the text), and struck his head against the wall so desperately that his white hairs were all stained with blood; finally, that he suffocated himself under the counterpane invoking Beelzebub. But when we think how Boniface arrived at extreme old age, enfeebled with reverses; how, shut up in a room alone, there was no one to be witness to the alleged gnawing and knocking and Satanic invocations, and how that the manner of his death was quite differently related by eye-witnesses, I do not know for whom Sismondi could have thought he was writing when he marred his history by inserting such a fable. What certainly happened, and it is certified by Cardinal Stefaneschi, who was present, and by the Report afterwards drawn up of the acts of Boniface—was, that ‘he was lodged in the Vatican at the time of his death, and breathed his last tranquilly. The bed of the dying Pontiff was surrounded by eight cardinals and by other distinguished persons (Process. Bonif. p. 37, p. 15), to whom, according to the custom of his predecessors, he made confession of faith, affirming, however enfeebled his voice, that he had lived in that faith, and wished to die in it, a Catholic. Consoled with the Viaticum of the Sacraments he gave up his soul to God, weary with the prolonged struggle he had sustained for the rights of the Church, ... thirty-five days after his imprisonment at Anagni’ (vol. ii. p. 286–7). Platina goes into less detail, but also records that he died in Rome (Le vite de’ Pontefici, Venice, 1674, p. 344). The magnanimous stedfastness evinced by Boniface when attacked by Colonna and Nogaret, all abandoned as he was by human aid (detailed by Tosti, p. 276, et seq.), could not but have been succeeded by a grander closing scene than that imagined by Ferreto. Maroni (vi. 17–18) not only narrates that he survived the Anagni affair to return to Rome, but that with great Christian charity he ordered Nogaret, who had been taken prisoner by the Romans in the meantime, to be released from confinement; and [xiv. 283] that he could have had no poison administered to him at Anagni, for all the time he was imprisoned he would eat nothing but eggs on purpose to be proof against it. The best disproof of the story, however, is that given by Tosti (p. 296–7). In the clearing for the rebuilding of the nave of St. Peter’s, 302 years after the death of Boniface, his sepulchre was opened and the grave then revealed the truth. It so happened that his body had scarcely undergone any change, and those who stood by could hence depose that both his head and his hands were quite perfect; there were no marks or blows on the former, and so far from his finger-tips being gnawed, they noticed that the nails even were particularly long. The face also wore a peculiarly placid expression.
Several contemporary writers cited by Tosti tell, however, that Benedict XI., Boniface’s successor, died of poison believed to have been administered by Sciarra Colonna at the instigation of Philippe le Bel. But unfortunately for the tradition in the text Moroni [xiv. 283], who also mentions this, adds that Sciarra Colonna died in exile as he deserved. The two Cardinals Colonna, however, who had been exiled with the rest of the family, were reinstated by Benedict XI., and Clement V. in 1305 restored the other members of it to their possessions in the Roman States, where they made themselves obnoxious enough during the Papal residence at Avignon, and were as hostile to Rienzi as they had ever been to the Popes. [↑]
2
DONNA OLIMPIA.
The vices of the rich are never forgotten by the people, and the traditions that still are current in Rome about Donna Olimpia[1] are such that I have had to refuse to listen to them. But I feel bound to mention them here, because it is curious that they should so live on for more than two hundred years (the traditions of Sciarra Colonna, however, are six hundred years old). They have, doubtless, rather gained than lost in transmission. Cardinal Camillo Pamfili, Donna Olimpia’s son, presents one of those rare instances of which history has only five or six in all to record, in which, for the sake of keeping up the succession to a noble or royal house, it has been permitted[2] to leave the ecclesiastical state for married life.[3] The singularity of this incident has impressed it in the memory of the people, and her promotion of it has contributed to magnify, not only the fantastic element in their narratives, but also the popular feeling against her; thus she is accused of having had a second object in promoting it, namely, to get the place in the pontifical household thus vacated filled by a very simple[4] nephew, and thus increase her own importance at the papal court. The pasquinades written about her in her own age were such that Cancellieri[5] tells us ‘spies were set, dressed in silk attire, to discover the authors of such lampoons (motti vituperosi).’