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From From St. Francis to Dante, translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221-88), by G. G. Coulton, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, 1907; pp. 49-97.

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[49]

CHAPTER V.

A Wicked World.

BUT Salimbene’s stay at Fano was brief. The friary lay outside the walls, by the sea-shore, and he was haunted by the idea that his father had hired pirates to seize and kidnap him. He therefore gladly welcomed a message from Brother Elias, who, delighted at the boy’s constancy in cleaving to the Order, sent him word that he might choose his own province. He chose Tuscany, and went thither after a brief stay at Jesi. On his way, he changed his home name for that which he was to bear during the rest of his life. (38) “Now as I went to dwell in Tuscany, and passed through the city of Castello, there I found in an hermitage a certain Brother of noble birth, ancient and fulfilled of days and of good works, who had four sons, knights, in the world. This was the last Brother whom the blessed Francis robed and received into the Order, as he himself related to me. He, hearing that I was called All-good, was amazed, and said to me, ‘Son, there is none good but One, that is, God.1 From henceforth be thou called no more Ognibene but Brother Salimbene (Leap-into-good), for thou hast well leapt, in that thou hast entered into a good Order.’ And I rejoiced, knowing that he was moved with a right spirit, and seeing that a name was laid upon me by so holy a man. Yet had I not the name which I coveted: for I would fain have been called Dionysius, not only on account of my reverence for that most excellent doctor, who was the disciple of the Apostle Paul, but also because on the Feast of St. Dionysius I was born into this world. And thus it was that I saw the last Brother whom the blessed Francis received in the Order, after whom he received and robed no other. I have seen also the first, to wit, Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, with whom I dwelt for a whole winter in the Convent of Siena. And he was my familiar friend; and to me and other young men he would recount many marvels concerning the blessed Francis; and much good have I heard and learnt from him.”

50

In Tuscany, Salimbene dwelt in turn in the convents of Lucca, Siena, and Pisa. It is possible that he was twice at Pisa, since he had there an adventure which seems to imply that he was scarcely yet settled in the 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 courtyard, and entered it together. Therein was a living vine, overspreading the whole space above, delightful to the eye with its fresh green, and inviting us to rest under its shade. There also were many leopards and other beasts from beyond the seas, whereon we gazed long and gladly, as men love to see strange and fair sights. For youths and maidens were there in the flower of their age, whose rich array and comely features caught our eyes with manifold delights, and drew our hearts to them. And all held in their hands viols and lutes and other instruments of music, on which they played with all sweetness of harmony and grace of motion. There was no tumult among them, nor did any speak, but all listened in silence. And their song was strange and fair both in its words and in the variety and melody of its air, so that our hearts were rejoiced above measure. They spake no word to us, nor we to them, and they ceased not to sing and to play while we stayed there: for we lingered long in that spot, scarce knowing how to tear ourselves away. I know not (I speak the truth in God), how we met with so fair and glad a pageant, for we had never seen it before, nor could we see any such hereafter.2 So when we had gone forth from that place, a certain man met me whom I knew not, saying that he was of the city of Parma: and he began to upbraid and rebuke me bitterly with harsh words of scorn, saying; ‘Hence, wretch, hence! Many hired servants in thy father’s house have bread and flesh enough and to spare, and thou goest from door to door begging from those who lack bread of their own, whereas thou mightest thyself give abundantly to many poor folk. Thou 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 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 I 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 (1 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 I 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 I lifted my eyes and saw how the Son of God came from one of the houses, bearing bread and putting it into my basket. Likewise also did the Blessed Virgin, and Joseph the child’s foster-father, to whom the Blessed Virgin had been espoused. And so they did until my round was ended and my basket filled. For it is the custom in those parts to cover the basket over with a cloth and leave it below; and the friar goes up into the house to beg bread and bring it down to his basket. So when my round was ended and my basket filled, the Son of God said unto me: ‘I 52 am thy Saviour, and this is My Mother and the third is Joseph who was called My father. I am He Who for the salvation of mankind left My home and abandoned Mine inheritance and gave My beloved soul into the hands of its enemies . . .’ ” Under the thin veil of our Lord’s speech to him, the good friar here launches out into a long and rambling disquisition on the merits of voluntary poverty and mendicancy: a theme so 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.3 There are, however, one or two points of interest in this wilderness of incoherent texts and old wives’ tales. Salimbene, who (as he tells us elsewhere) had at least one Jewish friend, gives us an interesting glimpse of thirteenth century apologetics. “Moreover in my vision I spake again to the Lord Christ, saying: ‘Lord, the Jews who live among us Christians learn our grammar and Latin letters, not that they may love Thee and believe in Thee, but that they may carp at Thee and insult us Christians who adore the crucifix; and they cite that scripture of Esaias, “They have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven work, and pray unto a god that cannot save.” ’ ” He represents the Jews, in fact, as objecting the texts which a modern Jew might quote; while he himself meets their objections with arguments which no modern apologist would dare to use. Indeed, his wordy and futile apologia illustrates admirably a well-known anecdote of St. Louis. “The holy king related to me” (writes Joinville, x. 51) “that there was a great disputation between clergy and Jews at the Abbey of Cluny. Now a knight was present to whom the Abbot had given bread for God’s sake; and he prayed the Abbot to let him say the first word, which with some pain he granted. Then the knight raised himself on his crutch, and bade them go fetch the greatest clerk and chief rabbi of the Jews: which was done. Whereupon the knight questioned him: ‘Master,’ said he, ‘I ask you if you believe that the Virgin Mary, who bare God in her womb and in her arms, was a virgin mother, and the Mother of God?’ And the Jew answered that of all this he believed naught. Then answered the knight that he had wrought great folly, in that he believed not and loved her not, and yet was come into her minster and her house. ‘And of a truth,’ said the knight, ‘you shall pay it dear.’ With that he lifted his crutch and smote the Jew under 53 the ear and felled him to earth. And the Jews turned to flight and bare off their wounded rabbi; and thus was the disputation ended. Then came the Abbot to the knight and said the he had wrought great folly. But he said that the Abbot had wrought more folly to ordain such a disputation: ‘For here,’ he said, ‘are many good Christians present who, or ever the dispute had been ended, would have departed in unbelief, for they would never had understood the Jews.’ ‘So say I,’ added the king, ‘that none should dispute with them, but if he be a very learned clerk. The layman, when he hears any speak ill of the Christian faith, should defend it, not with words but with the sword, which he should thrust into the other’s belly as far as it will go.’ ” This story is all the more instructive because St. Louis was, in practice, extremely kind to the Jews in comparison with most medieval princes. Another medieval practice admirably illustrated by these pages of Salimbene’s is the wresting of Scripture to prove a preconceived theory, by distortion of its plain meaning, interpolation of words or phrases, and quotations from the Gloss,* as of equal authority with the Bible text. These time-hallowed liberties in the interpretation of Scripture go far to explain why medieval religious controversy, even among Christians, nearly always ended in an appeal to physical force. So long as a word and a blow was looked upon as the most cogent religious argument, men seldom attempted either to understand their opponents’ position or to weigh seriously their own arguments. And so in this passage our good friar loses himself in his own labyrinth of texts, and at last confesses that most of this elaborate dialogue has been a mere afterthought, — a “story with a purpose.” It was written, he tells us, to confute Guillaume de St. Amour and other wicked people who, seeing how far the friars had already drifted from the Rule of St. Francis, accused them of being the “ungodly men” of 1 Tim. iii. 5-7 and iv. 3, come as heralds of the last and worst age of the world. There was, however, enough 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 and said, ‘Your father salutes you and says thus: “Your mother would fain see you one day; after which she would willingly die on the morrow.” ’ Wherein he thought to have spoken words that would grieve me sore, 54 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 noviciate all temptations to apostasy (for so the Brethren called it, however unjustly), he felt a natural human complacency in looking back as an old man on what he had given up. Speaking of Cardinal Gerardo Albo, he tells us, “He was born in the village of Gainago, wherein I, Brother Salimbene, had once great possessions”: and he repeats the same phrase a second time, when he comes again to speak of the great Cardinal. Similarly, he cannot think without indignation of the miserable price at which his father’s house was sold when poor Guido was gone, leaving his wife and children dead to the world in their respective convents. “The Lord Jacopo da Enzola bought my house in Parma hard by the Baptistery; and he had it almost for a gift, that is, for a sum of small worth in comparison with that whereat my father justly esteemed it.” Finally, he dwells with pardonable pride on the honours to which he might have attained, under certain very possible contingencies, even as a friar. In those, as in later, days, there was no such friend for a cleric as a Pope’s nephew: and Salimbene, speaking of a nephew of Pope Innocent IV, continues: (61) “I knew him well, and he told me that my father hoped to procure from Pope Innocent my egress from the Order; but he was prevented by death. For my father, dwelling hard by the Cathedral Church, was well known to Pope Innocent, who had been a canon of Parma and was a man of great memory. Furthermore, my father had married his daughter Maria to the lord Azzo, who was akin to the Lord Guarino, the Pope’s brother-in-law; wherefore he hoped, what with the Pope’s nephews and what with his own familiar knowledge of him, that the Pope would restore me to my home, especially since my father had no other sons. Which, as I believe, the Pope would never have done; but perchance to solace my father he might have given me a Bishopric or some other dignity: for he was a man of great liberality.”

However, for good or for evil, our chronicler is now irrevocably rooted in his cloister, and his father has no sons left to him in the world. The two last males of his house have definitely exchanged all their early possessions for a heavenly. (56) “I, Brother Salimbene, and my Brother Guido di Adamo destroyed our house in all hope of male or female issue by entering into Religion, that we might build it in Heaven. Which may He grant us Who 55 liveth and reigneth with the Father and the Holy Ghost for ever and ever. Amen.” One needs, of course, at least a homœopathic dose of Carlyle’s “stupidity and sound digestion” to live at peace anywhere; but to nine friars out of ten the gain of the celestial inheritance would seem as certain henceforth as the loss of the terrestrial: for it is an ever-recurring commonplace 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 thirteenth 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 improvement 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. What is more, he plainly tells us that he looks upon even this new Revival as the last flicker of an expiring world. The Franciscan Order, he says, “has revived religion, which had almost died out in the eventide of a world whose sun is setting, and which is threatened by the coming of the Son of Perdition: in order that it might have new champions against the perilous days of Antichrist, fortifying and propping up the Church.”.4

Slender as were Vitry’s hopes, his compeers were more hopeless still. Most of them, however pious and learned and brave, simply ring variations on the theme which to us seems so incongruous on the lips of our remote ancestors: “The world is very evil, the times are waxing late!” Read the great poem of Bernard of Morlaix from which this hymn is translated, and you will find page after page of bitter and desperate lamentations on the incorrigible iniquity of the whole world. The greatest of all medieval historians, Matthew Paris, had no doubt that the 56 thirteenth century marked the last stage of senile decay. Adam Marsh, one of the greatest and most strenuous of the early Franciscans in England, is never weary of alluding to “these most damnable times,” “these days of uttermost perdition,” in which “no man can fail to see plainly that Satan is either already loosed or soon to be loosed, except those whom (according to the Scripture) the Lord hath struck with madness and blindness.” Grosseteste, unsurpassed in learning and energy among our Bishops, complained in a sermon before the Pope at Lyons that (leaving heretics aside) even the Catholic population was, as a body, incorporate with the Devil. Innocent III writes in a Bull of “the corruption of this world, which is hasting to old age.” St. Francis, at the end of his life, sighed over “these times of superabundant malice and iniquity.” St. Bonaventura, Vincent of Beauvais, Humbert de Romans, Gerard de Frachet, Thomas of Chantimpré, Raimondo da Vigna (to name only distinguished friars who were not tempted to minimize the work of their Orders towards the betterment of the world), echo the same despairing cry.5 Dante shares their belief that the end of the world is at hand, and leaves but few seats still vacant in his Paradise (xxx. 131; cf. Convivio ii. 18.) His Ubertino da Casale gives a curious reason for thinking that the world will just last his own time: viz, Petrus Comestor,* in his commentary on Gen. ix. 13, had written “that the rainbow will not appear for 30 or 40 years before the Day of Doom; but the rainbow hath appeared this year [1318] . . . Wherefore we have now at least 30 or 40 years before Doomsday.”6

If Dante or St. Francis could come back to life for a single day, their first and greatest surprise would probably be that the world still exists after six hundred years, far younger and more hopeful than in their days; a world in which even visionaries and ascetics look rather for gradual progress than for any sudden and dramatic appearance of Antichrist. But more significant even than the chorus of misery and despair from thirteenth-century theologians and poets is the deliberate pessimism of a cool and far-sighted genius like Roger Bacon. He anticipated the verdict of modern criticism on the boasted philosophy of his contemporaries: that, with all its external perfection, it rested upon a Bible and an Aristotle frequently misunderstood, and 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, 57 which is one of the mainsprings of future progress for the world. The passage is so significant both of the barbarous atmosphere which stifled the greatest minds of the thirteenth century, and of the limited outlook which paralyzed their best energies, that I must give a full summary of it here. It was written in 1271, two whole generations after St. Francis began to preach; and the writer, it must be remembered, was himself a Franciscan.

Wisdom, he says, is intimately connected with morality; and although there has been a vast extension of learning of late — especially through the Friars during the last forty years — and, by the Devil’s wiles, much appearance of learning — yet “never was so much ignorance, so much error as now . . . For more sins reign in these days of ours than in any past age, and sin is incompatible with wisdom. Let us see all conditions in the world, and consider them diligently everywhere: we shall find boundless corruption, and first of all in the Head.” The court of Rome is given up to pride, avarice, and envy; “lechery dishonours the whole Court, and gluttony is lord of all.” Worse still when, as lately happened, the Cardinals’ quarrels leave the Holy See vacant for years. “If then this is done in the Head, how is it in the members? See the prelates: how they hunt after money and neglect the cure of souls. . . . Let us consider the Religious Orders: I exclude none from what I say. See how far they are fallen, one and all, from their right state; and the new Orders [of Friars] are already horribly decayed from their first dignity. The whole clergy is intent upon pride, lechery, and avarice: and wheresoever clerks are gathered together, as at Paris and Oxford, they scandalize the whole laity with their wars and quarrels and other vices.” 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 we have Baptism, and the Revelation of Christ, and the Sacrament of the Altar, which men cannot really believe in or revere, or they would not allow themselves to be corrupted by so many errors. With all these advantages, how do we stand in comparison with the ancient philosophers? “Their lives were beyond all comparison better than ours, both in all decency and in contempt of the world, with all its delights and riches and honours; as all men may read in the works of Aristotle, Seneca, Tully, Avicenna, Alfarabius, Plato, Socrates, and others; and 58 so it was that they attained to the secrets of wisdom and found out all knowledge. But we Christians have discovered nothing worthy of these philosophers, nor can we even understand their wisdom; which ignorance springs from this cause, that our morals are worse than theirs.” Therefore many wise men believe that Antichrist is at hand, and the end of the world. We know, however, from the Bible, that the fulness of the Gentiles must first enter in, and the remnant of Israel be turned to the Faith: which still seems far from accomplishment: for along the Baltic we have vast populations of pure heathens, to whom the word of God has never been preached, though they are nearer to Paris than Rome is. It may be that still, as of old, the long-suffering God will withhold his Hand awhile: “yet since the wickedness of men is now fulfilled, it must needs be that some most virtuous Pope and most virtuous Emperor should rise to purge the Church with the double sword of the spirit and the flesh: or else that such purgation take place through Antichrist, or thirdly through some other tribulation, as the discord of Christian princes, or the Tartars and Saracens and other kings of the East, as divers scriptures and manifold prophecies tell us. For there is no doubt whatever among wise men, but that the Church must be purged: yet whether in the first fashion, or the second, or the third, they are not agreed, nor is there any certain definition on this head.”7

That Bacon, on his lonely pinnacle of contemplation, found the world of the thirteenth century almost intolerable, will seem natural enough to those who follow the revelations which flow so freely even from Salimbene’s jovial pen. It is less natural, at first sight, that he should have done his own age the injustice of placing it on a far lower moral level than the Rome of Seneca or the Greece of Aristotle. But the cause is very simple; he knew nothing whatever of the inner life of ordinary Greece and Rome: he had only spent long years in studying the religious and philosophical writings of their greatest men. In a word, he had studied Antiquity as Newman studied the Middle Ages: and this false ideal of the past disabled him from making the best of the realities among which God had placed him.8

This false perspective, however, was inevitable in the thirteenth century. Men could not know the real past; and the present seemed only a chaos of conflicts and uncertainties. A broader view of history might have taught them how the very ferment of their own age was big with a glorious future; but such a wider view was impossible in those days of few and untrustworthy books. So they saw no hope in this world; no hope but 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 Captivity of Avignon. This expectation of a Deus ex machina seems to die out towards the end of the fourteenth century; undoubtedly the Black Death made men take more serious stock of the real grounds of their faith. Gerson spoke of the world in which he lived with all Dante’s loathing and contempt, but his hopes rested on a General Council to reform the otherwise hopeless Church.9 Meanwhile the lay element increased steadily in power: its influence may be traced in the growing magnificence of church buildings, furniture, and ritual. Presently powerful laymen set their hands, one by one, to assist that regeneration which the Church by herself had tried in vain to bring about: and then came the Reformation, with its slow evolution of a better world — a world which, with all its faults, enjoys such a combination of individual liberty and pubic 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 Reggio; and so also, in process of time, in Cremona. Therefore in those days was most cruel war, which endured many years. Men could 60 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. Nevertheless, hard by the town walls, men tilled the fields under guard of the city militia, who were mustered quarter by quarter according to the number of the gates. Armed soldiers thus guarded the peasants at their work all day long: for so it must needs be, by reason of the ruffians and bandits and robbers who were multiplied beyond measure. For they would take men and lead them to their dungeons, to be ransomed for money; and the oxen they drove off to devour or to sell. Such as would pay no ransom they hanged up by the feet or the hands, and tore out their teeth, and extorted payment by laying toads in their mouths, which was more bitter and loathsome than any death. For these men were more cruel than devils, and one wayfarer dreaded to meet another by the way as he would have dreaded to meet the foul fiend. For each ever suspected that the other would take and lead him 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 hunger; and they crept into the cities by night and devoured men and women and children who slept under the porticoes or in waggons. Nay, at times they would even break through the house-walls and strangle the children in their cradles.10 No man could believe, but if he had seen it as I have, the horrible deeds that were done in those days, both by men and by divers beasts. For the foxes multiplied so exceedingly that two of them even climbed one Lenten-tide to the roof of our infirmary at Faenza, to take two hens which were perched under the roof-tree: and one of them we took in that same convent, as I saw with mine own eyes. For this curse of wars invaded and preyed upon and destroyed the whole of Romagna in the days when I 61 dwelt there. Moreover, while I 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 I 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 Protestant 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.

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

* i.e., the traditional notes.

* The Mangiadore of Par. xii. 134.
[62]

CHAPTER VI.

Cloister Life.

BUT the cloister itself was only half a refuge. In vain did each generation try afresh to fence “Religion” with an impenetrable 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. I have pointed out elsewhere how false is the common impression that “Puritanism” and “Calvinism” were born with the Reformation.1 The self-imposed gloom of religion — the waste and neglect of God’s visible gifts in a struggle after impossible otherworldliness — the sourness and formalism and hypocrisy which are the constant nemesis of so distorted an ideal, meet us everywhere in the 13th century, and nowhere more inevitably than among the friars of St. Bonaventura’s school. There is, I believe, no feature of Puritanism (as distinct from Protestantism 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.2 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 paintings and carvings in monastic churches as little short of heathenism; and he argues most emphatically that the highest religion is least dependent on such extraneous aids to devotion.3 Multitudes 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 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 flourishng 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 theologians. 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 “mourned to be bound by obedience to a husband, by reverence to a mother, and by the care of her children,“ and prayed earnestly to be released from these impediments. Her prayer was heard, and “soon her mother, then her husband, and presently all her children departed this life.” The story is told with admiration by one Franciscan chronicler after another, even down to the sober Wadding in the middle of the 17th century. 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 introducing 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 us the life of the average friar than the Vicar of Wakefield shows us the average country parson of the 18th century. Many important inferences which might be drawn from it are most directly contradicted by St. Bonaventura (d. 1274), by other writers of his school, by the earliest chronicles of the Order, and — most incontrovertible evidence of all — by dry official documents. The Fioretti will always remain an inspiring example of what some men have done, but for the purposes of historical comparison the main question is, “How do most men live?”; and from this the Fioretti by themselves, would often lead us far astray. Nowhere within so small a compass can we so clearly realize average Franciscan life as from the directions to novices and older brethren compiled by St. Bonaventura, by his secretary Bernard of Besse, and by his contemporary David of Augsburg. These little books have been republished in a cheap form by the Franciscans of Quaracchi, and should be studied by all who wish to understand the 13th century friar.* But the reader must be prepared for things undreamt of in M. Sabatier’s St. Francis, admirable as that book is on the whole as a picture of the Order during the saint’s lifetime. Nothing is more remarkable in religious history than the rapid changes in Franciscan ideals and practice within a very few years.

The manuals of St. Bonaventura’s school — and their evidence is entirely borne out by such early documents as were composed without the poetic preoccupations which moulded the Fioretti — show a conventual ideal almost as gloomy as that of earlier monasticism. Of the Puritanism I have already spoken; the ideas of discipline were equally formal and lifeless. Novices are bidden not to thee and thou their seniors in the Order. To carry flowers or a staff, to twirl the end of one’s girdle-cord, to sit with crossed legs, to laugh, to sing aloud, are all unworthy of Franciscan decorum. So far from ever talking familiarly with a woman, or touching her hand, the friar must not even look at one when he can help it. Warning is heaped upon warning to show that spiritual friendship in these matters is even more dangerous than ordinary friendship; many pillars of the Order have fallen through this. The friar is thus cut off for life not only from the help of women, but from any free and personal influence over them.4 Again, to carry news is unfranciscan, or to speak of contingent matters without some such qualification as D.V.; or 65 to say How d’ye do? to people in whose health you have no special interest. As David of Augsburg sums it up, wherever the friar has no special prospect of spiritual profit, he is to look upon worldly folk with no more interest “than if they were so many sheep.”

Of course the average friar did not conform to all these rules. We cannot even begin to understand medieval life until we realize that the laws and regulations of those days represented only pious aspirations, all the more soaring because they were so little expected to bear fruit in fact. No doubt the average friar, in his easy sociability, resembled the friar of Chaucer and of Shakespeare, but the fact remains that the Constitutions of his Order, and the byelaws of his convent, required him to be quite a different person. Moreover (literary enjoyment and dilettante sentiment apart), we may well be glad that these most picturesque figures of the past are no longer living among us in their primitive shape. Brother Juniper running naked in our streets — or St. Francis himself; for on at least one occasion the earliest authorities expressly deny him even the scanty garments in which later prudery clokes him — we may well be glad to keep such children of nature within the covers of old books. We revel in Jacopone da Todi’s eccentricities, but we are happy to live 600 years to windward of him. And, in this respect, the sober prose documents are in complete agreement with the Fioretti: they show us many trances not only of the old unregenerate Adam, but, what is more, of the 13th century Adam, only dimly realizable at the best by politer readers of to-day. The directions 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 abstinences,” 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 fellow’s 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 the drink in the cup or upon any meat whatever. 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 refreshing 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 way 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.5

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 Augsberg 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 67 it.” Salimbene bears the same testimony in his own racy style à 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 too hearers and to officiants; as, for instance, at Prime on Sundays, when priests have to say their masses and the people await them, yet there is none to celebrate, for they are yet busied with Prime. So also with the recitation of the eighteen psalms at Nocturns on Sunday before the Te Deum. For these things beget sheer weariness, not only in summer, when we are harassed by fleas and the nights are short and the heat is intense, but in winter also. There are yet many things left in divine service which might be changed for the better. And it would be well if they were changed, for they are full of uncouth stuff, though not every man can see this.” Cæsarius 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 Vitæ Fratrum about a friar who was haunted all through service by a devil offering to his lips a contraband cheesecake, “such as the Lombards and French call a tart.” It was precisely during those long, monotonous hours that a man’s besetting sin haunted him most inexorably, as Nicholas of Clairvaux reminded his Brethren. “The great patriarch Abraham,” he adds, “could scarce drive away these unclean fowls from his sacrifice, and who are we to presume that we shall put them to flight? 68 Who of us can deny that he hath been plunged, if not altogether submerged, in this river?” It is the more necessary to insist upon this point, because of the false sentiment lavished on the monastic ideal by modern writers who would not touch with one of their fingers the burden of the strict monastic Rule. It is the merest cant to expatiate on that Rule without facing the fact that few ever came even within a measurable distance of strict conformity to it; while far more, having taken the vows without full understanding, bore afterwards not only the natural weariness of human flesh and blood, but the added burden of a system which less and less commended itself to their reason.6 Monks and friars were men like ourselves, who, finding themselves pledged by profession to an impossible theory of life, struck each an average depending on his own personal equation, varying in separate cases from the extreme of self-denial to the extreme of self-indulgence, but in the main following the ordinary lines of human conduct. Not one human being in a million can pray in heart for seven hours a day; few can even dream of doing so, and drowsiness in church is a commonplace of medieval monastic writers. Of the saintly and ascetic Joachim of Flora, for instance, his enthusiastic biographer assures us that he slept little at any time, and least of all in church. It is the same contract which meets us everywhere in the Middle Ages. Overstrained theories bore their fruit in extreme laxity of practice; and good men, distressed at this divergence, could imagine no better remedy than to screw the theory one peg higher.7

If outraged nature demanded a modicum of slumber during service, much of the same excuse can be pleaded, and was in fact allowed by the moralist, for irreverence. The extraordinary licence of behaviour in medieval churches was the necessary outcome of the elaborate medieval ritual, and of the small extent to which the words were understood even by the average officiant. Friars are warned not to laugh during service, or make others laugh, or pursue their studies, or walk about, or cleanse lamps, or come in late, or go out before the end. They must doff their hoods now and then at the more solemn parts, not toss their heads or stare around in their stalls; “It is blameworthy . . . . to busy thyself with talk while the office of the Mass is being celebrated, for Canon Law forbiddeth this at such times even to the secular clergy.”8 The same warning was needed by the layfolk in the nave, who (as Ubertino complains) were always loafing about in the friars’ churches “rather for the sake of curiosity and gossip than for spiritual profit.” Care must be taken to guard these layfolk, ignorant of the different steps 69 of the Mass, from the idolatry of adoring prematurely an unconsecrated wafer. Moreover, an officiating friar himself would frequently trip in his reading, to the irreverent glee of self-righteous Brethren, who scandalized others by their laughter or comments.9

There remains one more point to be noticed, if we are to realize the difference between Salimbene’s surroundings and our own. Many of his stories and allusions, far too natural then to need any special explanation from him, will seem scarcely credible in our age to those who have not yet realized facts which the 13th century took as matters of course. In studying medieval religious manners, we come to a point at which it is difficult to distinguish irreverence from the prevailing coarseness and uncleanliness of the times. The familiarity with which the people treated their churches had something pleasant and homely then, as it has in modern Italy. The absence of a hard-and-fast line between behaviour within and without the sacred building is in many ways very touching; yet, in a rude society, this familiarity had great inconveniences. The clergy often brought their hawks and hounds to church; and similar instances are recorded by Salimbene. For instance, when the Bishop of Reggio was buried in his own cathedral, it was quite natural for a dog to be present, and to show no better manners than a modern Protestant beast; nor were the citizens in the least deterred by reverence for the holy place when they wished to desecrate an unpopular governor’s tomb by filthy defilements. It is natural, therefore, that the Franciscan precepts for behaviour in church should resemble the counsels for table-manners. “While a single voice is reading in choir, as in the collects, chapters, or lessons, thou must take good heed to make no notable sound of spitting or hawking, until the end of a period, and the same care must be taken during a sermon or a reading.” A far more detailed warning lower down proves incontestably that, in personal cleanliness and respect for the church floor, the Italian of the thirteenth century was far behind even the Italian of to-day. It was the same elsewhere; in Provence, for instance, the dainty and aristocratic Flamenca is described as gratifying her lover with a momentary sight of her mouth as she lowered her wimple to spit in the church porch. And, as usual, we find that the neglect of cleanliness is accompanied by an almost corresponding bluntness of moral feeling; the warnings on this score point to a state of things which may indeed stagger a modern reader. The friar is bidden to observe the most scrupulous cleanliness at Mass; the server must “never blow his nose on the priestly garments, 70 especially upon the chasuble,” a warning which is repeated in even more grisly detail lower down: “moreover, he who ministers at mass must so keep his surplice (if he have one), as never in any degree to blow his nose on it, nor use it to wipe away the sweat from his face or any other part: neither let him expose its sleeves to drag, especially in the dust, over wood, stones, or earth.” What was worse, the offenders sometimes made a merit of their offence. “Certain careless [friars] . . . . can scarce keep [the long sleeves of their frocks], which have frequently been exposed to the utmost dirt, away from their fellows’ food, from the altar, or from the very maniple of the chalice. Such, who would fain please [God] by their very filth, brand their more careful brethren with the reproach of fastidiousness, and strive to colour their own vicious negligence with the show of virtue.”10 We may here read between the lines a further, and just, cause for the unpopularity of the Spirituals, with their stern insistence upon the Saint’s sordid example in dress, and their pride in wearing garments not only as coarse but also as old as possible. Many uncompromising old Spirituals wore, as others complained, frocks that had shrunk to the dimensions of an Eton jacket,11 and one such garment attained to a certain historical notoriety in the Order. Brother Carlino de’ Grimaldi, probably a scion of one of the greatest families in Genoa, had washed his frock (we are not told after how long an interval) and had spread it to dry in the sun. Here at last it lay at the mercy of the Brethren, who, having probably more than mere doctrinal differences to avenge, cut it into small pieces which they desecrated with medieval ingenuity.12 It is necessary to face this subject, since there is no other, except that of compulsory celibacy, which illustrates more clearly the practical weakness 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 sometimes shocked even the medieval layman, accustomed as he was, in the highest society, to many of the conditions of slum life. Cæsarius describes the conversion of a knight who had long wished to enter the cloister, but who always hung back, “on the 71 cowardly plea that he feared the vermin of the garments (for our woollen clothing harbours much vermin.)” The Abbot laughed away the scruples of the valiant soldier who would suffer such tiny creatures to scare him away from the Kingdom of God; and indeed, once admitted, the knight was soon sufficiently hardened to boast that “even though all the vermin of the monks should fall upon my single body, yet should they not bite me away from the Order.”13 Salimbene speaks jestingly on the same topic, quoting (1285-336) “those verses which men are wont to repeat: —

“Three are the torments that rhyme — ex,
  pulex and culex and cimex.
  Mighty to leap is the pulex,
  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.14 In short, all the early writings on the discipline of 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, and 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 72 unreformed friars” as those who most infected other religious Orders with the seeds of decay.15 Like the monks, they had often pledged themselves as boys to that which no boy can understand, while their manner of life exposed them to far more temptations than the average monk. It is impossible to do more than allude to this subject here, in the text; but I take the opportunity of pointing out that I have more than once requested, both privately and publicly, references for the most important statements of monastic apologists, such as Abbot Gasquet, and that these references have been steadily refused. On the other hand, I have given very definite evidence for my own contentions in the Contemporary Review, and in a separate pamphlet.16 Apologists of the Middle Ages have played upon the unwillingness of modern Englishmen to believe facts which can be proved to the hilt from contemporary records, though for obvious reason whose 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 himself even to imagine a state of things which is treated as notorious by medieval satirists and moralists, and is recorded in irrefragable documents. Charges which would be readily enough believed in modern Italy or Spain find little acceptance in a country like ours, where monks and nuns, living in a small minority under a glare of publicity and criticism, keep their vows with a strictness far beyond the average of the Middle Ages.

The third vow, that of obedience, was as radically modifed as the two others by the growth of St. Francis’s originally small family into an enormous Order. The most significant anecdote on this point is quoted by Wadding under the year 1258. In this year died one Brother Stephen, who deposed as follows to Thomas of Pavia, Provincial Minister of Tuscany — a great friend of Salimbene’s, it may be noted —” “I, Brother Stephen, dwelt for a few months in a certain hermitage with St. Francis and other brethren, to care for their beds and their kitchen; and this was our manner of life by command of the Founder.” We spent the forenoon hours in prayer and silence, until the sound of a board [struck with a mallet, like a gong] called us to dinner. Now the Holy Master was wont to leave his cell about the third hour [9]; and if he saw no fire in the kitchen he would go down into the garden and pluck a handful of herbs which he brought home, saying, ‘Cook these, and it will be well with the Brethren.’ And whereas at times I was wont to set before him eggs and milk, food which the faithful had sent us, with some sort of gravy stew [cum aliquo jusculento], then he would eat cheerfully with the 73 rest and say, ‘Thou hast done too much, Brother; I will that thou prepare naught for the morrow, nor do aught in my kitchen.’ So I, following his precepts absolutely, in all points, cared nothing so much as to obey that most holy man; when therefore he came, and saw the table laid with divers crusts of bread, he would begin to eat gaily thereof, but presently he would chide me that I brought no more, asking me why I had cooked naught. Whereto I answered, ‘For that thou, Father, badest me cook none.’ But he would say, ‘Dear son, discretion is a noble virtue, nor shouldest thou always fulfil all that thy Superior biddeth thee, especially when he is troubled by any passion.’ ” This anecdote, which is quite worthy of the Fioretti, gives us a most instructive glimpse into the strength and weakness of the Saint’s society. All his ways were intensely human and personal, but everything depended on his own spirit and his own presence. Nobody could have been angry with a saint who confessed so naïvely that he did not wish to be taken at his word: yet one sees at a glance how necessarily the increase of the Order thrust his direct authority into the background, and how naturally, while the veneration for his sanctity steadily increased, he himself fell from the position of a working Head into that of a a Dalai Lama, a sort of living relic, mighty to conjure with, but comparatively passive in the hands of others, and only liberating his soul by the deathbed protest of his “Testament” against those hateful courses upon which the Order had already embarked almost beyond recall.

In considering this revolt against St. Francis’s rule, we must bear in mind that it was the very intensity of the Saint’s ideal which caused that recoil, by a natural law as inevitable as gravitation. Thomas of Eccleston’s history, which is constantly quoted as the most vivid picture of the Order’s inner life, avowedly refers to a state of things already dead and gone within thirty years of the Saint’s death; already the writer speaks of the persecutions endured by those who strove for the original purity.17 It is idle to charge this decay to Brother Elias, or to any man or group of men; it was fatally involved in the very ideal of the Saint. As he hastened his own death by sinning grievously against Brother Body, just so he hastened the decay of his Order. Admirably as he protested against some of the crazy asceticisms of his age, he was still too much a child of his time. It is difficult to wish anything away from St. Francis’s own life, as it is difficult for an Englishman to regret the Charge of the Light Brigade. But, when our present age is taunted for its alledged soullessness by reactionaries whose eyes are too weak 74 to face the growing light of the times in which they live, it may be profitable to point out that in the Holy War, as in all other wars, we need not only courage and sudden self-sacrifice, but also calm judgment and even a certain amount of routine work.

The self-imposed hardships of an average friar’s life were very real, until at least the middle of the 13th century. Men were not wanting, even then, who managed to live more luxuriously in the cloister than they could ever have done in the World, as their Superiors frequently complained: but quite a considerable portion of the early friars had been boys of good family and position, to whom, after the first plunge, the trial was severe, for some years at least. We see something of this in the case of Salimbene, richly as his opportunities of travel and study indemnified him for those cabbages which his soul abhorred. We may gather it also from the very frequent mention of apostasies, either contemplated or carried out, in collections of Mendicant legends; and Berthold of Ratisbon, preaching to his Brethren about the middle of the century, implies the same. “Almost all Religious who have failed or still fail, in all religious Orders, have perished or still perish by reason of the evil example which they have seen and still see among the rest to whom they come. For almost all enter Religion with a mind most readily disposed to all good. But when on their entry they find one impatient, another wrathful, another carnal, another dissolute, another agape for news, another a mere trifler, another backbiting, another slothful, another breaking St. Francis’s prohibition against receiving money, then they follow in their ways and become like unto them.” He goes on to speak in the same breath of “so many in Religion” who thus “are corrupted and perish”; and the whole tenour of his sermons to his fellow-friars implies that, among the crowds who pressed with more or less precipitation into the Order (for the year of novitiate was not always strictly enforced) there were comparatively few who even approached its strict ideal. We get glimpses of this even in the records of the heroic age, and in those of a generation later the fact is gross and palpable. As St. Bonaventura shows us, the development from the friar of the Fioretti to something very like the friar of Chaucer was rapid and inevitable. Among even the best-intentioned of the first generation, few were able to keep their ascetic enthusiasm to the end.18 “When those who first kept the Order in its vigour are taken away or become enfeebled in body,” writes the Saint, “then they can no longer give to their juniors the same strict examples of severity as of old; and the new Brethren, who never saw their real labours, imitate 75 them only in that which they now behold in them, so that they become remiss, and spare their bodies under a cloke of discretion, saying that they will not destroy their bodies as did the Brethren of old. And, for that they see not the inner virtues which their elders had, they are negligent on both sides, neither exercising themselves in outward things nor grasping the inward virtues.” Berthold makes the same complaint in his own style. “Many took good care to avoid serious penance, clapping on bandages before they are wounded, . . . sparing themselves as tenderly as though they were silkworms, or silken stuff, or as though their flesh were as brittle as an eggshell.” Again, “they spare their bodies almost as tenderly as the relics of saints”; if one of them has but a little grace “he is like a hen, cackling so loudly over a single egg, that all grow weary of her, wherefrom she is driven forth from the house and loses her egg.” “Some [friars’] hearts are as the flesh of an old brood-hen, nay, as that of an old wild duck, which can scarce be sodden; for indeed a wild duck was taken for our convent which we boiled three days long and yet it lacked all natural tenderness, being till so tough that no man could cut it with a knife, nor would any beast eat thereof. Ye marvel at this in nature, far more should ye marvel that some — and thou thyself perchance among them — are stewed in the kitchen of Religion for nine or ten years, nay, for twelve, thirteen, or thirty years, and yet are ye altogether hard-hearted, and, what is more, impatient.”19

It will be necessary to glance again at the Friars as a whole towards the end of the book; meanwhile the present chapter may prepare the reader for Salimbene’s experiences in the Order. Miss Macdonell seems to think that the average friar was a more serious person than our chronicler; I cannot understand anyone thinking so who has read carefully the disciplinary works of St. Bonaventura’s school, the Constitutions of the Order, Angelo Clareno’s Seven Tribulations as edited by Father Ehrle, and Berthold of Ratisbon’s Sermons to his Brethren. A study of those works is calculated to make us accept Salimbene at something nearer to his own estimate — as standing above the common average of his fellows in nearly all respects, while he is far above that average in natural gifts, learning, and experience of the world.

* The Italian translation of Bernard of Besse’s book, published by the same community, must, however, be used with caution, as the text is softened down by omissions and similar changees, to avoid shocking the modern reader.

* Cf. Inf. vii, 123.

* In x finita tria sunt animalia dira:
Sunt pulices fortes, cimices culicumque cohortes;
Sed pulices saltu fugiunt, culicesque volatu,
Et cimices pravi nequeunt fœtore necari.


[76]

CHAPTER VII.

Frate Elia.

SALIMBENE had scarcely completed his novitiate, when a storm burst which had long been brewing within the Order. The Minister-General Elias, leader of the party which frankly abandoned the first strict ideal, and builder of the splendid basilica which now covers the Saint’s bones, was deposed from his office after a bitter struggle. Instead of bearing his defeat patiently, Elias “gave scandal to the Pope, to the Church, and to his Order,” by joining the Emperor Frederick, then excommunicate and at war with the Pope. Franciscan frocks were thus seen flitting about in the rebel camp, for Elias had taken others over with him: and he rode abroad publicly with the Emperor, whose trusted counselor he at once became. “Which was an evil example to the country folk and the rest of the laity, for whensoever the peasants and boys and girls met the Brethren Minor on the roads of Tuscany, they would sing (as I myself have heard a hundred times)

‘Frat’ elia is gone astray,
 And hath ta’en the evil way.’

“At the sound of which song the good Brethren were cut to the heart, and consumed with deadly indignation” (160).

Nor does Salimbene’s story of these first years leave by any means an impression of perfect harmony among those who remained within the Order, though, as will presently be seen, he himself made many friends there. To begin with, his gall was stirred by the way in which lady-superiors of Clarisses often lorded it over their fellow-nuns: for our friar was no believer in the “the monstrous regiment of women.” He describes (63) the “churlishness and avarice” of the Lady Cecilia, niece to Pope Innocent IV, and Abbess of a rich convent of Clarisses at Lavagna. The Clarisses of Turin had been driven from their convent by the ravage of war — a common story, as the pages of Wadding show — and 77 the Visitor of the Lombard province was doing his best to find other homes for the poor nuns. One only, the last of all, was brought to this rich convent; yet the Abbess, in her “hardness of heart and avarice and folly,” refused to receive a fresh inmate, and drove the poor refugee ignominiously from her door, in spite of the Visitor’s anathema. “Hereupon an ancient and devout Sister of the convent cast herself down before the altar and appealed against the Abbess to God, who presently answered, ‘I have heard thy prayer, and she shall be no more Abbess.’ So the Visitor sent a swift messenger forthwith to Chiavari to learn what had befallen that Abbess, and he found her dead and cursed and excommuncate and unabsolved; for even while the messenger was yet on his way, she began to be grievously sick and to fail for very faintness, and after divers torments she sank down on her bed and was at the point of death, crying, ‘Sisters, I die! Hasten! Help! Bring me some remedy!’ the Sisters came forthwith, pitying their Abbess, as was right. No mention was made of the salvation of her soul, not a word was spoken of confession. Her throat so closed that she could scarce breathe; and now, seeing death at hand, she said to the Sisters who were gathered round her, ‘Go an take in that lady! Go and take in that lady! Go and take in that lady! For her sake hath God smitten me! For her sake hath God smitten me! For her sake hath God smitten me!’ And with these words she yielded up her spirit, but it returned not to God Who gave it.”

Salimbene thinks the lady might perhaps have behaved better if she had been sent to rule over a strange convent far away from her powerful kinsfolk; but, to his eyes, the root of the matter lay in the constitutional unfitness of women to bear rule, and he dilates on this subject in truly medieval fashion, with a wealth of Biblical and profane quotations: “for woman, whensoever she may, doth take gladly dominion to herself, as may be seen in Semiramis who invented the wearing of breeches. . . . . Blessed be God Who hath brought me to the end of this matter!”

Yet, in spite of this sigh of relief, we find our good friar recurring almost immediately to the same ungallant complaints, and again, à propos of an Abbess of Clarisses (67). This was again in the first days of his new vocation, at Lucca, where he formed an intimacy with an aristocratic pair of doubtful morals, of whom he writes with his usual naïveté: “In the year 1229 the Lord Nazzaro Gherardini of Luccca was Podesta of Reggio, when he built the bridge and the Porta Bernone. His statue was set up in marble on the Porta Bernone which he made, and there he sits on his marble horse in the city of Reggio. He was a comely knight and 78 exceeding rich, my acquaintance and friend when I dwelt in the convent at Lucca. The Lady Fior d’Oliva, his wife, was a fair lady, plump and full-fleshed,* and my familiar friend and spiritual daughter (devota). She was of Trent, the wife of a certain notary, by whom she had two daughters, most fair ladies. But the Lord Nazzaro, when he was Podesta of Trent, took her from her husband and brought her, not unwilling, to the city of Lucca; and his own wife, who was still alive, he sent to a castle of his, where she dwelt till her death.1 The Lord Nazzaro died childless, and gave great riches to this lady, who, in course of time was beguiled (as she herself hath told me) into another marriage in the city of Reggio. He who took her to wife was Henry, son of Antonio da Musso, and she liveth yet in this year 1283 wherein I write. Both the Lord Nazzaro and the Lady Fior d’Oliva did much to comfort the Friars Minor of Lucca when the Abbess of the Clarisses at Gatharola stirred up the whole city of Lucca against the brethren, laying a blot on the elect, for that Brother Jacopo da Iseo would fain have deposed her because she bare herself ill in her office. For she was the daughter of a baker-woman of Genoa, and her rule was most shameful and cruel, and unhonest to boot, and she would fain have kept her rule by force, that she might still be Abbess. Wherefore, the better to hold her office, she lavished gifts on youths and men and worldly ladies, but especially on those who had any of near kin in her convent. And to such she would say, ‘This is why the Friars Minor would fain depose me, for that I will not suffer them to sin with our daughters and sisters;’ and so, as hath been said, she would have laid a blot on the elect, for she lied in her teeth. Yet for all that she was deposed, and the Friars recovered their honour and good report, and the city had rest from her troubling. I have therefore shown plainly how shameful is the dominion of women.

Salimbene records only one other noteworthy incident of these first days at Lucca. (164) “In the year of our Lord 1239 there was an eclipse of the sun, wherein the light of day was horribly and terribly darkened, and the stars appeared. And it seemed as though night had come, and all men and women had sore fear, and went about as if bereft of their wits, with great sorrow and trembling. And many, smitten with terror, came to confession, and made penitence for their sins, and those who were at discord made peace with each other. And the Lord Manfred da Cornazano, who was at that time Podesta, took the Cross in his hands and went in procession through the streets of Lucca, with 79 the Friars Minor and other men of religion and clerks. And the Podesta himself preached of the Passion of Christ, and made peace between those who were at enmity. This I saw with mine own eyes, for I was there, and my brother Guido di Adamo with me.”

It was apparently from Lucca that he went to Siena, where he enjoyed the privilege already recorded of a whole winter’s familiar intercourse with St. Francis’s first disciple, Bernard of Quintavalle. (39) Here also he received his first tinge of Joachitic Millenarianism from Hugues de Digne and other enthusiasts, as will be seen later on. Already, like most of his brethren, Salimbene took an active part in politics, working for the Pope against the Emperor. (174) “The See of Rome was vacant from the year 1241 to 1243, for the cardinals were dispersed and at discord, and Frederick had so straitly guarded all the roads that many men were taken, for he feared lest any should pass through to be made Pope. Yea, and I myself also was often taken in those days; and then I learned and invented the writing of letters after divers fashions in cypher.”

In spite of the preponderance of the lay element at Pisa, his next place of abode, he made very good friends there and loved the place. Although a powerful patron, Brother Anselm, Minister Provincial of Terra di Lavoro (552) “sent me letters that I should go with my brother Guido to dwell with him in his province, yet the Brethren of the convent of Pisa dissuaded us from the journey, for that they loved us.” Long afterwards, writing of the disastrous defeat of the Pisans at Meloria, he cannot help showing his pity for the sufferings even of his political opponents: “God knows I sorrow for them and pity them in my heart, for I lived four years in the convent of Pisa a good forty years since.” (535). Here also he was strengthened in his Joachism by “a certain abbot of the Order of Fiore, an aged and saintly man, who had placed in safety at Pisa all the books that he had of Abbot Joachim’s, fearing lest the Emperor Frederick should destroy his abbey, which lay on the road from Pisa to Lucca. For he believed that in the Emperor Frederick all the mysteries of iniquity should be fulfilled. And Brother Rudolf of Saxony, our lector at Pisa, a great logician and theologian and disputer, left the study of theology by reason of those books of Joachim’s, which were laid up in our convent, and became a most eager Joachite” (236).

As his stay at Lucca had been marked by an eclipse, so at Pisa he was startled by an earthquake. Two similar phenomena which occurred much later, in 1284, carry him back to these years 80 of his first vocation, and give occasion for an amusing anecdote and a very characteristic dissertation. (547-9). “Brother Roglerio of our Order, a native of Lodi, who had been a comrade of the Visitor of the Province of Bologna, was on his way back from the Roman Court wherein he had been with a certain Cardinal, and when he passed by Corenno, where he was to lodge, the inhabitants of that place said unto him ‘Holy father, we often feel earthquakes in this place.’ And immediately when they had said this an earthquake was felt. So the Brother said ‘He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth; He toucheth the hills, and they smoke’: and again ‘The earth trembled, and was still’; and again ‘Thou hast made the earth to tremble, Thou hast broken it; heal the breaches thereof, for it shaketh.’ But when the Brother had finished speaking thus, he looked round and saw a certain building thatched with straw, and said that he would sleep therein that night, ‘For if I sleep in some other house, it may be that the gutter-stones or tiles fall upon me, if the house be brought low; and there I shall die.’ So the women of that village, seeing and hearing these things, carried their beds into that thatched building, that they might sleep in safety by the side of the Friars. But a certain old man, seeing this, said to Broher Roglerio ‘Ye have done that which ye should not have done. For ye should always be ready to accept death, that the dust may return to the earth as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it.’ To whom the Friar answered ‘The blessed Jerome saith that “It is prudent to fear all that may happen”; and Ecclesiasticus “The wise man feareth in all things” [also Prov. xxviii. 14 and xi. 15; and Eccles. xviii. 27].’ All this I heard from the mouth of Brother Roglerio.” With regard to the following eclipse, Salimbene quotes a whole string of Bible texts connecting such natural catastrophes with the signs of the Last Judgment, after which he continues (549), “I have multiplied these texts because at one time the sun is darkened, and at another time the moon, and at times the earth will quake; and then some preachers, having no texts ready prepared for this matter, fall into confusion. I remember that I dwelt in the convent of Pisa forty years since and more, and the earth quaked at night on St. Stephen’s day; and Brother Chiaro of Florence of our Order, one of the greatest clerks in the world, preached twice to the people in the cathedral church there, and his first sermon pleased them, but the second displeased. And this only because he founded both sermons on one and the same text, which was a token of his mastery, since he drew therefrom two discourses; but the accursed and simple multitude that know not the law, 81 thought that he had preached again the same sermon, by reason of that same text which had been repeated; wherefore he reaped confusion where he should have had honour. Now his text was that word of Haggai, ‘Yet a little while, and I will move the heaven and the earth and the sea and the dry land.’ Note that earthquakes are wont to take place in cavernous mountains, wherein the wind is enclosed and would fain come forth; but since it hath no vent for escape, the earth is shaken and trembles, and thence we feel an earthquake. Whereof we have a plain example in the uncut chestnut, which leaps in the fire and bursts forth with might and main to the dismay of all who sit by.” Pisa, of course, is a city of the plain, but it is interesting to know what ideas were raised in Salimbene’s mind by the mountains which stand round it on the horizon.

At Siena he had received the subdiaconate (329); at Pisa he was ordained deacon (182); some time during the year 1247 he found himself a close spectator of the bloody struggle between Pope and Emperor. But before following him into that world of treasons, stratagems, and spoils, let us glance at those memories of Tuscan convents which most haunted his mind as an old man.

The Order in its early days, under St. Francis, had been specially distinguished by its unsacerdotal character.2 The saint himself was never more than deacon; and in a letter to the Order he evidently contemplated the presence of two priests in a single settlement of the Brethren as quite an exceptional case. Of the twenty-five friars whom he sent to evangelize Germany in 1221, thirteen were laymen, as were also five of the nine who began the English mission in 1224; it was not until 1239 that a priest, Agnello of Pisa, was elected Minister-General and could exclaim in triumph to the assembled brethren, “Ye have now heard the first mass ever celebrated in this Order by a Minister-General.” St. Francis had been content to impose on his brethren a plain and brief Rule, without “constitutions” or byelaws; St. Francis and his early friars had lived not in convents but in hermitages.3 But in fourteen years the ideal of the Order was already so changed that a young and ambitious student like Salimbene, in spite of his close personal intercourse with several of the earliest Brethren, could count it among the worst crimes of Brother Elias to have followed here in the Founder’s steps, though indeed he accuses him of having done so with a far different intention.4 He speaks of it as scandalous that he should have had to associate with fifty lay brethren during his six years at the two convents at Siena and Pisa, and that he, a clerk, should 82 have been subject at different times to a lay Custos and several lay Guardians. As to the lack of general Constitutions, though Salimbene is perfectly aware that neither St. Francis nor his immediate successor Giovanni Parenti had made any, yet he complains that the absence of such hard-and-fast rules under Elias resulted in a sort of anarchy; “in those days there was no king in Israel,’ he quotes (102); “but every one did that which seemed right to himself. For under [Brother Elias] many lay brethren wore the clerical tonsure, as I have seen with mine own eyes when I dwelt in Tuscany, and yet they could not read a single letter; some dwelt in cities, hard by the churches of the Brethren, wholly enclosed in hermits’ cells, and they had a window through which they talked with women; and the lay-brethren were useless to hear confessions or to give counsel; this have I seen at Pistoia and elsewhere also. Moreover, some would dwell alone, without any companion,5 in hospitals; this have I seen at Siena, where a certain Brother Martin of Spain, a little shrivelled old lay-brother, used to serve the sick in the hospital, and went alone all day through the city wheresoever he would, without any Brother to bear him company; so also have I seen others wandering about the world. Some also have I seen who ever wore a long beard, as do the Armenians and Greeks, who foster and keep their beard; moreover they had no girdle; some wore not the common cord, but one fantastically woven of threads and curiously twisted, and happy was he who could get himself the gayest girdle. Many other things I saw likewise, more than I can relate here, which were most unbecoming to the decency of the Franciscan habit. Moreover laymen were sent as deputies to the Chapter, and thither also a mighty multitude of other laymen would come, who had no proper place there whatsoever. I myself saw in a general chapter held at Sens a full 300 brethren, among whom the laymen were in the greater number, yet they did nought but eat and sleep. And when I dwelt in the province of Tuscany, which had been joined together out of three provinces, the lay-brethren were not only equal in numbers to the clerics, but even exceeded them by four. Ah God! Elias, ‘thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy.’ It would be a long and weary labour to relate the rude customs and abuses which I have seen; perchance time and parchment would fail me, and it would be rather a weariness to my hearers than a matter of edification. If a lay-brother heard any youth speaking in the Latin tongue, he would forthwith rebuke him, saying, ‘Ha! wretch! Wilt thou abandon holy simplicity for thy book-learning?”* 83 But I for my part would answer them thus from St. Jerome, ‘Holy selfishness profiteth itself alone; and howsoever it may edify Christ’s Church with the excellence of its life, by so much it worketh harm if it resist not them who would destroy her.’ In truth, as saith the proverb, an ass would fain make asses of all that he seeth. For in those days not only were laymen set above priests, but in one hermitage, where all were laymen save one scholar and one priest, they made the priest work his day in the kitchen in turn with the rest. So it chanced on a season that the Lord’s day came to the priest’s turn; wherefore, entering the kitchen and diligently closing the door after him, he set himself to cook the potherbs as best he could. Then certain secular folk, Frenchmen, passed that way and earnestly desired to hear Mass, but there was none to celebrate. The lay-brethren therefore came in haste and knocked at the kitchen door that the priest might come out and celebrate. But he answered and spake unto them, ‘Go ye and sing Mass, for I am busied in the work of the kitchen, which ye have refused.’ Then were they sore ashamed, perceiving their own boorishness. For it was boorish folly to pay no reverence to the priest who confessed them; wherefore in process of time the lay-brethren were brought to nought, as they deserved, for their reception was almost utterly forbidden,6 since they comprehended not the honour paid them, and since the Order of Friars Minor hath no need of so great a multitude of laymen, for they were ever lying in wait for us [clerics]. For I remember how, when I was in the convent of Pisa, they would have sent to the Chapter to demand that, whensoever one cleric was admitted to the Order, one lay-brother should be admitted at the same time, but they were not listened to — nay, they were not even heard to the end — for their demand was most unseemly. Yet in the days when I entered the Order, I found there men of great sanctity, mighty in prayer and devotion and contemplation and learning; for there was this one good in Brother Elias, that he fostered the study of theology in the Order.”

If the clerics of the Order smarted under Brother Elias’ encouragement of the lay-brethren, all alike groaned under his masterful government. Even in St. Francis’s lifetime we can see a natural tendency to more mechanical methods of discipline as the Order grew in size; in the Saint’s “Epistle to a Minister” of 1223 the conception of discipline is still paternal, and the Minister’s authority mainly moral; but in the “Testament” of only three years later we find already a stern insistence on the 84 necessity of imprisonment for heresy or certain forms of disobedience among the Brethren. Again, among the Constitutions passed at Padua in 1277 we find: “item, the General Chapter commands that there be strong prisons in great numbers (multiplices), and at the same time humane.” Salimbene’s Tuscan recollections of the years 1239-1247 fill in these bare notices admirably, and show the friction caused within the Order by the strong-willed, unscrupulous man who did more than any other to discipline these spiritual volunteers into a rigidly organized papal militia.

(104) “The sixth defect of Brother Elias was that he afflicted and reviled the Ministers Provincial, unless they would redeem their vexation by paying tribute and giving him gifts. For he was covetous and received gifts, doing contrary to the Scripture (Deut. xvi. 19); whereof we have an example in Alberto Balzolano, the judge of Faenza, who changed his judgment on hearing that a countryman had given him a pig. Moreover the aforesaid Brother Elias kept the Ministers provincial so utterly under his rod that they trembled at him as a rush trembles when it is shaken under the water, or as a lark fears when a hawk pursues and strives to take him. And this is no wonder, for he himself was a son of Belial, so that no man could speak with him. In very deed none dared to tell him the truth nor to rebuke his evil deeds and words, save only Brothers Agostino da Recanati and Bonventura da Iseo.* For he would lightly revile such Ministers as were falsely accused to him by certain malicious, pestilent, and hot-headed lay-brethren his accomplices, whom he had scattered abroad throughout the Provinces of the Order. He would depose them from their office of Minister even without fault of theirs, and would deprive them of their books, and of their licence to preach and hear confessions, and of all the lawful acts of their office. Moreover, he would give to some a long hood ** and send them from east to west, that is from Sicily or Apulia to Spain or England, or contrariwise. Moreover, he deposed from his Ministership Brother Albert of Parma, Minister of the Province of Bologna, a man of most holy life; and he bade Brother Gerard of Modena, whom he appointed by letter into the place of the deposed Minister, to bring him to himself at Assisi clad in the hood of probation. But Brother Gerard, who was a most courteous man, said nought of this matter to the Minister, only praying him that he would be his companion on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the 8 blessed father Francis. When therefore Brother Gerard was come with Brother Albert near to Brother Elias’ chamber, he brought forth from his bosom two hoods of probation, whereof he placed one on his own shoulders, and gave the other to the Minister of Bologna, saying ‘Place this on thine, father, and await my return to thee.’ So Brother Gerard went in to Elias and fell at his feet saying, ‘I have fulfilled thine obedience, in bringing to thee the Minister of Bologna with a hood of probation, and behold he watcheth without and is willing to do whatsoever ye command.’ When Elias heard this, all his indignation left him, and the spirit sank wherewith he had swelled against him. So Brother Albert was brought in and restored to his former rank; moreover, he obtained many favours also for his Province by the mediation of Brother Gerard. Wherefore on account of this and other deeds of that wicked man Elias, thoughts of revenge were bred in the hearts of the Ministers, but they waited for the time when they might answer a fool according to his folly. For Brother Elias was a most evil man, to whom we may fitly apply those words which Daniel saith of Nebuchadnezzar, ‘And for the greatness that he gave to him, all people, tribes, and languages trembled, and were afraid of him; whom he would, he slew; and whom he would, he destroyed; and whom he would, he set up; and whom he would, he brought down.’ Moreover, he sent Visitors who were rather exactors then correctors, and who solicited the Provinces and Ministers to pay tributes and grant gifts; and if a man gave not something into their mouth, they prepared war against him. Hence it came about that the Ministers Provincial in his time caused to be made at Assisi, at their own expense, for the church of the blessed Francis, a great and fair and sonorous bell, which I myself have seen, together with five others like unto it, whereby that whole valley was filled with delightful harmony. So likewise, while I dwelt as a novice in the convent of Fano, I saw two brethren coming from Hungary and bearing on sumpter-mules a great and precious salt fish, bound up in canvas, which the Minister of Hungary was sending to Brother Elias. Moreover, at the same time, by the Minister’s mediation, the King of Hungary sent to Assisi a great goblet of gold wherein the head of the blessed Francis might be honourably preserved. On the way, in Siena, where it was laid one night in the sacristy for safety, certain Brethren, led by curiosity and levity, drank therefrom a most excellent wine, that they might boast thenceforward of having drunk with their own lips from the King of Hungary’s goblet. But the Guardian of the convent, Giovannetto by name, a man 86 zealous for justice, a lover of honesty, and a native of Assisi, hearing this, bade the refectorer, a man of Belfort, who likewise was named Giovannetto — he bade him, I say, at the morrow’s dinner, to place before each of those who had drunk from the goblet, one of those little kitchen-pots called pignatta, black and stained, wherefrom each must drink will he nill he, in order that, if he would boast henceforward of having once drunk from the King’s goblet, he might remember also how for that fault he had drunk from a foul pipkin.”

Not content with these liberal contributions from all quarters, the General sought also for the Philosopher’s Stone. (160) “He was publicly reported of dealing in alchemy, and it is certain that, whenever he heard of Brethren in the Order who, while yet in the world, had known aught of that matter or craft, he would send for them and keep them by him in the Gregorian Palace — for Pope Gregory IX had built himself a great palace in the convent of Friars Minor at Assisi, both in honor of St. Francis and that he himself might dwell there when he came to Assisi. In this palace, therefore, were divers chambers and many lodgings, wherein Elias would keep the aforesaid craftsmen, and many others also, which was as much as to consult a pythonic spirit (Deut. xviii, 11). Let it be imputed to him; let him see to it”! It may be that Elias’ dealings in the black art were merely a popular fiction, but there was no doubt that the liberal contributions of the faithful were very often diverted from their proper object — a malpractice common everywhere in the 13th century, when pope after pope set the example of collecting money for the Crusades and spending it in private wars or in worldly pomp (157). “The seventh defect of Elias was that he would live in too great splendour and luxury and pomp. For he seldom went anywhither save to Pope Gregory IX and the Emperor Frederic II, whose intimate friend he was, and to Santa Maria della Porziuncula (where the Blessed Francis instituted his Order and where also he died), and to the convent of Assisi, where the body of the Blessed Francis is held in veneration, and to the House of Celle by Cotrona, which is a most fair and delightful convent, and which he caused to be specially built for himself n the Bishopric of Arezzo, for he was to be found either there or in the convent of Assisi. And he had fat and big-boned palfreys, and rode ever on horseback, even if he did but pass a half-mile from one church to another, thus breaking the rule which saith that Friars Minor must not ride save of manifest necessity, or under stress of infirmity. Moreover, he had secular youths to wait on him as pages, even as the Bishops have, and these were 87 clad in raiment of many colours to wait on him and minister to him in all things. Moreover, he seldom ate in the convent with the other brethren, but ever alone in his own privy chamber, which in my judgment was great boorishness, for

The sweetest joys are vain as air
Unless our friend may claim his share.

Moreover, he had his special cook in the convent of Assisi, Brother Bartholomew of Padua, whom I have seen and known, and who made most delicate dishes.” An anecdote in the Chronicle of the xxiv Generals (p. 229) at once corroborates Salimbene here, and suggests that much of his information about Elias may have come from his old comrade at Siena, the earliest disciple of St. Francis. “Brother Bernard of Quintavalle, when he saw Brother Elias on his horse, would pant hard after him and cry ‘This is too tall and big; this is not as the Rule saith!’ and would smite the horse’s crupper with his hand, repeating the same again. And when Elias fared sumptuously in his own chamber, Brother Bernard aforesaid would at times rise up in great zeal from the table of the refectory, bearing in his hand a loaf of bread, a flesh-hook and a bowl, and would knock at the door of Brother Elias’s chamber. When therefore the door was opened he would sit down beside the Minister at his table, saying, ‘I will eat with thee of these good gifts of God:’ whereat the General was inwardly tormented, yet for that Bernard was held in the utmost reverence throughout the Order, he dissembled altogether.”

Elias, whose despotic rule and contempt of early traditions made him so widely unpopular, had yet the magnetic attraction of a born ruler of men. He enjoyed the love of St. Francis, the close confidence of Emperor and Pope, even while they were at war with each other, and the loyal attachment of his humble intimates. As Salimbene continues, speaking of his special cook, (157) “this man clung inseparably to Elias until the last day of his life, and so also did all they of his household. For he had a special household of twelve or fourteen brethren, whom he kept by him in the convent of Celle, and they never changed the habit of the Order” — i.e. they never acknowledged themselves truly excommunicate for their adherence to an excommunicated man. “And after the death of their evil pastor, or rather their seducer, having understood that they were deceived, they returned to the Order. Moreover, Elias had in his company one John, whose surname was de Laudibus [of Lodi?], a lay-brother, hard and keen, and a torturer and most evil butcher, for at Elias’s bidding he 88 would scourge the brethren without mercy. And [just before the Chapter of 1239] Elias, knowing that the Provincial Ministers were gathered together against him, sent commands to all robust lay-brethren throughout Italy whom he counted as his friends, that they should not fail to come to the General Chapter; for he hoped that they might defend him with their cudgels.” This plan was frustrated, however; and after a stormy meeting, in which the Pope had to remind the friars that “it was not the fashion of Religious” to shout each other down with Thou liest and other abusive cries, Elias was deposed. His Man Friday, John of Lodi, whose raet bodily strength is spoken of by another chronicler, died in the odour of sanctity, and miracles were wrought at his tomb: he had enjoyed the supreme privilege of touching the wound in the side of St. Francis. This is not in the least inconsistent with Salimbene’s account; miracles were commonly worked at the tombs of men who in any way struck the medieval imagination, even as champions of a popular cause in purely secular politics, like Simon de Montfort or Thomas of Lancaster. St. Thomas à Becket would have done all that Salimbene here describes for the cause of discipline in a matter where his convictions were fixed.

* Pinguis et carnosa. This is always high praise from Salimbene.

* Pro tua sapientia scripturarum.

*Not to be identified with Dante’s Agostino or Bonaventura.

* i.e., degrade them to wear the novice’s hood.


[89]

CHAPTER VIII.

The Bitter Cry of a Subject Friar.

SO Elias was deposed; yet still he troubled Israel. Not only was his life in his first retirement at Celle a scandal to the rule, but presently he joined the Emperor’s camp openly, as we have already seen. Salimbene has much to say of this: — and, when he describes the difficulties created by this single man, we must remember also how many more of the same sort would be created by the numerous supporters who had once raised him to the Generalship and had nearly succeeded in procuring his re-election in 1239. Indeed, the deposition of Elias marks only the beginning of the most serious Franciscan dissensions. Salimbene tells how he went about justifying his apostasy, and how one friar withstood him to his face, finally dismissing him with St. Francis’s contemptuous farewell, “Go thy way, Brother Fly,” (161). Salimbene’s dear friend, Gerard of Modena, who had known Elias well, went once to Celle, and laboured all day long to bring him back to the Order: but in vain. Moreover, as Gerard tossed on his sleepless pallet that night, “it seemed to him that devils like bats fluttered all night long through the convent buildings: for he heard the sound of their voices, and fear and trembling seized him, and all his bones were affrighted, and the hair of his flesh stood up. Wherefore, when morning was come, he took his leave and departed in all haste with his companion. So in process of time Brother Elias died: he had been excommunicated aforetime by Pope Gregory IX: whether he was absolved and whether he ordered things well with his soul, he himself knoweth now: let him look to it! But in course of time (since, as the Wise Man saith, there is a time and opportunity for every business), a certain Custode dug up his bones and cast them upon a dunghill. Now if any would fain know whereunto this Brother Elias was like in bodily aspect, I say that he may be exactly compared to Brother Ugo of Reggio, surnamed Pocapaglia, who in the world had been a master of grammar, and a great jester and a ready speaker: and in the Order of the 90 Friars Minor he was an excellent and mighty preacher, who by his sermons and his parables confuted and confounded those who attacked our Order. For a certain Master Guido Bonatti of Forlì1 who called himself a philosopher and astrologer, and who reviled the preaching of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, was so confounded by Brother Ugo before the whole people of Forlì that he not only feared to speak, but durst not even show himself during all the time that the Brother was in those parts. For he was brimful of proverbs, stories, and instances; and they sounded excellently in his mouth, for he ever sited them to men’s manners; and he had a ready and gracious tongue, that the people were glad to hear him. Yet the ministers and prelates of the Order loved him not, for that he spake in parables, and would confound them with his instances and proverbs: but he cared little for them, since he was a man of excellent life. Let it suffice me to have said thus much of Brother Elias.” (163)

The fall of Elias leads Salimbene to moralize on the advantages of constitutional as compared with absolute government in a religious Order. The Friars differed from the older Orders in their frequent change and re-election of officials, a system in which we find one of the many strong points of similarity between the Revival of the XIIIth century and the Wesleyan movement.3 This frequent change had Salimbene’s hearty approval. For one thing, familiarity was apt to breed contempt. (146) “I have seen in mine own Order certain Lectors of excellent learning and great sanctity who had yet some foul blemish (merditatem), which caused others to judge lightly of them. For they love to play with a cat or whelp or with some small fowl, but not as the Blessed Francis was wont to play with a pheasant and a cicada, rejoicing the while in the Lord.”3

Again, the official might have some strange defect which forbade his inspiring proper veneration; for instance (137) “I was once under a minister named Brother Aldebrando, of whom Brother Albertino of Verona (whose sayings are much remembered) was wont to say in jest that there must have been a hideous idea of him in God’s mind.* For his head was misshapen after the fashion of an ancient helmet, with thick hair on his forehead: so that whenever it fell to him, in the service for the octave of the Epiphany, to begin the antiphon, ‘caput draconis’ (the dragon’s head), then the brethren would laugh, 91 and he himself would be troubled and ashamed. But I used to recall that saying of Seneca, ‘Of what sort, thinkest thou, is the soul within, where the outward semblance is so hideous?’ . . . . Therefore we advise the Prelate, who is set for an example to others, to abstain from levities so far as in him lies; and, if he indulged in such when he was a private person, let him quit them altogether when promoted to a prelacy: as a man did, whom the monks of a certain monastery chose for abbot as being the most disorderly (dissolutum) of all, hoping to live more laxly under his rule. But when he was made abbot, he caused the rule and statutes of his predecessors to be nobly kept. So the monks, being grieved beyond measure, said to their abbot ‘we chose thee in the hope of fulfilling the desire of our hearts under thy rule: but thou seemest changed into another man.’ To whom he answered ‘My sons, this is the change of the right hand of the Most High.’ . . . . But there are some who, as prelates, practice levities even as they did aforetime when they were private persons” (149).

Furthermore, a once vigorous prelate may fall into his second childhood, as (150) “I have oft-times read in the Liber Pontificalis of Ravenna that a certain Archbishop of that see became to old as to speak childishly, for he was grown a babe among babes. So when the Emperor Charlemagne should come to Ravenna and dine with him, his clergy besought him to abstain from levity for his honour’s sake, and for a good example in the great Emperor’s presence: to whom he made answer, ‘Well said, my sons, well said; and I will do as ye say.’ So when they were seated side by side at table, he patted the Emperor’s shoulders familiarly with his hand saying, ‘Pappa,** pappa, Lord Emperor!’ The Emperor, therefore, asked of those who stood by what this might mean: and they answered him, ‘He would invite you in childish fashion to eat with him; for he is in his dotage.’ Then with a cheerful face the Emperor embraced him, saying, ‘Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.’ ”

Therefore the Prelates (i.e. officials) of Religious Orders should be regularly and frequently changed, as the Captains and Podestas of the cities, in whose case the plan works admirably. It works admirably also amongst the Friars; for (112) “Let it be noted that the conservation of religious Orders lieth in the frequent change of Prelates, and this for three reasons. First, lest they wax too insolent with their long prelacy, as we see in 92 the abbots of the Order of St. Benedict, who, since they hold office for life and are not eposed, treat their subject monks as a mere rabble (vilificant subditos suos), and esteem them no more than the fifth wheel of a waggon, which is a thing of nought; and the abbots eat flesh with lay folk while the monks eat pulse in their refectory; and many other burdensome and unseemly things they do to their subjects, which they should not do, since they themselves choose to live in splendour and in the greatest liberty.4 Moreover, not only do nature and human courtesy bid them not afflict their subjects nor do them evil, but Holy Scripture also, and the example of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Of courtesy we have an example in a certain King of England, to whom, as he was at supper with his knights by a spring in a wood, a vessel of wine was brought such as the Tuscans call fiascone, and the Lombards bottaccio. Having asked, and received an answer that there was no more wine than this, he said, ‘Here then is enough for all,’ and poured the whole vessel into the spring, saying, ‘Let all drink in common’; which was held to be a great courtesy in him.* Not so doth the miser who saith, ‘I have found me rest, and now I will eat of my goeds alone’: not so do those Prelates who eat the finest white bread and drink the best and choicest wine in the presence of their subjects and of those who eat with them in the same house, and who give nought thereof to their subjects (which is held to be utter boorishness); and so also they do with other meats. Moreover some Prelates drink choice wine, yet give nought thereof to their subjects who are present, though these would as gladly drink as they; for all throats are sisters one to another.5 But the Prelates of our time, who are Lombards, gladly take to themselves all that their throats and appetites crave, and will not give thereof to others. Indeed, that curse seems on our days to be fulfilled which Moses imprecated upon evil-doers, saying ‘Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof.’ The prelates of our days, for the most part, ‘come for to kill and to steal and to destroy,’ as is written in St. John; and as Micah saith ‘the best of them is a briar, the most upright is as a thorn hedge.’ And if some man would now write a dialogue concerning prelates, as St. Gregory did, he might rather find offscourings than holy prelates; for as Micah again saith, ‘the good man is perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men.’ Yet after Christ’s example the Prelates should 93 minister to their subjects: as is indeed done in the Order of Pietro Peccatore; for on fast days at Collation the priors pour out drink to their subjects in memory of the Lord’s example. Now the head of the Order of Pietro Peccatore is in the church of Santa Maria in Porto at Ravenna; and of the same Order is the convent of Santa Felicula near Montilio in the Bishopric of Parma, and several other houses in divers parts of the world”6 Not only does the Rule of St. Francis bid that the superiors should be real servants of the Brethren, but they might learn from the example even of a heathen like Julius Cæsar, who never said to his soldiers “Go and do that,” but “Let us come and do this.”

Salimbene goes on to complain that, whereas the Apostles and the first Christians had all things in common, “it is not so nowadays” even in Franciscan convents. St. Francis’s Rule prescribes that the Minister should be a servant to all his brethren, and Christ rebukes the Pharisees for taking the foremost places in the synagogues, etc.: “Yet the prelates of our time do this, to the very letter.” Our Lord, again, likened His care for mankind to that of a hen for her chickens: but the evil prelate of to-day rather resembles that ostrich of which Job writes, “she is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not hers.” The hen defends her chickens against the fox, “which is a stinking and fraudulent beast”: so should the prelate defend his fellow-friars against the Devil or worldly tyrants. The hen, “finding a grain of corn, hideth it not, but rather crieth aloud that her brood may flock to her: and when they are come she casteth the grain before them without distinction of white or black or brown, but giving to each alike: yet the prelates of our days love not their subjects equally, but with a private love: some they count as sons, others as stepsons or spurious: and the same whom they invite to share their good cheer to-day, to the same they give just as freely on the morrow. But the rest who sing the invitatorium and whose place is in the refectory (i.e. who do not eat apart with the prelate,) stand all the while idle and grumble and murmur, saying with the poet, ‘The wild boar is feared for his tusks, the stag is defended by his horns; while we the peaceful antelopes are a helpless prey’: which is as much as to say, ‘the flies flock to the lean horse’ ” (118). This favouritism of our modern prelates in their invitations to good cheer is contrary both to our Lord’s words (Luke xiv. 12) and to the example of St. Lawrence, which Salimbene quotes at length. “But [modern prelates] have loved the glory of men more than the glory of God, and therefore shall they be confounded. For 94 they say, ‘To-day I will give you a good dinner in the hope that ye will give me the same to-morrow’: of whom the Lord saith, ‘Amen I say unto you, they have received their reward’ ” (119).

To these faults of unfairness and self-seeking the Prelates too often add that of discourtesy: which Salimbene rebukes by three Scriptural examples. Our Lord desired (not commanded) Simon to draw back a little from the land: Simon himself said to Cornelius, ‘Arise, I myself also am a man’: and the Angel of the Apocalypse said the same to St. John. “Lo therefore how our lord and the Apostle Peter and the Angel honour God’s servants; and how these boorish Prelates raise themselves above them in their pride! Note that in some religious Orders there will at times be men who were noble in the world, rich and powerful, and who are ancient in the Order both as to their own days and as to the time of their entrance into Religion; moreover, better still, they are spiritual and contemplative and devout and amiable to the Brethren; they are endowed also with wisdom and learning, having a knowledge of books and a ready tongue and mother-wit and honest morals. Yet over such men a Prelate may be set who is of obscure birth, insufficient and unprofitable in all the aforesaid qualities, and yet he will come to such pride and folly that his heart will be lifted to pride against his brethren, paying reverence to no man, but addressing all in the singular number with ‘tu’; which, as I may say, is not permitted except for five reasons.” Here he launches into a dissertation from which we learn incidentally how little the use of the pronouns was as yet fixed in Italian: for “the Apulians and Sicilians and Romans say thou to the Emperor or the Pope himself, while the Lombards say you not only to a child but even to a hen or a cat or a piece of wood” (120). He admits, indeed, that “even good Prelates have their persecutors and evil-speakers and scorners,” (120) for there are always sons of Belial, unbridled and uncontrolled, like those who despised Saul. But he harks back to the same complaints. “Doctors prescribe to their patients many things which they themselves will not do when they are sick: so Prelates know how to teach their subjects many things which they will not do themselves: as the Lord said, ‘For they say and do not’ (12). As to what we said above, that he who is chosen to a Prelacy should know his own insufficiency, if he be insufficient, we say there that this can seldom be, for whosoever has dominion and authority believes himself altogether sufficient, both in wisdom and in eloquence and in all things necessary to a Prelate” (123). He is apparently thinking mainly of the older Orders when he complains, à propos of 95 Ecclesiasticus xiv. 3, 4 (153) “we often see this fulfilled to the letter; for one Prelate will have much wealth heaped together, yet God doth not grant him power to eat thereof, but another coming after him will scatter them abroad.” Against similar faults he has already quoted (136) “the example of that rich man who gave nought to the poor, and was utterly given up to gluttony and lechery, nor would he hear Mass or Gospel. So when the priest and clergy sang a Requiem over his corpse, the Crucifix thrust its fingers into its ears, saying that it would in no wise hear the man who had scorned to hear its voice.” Prelates are apt to be hasty-tempered, and to excuse themselves by pleading a choleric complexion: such have no business in office, for (as we may see from Ecc. X. 5-7), “we cannot reduce a fool to silence by promoting him to the dignity of a Prelacy. This we see done daily; for a man is promoted who is not worth three pence, (unless he chance to have them in his mouth); and this is done of private affection, while another man, though fit and sufficient, will find go grace.” Nowadays, indeed, as often in the past, a man risks his immortal soul by accepting promotion in the Church (142): a saint of old once cut off his own ears to avoid being made Bishop, and, when this proved an insufficient protection, swore that he would cut out his tongue also unless they left him in peace. This holy man, continues our chronicler, resembled the beaver, who will mutilate himself to escape from his pursuers. He cites the well-known example of Geoffroi de Péronne, prior of Clairvaux, who “was chosen Bishop of Tournay and whom Pope Eugenius and his abbot St. Bernard would have compelled to submit to the burden: but he fell on his face in the form of a cross at the feet of the abbot and the clergy who had elected him, saying: ‘I may indeed, if ye elect me, be a runaway monk, but I shall never be a bishop.’ When he was in his death-agony a monk, his dear friend, who sat by his bedside, said: ‘Dear friend, now that we are being separated in the body, I pray thee (if by God’s will thou art able) to reveal me thy state after death.’ So, as he prayed after his friend’s death in front of the altar, Geoffrey appeared to him in a vision saying: ‘Lo here am I, Geoffrey thy brother!’ To whom the other said ‘Dear friend, how is it with thee?’ Whereunto he replied, ‘I am well; but it has been revealed to me by the Holy Trinity that, if I had been promoted to a bishopric, I should ave been among the member of the damned.’ ”

It will be as well to close this chapter with the summary of another most characteristic digression of Salimbene’s. He has been quoting many shining examples of the past who might well 96 shame the authorities of his day into something better (132). For post-Biblical times he chooses as typical heroes Saints Silvester, Nicholas, and Thomas of Canterbury. The mention of St. Nicholas leads him into a tirade which reads like a fragment of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. It may well be commended to the notice of those who have hastily inferred that, because the Franciscans exaggerated the already exaggerated devotion to the Virgin Mary, they were therefore possessed with a “chivalric respect for women” and “restored woman to her rightful position in Christian society.”7 Salimbene, it must be remembered, was no farouche ascetic: he tells us more than once of the charming ladies whose director he has been; he was far from holding, with St. Bonaventura’s cherished secretary, that women are not fit objects for a friar even to gaze upon. The quotations which he here heaps together are simply commonplaces of the Middle Ages, and represent the ordinary clerical attitude towards the fair sex. “Note,” he writes, “that it is said of St. Nicholas, ‘he avoided the company of women’: and herein he was wise; for it was women who deceived the children of Israel (Num. xxi.). Wherefore it is written in Ecclesiasticus, ‘Behold not every body’s beauty; and tarry not among women. For from garments cometh a moth, and from a woman the iniquity of a man.’ Again, in Ecclesiastes, ‘I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her: but he that is a sinner, shall be caught by her.’ In Proverbs again, ‘Why art thou seduced, my son, by a strange woman, and art cherished in the bosom of another?’ Again in the sixth chapter, ‘Let not thy heart covet her beauty, be not caught with her winks: For the price of a harlot is scarce one loaf: but the woman catcheth the precious soul of a man.’ And again in the twenty-third, “For a harlot is a deep ditch: and a strange woman is a narrow pit. She lieth in wait in the way as a robber, and him whom she shall see unwary, she shall kill.’ Moreover, Jerome saith, ‘It is perilous to be ministered to by one whose face thou dost frequently study’:* and again, ‘Believe me, he cannot be whole-hearted with God to whom women have close access’; and again, ‘With flames of fire doth a woman sear the conscience of him who dwelleth by her’; and again, ‘Where women are with men, 97 there shall be no lack of the devil’s birdlime.’ Again the poet saith, ‘Wouldst thou define or know what woman is? She is glittering mud, a stinking rose, sweet poison, ever leaning towards that which is forbidden her.’ And another poet, ‘Woman is adamant, pitch, buckthorn,** a rough thistle, a clinging burr, a stinging wasp, a burning nettle.’ And yet another, ‘Man hath three joys — praise, wisdom, and glory; which three things are overthrown and ruined by woman’s art’; and Augustine saith, ‘As oil feedeth the flame of a lamp, so doth a woman’s conversation feed the fire of lust.’ And Isidore, ‘As the green grass groweth by the waterside, so also groweth concupiscence by looking upon women.’ And John Chrysostom: ‘What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inevitable penance, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a coveted calamity, a domestic peril, a pleasant harm, the nature of evil painted over with the colours of good: wherefore it is a sin to desert her, but a torment to keep her.’ And Augustine: ‘Woman was evil from the beginning, a gate of death, a disciple of the serpent, the devil’s accomplice, a fount of deception, a dogstar to godly labours, rust corrupting the saints; whose perilous face hath overthrown such as had already become almost angels.’ Likewise Origen: ‘Lo, woman is the head of sin, a weapon of the devil, expulsion from Paradise, mother of guilt, corruption of the ancient law.’ ” To this whole page Salimbene has affixed the heading “Here the author shows that women are to be avoided: see below folio 323.” And on that folio (p. 270) he subjoins another string of the same or similar quotations, with the addition of one (genuine, alas! this time) from St. Augustine. “Among all the Christian’s battles the sorest are the struggles of chastity, wherein is continual conflict and seldom victory”: a warning which is enforced by the tale of St. Chrysanthus and his temptations.

We see then that, in spite of all Salimbene’s varied interests and thoroughly human point of view, even in spite of his little religious idylls, there was one hiatus in his sympathies. He might have thousands of women under his spiritual guidance; he might strike up piquant and dangerous Platonic friendships with one or two; but his very profession shut him off from that free and natural social intercourse without which neither sex can really understand the other.

 

“For, trusteth wel, it is impossible
  That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
  (But it if be of hooly Seintes lyves),
  Ne of noon other womman never the mo.”

“CHAUCER, Cant. Tales, D. 688.

* Quod turpem ideam in Deo habuerat, an allusion to Plato’s doctrine of ideas, according to which everything in the visible universe had its eternal exemplar in the Divine mind: so at least Plato was understood in the Middle Ages.

* Cf. Dante, Purg., xi. 105.

* This was probably the Re Giovane of Inf. xxviii. 135, who was a byeword for courtesy and liberality: cf. Novellino, 15, 16, 87.

* Lady readers may be glad to learn that, among all the soi-disant patristic quotations in this passage, only this first from St. Jerome is genuine. Prof. Holder-Egger has tracked six of the rest to spurious works of the Fathers here named; but even his industry has not been able to identify the remaining two.

* From which a sort of Black Draught was concocted in the Middle Ages.

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