In 1442 Pope Eugenius IV., impelled by the son of an apostate Jew, ordained that the Jews of Rome should keep their doors and their windows shut during Easter Week. By 1443 the modest annual sum of 12 gold pieces, originally contributed by the Jews to the sports in the Roman circus, had grown to 1130 pieces. Nor were the Romans any longer content with the extortion of money, but they now insisted on a personal participation of the Jews in the detested joys of the arena. The descendants of Titus, and of the Romans who gazed at the savage spectacle of Jewish captives torn to pieces by wild beasts, or forced to kill one another for the delectation of the victors, revived the taste of their remote ancestors for sportful homicide. The fifteenth-century Carnival in Rome opened with a foot-race, which was in every respect worthy of its pagan prototype of the first century. Eight Jews were compelled to appear semi-naked, and, incited by blows and invectives, to cover the whole of the long course. Some reached the goal exhausted, others dropped dead on the way. On the same day the secular and religious chiefs of the Jewish community were obliged to walk at the head of the procession of Roman Senators across the course, amidst a tempest of execration and derision on the part of the mob; while the eccentricities of the Jew and the prejudices of the Gentile found similar scope for display upon the stage. In the Carnival plays and farces of Rome the Jew supplied a stock character that never failed to provoke the contemptuous merriment of the audience. And yet, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, we find the Popes, in defiance of their own decrees, employing Jewish physicians. Nor does the lot of the Jew appear to have grown unbearable for some time after. Sixtus IV., whose intolerance towards the Jews of Spain has been recorded in a previous chapter, died in 1484, and was succeeded by Innocent VIII., a man of many superstitions and many children, but a feeble and ineffectual pontiff, the most interesting year of whose reign, to us, is the year of his death, 1492. In that year, in which the Renaissance reached its zenith, the Jewish population of Italy was augmented by the influx of large numbers of refugees from Spain. One party of them landed at Genoa; and a heart-rending sight they presented, according to an eye-witness, as they emerged from the hulls of the vessels and staggered on to the quay: a host of spectres, haggard with famine and sickness; men with hollow cheeks and deep-sunken eyes; mothers scarcely able to stand, fondling their famished infants in their skeleton arms. On that mole the hapless exiles, shivering under the blasts of the sea, were allowed to tarry for a short time in order to refit their vessels, and to recruit themselves for further trials. The law of the Republic forbade Jewish travellers to remain longer than three days in the country.