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FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE.

FROM ST. FRANCIS TO DANTE

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHRONICLE OF THE FRANCISCAN SALIMBENE ;

(1221-1288)

WITH NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM OTHER MEDIEVAL SOURCES.

BY

G. G. COULTON, M.A.

^econti (Etiition,

REVISED AND ENLARGED

Whan alle treswes aren tried, tretuthe is the best."

(piers plowman).

Eontion : DAVID NUTT, 57, LONG ACRE.

1907.

BARNICOTT AND PEARCE PRINTERS

i

TO

MY FATHER, MY MOTHER, AND MY WIFE.

Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive

in 2008 witii funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

Iittp://www.arcliive.org/details/2edfromstfrancis00couluoft

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 Saunders, p. 91.

viii Preface to Second Edition.

suspicion o£ 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 com-se, 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 ofiicial 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 efibrt 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 Modem Hiatory, 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 oflScial 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 pei'sistence on the other side. The extreme dread of partiahty, 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 oflPender 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 AthencBum while the editor nods, or to herd with other ancient prejudices in the Saturday Revieio. 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 ice 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. R. 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

quale 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 finalitj, even in the limited sense in which that word can ever be rightlj used. Large numbers of vital documents are still imprinted : 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.

Froude's "Early Life of Thomas Carlyle" (1891), vol. ii, pp. 16, 85.

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 glimmering 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 chng 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 iSalimbene, 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
11.	Parentage and Boyhood	12
III.	The Great Alleluia	21
IV.	Conversion .....	38
V.	A Wicked World ....	49
VI.	Cloister Life ....	. 62
VII.	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
XII.	Wanderjahre ....	. 134
XIII.	Abbot Joachim's Theory of Development .	. 150
XIV.	Further Wanderings	167
XV.	A Bishop's Conscience	176
XVI.	Settling Down ....	185
XVII.	Taking in Sail ....	201
XVIII.	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
XXIIl.	Clergy ajjd People ....	292
XXIV.	Faith .....	305
XXV.	Believing and Trembling	316
XXVI.	The Salt and its Savour	334
XXVII.	Conclusion .....	349
Appendices ......	355
Index	......	435

DESCRIPTION OF FRONTISPIECE.

The frontispiece (for kind permission to use which 1 have to thank Messrs. Cassell 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) betM'een 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 "\'ecchia, 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 : Aflf6. i.v, 3).

Chapter I. The Autobiography of Brother Salimbene.

THIS — the most remarkable autobiography of the Middle 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 Germnnice, (Vol. xxxii, Scriptores). An edition was indeed published in 1857 at Parma : but this w^as 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 scandaHzed readers of long ago '} 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 fulfilhng 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 bhndness in the passionate concentration of the original idea ; so that the movement soon took quite a different direction, and liberated quite diiferent 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 brotlier friars for no worse fault than obstinate devotion to the strict Rule of St. Francis. The Saint was the especial Ay)Ostle 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 wlien they did not themselves set the example.-

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 Avorld — 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 reader the retirement into monastic Hfe almost or quite unnecessary : and therefore, though there has been no age in which monks might so easily hve 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 Enghsli 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 Avould 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. The 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 ])lane 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 tliere 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 flye, 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 mm 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 imderstanding 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 thj lips, therefore hath God blessed thee for ever.' "^ We have here, therefore in Montaigne's words, " un livre de honnc 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 (rod'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."^ 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.^ 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 diflSculties 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 ' Octavianiis Ccesar Augustus, etc.^ 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 cln-onicle, 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, 1 have excellently composed, and Avhich 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 vohunes of Analccia Franciscana, by which the friars of (iuaracchi huve 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.^ Yet perhaps no Avriter 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 Re]mhlic. 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 difl^ercnces between our life and that of our seventeenth-century ancestors from even the most brilliant and penetrating comparisons between Jeremy Taylor and Liddon, liobbes and Herbert Spencer, Clarendon

8 From St. Francis to Dante.

and Carljle ? At the best, such studies could only illustrate and complete a real history written from very diiferent 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 Kultiir-und Sittcmjeschichte dcr Italienischcn Gcistlichkeit, 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. Xo 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 ditficulty ; 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 attomi)ts to strike an adversary who is heating himself with ecjiially 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 Avorld 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 Ciesarius of Heisterbach, and Thomas of Chantimpre. But Salimbene alone shows us every side of his

lo 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 IJltalic Mystique, and h(i Renaissance Italicnne. 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 Avithout 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 Salimbeue'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 faitliful 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.'^

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 Hible thoroughly well. Pages more are occupied with records of historical events compiled from other chronicles : the parentheses and repetitions arc multitudinous and bewildering. The book as it stands is less a history than materials for a history, like the miscellaneous paper bags from Avhich Hofrath Ileuschrecke 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 Avhich 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 Avill, however, find in Appendix C the original Latin of certain passages and allusions omitted from the text.

Chapter II. Parentage and Boyhood.

BROTHER Salimbene di Adamo was born of a noble family at Parma, in 1221, the year of St. Dominic's death. One of his sponsors was the Lord Balian of Sidon, a ^reat baron of France who had been vieei'oj for Frederick II in the Holy Laud. " 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, 1 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.^ 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 j)innacle 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 carth(puike 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-lleshed, 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 Confess lonale, 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 v^ery 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 thiown 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 Loon Gautier and Alwin Scluilz 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 Coutumes du Beauvoisis provided " que le marl ne doit battre sa femme que 7-a?sonnableme7it." But what Avere 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 suff're 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 I yet thou suflferest him until slaughter-time. Thy patience is but for the fruit's sake of the beast's fiesh, that thou majst 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 Avorld. Weary of his wife, the Emperor had seduced her cousin : and Jean de Brienne, exasperated by this double Avrong- 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 woidd 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 I 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 woidd 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 woidd 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 lady 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 tluis in merriment." One ^Yonders how CiangheUa's children were brought up; and we might ahiiost be tempted to look for one of them in the contemporary boj who was sent by his mother " to the common prison of Florence, to be there retained until he return to his good senses.'"-

Salimbcne, however, grew up under very different home influences. " My father's mother was the Lady Ermengarda. She was a wise lady, and Avas a himdred 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 I 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 1 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 oflices of the Clun-ch, each at the fit season ; and when- soever he was not busied with the oflices 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 snflPer children to cast stones against the Baptistery or the Cathedral to destroy the carvings or paint- ings^ ; 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 Keggio, 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 Avould 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 Yecchia, 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 Avith the Podestas to act as their advocate" (00). 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 iu 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 oft" (38). " The third am I, Brother Salimbene, who entered the Order of the Friars Minor, wherein 1 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 Balian 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 Of/nibene (All-f/ood), 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 favoural>le 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 Cclano, describing tlie 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 Avrote, gives a picture which we might well dismiss as an imhcalthy dream if it Avere not 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 imderstand the Friars until we have realized how many of them had plunged into Religion, like Salimbene, jtist 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 (iuarino, who was of kin to the Poi>e [Innocent IV]. lie had many other relations and connections ol 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' Stefaui, 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 Avords 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 Avhom death hath carried oflT in our days ; for within the space of sixty years mine own eyes have seen all but a few of those Avhom I have Avritten in the table of my kindred, and now they have departed from us and are no longer in the world. 1 have seen in my days many noble houses destroyed, in different parts of the Avorld. 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, atid powerful, is utterly extinct : likewise the house of the Stefani, whom 1 have seen in

20 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 sunmier is ended, and we are not saved.' Of which matter 1 have written above at sufficient length." Dante students w ill no doubt notice the strong similarity between this last passage and Purg. XI W 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 Katisbon 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*.

Chapter III. The Great Alleluia.

WHEN Salimbene was in his twelfth year, an event occurred 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 uo leader, let uie 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 holj innocence and honest life, whom also I saw and knew familiarly, both at Parma and afterwards at Pisa. This man had joined himself unto uo 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 bi'ass, 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 I ' 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, clemens 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' llarlo, 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 Cumje 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 gasp. Brother Leo made him promise to return and tell him of his 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, he jjrayed his comrades to awake him if they heard anything. And lo I 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 w'hen they had been laid at the liospital door, seeing to Avhat 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 diie reflection, he announced, " Since you have so good an opinion of me, 1 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. ^

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 w^as who, in the year 1238, prayed Brother Elias to receive me into the (3rder, 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 fcareth God is better tiian 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 ; aud 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.^ 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 1 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 bis 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 'em, 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 iMaria 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 month 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.^ 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 yeai', 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 wlio exalted jour Dominic, whom ye kept twelve years hidden in tlie earth, and, imless 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.^ This man, coming one day to the house of the Brethren Minor, and letting shave his beard by oiu- 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, bi-ethren, 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.

2 8 From St. Francis to Dante.

At which the Florentines began to langh, 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 pi'int. He himself had evidently some qualms about reporting it, for he goes on : " The Florentines took no oft'ence 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 om-selves whether this brother answered well or not ; and I reply that he answered ill, for many reasons. First, because he acted contrary to the vScripture 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 saith (xxii, 27), Fourthly, in that he who speaketh im- 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.''^ 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 confoimded the whole world by speaking with the sei-pent. . . . 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.^ .... 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.^ .... 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 fulhiess in spite of their apparent irrelevance to the Allehiia, because they are well calculated to give the reader an idea of Salimbene's discursive stjle, 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 1236 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 i)upil, the Abbot Guibert of Nogent, and in the Papal letter of 1238 to the Canons of the Holy Sepulchi'e 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- miuiion, 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 ofi'er 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 miserabl}' frustrated when the infant proved to be a girl. The good Bisho}) Thomas of Chantimpre does indeed blame the readiness of certain prelates in religion to tell lies for the j)i'ofit of their house ; yet even he approves a wife's pious deceit. The early Frauciscan 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 Viridiana, 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.^ St. Francis himself began his public career with such a pious theft ; and it is very difficult to imderstand 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]. Noav 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 therefoi'e 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 Avho 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.) INIoreover, 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.)"^*^

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 Allemannia* 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,^^ 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

* Ratisbou is in the district of Germany once inhabited by the Allemanni.

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.^^ 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 Avhich 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 in 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.^^ One day when he was to preach at a certain place, it befel 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 BerthokVs preaching, whatever task-work he might have to do.

Now it was Brother J5erthokVs custom to order his sermons which he intended to preach now in one city, now in anothei-, at divers times and in divers places, that the people who flocked to hear him might not lack food. Itbefel 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.'^ The banker hearing this, smiled and said, ' And how can 1 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 forthAvith to Brother Berthold with the lad}' 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. 2S

fulfilled readily and gladly to the praise of onr 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 (assasshiis) 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 Bretlu'en 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 comi'ade 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 Avholly 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. ^^ 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.^^) 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, w here 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 convent 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., j)^. 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 Analccta 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.

BLESSED be God," wrote Salimbene at the end of the 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 I " 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 will begin ! "

Professor Michael is much scandalized by the impenitent jovial- ity with which the friar quotes in extmso, on so slight a pretext, a poem which could scarcely be rendered into naked English. But Salimbone only followed the custom of his time ; the same poem, with a collection of others l)eyond conqjarison worse, was kept religiously until modern times in the great monastery of Bcnediktbeuern, ntid in fact nearly all the ultra-Zolacsquc 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.^

As Diotisalve and Primas drove the Alleluia out of Sahmbene'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 w^hich 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 Avas 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, Piacenza 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 From St. 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 mouth of Maj, in Old Testament phrase, as "the time when kings go forth to war.'' " Everj 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 religions 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 with warm admiration. The canonization of saints, in the same way, almost alsvays 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 kilhid by the adverse surroundings, and elastic enough to take sometliing of the outward colour of thuir 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 centurj 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 Salirabene'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, Avherein 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)^ 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\)hmo alevandhizo, ct de pioclo apicadhizo no po Vohm ynudere : ' 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,^ 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 stories 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 tor j 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, 12.38, 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. VVitliin 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 ]>hysician, and later on entered the Cistercian Order.

Sixteen years may seem a strangely innnatm-c ago at which

Conversion. 43

to renounce the world for life ; jet 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 cnide 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.^

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 Elias, 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 tlie infirmary, -where more delicate fare could be had thau the ordinary Rule permitted. Here, " though I had supped magnificently in my father's house, they set an excellent meal before me again. '^ But in course of time thej' 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 tiiat 1 had never even eaten the flesh stewed with them. So afterward I remembered that proverb which was often in men's months : ' The kite said to the chicken as he carried him off—' You may squeak now, but this isn't the worst.'^ 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 Avas 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 Avhich 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 Cortone, 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. Guide 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 Avhen 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. As 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."'^ How necessary was this rule in the friars' interest, Salimbenc'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 liis favour, he should hearken to him and give me back to mj 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 oj our trusty and well-beloved Guido di Adamo, etc. Brother Illuminato,^ 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 1 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, then 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 go with you, let him go in God's name. But if not, we cannot do 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 son 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 I 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^ who have deceived thee, but come with me, and all that 1 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 mourneth 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 I ' 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 Salimbeue's stay at Fano was brief. The friary lay outside the walls, bj 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, ' Sou, there is none good but One, that is, God.^ 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 1 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 adventui-e which seems to imply that he was scarcely yet settled in the Order. 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.^ 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 ! INIany 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 shouldst 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 Sou of God said unto me : ' I

* Salimbene here, as usual, reinforces his speech with several other texts — Rev. iii, 17 ; Jer. ii, 5 ; Ecc i, 2 ; Ps. Ixxvii, 33 ; and Ixxii, 19 ; Job xxi, 12, 13 ; and 1 Cor. ii, 14.

52 From St. Francis to Dante.

^am thj Saviour, and this is My Mother, and the third is Joseph who Avas 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 i-ambling disquisition on the merits of voluntary poverty and mendicancy : a theme so absorbing 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.^ 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 Avood 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. S3

the ear and felled him to earth. Aud 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 v.rought great f ollj. 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 imderstood 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 admii-ably 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 Scrij)ture 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 I Tim. iii. 5-7 and iv. 3, come as heralds of the last and worst age of the world. There was, however, enough truth 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 aud 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 fi-om the Order ; but he was prevented by death. For my father, dwelling hard by the Cathedral Church, was well known to Pope Innocent, w^ho 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. W hich may He grant us Who

A Wicked World. §§

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 Carljle'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."*

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

^6 From St. Francis to Dante.

thirteenth ceutury 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 i^uperabundant malice and iniquity." St. Bonaventura, Vincent of Beauvais, Humbert de Romans, Gerard de Frachet, Thomas of Chantimpre, Raimondo da Yigna (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.* 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 w^e have now at least 30 or 40 years before Doomsday."^

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 showed 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 Avith 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." Princes 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 Ave have Baptism, and the Revelation of Christ, and the Sacrament of the Altar, which men cannot really believe in or revere, or they Avould not allow themselves to be corrupted by so many errors. With all these advantages, how do we stand in comparison Avith 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 imderstand 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 I'emnant 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."^

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.^

This false perspective, however, Avas 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 Deus ex machina. 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 hved with all Dante's loathing and contempt, but his hopes rested on a General Council to reform the otherwise hopeless Church.^ 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 Salimbene'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 Imperial party held it. So it was also in Keggio ; and so also, in process of time, in Cremona. Therefore in those days was most cruel war, which endured many years. Men could

6o 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 nimiber 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 off 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 liunger ; 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.^^ 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. 6i

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 Yi,

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.^ 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. Bonaventura'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 " Calvinism or Methodism," was in fact specially common among the early Friars.^ 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 siich extraneous aids to devotion.' 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, I believe, by orthodox medieval theolo- gians. St. Bonaventura (following St. Gregory, and 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 " movirned 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.

I 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 than the Vica?' of Wakefield shows lis the average country parson of the 18th century. INIany important inferences which might be di*awn 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 iS7. 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 staiF, to twirl the end of one's girdle-cord, to sit with crossed legs, to laugh, to sing aloud, are all luiworthy 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 fi'ee and personal influence over them.* 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, publi8he<l 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't/e do ? to people iu 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 diiferent 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 ofFendeth 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.'

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 rauy 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 Dcum. 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." C^esarius 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 I 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 ofi^'ering to his lips a contraband cheese- cake, '^ such as the Lombards and French call a tarty 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 ?

-T^:

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 Avho 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.^ Monks and friars were men like ourselves, who, finding themselves pledged by profession to an impossible theoiy 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 Avriters. 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.''

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."^ 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.^

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 brovight 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 I'lamenca 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,

70 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."^" 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,^^ 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.^- 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. Cassarius 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."^^ 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, '. \

Pulex and ctdex and cimex, \^.

Mighty to leap is the pulex, '"^^f^

Swift on the wing is the culex ; '' - But 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.^* 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 a; finita tria sunt auimalia dira : Sunt pulices fortes, cimices culicumque cohortes ; Sed pulices saltu fugiunt, culicesque volatu, Et cimices pravi nequeunt foetore necari.

72 From St. Francis to Dante.

unreformed friars " as those who most infected other religious Orders with the seeds of decay. ^* Like the monks, thej had often pledged themselves as bojs 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 Bcvicic, and in a separate pamphlet.^® 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 Avith 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 mouths 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 jusculento'\, then he would eat cheerfully with the

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rest and saj, ' 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