A Source Book for Mediæval History: Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle AgeThatcher, Oliver J. (Oliver Joseph)
History
A Source Book for Mediæval History: Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age
Thatcher, Oliver J. (Oliver Joseph)
Europe -- History -- 476-1492 -- Sources; Middle Ages -- Sources
11. _The papal charge._ That the church is humiliated and insulted by
the fact that Peter Saraceno, her faithful subject, and friar Jordan are
held captive. _The emperor's answer._ Peter Saraceno has been seized
because he is an enemy and detractor of the emperor. He has attacked the
emperor in Rome as well as elsewhere. He did not come on the business of
the king of England, but he carried a letter of the king in order that
if he were arrested we might be led to spare him. But we did not heed
this letter because the king did not know what snares this man had
prepared for us. In regard to the friar Jordan, although he had defamed
the emperor in his sermons, the emperor neither seized him nor ordered
him to be seized. But because some of the emperor's faithful subjects
knew the friar's character and his trickery, and so were sure that if he
stayed in the mark of Treviso and in Lombardy, he would injure the cause
of the emperor, the emperor caused him to be set free and would have
given him over to the archbishop of Messina, if he had been willing to
submit to the said archbishop.
12. _The papal charge._ The emperor had stirred up sedition in Rome
against the church with the purpose of driving out the pope and his
cardinals, and, contrary to the privileges and rights of the pope, to
destroy the ecclesiastical liberties. _The emperor's answer._ The
emperor denies that he stirred up the sedition in Rome. But he has his
faithful subjects in Rome just as his predecessors, the Roman emperors
and kings of Sicily, had had. And sometimes at the election of senators,
the attempt was made to injure his subjects. Under these circumstances
he had assisted his subjects in their defence, and he would do so as
often as it should be necessary under similar circumstances. But when
the election of a senator took place harmoniously, there was no rioting,
as can be proved by the testimony of the archbishops of Palermo and
Messina.
13. _The papal charge._ That the emperor had ordered his subjects not to
permit the papal legate, the bishop of Preneste, to pass through their
territory. _The emperor's answer._ The emperor had never even dreamed of
giving such an order, although he might justly have done so, because the
bishop was his enemy. Although he had been sent by the pope as a
religious man on a religious errand, he had nevertheless at the command
of the pope, as he said, in a treacherous and wicked manner led a large
part of Lombardy to revolt against the emperor and had done all he could
to incite the Lombards to rebellion.
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