In 1321 the Jews of Rome were charged with insulting the crucifix as it was carried through the streets in a procession. The accuser is said to have been a sister of John XXII., a pope among whose principal claims to distinction love of gold ranked high. Several priests corroborated the charge, and the Pope decided to drive the Jews out of the Roman state. The details of the occurrence are uncertain; but the reality of the danger to which the Jews found themselves exposed is proved by the extraordinary fast instituted that year. While fervent prayers were offered up in the synagogues, messengers were despatched to the Pope at Avignon and to King Robert of Naples, his patron, who also was a great friend of the Jews, imploring that the decision might be cancelled. King Robert pleaded their cause successfully, for, it is said, his eloquence was supported by twenty thousand ducats presented by the Roman Jews to the Pope’s sister. In the middle of the same century we find the Jews of Rome obliged to contribute towards the expenses of the popular amusements in the Roman circus--a form of entertainment which was an abomination unto the Lord of the Jews--12 gold pieces a year; a small matter in itself, yet indicative of the direction in which the current flowed. But a new power came to stem for a while this current. We are in the heart of the fourteenth century. Dante died in 1321, and his obsequies were sumptuously performed at Ravenna. The tomb which closed over Dante’s remains on that July day received more than the spokesman of Mediaeval Faith. In it was buried Mediaeval Faith itself. Catholicism, and all that it had meant to Dante, was already a thing of the past. “One Church and one Empire for all men,” the idols of the Middle Age, were to be deposed by the ideal of “A Church and an Empire for each race of men,” gradually to develop into “No Church and no Empire for any man.” The last of the Catholics was carried to his grave, as the first of the Humanists appears on the scene. Dante’s censures of popes and cardinals were the rebukes of a brother; Petrarch’s denunciations are the assaults of an enemy. Dante, while condemning individual churchmen, sincerely reveres the Church which their malpractices disgraced. To him the Papal Court may be a home of hypocrisy, a nursery of shame, a cradle of crime, and he will have nothing to do with it; but that does not lead him to question the spiritual authority of that Court. His hero still is Gregory Hildebrand, _della fede cristiana il santo atleta_--the saintly athlete of the Christian Faith.[76] To Petrarch the Papal Court is all that and more. It is the mother of human slavery and the fount of human misery--a “Western Babylon,” as he calls it in one of his sonnets. It fills him with unutterable abhorrence. Petrarch died in 1374, but the new spirit of which he was the exponent did not die with him. It was transmitted to his disciple Boccaccio, in whose hands the keen weapon