Sunt quoque communis servata palatia Romæ
Dummodo certe ruant turresque palatia muri
Si rursus furere tentent fortassis in Urbem
Vel jam prolata nolint decreta tenere
In æde reponatur sacra pro tempore guerræ
Tempore vel caro servanda pecunia prorsus.”
The meaning of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lines is that, since the Romans have land enough to give them their daily bread, but do not object to any amount of quattrim (coin), if the vanquished should prefer, they may pay once for all a thousand pounds in money, instead of the annual tribute of two thousand sacks of grain—with freight charges to destination; and the last lines signify that a sum is laid up in the chapel to be used to carry on another war if the Tuscanellans should again machinate against the City—as Rome was proudly called—or refuse to fulfil the stipulations.
The pilgrims of the Jubilee generally made a small offering at the altars of the two basilicas, although no alms were required as a condition of gaining the indulgence; and it is particularly from a naïve passage of one of them in his valuable chronicle that Protestants and Voltaireans have taken occasion to deride the Jubilees as mere money-making affairs; and even the Catholic Muratori (Antichità Italiane, tom. iii. part ii. p. 156) carps at the inimitable description of so Romanesque a scene as that of two chatting clerics raking in the oblations of the forestieri; but Cenni, the annotator of this great work of the Modenese historian in the Roman edition of 1755, which we use, aptly remarks here that if writers will look only at the bad side of the many and almost innumerable events that have occurred in this low world of ours, and illogically conclude from a particular to the universal, they will discover that art of putting things whereby what has generally been considered good and laudable will appear thereafter worthy only of censure. The Chronicler of Asti, certainly with no great thought of what people would think five hundred years after he was mouldering in his grave, simply writes of the pilgrims’ donations: “Papa innumerabilem pecuniam ab eisdem recepit, quia die ac nocte duo clerici stabant ad altare sancti Petri, tenentes in eorum manibus rastellos rastellantes pecuniam infinitam.”
Although we believe that the honest Chronicler of Asti deserves credit for taking notes at the Jubilee, yet this very passage, read in connection with the other one about the dearness of his living, shows us that he was one of those pious but penurious souls who, if he had lived in our day, and a gentleman called on him for a subscription, would beg to be permitted to wait until the list got down very low. The Protestant Gregorovius has shown that these exaggerated offerings “were for the most part only small coin, the gift of common pilgrims”; while the Catholic Von Reumont (Geschichte der Stadt Rom, vol. ii. p. 650) has calculated that this “infinite amount of money” was only after all equal to about two hundred and forty thousand Prussian thalers, which would make no more than one hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred dollars. When the pope knew how generous were the offerings of the faithful, he ordered the entire sum to be expended on the two basilicas, in buying property to support the chapter of the one and the monastery attached to the other, and in those thousand and more other expenses which only those who have lived in Rome can understand to be necessary to support the majesty of divine worship within such edifices. Surely, it was better, in any case, that the money of the pilgrims should go for the glory of the saints and the embellishment of God’s temples than be exacted at home by cruel barons and ruthless princes to carry on their petty wars or strengthen their castles.
Mr. Hemans (no friend to our Rome), in his Mediæval Christianity and Sacred Art (vol. i. p. 474), says, after mentioning these “heaps of coins”: “If much of this went into the papal treasury, it is manifest that the expenditure from that source for the charities exercised throughout this holy season must also have been great.” This is a lame statement; because, although on the one hand the large subventions of the pope to the poor pilgrims are certain, on the other there is no proof whatever that any alms they gave went into his “treasury.” The pope, indeed, having at heart the comfort of the strangers and the beauty of the city, put up many new buildings and made other improvements, such as the beautiful Gothic loggia of S. John of Lateran, which the greatest painter of the age was commissioned to decorate with frescos (Papencordt, Rom im Mittelalter, p. 336). It is perhaps from a traditionary knowledge of these architectural propensities of the pope during the Jubilee year, and of his endowments to the basilicas, that so many people have quite erroneously believed the sombre but picturesque old farm-buildings of Castel Giubileo, which crown the green and lonely hill where more than two thousand years ago the Arx of Fidenæ stood a rival to the Capitol of Rome, to be a memorial of, and to get its designation from, this Jubilee of A.D. 1300. Even Sir Wm. Gell (Top. of Rome, p. 552) repeats the old story. But the more careful Nibby (Dintorni di Roma, vol. ii. p. 58) has demonstrated, with the aid of a document in the archives of the Vatican basilica, that the name of this place between the Via Salaria and the Tiber, five miles from Rome, is derived from that of a Roman family which acquired the site (previously called Monte Sant’ Angelo) and built the castle in the XIVth century; and that it did not come into the possession of the chapter of S. Peter until the 16th of December, 1458, when it was bought for the sum of three thousand golden ducats. So much for an instance of jumping at conclusions from a mere similarity of name, put together with something else, which is so common a fault of antiquaries.