Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/527

CHAP XXI reaching to the ground, and only so much more as a palm's breadth. Formerly they wore trains, sweeping the earth for several feet (per brachium et dimidium). A rhymer dubs them: Et drappi longhi, ke la polver menna.' ('The long cloaks that gather up the dust.')

"And he had this to be proclaimed in the churches, and imposed it on the women by command; and ordered that no priest should absolve them unless they complied. The which was bitterer to the women than any kind of death ! For as a woman said to me familiarly, that train was dearer to her than all the other clothes she wore. And further, Cardinal Latinus decreed that all women, girls and young ladies, matrons and widows, should wear veils. Which was again a horror for them. But they found a remedy for that tribulation, as they could not for their trains. For they made veils of linen and silk inwoven with gold, with which they looked ten times as well, and drew the eyes of men to lust all the more."

Thus did the cardinal-legate, the Pope's relative. And plenty of gossip has Salimbene to tell of such creatures of nepotism. "Flesh and blood had revealed" to the Pope that he should make cardinals of them; says he with a sort of giant sneer; "for he built up Zion in sanguinibus," that is, through his blood-relatives!" There are a thousand brothers Minorites, more fit, on the score of knowledge and holiness, to be cardinals than they." Had not another pope, Urban IV., made chief among the cardinals a relation whose only use as a student had been to fetch the other students' meat from market?

It was a few years after this that Salimbene returned to his native town of Parma, near the time when that city passed from the side of the Emperor to that of the Pope. This was a fatal defection for Frederick, which he set about to repair, by laying siege to the turn-coat city. And the war went on with great devastation, and the wolves and other wild beasts increased and grew bold. Salimbene throws Eccelino da Romano on the scene, that regent of the emperor, and monster of cruelty, "who was feared more than the devil," and had once burned to death "eleven thousand Paduans in Verona. The building holding them was set on fire; and while they burned, Eccelino and his knights held a tournament about them (circa eos).… I verily believe