Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/309

Rh wars, but did not know how: but if thou wilt contrive with thy friends the cardinals to have me elected Pope, I shall know how, and shall have the will and the power'; promising upon his faith and oath to aid him with all the power of the Church." Farther on he continues: "He was very magnanimous and lordly, and demanded great honor, and knew well how to maintain and advance the cause of the Church, and on account of his knowledge and power was much dreaded and feared. He was avaricious exceedingly in order to aggrandize the Church and his relations, not being over-scrupulous about gains, for he said that all things were lawful which were of the Church."

He was chosen Pope in 1294. "The inauguration of Boniface," says Milman, Latin Christ., Book IX., ch. 7, "was the most magnificent which Rome had ever beheld. In his procession to St. Peter's and back to the Lateran palace, where he was entertained, he rode not a humble ass, but a noble white horse, richly caparisoned: he had a crown on his head; the King of Naples held the bridle on one side, his son, the King of Hungary, on the other. The nobility of Rome, the Orsinis, the Colonnas, the Savellis, the Stefaneschi, the Annibaldi, who had not only welcomed him to Rome, but conferred on him the Senatorial dignity, followed in a body: the procession could hardly force its way through the masses of the kneeling people. In the midst, a furious hurricane burst over the city, and extinguished every lamp and torch in the church. A darker omen followed: a riot broke out among the populace, in which forty lives were lost. The day after, the Pope dined in public in the Lateran; the two Kings waited behind his chair."

Dante indulges towards him a fierce Ghibelline hatred, and assigns him his place of torment before he is dead. In Canto XXVII. 85, he calls him "the Prince of the new Pharisees"; and, after many other bitter allusions in various parts of the poem, puts into the mouth of St. Peter, Par. XXVII. 22, the terrible invective that makes the whole heavens red with anger.

He died in 1303. See Note 87, Purg. XX.

70. Nicholas III., of the Orsini (the Bears) of Rome, chosen Pope in 1277. "He was the first Pope, or one of the first," says Villani, VII. ch. 54, "in whose court simony was openly practised." On account of his many accomplishments he was surnamed Il Compiuto. Milman, Lat. Christ., Book XI. ch. 4, says of him: "At length the election fell on John Gaetano, of the noble Roman house, the Orsini, a man of remarkable beauty of person and demeanor. His name, 'the