The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The marvellous sight of priests, who smilingly shovelled up gold like hay, caused malicious Ghibellines to assert that the Pope had appointed the jubilee solely for the sake of gain. Boniface in truth stood in need of money to defray the expenses of the war with Sicily, which swallowed up incalculable sums. If instead of copper, the monks in St. Paul's had lighted on gold florins, they would necessarily have collected fabulous wealth, but the heaps of money, both in St. Peter's and St. Paul's, consisted mainly of small coins, the gifts of poor pilgrims.

Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi pointedly comments on the fact, and laments the change of times, when only the poor gave offerings, and when kings no longer, like the three magi, brought gifts to the Saviour. The receipts of the jubilee, which the Pope was able to devote to the two basilicas for the purchase of estates, were sufficiently considerable. If in ordinary years the gifts of pilgrims to St. Peter's amounted to thirty thousand four hundred gold florins, we may conclude how much greater must have been the gains of the year of jubilee. "The gifts of pilgrims," wrote the chronicler of Florence, "yield treasures to the Church, and the Romans all grow wealthy by the sale of their goods."

The year of jubilee was for them indeed a year of wealth. The Romans, therefore, treated the pilgrims with kindness, and nothing is heard of any act of violence. If the fall of the house of Colonna had aroused enemies to the Pope in Rome, he disarmed them by the immense profits which accrued to the Romans who have always lived solely on the money of foreigners. Their senators at this time were Richard Anibaldi of the Colosseum, from which the Anibaldi had already expelled the Frangipani, and Gentile Orsini, whose name may still be read on an inscription in the Capitol. These gentlemen did not permit the pious enthusiasm of the pilgrimage to prevent them from making war in the neighborhood. They allowed the pilgrims to pray at the altars, but they themselves advanced with the Roman banners against Toscanella, which they subjugated to the Capitol.

We may imagine on how vast a scale Rome sold relics, amulets, and images of saints, and at the same time how many remains of antiquity, coins, gems, rings, statues, marble remains, and also manuscripts were carried back by the pilgrims to their homes. When they had sufficiently satisfied their religious instincts, these pilgrims turned with astonished gaze to the monuments of the past.

Ancient Rome, through which they wandered, the book of the Mirabilia in their hand, exercised its profound spell upon them. Besides the recollections of antiquity other memories of the deeds of popes and emperors, from the time of Charles the Great, animated this classic theatre of the world in the year 1300. Every mind, alive to the language of history, must have felt deeply the influence of the city at this time, when troops of pilgrims from every country, wandering in this world of majestic ruins, bore living testimony to the eternal ties which bound Rome to mankind. It can scarcely be doubted that Dante beheld the city in these days, and that a ray from them fell on his immortal poem which begins with Easter week of the year 1300.

The sight of the capital of the world inspired the soul of another Florentine. "I also found myself," writes Giovanni Villani, "in that blessed pilgrimage to the holy city of Rome, and as I beheld the great and ancient things within her, and read the histories and the great deeds of the Romans—which Vergil, Sallust, Lucan, Titus Livius, Valerius, Paul Orosius, and other great masters of history have described—I took style and form from them, although as a pupil I was not worthy to do so great a work. And thus in 1300, returned from Rome, I began to write this book to the honor of God and St. John and to the commendation of our city of Florence." The fruit of Villani's creative enthusiasm was his history of Florence, the greatest and most naive chronicle that has been produced in the beautiful Italian tongue; and it is possible that many other talented men may have received fruitful impressions from Rome at this time.

For Boniface the jubilee was a real victory. The crowds that streamed to Rome showed him that men still retained their belief in the city as the sacred temple of the united world. The monster festival of reconciliation seemed to flow like a river of grace over its own past, and to wipe away the hated recollection of Celestine V, of his war with the Colonnas, and all the accusations of his enemies. In these days he could revel in a feeling of almost divine power, as scarcely any pope had been able to do before him. He sat on the highest throne of the West, adorned by the spoils of empire, as the "vicar of God" on earth. As the dogmatic ruler of the world, the keys of blessing and destruction in his hand, he beheld thousands from distant lands come before his throne and cast themselves in the dust before him as before a higher being. Kings, however, he did not see. Beyond Charles Martel, no monarch came to Rome to receive, as a penitent, absolution for his sins. This shows that the faith, which the battles of Alexander III and Innocent III had formerly won, was extinguished at royal courts.