WHILE Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to act as they pleased were _a fortiori_ ready to vindicate their right to think what they pleased. Thus free thought, which was stunted by the Popes of Rome in the far-off lands of the North, flourished under the very shadow of St. Peter’s throne. It was natural that it should be so. They who sit nearest the stage are least liable to be duped by scenic devices. The Italians were too near the Holy See to be impressed by its tricks or to be terrified by its theatrical thunder. They had seen Gregory VII. as an illiterate Tuscan lad playing in his father’s workshop, and they had known Innocent III. as plain Signor Lothario, son of the Count of Segni. No one is a demigod to his own parishioners. Hence the lofty pretensions of the Popes were nowhere less respected than in their immediate neighbourhood. The spiritual autocrats, whose anathemas made foreign princes and peoples tremble with superstitious terror, found many severe critics among their own countrymen. The Italian chronicler Salimbene (1221–1288), though himself a monk, in his vivid and varied picture of thirteenth century life, does not hesitate to comment freely on the greed, profligacy, gluttony, heresy and other sins of many a contemporary pope, cardinal and bishop. Even more significant is the attitude of the author of the _Divina Commedia_. There the judges are judged, and they who doomed others to everlasting torture are themselves consigned to a similar fate by the stern Florentine poet, the spokesman of the Middle Ages. Celestine V., who, yielding to base fear, abdicated St. Peter’s chair in 1294, is sentenced by Dante to wander in hell naked, his face bedewed with blood and tears, and beset by wasps and hornets; one of the dolorous tribe of trimmers--“Wretches who never lived”; sinners whose very disembodied shades are “both to God displeasing and to His foes.”[74] Pope Anastasius is condemned to an even worse plight, as a heretic. Nicholas III. is found planted with his heels upwards, waiting to be succeeded in that uncomfortable position by Boniface VIII., “the chief of the new Pharisees,” who, in his turn, is to be followed by Clement V., “the lawless pastor,” who, besides many other sins of omission and commission, abetted Philip the Fair in the suppression of the Templars, and with him divided the guilt, if he were defrauded of the fruits, of the atrocious crime. To an equally sad eternity are doomed popes and cardinals “over whom Avarice dominion absolute maintains”; the monks of Cologne; and the “Joyous Friars” (_Frati Godenti_), notorious for