“Discite, centeno detergi crimina Phœbo, (!)
Discite, si latebras scabrosi criminis ora
Depromunt, contrita sinu, dum circulus anni
Gyrat, perque dies quindenos exter, et Urbis
Incola tricenos delubra patentia Patrum
Ætherei Petri, Pauli quoque gentibus almi
Doctoris subeant, ubi congerit urna sepultos.”
Cardinal James of the Title of S. George in Velabro was one of the most distinguished men of Rome; “famous,” as Tiraboschi says (Letterat. Ital., v. 517), “not less for his birth than for his learning.” His mother was an Orsini. He died in 1343.
As soon as the grant of this great indulgence was noised abroad an extraordinarily large number of pilgrims set out from all parts of Italy, from Provence and France, from Spain, Germany, Hungary, and even from England, although not very many from that country, which was then at war. They came of every age, sex, and condition: children led by the hand or carried in the arms, the infirm borne in litters, the knightly and those of more means on horseback, while not a few old people were seen, Anchises-like, supported on the shoulders of their sons. The Chronicle of Parma (quoted by Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, v. p. 549) says that “every day and at all hours there was a sight as of a general army marching in and out by the Claudian Way,” which brought the pilgrims into the city after joining the Flaminian Way at the gate now represented by the Porta del Popolo; and the Chronicler of Asti has to use the words of the Apocalypse to describe the throngs that gathered about the roaring gates. “I went out one day,” he says, and “I saw a great crowd which no man could number.” The whole influx of pilgrims, including men and women, during the year, was computed by the Romans at over two millions; while Villani, who was a careful observer, writes that about thirty thousand people used to enter and leave the city every day, there being at no time less than two hundred thousand within the walls over and above the fixed population. But the pilgrimage was especially one of the poor to the tomb of the Fisherman; and all writers on it have remarked, in noticing the fervent enthusiasm of the common people, the cold reserve and absence of their royal masters. Only the Frenchman Charles Martel, titular King of Hungary, came; it is presumable more to obtain the pope’s good-will in the dispute about the succession to the throne than from piety. The nearest approach to royalty after him was Charles of Valois, who came accompanied by his family and a courtly retinue of five hundred knights, and doubtless hoped to receive the crown of Sicily from Boniface, if he could expel the usurping Aragonese.
So many thousands of pilgrims, citizens and strangers, went day and night to S. Peter’s that not a few were maimed, and some even trampled to death, in the struggling crowd of goers and comers that met at the crossing of the Tiber over the old Ælian bridge leading to the Leonine city. To obviate such disasters in future, the wide bridge was divided lengthwise by a strong wooden railing, thus forming two passages, of which the advancing and returning pilgrims took respectively the one on their right. The poet Dante, who is strongly supposed to have been in Rome for the Jubilee, although there is no proof either in the Divine Comedy or the Vita Nuova that he was, may have written as an eye-witness when he describes this very scene of the passing but not mingling streams of human beings in the well-known lines: