"Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the word, spare us, O Lord.
"Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.
"Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us !
It is doubtful whether the name of Lombardo is a family name, or only indicates that Marco was an Italian, after the fashion then prevalent among the French of calling all Italians Lombards. See Note 124.
Benvenuto says of him that he "was a man of noble mind, but disdainful, and easily moved to anger."
Buti's portrait is as follows : " This Marco was a Venetian, called Marco Daca ; and was a very learned man, and had many political virtues, and was very courteous, giving to poor noblemen all that he gained, and he gained much ; for he was a courtier, and was much beloved for his virtue, and much was given him by the nobility ; and as he gave to those who were in need, so he lent to all who asked. So that, coming to die, and having much still due to him, he made a will, and among other bequests this, that whoever owed him should not be held to pay the debt, saying, 'Whoever has, may keep.'
Portarelli thinks that this Marco may be Marco Polo the traveller ; but this is inadmissible, as he was still living at the time of Dante's death.
"The god upon its leaves
The sad expression of his sorrow weaves,
And to this hour the mournful purple wears
Ai, Ai, inscribed in funeral characters.'
"But in this indissoluble chain of causes, can we preserve the liberty of the will? Does this fatal Necessity restrain the motions of the human soul ? 'There is no reasonable being,' replied she, 'who has not freedom of will : for every being distinguished with this faculty is endowed with judgment to perceive the differences of things ; to discover what he is to avoid or pursue. Now what a person esteems desirable, he desires ; but what he thinks ought to be avoided, he shuns. Thus every rational creature hath a liberty of choosing and rejecting. But I do not assert that this liberty is equal in all beings. Heavenly substances, who are exalted above us, have an enlightened judgment, an incorruptible will, and a power ever at command effectually to accomplish their desires. With regard to man, his immaterial spirit is also free ; but it is most at liberty when employed in the contemplation of the Divine mind ; it becomes less so when it enters into a body ; and is still more restrained when it is imprisoned in a terrestrial habitation, composed of members of clay ; and is reduced, in fine, to the most extreme servitude when, by plunging into the pollutions of vice, it totally departs from reason : for the soul no sooner turns her eye from the radiance of supreme truth to dark and base objects, but she is involved in a mist of ignorance, assailed by impure desires ; by yielding to which she increases her thraldom, and thus the freedom which she derives from nature becomes in some measure the cause of her slavery But the eye of Providence, which sees everything from eternity, perceives all this ; and that same Providence disposes everything she has predestinated, in the order it deserves. As Homer says of the sun, It sees everything and hears everything.'"
Also Milton, Parad. Lost, II. 557 :--
"Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."
See also Par. XVII. Note 40.
"But I shall now endeavour to demonstrate, that, in whatever way the chain of causes is disposed, the event of things which are foreseen is necessary ; although prescience may not appear to be the necessitating cause of their befalling. For example, if a person sits, the opinion formed of him that he is seated is of necessity true ; but by inverting the phrase, if the opinion is true that he seated, he must necessarily sit. In both cases, then, there is a necessity ; in the latter, that the person sits ; in the former, that the opinion concerning him is true: but the person doth not sit, because the opinion of his sitting is true, but the opinion is rather true because the action of his being seated was antecedent in time. Thus, though the truth of the opinion may be the effect of the person taking a seat, there is, nevertheless a necessity common to both. The same method of reasoning, I think, should be employed with regard to the prescience of God, and future contingencies ; for, allowing it to be true that events are foreseen because they are to happen, and that they do not befall because they are foreseen, it is still necessary that what is to happen must be foreseen by God, and that what is foreseen must take place. This then is of itself sufficient to destroy all idea of human liberty."
"And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies."
They are indeed our pillar-fires,
"Au temps passé du siècle d'or,
"The Empire and the Papacy were now to meet in their last mortal and implacable strife ; the two first acts of this tremendous drama, separated by an interval of many years, were to be developed during the pontificate of a prelate who ascended the throne of St. Peter at the age of eighty. Nor was this strife for any specific point in dispute, like the right of investiture, but avowedly for supremacy on one side, which hardly deigned to call itself independence ; for independence, on the other, which remotely at least aspired after supremacy. Caesar would bear no superior, the successor of St. Peter no equal. The contest could not have begun under men more strongly contrasted, or more determinedly oppugnant in character, than Gregory the Ninth and Frederick the Second. Gregory retained the ambition, the vigour, almost the activity of youth, with the stubborn obstinacy, and something of the irritable petulance, of old age. He was still master of all his powerful faculties ; his knowledge of affairs, of mankind, of the peculiar interests of almost all the nations in Christendom, acquired by long employment in the most important negotiations both by Innocent the Third and by Honorius the Third ; eloquence which his own age compared to that of Tully ; profound erudition in that learning which, in the mediaeval churchman, commanded the highest admiration. No one was his superior in the science of the canon law ; the Decretals, to which he afterwards gave a more full and authoritative form, were at his command, and they were to him as much the law of God as the Gospels themselves , or the primary principles of morality. The jealous reverence and attachment of a great lawyer to his science strengthened the lofty pretensions of the churchman.
"Frederick the Second, with many of the noblest qualities which could captivate the admiration of his own age, in some respects might appear misplaced, and by many centuries prematurely born. Frederick having crowded into his youth adventures, perils, successes, almost unparalleled in history, was now only expanding into the prime of manhood. A parentless orphan, he had struggled upward into the actual reigning monarch of his hereditary Sicily ; he was even then rising above the yoke of the turbulent magnates of his realm, and the depressing tutelage of the Papal See ; he had crossed the Alps a boyish adventurer, and won so much through his own valour and daring that he might well ascribe to himself his conquest, the kingdom of Germany, the imperial crown ; he was in undisputed possession of the Empire, with all its rights in Northern Italy ; King of Apulia, Sicily, and Jerusalem. He was beginning to be at once the Magnificent Sovereign, the knight, the poet, the lawgiver, the patron of arts, letters, and science ; the Magnificent Sovereign, now holding his court in one of the old barbaric and feudal cities of Germany among the proud and turbulent princes of the Empire, more often on the sunny shores of Naples or Palermo, in southern and almost Oriental luxury ; the gallant Knight and troubadour Poet, not forbidding himself those amorous indulgences which were the reward of chivalrous valour and of the 'gay science;' , the Lawgiver, whose far-seeing wisdom seemed to anticipate some of those views of equal justice, of the advantages of commerce, of the cultivation of the arts of peace, beyond all the toleration of adverse religions, which even in a more dutiful son of the Church would doubtless have seemed godless indifference. Frederick must appear before us in the course of our history in the full development of all these shades of character ; but besides all this, Frederick's views of the temporal sovereignty were as imperious and autocratic as those of the haughtiest churchman of the spiritual supremacy. The ban of the Empire ought to be at least equally awful with that of the Church ; disloyalty to the Emperor was as heinous a sin as infidelity to the head of Christendom ; the independence of the Lombard republics was as a great and punishable political heresy. Even in Rome itself, as head of the Roman Empire, Frederick aspired to a supremacy which was not less unlimited because vague and undefined, and irreconcilable with that of the Supreme Pontiff. If ever Emperor might be tempted by the vision of a vast hereditary monarchy to be perpetuated in his house, the princely house of Hohenstaufen, it was Frederick. He had heirs of his greatness ; his eldest son was King of the Romans ; from his loins might yet spring an inexhaustible race of princes the failure of his imperial line was his last fear. The character of the man seemed formed to achieve and to maintain this vast design ; he was at once terrible and popular, courteous, generous, placable to his foes ; yet there was a depth of cruelty in the heart of Frederick towards revolted subjects, which made him look on the atrocities of his allies, Eccelin di Romano, and the Salinguerras, but as legitimate means to quell insolent and stubborn rebellion
"It is impossible to conceive a contrast more strong or more irreconcilable than the octogenarian Gregory, in his cloister palace, in his conclave of stern ascetics, with all but severe imprisonment within conventual walls, completely monastic in manners, habits, views, in corporate spirit, in celibacy, in rigid seclusion from the rest of mankind, in the conscientious determination to enslave, if possible, all Christendom to its inviolable unity of faith, and to the least possible latitude of discipline ; and the gay and yet youthful Frederick, with his mingled assemblage of knights and ladies, of Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans, of poets, and men of science , met , as it were, to enjoy and minister to enjoyment, --to cultivate the pure intellect.--where, if not the restraints of religion, at least the awful authority of churchmen was examined with freedom, sometimes ridiculed with sportive wit."
See also Inf X. Note 119.
"Messer Guido was assiduous in honouring men of worth, who passed on their way to France, and furnished many with horses and arms, who came hither-ward from France. To all who had honourably consumed their property, and returned more poorly furnished than became them, he gave, without hope of return, horses, arms, and money.
"Messer Gherardo da Camino delighted not in one, but in all noble things, keeping constantly at home."
He farther says, that his fame was so great in France that he was there spoken of as the "simple Lombard," just as, "when one says the City, and no more, one means Rome." Benvenuto da Imola says that all Italians were called Lombards by the French. In the Histoire et Cronique du petit Jehan de Saintré , fol. 219, ch. iv., the author remarks : "The fifteenth day after Saintré's return, there came to Paris two young, noble, and brave Italians, whom we call Lombards."
The Ottimo, who preceded Buti in point of time, gives a somewhat different and more equivocal account. He says : "Madonna Gaia was the daughter of Messer Gherardo da Camino : she was a lady of such conduct in amorous delectations, that her name was notorious throughout all Italy ; and therefore she is thus spoken of here."
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.096
Henry Vaughan, Sacred Poems: --
Seen as we go ;
They are that city's shining spires
We travel to."
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.099
Leviticus xi. 4 : "The camel because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof: he is unclean to you." Dante applies these words to the Pope as temporal sovereign.
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.101
Worldly goods. As in the old French satirical verses
Crosse de bois, éveque d'or ;
Maintenant changent les lois,
Crosse d'or, eveque de bois."
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.107
The Emperor and the Pope ; the temporal and spiritual power.
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.115
Lombardy and Romagna.
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.117
The dissension and war between the Emperor Frederick the Second and Pope Gregory the Ninth. Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ. , Book X. Ch. 3, says :--
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 16.124
Currado (Conrad) da Palazzo of Brescia ; Gherardo da Camino of Treviso ; and Guido da Castello of Reggio." Of these three the Ottimo thus speaks
"Messer Currado was laden with honour during his life, delighted in a fine retinue, and in political life in the government of cities, in which he acquired much praise and fame.
Longfellow (1897), Purg. 14.140
"This Gherardo," says Buti, had daughter, called, on account of
her beauty, Gaja ; and so modest and virtuous was she, that through all Italy was spread the fame of her beauty and modesty."