he Popes. The fact remains, astonishing
and ridiculous,--in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was
at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the
Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the
inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces,
seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to
ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome;
and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed.

Now for many years, Rome had been in the hands of a family of converted
Jews, known as the Pierleoni, from Pietro Leone, first spoken of in the
chronicles as an iniquitous usurer of enormous wealth. They became
prefects of Rome; they took possession of Sant' Angelo and were the
tyrants of the city, and finally they became the Pope's great enemies,
the allies of Roger of Apulia, and makers of antipopes, of whom the
first was either Pietro's son or his grandson. They had on their side
possession, wealth, the support of a race which never looks upon
apostasy from its creed as final, the alliance of King Roger and of Duke
Roger, his son, and the countenance, if not the friendship, of Arnold of
Brescia, the excommunicated monk of northern Italy, and the pupil of the
romantic Abelard. And the Pierleoni had against them the Popes, the
great Frangipani family with most of the nobles, and Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux, who has been called the Bismarck of the Church. Arnold of
Brescia was no ordinary fanatic. He was as brave as Stefaneschi, as
pure-hearted as Stephen Porcari, as daring and eloquent as Rienzi in
his best days. The violent deeds of his followers have been imputed to
him, and brought him to his end; but it was his great adversary, Saint
Bernard, who expressed a regretful wish 'that his teachings might have
been as irreproachable as his life.' The doctrine for which he died at
last was political, rather than spiritual, human rather than
theological. In all but his monk's habit he was a layman in his later
years, as he had been when he first wandered to France and sat at the
feet of the gentle Abelard; but few Churchmen of that day were as
spotless in their private lives.

He was an agitator, a would-be reformer, a revolutionary; and the times
craved change. The trumpet call of the first Crusade had roused the
peoples of Europe, and the distracted forces of the western world had
been momentarily concentrated