While Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to act as they pleased were a fortiori ready to vindicate their right to think what they pleased. Thus free thought, which was stunted by the Popes of Rome in the far-off lands of the North, flourished under the very shadow of St. Peter’s throne. It was natural that it should be so. They who sit nearest the stage are least liable to be duped by scenic devices. The Italians were too near the Holy See to be impressed by its tricks or to be terrified by its theatrical thunder. They had seen Gregory VII. as an illiterate Tuscan lad playing in his father’s workshop, and they had known Innocent III. as plain Signor Lothario, son of the Count of Segni. No one is a demigod to his own parishioners.

Hence the lofty pretensions of the Popes were nowhere less respected than in their immediate neighbourhood. The spiritual autocrats, whose anathemas made foreign princes and peoples tremble with superstitious terror, found many severe critics among their own countrymen. The Italian chronicler Salimbene (1221–1288), though himself a monk, in his vivid and varied picture of thirteenth century life, does not hesitate to comment freely on the greed, profligacy, gluttony, heresy and other sins of many a contemporary pope, cardinal and bishop. Even more significant is the attitude of the author of the Divina Commedia. There the judges are judged, and they who doomed others to everlasting torture are themselves consigned to a similar fate by the stern Florentine poet, the spokesman of the Middle Ages. Celestine V., who, yielding to base fear, abdicated St. Peter’s chair in 1294, is sentenced by Dante to wander in hell naked, his face bedewed with blood and tears, and beset by wasps and hornets; one of the dolorous tribe of trimmers—“Wretches who never lived”; sinners whose very disembodied shades are “both to God displeasing and to His foes.”74 Pope Anastasius is condemned to an even worse plight, as a heretic. Nicholas III. is found planted with his heels upwards, waiting to be succeeded in that uncomfortable position by Boniface VIII., “the chief of the new Pharisees,” who, in his turn, is to be followed by Clement V., “the lawless pastor,” who, besides many other sins of omission and commission, abetted Philip the Fair in the suppression of the Templars, and with him divided the guilt, if he were defrauded of the fruits, of the atrocious crime. To an equally sad eternity are doomed popes and cardinals “over whom Avarice dominion absolute maintains”; the monks of Cologne; and the “Joyous Friars” (Frati Godenti), notorious for things worse than joyousness.

Nor did the great religious upheavals of the Middle Ages which helped to tighten the Papal grip on the European mind produce any injurious effects in Italy. Far otherwise. The most serious of those movements, the Crusades, proved of signal benefit to the Italian republics. The campaigns that drained other countries of men and money, opened new sources of profit and power to Venice and Genoa, Florence, Milan and Pisa; they invigorated their maritime trade, and increased their knowledge of foreign lands. While the kings and knights of Northern and Central Europe dreamed dreams of military glory, of victory for the Cross, and of conquest for themselves, the commonwealths of Italy realised the more solid, if less splendid, boons of extensive commerce, and even more extensive credit. When Bayezid, surnamed the Lightning, towards the end of the fourteenth century, threatened to carry war into the heart of holy Christendom and boasted that his horse should eat his oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome, it was not the Romans who resented the impious insolence of the infidel. Nor were they moved when the King of Hungary, Sigismund, panic-stricken, sent a bishop and two knights with letters to King Charles VI. of France, the eldest son of the Church, imploring him to ward off the evils that menaced it. The Italians saw with calm unconcern the young Count de Nevers, heir of the Duke of Burgundy, and cousin of the French monarch, accompanied by four other princes, lead his brilliant host of knights and squires against the “enemies of God.” It was the villeins of Burgundy and the burgesses of Flanders who paid the expenses of the ruinous campaign undertaken to save Rome from the Turk. And if the honest, but credulous, Froissart is to be believed, the Italians, so far from sympathizing with the aim of the expedition, actually assisted the infidels by information and advice. Bayezid, on hearing that the Christian forces had crossed the Danube, is reported by the Chronicler to have said: “My wishes are now accomplished. It is now four months since I heard of the expedition from my good friend the Duke of Milan, who advised me to draw up my men with prudence.”

Furthermore, when the champions of the Cross met those of the Crescent on the fatal field of Nicopolis, and left upon it the flower of their chivalry, the Italians were the only people who had no reason to mourn the disaster. All useless prisoners were put to death; but the young Count de Nevers, and a score other princes and barons of France, were held by Bayezid to ransom. After a long and painful captivity the survivors obtained their liberty for 200,000 florins. But, while this immense sum and the costs of the negotiations and embassies, as well as the means for the prisoners’ return home in a manner befitting their high estate, were laboriously raised by extraordinary taxes levied by the Duke of Burgundy upon all towns under his obedience, and more especially upon those of Flanders—Ghent, Bruges, Mechlin, and Antwerp—the merchants of Genoa showed their enterprising genius, no less than their prosperity, by giving prompt security to the Sultan for five times the amount stipulated. Lastly, when the French lords, on their arrival at Venice, found themselves hardly able to defray the expenses of their sojourn in “one of the dearest towns in the world for strangers,” as Sir John sensibly observes, they met with scant courtesy at the hands of the Venetians. The King of Hungary, though the revenues of his realm were “ruined for this and the ensuing year,” volunteered to assist the princes by “offering for sale to the rulers of Venice the rents he received from that town, which amounted to 7000 ducats yearly”; but the Venetians, on hearing of the proposal, “coldly replied that they would consider the matter,” and after a fortnight’s consideration answered, “as I was told by one who heard it,” that “if the King of Hungary was disposed to sell his whole kingdom, the Venetians would willingly make the purchase, and pay the money down; but as for such a trifle as 7000 ducats of yearly revenue, which he possessed in the city of Venice, it was of so little value that they could not set a price on it either to buy or sell, and that they would not trouble themselves about so small an object.”

The narrative brings into vivid, if somewhat unpleasant, prominence the contrast between the Italians and their neighbours over the Alps: their wealth, their pride, their eagerness to draw profit from other people’s enthusiasms, and their utter want of interest in the questions which agitated so deeply the rest of mediaeval Christendom. The sons of Italy were too much engrossed in the affairs of this world to make any sacrifices to the next. Already sensuous bliss was all the bliss they knew or cared for. Undistracted by celestial chimeras, they would gladly have exchanged all the dreams of eternity for one day’s enjoyment of earthly realities. But, if their worldly prosperity and their practical wisdom made the Italians selfish, they also made them tolerant. To them the prejudice of feudalism was as unprofitable as its idealism.

The Jews reaped the fruit of Italian tolerance. By one of those wonderful paradoxes with which history loves to surprise the student, the people that had crucified Christ, the people that was held guilty of the sufferings of His disciples at the hands of the Pagans, the people that was execrated as a perpetual source of heresy, had from the first dwelt and prospered in the very city which had witnessed the most terrible of those sufferings, and which had early claimed to be revered as the capital of Christendom and the Supreme Court of orthodoxy. While their brethren in France, Germany, and England underwent martyrdom, the Jews of Rome enjoyed comparative, if not uninterrupted, peace. The fury of the Crusades, which stained the waters of the Rhine and the Moselle with Hebrew blood, found no parallel on the banks of the Tiber. The calumnies which stirred up a tempest against the Jews in Norwich, aroused no responsive echo in Rome. The Bulls which doomed the “accursed people” to persecution in those distant realms remained unheeded in the very place where they were framed and signed. The Popes, who denounced and proscribed the “unclean and perfidious race” abroad, with few exceptions, cherished, protected, and trusted individual members of it at home.

Pope Alexander III., the great antagonist of the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and of Henry II. of England, had a Jewish Minister of Finance, or treasurer of the household, and on his return to Rome, after his voluntary exile in France, he was met by a jubilant procession of Jewish Rabbis. The Roman Jews were not subject to any special tax, nor was their evidence against Christians considered invalid. Even greater was the liberty enjoyed by the Jews of Southern Italy and Sicily, where they chiefly abounded. The Norman Kings confirmed to them the ancient privilege of trial according to their own laws. ♦1198–1250♦ In Sicily, under Frederick II., there were Jewish administrators and Jewish landowners. A favourite minister of King Roger of Sicily frequented the Jewish synagogues and contributed to the expenses of the Jewish community. Broadly speaking, until the end of the fifteenth century, such ill-feeling as existed towards the Jews in Italy proceeded entirely from their own aloofness and eccentricity, and was in no way fostered by priests or pontiffs. Nothing is more eloquent of the general prosperity of the Italian Jews in those days than the silence of history concerning any religious activity amongst them.

Besides the absence of ecclesiastical fanaticism, there were other reasons to account for the Jew’s normal immunity from persecution in mediaeval Italy. The Italians had no cause to envy the Jew his commercial success. In Italy the sons of Israel found keen competitors in the native Christians. The financial genius of the Florentine and the Venetian was more than a match for that of the Jew. The Italians, therefore, did not exclude the Jews from their municipal and industrial organizations, but, by making the entrance to their Guilds less difficult for non-Christians, enabled the latter to engage in various trades elsewhere closed to them. Nor was the Holy See strong enough to ban usury in Italy and to fan the superstitious antipathy towards money-lenders as it did in other countries. Among the Italians the interests of the market counted for more than the interests of the Church, and canonical prohibitions were easily set at naught for the sake of convenience. Furthermore, the division of the peninsula into a number of States politically sundered, and often hostile to each other, but geographically connected, enabled the Jews to seek refuge in one place from persecution in another, and as soon as the tempest was over to return to their homes.

For all these reasons we find the relations between Jews and Christians in Italy more cordial than in any other part of mediaeval Europe. The foreign origin and foreign connections of the Jew, far from being a source of prejudice, proved an attraction to the educated Italian. It is easy to imagine those old schoolmen, with their alert curiosity and unquenchable thirst for knowledge—in an age when books were rare, travel perilous, and all that was distant in space or time a desert, dimly known or utterly unknown—eagerly seizing at every chance of enlarging their mental horizon and of enriching their intellectual stores. A chance of this kind offered itself in the Jewish Rabbis, physicians, and scholars, and the Italians did not neglect it. Friendships between learned Hebrews and Christian divines were not uncommon.75 In the tenth century we hear of a Jewish doctor Donnolo being on intimate terms with the Lord Abbot Nilus. One of the fruits of such friendships was the indirect transmission to the West of a few rays of Hellenic light long before the dawn of the Renaissance, through translations of the Arabic versions of the Greek classics into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Latin. The most illustrious of these literary connections between followers of the new and the old Hebrew prophet was the tender affection which, towards the end of the thirteenth century, bound Immanuel, “the Heine of the Middle Ages,” with Dante, the poet of old Catholicism, and the embodiment of all that was true and pure and truly noble in mediaeval Christianity. The two friends must have formed a pair of extraordinary incongruity. Dante, grand, stern, and sombre, couching the gloomiest conceptions in the light and graceful language of Italy; Immanuel, witty and caustic, venting his frolicsome sarcasms in the solemn tongue of the Hebrew prophets. The contrast is brought home to us with almost deliberate vividness by the works of the two friends. They both wrote visits to the land of the dead. Dante’s is a tragedy; Immanuel’s a satirical comedy—almost a parody. But in one respect the Jew shows himself superior to the Christian. His paradise includes the great shades of the pagan world.

And yet it would be an error to imagine that the Jew, even in those halcyon days of Italian freedom, was wholly exempt from the penalty which pursues dissent. Whatever the feelings of the cultured and the thoughtful might be, to the populace of Italy the Jew was a pestilent heretic. As early as 1016 we hear of a massacre of the Jews in Rome owing to an earthquake which wrought great havoc in the city. The calamity occurred on Good Friday, and it was ascertained that at the time of its occurrence the Jews were worshipping in their synagogue. A coincidence to the mediaeval mind was tantamount to conclusive proof of cause and effect. The Roman rabble, under the influence of panic and superstition, wreaked a terrible vengeance on the supposed authors of the misfortune, and Pope Benedict VIII. sanctioned a crime which he was probably unable to prevent. Innocent III. proved his consistency by oppressing the “enemies of Christ” in Italy as scrupulously as elsewhere, and the Jews were also expelled from Bologna in 1171. In 1278—when Dante was a precocious youth of twelve years of age, already devoted to his mystic adoration of Beatrice; when Thomas Aquinas, the tolerant of Judaism, had been dead only four years; and two years after the birth of the great painter Giotto, to whom we owe the one portrait of Dante that has escaped the deluge of the centuries—at that period at which the rosy morn of the Renaissance was faintly gilding the eastern firmament, we find the Jews compelled to attend Christian services and to submit to sermons preached against their own religion. But, with few exceptions, no bloody persecution soiled the canvas of Italian history. In the ensuing century synagogues, plain, gaunt, and ungainly, might still be seen in close proximity to gorgeous Christian churches in Rome, and the congregations which thronged the latter on Sundays had not yet discovered that it was their duty to punish their neighbours for worshipping their god on Saturday. But the discovery was not far distant.

In 1321 the Jews of Rome were charged with insulting the crucifix as it was carried through the streets in a procession. The accuser is said to have been a sister of John XXII., a pope among whose principal claims to distinction love of gold ranked high. Several priests corroborated the charge, and the Pope decided to drive the Jews out of the Roman state. The details of the occurrence are uncertain; but the reality of the danger to which the Jews found themselves exposed is proved by the extraordinary fast instituted that year. While fervent prayers were offered up in the synagogues, messengers were despatched to the Pope at Avignon and to King Robert of Naples, his patron, who also was a great friend of the Jews, imploring that the decision might be cancelled. King Robert pleaded their cause successfully, for, it is said, his eloquence was supported by twenty thousand ducats presented by the Roman Jews to the Pope’s sister.

In the middle of the same century we find the Jews of Rome obliged to contribute towards the expenses of the popular amusements in the Roman circus—a form of entertainment which was an abomination unto the Lord of the Jews—12 gold pieces a year; a small matter in itself, yet indicative of the direction in which the current flowed. But a new power came to stem for a while this current.

We are in the heart of the fourteenth century. Dante died in 1321, and his obsequies were sumptuously performed at Ravenna. The tomb which closed over Dante’s remains on that July day received more than the spokesman of Mediaeval Faith. In it was buried Mediaeval Faith itself. Catholicism, and all that it had meant to Dante, was already a thing of the past. “One Church and one Empire for all men,” the idols of the Middle Age, were to be deposed by the ideal of “A Church and an Empire for each race of men,” gradually to develop into “No Church and no Empire for any man.” The last of the Catholics was carried to his grave, as the first of the Humanists appears on the scene. Dante’s censures of popes and cardinals were the rebukes of a brother; Petrarch’s denunciations are the assaults of an enemy. Dante, while condemning individual churchmen, sincerely reveres the Church which their malpractices disgraced. To him the Papal Court may be a home of hypocrisy, a nursery of shame, a cradle of crime, and he will have nothing to do with it; but that does not lead him to question the spiritual authority of that Court. His hero still is Gregory Hildebrand, della fede cristiana il santo atleta—the saintly athlete of the Christian Faith.76 To Petrarch the Papal Court is all that and more. It is the mother of human slavery and the fount of human misery—a “Western Babylon,” as he calls it in one of his sonnets. It fills him with unutterable abhorrence. Petrarch died in 1374, but the new spirit of which he was the exponent did not die with him. It was transmitted to his disciple Boccaccio, in whose hands the keen weapon of indignation was replaced by the keener one of ridicule. Boccaccio’s popular tales spread the infamy of the monasteries and nunneries, and the hatred towards their inmates, far and wide. Henceforth contempt shall be the portion of the Church which had inspired his predecessors with mere horror. Poggio, Pulci, Franco, and others followed in the footsteps of the master, and though they could not rival Boccaccio in wit, they surpassed him in virulence.

The real importance of these attacks lies in the circumstance that they were levelled not at persons but at institutions. The warfare was not waged so much against the body as against the soul of Catholicism. It is true that Italian Christianity had very early divested itself of some of the Oriental austerity of the cult, and that great part of its original colour had been toned down, or touched up, in accordance with Occidental taste. After twelve centuries of Roman practice very little, indeed, was left of the gospel preached on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The self-sacrifice of the prophet had been replaced by the self-indulgence of the priest, the simplicity and humility of the saint by the purple splendour of the ecclesiastical prince, and the spirit of the Word had long been stifled beneath the mummeries and pageants of Roman ritual. But still there remained more than the Latin temperament, under the influence of the pagan revival, could bear with equanimity. The young Italian mind had had enough of the creed of abstinence, renunciation, and sacrifice; it panted for enjoyment. The litanies and the agonies of the Church repelled it; her self-mortifications and self-mystifications revolted it. The classic love for form was to oust again the Christian veneration for the spirit. Virgil ceased to be regarded as a heathen prophet of Christianity. Scholars ceased to scan his pages for predictions of the advent of Jesus, and began to revel in the charm of his paganism. In a former generation Dante had found in the poet of Mantua a ghostly guide to the Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven of Catholicism; the new school saw in him a mellifluous minstrel of sensuous joys: a singer of the beauty of flocks and flowers, of the humming bees, of the trilling birds, of the murmuring rivulets, of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses. The muse of Theocritus had risen from her enchanted sleep of a thousand years and brought back with her the sanity and the light that were to banish the phantoms and the mists of the mediaeval hell. Italy celebrated the resurrection of Pan.

Self-abasement was superseded by self-reverence; and abstinence by temperance. The dignity of the individual, long lost in the mediaeval worship of authority, was restored; the glorification of man succeeded to the glorification of the Kingdom of God on earth. The beauty of the naked human body was once more recognised and its cult revived. Fecundity and not chastity became the ideal virtue. And what the poets described in warm, impassioned melody, the artists of a later day depicted in no less warm and impassioned colour. Dante’s ethereal love for Beatrice would have been shocked at Raphael’s Madonna: Madonna the mother; no longer Madonna the maiden.

Nor was the new cult confined to profane poets, artists, and scholars. The divines of the Roman Church were also carried away by it. Rationalism invaded the Vatican, was petted by the priests, and promulgated from the pulpit. In sermons preached before the Pope and his cardinals the dogmas of Christianity were blended with the doctrines of ancient philosophy, and Hebrew theology was identified with heathen mythology. Christ’s self-sacrifice was compared to that of Socrates and of other great and good men of antiquity who had laid down their lives for the sake of truth and the benefit of mankind. Pontifical documents were couched in pagan phraseology; the Father and the Son appeared as Jupiter and Apollo; and the Holy Virgin as Diana, or even as Venus with the child Cupid; while sacred hymns were solemnly addressed by pious Catholics to the deities of Olympus. These and other vagaries were seriously indulged in, after a fashion abundantly grotesque, but none the less instructive. When pruned of its absurd extravagances and picturesque ineptitudes, this enthusiasm for paganism can be regarded both as the fruit and as the cause of an essentially healthy growth. The Italians of the fifteenth century succeeded where Julian the Apostate had failed in the fourth; and to that success may be traced all the subsequent developments of European culture.

How this revolution came about has been explained at great length by historians: how, partly through Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s influence, the nobles and merchant princes of the Italian republics took the new learning under their generous patronage; how young Italian pupils repaired to Constantinople to study the language and literature of ancient Greece at the feet of men to whom that language was a living mother tongue; how Greek teachers were encouraged to bring their treasures to Italy; how they were received by a public as eager to fathom the mysteries of Greek grammar as a modern public is to fathom the mysteries of a detective story; and how the stream gradually swelled into the mighty flood that followed on the fall of Constantine’s city in 1453. But all this was only a period of gestation. Modern Europe was really born on the day on which an obscure Dutch chandler made known to the world the marvellous invention which was to supersede the scribe’s pen, and to draw forth the torch of knowledge from the monk’s cell, and from the wealthy merchant’s study to the crowds in the street.

By a coincidence, apparently strange, the century which opened the prison-gates of the Christian condemned the Jew to a new dungeon. The age of the revival of learning and of the printing press is also the age of vigorous persecution of Israel in Italy. The compulsory attendance of Jews at divine service now began to be enforced in a manner more rigid at once and more stupid. Officials posted at the entrance to the church examined the ears of the Jews, lest the inward flow of the truth should be stemmed by cottonwool. Other officials, inside the church, were charged with the duty of preventing the wretched congregation from taking refuge in sleep. A Bull of Benedict XIII., issued at Valencia in 1415, decrees that at least three public sermons a year should be inflicted on the Jews, and prescribes the arguments that are to be employed for their conversion: proofs of Christ’s Messianic character drawn from the Prophets and the Talmud, exposure of the errors and vanities of the latter book, and demonstration of the fact that the destruction of the Temple and the woes of the Jews are due to the hardness of their hearts.

In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV., impelled by the son of an apostate Jew, ordained that the Jews of Rome should keep their doors and their windows shut during Easter Week. By 1443 the modest annual sum of 12 gold pieces, originally contributed by the Jews to the sports in the Roman circus, had grown to 1130 pieces. Nor were the Romans any longer content with the extortion of money, but they now insisted on a personal participation of the Jews in the detested joys of the arena. The descendants of Titus, and of the Romans who gazed at the savage spectacle of Jewish captives torn to pieces by wild beasts, or forced to kill one another for the delectation of the victors, revived the taste of their remote ancestors for sportful homicide. The fifteenth-century Carnival in Rome opened with a foot-race, which was in every respect worthy of its pagan prototype of the first century. Eight Jews were compelled to appear semi-naked, and, incited by blows and invectives, to cover the whole of the long course. Some reached the goal exhausted, others dropped dead on the way. On the same day the secular and religious chiefs of the Jewish community were obliged to walk at the head of the procession of Roman Senators across the course, amidst a tempest of execration and derision on the part of the mob; while the eccentricities of the Jew and the prejudices of the Gentile found similar scope for display upon the stage. In the Carnival plays and farces of Rome the Jew supplied a stock character that never failed to provoke the contemptuous merriment of the audience.

And yet, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, we find the Popes, in defiance of their own decrees, employing Jewish physicians. Nor does the lot of the Jew appear to have grown unbearable for some time after. Sixtus IV., whose intolerance towards the Jews of Spain has been recorded in a previous chapter, died in 1484, and was succeeded by Innocent VIII., a man of many superstitions and many children, but a feeble and ineffectual pontiff, the most interesting year of whose reign, to us, is the year of his death, 1492. In that year, in which the Renaissance reached its zenith, the Jewish population of Italy was augmented by the influx of large numbers of refugees from Spain. One party of them landed at Genoa; and a heart-rending sight they presented, according to an eye-witness, as they emerged from the hulls of the vessels and staggered on to the quay: a host of spectres, haggard with famine and sickness; men with hollow cheeks and deep-sunken eyes; mothers scarcely able to stand, fondling their famished infants in their skeleton arms. On that mole the hapless exiles, shivering under the blasts of the sea, were allowed to tarry for a short time in order to refit their vessels, and to recruit themselves for further trials. The law of the Republic forbade Jewish travellers to remain longer than three days in the country.

The Genoese monks hastened to make spiritual capital out of the wanderers’ desolate condition: children, starving, were baptized in return for a morsel of bread. Those who survived want, illness, and conversion, and finally left the mole of Genoa, were doomed to fresh distress. Their own co-religionists declined to receive them at Rome for fear of competition, and attempted to procure a prohibition of entry from Innocent’s successor by a bribe of one thousand ducats. The Pope, however, though not remarkable for tenderness of heart, was so shocked at the supreme barbarity of the exiles’ brethren that he issued a decree banishing the latter from the city. The Roman Jews, in order to obtain the repeal of the edict, were obliged to pay two thousand ducats, and to receive the refugees into the bargain.

Another contingent reached Naples under equally ghastly conditions. Their voyage from Spain had been a long martyrdom. A great many, especially the young and the delicately reared, had succumbed to hunger and to the foul atmosphere of the narrow and overcrowded vessels. Others had been murdered by the masters of the ships for the sake of their property, or were forced to sell their children in order to defray the expenses of the passage. Those who escaped the terrors of the sea, and reached the two harbours mentioned, brought with them an infectious disease, derived from the privations which they had endured. The infection lurked in Genoa and Naples through the winter; but when Spring came, it burst forth into a frightful plague, which spread with terrible rapidity, swept off upwards of twenty thousand souls in the latter city in one year, and then extended its wasting arms over the whole of the peninsula.

There can be little doubt that the people, who had elsewhere been made the scapegoats for epidemics with the origin of which they had nothing to do, would have been subjected to severe persecution for a visitation which could certainly be traced to their agency. But it so happened that the attention of the Italians was this year, and for many years after, absorbed by other calamities.

On Innocent’s death, Alexander VI. had been raised to St. Peter’s throne, which he strengthened by his own political genius, adorned by his magnificent liberality to the artistic genius of others, and disgraced by his monstrous depravity. ♦1494♦ Under Alexander’s reign Italy witnessed the invasion of Charles VIII. of France, an event which inaugurated a period of turmoil, and turned the country into a battle-ground for foreign princes. Rome alone escaped the consequences of this deluge. The Pope, alarmed at the king’s approach, offered terms of peace, which the French monarch finally accepted. Independence was secured at the cost of dignity, and Alexander VI. was enabled to steer safely amid the storms that raged over the rest of the peninsula. He died in 1503, regretted by a few, execrated by most of his contemporaries. Pius III. reigned for a few months, and was, in his turn, succeeded by Julius II., who proved himself one of the most energetic, warlike, and worldly statesmen that had ever wielded St. Peter’s sceptre. He died in 1513, and in his stead was elected Giovanni de Medici, under the name of Leo X. Born in 1475, a year after Ariosto, Giovanni was the second son of Lorenzo de Medici, chief of the Italian Platonists of the time. In his father’s house and among his father’s friends young Giovanni heard a great deal more of Pagan poetry and philosophy than of Christian theology. But while his contemporary, Ariosto, nourished in a similar school of thought, denounced the rapacity of the Roman Court and derided the papal pretensions to temporal power—laughingly dismissing the fabled gift of Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester to the realms of the moon—Giovanni devoted his life to the service of a Church whose doctrines he did not believe, and to her defence against heresies which he did not detest. His pontificate, accordingly, was distinguished by the elegant frivolities of a cultured gentleman far more than by the piety of a clergyman. Leo’s artistic taste and genial sense of the ludicrous were among his chief virtues; his love of the chase his greatest vice. Abstemious in his own diet, he delighted in providing for, and laughing at, the gluttony of others. But Leo’s principal title to the grateful remembrance of posterity lies in his munificent encouragement of art and letters. He died in 1521.

Most of these pontiffs, refined, intelligent, and irreligious, in fighting the reformers fought enemies to their own power, not the enemies of Christ. While opposing the spirit of rebellion which the licentiousness of some of them had brought into existence and the literary culture of others to maturity, they seem to have ignored the eternal heretics, the Jews. Under their rule Israel enjoyed one of those Sabbaths of rest which invariably preceded a new reign of terror. When an academic feud rent the learned world of the University of Padua into two factions, instead of the philosophical question under dispute being, after the fashion of the times, settled at the point of the rapier, it was submitted to the arbitration of a Jew, the great scholar Elias del Medigo. This worthy, vested in the professorial robes, addressed the students of Padua and Florence, and his decision was accepted as final. Lastly, the gulf between Jew and Gentile in Italy was bridged by a common philosophical faith.

The Italians of the period, in their eager search after truth, often strayed into strange paths. Many of them, weary of groping their way amid the darkness of the scholastic wilderness, rashly ran after any will-of-the-wisp that held out the promise of light and rest. Among these aberrations from commonsense was the rage for the Hebrew mysticism of the Cabbala, which found many susceptible disciples among the literati of Padua and Florence, and led to close and cordial relations between representatives of the two creeds. The omniscient youth Count Giovanni Pico de Mirandola, who had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabbala by a Jew, maintained that these mysteries yielded the most effective proof of the divinity of Christ, and, what is more remarkable still, he had even converted Pope Sixtus IV. to his way of thinking. Pico de Mirandola placarded Rome with a list of nine hundred theses, and invited all European scholars to come to the city at his own expense that they might be convinced of the infallibility of the Cabbala, while the Pope took great pains to have the Cabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the enlightenment of divinity students. Innocent VIII. was far too old-fashioned to favour new absurdities; and, while he persecuted witches and magicians in Germany and preached abortive crusades against the heretics of the West and the infidels of the East, he prohibited the reading of Pico’s nonsense. But the craze seized Leo X. and the early Reformers, and not only theologians but also men of affairs and men of war fell captives to it. Statesmen and soldiers devoted themselves to the study of Hebrew, in the pathetic belief that they had at last secured the magic key to universal wisdom.

Contrariwise, many Hebrew Cabbalists, filling high places in the Synagogue, found in these theosophic hallucinations a proof of the divine origin of Christianity and openly embraced it. But apart from mysticism, the genius of the Renaissance overstepped the iron circle of Judaism. The charm of Hellenism which had in old times attracted the Jews of Alexandria, once more prevailed against the Hebrew hatred of Gentile culture. Jewish youths gladly attended the Italian universities; the philosophy of Aristotle, the elegant Latinity of Cicero and the subtle criticism of Quintilian met with keen appreciation among them; and, though painting and sculpture continued to be regarded with suspicion, we find Italian Rabbis, like their Christian colleagues, drawing from pagan mythology illustrations for their sermons, and even paying, in full synagogue, rhetorical homage to “that holy goddess Diana.”

Thus Jew and Gentile were drawn near to each other by many intellectual forces. Even theologians succumbed to the mollifying influence of the new spirit. Too enlightened to persecute, not sufficiently in earnest to proselytise, they engaged in friendly and witty arguments with the Jews on the matter of their religion. ♦1523–1534♦ Pope Clement VII. even conceived the plan of a Latin translation of the Old Testament to be brought about by a collaboration of Jewish and Christian scholars. Under such illusory auspices was ushered in the century that was to open to the Jews the blackest chapter in their black history.