Which command Nicholas obeyed implicitly; but when the Chief Justice
began to question Tommaso Pace for a confirmation of the notary’s
evidence, the mutilated valet could only open his mouth and point to
where his tongue had been.
Nevertheless the Chief Justice ordered the immediate arrest of such
of the conspirators as were present in the hall of San Luigi; Robert
of Cabano and the Counts of Morcone and Terlizzi, the last of whom
had thus gained nothing by his barbarity upon Tommaso Pace. Of the
other conspirators, Filippa Cabano and her two daughters, together
with Donna Cancia, were thrown into prison immediately afterwards;
and the rest, the Lords Mileto, Catanzaro, and Squillace, being warned
in season, saved themselves by flight; old Charles of Artois and his
son Bertrand being still secure in their fortress of Sant’ Agata of
the Goths, near what was probably the real site of the Caudine Forks,
and from which, centuries later, the last Father of the Church, Saint
Alphonsus Liguori, was destined to take his episcopal title as Bishop
of Sant’Agata, where he died in the year 1788.
And when Nicholas of Melazzo had concluded his testimony, he was
sentenced, with his accomplice, Tommaso Pace, to be dragged at the
tail of a horse throughout the town, and then hanged by the neck in the
Mercato, the great market square in which Conradin of Hohenstaufen and
Frederick of Baden had been decapitated by order of Charles I of Anjou
in 1268, after the battle of Tagliacozzo. It was in this same square of
the Mercato that Masaniello’s rebellion broke out in the seventeenth
century; and here took place, also, the executions of the misguided
Liberals in 1799.
The sentence upon the notary and the valet having been forthwith
carried into effect, the other prisoners were on the following day
taken out of the Castel Nuovo and conveyed on to a galley in the bay,
their hands tied behind their backs, and having each a hook passed
through their tongue to prevent them from calling out to the crowd,
in passing, any mention of some forbidden name. When they had been
tortured on the galley—a precaution for which the Count of Monte
Scaglioso would seem to have been answerable—and their depositions
against one another duly written down and signed, needless to say they
were, one and all, condemned to be burned alive.
The next morning the crowd (composed mainly of descendants of the
slaves of the long-ago Romans) filled all the ways from the prison to
the Mercato, where on the side towards the Church of Sant’ Eligio—the
spot on which executions usually took place being before the other
church in the piazza, the ancient Church of Santa Croce—was erected
a huge pile of wood and many bundles of twigs about a number of posts
with staples to them. This was the pyre.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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