Its religion was essentially mediaeval. For instance, a religious wave arose in Perugia, spread through Italy, and crossed the Alps. Hosts of penitents, hundreds and thousands, lamenting, praying, scourging themselves, went from city to city. Men, women, and children, barefoot, walked by night over the winter's snow, carrying tapers, to find relief for their emotional frenzy. These Flagellants were like a primitive Salvation Army, and gave unconscious expression to the profound and widespread discontent with the Church. Their actions, however, so clearly exhibited religious mania that governments took alarm; the hard-headed rulers of Milan erected six hundred gallows on their borders and threatened to hang every Flagellant who came that way. Other forms of religious sentiment were more rational, and expressed themselves in passionate calls for peace between neighbours and countrymen. Priests adjured the fighting cities to be friends: "Oh, when will the day come that Pavia shall say to Milan, Thy people are my people, and Crema to Cremona, Thy city is my city?" In Genoa, one morning before daybreak, the church bells rang, and the astonished citizens, huddling on their clothes, beheld their archbishop, surrounded by his clergy with lighted candles, making the factional leaders swear on the bones of St. John Baptist to lay aside their mutual hate. Gregory X (1271-76) pleaded with the Florentine Guelfs to take back the banished Ghibellines. "A Ghibelline is a Christian, a citizen, a neighbour; then, shall these great names, all joined, yield to that one word, Ghibelline? And shall that single word--an idle term for none know what it means--have greater power for hate than all those three, which are so clear and strong, for love and charity? And since you say that you have taken up this factional strife for the sake of the Popes of Rome, now, I, Pope of Rome, have taken back to my bosom these prodigal citizens of yours, however far they may have offended, and putting behind me all past wrongs, hold them to be my sons."[13] In consequence of Gregory's passionate entreaty, one hundred and fifty leaders of each party met and embraced on the sandy flats of the Arno.