Latin Church, bound to its interests and careful for its majesty. Nay, when there was an unbroken series of Roman Popes during two full centuries, the supremacy itself had dwindled to a shadow; and local tyrants, like the Counts of Tusculum, or women of infamous reputation like Theodora and Marozia, set up, pulled down, and degraded to the humble position of their dependents, the successors of the Apostles. Pilgrims at the central shrine of Christendom were robbed and put to flight; the Popes were assaulted while engaged in their most solemn functions at the altar; they were thrown into prison and murdered by their rebellious kinsfolk. No less than six and thirty Popes are reckoned, who, in ages less barbarous than the tenth century, maintained an unequal contest with the Romans, until they escaped to Avignon, and, like the Emperors, became for seventy years absentees from a city which they could never control.

What is the explanation of these recurring tumults? Can it be, as St. Bernard implies when writing to his disciple Eugenius III, the Roman character-'a nation nursed in sedition, cruel, untractable, and scorning to obey, unless they are too feeble to resist'? He goes on to charge them with 'adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason,' as the familiar arts of their policy.' The Saint indulges in rhetoric which we must not press to its full extent; yet our latest observer, Mr. Crawford, finds in the Romans a certain likeness to their ancestors, above all, as being instinct with the spirit of opposition, as easily stirred to rage, saturnine, restless, sudden, ferocious in revenge, and, though not enduring military discipline, still by no means cowards when their blood is up. He ascribes much to the conflict of races which have never been assimilated as in northern lands, much also to the feudal independence whereby every great house looked to its own followers for protection, or employed them against its neighbour, lest he should climb too high. The mediaval baron was not far removed from the robber who had descended on Italy in quest of blackmail; he sold his help like a condottiere to Pope, Emperor, Duke, or Bishop, as readily as the freebooter to whom all causes were indifferent and all principles unknown. The Middle Ages were times of individual enterprise and lonely daring, such as India saw on a grander scale after the Mogul had lost his power; and Rome could not be an exception to the times. So far Mr. Crawford. But, true as these things are, the explanation which we seek lies beyond them.

* Gibbon, viii, 194. Bernard, ' De Consideratione,' Iv, ii.

Venice, Genoa, Florence, and other Italian cities rose out of the feudal anarchy to an ordered, though sometimes interrupted, freedom; they attained to a political unity, which Rome never reached. The pretensions of noble families were compelled elsewhere to give place before Republican ideas. How came it that in the Eternal City nobles outlasted the Republic, which did but struggle for existence a little while, and then passed away at the presence of the Pope or his legate? We must fall back on the latent antagonism, always abiding within its walls, between ideas, none of which could be annihilated until the task assigned to it was done. We have remarked how the last Emperor crowned in St. Peter's came thither in the days of Nicholas V, under whom, next year, in 1453, Stephen Porcaro, the last of the popular conspirators, was beheaded. The fifteenth century did not welcome a Roman Republic; it received with adulation the Popes who, by leading in the Renaissance, had shown their desire to foster art and civilisation, though little aware of what the consequence would be to themselves before a hundred years were over. Their turn had now come. The patriotic idea must wait or be transformed, and popular freedom did not get the upper hand, though the nobles were overthrown.

Still, the classic ruins were always preaching the same text, which was as old as Lucan, against every kind of Cæsar and in praise of liberty:—

'Quod fugiens civile nefas redituraque nunquam
Libertas ultra Tigrim Rhenumque recessit:

Ah toties nobis jugulo quæsita vagatur

Germanum Scythicumque bonum, nec respicit ultra
Ausoniam.'

There were always those who declined to believe that it would never return-patriots or dreamers, said 'Corinne,' with Tacitean brevity, 'qui ont pris les souvenirs pour les espérances.' The first of them was perhaps also the noblestArnold of Brescia, not a Roman, but on fire with Roman aspirations. The Capitol, he said, must be rebuilt, the dignity of the Senate restored, the equestrian order revived, the Pope confined to his spiritual functions. 'Arnold is the historic precedent,' observes Gregorovius, for all the forces, theoretical or practical, which have revolted against the secular character of the clergy.'t Whether he saw into the 'transformation of the cities,' so marked in the twelfth century, or understood that the quarrel about investitures would shake the Empire to its * 'Pharsalia,' vii, 432.

† Gregorovius, IV, Part ii, 505, 547.

foundation and bring in a new world, may be doubted. Yet he did mean 'to wrest the power from the nobility, to deprive the clergy of their estates, the Pope of the principality, and to transfer his sovereign rights to the Commune'; while his enthusiasm for the classic ages led him to imagine that Rome might become once more 'the seat of the Empire, the source of Freedom, the mistress of the world.'* Two strangers, the English Pope Hadrian IV, and Frederic Barbarossa, the Emperor from beyond the Alps, brought Arnold, in 1155, to the same end as Savonarola, with whom he has been not unnaturally compared. Strangulat hunc laqueus, ignis et unda vehunt,' writes Geoffrey, a chronicler of the time. But neither fire nor

water made an end of his remembrance. He was held aloft as the champion of the Populus Romanus, to be imitated in after centuries by Stefaneschi, Rienzi, and Porcaro, while United Italy regards him as the impersonation of its creative idea.

But he was rather its herald than its embodiment.

'The Romans of the present day,' we are told by Gregorovius, 'who dispute the Pope's temporal authority, derive their arguments from the majesty of the Italian nation, of which Rome is the capital, and to whose natural right the merely historical right of the Popes must yield. . . . In Arnold's time the idea of the unity of the nation was unknown, and patriots took their stand on the ground of antiquity. The majesty of the Roman people was for them the source of all power, the Roman Empire was an indestructible conception, and the Emperor was the magistrate of the Republic, elected and installed by the people.' t

History confirms these views with remarkable emphasis. In 1144, Arnold had preached, almost in the language afterwards familiar to Wycliffe, against the temporal possessions of the clergy. His opinions had been condemned by Innocent II and a Lateran Council, and a revolution had broken out in Rome. The Senate was restored, Jordan Pierleone was appointed Patrician, or Chief of the State, and, says Gregorovius, the city renewed the attempt, made in the time of Alberic, to dethrone the Pope.' On the part of the Commune, says Otto of Friesing, they brought all his regal claims under the Patrician's rights, and told him that he must support himself, as the clergy did of old, on tithes and oblations.' The Senators were not nobles; for these, terrified lest the Pontiff's overthrow should carry with it a restoration of their fiefs to the Republic, took part with Lucius II, and even the Frangipani gave up their + Ibid., 519.

* Gregorovius, IV, Part ii, 479, 501.

Ibid., 489.

place as leaders of the German faction. It was at this conjuncture that they became possessed of the Colosseum as well as the Circus Maximus, and of the Arches of Titus, Constantine, and Janus Quadrifrons. But the faction which held the Capitol belonged to the small people,' who were getting ready, said the new Pontiff, Eugenius III, to elect two Consuls, one of whom should bear the name of Emperor. In 1145, this much exercised Pope made his entry into the Lateran; not, however, until he had recognised the Commune, while to himself was granted the investiture of the Sacred Senate.' In the list of twenty-five Senators which has been preserved, scarcely any names are mentioned but those of the burgher class. The revolution had been throughout Republican and plebeian. The Italian towns stood aloof; but during a second revolt, which broke out almost on the heels of the first and was finally extinguished in blood, the Senate did not cease to harp on 'the Empire of the Romans, to restore which was their unanimous endeavour.' During so many changes of fortune, their idea remains always the same; Italy as a nation has not come to the birth; and the Cæsarean despotism of Justinian,' as Gregorovius concludes, 'was mingled,' by these Republicans, 'with the fundamental laws of democracy.'

In that uprising of immemorial though shadowy claims, now against the Pope, who held of a power invisible, and now against an Emperor, who was, after all, not a Latin, but a Frank or Greek or Teuton, the historian contemplates a strange and unparalleled tragedy. The sole auxiliaries upon which the Roman People could count were, says Gregorovius, 'the walls of Aurelian, the Tiber, the malaria, and the ghosts and monuments of their great ancestors.'t Singularly enough, he has overlooked one element which was more powerful than all these the living tradition, or custom of the city, preserved in its local districts, the fourteen Regions, and in the populace itself which dwelt there under its freely chosen captains, and which had its emblems or banners reminding us of the legionary standards; its crescent, column, wheel, griffin, stag, or what not-heraldic devices known long before 'chivalry' was invented. These institutions kept alive a sense of neighbourhood and hostility which is active still beneath all the Italian patriotism. The Regions were a survival of the Plebs Romana; ever at odds with Senate, Emperor, Pope, and a menace to any Government, because the very soil brought them forth, and no legislation could do away with their aboriginal fierceness.

* Gregorovius, Iv, Part ii, 521, 511,-520.

† Ibid., 541.

On this subject Mr. Crawford writes eloquently :

'Without the Regions,' he tells us, 'the struggles of the Barons would probably have destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John XIII a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorised the Barons and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not have made himself Dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the Pope and the Cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of medieval Rome could not have found a place in history.'*

According to Lanciani and Professor Middleton, Augustus divided the city into fourteen Regions, each being subdivided into Vici, or parishes, varying in number from seven to seventyeight. There were two hundred and sixty-five Vici in all. Each Vicus formed a religious body with its ædicula Larium or Compitalis; and they were presided over by Magistri Vicorum, the lowest in rank of the Roman magistrates. The first Region was Porta Capena, extending perhaps as far as the later Wall of Aurelian; the fourteenth was Transtiberina-Trasteverewhich contained the largest number of parishes, and took in the whole city across the river, with the Janiculum, the Vatican, and the Island of the Tiber.†

This number of fourteen has varied a little at different epochs; nor do the modern Rioni correspond to the ancient, since five, at least, of them cover the solitudes on which Imperial Rome displayed its magnificence, while the Campus Martius, which, in Pliny's time, was laid out symmetrically with great open spaces and fine monuments, afterwards became the most thickly populated quarter of Rome. The first of the new Regions is Monti,' or the Hills; it includes the Quirinal, Esquiline, and Cælian; it is by far the largest of all the districts; and before 1870 much of it was 'either fallow land or ploughed fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruin rose here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the midst of which towered the enormous Basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St. John Lateran.' + Trastevere and the Borgo closed the list; and as these were always Guelf or Papal in their sentiments, so Monti, down to the fall of the Temporal Power, was Ghibelline-in other words, Crawford, i, 107.

* Crawford, i, 103.

+ Middleton, i, 379–383.