[Footnote 174: Having mentioned the names of these illustrious Frenchmen, I feel bound to point out how accurately their criticism of the Jesuits was anticipated by Paolo Sarpi. His correspondence between the years 1608 and 1622 demonstrates that this body of social corrupters had been early recognized by him in their true light. Sarpi calls them 'sottilissimi maestri in mal fare,' 'donde esce ogni falsita et bestemmia,' 'il vero morbo Gallico,' 'peste pubblica,' 'peste del mondo' (Letters, vol. i. pp. 142, 183, 245, ii. 82, 109). He says that they 'hanno messo l'ultima mano a stabilire una corruzione universale' (ib. vol. i. p. 304). By their equivocations and mental reservations 'fanno essi prova di gabbare Iddio' (ib. vol. ii. p. 82). 'La menzogna non iscusano soltanto ma lodano' (ib. vol. ii. p. 106). So far, the utterances which I have quoted might pass for the rhetoric of mere spite. But the portrait gradually becomes more definite in details limned from life. 'The Jesuits have so many loopholes for escape, pretexts, colors of insinuation, that they are more changeful than the Sophist of Plato; and when one thinks to have caught them between thumb and finger, they wriggle out and vanish' (ib. vol. i. p. 230). 'The Jesuit fathers have methods of acquiring in this world, and making their neophytes acquire, heaven without diminution, or rather with augmentation, of this life's indulgences' (ib. vol. i. p. 313). 'The Jesuit fathers used to confer Paradise; they now have become dispensers of fame in this world' (ibid. p. 363). 'When they seek entrance into any place, they do not hesitate to make what promises may be demanded of them, possessing as they do the art of escape by lying with equivocations and mental reservations' (ib. vol. ii. p. 147). 'The Jesuit is a man of every color; he repeats the marvel of the chameleon' (ibid. p. 105). 'When they play a losing game, they yet rise winners from the table. For it is their habit to insinuate themselves upon any condition demanded, having arts enough whereby to make themselves masters of those who bind them by prescribed rules. They are glad to enter in the guise of galley-slaves with irons on their ankles; since, when they have got in, they will find no difficulty in loosing their own bonds and binding others' (ibid. p. 134). 'They command two arts: the one of escaping from the bonds and obligations of any vow or promise they shall have made, by means of equivocation, tacit reservation, and mental restriction; the other of insinuating, like the hedgehog, into the narrowest recesses, being well aware that when they unfold their piercing bristles, they will obtain the full possession of the dwelling and exclude its master' (ibid. p. 144). 'Everybody in Italy is well aware how they have wrought confession into an art. They never receive confidences under that seal without disclosing all particulars in the conferences of their Society; and that with the view of using confession to the advantage of their order and the Church. At the same time they preach the doctrine that the seal of the confessional precludes a penitent from disclosing what the confessor may have said to him, albeit his utterances have had no reference to sins or to the safety of the soul' (ib. vol. ii. p. 108). 'Should the Jesuits in France get hold of education, they will dominate the university, and eradicate sound letters. Yet why do I speak of healthy literature? I ought to have said good and wholesome doctrine, the which is verily mortal to that Company' (ibid. p. 162). 'Every species of vice finds its patronage in them. The avaricious trust their maxims, for trafficking in spiritual commodities; the superstitious, for substituting kisses upon images for the exercise of Christian virtues; the base fry of ambitious upstarts, for cloaking every act of scoundreldom with a veil of holiness. The indifferent find in them a palliative for their spiritual deadness; and whoso fears no God, has a visible God ready made for him, whom he may worship with merit to his soul. In fine, there is nor perjury, nor sacrilege, nor parricide, nor incest, nor rapine, nor fraud, nor treason, which cannot be masked as meritorious beneath the mantle of their dispensation' (ibid. p. 330). 'I apprehend the difficulty of attacking their teachings; seeing that they merge their own interests with those of the Papacy; and that not only in the article of Pontifical authority, but in all points. At present they stand for themselves upon the ground of equivocations. But believe me, they will adjust this also, and that speedily; forasmuch as they are omnipotent in the Roman Court, and the Pope himself fears them' (ibid. p. 333). 'Had S. Peter known the creed of the Jesuits, he could have found a way to deny our Lord without sinning' (ibid. p. 353). 'The Roman Court will never condemn Jesuit doctrine; for this is the secret of its empire—a secret of the highest and most capital importance, whereby those who openly refuse to worship it are excommunicated, and those who would do so if they dared, are held in check' (ibid. p. 105). The object of this lengthy note is to vindicate for Sarpi a prominent and early place among those candid analysts of Jesuitry who now are lost in the great light of Pascal's genius. Sarpi's Familiar Letters have for my mind even more weight than the famous Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. They were written with no polemical or literary bias, at a period when Jesuitry was in its prime; and their force as evidence is strengthened by their obvious spontaneity. A book of some utility was published in 1703 at Salzburg (?), under the title of Artes Jesuiticae Christianus Aletophilus. This contains a compendium of those passages in casuistical writings on which Pascal based his brilliant satires. Paul Bert's modern work, La Morale des Jesuites (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), is intended to prove that recent casuistical treatises of the school repeat those ancient perversions of sound morals.]

The working of the Company, as we have seen, depended upon a skillful manipulation of apparently hard-and-fast principles. The Declarations explained away the Constitutions; and an infinite number of minute exceptions and distinctions volatilized vows and obligations into ether. Transferring the same method to the sphere of ethics, they so wrought upon the precepts of the moral law, whether expressed in holy writ, in the ecclesiastical decrees, or in civil jurisprudence, as to deprive them of their binding force. The subtlest elasticity had been gained for the machinery of the order by casuistical interpretation. A like elasticity was secured for the control and government of souls by an identical process. It was no wonder that the Jesuits became rapidly fashionable as confessors. The plainest prohibitions were as wax in their hands. The Decalogue laid down as rules for conduct: 'Thou shalt not steal;' 'Thou shalt not kill;' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' Christ spiritualized these rules into their essence: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;' 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.' It is manifest that both the old and the new covenant upon which modern Christianity is supposed to rest, suffered no transactions in matters so clear to the human conscience. Jesus himself refined upon the legality of the Mosaic code by defining sin as egotism or concupiscence. But the Company of Jesus took pains in their casuistry to provide attenuating circumstances for every sin in detail. By their doctrines of the invincible erroneous conscience, of occult compensation, of equivocation, of mental reservation, of probabilism, and of philosophical sin, they afforded loopholes for the gratification of every passion, and for the commission of every crime. Instead of maintaining that any injury done to a neighbor is wrong, they multiplied instances in which a neighbor may be injured. Instead of holding firm to Christ's verdict that sexual vice is implicit in licentious desire, they analyzed the sensual modes of crude voluptuousness, taxed each in turn at arbitrary values, and provided plausible excuses for indulgence. Instead of laying it down as a broad principle that men must keep their word, they taught them how to lie with spiritual impunity and with credit to their reputation as sons of the Church. Thus the inventive genius of the casuist, bent on dissecting immorality and reducing it to classes; the interrogative ingenuity of the confessor, pruriently inquisitive into private experience; the apologetic subtlety of the director, eager to supply his penitent with salves and anodynes; were all alike and all together applied to anti-social contamination in matters of lubricity, and to anti-social corruption in matters of dishonesty, fraud, falsehood, illegality and violence. The single doctrine of probabilism, as Pascal abundantly proved, facilitates the commission of crime; for there is no perverse act which some casuist of note has not plausibly excused.

It may be urged that confession and direction, as adopted by the Catholic Church, bring the abominations of casuistry logically in their train. Priests who have to absolve sinners must be familiar with sin in all its branches. In the confessional they will be forced to listen to recitals, the exact bearings of which they cannot understand unless they are previously instructed. Therefore the writings of Sanchez, Diana, Liguori, Burchard, Billuard, Rousselot, Gordon, Gaisson, are put into their hands at an early age—works which reveal more secrets of impudicity than Aretino has described, or Commodus can have practiced—works which recommend more craft and treachery and fraud and falsehood than Machiavelli accorded to his misbegotten Saviour of Society. In these writings men vowed to celibacy probe the foulest labyrinths of sexual impurity; men claiming to stand outside the civil order and the state, imbibe false theories upon property and probity and public duty.

The root of the matter is wrong indubitably. It is contrary to good government that a sacerdotal class, by means of confession and direction, should be placed in a position of deciding upon conduct. It is revolting to human dignity that this same class, without national allegiance, and without domestic ties, should have the opportunity of infecting young minds by unhealthy questionings and dishonorable suggestions. But this wrong, which is inherent in the modern Catholic system, becomes an atrocity when it is employed, as the Jesuits employed it, as an instrument for moulding and controlling society in their own interest.

While the Jesuits rendered themselves obnoxious to criticism by their treatment of the individual in his private and social capacity, they speedily became what Hallam cautiously styles 'rather dangerous supporters of the See of Rome' in public and political affairs. The ultimate failure of their diplomacy and intrigue over the whole field of modern statecraft inclines historians of the present epoch to underrate their mechanics of obstruction, and to underestimate the many occasions on which they did successfully retard the progress of civil government and intellectual freedom. It were wiser to regard them in the same light as fanatics laying stones upon a railway, or of dynamiters blowing up an emperor or a corner of Westminster Hall. The final end of the nefarious traffic may not be attained. But credit can be claimed by those who took their part in it, for the wreck of express trains, the perturbation of cities, and the mourning of peaceable families. And thus it was with the Jesuits. Though the results of their political intrigues had not corresponded to their hopes, they yet worked appreciable mischief by the organization of the League in France, and the Thirty Years' War in Germany, and by their revolutionary theories which infected Europe with conspiracy and murder. Their method was not original. Machiavelli had expounded the doctrines they put in practice. He taught that in a desperate state of the nation, men may have recourse to treachery and violence. The nation of the Jesuits was a hybrid between their order and Catholicism. The peril to the Church was imminent; its decadence demanded desperate remedies. They invoked regicide, revolt, and treason, to effect an impossible cure.

The political theory of the Jesuits was deduced from their fundamental principle of obedience to the Church. They maintained that the ecclesiastical is jure divino superior to the secular power. The Pope through God's commission and appointment sways the Church; the Church takes rank above the State, as the soul above the body. Consequently, the first allegiance of a Christian nation, together with its secular rulers, belongs of right to the Supreme Pontiff. The people is the real sovereign; and kings are delegates from the people, with authority which they can only justly exercise so long as they remain in obedience to Rome. It follows from these positions that every nation must refuse fealty to an irreligious or contumacious ruler. In the last resort they may lawfully remove him by murder; and they are ipso facto in a state of mortal sin if they elect or recognize a heretic as sovereign. This theory sprang from the writings of the English Jesuits, Allen and Parsons. It was elaborated in Rome by Cardinal Bellarmino, applied in Spain by Suarez and Mariana, and openly preached in France by Jean Boucher. The best energies of Paolo Sarpi were devoted to combating the main position of ecclesiastical supremacy. His works had a salutary effect by delimiting the relations of the Church to the State, and by demonstrating even to Catholics the pernicious results of acknowledging a Papal overlordship in temporal affairs. At the same time the boldly democratic principle of the sovereignty of the people, which the Jesuits advanced in order to establish their doctrine of ecclesiastical superiority, provoked opposition. It led to the contrary hypothesis of the Divine Right of sovereigns, which found favor in Protestant kingdoms, and especially in England under the Stuart dynasty. When the French Catholics resolved to terminate the discords of their country by the recognition of Henri IV., they had recourse to this argument for justifying their obedience to a heretic. It was felt by all sound thinkers and by every patriot in Europe, that the Papal prerogatives claimed by the Jesuits were too inconsistent with national liberties to be tolerated. The zeal of the Society had clearly outrun its discretion; and the free discussion of the theory of government which their insolent assumptions stimulated, weakened the cause they sought to strengthen. Their ingenuity overreached itself.

This, however, was as nothing compared with the hostility evoked by their unscrupulous application of these principles in practice. There was hardly a plot against established rule in Protestant countries with which they were not known or believed to be connected. The invasion of Ireland in 1579, the murder of the Regent Morton in Scotland, and Babington's conspiracy against Elizabeth, emanated from their councils. They were held responsible for the attempted murder of the Prince of Orange in 1580, and for his actual murder in 1584. They loudly applauded Jacques Clement, the assassin of Henri III. in 1589, as 'the eternal glory of France.'[175] Numerous unsuccessful attacks upon the life of Henri IV., culminating in that of Jean Chastel in 1594, caused their expulsion from France. When they returned in 1603, they set to work again;[176] and the assassin Ravaillac, who succeeded in removing the obnoxious champion of European independence in 1610, was probably inspired by their doctrine.[177] They had a hand in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and were thought by some to have instigated the Massaere of S. Bartholomew. They fomented the League of the Guises, which had for its object a change in the French dynasty. They organized the Thirty Years' War, and they procured the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. If it is not possible to connect them immediately with all and each of the criminal acts laid to their charge, the fact that a Jesuit in every case was lurking in the background, counts by the force of cumulative evidence heavily against them, and explains the universal suspicion with which they came to be regarded as factious intermeddlers in the concerns of nations. Moreover, their written words accused them; for the tyrannicide of heretics was plainly advocated in their treatises on government. So profound was the conviction of their guilt, that the death of Sixtus V. in 1590, predicted by Bellarmino, the sudden death of Urban VII. in the same year, and the death of Clement VIII. in 1805, also predicted by Bellarmino—these three Popes being ill-affected toward the order—were popularly ascribed to their agency. But of their practical intervention there is no proof. Old age and fever must be credited, in these as in other cases, with the decease of Roman Pontiffs supposed to have been poisoned.

[Footnote 175: See Mariana, De Rege, lib. i. cap. 6. This book, be it remembered, was written for the instruction of the heir apparent, afterwards Philip III.]

[Footnote 176: Henri IV. let them return to France, in mere dread of their machinations against him. See Sully, vol. v. p. 113.]

[Footnote 177: Sarpi, who was living at the time of Henri's murder, and who saw his best hopes for Italy and the Church of God extinguished by that crime, at first credited the Jesuits with the deliberate instigation Ravaillac. He gradually came to the conclusion that, though they were not directly responsible, their doctrine of regicide had inflamed the fanatic's imagination. See, in succession, Letters, vol. ii. pp. 78, 79, 81, 83, 86, 91, 105, 121, 170, 181, 192.]

It is not, however, to be wondered that sooner, or later the Jesuits made themselves insupportable by their intrigues in all the countries where they were established.[178] Even to the Papacy itself they proved too irksome to be borne. The Company showed plainly that what they meant by obedience to Rome was obedience to a Rome controlled and fashioned by themselves. It was their ambition to stand in the same relation to the Pope as the Shogun to the Mikado of Japan. Nor does the analysis of their opinions fail to justify the condemnation passed upon them by the Parlement of Paris in 1762. 'These doctrines tend to destroy the natural law, that rule of manners which God Himself has imprinted on the hearts of men, and in consequence to sever all the bonds of civil society, by the authorization of theft, falsehood, perjury, the most culpable impurity, and in a word each passion and each crime of human weakness; to obliterate all sentiments of humanity by favoring homicide and parricide; and to annihilate the authority of sovereigns in the State.'

[Footnote 178: Expelled from Venice in 1606, from Bohemia in 1618, from Naples and the Netherlands in 1622, from Russia in 1676, from Portugal in 1759, from Spain in 1767, from France in 1764. Suppressed by the Bull of Clement XIV. in 1773. Restored in 1814, as an instrument against the Revolution.]

Great psychological and pathological interest, attaches to the study of the Jesuit order. To withhold our admiration from the zeal, energy, self-devotion and constructive ability of its founders, would be impossible. Equally futile would it be to affect indifference before the sinister spectacle of so world-embracing an organism, persistently maintained in action for an anti-social end. There is something Roman in the colossal proportions of Loyola's idea, something Roman in the durability of the structure which perpetuates it. Yet the philosopher cannot but agree with the vulgar in his final judgment on the odiousness of these sacerdotal despots, these unflinching foes not merely to the heroes of the human intellect, and to the champions of right conduct, but also to the very angels of Christianity. That the Jesuits should claim to have been founded by Him who preached the Sermon on the Mount, that they should flaunt their motto, A.M.D.G., in the sight of Him who spake from Sinai, is one of those practical paradoxes in which the history of decrepit religions abounds.



CHAPTER V.

SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC MORALS: PART I.

How did the Catholic Revival affect Italian Society?—Difficulty of Answering this Question—Frequency of Private Crimes of Violence—Homicides and Bandits—Savage Criminal Justice—Paid Assassins—Toleration of Outlaws—Honorable Murder—Example of the Lucchese Army—State of the Convents—The History of Virginia de Leyva—Lucrezia Buonvisi—The True Tale of the Cenci—The Brothers of the House of Massimo—Vittoria Accoramboni—The Duchess of Palliano—Wife-Murders—The Family of Medici.

We are naturally led to inquire what discernible effect the Catholic Revival and the Counter-Reformation had upon the manners and morals of the Italians as a nation. Much has been said about the contrast between intellectual refinement and almost savage license which marked the Renaissance. Yet it can with justice be maintained that, while ferocity and brutal sensuality survived from the Middle Ages, humanism, by means of the new ideal it introduced, tended to civilize and educate the race. Now, however, the Church was stifling culture and attempting to restore that ecclesiastical conception of human life which the Renaissance had superseded. Did then her resuscitated Catholicism succeed in permeating the Italians with the spirit of Christ and of the Gospel? Were the nobles more quiet in their demeanor, less quarrelsome and haughty, more law-abiding and less given to acts of violence, than they had been in the previous period? Were the people more contented and less torn by factions, happier in their homes, less abandoned to the insanities of baleful superstitions?

It is obviously difficult to answer these questions with either completeness or accuracy. In the first place, we have no right to expect that the religious revival, signalized by the Tridentine Council, should have made itself immediately felt in the sphere of national conduct. In the second place, it was not, like the German Reformation, a renewal of Christianity at its sources, but a resuscitation of mediaeval Catholicity, in direct antagonism to the intellectual tendencies of the age. The new learning among northern races disintegrated that system of ideas upon which mediaeval society rested; but it also introduced religious and moral conceptions more vital than those ideas in their decadence. In Italy the disintegrating process had been no less thorough, nay far more subtle and pervasive. Yet the new learning had not led the nation to attempt a reconstruction of primitive Christianity. The Catholic Revival gave nothing vital or enthusiastic to the conscience of the race. It brought the old creeds, old cult, old superstitions, old abuses back, with stricter discipline and under a regime of terror. Meanwhile, it resolutely ranged its forces in opposition to what had been salutary and life-giving in the mental movement of the Renaissance. It compelled people who had watched the dawning of a new light, to shut their eyes upon that dayspring. It extinguished the studies of the Classical Revival; bade philosophers return to Thomas of Aquino; threatened thinkers with the dungeon or the stake who should presume to pass the Pillars of Hercules, when a whole Atlantic of knowledge had been opened to their curiosity. Under these circumstances it was impossible that a revolution, so retrograde in its nature, checking the tide of national energy in full flow, should have exercised a healthy influence over the Italian temperament at large. We have a right to expect, what in fact we find, the advent of hypocrisy and ceremonial observances, but little actual amendment in manners. In the third place, the question is still further complicated by the Catholic Revival having been effected concurrently with the establishment of the Spanish Hegemony. At the end of the first chapter of this volume I pointed out the evils brought on Italy by her servitude to a foreign and unsympathetic despot: the decline of commercial activity, the multiplication of slothful lordlings, the depression of industry, the diminution of wealth, and the suffering of the lower classes from pirates, bandits and tax-gatherers. These conditions were sufficient to demoralize a people. And mediaeval Catholicism, restored by edict, enforced by the Inquisition, propagated by Jesuits, was not of the fine enthusiastic quality to counteract them. Servile in its conception, it sufficed to bridle and benumb a race of serfs, but not to soften or to purify their brutal instincts.[179]

In this chapter I shall not attempt a general survey of Italian society.[180] I shall content myself with supplying materials for the formation of a judgment by narrating some of the most remarkable domestic tragedies of the second half of the sixteenth century, choosing those only which rest upon well-sifted documentary evidence, and which bring the social conditions of the country into strong relief. Before engaging in these historical romances, it will be well to preface them with a few general remarks upon the state of manners they will illustrate.

The first thing which strikes a student of Italy between 1530 and 1600 is that crimes of violence, committed by private individuals for personal ends, continued steadily upon the increase.[181]

[Footnote 179: The last section of Loyola's Exercitia is an epitome of post-Tridentine Catholicism, though penned before the opening of the Council. In its last paragraph it inculcates the fear of God: 'neque porro is timor solum, quem filialem appellamus, qui pius est ac sanctus maxime; verum etiam alter, servilis dictus' (Inst. Soc. Jesu, vol. iv. p. 173).]

[Footnote 180: An interesting survey of this wider kind has been attempted by U.A. Canello for the whole sixteenth century in his Storia della Lett. It. nel Secolo XVI. (Milano: Vallardi, 1880). He tries to demonstrate that, in the sphere of private life, Italian society gradually refined the brutal lusts of the Middle Ages, and passed through fornication to a true conception of woman as man's companion in the family. The theme is bold; and the author seems to have based it upon too slight acquaintance with the real conditions of the Middle Ages.]

[Footnote 181: Galluzzi, in his Storia del Granducato di Toscana, vol. iv. p. 34, estimates the murders committed in Florence alone during the eighteen months which followed the death of Cosimo I., at 186.]

Compared with the later Middle Ages, compared with the Renaissance, this period is distinguished by extraordinary ferocity of temper and by an almost unparalleled facility of bloodshed.[182]

[Footnote 182: In drawing up these paragraphs I am greatly indebted to a vigorous passage by Signor Salvatore Bonghi in his Storia di Lucrezia Buonvisi, pp. 7-9, of which I have made free use, translating his words when they served my purpose, and interpolating such further details as might render the picture more complete.]

The broad political and religious contests which had torn the country in the first years of the sixteenth century, were pacified. Foreign armies had ceased to dispute the provinces of Italy. The victorious powers of Spain, the Church, and the protected principalities, seemed secure in the possession of their gains. But those international quarrels which kept the nation in unrest through a long period of municipal wars, ending in the horrors of successive invasions, were now succeeded by an almost universal discord between families and persons. Each province, each city, each village became the theater of private feuds and assassinations. Each household was the scene of homicide and empoisonment. Italy presented the spectacle of a nation armed against itself, not to decide the issue of antagonistic political principles by civil strife, but to gratify lawless passions—cupidity, revenge, resentment—by deeds of personal high-handedness. Among the common people of the country and the towns, crimes of brutality and bloodshed were of daily occurrence; every man bore weapons for self-defence, and for attack upon his neighbor. The aristocracy and the upper classes of the bourgeoisie lived in a perpetual state of mutual mistrust, ready upon the slightest occasion of fancied affront to blaze forth into murder. Much of this savagery was due to the false ideas of honor and punctilio which the Spaniards introduced. Quarrels arose concerning a salute, a title, a question of precedence, a seat in church, a place in the prince's ante-chamber, a meeting in the public streets. Noblemen were ushered on their way by servants, who measured distances, and took the height of dais or of bench, before their master committed his dignity by advancing a step beyond the minimum that was due. Love-affairs and the code of honor with regard to women opened endless sources of implacable jealousies, irreconcilable hatreds, and offenses that could only be wiped out with blood. On each and all of these occasions, the sword was ready to the right hand; and where this generous weapon would not reach, the harquebuss and knife of paid assassins were employed without compunction.[183] We must not, however, ascribe this condition of society wholly or chiefly to Spanish influences.

[Footnote 183: The lax indulgence accorded by the Jesuit casuists to every kind of homicide appears in the extracts from those writers collected in Artes Jesuiticae (Salisburgi, 1703, pp. 75-83). Tamburinus went so far as to hold that if a man mixed poison for his enemy, and a friend came in and drank it up before his eyes, he was not bound to warn his friend, nor was he guilty of his friend's death (Ib. p. 135, Art. 651).]

It was in fact a survival of mediaeval habits under altered circumstances. During the municipal wars of the thirteenth century, and afterwards during the struggle of the despots for ascendency, the nation had become accustomed to internecine contests which set party against party, household against household, man against man. These humors in the cities, as Italian historians were wont to call them, had been partially suppressed by the confederation of the five great Powers at the close of the fifteenth century, and also by a prevalent urbanity of manners. At that epoch, moreover, they were systematized and controlled by the methods of condottiere warfare, which offered a legitimate outlet to the passions of turbulent young men. But when Italy sank into the sloth of pacification after the settlement of Charles V. at Bologna in 1530, when there were no longer condottieri to levy troops in rival armies, when political parties ceased in the cities, the old humors broke out again under the aspect of private and personal feuds. Though the names of Guelf and Ghibelline had lost their meaning, these factions reappeared, and divided Milan, the towns of Romagna, the villages of the Campagna. In the place of condottieri arose brigand chiefs, who, like Piccolomini and Sciarra, placed themselves at the head of regiments, and swept the country on marauding expeditions. Instead of exiles, driven by victorious parties in the state to seek precarious living on a foreign soil, bandits, proscribed for acts of violence, abounded. Thus the habits which had been created through centuries of political ferment, subsisted when the nation was at rest in servitude, assuming baser and more selfish forms of ferocity. The end of the sixteenth century witnessed the final degeneration and corruption of a mediaeval state of warfare, which the Renaissance had checked, but which the miseries of foreign invasions had resuscitated by brutalizing the population, and which now threatened to disintegrate society in aimless anarchy and private lawlessness.

It must not be imagined that governments and magistracies were slack in their pursuit of criminals. Repressive statutes, proclamations of outlawry, and elaborate prosecutions succeeded one another with unwearied conscientiousness. The revenues of states were taxed to furnish blood-money and to support spies. Large sums were invariably offered for the capture or assassination of escaped delinquents; and woe to the wretches who became involved in criminal proceedings! Witnesses were tortured with infernal cruelty. Convicted culprits suffered horrible agonies before their death, or were condemned to languish out a miserable life in pestilential dungeons. But the very inhumanity of this judicial method, without mercy for the innocent, from whom evidence could be extorted, and frequently inequitable in the punishments assigned to criminals of varying degrees of guilt, taught the people to defy justice, and encouraged them in brutality. They found it more tolerable to join the bands of brigands who preyed upon their fields and villages, than to assist rulers who governed so unequally and cruelly. We know, for instance, that a robber chief, Marianazzo, refused the Pope's pardon, alleging that the profession of brigandage was more lucrative and offered greater security of life than any trade within the walls of Rome. Thus the bandits of that generation occupied the specious attitude of opposition to oppressive governments. There were, moreover, many favorable chances for a homicide. The Church was jealous of her rights of sanctuary. Whatever may have been her zeal for orthodoxy, she showed herself an indulgent mother to culprits who demanded an asylum. Feudal nobles prided themselves on protecting refugees within their fiefs and castles. There were innumerable petty domains left, which carried privileges of signorial courts and local justice. Cardinals, ambassadors, and powerful princes claimed immunity from common jurisdiction in their palaces, the courts and basements of which soon became the resort of escaped criminals. No extradition treaties subsisted between the several and numerous states into which Italy was then divided, so that it was only necessary to cross a frontier in order to gain safety from the law. The position of an outlaw in that case was tolerably secure, except against private vengeance or the cupidity of professional cut-throats, who gained an honest livelihood by murdering bandits with a good price on their heads. Condemned for the most part in their absence, these homicides entered a recognized and not dishonorable class. They were tolerated, received, and even favored by neighboring princes, who generally had some grudge against the state from which the outlaws fled. After obtaining letters of safe-conduct and protection, they enrolled themselves in the militia of their adopted country, while the worst of them became spies or secret agents of police. No government seems to have regarded crimes of violence with severity, provided these had been committed on a foreign soil. Murders for the sake of robbery or rape were indeed esteemed ignoble. But a man who had killed an avowed enemy, or had shed blood in the heat of a quarrel, or had avenged his honor by the assassination of a sister convicted of light love, only established a reputation for bravery, which stood him in good stead. He was likely to make a stout soldier, and he had done nothing socially discreditable. On the contrary, if he had been useful in ridding the world of an outlaw some prince wished to kill, this murder made him a hero. In addition to the blood-money, he not unfrequently received lucrative office, or a pension for life.

A very curious state of things resulted from these customs. States depended, in large measure, for the execution of their judicial sentences in cases of manslaughter and treason, upon foreign murderers and traitors. Towns were full of outlaws, each with a price upon his head, mutually suspicious, individually desirous of killing some fellow-criminal and thereby enriching his own treasury. If he were successful, he received a fair sum of money, with privileges and immunities from the state which had advertised the outlaw; and not unfrequently he obtained the further right of releasing one or more bandits from penalties of death or prison. It may be imagined at what cross-purposes the outlaws dwelt together, with crimes in many states accumulated on their shoulders; and what peril might ensue to society should they combine together, as indeed they tried to do in Bedmar's conspiracy against Venice. Meanwhile, the states kept this floating population of criminals in check by various political and social contrivances, which grew up from the exigencies and the habits of the moment. Instead of recruiting soldiers from the stationary population, it became usual, when a war was imminent, to enroll outlaws. Thus, when Lucca had to make an inroad into Garfagnana in 1613, the Republic issued a proclamation promising pardon and pay to those of its own bandits who should join its standard. Men to the number of 591 answered this call, and the little war which followed was conducted with more than customary fierceness.[184]

[Footnote 184: See Salvatore Bonghi, op. cit. p. 159.]

Even the ordinary police and guards of cities were composed of fugitives from other states, care being taken to select by preference those who came stained only with honorable bloodshed. In 1593 the guard of the palace of Lucca was reinforced by the addition of forty-three men, among whom four were bandits for wounds inflicted upon enemies in open fight; twelve for homicide in duel, sword to sword; five for the murder of more than one person in similar encounters; one for the murder of a sister, and the wounding of her seducer; two for mutilating an enemy in the face; one for unlawful recruiting; one for wounding; one for countenancing bandits; and sixteen simple refugees.[185] The phrases employed to describe these men in the official report are sufficiently illustrative of contemporary moral standards. Thus we read 'Banditi per omicidi semplici da buono a buono, a sangue caldo, da spada a spada, o di nemici.' 'Per omicidio d'una sorella per causa d'onore.' To murder an enemy, or a sister who had misbehaved herself, was accounted excusable.

The prevalence of lawlessness encouraged a domestic custom which soon grew into a system. This was the maintenance of so-called bravi by nobles and folk rich enough to afford so expensive a luxury. The outlaws found their advantage in the bargain which they drew with their employers; for besides being lodged, fed, clothed and armed, they obtained a certain protection from the spies and professional murderers who were always on the watch to kill them. Their masters used them to defend their persons when a feud was being carried on, or directed them against private enemies whom they wished to injure.

[Footnote 185: Bonghi, op. cit. p. 159, note.]

It is not uncommon in the annals of these times to read: 'Messer So-and-so, having received an affront from the Count of V., employed the services of three bravi, valiant fellows up to any mischief, with whom he retired to his country house.' Or again: 'The Marquis, perceiving that his neighbor had a grudge against him on account of the Signora Lucrezia, thought it prudent to increase his bodyguard, and therefore added Pepi and Lo Scarabone, bandits from Tuscany for murders of a priest and a citizen, to his household.' Or again: 'During the vacation of the Holy See the Baron X had, as usual, engaged men-at-arms for the protection of his palace.'

In course of time it became the mark of birth and wealth to lodge a rabble of such rascals. They lived on terms of familiarity with their employer, shared his secrets, served him in his amours, and executed any devil's job he chose to command. Apartments in the basement of the palace were assigned to them, so that a nobleman's house continued to resemble the castle of a mediaeval baron. But the bravi, unlike soldiery, were rarely employed in honorable business. They formed a permanent element of treachery and violence within the social organism. Not a little singular were the relations thus established. The community of crime, involving common interests and common perils, established a peculiar bond between the noble and his bravo. This was complexioned by a certain sense of 'honor rooted in dishonor,' and by a faint reflection from elder retainership. The compact struck between landowner and bandit parodied that which drew feudal lord and wandering squire together. There was something ignobly noble in it, corresponding to the confused conscience and perilous conditions of the epoch.

While studying this organized and half-tolerated system of social violence, we are surprised to observe how largely it was countenanced and how frequently it was set in motion by the Church. In a previous chapter on the Jesuits, I have adverted to their encouragement of assassination for ends which they considered sacred. In a coming chapter upon Sarpi, I shall show to what extent the Roman prelacy was implicated in more than one attempt to take away his life. The chiefs of the Church, then, instead of protesting against this vice of corrupt civilization in Italy, lent the weight of their encouragement to what strikes us now, not only as eminently unchristian, but also as pernicious to healthy national conditions of existence. We may draw two conclusions from these observations: first, that religions, except in the first fervor of their growth and forward progress, recognize the moral conventions of the society which they pretend to regulate: secondly, that it is well-nigh impossible for men of one century to sympathize with the ethics of a past and different epoch. We cannot comprehend the regicidal theories of the Jesuits, or the murderous intrigues of a Borghese Pontiff's Court, without admitting that priests, specially dedicated to the service of Christ and to the propagation of his gospel, felt themselves justified in employing the immoral and unchristian means which social custom placed at their disposal for ridding themselves of inconvenient enemies. This is at the same time their defense as human beings in the sixteenth century, and their indictment as self-styled and professed successors of the Founder who rebuked Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane.

To make general remarks upon the state of sexual morality at this epoch, is hardly needful. Yet there are some peculiar circumstances which deserve to be noticed, in order to render the typical stories which I mean to relate intelligible. We have already seen that society condoned the murder of a sister by a brother, if she brought dishonor on her family; and the same privilege was extended to a husband in the case of a notoriously faithless wife. Such homicides did not escape judicial sentence, but they shared in the conventional toleration which was extended to murders in hot blood or in the prosecution of a feud. The state of the Italian convents at this period gave occasion to crimes in which women played a prominent part. After the Council of Trent reforms were instituted in religious houses. But they could not be immediately carried out; and, meanwhile, the economical changes which were taking place in the commercial aristocracy, filled nunneries with girls who had no vocation for a secluded life. Less money was yearly made in trade; merchants became nobles, investing their capital in land, and securing their estates on their eldest sons by entails. It followed that they could not afford to marry all their daughters with dowries befitting the station they aspired to assume. A large percentage of well-born women, accustomed to luxury, and vitiated by bad examples in their homes, were thus thrown on a monastic life. Signor Bonghi reckons that at the end of the sixteenth century, more than five hundred girls, who had become superfluous in noble families, crowded the convents in the single little town of Lucca. At a later epoch there would have been no special peril in this circumstance. But at the time with which we are now occupied, an objectionable license still survived from earlier ages. The nunneries obtained evil notoriety as houses of licentious pleasure, to which soldiers and youths of dissolute habits resorted by preference.[186] There appears to have been a specific profligate fanaticism, a well-marked morbid partiality for these amours with cloistered virgins. The young men who prosecuted them, obtained a nickname indicative of their absorbing passion.[187] The attraction of mystery and danger had something, no doubt, to do with this infatuation; and the fascination that sacrilege has for depraved natures, may also be reckoned into the account. To enjoy a lawless amour was not enough; but to possess a woman who alternated between transports of passion and torments of remorse, added zest to guilty pleasure. For men who habitually tampered with magic arts and believed firmly in the devil, this raised romance to rapture. It was a common thing for debauchees to seek what they called peripetezie di nuova idea, or novel and exciting adventures stimulative of a jaded appetite, in consecrated places. At any rate, as will appear in the sequel of this chapter, convent intrigues occupied a large space in the criminal annals of the day.

The Lady of Monza.

Virginia Maria de Leyva was a descendant of Charles V.'s general, Antonio de Leyva, who through many years administered the Duchy of Milan, and died loaded with wealth and honors.[188]

[Footnote 186: In support of this assertion I translate a letter addressed (Milan, September 15, 1622) by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo to the Prioress of the Convent of S. Margherita at Monza (Dandolo, Signora di Monza, p. 132). 'Experience of similar cases has shown how dangerous to your holy state is the vicinity of soldiers, owing to the correspondence which young and idle soldiers continually try to entertain with monasteries, sometimes even under fair and honorable pretexts.... Wherefore we have heard with much displeasure that in those places of our diocese where there are convents of nuns and congregations of virgins, ordinary lodgings for the soldiery have been established, called lonely houses (case erme), where they are suffered or obliged to dwell through long periods.' The Bishop commands the Prioress to admit no soldier, on any plea of piety, devotion or family relationship, into her convent; to receive no servant or emissary of a soldier; to forbid special services being performed in the chapel at the instance of a soldier; and, finally, to institute a more rigorous system of watch and ward than had been formerly practiced.]

[Footnote 187: In Venice, for example, they were called Monachini. But the name varied in various provinces.]

[Footnote 188: The following abstract of the history of Virginia Maria de Leyva is based on Dandolo's Signora di Monza (Milano, 1855). Readers of Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, and of Rosini's tiresome novel, La Signora di Monza, will be already familiar with her in romance under the name of Gertrude.]

For his military service he was rewarded with the principality of Ascoli, the federal lordship of the town of Monza, and the life-tenure of the city of Pavia. Virginia's father was named Martino, and upon his death her cousin succeeded to the titles of the house. She, for family reasons, entered the convent of S. Margherita at Monza, about the year 1595. Here she occupied a place of considerable importance, being the daughter of the Lord of Monza, of princely blood, wealthy, and allied to the great houses of the Milanese. S. Margherita was a convent of the Umiliate, dedicated to the education of noble girls, in which, therefore, considerable laxity of discipline prevailed.[189]

[Footnote 189: Carlo Borromeo found it necessary to suppress the Umiliati. But he left the female establishment of S. Margherita untouched.]

Sister Virginia dwelt at ease within its walls, holding a kind of little court, and exercising an undefined authority in petty affairs which was conceded to her rank. Among her favorite companions at the time of the events I am about to narrate, were numbered the Sisters Ottavia Ricci, Benedetta Homata, Candida Brancolina, and Silvia Casata; she was waited on by a converse sister, Caterina da Meda. Adjoining the convent stood the house and garden of a certain Gianpaolo Osio, who plays the principal part in Virginia's tragedy. He must have been a young man of distinguished appearance; for when Virginia first set eyes upon him from a window overlooking his grounds, she exclaimed: 'Is it possible that one could ever gaze on anything more beautiful?' He attracted her notice as early as the year 1599 or 1600, under circumstances not very favorable to the plan he had in view. His hands were red with the blood of Virginia's bailiff, Giuseppe Molteno, whom he had murdered for some cause unknown to us. During their first interview (Virginia leaning from the window of her friend Candida's cell, and Osio standing on his garden-plot beneath), the young man courteously excused himself for this act of violence, adding that he would serve her even more devotedly than the dead Molteno, and begging to be allowed to write her a letter. When the letter came, it was couched in terms expressive of a lawless passion. Virginia's noble blood rebelled against the insult, and she sent an answer back, rebuffing her audacious suitor. The go-betweens in the correspondence which ensued were the two nuns, Ottavia and Benedetta, and a certain Giuseppe Pesen, who served as letter-carrier. Osio did not allow himself to be discouraged by a first refusal, but took the hazardous step of opening his mind to the confessor of the convent, Paolo Arrigone, a priest of San Maurizio in Milan. Arrigone at once lent himself to the intrigue, and taught Osio what kind of letters he should write Virginia. They were to be courteous, respectful, blending pious rhetoric with mystical suggestions of romantic passion. It seems that the confessor composed these documents himself, and advised his fair penitent that there was no sin in perusing them. From correspondence, Osio next passed to interviews. By the aid of Arrigone he gained access to the parlor of the convent, where he conversed with Virginia through the bars. In their earlier meetings the lover did not venture beyond compliments and modest protestations of devotion. But as time went on, he advanced to kisses and caresses, and once he made Virginia take a little jewel into her mouth. This was a white loadstone, blessed by Arrigone, and intended to operate like a love-charm. The girl, in fact, began to feel the influence of her seducer. In the final confession which she made, she relates how she fought against temptation. 'Some diabolical force compelled me to go to the window overlooking his garden; and one day when Sister Ottavia told me that Osio was standing there, I fainted from the effort to restrain myself. This happened several times. At one moment I flew into a rage, and prayed to God to help me; at another I felt lifted from the ground, and forced to go and gaze on him. Sometimes when the fit was on me, I tore my hair; I even thought of killing myself.' Virginia was surrounded by persons who had an interest in helping Osio. Not only the confessor, who was a man of infamous character, but her friends among the nuns, themselves accustomed to intrigue of a like nature, led her down the path to ruin. False keys were made, and one or other of the faithless sisters introduced the young man into the convent at night. When Virginia resisted, and enlarged upon the sacrilege of breaking cloister, Arrigone supplied her with a printed book of casuistry, in which it was written that though it might be sinful for a nun to leave her convent, there was no sin in a man entering it. At last she fell; and for seven years she lived in close intimacy with her lover, passing the nights with him, either in his own house or in one of the cells of S. Margherita. On one occasion, when he had to fly from justice, the girls concealed him in their rooms for fifteen days. The first fruit of this amour was a stillborn child; after giving birth to which, Virginia sold all the silver she possessed, and sent a votive tablet to Our Lady of Loreto, on which she had portrayed a nun and baby, kneeling and weeping. 'Twice again I sent the same memorial to our Lady, imploring the grace of liberation from this passion. But the sorceries with which I was surrounded, prevailed. In my bed were found the bones of the dead, hooks of iron, and many other things, of which the nuns were well informed. Nay, I would fain have given up my life to save my soul; and so great were my afflictions, that in despair I went to throw myself into the well, but was restrained by the image of the Virgin at the bottom of the garden, for which I had a special devotion.' In course of time she gave birth to a little girl, named Francesca, who frequented the convent, and whom Osio legitimated as his child.

It was impossible that a connection of long standing, known to several accomplices, and corroborated by the presence of the child Francesca, should remain hidden from the world. People began to speak about the fact in Monza. A druggist, named Reinaro Soncini, gossiped somewhat too openly. Osio had him shot one night by a servant in his pay.

And now the lovers were engaged in a career of crime, which brought them finally to justice. Virginia's waiting-woman Caterina fell into disgrace with her mistress, and was shut up in a kind of prison by her orders. The girl declared that she would bring the whole bad affair before the superior authorities, and would do so immediately, seeing that Monsignor Barca, the Visitor of S. Margherita, was about to make one of his official tours of inspection.

This threat cost Caterina her life. About midnight, while a thunder-storm was raging, Virginia, accompanied by her usual associates, Ottavia, Benedetta, Silvia, and Candida, entered the room where the girl was confined. They were followed by Osio, holding in his hand a heavy instrument of wood and iron, called piede di bicocca, which he had snatched up in the convent outhouse. He found Caterina lying face downward on the bed, and smashed her skull with a single blow. The body was conveyed by him and the nuns into the fowl-house of the sisters, whence he removed it on the following night by the aid of Benedetta into his own dwelling. From evidence which afterwards transpired, Osio decapitated the corpse, concealed the body in a sort of cellar, and flung the head into an empty well at Velate.

The disappearance of Caterina just before the visitation of Monsignor Barca, roused suspicion; and, though a murder was not immediately apprehended, the guilty associates felt that the cord of fate was being drawn around them. In the autumn of 1607 the tempest broke upon their heads. Virginia was removed from Monza to the convent called Del Bocchetto at Milan; and on November 27 the depositions of the abbess, prioress, and other members of S. Margherita were taken regarding Osio's intrigues, the assassination of Soncini, and the disappearance of Caterina.

Among the nuns who had abetted Osio, the two most criminally implicated were Ottavia and Benedetta. Their evidence, if closely scrutinized, must reveal each secret of the past. It was much to Osio's interest, therefore, that they should not fall into the hands of justice; nor had he any difficulty in persuading them to rely on his assistance for contriving their escape to some convent in the Bergamasque territory. We may wonder, by the way, what sort of discipline was then maintained in nunneries, if two so guilty sisters counted upon safe entrance into an asylum, provided only they could leave the diocese of Milan for another.[190] On the night of Thursday, November 30, 1607, Osio came to the wall of the convent garden, and began to break a hole in it, through which Ottavia and Benedetta crept. The three then prowled along the city wall of Monza, till they found a breach wide enough for exit. Afterwards they took a path beside the river Lambro, and stopped for awhile at the church of the Madonna delle Grazie. Here the sisters prayed for assistance from our Lady in their journey, and recited the Salve Regina seven times. Then they resumed their walk along the Lambro, and at a certain point Ottavia fell into the river. In her dying depositions she accused Osio of having pushed her in; and there seems little doubt that he did so; for while she was struggling in the water, he disengaged his harquebuss from his mantle and struck her several blows upon the head and hands.

[Footnote 190: In ecclesiastical affairs the diocese of Milan exercised jurisdiction over that of Bergamo, although Bergamo was subject in civil affairs to Venice. This makes the matter more puzzling.]

She pretended to be dead, and was carried down the stream to a place where she contrived to crawl to land. Some peasants came by, whose assistance she implored. But they, observing that she was a nun of S. Margherita by her dress, refused to house her for the rest of the night. They gave her a staff to lean on, and after a painful journey she regained the church of the Grazie at early dawn. Ottavia's wounds upon the head, face, and right hand, inflicted by the stock of Osio's gun, were so serious that after making a clean breast to her judges, she died of them upon December 26, 1607.

When Osio had pushed Ottavia into the Lambro, and had tried to smash her brains out with his harquebuss, he resumed his midnight journey with Sister Benedetta. They reached an uninhabited house in the country about five or six miles distant from Monza. Here Osio shut Benedetta up in an empty room with a stone bench running along the wall. She remained there all Friday, visited once by her dreaded companion, who brought her bread, cheese, and wine. She abstained from touching any of this food, in fear of poison. About nine in the evening he returned, and bade her prepare to march. They set out again, together, in the dark; and after walking about three miles they came to a well, down which Osio threw her. The well was deep, and had no water in it. Benedetta injured her left side in the fall; and when she had reached the bottom, her would-be murderer flung a big stone on her which broke her right leg. She contrived to protect her head by gathering stones around it, and lay without moaning or moving, in the fear that Osio would attempt fresh violence unless he thought her dead. From the middle of Friday night, until Sunday morning, she remained thus, exploring with her eyes the surface of her dungeon. It was dry and strewn with bones. In one corner lay a round black object which bore the aspect of a human skull. As it eventually turned out, this was the head of Caterina, whom Benedetta herself had helped to murder, and which Osio had thrown there. On Sunday, during Mass, the men of the village of Velate were in church, when they heard a voice from outside calling out, 'Help, help! I am at the bottom of this well!' The well, as it happened, was distant some dozen paces from the church door, and Benedetta had timed her call for assistance at a lucky moment. The villagers ran to the spot, and drew her out by means of a man who went down with a rope. She was then taken to the house of a gentleman, Signor Alberico degli Alberici, who, when no one else was charitable enough to receive her, opened his doors to the exhausted victim of that murderous outrage. It may be remarked that the same surgeon who had been employed to report on Ottavia's wounds, now appeared to examine Benedetta. His name was Ambrogio Vimercati. Benedetta was taken to the convent of S. Orsola, where her friend Ottavia lay dying; and after making a full confession, she eventually recovered her health, and suffered life-long incarceration in her old convent.

Osio was still at large. On December 20, he addressed a long letter to the Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, in which he vainly attempted to defend himself, and throw the blame on his associates. It is a loathsome document, blending fulsome protestations and fawning phrases, with brutal denouncements of his victims, and treacherous insinuations. One passage deserves notice. 'Who was it,' he says, 'who suggested my correspondence with Virginia? The priest Paolo Arrigone, that ruin of the monastery! The Canon Pisnato, who is now confessor to the nuns of Meda; in his house you will find what will never be discovered in mine, presents from nuns, incitements to amours, and other such things. The priest Giacomo Bertola, confessor of the nuns of S. Margherita; who was his devotee? Sacha!—and he stayed there all the day through. These men, being priests, are not prosecuted; they are protected by their cloth, forsooth! It is only of poor Osio that folk talk. Only he is persecuted, only he is a malefactor, only he is the traitor!' Arrigone, as a matter of fact, was tried, and condemned to two years' labor at the galleys, after the expiration of which term he was not to return to Monza or its territory. This seems a slight sentence; for the judges found him guilty, not only of promoting Osio's intrigue with Virginia, by conducting the correspondence, and watching the door during their interviews in the parlor, but also of pursuing the Signora himself with infamous proposals.

In his absence Osio was condemned to death on the gibbet. His goods were confiscated to the State. His house in Monza was destroyed, and a pillar of infamy recording his crimes, was erected on its site. A proclamation of outlawry was issued on April 5, 1608, under the seal of Don Pietro de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, and governor of the State of Milan, which offered 'to any person not himself an outlaw, or to any commune, that shall consign Gianpaolo Osio to the hands of justice, the reward of a thousand scudi from the royal ducal treasury, together with the right to free four bandits condemned for similar or less offenses; and in case of his being delivered dead, even though he shall be slain in foreign parts, then the half of the aforesaid sum of money, and the freedom of two bandits as above. And if the person who shall consign him alive be himself an outlaw for similar or less offenses, he shall receive, beside the freedom of himself and two other bandits, the half of the aforesaid sum of money; and in the case of his consignment after death, the freedom of himself and of two other bandits as aforesaid.' I have recited this Bando, because it is a good instance of the procedure in use under like conditions. Justice preferred to obtain the culprit alive, and desired to receive him at honest hands. But there was an expectation of getting hold of him through less reputable agents. Therefore they offered free pardon to a bandit and a couple of accomplices, who might undertake the capture or the murder of the proscribed outlaw in concert, and in the event of his being produced alive, a sum of money down. Osio, apparently, spent some years in exile, changing place, and name, and dress, living as he could from hand to mouth, until the rumor spread abroad that he was dead. He then returned to his country, and begged for sanctuary from an old friend. That friend betrayed him, had his throat cut in a cellar, and exposed his head upon the public market place.

Virginia was sentenced to perpetual incarceration in the convent of S. Valeria at Milan. She was to be 'inclosed within a little dungeon, the door of which shall be walled up with stones and mortar, so that the said Virginia Maria shall abide there for the term of her natural life, immured both day and night, never to issue thence, but shall receive food and other necessaries through a small hole in the wall of the said chamber, and light and air through an aperture or other opening.' This sentence was carried into effect. But at the expiration of many years, her behavior justified some mitigation of the penalty. She was set at large, and allowed to occupy a more wholesome apartment, where the charity of Cardinal Borromeo supplied her with comforts befitting her station, and the reputation she acquired for sanctity. Her own family cherished implacable sentiments of resentment against the woman who had brought disgrace upon them. Ripamonte, the historian of Milan, says that in his own time she was still alive: 'a bent old woman, tall of stature, dried and fleshless, but venerable in her aspect, whom no one could believe to have been once a charming and immodest beauty.' Her associates in guilt, the nuns of S. Margherita, were consigned to punishments resembling hers. Sisters Benedetta, Silvia and Candida suffered the same close incarceration.

Lucrezia Buonvisi.

The tale of Lucrezia Buonvisi presents some points of similarity to that of the Signora di Monza.[191]

[Footnote 191: Storia di Lucrezia Buonvisi, by Salvatore Bonghi, Lucca, 1864. This is an admirably written historical monograph, based on accurate studies and wide researches, containing a mine of valuable information for a student of those times.]

Her father was a Lucchese gentleman, named Vincenzo Malpigli, who passed the better portion of his life at Ferrara, as treasurer to Duke Afonsono II. He had four children; one son, Giovan Lorenzo, and three daughters, of whom Lucrezia, born at Lucca in 1572, was probably the youngest. Vincenzo's wife sprang from the noble Lucchese family of Buonvisi, at that time by their wealth and alliances the most powerful house of the Republic. Lucrezia spent some years of her girlhood at Ferrara, where she formed a romantic friendship for a nobleman of Lucca named Massimiliano Arnolfini. This early attachment was not countenanced by her parents. They destined her to be the wife of one of Paolo Buonvisi's numerous sons, her relatives upon the mother's side. In consequence of this determination, she was first affianced to an heir of that house, who died; again to another, who also died; and in the third place to their brother, called Lelio, whom she eventually married in the year 1591. Lelio was then twenty-five years of age, and Lucrezia nineteen. Her beauty was so distinguished, that in poems written on the ladies of Lucca it received this celebration in a madrigal:—

Like the young maiden rose Which at the opening of the dawn, Still sprinkled with heaven's gracious dew, Her beauty and her bosom on the lawn Doth charmingly disclose, For nymphs and amorous swains with love to view; So delicate, so fair, Lucrezia yields New pearls, new purple to our homely fields, While Cupid plays and Flora laughs in her fresh hue.

Less than a year after her marriage with Lelia Buonvisi, Lucrezia resumed her former intimacy with Massimiliano Arnolfini. He was scarcely two yeara her elder, and they had already exchanged vows of fidelity in Ferrara. Massimiliano's temper inclined him to extreme courses; he was quick and fervent in all the disputes of his age, ready to back his quarrels with the sword, and impatient of delay in any matter he had undertaken. Owing to a feud which then subsisted between the families of Arnolfini and Boccella, he kept certain bravi in his service, upon whose devotion he relied. This young man soon found means to open a correspondence with Lucrezia, and arranged meetings with her in the house of some poor weavers who lived opposite the palace of the Buonvisi. Nothing passed between them that exceeded the limits of respectful courtship. But the situation became irksome to a lover so hot of blood as Massimiliano was. On the evening of June 5, in 1593, his men attacked Lelio Buonvisi, while returning with Lucrezia from prayers in an adjacent church. Lelio fell, stabbed with nineteen thrusts of the poignard, and was carried lifeless to his house. Lucrezia made her way back alone; and when her husband's corpse was brought into the palace, she requested that it should be laid out in the basement. A solitary witness of this act of violence, Vincenzo di Coreglia, deposed to having raised the dying man from the ground, put earth into his mouth by way of Sacrament, and urged him to forgive his enemies before he breathed his last. The weather had been very bad that day, and at nightfall it was thundering incessantly.

Inquisition was made immediately into the causes of Lelio's death. According to Lucrezia's account, her husband had reproved some men upon the road for singing obscene songs, whereupon they turned and murdered him. The corpse was exposed in the Church of the Servi, where multitudes of people gathered round it; and there an ancient dame of the Buonvisi house, flinging herself upon her nephew's body, vowed vengeance, after the old custom of the Vocero, against his murderers. Other members of the family indicated Massimiliano as the probable assassin; but he meantime had escaped, with three of his retainers, to a villa of his mother's at S. Pancrazio, whence he managed to take the open country and place himself in temporary safety. During this while, the judicial authorities of Lucca were not idle. The Podesta issued a proclamation inviting evidence, under the menace of decapitation and confiscation of goods for whomsoever should be found to have withheld information. To this call a certain Orazio Carli, most imprudently, responded. He confessed to having been aware that Massimiliano was plotting the assassination of somebody—not Lelio; and said that he had himself facilitated the flight of the assassins by preparing a ladder, which he placed in the hands of a bravo called Ottavio da Trapani. This revelation delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to the judicial authorities, who at the same time imprisoned Vincenzo da Coreglia, the soldier present at the murder.

Massimiliano and his men meanwhile had made their way across the frontier to Garfagnana. Their flight, and the suspicions which attached to them, rendered it tolerably certain that they were the authors of the crime. But justice demanded more circumstantial information, and the Podesta decided to work upon the two men already in his clutches. On June 4, Carli was submitted to the torture. The rack elicited nothing new from him, but had the result of dislocating his arms. He was then placed upon an instrument called the 'she-goat,' a sharp wooden trestle, to which the man was bound with weights attached to his feet, and where he sat for nearly four hours. In the course of this painful exercise, he deposed that Massimiliano and Lucrezia had been in the habit of meeting in the house of Vincenzo del Zoppo and Pollonia his wife, where the bravi also congregated and kept their arms. Grave suspicion was thus cast on Lucrezia. Had she perchance connived at her husband's murder? Was she an accomplice in the tragedy?

Lucrezia's peril now became imminent. Her brother, Giovan Lorenzo Malpigli, who remained her friend throughout, thought it best for her to retire as secretly as possible into a convent. The house chosen was that of S. Chiara in the town of Lucca. On June 5, she assumed the habit of S. Francis, cut her hair, changed her name from Lucrezia to Umilia, and offered two thousand crowns of dower to this monastery. Only four days had elapsed since her husband's assassination. But she, at all events, was safe from immediate peril; for the Church must now be dealt with; and the Church neither relinquished its suppliants, nor disgorged the wealth they poured into its coffers. The Podesta, when news of this occurrence reached him, sent at once to make inquiries. His messenger, Ser Vincenzo Petrucci, was informed by the Abbess that Lucrezia had just arrived and was having her hair shorn. At his request, the novice herself appeared—'a young woman, tall and pale, dressed in a nun's habit, with a crown upon her head.' She declared herself to be 'Madonna Lucretiina Malpigli, widow of Lelio Buonvisi.' The priest who had conducted her reception, affirmed that 'the gentle lady, immediately upon her husband's death, conceived this good prompting of the spirit, and obeyed it on the spot.'

For the moment, Lucrezia, whom in future we must call Sister Umilia, had to be left unmolested. The judges returned to the interrogation of their prisoners. Vincenzo del Zoppo and his wife Pollonia, in whose house the lovers used to meet, were tortured; but nothing that implied a criminal correspondence transpired from their evidence. Then the unlucky Carli was once more put to the strappado. He fell into a deep swoon, and was with difficulty brought to life again. Next his son, a youth of sixteen years, was racked with similar results. On June 7, they resolved to have another try at Vincenzo da Coreglia. This soldier had been kept on low diet in his prison during the last week, and was therefore ripe, according to the judicial theories of those times, for salutary torments. Having been strung up by his hands, he was jerked and shaken in the customary fashion, until he declared his willingness to make a full confession. He had been informed, he said, that Massimiliano intended to assassinate Lelio by means of his three bravi, Pietro da Castelnuovo, Ottavio da Trapani, and Niccolo da Pariana. He engaged to stand by and cover the retreat of these men. It was Carli, and not Massimiliano, who had made overtures to him. On being once more tortured, he only confirmed this confession. Carli was again summoned, and set upon the 'she-goat,' with heavy weights attached to his feet. The poor wretch sat for two hours on this infernal machine, the sharp edges and spikes of which were so contrived as to press slowly and deeply upon the tenderest portions of his body.[192] But he endured this agony without uttering a word, until the judges perceived that he was at the point of death. Next day, the 8th of June, Coreglia was again summoned to the justice-chamber. Terrified by the prospect of future torments, and wearied out with importunities, he at last made a clean breast of all he knew. It was not Carli, but Massimiliano himself, who had engaged him; and he had assisted at the murder of Lelio, which was accomplished by two of the bravi, Ottavio and Pietro. Coreglia said nothing to implicate Sister Umilia. On the contrary he asserted that she seemed to lose her senses when she saw her husband fall.

[Footnote 192: Campanelia, who was tortured in this way at Naples, says that on one occasion a pound and a half of his flesh was macerated, and ten pounds of his blood shed. 'Perduravi horis quadraginta, funiculis arctissimis ossa usque secantibus ligatus, pendens manibus retro contortis de fune super acutissimum lignum qui (?) carnis sextertium (?) in posterioribus mihi devoravit et decem sanguinis libras tellus ebibit.' Preface to Atheismus Triumphatus.]

The General Council, to whom the results of these proceedings were communicated, published an edict of outlawry against Massimiliano and his three bravi. A price of 500 crowns was put upon the head of each, wherever he should be killed; and 1,000 crowns were offered to any one who should kill Massimiliano within the city or state of Lucca. At the same time they sent an envoy to Rome requesting the Pope's permission to arrest Umilia, on the ground that she was gravely suspected of being privy to the murder, and of entering the convent to escape justice. A few days afterwards, the miserable witnesses, Carli and Coreglia, were beheaded in their prison.

The Chancellor, Vincenzo Petrucci, left Lucca on June 12, and reached Rome on the 14th. He obtained an audience from Clement VIII. upon the 15th. When the Pope had read the letter of the Republic, he struck his palm down on his chair, and cried: 'Jesus! This is a grave case! It seems hardly possible that a woman of her birth should have been induced to take share in the murder of her husband.' After some conversation with the envoy, he added: 'It is certainly an ugly business. But what can we do now that she has taken the veil?' Then he promised to deliberate upon the matter, and return an answer later. Petrucci soon perceived that the Church did not mean to relinquish its privileges, and that Umilia was supported by powerful friends at court. Cardinal Castrucci remarked in casual conversation: 'She is surely punished enough for her sins by the life of the cloister.' A second interview with Clement on June 21 confirmed him in the opinion that the Republic would not obtain the dispensation they requested. Meanwhile the Signory of Lucca prepared a schedule of the suspicions against Umilia, grounded upon her confused evidence, her correspondence with Massimiliano, the fact that she had done nothing to rescue Lelio by calling out, and her sudden resort to the convent. This paper reached the Pope, who, on July 8, expressed his view that the Republic ought to be content with leaving Umilia immured in her monastery; and again, upon the 23rd, he pronounced his final decision that 'the lady, being a nun, and tonsured and prepared for the perfect life, is not within the jurisdiction of your Signory. It is further clear that, finding herself exposed to the calumnies of those two witnesses, and injured in her reputation, she took the veil to screen her honor.' On August 13, Petrucci returned to Lucca.

Clement conceded one point. He gave commission to the Bishop of Lucca to inquire into Umilia's conduct within the precincts of the monastery. But the council refused this intervention, for they were on bad terms with the Bishop, and resented ecclesiastical interference in secular causes. Moreover, they judged that such an inquisition without torture used, and in a place of safety, would prove worse than useless. Thus the affair dropped.

Meanwhile we may relate what happened to Massimiliano and his bravi. They escaped, through Garfagnana and Massa, into the territory of Alfonso Malaspina, Marquis of Villafranca and Tresana. This nobleman, who delighted in protecting outlaws, placed the four men in security in his stronghold of Tresana. Pietro da Castelnuovo was an outlaw from Tuscany for the murder of a Carmelite friar, which he had committed at Pietrasanta a few days before the assassination of Lelio. Seventeen years after these events he was still alive, and wanted for grave crimes committed in the Duchy of Modena. History knows no more about him, except that he had a wife and family. Of Niccolo da Pariana nothing has to be related. Ottavio da Trapani was caught at Milan, brought back to Lucca, and hanged there on June 13, 1604, after being torn with pincers. Massimiliano is said to have made his way to Flanders, where the Lucchese enjoyed many privileges, and where his family had probably hereditary connections.[193] Like all outlaws he lived in perpetual peril of assassination. Remorse and shame invaded him, especially when news arrived that the mistress, for whom he had risked all, was turning to a dissolute life (as we shall shortly read) in her monastery. His reason gave way; and, after twenty-two years of wandering, he returned to Lucca and was caught. Instead of executing the capital sentence which had been pronounced upon him, the Signory consigned him to perpetual prison in the tower of Viareggio, which was then an insalubrious and fever-stricken village on the coast. Here, walled up in a little room, alone, deprived of light and air and physical decency, he remained forgotten for ten years from 1615 to 1625. At the latter date report was made that he had refused food for three days and was suffering from a dangerous hemorrhage. When the authorities proposed to break the wall of his dungeon and send a priest and surgeon to relieve him, he declared that he would kill himself if they intruded on his misery. Nothing more was heard of him until 1629, when he was again reported to be at the point of death. This time he requested the assistance of a priest; and it is probable that he then died at the age of sixty-nine, having survived the other actors in this tragedy, and expiated the passion of his youth by life-long sufferings.

[Footnote 193: I may here allude to a portrait in our National Gallery of a Lucchese Arnolfini and his wife, painted by Van Eyck.]

When we return to Sister Umilia, and inquire how the years had worn with her, a new chapter in the story opens. In 1606 she was still cloistered in S. Chiara, which indeed remained her home until her death. She had now reached the age of thirty-four. Suspicion meanwhile fell upon the conduct of the nuns of S. Chiara; and on January 9, in that year, a rope-ladder was discovered hanging from the garden wall of the convent. Upon inquiry, it appeared that certain men were in the habit of entering the house and holding secret correspondence with the sisters. Among these the most notorious were Piero Passari, a painter, infamous for vulgar profligacy, and a young nobleman of Lucca, Tommaso Samminiati. Both of them contrived to evade justice, and were proclaimed, as usual, outlaws. In the further course of investigation the strongest proofs were brought to light, from which it appeared that the chief promoter of these scandals was a man of high position in the state, advanced in years, married to a second wife, and holding office of trust as Protector of the Nunnery of S. Chiara. He was named Giovanbattista Dati, and represented an ancient Lucchese family mentioned by Dante. While Dati carried on his own intrigue with Sister Cherubina Mei, he did his best to encourage the painter in promiscuous debauchery, and to foster the passion which Samminiati entertained for Sister Umilia Malpigli. Dati was taken prisoner and banished for life to the island of Sardinia; but his papers fell into the hands of the Signory, who extracted from them the evidence which follows, touching Umilia and Samminiati. This young man was ten years her junior; yet the quiet life of the cloister had preserved Umilia's beauty, and she was still capable of inspiring enthusiastic adoration. This transpires in the letters which Samminiati addressed to her through Dati from his asylum in Venice. They reveal, says Signor Bonghi, a strange confusion of madness, crime, and love.[194]

[Footnote 194: Here again I have very closely followed the text of Signor Bonghi's monograph, pp. 112-115.]

Their style is that of a delirious rhetorician. One might fancy they had been composed as exercises, except for certain traits which mark the frenzy of genuine exaltation. Threats, imprecations, and blasphemies alternate with prayers, vows of fidelity and reminiscences of past delights in love. Samminiati bends before 'his lady' in an attitude of respectful homage, offering upon his knees the service of awe-struck devotion. At one time he calls her 'his most beauteous angel,' at another 'his most lovely and adored enchantress.' He does not conceal his firm belief that she has laid him under some spell of sorcery; but entreats her to have mercy and to liberate him, reminding her how a certain Florentine lady restored Giovan Lorenzo Malpigli to health after keeping him in magic bondage till his life was in danger.[195] Then he swears unalterable fealty; heaven and fortune shall not change his love. It is untrue that at Florence, or at Venice, he has cast one glance on any other woman. Let lightning strike him, if he deserts Umilia. But she has caused him jealousy by stooping to a base amour. To this point he returns with some persistence. Then he entreats her to send him her portrait, painted in the character of S. Ursula. At another time he gossips about the nuns, forwarding messages, alluding to their several love-affairs, and condoling with them on the loss of a compliant confessor. This was a priest, who, when the indescribable corruptions of S. Chiara had been clearly proved, calmly remarked that there was no reason to make such a fuss—they were only affairs of gentlefolk, cose di gentilhuomini. The rival of whom Samminiati was jealous seems to have been the painter Pietro, who held the key to all the scandals of the convent in his hand. Umilia, Dati, and Samminiati at last agreed 'to rid their neighborhood of that pest.' The man had escaped to Rovigo, whither Samminiati repaired from Venice, 'attended by two good fellows thoroughly acquainted with the district.'

[Footnote 195: It appears that violent passion for a person was commonly attributed at that epoch to enchantment. See above, the confession of the Lady of Monza, p. 320.]

But Pietro got away to Ferrara, his enemy following and again missing him. Samminiati writes that he is resolved to hunt 'that rascal' out, and make an end of him. Meanwhile Umilia is commissioned to do for Calidonia Burlamacchi, a nun who had withdrawn from the company of her guilty sisters, and knew too many of their secrets. Samminiati sends a white powder, and a little phial containing a liquid, both of which, he informs Umilia, are potent poisons, with instructions how to use them and how to get Calidonia to swallow the ingredients. Then 'if the devil does not help her, she will pass from this life in half a night's time, and without the slightest sign of violence.'

It may be imagined what disturbance was caused in the General Council by the reading of this correspondence. Nearly all the noble families of Lucca were connected by ties of blood or marriage with one or other of the culprits; and when the relatives of the accused had been excluded from the session, only sixty members were left to debate on further measures. I will briefly relate what happened to the three outlaws. Venice refused to give up Samminiati at the request of the Lucchese, saying that 'the Republic of S. Mark would not initiate a course of action prejudicial to the hospitality which every sort of person was wont to enjoy there.' But the young man was banished to Candia, whither he obediently retired. Pietro, the painter, was eventually permitted to return to the territory but not the town of Lucca. Dati surrounded himself with armed men, as was the custom of rich criminals on whose head a price was set. After wandering some time, he submitted, and took up his abode in Sardinia, whence he afterwards removed, by permission of the Signory, to France. There he died. With regard to the nuns, it seemed at first that the ends of justice would be defeated through the jealousies which divided the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Lucca. The Bishop was absent, and his Vicar refused to institute a criminal process. Umilia remained at large in the convent, and even began a new intrigue with one Simo Menocchi. At last, in 1609, the Vicar prepared his indictment against the guilty nuns, and forwarded it to Rome. Their sentence was as follows: Sister Orizia condemned to incarceration for life, and loss of all her privileges; Sister Umilia, to the same penalties for a term of seven years; Sisters Paola, Cherubina, and Dionea, received a lighter punishment. Orizia, it may be mentioned, had written a letter with her own blood to some lover; but nothing leads us to suppose that she was equally guilty with Umilia, who had entered into the plot to poison Sister Calidonia.

Umilia was duly immured, and bore her punishment until the year 1616, at which time the sentence expired. But she was not released for another two years; for she persistently refused to humble herself, or to request that liberation as a grace which was her due in justice. Nor would she submit to the shame of being seen about the convent without her monastic habit. Finally, in 1618, she obtained freedom and restoration to her privileges as a nun of S. Chiara. It may be added, as a last remark, that, when the convent was being set to rights, Umilia's portrait in the character of S. Ursula was ordered to be destroyed, or rendered fit for devout uses by alterations. Any nun who kept it in her cell incurred the penalty of excommunication. In what year Umilia died remains unknown.

* * * * *

The Cenci.

Shifting the scene to Rome, we light upon a group of notable misdeeds enacted in the last half of the sixteenth century, each of which is well calculated to illustrate the conditions of society and manners at that epoch. It may be well to begin with the Cenci tragedy. In Shelley's powerful drama, in Guerrazzi's tedious novel, and Scolari's digest, the legend of Beatrice Cenci has long appealed to modern sympathy. The real facts, extracted from legal documents and public registers, reduce its poetry of horror to comparatively squalid prose.[196] Yet, shorn of romantic glamour, the bare history speaks significantly to a student of Italian customs. Monsignore Cristoforo Cenci, who died about the year 1562, was in holy orders, yet not a priest. One of the clerks of the Apostolic Camera, a Canon of S. Peter's, the titular incumbent of a Roman parish, and an occupant of minor offices about the Papal Court and Curia, he represented an epicene species, neither churchman nor layman, which the circumstances of ecclesiastical sovereignty rendered indispensable. Cristoforo belonged to a good family among that secondary Roman aristocracy which ranked beneath the princely feudatories and the Papal bastards. He accumulated large sums of money by maladministration of his official trusts, inherited the estates of two uncles, and bequeathed a colossal fortune to his son Francesco. This youth was the offspring of an illicit connection carried on between Monsignore Cenci and Beatrice Amias during the lifetime of that lady's husband. Upon the death of the husband the Monsignore obtained dispensation from his orders, married Beatrice, and legitimated his son, the inheritor of so much wealth. Francesco was born in 1549, and had therefore reached the age of thirteen when his father died. His mother, Beatrice, soon contracted a third matrimonial union; but during her guardianship of the boy she appeared before the courts, accused of having stolen clothing from his tutor's wardrobe.

[Footnote 196: Francesco Cenci e la sua Famiglia. Per A. Bertolotti, Firenze, 1877.]

Francesco Cenci disbursed a sum of 33,000 crowns to various public offices, in order to be allowed to enter unmolested into the enjoyment of his father's gains: 3,800 crowns of this sum went to the Chapter of S. Peter's.[197] He showed a certain precocity; for at the age of fourteen he owned an illegitimate child, and was accused of violence to domestics. In 1563 his family married him to Ersilia, a daughter of the noble Santa Croce house, who brought him a fair dowry. Francesco lived for twenty-one years with this lady, by whom he had twelve children. Upon her death he remained a widower for nine years, and in 1593 he married Lucrezia Petroni, widow of a Roman called Velli. Francesco's conduct during his first marriage was not without blame. Twice, at least, he had to pay fines for acts of brutality to servants; and once he was prosecuted for an attempt to murder a cousin, also named Francesco Cenci. On another occasion we find him outlawed from the States of the Church. Yet these offences were but peccadilloes in a wealthy Roman baron; and Francesco used to boast that, with money in his purse, he had no dread of justice. After the death of his wife Ersilia, his behavior grew more irregular. Three times between 1591 and 1594 he was sued for violent attacks on servants; and in February of the latter year he remained six months in prison on multiplied charges of unnatural vice. There was nothing even here to single Francesco Cenci out from other nobles of his age.[198] Scarcely a week passed in Rome without some affair of the sort involving outrage, being brought before the judges. Cardinals, prelates, princes, professional men and people of the lowest rank were alike implicated. The only difference between the culprits was that the rich bought themselves off, while the destitute were burned. Eleven poor Spaniards and Portuguese were sent to the stake in 1578 for an offence which Francesco Cenci compounded in 1594 by the payment of 100,000 crowns. After this warning and the loss of so much money, he grew more circumspect, married his second wife Lucrezia, and settled down to rule his family. His sons caused him considerable anxiety. Giacomo, the eldest, married against his father's will, and supported himself by forging obligations and raising money. Francesco's displeasure showed itself in several lawsuits, one of which accused Giacomo of having plotted against his life. The second son, Cristoforo, was assassinated by Paolo Bruno, a Corsican, in the prosecution of a love affair with the wife of a Trasteverine fisherman. The third son, Rocco, spent his time in street adventures, and on one occasion laid his hands on all the plate and portable property that he could carry off from his father's house. This young ruffian, less than twenty years of age, found a devoted friend in Monsignore Querro, a cousin of the family well placed at court, who assisted him in the burglary of the Cenci palace. Rocco was killed by Amilcare Orsini, a bastard of the Count of Pitigliano, in a brawl at night. The young men met, Cenci attended by three armed servants, Orsini by two. A single pass of rapiers, in which Rocco was pierced through the right eye, ended the affair.

[Footnote 197: He was afterwards forced, in 1590, to disgorge a second sum of 25,000 crowns.]

[Footnote 198: Prospero Farinaccio, the advocate of Cenci's murderers, was himself tried for this crime (Bertolotti, op. cit. p. 104). The curious story of the Spanish soldiers alluded to above will be found in Mutinelli, Stor. Arc. vol. i. p. 121. See the same work of Mutinelli, vol. i. p. 48, for a similar prosecution in Rome 1566; and vol. iv. p. 152 for another involving some hundred people of condition at Milan in 1679. Compare what Sarpi says about the Florentine merchants and Roman cinedi in his Letters, date 1609, vol. i. p. 288. For the manners of the Neapolitans, Vita di D. Pietro di Toledo (Arch. Stor. It., vol. ix. p. 23). The most scandalous example of such vice in high quarters was given by Pietro de'Medici, one of Duke Cosimo's sons. Galluzzi, vol. v. p. 174, and Litta's pedigree of the Medici. The Bandi Lucchesi, ed. S. Bonghi, Bologna, 1863, pp. 377 381, treats the subject in full; and it has been discussed by Canello, op. cit. pp. 20-23. The Artes Jesuiticae, op. cit. Articles 62, 120, illustrate casuistry on the topic.]

In addition to his vindictive persecution of his worthless eldest son, Francesco Cenci behaved with undue strictness to the younger, allowing them less money than befitted their station and treating them with a severity which contrasted comically with his own loose habits. The legend which represents him as an exceptionally wicked man, cruel for cruelty's sake and devoid of natural affection, receives some color from the facts. Yet these alone are not sufficient to justify its darker hues, while they amply prove that Francesco's children gave him grievous provocation. The discontents of this ill-governed family matured into rebellion; and in 1598 it was decided on removing the old Cenci by murder. His second wife Lucrezia, his eldest son Giacomo, his daughter Beatrice, and the youngest son Bernardo, were implicated in the crime. It was successfully carried out at the Rocca di Petrella in the Abruzzi on the night of September 9. Two hired bravi, Olimpio Calvetti and Marzio Catalani, entered the old man's bedroom, drove a nail into his head, and flung the corpse out from a gallery, whence it was alleged that he had fallen by accident. Six days after this assassination Giacomo and his brothers took out letters both at Rome and in the realm of Naples for the administration of their father's property; nor does suspicion seem for some time to have fallen upon them. It awoke at Petrella in November, the feudatory of which fief, Marzio Colonna, informed the government of Naples that proceedings ought to be taken against the Cenci and their cut-throats. Accordingly, on December 10, a ban was published against Olimpio and Marzio. Olimpio met his death at an inn door in a little village called Cantalice. Three desperate fellows, at the instigation of Giacomo de'Cenci and Monsignore Querro, surprised him there. But Marzio fell into the hands of justice, and his evidence caused the immediate arrest of the Cenci. It appears that they were tortured and that none of them denied the accusation; so that their advocates could only plead extenuating circumstances. To this fact may possibly be due the legend of Beatrice. In order to mitigate the guilt of parricide, Prospero Farinacci, who conducted her defense, established a theory of enormous cruelty and unspeakable outrages committed on her person by her father. With the same object in view, he tried to make out that Bernardo was half-witted. There is quite sufficient extant evidence to show that Bernardo was a young man of average intelligence; and with regard to Beatrice, nothing now remains to corroborate Farinaccio's hypothesis of incest. She was not a girl of sixteen, as the legend runs, but a woman of twenty-two;[199] and the codicils to her will render it nearly certain that she had given birth to an illegitimate son, for whose maintenance she made elaborate and secret provisions. That the picture ascribed to Guido Reni in the Barberini palace is not a portrait of Beatrice in prison, appears sufficiently proved. Guido did not come to Rome until 1608, nine years after her death; and catalogues of the Barberini gallery, compiled in 1604 and 1623, contain no mention either of a painting by Guido or of Beatrice's portrait. The Cenci were lodged successively in the prisons of Torre di Nona, Savelli, and S. Angelo. They occupied wholesome apartments and were allowed the attendance of their own domestics. That their food was no scanty dungeon fare appears from the menus of dinners and suppers supplied to them, which include fish, flesh, fruit salad, and snow to cool the water. In spite of powerful influence at court, Clement VIII. at last resolved to exercise strict justice on the Cenci. He was brought to this decision by a matricide perpetrated in cold blood at Subiaco, on September 5, 1599. Paolo di S. Croce, a relative of the Cenci, murdered his mother Costanza in her bed, with the view of obtaining property over which she had control. The sentence issued a few days after this event. Giacomo was condemned to be torn to pieces by red hot pincers, and finished with a coup de grace from the hangman's hammer. Lucrezia and Beatrice received the slighter sentence of decapitation; while Bernardo, in consideration of his youth, was let off with the penalty of being present at the execution of his kinsfolk, after which he was to be imprisoned for a year and then sent to the galleys for life. Their property was confiscated to the Camera Apostolica. These punishments were carried out.[200] But Bernardo, after working at Civita Vecchia until 1606, obtained release and lived in banishment till his death in 1627. Monsignor Querro, for his connivance in the whole affair, was banished to the island of Malta, whence he returned at some date before the year 1633 to Rome, having expiated his guilt by long and painful exile. In this abstract of the Cenci tragedy, I have followed the documents published by Signor Bertolotti. They are at many points in startling contradiction to the legend, which is founded on MS. accounts compiled at no distant period after the events. One of these was translated by Shelley; another, differing in some particulars, was translated by De Stendhal. Both agree in painting that lurid portrait of Francesco Cenci which Shelley has animated with the force of a great dramatist.[201] Unluckily, no copy of the legal instructions upon which the trial was conducted is now extant. In the absence of this all-important source of information, it would be unsafe to adopt Bertolotti's argument, that the legend calumniates Francesco in order to exculpate Beatrice, without some reservation. There is room for the belief that facts adduced in evidence may have partly justified the prevalent opinion of Beatrice's infamous persecution by her father.