The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

a great and rich burgher of Paris, of a race of butchers or dealers in cattle.”

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When the Carlovingian race were all dead but one. And who was he? The Ottimo says it was Rudolph, who became a monk and afterwards Archbishop of Rhcims. Bcnvenuto gives no name, but says only “a monk in poor, coarse garments.” Buti says the same. Daniello thinks it was some Friar of St. Francis, perhaps St. Louis, forgetting that these saints did not see the light till some two centuries after the time here spoken of. Others say Charles of Lorraine; and Biagioli decides that it must be either Charles the Simple, who died a prisoner in the castle of Peronne, in 922; or Louis of Outré-Mer, who was carried to England by Hugh the Great, in 936, The Man in Cloth of Gray remains as great a mystery as the Man in the Iron Mask. ↩

Hugh Capet was crowned at Rheims, in 987. The expression which follows shows clearly that it is Hugh the Great who speaks, and not Hugh the founder of the Capetian dynasty. ↩

Until the shame of the low origin of the family was removed by the marriage of Charles of Anjou, brother of Saint Louis, to the daughter of Raimond Berenger, who brought him Provence as her dower. ↩

Making amends for one crime by committing a greater. The particular transaction here alluded to is the seizing by fraud and holding by force these provinces in the time of Philip the Fair. ↩

Charles of Anjou. ↩

Curradino, or Conradin, son of the Emperor Conrad IV, a beautiful youth of sixteen, who was beheaded in the square of Naples by order of Charles of Anjou, in 1268. Voltaire, in his rhymed chronology at the end of his Annales de l’Empire, says,

“C’est en soixante-huit que la main d’un bourreau
Dans Conradin son fils éteint un sang si beau.”

Endeavoring to escape to Sicily after his defeat at Tagliacozzo, he was carried to Naples and imprisoned in the Castel deir Uovo. “Christendom heard with horror,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity, Book XI Ch. 3, “that the royal brother of St. Louis, that the champion of the Church, after a mock trial, by the sentence of one judge, Robert di Lavena⁠—after an unanswerable pleading by Guido de Suzaria, a famous jurist⁠—had condemned the last heir of the Swabian house⁠—a rival king who had fought gallantly for his hereditary throne⁠—to be executed as a felon and a rebel on a public scaffold. So little did Conradin dread his fate, that, when his doom was announced, he was playing at chess with Frederick of Austria. ‘Slave,’ said Conradin to Robert of Bari, who read the fatal sentence, ‘do you dare to condemn as a criminal the son and heir of kings? Knows not your master that he is my equal, not my judge?’ He added, ‘I am a mortal, and must die; yet ask the kings of the earth if a prince be criminal for seeking to win back the heritage of his ancestors. But if there be no pardon for me, spare, at least, my faithful companions; or if they must die, strike me first, that I may not behold their death.’ They died devoutly, nobly. Every circumstance aggravated the abhorrence; it was said⁠—perhaps it was the invention of that abhorrence⁠—that Robert of Flanders, the brother of Charles, struck dead the judge who had presumed to read the iniquitous sentence. When Conradin knelt, with uplifted hands, awaiting the blow of the executioner, he uttered these last words, ‘O my mother! how deep will be thy sorrow at the news of this day!’ Even the followers of Charles could hardly restrain their pity and indignation. With Conradin died his young and valiant friend, Frederick of Austria, the two Lancias, two of the noble house of Donaticcio of Pisa. The inexorable Charles would not permit them to be buried in consecrated ground.” ↩

Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Schools, died at the convent of Fossa Nuova in the Campagna, being on his way to the Council of Lyons, in 1274. He is supposed to have been poisoned by his physician, at the instigation of Charles of Anjou. ↩

Charles of Valois, who came into Italy by invitation of Boniface the Eighth, in 1301. See Inferno VI 69. ↩

There is in old French literature a poem entitled Le Tournoyement de l’Antechrist, written by Hugues de Mery, a monk of the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés, in the thirteenth century, in which he describes a battle between the Virtues under the banner of Christ, and the Vices under that of Antichrist.

In the Vision of Piers Ploughman, there is a joust between Christ and the foul fiend:⁠—

“Thanne was Feith in a fenestre,
And cryde a fili David,
As dooth an heraud of armes,
Whan aventrous cometh to justes.
Old Jewes of Jerusalem
For joye thei songen,
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

“Thanne I frayned at Feith,
What al that fare by-mente,
And who sholde juste in Jerusalem.
‘Jhesus,’ he seide,
‘And fecche that the fend claymeth,
Piers fruyt the Plowman.’

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“ ‘Who shal juste with Jhesus?’ quod I,
‘Jewes or scrybes?’

“ ‘Nay,’ quod he; ‘The foule fend,
And fals doom and deeth.’ ”

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By the aid of Charles of Valois the Neri party triumphed in Florence, and the Bianchi were banished, and with them Dante. ↩

There is an allusion here to the nickname of Charles of Valois, Senzaterra, or Lackland. ↩

Charles the Second, son of Charles of Anjou. He went from France to recover Sicily after the Sicilian Vespers. In an engagement with the Spanish fleet under Admiral Rugieri d’ Oria, he was taken prisoner. Dante says he sold his daughter,