a further penalty, and while Europe looked on in apathy,
the Pope and his cardinals were made prisoners and a number of priests
were drawn through the mud at the horses' tails as the imperial troops
rode off. Gelasius II. was seized in the conclave which elected him,
trampled underfoot and chained in a tower belonging to the Frangipani.
Rescued by the Romans of Trastevere and the Island, he is next found
hiding in the _Borgo_ from the emperor, who pursued him in his flight
to Gaeta, annulled his election and proclaimed an antipope. On the
Pope's return to Rome he was entrapped at a mass in S. Prassede, but
escaping to the meadows by S. Paul's where he was found weeping with
the women of the neighbourhood, he died an exile in a Cluniac convent
in France.
[Illustration: BRONZE STATUE OF MARCUS AURELIUS ON THE CAPITOL
Placed here by Michael Angelo in 1538, who removed it from the
Lateran Piazza. It owed its preservation to the belief that it
represented Constantine. To the right and left are the museums of
the Capitol. In the rear is the Palace of the Senator overlooking
the Forum. See pages 13-15, 57, 58, 241.]
In 1144 the Romans determined to restore their free Senate and
demanded, under Arnold of Brescia's influence, the abolition of the
temporal power. Lucius II. stormed the Capitol and died defending his
rights, but his successor was forced to fly the eternal city. Our one
English Pope, who possessed the fine old English sounding name of
Nicholas Breakspear, declared on his death bed that the Pope of Rome
must find means to content the sordid soul of the Roman people or quit
his throne and his city a fugitive. Indeed nothing is more
noticeable than the strict impartiality with which the Romans meted
out violence to popes good and bad; and exactly a century before they
were deposing the great Hildebrand, they could have been seen
outraging the body of the infamous Boniface VII., surnamed "Francone,"
whose bleeding corpse was kicked and rolled down the streets of Rome
to the foot of the statue of the good Marcus Aurelius. In the same
century which saw the English Hadrian IV. reigning in Rome, two German
archbishops led troops against a pope. The Romans, as usual, required
the vanquished pope to abdicate, and accepted Barbarossa as their
ruler, who gave them an antipope. Of one emperor at this time it could
be truthfully said that he had "the whole College of Cardinals in his
pay" which affords some notion of the spiritual dignity of conclaves,
while the ups and downs to which the papal rulers of Rome were subject
is illustrated in the case of Pope Alexander who in the same twelfth
century was received with open arms after ten years' exile by the
fickle people, who however duly stoned his coffin when he died.
Clement III., himself a Roman, was obliged to sanction once more the
powers of the Roman Senate, and to hand over to the people part of the
tolls. Innocent IV. fled to Genoa, this time from fear of the emperor,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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