The feuds of Guelphs and Ghibellines kept up constant irritation at Rome. In 1118, when Paschal II. was officiating at the altar on Holy Thursday, he was interrupted by a mob, who demanded that he should confirm the appointment of a favourite magistrate, and his silence only exasperated them. During the festival of Easter, while the bishop and clergy barefoot and in procession visited the tombs of the martyrs, they were twice assaulted with volleys of stones and darts. The houses of the Pope's friends were demolished, he escaped with difficulty, and his last days were embittered by the strife of civil war. His successor, Gelasius II., in 1118 was dragged by his hair along the ground, beaten and wounded, and bound with an iron chain in the house of a factious baron named Cencio Frangipani, who stripped and beat and trampled on the cardinals. An insurrection of the people delivered the Pope for a while; but a few days later he was again assaulted at the altar, and during a bloody encounter between the factions he escaped in his sacerdotal garments. He then shook the dust from his feet, and withdrew from a city where, as he described it, one emperor would be more tolerable than twenty. About a quarter of a century later, Pope Lucius II., as he ascended in battle-array to assault the Capitol, was struck on the temple by a stone, and expired in a few days in 1145. Again in 1185 a body of priests were seized, and the eyes of all put out except those of one. They were crowned with mock mitres, mounted on asses with their faces to the tail, and paraded as a lesson to Pope Lucius III. RIENZI AS TRIBUNE OF ROME (1353).