a

CHAP. XVI. despair at the failure of his attempts at conciliation." A century afterwards Henry the Fifth's coronation produced violent tumults, occasioned by his seizing the Pope and cardinals in St. Peter's, and keeping them prisoners till they submitted to his terms. Remembering this, Pope Hadrian the Fourth would fain have forced the troops of Frederick Barbarossa to remain without the walls, but the rapidity of their movements disconcerted his plans and anticipated the resistance of the Roman populace. Having established himself in the Leonine city, Frederick barricaded the bridge over the Tiber under the fortress of St. Angelo, and was duly crowned in St. Peter's. But the rite was scarcely finished when the Romans, who had assembled in arms on the Capitol, dashed over the bridge, fell upon the Germans, and were with difficulty repulsed by the personal efforts of the Emperor. Into the city, whose narrow streets and thick-set strongholds made advance dangerous, he did not venture to pursue them, nor was he at any period of his reign able to make himself master of the whole of it. Finding themselves similarly baffled, his successors at last accepted their position, and were content to take the crown on the Pope's conditions and depart without further question.

A remarkable speech of expostulation made by Otto III to the Roman people (after one of their revolts) from the tower of his house on the Aventine has been preserved to us. It begins thus: 'Vosne estis mei Romani? Propter vos quidem meam patriam, propinquos quoque reliqui; amore vestro Saxones et cunctos Theotiscos, sanguinem meum, proieci; vos in remotas partes imperii nostri adduxi, quo patres vestri cum orbem ditione premerent numquam pedem posuerunt; scilicet ut nomen vestrum et gloriam ad fines usque dilatarem; vos filios adoptavi: vos cunctis praetuli.'- Vita S. Bernwardi; in Pertz, M. G. H. t. iv.

(It is from this form 'Theotiscus' that the Italian 'Tedesco' seems to have been derived.)

a The Leonine city, so called from Pope Leo IV, lay between the Vatican and St. Peter's and the river.

of the Germanic Em

Coming so seldom and remaining for so short a time, it CHAP. XVI is not wonderful that the Teutonic Emperors should, in Memorials the seven centuries from Charles the Great to Charles the Fifth, have left fewer marks of their presence in Rome perors in than Titus or Hadrian alone has done; fewer and less Rome. considerable even than those which tradition attributes to Servius Tullius and the elder Tarquin. Those monuments which do exist are just sufficient to make the absence of all others more conspicuous. The most important dates from the time of Otto the Third, the only Emperor who of Otto the attempted to make Rome his permanent residence. Of Third. the palace, possibly nothing more than a tower, which he built on the Aventine, no trace has been discovered; but the church, founded by him to receive the ashes of his friend the martyred St. Adalbert, may still be seen upon the island in the Tiber. In it there stands, in front of the high altar, an ancient marble font which shews upon one side a figure of St. Adalbert, and on another side one of the Emperor himself, both executed in the rude style of the eleventh century. Having received from Benevento relics supposed to be those of Bartholomew the Apostle,b it became dedicated to that saint, and is at present the church of San Bartolommeo in Isola, whose quaintly picturesque bell-tower of red brick, now grey with extreme age, looks out from among the orange-trees of a convent garden over the swift-eddying yellow waters of the Tiber.

Otto the Second, son of Otto the Great, died at Rome, and lies buried in the crypt of St. Peter's, the only Emperor who has found a resting-place among the graves of the Popes. His tomb is not far from that of his nephew Pope Gregory the Fifth: it is a plain one of roughly chis

b It would seem that Otto was deceived, and that in reality they are the bones of St. Paulinus of Nola.

As to the burial-places of the Emperors, see Note XIX at end.

Of Otto the

Second.

the Second.

d

CHAP. XVI. elled marble. The lid of the superb porphyry sarcophagus in which he lay for a time now serves as the great font of St. Peter's, and may be seen in the baptismal chapel on the left of the entrance of the church, not far from the monument to the last of the English Stuarts. Last of all must be mentioned a curious relic of the Emperor Frederick Of Frederick the Second, the prince whom of all others one would least expect to see honoured in the city of his foes. It is an inscription in the palace of the Conservators upon the Capitoline hill, built into the wall of the great staircase, and relates the victory of Frederick's army over the Milanese, and the capture of the carroccio of the rebel city, which he sends as a trophy to his faithful Romans. These are all or nearly all the traces of her Teutonic lords that Rome has preserved till now. Pictures indeed there are in abundance, from the mosaic of the Scala Santa at the Lateran and the curious frescoes in the church of Santi Quattro Incoronati, down to the paintings of the Sistine antechapel and the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, where the triumphs of the Popedom over all its foes are set forth with matchless art and equally matchless unveracity. But these are mostly long subsequent to the events they describe, and these all the world knows.

e

Associations of the highest interest would have attached to the churches in which the imperial coronation was per

d See note t, p. 178.

• See p. 116.

f These highly curious frescoes are in the chapel of St. Sylvester attached to the very ancient church of Quattro Santi on the Coelian hill, and are supposed to have been executed in the time of Pope Innocent III, possibly reproducing more ancient pictures which had disappeared. They represent scenes in the life of the Saint, more particularly the making of the famous donation to him by Constantine, who submissively holds the bridle of his palfrey. See p. 169. The picture was evidently executed under the influence of the claim advanced by Hadrian IV.

formed a ceremony which, whether we regard the dig- CHAP. XVI. nity of the performers or the splendour of the adjuncts, was probably the most imposing that Europe has known. But old St. Peter's disappeared in the end of the fifteenth century, not long after the last Roman coronation, that of Frederick the Third, while the basilica of St. John Lateran, in which Lothar the Saxon and Henry the Seventh were crowned, damaged by time and by fire and an earthquake in the fourteenth century, has been so wofully modernized that we can hardly figure it to ourselves as the same building."

Causes of the want of

mediaeval

monuments

Bearing in mind what was the social condition of Rome during the Middle Ages, it becomes easier to understand the architectural barrenness which at first excites the visitor's surprise. Rome had no temporal sove- in Rome. reign, and there were therefore only two classes who could build at all, the nobles and the clergy. Of these, the former had seldom the wealth, and never the taste, which would have enabled them to construct palaces graceful as the Venetian or massively grand as the Florentine Barbarism and Genoese. Moreover, the constant practice of war of the ariswithin the city made defence the first object of a house, beauty and convenience the second. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century, fortresses rather than mansions were what the great families needed. The nobility, therefore, either adapted ancient edifices to their purpose or built out of their materials those huge square towers of brick, a few of which still frown over the narrow streets in the older parts of Rome. We may judge of their number

• The last imperial coronation, that of Charles the Fifth, took place in the church of St. Petronius at Bologna, Pope Clement VII being unwilling to receive Charles in Rome. It is a grand church, but the choir, where the ceremony took place, has been 'restored' out of recognition since Charles's

tocracy.

CHAP. XVI. from the statement that the senator Brancaleone levelled one hundred and forty of them, as Frederick I had in his time destroyed a good many. With perhaps no more than one exception, that of the so-called House of Rienzo, a building obviously older by at least two centuries than the Tribune's time, these towers are the only domestic edifices in the city erected before the middle of the fifteenth century. The vast palaces to which strangers now flock for the sake of the picture galleries they contain, have been most of them constructed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, a few even later. Among the earliest is that Palazzo Cenci, whose gloomy lowbrowed arch so powerfully affected the imagination of Shelley.

Why more

was not done by the clergy.

A.D. 1308

1377.

A.D. 13781417.

It was no want of wealth that hampered the architectural efforts of the clergy, for large revenues flowed in upon them from every corner of Christendom. A good deal was actually spent upon the erection or repairs of churches and convents, although with a less liberal hand than that of such great Transalpine prelates as Hugh of Lincoln or Conrad of Cologne. But the Popes always needed money for their projects of ambition, and in times when disorder and corruption were at their height the work of building stopped altogether. Thus it was that after the time of the Carolingians scarcely a church was erected, though some were repaired and enlarged, until the beginning of the twelfth century, when the reforms of Hildebrand had breathed new zeal into the priesthood. The Babylonish captivity of Avignon, as it was called, with the Great Schism of the West that followed upon it, was the cause

h The name of Cenci is a very old one at Rome: it is supposed to be an abbreviation of Crescentius. We hear in the eleventh century of a certain Cencius, who on one occasion made Gregory VII prisoner. The Palazzo Venezia at the southern end of the present Corso is also of early date.