Strictly speaking these poor kings had no family names at all--that is
none in the sense that Smith and Brown are family names; and when Louis
XVI. was arraigned before those cut-throats of the Convention, and
called to answer to the name of Louis Capet, he refused, saying that
his name was Louis of France. And in the archives of the Convention, is
still to be found the inscription of a sum of francs expended to bury
the Widow Capet. Widow Capet was Marie Antoinette, Mary of Lorraine,
the descendant of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the daughter of a line of
emperors, the wife of Louis of Bourbon, the queen of France. Widow
Capet![5]
To return to the Captivity. On the death of Clement V. the cardinals
made an effort to rescue the pontificate from French domination, and
for two years there was no pope; but the French party prevailed, and
the bishop of Fréjus was chosen who took the name of John XXII. He
immediately confirmed the French ascendancy by appointing six new
French cardinals. It was during his reign that began the quarrel
between the Holy See and the Visconti a powerful Lombard family
from which were descended the later Valois kings, and from which
they derived their fatal claim to the Milanese. John XXII. not only
excommunicated Matteo Visconti the head of the family, but he added
an edict advertising him, his wife and children for sale as slaves.
There were no bids, because the Visconti were pugnacious and would not
have made good household servants. His son Marco beat the pope’s army
at Vavrio on the Adda, and drove him back to France. But he came not
bootless home like Bolingbroke. He had plundered Italy from end to end.
Though he did not succeed in turning the Visconti into cash, there were
found in his coffers after his death, twenty-five millions of florins
in gold, in jewels and in plate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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