gacity, relieved by certain
chivalric and noble qualities, were suited to enterprises far greater
and more important than the violent depredations of the atrocious
Werner. From these scourges, no state had suffered more grievously than
Rome. The patrimonial territories of the pope,--in part wrested from him
by petty tyrants, in part laid waste by these foreign robbers,--yielded
but a scanty supply to the necessities of Clement VI., the most
accomplished gentleman and the most graceful voluptuary of his time; and
the good father had devised a plan, whereby to enrich at once the Romans
and their pontiff.

Nearly fifty years before the time we enter upon, in order both to
replenish the papal coffers and pacify the starving Romans, Boniface
VIII. had instituted the Festival of the Jubilee, or Holy Year; in fact,
a revival of a Pagan ceremonial. A plenary indulgence was promised
to every Catholic who, in that year, and in the first year of every
succeeding century, should visit the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul.
An immense concourse of pilgrims, from every part of Christendom, had
attested the wisdom of the invention; "and two priests stood night and
day, with rakes in their hands, to collect without counting the heaps
of gold and silver that were poured on the altar of St. Paul." (Gibbon,
vol. xii. c. 59.)

It is not to be wondered at that this most lucrative festival should,
ere the next century was half expired, appear to a discreet pontiff
to be too long postponed. And both pope and city agreed in thinking it
might well bear a less distant renewal. Accordingly, Clement VI. had
proclaimed, under the name of the Mosaic Jubilee, a second Holy Year
for 1350--viz., three years distant from that date at which, in the
next chapter, my narrative will commence. This circumstance had a great
effect in whetting the popular indignation against the barons, and
preparing the events I shall relate; for the roads were, as I before
said, infested by the banditti, the creatures and allies of the barons.
And if the roads were not cleared, the pilgrims might not attend. It
was the object of the pope's vicar, Raimond, bishop of Orvietto (bad
politician and good canonist), to seek, by every means, to remove all
impediment between the offerings of devotion and the treasury of St.
Peter.

Such, in brief, was the state of Rome at the period we are about to
examine. Her ancient mantle of renown still, in the eyes of Italy and of
Europe,