"He was convicted in absence, and was given the choice of paying a heavy fine or having his right hand cut off. As he still refused to appear before the court, he was banished from Florence and suffered the confiscation of his property. Taking his young wife with him, he fled to Arezzo. There, two years later, Francesco Petrarca (as he later euphorized his name) burst upon the world.

"Predominatnly Ghibelline -- yielding political allegiance to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire rather than to the popes -- little Arezzo experienced in the fourteenth century all the tribulations of an Italian city. Guelfic Florence -- supporting the popes against the emperors in the struggle for political authority in Italy -- had overwhelmed Arezzo at Campaldino where Dante fought.

"In 1340 all Aretine Ghibellines between thirteen and seventy were exiled. In 1384 Arezzo fell permanently under Florentine rule. There, in ancient days, Maccenas had been born. There the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would see the birth of Giorgio Vasari who made the Renaissance famous and of Pietro Aretino, who for a while made it infamous.

"Every town in Italy had fathered genius and banished it.

In 1312 Ser Petracco rushed north to welcome the Emperor Henry VII as one who would save Italy or at least its Ghibellines. As sanguine as Dante in that year, Petracco moved his family to Pisa and awaited the destruction of the Florentine Guelfs."

Something is about to happen. Your thoughts?

"The shattering of her fleet by the Genoese in 1284 had reduced her possessions and narrowed her commerce. The strife of Guelf and Ghibelline within her gates left her with scant strength to elude the imperialistic grasp of a mercantile Florence eager to control the Arno to its mouth.

"But her brave burghers gloried in their majestic marble cathedral, their precarious campanile, and their famous cemetery, that Campo Santo, or Sacred Field, whose central quadrangle had been filled with soil from the Holy Land and whose walls were soon to receive frescoes by Giotto's pupils and the Lorenzetti, and whose sculptured tombs gve a moment's immortality to the heroic or lavish dead.

"In Pisa's university, soon after its establishment, the subtle jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato adapted Roman law to the needs of the age, but phrased his legal science in such esoteric verbiage as brought both Petrach and Boccaccio down upon his head.

"The Guelfs of Italy rejoiced. Ser Petracco, unsafe in Pisa, emigrated with his wife, his daughter, and his two sons to Avignon on the Rhone, where the newly established papal court and a rapidly expanding population, offered opportunities for a lawyer's skill.

"They sailed up the coast to Genoa and Petrarch never forgot the unfolding splendor of the Italian Riviera -- towns like diadems on mountain brows, slipping down to green blue seas. This, said the young poet, 'is liker to heaven than to earth.'

"They found Avignon so stuffed with dignitaries that they moved some fifteen miles northeast to Carpentras and there Francesco spent four years of happy carelessness.

"It was a university town, full of the frolic of students, the odor of learning, the excitement of independent thought. Here in this fourteenth century were given the first courses in human anatomy.

"Here were women professors, some, like Novella d'Andrea, so attractive that tradition, doubtless fanciful, described her as lecturing behind a veil lest the students should be distrtacted by her beauty.

"The commune of Bologna had been among the first to throw off the yoke of the Holy Roman Empire and proclaim its autonomy. As far back as 1153 it had chosen its own podesta or city manager. For two centuries it had maintained a democratic government.

"But in 1325, while Petrarch was there, it suffered so disastrous a defeat by Modena that it placed itself under the protection of the papacy and in 1327 accepted a papal vicar as its governor.

"All that he cared for in the legal treatises was their 'numberless references to Roman antiquity.'

"Instead of studying law he read all that he could find of Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca. They opened to him a new world, both of philosophy and of literary art. He began to think like them, he longed to write like them.

"When his parents died he abandoned law, returned to Avignon and steeped himself in classic poetry and romantic love.

"It was on Good Friday of 1327, he tells us, that he saw the woman whose withheld charms made him the most famous poet of his age.

"He described her in fascinating detaial but kept the secret of her identity so well that even his friends thought her the invention of his muse and counted all his passion as poetic license. But on the flyleaf of his copy of Virgil, jealously treasured in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, may still be seen the words that he wrote in 1348:-

'Laura, who was distinguished by her virtues, and widely celebrated by my songs, first appeared to my eyes in the year of Our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, at the first hour, in the church of Santa Clara Avignon. In the same city, in the same month, on the same sixth day, at the same first hour, in the year 1348, that light was taken from our day.'

"Who was this Laura?

"A will was filed in Avignon on April 3, 1348, by one Laura de Sade, wife of Count Hugues de Sade, to whom she had given twelve children. Presumably this was the lady of the poet's love, and her husband was a distant ancestor of the most famous sadist in history.

"A miniature attributed to Simone Martini, and now in the Laurentian Library at Florence, is described by tradition as a portrait of Petrarch's Laura. It shows a face of delicate beauty, fine mouth, straight nose, and lowered eyes suggesting a pensive modesty. We do not know if Laura was married or already a young mother when Petrarch first saw her. In any case she received his adoration calmly, kept him at a distance, and gave his passion all the encourgement of denial.

"The echoes of their songs still lingered in Avignon and Petrarch, like the young Dante a generation before him, became unconsciously a troubadour, wedding his passion to a thousand tricks of verse.

"The writing of poetry was then a popular pastime. Petrarch complained, in one of his letters, that lawyers and theologians, nay, even his own valet, had taken to rhyming. Soon, he feared, 'the very cattle would begin to low in verse.' From his own country he inherited the manner, form, and bound it into the difficult rhyme pattern that for centuries molded and hampered Italian poetry.

"Walking along the streams or among the hills, kneeling distracted at Vespers or Mass, groping his way among verbs and adjectives in the silence of his room, he composed during the next twenty one years 207 sonnets and sundry other poems on the living, breeding Laura.

"Gathered in manuscript copies as a Canzoniere or Songbook, these compositions caught the fancy of Italian youth, of Italian manhood, of the Italian clergy. No one was disturbed by the fact that the author, seeing no road to advancement except in the Church, had taken the tonsure and minor orders and was angling for a benefice. But Laura may have blushed -- and thrilled -- on hearing that her hair and brow and eyes and nose and lips were sung from the Adriatic to the Rhone. Never before, in the salvaged literature of the world, had the emotion of love been expounded in each diverse fullness or with such painstaking artifice.

"But the Italian people received these bonbons in the most exquisite music tht their language had yet heard -- subtle and delicate and melodious, gleaming with bright imagery making even Dante seem at times crude and harsh. Now indeed that glorious lanuage -- the triumph of the vowel over the consonant -- reached a height of beauty that even to our day remains unscaled.

"Like the humanists of a century after him, he chose Latin as his medium, not, like Dante, Italian. He wished to be understood by the whole literate Western world.

"As the poem progressed he became more and more doubtful of its merit. He never completed it, never published it. While he was absorbed in Latin hexamaeters his Italian Canzoniere was spreading his fame through Italy and a translation carred his name through France.

"In 1340 -- not without some sly manipulation on his part -- two invitations reached him, one from the Roman Senate, the other from the University of Paris, to come and receive at their hands the poet's laurel crown.

"He accepted the Senate's offer, and the suggestion of Robert the Wise that he should stop at Naples on the way.

"After the overthrow of Frederick II and the Hohenstaufens by the arms and diplomacy of the popes, his Regno -- Italy south of the Papal States -- had been given to the house of Anjou in the person of Charles, Count of Provence.

"Charles ruled as King of Naples and Sicily. His son Charles II lost Sicily to the house of Aragon. His grandson Robert, though failing in his war to recapture Sicily, earned his cognomen by competent government, wise diplomacy, and a discriminating patronage of literature and art.

"The Kingdom was poor in industry and its agriculture was dominated by myopic landowners who, as now, exploited the peasaantry to the edge of revolution. But the commerce of Naples gave the court an income that made the royal Castel Nuovo ring with frequent festivities.

"The well-to-do imitated the court. Marriages became ruinous ceremonies. Periodic regattas animated the historic bay. And in the city square young blades jousted in perilous tournaments while their garlanded ladies smiled upon them from bannered balconies. Life was pleasant in Naples and morals were comfortably loose. Women were beautiful and accessible. Poets found in this atmosphere of amorous dalliance many a theme and stimulus for their verse.

"It was a pitiful capital of the world.

"The papacy having moved to Avignon in 1309, no economic means remained of supporting even such moderate splendor as the city had known in the thirteenth century. The wealth that had trickled from a thousand bishoprics into streams from a dozen states no longer flowed into Rome. No foreign embassies kept palaces there.

"Rare was the cardinal who showed his face amid the ruins of the Empire and the Church. Christian shrines rivaled classic colonnades in dilapidation. Shepherds grazed their flocks on the slopes of the seven hills. Beggars roamed the streets and highwaymen lurked along the roads. wives were abducted, nuns were raped, pilgrims were robbed. Every man carried arms.

"The old aristocratic familes -- Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Annibaldi, Gaetani, Frangipani -- contested with violence and intrigue for political mastery in the oligarchic Senate tht ruled Rome.

"The middle classes were small and weak. The motley masses, mingled of a score of peoples, lived in a poverty too stupefying to generate self government.

"The hold of the absent papacy upon the city was reduced to the theoretical authority of a legate, who was ignored.

"Amid the chaos and penury the mutilated remains of a proud antiquity nourished the visions of scholars and the dreams of patriots.

"Some day, the Romans believed, Rome would again be the spiritual and political capital of the world and the barbarians beyond the Alps would send imperial tribute as well as Peter's pence. Here and there men could still spare a pittance for art. Pietro Cavalini adorned Santa Maria in Trastevere with remarkable mosaics and in Santa Cecilia he inaugurated a Roman school of fresco painting almost as important as Cuccio's in Siena or Giotto's in Florence. Even in Rome's destitution poets sang, forgetting the present for the past.

"From that day Petrarch had new fame and new enemies. Rivals plucked at his laurels with their pens, but kings and popes gladly received him at their courts.

"Soon Boccaccio would rank him with the 'illustrious ancients.'

"Italy, proud of his renown, proclaimed that Virgil had been born again.

"What sort of man was he at this apex of his curve?

"In his youth he had been handsome and vain of his looks and clothes. In later years he laughed at his once meticulous ritual of toilette and dress and curling of the hair and sqeezing of the feet into fancy shoes. In middle age he grew a bit stout and doubled his chin but his face had still the charm of refinement and animation. He remained vain to the end, merely pluming himself on his achievements instead of his appearance.

"But this is a fault that only the greatest saints can shun. His letters, so fascinating and brilliant, would have been more so without their sham modesty and honest pride.

"Like all of us he relished applause. He longed for fame, for literary 'immortality.' So early, in this presage of the Renaissance, he struck one of its most sustained notes, the thirst for glory. He was a little jealous of his rivals and descended to answer their slurs. He fretted some (although he denied it) at Dante's popularity. He shuddered at Dante's ferocity as Erasmus would at Luther's crudity. But he suspected that there was something in the dour Florentine too deep to be fathomed by a facile pen.

"Yet he speaks of his 'varying moods which were rarely happy and usually despondent.'

"To be a great writer he had to be sensitive to beauty in form and sound, in nature and woman and man. That is, he had to suffer more than most of us from the noises and deformities of the world. He loved music and played the lute well. He admired fine painting and numbered Simone Martini among his friends.

"Women must have attracted him for at times he spoke of them with almost anchoritic fear. After forty, he assures us, he never touched a woman carnally. He wrote:-'Great must be the powers of both body and mind that may suffice both to literary activity and to a wife.'

"He offered no novel philosophy. He rejected Scholasticism as vain logic-chopping far removed from life. He challenged the infallibility of Aristotle and dared to prefer Plato.

"He went back from Aquinas and Duns Scotus to the Scriptures anbd the Fathers and relished the melodious piety of Augustine and the Stoic Christianity of Ambrose. However, he quoted Cicero and Seneca as reverently as he cited the saints and drew his arguments for Christianity most often from pagan texts.

"He smiled at the discord of philosophers, among whom he found 'no more agreement than among clocks.' He complained::-'Philosophy aims only at hair splitting, subtle distinctions, quibbles of words.' Such a discipline could make clever debaters but hardly wise men. He laughed at the high degree of Master and Doctor with which such studies were crowned and marveled how a ceremony could make a pundit out of a fool.

"Almost in modern terms he rejected astrology, alchemy, demoniac possession, prodigies, auguries, dream prophecies, and the miracles of his time. He had the courage to praise Epicurus in an age when that name was used as a synonym for the atheist.

"Following the precedent of awarding some benefices -- i.e. the income from ecclesiastical properties -- for the support of writers and artists, Clement gave the poet a priorate near Pisa and in 1346 made him a canon of Parma.

"In 1343 he sent him on a mission to Naples and there Petrarch met one of the most unruly rulers of the age.

"Robert the Wise had just died and his granddaughter Joanna I had inherited his throne and dominions, including Provence and therefore Avignon. To pleas her father she had married her cousin Andrew, son of the king of Hungary. Andrew thought he should be king as well s consort. Joanna's lover, Louis of Taranto, slew him and married the Queen.

"Andrew's brother, Louis, succeeding to the throne of Hungary, marched his army into Italy and took Naples. Joanna fled to Avignon and sold that city to the papacy for 80,000 florins ($2,000,000). Clement declared her innocent, sanctioned her marrige, and ordered the invader back to Hungary. King Louis ignored the order but the Black Death so withered his army that he was compelled to withdraw. Joanna regained her throne and ruled in splendor and vice until deposed by Pope Urban VI.

"Proud of her antiquity and her Roman theater (where one may still, of a summer evening, hear opera under the stars), enriched by the trade that came over the Alps and down the Adige, Verona rose under the Scala family to a height where she threatened the commercial supremacy of Venice.

"After the death of the terrible Ezzelino, the commune chose Mastino della Scala as podesta. Mastino was assassinated in due course but his brother and successor Alberto firmly establihsed the rule of the Scaligeri ("ladder beaers") from the apt emblem of a climbing family and inaugurated the heyday of Verona's history.

"During his reign the Dominicans began to build the lovely church of Sant' Anastasia. An obscure copyist unearthed the lost poems of Carullus, Verona's most famous son.

"The Guelf family of the Capellerri fought the Ghibelline family of the Montechi, never dreaming that they would become Shakespeare's Capulets and Montagues. The strongest and not the least noble of the Scala 'despots' was Can Grande della Scala, who made his court an asylum for exiled Ghibellines and a haven for poets and scholars. There Dante for several years indignantly climbed the shaky steairs of patronage. But Can Grande brought Vicenza, Padua, Treviso, Belluno, Feltre, and Cividale under his power.

"Venice saw herself threatened with a strangling encirclement. When Can Grande was succeeded by the less ardent Mastino II she declared war, brought in Florence and Milan as her allies, and forced Verona to surrender all but one of the conquered towns. Can Grande II built the majestic Scaligero Bridge over the Adige with an arch whose span of 160 feet was then the largest in the world.

"He was assassinated by his brother Consignorio who followed this fratricide with a wise and beneficent rule, and built the most ornate of the famous tombs of the Scaligers.

"Niccola di Rienzo Gabrini, known by the economy of popular speech as Cola di Rienzo and by a careless posterity as Rienzi, had met Petrarch in 1343 when, as a young notary of thirty years age, he had come to Avignon to acquaint Clement VI with the dire condition of Rome and to solicit for the Roman people the support of the papacy against the feuding, marauding nobles who dominated the capital. Clement, although skeptical, had sent him back with encouragement and florins, hoping to use the fervent lawyer in the recurrent conflict of the popes with the aristocracy.

"Rienzo, like Petrarch, had had his imagination fired by the ruins and classics of Rome.

"Dressed in the white toga of an ancient senator and speaking with the ardor of the Gracchi and almost the eloquence of Cicero, he pointed to the remains of the majestic forums and colossal baths and reminded the Romans of the time when consuls or emperors, from these hills, had given laws and order urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world. He challenged them to seize the government, to restore the popular assembly, and to elect a tribune strong enough to protect them against the usurping nobility.

"The poor listened in awe. Merchants wondered might this potential tribune make Rome safe for industry and trade. Aristocrats laughed and made Rienzo the but of their dinner jollity.

"Rienzo appeared before them escorted by the bishop of Orviero as vicar of the pope. He proclaimed the restoration of the Republic and a distribution of alms. They elected him dictator and at a later meeting allowed him to take the old popular title of tribune.

"The aged Senator Stefano Colonna protested. Cola ordered him and the other nobles to leave the city. Furious, but respecting the armed revlutionaries, they withdrew to their country estates.

"Delirious with success, Rienzo began to speak of himself as the divinely inspired 'illustrious redeemer of the Holy Roman Republic by the authority of Jesus Christ.'

"His administration was excellent.

"Food prices were regulated to check profiteering. Surplus corn was stored in the granaries. Work was begun to drain the malarial marshes and put the Campagne under cultivation. New courts dealt out justice with impartial severity.

"A monk and a baron were beheaded for equal felonies. A former senator was hanged for robbing a merchant vessel. The cutthroats hired by noble factions were arrested. A court of concilliation pacified in a few months 1800 feuds.

"Aristocrats accustomed to being their own law were shocked to find themselves held responsible for crimes committed on their estates. Some paid heavy fines. Pietro Colonna, dripping dignity, was led on foot to jail. Judges guilty of malfeasance were exposed to public pillories.

"Peasants tilled their fields in unwonted security and peace. Merchants and pilgrims en route to Rome kissed the insignia of the resurrected Republic tht made the highways safe after half a century of brigandage.

"To a preliminary council of judges gathered from all Italy he submitted a question:--might the Roman Republic, now reconstituted, rightfully reclaim all the privileges and powers that in its decay had been delegated to other authorities?

"Answered in the affirmative, Rienzo put through the popular assembly a law restoring to the Republic all such grants of power. This grandiose declaration, sweeping away a millennium of donations, abdications, and coronations, threatened alike the Holy Roman Empire, the autonomous cities, and the termporal power of thge Church.

"Twenty-five communes sent representatives to Rienzo's parliament but the major city-states -- Venice, Florence, Milan -- hesitated to submit their sovereignty to a federation.

"Clement VI was pleased with the tribune's piety, his formal sharing of his authority with the bishop of Orvicto, the protection he gave to pilgrims, and prospects he held out of a lucrative jubilee in 1350.

"Power, like freedom, is a test that only a sober intelligence can meet. Rienza was too great an orator to be a realistic statesman. He came to believe his own magnificent phrases, promises, and claims. He was poisoned by his own periods.

"When the federative assembly met, he had arranged that it should begin by conferring knighthood upon him. That evening he proceeded with his escort to the baptistery of St. John, Lateran, and plunged bodily into the great basin, wherein, according to legend, Constantine had washed away his paganism and his sins. Then, clad in white, he slept through the night on a public couch set up amid the pillars of the church.

"On the morrow he issued to the assembly and the world a decree declaring all the cities of Italy to be free, endowing them with Roman citizenship, and reserving exclusively to the people of Rome and Italy the authority to elect an emperor. Drawing his sword, he flourished it in three directions, saying, as the representative of Rome, 'That belongs to me, that to me, and that.'

"He began now to indulge in ostentatious extravagance. He rode about on a white horse under a royal banner, preceded by one hundred armed men and dressed in a white silk robe with fringes of gold. When Stefano Colonna twitted him about the gold fringe, he announced that the nobles were conspiring against him (which was probably true), ordered the arrest of several, had them led in chains to the Capitol, proposed to the assembly that they should be beheaded, relented, pardoned them, and ended by appointing them to offices of state in the Campaigna.

"Cardinals from Italy and from France warned Clement that a unified Italy -- and much more an empire ruled from Rome -- would make the Italian Church a prisoner of the state.

"On October 7 Clement commissioned his legate Bertrand de Deux to offer Rienzo a choice betwen deposition and the striction of his powers to the secular affairs of the city of Rome. After some resistance Cola yielded. He promised obedience to the Pope and withdrew the edicts that had annulled imperial and papal privileges. Unmollified, Clenment resolved to unseat the incalculable tribune.

"On December 3 he published a bull stigmatizing Cola as a criminal and a heretic and called upon the Romans to banish him. The legate suggested that if this should not be done, no jubilee would be proclaimed. Meanwhile the nobles had raised another army which now advanced upon Rome. Rienzo had the tocsin rung to call the people to arms. Only a few came. Many resented the taxes he had levied. Some preferred the profits of a jubilee to the responsibilities of freedom.

"As the forces of the aristocrcy neared the Capitol, Rienzo's wonted courage waned. He discarded the insignia of his office, said good-by to his friends, broke into tears, and shut himself up in the Castello Sant' Angelo.

"Then, surviving a thousand hardships and tribulations, he made his way, secretly and in disguise, through Italy and the Alps and Austria to the Emperor Charles IV at Prague. He pronounced before him an angry indictment of the popes. To their absence from Rome he attributed the anarchy and poverty of that city and to their temporal power and policy the abiding division of Italy.

"Charles rebuked him and defended the popes. But when Clement demanded that Cola be sent as a papal prisoner to Avignon, Charles kept him in protective confinement in a fortress on the Elbe.

"After a year of unbearable inactivity and isolation Cola asked to be sent to the papal court. On his journey to Avignon crowds flocked to see him and gallant knights offered to guard him with their swords. On August 10, 1352, he reached Avignon in such miserable raiment that all men pitied him.

"He asked for Petrarch who was at Vancluse. The poet responded by issuing to the people of Rome a clarion call to protect the man who had offered them liberty.

"Clement did not ask for Cola's death but ordered him kept in custody in the tower of the papal palace at Avignon.

"While Rienzo studied Scripture and Livy there, a new tribune, Francesco Baroncelli, seized power in Rome, banished the nobles, flouted the papal legate and allied himself with the Ghibelline supporters of the emperors against the popes.

"Clement's successor, Innocent VI, released Cola, and sent him to Italy as an aide to Cardinal Albornoz, whom he charged with restoring the papal authority in Rome. As the subtle cardinal and the subdued dictator neared the capital a revolt was staged. Baroncelli was deposed and killed and the Romans turned over the city to Albornoz. The populace welcomed Rienzo with arches of triumph and joyful acclamations in crowded streeets.

"His policies cleaved to the papal line and shunned the grand emprises of his younger reign. The nobility still hated him and the proletariat, seeing in him now a cautious conservative cured of Utopia, turned against him as disloyal to their cause.

"When the Colonna decleared war upon him and beseiged him in Palestrina, his unpaid troops verged on mutiny. He borrowed money to pay them, raised taxes to redeem the debt, and alienated the middle class.

"Hardly two months after his return to power a revolutionary mob marched to the Capitol shouting:-'Long live the people! Death to the trator Cola di Rienzo!' He came out of his palace in knightly armor and tried to control the crowd with eloquence.

"But the rebels drowned his voice with noise and showered him with missiles. An arrow struck him in the head and he withdrew into the palace. The mob set fire to the doors, broke through them, and plundered the rooms.

"Hiding in one of these, Rienzo hastily cut off his beard, donned a porter's cloak, and piled some bedding upon his head. Emerging, he passed through part of the crowd unrecognized. But his gold bracelet betrayed him and he was led as a prisoner to the steps of the Capitol where he himself had condemned men to death. He asked for a hearing and began to move the meople with his speech.

"But an artisan fearful of eloquence cut him short with a sword thrust in the stomach. A hundred demiheroes plunged their knives into his dead body.

"Petrarch succeeded in restoring Roman literature which had never died. He had so openly supported Cola's revolt that he had forfeited the favor of the Colonna in Avignon. For a time he thought of joining Rienzo in Rome. He was as far on the way to Genoa when he heard that the tribune's position and conduct were deteriorating.

"He changed his course to Parma. He was in Italy when the Black Death came, taking many of his friends, and killing Laura in Avignon.

"It was already hundreds of years old when Livy was born there in 59 B.C. It became a free commune in 1174, suffered the tyranny of Ezzelino, recovered its independence, sang litanies to liberty, and subjectd Vicenza to its domination.

"Attacked and almost overcome by Can Grande della Scala of Verona, it abandoned its freedom and chose as dictator Iacopo I da Carrara, a man as hard as the marble tht bore his name. Later members of the family succeeded to his power by inheritance or assassination.

"Petrarch's host seized the reins in 1345 by murdering his predecessor, tried to atone by good government, but was stabbed to death after four years of rule.

"Francesco I de Carrra, in a remarkable reign of almost forty years, raised Padua to a passing rivalry with Milan, Florence, and Venice.

"It developed in a stimulating atmosphere of business competition, family feuds, and private violence unparalleled in the rest of Italy.

"The population was divided by class war and each class itself was split into factions merciless in victory and vengeful in deteat. At any moment the defection of a few families from one parte to another would tip the scales of power.

"At any moment some discontented element might take to arms and try to oust the government. If successful it exiled the leaders of the beaten party, usually confiscated their property, sometimes burned down their homes.

"But this economic strife and political agitation were not all of Florentine life. Though more devoted to their party than to their city, the citizens had a proud civic sense and spent much of their substance for the common good. Rich individuals or guilds would pay for paving a street, constructing sewers, improving the water supply, housing a public market, establishing or improving churches, hospital, or schools. An esthetic sense as keen as that of the ancient Greeks or the modern French dedicated public and private funds to the embellishment of the city with architecture, sculpture, and painting, and to the interior adornment of homes with these and a dozen minor arts.

"The artist rivaled the poet in ubiquity. Painter, sculptor, architect, capitalist, man of the world, equally ready with artistic conceptions, practical devices, and humorous repartee, Giotto moved through life with the confidence of a Reubens and spawned masterpieces in Florence, Rome, Assisi, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Faenza, Pisa, Lucca, Arezzo, Padua, Verona, Naples, Urbino, Milan.

"He seems never to have worried about obtaining commissions. When he went to Naples it was as the palace guest of the king. He married and had ugly children but this did not disturb the placid grace of his compositions or the cheerful tenor of his life. "He leased looms to artisans at twice the oridinary rental. However, he told the story of St. Francis, the apostle of poverty in one of the outstanding works of the Renaissance.

"He was still a youth when Cardinal Stefaneschi called him to Rome to design a mosaic -- the celebrated Navicella, or Little Ship, showing Christ saving Peter from the waves. It survives, considererably altered, in the vestibule of St. Peter's, inconspicuous above and behind the portico colonnade. It was probably the same Cardinal who commissioned the polyptych preserved in the Vatican.

"These products show an immature Giotto, vigorous in conception, weak in execution. Possibly a study of Pietro Cavallini's mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere and his fresco in Santa Cecilia, helped to form Giotto in those Roman years. While the naturalistic sculpture of Nicolo Pisano may have moved him to turn his eyes from the works of his predecessors to the actual features and feelings of living women and men.

"These paintings were whitewashed in later years. They were uncovered in 1853 and were repainted so that only the drawing and the composition are Giotto's.

"A like fare befell the celebrated frescoes in the double church of St. Francis at Assisi. That hilltop shrine is one of the major goals of pilgrimage in Italy and those visitors who come to view the paintings attributed to Cimabue and Giotto seem as numerous as those who to honor or solicit the saint.

"It was probably Giotto who planned the subjects and drew the outlines for the lower frescoes of the Upper Church. For the rest he seems to have confined himself to supervising the work of his pupils.

"These frescoes of the Upper church narrate in detail the life of St. Francis. Christ Himself had rarely received so extensive a painted biography. They are masterly in their conception and composition, pleasant in their gentle mood and flowing harmony.

"They end once and for all the hieratic stiffness of Byzantine forms. But they lack depth and force and individuality. They are graceful tableaux without the color of passion or the blood of life.

"The frescoes in the Lower Church, less mangled by time, mark an advance in Giotto's power. He seems to have been directly responsible for the pictures in the Magdalen Chapel while his aides painted the allegories illustrating the Franciscan vows, of poverty, obedience, and chastity.

"There Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, in the late thirteenth century, gave the sonnet its finished form. Not there, but longing for it, Dante the Florentine struck the first and last true note of Italian epic poetry. There Boccaccio composed the supreme work of Italian prose and Giovanni Villani wrote the most modern of medieval chronicles.

"Visiting Rome for the jubilee of 1300, and moved like Gibbon by the ruins of a mighty past, Villani thought for a while of recording its history. Then, judging that Rome had been sufficiently commemorated, he turned back to his native haunts and resolved 'to bring in this volume all the events of the city of Florence and give in full the deeds of the Florentines, and briefly the notable affairs of the rest of the world.'

"He began with the Tower of Babel and ended on the verge of the Black Death in which he died. His brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo continued the story to 1365.

"Giovanni was well prepared. He came of a prosperous mercantine family, commanded a pure Tuscan speech, traveled in Italy, Flanders, and France, served thrice as prior and once as master of the mint. He had for those times an uncommon sense of the economic bases and influences of history. And he was the first to salt his narrative with statistics of social conditions.

"The first three books of his Chroniche Fiorentine are mostly legend. But in later books we learn that in 1338 Florence and its hinterland had 105,000 inhabitants, of whom seventeen thousand were beggars and four thousand were on public relief, that there were six primary schools, teaching ten thousand boys and girls, and four high schools, in which six hundred boys and a few girls studied 'grammar' (literature) and 'logic' )philosophy).

"Unlike most historians, Villani included notices of new books, paintings, buildings. Seldom has a city been so directly described in all the departments of its life.

"The Amorosa Visione was dedicated to Fiammetta and recalled in 4400 lines of terza rima the happier days of their liaison. In a psychological novel, Fiammeta, the bastard princess is made to tell the story of her deviation with Boccaccio.

"She analyzes the emotions of love, the torments of desire and jealousy and desertion, in Richardsonian detail.

"And when her conscience rebukes her infidelity she imagines Aphrodite chiding her for cowardice:-'Make not thyself so timorous in saying, 'I have a husband and holy laws and promised faith forbid me these things. These are but vain conceits and frivolous objections against the power of Eros. For like a strong and mighty prince he plants his eternal laws, not caring for other laws of lower state, he accounts them base and servile rules.'

"Boccaccio, abusing the power of the pen, ends the book by having Fiammetta proclaim, to his glory, that it ws he who had deserted her not she who deserted him. Returning to poetry, he sang in the Ninfale Fiesolano the love of a shepherd for a priestess of Diana. His triumph is described in fond detail with some enthusiasm spared for natural scenery.

"Boccaccio estimated the Florentine dead at 100,000, Machiavelli at 96,000. These are transparent exaggerations, since the total population hardly exceeded 100,000.

"Boccaccio opens The Decameron with a frightful description of the plague:--

'Not only did converse and consorting with the sick give the infection to the sound, but the mere touching of the clothes, or of whatsover had been touched or used by the sick, appeared of itself to communicate the malady. A thing which had belonged to a man sick or dead of the sickness, being touched by an animal in a brief time killed it. Of this mine own eyes had experience.

'This tribulation struck such terror to the hearts of all that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew, oftentimes wife husband. Nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible), some fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children as though they had not been theirs.

'The common people being altogether untended and unsuccored, sickened by the thousand daily and died well nigh without recourse. Many breathed their last in the open street whilst other many, for all they died in their houses, made it known to the neighbors that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies than otherwise. Of these and others who died the whole city was full.

'The neighbors, moved more by fear lest the corruption, of the dead bodies should imperil themselves than by any charity for the departed, brought the bodies forth from the houses and laid them before the doors where, especially in the morning, those who went about might see corpses without number. Then they fetched biers, and some, in default thereof, they laid upon a board. Not was it only one bier that carried two or three corpses, nor did this happen but once. Nay, many might have been counted which contained husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and like. The thing was come to such a pass tht folk reckoned no more of men that died than nowadays they would of goats.'

"Contrast his tolerance with the bitter bigotry of Dante who condemns Mohammed to perpetually repeated vivisections in hell. In the second story of The Decameron the Jew Jehannat is converted to Christianity by the argument (adapted by Voltaire) that Christianity must be divine since it has survived so much clerical immorality and simony.

"Boccaccio makes fun of asceticism, purity, the confessional, relics, priests, monks, friars, nuns, even the canonization of saints. He thinks most monks are hypocrites and laughs at the 'simpletons' who give them alms.

"One of his most hilarious stories tells how the friar Cipolla, to raise a good collection, promised his audience to display 'a very holy relic, one of the angel Gabriel's feathers, which remained in the Virgin Mary's chamber after the annunciation.'

"The most obscene of the stories tells how the virile youth Masetto satisfied an entire nunnery. In another tale Friar Rinaldo cuckolds a husband, whereupon the narrator asks:-'What monks are these that do not do thus?'

"The ladies in The Decameron blush a bit at such stories but enjoy the Rabelaisian-Chaucerian humor. Filomena, a girl of especially nice manners, tells the tale of Rinaldo and sometimes, says Boccaccio's least happy image, 'the ladies kept up such a laughing that you might hve drawn all their teeth.'

"Boccaccio had been reared in the loose gaiety of Naples and most often thought of love in sensual terms. He smiled at chivalric romance and played Sancho Fanza to Dante's Don Quixote.

"Although twice married he seems to have believed in free love. After recounting a score of stories that would today be unfit for a male gathering, he makes one of the men say to the ladies:-'I have noted no act, no word, in fine nothing blameworthy, either on your part or on that of us men.'

"In concluding his book the author acknowledges some crsiticism of the license he has used and especially because 'I have in sundry places written the truth about the friars.'

"Its fame may be due more to its morals than to its art but even if immaculate it would have merited preservation. It is perfectly constructed -- superior in this respect to The Canterbury Tales. Its prose set a standard that Italian literature has never surpassed, a prose sometimes involved or flowery, but for the most part eloquent and vigorous, pungent and vivacious, and clear as a mountain stream.

"It is a book of the love of life. In the greatest disaster that had befallen Italy in a thousand years Boccaccio could find in his vitals the courge to see beauty, humor, goodness, and joy still walking the earth. At times he was cynical, as in his unmanly satire on women in the Corbaccio but in The Decameron he was a hearty Rabelais, relishing the give and take, the rough and tumble of life and love. Despite caricature and exaggeration the world recognized itself in the book.

"Every European language translated it. Hans Sachs and Lessing, Moliere and La Fontaine, Chaucer and Shakespeare, took leaves from it admiringly.

"The poet had written:-'You see in Genoa a city in the act of ruling, seated on rough hillsidees, superb in walls and men.'

"The merchant's itch for gain, pitting the sailor's pluck against the sea, had plowed lanes of Genoese commerce through the Mediterranean to Tunis, Rhodes, Acre, and Tyre, to Samos, Lesbos, and Constantinople, through the Black Sea to the Crimea and Trebizond, through Gibraltar and the Atlantic to Rouen and Bruges.

"These enterprising businessmen developed double-entry bookkeeping by 1340 and marine insurance by 1370. They borrowed money from private investors at seven to ten percent while in most Italian cities the rate ranged from twelve to thirty.

"For a long time the fruits of trade were divided, never amicably, among a few rich familiews -- the Doria, the Spinola, the Grimaldi, the Rieschi. In 1339 Simone Boccanera led the sailors and other workers in a successful revolution and became the first of a line of doges that ruled Genoa until 1797.

"Verdi commemorated him in an opera.

"Its craftsmen were famous for the elegance of their products, mostly made for the luxury trade. Its great arsenal employed 16,000 men.

"36,000 seamen manned its 3300 vesesels of war or trade. In the galleys freemen, not slaves as in the sixteenth century, plied the oars.

"Venetian merchants invaded every market from Jerusalem to Antwerp. They traded impartially with Christians and Mohammedans and papal excommunications fell upon them with all the force of dew upon the earth.

"Petrarch, who had ranged from Naples to Flanders in his 'love and zeal for seeing many things,' marveled at the shipping he saw in the Venetian lagoons.:---

'I see vessels as big as my mansion, their masts taller than its towers. They are as mountains floating on the waters. They go to face incalculable dangers in every portion of the glove. They bear wine to England, honey to Russia, saffron, oil, and linen to Assyria, Armenia, Persia, and Araby, wood to Egypt and Greece. They return heavily laden with products of all kinds, which are sent hence to every part of the world.'

"This lusty trade was financed by private funds collected and invested by moneylenders who began in the fourteenth century to take the name of bankers, bancberri, from the banco or bench on which they sat before their tables of exchange. The chief monetary units were the lira (a shortening of libra, pound) and the ducat )from duca, duke, doge), a gold coin of 3560 grams.

"The Venetians celebrated their holidays and victories with majestic ceremonies, carved and colored their pleasure vessels and their men-o'-war, draped their flesh in Oriental silks, brightened their tables with Venetian glass, and made much music on their waters and in their homes.

"In 1365 the Doge Lorenzo Celsi, accompanied by Petrarch, presided over a competition among the best musicians in Italy. Poems were chanted to various accompaniments, great choruses sang, and the first prize was awarded to Frencesco Landino of Florence, a blind composer of ballads and madrigals.

"Lorenzo Veneziano and others were making the transition from medieval severity to Renaissance grace in frescoes and polyprychs already presaging the colorfulness of Venetian painting. Houses, palances, and churches rose like corals out of the sea. There were no castles in Venice, no fortified dwellings, no massive forbidding walls, for here private feud soon submitted to public law and, besides, almost every mansion had a narutal moat.

"Architectural design was still Gothic but light and graceful as northern Gothic dared not be. In this period the majestic church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari was built. St. Mark's continued, every now and then, to lift its aging face with youthful decorations of sculpture, mosaic, and arabesques, and superimposed Gothic ogives upon some round arches of the old Byzantine form.

"Luciano Doria led a Genoese armada up to Pola, found the main Venetian fleet weakened by an epidemic among the sailors and in an overwhelming victory captured fifteen galleys and nearly two thousand men. Luciano lost his life in the battle but his brother Ambrogio, succeeding him as admiral, took the town of Chioggia -- on a narrow promontory some fifteen miles south of Venice -- formed an alliance with Padua, blocked all Veneteian shipping and prepared, with Genoese seamen and Paduan mercenaries, to invade Venice itself.

"The proud city, apparently defenseless, asked for terms. These were so insolent and severe that the Great Council resolved to fight for every foot of water in the lagoons. The rich poured their hidden wealth into the coffers of the state. The people labored day and night to build another fleet. Floating fortresses were raised around the islands and were equipped with cannon, now for the first time appearing in Italy.

"But the Genoese and Paduans, having already blockaded Venice from the sea, stretched a cordon of troops across its land approaches and shut off the city's food supply. While some of the population starved, Vittore Pisani trained recruits for the new navy.

"In December 1379, Pisani and the Doge Andrea Contarini led the reconstituted fleet -- thirty four galleys, sixty large craft, four hundred small boats -- to besiege the Genoese and their ships at Chioggia. The Genoese fleet was too small to face the new Venetian navy.

"Venetian cannon shot into the Genoese vessels, fortresses, and barracks stones weighing 150 pounds, killing among many, the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria. The Genoese, starving, asked leave to evaluate the women and children from Choggia. The Venetians consented but when the Genoese offered to yield if their fleet should be allowed to depart, it was the turn of Venice to demand unconditional surrender.

"For six months the siege of Chioggia continued. At last, reduced by disease and death, the Genoese gave up. Venice treated them humanely.

"When Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, offered mediation, the exhausted rivals agreed. They made mutual concessions, exchanged prisoners, and resigned themselves to peace in 1381."

The brave Venetians fought for "every foot of water."

"He brought his library with him, containing almost all the Latin classics except Lucretius. In an eloquent letter he deeded the precious collection to Venice but reserved its use to himself until his death.

"As a gesture of appreciation the Venetian government assigned to him the Palazzo Molina, furnished for his comfort. However, Petrarch took his books with him on his later wanderings.

"In 1370 he accepted the invitation of Francesco I de Carrara to live for the second time as a royal guest in Padua. But his aging nerves resented the city's bustle and he soon retired to a modest villa at Arqua in the Euganean hills, twelve miles southwest of Padua. There he passed the remaining four years of his life.

"He gathered and edited his letters for posthumous publications and wrote a charming miniature autobrography, Epistola ad posteros. Again he yielded to the philosopher's ancient failing -- to tell statesmen how to managa stqtes.

"In De republica optime administranda he advised the lord of Padua to 'be not the master but the father of thy subjects and to love them as thy children' - to drain marshes, ensure a food supply, maintain churches, support the sick and helpless and give protection and patronage to men of letters -- on whose pens all fame depends.

"In 1361 a dying monk had sent him a message reproaching him with his evil life and merry tales and prophesying for him, in case he deferred reform, a speedy death and everlasting agonies in hell. Boccaccio had never been an assiduous thinker. He accepted the delusions of his time in regard to casting horoscopes and telling the future through dreams. He believed in a multitude of demons and thought that Aeneas had veritably visited Hades.

"He turned now to orthodoxy and thought of selling his books and becoming a monk. Petrarch, advised of this, besought him to take a middle course to turn from the writing of amorous Italian poems and novelle to the earnest study of the Latin and Greek classics.

"Boccaccio accepteed the counsel of his 'venerble master' and became the first Greek humanist in Western Europe.

"Urged on by Petrarch, he collected classical manuscripts, rescued books XI-XVI of the Annals and books I-V of the Histories of Tacitus from their oblivion in the neglected library of Monte Cassino, restored the texts of Martial and Ausonius and contrived to give Homer to the Western world.

"Some scholars in the Age of Faith had carried on a knowledge of Greek but in Boccaccio's day Greek had almost totally disappeared from the ken of the West except in half-Greek Southern Italy.

"In 1341 Petrarch began to study Greek with the Calabrian monk Barlaam. When a bishopric in Calabria fell vacant, Petrarch successfully recommended Barlaam for it. The monk departed and Petrarch dropped Greek for lack of a teacher, a grammar, or a lexicon.

"No such books were then available in Latin or Italian. In 1359 Boccaccio met at Milan one of Barlaam's pupils, Leon Pilatus. He invited him to Florence and persuaded the university -- which had been founded eleven yers before -- to establish a chair of Greek for P8latus. Petrarch helped to pay his salary, sent copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey to Boccaccio and commissioned Pilatus to translate them into Latin. The work was frequently delayed and involved Petrarch in a troublesome correspondence. He complained that the letters of Pilatus were even longer and dirtier than his beard. Only through Boccaccio's exhorttations and co-opperation was Pilatus prodded to compoete the task.

"On December 21, 1375, Boccaccio too died, aged sixty-one.

"But politically there was no Italy. There were only city-states, fragments free to consume themselves in hate and war. Pisa destroyed its commercial rival Amalfi. Milan destroyed Piacenza. Genoa and Florence destroyed Pisa. Venice destroyed Genoa. And half of Europe would join most of Italy to destroy Venice.

"The collapse of central government in the barbarian invasions -- the 'Gothic War' of the sixth century -- the Lombard-Byzantine dichotomy of the peninsula -- the decay of the Roman roads -- the contest of Lombards and popes -- the conflict of papacy and Empire -- the papal fear that one secular power sovereign from the Alps to Sicily would make the pope a prisoner, subjecting the spiritual head of Europe to the political leader of a state -- all these had wrought the disunity of Italy.

"Partisans of the popes and partisans of the emperors not only divided Italy, they split almost every city into Guelf and Ghibelline. And even when that strife subsided, the old labels were used by new rivalries and the lava of hate flowed into all the avenues of life.

"If Ghibellines wore feathers on one side of their caps, Guelfs wore them on the other. If Ghibellines cut fruit crosswise, Guelfs cut it straight down. If Ghibellines wore white roses, Guelfs wore red. In Crema the Ghibellines of Milan tore a statue of Christ from a church altar and burned it because its face was turned in what was considered a Guelf direction. In Ghibelline Bergamo some Calabrians were murdered by their hosts who discovered from their way of eating garlic that they were Guelfs.

"When that bubble burst he turned like Dante to the head of the Holy Roman Empire, theoretically the secular heir to all the temporal powers of the pagan Roman Empire in the West. Soon after Rienzo's retirement Petrarch addressed a stirring message to Charles IV, King of Bohemia and, as 'King of the Romans,' heir apparent to the Imperial throne. Let the King come down to Rome and be crowned emperor, the poet pleaded. Let him make Rome, not Prague, his capital. Let him restore unity, order, and peace to 'the garden of the Empire' -- Italy.

"When Charles crossed the Alps in 1354 he invited Petrarch to meet him at Mantua and listened courteously to appeals echoing the impassioned pleas of Dante to Charles' grandfather, Henry VII. But Charles, having no force adequate to conquer all the despots of Lombardy and all the citizens of Florence and Venice, hurried to Rome, got himself crowned by a papal prefect for lack of a pope and then hastened back to Bohemia, sedulously selling Imperial vicariates on the way.

"The fragmentation of Italy favored the Renaissance. Large states promote order and power rather than liberty or art. The commercial rivalry of the Italian cities inaugurated and completed the work of the Crusades in developing the economy and wealth of Italy.

"The variety of political centers multiplied interurban strife but these modest conflicts never totaled the death and destruction caused in France by the Hundred Years' War.

"Local independence weakened the capacity of Italy to defend herself against foreign invasion but it generated a noble rivalry of the cities and princes in cultural patronage in the zeal to excel in architecture sculpture, painting, education, scholarship, poetry.

"Renaissance Italy, like Goethe's Germany, had many Parises.

"We need not exaggerate to appreciate the degree in which Petrarch and Boccaccio prepared the Renaissance. Both were still mortgaged to medieval ideas.

"The great storyteller, in his lusty youth, laughed at clerical immorality and relicmongering but so had millions of medieval men and women. He became more orthodox and medieval in those very years in which he studied Greek.

"Petrarch properly and prophetically described himself as standing between two eras. He accepted the dogmas of the Church even while he flayed the morals of Avignon. He loved the classics with a troubled conscience at the close of the Age of Faith as Jerome had loved them at its opening. He wrote excellent medieval essays on contempt of the secular world and on the holy peace of the religious life.

"Nevertheless, he was more faithful to the classics than to Laura. He sought and cherished ancient manuscripts and inspired others to do the same. He overleaped nearly all medieval authors except Augustine to regain continuity with Latin literature. He formed his manner and style on Virgil and Cicero. And he thought more of the fame of his name that of the immortality of his soul.

"His poems fostered a century of artificial sonneteering in Italy but they helped to mold the sonnets of Shakespeare. His eager spirit passed down to Pico, his polished form to Politian. His letters and essays threw a bridge of classical urbanity and grace between Seneca and Montaigne. His reconciliation of antiquity and Christianity matured in Popes Nicholas V and Leo X.

"The amazing growth and zest of Italian trade and industry had gathered the wealth that financed the movement, and the passage from rural peace and stagnation to urban vitality and stimulus had begotten the mood that nourished it.

"The political basis had been prepared in the freedom and rivalry of the cities -- in the overthrow of an idle aristocracy -- in the rise of educated princes and a virile bourgeoisie.

"The literary basis had been prepared in the improvement of the vernacular languages and in the zeal for recovering and studying the classics of Greece and Rome.

"The ethical bases had been laid. Increasing wealth was breaking down old moral restraints. Contact with Islam in commerce and Crusades had encouraged a new tolerance for doctrinal and moral deviations from traditional beliefs and ways. The rediscovery of a pagan world relatively free in thought and conduct shared in undermining medieval dogmas and morality.

"Interest in a future life gave ground before secular, human, earthly concerns. Esthetic development proceeded. The medieval hymns -- the cycles of romance -- the songs of the troubadours -- the sonnets of Dante and his Italian predecessors -- the sculptured harmony and form of The Divine Comedy -- had left a heritage of literary art.

"The classic models transmitted a refinement of taste and thought, a polish and politeness of speech and style, to Petrarch, who would bequeath it to an international dynasty of urbane genius from Erasmus to Anatole France. And a revolution in art had begun when Giotto abandoned the mystic rigor of Byzantine mosaices to study men and women in the actual flow and natural grace of their lives.

"He was a Frenchman, the former bishop of Bordeaux. He owed his election to Philip IV of France who had starled all Christendom by not only defeating Pope Boniface VIII but arresting him, humiliating him, and almost starving him to death.

"Clement's life would be unsafe in a Rome that reserved to itself the right to maltreat a pope and resented the insolent irreverence of the King. Moreover, the French cardinals formed now a large majority in the Sacred College and refused to entrust themselves to Italy. So Clement stayed awhile at Lyons and Poitiers.

"He bowed as little as he could to Philip IV who held over Clement's head the threat of a scandalous post-mortem inquest into the private conduct and beliefs of Boniface VIII.

"Harassed for funds, the Pope sold ecclesiastical benefices to the highest bidder. But he lent tacit approval to the merciless reports that the mayor of Angers and the bishop of Mende presented on the subject of clerical morals and Church reform to the Council of Vienne.

"He himself led a clean and frugal life and practiced an undemonstrative piety. He protected the great physician and critic of the Church, Arnold of Villanova, from persecution for heresy. He reorganized medical studies at Montpellier on Greek and Arabic texts and tried -- though he failed -- to establish chairs of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabid in the universities. To all his troubles was added a painful disease -- lupulus, probably a fistula -- which compelled him to shun society and killed him in 1314.

"Dante wrote to the Italian cardinals urging them to hold out for an Italian pope and a return to Rome. But only six of the twenty three cardinals were Italian. When the conclave met in a locked room at Carpentras, near Avignon, it was surrounded by a Gascon populace that shouted:-'Death to the Italian cardinals!'

"The houses of these prelates were attacked and destroyed. The crowd set fire to the building that housed the conclave. The cardinals broke a passage through the rear wall and fled from the fire and the mob.

"For two years no further attempt was made to choose a pope. Finally at Lyons, under the protection of French soldiery, the cardinals raised to the papacy a man already seventy two years of age who might reasonably be expected to die soon but who was destined to rule the Church for eighteen years with rugged zeal, insatiable avidity, and imperial will.

"John XXII had been born at Cahors in southern France, the son of a cobbler. It was the second time that a cobbler's son had risen by the remarkable democracy of an authoritarian Church, to the highest place in Christendom. Urban IV had shown the way. employed as a teacher for the children of the French king of Naples.

"John studied civil and canon law with such aptitude that the king took him into favor. On the king's recommendation, Boniface VIII made him bishop of Frejus and Clement V raised him to the see of Avignon.

"Benedict XII, the son of a baker, tried to be a Christian as well as a pope. He resisted the temptation to distribute offices among his relatives. He earned an honorable hostility by bestowing benefices for merits, not for fees.

"He repressed bribery and corruption in all branches of Church administration. He alienated the mendicant orders by commanding them to reform. He was never known to be cruel or to shed blood in war.

"Almost all who came to him for appointments secured them. No one, he said, should depart from him unsatisfied. He announced that any poor clergyman who should come to him within the next two months would partke of his bounty. An eyewitness reckoned that 100,000 came.

"He gave rich gifts to artists and poets, maintained a stud of horses equal to any in Christendom, admitted women freely to his court, enjoyed their charms, and mingled with them in Gallic gallantry. The countess of Turenne was so close to him that she sold ecclesiastical preferments with careless publicity.

"Hearing of Clement's good nature, the Romans sent an embassy inviting him to reside in Rome. He did not relish the prospect but he appeased them by declaring that the jubilee, which Boniface VIII had established in 1300 for every hundred years, should be clebrated every half century.

"Now the administrative machinery of the Church took its definitive form:--an Apostolic Chamber (camera apostolica) in charge of finances, and headed by a papal chamberlain (camerarius) who was second in dignity to the pope alone -- a Papal Chancery (cancelleria) whose seven agencies, directed by a cardinal vice chancellor, handled the complex correspondence of the See -- a Papal Judiciary composed of prelates and laymen learned in canon law -- and including the Consistory -- the pope and his cardinals acting as a court of appeals -- and an Apostolic Penitentiary -- a college of clergy who dealt with marital dispensations, excommunication and interdict, and heard the confessions of those seeking papal abasolution.

"To house the pope and his aides, these ministries and agencies, their staffs and servants, Benedict XII began, and Urban V completed, the immense Palace of the Popes, a congeries of Gothic buildings -- living chambers, council halls, chapels, and offfices -- enclosing two courts, and themselves enclosed by mighty ramparts whose height and breadth and massive towers suggest that the popes, if besieged, would rely on no miracle for their defense.

"Benedict XII invited Giotto to come and decorate the palace and the adjoining cathedral. Giotto planned to come but died and in 1338 Benedict summoned from Siena Simone Marrini, whose frescoes, now obliterated, marked the zenith of painting in Avignon.

"Around the palace, in lesser palaces, mansions, tenements, and hovels, gathered a great population of prelates, envoys, lawyers, merchants, artists, poets, servants, soldiers, beggars, and prostitutes of every grade from cultured courtesans to tavern tarts.

"Several sources of income were nearly dried up. Italy, deserted by the papacy, sent hardly anything. Germany, at odds with John XXII, sent half its usual tribute. France, holding the Church almost at its mercy, appropriated for secular purposes a large part of French ecclesiastical revenues, and borrowed heavily from the papacy to finance the Hundred years' War. England severely restricted the flow of money to a Church that was in effect an ally of France.

"To meet this situation the Avignon popes were driven to develop every trickle of revenue. Each bishop or abbot, whether appointed by pope or secular prince, transmitted to the Curia, as an inaugural fee, one third of his prospective income for a year and paid exasperating gratuities to the numerous intermediaries who had supported his nominations.

"If he became an archbishop he had to pay a substantial fee for the archepiscopal pallium -- a circular band of white wool, worn over the chasuble as the insignia of his office. When a new pontiff was elected, every ecclesiastical benefice or office sent him its full revenue for one year (annates) and thereafter a tenth of its revenue in each year.

"Additional voluntary contributions were expected from time to time. On the death of any cardinal, archbishop, bishop, or abbot, his personal possessions and effects belonged to the papacy. In the interim between such death and the installation of a new appointee the popes received the revenues, and paid the expenses, of the benefice and they were accused of deliberately extending this interval.

"Every ecclesiastical appointee was held responsible for dues unpaid by his predecessors. As bishops and abbots were in many cases feudal proprietors of estates received in fief from the king, they had to pay him tribute and provide him with soldiery, so that many were hard pressed to meet their combined ecclesiastical and secxular obligations. And as the papal exactions were more severe than the state's, we find the hierarchy sometimes supporting the king against the pope.

"The Avignon pontiffs almost completely ignored the ancient rights of cathedral chapters or monastic councils to choose bishops or abbots. These by-passed collators joined in the accumulating resentment.

"Cases tried in the Papal Judiciary usually required the expensive help of lawyers who had to pay an annual fee for license to plead in the papal courts. Every judgment or favor received from the Curia expected a gift in acknowledgement. Even permission to be ordained had to be bought.

"The Spanish prelate Alvaro Pelayo, though thoroughly loyal to the papacy, wrote On the Lamentation of the Church in which he mourned that 'Whenever I entered the chambers of the ecclesiastics of the papal court, I found brokers and clergy engaged in weighing and reckoning the money that lay in heaps before them. Wolves are in control of the Church and feed on the blood' of the Christian flock.

"Cardinal Napoleone Orsini was disturbed to find that nearly all the bishoprics of Italy were the object of barter or family intrigue under Clement V.

"Edward III of England, himself adept in taxation, reminded Clement VI that 'the successor of the Apostles were commissioned to lead the Lord's sheep to the pasture, not to fleece them' and the English parliament passed several statutes to check the taxing power of the popes in Britain.

"In Germany papal collectors were hunted down, imprisoned, mutilated, in some cases strangled. In 1372 the clergy of Cologne, Bonn, Xanten and Mainz bound themselves by oath not to pay the tithe demanded by Gregory XI.

"When we reflect that of the seven Avignon popes only one lived a life of worldly pleasure and another, John XXII, however rapacious and severe, disciplined himself to ascetic austerity.

"Another, Gregory XI, though merciless in war was in peace a man of exemplary morals and piety.

"Three -- Benedict XII, Innocent VI, and Urban V -- were men of almost saintly life. We cannot hold the popes responsible for all the vice that gathered in papal Avignon.

"The cause was wealth which has had like rsults in other times -- in the Rome of Nero, the Rome of Leo X, Paris of Louis XIV, the New York and Chicago of today.

"In 1342 Benedict XII, to weaken the rebellious Louis of Bavaria, confirmed to all the despots of the Lombard cities the authority they had assumed in defiance of Imperial claims. Louis, in revenge, gave the Imperial sanction to the despots who had seized the Papal States.

"Milan openly flouted the popes. When Urban V sent two legates to Milan, bearing bulls of excommunication to the Visconti, Bernabo compelled them to eat the bulls -- parchment, silken cords, and leaden seals.

"Innocent was almost a model pope. After indulging a few relatives with appointments, he determined to stop the current of nepotism and corruption. He put an end to the epicurean splendor and wasteful outlay of the papal court, dismissed the horde of servants that had ministered to Clement VI, scattered the swarm of place seekers, ordered every priest to reside in his benefice, and himself led a life of integrity and modesty.

"He saw that the authority of the Church could be stored only by liberating her from the power of France and could hardly maintain herself without the revenues that had formerly come to her from the Papal States.

"He labored to restore discipline and honesty in the clergy and at the papal court, discountenanced luxury among the cardinals, checked the chicanery of the lawyers and the extortions of the moneylenders, punished simony, and won to his service men of excellence in character and mind.

"He maintained at his own expense a thousand students in the universities, founded a new college at Montpellier and supported many savants.

"To crown his pontificate he resolved to restore the papacy to Rome. The cardinals were horrified at the prospect. Most of them had their roots and affections in France and were hated in Italy. They begged him not to heed the pleas of St. Catherine or the eloquence of Petrarch.

"Urban poinbted out to them the chaotic condition of France -- its king a prisoner in England, its armies shattered, the English conquering the southern provinces and coming ever nearer to Avignon.

"On October 16 he entered Rome amid the wild acclaim of the populace, the clergy, and the aristocracy. Italian princes held the bridle of the white mule on which he rode. Petrarch poured out his gratitude to the French Pope who dared to live in Italy.

"It was a desolate though happy Rome -- impoverished by its long separation from the papacy -- half of its churchs deserted and decayed -- St. Paul's in ruins -- St. Peter's threatening at any minute to collapse -- the Lateran palace but recently destroyed by fire -- palaces rivaling the tenements in dilapidation -- swamps where there had been dwellings -- rubbish lying ungathered in the squares and streets.

"Urban gave orders and allotted funds for rebuilding the papal palace. Unable to bear the sight of Rome, he went to live at Montefiascone. But even there his memories of luxurious Avignon and beloved France made him miserable.

"Petrarch heard of his hesitation and urged him to persevere. St. Bridget of Sweden prodicted that he would die soon if he left Italy. The Emperor Charles IV sought to strengthen him -- gave the Impeial saanction to the papal recovery of central Italy -- came humbly to Rome to lead the Pope's horse from Sant' Angelo to St. Peter's -- served him at Mass, and was crowned by him in a ceremony that seemed happily to heal the old strife of Empire and papacy.

"Then, on September 5, 1370, perhaps yielding to his French cardinals, and saying that he wished to make peace between England and France, Urban embarked for Marseille.

"On December 29, 1370 he was ordained a priest and on December 30, aged thirty nine, he was electd pope.

"He was a man of learning, in love with Cicero. Fate made him a man of war and consumed his pontificate in volent revolt.

"Urban V, fearing that a French pope could not yet trust Italians, had named too many Frenchmnen as legates to govern the Papal States. Finding themselves in a hostile environment, these prelates had built fortresses against the people, had imported numerous French aides, had taxed exorbitantly, and had preferred tyranny to tact.

"At Perugia a nephew of the legate pursued a married lady so voraciously that in trying to escape him she fell from a window and was killed. When a deputation demanded punishment for the nephew, the legate replied:--'Why all this fuss? Do you mistake a Frenchman for a eunuch?'

"By a variety of means the legates earned such hatred that in 1375 many of the states rose against them in successive revolutions. St. Catherine made herself the voice of Italy and urged Gregory to remove these 'evil pastors who poison and devastate the garden of the Church.'

"Florence, usually an ally of the papacy, took the lead of the movement and unfurled a red flag bearing in golden letters the word Libertas.

"At the beginning of 1375 sixty four cities had acknowledged the pope as their civic as well as their spiritual head. In 1376 only one remained loyal to him.

"When they refused, he excommunicated them, forbade religious services in their city and declared all Florentines to be outlaws whose goods might be seized and whose persons might be enslaved by any man anywhere.

"The whole structure of Florentine commerce and finance was threatened with collapse. England and France at once laid hands upon the Florentines and their property there. Florence responded by confiscating all Church property in its territory, tearing down the buildings of the Inquisition, closing the ecclesiastical courts, jailing -- in some cases hanging -- obstinate priests, and sending an appeal to the people of Rome to join the revolution and end all temporal power of the Church in Italy. While Rome hesitated, Gregory despatched to its leaders a solemn promise that if the city remained loyal to him, he would return the papacy to Rome.

"Robert waged the war with incredible barbarity. Having taken Cesena with the promise of an amnesty, he put every man, woman, and child there to the sword. John Hawkwood, leading his mercenaries in the service of the Church, slew 4000 in Faenza on suspicion that the town intended to join the revolt.

"St. Catherine of Siena was shocked by these brutalities, by the mutual confiscations, by the cessation of religious services in so much of Italy.

"Florence invited her to be one of its envoys to Gregory. She went and took the occasion to condemn the morals of Avignon. She was so outspoken that many called for her arrest but Gregory protected her.

"The mission had no immediate result. But when word reached him that unless he came soon Rome would join the revolt, Gregory -- perhaps moved also by Catherine's pleas -- set out from Marseille and reached Rome on January 17, 1377.

"He was not unanimously welcomed. The appeal of Florence had stirred old republican memories in the degenerate city and Gregory was warned that his life was unsafe in the ancient capital of Christendom.

"His agents encouraged the populace of the cities who longed for peace with the Church to overthrow their rebel governments and to all towns that returned to his allegiance he promised self government under a papal vicar of their own choice.

"City after city accepted these terms. In 1377 Florence agreed with Gregory to let Bernabo Visconti arbitrate their dispute. Bernabo, having persuaded the Pope to give him half of any penalty he might lay upon Florence, bade the city pay an indemnity of 800,000 florins ($20,000,000) to the Holy See.

"Deserted by her allies, Florence angrily submitted but Pope Urban VI reduced the penalty to 250,000 florins.

"Gregory had not lived to see his victory. On November 7, 1377 he returned to Rome. He had been an invalid even in Avignon and had not borne well his winter in central Italy. He felt the approach of death and feared that the conflict between France and Italy for possession of the papacy would tear the Church to pieces. On March 19, 1378 he made arrangements for the speedy election of his successor.

"Fairness requires us to remember that the great majority of Christians then believed that the Church had been instituted, and that her basic doctrines had been laid down, by the Son of God. Hence -- whatever might be the faults of her human personnel -- any active movement to overthrow her was rebellion against divine authority as well as treason against the secular state of which the Church was the upholding moral arm.

"The same century that saw the tribulations and corruptions of Avignon produced missionaries like Giovanni da Monte Corvino and Oderic of Pordenone who tried to convert the Hindu and Chinese. But the Chinese, says a Franciscan chronicler, clung to the 'error that any man could be saved in his own sect.'

"Unwittingly these missionaries contributed less to religion than to the science of geography.

"Sr. Catherine of Siena was born, lived, and died in a modest room still shown to visitors.

"From that foot of earth she helped to move the papacy, and to revive in the people of Italy a piety tht has survived Rinascita and Risorgimento alike. At fifteen she joined the Order of Penance of St. Dominic. This was a 'tertiary' organization, composed not of monks or nuns, but of men and women living a secular life, yet dedicating themselves as much as possible to works of religion and charity.

"Catherine dwelt with her parents but she made her room almost an anchoritic cell, lost herself in prayer and mystical contemplation, and hardly left her home except to go to church. Her parens were disturbed by her preocdupation with religion and feared for her health. They laid upon her the heaviest drudgery of the household which she performed without complaint. She said:-'I make a little corner apart in my heart for Jesus' and maintained a childlike seenity.

"All the job, doubt, and ecstasy that other girls might derive from 'profane' love Catherine sought and found in devotion to Christ. In the growing intensity of these solitary meditations she thought and spoke of Christ as her heavenly lover, she exchanged hearts with Him, saw herself in vision, married to Him. And like St. Francis she thoyght so long about the five wounds of the Crucified that it seemed to her that she felt them in her own hands and feet and side.

"As she had devoted her womanhood to Christ, so she devoted her maternal tenderness to the sick and needy of Siena. She stayed to the last moment with the victims of plague and stood in spiritual consolation beside condemned criminals until the hour of their execution.

"When her parents died and left her a modest patrimony, she distribued it among the poor. Though she was disfigured by small pox, her face was a blessing to all who saw her. Young men at her word abandoned their wonted blaspehmies and older men heard with melting skepticism her simple and trusting philosopby.

"All the evils of human life, she thought, were the result of human wickedness but all the sins of mankind would be swallowed up and lost in the ocean of God's love. And all the ills of the world would be cured if men could be persuaded to practice Christian love.

"Many believed her. Montepulciano sent for her to come and reconcile its feuding families. Pisa and Lucca sought her counsel. Florence invited her to join an embassy to Avignon.

"The classic world, the Italians felt, had died in the German and Hun invasions of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. The heavy hand of the Goth had crushed the fading but still fair flower of Roman art and life. 'Gothic' art had repeated the invasion with an architecture precariously unstable and decoratively bizarre, and a sculpture coarse, crude, and gloomy with dour prophets and emaciated saints.

"Now, by the grace of time, those bearded Goths and those 'long-beard' Lombards had been absorbed into the dominant Italian blood. By the grace of Vitruvius and the instructive ruins of the Roman Forum the classic column and architrave would again build shrines and palaces of sober dignity. By the grace of Petrarch and a hundred Italian scholars the rediscovered classics would restore the literature of Italy to the pure idiom and precision of Cicero's prose, and the mellow music of Virgil's verse.

"The sunshine of the Italian spirit would break through the northern mists. Men and women would escape from the prison of medieval fear. They would worship beauty in all its forms and fill the air with the joy of resurrection.

"The men who spoke so were too near the event to see the 'Rebirth' in historical perspective or in the confusing diversity of its constituents. But it took more than a revival of antquity to make the Renaissance.

"First of all it took money -- smelly bourgeois money:-the profits of skillful managers and underpaid labor -- of hazardous voyages to the East and laborious crossings of the Alps, to buy goods cheap and sell them dear -- of careful calculations, investments, and loans -- of interest and dividends accumulated until enough surplus could be spared from the pleasures of the flesh from the purchase of senates, signories, and mistresses, to pay a Michelangelo or a Titian to transmute wealth into beauty, and perfume, a fortune with the breath of art.

"Money is the root of all civilization. The funds of merchants, bankers, and the Church paid for the manuscripts that revived antiquity. Nor was it those manuscripts which freed the mind and senses of the Renaissance.

"It was the secularism that came from the rise of the middle classes. It was the growth of the universities, of knowledge and philosophy, the realistic sharpening of minds by the study of law, the broadening of minds by wider acquaintance with the world.

"Doubting the dogmas of the Church, no longer frightened by the fear of hell, and seeing the clergy as epicurean as the laity, the educated Italian shook himself loose from intellectual and ethical restraints. His liberated senses took unabashed delight in all embodiments of beauty in woman, man, and art. His new freedom made him cereative for an amazing century (1434-1534) before it destroyed him wth moral chaos, disintegrative indiviualism, and national slavery.

"There the old Roman world had never been quite destroyed. The towns had kept their ancient structure and memories and now renewed their Roman law. Classic art survived in Rome, Verona, Mantua, Padua.

"Agrippas Pantheon still functioned as a place of worship though it was fourteen hundred years old. In the Forum one could almost hear Cicero and Caesar debating the fate of Catiline. The Latin language was still a living tongue of which Italian was merely a melodious variant. Pagan deities, myths, and rites lingered in popular memory or under Christian forms.

"Italy stood athwart the Mediterranean, commanding that basin of classic civilization and trade. Northern Italy was more urban and industrial than any other region of Europe except Flanders. It had never suffered a full feudalism but had subjected its nobles to its cities and its merchant class.

"It was the avenue of trade between the rest of Italy and transalpine Europe and between Western Europe and the Levant. Its commerce and industry made it the richest region in Christendom. Its adventurous traders were everywhere from the fairs of France to the farthest ports of the Black Sea.

"Accustomed to dealing with Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, Persians, Hindus and Chinese, they lost the edge of their dogmas and brought into the literate classes of Italy that same indifference to creeds which in ninteenth century Europe came from widening contacts with alien faiths.

"Mercantile wisdom, however, conspired with national traditions, temperament and pride to keep Italy Catholic even while she became pagan. Papal fees trickled to Rome along a thousand rivulets from a score of Christian lands and the wealth of the Curia overflowed throughout Italy. The Church rewarded Italian loyalty with a generous lenience to the sins of the flesh and a genial tolerance (before the Council of Trent, 1545) of heretical philosophers who refrained from undermining the piety of the people.

"So Italy advanced, in wealth and art and thought, a century ahead of the rest of Europe. It was only in the sixteenth century when the Renaissance faded in Italy, that it blossomed in France, Germany, Holland, England, and Spain.

"The peasants were not serfs but partly small proprietors, mostly tenant farmers who lived in houses of crude cemented stone much as today and chose their own village officials to govern them in local affairs.

"Machiavelli did not disdain to chat and play with these hardy knights of the field, the orchard, or the vine. But the magistrates of the cities regulated sales and, to appease a troublesome proletariat, kept food prices too low for peasant happiness.

"About a fourth of the city dwellers were industrial workers. The textile lines alone, in the thirteenth century, employed 30,000 men and women in two hundred factories. In 1300 Federigo Oricellari earned his surname by bringing from the East the secret of extracting from lichens a violet pigment (orchella, archil). This technique revolutionized the dye industry and made some woolen manufaccturers into what today would be millionaires.

"In textiles Florence had already reached by 1300 the capitalistic stage of large investment, central provision of materials and machinery, systematic division of labor, and control of production by the suppliers of capital.

"In 1407 a woolen garment passed through thirty processes, each performed by a worker specializing in that operation.

"To sell its products Florence encouraged its merchants to maintain trade with all ports of the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic as far as Bruges. Consuls were stationed in Italy, the Baleares, Flanders, Egypt, Cypress, Constantinople, Persia, India, and China to protect and promote Florentine trade. Pisa was conquered as an indispensable outlet of Florentine goods to the sea and Genoese merchant vessels were hired to carry them.