
 
 < 
 

 
 FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE.
 
 BAPTISTERY OF PARMA 
 
 WITH SALIMBENE'S HOUSE 
 
 [See page xvi.J
 
 FROM 
 ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE 
 
 TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHRONICLE OP THE 
 
 FRANCISCAN SALIMBENE J 
 
 (1221-1288) 
 
 WITH NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM OTHER 
 MEDIEVAL SOURCES. 
 
 BY 
 
 G. G. COULTON, M.A. 
 
 (EMtion, 
 
 REVISED AND ENLARGED 
 
 " Whan alle tresores aren tried, trewtJie is the best." 
 
 (PIERS PLOWMAN). 
 
 DAVID NUTT, 57, LONG ACRE. 
 1907.
 
 BARNICOTT AND PEARCE 
 PRINTERS
 
 TO 
 
 MV FATHER, MY MOTHER, 
 AND MY WIFE.
 
 PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 THE present edition contains a considerable amount of fresh 
 matter from Salimbene's chronicle, omitted from the first mainly 
 for the insufficient reason that I had already published it else- 
 where. The notes and appendices have been even more extended, 
 especially on points where different critics seemed to think the 
 evidence inadequate. 
 
 Apart from the more obvious advantages of a second edition, 
 an author must always welcome the further opportunity of ex- 
 plaining himself ; especially when he has struck for a definite 
 cause and provoked hard knocks in return. To most of my re- 
 viewers I owe hearty thanks, and certainly not least to a Guardian 
 critic, whose evident disagreement with me on important points 
 did not prevent him from giving me credit for an honest attempt 
 to describe the facts as they appeared to one pair of eyes. In 
 that recognition an author finds his real reward : after all, even 
 Goethe was content to say, " I can promise to be sincere, but not 
 to be impartial."* Genuine impartiality is one of the rarest of 
 virtues, though there have always been plenty of authors who 
 shirk thorny questions, or who concede points to the weaker side 
 with the cheap generosity which impels a jury to find for a needy 
 plaintiff against a rich man. Never, perhaps, was this kind of 
 impartiality so common as at present, when (to quote a recent 
 witty writer) " the fashion is a Roman Catholic frame of mind 
 with an agnostic conscience : you get the medieval picturesqueness 
 of the one with the modern conveniences of the other." Even 
 the Editors of the Cambridge Modern History, fearing more the 
 
 * Goethe's Maxims and Reflections, translated by T. Bailey Saundera, p. 91.
 
 viii Preface to Second Edition. 
 
 suspicion of partiality than the certainty of an error, have 
 allowed two contributors to contradict each other almost categor- 
 ically, within a few pages, on one of the most important points 
 in the first volume * Direct references to authorities are for- 
 bidden by the plan of the History : there is, of course, nothing 
 to warn the ordinary reader how far one of the two contributors 
 surpasses the other in originality and depth of research ; and it 
 is practically left to him to accept whichever of the two state- 
 ments fits in best with his preconceived opinions. We cannot 
 imagine a great co-operative work on Natural Science written 
 nowadays on these principles ; and this alone would go far to 
 account for the present unjust neglect of history by readers of 
 an exact turn of mind. Yet there is a further reason also ; for 
 to shirk disputed questions is to neglect matters of the deepest 
 interest : and the elaborate dulness of many official histories is 
 a libel on the many-coloured web of human life. 
 
 Eleven years ago, finding it impossible to get from the accredited 
 text-books satisfactory information on points which I had long 
 studied in a desultory way, I began systematic work for myself 
 within a narrow area, and soon found how little the original 
 documents are really studied, and how much one historian is 
 content to take at second-hand from another. In cases like this, 
 anything that can be done to sweep away ancient cobwebs is a 
 real gain. I knew that I should make mistakes, as even officialism 
 is far from infallible, and we have recently seen a reviewer fill 
 three and a half quarto columns with the slips made by one of 
 our most dignified professors in a single octavo volume. I knew 
 also that, however correct my facts, the very effort to expose 
 widely-accredited fallacies would give a certain want of perspec- 
 tive to my work. But, without for a moment supposing that this 
 book would by itself give anything like a complete picture of 
 medieval life, I yet believed that our forefathers' "common 
 
 * Cambridge Modern History, vol. i, p. 632 : cf. 660, 672, 674-6.
 
 Preface to Second Edition. ix 
 
 thoughts about common things " would never really become in- 
 telligible without informal and frankly personal studies of this 
 kind ; and the public reception has now strengthened this belief. 
 I have, however, departed even more from official usage in 
 another matter the direct criticism of many misstatements 
 which have gained currency by reaction from the equally one- 
 sided Protestantism of a century ago, more especially through 
 the writings of Abbot Gasquet. While it is to the direct in- 
 terest of all Roman Catholic clergy, and of many High Church- 
 men, to misread certain facts of history, there are comparatively 
 few who have the same official excuse for equal vigilance and 
 persistence on the other side. The extreme dread of partiality, 
 into which modern literature has swung from the still worse 
 extreme of blind partisanship, restrains first-rate historians from 
 speaking with sufficient plainness, even in the few cases where 
 they have found time to convince themselves, by carefully verify- 
 ing his references, of an author's inaccuracy. So long, therefore, 
 as the most authoritative writers salve their consciences by merely 
 describing certain books as able pleas from the Roman Catholic 
 point of view, the public will never grasp what this indulgent 
 phrase really means. Moreover, the euphemism itself would seem 
 to imply a very low view both of history and of religion. No 
 man of science would content himself with such equivocal language 
 in the face of systematic distortions and suppressions of evidence, 
 however personally respectable the literary offender might be. 
 For it is absolutely necessary here to separate the personal and 
 the literary questions as much as possible. The fact that an 
 author is sincerely attached to a particular church, in which he 
 also holds a high official position, is thoroughly honourable to him 
 personally ; but it aggravates the ill effect of his interested mis- 
 statements. Not charity, but cynicism underlies the plea which 
 is constantly implied, if not expressed, that certain religious 
 beliefs should be allowed wide licence in the treatment of historical
 
 x Preface to Second Edition. 
 
 facts that a writer's public falsehoods may be considered an 
 almost inseparable accident of his private creed, a superfetation 
 of his excessive piety. No bitterer condemnation could be 
 imagined than this contemptuous leniency which most men extend 
 to a priest's misstatement in the name of Christian Truth. 
 Moreover, we all know Roman Catholics whose theory and 
 practice alike contradict this plea. It was Lord Acton who said, 
 after years of struggle against official distortions of history, 
 " the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to 
 debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, 
 but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, 
 and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty 
 which history has the power to inflict on wrong." Nor did 
 Lord Acton stand alone here : for cultivated laymen show an 
 increasing repugnance to the crooked historical methods which 
 are still only too popular in ecclesiastical circles ; and certain 
 apologists pay already to truth at least the unwilling homage of 
 anonymity. Legends, which once stalked boldly abroad, are 
 fain to lurk now in unsigned articles for the Church Times, or 
 to creep into corners of the Athenceum while the editor nods, or 
 to herd with other ancient prejudices in the Saturday Review. 
 Yet, to clear the ground thoroughly, it is necessary sometimes 
 to pursue them even into this last ditch, and to show the public 
 how, in spite of the high general tone of our periodical literature, 
 the editorial we must inevitably cover some creatures which do 
 well become so old a coat. When the Saturday proclaims, with 
 its traditional wealth of epithet, that our writings lack the odour 
 of sanctity, we may profitably point out that there have always 
 been two separate voices on that journal. As in the days of the 
 Stephens and J. B. Green, it still doubtless owes its real flavour 
 to witty latitudinarians, and only keeps a few vrais croyants on 
 the premises to do the necessary backbiting. 
 
 I realise as clearly, perhaps, as some of my critics, how inade-
 
 Preface to Second Edition. xi 
 
 quate and unsatisfactory mere negative work must necessarily be. 
 But, having once liberated my soul by plainly exposing the dis- 
 like felt by a certain school of historians and critics for the open 
 discussion of actual medieval documents, I hope presently to 
 pass on to a more constructive picture of social life in the past. 
 Yet it may still be doubted whether any history of the Middle 
 Ages can at present avoid controversy without falling into super- 
 ficiality : and the blame of these conditions lies partly with the 
 want of proper organization at our universities, though there are 
 recent signs of a real awakening. All history is a chain which 
 may break at any point unless each link has been forged with 
 separate care. We cannot understand our place in the modern 
 world without comprehending the French Revolution and the 
 Reformation : nor can we understand these without an accurate 
 conception of the ancien regime which each replaced. For 
 instance (to state the problem which the Cambridge History 
 sometimes obscures), were the clergy, from whom the laity 
 revolted four hundred years ago, such as would be tolerated by 
 any civilized country of to-day ? The question is far from in- 
 soluble ; it may almost be said that judgment has already gone by 
 default, since Dr. Lea's Sacerdotal Celibacy has held the field 
 for forty years. Certainly, if it were made worth their while, 
 one or two able men could in a few years work through the 
 evidence, and bring the public to the same rough agreement as 
 has long been reached on many subjects once as contentious as 
 this. Dozens of important questions similarly await a solution 
 before any real history of medieval life can be written ; and, in 
 default of such organized study as we have long seen in physical 
 science, most of this necessary foundation-work will continue to 
 be done slowly and fitfully by volunteers, amateurs, and con- 
 troversialists, while the universities are raising enormous monu- 
 ments on the quicksands of our present uncertainties. The 
 forthcoming Cambridge Medieval History cannot possibly come
 
 xii Preface to Second Edition. 
 
 near to finality, even in the limited sense in which that word can 
 ever be rightly used. Large numbers of vital documents are 
 still unprinted : many even of the printed volumes are not yet 
 digested, and generations of acute controversy are likely to elapse 
 before a real historian of the Middle Ages could find such 
 materials as Gibbon found ready to his hand. It is pathetic to 
 see how much of professional historiography is still a mere pour- 
 ing of old wine into new bottles, and to think that Carlyle wrote 
 half a century ago " After interpreting the Greeks and Romans 
 for a thousand years, let us now try our own a little. .. . How clear 
 this has been to myself a long while ! Not one soul, I believe, 
 has yet taken it into him. Universities founded by "monk ages" 
 are not fit at all for this age. . . . What all want to know is 
 the condition of our fellow men ; and, strange to say, it is the 
 thing of all least understood, or to be understood as matters go."* 
 The condemnation of the universities is, of course, couched in 
 terms of Carlylean exaggeration : but it can scarcely be denied 
 that the official schools are still tempted through official 
 timidity, or natural laziness, or mere muddle to neglect those 
 questions of past history which are indeed most contentious, but 
 which go nearest to the roots of human life. 
 
 Fronde's "Early Life of Thomas Carlyle" (1891), vol. ii, pp. 16, 80.
 
 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. 
 
 THERE are many nowadays, and of the best among us, who 
 still halt between the medieval and the modern ideals. In 
 their just dislike of much that is blameworthy in the present, 
 they are often tempted to imagine Religion as a lamp glimmeriDg 
 in the far depths of the past, dimmer and dimmer to human 
 eyes as the world moves onward down the ages. At other 
 times, with the healthy instinct of life, they cling to the more 
 hopeful conception of Faith as a sacred flame kindled from 
 torch to torch in the hands of advancing humanity varying 
 and dividing as it passes on, yet always essentially the same 
 broadening over the earth to satisfy man's wider needs, instead 
 of fading away in proportion as God multiplies the souls that 
 need it. 
 
 These two ideals are mutually exclusive, and the choice is 
 plain if historians would write plainly. Medieval history has 
 been too exclusively given over to the poet, the romancer, and 
 the ecclesiastic, who by their very profession are more or less 
 conscious apologists. Yet we cannot understand the present 
 until we face the past without fear or prejudice. The thirteenth 
 century the golden age of the old ideal is on the one hand 
 near enough for close and accurate observation, while it is 
 sufficiently distant to afford the wide angle needed for our 
 survey. 
 
 This present study lays no claim to impartiality in one 
 sense, for I cannot affect to doubt which is the higher of the 
 two ideals. At the same time, when I first fell in love with the 
 Middle Ages, thirty years ago, it was as most people begin to 
 love them, through Chaucer and the splendid relics of Gothic 
 art. An inclination, at first merely aesthetic, has widened and 
 deepened with the growing conviction that the key to most
 
 xiv Preface to First Edition. 
 
 modern problems is to be found in the so-called Ages of Faith. 
 Even here, where the very conception of my work compels me 
 to run counter to many cherished convictions, I have honestly 
 tried to avoid doubtful statements or exaggerations, and am 
 ready to guarantee this by the only pledge in my power by an 
 offer which I have already made (in substance) several times in 
 vain. Many writers disparage modern civilization in comparison 
 with what seems to me a purely imaginary past. If any one 
 of these will now take me at my word, I will willingly accept 
 his severest criticisms to the extent of thirty-two octavo pages, 
 restrict my reply within the same limit, and publish the whole 
 at my own expense without further comment. If my content- 
 ions are false, I am thus undertaking to offer every facility for 
 my own exposure. 
 
 I must here record my special thanks to Prof. L. Cledat 
 of Lyons, and Geheimrath-Prof. O. Holder-Egger of Berlin. 
 The former, who had once projected a complete edition of 
 Salimbene, generously put his very extensive collations at my 
 service : and the latter, who has at last published the Chronicle 
 with a perfection of scholarly apparatus which leaves nothing 
 to be desired, has not only met my enquiries with the most 
 ungrudging courtesy, but has kindly supplied me with advance 
 sheets of his great work. 
 
 G. G. COULTON. 
 
 EASTBOURNE, July, 1906.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 i. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BROTHER SALIMBENE . 1 
 
 ii. PARENTAGE AND BOYHOOD . . . .12 
 
 in. THE GREAT ALLELUIA . . . .21 
 
 iv. CONVERSION . . . . . .38 
 
 v. A WICKED WORLD . . . . .49 
 
 vi. CLOISTER LIFE . . . . .62 
 
 vn. FRATE ELIA . . . . .76 
 
 viii. THE BITTER CRY OF A SUBJECT FRIAR . . 89 
 
 ix. CONVENT FRIENDSHIPS . . . .98 
 
 x. THE SIEGE OF PARMA . . . .115 
 
 xi. THE GUELFS VICTORIOUS . . . .124 
 
 xn. WANDERJAHRE ..... 134 
 
 xin. ABBOT JOACHIM'S THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT . . 150 
 
 xiv. FURTHER WANDERINGS . . . .167 
 
 xv. A BISHOP'S CONSCIENCE . . . .176 
 
 xvi. SETTLING DOWN . . . . .185 
 
 xvn. TAKING IN SAIL ..... 201 
 
 xvin. FRESH STORMS ..... 213 
 
 xix. LAST DAYS ...... 227 
 
 xx. THE PRINCES OF THE WORLD . . . 239 
 
 xxi. NEITHER FISH NOR FLESH .... 257 
 
 xxii. THE PRINCES OF THE CHURCH . . . 273 
 
 xxin. CLERGY AND PEOPLE ..... 292 
 
 xxiv. FAITH ...... 305 
 
 xxv. BELIEVING AND TREMBLING . . . .316 
 
 xxvi. THE SALT AND ITS SAVOUB .... 334 
 
 xxvn. CONCLUSION ...... 349 
 
 APPENDICES . . . . . . . 355 
 
 INDEX .... 435
 
 DESCRIPTION OF FRONTISPIECE. 
 
 THE frontispiece (for kind permission to use which I have to thank 
 Messrs. Caasell and Co. ), shows the Baptistery which was the special 
 glory of Parma. Salimbene tells us (585) " in the year 1196 it was 
 begun ; and my father (as I have heard from his lips) laid stones in 
 its foundation for a memorial and a sign of good remembrance to 
 posterity : for there was naught (nulla interposilio) between the 
 Baptistery and my house." This definitely marks the site of 
 Salimbene's house as the corner building on the spectator's right 
 hand, since the left-hand corner house does not stand near enough to 
 satisfy what he tells us in another place, of his mother's fear lest 
 the earthquake should bring the Baptistery down upon their heads. 
 
 The picture is taken from a spot close by the west front of the 
 Cathedral ; opposite the Baptistery (and therefore behind the spec- 
 tator to the right) stands the Bishop's palace. These three buildings, 
 which stand thus round the head of the Piazza Vecchia, were all in 
 course of construction during the chronicler's lifetime. 
 
 Very many of the houses in Parma keep their 13th century walls 
 under the later stucco : and it is quite possible that the shell of our 
 chronicler's house is still there. The Baptistery was first used in 
 1216, though not actually finished until 1270 : the delay was 
 occasioned by Ezzelino's domination of Verona, which stopped the 
 supplies of that delicate pink-and-white Verona marble of which the 
 building was made. (Salimbene p. 519 : Affo. i.v, 3).
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 
 
 the most remarkable autobiography of the Middle 
 I Ages is only now beginning to take its proper place in 
 history. Inaccessible until lately even to most medieval scholars, 
 it is now at last being published in its entirety under the 
 admirable editorship of Prof. Holder-Egger, in the Monumenta 
 Germanics (Vol. xxxii, Scriptores). An edition was indeed 
 published in 1857 at Parma : but this was printed from an 
 imperfect transcript, mutilated in deference to ecclesiastical 
 susceptibilities. The original MS., after many vicissitudes, had 
 been bought into the Vatican library in order to render a 
 complete publication impossible ; and it was only thrown open to 
 students, with the rest of the Vatican treasures, by the liberality 
 of the late Pope Leo XIII. Even now, the complete Salimbene 
 will never be read ; for many sheets have been cut out of the 
 MS., and parts of others erased, by certain scandalized readers 
 of long ago : l but, in the shape in which we have him at last, 
 he is the most precious existing authority for the ordinary life of 
 Catholic folk at the period which by common consent marks the 
 high-water line of the Middle Ages. 
 
 There have been few more brilliant victories in history than 
 those of St. Francis, and few more pathetic failures. The very 
 qualities which put him in a class by himself, and command 
 admiration even from his least sympathetic critics, foredoomed 
 his ideal to a fall as startling as its rise. The generation which 
 followed him was at least as far from fulfilling his hopes as the 
 First Empire was from realizing the ideal of 1789. In each case, 
 an impulse was given which shook Europe to its foundations, 
 and still vibrates down the ages. But in each case there was 
 something of necessary blindness in the passionate concentration 
 of the original idea ; so that the movement soon took quite a 
 different direction, and liberated quite different forces, from 
 those which had been comtemplated by the men who threw their 
 whole soul into the first blow. In Dante's lifetime, not a century
 
 2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 after St. Francis's death, friars were burned alive by their 
 brother friars for no worse fault than obstinate devotion to the 
 strict Rule of St. Francis. The Saint was the especial Apostle 
 of Poverty : yet that century of steadily-growing wealth and 
 luxury which stirred Cacciaguida's gall so deeply (Par. xv. 97 
 foil.) coincided precisely with the century of first and purest 
 Franciscan activity : especially if we read the poet in the light 
 of contemporary chroniclers, who date the change from "the 
 days of Frederick II." St. Francis was born in that age of 
 Bellincion Berti to which Dante looked back as so simple, so 
 sober, and so chaste ; and if he had come back to earth on the 
 centenary of his death, he would have found himself "in the 
 days of Sardanapalus." Making all allowance for Dante's 
 bitterness, and for his characteristically medieval praise of past 
 times at the expense of the present, still we cannot doubt that 
 the change was real and far-reaching. It was in Dante's life- 
 time, for instance, that the custom of buying Oriental slaves 
 grew up, with other similar luxuries which the friars were quite 
 powerless to banish, even when they did not themselves set the 
 example. 2 
 
 Again, Innocent III had seen in a vision St. Francis propping 
 the falling Church : yet this hope, too, was partly belied by the 
 facts of later history. The friars, it is true, seemed for a time 
 to have entirely checked the growing spirit of antisacerdotalism ; 
 but they brought among the clergy themselves a ferment of free 
 thought which only found its proper outlet at the Reformation ; 
 just as the Oxford movement, though initiated as a protest not 
 against the Low Church but against Liberalism, has worked in 
 the long run for Liberalism within our own communion. The 
 Church, in the narrower sense in which Innocent and Francis 
 understood the word, was partly propped, but also seriously 
 shaken, by the thrust of the Franciscan buttress. 
 
 Yet the true kernel of St. Francis's teaching has lived and 
 grown : he has given an undying impulse to the world's spiritual 
 life. He showed that a man need not leave the world to live the 
 highest life that indeed he can scarcely live the highest life 
 except in the world and, in spite of occasional hesitation on 
 the Saint's own part, in spite of the blindness of many of his 
 most devoted successors, this is a lesson which men have 
 never since forgotten. In this at least, the twentieth century 
 is more Franciscan than the thirteenth ; that you may find a 
 true saint in cricketing flannels or at a theatre, or selling you a 
 pennyworth of biscuits without any airs whatever behind the 
 counter of a village shop. Society in general has grown sufficiently
 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 3 
 
 decent to render the retirement into monastic life almost or quite 
 unnecessary : and therefore, though there has been no age in 
 which monks might so easily live in undisturbed retirement as in 
 our own (if indeed they would seek such retirement, and avoid 
 worldly politics), yet monastic vocations among grown-up men 
 and women are extremely rare even in Roman Catholic countries. 
 The good man seldom dreams of cutting himself off from society : 
 and both he and society find themselves the better for it. 
 
 The persistence with which most English writers on St. Francis 
 ring the changes on M. Sabatier's admirable biography without 
 refreshing themselves at original sources is apt to create a very 
 artificial atmosphere. Indeed, M. Sabatier himself seems at 
 times to forget the essential impracticability of the strict 
 Franciscan ideal. When he writes that there was something 
 " which all but made of the Franciscans the leaven of a quite 
 new civilization " in " the thought . . that the return of the 
 Spirit of Poverty to dwell on the earth should be the signal for 
 a complete restoration of the human race" (Sacrum Commercium, 
 p. 8) he himself would probably frankly confess, on second 
 thoughts, that his enthusiasm has carried him too far. The idea 
 of a formal and absolute renunciation of property was from the 
 first as essentially incapable of regenerating the world as the 
 idea of formal celibacy was of settling "the social problem." 
 It was simply a religious charge of the Light Brigade magnifi- 
 cent in its moral effect, eternally inspiring within its own limits, 
 but vitiated by a terrible miscalculation of the opposing forces. 
 It had no more effect on the growing luxury of the 13th century 
 than had the Six Hundred on the solid Russian army. Military 
 suicide is in the long run as fatal to victory in the Holy War as 
 in any other : and many of the worst treasons to the Franciscan 
 spirit may be traced directly to the Saint's own exaggerations. 
 T he Franciscan legend in England seems in danger of becoming 
 almost as artificial as the Napoleonic legend in France : the 
 strain of praise is pitched higher and higher by each successive 
 writer, till it comes very near to the falsetto of cant. The time 
 seems almost at hand when those who cared for the Saint before 
 M. Sabatier's Life was published will feel like those who cared 
 for art before the coming of JEstheticism. The cycle of early 
 Franciscan legends is studied almost as the Bible was two hundred 
 years ago as a Scripture rather desecrated than honoured by 
 illustration from outside sources. Miss Macdonell's Sons of 
 Francis, in spite of the lacunae in her scholarship, is, however, a 
 real attempt to illustrate the Saint's life by those of some of his 
 nearest companions and most distinguished followers. But even
 
 4 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 she moves almost altogether in the plane of exceptional mani- 
 festations, and lacks the deeper knowledge of contemporary 
 manners which is necessary for a comprehension of the average 
 friar. Yet it is in fact almost as important to understand the 
 average friar as to understand St. Francis himself, if we would 
 realize the 13th century. And though Salimbene himself cannot 
 be called an average friar he was in many ways far above the 
 ordinary yet there is no other single book in which the ordinary 
 friar, and the world on which he looked out, may so well be 
 studied. 
 
 The author's time and circumstances were among the most 
 favourable that could possibly be conceived for an autobiographer. 
 He was a citizen of one of the busiest cities of Italy during in- 
 comparably the most stirring period of its history. A Franciscan 
 of the second generation, overlapping St. Francis by five years 
 and Dante by twenty-five, he knew personally many of the fore- 
 most figures in Franciscan and Dantesque history : and the course 
 of his long and wandering life brought him into contact with 
 many real saints, and still more picturesque sinners, whom he 
 describes with the most impartial interest. His naturally obser- 
 vant and sympathetic mind had been ripened, when he wrote, by 
 forty years' work in the busiest, most popular, most enterprising 
 religious order that ever existed : 
 
 " Lo, goode men, a five, and eek a frere 
 Wol falle in every dyshe and mateere." 
 
 And, rarest and most precious circumstance of all, he is among 
 the frankest of autobiographers, not so much composing as 
 thinking aloud. Like Pepys, whom he resembles so closely in 
 other ways, he wrote with small thought for posterity : the Chron- 
 icle was apparently designed at first for the edification of his dear 
 niece, a nun of his own order. As he tells us (p. 187 ), " Moreover, 
 in writing divers chronicles I have used a simple and intelligible 
 style, that my niece for whom I wrote might understand as she 
 read ; nor have I been anxious and troubled about ornaments of 
 words, but only about the truth of my story. For my niece 
 Agnes is my brother's daughter, who, having come to her fifteenth 
 year, entered the order of St. Clare, and continues in the service 
 of Jesus Christ even to this present day, A.D. 1284, wherein I 
 write these words. Now this Sister Agnes, my niece, had an 
 excellent understanding in Scripture, and a good understanding 
 and memory, together with a delightful tongue and ready of 
 speech, so that it might be said of her, not without reason, ' Grace
 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 5 
 
 is poured abroad in thy lips, therefore hath God blessed thee for 
 ever.' " 3 We have here, therefore in Montaigne's words, " un livre 
 de bonne foy" If some of the stories which the grey-headed friar 
 chronicles for the edification of his aristocratic and cultured 
 niece seem to us a trifle full-flavoured, we must remember that 
 this was thoroughly characteristic of the Ages of Faith. After 
 all, Madame Eglantine and her two fellow-nuns heard worse still 
 on their pious journey to Canterbury : and the most classical 
 educational writer of the Middle Ages, the Knight of La Tour 
 Landry, records even stranger tales than Chaucer's for the instruc- 
 tion of his two motherless daughters. If, again, the friar's very 
 plain-spoken criticisms of matters ecclesiastical may startle 
 those who have indeed read their Dante, but who have been 
 taught, perhaps, that Dante writes with peculiar bitterness as 
 a disappointed man, this is only because many of the most 
 important facts of thirteenth century history have never in 
 modern times been fairly laid before the public. Nobody could 
 gather from even the most candid of modern ecclesiastical 
 historians that the crowning period of the Middle Ages seemed, 
 to those who lived in it, almost hopelessly out of joint. The 
 most pious, the most orthodox, the bravest men of the thirteenth 
 century write as unwilling dwellers in the tents of Kedar. To 
 them, their own world, whether before or after the coming of the 
 Friars, was the mere dregs of the good old world of the past : 
 and they expected God's final vengeance in the near future. 
 Herein lies one of the principal, though hitherto imperfectly 
 recognized, causes of the strange unprogressiveness of the Middle 
 Ages : the strongest minds were hopelessly oppressed by the 
 sight of the crying evils around them, and by the want of 
 histories to teach them how, barbarous as the present was in so 
 many ways, it yet marked a real improvement on the past. 
 
 The modern historian, therefore, cannot be too thankful for 
 these memoirs, written without pose or effort, to interest his 
 favourite niece, by a man who had looked sympathetically on 
 many sides of the world in which St. Francis and Dante lived 
 and worked. The learned Jesuit Michael, sadly as he is shocked 
 by our author in many ways, cannot deny that this book presents 
 a mirror of the times, and quotes with approval the verdict of 
 Dove : " His character stands out in striking completeness of 
 modelling by the side of the bas-reliefs of other medieval 
 authors.' 4 The dryness of the ordinary medieval chronicler, 
 his apparent unconsciousness of any human interest beyond 
 the baldest facts, is often exasperating : or again, when he 
 betrays real interest, it is too often at the expense of fact. Not.
 
 6 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 only lives of saints, but whole histories, were written avowedly 
 by direct angelic revelation, pure from all taint of earthly 
 documents. 6 But, fortunately for us, Salimbene had more modern 
 notions of the historian's duty. With him, fact comes first, 
 and even edification takes a subordinate place. "Whereas I 
 may seem sometimes to digress from the matter in hand," he 
 says, " it must be forgiven me. I cannot tell my stories otherwise 
 than as they came about in very deed, and as I saw with mine 
 own eyes in the days of the Emperor Frederick II ; yea, and 
 many years after his death, even unto our own days wherein I 
 write these words, in the year of our Lord 1284 " (185). Later 
 on (217) he gives us further evidence of his anxiety to learn 
 the exact truth of the stories current in his own day : and the 
 passage is interesting also as exemplifying the difficulties which 
 ordinary medieval writers experienced in producing even a 
 single copy of their work. He is speaking of a book of his, which 
 unfortunately has not survived : " The chronicle beginning 
 * Octavianus C&sar Augustus, etc.J which I wrote in the convent 
 of Ferrara in the year 1250 ; the style of which chronicle I 
 gathered from divers writings, and continued it as far as to the 
 story of the Lombards. Afterwards I slackened my quill, and 
 ceased to write upon that chronicle, being, indeed, so poor that 
 I could procure neither paper nor parchment. And now we 
 are in the year 1284 : yet I ceased not to write divers other 
 chronicles which, in mine own judgment, I have excellently 
 composed, and which I have purged of their superfluities, follies, 
 falsehoods, and contradictions. Nevertheless, I could not purge 
 them of all such ; for some things which have been written are 
 now so commonly noised abroad that the whole world could not 
 remove them from the hearts of men who have thus learnt them 
 from the first. Whereof I could show many examples ; but to 
 rude and unlearned people all examples are useless ; as it is 
 written in Ecclesiasticus, 'He that teacheth a fool, is like one 
 that glueth a potsherd together.' ' Nor are these mere idle 
 boasts. With all his partiality here and there a partiality the 
 more harmless because it is so naively shown Salimbene stands 
 the test of comparison with independent documents quite as well 
 as Villani. Among modern writers, those who have least reason 
 to love him are glad to avail themselves of his authority. The 
 footnotes to the three volumes of Analecta Franciscana, by 
 which the friars of Quaracchi have laid modern students under 
 such heavy obligations, swarm with references to Salimbene, 
 whose data are constantly used to correct even so painstaking a 
 compiler as Wadding.
 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 7 
 
 Amid all that has been written of the thirteenth century, there 
 is extraordinarily little to guide the general reader in a compari- 
 son between those men's real lives and ours. It is true that the 
 main ebb and flow of their conflicts in Church and State has often 
 been related ; the theory of their institutions has been described 
 and analysed ; we have excellent studies of the lives and ideals 
 of some of their greatest men. All this is most important, yet 
 it says comparatively little to the ordinary reader, who, without 
 leisure for special study, often craves nevertheless to compare 
 other states of life with his own. Even the student of greater 
 leisure and opportunities can find but little answer to the all- 
 important question, " Which would be the better to live and die 
 in, a world with those institutions and ideals, or a world with 
 ours ? " Those who have set themselves most definitely to 
 answer this question have too often placed themselves from 
 the outset at a necessarily distorting point of view. They have 
 painted the medieval life mainly after medieval theories of 
 Church and State, or after the lives of a few great men. Yet 
 there never was an age in which theory was more hopelessly 
 divorced from practice than in the thirteenth century ; or in 
 which great men owed more of their greatness to a passionate 
 and lifelong protest against the sordid realities of common life 
 around them. The Franciscan gospel of poverty and humility 
 was preached to a world in which money and rank had far more 
 power than in modern England ; and there is scarcely a page 
 of the Divina Commcdia that does not breathe a sense of the 
 terrible contrast between Catholic theory and Catholic life. 
 Dean Church, in one of his essays, shows himself fully alive to 
 the danger of judging an "age simply after the pattern of its 
 great men. 6 Yet perhaps no writer on the Middle Ages follow- 
 ed this dangerous path more closely than Church's great Oxford 
 master, with all his genius and his natural love of truth. New- 
 man's pictures of the Middle Ages have all the charm and the 
 earnest personal conviction of his best writings, but they have 
 often scarcely more correspondence with the historical facts of 
 any state of society than has Plato's Republic. A momentary 
 survey of periods with which we are more familiar will at once 
 show us how fatally history of this kind must take the colour of 
 the writer's personal ideals and prepossessions, in the absence of 
 unquestionable landmarks to correct the play of his imagination. 
 What conception could we form of the real differences between 
 our life and that of our seventeenth-century ancestors from even 
 the most brilliant and penetrating comparisons between Jeremy 
 Taylor and Liddon, Hobbes and Herbert Spencer, Clarendon
 
 8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and Carlyle ? At the best, such studies could only illustrate and 
 complete a real history written from very different sources. 
 
 Such sources are abundant enough for the actual ways and 
 thoughts of the people in the Middle Ages : yet a vast amount of 
 work remains to be done before the historian of the future can 
 give us a full and intimate picture of thirteenth century life. 
 The foundation needs first to be laid in a series of exhaustive 
 monographs with full references, such as Dr. Rashdall' Universi- 
 ties of Europe in the Middle Ages, Dr. Dresdner's Kultur-und 
 Sittcngcschichtc dcr Italicnischen Geistlichkeit, and Dr. Lea's 
 admirable books on the Inquisition, Confession, Indulgences, and 
 Celibacy. Yet such monographs are still far too few : many of 
 the most important documents are still unprinted : many of those 
 in print have been most imperfectly read and discussed ; and a 
 period of acute controversy must necessarily come before we can 
 arrive at even a rough agreement as to the main facts. Though 
 the history of medieval civilization needs most care of all 
 for here at every step we move among the flames, or at least 
 over the smouldering ashes, of passionate convictions and pre- 
 judices it is still the one domain of history into which, in 
 England at least, the scientific spirit has least penetrated. Even 
 the new series of English Church histories published by Messrs. 
 Macmillan nay, the Cambridge Modern History itself are 
 shorn of half their use to the serious student by the entire absence 
 of references or similar guarantees of literary good faith. No 
 bank can exist in these days without publishing its balance- 
 sheets : yet we are still expected to accept teaching which may 
 be more vital than money, upon the ipse dixit of this or that 
 writer. Half our religious quarrels are due to this habit of 
 writing without references, and therefore too often in reliance 
 upon evidence which will not bear serious criticism. The tempta- 
 tion is too strong for human nature. Whether a writer's 
 prepossessions be pro-medieval or anti-medieval, he can count 
 upon a sympathetic public of his own, and upon comparative 
 immunity from criticism ; since his separate blunders, unsup- 
 ported by references, can be traced and exposed only with the 
 greatest difficulty ; and, in the present state of public opinion, 
 nobody thinks the worse of him for making the most sweeping 
 statements without adequate documentary vouchers. The 
 inevitable result is that well-meaning men, whom a careful study 
 of their opponents' sources would soon bring to some sort of 
 rough agreement, spend their lives beating the air in wild attempts 
 to strike an adversary who is heating himself with equally vain 
 and violent demonstrations after his own fashion. Moving in
 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 9 
 
 wholly different planes, with scarcely a single point of possible 
 contact, they are necessarily carried farther apart at every step ; 
 and the consciousness of their own good faith in the main compels 
 them to look upon their mysteriously perverse adversaries as 
 Jesuits or Atheists (as the case may be) in disguise. At the 
 same time, the general reader is rather annoyed than interested 
 by interruptions. I have, therefore, omitted footnotes as far as 
 possible, not even marking the necessarily frequent omissions 
 of repetitions and irrelevancies in direct quotations from 
 Salimbene omissions which sometimes run to a page or more 
 but simply giving page-references by means of which students 
 can always verify my translations. To the general reader I 
 offer the guarantee of good faith already explained in my 
 preface, viz., an undertaking to print at my own expense the 
 first criticism of my methods which any scholar may care to 
 send me, to the extent of 36 octavo pages. Those who may 
 wish to verify my illustrations from other sources will find full 
 quotations in the notes (Appendix A), whither I have also 
 relegated a good deal of detailed evidence interesting in its 
 bearing upon my subject, but too lengthy to find a place in 
 the text. I have found it hopeless, however, to give in a 
 book of this compass more than a very small fraction of the 
 evidence which I have collected during the past nine years to 
 show that what Salimbene describes is nothing exceptional, but 
 simply the normal state of thirteenth-century society. For he is 
 indeed the natural and artless chronicler of ordinary life in the 
 age of St. Francis and Dante. As with Pepys or Boswell, his 
 very failings as a man are to his advantage as a historian ; and, 
 for us, his lively interest in all sorts of men more than counter- 
 balances his occasional lukewarmness of family affection. The 
 figures which too often stalk like dim ghosts through the pages 
 of far more famous authors, startle us here with their almost 
 modern reality. They move indeed in a world differing from 
 ours to an extent almost past belief, except to those who have 
 carefully measured the strides of civilization even during the 
 past century : yet the most startling of his anecdotes are cor- 
 roborated by unimpeachable independent testimony. All the 
 documents of the thirteenth century, from poems and romances 
 to saints' lives and bishops' registers, yield to the patient student 
 scattered bones from which a complete skeleton of the society of 
 that time might be built up. Beyond this, there are a few authors 
 who in themselves show us something more than mere bones 
 Joinville, for instance, and Cicsarius of Heisterbach, and Thomas 
 of Chantimpre. But Salimbeue alone shows us every side of hi?
 
 io From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 age, clothed all round in living flesh, and answering in every part 
 to the dry bones we find scattered elsewhere. 
 
 The history of his MS. is sufficient to explain why he is as 
 yet so little known : for it is difficult to do much with a 
 notoriously imperfect text. The reader will, however, find a 
 good deal about Salimbene in Gebhart's fascinating Ultalic 
 Mystique, and La Renaissance Italicnnc. He has been the 
 subject of learned monographs by Professors Cledat of Lyons 
 and Michael of Innsbruck, the latter of whom analyses the book 
 very fully and without too obvious partiality. A very short 
 abstract of the Chronicle has been printed in English by Mr. 
 Kington Oliphant ; and, quite recently, Miss Macdonell has 
 dealt with Salimbene at some length on pp. 252 foil, of her 
 Sons of Francis. Lively and interesting as this chapter is, it 
 fails, however, to give an adequate idea either of the contents 
 of Salimbene's book, or of his value as a historian. The author, 
 though she quotes from the Latin text, has evidently worked 
 almost entirely from Cantarelli's faulty Italian translation, of 
 which she herself speaks, somewhat ungratefully, with exag- 
 gerated scorn. Not only has she followed Cantarelli blindly 
 in all his worst blunders quoting, for instance, as specially 
 characteristic of Salimbene's attitude towards Frederick II a 
 paragraph, which, in fact, describes a different man altogether 
 (p. 300) but she adds several of her own. The greatest weak- 
 ness of her study, however, is that her comparative unfamiliarity 
 with other first-hand contemporary sources tempts her to 
 depreciate Salimbene's value as a faithful mirror of his times. 
 She evidently looks upon certain perfectly normal facts as strange 
 and exceptional ; and her essay, though well worth reading, 
 fails in this respect to do justice to its subject. 7 
 
 In the following pages 1 have made no attempt to translate 
 the Chronicle in the exact state in which Salimbene left it. The 
 good friar jotted things down just as they came into his head, 
 with ultra-medieval incoherence : " For the spirit bloweth 
 whither it listeth, neither is it in man's power to hinder the 
 spirit," as he says after one of his wildest digressions. Whole 
 pages are filled with mere lists of Scripture texts, often apparently 
 strung together from a concordance, though he undoubtedly 
 knew his Bible thoroughly well. Pages more are occupied with 
 records of historical events compiled from other chronicles : the 
 parentheses and repetitions are multitudinous and bewildering. 
 The book as it stands is less a history than materials for a 
 history, like the miscellaneous paper bags from which Hofrath 
 Heuschrecke compiled the biography of Teufelsdrockh. The
 
 The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene. 1 1 
 
 only possible way of introducing the real Salimbene to the modern 
 public is to translate or summarize all the really characteristic 
 portions of the Chronicle, reducing them by the way to some sort 
 of order. But I have been compelled to omit a good deal both 
 from my author's text and from the scope of my illustrations : 
 for there is one side of medieval life which cannot be discussed 
 in a book of this kind. To the darkest chapter in Celano's life 
 of St. Francis I have barely alluded ; and I have turned aside 
 altogether from the most terrible canto in the Inferno. The 
 student will, however, find in Appendix C the original Latin 
 of certain passages and allusions omitted from the text.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Parentage and Boyhood. 
 
 ~T)ROTHER Salimbene di Adamo was born of a noble family at 
 IJ Parma, in 1221, the year of St. Dominic's death. One of 
 his sponsors was the Lord Balian of Sidon, a great baron of 
 France who had been viceroy for Frederick II in the Holy Land. 
 " My father was Guido di Adamo, a comely man and a valiant 
 in war, who once crossed the seas for the succour of the Holy 
 Land, in the days of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, before my 
 birth. And I have heard from him that, whereas other Lombards 
 in the Holy Land enquired of diviners concerning the state of 
 their houses at home, my father would never enquire of them ; 
 and, on his return, he found all in comfort and peace at home ; 
 but the others found evil, as the diviners had spoken. Further- 
 more, I have heard from my father that his charger, which he had 
 brought with him to the Holy Land, was commended for its 
 beauty and worth above those of all the rest who were of his 
 company. Again, I have heard from him that, when the 
 Baptistery of Parma was founded, he laid stones in the foundations 
 for a sign and a memorial thereof, and that on the spot whereon 
 the Baptistery is built had been formerly the houses of my 
 kinsfolk, who after the destruction of their houses, went to 
 Bologna" (37). In 1222 occurred the Great Earthquake in 
 Lombardy, attributed by the orthodox to God's anger against 
 the heretics, who swarmed in France, Germany and Italy, and 
 who in Berthold of Ratisbon's excited imagination numbered 
 a round hundred-and-fifty sects. 1 The common folk, however, 
 when their first panic was over, treated it rather as a joke : 
 " They became so hardened by the earthquake that, when a 
 pinnacle of a tower or a house fell, they would gaze thereon 
 with shouts and laughter. My mother hath told me how at the 
 time of that earthquake I lay in my cradle, and how she caught 
 up my two sisters, one under each arm, for they were but babes 
 as yet. So, leaving me in my cradle, she ran to the house of 
 her father and mother and brethren, for she feared (as she said),
 
 Parentage and Boyhood. 13 
 
 lest the Baptistery should fall on her, since our house was hard 
 by. Wherefore I never since loved her so dearly, seeing that 
 she should have cared more for me, her son, than for her 
 daughters. But she herself used to say that they were easier 
 for her to carry, being better grown than I " (34). Yet he 
 describes her as a most loveable woman, in spite of her perverse 
 choice on that eventful day. " She was named the Lady Imelda, 
 a humble lady and devout, fasting much and gladly dispensing 
 alms to the poor. Never was she seen to be wroth ; never did 
 she smite any of her maidservants with her hand. In winter, 
 she would ever have with her, for the love of God, some poor 
 woman from the mountains, who found in the house both lodging 
 and food and raiment all winter long ; and yet my mother had 
 other maids who did the service of the house. Wherefore Pope 
 Innocent [the IVth, who knew her personally] gave me letters 
 at Lyons that she might be of the order of St. Clare, and the 
 same he gave another time to Brother Guido, my blood-brother, 
 when he was sent on a mission from Parma to the Pope. She 
 lieth buried in the convent of the ladies of St. Clare ; may her 
 soul rest in peace ! Her mother, that is, my grandmother, was 
 called the Lady Maria, a fair lady and a full-fleshed, sister to 
 the Lord Aicardo, son to Ugo Amerigi, who were judges in Parma, 
 rich men and powerful, and dwelt hard by the church of St. 
 George " (55). The implication in this remark about the maid- 
 servants is only too fully justified by all contemporary evidence. 
 The Confessionale, a manual for parish priests, variously at- 
 tributed to St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus 
 Magnus, specifies the canonical penances to be imposed for some 
 sixty probable transgressions. One of them runs, " If any 
 woman, inflamed by zealous fury, have so beaten her maid- 
 servant that she die in torments within the third day, .... 
 if the slaying have been wilful, let her not be admitted to the 
 communion for seven years ; but if it have been by chance, let 
 her be admitted after five years of legitimate penance." A 
 stock case in Canon Law is that of the priest who, wishing to beat 
 his servant with his belt, had the misfortune to wound him With 
 the dagger thereto attached. A Northumbrian worthy in 1279, 
 striking at a girl with a cudgel, struck and killed by mistake 
 the little boy whom she held in her arms ; the jury treated it as 
 a most pardonable misadventure, though he showed his sense of 
 having sailed very close to the wind by absconding until the trial 
 was over. It is necessary, indeed, on the threshold of any out- 
 spoken study of medieval life, to recognise the essential difference 
 between past and present manners in this matter of personal
 
 14 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 violence. On this subject, as on so many others, a false glamour 
 has been thrown over the past by writers who have studied only 
 the theory of knightly courtesy, without making any attempt to 
 gauge the actual practice. The instances of brutality to women 
 in high life quoted by Leon Gautier and Alwin Schulz from the 
 Chansons dc Geste might be multiplied almost indefinitely. The 
 right of wifebeating was formally recognised by more than one 
 code of laws : and it was already a forward step when, in the 
 thirteenth century, the Coutumcs du Beauvoisis provided " que le 
 man ne doit battre sa femme que raisonnablcment." But what 
 were the limits of reason in this matter, to the medieval mind ? 
 We may infer them fairly well from the tales told by the Knight 
 of La Tour-Landry (1372) for the instruction of his daughters. 
 He tells, for instance, how a lady so irritated her husband by 
 scolding him in company, that he struck her to the earth with his 
 fist and kicked her in the face, breaking her nose. Upon this 
 the good Knight moralises, "And this she had for her euelle 
 and gret langage, that she was wont to saie to her husbonde. 
 And therefor the wiff aught to suffre and lete the husbonde 
 haue the wordes, and to be maister, for that is her worshippe." 
 This was also the opinion of St. Bernardino, who said in a 
 public sermon : " And I say to you men, never beat your wives 
 while they are great with child, for therein would lie great peril. 
 I say not that you should never beat them, but choose your time. 
 . . . . I know men who have more regard for a hen that 
 lays a fresh egg daily, than for their own wives : sometimes the 
 hen will break a pot or a cup, and the man will not beat her, for 
 the mere fear of losing the egg that is her fruit. How stark 
 mad are many that cannot suffer a word from their own lady 
 who bears such fair fruit : for if she speak a word more than 
 he thinks fit, forthwith he seizes a staff and begins to chastise 
 her : and the hen, which cackles all day without ceasing, you 
 
 suffer patiently for her egg's sake Many a man, when 
 
 he sees his wife less clean and delicate than he would fain see 
 her, strikes her forthwith ; and the hen may befoul your table, 
 and yet you have patience with her : why not, then, with her to 
 whom you owe patience ? Seest thou not the hog, too, always 
 grunting and squealing and defiling thy house ! yet thou sufferest 
 him until slaughter-time. Thy patience is but for the fruit's 
 sake of the beast's flesh, that thou mayst eat it. Bethink thee, 
 wretch, bethink thee of the noble fruit of thy lady, and have 
 patience ; it is not meet to beat her for every trifle, no ! " 
 Moreover, it is the same story if we pass upwards from such a 
 citizen's house, where the pigs and the fowls were as familiar as
 
 Parentage and Boyhood. 1 5 
 
 in an Irish cabin, and peep into the palace of Frederick II, the 
 wonder of the world. Weary of his wife, the Emperor had 
 seduced her cousin : and Jean de Brienne, exasperated by this 
 double wrong to his daughter and his niece, talked loudly of 
 washing it out in blood. Therefore the Emperor " so threatened 
 and beat the Empress as almost to slay the babe in her womb." 
 We get a similar glimpse of the relations between Frederick's 
 father and mother the Costanza of Par. iii, 118. "I have 
 heard," writes Etienne de Bourbon, " that when the father of the 
 Ex-Emperor Frederick had gone to bed, and the Empress his 
 spouse would fain come to him, and had taken off in his presence 
 her head-attire with a great mass of false hair, then he began to 
 call his knights and squires, and in their presence, loathing that 
 hair as a piece of carrion, he cried aloud as one raving : ' Quick, 
 quick ! bear away this carrion from my room and burn it in the 
 fire, that ye may smell its evil savour : for I will have no dead 
 wife, but a living one.' ' When these things were done in the 
 green tree of their honeymoon, we need scarcely wonder that 
 Salimbene should give a sad account of their married life in the 
 dry, after deep political differences had multiplied the causes of 
 quarrel. "There was grievous discord and war between these 
 two, so that wise and learned men were wont to say these are 
 not as Ecclesiasticus teacheth, ' man and wife that agree well 
 together : ' while, again, buffoons would say ' if one should now 
 cry Mate ! to the King, the Queen would not defend him ' " (359). 
 Nor was it the rougher sex alone which permitted itself such 
 violence, as Salimbene has already hinted. We may find the 
 exact antithesis of the good Imelda in Benvenuto da Imola's 
 description of another lady of high rank in Dante's Florence 
 the Cianghella of Par. xv, 128. " She was most arrogant and 
 intolerable ; she was wont to go through the house with a 
 bonnet on her head after the fashion of the Florentine ladies, 
 and with a staff in her hand ; now she would beat the serving- 
 man, now the cook. So it befell once that she went to mass 
 at the convent of Friars Preachers in Imola, not far from 
 her own house ; and there a friar was preaching. Seeing, 
 therefore, that none of the ladies present rose to make room for 
 her, Cianghella was inflamed with wrath and indignation, and 
 began to lay violent hands on one ladj after another, tearing hair 
 and false tresses on the one hand, wimple and veil on the other. 
 Some suffered this not, but began to return her blow for blow, 
 whereat there arose so great noise and clamour in the church 
 that the men standing round to hear the sermon began to laugh 
 with all their might, and the preacher laughed with them, so
 
 1 6 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 that the sermon ended thus in merriment." One wonders how 
 Cianghella's children were brought up ; and we might almost be 
 tempted to look for one of them in the contemporary boy who 
 was sent by his mother " to the common prison of Florence, to 
 be there retained until he return to his good senses." 2 
 
 Salimbene, however, grew up under very different home 
 influences. " My father's mother was the Lady Ermengarda. 
 She was a wise lady, and was a hundred years old when she went 
 the way of all flesh. With her I dwelt fifteen years in my 
 father's house ; how often she taught me to shun evil company 
 and follow the right, and to be wise, and virtuous, and good, so 
 often may God's blessing light upon her ! For oft-times she 
 taught me thus. She lieth buried in the aforesaid sepulchre, 
 which was common to us and to the rest of our house " (54). 
 
 An equally definite religious influence was that of an old 
 neighbour on the Piazza Vecchia : " The Lord Guidolino da 
 Enzola, a man of middle stature, rich and most renowned and 
 devoted beyond measure to the Church, whom I have seen a 
 thousand times. Separating himself from the rest of the family, 
 who dwelt in the Borgo di Santa Cristina, he came and dwelt 
 hard by the Cathedral Church, which is dedicated to the glorious 
 Virgin, wherein he daily heard mass and the whole daily and 
 nightly offices of the Church, each at the fit season ; and when- 
 soever he was not busied with the offices of the Church, he would 
 sit with his neighbours under the public portico by the Bishop's 
 Palace, and speak of God, or listen gladly to any who spake of 
 Him. Nor would he ever suffer children to cast stones against 
 the Baptistery or the Cathedral to destroy the carvings or paint- 
 ings 3 ; for when he saw any such he waxed wroth and ran swiftly 
 against them and beat them with a leather thong as though he 
 had been specially deputed to this office ; yet he did it for pure 
 godly zeal and divine love, as though he said in the Prophet's 
 words, ' The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.' Moreover, 
 this said lord, besides the orchard and town and palace wherein 
 he lived, had many other houses, and an oven and a wine cellar ; 
 and once every week, in the road hard by his house, he gave to 
 all the poor of the whole city who would come thither a general 
 dole of bread and sodden beans and wine, as I have seen, not 
 once or twice only, with mine own eyes. He was a close friend 
 of the Friars Minor, and one of their chief benefactors " (609). 
 For a man of such exceptional piety, Guidolino was unfortunate 
 in his descendants. His son Jacobino, who bought Salimbene's 
 father's house, was an usurer, and failed miserably as Podesta 
 of Reggio, leaving a son who was the hero of a somewhat
 
 Parentage and Boyhood. 17 
 
 disreputable quarrel. His only daughter, the Lady Rikeldina, 
 " was a worldly and wanton woman," and married a rich lord who 
 " consumed all his substance with his banquetings and buffoons 
 and courtly fashions ; so that his sons must needs starve unless 
 they would beg, as one of them told me even weeping." 
 
 The Chronicler has warm words of praise for most of his elder 
 relations : " fair ladies and wise " ; "a very fair lady " ; " an 
 honourable lady and devout " ; "a fair lady, wise and honour- 
 able, who ended her days in a convent " ; " the most fair lady 
 Caracosa, excellent in prudence and sagacity, who ruled her house 
 most wisely after her husband's death." There was evidently 
 a definitely religious note in the family, though this, in good 
 medieval society, was perfectly consistent with the fact that our 
 chronicler's father had a son by a concubine named Rechelda (54). 
 He had also three legitimate sons. First came Guido, by a first 
 wife, " the lady Ghisla of the family de' Marsioli, who were of old 
 noble and powerful men in the city of Parma. They dwelt in the 
 lower part of the Piazza Vecchia, hard by the Bishop's Palace ; 
 whereof I have seen a great multitude, and certain of them were 
 clad in robes of scarlet, more especially such as were judges. They 
 were also kinsfolk of mine own through my mother, who was 
 daughter to the Lord Gerardo di Cassio, a comely old man, who 
 died (as I think) at the age of one hundred years. He had three 
 sons ; the lord Gerardo, who wrote the Book of Composition, for he 
 was an excellent writer of the more noble style ; the Lord Bernardo, 
 who was a man of no learning, but simple and pure ; and the 
 Lord Ugo, who was a man of learning, judge and assessor. He 
 was a man of great mirth, and went ever with the Podestas to 
 act as their advocate" (55). This eldest brother Guido married 
 into a greater family still. " My brother Guido was a married 
 man in his worldly life, and a father, and a judge ; and afterwards 
 he became a priest and a preacher in the Order of the Friars 
 Minor. His wife was of the Baratti, who boast that they are of 
 the lineage of the Countess Matilda, and that in the service of 
 the Commune of Parma forty knights of their house go forth to 
 war " (38). It was natural, therefore, that our chronicler, as he 
 tells us on another page, should have owed special reverence to 
 the great protectress of the Church whom Dante also set on so 
 high a pinnacle, if we are to accept the almost unanimous opinion 
 of the early commentators. When Guido became a friar, his 
 wife entered a convent, and their only daughter was that Agnes 
 for whom, in her Franciscan convent of Parma, Salimbene wrote 
 part at least, of his Chronicle. It is noteworthy that of the 
 sixty-two persons who are named in this genealogy, no less than
 
 1 8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 fourteen became monks, friars, or nuns, while five were knights 
 and three were judges. 
 
 After Guido came Nicholas, who " died while he was yet a 
 child, as it is written, ' while I was yet growing he cut me off' 
 (38). "The third am I, Brother Salimbene, who entered the 
 Order of the Friars Minor, wherein I have lived many years, as 
 priest and preacher, and have seen many things, and dwelt in 
 many provinces, and learnt much. And in my worldly life I 
 was called by some Dalian of Sidon, by reason of the above- 
 mentioned lord who held me at the sacred font. But by my 
 comrades and my family I was called Ognibcne (All-good), by 
 which name I lived as a novice in our Order for a whole year 
 long" (38). 
 
 The name seems to indicate a docile, impressionable disposition, 
 and all Salimbene's home memories point the same way. " From 
 my very cradle I was taught and exercised in [Latin] grammar " 
 (277). In other respects, his upbringing must necessarily have 
 been rough, however favourable it may have been for those 
 times. Home life even among the highest classes in the 13th 
 century was such, in many of its moral and sanitary conditions, 
 as can now be found only among the poor. The children had 
 ordinarily no separate bedroom, but slept either with their 
 parents or with servants and strangers on the floor of the hall. 
 Thomas of Celano, describing the home education of St. Francis's 
 day, and showing by his present tenses that things were still the 
 same in the generation in which he wrote, gives a piature which 
 we might well dismiss as an unhealthy dream if it were riot so 
 accurately borne out by the repeated assertions of Gerson 150 
 years later. " Boys are taught evil as soon as they can babble," 
 says Celano, " and as they grow up they become steadily worse, 
 until they are Christians only in name." As half-fledged youths 
 they ran wild in the streets : and we cannot understand the 
 Friars until we have realized how many of them had plunged 
 into Religion, like Salimbene, just at the age when a boy begins 
 to realize dimly the responsibilities of a man, and to look back 
 upon what already seem long years spent as his awakened 
 imagination may now warn him with even hysterical emphasis 
 in the service of the Devil. 
 
 Our author had three sisters also, " fair ladies and nobly wed- 
 ded," of whom the first was the Lady Maria, married to the 
 Lord Azzo, cousin-german to the Lord Guarino, who was of kin 
 to the Pope [Innocent IV]. He had many other relations and 
 connections of noble rank and distinction in other ways. His 
 musical tastes came partly by birth and partly by education.
 
 Parentage and Boyhood. 19 
 
 (54). " My father's sister was the mother of two daughters, 
 Grisopola and Vilana, excellent singers both. Their father, the 
 Lord Martino de' Stefani, was a merry man, pleasant and jocund, 
 who loved to drink wine ; he was an excellent musician, yet no 
 buffoon. One day in Cremona he beguiled and out-witted 
 Master Gerardo Patechio, who wrote the Book of Pests*. But 
 he was well worthy to be so out-witted, and deserved all that be- 
 fell him." 
 
 Having come to the end of this genealogy or nearly to the 
 end, for he throws in occasional postscripts afterwards he 
 explains why he has entered into such full details. (56) " Lo 
 here I have written the genealogy of my kinsfolk beyond all that 
 I had purposed ; yet, for brevity's sake, I have omitted to des- 
 cribe many men and women, both present and past. But since 
 I had begun, it seemed good to me to finish the same, for five 
 reasons. First, for that my niece, Sister Agnes, who is in the 
 convent of the nuns at St. Clare in Parma, wherein she enclosed 
 herself for Christ's sake while she was yet a child, hath begged 
 me to write it by reason of her father's grandmother, of whom 
 she could obtain no knowledge. Now therefore she may learn 
 from this genealogy who are her ancestors both on the father's 
 and on the mother's side. Moreover, my second reason for 
 writing this genealogy was, that Sister Agnes might know for 
 whom she ought to pray to God. The third reason was the 
 custom of men of old time, who wrote their genealogies ; whence 
 it is written of certain folk in the book of Nehemiah that they 
 were cast forth from the priesthood, for that they could not find 
 the writings of their genealogies. The fourth reason was, that 
 by reason of this genealogy I have said certain good and profitable 
 words which otherwise I should not have said. The fifth and 
 last was, that the truth of those words of the Apostle James 
 might be shown, wherein he saith, ' For what is your life ? It is 
 a vapour which appeareth for a little while and afterwards shall 
 vanish away.' The truth of which saying may be shown in the 
 case of many whom death hath earned off in our days ; for 
 within the space of sixty years mine own eyes have seen all 
 but a few of those whom 1 have written in the table of my 
 kindred, and now they have departed from us and are no longer 
 in the world. I have seen m my days many noble houses 
 destroyed, in different parts of the world. To take example from 
 near at hand, in the city of Parma my mother's house of the 
 Cassi is wholly extinct in the male branch ; the house of the 
 Pagani, whom I have seen noble, rich, and powerful, is utterly 
 extinct; likewise the house of the Stefani, whom I have seen in
 
 2O From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 great multitude, rich men and powerful. Consider now that we 
 shall go to the dead rather than they shall return to us, as David 
 saith, speaking of his dead son. Let us therefore be busy about 
 our own salvation while we have time, lest it be said of us as shall 
 be said of those of whom .Jeremiah speaketh, 'The harvest is 
 past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.' Of which 
 matter 1 have written above at sufficient length." Dante students 
 will no doubt notice the strong similarity between this last passage 
 and Purg. XIV. 9, foil., where the Pagani are among the families 
 whose decay the poet bewails. The same cry is constant through 
 the Middle Ages, no doubt partly because the noble families, 
 forming a specially fighting caste, were specially liable to sudden 
 extinction ; partly also because they led such irregular lives. 
 Berthold of Ratisbon complains that " so few great lords reach 
 their right age or die a right death," and ascribes this to their 
 careless upbringing and to the oppressions which, when grown to 
 man's estate, they- exercise upon the poor 5 .
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Great Alleluia. 
 
 ~TT7~HEN Salimbene was in his twelfth year, an event occurred 
 VV which undoubtedly impressed him deeply, and probably 
 determined his choice of a career. This was the great North 
 Italian religious revival of 1233, which was called The Alleluia. 
 There is an excellent article on this and similar medieval revivals 
 in Italy by J. A. Symonds, in the Cornhill for January, 1875. 
 But no chronicler tells the great Alleluia of 1233 with anything 
 like the same picturesque detail as Salimbene. (70) " This 
 Alleluia, which endured for a certain season, was a time of peace 
 and quiet, wherein all weapons of war were laid aside ; a time of 
 merriment and gladness, of joy and exultation, of praise and re- 
 joicing. And men sang songs of praise to God ; gentle and simple, 
 burghers and country folk, young men and maidens, old and young 
 with one accord. This devotion was held in all the cities of Italy ; 
 and they came from the villages to the town with banners, a great 
 multitude of people ; men and women, boys and girls together, 
 to hear the preaching and to praise God. And they sang God's 
 songs, not man's ; and all walked in the way of salvation. And 
 they bare branches of trees and lighted tapers ; and sermons 
 were made at evening and in the morning and at midday, accord- 
 ing to the word of the Prophet, ' Evening, and morning, and at 
 noon will I pray and cry aloud, and He shall hear my voice.' And 
 men held stations in the churches and the open places, and lifted 
 up their hands to God, to praise and bless Him for ever and ever ; 
 and they might not cease from the praises of God, so drunken 
 were they with His love ; and blessed was he who could do most 
 to praise God. No wrath was among them, no trouble nor hatred, 
 but all was done in peace and kindliness ; for they had drunken 
 of the wine of the sweetness of God's spirit, whereof if a man 
 drink, flesh hath no more savour to him. Wherefore it is 
 commanded to preachers, * Give strong drink to them that are 
 sad, and wine to them that are grieved in mind. Let them drink 
 and forget their want, and remember their sorrow no more.'
 
 22 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 And forasmuch as the Wise Man saith, ' Where there is no 
 governor, the people shall fall,' lest it be thought that these had 
 no leader, let me tell now of the leaders of those congregations. 
 First came Brother Benedict to Parma, who was called the 
 Brother of the Horn, a simple man and unlearned, and of holy 
 innocence and honest life, whom also I saw and knew familiarly, 
 both at Parma and afterwards at Pisa. This man had joined 
 himself unto no religious congregation, but lived after his own 
 conscience, and busied himself to please God ; and he was a 
 close friend of the Friars Minor. He was like another John 
 the Baptist to behold, as one who should go before the Lord and 
 make ready for him a perfect people. He had on his head an 
 Armenian cap, his beard was long and black, and he had a little 
 horn of brass, wherewith he trumpeted ; terribly did his horn 
 bray at times, and at other times it would make dulcet melody. 
 He was girt with a girdle of skin, his robe was black as sack- 
 cloth of hair, and falling even to his feet. His rough mantle 
 was made like a soldier's cloak, adorned both before and behind 
 with a red cross, broad and long, from the collar to the foot, 
 even as the cross of a priest's chasuble. Thus clad he went 
 about with his horn, preaching and praising God in the churches 
 and the open places ; and a great multitude of children followed 
 him, oft-times with branches of trees and lighted tapers. More- 
 over I myself have oft-times seen him preaching and praising 
 God, standing upon the wall of the Bishop's Palace, which at 
 that time was a-building. And thus he began his praises, saying 
 in the vulgar tongue, ' Praised and blessed and glorified be the 
 Father.' Then would the children repeat in a loud voice that 
 which he had said. And again he would repeat the same words, 
 adding ' be the Son ; ' and the children would repeat the same, 
 and sing the same words. Then for the third time he would 
 repeat the same words, adding ' be the Holy Ghost ' ; and then 
 ' Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia ! ' Then would he sound with his 
 trumpet ; and afterwards he preached, adding a few good words 
 in praise of God. And lastly, at the end of his preaching, he 
 would salute the blessed Virgin after this fashion : 
 
 ' Ave Maria, clemena et pia, etc., etc.' " 
 
 But Brother Benedict was far outdone in popularity by the 
 great Franciscan and Dominican preachers. There was Brother 
 Giacomino of Reggio, a learned man, and in later life a friend 
 of our chronicler's, who so wrought upon his hearers that 
 great and small, gentle and simple, boors and burghers, worked
 
 The Great Alleluia. 23 
 
 for the building of the Dominican Church at Reggio. Blessed 
 was he who could bring most stones and sand and lime on his 
 back, without regard for his rich furs and silks, for Brother 
 Giacomino would stand by to see that the work was well done. 
 This Brother held a great preaching between Calerno and Sant' 
 llario, whereat was a mighty multitude of men and women, boys 
 and girls, from Parma and Reggio, from the mountains and 
 valleys, from the field and from divers villages. And it came to 
 pass that a poor woman of low degree brought forth among the 
 multitude a man child. Then, at the prayer and bidding of 
 Brother Giacomino, many of those present gave many gifts to 
 that poor woman. For one gave her shoes, another a shirt, 
 another a vest, another a bandage ; and thus she had a whole 
 ass's load. Moreover, the men gave one hundred imperial solidi. 
 One who was there present, and saw all these things, related them 
 to me a long while afterwards, as I was passing with him through 
 this same place ; and I have also heard the same from others." 
 (73) There was another Franciscan of Padua, " who was preach- 
 ing at Cumae on a certain feast day, and a usurer was having his 
 tower built : and the friar, impeded by the tumult of the work- 
 men, said to his hearers ' I forewarn you that within such and 
 such a time this tower will fall and be ruined to the very found- 
 ations ' : and so it came to pass, and men held it a great miracle. 
 Note Ecclesiasticus xxxvii, 18 and Proverbs xvii, 16, and the 
 example of the man who foretold the fall of the tower, and 
 Grilla's son, and the three pumpkins, in one of which was a 
 mouse : he happened to tell all things by chance as they were, 
 and therefore he was hailed as a prophet" (74). Then there 
 was " Brother Leo of Milan, who was a famous and mighty 
 preacher, and a great persecutor and confuter and conqueror of 
 heretics " a panegyric which shows how soon the Order had 
 lost the sweet reasonableness which was one of the most 
 striking characteristics of St. Francis. "He was so bold 
 and stout-hearted that once he went forward alone, standard 
 in hand, before the army of Milan which was marching 
 against the Emperor ; and, crossing the stream by a bridge, 
 he stood long thus with the standard in his hands, while the 
 Milanese shrank from crossing after him, for fear of the 
 Emperor's battle-array. This Brother Leo once confessed the 
 lord of a certain hospital at Milan, who was a man of great name 
 and much reputed for his sanctity. While he was at his last 
 
 fasp, Brother Leo made him promise to return and tell him of 
 is state after his death, which he willingly promised. His death 
 was made known through the city about the hour of vespers.
 
 24 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Brother Leo therefore prayed two Brethren, who had been his 
 special companions while yet he was Minister Provincial, to watch 
 with him that night in the gardener's cell at the corner of the 
 garden. While, therefore, they all three watched, a light sleep 
 fell upon Brother Leo ; and, wishing to slumber, ho prayed his 
 comrades to awake him if they heard anything. And lo ! they 
 suddenly heard one who came wailing with bitter grief ; and 
 they saw him fall swiftly from heaven like a globe of fire, and 
 swoop upon the roof of the cell as when a hawk stoops to take a 
 duck. At this sound, and at the touch of the brethren, Brother 
 Leo awoke from his sleep and enquired how it stood with him, 
 for ever he wailed with the same woful cries. He therefore 
 answered and said that he was damned, because in his wrath he 
 had suffered baseborn children to die unbaptized when they had 
 been laid at the hospital door, seeing to what travail and cost 
 the spital was exposed by such desertion of children. When, 
 therefore, Brother Leo enquired of him why he had not confessed 
 that sin, he answered either that he had forgotten it, or that he 
 thought it unworthy of confession. To whom the Brother replied, 
 ' Seeing that thou hast no part or lot with us, depart from us and 
 go thine own way ! ' so the soul departed, crying and wailing as 
 it went" (74). Brother Leo's subsequent history is interesting. 
 The Chapter of Milan, disagreeing hopelessly about the election 
 of an Archbishop, agreed to leave the choice in his hands. After 
 due reflection, he announced, " Since you have so good an opinion 
 of me, I name myself Archbishop." The people, surprised at 
 first by this decision, presently applauded it, and the Pope 
 approved. After sixteen years' rule, however, Leo left the city 
 a prey to civil strife, and for fourteen years the Milanese refused 
 to accept his successor, in spite of the army and the Papal 
 anathemas with which he supported his claim. 1 
 
 After Leo came Brother Gerard of Modena, " one of the first 
 Brethren of our Order, yet not one of the Twelve. He was 
 an intimate friend of St. Francis, and at times his travelling- 
 companion" (75). He was of noble birth, strict morals, and 
 great eloquence, though his learning was small. " He it was 
 who, in the year 1238, prayed Brother Elias to receive me into 
 the Order, and I was once his travelling-companion. When I call 
 him to mind, I always think of that text, ' He that hath small 
 understanding and feareth God is better than one that hath much 
 wisdom, and transgresseth the law of the Most High.' With 
 him I also lay sick at Ferrara of that sickness whereof he died ; 
 and he went about New Year's tide to Modena, where he gave up 
 the ghost. He was buried in the church of the Brethren Minor,
 
 The Great Alleluia. 25 
 
 in a tomb of stone ; and through him God hath deigned to work 
 many miracles, which, for that they be written elsewhere, I here 
 omit for brevity's sake." Several of these are recorded by 
 Angelo Clareno (Archiv. Bd. ii. p. 268) ; they are mostly of the 
 common type, but one bears a very suspicious resemblance to this 
 bogus miracle which Salimbene relates immediately below. (76) 
 " One thing 1 must not omit, namely that, at the time of the 
 aforesaid devotion, these solemn preachers were sometimes 
 gathered together in one place, where they would order the 
 matter of their preachings ; that is, the place, the day, the hour, 
 and the theme thereof. And one would say to the other, ' Hold 
 fast to that which we have ordered ' ; and this they did without 
 fail, as they had agreed among themselves. Brother Gerard 
 therefore would stand, as I have seen with mine own eyes, in the 
 Piazza Communale of Parma, or wheresoever else it pleased him, 
 on a wooden stage which he had made for his preaching ; and, 
 while the people waited, he would cease from his preaching, and 
 draw his hood deep over his face, as though he were meditating 
 some matter of God. Then, after a long delay, as the people 
 marvelled, he would draw back his hood and open his mouth in 
 such words as these : ' I was in the spirit on the Lord's day, and 
 I heard our beloved brother, John of Vicenza, who was preaching 
 at Bologna on the shingles of the river Reno, and he had before 
 him a great concourse of people ; and this was the beginning of 
 his sermon : Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord 
 Jehovah, and blessed are the folk that he hath chosen to him 
 to be his inheritance.' So also would he speak of Brother 
 Giacomino ; so spake they also of him. The bystanders marvel- 
 led and, moved with curiosity, some sent messengers to learn the 
 truth of these things that were reported. And having found 
 that they were true, they marvelled above measure, and many, 
 leaving their worldly business, entered the Orders of St. Francis 
 or St. Dominic. And much good was done in divers ways and 
 divers places at the time of that devotion, as I have seen with 
 mine own eyes. 2 Yet there were also at the time many deceivers 
 and buffoons who would gladly have sought to bring a blot upon 
 the Elect. Among whom was Buoncompagno of Florence, who 
 was a great master of grammar in the city of Bologna. This 
 man, being a great buffoon, as is the manner of the Florentines, 
 wrote a certain rhyme in derision of Brother John of Vicenza, 
 whereof I remember neither the beginning nor the end, for that 
 it is long since I read it, nor did I even then fully commit it to 
 memory, seeing that I cared not greatly for it. But therein 
 were these words following, as they come to my memory :
 
 26 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 John, in his Johannine way 
 
 Dances all and every day. 
 
 Caper freely, skip for joy, 
 
 Ye who hope to reach the sky ! 
 
 Dancers left and dancers right, 
 
 Thousands, legions infinite 
 
 Noble ladies dance in rhythm, 
 
 Doge of Venice dances with 'era, etc., etc. 3 
 
 Furthermore, this master Buoncompagno, seeing that Brother 
 John took upon himself to work miracles, would take the same 
 upon himself ; wherefore he promised to the men of Bologna 
 that, in the sight of all, he would presently fly. In brief, the 
 report was noised abroad through Bologna, and on the appointed 
 day the whole city, men and women, boys and old men, were 
 gathered together at the foot of the hill which is called Santa 
 Maria in Monte. He had made for himself two wings, and stood 
 now looking down upon them from the summit of the mountain. 
 And when they had stood thus a long while gazing one at the 
 other, he opened his mouth and spake, ' Go ye hence with God's 
 blessing, and let it suffice you that ye have gazed on the face of 
 Buoncompagno ! ' Wherefore they withdrew, knowing that they 
 were mocked of him " (78). 
 
 John's strange career is described at length in Symonds's 
 article, and still more fully in an exhaustive monograph by C. 
 Sutter (Johann v. Vicenza. Freib. i/B. 1891). Matthew Paris 
 (an. 1238) tells how he crossed rivers dry shod, and by his mere 
 word compelled eagles to stoop in their flight. On the other 
 hand, a contemporary satire on his reported miracles was attributed 
 to Piero delle Vigne, and Guido Bonatti complained that he had 
 sought for years in vain to meet any one of the eighteen men 
 whom John was said to have raised from the dead. 4 At the back 
 of all these legends, however, lies the certain fact that many 
 cities of Italy entrusted him and other friars (e.g. Gerard of 
 Modena) with dictatorial powers during this Alleluia year, per- 
 mitting them to make or remodel laws as they pleased. John 
 was made Lord of Vicenza, with the titles of Duke and Count ; 
 and it was apparently these honours which finally turned his head. 
 He used his power so recklessly that he was cast into prison, 
 from which he emerged a discredited and neglected man. But, 
 already in the Alleluia year, Salimbene tells us how he " had 
 come to such a pitch of madness by reason of the honours which 
 were paid him, and the grace of preaching which he had, that he 
 believed himself able in truth to work miracles, even without 
 God's help. And when he was rebuked by the Brethren for the 
 many follies which he did, then he answered and spake unto them :
 
 The Great Alleluia. 27 
 
 * I it was who exalted your Dominic, whom ye kept twelve years 
 hidden in the earth, and, unless ye hold your peace, I will make 
 your saint to stink in men's nostrils and will publish your doings 
 abroad' (78). For [at the time of the Alleluia] the blessed 
 Dominic was not yet canonized, but lay hidden in the earth, nor 
 was there any whisper of his canonization ; but, by the travail 
 of this aforesaid Brother John, who had the grace of preaching 
 in Bologna at the time of that devotion, his canonization was 
 brought about. To this canonization the Bishop of Modena gave 
 his help ; for he, being a friend of the Friars Preachers, impor- 
 tuned them, saying, ' Since the Brethren Minor have a saint of 
 their own, ye too must so work as to get yourselves another, even 
 though ye should be compelled to make him of straw ' (72). So, 
 hearing these words of Brother John, they bore with him until 
 his death, for they knew not how they might rise up against him. 8 
 This man, coming one day to the house of the Brethren Minor, 
 and letting shave his beard by our barber, took it exceeding ill 
 that the brethren gathered not the hairs of his beard, to preserve 
 them as relics. But Brother Diotisalve, a Friar Minor of 
 Florence, who was an excellent buffoon after the manner of the 
 Florentines, did most excellently answer the fool according to 
 his folly, lest he should be wise in his own conceit. For, going 
 one day to the convent of the Friars Preachers, when they had 
 invited him to dinner, he said that he would in no wise abide 
 with them, except they should first give him a piece of the tunic 
 of Brother John, who at that time was there in the house, that 
 he might keep it for a relic. So they promised, and gave him 
 indeed a great piece of his tunic, which, after his dinner, he put to 
 the vilest uses, and cast it at last into a cesspool. Then cried he 
 aloud saying, ' Alas, alas ! help me, brethren, for I seek the relic 
 of your saint, which 1 have lost among the filth.' And when they 
 had come at his call and understood more of this matter, they 
 were put to confusion ; and, seeing themselves mocked of this 
 buffoon, they blushed for shame. This same Brother Diotisalve 
 once received an Obedience (i.e., command) to go and dwell in 
 the province of Penna, which is in Apulia. Whereupon he went 
 to the infirmary and stripped himself naked, and, having ripped 
 open a feather bed, he lay hid therein all day long among the 
 feathers (Lat. in pennis\ so that, when he was sought of the 
 brethren, they found him there, saying that he had already 
 fulfilled his Obedience ; wherefore for the jest's sake he was 
 absolved from his Obedience and went not thither. Again, as 
 he went one day through the city of Florence in winter time, it 
 came to pass that he slipped upon the ice and fell at full length.
 
 28 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 At which the Florentines began to laugh, for they are much given 
 to buffoonery ; and one of them asked of the friar as he lay 
 
 " (79). The dialogue which our good Franciscan here 
 
 records is unfortunately quite impossible in modern print. He 
 himself had evidently some qualms about reporting it, for he 
 goes on : " The Florentines took no offence at this saying, but 
 rather commended the friar, saying ' God bless him, for he is 
 indeed one of us ! ' Yet some say that this answer was made by 
 another Florentine, Brother Paolo Millemosche (Thousand-flies) 
 by name. Now we should ask ourselves whether this brother 
 answered well or not ; and I reply that he answered ill, for many 
 reasons. First, because he acted contrary to the Scripture 
 which saith, ' Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou 
 also be like unto him.' Secondly, for that the answer was 
 unhonest, since a religious man ought to answer as becometh 
 a religious. Whence James saith, ' If any man among you 
 seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth 
 his own heart, this man's religion is vain.' Again, ' If any man 
 speak, let him speak as the speech of God.' And Jerome saith, 
 * Blessed is the tongue which knoweth not to speak, save of God 
 only.' (Also Eph. iv, 29 and Coloss. iv, 6). Thirdly, in that 
 he spake an idle word, whereof our Lord saith (Matt, xii, 36). 
 Now that word is idle which profiteth neither to speaker nor to 
 hearer, wherefore our Lord addeth (Matt, xii, 37) ; Ecclesiasti- 
 cus saitb (xxii, 27). Fourthly, in that he who speaketh un- 
 honest words showeth that he hath a vain heart, and moreover 
 giveth to others an ensample of sin (1 Cor. xv. 33). But hear 
 the remedy or vengeance (Isa. xxix. 20). Of the vain heart we 
 may say that which is spoken of the eye. For even as the 
 immodest eye is the messenger of an immodest heart, so the vain 
 word showeth a vain heart. Therefore saith the Wise Man 
 (Prov. iv. 23 and xxx. 8). Fifthly, because silence is commanded 
 us (Lam. iii. 28; Isa. xxx. 15; Exod. xiv. 14; Ps. cvii. 30). 
 It is written that the Abbot Agatho kept a pebble three whole 
 years in his mouth that he might learn to be silent. Sixthly, 
 because much speaking is condemned (Prov. x, 19, and 7 similar 
 texts). Note the example of the philosopher Secundus, by whose 
 speech his mother met her death ; and he. by reason of penitence, 
 kept silence even to the day of his death ; to whom we might 
 indeed say, ' If thou hadst kept silence, thou wouldst have been 
 a philosopher.' 6 Again, the Apostle bade that ' women should 
 keep silence in churches, for it is not permitted unto them to 
 speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also 
 saith the law ; and if they will learn anything, let them ask their
 
 The Great Alleluia. 29 
 
 husbands at home, for it is a shame for women to speak in the 
 church/ For women do indeed speak much in church ; wherefore 
 some say that the Apostle forbade not to women useful and 
 laudable speech, as when they praise God, or when they confess 
 their sins to the priest ; but he forbade their presuming to preach, 
 an office which is known to belong properly to men. Which, 
 indeed, is evident from this, that the Apostle was speaking only 
 of the office of preaching. But Augustine saith that speech is 
 therefore, forbidden to woman, because she once confounded the 
 whole world by speaking with the serpent. . . . The eighth 
 and last reason is, that he who speaketh base and unprofitable 
 and vain and unhonest words in the Order of the Friars Minor 
 should be accused and punished for his deeds if they are seen, 
 or his words if they are heard. And this is right, since the Lord's 
 words are clean words ; and in the Rule of the Friars Minor it is 
 said that their speech should be well-considered and clean for the 
 profit and edification of the people, etc. 7 .... Yet Brother 
 Diotisalve, by reason of whom I have written this, may be excused 
 for manifold reasons. However, his words should not be taken 
 for an example, to be repeated by another, for the Wise Man 
 saith, ' As a dog that returneth to his vomit, so is a fool that 
 repeateth his folly.' Now the first reason for his excuse is that 
 he answered the fool according to his folly, lest he should seem 
 wise in his own eyes. The second is, that he meant not altogether 
 as his words sounded ; for he was a merry man, as Ecclesiasticus 
 saith, * There is one that slippeth with the tongue, but not from 
 his heart.' .... The third reason is that he spake to his fellow- 
 citizens, who took no ill example from his words, for they are 
 merry men and most given to buffoonery. Yet in another place 
 that brother's words would have sounded ill. . . . Moreover I 
 know many deeds of this Brother Diotisalve, as also of the 
 Count Guido [da Montefeltro], of whom many men are wont to 
 tell many tales, yet as these are rather merry than edifying, I 
 will not write them. 8 .... Yet one thing I must not omit, 
 namely, that the Florentines take no ill example if one go forth 
 from the Order of Friars Minor, nay, they rather excuse him, 
 saying, ' We wonder that he dwelt among them so long, for the 
 Friars Minor are desperate folk, who afflict themselves in divers 
 ways.' Once, when the Florentines heard that Brother John of 
 Vicenza would come to their city, they said, ' For God's sake 
 let him not come hither, for we have heard how he raiseth the 
 dead, and we are already so many that there is no room for us in 
 the city.' And the words of the Florentines sound excellently 
 well in their own idiom. Blessed be God, Who hath brought 
 me safe to the end of this matter."
 
 30 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 I have given these anecdotes and quotations with some 
 approach to fullness in spite of their apparent irrelevance to the 
 Alleluia, because they are well calculated to give the reader an 
 idea of Salimbene's discursive style, and to prepare him for 
 many strange things which will come later in this autobiography. 
 It may indeed seem startling that a friar should feel it necessary 
 to point out to a nun (for here the reference to his niece seems 
 obvious) that St. Paul does not mean to forbid women from join- 
 ing in the service as members of the congregation ; or again, 
 that he should relate with such complacent triumph the success 
 of bogus miracles concocted by two of the greatest revivalists in 
 the century of St. Francis. For not only had Gerard been a 
 close companion of St. Francis, but he was also one of the six 
 '* solemn ambassadors " sent to the Pope in 1 236 to protest 
 against Brother Elias. It was evidently he who had the main 
 share in Salimbene's conversion, and after his death he was 
 honoured as a saint. That such a person deliberately reinforced 
 his preaching by false miracles seems strange enough ; but that 
 a clever man like Salimbene should tell it in this matter-of-fact 
 way, in the same breath in which he alludes to real miracles 
 wrought by his sainted friend, seems to the modern mind abso- 
 lutely inexplicable, and the Jesuit professor Michael discreetly 
 slurs over the whole story. But the curious reader may find 
 abundant evidence of the same kind in the Treatise on Relics of 
 St. Anselm's pupil, the Abbot Guibert of Nogent, and in the 
 Papal letter of 1238 to the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre at 
 Jerusalem, who forged annually on Easter Eve miraculous flames 
 of fire which even Guibert, a century earlier, had believed to be 
 genuine. One of the greatest men of Salimbene's century, 
 Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, relates with approval an equally 
 false miracle of a priest who slipped a bad penny instead of the 
 Host into the mouth of a miserly parishioner at Easter com- 
 munion, and then persuaded the man that the Lord's body had 
 been thus transmuted, for his punishment, into the same false 
 coin which he had been wont to offer yearly at that solemnity. 
 Csesarius of Heisterbach sees nothing but a triumph for the 
 Christian religion and for the " God of Justice " in the fact 
 that a cleric of Worms, who had seduced a Jewess, tricked 
 the parents into believing that the child to be born would be 
 Messiah, a hope which was miserably frustrated when the infant 
 proved to be a girl. The good Bishop Thomas of Chantimpre 
 does indeed blame the readiness of certain prelates in religion to 
 tell lies for the profit of their house ; yet even he approves a 
 wife's pious deceit. The early Franciscan records simply swarm
 
 The Great Alleluia. 31 
 
 with pious thefts and pious lies. St. Rose of Viterbo, St. 
 Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Elizabeth of Portugal, the blessed 
 Viridiaria, all boast an incident of this sort as one of their chief 
 titles to fame ; " a pious theft," says the approving Wadding of 
 the last case, in so many words. 9 St. Francis himself began his 
 public career with such a pious theft ; and it is very difficult to 
 understand how, in the face of the early biographers, so admir- 
 able a writer as M. Sabatier can speak of the Foligno incident 
 as though the horse and cloth had really been the Saint's own. 
 At the same time, he is a great deal too careful to allow himself 
 anything like Canon Knox-Little's astounding assertion that St. 
 Francis's theft is a figment of "modern biographers," and an 
 example of " modern prejudice or stupidity in dealing with the 
 facts of the Middle Ages." If the Canon had consulted so ob- 
 vious an authority as Wadding, he would have found that, even 
 in the face of Protestant attacks, the learned and orthodox 
 Romanist Sedulius felt obliged to admit the evidence against St. 
 Francis. Moreover, Wadding himself, in the middle of the 17th 
 century, deeply as he resents criticism on this point, ventures only 
 upon a half-hearted defence. His main argument, involved in a 
 cloud of words which betrays his embarrassment, amounts merely 
 to a plea that the goods might have been the saint's own, or 
 that he might have thought them such ; and, admitting the possi- 
 bility that neither of these alternatives were true, he falls back on a 
 timid defence which really embodies, in more cautious language, 
 the 13th century theory. "He [Francis] received from Christ, 
 speaking plainly to his bodily ears, the command to restore this 
 church, and although the Lord's words intended otherwise, yet 
 he understood them to lay on him the task of repairing that 
 building [of St. Damian]. Now he knew full well that Christ 
 bade no impossibilities, whence he inferred not without proba- 
 bility that, if he was to obey the divine command, it was lawful 
 to him to take of his father's goods where his own sufficed not." 
 His action, concludes Wadding, was therefore worthy not of 
 blame but of praise (Vol. i. p. 32). To Salimbene and his readers 
 in the 13th century, the line of thought thus laboriously worked 
 out by the 17th century apologist was natural and instinctive. 
 The miracles had impressed men who would otherwise have paid 
 no attention to the Revival ; they were a most successful 
 stratagem in the Holy War : they would have been discreditable 
 only if they had failed. Yet, even then, there were a few who 
 realized that " nothing can need a lie," and who were almost as 
 much embarrassed as edified by the frequency of miraculous 
 claims around them or in their midst. David of Augsburg,
 
 32 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 whose fundamental good sense remained unshaken by his religious 
 fervour, wrote very strongly on this point. " Visions of this 
 sort have thus much in common, that they are vouchsafed 'not 
 only to the good, but often to the evil also. Moreover, that they 
 are sometimes true and teach the truth, sometimes deceptive and 
 delusive as Ezekiel saith (xiii. 7.) Moreover, that they neither 
 make nor prove their seer holy : otherwise Baalam would be 
 holy, and his ass who saw the Angel, and Pharaoh who saw 
 prophetic dreams. Moreover, even if they are true, yet in them- 
 selves they are not meritorious ; and he who sees many visions is 
 not therefore the better man than he who sees none, as also in the 
 case of other miracles. Moreover, many men have often been 
 more harmed than profited by such things, for they have been 
 puffed up thereby to vain-glory : many also, thinking themselves 
 to have seen visions, when in fact they had seen none, seduced 
 themselves and others, or turned them aside to greed of gain : 
 many again have falsely feigned to see visions, lest they should 
 be held inferior to others, or that they might be honoured above 
 others, as holier men to whom God's secrets were revealed. 
 Moreover, in some folk such visions are wont to be forerunners 
 of insanity ; for when their brain is addled, and clouded with its 
 own fumes, the sight of their eyes is confounded also, until a man 
 takes for a true vision that which is merely fantastic and false, as 
 Ecclesiasticus saith (xxxiv. 6,,)" 10 
 
 These words of David's are all the more weighty, because he 
 was the master of the greatest of 13th century mission-preachers, 
 whose fame spread through Europe only a few years after the 
 Great Alleluia. About the year 1250, chroniclers of cities 
 far distant from each other mention the startling appearance 
 among them of this Berthold of Ratisbon, whom Salimbene 
 describes at some length on a later page, in connexion with John 
 of Parma's friends (559). " Now let us come to Brother 
 Berthold of Allemaunia* of the order of Friars Minor ; a priest 
 and preacher and a man of honest and holy life as becometh a 
 Religious. He expounded the Apocalypse, 11 and I copied out 
 his exposition of the seven bishops of Asia only, who are brought 
 forward under the title of Angels in the beginning of the 
 Apocalypse : this I did, to know who those angels were, and 
 because I had Abbot Joachim's exposition of the Apocalypse, 
 which I esteemed above all others. Moreover, this Berthold 
 made a great volume of sermons for the whole course of the year, 
 both for feast days and de tempore, i.e., for the Sundays of the 
 
 * Ratisbon is in the district of Germany once inhabited by the Allenutuni.
 
 The Great Alleluia. 33 
 
 whole year. Of which sermons I copied two only, for that they 
 treated excellently of Antichrist : whereof the first was on Luke 
 ii. 34, and the other on Matt, viii, 23 : for both teach most fully 
 both of Antichrist and of the awful judgment. 12 And note that 
 Brother Berthold had of God a special grace of preaching, and 
 all who have heard him say that from the apostles even to our 
 own day there hath not been his like in the German tongue. He 
 was followed by a great multitude of men and women, sometimes 
 sixty or a hundred thousand, sometimes a mighty multitude from 
 many cities together, that they might hear the honeyed words of 
 salvation which proceeded from his mouth, by His power who 
 ' giveth His voice a voice of might ' and ' giveth word to them 
 that preach with much virtue.' He was wont to ascend a belfry 
 or wooden tower made almost after the fashion of a campanile, 
 which he used for a pulpit in country places when he wished to 
 preach : on the summit whereof a pennon also was set up by those 
 who put the work together, so that the people might see whither 
 the wind blew, and know where they ought to sit to hear best. 
 And, marvellous to relate ! he was as clearly heard and understood 
 by those far from him as by those who sat hard by ; nor was there 
 one who rose and withdrew from his preaching until the sermon 
 was ended. And when he preached of the dreadful day of doom, 
 all trembled as a rush quakes hi the water : and they would beg 
 him for God's sake to speak no more of that matter, for they 
 were terribly and horribly troubled to hear him. 13 One day when 
 he was to preach at a certain place, it bef el that a peasant prayed 
 his lord to let him go, for God's sake, to hear Brother Berthold's 
 sermon. But the lord answered ' I shall go to the sermon, but 
 thou shalt go into the field to plough with the oxen,' as it is 
 written in Ecclesiasticus ' Send him to work, lest he be idle.' So 
 when the peasant one day at high dawn had begun to plough in 
 the field, wondrous to relate ! he heard the very first syllable of 
 Brother Berthold's sermon, though he was thirty miles away at 
 that time. So he loosed the oxen forthwith from the plough, 
 that they might eat, and he himself sat down to hear the sermon. 
 And here came to pass three most memorable miracles. First, 
 that he heard and understood him, though he was so far away as 
 thirty miles. Secondly, that he learnt the whole sermon and 
 kept it by heart. Thirdly, that after the sermon was ended he 
 ploughed as much as he was wont to plough on other days of un- 
 interrupted work. So when this peasant afterwards asked of his 
 lord concerning Brother Berthold's sermon, and he could not 
 repeat it, the peasant did so word for word, adding how he had 
 heard and learnt it in the field. So his lord, knowing that this
 
 34 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 was a miracle, gave the peasant full liberty to go and hear freely 
 Brother Berthold's preaching, whatever task-work he might have 
 to do. 
 
 Now it was Brother Berthold's custom to order his sermons 
 which he intended to preach now in one city, now in another, at 
 divers times and in divers places, that the people who flocked to 
 hear him might not lack food. It befel upon a time that a certain 
 noble lady, inflamed with great and fervent desire to hear him 
 preaching, had followed him for six whole years from city to city 
 and town to town, with a few companions and carrying her wealth 
 with her ; yet never could she come to private and familiar talk 
 with him. But when the six years were past, all her goods 
 were wasted and spent, and on the Feast of the Assumption of 
 the Blessed Virgin, neither she nor her women had food to eat ; 
 so she went to Brother Berthold and told him all her tale from 
 beginning to end. Brother Berthold, therefore, hearing this, sent 
 her to a certain banker, who was held the richest of all in that 
 city, bidding her tell him in his name, to give her for her food 
 and charges as many moneys as the worth of one single day of 
 that Indulgence for which she had followed the Brother these 
 six years. 14 The banker hearing this, smiled and said, ' And how 
 can I know the worth of the Indulgence for one day whereon 
 you have followed Brother Berthold ? ' And she, ' The man of 
 God bade me tell you to lay your moneys in one scale of the 
 balance, and I will breathe into the other scale, and by this sign 
 ye may know the worth of my Indulgence.' Then he poured in 
 his moneys abundantly and filled the scale of the balance ; but 
 she breathed into the other scale, and forthwith it was weighed 
 down, and the moneys kicked the beam as suddenly as if they 
 had been changed to the lightness of feathers. And the banker 
 seeing this was astonished above measure ; and again and again 
 he heaped moneys upon his side of the balance ; yet not even so 
 could he outweigh the lady's breath ; for the Holy Ghost lent 
 such weight thereto that the scale whereon she breathed could be 
 counterbalanced by no weight of moneys. Wherefore the 
 banker, seeing this, came forthwith to Brother Berthold with the 
 lady and her whole company of women ; and they told him in 
 order all those things which had come to pass. And the banker 
 added, ' I am ready to restore all my ill-gotten gains and to dis- 
 tribute my own goods for God's sake amongst the poor, and I 
 desire to become a good man ; for in truth I have to-day seen 
 marvellous things.' So Brother Berthold bade him minister the 
 necessities of life abundantly to that lady by reason of whom he 
 had seen this marvel, and to them that were with her. This he
 
 The Great Alleluia. 35 
 
 fulfilled readily and gladly to the praise of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 to whom is glory and honour for ever and ever. Amen. 
 
 Another time, as Brother Berthold was passing at eventide 
 by a certain road with a lay-brother his comrade, he was taken 
 by the hired ruffians (assassinis) of a certain Castellan and brought 
 to his castle ; where all that night he was kept chained and in 
 evil plight. (Now this Castellan had so provoked his fellow- 
 citizens that they had caused a picture to be painted in the Palazzo 
 Communale shewing forth his punishment if ever he were taken 
 that is, the doom of hanging.) And on the morrow at dawn 
 the chief executioner came to the Castellan his lord, and said, 
 * What are your lordship's commands with respect to those 
 Brethren who were brought to us yesterday ? ' He answered, 
 ' Away with them,' which was as much as to say, ' Slay them : ' 
 for that was the custom of this Castellan and his ruffians, that 
 some they robbed and others they slew ; and others again they 
 cast into the castle dungeons until they should redeem themselves 
 with money : otherwise they must needs be slain. Now Brother 
 Berthold slept : but the lay brother his comrade was awake and 
 said his Mattins ; and, hearing the sentence of death pronounced 
 upon them by the Castellan (for there was but a party-wall 
 between them) he began to call again and again on Brother 
 Berthold. The Castellan therefore, hearing the name of Brother 
 Berthold, began to think within himself that this might well be 
 that famous preacher of whom such marvels were told ; and 
 forthwith he recalled his executioner and bade him do the 
 Brethren no harm, but bring them before his face. When there- 
 fore they came before him he enquired what might be their 
 names : whereto the lay-brother answered, ' My name is such-and- 
 such : but my comrade here is Brother Berthold, that renowned 
 and gracious preacher, through whom God worketh so great 
 marvels.' The Castellan hearing this forthwith cast himself down 
 at Brother Berthold's feet ; and having embraced and kissed him 
 he besought for God's sake that he might hear him preach, for 
 he had long time desired to hear the word of salvation from his 
 lips. To this Brother Berthold consented on condition that he 
 should call together before him all the ruffians whom he had in 
 his castle, that they also might hear his sermon : which he gladly 
 promised. When therefore the lord had called his ruffians to- 
 gether and Brother Berthold had gone aside for a while to pray 
 to God, then came his comrade and said to him, ' Know now, 
 Brother, that this man condemned us even now to death : there- 
 fore if ever you have preached well of the pains of hell and the 
 joys of Paradise, you need now all your skill.' At which words
 
 36 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Brother Berthold betook himself wholly to prayer ; and then, 
 returning to that assembly, he spake the word of salvation with 
 such exceeding glory that all were moved to tears. And before 
 his departure thence he confessed them all of their sins, and bade 
 them depart from that castle and restore their ill-gotten gains 
 and continue in penance all the days of their life : ' and so,' said 
 he, * shall ye come to everlasting life.' But the Castellan fell 
 down at his feet, and besought him with many tears that, for the 
 love of God, he would deign to receive him into the order of St. 
 Francis : so he received him, hoping that the Minister General 
 would grant him this grace. 16 Then he would fain have followed 
 Brother Berthold on his journey, but he suffered him not, for the 
 fury of the people whom he had provoked and who had not yet 
 heard of his conversion. So Berthold went on his way into the 
 city, and the people were gathered together to hear his sermon 
 on the shingles of a river bed ; the pulpit was set up over against 
 the gibbet whereon hung the bodies of thieves. (Thou, when 
 thou hearest this, picture it to thyself as though it were upon 
 the shingles of the River Reno at Bologna. 16 ) So the aforesaid 
 Castellan, after Brother Berthold's departure, was so inflamed 
 with divine love, and so drawn with desire of hearing the 
 preacher that he thought no more of all the evils which he had 
 wrought to that city, but came alone to the place of preaching, 
 where he was forthwith known, and taken, and led straight to the 
 gallows : so that all ran after him crying ' Let him be hanged, 
 and die a felon's death, for he is our most mortal foe.' Brother 
 Berthold therefore, seeing how the multitude ran together and 
 departed from his sermon, marvelled greatly, and said : ' Never 
 before have I known the people depart from me until my sermon 
 was ended and the blessing given.' And one of those who re- 
 mained answered, 'Father, marvel not, for that Castellan who 
 was our mortal foe, is taken, and men lead him to the gallows.' 
 Whereat Brother Berthold trembled greatly and said with sorrow, 
 * Know ye that I have confessed him and all them that are with 
 him ; and the others I have sent away to do penance, and him I 
 had received into the order of St. Francis : he was come now to 
 hear my sermon : let us all hasten therefore to loose him.' Yet 
 though they made all haste to the gallows, they found that he 
 had even then been drawn up, and had given up the ghost. 
 Nevertheless, at Berthold's bidding, men took him down, and 
 round his neck they found a paper written in letters of gold with 
 these words following : ' Being made perfect in a short space, he 
 fulfilled a long time : for his soul pleased God : therefore he 
 hastened to bring him out of the midst of iniquities.' (Wisdom
 
 The Great Alleluia. 37 
 
 iv, 13, 14). Then Brother Berthold sent to the con vent of Friars 
 Minor in that city, that the Brethren might bring a cross and a 
 bier and a friar's habit, and see and hear what marvels God had 
 wrought. And when they came he expounded to them all the 
 aforesaid story, and they brought his body and buried it honour- 
 ably in their convent, praising the Lord who worketh such 
 wonders." 
 
 A comparison of these stories in Salimbene with Wadding 
 (vol. iv, p. 345 foil.) or the parallel passages in xxiv Gen., pp. 
 238-9, clearly brings out the good friar's superiority to the general 
 run of medieval chroniclers. Upon one of these stories we have, 
 by rare good fortune, the criticism of the hero himself. A 
 precious fragment printed in the Analecta Franciscana (vol. 1, 
 p. 417) describes how, when Berthold came to France, St. Louis 
 wished to see and speak with him. " And addressing him in 
 Latin, he added : ' Good Brother, I know but little of the Latin 
 tongue.' * Speak boldly, my Lord King,' answered Brother 
 Berthold, ' for it is no shame or wrong for a king to speak false 
 Latin.' " The writer then relates how the King of Navarre, 
 who was present at this interview, recounted to St. Louis, in the 
 preacher's own presence, the story here told by Salimbene about 
 the peasant who heard the sermon thirty miles off or, as the 
 king more modestly put it, at three miles' distance. Berthold's 
 reply was " ' My Lord, believe it not and put no faith in tales of 
 this sort which men tell of me as though they were miracles. 
 For this I believe to be false, nor have 1 ever heard that it was 
 true. But there are a sort of men who, for greed of filthy lucre 
 or for some other vain cause, follow with the rest of the multitude 
 after me, and invent sometimes such stories, which they tell to 
 the rest.' Whereat both kings were much edified, perceiving 
 
 clearly that this Brother loved the truth better than 
 
 popular favour or the sound of empty praise."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Conversion. 
 
 ""TDLESSED be God," wrote Salimbene at the end of the 
 IJ long digression into which he had been tempted on the 
 subject of Diotisalve's witticisms : " blessed be God who hath 
 brought me safe to the end of this matter ! " He is therefore 
 conscious of his failing, and will no doubt hasten back to his 
 main subject : to that great Alleluia which probably determined 
 
 his own choice of a career 
 
 Nothing lies farther from his thoughts : he goes on in the 
 same breath with a fresh digression, smacking still less of 
 revivalism than the first (83). " There lived in these days a 
 canon of Cologne named Primas, a great rogue and a great 
 buffoon, and a most excellent and ready versifier ; who, if he had 
 given his heart to love God, would have been mighty in divine 
 learning, and most profitable to the Church of God." Here 
 follow a few specimens of his epigrams, interesting only to the 
 student. " Moreover he was once accused to his archbishop of 
 three sins, namely of incontinence or lechery, of dicing, and of 
 tavern-haunting. And he excused himself thus in verse." Here 
 Salimbene quotes at length the witty and profligate verses so well 
 known in their attribution to Walter Map, of which Green gives 
 a spirited extract in his Short History (p. 116) : 
 
 " Die I must, but let me die drinking in an inn ! 
 
 Hold the wine-cup to my lips sparkling from the bin ! 
 
 So, when angels flutter down to take me from my sin, 
 ' Ah, God have mercy on this sot,' the cherubs wUl begin ! " 
 
 Professor Michael is much scandalized by the impenitent jovial- 
 ity with which the friar quotes in extenso, on so slight a pretext, 
 a poem which could scarcely be rendered into naked English. 
 But Salimbene only followed the custom of his time ; the same 
 poem, with a collection of others beyond comparison worse, was 
 kept religiously until modern times in the great monastery of 
 Beuediktbeuern, and in fact nearly all the ultra-Zolaesque litera-
 
 Conversion. 39 
 
 ture of the middle ages (except that of the Fabliaux) has come 
 down to us through Church libraries. Nor is there the least 
 a priori reason against Salimbene writing such things to Sister 
 Agnes : for nuns were often accustomed to hear songs of un- 
 becoming purport sung in the churches during the Feast of 
 Fools, and not infrequently joined themselves in the songs and 
 the dancing. 1 
 
 As Diotisalve and Primas drove the Alleluia out of Salimbene's 
 head, so did like worldly vanities banish it from men's hearts 
 in Northern Italy after those few months of 1233 were past. All 
 such religious revivals have been short-lived in direct proportion 
 to the suddenness of their origin. No doubt they left behind in 
 many minds some real leaven, however small, of true religion : 
 but the mass swung back all the more violently into their old 
 groove : and those populations which had suddenly thrown 
 away their swords and sworn with tears an eternal peace, were 
 again in a month or two as busy as ever with the ancient feuds. 
 During the Alleluia itself, many earnest men must have felt the 
 fear expressed on a similar occasion by a pious chronicler of the 
 fifteenth century : " Now may God grant that this be peace 
 indeed, and tranquillity for all citizens ; whereof I doubt." 
 Jacopo da Varagine, author of the Golden Legend, describes a 
 similar religious revival and pacification at which he himself played 
 a prominent part in 1295 ; yet, since nothing is pure in this world, 
 the year was not yet out before the Devil inspired the citizens 
 again with such a spirit of discord that there were several days 
 of street fighting, in which a church was burned to the ground. 
 In the year after the great Alleluia, Salimbene records, without 
 comment, how there was a great battle in the plain of Cremona 
 between the seven principal towns of Lombardy, in spite of 
 natural calamities in which they might well have seen the finger 
 of Providence. For (88) "There was so great snow and frost 
 throughout the month of January that the vines and all fruit- 
 trees were frost-bitten. And beasts of the forest were frozen to 
 death, and wolves came into the cities by night : and by day 
 many were taken and hanged in the public streets. And trees 
 were split from top to bottom by the force of the frost, and 
 many lost their sap altogether and were dried up." The next 
 year came another bitter winter and greater destruction of 
 vines : but the warm weather was again marked by the usual 
 civil wars. In this year 1235 . . . the men of Parma and 
 Cremona, Piacen/a and Pontremoli, went with those of Modena 
 to dig the Scotenna above Bologna ; for they would fain have 
 thrown the stream against Castelfranco to destroy it. And no
 
 40 FronvSt. Francis to Dante. 
 
 man was excused from the labour ; for some digged, others 
 carried earth, both nobles and common folk" (92). Salimbene 
 more than once speaks of the month of May, in Old Testament 
 phrase, as "the time when kings go forth to war." "Every 
 spring," as Ruskin put it, " kindled them into battle, and every 
 autumn was red with their blood." The worst horrors of civil 
 war recorded by Salimbene come after the great Alleluia of 
 1233. 
 
 It must be noted also to what an extent this, like most other 
 religious movements in the Middle Ages, came from the people 
 rather than from the hierarchy. Brother Benedict of the Horn 
 had no more claim to Apostolical Succession than General 
 Booth, or, for the matter of that, than St. Francis when he first 
 began to preach. There is no hint that either of them had at 
 first any episcopal licence even of the most informal kind, any 
 more than the Blessed Joachim of Fiore and St. Catherine of 
 Siena, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, who all set an example of 
 lay preaching. No doubt the practice was contrary to canon law : 
 but the thing was constantly done ; and, so long as the preacher 
 did not become a revolutionary, it seems to have caused neither 
 scandal nor surprise. Matthew Paris (ann. 1225) describes a 
 wild woman-preacher of this sort, not with contempt, but Avith 
 warm admiration. The canonization of saints, in the same way, 
 almost always came from the people and the lower classes. 
 Nothing is more false than to suppose that the medieval Church 
 was disciplined like the present Church of Rome. It was as 
 various in its elements, with as many cross-currents and as many 
 conflicts of theory with practice, as modern Anglicanism ; and 
 much which seems smooth and harmonious to us, at six hundred 
 years' distance, was as confusing to contemporaries as a Fulham 
 Round-Table Conference. Again, the oft-quoted saying of 
 Macaulay, that Rome has always been far more adroit than Prot- 
 estantism in directing enthusiasm, is true (so far as it is true at 
 all) only of Rome since the Reformation. What Darwin took at 
 first for smooth unbroken grass-land proved, on nearer examina- 
 tion, to be thick-set with tiny self-sown firs, which the cattle 
 regularly cropped as they grew. Similarly, that which some love 
 to picture as the harmonious growth of one great body through 
 the Middle Ages is really a history of many divergent opinions 
 violently strangled at birth ; while hundreds more, too vigorous 
 to be killed by the adverse surroundings, and elastic enough to 
 take something of the outward colour of their environment, 
 grew in spite of the hierarchy into organisms which, in their 
 turn, profoundly modified the whole constitution of the Church.
 
 Conversion. 41 
 
 If the medieval theory and practice of persecution had still been 
 in full force in the eighteenth century in England, nearly all the 
 best Wesleyans would have chosen to remain within the Church 
 rather than to shed blood in revolt ; and the rest would have 
 keen killed off like wild beasts. The present unity of Roman- 
 ism, so far as it exists, is due less to tact than to naked force ; so 
 that in the Middle Ages, when communication was difficult and 
 discipline of any kind irregularly enforced, the religious world 
 naturally heaved with strange and widespread fermentations. It 
 is true that the modern Church historian generally slurs them 
 over : yet they were very pressing realities at the time. 
 
 Amid these wars, Salimbene records one very dramatic scene 
 (88). The Bishop of Mantua, whose sister was afterwards " mea 
 dcvota " i.e., one of Salimbene's many spiritual daughters was 
 murdered in a political quarrel. " And note that the College of 
 Canons and Clergy at Mantua sent news of the murder to the 
 Pope's court by a special envoy of exceeding eloquence : who, 
 young though he was, spake so that Pope and Cardinals marvel- 
 led to hear him. And, having made an end of speaking, he 
 brought forth the Bishop's blood-stained dalmatic, wherein he 
 had been slain in the Church of St. Andrew at Mantua, and 
 spread it before the Pope, saying : * Behold, Father, and see 
 whether it be thy son's coat or not.' And Pope Gregory IX, 
 with all his cardinals, wept at the sight as men who could not be 
 comforted ; for he was a man of great compassion and bowels of 
 mercy. And the Avvocati of Mantua, who slew this their 
 Bishop, were driven forth from their city without recall, and they 
 wander in exile even to this present day : in order that perverse 
 and incorrigible men (of whom and of fools the number is infinite) 2 
 and pestilent men who ruin cities, may all know that it is not 
 easy to fight against God. Note that folk say commonly in Tus- 
 cany ' D'ohmo alevandhizo, ct de pioclo apicadhizo no po fohm 
 ynuderc : ' which is, being interpreted, ' A man hath no joy of a 
 man who is a foreigner, nor of a louse which clingeth : ' that is, 
 thou hast no solace of another man's louse which clingeth to 
 thee, nor of a stranger man whom thou cherishest. Which may 
 be seen in Frederick II, whom the Church cherished as her 
 ward, and who afterwards raised his heel against her and afflicted 
 her in many ways. So also it may be seen in the Marquis of 
 Este who now is, 3 and in many others." After which Salim- 
 bene loses himself in a long sermon on martyrs, from Abel and 
 Zacharias to Becket ; from whose legend he quotes a series of 
 absolutely apocryphal stones relating the miraculous torments 
 amid which his murderers severally expired. Then the good
 
 42 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 friar goes on with his common s tory of wars and bloodshed : for 
 of the 76 years covered by the Chronicle proper, only 21 are 
 free from express record of war in the writer's own neighbour- 
 hood, while several of the others were years of famine or pesti- 
 lence. Salimbene, as he played about the streets of Parma, saw 
 the heralds of the mighty host that Frederick was bringing to 
 crush the rebellious cities of Lombardy, " an elephant, with 
 many dromedaries, camels, and leopards," and all the strange 
 beasts and birds that the great Emperor loved to have about 
 him (92). Two years later, another imperial elephant came 
 through Parma armed for war, with a great tower and pennons 
 on its back, " as described in the first book of Maccabees and in 
 the book of Brother Bartholomew the Englishman " (94). From 
 his earliest childhood he had been familiar with the trophies of 
 the bloody fight at San Cesario a number of mangonels taken 
 from the vanquished Bolognese, and ranged along the Baptistery 
 and the west front of the Cathedral, almost under the windows 
 of his father's house (60). And now in his seventeenth year 
 the sad side of war was for the first time brought vividly 
 before his bodily eyes. The Bolognese in their turn had 
 destroyed Castiglione, a fortress of friendly Modena ; and 
 Parma itself was threatened (95 ). " Then the Advocate of 
 the Commune of Parma (who was a man of Modena) rode on 
 horseback, followed by a squire, through the Borgo di Sta. 
 Cristina, crying again and again with tears in his voice, ' Ye 
 lords of Parma, go and help the men of Modena, your friends 
 and brothers ! ' And hearing his words my bowels yearned for 
 him with a compassion that moved me even to tears. For 1 
 considered how Parma was stripped of men, nor were any left in 
 the city but boys and girls, youths and maidens, old men and 
 women ; since the men of Parma, with the hosts of many other 
 cities, had gone in the Emperor's service against Milan." 
 
 In the next year, 1238, came the turning point of Salimbene's 
 life. The Alleluia had impressed him deeply : Gerard of Mod- 
 ena, one of the most distinguished men of the Order, took a per- 
 sonal interest in his conversion : and on February 4th, at the age 
 of sixteen years and a few months, he slipped away from his father's 
 home and was admitted that same evening as a novice among 
 the Franciscans of Parma. Within the brief space of three 
 hundred yards he had passed from one world to another. A 
 friend of his, Alberto Cremonella, was admitted at the same 
 time, but went out during his noviciate, became a physician, and 
 later on entered the Cistercian Order. 
 
 Sixteen years may seem a strangely immature age at which
 
 Conversion. 43 
 
 to renounce the world for life ; yet very many joined the Friars 
 at an earlier age than this. Conrad of Offida and John of La 
 Vernia, two of the most distinguished Franciscans of the first 
 generation, were only fourteen and thirteen respectively when 
 they joined the Order. Salimbene's contemporary, Roger Bacon, 
 asserts that most Friars had joined before they were of age, and 
 that in all countries they were habitually received at any age 
 between ten and twenty years. Thousands become friars, he 
 says, who can read neither their grammar nor their psalter. 
 Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, accused the friars of 
 attracting boys by presents of apples and wine ; and in 1313 the 
 University of Oxford passed a statute forbidding them to receive 
 novices below eighteen years of age. The crude spirit of adven- 
 ture which prompts a modern schoolboy to go to sea, sometimes 
 found a vent six hundreds years ago in an equally ill-regulated 
 religious enthusiasm. Only nine years before Salimbene's birth, 
 Northern Italy had witnessed the Boys' Crusade, which originat- 
 ed on the Rhine and swelled to a troop of seven thousand youths 
 and children, many of whom were of noble families, and who 
 expected to cross the sea dry-shod from Genoa to the Holy Land. 
 The Genoese, scandalized by the moral disorders which reigned 
 among them, and judging them " to be led by levity rather than 
 by necessity," closed their gates upon the juvenile pilgrims, who 
 were dispersed and perished miserably. Salimbene tells the story 
 on p. 30, and the author of the Golden Legend makes the 
 startling assertion that the fathers of the well-born boys had sent 
 harlots with their children. 4 
 
 Albert and Salimbene had chosen their time well ; for Brother 
 Elias, the powerful Minister-General of the Order, was at that 
 moment passing through Parma ; and, once received by him in 
 person, they would be pretty safe from all outside interference. 
 They found the great man on a bed of down in the guesten-hall ; 
 for the easy-chair was not a medieval institution, and even kings 
 or queens would receive visitors seated on their beds. Brother 
 Elias " had a goodly fire before him, and an Armenian cap on his 
 head : nor did he rise or move from his place when the Podesta 
 entered and saluted him, as I saw with mine own eyes : and this 
 was held to be great churlishness on his part, since God Himself 
 saith in Holy Scripture, ' Rise up before the hoary head, and 
 honour the person of the aged man.' ' After all, however, such 
 boorishness was natural to Brother EHas, who in his youth had 
 been glad to earn a scanty living by sewing mattresses and teach- 
 ing little boys to read their psalter. Brother Gerard of Modena 
 was also present : and at his prayer the young Salimbene was re-
 
 44 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 ceived into the Order. The Abbot of St. John's at Parma had 
 sent for the Brethren's supper a peasant loaded with capons 
 hanging before and behind from a pole over his shoulders ; the 
 friars took the boy to sup in the infirmary, where more delicate 
 fare could be had than the ordinary Rule permitted. Here, 
 " though I had supped magnificently in my father's house, they 
 set an excellent meal before me again. 8 But in course of time 
 they gave me cabbages, which I must needs eat all the days of 
 my life : yet in the world I had never eaten cabbages nay, 
 I abhorred them so sore that 1 had never even eaten the flesh 
 stewed with them. So afterward I remembered that proverb 
 which was often in men's mouths : ' The kite said to the chicken 
 as he carried him off ' You may squeak now, but this isn't the 
 worst.' 6 And again I thought of Job's words, ' The things 
 which before my soul would not touch, now through anguish 
 are my meats ' " (99). Salimbene kept his eyes and ears open 
 that evening : for he was in the presence of one of the greatest 
 men in Italy. As a grown man he was far from approving 
 Brother Elias's policy, of which he has left the most detailed 
 criticism now extant. (96 foil.) This most thorny question, 
 however, is exhaustively discussed in Lempp's Frere Elie de 
 Cortonc, and well summarized by Miss Macdonell ; so I shall 
 quote elsewhere only such of our chronicler's remarks as throw 
 definite light upon the general conditions of the Order. 
 
 Once admitted, he was sent forthwith to Fano, in the Mark of 
 Ancona, some hundred and fifty miles from Parma. Guido 
 di Adamo was a man of influence, and only too likely to resent 
 the loss of his son and heir : for the proselytizing methods of 
 the friars constantly caused bitter family quarrels. " Greedy 
 and injurious men ! " complains an Italian dramatist of the next 
 century, " who think they have earned heaven when they have 
 separated a son from his father ! " The friars in their turn, 
 enforced the strictest separation from all friends during the year 
 of the noviciate. A s St. Bonaventura's secretary writes " To 
 speak with outsiders, whether lay folk (even such as serve the 
 Brethren) or Religious of any Order, is absolutely forbidden to 
 the novices except in the presence of a professed friar, who shall 
 hear and follow all the words spoken on either side ; nor may 
 the novices without special licence be allowed to go to the gate or 
 to outsiders." 7 How necessary was this rule in the friars' interest, 
 Salimbene's own words will show. (39.) " My father was sore 
 grieved all the days of his life at my entrance into the Order of 
 the Friars Minor, nor would he be comforted, since he had now 
 no son to succeed him. Wherefore, he made complaint to the
 
 Conversion. 45 
 
 Emperor, who had come in those days to Parma, that the 
 Brethren Minor had robbed him of his son. Then the Emperor 
 wrote to Brother Elias, Minister-General of the Order, saying 
 that, as he loved his favour, he should hearken to him and give 
 me back to my father. Then my father journeyed to Assisi, 
 where Brother Elias was, and laid the Emperor's letter in the 
 General's hand, whereof the first words were as follows : To 
 comfort the sighing of our trusty and well-beloved Guido di Adamo, 
 etc. Brother Illuminato, 8 who in those days was scribe and 
 secretary to Brother Elias, and who was wont to write in 
 a book, apart by themselves, all the fair letters which were 
 sent by princes of the world to the Minister-General, showed 
 me that letter, when in process of time I dwelt with him in the 
 convent of Siena. Wherefore Brother Elias, having read the 
 Emperor's letter, wrote forthwith to the Brethren of the convent 
 of Fano, where I then dwelt, bidding them, if I were willing, to 
 give me back to my father without delay, in virtue of holy 
 obedience ; but if they found me unwilling to return, their 
 should they keep me as the apple of their eye. Whereupon 
 many knights came with my father to the house of the Brethren 
 in the city of Fano, to see the issue of this matter. To them I 
 was made a gazing-stock ; and to myself a cause of salvation. 
 For when the Brethren and the laymen had assembled in the 
 chapter-house, and many words had been bandied to and fro, my 
 father brought forth the letter of the Minister-General, and 
 showed it to the Brethren. Whereupon Brother Jeremiah the 
 Custode, having read it, replied to my father, ' My Lord Guido, 
 we have compassion for your grief, and are ready to obey the 
 letters of our father. But here is your son : he is of age, let 
 him speak for himself. Enquire ye of him : if he is willing to 
 
 fo with you, let him go in God's name. But if not, we cannot 
 o him violence, that he should go with you.' My father asked 
 therefore whether I would go with him, or not. To whom I 
 answered, ' No ; for the Lord saith, " No man, putting his hand 
 to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of 
 God." ' And my father said to me : * Thou hast no care then 
 for thine own father and mother, who are afflicted with divers 
 pains for thy sake ? ' To whom I made answer, ' No care have 
 I in truth, for the Lord saith, " He that loveth father or mother 
 more than Me, is not worthy of Me." Thou, therefore, father, 
 shouldst have a care for Him, Who for our sake hung on a tree, 
 that He might give us eternal life. For he it is Who saith, 
 ' For I came to set a man at variance against his father,' etc., 
 etc. (Matt. x. 35, 36, 32, 33). And the Brethren marvelled and
 
 46 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 rejoiced that I spake thus to my father. Then said he to 
 the Brethren, * Ye have bewitched and deceived my son, lest 
 he should obey me. I will complain to the Emperor again 
 concerning you, and to the Minister-General. Yet suffer me 
 to speak with my sou secretly and apart ; and ye shall see 
 that he will follow me without delay.' So the Brethren suffered 
 me to speak alone with my father, since they had some small 
 confidence in me because of my words that 1 had even now 
 spoken. Yet they listened behind the partition to hear what 
 manner of talk we had : for they quaked as a rush quakes in the 
 water, lest my father by his blandishments should change my 
 purpose. And they feared not only for the salvation of my 
 soul, but also lest my departure should give occasion to others 
 not to enter the Order. My father, therefore, said to me : 
 * Beloved son, put no faith in these filthy drivellers 9 who have 
 deceived thee, but come with me, and all that I have will I give 
 unto thee.' And I answered and spake to my father : * Hence, 
 hence, father : the Wise Man saith in his Proverbs, in the third 
 chapter, " Hinder not from well-doing him who hath the power : 
 if thou art able, do good thyself also." ' And my father answered 
 even weeping, and said to me, 'What then, my son, can I say 
 to thy mother, who mourueth for thee night and day ? ' And 
 I spake unto him : ' Say unto her for my part, Thus saith thy 
 son : " When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord 
 will take me up." ' My father, hearing all this, and despairing 
 of my return, threw himself upon the earth in the sight of the 
 Brethren and the layfolk who had come with him, and cried, ' I 
 commit thee to a thousand devils, accursed son, together with 
 thy brother who is here with thee, and who also hath helped 
 to deceive thee. My curse cleave to thee through all eternity, and 
 send thee to the devils of hell ! ' And so he departed, troubled 
 beyond measure; but we remained in great consolation, giving 
 thanks unto God, and saying to Him, ' Though they curse, yet 
 bless Thou. For he who is blessed above the earth, let him be 
 blessed in God. Amen.' So the layfolk departed, much edified 
 at my constancy : and the Brethren also rejoiced greatly that 
 the Lord had wrought manfully through me His little child ; 
 and they knew that the words of the Lord are true, Who saith, 
 ' Lay it up therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before how 
 you shall answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which 
 all your adversaries shall not be able to resist and gainsay.' In 
 the following night the Blessed Virgin rewarded me. For 
 methought I lay prostrate in prayer before the altar, as is the 
 wont of the Brethren, when they arise to matins : and I heard
 
 Conversion. 47 
 
 the voice of the Blessed Virgin calling unto me. And, raising 
 my face, I saw her sitting upon the altar, in that place where the 
 Host and the chalice are set. And she had her little Child in her 
 lap, Whom she held out to me, saying, ' Draw thou nigh without 
 fear, and kiss my Son Whom thou hast confessed yesterday before 
 men.' And when I feared, I saw that the Child opened His arms 
 gladly, awaiting my coming. Trusting, therefore, in the cheer- 
 fulness and innocence of the Child, no less than in this so liberal 
 favour of His mother, I came forward and embraced and kissed 
 Him ; and His gracious mother left Him to me for a long space. 
 And since I could not take my fill of Him, at length the Holy 
 Virgin blessed me, saying : ' Depart, beloved son, and take thy 
 rest, lest the Brethren should rise to matins, and find thee here 
 with us.' I obeyed, and the vision disappeared : but in my 
 heart remained so great sweetness as tongue could never tell. 
 In very truth I avow, that never in this world had I such sweetness 
 as that. And then I knew the truth of that scripture which 
 saith, ' To him who hath tasted of the spirit, there is no taste 
 in any flesh.' 
 
 " At that time, while I was still in the city of Fano, I saw in a 
 dream that the son of Thomas degli Armari, of the city of Parma, 
 slew a monk ; and I told the dream to my brother. And after 
 a few days there came through the city of Fano Amizo degli 
 Amici, going into Apulia to fetch gold from thence ; and he 
 came unto the house of the Brethren, where he saw us : for he 
 was our acquaintance and friend and neighbour. And then, 
 beginning from another matter, we enquired how it might be 
 with Such-an-one (now his name was Gerard de' Senzanesi), 
 and he said to us : ' It is ill with him, for the other day he slew 
 a monk.' Then we knew that at times dreams are true. Further- 
 more, at that time also, when first my father passed through 
 the city of Fano, journeying towards Assisi, the Brethren hid 
 me many days, together with my brother, in the house of the 
 Lord Martin of Fano, who was a Master of Laws, and his palace 
 was hard by the seaside. And at times he would come to us 
 and speak to us of God and of the Holy Scriptures, and his 
 mother ministered unto us. Afterwards he entered the Order 
 of the Friars Preachers, wherein he ended his life with all praise. 
 While then he was yet in that Order, he was chosen Bishop of his 
 own city : but the Preachers would not suffer him to accept it, 
 for they were not willing to lose him. He would have entered 
 our Order, but he was dissuaded therefrom by Brother Taddeo 
 Buonconte, who was himself thereof. For our Brethren lay 
 sore upon Taddeo that he should return all ill-gotten gains, if he
 
 48 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 would be received among us : and he said to the Lord Martin, 
 ' So will they do with thee also, if thou enter the Order.' So 
 he feared, and entered the Order of Preachers, which perchance 
 was better for him and for us." This restitution of ill-gotten 
 gains was a very sore point with both Orders. 
 
 As Salimbene had learnt Latin " from his very cradle," so 
 now, from the very first days of his conversion, he set himself to 
 study theology. Forty-six years afterwards, on the anniversary 
 of his entrance, he looks back with pardonable complacency 
 over this long term of study. (277) "From my very earliest 
 noviciate at Fano in the March of Ancona, I learned theology 
 from Brother Umile of Milan, who had studied at Bologna under 
 Brother Aymo, the Englishman ; which same Aymo, in his old 
 age, was chosen Minister-General of our Order, and held that 
 office three years, even to his death. And in the first year of my 
 entrance into the Order I studied Isaiah and Matthew as Brother 
 Umile read them in the schools : and I have not ceased since then 
 to study and learn in the schools. And as the Jews said to Christ, 
 ' Six and forty years was this temple in building,' so may I also 
 say : for it is 46 years to-day, Saturday the Feast of St. Gilbert, 
 in the year 1284, whereon I write these words, since I entered 
 the Order of Friars Minor. And I have not ceased to study 
 since then : yet not even so have I come to the wisdom of my 
 ancestors."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 A Wicked World. 
 
 BUT Salimbene's stay at Fano was brief. The friary lay 
 outside the walls, by the sea-shore, and he was haunted 
 by the idea that his father had hired pirates to seize and 
 kidnap him. He therefore gladly welcomed a message from 
 Brother Elias, who, delighted at the boy's constancy in cleaving 
 to the Order, sent him word that he might choose his own province. 
 He chose Tuscany, and went thither after a brief stay at Jesi. 
 On his way, he changed his home name for that which he was 
 to bear during the rest of his life. (38) " Now as I went to dwell 
 in Tuscany, and passed through the city of Castello, there 1 
 found in an hermitage a certain Brother of noble birth, ancient 
 and fulfilled of days and of good works, who had four sons, 
 knights, in the world. This was the last Brother whom the 
 blessed Francis robed and received into the Order, as he himself 
 related to me. He, hearing that I was called All-good, was 
 amazed, and said to me, * Son, there is none good but One, that is, 
 God. 1 From henceforth be thou called no more Ognibene but 
 Brother Salimbene (Leap-into-good), for thou hast well leapt, in 
 that thou hast entered into a good Order.' And I rejoiced, know- 
 ing that he was moved with a right spirit, and seeing that a name 
 was laid upon me by so holy a man. Yet had I not the name 
 which I coveted : for I would fain have been called Dionysius, 
 not only on account of my reverence for that most excellent 
 doctor, who was the disciple of the Apostle Paul, but also because 
 on the Feast of St. Dionysius I was born into this world. And 
 thus it was that I saw the last Brother whom the blessed Francis 
 received in the Order, after whom he received and robed no other. 
 I have seen also the first, to wit, Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, 
 with whom I dwelt for a whole winter in the Convent of Siena. 
 And he was my familiar friend ; and to me and other young men 
 he would recount many marvels concerning the blessed Francis ; 
 and much good have 1 heard and learnt from him."
 
 50 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 In Tuscany, Salimbene dwelt in turn in the convents of Lucca, 
 Siena, and Pisa. It is possible that he was twice at Pisa, since 
 he had there an adventure which seems to imply that he was 
 scarcely yet settled in the Oi'der. At any rate it belongs logically, 
 if not chronologically, to this place. (44) " Now at Pisa I was 
 yet a youth, and one day I was led to beg for bread by a certain 
 lay-brother, filthy and vain of heart (whom in process of time 
 the Brethren drew out of a well into which he had thrown himself, 
 in a fit of I know not what folly or despair. And a few days 
 later, he disappeared so utterly that no man in the world could 
 find him : wherefore the Brethren suspected that the devil had 
 carried him off: let him look to it !). So when I was begging 
 bread with him in the city of Pisa, we came upon a certain court- 
 yard, and entered it together. Therein was a living vine, 
 overspreading the whole space above, delightful to the eye with 
 its fresh green, and inviting us to rest under its shade. There 
 also were many leopards and other beasts from beyond the seas, 
 whereon we gazed long and gladly, as men love to see strange 
 and fair sights. For youths and maidens were there in the 
 flower of their age, whose rich array and comely features caught 
 our eyes with manifold delights, and drew our hearts to them. 
 And all held in their hands viols and lutes and other instruments 
 of music, on which they played with all sweetness of harmony 
 and grace of motion. There was no tumult among them, nor 
 did any speak, but all listened in silence. And their song was 
 strange and fair both in its words and in the variety and melody 
 of its air, so that our hearts were rejoiced above measure. They 
 spake no word to us, nor we to them, and they ceased not to 
 sing and to play while we stayed there : for we lingered long in 
 that spot, scarce knowing how to tear ourselves away. I know 
 not (I speak the truth in God), how we met with so fair and 
 glad a pageant, for we had never seen it before, nor could we see 
 any such hereafter. 2 So when we had gone forth from that place, 
 a certain man met me whom I knew not, saying that he was of 
 the city of Parma : and he began to upbraid and rebuke me 
 bitterly with harsh words of scorn, saying ; ' Hence, wretch, 
 hence I Many hired servants in thy father's house have bread 
 and flesh enough and to spare, and thou goest from door to door 
 begging from those who lack bread of their own, whereas thou 
 mightest thyself give abundantly to many poor folk. Thou 
 should st even now be caracoling through the streets of Parma 
 on thy charger, and making sad folk merry with tournaments, 
 a fair sight for the ladies, and a solace to the minstrels. For 
 thy father wasteth away with grief, and thy mother well-nigh
 
 A Wicked World. 51 
 
 despaireth of God for love of thee, whom she may no longer see.' 
 To whom I answered : ' Hence, wretch, hence thyself ! For 
 thou savourest not the things which are of God, but the things 
 which are of fleshly men : for what thou sayest, flesh and blood 
 hath revealed it to thee, not our Father which is in heaven.'* 
 Hearing this, he withdrew in confusion, for he wist not what to 
 say. So, when we had finished our round [of begging], that 
 evening I began to turn and ponder in my mind all that 1 had 
 seen and heard, considering within myself that if I were to live 
 fifty years in the Order, begging my bread in this fashion, not 
 only would the journey be too great for me (I Kings xix, 7), but 
 also shameful toil would be my portion, and more than my 
 strength could bear. When, therefore, I had spent almost the 
 whole night without sleep, pondering these things, it pleased 
 God that a brief slumber should fall upon me, wherein He 
 showed me a vision wondrous fair, which brought comfort to 
 my soul, and mirth and sweetness beyond all that ear hath 
 heard. And then I knew the truth of that saying of Eusebius, 
 ' Needs must God's help come when man's help ceases : ' for I 
 seemed in my dream to go begging bread from door to door, 
 after the wont of the Brethren ; and I went through the quarter 
 of St. Michael of Pisa, in the direction of the Visconti ; because in 
 the other direction the merchants of Parma had their lodging, 
 which the Pisans call Fondaco ; and that part I avoided both 
 for shame's sake, since I was not yet fully strengthened in Christ, 
 and also fearing lest 1 might chance to hear words from my 
 father which might shake my heart. For ever my father pursued 
 me to the day of his death, and still he lay in wait to withdraw 
 me from the Order of St. Francis ; nor was he ever reconciled 
 to me, but persisted still in his hardness of heart. So as I went 
 down the Borgo San Michele towards the Arno, suddenly 1 lifted 
 my eyes and saw how the Son of God came from one of the 
 houses, bearing bread and putting it into my basket. Likewise 
 also did the Blessed Virgin, and Joseph the child's foster-father, 
 to whom the Blessed Virgin had been espoused. And so they 
 did until my round was ended and my basket filled. For it is 
 the custom in those parts to cover the basket over with a cloth 
 and leave it below ; and the friar goes up into the house to beg 
 bread and bring it down to his basket. So when my round was 
 ended and my basket filled, the Son of God said unto me : * I 
 
 * Salimbene here, as usual, reinforces his speech with several other texts 
 Rev. Hi, 17 ; Jer. ii, 5 ; Ecc. i, 2 ; Pa. Ixxvii, 33 ; and Ixxii, 19 ; Job xxi, 12, 13 ; 
 and 1 Cor. ii, 14.
 
 52 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 am thy Saviour, and this is My Mother, and the third is Joseph 
 who was called My father. I am He Who for the salvation of 
 mankind left My home and abandoned Mine inheritance and 
 gave My beloved soul into the hands of its enemies . . ."' 
 Under the thin veil of our Lord's speech to him, the good friar 
 here launches out into a long and rambling disquisition on the 
 merits of voluntary poverty and mendicancy : a theme so 
 absoi'bing that he more than once loses sight of all dramatic 
 propriety. Not only does he make our Lord mangle the Bible 
 text, quote freely from apocryphal medieval legends, and cite the 
 tradition recorded by " Pietro Mangiadore " that the widow of 
 2 Kings IV had been the wife of the prophet Obadiah, but more 
 than once we find Him inadvertently speaking of God in the 
 third person. 3 There are, however, one or two points of interest 
 in this wilderness of incoherent texts and old wives' tales. Salim- 
 bene, who (as he tells us elsewhere) had at least one Jewish friend, 
 gives us an interesting glimpse of thirteenth century apologetics. 
 " Moreover in my vision I spake again to the Lord Christ, saying : 
 ' Lord, the Jews who live among us Christians learn our grammar 
 and Latin letters, not that they may love Thee and believe in 
 Thee, but that they may carp at Thee and insult us Christians 
 who adore the crucifix ; and they cite that scripture of Esaias, 
 "They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven 
 work, and pray unto a god that cannot save." ' He represents 
 the Jews, in fact, as objecting the texts which a modern Jew 
 might quote ; while he himself meets their objections with 
 arguments which no modern apologist would dare to use. Indeed, 
 his wordy and futile apologia illustrates admirably a well- 
 known anecdote of St. Louis. " The holy king related to me " 
 (writes Joinville, x. 51) "that there was a great disputation 
 between clergy and Jews at the Abbey of Cluny. Now a knight 
 was present to whom the Abbot had given bread for God's sake ; 
 and he prayed the Abbot to let him say the first word, which 
 with some pain he granted. Then the knight raised himself on 
 his crutch, and bade them go fetch the greatest clerk and chief 
 rabbi of the Jews : which was done. Whereupon the knight 
 questioned him : * Master,' said he, ' I ask you if you believe 
 that the Virgin Mary, who bare God in her womb and in her 
 arms, was a virgin mother, and the Mother of God ? ' And the 
 Jew answered that of all this he believed naught. Then answered 
 the knight that he had wrought great folly, in that he believed 
 not and loved her not, and yet was come into her minster and 
 her house. ' And of a truth,' said the knight, 'you shall pay it 
 dear.' With that he lifted his crutch and smote the Jew under
 
 A Wicked World. 53 
 
 the ear and felled him to earth. And the Jews turned to flight 
 and bare off their wounded rabbi ; and thus was the disputation 
 ended. Then came the Abbot to the knight and said that he 
 had wrought great folly. But he said that the Abbot had wrought 
 more folly to ordain such a disputation : ' For here,' he said, 
 ' are many good Christians present who, or ever the dispute had 
 been ended, would have departed in unbelief, for they would 
 never have understood the Jews.' ' So say I,' added the king, 
 ' that none should dispute with them, but if he be a very learned 
 clerk. The layman, when he hears any speak ill of the Christian 
 faith, should defend it, not with words but with the sword, which 
 he should thrust into the other's belly as far as it will go.' ' 
 The story is all the more instructive because St. Louis was, in 
 practice, extremely kind to the Jews in comparison with most 
 medieval princes. Another medieval practice admirably illus- 
 trated by these pages of Salimbene's is the wresting of Scripture 
 to prove a preconceived theory, by distortion of its plain meaning, 
 interpolation of words or phrases, and quotations from the Gloss,* 
 as of equal authority with the Bible text. These time-hallowed 
 liberties in the interpretation of Scripture go far to explain why 
 medieval religious controversy, even among Christians, nearly 
 alway ended in an appeal to physical force. So long as a word 
 and a blow was looked upon as the most cogent religious argument, 
 men seldom attempted either to understand their opponents' 
 position or to weigh seriously their own arguments. And so 
 in this passage our good friar loses himself in his own labyrinth 
 of texts, and at last confesses that most of this elaborate dialogue 
 has been a mere afterthought, a " story with a purpose." 
 It was written, he tells us, to confute Guillaume de St. Amour 
 and other wicked people who, seeing how far the friars had 
 already drifted from the Rule of St. Francis, accused them of 
 being the " ungodly men " of 1 Tim. iii. 5-7 and iv. 3, come as 
 heralds of the last and worst age of the world. There was, 
 however, enough tcuth in the first portion of the vision to support 
 Salimbene himself (53). " Wherefore, after this vision aforesaid, 
 I had such comfort in Christ, that when jongleurs or minstrels 
 came at my father's bidding to steal my heart from God, then 
 I cared as little for their words as for the fifth wheel of a waggon. 
 For upon a day one came to me and said, ' Your father salutes 
 you and says thus : " Your mother would fain see you one day ; 
 after which she would willingly die on the morrow." Wherein 
 he thought to have spoken words that would grieve me sore, 
 
 * i.e., the traditional notes.
 
 54 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 to turn my heart away ; but I answered him in wrath : ' Depart 
 from me, wretch that thou art ; for I will hear thee no more. 
 My father is an Amorite unto me, and my mother a daughter 
 of Heth.' And he withdrew in confusion, and came no more." 
 
 Yet, manfully as Salimbene might resist during his novicate 
 all temptations to apostasy (for so the Brethren called it, however 
 unjustly), he felt a natural human complacency in looking back 
 as an old man on what he had given up. Speaking of Cardinal 
 Gerardo Albo, he tells us, " He was born in the village of Gainago, 
 wherein I, Brother Salimbene, had once great possessions " : and 
 he repeats the same phrase a second time, when he comes again 
 to speak of the great Cardinal. Similarly, he cannot think 
 without indignation of the miserable price at which his father's 
 house was sold when poor Guido was gone, leaving his wife and 
 children dead to the world in their respective convents. " The 
 Lord Jacopo da Enzola bought my house in Parma hard by the 
 Baptistery ; and he had it almost for a gift, that is, for a sum of 
 small worth in comparison with that whereat my father justly 
 esteemed it." Finally, he dwells with pardonable pride on the 
 honours to which he might have attained, under certain very 
 possible contingencies, even as a friar. In those, as in later, days, 
 there was no such friend for a cleric as a Pope's nephew : and 
 Salimbene, speaking of a nephew of Pope Innocent IV, continues : 
 (61) "I knew him well, and he told me that my father hoped to 
 procure from Pope Innocent my egress from the Order j but 
 he was prevented by death. For my father, dwelling hard by 
 the Cathedral Church, was well known to Pope Innocent, who 
 had been a canon of Parma and was a man of great memory. 
 Furthermore, my father had married his daughter Maria to the 
 Lord Azzo, who was akin to the Lord Guarino, the Pope's 
 brother-in-law ; wherefore he hoped, what with the Pope's 
 nephews and what with his own familiar knowledge of him, that 
 the Pope would restore me to my home, especially since my 
 father had no other sons. Which, as I believe, the Pope would 
 never have done ; but perchance to solace my father he might 
 have given me a Bishopric or some other dignity : for he was a 
 man of great liberality." 
 
 However, for good or for evil, our chronicler is now irrevocably 
 rooted in his cloister, and his father has no sons left to him in the 
 world. The two last males of his house have definitely exchanged 
 all their earthly possessions for a heavenly. (56) " I, Brother 
 Salimbene, and my Brother Guido di Adamo destroyed our 
 house in all hope of male or female issue by entering into Religion, 
 that we might build it in Heaven. Which may He grant us Who
 
 A Wicked World. 55 
 
 liveth and reigneth with the Father and the Holy Ghost for 
 ever and ever. Amen." One needs, of course, at least a homoeo- 
 pathic dose of Carlyle's " stupidity and sound digestion " to 
 live at peace anywhere ; but to nine friars out of ten the gain 
 of the celestial inheritance would seem as certain henceforth 
 as the loss of the terrestrial : for it is an ever-recurring common- 
 place in Franciscan chronicles that the Founder had begged 
 and obtained a sure promise of salvation for all his sons who should 
 remain true to the Order. But, if we would fully understand 
 the rest of Salimbene's earthly life, we must pause a moment 
 here to take stock of the old world he had left, and of the new 
 world into which he had so intrepidly leapt at the age of sixteen 
 years. 
 
 One would be tempted to say that " the world," in the thir- 
 teenth century, deserved almost all the evil which religious men 
 were never weary of speaking about it. It is scarcely possible 
 to exaggerate the blank and universal pessimism, so far as this 
 life is concerned, which breathes from literature of the time. 
 It is always rash to assert a negative ; yet after long search in 
 likely places, I have found only one contemporary author who 
 speaks of his own brilliant century as marking a real advance, 
 in morals and religion, on the past. This is Cardinal Jacques 
 de Vitry, who died in 1244, before the decline of the friars was 
 too obvious to be blinked, and who wrote earlier still, while St. 
 Francis was alive. Moreover, even his testimonial to the improve- 
 ment during his own days must be taken in connection with his 
 astounding descriptions of the moral and religious squalor which 
 reigned before the advent of Francis and Dominic. W hat is more, 
 he plainly tells us that he looks upon even this new Revival as 
 the last flicker of an expiring world. The Franciscan Order, 
 he says, " has revived religion, which had almost died out in the 
 eventide of a world whose sun is setting, and which is threatened 
 by the coming of the Son of Perdition : in order that it might 
 have new champions against the perilous days of Antichrist, 
 fortifying and propping up the Church." 4 
 
 Slender as were Vitry's hopes, his compeers were more hopeless 
 still. Most of them, however pious and learned and brave, 
 simply ring variations on the theme which to us seems so incon- 
 gruous on the lips of our remote ancestors : " The world is very 
 evil, the times are waxing late ! " Read the great poem of Bernard 
 of Morlaix from which this hymn is translated, and you will find 
 page after page of bitter and desperate lamentations on the 
 incorrigible iniquity of the whole world. The greatest of all 
 medieval historians, Matthew Paris, had no doubt that the
 
 56 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 thirteenth century marked the last stage of senile decay. Adam 
 Marsh, one of the greatest and most strenuous of the early 
 Franciscans in England, is never weary of alluding to "these 
 most damnable times," " these days of uttermost perdition," 
 in which "no man can fail to see plainly that Satan is either 
 already loosed or soon to be loosed, except those whom (according 
 to the Scripture) the Lord hath struck with madness and blind- 
 ness." Grosseteste, unsurpassed in learning and energy among 
 our Bishops, complained in a sermon before the Pope at Lyons 
 that (leaving heretics aside) even the Catholic population was, 
 as a body, incorporate with the Devil. Innocent III writes in 
 a Bull of " the corruption of this world, which is hasting to old 
 age." St. Francis, at the end of his life, sighed over " these times 
 of superabundant malice and iniquity." St. Bonaventura, 
 Vincent of Beauvais, Humbert de Romans, Gerard de Frachet, 
 Thomas of Chantimpre, Raimondo da Vigna (to name only 
 distinguished friars who were not tempted to minimize the work 
 of their Orders towards the betterment of the world), echo the 
 same despairing cry. 5 'Dante shares their belief that the end of 
 the world is at hand, and leaves but few seats still vacant in 
 his Paradise (xxx. 131 ; cf. Convivio ii. 18.) His Ubertino da 
 Casale gives a curious reason for thinking that the world will just 
 last his own time : viz, Petrus Comestor,* in his commentary on 
 Gen. ix. 13, had written "that the rainbow will not appear for 
 30 or 40 years before the Day of Doom ; but the rainbow hath 
 appeared this year [1318] . . . wherefore we have now at least 
 30 or 40 years before Doomsday." 6 
 
 If Dante or St. Francis could come back to life for a single 
 day, their first and greatest surprise would probably be that the 
 world still exists after six hundred years, far younger and more 
 hopeful than in their days ; a world in which even visionaries 
 and ascetics look rather for gradual progress than for any sudden 
 and dramatic appearance of Antichrist. But more significant 
 even than the chorus of misery and despair from thirteenth- 
 century theologians and poets is the deliberate pessimism of a 
 cool and far-sighted genius like Roger Bacon. He anticipated 
 the verdict of modern criticism on the boasted philosophy of his 
 contemporaries : that, with all its external perfection, it rested 
 upon a Bible and an Aristotle frequently misunderstood, and 
 snowed a fatal neglect of the mathematical and physical sciences. 
 But in the domain of history he shared the ignorance of his 
 time, and was deprived of that assurance of progress in the past, 
 
 * The Mangiadore of Par. xii. 134.
 
 A Wicked World. 57 
 
 which is one of the mainsprings of future progress for the world. 
 The passage is so significant both of the barbarous atmosphere 
 which stifled the greatest minds of the thirteenth century, and 
 of the limited outlook which paralyzed their best energies, that 
 I must give a full summary of it here. It was written in 1271, 
 two whole generations after St. Francis began to preach ; and 
 the writer, it must be remembered, was himself a Franciscan. 
 
 Wisdom, he says, is intimately connected with morality ; and 
 although there has been a vast extension of learning of late 
 especially through the Friars during the last forty years and, 
 by the Devil's wiles, much appearance of learning yet " never 
 was so much ignorance, so much error as now . . . For more 
 sins reign in these days of ours than in any past age, and sin is 
 incompatible with wisdom. Let us see all conditions in the 
 world, and consider them diligently everywhere : we shall find 
 boundless corruption, and first of all in the Head." The court 
 of Rome is given up to pride, avarice, and envy ; " lechery 
 dishonours the whole Court, and gluttony is lord of all." Worse 
 still when, as lately happened, the Cardinals' quarrels leave the 
 Holy See vacant for years. " If then this is done in the Head, 
 how is it in the members ? See the prelates : how they hunt 
 after money and neglect the cure of souls. ... Let us consider 
 the Religious Orders : I exclude none from what I say. See 
 how far they are fallen, one and all, from their right state ; and 
 the new Orders [of Friars] are already horribly decayed from 
 their first dignity. The whole clergy is intent upon pride, 
 lechery, and avarice : and wheresoever clerks are gathered 
 together, as at Paris and Oxford, they scandalize the whole 
 laity with their wars and quarrels and other vices." Princea 
 and Barons live for war : " none care what is done, or how, by 
 hook or by crook, provided only that each can fulfil his lust : " 
 for they are slaves to sensuality. The people, exasperated by 
 their princes, hate them and break faith with them whenever- 
 they can. But they too, corrupted by the example of their 
 betters, are daily busy with oppression or fraud or gluttony or 
 lechery. Yet we have Baptism, and the Revelation of Christ, 
 and the Sacrament of the Altar, which men cannot really believe 
 in or revere, or they would not allow themselves to be corrupted 
 by so many errors. With all these advantages, how do we stand 
 in comparison with the ancient philosophers ? " Their lives, 
 were beyond all comparison better than ours, both in all decency 
 and in contempt of the world, with all its delights and riches and 
 honours ; as all men may read in the works of Aristotle, Seneca, 
 Tully, Avicenna, Alfarabius, Plato, Socrates, and others ; and
 
 58 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 so it was that they attained to the secrets of wisdom and found 
 out all knowledge. But we Christians have discovered nothing 
 worthy of these philosophers, nor can we even understand their 
 wisdom ; which ignorance springs from this cause, that our 
 morals are worse than theirs." Therefore many wise men be- 
 lieve that Antichrist is at hand, and the end of the world. We 
 know, however, from the Bible, that the fulness of the Gentiles 
 must first enter in, and the remnant, of Israel be turned to the 
 Faith : which still seems far from accomplishment : for along 
 the Baltic we have vast populations of pure heathens, to whom 
 the word of God has never been preached, though they are nearer 
 to Paris than Rome is. It may be that still, as of old, the long- 
 suffering God will withhold his Hand awhile : " yet since the 
 wickedness of men is now fulfilled, it must needs be that some 
 most virtuous Pope and most virtuous Emperor should rise to 
 purge the Church with the double sword of the spirit and the 
 flesh : or else that such purgation take place through Antichrist, 
 or thirdly through some other tribulation, as the discord of Christ- 
 ian princes, or the Tartars and Saracens and other kings of the 
 East, as divers scriptures and manifold prophecies tell us. For 
 there is no doubt whatever among wise men, but that the Church 
 must be purged : yet whether in the first fashion, or the second, or 
 the third, they are not agreed, nor is there any certain definition 
 on this head." 7 
 
 That Bacon, on his lonely pinnacle of contemplation, found 
 the world of the thirteenth century almost intolerable, will seem 
 natural enough to those who follow the revelations which flow 
 so freely even from Salimbene's jovial pen. It is less natural, at 
 first sight, that he should have done his own age the injustice of 
 placing it on a far lower moral level than the Rome of Seneca 
 or the Greece of Aristotle. But the cause is very simple ; he 
 knew nothing whatever of the inner life of ordinary Greece and 
 Rome : he had only spent long years in studying the religious 
 and philosophical writings of their greatest men. In a word, he 
 had studied Antiquity as Newman studied the Middle Ages : 
 and this false ideal of the past disabled him from making the best 
 of the realities among which God had placed him. 8 
 
 This false perspective, however, was inevitable in the thirteenth 
 century. Men could not know the real past ; and the present 
 seemed only a chaos of conflicts and uncertainties. A broader 
 view of history might have taught them how the very ferment 
 of their own age was big with a glorious future ; but such a 
 wider view was impossible in those days of few and untrust- 
 worthy books. So they saw no hope in this world ; no hope but
 
 A Wicked World. 59 
 
 in a Dens ex mackina. Some Good Emperor and Good Pope 
 shortly to come, or else Christ's second Advent and the end of all 
 things that was the heart's cry of the crowning period of the 
 Middle Ages ! Dante shared this longing for a Good Emperor 
 and a Good Pope ; but he lived to see Henry of Luxemburg 
 poisoned, Boniface VIII triumphant, and the Babylonian Captiv- 
 ity of Avignon. This expectation of a Deus ex machina seems to 
 die out towards the end of the fourteenth century ; undoubtedly 
 the Black Death made men take more serious stock of the real 
 grounds of their faith. Gerson spoke of the world in which he 
 lived with all Dante's loathing and contempt, but his hopes 
 rested on a General Council to reform the otherwise hopeless 
 Church. 9 Meanwhile the lay element increased steadily in power : 
 its influence may be traced in the growing magnificence of church 
 buildings, furniture, and ritual. Presently powerful laymen 
 set their hands, one by one, to assist that regeneration which 
 the Church by herself had tried in vain to bring about : and 
 then came the Reformation, with its slow evolution of a better 
 world a world which, with all its faults, enjoys such a combina- 
 tion of individual liberty and public order as would have seemed 
 Utopian to the most hopeful minds of the thirteenth century. 
 
 If there had been nothing else in those days to render modern 
 liberty and order impossible, there was the ingrained habit of 
 civil and religious war. The fanatical craving of the Middle 
 Ages for an outward unity fatally frustrated all real inward 
 peace, as the greedy drinker chokes and spills in his own despite. 
 The civil wars of Salimbene's Italy were not worse than those 
 of Stephen's England, or the France of Charles VI, to leave less 
 civilised countries out of the question : and Guibert of Nogent's 
 autobiography indicates a state of things quite as bad in the 
 North of France during St. Bernard's generation. Again, our 
 good friar takes no cognizance of the still more horrible religious 
 wars against the Albigenses and Stedingers, and the half -converted 
 heathen of Prussia. Yet, omitting all those touches which would 
 add so much deeper a gloom to any comprehensive picture of the 
 Middle Ages, here is Salimbeue's description of what went on as 
 the necessary consequence of quarrels between Pope and Emperor, 
 in that outer world upon which he now looked out in comparative 
 safety from under his friar's cowl. (190) " But here, that you 
 may know the labyrinth of affairs, I must not omit to tell how 
 the Church party in Modena was driven forth from the city, 
 while the I mperial party held it. So it was also in lleggio ; and 
 so also, in process of time, in Cremona. Therefore in those days 
 was most cruel war, which endured many years. Men could
 
 60 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 neither plough, nor sow, nor reap, nor till vineyards, nor gather 
 the vintage, nor dwell in the villages : more especially in the 
 districts of Parma and Reggio and Modena and Cremona. Never- 
 theless, hard by the town walls, men tilled the fields under guard 
 of the city militia, who were mustered quarter by quarter 
 according to the number of the gates. Armed soldiers thus 
 guarded the peasants at their work all day long : for so it must 
 needs be, by reason of the ruffians and bandits and robbers who 
 were multiplied beyond measure. For they would take men 
 and lead them to their dungeons, to be ransomed for money ; 
 and the oxen they drove off to devour or to sell. Such as would 
 pay no ransom they hanged up by the feet or the hands, and 
 tore out their teeth, and extorted payment by laying toads in 
 their mouths, which was more bitter and loathsome than any 
 death. For these men were more cruel than devils, and one 
 wayfarer dreaded to meet another by the way as he would have 
 dreaded to meet the foul fiend. For each ever suspected that 
 the other would take and lead him oft' to prison, that 'the ransom 
 of a man's life might be his riches.' And the land was made 
 desert, so that there was neither husbandman nor wayfarer. 
 For in the days of Frederick, and specially from the time when 
 he was deposed from the Empire [by the Pope], and when Parma 
 rebelled and lifted her head against him, * the paths rested, and 
 they that went by them walked through bye-ways.' And evils 
 were multiplied on the earth ; and the wild beasts and fowls 
 multiplied and increased beyond all measure, pheasants and 
 partridges and quails, hares and roebucks, fallow deer and 
 buffaloes and wild swine and ravening wolves. For they found 
 no beasts in the villages to devour according to their wont : 
 neither sheep nor lambs, for the villages were burned with fire. 
 Wherefore the wolves gathered together in mighty multitudes 
 round the city moats, howling dismally for exceeding anguish 
 of hunger ; and they crept into the cities by night and devoured 
 men and women and children who slept under the porticoes or 
 in waggons. Nay, at times they would even break through the 
 house-walls and strangle the children in their cradles. 10 No 
 man could believe, but if he had seen it as I have, the horrible 
 deeds that were done in those days, both by men and by divers 
 beasts. For the foxes multiplied so exceedingly that two of 
 them even climbed one Lenten-tide to the roof of our infirmary 
 at Faenza, to take two hens which were perched under the roof- 
 tree : and one of them we took in that same convent, as I saw 
 with mine own eyes. For this curse of wars invaded and preyed 
 upon and destroyed the whole of Komagna in the days when I
 
 A Wicked World. 61 
 
 dwelt there. Moreover, while 1 dwelt at Imola, a certain layman 
 told me how he had taken 27 great and fair cats with a snare in 
 certain villages that had been burnt, and had sold their hides to 
 the furriers : which had doubtless been house-cats in those 
 villages in times of peace." When we consider that the moral 
 disorders of the time were almost as great as the political 
 disorders ; and that the lives of the Saints constantly describe 
 their heroes as meeting with worse religious hindrances in their 
 own homes than they would be likely to find in a modern Protes- 
 tant country then we shall no longer wonder that so many 
 escaped from a troubled world into what seemed by comparison 
 the peace of the cloister.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Cloister Life. 
 
 BUT the cloister itself was only half a refuge. In vain did each 
 generation try afresh to fence " Religion " with an impene- 
 trable wall, for within a few years " the World " had always 
 crept in again. Most men brought with them into the cloister a 
 great deal of the barbarous world without ; the few who cast off 
 the old man did so only after such a struggle as nearly always left 
 its life-long shadow on the mind. 1 have pointed out elsewhere 
 how false is the common impression that " Puritanism " and 
 " Calvinism " were born with the Reformation. 1 The self-imposed 
 gloom of religion the waste and neglect of God's visible gifts 
 in a struggle after impossible otherworldliness the sourness 
 and formalism and hypocrisy which are the constant nemesis of 
 so distorted an ideal, meet us everywhere in the 13th century, 
 and nowhere more inevitably than among the friars of St. 
 Bouaventura's school. There is, I believe, no feature of 
 Puritanism (as distinct from Protestanism in general) which had 
 not a definite place in the ideals of the Medieval Saints. The 
 " personal assurance of salvation " which Newman mentions as 
 specially characteristic of " Calrinism or Methodism," was in 
 fact specially common among the early Friars. 3 So was the 
 dislike of church ornaments and church music ; high officials in 
 the Order were disgraced for permitting a painted window or a 
 painted pulpit in their churches ; and even in the 17th century 
 there were many who believed that St. Francis had forbidden 
 music altogether. St. Bernard speaks of the profusion of paint- 
 ings and carvings in monastic churches as little short of heathen- 
 ism ; and he argues most emphatically that the highest religion 
 is least dependent on such extraneous aids to devotion. 3 Multi- 
 tudes of beautiful works of art were mutilated, and noble buildings 
 destroyed, by the vandalism of the very ages which gave them 
 birth ; and the iconoclasm of the reformers was simply the medieval 
 spirit of destructiveness working under particularly favourable 
 conditions. Moreover, the selfish view of salvation which is
 
 Cloister Life. 63 
 
 often spoken of as distinctively Puritan the idea of the Christian 
 race as a sort of jostle for heaven was particularly medieval, 
 and particularly monastic. It is true, St. Francis did much to 
 shake the idea ; but it was soon flourishing again in his own Order ; 
 and the ideal friar of St. Bonaventura's school is almost as deeply 
 imbued with what St. Jerome calls " holy selfishness " as the 
 older monks themselves. The tenet of the certain damnation 
 of unbaptized infants, so often charged against Calvinism, is 
 maintained universally, T believe, by orthodox medieval theolo- 
 gians. St. Bonaventura (following St. Gregory, aud in company 
 with Aquinas, Gerson, and numbers of others almost as eminent) 
 reckons among the delights of the blest that they will see the 
 damned souls writhing below them in hell. One anecdote will show 
 how little the early Franciscans realized the lesson which the 
 modern world has learnt from St. Francis and from others who 
 have followed in his steps that to save our own souls we not 
 only need not, but almost must not, avoid our fellow-men, or 
 break off the ordinary relations of life. The Blessed Angela of 
 Foligno was the spiritual instructress of Dante's Ubertino da 
 Casale ; she is singled out by Canon Knox-Little for special 
 praise among the Franciscan saints. On her conversion to God 
 she " mourned to be bound by obedience to a husband, by 
 reverence to a mother, and by the care of her children," and 
 prayed earnestly to be released from these impediments. Her 
 prayer was heard, and " soon her mother, then her husband, and 
 presently all her children departed this life." The story is told 
 with admiration by one Franciscan chronicler after another, 
 even down to the sober Wadding in the middle of the 17th cen- 
 tury. St. Francis's admirable combination of cheerfulness and 
 religion passed to but few of his disciples, as we realise at once 
 when we wander afield beyond the charmed circle of the 
 Fioretti legends. In the generations between St. Francis and 
 Dante there were merry and sociable friars, and there were 
 deeply religious friars ; but from a very early period the merry 
 and the serious were divided into almost irreconcilable parties 
 within the Order. 
 
 1 had hoped to give at this point as full a picture as possible of 
 inner Franciscan life in the later 13th century, by way of intro- 
 ducing my reader to Salimbene's experiences, but this would 
 take me so far from my main purpose that I must reserve it for 
 another time. At the same time it is necessary to give a few 
 details, if only to disabuse the reader who may have formed his 
 notions of ordinary Franciscan life from the Fioretti alone. That 
 immortal book, true as it is within its own limits, no more gives
 
 64 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 us the life of the average friar thau the Vicar of Wakcfield shows 
 us the average country parson of the 18th century. Many 
 important inferences which might be drawn from it are most 
 directly contradicted by St. Bonaventura (d. 1274), by other 
 writers of his school, by the earliest chronicles of the Order, and 
 most incontrovertible evidence of all by dry official documents. 
 The Fioretti will always remain an inspiring example of what 
 some men have done, but for the purposes of historical compari- 
 son the main question is, " How do most men live ? " ; and from 
 this the Fioretti, by themselves, would often lead us far astray. 
 Nowhere within so small a compass can we so clearly realize 
 average Franciscan life as from the directions to novices and 
 older brethren compiled by St. Bonaventura, by his secretary 
 Bernard of Besse, and by his contemporary David of Augsburg. 
 These little books have been republished in a cheap form by the 
 Franciscans of Quaracchi, and should be studied by all who wish 
 to understand the 13th century friar.* But the reader must be 
 prepared for things undreamt of in M. Sabatier's St. Francis, 
 admirable as that book is on the whole as a picture of the Order 
 during the saint's lifetime. Nothing is more remarkable in 
 religious history than the rapid changes in Franciscan ideals and 
 practice within a very few years. 
 
 The manuals of St. Bonaventura's school and their evidence 
 is entirely borne out by such early documents as were composed 
 without the poetic preoccupations which moulded the Fioretti 
 show a conventual ideal almost as gloomy as that of earlier 
 monasticism. Of the Puritanism I have already spoken ; the 
 ideas of discipline were equally formal and lifeless. Novices are 
 bidden not to thee or thou their seniors in the Order. To carry 
 flowers or a staff, to twirl the end of one's girdle-cord, to sit with 
 crossed legs, to laugh, to sing aloud, are all unworthy of Francis- 
 can decorum. So far from ever talking familiarly with a woman, 
 or touching her hand, the friar must not even look at one when 
 he can help it. Warning is heaped upon warning to show that 
 spiritual friendship in these matters is even more dangerous than 
 ordinary friendship ; many pillars of the Order have fallen 
 through this. The friar is thus cut off for life not only from the 
 help of women, but from any free and personal influence over 
 them. 4 Again, to carry news is unfranciscan, or to speak of con- 
 tingent matters without some such qualification as D.V. ; or 
 
 * The Italian translation of Bernard of Besse's book, published by the same 
 community, must, however, be used with caution, as the text is softened down 
 by omissions and other similar changes, to avoid shocking the modern reader.
 
 Cloister Life. 65 
 
 to say How d'ye do ? to people in whose health you have no 
 special interest. As David of Augsburg sums it up, wherever 
 the friar has no special prospect of spiritual profit, he is to look 
 upon worldly folk with no more interest " than if they were so 
 many sheep." 
 
 Of course the average friar did not conform to all these rules. 
 We cannot even begin to understand medieval life until we 
 realize that the laws and regulations of those days represented 
 only pious aspirations, all the more soaring because they were 
 so little expected to bear fruit in fact. No doubt the average 
 friar, in his easy sociability, resembled the friar of Chaucer and 
 of Shakespeare, but the fact remains that the Constitutions of 
 his Order, and the byelaws of his convent, required him to be 
 quite a different person. Moreover (literary enjoyment and 
 dilettante sentiment apart), we may well be glad that these most 
 picturesque figures of the past are no longer living among us in 
 their primitive shape. Brother Juniper running naked in our 
 streets or St. Francis himself ; for on at least one occasion the 
 earliest authorities expressly deny him even the scanty garments 
 in which later prudery clokes him we may well be glad to keep 
 such children of nature within the covers of old books. We 
 revel in Jacopone da Todi's eccentricities, but we are happy to live 
 600 years to windward of him. And, in this respect, the sober 
 prose documents are in complete agreement with the Fioretti : 
 they show us many traces not only of the old unregenerate 
 Adam, but, what is more, of the 1 3th century Adam, only dimly 
 realizable at the best by politer readers of to-day. The direc- 
 tions for behaviour in refectory and in church are startling indeed, 
 for they exemplify something more than that " morbid craving 
 for an indulgence of food and drink, making mockery of their 
 long fasts and abstinence," which Mr. McCabe describes as 
 general among modern friars. St. Francis himself had noted and 
 legislated against this gluttony, and the complaints continue 
 through St. Bonaventura and others down to Ubertino da Casale. 
 " Fall not upon thy meat with tooth and claw like a famished 
 dog," pleads David of Augsburg ; and St. Bonaventura's secretary 
 enters into minuter details. " Cleanliness should be observed 
 not only as to thine own and thy fellows' food, but as to the table 
 also whereat thou eatest. Beware, in the name of cleanliness 
 and decency alike, of plunging into dish, cup, or bowl that which 
 thou hast already bitten and art about to bite again. It is a 
 foul thing to mingle the leavings of thine own teeth with others' 
 meat. Never grasp the cup with fingers steeped in pottage or 
 other food, nor plunge thy thumb into the goblet, nor blow upon
 
 66 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the drink in the cup or upon any meat whatsoever. It is indecent 
 for a man to plunge his fingers into the pottage and fish for 
 gobbets of meat or potherbs with bare hands in lieu of spoon, 
 thus (as Hugh of St. Victor writes) washing his hands and refresh- 
 ing his belly with one and the same broth." The friar is further 
 warned not " to cast forth upon the table the superfluity of his 
 fish or other meat, to crack nuts with his teeth for another guest, 
 to cough or sneeze without turning away from the table, to . . ." 
 but the rest of this warning must be left to the decent obscurity 
 of the original. It is sufficient to remind the reader that even 
 sybaritic worldlings in the thirteenth century possessed neither 
 handkerchief nor fork, and that their most elaborate refinements 
 of manners under these difficulties will scarcely bear description 
 in a less downright age. . . . Again, "the cleanliness of the 
 table demands that the cloth should by no means be fouled through 
 frequent or superfluous wipings of thy knife or thy hands ; least 
 of all should it be submitted to purging of teeth. For it is a base 
 and vile thing to befoul the Brethren's common cloths and towels 
 with rubbing of thy gums. He who dishonoureth the common 
 goods oflfendeth against the community." It is only fair to add 
 that many of these rules for behaviour are adapted from those 
 drawn up by Dante's Hugh of St. Victor for his fellow-monks ; 
 and that, on the whole, the friars were apparently just one shade 
 more civilized at table than the members of a great Augustinian 
 convent a century earlier, of whom Hugh complains that many 
 rushed upon their meat like a forlorn hope at the breaches of a 
 besieged city. The great Dominican General Humbert de 
 Romans makes similar complaints of his brother-friars' behaviour 
 at table. 6 
 
 But even more significant than these hints on table manners 
 are the indications which may be gathered as to the conduct of 
 divine service. St. Bonaventura twice alludes to the extreme 
 length of the services, assuming that the novice in confession 
 will have to accuse himself " of much negligence and irreverence 
 in the matter of thine Hours, for thou sayest them sleepily and 
 indevoutly and with a wandering heart and imperfectly, omitting 
 at times whole verses and syllables." David of Augsburg speaks 
 of the common temptation to melancholy or levity in the friar's 
 mind, "whence we are forced to attend divine service with a 
 mind that struggles against it, like puppies chained to a post ; 
 and this is the vice of accedia, the loathing of good.* Many, 
 even among Religious, are sick of this disease, and few overcome 
 
 * Cf. Inf. vii, 123.
 
 Cloister Life. 67 
 
 it." Salimbene bears the same testimony in his own racy style 
 a propos of the changes made by the great Innocent III, who 
 (31) "corrected and reformed the church services, adding matter 
 of his own and taking away some that others had composed ; 
 yet even now it is not well ordered, as many would have it and 
 as real truth requires. For there are many superfluities which 
 beget rather weariness than devotion, both to hearers and to 
 officiants ; as, for instance, at Prime on Sundays, when priests 
 have to say their masses and the people await them, yet there is 
 none to celebrate, for they are yet busied with Prime. So also 
 with the recitation of the eighteen psalms at Nocturns on Sunday 
 before the Te Deum. For these things beget sheer weariness, 
 not only in summer, when we are harassed by fleas and the nights 
 are short and the heat is intense, but in winter also. There are 
 yet many things left in divine service which might be changed 
 for the better. And it would be well if they were changed, for 
 they are full of uncouth stuff, though not every man can see 
 this." Caesarius of Heisterbach, again, has many tales of 
 Brethren who slumber in church. Within the walls of the 
 sanctuary his saints are as drowsy as his sinners, and, while the 
 idle Cistercian is dreaming of Hell, the industrious Cistercian, 
 no less oblivious of earthly psalmody, is rapt into the Seventh 
 Heaven. In spite of the theoretical gravity of the sin, the stern 
 moralist unbends to humour in writing of a lapse so natural and 
 so inevitable in practice. " A certain knight of Bonn once made 
 his Lenten retreat in our abbey. After that he had returned to 
 his home, he met our Abbot one day and said to him, ' My Lord 
 Abbot, sell me that stone which lieth by such and such a column 
 in your choir, and 1 will pay whatsoever price thou wilt.' Our 
 Abbot asked, ' What need hast thou thereof ? ' 'I will lay it,' 
 he replied, ' at my bed's head, for it hath such virtue that the 
 wakeful need but lay his head thereon and forthwith he falleth 
 asleep.' . . . Another noble, who had been at our abbey for a 
 similar penitence, is reported to have said in like words, ' the 
 stones of the Abbey choir are softer than all the beds of my 
 castle.' " There is an almost equally amusing story in the 
 Dominican Vita Fratrum about a friar who was haunted all 
 through service by a devil offering to his lips a contraband cheese- 
 cake, " such as the Lombards and French call a tart." It was pre- 
 cisely during those long, monotonous hours that a man's besetting 
 sin haunted him most inexorably, as Nicholas of Clairvaux re- 
 minded his Brethren. " The great patriarch Abraham," he adds, 
 " could scarce drive away these unclean fowls from his sacrifice, 
 and who are we to presume that we shall put them to flight ?
 
 68 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Who of us can deny that he hath been plunged, if not altogether 
 submerged, in this river ? " It is the more necessary to insist 
 upon this point, because of the false sentiment lavished on the 
 monastic ideal by modern writers who would not touch with one 
 of their fingers the burden of the strict monastic Rule. It is the 
 merest cant to expatiate on that Rule without facing the fact 
 that few ever came even within a measurable distance of strict 
 conformity to it ; while far more, having taken the vows without 
 full understanding, bore afterwards not only the natural weari- 
 ness of human flesh and blood, but the added burden of a system 
 which less and less commended itself to their reason. 6 Monks 
 and friars were men like ourselves, who, finding themselves pledged 
 by profession to an impossible theory of life, struck each an 
 average depending on his own personal equation, varying in 
 separate cases from the extreme of self-denial to the extreme of 
 self-indulgence, but in the main following the ordinary lines of 
 human conduct. Not one human being in a million can pray in 
 heart for seven hours a day ; few can even dream of doing so, and 
 drowsiness in church is a commonplace of medieval monastic 
 writers. Of the saintly and ascetic Joachim of Flora, for 
 instance, his enthusiastic biographer assures us that he slept but 
 little at any time, and least of all in church. It is the same 
 contrast which meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages. Over- 
 strained theories bore their fruit in extreme laxity of practice ; 
 and good men, distressed at this divergence, could imagine no 
 better remedy than to screw the theory one peg higher. 7 
 
 If outraged nature demanded a modicum of slumber during 
 service, much of the same excuse can be pleaded, and was in fact 
 allowed by the moralist, for irreverence. The extraordinary 
 licence of behaviour in medieval churches was the necessary 
 outcome of the elaborate medieval ritual, and of the small extent 
 to which the words were understood even by the average 
 officiant. Friars are warned not to laugh during service, or make 
 others laugh, or pursue their studies, or walk about, or cleanse 
 lamps, or come in late, or go out before the end. They must doff 
 their hoods now and then at the more solemn parts, not toss their 
 heads or stare around in their stalls ; " It is blameworthy .... 
 to busy thyself with talk while the office of the Mass is being 
 celebrated, for Canon Law forbiddeth this at such times even to 
 the secular clergy." 8 The same warning was needed by the 
 layfolk in the nave, who (as Ubertino complains) were always 
 loafing about in the friars' churches "rather for the sake of 
 curiosity and gossip than for spiritual profit." Care must be 
 taken to guard these layfolk, ignorant of the different steps
 
 Cloister Life. 69 
 
 of the Mass, from the idolatry of adoring prematurely an 
 unconsecrated wafer. Moreover, an officiating friar himself would 
 frequently trip in his reading, to the irreverent glee of self- 
 righteous Brethren, who scandalized others by their laughter or 
 comments. 9 
 
 There remains one more point to be noticed, if we are to realize 
 the difference between Salimbene's surroundings and our own. 
 Many of his stories and allusions, far too natural then to need 
 any special explanation from him, will seem scarcely credible 
 in our age to those who have not yet realized facts which the 
 13th century took as matters of course. In studying medieval 
 religious manners, we come to a point at which it is difficult to 
 distinguish irreverence from the prevailing coarseness and 
 uncleanliness of the times. The familiarity with which the 
 people treated their churches had something pleasant and homely 
 then, as it has in modern Italy. The absence of a hard-and-fast 
 line between behaviour within and without the sacred building 
 is in many ways very touching ; yet, in a rude society, this 
 familiarity had great inconveniences. The clergy often brought 
 their hawks and hounds to church ; and similar instances are 
 recorded by Salimbene. For instance, when the Bishop of 
 Reggio was buried in his own cathedral, it was quite natural for 
 a dog to be present, and to show no better manners than a modern 
 Protestant beast ; nor were the citizens in the least deterred by 
 reverence for the holy place when they wished to desecrate an 
 unpopular governor's tomb by filthy defilements. It is natural, 
 therefore, that the Franciscan precepts for behaviour in church 
 should resemble the counsels for table-manners. " While a 
 single voice is reading in choir, as in the collects, chapters, or 
 lessons, thou must take good heed to make no notable sound of 
 spitting or hawking, until the end of a period, and the same care 
 must be taken during a sermon or a reading." A far more 
 detailed warning lower down proves incontestably that, in personal 
 cleanliness and respect for the church floor, the Italian of the 
 thirteenth century was far behind even the Italian of to-day. It 
 was the same elsewhere ; in Provence, for instance, the dainty 
 and aristocratic Flamenca is described as gratifying her lover 
 with a momentary sight of her mouth as she lowered her wimple 
 to spit in the church porch. And, as usual, we find that the 
 neglect of cleanliness is accompanied by an almost corresponding 
 bluntness of moral feeling ; the warnings on this score point to a 
 state of things which may indeed stagger a modern reader. The 
 friar is bidden to observe the most scrupulous cleanliness at Mass ; 
 the server must " never blow his nose on the priestly garments,
 
 jo From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 especially upon the chasuble," a warning which is repeated in 
 even more grisly detail lower down : " moreover, he who ministers 
 at mass must so keep his surplice (if he have one), as never in 
 any degree to blow his nose on it, nor use it to wipe away the 
 sweat from his face or any other part : neither let him expose its 
 sleeves to drag, especially in the dust, over wood, stones, or 
 earth." What was worse, the offenders sometimes made a merit 
 of their offence. " Certain careless [friars^] .... can scarce 
 keep [the long sleeves of their frocks], which have frequently 
 been exposed to the utmost dirt, away from their fellows' food, 
 from the altar, or from the very maniple of the chalice. Such, 
 who would fain please [God] by their very filth, brand their 
 more careful brethren with the reproach of fastidiousness, and 
 strive to colour their own vicious negligence with the show of 
 virtue." 10 We may here read between the lines a further, and 
 just, cause for the unpopularity of the Spirituals, with their 
 stern insistence upon the Saint's sordid example in dress, and 
 their pride in wearing garments not only as coarse but also as 
 old as possible. Many uncompromising old Spirituals wore, as 
 others complained, frocks that had shrunk to the dimensions of 
 an Eton jacket, 11 and one such garment attained to a certain 
 historical notoriety in the Order. Brother Carlino de' Grimaldi, 
 probably a scion of one of the greatest families in Genoa, had 
 washed his frock (we are not told after how long an interval) 
 and had spread it to dry in the sun. Here at last it lay at the 
 mercy of the Brethren, who, having probably more than mere 
 doctrinal differences to avenge, cut it into small pieces which 
 they desecrated with medieval ingenuity. 12 It is necessary to 
 face this subject, since there is no other, except that of compul- 
 sory celibacy, which illustrates more clearly the practical weak- 
 ness of the strict Franciscan Rule. The ideal of absolute and 
 uncompromising poverty was in fact hopelessly retrograde. Even 
 without such ascetic exaggerations, the very Rules of the religious 
 Orders forbade cleanliness in the modern sense. Father Taunton 
 (Black Monks of St. Benedict^ i. 83) does indeed take some pains 
 to combat this impression ; but the documents to which he refers 
 flatly contradict his assertions, nor have I been successful in 
 eliciting further references from him. Among the real hardships 
 of a strict monk's life, this would have been the most intolerable, 
 during his noviciate at least, to a modern Englishman. It some- 
 times shocked even the medieval layman, accustomed as he was, 
 in the highest society, to many of the conditions of slum life. 
 Caesarius describes the conversion of a knight who had long 
 wished to enter the cloister, but who always hung back, " on the
 
 Cloister Life. 7 1 
 
 cowardly plea that he feared the vermin of the garments (for 
 our woollen clothing harbours much vermin.)" The Abbot 
 laughed away the scruples of the valiant soldier who would suffer 
 such tiny creatures to scare him away from the Kingdom of 
 God ; and indeed, once admitted, the knight was soon sufficiently 
 hardened to boast that " even though all the vermin of the monks 
 should fall upon my single body, yet should they not bite me 
 away from the Order." 13 Salimbene speaks jestingly on the same 
 topic, quoting (1285-336) "those verses which men are wont to 
 repeat : 
 
 ' Three are the torments that rhyme ex, 
 Pulcx and culex and cimex. 
 Mighty to leap is the pulex, 
 Swift on the wing is the culex ; 
 Bat the cimex, whom no fumigation can slay, 
 Is a monster more terrible even than they.' "* 
 
 Bernard of Besse (p. 327) bears far more significant witness 
 in solemn prose. The strict rule of poverty would have 
 condemned the uncompromising Franciscan to something less 
 than ordinary monastic cleanliness, as it would have condemned 
 him also to ignorance. 14 In short, all the early writings on the 
 discipline o the Order, as well as the early collections of legends, 
 point to the impossibility of carrying out the Franciscan ideal 
 on a large scale, and under the conditions which the age demanded. 
 As the strict rule of poverty would have condemned the Order 
 to barbarism, so the vow of chastity could not in those days be 
 kept with anything like the strictness which modern society 
 demands from a religious body, by any but an order of virtual 
 hermits. The ascetic writers of the time assure us, over and 
 over again, that this virtue needed a perpetual consciousness of 
 living in a state of siege, a deliberate aloofness from one half of 
 mankind, which was patently impossible for any missionary body 
 on the enormous scale of the Franciscan Order. What the early 
 disciplinarians prophesy as imminent, later writers complain of 
 as an accomplished fact. Gower and the author of Piers Plowman^ 
 though they both hated heretics as heartily as Dante did, asserted 
 roundly that the friar was a real danger to family life. Benvenuto, 
 in his comment on Par. xii. 144, specifies lubricity as one of 
 the vices of the friar of his day, and Sacchetti speaks even more 
 strongly. Again, Busch in the 15th century names " the 
 
 * In x linita tria sunt animalia dira : 
 Sunt pulices fortes, cimices culicumque cohortes ; 
 Sed pulices saltu fugiunt, culicesque volatu, 
 Et cimices pravi nequeunt fa-tore necari.
 
 72 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 unreformed friars " as those who most infected other religious 
 Orders with the seeds of decay. 16 Like the monks, they had often 
 pledged themselves as boys to that which no boy can understand, 
 while their manner of life exposed them to far more temptations 
 than the average monk. It is impossible to do more than allude 
 to this subject here, in the text ; but I take the opportunity of 
 pointing out that I have more than once requested, both privately 
 and publicly, references for the most important statements of 
 monastic apologists, such as Abbot Gasquet, and that these refer- 
 ences have been steadily refused. On the other hand, I have 
 given very definite evidence for my own contentions in the Con- 
 temporary Review, and in a separate pamphlet. 16 Apologists of 
 the Middle Ages have played upon the unwillingness of modern 
 Englishmen to believe facts which can be proved to the hilt 
 from contemporary records, though for obvious reasons those who 
 know these facts find it difficult to publish them. There can be 
 no better testimony to the civilizing work of the Reformation 
 than that the average educated Anglican cannot now bring him- 
 self even to imagine a state of things which is treated as notorious 
 by medieval satirists and moralists, and is recorded in irrefragable 
 documents. Charges which would be readily enough believed in 
 modern Italy or Spain find little acceptance in a country like ours, 
 where monks and nuns, living in a small minority under a glare 
 of publicity and criticism, keep their vows with a strictness far 
 beyond the average of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The third vow, that of obedience, was as radically modified as 
 the two others by the growth of St. Francis's originally small 
 family into an enormous Order. The most significant anecdote 
 on this point is quoted by Wadding under the year 1258. In 
 this year died one Brother Stephen, who deposed as follows to 
 Thomas of Pavia, Provincial Minister of Tuscany a great friend 
 of Salimbene's, it may be noted " I, Brother Stephen, dwelt for 
 a few months in a certain hermitage with St. Francis and other 
 brethren, to care for their beds and their kitchen ; and this was 
 our manner of life by command of the Founder. We spent the 
 forenoon hours in prayer and silence, until the sound of a board 
 ("struck with a mallet, like a gong] called us to dinner. Now the 
 Holy Master was wont to leave his cell about the third hour [9] ; 
 and if he saw no fire in the kitchen he would go down into the 
 garden and pluck a handful of herbs which he brought home, 
 saying, ' Cook these, and it will be well with the Brethren.' And 
 whereas at times I was wont to set before him eggs and milk 
 food which the faithful had sent us, with some sort of gravy stew 
 [cum aliquo jusculentd], then he would eat cheerfully with the
 
 Cloister Life. 73 
 
 rest and say, 'Thou hast done too much, Brother; I will that 
 thou prepare naught for the morrow, nor do aught in my kitchen.' 
 So I, following his precepts absolutely, in all points, cared for 
 nothing so much as to obey that most holy man ; when therefore 
 he came, and saw the table laid with divers crusts of bread, he 
 would begin to eat gaily thereof, but presently he would chide 
 me that I brought no more, asking me why I had cooked naught. 
 Whereto I answered, ' For that thou, Father, badest me cook 
 none.' But he would say, ' Dear son, discretion is a noble virtue, 
 nor shouldest thou always fulfil all that thy Superior biddeth 
 thee, especially when he is troubled by any passion.' " This 
 anecdote, which is quite worthy of the Fioretti, gives us a most 
 instructive glimpse into the strength and weakness of the Saint's 
 society. All his ways were intensely human and personal, but 
 everything depended on his own spirit and his own presence. 
 Nobody could have been angry with a saint who confessed so 
 naively that he did not wish to be taken at his word : yet one 
 sees at a glance how necessarily the increase of the Order thrust 
 his direct authority into the background, and how naturally, 
 while the veneration for his sanctity steadily increased, he him- 
 self fell from the position of a working Head into that of a 
 Dalai Lama, a sort of living relic, mighty to conjure with, but 
 comparatively passive in the hands of others, and only liberating 
 his soul by the deathbed protest of his "Testament" against 
 those hateful courses upon which the Order had already embark- 
 ed almost beyond recall. 
 
 In considering this revolt against St. Francis's rule, we must 
 bear in mind that it was the very intensity of the Saint's ideal 
 which caused that recoil, by a natural law as inevitable as 
 gravitation. Thomas of Eccleston's history, which is constantly 
 quoted as the most vivid picture of the Order's inner life, avow- 
 edly refers to a state of things already dead and gone within 
 thirty years of the Saint's death ; already the writer speaks of 
 the persecutions endured by those who strove for the original 
 purity. 17 It is idle to charge this decay to Brother Elias, or to 
 any man or group of men ; it was fatally involved in the very 
 ideal of the Saint. As he hastened his own death by sinning 
 grievously against Brother Body, just so he hastened the decay 
 of his Order. Admirably as he protested against some of the 
 crazy asceticisms of his age, he was still too much a child of his 
 time. It is difficult to wish anything away from St. Francis's 
 own life, as it is difficult for an Englishman to regret the Charge 
 of the Light Brigade. But, when our present age is taunted for 
 its alleged soullessness by reactionaries whose eyes are too weak
 
 j^ From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 to face the growing light of the tiroes in which they live, it may 
 be profitable to point out that in the Holy War, as in all other 
 wars, we need not only courage and sudden self-sacrifice, but also 
 calm judgment and even a certain amount of routine work. 
 
 The self-imposed hardships of an average friar's life were very 
 real, until at least the middle of the 13th century. Men were 
 not wanting, even then, who managed to live more luxuriously in 
 the Cloister than they could ever have done in the World, as 
 their Superiors frequently complained : but quite a considerable 
 portion of the early friars had been boys of good family and 
 position, to whom, after the first plunge, the trial was severe, 
 for some years at least We see something of this in the case 
 of Salimbene, richly as his opportunities of travel and study in- 
 demnified him for those cabbages which his soul abhorred. We 
 may gather it also from the very frequent mention of apostasies, 
 either contemplated or carried out, in collections of Mendicant 
 legends ; and Berthold of Ratisbon, preaching to his Brethren 
 about the middle of the century, implies the same. " Almost 
 all Religious who have failed or still fail, in all religious Orders, 
 have perished or still perish by reason of the evil example which 
 they have seen and still see 'among the rest to whom they come. 
 For almost all enter Religion with a mind most readily disposed 
 to all good. But when on their entry they find one impatient, 
 another wrathful, another carnal, another dissolute, another 
 agape for news, another a mere trifler, another backbiting, 
 another slothful, another breaking St. Francis's prohibition 
 against receiving money, then they follow in their ways and 
 become like unto them." He goes on to speak in the same breath 
 of " so many in Religion " who thus " are corrupted and perish " ; 
 and the whole tenour of his sermons to his fellow-friars implies 
 that, among the crowds who pressed with more or less precipita- 
 tion into the Order (for the year of novitiate was not always 
 strictly enforced) there were comparatively few who even 
 approached its strict ideal. We get glimpses of this even in the 
 records of the heroic age, and in those of a generation later the 
 fact is gross and palpable. As St. Bonaventura shows us, the 
 development from the friar of the Fioretti to something very like 
 the friar of Chaucer was rapid and inevitable. Among even the 
 best-intentioned of the first generation, few were able to keep 
 their ascetic enthusiasm to the end. 18 " When those who first 
 kept the Order in its vigour are taken away or become enfeebled 
 in body," writes the Saint, "then they can no longer give 
 to their juniors the same strict examples of severity as of old ; 
 and the new Brethren, who never saw their real labours, imitate
 
 Cloister Life. 75 
 
 them only in that which they now behold in them, so that they 
 become remiss, and spare their bodies under a cloke of discretion, 
 saying that they will not destroy their bodies as did the Brethren 
 of old. And, for that they see not the inner virtues which their 
 elders had, they are negligent on both sides, neither exercising 
 themselves in outward things nor grasping the inward virtues." 
 Berthold makes the same complaint in his own style. " Many 
 take good care to avoid serious penance, clapping on bandages 
 before they are wounded, . . . sparing themselves as tenderly 
 as though they were silkworms, or silken stuff, or as though their 
 flesh were as brittle as an eggshell." Again, " they spare their 
 bodies almost as tenderly as the relics of saints " ; if one of them 
 has but a little grace " he is like a hen, cackling so loudly over a 
 single egg, that all grow weary of her, wherefore she is driven 
 forth from the house and loses her egg." " Some [friars'] hearts 
 are as the flesh of an old brood-hen, nay, as that of an old wild 
 duck, which can scare be sodden ; for indeed a wild duck was 
 taken for our convent which we boiled three days long and yet 
 it lacked all natural tenderness, being still so tough that no man 
 could cut it with a knife, nor would any beast eat thereof. Ye 
 marvel at this in nature, far more should ye marvel that some 
 and thou thyself perchance among them are stewed in the 
 kitchen of Religion for nine or ten years, nay, for twelve, thirteen, 
 or thirty years, and yet are ye altogether hard-hearted, and, what 
 is more, impatient." 19 
 
 It will be necessary to glance again at the Friars as a whole 
 towards the end of the book ; meanwhile the present chapter 
 may prepare the reader for Salimbene's experiences in the Order. 
 Miss Macdonell seems to think that the average friar was a more 
 serious person than our chronicler ; I cannot understand anyone 
 thinking so who has read carefully the disciplinary works of St. 
 Bonaventura's school, the Constitutions of the Order, Arigelo 
 Clareno's Seven Tribulations as edited by Father Ehrle, and 
 Berthold of Ratisbon's Sermons to his Brethren. A study of 
 those works is calculated to make us accept Salimbene at some- 
 thing nearer to his own estimate as standing above the common 
 average of his fellows in nearly all respects, while he is far above 
 that average in natural gifts, learning, and experience of the world.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Frate Elia. 
 
 OALIMBENE had scarcely completed his novitiate, when a 
 IO storm burst which had long been brewing within the Order. 
 The Minister-General Elias, leader of the party which frankly 
 abandoned the first strict ideal, and builder of the splendid 
 basilica which now covers the Saint's bones, was deposed from 
 his office after a bitter struggle. Instead of bearing his defeat 
 patiently, Elias " gave scandal to the Pope, to the Church, and 
 to his Order," by joining the Emperor Frederick, then excom- 
 municate and at war with the Pope. Franciscan frocks were 
 thus seen flitting about in the rebel camp, for Elias had taken 
 others over with him : and he rode abroad publicly with the 
 Emperor, whose trusted counsellor he at once became. " Which 
 was an evil example to the country folk and the rest of the laity, 
 for whensoever the peasants and boys and girls met the Brethren 
 Minor on the roads of Tuscany, they would sing (as I myself have 
 heard a hundred times) 
 
 ' Frat' Elia is gone astray, 
 And hath ta'en the evil way.' 
 
 At the sound of which song the good Brethren were cut to the 
 heart, and consumed with deadly indignation " (160). 
 
 Nor does Salimbene's story of these first years leave by any 
 means an impression of perfect harmony among those who 
 remained within the Order, though, as will presently be seen, 
 he himself made many friends there. To begin with, his gall 
 was stirred by the way in which lady-superiors of Clarisses often 
 lorded it over their fellow-nuns : for our friar was no believer in 
 " the monstrous regiment of women." He describes (63) the 
 " churlishness and avarice " of the Lady Cecilia, niece to Pope 
 Innocent IV, and Abbess of a rich convent of Clarisses at Lavagna. 
 The Clarisses of Turin had been driven from their convent by the 
 ravage of war a common story, as the pages of Wadding show
 
 Frate Elia. 77 
 
 and the Visitor of the Lombard province was doing his best to find 
 other homes for the poor nuns. One only, the last of all, was 
 brought to this rich convent; yet the Abbess, in her "hardness of 
 heart and avarice and folly," refused to receive a fresh inmate, 
 and drove the poor refugee ignominiously from her door, in spite 
 of the Visitor's anathema. " Hereupon an ancient and devout 
 Sister of the convent cast herself down before the altar and 
 appealed against the Abbess to God, Who presently answered, 
 ' I have heard thy prayer, and she shall be no more Abbess.' So 
 the Visitor sent a swift messenger forthwith to Chiavari to learn 
 what had befallen that Abbess, and he found her dead and 
 cursed and excommunicate and unabsolved ; for even while the 
 messenger was yet on his way, she began to be grievously sick 
 and to fail for very faintness, and after divers torments she sank 
 down on her bed and was at the point of death, crying, ' Sisters, 
 I die ! Hasten ! Help ! Bring me some remedy ! ' The Sisters 
 came forthwith, pitying their Abbess, as was right. No mention 
 was made of the salvation of her soul, not a word was spoken of 
 confession. Her throat so closed that she could scarce breathe ; 
 and now, seeing death at hand, she said to the Sisters who were 
 gathered round her, ' Go and take in that lady ! Go and take in 
 that lady ! Go and take in that lady ! For her sake hath God 
 smitten me ! For her sake hath God smitten me ! For her sake 
 hath God smitten me ! ' And with these words she yielded up 
 her spirit, but it returned not to God Who gave it." 
 
 Salimbene thinks the lady might perhaps have behaved better 
 if she had been sent to rule over a strange convent far away from 
 her powerful kinsfolk ; but, to his eyes, the root of the matter 
 lay in the constitutional unfitness of women to bear rule, and he 
 dilates on this subject in truly medieval fashion, with a wealth 
 of Biblical and profane quotations : " for woman, whensoever 
 she may, doth take gladly dominion to herself, as may be seen in 
 
 Semiramis who invented the wearing of breeches Blessed 
 
 be God Who hath brought me to the end of this matter ! ' 
 
 Yet, in spite of this sigh of relief, we find our good friar recurring 
 almost immediately to the same ungallant complaints, and again, 
 a propos of an Abbess of Clarisses (67 ). This was again in the first 
 days of his new vocation, at Lucca, where he formed an intimacy 
 with an aristocratic pair of doubtful morals, of whom he writes 
 with his usual naivete: "In the year 1229 the Lord Nazzaro 
 Gherardini of Lucca was Podesta of Reggio, when he built the 
 bridge and the Porta Bernone. His statue was set up in marble 
 on the Porta Bernone which he made, and there he sits on his 
 marble horse in the city of Reggio. He was a comely knight and
 
 78 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 exceeding rich, my acquaintance and friend when I dwelt in the 
 convent at Lucca. The Lady Fior d'Oliva, his wife, was a fair 
 lady, plump and full-fleshed,* and my familiar friend and spiritual 
 daughter (devota}. She was of Trent, the wife of a certain notary, 
 by whom she had two daughters, most fair ladies. But the Lord 
 sazzaro, when he was Podestaof Trent, took her from her husband 
 and brought her, not unwilling, to the city of Lucca ; and his own 
 wife, who was still alive, he sent to a castle of his, where she 
 dwelt till her death. 1 The Lord Nazzai'o died childless, and gave 
 great riches to this lady, who, in course of time was beguiled 
 (as she herself hath told me) into another marriage in the city of 
 Reggio. He who took her to wife was Henry, son of Antonio da 
 Musso, and she liveth yet in this year 1283 wherein I write. Both 
 the Lord Nazzaro and the Lady Fior d'Oliva did much to comfort 
 the Friars Minor of Lucca when the Abbess of the Clarisses at 
 Gatharola stirred up the whole city of Lucca against the brethren, 
 laying a blot on the elect, for that Brother Jacopo da Iseo would 
 fain have deposed her because she bare herself ill in her office. 
 For she was the daughter of a baker-woman of Genoa, and her 
 rule was most shameful and cruel, and unhonest to boot, and she 
 would fain have kept her rule by force, that she might still be 
 Abbess. Wherefore, the better to hold her office, she lavished 
 gifts on youths and men and worldly ladies, but especially on those 
 who had any of near kin in her convent. And to such she would 
 say, ' This is why the Friars Minor would fain depose me, for that 
 I will not suffer them to sin with our daughters and sisters ; ' 
 and so, as hath been said, she would have laid a blot on the elect, 
 for she lied in her teeth. Yet for all that she was deposed, and 
 the Friars recovered their honour and good report, and the city 
 had rest from her troubling. I have therefore shown plainly how 
 shameful is the dominion of women." 
 
 Salimbene records only one other noteworthy incident of these 
 first days at Lucca. (164) "In the year of our Lord 1239 there 
 was an eclipse of the sun, wherein the light of day was horribly 
 and terribly darkened, and the stars appeared. And it seemed 
 as though night had come, and all men and women had sore fear, 
 and went about as if bereft of their wits, with great sorrow and 
 trembling. And many, smitten with terror, came to confession, 
 and made penitence for their sins, and those who were at discord 
 made peace with each other. And the Lord Manfred da 
 Cornazano, who was at that time Podesta, took the Cross in his 
 hands and went in procession through the streets of Lucca, with 
 
 * Pinguis et carnosa. This is always high praise from Salimbene.
 
 Frate EHa. 79 
 
 the Friars Minor and other men of religion and clerks. And the 
 Podesta himself preached of the Passion of Christ, and made 
 peace between those who were at enmity. This I saw with mine 
 own eyes, for I was there, and my brother Guido di Adamo with 
 me." 
 
 It was apparently from Lucca that he went to Siena, where he 
 enjoyed the privilege already recorded of a whole winter's 
 familiar intercourse with St. Francis's first disciple, Bernard of 
 Quintavalle. (39) Here also he received his first tinge of J oachitic 
 Millenarianism from Hugues de Digne aud other enthusiasts, as 
 will be seen later on. Already, like most of his brethren, 
 Salimbene took an active part in politics, working for the Pope 
 against the Emperor. (174) " The See of Rome was vacant from 
 the year 1241 to 1243, for the cardinals were dispersed and at 
 discord, and Frederick had so straitly guarded all the roads that 
 many men were taken, for he feared lest any should pass through 
 to be made Pope. Yea, and 1 myself also was often taken in 
 those days ; and then I learned and invented the writing of letters 
 after divers fashions in cypher." 
 
 In spite of the preponderance of the lay element at Pisa, his 
 next place of abode, he made very good friends there and loved 
 the place. Although a powerful patron, Brother Anselm, Minister 
 Provincial of Terra di Lavoro (552) " sent me letters that 
 1 should go with my brother Guido to dwell with him in his 
 province, yet the Brethren of the convent of Pisa dissuaded us 
 from the journey, for that they loved us." Long afterwards, 
 writing of the disastrous defeat of the Pisans at Meloria, he can- 
 not help showing his pity for the sufferings even of his political 
 opponents : " God knows I sorrow for them and pity them in my 
 heart, for I lived four years in the convent of Pisa a good forty 
 years since.'' (535). Here also he was strengthened in his 
 J oachism by " a certain abbot of the Order of Fiore, an aged and 
 saintly man, who had placed in safety at Pisa all the books that 
 he had of Abbot Joachim's, fearing lest the Emperor Frederick 
 should destroy his abbey, which lay on the road from Pisa to 
 Lucca. For he believed that in the Emperor Frederick all the 
 mysteries of iniquity should be fulfilled. And Brother Rudolf 
 of Saxony, our lector at Pisa, a great logician and theologian 
 and disputer, left the study of theology by reason of those books 
 of Joachim's, which were laid up in our convent, and became a 
 most eager Joachite" (236). 
 
 As his stay at Lucca had been marked by an eclipse, so at Pisa 
 he was startled by an earthquake. Two similar phenomena 
 which occurred much later, in 1284, carry him back to these years
 
 8o From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 of his first vocation, aud give occasion for an amusing anecdote 
 and a very characteristic dissertation. (547-9). " Brother 
 Roglerio of our Order, a native of Lodi, who had been a com- 
 rade of the Visitor of the Province of Bologna, was on his way 
 back from the Roman Court wherein he had been with a certain 
 Cardinal, and when he passed by Corenno, where he was to lodge, 
 the inhabitants of that place said unto him ' Holy father, we often 
 feel earthquakes in this place.' And immediately when they had 
 said this an earthquake was felt. So the Brother said ' He 
 looketh on the earth, and it trembleth ; He toucheth the hills, and 
 they smoke ' : and again ' The earth trembled, and was still ' ; 
 and again * Thou hast made the earth to tremble, Thou hast broken 
 it ; heal the breaches thereof, for it shaketh.' But when the 
 Brother had finished speaking thus, he looked round and saw a 
 certain building thatched with straw, and said that he would sleep 
 therein that night, ' For if I sleep in some other house, it may be 
 that the gutter-stones or tiles fall upon me, if the house be 
 brought low ; and there I shall die.' So the women of that 
 village, seeing and hearing these things, carried their beds into 
 that thatched building, that they might sleep in safety by the 
 side of the Friars. But a certain old man, seeing this, said to 
 Brother Roglerio ' Ye have done that which ye should not have 
 done. For ye should always be ready to accept death, that the 
 dust may return to the earth as it was, and the spirit unto God 
 who gave it.' To whom the Friar answered * The blessed Jerome 
 saith that " It is prudent to fear all that may happen " ; and 
 Ecclesiasticus " The wise man feareth in all things " [also Prov. 
 xxviii. 14 and xi. 15 ; and Eccles xviii. 27].' All this I heard 
 from the mouth of Brother Roglerio." With regard to the 
 following eclipse, Salimbene quotes a whole string of Bible texts 
 connecting such natural catastrophes with the signs of the Last 
 Judgment, after which he continues (549), " I have multi- 
 plied these texts because at one time the sun is darkened, and at 
 another time the moon, and at times the earth will quake ; and 
 then some preachers, having no texts ready prepared for this 
 matter, fall into confusion. I remember that I dwelt in the con- 
 vent of Pisa forty years since and more, and the earth quaked at 
 night on St. Stephen's day ; and Brother Chiaro of Florence of 
 our Order, one of the greatest clerks in the world, preached twice 
 to the people in the cathedral church there, and his first sermon 
 pleased them, but the second displeased. And this only because 
 he founded both sermons on one and the same text, which was a 
 token of his mastery, since he drew therefrom two discourses ; 
 but the accursed and simple multitude that knew not the law,
 
 Frate Elia. 8 i 
 
 thought that he had preached again the same sermon, by reason 
 of that same text which had been repeated ; wherefore he reaped 
 confusion where he should have had honour. Now his text was 
 that word of Haggai, ' Yet a little while, and I will move the 
 heaven and the earth and the sea and the dry land.' Note that 
 earthquakes are wont to take place in cavernous mountains, 
 wherein the wind is enclosed and would fain come forth ; but 
 since it hath no vent for escape, the earth is shaken and trembles, 
 and thence we feel an earthquake. Whereof we have a plain 
 example in the uncut chestnut, which leaps in the fire and bursts 
 forth with might and main to the dismay of all who sit by." 
 Pisa, of course, is a city of the plain, but it is interesting to 
 know what ideas were raised in Salimbene's mind by the mountains 
 which stand round it on the horizon. 
 
 At Siena he had received the subdiaconate (329) ; at Pisa he 
 was ordained deacon (182) ; some time during the year 1247 he 
 left the province of Tuscany and went to Cremona, where he soon 
 found himself a close spectator of the bloody struggle between 
 Pope and Emperor. But before following him into that world of 
 treasons, stratagems, and spoils, let us glance at those memories 
 of Tuscan convents which most haunted his mind as an old man. 
 
 The Order in its early days, under St. Francis, had been 
 specially distinguished by its unsacerdotal character. 2 The saint 
 himself was never more than deacon ; and in a letter to the Order 
 he evidently contemplated the presence of two priests in a single 
 settlement of the Brethren as quite an exceptional case. Of the 
 twenty-five friars whom he sent to evangelize Germany in 1221, 
 thirteen were laymen, as were also five of the nine who began the 
 English mission in 1224 ; it was not until 1239 that a priest, 
 Agnello of Pisa, was elected Minister-General and could exclaim 
 in triumph to the assembled brethren, " Ye have now heard the 
 first mass ever celebrated in this Order by a Minister-General." 
 St. Francis had been content to impose on his brethren a plain 
 and brief Rule, without " constitutions " or byelaws ; St. Francis 
 and his early friars had lived not in convents but in hermitages. 3 
 But in fourteen years the ideal of the Order was already so 
 changed that a young and ambitious student like Salimbene, in 
 spite of his close personal intercourse with several of the earliest 
 Brethren, could count it among the worst crimes of Brother 
 Elias to have followed here in the Founder's steps, though in- 
 deed he accuses him of having done so with a far different 
 intention. 4 He speaks of it as scandalous that he should have 
 had to associate with fifty lay brethren during his six years at 
 the two convents at Siena and Pisa, and that he, a clerk, should
 
 82 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 lia\o been subject at different times to a lay Gustos and several 
 lay Guardians. As to the lack of general Constitutions, though 
 Salimbene is perfectly aware that neither St. Francis nor his 
 immediate successor Giovanni Parenti had made any, yet he 
 complains that the absence of such hard-and-fast rules under 
 Elias resulted in a sort of anarchy ; " in those days there was no 
 king in Israel," he quotes (102) ; "but every one did that which 
 seemed right to himself. For under [Brother Elias] many lay 
 brethren wore the clerical tonsure, as I have seen with mine own 
 eyes when I dwelt in Tuscany, and yet they could not read a 
 single letter ; some dwelt in cities, hard by the churches of 
 the Brethren, wholly enclosed in hermits' cells, and they had a 
 window through which they talked with women ; and the lay- 
 brethren were useless to hear confessions or to give counsel ; this 
 have I seen at Pistoia and elsewhere also. Moreover, some 
 would dwell alone, without any companion, 5 in hospitals ; this 
 have I seen at Siena, where a certain Brother Martin of Spain, 
 a little shrivelled old lay-brother, used to serve the sick in the 
 hospital, and went alone all day through the city wheresoever he 
 would, without any Brother to bear him company ; so also have 
 I seen others wandering about the world. Some also have I seen 
 who ever wore a long beard, as do the Armenians and Greeks, 
 who foster and keep their beard ; moreover they had no girdle ; 
 some wore not the common cord, but one fantastically woven of 
 threads and curiously twisted, and happy was he who could get 
 himself the gayest girdle. Many other things I saw likewise, 
 more than I can relate here, which were most unbecoming to the 
 decency of the Franciscan habit. Moreover laymen were sent 
 as deputies to the Chapter, and thither also a mighty multitude 
 of other laymen would come, who had no proper place there 
 whatsoever. I myself saw in a general chapter held at Sens a 
 full 300 brethren, among whom the laymen were in the greater 
 number, yet they did nought but eat and sleep. And when 
 I dwelt in the province of Tuscany, which had been joined 
 together out of three provinces, the lay-brethren were not 
 only equal in numbers to the clerics, but even exceeded them by 
 four. Ah God ! Elias, * thou hast multiplied the nation, and 
 not increased the joy.' It would be a long and weary 
 labour to relate the rude customs and abuses which 1 have 
 seen ; perchance time and parchment would fail me, and it 
 would be rather a weariness to my hearers than a matter of 
 edification. If a lay-brother heard any youth speaking in the 
 Latin tongue, he would forthwith rebuke him, saying, ' Ha ! 
 wretch I wilt thou abandon holy simplicity for thy book-learn-
 
 Frate Elia. 83 
 
 ing?"* But I for my part would answer them thus from St. 
 Jerome, ' Holy selfishness profiteth itself alone ; and howsoever 
 it may edify Christ's Church with the excellence of its life, by so 
 much it worketh harm if it resist not them who would destroy her.' 
 In truth, as saith the proverb, an ass would fain make asses of all 
 that he seeth. For in those days not only were laymen set above 
 priests, but in one hermitage, where all were laymen save one 
 scholar and one priest, they made the priest work his day in the 
 kitchen in turn with the rest. So it chanced on a season that the 
 Lord's day came to the priest's turn ; wherefore, entering the 
 kitchen and diligently closing the door after him, he set himself 
 to cook the potherbs as best he could. Then certain secular folk, 
 Frenchmen, passed that way and earnestly desired to hear Mass, 
 but there was none to celebrate. The lay-brethren therefore 
 came in haste and knocked at the kitchen door that the priest 
 might come out and celebrate. But he answered and spake unto 
 them, ' Go ye and sing Mass, for I am busied in the work of the 
 kitchen, which ye have refused.' Then were they sore ashamed, 
 perceiving their own boorishness. For it was boorish folly to pay 
 no reverence to the priest who confessed them ; wherefore in 
 process of time the lay-brethren were brought to nought, as they 
 deserved, for their reception was almost utterly forbidden, 6 
 since they comprehended not the honour paid them, and since the 
 Order of Friars Minor hath no need of so great a multitude of 
 laymen, for they were ever lying in wait for us [clerics]. For I 
 remember how, when I was in the convent of Pisa, they would 
 have sent to the Chapter to demand that, whensoever one cleric 
 was admitted to the Order, one lay-brother should be admitted 
 at the same time, but they were not listened to nay, they were 
 not even heard to the end for their demand was most unseemly. 
 Yet in the days when I entered the Order, I found there men of 
 great sanctity, mighty in prayer and devotion and contemplation 
 and learning ; for there was this one good in Brother Elias, that 
 he fostered the study of theology in the Order." 
 
 If the clerics of the Order smarted under Brother Elias' en- 
 couragement of the lay-brethren, all alike groaned under his 
 masterful government. Even in St. Francis's lifetime we can 
 see a natural tendency to more mechanical methods of discipline 
 as the Order grew in size ; in the Saint's "Epistle to a Minister " 
 of 1223 the conception of discipline is still paternal, and the 
 Minister's authority mainly moral ; but in the "Testament" of 
 only three years later we find already a stern insistence on the 
 
 * Pro tua sapientia scripturarum.
 
 84 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 necessity of imprisonment for heresy or certain forms of disobe- 
 dience among the Brethren. Again, among the Constitutions 
 passed at Padua in 1277 we find : "item, the General Chapter 
 commands that there be strong prisons in great numbers (multi- 
 pliccs}, and at the same time humane." Salimbene's Tuscan re- 
 collections of the years 1239-1247 fill in these bare notices 
 admirably, and show the friction caused within the Order by the 
 strong-willed, unscrupulous man who did more than any other to 
 discipline these spiritual volunteers into a rigidly organized papal 
 militia. 
 
 (104) " The sixth defect of Brother Elias was that he afflicted 
 and reviled the Ministers Provincial, unless they would redeem 
 their vexation by paying tribute and giving him gifts. For he 
 was covetous and received gifts, doing contrary to the Scripture 
 (Deut. xvi. 19) ; whereof we have an example in Alberto Balzo- 
 lano, the judge of Faenza, who changed his judgment on hearing 
 that a countryman had given him a pig. Moreover the aforesaid 
 Brother Elias kept the Ministers Provincial so utterly under his 
 rod that they trembled at him as a rush trembles when it is shaken 
 under the water, or as a lark fears when a hawk pursues and 
 strives to take him. And this is no wonder, for he himself was 
 a son of Belial, so that no man could speak with him. In very 
 deed none dared to tell him the truth nor to rebuke his evil deeds 
 and words, save only Brothers Agostino da Recanati and Bona- 
 ventura da Iseo.* For he would lightly revile such Ministers as 
 were falsely accused to him by certain malicious, pestilent, and 
 hot-headed lay-brethren his accomplices, whom he had scattered 
 abroad throughout the Provinces of the Order. He would depose 
 them from their office of Minister even without fault of theirs, 
 and would deprive them of their books, and of their licence to 
 preach and hear confessions, and of all the lawful acts of their 
 office. Moreover, he would give to some a long hoodf and send 
 them from east to west, that is from Sicily or Apulia to Spain or 
 England, or contrariwise. Moreover, he deposed from his 
 Ministership Brother Albert of Parma, Minister of the Province 
 of Bologna, a man of most holy life ; and he bade Brother Gerard 
 of Modena, whom he appointed by letter into the place of the 
 deposed Minister, to bring him to himself at Assisi clad in the hood 
 of probation. But Brother Gerard, who was a most courteous man, 
 said nought of this matter to the Minister, only praying him that 
 he would be his companion on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the 
 
 * Not to be identified with Dante's Agostino or Bonaventura. 
 t Le., degrade them to wear the novice's hood.
 
 Frate Elia. 85 
 
 
 
 blessed father Francis. When therefore Brother Gerard was come 
 with Brother Albert near to Brother Elias' chamber, he brought 
 forth from his bosom two hoods of probation, whereof he placed one 
 on his own shoulders, and gave the other to the Minister of 
 Bologna, saying ' Place this on thine, father, and await my return 
 to thee.' So Brother Gerard went in to Elias and fell at his 
 feet saying, * I have fulfilled thine obedience, in bringing to thee 
 the Minister of Bologna with a hood of probation, and behold 
 he watcheth without and is willing to do whatsoever ye command.' 
 When Elias heard this, all his indignation left him, and the spirit 
 sank wherewith he had swelled against him. So Brother Albert 
 was brought in and restored to his former rank ; moreover, he 
 obtained many favours also for his Province by the mediation of 
 Brother Gerard. Wherefore on account of this and other deeds 
 of that wicked man Elias, thoughts of revenge were bred in 
 the hearts of the Ministers, but they waited for the time when 
 they might answer a fool according to his folly. For Brother 
 Elias was a most evil man, to whom we may fitly apply those 
 words which Daniel saith of Nebuchadnezzar, ' And for the 
 greatness that he gave to him, all people, tribes, and languages 
 trembled, and were afraid of him ; whom he would, he slew ; 
 and whom he would, he destroyed ; and whom he would, he set 
 up ; and whom he would, he brought down.' Moreover, he sent 
 Visitors who were rather exactors than correctors, and who 
 solicited the Provinces and Ministers to pay tributes and grant 
 gifts ; and if a man gave not something into their mouth, they 
 prepared war against him. Hence it came about that the 
 Ministers Provincial in his time caused to be made at Assisi, at 
 their own expense, for the church of the blessed Francis, a 
 great and fair and sonorous bell, which I myself have seen, 
 together with five others like unto it, whereby that whole valley 
 was filled with delightful harmony. So likewise, while 1 dwelt 
 as a novice in the convent of Fano, I saw two brethren coming 
 from Hungary and bearing on sumpter-mules a great and 
 precious salt fish, bound up in canvas, which the Minister of 
 Hungary was sending to Brother Elias. Moreover, at the same 
 time, by the Minister's mediation, the King of Hungary sent 
 to Assisi a great goblet of gold wherein the head of the blessed 
 Francis might be nonourably preserved. On the way, in Siena, 
 where it was laid one night in the sacristy for safety, certain 
 Brethren, led by curiosity and levity, drank therefrom a most 
 excellent wine, that they might boast thenceforward of having 
 drunk with their own lips from the King of Hungary's goblet. 
 But the Guardian of the convent, Giovannetto by name, a man
 
 86 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 zealous for justice, a lover of honesty, and a native of Assisi, 
 hearing this, bade the refectorer, a man of Belfort, who likewise 
 was named Giovannetto he bade him, I say, at the morrow's 
 dinner, to place before each of those who had drunk from the 
 goblet one of those little kitchen-pots called pignatta, black and 
 stained, wherefrom each must drink will he nill he, in order that, 
 if he would boast henceforward of having once drunk from the 
 King's goblet, he might remember also how for that fault he had 
 drunk from a foul pipkin." 
 
 Not content with these liberal contributions from all quarters, 
 the General sought also for the Philosopher's Stone. (160) " He 
 was publicly reported of dealing in alchemy, and it is certain 
 that, whenever he heard of Brethren in the Order who, while yet 
 in the world, had known aught of that matter or craft, he would 
 send for them and keep them by him in the Gregorian Palace 
 for Pope Gregory IX had built himself a great palace in the 
 convent of Friars Minor at Assisi, both in honour of St. Francis 
 and that he himself might dwell there when he came to Assisi. 
 In this palace, therefore, were divers chambers and many lodgings, 
 wherein Elias would keep the aforesaid craftsmen, and many 
 others also, which was as much as to consult a pythonic spirit 
 (Deut. xviii, 1 1 ). Let it be imputed to him ; let him see to it " ! 
 It may be that Elias' dealings in the black art were merely a 
 popular fiction, but there was no doubt that the liberal contribu- 
 tions of the faithful were very often diverted from their proper 
 object a malpractice common everywhere in the 13th century, 
 when pope after pope set the example of collecting money for 
 the Crusades and spending it in private wars or in worldly pomp 
 (157 ). " The seventh defect of Elias was that he would live in too 
 great splendour and luxury and pomp. For he seldom went 
 anywhither save to Pope Gregory IX and the Emperor Frederick 
 II, whose intimate friend he was, and to Santa Maria della 
 Porziuncula (where the Blessed Francis instituted his Order and 
 where also he died), and to the convent of Assisi, where the body 
 of the Blessed Francis is held in veneration, and to the House of 
 Celle by Cortona, which is a most fair and delightful convent, 
 and which he caused to be specially built for himself in the 
 Bishopric of Arezzo, for he was to be found either there or in 
 the convent of Assisi. And he had fat and big-boned palfreys, 
 and rode ever on horseback, even if he did but pass a half-mile 
 from one church to another, thus breaking the rule which saith 
 that Friars Minor must not ride save of manifest necessity, or 
 under stress of infirmity. Moreover, he had secular youths to 
 wait on him as pages, even as the Bishops have, and these were
 
 Frate Elia. 87 
 
 clad in raiment of many colours to wait on him and minister to 
 him in all things. Moreover, he seldom ate in the convent with 
 the other brethren, but ever alone in his own privy chamber, 
 which in my judgment was great boorishness, for 
 
 The sweetest joys are vain as air 
 Unless our friend may claim his share. 
 
 Moreover, he had his special cook in the convent of Assisi, Brother 
 Bartholomew of Padua, whom I have seen and known, and who 
 made most delicate dishes." An anecdote in the Chronicle of 
 the xxiv Generals (p. 229) at once corroborates Salimbene here, 
 and suggests that much of his information about Elias may have 
 come from his old comrade at Siena, the earliest disciple of St. 
 Francis. " Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, when he saw Brother 
 Elias on his horse, would pant hard after him and cry ' This is 
 too tall and big ; this is not as the Rule saith ! ' and would 
 smite the horse's crupper with his hand, repeating the same again. 
 And when Elias fared sumptuously in his own chamber, Brother 
 Bernard aforesaid would at times rise up in great zeal from the 
 table of the refectory, bearing in his hand a loaf of bread, a flesh- 
 hook and a bowl, and would knock at the door of Brother Elias's 
 chamber. When therefore the door was opened he would sit 
 down beside the Minister at his table, saying, ' I will eat with thee 
 of these good gifts of God : ' whereat the General was inwardly 
 tormented, yet for that Bernard was held in the utmost reverence 
 throughout the Order, he dissembled altogether." 
 
 Elias, whose despotic rule and contempt of early traditions 
 made him so widely unpopular, had yet the magnetic attraction 
 of a born ruler of men. He enjoyed the love of St. Francis, the 
 close confidence of Emperor and Pope, even while they were at 
 war with each other, and the loyal attachment of his humble 
 intimates. As Salimbene continues, speaking of his special cook, 
 (157) "this man clung inseparably to Elias until the last day of 
 his life, and so also did all they of his household. For he had a 
 special household of twelve or fourteen brethren, whom he kept 
 by him in the convent of Celle, and they never changed the habit 
 of the Order" i.e. they never acknowledged themselves truly 
 excommunicate for their adherence to an excommunicated man. 
 " And after the death of their evil pastor, or rather their seducer, 
 having understood that they were deceived, they returned to the 
 Order. Moreover, Elias had in his company one John, whose 
 surname was de Laudibus [of Lodi ?], a lay-brother, hard and keen, 
 and a torturer and most evil butcher, for at Elias's bidding he
 
 88 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 would scourge the brethren without mercy. And [just before 
 the Chapter of 1239] Elias, knowing that the Provincial Ministers 
 were gathered together against him, sent commands to all robust 
 lay-brethren throughout Italy whom he counted as his friends, 
 that they should not fail to come to the General Chapter ; for he 
 hoped that they might defend him with their cudgels." This 
 plan was frustrated, however ; and after a stormy meeting, in 
 which the Pope had to remind the friars that " it was not the 
 fashion of Religious " to shout each other down with Thou liest 
 and other abusive cries, Elias was deposed. His Man Friday, 
 John of Lodi, whose great bodily strength is spoken of by another 
 chronicler, died in the odour of sanctity, and miracles were 
 wrought at his tomb : he had enjoyed the supreme privilege of 
 touching the wound in the side of St. Francis. This is not in the 
 least inconsistent with Salimbene's account; miracles were 
 commonly worked at the tombs of men who in any way struck 
 the medieval imagination, even as champions of a popular 
 cause in purely secular politics, like Simon de Montfort or Thomas 
 of Lancaster. St. Thomas a Becket would have done all that 
 Salimbene here describes for the cause of discipline in a matter 
 where his convictions were fixed.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar. 
 
 SO Elias was deposed ; yet still he troubled Israel. Not only 
 was his life in his first retirement at Celle a scandal to the 
 Rule, but presently he joined the Emperor's camp openly, as we 
 have already seen. Salimbene has much to say of this : and, 
 when he describes the difficulties created by this single man, we 
 must remember also how many more of the same sort would be 
 created by the numerous supporters who had once raised him to 
 the Generalship and had nearly succeeded in procuring his re- 
 election in 1239. Indeed, the deposition of Elias marks only the 
 beginning of the most serious Francisan dissensions. Salimbene 
 tells how he went about justifying his apostasy, and how one 
 friar withstood him to his face, finally dismissing him with St. 
 Francis's contemptuous farewell, " Go thy way, Brother Fly." 
 (161). Salimbene's dear friend, Gerard of Modena, who had 
 known Elias well, went once to Celle, and laboured all day long 
 to bring him back to the Order : but in vain. Moreover, as 
 Gerard tossed on his sleepless pallet that night, " it seemed to him 
 that devils like bats fluttered all night long through the convent 
 buildings : for he heard the sound of their voices, and fear and 
 trembling seized him, and all his bones were affrighted, and the 
 hair of his flesh stood up. W herefore, when morning was come, 
 he took his leave and departed in all haste with his companion. 
 So in process of time Brother Elias died : he had been excom- 
 municated aforetime by Pope Gregory IX : whether he was 
 absolved and whether he ordered things well with his soul, he 
 himself knoweth now : let him look to it ! But in course of time 
 (since, as the Wise Man saith, there is a time and opportunity 
 for every business), a certain Custode dug up his bones and cast 
 them upon a dunghill. Now if any would fain know whereunto 
 this Brother Elias was like in bodily aspect, I say that he may 
 be exactly compared to Brother Ugo of Reggio, surnamed 
 Pocapaglia, who in the world had been a master of grammar, and 
 a great jester and a ready speaker : and in the Order of the
 
 90 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Friars Minor he was an excellent and mighty preacher, who by 
 his sermons and his parables confuted and confounded those who 
 attacked our Order. For a certain Master Guido Bonatti of 
 Forli 1 who called himself a philosopher and astrologer, and who 
 reviled the preaching of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, 
 was so confounded by Brother Ugo before the whole people of 
 Forli that he not only feared to speak, but durst not even show 
 himself during all the time that the Brother was in those parts. 
 For he was brimful of proverbs, stories, and instances ; and they 
 sounded excellently in his mouth, for he ever suited them to men's 
 manners ; and he had a ready and gracious tongue, that the 
 people were glad to hear him. Yet the ministers and prelates of 
 the Order loved him not, for that he spake in parables, and would 
 confound them with his instances and proverbs : but he cared 
 little for them, since he was a man of excellent life. Let it 
 suffice me to have said thus much of Brother Elias." (163). 
 
 The fall of Elias leads Salimbene to moralize on the advantages 
 of constitutional as compared with absolute government in a 
 religious Order. The Friars differed from the older Orders in 
 their frequent change and re-election of officials, a system in 
 which we find one of the many strong points of similarity between 
 the Revival of the Xlllth century and the Wesleyan movement. 2 
 This frequent change had Salimbene's hearty approval. For 
 one thing, familiarity was apt to breed contempt. (146) " I 
 have seen in mine own Order certain Lectors of excellent learning 
 and great sanctity who had yet some foul blemish (merditatem\ 
 which caused others to judge lightly of them. For they love to 
 play with a cat or a whelp or with some small fowl, but not as 
 the Blessed Francis was wont to play with a pheasant and a 
 cicada, rejoicing the while in the Lord." 3 
 
 Again, the official might have some strange defect which 
 forbade his inspiring proper veneration; for instance (137) "I 
 was once under a minister named Brother Aldebrando, of whom 
 Brother Albertino of Verona (whose sayings are much remem- 
 bered) was wont to say in jest that there must have been a 
 hideous idea of him in God's mind.* For his head was mis- 
 shapen after the fashion of an ancient helmet, with thick hair on 
 his forehead : so that whenever it fell to him, in the service for 
 the octave of the Epiphany, to begin that antiphon, ' caput 
 draconis ' (the dragon 's head\ then the brethren would laugh, 
 
 * Quod turpem ideam in Deo habuerat, an allusion to Plato's doctrine of ideas, 
 according to which everything in the visible universe had its eternal exemplar in 
 the Divine mind : BO at least Plato was understood in the Middle Ages.
 
 The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar. 91 
 
 and he himself would be troubled and ashamed. But I used to 
 recall that saying of Seneca, ' Of what sort, thinkest thou, is the 
 soul within, where the outward semblance is so hideous ?'.... 
 Therefore we advise the Prelate, who is set for an example to 
 others, to abstain from levities so far as in him lies ; and, if he 
 indulged in such when he was a private person, let him quit them 
 altogether when promoted to a prelacy : as a man did, whom the 
 monks of a certain monastery chose for abbot as being the most 
 disorderly (dissolution) of all, hoping to live more laxly under 
 his rule. But when he was made abbot, he caused the rule and 
 statutes of his predecessors to be nobly kept. So the monks, be- 
 ing grieved beyond measure, said to their abbot ' we chose thee 
 in the hope of fulfilling the desire of our hearts under thy rule : 
 but thou seemest changed into another man.' To whom he 
 answered ' My sons, this is the change of the right hand of the 
 Most High.' .... But there are some who, as prelates, practise 
 levities even as they did aforetime when they were private per- 
 sons " (149). 
 
 Furthermore, a once vigorous prelate may fall into his second 
 childhood, as (150) " I have ofttimes read in the Liber Pontifica- 
 lis of Ravenna that a certain Archbishop of that see became so 
 old as to speak childishly, for he was grown a babe among babes. 
 So when the Emperor Charlemagne should come to Ravenna 
 and dine with him, his clergy besought him to abstain from 
 levity for his honour's sake, and for a good example in the great 
 Emperor's presence : to whom he made answer, ' Well said, 
 my sons, well said ; and I will do as ye say.' So when they 
 were seated side by side at table, he patted the Emperor's 
 shoulders familiarly with his hand saying, ' Pappa,t pappa, 
 Lord Emperor ! ' The Emperor, therefore asked of those who 
 stood by what this might mean : and they answered him, ' He 
 would invite you in childish fashion to eat with him ; for he is 
 in his dotage.' Then with a cheerful face the Emperor embraced 
 him, saying, ' Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no 
 guile.'" 
 
 Therefore the Prelates (i.e., officials) of Religious Orders 
 should be regularly and frequently changed, as the Captains and 
 Podestas of the cities, in whose case the plan works admirably. 
 It works admirably also amongst the Friars ; for (,112) " Let it 
 be noted that the conservation of religious Orders lieth in the 
 frequent change of Prelates, and this for three reasons. First, 
 lest they wax too insolent with their long prelacy, as we see in 
 
 ' t Cf. Dante, Purg., xi. 105.
 
 92 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the abbots of the Order of St. Benedict, who, since they hold 
 office for life and are not deposed, treat their subject monks as a 
 mere rabble (vilificant subditos suos\ and esteem them no more 
 than the fifth wheel of a waggon, which is a thing of nought ; 
 and the abbots eat flesh with lay folk while the monks eat pulse 
 in their refectory ; and many other burdensome and unseemly 
 things they do to their subjects, which they should not do, since 
 they themselves choose to live in splendour and in the greatest 
 liberty. 4 Moreover, not only do nature and human courtesy bid 
 them not afflict their subjects nor do them evil, but Holy 
 Scripture also, and the example of the Father, the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost. Of courtesy we have an example in a certain King 
 of England, to whom, as he was at supper with his knights by a 
 spring in a wood, a vessel of wine was brought such as the Tus- 
 cans ca\\Jiasconc, and the Lombards bottaccw. Having asked, 
 and received an answer that there was no more wine than this, he 
 said ; ' Here then is enough for all,' and poured the whole vessel 
 into the spring, saying, * Let all drink in common ' ; which was 
 held to be a great courtesy in him.* Not so doth the miser who 
 saith, ' I have found me rest, and now I will eat of my goods 
 alone ' : not so do those Prelates who eat the finest white bread 
 and drink the best and choicest wine in the presence of their 
 subjects and of those who eat with them in the same house, and 
 w r ho give nought thereof to their subjects (which is held to be 
 utter boorishness) ; and so also they do with other meats. More- 
 over some Prelates drink choice wine, yet give nought thereof 
 to their subjects who are present, though these would as gladly 
 drink as they ; for all throats are sisters one to another. 8 But 
 the Prelates of our time, who are Lombards, gladly take to them- 
 selves all that their throats and appetites crave, and will not give 
 thereof to others. Indeed, that curse seems in our days to be 
 fulfilled which Moses imprecated upon evil-doers, saying ' Thine 
 ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat there- 
 of.' The prelates of our days, for the most part, ' come for to 
 kill and to steal and to destroy,' as is written in St. John ; and 
 as Micah saith ' the best of them is a briar, the' most upright is 
 as a thorn hedge.' And if some man would now write a dia- 
 logue concerning prelates, as St. Gregory did, he might rather 
 find offscourings than holy prelates ; for as Micah again saith, ' the 
 good man is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright 
 among men.' Yet after Christ's example the Prelates should 
 
 * This was probably the Re Qiovane of Inf. xxviii. 135, who was a byeword for 
 courtesy and liberality : cf. Navcllino, 15, 16, 87.
 
 The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar. 93 
 
 minister to their subjects : as is indeed done in the Order of 
 Pietro Peccatore ; for on fast days at Collation the priors pour 
 out drink to their subjects in memory of the Lord's example. 
 Now the head of the Order of Pietro Peccatore is in the church 
 of Santa Maria in Porto at Ravenna ; and of the same Order is 
 the convent of Santa Felicula near Montilio in the Bishopric of 
 Parma, and several other houses in divers parts of the world." 6 
 Not only does the Rule of St. Francis bid that the superiors 
 should be real servants of the Brethren, but they might learn 
 from the example even of a heathen like Julius Ca;sar, who never 
 said to his soldiers " Go and do that," but " Let us come and do 
 this." 
 
 Salimbene goes on to complain that, whereas the Apostles and the 
 first Christians had all things in common, "it is not so nowadays" 
 even in Franciscan convents. St. Francis's Rule prescribes that 
 the Minister should be a servant to all his brethren, and Christ 
 rebukes the Pharisees for taking the foremost places in the 
 synagogues, etc. : " Yet the prelates of our time do this, to the 
 very letter." Our Lord, again, likened His care for mankind to 
 that of a hen for her chickens : but the evil prelate of to-day 
 rather resembles that ostrich of which Job writes, " she is 
 hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers." 
 The hen defends her chickens against the fox, " which is a 
 stinking and fraudulent beast " : so should the prelate defend his 
 fellow-friars against the Devil or worldly tyrants. The hen, 
 " finding a grain of corn, hideth it not, but rather crieth aloud 
 that her brood may flock to her : and when they are come she 
 casteth the grain before them without distinction of white or 
 black or brown, but giving to each alike : yet the prelates of 
 our days love not their subjects equally, but with a private love : 
 some they count as sons, others as stepsons or spurious : and the 
 same whom they invite to share their good cheer to-day, to the 
 same they give just as freely on the morrow. But the rest who 
 sing the invitatorium and whose place is in the refectory (i.e. who 
 do not eat apart with the prelate,) stand all the while idle and 
 grumble and murmur, saying with the poet, ' The wild boar is 
 feared for his tusks, the stag is defended by his horns ; while we 
 the peaceful antelopes are a helpless prey ' : which is as much as 
 to say, ' the flies flock to the lean horse' " ( 1 18). This favouritism 
 of our modern prelates in their invitations to good cheer is 
 contrary both to our Lord's words (Luke xiv. 12) and to the 
 example of St. Lawrence, which Salimbene quotes at length. 
 " But [modern prelates] have loved the glory of men more than 
 the glory of God, and therefore shall they be confounded. For
 
 94 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 they say, * To-day I will give you a good dinner in the hope that 
 ye will give me the same to-morrow ' : of whom the Lord saith, 
 * Amen I say unto you, they have received their reward ' " (119). 
 To these faults of unfairness and self-seeking the Prelates too 
 often add that of discourtesy : which Salimbene rebukes by 
 three Scriptural examples. Our Lord desired (not commanded] 
 Simon to draw back a little from the land : Simon himself said 
 to Cornelius, ' Arise, I myself also am a man ' : and the Angel 
 of the Apocalypse said the same to St. John. " Lo therefore 
 how our Lord and the Apostle Peter and the Angel honour God's 
 servants ; and how these boorish Prelates raise themselves above 
 them in their pride ! Note that in some religious Orders there 
 will at times be men who were noble in the world, rich and 
 powerful, and who are ancient in the Order both as to their own 
 days and as to the time of their entrance into Religion ; more- 
 over, better still, they are spiritual and contemplative and devout 
 and amiable to the Brethren ; they are endowed also with wisdom 
 and learning, having a knowledge of books and a ready tongue 
 and mother-wit and honest morals. Yet over such men a Prelate 
 may be set who is of obscure birth, insufficient and unprofitable 
 in all the aforesaid qualities, and yet he will come to such pride 
 and folly that his heart will be lifted to pride against his 
 brethren, paying reverence to no man, but addressing all in the 
 singular number with ' tu ' ; which, as I may say, is not permitted 
 except for five reasons." Here he launches into a dissertation 
 from which we learn incidentally how little the use of the pro- 
 nouns was as yet fixed in Italian : for " the Apulians and Sicilians 
 and Romans say thou to the Emperor or the Pope himself, while 
 the Lombards say you not only to a child but even to a hen or a 
 cat or a piece of wood" (120). He admits, indeed, that "even 
 good Prelates have their persecutors and evil-speakers and 
 scorners," (120) for there are always sons of Belial, unbridled 
 and uncontrolled, like those who despised Saul. But he harks 
 back to the same complaints. " Doctors prescribe to their patients 
 many things which they themselves will not do when they are 
 sick : so Prelates know how to teach their subjects many things 
 which they will not do themselves : as the Lord said, 'For they 
 say and do not' (122). As to what we said above, that he 
 who is chosen to a Prelacy should know his own insufficiency, if 
 he be insufficient, we say here that this can seldom be, for who- 
 soever has dominion and authority believes himself forthwith 
 altogether sufficient, both in wisdom and in eloquence and in all 
 things necessary to a Prelate " (123). He is apparently thinking 
 mainly of the older Orders when he complains, a propos of
 
 The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar. 95 
 
 Ecclesiasticus xiv. 3, 4 (153) "we often see this fulfilled to the 
 letter ; for one Prelate will have much wealth heaped together, 
 yet God doth not grant him power to eat thereof, but another 
 coming after him will scatter them abroad." Against similar 
 faults he has already quoted (136) " the example of that rich man 
 who gave nought to the poor, and was utterly given up to gluttony 
 and lechery, nor would he hear Mass or Gospel. So when the 
 priests and clergy sang a Requiem over his corpse, the Crucifix 
 thrust its fingers into its ears, saying that it would in no wise 
 hear the man who had scorned to hear its voice." Prelates are 
 apt to be hasty-tempered, and to excuse themselves by pleading 
 a choleric complexion : such have no business in office, for (as 
 we may see from Ecc. x. 5-7), " we cannot reduce a fool to silence 
 by promoting him to the dignity of a Prelacy. This we see done 
 daily ; for a man is promoted who is not worth three pence, 
 (unless he chance to have them in his mouth) ; and this is done 
 of private affection, while another man, though fit and sufficient, 
 will find no grace." Nowadays, indeed, as often in the past, a 
 man risks his immortal soul by accepting promotion in the Church 
 (142) : a saint of old once cut off his own ears to avoid being 
 made Bishop, and, when this proved an insufficient protection, 
 swore that he would cut out his tongue also unless they left him in 
 peace. This holy man, continues our chronicler, resembled the 
 beaver, who will mutilate himself to escape from his pursuers. 
 He cites the well-known example of Geoffroi de Peronne, prior 
 of Clairvaux, who "was chosen Bishop of Tournay and whom 
 Pope Eugenius and his abbot St. Bernard would have compelled 
 to submit to the burden : but he fell on his face in the form of a 
 cross at the feet of the abbot and the clergy who had elected 
 him, saying : ' I may indeed, if ye elect me, be a runaway monk, 
 but I shall never be a bishop.' When he was in his death-agony 
 a monk, his dear friend, who sat by his bedside, said : ' Dear 
 friend, now that we are being separated in the body, I pray thee 
 (if by God's will thou art able) to reveal me thy state after 
 death.' So, as he prayed after his friend's death in front of the 
 altar, Geoffrey appeared to him in a vision saying : ' Lo here am 
 I, Geoffrey thy brother ! ' To whom the other said ' Dear friend, 
 how is it with thee ? ' Whereunto he replied, ' I am well ; but 
 it has been revealed to me by the Holy Trinity that, if I had 
 been promoted to a bishopric, I should have been among the 
 number of the damned.' " 
 
 It will be as well to close this chapter with the summary of 
 another most characteristic digression of Salimbene's. He has 
 been quoting many shining examples of the past who might well
 
 96 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 shame the authorities of his day into something better (132). 
 For post^Biblical times he chooses as typical heroes Saints 
 Silvester, Nicholas, and Thomas of Canterbury. The mention 
 of St. Nicholas leads him into a tirade which reads like a 
 fragment of the Wife of Bath's Prologue. It may well be 
 commended to the notice of those who have hastily inferred 
 that, because the Franciscans exaggerated the already exag- 
 gerated devotion to the Virgin Mary, they were therefore 
 possessed with a " chivalric respect for women " and " restored 
 woman to her rightful position in Christian society." 7 Salimbene, 
 it must be remembered, was no farouche ascetic : he tells us 
 more than once of the charming ladies whose director he has 
 been ; he was far from holding, with St. Bouaventura's cherished 
 secretary, that women are not fit objects for a friar even to gaze 
 upon. The quotations which he here heaps together are simply 
 commonplaces of the Middle Ages, and represent the ordinary 
 clerical attitude towards the fair sex. " Note," he writes, " that 
 it is said of St. Nicholas, * he avoided the company of women ' : 
 and herein he was wise ; for it was women who deceived the 
 children of Israel (Num. xxxi.). Wherefore it is written in 
 Ecclesiasticus, ' Behold not every body's beauty ; and tarry 
 not among women. For from garments cometh a moth, and 
 from a woman the iniquity of a man.' Again, in Ecclesiastes, 
 4 1 have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the 
 hunter's snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. 
 He that pleaseth God shall escape from her : but he that is a 
 sinner, shall be caught by her.' In Proverbs again, ' Why art 
 thou seduced, my son, by a strange woman, and art cherished 
 in the bosom of another ? ' Again in the sixth chapter, ' Let not 
 thy heart covet her beauty, be not caught with her winks : For 
 the price of a harlot is scarce one loaf : but the woman catcheth 
 the precious soul of a man.' And again in the twenty-third, ' For 
 a harlot is a deep ditch : and a strange woman is a narrow pit. 
 She lieth in wait in the way as a robber, and him whom she 
 shall see unwary, she shall kill.' Moreover, Jerome saith, ' It is 
 perilous to be ministered to by one whose face thou dost frequently 
 study':* and again, 'Believe me, he cannot be whole-hearted 
 with God to whom women have close access ' ; and again, ' With 
 flames of fire doth a woman sear the conscience of him who 
 dwelleth by her ' ; and again, ' Where women are with men, 
 
 * Lady readers may be glad to learn that, among all the soi-disant patristic 
 quotations in this passage, only this first from St. Jerome is genuine. Prof. 
 Holder-Egger has tracked six of the rest to spurious works of the Fathers here 
 named ; but even his industry has not been able to indentify the remaining two.
 
 The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar. 97 
 
 there shall be no lack of the devil's birdlime.' Again the poet 
 saith, 'Wouldst thou define or know what woman is? She is 
 glittering mud, a stinking rose, sweet poison, ever leaning towards 
 that which is forbidden her.' And another poet, ' Woman is 
 adamant, pitch, buckthorn, f a rough thistle, a clinging burr, a 
 stinging wasp, a burning nettle.' And jet another, 'Man hath 
 three joys praise, wisdom, and glory : which three things are 
 overthrown and ruined by woman's art ' : and Augustine saith, 
 ' As oil feedeth the flame of a lamp, so doth a woman's conversa- 
 tion feed the fire of lust.' And Isidore, ' As the green grass 
 groweth by the waterside, so also groweth concupiscence by 
 looking upon women.' And John Chrysostom : ' What else is 
 woman but a foe to friendship, an inevitable penance, a necessary 
 evil, a natural temptation, a coveted calamity, a domestic peril, 
 a pleasant harm, the nature of evil painted over with the colours 
 of good : wherefore it is a sin to desert her, but a torment to keep 
 her.' And Augustine : ' Woman was evil from the beginning, 
 a gate of death, a disciple of the serpent, the devil's accomplice, 
 a fount of deception, a dogstar to godly labours, rust corrupting 
 the saints ; whose perilous face hath overthrown such as had 
 already become almost angels.' Likewise Origen : * Lo, woman 
 is the head of sin, a weapon of the devil, expulsion from Paradise, 
 mother of guilt, corruption of the ancient law.' " To this whole 
 page Salimbene has affixed the heading " Here the author shows 
 that women are to be avoided : see below folio 323." And on 
 that folio (p. 270) he subjoins another string of the same or 
 similar quotations, with the addition of one (genuine, alas ! this 
 time) from St. Augustine. " Among all the Christian's battles the 
 sorest are the struggles of chastity, wherein is continual conflict 
 and seldom victory" : a warning which is enforced by the tale of 
 St. Chrysanthus and his temptations. 
 
 We see then that, in spite of all Salimbene's varied interests 
 and thoroughly human point of view, even in spite of his little 
 religious idylls, there was one hiatus in his sympathies. He 
 might have thousands of women under his spiritual guidance ; he 
 might strike up piquant and dangerous Platonic friendships 
 with one or two ; but his very profession shut him off from that 
 free and natural social intercourse without which neither sex can 
 really understand the other. 
 
 " For, trusteth wel, it is impossible 
 That any clerk wol speke good of wyves, 
 (But if it he of hooly Seintes lyves), 
 Ne of noon other womman never the mo." 
 
 CHAUCER, Cant. Tales, D. 688. 
 
 1 From which a sort of Black Draught was concocted in the Middle Ages 
 
 H
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Convent Friendships. 
 
 O ALIMBENE was eminently a sociable man, and he has much 
 fO to tell us of his friends. Many such descriptions will 
 come later on in other contexts, but it will be well to collect in 
 this chapter such scattered notices as may give an idea of the 
 cheerful side of Franciscan life, in contrast to the troubles and 
 discontents to which he so frequently alludes. 
 
 The Friars were still, until some time after his death, the most 
 real intellectual and moral force in Christendom. All the great 
 Schoolmen of this period were Friars ; all or nearly all the great 
 preachers ; and the movement gave a great stimulus to poetry 
 and to art. Salimbene found in his Order full scope for his love 
 of travel, his eager (if somewhat random) curiosity, and his 
 passion for music. All his closest friends seem to have been 
 musicians ; and he has left us delightful portraits of these 
 minstrels of God. (181) "Brother Henry of Pisa was a comely 
 man, yet of middle stature, free-handed, courteous, liberal, and 
 ready. He knew well how to converse with all, condescending 
 and conforming himself to each man's manners, gaining the 
 favour both of his own brethren and of secular persons, which 
 is given but to few. Moreover, he was a preacher of great weight 
 and favour with both clergy and people. Again, he was skilled 
 to write, to miniate (which some call illuminate), for that the 
 book is illuminated with the scarlet minium), 1 to write music, 
 to compose most sweet and delightful songs, both in harmony 
 and in plain-song. He was a marvellous singer ; he had a great 
 and sonorous voice, so that he filled the whole choir ; but he 
 had also a flute-like treble, very high and sharp ; sweet, soft, 
 and delightful beyond measure. He was my Custos in the 
 Custody of Siena, and my master of song in the days of Pope 
 Gregory IX. Moreover he was a man of good manners and 
 devoted to God and the Blessed Virgin and Blessed Mary 
 Magdalene ; and no wonder, for the church of his contrada at 
 Pisa was dedicated to this saint. Having heard a certain maid-
 
 Convent Friendships. 99 
 
 servant tripping through the cathedral church of Pisa and singing 
 in the vulgar tongue, 
 
 " If thou carest not for me, 
 I will care no more for thee," 
 
 he made then, after the pattern of that song, words and music of 
 this hymn following : 
 
 " Christ Divine, Christ of mine, 
 Christ the King and Lord of alL" 8 
 
 Moreover, because when he was Guardian and lav sick on his 
 bed in the infirmary of the convent of Siena, he could write no 
 music, therefore he called me, and I was the first to note one of 
 his airs as he sang it." Salimbene goes on to enumerate other 
 compositions of Brother Henry's, the last of which reminds him 
 of another musical friend. " Sow the second air of these words, 
 that is, the harmony, was composed by Brother Vita of the city 
 of Lucca, and of the Order of Friars Minor, the best singer in 
 the world of his own time in both kinds, namely, in harmony and 
 in plain-song. He had a thin or subtle voice, and one delightful 
 to hear. There was none so severe but that he heard him gladly. 
 He would sing before Bishops, Archbishops, and the Pope him- 
 self; and gladly they would hear him. If any spoke when 
 Brother Vita sang, immediately men would cry out with Ecclesi- 
 asticus, ' Hinder not music.' Moreover, whenever a nightingale 
 sang in hedge or thicket, it would cease at the voice of his song, 
 listening most earnestly to him, as if rooted to the spot, and 
 resuming its strain when he had ceased ; so that bird and friar 
 would sing in turn, each warbling his own sweet strains. So 
 courteous was he in this that he never excused himself when he 
 was asked to sing, pleading that he had strained his voice, or 
 was hoarse from cold, or for any other reason ; wherefore none 
 could apply to him those oft-quoted verses [of Horace], 'All 
 singers have this fault, that they can never be brought to sing 
 when they are begged to perform among friends.' He had a 
 mother and sister who were delightful singers. He composed 
 this sequence, * Ave mundij both words and air. He composed 
 many hymns in harmony, wherein the Secular clergy specially 
 delight. He was my master of song in his own city of Lucca. 
 Again, the Lord Thomas of Capua having written that sequence, 
 1 Let the Virgin Mother rejoice,' andhaving begged Brother Henry 
 of Pisa to compose an air to it, he composed one delightful and 
 fair and sweet to hear, whereto Brother Vita composed the 
 secondary air, or harmony ; for whenever he found any plain-
 
 ioo From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 chant of Brother Henry he would gladly compose a harmony 
 thereto. Moreover, the Lord Philip, Archbishop of Ravenna, 
 took this Brother Vita to be of his household, both because he 
 was of his own country, and because he was a Friar Minor, 
 and because he knew so well to sing and write. He died at 
 Milan, and was buried in the Convent of the Friars Minor. He 
 was slender and lean of body, and taller of stature than Brother 
 Henry. His voice was fitter for the chamber than for the choir. 
 Oft-times he left the Order, and oft-times returned : yet he never 
 left us but to enter the Order of St. Benedict ; and when he 
 wished to return, Pope Gregory IX was ever indulgent to him, 
 both for St. Francis's sake, and for the sweetness of his song. 
 For once he sang so enchantingly that a certain nun, hearing his 
 song, threw herself down from a window to follow him ; but this 
 might not be, for she broke her leg with the fall. This was no 
 such hearkening as is written in the last chapter of the Song of 
 Songs, * Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the friends hearken : 
 make me hear thy voice.' Truly, therefore, spake Brother Giles 
 of Perugia (not that he was of Perugia, but that there he lived 
 and ended his days a man given to ecstasies and rapt in divine 
 contemplation, the fourth Brother admitted to our Order, after 
 St. Francis ), truly he spake, ' It is a great grace of God to have 
 no graces at all,' speaking here of graces not given freely by 
 God, but acquired, by reason whereof some men are frequently 
 led into evil." The celebrated Helinand of Froidmont, it may 
 be noted, speaks still more strongly of the dangers of music to 
 the Religious, "whether of instruments, or of the human 
 
 voice as Orpheus with his lute followed his desire 
 
 even to hell. In further proof whereof, mark that thou shalt 
 
 scarce find a man of light voice and grave life I have 
 
 seen numberless men and women whose life was so much the 
 more evil as their voice was more sweet." Benvenuto, again, 
 while noting how Casella too belied Horace's sarcasm by singing 
 without delay at Dante's request, and while laying stress on the 
 sovereign virtues of good music, speaks of the danger of 
 elaborate church music, " wherefore Athanasius, to avoid vanity, 
 
 forbade the custom of singing in church, and a 
 
 certain good and prudent man who had the care of a great con- 
 vent of nuns forbade them to celebrate their church services with 
 song." 3 This Puritan estimate of song was far more common 
 before the Reformation than is generally realised ; and even 
 St. Francis was believed by many to have forbidden church 
 music. 
 
 But to return to Brother Henry. " In truth Brother Henry of
 
 Convent Friendships. 101 
 
 Pisa was my intimate friend, and such as he of whom the Wise 
 Man saith 'A man amiable in society shall be more friendly than 
 a brother ' ; for he himself also had a brother in the Order of my 
 age, and I a brother of his age ; yet he loved me far more, as he 
 said, than his own blood-brother. And whereas Ecclesiasticus 
 saith ' The token of a good heart and of a good countenance thou 
 shalt hardly find, and with labour,' yet this could in no wise 
 be said of him. He was made Minister of Greece, which is the 
 Province of Romania, and gave me a letter of obedience, whereby, 
 if it pleased me, I might go to him and be of his Province, with 
 a companion of my own choice. Moreover, he promised that 
 he would give me a Bible and many other books. But I went 
 not, for he departed this life in the selfsame year wherein he 
 went thither. He died at a certain Provincial Chapter, celebrated 
 at Corinth, where also he was buried and hath found rest in peace. 
 Moreover he foretold the future in the hearing of the Brethren 
 who were in that Chapter, saying, * Now are we dividing the 
 books of departed Brethren ; but it may be that within a brief 
 while our own too shall be divided.' And so it came to pass ; 
 for in that same Chapter his books were divided." 
 
 Though Brother Henry worked no miracles himself, yet he had 
 long been of the household of the miracle-working Patriarch of 
 Antioch. The reader will not fail to notice how many of 
 Salimbene's friends and acquaintances were distinguished in 
 life or in death by these thaumaturgic powers. From the matter- 
 of-fact frequency with which he notes the fact, one might almost 
 fancy that he half expected the same of his own bones, when 
 he should come in his turn to lie in the " good thick stupefying 
 incense-smoke" of the choir at Montefalcone or at Reggio.* 
 Miracles were in the air : the earlier volumes of Wadding teem 
 with notices of obscure but wonder-working friars. In many 
 cases, their very names had been forgotten within a century 
 or two of their death ; only a vague memory was cherished 
 among the Brethren that " a saint is buried in our convent." 4 
 
 Another intimate friend was Brother Roland of Pavia, humble 
 and eloquent, of whom Salimbene relates one miracle of the 
 stereotyped pattern. There is, however, far more individuality 
 in (556) " Brother Nicholas of Montefeltro . . . who was many 
 years Minister of Hungary, and afterwards for many years, even 
 to the day of his death, he dwelt in subjection in the convent 
 of Bologna. He was humble beyond all men whom I have ever 
 
 * A miracle-working Brother Salimbene was in fact buried at Rodi ; but he can 
 scarcely be our chronicler (Eubel. Provinciate, p. 53).
 
 102 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 seen in this world. He neither thought nor would have others 
 to think that he was anything at all : so that, when any man 
 would do him reverence, forthwith he would fall to the ground 
 and kiss his feet, if he might. When the refectory bell was rung 
 for meals, it was he who came first to pour water into the lavatory 
 for the Brethren's hands : and when strange Brethren came, 
 he would hasten first of all the convent to wash their feet ; and 
 though in appearance he was ill-fitted to perform such offices, 
 for he was aged and corpulent, yet his charity and humility and 
 holiness and courtesy and liberality and readiness made him 
 skilful and pleasant and proper thereto. He lieth buried 
 honourably in the church of the Friars Minor of Bologna. After 
 his death God showed forth no miracle through him, for that he 
 had prayed God that he might work none ; as also that most 
 holy Brother Giles of Perugia had besought God to show forth 
 no miracles on his behalf after his death. (This was the 
 Brother Giles, whose life Brother Leo, one of the three special 
 companions of St. Francis, wrote at some length.) But in his 
 lifetime Brother Nicholas wrought three miracles or God 
 through him which are worthy to be related. The first was 
 that the Guardian of a certain convent had laid upon a certain 
 young friar, who was also a clerk and sub-deacon, the duty of 
 cooking the Brethren's soup or pottage for God's sake, until the 
 cook, who was absent, should return. He then obeyed in all 
 humility ; but by evil fortune his breviary fell into the pot and 
 was utterly sodden with the pottage. Since therefore the book 
 was thus foully destroyed, and the Brother wept and wailed, 
 for this was his greatest cause of grief, that the book was 
 borrowed Brother Nicholas hearing this, and willing to console 
 him, said, ' See, son, weep no more, but lend me the book, which 
 I need awhile for saying Hours.' And having taken the book, 
 he went apart and poured forth his soul in prayer ; and behold, 
 God restored it to its former beauty, so that no spot or blemish 
 appeared thereon. And the Brother who had before wept so 
 bitterly at the destruction of the book, seeing this, was comforted 
 and filled with admiration, and gave praise to God." The next 
 miracle of Brother Nicholas was of a more commonplace character ; 
 but the third is truly original. " There was a certain youth in the 
 convent of Bologna who was called Brother Guido. . He was wont 
 to snore so mightily in his sleep that no man could rest in the same 
 house with him ; and, what is more, he made their waking-hours 
 as hideous as their sleep-time : wherefore he was set to sleep in 
 a shed among the wood and straw : yet even so the Brethren 
 could not escape him, for the sound of that accursed rumbling
 
 Convent Friendships. 103 
 
 echoed throughout the whole convent. So all the priests and 
 discreet Brethren gathered together in the chamber of Brother 
 John of Parma, the Minister-General, and told him of this boy, 
 how he must be cast utterly forth from the Order by reason of 
 this monstrous fault ; and I myself was there present. And it was 
 decreed by a formal sentence that he should be sent back to his 
 mother, who had deceived the Order, since she knew all this of 
 her son before he was received among us. Yet was he not sent 
 back forthwith ; which was the Lord's doing, Who purposed to 
 work a miracle through Brother Nicholas. For this holy man, 
 considering within himself that the boy must needs be cast out 
 through a defect of nature, and without guilt on his own part, 
 called the lad daily about the hour of dawn to come and serve 
 him at his Mass : and at the end of the Mass, the boy would 
 kneel at his bidding behind the altar, hoping to receive some 
 grace of him. Then would Brother Nicholas touch the boy's 
 face and nose with his hands, desiring, by God's gifts, to bestow 
 on him the boon of health, and bidding him reveal this secret to 
 no man. In brief, the boy was suddenly and wholly healed ; 
 and thenceforth he slept in peace and quiet, like any dormouse, 
 without further discomfort to the Brethren. Afterwards he was 
 transferred to the Province of Rome, where he became a priest 
 and confessor and preacher, most serviceable and profitable to 
 the Brethren, ever thankfully remembering the grace bestowed 
 on him through the merits and prayers of the blessed Nicholas 
 by God, Who is blessed for ever and ever. Amen." 
 
 Here again is one more Franciscan of the true type. (429) 
 " Brother Thomas of Pavia was a holy and good man, and a 
 great clerk. He had grown old in the Order ; a man of wisdom 
 and discretion, and of good and sober counsel. He was a friendly 
 man, ready, humble, and kindly, and devoted to God, and a 
 gracious and weighty preacher. He wrote a great chronicle, 
 for he was very full and prolix ; he made also a treatise of 
 sermons and a great and most diffuse work of theology, which 
 for its size he named ' The Ox.' He reformed the Province of 
 Tuscany. He was a dear friend of mine, for I lived with him 
 many years in the Convent of Ferrara ; may his soul, of God's 
 mercy, rest in peace ! Amen." Many of Salimbene's other 
 friends and acquaintances were distinguished authors of their 
 time : Brother Benvenuto of Modena, a Greek scholar and a 
 textual critic of the Bible, Master William of Auxerre, to whom 
 the more famous Durandus was deeply indebted ; Brother Wil- 
 liam of the Friars Preachers, " with whom 1 was familiar : for 
 he was a humble and courteous man, though small of stature " ;
 
 IO4 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and again, " Brother William Britto of the Friars Minor, whose 
 Book is remembered of men ; and who in stature was like unto 
 that other Brother William aforesaid, jet not in manners ; for 
 he seemed rather wrathful and impatient, as is the nature of men 
 who are small of stature : wherefore the poet saith : 
 
 ' Seldom is the small man humble, seldom hath the long man reason ; 
 Seldom shalt thou find a red-head but his troth will smack of treason."* 
 
 Nearly all the portraits of good friars in this chronicle belong 
 to the same general type : learned men and busy workers of 
 the first or second generation, who had grown grey in the Order, 
 and whom our friend knew in the tranquil and honoured evening 
 of their life. Here and there, however, we have glimpses of 
 wilder natures in the ferment of their first overwhelming sense 
 of sin, and in all the agonies of conversion. There is the Lord 
 Bernardo Bafolo (1285 364J, a knight of great wealth and 
 renown, who entered the Order in its earliest days, and sought 
 to share the reproach of Christ by causing his own servants to 
 scourge him round the city at a horse's tail. As he passed thus 
 by the portico of S. Pietro, " where the knights are wont to sit 
 and make merry in their hours of ease, they were pricked to the 
 heart, saying with groans ' In truth we have seen marvels this 
 day ' ; and many were goaded by his example to leave the world." 
 Two usurers, brethren by blood, restored their ill-gotten gains 
 and joined the Franciscans ; and one of them caused himself 
 to be scourged likewise all round the city, with a bag of money 
 round his neck. Bernardo Bafolo, whose father had distinguished 
 himself at the storming of Constantinople in 1204, did not leave 
 his own knightly courage behind him when he took the cowl : 
 for " when he was a Friar Minor, and the men of Parma had 
 marched with the Emperor's army against Milan, he ran to the 
 fire which had been kindled in the Borgo di Santa Cristina ; and 
 standing on the top of a burning house, he cut away with an axe 
 and cast down on all sides the blazing timbers, that no other 
 houses might take fire. And all men saw him and commended 
 him that he had wrought prudently and valiantly ; and ' it was 
 reputed him unto justice, to generation and generation for ever- 
 more ' : for this doughty deed of his hath lived many years in 
 men's memories. After this he crossed to the Holy Land, where 
 he ended his days with all praise in the Order of St. Francis. 
 May his soul by God's mercy rest in peace, for he began well 
 and ended well." 
 
 * Vix humilis parvus ; vix longus cum ratione ; 
 Vix reperitur homo ruffus sine proditione (233).
 
 Convent Friendships. 105 
 
 But the greatest by far of Salimbene's friends was John of 
 Parma, a man of very considerable intellectual force, and the 
 Minister- General who trod most closely of all in the steps of St. 
 Francis. For the life of this remarkable man Salimbene is by 
 far our fullest authority : but he writes of him in so prolix and 
 rambling a fashion (296 foil.), and John's life has so often been 
 told elsewhere, that I will abridge it considerably here. His 
 father was called Albert the Fowler ; for he loved fowling and 
 made it his business. But John owed his education to an uncle, 
 priest and Guardian of the Lazar-house at Parma, Avho sent him 
 to the university. There he fell into an apparently fatal illness, 
 " but one day he was comforted in the Lord and said in the 
 bystanders' hearing, ' The Lord chastising hath chastised me, 
 but He hath not delivered me over to death.'* After this he 
 recovered suddenly of his sickness and began to study with 
 fervour, and walked most manfully in the way of the Lord until 
 he became a Friar Minor ; and then he began to go on most 
 abundantly from virtue to virtue and was full of power and 
 wisdom, and God's grace was with him. He was of middle 
 stature or rather less ; he was shapely in all his limbs, and of a 
 strong complexion and sound and stout to bear labours, both 
 in walking and in study. His face was as an angel's face, gracious 
 and ever bright of cheer : he was free and liberal and courtly 
 and charitable, humble and mild and kindly and patient ; 
 devoted to God and fervent in prayer, pious and gentle and 
 compassionate. He sang Mass daily, and so devoutly that those 
 who stood by felt some of his own grace : he would preach so 
 fervently and well both to the clergy and to the Brethren that, 
 as I have oft-times seen, he provoked many of his hearers to 
 tears : he had a ready tongue that never stumbled, for he was 
 most learned also, having been a good grammarian and a Master 
 in Logic while yet in the world ; and in our Order he was a great 
 theologian and disputator. He was a mirror and an example 
 to all that beheld him ; for his whole life was full of honour and 
 saintliness, and good and perfect manners : he was gracious 
 both to God and man : learned in music and a good singer. 
 Never saw I so swift a writer, in so fair and true a hand ; for 
 his characters were exceeding easy to read. He was a most 
 noble composer in the polished style ; and whensoever he would, 
 he enriched his letters with many wise sentences. He was the 
 first Minister-General who began to go round the whole Order 
 
 * Cf . Newman "All through (my fever in Sicily) I had a confident feeling 
 I should recover .... and gave as a reason . . . . ' I thought God had some 
 work for me.' " Letters, vol i., p. 414.
 
 io6 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and visit province bj province, which had not been the custom 
 aforetime, except that Brother Aymo once went to England, which 
 was his native land. But when Brother Bonagratia would have 
 thus visited the Order after the example of John of Parma, 
 the travail was more than he could bear, wherefore he fell 
 sick unto death within four years of his Generalship, and ended 
 his life at Avignon. Moreover Brother John of Parma gave 
 licence to Brother Bonaventura of Bagnorrea* to lecture at Paris, 
 which he had never as yet done anywhere : for he was but a 
 Bachelor and not yet Master. Moreover, at another time, during 
 the Chapter of Metz, the Provincials and Custodes said to Brother 
 John: ' Father, let us make some Constitutions.' [i.e. bye-laws.] 
 But he answered and said, ' Let us not multiply our Constitutions, 
 but let us keep well such as we have. For know that the Poor 
 Brethrenf complain of you that ye make a multitude of Constitu- 
 tions and lay them on the neck of your subjects, and ye who 
 make them will not keep them.' For he looked more to a 
 Superior's hand than to his tongue : as we read of Julius Caesar, 
 who never said to his soldiers ' Go ye and do that,' but ' Let us 
 go and do it,' ever associating himself with them." He also 
 introduced uniformity into the Friars' services : for hitherto 
 they had made many changes each after his own fancy " either 
 contrary to the rubrics or altogether beside them, as I have seen 
 with mine own eyes." 
 
 " Moreover, while he was Lector at Naples, and not yet 
 Minister-General, he passed through Bologna, and sat down 
 one day to meat in the guesten-hall with his companions and 
 with other strangers : then certain Brethren came and took 
 him by force from the table, that they might bring him to eat 
 in the infirmary. f But he, seeing that his companion was left 
 uninvited, turned back and said, ' I will eat nowhere without 
 my companion ' : which was thought great boorishness on the 
 part of the hosts, and the greatest courtesy and fidelity on Brother 
 John's part. Another day, when he was General and would 
 fain find a moment's leisure, he came to the convent of Ferrara : 
 and, considering himself that the same Brethren were always 
 invited to eat with him that is, the same who had dined with 
 him, were at supper also, and the same to-day, the same to-morrow 
 he saw that our Guardian was a respecter of persons, which 
 displeased him. So when Brother John was washing his hands 
 
 * Saint Bonaventura. 
 
 t i.e. the Sphituals, with whom he deeply sympathized. 
 
 \ Where the food was always more delicate.
 
 Convent Friendships. 107 
 
 one day for supper, then the Brother on service asked of the 
 Guardian, ' Whom shall I invite ? ' ; and he answered, ' Take 
 Brother Jacopo of Pavia and Brother A vanzio and such an one and 
 such an one.' Now these four had already washed their hands in 
 expectation, and stood ready, behind the General's back, as he 
 had well seen from the first : wherefore he took up his parable, 
 inspired perhaps by the Holy Ghost in the fervour of his spirit, 
 and cried, ' Yea, yea ! take Brother John of Pavia, take Brother 
 Avanzio, take this one and that other I take ten stripes for thy- 
 self, for that is a mere goose's song ! ' So they who had been 
 invited to the meal were confounded and put to shame when they 
 heard this : and the Guardian was no less ashamed, saying to the 
 Minister, ' Father, it was for thine honour that I invited these 
 to bear thee company, since I hold them the most worthy.' The 
 Minister answered, ' Saith not the Scripture, " When thou makest 
 a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind : and 
 thou shalt be blessed" ? (and I heard all this, for I stood by his 
 side). Then said the friar on service, * Whom then shall I ask? ' 
 ' Invite,' said the Guardian, * as the Minister shall bid thee.' 
 Then said he, ' Go, call me the poor Brethren of the convent ; 
 for this office [of eating] is one wherein all know enough to bear 
 their Minister company. So that friar on service went to the 
 refectory, and said to the feeblest and poorest Brethren, who 
 seldom ate outside the refectory, ' The General inviteth you to 
 supper : I bid you on his part to bear him company forthwith ' : 
 and so it was. For Brother John, whenever he came to some 
 fresh convent, would ever have the poor Brethren to eat with him, 
 or else all together, or else these and those by turns, that they 
 might have some refreshment by his coming. And thus he 
 would ordain before his guest-table was full, that is, before he 
 went into the refectory to eat, which he ever did forthwith after 
 he was refreshed from his journey and his travail, when he stayed 
 in any convent. So Brother John was no respecter of persons, 
 nor bare he private love for any, but he was most courteous and 
 free at table, so that, if divers sorts of good wine were set before 
 him, he would cause equal portions to be poured out for all, or 
 else he would pour it into a great cup, that every man might 
 drink alike, which was esteemed by all to be an excellent courtesy 
 and charity. Moreover, even when he was Minister-General, 
 whensoever the bell was rung for cleaning the vegetables or herbs 
 for the table, he would come to the con vent -workers and labour 
 with the other Brethren, as I have oft-times seen with mine own 
 eyes : and, being familiarly known to him, I said to him, * Father, 
 ye do as the Lord taught : " He that is the leader among you,
 
 io8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 let him be as he that serveth." ' And he answered, ' " So it 
 becometh us to fulfil all justice," that is, perfect humility.' 
 Moreover he fulfilled his church services both nightly and daily, 
 and especially Mattins and Vespers and the Conventual Mass, 
 and whatsoever the Cantor laid upon him he obeyed at once, 
 either beginning the antiphons or chanting lessons and responses 
 or singing conventual masses. In short, he was full of all good 
 deeds : he would fain write with his own hands even when he 
 was a General, that he might by his labour earn wherewithal to 
 be clothed : but the Brethren would not suffer this, for they saw 
 him busied with the service of the Order, and therefore they 
 gladly supplied him with all things necessary." 
 
 But John, as will be seen in Chapter XIII, was a Joachite ; 
 he apparently did nothing to punish the rash author of the " In- 
 troduction to the Eternal Gospel " ; and the scandal of the book 
 fell in a great measure upon him also. His restless energy had 
 already worn out twelve secretaries one after the other : even 
 his own iron frame and cheerful temper must have bent under 
 the discouraging drudgery of visiting convent after convent that 
 was drifting daily farther from the Founder's purpose : 5 and, if 
 Salimbene is right, he met his sentence halfway, calling a special 
 General Chapter to tender his resignation. For a whole day the 
 Chapter refused to accept it, but at last, "seeing the anguish of 
 his soul," they unwillingly consented, and besought him to name 
 his successor : " and forthwith he chose Brother Bonaventura, 
 saying that he knew none better in the whole Order. So Brother 
 Bonaventura held the Generalate for 17 years, and did much 
 good." According to Wadding, it was the Pope who had 
 insisted on this resignation, partly on account of his Joachism, 
 and partly because his efforts to enforce the strict observance of 
 St. Francis's precepts had exasperated a section of the Order : 
 and John gladly obeyed, alleging " his feebleness, his weariness, 
 and his age." 6 Before his fall, John had won golden opinions 
 on all sides : Salimbene tells us of the great respect with which 
 he was treated by princes so different as the emperor Vatatzes ; 
 Henry III of England; and, "as I saw with mine own eyes," 
 St. Louis and his brothers. Even Popes and Cardinals admired 
 him, in spite of his Joachism. The worldly Innocent IV (304) 
 " loved him as his own soul, and ever welcomed him with a kiss 
 on the mouth when he came to see him, and thought to make him 
 a Cardinal, but was himself overtaken by death." Alexander IV 
 had loved him also ; and even now in his disgrace he found 
 powerful defenders. St. Bonaventura did indeed permit the 
 heresy-hunters to bait his old master, and would even have
 
 Convent Friendships. 109 
 
 acquiesced in his imprisonment ; the disgust of the Spirituals 
 at this and other concessions to the " relaxed " party found 
 utterance in the vision of blessed Jacopo dalla Massa (Fioretti 
 chap. 48). It is true that the compiler of the Fioretti takes 
 care, for scandal's sake, to suppress the great General's name : 
 but the earlier versions of the vision in the Actus and the Seven 
 Tribulations tell us plainly that the bitter adversary, with iron 
 nails like razors, who would fain have torn John of Parma to 
 pieces, was no other than Dante's guide through the twelfth 
 Canto of the Paradiso. John was saved not, as in the vision, 
 by St. Francis stooping from heaven, but by the intervention 
 of Cardinal Ottobono, afterwards Pope Adrian V. He was 
 allowed to choose his own place of retreat, and selected the 
 secluded hermitage of Greccio, where St. Francis had spent one 
 Christmas and imitated the Manger of Bethlehem. Even in 
 this his exile, he was still remembered at the Roman Court. (304) 
 " When Master Pietro Ispano 7 was made first a Cardinal and 
 then presently Pope John XXI, being a great dialectician and 
 logician and disputer and theologian, he sent for Brother John of 
 Parma, who also had the like qualities. For the Pope would 
 fain have had him ever at his court, and thought to make him 
 a Cardinal ; but death overtook him before he could fulfil his 
 purpose ; for the vault of his chamber fell upon him and slew 
 him." The next Pope, however, had no less respect for the 
 saintly ex-General. (302) "A long time after [his retirement], 
 Pope Nicholas III took him by the hand and led him familiarly 
 through his palace, saying to him, ' Since thou art a man of much 
 counsel, were it not better for thyself and for thine Order that 
 thou shouldst be a Cardinal here with us at our Court, than that 
 thou shouldst follow the words of fools who prophesy from their 
 own heart? ' So Brother John answered and said to the Pope, 'I 
 care nought for your dignities, for it is sung in praise of every 
 saint : " He sought no glory of earthly dignity, but came to the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. ' ? As concerning counsel I say unto you 
 that I could indeed give some counsel if there were any who would 
 hear me. But in these days little else is treated in the Court 
 of Rome but wars and buffooneries, instead of matters which 
 concern the salvation of men's souls.' The Pope, hearing this, 
 groaned and said, * We are so accustomed to such things that 
 we believe all that we say and do to be profitable.' Then 
 answered Brother John, ' And the blessed [Pope] Gregory, as we 
 read in his Dialogues, would have sighed at such things.' So 
 Brother John was sent away and returned to the hermitage of 
 Greccio where he was wont to dwell." Salimbene, in spite of his
 
 no From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 personal affection, agreed with the criticism passed by a fellow- 
 friar on Brother John, that if he could have given up his Joachism 
 he might have effected some real reform at the Court of Rome. 
 He goes out of his way to account for John's clinging to the creed 
 even after the shock dealt to it by Frederick's premature death 
 in 1250; "Some men so cling to their opinions that they are 
 ashamed afterwards to retract, lest they should seem liars : and 
 therefore they cannot change their minds" (303). He himself 
 once volunteered to go to Greccio and attempt to convert his 
 old master : but he is unwoutedly reticent as to the issue of this 
 journey. Later on, however, he gives us two anecdotes of the 
 holy man's life there: (310) a pair of wildfowl built their nest 
 and hatched their brood under his study desk ; and again, an 
 angel came and served for him at Mass when the poor little 
 scholar, who should have served, had overslept himself. " Much 
 more good," continues Salimbene, " have I seen and heard and 
 known of Brother John of Parma, which would be worthy 
 of record ; yet 1 must omit the rest for brevity's sake and 
 because 1 am in haste to pass on to other things ; and because 
 the Scripture saith, ' Praise not any man before death.' For he 
 hath lived long and he liveth yet in this year 1284 wherein I 
 write." 8 
 
 Five years afterwards, in the year in which Salimbene himself 
 probably died, John of Parma undertook a second journey to 
 Constantinople for the conversion of the Greeks. He started 
 with the blessing of his general, Acquasparta, and of Pope 
 Nicholas IV, himself a Franciscan ; but at Camerino in the 
 Apennines his strength failed him. As he entered the city he 
 murmured the words of the Psalmist, "This is my rest for ever 
 and ever ; here will 1 dwell, for ] have chosen it." A few days 
 later, he breathed his last among the Brethren, and in the presence 
 of many citizens whom the renown of the stranger's sanctity had 
 attracted to the convent. Dante's Ubertino da Casale, who in 
 former days had made a special pilgrimage to Greccio for the sake 
 of the old man's absolution and blessing, records the vivid and 
 immediate renown of the miracles worked at his tomb. " Seldom 
 do I remember to have read, for a long time past, so many mir- 
 acles worked by any saint The less he hath been formally 
 
 approved by that carnal Church which he most bitterly rebuked, 
 the more richly he would seem to have been endowed in the 
 heavenly Church with the manifold working of miracles." To 
 Angelo Clareno he was one of the four great wonder-workers of 
 the latter 13th century witnesses of God's power in an age 
 which had almost lost the power of miracles. A hundred and
 
 Convent Friendships. 1 1 1 
 
 fifty years later, St. Bernardino of Siena calls him Saint John, 
 and alludes to a record which attributes more miracles to him 
 than to any other disciple of St. Francis. His tomb was still 
 hung round with a multitude of votive offerings at the beginning 
 of the XVIIIth century, when they were destroyed by "restor- 
 ers." The original Gothic tomb, which is described as a work 
 of great beauty, had perished at a still earlier restoration. His 
 worship had long been officially recognised, if not by the Pope, 
 at least by the city, so that it remained untouched by that Papal 
 decree of 1675, which forbade the cult of unauthorised saints 
 unless they could show a prescription of at least 100 years. John 
 was formally beatified by Pius VI in 1777, so that Salimbene's 
 friend has now his special Mass and Offices among the services 
 of the Roman Church. 9 
 
 Our chronicler claims also to have known intimately all the 
 twelve " companions " or secretaries whom John wore out suc- 
 cessively by his long journeys on foot from convent to convent ; 
 and he paints most of them with vivid touches (550 foil.). 
 First comes Brother Mark of the swift untiring pen ; " an honest 
 and holy man who lived to a great age ; he was of Modena, and 
 lies buried at Urbino where he coruscates with miracles. He was 
 a good writer and swift and easily understood : and for the 
 labour which he bore as companion to Ministers-general and in 
 writing their letters, he earned for himself the decree in a general 
 chapter that each priest in the Order should, after his decease, 
 say a funeral mass for his soul. He was a special friend of mine, 
 and he dearly loved Brother Bonaventura, the Minister-General, 
 so that after his death, whensoever he recalled his great learning 
 and all the graces that were his, he would burst into tears at the 
 sweetness of that memory. Moreover, when Brother Bonaven- 
 tura was to preach before the clergy, Brother Mark would go to 
 him and say, ' Thou art but an hireling, and when thou preach- 
 edst last, thou knewest not what to say ; but I hope thou wilt 
 not do so this time.' Thus said Brother Mark that he might 
 provoke him to speak the better ; and yet he would write down 
 all Brother Bonaventura's sermons for his own use I But 
 Brother Bonaventura rejoiced when Brother Mark reviled him, 
 for five reasons ; first, because he was a kindly and patient man ; 
 secondly, because therein he imitated St. Francis ; thirdly, be- 
 cause he was assured that the Brother loved him dearly ; fourthly, 
 because he had an occasion of avoiding vainglory ; and fifthly, 
 because it gave him an occasion of greater prudence." Next 
 comes Brother Andrew of Bologna, Minister of the Holy Land 
 and Penitentiary to the Pope. " The third was Brother Walter,
 
 1 1 2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 English by birth, and a truly angelic man.* He was a good 
 singer, slender, and of seemly stature, a goodly man to see, of 
 holy and honest life, well-mannered and learned. Moreover, 
 Brother Walter was sent to stay at the Court of Rome, but he 
 laboured all he could to be removed thence, rather choosing to be 
 afflicted with the people of God than to have the pleasure of sin 
 for a time, esteeming the reproaches of Christ greater riches 
 than the treasure of the Egyptians. Yet I have heard of this 
 Walter that afterwards against his will he was made a Bishop, I 
 know not where. He was my friend. And note that all the 
 comrades of Brother John of Parma were my intimate and 
 familiar friends. The fourth was Brother Bonagiunta of Fab- 
 riano, a good Guardian and a learned man, a good singer, 
 preacher and writer, bold, and of middling stature, and with a 
 face like St. Paul. When I was a novice in the convent of 
 Fano in the year 1238, he was a youth and lived there with me. 
 He was first and last Bishop of Recanati. The fifth was Brother 
 John of Ravenna, big and corpulent and black, a good man, and 
 of honest life. Never saw I a man who so loved to eat macaroni 
 with cheese " yet, as a native of Parma, Salimbene must have 
 had great opportunities in this line. " The sixth was Anselmo 
 Rabuino of the city of Asti in Lombardy, big and black, with 
 the figure and bearing of a prelate, and of honest and holy life ; 
 he was a judge while in the world ; he was Minister of the 
 Province of Terra di Lavoro." The Brethren looked upon him 
 as a saint (315). " The seventh was Brother Bartolomeo Guis- 
 colo of Parma, a great orator and a great Joachite, a courtly 
 and liberal man, who in the world had been a Master in Grammar, 
 of honest and holy life in the Order. He could write, illuminate, 
 and preach. The eighth was Brother Guidolino Gennaro of 
 Parma, a learned man and a good singer, who sang excellently 
 both in harmony and in plainsong. His singing was better than 
 his voice, for he had a very slender voice. He was a good writer, 
 and his hand-writing also was good and fair. And he corrected 
 texts well in the convent at Bologna, for he knew the text of the 
 Bible excellently, and was of honest and holy life, so that the 
 Brethren loved him. The ninth was Brother Giacomino da 
 Berceto, Guardian of the convent at Rimini, a man of honest and 
 holy life, and a good preacher, having a mighty voice. The tenth 
 
 * The text has " Anglicus nalione, et homo vere angelicus:" there can be no 
 doubt that the writer intended a pun here : (cf. Sussex Arch. Coll., vol. vii, p. 219.) 
 Salimbene seems always so interested in his English friends that it is a thousand 
 pities he died a few years too soon to have known the Adam Goddam who (iu 
 spite of his truly medieval nickname) was a pillar of the English province in 1320 
 (Wadding, 1320, 1).
 
 Convent Friendships. 1 1 3 
 
 was Brother Jacopo degli Assandri of Mantua, a man of honest 
 and holy life, and excellently versed in the Decretals, and in giving 
 counsel. The eleventh was Brother Drudo, Minister of Burgundy, 
 lector in theology, who would daily preach to the Brethren con- 
 cerning Divine influences, as I heard with mine own ears, when I 
 was in Burgundy with him. He was a noble and comely man, and 
 of incredibly honest and holy life, for he was marvellously devoted 
 to God beyond all thought of man. The twelfth was Brother 
 Bonaventura da Iseo, who was ancient both in the Order and in 
 age, wise and industrious, and most sagacious, and a man of 
 honest and holy life, and beloved of Ezzelino da Romano ; yet 
 he played the lord (' baronizabat'} above measure, seeing that 
 his mother, as men said, was hostess of a tavern. He wrote a 
 great volume of sermons for the Sundays and Feast-days of the 
 year. His end was praiseworthy ; may his soul rest in peace ! 
 And note that Brother John of Parma, when he was Minister- 
 General, had not all the aforesaid comrades travelling with him 
 at the same time, but successively ; for he would go round and 
 visit the Order, and his comrades could not endure the labour 
 therefore he needed to have a multitude of comrades. These 
 twelve aforesaid had in them much good which I have omitted 
 for brevity's sake." 
 
 But Salimbene was not familiar with saints alone ; we get 
 constant references to such personages as Buondio the Jew 
 (394), or Asdente, the harmless cobbler-prophet of Parma, 
 whom Dante thrust so rudely down to Hell. 10 He dwells, too, 
 with pardonable pride on his noble friends. (467) "In the 
 year 1261 died the Lord Simon de Manfredi. He was my 
 friend, and a good and valiant fighter for the Church party 
 at the time of the Great War." Again, (377) "The Lady 
 Mabel, daughter of the Lord Markesopolo* Pallavicini, was 
 married by her father before I entered the Order, and she came 
 from Soragna to Parma, and lodged near the church of St. Paul. 
 And her father gave her a dowry of 1,000 Imperial, and wedded 
 her to the Lord Azzo, Marquis of Este, 11 who was a good man 
 and courteous, humble and gentle and peaceful, and a friend of 
 mine. For once I read to him the Exposition of the Abbot 
 Joachim on the Burdens of Esaias, and he was alone with me 
 and another Friar Minor under a fig-tree. The Lady Mabel like- 
 wise was devoted to me, and to all men of Religion, and especially 
 to the Friars Minor, to whom she confessed, and whose Offices 
 she always said, and in whose church at Ferrara she was buried 
 
 * ? Marchese Paolo.
 
 1 1 4 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 by her husband's side, and rests in peace. She did much good in 
 her lifetime, and at her death scattered abroad and gave to the 
 poor many alms of her possessions. Seven years I dwelt at 
 Ferrara, where she likewise dwelt. She was a fair lady, wise, 
 clement, benign, courteous, honest, and pious, humble, and ever 
 devoted to God. She was not avaricious of her goods, but freely 
 she gave to the poor. She had a furnace in an inner chamber of 
 her palace, as I have seen with mine own eyes, and she herself 
 made rose-water and gave it to the sick ; wherefore the physicians 
 stationary* and apothecaries loved her the less. But she cared 
 for none of these things, if only she might succour the sick, 
 and please God. Many years she lived with her husband, and 
 was ever barren. But after the death of her husband she caused 
 a house to be built for her beside the convent of the Friars Minor, 
 and there she dwelt in her widowhood. May her soul, through 
 God's mercy, rest in peace, for she was a virtuous lady. After 
 the death of the Marquis she came to Parma, and I was there, 
 and heard from her that she was in marvellous comfort, for that 
 she was hard by the convent of the Friars Minor, and the church 
 of the glorious Virgin. Never saw I any lady who so brought to 
 my mind the Countess Matilda, 12 according to all that I have 
 found written of her." Her father, Markesopolo, had long since 
 found himself unable to keep up his old baronial dignity in the 
 new and prosperous Parma, " for he was noble and great-hearted, 
 and therefore took it ill that any man of the people soever, 
 whether of the city or of the country around, might send an 
 ambassador with a red fillet on his brow, and draw him to the 
 Palazzo Communale to go to law with him before the judges." 
 So he went off and fought in Greece, where he was treacherously 
 slain in his own house : ' for all things obey the power of money.' 13 
 Moreover, the Lord Kubino, his brother, dwelt in Soragna, and 
 had to wife the Lady Ermengarda da Palude. She was a fair lady, 
 but wanton, of whom we might say with Solomon, ' A golden ring 
 in a swine's snout, a woman fair and foolish.' The Lord Rubino 
 was old and full of days, and sent for me in the year of the 
 great mortality (1259), and confessed to me and made his soul 
 right with God, and died in good old age, passing from this 
 world to the Father. But his wife took another husband, one 
 Egidio Scorza ; and afterwards she fell down from an upper 
 chamber, and died and was buried," For Salimbene is always 
 laudably anxious to bring his heroes to a good end, and to record 
 how his villains had their reward at last. 
 
 * i.e., those who kept ahopa.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 The Siege of Parma. 
 
 IN spite of the distant thunder of the Brother Elias storm, 
 Salimbene's first years in those Tuscan convents seem to 
 have been among the most peaceful of his life. At Cremona, 
 however, in the ninth year after his reception, he found himself 
 a close spectator of one of the most savage and prolonged wars 
 in civilized history. The conflicts of thirteenth century Italy 
 between Pope and Emperor on the one hand, and jealous cities 
 on the other, have seldom been surpassed in horror among 
 Christian nations. The bitterest period of those conflicts began 
 with the renewed excommunication and deposition of Frederick 
 II by Innocent IV in 1245. Salimbene describes Frederick's 
 spirit at this time as that of " a bear robbed of her whelps." 
 The war speedily degenerated into a chaos of sickening atrocities 
 and reprisals : I give a few of the entries as specimens. 
 
 In 1239 " The Emperor caused castles of wood to be made, to 
 fight with the men of Brescia : and on those castles he placed 
 the captives whom he had taken. But the men of Brescia 
 smote the said castles with their mangonels, without any hurt 
 to the captives who were therein ; and they for their part hanged 
 up by the arms, without the palisade of their town, such of 
 the Emperor's men as they had taken captive " (95). In 
 1246 "Tebaldo Francesco and many other barons of Apulia 
 rebelled against the deposed Emperor Frederick ; and after a 
 long siege they were taken in the castle of Cappozio, and miserably 
 tormented, both men, women, and little children." In the 
 year following, " Ezzelino laid waste the whole diocese of Parma, 
 on this side of the Lencia toward the castle of Bersello : and 
 the Mantuans for their part burnt the whole diocese of Cremona 
 from Torricella downwards. For it was a fierce war, and tangled, 
 and perilous" (178). In a war of this description, the first 
 advantage would seem to lie with the more barbarous and 
 unscrupulous of the two parties : and there can be little doubt 
 that, on the whole, this bad pre-eminence was with the Ghibel- 
 lines. With the help of his unspeakable lieutenant Ezzelino,
 
 1 1 6 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Frederick had devastated the north of Italy, and was already 
 thinking of crossing the Alps to attack the Pope in his refuge 
 at Lyons, when the sudden revolt of Salimbene's own native city 
 struck the blow which was destined to ruin his hopes. It was the 
 old story : the Imperialists of Parma had in the previous year 
 expelled all the principal Guelfs from the city, and burnt their 
 houses ; so that these desperate men, having nothing further to 
 lose, led a forlorn hope which turned the whole tide of the war. 
 (188) "In the year of our Lord 1247 a few banished knights, 
 dwelling at Piacenza, who were valiant, vigorous, and strong, 
 and most skilled in war these men were in bitterness of spirit, 
 both because their houses in Parma had been torn to the ground, 
 and because it is an evil life to wander as guest from house to 
 house 1 for they were exiles and banished men, having great 
 households and but little money, for they had left Parma suddenly 
 lest the Emperor should catch them in his toils these men, I 
 say, came from Piacenza and entered Parma, and expelled the 
 Emperor's party on the 15th day of June, slaying the Podesta 
 of Parma, who was my acquaintance and friend, and dearly 
 beloved of the Brethren Minor. 
 
 Now there were many reasons why these banished men were 
 easily able to take the city . . . The third reason is that on that 
 day the Lord Bartolo Tavernario gave his daughter in marriage 
 to a certain Lord of Brescia, who had come to Parma to fetch 
 her ; and those who met the exiles as they came to attack the 
 city had eaten at that banquet, so that they were full of wine 
 and over-much feasting ; and they arose from table and fondly 
 thought to overthrow all at the first onset. Seeing therefore that 
 they were as men drunk with wine, their enemies slew and 
 scattered them in flight. The fourth is that the city of Parma 
 was wholly unfenced, and open in all directions. The fifth is 
 that those who came to invade the city folded their hands on 
 their breasts, thus making the sign of the Cross to all whom 
 they met, saying, ' For the love of God and the Blessed Virgin 
 His Mother, who is our Lady in this city, may it please you that 
 we return to our own city, whence we were expelled and banished 
 without fault of our own ; and we come back with peace to all, 
 nor are we minded to do harm to any man.' The men of Parma 
 who had met them unarmed along the street, hearing this, were 
 moved to pity by their humility, and said to them, ' Enter the 
 city in peace, in the name of the Lord, for our hand also shall 
 be with you in all these things.' The sixth is that they who 
 dwelt in the city did not concern themselves with these matters, 
 for they neither held with those who had come in, nor did they
 
 The Siege of Parma. 117 
 
 fight for the Emperor ; but bankers or money-changers sat at 
 their tables, and men of other arts worked still at their posts as 
 though nought were." Our author presently goes on to describe, 
 in the words which I have already quoted in full, that horrible 
 devastation of the country which he expressly dates from " the 
 time when Parma withdrew from Frederick's allegiance, and 
 clave to the Church." 
 
 To Salimbene, this revolt was but a natural consequence of 
 the Pope's ban, which had reduced the Emperor to the state of 
 " a bird whose wing feathers have been plucked away." But 
 the blow only roused Frederick to greater exertions. His son 
 Enzio, who was the nearest imperialist commander, might have 
 retrieved the disaster by a sudden counterstroke : but he lacked 
 the necessary nerve. (193) " When King Enzio heard that the 
 Guelf exiles had entered Parma by force, leaving the siege of 
 Quinzano, he came by a forced night march, not singing but 
 groaning inwardly, as is the wont of an army returning from a 
 rout. I lived in those days in the convent of the Friars Minor 
 at Cremona, wherefore I knew all these things well. For at 
 early dawn the men of Cremona were assembled forthwith with 
 the King to a Council, which lasted even to high tierce (i.e. past 
 9 o'clock) ; after which they ate hurriedly and went forth to the 
 very last man, with the Carroccio in their van. There remained 
 not in Cremona one man who was able to march and fight in 
 battle ; and I am fully persuaded that if they had marched 
 without delay to Parma and quitted themselves like men, they 
 would have recovered the city. For if one enemy knew how 
 it fared in all things with his enemy, he might oft-times smite 
 him ; but by the will of God King Enzio halted with the army 
 of Cremona by the Taro Morto, and came not to Parma, that 
 the Lord might bring evil upon them. For he wished to wait 
 there until his father should come from Turin. Meanwhile 
 succour came daily from all parts to the men of Parma who had 
 entered the city : and the citizens made themselves a ditch 
 and a palisade, that their city might be shut in against the 
 enemy. Then the Emperor, all inflamed with wrath and fury 
 at that which had befallen him, came to Parma ; and in the 
 district called Grola, wherein is great plenty of vineyards and 
 good wine (for the wine of that land is most excellent), he built 
 a city, surrounded with great trenches, which also he called 
 Victoria, as an omen of that which should come to pass. And 
 the moneys which he minted there were called Victorini; and 
 the great church was called after St. Victor. So there Frederick 
 lodged with his army, and King Enzio with the army of Cremona ;
 
 1 1 8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and the Emperor summoned all his friends to come in haste to 
 his succour. And the first who came was the Lord Ugo Boterio, 
 a citizen of Parma, sister's son to Pope Innocent IV ; who, 
 being Podesta of Pavia at that time, came with all the men of 
 Pavia whom he deemed fit for war. Neither by prayers nor 
 by promises could the Pope tear away this nephew of his from 
 the love of Frederick ; and yet the Pope loved his mother best 
 of all his three sisters for the other two were likewise married 
 in Parma. 
 
 After him came Ezzelino da Romano, who in those days was 
 Lord of the Mark of Treviso, and he brought with him a vast 
 army. This Ezzelino was feared worse than the devil : he held it 
 of no account to slay men, women, and children, and he wrought 
 such cruelty as men have scarce heard. On one day he caused 
 11,000 men of Padua to be burnt in the field of Saint George in 
 the city of Verona ; and when fire had been set to the house in 
 which they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport around them 
 with his knights. It would be too long to relate his cruelties, 
 for they would fill a great book. I believe most certainly that 
 as the Son of God wished to have one specially whom He might 
 make like unto Himself, namely St. Francis, so the Devil chose 
 Ezzelino. It was of the blessed Francis that it was written 
 that to one servant He gave five talents ; for never was there 
 but one man in this world, namely the blessed Francis, on whom 
 Christ impressed the five wounds in likeness of Himself. 2 For, 
 as was told me by Brother Leo, his comrade, who was present 
 when he was washed for burial, he seemed in all things like a 
 man crucified and taken down from the cross. 
 
 Furthermore, after Ezzelino many nations came to Frederick's 
 succour, as the men of Reggie and Modena, who were for the 
 Emperor in their several cities, the men of Bergamo also, and 
 other cities, as well of Tuscany as of Lombardy, and other parts 
 of the world which held rather with the Emperor than with the 
 Church. And they came from Burgundy and Calabria and Apulia 
 and Sicily, and from Terra di Lavoro ; and Greeks, and Saracens 
 from Nocera, and well-nigh from every nation under the sun. 
 Wherefore that word of Esaias might have been said to him, ' Thou 
 hast multiplied the nation, and hast not increased the joy ' : and 
 this for many reasons. First, with the aid of his whole host he 
 could but beset that one road from Parma to Borgo San Donnino ; 
 while the rest of the city felt nothing of the siege. Again, 
 whereas the Emperor thought in his heart utterly to destroy 
 the city and to transfer it to the city of Victoria which he had 
 founded, and to sow salt in token of barrenness over the destroyed
 
 The Siege of Parma. 1 1 9 
 
 Parma ; then the women of Parma, learning this, (and especially 
 the rich, the noble, and the powerful), betook themselves with 
 one accord to pray for the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that 
 she might help to free their city ; for her name and title were 
 held in the greatest reverence by the Parmese in their cathedral 
 church. And, that they might the better gain her ear, they made a 
 model of the city in solid silver, which I have seen, and which 
 was offered as a gift to the Blessed Virgin ; and there were to 
 be seen the greatest and chiefest buildings of the city, fashioned 
 of solid silver, as the cathedral church, the Baptistery, the 
 Bishop's palace, the Palazzo Communale, and many other 
 buildings which showed forth the image of the city. The Mother 
 prayed her Son : the Son heard the Mother, to whom of right He 
 could deny nothing, according to the word which is figuratively 
 contained in Holy Scripture, * My mother, ask : for I must not 
 turn away thy face.' These are the words of Solomon to his 
 mother. And when the Mother of Mercy had prayed her Son 
 to free her city of Parma from that multitude of nations which 
 was gathered together against it, and when the night was now 
 close at hand, the Son said to His Mother, ' Hast thou seen all 
 this exceeding great multitude? Behold, I will deliver them 
 into thy hand this day, that thou mayest know that I am the 
 Lord.'" In repeating this dialogue between the Virgin Mary 
 and her Son, Salimbene is of course only a child of his time. It 
 was a commonplace of thirteenth century theology, that " it 
 was not right for the Son to deny His Mother aught" : and a 
 far more blasphemous dialogue to the same effect, which is 
 repeatedly recorded by the Franciscan and Dominican writers, 
 may be found in the first chapter of " Lives of the Brethren." 
 More popular ideas of the Virgin Mary's power over her Son are 
 exemplified by Caesarius's story of the simple-minded Cistercian 
 lay-brother who was heard to pray, "In truth, Lord, if Thou 
 free me not from this temptation, I will complain of Thee to Thy 
 Mother." The convent was much edified by the lay-brother's 
 simplicity, and by our Lord's humility in condescending to 
 grant a prayer couched in such terms. 3 We have here only the 
 grosser side of the rapidly-growing materialism : the great 
 encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais, who compiled his work with 
 the help of St. Louis' library, writes of a Pope as saying that 
 " Mary, the Mother of Jesus ... is the only hope of reconciliation 
 for [sinful] man, the main cause of eternal salvation " (Spec. 
 Hist. vii. 95). 
 
 Meanwhile the Emperor pushed the siege with an energy 
 proportionate to the bitterness of his disappointment. Salimbene
 
 1 20 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 had returned bv this time to his native city probably among 
 those Guelf exiles from Cremona of whom he speaks so feelingly 
 below : and here he found plenty of exciting incidents : for 
 ( 1 96) " men went out daily from either side to fight : crossbowmen, 
 archers, and slingers, as I saw with mine own eyes : and ruffians 
 also daily scoured the whole diocese of Parma, plundering and 
 burning on all sides : and likewise did the men of Parma to 
 those of Cremona and Reggio. The Mantuans also came in 
 those days and burnt Casalmaggiore to the ground, as I saw 
 with mine own eyes. And every morning the Emperor came 
 with his men, and beheaded three or four, or as many more as 
 seemed good to him, of the men of Parma and Modena and 
 Reggio who were of the Church party, and whom he kept in 
 bonds : and all this he did on the shingles by the riverside within 
 sight of the men of Parma who were in the city, that he might 
 vex their souls. The Emperor put many innocent men to an 
 evil death, as we see in the case of the Lord Andrea di Trego, 
 who was a noble knight of Cremona, and of Conrad di Berceto, 
 who was a clerk, and valiant in arms, whom he tortured in divers 
 manners with fire and water and manifold torments. The 
 Emperor was wont to slay of these captives at his will ; and 
 especially when he made assault with outrageous words against 
 the city, and when the battle went against him, then would he 
 refresh his soul in the blood of these captives. At one time also 
 certain knights of the Mark of Ancona deserted the Emperor, 
 and fled to Parma ; because at the beginning of the rebellion 
 the Emperor caused many knights of the Mark to be put in 
 ward as hostages in the city of Cremona. And a messenger 
 came from the Emperor bidding five of these knights, even as 
 they washed their hands before supper, to mount their horses 
 forthwith and ride with him to the Emperor. And when they 
 were come to a certain field called Mosa, which is without the 
 city of Cremona, he led them to the gallows, and they were 
 hanged. And these butchers said, ' This is the Emperor's 
 command, for ye are traitors ' ; yet they had come to his succour. 
 On the day following the Brethren Minor came and took them 
 down and buried them ; and scarce could they drive away the 
 wolves from eating them while they yet hung on the gallows. 
 All this I saw, for I lived at Cremona in those days, and in 
 Parma likewise. It would be too long to recount all those of 
 the Church party whom he slew and caused to be slain in those 
 days. For he sent the Lord Gerardo di Canale of Parma into 
 Apulia, and caused him to be drowned in the depths of the sea 
 with a mill-stone at his neck ; and yet he had been at first one
 
 The Siege of Parma. 121 
 
 of his nearest friends, and had held many offices from him ; and 
 ever he remained with him in the army without Parma. And 
 the Emperor had but this one cause of suspicion against him, 
 that the tower of his mansion in Parma was not destroyed. 4 
 Wherefore the Emperor would sometimes say to him, laughing 
 in false and feigned jest, ' The men of Parma love us much, my 
 Lord Gerard, for that whereas they tore down in their city the 
 other Ghibelline buildings, they have as yet destroyed neither 
 your tower, nor my palace on the Arena.' Wherein he spoke 
 ironically, but the Lord Gerard understood him not. When 
 therefore I left Parma to go into France, I passed through the 
 village wherein the Lord Gerard then lived ; and he saw me 
 gladly, saying that he was of much profit to the citizens of 
 Parma. And I said to him * Since the Emperor is besieging 
 Parma, be ye wholly with him or wholly with the citizens, and 
 halt not between two opinions, for it is not to your profit.' Yet 
 he hearkened not unto me ; wherefore we may say of him with 
 the Wise Man * The way of a fool is right in his own eyes : but 
 he that is wise hearkenth unto counsels.' And note that the 
 Lord Bernard, son of Rolando Rossi of Parma, who was of 
 kindred with the Lord Pope Innocent IV (for he had the Pope's 
 sister to wife), better understood the Emperor's ironical speech 
 than did the Lord Gerard di Canale. For when, as he rode 
 one day with the Emperor, his horse stumbled, then the Emperor 
 said to him, ' My Lord Bernard, ye have an evil horse, but I hope 
 and promise you that within a few days 1 will give you a better, 
 which shall not stumble.' And the Lord Bernard understood 
 that he spake of hanging him on the gallows : wherefore he was 
 inflamed with indignation against the Emperor, and fled from 
 before his face. 5 Yet the Lord Bernard was the Emperor's 
 gossip and most intimate friend, and well-beloved of him, and 
 when he would enter into his chamber, no man ever denied him 
 the door. But the Emperor could keep no man's friendship ; 
 nay, rather, he boasted that he had never nourished a pig, but 
 that at last he had its grease, which was as much as to say that 
 he had never raised any to riches and honour but that in the 
 end he had drained his purse or his treasure. Which was a 
 most churlish saying, yet we see an example thereof in Pier delle 
 \ f igne, who was the greatest counsellor and writer of State 
 papers in the Emperor's court, and was called by the Emperor 
 his chancellor. And yet the Emperor had raised him from the 
 dust ; and afterwards he returned him to the same dust, for he 
 found an occasion of a word and a calumny against him, which 
 was as follows. The Emperor had sent the judge Taddeo and
 
 122 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Pier delle Vigne, whom he loved above all, and who stood above 
 all others in his court, and certain others he had sent with them 
 to Lyons to Pope Innocent IV, to hinder the said Pope from 
 hastening to depose him ; for he had heard that to this end the 
 Council was being gathered together. And he had straitly 
 charged them that none should speak with the Pope without 
 his fellow, or without the presence of others. But after they 
 were returned, his comrades accused Pier delle Vigne that he 
 had often had familiar colloquy with the Pope without them. 
 The Emperor therefore sent and caused him to be taken and 
 slain by an evil death, saying in the words of Job ' They that 
 were sometime my counsellors have abhorred me : and he whom 
 I loved most is turned against me.' For in those days the 
 Emperor was easily troubled in his mind, because he had been 
 deposed from the Empire, and Parma had fostered the spirit of 
 rebellion against him. 
 
 So Frederick's affliction and cursedness wherewith he was 
 inflamed against Parma, endured from the end of the month 
 of June 1247 to Tuesday the 18th of February 1248, on which 
 day his city of Victoria was taken. For the men of Parma went 
 forth from their city, knights and commons side by side, fully 
 harnessed for war ; and their very women and girls went out 
 with them ; youths and maidens, old men and young together. 
 They drove the Emperor by force from Victoria with all his 
 horse and foot ; and many were slain there, and many taken 
 and led to Parma. And they freed their own captives, whom 
 the Emperor kept in bonds in Victoria. And the Carroccio of 
 Cremona, which was in Victoria, they brought to Parma, and 
 placed it in triumph in the Baptistery. But those who loved 
 not the men of Cremona, (as the Milanese, and Mantuans, and 
 many others whom the men of Cremona had offended,) when 
 they came to see the Baptistery, and saw the Carroccio of their 
 enemies, carried off the ornaments of ' Berta ' (for so was that 
 Carroccio called) to keep them as relics. So the wheels alone 
 and the framework of the carriage remained on the pavement 
 of the Baptistery : and the mast or pole for the standard stood 
 upright against the wall. Moreover the men of Parma spoiled 
 the Emperor of all his treasure for he had a mighty treasure 
 of gold and silver and precious stones, vessels and vestments. 
 And they took all his ornaments and his imperial crown, which 
 Avas of great weight and value, for it was all of gold, inlaid with 
 precious stones, with many images of goldsmith's work standing 
 out, and much graven work. It was as great as a cauldron, for 
 it was rather for dignity and for great price than as an ornament
 
 The Siege of Parma. 123 
 
 for his head ; for it would have hidden all his head, face and all, 
 had it not been raised to stand higher by means of a cunningly 
 disposed piece of cloth. This crown I have held in my hands, 
 for it was kept in the sacristy of the Cathedral of the Blessed 
 Virgin in the city of Parma. It was found by a little man of 
 mean stature, who was called ironically Cortopasso ( Short-step), 
 and who bore it openly on his fist as men bear a falcon, showing 
 it to all who could see it, in honour of the victory they had 
 gained, and to the eternal disgrace of Frederick. For whatso- 
 ever each could seize became his own, nor did any dare to tear 
 aught away from another : nor was a single contentious or injur- 
 ious word heard there, which was a great marvel. So the afore- 
 said crown was bought by the men of Parma from this their fellow- 
 citizen, and they gave him for it 200 Imperial, and a house near 
 the Church of Santa Cristina, where of old days had been a pool 
 to wash horses. And they made a statute that whosoever had 
 aught of the treasure of Victoria should have the half for himself, 
 and should give half to the community : wherefore poor men 
 were marvellously enriched with the spoil of so rich a prince. 
 
 Now the Emperor's special effects which appertained to 
 war, as his pavilions and things of that kind, were taken by the 
 Legate, Gregorio da Montelungo ; but the images and the relics 
 which he possessed were placed in the sacristy of the Cathedral 
 Church of the Blessed Virgin, to be kept there. And note that 
 of the treasures which were found in Victoria little remained 
 in Parma ; for merchants came from divers parts to buy them, 
 and had them good cheap, and carried them away namely, 
 gold and silver vessels, gems, unions, pearls and precious stones, 
 garments of purple and silk, and of all things known that are 
 for the use and ornament of men. Note also that many treasures 
 in gold and silver and precious stones remained hidden in jars, 
 chests, and sepulchres, in the spot where the city of Victoria 
 was, and are there even unto these days, although their hiding- 
 places are unknown. Note also that, after the destruction of 
 Victoria, each man recognised so clearly the place in which 
 aforetime he had had his vineyard, that no word of contention 
 or quarrel arose among them. Moreover, at that time when 
 Frederick was put to flight by the men of Parma, the Scripture 
 was fulfilled which saith * As a tempest that passeth, so the 
 wicked shall be no more.' " Here Salimbene enters upon a 
 lengthy exposition of the eleventh chapter of Daniel, the detailed 
 fulfilment of which he sees in Frederick's career, and especially 
 in the fact that his own illegitimate son Manfred poisoned him 
 by means of a clyster, and was himself slain in battle by Charles 
 of Anjou.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 The Guelfs Victorious, 
 
 rTMiOUGH Frederick never recovered from the blow that fell 
 I upon him at Victoria, he still hovered about Parma, ravag- 
 ing the country and waiting for some unguarded moment. The 
 Pope vainly attempted to stir up St. Louis against him. Mean- 
 while the war raged with varying success. Bernardo Rossi was 
 slain in battle, to the disappointment of Frederick, who had 
 hoped to take him alive and put out his eyes. Next year, 
 however, the tide turned again and the Emperor's natural son 
 Enzio was taken by the Bolognese. (329) " In the year 1249 
 the Podesta of Genoa came to our convent on the day of Pentecost 
 to hear Mass. And I was there ; and the sacristan was Brother 
 Pentecost, a holy, honest, and good man, who would have rung 
 the bell for the Podesta's coming : but he said, ' Hear first my 
 tidings, for the men of Bologna have taken King Enzio, with a 
 great multitude of the men of Cremona and Modena, and German 
 soldiers.' Now this King Enzio was a valiant man, and bold and 
 stout-hearted ; and doughty in arms, and a man of solace when 
 he would, and a maker of songs : and in war he was wont to 
 expose himself most boldly to perils. He was a comely man, of 
 middle height ; many years the men of Bologna kept him in prison, 
 even to the end of his life. And when one day the gaolers would 
 not give him to eat, Brother Albertino of Verona, who was a 
 mighty Preacher in our Order, went and besought them to give 
 him to eat for God's love and his. And when they gave no ear 
 to his petition, he said to them, ' I will play at dice with you, and if 
 I win, I may then bring him meat.' So they played, and he won, 
 and gave the king meat, and remained in familiar converse with 
 him : and all who heard this commended the friar's charity, 
 courtesy, and liberality. 1 Moreover, the Lord Guido da Sesso, 
 who was the chief of the Emperor's party in the city of Reggio, 
 perished in the flight [of Enzio's army], for he was smothered 
 with his war-horse in the cesspool of the leper-house of Modena. 
 He was a most bitter enemy of the Church party, so that once
 
 The Guelfs Victorious. 1 2 5 
 
 when many had been taken by the King and doomed to the 
 gallows, and would fain have confessed their sins, he would grant 
 them no respite, saying, ' Ye have no need to confess ; for, being 
 of the Church party, ye are saints, and will go forthwith to 
 Paradise : ' so they were hanged unshriven. Moreover, in those 
 days he would enter with other malefactors into the convent of 
 the Friars Minor ; and calling together the Brethren in the 
 Chapter-house he would demand of each in turn whence he came ; 
 and he let write their names by his notary, saying to each, ' Go 
 thou thy ways, and thou likewise go thy ways, and never dare to 
 appear again in this convent or this city.' And so they expelled 
 all but a few who kept the convent, and even these, as they went 
 begging through the city for their daily needs, were reviled and 
 slandered by him and his men, as though they carried false 
 letters, and were traitors to the Emperor. Neither the Friars 
 Minor nor the Preachers dared to enter the cities of Modena or 
 Reggio or Cremona on their journeys, and if ever any had 
 chanced to enter unwittingly, they were led to the Palazzo Com- 
 munale and kept in ward ; and having been fed with the bread 
 of affliction and the water of anguish for certain days, they were 
 opprobriously driven out, cast forth and tormented, or even slain. 
 For many were tortured in Cremona and in Borgo San Donnino. 
 In Modena they took the Friars Preachers who had iron moulds 
 for making holy wafers, and led them with many indignities to 
 the Palazzo Communale, saying that they bore stamps to coin 
 false and counterfeit money. Nor did they spare even the 
 Brethren of their own party whose kin were said to be wholly on 
 the Emperor's side, and who themselves also persevered therein ; 
 for Brother Jacopo of Pavia was expelled and thrust forth with 
 ignominy, and Brother John of Bibbiano and Brother Jacopo of 
 Bersello among others; and, in a word, all in the convent of 
 Cremona who were of the Church party, were dismissed : and I 
 was present in that year. Moreover, they kept Brother Ugolino 
 da Cavazza long waiting in ward at the gate of the city of 
 Reggio, and would not suffer him to enter in, though he had 
 several blood-brethren of the Emperor's party in the city. To 
 speak shortly, they were men of Satan, the chief of whom in 
 malice was one Giuliano da Sesso, a man grown old in evil days, 
 who caused some of the Fogliani family to be hanged, and many 
 others to be slain because they were of the Church party ; and 
 he gloried in these things, saying to his fellows, ' See how we 
 treat these bandits.' This Giuliano was in truth a limb of the 
 fiend ; wherefore God struck him with palsy, so that he was 
 wholly withered up on one side, and his eye started from his
 
 1 26 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 head, yet without leaving its socket, but jutting forth outwardly 
 like an arrow, which was loathsome to see. Moreover, he 
 became so stinking that none dared come near him for his 
 superfluity of nastiness, except a certain German damsel whom 
 he kept as a leman, and whose beauty was so great that he who 
 beheld her without pleasure was held most austere. This Giuil- 
 iano said in full assembly that it were better to eat quicklime 
 than to have peace with the Church party, though he himself 
 fed on good capons, while the poor were dying of hunger. Yet 
 the prosperity of the wicked endureth not long in this world : 
 for presently the Church party began to prosper ; and then this 
 wretch was driven forth and carried secretly from the city, and 
 died a mass of corruption, excommunicate and accursed ; un- 
 houseled, disappointed, unanel'd. He was buried in a ditch in the 
 town of Campagnola." 
 
 In 1250 Frederick gained his last victory against the rebellious 
 city, on that very site of Victoria where his own army had been 
 defeated. He drove them back in such headlong rout that his 
 men would have entered the city pell-mell with the fugitives, 
 had not the Blessed Virgin intervened by breaking the bridge 
 and drowning Guelfs and Ghibellines together in the moat. As 
 it was, the Ghibellines took the Parmese Carroccio with 3,000 
 prisoners. (335) "They bound their captives on the gravel of 
 the River Taro, as the Lord Ghiaratto told me, who was bound 
 there himself; and they led them to Cremona and cast them 
 chained into dungeons. There for vengeance sake, and to extort 
 ransom, they practised many outrages on them, hanging them 
 up in the dungeons by their hands and their feet, and drawing 
 out their teeth in terrible and horrible wise, and laying toads in 
 their mouths. For in those days were inventors of new torments, 
 and the men of Cremona were most cruel to the captives of 
 Parma. But the Parmese of the Emperor's party were still 
 worse, for they slew many ; but in process of time the Church 
 party in Parma avenged themselves wondrously." 
 
 An interesting side-light is thrown on this account of Salim- 
 bene's by the very impartial contemporary Chronicle of Parma 
 published by Muratori (Scriptores vol. ix. p. 771 foil.) It tells us 
 of savage reprisals on the part of the citizens : and how " many 
 [imperialists] were caught coming in as spies hidden in hay or 
 straw waggons, or in casks and chests : and such were tortured, 
 confessed, and were burned on the river-beach of the city. And 
 many women were thus caught, put to torment, and burned." 
 The Emperor, adds the Chronicler, beheaded only some ten or 
 twelve of his prisoners, and spared the rest, partly at the prayer
 
 The Guelfs Victorious. 127 
 
 of the men of Pavia, partly because he recognised the uselessness 
 of such executions. But he kept in bonds about a thousand of 
 his Guelf prisoners : and " their kinsfolk rejoiced rather in their 
 death than in their life . . . for oftentimes these prisoners died 
 in the aforesaid prisons, slain with stench and terror." In the 
 year 1253 peace was made and all prisoners were released : but 
 of the thousand only 318 returned to their homes, "since all the 
 rest had died in the aforesaid prisons by reason of their grievous 
 and insupportable torments. For daily they were set to the rack, 
 and hanged upon the engines as upon a cross ; and oft-times 
 men denied them food ; and they suffered from the stench of 
 the corpses, for the dead were never drawn forth from prison 
 until the living had first paid the tax imposed upon them, and 
 [meanwhile] men gave them no bread : so that the living oft- 
 times hid their bread and other victuals among the bodies of the 
 dead, lest their cruel jailors should find them when they locked 
 up the prison. And the aforesaid prisons wherein the men of the 
 Church party lay bound were called ' The Hell ' ; and such 
 indeed they were. The dead had no sepulture, but were cast 
 into the Po." 3 The Chronicler expressly mentions that the death 
 of Bernardo Rossi in the battle of 1248 was avenged by the 
 cold-blooded execution of four of the chief Ghibelline captives 
 in Parma ; and that the Emperor retaliated by transporting 
 fourteen of his Guelf prisoners to his A pulian dungeons. 
 
 All this time the Parmese Ghibellines had taken up their 
 headquarters at Borgo San Donnino, a little town some fourteen 
 miles N.VV. of Parma on the Emilian Way. They long counted 
 on some such sudden turn of fortune's wheel as that by which 
 they themselves had lost the city : for they had still partisans 
 among the citizens. (371) " But in process of time the Parmese 
 exiles at Borgo San Donnino besought their fellow-citizens of the 
 Church party that they would vouchsafe to take them into the 
 city again, for God's sake and the blessed and glorious Virgin's : 
 for they would have peace, since the Emperor was now dead. So 
 those made peace with them and brought them into their city, 
 as I saw with mine own eyes. But they, seeing their houses 
 destroyed (for this the Church party had done when they expelled 
 them) began to contend again and to attack the Church party ; 
 and seeing that Uberto Pallavicino was lord of Cremona and of 
 many other cities, they thought in their hearts to make him lord 
 of Parma also. At this the citizens quaked as a rush quakes in 
 the stream, and set themselves to hide many of their dearest 
 possessions. I also hid my books (for I lived at Parma then), 
 and many citizens of the Church party purposed to depart from
 
 il8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the city of their own free will, lest Pallavicino should come and 
 catch them and spoil their goods. Meanwhile, Parma was full 
 of rumours of his coming, and yet he came not so soon, since he 
 had other threads to weave. For he purposed first to take 
 Colurnio and Borgo San Donnino (as indeed he did), that he might 
 enter Parma more triumphantly afterwards : seeing that the 
 Guelfs, driven out from Parma, would have no place of refuge, 
 and would thus receive checkmate after cherishing the serpent 
 in their bosom. But suddenly in the meanwhile a man rose up 
 against him, who dwelt hard by the bridge-head of Parma. This 
 was a tailor, Giovanni Barisello by name, the son of a farmer 
 (such as the Parmese call mezzadro) on the estate of theTebaldi. 
 For he took in fiis hands a cross and a book of the Gospels, and 
 went through Parma from house to house of the Ghibelline party, 
 and made each swear obedience to the Pope's bidding and to the 
 Church party ; for he had with him a full five hundred armed men 
 who followed him as their chief. Wherefore many swore obedience 
 to the Church and the Pope, partly of their free will, partly for 
 fear of the armed men whom they saw : and such as would not 
 swear went forth hastily from Parma to dwell at Borgo San 
 Donnino : for whensoever there was a division between the 
 citizens of Parma, the exiles had that city of refuge ever at hand ; 
 whose citizens rejoiced in the discords of Parma, and would have 
 rejoiced yet more to see her utterly destroyed. For they of Borgo 
 never loved Parma : nay rather, when Parma was at war, all the 
 ruffians of Lombardy would gather together there, and Borgo 
 would receive them gladly for the destruction and confusion of 
 Parma. Yet the Parmele had done well to Borgo, as I saw with 
 mine own eyes, for I lived there a whole year in 1259, when the 
 great plague was throughout Italy. The first benefit was, that 
 they gave them a Podesta yearly from Parma and paid the half of 
 his salary. The second, that the citizens might have at Borgo, 
 without contradiction of the Parmese, the market of all the land 
 on their side of the river Taro, which is five miles distant froTh 
 Parma : and thug they had ten miles of the Bishopric of Parma 
 for their market, and the Parmese five miles only. The third 
 was, that the Parmese defended them if they were at war with 
 the Cremonese or others. The fourth, that, though there were 
 but two noble houses in Borgo, the Pinkilini and the Verzoli, 
 and the rest were citizens and rich farmers, yet the Parmese 
 would marry their noble ladies among them, which was no small 
 matter. I think I have seen there a score of ladies from Parma, 
 clothed in fur of vair and in scarlet cloth. In spite of all these 
 benefits the men of Borgo were ungrateful, and well they deserved
 
 The Guelfs Victorious. 1 29 
 
 their destruction by the men of Parma when a fit time was come. 
 So this Giovanni Barisello, as he went through Parma and made 
 all the suspects swear, came to the house of the lord Rolando di 
 Guido Bovi, who dwelt at the bridge-head by the church of San 
 Gervasio ; and, calling him forth from his house, he bade him 
 swear fealty to the Church party without further delay, or else 
 depart from Parma as he loved his life. This lord was of the 
 Ghibelline party, and had been Podesta of many cities under the 
 Emperor : yet when he saw so great a multitude gathered together 
 and heard their demands and their threats, he did as the Wise 
 Man saith ' The prudent man saw the evil and hid himself : the 
 simple passed on, and suffered loss.' For he took the oath, 
 saying ' I swear to stand by and obey the precepts of the Pontiff 
 of Rome, and to cleave to the Church party all the days of my 
 life, to the shame of that other most miserable and utterly filthy 
 (merdifcrosac.) party of all that are beneath the sky.' This he 
 said of his own, the Emperor's party, for that they had suffered 
 themselves to be basely trodden under foot by such men. And 
 the Parmese Guelfs loved him from thenceforth, for it was 
 reckoned to his honour. Now this Giovanni Barisello who rose 
 up in Parma was a man poor and wise, who delivered the city 
 by his wisdom : wherefore the citizens were not ungrateful but 
 repaid him with many kindnesses. First, they turned his 
 poverty to riches ; secondly, they gave him a wife of the noble 
 family of Cornazano ; thirdly, they ordained that he should 
 ever be of the Council without further election, for he had mother- 
 wit and was a gracious speaker ; fourthly, they permitted him 
 to found and lead a gild called after his own name, on condition 
 that it should ever be to the honour and profit of the Commune. 
 This gild lasted many years ; but a certain Podesta of Parma, the 
 Lord Manf redino di Rosa of Modena, would fain have destroyed 
 it, for he would not that the men of Parma should be called after 
 such a man's name : and he wished to rule the city with his own 
 Council. Wherefore he bade Giovanni Barisello see to his own 
 house and his own work, and leave this gild and this great show 
 which he seemed to make : so Giovanni obeyed humbly, and that 
 same day he went back to his board and took his needle and 
 thread, and began to sew garments in the sight of his fellow- 
 citizens. (The father of the aforesaid Podesta was of my 
 acquaintance ; his mother and his wife were my spiritual 
 daughters). Yet this Giovanni was ever beloved of the citizens, 
 and had ever a place and a good repute in Parma. But in 
 process of time King Charles of Anjou, hearing that the Parmese 
 were a warlike folk, and friendly to him, and ever ready to succour
 
 1 30 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the Church, sent word to them to found a gild in honour of God 
 and the Holy Roman Church, which should be called the Gild of 
 the Cross : of which gild he himself would be one ; and he would 
 that all other gilds of Parma be incorporated in this, and that 
 they should ever be ready to succour the Roman Church when 
 she should need it. So the citizens formed this gild and called it 
 the Gild of the Crusaders, and they inscribed King Charles in 
 letters of gold at the beginning of the register, that this prince 
 and duke and count and king and triumphant hero might be 
 the captain and leader of this gild. And whosoever in Parma 
 is not thereof, if he offend any of the gild, they defend each other 
 like bees, and run forthwith and tear down his house to its very 
 foundations, razing it so utterly to the ground that not one stone 
 is left upon another : which strikes fear into the rest, for they 
 must either live in peace or enter this gild. And so the gild hath 
 increased marvellously, and the men of Parma are no longer 
 named after Giovanni Barisello, but after King Charles and the 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom is honour and glory for 
 ever and ever, Amen." 
 
 Prof. Holder-Egger (p. 375. notes 4, 5,) points out inaccuracies 
 of detail in this account : and Salimbene's narrative needs one im- 
 portant rectification which the author did not live to make : for in 
 1298 poor Barisello was taken prisoner and tortured to death. But 
 the description of the gild's activity is fully borne out by the 
 Chronicon Parmensc, from which one extract may suffice. " In the 
 year 1293 the Lord Podesta, with an armed force of 1,000 or more, 
 made an assault after the customary fashion upon the houses 
 of the Lord Giovanni de' Nizi (who was a Frate Godente), and of 
 Poltrenerio de' Ricicoldi, by reason of certain injuries which they 
 had done to some who were enrolled in the Gild Book." So 
 valuable a privilege naturally led to abuses ; and we accordingly 
 find that in 1286 the Gild Register had to be burnt "because 
 many were found to be illegally enrolled therein. . . . Wherefore 
 it was ordained that another new register should be compiled 
 from that copy which was in the Sacristy of the Cathedral Church, 
 and that it should be so rubricated with red ink as that no fresh 
 names could be added thereto." But the political morality of 
 a medieval Italian city rendered all such precautions useless. 
 Only seven years later the Captain of the City and his notary, 
 in collusion with another scrivener, falsified the register afresh, 
 and fled the city on the discovery of their forgery. 3 
 
 The Gild, however, had thoroughly done its work of ensuring 
 Guelf supremacy in Parma. The first inquisition held by 
 Bariselli with his 500 satellites had inaugurated a three days'
 
 The Guelfs Victorious. 131 
 
 reign of terror in the citj, marked by robberies and ravages 
 which the Podestas were powerless to prevent or to punish. 
 Many Ghibelline houses were razed, or burned with such blind 
 fury that even a raven's nest was consumed in the flames, in 
 spite of the medieval superstition which reprobated so ominous 
 an outrage. The palaces of the obnoxious Pallavicino were of 
 course destroyed, and the site turned into a meat market, as in 
 the case of the Uberti at Florence : Salirnbene mentions a third 
 case at Reggio under the year 1273. This destruction at Parma 
 was probably in 1266. In 1268 the citizens already felt strong 
 enough, with their allies, to attempt the complete reduction of 
 Borgo San Donnino : " but after a long siege they retired, 
 destroying the trees and corn and houses outside the walls, 
 together with the vineyards. And that same year the men of 
 Parma made peace" (475). 
 
 As the Chronicon Parmense tells us, this peace was received in 
 the city with such wild rejoicing that many were crushed to 
 death that evening in the crowd. The same year saw the defeat 
 and death of Conradin, the last hope of the Ghibellines in Italy ; 
 and it was evident that Borgo could no longer sustain the unequal 
 struggle. The Parmese were planning the details of a great 
 fortress to act as a perpetual check upon the rebel stronghold, 
 when the Podesta and councillors came with the keys of their 
 town to surrender at discretion. The Parmese might now spare 
 themselves the expense of the new fortress : " they razed the 
 walls of Borgo San Donnino to the ground, and filled up the 
 moats, and commanded the citizens to quit the town and to 
 rebuild their houses in a long street on either side of the high road 
 towards Parma ; and thus they did, and thus it remains unto 
 this day " (478). Eleven years afterwards, another great step 
 was taken in the cause of peace. Parma had long since allied 
 herself with her old enemy Cremona ; and now at last (505) 
 "the Parmese restored to Cremona her Carroccio, which they 
 had taken when they drove the Emperor from Victoria ; and so 
 also did the Cremonese with the Carroccio of Parma which they 
 had captured, restoring it now to the men of Parma ; and these 
 restitutions were made with great honour and joy and gladness 
 on either side." 
 
 So Parma now no longer fights for life and death, but is a 
 definitely Guelf city at comparative peace. The stormcloud 
 drifts away for a while, and we get only fitful glimpses of battle 
 that flash and die out in the distance like summer lightning all 
 round Salimbene's horizon ; but such flashes are still frequent 
 and lurid enough. " In 1248 the town of Castellarano was taken
 
 132 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 by the Commune of Reggio and many were taken and slain ; 
 and all men of Trignano and of the Bishopric of Reggio who were 
 found in the said town were put to an evil death." In 1265 the 
 Count of Flanders " destroyed the town of Capicolo, and all were 
 slain therein, men and women and children, for that they had 
 hanged one of the aforesaid count's knights." Salimbene records 
 many other similar incidents under the years 1266-1280 : after 
 which these monotonous notices of petty quarrels give way to 
 fresh pictures of civil war on a larger scale. For the discords of 
 Florence from which Dante suffered so cruelly were merely 
 typical of the state of things throughout Italy. The Guelfs had 
 hardly assured their supremacy over the Ghibellines, when they 
 themselves split into new parties as savage and irreconcilable as 
 the old. Salimbene complains (379) that "the Imperial party 
 has been utterly destroyed in Imola, and the Church party from 
 its envy and ambition is now divided into two factions. This same 
 curse has now come to the men of Modena, and is to be found 
 in Reggio also. God grant that it be not found in Parma, where 
 the same matter is likewise to be feared." Again (370) "This 
 city of Bologna was the last to drink of the cup of God's wrath, 
 and she drank it even to the dregs, lest perchance she should be 
 moved to boast of her righteousness and insult other cities which 
 had already drunk of the cup of the wrath of God, and of His 
 fury and indignation. For in that city were assassins, nor could 
 
 she get the better of them." here a page is cut out of 
 
 the manuscript, which (as we learn from the ancient table of 
 contents), treated " of the causes of the destruction of Bologna, 
 and against the taking of usury and bribes, and concerning other 
 sins." 4 Italy, in short, remained for generation after generation 
 in a state of anarchy and misery which among our own annals 
 can be paralleled only in Stephen's reign ; when men said that 
 God and His saints slept. Yet the sad facts must be faced : 
 for it was from this violent ferment that noble minds like St. 
 Francis and Dante took much of that special flavour which 
 appeals so strongly to the modern literary mind. Here, as 
 on many other points, Salimbene's evidence is all the more 
 valuable that he himself was neither saint nor poet, but a clever, 
 observant, sympathetic man with nothing heroic in his com- 
 position. All through his chronicle runs the feeling that, in 
 this " hostelry of pain,'' the only fairly happy folk were fools at 
 one end of the scale and friars at the other : that a man's only 
 wise bargain was to destroy his house on earth that he might 
 build himself a mansion in heaven. 
 
 Nor was his individual experience specially unfortunate for
 
 The Guelfs Victorious. 133 
 
 that time : his long tale of slaughter and ravage includes scarcely 
 the most distant allusion to those wars in Tuscany which to 
 Dante and his commentator Benvenuto seemed worst of all. 5 
 To Benvenuto, indeed, at the end of the 14th century, things 
 seemed if possible more intolerable than to Salimbene in the 
 middle of the 13th : he complains of even Sordello's bitter 
 Philippic as utterly inadequate. " In thy time, O Dante, certain 
 special evils did indeed oppress Italy, but those were small and 
 few [in comparison with to-day]. . . . I may say now of all Italy 
 what thy \ 7 irgil said of one city : 
 
 ' Look where you will, heart-rending agony 
 And panic reign, and many a shape of death.' 
 
 Assuredly Italy suffered not so much from Hannibal or Pyrrhus 
 or even from the Goths and Lombards. . . .Thy lines, Dante, 
 were cast in happy days which may well be envied by all of us 
 who live in the wretched Italy of to-day." 6 Yet, a century later, 
 Savonarola might have looked back with regret even to the days 
 of despairing Benvenuto. 7 This decline, whether real or apparent, 
 was certainly not so rapid as each of those writers imagined ; 
 but it is plain that the good man was always uneasy in his own 
 age, and sighed fondly for a comparatively unknown past, or for 
 a future in which some sudden stroke of God's hand might create 
 a new heaven and a new earth. The saint's constant cry was 
 " Would God it were even ! " or else " Would God it were 
 morning ! " The conception of a world around us slowly yet 
 surely working out its own salvation by God's grace was almost 
 impossible to him. Nowadays, thanks to the work of saints in 
 all ages, and to this era of patient research and free discussion, 
 men are able to face the facts of human life with a serener eye. 
 We see how much richer the world has grown, from age to age, 
 by the lives of such men as St. Francis ; even though learned 
 and pious Italians of the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th, centuries 
 constantly yearned backwards to " the good old days " before 
 St. Francis was born. It is our privilege, in the broader light of 
 history, to see how the world is more truly Christian, on the 
 whole, than in our Lord's days : more truly Franciscan than in 
 the age of St. Francis : and how the loss of the past centuries is 
 not worthy to be compared with our present gain and our future 
 hopes.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 Wanderjahre. 
 
 O AL1MBENE, as we have seen, had left Cremona expelled, 
 JO perhaps, by the Ghibelline authorities and had come to 
 Parma at the beginning of the siege. However, he did not see 
 that siege to an end, but left the city after a few months with 
 news for the Pope ; one of the thousand friars who swarmed on 
 all the roads of Italy and did such yeoman service to the Guelf 
 cause as despatch-bearers and spies. (53). "In that same year 
 1247, while my city was beleaguered by the deposed Emperor 
 Frederick, I went to Lyons, and arrived there on the Feast of 
 All Saints. And forthwith the Pope sent for me and spake 
 familiarly with me in his chamber. For since my departure 
 from Parma, even until that day, he bad seen no messenger nor 
 received no letters. And he was very gracious unto me ; that is, 
 he heard the voice of my petition, being indeed a most courteous 
 man, and a liberal." Elsewhere he specifies the favours here 
 received from the Pope : permission for his mother to enter a 
 convent of Clarisses (55), and for himself the coveted rank of 
 a Preacher in his Order (178). This Pope had himself been a 
 canon of Parma and on fairly intimate terms with Salimbene's 
 father. Now, as the bearer of news from the front, our hero 
 was fully conscious of his own importance ; and he dwelt fondly 
 on the scene his whole life long. As he tells us later, he allowed 
 himself in this interview to hint very plain doubts as to the good 
 faith of the great Cardinal Ottaviano : (Dante Inf. x. 120,) and 
 the scene as he describes it supplies a vivid commentary on the 
 *' messagicr eke porta ulivo " in Dante's meeting with Casella and 
 his companions. (384) " The bystanders were there in such 
 multitudes that they lay hard one on the other's shoulders in 
 their eagerness to hear tidings of Parma 1 ; when therefore they 
 who stood by heard me end my speech thus, they marvelled, 
 and in my own hearing they said to each other, * All the days 
 of our life we have seen no friar so void of fear, and speaking so 
 plainly.' This they said partly because they saw me sitting
 
 Wanderjahre. 135 
 
 between the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Guardian, (for 
 the Guardian had invited me to sit down, and I thought not fit 
 to spurn and contemn such an honour ;) and also because they 
 saw and heard me speak so of so great a man, and in the pre- 
 sence of such an assembly. For in those days I was a deacon, 
 and a young man of 25 years old." 
 
 But Lyons and the Pope were only the beginning of our friar's 
 adventures on this journey. (206) " After the Feast of All 
 Saints I set out for France. 2 And when I had come to the first 
 convent beyond Lyons, on that same day arrived Brother John 
 di Piano Carpine, returning from the Tartars, whither the Pope 
 had sent him. This Brother John was friendly and spiritual and 
 learned, and a great speaker, and skilled in many things. He 
 showed us a wooden goblet which he bore as a gift to the Pope, 
 in the bottom whereof was the likeness of a most fair queen, as 
 I saw with mine own eyes ; not wrought there by art or by a 
 painter's cunning, but impressed thereon by the influence of the 
 stars : and if it had been cut into a hundred parts, it would 
 always have borne the impress of that image. Moreover, lest 
 this seem incredible, I can prove it by another example. For 
 the Emperor Frederick gave the Brethren a certain Church in 
 Apulia, which was ancient and ruined and forsaken of all men. 
 And, on the spot where of old the altar had stood, grew now a 
 vast walnut-tree, which when cut open showed in every part the 
 image of our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross ; and if it had 
 been cut a hundred times, so often would it have shown the image 
 of the Crucifix. This was miraculously shown by God, since 
 that tree had grown up on the very spot whereon the Passion 
 of the spotless Lamb is represented in the Host of Salvation 
 and the Adorable Sacrifice ; yet some assert that such impres- 
 sions can be made by the influence of the stars." 3 Brother John 
 told the Brethren those stories which may still be read in his 
 own book (Ed. C. R. Beazley, Hakluyt Soc. 1903) : remarkably 
 true and sober accounts, on the whole, of China and the Far 
 East. " And he caused that book to be read, as I have often 
 heard and seen, when he was wearied with relating the deeds 
 of the Tartars. And when they who read wondered or under- 
 stood not, he himself would expound and dissert on single points. 
 When I first saw Brother John he was returning from the Tartars, 
 and on the morrow he went his way to see Pope Innocent ; and 
 I on mine to France. And I dwelt in Brie of Champagne ; first 
 for fifteen days at Troyes, where were many Lombard and Tuscan 
 merchants, for there is a fair which lasts two months. Then I 
 went to Provins, from the 13th day of December until the 2nd
 
 136 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 of February, on which day I went to Paris, and dwelt there a 
 week, and saw many pleasant sights. Then 1 returned and 
 dwelt in the convent of Sens, for the French Brethren gladly 
 kept me with them everywhere, because I was a peaceful and 
 ready youth, and because I praised their doings. And as I lay 
 sick in the infirmary by reason of the cold, there came hastily 
 certain French Brethren of the convent to me, with a letter, 
 saying, ' We have excellent news of Parma ; for the citizens 
 have driven out Frederick, the late Emperor, from the city of 
 Victoria which he had built, and have taken the Emperor's 
 whole treasure, and also the chariot of the Cremonese ; and here 
 is a copy of the letter from the men of Parma to the Pope.' And 
 they asked me to what purpose that chariot could be used. And 
 I answered them that the Lombards call this kind of chariot a 
 * Carroccio,' and if the Carroccio of any city be taken in war, the 
 citizens hold themselves sore shamed ; even as, if the Oriflamme 
 were taken in war, the French and their King would hold it a 
 great disgrace. Hearing this, they marvelled, saying, ' Ha ! 
 God ! We have heard a marvellous thing.' After that 1 
 recovered. And behold ! Brother John di Piano Carpine was on 
 his way home from the king, to whom the Pope had sent him ; 
 and he had his book which the Brethren read in his presence ; 
 and he himself interpreted whatsoever seemed obscure and 
 difficult to understand or believe. And I ate with Brother John, 
 not only in the Convent of the Brethren Minor, but outside in 
 abbeys and places of dignity, and that not once or twice only, 
 for he was invited gladly both to dine and to sup, partly as the 
 Pope's Legate, partly as ambassador to the King of France, 
 partly because he had come from the Tartars, and partly also 
 for that he was of the Order of Friars Minor, and all believed 
 him a man of most holy life. For when I was at Cluny, the 
 monks said to me, ' Would that the Pope would ever send such 
 Legates as Brother John ! for other Legates, so far as in them 
 lies, spoil the Church, and carry off all that they can lay their 
 hands upon. But Brother John, when he passed by our Abbey, 
 would accept nothing but cloth for a frock for his comrade.' 4 And 
 know thou who readest my book, that the Abbey of Cluny is the 
 most noble monastery of Black Monks of St. Benedict in Burgundy ; 
 and in that cloister are several priors ; and in the aforesaid Abbey 
 the multitude of buildings is so great that the Pope with his 
 Cardinals and all his Court might lodge there, and likewise at 
 the same time the Emperor with all his ; and this without hurt 
 to the monks : nor on that account would any monk need to 
 leave his cell or suffer any discomfort. Note also that the Order
 
 Wanderjahre. 137 
 
 of St. Benedict, so far as the Black Monks are concerned, is far 
 better kept in lands beyond the mountains than among us in 
 Italy. 5 Then from Sens I went to Auxerre, and dwelt there, for 
 the Minister of France had assigned me specially to that convent." 
 Auxerre interested him with its many tombs of Saints and 
 martyrs, and as the dwelling-place of Master William, a great 
 contemporary theologian and disputant, but one who " when he 
 undertook to preach, knew not what to say : note the example 
 of that cobbler in Brother Luke's sermon, who removed a moun- 
 tain in the land of the Saracens and freed the Christians." But 
 the city had another still more vivid interest for him : " I remem- 
 ber how, when I dwelt at Cremona, Brother Gabriel, who was a 
 most learned and holy man, told me that Auxerre had more plenty 
 of vineyards and wine than Cremona and Parma and Reggio and 
 Modena together ; whereat I marvelled and thought it incredible. 
 But when I dwelt myself at Auxerre, I saw how he had said the 
 truth ; for not only are the hillsides covered with vineyards, 
 but the level plain also, as I have seen with mine own eyes. For 
 the men of that land sow not, nor do they reap, neither have 
 they storehouse nor barn ; but they send wine to Paris by the 
 river which flows hard by ; and there they sell it at a noble 
 price. And I myself have encompassed the diocese of Auxerre 
 three times on foot ; once with a certain Brother who preached 
 and gave men the Cross for the Crusade of St. Louis ; another 
 time with another Brother who, on the day of the Lord's Supper, 
 preached to the Cistercians in a most fair Abbey ; and we kept 
 the Feast of Easter with a certain Countess, who gave us for 
 dinner (or rather, who gave to her whole court) twelve courses 
 or diversities of food and if the Count, her husband, had been 
 there, then still greater plenty would have been served. The 
 third time 1 journeyed with Brother Stephen, and saw and heard 
 many noteworthy things, which I omit here for brevity's sake. 
 And note that in the Province of France are eight custodies of 
 our Order, whereof four drink beer, and four drink wine. Note 
 also that there are three parts of France which give great plenty 
 of wine, namely, La Kochelle, Beaune, and Auxerre. Note 
 that the red wines are held in but small esteem, for they are not 
 equal to the red wines of Italy. Note likewise that the wines 
 of Auxerre are white, and sometimes golden, and fragrant, and 
 comforting, and of strong and excellent taste, and they turn all 
 who drink them to cheerfulness and merriment ; wherefore of 
 this wine we may rightly say with Solomon ' Give strong wine 
 to them that are sad, and wine to them that are grieved in mind : 
 Let them drink and forget their want, and remember their sorrow
 
 138 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 no more.' And know that the wines of Auxerre are so strong 
 that, when they have stood awhile, tears gather on the outer 
 surface of the jar. Note also that the French are wont to tell 
 how the best wine should have three B's and seven F's. For 
 they themselves say in sport 
 
 Et bon et bel et blanc 
 Fort et tier, fin et franc, 
 Froid et frais et fretillant.' " 
 
 Here, as elsewhere where he is reminded of good cheer, Salimbene 
 seizes the occasion for breaking out into a drinking song : it is 
 of the usual type of clerkly medieval rhymes ; and I have tried 
 to render it fairly literally, while softening down some of its 
 inevitable crudities. It will no doubt be noted that the metre 
 is one of those which hymn-writers very likely borrowed at first 
 from secular songs, and which bacchanalian or erotic songsters 
 undoubtedly borrowed back from the Church hymns, often 
 with a very definite turn of parody. 6 
 
 (219) " Now Master Morando, who taught grammar at Padua, 
 commended wine according to his own taste in this fashion, 
 singing 
 
 ' Drink'st thou glorious, honey'd wine ? 
 Stout thy frame, thy face shall shine, 
 Freely shalt thou spit : 
 
 Old in cask, in savour full ? 
 Cheerful then shall be thy soul, 
 Bright and keen thy wit. 
 
 Is it strong and pure and clear ? 
 Quickly shall it banish care, 
 Chills it shall extrude : 
 
 But the sour will bite thy tongue, 
 Rot thy liver, rot thy lung, 
 And corrupt thy blood. 
 
 Is thy liquor greyish pale ? 
 Hoarseness shall thy throat assail 
 Fluxes shall ensue : 
 
 Others, swilling clammy wine, 
 Wax as fat as any swine, 
 Muddy-red of hue. 
 
 Scorn not red, though thin it be : 
 Ruddy wine shall redden thee, 
 So thou do but soak : 
 
 Juice of gold and citron dye 
 Doth our vitals fortify, 
 Sicknesses doth choke :
 
 Wanderjahre. 1 39 
 
 But the cursed water white 
 Honest folk will interdict, 
 Lest it spleen provoke.' 
 
 " So the French delight in good wine, nor need we wonder, 
 for wine 'cheereth God and men,' as it is written in the ninth 
 chapter of Judges." The author here loses himself again in 
 Biblical quotations Noah, Lot, and the warnings of Proverbs 
 after which he goes on : " It may be said literally that French 
 and English make it their business to drink full goblets ; where- 
 fore the French have bloodshot eyes, for from their ever-free 
 potations of wine their eyes become red-rimmed, and bleared, 
 and bloodshot. And in the early morning, after they have 
 slept off their wine, they go with such eyes to the priest who 
 has celebrated Mass, and pray him to drop into their eyes the 
 water wherein he has washed his hands. But Brother Bartolom- 
 meo Guiscolo of Parma was wont to say at Provins (as I have 
 often heard with mine own ears) * ale, he malonta ve don De; 
 metti de Taighe in le vins, non in Us ocli ; ' which is to say, ' Go ! 
 God give you evil speed ! Put the water in your wine when ye 
 drink it, and not in your eyes ! ' The English indeed delight in 
 drink, and make it their business to drain full goblets ; for an 
 Englishman will take a cup of wine, and drain it, saying, Ge hi, a 
 vui 7 which is to say * It behoveth you to drink as much as I shall 
 drink,' and therein he thinketh to say and do great courtesy, and he 
 talceth it exceeding ill if any do otherwise than he himself hath 
 taught in word and shown by example. And yet he doth against 
 the Scripture, which saith, ' . . . Wine also in abundance and 
 of the best was presented, as was worthy of a king's magnificence. 
 Neither was there any one to compel them to drink that were 
 not willing.' (Esther i, 7). Yet we must forgive the English 
 if they are glad to drink good wine when they can, for they have 
 but little wine in their own country. In the French it is less 
 excusable, for they have greater plenty ; unless indeed we plead 
 that it is hard to leave our daily wont. Note that it is thus 
 written in verse, 'Normandy for sea-fish, England for corn, 
 Scotland [or Ireland ?] for milk, France for wine.' Enough 
 of this matter. But note that in France, as I have seen with 
 mine own eyes, the days are longer in the corresponding months 
 than in Italy : namely, in May they are longer there than here, 
 and in winter they are less. Let me return now to my own 
 affairs, and speak of the French King. 
 
 " In the year 1248, about the Feast of Pentecost or somewhat 
 later, I went down from Auxerre to the convent of Sens, for the
 
 140 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Provincial Chapter of our Order in France was to be held there ; 
 and the Lord Louis (IX), King of France, was to come thither. 
 And when the King was already hard by our convent, all the 
 Brethren went forth to meet him, that they might receive him 
 \\h\\ :\11 honour. And Brother Rigaud of our Order, Professor 
 of Theology at Paris, and Archbishop of Rouen, clad in his 
 pontifical robes, hastened forth from the convent, crying as he 
 went, ' W here is the King ? Where is the King ? ' So I fol- 
 lowed him, for he went by himself as a man distraught, with his 
 mitre on his head, and his pastoral staff in his hand. 8 For he 
 had fallen behindhand in robing himself, so that the other 
 Brethren had already gone forth, and stood on either side of the 
 street with their faces turned towards the King, in their eagerness 
 to see him coming. And I marvelled beyond measure within 
 myself, saying ' Certainly I have read oftentimes how the Sen- 
 onian Gauls were so mighty that under Brennus they took the 
 city of Rome ; but now their women seem for the most part like 
 handmaids : yet, if the King had passed through Pisa or 
 Bologna, the whole flower of the ladies of those cities would 
 have gone out to meet him.' Then I remembered that this is 
 indeed the custom of the French ; for in France it is the 
 burgesses only who dwell in the cities, whereas the knights and 
 noble ladies dwell in the villages and on their estates. 
 
 " Now the King was spare and slender, somewhat lean, and of 
 a proper height, having the face of an angel, and a mien full of 
 grace. And he came to our Church, not in regal pomp, but 
 in a pilgrim's habit, with the staff and the scrip of his pilgrimage 
 hanging at his neck, which was an excellent adornment for the 
 shoulders of a king. And he came not on horseback, but on 
 foot; and his blood-brethren, who were three counts, (whereof 
 the eldest was named Robert, and the youngest Charles, who 
 did afterwards many great deeds most worthy of praise), followed 
 him in the same humble guise, so that they might have said in 
 truth that word of the prophet 'Woe to them that go down to 
 Egypt for help, trusting in horses, and putting their confidence 
 in chariots, because they are many, and in horsemen, because 
 they are very strong : and have not trusted in the holy One of 
 Israel, and have not sought after the Lord.' Nor did the King 
 care for a train of nobles, but rather for the prayers and suffrages 
 of the poor ; and therefore he fulfilled that which Ecclesiasticus 
 teacheth ' Make thyself affable to the congregation of the poor.' 
 In truth he might rather be called a monk in devotion of heart, 
 than a knight in weapons of war. When he had come into our 
 church, and had made a most devout genuflexion, he prayed
 
 Wander] ahre. 1 4 1 
 
 before the altar ; and as he departed from the church, and was 
 yet standing on the threshold, I was by his side ; and behold, 
 the treasurer of the cathedral of Sens sent him a great living 
 pike in water, in a vessel of fir-wood, such as the Tuscans call 
 ' bigonzaj wherein nursling children are washed and bathed : 
 for in France the pike is esteemed a dear and precious fish. And 
 the King thanked not only the sender, but him who brought the 
 gift. 
 
 " Then cried the King in a loud and clear voice that none but 
 knights should enter the Chapter-house, save only the Brethren, 
 with whom he would fain speak. And when we were gathered 
 together, the King began to speak of his own matters, commending 
 himself and his brethren and the Queen his mother, and his 
 whole fellowship ; and kneeling most devoutly he besought the 
 prayers and suffrages of the Brethren. And certain Brethren 
 of France who stood by my side wept so sore for devotion and 
 pity that they could scarce be comforted. After the King, the 
 Lord Oddo, Cardinal of the Roman Court, who had formerly 
 been Chancellor of the University of Paris, and was now to go 
 beyond the seas with him, began to speak, and concluded the 
 matter before us in a few words, as Ecclesiasticus teach eth : 
 ' Desire not to appear wise before the king.' After those two, 
 Brother John of Parma, the Minister-General, (on whom in 
 virtue of his office fell the task of replying), spake as follows : 
 " * Our King and lord and benefactor hath come to us humbly 
 and profitably, courteously and kindly ; and he first spake to 
 us, as was right ; nor doth he pray us for gold or silver, whereof 
 by God's grace there is sufficient store in his treasury ; but only 
 for the prayers and suffrages of the Brethren, and that for a 
 most laudable purpose. For in truth he hath undertaken this 
 pilgrimage and signed himself with the Cross, in honour of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and to succour the Holy Land, and to conquer 
 the enemies of the Faith and Cross of Christ, and for the honour 
 of Holy Church and the Christain Faith, and for the salvation 
 of his soul, with all theirs who are to pass the seas with him. 
 Wherefore, seeing that he hath been a special benefactor and 
 defender of our Order, not only at Paris, but throughout his 
 kingdom ; and that he hath come humbly to us with so worthy 
 a fellowship to pray for our intercession, it is fitting that we 
 should render him some good. Now whereas the Brethren of 
 France are already more willing to undertake this matter, and 
 purpose to do more than I could impose upon them, therefore 
 upon them I lay no precept. But, seeing that I have begun 
 to visit the Order, I have purposed in my mind to enjoin on
 
 142 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 each priest of the whole Order to sing four Masses for the King 
 and this holy fellowship. And if so be that the Son of God call 
 him from this world to the Father, then shall the Brethren add 
 jet more Masses. And if 1 have not answered according to his 
 desire, let the King himself he our lord to command us, who 
 lack not obedient hearts, but only a voice to prescribe.' The 
 King, hearing this, thanked the Minister-General, and so wholly 
 accepted his answer that he would fain have it confirmed under 
 his hand and seal. Moreover, the King took upon himself all 
 that day's cost, and ate together with us in the refectory ; and 
 with us sat down to meat the King's three brethren, and the 
 Cardinal, and the Minister-General, and Brother Rigaud, Arch- 
 bishop of Rouen, and the Minister-Provincial of France, and the 
 Custodes and Definitores, and the Discreti, 9 and all who were of 
 the capitular body, and the Brethren our guests, whom we call 
 ' foreigners.' The Minister-General therefore, seeing that the 
 King had already a noble and worthy fellowship, was unwilling 
 to thrust himself forward, according to the word of Ecclesiasticus, 
 * Be not exalted in the day of thy honour,' though indeed he 
 was invited to sit by the King's side ; but he loved rather to 
 practise that courtesy and humility which our Lord taught by 
 word and example. Wherefore Brother John chose rather to sit 
 at the table of the humble ; and it was honoured by his presence, 
 and many were edified thereby : for consider that God hath 
 not placed all the lights of heaven in one part alone, but hath 
 distributed them in divers parts and in sundry manners for the 
 greater beauty and utility of the heavens. This then was our 
 fare that day : first, cherries, then most excellent white bread ; 
 and choice wine, worthy of the King's royal state, was placed 
 in abundance before us ; and, after the wont of the French, 
 many invited even the unwilling and compelled them to drink. 
 After that we had fresh beans boiled in milk, fishes and crabs, 
 eel-pasties, rice cooked with milk of almonds and cinnamon 
 powder, eels baked with most excellent sauce, tarts and junkets, 
 [or curd-cheeses] and all the fruits of the season in abundance and 
 comely array. And all these were laid on the table in courtly 
 fashion, and busily ministered to us. On the morrow the King 
 went on his way ; and I, when the Chapter was ended, followed 
 him ; for I had a command from the Minister-General to go and 
 dwell in Provence : and it was easy for me to overtake the King, 
 for oft-times he turned aside from the high, road to visit the her- 
 mitages of Brethren Minor or of other Religious, that he might 
 commend himself to their prayers ; and so he did daily until he 
 came to the sea, and set sail for the Holy Land. When therefore
 
 Wander] ah re. 143 
 
 I had visited the Brethren of Auxerre, which had been my convent, 
 I went in one day to Urgeliac, a noble town in Burgundy, where 
 the body of the Magdalene was then thought to lie. And the 
 morrow was a Sunday ; so at early dawn the King came to our 
 church to pray for our suffrages, according to the word which is 
 written in Proverbs * Well doth he rise early who seeketh good 
 things.' And he left all his fellowship in the town hard by, save 
 only his three brethren, and a few grooms to hold their horses ; 
 and, when they had knelt and made obeisance before the altar, his 
 brethren looked round for seats and benches. But the King 
 sat on the ground in the dust, as I saw with mine own eyes, 
 for that church was unpaved. 10 And he called us to him, saying, 
 ' Come unto me, my most sweet Brethren, and hear my words ' ; 
 and we sat round him in a ring on the ground, and his blood- 
 brethren did likewise. And he commended himself to us, 
 beseeching our suffrages : and after we had made answer, he 
 departed from the church to go on his way ; and it was told 
 him that Charles still prayed fervently ; so the King was glad, 
 and waited patiently without mounting his horse while his 
 brother prayed. And the other two counts, his brethren, stood 
 likewise waiting without. Now Charles was his youngest brother, 
 who had the Queen's sister to wife ; and oft-times he bowed his 
 knee before the altar which was in the church aisle hard by the 
 door. So I saw how earnestly Charles prayed, and how patiently 
 the King waited without ; and I was much edified, knowing the 
 truth of that Scripture ' A brother that is helped by his brother 
 is like a strong city.' Then the King went on his way ; and, 
 having finished his business, he hastened to the vessel which had 
 been prepared for him : but 1 went to Lyons, and found the 
 Pope still there with his Cardinals. Thence I went down the 
 Rhone, to the city of Aries, and it was the 29th of June." 
 
 We here take leave of the saintly King, of whose crusade 
 Salimbene tells us briefly later on (320) that it failed "by reason 
 of the sins of the French," and whom after this he only mentions 
 cursorily here and there, without any first-hand touches. But 
 the next stage of his journey brought him into contact with a 
 man almost as celebrated in his own day as St. Louis himself : 
 the holy Cordelier of Joinville's narrative ( 657 foil.), which 
 is too vivid and characteristic to be omitted here. " King 
 Louis," writes Joinville of the year 1254, " heard tell of a Grey 
 Friar whose name was Brother Hugh : and for the great renown 
 that he had the King sent for that Friar to see and hear him 
 speak. The day he came to Hyeres, we looked down the road 
 whereby he came, and were aware of a great company of people,
 
 144 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 both men and women, following him on foot. The King bade 
 him preach : and the first words of his sermon dealt with men 
 of Religion. ' My Lord,' said he, ' I see many more folk of 
 Religion in the King's court and in his company than should of 
 right be there ' ; and then * First of all,' said he, ' I say that 
 such are not in the way of salvation, nor can they be, unless 
 Holy Scripture lie. For Holy Scripture saith that the monk 
 cannot live out of his cloister without mortal sin, even as the 
 fish cannot live without water. 11 And if the Religious who are 
 with the King say that his court is a cloister, then I tell them it 
 is the widest that ever I saw ; for it stretches from this side of 
 the great sea to the other. And if they plead that in this cloister 
 a man may lead a hard life to save his soul, therein I believe 
 them not ; for I tell you that I have eaten with them great plenty 
 of divers flesh-meats, and drunken of good wines, both strong 
 and clear ; wherefore I am assured that if they had been in 
 their cloister they would not have been so at their ease as they 
 now are at the King's court.' Then in his sermon he taught 
 the King how he should hold himself to please his people ; and 
 at the end of his sermon he said that he had read the Bible and 
 all the books that go against the Bible ; and never had he found, 
 whether in believers' books or in unbelievers', that any kingdom 
 or lordship was ever ruined or ever changed its lord, but by reason 
 of defect of justice: 'Wherefore' said he 'let the King look 
 well to it, since he is returning to his kingdom of France, that 
 he render his folk such justice as to keep God's love, that God 
 may never take the kingdom from him so long as he is alive ! ' 
 So I, Joinville, told the King that he should not let this man quit 
 his company, if by any means he might keep him : but he 
 answered ' I have already prayed him, and he will do nought 
 for me. ' Come,' said he, taking me by the hand, ' let us go and 
 pray him once more.' We came to him and I said to him, 
 ' Sir, do as my Lord the King hath prayed you, to abide with 
 him while he is yet in Provence.' And he answered me in great 
 wrath, ' Be sure, Sir, that I will not do so : for 1 shall go to a 
 place where God will love me better than He would love me in 
 King's company.' One day he tarried with us, and on the 
 morrow he went his way. They have told me since that he lieth 
 buried in the city of Marseilles, where he worketh many fair 
 miracles." A fine, sturdy John-Baptist of a friar, this : but 
 how will he suit our chronicler, who is so far from sharing his 
 abhorrence of delicate fare and choice wines in Kings' houses ? 
 Excellently, according to Salimbene's own account ; nor is 
 there any reason to doubt his word. To begin with they had
 
 Wanderjahre. 145 
 
 common friends and strong common interests : for Joachism 
 was a powerful freemasonry in the thirteenth century. More- 
 over, Salimbene was one of those who, without great pretensions 
 to superior personal sanctity, are yet so sympathetic and sociable 
 that the most intractable saints suffer their company as gladly as 
 Johnson suffered Boswell's. Our friar, like so many others, 
 constantly plumed himself on the theoretical strictness of that 
 Rule which in practice he interpreted so liberally ; and he took 
 just the same aesthetic delight in the rugged sanctity of his friend. 
 So from Aries he went to Marseilles (226) " and thence to 
 see Brother Hugues de Barjols, or de Digne, whom the Lombards 
 call Brother Hugh of Montpellier. He was one of the greatest 
 and most learned clerks in the world, a most famous preacher, 
 beloved of clergy and lay folk alike, and a most excellent disputant, 
 ready for all questions. He would entangle and confound all 
 men in argument ; for he had a most eloquent tongue, and a 
 voice as a ringing trumpet, or mighty thunder, or the sound of 
 many waters falling from a cliff. He never tripped or stumbled, 
 but was ever ready with an answer for all. He spake marvellously 
 of the Court of Heaven, and the glories of Paradise, and most 
 terribly of the pains of hell. He was of middling stature, and 
 somewhat swarthy of hue a man spiritual beyond measure, so 
 that he seemed a second Paul or Elisha ; for in his days he feared 
 neither principalities nor powers ; none ever conquered him or 
 overcame him in word. For he spake in full consistory to the 
 Pope and his Cardinals as he might have spoken to boys as- 
 sembled in school ; both at the Council of Lyons, and aforetime 
 when the Court was at Rome : and all trembled as a reed trembles 
 in the water. For once being asked by the Cardinals what sort 
 of tidings he had, he rated them like asses, saying, ' I have no 
 tidings, but I have full peace, both with my conscience and with 
 God, which passeth all understanding, and keepeth my heart 
 and mind in Christ Jesus. I know in truth that ye seek new 
 tidings, and are busy about such things all day long, for ye are 
 Athenians, and no disciples of Christ.' " This little incident 
 forms a living commentary upon one of the precepts most 
 frequently insisted upon in the Franciscan disciplinary writings. 
 The friar of Shakespeare's plays a sort of walking newspaper 
 and ready dens ex machina for any innocent little plot that may 
 be on foot the indispensable confidant in all family matters, 
 from the least to the greatest was already fully developed in 
 St. Bonaventura's time, and was the bugbear of the convent 
 authorities, since he brought into the Order the oft-forbidden 
 " familiarities with women," together with all sorts of other
 
 146 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 purely worldly interests. To take only one quotation out of 
 many from the " Mirror of Novices " (p. 239) ; " Study thy 
 whole life long, so far as thou well mayest, to avoid familiarities 
 with secular persons ; for they are ' a perverse generation and 
 unfaithful children,' as the Scripture saith. And when thou 
 art brought among them by the compulsion of necessity or 
 [spiritual] profit, beware lest thou ever speak with them any 
 but profitable and honest words ; and if they themselves speak 
 of secular matters, or of the wars, or of other unprofitable 
 things, never follow them even though thou know of these 
 matters, but say with the Prophet 'That my mouth may not 
 speak the works of men.' . . . Moreover, flee from women, so 
 far as in thee lieth, as thou wouldst flee from serpents, never 
 speaking with them but under compulsion of urgent necessity ; 
 nor ever look in any woman's face ; and if a woman speak to 
 thee, circumcise thy words most straitly, for as the Prophet 
 saith ' Her words are smoother than oil, and the same are darts.' " 
 The rest of Hugh's long speech to the Cardinals, vivid as its 
 interest is for the student of medieval manners, belongs rather 
 to another place : 12 as indeed Salimbene himself must have 
 realized by the time he had come to the end of it : for he exclaims 
 again " Blessed be God that 1 am at last at the end of this 
 matter ! " 
 
 He goes on to enumerate Hugh's special friends: (232) the 
 first was John of Parma, " for whose love he became my familiar 
 friend also, and because I seemed to believe in the writings of 
 Abbot Joachim of Fiore." The second was the Archbishop 
 of Vienne ; the third, Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln ; the 
 fourth, Adam Marsh, the great Oxford scholar and adviser of 
 Simon de Montfort. While Salimbene was a youthful convert 
 at Siena he had already met Hugh, whose eloquence and 
 readiness in disputation had electrified him (233). Our 
 chronicler had again heard him preach on a solemn occasion 
 at Lucca: (234) for "it chanced that I came thither from 
 Pistoia at the very hour at which he must needs go to the 
 Cathedral Church, and the whole convent was gathered together 
 to go with him. But he, seeing the Brethren without the gate, 
 marvelled and said, * Ha ! God ! Whither would these men go ? ' 
 And it was answered him that the Brethren did thus for his 
 honour, and for that they would fain hear him preach. So he 
 said * 1 need no such honour, for I am not the Pope ; but if they 
 will hear me, let them follow when I am entered into the church ; 
 for I will go on with a single comrade, and not with this multitude.' 
 Brother Hugh therefore preached with such edification and
 
 Wanderjahre. 1 47 
 
 comfort of his hearers that the clergy of the Bishopric of 
 Lucca were wont to say many years after how they had never 
 heard a man speak so well ; for the others had recited their 
 sermons even as a psalm which they might have learnt by heart. 
 And they loved and revered the whole Order for his sake. Another 
 time I heard him preach to the people in Provence, at Tarascon 
 on the Rhone, at which sermon were men and women of Tarascon 
 and Beaucaire, (which are two most noble towns lying side by 
 side, with the river Rhone between ; and in each town is a fair 
 convent of the Brethren Minor). And he said to them (as I 
 heard with mine own ears) words of edification, useful words, 
 honeyed words, words of salvation. And they heard him gladly, 
 as a John the Baptist, for they held him for a Prophet. These 
 things find no credence with men who are themselves deprived 
 of such grace ; yet it is most ridiculous if I will not believe that 
 there is any Bishop or any Pope because I myself am not a 
 Bishop or a Pope ! Moreover, at the court of the Count of 
 Provence was a certain Riniero, a Pisan by birth, who called 
 himself an universal philosopher, and who so confounded the 
 judges and notaries and physicians of the Court that no man 
 could live there in honour. Wherefore they expounded their 
 tribulation to Brother Hugh, that he might vouchsafe to succour 
 and defend them from this bitter enemy. So he made answer : 
 ' Order ye with the Count a day for disputation in the palace, 
 and let knights and nobles, judges and notaries and physicians 
 be there present, and dispute ye with him ; and then let the 
 Count send for me, and I will prove to them by demonstration 
 that this man is an ass, and that the sky is a frying-pan.' All 
 this was so ordered, and Brother Hugh so involved and entangled 
 him in his own words that he was ashamed to remain at the 
 Count's court, and withdrew without taking leave of his host; 
 nor did he ever dare thereafter to dwell there, or even to show 
 his face. For he was a great sophist, and thought within himself 
 to entangle all others in his sophistries. Brother Hugh therefore 
 'delivered the poor from the mighty, and the needy that had 
 no helper ; ' and they kissed his hands and feet. Note that 
 this aforesaid Count was called Raymond Berenger, (Paradiso, 
 vi, 134), a comely man, and a friend of the Friars Minor, and 
 father to the Queens of France and of England. Moreover, in 
 Provence there is a certain most populous town named Hye"res, 
 where is a great multitude of men and women doing penitence 
 even in worldly habit in their own houses. These are strictly 
 devoted to the Friars Minor ; for the Friars Preachers have no 
 convent there, since they are pleased and comforted to dwell in
 
 148 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 great convents rather than in small. In this town Brother Hugh 
 lived most gladly, and there were many notaries and judges and 
 physicians and other learned men, who on solemn days would 
 assemble in his chamber to hear him speak of the doctrine of 
 Abbot Joachim, or expound the mysteries of Holy Scripture, or 
 foretell the future. For he was a great Joachite, and had all the 
 works of Abbot Joachim written in great letters : and I myself 
 also was there to hear him teach." 
 
 These Franciscan Tertiaries of whom Salimbene speaks were 
 the nucleus of one of the earliest and most famous Beguinages, 
 under the direction of Hugh's sister St. Douceline, of whom 
 Salimbene gives a brief account lower down (554). " In another 
 stone chest by Brother Hugh's side is buried his sister in the 
 flesh, the Lady Douceline, whose fame God likewise showed 
 forth by miracles. She never entered any religious Order, but 
 ever lived chastely and righteously in the World. She chose 
 for her spouse the Son of God, and for the saint of her special 
 devotion the blessed Francis, whose cord she wore round her 
 body ; and almost all day long she prayed in the church of the 
 Friars Minor. There was none who spoke or thought evil of 
 her ; for men and women, religious and layfolk, honoured her 
 for her exceeding sanctity. She had of God a special grace of 
 ecstasies, as the Friars saw a thousand times in their church. 
 If they raised her arm, she would keep it thus raised from morning 
 to evening, for she was wholly absorbed in God : and this was 
 spread abroad through the whole city of Marseilles, and through 
 other cities also. She was followed by eighty noble ladies of 
 Marseilles, of middle and of higher rank, who would fain save 
 their souls after her example ; and she was lady and mistress of 
 them all." Of this saint, her asceticism and her trances, and the 
 wonderful power over others which she found in her single- 
 hearted devotion to God, the reader may find a full account in 
 Albanes' edition and translation of the thirteenth-century life 
 by one of her disciples, and in a recent essay by Miss Macdonell. 
 
 Here then dwelt Salimbene, for the second time in his life, in 
 an atmosphere of the most contagious religious enthusiasm, 
 thoroughly enjoying it all, and yet saved by his critical faculty 
 (as we shall presently see) from being swept off his legs altogether. 
 It is not difficult, I think, to trace in his history a very usual 
 type of religious development. The Alleluia of 1233 marked 
 his conversion, his first realization of a life to come ; an over- 
 powering appeal to his feelings while his intellect was as yet 
 utterly undeveloped. Now, as an impressionable and (for his 
 age) highly educated young man, he is brought into close contact
 
 Wanderjahre. 149 
 
 with a party leader of intense magnetic power, from whom, 
 and from others of the same party, he imbibes a new and 
 startling theory of Church statesmanship, and a philosophy of 
 history which, even after experience had proved its partial 
 falsehood, was so noble and true that it could not fail to influence 
 all the rest of his life. Even in the ashes of Salimbene's old 
 age lived the wonted fires of Joachism : after all his disillusions, 
 and even through his period of antagonism to his old comrades, 
 he was always a different man for having once accepted this 
 13th-century "Theory of Development." It is this which 
 gives much of its charm to his book : one feels the mellow 
 judgment of a man who, (to put it in terms of our own age), 
 after having been " converted " as a boy in the Evangelical 
 sense after having been carried away at Oxford by Newman 
 has gradually settled down to views more consonant with the 
 facts of human life than that earlier intense Tractarianism, 
 and yet Tractarian in their sense of an eternal purpose for the 
 Church amid the perlexing phenomena of daily life.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development* 
 
 HO W is it that Dante assigned one of the most conspicuous 
 places in his Paradise to a visionary, one of whose most 
 important writings had been solemnly condemned by Innocent 
 III at the great Lateran Council, and thought worthy of 
 an elaborate refutation by St. Thomas Aquinas ? It is not 
 sufficient to say that Dante claimed in his poem an unusujd 
 liberty of private judgment ; for three popes had patronized 
 Joachim even in his lifetime ; and, strangest of all, his most 
 dangerous speculations were never definitely condemned, even 
 after they had been pushed to what seems their only legitimate 
 conclusion, in a book which raised a storm throughout Latin 
 Christendom. The real explanation of so strange a paradox is 
 to be found in that comparative freedom of thought which makes 
 the 13th century, especially in Italy, so living a period in the 
 history of the pre-reformation Church. Dante, in fact, caused 
 as little scandal by promoting Joachim to a high place in heaven 
 as by degrading a canonized pope, Celestine V, to one of the most 
 contemptible corners of the lower regions. The rigid framework 
 and the inexorable discipline of the modern Roman Church are 
 mainly the work of the Counter-Reformation ; and the records 
 of the 13th century show us, beneath much orthodox intolerance, 
 an irrepressible diversity of religious life which in many essential 
 respects reminds us rather of Anglicanism. The Church, as it 
 embraced the whole population, embraced also every type of 
 mind, from the most superstitious to the most agnostic : and 
 many of these unorthodox elements worked far more freely, 
 under the cloak of outward conformity, than is generally supposed. 
 Almost all variations of opinion were tolerated, so long as their 
 outward expression was fairly discreet : partly, no doubt, because 
 the machinery of repression was as yet imperfect; but partly 
 also because there was too much life and growth to be easily 
 repressed. It was far less dangerous to hint that Rome was the 
 Scarlet Woman, as Joachim did ; or again (with certain friars
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 151 
 
 of whom Eccleston tells us), to debate in the Schools " whether 
 God really existed," 1 than to wear publicly and pertinaciously a 
 frock and cowl of any but the orthodox cut. Joachim's book 
 against Peter Lombard was condemned as a public attack on a 
 pillar of the Schools ; his evolutionary speculations were treated 
 leniently because any other course would have enabled the 
 secular clergy to triumph over the Friars, and no pope could 
 afford to lose the support of the two Orders. 
 
 The story of the Abbot Joachim is admirably told by Kenan, 
 Gebhart, Tocco, Father Denifle, and Dr. Lea : a summary of 
 these by Miss Troutbeck appeared in the Nineteenth Century 
 for July 1902. Born about 1132 in Calabria, where Roman 
 religious ideas were leavened with Greek and even Saracen 
 elements : by turns a courtier, a traveller, an active missionary, 
 and a contemplative hermit, he has been claimed with some 
 justice as a sort of St. John Baptist to the Franciscan movement : 
 and he may be called with almost equal truth its St. John the 
 Divine also. The hateful and notorious corruption of the Church, 
 which impelled Francis to found his Order, had previously driven 
 Joachim into an attempt to interpret the world's history in the 
 light of Scripture. He found the solution of present evils in a 
 theory of gradual decay and renewal, elaborated from St. 
 Augustine's philosophy of history. The visible Church, in 
 Joachim's system, was no temple of stone, but a shifting taber- 
 nacle in this worldly wilderness ; pitched here to-night, but 
 destined to be folded up with to-morrow's dawn, and carried one 
 stage onward with an advancing world. As Salimbene puts it 
 (466) ; " he divides the world into a threefold state ; for in the 
 first state the Father worked in mystery through the patriarchs 
 and sons of the prophets, although the works of the Trinity are 
 indivisible. In the second state the Son worked through the 
 Apostles and other apostolic men ; of which state He saith in 
 John ' My Father worketh until now, and I work.' In the third 
 state the Holy Ghost shall work through the Religious." In 
 other words, the first state of the Church was taught by the 
 Father through the Old Testament ; the second state by the Son 
 through the New Testament ; the third state (which maybe said 
 in one sense to have begun with St. Benedict) shall be taught by 
 the Holy Spirit. Not that the Old and New Testaments are to 
 be abrogated, or that a new Bible shall be revealed ; but that 
 men's eyes shall be opened by the Spirit to see a new revelation 
 in the time-honoured scriptures an Eternal Gospel, proceeding 
 from the Old and New Testaments as its Author the Holy Spirit 
 proceeds from the Father and the Son. And to these threefold
 
 i 52 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 stages of inspiration correspond three orders of missionaries : 
 first, the patriarchs and prophets : secondly, the Apostles and 
 their successors the clergy : the third era of the Church shall be 
 an era of hermits, monks, and nuns, not superseding the present 
 hierarchy, but guiding it into new ways. Further, like nearly 
 all the prophets of this age, Joachim argued from the corruption 
 of the then world to the imminence of Antichrist, of the Battle 
 of Armageddon, and of all the convulsions foretold in the 
 Apocalypse as preceding the Reign of the Saints. 
 
 It is obvious how these prophecies would be caught at by all 
 who felt deeply the miseries caused by the wars between Pope 
 and Emperor ; and how to all good Guelfs Frederick would seem 
 a very sufficient Antichrist. The Friars, too, had every reason 
 to welcome prophecies of a millennium to be heralded by new 
 Orders of surpassing holiness and authority : and the spiritual 
 Franciscans especially found in Joachism the promise of a reign 
 of glory after their bitter persecutions of the present time. Here 
 therefore was plenty of material for a great conflagration, to 
 which the match was set by one of Salimhene's friends, Gerard 
 of Borgo San Donnino. Appointed professor of theology at Paris 
 about 1250, he published four years later an Introduction to the 
 Eternal Gospel, containing one of Joachim's best-known works, 
 with a preface and notes of his own, The work created an 
 instant sensation, and was eagerly read by the laity. The saintly 
 John of Parma, General of the Franciscans and himself a strong 
 Joachite, certainly took no steps to punish the writer, and was 
 himself often credited with the authorship. But the University 
 of Paris, delighted to find a handle against the unpopular friars, 
 took the matter up. There seems no doubt that this book 
 pressed Joachim's theories to the antisacerdotal conclusions 
 which they would seem legitimately to bear, but which Joachim 
 himself had studiously avoided. Gerard regarded the sacraments 
 as transitory symbols, to be set aside under the reign of the Holy 
 Ghost ; and he predicted that the Abomination of Desolation 
 should be a simoniacal pope shortly to come a prediction of 
 which many saw the fulfilment forty years later in Boniface VIII. 
 Gerard was further accused, we cannot tell now with what justice, 
 of seeing in St. Francis a new Christ who was to supersede the 
 Christ of the Second Age. Speculations like this, published in 
 the very Schools of Paris, could not be allowed to pass uncon- 
 demned : and the matter was brought in 1 255 before a Papal 
 Commission : Gerard's work was condemned and suppressed, and 
 exists at present only in the extracts singled out by his accusers. 
 This event, as we have seen, brought about the fall of John of
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 1 53 
 
 Parma. Yet, all through this storm, Joachim's own prophecies 
 were never condemned ; the whole affair was hushed up as quietly 
 as possible, not only for the sake of the Franciscan Order, but 
 because there were so many others who had long held Joachim for 
 a prophet, feeling with him that traditional Christianity was a 
 failure, and that an altogether new world was needed for its re- 
 newal. The immense popularity of his prophecies which were 
 quoted as authoritative by Roman Catholic divines even in the 
 1 7th century goes far to explain many of the strangest religious 
 phenomena recorded by Salimbene. He himself believed to the 
 end in Joachim as a prophet, even after he had long given up 
 Joachism in the strictest sense. 
 
 He had received his first tinge of Joachism from Hugues de 
 Digne at Siena, and was confirmed in this creed at Pisa by an 
 Abbot of the Order of Fiore, and by his own Franciscan Lector 
 there. Again, at the very beginning of these his wander-years, 
 in December 1247, he had been brought under the immediate 
 influence of the future author of the notorious " Introduction." 
 (237) "When King Louis was on his first passage to succour the 
 Holy Land, and I dwelt at Provins, there were two brethren 
 wholly given to Joachism, who essayed all they could to draw 
 me to that doctrine. Whereof one was Brother Bartolommeo 
 Guiscolo, of my own city of Parma, a courteous and spiritual 
 man, but a great talker and a great Joachite, and devoted to the 
 Emperor's party. He was once Guardian in the Convent of 
 Capua : he was most active in all his works. In the world he 
 had taught grammar, but in our Order he knew to copy, to 
 illuminate, to compose writings, and to do many other things. 
 In his lifetime he did marvels, and in his death he worked still 
 more marvellously ; for he saw such things when his soul went 
 forth from his body, that all the Brethren present were in 
 admiration. The other was Brother Gerardino of Borgo San 
 Donnino, who had grown up in Sicily, and had taught grammar, 
 and was a well-mannered youth, honest and good, save for this one 
 thing, that he persevered too obstinately in Joachim's doctrine, 
 and clung so to his own opinion that none could move him. 
 These two lay hard upon me that I should believe the writings 
 of Abbot Joachim and study in them ; for they had Joachim's 
 exposition on Jeremias 1 ' and many other books. And when 
 the King of France in those days was preparing to cross the seas 
 with other Crusaders, they mocked and derided, saying that he 
 would fare ill if he went, as the event showed afterwards. And 
 they showed me that it was thus written in Joachim's exposition 
 on Jeremias, and therefore that we must expect its fulfilment.
 
 1 54 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 And whereas throughout the whole of France all that year men 
 sang daily in their conventual Masses the psalm * O God, the 
 heathens are come into thy inheritance,' yet these two scoffed 
 and said in the words of Jeremiah * " Thou hast set a cloud before 
 thee, that our prayer may not pass through " ; for the King of 
 France shall be taken, and the French shall be conquered in war, 
 and many shall be carried off' by the plague.' Wherefore they 
 were made hateful to the Brethren of France, who said that 
 these evil prophecies had been fulfilled on the former Crusade. 
 There was at that time in the convent of Provins a Lector named 
 Brother Maurice, a comely man, and noble, and most learned, who 
 had studied much, first in the World, at Paris, and then eight 
 years in our Order. He had lately become my friend, and he said 
 to me : ' Brother Salimbene, have no faith in these Joachites, for 
 they trouble the Brethren with their doctrines ; but help me in 
 writing, for I would fain make a good Book of Distinctions, 
 which will be most useful for preachers.' 
 
 " Then the Joachites separated of their own free will ; for I 
 went to dwell at Auxerre, Brother Bartolommeo to dwell in the 
 convent of Sens, Brother Gerardiuo was sent to Paris to study for 
 the Province of Sicily, on behalf of which he had been received 
 into the Order. And there he studied four years, and thought 
 out his folly, composing a book, and publishing it abroad without 
 the knowledge of the Brethren. And because for this book's 
 sake the Order was evil-spoken of both at Paris and elsewhere, 
 therefore the aforesaid Gerardino was deprived of his offices of 
 Lector and Preacher, and of the power of hearing confessions, 
 and of all priestly powers. And because he would not amend 
 himself and humbly acknowledge his fault, but with wayward 
 obstinacy persevered in his headstrong contumacy, therefore 
 the Brethren cast him into prison and bonds, feeding him with 
 bread of affliction and water of distress. Yet not even then 
 would this wretch withdraw from his obstinate purpose ; but he 
 suffered himself to die in prison, and was deprived of the burial 
 of the Church and buried in a corner of the garden. Let all 
 know, therefore, that due rigour of justice is kept among us against 
 all that transgress : wherefore one man's fault is not to be imputed 
 to the whole Order. 2 
 
 " So when in the year of our Lord 1248 I was at Hyeres with 
 Brother Hugh (seeing that I was curious of the teaching of Abbot 
 Joachim, and gladly heard him, applauding and rejoicing with 
 him), he said to me, ' Art thou infatuated as those who follow 
 this doctrine ? ' For they are indeed held infatuated by many, 
 since although Abbot Joachim was a holy man, yet he had three
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 155 
 
 hindrances to his doctrine. The first was the condemnation of 
 that book which he wrote against Master Peter Lombard, whom 
 he charged with heresy and madness. The second was that he 
 foretold tribulations to come, which was the cause why the Jews 
 slew the Prophets, for carnal men love not to hear of tribulations 
 to come. The third hindrance came from men who believed in 
 him, but who would fain forestall the times and seasons which 
 he had prescribed : for he fixed no certain terms of years though 
 some may think so. Rather, he named several terms, saying, 
 ' God is able to show His mysteries yet more clearly, and they 
 shall see who come after us. 3 ' 
 
 " Now when 1 saw that judges and notaries and other learned 
 men were gathered together in Brother Hugh's chamber to hear 
 him teach the doctrine of Abbot Joachim, I remembered Eliseus, 
 of whom it is written 'But Eliseus sat in his house, and the 
 ancients sat with him.' In those days there came two other 
 Joachites of the convent of Naples, whereof one was called 
 Brother John the Frenchman, the other Brother Giovannino 
 Pigolino of Parma. These had come to Hyeres to see Brother 
 Hugh and hear him speak on this Doctrine. Then also came 
 two Friars Preachers returning from their General Chapter at 
 Paris, whereof the one was called Brother Peter of Apulia, the 
 Lector of their Order at Naples, and a learned man and a great 
 talker ; and he was waiting a fit time to sail. To him one day 
 after dinner said Brother Giovannino, who knew him very well, 
 * Brother Peter, what thinkest thou of the doctrine of Abbot 
 Joachim ? ' To which he answered, ' I care as little for Joachim 
 as for the fifth wheel of a waggon ; for even Pope Gregory in 
 one of his homilies believed that the end of the world would come 
 almost in his own time, since the Lombards had come in his days 
 and were destroying all things.' Brother Giovannino therefore 
 hastened to Brother Hugh's chamber, and in the presence of those 
 aforesaid men said to him, ' Here is a certain Friar Preacher who 
 will have nothing of this doctrine.' To whom Brother Hugh 
 said, ' What is that to me ? To him shall it be imputed. Let 
 him look to it when " vexation alone shall make him understand 
 what he hears." Yet call him to disputation and I will hear his 
 doubts.' So he came, but unwillingly, for he despised Joachim, 
 and deemed that there were none in our convent to be compared 
 with himself in learning or in knowledge of the Scriptures. 
 Brother Hugh said to him, 'Art thou he who doubts of the 
 doctrine of Joachim?' Brother Peter answered, 'I am he 
 indeed.' ' Hast thou then read Joachim ? ' 'I have read him,' 
 said he, ' with care.' ' Yea,' said Brother Hugh, ' I believe thou
 
 156 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 hast read him as a woman her Psalter, who when she is come to 
 the end knows and remembers no word of that which she read 
 at the beginning. So many read without understanding, either 
 because they despise what they read, or because their foolish 
 heart is darkened. Tell me now what thou wouldest hear of 
 Joachim.' To whom Brother Peter answered, 'Prove me now 
 by Esaias, as Joachim teacheth, that the life of the Emperor 
 Frederick must be ended in seventy years (for he liveth yet) : 
 and that he cannot be slain but by God that is, by no violent, 
 but by a natural death.' To whom Brother Hugh said, ' Gladly ; 
 but listen patiently, and with no declamations or cavils, for in the 
 matter of this doctrine it behoveth to listen with faith.' ' Here 
 follows a discussion so long that I am compelled reluctantly to 
 omit by far the greater part of it : though it contains one most 
 interesting anecdote of the Saint (240). "As to the holiness 
 of Joachim's life, beyond what is to be read in his Legend, I can 
 cite one example wherein his admirable patience is shown. 
 Before he was made Abbot, when he was a subordinate and 
 private person, the refectorer was wroth against him, and for a 
 whole year long always filled his jug with water to drink, wishing 
 to keep him on the bread of affliction and water of distress ; all 
 which he bore patiently and without complaint. But when at the 
 end of the year he was sitting beside the Abbot at table, the 
 Abbot said to him, * Wherefore drinkest thou white wine, and 
 
 5ivest none to me ? Is that thy courtesy ? ' To whom the holy 
 oachim answered, ' I was ashamed, Father, to invite you, for 
 " my own secret to myself." ' Then the Abbot taking his cup, 
 and wishing to prove him, tasted thereof, and saw that his mer- 
 chandise was not good. So, when he had tasted this water not 
 turned to wine, he said, ' And what is water but water ? ' And 
 he said to him, * By whose leave drinkest thou such drink ? ' 
 And Joachim answered, ' Father, water is a sober drink, which 
 neither tieth the tongue, nor bringeth on drunkenness, nor maketh 
 men to babble.' But when the Abbot had learnt in the Chapter- 
 house that this injury and vengeance had been done of the malice 
 and rancour of the refectorer, he would have driven him forth 
 from the Order, but Joachim fell at the Abbot's feet, and prayed 
 him until he spared to expel that lay-brother from the Order. 
 Yet he reviled and rebuked him hard and bitterly, saying, 
 ' I give thee for a penance that thou drink nought but water for 
 a whole year long, as thou hast dealt unjustly with thy neighbour 
 and brother.' " This story (of which Prof. Holder-Egger gives 
 a different and less picturesque version from Joachim's biographer 
 Luke of Cosenza) was well worth recording : but the rest of this
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 1 5 7 
 
 long episode is chiefly interesting for the light it throws on 
 medieval methods of theological discussion, which closely resemble 
 those of the tavern disputants in Janet's Repentance. Brother 
 Hugh is as mercilessly rhetorical as Lawyer Dempster ; and to 
 Salimbene, as to Mr. Budd, the consideration that his hero had 
 " studied very hard when he was a young man " and was always 
 ready to answer any question on any subject without the least 
 hesitation, entirely outweighs the fact that the event had proved 
 him altogether wrong for Frederick was now long since dead, at 
 an age considerably short of the prophetical seventy years. Brother 
 Hugh's methods, though every whit as reasonable as those of 
 world-famed controversialists like St. Bernardino of Siena and 
 St. James of the Mark, would carry but little conviction to-day. 
 In vain did the sceptical Dominican ask for more real evidence, 
 and protest against Merlin and the Sibyl being quoted as final 
 authorities : in vain did he " turn to the original words of the 
 Saints and to the sayings of the philosophers " : for " therein 
 Brother Hugh entangled and involved him forthwith ; since he 
 was a most learned man. Then Brother Peter's comrade who 
 was a priest and an old and good man, began to help him, but 
 Brother Peter cried to him * Peace ! Peace ' I So when Brother 
 Peter found himself conquered, he turned to commend Brother 
 Hugh for his manifold wisdom. And when the aforesaid words 
 had been ended, behold suddenly the shipman's messenger came 
 for the Preachers, telling them to go hastily to the ship. So after 
 their departure, Brother Hugh said to the remaining learned men 
 who had heard the disputation, ' Take it not for an ill example if 
 we have said some things which we should not have said ; for they 
 who dispute of presumptuous boldness are wont to run hither 
 and thither over the field of licence.' And Brother Hugh added 
 ' These good men always boast of their knowledge, and say that 
 in their Order is the foundation of wisdom. They say also that 
 they have passed among unlearned men when they have passed 
 through the convents of the Friars Minor, wherein they are 
 charitably and diligently entertained. But by God's grace they 
 shall not say this time that they have passed among men of no 
 learning, for I have done as the Wise Man teacheth " Answer a 
 fool according to his folly, lest he imagine himself to be wise." ' 
 So the lay folk departed much edified and consoled, saying ' We 
 have heard marvels to-day ; but on the Feast following we would 
 hear somewhat of the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.' To 
 whom Brother Hugh said, 'If I be still alive I will receive you 
 
 fladly, and therefore come indeed.' Moreover, that same day the 
 riars Preachers returned and solaced themselves with us, for
 
 i 58 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 they had no fit weather to sail. And after supper Brother Hugh 
 was familiar with them, and Brother Peter seated himself on the 
 ground at his feet, nor was there any who could make him rise 
 and sit on a level bench with him no, not even Brother Hugh 
 himself, though he prayed him instantly. Moreover Brother 
 Peter, now no longer disputing or contradicting, but humbly 
 listening, heard the honeyed words which Brother Hugh spake, 
 (which indeed would be worthy to be related here, but I omit 
 them for brevity's sake, for I hasten to other things.) Then 
 Brother Peter's comrade said to me in private, ' For God's sake, 
 tell me who is that Brother, whether he be a prelate a Guardian, 
 a Gustos, or a Minister?' To whom I said, 'He has no prelacy, 
 for he will have none. Once he was a Minister-Provincial, but 
 now he is a private person, and he is one of the greatest clerks of 
 the world, and is so esteemed by all who know him.' Then said 
 he to me, ' In good truth I believe it, for never did 1 see a man 
 who speaketh so well, and is so ready in all knowledge. But I 
 wonder wherefore he dwelleth not in great convents.' 4 To whom 
 1 said, ' By reason of his humility and sanctity, for he is more 
 comforted to dwell in little houses.' Then said he, ' God's bless- 
 ing light on him, for he seemeth all heavenly.' And after many 
 commendations on both sides, the Friars Preachers departed, 
 consoled and much edified." 6 
 
 This was in 1248 : and Hugh's triumphant exposition of 
 Joachism was shattered in less than two years by the Emperor's 
 death not after 1264, as it should have been, but as early as 
 1250. No doubt Hugh's robust faith survived the shock, for he 
 could still look forward to the Reign of the Holy Ghost, prophesied 
 to begin in the year 1260 a year which, by the bye, he never 
 lived to see. Bxit when 1260 also passed without the expected 
 signs (though the Flagellants' mania of that year had given him 
 a brief gleam of hope) then Salimbene's faith in Joachism as an 
 -ism collapsed. (302) "After the death of the ex-Emperor 
 Frederick, and the passing of the year 1260, then I let that whole 
 doctrine go ; and I am purposed to believe no more than I can 
 see." 
 
 Yet he always kept up a lively outsider's interest, and gives 
 us a long account of a talk with the notorious Gerard of Borgo 
 San Donnino which took place, as Prof. Michael has shown, in 
 1256. The condemnation of the Introduction to the Eternal 
 Gospel naturally led to the punishment of its author, who 
 (456) "had been sent back [from Paris] to his own province 
 [of Sicily] ; and, because he would not draw back from his folly, 
 Bonaventura the Minister-General sent for him to join him in
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. i 59 
 
 France. When therefore he passed through Modena, I dwelt 
 there, and I said to him, since I knew him well : ' Shall we dispute 
 of Joachim ? ' Then said he, * Let us not dispute, but confer 
 thereof : and let us go to some privy place.' So I took him 
 behind the dormitory, and we sat under a vine ; and I said 
 to him ' My question is of Antichrist, when and where he shall 
 be born ? ' Then said he ' He is already born and full-grown ; 
 and the Mystery of Iniquity shall soon be at work.' So I said 
 4 Dost thou know him ? ' 'I have not seen his face, but I know 
 him well through the Scripture.' * Where then is that Scripture ? ' 
 ' In the Bible,' said he. ' Tell me then, for I know my Bible 
 well.' ' Nay, I will by no means tell it but if we have a Bible 
 here. So I brought him one, and he began to expound the 
 whole 18th chapter of Isaiah, beginning ' Woe to the land the 
 winged cymbal ' and so on to the end, as referring to a certain 
 King [Alfonso] of Castile in Spain. 6 So 1 said to him, ' Sayest 
 thou then that this King of Castile now reigning is Antichrist ? ' 
 ' Beyond all doubt he is that accursed Antichrist whereof all 
 doctors and saints have spoken who have treated of this matter.' 
 Then I answered, mocking him, ' I hope in my God that thou 
 shalt find thyself deceived.' And as I thus spake, suddenly 
 many brethren and secular folk appeared in the meadow behind 
 the dormitory, speaking sadly one with another, : so he said, ' Go 
 thou and hear what these say, since they seem to bring woful 
 news.' I went and returned and said to him, ' They say that the 
 Lord Philip Archbishop of Ravenna [and Papal legate] hath 
 been taken by Ezzelino.' Then he answered * Thou seest that 
 the mysteries are even now begun.' Then he enquired of me 
 whether I knew a certain man of Verona dwelling in Parma, 
 who had the spirit of prophecy and wrote of the future. ' I 
 know him well,' said I, ' and have seen his writings.' ' I would 
 fain have his writings : I beseech thee therefore to procure them 
 for me if it be possible.' * Yea, for he is glad to publish them 
 abroad, and rejoices greatly whensoever any will have them : for 
 he has written many homilies which I have seen, and has left 
 the trade of a weaver whereby he was wont to live in Parma, 
 and betaken himself to the convent of the Cistercians at 
 Fontanaviva. There he dwells in worldly dress at the monks' 
 expense, and writes all day long in a chamber which they have 
 assigned to him : and thou mayest go to him, for the convent is 
 no more than two miles below the high road.' ' Nay,' said he, 
 ' for my companions would not turn aside from the road ; but I 
 beseech thee to go thither and procure me those books, and thou 
 shalt earn my gratitude.' So he went on his way, and I saw him
 
 160 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 no more : but when I had time I went to that convent. There 
 I found a friend of mine, Brother Alberto Cremonella, who 
 
 entered the Order of Friars Minor the same day as I, 
 
 but he quitted the Order during his novitiate, returning to the 
 world and studying medicine, and after that he entered the 
 Cistercian Order at Fontanaviva. where he was held in great 
 esteem by all. Seeing me therefore, he thought (as he said) to 
 see an angel of God ; for he loved me familiarly. Then said I 
 that he would do me much favour if he would lend me all the 
 writings of that man of Verona. But be answered and said, 
 * Know, Brother Salimbene, that I am great and powerful in this 
 house, and the brethren love me of their own lovingkindness 
 and for my gift of physic ; and if thou wilt I can lend thee all 
 the works of St. Bernard : but this man of whom thou speakest 
 is dead, nor is there one letter of all his writings left in the world, 
 for with mine own hands have I scraped all his books clean, and 
 I will tell thee how and why. We had a Brother in this convent 
 who was excellently skilled in scraping parchment, and he said 
 to our Abbot, " Father, the Blessed Job and Ecclesiastes warn 
 us of our death : and it is written in Hebrews * It is appointed 
 unto men once to die : ' since therefore it is clearer to me than 
 the light of day that I must some day depart this life, for I am 
 no better than my fathers ; therefore, Father, I pray you 
 vouchsafe to assign me certain disciples who would learn to scrape 
 parchment : for they might be profitable to this convent after 
 my death." Since therefore there was none found but I who 
 would learn this art, therefore after the death of my master and 
 of this man of Verona, I scraped all his books so clean that not 
 one letter is left of all his writings : not only that I might have 
 material whereon to learn my art, but also for that we had been 
 sorely scandalized by reason of those prophecies.' 7 So I, hearing 
 this, said in my heart, ' Yea, and the book of Jeremias the Pro- 
 phet was once burned, and he who burned it escaped not due 
 punishment ; and the law of Moses was burned by the Chaldees, 
 yet Esdras restored it again by the aid of the Holy Ghost.' So 
 there arose in Parma a certain simple man whose intellect was 
 enlightened to foretell the future, as it is written in Proverbs, 
 ' God's communication is with the simple.' 8 Moreover after 
 many years, while I dwelt in the convent of Imola, Brother 
 Arnolfo my Guardian came to my cell with a book written on 
 paper sheets, saying, ' There is in this land a certain notary who 
 is a friend of the brethren ; and he hath lent me this book to 
 read, which he wrote at Rome when he was there with the Lord 
 Brancaleone of Bologna, Senator of Rome ; and the book is
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 1 6 1 
 
 exceedingly dear to him, for it is written and composed by 
 Brother Gerard of Borgo San Donnino : wherefore do thou, who 
 hast studied in the books of Abbot Joachim, read now this 
 treatise and tell me whether there is any good therein.' So when 
 I had read and understood it, 1 answered Brother Arnolfo say- 
 ing : ' This book hath not the style of the ancient doctors ; but 
 rather frivolous and ridiculous words ; wherefore the book is of 
 evil fame and hath been condemned, so that I counsel you to cast 
 it into the fire and burn it, and bid this friend of yours have 
 patience with you for God's sake and the Order's.' So it was 
 done, and the book burned. Yet note that this Brother Gerard 
 who wrote the aforesaid book seemed to have much good in him. 
 For he was friendly, courteous, liberal, religious, honest, modest, 
 well-mannered, temperate in word and food and drink and raiment, 
 helpful with all humility and gentleness. He was indeed such as 
 the Wise Man writeth in Proverbs 'a man amiable in society, 
 who shall be more friendly than a brother ' ; yet his wayward- 
 ness in his own opinion brought all these good things to nought. 
 It was ordained by reason of this Gerard that from henceforward 
 no new writing should be published without the Order, save only 
 such as had first been approved by the Ministers and the 
 Definitors in a Chapter General; and that if any did contrary 
 to this rule, he should fast three days on bread and water, and 
 his book should be taken from him." Gerard's book, according 
 to our chronicler, "contained many falsehoods contrary to the 
 doctrine of Abbot Joachim, and such as he had never written ; 
 as for instance that Christ's Gospel and the teaching of the New 
 Testament had led no man to perfection, and would be super- 
 seded in the year 1260." 
 
 In judging the apparent coolness with which Salimbene speaks 
 of his friend's disgrace and death, we must remember that he 
 himself had given up the Millennarian side of Joachism, and was 
 therefore compelled, like nine-tenths of the other Franciscans, to 
 look upon Gerard as the man whose blundering obstinacy might 
 easily have caused the defeat of the Orders in their great struggle 
 with the secular doctors at Paris. Gerard was the intellectual 
 black sheep of the Order ; Angelo Clareno, excluding him from 
 the list of persecuted Spirituals, rejoices on the contrary to 
 record that " he died as a heretic and excommunicate, and was 
 denied Christian burial" after 18 years of imprisonment in Fran- 
 ciscan dungeons (Arch, iv, n, 283 ff.) ; and, considering the 
 usual tone of medieval religious controversy, Salimbene's gener- 
 ous tribute to Gerard's character is far more noticeable than his 
 failure to sympathize with sufferings which a recantation would
 
 1 62 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 at any moment have ended. It is difficult for us in this age to 
 realize even remotely the scorn which the most sympathetic men 
 felt then for all poor fools who went to death as champions of 
 unorthodox ideas. " This is the utmost folly " (writes Salimbene, 
 p. 460), " when a man is rebuked by men of the greatest learn- 
 ing, and yet will not retreat from his false opinions against the 
 Catholic faith .... no man, therefore, ought to be wanton and 
 pertinacious in his own opinions." St. James of the Mark, 
 again, was an able man and a real saint : but it is impossible to 
 read without a shudder the reasons by which he overcame his 
 natural reluctance to burn heretics. 9 
 
 Frequent as are Salimbene's further allusions to Joachim, 
 they mostly imply no more than that he still looked upon him as 
 a man of great personal holiness, and endowed with the gift of 
 foretelling certain particular events. He caught gladly, to the 
 very end, at all Joachistic prophecies which fell in with his own 
 views, but tacitly abandoned the rest. He is especially fond of 
 the spurious " Exposition of Jeremiah," with its prophecies of 
 the greatness of the friars, and especially with the preference 
 which it shows for the Franciscans over the Dominicans. The 
 Franciscans (it says) shall be the more popular and less exclusive 
 Order : they alone shall last till the day of Judgment : for 
 Salimbene, like most men of his time, was haunted by that vague, 
 not always uncomfortable, foreboding of the near end of the 
 world which contributed so much to the popularity of Joachism. 
 He quotes how (579) "it was once revealed in a vision to a 
 certain spiritual brother of the Friars Preachers that they would 
 have as many Ministers- General as there are letters in the word 
 dirigimur (" we are governed ") : which hath nine letters ; so 
 that, if the vision be true, there are but two to come : namely, 
 u and r. For the first letter signifieth Dominic, the second, 
 lordan, the third, Raymund, the fourth, lohn, the fifth, Gumbert 
 [z.e., Humbert de Romans], the sixth, lohn the Second, the 
 seventh, Munio, who is now their General : whereof a like example 
 is recorded by St. Gregory in the third book of his dialogues. 
 And note that Abbot Joachim, to whom God revealed the future, 
 said that the Order of Preachers should suffer with the rest of 
 the clergy, but the Order of Friars Minor should endure to the 
 end." The reference to St. Gregory is no doubt chap. 38, where 
 the Pope, writing about 600 A.D., speaks of the probability 
 or, rather, the certainty that the Last Judgment is close at 
 hand. He therefore proceeds to relate a series of miracles 
 designed to confute those " many folk within the bosom of Holy 
 Church who doubt whether the soul survive the death of the
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 163 
 
 flesh." Salimbene, as we may see from a sentence recorded 
 above in his description of Hugh's argument, was critical 
 enough to observe that these expectations of immediate judgment 
 had been common at least from an early period of the Middle 
 Ages. Later on he records another story showing how men's 
 minds were haunted in his day by similar terrors of a coining 
 Visitation of God. It may remind some readers of Chaucer's 
 " Miller's Tale," the plot of which was probably taken from some 
 13th-century fabliau. (620) "In the year 1286 there died in 
 the city of Keggio a certain man of Brescia, who had aforetime 
 taught boys to read the Psalter, and feigned himself to be poor, 
 and went about begging, singing also at times and playing the 
 panpipe, that men might the more readily give. The devil put it 
 into his heart that there would be a great famine ; wherefore 
 he would roast crusts of bread and lay them in chests ; and he 
 filled sacks with meal trodden down, which likewise he laid up in 
 chests, against this famine which, as I have said, he hoped for 
 at the devil's suggestion. But as it was said to the rich man in 
 the Gospel ' Thou fool, etc.' so it befel this wretched miser. For 
 one evening he fell into a grievous sickness beyond his wont, 
 and, being alone in his house, he diligently bolted the door upon 
 himself ; and that night he was foully choked by the devil, and 
 shamefully mishandled. So on the morrow when he appeared not, 
 his neighbours came together, men and women and children, and 
 burst his door by force, and found him lying dead on the earth ; 
 and they found the sacks of meal already rotten in one chest, 
 and two other chests they found full of roasted bread-crusts. 
 And it was found likewise that he had two houses in the city, 
 in different quarters, which became forfeit to the Commune of 
 Reggio ; that the common proverb might be fulfilled, ' Quod non 
 accipit Christies accipit Fiscus That which is not given to Christ 
 goeth to the public treasury.' Moreover the children stripped 
 that wretch naked, and bound shackles of wood to his feet, and 
 dragged his naked corpse through all the streets and places of 
 the city, for a laughing-stock and a mockery to all men. And, 
 strange to relate ! no man had taught them to deal thus, nor did 
 any reprove them or say that they had done ill. But when at 
 last they came to St. Anthony's spital, and were weary with 
 their labour, it chanced that a certain peasant came that way 
 with an ox-waggon. The boys therefore would have bound this 
 outcast corpse to the tail of his waggon, but he strove to hinder 
 them ; then the boys rose up suddenly against that boor, and 
 beat him sore, that he was fain at last to let them do as they 
 would. They went out of the city therefore by the bridge of
 
 164 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 S. Stefano, and cast the corpse from the bridge upon the gravel 
 of the torrent called Crostolo, and then climbing down they 
 heaped thereon a mighty pile of stones, crying ' Thy famine and 
 thine avarice go down with thee to hell, and thy churlishness 
 withal, for ever and a day.' Whence it became a proverb that 
 men would say to miserly persons * Take heed lest ye provoke 
 the boys' fury by your churlishness.' " 10 
 
 It is disappointing from many points of view that our chronicler 
 so early lost sympathy with Joachism as a life-force : with that 
 Joachism which was soon to inspire Dolcino, and after him 
 Kienzi, and was so often the mainspring of those antisacerdotal 
 sects which flourished all through the Middle Ages. For it can 
 scarcely be out of place here to point out a more than superficial 
 analogy between 13th century and 19th century religious life. 
 Mysticism and Rationalism, little as they care to recognize each 
 other, have strong secret affinities : enthusiasm may give a 
 mighty impulse, but can never be sure what direction the forces 
 thus liberated will finally take. Every fresh presentment of 
 Christianity is double-edged in its truth as in its error. By 
 means of his Theory of Development Newman reconciled himself 
 to a Rome which, as he saw only too clearly, was very different 
 from the Rome of the Apostles : he took the theory with him 
 into his new church, and there it has borne unexpected fruit in 
 the doctrines of Abbe Loisy and his school. To Newman, it was 
 the high road from dreary Private Judgment to blessed Authority : 
 to the modern intellectual Romanist, it is as easy a backward 
 road from Authority to Private Judgment. Much of this same 
 tendency may be traced in the history of Joachism. The Prophet 
 of Calabria reconciled himself to the corruptions of the Church 
 around him as to tokens which, after all, marked the imminent 
 birth of a new era ; and his theory undoubtedly did much to 
 create a favourable atmosphere for the coming friars, who were 
 themselves deeply inspired by the conviction that old things 
 were passed away, and all things were become new. When, 
 however, after a generation or so, it became evident how little 
 the Church in general was shaken from its old evil ways, then the 
 restless energies of the new movement began in many cases to work 
 backwards, rebounding with the very force of their own impact 
 against so vast and inert a mass. The more men realized the 
 living forces liberated by the Franciscan and Dominican reform, 
 the more they were tempted to despair of a priesthood on which 
 even such a shock could scarcely make an appreciable impression. 11 
 It was certain (so at least Joachim, truly interpreting the 
 yearnings of his age, had taught), that the world was on the brink
 
 Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development. 1 65 
 
 of a new and brighter era, with nothing now intervening save 
 Antichrist and the Abomination of Desolation the death-throes 
 of a dying world from which the new world was to be born. Men 
 whose every thought was coloured by this conviction and 
 thousands of the best and most pious, such as Adam Marsh, 
 were more or less avowed Joachites would find it difficult 
 indeed to stifle antisacerdotal suggestions, as decade after decade 
 passed without real reform within the Church. So long as 
 Frederick and his race were alive, so that the civil wars of Italy 
 bore some real appearance of religious wars, so long good Church- 
 men could always see Antichrist in the Empire. But when, in 
 the latter half of the 13th century, the Emperors became almost 
 vassals of the Popes, and yet the world seemed rather worse 
 than better then at last men began to ask themselves whether 
 the real enemy of the Church was not the Cleric himself : whether 
 that Antichrist and that Abomination of Desolation, which by 
 the Joachitic hypothesis were already let loose upon the world, 
 could be any other than the Pope and his court, so powerful to 
 fight with carnal weapons, and so powerless to reform the Church. 
 And so among the Franciscans who naturally counted a dis- 
 proportionate number of enthusiasts and quick intellects, and 
 with whom the liberties of the individual friar were often all 
 the greater for his Order's well-earned reputation of subservience 
 to the Pope many among the Franciscans, first as zealous 
 Spirituals and then as schismatical Fraticelli, became the chief 
 exponents of the Antipapal element in Joachim's theories. 
 Much is permitted to a man who is labelled with the label of a 
 powerful party : and antipapalism often grew up unchecked 
 among the Papal militia of the Middle Ages, just as 
 Unitarianism grew up under the 18th century Presbyterianism, 
 and as in our own generation a strict devotion to ritual 
 will cover views on inspiration and on miracles which to the 
 early Tractarians would have seemed unspeakably abominable. 
 We can see this under our own eyes : we can trace much of the 
 same tendency in the 13th century ; and it would have been 
 welcome indeed if Salimbene had spoken as freely on this subject 
 as he did on many others. But the old chronicler had already 
 forgotten many of the interests of his youth ; and indeed this 
 matter of Joachism is the one solitary case in which Salimbene 
 seems ever to have cherished sectarian sympathies ; some of 
 his most important and entertaining records, as will be seen 
 later on, are directed against enthusiasts of his age whose 
 religious zeal outran their discretion. Nor is it easy to imagine 
 that he ever fully sympathized even under the daily influence
 
 1 66 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 of Brothers Hugh and John of Parma with that passionate 
 longing for a new world which was the soul of real Joachism. 
 The world he saw and knew, with all its shortcomings, was a 
 great deal too full of interest to be wished away. He was an 
 Epicurean in the higher sense, recognizing that there are few 
 pleasures in life so keen and abiding as that of learning ; and 
 that, so long as one is young and strong, there is no better way 
 of learning than to travel among many men and many cities.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 Further Wanderings. 
 
 Q1ALIMBENE, however happy in Brother Hugh's company, 
 JO had no real business at Hyeres, and could not stay there 
 indefinitely. Accordingly (294) " I borrowed from him what 
 he had of the Expositions of Abbot Joachim on the four 
 Evangelists, and went to dwell in the convent of Aix, where I 
 copied the book with the help of my comrade for Brother John 
 of Parma, who was likewise a very mighty Joachite." Aix 
 attracted him for those romantic but mythical traditions which 
 may still be read in the Golden Legend, a book which was com- 
 piled by a contemporary of Salimbene's and probably an acquain- 
 tance : for he seems to have been in the Dominican convent of 
 Genoa in this year 1248 when Salimbene spent some months at 
 the Franciscan convent there. Martha and Lazarus and the 
 Magdalene, with St. Maximin who had been one of the 72 
 disciples, and Martilla who had cried in the crowd " Blessed is 
 the womb that bare thee," and Cedonius, the blind man of John 
 ix. 2, had been put by the Jews on board a boat without sails 
 or rudder ; and " by God's will they came to Marseilles, where 
 in process of time Lazarus was Bishop ; and he wrote his book 
 On the Pains of Hell, as he had seen them with his own eyes. But 
 when I enquired after this book at Marseilles, I heard that it had 
 been burnt by the negligence and carelessness of the guardian 
 of the church." 1 (295) " When therefore I had written this 
 book, the month of September was come, and Brother Raymond, 
 Minister of Provence, wrote me w.ord to come and meet the 
 Minister-General. He wrote also to Brother Hugh to meet him, 
 and we found him at Tarascon, where now is the body of St. 
 Martha : so we went to visit her body we twelve Brethren 
 besides the General ; and the Canons showed us her arm to 
 kiss. So when we had said our Compline in the convent, and 
 beds had been assigned to the guests to sleep in the same building 
 with the General, he went out into the cloister to pray. But the 
 strange Brethren feared to enter their beds until the General
 
 1 68 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 came to his ; and I, seeing their distress, for they murmured, 
 because they would fain have slept, and could not, for the bed- 
 places were lighted with bright tapers of wax therefore I went 
 to the General, who was my very close and intimate friend, being 
 of my country, and akin to my kindred. So I found him praying, 
 and said, ' Father, the strange -Brethren, wearied with their 
 journey and their labour, would fain sleep ; but they fear to enter 
 their beds, until you be first come to yours.' Then said he, ' Go, 
 tell them from me to sleep with God's blessing ' : and so it was. 
 But it seemed good to me to await the General, that I might 
 show him his bed. When therefore he was come from prayer, 
 1 showed him the bed prepared for him : but he said, * Son, the 
 Pope's self might sleep in this bed:* never shall John of Parma 
 sleep therein.' And he threw himself upon the empty bed which 
 I hoped to have. And I said to him, ' Father, God forgive you, 
 for you have deprived me of my allotted bed, wherein I thought 
 to sleep.' And he said, ' Sou, sleep thou in that Papal bed ' ; 
 and when after his example I would have refused, he said to me, 
 * I am firmly resolved that thou shalt lie there, and that is my 
 command ' : wherefore I must needs do as he commanded." 
 Here at Tarascon Salimbene saw and admired two English friars, 
 of whom the principal, Brother Stephen, " had entered the Order 
 in his boyhood ; a comely, spiritual, and learned man, of most 
 excellent counsel, and ready to preach daily to the clergy ; and 
 he had most excellent writings of Brother Adam Marsh, whose 
 lectures on Genesis I heard from him." Stephen, of whom 
 Salimbene has an interesting tale to tell presently, is possibly 
 the hero of one of the most charming anecdotes in Eccleston. 
 (R.S. p. 26.} " Brother Peter the Spaniard, who was afterwards 
 Guardian of Northampton and wore a shirt of mail to tame the 
 temptations of the flesh . . . had in his convent a novice who 
 was tempted to leave the Order : but he persuaded him with 
 much ado to go with him to the Minister. On the road, Brother 
 Peter began to preach to him of the virtue of Holy Obedience ; 
 and lo ! a wild bird went before them as they walked on the way. 
 So the novice, whose name was Stephen, said to Brother Peter, 
 ' Father, if it be as thou sayest, bid me in virtue of obedience to 
 catch this wild bird, and bid it wait for me.' The Brother did 
 so : and the bird stood suddenly still, and the novice came up 
 and took it and handled it as he would. Straightway his tempt- 
 ation was wholly assuaged, and God gave unto him another 
 
 * Alia paperina was a common Italian phrase to denote great comfort : cf. 
 Sacchetti Nov. 131 and 156.
 
 Further Wanderings. 169 
 
 heart, and he returned forthwith to Northampton and made his 
 profession of perseverance ; and afterwards he became a most 
 excellent preacher, as I saw with mine own eyes." 
 
 Salimbene accompanied John of Parma down the Rhone 
 again to Aries. (297) "And one day when the General was 
 alone, I went to his chamber, and behold, after me came my 
 comrade who was likewise of Parma, Brother Giovannino dalle 
 Olle by name, and he said, ' Father, vouchsafe that I and Brother 
 Salimbene may have the aureole.'* Then the General showed a 
 jocund face, saying to my comrade, ' How then can I give you 
 the aureole ? ' To whom Brother Giovannino answered, * By 
 giving us the office of Preachers.' Then said Brother John, 
 * In very truth, if ye were both my blood-brethren, ye should not 
 have that office otherwise than by the sword of examination.' 
 Then I answered and said to my comrade in the Minister's 
 hearing, ' Hence, hence, with thine aureole I I received the office 
 of Preacher last year from Pope Innocent IV at Lyons. Since 
 therefore it hath once been granted to me by him who had all 
 power, shall I receive it now from Brother Giovannino of San 
 Lazzaro ? ' (For Brother John of Parma was called Master 
 Giovannino when he taught logic in the world ; and di San 
 Lazzaro after the spital of San Lazzaro where his uncle brought 
 him up.) Then answered my comrade, ' I would rather have the 
 office from the Minister-General than from any Pope, and if we 
 must needs pass by the sword of examination, then let Brother 
 Hugh examine us.' ' Nay,' said Brother John, ' I will not that 
 Brother Hugh examine you, for he is your friend and will spare 
 you ; but call me the Lector and Repetitor of this convent.' 
 They came at his call, and he said, ' Lead these Brethren apart, 
 and examine them on matters of preaching alone, and bring me 
 word whether they are worthy to have that office/ It was done 
 as he commanded : to me he gave the office, but not to my com- 
 rade, who was found wanting in knowledge. Yet the General 
 said to him, ' Delay is no robbery. Study wisdom, my son, and 
 make my heart joyful, that thou mayest give an answer to him 
 that reproacheth.' Then came two young Brethren of Tuscany 
 also, deacons and good scholars, who had studied many years 
 with me in the convent of Pisa : and on the morrow, when they 
 would have departed, they sent to the General through Brother 
 
 * It waa commonly believed that a halo of special glory in heaven was reserved 
 for virgins, or doctors, or martyrs, and that a preacher might rank for this 
 purpose with a doctor. Salimbene, who certainly did not aspire to martyrdom, is 
 glad to think that, through the Pope's grace, he is yet sure of his future crown of 
 glory.a
 
 i 70 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Mark his companion, beseeching the office of Preacher and a 
 licence for the priesthood. The General was saying his Com- 
 pline, and I with him : then came Brother Mark and interrupted 
 our Compline to give his message : to whom the General answer- 
 ed in fervour of spirit (as was his wont when he believed himself 
 to be stirred with zeal for God) saying * These brethren do ill, 
 in that they beg shamelessly for such honours : for the Apostle 
 saith : " No man doth take the honour to himself." Lo these 
 men have come away from their own Minister, who knew them 
 and might have given them that which they seek from me : 
 let them therefore go now to Toulouse whither they are sent to 
 study, and continue to learn there ; for we need not their 
 preaching : yet at a fitting season they may obtain this.' Then, 
 seeing that he was wroth, Brother Mark withdrew from him 
 saying : ' Father, ye should rather believe that they ask not of 
 their own accord : for it might well have been that Brother 
 Salimbene had besought me to plead with you on their behalf.' 
 Then answered the General : * Brother Salimbene hath been 
 all the while saying his Compline here with me : therefore know 
 I that it was not he who spake to thee of this matter.' So 
 Brother Mark withdrew saying, 'Father, be it as thou wilt.' 
 Knowing therefore that Brother Mark had not taken the 
 General's answer in good part, I went to comfort him when 
 our Compline was done. And he said unto me : ' Brother Salim- 
 bene, Brother John hath done evil in that he hath turned away 
 my face, and would not admit my prayers, even though the favour 
 were but small ; albeit that I pain myself for the Order, in follow- 
 ing him and in writing his letters, though I be now advanced 
 in years.' " Brother Mark's distress gains additional pathos 
 from the character which Salimbene gives him elsewhere (see 
 Chap, ix) ; but the first fault was in his own indiscretion. John 
 of Parma was not among the many who, in St. Bonaventura's 
 words, " say the Hours sleepily and indevoutly and imperfectly, 
 with a wandering heart, and a tongue that sometimes omits 
 whole verses and syllables " : on the contrary, Angelo Clareno 
 assures us that he took his Breviary very seriously, always 
 standing and doffing his hood to recite, as St. Francis 
 had done : so that his old friend ought to have known better 
 than to interrupt him at Compline. 3 No doubt Brother 
 Mark's zeal had for a moment overrun his discretion : and 
 his disappointment was now all the more bitter. "If they 
 were priests," he complained, " then they might celebrate 
 Masses for both quick and dead, and be more profitable 
 to the Brethren to whom they go ; and God knoweth that I am
 
 Further Wanderings. 1 7 i 
 
 ashamed now to return to them with my prayer ungranted." 
 Salimbene, however sympathetic, could only remind him that 
 " patience hath a perfect work." 
 
 " That evening " (he continues) " the General sent for me and 
 my comrade, and said, ' My sons, I hope soon to leave you, for 
 I purpose to go to Spain ; wherefore choose for yourselves any 
 convent soever, except Paris, in the whole Order, and take the 
 space of this night to ponder and make your choice, and tell me 
 to-morrow.' On the morrow he said, * What have ye chosen ? ' 
 So I answered, ' In this matter we have done nothing, lest it 
 should become an occasion of mourning to us ; but we leave it 
 in your choice to send us whithersoever it may seem good, and we 
 will obey.' Whereat he was edified, and said, ' Go therefore 
 to the convent of Genoa, where ye shall dwell with Brother 
 Stephen the Englishman. Moreover, 1 will write to the Minister 
 and Brethren there, commending you to their favour even as my- 
 self ; and that thou, Brother Salimbene, mayest be promoted to the 
 priesthood, and thy comrade to the diaconate. And when I come 
 thither, if I find you satisfied, I shall rejoice ; and if not, I will 
 console you again.' And so it was. Moreover, that same day 
 the General said to Brother Hugh his friend, ' What say ye, shall 
 we go to Spain, and fulfil the Apostle's desire ? ' And Brother 
 Hugh answered him, ' Go ye, Father ; for my part I would fain 
 die in the land of my fathers.' So we brought him forthwith to 
 his ship, which lay ready on the Rhone : and he went that day to 
 St.-Gilles, but we went by sea to Marseilles, whence we sailed 
 to Hyeres to Brother Hugh's convent. There I dwelt with my 
 comrade from the Feast of St. Francis until All Saints ; rejoicing 
 to be with Brother Hugh, with whom I conversed all day long of 
 the doctrine of Abbot Joachim : for he had all his books. But 
 I lamented that my comrade grew grievously sick, almost to 
 death ; and he would not take care of himself, and the weather 
 grew daily worse for sailing as the winter drew on. And that 
 country was most unwholesome that year, by reason of the sea- 
 wind ; and by night I could scarce breathe, even as I lay in 
 the open air. And I heard wolves crying and howling in the 
 night in great multitudes, and this not once or twice only. So 
 I said to my comrade, who was a most wayward youth, ' Thou 
 wilt not guard thyself from things contrary to thy health, and art 
 ever relapsing into sickness. But I know that this country is 
 most unwholesome, and I would fain not die yet, for I would 
 fain live to see the things foretold by Brother Hugh. Wherefore 
 know thou, that if fitting fellowship of our Brethren shall come 
 hither, I will go with them.' And he said, ' What thou sayest
 
 1 72 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 pleases me. I also will go with thee.' For he hoped that none 
 of the Brethren would come at that time. And behold, by the 
 will of the Lord forthwith there came one Brother Ponce, a holy 
 man, who had been with us in the Convent of Aix ; and he was 
 going to Nice, of which Convent he had been made Guardian. 
 And he rejoiced to see us ; and I said to him, ' We will go with 
 you, for we must needs come to Genoa to dwell there.' And he 
 answered and said, ' It is most pleasing to me. Go therefore 
 and procure us a ship.' So on the morrow after dinner we went 
 to the ship, which was a mile from our Convent, but my comrade 
 would not come, until, seeing that I was straitly purposed to 
 depart, he took leave of the Guardian, and came after us. And 
 when 1 gave him my hand to raise him up into the ship, he 
 abhorred it, and said, * God forbid that thou shouldst touch me, 
 for thou hast not kept faith and good comradeship with me.' 
 To whom I said, ' Wretched man ! know now God's goodness 
 towards thee. For the Lord hath revealed to me that if thou 
 hadst stayed here, thou wouldst doubtless have died.' Yet 
 he believed me not, until 'vexation did make him understand 
 what he heard ' ; for all that winter he could not shake off the 
 sickness which he had taken in Provence. And when on the 
 Feast of St. Matthew following I again visited Hyeres, I found 
 six Brethren of that convent dead and buried, the first of whom 
 was the Guardian, who had accompanied my comrade to the 
 ship. So when I was come back to Genoa and had told my 
 comrade of these deaths, he thanked me that I bad snatched 
 him from the jaws of death." It would have been a thousand 
 pities if he had died in his wayward youth : for he went after- 
 wards as a missionary to the Christian captives in Egypt after 
 the disastrous failure of St. Louis' second crusade, "for the 
 merit of salutary obedience and for the remission of all his sins. 
 For he himself did much good to those Christians, and was the 
 cause of much more j and he saw an Unicorn and the Balsam 
 Vine,* and brought home Manna in a vessel of glass, and water 
 from St. Mary's Well (with which alone the Balsam Vine can be 
 watered so as to bear fruit) : and Balsam wood he brought home 
 with him, and many such things which we had never seen, which 
 he was wont to show to the Brethren : and he would tell also 
 how the Saracens keep Christians in bonds and make them to 
 
 * For this Balsam see Sir John Mandeville (chap, v), who gives an equally 
 miraculous, though quite different account of its methods of fructification. It 
 grows only near Cairo, and in "India the Greater, in that desert where the 
 trees of the sun and moon spake to Alexander. But I have not seen it, for I 
 have not been so far upward, because there are too many perilous passages."
 
 Further Wanderings. 1 73 
 
 dig the trenches of their fortifications and to carry off the earth 
 in baskets, and how each Christian receives but three small 
 loaves a day. So he was present at the General Chapter in 
 Strasburg [A.D. 1282]; and on his way thence he ended his days 
 at the first convent of the brethren this side of Strasburg [i.e. 
 Colmar], and shone with the glory of miracles. So lived and died 
 Brother Giovannino dalle Olle, who was my comrade in France, 
 in Burgundy, in Provence, and in the convent at Genoa : a good 
 writer and singer and preacher ; an honest and good and profitable 
 man : may his soul rest in peace ! In the convent wherein he 
 died was a brother incurably diseased, for all that the doctors 
 could do, of a long-standing sickness ; yet when he set himself 
 wholly to pray God that He would make him whole for love of 
 Brother Giovannino, then was he forthwith freed from his sickness, 
 as I heard from Brother Paganino of Ferrara, who was there 
 present." In his company, then, Salimbene sailed to Nice, 
 where they picked up a famous Spiritual, Brother Simon of 
 Montesarchio. The three sailed on from Nice to Genoa ; and 
 here our chronicler found himself again among good friends. 
 (315) " The Brethren rejoiced to see us, and were much cheered ; 
 more especially Brother Stephen the Englishman, whom afterwards 
 the Minister-General sent to Rome as he had promised ; and 
 he became Lector in the convent of Rome, where he died with his 
 comrade, Brother Jocelin, after they had completed their desire 
 of seeing Rome and her sanctuaries. Moreover, in the convent of 
 Genoa when I arrived there was Brother Taddeo, who had been 
 a Canon of St. Peter's Church in Rome. He was old and stricken 
 in years, and was reputed a Saint by the Brethren. So likewise 
 was Brother Marco of Milan, who had already been Minister : so 
 likewise was Brother Anselmo Rabuino of Asti, who had been 
 Minister of the Provinces of Terra di Lavoro, and Treviso, and had 
 dwelt long at Naples with Brother John of Parma. There were 
 also at Genoa Brother Bertolino the Custode, who was afterwards 
 Minister, and Brother Pentecost, a holy man, and Brother Matthew 
 of Cremona, a discreet and holy man : and all these bore themselves 
 kindly and courtly and charitably towards us. For the Guardian 
 gave me two new frocks, an outer and an inner, and the same to 
 my comrade. And the Minister, Brother Nantelmo, promised to 
 give me whatsoever consolation and ^race 1 might require. He 
 gave his own companion, Brother William of Piedmont, a worthy 
 and learned and good man, to teach me to sing Mass. These 
 have passed all from this world to the Father, and their names are 
 in the Book of Life, for they ended their life well and laudably." 
 Here in Genoa, therefore, Salimbene settled down for a while,
 
 i 74 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 happy in his easily-won Preacher's aureole ; but his companion 
 passed straight on to fight for a Martyr's crown. (3 18) "In 
 this same year 1248, Pope Innocent IV sent Brother Simon of 
 Montesarchio into Apulia, to withdraw that kingdom and Sicily 
 from the dominion of the deposed Emperor. And he drew 
 many to the Church party ; but at last the Emperor took him 
 and had him tortured with eighteen divers torments, all of which 
 he bore patiently, nor could the tormentors wring aught from 
 him but praise of God ; Who wrought many miracles through 
 him may he be my Intercessor, Amen ! He was my friend at 
 the Court of Lyons when we travelled together to the Pope, and 
 when we travelled from Nice to Genoa we told each other many 
 tales. He was a man of middle height, and dark, like St. 
 Boniface* ; always jocund and spiritual ; of good life and proper 
 learning. There was also another Brother Simon, called ' of the 
 Countess,' whom God glorified by miracles, and who was my 
 familiar friend at the convent of Marseilles this same year." 
 This Simon, also called Simon of Colazzone, was one of the 
 leaders of the Spirituals in their resistance to Brother Elias ; but 
 the wily Minister, dreading his noble and royal connexions, 
 spared him when he scourged St. Anthony of Padua and 
 imprisoned Cassarius of Spires. A long list of his miracles, from 
 the Papal Bull of Beatification, may be found in Mark of Lisbon 
 (L. i. cap. x.) The allusion to him here is important as a further 
 proof that, if Salimbene took for granted the " relaxed " view 
 of the Rule, it was not for want of zealous Spiritual friends. 
 John of Parma, Hugues de Digne, Bernard of Quintavalle, Giles 
 of Perugia, Illuminate, Simon of Colazzone, all six Beati and 
 miracle-workers, show that Salimbene kept the best of company 
 within his Order. This lends all the more point to the story of 
 holy violence which he tells ; a tale admirably illustrating those 
 encroachments by which the friars, to the detriment of their 
 own healthy influence in other directions, needlessly exasperated 
 the parish clergy. (316) "There was in the city of Genoa a 
 certain Corsican Bishop, who had been a Black Monk of St. 
 Benedict, and whom King Enzio or Frederick, in their hatred 
 of the Church, had expelled from Corsica. He now dwelt at 
 Genoa and copied books with his own hand for a livelihood ; and 
 daily he came to the Mass of the Friars Minor, and afterwards 
 he heard Brother Stephen the Englishman teach in our Schools. 
 This Bishop consecrated me priest in the church of Sant' Onorato, 
 
 * Who is described in the Golden Legend as ''a square-built and stout man, 
 with thick hair," and as " bearing pain readily."
 
 Further Wanderings. 175 
 
 which is now in the convent of the Friars Minor at Genoa. But 
 in those days it was not so naj, rather, a certain priest had and 
 held it just over our convent, though he had no folk for his 
 parishioners. And when the Brethren came back from Matins 
 to rest in their cells, this good man troubled their rest with his 
 church-bells ; and thus he did every night. Wherefore the 
 Brethren grew weary, and so wrought with Pope Alexander IV 
 that they took that church from him. This Pope had canonized 
 St. Clare, and at the very hour whereat he celebrated the first 
 Mass of St. Clare, when he had said his prayer, the priest drew 
 near and said, ' I beseech you, Father, for love of the Blessed 
 Clare, not to take from me the church of Sant' Onorato.' But 
 the Pope took up his parable and began to say, in the vulgar 
 tongue, ' For the love of theBlessed Clare 1 will that the Brethren 
 Minor have it.' And thus he said many times over, so that he 
 seemed almost mad (infatuatus) to repeat it so often, and that 
 the priest groaned to hear it and departed from him."
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 A Bishop's Conscience. 
 
 O AL1MBENE had come to Genoa in November 1248 : in Feb. 
 O 1249 he was already on the move again : for (320) " It 
 pleased Brother Nantelmo my Minister to send me to the 
 Minister-General for the business of the Province. So I put to 
 sea, and came in four days to Brother Hugh's convent at Hyeres. 
 And he rejoiced to see me ; and, being Guardian for the time 
 being, he ate familiarly with me and my comrade and none else 
 but the Brethren who served us. He gave us a magnificent 
 dinner of sea-fish and other meats, for we were at the beginning 
 of Lent ; and not only my comrade from Genoa, but even the 
 Brethren of that convent marvelled at his great familiarity and 
 complaisance with me : for in those days Brother Hugh was not 
 wont to eat with any, perchance because Lent was at hand. And 
 we spake much of God during that dinner, and of the doctrine of 
 Abbot Joachim, and of what should come to pass in the world. 
 When I left Genoa there was an almond-tree in blossom hard by 
 our sacristy, and in Provence I found the fruit of this tree already 
 big with green husk. 1 found also broad beans fresh grown in their 
 pods. After dinner I went on my way to the Minister-General, 
 whom I presently found at Avignon on his return from Spain ; for 
 he had been recalled by the Pope to go among the Greeks, of whom 
 there was hope that by the mediation of Vatatzes they might be 
 reconciled to the Roman Church. Thence I went to Lyons with 
 the Minister-General, and at Vienne we found the messenger of 
 Vatatzes, who was of our Order, and was called Brother Salimbene, 
 even as I. He was Greek of one parent, and Latin of another, 
 and spoke Latin excellently, though he had no clerical tonsure. 
 And when the General had come to the Pope, the Holy Father 
 received him and vouchsafed to kiss him on the mouth, and said 
 to him, ' God forgive thee, son, for thou hast delayed long. Why 
 didst thou not come on horseback, to be with me the sooner ? ' 
 To whom Brother John answered, 'Father, 1 came swiftly enough 
 when I had seen thy letters ; but the Brethren by whom I have
 
 A Bishop's Conscience. 1 77 
 
 passed have kept me on the way.' To whom the Pope said, 
 ' We have prosperous tidings, namely that the Greeks are willing 
 to be reconciled with the Church of Rome ; wherefore I will that 
 thou go to them with good fellowship of Brethren of thy Order, 
 and it may be that by thy mediation God will deign to work some 
 good. Receive therefore from me every favour which thou 
 mayest desire.' So the Minister-General departed from Lyons 
 when Easter week was passed. 
 
 " I found at Lyons Brother Ruffino, Minister of Bologna,* who 
 said to me, ' I sent thee into France to study for my Province, and 
 thou hast gone to dwell in the convent of Genoa. Know there- 
 fore that I take this very ill, since I bring students together for 
 the honour of my Province.' And I said, ' Forgive me, Father, 
 for I knew not that you would take it ill.' Then he answered, 
 ' I forgive under this condition, that thou write forthwith an 
 Obedience whereby thou mayest return to my Province whence 
 thou hast come, with thy comrade who is now in Genoa.' So I 
 did, and the Minister-General knew not of this Obedience when 
 he was at Lyons. So I went on my way to Vienne, and thence 
 through Grenoble and the valley of the Count of Savoy, where 
 I heard of the fall and ruin of the mountain. For the year 
 before, in the valley of Maurienne between Grenoble and 
 Chambery there is a plain called the valley of Savoy proper, 
 a league distant from Chambery, over which rose a great and 
 lofty mountain, which fell one night and filled the whole valley ; 
 the ruin whereof is a whole league and a half in breadth : under 
 which ruin seven parishes were overwhelmed, and 4000 men 
 were slain. I heard tell of this ruin at Genoa ; and in this year 
 following I passed through that country, that is, through 
 Grenoble, and understood it with more certainty ; and many 
 years after, at the convent of Ravenna, I enquired of the fall of 
 this mountain from Brother William, Minister of Burgundy, who 
 was passing through that city on his way to a Chapter General : 
 and I have written it faithfully and truly as I heard it from his 
 mouth. 1 On this journey I entered a certain church dedicated 
 to St. Gerard, which was all full of children's shirts.f Thence 
 I passed on to Embruu, where was an Archbishop born of 
 Piacenza, who daily gave dinner to two Friars Minor, and ever 
 set places for them at his table, and portions of all his dishes 
 before them. So if any came, they had this dinner ; but if not, 
 
 * Not the Kuflino of the Fioretti. 
 
 t No doubt as thanksgiving offerings for cures : perhaps the church was that 
 of Gieres by Grenoble.
 
 i 78 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 he caused it to be given to other poor folk. Moreover, in that 
 country dwell thirteen Brethren. Then came the Guardian and 
 said to me, ' Brother, may it please tbee to go and eat with the 
 Archbishop, who will take it in excellent good part ; for it is long 
 since the Brethren have eaten with him, because they are wearied 
 to go thither so often.' But I said, 'Father, forgive me, and take 
 it not ill : for 1 must depart without delay after meat ; but the 
 Archbishop, hearing that I was from the Court, would hinder my 
 journey by asking after tidings.' Then the Guai'dian held his 
 peace, but I said softly to my comrade, ' I have bethought me 
 that it is well to finish our journey while we have fair weather and 
 good letters, that we may quickly answer those who sent us, and 
 also lest the Minister-General come before us to the convent of 
 Genoa ; for our own Minister would not take our journey in so 
 good part : ' and that which I said and did pleased my comrade. 
 So we departed therefore and passed through the lands of the 
 Count Dauphin, and so came to Susa. And when we were come 
 to Alessandria we found two Brethren of Genoa, to whom my 
 comrade said, 'Know that ye are losing Brother Salimbene and his 
 comrade at Genoa, for the Minister of Bologna is recalling them 
 to his Province. But I, though I be of Genoa, will not go thither ; 
 but I am purposed to return to my convent of Novara, whence 
 the Minister took me when he sent me to the General. Now 
 therefore take these letters and give them to the Minister 
 Provincial of Genoa on the General's part.' Then he brought 
 forth his letters, and gave them to my comrades [of Genoa]. So 
 on the morrow we went from Alessandria to Tortona, which is 
 ten miles' journey : and next day to Genoa, which is a far 
 journey.* And the Brethren rejoiced to see me, for I was come 
 from afar, and brought good tidings. 
 
 " Now at Lyons I had found Brother Rinaldo, of Arezzo in 
 Tuscany, who had come to the Pope to be absolved from his 
 Bishopric. For he was Lector at Rieti, and when the Bishop of 
 that city died, the folk found such grace in him that the canons 
 of one accord elected him. And Pope Innocent, hearing of his 
 learning and sanctity, would not absolve him, nay, rather, by the 
 counsel of his brother Cardinals, he straitly commanded him to 
 accept the Bishopric, and afterwards honoured him by consecrating 
 him personally, while I was at Lyons. A few days therefore 
 after [my return to Genoa] Brother Rinaldo returned as a Bishop 
 from Lyons ; and on Ascension Day he preached to the people, 
 and celebrated with his mitre on his head in the church of our 
 
 * It is between 35 and 40 English miles.
 
 A Bishop's Conscience. 179 
 
 convent at Genoa. And by that time I was a priest, and served 
 him at Mass, although a deacon was there, and a sub-deacon, 
 and other ministers. And he gave the Brethren a most excellent 
 dinner of sea-fish, and other meats, eating familiarly with us in 
 the refectory. But the night following after Mattins, Brother 
 Stephen the Englishman preached to the Brethren in the Bishop's 
 hearing, and among other honied words (such as he was wont to 
 speak), he told a story to the Bishop's confusion, saying : ' A 
 certain Friar Minor in England, a layman, but a holy man, spake 
 truly one day concerning the Easter candle. When it is kindled 
 to burn in the church, it shines and sheds light around : but 
 when the extinguisher is placed upon it, its light is darkened, 
 and it stinks in our nostrils. So it is with a Friar Minor when he 
 is fully kindled and burns with Divine love in the Order of St. 
 Francis : then indeed doth he shine and shed light on others 
 by his good example. Now I bethought me yesterday at dinner 
 how our Bishop suffered his Brethren to bow their knees to him 
 when dishes were placed before him on the table. To him, 
 therefore may we well apply that word which the English Brother 
 spake.'* The Bishop groaned to hear this ; and when the sermon 
 was ended, he bent his knees and besought Brother Bertolino the 
 Custode for leave to speak ; (for the Minister Provincial was not 
 present) and, leave being given, he well excused himself, 
 saying, ' I was indeed aforetime a candle, kindled, burning, 
 shining, and shedding light in the Order of St. Francis, giving 
 a good example to those that beheld me, as Brother Salimbene 
 knows, who dwelt two years with me in the convent of Siena. 
 And he knows well what conscience the Brethren of Tuscany have 
 of my past life ; nay, even in this convent here the ancient 
 Brethren know of my conversation : for it was on behalf of this 
 convent that I was sent to study at Paris. If the Brethren have 
 done me honour by bowing the knee before me at table, that 
 hath not proceeded from my ambition ; for I have forbidden 
 them often enough to do thus. But it was not in my power to 
 beat them with my staff; neither could I nor dared I insist upon 
 obedience. Wherefore I pray you for God's sake to hold me 
 excused, seeing that there was neither ambition nor vainglory 
 in me.' Having thus spoken, he bent his knees (as I myself saw 
 and heard), confessing his fault, if by chance he had given evil 
 example to any man, and promising to remove, as quickly as 
 
 * This anecdote gains point from the fact recorded by Eccleston and others, 
 that the English Province was noted for its comparatively strict observance of 
 St. Francis's rule.
 
 1 80 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 might be, that extinguisher which by force had been set over him. 
 After this he commended himself to the brethren, and so we led 
 him honourably forth, and accompanied him to an Abbey of 
 White Monks without the city, where was an old man who had 
 resigned of his own free will the Bishopric of Turin that he might 
 live more freely in that cloister for himself and for God. Hearing 
 then that Brother Rinaldo was a mighty clerk and had lately been 
 made Bishop, he sighed and said : ' I marvel how thou, a wise 
 man, art fallen so low in folly as to undertake a Bishopric, 
 whereas thou wert in that most noble order of St. Francis, an 
 Order of most excellent perfection, wherein whosoever endureth to 
 the end shall without doubt be saved. Meseemeth therefore that 
 thou hast greatly erred, and art become as it were an apostate, 
 because thou hast returned to active life from that state of 
 contemplative perfection. For I also was a Bishop like unto 
 thee, but when I saw that I could not correct the follies of my 
 clergy who walked after vanity, then " my soul rather chose 
 hanging : " I resigned therefore my Bishopric and my clergy 
 and chose rather to save mine own soul. And this I did after 
 the example of St. Benedict, who left the company of certain 
 monks for that he had found them froward and wicked.' 
 
 " When therefore Brother Rinaldo had heard these words, he 
 made no answer, though he was a man of learning and of great wit ; 
 for the Bishop's words were to his mind, and he knew that he 
 had spoken truth. Then I answered and said to the Bishop of 
 Turin, lest he should seem wise in his own eyes, ' Father, lo thou 
 sayest that thou hast forsaken thy clergy, but consider whether 
 thou hast done well. For Pope Innocent III among many other 
 things said to a certain Bishop who would have refused his 
 Bishopric, " Think not that because Mary hath chosen the best 
 part, which shall not be taken away from her, therefore Martha 
 hath chosen an evil part in that she was busy about many things : 
 for, though the contemplative life be more free from care, yet is 
 the active life the more fruitful : though the former be sweeter, 
 yet is the latter more profitable : for Leah the blear-eyed sur- 
 passed in fertility of offspring the well-favoured Rachel. ' ' 
 
 " When therefore I had spoken thus, the Bishops listened on 
 either side, but Brother Rinaldo answered me not a word, lest he 
 should seem to delight in his Bishopric. For he purposed in his 
 mind to lay down the load imposed upon him as soon as a fit 
 season should come. He went therefore to his Bishopric, and 
 when he was come thither the canons came to see him, and told 
 him of a certain wanton fellow-canon of theirs, who seemed 
 rather a layman than a clerk, for he had long hair even to his
 
 A Bishop's Conscience. 1 8 1 
 
 shoulders, and would wear no tonsure. And the Bishop dragged 
 him by the hair and smote him on the cheek, and called his parents, 
 and kinsfolk, who were noble, rich, and powerful, and said to 
 them, * Let this son of jours either choose the life of a layman, 
 or wear such a habit as may show him to be a clerk ; for I can in 
 no wise suffer that he go thus clad.' And his parents answered 
 and said to the Bishop, ' It is our pleasure that he should be a 
 clerk, and that ye should do to him whatsoever seems to you 
 honest and good.' Then with his own hands the Bishop cut his 
 hair and made him a tonsure, round and great, in the figure of a 
 circle, that therein he might for the future be amended wherein 
 he had aforetime sinned. And he to whom these things were 
 done was grieved, but the canons rejoiced beyond measure. 
 
 " When therefore Brother Rinaldo could no longer dissemble 
 with a whole conscience the works of his clergy, seeing that they 
 would not return to the way of honesty and righteousness, he 
 visited Pope Innocent I V, who was come to Genoa, and resigned 
 the dignity which had been conferred on him at Lyons, saying 
 that he was wholly purposed from thenceforward to be no Bishop. 
 The Pope, seeing the anguish of his soul, promised to absolve him 
 when he should be come to Tuscany ; for he hoped that perchance 
 Brother Rinaldo would yet change his mind, which however was 
 far from him. So Brother Rinaldo came and dwelt many days 
 at Bologna, hoping that the Pope would pass that way into 
 Tuscany ; and when the Holy Father had come to Perugia 
 Brother Rinaldo came to him, and before the cardinals in Con- 
 sistory resigned his office and benefice, laying his pontificals, that 
 is, his staff, his mitre, and his ring, at the Supreme Pontiffs feet. 
 And the Cardinals marvelled and were troubled, seeing how 
 Brother Rinaldo seemed therein to derogate from their state, as 
 though they were not in a state of salvation, being promoted to 
 dignities and prelacies. The Pope likewise was troubled, for that 
 he had consecrated him with his own hands, believing himself to 
 have conferred a fit man upon the church of Rieti, as all held him 
 to be, and as indeed he was. So the Cardinals and the Pope prayed 
 him instantly for the love of God and for their honour and for 
 the profit of the Church and the salvation of souls that he should 
 not renounce his dignity. But he answered that they laboured 
 thus in vain. And the Cardinals said, ' What if an angel hath 
 spoken to him, or God hath revealed this to him ? ' Then the 
 Pope, perceiving his steadfast purpose, said to him, * Although 
 thou wilt not have the thought and care of Episcopal rule, yet let 
 the pontifical powers at least be left, and keep dignity and 
 authority to ordain others, that thy Order may thus have some
 
 1 82 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 profit from thee.' And he answered, ' I will keep nothing what- 
 soever.' So, being absolved from his office, he came to the 
 Friars that same day : and, taking his bag or wallet or basket, 
 he besought leave to go with the almoner begging for bread. 
 And as he went thus begging through the city of Perugia a certain 
 Cardinal met him on his way back from the Consistory, perchance 
 by the will of God, that he might see, teach, and hear. Who, 
 knowing him well, said to him, ' Wert thou not better to be still 
 a Bishop than to go begging from door to door ? ' But Brother 
 Rinaldo answered him, 'The Wise Man saith in Proverbs, "It 
 is better to be humbled with the meek than to divide spoils with 
 the proud." As to my Bishopric, I grant indeed that it is more 
 blessed to bestow spiritual gifts than to beg them from others : 
 but the Friars Minor do indeed bestow such gifts ; whereof the 
 Psalmist saith " Take a psalm and bring hither the timbrel," 
 which is to say " Take spiritual gifts and bring hither temporal 
 gifts."* Wherefore I will cleave to the end to this way which I 
 have learnt in the Order, as the blessed Job saith, "Till I die 
 I will not depart from my innocence : my justification, which 
 1 have begun to hold, I will not forsake." However, as the 
 Apostle saith, " Everyone hath his proper gift from God, one 
 after this manner, and another after that : " yet " Some trust in 
 chariots and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of 
 the Lord our God." : The Cardinal, hearing this, and knowing 
 that God had spoken through the mouth of his saint, departed 
 from him, and reported all his words on the morrow to the Pope 
 and Cardinals in Consistory : and they all marvelled. But Brother 
 Rinaldo told the Minister-General, Brother John of Parma, to 
 send him to dwell wheresoever he would ; and he sent him to the 
 convent of Siena, where he was known to many ; and there he 
 dwelt from All Saints until after Christmas, and so he died and 
 went to God. Now as he lay sick of the sickness whereof he died, 
 there was at Siena a certain canon of the cathedral church who 
 had lain six years palsied in bed, and with all the devotion of his 
 heart had recommended himself to Brother Rinaldo. He, about 
 daybreak, heard in his dreams a voice that said unto him, ' Know 
 thou that Brother Rinaldo hath passed from this world to the 
 Father, and through his merits God hath made thee altogether 
 whole.' And waking forthwith, and feeling himself wholly de- 
 livered from that sickness, he called his boy to bring his garments, 
 
 * This explanation is from the Glossa Ordinaria, and well exemplifies the 
 confusion imported into medieval theology by this habit of arguing from far- 
 fetched traditional glosses as almost equal in authority to the Bible text.
 
 A Bishop's Conscience. i 83 
 
 and going to the chamber of a fellow-canon, told him of this new 
 miracle, and both hastened forthwith to the Brethren to tell them 
 this evident miracle which God had deigned to work that night 
 by the merits of the blessed Kinaldo. And when they were come 
 out of the town gate they heard the Brethren chanting as they 
 carried his body to church ; and so they were present at his 
 funeral, and afterwards related the miracle with joy ; and the 
 Brethren rejoiced, saying ' Blessed be God.' Such was Brother 
 Rinaldo of Arezzo, of the Order of the Friars Minor, Bishop of 
 Rieti, who in his life wrought marvels, and in his death did yet 
 greater wonders. He was a man of most excellent learning, a 
 great Lector in theology, a splendid and gracious preacher, both 
 to clergy and to people, for he had a most eloquent tongue that 
 never stumbled, and was a man of great heart. Two years 1 
 dwelt with him in the convent of Siena, and saw him oft-times 
 in those of Lyons and Genoa. 1 could not have believed, if any 
 man had told me, that Tuscany could have produced such a man, 
 unless I had seen it with mine own eyes.* He had a blood- 
 brother in the Order of Vallombrosa, who was Abbot of the 
 monastery of Bertinoro in Romagnola, (Purg. xiv. 112) a holy, 
 learned, and good man, and a great friend of the Friars Minor ; 
 may his soul rest in peace ! 
 
 (332) " Moreover, in the year of our Lord 1249, after the Feast 
 of St. Anthony of Padua I departed from the Convent of Genoa 
 with my comrade, and we came to Bobbio, and saw one of the 
 water-pots wherein the Lord turned water into wine at the 
 wedding-feast, for it is said to be one of them. Whether it be so 
 indeed, God knoweth, to Whose eyes all things are naked and 
 open. Therein are many relics ; it stands on the altar of the 
 monastery of Bobbio, and there are many relics of the blessed 
 Columban, which we saw. Afterwards we came to Parma, 
 where we had been before, and there we did our business. Now 
 after our departure from Genoa, the Minister-General, Brother 
 .John of Parma, came thither ; to whom the Brethren said, 
 ' Wherefore, Father, hast thou taken away from us our Brethren, 
 whom thou hadst sent hither? We rejoiced in your love, for 
 that they were here with us, and for that they are good Brethren, 
 and full of consolation, and have behaved themselves well.' 
 Then the Minister answered and said, 'Where then are they ? 
 Are they not in this Convent ? ' And they said, ' No, Father, 
 
 * Compare the character which Salimbene has already given to the Tuscans 
 in hia account of the Great Alleluia, and Sacchetti's letter to Giacomo di Conte. 
 The Saints of the Order came far more from mountain districts like Umbria and 
 the Mark of Ancona than from the great towns.
 
 i 84 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 for Brother Ruffino of Bologna hath recalled them to his Province.' 
 Then said the General, * God knoweth I knew nothing of this 
 command ; nay, rather, I believed that they were in this house, 
 and marvelled much that they came not to me.' Afterwards he 
 found us at Parma, and said to us with a merry face, * Ye are 
 much abroad, my children, now in France, now in Burgundy, 
 now in Provence, now in the Convent of Genoa, and now ye 
 
 furpose to dwell in that of Parma. If I might rest as ye may 
 would not wander so much abroad.' And I said to him, ' On 
 you, Father, falls the labour of travelling by reason of your 
 ministry ; but know of us that true and pure obedience has 
 always been our part.' Hearing this, he was satisfied, for he 
 loved us. And when we were at Bologna, he said one day in his 
 chamber to the Minister, Brother Ruffino, * I had placed those 
 Brethren in the Convent of Genoa to study, and thou hast 
 removed them thence.' Brother Ruffino answered, * Father, 
 this I did for their consolation, for I had sent them to France in 
 the days when the Emperor was besieging Parma, and thought 
 therefore to comfort them by recalling them.' Then said I to 
 the Minister-General, ' Yea, Father, it was as he saith.' Then 
 said the General to him, ' Thou wilt therefore place them well, 
 that they may be comforted, and attend to their studies, and 
 wander not so much abroad.' To whom Brother Ruffino 
 answered, ' Gladly, Father, will I do them favour and comfort, 
 for your love and for theirs.' Then he kept my comrade at 
 Bologna to correct his Bible for him ; but me he sent to Ferrara, 
 where I lived seven years continuously without changing my 
 abode." 

 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 Settling Down. 
 
 SEVEN jears on end ! With what tell-tale emphasis Saliin- 
 bene writes here, and repeats elsewhere, this significant 
 phrase ! Hitherto he had travelled about pretty much as he 
 pleased ; if only by getting different " obediences " from differ- 
 ent authorities, and choosing whichever pleased him best : for 
 we see clearly in his pages how impossible it was even for the 
 untiring John of Parma to superintend more than a small 
 fraction of so extensive an Order, with all its complicated details 
 and overlappings of jurisdiction. One can realize too how easily 
 the more wayward friars could manage to live in vagabondage 
 for years ; and Wadding's records of constant complaints on this 
 subject, in spite of vainly-repeated papal anathemas, are seen to 
 be natural enough. From this arrival at Ferrara onwards, we 
 find far fewer autobiographical records, until Salimbene's last 
 few years brought him again into the mid vortex of civil war. 
 It seems that for a period of about 32 years, from 1249 to 1281, 
 our good friar lived a comparatively uneventful convent life, 
 studying, preaching, writing, always observing no doubt, but with 
 fewer experiences of the sort that would specially interest his 
 niece in her convent. If only he had kept a business diary dur- 
 ing those years, like his acquaintance the Archbishop of Rouen, 
 and passed down to us a record of that daily convent life which 
 was too trivial to be told to Sister Agnes ! 
 
 Yet even this comparatively stationary and uniform life was 
 not without many distractions. Prof. Holder-Egger points out 
 that a chance observation of Salimbene's suggests the probabil- 
 ity of brief wanderings even during the " seven continuous 
 years" of Ferrara (p. 41, note 3). Prof. Michael had previously 
 traced Salimbene's places of abode during the next few years, 
 and they make a very varied list. After the Ferrara years came 
 a long abode in Romagna five years altogether at Ravenna, five 
 at Imola, and five at Paenza, of which periods however the two 
 last were certainly not unbroken and consecutive. One year he
 
 i 86 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 spent at Bagnaeavallo, and one at Montereggio : another year 
 he passed in his native Parma, probably only off and on. In 
 1259 we find him in neighbouring Borgo san Donnino : twice 
 again in neighbouring Modena. He went on a pilgrimage to 
 Assisi, some time after 1270. He was at Forli when it was be- 
 sieged in 1273, and at Faenza during the siege of 1274. In 
 1281, at last, he came to end his days in his native province of 
 Emilia. 
 
 It is quite possible that, as Michael supposes, he worked hard 
 as preacher and confessor all these years, though the quotation 
 adduced scarcely goes so far as this : " I have now lived in the 
 Order many years as a priest and preacher, and have seen many 
 things and dwelt in many provinces and learnt much." (38) 
 He was no doubt always sociable, always busy, always popular, 
 but nothing in his chronicle seems to imply that he worked really 
 hard among the people : and certainly he always lent his heart 
 out with usury to just those worldly sights and sounds, just those 
 innumerable and thoroughly human trifles, which the disciplinar- 
 ians of his Order tried so earnestly to exclude from a friar's life. 
 
 He read hard undoubtedly, or he would never have known his 
 Bible so well : though here and there his strings of quotations 
 seem to smack rather of the concordance, which was the inven- 
 tion of a 13th century Dominican, to whom our good Franciscan 
 pays a somewhat grudging tribute on p. 175. And he wrote 
 busily too, witness the list of his writings, mostly compilations, 
 and now all unfortunately lost but one. First, in 1250, he wrote 
 his " Chronicle beginning : Octavianus Ccesar Augustus" (217) : 
 in another place he tells us that he wrote three other chronicles 
 besides the one which has survived (293). One of these may be 
 the " Treatise of Pope Gregory X " to which he refers on page 
 245 (A.D. 1266) : and another the chronicle concerning Frederick 
 II (204, 344, 592). The "Treatise of Elisha " (293) and the 
 " Types and Examples, Signs and Figures and Mysteries of Both 
 Testaments" (238) were doubtless of a purely theological char- 
 acter. Another was apparently in verse, an imitation of Patec- 
 chio's satirical " Book of Pests." (464) Two other treatises 
 have been preserved by the happy impulse which prompted the 
 author to copy them bodily into the present chronicle : these are 
 the " Book of the Prelate," a violent pamphlet against Brother 
 Elias, from Avhich I have already quoted and shall quote again 
 (96 foil.) and the " Treatise of the Lord's Body," mainly 
 liturgical (336 foil.) 
 
 But his life during these 32 years was by no means entirely 
 devoid of outward interest : as the rest of this chapter will show.
 
 Settling Down. 187 
 
 To begin chronologically with the seven years at Ferrara : here 
 he found himself a close spectator of the cruelties of Ezzelino 
 and his Brother Alberigo, and of the crusade which finally 
 crushed the former. Here too he heard of Frederick's death, 
 and saw the Pope come home in triumph from his long exile at 
 Lyons. This was in 1251, while Europe was still shuddering at 
 the failure of St. Louis' first crusade and mourning for thousands 
 of Christians slaiu : but no news of public disaster to Christen- 
 dom could spoil the Pope's private triumph. (445) " He came in 
 the month of May to his own native city of Genoa, and there 
 gave a wife to one of his nephews ; at whose wedding he himself 
 was present with his cardinals and 80 bishops ; and at that feast 
 were many dishes and courses and varieties of meats, with divers 
 choice and jocund wines ; and each course of dishes cost many 
 marks. No such great and pompous wedding as this was 
 celebrated in my days in any country, whether we consider the 
 guests who were present or the meats that were set before 
 them : so that the Queen of Sheba herself would have marvelled 
 to see it." 
 
 Meanwhile very different events were taking place in the land 
 which the Pope had just left. The common people of France, 
 indignant at the failure of their nobles in the Crusade, rose under 
 a leader who boasted that he had no mere papal or episcopal 
 authority, but a letter direct from the Virgin Mary, which he 
 held night and day in his clenched hand. So writes Matthew 
 Paris, whose very full account, from the lips of an English monk 
 jwho had fallen into the hands of these Pastoureaux, confirms 
 the briefer notice of Salimbene. (444) "In this year an 
 innumerable host of shepherds was gathered together in France, 
 saying that they must cross the sea to slay the Saracens and 
 avenge the King of France : and many followed them from 
 divers cities of France, nor dared any man withstand them, but 
 all gave them food and whatsoever they desired ; wherefore the 
 very shepherds left their flocks to join them. For their leader 
 told how God had revealed to him that the sea should be parted 
 before him, and he should lead that innumerable host to avenge 
 the King of France. But I, when I heard this, said ' Woe to 
 the shepherds that desert their sheep. Where the King of 
 France could do so little with his armed host, what shall these 
 fellows do ? ' Yet the common folk of France believed in them, 
 and were terribly provoked against the Religious, more especially 
 against the Friars Preachers and Minors, for that they had 
 preached the Crusade and given men crosses to go beyond seas 
 with the King, who had now been conquered by the Saracens.
 
 i 88 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 So those French who were then left in France were wroth against 
 Christ, to such a degree that they presumed to blaspheme His 
 Name, which is blessed above all other names. For in those 
 days when the Friars Minor and Preachers begged alms in France 
 in Christ's name, men gnashed with their teeth on them ; then, 
 before their very faces, they would call some other poor man and 
 give him money and say, * Take that in Mahomet's name ; for 
 he is stronger than Christ.' So our Lord's word was fulfilled in 
 them ' They believe for a while, and in time of temptation they 
 fall away.' Wretched misery I whereas the King of France was 
 not provoked to wrath, but suffered patiently, these men were 
 goaded to fury ! Moreover that host of shepherds destroyed 
 a whole Dominican convent in one city so utterly that not one 
 stone was left upon another, and this because the friars had 
 dared to speak a word against them. But in this same year 
 they were brought to nought, and their whole congregation was 
 utterly destroyed." Matthew Paris tells us how the Pastoureaux 
 owed much of their popularity to their attacks on the clergy, 
 especially upon the friars : he looks upon these crusaders as 
 precursors of Antichrist, but admits that many pious folk, 
 including the severe queen Blanche herself, favoured their 
 preaching at first, in spite of its entire lack of ecclesiastical 
 authority. He speaks also in the strongest terms of the wide- 
 spread infidelity in France at that time : " faith began to waver 
 in the kingdom of France : " " the devil .... saw that the 
 Christian faith was tottering to its fall even in the sweet realm 
 of France." A few pages higher up, under the year 1250, after 
 describing the outbreak of blasphemy among the French at the 
 first news of St. Louis' failure, he adds : " Moreover the most 
 noble city of Venice, and many cities of Italy whose inhabitants 
 are but half-Christians, would have fallen into apostasy if they 
 had not been comforted and strengthened by bishops and holy 
 men of Religion." 
 
 After his nephew's wedding at Genoa, Innocent IV "came 
 through Brescia and Mantua (445) to the great Abbey of San 
 Benedetto di Polirone, where the Countess Matilda lieth buried in 
 a tomb of marble : in whose honour the Pope with his cardinals 
 recited the psalm De Profundis around her grave ; for they were 
 mindful of the benefits which she had conferred in old time on 
 the Roman Church and Pontiffs. Then he came on to Ferrara, 
 where I dwelt. So when he should have entered the city, he 
 sent word that the Friars Minor should come out to meet him, 
 and abide ever by his side ; which we did all along the Via San 
 Paolo. His messenger this time was a certain Brother of Parma
 
 Settling Down. 189 
 
 named Buiolo, who dwelt with the Pope and was of his family : and 
 the Pope's confessor was another Minorite, Brother Nicholas, [the 
 Englishman] my friend, whom the Pope made Bishop of Assisi : l 
 and there was likewise in the Holy Father's household my friend 
 and companion Brother Lorenzo, whom he afterwards made Bishop 
 of Antivari [in Greece], and there were yet two other Friars Minor 
 in the Pope s household. And the Pope stayed many days at 
 Ferrara, until the octave of St. Francis, and he preached a sermon 
 standing at the window of the Bishop's palace ; and certain 
 cardinals stood by him on either side, one of whom, the Lord 
 William his nephew, made the Confession in a loud voice after 
 the sermon. For there was a great multitude gathered together 
 as for judgment ; and the Pope took for his text ' Blessed is the 
 nation whose God is the Lord : the people whom He hath chosen 
 for His inheritance.' And after his sermon he said : ' The Lord 
 hath kept me on my journey from Italy, and while I dwelt at 
 Lyons, and on my way back hither ; blessed be He for ever and 
 ever ! ' And he added : ' This is mine own city ; 1 beseech you 
 to live in peace ; for the lord who was once your Emperor and 
 who persecuted the Church, is now dead.' Now I stood hard 
 by the Pope, so that I might have touched him when I would ; 
 for he was glad to have Friars Minor about him. Then Brother 
 Gerardino of Parma, who was the master of Brother Bonagrazia 
 [the Minister-General], touched me with his elbow and said : 
 * Hear now that the Emperor is dead : for until now thou hast been 
 unbelieving ; leave therefore thy Joachim.' Moreover in those 
 days when the Pope dwelt at Farrara, the cardinals sent us oft- 
 times swine ready slaughtered and scalded which men gave them 
 continually : and we in our turn gave thereof to our Sisters of 
 the Order of St. Clare. Moreover the Pope's seneschal sent word 
 to us saying : ' To-morrow the Holy Father will depart : send 
 me therefore your porters, and I will give you bread and wine 
 for yourselves, seeing that we have no further need thereof : ' 
 and so we did. And when the Pope was come to Bologna, he 
 was received with great pomp by the citizens : but he tarried 
 little with them, departing in haste, and wroth for that they 
 besought him to give them Medicina, which is a Church estate 
 in the Bishopric of Bologna, and which they had long held by 
 force. He therefore would not listen to their petition, but said, 
 ' Ye hold Church lands by force, and now ye beg the same as a 
 gift ? Get you hence in God's name, for I will not hear your 
 petition.' But at his departure he found many fair and noble 
 ladies of Bologna gathered together, who had come from the 
 villages to the road by which he must pass, for they were fain to
 
 1 90 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 see him : so he blessed them in the Lord's name and went on his 
 way and dwelt at Perugia/' 
 
 it will be seen that Salimbene was never slow to take the place 
 to which he felt himself entitled by his birth and his abilities : 
 and on one occasion at least, about the year 1256, he was 
 entrusted with the responsible office of peacemaker between 
 Bologna and Reggio. On another occasion (451) we find him a 
 guest at the villa of Ghiberto da Gente, Podesta of Parma, who 
 tried to make use of our friend to further his designs on Reggio : 
 but Salimbene did not like the job, and remembered opportunely 
 that " The Apostle saith in his second Epistle to Timothy : ' No 
 man being a soldier to God entangleth himself with secular 
 businesses.' " Later on, when Ghiberto had fallen from his high 
 estate in Parma, it was the friar's turn to plead, and equally in 
 vain. " Being in his villa of Carnpigine I said to him, ' What 
 now, my Lord Ghiberto? Why enter ye not into our Order ? ' 
 Then he answered and said : ' And what would ye now do with 
 me, who am an old man of 60 years and more ? ' And I said : 
 ' Ye would give a good example to others, and would save your 
 own soul.' He then answered and said : ' I know that ye give 
 me profitable counsel ; but I cannot hear you, for my heart is 
 wholly concerned with other matters.' And, in short, I besought 
 him long and instantly, but he would not listen to do well : for 
 he " devised iniquity on his bed," hoping to be avenged of the 
 men of Parma and Reggio who had deposed him from his lordship 
 there. He died at Ancoua and was there buried : and he assigned 
 certain yearly rents of his meadows in the Bishopric of Parma 
 to the Friars Minor and Preachers, that they might enjoy them 
 during a certain term of years as conscience money for his ill- 
 gotten gains : and so they have indeed enjoyed them ; may his 
 soul of God's mercy rest in peace ! Amen." Salimbene's third 
 and last political mission will be told in its place under the year 
 1285. 
 
 1258 had been a year of famine; and then (464) "Next 
 year a great pestilence fell upon men and women, so that at the 
 office of Vespers we had two dead together in our church. This 
 curse began in Passion-week, so that in the whole Province of 
 Bologna the Friars Minor could not hold their services on Palm- 
 Sunday, for they were hindered by a sort of numbness. And this 
 lasted many months : whereof three hundred and more died in 
 Borgo San Donnino, and in Milan and Florence many thousands ; 
 nor did men toll the bells, lest the sick should be afraid." Famine 
 and pestilence led to a great religious revival, beginning as usual 
 among the common people. (465) " The Flagellants came
 
 Settling Down. 1 9 1 
 
 through the whole world ; and all men, both small and great, 
 noble knights and men of the people, scourged themselves naked 
 in procession through the cities, with the Bishops and men 
 of Religion at their head ; and peace was made in man j 
 places, and men restored what they had unlawfully taken away, 
 and they confessed their sins so earnestly that the priests had 
 scarce leisure to eat. And in their mouths sounded words of 
 God and not of man, and their voice was as the voice of a multi- 
 tude : and men walked in the way of salvation, and composed 
 godly songs of praise in honour of the Lord and the Blessed 
 Virgin : and these they sang as they went and scourged them- 
 selves. And on the Monday, which was the Feast of All Saints, 
 all those men came from Modena to Reggio, both small and 
 great ; and all of the district of Modena came, and the Podesta 
 and the Bishop with the banners of all the Gilds ; and they 
 scourged themselves through the whole city, and the greater 
 part passed on to Parma on the Tuesday following. So on the 
 morrow all the men of Reggio made banners for each quarter of 
 the town, and held processions around the city, and the Podesta 
 went likewise scourging himself. And the men of Sassuolo at 
 the beginning of this blessed time took me away with the leave 
 of the Guardian of the convent of the Friars Minor at Modena, 
 where I dwelt at that time, and brought me to Sassuolo, for both 
 men and women loved me well ; afterwards they brought me 
 to Reggio and then to Parma. And when we were come to 
 Parma this Devotion was already there, for it flew as ' an eagle 
 flying to the prey,' and lasted many days in our city, nor was 
 there any so austere and old but that he scourged himself gladly. 
 Moreover, if any would not scourge himself, he was held worse 
 than the Devil, and all pointed their finger at him as a notorious 
 man and a limb of Satan : and what is more, within a short time 
 he would fall into some mishap, either of death or of grievous 
 sickness. Pallavicino only, who was then Lord of Cremona, 
 avoided this blessing and this Devotion with his fellow-citizens 
 of Cremona ; for he caused gallows to be set up by the bank of 
 the River Po, in order that if any came to the city with this 
 manner of scourging he might die on the gibbet : for he loved 
 the good things of this life better than the salvation of souls, 
 and the world's glory better than the glory of God. Nevertheless 
 many brave youths of Parma were fully resolved to go thither, 
 for they were glad to die for the Catholic Faith, and for God's 
 honour and the remission of their sins. And I was then at Parma 
 in the Podesta's presence, who said ' His heart is blinded, and he 
 is a man of malice, who knoweth not the things of God. Let us
 
 192 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 therefore give him no occasion of ill-doing, for he loved cursing, 
 and it shall come unto him : and he would not have blessing, 
 and it shall be far from him.' And he said, ' How seemeth it 
 to you, my Brethren ? Say I well ? ' Then I answered and 
 said, * You have spoken wisely and well, my Lord.' Then the 
 Podesta sent heralds throughout the city of Parma, forbidding 
 under the heaviest penalties lest any man of Parma should dare 
 to cross the Po : so their purpose ceased. And this was the year 
 wherein that age should have begun which was foretold by Abbot 
 Joachim, who divideth the world into three states : and they say 
 that this last state of the world began with these Flagellants of 
 the year 1260, who cried with God's words and not with men's." 
 Manfred also kept the Flagellants out of his states by the threat 
 of martyrdom, for he, like Pallavicino, was known to be as good 
 as his word in these matters, and to wage perpetual war against 
 religious enthusiasms which were only too likely to cause 
 political complications in his dominions. This leads the Domini- 
 can chronicler Pipinus to lament the premature end of the 
 movement in Italy : though it was to some extent kept up 
 by formally constituted Gilds of Penitents in most of the cities. 
 But elsewhere the revival degenerated into such superstitions 
 and disorders as could be only too surely anticipated from such 
 descriptions as Varagine and Pipinus himself give us in their 
 chronicles. The Pope had never approved the movement, which 
 was plainly an attempt of the common folk to come to God 
 without human mediation ; and the clergy of Germany and 
 Poland were compelled to suppress it as mercilessly as the Italian 
 tyrants. The same superstition broke out with greater violence 
 after the Great Plague of 1349, and again on several other 
 occasions. Gerson wrote a treatise against it in 1417, recalling 
 how often the movement had already been condemned by the 
 authorities, and partly explaining its recrudescence by the fav- 
 ourite medieval quotation from Ecclesiastes ( Vulg.) " The number 
 of fools is infinite." 2 
 
 The next important dates of which we are sure in Salimbene's 
 biography find him at Ravenna : he was therein 1264 and 1268, 
 and it is very likely that the five years' residence of which he 
 speaks was continuous, except for short excursions to neighbouring 
 towns. Our chronicler looked back very fondly to those five 
 years at Ravenna. Everything in the old Imperial city appealed 
 to him. The district was at peace, so far as there could be peace 
 in 13th century Italy, and here were old families to associate 
 with, and old books to read. He enjoyed, too, the antiquarian 
 atmosphere of the city : it did his heart good to see the desecrated
 
 Settling Down. i 93 
 
 tomb of the unorthodox Theodoric, and to think that (209) " the 
 blessed Pope Gregory, when he came hither, caused his bones 
 to be torn from the tomb of porphyry, (which is shown empty 
 unto this day,) and thrown upon the dunghill and into the 
 cesspool ; " though it is almost certain that some other profane 
 hand did what he ascribes here to the great Pope. Here 
 also he could admire the tomb of his heroine the Empress 
 Gralla Placidia, with other similar monuments of the earliest 
 Christian art : and he was naturally chosen as cicerone when a 
 distinguished visitor came to see the churches of Ravenna 
 (169), and earn the rich indulgences to be gained there. Last, 
 but not least, Ravenna was a city of good living. As the 
 Podesta boasted one day to Salimbene (482) " We have such 
 plenty of victuals here that he would be a fool who should seek 
 for more : for a good bowl of salt, full and heaped up, may be 
 had here for a poor penny ; and for the same price a man may 
 buy twelve clean boiled eggs at a tavern ; I can buy whensoever 
 I will an excellent fat wild-duck for four pence in the proper 
 season ; and I have seen times when, if a man would pluck 
 ten ducks, he might keep the half of them for himself." Here 
 he lived out of reach of actual war, hearing only the distant 
 echoes of those battles in the South which decided the fate of 
 Frederick's last descendants. One Christmastide, on his way 
 to preach at San Procolo near Faenza, he met the great French 
 host passing southwards to conquer Manfred at Benevento. 
 " And a great miracle then befel : for in that year wherein they 
 came was neither cold nor frost nor ice nor snow nor mire nor 
 rain ; but the roads were most fair, easy, and smooth, as though 
 it had been the month of May. Which was the Lord's doing, 
 for that they came to succour the Church and to exterminate 
 that accursed Manfred, whose iniquities well deserved such a 
 fate : for they were many indeed.* For he had slain, as was 
 said, his brother Conrad, who himself had slain his own brother 
 Charles, born at Ravenna of the Emperor's English wife." 
 (470) 
 
 Again, he remembers Conradin's defeat in 1268 by a strange 
 natural phenomenon in which he doubtless saw an omen of that 
 event. (480) " In that year and at that same season, there 
 passed so great a number of those birds which destroy the 
 grapes in the vineyards and are called in the vulgar tongue 
 turili, [thrushes] that every evening between supper-time and 
 twilight the open sky could scarce be seen. And at times there 
 
 * " Orribil furon li peccati miei." Purg. iii. 121
 
 1 94 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 were two or three storeys of them one over another, and they 
 stretched three or four miles, and after a brief space other birds of 
 the same sort would take their place, flying and chattering and 
 murmuring, and as it were, complaining. And so they did every 
 evening for many days, coming down from the mountains to the 
 valleys and filling the whole air. And 1 with the other Brethren 
 was wont to go out and stand in the open air every evening to see 
 and contemplate and marvel at them : and yet I was not in the 
 open air, for they covered the whole sky. I say in truth that if 
 I had not seen them, I could not have believed any who should 
 have told me thereof." Salimbene's church at Ravenna was of 
 course that in which Dante's bones were first laid, and outside 
 which stands his present tomb : and the open air into which the 
 Friars came out every evening to watch these portents in the sky 
 would have been practically the garden of the present Hotel 
 Byron. 
 
 The one piece of fighting which took place even in the peaceful 
 district of Ravenna was, according to our friar's account, simply 
 owing to the greed of the Venetians, whom he accuses of methods 
 not unknown to modern diplomacy. (481). They had "taken 
 a fifty-years' lease " of a castle commanding the mouth of 
 the Ravenna canal ; and now, at the very end of their 50 years, 
 instead of preparing to quit, they were rebuilding the wooden 
 bulwarks of their fortress in stone. Again, they entirely 
 neglected the principle of the Open Door ; " so utterly closing 
 this canal to the Lombards, that they can draw no supplies from 
 Romagna or the Mark of Ancona : yet, but for this hindrance 
 of the Venetians, they might draw therefrom corn and wine and 
 oil, fish and flesh and salt and pigs, and all good things to sustain 
 man's life." Moreover, their trade methods were so astute, and 
 their Visdomini (consuls) were such active political agents, that 
 the Bolognese found themselves outbought and outsold even in 
 their own districts, and were compelled in self-defence to build a 
 fortress at Primario, at the mouth of the Po, which might keep 
 the Venetian fortress in check. (480) " And the Venetians 
 came with a great fleet and all siege-engines and battered the 
 tower with mangonels and catapults, and the men of Bologna 
 defended their castle manfully, and the Venetians retired. And 
 the men of Bologna remained there, as I think, some 2 or 3 years 
 and 300 or 500 of them died by reason of the unwholesomeness 
 of the sea-air, and of the multitude of fleas and gnats and flies 
 and gad-flies. And Brother Peregrine di Polesmo of Bologna, of 
 the Order of Friars Minor, went and made peace between the 
 Bolognese and the Venetians, and the men of Bologna destroyed
 
 Settling Down. 195 
 
 the castle which they had made and departed thence, and gave 
 much wood of the said castle to the Friars Minor of Ravenna. 
 The Venetians are greedy men and stubborn and outrageous, 
 and they would gladly subdue the whole world to themselves 
 if they could ; and they treat boorishly the merchants who go 
 to them, both by selling dear, and by taking tolls in divers places 
 of their district from the same persons at the same time. And 
 if any merchant carries his goods thither for sale he may not 
 bring them back with him : nay, but he must needs sell them 
 there, will-he nill-he. And if by mishap of the sea any ship 
 other than their own is driven to them with its merchandise, 
 it may not depart thence except it have first sold all its cargo : 
 for the Venetians say that this ship has been driven to them by 
 God's will, which no man may gainsay." He had not only little 
 sympathy with Venetian commercial methods, but he also 
 disliked the city for its aloofness from the Guelf cause, and was 
 ready to believe that the disastrous floods which ravaged Venice 
 in 1284 were due to the Papal excommunication for its lukewarm- 
 ness in the cause of Charles of Anjou. He even shows imperfect 
 sympathy with that ancient pageant which we especially associate 
 with the name of Venice, the Espousal of the Adriatic which 
 he traces " partly to a certain idolatrous custom, whereby the 
 Venetians sacrifice to Neptune." 
 
 It seems only fitting, however, that his memories of Ravenna 
 should to us be redolent of the Commedia, though he left the 
 city while Dante was still almost in the nursery. The Middle 
 Ages were rich in pretenders, and Salimbene alludes briefly to 
 many of these : a false Count of Flanders, who was finally 
 betrayed by his inability to remember at whose hands he had 
 received knighthood : a false Frederick II : a whole crop of 
 false Manfreds, whom Charles of Anjou destroyed one after 
 another. (174 ; 472). But by far the most picturesque of 
 these is a story of the famous " Casa Traversara," once so rich 
 in noble lords and ladies, in courtesy and in love, of which Dante 
 laments the extinction. (Purg. xiv. 107). Salimbene tells us of 
 Paolo Traversario and his adversary Anastagio, who are promi- 
 nent in that strange tale of unrequited passion and repentance 
 which Dryden borrowed from Boccaccio 3 and entitled " Theodore 
 and Honoria " : while the former is also commemorated as " the 
 noblest man of all Romagna " in the 35th story of the still older 
 " Novellino." He tells us how all the four noblest houses of 
 Ravenna were now extinct ; of which the last and greatest was 
 this of the Traversari. After Paolo's death, the house was 
 represented by a single girl Traversaria, born out of wedlock,
 
 196 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 whom Innocent IV legitimated and married to his kinsman Tom- 
 maso Fogliani. Their only son, however, died in early youth, 
 and the vast possessions of the house passed for a while to Lord 
 Matteo Fogliani. (166) "But in process of time one Guliel- 
 motto of Apulia came with a handmaid named Paschetta ; but 
 he gave her the name of Ayca, saying that she was his wife, 
 and daughter to the Lord Paolo Traversario : for in truth the 
 Emperor Frederick had taken Paolo's daughter Ayca and sent 
 her as a hostage to Apulia. Afterwards, however, when the 
 Emperor waxed wroth against the girl's father, he caused her to 
 be cast into a burning fiery furnace ; and so she gave up her 
 soul to God. For a certain Friar Minor, Ubaldino by name, 
 who dwelt in Apulia, and was a noble of Ravenna, and 
 brother to the Lord Segnorelli, was present and heard her con- 
 fession. And she was a most fair lady and no wonder, for she 
 had a most comely father. But this Paschetta, who gave her- 
 self out as Ayca, was foul and deformed, and beyond measure 
 miserly and avaricious ; for 1 have spoken with her in the city 
 of Ravenna, and seen her a hundred times. She had learnt 
 from her mistress her father's manners, and the circumstances of 
 the city of Ravenna : moreover, a certain man of Ravenna, 
 whom I knew well, the Lord Ugo de' Barci, went oft-times to 
 Apulia, and of his malice instructed her in these things, hoping 
 for a reward if she were exalted. So Guliel motto came with his 
 wife to Ravenna, and the men of the city rejoiced to hear there- 
 of and went out gladly to meet them. I also went out with a 
 friar, my comrade, to without the gate of San Lorenzo, and 
 stood waiting on the river-bridge to see what this might be. 
 And as I waited, a certain youth came running, who said to me, 
 ' And wherefore have not the other Brethren come ? In truth, 
 if the Pope with his Cardinals were in Ravenna, he should 
 hasten to behold this rejoicing.' Hearing this I beheld him, and 
 smiled, saying, ' Blessed be thou, my son ; thou hast spoken 
 well.' Now when they had entered Ravenna, they went forth- 
 with to the church of San Vitale, to visit the grave of Paolo 
 Traversario. When therefore Paschetta stood face to face with 
 his sepulchre, she raised her voice and began to weep, as though 
 she mourned for her father. And then she began to feign her- 
 self sick, for loathing that Traversaria [the illegitimate"! should 
 be buried in the sepulchre of her father : and after that they 
 went to the lodgings ordained for them. All this was reported to 
 me by one who saw with his own eyes, my friend Dom Giovanni, 
 monk and sacristan of San Vitale. And on the morrow Guliel- 
 motto spoke in the city Council, for he was a comely knight, and
 
 Settling Down. 197 
 
 a great orator. And when he had ended his speech in open 
 Council, the citizens promised and offered him more than he him- 
 self had asked ; for they rejoiced at this revival of the Lord 
 Paolo's house. The Lord Philip likewise, Archbishop of Rav- 
 enna, was consenting thereto. So Gulielmotto had these posses- 
 sions and lands, as well as ever the Lord Paolo himself had 
 possessed them : and he abounded in money and goods, and built 
 courts and mansions and walls and palaces, and prospered many 
 years, as I saw with mine own eyes. Yet after this he rose up 
 against the Church party, and was driven forth from Ravenna : 
 and all his palaces and buildings were torn down. Moreover, 
 that woman his wife, who feigned herself to be Ayca, had no son 
 by him : yet she would send and fetch boys of five and seven 
 years old from Apulia, whom she said to be her children. At 
 length one of those children died : and she buried him in the 
 sepulchre of the Lord Paolo, bursting forth into bitter lamenta- 
 tion and crying, * O glories of Lord Paolo, where must 1 leave 
 you ! O glories of Lord Paolo, where must I leave you ! O 
 glories of Lord Paolo, where must I leave you ! ' At length, 
 amid the multitude of wars, she ended her days at Forli : and 
 Gulielmotto returned to Apulia, naked and stripped of his 
 possessions." 
 
 These years at and near Ravenna brought Salimbene into 
 close contact with two more of the most striking figures in the 
 Commedia Guido da Montefeltro and Tebaldello. He was 
 living both at Forli and at Faenza when those cities were 
 besieged by the Pope's Bolognese allies, and when the siege of 
 Faenza was raised by Guide's brilliant victory at San Procolo, 
 2 miles from the city. He describes the terrible slaughter of 
 the Bolognese knights : and how the four thousand common 
 folk, huddled helplessly round their carroccio, presently 
 surrendered in a body. Many of these prisoners, with their 
 hands bound, were butchered in cold blood : the rest were brought 
 in triumph to prison at Faenza. Ricobaldo, writing at Ferrara 
 more than 20 years after the event, speaks with bated breath of 
 this massacre, and breaks off with " But I must say no more, 
 lest even now I awaken men's half-slumbering hate." 4 The 
 battle took place on the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, " and 
 therefore " says Salimbene " the Bolognese cannot bear to hear 
 the Saint's name mentioned in their city." (397) At Bologna 
 and Reggio the dead knights lay at the church doors, each in his 
 own coffin, while the men of Faenza swarmed out and carried to 
 their houses the plunder of that vast camp which only a day 
 before had threatened the very existence of their city. (490)
 
 1 98 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Six years later, Guide took Sinigaglia and put 1,500 Guelfs (it 
 was said) to the sword (506) ; but next year saw the election of 
 Martin IV, who soon showed himself desperately in earnest with 
 the war, and who spent upon it the vast hoards which his prede- 
 cessors had collected for the next Crusade in the East. So, al- 
 though the men of Forli held out bravely, yet (516) " every year 
 Pope Martin IV sent against them a mighty army of French and 
 of divers other nations, who destroyed their vines and corn and 
 fruit-trees, with their olives and figs, almonds and fair pome- 
 granates, nouses and cattle, casks and vats, and all that pertaineth 
 to country-folk. And the Pope spent in these years many 
 thousands of florins, nay, many pack-loads of gold pieces. So 
 when the city had come to the obedience of the Church, all the 
 moats were filled in and the gates razed, and houses and palaces 
 torn down, and the chief buildings shattered to pieces : and 
 the chief men of that city went out and fled to divers hiding- 
 places, that they might give way to wrath. But Count Guido da 
 Montef eltro, who had been their captain and that of the Imperial 
 party, made peace with the Church, and was banished for a while 
 to Chioggia, after which he was sent to Astiin Lombardy, where 
 he dwelt in great honour, since all loved him for his former 
 probity, and frequent victories, and for his present wise and 
 humble obedience to the Church. Moreover he was noble and 
 full of sense and discreet and well-mannered, liberal and courteous 
 and generous ; a doughty knight and of great courage and skill 
 in war. He loved the Order of St. Francis, not only because he 
 had kinsfolk therein, but also that the blessed Francis had 
 delivered him from many perils, and from the dungeon and 
 chains of the Lord Malatesta " for, as Salimbene had pointed 
 out before, his great victory was won on the Feast of St. Anthony 
 of Padua, and the siege of Faenza was raised on St. Francis's 
 day. " Yet for all that he was oft-times grievously offended by 
 certain fools of the Order of Friars Minor. In the city of Asti 
 he had a decent company and household, for many ceased not to 
 lend him a helping hand." These remarks are all the more 
 interesting for having been written before Guido had become a 
 Franciscan and given his fatal counsel to Boniface VIII. 
 
 How difficult it was for him to refuse his services to the Pope, 
 and how thoroughly men of Religion were expected to put even 
 the least religious of their worldly talents at the service of their 
 new Brethren, is shown not only by Salimbene's friar who was 
 compelled to build siege engines (as will be seen later on,) but 
 also by the two following anecdotes from Cardinal Jacques de 
 Vitry's sermons. 6 " I have heard of a noble knight who left all
 
 Settling Down. 1 99 
 
 his great possessions and became a monk, that he might serve God 
 in peace and humility. But the Abbot, seeing that in the World 
 he had been a man of many wiles, sent him to the fair to sell the 
 aged asses of the convent and buy younger beasts. The nobleman 
 loved not the task, but bent his will to obey. So when the buyers 
 asked whether these asses were good and young, he deigned not 
 to dissemble, but answered, ' Think ye that our convent is come 
 to such poverty as to sell young asses that might be profitable 
 to the house ? ' When again men asked why they had so little 
 hair on their tails, he replied, ' Because they fall oftentimes under 
 their burdens ; wherefore, since we raise them again by their 
 tails, these have lost their hair.' 6 So when he came home to 
 the cloister without having sold a single beast, then a lay-brother 
 who had gone with him accused him before the Chapter. So 
 the abbot and monks, in white-hot wrath against him, set about 
 beating him with stripes as for a grievous fault. He therefore 
 said to them : ' I left behind in the World a multitude of asses 
 and great possessions : therefore I was unwilling to lie for the 
 sake of your asses, and to harm mine own soul by deceiving my 
 neighbours.' So thenceforward they never sent him forth on 
 worldly business." The other story is of a great advocate who 
 for the same reason lost his causes when he had become a monk 
 and was sent to plead for the convent. Both tales appear 
 frequently in Preachers' manuals, and evidently appealed vividly 
 to the medieval mind. 
 
 Salimbene twice mentions the double betrayal of Faenza by 
 Tebaldello, whom Dante plunges for that reason into the hell 
 of ice (Inf. xii, 123.), and of whom our friar says (505-6) 
 " He was named Tebaldello de' Zambrasi, a great and powerful 
 noble of the aforesaid city of Faenza ; he was base-born, but his 
 brother Zambrasino, of the Order of Frati Godenti, had given 
 him the half of his father's inheritance, for that those two 
 brethren only were left of the family, and there was wealth 
 enough for two : therefore his brother gave him an equal share 
 of the inheritance and made him a nobleman. So this Tebaldello 
 (whom I knew and have seen a hundred times, and who was a 
 man of war, like a second Jephthah) betrayed his city of Faenza 
 into the hands of the Bolognese. At that season the half of the 
 citizens of Faenza were gone with the banished party of Bologna 
 to lay siege to a certain town ; so that Tebaldello had watched 
 for a fit time for his evil deed. [Then Pope Martin] sent his army 
 oft-times against Forli, and the Church party had the under hand, 
 for they were conquered and taken and slain and put to flight : 
 among whom fell Tebaldello also, who had twice betrayed his
 
 2OO From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 own city of Faenza ; for he was drowned in the moat of the city 
 of Forli and smothered there together with his charger." 
 
 Such, then, were the events which Salimbene constantly saw 
 and heard during the few remaining years which he spent in 
 Romagna after that quiet life in Ravenna. In his terrible 
 description of the devastation wrought by civil wars, his deepest 
 pity is for this province of Romagna : and, in spite of all Martin 
 IV's favours towards his own Order, the good friar never forgave 
 this waste of crusade-money and this drenching of Italian soil 
 with Christian blood. 
 
 His old age, as the Chronicle tells us plainly, was spent in his 
 native province of Emilia mainly at Reggio and Montefalcone, 
 within easy reach of his early home at Parma. He may have 
 settled in Reggio as early as the spring of 1281 : he was certainly 
 there in August 1283 (526) : and the minuteness with which he 
 chronicles the occurrences of 1282 in that district is a strong 
 proof that he was then living there. The last event referred to 
 is a Papal Bull of May 14, 1288, and the reference does not 
 imply that this was very recent (625) : so that there is no reason 
 to quarrel with Gebhart's guess that he died in 1289, or Cledat's 
 that it was he himself whose trembling hand scratched out the 
 unflattering notices of Obizzo when that tyrant became master of 
 Reggio in 1290. 
 
 The events of these last years have a very special interest for 
 us. Salimbene was of the same generation as Dante's father ; 
 and all that he has told us hitherto is what the poet might have 
 heard from his parents at his own fireside. But now we come 
 to Dante's own age ; for Salimbene came to Reggio a little before 
 the first salutation of Beatrice, and died about the time when 
 Dante showed his real manhood at the battle of Campaldino. 
 Life in the towns of Emilia was very like that in adjoining 
 Tuscany : and what the friar tells us of his own experiences is 
 practically what passed under the poet's eyes from his 17th to 
 his 25th year.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 Taking in Sail. 
 
 SO our busy friend rested at last from his wanderings, and 
 came to end his days in the convents of his native province 
 a land flowing with milk and honey, if only men could have 
 ceased for awhile from war. "This is the fairest spot in the 
 world," writes the Continuator of Ricobaldi's Chronicle : " con- 
 veniently hilly, yet with fruitful plains and lakes for fish ; and 
 therein dwell men of kingly heart." 1 Parma and Reggio and 
 Modena are sleepy enough nowadays ; very restful to the weary 
 traveller, with their Apennines hard by, and far off the Alps of 
 Trent and Verona looming in ghostly orange on the evening 
 horizon, high above that endless stretch of purple plain. But in 
 Salimbene's days this sleepy world was like a swarming bee- 
 hive, upon which the good old friar looked down as Lucretius' 
 philosopher contemplated the troubled sea of human error and 
 pain. 
 
 In those harder times a man was already aged at fifty : but 
 in 1282 Salimbene was in his 61st year, and had at least six more 
 to live. This year 1282 passed comparatively peacefully for the 
 cities in which he was most interested. His native Parma was 
 now reconciled again to the Church, after an interdict of three 
 years. For in 1279 the Dominicans had burned for heresy, first 
 a noble lady of the city, and then an innkeeper's wife, who had 
 once been her maidservant (501). On this, "certain fools" 
 attacked the Dominican convent and wounded some of the 
 Brethren (507) ; or, as the contemporary Chronicler of Parma 
 tells us with more detail " certain evil men, by suggestion of 
 the Devil, ran to the convent and entered it by force and 
 despoiled it, smiting and wounding many of the Brethren, and 
 killing one Brother Jacopo de' Ferrari, who was an aged man 
 and (as was reported) a virgin of his body ; who was also blind 
 of his eyes, and had lived forty years and more in the Order." 
 Yet, in spite of her recent prosperity, Parma was not quite free 
 from war. Her citizens made a petty raid into neighbouring
 
 2O2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 territory, and destroyed some crops : again, they sent a force 
 to garrison friendly Cremona while the Cremonese went to fight 
 against the Ghibellines in Lombardy. Within the city itself, 
 this was a gay year, in spite of the pulling down of certain rebels' 
 houses and of a sudden scare in the summer, when " thunderclaps 
 were heard at nightfall so horrible and so startling that they 
 seemed almost visible and palpable, and many fearful folk fell to 
 the ground" (511). There were many worldly pageants, which 
 the good friar describes in the language of keeu enjoyment, 
 but with extreme brevity. This is all the more disappointing 
 because even a few details, such as might so naturally have come 
 from the pen of an observant man writing for his favourite 
 niece, would have made us realize even more vividly Villani's 
 description of the " noble and rich company, clad all in white, 
 and with a Lord of Love at its head," which made Florence so 
 gay for nearly two months of the next year 1283, and which it 
 is so natural to connect with the occasion, in that same year, 
 when Dante first exchanged speech with his Beatrice, " dressed 
 all in pure white." 2 At Parma, two brothers of the great Rossi 
 family were knighted, one of them resigning his canonry for the 
 occasion, and the feastings lasted nearly a month. Again, there 
 were other knightings at Reggio, and most noble festivities at 
 Ferrara, where Azzo of Este was knighted and wedded to a niece 
 of Pope Nicholas III. At Reggio, rival factions were reconciled 
 by the mediation of the Friars Minor, and " many men and 
 women, youths and maidens," were present at the solemn oath 
 of reconciliation in the convent. Outside this narrow circle, 
 however, the political horizon was dark enough. The Sicilians 
 got rid of their French masters by the Sicilian Vespers : which 
 Salimbene recounts with the brevity usual to him when he writes 
 at second hand of distant events. " In the city of Palermo they 
 slew all the French of both sexes, dashing their little ones against 
 the stones, and ripping up the women that were with child : but 
 the men of Messina treated them less cruelly, stripping them of 
 their arms and their goods and sending them back to their master 
 Charles " (508). The Vespers kindled a long and bloody war 
 between Charles of Anjou and Peter of Aragon. Another war, 
 equally long and bloody, was being fought out with redoubled 
 energy by Martin IV, the French Pope whom Charles of Anjou 
 had lately forced upon Christendom by kidnapping the dissentient 
 Cardinals and intimidating the rest. Salimbene, staunch Church- 
 man as he is, speaks very plainly about these papal wars, as will 
 presently be seen. This greed for fresh territory was all the 
 more blameworthy because even their earliest territorial posses-
 
 Taking in Sail. 203 
 
 sions kept them constantly involved in political complications and 
 their resultant wars. " The men of Perugia made ready to go 
 and waste the lands of Foligno, and the Pope sent word that they 
 should utterly desist, on pain of excommunication, since Foligno 
 was of the garden of St. Peter. Yet the Perugians turned not 
 aside from their purpose, but went and ravaged the whole 
 Bishopric of Foligno even to the ditches of the city. So they 
 were excommunicated ; wherefore in their wrath they made a 
 Pope and Cardinals of straw, and dragged them outrageously 
 through the whole city : after which they dragged them to the 
 summit of a hill, where they burned the Pope in robes of scarlet, 
 and his Cardinals with him ; saying, ' this is such a Cardinal, 
 and this is such another.' And note that the Perugians thought 
 to do a good deed in fighting against Foligno and ravaging the 
 lands ; for in former times there was much war between the two 
 cities, and the men of Foligno raged so cruelly against the Per- 
 ugians, on whom God sent at the same time such confusion, that 
 one old woman of Foligno drove 10 Perugians to prison with a 
 rod of reed : and other women did likewise ; for the Perugians 
 had no heart to resist them." (510). 
 
 1283 was a fairly quiet year too: there was a great cattle- 
 plague, but the mortality did not spread among men until the 
 year following. At Parma men built rapidly, almost feverishly, 
 in those days of prosperity : the Friars Minor built a handsome 
 refectory, the city walls and Baptistery rose rapidly : the 
 Cathedral was adorned with its " porch-pillars on the lion rest- 
 ing : " a great stone bridge was built, and three fair new streets 
 lined with houses and palaces ; also a governor's palace and a 
 canal " but this canal was little worth : I myself could have 
 planned a better canal for the service of Parma if I were lord of 
 the city." Here a reader of the 14th or 15th century, provoked 
 at Salimbene's self-sufficiency, has scribbled on the margin of 
 the MS. "note the bestial folly of this fellow ! " (519). 
 
 At Reggio, the little cloud of last year, no bigger than a 
 man's hand, was coming up dark on the horizon. (515). "The 
 Podesta was too remiss, and many manslaughters and crimes 
 were done in the district, so that in one house in the city a man's 
 enemies entered by a ladder and slew him in his bed. This 
 Podesta was succeeded next year by the Lord Bernabo dei 
 Palastrelli of Piacenza, who spared none, and destroyed many 
 evildoers and robbers in his days. Many he slew and caused to 
 be slain in his government ; and therefore, because he kept 
 justice well, the men of Reggio said that he was the destroyer of 
 their city. But his predecessor was rather their destroyer, who
 
 2O4 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 was too remiss and negligent, so that many wars began in the 
 city which last even to this day, and are a cause of destruction 
 to the city, unless God shall ordain otherwise." 
 
 God did not interfere to save them from the consequences of 
 their quarrels : and next year saw the outbreak of savage civil 
 wars at Reggio and Modena, though Parma was still in compara- 
 tive peace. The last quarter of Salimbene's chronicle is largely 
 taken up with the record of these sordid and barbarous wars, 
 which I shall give only in the briefest summary, except for those 
 personal touches which put Salimbene so high above most of his 
 contemporaries. Again in 1284 Reggio dismissed its Podesta : 
 not only because his acts were factious and partial, but also be- 
 cause he put them to shame with his uncouthness. " He had 
 such an impediment in his speech as provoked his hearers to 
 laugh ; for when in Council he would say * Ye have heard what 
 hath been proposed,' he said, * Ye have heard what hath been 
 propolt,' (audivistis propoltam), and so they mocked him as a 
 tongueless man, for he was thick of speech. Yet the citizens 
 were more worthy of scorn for electing to their lordship such 
 men as are of no worth, for it is a sign that like loves like, and 
 that they are ruled by private friendship, and care little for the 
 
 common profit " Indeed, the position of podesta was not 
 
 so enviable in those days, and Sacchetti very naturally wondered 
 how any man of sense could be tempted to take the office. Here 
 is another instance from Salimbene : " The Lord Jacopo da 
 Enzola, Podesta of Modena, had fallen ill and died in that city, 
 and lay buried there in the Cathedral church : and on his tomb 
 he was portrayed sitting with all honour on his horse, as became 
 a knight ; and, for that in the days of his government all those 
 manslaughters and misdeeds had been done, wherefrom sprang 
 the divisions of parties and civil wars in Modena (for he had not 
 done due justice and vengeance for them), therefore the men of 
 Modena, provoked to wrath and troubled with indignation at 
 the sight of these evils, put out the eyes of the Podesta's 
 image, and defiled his tomb in so foul and swinish a fashion as 
 may scarce be written here." 3 (608). Here again, as usual, out- 
 rage bred fresh outrage. " In process of time the citizens of Mo- 
 dena, sent to Parma two ambassadors, one of whom in full Council 
 spake many opprobrious insults against this dead Podesta Jacopo 
 da Enzola [who was a native of Parma]. Therefore his son 
 Ghirardino, provoked to wrath by these words, wrought according 
 to the saying of Scripture * A patient man shall bear for a time, 
 and afterwards joy shall be restored to him.' For when that 
 ambassador who had reviled his father departed, Ghirardino
 
 Taking in Sail. 205 
 
 followed after him along the road with certain wanton young 
 men ; and after he was come into the Bishopric of Reggio he 
 grievously wounded and maimed him, yet not so as to slay him : 
 wherefore he was condemned by the men of Parma [to pay 1,000 
 Parmese :] which he paid to the last penny. All this I say to 
 show that the men of Parma did well in keeping justice, and they 
 did evil who kept it not at Modena." 
 
 With such rulers and such people, the story of Dante's Florence 
 was repeated in every city. A jealous quarrel a cry of " cosa 
 fatta capo ha," a sudden murder in the streets a consequent 
 series of vendettas and in a few weeks the city was cleft in twain 
 by a gulf of implacable feuds. After some days of street fighting, 
 the weaker party would be driven into exile, and its houses razed 
 to the ground with every circumstance of indelible insult. 
 Nothing tended so inevitably to perpetuate civil feuds in Italy 
 as these wholesale expulsions of the beaten party and destructions 
 of their houses. Many who first read how the houses of the 
 Ghibellines at Florence were pulled down, and their stones used 
 to build walls which should shut out all Ghibellines for ever from 
 their native city or how the great Piazza was made on the site 
 of the houses of the exiled Uberti are apt to look on these as 
 isolated and exceptional instances ; but the chronicles of other 
 cities show us that these barbarous reprisals were normal and 
 incessant. The author of the Chronicon Parmense records 
 twenty-four cases of house-wrecking in the forty years following 
 1265. These were all in consequence of quarrels between Guelf 
 and Guelf, quite independently of the wholesale destruction of 
 1247, when "the Ghibellines' houses and towers were daily 
 destroyed, and from the bricks and beams and planks men built 
 walls and engines for the city." The provocation was usually 
 a murder, but often merely a bloodless quarrel : as in 1285 when 
 Marcherio da Montecchio " had had words with (habuerant verba 
 cum) Gherardino Ansaldi by reason of the priory of St. Bartholo- 
 mew," or in 1293 when "the Lord Podesta, with more than 1,000 
 armed men, ran as usual (more solito) to the house of the Lord 
 Giovanni de' Nizi, who was a Frate Godente, and likewise to that 
 of Poltrenerio de' Ilicicoldi, by reason of certain injuries which 
 they had committed against men of the Gild of the Cross," 
 The result was that Italy swarmed from sea to sea with homeless 
 and desperate men, degraded still more by that hand-to-mouth 
 kfe and base companionship which Dante describes so bitterly 
 (Parad. xvii. 58 foil.) The acts of the Provincial Synod of 
 Milan, held in 1311, contain a long decree as to the means of 
 raising an income for the many bishops who were wandering in
 
 206 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 exile from their sees. 4 Here is the light in which Salimbene saw 
 all this, anticipating Cacciaguida's prophecy by thirteen years 
 (1287 395). " Moreover, in this year all they who were of the 
 old party of the Emperor Frederick, who had long been cast forth 
 from their own cities and had wandered homeless in exile, thought 
 to take some city wherein they might thenceforth dwell without 
 reproach and without loathing, and wherefrom they might take 
 vengeance on their enemies unless they would live at peace with 
 them. They were driven to this by utter necessity : for indeed 
 they of the Church party utterly refused to show them bowels 
 of mercy or receive them to peace by opening their cities to 
 them." It speaks much for Salimbene's candour, that, good 
 Guelf as he is, he cannot help finding some sympathy and 
 justification for these Ghibellines at bay. Such exiles usually 
 seized a neighbouring town or castle from which they might 
 harass their former city and possibly some day, by a sudden 
 coup de mam, enter again as victors and destroy their enemies' 
 houses in turn. Desperate themselves, they collected round 
 them all the desperate characters of the district. The Monk of 
 Canossa probably one of those unfrocked clerics so often 
 conspicuous among the ruffian leaders of medieval wars made 
 his den in Matilda's old castle, and was probably still there in 
 the year when Dante saw the transfigured Countess in his Earthly 
 Paradise. Here is another scene from Salimbene (592). When 
 the exiles stormed Magreba, " Nero da Leccaterra entered 
 into the church of the Blessed Virgin and set fire to it that it 
 might be utterly consumed, saying, ' Now, St. Mary, defend 
 .thyself if thou canst ! ' Yet even as he spake these words of 
 malice and insult, a lance hurled by some other hand pierced 
 through his breastplate and entered even into his heart, and 
 suddenly he fell down dead. And, for it is certain that his own 
 men hurled no such lance, especially against their Captain, 
 therefore it is believed that the blow was dealt by St. Mercury, 
 both because he is the wonted avenger of wrongs done to the 
 Blessed Virgin, and also because he slew the apostate Julian with 
 his lance in the Persian war." This legend of Julian's death 
 by the lance of St. Mercury and at the command of the Virgin 
 Mary occurs first in the Life of St. Basil, whose prayers are 
 said to have brought about this vengeance ; it is told also by 
 Vincent of Beauvais ; and Caesarius quotes it as a proof that 
 Christian charity by no means forbids one saint to avenge in- 
 juries done to another : " St. Mercury the Martyr, though per- 
 chance in this life he prayed for his own murderers, yet stepped 
 down from the realms of glory to slay Julian." 5
 
 Taking in Sail. 207 
 
 The brutalities committed on each side were awful. The 
 destruction of houses and crops, orchards and vineyards, went 
 on wholesale : our good friar spares a word of special regret 
 for one particular vineyard " which made Vernaccia wine." 6 
 Prisoners were killed in cold blood or carried off like cattle : " the 
 greater part of these 103 prisoners were bound with a single 
 rope and led off to Reggio, where men threw them into chains 
 and kept them bound in the common prison." On one attack, 
 children were slaughtered in their cradles : at another time, the 
 men vented their spite on the women (587). "In this year, 
 when the women of Modena had come forth to gather grapes 
 in the vineyards, the men of Sassuolo took 300 of them and 
 led them to Sassuolo, and there cast them into prison . . . 
 but they were quickly loosed, for the Modenese for their part 
 took the women of Sassuolo." It is not surprising to find that 
 these ruffians, losing heart in battle, " took to flight, casting away 
 their arms and garments and all that they had, desiring only to 
 save their souls ; " or that another, taken prisoner by the Monk 
 of Canossa, " after but small persuasion of torture, became of his 
 party and dwelt from thenceforth with him." Yet the men who 
 did these things might be good churchmen, as churchmanship 
 was often understood. Here is Salimbene's description of the 
 Lord Burigardo, who cast the 300 women into prison. (589) 
 "And note that he bad certain virtues (bonitatcs) towards God : 
 for he was so devout that he always had a chaplain of his own at 
 his court, (as I saw with mine own eyes) who daily said Mass 
 for him and celebrated divine service. When he was at Reggio 
 he sent the Friars Minor a great branched candlestick to illum- 
 inate and honour the Lord's body, when it is elevated and shown 
 to the people in the Mass." So far these people came up to the 
 modern idea of the medieval robber-baron : but modern ideas of 
 chivalry will find little satisfaction in the friar's chronicle. Only 
 one trait of generosity is recorded in this whole dismal series of 
 civil conflicts : and the very stress laid on this is eloquent as to 
 the ordinary practice. (636) " The chief captain of the men 
 of Gesso was the Lord Rolandino of Canossa, a fair and noble 
 man, courtly and liberal, and who in his day had been Podesta 
 of many divers cities. His mother was of the house of Piedemonte, 
 a noble lady and most holy of life. Moreover the Lord Rolandino 
 did one great act of courtesy which is worthy to be recounted 
 and remembered. For when the men of Gesso had a truce with 
 the men of Albinea, a certain man of Albinea came and complained 
 to the Lord Rolandino that a man of Gesso had driven off his 
 oxen. And he had the oxen forthwith restored to him, adding
 
 208 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 * what wilt thou now ? ' Then the man answered * I would 
 have that man, whom I see standing there, restore me my garment 
 which he hath.' So the Lord Rolandino prayed the man to 
 restore the garment ; and when he utterly refused, he himself 
 took off his outer mantle and gave it to the man who had been 
 robbed, saying ' Methinks thou hast now full satisfaction for 
 thy garment : go now in peace.' When therefore the country 
 fellow who had stolen the garment saw this, he was ashamed and 
 fell at the Lord Rolandino's feet and confessed his fault." 
 
 Imagine the lot of the ordinary peasant in these times the 
 class of whom we often speak as the backbone of the country, 
 fretting ourselves nowadays merely because they insist on 
 flocking, like ourselves, to the towns ! Castles and cities being 
 generally too well fortified for attack, the whole story of the war 
 is that of outrages and reprisals upon the peasants of either party. 
 "The villagers dwelt apart almost after the fashion of the 
 Sidonians, nor was there any that resisted their enemies or 
 opened the mouth or made the least noise. And that night 
 they burned fifty-three houses in the village, good and mean 
 alike : and they would have burned all without distinction but 
 that they desisted at the prayers of the Friars Minor who opposed 
 themselves to the evildoers. So the men of JBibbiano seeing this 
 gave 100 imperial to the men of Gesso, and made a truce with 
 them for one year, that they might labour in safety and gather 
 in the fruits of the earth." The majority of the peasants' 
 possessions were thus at the mercy of their enemies : even their 
 lives and portable goods were in comparative safety only when 
 they neglected ecclesiastical prohibitions and turned the parish 
 churches into fortresses. Short of this, there was no salvation 
 but in bodily removal of their houses. (633) "The men of 
 Castelli carried away their houses and rebuilt them round the 
 mount of Bianello, on its very summit. Likewise did the men 
 of Coresana and Farneto and Corniano and Piazzola round Monte 
 Lucio, on its highest point ; likewise also did the men of Oliveto ; 
 the men of Bibbiano also fortified themselves, fearing the war 
 to come. But the men of San Polo d'Enza built their houses 
 round the parish church, and digged moats and filled them with 
 water, that they might be safe from the face of the spoiler." The 
 ordinary farm-house was evidently slight enough in those days ; 
 for Salimbene thus describes the rejoicings after a battle : " that 
 evening the citizens kindled a beacon of fire on the summit of 
 the Tower of the Commune at Reggio in sign of joy and gladness, 
 and to rejoice the hearts of their friends : and they for their part 
 did likewise, showing lighted beacons, as the country folk do at
 
 Taking in Sail. 209 
 
 carnival times, when they burn down their cottages and hovels " 
 (639). 
 
 Nor was it only the peasants who suffered from what may be 
 called the contingent horrors of civil war. In those days of 
 exasperated party feeling, both sides were merciless to traitors, 
 real or suspected (1287394). "The Monk of Canossa took 
 Bernardo Guglielmi, deacon of the church of S. Antonino at 
 Castelli, who confessed outright and of his own free will, without 
 torment (as they said who took him captive) that he would have 
 betrayed Bianello to the men of Gesso. So forthwith they slit 
 his windpipe, and dragged his dead body naked through the 
 town : afterwards they cast him forth like carrion without the 
 walls, and so he was buried in his bare shirt at the church of 
 S. Antonino. On St. John Baptist's day when I sang Mass at 
 Bianello, that same man sang the gospel to my Mass ; and that 
 same year, on the day following the feast of the beheading of St. 
 John Baptist, he also was beheaded. Moreover, they cut out 
 the tongue of his sister, Bertha by name, and cast her forth into 
 perpetual banishment. For they accused not only her but also 
 the dead man's leman or concubine of carrying evil news to and 
 fro between Gesso and certain abominable traitors at Castelli. 
 That deacon was an old man : he kept a concubine, and at his 
 last end he could not, or would not, make his confession. He was 
 slain by one Martinello, a murderer and notorious evildoer whom 
 the monk of Bianello kept in his castle. The year before, the 
 Monk's hired murderers had slain the parish priest of S. Polo, 
 on the same accusation that he was not truly of the Monk's party, 
 and for many other reasons which are not worthy to be told or 
 remembered. His four murderers supped familiarly with him 
 one evening ; and at night as he slept under his own roof and in 
 his own chamber, they slew him with their swords and deformed 
 his corpse with so foul a mockery that it was a horrible and 
 monstrous sight to see. But God brought swift vengeance on 
 them ; for before the year was past, Raimondello was slain by 
 the men of Gesso, into whose hands Giacomello likewise fell, 
 and they smote out two of his teeth and scarce left him his life ; 
 and God smote Accorto and Ferrarello in their own beds." On 
 another occasion Modena was nearly taken by a band of exiles 
 treacherously introduced by night : and next morning (1287 397) 
 " men began to enquire diligently who were the traitors who had 
 let them in. And they took the Lord Garso de' Garsoni and 
 hanged him at the Porta Bazoaria ; and in those days thirty -nine 
 men were hanged for the same cause, some of whom were said to 
 have been guiltless. The Podesta of Modena at that time was
 
 2 1 o From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the Lord Bernardino of Ravenna, son to the Lord Guido da 
 Polenta," and therefore brother to Francesca da Rimini. . . " So 
 the Lord Matteo Correggio went to Modena, and there in the 
 Palazzo Communale, before the full council, he bitterly rebuked 
 the Podesta, saying, ' Of a truth, my Lord Podesta, ye have 
 brought a great burden upon us and upon this city, seeing that 
 we must now dwell in fear our whole life long by reason of the 
 headlong vengeance which ye have taken.' ' Two similar 
 instances of torture and random vengeance are recorded about 
 the same time (1287389). 
 
 One of the most hopeless features of these civil wars is the 
 part played in them by Churchmen. Salimbene shows us 
 bishops driven out of their sees for their share in these faction- 
 fights : the archpriest of Fornovo murdered in one political 
 quarrel : and the Bishop of Tortona in another, by the " Guglielmo 
 Marchese " of Purg. vii. 134. The abbots of the great mon- 
 asteries, again, were almost as rich and powerful as the bishops : 
 and they too were generally chosen on political principles 
 and expected to work for political ends. 
 
 San Prospero at Reggio was one of the great abbeys of Italy, 
 though its princely revenues had within recent years been much 
 diminished by lawsuits and wars. The Abbot's election in 1272 
 had been celebrated by a great feast " whereat all the clergy and 
 men of Religion were present, and all the good men (i.e. the upper 
 classes) of the city" (488). In 1284 we find the Abbot on 
 the losing side in the civil strife at Reggio, and only enabled 
 to retain his Abbey by making peace with his powerful enemies 
 the Boiardi, ancestors of the famous poet. Now, however, in 
 1286, the Abbot fell under suspicion not only of giving help to 
 the other party, but also of complicity in two recent murders 
 that of the brothers da Bianello and of the archpriest Gerardo 
 Boiardi. The rest may be told in Salimbene's words (621) 
 " The Abbot Guglielmo de' Lupicini was a good man indeed 
 with regard to God and to man's honour ; but as regards 
 worldly affairs he was simple, and churlish, and miserly ; for he 
 treated his monks ill in the matter of their food, and therefore he 
 found them traitors afterwards. For Bonifazio Boiardi, with 
 the connivance of certain monks who stood ill with their Abbot 
 for that he had dealt unkindly with them in the matter of victuals, 
 took the monastery by assault on the feast of Pentecost, at the 
 hour of dinner ; and, having despoiled it of all that he coveted, 
 he departed. And the Abbot sought safety in flight and came 
 to the convent of the Friars Minor, where he abode all that day 
 and the night following ; then he went to the house of his brother
 
 Taking in Sail. 2 1 1 
 
 by blood, named Sinibaldo, and dwelt there some days in doubt 
 of mind and anguish of heart. Moreover, the said Bonifazio 
 seized all the granges of the convent at the season of wheat- 
 harvest, and afterwards he seized Fossola by force, and besieged 
 and took and burnt Domomatta, where he slew a man who 
 defended his oxen and would not yield them up ; and another 
 they beat and grievously wounded, leaving him half dead. And 
 note that all these things had been foretold to the Abbot before 
 the event ; but in his simplicity and his miserliness he would not 
 avoid them nor beware. But his friends, seeing that he was 
 slow to guard himself, came of their own accord and uninvited, 
 forty good men of Reggio in all, and kept the convent of San 
 Prospero all night before Pentecost. But when the dinner hour 
 came he thanked them not for the guard which they had held all 
 night long, nor did he call them to dinner, but suffered each to 
 go and dine at his own house while he himself went to dine at his 
 palace with certain esquires and pages of his own. And lo, while 
 he sat at meat and believed that all was at peace, suddenly he 
 heard the bell which the traitor monks rang from the campanile. 
 Then the secular enemies of the Abbot came forth swiftly from 
 their hiding-places and rushed into the convent, wishing to make 
 a fresh Abbot of their own ; but by God's mercy the Abbot cast 
 himself down from a certain small upper chamber which they 
 call the ambulatory, and forthwith he waded through the city 
 moat and came, as aforesaid, to the convent of the Friars Minor, 
 trembling for fear as a rush trembles in the water. There all his 
 friends who came to visit him cursed him, heaping reproaches 
 and imprecations on his head ; for they said that all this was 
 befallen him by reason of his churlishness and avarice. Yet he 
 bore all with much patience, knowing himself guilty in this 
 matter. Moreover, the month before, that is in May, before 
 these things had befallen the Abbot . . . . " 
 
 Here we have another lamentable gap of five sheets, torn out 
 by some impatient reader who was no doubt offended by our 
 friar's frank revelations. The Abbot's story, like most others of 
 the kind, had a bloody sequel next year, when (625) "peace 
 was made between the Lupicini and Boiardi, and two monks of 
 San Prospero were slain. These were the monks who had 
 betrayed both their Abbot and their convent. And in process 
 of time within a brief space, another monk of the same convent 
 was slain in revenge for those two, on his way to the court with 
 another priest, for the Abbot had made him his proctor. He asked 
 of his murderers * Who are ye ? ' They answered and said * We 
 are the proctors of those two monks who were slain a few days
 
 2 1 2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 past ; and we have been sent to return blow for blow.' Thus 
 then they wounded him and left him half dead ; and he was 
 taken to the house of his parents, where he confessed himself 
 well, and fell asleep in the Lord. And within a few days the 
 mother of this monk, bowed down with grief, fell sick and gave 
 up the ghost." Dom Affarosi, the historian of S. Prospero. 
 gives us further details of these disorders. The Boiardi had 
 sacked not only the convent but the church. As the civil wars 
 went on, the affairs of the convent went from bad to worse, so 
 that the monks were obliged to desert it altogether and live in 
 their own hospice of S. Matteo. Not until some years after, 
 when the city had recovered a little quiet by throwing itself into 
 the arms of the despot Obizzo da Este, was Ciuglielmo's successor 
 able to begin restoring the ravages wrought on the Abbey by 
 these wars. The Parmese, dreading the effect of these quarrels 
 at Reggio and Modena on their own tranquillity, tried to make 
 peace but only earned the further enmity of the two jealous 
 cities. Shortly after our chronicler's death, Parma also " drank 
 of the cup of God's fury."
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 Fresh Storms. 
 
 rMHE reader will easily realize that politics were a vivid interest 
 JL in those days ; and it is natural that the friars' manuals 
 should strictly forbid all listening to or repeating tales of 
 worldly wars. This, however, if we may judge from Salimbene, 
 did not render them less curious. Over and over again, he ends 
 some fresh entry in his chronicle with a phrase like this : " Thus 
 matters stand to-day, on the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed 
 Virgin : how they will end we know not ; yet, if life be spared 
 us, we shall see." We need not wonder that divines and prophets 
 were in great request throughout these uncertain times. " The 
 Inner Party of Modena had a man of Brescia who called himself 
 an astrologer and diviner, to whom they gave daily ten great 
 pennies of silver, and nightly three great Genoese candles of the 
 purest wax, and he promised them that if they fought a third 
 time they should have the victory. And they answered him 
 4 We will not fight on a Monday or a Tuesday, for that we have 
 been conquered on those two days. Choose us therefore another 
 day ; and know that if we gain not this time the promised 
 victory, we will tear out thy remaining evil eye : ' for he was 
 one-eyed. So, fearing to be found out in his falsehood, he carried 
 off all that he had gained, and went his way without saluting 
 his hosts. Then the men of Sassuolo began to mock them, ' as 
 men who sacrifice to devils and not to God,' as it is written in 
 Deuteronomy." Moreover, two of the soothsayers whom Dante 
 has gibbeted were consulted in these civil wars. Asdente is first 
 mentioned on p. 512, where he is described as "a poor working 
 cobbler, pure and simple and fearing God and courteous and 
 urbane : illiterate, but with great illumination of mind, so that he 
 understood the writings of those who have foretold the future, 
 as Abbot Joachim, Merlin, Methodius and the Sibyl, Isaiah, 
 Jeremiah, Hosea, Daniel and the Apocalypse, and Michael Scot, 
 who was astrologer to the deposed Emperor Frederick II. And 
 many things have I heard from Asdente which in process of time
 
 2 1 4 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 came to pass, viz. that Pope Nicholas III should die in the month 
 of August, and be succeeded by Pope Martin : and many other 
 things which we hope to see if life be spared us. This man 
 besides his own name, which is Master Benvenuto, is commonly 
 called Asdente, that is toothless, by way of contrary, for he hath 
 great and disordered teeth and an impediment in his speech, yet 
 he understands and is understood well. He dwells at the bridge- 
 head of Parma, hard by the city moat and the well, along the 
 street which goes to Borgo San Donnino." He is mentioned 
 again under 1284 (531) " When the ambassadors of Reggio were 
 in their lodging in the suburb of Santa Cristina, hearing of 
 Asdente the prophet of the men of Parma, they sent for him to 
 consult him of their state, and laid it on his soul that he should 
 withdraw no word of the future which the Lord purposed to bring 
 about. So he answered that if they would keep themselves in 
 peace to the Feast of Christ's Nativity they should escape the 
 wrath of God : if not, they should drink of the cup of His wrath as 
 the men of Modena had drunk. They answered him that they 
 would keep well at peace, for they purposed to make intermarriages 
 for peace and friendship. Yet he answered that they were doing all 
 these things fraudulently, and under a cloak and veil of peace. 
 Wherefore the ambassadors of Reggio returned, and ceased from 
 their marriages, and are rather preparing themselves to make and 
 gather together arms of war than to keep peace with each other, 
 that the word of Michael Scot may be fulfilled in them, which 
 he wrote in his verses wherein he predicted the future, ' And the 
 factions at Reggio shall hold ill words together.' ' 
 
 A little lower down we come for the third time to Asdente, and 
 see again what injustice Dante has done him. (532) "In those 
 days the Lord Obizzo, Bishop of Parma, invited to dinner the 
 prophet of the men of Parma, who is called Asdente, and enquired 
 of him diligently concerning the future. And he said that within 
 a short while the men of Reggio and Parma would suffer many 
 tribulations ; and he foretold likewise the death of Pope Martin 
 IV, determining and specifying the times of all these things which 
 I will not set down : and he foretold that three Supreme Pontiffs 
 should succeed and be at discord with each other, one of whom 
 should be lawful, and two unlawfully created : and he had 
 foretold the ruin of Modena before it came to pass. This man is 
 only so far a prophet, that he hath a mind illuminated to under- 
 stand the sayings of Merlin and the Sibyl and the Abbot Joachim, 
 and all who have foretold anything of the future. He is courteous 
 and humble and familiar, and without pomp or vainglory. Nor 
 doth he say anything positively, but rather, ' Thus it seemeth
 
 Fresh Storms. 
 
 215 
 
 to me,' or * Thus do I understand that scripture.' And when 
 any man reading before him omits anything, immediately he 
 perceives it, and says, ' Thou deceivest me, for thou hast omitted 
 something.' And many come from divers parts of the world to 
 inquire of him. A good three months beforehand he predicted 
 the mishap of the Pisans ; for a man of Pisa came to Parma of set 
 purpose to inquire of him, after Pisa had already fought twice 
 with Genoa. For the men of Pisa and Genoa met three times 
 in sea-fight, once in 1283, and twice in 1284. In the first two 
 fights 6000 Pisans were reckoned among the dead and wounded, 
 and while they still fought fiercely at sea, a man of Genoa boarded 
 a Pisan vessel, and loaded himself with many plates of silver, 
 and thus armed in steel and laden with silver, wishing to board 
 his own ship again, he missed his mark, and plunged to the bottom 
 like a stone, with his silver and his steel and perchance with 
 many crimes on his head. All this I heard from our Lector at 
 Ravenna, who was a Genoese, and newly come from Genoa. 
 Note and consider the marvel that the Pisans were taken by the 
 Genoese at the same season and month and day and place wherein 
 they themselves had taken the prelates in the days of Pope 
 Gregory IX of pious memory, that thou mayest see the truth 
 of what the Lord saith ' He that toucheth you, toucheth the 
 apple of my eye.' And note that the Parmese, of whom I am 
 one, are wont to say that a vengeance of thirty years old is 
 timely enough, and they say the truth. 
 
 So in this year 1284 the Pisans, seeing all the evil which the 
 Genoese had inflicted upon them, and wishing to avenge them- 
 selves, built many ships and galleys and sea-vessels, in the river 
 Arno, and when the fleet had been made ready, they ordained 
 that none betwixt the ages of 20 and 60 years should stay at 
 home, but all should go to the fight. And they scoured the whole 
 of the Genoese shore, destroying and burning, killing and taking 
 captives, and plundering. And this they did along all the shore 
 from Genoa to Provence, desiring to find the Genoese and fight 
 with them. But the Genoese had ordained that none of their 
 citizens should remain at home between the ages of 18 years and 
 70, for all must go to fight. Thus they scoured the sea, desiring 
 to find the Pisans. At last they found each other between the 
 point of Corsica and Gorgona, and grappled their ships together 
 after the fashion of sea-fights, and there they fought with such 
 slaughter on either side that even the heavens seemed to weep 
 in compassion, and many on either part were slain, and many 
 ships sunken. But when the Pisans had already the upper hand, 
 other Genoese came and fell upon them, wearied as they were.
 
 2 1 6 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Nevertheless, the battle still raged furiously on both sides. At 
 last, the Pisans finding themselves worsted, yielded themselves 
 to the Genoese, who slew the wounded, and kept the rest in 
 prison : and even the victors had no cause for boasting, since 
 fortune was cruel to either side; and there was such weeping and 
 wailing in Genoa and Pisa as was never heard in those two cities 
 from the day of their foundation to our times. For who without 
 woe and bitter weeping can consider how those two noble cities, 
 whereby all plenty of good things came to us in Italy, destroyed 
 each other from mere ambition and pomp and vainglory, whereby 
 each desired to overcome the other, as though the sea were not 
 wide enough for the ships of both ! I care not to write here the 
 number of captives and slain from either side, for they were 
 diversely told. Yet the Archbishop of Parma, in his letter to 
 his blood-brother the Bishop of Bologna, hath named a certain 
 number, which also 1 care not to write ; for I expect Brethren 
 Minor of Pisa, who will better tell me the exact number. And 
 note that this murderous fight between Genoa and Pisa was fore- 
 told long before it happened. For in the town of San Ruffino 
 in the Bishopric of Parma, women who were bleaching linen by 
 night, saw two great oxen fighting and retreating, and again 
 meeting to fight with each other. Moreover, after the fight of 
 the Pisans and Genoese, many women of Pisa, fair ladies and 
 noble and rich and mighty, gathered together in companies of 
 thirty and forty at a time, and went on foot from Pisa to Genoa, 
 to seek out and visit their captives. For one had a husband there, 
 another a son or a brother or a cousin . . . And when the afore- 
 said women sought out their captives, the jailers would answer 
 them, ' Yesterday thirty died, and to-day forty. We cast them 
 into the sea, and thus we do daily with the Pisans.' So when those 
 ladies heard such news of their dear ones and could not find them, 
 they fell down amazed with excess of grief, and could scarce 
 breathe for utter anguish and pain of heart. Then after a while, 
 when their breath was come again, they rent their faces with 
 their nails and tore their hair, and raising their voices wept with 
 great wailing until their fountain of tears was dried. For the 
 Pisans died in prison of hunger and famine, and poverty and 
 misery, and anguish and sadness, for ' they that hated them had 
 dominion over them, and their enemies afflicted them : and 
 they were humbled under their hands.' Nor were they thought 
 worthy of the sepulchres of their fathers, and they were deprived 
 of burial rites. Moreover, when the aforesaid ladies of Pisa 
 were come home, they found others dead whom they had left 
 safe in their homes. For the Lord smote the Pisans with a
 
 Fresh Storms. 217 
 
 plague in that year, and many died : nor was there any house 
 without its dead. For the sword of the Lord's fury slew the 
 Pisans, because they rebelled long time against the Church. 
 Four years I dwelt in the convent of the Friars Minor at Pisa, a 
 good forty years past ; and therefore I am sad for the Pisans, 
 and have compassion on them, God knoweth! Note moreover 
 that as there is a natural loathing between men and serpents, 
 dogs and wolves, horses and gryphons, so is there between the 
 Pisans and Genoese, Pisans and men of Lucca, Pisans and 
 Florentines. So the Florentines and men of Lucca, who are 
 bound with a chain of close friendship, hearing of this defeat of 
 the Pisans, and seeing now their own favourable time, ordained 
 an expedition against Pisa a little before Christmas in that same 
 year ; with which expedition the men of Prato and Corneto also 
 were to come and sweep the rest of the Pisans into their net, 
 and raze the city if possible to the foundations, and blot it from 
 the face of the earth. So the Pisans bethought them of a good 
 counsel, and sent the keys of the gates of their city to Pope 
 Martin, that he might defend them against their enemies. And 
 he received them graciously and repressed the enemies that rose 
 up against them." 
 
 We have seen how Asdente unmasked the treachery which 
 underlay these pacific overtures : and Salimbene shows us more 
 than once how the promised peace of those days might be worse 
 than open war. He himself was one of the two friars selected 
 as peacemakers between the cities of Modena and their exiled 
 enemies. " They answered me most courteously and kindly, 
 that they were most willing to make peace with their fellow- 
 citizens." (590) But there was an evident want of good faith 
 on both sides, and the war blazed up again. This leads our 
 chronicler to remark " I have little trust of peace among 
 Lombards : for their peacemakings are like the boys' game when 
 they lay hand above hand upon their knees : and each, seeking 
 to get the better of the other, withdraws his hand from below 
 and strikes it upon the hand above, and thus each thinks to have 
 the better : but oftentimes we see the conqueror conquered in 
 his turn." And here, after giving instances of inextinguishable 
 party hate at Parma and Bologna, Modena and Reggio, and 
 Cremona, in which Imperialists and Churchmen had shown equal 
 rancour and treachery, he goes on to quote Jeremiah ix, 4, 5 and 
 Ecclesiasticus xii, 10-12 : " Take ye heed everyone of his neigh- 
 bour, and trust ye not in any brother distrust thine enemy for 
 ever and ever." He quotes the old fable of the man and serpent 
 who, for a while, lived on friendly terms until one day the latter
 
 2 1 8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 killed the child of the man, who cut off a great part of his tail 
 in revenge, and then felt generous enough to say " Shall we make 
 peace ? " No," said the serpent : " for thou wilt never forget 
 thy son's death, nor I my revenge when I see my mutilated tail. 
 Let each, therefore, work for his own hand as best he can, which 
 will be more profitable alike for thee and for me." 
 
 Moreover, Salimbene's descriptions show that these later wars 
 in Emilia were no less barbarous than those of Romagna which 
 he has already painted in such lurid colours. (1287-392) " Under 
 pretext of the peace above-mentioned the siege was raised and 
 the men escaped ; yet peace was never made, but the men of 
 Gesso did worse than before, plundering and spoiling the villages 
 of the Bishopric of Reggio, and taking prisoners, whom they 
 tortured with divers exquisite torments to extort money for 
 their ransom. And they who did thus were hireling soldiers of 
 Bergamo and Milan and other ruffians from Liguria. Once they 
 took a poor man who had never harmed them ; nay, who would 
 have served them if he had been able ; whom they led away 
 captive to Gesso and said to him ' Tax thyself,' which was as 
 much as to say ' Let us hear what thou canst give us.' And 
 when he answered that he had nought to give, forthwith they 
 smote him in the mouth with a flint-stone, with which one blow 
 six of his teeth were smitten out, and the seventh was ready to 
 fall. Likewise also they did to many others. For some men's 
 heads they bound with a cord and lever, and strained it with such 
 force that their eyes started from their sockets and fell upon their 
 cheeks : others they bound by the right or left thumb only, and 
 thus lifted the whole weight of their body from the ground : 
 others again they racked with yet more foul and horrible torments 
 which I blush to relate : others they would hang by the little 
 toe of one foot, or seat them with their hands bound behind 
 their back and lay under their feet a pot of live coals, blowing 
 with the bellows to stir them yet more ; with others again they 
 would bind the great toe of their right foot with a bowstring to 
 one tooth, and then prick their backs with a goad that they 
 might tear out their own teeth ; or they bound their hands and 
 legs together round a spit (as a lamb is carried to the butcher) 
 and kept them thus hanging on that pole all day long, without 
 food or drink : or again with a hard and rough piece of wood they 
 would rub and grate their shins until the bare bone appeared, 
 which was a misery and sore pity even to behold. And when the 
 chief men of Gesso rebuked them, saying that it was horrible to 
 see such things practised on Christian folk, then these ruffians 
 waxed wroth and threatened to depart from them if they suffered
 
 Fresh Storms. 
 
 219 
 
 not such things ; wherefore the chief men must needs suffer them 
 whether they would or not. Many other torments they invented 
 and inflicted, which I have omitted for brevity's sake ; but these 
 I have written that it may be known how some men are more 
 cruel than beasts : wherefore it is nought but just that they who 
 do such things should be tormented with such devils in hell." 
 
 Meanwhile, whoever might have lost during these civil wars, 
 the friars of Reggio had steadily grown. Already in 1256 they 
 bought the Emperor's palace for their convent, and found 
 occasion to enlarge it soon after. (463) Soon afterwards, when 
 the Emperor of Constantinople passed through Reggio, it was 
 the friars who lodged him, (no doubt by way of acknowledg- 
 ment for their tenure of the palace) : and the convent was the 
 scene of brilliant festivities which brought rich gifts to the 
 Brethren. (483) And now (582) they began to build a 
 new church, laying the foundation stone on May 18th. But, 
 as ill-luck would have it, " the whole May was a rainy month 
 that year, so that it rained daily, and the country-folk were 
 disquieted, for that they could do no work in the fields : and 
 they laid the blame on the Friars Minor, who had dug up the 
 
 f raves of the dead for the foundations of their church." St. 
 rancis would have shared the peasants' horror at this desecration, 
 and still more at the present craving of his brethren for money 
 and creature comforts. The men of Parma, complains Salimbene, 
 " cared little for the friars, for they are ever indevout and hard- 
 hearted towards men of religion." He comes back to this same 
 subject later on (596) while speaking of the Bishop of Spoleto, 
 known as " Master Roland of Parma, whose father was called 
 Master Taberna, a comely and courteous man and an excellent 
 tailor, who made the garments of the nobles. This Master Roland 
 went to Paris in great poverty, and there he studied many years 
 in divers sciences, and became a great clerk and full of know- 
 ledge : after which he became a very great advocate at the 
 Pope's court, where he gained wealth and honour. And to the 
 Religious of Parma he was ever hard and clownish, and never 
 familiar or kindly : nor did he ever leave them anything at his 
 death. And this cursed property is common to almost all the 
 people of Parma both clergy and laity, men and women, noble 
 and commonalty that they are always indevout and hard and 
 cruel to Religious and other servants of God, whether of their 
 own or of other cities, which would seem a most evil sign of the 
 wrath of God upon them. For as Ezechiel saith * Behold this 
 was the iniquity of Sodom thy sister, pride, fulness of bread, 
 and abundance, and the idleness of her and of her daughters,
 
 22O From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and they did not put forth their hand to the needy and to the 
 poor,' so we may say of the city of Parma for its hardness and 
 mercilessness towards the poor servants of God : and therefore 
 I, Brother Salimbene of Parma, have been 48 years in the Order 
 of Friars Minor, yet never would I dwell at Parma by reason of 
 the indevotion which its citizens show and practise towards God's 
 servants. For they care not to do them kindness, though at 
 times they could easily help them if they would : for they are 
 most liberal in largesse to play-actors and minstrels and buffoons. 
 Certainly if a city so great as Parma were in France, then 100 
 Friars Minor would be settled to dwell there in all decency and 
 comfort, and abundantly supplied with all things needful." 
 Yet presently a Parmesan Cardinal did actually give 20 Im- 
 perial to the convent, and another 10 each to the two Brethren 
 who went on an embassy to him at Rome (597) which latter 
 gift shows, even more clearly than Salimbene's commercial 
 criterion of religion, how far the Order had already changed in 
 the 60 years since St. Francis had written " I strictly forbid the 
 Brethren, all and single, to accept coin or money in any way, 
 whether directly or through a third person." We see also how 
 fast the friars were losing the unique popularity and influence 
 which they had enjoyed so long as they were really poor. 
 (627) " In this year, at the Carnival season, the men of Reggio 
 disported themselves not after the fashion of other Christian 
 people, who all and in every place revel and play the fool at that 
 season (stultizant et infatuantur) ; but rather they kept silence 
 as though they mourned their dead. But in the season of Lent, 
 when the time is sacred to God, then began they to play ; yet 
 this is the acceptable time and the day of salvation, a time for 
 giving alms and doing works of piety, moreover a time for con- 
 fession and hearing of sermons, and visiting of churches, of pray- 
 ing, and fasting, and weeping, as the church lessons tell us. 
 So in the solemn Lenten season the men of Reggio wrought 
 not the aforesaid works of piety or devotion ; and although the 
 Lord forbiddeth a man to use woman's apparel they heeded 
 this not, but walked after their own inventions. For many of 
 them borrowed garments from ladies, wherein they clothed 
 themselves and began to play and wander through the city as 
 in a tournament. And, that they might the better resemble 
 women, they painted white masks wherewith they covered their 
 faces, caring nought for the penalty promised for such deeds. 
 For the Scripture saith of sinners ' all faces shall be made like a 
 kettle : ' and again ' the faces of them all are as the blackness 
 of a kettle : ' and again * their face is now made blacker than
 
 Fresh Storms. 221 
 
 coals.' (Joel ii, 6. Nahum ii, 10. Lam. iv, 8.) Woe to such 
 wretched Christians, who strive to turn the worship of the 
 Church into dissoluteness and vain talk ! for certain wretched 
 Christians in the cities of Lombardy neither fast nor confess 
 their sins in the solemn season of Lent. And, since no flesh can 
 be found at that season in the market, therefore they eat in 
 secret the flesh of hens and capons ; and after the hour of siesta 
 they sprawl all day long in the squares and under the porticoes, 
 playing with dice at games of hazard ; and there they blaspheme 
 the Lord, and the Blessed Virgin His mother. Note that the 
 Apostle hath described certain signs of evil Christians who shall 
 live about the days of Antichrist ; which signs seem to be fulfilled 
 in these men of our days who sin without shame. ( 1 Tim. iv, 1 : 
 2 Tim. iii, 1.) And note that for the many evils done by the 
 Jews, the Lord complained of them and removed them from 
 before his face (Jer. xxxii, 30.) See in the Bible. Yet not 
 even so will wretched sinners be warned ; but they are as the 
 sluggard of whom it is written in Proverbs (xxii, 24-32) For in 
 the years before this date certain millers of the city, with cunning 
 and malice prepense, begged and obtained of the Friars Minor 
 certain old frocks, saying that they would cause them to be 
 cleansed in a fulling-mill : and afterwards, in the Carnival season 
 and at the hour of vespers, they clothed themselves in these 
 borrowed frocks as Friars Minor and danced in the public street. 
 Which folly they wrought at the instigation of the Devil, desiring 
 to lay a blot on the elect, that the passers-by might believe those 
 revellers to be Friars Minor, and the matter might thus redound 
 to the scandal and disgrace of the Order. But the Podesta of 
 the city, hearing of this, and being moved to bitter wrath by his 
 zeal both for the Friars and for the dignity of his office, fined 
 them heavily and issued a perpetual decree that no others should 
 ever dare to do likewise.' Though two well-known preachers 
 publicly justified these lententide revels at Reggio, God showed 
 His displeasure by permitting the Monk of Canossa to make a 
 bloody incursion into the city shortly afterwards: (632) "and 
 that day I came down to Reggio from tne convent of Montef alcone 
 and entered the city, and saw all these things with mine own 
 eyes : for all day I went round the streets while these things 
 were done. Moreover, on this day of tumult, after the hour of 
 noon, many ribalds and evildoers ran to the convent of the Friars 
 Minor and would have entered it and carried off the goods therein 
 deposited [by others]. But the Brethren seeing this rang the 
 great bell, and forthwith the Lord Guido da Tripoli came fully 
 armed on his charger, as I saw with mine own eyes, and smote
 
 222 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 them with his mace and put them all to flight. And he looked 
 on me and said * Ha, Brethren, why have ye no stout staves 
 wherewith to smite these ribalds, that they spoil not your goods ? ' 
 Then I answered that it was not lawful to us to smite any man, 
 as the Lord saith, ' If one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn 
 to him also the other.' Yet He Himself showed that we should 
 not do this to the letter, in that He answered to him who smote 
 Him on the cheek, * If I have spoken well, why strikest thou 
 Me ? ' Yet a certain holy father fulfilled this to the letter : for 
 when a demoniac had smitten him on the cheek, he turned the 
 other ; and forthwith the demon, confounded at his humility, left 
 the man's body and vexed him no more." Nor was this the only 
 occasion on which rioters scented plunder in the friaries ; for " in 
 this same year 18 ribalds of the men of Gesso purposed to come 
 and despoil the Friars Minor in their convent of Montefalcone. 
 But when this came to the ears of certain Lords, they frighted 
 them by threats from their purpose ; so that the fools ceased from 
 their folly." But, however the Friars had lost in real spiritual 
 influence with the masses however they might alarm even their 
 patron the Pope by their encroachments on the duties and privil- 
 eges of the parish clergy they were still at the zenith of their 
 popularity among the richer classes, to whom for many generations 
 they were tactful and not too exacting confessors. Of this Sal- 
 imbene gives us instructive glimpses on almost the last page of 
 his chronicle. In spite of the peculiarly odious crimes with 
 which he charges Obizzo of Este, one of the most conspicuous 
 tyrants in Dante's Inferno ; in spite of the fact that Boccaccio 
 put the Countess on very much the same moral plane as her 
 husband, our chronicler is proud to relate how the former feasted 
 the assembled Friars at the General Chapter of 1287, and how 
 the latter was buried in their convent. This Chapter (it may 
 be noted) was presided over by the Acquasparta of Par. xii. 124. 
 It is evident that the good old friar felt deeply both the public 
 disasters around him and the decaying prestige of his Order ; 
 for he more than once lets fall a word of discouragement. 
 " These accursed parties and divisions in Italy cannot be healed or 
 assuaged, by reason of men's wickedness and the Devil's malice " 
 (591) : and again " the whole world is seated in wickedness." 
 One symptom of the deep-rooted unrest was the appearance of 
 an impostor claiming to be the Emperor Frederick, long since 
 dead and damned. Another report, still more interesting to 
 Salimbene, announced the impending conversion of the Tartars 
 to Christianity : for " truthful travellers who have lately come 
 from the Holy Land (to wit, Friars Minor and Preachers,) report
 
 Fresh Storms. 223 
 
 that a very great and new marvel shall come to pass among the 
 Tartars and Saracens. For they say that the son of the late 
 king of the Tartars is purposed to be in Jerusalem for Easter 
 Eve ; and if he shall see the fire coming down from heaven as the 
 Christians assert, then he promises to slay all the heathen whom 
 he can find." These reports of a wholesale and miraculous 
 conversion of Tartars or other infidels were frequently circulated 
 by " truthful travellers " in the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon 
 shows us how they were begotten of men's belief in the approach- 
 ing end of the world, to which this conversion would be a necessary 
 preliminary (Matt. xxiv. 14). 1 The yearly miracle of fire at 
 Jerusalem had been condemned by Gregory IX in 1238 as a 
 barefaced forgery of the canons of the Holy Sepulchre : but it 
 evidently flourished still, for Salimbene hints no suspicion what- 
 ever, though he was not uncritical for his age. 
 
 But amid all his records of war, and grave misgivings for the 
 future, he never loses his interest in picturesque trifles. He has 
 much to tell us of the obstinate ambition of the Parmese to get 
 a bell which would be heard northward to rival Borgo San 
 Donnino, and southward to Reggio 14 and 17 miles off. (584) 
 They sent for a famous master who came from Pisa " like a great 
 baron." The whole town marvelled at his elaborate preparations 
 for the great mould. Vast sums were spent on three attempts, 
 yet even the last and best of the three bells " could scarce be 
 heard over the city of Parma," which was a providential blow to 
 the citizens' pride. Two years later a fourth was made, which, 
 before it had been hung in the tower, " fell down from its platform 
 and hurt no man, save that it cut off the foot of a certain young 
 man, wherewith he had once spurned his own father " (634). He 
 is always much impressed by comets, eclipses, and earthquakes, 
 and believes, of course, firmly in their occult influence on current 
 events. Of plagues there are naturally frequent notices : e.g., in 
 1285 (584) "in the village of Popilio in the Bishopric of Parma 
 80 men died within three months ; for this is a general rule or 
 proved fact that, whensoever we have a cattle plague, the next 
 year comes always a pestilence on men. The plague and sickness 
 was so great that year in Rome, that bishops and mitred Abbots, 
 between Easter and the Feast of the Assumption, died to the 
 number of twenty-four (593). And, of strangers only, two 
 thousand died in the city ; and the Friars Minor had oft-times 
 four funerals in their church on one day. And there was an old 
 bishop-elect from beyond the Alps, who had come to Rome for 
 his consecration ; and he died with twenty-five of his attendants. 
 Then I remembered the words of the prophet Amos ' Wailing
 
 224 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 shall be in all streets, and they shall say in all the highways 
 Alas ! alas !' (v. 16, 17 : viii, 3)." Later on in the year (608) 
 " there was a terrible plague among the cats : for they fell sick, 
 and were covered with blotches like lepers, and in process of time 
 they died. Moreover, on the feast of St. Callistus (Oct. 14) 
 two stars appeared in conjunction at the hour of dawn ; and so 
 they appeared nightly for many days : but about the feast of 
 All Saints they began to separate again." Nothing seems to 
 escape him. He notices how rich one particular summer is in 
 butterflies, and augurs from it a repetition of past caterpillar 
 plagues. (547) Another year, there were " such a vast multitude 
 of gnats that their importunate bites made men aweary of their 
 lives . . . and the reapers ended not their harvest till the end of 
 July ; so that to Christian folk there seemed a punishment in 
 that which had been promised as a blessing to the Jews : ' the 
 threshing of your harvest shall reach unto the vintage, and the 
 vintage shall reach unto the sowing-time.' ' Even his smallest 
 personal experiences are recorded to point a moral. (547) " In 
 this aforesaid year, on the Feast of St. Clara, I ate for the first 
 time raviuoli without any crust of pastry ; and this I say to show 
 how subtle is human gluttony in this appetite of bodily meats 
 in comparison of earlier men, who were content with the food 
 created by nature, whereof Ovid saith in the first book of his 
 Metamorphoses ' And, contented with the meats created of 
 nature's own free will, they picked arbutus berries and beechnuts 
 from the mountains, and cornels and blackberries clinging to 
 the rough brambles, and acorns fallen from the spreading tree 
 of Jove.' ' Raviuoli are a sort of rissole : and it was evidently 
 looked upon as a tour de force to fry them without the usual 
 envelope of pastry. 
 
 Under the year 1285 he records an incident at Reggio which 
 illustrates admirably the medieval attitude towards inconvenient 
 trade combinations. (586) " In this year it was ordained in full 
 council of the citizens of Reggio, that fishmongers should sell no 
 fish from the beginning of Lent until after Easter, under penalty 
 of 25 Bolognese, and that none should buy of them under pain 
 of 10 Bolognese ; and this statute was most strictly kept. Now 
 the cause thereof was that, when knights or judges would enquire 
 of some fisherman * At what price wilt thou sell this fish ? ' the 
 latter, though asked twice or thrice, would disdain to answer ; 
 nay, rather, he would turn away his face, and speak with his 
 partner, saying : ' Gossip, put the barrel or the chest in that 
 place ! ' according to the Proverb * A servant will not be correct- 
 ed by words : because he understandeth what thou sayest, and
 
 Fresh Storms. 225 
 
 will not answer.' Moreover, they demanded three or four grossi 
 for a single small tench or eel. When therefore the fishermen 
 and fishmongers saw how strictly and steadfastly men kept the 
 statute made against them, and that they lost much thereby (for 
 all their fish were numbered and placed in stewponds until after 
 Easter) then they came to the Friars Minor and besought them 
 to beg of the Podesta and the Captain and the Ancients and the 
 whole council some relaxation of that statute : in which case 
 they for their part would promise to sell reasonably and discreetly 
 and courteously and good cheap to all who desired to buy of 
 their fish. Yet not even so was the statute relaxed, as the 
 Apostle saith of Esau, 'for he found no place of repentance, 
 although with tears he had sought it.' Moreover, the citizens 
 threatened to deal in like manner with the butchers at Eastertide, 
 unless they sold their flesh in the shambles both courteously and 
 reasonably. But the butchers hearing this did after the Wise 
 Man's counsel * The wicked man being scourged, the fool shall be 
 wiser.' " 
 
 A similar quarrel between priests and people had already had 
 much the same issue (504). " In the month of October 1280 a 
 quarrel arose between the Lord Guglielmo, Bishop of Reggio, 
 with the clergy of his city and bishopric on the one part, and the 
 Lord Dego, Captain of the people, with the citizens of Reggio 
 on the other part. This quarrel was by reason of the tithes, for 
 the clergy seemed to wish to collect too much from the men of 
 the people and all the citizens. Wherefore the Lord Captain, 
 with the 24 Defenders of the People, made certain statutes against 
 the lay-collectors of the said tithes, by reason of which statutes 
 the Lord Bishop excommunicated the aforesaid Captain and 24 
 Defenders and the whole Council-General of the people, and 
 therewithal he laid the whole city under an interdict. So the 
 people were wroth at this, and chose other 25 from among them- 
 selves, among whom were 7 judges (among the aforesaid 24 there 
 had been 4 judges), and made many other statutes against the 
 clergy. First, that none should pay them any tithe, nor give 
 them counsel, help, or favour, nor sit at meat with them, nor stay 
 in their service, nor have any dealings of trade with them, nor 
 dwell in their houses or at their farms, nor give them to eat or to 
 drink and many other such provisions there were, and a most 
 grievous penalty was laid upon the breach of any one. Neither 
 might any man grind their corn, nor bake their bread, nor shave 
 them, nor do any service to them : and the aforesaid Wise Men 
 claimed of their own authority to proclaim, resolve, and ordain in 
 the aforesaid matters according to their own will and pleasure.
 
 226 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 This claim was afterwards confirmed by the General Council of 
 the People, and all the aforesaid laws were ratified and kept both 
 by all the people and by the Knights and other chief men. So 
 by reason of these laws many millers were condemned each to a 
 fine of 50 of money of Reggio, for that they remained in the 
 mills of the clergy against the aforesaid ordinances beyond the 
 term fixed ; and many other persons were condemned also ... In 
 the month of November of the same year this matter of the 
 tithes was peaceably concluded ... to the effect that none should 
 be compelled to pay tithes but according to his own conscience, 
 and many other provisions which were written in the aforesaid 
 treaty." 2
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 Last Days. 
 
 IT is natural enough that the tone of the old man's chronicle 
 should grow sadder towards its end. The year 1285 was 
 marked by many tragic occurrences. At Faenza, hard by, a 
 noble was murdered, with his son, by some cousins in whose house 
 they had sat down to dinner : at Cesena Malatesta of Rimini 
 (the Mastin Vecchio of Dante, Inf. xxvii, 46) was nearly murdered 
 by Taddeo da Buonconte, but just managed to slip away, though 
 wounded, through the open door of the convent of the Austin 
 Friars, where he took sanctuary. This same year saw the death 
 of the four sovereigns who loomed largest on the horizon 
 Charles of Anjou, Peter of Aragon, Martin IV, and Philip the 
 Bold of France : and our chronicler dismisses them with a 
 characteristic epitaph (600) " Note that these four great men of 
 whom I have made mention were all ' stout hunters before the 
 Lord,' (i.e., oppressors of mankind) . . . . . yet in one and 
 the same year they went the way of all flesh. Whereof Primas 
 hath written most excellently in his treatise * Of this World's 
 Life,' saying 
 
 ' Out, alas ! dear life on earth, 
 Why art thou so rich in mirth ? 
 Since thon mayst not stay with me, 
 Why must I so cling to thee ? ' " 
 
 Not only was there this public memento mori, but Salimbene 
 had also to mourn a far nearer loss that of two old friends 
 (594). " About the Feast of St. Lucy died Bernabo di Regina, 
 a native of Reggio, expiring suddenly in his bed without warn- 
 ing of illness. He was a dear friend of mine, and his words 
 were the joy of canons, cardinals, and all prelates, with knights 
 and barons and all who loved mirth ; for he spake most excellently 
 in the French and Tuscan and Lombard tongues, and in divers 
 other fashions. He could speak childishly, as children speak 
 with each other ; or as women speak with women, discussing
 
 228 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 their own affairs in familiar speech with their gossips ; and he 
 could imitate the fashion of address of the ancient preachers, 
 as they held forth in the days of the Alleluia, when they took 
 upon themselves to work miracles, as I saw with mine own eyes 
 in those days." 1 The other friend was a lady, heroine of a 
 domestic tragedy which recalls that of Pia de' Tolomei. We 
 must go back a little, with Salimbene, to understand the circum- 
 stances of the family into which she married. 
 
 Ghiberto da Gente, Podesta of Parma for many years, became 
 so unpopular that he was finally driven from the city, but kept 
 a country villa not far off, at Campagine. In process of time, 
 however, his sons became even more unpopular than the father : 
 so that the whole race was driven forth utterly by the citizens 
 in this year 1285, and their villa destroyed. (606607). " For 
 thou must know that Ghiberto had a son named Pino, whose 
 wicked deeds provoked the men of Parma in many ways against 
 Ghiberto's heirs : for first he attacked and took Guastalla, and 
 would have held it in spite of Parma ; then he married a wife 
 whom he afterwards caused to be murdered ; from which crime, 
 by God's providence, much evil came afterwards upon him. 
 Now his father Ghiberto was at first desirous to take this same 
 lady to wife, when he dwelt in exile at Ancona after his expulsion 
 from Parma : but Pinotto forestalled his father and secretly 
 stole her away, for greed of her wealth and for the allurement of 
 her comeliness. She was called the Lady Beatrice ; and she had 
 much treasure and was a comely lady, alert and merry and liberal 
 and courtly ; and she was exceeding well skilled in the games 
 of chess and hazard, 2 and dwelt with Pino her husband at 
 Bianello, which had once been a castle of the Countess Matilda. 
 Oftentimes she would come to the convent of the Friars Minor 
 at Montefalcone in the days when 1 dwelt there, for the sake of 
 recreation and of speaking with the Brethren : and she related 
 to me in familiar converse that men would have slain her ; and 
 I knew of whom she spoke, and had compassion on her, and 
 taught her that she should confess her sins and ever order her 
 life well, that she might be ever ready to meet death. In those 
 days her husband Pino departed in great wrath against the Lord 
 Guido his cousin, as I saw with mine own eyes, and he took his 
 wife with him to the village of Correggio, wherein he caused her 
 to be smothered with a featherbed by a squire named Martinello, 
 and in that same village she was buried ; and he had by her 
 three daughters who are most comely damsels. And, seeing it is 
 written that * the soul of the wounded hath cried out, and Gocl 
 doth not suffer it to pass unrevenged,' therefore I must say
 
 Last Days. 229 
 
 somewhat of the misfortunes which befel her husband. First 
 he became hateful, not only to the men of Parma, but even to 
 his cousins and nephews : secondly he was taken by the ruffians 
 of Sassuolo, who took from him for ransom his horses and 200 
 Imperial : thirdly, on a time when he would have avenged himself 
 by plundering a wayfarer on the highway leading to Parma, the 
 citizens sent to the village of Campagine, wherein he had his 
 possessions, and ploughed up all his crops and green corn, and 
 razed to the ground fourteen or twenty of his houses in the village : 
 fourthly, the lady whom he took to wife after the murder of his 
 first spouse could never be his lawful wife, since there were many 
 hindrances on either side. She was named the Lady Beatrice 
 even as his first wife, and was most comely, and daughter to the 
 Lord Jacobino da Palude ; he espoused her in her widowhood 
 of her first husband the Lord Atto da Sesso. Fifthly and lastly, 
 once again he took certain men and cast them into chains in his 
 dungeons, and would take no ransom for them, though they had 
 never offended him nor owed him any obedience : wherefore the 
 men of Parma, seeing that he was already outlawed and yet 
 ceased not from evil, cast forth both Pino and all the heirs of 
 Ghiberto da Gente from their village of Campagine. This 
 Pinotto was named likewise the Lord Jacobino, and was a comely 
 man and of great courage, bold and careless, and most haughty, 
 as is the manner of the men of Parma." 
 
 The misfortunes which Salimbene so gladly records here may 
 seem a light enough punishment for a cowardly murder; but 
 there was more to follow in later years. Next year the cousin 
 Guido, whose conduct had occasioned Pino's jealousy, was 
 himself murdered. (615) "For he was journeying from 
 Reggio to Bianello with his kinswoman, the Lady Giovannina, 
 wife to his brother Bonifazio, which brother followed without 
 attendants at a distance of three miles ; and these three had only 
 a few hackneys with them, and they were unarmed and without 
 escort. The murderers of these two brethren were, first, one 
 Scarabello da Canossa, who threw the Lord Guido from his horse 
 and thrust him through with his lance as he lay on the ground 
 so that there needed no second blow : and secondly, Azzolino, 
 brother to the Abbot of Canossa, and son to the Lord Guido da 
 Albareto, who smote off his head : and others there were, both 
 on horse and on foot, who smote him with many strokes, * and 
 tore him with wound upon wound.' So likewise they did to his 
 brother Bonifazio who followed hard on him. Then they laid 
 the Lady Giovannina on her horse, wherefrom she had cast herself 
 to fall upon her Lord Guido, believing and hoping that they
 
 230 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 would spare him for her sake, since she was their kinswoman ; 
 and all day she journeyed alone and groaning in the bitterness 
 of her heart, and came to Bianello ; and there she told her bitter 
 tidings. And they that heard her lifted up their voices and wept 
 most bitterly, until the fount of their tears was dried up. And 
 all that night the bodies of the two brethren lay in that waste 
 and solitary spot. Yet some say that the Lord Manfredino was 
 moved to pity at these tidings, and took men and a waggon, and 
 raised and joined together the bodies, and laid them in the church 
 of the Templars midway on the road to Bianello. And next day 
 came the men of Bianello, and carried off the bodies and buried 
 them in their robes and armour in the sepulchre of their fathers, 
 in the convent of the Friars Minor at Montefalcone ; and it was 
 a Saturday, whereon men sang for the Epistle at Mass those 
 words of Jeremiah, ' Let their wives be bereaved of children, 
 and widows.' And, for that the Lord Rolandino of Canossa was 
 cousin-german to this Scarabello, therefore he was accused before 
 the Podesta : (for Scarabello himself had been already banished 
 from Reggio, nor would he have appeared if he had been cited.) 
 Wherefore the Lord Bonifacio, Podesta of Reggio, sent for the 
 Lord Rolandino, who came before him with a very great 
 multitude of armed men : so when the Podesta had learned his 
 innocence in this matter he suffered him to go in peace and 
 unhurt. Then the Lord Guido da Albareto was accused, and 
 appeared and was kept ten days in prison, and gently tortured 
 once only, and then sent away. And while he was being put to 
 the torture, the men of Reggio thought they must needs have 
 civil war for three reasons : first, by reason of these two brothers 
 lately slain ; secondly, by reason of this great lord who was being 
 tortured ; and thirdly, by reason of the parties at Reggio. (For 
 there were two parties, each whereof called itself, and was indeed, 
 of the Church party : for they of the Emperor's party had been 
 cast forth from the city many years since, and still wandered 
 homeless through the world.) But at the beginning, when the 
 Lord Guido was to be put to torture, the Podesta besought him 
 to suffer it in all patience for God's sake and his own ; more 
 especially ' (he said) ' in that I am unwilling to inflict such pain, 
 but I needs must do so, both by reason of my office, and by reason 
 of the crime whereof you stand accused.' So the Lord Guido, 
 knowing that the Podesta did this for the honour of both parties, 
 suffered patiently that which afore would have been sour and 
 bitter to him ; yet afterwards, when he knew the reason, he held 
 it pleasant. And he said to the Podesta, 'If it be possible, let 
 this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as
 
 Last Days. 231 
 
 them wilt.' Yet there were some who said that the aforesaid 
 Guido was spared all torment, with the help of money, which 
 all things obey. For his son Roland, Abbot of Canossa, gave 
 100 Imperial to the Lord Guido da Correggio, and as much 
 again to the Podesta of Reggio ; and by their favour he escaped 
 this torment. So when it was noised abroad that he should be 
 tortured, the Podesta would suffer none to be there with him but 
 himself alone ; and then he caused him to sit awhile on a great 
 balance for weighing flour, and spake familiarly with him of all 
 these things which had befallen. So when he was come down 
 from this instrument of torture 3 and lay in bed, he sent for his 
 brother Jaoopo da Palude and told him all that he had suffered 
 in his torture : then he came down from the palace and went to 
 the house of the Lord Rolandino of Canossa, which was hard by 
 the piazza ; and there he dwelt at his ease, eating and drinking 
 and merrymaking the whole day long. Yet before, when he 
 came down from the Palazzo Communale, he had caused himself 
 to be upheld by two men, one on either side, as desiring thereby 
 to show that he had been grievously tortured by the Podesta. 
 But the Lord saith ' There is nothing covered that shall not be 
 revealed.' Moreover, concerning this Lord Guido da Albereto, 
 it was told me by his son the Abbot of Canossa, speaking 
 familiarly with me hard by the gate of the town of Gesso, 
 that five years before his father suffered this mishap, he himself 
 had enquired of a certain diviner of that which should befal his 
 father ; whereupon the diviner showed him a book wherein was 
 written ' He shall fall into the hands of a judge : ' as indeed 
 came to pass. Whereby we see that not only prophets foretell 
 the future, but even sometimes demons and sinful men ; yet 
 the righteous foretell it better than they, as I may be able to 
 show next year, if life be spared me. . . . 
 
 (617) "Now this Lord Guido da Bianello who was thus 
 murdered was a comely man, and learned, and of great discern- 
 ment and memory, and ready speech, and eloquence, sprightly 
 and jocund and free and liberal, and of most familiar and pleasant 
 company, and a lover and a great benefactor of the Friars Minor. 
 For the Friars Minor had a convent on his lands, in the wood at 
 the foot of Montefalcone, where he also was buried with his 
 brother in the sepulchre of their fathers, as I have said above : 
 God of His mercy grant that his soul may rest in peace, if so it 
 may be. Amen. P or while he lived he was an exceeding good 
 friend to me and to Guido di Adamo, my brother in the flesh and 
 in Religion, who likewise died and was buried at Montefalcone. 
 Yet this Lord Guido was held to be a man of malice by them
 
 232 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 that loved him not ; and they accused him of many wicked- 
 nesses ; that is, that he was a slanderer and defamer of God's 
 servants. And that is ever the wont of carnal men, gladly to 
 defame God's servants, for they think themselves excused of 
 their own sins if they may have holy men to bear them company. 
 Moreover, men accused him that he was wont to say ' If I am 
 predestined to eternal life, then shall I come thereto, whatsoever 
 may be my sins ; and if I am predestined to eternal damnation, 
 so shall it be likewise, in spite of all good deeds.' In proof 
 whereof he would bring forward that which is written ' Whosoever 
 shall seek to save his life, shall lose it ; and whosoever shall lose 
 it, shall preserve it.' And such was his folly that, howsoever 
 either I or other Brethren and friends of his might warn him to 
 look to his ways, he scorned to hear us and would only answer, 
 4 It is written, " He that is hasty to give credit, is light of heart, 
 and shall be lessened." Yet I would answer against him (for 
 he was most learned in the Bible) saying ' The Wise Man saith 
 " Blessed is the man that is always fearful." ' And, as aforesaid, 
 he would not hear me, but ever shook his head as though he 
 scorned all that I spake to him. So I said to him, ' It is written 
 in the Proverbs " The way of a fool is right in his own eyes : but 
 he that is wise hearkeneth unto counsels." Yet when I had 
 thus spoken, adding, ' I have said to thee all that in me lieth,' 
 then answered he and said ' Ecclesiasticus saith " There are 
 many words that have much vanity in disputing.' " . . . . Here 
 five sheets have been torn out of the MS., no doubt as having 
 scandalized some reader. This fatalistic infidelity, as will be 
 seen below, was common among the upper classes in the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 The feud broke out again ; and the Monk of Canossa made a 
 murderous incursion into the city of Reggio, as above recorded, 
 in revenge for the death of his kinsman. But the final vengeance 
 only came in 1287 (638), when "on the 17th day of May was 
 slain Piuotto, son of the Lord Ghiberto da Gente, in his villa of 
 Campagine, by his nephews Ghibertino and Guglielmo. The 
 cause of this murder was a certain mill, for the possession of 
 which each party contended nay, what is worse, he was slain 
 for the sake of a pinza or small tongue of land behind the mill. 
 But many days and years before this he had exchanged words 
 of discord and contention with them and with their father ; 
 wherefore they came with certain evil doers and hired murderers 
 and fell upon him with clubs and other weapons, and slew him. 
 And note here three judgments of God. First, that all who were 
 consenting and privy to the death of Pinotto's wife, the Lady
 
 Last Days. 233 
 
 Beatrice of Apulia, were slain themselves also within a brief 
 space : the first of whom was Pinotto himself ; then the Lord 
 Guido da Bianello. For the Lord Guido had given Pinotto 
 cause for her death, since he would have lain with her, but she 
 utterly spurned such a temptation, not only for the crime of 
 adultery, but also for that Pinotto and Guido were cousins- 
 german. The third was one Martinello, who smothered her one 
 night with a featherbed in the villa of Correggio. The second 
 judgment of God is that this same Martinello was not only present 
 at the murder of Pinotto (whose wife he had already slain at 
 his bidding) but also, being wounded at the siege of Montecalvolo, 
 returned home, and there met his death by his own wife's 
 treachery, whereof he was ignorant. The third marvellous 
 judgment of God is that, if strangers had slain Pinotto, instead 
 of his nephew, then those same nephews would have avenged 
 his death for the honour of their house, and according to the 
 vainglorious custom of worldly men." 4 
 
 This, then, was a sad year for our sociable friar ; and his 
 melancholy finds expression in the last words he wrote under 
 this date. He has been speaking of certain noble families which 
 he remembered in Parma, and of Friars who lived in the earlier 
 heroic days of the Order ; and he goes on (1286 366) " I have 
 written these matters aforesaid, for that I have seen and known 
 wellnigh all these men whereof I have spoken ; and quickly, 
 as in a brief space, they have passed from this life into another. 
 If more noteworthy deeds were done in this year 1285 I remember 
 them not. I have written the aforesaid in good faith, with truth 
 for my guide, even as I saw each thing with mine own eyes. 
 Here endeth the year 1285 : and here followeth the year which 
 is to come." 
 
 Our chronicler's forebodings of evil were soon justified : for 
 the year 1286 was not only destined to bring fightings and fears 
 to Reggio, but was big from the first with those, small troubles 
 of life which are not always the most tolerable. " This year 
 was a disordered wintertide, for all ancient saws were found false 
 except one which men commonly say, * February brief, yet most 
 fulfilled of grief.' Which proverb was most plentifully fulfilled 
 this year, above all that I have seen in all the days of my life : 
 for seven times this February did God ' give snow like wool ; ' 
 and there was a mighty cold and frost. And many blains and 
 boils were engendered both in men and in hens, which afterwards 
 broke out openly. For in Cremona and Piacenza and Parma 
 and Reggio and many other cities and Bishoprics of Italy there 
 were very many deaths both among men and among hens ; and
 
 234 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 in the city of Cremona a single woman lost, within a brief space, 
 forty-eight hens ; and a certain doctor of medicine caused some 
 to be opened, and found on the tip of the heart of each hen a boil 
 like unto a small bladder ; he caused a dead man to be opened 
 likewise, on whose heart he found the same. In those days, in 
 the month of May, Master John the Leech, who dwelt at Venice 
 and had a stipend from the city, sent a letter to his fellow citizens 
 of Reggio, warning them to eat neither potherbs, nor eggs, nor 
 hens' flesh throughout the month of May : wherefore a hen was 
 sold in those days for five small pence. Yet certain wise women 
 fed their hens with pounded rue mingled with bran or meal ; by 
 the virtue of which antidote they were liberated and escaped 
 death." Then, when a bright spring sunshine had tempted 
 the almonds and all the other fruit trees into their richest blossom, 
 a sudden frost cut off all the hope of the orchards for that year, 
 and men were but half consoled even by the plenty of corn and 
 oil and wine which followed. 
 
 Moreover, it was a bad year for the Franciscan Order, and 
 therefore for Salimbene, than whom the Order had no more 
 convinced champion. Pope Honorius very nearly decided a 
 quarrel between "certain prelates" and the Friars in favour of 
 the former, and would certainly have done so but for his 
 providential removal from this world in the very nick of time, 
 in answer to the prayers of the Brethren (see chap, xxi below). 
 Again, the Franciscans were boycotted by their old allies the 
 Cistercians, whom the friars had at last alarmed by their enor- 
 mous growth and (it must frankly be confessed) their continual 
 pious encroachments (623). "A certain Friar Minor left our 
 Order to enter that of the Cistercians, and he bore himself so well 
 among them that they made him Abbot of a great monastery. 
 Then the Friars, having a zeal of God. but not according to 
 knowledge on this occasion, fearing moreover lest others might 
 leave our Order after the example of this brother, took him and 
 brought him back into his past Order and fed him with the bread 
 of affliction and water of distress. The Cistercians hearing this 
 were greatly troubled and incensed against the Friars, and this 
 for five several reasons. First, for that they punished so sorely 
 a man who deserved no punishment. Secondly, for that he had 
 already been released from our Order. Thirdly, for that they 
 took him clad in his own Cistercian habit. Fourthly, for that 
 he had a great prelacy in their Order, being an Abbot. Fifthly, 
 for that he had borne himself so excellently in their Order, as to 
 his life and good manners, as to be acceptable and gracious to 
 all men. Brother Bonagrazia, when he was Minister Provincial
 
 Last Days. 235 
 
 of Bologna, had a like quarrel with the Abbey of Nonantola. 
 For a certain brother Guidolino of Ferrara left our Order and 
 entered among the Black Monks of St. Benedict, where he bore 
 himself so well and laudably in the Abbey of Nonantola that he 
 was beloved by all, and they chose him for Abbot. 8 Wherefore 
 the Friars had a great altercation with those monks before the 
 Lord Giovanni Gaietano, who was then Protector of our Order 
 and who after was Pope Nicholas III ; and the Friars with much 
 violence obtained their desire that he should not be Abbot ; yet 
 the said monks spent 10,000 Imperial that they might have 
 him for their Abbot. And finding that they laboured in vain to 
 procure his election, they chose no other in his room, but made 
 him lord of their Abbey as though he were their true Abbot. 
 See now how those monks loved him ! Yet he was like Joseph 
 of old, nor would he return evil for evil unto his brethren, though 
 he had it in his power and opportunity : nay, rather he studied 
 to do them good. For he saw and welcomed our Brethren at 
 Nonantola as angels from Heaven, and prayed them to keep 
 two copyists always there at the expense of the Abbey, that they 
 might copy to their fill the original writings whereof it had great 
 plenty. This Brother Guidolino was my close friend when we 
 dwelt together in the convent of Ravenna. And note that the 
 Friars Minor obtained of Pope Nicholas IV (who was of their 
 own Order) the privilege that none who left their Order should 
 ever be promoted to any prelacy in another Order." It is 
 obvious how often such a privilege must have roused the 
 indignation of the older foundations, already too often jealous of 
 the rapid growth of the Friars. The Cistercian quarrel, however, 
 was settled by the personal intervention of the Emperor Rudolf 
 of Hapsburg, who loved both Orders alike. 
 
 The events of these last years were indeed a few degrees less 
 barbarous than what Salimbene had seen in his youth at the 
 siege of Parma, and later on during the civil wars of Romagna : 
 but his mind had lost something of its elasticity, and it now 
 seemed to him that the foundations of the earth were out of 
 course. He was out of sympathy even with the democratic 
 movement of the century which the Friars, directly or indirectly, 
 had done so much to promote. (1287 391) " In these days 
 the Commonalty of Bologna made heavy statutes against their 
 knights and all the nobles of their city, namely that whosoever 
 of the knights or nobles should wrong a man of the people's 
 guilds, that man should be so spoiled both in his villages and 
 in the city, in his houses and fields and trees, that of all his 
 possessions not one stone should be left on another. And the
 
 236 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 first to fall under this curse were the sons of the Lord Niccolo 
 de' Bazeleri, who were utterly despoiled by the people : wherefore 
 the knightly families of Bologna fear now to live in the city, for 
 the onslaughts of the furious Commonalty : and, like the French, 
 they dwell now on their country estates : wherefore the common 
 folk, who live in the city, may well be called henceforth the 
 bourgeois,, as in France. But let the Commonalty dread lest 
 God's wrath come upon them, for they do against the Scripture 
 (Levit. xix, 15). Moreover the men of the people and country 
 folk are they through whom the world is ruined, but through 
 knights and nobles it is saved. For Patecchio saith in his Book of 
 Pests 
 
 " Et quando de sola fit tomera, etc.," 
 
 which is to say, that it is a pest when that is exalted which should 
 be lowly. Remember the example of the butchers of Cremona, 
 one of whom had a great dog who bore patiently many insults 
 from another butcher's small dog ; but when the other would 
 not cease from his accustomed insolence, being at last provoked 
 beyond measure, he caught him by the throat and drowned him 
 in the Po. And so are many in this world, who if they lived in 
 peace would be hurt by no man ; but because they go about 
 seeking quarrels of set purpose, therefore they find them. That 
 same year the men of Bologna banished many of their fellow 
 citizens to dwell in exile in divers cities : and this was done by 
 the Commonalty, who had gained the mastery over the knights. 
 And note that the Holy Scriptures speak of the dominion of 
 certain persons as most mischievous ; that is, of women, 
 children, servants, and fools ; also of enemies and worthless 
 persons." 
 
 He was evidently weary of politics : for, after a brief notice 
 of the faction fights at Parma between Guido Correggio and the 
 Bishop, he adds (398) : "And men spake of these things with 
 praise or reviling according to their love or their hate. But the 
 blessed Augustine saith that we should care little for men's 
 judgment, giving for his reason that ' neither can injustice damn 
 a man, nor false praise crown him.' ' 
 
 But, looking at the wars beyond his own immediate neighbour- 
 hood, the good friar chronicles an event in which he evidently 
 took a personal interest of the liveliest sort. In these, the last 
 words that he wrote, readers of Dante will recognize something 
 more than mere aversion to the foreigner as a foreigner : some- 
 thing of that filial compassion for Mother Italy which, even in 
 those minds in which party politics came foremost, necessarily
 
 Last Days. 237 
 
 implied a hatred of the French. Salimbene had lived in France 
 and made friends there ; his own Guelfs owed their triumph in 
 the peninsula mainly to a French prince, Charles of Anjou ; 
 but the foreigner could bring no lasting peace to Italy. On the 
 contrary, his very presence implied, and tended to perpetuate, 
 the discords which had made her a mere "hostelry of pain." 
 The Frenchman in Italy, like our own Henry V and Bedford 
 in France, was inevitably hated even by the party to whose 
 political purposes he directly ministered : and Salimbene, who 
 had so little sympathy with the political ambitions of the Popes, 
 had naturally still less with the foreigners who had been imported 
 to serve those ambitions. These concluding words of his 
 chronicle form an admirable commentary on the striking fact 
 that, to Dante, St. Louis himself is not the hero which even 
 modern Protestants and freethinkers see in him, but simply the 
 somewhat despicable brother of the hated Charles of Anjou. 6 
 
 " Moreover, in this year 1287, many French ships were sunken 
 in the sea beyond Naples by the fleet of Peter of Aragon. And 
 many of King Charles' fleet who had survived the fight, common 
 folk and knights, nobles and barons, were blinded by their captors. 
 Which vengeance was just and merited, for they are most proud 
 and foolish, an accursed folk who despise almost all other peoples 
 of the world ; and especially do they scorn the English and the 
 Lombards (under which term they include all Italians and all on 
 this side of the Alps) : whereas in truth it is they who are 
 despicable and scorned of all men. For to them we may apply 
 that which is said in the trutannic verse of Trutannus 
 
 The Vagrant with his pot of wine, warm in an ingle-nook, 
 
 Will deem the wealthiest Eastern King scarce fit to be his cook.? 
 
 For when Frenchmen have well drunken, then they think to 
 beat down and conquer the whole world at one blow. But they 
 are deceived* .... therefore the French are proud beyond 
 measure. And they afflicted the Kingdom of Naples, and 
 Tuscany, and the Lombards dwelling in the kingdom of 
 Apulia, and took from them their victuals without money 
 and without price corn and wine and milk, fish and flesh, 
 capons and geese and hens and whatsoever they found fit for 
 food. Nor was it enough that they gave no payment ; but they 
 beat men also and wounded them grievously. A man of Parma 
 had a most fair wife ; and when she asked of a certain Frenchman 
 
 * On this last page of the MS. a few words here and there are entirely illegible.
 
 238 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the price of the geese which she had sold him, not only did he 
 refuse her all payment, but he wounded her grievously, with so 
 sore a stroke tnat no second was needed ; and yet he asked of 
 her ' Wilt thou that I smite thee again ? ' Her husband hearing 
 this quaked with indignation ; and herein was no marvel : for 
 whereas aforetime she had been most perfect in beauty, now all 
 the rest of her life she halted in her gait by reason of that stroke. 
 Wherefore I say that the rule of the French hath ever been most 
 foul and cruel, and it is just that mishap should fall upon them 
 and that they should be destroyed. Moreover in that same 
 year the men of the ancient party of the Emperor Frederick, 
 seeing that they could neither take by force nor hold Reggio nor 
 
 Modena, went then and seized " With these words the 
 
 present manuscript breaks off, though, as we know from the 
 author's own headline to fol. 356 (p. 590), there once existed 
 more of it, in which he treated again of civil wars under the two 
 texts " Mistrust thine enemy for ever and ever " and " Bring not 
 every man into thine house" (Eccles. xii, 10 and xi, 31). The 
 good friar, as we have seen, probably died either towards the 
 end of 1288 or not long afterwards.
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 The Princes of the World. 
 
 WITH these last words of his chronicle Salimbene the man 
 disappears suddenly and finally from our sight. But 
 his outlook on the Italy of St. Francis and Dante is more in- 
 teresting even than his personality : and many of his anecdotes, 
 omitted hitherto as bearing only remotely on his life, are 
 of extreme importance for the light they throw on contemporary 
 society. 1 will therefore summarize these briefly here, with 
 only such outside illustrations as are strictly necessary to give 
 them their full significance. 
 
 I must begin by repeating that our author's love of small 
 details and his familiar style have blinded some critics to his 
 true authority as a chronicler. Miss Macdonell, for instance, 
 complains that "the solemnity with which his judgments on 
 men are received, is absurd : " but it is abundantly evident that, 
 apart from her frequent failure to understand Salimbene's own 
 words, she lacks the knowledge of other contemporary authorities 
 which is necessary to form a sound opinion on this subject. It 
 is natural enough that his lively style should at first sight suggest 
 doubts of his accuracy. Yet, on comparing him closely with 
 the most valuable of his contemporaries distinguished Church- 
 men who wrote under a strong sense of responsibility we find 
 that his judgments on the principal figures and institutions of 
 his time coincide in the main with theirs. St. Bonaventura, 
 Roger Bacon, Adam Marsh, Bishop Thomas of Chantimpre, 
 Caesarius the novice-master of Heisterbach, have penned sadder 
 words on the whole than Salimbene. The private Register of 
 Archbishop Eudes Rigaud, like many other strictly official 
 documents, bears the same testimony. Joinville, if we read 
 him carefully from end to end, gives us an equally sad impression 
 of the past, and equal hope, by comparison, for our own much- 
 abused age. Salimbene is not less tnistworthy as a historian 
 for being instinct to his finger-tips with that life which most 
 medieval chroniclers so sadly lack : and indeed his most startling
 
 240 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 pictures are corroborated by independent witnesses from his own 
 and the next two centuries. 
 
 There is enough in Salimbene's more strictly autobiographical 
 pages to show the general reader as much as he needs to realize 
 nowadays of those barbarous and incessant wars which made 
 Italy so miserable not only in Dante's day, but for generations 
 before and after him. Moreover, Salimbene's judgments show us 
 how little respect sober men often felt for the leaders on either 
 side for the Emperor and his princes or the Pope and his 
 Legates. He could not help seeing some good both in Frederick 
 and in Manfred, as he frankly confesses : but in his youthful 
 days of Joachism he had looked upon Frederick as Antichrist 
 (174), though in later life he thought this somewhat exaggerated. 
 (362). Still, he always felt a mystery of evil about him, both 
 in his birth and in his death : though his silence shows that 
 Villani's and Dante's legends on both these subjects are of later 
 growth than his day. To Salimbene, Costanza was simply a 
 fcmme incomprisc : and his version of her marriage is more con- 
 sonant with known facts than Villani's. (358) " King William 
 of Sicily on his deathbed bade his sons, I know not wherefore, 
 never to marry their sister Costanza : wherefore they kept her 
 by them until the 30th year of her age. But she was a froward 
 woman, and troubled her brothers' wives and their whole house- 
 hold. So, considering that the Wise Man said truly, ' It is better 
 to sit in a corner of the housetop, than with a brawling woman 
 and in a common house,' they said among themselves, 'Let us 
 marry our sister and put her far away from us.' " Although 
 Costanza was 20 years younger at her marriage than Villani 
 imagined, and only 40 when Frederick was born, yet already in 
 Salimbene's day his enemies believed him a supposititious child. 
 (43) "Now Frederick was born at Jesi ; and it was noised 
 abroad concerning him that he was the son of a baker in that 
 city, for the Empress Constance was aged and advanced in years 
 \multorum erat dierum et multum annosa] when she espoused the 
 Emperor Henry ; nor is she said to have had any son or daughter 
 but this one ; wherefore it was said that she took him from his 
 father (having first feigned herself great with child) and took 
 him to herself that she might be thought to have brought him 
 forth : which I am led to believe by three things. First, that 
 women are indeed wont to do thus, as I remember oft-times to 
 have found. Secondly, that Merlin wrote of him ' The second 
 Frederick [shall be] of marvellous and unhoped-for birth ' ; thirdly, 
 that King John [of Brienne], who was King of Jerusalem and 
 father-in-law to the Emperor, one day with wrathful soul and
 
 The Princes of the World. 241 
 
 frowning brow called the Emperor in his own French speech the 
 son of a butcher, since he would fain have slain his kinsman 
 Grualterotto. And because the Emperor could not compass his 
 wish with poison, therefore it was to be done with the edge of 
 the sword, while they sat together at a game of chess : for the 
 Emperor feared lest by some chance the kingdom of Jerusalem 
 [or rather of Sicily] should fall to Gualterotto. But these things 
 were not hidden from King John, who went and caught his 
 nephew by the arm as he played with the Emperor, and withdrew 
 him from the game and reproached the Emperor bitterly in his 
 own French tongue, saying : ' Devil ! son -of a butcher ! ' For 
 King John was tall and stout and of great stature, strong and 
 brave and skilled in war, so that he might seem a second Charle- 
 magne : and when with his mace he smote on every side in battle, 
 then the Saracens fled from before his face as though they had 
 seen the devil, or a lion ready to devour them. Wherefore con- 
 cerning him and Master Alexander [of Hales], who was the most 
 learned man in the world and was of our Order and taught at 
 Paris, in their praise (I say) a song was made half in French 
 and half in Latin, which I have oft-times sung : and it began 
 
 A vent tutt mantenent 
 
 Nostris florent temporibus. 
 
 This King John, while he was being armed by his servants for 
 battle, would tremble as a rush quakes in the water. And when 
 they asked him wherefore he thus trembled, since he was a stout 
 and mighty fighter against his enemies in battle, then he would 
 answer that he cared not for his body, but feared lest his soul 
 were not well with God. This is as the Wise Man saith [Prov. 
 xxviii. 14, and Ecclus. xviii. 27] : moreover St. Jerome saith 
 " it is prudent to fear whatsoever may come to pass " . . . . 
 When this King John went into battle and was heated in fight, 
 none durst stand before his face, but they turned aside when they 
 saw him, for he was a brave and mighty warrior." The chron- 
 icler Pipinus, as I have already noted, gives another cause of 
 quarrel between John and Frederick : but there is no reason to 
 doubt that both are true. 
 
 To Salimbene, as to Dante, Frederick was a man of heroic 
 proportions in his very sins. (348) " Of faith in God he had 
 none ; he was crafty, wily, avaricious, lustful, malicious, wrath- 
 ful ; and yet a gallant man at times, when he would show his 
 kindness or courtesy ; full of solace, jocund, delightful, fertile 
 in devices. He knew to read, write, and sing, and to make songs
 
 242 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and music. He was a comely man, and well-formed, but of 
 middle stature. I have seen him, and once I loved him, for on 
 my behalf he wrote to Brother Ellas, Minister-General of the 
 Friars Minor, to send me back to my father. Moreover, he knew 
 to speak with many and varied tongues, and, to be brief, if he 
 had been rightly Catholic, and had loved God and His Church, 
 he would have had few emperors his equals in the world." He 
 goes on to enumerate several specimens of the Emperor's 
 " curiosities " or " excesses," though for sheer weariness he will 
 not tell them all. Frederick cut off a notary's thumb who had 
 spelt his name Fredericus instead of Fridericus. Like Psam- 
 metichus in Herodotus, he made linguistic experiments on the 
 vile bodies of hapless infants, "bidding foster-mothers and 
 nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no wise 
 to prattle or speak with them ; for he would have learnt whether 
 they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the 
 first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of 
 their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in 
 vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the 
 hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandish- 
 ments." Again, " when he saw the Holy Land, (which God 
 had so oft-times commended as a land flowing with milk and 
 honey and most excellent above all lands,) it pleased him not, 
 and he said that if the God of the Jews had seen his lands of 
 Terra di Lavoro, Calabria, Sicily, and Apulia, then He would 
 not so have commended the land which He promised to the Jews. 
 But Ecclesiasticus saith : ' Speak nothing rashly, nor let thy 
 heart be swift to utter thy speech before God : for God is in the 
 heaven, and thou upon earth ; wherefore let thy words be few.' 
 Take an example of that clerk who uttered against God such 
 words as should not have been said : wherefore he was smitten 
 forthwith by a thunderbolt from heaven, and fell dead. His 
 fourth excess was that he oft>times sent one Nicholas against his 
 will to the bottom of the Faro, and oft-times he returned thence ; 
 and, wishing to know in sooth whether he had indeed gone down 
 to the bottom and returned thence, he threw in his golden cup 
 where he thought the depth was greatest. So Nicholas plunged 
 and found it and brought it back, whereat the Emperor marvelled. 
 But when he would have sent him again, he said : ' Send me not 
 thither, I pray you ; for the sea is so troubled in the depth that, 
 if ye send me, I shall never return.' Nevertheless the Emperor 
 sent him ; so there he perished and never returned : for in those 
 sea-depths are great fishes at times of tempests, and rocks and 
 many wrecks of ships, as he himself reported. He might have
 
 The Princes of the World. 243 
 
 said to Frederick in Jonah's words ' Thou hast cast me into the 
 deep, in the heart of the sea, and the flood encompassed me 
 about ; all thy whirlpools and waves went over me.' This Nicholas 
 was a Sicilian who once grievously offended his mother and pro- 
 voked her to wrath ; wherefore she cursed him that he should 
 ever live in the water and come seldom to land ; and so it came 
 about. Note that the Faro is an arm of the sea in Sicily hard 
 by the city of Messana, where there is at times a mighty rush of 
 waters, and great whirlpools which suck ships under and drown 
 them ; and therein are Syrtes and Charybdes and rocks of vast 
 size, and many misfortunes. And on the other shore of this strait 
 is the city of Reggio, whereof St. Luke writeth (Acts xxviii. 
 13). All that I have above written I have heard a hundred times 
 from Brethren of Messana, who have been close friends of mine : 
 for I had in our Order a cousin-german, Brother Giacomino da 
 Cassio of Parma, who dwelt at Messana and told me those things 
 which I have written above. 1 Moreover, Frederick had likewise 
 other excesses and curiosities and cursed ways and incredulities, 
 whereof I have written some in another chronicle : as of the 
 man whom he shut up alive in a cask until he died therein, wish- 
 ing thereby to show that the soul perished utterly, as if he might 
 say the word of Isaiah ' Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
 die.' For he was an Epicurean ; wherefore, partly of himself 
 and partly through his wise men, he sought out all that he could 
 find m Holy Scripture which might make for the proof that there 
 was no other life after death, as for instance ' Thou shalt destroy 
 them, and not build them up ' : and again ' Their sepulchres shall 
 be their houses for ever ' ' [also Ps. xxxviii. 14, Ecclus. xlviii. 
 12, Ps. cvi. 5, Ecc. iii. 19-22, "and many such, which Solomon 
 said in Ecclesiastes in the person of carnal folk : " after which 
 Salimbene quotes several contrary texts, " all of which make for 
 the destruction of the credulity of Frederick and his wise men, 
 who believed that there was no life but this present, in order that 
 they might the more freelv employ themselves in their fleshly 
 lusts and wretched ways. '] " Sixthly, he fed two men most 
 excellently at dinner, one 01 whom he sent forthwith to sleep, 
 and the other to hunt ; and that same evening he caused them to 
 be disembowelled in his presence, wishing to know which had 
 digested the better : and it was judged by the physicians in 
 favour of him who had slept. Seventhly and lastly, being one 
 day in his palace, he asked of Michael Scot* the astrologer how 
 
 * Dante. //. xx. 116. In spite of his later evil fame, he was honoured in his 
 lifetime by two popes.
 
 244 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 far he was from the sky, and Michael having answered as it 
 seemed to him, the Emperor took him to other parts of his 
 kingdom as if for a journey of pleasure, and kept him there 
 several months, bidding meanwhile his architects and carpenters 
 secretly to lower the whole of his palace hall. Many days after- 
 wards, standing in that same palace with Michael, he asked of 
 him, as if by the way, whether he were indeed so far from the 
 sky as he had before said. Whereupon he made his calculations, 
 and made answer that certainly either the sky had been raised or 
 the earth lowered ; and then the Emperor knew that he spake 
 truth." (350 foil.) Yet Salimbene is careful to note that Fred- 
 erick's cruelties might justly be excused by the multitude of his 
 open and secret enemies, and that he had a saving sense of 
 humour. (353) " He was wont at times to make mocking 
 harangues before his court in his own palace, speaking for example 
 after the fashion of the Cremonese ambassadors, who were sent 
 to him by their fellow-citizens ; one of whom would begin by 
 praising the other with manifold words of commendation, saying 
 ' This lord [my fellow] is noble, wise, rich, and powerful ' : and 
 so after commending each other the ambassadors would at last 
 come to their proper business. Moreover, he would suffer 
 patiently the scoffings and mockings and revilings of jesters, and 
 often feign that he heard not. For one day, after the destruction 
 of Victoria by the men of Parma, he smote his hand on the 
 hump of a certain jester, saying ' My Lord Dallio, when shall 
 this box be opened ? ' To whom the other answered, ' 'Tis odds 
 if it be ever opened now, for I lost the key in Victoria.' The 
 Emperor, hearing how this jester recalled his own sorrow and 
 shame, groaned and said, with the Psalmist, ' I was troubled, and 
 I spoke not.' If any had spoken such a jest against Ezzelino da 
 Romano, he would without doubt have let him be blinded or 
 hanged. Again, another time he suffered patiently that Villano 
 da Ferro mocked him at the siege of Berceto ; for the Emperor 
 asked him how men named the mangonels and catapults which 
 were there, and Villano gave him for their names certain mocking 
 words, namely ' sbegna ' and ' sbegnoino' But the Emperor did 
 but smile and turn away." Moreover, he could himself play 
 cruel practical jokes (591) "For one day, when he was excom- 
 municated by Pope Gregory IX and had come to certain parts 
 where was the Patriarch of Aquileia, the Lord Berthold, whom 
 I have seen and known, a comely man and uncle to St. Elizabeth 
 of Hungary, then the Emperor sent word to him to come and 
 hear Mass with him. But the Patriarch, knowing all this, called 
 his barber and caused himself to be bled before he had seen the
 
 The Princes of the World. 245 
 
 Emperor's messenger ; then he sat down and began to dine, and 
 sent word to the Emperor that he could not go and hear Mass 
 with him, since he had been bled and was set down to meat. So 
 the Emperor sent a second time, bidding him come forthwith, all 
 impediments notwithstanding : whereupon, willing to redeem his 
 vexation, he humbly obeyed, and came and heard Mass with him." 
 To hear Mass with an excommunicate \vas of course a mortal 
 sin, which the poor Patriarch had only aggravated by the trick 
 of beginning his dinner beforehand : and the anecdote gains point 
 from what Salimbene tells us on another page of the victim's 
 grandeur. He has been speaking of superfluity in food and 
 dress ; and he goes on (281) " It is reported, and truly reported 
 (and this is altogether superfluous) that the Patriarch of Aquileia, 
 on the first day of Lent, has at his table forty dishes, that is 
 forty varieties and courses of food : and thus one less is set on 
 every day until Holy Saturday : and he says that he does this 
 for the honour and glory of his Patriarchate. Truly then Patri- 
 archs of Aquileia took not this example from Christ, who fasted 
 forty days and forty nights in the desert." The Patriarch was 
 honourable and glorious, and uncle to St. Elizabeth ; and to hear 
 Mass under these conditions was to crucify Christ afresh : but 
 the Emperor was the Emperor, who (if he had been driven to 
 it) was quite capable of having the great churchman ripped open 
 to see whether the excuse of dinner was true. 
 
 That superabundant awe of the Emperor, which our Chronicler 
 shared with so many others of his time, made him ready to 
 attribute to Joachim's and Merlin's and the Sibyl's prophecies 
 an authority scarcely second to that of Holy Writ. (174) "I 
 could never have believed that he was indeed dead, had I not 
 heard it with mine own ears from the mouth of Pope Innocent IV, 
 preaching at Ferrara in full concourse of people ; for I was a 
 Joachite, believing and expecting and hoping that Frederick 
 would do yet more evil." So widespread was the reluctance to 
 believe in the Emperor's final disappearance, that he was twice 
 personated after his death : and ambassadors came from far 
 countries to see the second of these pretenders. Even in his 
 old age, Salimbene attributes the death of Pope Gregory X and 
 Honorius I V, in part at least, to their flying in the face of Provi- 
 dence by attempting to set up new Emperors after Frederick's 
 death, for it had been prophesied " by some Sibyl, as men say," 
 that the Empire should end with him, (349 : 494 : 629). 
 
 Next to the Emperor and to St. Louis, the most striking kingly 
 figure of the book is Charles of Anjou. Salimbene shows mingled 
 admiration and repulsion for " him of the manly nose." He
 
 246 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 mentions neither the cynical greed with which Charles robbed 
 unhappy Crusaders wrecked on his coasts, 2 nor his reputed guilt 
 as the poisoner of St. Thomas Aquinas but he repeatedly 
 censures his ambition and violence and those of his French 
 knights. At the same time, he bears the most emphatic testimony 
 to his valour (599). A Campanian champion was reputed 
 invincible in single combat : and all the knight-errant in Charles' 
 soul was grieved to hear this man's praise. He therefore chal- 
 lenged the knight incognito, brushing aside impatiently his son's 
 prudent quotation from Ecclesiasticus, " He that is high hath 
 another higher, and there are others still higher than these." 
 The champions fought like heroes of romance, until Charles was 
 smitten senseless from his horse ; and the knight, horrified to 
 find who it was that he had conquered, fled the country to avoid 
 the vengeance which too often awaited a successful champion 
 after medieval tournaments. Charles, on recovering his senses, 
 was anxious to renew the fight : and his son had much ado to 
 quiet him with a " Peace, father, for the leeches say that ye have 
 two ribs of your body broken." Salimbene has much also to 
 say of the abortive duel between Charles and Peter of Aragon : 
 of Peter's pitiful evasions, and the accusations of treachery 
 against Charles. (517 ff.) Yet Peter, for all his unknightly 
 shifts on this occasion, was not unworthy to rest by his rival's 
 side in that Valley of Flowers where Dante saw them on the 
 brink of Purgatory. He was the hero of one of the earliest 
 recorded Alpine ascents, climbing to the top of Canigou for 
 mere adventurous curiosity. (598) A thunderstorm broke over 
 the party half-way, and the other knights " fell to the ground 
 and became as dead men for the fear and anguish that was come 
 upon them." Peter had much ado to tempt them a little further 
 upwards ; breath and courage alike deserted them, and he was 
 obliged to finish the ascent alone. At the top he found a lake : 
 "and when he had cast a stone into the waters, a monstrous 
 dragon of loathly aspect issued therefrom, hovering round in the 
 air until the face of heaven was darkened with the vapour of his 
 breath : whereupon Peter went down again. Methinks that this 
 achievement of his may be reckoned with those of Alexander." 
 Salimbene gives only the briefest glimpses of our own Edward 
 I, first as a crusader, and then on his way back from the Holy 
 Land to take possession of his crown : but he records two char- 
 acteristic anecdotes of Henry III. (305) The pious king 
 humbled himself to welcome John of Parma, and kiss him as an 
 equal, silencing the murmurs of his knights with the reminder 
 that this was for the honour of God and St. Francis. But then
 
 The Princes of the World. 247 
 
 Henry " was reputed a simple man." One day a jester cried 
 aloud in his presence " Hear ye, hear ye, my masters ! Our king 
 is like unto the Lord Jesus Christ. " How so ? " asked the 
 King, hugely flattered. " Because our Lord was as wise at the 
 moment of His conception as when he was 30 years old : so like- 
 wise our King is as wise now as when he was a little child." 
 Henry, like other weak men, had his fits of sudden fury ; and 
 he ordered the jester to be strung up out of hand. His servants, 
 however, only went through an empty form of execution, and 
 bade the unlucky fool keep carefully out of the way until the 
 King should have forgotten. Of Manfred, again, he tells us 
 disappointingly little, though he once implies a real sympathy at 
 bottom for that bright and unfortunate figure, and his words go 
 far to explain the feeling even among the Guelfs which dictated 
 Dante's " per lor maladizion si non se perde." (472) Of all 
 the princes of his time, our good friar seems to have had the 
 greatest admiration for the above-quoted John of Brienne. 
 Not only was John the hero of almost as many martial legends 
 as our own Coeur-de-Lion ; but he was persuaded to join the 
 Franciscan Order on his death-bed ; and our chronicler is con- 
 vinced that " he would have persevered in the Order all the days 
 of his life, if God had prolonged his days." (44) 
 
 I will not attempt to follow Salimbene from point to point 
 among the scores of petty princes who fought nominally for tope 
 or Emperor, but really for their own hand : yet much must be 
 told of these men if we are to understand the age of Dante. 
 Perhaps the most striking figures in the Inferno are the great 
 Guelf and Ghibelline leaders. We find them in the Tombs of 
 Fire or the River of Blood, or bound to their trees of anguish in 
 the Forest of the Harpies ; and we long to know more of their 
 life on earth. What brought these great soldiers and statesmen 
 to this dolorous pass ? By what stealthy temptations, what mad 
 passions, what fatal pressure of circumstances, did Satan gain 
 such empire over these souls for whom Christ died ? Our foot- 
 notes give us a few dry sentences with a couple of dates ; and 
 even Benvenuto da Imola, the great collector of Dante legends, 
 too often fails us in our sorest need. The real commentator on 
 Dante is Salimbene, not only directly by what he tells us of actual 
 actors in the Commedia, but still more by his living portraits of 
 their compeers. Yet his pictures of these men (like the words 
 of all free-spoken medieval churchmen) are most unflattering to 
 knightly society. From Ezzelino downwards Ezzelino, who 
 was the devil's chosen servant, as St. Francis was the chosen 
 servant of Christ there is scarcely one for whom we can feel
 
 248 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 real respect. Ezzelino once slaughtered in cold blood a crowd of 
 prisoners variously reckoned, no doubt with medieval exaggera- 
 tion, at eleven or twelve thousand. (367) " I believe in truth 
 that no such wicked man has been from the beginning of the 
 world unto our own days : for all men trembled at him as a rush 
 quivers in the water, and not without cause : for he who lived 
 to-day was not sure of the morrow. The father would seek out 
 and slay his son, and the son his father, or any of his kinsfolk, 
 to please this man : he would submit ladies to the foulest mutila- 
 tions, and cast them into prison with their sons and daughters to 
 perish of hunger." Scarcely less devilish was his brother Al- 
 berigo, on whom, when at last he fell, his infuriated enemies 
 inflicted cruelties more bestial than those which he himself had 
 exercised on them and theirs. Neither age nor sex was spared in 
 these civil wars : to Papalist and Imperialist alike, death or 
 bodily torture were not enough for an enemy, whose last moments 
 must be still further embittered by the anguish and shame of his 
 womenfolk ; and it was probably Alberigo's deathbed repentance 
 and horrible fate which moved Dante to spare him the tortures 
 of the River of Blood. " He was indeed a limb of Satan and a 
 son of iniquity," writes Salimbene ; " but he died an evil death 
 with his sons and daughters. For those who slew them tore the 
 legs and arms of his little sons from their living bodies, in the 
 sight of their parents, and therewith they smote the fathers' and 
 mother's mouths. Afterwards they bound his wife and daughters 
 to stakes and burned them, though they were noble maidens, and 
 the fairest in the world, and guiltless : yet men so hated their 
 parents that they would not spare their innocence. For the 
 father and mother had brought terrible evil and horrible affliction 
 on the Mark of Treviso : wherefore men came to Alberigo with 
 pincers, and there in the market-place each tore a piece from his 
 living flesh ; thus they destroyed his body in mockery and scorn 
 and grievous torments. For he had slain this man's cousin, that 
 man's brother, another's father or son ; moreover, he had laid so 
 grievous taxes and fines on that land that they must needs tear 
 down their own houses and lay the boards and beams and chests 
 and casks and barrels on barges, and send them for sale to 
 Ferrara, that they might have money to pay the taxes and redeem 
 themselves. This I saw with my own eyes. And he feigned to 
 be at war with his own brother Ezzelino, that he might the more 
 securely do these evil deeds : nor did he spare to slay his own 
 fellow-citizens and subjects. Moreover, in one day he hanged 
 25 of the greatest men of Treviso, who had in no wise offended 
 or harmed him : but, because he feared they might harm him,
 
 The Princes of the World. 249 
 
 therefore he removed them from before his face by basely hang- 
 ing them. And at the same time he caused 30 noble ladies, their 
 wives and daughters and sisters, to come and see them and to be 
 seen of them while they were hanged ; moreover, he would have 
 cut off the ladies' noses, but this was spared them by the grace 
 of one whom he called his bastard son, but who was not. Yet, 
 even so, their garments were cut away in the most foul and 
 shameful wise 3 ; and they were thus shown to the men who were 
 to be hanged. And these were hanged so near to the ground 
 that the ladies were driven among their feet : and they in the 
 bitterness of their soul smote the ladies' faces as they died with 
 their legs and feet : whose life was pain and anguish to them for 
 this foul mockery. After this, Alberigo caused them to be fer- 
 ried over the river Sila, that they might go whither they would ; 
 and with the shreds of garments which were left they bound 
 themselves about the middle like wild folk ; and all that day they 
 went 1 5 miles through an untilled land, among thorns and briars 
 and nettles and burrs and pricks and thistles, while the flies stung 
 their bare bodies ; and thus they went weeping, as indeed they 
 had cause ; and withal they had nought to eat. But God's help 
 must needs come where man's help fails, as we see in the story 
 of Susanna, and in the case of Esaias who, while he was being 
 sawn asunder with a wood-saw and was in vehement thirst, and 
 his tormentors would give him no water to drink at his request, 
 the Lord sent water from on high which flowed into his mouth. 
 So these ladies came that day, about nightfall, to the lagoons of 
 the Venetian Sea : and behold ! they were aware all at once of 
 a fisher alone in his little boat, to whom they cried for help : but 
 he was sore afraid, thinking to see some diabolical illusion, or a 
 crew of spirits, or monsters of the sea at least ; but at last by 
 God's grace, and for their instant prayers, he came to them. So 
 when they had told their whole story and all their woes, he said 
 * 1 pity you sore, nor will I leave you till God give you help : 
 yet, since my little boat may bear but one at a time, therefore 
 will I bring you one by one and set you down on dry land in 
 Saldino ; for if ye should stay here this night the wolves would 
 devour you. Then on the morrow, before daybreak, I will get 
 me a greater boat and bring you to St. Mark's church at Venice ; 
 where I hope God will give you help.' In brief, he brought all 
 over but one, the last, whom he led to his fisher's hut and fed to 
 her heart's content, and treated her with all kindness and court- 
 esy and humanity and charity and honesty : and on the morrow 
 he exactly fulfilled all his promises. So when he had brought 
 them into St. Mark's church, he came to the Lord Ottaviano,
 
 250 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Cardinal of the Roman Court and Legate in Lombardy, who at 
 that time was at Venice ; to whom he told the whole tale of these 
 ladies and of their misfortunes, and where they now were. So 
 the Cardinal came forthwith to them and gave them to eat ; and 
 he sent word throughout the whole city that all should come to 
 him swiftly and hastily without delay in the church of St. Mark : 
 both men and women, small and great, young men and maidens, 
 old men and young : for he would tell them (he said) such things 
 as they had never heard, and show them such sights as they had 
 never seen. What then ? swifter than the tale may be told, the 
 whole city of Venice was gathered together to him on the Piazza 
 of St. Mark, and from his lips they heard all the aforesaid story : 
 and when he had finished speaking, he brought forward those 
 ladies, in such foul array and such nakedness as that accursed 
 Alberigo had devised to their dishonour ; and this he did to pro- 
 voke the citizens unto the greater hatred against that tyrant, and 
 pity towards these ladies. So when the Venetians heard the 
 story, and saw the ladies as naked as I have said, then they rais- 
 ed a great shout and cried, ' Let him die ! let that accursed man 
 die ! Let him and his wife be burnt alive, and his whole seed 
 be rooted out from this world.' Then, by the common consent 
 of the whole city, both men and women, he preached a crusade 
 against that accursed Alberigo. So they went with one mind 
 against Alberigo and wrought him much evil, yet they destroyed 
 him not utterly : howbeit within a short time after that crusade 
 he was utterly destroyed with all his seed, and suffered justly the 
 aforesaid mockery and torments and woes. For one day, having 
 lost his hawk, and being under the open sky, he made so foul 
 and boorish a gesture at the heaven, in sign of mockery and con- 
 tumely and derision, thinking thereby to take vengeance on God, 
 as may scarcely be told : moreover, when he was come home, he 
 went forthwith into the church and defiled God's altar in un- 
 speakable wise, at that very spot where the Lord's Body is con- 
 secrated. Moreover his wife would call other noble ladies and 
 matrons harlots and such like names, nor did her husband ever 
 rebuke her and say, ' Wherefore sayest thou thus ? ' Nay 
 rather, but he heeded it not, and she took heart from his heed- 
 lessness : so that was a just vengeance which the men of Treviso 
 wreaked upon them. But after the Cardinal had ended his 
 sermon to the Venetians, then he commended those ladies to the 
 citizens as he would have commended himself : and they suc- 
 coured them most liberally both in food and in clothing : more- 
 over the men of Treviso spared that man by whose grace the 
 ladies had not lost their noses, and they suffered him to live and
 
 The Princes of the World. 251 
 
 did him much kindness, whereof he was worthy ; for he oft- 
 times restrained those tyrants from many iniquities which they 
 would have done." 
 
 These two brothers are only the first in evil pre-eminence 
 among a whole host of petty tyrants whom Salimbene enumerates 
 under the year 1250, and to whom he frequently refers elsewhere. 
 There, first, is Obizzo of Este the flaxen head which emerges 
 side by side with Ezzelino's shaggy black locks from Dante's 
 River of Blood. In 1290 Obizzo became tyrant of Reggio ; and 
 this explains why Salimbene's very unflattering description of 
 him (167) has been so mutilated by some cautious hand that it 
 is only legible here and there. To begin with, he was believed 
 to have been a supposititious child, intruded by a trick into the 
 noble inheritance of Este. Furthermore, "he caused his own 
 mother to be drowned : for she had been a washerwoman, and 
 the buffoons were wont to put him to shame for his base birth 
 and his ignoble mother. Moreover it was reported of him that 
 he violated the wives and daughters of both nobles and commons 
 at Ferrara ; and he was ill-famed of many foul and incestuous 
 connexions. Many other evils he did, and many shall he receive 
 from God, unless he be converted to Him. He was so intimate 
 a friend of the Cardinal Ottobono, who was afterwards Pope 
 Adrian V, that he took his near kinswoman to wife : and his 
 firstborn was the Lord Azzo [Inf. xviii, 56] who had a wife of 
 the kin of Pope Nicholas III, a Roman by birth." We get brief 
 glimpses of other figures familiar to us in the " Commedia " 
 Pietro Pagani (370), whose wife and sister were both Salimbene's 
 spiritual daughters : Salinguerra, (165) "who was wont to say 
 'He hath given the heaven to the Lord of Heaven, but the 
 earth to the children of men,' as who should boast of his own 
 might here on earth. Yet he was drowned in the lagoons of 
 Venice ; and, wise as he was, he had a foolish son, as Rehoboam 
 was to Solomon." We get some glimpses of Buoso da Duera, 
 who (363) " did much evil to others, and in the end himself also 
 received much evil." Pinamoute, again, is mentioned at some 
 length (436 ff) : " he was feared as the Devil : he was an old 
 man and altogether bald-headed, and had a huge multitude of 
 children ; among whom was a certain Friar Minor, Brother 
 Philip by name, a good and honest man and Lector in theology, 
 who was once Inquisitor, and took and scattered and destroyed 
 many heretics of the district called Sermilione." To him, in 
 1283, the Cardinal-Legate Bernardo sent two friars as am- 
 bassadors for the sake of peace : " and the Lord Pinamonte 
 received them courteously, both for their Order's sake and for
 
 252 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 the Cardinal's : notwithstanding it had been ordained that who- 
 soever should bring a letter into Mantua should be beheaded. 
 And he sent to the Friars Minor, for these messengers' sake, a 
 waggon-load of good wine, and the half of a flitch of bacon ; and 
 one of his sons sent to the Brethren a great and glorious pasty, 
 with many other gifts. So the Brethren returned with the Lord 
 Pinamonte's letters : what might be contained therein, God only 
 knoweth. Moreover the Lord Pinamonte was wont to boast that he 
 had never had any ill-fortune, but all things had succeeded as he had 
 wished : which was a great folly, as the wise man saith in Proverbs 
 [xxvii, 1]." Of Guido Vecchio da Polenta, father to the ill- 
 fated Francesca da Rimini and grandfather to Dante's last patron 
 Guido Novello, Salimbene gives us one of his few anecdotes 
 worthy of the romantic conception of the Age of Chivalry. 
 (606) After relating an instance of bitter and somewhat un- 
 generous rivalry, he goes on : " The Lord Guido da Polenta 
 of the city of Ravenna wrought far better than this, in that he 
 avenged himself sufficiently, yet would not pass beyond measure. 
 For when he was yet a boy, and the Emperor kept his father in 
 chains, the Lord Guido Malabocca, brother of the Count Roger 
 of Bagnacavallo, persuaded the Emperor to cut off the father's 
 head ; wherefore the Lord Guido, when he was grown to man's 
 estate, cut off in return the head of Guido Malabocca. Now, in 
 process of time, as he was journeying to Bagnacavallo with a 
 great following of armed men, and those who were his fellows 
 on that journey would have persuaded him that he might now 
 rid himself wholly of the Count Roger and never fear him more, 
 yet he answered and said, ' We have done enough : suffice it 
 then that we have done thus far : for evil may ever be done, but 
 afterwards it may not be undone.' And so he suffered him to go 
 free." The very emphasis with which the chronicler records 
 this trait of ordinary generosity is significant ; and indeed all 
 intimate records of the Middle Ages give very much the same 
 unfavourable picture of the feudal nobility. Not that they 
 were unworthy of the place they occupied in their own times 
 and among their own circumstances : but what circumstances, 
 and what times ! No more damning judgment can be passed 
 on medieval society than the continual cry of the apologist, 
 perfectly true within its own limits, " You must not judge the 
 man or the deed in that century as you would judge them in 
 ours ! " Yet the best men of their own age made less allowance 
 for them than we. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, when he comes 
 to speak of the sufferings of the common folk in the 13th century, 
 exclaims outright " How mad are the men who rejoice when sons
 
 The Princes of the World. 253 
 
 are born to their lords ! " 4 Page after page of Salimbene's book 
 tells us of reckless bloodshed, cowardly murders, and treachery. 
 Like the Knight of La Tour Landry, [p. 2 and passim] he shows 
 us plainly and frequently the risks which a lady's honour ran in 
 noble houses. 5 (pp. 27, 67, 427, 429) His average noble, like 
 those of contemporary chronicles and even of many medieval 
 romances, answers pretty well to the Byronic sarcasm not 
 quite a felon, yet but half a knight. We have the knightly 
 forger of a will (1287398), and the usual knightly Bluebeard. 
 (483) " The Lord Jacobino di Palude on divers occasions slew 
 many of his own house, namely, the father of his son-in-law, 
 and his son-in-law, and the son of his own daughter, a little 
 child still at the nurse's breast, whom he dashed against the 
 earth, and his cousin-german, the Lord Arverio, with his two 
 sons, and likewise another of his own house." 
 
 Salimbene is exceptional in giving us no hint of the frequency 
 with which ladies were beaten in private life by their fathers and 
 husbands ; but we have already had glimpses of their fate in 
 time of war and when was there not war ? The study of fresh 
 documents makes it plainer every day that theory and practice 
 were as widely divorced in medieval chivalry as in religion. 
 Sacchetti, who was born about the time of Dante's death, 
 complains repeatedly that money would buy knighthood for 
 the vilest mechanics, bakers, " usurers and cozening ribalds." 
 His contemporary Fra Giordano da Rivalto implies the same : and 
 Salimbene also shows us how great a part usury often played in 
 family greatness (609). It was a mortal sin, of course ; and few 
 figures are more pitiful in the Inferno than the usurers writhing 
 and shifting under the rain of fire ; yet, as the good Benvenuto 
 complains in his commentary, "He who taketh usury goeth to 
 hell : and he who taketh none liveth on the verge of beggary." 
 Moreover, there was always good hope of escaping the doloroso 
 foco: it was only necessary to make a last confession to the friars 
 and leave them some of the ill-gotten gains for conscience-money. 
 We see this even in Salimbene : Ubertino and the Spirituals 
 complain of it as one of the worst scandals in the Order ; and 
 St. Bonaventura sadly admits something of the impeachment. 8 
 Though this process of buying nobility marks the beginning of a 
 new world, yet the people in general were scarcely happier under 
 this new aristocracy than they had been under the old. Canon 
 Knox-Little, with even more neglect than usual of plain fuels, 
 asserts that the Franciscan Tertiary system broke the power of 
 Feudalism before 1230, and had " emancipated the middle classes 
 and the poor from feudal tyranny " before the death of Frederick
 
 254 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 in 1250. (pp. 217-220). No doubt the Tertiary system exer- 
 cised a real democratic influence in the long run ; but it is almost 
 incredible that anyone professing an acquaintance with Italian 
 history could bring himself to write " What now ? Military 
 service was swept away." To St. Bonaventura, the Tertiaries 
 were mainly an ungrateful burden. 7 Often as Salimbene tells us 
 of the Friars' services, either as peacemakers or as combatants 
 against the pre-eminently feudal party, he has not a word to say for 
 the Tertiaries : while for their aristocratic imitators, the Frati Go- 
 denti, he has as little sympathy as Dante had. (467) " In the year 
 1261 was composed and ordained the Rule of the knights of the 
 Blessed Virgin Mary, by the mediation of Brother Ruffo Gur- 
 gone of Piacenza, who for many years had been minister Provin- 
 cial of Bologna, and was then a Penitentiary at the Papal court. 
 The Order was founded by Loderingo degli Andaloi of Bologna, 
 who was its Prior and Prelate, and by other honourable and noble 
 men. These knights are by the country-folk scoffingly called 
 ' Godenti,' as who should say ' They are only become Frati that 
 they may keep their goods for themselves alone, according to the 
 word of that miser of whom Ecclesiasticus speaketh (xi. 18.)' 
 Moreover I remember that this Order was founded in Parma at 
 the time of the Alleluia, (that is in the days of the other great 
 devotion), by the means of Brother Bartholomew of Vicenza of 
 the Friars Preachers, who in those days had high rank in Parma, 
 a good man who was afterward Bishop of Vicenza, his own 
 native city. And the aforesaid Brethren had the same habit as 
 these [Godenti], and a white saddle and a red cross : there was 
 only this difference, that the Parmese Order were called Knights 
 of Jesus Christ, and the Godenti, Knights of St. Mary. But 
 the former lasted and endured many years, and at length failed : 
 for I saw both their beginning and their end, and few entered 
 into their Order. Likewise these Godenti are indeed multiplied 
 like bread in the hand of a hungry man : and they think them- 
 selves to have done a great and noble deed in taking this habit : 
 but they are little esteemed at the Court of Rome ; and this for 
 four reasons. First, they have never used their wealth to build 
 monasteries or hospitals, or bridges or churches, nor are they 
 found to have done other works of piety. Secondly, that they 
 have ravished much of others' goods, as great men are wont to do, 
 nor have they restored their illgotten gains. Thirdly, after they 
 have wasted their wealth in lavish expenses upon many vanities, 
 and in banqueting with buffoons rather than with Christ's poor, 
 they now beg of the Roman church and would fain get from the 
 Pope and enter into the convents of better Religious than them-
 
 The Princes of the World. 255 
 
 selves, and expel these latter from their dwellings. Fourthly, for 
 that they are most avaricious men. Fifthly and lastly," [for our 
 chronicler finds an extra reason], " I see not whereunto they serve 
 God s church or what profits they bring, unless perchance that 
 they save their own souls, which St. Jerome calleth ' a holy 
 boorishness, profitable to itself alone.' Enough of this matter : 
 now must we rejoice with them that rejoice [CMTH Gaudentibus~\ 
 and weep with those that weep, as the Apostle saith." 
 
 In spite of Salimbene's many aristocratic friends ; in spite of 
 the consciousness of noble birth which never deserted him and 
 coloured all his views, you may seek vainly from end to end of 
 his long chronicle for more than one or two instances of real 
 chivalry. Of mere vulgar barons of prey there are plenty : 
 Ghiberto da Gente, for instance, whom the Chronicon Parmense 
 accuses of abusing his judicial power to torture an innocent 
 noble after failing to seduce his daughter ; and who after coming 
 into power with the help of the butchers of Parma, showed him- 
 self as grasping and close-fisted as any nouvcau richc of our own 
 century (448) " He was greedy and avaricious beyond all 
 measure ; so that, during his dominion, no man in Parma might 
 sell any sort of victual except publicly ; and he made himself a 
 partner with all who sold, that he might get his share of gain 
 from all. Moreover he was so stingy that, when a knight of the 
 court [i.e., jongleur] had begged him for a gift, he said he would 
 give him a shilling of Bologna to buy himself figs withal. I 
 myself experienced and proved and saw and knew his boorish- 
 ness and avarice and filthy stinginess [merditatcni] in his villa of 
 Campigine ; yet I had gone thither on his own service, with 
 Brother Bernardino da Buzea." There is Uberto Pallavicino, 
 again, (344) "a puny and weakly old man, and one-eyed (for, 
 while he was yet in his cradle, a cock had picked out one of his 
 eyes), whom in former days I have seen so poor that he was proud 
 to have two squires riding abroad with him on sorry jades " : yet by 
 his courage and audacity he won city after city, built palace upon 
 palace, (one of which was " like a town in itself "), and exchanged 
 his barren wife, like any Henry VIII, for another who might 
 bear him a son. We see too the truth of Joinville's remark that 
 many men of great pretensions belied their reputation in the hour 
 of danger. Bartolino Tavernario, one of the greatest nobles in 
 Parma, lived " many days and nights " in such anguish of his life 
 for fear of Pallavicino and other enemies that " when he heard 
 noises by night as indeed he heard many such he would flee forth 
 on horseback from his villa into the field and tarry there sleepless 
 all night long in the open air, ready at any moment for flight." 8
 
 256 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 (604) Another, it is true, commanded Salimbene's admiration by 
 his coolness and courage under similar circumstances : for " one 
 day when Pallavicino was to march with his 500 men-at-arms 
 through one of the quarters of Parma, the Marchese Lnpi bade 
 a servant wash his feet in a tub under his portico in the very 
 street ; for he wished to show how he cared no more for Palla- 
 vicino than for a goat's tail." (605) Rare indeed is such a 
 picture as this following, of one who might pass for a living 
 illustration of Chaucer's " verray parfit, gentil knyght." " The 
 Count [Lodovico] di San Bonifazio, who should have been Lord 
 of Verona, wandered through the world as an exile : yet he waa 
 wholly devoted to the Church party, a good man, and holy, and 
 strong and doughty in arms, and skilled in war. In the year 
 1283 he lay dying, and by his testament he committed all his 
 children into the hand of the lord Obizzo of Este, who received 
 them courteously and treated them as his children, though 
 formerly he loved not the count, for they had quarrelled 
 concerning the city of Mantua. So in the mght following the 
 count died in the presence of the Friars Minor, to whom lie had 
 confessed : and he ordered excellently for the health of his soul. 
 And the citizens of Reggio spent liberally on his funeral, as for 
 a noble man who had been their Podesta and had been driven 
 from his possessions for the sake of the Church party. And all 
 the Religious of Reggio and many nuns were at his funeral, and 
 all the citizens with many foreigners, and the noblest of the city 
 bore him on his bier. His body was clothed in scarlet with fair 
 fur of vair and a splendid pall ; and it was laid with the same 
 magnificence on the Monday following in a fair tomb, exceeding 
 fair, which the Commune had caused to be made at their own 
 expense. His sword was by his side, and his gilded spurs on his 
 -feet, and a great purse at his belt of silk, and gloves on his 
 hands, and on his head a most fair cap of vair and scarlet, and a 
 mantle of scarlet trimmed with divers furs. And he left his 
 charger and his armour to the Friars Minor. He was an hon- 
 ourable and holy man : so honourable that when he went through 
 the city he never raised his eyes to look on any woman, whereat 
 even the women and the fairest ladies marvelled. Moreover, on 
 the anniversary of his death his wife sent a fair pall of purple 
 samite for the altar of the Friars' convent at Reggio, where her 
 husband was buried. May his soul, by God's mercy, rest in 
 peace I Amen." (368 ; 513).
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 
 
 r I iHE story of these worldly princes is taken mainly from a 
 I long digression in which Salimbene enumerates and char- 
 acterises the rulers of his time. He then proceeds to give us 
 the other side of the picture, and to estimate with his usual keen 
 but sympathetic insight the Legates who had been commissioned 
 by different Popes to champion the Church cause in Northern 
 Italy : and who, in consequence of the worldly policy which was 
 inseparable from the Temporal Power, were necessarily statesmen 
 or warriors first of all, and churchmen only in the second place. 
 These portraits are valuable as coming from a convinced and 
 consistent Churchman who had yet independence enough to write 
 of things and men exactly as he saw them, and as they were 
 frankly discussed within the ranks of the Guelf party. It is 
 very difficult for a modern reader to realize 13th century society. 
 But here and there even a single episode, told frankly and in 
 detail, gives the intelligent reader just that double evidence which 
 we require the conviction, not only that the thing is true in 
 itself, but also that it is characteristic of the times no mere 
 artificial museum-specimen, but a real natural growth, drifted 
 down the ages to us, with the soil of its home still clinging to its 
 roots. Not all the crimes of Gilles de Retz are half so damning 
 to loth century society as the collateral evidence of the equanimity 
 with which his misdeeds were so long suffered, of his own firm 
 trust to meet his accomplice in Paradise, and of the tenderness 
 with which his bones were brought by " damsels of high estate," 
 to be buried honourably with the Carmelite friars of Nantes. 1 
 Similarly, even the sickening atrocities of Alberigo, and the no 
 less sickening reprisals of his victims, carry in themselves less 
 demonstrative force than the matter-of-course words in which 
 Salimbene, a nobleman by birth and a man of Religion by pro- 
 fession, records how the victims were paraded before the crowd 
 in their naked shame, until the Venetian citizens were sufficiently 
 wrought up to the Holy War. So, again, many students to
 
 258 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 whom the Inferno has given an inkling of the real life of the 
 tyrants, and who have a clear enough general recollection that 
 Dante saw grave faults in the Church of his time, may yet be sur- 
 prised at these figures of Church champions drawn by Salimbene 
 from the life. He describes in chronological order the twelve 
 Papal Legates who, during his lifetime, had championed the 
 Church cause in Italy. The first was Ugolino, friend and pro- 
 tector of St. Francis, and later Pope Gregory IX. The next 
 was " The Cardinal " par excellence, Ottaviano, into whose mouth 
 later chroniclers put the despairing cry, "if there be such a 
 thing as a soul, then I have lost mine for the Ghibellines ! " 
 (385) " He was a goodly man to see, and of noble birth ; for he 
 was of the sons of Ubaldino da Mugello in the Bishopric of 
 Florence ; he was of great repute among the Imperial party ; but 
 for his own honour's sake he sometimes wrought to the profit of 
 the Church, knowing that thereto he had been sent. When he 
 was Legate at Bologna, I oft-times ate with him, and he set me 
 ever at the head of his board, so that none sat betwixt me and 
 him but the friar my comrade ; and he himself took the third 
 place from the head of the table. Then I did as the Wise Man 
 saith in Proverbs : ' When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, con- 
 sider diligently what is before thee and set a knife to thy throat ' : 
 and this was right and proper, for the whole hall of this palace 
 was full of guests. Yet we had food in plenty and with all 
 decency, and choice wine was set before us, and all delicacies. 
 Then began I to love the Cardinal, as it is written in Proverbs 
 ' Many will intreat the favour of the prince ; and every man is a 
 friend to him that giveth gifts.' But the Cardinal invited me and 
 my comrade to go and eat daily with him ; but I thought best to 
 do as Ecclesiasticus teacheth ' When thou art bidden of a more 
 powerful man than thou, depart, for thus will he bid thee all the 
 more.' Moreover, it was said of this same Cardinal that he was 
 the son of the Lord Pope Gregory IX ; perchance for that he 
 had loved him with special love. I have also seen the daughter 
 of this Cardinal, a nun in a certain convent 2 : and she invited 
 and prayed me instantly to be her spiritual father, (devotus) and 
 she my spiritual daughter (devota}. She knew not whose daughter 
 she was, nor what a father she had. But I knew well, and 
 answering said to her, ' I will not have thee for a friend, for the 
 poet Patecchio saith, " It is a weariness when I cannot speak with 
 her," meaning to say, " It is a weariness to have a lady-friend to 
 whom her friend cannot speak," as thou art, being enclosed in a 
 convent.' And she said to me, ' Even if we may not converse 
 together, at least let us love each other in heart, and pray
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 259 
 
 mutually for each other's salvation, as St. James saith in his last 
 chapter (v. 16).' And I thought within mvself that she would 
 have drawn me in little by little, and entangled me, that I might 
 love her : so I told her the example of the blessed Arsenins." 
 The reference is to St. Jerome's " Lives of the Fathers." 1 The 
 aged Arsenius was visited in his desert cell by a noble Roman 
 lady, who had dared the perils of the deep and of the wilderness 
 to look once upon his face. She fell at his feet : but he rebuked 
 her intrusion with such asperity that she dared not even look up, 
 and could only falter, " I beseech thee, pray for me and deign to 
 bear me in mind." " I pray to God," replied the Saint, " that 
 He may blot all memory of thee from my soul." She was cut to 
 the heart, went home, took to her bed and longed to die. Her 
 own bishop, however, cured her by pointing out how subtle a 
 flattery the Saint's rudeness implied to her charms ; and we may 
 perhaps hope that the same reflection consoled Salimbene's fair 
 friend. He pursues " Moreover the Lord Ottaviano was a most 
 subtle man. For one day when there was a great procession, a 
 certain jester raised his voice as the Cardinal went by and said in 
 his hearing, ' Remove, all ye good folk, and give way and let the 
 man pass who hath betrayed the Roman court and oft-times 
 deceived the church ! ' Hearing this, the cardinal softly bade one 
 of his men to shut the man's mouth with a gift of money, know- 
 ing that all things obey money. And thus he redeemed his own 
 vexation ; for the jester took the gift, and went forthwith to 
 another place where the Cardinal should pass by ; and then he 
 spake in manifold commendation of him, saying that there was 
 no better cardinal at the court, and that he was well worthy of 
 the Papal tiara. Of such saith Micah : ' if one give not some- 
 what into their mouth they hallow war against him.' Moreover 
 I have heard it said that if Pope Innocent IV had lived but a 
 little while longer, he would have put down the Lord Ottaviauo 
 from his Cardinalate for that he was too much Imperial and 
 wrought not faithfully for the Church. But he, knowing that he 
 had not the Pope's favour, and that this had already been noised 
 abroad by many at the Court and elsewhere, did thus to show 
 that he had the Pope's favour. One day when all the Cardinals 
 were hastening to go out from the Consistory and from the Pope's 
 presence to their own homes, the Lord Ottaviano alone remained 
 so long in talk with a clerk in the closet or chamber which was at 
 the issue from the Pope's presence, until he knew that all the 
 other Cardinals were gone forth, so that they who were in the 
 palace hall might think him to have gone out last of all, wishing 
 thus to show that the Pope had kept him to hold familiar converse
 
 260 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and treat privily of great matters with him ; that they might thus 
 think him the greatest cardinal of the court, and most powerful of 
 all with the Pope, and in consequence might bring him gifts as 
 to one who could help them in their business with the Pope." 
 
 The next Legate whom he describes is Gregorio da Monte- 
 lungo, who lived in Ferrara shortly before Salimbene, and 
 whose pet raven was already of legendary fame, like the raven 
 of St. Francis. 4 " Long ago, when he lived in Ferrara, he had 
 a raven which he was wont to pledge for great sums of money, 
 and afterwards to redeem faithfully by repaying the gold. For the 
 raven spake like a man and was an excellent buffoon. For he 
 would arise in the night and call forth from their inns the travellers 
 who abode therein, crying ' Who will come to Bologna ? Who 
 will come to Dojolo ? Who will come to Peola ? Let him come, 
 come, come ! Quick, quick 1 Arise, arise ! Come, come ! 
 Bring your baggage ! Off, off ! To the boat, to the boat ! 
 Raise [the anchor], raise ! Yare, yare, yare ! Get off the boat ! 
 Steer, steer ! ' So the stranger guests, not knowing the wiles and 
 deceits of this raven, would arise and carry their goods and 
 baggage ; and well-nigh all night long they would wait by the 
 Po bank for the ship to take them whither they would go : and 
 they marvelled who could so have deceived them, for they heard 
 no man by the river. Moreover, this raven had such a feud with 
 a certain blind man that, whenever he begged with bare legs and 
 feet along the banks of the Po, the bird would come and peck 
 his heels and calves, and draw back and cry injuriously to the 
 blind man, * now thou hast it, now thou hast it ! ' But one day 
 the blind man smote the raven with his staff and broke his wing, 
 and said * now thou hast it, now thou hast it ! ' W hereunto the 
 raven answered : ' now I have it, now I have it.' And the blind 
 man ' keep now that thou hast, take what is thine own and 
 depart ! cozeners and deceivers provoke the wrath of God : 1 
 have smitten thee once and no second stroke will be needed. Go 
 to the physician, if by chance he may heal thee, for incurable 
 is thy breaking, terrible is thy wound.' So the lord Gregorio 
 pawned his raven for a pledge and would never redeem him, but 
 left him there, for that he was smitten. So do very many, 
 \plures~\ who leave their servants when they begin to fall sick." 
 Salimbene pays a high tribute to the Legate's military genius 
 and political orthodoxy : but his morals were no more irreproach- 
 able than those of Ottaviano. (391 ) " He faithfully treated and 
 wrought the affairs of the Church, and therefore he earned the 
 Patriarchate of Aquileia and held it many years, even to his last 
 end. Yet it must be known of the Lord Gregorio da Monte-
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 261 
 
 lungo that he was gouty and unchaste [non bene castns] : for I 
 knew a It-man of his. But many secular clerics who have lord- 
 ships and prelacies and live in delights, seem to care little for 
 chastity ; and they put into the Apostle's [Paul's] mouth that 
 he said * though not chastely, yet [live] cautiously.' 6 But the 
 Apostle wrote not thus : rather he wrote [1 Cor. xv, 33, 34 ; 
 Gal. vi, 5-8 ; also Wisdom ix, 15, Eccles. xiv, 20, 21, and many 
 other texts]. All this I have said, because certain worldly 
 clerics, who desire to live after the flesh, lay upon the Apostle 
 this crazy falsehood, saying that he said 'if not chastely, yet 
 [live] cautiously.' Methinks I have heard them say it a hundred 
 times : and certainly the Apostle taught no such doctrine : for he 
 saith ' A bishop must be blameless, having his children in sub- 
 jection with all gravity.'* After Gregorio da Montelungo the 
 Lord Philip [Fontana], by the grace of God and of the Pope 
 Archbishop of the holy church of Ravenna, was made Legate 
 of the Apostolic See. This Legate was born in Tuscany in the 
 district of Pistoia, and being yet a poor scholar he came to the 
 city of Toledo, desiring to learn the art of necromancy. And 
 as he sat one day in that city under a portico, a certain knight 
 asked him what he sought. So when he said he was a Lombard, 
 and why he was come thither, the knight led him to a certain 
 great master of that art, an old man of hideous aspect with a 
 hood over his head, to whom the knight recommended him, 
 begging the necromancer for his sake to instruct this stranger 
 in his art. The old man led him therefore into his chamber, 
 and gave him a book, saying, * When I am gone from thee 
 thou must stay and study here.' Then departing from him, 
 he diligently closed the door, and the whole chamber. So, as 
 that youth read in the book, suddenly there appeared demons 
 of manifold kinds and shapes ; for all seemed full of mice, cats, 
 dogs, and pigs, which ran tumultuously hither and thither 
 through the chamber. And forasmuch as he spake nothing to 
 them, suddenly he found himself sitting outside the chamber 
 in the street ; and the Master came and said to him, ' What 
 dost thou here, son ? ' Then he told the Master what had 
 befallen him, so that the old man brought him again into the 
 chamber, and departed from him as before, and locked the door 
 with care. And as he read, there appeared a multitude of boys 
 and girls, running hither and thither through the chamber. For- 
 
 * Note that Salimbene omits ' the husband of one wife/ thus making the rest 
 of the Latin text read as though children were used only metaphorically of the 
 Bishop's flock.
 
 262 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 asmuch as again he spoke nought to them, he again found himself 
 sitting without in the street ; wherefore his Master said : ' Ye 
 Lombards are unfit for this art ; leave it to us Spaniards, who are 
 fierce men, and like unto demons. But thou, son, go to Paris, 
 and study in Holy Scripture ; for thou shalt yet be a mighty 
 man in the church of God.' So he went and studied at Paris, 
 and learned excellently, and returned to Lombardy and dwelt at 
 Ferrara with the Bishop of Garsendino, who was one of the sons 
 of Manfred of Modena, and brother of the Abbot of Pomposia. 
 And the Bishop made him his chamberlain ; and after his death 
 another Bishop was elected, after whom this Philip was elected 
 Bishop of Ferrara, and remained many years Bishop Elect, 
 until he was made Bishop of Ravenna. And when Pope Inno- 
 cent IV came from Lyons to Ferrara, this Bishop there " 
 
 [Here some scandalised reader has torn a leaf out of the manu- 
 script, which (as we learn from the ancient table of contents) 
 related " how a certain nun disposed in her heart to forsake God 
 unless He should come to her succour." The text then proceeds :] 
 " It came to pass therefore at the time when kings go forth to 
 war, that the Lord Philip, Archbishop of Ravenna, having been 
 made Legate by the Lord Pope, came to Ferrara. (Now that 
 which men call " the time when kings go forth to war " is the 
 month of May, for then the weather is quiet and jocund and 
 temperate, wherein the nightingale tunes her song, and grass is 
 found abundantly for oxen and horses). The Legate then, being 
 at Ferrara, gathered together all the citizens of that city and 
 strangers from Padua, and preached from the great door of the 
 Cathedral church of St. George, opposite to the church of San 
 Romano. And all the monks and friars were there and all folk 
 of the city, both great and small ; for they hoped to hear great 
 marvels of God. Moreover, I also was by the Archbishop's 
 side, and Buongiorno the Jew, who was my familiar friend, sat 
 by my side, for he also would fain listen. The Legate therefore, 
 standing in the gate of the Lord's house, began to preach in a 
 loud voice, saying briefly that the time for words was now past, 
 and we must keep silence, for the time is come to do those deeds 
 which words do but represent. And he published how he had 
 been made Legate by the Lord Pope against Ezzelino da 
 Romano, and how he would fain raise an army of Crusaders to 
 recover the city of Padua, and restore the expelled Paduans. 
 And whosoever would be of his army in that expedition should 
 have Indulgence and remission and absolution of all his sins. 
 And let none say : ' It is impossible for us to fight against that 
 man of the Devil whom even demons fear,' for it shall not be
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 263 
 
 impossible with God, who will fight for us. And the Legate 
 added, * I say to you, to the honour and praise of God Almighty, 
 and of the blessed Peter and Paul, his Apostles, and likewise of 
 the blessed Anthony, whose body is held in veneration at Padua, 
 that if I had in my army none but the orphans, the wards and the 
 widows, and the rest who have been afflicted by this man 
 Ezzelino, yet even with these I would hope to have the victory 
 over that limb of Satan and son of iniquity. For now the cry 
 of his wickedness is gone up to Heaven, and therefore they shall 
 fight from Heaven against him.' So when he had finished his 
 speech his hearers rejoiced : and he gathered together an army, 
 and in due time marched forward to assault the city of Padua, 
 which Ezzelino had most strongly fortified, garrisoning it with 
 1,500 knights, all stout men and skilled in war. Yet he himself 
 dwelt elsewhere, for he feared as little for Padua as God fears 
 lest the sky should fall, especially since the city had three rings 
 of walls, and a moat both within and without, besides the knights 
 and a multitude of people. For he held the Legate's army, with 
 regard to their fitness to storm such a city, as a mere unarmed 
 rabble without either courage or skill in war. Yet in that army 
 there was a certain lay-brother of the Order of Friars Minor, a 
 Paduan by birth, called Clarello, whom I have seen and known 
 well, who was a man of great courage, and whose heart's desire 
 Avas that the Paduans who had long been in exile should return 
 now to their city. Seeing then that this occasion was favourable 
 to him, and knowing how God hath chosen the weak things of 
 the world to confound the things which are mighty, he undertook 
 to be the standard-bearer of that army, if haply God would give 
 them salvation through his hand. Wherefore he strode before 
 the army and found a peasant there with three mares, whereof he 
 took one by force and, mounting it, caught in one hand a pole to 
 serve him for a lance, and began to gallop hither and thither, 
 shouting valiantly, ' Ho ! ye soldiers of Christ ! Ho ! ye soldiers 
 of the blessed Peter ! Ho ! ye soldiers of the blessed Anthony ! 
 Cast away fear from you, be strong in the Lord.' In brief, the 
 army was so cheered and comforted by these words of his that 
 it was ready to follow him whithersoever he might go ; and thus 
 cried Brother Clarello, ' On ! On 1 At them ! At them ! Salvation 
 is the Lord's. Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered ! ' 
 So the army followed him as its herald and standard-bearer, 
 and set itself to storm the city. But the Lord struck fear into 
 the hearts of those that were within, so that they dared not 
 resist. For there was in the army another lay brother, also of 
 the Friars Minor, a holy man and devout, who in the world
 
 264 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 had been the Lord Ezzelino's master-engineer, to build his 
 machines and catapults and mangonels and battering rams, for 
 the storming of cities and castles. Him the Legate command- 
 ed by holy obedience to strip off the habit of St. Francis (for 
 the Legate loved that Order), and to put on a white habit, and 
 build such an engine as might enable them to take the city 
 by storm. 6 So the Friar humbly obeyed him, and forthwith 
 built an engine which in front was all fire, and behind was full of 
 armed men ; and the city was soon taken. Then the Church 
 party, when they had entered the city, would neither hurt any in 
 the city, nor did they slay nor take prisoners nor spoil goods, 
 nor carry away anything ; but they spared all men and let them 
 go free. And the others held themselves happy in their mere 
 freedom from prison and other harm ; so the whole city exulted 
 and rejoiced. 7 The Legate therefore, although his name had 
 been renowned even before this time, yet was he far more renown- 
 ed after the capture of the city of Padua. In old days he had 
 been Legate in Germany, by reason of the Landgrave who had 
 been made Emperor after Frederick's deposition, [z>., Heinrich 
 Raspe, d. 1247.] And at this time there were in Germany three 
 Provinces, wherein were certain brethren of great dignity 
 [solemnesA who, despising the discipline of the Order, would not 
 obey the Ministers ; and when they came to consult this Legate, 
 he took them and handed them over to the power of the Minis- 
 ters, that they might exercise judgment and justice on them 
 according as the statutes of the Order demanded. 8 Now it came 
 to pass that the Landgrave died ; and the Legate, being in 
 another city, and hearing of the death of the Landgrave, feared 
 Frederick's son, Conrad, who caused Germany to be most strictly 
 guarded. He commanded, therefore, one of his household on no 
 account to open his chamber to any man for several days ; for 
 he purposed to flee, lest he should be utterly taken. Then, 
 changing his garments, and taking with him a single comrade 
 only, he came furtively and secretly to a convent of the Friars 
 Minor, where he called the Guardian apart, and said to him, 
 * Knowest thou me ? ' And he answered, ' Truly, nay ! ' Then 
 said the Legate, * I know thee well : and I command thee by 
 holy obedience to keep in thine own bosom all that I shall tell 
 thee, and to disclose it to none until I shall give thee leave ; and 
 to speak to no man but in my presence, and never in thy native 
 German, but ever in the Latin tongue. The Landgrave is dead, 
 and I am the Legate. Thou shalt therefore give me and my 
 comrade a habit of the Order, and without delay thou shalt give 
 me means to flee, and lead me to a safe place, that I be not taken
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 265 
 
 bj Conrad.' To be brief, all this was done obediently and 
 gladly ; but when the Guardian would have led them forth from 
 the city, he found one gate shut, and likewise the second and the 
 third : yet through the third, by a space which was beneath the 
 gate, they saw a great dog creep out, and it seemed to them that 
 this was the only way whereby they also might pass. But when 
 they attempted it, it was found that the Legate was too fat to 
 pass through ; but the Guardian stood upon his body, and flat- 
 tened him by stamping it to the ground, and thus he crept forth. 
 When therefore all four were gone forth, they passed on and 
 came that day to dinner at a certain city, wherein was a Convent 
 of Friars Minor. And when these asked of the Guardian who 
 were these friends whom he brought with him, he answered, 
 ' They are great Lombards. For God's sake show them charity 
 and courtesy and do them service.' So the guardian of that 
 house came with ten brethren of the convent, and ate with them 
 in the guest-house with the greatest familiarity and solace, being 
 much comforted to have such guests. When therefore the Le- 
 gate saw that he was in a safe place, and had escaped all perils, 
 at the end of dinner he gave leave to the Guardian his guide 
 and fellow-traveller to make him known. Then that stranger- 
 guardian who had travelled with him, said to the brethren, 
 ' Know, dearest friends, that this Brother with whom ye have 
 eaten is the Legate of the Lord Pope, and therefore have I 
 brought him to you, for that the Landgrave is dead, and here at 
 last we have no further fear of Conrad. But even the comrade 
 who travelled with me has known none of these things until 
 this very hour.' The brethren, hearing this, began to tremble as 
 a reed when it is shaken with the water. But the Legate said 
 to them, ' Fear not, brethren ! I know you, that ye have God's 
 love in you : ye have busily ministered to us, ye have shown us 
 courtesy and charity and familiarity ; the Lord repay you ! I 
 was even heretofore a friend to the Order of St. Francis : and 
 that friendship will I now hold fast all the days of my life.' 
 And so in truth it was. For he gave to the Friars Minor the 
 church of St. Peter the Great at Ravenna, 9 and granted us every 
 favour which we sought from him, of preaching, of hearing con- 
 fessions, and of absolving from all cases of conscience which 
 were reserved for himself. He had a terrible and savage 
 household, yet they all revered the Friars Minor as apostles of 
 Christ, knowing that their Lord loved us dearly. For they 
 were full forty men-at-arms, whom he ever led with him, to be 
 guardians of his life and person ; and they feared him as they 
 feared the Devil. Nay, Ezzelino da Romano was scarcely less
 
 266 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 feared ; for he gave his servants most grievous punishments. 
 One day, as he went from Ravenna to Argenta (which is the 
 Archiepiscopal palace), he caused one of his servants to be 
 bound with a rope and plunged into the water, and thus they 
 dragged him bound to the ship through the rolling waves, as 
 though he were a sturgeon, because he had forgotten to bring 
 salt. Another time he caused a certain other servant to be 
 bound to a great pole and turned as on a spit, before the fire ; 
 and when the men of his household wept for him with pity and 
 compassion, the Legate, seeing the cruel sight, said to them, ' Poor 
 wretches ! Do ye weep so soon ? ' and so bade that he should be 
 taken away from the fire. Yet the man had already borne bitter 
 anguish of soul and much roasting. Moreover, the Legate cast 
 into chains a certain Amanato, his steward, a Tuscan ; and the 
 rats devoured him in the prison, for he was accused of having 
 wasted his master's goods. Many other cruelties he practised on 
 those who were of his household, for his own vengeance and their 
 punishment, and to strike fear into others. And therefore God 
 suffered him to be taken, while he was yet Legate, by Ezzelino, 
 who kept him carefully, and took him whithersoever he went, 
 that he might the more carefully guard him. Yet he treated 
 him with honour and reverence, although he had taken Padua 
 from him. But He who liberated Manasses from his dungeon 
 and restored him to his kingdom, liberated likewise this Legate 
 in the manner following. A certain man of Reggio, named 
 Gerardo de' Campsori, drew him forth from Ezzelino's dungeon 
 and let him down by a rope from an upper chamber : and so he 
 escaped in the Lord's name from Ezzelino's hands. But he was 
 not unmindful of this loving kindness, but repaid the same man 
 by making him a Cardinal 10 of Ravenna. Moreover, to Brother 
 Enverardo of Brescia, a great Lector of the Order of Friars 
 Minor, he gave the bishopric of Cesena, for that he was of his 
 household, and had been taken prisoner with him ; which 
 Brother Enverardo, after the death of Ezzelino, was freed from 
 prison with all the other prisoners whom that accursed tyrant 
 kept in ward. Moreover, this aforesaid Archbishop [of 
 Ravenna] had two nephews, Francis and Philip ; but Philip 
 was his own son, and was twenty-five or thirty years old, comely 
 and fair as a second Absalom : and this Lord Philip, Archbishop 
 of Ravenna, and Legate of the Roman court, loved him as his 
 own soul. Whoever therefore was willing to fill the hands of 
 these two men with gifts might have a prebend or whatsoever 
 he demanded from the Archbishop ; and thus they became rich 
 beyond measure. He had also a fair daughter, whom he would
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 267 
 
 have given to wife to the Lord Jacopo di Bernardo : but he 
 would not take her, both because she was not of lawful birth, 
 and for that he would not take a dowry of Church goods, and 
 also because he purposed to become a Friar Minor and die in 
 that Order, as in truth he did. Moreover, the said Archbishop 
 was sometimes so melancholy and gloomy and furious, and such 
 a son of Belial, that none could speak with him. But to me he 
 was always kind and familiar and courteous and liberal ; for he 
 gave me the relics of the blessed Eliseus. 11 of whom we read in 
 the Book of Kings, which were in a certain city called Caesarea, 
 hard by Kavenna, in the Monastery of St. Lawrence, in a stone 
 coffin within the royal chapel ; and I carried off the principal 
 and greatest bones of that body, and placed them within the 
 high altar of the Friars Minor at Parma, where they are even 
 unto this day, with the following epitaph, besides that which 
 I had affixed first in leaden letters : 
 
 Hie virtute Dei patris ossa manent Helysei, 
 Qua Salimbene detulit ossa bene. 
 
 But I could not have the head of Eliseus, because the Austin 
 friars had stolen it and carried it away unbidden. For the 
 Archbishop cared more for war than for relics of Saints. Once 
 when he was Legate he came to Faenza, where 1 then dwelt : 
 and because he needed to enter a convent of the Order of St. 
 Clara, and the Abbess wished to speak long with him, he sent 
 for some brethren to be his comrades, both for honesty's sake and 
 for his own honour. For he loved honour above all men in the 
 world, as my judgment goes ; and above all men in the world he 
 knew how to lord it and play the baron, as I have heard from 
 others, and as it seemed to me likewise. We were therefore ten 
 brethren that bare him company ; and after we had warmed 
 ourselves by the fire (for it was a Saturday morning in the 
 month of January, on the feast of St. Timothy), he robed 
 himself in sacerdotal vestments, that he might enter the Con- 
 vent decently and honestly. And when he would have put on 
 his alb, and found it too close in the sleeves, he was troubled. 
 And the Bishop of Faenza said to him, ' It is not close for me, 
 for I put it on easily.' To whom the Archbishop said, ' How ! 
 Is this alb thine ? ' ' It is mine,' said the Bishop. * And where 
 then is mine ? ' said the Archbishop ; and presently it was found 
 that one of his servants had carried it to Ravenna. And the Arch- 
 bishop said, * In truth, I wonder much at mine own long-suffering, 
 yet will I give him punishment ! I cannot inflict it here in his
 
 268 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 absence ; but delay is no robbery ! ' And I said to the Arch- 
 bishop, * Have patience, Father, for " patience hath her perfect 
 work. And the Wise Man saith " By patience a prince shall 
 be appeased, and a soft tongue shall break harness." ' Then the 
 Archbishop said, * The Wise man saith also in the xiii chapter of 
 Proverbs " He that spareth the rod hateth his son ; but he that 
 loveth him correcteth him betime." '* I, seeing that the Arch- 
 bishop was wholly purposed in his own heart to punish the 
 offender, said, * Father, let us leave these words and speak of 
 another matter. Do you celebrate ? ' And he said, * No, I will 
 that thou sing Mass.' And I said to him, ' I will obey you 
 and sing Mass.' Then said the Archbishop, ' Will ye that I 
 prophesy to you of the Pope to be ? ' (for the Papacy had been 
 vacant since the death of Pope Urban IV of Troyes.) And 
 we said, ' Yea, Father, tell us who shall be the Pope.' And he 
 said : ' Pope Gregory IX loved much the Order of St. 
 Francis. Now shall succeed Gregory X, who shall dearly 
 love the Friars Minor.' (For he thought to speak thus 
 of himself ; for he desired much to have the Papacy, and even 
 hoped it ; both because he was a friend of the Friars Minor, and 
 because the master of necromancy at Toledo had foretold that he 
 would be great in the Church of God, and also because he saw 
 himself already great, and that sometimes the Cardinals were at 
 discord in the Papal election, and that at times men spake his 
 name in this matter.) Then I answered and said, ' Father, if the 
 Lord will, you will be that Gregory X : and you have loved us, 
 and will love us yet more.' Yet it came not thus to pass ; for no 
 Gregory X succeeded then, but Clement IV ; nor did this Arch- 
 bishop of Ravenna ever come to the Papacy. So when this 
 Archbishop and Legate had spoken the aforesaid words, he added, 
 ' These are they who shall enter the Convent : firstly, all the 
 Friars who are here ; then, of mine own company, let none enter 
 but the Bishop of Faenza, the Archdeacon of Ravenna, and the 
 Podesta of this city.' When therefore we were come to the door 
 of the church, we found there a lay-brother with a smoking 
 censer, and when he had censed the Legate the latter took the 
 censer from his hands, and censed each friar as he entered the 
 church, saying thrice, de licenso alifrati mc^ which being inter- 
 preted is * Incense to my Brethren.' Then we went to the stairs, 
 and he leant on me, for honour's sake and for help, both in 
 mounting and descending ; so that I held up his right arm, and 
 
 * This text was taken in the Middle Ages to apply equally to servants : See 
 the Moral Talcs of the Franciscan Nicole Bozou. (p. 25.)
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 269 
 
 the Archdeacon of Ravenna his left. And the church was on an 
 upper floor, and the whole Convent of those ladies, to the number 
 of 72, was there gathered together; and after Mass had been 
 solemnly celebrated, and all our council and business was ended, 
 we went out from the Convent and found a plenteous fire kindled. 
 
 And forthwith the bell ran to Nones, and the Legate took leave, 
 and said, '1 invite ye all to dine with me.' I believe that he 
 
 again 1 remvite you. 
 ful and shamefaced that I could not bring with me but two ; the 
 rest went to eat in the Convent of the Brethren. When there- 
 fore I had come to the Bishop's palace, the Legate said to me, 
 * To-day is the Sabbath-day, and the Bishop and Podesta will eat 
 flesh. Let us part from them, and go to the hall of the Palace, 
 where we shall have abundantly to eat.' And he kept me and 
 made me sit by his side at table ; and oft-times he said how he 
 took it exceeding ill that I had not honoured him by bringing 
 other Brethren with me ; for he had invited them all. And I 
 dared not tell him that they would not come, for he would have 
 taken it too ill ; but I told him that another time he should have 
 the whole Convent. For he rejoiced much when men honoured 
 him. Moreover the Archdeacon bare us company, and sat at a 
 lower table by himself ; but he was my friend and acquaintance 
 and sent me a present." 
 
 Here follows a long digression on the Council of Ravenna, in 
 which Philip, despite his own lax morals, stoutly supported the 
 Friars in their attempt to reform the morals of the parish clergy. 
 Salimbene speaks again of his hopes of the Papacy, and their 
 repeated disappointments ; and he gives a pathetic picture of the 
 great man's last days. (429) " So the Lord Philip, Archbishop 
 of Ravenna, after that he had fought many fights and gained 
 many victories, becamed aged and weighed down with years and 
 fell sick of the sickness whereof he died. And, wishing to die 
 in his own land, he let himself be carried on a wooden litter by 
 twenty men, ten and ten by relays ; and when he came to Imola, 
 he would fain stay in the Convent of the Friars Minor, where at 
 that time I dwelt ; and we gave him the whole Refectory to him- 
 self, and he stayed with us but one day. And when he was come 
 to Pistoia, he sent for Brother Thomas of Pavia, who was his 
 acquaintance and friend of old, and confessed to him and ordered 
 well for the salvation of his soul ; and so he rested in peace, and 
 was buried in the church of the Friars Minor at Pistoia. (430) 
 Moreover, this Lord Philip, when he was in his villa called
 
 270 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Argenta on the banks of the Po, and when he went to and fro 
 through his palace, was wont to go singing some responsory or 
 antiphon in praise of the glorious Virgin, from one corner to 
 another of that palace. And in summer time he would drink at 
 each corner ; for at each corner of the palace he had a pitcher of 
 excellent and noble wine in the coldest water. For he was a 
 mighty drinker, and loved not water with his wine, wherefore 
 also he loved much the treatise which Primas wrote against 
 mixing water with wine, which we will perhaps write in this book 
 for the solace of some. Yet, you must know that water is most 
 profitable in wine for many reasons : for watered wine doth not 
 hurt the head or gnaw the stomach, or make the mouth to stink or 
 impede the tongue, or inebriate or make a man wordy or provoke 
 to lust : for (as St. Jerome saith) the belly that revelleth with 
 wine is quick to foam into lust." With which excuse Salimbene 
 quotes in extenso these most unedifying verses of Primas. 
 
 The next whom he names (433) was not strictly a Legate, 
 (though Salimbene calls him so), but a Bishop of Mantua sent 
 by the Pope to preach the crusade in Lombardy. He again was 
 "a mighty drinker," and not unnaturally subject to fits of 
 religious depression : yet he was " a courteous man, humble and 
 kindly and open-handed and liberal." He had been a personal 
 friend of Salimbene's eldest brother ; and one day our autobio- 
 grapher sat a long while with him in the palace where he lodged 
 on his way through Ravenna. The Legate rose at last and went 
 to the window : " Where, then, is your convent, Brother Salim- 
 bene ? " " Then I pointed it out to him : a great church with a 
 tall campanile like the donjon-tower of a fortress," in the shadow 
 of which Dante's bones still lie. " Then said the Bishop, ' Do you 
 believe, Brother Salimbene, that we bishops can come to heaven 
 we who are in so many labours and cares and anxieties by reason 
 of the flocks committed to us unless you Religious, who are in 
 familiar converse with God, help us with your frocks and hoods ? ' ' 
 Salimbene comforted the Bishop with Prov. xv. 13, and xii. 25, 
 and with a long quotation from St. Bernard's sermons on the Can- 
 ticles, in which the saint argues that the monk, who from his safe 
 castle of contemplation looks down upon the sin-spotted Bishop 
 in the outer world, is like the woman at her spinning-wheel who 
 should scold the man returning from battle ; for (quotes St. 
 Bernard from Ecclesiasticus) "better is the iniquity of a man 
 than a woman who doth well." " These things " (pursues Salim- 
 bene) " are said [by St. Bernard] against the double temptation 
 by which men of Religion are oft-times urged of the Devil either 
 to run after the glory of Bishops or to judge rashly of their
 
 Neither Fish nor Flesh. 271 
 
 excesses. So when I had quoted all these sayings, the Bishop 
 said : ' May the Lord reward thee, Brother Salimbene, for thou 
 hast given me excellent comfort : thou art in truth, in the words 
 of Ecclesiasticus, " a man of counsel who will not destroy under- 
 standing." ' After him another Legate was sent to Lombardy, 
 a Cardinal who had been Archbishop of Embrun. (323) He 
 was a man of worth in knowledge and song and letters and honest 
 and holy life : and once when a minstrel had played his viol in 
 the Legate's presence and begged for some gift, the Archbishop 
 answered * if thou wilt fain eat, I will give thee gladly for God's 
 sake : but for thy song and viol I would give thee nought, for I 
 can sing and play as well as thou.' He always kept with him two 
 Brethren Minor. (435) He transformed the Alleluia of St. 
 Francis O patriarcha pauperum, into a hymn to the same air for 
 the Blessed Virgin, O consolatrix pauperum : and he wrote the 
 Summa Copiosd*. After him a certain [Papal] chaplain was 
 sent by the Lord Pope, who would have gathered knights from 
 every city in help of King Charles against Manfred. When he 
 came on this business to Faenza, he gathered together the Friars 
 Minor and the Preachers in the Bishop's chamber, who was there 
 with his canons ; and I likewise was present and heard his words. 
 And he concluded our business in few words after the fashion of 
 [his own] French, who speak briefly, and not like the men of 
 Cremona, who delight in much speech : for he reviled Manfred 
 and accused him to us of manifold crimes. Then he said that 
 the French army would come (juickly, and this was true, as I saw 
 with mine own eyes at the Christmastide next following. Lastly 
 he promised that the matter whereon they marched would quickly 
 end well with victory ; and so it was : yet some of his hearers 
 scoffed and derided him, saying : Ver, vcr, cum bon baton, which 
 was to say that the French should have the victory with good 
 staves. After him another chaplain was sent as Legate, who 
 contrived excellently to bring back the Church exiles of Cremona 
 to their city ; for they had long been exiles and wanderers. 
 Moreover he subtly expelled Buoso da Duera and Pallavicino 
 from the lordship of Cremona, which they had long held and 
 done much ill. So the Church exiles returned to Cremona and 
 gave them tit for tat, destroying their towers and houses and 
 palaces and seizing their lands and possessions, as is the custom 
 in Lombardy. This Legate was followed by Cardinal Latino, a 
 young man and lean of flesh, of the Order of Friars Preachers, 
 
 * A standard commentary on the Canon Law which goes by the name of hU 
 cardinalate, Hostiensis.
 
 272 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 whom Pope Nicholas IV had made Cardinal and Legate for his 
 kindred's sake. (169) He troubled all the ladies with a certain 
 Constitution which he promulgated, wherein it was written that 
 all women should have garments of length to reach to the ground, 
 and only the measure of a single palm further ; for before this 
 they trailed along the ground tails of garments a whole ell and a 
 half long, whereof the Poet Patecchio writeth ' And trains of 
 cloth, long-trailing in the dust.' And the Bishop caused this 
 Constitution to be preached in all the churches, and imposed it 
 strictly upon the women, and that no priest might absolve them of 
 their sins but if they obeyed ; which to the women was bitterer 
 than any death. For a certain lady told me in familiar talk that 
 this tail was dearer to her than the whole of the rest of the 
 garments wherewith she was clad. Moreover, the Cardinal 
 enjoined that all women, both maidens and noble damsels, married 
 and widows and matrons, should wear veils on their heads, which 
 was horribly grievous to them. Yet for that tribulation they 
 found a remedy, which for their tails they could not ; for they 
 caused their veils to be made of fine muslin and silk inwoven with 
 gold, wherein they showed ten times fairer than before, and drew 
 beholders' eyes all the more to wantonness." 12 The twelfth and 
 last Legate was that Cardinal Bernardo of whom we have already 
 heard in connexion with Pinamonte. He had been created by 
 Martin IV, and was his willing instrument in those wars of 
 aggrandisement in which he wasted such incalculable blood and 
 treasure. Salimbene constantly speaks with horror of this 
 slaughter and waste ; he tells us that the Pope spent " 1,400,000 
 golden florins, which sum was from the tithes of all the churches 
 which Pope Gregory X had gathered for the succour of the 
 Holy Land, and which was thus diverted from its true purpose." 
 " These twelve abovenamed," adds our chronicler, " were the 
 most noble Legates and Princes of the Church whom the Pope 
 sent into Lombardy and Romagna, not only for the salvation of 
 men's souls, but also against the wiles of that Dragon, the 
 Emperor Frederick, who strove with his princes and followers to 
 overthrow the liberty of the Church, and to corrupt the unity of 
 the faithful." The remedy, however, was not so much more 
 tolerable than the disease ; and we can well understand the com- 
 plaint which Salimbene ascribes to the monks of Cluny : " The 
 Pope's Legates rob the churches so far as in them lies, and carry 
 off whatsoever they can." (213)
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 The Princes of the Church. 
 
 BUT the Papal Legate was apt to be statesman first and 
 churchman afterwards : the nemesis of that Temporal 
 Power in which so many besides Dante have seen one of the 
 weakest points of the Roman Church. Let us turn now to other 
 prelates who were in theory spiritual pastors first of all, and 
 statesmen only accidentally. 
 
 Salimbene records the reign of sixteen Popes ; for most of these 
 he has little to say, and they are far from bulking in his chronicle 
 as they would in a similar book of modern memoirs. First, in 
 time and in greatness, comes Innocent III. After quoting 
 Sicardo's description of the great Pope's energy and successes, 
 Salimbene goes on (31) " The Church flourished and throve in 
 his days, holding the lordship over the Roman Empire and over 
 all the kings and princes of the whole world. Yet this Pope 
 sowed the seeds of the cursed dissensions between Church and 
 Empire, with his chosen Emperors Otto IV and Frederick II, 
 whom he exalted and entitled Son of the Church : but herein he 
 may be excused, that he meant well. And note that this Pope 
 was a bold man and stout of heart. For once he measured on 
 his own person the Seamless Coat of our Lord, and he thought 
 how the Lord must have been of small stature ; yet when he had 
 put on the coat, it seemed too great for him ; so he feared and 
 venerated the relic, as was seemly. Moreover he would some- 
 times keep a book before him when he preached to the people ; 
 and when his chaplains asked why he did this, being so wise and 
 learned a man, he would answer and say * I do it for your sakes, 
 to give you an example : for ye are ignorant and yet are ashamed 
 to learn.' Moreover, he was a man who, as the poet saith, 
 mingled his business at times with mirth, as this example may 
 show. One day a minstrel of the Mark of Ancona saluted him, 
 saying :
 
 274 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 ' Papa Innocentium, 
 Doctoris omnia gentium, 
 Salutat te Scatutius 
 Et habet te pro dominus. ' 
 
 And when the Pope asked, * Whence art thou then, Scatuzio ? ' 
 he answered : 
 
 ' De castro Recanato, 
 Et ibi fui nato.' 
 
 To whom the Pope said : 
 
 ' Si veneris Romam, 
 Habebis multam bonam,' 
 
 answering purposely in false grammar to the false grammar of 
 the Minstrel. Moreover, one day as he preached to the people, 
 he saw how a certain scholar mocked at his words. So when his 
 sermon was ended he called him apart into his chamber and 
 asked him why he had laughed at the Word of God which is 
 profitable for salvation of souls. The scholar answered that the 
 Pope's were mere words, but that he himself could show deeds, as 
 for example raising of the dead and authority over demons. So 
 the Pope learned from him that he was a necromancer who had 
 studied at Toledo : wherefore he besought him to raise a certain 
 dear friend of his own, with whom he would fain speak and hear 
 of his soul's health. So they chose a desert and secret spot in 
 Rome, whereunto the Pope went as though he walked abroad for 
 air ; and when he was come thither he bade his attendants pass 
 on and tarry until he came again to them. They therefore did 
 as he had bidden, believing that he went down into this place at 
 the call of nature. So the scholar raised up before his eyes the 
 Archbishop of Besmantova, 1 with the same pomp and vainglory 
 with which he was wont to come to Court. First came his 
 servants to make ready his lodging, then a great multitude of 
 sumpter-mules with his treasures, then his squires to wait on 
 him, and then his knights, and himself last of all with many 
 chaplains round him. The necromancer asked him whither he 
 went : and he made answer ' To the Court, to my friend Pope 
 Innocent, who would fain see me.' Then said he ' Here is thy 
 friend Innocent, who would know from thine own mouth how it 
 standeth with thec.' * 111 indeed,' said the Archbishop, ' for 1 
 am damned by reason of my pomp and vainglory and my other 
 sins : and I did no penitence : wherefore 1 am doomed to dwell 
 with devils and with those who go down to hell.' When there-
 
 The Princes of the Church. 
 
 275 
 
 fore these speeches were ended on either side, the apparition 
 vanished and the Pope went back to his attendants." 
 
 It is evident that Salimbene did not feel unmixed admiration 
 even for the greatest Pope of the age. We have seen already 
 (chap, vi) how little he valued Innocent's liturgical ordinances : 
 and (as Prof. Michael points out) he dismisses in a few careless 
 lines that great Lateran Council which made Tran substantiation 
 a dogma of the Church and aimed at a sweeping reform of clerical 
 learning and discipline (22). "Among other things, the Pope 
 ordained that there should be henceforth no [new] Order of 
 religious Mendicants : but this constitution was not kept, 
 through the negligence of the prelates. Nay rather, whosoever 
 will may clap on a hood and go begging and boast that he has 
 founded a new Order. Hence comes confusion in the world ; 
 for secular folk are burdened thereby, and their alms are not 
 enough for those who labour in word and in teaching, and whom 
 the Lord hath set to live by the gospel. For rude secular folk, 
 who have no knowledge or discernment, leave as much by will 
 to one wretched woman living in a hermitage as to a convent of 
 thirty priests, who celebrate mass almost daily for the living and 
 for the dead. May the Lord see to it, and change for the better 
 all that is ill done I The rest that was ordained at that Council I 
 write not here, for weariness and for the avoidance of prolixity." 
 Salimbene's contempt, apart from his obvious zeal for his own 
 Order, is no doubt partly to be explained by the scanty practical 
 result of that Council : but it ia also true that Innocent in his 
 own days often commanded a far less unreserved admiration 
 than in ours. Many good Churchmen were quite as much 
 scandalized by his political struggles as edified by his zeal for 
 religion : e.g. St. Liutgardis spoke of him as only having just 
 avoided damnation, and Caesarms thought little better of him. 
 The conception of the Papacy in the 13th century was in many 
 ways still far from its modern development. Nearly two 
 centuries after Salimbene, even so orthodox a saint as James of 
 the Mark, in controversy with the heretics of his time, could only 
 claim that at least no two consecutive popes had taught heresy, 
 for there had always been an orthodox successor to repudiate 
 his forerunner's errors. 8 It must always be borne in mind that 
 the " state of siege " (as Mr. Wilfrid Ward calls it) in which 
 Romanism has lived since the Reformation has contributed very 
 strongly to raise the characters of the Popes, and to teach them 
 circumspection in their actions. Even in the 13th century (to 
 say nothing of the far worse 200 years which followed) the average 
 Pope generally cuts a poor figure in the pages of contemporary
 
 276 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 chroniclers : and it is a matter of common remark that Dante, 
 who damns so many, mentions even the great Innocent only in a 
 couple of words, as having ratified the Rule of St. Francis. 
 
 Of Honorius III Salimbene tells us that (33) "he deposed a 
 Bishop who had not read Donatus : " i.e. who knew little or no 
 Latin. 
 
 Gregory IX had been the Cardinal Ugolino of Franciscan 
 history : Salimbene speaks of him as a man of strong feelings 
 (88), but had little sympathy with his aggressive politics, which 
 had for a moment well-nigh wrecked the Church (36). Later on, 
 as we have already seen, he mentions the report that Cardinal 
 Ottaviano was this Pope's son. Celestine IV and the inter- 
 regnum of nearly two years are barely mentioned : but Innocent 
 IV, who ruled eleven years and had been a friend of Salimbene's 
 father, receives plenty of attention, though not always of a flatter- 
 ing kind, in spite of his favour to the Friars. (61, 62). Indeed, 
 nearly all the Popes of this period were staunch friends to the 
 Franciscans, a fact which adds all the more weight to these criti- 
 cisms, since Salimbene's strongest prejudices were those of his 
 Order. He speaks repeatedly of Innocent's shameless nepotism 
 (62, 1 76), and has no doubt that God smote him for a momentary 
 weakness in siding with the parish clergy against the Friars. 
 Certain German Friars, who had vainly waited long months for 
 an audience, found their way in at last when all others had 
 deserted the dying Pope, and promised to wash his body for 
 burial : " for he remained on the straw, naked and abandoned of 
 all men, as is the wont of the Pontiffs of Rome when they give 
 up the ghost " (420). The sang-froid with which Salimbene 
 speaks of God's judgment on this Pope will surprise only those 
 who are unfamiliar with medieval chronicles. The learned and 
 orthodox Wadding describes the affair at much greater length. 
 He tells us how the friars in their trouble recited a daily Litany 
 against the Pope's oppressive measure ; and how the Virgin 
 Mary was seen standing on the altar of their great church at 
 Rome and saying " Son, hear them ! " Innocent fell ill at 
 Naples, and died on December 7th, quoting with his last breath 
 " Thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin : " hence a proverb- 
 ial saying at the Roman court " Beware of the Litanies of the 
 Friars Preachers." Thomas of Chantimpre, himself a Domini- 
 can and a suffragan Bishop at that time, asserts that the Pope 
 was struck with palsy on the very day on which he signed the 
 Bull. Thomas of Eccleston tells substantially the same story, and 
 adds that " no beggar not to say, no human being dies a more 
 miserable and viler death than all Popes die." 3
 
 The Princes of the Church. 277 
 
 Alexander IV (453) astounded the world by his freedom from 
 nepotism : he neither made a Cardinal of his nephew nor an Abbess 
 of his niece. Moreover he was a learned and zealous man and 
 "a true and faithful friend, as we see in the case of Brother Rinaldo 
 di Tocca of our Order, whom he loved more dearly than Jonathan 
 his David, or Amis his Amiles. 4 For though the whole world had 
 said aught of evil against him, the Pope would have believed no 
 whit thereof, nor even lent ear thereto ; and he would go bare- 
 foot to open when Brother Rinaldo knocked at his chamber door, 
 as was seen by one who was alone with the Pope in his chamber, 
 namely, Brother Man sue to da Castiglione of Arezzo, my friend, 
 from whose mouth I heard all this. This Pope would not meddle 
 with wars, but passed his days in peace. He was big, that is, 
 fat and corpulent, like another Eglon : he was kindly, merciful, 
 just, Godfearing, and devout." " He died of a broken heart, 
 considering daily the terrible and increasing strife among Christ- 
 ians,"says Wadding (an. 1261.) 
 
 Of his successor Urban IV, Salimbene had a poor opinion : 
 and he attributes his death to the influence of the great comet of 
 1264. But the next Pope was again a man after his own heart. 
 This was Clement IV, who had had a wife and children " in the 
 World," and who as Pope "was so devoted to vigils, fastings, 
 and prayers that God is thought to have remedied for his merits 
 many disorders under which the Church then suffered." (476) 
 After him came a disastrous interregnum -of nearly four years, 
 which men vainly attempted to prevent in future by passing 
 ordinances to which nobody paid any attention. Then came 
 Gregory X, the last of the good Popes in this chronicle. One 
 case of nepotism is indeed reported of him ; he gave the Arch- 
 bishopric of Ravenna, in favour of his kindred, to the Bonifacio 
 Fiescni of Purg. xxiv, 29 ; " che pasture col rocco molte gcnti " 
 (83). All else that he tells us is very much to this Pope's credit. 
 (488, 491) He hated simony: a rare virtue in that century: 
 " he was a good man, just, and upright and God-fearing, and 
 very zealous for religion ; and he purposed to do many things 
 which were broken off by his death. In 1274 he celebrated a 
 General Council at Lyons, wherein he appeared truly holy, for 
 there he ordained many good constitutions." Moreover, he 
 thought to cleave fast to Christ's commands, if he had lived : 
 but he was carried off by death, even as Josiah, King of Judah, 
 at that moment when he was most needed, for the sake of our 
 wickedness who still survive him." But Salimbene finds two 
 other characteristic reasons for the Pope's death he had 
 attempted to continue the imperial line after Frederick's decease,
 
 278 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and had set his heart upon recovering the Holy Land : in each 
 case, in flat neglect of Joachim's prophecies. 
 
 Nicholas III earned Salimbene's gratitude by making two 
 Franciscan Cardinals : but the costly and scandalous wars of 
 Martin IV had their real origin in Nicholas's acquisition of 
 Romagna from the Emperor Kudolf : " for the Popes oft-times 
 seek to extort gifts from the Empire by reason of a fresh acces- 
 sion, since the Emperor cannot fittingly refuse a demand at that 
 moment" (509). Again, Nicholas was sadly given to nepotism, 
 " for he * built up Sion with blood,' as also certain other Roman 
 Pontiffs have sometimes done. 6 I believe most surely in my 
 conscience that there are a thousand Friars of the Order of the 
 blessed Francis (whereof I am a poor and most humble Brother) 
 who would be better fitted by their learning and holy life to 
 receive the Cardinal's hat than many who are promoted by reason 
 of their kindred by the .Roman Pontiffs. We need not seek far 
 for an example. Pope Urban IV promoted to the Cardinalate 
 his nephew Anger, and exalted him in riches and honour above 
 all the Cardinals of the Court : yet he was at first so miserable a 
 scholar that he was wont to fetch back flesh from the market for 
 his fellow scholars ; and in process of time it was found that he 
 was the Pope's son and so they promote and exalt their bastards, 
 and say that they are their nephews, sons of their brethren. 6 Not 
 so did the blessed Job, who saith of himself ' If as a man I have 
 hid my sin, and have concealed my iniquity in my bosom,' etc. 
 And certainly such men as these are thought most honourable 
 when they are promoted to power and dignities, and have wealth 
 and free access to the Pope ; but hearken now to a text which 
 may comfort thee against any man who hath a fat prebend. ' If 
 his sons be multiplied, they shall be for the sword, and his grand- 
 sons (nepotcs) shall not be filled with bread.' Therefore . . . ." 
 here follow six-and-a-half lines which have been scratched out, 
 the only legible words being at the end " is loved, for that she is 
 foul and deformed ; moreover, she is hunchbacked and of 
 illegitimate birth." (170) 
 
 Of Martin IV he speaks frequently, showing little sympathy 
 with his waste of blood and treasure in the Italian wars, and with 
 his embezzlement of Crusade money : he is rather amused than 
 otherwise that the Perugians should have burnt him and his 
 Cardinals in effigy. (510) At the same time, he shows his 
 leniency in omitting all mention of that gluttony and wine- 
 bibbing which earned Martin a conspicuous place in Dante's 
 Purgatory. Martin's successor, Honorius IV, passed among the 
 Friars for an enemy of their Order ; and Salimbene probably
 
 The Princes of the Church. 279 
 
 wrote more about him than we shall ever know. For, under the 
 year 1286, two passages of five sheets each have been torn from the 
 MS., no doubt as containing more unedif jing details than usual. 
 The first evidently contained criticism of the Roman Court, since 
 among the first words on the next page we read (618) " For 
 the Cardinals are wont to care little for such things. More- 
 over, the Cardinals at that time had just such a Pope, a Roman 
 named Jacopo Savelli, grasping and avaricious and of little worth 
 and crippled with the gout. 7 He was called Pope Honorius IV : 
 and not only was he no founder of new Orders of Religion, but, 
 so far as in him lay, he was a great destroyer of those already 
 founded and growing being moved thereto by bribes from 
 certain prelates of churches ; for all things are obedient unto 
 gold." His death (thinks Salimbene) might partly be explained 
 by his renewing Gregory X's attempt to continue the Roman 
 Empire after Frederick's death, in the teeth of Joachim's 
 prophecies : but the main cause was this aforesaid acceptance of 
 100,000 Tournois to curtail the privileges of the Friars. 
 " And the Lord Matteo Rossi who was the cardinal, protector, 
 governor, and corrector of the Franciscan Order, came weeping 
 to the Brethren, and said to them with tears : ' My brethren, I 
 have laboured all that in me lay to turn the Supreme Pontiff 
 aside from his purpose ; yet could I not recall him from his evil 
 disposition (malignitate) which he beareth in his heart towards 
 you. Pray ye therefore to God who " bringeth to nought the 
 designs of the malignant," that he may " deliver you from im- 
 portunate and evil men." Pray ye also to the blessed Francis 
 that he may deign to work his accustomed marvels against those 
 who strive to trouble his Order, that all men living may know, 
 and all who do evil, that it is not easy to fight against God and 
 his servants.' Hearing this, the Brethren turned with one mind 
 to beseech the Lord that He might deign to succour them in this 
 peril ; and, for that ' the prayers of so many must needs be 
 heard' (as saith St. Augustine) therefore He who 'hath had 
 regard to the prayer of the humble ; and hath not despised their 
 petition ' that is, God whereas Pope Honorius was about to 
 promulgate the aforesaid decree on the morrow of Maundy 
 Thursday God (I say) smote him on the fourth day of Holy 
 Week at even, and he died." (619, 629). 
 
 After all, Papal embezzlement, Papal immorality, Popes prayed 
 to death by the faithful, are common phenomena enough in the 
 13th and 14th centuries. Matthew Paris speaks far more bitter- 
 ly than Salimbene about the theft of Crusade money, though he 
 never lived to see its grosser forms under Martin IV : and this
 
 280 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 was no doubt one of the main causes for that decay of crusading 
 enthusiasm of which Etienne de Bourbon so bitterly complains 
 (p. 174). If there is any medieval chronicler who wrote consist- 
 ently of the Popes in terms that would satisfy a modern Roman 
 Catnolic, it may pretty safely be asserted that the majority did 
 not. Salimbene's popes, it must be remembered, were after all 
 far better than those of an earlier or a later age. His complaint 
 as to the distribution of Church preferment, petulant as it sounds, 
 is outdone by St. Dominic's successor, the blessed Jordan of 
 Saxony. Here is the latter's reply to certain Bishops who com- 
 plained that Friars, when raised to the episcopal rank, were less 
 satisfactory than before. " Though I have passed many years 
 in the [Dominican] Order, I do not recall a single instance in 
 which his Holiness the Pope, or any Legate, or Cathedral 
 Chapter, has ever asked me or any of our Superiors, or any 
 General or Provincial Chapter, to find them a good bishop. On 
 the contrary, they picked their own men at will, either for reason 
 of nepotism, or from some other unspiritual motive, and so no 
 blame can rest with us." 
 
 " Like Pope, like Cardinal," as all contemporaries assure us. 
 The terrible accusations which Grosseteste brought against the 
 Papal Court at the First Council of Lyons (1245) are if possible 
 outdone by Hugh de Digne's diatribe against the Cardinals on 
 that same occasion, as recorded by Salimbene. " I heard it " (he 
 says) " from the mouth of Brother Hugh, and wrote it down even 
 as I heard it, fully and faithfully." Fully indeed, for it would fill 
 nearly twenty pages of this book, and I can give only the briefest 
 summary here (226ff). Innocent IV had asked Hugh to attend 
 and give an informal account of his Joachistic beliefs before the 
 Cardinals in Consistory. They began by asking what news he 
 brought naturally enough, as the modern reader would think, 
 seeing that the ordinary friar was a sort of professional go-be- 
 tween and newsbearer. But Hugh was of St. Bonaventura's 
 opinion in the matter, and loathed the ready sociability of his 
 ordinary brethren : in a moment his Proven9al blood was up, and 
 he felt himself " full of the fury of the Lord." Taking their 
 worldly curiosity as the text of his sermon, he proceeded to " rate 
 them like asses." First he compared them to St. Paul's Athen- 
 ians, idly agape all day long for some new thing. Then he passed 
 on to rebuke their notorious simony and nepotism, and the bribery 
 that was rampant at the Roman Court. Both Pope and cardinals 
 (he says) neglect to do as Jethro advised Moses ; i.e. choose fit 
 men to govern in pastoral offices. At Rome, there is no relic 
 half so efficacious as the bones of St. Gold and St. Silver : with
 
 The Princes of the Church. 281 
 
 money, a man may buy a judgment at his will. He quotes the 
 University epigram : 
 
 " On an accusative errand no suitor to Rome need wend, 
 Unless he bring with him the dative, to make that Mammon his friend." 
 
 By this time his blood is well up, and he proceeds to hurl text 
 after text at the princes of the Church. The bitterest invectives 
 of Isaiah and Amos against rich men's luxury and wantonness, 
 and of Christ against the Pharisees, had but prefigured the 
 Cardinals or, as pseudo-Joachim nicknamed them, the Grab- 
 binals (Carpinales). Their very title and dignity is a mushroom 
 growth : in Constantino's time no Cardinals were known : it was 
 but yesterday in 1245 that Innocent IV gave them their red hats 
 to distinguish them from the rest of the clergy 8 ..." And ye 
 travel not, except it be in pomp from your own lodging to the 
 Pope's Consistory, and thence to your own table, where ye eat and 
 drink sumptuously. Then ye journey to your bed and sleep soft- 
 ly ; after which ye are all day idle in your chambers, stagnating 
 in sloth, and sporting with hounds and hawks, or with your nephews 
 and your fat palfreys. Such is the business of your lives, nor do 
 ye care what stranger lies in the street, who lacks bread, who 
 needs clothing, who is to be visited or redeemed from captivity 
 or buried. Surely ye might convert the whole world if ye followed 
 what the Wise Man teacheth, ' Run about, make haste, stir up 
 thy friend : ' thus would men believe in you more than in their 
 priests. Of the Lord it is said that He went about all Galilee, 
 teaching in their synagogues. But the chief Pontiff, who is 
 called Pope, and Bishop, and Servant of the Servants of God, 
 remains shut in day and night, that they may gain money who 
 keep him in prison. ... St. Paul said ' There shall be a time 
 when they will not endure sound doctrine : but according to 
 their own desires they will heap to themselves teachers, having 
 itching ears, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the 
 truth, but will be turned unto fables.' Of whom in truth ye are, 
 who inquire after fables and news. Tell me who of your whole 
 College 1 mean of you Cardinals has yet been written on the 
 roll of the Saints ? Certainly Pope Damasus was accused by 
 you of adultery, St. Jerome was foully and shamefully driven 
 away, but he did wisely in departing from you, 9 and was of more 
 profit to the Church of God by withdrawing from you than if 
 ne had remained with you and had become Pope ; for if he had 
 been Pope, perchance he might have made four Deacons and five 
 Presbyters and fifteen Bishops in divers places, and would have
 
 282 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 ordained patens of glass to be kept. 10 But after his departure 
 from your midst he edited many books, and expounded many, 
 and translated the Bible. ... I have spoken : it is enough." 
 
 The Cardinals were cut to the heart and gnashed their teeth 
 at the bold friar : " It seemed long to them till he should depart 
 from them and go forth from the chamber, nor did they imitate 
 the Athenians in saying 'We will hear thee again concerning 
 this matter.' ' But the Pope, to his honour be it said, praised 
 Hugh for his fearless speech : it will be remembered that In- 
 nocent, with all his faults, had also a real regard for the incon- 
 veniently earnest John of Parma. Moreover, Hugh had from 
 the first stipulated that he should have fair play, and be allowed 
 to finish his speech without interruption. Salimbene, ever glad 
 to show his very great scripture knowledge, remarked that, if the 
 Cardinals had been less taken aback and more ready with their 
 Bibles, they might have answered Hugh with one or two con- 
 temptuous texts such as Prov. xvii. 28, or xxvi. 10 : or xix 25. 
 In this latter case they might have suited the action to the word 
 and caused him to be scourged. To which Hugh answered that 
 he would have taken the stripes cheerfully, with the tranquil 
 conviction that he had had his money's worth of plain speech 
 beforehand : for he had thoroughly fulfilled his initial promise, 
 " I will touch the mountains, and they shall smoke." 
 
 On this point, as on nearly all the others on which I touch in 
 these chapters, the significance of the evidence lies less even in 
 its intensity than in its universality. That one or two men 
 even specially distinguished men should have "rated the 
 Cardinals like asses " is not so surprising : but the absence of 
 rebutting evidence is most remarkable. Similar accusations of 
 corruption made by orthodox writers against the Court of Rome 
 during the last four centuries before the Reformation would fill 
 a volume. Matthew Paris quotes the epigram : 
 
 " The whole world for Home's greed can not suffice 
 Nor the world's harlots for its lecheries." 
 
 Wherever the Pope has made his abode until quite recent times 
 the morality of that city has alway enjoyed an evil reputation. 
 Hugh of St.-Cher, one of the few really learned and virtuous 
 Cardinals under Innocent IV, made a memorable farewell speech 
 to the citizens when the Papal Court was on the point of leaving 
 Lyons : " We found three or four houses of ill-fame when we 
 came hither [seven years ago], and now at our departure we 
 leave the whole city one continuous brothel." Petrarch has still
 
 The Princes of the Church. 283 
 
 harder words for Avignon during the years of the Pope's abode 
 there : and its common nickname of " the sinful city " finds its 
 way even into English parliamentary documents of the time. 
 Exactly the same complaint was made against the city of Con- 
 stance during the sitting of the Great Council in the next cen- 
 tury. The iniquities of the city of Rome itself have always 
 been proverbial : both Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola refer 
 to them as notorious, and they are silently admitted even by 
 Father Ryder in his reply to Littledale's Plain Reasons. 11 
 
 Moreover, the Bishops as a class were if anything worse than 
 the Cardinals. We have seen what Jordan of Saxony says 
 about them : and Salimbene among others, makes the very same 
 complaint : " Note that in my days many Friars Minor and 
 Preachers have been raised to bishoprics, rather by favour of 
 their family and their fleshly kindred, than by favour of their 
 Order. For the canons of the cathedral church of any city care 
 little to have men of religious orders set above them as prelates, 
 however clearly they may see them to shine in life and doctrine. 
 For they fear to be rebuked of them, while they would fain live 
 in fleshly lusts and wantonness." At that Council of Lyons at 
 which St. Bonaventura was the prominent figure, the good 
 Gregory X had roundly asserted that "the prelates were the 
 cause of the ruin of the whole world." This pope did what he 
 could for reform during those brief years which were yet granted 
 him " in a world too evil to retain him." By exerting the whole 
 weight of his authority, he succeeded in enforcing the resignation 
 of the great prince-bishop Henry of Liege, who for nearly thirty 
 years had led a life almost incredible, but for the plain evidence 
 of similar episcopal scandals even under Innocent III. Two 
 abbesses and a nun were among his concubines ; and he boasted 
 of having had fourteen children in twenty-two months. Though 
 illiterate, and not made a priest till eleven years after, he 
 had been elected for political reasons by the special exertions 
 of Innocent IV, the Pope whose influence on the Church was 
 perhaps strongest of all during Salimbene's lifetime. It has 
 been pleaded that we must be lenient to the episcopal scandals of 
 the Middle Ages, regarding the Church rather as an unwilling 
 victim to rude and oppressive secular lords, who too often forced 
 unworthy prelates upon her : but the plea will not bear a 
 moment's serious examination. 15 The Papal Court had plenty 
 of power to minimize or even stamp out such an abuse, if it had 
 cared to throw into such a struggle those energies which it wasted 
 in petty Italian civil wars, in the persecution of heretics, and in 
 the collection of vast sums to be squandered on selfish and
 
 284 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 scandalous indulgences. What is more, contemporaries assure 
 us that the Popes themselves were directly responsible for the 
 unworthiness of the prelates. Salirnbene, (as we have seen in 
 Chapter VIII) quotes the saintly Cistercian Geoffroi de Peronne, 
 whose spii'it came back from the other world to announce that 
 he would have been damned without hope if he had let himself be 
 persuaded by St. Bernard and the Pope to accept the Bishopric 
 of Tournai. Franciscan records tell us how a 13th-century 
 scholar of Paris, being led down to hell in a vision, asked news of 
 his lately deceased uncle the Bishop. " The demon replied, ' I 
 know him not : so many Bishops come hither daily that I know 
 not of whom thou speakest.' " We have small reason to look 
 back fondly to an age when a Bishopric could be spoken of, even 
 hyperbolically, as one of the high roads to damnation ; and when 
 this aversion to the office was strongest among many of the very 
 best men. Salimbene has told us already of poor Rinaldo and 
 the ex-Bishop of Turin : and similar evidence meets us every- 
 where. Gregory X complained of the number of Bishops who 
 besieged him for leave to resign their sees. Albert the Great, a 
 man perhaps superior on the whole to his pupil Aquinas, accepted 
 the Bishopric of Ratisbon for the sake of carrying out definite and 
 sorely-needed reforms : the General of his Order treated this 
 acceptance as a terrible fall. " Who would believe that you, in 
 the very evening of life, would set such a blot on your own glory 
 and on that of the Order which you have done so much to augment? 
 Consider what has befallen such as have suffered themselves to 
 be drawn into such offices : what their reputation now is, what 
 fruits they have brought forth, how they have ended their lives ! " 
 Later on, Albert resigned his see, and died as a simple monk at 
 Cologne. Aquinas refused the see of Naples, Bonaventura that 
 of York. Such refusals are specially plentiful in Franciscan 
 chronicles : but they stare out from every page of the history of 
 the times, down to the Gran Rifiuto of Celestine V, who, before 
 taking the decisive step, used to weep alone in his cell ; " they 
 say I have all power in this world over souls, and why cannot I 
 ensure my own salvation ? " It is generally known that John 
 of Salisbury debated more or less seriously the question " Can 
 an Archdeacon ever be saved ? " but few know the earnest and 
 far more significant discussion in Caesarius of Heisterbach. He 
 begins : " A certain clerk at Paris pronounced a terrible judgment 
 on Bishops a few years ago, saying, ' I can believe anything, but 
 I cannot believe that any German Bishop can ever be saved : ' ' 
 and he goes on to quote Salimbene's Geoffroi de Peronne as 
 saying, " The state of the Church is now come to such a pass
 
 The Princes of the Church. 285 
 
 that it is not worthy to be ruled but by Bishops doomed to 
 damnation." 13 
 
 Lurid as this picture is, it is quite in accord with other details we 
 find in Salimbene, though he leaves the world-renowned sinners 
 alone, and speaks merely of those who have come within his own 
 ken. We have seen already how low one Bishop of his acquain- 
 tance estimated Episcopal chances of salvation (435, quoted in 
 chap. xxi). He tells us of eight Bishops of Parma during his 
 lifetime. The first, uncle to Innocent IV, was "honest of his 
 person, as men report " i.e., chaste : a praise which of itself is 
 significant. (69) His successor Grazia " was held by the Parmese 
 to be a good Bishop : in truth he was no dissipator of the Episcopal 
 revenues. After him came a certain Gregory, a Roman, who 
 lived but a short time, and died at Mantua, a heretic and accursed. 
 For when in his last illness they brought him the Body of the 
 Lord, he would not take it, saying that he believed nothing of 
 such a faith. When therefore he had been asked why he accepted 
 the bishopric, he said, ' Because of its riches and honours ; ' and 
 so he died, without the Holy Communion. After him Master 
 Martin da Colurnio was Bishop, a man of no very distinguished 
 birth ; after whom came Bernardo Vizi. From this Bernard, ( who 
 had founded the Order of Brethren of Martorano,,) although he 
 had received the Bishopric from the Legate Gregorio da Monte- 
 lungo, Pope Innocent IV nevertheless took it away and gave it 
 to his brother Albert : for he dearly loved his kinsfolk." (69, 
 176, 1285 365) Albert, though useless as a Bishop, was however 
 again " honest of his person." He never took priest's orders or 
 obtained consecration, though he held the see for fourteen years. 
 His death was the signal for an exact repetition of the previous 
 jobbery : Master John was canonically and rightly elected, but 
 " then came the Lord Obizzo Bishop of Tripoli, who was likewise 
 a nephew of the aforesaid Pope, and took it from him." (69) 
 Obizzo began less decently than his brother, but apparently lived 
 to become quite a respectable specimen of an Italian Bishop. 
 " He was rather like a knight, and may be described as we have 
 above described the Lord Nicholas, Bishop of Reggio ; for he 
 was a clerk with the clergy, a monk with monks, a layman with 
 laymen, a knight with knights, a baron with barons : a great 
 embezzler (baratator), a great waster, freehanded, liberal, and 
 courtly. At first he wasted many lands and possessions of the 
 Bishopric, and gave them to buffoons ; but as time went on, he 
 recovered the lands which he had given away, and did much 
 good in his Bishopric. He was a man of learning, especially in 
 Canon Law, and most skilled in the office of a Churchman, and
 
 286 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 he knew the game of chess, and kept the secular clergy strictly 
 under his rod, and he would give parishes and churches to those 
 who did well by him." (62). About ten years after Salimbene's 
 death, Obizzo was driven from Parma by a popular rising, and 
 fled to Ravenna, where he succeeded Dante's Bonifazio as Arch- 
 bishop. 14 
 
 This is not a brilliant record for sixty years of Bishops, in a see 
 which was as safe from undue secular influence as any in Europe. 
 In truth, Papal appointments were generally quite as political as 
 any others : and these illegal interferences with the freedom of 
 election constantly resulted in bloody quarrels or at least in long 
 vacancies, during which the people got on as best they could 
 without a Bishop. So it was at Milan after the death of the 
 pugnacious Leo : so at Modena (141) : and Keggio, still nearer 
 to Parma, was thus vacant for ten years, while two noble candi- 
 dates of rival houses fought out their differences. (175) The 
 Papal candidate entered at last into his see : but Salimbene's 
 epitaph shows that he was of the type of Innocent's other 
 creations. (518). "In this year died the Lord Guglielmo Fog- 
 Hani, Bishop of Reggio, and he ordered ill for the health of his 
 soul. For he was avaricious, illiterate, and almost as a layman. 
 He was also as Zacharias saith ' a shepherd, and idol, that for- 
 saketh the flock.' He loved to live splendidly or eat sumptuously 
 every day for the pampering of his body. Oft-times he made 
 great feasts to the rich and to his relatives, but from the poor he 
 shut up the bowels of compassion. He dowered no girls ; he 
 was a boorish man, that is, dull and rude : he had few who spoke 
 well of him. It had been better for him had he been a swine- 
 herd or a leper than a Bishop. He left nothing to the Religious, 
 nor to the Friars Minor or Preachers, nor to other poor : the 
 poor Religious who were present that day at his funeral had 
 naught to eat of his goods, or rather, of the goods of the Bishop- 
 ric. I was present at his funeral and interment, and I know 
 that a dog defiled his grave when he was laid therein. 15 He was 
 buried below in the cathedral church, where the men of the 
 people are laid (yet he was rather worthy to be buried on a dung- 
 heap;) and he troubled many that were at peace. He held the 
 Bishopric of Reggio for forty years save one month." 
 
 The avarice or wastefulness of the Bishops is a common med- 
 ieval theme : many were the prelates of whom it might be said, 
 as Innocent III said of the Archbishop of Narbonne, that he 
 had a purse where his heart should have been. Cardinal 
 Jacques de Vitry, with all his sense of responsibility, does not 
 hesitate to tell us of a priest who suffered so terribly from an
 
 The Princes of the Church. 287 
 
 episcopal visit and from the insatiable demands of his Lordship's 
 cook, that, in despair, he sawed several slices from the body of 
 the great crucifix, and brought them roasted to the Bishop. 
 "My larder is empty : 1 have nothing left for your table but 
 these ribs of the Crucified." 16 Salimbene bears out this picture : 
 in three other places he describes covetous Bishops of his day. 
 Of one (Genoa) he adds that "men even whisper a sinister report 
 of him, to wit that he was not altogether a good Catholic," 
 (317) but it is only fair to note that the author of the Golden 
 Legend gives this bishop a good character : (Chron. Januense, 
 col. 47), and Salimbene seems certainly mistaken in quoting a 
 report that he was finally murdered. He goes on with another 
 anecdote on which Prof. Holder-Egger throws doubt also : " The 
 Bishop of Ferrara was no less miserly and covetous than he ; 
 for when the Patriarch of Jerusalem had come from the Holy 
 Land to Ferrara on a journey of business to the Roman Court, 
 and besought the Bishop to lodge him for one night in his palace, 
 he denied his brother that hospitality. So the Patriarch went to 
 the Court of Rome ; and there after a short space he was made 
 Pope by the title of Urban IV. So he wrote letters to the 
 Bishop of Ferrara saying, ' Know now that I am Pope, and that 
 I may render thee thy deserts for thy avarice and thy covetous- 
 ness ; since the Apostle saith " a Bishop must be given to hos- 
 pitality." ' Yet we read not that the Pope wrought the Bishop 
 any evil : though, indeed, the latter feared it all the days of his 
 life, which itself was a great vengeance. The aforesaid Bishop 
 was a Brescian by birth, and a physician by his calling : then he 
 was made Bishop of Piacenza ; and, going to the Court, he pro- 
 cured the Bishopric of Ferrara. At Piacenza he was wont to 
 keep two Friars Minor in his palace ; but they had a miserable 
 life in the matter of victuals, by reason of his avarice." Our 
 chronicler describes the bestial debauchery of another (Faenza) 
 in words which the Parmese editor felt bound to omit even from 
 his Latin text. This satyr was succeeded by a mere party poli- 
 tician, who received a politician's reward, and was driven out by 
 the other faction. " So this Bishop went to Bagnacavallo, where 
 he tarried all night shut up in the campanile of the parish 
 church, quaking with terror, since he feared for his own skin. 
 He lived but a few days after this, and another Bishop was made 
 in his room." (426). Indeed, good Bishops are rare in our 
 chronicle : and the general level may be judged by Salimbene's 
 enthusiasm over the Patriarch of Antioch, (179) " who was of 
 the family of Roberti at Reggio. At the time of the great 
 earthquake he was Bishop of Brescia ; and having left his
 
 288 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 chamber at the cry of a certain Friar Minor who dwelt with him 
 whilst he was Bishop, immediately after he had quitted it the 
 chamber fell in at the shock of the earthquake ; and he so 
 recognised this benefit from God, that he was wholly converted 
 to Him. For immediately without delay he made a vow, and 
 promised firmly to God that for all the days of his life he would 
 keep his chastity, which he was not formerly wont to keep ; and 
 that all the days of his life he would eat no flesh, which vow he 
 inviolably kept. Yet he gave abundantly to all of his household, 
 according to the word of St. Chrysostom which saith, ' Wilt 
 thou both appear and be holy, be austere with respect to thine 
 own life, kindly with respect to the lives of others. Let men 
 hear of thee as doing hard things, and commanding small 
 things.' But there are some wretched men, who when they ab- 
 stain and fast, would have all men do likewise, and when they 
 are sad, would have all be sad, which, indeed, they do either 
 from avarice or from churlishness. This Patriarch was wont to 
 do as the Apostle saith to the Romans, ' Rejoice with them that 
 rejoice, weep with them that weep,' which, indeed, he did excel- 
 lently, for he could be sportive when he would. Wherefore, one 
 day as he sat at meat with his whole court and many other 
 guests, he saw how a certain jongleur hid by stealth a silver 
 spoon. So the Patriarch called his servant and said to him, ' I 
 will not return thee my spoon unless each one at this table shall 
 first have returned thee his,' and so by this speech he made this 
 seneschal careful, and recovered his spoon. Moreover, the said 
 Patriarch was a man of small learning, but made amends for this 
 defect by other good deeds which he wrought ; for he was a 
 bountiful almsgiver, and was wont daily to say the Office for 
 the dead with nine lessons. Being, therefore, a man with small 
 learning, who made up by good works for that to which he could 
 not attain in books, he might have said * Because I have not 
 known learning, I will enter into the powers of the Lord,' and 
 so forth (Ps. Ixx. 15 Vulg.) : for, as St. Paul saith, 'The letter 
 killeth but the spirit quickeneth.' Because therefore this Patri- 
 arch continued his good life from the time when he gave up his 
 heart wholly to love of God, therefore God glorified him in 
 death by miracles, thus showing that he had been His servant 
 and friend. Which miracles I write not here for brevity's sake." 
 Of another Archbishop (Embrun) Salimbene records "he was 
 made a Cardinal of the Roman court, and was a man of worth 
 in learning and in song and in letters and in honest and holy life. 
 And one day when a jongleur had played his viol in the Arch- 
 bishop's presence and begged for a gift, the prelate answered, ' if
 
 The Princes of the Church. 289 
 
 thou art in want of food, I will give gladly unto thee for God's 
 sake : but I would give thee nought for thy song and viol-play, 
 for I can sing and play as well as thou.' " (323). 
 
 Another good Bishop's life shows that medieval belief in the 
 mysterious significance of anniversaries and symmetrical periods 
 of time, which comes out so strikingly in the "Vita Nuova." 
 " At Marseilles a boy was born on the feast of St. Benedict, and 
 named Benedict ; and after he had been weaned, he was set to 
 learn letters on St. Benedict's day ; afterwards, well versed in 
 literature and almost grown to manhood, he entered upon St. 
 Benedict's day into the Order of Black Monks of St. Benedict : 
 and in process o time he was made sacristan on that same day. 
 Then, many years after, for his good life and manners, the monks 
 choose him for their abbot on the Feast of St. Benedict ; and 
 thus, step by step, on the Feast of St. Benedict the Canons of 
 Marseilles chose him to be their Bishop, in which office he bore 
 himself with all praise. At length on the same day he entered 
 the Order of the Blessed Francis, wherein he lived humbly 
 and with all praise for ten years, and breathed his last on the 
 Feast of St. Benedict. He is buried in a marble tomb in the 
 church of the Friars Minor of Marseilles, and God hath glorified 
 him by miracles. He was, indeed, a man of venerable life, 
 blessed both in grace and in name . . . Blessed be that Bishop, 
 for he began well and ended well, and the Friars Minor of 
 Marseilles had many good books through his favour ; for he 
 would rather ' be humbled with the meek than to divide the 
 spoils with the proud.' ' 
 
 But there is one prelate in this book who needs no apology of 
 any kind : a man little known compared with inspired madmen 
 like Brother Juniper and Jacopone da Todi, yet a far truer son 
 of the real Christlike Francis. Eudes Rigaud, Archbishop of 
 Rouen, would scarcely have run stark naked through the streets 
 with Ruffino and his master : but he plodded doggedly along the 
 thorny path of office for 27 years, and men called him afterwards 
 " The Model of Good Life. 17 One of the greatest scholars of his 
 time, he quitted his books to wrestle with the sordid ignorance of 
 clergy and laity in a great province. Of noble birth, he was one 
 of the few friars whom the princely state and income of a prelate 
 never tempted away from their first simplicity : to the very 
 last he valued his friendship of King Louis and his influence 
 with the Popes mainly for the power they lent him in his daily 
 warfare against the encompassing wickedness. Side by side with 
 St. Bonaventura, he led the van of the reformers at the second 
 council of Lyons ; and he has left to posterity the most valuable
 
 290 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 episcopal record of medieval Europe an official diary so com- 
 plete, that, except for two or three chance omissions, we may 
 trace his movements and his labours from day to day for more 
 than twenty years. It unfortunately does not begin until a month 
 after Salimbene's meeting with him and St. Louis at Sens in 
 1248. But it does record the Archbishop's presence at Mantua, 
 Ferrara, and Bologna early in 1253, when we know Salimbene to 
 have been living at Ferrara ; and of this journey our chronicler 
 tells us the following anecdote. (434) " The Legate dealt most 
 generously at Mantua with Brother Rigaud and all his household, 
 when he passed towards the Court of Rome : and he sent forward 
 his seneschal to pay his expenses as far as Bologna : but Brother 
 Rigaud would not suffer him, saying that he and his whole house- 
 hold could live with becoming splendour on the half of his revenue, 
 wherefore the other half was superfluous to him. Yet he had on 
 that journey eighty mounted attendants, and a proper household ; 
 and when he sat at meat in the city of Ferrara he had with him 
 four Friars Minor, who had gone to visit him. And he had 
 before him on the table two great bowls of silver, wherein food 
 was put for the poor, and his butler always brought two dishes 
 of each kind of food, according to the diversities of meats, and 
 laid them before Brother Rigaud : and he kept one dish for him- 
 self and ate therefrom, and the other he poured into the silver 
 bowls, for the poor. And this he did with each course and each 
 several sorts of meats. Now this Brother Rigaud was of our 
 Order, and one of the most learned men in the world. He had 
 been doctor of theology in the convent [at Paris] : being a most 
 excellent disputator and a most gracious preacher. He wrote a 
 work on the Sentences j he was a friend of St. Louis, King of 
 France, who indeed laboured that he might be made Archbishop 
 of Rouen. He loved well the Order of the Friars Preachers, as 
 also his own of the Friars Minor, and did them both much good : 
 he was foul of face, but gracious in mind and works, for he was 
 holy and devout, and ended his life well ; may his soul, by God's 
 mercy, rest in peace ! He had a brother according to the flesh in 
 the Order, a goodly man and learned, who was called Brother 
 Adam le Rigaud. I saw both often and in divers places." 
 Brother Adam appears prominently also in the diary, from which 
 I shall quote later on to corroborate Salimbene's evidence as to 
 the parish clergy. The bitterest epigrams of satirists and preach- 
 ers, the most heartrending confessions of great administrators like 
 St. Bonaventura, are less dismal on the whole than the daily pro- 
 saic tale of the struggles, and disappointments, and compromises 
 of this other saint who faced the most thankless routine work
 
 The Princes of the Church. 291 
 
 under a system already rotten to the core. Eudes Rigaud was 
 one of those true heroes who plod on through the discouragements 
 which all men are apt to feel in their own generation, and from 
 which most of us are tempted to escape in day-dreams of the 
 past or of the future. We cannot help admiring poor Binaldo 
 for throwing off the Lord Bishop to beg round the town in his 
 ragged frock, and presently to lay his weary bones in a grave 
 which the poor folk honoured with their simple faith. But a 
 closer acquaintance with the morals and manners of the 13th 
 century would move most men to far deeper respect for his sturdy 
 brother of Rouen, who laboured for nearly half a lifetime to make 
 the crooked paths straight.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 Clergy and People. 
 
 IT is sometimes tacitly assumed that, however unworthy the 
 clergy of the early 13th century might have been, the 
 Franciscan and Dominican movements soon effected something 
 like a radical reform. Such ideas as this are mainly fostered 
 by a class of writers who read their Franciscan texts only 
 in the light of carefully expurgated Church histories. Father 
 Cuthbert, for instance, has prefaced his translation of Thomas of 
 Eccleston with a long introduction which takes the most medieval 
 licence with the facts of history. He describes (p. 4) the embar- 
 rassment caused to the clergy by the growth of urban populations 
 in language almost strong enough to describe the present state of 
 things. Yet the plain fact is that England in the 1 3th century 
 had nearly 9000 parish churches to four million souls or only 
 about 450 per parish and that the towns were, if anything, better 
 off for priests than the country districts. There were of course 
 great inequalities then as now : St. Peter's Mancroft at Norwich 
 contained probably about 3000 souls : and Ca3sarius speaks of a 
 specially large parish in Germany which contained 10,000 : 
 though here he probably takes the usual medieval licence with 
 figures. But any attempt to represent the average medieval 
 town parish as over-populated is contradicted by the most 
 elementary facts of economic history : and such descriptions 
 as Father Cuthbert's are simply random exaggerations of the 
 already ultra-enthusiastic picture drawn by Prof. Brewer. 1 St. 
 Bonaventura does indeed complain how great is the harvest and 
 how few the labourers : but the context of this complaint, with 
 its stress on the uselessness of the clergy and the perversity of 
 their flocks, makes it perfectly consistent with the figures above 
 quoted ; especially when it is borne in mind that Italian condi- 
 tions were definitely worse than French or English in this respect. 
 The saint, as one who both knew the facts and had reason to 
 weigh his words, is our most unexceptionable Italian authority 
 on this subject. 8 " The world," he complains, " seems far worse
 
 Clergy and People. 293 
 
 now than it was of old " : " many (plures} clergy weaken the 
 laity both in morals and in faith by their evil example. . . . 
 Very many of the clergy are notoriously unchaste, keeping 
 concubines in their houses or elsewhere, or notoriously sinning 
 here and there with many persons. . . . Simple folk might 
 think that those sins among the clergy were not hateful to God, 
 unless we preached against them ; and silly women might think 
 that it was no fault to sin with them ; as it is well known that 
 some have been so persuaded by the clergy. . . . Many (plerique) 
 of them [cannot hear confessions, since] an honest woman fears 
 to lose her reputation if she whisper secretly with them . . . 
 Again, whereas the late Legate in Germany gave a general 
 sentence of suspension from office and benefice against clergy 
 who solicited nuns of any Order to sin, and of excommunication 
 against all who actually sinned with them . . . it is to be feared 
 that many have come under this sentence." Yet these go on 
 in their parishes as if nothing had happened, and crucify Christ 
 daily afresh : while their confession and absolution are void 
 and their prayers ineffectual, and the parishioners have no right 
 to attend their Masses. Even these, moreover, are only a small 
 proportion of the parish priests who have lost almost all priestly 
 powers, and are therefore worse than useless, deceiving their 
 flocks with hollow ministrations, leaving them in their sins, and 
 involving in their own excommunication those parishioners who 
 ask them for Masses or offer them money. 8 For the unchaste, 
 the illegitimately born, the simoniacal, the pluralists, those who 
 have celebrated in defiance of their suspension all these 
 numerous clergy have become "irregular" and lost the power 
 of binding and loosing from sin, unless (which is seldom the case) 
 they amend and procure the removal of their disabilities. More- 
 over, even of those who have the strict right to bind or loose, few 
 are able to use it properly. " There are in Italy so many inex- 
 perienced clergv that, even if they be well-taught in grammar 
 and other knowledge, yet where a hundred or more rectors and 
 vicars are gathered together, there are scarcely any (viz pauci) 
 who have in fact enough knowledge of the Scriptures to manage 
 either the souls committed to their care, or other things necessary 
 for salvation . . . [The Prelates], given up to temporal cares, 
 wink at these faults, so that there is scarce any hope of amend- 
 ment : nay, even if at times they would fain correct such short- 
 comings and remove the unprofitable clergy, they have none 
 better to put in their places." Therefore the Friars themselves 
 are terribly hampered in their ministrations, since they dare not 
 supersede the parish clergy too openly for fear of increasing what
 
 294 From St Francis to Dante. 
 
 is already the main cause of heresies the contempt of the flocks 
 for their pastors. Almost incredibly dark as this picture seems, 
 it is borne out by the contemporary writers Eudes Rigaud in 
 France, Berthold of Ratisbon in Germany, and Salimbene in 
 Italy. Here, for instance, is the latter's report of the Council of 
 Ravenna in 1261. (403) It had been summoned at the Pope's 
 bidding to collect money against the invading Tartars : but 
 the parish clergy refused to contribute until they had discussed 
 the encroachments of the Friars upon their duties and privileges. 
 " So the Archbishop began hotly to defend the Friars, saying, 
 ' Wretched madmen I to whom shall I commit the confessions 
 of layfolk, if the Friars are not to hear them ? I cannot with 
 a safe conscience commit them to you : for if they come to you 
 seeking balm for their souls, and desiring to confess, ye give them 
 poison to drink. For ye lead women behind the altar under 
 pretence of confession, and there ye deal as the sons of Eli dealt 
 at the door of the tabernacle, which is horrible to relate and 
 more horrible to do. Therefore doth the Lord complain of you 
 through the mouth of the prophet Hosea " I have seen a horrible 
 thing in the house of Israel : these are the fornications of Eph- 
 raim " : for therefore are ye grieved that the Friars hear confess- 
 ions since ye would not that they should hear your evil deeds. 
 Can I commit women's confessions to the priest Gerard here pre- 
 sent, when I know well that he has a whole house full of sons and 
 daughters, and that he might not unfitly be spoken of in the 
 words of the Psalmist, "Thy children shall be like young 
 olive trees around thy table " ? And would that Gerard were 
 singular in this matter, and had no partners like unto himself ! ' 
 So when the Archbishop had thus spoken his mind, all were 
 ashamed who were conscious of guilt in this matter." Salimbene 
 then goes on to record two incidents of which the first, though 
 told originally by the Bishop within whose experience it happened, 
 and repeated by Pope Alexander IV to St. Bonaventura, cannot 
 be reproduced here even in summary. (409) Its moral is the 
 same as that of this next here following. (411) "1 knew 
 one Brother Umile of Milan, who was Custode of the Parma 
 Custody. 4 One Lententide, when he was dwelling in our convent 
 of Fano, he was busy in preaching and hearing confessions. 
 The mountaineers, men and women, hearing this, sent and 
 prayed him for God's sake and for the salvation of their souls, 
 to deign to come unto them ; for they would fain confess to him. 
 So he took a companion and went unto them preaching and 
 hearing confessions for many days, and working much good 
 there with his salutary counsels. So one day a certain woman
 
 Clergy and People. 295 
 
 came to him for confession." It transpired that she had twice 
 been not only invited, but forced to sin by the priests to whom 
 she had come for confession. "He therefore said to her: '/ 
 have not invited thee to sin, nor will I so invite thee : but rather 
 I invite thee to the joys of Paradise, which the Lord will 
 grant thee if thou love Him and do penance.' So he gave 
 her absolution, and said, ' What meaneth this knife which thou 
 hast in thy hand, at such an hour as this ? ' She answered, 
 4 Father, in truth 1 was purposed to stab myself and die in my 
 despair, if ye had invited me to sin as the other priests had done.' " 
 Any reader who cares to follow this subject up should refer to the 
 story of the old canon of Lucca (426). Prof. Michael (p. 75) 
 does Salimbene great injustice in complaining that our chronicler 
 relates so many startling stories in such plain language. One of 
 the worst of those stories (as we have seen) came to him through 
 a Saint and a Pope. It is impossible to get away from such 
 things in facing the real facts of the Middle Ages. So far from 
 being exceptional in its plain speech, Salimbene's chronicle is at 
 least as fit to be put into a girl's hands as many definitely " edify- 
 ing " books of the Middle Ages. It will bear comparison in this 
 respect with the collections of anecdotes for sermons made by 
 Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, the Dominican Etienne de Bourbon, 
 and the Franciscan Nicole Bozon ; with Bishop Thomas of 
 Chantimpre's edifying treatise De Apibus, or with that standard 
 book of religious instruction, the Gesta Romanorum. It is 
 decidedly more decent than the manual which the Chevalier de 
 la Tour-Landry wrote for his daughters, and which became at 
 once the most popular educational treatise of the Middle Ages. 
 If Salimbene, in speaking of the clergy of his time, uses language 
 shocking to modern ears, it is because he has to describe a state 
 of things entirely foreign to modern experience.* For indeed 
 all thirteenth century writers who take their readers into their 
 confidence speak practically with the same voice about the abuse 
 of the Sacrament of Penitence. They show us the confessional 
 treated as a farce on the one hand, or used for blackmail and 
 seduction on the other : moreover, even the well-meaning 
 "groper of consciences" would sometimes put into innocent 
 
 The fullest evidence on this subject may be found in Dr. Lea's 
 vol. i, p. 382, and Celibacy, pp. 350, 666, 632. Some who cannot deny the 
 accuracy of Dr. Lea's quotations accuse him of playing the part of "the man 
 with the muck-rake : " out readers who have gone over a good deal of the same 
 ground in original authorities will only wonder at his moderation and telf- 
 restraint. He might have quoted indefinitely more to the same effect, I ut has 
 rightly judged it useless to multiply evidence which is already absolutely con- 
 clusive to any open mind.
 
 296 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 minds ideas hitherto undreamt of, yet henceforth never to be 
 forgotten, as Caesarius (for instance) complains. Nowadays, 
 when confession is practised by onlv a fraction of the population, 
 under the eye of unsympathetic critics and with hitherto unknown 
 guarantees for publicity, the system is no doubt comparatively 
 Free from those worst scandals which were the despair of good 
 Churchmen in the 13th century. 6 No apologist has ever dared 
 to grapple at close quarters with the evidence brought forward 
 thirty-eight years ago by Dr. Lea ; yet still the ordinary public has 
 only a faint conception of the actual facts ; and modern English- 
 men have reason to be proud that their countrymen are so slow to 
 realize abominations which haunted the saints of the Middle 
 Ages like a nightmare. Moreover, it is necessary to protest 
 against the mischievous modern plea that most of these clerical 
 connexions were virtual, though not legal, marriages. Even 
 if this were true, what religious denomination could hold up its 
 head in any civilized country of to-day, if a large proportion of 
 its clergy, (to suggest a very mild parallel,) habitually broke the 
 law by marrying their deceased wives' sisters ? But the plea 
 itself contains only a very small grain of truth, even if we con- 
 sider 13th century England and Germany alone, where the clergy 
 fought so hard for their ancient rights. On every side we have 
 evidence that the tie was necessarily furtive, scandalous, and 
 precarious. The Register of Salimbene's friend Eudes Rigaud, 
 which gives us the very names of the worst clerical offenders in 
 the diocese of Rouen between 1248 and 1261, shows us that 
 scarcely any of these connexions can possibly have borne the 
 character even of an informal marriage. Many of them were 
 multiple : some even incestuous. None of the evidence packed 
 into Dr. Lea's 650 learned pages accurate as it is reluctantly 
 allowed to be even by hostile critics has the same quiet force 
 as this diary in which the saintly Eudes wrote down sadly, from 
 day to day, the results of his visitations. In very few dioceses 
 in Europe can the conditions have been so favourable as in that 
 of Rouen : yet here we find, at the first visitation, 1 8 per cent of 
 the parishes possessing, to the Archbishop's knowledge, drunken 
 or concubinary priests. Worse still, it was difficult to remove 
 even these, and dangerous in many ways for what security had 
 the Archbishop for those who might take their places ? True, 
 the offenders were ipso facto excommunicate : but they went on 
 deluding their flocks with sacraments and services of which many 
 were invalid in Canon Law : and even this very exceptionally 
 strong pi-elate was almost powerless against the dead weight of 
 their resistance. As his contemporary Bourbon put it, the clergy
 
 Clergy and People. 297 
 
 cared more for a fine of a few shillings than for their bishop's 
 sentence of excommunication : and, later on, the University of 
 Oxford was driven to the same sad confession. 6 
 
 Not half a century after St. Francis's death, it was already 
 impossible for the Friars to imitate him in kissing a priest's hand 
 as a rebuke to others who accused their pastor of immorality. 
 These few years had made it quite plain that, if the Friars were 
 ever to reform the Church, it must be in spite of the parish priests. 
 St. Bonaventura, as we have seen, was driven to speak of them 
 in terms which might well seem too violent in the mouth of a 
 modern Protestant : and 1 will here conclude with Salimbene's 
 racier, though not more damning, evidence. (425) "I have 
 found some priests lending out their money to usury and en- 
 riching themselves merely for the sake of their bastards : again, 
 I have found others keeping taverns, with the sign of the hoop, 7 
 and selling wine, and their whole house full of bastard children, 
 and spending their nights in sin, and celebrating Mass next day. 
 And when the people communicate, they thrust the consecrated 
 hosts which remain over into clefts of the wall : though these 
 are the very body of our Lord. And many other foul things 
 they do and horrible to be told, which I pass over for brevity's 
 sake. They keep their missals, corporals, and church ornaments 
 in an indecent state coarse, black, and stained : tiny chalices 
 of tarnished pewter ; rough country wine, or vinegar, for the 
 Mass. The hosts they consecrate are so little as scarce to be 
 seen betwixt their fingers not circular, but square, and all 
 filthy with the excrements of flies.* Many women have better 
 shoe-bands than the cincture, stole, and maniple of many priests, 
 as I have seen with mine own eyes. One day when a Franciscan 
 friar had to celebrate Mass in a certain priest's church on a feast- 
 day, he had no stole but the girdle of the priest's concubine, with 
 the bunch of keys attached : and when the friar (whom 1 knew 
 well) turned round to say * Dominus vobiscumj the people heard 
 the jingling of the keys. (425). Am I then to preach for 
 tithes on these men's behalf ? or shall I for their sake abstain 
 from celebrating Mass in our convents, that they may the easier 
 get offerings to spend in this fashion ? God forbid, God forbid ! " 
 And he quotes the evidence of the so-called DeviFs Letter, which 
 was commonly believed in the Middle Ages. (419) " Certain it is 
 that, before the Friars Minor and Preachers had appeared in the 
 world, when the secular clergy and prelates were gathered to- 
 
 Cf. Mirror of Perfection, chaps. 56 and 65, where Leo describes how St. 
 Francis used to carry a broom to sweep dirty churches, and tried to tench 
 priests to treat the consecrated host with more reverence.
 
 298 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 gether at a synod, letters were thrown into their midst couched in 
 these terms : * The Princes of darkness to the Prelates of the 
 churches, greeting. We give you abundant thanks, for that all the 
 souls committed to you are transmitted to us.' " 8 
 
 Moreover, many of the parish clergy were as ignorant as they 
 were idle and immoral. Roger Bacon, casting about for an 
 illustration of parrot-learning which would at once be understood 
 by his hearers, wrote " just as boys gabble through the psalter 
 which they have learnt ; and as clerks and country priests recite 
 the Church services (of which they know little or nothing) like 
 brute beasts." St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, Caesarius 
 of Heisterbach, St. Bernardino, St. Catharine of Siena, and 
 Sacchetti made similar complaints, which were echoed in many 
 great church councils during the times of St. Francis and Dante. 
 At two English synods, in 1222 and 1237, it was enacted, " Let 
 the Archdeacons see that the priests can rightly pronounce at least 
 the formula of consecration [in the Mass] and that of baptism, 
 and that they clearly understand the meaning of these two formu- 
 las." The modern reader may well stagger at the abyss of ignor- 
 ance revealed by these injunctions, and hesitate to press them to 
 their legitimate conclusion without further evidence. But we have 
 such evidence in abundance. For instance, the Salisbury Register 
 of St. Osmund, under the year 1222, contains a record of the ex- 
 amination to which a number of curates were submitted who had 
 long been serving livings in the gift of the Dean and Chapter. 
 Five of these men, who had been in priests' Orders for an aver- 
 age of nearly six years, were unable to construe or parse the very 
 first words of the Canon of the Mass the most solemn portion 
 of the whole service, which could be learnt by heart almost in a 
 single day by a man to whom Latin is really familiar. What is 
 more, there is no hint of any measures taken to get rid of these 
 illiterate priests, though the Commissaries did superannuate 
 another worn-out curate whose toothless jaws mumbled so unin- 
 telligibly as to make it impossible, (according to Canon Law,) 
 that he should work the miracle of Transubstantiation. It may 
 be that curates were often hired for Dean and Chapter livings in 
 the cheapest market, as was notoriously the case with monastic 
 churches ; yet even so it is startling to find five such incapables 
 in seventeen parishes. But the contemporary Register of 
 Eudes Rigaud records six similar examinations of clergy, 
 with very similar results. One candidate could not even con- 
 strue annuus : he dimly thought that it meant " often," and 
 when asked " How often ? " replied " Every day ! " Another, 
 whom the Archbishop found " unable to read competently or
 
 Clergy and People. 299 
 
 to construe," promptly gave notice of appeal to the Pope. 
 Johann Busch gives us similar evidence for Germany in the 
 15th century. Abbot Gasquet's attempts to whitewash English 
 religious education in the later Middle Ages rest, like so 
 many of his other theses, partly on disingenuous suppressions 
 and partly on misquotation of his documents. 8 For, as the 
 clergy were, so were their flocks. Bishop Haymo of Hythe, 
 founding an almhouse in 1337 for the special benefit of men 
 of good position who had come down in the world, made it a 
 sine qua non that they should know the Lord's Prayer, the Ave, 
 and the Creed : and we have plenty of evidence to show how 
 necessary this stipulation was. What (for instance) must have 
 been the ignorance of those lay populations to whom their clergy 
 could quote St. Paul broadcast as having counselled Christians 
 to " walk cautiously even if they did not live chastely " ? What 
 was the education of those " many thousands " who, in conse- 
 quence of the lying persuasions of indulgence-mongers, " falsely 
 believe that they have done penance for all their sins with a penny 
 or a halfpenny, and so go straight to hell?" These are the 
 words of Brother Berthold of Ratisbon, perhaps the greatest 
 popular preacher of the 13th century, of whom Roger Bacon 
 speaks no less enthusiastically than Salimbene : and the testimony 
 of Gascoigne two centuries later is more damning still. The plain 
 proofs of popular ignorance and irreverence, though they have 
 never yet been fairly faced, are bewildering in their multiplicity. 
 The many-sided records of medieval life, public and private, 
 show us the people going in and out as they pleased during Mass ; 
 often coming in only for a moment at the Elevation, and forth- 
 with " running off as if they had not seen Christ but the Devil." 
 Among St. Louis's brief dying instructions to his sons we find 
 *' attend the service of Holy Church devoutly and without jesting 
 talk." The knight of La Tour Landry impresses the same on his 
 daughters : and his statement of the strictest theory on this 
 point is eloquent as to the laxer practice of the majority : " sum 
 clerkes susteineth that none shulde not speke no manere thing 
 whiles they bene atte masse, and in especial atte the gospel, nor 
 atte the ' per omnia.' " Silence during the Church services was 
 among the nineteen points of self-denial to which Franciscan 
 Tertiaries were pledged by their statutes. Visitations of great 
 cathedral and collegiate churches record how the canons and 
 vicars walked about during the service, chattered with women in 
 the aisles, or across to each other in the choir, mocked aloud at 
 the officiants, and played childish practical jests, dropping hot 
 wax or snuffings from their candles upon the shaven pates of the
 
 300 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 clergy in the stalls below them " to excite ridicule and perhaps 
 . . . open discord, or at least rancour and spite of heart.' These 
 irreverences had become so ingrained that the Bishop of Angers 
 complained at the Ecumenical council of Vienne in 1311 "the 
 clergy of collegiate churches . . . impede and disturb divine 
 service, to the scandal of many " : and a formal statement to the 
 same effect was solemnly registered by the Pope in his collection 
 of Decretals. Moreover, church councils constantly complain 
 of the indevout way in which the service was gabbled. Ben- 
 venuto, in his note on Inf. vii, 125 ff, explains how Dante's 
 "this hymn they gurgle in their throats' contains a direct 
 satire upon the clergy : " since priests, whose duty it is to 
 sing hymns, labour most of all under the vice of accedia and 
 asinine sloth (asinitatis) ; wherefore such sluggards, when they 
 chant divine service, oft-times can scarce move their lips." 
 Etienne de Bourbon speaks even more strongly : a priest came 
 back from the dead to say that " an infinite multitude of clerks 
 and priests " suffered terribly in hell for the words they had 
 skipped or mumbled in their services. " I have heard " (he goes 
 on) " that a poor scholar came from Paris and helped a parish 
 priest to celebrate Mass. When the priest was saying his hours, 
 he so corrupted the verses that the scholar could not understand 
 a word, but only the sound : so he for his part began to cry 
 aloud in imitation of what he had heard in Paris of a workman 
 crying his wares (even as, for instance, botchers of old clothes cry, 
 or such as go about seeking old shoes, or muffin-men) ; and the 
 priest believed him to have said all his responses aright, for he 
 understood the clerk as little as the clerk understood him that 
 is, he heard only the sound of his voice." 10 
 
 We need hardly wonder, then, that Berthold of Ratisbon 
 has to complain of ordinary lay folk habitually talking at 
 Mass " as if they were at market." " Nay, Brother Berthold, 
 we understand not the Mass," pleads a voice from the congrega- 
 tion. " The sermon indeed we can follow word by word, but 
 not the Mass : we know not what is being sung or read ; we 
 cannot comprehend it." The good friar finds the excuse so far 
 justified, that he spends the rest of his sermon in explaining 
 roughly the different stages of the ecclesiastical service. St. 
 Bernardino, again, interrupts one of his sermons with the same 
 complaint. " Fie on you, ladies I for in the morning while I am 
 saying Mass ye make such a noise that I seem to hear a pile of 
 clattering bones, such a chatter do ye make. One says * Gio- 
 vanna ' ! another cries, ' Caterina ' ! and a third, * Francesca ' ! 
 Oh ! your fine devotion to hear Mass ! To my poor wits, it seems
 
 Clergy and People. 301 
 
 to be mere confusion, without any devotion or reverence what- 
 soever. Do ye not consider that here we celebrate the glorious 
 body of Christ the Son of God, for your salvation ? and that ye 
 should stay so still that none should say a single husk I Yet 
 here comes Madonna Pigara, and would fain sit in front of 
 Madonna Sollecita. No more of this : first at the mill, first 
 grind.' 11 Take your seats in order as ye come, and let none 
 crowd in before you. And now to my sermon again." His 
 contemporary, Gerson, complains in the same words as Berthold 
 200 years before : " they talk as if they were at market." 
 Men and women scuffled and fought for precedence not only at 
 the Communion but also at religious processions : such fights 
 not infrequently ended fatally. 12 Apart from war and the name- 
 less vices of the soldiery, 13 even in times of peace the churches 
 were too often neglected by priests and people alike. Parish 
 churches and cathedrals were used as barns ; a Devonshire 
 parson even brewed his beer within the sacred walls. If the 
 Reformation had come in the middle of the 13th instead of the 
 16th century, there would have been comparatively little point in 
 Dr. Jessopp's articles on " the Great Pillage." The separation 
 of the sexes during service, often revived in our own day, was in 
 those days a necessary measure of propriety. The vulgar 
 proverb that " thunderbolts often fall on the church but never 
 on the tavern," is justified by Bourbon on the ground of the 
 profanities and indecencies which went on in God's house : and 
 he is borne out by an anecdote which Wadding quotes. 14 Really 
 devout people, of course, attended Mass daily : but St. 
 Bernardino speaks as if the majority came only on Sundays, and 
 with very scant reverence even then. To communicate every 
 Sunday and holy day was very exceptional, and such superfluous 
 devotion was sometimes strongly discouraged by the parish 
 clergy. 16 Moreover, we get glimpses here and there of the 
 most extraordinary irregularities even in the most ordinary 
 ecclesiastical offices. Sacchetti mentions " a good many " who 
 did not feel certain that they had been baptized, and whom 
 he consoles by assuring them their faith in the fact would be 
 taken by God as equivalent to the fact itself. The ignorant 
 folk were withheld from accepting extreme unction by the 
 grossest superstitions, and in Germany at least by the heavy fee 
 which the clergy demanded for that sacrament. A Constitution 
 of Archbishop Peckham (1281) complains that there were in 
 England "numberless people grown old in evil days who had 
 not yet received the grace of confirmation : " and there is 
 similar evidence on this subject from Germany, Flanders, and
 
 302 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Austria. Yet it must be borne in mind how numerous and 
 powerful the clergy were, what rights the law gave them over 
 almost every part of their parishioners' lives, and how fully they 
 insisted on those rights whenever they were pecuniarily profitable. 
 Indeed, one of the main causes for the general irreverence was 
 the fact that clergy and people were constantly quarrelling about 
 tithes. It was a matter of common complaint that heretics 
 found their strongest justification in the lives of the clergy : as 
 Benvenuto comments on Purg. xvi. 102 : " we see, as a matter of 
 fact, that the people catch vices more readily than virtues from 
 the morals of the priests." Gower bears him out ; and the 
 professor and the satirist are outdone in vehemence by the 
 greatest saint of their time. " It is impossible," writes Mr. E< 
 G. Gardner, " to reject the appalling picture of the corruption 
 of the ministers of the Church that is given us by St. Catherine 
 [of Siena] herself in certain amazing chapters of her Dialogue. 
 The saint s own words make it abundantly clear that the lives of 
 the great prelates of the curia and of the humblest parish priests 
 alike were too often such that the fire from heaven, with which 
 Dante and Petrarch had threatened the Cardinals, seemed as 
 though it needs must fall." 16 
 
 It need not surprise us therefore to find that, even in the 13th 
 century, the heretics were often distinguished from the orthodox 
 laity by their avoidance of profane oaths and by their wider 
 religious knowledge. We know this on the testimony of their 
 most determined adversaries. " They know the Apostle's Creed 
 excellently in the vulgar tongue," says Etienne de Bourbon : 
 " they learn by heart the Gospels of the New Testament in the 
 vulgar tongue, and repeat them aloud to each other. ... I have 
 seen a young cowherd who had dwelt but one year in the house 
 of a Waldensian heretic, yet had attended so diligently and 
 repeated so carefully all that he heard, as to have learned by 
 heart within that year forty Sunday gospels, not counting those 
 for feast-days .... and other extracts from sermons and 
 prayers. I have also seen some layfolk who were so steeped in 
 their doctrine that they could even repeat by heart a great part 
 of the Evangelists, as Matthew or Luke, and especially all that 
 is said therein of our Lord's teaching and sayings ; so that they 
 could repeat them continuously with scarce one wrong word 
 here and there. This I say on account of their diligence in evil 
 and the negligence of the Catholics in good ; for many (plurcs) 
 of these latter are so negligent of their own and their families' 
 salvation as scarce to know their Pater or their Creed, or to teach 
 the same to their servants." Berthold of Katisbon says the same
 
 Clergy and People. 303 
 
 of the Jews, that they knew their Bible better than Christian 
 laymen, and were therefore dangerous adversaries. At the same 
 time, the Church blindly attempted to right herself by suppress- 
 ing these " heretical " scripture studies, instead of rivalling them 
 by the thoroughness of her own instruction in orthodoxy : and 
 even the enlightened Busch, who would allow the laity some 
 religious books in their mother tongue, disapproved of "such 
 lofty or divine books " as a translation of the Communion service : 
 indeed, finding one in the hands of some nuns, he committed it 
 to the flames. The modern apology that the authorities forbade 
 only unorthodox translations of Bibles and religious books is 
 demonstrably false. 17 The Friars had, it is true, brought a real 
 change into religious education : yet even so the world of 1300 
 was far less in advance of 1200 than both were still behind our 
 present age, with all its grievous shortcomings. The Friars did 
 study the Bible, in the earlier generations at least ; and Salimbene 
 himself is an admirable example. But they did little to spread 
 the knowledge of the actual text among the people, who were fed 
 on glosses and pious embroideries rather than on the plain facts 
 of Bible history. One of the most popular books of this kind, 
 St. Bonaventura's Hundred Meditations on the Life of Christy 
 contains a good twenty per cent, of glosses from the Fathers, or else 
 of sheer romance, based upon the saint's own surmises of what 
 might have happened, or on revelations vouchsafed to " a holy 
 Brother of our Order." In spite of a general warning at the 
 beginning of the book, and several others elsewhere, there is 
 nothing in most cases to mark the transition from Bible fact to 
 pious fancy. The Virgin Mary is constantly brought in as acting 
 and speaking without the least Biblical authority. And the ex- 
 ample thus set by one of the first men of the century was natur- 
 ally followed by others : e.g. by the friar who wrote the very 
 pretty but utterly unbiblical romance of the Magdelene, lately 
 translated by Miss Hawtrey. Chaucer's keen eye noted this 
 tendency on the Friars' part. (Cant. Tales, D. 1790, 1920). 
 St. Bonaventura's book, apparently, was designed for the im- 
 mediate use of the clergy, through whom it would filter to 
 the people : but in this indirect process it would be just the 
 extraneous features of these Biblical romances which would 
 catch the hearers' fancy, and stick most surely. At the best, 
 therefore, the great bulk of the people knew the Bible story 
 only with a strong admixture of modern Franciscan notions.' 8 
 Here again Chaucer helps us : his clerk Nicholas, reminding 
 the carpenter of Noah's flood, has no doubt that he will remember 
 the least Biblical feature in that event as conceived in the
 
 304 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 later Middle Ages the refusal of Noah's wife to embark 
 until she had drunk one more pot of ale with her jolly gossips 
 ashore. It is true that many of St. Bonaventura's fancies are 
 really beautiful : but it is difficult to realize nowadays how 
 inevitably even the most pious fancies ended in hateful false- 
 hoods, among people who had no materials for criticism and 
 were not permitted free discussion. A single example may 
 suffice. The legends of the early martyrs had inspired many 
 generations of Christians ; and the pious enthusiasm with which 
 each martyrologist would outbid his predecessors in describing 
 their odour of sanctity and their joy under torments might well 
 seem harmless or even praiseworthy. Yet these legends, from 
 the 13th century onwards, served to steel the hearts of naturally 
 charitable men against the most devilish cruelties practised on 
 their fellow-Christians. St. James of the Mark, arguing with 
 those Fraticelli whose faith had originated in loyalty to the 
 Franciscan tradition, takes it as a plain note of uncatholicity 
 that their sect does not flourish, like the early Christians, under 
 the unrelenting persecutions to which it is subjected. Again, 
 (he argues) when a heretic is burnt the odour of sanctity is en- 
 tirely wanting : " for instance, when the Pope Nicholas V was at 
 Fabriano, certain heretics were burned there, and the stench of 
 them filled the city three days long ; this I know, for I smelt 
 the evil savour all those three days even in our convent." Etienne 
 de Bourbon tells a similar story ; and St. Bernardino of Siena 
 was of the same mind. 19 When we consider in what blind 
 reliance on this and similar pious figments whole populations have 
 been exterminated at the bidding of men who thought to do God 
 service, we may well be thankful that the poorest in our own age 
 have at any rate some chance of checking mistaken glosses by 
 comparison with the text to which all Christians nominally appeal 
 in the last resort. 
 
 I am quite aware that much of what I have written in this 
 chapter will excite strong disapproval in many quarters, and 
 that in one sense the very strength of my evidence may render it 
 scarcely credible to modern readers. 1 would only repeat that 
 while I have often tried in vain to obtain any real evidence from 
 apologists of the Middle Ages, I am always ready to discuss this 
 and similar questions, at my own expense, with any competent 
 student of medieval history.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 Faith. 
 
 IF we are to define faith as we define no other virtue, and 
 measure it by its outward manifestation rather than by the 
 inward working of the heart ; if we esteem more highly the 
 assent to certain dogmas imposed from without than the soul's 
 own sincere effort to climb to the highest realities within its ken, 
 then no doubt the 13th century was an age of faith compared 
 with ours. But such a definition of faith, which would have 
 made St. Paul's conversion impossible, and left him at best a 
 staunch though tolerant Pharisee, is becoming daily more dis- 
 credited. It seems strange that it should ever have grown up 
 under the name of Christ, who valued the widow's mite not at 
 its market price but at the rate of the inward effort which had 
 prompted the gift. Measured by its living faith, the 13th century 
 can claim no advantage, to say the least, over the 20th. Again, 
 it is only a superficial view of history which would represent our 
 ancestors as the merely passive recipients of a creed formulated 
 by the Fathers of the church, and made binding on the consciences 
 of the faithful by the decrees of Popes and Councils. On the 
 contrary, many of the most distinctive tenets of Romanism grew 
 up from beloiv, and were only accepted later on by Priests and 
 Bishops, Doctors of the Church and Popes. In many matters, 
 of course, Dante's ideas arc far in advance of the current religion 
 of his age ; and in no matter more definitely than in his conception 
 of purgatory as a place where the soul is conscious of its own 
 happy growth in peace of mind as in fitness to appear before 
 God. But many other elements of that religion which Dante 
 learned first at his mother's knee, and could never seriously 
 question in after life, had been born among the ignorant. Thence 
 they had risen and spread slowly from generation to generation, 
 until at last they had been brought into some sort of harmony 
 with scripture and reason by Schoolmen who themselves also had 
 sucked these doctrines in with their mother's milk. Since the 
 times when Christianity first became a great world-creed, the 
 mass of the faithful had never been really imbued with a knowledge
 
 306 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 of the New Testament : and they had retained, with or without 
 sacerdotal permission, much of their old heathenism. Origen, 
 writing about 230 A.D. to rebut the arguments of the philosopher 
 Celsus, laughs at the learned pagan for contending that he can 
 raise his mind to the Unseen by gazing at or praying to a statue ; 
 he shames him by explaining how " a Christian, however 
 unlearned, is persuaded that every corner of the world is a part 
 of God's whole temple ; so that he prays everywhere with his 
 bodily eyes closed, and, raising his spiritual eyes, soars in con- 
 templation above the whole universe." 1 Little by little, how- 
 ever, the practice of image-worship crept in ; it was definitely 
 legalized in 787, after a long struggle, by the 2nd Council of 
 Nicaea ; and in the later Middle Ages Christians were burned 
 for maintaining a doctrine which one of the greatest of the 
 Fathers had described as notorious even among the most unlearn- 
 ed. We see the same process, to the very end of the 13th century, 
 in the canonization of saints, in spite of a Bull of 1181 which 
 claimed the right exclusively for Popes. 2 John of Parma is only 
 one of hundreds who were worshipped without leave from the 
 Pope often without any leave at all. In each case it is the same 
 story. The cult began among the people and lower clergy : the 
 Bishops were gradually forced to take notice of it : by this time 
 it was already an ineradicable part of popular religion, and the 
 Pope had little choice but to sanction it. Or, as in many cases 
 of very respectable cults which still survive, there was no papal 
 sanction of any kind, until the Bull of 1675 granted a prescriptive 
 right of existence to all worships, however little proof of authority 
 they could show, which had enjoyed a continuous existence of 
 200 years. The feast of Corpus Christi, one of the most solemn 
 and striking of all in the modern Roman Church, grew up entirely 
 from below. It was first suggested by a visionary girl : the 
 Office was composed by a young unlearned priest : but the 
 worship caught like wild-fire among the people, and at last forced 
 itself through all obstacles into recognition by Prelates and 
 Popes. 3 The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was repro- 
 bated by St. Bernard, and formed no part of Dante's theology. 
 It was consistently opposed throughout the Middle Ages by 
 the Dominicans, the most learned Order in the Church: but 
 the Franciscans, strong in the popular support, at last carried 
 the day. Practically all the differences between Dante's creed 
 and St. Paul's had originated thus in the popular imagination : 
 and Salimbene better than most men shows us that imagination 
 at work. He gives more than one admirable example of popular 
 canonization : and his descriptions are corroborated by other con-
 
 Faith. 
 
 307 
 
 temporaries. (501) " In this same year 1279 appeared the cozen- 
 ing miracles of a certain Alberto who dwelt at Cremona. This 
 man was a wine-porter, loving the wine-pot, and living in sin ; * 
 after whose death, as men said, God wrought many miracles in 
 Cremona, Parma, and Reggio. In Reggio He wrought them in 
 the church of St. George and of the Blessed John the Baptist, 
 in Parma in the church of St. Peter, which is by the Piazza 
 Nuova, where all the wine-porters of the city were gathered 
 together ; and blessed was the man or woman who could touch 
 [his relics,] or give anything of his own. And they made 
 gilds in divers quarters of the town, and went out into the 
 streets and squares to gather together in pairs and walk in 
 procession to the church of St. Peter, where the relics of that 
 Alberto were kept. They bore crosses and banners, and 
 chanted as they went, and gave purple and samite and brocade 
 of Bagdad, and much money ; all which the wine-porters divided 
 among themselves, and kept to their own use. So the parish 
 priests, seeing this, caused this Alberto to be portrayed in their 
 own churches, that they might the easier obtain offerings from 
 the people. And not only in the churches was his likeness 
 painted in those days, but even on many walls and porticoes 
 of the cities and villages or country towns. Yet this is known 
 to be directly against the statutes of the Church, for no man's 
 relics may be held in reverence except they be first approved by 
 the Church of Rome, and written in the catalogue of the Saints. 
 Nor may any man be portrayed anywhere as a Saint except his 
 canonization be first published by the Church. Wherefore the 
 Bishops who suffered such abuses to be done in their dioceses or 
 under their rule would deserve to be removed from their bishop- 
 rics, and wholly deprived of their dignity. Yet he who was 
 absent from this solemnity was held for an heretic, and envious ; 
 and the seculars would say loudly and audibly to the Friars 
 Minor and Preachers ' Ye think that none can do miracles except 
 your own Saints : but ye are much deceived, as may be seen 
 now in this man.' But God swiftly purged this reproach 
 from His servants and friends by showing forth the lying men 
 v, ho had espoused them, and punishing those who laid a blot 
 on the elect. For some came from Cremona claiming to have 
 brought relics of this Saint Alberto, namely, the little toe 
 of his right foot ; so that all the men of Parma were gathered 
 together, from the least even unto the greatest ; men and 
 women, young men and maidens, old men and youth-, clerks 
 and laymen, and all the men of Religion : and in solemn pro- 
 
 * Vini portator tlmul et potator nee non ttpeccator.
 
 308 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 cession, with many chants, they bore that toe to the cathedral 
 church, which is dedicated to the glorious Virgin. When there- 
 fore the aforesaid toe had been laid on the high altar, there 
 canie the Lord Anselmo di Sanvitale, canon of the cathedral 
 church and at one time vicar to the Bishop, and kissed the 
 relic. Whereupon becoming aware of a savour (or rather, a 
 stench) of garlic, he made it known to the other clergy, who 
 themselves also saw that they were both deceived and confoun- 
 ded ; for they found therein nought but a clove of garlic. 
 And so the men of Parma were despised and mocked, for that 
 they had walked ' after vanity, and become vain.' Wherefore 
 the sinner or the sick man errs greatly who leaves famous Saints, 
 and turns to call on one who cannot be heard. Note now and 
 diligently consider that, as the men of Cremona and Parma and 
 Reggio wrought folly of late with their brentadore Alberto, even 
 so do the Paduans work folly with one Antonio a pilgrim, and 
 the men of Ferrara with a certain Armanno Punzilovo : but the 
 Lord came also truly in the blessed Francis and the blessed 
 Anthony and St. Dominic and in their sons, in whom sinners 
 should believe. Now this devotion to the false Saint had its 
 origin in many reasons : among the sick, because they sought to 
 be healed ; among the curious, because they desired to see new 
 things ; among the clergy, on account of the envy which they 
 have to modern men of Religion [i.e. the new Orders of Friars] ; 
 among the Bishops and Canons on account of the gains thereby 
 accruing to them, as is plain in the matter of the Bishop of Ferrara 
 and his canons, who gained much by occasion of Armanno 
 Punzilovo. Also [the devotion] grew among those who, having 
 been driven from their cities for their adherence to the Emperor's 
 party, hoped through these miracles of new saints to make peace 
 with their fellow-citizens, whereby they might be brought back 
 into possession of their earthly goods, and no longer wander 
 homeless through the world." The contemporary author of the 
 Chronicon Parmense gives Alberto a better character, and seems 
 rather more inclined to believe in his miracles. He describes 
 the Piazza outside the church of St. Peter as encumbered with 
 booths, in which the sick lay ; and tells how a great part of the 
 offerings to the new saint were devoted to the building of a 
 hospital. Of Armanno Punzilovo we only know that, after he 
 had been worshipped for thirty years, the inquisitors found him to 
 have been a seducer and a heretic : whereupon his corpse was 
 torn from its shrine and burned. 4 A still stranger case of the 
 same sort happened in these days at Milan, though Salimbene 
 does not mention it. A woman named Guglielma passed during
 
 Faith. 
 
 309 
 
 her lifetime for an Incarnation of the Holy Ghost. She was 
 worshipped for some years specially by people of the wealthy 
 class, under the direct patronage of the Cistercian monks and 
 without opposition from the Archbishop, until the matter was 
 taken up by the Inquisition. The reader may have been struck 
 by the serious failings which Salimbene attributes to these ob- 
 jects of popular worship in his time ; but moral excellence, 
 though undoubtedly an advantage, was by no means a sine qua 
 non in these cases. One of the scandalous cases quoted by Gui- 
 bert of Nogent is that of an abbot whose claims to sanctity, 
 under investigation, reduced themselves to this : that he had 
 fallen down a well in a state of intoxication and so perished. 
 Canonization, again, was one of the regular forms of popular pro- 
 test in purely political quarrels : there was a constant stream of 
 pilgrims to the tombs of Simon de Montfort, of King Henry VI, 
 and even of the selfish and despicable Thomas of Lancaster, who 
 worked far more miracles than many of his betters. While the 
 soul of Martin IV was expiating in Dante's purgatory those sur- 
 feits of Bolsena eels and Vernaccia wine, his body was busily 
 working miracles on earth. So also did the body of Gregory 
 IX, a far more remarkable Pope, though he was believed by 
 many to have had an illegitimate son, and certainly did more 
 than any other Pope of the 13th century to degrade the first 
 Franciscan ideal. 
 
 The wine-bibbing wine-porter at Parma, and the Incarnation 
 of the Holy Ghost at Milan, were in the fresh bloom of their 
 saintship on the day on which Dante first spoke to Beatrice : and 
 Sacchetti shows us a similar picture after the poet's death. 
 There was a strong popular movement to canonize Urban V, 
 whose life contrasted favourably with that of most XIV Century 
 Popes. 8 Sacchetti, writing to a friend in 1365, does not stick at 
 calling it sheer idolatry. He complains that, in the great 
 Baptistery of Florence Dante's bel San Giovanni the brand- 
 new image of this unauthorized saintling " had before it a lighted 
 war torch of two pounds' weight, while the Crucifix hard by had 
 but a mean penny taper. ... If a man were new come into the 
 world, without knowledge of divine things, and if we told him 
 * One of these two is the King of Everlasting Life ; ' then, con- 
 sidering the painting and the light, he must needs have believed 
 that Pope Urban was He. . . . The cause of this is in the 
 clergy, who consent to these things in their avarice, to make 
 men draw to them. . . . You tell me how Marquis Ghino 
 Cittadella once said that these new-fangled saints made him lose 
 faith in the old. Are not this nobleman's words indeed true ?
 
 3 1 o From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and who IB to assure us that there are not many (assai) who sur- 
 mise that other saints began in this fashion, first with mere rays 
 round their head and ' Beato ' on the label under their feet ; 
 until in process of time the rays have become a halo, and the 
 Beato a Saint ? How can we believe in our priests, when they 
 raise on high the bodies of these Beati, setting lights and 
 waxen images round them, while our Lord and the Virgin 
 Mother are portrayed in the gloom, almost on the level of the 
 ground, and without a single light ? . . . . The Friars Minor of 
 Florence have the bodies of St. Bartolommeo Pucci and St. 
 Gerard of Villamagna and Santa Umiliana de' Cerchi, who have 
 passed from Beati to Saints ; and are all honoured with many 
 tapers, while our Lord and the Apostles, and even St. Francis, 
 have none. And the Friars Preachers have the blessed Giovanna 
 .... and the blessed Villana, a girl who dwelt in Florence, 
 hard by mine own house, and who went about clothed like other 
 folk ; and now they make much of her, and St. Dominic stands 
 aside." So also with the other friars : brand-new saints have 
 almost driven St. Augustine and St. Benedict out of mind. As 
 to the Santo Volto of Lucca, no man knows its history, and the 
 most miraculous thing about it is its hideousness : two holy friars 
 have preached openly against its worship. 6 Nor are the miracles 
 less doubtful : a blind friend of Sacchetti's pressed into the 
 crowd to touch one of these new saints, and came out as blind 
 as he went, but with his nose cleft almost in half : a peasant 
 returning from the same saint found that he had only lost his 
 purse. " I have no space to tell how wide this error is spread in 
 our days, solely because it brings grist to some men's mills. And 
 the Pope pays no attention : he has greater things to do. . . . 
 How many changes have there been, in my city of Florence alone, 
 in the figure of our Lady ! There was a time when all flocked to 
 Santa Maria da Cigoli : then it was Santa Maria della Selva : 
 then grew up the fame of Santa Maria in Pruneta : then Santa 
 Maria Primeriana at Fiesole : then our Lady of Or San Michele : 
 then all these were left in the lurch, all flock now after La 
 Nunziata de' Serri, round whom so many images have been hung, 
 one way or another, that if the walls had not been bound with 
 chains of late, they bade fair to fall flat to the ground, roof and 
 all. . . . And so our folk are clear of sin, God knows how, as 
 though our Lady had more might to work graces in one place 
 than in another ! " 
 
 This then was what men of learning and ability said to each 
 other in 14th century Florence. But in Salimbene's Lombardy 
 of a century earlier it was easier to keep some belief in these new
 
 Faith. 
 
 saints at any rate, in those of one's own Order or party. Salim- 
 bene seems as naively delighted as Charles of Anjou at the dis- 
 covery of a fresh body of " the Magdalene, whole save for one 
 leg" near Aix in Provence (520) "where I dwelt in the year 
 when the King of France went on his Crusade, for I was of 
 the convent there. When this body was found, her epitaph 
 could scarce be read with a crystal glass, for the antiquity of the 
 writing. And it pleased King Charles that the body should be 
 displayed abroad and exalted and honoured, and that a solemn 
 feast should be made in her honour. And so it was : wherefore 
 the contentions and contradictions and cavils and abuses and 
 falsehoods which were of old concerning her body are henceforth 
 ended. For the men of Sinigaglia had formerly claimed to possess 
 it, and the men of Vezelay had it likewise, as they said, and had 
 even a legend thereof : but it is manifest that the body of the 
 same woman cannot be in three places. (For this same cause 
 there is a bitter quarrel at Ravenna concerning the body of St. 
 Apollinare, for the men of Chiassi, which was once a city, say 
 that they possess it : and the citizens of Ravenna claim to possess 
 it too.) Now the Magdalene's cave, wherein she did penitence 
 thirty years, 7 is five miles distant from Marseilles, and I slept 
 there one night immediately after her feast. It is in a high rocky 
 mountain, and great enough, if I remember well, to contain a 
 thousand men. There are three altars and a dropping well of 
 water like unto the well of Siloa, and a most fair road to it, and 
 without is a church hard by the cave, where dwells a priest ; and 
 above the cave the mountain is as high again as the height of the 
 Baptistery of Parma, and the cave itself is so far raised above 
 the level ground that three towers like that of the Asinelli of 
 Bologna could not reach it, if 1 remember aright : so that great 
 trees which grow below show like nettles or bushes of sage ; and 
 since this region is utterly uninhabited and desolate, therefore 
 the women and noble ladies of Marseilles when they come thither 
 for devotion's sake bring with them asses laden with bread and 
 wine, and pasties and fish, and such other meats as they desire. 
 Here then is a miracle for the confirmation of the Invention of 
 the Magdalene's body ; which miracle the Lord showed through 
 her to prove that it is hers indeed. In those days a young 
 butcher was going upon the road, and an acquaintance asked him 
 whence he came. He answered, ' From the town of St. Maximin, 
 where the body of the blessed Mary Magdalene has been newly 
 found ; and I kissed her leg.' The other answered, * Thou hast 
 kissed no leg of hers, but rather the leg of an ass or a mare, which 
 the clergy show to the simple for lucre's sake.' When therefore
 
 312 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 a great contention had arisen between these two concerning this 
 matter, the undevout man who believed not in the Magdalene 
 smote the devout man with many blows of his sword, yet he with 
 the Magdalene's help took no hurt. Then he who was devoted to 
 the Magdalene smote the undevout man but once, and there 
 needed no more ; for he straightway lost his life and found his 
 death. So the champion of the Magdalene, grieving that he had 
 slain a man, even in self-defence, and fearing to be taken by 
 the kinsfolk of the deceased, fled to the city of Aries and 
 thence to St.-Gilles, that he might be safe there, and give place 
 unto wrath. But the father of the slain man, by a bribe to a 
 traitor, caused the slayer of his son to be cast into prison, for he 
 was already condemned to be hanged. Yet in the night before 
 his execution, as he lay awake in his cell, the Magdalene appeared 
 to him and said, ' Fear not, my servant, defender and champion 
 of mine honour, for thou shalt not die : I will help thee in due 
 time, that all men who see may marvel and give thanks to God 
 our Creator, Who worketh marvels, and to me, His servant. But 
 when thou shalt be free, remember this kindness that I have done 
 thee, and give the reward of this good fortune to God thy liberator, 
 to the benefit of thine own soul.' With these words the Magdalene 
 disappeared, and left the man comforted. Next day, when he 
 was hanged on the gallows, yet his body felt neither harm nor 
 pain ; and suddenly, in the sight of all who had come to see, 
 there flew swiftly down from heaven a dove, dazzling white as 
 snow, and alighted on the gallows, and loosed the knot round the 
 neck of the hanged man, its own devotee, and laid him on the 
 earth wholly unhurt. But when the officials and men of justice, 
 at the instigation of the dead man's relatives, would have hanged 
 him again, he escaped by the goodwill of the butchers, of whom 
 a very great band was there, ready armed with swords and staves ; 
 for he had been their comrade and friend, and they had also seen 
 this stupendous miracle. Therefore when he had told all men how 
 he had slain the man unwillingly to defend his own life and the 
 Magdalene's honour, and how the Saint had promised him in his 
 dungeon that she would free him when the time came, then they 
 held themselves satisfied, and praised God and the blessed Mag- 
 dalene who had freed him. And the Count of Provence, hearing 
 these things, desired to see the man and to hear it from his own 
 lips, and to keep him about his person at the court all the days 
 of his life. Yet he answered that if any should offer him the 
 lordship of the whole world he would not end his life anywhere 
 but in the service of the Magdalene, in the town of St. Maximin, 
 in the place wherein her body was newly found in this year 1283."
 
 Faith. 
 
 313 
 
 While entirely agreeing with Salimbene that the Magdalene's 
 body could hardly be in three places at once, we may well decline 
 to accept the butcher's evidence as conclusive. This saint is 
 indeed one of the most ubiquitous and elusive of the whole 
 calendar. Vincent of Beauvais describes her translation from 
 Aix to Ve"zelay in A.D. 746 : though even then some men claimed 
 that she was at Ephesus. In 898 her body was at Constantinople : 
 in 1 146 it was at Vezelay. In 1254 St. Louis went and worshipped 
 it at Ste-Baume, which is the first hint we get of her ever having 
 been in Provence. In 1 267, again, the saintly king showed his 
 impartiality by assisting in state at the solemn translation of the 
 rival corpse of Vezelay, and dividing some fragments of the relics 
 with the Papal Legate. In 1281, that Legate, now Pope Martin 
 IV, gave to the Cathedral of Sens a rib from the Vezelay corpse, 
 and declared in his accompanying Bull that this was the genuine 
 body. Rome had spoken, and the dispute was for the moment 
 nominally settled : yet here, only two years later, we find the 
 Pope's particular friend Charles of Anjou ostentatiously patroniz- 
 ing the rival corpse ; and Salimbene, writing a year later again, 
 imagines that the claims of Vezelay and Sinigaglia are dead for 
 ever ! No doubt the perplexed faithful consoled themselves as 
 Sir John Maundeville did for the similar multiplication of St. 
 John's head : " I know not which is true, but God knows ; but 
 however men worship it, the blessed John is satisfied." 8 
 
 This is not the place to treat fully of 13th century infidelity : 
 but its prevalence may be established by details as manifold and 
 as startling as those which I have briefly summarized to indicate 
 the prevailing ignorance and irreverence. Apart from noble 
 ruffians like Alberigo and Nero da Leccaterra, who had apparently 
 just enough belief in God's existence to lend point to their obscene 
 blasphemies, four definite kinds of unbelief may be traced. There 
 was the learned scepticism of the universities and of Frederick's 
 court, well described in Renan's Averroes : and the scoffing 
 scepticism of the rich and self-indulgent, conspicuous in Piers 
 Plowman and in Sacchetti's Sermons. Again, a certain fatalism 
 and semi-Mahomedanism was brought home from the Crusades : 
 and the failure of these holy wars provoked, as we have seen, an 
 explosion of popular infidelity throughout Europe. Lastly, 
 there was the involuntary scepticism of the pious and faithful 
 soul : a state of mind which is often ignorantly spoken of as 
 purely modern. Joinville has recorded a stock instance of this : 
 Franciscan and Dominican writers are full of similar indica- 
 tions, from St. Bonaventura downwards. Female saints were 
 specially tortured with such doubts. Gerson wrote a long
 
 314 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 treatise on the subject : but perhaps the most interesting con- 
 fession comes from his younger contemporary, Johann Busch. 9 
 " What temptations I suffered as a novice," (he writes) " and 
 especially concerning the Catholic faith, God alone knoweth, 
 from whom nothing is hid. . . . But God Almighty suffered 
 me to be thus tried, because in later years, taught by experience, 
 I liberated many who were buffeted with the same temptation." 
 Indeed the 13th century, which from our modern distance seems 
 at first sight to swim in one haze of Fra Angelico blue, shows to 
 the telescope its full share of barren sand and pestilent marsh. 
 Sensitive souls struggled then too for their faith, with an agony 
 that was often bitterest before the very altar and in the presence 
 of what should have been to them the bodily flesh and blood of 
 the Redeemer. The duties to temporal and spiritual powers 
 were generally-in hopeless conflict : or, within the strictly religious 
 domain, a man had often no alternative but to disobey flatly 
 either his Bishop or his Pope. His parish priest might well be 
 one with whom no honest woman dared be seen to whisper ; if 
 he wished to call in the friars instead, that right was frequently 
 denied him ; nor could he be certain that the friar himself was 
 such as we expect all clergy to be in the present century. He 
 risked worshipping a villain as a saint, and saw the saints them- 
 selves often receiving less hearty recognition than in these days 
 of open unorthodoxy. 
 
 For an age must be judged not only by the few remarkable men 
 it produces, but still more by the attitude of the rest of the world 
 towards these men. It is of course far easier to ticket a period 
 with just a dozen names for even a great age produces no great 
 number of first-rate men and to judge it accordingly. But we 
 do not stop at the fact that St. Paul and the other apostles were 
 Jews of a certain generation : we ask further, " How did their 
 own generation accept their persons or their teaching ? " Why 
 then should we be asked to stop at the fact that a certain century 
 produced Innocent III and St. Francis, Dante and Aquinas ? 
 Innocent was believed by some of his time to have barely escaped 
 damnation, and was often criticized with the greatest freedom 
 in his own Church. St. Francis and his early missionaries were 
 treated by many who misunderstood them with a brutality from 
 which modern England impartially protects expelled monks from 
 France and Jews from Russia. Florence was a true Nazareth to 
 Dante ; she would have burned him alive if she could have taken 
 him : and his De Monarchic, was indeed burned as heretical by the 
 Papal Legate eight years after his death. Aquinas's family tried 
 to prevent his becoming a Dominican and a Saint by foul and
 
 Faith. 3 1 5 
 
 barbarous means scarcely credible to us. He was finally poisoned 
 (so at least Dante believed) by the King who had been the special 
 creation and particular champion of the Church ; and within a 
 few years of his death some of his doctrines were solemnly con- 
 demned at Paris and at Oxford. A greater intellect than Aquinas, 
 Roger Bacon, was all but quenched in prison, and it is only by a 
 miracle that we possess his writings. There was widespread 
 disbelief in the Stigmata of St. Francis even towards the end of 
 his own century. Bernard of Quintavalle, his first disciple, was 
 hunted from forest to forest like a wild beast by the * relaxed ' 
 Franciscans : Caesarius of Spires, another of his truest disciples, 
 was murdered by his conventual gaoler. St. Bonaventura is 
 one of the most heartily abused men in the Fioretti. The great- 
 est perhaps of the Franciscan Generals, John of Parma, narrowly 
 escaped imprisonment for life ; while Raymond Gaufridi, his 
 only successor who dared to take the side of the Spirituals, was 
 poisoned.* So was Henry of Luxemburg, the one Emperor of 
 the age whom Dante thought not unworthy of the throne ; so 
 also was Kilwardby, one of the most efficient Archbishops of 
 Canterbury. The great English prelates of the century were 
 indeed peculiarly unfortunate. St. Edmund Rich died in exile, 
 equally unable to tolerate or to reform that Henry III who, 
 of all our English kings, was most after the Pope's own heart. 
 St. Richard of Chichester, when first elected Bishop, was ignomin- 
 iously rejected. St. Thomas Cantilupe was excommunicated by 
 the no less saintly Peckham, who himself was on such bad terms 
 with our great Edward I, that he retained his canonry at Lyons 
 as a refuge in case of exile. Grosseteste's whole life was one long 
 struggle with the powers of evil in high or low places ; and he 
 died in bitterness of heart. Prominent in the lives of 13th and 
 14th century saints are the persecutions they endured at home, 
 and the continued distrust even of their spiritual advisers. St. 
 Louis, who was a great king as well as a real saint, could not 
 escape even in his own chamber from the lords who cursed and 
 called him nicknames in the antechamber. 10 It is far safer and 
 more comfortable to be a good Roman Catholic in modern England 
 than it was in Dante's Italy. Of most generations it may be 
 said that they build the tombs of their prophets : but when we 
 are inclined to doubt of our own age, let us remember that few 
 centuries have been more ungrateful to their best men than the 
 Thirteenth. 
 
 * Accusations of poison are so common in the Middle Ages that one can never 
 in any particular case assert more than a probable suspicion : but the extreme 
 frequency of these suspicions is in itself most significant.
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 Believing and Trembling. 
 
 is one side of Franciscan life which comes out less 
 _L clearly in Salimbene's story than in other documents : for 
 his was a naturally happy disposition. Many men and women 
 of our own times whose backs are bowed under the burden 
 of spiritual self-reliance, with its possible contingencies of doubt 
 and mental agony to whom God seems too distant and un- 
 approachable without constant help from visible mediators 
 many such are attracted to a Church which promises an end of 
 struggles and uncertainties. This promise may be more or less 
 true in the case of modern Romanism, with its definite limitations, 
 its mechanical completeness on the surface, and the ever-watchful 
 discipline with which it represses attempts to pierce below the 
 surface. Under the present free competition, a religion like this 
 tends more and more to attract a certain type of mind in proportion 
 as it repels other types : so that the Church which promises 
 certainty without the pain of enquiry becomes more and more 
 the Church of those who do not even wish to enquire. But in 
 the 13th century the Church included all minds, except that small 
 minority which was ready to risk the loss of friends, fortune, and 
 life for the sake of an unpopular idea. It was therefore a living 
 and growing Church in a sense very different to that of modern 
 Romanism : a Church in which Dante could write without 
 misgiving "In religion, God cares for nought of us but the heart." 
 And the individual soul, like the Church of which it was a part, 
 had its own growing-pains, far more nearly resembling those of 
 our own century than most men imagine. Even among laymen, 
 sensitive minds were distracted by constant conflicts among 
 their spiritual teachers. Dante had no doubt (though here he 
 was probably wrong) that Pope Anastasius was a heretic. The 
 heresy of Pope Honorius was openly proclaimed in the Breviary 
 itself. St. James of the Mark, as we have seen, could only con- 
 gratulate himself that at any rate no two consecutive Pontiffs 
 have ever been heretical, and that God will never impute the
 
 Believing and Trembling. 317 
 
 guilt of such papal heresies to the flocks who follow them in 
 ignorance. Men's faith was perplexed on all sides by visions and 
 miracles often proved to be false ; and the friar in his cell, so 
 far from escaping these spiritual trials, was frequently tortured 
 tenfold : the early legends show us glimpses of a veritable 
 religious Inferno. The greatest saints had often the bitterest 
 struggles : first with their own family and the World : then with 
 religious doubts ; then with unsympathetic superiors and 
 companions even in religion ; lastly with devils on their death- 
 bed. For we need to realise that, if the 13th century looked far 
 oftener than ours for the visible and tangible presence of God, 
 yet it also realized with even disproportionate vividness the 
 omnipresence of the Devil. Flashes of blinding spiritual light 
 alternated with a horror of great darkness. Much of what is 
 most harsh and repulsive in early Protestantism is a direct legacy 
 of this medieval Satanology. Many of the best minds of the 
 Middle Ages suffered Bunyan's own agonies of mind on the 
 subject of Predestination. The Fioretti tells us how this despair 
 tortured Ruffino, one of the Three Companions, in the very 
 presence of St. Francis. Giles, a greater name still in the annals 
 of the Order, was so buffeted of Satan that " he was wont to say 
 with a sigh as he returned to his cell in the evening, ' Now I await 
 my martyrdom.' " It was the penalty of the constant preponder- 
 ance of sentiment over reason in the religion of the time, just as 
 numb and weary doubts are the nemesis now of a reason which 
 tyrannizes over sentiment. The early friars encouraged even 
 the most hysterical manifestations. The gift of tears in prayer 
 was especially coveted ; and the blessed Umiliana, lacking these 
 for a time, nearly blinded herself by trying to recall them 
 artificially with quicklime. Visions and ecstasies were infectious ; 
 sensual enjoyments of taste, of smell, of touch were eagerly 
 sought and highly prized in religion. Words of prayer would 
 leave a literal taste of honey in the mouth or a smell of incense 
 in the nostrils : again, the ecstasy of devotion would take 
 more violent forms which seemed perilous even to the en- 
 thusiastic David of Augsburg, and are altogether horrible to 
 the modern mind, whether Catholic or Protestant. 1 Indeed, 
 the crazy conceits and vain self-torturings recorded in the century 
 from St. Francis to Dante have never been exceeded, and seldom 
 equalled, in other Christian ages. So long as these inventions 
 were not too antisacerdotal or too contrary to the then popular 
 currents of religious thought, there was no extravagance that 
 did not find its admirers and its imitators. 
 
 Devils, then, were everywhere plain to the eye of faith in the
 
 318 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 most ordinary and innocent operations of nature. To St. Edmund 
 Rich, they rode on the thunderstorm and filled the winter twilight 
 like rooks cawing their way home to roost. To St. Dominic, 
 the fiend was incarnate in a wretched sparrow which interrupted 
 his studies and which he therefore plucked alive, exulting in its 
 shrieks. Thousands of devils would besiege one tiny Franciscan 
 hermitage : friars would be seen brandishing their sticks in the 
 air and driving them away like flies. But the fear of the visible 
 devil was not the worst : there was always the horrible suspicion 
 that he might be lurking under the disguise of an angel of light, 
 of the Virgin Mary, of our Lord Himself. Long hours of tender 
 spiritual talk, of rapturous visions, of graces begged and vouch- 
 safed, of ecstasies faint with sweetness, would suddenly reveal 
 themselves as a mere film of bright deceptions concealing the 
 unspeakable abominations of Hell. Salimbene gives us a glimpse 
 of this, though his stories are far less painful than others which 
 might be quoted. He tells (569) of a friar to whom the Devil 
 came habitually in the form of Saints Francis, Anthony, Clare, 
 Agnes, the Virgin Mary, or Christ Himself. These visions 
 promised that he should become Pope ; and he was delighted to 
 think how much good he could then do. He refused, however, 
 to follow certain " devilish and unhonest " suggestions of the 
 Demon, who therefore told him that he had now lost the papacy 
 by his disobedience. This leads Salimbene to tell a string of 
 similar devilish deceptions, by way of warning readers how 
 difficult it was to distinguish between false and true visions. To 
 another Franciscan the Devil appeared in our Lord's shape ; a 
 third was haunted on his deathbed by a demon assuring him 
 that he was damned, and that his daily adoration of the Host at 
 the Mass had been sheer idolatry. 2 Again, Brother Richard of 
 England told Salimbene a strange incident which had happened 
 in his own convent. " A simple and upright friar, fearing God 
 and avoiding evil," dwelt in a hermitage near Naples : and the 
 other Brethren esteemed him so highly that they made no scruple 
 of leaving him at home alone when they went abroad on business. 
 The Devil therefore, in the likeness of an angel, came and told 
 him "thy life is most pleasing in God's sight: so that thou 
 wouldst be altogether like unto His Son (in so far as human 
 frailty permitteth) if thou hadst yet one thing, for lack whereof 
 thou canst not be saved." The one thing lacking was, that he 
 should literally crucify himself : and one day the Brethren found 
 him half-dead, with one hand and both feet nailed to a cross. 
 Salimbene does not tell us the last end of this friar : in the 
 parallel incident, the visionary held impenitently to his own
 
 Believing and Trembling. 319 
 
 belief, till the discussion was ended by the Devil carrying him 
 off. We might be tempted to dismiss such stories with a laugh, 
 but for their significance as to the frequency of homicidal and 
 suicidal delusions in the cloister ; for the monastic records teem 
 with such stories. As Salimbene puts it, " some by the guile of 
 these devils are persuaded to hang themselves ; others they drive 
 to despair ; others they drown in the waters or dash to pieces from 
 a precipice ; others they cast into the fire, whence they shall 
 pass to where their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be 
 quenched." 3 
 
 Sometimes indeed the tragedy turns to comedy : for instance, 
 (571) " there was a certain Friar Minor of Provence who had eat- 
 en a partridge for his supper, and who then went to sleep. Where- 
 fore that night in his sleep the Devil came and smote him with his 
 fist, so that the Brother awoke in fear, and fell asleep again. 
 Then came the Devil and smote him as before ; and again the 
 Brother fell asleep. Lo then a third time the Devil came and 
 smote him mercilessly with his fist, so that the Brother awaked 
 and cried in fear, ' Ah God I must I be slain for that I ate a 
 partridge last night ? ' To whom the Devil replied, ' Ye murmur, 
 ye are ungrateful and discontented ; I have taken from you the 
 fruit of your prayers.' And with these words he departed from 
 the friar, who now changed his life for the better : for perchance 
 he had been faulty in those things whereof he was accused by 
 the Devil. Hence we read that the blessed Francis said to his 
 companion, one night when he was smitten of demons at the 
 palace of a certain cardinal : " The demons are our Lord's bailiffs, 
 whom He hath set apart to exercise men. For I believe that 
 God hath suffered His bailiffs to fall upon us because our sojourn 
 at the court of great folk is no good ensample to others.' " There 
 is another charming story of a devil who entered into a 
 peasant and made him talk Latin. "But he tripped in his 
 Latin, whereat our Lector mocked him for his faults of gram- 
 mar. To whom the demon said, * I myself can speak Latin 
 as well as thou, but the tongue of this boor is so gross and 
 unhandy of speech, that for very uncouthness I can scarce wield 
 it.' " Our chronicler presently goes on to relate another long 
 and amusing, but very rambling, story about a demoniac peasant 
 who also talked Latin : Miss Macdonell, who has evidently 
 somehow misunderstood it, goes out of her way to found upon it 
 a very unjust accusation of unfriendliness against Salimbene 
 himself. 4 
 
 But it was not always the Devil who got the best of these 
 discussions. A friar of the Mark Tapley type, who was crying
 
 320 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 aloud the praises of God at a time when such utterances were 
 discouraged as undignified by monastic moralists, " was rebuked 
 by the Devil, who said that this place was neither fitting nor 
 honest for the praise of God. To whom the friar answered and 
 said, ' I am so wont to praise God that I cannot cease therefrom ; 
 for I have learned in the Scriptures that He is everywhere, and 
 should therefore everywhere be praised by His own, even as the 
 Apostle saith " I will therefore that men pray in every place," 
 wherefore even in this base place will I praise God with my 
 mouth. For God abhorreth no uncleanness but the uncleanness 
 of iniquity. But thou, wretch, who wert created to praise God in 
 heaven, hast now lost it by thy pride. Prithee tell me now, wert 
 thou of those who prayed the Lord to send them into the herd of 
 swine ? ' To whom the demon said, ' Why askest thou this ? ' 
 ' Because,' said the friar, * like cleaveth to like. Thou art a swine, 
 unclean by nature and by name ; thou lovest uncleanness and 
 seekest uncleanness ; for thou wert created to dwell in heaven, and 
 now thou goest from dunghill to dunghill, and spiest out the cess- 
 pools.' At which words the devil was ashamed, and departed from 
 him in confusion. For all demons are utterly confounded and 
 put to shame by whatsoever recalleth their lost glory and the 
 present misery which they have brought upon themselves." 
 
 Another friar, a friend of Salimbene's, who " made 300 genuflec- 
 tions every night, and fasted daily his whole life long," put a 
 devil to the blush by ridiculing the contrast between his former 
 high place in heaven and his present lurking-place in the body of 
 a miserable harlot. (570) Nor did this discomfited demon mend 
 matters by attempting a diversion. " He paused and listened to 
 a certain young friar who went singing through the convent : then 
 said he to the Brethren who stood by, ' Hear ye that friar who 
 sings as he goes through the house ? He is wholly mine.' So 
 when that friar had come to the place where the demoniac was, 
 the Brethren said unto him, ' This demon saith thou art wholly 
 his.' Then was the Brother ashamed, being conscious within 
 himself of certain faults : and, turning aside from him, he found 
 a priest, to whom he confessed those sins whereof he had greatest 
 remorse of conscience. Then he returned and said again to the 
 demon, ' Tell me, wretch, what have I done that I should be 
 wholly thine ? ' To whom the demon answered, ' A little while 
 ago I knew well ; but now I have forgotten. Yet know thou 
 beforehand, that I have bound such a chain to thy feet as, before 
 forty days are past, shall draw thee out from this Order, and 
 thou shalt go thy way and return to thy vomit.' And it came 
 to pass as the Devil had said. See now the virtue of confession,
 
 Believing and Trembling. 321 
 
 whereby sins are hidden ; for at first the Devil knew, yet after 
 Confession he could know nothing." This anecdote is a very 
 mild specimen of a type which even highly accredited medieval 
 moralists frequently repeat with great gusto. The point is that 
 confession not only annuls the guilt of sin before God, but also 
 justifies the criminal in denying it altogether to his fellow-men : 
 as we are told that, even in modern Ireland, a priest who has 
 confessed and absolved a penitent of political murder will speak 
 of him henceforth in public as " the innocent man." 6 
 
 On the other hand, this casting out of demons had its dangerous 
 side. (572) " A certain clerk named Guglielmo, who dwelt in 
 Parma, was a comely man, strong and of great stature, evil-mind- 
 ed, and a conjuror of demons. So one day when the wife of one 
 Ghidino, a blacksmith, was possessed by a demon, this aforesaid 
 clerk came and began to conjure the demon to depart from her. 
 To whom the demon said, ' I will indeed depart from her, but for 
 thee I will weave such a web that thou shalt nevermore molest 
 me nor drive me forth from my abodes ; for know well that I 
 will shortly cause thee to be slain, and thou shalt slay another.' 
 And it came to pass even as he had said ; for a few months 
 afterwards, in that same city of Parma, the clerk fell out in a 
 certain courtyard with Ardoino da Chiavari, and they so rushed 
 upon each other that, the strong stumbling against the strong, 
 both fell together. Our chronicler presently goes on to enumer- 
 ate "the eight perils whereof the Apostle speaketh" (2 Cor. viii, 
 11, 26), and adds "as Brother Bouaventura the Minister-general 
 said, in his sermons to the Brethren at Bologna whereat I was 
 always present, ' to consent to the temptations and suggestions of 
 demons is as though a man should throw himself from the summit 
 of a most lofty tower, and, when he is fallen half-way, should 
 seek to catch some pole or stake to arrest his fall.' " 
 
 These abbreviated quotations give but a faint idea of the 
 place held by the Devil in even a well-balanced imagination of 
 the Middle Ages. Difficulties and temptations change their 
 forms as time goes on : yet then, as now, Christ brought to many 
 souls not peace but a sword. In spite of the elaborate organiza- 
 tion of the hierarchy and the theory of the sacraments, every 
 man had still to work his own salvation with fear and trembling : 
 and desperate pangs of conscience were a sign not of reprobation 
 but of grace. 
 
 Moreover, as a vigorous soul is never without its struggles, so 
 a vigorous Church has always its sects. Those who are curious 
 to learn how Italy was distracted during this period should con- 
 sult Dr. Lea's great History of the Inquisition. I have no room
 
 322 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 here but for those religious aberrations which came under 
 Salimbene's own eyes. These all throw unjust as it would be 
 to press the comparison too closely very interesting side-lights 
 on the beginnings of the Franciscans themselves. 
 
 One sect originated indirectly with Salimbene's dear friend 
 and master, Hugues de Digne. (254) Two laymen, touched by 
 his preaching, came and begged admission to the Order : but he 
 refused and put them off with Joachitic parables which they 
 very naturally misunderstood. " Go into the woods," said Hugh, 
 " and learn to eat roots, for the Tribulations are at hand." They 
 took him literally, and formed an order of wild hermits whom the 
 Franciscans called derisively Bushmen (Boscarioli), but who 
 called themselves Friars of the Sack. " They made themselves 
 striped garments of black and white .... then in process of 
 time they made themselves a frock of sackcloth not sackcloth 
 of hair [as in the Apocalypse] but almost of fine linen : and be- 
 neath this they had excellent tunics, and at their neck a mantle 
 of sackcloth, whence they are called Friars of the Sack. And 
 they caused sandals to be made for them, such as the Friars 
 Minor have : for all who wish to make some new Rule always 
 beg somewhat from our Order either our sandals or our cord or 
 even our frock. But now we have a papal privilege that no man 
 shall wear such a habit as might cause him to be taken for a 
 Friar Minor : for the so-called Britti Friars of the Mark of 
 Ancona were wont to wear just such an habit : but Pope Alex- 
 ander IV brought them into one congregation with the Austin 
 Friars." Meanwhile these friars waxed in numbers and became 
 indefatigable beggars, to the disgust of the older Mendicants. 
 " One day the Lady Giuletta degli Adhelardi, a devotee of ours, 
 seeing these Friars of the Sack begging their bread from door to 
 door in Modena, said to the Franciscans, ' I tell you truly, 
 Brethren, we had already so many bags and wallets to empty our 
 granaries, that this Order of the Sack was not needed.' ' Salim- 
 bene, therefore, is convinced that Gregory X was divinely 
 inspired in abolishing the Order, as tending "to weary and 
 burden Christian folk with the multitude of beggars." He 
 goes on to explain how the Austin Friars were organized by 
 Alexander IV, who compelled half-a-dozen sects of begging 
 Hermits to coalesce into that single Order. Among these were 
 the Giambonitani, " founded by one Giovanni Bono, who lived 
 in the days of St. Francis ; his body was buried in my days at 
 Mantua, and his son I have seen and known, Brother Matthew 
 of Modena, a fat man." Yet he remarks complacently that 
 these Austin Friars existed even now only on sufferance, and in
 
 Believing and Trembling. 323 
 
 daily peril of disruption. An Austin Friar might possibly have 
 retorted the criticism on the Franciscan Third Order, which was 
 already getting so seriously out of hand that St. Bonaventura 
 seemed to look upon it as a hindrance rather than a help. 8 
 
 The strangest story of all, however, is told on p. 255 ff., with 
 even more than Salimbene's usual superfluity of repetitions and 
 abusive epithets. In or about 1260 the year foretold for 
 Joachim's Reign of the Holy Ghost, and actually marked by the 
 rise of the Flagellants a new Order arose. It grew up, as usual, 
 among the common people. Salimbene was living in the convent 
 of his native Parma, when one Gerardino Segarello applied for 
 admission and was refused, being " of vile parentage, illiterate 
 and a layman, unlearned and foolish." 7 Nothing daunted, he 
 lingered in their churches, studying how to found a religion of 
 his own. This was of course contrary to the definite decree of 
 the Lateran Council (1215) : but we have seen already how little 
 the decrees of that great Council were regarded. Segarello hit at 
 last upon the idea of imitating our Lord's outward actions even 
 more literally, and with even more scenic effect, than the Fran- 
 ciscans. His first suggestion came from a lamp-cover in their 
 church, embossed with figures of the Apostles " wearing sandals 
 on their feet, and mantles wrapped round their shoulders, accord- 
 ing to the ancient traditions among painters." He conformed 
 himself carefully to this model, letting his hair and beard grow, 
 making a mantle of coarse woollen stuff which he threw over his 
 shoulders, and " taking the Franciscan sandals and cord : for 
 whosoever would make a new congregation must needs steal from 
 our Order." Then, selling his house, he took the money and cast 
 it " not to the poor, but to the rabble at play in the piazza, who 
 departed to continue their dicing, and blasphemed the living God 
 in the giver's very ears. He thought to fulfil Christ's counsel : 
 yet Christ said not ' Give to the rabble ' but ' Give to the poor : ' 
 give to those who praise God, and not to those who blaspheme 
 Him and the virgin mother of Christ, who made the Son of God 
 our brother. Again, wishing to make himself like to the Son of 
 God, he caused himself to be circumcised, which is contrary to 
 the words of the Apostle, (Gal. vi. 15). Moreover, he lay in a 
 cradle wrapped in swaddling-clothes, and sucked milk from 
 the breast of a certain ignorant woman. After that he went 
 to a certain village called Collechio ; and standing in the 
 midst of the road, in his simple folly he cried aloud to the 
 passers-by * Go ye into my v ineyard.' Such as knew him 
 held him for a madman, knowing that he had there no vine- 
 yard : but the hill-folk, who knew him not, entered the vine-
 
 324 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 yard that lay towards his outstretched hand, and ate other 
 men's grapes, thinking themselves bidden thereto by the proper 
 lord. Moreover he spake to none and saluted none, thinking 
 thereby to fulfil that word of Christ's * Salute no man by the 
 way.' And often would he say the Lord's word ' Penitenz- 
 affitCy (for he was too rude and unlearned to say ' Pcenitentiam 
 agite : '*) and thus in process of time said his followers for many 
 years, being rustics and unlearned men. If ever he were bidden 
 to dine or to sup or to lodge, he ever answered in doubtful phrase, 
 saying *1 will come or I will not come : ' which was against that 
 word of the Lord * Let your speech be Yea, yea, No, no.' So 
 when he came to the house of the Brethren Minor, and asked 
 whether this Brother or that were in the house, the porter would 
 answer him scoffingly and derisively, saying ' Either he is in the 
 house, or he is not. 1 This is as grammarians teach us, ' In what- 
 ever case the question is asked, in that same the answer should 
 be made.'" Salimbene further accuses him of practising an 
 ordeal not infrequent among ignorant enthusiasts in the earlier 
 days of Christianity, but already repugnant to the moral sense of 
 the 13th century. 
 
 Crerardino soon had about thirty followers. He called his 
 Order the Apostles : Salimbene can never bring himself to write 
 the name without some scornful addition ; often he parodies the 
 Apocalypse : " They who say that they are Apostles and are 
 not, but are the synagogue of Satan a congregation of fools 
 and lewd folk, and forerunners of the disciples of Antichrist." 
 The first proselyte had been " a certain servant of the Friars 
 Minor of tarma, Robert by name, who was a disobedient and 
 wayward youth, of whom the Wise Man writeth in Prov. xxix, 
 19, 21 : whereof a certain tyrant said well ' the race of menials 
 cannot be corrected but by torture.' Gerardino persuaded this 
 servant to leave us and cleave to him : and this was to our great 
 profit, for we got an excellent servant in his place, as it is written in 
 Esaias ' instead of the shrub shall come up the fir-tree, and instead 
 of the nettle shall come up the myrtle-tree.' " He was " like 
 unto Judas Iscariot," not only because " he took away with him 
 the Brethren's knife and cup and napkin, as though they had been 
 his own," but also because he bare the bag of these false Apostles, 
 to his own private profit. For, sad to say, "men and women 
 gave to them more willingly than to us and the Dominicans." 
 Yet this new Order could neither pray for men, nor preach, nor 
 sing masses or other offices : they were merely " a congregation 
 
 * A.V. " Repent ! " Douay version " Do penance ! "
 
 Believing and Trembling. 325 
 
 of rascals and swineherds and false and lewd folk ; of fools and 
 of beastly ribalds, ignorant as brute beasts boorish and beastly- 
 men," who, like the Gibeonites, had crept in under false pretences 
 among the Lord's chosen people, and deserved to be made mere 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water nay "quibus magis 
 incomberet purgare latrinos out alia vilia opera exercere" 
 
 They were indeed mere religious tramps, spending their days 
 in idle gossip, and coming back to their common doss-house only 
 to eat and sleep. Salimbene complains bitterly that they actually 
 carried money about with them : for the Franciscan, though 
 ready to accept any sum whatever through a third person, still 
 carefully abstained from touching it with his own fingers, for 
 Lady Poverty's sake. 8 He is also shocked at their going about 
 singly, unlike other Religious, who were bound to go about two 
 and two for the avoidance of scandal. Moreover, they talked 
 and went about freely with women as indeed St. Francis and 
 the very earliest Brethren had done with St. Clare and her sisters. 
 But " the malice of the times " had long rendered such ideal 
 relations impossible to the Friars ; and Salimbene is all the more 
 angry at the licence of the Apostles : " they run about the city 
 all day beholding women." Worse still, "they are not in a 
 state of salvation, since some of them keep not the rule of 
 chastity to which all religious Orders are bound : . . . . more- 
 over, trusting to St. Paul's words (1 Cor. ix, 5), these, who 
 believe themselves to be Apostles, led about with them the lady 
 Tripia, sister to Brother Guido Putagio, who was many years 
 their head : and likewise many other Avomen also, who were an 
 occasion of ruin to them. So that, in literal truth, ribalds and 
 seducers enter in among these Apostles ; and deceivers and 
 robbers and fornicators, committing much folly with women and 
 also with boys, and returning afterwards to their ribaldry." 
 On another point also the Apostles pushed Franciscan ideas to a 
 dangerous extreme. "They would fain be content with one 
 single tunic, believing this to be commanded them of God. 
 Yet therein they err ; for when the Lord said, * nor two coats,' 
 He did not understand these words literally, to forbid more 
 than one to such as might be in need, both for the washing 
 away of dirt, and for avoiding harm from cold. It is plain 
 therefore that the Apostles of Gerardino Segarello are most 
 foolish to be contented with a single tunic. Moreover, they 
 expose themselves to danger of cold and of grievous illness, or 
 even of death : or again to much wretchedness, both of vermin, 
 which they cannot shake off, and also of sweat and dust and 
 filth. For they can neither shake nor wash their tunic, unless
 
 326 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 they would be naked meanwhile. Whence one day a certain 
 woman said scoffingly to two Friars Minor 'Know that an Apostle 
 lieth in my bed at home, where he will remain until his tunic is 
 dry, which I have washed.' The Brethren Minor, hearing this, 
 began to laugh at the woman's folly, and that of the unwise 
 Apostle." Nothing is apt to be more irritating than the 
 exaggerated imitation of our own mannerisms : and though it 
 was counted saintly in one Franciscan that he wore the same 
 garment for thirty years, the same feat seemed merely sordid in 
 an " Apostle." It is interesting, again, that our chronicler should 
 apply to these Apostles the very text which was oftenest quoted 
 against the Friars themselves by their adversaries : " they who 
 creep into houses, and lead captive silly women loaden with sins, 
 who are led away with divers desires : ever learning, and never 
 attaining to the knowledge of the truth." 
 
 Salimbene is specially disgusted at these men's ignorance : 
 " These fellows, who say that they are Apostles and are not, have 
 neither book-learning nor mother-wit ; and when they would fain 
 preach without scriptures they busy themselves with goat's wool 
 and the fifth wheel of a waggon, 9 for they speak buffooneries and 
 sow heresies abroad, ' understanding neither the things they say, 
 nor whereof they affirm.' Of whom one may say with the 
 prophet Micah : ' thou shalt sow, but shalt not reap ; thou shalt 
 tread the olives but not be anointed with the oil ; and the new 
 wine, but shalt not drink the wine : ' which is to say that these 
 ribalds of Brother Gerardino Segarello, who call themselves 
 Apostles, shall have no reward of their preaching, for they know 
 not what they say : nay, in the words of the Scripture ' they shall 
 sow wind, and reap a whirlwind.' " The reference here to Salim- 
 bene's own aureole laid up for him in heaven is unmistakable : and 
 he goes on to reckon up with pardonable complacency his own 
 opportunities of learning, and the use he has made of them. 
 " Forty and six years have 1 studied unceasingly : and even yet 
 I have not attained to the wisdom of my forefathers. But these 
 so-called Apostles are mere rustics, who ought rather to take the 
 hoe and labour the earth, which crieth far and wide for tillage. 
 In their congregation such men preached as, in our Order would 
 scarce be suffered to wait at our tables, or wash our dishes, or 
 go from door to door for bread." Of this he gives two very 
 amusing instances. " A certain Friar Minor, who had a nephew 
 not yet 15 years old, was causing him to be taught, that he might 
 enter later on into the Order of Friars Minor. This nephew 
 would write out sermons for the Friar his uncle, whereof he 
 learnt four or five by heart : and since we received him not so
 
 Believing and Trembling. 327 
 
 quickly as he wished, he caused himself to be taken into the 
 Congregation nay, rather, into the Dispersion of those who 
 say they are Apostles and are not ; and these also let him preach 
 in Cathedral churches those sermons which he had learnt. Many 
 of these fellows would command silence; and then would the 
 boy speak to the assembled people. So one day when Brother 
 Bonaventura da Iseo* was preaching at Ferrara in the church of 
 the Friars Minor, he saw some of his hearers rise suddenly and 
 run hastily forth. And he marvelled greatly ; for he was a 
 famous and gracious preacher, whom men were wont to hear 
 gladly, so that none would withdraw from his preaching until it 
 was ended. So he asked why they had left the church in such 
 haste, and the congregation told him * A little boy of these 
 Apostles is ready to preach in the Cathedral church, where the 
 people is gathered together ; wherefore all are in haste to run 
 and get themselves places.' To whom Brother Bonaventura 
 answered ' I see that your heart is busied and troubled with other 
 things ; wherefore 1 will dismiss you forthwith, for I should 
 labour in vain if I preached longer. In truth we need not that 
 Antichrist should come with his forerunners ; for he would find 
 many followers among Christian folk. Go therefore to your 
 child whom ye desire to hear, and let him confess you of your 
 sins ; for to-day is that day wherein the Lord's words shall 
 be fulfilled, saying "Behold, the hour cometh, and it is now 
 come, that ye shall be scattered each one to his own, and shall 
 leave Me alone : and yet I am not alone, because the Father is 
 with Me." ' Therewith he dismissed them ; and all made such 
 a haste to depart that none waited for the other. Another 
 time, when I dwelt at Ravenna, those Apostles caused the 
 aforesaid boy to preach in the archiepiscopal cathedral of 
 the city of Ravenna ; and in so great haste did folk of both 
 sexes run together that scarce would one await the other. 
 Wherefore a certain great and noble lady of that land, who 
 was a devotee of the Friars Minor, the Lady Giullietta, wife 
 of the Lord Guido, Son of Rizola da Polenta, complained to 
 the Brethren that she could scarce find a friend to go with her. 
 And the Cathedral was already so full when she came thither that 
 she was fain to stand without by the door ; yet that Cathedral 
 church is so great that it has four aisles, beside the great nave, 
 which contains half the space. Moreover, those fellows who call 
 themselves Apostles were wont to lead round this boy of theirs 
 from city to city, and made him preach in Cathedral churches ; 
 
 * Not the Saint, but a contemporary of ionie note in the Order.
 
 328 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 and folk flocked thick together, and there was a vast congregation, 
 and much gaping both of men and of women ; for the men of 
 our days delight in new things. 10 Wherefore it is strange that 
 the Church should suffer boys to elect one of their fellows to sit in 
 the Bishop's seat on the Feast of the Innocents." 11 Salimbene 
 heads the whole of this paragraph " Of the folly of Christian 
 folk." In short, he could see only two good points in these 
 Apostles ; first, the picturesqueness of their dress, which he 
 admits not without a little natural envy ; and secondly that they 
 did really begin in or about the year 1260, the Great Year of 
 Joachism. But this latter advantage was neutralized by the 
 fact that there was no word of them in Joachim's prophecies, 
 (or rather in the pseudo-Joachim,) which, as all the world 
 knew, had foretold exactly the coming of the Franciscans and 
 Dominicans. 
 
 All this, however, did not hinder the Apostles from growing 
 rapidly. Among the ignorant folk Segarello's pious folly passed 
 for a good imitation of the Friars' life. Nor was it popular 
 among the ignorant only : for the Apostles had at least three 
 powerful patrons in the Church the Bishop Obizzo, the Notary 
 Apostolic Albert of Parma, and the Abbot of the great Cister- 
 cian monastery of Fontanaviva. It was this latter who advised 
 them not to build convents, but to tramp the country and live 
 on alms. Segarello soon found himself an object of fervent 
 worship, and his house a resort of pilgrims from all quarters. 
 The devotees would "flock around him in a certain house, 
 never opening their mouths but to cry with a loud voice a 
 hundred times or more, ' Pater, Pater, Pater ! ' Then after a 
 brief space they would begin again, and chant * Pater, Pater, 
 Pater I ' after the wont of boys in grammar-schools, when they 
 repeat in chorus at intervals the words which have been spoken 
 by their master. But he honoured them in return by stripping 
 himself and them so stark naked as to uncover their shame ; 
 and they stood round in array leaning against the wall ; yet in 
 no orderly or honest or good array. For he would fain strip them 
 of all their worldly goods, that, naked, they might henceforth 
 follow the naked Christ. For each of them at the master's 
 bidding had bound up his garments and laid them in the 
 midst of that building. Then, at the master's bidding, as they 
 stood in this unhonest guise, was brought in (as Origen saith) 
 ' woman, the fountain-head of sin, the devil's weapon, expulsion 
 from paradise, mother of guilt, corruption of the old law.' To 
 her Gerardino commanded that she should give back the clothes 
 as she pleased to these poor folk thus stripped and denuded of
 
 Believing and Trembling. 329 
 
 their worldly goods : and they, when they were clothed again, 
 cried out as before, * Pater ', Pater, Pater ! ' Such then was the 
 reward and guerdon they had for this honour done to their 
 master, that he played the fool in their presence and made them 
 to play the fool : therefore the Wise Man saith in Proverbs * as 
 he that casteth stone into the heap of mercury, so is he that 
 giveth honour to a fool.' After this he sent them to show 
 themselves to the world : so some went to the court of Rome, 
 others to Compostella, others to St. Michael's mount, 12 and 
 others even to the Holy Land." Salimbene saw such a troop 
 in 1284, when "seventy-two of those who call themselves 
 Apostles but are not, came by the high road through Modena 
 and Reggio, old men and children together, on their way 
 to Parma to see their founder Segarello, that they might 
 give all their goods into his hand and receive his blessing, 
 and wander by his leave through the world. So he brought them 
 into a certain church in Parma ; and, stripping them all naked, 
 he reclothed them and received them into his Order and blessed 
 them, and then sent them to go whithersoever they would. Yet 
 Pope Gregory X in full Council at Lyons [A.D. 1274] had for- 
 bidden their further multiplication ; but they cease not on that 
 account to take the habit of that Religion, and to wander in their 
 folly throughout the world, neither fearing God nor honouring 
 man, (that is, the Supreme Vicar of Jesus Christ :) and yet they 
 dream that they are in a state of salvation, though they obey not 
 the Church of Rome ! Moreover, in that same year, a few days 
 later, there came along the same highway twelve girls, with mantles 
 wrapped round their shoulders, calling themselves the Sisters 
 of the aforesaid Apostles, and seeking Brother Gerardino 
 on the same errand. These men, who call themselves Apostles 
 and are not nay rather, they are ribalds, boorish and beastly 
 men, leading with them women of this kind yet they believed 
 themselves to be doing what the Apostle saith ' Have we not power 
 to carry about a woman, a sister, as well as the rest of the Apostles, 
 and the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas ? ' ' The indignation 
 which plays such havoc with Salimbene's grammar was felt in 
 other quarters also. In 1287, the Council of Wiirzburg stigmatized 
 the Apostles as disorderly tramps, and forbade the faithful to 
 support them. Meanwhile Segarello himself "remained at 
 Parma, where he was born, and wrought much folly ; for he 
 cast off his mantle wherein he had been wrapped, and made him 
 a white over-mantle of coarse stuff without sleeves, wherein he 
 seemed rather a buffoon than a man of Religion. Moreover, he 
 wore pointed shoes, and gloves on his hands ; his words were
 
 330 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 ribald, foul, vain, and unhonest, and empty and ridiculous, 
 rather from his folly and stupidity than from the malice of his 
 heart." The decree of Pope and Council against the reception 
 of new members was easily evaded, in the then state of ecclesi- 
 astical discipline. " Instead of obeying, they make the garments 
 of their Order, and lay them apart in the sight of those who 
 would fain join them, saying * We dare not receive you, for that 
 is forbidden us : but to you it is not forbidden : wherefore do ye 
 as seemeth good in your eyes.' Thus have they grown and 
 multiplied beyond all count ; nor will they rest or cease from 
 their folly until some Pope, in his indignation, shall blot out the 
 very memory of them from beneath the sky." Meanwhile " by 
 the miserliness and sloth of the Bishops they are suffered to 
 wander unprofitably about the world." 
 
 This multiplication had already brought its natural consequence 
 a schism in the Order. Gerard was no organizer, and had 
 never cared to assume the formal headship. "They have no in- 
 struction, which is great folly : for, whereas beasts and birds and 
 other creatures have all that they need from nature at their very 
 birth, yet man's soul is created by God like a blank tablet, and 
 they need a teacher. Therefore to these Apostles (not Christ's 
 but Segarello's) who are teacherless, we may apply that saying in 
 the Book of Judges * in those days there was no king in Israel, 
 but everyone did that which seemed right to himself ' (Now 
 that clause is written four times in the Book of Judges, once 
 in the 17th chapter, and twice in the next, that is in the first and 
 last verse, and again at the end of the book.) Therefore in a 
 certain town of Apulia, where the country-folk said ' we are all 
 captains and good folk,' they were put to flight by a certain baron 
 from France on his way to the Emperor : for they demanded toll 
 of him, which also he would have paid if he had found a captain." 
 From Robert, again, little was to be expected in the way of 
 leadership : for " in process of time, while I dwelt at Faenza, he 
 dwelt there also in the house of a certain Tertiary called brother 
 Ghiotto [glutton] ; and " on Good Friday, at the hour at which the 
 Son of God was crucified, he became apostate, and cut his hair, 
 and shaved his beard, and took to wife a certain female Hermit. 
 I had heard all this, but I was loth to believe it until I had asked 
 him ; whereupon he confessed and denied not that he had in truth 
 done all these things. Then I rebuked him sharply, but he made 
 excuse, saying that he had never bound himself to obedience nor 
 to chastity ; wherefore he might well take a wife. But I said to 
 him that he had worn publicly for many years the habit of 
 religion, and ought therefore in no wise to have taken to wife a
 
 Believing and Trembling. 331 
 
 Hermitess dedicated to God ; and I added many authorities and 
 examples to show him his folly and wickedness . . . sixthly aud 
 lastly, I showed him how all who fall away from God and become 
 apostate come to an evil end, which I have proved not by ex- 
 perience only, (for I have seen it with mine own eyes and heard 
 it from others) but also from holy Scripture. For either they are 
 beheaded or burnt or slain with the sword or hanged on gallows, 
 or surely they die by some other most evil and shameful and cruel 
 death." Robert, however, only " began to scoff." 
 
 In default of Robert, Segarello found his Frate Elia in one 
 Guido Putagio, a man of noble family and a personal friend of 
 Salimbene's. Guido " manfully took the government to himself, 
 and held it many years. But he went abroad too pompously with 
 many horsemen, and made such lavish expenses and banquets as 
 the Legates and Cardinals of the Roman Court are wont to make, 
 wherefore his followers took it ill, and chose themselves another 
 head, one Brother Matteo of the Mark of Ancona ; so that a 
 division was made among them. They came to blows with one 
 another that is, the Apostles of Brother Matteo with the Apos- 
 tles of Brother Guido Putagio and gave an evil example to the 
 laity at Faenza. For J dwelt there in those days, and can bear 
 witness thereof. Brother Guido dwelt at Faenza in a little church 
 which was in the orchard of the families of Alberghetti and 
 Accherisi ; with whom were but few Brethren of his own party, 
 and Brother Gerardino. It seemed therefore to the Apostles of 
 the Mark that if they could have Brother Gerardino, who was 
 their founder, they would obtain the victory ; so they would fain 
 have carried him off by main force into the Mark : but this they 
 might by no means do, so that either party fought against the 
 other." The scandal of these conflicts was heightened by a worse 
 incident. " In the year 1286, a certain rich young man, whose 
 father and mother were still living, married a wife ; and on the day 
 of his wedding he gave hospitality to three ribalds of the Order of 
 those who call themselves Apostles and are not ; and these ribalds 
 deceived him shamefully and horribly. So when the young man saw 
 that he had been deceived, he caused them to be taken before the 
 Podesta, and they were led to the gallows. When therefore 
 this had come to the ears of the Lord Obizzo di Sanvitale, 
 Bishop of Parma, (who had long protected this Order by reason 
 of Gerardino their founder) he expelled them from Parma and 
 from his whole Bishopric. This same Gerardino is now come to 
 such a pitch of madness as to walk abroad clad like a buffoon ; 
 and like a strolling actor or clown he trails his folly through the 
 streets and squares of the city." Some years earlier, moreover,
 
 332 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Segarello had been in the Bishop's prison : for Salimbene wrote 
 in 1284 that "on account of his follies, and his foul, carnal, and 
 foolish words that he was wont to say, and the scandal that he 
 gave with his unseemly ordeal of chastity, therefore the Lord 
 Obizzo, Bishop of Parma, took and cast him bound into prison : 
 but in process of time he brought him thence and kept him in 
 his palace. So when the Bishop ate, he ate also in the hall of 
 the palace, at a lower table with others. And he loved to drink 
 choice wines and eat delicate meats ; so when the Bishop drank 
 some choice wine, then Segarello would cry in all men's hearing, 
 desiring to drink of that same wine ; and forthwith the Bishop 
 would send him thereof. So when he was fulfilled of delicate 
 meats and choice wine, he would speak folly, and the Bishop, 
 being a merry man, would laugh at the words and deeds of that 
 fool, whom he took not for a man of Religion, but for a silly and 
 senseless buffoon." 
 
 Segarello disappears here from Salimbene's pages, but not 
 from the stage of history. Honorius IV had issued a special 
 Bull against the Apostles about the year 1286 : but it was 
 evidently not obeyed, for Nicholas IV reissued it five years later. 
 The order was now proscribed : and in 1294 four Apostles were 
 burned as heretics at Parma. Segarello abjured, and was con- 
 demned to imprisonment for life. He relapsed, however, and 
 was burned in 1300, the year of Dante's vision. 
 
 We must, of course, allow for Salimbene's jealousy ; but his 
 accounts tally with those from other sources. Almost incredible 
 as it seems that these Apostles should have enjoyed distinguished 
 ecclesiastical patronage, their story is less strange than that of 
 their contemporaries the Guglielmites at Milan and the Nemin- 
 ians in France, of whom only one chance record has survived. 13 
 After all, why should not Segarello have passed so long for a saint, 
 in an age which was accustomed to still more startling manifest- 
 ations on the part of good Franciscans ? There is nothing in his 
 outward conduct more eccentric than what we read of Fra Gine- 
 
 Ero and Jacopone da Todi ; of Thomas the Irishman cutting off 
 is right thumb to avoid the priesthood ; of St. Francis and Fra 
 Ruffino climbing the pulpit " naked as they were born, save in 
 their drawers only." Segarello, like these, had not only power- 
 ful protectors, but also distinguished disciples. The most emi- 
 nent of these, Dante's Fra Dolcino, came forward publicly for 
 the first time within a month or two of Segarello's death, and a 
 dozen years of Salimbene's. A factitious importance was given 
 to suchjenthusiasts by the widespread religious unrest of the age : 
 an unrest which seemed as strong, after nearly a century of the
 
 Believing and Trembling. 333 
 
 Friars' influence, as in those days when Francis first gained the 
 world's ear by words of authority which contrasted strangely 
 with those of the Scribes and Pharisees of his time. As in the 
 year 1200, so also in 1300, thousands were sick at heart, doubt- 
 ing gravely of the official doctors, and therefore ready to follow 
 any blatant quack who caught their fancy. A deep despair of 
 the present world lay at the root of Dolcino's revolt. The Good 
 Pope, to whom Roger Bacon and so many others had looked for- 
 ward, seemed farther off than ever. Any man therefore could 
 command a following by condemning the vices of the clergy and 
 offering to lead others through blood and flame along the shortest 
 path to heaven. On this idea, at least, Dolcino did stake his 
 own life and happiness, and persuaded others to stake theirs. 
 Few are recorded to have fought and suffered as those 1400 who 
 followed him into the mountains ; fewer still have ever matched 
 the constancy with which he himself bore the tortures of the In- 
 quisition, and Margaret insisted on sharing them with him.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 The Salt and its Savour. 
 
 FT1HE reader has now seen how Salimbene and his contempor- 
 _|_ aries regarded the faith, the education, and the morals of 
 a generation which is generally allowed to stand at the high-water 
 mark of medieval life. Things were worse than this before St. 
 Francis came ; and again there was a falling-off in many ways 
 when the Friars became as corrupt as the rest of the clergy. 
 For the heroic days described in the Fioretti and Thomas of 
 Eccleston and Jordan of Giano were brief indeed ; and long be- 
 fore the first example of self-sacrifice had made its definite mark 
 on the world, such self-sacrifice was already rare in the Order 
 itself. 1 In brief, the Friars took the colour of the old world far 
 more rapidly than their own better leaven worked among the 
 people. In the divine inspiration of the earliest days Francis 
 might almost have blessed his Order (if Order it could then be 
 called) in Virgil's words to the purified Dante : " Free, upright, 
 and whole is thy will, and 'twere a fault not to act according to 
 its prompting ; wherefore I do crown and mitre thee over thy- 
 self." But even before the Saint's death, Franciscanism could 
 no longer be left safely to its own promptings. The stricter 
 friars found themselves driven into a severity of discipline, a 
 stern and sad view of human life such as became characteristic 
 of later Puritanism. 3 Others at the opposite pole abused Fran- 
 ciscan liberty in vagabondage, gluttony, wine-bibbing and 
 wantonness. The large majority, between these two extremes, 
 tried more or less unconsciously to make the best of both worlds, 
 and lived such a life as we see reflected in Salimbene's pages. 
 
 For Salimbene, in spite of all that may be said to the contrary 
 by those who have formed their ideas from only one side of the 
 early records, is quite the typical better-class Franciscan of the 
 generation between St. Francis and Dante. He had many 
 better friends, and many worse, but he himself was quite up to 
 the average. That average may seem low indeed to those who
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 335 
 
 know what St. Francis not only expected of all his Brethren, but 
 obtained from many by the magnetism of his personal influence. 
 Yet we must not judge of the Order from that first group of 
 missionaries : for a serious rift appeared even in the saint's life- 
 time between Franciscan theory and practice, and widened 
 rapidly into an almost impassable gulf. 
 
 Every friar on entry swore obedience to the Rule, which con- 
 tained these words, written by St. Francis and solemnly ratified 
 by the Pope : " I straitly command all my Brethren to receive 
 in no wise either money or coin, whether directly or through any 
 third person." The Brethren were further forbidden to possess 
 houses of their own ; and on his deathbed the Saint solemnly 
 laid it on their consciences never to explain away these plain 
 words, nor to obtain Papal letters of interpretation, whether 
 directly or indirectly. Each novice, as he was admitted, swore 
 obedience to this Rule, and received in return a solemn and 
 official assurance that by keeping it he would earn eternal life. 
 Compare this theory with an incident which Salimbene relates 
 without comment, and which is confirmed by official documents, 
 exactly 30 years after St. Francis's death. (463) " This year 
 .... in the month of May, the Lord Guglielmo Fogliani, 
 Bishop of Reggio, sold to the Friars Minor of that city, that 
 they might make their habitation there, the Imperial palace, 
 which the Lord Nicholas his predecessor had had as a gift from 
 the Emperor ; except that the Emperor kept the right of lodging 
 there on his journeys. And the friars bought it, and paid for it 
 with money which they had from the Sisters of the Order of St. 
 
 Clare, to whom they sold their old convent And because 
 
 the friars had bought the aforesaid palace, (save for the 
 Emperor's right of lodging there), therefore in process of time, 
 they sent word to the Lord Rodolph, who had been elected 
 Emperor by Pope Gregory X, that they possessed and dwelt 
 in his palace in the city of Reggio, and they would gladly 
 have his leave to dwell there. And he answered that he was 
 exceeding glad to have such guests, and whatever rights he had 
 therein he gave wholly and freely to the Friars Minor. And of 
 this he gave them two indented letters, confirmed with his own 
 seal, promising to confirm them yet more strongly if he were 
 successful in getting possession of the Empire. And because 
 the aforesaid dwelling was narrow, therefore the Friars Minor 
 bought more ground and houses round about." Lower down he 
 describes the buying of this new land and the building of the 
 additions to the convent, " and the commune," he adds, " gave 
 them valuers to value in good faith the price of the houses to be
 
 336 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 bought." Alberto Milioli, the contemporary chronicler of Reg- 
 gio, adds the information (implied even in Salimbene's text), 
 that the Friars evicted the unwilling sellers from their houses ; 
 and our friar's own words, " they made a new street," imply that 
 these additions were of considerable value and extent. Yet the 
 original palace must have been a very large building : for, even 
 before the alterations, when the Emperor of Constantinople 
 passed through the city, he solemnly knighted a noble " in the 
 convent of the Friars Minor," on which occasion " all the knights 
 and almost all the ladies of Reggio," were present. (483 ; 487) 
 Only twelve years after St. Francis's death, in 1238, the Friars 
 of Valencia were presented with a palace by a Moorish king, 
 recently converted at the point of the sword ; and dozens of 
 cases might be quoted to show how rapidly and how completely 
 the Order disobeyed their master's solemn precepts on this point. 
 So also on the point of dress. The Rule bids them be content 
 with two tunics, which they may patch with sackcloth. These 
 patches were also used to thicken the tunics where the body was 
 most sensible to cold. 3 But less than 15 years after St. Francis's 
 death the friar who contented himself with two old frocks was 
 already a rara avis. Salimbene (286) speaks with admiration of 
 Brother Buoncompagno da Prato " a spiritual man : for when I 
 dwelt with him in the convent of Pisa, whereas each Brother 
 took two new woollen tunics yearly, yet he would never accept 
 but one, and that an old one ; and when I enquired the reason, 
 he would answer me saying, 'Brother Salimbene, the Apostle 
 saith, Every one of us shall render account to God for himself ; 
 and God shall also demand such an account, saying " Give an 
 account of thy stewardship." Indeed, I shall scarce be able to 
 satisfy God for this single tunic which I take.' " 4 Ubertino says 
 that some friars in the Genoa province had two frocks and five 
 under-tunics ; and that all of the Milan province wore frocks of 
 the finest cloth made in Italy. The appalling quibbles by which 
 this kind of thing was justified may be read in the answer of the 
 Community to these accusations. Indeed, here and elsewhere, 
 the facts themselves are less significant than the Jesuitry with 
 which such flat disobedience was explained away even by men 
 like St. Bonaventura. For the mere breach of their Rule the 
 friars had indeed the precedent of centuries. The monk also 
 was forbidden by his Rule to possess anything whatever of pri- 
 vate property. Popes condemned the souls of " proprietary " 
 monks to hell, and their bodies to the dunghill. Books of con- 
 vent miracles swarm with tales of their damnation. On the very 
 threshold of the Reformation, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 337 
 
 gravely decides that it is a mortal sin for any monk to say even 
 of a book or any similar object (except by a mere slip of the 
 tongue) " That is mine." On the other hand monks did in fact 
 enjoy their private pocket-money, or even private incomes, for 
 centuries, and would have enjoyed them for centuries more but 
 for the violent interference of the State : yet even the crooked 
 excuses offered for this breach of the Monastic rule seem 
 straightforward compared with the jugglery of which Ubertino 
 convicted his fellow-Franciscans. The degradation of the friars 
 was unquestionably hastened by the habitual Jesuitry with which 
 their false position was defended. 6 
 
 In this matter of buildings, especially, modern writers have 
 painted even the earliest days in false colours which cannot but 
 prove mischievous in the long run. Dr. Jessopp outbids Dr. 
 Brewer, Canon Rawnsley outbids M. Sabatier, and Father 
 Cuthbert outbids them all. But nothing can need a lie, and 
 least of all the spirit of St. Francis, who loses far more than he 
 gains by pious exaggerations. Professor Brewer, by a very 
 natural slip, greatly exaggerated the meanness of the Cambridge 
 Friars' chapel : but all the rest follow him without suspicion, in 
 spite of the extreme inherent improbability of the story. 8 * 
 Again, he exaggerated the meanness of the town or suburban dis- 
 tricts in which the friars settled ; yet Dr. Jessopp outdoes these 
 first exaggerations even in the case of the two Norfolk boroughs 
 which lie close to his own home. He writes " The Friars settled 
 outside the city walls at Lynn .... in a filthy swamp at Norwich 
 through which the drainage of the city sluggishly trickled into 
 the river, never a foot lower than its banks." These words are 
 typical of the false perspective which dominates nearly all modern 
 popular writings on the early Franciscans. Lynn had no town 
 walls when the Friars settled there : and the later fortifica- 
 tions, never including a continuous wall, left the Greyfriars inside 
 their enclosure by a good quarter of a mile ! Their site was 
 then, as now, central and healthy. At Norwich, their site was 
 separated from the river, first by one of the oldest streets in the 
 town and then by a broad stretch of meadow. Of these meadows 
 between the Friars and the river all were held by great folk : and 
 in one of them, about 1300, Sir Thos. Roscelyn built himself a 
 house which passed into the hands of other equally noted citizens. 6 
 Only a small fraction of the city could possibly have drained past 
 the Friary : nearly all the streets lay on the other side of the 
 slope, and drained into the other bend of the river. As the old 
 antiquary Kirkpatrick puts it, the Friars had " a large parcel of 
 land, and of a very pleasant situation." In London, where space
 
 338 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 was extremely scarce, they evidently did settle at first on an 
 unpleasant site : but a beautiful Early English capital dug up 
 on the site of Christ's Hospital shows that they very soon joined 
 the many offenders against the constitution forbidding large or 
 ornamental churches ; indeed, within a short space afterwards 
 their church became one of the most magnificent in the city. 
 If this was so even in England, where Franciscans prided them- 
 selves on their special strictness, we need not be surprised that 
 in Italy, long before the century was out, they had given grave 
 offence with their gardens and orchards and vineyards. The 
 Spirituals attacked, and St. Bonaventura very lamely defended, 
 their rapidly-growing habit of settling, " to the scandal of clergy 
 and people," no longer in the country or the suburbs, but actually 
 within the great towns ; where, in spite of the enormous cost of 
 land, they yet managed to get their great burial-grounds and 
 their orchards. This complaint is still further emphasized by 
 Bernard of Besse's admission that the strict observance of St. 
 Francis's ideal of poverty " is precluded in cities, by men's 
 wickedness and by the multitude of the Brethren." 7 The 
 Franciscan churches of Assisi, Florence, Padua, Todi, Bologna, 
 Parma, all built within a century of the Saint's death are 
 like so many cathedrals. The inference of poverty commonly 
 drawn from the fact that the Friaries yielded little spoil at the 
 Dissolution, and that they had sometimes sold their books even 
 earlier, is extremely fallacious. It only shows that, whatever 
 their income was, they spent it as fast as they got it ; or even, 
 like other religious Orders, incurred heavy liabilities by living 
 beyond it. The amount of plunder which could be squeezed at 
 the present moment from the Salvation Army would be no true 
 measure either of its actual income or of the comforts enjoyed by 
 its officers : yet General Booth's financial arrangements are far 
 more precise and business-like than those of the friars ; and a 
 modern liquidator would have advantages which were altogether 
 lacking in the 16th century. We have evidence that, long before 
 Dante's death, the friars were collecting large sums of money 
 which were not always spent on such worthy objects as buildings 
 and church ornaments, illicit as even these were. Ubertino 
 describes many of his brother Friars as begging all over the 
 country, with servants at their heels bearing money boxes of 
 which the masters alone kept the key : " and how they spend 
 it, the tavern-keepers know, and the servants who bear the 
 
 money They have so corrupted the roads that such poor 
 
 Friars as will not or cannot take bursars with them can now 
 scarce find a living, since men believe they must possess money
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 339 
 
 like these others." Here we have already Chaucer's Friar, as 
 described by the Summoner, with his servant to carry the spoils. 
 Ubertino only stops short of the last and most intolerable 
 accusation that, after writing down the benefactor's names to 
 be mentioned in his prayers 
 
 " Whan that he was out at dore anon, 
 He planed away the names everichon : . . . . 
 Kay, there thou lirt, them Somonour ! quod the Frere." 
 
 Yet for this also we have plain documentary evidence. The 
 still existing mortuary book of the Landshut Friary has had all 
 its earlier names carefully erased with pumice-stone to make 
 room for later entries ; so that even the special glory of the 
 convent's earlier days, "the Venerable Father Brother Conrad von 
 Weilheim," had no longer any share in the prayers of the later 
 Brethren. Similarly Ubertino tells us how the Friars would sell 
 the same wax taper ten times over to different devotees, each 
 of whom had paid for it in the hope of receiving its spiritual 
 benefit for himself alone. 8 The mere greed of money would 
 of itself have seriously impaired the Friars' authority over the 
 people : but the evil was increased by others which it drew in 
 its train. The earliest Brethren had braced themselves for their 
 missionary work by frequent retreats to solitary hermitages : 
 but in Salimbene's time they already crowded into the cities as 
 modern country-folk crowd into London. Of this he gives us, 
 quite incidentally, a remarkable example. After speaking of the 
 miracles of Brother Roland of Padua he goes on to speak of 
 the convent of La Vernia (556) "where the seraph marked 
 the Blessed Francis with the five wounds after the likeness of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. So I saw all the places of devotion 
 which are there : and on the Lord's Day I celebrated the convent 
 Mass, and after the Gospel I preached to the assembled people, 
 both men and women. And note that, when I was at Alvernia, 
 Brother Lothario, who had formerly been my Gustos at Pisa, 
 was still dwelling there, though old and infirm. I believe that 
 this convent would have been deserted by the Brethren (as he 
 said to me), unless it had been retained by his good offices." It 
 may seem almost incredible that a hermitage so sacred in 
 Franciscan tradition as La Vernia should have been almost 
 abandoned : but another sacred spot, Monte Casale, where 
 Brother Angelo joined the Order and St. Francis converted the 
 three robbers, was actually given up by the Brethren before 
 1450. Before that year of Jubilee in which Dante imagines 
 his poem, there were not many friars left who had enough
 
 340 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 firmness of purpose to live the old simple life. Ubertino 
 complains that the Order in general had already quite lost its 
 faith in the promises of Christ and St. Francis, and relied 
 instead on the money gained from burials of rich folk, abso- 
 lutions of usurers, legacy-hunting, and fees for masses and 
 spiritual services. And Salimbene shows us this process already 
 actively at work. He bitterly regrets that the earlier loyalty to 
 St. Francis's ideal should have lost to the Order the bodies of 
 Count Raymund of Toulouse and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 
 and many other such rich prizes, including a whole convent, 
 richly endowed, which Innocent IV had offered them at Lavagna. 
 (61, 295.) He shows us usurers compounding for their sins by 
 giving conscience-money to the friars (452 : 609). Moreover, 
 even the grosser forms of usury received underhand encourage- 
 ment from the very Church which damned them ; and none 
 sinned more deeply in this respect than the ordinary friars, whom 
 the Spirituals charged with habitually absolving the impenitent 
 for the sake of a share in the plunder. Certain it is that the 
 century of their first and strongest influence saw a rapid 
 development of usurious practices, as the Franciscan Nicole 
 Bozon himself complains, about the date of Dante's death. 
 " Nowadays," he complains, " the old fashion is changed ; for 
 those who once avoided to give such men the kiss of peace in 
 church, are now ready to kiss their feet, . . . and they whose 
 bodies were wont to be buried in the field or the garden are now 
 entombed in churches before the High Altar." 9 
 
 Again, this growing thirst for money brought the Franciscans 
 into collision with the other clergy and Religious no longer now 
 with the vicious and jealous only, but with the whole body out- 
 side their own Order. Already in Thomas of Celano's " Second 
 Life" we find complaints of quarrels with their old friends and 
 allies the Dominicans. Salimbene tells us plainly of the breach 
 with their next nearest friends, the Cistercians. The Spirituals 
 were justly scandalized by the Bulls which the laxer Brethren 
 obtained to hinder other Orders from building convents within 
 a certain radius of their own Friaries. The holy violence with 
 which we have seen them evict a priest from his own church 
 in Genoa was quite common, by Bonaventura's own confession. 
 One by one, they obtained Papal privileges enabling them to 
 encroach by force on parochial duties, and to compete for 
 parochial fees. The consequences may be guessed. St. Francis 
 had indeed protested on his deathbed " If I had the wisdom of a 
 Solomon, and found paltry secular priests, I would not preach 
 against their will in the churches wherein they reside." But,
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 341 
 
 only 30 years afterwards, St. Bonaventura writes " If we were 
 never to abide in parishes but by the priest's will, then we should 
 scarce ever be able to stay long ; since, whether of their own 
 motion or at others' instigation, they would eject us from their 
 parishes sooner than heretics or Jews." 10 Indeed, it was not long 
 before the parish clergy began to retort the worst of the 
 accusations brought against themselves by the Friars. St. 
 Francis himself, apparently, had not altogether escaped suspic- 
 ion ; and he in turn sounded a plain note of warning to his 
 Brethren in the eleventh chapter of his Rule. Scandals, and 
 sometimes more real difficulties, compelled the Franciscan 
 authorities to renounce, over and over again, the official direct- 
 tion of the Poor Clares. Salimbene (421) tells us how one day 
 at Faenza " as I was walking through the garden thinking of 
 the Lord, I was called by a certain secular man of Ferrara 
 named Matulino, a very great talker and composer of Canzoni 
 and Serventesi, and one who noted us Religious and found 
 fault with us : for he sat under a fig-tree with two Brethren of 
 whom he asked questions ; and he cried to me ' Dan Friar, come 
 hither and sit with us.' " Matulino had lately been at dinner 
 with the Bishop of Forli, and there the clergy had made much 
 the same complaints against the Friars with which St. Bonaven- 
 tura deals in the Quaestiones circa Regulam and Libellus Apologe- 
 ticus : for, (as Salimbene puts it) " it is plain that the priests and 
 secular clergy always lie in wait for us and are glad to calumniate 
 us .... As to the sixth of these malicious accusations, that 
 we are ladies' men ; that is, that we gladly see women and speak 
 with ladies, and are in familiar talk with them, we say that these 
 are the words of such as ' lay a blot on the elect ' that is, of 
 buffoons and play-actors and such as are called Knights of the 
 Court, who think to excuse themselves from their own vanity 
 and wantonness in defaming others.' Then answered Matulino 
 and said * I tell you in truth, Brother Salimbene, those were the 
 words of the Bishop of Forli, and not of a buffoon. And, under 
 my eyes, he arose from table and took a Bible and showed me 
 how it was written " Sit not at all with another man's wife, nor 
 repose upon the bed with her ; and strive not with her over 
 wine, lest thy heart decline towards her, and by thy blood thou 
 fall into destruction." And he said that ye 1 riars Minor and 
 Preachers do daily contrary to that Scripture ; and his clergy 
 consented with him and confirmed his words.' Then I answered 
 and said ' The Bishop of Forli is such as Ecclesiasticus saith "he 
 lieth in wait and turned good into evil, and on the Elect he 
 will lay a blot " ; and of his clergy I say that I care not
 
 342 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 for their praise, for Seneca saith " Care no more to be praised 
 by base folk than if thou wert praised for base things. ' We 
 and the Friars Preachers are poor mendicants who must needs 
 live on alms ; and among those who help us are women, as it is 
 written in Ecclesiasticus " Where there is no wife, he mourneth 
 that is in want " : for they are more merciful to help the poor 
 and more pitiful to the afflicted than men, who are harder of 
 heart. Wherefore, when they send for us, we must needs go to 
 them for their sick folk or for any other tribulation which they 
 have, that we may make them some return of kindness and not 
 be found ungrateful, since the Apostle saith " and be ye thank- 
 ful." We strive not with any women over wine ; for according 
 to our constitution we dare not drink in cities, save with prelates 
 and Religious and Lords of Manors.' " This plea, which after 
 all only rehearses the theory of Franciscan life and still leaves 
 its practice to be proved, is reinforced by a digression in which 
 our Friar brings against the clergy some of the accusations re- 
 corded in a previous chapter : and Matulino professed himself 
 abundantly satisfied. " But I said to him : ' five years 1 dwelt 
 in the city of Ravenna, yet I never set foot in the house of the 
 lord Marquis Michael, who is one of the greatest and most noble 
 and richest of that city.' ' And I,' said he, ' have been there 
 an hundred times at meat with him.' Then answered I ' Who 
 therefore is the greater ladies' man, thou or I ? ' And he said 
 * I see that it is I : and you have hemmed me in and given me 
 checkmate, nor have I more to answer.' Then said I to 
 Matulino" and here follows the second little sermon against 
 ladies' society and in praise of chastity from which I have already 
 quoted in chapter viii : after which Salimbene ends in triumph, 
 " Since, then, we are not ignorant of all these things, we are no 
 ladies' men, as our friends assert against us, but (as it is written 
 in the book of Tobias) ' we are the children of saints, and look 
 for that life which God will give to those that never change 
 their faith with him.' What more shall I say ? " What more, 
 indeed ? How could Matulino fail to become " such a friend of 
 mine that I always found him ready to render me service ; but 
 he lost nothing thereby, for I gave him to wife the daughter of 
 a man of Ferrara who dwelt at Ravenna, by whom he had a 
 great dowry .... for the girl's father confessed to me in that 
 aickness whereof he died." 
 
 It is a long step from all this to the Fioretti or to Thomas of 
 Eccieston : and indeed that intervening half century had 
 wrought far-reaching changes among the Franciscans. The 
 fact is, that the very strictness of the Rule in theory hard-
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 343 
 
 ened the average friar's heart against its literal observance 
 in practice, just as the very Puritanism of the medieval theory 
 of religion partly accounts for the absence of Puritanism in 
 medieval practice. A limited number of men were precisians 
 by profession, and the majority felt all the more dispensed from 
 the necessity of imitating them ; as the crowds of our great 
 towns claim a sort of vicarious merit in the achievements of 
 their professional football-players. St. Francis's straightforward 
 glance had already noted how many of his Brethren " were fain 
 to receive praise and honour only by rehearsing and preaching 
 the works that the saints did themselves achieve." So Ubertino 
 asserts solemnly before God that, although there was no longer 
 any real difference between friars and monks as to the reception 
 of money, his brethren continued to glory in the unique strictness 
 of their own Rule. 11 
 
 Moreover, quite apart from their quarrels with the clergy, 
 they rapidly lost popularity with the laity. Salimbene has told 
 us how the country-folk attributed the barrenness of the earth 
 to the malign influence of the Friars : and the same complaint 
 meets us in a saying of Jordan of Saxony. St. Bonaventura and 
 Ubertino, however else they differ, agree in frequently referring to 
 the waning popularity of their Order. 12 Almost more significant 
 are the disciplinary books of the early Franciscans, in their ex- 
 treme and petty anxiety to avoid unsympathetic criticism. Mr. 
 McCabe describes the painful efforts of the modern Franciscans 
 to hide all their doings from even the most sympathetic outsiders : 
 and there was just the same jealous secrecy in the 13th century. 13 
 Eccleston describes how Albert of Pisa, Minister General of the 
 Order (d. 1280) "was wont to say to his companion, Ognibene by 
 name, when they came to the house of spiritual friends, ' Eat now, 
 eat ; we may eat securely here ! ' For he was wont, so far as in 
 him lay, to beware of all secular folk." He goes on to tell another 
 story to point the same moral, that the less layfolk see of the 
 inner life of the Religious, the more they are likely to honour 
 them. St. Bonaventura's secretary shows the same jealous 
 exclusiveness. " If novices are questioned about the doings of 
 the Order, as of their fashion of fasting, their silence, or other 
 points, let them plead that they are fresh to the Order, and pass 
 the question on to a senior ; lest perchance, while they think 
 themselves to answer wisely and well, they say something foolish 
 and altogether unfit to be said. Let them reveal the secrets of 
 the Order to none, however religious or familiar ; nor let them 
 publish any statute, unless, perchance, it cannot conveniently 
 be concealed." Again, " Let them never invite strangers, even
 
 344 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 their familiar friends, to visit the Offices of the Convent. Or if 
 ever, at some man's urgent entreaty, they are permitted to show 
 these, let them show only the more common buildings, not entering 
 and going from place to place and from corner to corner, but 
 standing at the door and, with all possible expedition short of 
 discourtesy, furtively hiding all that can be concealed from the 
 strangers' gaze. There is no Religion where all things are open to 
 all men" Moreover, even where the Friar thinks himself most 
 secure, he must still be on his guard. " A certain Brother was 
 wont to relate that he had discovered in certain lay folks' houses 
 secret loopholes, whereby all that was unsuspiciously done in 
 those houses could be clearly seen." " Let [friars] altogether 
 avoid loud speech .... and especially when they are in woods 
 or thickets : for, (as the vulgar proverb hath it) woods have ears, 
 and the level plain hath eyes. Let them therefore abstain 
 altogether, in thick and woody places, from all things which they 
 would not say before secular folk ; unless perchance they wish 
 to say anything under their breath, as it were, and in the Latin 
 tongue. Miserable confusions from this cause are reported 
 oftentimes to have befallen certain friars who have not used due 
 caution." Even in the estimate of the gravity of an offence this 
 consideration of scandal plays a great part. St. Bonaventura, 
 commenting on the clause of the Rule which bids friars who 
 have committed mortal sin to have recourse at once to their 
 Provincial for absolution, adds " This is to be understood of 
 notorious sins only : for those which are secret should not be 
 made public : since, other things being equal, a sin done publicly 
 to the scandal of others is more grievous than a hidden sin, and 
 therefore more grievously to be punished." 14 
 
 Yet all this was a mere daubing with untempered mortar ; for, 
 when it was known that so many scandals really existed, the 
 very effort to conceal them did more harm than good. As the 
 adversary objects to St. Bonaventura, " since the Religious are 
 wont so studiously to conceal their doings, it is suspected that 
 certain improprieties take place among them : for why else are 
 things so studiously hidden, since there is no need to conceal 
 that which is good ? " To which the Saint can only reply that 
 this is partly in order to avoid vainglory, partly to conceal real 
 shortcomings, but " mainly for the laity's sake .... for friars 
 cannot look into all men's hearts and satisfy all with a reason 
 why this or that is done [in their convents], since secular folk 
 are rude, and prone generally to suspect evil of the Religious." 15 
 Yet there is nothing hid that shall not be revealed ; and from a 
 thousand little scattered indications we can reconstitute pretty
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 345 
 
 exactly the life of a Franciscan cloister. However, it is no part 
 of my task here to present a full picture of the ordinary Friar's 
 daily life : that would need a special volume to itself. I shall 
 only attempt to bring out certain points which are necessary to 
 the full appreciation of Salimbene's autobiography, yet on which 
 the most accessible books tell us little or nothing. 
 
 Next to the matter of money and possessions, in which even 
 the Papal Bulls mark clearly step by step the rapid lowering of 
 the Franciscan ideal, perhaps the Friar's most natural and 
 insidious temptation lay in the hospitality of the outside world 
 towards his Order and himself. It is a matter of common ob- 
 servation that the customary inactivity of the modern Sunday 
 generates, in all but the most earnest and ascetic minds, a positive 
 craving for creature comforts ; and the 13th century was no 
 more able than our own age to supply enough really earnest and 
 ascetic minds to form one tenth of the multitudes who crowded 
 into the new Orders. " Why," asks St. Bonaventura's adversary, 
 " do we see all Orders of Religious decay in religious life, even 
 while they seem to advance in temporal prosperity and in certain 
 ceremonial observances ? " And the saint, admitting the fact, 
 answers sadly that "one cause is the multitude of those that 
 enter in." As Roger Bacon tells us, thousands of these converts 
 were ignorant schoolboys : many others brought into the Order 
 a mind and body broken by dissipation, like the typical husband 
 of French Romance : and there can be no doubt that this collo- 
 cation of those who knew nothing of real life with others who 
 knew only too much of one side of it, reacted almost as in- 
 juriously on the discipline of the cloister as it notoriously did on 
 that of the medieval universities. We find in these Franciscan 
 manuals evident efforts to keep the old and the young apart to 
 some extent, though nothing like the elaborate system of precau- 
 tions which the Benedictines attempted. After all the goodwill 
 of their first conversion, the majority found themselves still very 
 human. The strictly ascetic minority, again, were too few, under 
 the most favourable circumstances, to leaven the mass thoroughly ; 
 while in most places they were actually persecuted and imprison- 
 ed, or even done to death and buried with the burial of a dog, 
 for their inconvenient puritan zeal. Hence we find very early in- 
 dications of that recoil of oppressed nature which Mr. McCabe 
 describes so graphically among the modern Franciscans. He 
 relates how casuists permit a fast-dinner to be protracted for 
 four hours, and how he himself has assisted at such which have 
 lasted for three ; statements which square well enough with the 
 menu of the fast-dinner given by St. Louis, and with several
 
 346 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 other indications in our chronicle. Salimbene complains more 
 than once of habitual self-indulgence on the part of the higher 
 officials. Similarly, Ubertino writes " while Prelates guzzle 
 daily, the sick are almost starved : " and again " so high has the 
 flood of idleness and gluttony and continued familiarities with 
 women risen, that I rather wonder at those who stand than at 
 those who fall." 16 
 
 The early Franciscan documents show us at every turn how 
 the ultra-ascetic ideal defeated its own object. The whole tragedy 
 of the Friars' decay during the lifetime of those who had known 
 the founder himself, may be found written in St. Bonaventura's 
 Qucestioncs circa Regulam and his two Epistles to the Provincials 
 of the Order. As the early heroes of Franciscanism dropped out 
 of the ranks some by premature death, others eking out a 
 crippled existence in the convent infirmaries after the ascetic 
 excesses of their earlier days a new generation grew up which, 
 while it knew the old rigours mainly by hearsay, had the plainest 
 ocular testimony of the irregular luxuries with which the dis- 
 crepit Religious were daily pampered. The enormous popularity 
 of the Order, and the indiscriminate reception of candidates, 
 contributed still more to relax the earlier discipline. St. Bona- 
 ventura bewails the growing extravagance of their buildings and 
 private expenses, and their wearisome demands, direct or indirect, 
 upon the charity of the laity, so that the wayfarer already fears 
 a friar as he would fear a robber. The Saint himself " would 
 willingly be ground to powder," if so he could bring the Order 
 back to its purity of only half-a-century ago : but (as Father 
 Ehrle points out) the downward impetus was too strong, and 
 the " relaxed " party made rapid strides even during the Saint's 
 long generalate. 17 Moreover these relaxations among the large 
 majority necessarily entailed sufferings upon the strict minority, 
 who, as even moderates like St. Bonaventura and David of 
 Augsburg complain, were already not only despised but actually 
 persecuted. 18 It only remained that the too strict observance of 
 St. Francis's Rule and Testament should be publicly condemned 
 as heresy ; and this was done by John XXII in 1317. From that 
 time forward, friars were burned by their fellow-friars for loyalty 
 to the first traditions of the Order ; since, helplessly subject as 
 they were to the Roman hierarchy, they were not even allowed 
 for many years to form separate congregations of their own for 
 the strict observance of the Rule. This must alway be borne in 
 mind when we are tempted to draw invidious parallels between 
 the Franciscans and, for instance, the Wesleyans. The price which 
 St. Francis had paid for the official recognition of his Order by
 
 The Salt and its Savour. 347 
 
 Innocent III was in fact the degradation of the whole ideal. 
 From the moment that the Friars became a sort of papal militia, 
 they must needs conform to the general policy of the Roman 
 Court, and come to terms with the greed, the ambition, and the 
 corruption for which that Court long had been, and was long to 
 be, notorious. The Wesley ans, as an independent body, have 
 thus been able to work more powerfully for good on the Church 
 which they left, than the Friars could act on the Church to which 
 they clung. In the face of powerful spiritual rivals, Anglicanism 
 has had no chance of holding her ground but by her learning and 
 her good works. On the other hand, when once the Roman 
 Court had succeeded in assimilating the Friars, she had little 
 further to fear from their inconvenient reforming energy. Under 
 its garb of poverty, the Order soon became notorious for its 
 flattery of the rich. The friars of the 13th century had indeed 
 protested almost with Luther's violence against the abuses of the 
 indulgence system : but the friars of the 15th and 16th centuries 
 were the chief pardon-mongers. 19 When we speak of schism as a 
 great evil, let us also admit that even greater evils may conceivably 
 spring from conformity to a system deeply corrupted in practice. 
 The failure of the Franciscans is in fact a direct justification of 
 the policy of our Reformers : for certainly one of the most potent 
 causes of Franciscan corruption lay in a false notion of Authority. 
 It was that notion which enabled the less spiritual majority 
 among the Friars, while swearing obedience to the Rule and boast- 
 ing the strictness of that Rule, to torture or put to death those 
 few who really followed the Rule. 
 
 Of this, however, Salimbene gives us little direct evidence, 
 though his chronicle supplies us with the most valuable indirect 
 corroboration of bitter and repeated complaints from contem- 
 poraries. It is natural, after all, that he should accept papally 
 approved relaxations as a matter of course, and spend little ink 
 on the dissentient Brethren who clung in spite of persecution to 
 a doomed cause. Of horrors outside the convent he has plenty 
 to tell us : but, so far as the inner life is concerned, the greater 
 part of his Chronicle reflects his own cheerful and slightly cynical 
 humour. In it we see plainly the average Friar, deep in admira- 
 tion for the Saints of his Order, yet without any strong personal 
 desire for martyrdom : full of fellow-feeling for the sinners, yet 
 keeping himself pure on the whole from all grosser transgressions. 
 If at times his manners and his morals seem strange to us, the 
 fault lies not in the man but in his age. The more intimate 
 study of medieval life, while it deepens our interest and affection 
 for the separate figures which flit over that strange stage, is apt
 
 348 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 to increase our horror of the gloomy background behind even the 
 gayest and brightest groups of actors. Then, as now, most men 
 struggled with more or less success against disorder and crime : 
 but our hearty recognition of their honest efforts ought not to 
 blind us to the rottenness of many institutions which they sought 
 to uphold, or to the barbarous conditions which too often rendered 
 their labours fruitless.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 Conclusion. 
 
 I HA VE tried to show, through a faithful summary of Salim- 
 bene's autobiography with contemporary illustrations, how 
 life would have looked to us if we had been born in the age of 
 St. Francis and Dante. If I seem to have laid undue stress on 
 the darker side, I would plead two considerations. First, if I 
 had contented myself with a bare translation of Salimbene off- 
 hand or, for the matter of that, of any among half-a-dozen 
 others of that century whom I could name the picture thus pre- 
 sented would still have seemed almost incredibly dark to the 
 modern English reader. Imagination staggers at the moral gulf 
 that yawns between that age and ours. Secondly, plain speaking 
 on this subject is rendered imperative by the persistent misrepre- 
 sentations of those who champion dying theories in our own day. 
 Reactionaries build themselves an imaginary past, just as the 
 femme incomprise takes refuge, in the imaginary homage of 
 distant friends, from the unsympathetic common-sense of those 
 among whom she has to live. The whole Middle Ages cry out 
 to us from Dante's great poem " Who shall deliver us from the 
 body of this death ? " and I have chosen Salimbene's chronicle 
 for my main theme because he shows us more clearly than any 
 other what was the Body of that Death. I am aware that many 
 will refuse to accept this picture as true : but, as I have already 
 said, I gladly challenge comparison with other contemporary 
 evidence. 
 
 Meanwhile it is essential to a comprehension of our own life 
 that we should face honestly and answer as truly as possible the 
 question whether the morality of the "Ages of Faith" stood 
 higher or lower than that of our own time. If the things that 
 are more excellent have been steadily fading from the world 
 during these 600 years, then it should clearly be the aim of 
 civilization to hark back to the ideal of one central and absolute
 
 350 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 religious authority. If, on the other hand, the struggle among 
 different creeds has tended towards a steady elimination of evil 
 and growth of good if many theories of the past, however 
 massive and imposing, have shown themselves as little fitted to 
 survive, as little worthy of regret, as the Mammoth or the 
 Mastodon then we may continue without misgiving to shape 
 our creed by the Pauline maxim " Prove all things, hold fast that 
 which is good." I have tried, in the spirit of that maxim, to 
 appreciate those real virtues of Romanism which make it still a 
 living creed, and have changed it gradually for the better in 
 spite of its professed immutability. But I have not attempted 
 to conceal my conviction that its exclusive pretensions are flatly 
 contradicted by the history of the very time at which they seemed 
 most nearly justified : and that the world is far purer and better 
 for the decay of sacerdotalism. One tenth of the abuses that 
 reigned in the 13th century would have sufficed to wreck any 
 Church in a less barbarous age. If Romanism dominated the 
 Western world for three whole centuries longer, it was mainly 
 because it maintained a Saturnine supremacy by devouring its 
 own children. The Inquisition ruthlessly murdered every non- 
 Roman organization in its cradle : and all the while, within the 
 Church itself, men hoped for better things till hope grew sick. 
 Dante, with the Franciscan reform not yet dead around him, 
 could still look for the regeneration of Romanism from within. 
 But Langland, a couple of generations later, though he hated 
 heretics as heartily as Dante did, had already lost Dante's hope 
 in the Church. For him, the last stronghold of Christianity had 
 already succumbed to the assaults of Antichrist and the treachery 
 of the Friars. Henceforth his pattern of simple faith, his Piers 
 Plowman, must shake the dust of the past from his feet, and 
 wander forth alone to the world's end in search of the Christ that 
 is to be. 1 Wiclif himself scarcely condemns the prelate and the 
 parish priest more outspokenly than St. Bonaventura : it was 
 only that the Englishman's bolder logic and his century of later 
 experience drove him to a conclusion which the Saint had 
 studiously avoided. Wiclif was the first great philosopher and 
 theologian to confess frankly that the Medieval Church would 
 never be reformed except by a revolution from within and by 
 violent pressure from the laity without. 
 
 Much, however, of the generous modern over-estimate of 
 medieval society is due to the admiration for medieval art. Men 
 have jumped to the hasty but mistaken conclusion that the artists 
 whom we now admire so much had greater honour in their own 
 country than their modern successors have. 2 Again, the men
 
 Conclusion. 351 
 
 who built and adorned our churches (it is argued), must have 
 been better men than we. Yet this indirect argument from art 
 to morals is utterly fallacious. Perugino was a rank materialist, 
 who could never be persuaded of the immortality of the soul : 3 
 Raphael painted his Madonnas in the midst of a society rotten 
 to the core : and the peculiarly modern art of landscape may 
 teach us the same lesson. Six hundred years hence, the enthusi- 
 astic student of Turner will be tempted to imagine that Eng- 
 lishmen of the 19th century loved their country scenery better 
 than any race in any age. Yet never has man done more to ruin 
 the landscape ; never has he crowded more blindly from the fresh 
 fields into the smoky town. Now that we are falling in love with 
 the country again, preserving ruins and lakes by Act of Parlia- 
 ment, and planning our new Garden Cities, who dares on that 
 account to promise us another Turner, or even another David 
 Cox ? The art of the Middle Ages stood at that exquisite 
 moment when the first rays of sunrise glisten on the dews of 
 night, and colour its parting clouds. In those wild days, building 
 was the one possible investment, and the church the one building 
 which offered the artist some real hope of protection for himself 
 and his work. The true artistic greatness of the Middle Ages 
 begins with the 1 1th century, when art and learning began to 
 leave the cloister which had sheltered them in the germ, and to 
 spread freely through the world. The greatest works of those 
 days were carried out not by celibate monks or clerics, but only 
 for monks and clerics. The real artists were the most Bohemian 
 of craftsmen wandering masons, who loved wine, women, and 
 gong, but whose too riotous fancies were chastened by the spirit 
 of asceticism among the clerical patrons that directed the general 
 lines of their work. Even so, the glories of medieval art often 
 seemed superfluous, wasteful, and actually semi-pagan, to the 
 noblest minds of the time. So long as the spirit of St. Bernard 
 lived in the Order, there was no Cistercian school of architecture ; 
 and before ecclesiastical art had grown to maturity in the 13th 
 century, the monasteries were already verging on moral decay. 
 St. Francis, again, gave a powerful impulse to art : but only 
 indirectly, and against his own will. The splendid basilica at 
 Assisi, Sta. Croce at Florence, and all the great Franciscan 
 churches which we admire now, were as definitely false to the 
 Saint's spirit as was the Golden Calf to the Mosaic Law. 4 Art 
 was not the product of medieval religion, but of worldlinesa 
 under some restraint of religion. Many details of church carving 
 are too licentious to be photographed or modelled ; and some at 
 least of our most beautiful English cathedrals were built in part
 
 352 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 from the fines collected from unchaste priests, in part from more 
 questionable sources still. 8 
 
 The last and most potent cause of modern ignorance of the 
 past lies in the dissatisfaction which many feel with the present 
 world. In all ages, there are many minds of the type so familiar 
 to us in everyday life ; unsympathetic to the family or the 
 servants with whom their lot is immediately cast, and spending 
 all their tenderness on cats or dogs or foreign missions. In its 
 milder forms, most men feel this temptation more or less strongly : 
 and many who can see no good in the flesh and blood of the 20th 
 century can see no harm in the ghosts of the 1 3th. Yet it is idle 
 to seek God in a corner of the past, while we reject the facts of 
 the present. To find only poetry in distant history, only prose 
 in our own age, is not imagination but dulness of imagination : 
 not love of a purer ideal, but bat-like blindness to the broader 
 light. Every spring-time reminds us afresh that the world is 
 eternally young, and that any generation's weary complaints of 
 old age are merely ridiculous to posterity. There is more hope 
 in the world now, and more of the buoyancy of youth, than 600 
 years ago when Bernard of Morlaix sang dolefully " The times 
 are waxing late . . . The judge is at the gate." That ideal of 
 a fast-approaching external judgment was natural enough in 
 days when men feared that Christ and His Saints slept. With us, 
 the truer ideal is that of a present and perpetual judgment : a 
 world in which God asks us daily : " Can you trace My finger 
 evei-ywhere here, or can you only find the Devil's ? Are you 
 seeking among your living fellow-men for My kingdom, or are 
 you quarrelling with your own age, and whimpering for institutions 
 which had not enough of My spirit to preserve them from decay ? " 
 It is easy at a safe distance of 600 years to wax sentimental 
 over a dead world which is often all the more picturesque to us 
 because we never dream of living there. It needs a truer effort 
 of faith and charity to see real good in a vulgar fellow at the 
 meeting-house over the way, who daily vexes our righteous soul 
 by preaching our own God in formulas which are not our own. 
 But which is the more truly Franciscan to chant with wearisome 
 iteration the glories of those past Rolands and Olivers of the faith, 
 or to accept modern facts and make the best of them ? How, 
 again, shall we plead Dante's authority for a policy of idle regret ? 
 Thoroughly as he mastered the religious ideas of his time, he has 
 anticipated enough of ours to assure us that he would have been 
 no mere reactionary if his lot had been cast with us. It is quite 
 inconclusive to plead his passionate attachment to the Church as 
 he knew it then : just so may the noblest of women, and the
 
 Conclusion. 353 
 
 most clear-sighted, cling to some incurably drunken husband. 
 If, again, the ideal Church of his vision bore a close resemblance 
 to the real Church whose decay he lamented, so also a good 
 woman's ideal always resembles some unworthier object in the 
 flesh. Assuredly, if Dante had lived in the age of modern 
 discoveries, he would no more have neglected science than 
 theology, but would have struggled to possess the future, leaving 
 the dead to bury their dead. 
 
 For Dante and St. Francis are great only as they anticipate the 
 world that is to be. While sharing the inevitable belief in the 
 decay of their own age inevitable then, because true History 
 was impossible they rose by faith high above the pessimism of 
 their contemporaries. Such too is the real greatness of their 
 century, beneath the purely imaginary virtues with which it is 
 often credited. That age is truly great, not in the false appearance 
 of monumental completeness which it presents to a distant eye, 
 but in the ferment and struggle which are only apparent to a closer 
 scrutiny. We are often told to admire in the Middle Ages a 
 pastoral of the 18th-century pattern: clean-washed sheep with 
 pink ribbons round their necks lying in the tranquil shade, while a 
 shepherd, in pink ribbons, pipes to them through the livelong 
 day. But in fact they felt themselves as shepherdless as we : 
 
 " A thousand of men tho tbrungen togyderes, 
 Criede upward to Cryst and to His dene Moder 
 To have grace to go with hem, treuthe to seke, 
 Ac there was wyghte lion so wys, the way thider couthe, 
 But blustreden forth as bestes, over bankes and hilles, 
 Til late was and longe." 
 
 (P. Plowman. B. v., 517). 
 
 In short, they struggled and suffered manfully, as generation 
 after generation has done after them : and with the stripes of 
 these our ancestors we ourselves are healed, if we will only accept 
 their experience. Our later time has inherited a world for which 
 the Middle Ages groaned and travailed in pain : yet half our 
 teachers seem to spend their best energies in trying to put us out 
 of patience with it. In our fight against the evil of our own 
 times, often discouraging enough, we may brace ourselves by 
 pausing for a moment to measure the world's past progress. 
 There is no fear of present evils and defects being ignored : 
 poverty and crime, luxury and levity, force themselves only too 
 plainly on our notice. The encompassing hosts of wickedness are 
 as visible to the honest Agnostic on one side as to the honest 
 Romanist on the other. But the progress of the past is an 
 
 A3
 
 354 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 earnest of far greater progress in the future. It is melancholy 
 to see good men of every generation spending their whole energies 
 in daubing the bulging bulwarks of the old world, which the next 
 generation abandons as useless. Meanwhile, if we would only 
 look steadily upwards instead of downwards, we should see how 
 many more are with us than with them ; how truly the whole 
 mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about us.
 
 APPENDIX A. 
 
 NOTES OX THE CHAPTERS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 1. These lacunse existed already in the 16th century, when a tran- 
 
 script of the Chronicle was made. 
 
 2. For growth of luxury see Murat. ix, pp. 128 ft' and 669 : Ben. 
 
 Im. vol. v, p. 150 : for slaves see Biagi, p. 333, and Wadding, 
 1274, p. 423. 
 
 3. Ps. xliv, 3. I have thought it best to give nearly all the Bible 
 
 quotations from the Douai version, as more exactly representing 
 the Vulgate, which Salimbene of course always quotes. The page 
 references are to the text of Salimbene in Mon. Germ. Hist. 
 Scriptt., t. xxxii. In some cases, however, I have not been able 
 to secure in time the paged sheets of this standard edition ; in 
 such cases I give the year under which Salimbene records the 
 matter, together with the page of the Parma edition. Thus the 
 reference (1250-237) will enable the reader to verify my quota- 
 tion on p. 237 in the Parma edition, or under the year 1250 in 
 either edition. Whether the whole of the Chronicle was written 
 for Sister Agnes has been questioned by Father Michael, who 
 however gives no very cogent reasons for his doubt. Certainly 
 Salimbene's freedom of speech supplies no proof that it was not 
 written for a nun : see chap, iii, note 7. 
 
 4. Michael, p. 2, 
 
 5. e.g. The early history of the city and diocese of Tournai, in the 
 
 Corpus Chronicorum Flandrice, 1841, t. ii, pp. 480 following. 
 Similarly, Abbot Guibert of Nogent tells how he has been 
 pestered to deliver imaginary panegyrics on unknown saints : 
 and his words imply that such requests were frequent and diffi- 
 cult to refuse. (Migne. Pat. Lat., vol. clvi, p. 624). When, 
 in 1282, a general chapter of the Franciscans was held at Strass- 
 burg, " the Minister-General enjoined Brother Philip,
 
 356 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 minister of Tuscany, to enquire diligently, if perchance he could 
 find the day and hour on which the stigmata of Jesus Christ 
 were imprinted on St. Francis' body. So he found a lay-brother, 
 perfect in all virtues, to whom had been vouchsafed many reve- 
 lations directly from St. Francis, to the effect that on the day of 
 the Exaltation of the Holy Cross .... the Lord Jesus .... im- 
 printed on him those marvellous wounds." (24 Gen., p. 374). 
 
 6. Occasional Papers. Vol. i, p. 87 (Macmillan, 1897). 
 
 7. She speaks of Cantarelli's as "an Italian version, for which it is 
 
 difficult to say one good word " (p. 60) : yet, where Salimbene 
 has Rex Hyrtacus, and Cantarelli's Italian has naturally it 
 Rege Irtaco, Miss Macdonell mistranslates this as " King of 
 Ithaca " (p. 259) ; and by a similar misunderstanding of Italian 
 she converts Salimbene's swineherds into swine. There are very 
 many other such mistakes, often small in themselves, but going 
 far to explain Miss Macdonell's under-estimate of Salimbene's 
 value as a serious historian. 
 
 For a conspectus of all that is at present known about Salim- 
 bene we must await Prof. Holder-Egger's introduction : but 
 meanwhile a very good bibliography may be gathered from Prof. 
 Michael's Salimbene und seine Chronik" (Innsbruck, 1889), pp. 
 1-5 and 87-94. The author, though his theological bias is obvious 
 and natural, subordinates it generally to the interests of historical 
 truth. His book shows a truly German industry and mastery 
 of detail, though it is interesting to an Englishman to mark the 
 natural limits of a Jesuit professor's familiarity with the Bible 
 text. On page 123 he quotes the similes of the she-bear robbed 
 of her whelps, and the eagle that hasteneth to the prey, as speci- 
 mens of Salimbene's picturesque phrases : the context shows that 
 he has no suspicion of their Biblical origin. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 1 . Ca;s. Heist, dist. x, cap. 99. Bert. Rat. Fred. I, 402. 
 
 2. Vine. Bell. Spec. Doct. x, 12. Northumberland Assize Eolls 
 
 (Surtees Soc., vol. 88), p. 341. L. Gautier, La Chevalerie, pp. 
 342-9; A. Schulz, Hb'fisches Leben, vol. ii, p. 163; La Tour, 
 chaps. 17-19 ; Bern. Sen. Pred. II, 103, 115 ; Pipinus in Murat, 
 ix, 647 ; Bourbon, p. 241 (where the editor misses much of the 
 point of the story by referring Imperator quondam to Barbarossa, 
 not realizing that this was the stereotyped phrase applied to 
 Frederick II by good churchmen after the sentence of deposition 
 pronounced on him by Innocent IV in 1245) ; Ben. Im., vol. v,
 
 Appendix A. 357 
 
 p. 150 ; Arte, p. 74. The statutes of medieval towns often 
 yield very interesting evidence. Those of Castellarquato, near 
 Piacenza (about 1350 A.D. ; pub. 1876, p. 179 ff), give a tariff 
 of fines for defamatory language or assaults. The former list 
 varies from 20 pence for calling another Tapeworm ! through a 
 rising gradation of Cagasangue ! and similar picturesque epithets, 
 to 10 imperial for Forger! or Traitor! Pulling the hair or 
 scratching, if without effusion of blood, cost 1 ; with blood, 
 2, unless the assault were committed " by way of correction," 
 in which case it was condoned altogether. Biting was assessed 
 at 2 10s. without blood, and 5 with blood. An assault with- 
 out arms, if it drew blood from the victim's body, cost 10 ; if 
 from his face, 15. With arms and blood, the tariff was 20 
 per wound inflicted, plus the doctor's bill. To throw a stone 
 and miss cost 1 ; the too successful marksman must, however, 
 pay 10, or, if the missile struck his victim's face, 20. This 
 elaborate tariff (of which I have given only brief specimens) was, 
 however, inapplicable to " ribalds, prostitutes, or vile and abject 
 persons," who were to be fined or punished at the judge's dis- 
 cretion. Other equally interesting tariffs at medieval universities 
 may be found in Rashdall, vol. ii, pp. 415, 614. As the example 
 of Cianghella may suggest, the idea of self-control even in church 
 was foreign to the mass of the people. Bishop Quivil of Exeter 
 complains, in his Synod of 1287, that the services were often 
 scandalously interrupted by two or three parishioners scuffling 
 for the same seat; Chaucer twice alludes to similar quarrels 
 of women for precedence or salutes in church ; and I shall have 
 occasion to quote St. Bernardino to the same effect (Wilkins 
 Concil, vol. ii, p. 139, Cant. Tales, Prol. 450 and B. 3091). The 
 scuffle of the two Archbishops for precedence in Westminster 
 Abbey, York finally sitting on Canterbury's lap, and getting his 
 clothes torn almost off his back, is only one of a dozen similar 
 instances which might be quoted (Gervase of Canterbury, R,S., 
 vol. i, p. 258). The Bishops' registers are full of solemn " recon- 
 ciliations" of churches and churchyards polluted by bloodshed 
 in brawls. 
 
 3. The 14th-century commentator, Benvenuto da Imola, speaks as if 
 
 this boyish vandalism were quite common quite apart from the 
 pleasure which older ruffians found in destroying churches or 
 palaces in war-time (vol. i, pp. 115, 461). 
 
 4. For this, " the earliest of all the poets of Northern Italy known 
 
 to us," see Gaspary's Hist, of Early Italian Literature. Salim- 
 bene frequently quotes him, and paid him the compliment of an 
 imitation, as he tells us (464). 
 
 5. Bert. Rat. Pred., vol. i, p. 89, and ii, 205.
 
 358 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 1. For Leo see Floury, an. 1240, xxxiv, and 1267, liii. 
 
 2. For Gerard of Modena, see Wadding, 1244, p. 109, and 1251, 
 
 p. 277. Bartholomew of Vicenza seems, like his fellow-towns- 
 man John, to have had two sides to his character. Prof. Holder - 
 Egger points out (p. 74, note 1) that he is almost certainly the 
 friar who was chosen in 1231 to arbitrate between Genoa and 
 Alessandria, but who disgraced his office by falsifications and in- 
 terpolations of documents. 
 
 3. " Et Johannes johannizat 
 
 Et saltando choreizat. 
 Modo salta, modo salta, 
 Qui celorum petis alta ! 
 Sal tat iste, sal tat ille, 
 Kesaltant cohortes mille, 
 Saltat chorus dominarum, 
 Saltat dux Venetiarum, <fec." 
 
 4. For this satire, and Guido Bonatti's testimony, see Prof. Holder- 
 
 Egger's notes, pp. 77, 78. 
 
 5. For a more orthodox explanation of the delay in St. Dominic's 
 
 canonization, see p. 30 of the works of his successor, Jordan of 
 Saxony (Ed. Berthier, Fribonrg, 1891). 
 
 6. The story of the philosopher Secundus may be found in Vincent 
 
 of Beauvais, Spec. Hist, x, 70. Though designed to point a moral 
 in its time, it again is scarcely suitable for modern print. 
 
 7. Cf. Archiv, iii, 458, for a decree of the general chapter of Terni 
 
 forbidding friars to have obscene books in their possession. A 
 similar prohibition of cantilence lasdvce may be found in the 
 Franciscan Constitutions of 1290, edited by Prof. Little. (Eng. 
 Hist. Review, July, 1903, p. 493.) Similarly, in his instructions 
 to preachers, Cardinal Jacques de Vitry finds it necessary to re- 
 cord the warning, " scurrilia tamen aut obscena verba vel turpis 
 sermo ex ore predicatoris non procedant" (Vit. Serm. p. xliii, 
 note). To realize how much need there was for this admonition, 
 the reader should refer to A. M6ray, " La Vie aux Temps des 
 Libres PrScheurs," vol. ii, pp. 143 ff, 243. It is a book which 
 must often be used with caution for historical purposes : but the 
 quotations on those pages tell their own tale. Gerson complained 
 of the obscene talk of university professors, by which their pupils 
 were corrupted (ii, 763). The manners of ordinary society
 
 Appendix A. 359 
 
 in this respect are clearly shown by Chaucer : but, in view of 
 attempts often made to avoid the natural inferences from the 
 Canterbury Tales, it may be worth while to add further references 
 here. The licence allowed in society games may be inferred from 
 a " Ragman Roll," printed in Wright and Halli well's Rdiquice 
 A ntiqua, and from the fact that medieval moralists and preachers 
 condemn dancing with practical or literal unanimity, and fre- 
 quently even attendance at weddings. The book of the Knight of 
 La Tour Landry shows how a particularly careful nobleman talked 
 to his daughters : next to this book, there is perhaps no document 
 so significant of medieval manners in this respect as the sermons 
 which St. Bernardino delivered in the great square of Siena, and to 
 which he expressly asked the mothers to bring their daughters. 
 (Prediche, vol. ii, nos. xix-xxii : especially pp. 98, 108, 110, 132, 
 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143, 149, 150, 167-172.) Yet that 
 even this licence of speech was insignificant compared with that 
 which the manners of the time often permitted, may be gathered 
 plainly from the horror with which he describes the common 
 sins of 14th century society in this respect. (Opera, vol. iii, 
 p. 3676.) We get similar evidence from Sir Thomas More, as I 
 have pointed out in Med. Studies, no. 6 ; and from one of the 
 early chapters in Raimondo da Vigna's " Life of St. Catherine 
 of Siena." 
 
 8. Compare this reference to Guido with what Salimbene says of him 
 
 later on, in the chapter which I have entitled "Settling Down." 
 
 9. Guibert is specially concerned to combat the error of the monks of 
 
 St. M^dard at Soissons, who boasted the possession of one of our 
 Lord's milk-teeth, fallen out in the course of nature when He 
 was nine years old. Incidentally he refers to those who prided 
 themselves on still stranger relics umbUicum et praeputium 
 Domini. Even Innocent III treated these relics seriously (De 
 Sacro Altat-ia Mysterio, Lib. iv, c. 30), discussed the claims of two 
 rival preputia, and summed up (very nearly in the words of Sir 
 John Maundeville), " yet it is better to commit all to God than 
 to define rashly either way."* The encyclopaedic learning of the 
 late Father Denifle, sub-librarian of the Vatican, has unearthed 
 no less than seven churches which claimed this strange relic 
 (Desolation des Eglises), vol. i, p. 167 : (c/. J. B. Thiers, Traite 
 des Superttitions, Avignon, 1777, p. 365, from whom it appears 
 
 * The plea that all these duplicate relics were really fragments of one genuine 
 relic is, I believe, quite modern, beginning with Wadding and other 17th century 
 scholars whose bias was definitely apologetic. In many cases the plea is demon - 
 strably false, for different churches claimed the relic in its entirety. Mr. J. C. 
 Wall (" Shrines of British Saints," p. 9) writes in a very misleading fashion on 
 this subject.
 
 360 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 that it had a Mass of its own). Guibert, bolder and more logical 
 than the great Pope, decides that, if we are to believe in the 
 resurrection of the body, we cannot suppose the risen Christ to 
 have left a tooth or any other such relic on earth (col. 631). The 
 monks of Soissons, he concludes, can therefore only be absolved 
 from heresy on the charitable supposition that they are liars : 
 nor can he admit that the alleged miracles afford any valid proof 
 of the relic's authenticity. As a somewhat earlier chronicler 
 puts it " miracles are sometimes wrought by evil spirits, by God's 
 permission and as a punishment for men's sins." (Rodulfi Glabri 
 Monachi Cluniacensis Hist. lib. iv, c. 3.) Guibert's treatise 
 should be read in its entirety : but the following extracts will 
 give some idea of the attitude of a very distinguished scholar 
 and churchman in St. Bernard's generation towards popular 
 beliefs (col. 621). "A certain most famous church (he is proba- 
 bly speaking of Laon Cathedral) was sending round wandering 
 collectors of this kind, and had employed a preacher to beg 
 money for its restoration. This man, swelling beyond all 
 measure in his sermon over the relics which he bore, brought 
 forth a casket in my presence. ' Know ye,' said he [to the con- 
 gregation], ' that this casket contains some of the bread which 
 our Lord pressed with His own teeth : and, if ye are slow to be- 
 lieve, behold this illustrious man ' (for thus he spake of me) ' of 
 whose great learning ye yourselves are witnesses, and who will 
 rise up, if need be, as a witness to the truth of my words.' I 
 confess that I blushed to hear this : and (but that I feared in 
 the presence of those at whose prompting he spake, lest I should 
 offend them even more than the speaker himself),* I should have 
 exposed the fraud. What shall I say ? not even monks let 
 alone the secular clergy abstain from such filthy lucre, or shrink 
 from speaking heresies on matters of our faith even in my 
 presence. [And I must be silent] for, as Boethius said 'I should 
 be rightly condemned as a madman if I were to dispute with 
 madmen.' " As Guibert says in another place (624) "There are 
 things written about some saints which are much worse than old 
 wives' fables, and unfit even for the ears of cowherds." While 
 the clergy hold their tongues, old women and ignorant hussies 
 sing these legendary saints' lives, and will attack the rash 
 sceptic not only with abuse but with their distaffs (622). Men 
 are put as saints under the altars who, living, were scarcely fit 
 to come into the sanctuary (615) : villages and little towns 
 "daily" invent saints of their own to rival the St. Martins and 
 St. Re"mis of the great churches : and Guibert quotes in this con- 
 text, I Sam., xvii, 29, "Each nation made its own God" (622). 
 
 * The text of this parenthesis seems corrupt in parts, but its general sense is 
 obvious.
 
 Appendix A. 361 
 
 He illustrates this manufacture of relics from his own experience 
 (625). " Those who worship they know not what, even though 
 it be in fact a holy relic, are yet never free from great danger. 
 If on the contrary it be no relic at all, then they live in most 
 terrible sacrilege : for what could be more sacrilegious than to 
 
 worship as divine that which is not divine ? Hear a tale 
 
 which may explain my complaints and show the truth of what I 
 have advanced. Odo, bishop of Bayeux, natural son to Robert 
 count of Normandy, and blood-brother to William the First of 
 England, eagerly sought the body of St. Exuperius his prede- 
 cessor, who is worshipped with the utmost reverence in the town 
 of Corbeil. He paid, therefore, the sum of one hundred pounds 
 to the sacristan of the church which possessed these relics, that 
 he might take them for himself. But the sacristan cunningly 
 dug up the bones of a peasant named Exuperius, and brought 
 them to the bishop. The bishop, not content with his mere 
 assertion, exacted from him an oath that these bones which he 
 brought were those of Saint Exuperius. ' I swear,' replied the 
 man, ' that these are the bones of Exuperius : as to his sanctity 
 I cannot swear, since many earn the title of saints who are far 
 indeed from holiness.' Thus the thief assuaged the bishop's sus- 
 picions and set his mind at rest See now what disgrace 
 
 this bishop's bargain brought upon religion, when the bones of 
 this profane peasant Exuperius were thrust into God's holy altar, 
 which perchance will never more be purged of them. I can re- 
 call so many like deeds in all parts that I lack time and strength 
 to tell them here ; for fraudulent bargains are made, not so much 
 in whole bodies as in limbs, common bones being sold as relics 
 
 of the saints " 
 
 Compare this with a parallel passage from Cardinal Jacques 
 de Vitry about 1220 (Hist. Occ., c. 10). After a vivid des- 
 cription of the traffic in false relics and indulgences, the blackmail 
 exacted by preachers for ill-gotten gains, and the drunkenness and 
 debauchery in which much of the money thus extorted from the 
 laity was spent, the Cardinal goes on : " Those who send these 
 aforesaid filthy and blasphemous fellows to preach for the 
 building of their churches, and the bishops who grant them their 
 letters of authorization, shall give account to the strict judge for 
 all their perverse deeds." While the minds of the faithful 
 were thus poisoned by the habit of revering false relics and false 
 miracles, the belief was commonly exploited to their own sinister 
 purposes by rascals even in the highest ecclesiastical circles. 
 There is a typical instance from the Winchester annals (Annalca 
 Monastici, R.S. ii, 100, A.D. 1262). The prior of St. Swithun's 
 was imprisoned for his sins, and, escaping by fraud, said that St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury had set him free by a miracle : in token 
 whereof he hung bis chains at the Canterbury shrine " pro-
 
 362 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 ludibrio, ne dicam pro miraculo," remarks the indignant chronicler 
 of the monastery. 
 
 The Papal Jitter referred to in the text may be found in 
 Raynaldus, Ann. Ecc., an. 1238, 33: cf. Caes. Heist., dist. ii, 
 c. 24: Thos. Cant. II, xxvi, 7, 8. The latter writes: "I 
 remember what I once heard from a very simple-minded lay- 
 man at Cambrai. Certain monks had made him a solemn 
 promise which they had not kept : so, not seeing how else he 
 could excuse them, he said, 'Those men break their promise 
 to me by a daily lie ; but I believe that they lie by leave 
 of their Abbot.' This is still remembered as a proverb in those 
 parts where some monk fails to tell the truth : ' Let him alone,' ' 
 men say, ' for he lies by his Abbot's leave." " Thomas blames their 
 habit of excusing such falsehoods by the example of Abraham, 
 Sarah, Isaac, and other patriarchs. The fraud which he relates 
 with approval may be found in II, xxv, 13. 
 
 With regard to the case of St. Francis, see Sabatier, Vie de 
 St. F., pp. 64, 65 : Knox-Little, St. Francis, p. 94. The Three 
 Companions say (chap, vi), " restore [to thy father] the money 
 which thou hast ; for, since it is perchance ill-gotten, God willeth 
 not that thou pay it to Church uses." Thomas of Celano, Leg. 
 Antiq. (Ed. flosedale, p. 14): "He restored the money to his 
 father ... at the persuasion of the Bishop, a most pious man, 
 for the reason that it was unlawful to expend anything ill-gotten 
 on pious uses (eo quod non liceret de male acquisitis aliquid in 
 sacros usus expendere)." Nowhere do the early authorities, I 
 believe, claim that the horse and cloth sold at Foligno were the 
 saint's own : they simply say, venditis . . . quse portaverat (or 
 portabat). For admitted "pious thefts," see Wadding, 1242, p. 
 80; 1252, p. 281; 1297, p. 359; and Ana. Fra. hi, 164, 425, 
 551. 
 
 10. Dav. Aug., p. 357. 
 
 1 1 . This book is now lost. 
 
 12. These two sermons on Antichrist have been edited by SchbnbacL, 
 
 "Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt," IV. For 
 information as to the preacher see E. Bernhardt " Bruder Ber- 
 thold v. Regensburg." (Erfurt, 1905). 
 
 13. The vivid impression made by Berthold's sermons may be 
 
 realized, even through legendary exaggerations, from an anecdote 
 quoted from an anonymous chronicler in Pfeiffer's edition of 
 Sermons (vol. i, p. xxi), and recorded in the Chronicle of the 
 24 Generals, p. 238. " Once when he was preaching against 
 the vice of lechery, a certain prostitute who heard him was 
 smitten with such pain by the arrow of his word, shot from so
 
 Appendix A. 363 
 
 valiant and direct a bow, that she gave up the ghost." Berthold 
 prayed her back to life : " And among other things she revealed 
 how in that same hour wherein she died 60,000 men were called 
 from life in divers parts of the world; of whom three only 
 entered purgatory. The rest were plunged into hell, all but one 
 Friar Minor, who passed through Purgatory and, suddenly 
 taking with him two souls which had confessed to him, went up 
 with them to Paradise." 
 
 14. The version of this story given by Wadding explains that 
 
 Berthold had Papal authority to grant several days' Indulgence 
 to his listeners at every sermon, and that on this occasion he 
 had granted one of ten days. 
 
 15. Berthold was exceeding his powers in admitting a new member 
 
 into the Order ; but he hoped that the General would ratify his 
 decision. 
 
 16. This address to a single definite reader, who knew Bologna, adds 
 
 to the probability that our chronicler is here thinking of his 
 niece. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 1. Michael, p. 70 : but cf. Cannina Burana (Ed. Schmeller, Breslau, 
 
 1883), p. 71. For Primas see Cses. Heist. Dist. ii, c. 15; Boc- 
 caccio's Decameron, G. i, n. 7, and the references given by Prof. 
 Holder-Egger, p. 83, note. For Feast of Fools, Gerson, vol. ii, 
 pp. 555A, 636D, 641c; Od. Rig., pp. 44, 384, 472. Sacchetti. 
 Serm. p. 22. For the transitory nature of these Revivals, see 
 Murat., vol. ix, p. 55, and xxiii, 839. 
 
 2. Ecc. i, 15, Vulg. This text was a great favourite with medieval 
 
 moralists, whose pale ghosts must have rejoiced far more to wel- 
 come Carlyle's disembodied spirit than Wordsworth's. 
 
 3. ObLzzo ii : see Dante, Inf. xiii, 110. 
 
 4. Bacon, ed. Brewer, R. S., p. 426 Rashdall, vol. ii, p. 385 Jac. 
 
 de Varagine in Murat, vol. ix, p. 45. 
 
 5. Miss Macdonell (p. 263) is misled by Canturelli's translation into 
 
 imagining that the friars only promised him an excellent meal 
 this evening, and actually gave him cabbages : thus missing the 
 whole point of the story. This supper in the infirmary before 
 his admission was in fact excellent ; only, when once he was ad-
 
 364 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 mitted, he must needs eat cabbages at his daily meals in the 
 refectory, like the rest of the Brethren. 
 
 6. " Milvus ait pullo, dum portaretur ab illo, cum pi pi faris, non te 
 
 tenet ungula talis." 
 
 7. "Homini avari, e pien d'ogni empietate, 
 
 Che lor par proprio ire in paradiso 
 Quando hanno il figlio dal padre diviso ! " 
 
 (Drama of 14th or 15th century, quoted in D'Ancona, Origini 
 del Teatro, etc., vol. i, p. 189). Bern. Bess., pp. 297, 399. 
 Salimbene, as his own artless revelations often show, would have 
 learnt more easily than most otherwise amiable boys that renun- 
 ciation of home ties which has always been preached as one of 
 the first duties of a Religious. As the Mirror of Monks puts it 
 (a treatise often printed among St. Bernard's works), " the Re- 
 ligious should be like Melchizedek, without father, without 
 mother, without genealogy." Again, Brother Giles, paraphrasing 
 Luke xiv, 26 after his own hyperbolical fashion, advised the in- 
 tending postulant to "go forthwith and slay his parents, his 
 brothers, his sisters, and his cousins" (24 Gen., p. 92 : cf. 98). 
 Though we may scarcely need Prof. Holder- Egger's warning that 
 the man's account of the boy's ever-ready Biblical quotations are 
 not to be taken too literally, it transpires plainly enough from this 
 and other episodes that Salimbene, if he did not slay his father 
 and mother, at least did not strive officiously to keep them alive. 
 
 8. This is the Illuminate of Dante, Par. xii, 130. 
 
 9. The actual word here used by Guido, though unfamiliar to polite 
 
 English ears, is said to be still commonly used in Italy as a term 
 of abuse for monks and friars. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 1. There was, nevertheless, another Br. Ognibene in the Order at the 
 
 same time as our chronicler. He is mentioned by Eccleston (p. 
 59) as the Companion of Albert of Pisa in England. 
 
 2. This description is strikingly like the fresco of the vocation of S. 
 
 Ranieri in the Campo Santo of Pisa. Salimbene could not of 
 course have seen that actual painting ; but his imagination might 
 well have been struck by the story, which may be read in the 
 Acta Sanctorum, or in the old Italian translation of Benincasa's 
 Life of S. Ranieri, published at Pisa in 1842.
 
 Appendix A. 365 
 
 3. E.g., the story (recorded in Vincent of Beauvais and the Golden 
 
 Legend) how St. John the Evangelist turned pebbles into gems 
 and sticks into gold (p. 46) : again, stories from St. Gregory's 
 Dialogues and (nominally at least) from the Vitae Patrum. The 
 Bible misquotation is p. 51, line 43 : God in the third person, 
 p. 52, 11. 39, 40. Prof. Holder-Egger assumes that Christ's 
 speech must have ended somewhere before this, but there is no 
 such indication in the text ; and the simplest explanation seems 
 to be that our good friar had become thoroughly muddled with 
 his own arguments. 
 
 4. Hist. Occ., p. 349 : the s'etaient crus of Sabatier, Vie de St. F., p. 
 
 cxxiii, is distinctly misleading. 
 
 5. Matt. Paris an. 1244 (p. 558), and 1250 (695), 1252 (731). Mon. 
 
 Franc., pp. 86, 90, 96, 101, 105, 213 and passim Browne 
 Fasc. ii, 251. Cf. Grosseteste. Epistolse. R.S., pp. 434, 440 
 A A. SS. Oct. iv, 712 Bonaventura Qusestio ii, circa Regulam 
 Vine. Bell. Spec. Doct., lib. ii, dist. ii, pars 2 : Spec. Hist. lib. 
 xxx, c. 107 QuStif-Ecbard. Scriptt O. P. i, 25, notes A2 and 
 B. Vit.' Frat. cap. I, ii, iii, Thos. Cant., pp. 253 (lib. ii, 
 c. 37). AA. SS. Ap. Ill, prologus primus in vitam S. Cath. 
 Senensis, sect, iii and iv. 
 
 6. Archiv., vol. iii, p. 453. 
 
 7. Bacon ed. Brewer, RS., pp. 24, 30, 33, 38, 398404, 426, 475. 
 
 8. See an article by the present writer in the Independent Review for 
 
 June, 1905, reprinted as No. 5 of Medieval Studies. (Simpkin, 
 Marshall <fe Co., 6d.) 
 
 9. Gerson, vol. i, p. 201 A, vol. ii, pp. 555r, 649s, 712A. The Church, 
 
 he says, is as though smitten with an incurable disease, and 
 remedies do but make her worse. Compare the striking anecdote 
 told by Salimbene's contemporary, Etienne de Bourbon (p. 217). 
 Etienne had been informed by Petrus Hispanus apparently not 
 Dante's pope of that name, but a fellow-friar how a holy man 
 watching in prayer saw a vision of a fair lady who announced 
 herself to be that Holy Church on whose behalf the devotee 
 uttered so many groans and prayers. "And then she took off 
 the resplendent crown which she wore and bowed her head to- 
 wards him. And he saw the crown of the head cleft crosswise 
 in four parts, and vermin bubbling forth from her brain, and her 
 wounds reeking with corrupted blood in all four quarters. 
 ' Behold ! ' said she : ' from what thou canst see of my head thou 
 mayst now understand my corruption and pain in the rest of my 
 limbs." A strikingly similar vision of the Franciscan Order 
 smitten with leprosy is recorded in Angelo Clareno's Seven Tribu-
 
 366 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Iatio7is but, in deed, it would be easy to fill a whole book of this 
 size with similar complaints from orthodox medieval churchmen. 
 
 10. We may gather from frequent allusions in inquest and assize rolls 
 that many houses in the towns of the 1 3th century were built of 
 wattle and clay. The burglar's line of least resistance was often 
 not a door or a window, but a more or less decayed portion of 
 the house wall. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 1. Independent Review, Feb., 1905. Contemporary Review, Aug., 1905 
 
 (reprinted as Medieval Studies, nos. 3 and 4). 
 
 2. Newman's Letters, Ed. Mozley (1891), vol. ii, p. 481 : cf. Ana. 
 
 Fra. vol. iii, pp. 118, 269, 360 and passim. Wadding, an. 1246, 
 p. 158 : 1261, p. 178 : 1277, p. 22 : Eubel. Prov. passim. 
 
 3. For puritanism in architecture see Eccleston, col. vii ; Archiv. vi, 
 
 pp. 34-36, 70; Ana. Fra. ii, 123; Wadding, an. 1242, p. 17; 
 Actus S. Francisci ed. Sabatier, p. 203 ; D. Bernardi Ep. ad 
 Guil. Abbatem, cap. xii. For music Dav. Aug., p. 28 : R. 
 Bacon ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 297 ; Archiv. vi, p. 70 ; Wadding, 
 an. 1250, p. 241. For vandalism Od. Rig., pp. 426, 572 : 
 Sacchetti Serm. vii : Frati, p. 82 : Bern. Sen., vol. i, p. 208 ; 
 Wadding, an. 1236, p. 429; 1279, 462; 1280, 467; 1291; 
 Actus S. Francisci, cap. xl. For Calvinistic ideas of hell Bonav. 
 Qusest. Giro. Reg. xix and Soliloq., c. iv : Aquinas sup. qusest. 
 XCIV (XCV) art. iii. Gerson, vol. ii, p. 676E. In fact (as Dr. 
 Brown has pointed out in his recent able essay on Pearl] this 
 Calvinistic idea is not the exception, but the almost universal 
 rule among medieval schoolmen. (For Angela, see Wadding, 
 an. 1309, xi). 
 
 St. Bernard's bitter condemnation of elaborate architecture or 
 ornament for monastic churches, though perhaps the most in- 
 structive document of its kind, is too long to quote here ; but I 
 subjoin a shorter passage from the De Ciaustro Animce, printed 
 among the works of Hugh of St. Victor, but probably written 
 by his contemporary, Hugh Foliot (Migne Pat. Lat., clxxvi, 
 col. 1053). " Let the Brethren's buildings be not superfluous, 
 but bumble ; not delightful, but decent. Stone is useful in build- 
 ing, but of what use is carving in the stone ? " Such show might 
 indeed be permitted in the Temple under the Old Testament dis- 
 pensation, and nowadays "let it be permitted (if it be permitted 
 in any case) to those who dwell in towns or villages frequented 
 by layfolk, that such simple minds as are not delighted by the 
 subtleties of Holy Scripture may be held fast by the delight of
 
 Appendix A. 367 
 
 of painting [or sculpture] : but, for us [monks] who delight in 
 solitude, a horse or ox is better in the field than carved on the 
 wall." Gerson is not at all sure that the multiplicity of images 
 does not lead the common folk into idolatry : and Chaucer's con- 
 temporary, Eustache Deschamps, composed a poem which he 
 entitled " Balade, que on ne doit mettre es eglises nulz ymaiges 
 entaillez, fors le crucifix et la vierge, pour doubte d'ydolatrier." 
 (Works, vol. viii, p. 201). There is one stanza of the poem, 
 which (if we had no other evidence) would show the futility of 
 Abbot Gasquet's contention that even the common people wor- 
 shipped images without any risk of idolatry : 
 
 " Car 1'ouvraige est forme plaisant ; 
 La painture dont je me plain, 
 La beaute de 1'or reluisant, 
 Font croire a maint peuple incertain 
 Que ce soient Dieu pour certain, 
 Et servent par pense"es foles 
 
 Telz ymages qui font caroles (i.e., stand in a ring) 
 Es moustiers ou trop en mettons ; 
 C'est tres mal fait : a briefs paroles 
 Telz simulacres n'aourons." 
 
 4. Bern. Bess., pp. 303-309, 405. St. Bonaventura in the same 
 volume, pp. 234, 249, 262-265. Dav. Aug., pp. 32 ff, 188, 
 325 ff, 286 ff. Bern. Bess., 364, 347. Mirror, chap. 96. 
 Dav. Aug., pp. 46, 48. I will quote a few of these warnings in 
 full. St. Bonaventura (262): "Avoid in all places all women 
 and beardless youths, except for reasons of necessity or manifest 
 profit." Again (239) : " Flee from women as far as in thee 
 lieth, as from serpents ; nor even speak with any except under 
 compulsion of urgent necessity ; nor even look in the face of any 
 
 woman For Augustine saith ' with women we must 
 
 speak roughly, briefly and stiffly : nor are they less perilous for 
 being holy women : for, the holier they are, the more they entice 
 us, and under the cloke of smooth speech creeps in the slime of 
 most impious lust. Believe me, who am a bishop : I speak the 
 truth in God, I lie not. I have known cedars of Lebanon and 
 bell-wethers of the flock to fall by this pretext : men whose 
 ruin I should no more have suspected than that of St. Jerome or 
 St. Ambrose.' " St. Bona Ventura's secretary (381), after warning 
 the friar never to kiss even his mother, if he can well avoid it, 
 or " his sister or niece, of however tender age," adds, " how can 
 it be lawful to touch that which is not lawful to gaze upon ? " 
 David of Augsburg (188) : " How many have frequented spiritual 
 women under the excuse of spiritual friendship and of obtaining 
 their prayers ! See, what purity in their first intention, viz.,
 
 368 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 charity and devotion ! Then follow long talks, now of God, 
 now of their own mutual love and faith, and loving looks and 
 little presents exchanged for memorials of friendship. ... At 
 last follow false goods, but true evils, namely, embraces, kisses, 
 touching of hands and breasts, and the like ; all of which are 
 suspicious signs of carnal affection and preludes of foul works. 
 Last of all, as the guilt of what hath gone before, follows im- 
 modesty, that is, open works of iniquity." There, again, is an 
 anecdote of St. Dominic's successor, Jordan of Saxony, a saint, 
 and a man of sound common sense (Vit. Frat., p. 146): "A 
 certain friar accused a brother friar in Chapter of having touched 
 a woman's hand. He replied, ' She was a good woman.' Then 
 answered the president (Jordan of Saxony), 'Rain is good and 
 earth is good, yet from their mingling mud is formed : so also is 
 it even with the good hand of a man and of a woman ; for when 
 they join together evil thoughts and affections sometimes arise.'" 
 S. Bernardino of Siena, enumerating the cases in which a friar 
 may lawfully appeal to the higher axxthorities against the deci- 
 sion of his immediate superiors, specifies " also if he were to be 
 compelled by the superiors of any monastery to hear confessions, 
 and through such confessions should frequently fall into frailty 
 on account of the foul things which he hears in the confessional 
 .... also if any woman were to solicit him to sin with her 
 by signs or words or presents" (Opp., vol. iii, p. 442). Many 
 friars tried to live up to this ascetic creed : admiring chroniclers 
 record how St. Louis of Toulouse was asked by his mother, after 
 a long absence, " ' Am I not your mother, who may lawfully kiss 
 you 1 ' To whom her virginal son replied, ' I know, my Lady, that 
 you are my mother and a woman, whom it is not expedient for a 
 servant of God to kiss ' " (24 Gen., p. 434). Also, " Brother Jacopo 
 di Benedetto daTodi, a man of great perfection, was so firmly rooted 
 in purity of mind and body that (as be said) he cared to see the 
 head and face of the fairest woman no more, or perchance even 
 less than an ass's head " (Ibid, p. 460). Yet we may see clearly, 
 even from Salimbene, how little the majority were inclined to 
 avoid all social intercourse with women, and how easy it might 
 be to fall into spiritual familiarity with a nun. A little later, 
 Alvarez Pelayo, a learned Spanish Franciscan, who became a 
 Papal Penitentiary, complained of the frequency with which 
 familiarity between nuns and their devoti, or spiritual directors, 
 led to sin. "Scarce any nun is without her carnal devotus 
 .... and she holds herself neglected who has no such devotee, 
 or rather corrupter. Secular folk and nuns' relations know this, 
 and murmur and are scandalized and complain to the Superioi-s, 
 but to small purpose ; for the flame of the flesh is a consuming 
 fire." (De Planctu Ecclesice, fol. 243A ; lib. ii, art. 73). These 
 words, from a churchman in such high position, lend double sig-
 
 Appendix A. 369 
 
 nificance to Salimbene's tales of the Abbess of Gatharola, and 
 the poor nun who had Cardinal Ottaviano for her father; and 
 they make us understand the frequent attempts of some of the 
 best Franciscan Generals to cut the male part of the Order alto- 
 gether apart from the female (cf. Wadding, 1245, p. 140 ; 1250, 
 p. 223; 1255, p. 537 ; 1263, p. 218). In this last passage St. 
 Bonaventura asserts most earnestly ' ' the secret evil and hidden 
 danger" of such relations. Moreover, there was the further 
 chance of scandal even where there was no guilt, as St. Bona- 
 ventura says again in repudiating the care of the be"guinages : 
 " if any of these [beguines] were of evil repute for any crime of 
 fornication or adultery, forthwith men who perchance love us 
 not would publish this abroad to our infamy, saying, ' Lo ! these 
 barefooted Sisters bring forth little barefooted children for them ! 
 but of whom should they conceive such if not of those who are 
 busy about them all day long 1 And wanton clergy or laymen, 
 in their hatred of us, would be more unfriendly to those Sisters, 
 either to corrupt them or to bring them into evil fame, since 
 their disgrace would fall upon us rather than upon others.' " 
 (Libell. Apol., Quaest. xvi). These passages, out of ten times 
 as many which might be quoted, may suffice to show the reader 
 how much greater were the perils of monastic life in days when 
 the Religious swarmed everywhere, and public opinion was com- 
 paratively lenient, than in our days of few monasteries, efficient 
 police, and strong public opinion. 
 
 5. Friars and food, see McCabe, " Twelve Years in a Monastery," 
 p. 263, and " Life in a Modern Monastery," chap, iv : Eccleston 
 R. S., p. 19 : Bonav. Qusest. circ. Reg. ix : Bert. Rat. Sermones, 
 p. 30 : Archiv. vol. iv, pp. 77, 80. cf. 187 : Bern. Bess., chaps, 
 xxi, xxii, xxxii : Hugo de S. Victore de Inst. Novitiorum. 
 (Migne. Pat. Lat., vol. 176), col. 949c: Humb. de Romanis 
 Speculum Religiosorum (Cologne, 1616), p. 136. "Indecenter 
 agitur" (saysB. Bess., p. 352) . . . " si quis tussit aut sternutat 
 non aversa facie a mensa ; raro enim hoc fit sine qualicunque 
 emissione reliquiarum oris ; si nudam manum in mensa naribus 
 emungendis vel carni nudse scalpendae apponit, vel manum 
 ipsum ad vestimenta detergit." The handkerchief or napkin, 
 though not absolutely unknown even in the 13th century, was 
 seldom or never used for ita chief modern purpose. The 14th 
 century " Boke of Curtasye " warns : 
 
 " If thou spitt ouer the borde, or elles opon, 
 Thou shalle be holden an uncurtase mon . . . 
 If thy nose thou dense, as may be-falle, 
 Loke thy honde thou dense, as wythe-alle, 
 Priuely with skyrt do hit away, 
 Other ellis thurgh thi tepet that is so gay." 
 
 B *
 
 370 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 (Manners and Meals. E.E.T.S., p. 301, cf 25). A quotation 
 from Hugh of St. Victor's rules for the table behaviour of 
 Austin Canons, will enable the reader to see how nearly monks 
 and friars approached each other in this respect. (Migne Pat. 
 Lat. clxxvi, 949). "Let nothing be done with noise or tumult 
 ... do not as some do, who on sitting down to table show 
 their intemperance of mind by a certain uneasy agitation and 
 confusion of their limbs. They wag their heads, stretch out their 
 arms, spread out their hands on high, and not without great boor- 
 ishess (as though they would swallow down the whole meal at one 
 gulp), they strain and stretch with unseemly gestures. They pant, 
 they gasp for anguish : you might fancy that they were seeking 
 some easier inlet to their clamorous maw, as though the straitness 
 of their gullet could not minister in proper abundance to their hun- 
 gry stomach. . . . Some at their meals, in their anxiety to empty 
 the dishes, wrap in the cloth, or throw upon it, the sops reeking 
 with fat or gravy that have been poured over them ; until at 
 last (having meanwhile gutted the inward parts of the dish) they 
 put back the sops as they were. Others, as they drink, plunge 
 their fingers half-way into the cup. Others wipe their greasy 
 hands on the frocks, and turn again to handle the food. Others 
 again fish out their vegetables with bare fingers instead of a 
 spoon ; so that they seem to seek to wash their hands and refresh 
 their belly with one and the same broth. Others thrust again 
 into the dish their half-gnawed crusts or sops, and dip into the 
 cups the leavings of their own teeth in the guise of sippets. 
 These things (as I have said above) would be shameful for me 
 to describe, but that I have been forestalled by such as do them 
 in deed." 
 
 6. Cf. a Reviewer in the Church Times for Aug. 26th, 1904, who 
 
 complains that the average Englishman judges monks by " the 
 consciousness of what he himself should (sic.) be and do if he 
 were placed in a cloister," and who goes on to betray complete 
 ignorance of monastic life as described by monks themselves. 
 
 7. Friars in church, see esp. Bern. Bess., pp. 301-341. Bonav., pp. 
 
 56, 218 of same vol. : Dav. Aug. pp. 7, 107 : Cses. Heist., vol. 
 i, pp. 202-206, 222, 250 (2), 283, 284, 333 : vol. ii, p. 104 : Yit. 
 Frat., p. 206. Nic. 'Clar. Serm. iii in Nativ. Domini, (in Ma- 
 billon's St. Bernard, 1719, vol. ii, p. 584). Thos. Cant. pp. 334, 
 335, 405. Italic Mystique, p. 71. 
 
 8. The law might indeed forbid : but the reader will see later on that 
 
 the secular clergy were often almost incredibly irreverent in 
 medieval churches.
 
 Appendix A. 371 
 
 9. Talking, laughing, etc., Eccleston R.S., p. 20 Vit. Frat., p. 
 144. Bonav. 1. c. 207. Bern. Bess. 328, 357, 377, 395, 396. 
 Archiv., vol. iii, p. 168. Bern. Bess. 340, 302. This same 
 habit of public criticism during service is noted by Bishop 
 Grandisson among his clergy in Exeter Cathedral. Too often 
 one officiant would trip in his reading ; when the rest, who 
 should rather have mourned his fault, would cry aloud in the 
 vulgar tongue, "Cursed be he who spake that last lie" (Reg., 
 p. 586). 
 
 10. For sanitary rules in church, etc., see Bern. Bess. 327, 328, 338, 
 
 339, 364, 368, 370, 406. Flamenca (ed. P. Meyer), line 3, 131 ; 
 cf. T. Wright, Domestic Manners, pp. 162, 277, 366. 
 
 11. Mantellos curtos usque ad nates. For this, and other wilful singu- 
 
 larities, the General Crescenzio da Jesi " valiantly exterminated 
 them." (xxiv Gen., p. 263. Cf. 469, and Ubertino's description 
 of the Brethren's dresses in Archiv., iii, 56). 
 
 12. Archiv., iii, 65. 
 
 13. Cses. Heist, dist. iv, c. 48 : cf. iii 8, iv 6, xii 5. For monastic 
 
 and general ideas of personal cleanliness in the Middle Ages see 
 Busch. introd., p. xxiv, and p. 584 : Consuetudines S. Aug. 
 Cant. (H. Bradshaw Soc. 1902), p. 195 : Winchester Obe- 
 dientiary Rolls (Hampshire Record Soc.), p. 71 : cf. 36, 87 : 
 R. Steele, Medieval Lore, p. 51 : Vine. Bell. Spec. Hist, 
 xxviii 128, and xxix 116 : Register of Peckham, R.S., vol. i, 
 p. 1. : Maitland, Dark Ages, 1890, p. 85. David of Augsburg 
 mentions vermin among the petty trials which no religious can 
 escape : " oportet nos pati morsiones pulicum et sim ilium bestio- 
 larum " (259) ; cf. the Dominican Vitae Fratrum, p. 39, where 
 Father Conway renders a plain word of the original by the 
 euphemistic phrase " and other discomforts." Etienne de 
 Bourbon is even more plain-spoken about the inconvenience of 
 the elaborately dressed wigs which were in vogue among 13th 
 century ladies, and which had to be built up with such toil and 
 kept so carefully undisturbed. Such fashionable ladies, he says, 
 are "the devil's martyrs" : just consider "the pain and labour 
 which they suffer in getting and dressing [the hair], washing and 
 combing, dyeing and anointing, suffering vermin and nits and lice 
 therein, etc., etc." (pp. 233, 240). Michelet was too hasty in 
 asserting that Europe forgot to bathe for 1,000 years ; but it is 
 none the less true that the daily tub draws a hard and fast line 
 between polite society in the 20th century and in the 13th. 
 This is clearly shown by many detailed descriptions of the 
 knight's morning toilette : e.g. Petit Jean de Saintre" pt. i, c. ix :
 
 37 2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Manners and Meals E.E.T.S., p. 179: Flamenca, 1. 224 ff. 
 cf. 1556 ff. See again the words of St. Vincent Ferrer (in 
 a sermon quoted by Thureau-Dangin St. Benardin de Sienne. 
 Chap, iv, ii. (Paris, 1897.) " What does a man do on 
 awakening in the morning ? He does ten things : opens his 
 eyes, sits up in bed, half dresses, gets out of bed, spits, puts on 
 his drawers, washes his hands, etc., etc." L. Gautier, in his 
 La Chevalerie, shows clearly enough that the bath was not un- 
 known, but entirely fails to see that this was the warm bath, 
 taken as a luxury or by doctor's orders. Simeon Luce points 
 out that public bathing establishments of this kind were to be 
 found sometimes even in villages in 13th century France : but 
 his assertions on this and similar points are summed up very in- 
 accurately and apologetically by Abbot Gasquet (Gt. Pestilence, 
 pp. 54-56 : cf. Luce, chap. iii). 
 
 14. Cf. Ubertino's contention (Archiv. iii, p. 176), that "the Rule 
 
 alloweth no change of garments, for outer or for inner wear . . . 
 yet, since the Brethren need now and then (interdum) to wash 
 their frocks [which the Rule compelled them to wear day and 
 night], St. Francis ordained that some should be kept in com- 
 mon, more or less according to the numbers of the brethren ; 
 which common frocks might be used by the sick." Thomas of 
 Eccleston (R.S. p. 33), mentions how " Brother Elias sent word 
 round that the Brethren should wash their own drawers : so the 
 Brethren of the English Administration washed theirs, according 
 to his bidding ; but they of the Scottish Administration waited 
 for further orders." This probably involved the problem of the 
 lavandaria, or washerwoman, which had long been a serious 
 difficulty in the older orders, and became acute later on among 
 the Friars also, as Ninguarda's 16th century Visitations show. 
 
 15. For friars' morality see Ana. Fra. iii, p. 268. Piers Plowman, B. 
 
 xx, 345. Ben. Im. vol. v. p. 85. Busch, p. 45. Gerson, vol. 
 i. p. 194E.. ii, 641c. Gower., Vox Clamantis, lib. iii, 1. 837 ; 
 and the parallel passages in his Mirour de VOmme. 
 
 16. Contemporary, Dec., 1905, and April, 1906 : cf. reply by Father 
 
 R. H. Benson in the June number, and my rejoinder in July. 
 I cannot help regretting that Father Benson, from a dislike of 
 controversy which I know to be genuine in his case, has de- 
 clined to allow me to reprint his essay under the same covers 
 as my two (Medieval Studies, No. 6, " The Truth about the 
 Monasteries"). I had already dealt with Abbot Gasquet's 
 falsifications of the real evidence in my first Medieval Study, 
 "The Monastic Legend." The matter was also discussed at 
 some length in the Tablet (Dec. 6, 1905, to the following Feb-
 
 Appendix A. 373 
 
 ruary) : but my antagonist in that paper, Father Gerard, whom 
 I had convicted of gross and palpable mis-statements, altogether 
 declined to let me reprint the whole correspondence. I have 
 since permitted the Protestant Reformation Society to reprint my 
 letters, with summaries of Father Gerard's, in a pamphlet 
 entitled, " Catholic Truth and Historical Truth." 
 
 17. Monumenta Franciscana, p. 55. Father Cuthbert's translation 
 
 (" The Friars, and how they came to England") destroys the real 
 sense of this passage, by omitting the crucial word ordinis, thus 
 making it appear as if the friars' difficulties were incurred in 
 reforming other institutions than their own. 
 
 18. Of. Eccleston's description of the General Aymon of Faversham, 
 
 who through his early asceticism " became at last so feeble and 
 delicate that he could scarce live without roast meats and warm 
 food " (R.S., p. 22). Similarly Bourbon (p. 422) describes the ex- 
 tent to which St. Bernard, after ruining his own health, was 
 forced to set a dangerous example to his brother monks. 
 
 19. Bert. Rat. Serm., p. 11 : cf. 8, 9, 13, 14, and passim. Bonav. 
 
 Qusest. circ. Reg. xix : cf. the even stronger language of his 
 contemporary, David of Augsburg, as to the scorn and persecu- 
 tion to which strict friars were already subjected by the laxer 
 majority (pp. 110, 285, 331). Bert. Rat. Serm., pp. 29, 41, 71, 
 90. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 1. In theory, divorce in the modern sense is not permitted by the 
 
 Roman Church ; but it was generally easy for influential persons 
 to obtain a decree of nullity on different pretexts, or (as appar- 
 ently in this case) to take the law into their own hands and 
 practically change wives at pleasure. For the absurd and im- 
 moral anomalies of the Canon Law on the question of marriage, 
 see the chapter on this subject in Pollock and Maitland's 
 " History of English Law." 
 
 2. Cf. Brother Thomas Hibernicus, who imitated a certain St. Mark 
 
 in cutting off his thumb to escape the priesthood (Eubel. Prov., 
 p. 51), and Conrad of Offida, one of the greatest of the early 
 friars. " Brother Andrew asked Brother Conrad of Offida why 
 he never celebrated, since he was priest and was [formerly] wont 
 to celebrate frequently : wbereunto he answered, ' Know, Brother 
 Andrew, that before I was made priest, I was for full seven 
 years continuously in such a mood that in all created things 
 stocks and stones and whatsoever else they might be in all, I
 
 374 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 say, I was wont to behold God wrapped in sweet celestial light : 
 and then I was so comforted that I thought to possess a Paradise 
 everywhere. And at that time it was burdensome to me to 
 serve at mass, for that it distracted me from this consolation, 
 when I must needs serve the priest in his mass. How then 
 could I now celebrate mass, though I receive the Loi-d's body on 
 Sundays and feast days for the reverence and efficacy of the 
 Sacrament? And meseems that, before I was a priest, St. 
 Francis appeared more often to me than now : and at times he 
 would lean his head on my breast, and would speak to me at 
 greater length than now.' " (Ana. Fra., iii, 427.) 
 
 3. For St. Francis see H. Bohmer, Analekten z. Gesch. des. F. v. 
 
 Assisi. (Tubingen, 1904), pp. 28, 39. The former reference is 
 translated at length, though not very correctly, by Miss Mac- 
 donell, p. 152. The hermitage system went on at least till 1220, 
 six years before the saint's death : Sabatier, p. 199. 
 
 4. Salimbene, pp. 100 foil. Lempp. (p. 116) thinks that his opinions 
 
 can scarcely be taken as altogether typical on this point ; that the 
 Order can scarcely have drifted so far in so short a time. But it 
 had undoubtedly drifted at least as far from the Saint's purpose 
 in the direction of extravagant buildings and reception of money : 
 and even the love of money is not a more natural instinct than 
 that the learned members of a religious Order should resent such 
 an equality, or even preponderance, of the unlearned, as was the 
 rule under St. Francis. 
 
 5. Cf. Dante, Inf., xxiii, 3. After the example of the earlier 
 
 monastic Orders, friars were commanded always to go about two 
 by two, to avoid scandal : and the same regulation was enforced 
 on the inmates of colleges at medieval universities. 
 
 6. Salimbene here exaggerates: Haymo of Faversham (1240-1244) 
 
 did indeed forbid their promotion to offices, but they were still 
 admitted to the Order, as Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 103, 
 note 6). 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 1. For Guido Bonatti see Dante Inf., xx, 118, and Prof. Holder- 
 
 Egger 's note on this page 163. 
 
 % 
 
 2. It is noteworthy that St. Bonaventura was here of an opposite 
 
 opinion to his contemporary Salimbene. He specifies this 
 " frequent re-election of officials as one of the chief causes of the 
 decay of a religious Order," and gives his reasons at length. 
 (Qua?st circ. Reg., xix.)
 
 Appendix A. 375 
 
 3. Cf. his Life by Bonaventura, viii, 9, 10. I have already noted 
 
 (Medieval Studies, no. 3) how little the Order in general seems 
 to have shared Francis's love of animals. From the time of the 
 General Chapter of Narbonne, at least (1260), it was a strict 
 rule " that no animal be kept, for any Brother or any convent, 
 whether by the Order or by some person in the Order's name, 
 except cats and certain birds for the removal of unclean things." 
 
 4. Such assertions as that in Mr. F. 8. Stevenson's Grosseteste (p. 
 
 148), that the early part of the 13th century was the "golden 
 age 06 English monasticism " cannot be taken without very con- 
 siderable qualification. There is a strong tendency among modern 
 writers to ignore the large body of irreproachable evidence as to 
 widespread and serious abuses in all, or nearly all, the Orders 
 long before 1250. Guibert of Nogent, early in the 12th century, 
 describes the monasteries of his time as dumping grounds for 
 young men of good family who could not otherwise be provided 
 for, and who therefore spent their monastic life in idleness and 
 dissipation of the common revenues. (Migne. Pat. Lat. clvi, 
 col. 850) : Jacques de Vitry, early in the 13th, and Roger Bacon, 
 towards the end of the same century, bear testimony at least as 
 unflattering. See note 5 to chap. 12, and appendix D, in which 
 I have put a small selection from the vast mass of available 
 evidence. 
 
 5. Among the witty and improper pieces of prose and verse contained 
 
 in the Franciscan MS. Harl. 913, is one on the Abbot of Glou- 
 cester's Feast, in which the Brethren make this complaint. See 
 Reliquiae Antiquce, i, 140. 
 
 6. For Pietro Peccatore see Dante, Par., xxi, 122, and Toynbee's 
 
 Dante Dictionary s.v. Damiano and Pietro degli Onesti. It is 
 very possible that Dante confused the two men ; but these words 
 of Salimbene's seem to show conclusively that the second was the 
 real Pietro Peccatore. 
 
 7. Cf. Father Cuthbert's The Friars, and how they came to England, 
 
 pp. 105, 106, in which a doubtful sentence of Prof. Brewer's is 
 exaggerated out of all moderation and reason. Apart from such 
 passages as this of Salimbene's, and hundreds of other briefer 
 testimonies to the same spirit among the records of the early 
 friars, (e.g. Bonaventura' 8 Life of St. Francis, v. 5), Father 
 Cuthbert's theory is flatly contradicted by two passages of the 
 very chronicle which he has undertaken to edit (pp. 207, 233). 
 His only medieval reference in its support is to Chaucer (Prol. 
 212, 213), where the poet obviously intends slyly to convey that 
 same accusation against the Friars' morality which is outspokenly
 
 376 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 pronounced in Piers Plowman, B. xx. 344. Father Cuthbert's 
 work, though the Church Times commends it warmly " to all 
 who are vexed with Dissenters," abounds in such purely 
 imaginary presentations of history ; and his translation of Thomas 
 of Eccleston, apart from a few obvious blunders, is disfigured by 
 one or two very unfortunate misrepresentations. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 1. Cf. Purg., xi, 81. 
 
 2. For the extent to which Latin hymnology was indebted to popular 
 
 songs, see Du Meril, pp. 26 ff. 
 
 3. Helinand in Vine. Bell. Spec. Hist., 1. xxix, c. 144 Ben. Im., 
 
 vol. iii, p. 75. 
 
 4. Some instances of the rapid oblivion which overtook even miracle- 
 
 workers may be found in Wadding 1212, 42 : 1233, p. 369 : 
 1235, p. 401 : 1282, p. 114 : 1291, p. 281 : 1305, 4. The 
 seven bulls said to have been addressed in 1216 to seven bishops 
 about the Portiuncula Indulgence were all lost by 1281, or at 
 latest by 1330 (Sabatier, p. 415 : cf. 24 Gen., p. 372 note). 
 Bartholomew of Pisa, when he wrote his book of the Conformities, 
 was unable to ascertain where Simon of Assisi was buried. 
 Already in 1360 the important book of the Minister-General 
 Crescenzio da Jesi, on the lives of early Friars, was half destroyed : 
 " some of it is left, the rest has perished through neglect." St. 
 Adhemar de Filsin died in 1309 : half a century later the 
 Chronicler of the Twenty-four Generals writes " although much 
 had been written of his life and miracles, all have been lost by 
 carelessness" (Ana. Fra., pp. 160, 263, 464: cf. 216 and 372 
 note). I shall have occasion to return to this subject of medieval 
 negligence of books. (Chap, xiii, note 6). 
 
 5. See the confessions of W. de Notyngham in Mon. Franc. R.S., 
 
 p. 71, and compare those of Adam Marsh, on p. 336. 
 
 6. Wadding, 1256, pp. 2 ff. 
 
 7. Dante. Par. xii, 134. 
 
 8. Miss Macdonell (pp. 246 foil.) brings out well the unselfish 
 
 humility of John's last thirty years, though here again she twice 
 misreads Salimbene, and misapplies to John some words of 
 Ubertino which were really written of St. Francis.
 
 Appendix A. 37-7 
 
 9. These testimonials to John of Parma are quoted in full by Affb, 
 Vita di Gioanni di Parma (Parma, 1777), pp. 181, 182. Miss 
 Macdonell puts the date of his beatification wrongly in 1770. 
 
 10. " Ugolino the shearer," whom Miss Macdonell quotes to prove 
 
 Salimbene's want of snobbishness, even towards humble friends, 
 would in fact be a man of wealth and position in the city. The 
 "tonsores" (not shearers, but shearmen) were clothdressers, 
 possessing a quarter of their own in 13th century Oxford, 
 Norwich, and elsewhere; and a master-shearman, such as the 
 context implies Ugolino to have been, would be a wealthy man. 
 
 11. Not the Azzo VIII of Inf. xviii, 56 and Purg. v, 77; but his 
 
 great-grandfather, Azzo VII, who died in 1264. 
 
 12. The great heroine of the Church party, and probably the Matelda 
 
 of Purg. xxviii, 40 foil. 
 
 13. Ecc. x, 19 (Vulg.) Those who groan over the power of "the 
 
 almighty dollar " in the modern world, may be consoled to learn 
 that this text was repeated in the Middle Ages with wearisome 
 iteration by writers of all classes, and certainly with at least as 
 much justice as at present. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 1. These and half-a-dozen similar sentences in Salimbene form an ad- 
 
 mirable commentary on Par. xvii, 58. 
 
 2. With regard to Salimbene's remark about the five talents Prof. 
 
 Holder-Egger falls into a curious error. Not recognizing the 
 allusion to the Parable of the Talents, he notes, " I have never 
 read this incident in the lives of St. Francis : nor do I see how 
 it can be bold of a man who would not touch money." Salim- 
 bene, with the usual Franciscan ingenuity in finding types of 
 St. Francis throughout Holy Scripture, has no doubt that St. 
 Matthew's words "to one he gave five talents" prefigured the 
 one Saint to whom Christ had given his five wounds. For it 
 must be borne in mind that this miracle of the Stigmata, not 
 uncommon since, was still unique when Salimbene wrote. 
 
 3. Cses. Heist. Dist. vi, c. 30. 
 
 4. The Parmese had torn down all the exiles' houses and built their 
 
 city walls with the materials (Murat. ix, p. 773D).
 
 378 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 5. This is the Bernardo Rossi whom Salimbene compares with Charle- 
 magne: a flattering description which Miss Macdonell, blindly 
 following Cantarelli's translation, transfers to the Emperor 
 Frederick. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 1. Cf. Ben. Im., iii, 320 (commentary on Purg., xi, 134 ff). Prof. 
 
 Holder-Egger throws doubt on this story : very unnecessarily, 
 as I cannot help thinking. The fact that Enzio was at one time 
 treated well in prison affords only a very slight presumption in 
 favour of his continued good treatment, especially in the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
 2. For the horrors of prison life even under ordinary circumstances 
 
 see Gross, Office of Coroner (Selden Soc.), pp. 79 ff. Six prisoners 
 died in Northampton Gaol, within little more than a year 
 (1322-3), of "hunger and thirst and cold." 
 
 3. Chron. Parm. in Murat., ix, pp. 810, 823, 825. 
 
 4. One of the most crying sins of Bologna is branded by Benvenuto 
 
 da Imola, vol. i, pp. 522 ff. (Commentary on Inf. xv, 106 ff.) 
 
 5. Ben. i, 128 : cf. 222 though in iii, 397 he seems to say that all 
 
 provinces of Italy were alike desolate. 
 
 6. Ill, 181, on Purg., vi, 76 foil. 
 
 7. Sermon iv, p. 93. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 1. Miss Macdonell, again misled by the Italian translation, represents 
 
 the courtiers as standing on each other's shoulders ! 
 
 2. Lyons was then nominally in the Empire. 
 
 3. This latter tree is described also, in much the same language, in 
 
 the Chronicle of the Twenty-four Generals, p. 354. 
 
 4. This unflattering account of Papal Legates is borne out by the 
 
 distinguished John of Salisbury, who writes : " Not even do the 
 Papal legates keep their hands altogether free from bribes ; for 
 sometimes they rage with such fury in their provinces as though
 
 Appendix A. 379 
 
 Satan had come out from before the Lord's face to scourge His 
 church .... I do not say this of all legates, however." (Migne. 
 Pat. Lat. cxcix, col. 580.) 
 
 5. This remark about the Benedictines is all the more significant, 
 
 because the journal of his contemporary, Odo Rigaldi, shows that 
 even these stricter French monasteries were already in such a 
 state of decay as would not be tolerated in modern England. 
 
 6. For these parodies see Du Me"ril, pp. 204 note, 222 note. 
 
 7. i.e., in modern French "J'ai bu : a vous ! " "I have drunk, 
 
 now it's your turn ! " 
 
 8. For Eudes Rigaud, one of the most remarkable prelates of the 
 
 Middle Ages, see the chapter below on "The Princes of the 
 Church." 
 
 9. See Archiv., vol. vi, p. 129. 
 
 10. It was not only in churches that the scantiness of medieval furni- 
 
 ture frequently necessitated sitting on the ground, e.g., Joinville, 
 vi, 37 " li roys . . . mist la main a terre, et dist : ' Seez-vous 
 ci, bien pres de moy, pour ce que on ne nous oie.' " Of. ibid iv, 
 27; Eccleston R.S., p. 60; Rashdall i, pp. 438, 561. This 
 explains, though it can scarcely justify, the frequency of scuffles 
 for seats during the service. 
 
 11. Cf. Chaucer, Prologue i, 179. The ascription of these words to 
 
 " Holy Scripture " will surprise none of those who know what 
 quasi-Biblical authority was usurped in the Middle Ages by some 
 most unbiblical books : this quotation is in fact from Gratian's 
 Decretum. 
 
 12. See below : " Princes of the Church." 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 1. One of the spurious writings called forth by the popularity of 
 
 Joachim's prophecies. 
 
 2. The same "rigour of justice" was also inflicted on friars whose 
 
 only crime was that of interpreting the Rule too literally. 
 Perhaps the worst case was that of Bro. Pontius Potugati, who 
 had refused to give up for the burning certain writings which he 
 possessed of the Spiritual Jean de Pierre d'Olive. " Nam vin-
 
 380 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 culis ferreis couipeditum et catena ferrea, infra carcerem fetidum 
 artum et ctecum ligatum inchidunt, et affigentes trunco cathenam 
 in tantum eum coarctant et stringunt ut non alibi, nisi ubi sedere 
 ferro gravatus cogebatur, posset secedere vel modicum ad requisita 
 nature, super nudam humum urina pediim suorum et stercore 
 
 stratam, fetentem et lutosam, infixus sordido limo jacebat 
 
 Infirmatus tandem jacebat vel potius reclinatus sedebat sub 
 pondere ferri in fetoribus stercoris et urine animo letus et cari- 
 tatis igne succensus, intinitas Deo gratias refferens spiritum Deo 
 reddidit. . . . Gustos . . . duobus fratribus laycis robustis corpore 
 mandat, in fossis orti foveam aliquam facere et in ea corpus hora 
 secreta projectum humo operire. Accedunt fratres hii injuncta 
 perficere, et dura laborant corpus semisepultum in vermibus et 
 stercore a cathena et ferreis vinculis solvere, a lumbis deorsum 
 inveniunt [per] multitudinem vermium ex magna parte corrosum. 
 Intuentes vero vultum ipsius obstupuerunt, eo quod quedam 
 claritas refulgebat in facie ejus, que videbatur naturam hominis 
 excedere, et esse potius angelica quam humana." Angelo Clareno 
 in Archiv. ii, p. 300. Other similar cases may be found des- 
 cribed in Dr. Lea's Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 1-89. 
 
 3. Joachim was generally understood to have fixed the year 1260 for 
 
 the beginning of the New Era: and indeed Salimbene himself 
 says as much on p. 466. It is significant of the widespread un- 
 rest and expectation of change that, in the great dispute between 
 the Mendicants and the University of Paris, both parties were 
 agreed as to the mysterious significance of the year 1260. 
 (Eashdall i, 383, note 1.) 
 
 4. Further allusions to the love of the Dominicans for great convents, 
 
 and to the relations between them and the Franciscans, may be 
 found on pp. 88 ff of the Mon. Germ., and 337 of the Parma 
 edition (an. 1285). 
 
 5. For further information about Gerard and his book, see Rashdall i, 
 
 345 ff. 
 
 6. This was of course a pis-oiler; Frederick, the original Antichrist, 
 
 being now dead. 
 
 7. This systematic destruction of older MSS. for the sake of fresh 
 
 writings was especially common in Italy, e.g. the library of 
 Bobbio, not far from Parma, contained a very large proportion 
 of palimpsests. There is a strong tendency among modern 
 writers to exaggerate the responsibility of the Reformation for 
 the destruction of books as well as for that of ancient buildings. 
 Visitations and similar documents supply us with abundant evi-
 
 Appendix A. 381 
 
 dence of books lost or decayed through the fault of clerical 
 custodians ; it is by no means rare to hear of books completely 
 lost to posterity, as that attributed to Lazarus, of which Saliui- 
 bene tells us a few pages lower down, and those of which I have 
 already spoken in note 4 to chap. ix. The number of books 
 written in monasteries has also been grossly exaggerated. Eudes 
 Bigaud's register shows us that the Norman monks in Salimbene's 
 day seldom did any writing at all. It may be doubted whether, 
 if there had been no Reformation, we should possess many more 
 medieval books and buildings than we do at present. For in- 
 stance, there is more ancient stained glass left in English than in 
 Italian churches ; and no country can compare with oui*s in the 
 completeness of its medieval episcopal records. It is char- 
 acteristic of the amount of detailed research which still needs to 
 be done, that so good a scholar as Prof. Medley can write (Social 
 England, illustrated edition, vol. ii, p. 762) " large numbers of 
 copyists were at work in every monastery and nunnery through- 
 out the land." This is simply to accept uncritically the ex- 
 aggerated ideas set afloat by S. R. Maitland in his Dark Ages 
 ideas which sprang out of a natural reaction from the still more 
 uncritical acceptance, a generation earlier, of Robertson's mis- 
 statements as to the booklessness of the Middle Ages. For the 
 small amount of writing done in the monasteries of Normandy, 
 even in the 13th century, and the frequent neglect of their 
 books, see the Register of Abp. Eudes Rigaud, pp. 76, 145, 
 339, 361, 407 (2), 496, 555, 556, 572, 577, 578 (2), 585, 593, 
 596, 597, 601, 609, 612, 619, 622 (2), 628, 630, 632, 633, 639. 
 Even great monasteries like Eu and Tre"port had nobody on 
 the premises who could re-write the dilapidated service-books. 
 Compare the evidence of Nicke's Norwich Visitations (Camden 
 Soc., 1888, pp. 178, 295), and of Gascoigne (pp. 73, 112), who 
 tells us plainly that the 15th century monks were rather des- 
 troyers than producers of books. At the Augustinian Priory of 
 Taunton, in 1 339, five of the twenty-three Brethren were unable 
 even to sign their names to a document, and therefore com- 
 missioned Brother John Coker to sign for them. (Reg. Rad. de 
 Salopia. Somerset Record Soc., p. 351). Cf. Gerson, de Laude 
 Script., Consid. x, and especially xii. 
 
 8. The seer thus raised up in Parma is no doubt Dante's Asdente, 
 
 of whom Salimbene will speak at length later on. 
 
 9. See his treatise in Baluze-Mansi, Misc. ii, p. 595 ff: especially 
 
 600, 604, 609, 610: cf. Bourbon, p. 25. 
 
 10. It is possible that the pueri of this passage were simply the city 
 loafers, " undesirables," and lower classes generally. The
 
 382 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Chronicon Parmense describes a similar scene of mob-rule in 
 1294 (Murat. ix, 827a), where pueri is evidently used in this 
 sense. 
 
 11. Here, for instance, are the words of S. Giovanni Capistrano in the 
 life of his contemporary S. Bernardino : " All Italy then (about 
 
 1420) lay wholly sunken in vices and crime There was no 
 
 devotion to be found amongst Religious and Clerics, no faith 
 among their flocks, no mercy, modesty, or morality (disciplina 
 mo-rum)." Savonarola, of course, spoke equally strongly. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 1. The steps by which the Magdalene became one of the greatest 
 
 saints of the Middle Ages are interesting to trace. Many of the 
 romantic tales which had grown up round her and her family 
 may be found in the Golden Legend : but the high- water mark 
 is reached by the pseudo-Cavalca, whose legend of the saint has 
 recently been translated by Miss Hawtrey (Lane, 1904). 
 
 2. For the aureola see Ducange (who quotes Josephus Angles in 4 
 
 Sent., dist. xlix, art. 6), and Bonav. Compend. Theol. Verit., 
 lib. vii, cap. 29. This is a work of doubtful authorship : it is 
 also ascribed to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The 
 virgins' crown will be white, the martyrs' red, and the doctors' 
 green : each will proceed from a certain redundancy of spiritual 
 joy shining forth in outward shape : cf. Dante, Par. v, 131-137 ; 
 xi, 18; xvii, 121-123; xviii, 55-63, etc., etc. 
 
 3. For John of Parma's extreme reverence see Angelo Clareno in 
 
 Archiv. ii, 267. 
 
 CHAPTER XY. 
 
 1 . Miss Macdonell (p. 278) adduces it as a special proof of Salimbene's 
 curiosity that he should have turned aside to see this landslip : 
 but he nowhere speaks of having actually seen it, and only im- 
 plies that he learnt what he tells us on his natural road from 
 Lyons to Genoa. This fall of Mont Grenier, more terrible even 
 than the Goldau catastrophe, is mentioned by Matthew Paris 
 (an. 1248), who attributes it to the divine wrath at the greed 
 and lust and brigandage of the inhabitants of that valley. On 
 the other hand, Etienne de Bourbon (p. 182) explains that God's 
 object was to punish an unscrupulous clerical politician named 
 Jacques Bonivard, who had wrongfully seized a priory near
 
 Appendix A. 383 
 
 Chambe'ry, and had no sooner taken possession than the landslip 
 overwhelmed him. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 1. Nicolaus Anglicus or Brito, bishop of Assisi in 1247. He is 
 
 described as a man of great learning and high moral character. 
 
 2. For the Flagellants see Murat. ix, 704; Affb, vol. iii, p. 259. 
 
 Fleury an. 1259, 62. Gerson, vol. i, pp. 636-643. 
 
 3. Boccaccio, Decameron, G. v, n. 8. 
 
 4. Ricobaldo an. 1275, in Murat. ix : Chron. Farm. an. 1275. 
 
 5. Vit. Ex., pp. 20, 21. 
 
 6. I have already pointed out in the Independent Review of Feb., 
 
 1905 (Medieval Studies, no. 3), how little the contention of the 
 Marquis de Rambures in his L'Eglise et la Pitie envers les 
 Animaiix is borne out by actual medieval facts. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 1. Ricobaldi Ferrarensis Additamentum (Murat. ix, 190c). Murat. 
 
 ix, p. 792. 
 
 2. Dante, Vita Nuova. cap. iii. Murat. ix, p. 801. 
 
 3. I point out lower down (chap, xxiii) how mistaken is the common 
 
 idea that this sort of vandalism originated with the Reformation : 
 and I have dealt more fully with the same subject in Medieval 
 Studies, nos. 3 and 4. 
 
 4. This decree of the Synod of Milan is in Murat. ix, p. 570. 
 
 5. Cs. Heist. Dist. viii, c. 52. 
 
 6. Pury. xxiv, 24. Salimbene smacks his lips on another page (572) 
 
 over the recollection of this choice vintage, apropos of which he 
 quotes " the verses of a certain buffoon, who wrote : 
 
 '0 precious juice of the vine, what gift hath life like thine ? 
 If two sorts come to the feast, then fill me a cup of the best ! 
 Small is the profit to me if I suck down less than three ; 
 Sweet is the fourth full bowl, and deep is the calm of my soul ; 
 But the fifth cup sets me adaze, and my memory all in a maze ; 
 With the sixth I desire no more, but sprawl full length on the floor.' "
 
 384 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 1. R. Bacon, ed. Brewer. R.S., p. 402. 
 
 2. The transactions of Church Synods in the Middle Ages are full of 
 
 notices of such tithe quarrels. One of the most interesting of 
 these is recorded in the diocese of Exeter at this same time. It 
 was naturally the pettiest tithes which often caused the deepest 
 irritation, and especially that on milk. The parson preferred to 
 receive this in the more convenient form of cheese : but recal- 
 citrant parishioners, as Bishop Quivil complained, hit upon an 
 exquisite artifice to rid themselves of the vexatious tribute. 
 They " maliciously brought their tithe of milk to church in its 
 raw state ; and then, more iniquitous still, if they found no man 
 there to receive it, they poured it out before the altar to the dis- 
 honour of God and of the Church." (Wilkins, Concilia, ii, 160.) 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 1. Miss Macdonell, by some strange misunderstanding, seems to 
 
 attribute this gift of mimicry to Salimbene himself (p. 383). 
 
 2. " De Ivdo schacchorum et alearum optime noverat." Salimbene had 
 
 no business to know this, for by Canon Law not only were all 
 men forbidden to play at games of hazard, but it was sinful even 
 to abet or watch the players, especially for an ecclesiastic ; and 
 this prohibition had been recently renewed by the great Lateran 
 Council of 1215. Even chess enjoyed a very bad reputation: 
 and St. Peter Damian speaks of it as a positively criminal game 
 for a bishop. St. Benardino triumphs in the success of a mission- 
 preacher who " burned many chessboards, and converted 
 
 more souls than I could tell " (Prediche i, p. 73). This was no 
 doubt because the game was usually played for money and led to 
 much quarrelling : a murder at chess is among the stock in- 
 cidents of medieval romance, and Salimbene himself give us an 
 instance later on (chap. xx). See B. Petri Damiani, lib. i, 
 ep. x (Ed. Paris, 1743, t. iii, p. 227). Cf. Rashdall, vol. ii, 
 p. 671, and T. Wright, Homes of Other Days, pp. 214 ff; 
 Domestic Manners, pp. 198 ff. An admirable essay on Dante 
 and the games of his time, in which much use is made of Salim- 
 bene's evidence, has been contributed by Mr. E. Armstrong to 
 the Modern Language Revieiv (April and June, 1906). 
 
 3. The Latin word acuhus used here by Salimbene marks his sarcasm 
 
 even more plainly. The aculeus or equuleus was a bar of wood
 
 Appendix A, 385 
 
 with a sharp upper edge, which the victim was forced to bestride 
 as on horseback, with weights hung to his ankles. The Chronicon 
 Parmense speaks of these mock-trials as frequent during the long 
 period of Ghiberto da Gente's rule at Parma. (Murat. ix, 778). 
 
 4. Cf. Inf. xxix, 20, where the shade of Geri del Bello scorns his 
 
 cousin Dante for not having continued the family vendetta. 
 
 5. Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 624, note 3) that Guidolino 
 
 was elected in place of a murdered abbot, Landolfo. 
 
 6. Purg. vii, 127-129. How thoroughly Italian Dante's feeling was 
 
 on this point, is shown by Benvenuto da Imola's comments on 
 Inferno xxix, 122 (vol. ii, p. 409). "To understand this matter, 
 thou must know that the French have been from ancient times 
 the vainest of all nations, as may often be read in Julius Celsus 
 (sic), and may be seen to-day in deed : for we see them daily in- 
 vent new habits and new shapes of garments. Whence there is 
 not a limb of the Frenchman which hath not its own fashion : 
 for they wear chains on their necks, bracelets on their arms, 
 points at their hose ; and garments so short as to show their 
 nakedness and the dishonourable parts of their body which should 
 rightly be hid : while the honourable part, the head, which 
 should be shown free, is covered by a hood over their face ; and 
 so may it be said of many of their vanities. Wherefore I marvel 
 much, not without indignation of mind, when I see Italians, and 
 especially our nobles, seeking to follow in these men's footsteps 
 and learning the French tongue, and asserting that no tongue is 
 fairer than the French : which I cannot see : for the French is 
 a bastard of the Latin tongue, as plain experience showeth. For, 
 since they cannot rightly pronounce cavaliero, they corrupt tho 
 word and say chevalier : and in like manner they cannot say 
 signor but sir, and so with the rest. Whereof we have a testi- 
 mony herein, that even now when they would fain say ' speak in 
 the vulgar tongue,' they say 'speak Romance,' and their vulgar 
 tongue is called the Romance. Wherefore it is not meet that 
 Italians should willingly submit their own nobility to less noble 
 folk." 
 
 7. Dum Trutannus in m pater am tenet, et sedet ad pir, 
 Regem Cappadocum credit habere cocum. 
 
 i.e. " While Trutannus sits at the fire with a wine-pot in his 
 hand, he dreams he has the king of the Cappadocians for his 
 cook." The reference is evidently to Horace, Ep. i, 6, 39. 
 Trutannus is the typical drunken vagabond of medieval satire, 
 the Roi des Truands of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame. 
 
 Ci
 
 386 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 1. For a long description of this Nicholas see Murat. ix, p. 248. 
 
 2. In 1270 a fleet of Sicilian and Genoese crusaders was wrecked off 
 
 Trapani : Charles of Anjou appropriated everything of value 
 that could be recovered from the wrecks, " alleging an injurious 
 law of King William and a longstanding but infamous custom." 
 Muratori Annali d' Italia, an. 1270, and Scriptt. vi, 55 la. The 
 poisoning is, of course, referred to by Dante, Purg. xx, 69 : cf. 
 the authorities quoted for and against in Toynbee's Dante Dic- 
 tionary, p. 532. 
 
 3. It is impossible to translate Salimbene's description fully, either 
 
 here or lower down : but I subjoin a few references to enable 
 the student to realize how characteristic such scenes are of the 
 Middle Ages. The De Antiquis Legibus Liber (Camden Soc., 
 p. 75) describes the obscene mutilations practised on Simon de 
 Montfort's corpse for the gloating vengeance of a noble lady his 
 enemy: cf. Ben. Im. i, 416, iii, 111, and A. Schulz. Hofisches 
 Leben. i, p. 453. Such mutilations are spoken of as perfectly 
 natural in Murat. Scriptt. ix, p. 130. 
 
 4. Vit. Ex., p. 64. 
 
 5. La Tour, p. 2 and passim : Salimbene, pp. 27, 67, 427, 429. In 
 
 the first of these passages, Salimbene is speaking of Nicholas, 
 bishop of Reggio, who " loved the friars minor so well, that he 
 would fain have given them the cathedral church to occupy : and 
 the canons who then held it consented thereto, and for love of 
 the Brethren they would have gone to occupy chapels in divers 
 parts of the city : but the friars in their humility would not 
 suffer this ; nay, they utterly refused it. This bishop received 
 an accusation against his steward, that this man was wont to 
 withdraw from the friars the dole of bread which the bishop had 
 commanded : wherefore he called him to his presence and re- 
 buked him sore (Ecclus. iv). Moreover, knowing, as Solomon 
 saith, that ' a servant cannot be taught with words, for he under- 
 standeth what thou sayest and scorneth to answer,' he laid him 
 in strictest keeping within a dark dungeon, and fed him with 
 the bread of tribulation and the water of anguish : after which 
 he drave him forth from his service : God's benison be upon him ! 
 for he knew that the race of servants cannot be corrected but by 
 torments,' as a certain tyrant said to them that nourished St. 
 Hippolytus [in the Golden Legend]. As Patecchio saith ' blessed 
 be the Marquis of Montferrat, who was gentle to all men but to
 
 Appendix A. 387 
 
 serving-men.' [Scutiferis : literally squires]. Wretched fellows ! 
 for when they are exalted and honoured in the courts of great 
 folk, then they become miserly, to show themselves good hus- 
 bands and guardians of their lords' goods : robbing from the poor 
 and the righteous that which they waste afterwards on their 
 harlots ; and meanwhile in some parts the wives and daughters 
 of their lords become lemans of servants and stewards and 
 bailiffs, for they can have nothing whatsoever of the goods of the 
 house but by the hands of such menials. Most avaricious are 
 such lords, who love their worldly goods better than their own 
 honour, or the bodies of their wives and daughters ! Mine own 
 eyes have seen and proved all these things." Marriage itself, 
 though in theory a sacrament of the church, was generally a more 
 or less definitely commercial bargain ; and nobody needed to 
 visit Gretna Green in an age when the mere promise by word of 
 mouth exchanged between two children in the presence of wit- 
 nesses constituted a perfectly binding marriage without any 
 ecclesiastical formalities, though the priest's blessing was useful 
 to guard from contingent difficulties. Here is a scene from 
 Simeon Luce's Du Guesclin, p. 139 ff. " Cette frene"sie de luxe, 
 ou se laisse emporter la noblesse, n'a d'egale que la corruption 
 des raceurs. Froissart, cet historien, on pourrait presque dire ce 
 chantre de la chevalerie, a raconte longuement un brillant fait 
 d'armes de Galehaut de Bibemont contre les Anglais . . . Ce que 
 le chroniqueur de Valenciennes se garde bien de dire, et pourtant 
 il 6tait trop rapprochS du theatre des evenements pour 1'ignorer, 
 c'est que ce rne'me Galehaut avait commis I'ann6e precedente 
 1'attentat le plus audacieux dont les annales judiciaires de cette 
 ^poque, si riche pourtant en scandales, aient gard^ le souvenir. 
 En 1356, Marie de Mortagne, fille unique de Guillaume de Mor- 
 tagne, sire d'Oudenarde, est reste"e orpheline a 1'age de huit ou 
 neuf ans, avec six mille livres de revenu annuel : c'est alors la 
 plus riche h^ritiere de Flandre et de Hainaut. Aussi, obtenir la 
 main de cette fillette est le reve que caressent tous les gentils- 
 horames de cette region. En attendant qu'elle soit en age de se 
 marier, Marie vit au chateau de Tupigny sous la garde de la dame 
 de Tupigny, d'Eustache et de Galehaut de Ribemont, ses cousins 
 germains, impatients de voir murir cet e"pi blond dont ils se 
 promettent bien les grains les plus dor^s. Malheureusement pour 
 eux, un chevalier de leurs amis, Jean de Fay, a deja jete^ lui 
 aussi, un regard de convoitise sur cette riche proie. Pendant 
 qu'Eustache et Galehaut sont alle"s servir le roi Jean dans cette 
 n^faste expedition qui se termine par la ddfaite de Poitiers, Jean 
 profite de leur absence pour enlever a I'^glise pendant la messe, 
 avec 1'aide d'une de ses sceurs nomm^e Cle'mence, la richissime 
 heritiere. II 1'emmene en son chateau du Fay, trouve un pretre 
 pour be"nir leur mariage, et le tour est jou6. Quelle n'est pas la
 
 388 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 d&xmvenue des deux Ribemont lorsqu'a leur retour en Picardie, 
 ils s'apercoivent qu'on lea a prevenus Un avide oiseleur a mis la 
 main sur la petite colombe, alors que les premieres plumes lui 
 poussaient & peine. Galehaut, surtout, moins riche que son frere 
 en sa qualit^ de cadet, est inconsolable, et il guette des lors 
 1'occasion de reprendre celle qu'il considere comme son bien. 
 Jean de Fay et Marie de Mortagne sont marirs depuis plus de 
 deux ans ; ils habitent le chateau du Fay, en Vermandois. Un 
 matin qu'ils reposent tranquillement ensemble, Galehaut, qui 
 s'est introduit par surprise dans le chateau, envahit avec 1'aide 
 de Bauclas de Hennin, sire de Cuvilliers, chevalier, de Colard de 
 la Cauchie, de Bernequin de Bailleul et de Bridoulet d'Atiches, 
 buyers, la chambre nuptiale, arrache Marie de Mortagne, toute 
 nue et tremblante de frayeur, des bras de son mari, puis la 
 conduit dans son manoir de Sorel, situ a. quatre lieues du Fay 
 ou il la tient enfermee dans une tour pendant plusieurs semaines. 
 Enfin, comme la jeune femme, reVolt^e sans doute de passer ainsi 
 de main en main comme une marchandise qu'on s'arrache, refuse 
 de faire les volontes de ce nouveau ravisseur, Galehaut, qui veut 
 que son ^quip^e lui rapporte au moins quelque chose, prend le 
 parti de transporter sa cousine germaine an chateau de Dossemer, 
 dans le souverain bailliage de Lille, ou il la vend en mariage a un 
 chevalier de Gand, nomm Pierre Pascharis, " au prix de deux 
 mille quatre cents florins d'or, plus deux draps d'ecarlate." Voila. 
 le vilain revers de cette chevalerie, affol^e de luxe, de tournois, de 
 parade, dont Froissart n'a voulu voir que les prouesses et les 
 elegances. 
 
 In war, the lot of women was of course infinitely less enviable. 
 To quote Luce again (p. 67) "II n'est pas de crime que 1'on ne 
 puisse se faire pardonner quand on sort fidelement le roi a la 
 guerre. Un chevalier, nomm Guillaume d'Agneaux, a commis en 
 basse Normandie quatre viols bien ave>s, un sur la personne 
 d'une jeune fille, trois sur la personne de femmes mariees, mais il 
 sert le roi sur mer sous les ordres de Jean de Vienne, amiral de 
 France ; et le sage, le pieux Charles V accorde purement et sim- 
 plement k ce monstre le pardon de ses atrocit^s." Even this is 
 out-done by the case of Sir John Arundel towards the end of the 
 century. This ruffian and his crew first carried off nuns whole- 
 sale from a convent near Southampton and then threw them 
 overboard to lighten the ship during a storm. (Walsingham, 
 R.S., vol. i, p. 420, quoted in "Social England," vol. ii). 
 
 6. Sacchetti, Nov. 153. Giordano da Rivalto Prediche, p. 250 
 (Bologna, 1867). Ben. Im. i, p. 579. Archiv. iii, 107. 
 Bonaventura Qusest. xxvi, circa Regulam. In the Middle Ages 
 all taking of interest, directly or indirectly, was held a mortal 
 sin, and Pope Clement V expressly declared in the Council of
 
 Appendix A. 389 
 
 Vienne (1311) that it was heresy to deny the wickedness of 
 usury : the offender was to be excommunicated and deprived of 
 Christian burial unless he repented, confessed, and made all 
 restitution in his power. This law however was as freely broken 
 as most others : we constantly find monasteries in debt to money- 
 lenders : even the best of English bishops were compelled to 
 borrow at usury the enormous sums which had to be paid to the 
 Papal court for their appointment : and Matthew Paris (an. 1250, 
 1253), complains bitterly of the protection afforded by the Popes 
 to these bloodsuckers, adding, "In England at this time there 
 were scarce any who were not taken in their toils." Usury was 
 perhaps most regularly practised in the South of France (see 
 Toynbee, Dante Diet., art. Caorsini) : but the Lombard merchants 
 were also very frequently bankers : and indeed as trade began to 
 grow in Europe it was found impossible to carry it on without 
 the forbidden usury. In spite of these hard facts, usury re- 
 mained a mortal sin until long after the Reformation, in theory 
 at least : nor am I aware that the solemn decision of Pope 
 Clement V has ever been reversed. 
 
 7. Libellus Apologeticus Qusest. xvi, in which the saint deals with 
 
 the question ' why do you not give more encouragement to the 
 Third Order?' 
 
 8. Prof. Holder-Egger seems hypercritical in pointing out that, as 
 
 Salimbene's other data prove Bartolino to have stayed at Noceto 
 only from Oct. 27th to Dec. 7th at most, thus "many days and 
 nights " cannot be true (p. 604, note 1). Six weeks or even the 
 half of six weeks would indeed be an uncomfortably long time 
 to spend under these nightly excursions and alarms. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 1. Michelet. Hist, de France, liv. xi, c.l. M. Reinach (Revue de 
 
 I'Universite' de Bruxelles, Dec. 1904) has shown that Michelet 
 was too hasty in taking literally the probably exaggerated testi- 
 mony of contemporary witnesses; but the arguments by which 
 he attempts altogether to explode that testimony show a strange 
 estimate of what is reasonably to be expected from a 15th century 
 law report. 
 
 2. The convents were too often dumping-grounds for natural children 
 
 of great men : even in the 17th century, Wadding boasts that a 
 Poor Clare of the 13th century was "the legitimate daughter of 
 the king" (1259, p. 117 : and he vaunts shortly afterwards two 
 " legitimate daughters of marquises.")
 
 390 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 3. Vitse Patrum ii, c. 61 : cf. Golden Legend (Temple Classics), vol. 
 
 vii, p. 79. 
 
 4. Ana. Era., vol. iii, p. 196. "A certain raven was offered to St. 
 
 Francis during his lifetime, and the hird became so domesticated 
 among the Brethren by the merits of the holy father, and so 
 learned, that he seemed endowed with human reason. For he 
 would go into Choir with the Brethren at all their Hours ; and 
 while the Brethren washed their hands before meat, the raven 
 also washed his beak, and, coming into the refectory, took his 
 food with the Brethren, and after a while, by the mere grace of 
 God, the bird began to speak intelligibly. So St. Francis, 
 seeing this with amazement and joy, once in the refectory bade 
 him go to the infirmary to care for the sick and minister to their 
 necessities. Wondrous to relate ! Immediately the raven, like 
 a reasonable creature, obeyed the servant of God implicitly. Ho 
 would go through the city of Assisi at the man of God's bidding, 
 with a servant following him, and entering rich men's houses he 
 would beg alms after his own fashion for the sick. So men 
 naturally marvelled, and gave alms to the servant, who brought 
 them to the sick Brethren. One day when the bishop was cele- 
 brating and collecting alms, the raven begged of him according to 
 his wont. The bishop would give nothing at the moment, but 
 promised to give some other time ; wherefore the raven, as if in 
 indignation, took the bishop's mitre and carried it to a butcher ; 
 and then taking meat for two sick Brethren, left him the mitre 
 as a pledge. The bishop wondered to hear this, and paid the 
 price to recover his mitre. Another day a knight was walking 
 unshod through the streets in summer-time, and refused the 
 raven's prayer for alms ; whereupon the bird ran after him and 
 pecked him with his beak on the shin, and the knight forthwith 
 struck him again with his staff. So another day the raven found 
 the aforesaid knight riding between Assisi and the Portuincula 
 with a fair helmet or cap upon his head ; and, remembering how 
 the knight had once struck him, he snatched the cap from his 
 head, and left it hanging high on a tree. So the knight dis- 
 mounted and climbed to the top of the tree for his cap. But the 
 raven forthwith swooped upon the horse, and smiting him sore 
 with his beak, urged him to a gallop, and so was revenged of the 
 knight. When St. Francis died, the raven fell grievously sick, 
 and would eat nothing. But when the Brethren told him to go 
 to the saint's tomb, he obeyed forthwith, and would not leave it, 
 or eat, or drink, but died there of grief." 
 
 5. The phrase was doubtless commonly current in the Middle Ages : 
 
 Gower alludes to it in speaking of the number of evil clergy in 
 his day (Vox Clamantis, bk. iii, 1. 1327).
 
 Appendix A. 391 
 
 " Tales nee caste curant neque vivere caute, 
 De quibus exempla sunt modo saepe mala." 
 
 Cf. Fuller, Church History, bk. vi, sect, iii, c. x, 7, "The 
 Charta Magnet, as I may call it, of monastical practice, ' si non 
 caste, tamen caute.' " 
 
 6. Miss Macdounell (p. 287) has misread this passage, evidently not 
 
 fully realizing the sacreduess of the Franciscan habit. Her 
 account of the two Germans and of Rinaldo of Arezzo on the 
 same page is equally inaccurate. 
 
 7. This too favourable description, which Salimbene no doubt heard 
 
 as a tradition in the Order, is in direct variance with the accounts 
 of eye witnesses, themselves of the Church party. (Murat. 
 Scriptt. torn, viii, 299 and 694). Only five men were murdered, 
 but " the violent plunder of the houses was more than can be 
 described or imagined." 
 
 8. These were the friars who clung to the original Franciscanism of 
 
 the Fioretti and the Mirror of Perfection, and who resisted the 
 relaxations introduced by Brother Elias. It is from Salimbene 
 alone that we learn the character of the Legate who compelled the 
 German province to conform to these relaxations. 
 
 9. This is the church by which Dante's tomb now stands. 
 
 10. i.e. a canon of the cathedral. For the steps by which this title 
 
 came to be applied exclusively to members of the sacred college, 
 see Ducange, s.v. 
 
 11. Prof. Holder-Egger points out (p. 400, note 3) that the chronicler 
 
 Thomas of Pavia records the finding of this body in 1231, and tells 
 how the great Bonaventurn was glad to get a single tooth. Parma 
 is too near Kavenna for Salimbene to have successfully imposed 
 on his brother-friars with a totally different body ; we must 
 therefore infer that the relic had cheapened very much between 
 1231 and 1270, when the archbishop died. This however is 
 a common medieval phenomenon : we may see from inventories 
 that relics were constantly disappearing from churches : the charm 
 of novelty seems rapidly to have evaporated, and they were 
 either stolen or allowed to disappear by mere neglect : for popular 
 worship was apt to tire as quickly and as unaccountably as it had 
 sprung up. 
 
 12. Much curious information about contemporary ladies' costume may 
 
 be found in Bourbon, esp. pp. 228, 231, 233, which cast inter-
 
 392 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 esting sidelights also on contemporary manners. Bourbon is 
 specially indignant at their cosmetics and false hair : "they paint 
 themselves like idols " : " they are like images of Janus, old in 
 front and young behind." 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 1. Probably Gerard, Archbishop-elect of Albano, who died in 1211. 
 
 2. Liutgardis quoted in Hurter's Innocent III., 1. xxi. Cses. Heist. 
 
 dist. ii., cap. 30. Jac. de Marchia in Baluze-Mansi Misc., vol. 
 ii., p. 599. 
 
 3. Wadding III, 325: Thos. Cant. II, x, 21 Eccleston R.S. p. 66: 
 
 his words are " quam Papa quicunque." Here, as in other places, 
 Father Cuthbert's translation is not true to the too plain-spoken 
 original. Compare Pipinus's account of another papal deathbed 
 (Murat ix, 750). "Pope Clement V possessed in his life- 
 time a flood of riches ; yet on his deathbed he was stripped even 
 of his clothes by the servants, so that only one wretched cloak 
 could be found to cover his corpse withal, as was reported after- 
 wards by the Religious who were then present. Moreover, it is 
 said that on the night whereon he died he was so deserted by all, 
 that his body was partly burnt by the fire of some tapers which 
 fell upon him." 
 
 4. A well-known medieval romance of two knights who had sworn 
 
 blood-brotherhood. 
 
 5. This was a common scriptural quotation against nepotism : of 
 
 Grosseteste's letters. R.S. p. 437. 
 
 6. See the satire quoted by Benvenuto da Imola (ii, 408) upon the 
 
 sons of the clergy masquerading as their nephews. " Saepe 
 sacerdotes filios dixere nepotes." 
 
 7. Prof. Holder-Egger quotes similar unflattering descriptions of 
 
 Honorius from other writers, including the verdict of Brunetto 
 Latini, " fu avarissimo come cane." (618, note 4). 
 
 V 
 
 8. The author of the Golden Legend speaks almost equally strongly of 
 
 the Cardinalate as an upstart dignity. Murat. Scriptt. ix, p. 22. 
 
 9. Cf. Golden Legend (Temple Classics) vol. v, p. 201. St. Jerome 
 
 " blamed the jollity and lavish life " of some of the clergy, who
 
 Appendix A. 393 
 
 revenged themselves by falsely accusing him of unchastity : 
 whereupon he retired from Kome to Constantinople. 
 
 10. Salimbene, as Prof. Holder-Egger points out, is here parodying the 
 
 records of the early Popes which he found in the Liber Ponti- 
 ficalis of Eavenna. The Professor appears to think that nearly 
 all this speech is Salimhene's own invention : hut the main con- 
 tents are in perfect harmony not only with what we know of 
 Hugh from other sources (e.g. Joinville 657, Angelo Clareno in 
 Archiv. II, 282, and Ana. Fra. Ill, 405), but also with Grosse- 
 teste's speech at Lyons (Browne, Fascic II, 250). 
 
 11. Matt. Paris an. 1251, and Petrarch in Lea's Celibacy, p. 342. In 
 
 1311 Bp. Guillaume Durand presented a petition to the Pope in 
 full ecumenical council, one clause of which ran " moreover [we 
 pray] that public brothels be not held hard by the Churches of 
 the Roman Court and hard by the palace of the Lord Pope, nor 
 near the houses of prelates elsewhere [in Avignon] . And we 
 pray that the Lord Pope's Marshal and other similar officers may 
 receive nothing from the prostitutes and pimps of the same 
 brothels." (Baluze. Vit. Pap. Aven. col. 810). Benvenuto 
 comments on Inf. xix, 106 (II, 59) " Wherefore the modern 
 poet Petrarch will have it that this great Babylon is Avignon, 
 the new Babylon in France, which may truly be called Babylon 
 the Great, not for the circuit of its walls but for its greed of 
 souls (non ambitu murorum sed ambitu animarum). She is in 
 truth the mother of fornication, lechery, and drunkenness, full 
 of all abomination and uncleanness, and she sitteth indeed be- 
 tween the devouring waters of the Rhone, the Durance and 
 the Sorga ; and the woman's adornment fits well with the pre- 
 lates themselves, who are wrapped in with purple, gold, silver, 
 and precious stones ; and that band of prelates is indeed drunken 
 with the blood of the holy martyrs of Jesus Christ." With 
 regard to Rome, Benvenuto (vol. i, p. 95) also repeats Boccaccio's 
 story about the Jew who was converted by the extreme wicked- 
 ness of that city, arguing within himself thtt only a true religion 
 could have escaped suffocation in such a hot-bed of vice. He 
 speaks almost equally strongly below, p. 118, and ii, 186. For 
 Constance see Lea, p. 390. 
 
 12. Such, at least, is the apparent drift of Dr. Barry's plea on pp. 630, 
 
 652, of the Cambridge Modern History, vol. I. For Gregory 
 X, and Henry of Liege see Fleury, an. 1273, 1274. For other 
 bishops worthy to be placed by Henry's side see Fleury an. 1245, 
 1248, 1251, 1257, and Innocent III, Epp. xiv, 125, xvi, 158: 
 and for their general unpopularity see Ana. Fra. iii, 648.
 
 394 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 13. For Geoffroi de Pckonne see also Peter of Blois, Ep. 102, Caes, 
 
 Heist, ii, 28, Etienne de Bourbon, pp. 249, 421. The scholar's 
 vision, Ana. Fra. iii, 297. Gregory's complaint, Floury, an. 
 1274 : for the other names : ibid. 1260, 1280, 1285, 1294. Jo. 
 Sarisb. Ep. 166. (Migne. Pat. Lat. cxcix, 156.) Caes. Heist. II, 
 27, 28 : cf. 39, 40. In connection with these and the abundant 
 similar quotations which might be made from medieval documents, 
 it may interest some readers to see a passage from the Roman 
 Catholic Monitor (March 22nd, 1901). "In reference to the 
 recent appointment of Dr. Ingram it [the Church Times j declares 
 that ' he takes up a burden that is almost frightful,' and again, 
 'the burden is terrible. The strongest may bow and break 
 beneath it.' We believe the Church Times says that which is 
 strictly true. The burden imposed on Dr. Ingram is very 
 grievous. The language of the Church Times confirms the truth 
 that the new line of Bishops have not the grace of Orders to 
 support them. Language of this kind could not be used of true 
 Catholic Bishops. They have a load, but they have grace to 
 bear it. The task is proportioned to the strength. They may 
 die under it but they fall unconquered and glorious. The words 
 above quoted are neither Primitive nor Catholic." An equally 
 astounding historical mis-statement about the seal of confession 
 was made publicly for similar polemical purposes by Cardinal 
 Gibbons : see Lea, Confession, I, 414. 
 
 14. For Obizzo see Chron. Parm. an. 1295 : for Reggio, Aflarosi I, pp. 
 
 227, 252, 
 
 15. Clement V protested in a bull against this introduction of hounds 
 
 and hawks into the sanctuary : and Gerson, a century later, com- 
 plained of the same practice, adding that such animals snowed 
 no more respect for the sacred places than mere protestant beasts. 
 Yet, at the very time when Gerson was complaining, the Menagier 
 de Paris was advising good folk to bring their hawks to church, 
 that they might thus grow used to crowds of men and lose their 
 native shyness : and the Editor points out in a footnote how 
 certain canonries carried with them the express right of bringing 
 hawks into church. This evidence is specially significant, since 
 the Menagier is singled out by M. Leon Gautier, in his apology 
 for the Middle Ages, as one of the four books that give the 
 purest idea of medieval manners the other three being Ville- 
 hardouin, Joinville, and the Knight of La Tour-Landry. The 
 Chronicon Parmense tells an amusing story of a dog which for 
 twenty years always followed funerals into the church. Decret. 
 Clement, lib. iii, tit. xiv, c. ; Gerson ii, 630D. Menagier ii, p. 
 296. Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie (Paris, 1891), p. 448. Murat. 
 ix, 779.
 
 Appendix A. 395 
 
 16. Vit. Exemp., p. 2. 
 
 17. For Odo Eigaldi see his Register (Ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852): P. 
 
 Feret, La Faculte de Theologie de Paris au M.-A. (Paris, 1894, 
 etc.); Hist. Litt. de la France, vol. xxi, pp. 616 f, and a few 
 fresh and valuable details in Ana. Fra. vol. iii, (see index). 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 1 . The Yorkshire Chantry Surveys published by the Surtees Society 
 
 (vols. 91 and 92) frequently plead the number of " houseling 
 people," i.e., those over 14, who were bound to attend the yearly 
 Easter communion in different parishes, as a reason for not 
 suppressing particular chantries. Though the parishes for which 
 these figures are given are therefore naturally larger than the 
 average, yet the 107 specified for the county of York yield an 
 average of only 821 houseling people or from 1,300 to 1,600 
 souls per parish. In the city of York itself, the seventeen 
 parishes specified had only an average of from 400 to 450 souls. 
 Merston, with only 320 houseling folk, is spoken of as a " wide 
 and great " parish. The only instances, I believe, in which the 
 parish priests had to deal with more than 1,000 houseling people 
 apiece were at Kyldewike and Halifax (pp. 407, 421). Thorold 
 Rogers calculated that England had one priest to every fifty souls 
 in the later Middle Ages : Abbot Gasquet is probably nearer the 
 truth in putting the proportion at one to 100. (Great Pestilence, 
 pp. 166, 205). Sir Thomas More felt very strongly that the 
 Church would have done better with a far smaller and more select 
 body of ministers (English works, pp. 224, 227). The proportion 
 of ministers of every denomination to the present population of 
 England seems to be about one in 900. Sacchotti (Nov. 28) 
 shows us how small was the average Italian parish, for he 
 distinctly implies that, as a rule, the parson knew all his flock by 
 sight. Caesarius speaks of a Lombard Bishop who knew all the 
 folk in his diocese : this is probably a picturesque exaggeration 
 (ii. 29). I owe the Norwich calculation, with other valuable 
 information about town life, to the Rev. W. Hudson, F.S.A., 
 editor of the Medieval volume of the Records ot the city of 
 Norwich. A quotation from Hoeniger in Gasquet's Great 
 Pestilence (p. 66) goes some way in support of Caesarius's asser- 
 tion as to the size of some German parishes : but it must be 
 remembered that these would be endowed to maintain more than 
 one priest. 
 
 2. His most important writings from this point of view are the two 
 
 treatises in which he defends the Friars against charges of en-
 
 396 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 croachment on the duties of the parish clergy (IMellus Apologeti- 
 cus and Quare Fratres Minores Praedicent). 
 
 3. Bourbon, p. 259, quotes a Cardinal Legate as asserting that the 
 
 devil gained more souls thus than in any other way whole 
 parishes swept to hell by communicating with an excommunicate ! 
 Similarly, the Bishop of Angers asserted at the council of Vienne 
 that it was common to find a parish with three or four hundred 
 excommunicate, " and I have known one with as many as 700." 
 (Lib. Guil. Major, p. 477 : cf. Fleury an. 1311. 51). 
 
 4. He was a man of some note in the Order : see chap. x. above : but 
 
 he must be distinguished from the Bro. Umile of the Fioretti. 
 
 6. I give here only supplementary evidence to that contained in Dr. 
 Lea's Confession. The allusion in my text is to Ceesarius, 
 Dist. iii., cap. 47. Chapters 40-47 of this book are sufficient by 
 themselves to show that Salimbene's descriptions are not exag- 
 gerated. Csesarins there tells us of the priest who, at the Easter 
 confession, would cast his stole over six or eight penitents in a 
 batch, and make them repeat a general confession after him : so 
 that his successor found his flock willing to own vicariously to all 
 the sins of the decalogue, but utterly recalcitrant to personal and 
 first-hand confession. Another would say off-hand, " Do the same 
 penance as my predecessor gave you," or " the same penance I 
 gave you last year." Some are willing to absolve a heavy tale of 
 sins for the gift of a hen and a pint of wine ; another is accus- 
 tomed to use the confessional for blackmailing purposes : such 
 are ready " to kill souls for a handful of barley," as Ezekiel says. 
 The 47th chapter, referred to in my text, should be carefully 
 studied by those who believe that such manuals as St. Alfonso 
 Liguori's are without danger in practice, and unclean only to the 
 unclean Protestant mind. Csesarius tells us also of the female 
 penitent who tempts her confessor ; and again a converse illustra- 
 tion which might serve as a worthy pendant to the tale which St. 
 Bouaventura told to Salimbene. Nor does he thus exhaust his 
 stock of instances : " I might show thee by very many examples 
 how great evils are brewed in confession by wicked priests who 
 fear not God , but I must spare the Order, spare the sex, spare 
 Religion." Later on, however, he so far forgets this resolve as to 
 record an incident if possible still more damning, though the point 
 which interests him is less the opportunity of seduction in the 
 confessional than the abuse of the consecrated Host as a love- 
 philtre. (Dist. ix., cap 6.). Bourbon relates (p. 257) a story of 
 a lady soliciting a Bishop to sin in the confessional, and bringing 
 counter-accusations against him when he resisted her : such anec- 
 dotes are by no means infrequent in collections of moral tales. 
 But far more damning are the frequent warnings of sober coun-
 
 Appendix A. 397 
 
 sellers to ladies that they should avoid the company of the clergy 
 as much as possible. St. Catherine of Siena, writing to her niece 
 in her convent of Montepulciano, says : " go to confession, and 
 tell your need, and when you have received your penance, flee ! 
 Take care, too, that [your confessors] be not of those with whom 
 you have been on friendly terms : and marvel not that I speak 
 thus, for thou mayst oft-times have heard me say (and this is 
 truth) that conversation under the perverse title of ' spiritual 
 fathers' and ' spiritual daughters' (col perverse vocabolo de' divoti 
 e delle divote), spoils souls and the customs and observances of 
 religious Orders." (Lettere. Ed. Tommaseo vol. I p. 100.) The 
 reader will perhaps here remember what I have already quoted 
 from Alvarez Pelayo about these divoti and divote,* and will be 
 prepared to find the same idea repeated in St. Bernardino's very 
 explicit warning to widows (Prediche, vol. II, p. 185) " widow, 
 if thou be not wise, thou wilt take harm : beware with whom 
 thou hast to converse. Wilt thou do well ? then have no conver- 
 sation with good or with bad : oh ! thou wouldst have good friars, 
 oh ! thou would'st have holy priests : I tell thee no ! with nobody. 
 Believe me, thou wilt do better to stay at home. What ? may I 
 not associate (usare) with good and holy men, that they may 
 teach me 1 Yes, but with a wall between you Oh, but my de- 
 votion which I have taken upon myself 1 ! I tell thee no ! let it 
 
 be Take care to remove peril for thine own part, and 
 
 thou wilt keep thyself from ill fame, and other men from scandals 
 and sins. . . . Go not too often to places where thou may'st 
 easily take harm. Stay not too long in church : take away every 
 occasion [of evil] ; give all good example of thyself and thy 
 life.f . . . Why, if it is seen that one woman talks with a friar, 
 seven others will murmur against her. And even though their 
 converse be only in church, and the friar be there by the side, 
 not speaking to her, they still murmur ; nay, if one glance alone 
 can be cauyht, there is no need of more ! " And the saint goes 
 on to relate a story which matches those of Salimbene on this 
 subject. Again, in the very popular rhymed precepts for girls 
 reprinted by Montaiglon (Recueil de Poesies. FranQ. des xv e and 
 xvi'SS, vol. II, p. 22), the moralist writes : 
 
 Fille, hormis confession 
 Seulette ne parlez prebstre 
 Laissez-les en leur eglise estre, 
 Sana ce qu 'ilz hantent voa maisons. 
 
 * Chapter VI, note 5. 
 
 t The church was a common trysting-place for lovers : cf. the Prologue to 
 Boccaccio's Decameron and Saccnetti, Serm. VII, "men were wont to 
 go to church for prayer : but now they go to drive bargains in all sorts 
 of sins, and specially in lechery, with all evils that tongue can tell." 
 Almost stronger are the words of St. Bernardino (Opera, vol. I, p. 208).
 
 398 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 A similar warning by the mission-preacher Geiler von Kaisersberg 
 is quoted by A. Mdray (Libres Precheurs, vol. II, p. 149 : cf 
 vol. I, 142, 144). Moreover, when the confessor was honest, he 
 was too often a mere bungler : and the blessed Raimondo da 
 Vigna records of his heroine St. Catherine " if this holy virgin 
 had had no other afflictions . . . than those brought upon her 
 by her most indiscreet [spiritual] preceptors, she might yet have 
 been called a martyr for all that she suffered." (AA. SS. Ap. 
 vol. iii, p. 882 : cf. ibid. lib. i, c. v, 84.) 
 
 6. Bourbon p. 268 : Munim. Acad. R.S. p. 305 : cf. Rashdall, ii, 
 
 689, note 3. 
 
 7. A hoop, a branch of a tree, or a wisp of straw were ordinary 
 
 tavern-signs. The first seems to have been the most usual on the 
 continent in the 13th century: David of Augsburg speaks of it 
 as the ordinary inn-sign (p. 218) ; and Prof. Holder- Egger seems 
 to be mistaken in tracing a connexion between the circle and the 
 clerk's circular tonsure. After all, the hoop is still a common 
 enough English sign : it probably was at first simply a barrel-hoop. 
 
 8. The earliest form of this Devil's Letter seems to be in Odo of 
 
 Cheriton's sermons : see Prof. Holder-Egger's note. The fullest 
 account of these documents may be found in Wattenbach's article 
 "iiber erfundene Briefe u.s.w." in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner 
 Acad. 1892, p. 91 ff. A reviewer who ought to have known better 
 having questioned the pertinence of Salimbene's evidence here, 
 I may refer doubting readers to the criticisms of three distinguished 
 bishops, and of Humbert de Romans, general of the Dominicans, 
 before the two great reforming councils of Lyons and Vienne. 
 (Raynaldus an. 1273 6 ff : Labbe-Mansi. Concilia, xxiv, 109 ff: 
 the latter is summarizod in Fleury, an. 1311, 51). It is note- 
 worthy that the documents of 1311 show if anything a worse 
 state of things than those of 1274. 
 
 9. Compare his versions of the Colyton and Culmstock reports with 
 
 the originals in Stapeldon's Register, pp. Ill, 130. I have ex- 
 posed his manipulation of the other evidence in the Contemporary 
 Review for Oct. 1906 and the Churchman for Apl. 1907 (reprinted 
 as Medieval Studies, nos. 7 and 8). Guibert of Nogent, speaking 
 of a gathering of important churchmen in the presence of Pope 
 Paschal II, (d. 1118) mentions casually that "some [of the 
 priests] scarce knew the rudiments [of Latin] " (Migne. Pat. 
 Lat. 156, col. 913). St. Bernardino (Prediche. II, 127) tells a 
 tale of four priests, who had a heated dispute as to the correct 
 Latin for the four words of consecration in the Mass " This is 
 my Body." One only could repeat the words correctly : another
 
 Appendix A. 399 
 
 was wont to say Hoc est corpusso meusso, and the last confessed 
 " I don't bother myself about it : I just say an Ave Maria over 
 the wafer," thus, as the Saint remarks, living from day to day 
 in mortal sin, and teaching his whole parish to commit idolatry 
 by worshipping an unconsecrated wafer. The Bishop of Mende, 
 in his memoir for the Council of Vienne " se plaint que memo 
 entre les hommes lettre"s, il' s'en trouve tres peu qui soient bien 
 instruits de ce qui regarde les articles de foi et le salut des ames, 
 ce qui les expose (ajoute-t-il) a la rise"e des intideles quand il faut 
 confe"rer avec eux " (Fleury, an. 1311 52). His colleague, the 
 scarcely less distinguished Bishop of Angers, asserted on the same 
 occasion " the law of God, the articles of faith, and other things 
 pertaining to the religion of the Christian faith and to the 
 salvation of souls, are almost utterly unknown to the faithful." 
 (Lib. Guil. Major, p. 477). The other authorities referred to in 
 the text are K. Bacon, Ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 413. Aquinas 
 Contra Impug. Religion, cap iv, 10. Bonaventura Libell. 
 Apologet. Q.I. Caes. Heist, vii, 4 and 5. Dialogo di Santa 
 Caterina, cap. 129. Sacchetti serm. 27, cf. Nov. 35. Labbe 
 Concil. xxii, col. 1159, and xxiii, col. 458. Reg. of. S. Osmund 
 R.S., i, p. 304. Od. Rig., pp. 159, 174, 217, 332, 395, 787. 
 Busch., p. 441. 
 
 10. Bp- Haymo in Thorpe's Registrum Roffense, p. 413 Bert. Rad. 
 
 Pred. I. 393. Gascoigne, pp. 118, 123 Bern. Sen. I, 495, cf. 
 112 Joinville 297, 742 : cf. St. Louis's life by his Queen's 
 Confessor in AA. SS. Aug. V, c, iii, 88. La Tour pp. 40-42. 
 Miiller Anfange p. 147. For the visitations see Od. Rig., Reg. 
 Grand , the Southwell visitations (Camden Soc.) Bp. of Mende 
 in Labbe-Mansi, vol. xi, p. 536. Decret. Clem. lib. Ill, tit. xiv, 
 1. Ben. Im. I, 271. Bourbon, p. 185. 
 
 11. This proverb is quoted by the Wife of Bath : Cant. Tales, D. 389. 
 
 12. Bert. Rad. Pred. I, p. 493. Bern. Pred. II, 109. Gerson, vol. 
 
 II, pp. 630 and 641. Chaucer, Cant. Tales Prol. 376, 449. 
 Grosseteste (K.S. p. 162) enjoined throughout his diocese " let 
 not rectors and parish priests permit their parishioners to strive 
 for precedence in their procession with banners at the yearly 
 visitation of the Cathedral Church ; for thence not only fights 
 but death are wont to come about." Fifty years later, Bp. 
 Giffard of Worcester proclaimed " in consequence of the recent 
 disturbance and drawing of blood in the Cathedral Church of 
 Worcester, that all incumbents of churches and chapels shall 
 give out for four Sundays before the feast of Pentecost, that no 
 one shall join in the Pentecostal processions with a sword or 
 other kinds of arms" (Reg. Giftard, p. 422). In 1364, Bp.
 
 4OO From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Langham of Ely repeated Grosseteste's complaint of occasional 
 deaths on these occasions (Wilkins III, 61) : and a milder 
 complaint of the same nature from a fifteenth century Bp. of 
 Chichester is quoted by Cutts (Parish Priests and their People, 
 p. 122). 
 
 13. See Denifle's La Desolation des Eglises passim. Sacchetti writes 
 
 (serai. VII, on Matt, xxi, 13). "Per queste parole si puo 
 comprendere come li viventi uomeni e donne son divoti al tempo 
 d'oggi nelli templi di Dio. lo per me mi vergognero quasi di 
 scriverlo, che cosa & a dire, che ogni brottura e ogni crimine e 
 peccatto in quelli li mondani sono discorsi a usare. In molti 
 tempi dell' anno vanno li gioveni e le giovene donne vane alii 
 monasterii a fare le delicate merende con balli e canti e con 
 stormenti, ladove ciascuno da simile cose si doveria guardare, 
 e 1'onesta si rimane dall' uno de' lati. Cominciasi per li difetti 
 de' Cristiani una guerra. Conducesi gente a piede e a cavallo : 
 non si possono negli alberghi delle terre questi tali acconciare. 
 E dato loro, che si chiama alloggiamento nelle chiese di Dio ; e 
 qui con tutti li vizi che dire si possono, dimorano giocando, dove 
 continue si biastemma Dio e' Santi, adoperando la lussuria in 
 tutti e modi dissoluti, insino la sodomia a pie degli altari : o per6 
 si puote bene dire aperlamente oggi : Vos fecistis illam speluncam 
 latronum." Similar testimony is borne by Frati, p. 82, and Bern. 
 Sen. I, 208. 
 
 14. For corn and brewing in churches see Reg. Stapeldon, p. 337, 
 
 and Statuta Communitatis Parmse, p. 320. It was Salimbene's 
 friend, Gerard of Modena, who obtained the removal of this 
 corn from the cathedral. Markets were held at the same time in 
 the Cathedral of Ravenna, and barrels stored there (Labbe- 
 Mansi. xi, 1583). The synod of Durham in 1220 complains of 
 the dirty state of churches and their use as warehouses (Wilkins 
 I, 580) : one of the most frequent subjects dealt with by church 
 synods in all counties was that of markets, games, and dances in 
 churches and churchyards. For the dilapidation of the chinches 
 see Reg. Grand, pp. 570 ff and 604 ff; Reg. Stapeldon passim ; 
 Visitations of St. Paul's Churches (Camden Soc., N.S.), Reg. 
 St. Osmund (R.S.), p. 275 ff. For the separation of the sexes, 
 Bern. Sen. Vita Cap. xlix, and Savonarola Serni. xxvi. For 
 churches and lightning, Bourbon, p. 269, cf. Wadding, 1236, 
 420. 
 
 The best way of explaining medieval conditions to the general 
 reader is to quote at some length a single visitation out of many 
 which might be adduced : it is one of those recorded in the 
 York Fabric Rolls, (Surtees Soc. pp. 242 ff), and shows a state 
 of things fairly common even in the most stately cathedrals.
 
 Appendix A. 401 
 
 The date is 1409. " The chantry-priests do not celebrate masses 
 as they are bound by the terms of their chantries : very many 
 (quam plures) masses are left unsung by the defect of the clergy. 
 The dignitaries do not come to the choir at double feasts and 
 feasts of nine lessons, as they should. The deacons and incense- 
 bearers do not come into the choir as they ought : and at the 
 time when they are in the choir they chatter and do not behave 
 themselves as they ought. The choirboys are not taught as they 
 should be in singing, nor do they walk sedately and decently, as 
 they should, in the processions. Both dignitaries, vicars, and 
 other ministers wander about excessively and habitually (nimis 
 et communiter) in the Cathedral, even while divine service is 
 being celebrated in the choir. The books in the choir, viz., two 
 called ' standards,' and the processional books, by reason of their 
 age, their discordance, and their excessive fewness, are too defective, 
 causing divers and numerous defects and discordances among 
 those who sing in choir. Part of the Bible, and the books of 
 sermons from which the Legend is read in choir, are worn-out 
 and defective in those parts where the lessons are read. Within 
 the vestry, the proper sedate silence is not observed as it should 
 be by the Cathedral ministers ; but noisy disorders commonly 
 take place there while service is being said in the choir, and 
 especially while the minister on duty for the week is preparing 
 for the celebration of High Mass ; which disorders frequently 
 impede and disturb the devotion of the celebrant. The prebend- 
 aries pay irregularly the salaries for the vicars' common hall. . . . 
 Very many (plura} vestments and ornaments and jewels belonging 
 to divers chantries are in an exceedingly defective state, and 
 perhaps some have been made away with, by the default of the 
 custodian and of due inquisition in this matter . . . ." After 
 other complaints of pecuniary mismanagement and defective 
 service-books, the report goes on : " Within the Cathedral and its 
 gates, and especially during the greatest and most solemn festivals 
 of the year, public markets (mercimonia) are held, not without 
 public, notorious and enormous degradation to the House of God, 
 contrary to the teaching of the Gospel. The vicars wander too 
 much in the Cathedral, with their robes on, at time of Divine 
 Service. Divers vicars are too much given to chattering and 
 talking together in the choir during service." 
 
 15. Bern. Sen. i, 490. For communion see Aquinas Summa Pars iii, 
 Q. Ixxx, art x. (Migne vol. iv, col. 806). Pope Anacletus (he says) 
 had prescribed daily communion ; then, as faith gradually failed, 
 Pope Fabianus thrice a year at least : ' at last, since the charity of 
 many began to grow cold by reason of the abundance of iniquity, 
 Innocent III enjoined . . . that the faithful should communicate 
 at least once a year, at Easter." He goes on to speak of weekly 
 
 Da
 
 4O2 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 communion as a counsel of perfection. For exceptional devotees 
 who kept this see Ana. Fra., 106, 392, 427, Bourbon p. 149, and 
 compare Salimbene's Guglielmo di Sanvitale " a most conscientious 
 youth, who would be confessed at least once a week " (62). For 
 clergy who grudged to let their parishioners communicate, see 
 Cses. Heist, dist. ix, c. 25, 26, 46 : in the last case the priest 
 " waxed wroth, and answered with indignation ' ye women always 
 wish to communicate at your own will.' " The great Bishop 
 of Mende, in his memoir for the Council of Vienne in 1311, 
 suggested that the Church should return to the ancient custom 
 of three communions a year : but among the sixteen articles 
 of complaint drawn up by the Devon rebels of 1549 was one 
 requiring that the laity should go back to the system of yearly 
 communions, the Reformers having increased the frequency of 
 celebration, (Raynaldus. an. 1311, 54 note: Gairdner, English 
 Ch. in the 16th century, p. 268.) 
 
 16. For baptism, Sacchetti. Serm. xiv. : cf. Gascoigne, p. 197. For 
 
 extreme unction, Bert. Rat. Pred. i., 304, ii., 89, and Wilkins 
 Concilia i, 583, 595, 599, 600, 616, 670, 690 : ii, 135, 295. 
 These cover the years from 1220 to 1308, and cast an interesting 
 sidelight on religious education also. The reasons why parish- 
 ioners feared extreme unction are given most fully in Bp. Quivil's 
 Constitutions (ii. 135) : " they foolishly imagine that if perchance 
 they recover after the reception of extreme unction, it is altogether 
 forbidden them to eat flesh, go barefoot, or know their own lawful 
 spouses again." For confirmation, see Wilkins Concilia ii., 53 : 
 Fleury an. 1287 : Corpus Chronicorum Flandriee ed. De Smet, 
 vol. ii, p. 507 : Quellen und Forschungen hrsg. vom. K. Pr. 
 Historischen Institut in Rom. (Loescher), vol. v, p. 180. For 
 the irreverence bred of tithe-quarrels, see Wilkins ii, p. 160, and 
 passim. Ben. Im. iii, 442 (on Purg. xvi, 102) : Gower, Mirour 
 de Tomme. 20, 593 ff. E. G. Gardner in Hibbert Journal. Apl. 
 1906, p. 571. 
 
 17. Bourbon pp. 299, 307, 308. Bert. Rat. Pred. ii, 531 : cf. Gerson, 
 
 vol. i, p. 204, 268, 849 ; vol. ii, pp. 552, 761, 762, and De Laud. 
 Script., Consid. xi., xii. : Busch., p. 731. Gerson expressly 
 specifies this want of religious education as a main cause of the 
 notorious decay of the Church in his days (early 15th century). 
 For the question of Bible reading, cf. Trevelyan's Wy cliff e pp. 
 130, 361, and the Church Quartei-ly Review for Oct., 1900, and 
 Jan., 1901, where Abbot Gasquet's misstatements on this subject 
 are exposed. The Church Quarterly points out (p. 285) how, 
 after Mr. F. D. Matthew had exposed in the Enylish Historical 
 Review a definite and fundamental misstatement of fact by the 
 Abbot, the latter yet reprinted this part of his essay without
 
 Appendix A. 403 
 
 correction, although he attempted to meet other criticisms of Mr. 
 Matthew's. I have further shown that even Sir Thomas More, 
 from whose apologetic writings the Abbot had quoted to show 
 that the Church went on the principle of " the open Bible," very 
 definitely repudiates that principle. Not only does More admit 
 that no orthodox writer had made any translation which any 
 printer would dare to publish in the face of ecclesiastical censure, 
 but he further asserts his own conviction that the most orthodox 
 translations ought to be lent by the Bishop only with great pre- 
 cautions " to such as he perceiveth honest," and that even to such 
 well-meaning students the Bishop might well forbid the reading 
 of St. John's Gospel or the Epistle to the Romans, as liable to 
 misinterpretation. (Contemporary Review, Oct., 1906, reprinted 
 in Medieval Studies, No. 7). 
 
 18. One of the best instances of this is to be found in the Book of the 
 
 Knight of La Tour-Landry, written (as he assures us) with the 
 help of four clerics, of whom two were priests. His distortions 
 of Bible narrative are almost incredible : the story of Ruth, for 
 instance, contains scarcely more than the heroine's name in 
 common with the scripture narrative, (p. 3 : of chap, xci.) 
 
 19. Baluze-Mansi, Misc. ii., 600, 610. Bourbon, p. 286. Bern. Sen. 
 
 vol. i, p. 431. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 1. Cont. Cels vii. 44 (Ed. Spencer, p. 362.) A part of this is quoted 
 
 in Dr. Littledale's " Plain Reasons," and is prudently ignored by 
 the Roman Catholic Father Ryder in his reply. There are in 
 Father Ryder's book several similar instances of convenient 
 blindness to facts which it would be difficult either to deny or to 
 explain away. 
 
 2. But see Lea, Inquisition, iii. 91, for the extent to which bishops 
 
 still exercised the right. 
 
 3. Fleury. an. 1264 26. 
 
 4. Further references to Alberto and to Punzilovo may be found in 
 
 Lea's History of the Inquisition. Compare Guib. Nov., p. 614 : 
 but the whole of this treatise should be studied. For the gain 
 accruing to the clergy from these new saints see ibid. : also 
 Sacchetti's Letter to Giacomo di Conte. (Senn. p. 214 ff.), quoted 
 below in my text. The Church councils of Rouen (1445) and 
 Angers (1448) make the same complaint : the former even forbids
 
 404 From St Francis to Dante. 
 
 giving names to different images (our Lady of Eedemption, our 
 Lady of Pity, of Consolation, of Grace, etc.) as an invention 
 probably due to the desire of squeezing more money from men's 
 pockets. Abbot Gasquet, in his Eve of the Reformation, speaks 
 of the alleged connection between saint-worship and clerical greed 
 with a bland ridicule which carries weight only with readers 
 accustomed to modern enlightenment and modern ideals of clerical 
 honesty. If he had taken the trouble to look into the actual 
 evidence, he would have found himself compelled, in common 
 prudence, to leave the question alone. 
 
 5. For this canonization see Father Denifle's short article in Archiv. iv, 
 
 349 : also Baluze. Vit. Pap. Aven. i, 413. 
 
 6. For the Santo Volto, or miraculous portrait of Christ, see the 
 
 demon's scoff in Inf. xxi, 48. Benvenuto (ii, 106) tells the 
 legend that Nicodemus painted it, with other marvellous details ; 
 but he adds : " Believe thou as much of this as thou wilt, for it 
 is not one of the Articles of Faith." 
 
 7. The Magdalene's abstinence from food was (as we are assured) 
 
 rivalled by St. Catherine of Siena alone, who became in conse- 
 quence so emaciated " ut in obitu repertum sit, umbilicum ejus 
 renibus adhaerere." So at least reports one of her confessors, 
 Fra Tommaso Caffarini (A A. SS. Ap. vol. iii, p. 877 note). 
 
 8. Even Innocent III, as I have pointed out above, was obliged to 
 
 acknowledge the same embarrassment in dealing with these dupli- 
 cate relics : " it is better to commit all to God than to define rashly 
 either way," (see note 9 to chap. III). 
 
 9. Joinville 46 " [St. Louis] told me how William Bishop of Paris 
 
 [1228-1248] had spoken to -him of a great Doctor of Divinity 
 who had come to him saying that he would fain speak with him. 
 Then said the Bishop : ' Doctor, tell me your will.' And when 
 he would fain have spoken to the Bishop, he fell to weeping most 
 bitterly. So the Bishop said to him 'Doctor, say on, be not dis- 
 consolate : for no man can sin so sore as that God can no more 
 pardon him.' ' And I say unto you, my Lord,' said the Doctor, 
 ' that I cannot keep back my tears, for I hold myself an infidel, 
 since I cannot bring my heart to believe in the Sacrament of the 
 Altar, as Holy Church teaches it: and I know well that this is 
 one of the Devil's temptations.' " The Bishop, with admirable 
 sense, comforted him by pointing out how such trials only gave 
 him the opportunity of showing his essential faith, cf. Gerson, 
 Tractatus de Foeda Tentatione in the 4th vol. of his works : 
 Busch. Lib. Kef., cap. ii., (p. 395).
 
 Appendix A. 405 
 
 10. For St. Louis see the remarkable anecdote in Ana. Fra., vol. i, p. 
 413 ff. " One day a certain God-fearing knight, very familiar 
 and intimate with St. Louis, said to him : ' my lord, I will depart 
 from your court, for I can bear it no longer.' ' Why so 1 ' asked 
 the King. ' By reason,' said the knight, ' of that which I hear 
 and see.' For he heard pestilent folk reviling the King, who 
 (they said) bore himself rather like a monk than a king. So St. 
 Louis said, 'have patience; I will by no means suffer thee to 
 leave me : as often as thou wilt let us go apart from these worldly 
 folk, and comfort each other by talking of God and heavenly 
 things. Care not for the words of fools : I will tell thee that 
 which befalls me sometimes as I sit in my bed-chamber. I hear 
 some crying " Brother Louis ! " [as to a friar,] and cursing me, 
 not thinking to be heard of me. Then I think within myself 
 that I might cause them to be slain ; but I see that this befalls 
 me for my great good, if I bear it patiently for God's sake : and 
 in truth I say unto thee, that I am not displeased at this injury 
 which they do to me.' " 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 1. Dante. Convivio. Trat. iv, c. 28. Giles in Ana. Fra. iii, 112, 296. 
 
 For Urniliana, Wadding an. 1246, p. 157, cf. Bern. Bess. p. 321, 
 Cses. Heist., ii, 19. St. Louis' Life, by Q. Margaret's Confessor 
 (in AA. SS.), cap. v, 56. Dav. Aug. De. Ext. et. Int. 
 Hominis Compositione Lib. Ill, c. 66. 
 
 2. St. Edmund Rich in Golden Legend (Temple Classics), vol. vi, p. 
 
 234. St. Dominic in Lives of the Brethren, tr. J. P. Conway 
 (Newcastle, 1896), p. 290. For these devilish suggestions see 
 Dav. Aug. p. 360, Bonaventura Sermo vi. de Decem Prseceptis, 
 and Bourbon, p. 199. Many similar pseudo-divine appearances, 
 counselling suicide or homicide or other deadly sins as special 
 degrees of religious perfection, may be found in Wadding, an. 
 1253, pp. 317 foil.; 1261, 141, 1293, 317 (cf. 1291, 253, and 
 the quotation from Alvarez Pelayo, 1318, 43). St. Bernard 
 Sermo vi, de x. Praeceptis : Vitry Ex. p. 34 : 24 Gen. pp. 308 
 foil. (cf. 315) : Kenan's " Christine de Stommeln," in Nouvelles 
 Etudes, p. 353 ff. Cses. Heist, iii. 127 : Thos. Cant. Lib. ii. c. i. 
 14. An instance given by Wadding (1322, 45) specifies the 
 f ados tactus which are probably referred to here by Salimbene, 
 and certainly by David of Augsburg. For the devils like flies 
 see Wadding loc. cit. 
 
 3. An exactly similar occurrence in Spain is told in Analecta Francis- 
 
 cana, iii, 309 : cf. Vitry, Exempla p. 34. Sir Thomas More tells
 
 406 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 a similar story of a woman who hoped to attain canonization by 
 suicide (English Works, p. 1188) ; and another of a carver who 
 wanted his wife to crucify him on Good Friday (p. 1193). 
 
 4. (p. 257) There is in the original no trace of the almost treacherous 
 
 change of tone of which she complains. 
 
 5. Ceesarius alone gives many instances of this immoral teaching 
 
 about confession (ii. 23 ; iii. 2, 3, 6, 18 : x. 35), and many more 
 may be found in the note to Bourbon, p. 448 : cf. Athenceum, 
 No. 4025, p. 834. 
 
 6. Eccleston (R.S., p. 72) gives an equally uncomplimentary account 
 
 of the origin of these Friars of the Sack. For the Third Order 
 see Bonav. Libell. Apol. xvi. 
 
 7. For Segarello and Dolcino see Lea's Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 103 ff. 
 
 8. Even St. Bonaventura seems to attach real importance to this 
 
 Jesuitical distinction: see his Epistle of 1257 .... "pecunia, 
 nostri Ordinis paupertati super omnia inimica, avide petitur, 
 incaute recipitur et incautiw contrectatur." Ubertino da Casale, 
 a few years later, describes how the Friars who collected large 
 sums of money salved their consciences by keeping a servant to 
 touch it, though they kept the key of the bag to themselves. 
 (Archiv. Ill, 67). 
 
 9. ' Lana caprina:' see Horace Epist. I, xviii, 15. The fifth wheel 
 
 of a waggon, ' quinta rota plaustri,' is a favourite phrase of 
 Salimbene's for an insignificant trifle : it is used also by Matthew 
 Paris. 
 
 10. ' Gaudent novitate moderni,' a tag of a verse which is quoted in 
 
 another thirteenth century chronicle, as Prof. Holder- Egger points 
 out, and (in a slightly different form) by Bp. Guillaunie le Maire 
 of Angers. 
 
 11. This, of course, is the "Boy Bishop," an institution closely con- 
 
 nected with the Feast of Fools. Abbot Gasquet describes it 
 with characteristic inaccuracy on pp. 165 ff. of his Parish Life in 
 Medieval England, suppressing in his quotation from the Sarum 
 Statutes Bishop Mortival's complaint of the " manifold dis- 
 orders" which formerly had caused "some damage both to 
 persons and to the Cathedral," (see Rock. Church of our Fathers, 
 ed. Frere, vol. iv, p. 255, note). The Boy Bishop was in fact 
 long tolerated even by the pious prelates who (like Grosseteste) 
 looked upon the Feast of Fools as downright devilish : but
 
 Appendix A. 407 
 
 already in 1260 the provincial Council of Cognac forbade it; and 
 it was formally abolished by a decree of the ecumenical council 
 of Bale in 1431. It lingered long, however, and was only 
 killed at last by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. 
 
 12. Prof. Holder-Egger refers this to the sanctuary of St. Michael on 
 
 Monte Gargano : but, as Salimbene lays evident stress on the 
 distances covered by these pilgrims, it is possible that he may 
 refer to the French sanctuary. 
 
 13. See Father Denifle's essay in Archiv. IV, 330 ff. A certain 
 
 Radulfus, about 1290, got it into his head that whenever the 
 word nemo (no man} occurred in Latin writings, it was no mere 
 negation, but referred to a person of that name, whom he 
 proved to be identical with the Son in the Holy Trinity. His 
 own reading (as may well be believed) was small : but he paid 
 monks and clerks to make a collection of such passages, mainly 
 from the Bible, from which he composed a " Sermon upon 
 Nemo " which he dedicated to Cardinal Benedict Caietan, 
 afterwards Boniface VIII. The sermon still exists in different 
 versions, and an adversary assures us that Radulfus founded a 
 sect of Neminians, among whom he names Peter of Limoges. 
 This adversary, Stepbanus de S. Georgio, " must have been as 
 great a fool as Radulfus to think of refuting him," as Denifle 
 truly remarks. Here is the beginning of Radulf ns's sermon : 
 " Beloved, God at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in 
 times past to the fathers by the prophets, who preached darkly 
 and with uncertain voice that the Only Begotten Son of God 
 would come to redeem those who sit in darkness and in the 
 shadow of death ; but in these last days He speaketh openly by 
 His Holy Scripture, preaching, setting forth, and testifying the 
 most blessed Noman as His own compeer, born before all ages, 
 (as it is written in the 138th Psalm [v. 16], ' days shall be 
 formed, and Noman in them : ' that is, He was before the 
 Prophet David himself), yet hitherto unknown to mankind by 
 reason of their sins. But our Lord and Saviour Himself, whose 
 nature it ever is to spare and show pity, and Who never leaves 
 His own unheard, hath taken pity on the people redeemed by 
 His precious blood ; and, having removed the old darkness 
 altogether from our eyes, hath vouchsafed to discover to us the 
 precious treasure of this most glorious Noman ; that whereas, to 
 our great loss, he hath hitherto been hidden, we may be able 
 henceforth to behold him with the eye of faith. The blessed 
 Noman, therefore, is found in Holy Scripture to be co-eval with 
 God the Father, and in essence most like unto the Son, as not 
 created nor proceeding, but born : wherein this is plainly said 
 by the Psalmist, ' Days shall be formed, and Noman in them.'
 
 408 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Afterwards his authority grew deservedly so great that, as 
 though scorning earthly things, he soared with marvellous flight 
 to the highest heaven, as it is written ' Noman hath ascended 
 into heaven.' " And so on, through, " Noman hath seen God," 
 " Noman knoweth the Father," " Noman knoweth the Son," 
 " Noman can do these signs which thou dost," and a long 
 catalogue of similar quotations. Stephanus, in his treatise 
 addressed to the same Cardinal Caietan, takes these quotations 
 one by one, and explains each painfully away : after which he 
 proceeds to confute Radulfus by a string of counter-quotations 
 from the Decretals: e.g., "Noman sunk in sin," "to Noman 
 did God give easy occasion of sin," " to Noman doth the Church 
 shut her breast when he would fain return :" and he clenches the 
 matter with the triumphant argument that God, Who would 
 have all men saved, would therefore have Noman damned ever- 
 lastingly : after which he concludes by calling on the secular 
 and religious authorities present at the Provincial Council of 
 Paris to burn these Neminians and their writings. One might 
 be tempted to take it all for an elaborate hoax but for the 
 abundant medieval evidence of the same sort, and for the fact 
 that Stephen's memoir is solemnly filed among the Vatican 
 archives. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 1. Part of this chapter appeared in a rather fuller form in the Hibbert 
 
 Journal for Jan., 1 907. It was attacked in April by the Fran- 
 ciscan Fathers Cuthbert and Stanislaus, with great vehemence 
 but little pretence of documentary proof. A little of this will 
 appear in my rejoinder (July) : but consideration for the Editor's 
 space obliged me to postpone the full exposure of their ignorance 
 on elementary points of Franciscan history to a separate reissue 
 of the article (Medieval Studies, No. 9). 
 
 2. Father Cuthbert's attempt to contrast the "gloomy, laughter-lack- 
 
 ing spirit" of the "sectary'' with the holy joy of the Friars is 
 not only inconsistent with the tenour of Franciscan disciplinary 
 writings, but is contradicted by so well-known an authority as 
 Brother Leo, who assures us that St. Francis himself "did 
 specially abhor laughter " (Mirror 96). The strict Franciscan 
 was as a rule cheerful only in comparison with the lachrymose 
 piety of the other Religious of the Middle Ages : many of his 
 tenets were such as are emphasized now only by gloomy fanatics. 
 I have pointed this out at length in Medieval Studies, Nos. iii 
 and iv.
 
 Appendix A. 409 
 
 3. " Usque ad umbilicum ante et usque ad renes retro, buscum tunicce 
 
 sacco operientes." This, and the habit of wearing the second 
 frock over the first, gave the early Friars' figures that extraordin- 
 arily unwieldy shape which we see in Giotto's pictures. See 
 Ubertino in Archiv. iii, 173 ff., which is full of curious details 
 about the Friars' dress. 
 
 4. Miss Macdonell, not recognizing the reference to the Rule, has 
 
 again been misled by the Italian translation and missed the point 
 of this passage. 
 
 5. For the quibbles about money, etc., see for instance Archiv. iii., 
 
 p. 150, and Bonaventura Lib. Apol. Q. 6, 13, 18. For monks' 
 pocket-money, Kitchin's Obedientiary Rolls (Hampshire Record 
 Soc.), pp. 94, 95 : Jessopp's Norwich Visitations (Camden Soc., 
 p. 77, and passim. ) : for the vain attempts to check this abuse 
 see the various General Chapter Acts of the Benedictines given 
 by Wilkins and Reynerus. 
 
 5a. Eccleston's words are (R.S. p. 18) "Et sic aedificabant fratres 
 capellam ita pauperrimam, ut unus carpentarius in una die 
 faceret, et erigeret una die xiv coplas tignorum" "and so the 
 Brethren built a chapel so miserably poor that a single carpenter 
 made in one day, and set up in one day, 14 pairs of rafters" 
 (see Ducange s. v. Cupla). I am informed by an intelligent 
 carpenter that this would point to a building some 20 or 25 feet 
 long by 10 or 12 broad : the rafters would in this case be from 
 7 to 9 feet long each, and it would be a man's work to cut them 
 one day out of the rough spars, and set them up in another day. 
 Indeed, it would scarcely be possible for a single man to set up 
 unaided any larger rafters than these. We have here a miser- 
 ably small chapel indeed, but far from Prof. Brewer's " their 
 chapel was erected by a single carpenter in one day," or Father 
 Cuthbert's " one carpenter built it in one day." 
 
 6. See Mr. Hudson's excellent little History of the Parish of St. Peter 
 
 Permountergate " (Norwich 1889). 
 
 7. Bernard of Besse in Ana. Fra. iii, p. 674. For friaries inside 
 
 towns see Archiv. ii. 258, and iii. 84, 116 : Bonav. Libell. Apol. 
 Q., VL, xix. 
 
 8. The friar's money-box is very conspicuous in the 23rd cut of 
 
 Holbein's Dance of Death. (Lyon, 1538.) For Ubertino's 
 complaints see Archiv. iii. 70, 104 : for Landshut, see Eubel. 
 Oberdeutsche Minoritenprovinz (WUrzburg, 1886), p. 239, cf. 
 Archiv. iii. 105. For the unpopularity which this begging bred 
 see Archiv. iii., 105, and St. Bonaventura's two Circular Letters.
 
 41 o From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 9. Monte Casale in Fioretti i. c. 26 : its abandonment is recorded in 
 Eubel. Provinciale, 143. Bozon. Ed. Toulmin Smith (Soc. des 
 Anciens Textes Francois, 1889), p. 35. Cf. Bonav. Quaest. circ. 
 Reg. xxvi, and Archiv. iii. 107, 165. 
 
 10. For evictions of clergy, cf. Bonav. Lib. Apol. Q. xi. : for friar 
 
 unpopularity with parish priests, ib. Quaest. X. 
 
 11. Ubertino in Archiv. iii, 67. 
 
 12. Jordan in Vit. Frat. p. 138. Eccleston, R.S., p. 59 : Bern. Bess. 
 
 p. 371, 384. 
 
 13. Life, in a Modern Monastery, pp. 53 foil. This book, and the 
 
 equally interesting Twelve years in a Monastery, describe a state 
 of things extraordinarily similar in most respects to what may 
 be gathered from medieval documents. The similarity is all the 
 more striking because the author had evidently not studied the 
 inner history of his Order in the past. 
 
 14. Here, for instance, is an extract from the diary of one of the 
 
 strictest prelates of the Middle Ages, Archbishop Eudes Rigaud 
 of Rouen (p. 42). He is visiting a Chapter at Pontoise. 
 " Richard de Triguel is accused of sin with a certain prostitute ; 
 yet there was no great scandal : we warned him to desist. Again 
 Master Robert is accused with the gardener's daughter, and has 
 but lately had a child by her, but the scandal is not great : we 
 warned him to desist. Moreover, he behaves improperly in 
 going barefooted outside his door to a certain workshop where 
 women of ill fame are often congregated : we warned him to 
 desist from such behaviour." (p. 42.) This hushing-up spirit is 
 constantly traceable in medieval visitation records ; cf. Gower 
 Mirour de 1'Omme. 1. 20,137, and Mr. A. F. Leach's preface to 
 the Southwell visitations. (Camden Soc., pp. Ixxv, Ixxxv, 
 Ixxxix). Ubertino da Casale and Angelo Clareno accuse their 
 fellow-friars of great duplicity in hiding the misdeeds of the 
 Order (Archiv. ii, 300, 301, 353 : cf. Piers Plowman's Creed 
 Ed. Skeat. 1. 625 ff). 
 
 15. Qusest. circ. Reg. Q. 21. 
 
 16. Bonav. Qusest. circ. Reg. xix. : cf. his first circular letter "modis 
 
 omnibus volo quod restringatis receptionem multitudinis " : 
 Bacon, ed. Brewer, R.S., p. 426. Martene De Antiquis Ritibus, 
 lib. v., c. v., and passim. Ubertino in Archiv. iv., 77, 80, 187. 
 
 17. See Bonaventura's first Circular Letter, and his words in 
 
 Archiv. iii., 517, with Ehrle's comment, ib. p. 591.
 
 Appendix A. 411 
 
 18. Bonav. Qusest. xix. circa Regulam. " Already the early brethren 
 
 are becoming a laughing-stock, instead of being taken as 
 examples." Dav. Aug. p. 110, "now of spiritual delights and 
 the taste of inward sweetness, which surpass beyond compare ail 
 delights of this world as honey surpasses dung, of this there is 
 now scarce any mention or effectual desire or zeal, even among 
 those who seem to themselves to have climbed high in Religion : 
 nay rather, it (sic) is despised, derided, and held as a folly and 
 abomination in these days ; and men of this kind suffer perse- 
 cution from other Religious and are thought possessed of demons, 
 and are called heretics." cf. ibid. 285, 331. The locus classicus 
 for the persecution of the Spirituals is of course Angelo Clareno's 
 Seven Tribulations, published almost entirely in Archiv., vols. i 
 iv : but, a century later, we find St. Catharine of Siena speaking 
 if possible still more strongly : the Order to which she specially 
 refers is probably the Dominican. " They [the evil Religious] 
 fall like famished wolves on the lambs who would fain keep their 
 Rule, scoffing at them and mocking them. And these wretches 
 with their persecution, their misdoings and their scoffs, which 
 they inflict on good Religious and keepers of the Rule, think to 
 cover their own defects : but they discover them far more." 
 (Dialogo. Cap. 124). In the same chapter and again more 
 emphatically in c. 162, she speaks of the multitude of evil 
 Religious compared with the really good. The contemporary 
 Gower bears the same testimony in his Mirour de 1'Omme and 
 Vox Clamantis. 
 
 19. Berthold of Ratisbon constantly harps on the soul-slaying abuses 
 
 of Indulgences (Fred. i. 132, 148, 154, 208, 394: ii. 12, 219). 
 For the later Friars see Wycliffe's works passim, and Bishop 
 Gardiner as quoted in Abbot Gasquet's Eve of the Reformation, 
 p. 438. It is strange, however, that Abbot Gasquet can have 
 made such a statement as that on which Bishop Hedley relies in 
 his article in the Nineteenth Century (Jan., 1901, p. 170), con- 
 sidering the appalling revelations of the Oxford Chancellor 
 Gascoigne as to Indulgence abuses in 1450. (Lib. Ver., pp. 
 118, 119, 123, and passim). Men go about, says Gascoigne, 
 selling indulgences "sometimes for twopence, sometimes for a 
 good drink of wine or beer, sometimes for the stake of a game 
 of ball, sometimes for a prostitute's hire, sometimes for fleshly 
 love," with the result that " sinners say nowadays ' I care not 
 what and how many sins I commit before God, for I can get 
 with the greatest ease and expedition a plenary remission of all 
 guilt and penalty by absolution and the indulgence granted me 
 by the Pope, which I have bought for four pence, or six pence, 
 or a game of ball." Bishop Hedley's whole article is vitiated 
 by similar historical misstatements, none the less serious because
 
 412 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 they are evidently made in pure ignorance. He knows nothing 
 even of Berthold's words, though they are quoted in so orthodox 
 a Romanist history as that of Prof. Michael (Gesch. d. d. 
 Volkes im xiii, Jhtd. Vol. ii, p. 166). 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 1. P. Plowman, B. xxi, 241 ff. 
 
 2. Benvenuto's commentary on Dante's mention of the great miniature- 
 
 painter Oderisi shows clearly enough how far the thirteenth 
 century artist was from commanding such social consideration as 
 their most successful brethren command in our own day (III, 
 310 : on Purg. XI). " Note here that some men wonder 
 ignorantly here, and say 'wherefore bath Dante here named 
 humble and obscure craftsmen' (homines ignoti nominis et bassae 
 artis), when he might more worthily have named most excellent 
 men who thirsted sore for glory and wrought fair and noble 
 works. But certainly the poet did thus with great art and with 
 excellent justice ; for thus he gives us tacitly to understand that 
 the great craving for glory seizes on all men with so little 
 distinction, that even lowly craftsmen (parvi artifices) are 
 anxious to gain it, even as we see that painters put their names 
 on their works, as Valerius writeth of a famous painting." The 
 tone of this comment is all the more remarkable because of the 
 allusions to Grotto and Cimabue in the context. It is very doubt- 
 ful whether the great artists of the past received more considera- 
 tion in official quarters than now-a-days : certainly it would be 
 difficult to find a modern author of Benvenuto's calibre writing 
 of great artists as he does. 
 
 3. " He was a person of scant religion, and never could get himself to 
 
 believe in the immortality of the soul ; wherefore with words 
 suited to his own flinty brain he most obstinately rejected all 
 good doctrine. He had all his hope in the gifts of fortune ; and 
 for money he would have undertaken to do any ill deed'" 
 (Vasari. Life of Pietro Perugino ad. Jin.} 
 
 4. About 1230 A.D., a friar of Gloucester was very severely punished 
 
 by the Visitor for having painted a pulpit ; and Eccleston was 
 convinced that many others bitterly expiated in purgatory their 
 share in building those beautiful churches which we admire. 
 Wadding quotes an early visionary who went further : according 
 to him, an otherwise excellent friar was sent to hell for this sole 
 cause (Eccleston R.S. col. v : cf. Actus s. Francisci cap. Ixx, 
 Wadding an. 1242 17.)
 
 Appendix A. 413 
 
 5, Those who (like Dr. Gasquet) argue so confidently from art to 
 morals, should consider the following facts quoted by Mr. A. F. 
 Leach from the Visitations of the Wells Cathedral clergy. " In 
 1511 . . . a Vicar Choral convicted of several adulteries was 
 ordered [as a punishment] ' to paint one king before the choir 
 door which is not yet painted ; and, if he escaped prosecution in 
 the king's court, to paint another king not yet painted.' This 
 experiment seems to have been so successful that, another chantry 
 priest having been ordered ' candle penance ' for a similar offence, 
 it is commuted to ' painting the image of St. Michael and its 
 canopy.'" (Visitations of Southwell. Introd. p. 87). Brown- 
 ing's Lippo Lippi exactly typifies one phase of medieval life. 
 
 For the custom of devoting the fines of unchaste priests to 
 cathedral fabrics see p. 42 of C. A. Swainson's, " A Cathedral 
 of the old Foundation" (Le., Chichester, A.D. 1287): two 
 Norwich visitations of 1498 and 1499 (Reg. Morton in Lambeth 
 Library, ff 77a, 77b, and M. S. Tanner, 100 in Bodleian, ff 56a, 
 65a.) : also the constitutions of Chichester in \Vilkins, i. 692 : 
 and Ripon Chapter Acts (Surtees Soc.) pp. 292, 294. Similarly 
 in the diocese of Wells, the Archdeacon of Bath, for incontinence 
 and other offences (including the unpardonable guilt of 
 contumacy), was not deprived, but fined 100 marks for the fabric 
 fund (Reg. R. de Salopia, Somerset Record Soc., p. 429, A.D. 
 1340). Gascoigne (pp. 121, 123) speaks very strongly of the 
 scandalous extortions for the York Cathedral fabric, and the 
 immoralities by which the indulgence-mongers sometimes raised 
 contributions.
 
 APPENDIX B. 
 
 FULL TITLES OF THE BOOKS 
 (Which are quoted only by their short titles in the notes.) 
 
 AA. SS. Acta Sanctorum : (references here are to the London Library 
 copy.) 
 
 A/o. I Affo : Storia di Parma. (Parma, 1792.) 
 
 Ana. Fra. Analecta Franciscana. (Quaracchi, 1885, etc.) 
 
 Arcliiv. Archiv fur Litt-und Kirchengeschichte d. Mittelalters. Ed. 
 Denifle und Ehrle. 
 
 Arte. Arte, Scienza, e Fede ai Giorni di Dante. (Milan, 1901.) 
 
 Ben. Im. Benvenutus de Imola. Comentum super Dantis Comoe- 
 diam. (Florence, 1887.) 
 
 Bern. Bess. Bernard of Besse in " Selecta pro instruendis fratribus 
 scripta S. Bonaventurae." (Quaracchi, 1898.) 
 
 Bern. Sen. B. Bernardini Senensis Opera. Ed. de la Haye (1636). 
 
 Bern. Sen. Pred. Le Prediche Volgari di S. Bernardino. (Siena, 
 1880.) 
 
 Bert. Rat. Pred. Berthold. v Begensburg. Predigten, ed. Pfeiffer. 
 (Vienna, 1862.) 
 
 Bert. Putt. Serm. Bertholdi a Ratisbona Sermones ad Eeligiosos. 
 Ed. Hoetzl. (Munich, 1882.) 
 
 Biagi. Guido Biagi. The Private Life of the Eenaissance Floren- 
 tines. (Blackwood's Maga., vol. cliii, pp. 328 ff.) 
 
 Browne Fasc. Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum. Ed. 
 Browne. (London, 1690.) 
 
 Busch. Joh. Bu$ch. Chron. Windeshemense et Liber de Eeforma- 
 tione. Ed. Grube. (Halle, 1887.) 
 
 Cos. Heist. Csesarii Heisterbachensis Dialogus Miraculorum. (Ed. 
 Strange. Cologne, 1851.) 
 
 Dav. Aug. David de Augusta. De exterioris et interioris hominis 
 compositione. (Quaracchi, 1899.) 
 
 Du Merit. Poesies Populaires Latines du M-A. par. Ede"lestand du 
 Meril. (Paris, 1847.) 
 
 Eccleston. Thomas of Eccleston's Chronicle in Monumenta Franciscana 
 E.S., 1858.
 
 Appendix B. 415 
 
 Eubd. Prov. Provinciale 0. F. M. vetustissimum. Ed. C. Eubel. 
 (Quaracchi, 1892.) 
 
 Frati. La Vita Privata di Bologna, da L. Frati. (Bologna, 1900.) 
 
 Gascoigne. Loci e Libro Veritatum. Ed. Rogers. (Oxford, 1881.) 
 
 Gautier. Le"on Gautier. La Chevalerie (nouvelle Edition, 1883). 
 
 Gerson. Joannis Gersonii Opera. (Paris, 1606.) 
 
 Guib. Nov. Guiberti de Novigento Opera. (Migne Pat. Lett., vol. 
 156.) 
 
 La Tour. The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry. E.E.T.S., 
 1868. 
 
 Lib. Guil. Major. Melanges Historiques. Choix de Documents. 
 Tom. 2, Paris, 1877. Liber Guillelmi Majoris Episcopi Andegavensis. 
 
 Matt. Paris. Chronicle of M. P. Ed. Wat. (London, 1684.) 
 
 Michael. E. Michael, S. J. Salimbene und Seine Chronik. (Inns- 
 bruck, 1889.) 
 
 Mon. Franc. Monumenta Franciscana. Ed. Brewer, E.S., 1858. 
 
 Midler Anfange. Karl Miiller. Die Anfange des Minoritenordens 
 u. s.w. (Freiburg i/B, 1885.) 
 
 Murat. Muratori Scriptores Eerum Italicarum. 
 
 Od. Rig. Eegestrum Visitationum Odonis Eigaldi. Ed. Bonnin. 
 (Eouen, 1852.) 
 
 Rashdall. H. Eashdall. The Universities of Europe in the Middle 
 Ages. (Oxford, 1895.) 
 
 Reg. Grand. Episcopal Eegisters of Exeter. Ed. Hingeston-Eandolph. 
 Grandisson (1327-1369). 
 
 Reg. Stapeldon. Stapeldon's Eegister in same series (1307-1326). 
 
 R. S.- Chronicles and Memorials published under the direction of the 
 Master of the Eolls. 
 
 Sacchetti Nov. Le Novelle di Sacchetti. (Milan. Sonzogno, 1876.) 
 
 Sacchetti. Serm. I sermoni, le lettere, ed altri scritti di Sacchetti. 
 Ed. Gigli (Florence, 1857). 
 
 Thos. Cant. Thomse Cantimpratani Bonum Universale de Apibus. 
 (Douai, 1597.) 
 
 Vine. Bell. Vincentii Bellovacensis Speculum Quadruplex. (Douai, 
 1624.) 
 
 Vit. Exemp. The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry. Ed. Crane. (Folk- 
 Lore Society, 1890.) 
 
 Vit. FraL Vitse Fratrum 0. P. Ed. Eeichert. (Louvain, 1896.) 
 
 Wad. Wadding. Annales Minorum. (Eeferences are to the London 
 Library copy.) 
 
 Wilkins. Wilkins. Concilia Magnse Britanniee et Hiberniae.
 
 APPENDIX C. 
 
 Quae hie sequuntur quamvis non omnibus legenda sint, illis tamen haudquaquaiu 
 praetereunda, qui scire studeant qualis illis temporibus hominum vita vere fuerit. 
 Hoc unuin lector benevolus in inente retineat, omnia paene quse hie ponuntur a 
 fratre Salimbene pro amicis suis, et praecipue, ut videtur, pro fratris sui h'lia, 
 moniali Ordinis Sanctas Clarae, scripta esse. Paueissima ipse ex aliis fontibus 
 odjeci, quse ad intellectum rerum in hoc libro scriptarum utilia videbantur. 
 Numeri ad paginas meas referunt, ubi tales materias jam brevissime perstriuxi, 
 sicco pede transiens. Signum "J/o. Germ." cum numero iudicat paginain 
 editionis novaa quam etiam nunc curat vir doctissimus 0. Holder-Egger : "Ed. 
 Parm." significat paginam editionis Parmensis anni MDCCCLVII, ubi verba in 
 hac Appendice relata aut stant aub stare debent. 
 
 11. Vix credibile est, quantum inter homines niedii aevi, praesertim 
 inter scholares et clericos, vitium pasderastiae vulgatum fueiit. 
 Testimonia hujus rei vix enumeranda sunt ; perpauca tamen e tot 
 indiciis hie pono. Scribit Benvenutus de Iniola (vol. i, pp. 522 
 sq.) clericos et litteratos sui temporis maximam copiam peccandi 
 contra naturum habere ; adjicit etiam se primo molestissiine tulise 
 Dantem tales vires hujus sceleris tarn aperte arguisse (Inf. xv, 
 106 sq.) ; postea tamen, cum Bononite in scholia legeret, "ex- 
 perientia teste" didicisse "quod hie sapientissimus poeta optime 
 fecit." Testatur Cancellarius Parisiensis Joannes Gerson, theo- 
 logus aevi sui praestantissimus, in scholis praesertim atque inter 
 monachos aut mouiales hujusmodi vitium vigere : " exercent 
 parentes utrique cum utraque progenie et affines affinibus in 
 adolescentia, senesque cum junioribus tarn in religione quam in 
 scholis et alibi. Dubitaverim prosus si non deteriores mores 
 trahunt aliquando pueri et puellae hac occasione in parentum 
 domiciliis et religionum ac scholarum contuberniis quam facturi 
 erant in prostibulis lenonum vel meretricum" (Opp. ed. Paris, ii, 
 629 : cf. 380, 637, 680, 762). Horrenda ac vix alias credibilia 
 monet Beatus Bernardinua Senensis inter prasdicationem publican) 
 (Pred. Pop., Siena, 1884, pred. -xx, vol. ii, p. 142: cf. pp. 98, 
 108, 140, 150, necnon vol. iii, p. 136 et Opera Latino, vol. iii, 
 pp. 188 sq.) Arguit Bernardinus "infinitatem hujus peccati . . . 
 nam Christiani erant per Christum a pagania purificati ab ito 
 vitio, sed reversi in eodem (sic.) sunt pejores quam prius. His 
 tamen etiam pejora in Universitate Romana seculo sedecimo 
 publice ac quasi solemniter agebantur, testantibus coram magis- 
 tratu duobus professoribus : (vide scripturn A. Bertolotti apud
 
 Appendix C. 417 
 
 Giornale Storico della Lett. It., vol. ii, pp. 144 sq.) Notandum 
 est, inter folia ilia quae a lectore quodam irato ex Salimbenis 
 Chronica excissa sunt, fuisse quae (ut index antiquus testatur), de 
 peccatis urbis Bononiae tractabant (Mon. Germ., p. 371 : ubi in 
 nota sic legitur : " Haec de excise f. 363, leguntur : De causa 
 destructionis Bon[onie] et de usuris non accipiendis et munera e 
 de aliis peccatis ac. 363, 364 "). Nota item, Salimbenem ejusdem 
 vitii pseudapostolos Segalelli accusare (vide p. 304 hujus libri : 
 Mon. Germ., pp. 269 sq.) 
 
 18. Vita Prima S. Francisci auctore Thoma de Celano c. i. (Ed. 
 Eosedale, p. 6.) 
 
 " Quoniam hec pessima consuetudo una [sic : fortasse legendum 
 in\ doctrina puerorum apud eos, qui christiano censentur nomine, 
 sic undique inolevit ; et perniciosa doctrina hec velut lege publica 
 ita ubique firmata est et prescripta, ut ab ipsis cunabulis remisse 
 nimis et dissolute filios suos studeant educare. Primo namque 
 cum fari vel balbutire incipiunt, turpia quedam et execrabilia 
 valde signis et vocibus edocentur pueruli nondum [lege, vixdum] 
 nati : et, cum tempus ablactationis advenerit, quedam luxu et 
 lascivia plena non solum fari sed et operari coguntur. Non audet 
 aliquis eorum, etatis timore coactus, honeste se gerere, quoniam 
 ex hoc duris subjacet disciplinis. Ideo bene ait seculaiis poeta : 
 Quia inter exercitationes parentum crevimis, ideo a pueritia nos 
 
 omnia mala sequuntur sed et cum paulo plusculum etate 
 
 profecerint, se ipsis impellentibus, semper ad deteriora opera dila- 
 buntur .... Cum vero adolescentie portas cceperint introire, 
 quales eos fieri arbitraris ? Tune profecto omni dissolution is 
 genere fluitantes, eo quod liceat eis explore omne quod libet, omni 
 studio se tradunt flagitiis deservire. Sic enim voluntaria servitute 
 servi effecti peccati, arma iniquitati exponunt omnia membra sua ; 
 et nichil in se christiane religionis in vita seu in moribus prefer- 
 entes solo christianitatis nomine se tuentur. Simulant miseri 
 plerumque se nequiora fecisse quam fecerint, ne videantur ab- 
 jectiores, quo innocentiores existant. Hec sunt misera rudimeuta 
 in quibus homo iste [sc. S. Franciscus], quern sanctum hodie 
 veneramur, quoniam vere sanctus est, a pueritia versabatur." Cf. 
 Gerson, ii, 310. 
 
 27. Mon. Germ., p. 79. "Nam cum quadam die [fratur Deustesalvet] 
 ad (Ionium Predicatorum ivisset, et illi invit assent eum ad pran- 
 dium, dixit quod nullo modi ibi staret, nisi ei darent de tunica 
 fratris Johannis, qui in domo illo erat, ut pro reliquiis reservaret. 
 Promiserunt et magnam petiam de tunica sibi dederunt, cum qua 
 post prandium purgato ventre posteriora terxit, et petiam dejecit 
 in stercora. Postmodum accipiens perticam stercora revolvebat, 
 clamens et dicens : ' Heu, heu ! succurrite, fratres, quia reliquias 
 
 Ea
 
 4 1 8 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 sancti require, quas perdidi in latrina ! ' Cumque vultus suos 
 inclinassent ad orificia camerarum, cum pertica stercora revolvebat 
 valenter, ut stercorum fetorem sentirent. Infecti itaque tali 
 odoraniento erubuerunt cognoscentes se a tali trufatore delusos. 
 
 Cum autem quadam die tern pore yemali per civitatem 
 
 Florentie ambularet, contigit ut ex lapsu glatiei totaliter caderet. 
 Videntes hoc Florentini, qui trufatores maximi sunt, ridere 
 ceperunt. Quorum unus quesivit a fratre qui ceciderat, utrum 
 plus vellet habere sub se. Cui frater respoudit, quod sic, 
 scilicet interrogantis uxorem. Audientes hoc Florentini non 
 habuerunt malum exemplum, sed commendaverunt fratrem 
 dicentes : ' Benedicatur ipse, quia de nostris est.' " 
 
 46. Mon. Germ,, p. 40. " Dixit igitur michi pater meus : ' Fili dilecte, 
 non credas istis pissiutunicis ' id est, qui in tunicis mingunt 
 ' qui te deceperunt, sed veni mecum, et omnia mea tibi dabo.' " 
 
 69. Bern. Bess. Speculum Discipline pars, i, cap. xv, 3 (ed. Quaracchi, 
 p. 327). "Indignum quoque in divino officio venandis vermi- 
 culis et mactandis intendere, quibus palam in oratorio digitos aut 
 ligna foedare frons inverecunda non metuit." Ibid. cap. xxiv, 2 
 (p. 364). "Nares non in aliorum aspectu, sed ad parteni cum 
 duorum tantum aut trium appositione digitorum emungant ; 
 seorsum etiam spuendum est, maxime in conventu fratrum, ne 
 loca publica, sive in choro sive alibi, sputo foedentur, et astantium 
 oculi offendantur. Pudet quidem in ipso chori deambulatorio ad 
 pedes suos palam fratribus spuere nee pudere. 
 
 204. Mon. Germ, p. 608. " Dominus Jacobus de Henzola mutinensis 
 fuit Potestas, et ibi infirmatus et mortuus et sepultus ad 
 majorem ecclesiam, et in tumulo in equo, ad modum militis, 
 honorifice fuit depictus; et, quia tempore suse potestarise facta 
 fuerunt ilia homicidia et maleficia, quse fuerunt initia futurse 
 guerrse in Mutina, . . . provocati Mutinenses, irati, turbati, et 
 indignati, et videntes mala quse ille occasione venerant super eos, 
 eruerunt oculos Potestatis depicti et cacaverunt super tumulum 
 ejus." Confer ea quse de Alberico de Romano narrat Salimbene 
 (Mon. Gei-m., p. 367). "Nam quadam die, quia perdiderat 
 accipitrem suum, cum esset sub divo, extraxit sibi bracas et culum 
 ostendit Deo in signum opprobrii et convitii atque derisionis, 
 credens se ex hoc de Deo ulcisci. Cum autem fuit domi, ivit et 
 cacavit super altare in eo loco proprie, ubi cousecratur Dominicum 
 corpus." 
 
 218. Ed. Parm., 393. " Aliquos vero ligabant solum modo per pollicem 
 mauus dextrse sive sinistrse et totaliter totum corpus hominis 
 suspendebant a terra; et aliquos etiam, ligando testiculos, sus-
 
 Appendix C. 419 
 
 peiidebant, etc., etc." Cf. Guib. Novig., p. 933, ubi de Thoma 
 de Codiaco (Coucy) sic legitur: "cum enim captos ad redemp- 
 tionem quoslibet cogeret, hos testiculis appendebat propria 
 aliquoties manu, quibus saepe corporea mole abruptis, eruptio 
 pariter vitalium non tardabat. Alteri suspense per pollices aut 
 per ipsa pudenda, saxo etiam superposito, bumeros comprimebat, 
 et ipse subter obambulans, cum quod habere non poterat ab eis 
 extorquere non posset, fustibus super eorum corpora tandiu bac- 
 chabatur, donee ei placentia sponderent, aut in poenis morerentur. 
 
 248. Mon. Germ., 367. "Omnes maiores et meliores et potentiores et 
 ditiores et nobiliores delevit [Icilinus] de marchia Trivisina, et 
 mulieres castrabat et cum filiis et filiabus in carceribus includebat, 
 et ibi fame et miseria peribaut." 
 
 248. Mon. Germ., 364. Albericus . . . XXV de maioribus Trivisii fecit 
 una die suspendi . . . et XXX nobiles mulieres, matres istorum, 
 uxores, filias, et sorores, fecit venire ut viderent suspendendos, et 
 ipsi eas ; quibus voluit nasum precidere, sed benefitio cuiusdam 
 quem appellabat filium suum spurium, sed non erat, fuit dimissum. 
 Verumtamen usque ad mammillas fuerunt vestes earum precise, 
 ita quod totum corpus cuiuslibet earum nudum erat, et viderunt 
 eas qui suspendendi erant.* Et ita iuxta terram fuerunt suspensi, 
 quod iste mulieres cogebantur per tibias eorum transire, et cum 
 tibiis et pedibus vultum earum percutiebant, dum moriebantur in 
 amaritudine animarum suarum. . . . Post hec fecit eas poni ultra 
 fluvium quf dicitur Silva vel Siler, ut irent quo vellent. Et 
 fecerunt sibi coopertoria de modico indumento quod habebant 
 circa mammillas, et oparuerunt sibi membra genitalia, id est 
 pudenda, et ambulaverunt tota die ilia, etc., etc." Postridie, 
 auxilio piscatoris cujusdaui, Venetias in ecclesiam sancti Marci 
 vectee sunt. " Audiens hec Cardinalis [Octavianus, Legatus in 
 Lombardia], sine mora venit ad eas et dedit eis comedere. Et 
 inisit per totam civitatem dicendo, quod celeriter atque festine et 
 sine aliqua mora onmes venirent ad ipsum ad ecclesiam Sanoti 
 Marci, turn viri quam mulieres, tarn parvi quara magni . . . 
 quoniam talia diceret ei? que nunquam audiverant, et talia 
 ostenderet eis que nunquam viderant. Quid plura 1 Dicto cicius 
 congregata est tota civitas Venetorum ad eum in platea ecclesie 
 sancti Marci, et audivorunt ab eo totam historian! suprascriptam. 
 Quam cum recitasset, fecit venire doininas illas ita dehonestatas 
 et nudas sicut ille maledictus Albricus dehonestari fecerat. Hoc 
 ideo fecit cardinalis, ut magis provocaret Venetos contra ilium et 
 magis induceret ad miserendum istis. Cum autem audivissent 
 
 * "Idem facinun referunt Ann. S. lustinte Patav. SS. XIX, p. 178," Editoria 
 nota.
 
 420 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Veneti omnem historian! supradictam et dominas ita nudatas con- 
 spexissent, elevata voce clamaverunt : etc., etc." 
 
 Quani usitatae fuerint tales turpitudines, ex duobus exemplis 
 colligi potest. Narrat De Antiquis Legibu* Liber (C. S., 1846, 
 p. 75) mortam Simonis de Monteforti A.D. 1266 ; ubi sequuntur 
 hrec verba : " Capud veto dicti conritis Leicestrie, ut dicitur, 
 abcisum fuit a corpore, et testiculi sui abcisi fuerunt et appensi 
 ex utraque parte nasi sui, et ita missum fuit capud suum uxori 
 Domini Rogeri de Mortuo Mari apud caatrum de Wiggemora: 
 Pedes vero et manus sue abcisi fuerunt, et missi per diversa loca 
 inimicis suis ad magnum dedecus ipsius defuncti ; truncus auteni 
 corporis sui tantummodo datus est sepulture in ecclesia de Eves- 
 ham." Cum his confer quae citat A. Scliulz de sacerdote in 
 civitate Basileensi (A.D. 1297) " cujus testiculi, ob raptum ab eo 
 perpetratum, abscissi et in platea publica suspensi sunt." . (Hofis- 
 ches Leben. i, 453 : cf. Ben. Im. i, 416.) 
 
 251. Mon. Germ., p. 168. "Item dictum fuit de [Opizone] quod filias 
 et uxores tarn nobilium quam ignobilium de Feraria constuprabat. 
 Item diffamatus fuit quod proprias sorores cognoverit necnon et 
 et sororem uxoris." 
 
 253. Mon, Germ., p. 27. " Benedicatur [episcopus Reginus, qui 
 villicum suum dure puniverat] ; sciebat enim quod genus ser- 
 vorum nisi cum supplicio non emendatur, sicut dixit quidam 
 tyrannus nutritoribus sancti Ypoliti. ' Benedicatur,' dicit Patte- 
 clus, ' marchio Montisferrati, qui omnibus pepercit nisi scutiferis ! ' 
 Miserrimi homines, qui postquam exaltati et honorati sunt in 
 curiis magnorum, efficiuntur avari, ut ostendant se bonos conser- 
 vatores et custodes rerum dominorum suorum, et subtrahunt 
 pauperibus et viris iustis quod postea suis dant meretricibus ; et 
 interdum in aliquibus partibus dominorum uxores et filie servorum 
 et canavariorum et gastaldorum efficiuntur amasie, eo quod de 
 rebus domus nichil nisi per manus talium habere possint omnino. 
 Miserrimi tales domini, qui plus diligunt res temporales quam 
 honorem proprium et corpus uxorum et filiarum. Hec omnia 
 vidit oculus meus et probavit singula." 
 
 Ibid., p. 428. "Usque adeo Matulinus [poeta quidam] factus 
 est meus amicus, ut semper invenirem eutn paratum ad servitia 
 impendenda. Sed nee ipse aliquid perdidit inde, quia dedi sibi 
 uxorem filiam cuiusdam Ferrariensis qui habitabat Ravenne, ex 
 qua habuit magnam dotem, adjuvantibus apud marchionem 
 [Estensem] domno Guidone de Polenta et domno Adhegerio de 
 Fontana. Confitebatur enim mecum pater puelle in ilia infirmitate 
 de qua mortuus est, et ipso volente et consentiente feci hoc totum. 
 Et dixit michi pater puelle : ' Frater Salimbene, retribuat vobis 
 Dominus, quia filia mea remansisset in taberna post mortem meam
 
 Appendix C. 421 
 
 et forte facta fuisset meretrix, nisi vos fuissetis qui maritastis earn, 
 lam letus moriar, ex quo constat michi quod filia mea bene est 
 maritata.' " 
 
 265. Mon. Germ., p. 398. " Cumque vellet eos extra civitatem per- 
 ducere, invenerunt portam unam clausam, similiter secundam et 
 tertiam. Sed per tertiam, per vadum, quod erat subtus portam, 
 viderunt quendam magnum canem exterius exeuntem, et visum 
 est eis eodem modo posse eos exire. Quod cum attemptassent, 
 propter grositiem legatus exire non poterat. At guardianus posuit 
 pedem super nates ipsius et calcavit comprimendo ad terram, et 
 ita exivit." 
 
 286. Mon. Germ., p. 608. "Funeri ejus interfui et sepulturae : et scio 
 
 quod canis cacavit super eum postquam sepultus fuit. In majori 
 ecclesia fuit sepultus inferius, " etc., etc. 
 
 287. Mon. Germ., p. 426. Ego autem cognovi talem episcopum, qui de 
 
 die in lecto suo denudabat iuvenculam mulierem, ut earn diu 
 videret et tangeret, et ponebat florinos aureos super corpus illius 
 et coxas, quos postea donabat eidem, et dicebat quod non erat 
 plus mundus. Et erat senex et inveteratus dierum malorum. 
 Et post paucos dies quadam nocte fuit suffocatus a quodam qui at- 
 tinebat eidem, et totum thesaurum suum, quem repperit, as- 
 portavit. Et istius episcopi interfui sepulture. Iste fuit Faven- 
 tinus episcopus . . . Cognovi etiam quendam canonicum quem 
 diabolus strangulavit, et fuit sepultus in sterquilinio juxta porcos. 
 Hunc pluries invenerunt in lecto suo cum quadam nobili muliere, 
 quem amasiam retinebat, fratres Minores, quando summo diluculo 
 ibant ad eum ad aliquid inquirendum; erat enim iuris peritus. 
 Iste fuit lohannes de Bondeno Ferrariensi, qui X annis stetit in 
 ordine fratrum Predicatorum et postea apostatavit et intravit 
 ordinem canonicorum sancti Frigdiani de Luca et cum eis fuit 
 aliquibus annis ; postea inde egressus factus est canonicus Fer- 
 rariensis in matrice ecclesia [sc. cathedrali]. Cum autem habi- 
 taret in ecclesia sancti Alexii et ibi quandam dominam nobilem, 
 pauperem Faduanam, ab Icilino expulsam, retineret amasiam, 
 inventus fuit in lecto a diabolo sine confessione et viatico suffo- 
 catus." 
 
 294. Mon. Germ., p. 403. Ducitis enim mulieres post altare causa con- 
 fitendi et ibi eas cognoscitia ; quod nefas est dicere et peius 
 operari." 
 
 294. Mon. Germ., p. 409. "Narratio trufatoria, sed vera, quam retulit 
 papa Alexander IV fratri Bonaventure, gonerali ministro 
 O.F.M
 
 422 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Frater Bonaventura generalis minister interrogavit papam 
 Alexandrum IV utruni placeret ei quod fratres Minorca con- 
 fessiones audirent, et ipse dixit ei : ' Immo volo penitus, quod ipsi 
 audiant. Et dicam tibi orribilem exemplum et truffatorium. 
 Quedam mulier confitebatur sacerdoti suo in ecclesia sua. Hie 
 veto volens earn cognoscere et carnaliter cum ea dormire cepit earn 
 de opere venereo multum sollicitare. Cumque in ecclesia post 
 altare juxta locum dominici corporis violenter vellet earn oppri- 
 mere, dixit ei domina ilia, ' Nee locus requirit nee tempus, ut 
 hie nepharia et venerea opera perpetrentur. Alio loco et tempore 
 poterunt congruentius ista fieri.' Hec autem dicebat volens 
 evadere manus eius. Sacerdos vero sperans habere propositum 
 acquievit et habuit secum quedam familiaria verba : tamen, 
 quando domina ilia recedebat ab eo ut domum rediret, dixit ei 
 sacerdos : 'Domina, record ernini illius uegotii, quod scitis, scilicet 
 depostetiarum.'* Cui ilia dixit : ' Optimo recordabor.' Cum 
 autem esset domi, quantum aforis apparebat, fecit pulcherrimani 
 turtam, que intrinsecus humano stercore plena erat, et pro exenio 
 misit earn sacerdoti cum enghestaria optimi vini et albi. In hoc 
 solum fuit ex parte mulieris defectus ; quia debebat urinam pro- 
 priam sacerdoti transmittere, sicut merdam propriam transmisit in 
 turta. Videns vero sacerdos tarn pulcherrimam turtam cogitavit 
 quod tali exenio episcopus dignus esset, et misit episcopo. Cum 
 autem episcopus cum suis discumberet, precepit servienti ut 
 divideret turtam et apponeret discunibentibus. Quod cum seorsum 
 faceret, invenit merdam intrinsecus et aborruit, et reservavit turtam, 
 ut episcopo posset ostendere. Cum autem episcopus instaret, ut 
 turtam portaret minister, dixit ei : ' Satis habetis modo ; alia vice 
 Domino concedente habebitis melius.' Quid plura 1 Postquam 
 episcopus vidit talem turtam, contra sacerdotem indignatus est 
 valde et misit pro eo et dixit ei : ' Dicatis michi, domne sacerdos ; 
 Quis docuit vos mittere tales turtas et maxime episcopo vestro \ 
 Quid promerui aut in quo unquam offendi vos, ut mini talem 
 injuriam faceretis mittendo turtam humano stercore plenam ? ' 
 Quod cum audisset sacerdos, obstupuit et dixit episcopo : ' Pater, 
 in veritate ego non feci fieri illam turtam, immo talis domina 
 misit, et ego credidi quod vos essetis tali exenio dignus, et ideo 
 misi vobis causa utilitatis atque honoris, credens turtam optimarn 
 esse.' Quod cum audisset episcopus, accepit satisfactionem. Et 
 licenciato sacerdote accersivit dominam illam, volens huius rei 
 cognoscere veritatem. Ipsa vero conf essa est et non negavit quod 
 ideo fecit hoc ut sacerdotem truffaret qui earn, cum confiteretur, 
 de opere venereo invitabat, volens in ecclesia et post altare cum 
 
 * Nota viri doctissimi 0. Holder- Egger : ' ' hoc verbum non invenitur in 
 Glossario medise et infimse Latinitatis. Formatum videtur ad instar vocis in- 
 prcesentiarum a depost."
 
 Appendix C. 423 
 
 ea peccare. Episcopus vero dominam illam ex eo quod fecerat 
 multipliciter commendavit et sacerdotem punivit egregie. Et iste 
 idem episcopus, qui tale exenium habuit, dixit pape Alexandra 
 IV hec omnia, referendo ei totam historiam supradictam, et papa 
 Alexander retulit fratri Bonaventure . . . Et adjecit papa 
 dicendo ' Quapropter volo penitus quod fratres Minores de mea 
 conscientia et licentia confessiones audiant secularium person- 
 arum.' " 
 
 " Alia narratio dolorosa. . . . 
 
 Cognovi quemdam fratrem Humilem de Mediolano, qui fuit custos 
 Parmensis custodie. Hie dum habitaret in loco f ratrum Minorum 
 de Fanano, tempore quadragesimali instabat predicatiouibus et 
 confessionibus audiendis. Quod audientes illi de Alpibus, hom- 
 ines et mulieres, miserunt rogando ut amore Dei pro salute 
 animarum suarum dignaretur ad eos accedere, quia volebant con- 
 fiteri cum eo. Et assumpto socio ivit ad eos et multos dies 
 predicavit et confessiones audivit, et multa bona fecit consilia 
 salubria eis dando. Quadam autem die venit ad eum quedam 
 mulier volens confiteri, et dixit ei : ' Heu me ! pater, mulier in- 
 felix nimis ego sum.' Cui f rater : ' Die tu prius iniquitates tuas, 
 et narra, si quid habes, ut iustificeris. De omnibus ergo peccalis 
 tuis culpabilem te proclama, et sic absolutione recepta postea eris 
 felix.' Et dixit : ' Quadam die, dum irem sola per viarn, invenit 
 me quidam homo et violenter oppressit atque cognovit. Accessi 
 ergo ad unum de sacerdotibus volens confiteri. Qui duxit me 
 post altare, et revelato sibi peccato meo violenter oppressit me 
 ibidem atque cognovit, non veritus locum sacrum nee honorem 
 Dei neque me plurimum deplorantem. Idem accidit michi cum 
 secundo et tertio sacerdote, quia quilibet me cognovit et post 
 altare juxta dominicum corpus mecum peccavit, dum eis crcderem 
 conflteri.' Postquam igitur de omnibus peccatis suis fideliter est 
 confessa, absolvit earn frater et dixit ei : Quid sibi vult cultellus 
 iste quern habes in manu, et ad quid tempore isto et hora dc- 
 servit 1 ' Et dixit ei : ' Pater, in veritate cogitabam me gladio 
 occidere et in desperatione mea mori, si invitavissetis me de 
 peccato sicut fecerunt alii sacerdotes.' Cui frater dixit : ' Nee 
 invitavi nee invitabo, sed potius invito te ad gaudia paradisi, quo 
 dabit tibi Dominus, si dilexeris eum peuitentiam faciendo. Vade 
 in pace, dilecta filia, et amplius noli peccare.' " 
 
 297. Mon. Germ., p. 425. "Item inveni aliquos . . . totam domum 
 filiis spuriis plenam habentes et cum focaria sua tota nocte in 
 eodem lecto jacentes et in crastinum celebrantes." 
 
 317. David de Augusta. De ext et Int. Horn. Compositione. Lib. II L, 
 cap. 66 (Ed. Quaracchi, p. 359). Cum de visionibus revelation- 
 ibus et consolationibus religiosis auctor locutus sit, bscc verba
 
 424 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 adjicit : " Non videtur autem prsetereundum, quod quidam, de- 
 cepti a seductoriis spiritibus, vel propriis falsis opinionibus, putant 
 sibi apparere in visione vel ipsum Christum vel ejus gloriosissi- 
 inam Genitricem et non solum amplexibus et osculis, sed etiam 
 alis indecentioribus gestibus et actibus ab eis demulceri ; ut, sicut 
 spiritus ipsorum interius ab ipsis consolatur spiritualiter, ita et 
 caro exterius sibi congruo obleotationis sensu sensibiliter demul- 
 ceatur et carnaliter consoletur. Quod non tantum ease falsum 
 et seductorium, sed etiam blaspbemia gravis esse liquido 
 comprobatur. Spiritus sancti visitatio, sicut contra omnia vitia 
 reprimenda et detestanda infunditur, ita etiam singulariter contra 
 carnales illecebras opponitur ; et ubi spiritus munditise suo jubare 
 resplenduerit, continue omnes pravse voluptatis motus evanescere 
 et velut tenebras, superveniente lumine, disparere necesse est. De 
 his vero qui cum aliquando dulcedinem spiritualem sentiunt con- 
 tinuo etiam corporalis delectationis pruritu illecti foedantur, nescio 
 quid judicem, nisi quod potius eligo illis carere tioribus quos de 
 luti sordibus legere deberem. Et sicut illos damnare non audeo 
 qui inviti quandoque in hujusmodi spiritualibus affectionibus 
 carnalis fluxus liquore maculantur, ita etiam excusare nescio qui 
 tali fluxui ex consensu condelectantur, qualiscumque eorum in- 
 tentio videatur." Cf. Wadding, 1322, p. 45, " Multis [B. 
 Johannem de Alvernia dsemones] illusionibus perturbare tentarunt 
 .... fcedos et obscoenos ei tactus representabant." 
 
 320. Consuet S. Augustini Cantuarensis, p. 186. " Nee [fratres] pro- 
 nuncient aliquas orationes vocales dummodo secreta naturae faciunt, 
 ne verba Dei sancta vilescant." 
 
 Mon. Germ., p. 570. " Quidam religiosus, dum in loco 
 private ad requisita nature sederet et Deum laudaret, fuit repre- 
 hensus a demone, quod locus ille non erat ydoneus, sed inhonestus 
 ad Deum laudandum. Cui respondit frater et dixit : ' Ita sum 
 divinis laudibus assuetus, quod a laude Dei cessare non possum, 
 nam scriptura teste didici quod Deus est ubique, ergo ubique est 
 laudandus [a suis], quod etiam apostolus docuit I. ad Tirno. II : 
 Volo viros orare in omni loco, levantes puras manus sine ira et 
 disceptatione. Igitur qui omnem locum dicit, nullum excludit. 
 Quapropter et ventrem meum purgabo et Deum meum luadabo. 
 Deus enim non nisi sordes vitiorum abhorret. Sed tu miser, qui 
 factus eras, ut Deum laudares in celo, propter superbiam tuam 
 celum perdidisti, . . . . et nunc vadis per sterquilinia visitando 
 latrinas." 
 
 324. Mon. Germ., p. 257. "Post hec, cum hospitaretur [Segalellus] 
 apud aliquam mulierculam viduam, filiani nubilem et speciosam 
 habentem, dicebat sibi a Domino revelatum quod cum ilia puella 
 debebat ilia nocte nudus cum nuda in eodem lecto dormire, ut
 
 Appendix C. 425 
 
 probaret si castitatom servare possit necne. Consentiebat mater 
 reputans se beatam, et puella minime hoc negabat." Vide etiam 
 editoris notam, ubi Segalellus docuisse probatur (teste Bernardo 
 Guidonis) "quod jacere cum muliere et non commisceri ex carnal- 
 itate mains est quam resuscitare mortuum." Cum his confer 
 Sacchetti Nov. CI. 
 
 325. Mon. Genn., p. 268 sq. " Quod autem isti Apostoli non sint in 
 
 statu salutis, pluribus rationibus possumus demonstrare 
 
 Secunda ratio, est, quod aliqui eorum non servant castitatem, ad 
 quam omnes religiosi tenentur . . . Apostoli autem, non Christi 
 sed Ghirardini Segalelli, male servant castitatem. Nam, ut michi 
 dixerunt, quando vadunt per mundum, ad meretrices declinant et 
 in domibus in quibns hospitantur, si a lascivis mulieribus sollici- 
 tantur ad peccatum sive ad peccandum, consentiunt eis, et parva 
 est pugna [hie citantur Ecclus. xxiii. 24, xix. 25 ; Osee iv. 14, 
 15, etc., etc.] . . . Cogitat enim virgo vel iuvencula, quando 
 aspicitur a spadone, dicens ; ' Si isti religiosi, qui spadones debent 
 esse iuxta verbum Domini, [Matt. xix. 12] non reputant peccatum 
 lasciviam carnis, ego quare reputabo ? ' Et ita dant ei maleficiendi 
 occasionem, necnon et sibi ipsis . . . Item Apostoli Ghirardini 
 Segalelli masculi in masculos turpitudinem operantur, maxime 
 senes cum innioribus qui ingrediuutur ad eos, ut dixerunt michi. 
 Et ideo aut combustione aut carcere essent digni," etc., etc. 
 
 328. Mon. Germ., p. 264. "Ipse vero pro hoc honore tale beneficium 
 rependit eisdem, quod se et omnes alios denudavit usque adeo, 
 quod etiam membra genitalia sine bracis et aliquo velamine nuda 
 essent, et stabant appodiati ad niurum in acie circum circa, sed 
 non in acie ordinata nee honesta nee bona." 
 
 331. Mon. Germ., p. 620. "Tres ribaldos recepit hospitio ex eis qui se 
 dicunt Apostolos esse et non sunt, qui suaserunt juveni ne uxorem 
 cognosceret nee cum ea in eodem lecto prima nocte dormiret nisi 
 quando dicerent ei. Hoc autem dicebant, quia volebant juvenem 
 praevenire atque decipere et prius cum uxore dor mire, sicut factum 
 est, quia omnes tres ilia nocte iverunt ad lectum ejus unus post 
 alium facto modico intervallo et cognoverunt earn," etc., etc.
 
 APPENDIX D. 
 
 CLERICAL CELIBACY. 
 
 THERE is probably nothing which draws so sharp a line between medieval 
 and modern Society as the status of the clergy their immense numbers, 
 their privileges, and the celibacy which made it possible to treat them 
 so entirely as a separate caste. Since even reviewers who ought to have 
 known better have thrown doubt on the trustworthiness of Salimbene's 
 evidence on this point, I subjoin here a few documents supplementary 
 to the mass of evidence which is to be found in the six hundred closely- 
 printed octavo pages of Dr. Lea's " Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian 
 Church." Many readers may not care to pursue the subject ; but those 
 who do can scarcely fail to realize how strictly Salimbene has kept 
 within the facts. 
 
 A. Popes. The Chronicle of Meaux was written at the Cistercian 
 Abbey of that name in Yorkshire, by Abbot Thomas of Burton, at the 
 end of the fourteenth century. On p. 89 of vol. iii he speaks of Pope 
 Clement VI, who instituted the fifty -years' Jubilee,* and against whom 
 the Cistercians as a body had certainly no grudge. The Chronicler goes 
 on : " Now this same Pope Clement VI had been lecherous beyond 
 measure his whole life long. For every night at vespertide he was 
 wont, after the cardinals' audience, to hold a public audience of all 
 matrons and honourable women who wished to come. At last some 
 men, speaking ill of him on this account, began to stand by the palace 
 doors and secretly to number the women who went in and who came 
 out. And when they had done thus for many days, there was ever one 
 lacking at their egress from the number of those who had entered in. 
 When therefore many scandals and obloquies arose on this account, the 
 confessor of the Lord Pope warned him frequently to desist from such 
 conduct, and to live chastely and more cautiously.} But he ever made 
 the same answer, ' Thus have we been wont to do when we were young, 
 
 *The great Jubilee Indulgence was first instituted by Dante's Boniface VIII in 
 1300, and was intended to recur only once in a hundred years : Clement VI short- 
 ened this period by half, and held the second Jubilee in 1350. 
 
 t Cf. Salimbene' B " Si non caste, taruen caute."
 
 Appendix D. 427 
 
 and what we now do we do by counsel of our physicians.' But when 
 the Pope was aware that his brethren the Cardinals and his auditors 
 and the rest of the Court murmured and spake ill of him on this account, 
 one day he brought in his bosom a little black book wherein he had the 
 names written of his divers predecessors in the Papal chair who were 
 lecherous and incontinent ; and he showed by the facts therein recorded 
 that these had better ruled the Church, and done much more good, than 
 the other continent Popes. Moreover on the same day he raised to the 
 Cardinalate one of his sons, a boy of sixteen, who was afterwards Pope 
 Gregory XI. This Clement VI was succeeded by Innocent VI, who, 
 like his predecessor Clement, promoted his own sons and brethren and 
 nephews to Cardinals and Bishops, so that scarce any were left in the 
 Sacred College who were not of his kin or of the aforesaid Clement's." 
 The chronicler's account is no doubt exaggerated, in parts at least : but 
 the significance of the story lies in the fact that it was believed and re- 
 corded for posterity by a man in Abbot Burton's position. Hardly less 
 significant is the praise occasionally bestowed by chroniclers on popes of 
 exceptional virtue. Peter of Herentals thinks it worth while to note 
 that Gregory XI " died a virgin in mind and body, as some have 
 asserted " (Baluze, Vit. Pap. Aven. i, 483) : and similarly Wadding is 
 proud to record of Salimbene's Nicholas III, "he kept perpetual vir- 
 ginity" (An. 1280, 93). Indeed, the scandals sometimes forced even 
 the laity to interfere. In 1340, the King of France felt bound to com- 
 plain publicly to the Pope, who had legitimized "three brothers, born 
 of a detestable union, that is to say of a Bishop in pontifical dignity, 
 degree, or order, and an unmarried woman." The word in the original 
 being Pontifex, it is possible that the father may have been one of the 
 Pope's predecessors, several of whom were notoriously unchaste. (Baluze, 
 Vit. Pap. Aven., p. 600). 
 
 B. Bishops. Here is Cardinal Jacques de Vitry's account of the 
 state of things about the time of St. Francis's birth. "The cause of all 
 these evils [monastic decay, etc.] was the indiscipline and insufficiency 
 and ignorance of the prelates ; for it was not only while the shepherds 
 were asleep, but with their help, that the enemy sowed tares in the 
 midst of the wheat .... In those days scarce any could be found who 
 sorrowed for Christ's sufferings, even though He had an infinite number 
 of ministers ; scarce any setting themselves up as a wall for the Lord's 
 house, or eaten up with zeal for the house of God, or catching the little 
 foxes that destroy the Lord's vines. For, crucifying again to themselves 
 the Son of God, and making Him a mockery, they not only made His 
 limbs bare of all substance by the greed of their avarice, but also stripped 
 them of virtues by the example of their iniquity. At night among 
 harlots, next morning at the altar ; caressing the daughter of Venus by 
 night, and on the morrow handling the Son of the Virgin Mary, they 
 trod under foot the Son of God, and esteemed the blood of the Testament 
 unclean." (Hist. Occ. cap. v).
 
 428 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 C. Secular (i.e. non-monastic} Clergy. I have already referred to 
 the fact that St. Bonaventura condemns them in language almost as 
 strong as Wiclif 's : here again is what is said of them by St. Anthony 
 of Padua when Salimbene was a boy. He speaks of clergy who " flay 
 the faithful by forced offerings, whereon they fatten their horses, their 
 foals, and the sons of their concubines." (Opera, ed. de la Haye, p. 334). 
 How little the Friars succeeded in reforming this, may be judged from the 
 words of another celebrated Franciscan, Alvarez Pelayo, a Papal Peni- 
 tentiary who wrote about a generation after Salimbene (1320). He 
 says: "The Parish Priests .... live very incontinently (and would 
 that they had never vowed continence) ! especially in Spain and South 
 Italy, in which provinces the children of the laity are scarcely more 
 numerous than those of the clergy .... They often sin most abomin- 
 ably with women of their parish whose confessions they hear." He goes 
 on to describe, in language strikingly like Salimbene's, their irreverent 
 treatment of the consecrated Host and carelessness of proper ceremonies 
 at mass, their keeping of taverns, their greed for offerings and negligence 
 of their duties. (De Planctu Ecclesise, lib. ii, artic. xxvii). Gower 
 speaks equally strongly and fully (Mirour de 1'Omme 20, 593 ff, and 
 Yox Clamantis, bk. iii, 1. 193 ff.) But more eloquent still are the frag- 
 mentary statistics of visitations which have survived. Here are the 
 words in which Salimbene's acquaintance, Eudes Rigaud, Archbishop of 
 Rouen, sums up his first ruridecanal visitation. (A.D. 1249. Reg. p. 17) : 
 " We caused to be called together and visited, at St. Aubin, the priests 
 of the deanery of Longueville [which contained 42 parishes and 3 
 chapelries]. We found that Richard, priest of Roumesnil, has long 
 kept a certain woman and had a child by her, yet he has been corrected 
 by the archdeacon and the ill report has ceased. Item, the priest of 
 Appeville is ill-famed for drunkenness. Item, we found that the priest 
 of Martigny, ill-famed for incontinence, is non-resident and absents him- 
 self from rural chapters. Item, the priest of Ste-Foy is ill-famed of a 
 woman by whom he has two children, as several witnesses have deposed ; 
 and he sells his corn at the end of the year. Item, the priest of St. 
 Germain of a woman by whom he has a child. Item, the priest of 
 Torcy le Petit, of the wife of Gautier de Laistre. Item, the priests of 
 Chapelle and Boisrobert are ill-famed for incontinence. Item, the 
 priest of Mesnilobert is ill-famed of a certain woman. Item, the priest 
 of Appeville, of Reialle's wife. Item, the priests of Arques and Arceaux 
 are said to be incontinent. Item, the priests of St.-Honor6, of Appe- 
 ville, of Arques, of Fresnoy and of Autels are ill-famed for drunkenness. 
 We warned and rebuked them, and threatened them that, if they are 
 found again ill-famed of such transgressions, we would punish them 
 heavily." The rest mainly concerns the unclerical attire of the priests 
 and other smaller faults. 
 
 Eleven incontinents and four drunkards out of forty-five parishes is 
 nearly double of the general average of these visitations : though, again, 
 there were in other deaneries a good many worse individual offenders
 
 Appendix D. 429 
 
 than any on this list. But even more significant is the comparative 
 impunity of the offenders, though for generations church councils had 
 attempted to stamp out the evil by enacting the severest punishments 
 not only on the clergy but on their partners. Any one of these Norman 
 black sheep would at once have been deprived under the modern An- 
 glican regime ; and it is significant of the difference between our 
 century and theirs to trace their actual careers. In 1259, Eudes began 
 a second ruridecanal visitation which even his untiring energy failed to 
 complete (p. 329 ff.) Here, after this ten years' interval, we find the 
 priest of Appeville still "a drunkard and a sot" : Roumesnil is as " ill- 
 famed of witchcraft, and kept his daughter in his house " : and there 
 were two fresh incontinent^ who bad not appeared on the earlier list, 
 one of whom " had sometimes taken harlot into his house." The Arch- 
 bishop adds "all these things we corrected and bade them amend: 
 moreover we warned the priests generally, all and singular, to abstain 
 from foul, mocking, and jesting words, especially before lay folk : and 
 that they who had not close cassocks should buy them by mid-Lent." 
 A later notice in the diary discloses that the priest of Boisrobert is 
 " ill-famed of the wife of a certain clerk named Bigre, and of a certain 
 Englishwoman : we enjoined him to expel altogether the said Bigre and 
 his wife." (516). The priest of Mesnilobert, too, is heard of again. 
 (139, 192, 655). In 1252 he was found to be helping his uncle, prior 
 of the hospital at Neuchatel, to consume in riotous living the revenues 
 of that pious foundation. In 1254 he was cited to answer for certain 
 misdeeds which were recorded in another register, now unfortunately 
 lost. The result was that he gave an undertaking in legal form to re- 
 sign when called upon ; whether he amended his ways, or whether this 
 written promise was later enforced against him, there is nothing to show. 
 The rector of Fresnoy (669) was solemnly warned in 1264 for non- 
 residence and neglect of Church services, and for beating a parishioner's 
 wife with his fists. The priest of Autels (786 and 402) proved unsatis- 
 factory, and it was ordered in 1252 that he should be pensioned off or 
 exchange his living : in 1261 he, or his successor, resigned. The rector 
 of Torcy le Petit (146) was in 1252 kicked in his own churchyard by 
 the Lord Jean de Peletot, Kt., who was forced to put himself at the 
 Archbishop's mercy for a fine. But the strangest career from among 
 these misdemeanants of 1248 was that of the priest of Martigny, near 
 Dieppe. On Aug. 5th, 1257, "Gerard, priest of Martigny, appeared 
 before us and confessed that he had kept for three years one of his 
 parishioners named Matilda, and had frequently (pluries) known 
 another girl : and we assigned him a day, viz., Aug. 16th, to proceed 
 legally upon his confessions legally made in our presence : but at length 
 he gave a formal undertaking that, if it should befall him to relapse, 
 his living might be taken as resigned." By canon law, of course, his 
 living ought long ago to have been vacated. This formal undertaking, 
 signed before witnesses, is duly filed in the Appendix of the Register. 
 On December 25th, 1261, the same Gerard was summoned to answer
 
 430 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 for having wounded a vassal of the Lord Thomas of Beaumont with a 
 sword ; he pleaded self-defence, and an enquiry was instituted, we are 
 not told with what result. On the 20th July, 1265, "he was cited by 
 his archdeacon on a fresh accusation of incontinency but denied it on 
 oath ; and we fixed the 16th August to hear the result of such inquisi- 
 tion as the Archdeacon should make in the mean time." This in- 
 quisition was unfavourable : for on August 1 7th he was cited to appear 
 on January 8th next for compurgation by the oaths of six other priests 
 (at his own choice within certain obvious limitations) who would swear 
 with him that they believed him innocent. This was the usual lenient 
 procedure for clerical offenders ; and the great Oxford Chancellor 
 Gascoigne describes in very strong language the iniquities to which it 
 gave rise at the University. (Mun. Acad., R.S., p. 536). Apparently 
 Gerard found the requisite number of obliging colleagues ; for there is 
 no more of him, nor any record of a vacancy at Martigny, in the 
 Register, which lasts to the end of 1269. (See pp. 17, 283, 417, 523, 
 525, 658). 
 
 It is not at all uncommon to find such a paragraph as " we warned 
 the priest of St. Peter's to abstain from tavern- haunting, immoderate 
 wine-bibbing, gadding about and unhonest consorting with women : for 
 he was exceedingly ill-famed of such offences." Here, again, is another 
 case in detail, illustrating the leniency with which offenders were 
 treated. On November 9th, 1261, "we fixed December 15th for [John] 
 priest of Civieres, who is of manifold evil report for divers vices, to 
 purge himself with the oaths of eight other priests from the accusations 
 of incontinence, adultery, manifold assaults, and tavern-haunting." On 
 December 1 6th John appeared without his compurgators : he was 
 allowed a respite until the Wednesday before Christmas : on which day 
 he failed to appear at all. Meanwhile the Archbishop instituted an 
 inquisition into his case : from which it appeared that he was also under 
 ill report of buffoonery, and that the witnesses who deposed to his 
 offences were " good and grave men " : he was therefore cited again and 
 appeared on Apiil 1st, 1262. Here a day was again fixed for his pur- 
 gation (April 17th) : meanwhile, if he had any real proof of innocence 
 to bring, he might bring it next day (April 2nd) : however, "neither 
 he appeared, nor any on his behalf." He evidently failed to find com- 
 purgators, for on June 7th he was forced to sign a deed admitting that 
 
 he " lay under grievous ill report of incontinence with my own 
 
 parishioners and with other women, of tavern-haunting, of assault ; and 
 seeing that my father the Archbishop might deal hardly with me on 
 that account, if he were so minded," he therefore swears in due legal 
 frrm to resign his benefice when called upon by the Archbishop. Two 
 years later, September 21st, 1264, he is again "under manifold ill report 
 of incontinence " and is given the 17th October on which to appear with 
 six compurgators. He did not appear : but on November 5th " he 
 appeared with seven priests, in readiness to purge himself of many 
 vices whereof he was accused, and whereof he lay also under manifold
 
 Appendix D. 431 
 
 ill-report. But we, fearing his fury and that of the priests that were 
 with him,* and recalling that undertaking which he had formerly given 
 us concerning the aforesaid matters, thought best to remit him this pur- 
 gation, assigning to him the Tuesday before Christmas to fulfil what is 
 contained in the said letter, as he promised under his own oath." On 
 the 3rd May, 1265, he was at last brought to bay and compelled to beg 
 for mercy : upon which the Archbishop made him swear that he would 
 consider his living as vacant on July 29th and allow another to be put 
 in his place. On the 8th of August it is at last recorded that he has 
 actually resigned in due form. (pp. 415, 417, 423, 434, 497, 502, 516, 
 524, 666). 
 
 There are many other cases worse in certain respects than either of 
 these priests who had formed incestuous connexions, or with married 
 women, or with two or three different women, or who regularly haunted 
 the neighbouring convents. There are many others also showing almost 
 as strongly as those I have quoted the difficulty of enforcing the law, 
 even when the prelate happened to be one of the most energetic in 
 Christendom, and the diocese one of the most civilized. In many cases 
 Elides simply bound down the priests to heavy fines in case of relapse ; 
 in others (and these among the worse), he compelled them to exchange 
 into other provinces, where no doubt they had an easier time. 
 
 I am publishing similar visitation records for England in Medieval 
 Studies, No. 8, " Priests and People," which will probably be ready in 
 August, 1907. In these English records, the clergy and their flocks are 
 presented side by side : and the former supply, in proportion to their 
 numbers, from five to ten times as many incontinents as the laity. I 
 say from five to ten times, because it depends whether we accept Thorold 
 Rogers's calculation that the clergy formed fifty per cent, of the total 
 population, or Abbot Gasquet's more probable contention that they 
 formed only one hundred per cent. It is worth while to consider for 
 one moment what this means in modern figures. There would be, under 
 medieval conditions, about 350,000 priests in the United Kingdom at 
 the present day ; and, if we may take as a standard Bishop Morton's 
 Norfolk Visitations of 1499 (Bodleian MS., Tanner, 100, f. 56), there 
 would be about 2,500 notorious black sheep among them ! The Ripon 
 and Beverley Chapter Acts show a state of things even worse. 
 
 D. Religious (i.e. monastic clergy). I have already pointed out in 
 Medieval Studies, Nos. 1 and 6, how strong and unimpeachable is the 
 evidence of monastic decay from A.D. 1200 onwards; and the list of 
 authorities might be much extended. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry speaks 
 
 * Timentes ne ipse cum eisdem prtmbyteris deliraret, a phrase which is sufficiently 
 explained by Gascoigne (1. c.) 'no townsman of Oxford dare object . . ..for, if he 
 were to object against these false purgations, then the accused and his coinpurga- 
 tor.i would secretly maim or slay him.' It is possible that Eudes remembered how 
 nearly one of his predecessors in the see of Rouen was stoned to death for his 
 zeal in enforcing the laws against concubinary priests. Pommeraye, p. 98.
 
 432 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 of the monks before the Franciscan movement as "keeping an outward 
 show of piety but denying its inward virtue . . . disobedient, murmur- 
 ers, backbiters, bearing Christ's cross unwillingly, unclean and inconti- 
 nent, walking after the flesh and not after the spirit." Turning to the 
 nuns, he asserts that a girl's virtue was safe among none but those of 
 the Cistercian Rule (Hist. Occ., caps 4 and 5). Fifty years afterwards 
 St. Bona ventura writes, "Seeing that . . . the late Legate in Germany 
 pronounced a general sentence of suspension from office and from benefice 
 against clergy soliciting nuns of any order whatsoever, and of excom- 
 munication against those who seduced them ; and whereas Pope 
 Gregory IX confirmed this, and granted to few confessors the power of 
 absolving such offenders, it is to be feared that many are bound by these 
 sentences, who think not in their hearts that they need the grace of 
 absolution or dispensation ; yet they minister in this state, and keep 
 their cures of souls, and receive church benefices while under this 
 anathema." Gower, who had no personal enmity against the monks, 
 speaks even more strongly a century later. In some monasteries, he says, 
 chastity is dead, and lechery has taken her place : very many (plures) 
 monks go to hell for women, and nuns are sometimes seduced by the 
 very visitors whose office it is to guard them (Vox Clamantis iv, 327 ff, 
 461, 495 : much of this is repeated in his Mirour de L/Omme). His 
 contemporary St. Catherine of Siena asserts that unnatural vices reigned 
 among religious and parish clergy as much as among other classes : the 
 stench of these sins tortured her so that she longed for death as a relief. 
 There was little discipline in the monasteries, because the superiors were 
 often as bad as the rank and file : monks and nuns sin together " and 
 oft-times (spesse volte) they go so far that both abandon Holy Religion, 
 whereby he is become a ruffian, and she a public harlot" (Dialogo, ch. 
 125 : cf. 162). Scarcely a generation later, the great Gerson made the 
 same accusation of unnatural vices, and wrote, "I actually doubt whether 
 boys and girls do not sometimes learn worse morals ... at the schools 
 and among monks and nuns (in rdigionum et scholarum conluberniis) 
 than they would in brothels." (Ed. Paris, 1606, ii, 628). 
 
 In 1414, almost at the same time as Gerson wrote these words, the 
 University of Oxford addressed to Henry V a series of articles for the 
 reform of the Church, probably in view of the Council of Constance. 
 Although several of these articles are strongly anti-Lollard, yet those in 
 which the University touches different failings of the clergy could 
 scarcely have been more strongly expressed by Wiclif himself. The 
 "Religious" exempt from episcopal jurisdiction were very numerous: 
 probably nearer a half than a third of the whole number in England : 
 and the University complains : " Whereas exempt Religious, at the 
 Devil's persuasion, are frequently defiled with fleshly vices, and are not 
 punished by their own superiors, but their sins remain unpunished, 
 therefore it seems expedient to appoint that the ordinaries may have 
 full power to punish and reform all Religious, and especially for the 
 crime of fornication committed outside their cloister." (Wilkins, iii,
 
 Appendix D. 433 
 
 363). The next generation brings us to another distinguished name, 
 Tritheim, an abbot of that Congregation of Bursfeld which owed its re- 
 form to Thomas J\ Kempis's Congregation of Windesheim : and this leads 
 me to point out an extraordinarily ineffectual criticism by a writer in 
 the Contemporary Review for September, 1906, who professes con- 
 siderable familiarity with medieval history. He is offended at my 
 speaking of the plain evidence for monastic decay, and writes : "on the 
 whole the standard was much higher than one might expect. It is 
 noticeable that Thomas a Kempis barely hints at the possibility of 
 moral laxity." This criticism betrays a very strange ignorance of 
 monastic history. Thomas i\ Kempis belonged to a particularly small 
 and select Congregation at the period of its earliest and purest activity, 
 and was not ac all likely to write of gross sins. Yet, on the other hand, 
 a scarcely less distinguished contemporary, himself a member of the 
 same Congregation, has left enough and to spare of that evidence which 
 it did not come within the province of Thomas a Kempis to give I 
 allude to the Liber de Reformatione of Johann Busch, which my re- 
 viewer would have done well to read side by side with a Kempis. 
 Johann Busch, a Provost in his own Order, spent himself in the 
 effort to reform other monasteries and bring them under the strict 
 Bursfeld rule : he records the most startling details, and tells how his 
 life was more than once in danger from those whose immoralities he 
 attempted to check. Tritheim, who wrote some thirty years after Busch, 
 and who was an Abbot of this same reformed Congregation of Bursfeld, 
 shows how short-lived that reform had been. For seventy years, he 
 says, scarcely one Abbot of his own house of Spanheim had died in 
 harness : nearly all had given up the apparently hopeless task of bring- 
 ing their monks to order. Again and again Tritheim enumerates the 
 great monastic reforms of the past including this of Bursfeld which owed 
 so much to the friends of Thomas a Kempis but only to lay stress on 
 their evanescence. Addressing his fellow- Abbots at the Chapter General 
 of 1493 he asks " where are those terrible oaths of all the Abbots of our 
 province, whereby they swore to Cardinal Cusanus before the altar of 
 
 St. Stephen at Wiirzburg that they would observe the Rule ? 
 
 Behold Fathers, ye have 127 abbeys under the authority of your 
 
 Chapter, whereof scarce 70 have remained under the Reform. 
 
 .... See the manner of life both of abbots and monks, whose smoke 
 goes up round about, which, though it be known, I blush to tell, and ye 
 (most reverend Fathers) shudder to hear ! For the three vows of 
 Religion [poverty, obedience and chastity], which by reason of their 
 excellence are called 'the substantial vows,' these men care no more 
 
 than if they had never promised to keep them The whole day 
 
 is spent in filthy talk . . . they despise the vow of poverty, and know 
 not that of chastity." Again, nobody (he says) builds new churches or 
 endows monasteries nowadays ; " for the laity say ' Lo ! sinful priests 
 and monks have gotten to themselves riches : lo ! they despise the 
 worship of God and waste their substance with harlots.' " (Preface to 
 
 Ft
 
 434 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Homilies De Statu et Ruina, c. xi Oratio III : cf. De Viris Illust. 
 lib. i : Declamatio ad Abbates, c. ii, iii, and v). 
 
 In the case of the cloistered clergy, as in that of the parish priests, 
 these unfavourable judgments of distinguished and orthodox churchmen 
 are borne out by official records. The Liber de Reformatione of Johann 
 Busch is, in itself, sufficient to explain the depth of that moral impulse 
 which undoubtedly underlay those wild passions and frequent injustices 
 of the Reformation. Abbot Gasquet's Henry VIII and the English 
 Monasteries, with all its show of full documentary evidence on less 
 important points, ignores most unaccountably the mass of obvious and 
 unimpeachable evidence against the monasteries during the four centuries 
 preceding the Reformation. When we take this ignorance in conjunction 
 with his constant professions of familiarity with the subject, his flat re- 
 fusal either to give chapter and verse for some of his most important 
 statements or to discuss them publicly, and the fact that his strongest 
 support has for some time come from anonymous articles and anonymous 
 books, it is difficult not to conclude that the defenders of the monastic 
 legend are at last driven to the last ditch in which the defenders of the 
 Loretto legend are now fighting abroad that of more or less wilful 
 ignorance and of misrepresentations hurled from the dark corners of 
 periodical literature. Any reader who cares to realize the shifts to 
 which Abbot Gasquet's supporters have by this time been reduced, even 
 in their own journals, may refer to the Tablet for Dec. 9, 1906, and 
 following numbers, and Demain for May 3, 1907, ff.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 N.B. Names of persons are generally indexed under the Christian name, 
 except in a few cases of titles, or where the surname has by custom become far 
 the better known of the two. Some unimportant names of places and persons 
 are altogether omitted from this index. 
 
 ACQUASPARTA ... 110, 222 
 
 Adam Marsh, or de Marisco, 56, 146, 
 
 165, 168, 239 
 
 AdamleRigaud 290 
 
 Adamo, (the family of) 4 
 
 Adrian V. 109, 251 
 
 Affarosi 212 
 
 Agatho, Abbot 28 
 
 Agnello of Pisa 81 
 
 Agnes, Salimbene's niece, 4, 17, 19, 
 
 39, 185, 318 
 
 Agostino da Recanati 84 
 
 Aicardo, Amerigi 13 
 
 Aix 167, 172, 311 
 
 Alberigo da Romano, 187, 248, 249, 
 
 250 257 313 
 Albert of Parma ... 84, 85, 328 
 
 Albert of Pisa 343 
 
 Albert the Fowler .. .105 
 
 Albertino of Verona ... 90, 124 
 
 Alberto Balzolano 84 
 
 Alberto Cremonella ... 42, 160 
 
 Alberto (false saint) 307 
 
 Albertus Magnus .. 13, 284 
 
 Aldebrando, (Bro.) 90 
 
 Alessandria 178 
 
 Alexander IV. 108, 175, 277, 294, 322 
 Alexander of Hales .. ... 241 
 
 Alfonso of Castillo 159 
 
 Alleluia, the Great ... 21,228 
 
 Alpine Climbing 246 
 
 Alvernia (see La Vernia) 
 
 Amis and Amiles 277 
 
 Amizo degli Amici 47 
 
 Anastagio degli Onesti : 195 
 
 Anastasius, Pope 316 
 
 Ancona 190, 228, 322 
 
 Andrea di Trego 120 
 
 Andrew of Bologna Ill 
 
 Angela of Foligno .. ... 63 
 
 Angelico (Fra) 314 
 
 Angelo (Bro.) 339 
 
 Angelo Clareno 25, 75, 110, 161, 170 
 
 Anglicanism and the 13th century 
 
 Church 150 
 
 Animals, Treatment of 90, 110, 119 
 
 Anselm, St. 30 
 
 Anselmo Rabuino of Asti 112, 173 
 
 Anselmo di Sanvitale 308 
 
 Anthony of Padua 174, 183, 197, 198, 
 
 308, 318 
 
 Antichrist ... 152, 159, 240, 327, 350 
 Antisacerdotalism 152, 164, 165, 192 
 
 Antonino, St 209 
 
 Antonio da Musso 78 
 
 Antonio (false saint) 308 
 
 Apostasy .. .. 74, 100, 168 
 
 Aquileia 260 
 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas 13, 63, 150, 284, 
 311, 315 his doctrines con- 
 demned 315 
 Archdeaconry and Damnation ... 284 
 
 Architecture 62, 351 
 
 Ardoino da Chiavari 321 
 
 Arezzo 86 
 
 Argenta 266, 270 
 
 Aristotle 57, 58 
 
 Aries 143, 145, 169 
 
 Armanno Punzilovo 308 
 
 Arsenius, St. .. 259 
 
 Art and Morals 351 
 
 Arverio ... 253 
 
 Asdente ... 113, 213, 214, 217 
 
 Assisi 45, 47, 84, 85, 86, 87, 186, 189 
 338, 351 
 
 Asti 112, 198 
 
 Astrology 213 
 
 AttodaSesso 229 
 
 Augustine (St.) 29, 97, 151, 279, 310 
 
 Aureole 169, 174 
 
 Auxerre ... 137, 138, 139, 143, 154 
 
 Avanzio 107 
 
 Avicenna 67 
 
 Avignon 59, 106, 176, 283 
 
 Ayca 196, 197 
 
 Ayinon of Faversham ... 48, 106
 
 43 6 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Azzo di Sanvitale ... 18, 54 
 
 Azzo, VII of Este 113 
 
 Azzo, VIII of Este ... 202,251 
 
 Azzolino .. .. 229 
 
 BACON, ROGER 43, 56, 58, 223, 239, 
 
 298. 
 
 Bagnacavallo ... 186, 252, 287 
 Baldwin of Flanders ... ... 12 
 
 Balian of Sidon 12, 18 
 
 Balsam Vine 172 
 
 Bartholomew the Englishman .. 42 
 Bartholomew of Padua ... ... 87 
 
 Bartholomew of Vicenza ... 254 
 
 Bartolino Tavernario 255 
 
 Bartolo Tavernario 116 
 
 Bartolommeo Guiscolo of Parma 112, 
 
 139, 153, 154 
 Bartolommeo Pucci (St.) ... 310 
 
 Beatrice 200, 202, 309 
 
 Beatrice, da Gente I ... 228, 233 
 
 Beatrice, da Gente, II 229 
 
 Beaucaire ... ... 147 
 
 Beaune 137 
 
 Belfort 86 
 
 Bellincion Berti 2 
 
 Benedict, (St.) 100, 136, 137, 151, 174, 
 
 180, 239, 310 
 Benedict of the Horn ... 22, 40 
 
 Benevento ... ... 193 
 
 Benvenuto da Imola 15, 71, 100, 133, 
 
 214, 247, 253, 283, 300, 302 
 
 Benvenuto of Modena 103 
 
 Bergamo 118, 218 
 
 Bernabo dei Palastrelli 203 
 
 Bernabo di Regina ... ... 227 
 
 Bernard, (St.) 59, 62, 95, 160, 270, 284, 
 
 306 
 
 Bernard of Besse ... 64, 71, 338, 343 
 Bernard of Morlaix ... 55, 352 
 Bernard of Quintavalle 49, 79, 87, 174 
 
 315 
 Bernardino da Buzea ... ... 255 
 
 Bernardino of Ravenna ... ... 210 
 
 Bernardino of Siena (St.) 14, 111, 157, 
 
 298, 300, 301, 304 
 
 Bernardo Bafolo 104 
 
 Bernardo (Card) 251, 272 
 
 Bernardo di Cassio 17 
 
 Bernardo Guglielini .. ... 209 
 Bernardo Rossi 120, 121, 124, 127 
 
 Bernardo Vizi 285 
 
 Berthold of Aquileia 244 
 
 Berthold of Ratisbon 12, 20, 32, 74, 
 
 75, 294, 299, 300, 302 
 
 Bertinoro 183 
 
 Bertolino 173, 179 
 
 Besmantova 274 
 
 Bianello ... 209, 228, 229, 230 
 
 Bibbiano 208 
 
 Bible, 101, 103, 112, 159, 184, 186, 
 243, 245, 282 ; and friars, 303 ; 
 forbidden 303 ; ignorance of 53, 
 56, 261, 302, 305 ; knowledge of 
 10, 80, 232; interpretation of 119, 
 182 
 Bishop, heretical 287 ; resigns 180, 
 
 181 ; scene at his table 332 
 Bishops, avaricious 286 ; evil 283, 
 285, 286, 287; German 284; 
 good 287-289 ; negligent 275, 330 ; 
 their quarrels 286 
 
 Bishopric, danger of 95, 112, 270, 280, 
 284 ; dreaded 180 
 
 Blanche, Queen 188 
 
 Blasphemy ... 221, 242, 323 
 
 Bobbio 183 
 
 Boccaccio 195, 222, 283 
 
 Boiardi ... 210 
 
 Bologna 12, 25, 26, 39, 48, 80, 84, 85, 
 102, 106, 112, 124, 132, 140, 181, 
 184, 189, 190, 194, 197, 199, 217, 
 235, 236, 255, 258, 260, 290, 311, 
 321, 338 
 
 Bonagiunta of Fabriano ... 112 
 
 Bonagrazia (Minister-General) 106, 
 
 234 
 
 Bonaventura (St.) 13, 44, 56, 62, 63, 
 
 64, 65, 66, 74, 75, 96, 106, 108, 
 
 109, 111, 145, 158, 170, 239, 253, 
 
 254, 280, 283, 284, 289, 290, 292, 
 
 294, 297, 298, 303. 304, 313, 315, 
 
 321, 323, 336, 338, 340, 341, 343, 
 
 344, 345, 346, 350, 351 
 
 Bonaventura da Iseo 84, 113, 327 
 
 Boniface VIII ... 59, 152, 198 
 
 Bonifazio Boiardi ... ... 210 
 
 Bonifazio Fieschi ... 277, 286 
 
 Bonifazio da Gente 229 
 
 Bonifazio (Podesta of Reggio) . . . 230 
 Books, scarcity of 6 ; destruction 
 
 of 160. 167 
 
 Borgo San Donnino 118, 125, 127, 
 128, 131, 152, 186, 190, 214, 223 
 Bourbon Etienne de 295, 301, 302 
 Boy Bishop 328 ; Preacher 326 ; at 
 
 school 328 
 Bozon 
 
 Brancaleone 
 Brescia 
 Brewer (Prof.) 
 
 Bribery 
 
 Buoncompagno ... 
 Buoncompagno da Prato 
 
 Buondio 
 
 Buoso da Duera . . 
 
 ... 295, 340 
 
 160 
 
 115, 163, 188, 213 
 ... 292, 337 
 ... 279, 281 
 25, 26 
 ... 336 
 113, 262 
 251, 271
 
 Index. 
 
 437 
 
 Burigardo 206, 207 
 
 Busch 71, 299, 303, 314 
 
 Butchers of Reggio 225 
 
 CACCIAGUIDA 2,206 
 
 Caesarius of Heisterbach 9, 30, 67, 
 ^l 70, 119, 239, 275, 284, 292, 296, 298 
 Csesarius of Spires ... 174,315 
 
 Camerino 1 110 
 
 Campaldino 200 
 
 Canigou, Mt ... 246 
 
 Canon, under ical 180 
 
 Canonization, popular 40, 88, 111. 
 291, 306, 308, 310, capricious 101 
 Canossa, Abbot, 229, 231 ; monk of 
 206, 207, 209, 221, 232 
 
 Cantarelli ... .. 10 
 
 Capua (Convent of) 153 
 
 Caracosa .. ... 17 
 
 Cardinalate, modernity of ... 281 
 Cardinals, unworthy 146, 181, 278, 
 279 ff ; luxurious 274, 331 ; world- 
 ly 181 
 
 Carlino de' Grimaldi 70 
 
 Carnival 221 
 
 Casella 100, 134 
 
 Caterpillars 224 
 
 Catherine of Siena (St.) 40, 298, 302 
 
 Cecilia (Abbess) 76 
 
 Cedonius (St.) 167 
 
 CelestinelV 276 
 
 CelestineV 150,284 
 
 Chambe'ry 177 
 
 Champagne 135 
 
 Charity 13, 16, 114, 177 
 
 Charlemagne 91, 241 
 
 Charles of Anjou, 123, 129, 140, 143, 
 
 195, 202, 227, 237, 245 ff, 311, 313 
 
 Chaucer 5, 65, 74, 97, 163, 256, 303, 339 
 
 Chess 228, 241, 286 
 
 Chiassi 311 
 
 Children, foundling 24 
 
 Chivalry, defects of ... 20,253 
 (See also Women). 
 
 Chrysanthus, St 97 
 
 Chrysostom, St. John ... 97, 288 
 
 Church (Dean) 7 
 
 Church, a part of daily life 69, 99, 
 307 ; its discipline 330 ; corrupt- 
 ion of 57, 151, 153, 165, 283, 285 
 Churches, dirt of 297 ; used as fort- 
 resses 208 301 ; dogs in 286 ; 
 separation of sexes in 301 ; sleep 
 in 67 ; services too long 67 ; the 
 builders of 351 ; fights in 301 ; 
 improprieties in 301, 328 ; mag- 
 nificence of Franciscan 338 
 Cianghella 15, 16 
 
 Cistercians 328, 340 
 
 Clare (St.) ... 19, 175, 318, 325 
 
 Clarello ... 263 
 
 Clarisses 77, 341 
 
 Cle"dat, Prof 10,200 
 
 Clement IV 268, 277 
 
 Clergy and civil wars 210 ; and politics 
 287 ; and drink 270 ; embezzlement 
 by 285 ; evil 164, 180, 181, 293 ; 
 ignorant 68, 276, 289, 293, 298 ; 
 examinations of 298 ; gabble their 
 services 300 ; keep inns 297 ; 
 Italian worse than English or 
 French 292 ; murdered 209, 210, 
 211 ; gain money from relics and 
 saints 307, 311 ; unpopular 188, 
 225, 333 ; avarice of 309 ; morals 
 of 209, 261, 283, 285, 287, 293, 
 294, 296, 297, 314, 351 ; marriages 
 of 296 
 
 Cluny 52, 136, 272 
 
 Colmar 173 
 
 Cologne 38, 284 
 
 Columban (St.) 183 
 
 Comet 277 
 
 Communion infrequent 301 
 
 Compostella 329 
 
 Confession, dangers of ... 293, 295 
 
 Confirmation, neglected 301 
 
 Conrad 193, 264, 265 
 
 Conrad of Berceto 120 
 
 Conrad of Offida 43 
 
 Conrad von Weilheim 339 
 
 Conradin 131, 193 
 
 Constance, Empress ... 240, 283 
 
 Constantinople ... 313 
 
 Contrade (of Pisa) 98 
 
 Corinth x ... 101 
 
 Corpus Christi 306 
 
 Correggio 228, 233 
 
 Cortona 86 
 
 Corto-passo . . 123 
 
 Costanza 15, 240 
 
 Counter-Reformation 150 
 
 Cremona 19, 39, 59, 81, 115, 117, 120, 
 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 134, 
 137, 191, 202, 217, 233, 234, 236, 
 271, 307, 308 
 
 Crucifix and miracle 95 
 
 Cruelties 115, 125, 126, 196, 197, 202, 
 
 207, 209, 237, 253, 266 
 Crusades 12 ; disbelief in 154 ; failure 
 of 187 I of boys 43 ; money em- 
 bezzled 198, 200, 278, 279 
 Crusaders ill-treated ... 172,246 
 
 Cum 23 
 
 Cuthbert (Fr.) ... 292,311,337
 
 438 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 DAMIAN (St. Peter) 31 
 
 Damasus (Pope) 281 
 
 Dant 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 15, 17. 20, 56, 59, 
 63, 66, 71, 84, 91, 100, 109, 110, 
 113, 132, 133, 1S4, 147, 150, 183, 
 193, 195, 197, 199, 200, 202. 205, 
 206, 210, 213, 214, 222, 227, 236, 
 237, 239, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247, 
 251, 253, 254, 258, 270, 273, 276, 
 277, 278, 286, 298, 302, 305, 306, 
 309, 314, 315, 316, 317, 332, 334, 
 388, 339, 340, 349, 350, 351, 352, 
 353 ; illustrated by Salimbene 
 20 ; his religious ideas 305 
 David of Augsburg 31, 64, 65, 66, 317, 
 346 
 
 Death, fear of 80,241 
 
 Dego 225 
 
 Denifle (Father) 151 
 
 Devil 163 ; power of in Middle Ages 
 
 317; as angel of light 318; in 
 
 shape of Christ 318 ; letter from 
 
 297 
 
 Diotisalve ... ... 27, 29, 38, 39 
 
 Distillation 114 
 
 Divorce 78, 255 
 
 Dog, the butcher's 236 ; in church 286 
 
 Dolcino (Fra.) ... 164, 332, 333 
 
 Dominic (St.) 12, 25, 27, 55, 162, 
 
 280, 308, 310, 318 ; canonization 
 
 of 27 
 
 Dominicans 201, 306, 340 ; and Fran- 
 ciscans 148 
 Douceline (St.) ... . ... 148 
 
 117 
 
 Dove (Alfred) 
 Dresdner 
 Drudo (Bro.) 
 Durandus 
 
 5 
 8 
 
 113 
 103 
 
 EARTHQUAKES 12, 79, 80, 223, 
 
 287, 288 
 
 Easter candle 179 
 
 Eclipse 78, 223 
 
 Edmund Rich (St.) ... 315, 318 
 
 Edward I 246, 315 
 
 Egidio Scorza 114 
 
 Ehrle, Father 75 
 
 Elephant 42 
 
 Elias (Bro.) 24, 30, 43, 44, 45, 49, 73, 
 
 76 ff, 89, 90, 115, 174, 186, 242 
 
 Eliseus ... 267 
 
 Elizabeth of Hungary (St.) 31, 244. 
 
 340 
 Elizabeth of Portugal (St.) ... 31 
 
 Embrun 177,271,288 
 
 Emperor, the longing for a good 58 
 England and English 109, 179, 237, 
 
 292, 338 ; friars strict 179, 338 
 
 Enverardo of Brescia 
 Enzio, King 
 
 Ephesus 
 
 Ermengarda di Adamo . . . 
 Ermengarda da Palude ... 
 
 Este 
 
 Etienne de Bourbon 15, 279, 
 
 302, 304 
 Eudes Rigaud 140, 142, 239, 
 
 294, 296, 298 
 Everlasting Gospel 
 Evil Times 
 
 Exiles ... 116, 197, 198 
 Ezzelino .. 115, 159 
 
 Ezzelino da Romano 113, 
 
 159, 187, 244, 247, 262, 
 
 265, 266 
 
 ... 266 
 
 124, 174 
 
 ... 313 
 
 ... 16 
 
 ... 114 
 
 ... 251 
 
 295, 300, 
 
 289, 290, 
 
 .. 151 
 
 ... 293 
 
 205, 308 
 
 , 187, 247 
 115, 118, 
 263, 264, 
 
 FAENZA 60, 84, 185, 186, 193, 197, 
 198, 199, 227, 267, 271, 287, 330, 
 331, 341 
 
 Faith 305 
 
 Famine 163, 190 
 
 Fano 44, 45, 47, 49, 85, 112, 294 
 
 Fasts violated 221 
 
 Feast of Fools 39,328 
 
 Ferrara 6, 24, 103, 106, 113, 184, 185, 
 187, 189, 197, 202, 245, 248, 251, 
 260, 262, 287, 290, 308, 327, 342 
 
 Ferrarello 209 
 
 Feudalism 253 
 
 Fiord' Oliva 78 
 
 Fioretti 74, 109, 315, 317, 334, 342 
 
 Fishmongers of Reggio 224 
 
 Flagellants 158, 191 
 
 Flamenca 69 
 
 Flanders (Count of ) ... 132,195 
 Florence 15, 27, 131, 132, 202, 205, 
 258, 310, 314, 338, 351 ; Baptist- 
 ery of 309 
 
 Florentines, levity of 25, 27, 28, 29, 
 183, 310 
 
 Fontanaviva ... 328 
 
 Forgery 253 
 
 Forli 186 
 
 Francesca da Rimini ... 210,252 
 Francis (St.) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 18, 
 23, 24, 25, 30, 31, 36, 40, 49, 51, 
 53, 55, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 72, 73, 
 74, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 
 90, 93, 100, 102, 105, 108, 109, 
 111, 118, 132, 133, 148, 151, 152, 
 170, 171, 179, 180, 189, 198, 219, 
 220, 239, 246, 247, 258, 260, 264, 
 265, 268, 271, 276, 278, 289, 297, 
 298, 310, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 
 322, 325, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 
 338, 339, 340, 341, 343, 346, 349,
 
 Index. 
 
 439 
 
 Francis (St.) continued. 
 
 351, 353 ; his failure 1 ; his stig- 
 mata 339 ; his pious theft 30 
 
 Franciscans, unconventional 332 ; and 
 Cistercians 234 ; and Dominicans 
 47, 155, 158, 162, 290, 340 
 
 Fraticelli 165 
 
 Frati Godenti 130, 199, 205, 254 
 
 Frederick II 2, 6, 10, 12, 15, 41, 42, 
 60, 76, 79, 86, 110, 115, 116, 117, 
 122, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 136, 
 152, 157, 158, 165, 174, 186, 187, 
 193, 196, 206, 213, 222, 238, 240, 
 241, 279, 313; his death 189, 
 245 ; character 241; cruelty 115, 
 120, 242 ; selfishness 121 ; sense 
 of humour 244 ; as Antichrist 
 79 ; excommunicated by Innocent 
 IV 115 
 
 French 292 ; in Italy 237 
 
 Friars (See also Dominican, Francis- 
 can, Spiritual*) ; and animals 90, 
 1 10 ; average 334 ; their begging 
 51, 182, 338; and Benedictines 
 235 ; and Bible 303 ; and books 
 
 82, 83, 101, 103, 154, 161 ; buf- 
 foonery 27 ; their buildings 203 
 219, 335, 338 ; change of super- 
 iors 90 ; charity 124, 290; clean- 
 liness 70 ; creature-comforts 200 ; 
 conversions 18, 25, 104 ; con- 
 science-money 48, 190, 253, 340 ; 
 courage 23, 104, 263 ; decay 92, 
 93 ; chap, xxvi passim ; and 
 democracy 235, 254 ; and devils 
 297 ff ; and discipline 73, 83, 86, 
 106, 335, 343 ; dissensions 78, 
 
 83, 85, 87, 89 ; doubts 317 ; dress 
 70, 82, 336 ; as educators 303 ; 
 their encroachments 175, 234, 340; 
 English (see under English) ; good 
 chap, ix passim ; free thought 
 among 150, 151, 165 ; and funer- 
 als 340 ; gifts to 189, 219, 256 ; 
 and gossip 64, 74, 145, 178, 
 281 ; their hardships 44, 51, 74 ; 
 hermitages 81, 82 ; hospitality to 
 94, 106 ; humility 101 ; hysteri- 
 cal 317 ; ignorant 69 ; indecorous 
 29 ; irreverent 66 ; labour 107 ; 
 lax 74 ; luxurious 74, 92, 338 ff ; 
 and money 220, 325, 335, 338 ; 
 morality of 72, 172, 190, 334; 
 and nuns 78, 100, 189, 258, 
 341 ; and parish clergy 293, 
 297, 307, 340 ; as peace-makers 
 190, 194, 202, 208, 210, 217, 
 225 ; persecutors, 23, 201 ; poli- 
 
 Friars continued. 
 
 tics 125, 251 ; and popes 276, 
 347 ; popular 346 ; poverty alleged 
 338 ; and prison 84, 154, 345 ; 
 privileges 235 ; puritanism 62 
 334 ; revivalists 23 ; and robbers 
 221 ; and salvation 55, 180, 335 ; 
 their secrecy 344 ; study 177, 
 179 ; suicide 50, 319 ; supper 44 ; 
 table manners 65 ; tertianes 148, 
 254, 323 ; two and two 82 ; un- 
 popular 78, 154, 188, 201, 219, 
 220, 308, 343, 344, 350 ; unsacer- 
 dotal 81, 332 ; and vagabondage 
 185 ; visitations 84, 85, 108 ; in 
 war 23, 198, 264; weakness of 
 their ideal 70, 71, 72, 343, 346 ; 
 and Wesleyans 346 ; and women 
 64, 71, 82, 96, 100, 146, 341 ; 
 youth of 42 
 
 Foligno 203 
 
 Fontanaviva 159, 160 
 
 Forli 90, 186, 197, 199 
 
 Fornovo (Archpriest of) ... 210 
 
 GABRIEL (Bro.) 137 
 
 Galla Placidia 193 
 
 Gambling 221, 241, 323 
 
 Games 217, 227 
 
 Gardner, E. G 302 
 
 Garso de' Garsoni 209 
 
 Gasquet (Abbot) ... 72,299 
 
 Gautier, Leon ... 14 
 
 Gebhart 10, 151, 200 
 
 Genoa 43, 70, 78, 124, 167, 171, 172, 
 
 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 
 
 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 215, 216, 
 
 289, 336, 340. 
 
 Geoffroi de Peronne ... 95, 284 
 
 Gerard of Borgo San Donnino 152 ff. 
 
 Gerard de Frachet 56 
 
 Gerard of Modena 24, 26, 30, 42, 43, 
 
 84, 89 
 
 Gerard of Villamagna 310 
 
 Gerardo Albo 54 
 
 Gerardo Bpiardi 210 
 
 Gerardo cli Canale ... 120, 121 
 
 Gerardo di Cassio 17 
 
 Gerardo de' Campsori 266 
 
 Gerardo de' Senzanesi 47 
 
 Gerardino of Parma 189 
 
 Gerardino Segarello (See SegareUo) 
 Gerson 18, 59, 63, 192, 301, 313 
 
 Gesta Romanorum 295 
 
 Gherardino Ansaldi 205 
 
 Ghidino 321 
 
 Ohino CittadeUa ... ... ...309 
 
 Ghiotto (Bro.) 330
 
 440 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Ghiberto da Gente 190, 228, 229, 232, 
 255 
 
 Ghirardino da Eiizola 204 
 
 Ghisla 17 
 
 Giacomello 209 
 
 Giacomino da Berceto . .. ... 112 
 
 Giacomino da Cassio 243 
 
 Giacomino of Reggio .. . 22, 25 
 
 Giambonitani .. 322 
 
 Giles (Bro.) 100, 102, 174, 317 
 
 Gilles de Retz 
 
 ... 257 
 
 Ginepro (See Juniper) 
 Giordano da Rivalto 
 
 ... 253 
 
 Giovanna (Beata) 
 
 ... 310 
 
 Giovanni Barisello 
 
 128 ff 
 
 Giovanni Bono ... ... 
 
 ... 322 
 
 Giovanni de' Nizi 
 
 130, 205 
 
 Giovanni Parent! 
 
 ... 82 
 
 Giovannino dalle Olle 
 
 169 ff 
 
 Giovannino Pigolino 
 
 ... 155 
 
 Giuliano da Sesso 
 
 125, 126 
 
 Giullietta da Polenta 
 
 ... 327 
 
 Giuletta degli Adhelardi 
 
 ... 322 
 
 Glass, magnifying 
 Glosses, Bible 
 
 ... 311 
 53, 182 
 
 
 224 
 
 Golden Legend 
 
 .. 167 
 
 Gower ... ... ... 
 
 71 
 
 Grazia (Bp. ) 
 
 ... 285 
 
 Greccio ... 
 
 109, no 
 
 Gregorio da Montelungo 123, 260, 
 
 285 
 Gregory, (St.) 63, 92, 109, 155, 162, 
 
 193 
 Gregory IX. 41, 86, 89, 98, 100, 215, 
 
 223, 244, 258, 268, 276, 309 
 Gregory X. 245, 268, 272, 277, 279, 
 
 283, 284, 322, 329, 335 
 
 Gregory (Bp.) 285 
 
 Grenoble 177 
 
 Grisopola 19 
 
 Grosseteste ... 56, 146, 280, 315 
 
 Gualterotto 241 
 
 Guarino 18, 54 
 
 Guastalla 228 
 
 Gnglielma (false saint) 308 
 
 Guglielmo Fogliani 225, 286, 335 
 Guglielmo Marchese 
 Guglielmo de' Lupicini 
 Guibert de Nogent 
 
 210 
 
 210, 212 
 ...30,59,309 
 
 Guido (Salimbene's father) 12, 45, 231 
 Guido (Salimbene's brother) 13, 17, 
 
 18, 54, 79 
 Guido (Bro.) 102 
 
 Guido da Albareto 
 Guido Bonatti 
 Guido da Bianello 
 Guido Correggio ... 
 
 ... 230 
 
 26. 90 
 
 228ff 
 
 231, 236 
 
 Guido Malabocca 252 
 
 Guido da Montefeltro ... 29, 198 
 Guido (Novello) da Polenta 210, 252 
 Guido (Vecchio) da Polenta ... 252 
 
 Guido Putagio 325, 331 
 
 Guido da Sesso 124 
 
 Guido da Tripoli 221 
 
 Guidolino da Enzola 16 
 
 Guideline of Ferrara 235 
 
 Guidolino Gennaro 112 
 
 Guillaume de St. Amour ... 53 
 
 Gulielmotto of Apulia ... 196,197 
 
 HAWTREY (Miss) 303 
 
 Haymo of Hythe 299 
 
 Heinrich Raspe 264 
 
 Helinand of Froidmont 100 
 
 Henry (da Musso) 78 
 
 Henry of Pisa .. 98, 99, 100, 101 
 Henry III of England 108, 246, 315 
 Henry VI (Emp.) .. 240, 309 
 
 Henry VII (Emp.) ... 59, 315 
 
 Henry of Liege 283 
 
 Hens, plague among ... . 234 
 Heresy 23, 302 ; burning for 162, 201, 
 
 332 
 
 Heresy-hunting 306, 346 
 
 Hermitess, her marriage ... 330 
 
 History, ignorance of ... .. 58 
 Holder-Egger, Prof. 1, 130, 156, 185, 
 
 287 
 Honorius I, his heresy ... ..316 
 
 Honorius III 276 
 
 Honorius IV 234, 245, 278, 279, 332 
 
 Host, neglect of 297 
 
 Houses, frail nature of ... 60, 208 
 
 Hugh of St. Victor 66 
 
 Hugh of St. Cher 282 
 
 Hugues de Digne 79, 143, ff ; 280 ff ; 
 
 322 
 
 Humbert de Romans 56, 66, 162 
 Hyeres 143 ff. 
 
 IDOLATRY 69, 306, 309, 318 
 
 Ignorance breeds intolerance ... 304 
 Illumination (art of) 98, 112, 153 
 
 Illuminate (Bro. ) 45, 1 74 
 
 Imelcla (da Adamo) 13 
 
 Immaculate Conception 306 
 
 Imola 15, 61, 132, 160, 185 
 
 Incest 296 
 
 Indulgences .. 34, 193, 347 
 
 Infidelity (or free thought) 163, 165, 
 
 188, 232, 243, 285, 309, 311, 313, 
 
 316 
 Innocent III 2, 56, 67, 150, 181, 273ff, 
 
 283, 286, 314, 347
 
 Index. 
 
 441 
 
 Innocent IV 13, 18, 54, 76, 108, 115, 
 118, 121, 122, 134, 135, 169, 174, 
 178, 181, 188, 195, 245, 259, 262, 
 276, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 340 
 
 Inquisition 350 
 
 Intolerance, causes of 52, 162, 304 314, 
 350 
 
 Irreverence 15, 66, 68, 90, 220, 247, 
 287, 297, 299, 327, 328 
 
 JACOBINO DA ENZOLA ... 16 
 Jacobino da Palude 229, 231, 253 
 Jacopo degli Assandri . ... 113 
 
 Jacopo di Bernardo - ... 267 
 
 Jacopo of Bersello . . . 125 
 
 Jacopo da Enzola . 54, 204 
 
 Jacopo de' Ferrari . ... 201 
 
 Jacopo da Iseo ... . ... 78 
 
 Jacopo dalla Massa . ... 109 
 
 Jacopo of Pavia ... . 107,125 
 
 Jacopo da Varagine 39, 167, 192 
 
 Jacopone da Todi 65, 289, 332 
 
 Jacques de Vitry, 30, 55, 198, 252, 
 
 286, 295 
 James of the Mark (St.) 157, 162, 275, 
 
 304, 316 
 Jean de Brienne 240, 247 
 
 Jerome (St.) 
 Jesi 
 
 Jessopp (Dr.) 
 Jews 
 
 63, 281 
 49,240 
 301, 337 
 52, 113, 303 
 
 Joachim of Fiore 32, 40, 68, 79, 113, 
 146, 148, 150 ff. 167, 171, 176, 
 213, 245, 278, 279, 323 
 Joachism 108, 148, 149, 171, 176, 189, 
 240, 328.llf5,lfr>t v Wo 
 
 Jocelin (Bro.) 173 
 
 Johann Busch 299, 314 
 
 Johannes de Laudibus .. ... 87 
 
 John (St.) Ill 
 
 John XXI (Pope) 105 
 
 John XXII 346 
 
 John (0. P.) 162 
 
 John of Bibbiano ... ... 125 
 
 John of Brienne 15, 240, 241, 247 
 
 John the Frenchman 155 
 
 John of La Vernia 43 
 
 John the Leech 234 
 
 John of Lodi 87 
 
 John of Parma 32, 103, ff, 141, 142, 
 146, 152, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 
 173, 174, 176, 182, 183, 185, 246, 
 282, 306, 315 
 
 John of Pavia 107 
 
 John of Piano Carpine ... 135, 136 
 
 John of Ravenna 112 
 
 John of Salisbury . ... 284 
 
 John of Vicenza 25, 26, 27, 29 
 
 Joinville 9, 52, 143, 144, 239, 255, 313 
 
 Jordan of Giano ... 334 
 
 Jordan of Saxony 162, 280, 283, 343 
 
 Julian (Emp.) 206 
 
 Juniper (Bro.) ... 65, 289, 332 
 
 Justice ... 84, 209, 231, 255, 312 
 
 KILWARDBY (Abp.) 315 
 
 Knighthood (see also Nobility) cere- 
 monies of 202, 336 ; bought 253 ; 
 perfect 256 ; courtesy of 207 ; 
 honour of 246, 252 ; and ruffians 
 313 
 Knox-Little (Canon) ... 31, 63, 253 
 
 LA ROCflELLE 137 
 
 La Tour Landry (Kt. of) 5, 14, 253, 
 
 295, 299 
 
 La Vernia 339 
 
 Laudshut 339 
 
 Landslip 177 
 
 Langland 350 
 
 Last Judgment imminent 56, 58, 162, 
 
 223 
 
 Lateran Council 275, 323 
 
 Latino (Card.) 271 
 
 Laudibus (John de) 87 
 
 Lavagna 76, 340 
 
 Lawrence (St.) 93 
 
 Lay-Brethren, their irregularities 82 ; 
 
 and clerics 83, 84 ; discouraged 
 
 83 
 
 Lazarus 167 
 
 Lea (Dr.) ... 8, 151, 286, 296, 321 
 
 Legates, Papal 136, 252 ff 
 
 Lempp (Dr.) 44 
 
 Leo (Bro.) 102,118 
 
 Leo of Milan 23,24 
 
 Loderingo degli Andaloi .. 254 
 
 Lodi 80 
 
 Lodovico di San Bonifazio . . . 256 
 
 Loisy (Abbe) 164 
 
 Lorenzo (Bro.) 189 
 
 Lothario (Bro.) 339 
 
 Louis (St.) 37, 52 108, 124, 137, 140, 
 
 142, 143, 144, 153, 172, 187, 188. 
 
 237, 245, 289, 290, 299, 313, 315, 
 
 345 
 Lucca 50, 77, 78, 79, 99, 146, 217,295 ; 
 
 Santo Volto of 310 
 
 Luitgardis (St.) i75 
 
 Luke (Bro.) 137 
 
 Luther ... 347 
 
 Lynn 337 
 
 Lyons 13, 56, 116, 122, 134, 135, 143, 
 
 169, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 187, 
 
 189, 202, 282; council of 145, 
 
 Ga
 
 442 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Lyons continued. 
 
 277, 280, 283, 289, 290 ; court of 
 174 
 
 MABEL (Lady) 113 
 
 Macaroni ... 108 
 
 Macaulay 34 
 
 Macdonell (Miss) 3, 10, 44, 75, 148,.' 
 
 _>:;.), :d!) -j-j.^x,^ 
 
 Magdalene ... 167, 311, 312 
 
 Magic 261, 274 
 
 Mahomet 188 
 
 Malatesta of Rimini ... 198,227 
 Manfred 123, 192, 193, 195, 240, 247, 
 
 271 
 
 Manfred da Cornazano 78 
 
 Manfred of Modena 262 
 
 Manfredino (Lord) 230 
 
 Manfrediuo di Rosa 129 
 
 Manna 172 
 
 Manners 13, 46, 94, 181 
 
 Mansueto da Castiglione . 277 
 
 Mantua ... 41, 188, 252, 290 322 
 
 Map, Walter 38 
 
 Marcherio da Montecchio . . 205 
 
 Marchese Lupi 256 
 
 Margaret of Trent 333 
 
 Mariolatry 119, 303 
 
 Mark of Milan 173 
 
 Mark of Montefeltro .. Ill, 170 
 Markesopolo Pallavicino 113, 114 
 Marseilles 144, 145, 148, 167, 171, 174, 
 
 289. 
 
 Martha (St.) 167 
 
 Martilla - .. 167 
 
 Martin IV 198, 199, 214, 217, 227, 
 
 272, 278, 309, 313 
 Martin da Colurnio .. ... 285 
 
 Martin of Fano 47 
 
 Martin of Spain 82 
 
 Martinello ... 209, 228, 233 
 
 Martyrdom 174, 191 
 
 Mass Ceremonies 70 ; not understood 
 
 300 
 Matilda (Countess) 17, 114, 188, 206, 
 
 228 
 
 Matteo (Bro.) 231 
 
 Matteo Correggio .. . . 210 
 
 Matteo Fogliani .196 
 
 Matteo Rosai 279 
 
 Matthew of Cremona .. . . 173 
 
 Matthew of Modena 322 
 
 Matthew Paris, 2*3, 40, 55, 187, 279, 
 
 282 
 
 Matulino 341, 342 
 
 Maundeville (Sir John) ... 172,313 
 
 Maurice (Bro.) 154 
 
 Maurienne ... 177 
 
 Maximin (St.) 167 
 
 McCabe i\".6fi, 343,345 
 
 Meloria (Battle of) 79 
 
 Mercury (St.) 206 
 
 Merlin 157, 213, 214, 240, 245 
 
 Messina 202, 243 
 
 Methodius ... 213 
 
 Michael (Marquis) .. ... 342 
 
 Michael (Prof.) 5, 10, 30, 38, 158, 184, 
 
 186, 275, 295 
 
 Michael Scot 213, 214, 243, 244 
 
 Middle Ages and freedom of speech 5, 
 38, sadness of 5, 55, 349, 352 ; 
 careless of objective truth 5 ; 
 compared with modern times 58 ; 
 chaps, i and xxvii passim ; bar- 
 barous 18 ; ideas of cleanliness 
 69, 70 ; art of 351 
 Milan 23, 24, 42, 100, 104, 190, 218, 
 
 286, 308, 309, 332, 336 
 Millemosche (Paolo) ... 28 
 
 Miracles 101, 102, 110, 148, 153, 173, 
 183, 193, 216, 222, 228, 2-73 ; dis- 
 couraged 102 ; false 25, 30, 32, 
 37, 223, 307, 310, 317 ; ridiculed 
 26 ; decrease of 111; no proof of 
 sanctity 309 
 
 Modena 39, 42, 59, 111, 118, 120, 124 
 125, 132, 137, 159, 186, 191, 201, 
 204, 205, 207, 210, 212, 214, 217, 
 238, 286, 322, 329 
 
 Money, power of 2, 114, 231, 281, 340 
 Monks, their ideals 3, 68 ; morality 
 72; discipline 91, 92, 137, 156; 
 and money 95 ; commerce 199 ; 
 murdered 47, 211; food 210; 
 proprietary 336 ; and art 351 
 Montefalcone 101, 200, 221, 228, 230, 
 231 
 
 Montereggio 186 
 
 Morals, Medieval 39, 251, 253, 296, 
 301, 325, 331 
 
 Morando (Master) 138 
 
 Munio (O.P.) 162 
 
 Murders 47, 203, 205, 210, 227, 228, 
 
 229, 232, 233, 251, 253, 315 
 Music 99, 105, 112, 173; its dangers 
 
 100 
 Mysticism and Rationalism ... 164 
 
 NANTELMO 173, 176 
 
 Naples 106, 155, 173, 237, 275, 284, 
 
 318 
 
 Nazzaro Gherardini 77 
 
 Nero da Leccaterra 206 
 
 Newman (Card.) 7, 58, 62, 105, 149, 
 
 164 
 Niccolo de' Bazeleri ... 236
 
 Index. 
 
 443 
 
 Nice 172, 173, 174 
 
 Nicholas (St.) 96 
 
 Nicholas III 109, 202, 214, 235, 251, 
 
 278 
 
 Nicholas IV 110, 235, 272, 332 
 
 Nicholas (Bp. of Reggio) 285, 335 
 Nicholas of Clairvaux ... .. 67 
 Nicholas the Englishman .. 189 
 
 Nicholas the Fish 242 
 
 Nicholas of Montefeltro .. 101 
 
 Nobility, decay of ... 19 195 
 
 Nouantola 235 
 
 Norwich 292, 337 
 
 Novellino 195 
 
 Novelty, love of .. ... ..328 
 
 Nuns oppressed 77 ; their morals 78, 
 
 293 
 
 OBIZZO DA ESTE 41, 200, 212, 222. 
 
 251 256 * 
 
 Obizzo (Bp. of Parma) 214, 215, 236, 
 
 285, 286, 328, 331 
 
 Oddo (Cardinal) 141 
 
 Odo Rigaldi (see Eudes) 
 
 Odour of sanctity ... ... 304 
 
 Ognibeue 18,49,343 
 
 Oliphaut 10 
 
 Or San Michele 310 
 
 Origen 97, 306 
 
 Osmund (St.) 298 
 
 Ottaviano (Card.) 134, 250, 258, 259, 
 
 260, 276 
 
 Otto IV. 273 
 
 Ottobono (Card., later Adrian V.) 109, 
 
 251 
 
 Ovid 224 
 
 Oxford 57, 315 
 
 PADUA 23, 84, 118, 138, 262, 263, 
 264, 266, 338 
 
 Pagani 19 
 
 Paganino 173 
 
 Pallavicino 127, 128, 131, 191, 192, 
 
 255, 271 
 
 Paolo Traversario ... 195,196 
 
 Paris 57, 106, 136, 137, 140, 141, 152, 
 
 154, 155, 158, 161, 171, 179, 219, 
 
 241, 262, 284. 300, 315 
 
 Parishes, size of ... ... ... 292 
 
 Parma 12, 13, 17, 19, 22, 25, 39, 42, 
 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 54, 60, 93, 
 104, 105, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 
 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 
 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 
 134, 136, 137, 153, 159, 160, 183, 
 186, 190, 191, 192, 200, 201, 202, 
 203, 204, 205, 212, 214, 215, 216, 
 
 Parma continued. 
 
 217, 219. 223, 228, 229, 233, 235, 
 236, 2377 244, 254, 267, 286, 307, 
 308, 321, 323, 329, 331, 332, 338 ; 
 baptistery of 12, 13, 16, 119, 203, 
 311 ; bishop of 285 ; Bishop's 
 palace 17, 22, 119; convent of 
 St. Clare 19; Cathedral of 16, 
 123, 203 ; Piazza Communale 25 ; 
 rebellion of 116; silver model of 
 119 
 
 Paschetta 196 
 
 Pastoureaux 187 
 
 Patecchio 19, 186, 236, 258, 272 
 
 Pavia 118, 127 
 
 Peckham (Abp.) 301, 315 
 
 Pentecost (Bro.) 124, 173 
 
 Peregrine di Polesino ... ... 194 
 
 Perugia ... 100, 181, 190, 203 
 
 Perugino 351 
 
 Peter (St.) 203 
 
 Peter of Apulia 155ff 
 
 Peter of Aragon 202, 227, 237, 246 
 
 Peter Lombard 151, 155 
 
 Peter the Spaniard . ... 168 
 
 Petrarch 282, 302 
 
 Philip (Bro.) 251 
 
 Philip the Bold 227 
 
 Philip of Bavenna (Abp.) 100, 159, 
 
 197, 261, 262, 266, 269. 
 Physician salaried by city ... 234 
 
 Pia de' Tolomei 228 
 
 Piacenza 39, 116, 177, 233, 287 
 
 Plero delle Vigne ... 26, 121 
 
 Piers Plowman 71, 313, 350, 353 
 Pietro Ispano (John XXI) ... 109 
 Pietro Mangiadore ... 52, 56 
 
 Pietro Pagani , 251 
 
 Pietro Pecoatore .. .. ... 93 
 
 Pilgrimage and comforts ... 311 
 
 Pinamonte 251, 272 
 
 Pino da Gente 228, 229, 232 
 
 Pious fraud 25, 199 ; thefts 30 ; ruffian 
 206 
 
 Pipinus 192,241 
 
 Pisa 22, 50, 79, 80, 81, 83, 98, 140, 
 153, 169, 215, 216, 217, 223, 336, 
 339 
 Pistoia 82, 146, 201, 269 
 
 PiuaVI Ill 
 
 Plague ... 190, 192, 203, 217, 233 
 
 Pocapaglia 89 
 
 Politics, dangers of ... 204,230 
 Poltrenerio de' Ricicoldi 130, 205 
 
 Ponce (Bro.) 172 
 
 Popes 273 ; looked upon as Antichrist 
 151, 165; bribed 279; burnt in 
 effigy 203 ; canonized 30G ; court
 
 444 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Popes continued. 
 
 corrupt 109, 112, 145, 278, 282 ; 
 criticized 67, 145, 202, 245, 273, 
 275, 278 ; damned 276 ; discipline 
 310, 330 ; elected by force 202 ; 
 embezzle 86, 198, 278 ; and em- 
 peror 1 14, 273 ; evil predicted 152 ; 
 good expected 58, 333 ; heretical 
 275, 316 ; immoral 276, 278 ; lux- 
 ury 187 ; magic 274 ; nepotism 
 277, 278, 280 ; power in the 13th 
 Century 275 ; prayed to death 
 234 ; temporal power 273 
 
 Prato 217 
 
 Preaching 23, 33, 80 ; lay 40 ; un- 
 licensed 326 
 
 Predestination 232, 317 
 
 Pretenders 195 
 
 Primas 38, 39, 227, 270 
 
 Prison, cruelty of 124,126,127,207,216 
 Private judgment ... 150, 164 
 
 Prophecy ... 153, 159, 162, 214 
 
 Proverbs 41, 44, 83, 93, 95, 104, 163, 
 164, 169, 233, 301 
 
 Provins 135, 139, 153 
 
 Punishment Corporal ... 14,181 
 Puritanism 62, 100, 317, 334, 343 
 
 RAIMONDELLO 209 
 
 Raimondo da Vigna ... ... 56 
 
 Rashdall (Dr.) 8 
 
 Raven 260 
 
 Ravenna 91, 177, 185, 192, 193, 195, 
 196, 197, 200, 215, 235, 252, 265, 
 266, 267, 268, 270, 286, 311, 327, 
 342 : council of 269, 294 (See also 
 Philip) 
 
 Raviuoli 224 
 
 Rawnsley, Canon ... 337 
 
 Raymond (Bro.) ... ... 167 
 
 Raymond Berenger ... 147 
 
 Raymond Gaufridi ... 315 
 
 Raymond (0. P.) ... 162 
 
 Raymond of Toulouse ... 340 
 
 Recanati(Bp. of) .. 112 
 
 Reformation 2, 301 ; need of in 13th 
 
 Century 58 ; laity assists 59 ; 
 
 justified 72, 109, 164, 293, 294, 
 
 347 ; its influence on Romanism 
 
 275. 
 
 Reggio 16, 23, 59, 77, 78, 101, 118, 
 120, 124, 125, 131, 132, 137, 163, 
 190, 191, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 
 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 
 212, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 
 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 
 231, 232, 233, 238, 243, 251, 266, 
 286, 287, 307, 329, 335, 336. 
 
 ReGiovane 92 
 
 Relics 183, 267, 273 ; false 307 ; 
 duplicate 291, 311, 313 ; profitable 
 308, 311 'S^t-vjiSo 
 Religion (See also Faith, Infidel, In- 
 tolerance, Irreverence, Revival, 
 Tolerance) 21, 165, 187, 188, 191, 
 192, 197, 221, 321 ; freedom of in 
 13th Century 22, 305 ; hysterical 
 317 ; modern 315 ; a popular 
 growth 40, 305, 323; sensual 
 317. 
 
 Religious education (or want of) 18, 
 43, 156, 163, 299, 302. 
 
 Renan 151,313 
 
 Revivals 21ff, 187, 191 
 
 Rich and poor 208, 252 
 
 Richard de Bury ... 43 
 
 Richard of Chichester (St.) ...315 
 Richard of England (Bro.) ...318 
 
 Ricobaldo 197,201 
 
 Rienzi 164 
 
 Rieti 178, 181 
 
 Rikeldina da Enzola 17 
 
 Rimini 112 
 
 Rinaldo of Arezzo (Bp.) 178 ff, 284, 291 
 
 Rinaldo di Tocca 277 
 
 Riniero ... 147 
 
 Ritual, varieties of .. ... 106 
 
 Rizola da Polenta 327 
 
 Robert (the Apostle) 324, 330, 331 
 
 Robert of Artois 140 
 
 Roberti 287 
 
 Roger Bacon 223, 239, 298, 299, 315, 
 
 333 ; his despair 56 
 Roger of Bagnacavallo ... ... 252 
 
 Roglerio 80 
 
 Roland (Abbot of Canossa) ... 231 
 
 Roland of Padua 339 
 
 Roland of Parma 219 
 
 Roland of Pavia 101 
 
 Rolandino of Canossa 207, 230, 231 
 Rolando di Guido Bovi ... 129 
 
 Rolando Rossi 121 
 
 Rolle of Hampole ... .. 40 
 
 Romagna ... 218, 272, 278 
 
 Romanism and Tolerance 34, 350 
 
 Rome 40, 57, 58, 79, 103, 109, 112, 
 
 150, 160, 164, 173, 220, 223, 274, 
 
 280, 283, 313 
 
 Rome, sanctuaries of 173 
 
 Rose of Viterbo (St.) 31 
 
 Rouen 291, 296 
 
 Rubino ... ... 114 
 
 Rudolf (Emperor) ... 278,335 
 Rudolf of Saxony (Bro.) ... 79 
 Ruffino (Bro.) 177, 289, 317, 332 
 Ruffino of Bologna 184
 
 Index. 
 
 445 
 
 Ruffo Gurgone 
 Ruskin 
 Ryder, (Fr.) 
 
 254 
 40 
 
 28 
 
 SABATIER ... 3, 31, 64, 337 
 Sacchetti 71, 204, 253, 298, 301, 309, 
 
 310, 313 
 Sacraments ineffectual 293 ; neglected 
 
 301 ; transitory 152 
 Saints false 308, 309 ; misunderstood 
 314 ; new-fangled 310 ; work 
 their own salvation 314 ; worship- 
 ped before God 309 ; their in- 
 ward struggles 317 
 
 Saint-Gilles 171, 312 
 
 Saint- Victor 117 
 
 Salimbene, his accuracy and love of 
 detail 4, 6, 112, 193, 215, 216, 
 222, 223 ; admires beauty 78, 
 126, 256 ; an average friar 334, 
 347 ; aristocratic views 80, 113, 
 114, 224, 235,330, 355 ; conversion 
 42; curiosity 196; deacon 81; 
 death 238 ; dream 47 ; education 
 18, 48, 173, 326 ; epicureanism 44, 
 166, J76, 179, 193, 207; his 
 father 12, 44ff, 54, 276; fears 
 death 171 ; frankness 4 ; and the 
 French 237 ; friends 77, 79, chap, 
 ix. passim, 152, 173, 174, 183, 
 189, 193, 196, 227, 235, 277 ; as 
 historian 9, 10, 239 ; genealogy 
 19 ; importance 190 ; intolerance 
 161, 165 ; Joacbism 245 ; literary 
 friends 154 ; mother 53 ; musical 
 18; name 49; namesakes 101, 
 176 ; niece 4 ; peacemaker 217 ; 
 politics 79, 195, 236 ; popularity 
 191 ; preacher 169 ; priest 174 ; 
 and relics 267 ; self-confidence 
 135, 180, 189, 203, 278 ; self- 
 sacrifice 54 ; scepticism 183, 311 ; 
 and Spirituals 174 ; spiritual 
 daughters 41, 78, 97. 258 ; spirit- 
 ual development 149 ; subdeacon 
 81 ; temptations 51 ; vagabond 
 tastes 184, 185 ; visions 46, 50, 
 51 ; wanderings 134ff, 186 ; and 
 women 76, 78, 236, 258 ; writings 
 6, 186 
 Salinguerra ... ... ... 251 
 
 Salvation Army 338 
 
 San Benedetto di Polirone ... 188 
 San Bonifazio (Count Lodovico di) 256 
 San Procolo (battle of) .. 193 
 
 Sanctity, odour of 304 
 
 Santa Croce 351 
 
 Santo Volto 310 
 
 Savonarola ... 133 
 
 Scarabello da Canossa 229 
 
 Scatuzio 274 
 
 Schoolmen 283 
 
 Schulz (Alwin) 14 
 
 Sectaries patronized 188, 309, 328, 
 
 popular 331, 332 
 
 Sects 322, 323 
 
 Secundus .. 28 
 
 Sedulius 31 
 
 Segarello, Gerardino ... 323ff-" . 
 
 Segnorelli 196 
 
 Semiramis . . . 77 
 
 Seneca 58, 91, 342 
 
 Sens 82, 136, 139, 154, 290, 313 
 
 Serpent (fable of) 217 
 
 Servants (treatment of) 13, 266 
 
 Sibyl 157, 214, 245 
 
 Sicilian vespers 202 
 
 Siena 45, 49, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 98, 
 
 146, 153, 179, 182, 304 
 
 Silvester (St.) 96 
 
 Simon of Colazzone .. ... 174 
 
 Simon de Manfredi ... ... 113 
 
 Simon of Montesarchio ... 173, 174 
 Simon de Montfort ... 146,309 
 
 Sinibaldo Lupicini 211 
 
 Sinigaglia ... 198, 311, 313 
 
 Slaves, oriental ... ... ... 2 
 
 Sordello 133 
 
 Spirituals 70, 106, 152, 161, 165, 174, 
 "SJfO 253, 264 ; persecuted 73, 315, 345, 
 
 '346. Mil 
 Stephen the Englishman 72, 137, 168, 
 
 171, 174, 179 
 
 Stigmata of St. Francis 118, 315 
 
 Strasburg ... ... ... ... 173 
 
 Suicide, monastic ... ... 318 
 
 Susa 178 
 
 Symonds, J. A 21,26 
 
 TADDEO(Bro.) 
 Taddeo Buonconte 
 Taddeo da Suessa 
 
 Tarascon 
 
 Tartars 
 
 Taunton(Fr.) 
 
 Tears in prayer ... 
 
 Tebaldello 
 
 Tebaldo Francesco 
 
 Theodoric 
 
 Thomas Aquinas (St.) 
 
 284, 298, 314 ; his 
 
 demned 315 
 Thomas degli Armari 
 Thomas a Becket 
 Thomas Cantilupe (St. ) 
 Thomas of Capua 
 
 173 
 
 ... 47, 227 
 
 121 
 
 ... 147, 167 
 ... 135, 223 
 
 70 
 
 317 
 
 ... 197, 199 
 
 115 
 
 193 
 
 63, 150, 246, 
 doctrines con- 
 
 ... 47 
 
 41, 88, 96 
 
 315 
 
 . 99
 
 446 
 
 From St. Francis to Dante. 
 
 Thomas of Celano .!- 11, 18, 340 
 Thomas of Chantimprl 9, 30, 56, 239 
 
 276, 295 
 Thomas of Eceleston 73, 151, 168,276, 
 
 292, 334. 342, 343 
 
 Thomas the Irishman (Bro.) ... 332 
 Thomas of Lancaster : ... 309 
 
 Thomas of Pavia 72, 103, 269 
 
 Tithe quarrels 225,302 
 
 Tocco 151 
 
 Todi 338 
 
 Toledo 261, 268, 274 
 
 Tolerance, modern 314 
 
 Torquemada (Card. Juan) ... 336 
 
 Tortona 178 
 
 Torture 112, 120, 207, 209, 210, 218, 
 
 230, 266 
 
 Toulouse 170 
 
 Tournaments and vendettas ... 246 
 Trade unions ... ... ... 224 
 
 Traversara (Casa) ... ... 195 
 
 Treachery 1 99, 209, 2 1 1 , 2 1 7, 246 
 
 Tripia 325 
 
 Troyes 135 
 
 Trutannus . 237 
 
 Turin 76, 117 
 
 Tuscany 41, 49, 50, 72, 76, 81, 82, 103, 
 
 118, 133, 169, 181, 183, 200, 237, 
 
 261. 
 
 UBALDINO (Bro.) 196 
 
 Ubaldino da Mugello 258 
 
 Uberti 131,205 
 
 Ubertino da Casale 56, 63, 65, 110, 
 
 253, 336, 339, 340, 343, 346. 
 Uberto Pallavicino 127, 191, 255, 256 
 Ugo Amerigi ... ... ... 13 
 
 Ugode'Barci 196 
 
 Ugo Boterio 118 
 
 Ugo di Caasio 17 
 
 Ugo of Reggio 89 
 
 Ugolino (Card.) (See also Gregory IX.) 
 
 258, 276 
 Ugolino da Cavazza ... .. 125 
 
 Umile of Milan 48, 294 
 
 Umiliana (St.) .. 317 
 
 Unicorn 172 
 
 Universities, corrupt ... ... 57 
 
 Urban IV ... 268, 277, 278, 287 
 
 Urban V 309 
 
 Urgeliac 143 
 
 Usury 104, 253 
 
 VALLOMBROSA (Order of) ...183 
 Vandalism 16, 69, 111, 160, 161, 
 
 193, 198, 202, 205, 207, 212, 219, 
 
 229, 301 
 Varagine. Jacopo da .. 39,167 
 
 Vatatzes 108, 176 
 
 Vendettas 197, 203, 204, 205, 210, 
 
 211, 215, 229. 233, 246, 312 
 Venice ... 188, 194, 195, 234. 249ff 
 
 Vermin 67, 71, 194, 325 
 
 Vernaccia ... ... ... ... 207 
 
 Verona ... 118, 159, 160, 201 
 
 V4zelay 311, 313 
 
 Vicenza 26, 159 
 
 Victoria 117, 118, 122, 123, 124, 126, 
 
 131, 136, 244 
 Vienne 176, 177 ; Council of 301 
 
 Vilana de' Stefani 19 
 
 Villani 6, 202, 240 
 
 Villano da Ferro ... ... ... 244 
 
 Vincent of Beauvais 56, 119, 313 
 
 Viridiana (St.) 31 
 
 Visions, false 32,317 
 
 Vita (Brother) 99,100 
 
 WADDING 6, 31, 37, 63, 72, 76, 101, 
 108, 185, 276, 277, 301 
 
 Walter (Bro.) ... Ill 
 
 Walter Map 38 
 
 Ward (Wilfrid) .275 
 
 Wars 39, 42, 59, 112, 152, 194, 200, 
 201, 204 ; desolation of 60, 208, 
 301 ; cruelty of 118, 120, 218, 238 
 
 Wesleyans 41,90,346 
 
 Wiclif 350 
 
 William of Auxerre .. 103, 137 
 
 William Britto 104 
 
 William da Fieschi 189 
 
 William of Piedmont 173 
 
 William of Sicily 240 
 
 Wine ... 92, 107, 207, 258, 270 
 
 Wolves 39, 171 
 
 Women, status and treatment of 13, 
 96, 115, 126, 196, 201, 202, 209, 
 228, 229, 237, 251, 253, 255 ; not 
 to speak in Church 28 ; unfit for 
 power 76, 77 
 
 Writing 98, 105, 108, 111, 11?, 113, 
 153, 160, 174, 235, ?9i 
 
 ZAMBRASINO DE 1 ZAMBRASI 199
 
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