words to strike the hostile Cardinals; and in like manner to Onorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, who had protected the schismatic conclave with his hired troops. "Where is the just man that they have elected for Antipope," she writes again to the Queen of Naples, "if in very sooth our supreme pontiff, Pope Urban VI., were not true Vicar of Christ? What man have they chosen? A man of holy life? No: a man of iniquity, a demon; and therefore he does the office of the devils."[42] In December the adherents of the Antipope were lying in wait to take Frate Raimondo, whom the Pope was sending on a dangerous mission to France, and the good friar's courage failed him. Catherine, with her mystic longings for shedding her blood for the cause, was amazed at his pusillanimity, and sent him letters of characteristic remonstrance, reminding him that he need have no fear, because he was not worthy of the grace of martyrdom, exhorting him to be a man and not a woman, laying all the blame on herself (as she invariably does in her severest letters), pleading love as her excuse for rebuking him. In the meanwhile Urban had hired the Italian mercenaries of the Company of St George, commanded by Count Alberico da Balbiano. On April 29th Alberico gained a complete victory over the Breton and Gascon soldiery of the Clementines at Marino, and the French governor of Sant' Angelo surrendered to the Senator of Rome, Giovanni Cenci. Catherine is said--and a passage in one of her letters seems to confirm it--to have been the means of effecting the surrender. At her instigation the Pope went barefooted from Santa Maria in Trastevere to San Pietro in solemn procession, to give thanks before returning to take up his abode in the Vatican--an act of humility that aroused astonishment (strange reflection on the pomp of the Curia!) as something that had not been seen for ages. To the magistrates of the Roman Republic she wrote a letter on behalf of the victorious soldiery, which Tommaseo characterises as "worthy of the name of Rome."[43] Then, flushed with victory, she addresses the King of France, in hopes that he may still be won over; she makes one more flaming, impassioned appeal to the Queen of Naples, and then--sole blot, I think, in all this blameless life--co-operates with Urban, in her letters to the King Louis and his cousin, Charles of Durazzo, in his attempt to raise the power of Hungary and Poland upon Giovanna's head.[44] Her last extant letter to Urban himself is to urge him to adopt a mild and generous policy towards the Roman People. "You must surely know," she says, "the character of your Roman children, how they are drawn and bound more by gentleness than by any violence or by harshness of words; and you know, too, the great necessity that is yours and Holy Church's, of preserving this people in obedience and reverence to your Holiness; for here is the head and the beginning of our faith."[45] A furious riot broke out at the beginning of 1380.