Baring-Gould’s sources: Roman and Franciscan Martyrologies. Venerated chiefly at Viterbo. S. Rosa died on March 6, and Sept. 4 is the Feast of her Translation, but it is that which is specially observed in her honour. The ancient and authentic acts of this saint have perished, those which exist have been formed out of them, as the writer states.] This little saint was born in the midst of the grievous troubles which afflicted Italy, when Frederick II. and Gregory XI. were in fiercest conflict; and Guelfs andGhibellines were at each other’s throats. The crown of Rome, which had been laid on the brows of Charlemagne by Leo III., had become a reality. The empire held the Papacy in constant alarm; there was never-ceasing fear lest the authority of the Emperor should interfere with the supremacy of the Pope. There were two parties in Italy, the Guelfs, who made Italian freedom their watchword, and who looked to the independence of every republic in the peninsula as their ideal of political perfection, and the Ghibellines, who thought the prosperity of Italy would be better consulted if all these petty States were crushed into submission to one sovereign. The Popes, as hostile to German interference, supported the Guelfs. For ages the Popes found their advantage in standing at the head of Italian nationality. Ever since the time of Hildebrand, they were the great obstacles to the establishment of the German sway in Italy. In the 13th century they waged inveterate warfare against the empire with arms spiritual and carnal. Two hundred years later, to quote a phrase of Pope Paul IV., Rome acted as one of the four strings which kept the Italian harp in tune. In the 16th century, when France, Germany, and Spain made Italy their battleground, the Popes headed many conspiracies to scare all foreign robbers from the fair prize. Julius II., Clement VII., and Paul IV. took the lead in this generous policy. The Ghibellines, on the other hand, looked up to a foreigner as their head. Many good patriots were to be found in the ranks of this party; these, weary with the endless civil wars waged by family against family, and city against city, thought that the only hope of peace lay in submitting to the rule of a despot. If ever any man loved his country, that man was Dante, who may be taken as the mouthpiece of the Ghibelline spirit. He looks upon the person of the Emperor with mysterious reverence. Popes and priests may be doomed to grotesque sufferings in the nether world, but a Caesar must always be treated with respect. The murder of Julius is the greatest crime, save one, that earth has ever seen. Brutus and Cassius are placed by the side 6'. Jtosa.

…of Iscariot. Some of the old German Caesars undergo purgatorial punishment on account of their resistance to the Popes. One alone is doomed to Hell, but that is for his supposed infidel opinions. His fate is recorded in one short line of the Inferno, for the sufferings of an Emperor are not meet for the ears of the vulgar. To return to earth; Dante's remedy for the woes of his country would seem a strange one to an Italian patriot of our own day. It was simply this, that the Emperor, a German elected by Germans, should make Rome his residence, and should thence rule Italy at his will. And who was the despot, whose invoked presence was to be the source of countless blessings ? It was Albert of Hapsburg, known to us chiefly as the despoiler of the rights of his nephew, and as the patron of the infamous Gessler. In the year 1239 the two parties were fairly brought face to face. The Guelfs shouted for the Pope and freedom; the Ghibellines for the Emperor and order. The former cursed the heretical tyrant, the worst of his wicked race, who was bringing Germans from the north, and Arabs from the south, to sweep away the hard-won rights of the Italian cities. The Ghibellines pointed to the bloody wars between neighbouring towns, wars that had never ceased to rage within the memory of man. What prospect of happiness or peace could there be, unless the Emperor should appear in Italy and put down all the civil broils with his strong hand ? In the 13th century Italy was divided into two camps. Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bologna, and Perugia were the chief Guelf States. Pisa, Cremona, Padua, Modena, and Siena were at the head of the Ghibelline interest. In a word, those cities nearest the Alps yearned most for emancipation from the imperial rule, and those closest to Rome were most eager for the supremacy of the Empire. We can have but a slight idea of the fierce spirit evoked by the two great party names. If one State took the Guelf side, that was reason enough why its neighbour should embrace the Ghibelline party. Revolutions of politics were frequent; exiles abounded, ever on the watch to wreak their vengeance on those who had driven them out.

The most horrible phase of the civil war was when it sundered families, or rendered all government impossible. What a picture of factious rage is drawn by an admiring eye-witness ! There was a club at Parma called that of the Crusaders, who combined together for the honour of God and Holy Church; they had a king’s name— that of the ferocious Charles of Anjou — inscribed at the head of their rolls in golden characters by his special desire. They stuck to each other like bees; if a fellow-citizen who did not belong to the club chanced to wrong one of its members, they would all run and pull down the offender’s house, until not a stone was left. The result of this terrorism was that the citizens either joined the club, or took care to live in peace with its members.1 This was the state of affairs in a city devoted to the Church, but doubtless the Ghibellines, wherever they could, exercised a tyranny every whit as unchristian. The Guelfs had one great advantage over the rival faction, since not only earthly but ghostly arms were wielded in their favour. To them the Pope’s name was a tower of strength. Every Genoese crossbowman who plied his national weapon, every Milanese monk who donned chain-mail at the bidding of Montelongo, every Venetian sailor who embarked on the Apulian venture, knew that he was one of Heaven’s chosen champions. Paradise was his reward, if he fell fighting against an Emperor worse than any Paynim. When in the field, the patriotic Crusader was paid from the coffers of the Church; 1 Salimbene.

S. Rosa. these had been filled with money drawn from distant lands for the benefit of Christ’s soldiers in Italy. But the Ghibellines had to put their trust in the arm of flesh, and in that alone. The thunders of the Lateran [St. John Lateran, the pope’s cathedral in Rome] must have struck terror into many a pious partizan of the Empire, who strove hard to reconcile his duty to Caesar with his duty to God. Still, several of the most esteemed prelates would not desert the Emperor, even after his excommunication. The type of this class is Nicolas, Bishop of Reggio, whose courteous manner, unaffected piety, and lavish expenditure, endeared him alike to the Imperial and the Papal courts. This instance proves that all the Imperial partizans were not abandoned men; although it is certain that the sense of their being excommunicate, outcasts from the Church, debarred from sacraments, cut off from grace, for taking a political side, did render many of the Ghibelline chieftains reckless in their wickedness. The upshot of the Crusade waged in the cause of religion was, that practical piety came in time to be altogether banished from the thoughts of the combatants.

In the month of February, 1239, Frederick for the first time carried the war into the Romagna. This province, the daring spirit of which he knew by experience, became the principal theatre of the struggle for three successive years. He took Bologna, but the Papal legate [an official representative sent by the pope] in Lombardy, Gregory of Montelongo, a man of loose morals, but great zeal, called on all the citizens of Milan to assume the Cross, and ordered all the clergy and friars to take up arms in the cause of the Pope. Frederick was obliged to leave the Romagna, and check the rising in the north of Italy. Next year he returned, and reached Viterbo about the middle of February, 1240, which threw open her gates enthusiastically to receive him.

Whilst Frederick was in Viterbo, to use the grandiloquent words of a modem biographer, “a child was bom at the foot of his palace, a maiden destined by providence to be the stone on which the haughty emperor should be broken.”1 The little child from infancy seemed set apart for something remarkable. When she ate and crumbled bread, birds surrounded her, and pecked the particles out of her hand. She was led by her mother, as her little mind began to dawn, to the church of the Franciscans, and their teaching sowed the seeds in her which ripened so rapidly. Let us place ourselves for a moment in some Italian city of the thirteenth century. The population is gathered together, either in the nave of the great church, or round an extemporized pulpit in the market-place. A little apart stands the parish priest, who looks on with undisguised discontent, viewing a Dominican or a Franciscan orator haranguing the people. The Benedictines [monks following the Rule of St. Benedict] of the neighbouring abbey share in the discontent of the parish priest. The old Orders have no relish for the ignorant friars who preach in the broadest vernacular, dividing their sermons into no heads and minor heads, and have no acquaintance, even second-hand, with the works of the Fathers. The area, as far as a man’s voice can reach, is full. The congregation is made up of every class. High-born ladies, brave knights, wealthy burghers, humble artizans, and uncouth peasants from the neighbourhood, are all thronging round the pulpit. It is ascended by a man who bears evidence in his countenance of long watchings and fastings, an ecclesiastic of a very different stamp from the jovial parish priest. The friar begins his sermon; he extols the merits of the founder of his Order, then tells the latest tidings from abroad, for in those days the pulpit was to the 1 A. Vaillant, in Guerin and Giry's “Vies des Saints.” The Process of Canonization of S. Rose under Calixtus 111. strangely blunders concerning the Emperor, and calls him Frederick Barbarossa, and the Pope, Alexander IV., and the date, which it sets down as a.d. 1200.

Sept 4.3 S. Rosa. people what the press is to us, giving both the tone to their opinions and supplying them with news. There is much doing in these bustling times. Perhaps a great victory has been won over the Moslems by one of the gallant Spanish kings. Perhaps the Tartars (so named, says the friar, because they have been spawned out of Tartarus) are laying waste Poland and Hungary with unheard-of cruelty. The preacher then dwells on the state of the Western kingdoms. And now he comes to the great topic of his discourse, the Emperor Frederick. Scripture is ransacked to supply parallels for the cruelty and unbelief of this miscreant. Pharaoh, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus, Herod, Pilate, and Nero, are all pressed into the service. He is the Abomination of desolation, the Man of Sin, the Antichrist that should come, the Beast whom S. John foretold, and whose mark too many in Italy have received.

The effect of the sermon upon the hearers is most powerful. We can have but a slight idea of the influence of the friars, and the effect produced by such appeals as these. The throne of our Charles I. was shaken by the Puritan preachers. Keeping this in mind, we shall have some notion of the amazing power wielded by the begging friars, and see the wisdom of the great Innocent in raising two such armies for the future defence of the Church as those furnished to him by S. Dominic and S. Francis. To them it was mainly owing that Rome came forth conqueror from those awful struggles of the thirteenth century, in which she had to contend, first with a widespread revolt among her own flock, and then with one of the greatest emperors who ever sat in the seat of Charlemagne [king of the Franks, crowned emperor in 800].

Whilst a child of six or seven, the little Rosa of Viterbo was fired by these exhortations, and the whole bent and enthusiasm of her mind was turned against Frederick II. and the Ghibellines. She joined the third Order of S. Francis, and in season and out of season, her childish voice, with all the vehemence of a single mind, declaimed against the political party which was most popular in her native city. The little woman would seek every occasion of publicly preaching such scraps of the sermons of the Franciscans as she retained in her memory; and the Ghibellines, vexed with her pertinacity, turned her parents and her out of the city. It was winter, and the snow lay over the ground. The unfortunate exiles had to trudge through the drifts in no amiable mood towards their daughter; but she, filled with enthusiasm, and deeming that now they were confessors for their cause, with her childish prattle, encouraged them not to be cast down.

At last they reached Soriano, where they obtained shelter for the night. The excitement of the day had worked on the child’s brain, and she dreamt that she saw an angel, who announced to her that good news was in store for the Guelfs. In the morning she proclaimed this prophecy throughout the town, and when it was rumoured some days later that the Emperor Frederick was dead, the merits of Rosa as a prophetess were acknowledged.

From Soriano the exiles pushed on to Vitorchiano, where she preached to the people on the one unfailing topic, the only one then of sovereign interest, the one on which all religion hinged.

There was a woman of Vitorchiano who was as loud on the Ghibelline side as this child was on that of the Guelfs. Rosa — she was then ten years old — went boldly before the woman and said, “ I defy you to a contest. I will fast twenty days, and be as stout as I am now at the end of that time. Do the same if you can/' “ Bah !” said the woman, “ wolves and cranes are fasters by nature, and a wolf (Guelf) and a chattering crane such as you, have it in your blood.”

S. Rosa. “ Then/' said Rosa, “ I defy you to the ordeal of fire.77 And she scampered off to the priests, and ordered them to ring all the bells of their churches, and call the citizens together, to see her walk unharmed through a bonfire. A pyre was raised and lighted; she jumped into the midst of the flames, ran about in them, and came forth unharmed.

After awhile the parents and S. Rosa returned to Viterbo, and the child asked to be admitted into the Convent of the Poor Clares, but the nuns refused her admission. “ I know well enough your reason/7 said Rosa, “ you do not care to have me in your house; you despise me. However I will tell you this; although you reject me living, you will be eager enough to get me dead.77 She died at the age of fifteen, or thereabouts, and was buried in the church of S. Maria in Podio. But having appeared in vision to Pope Alexander IV., and urged her removal to the chapel of the Poor Clares, he gave orders that what she wished should be granted her. The story goes, that when she was dug up, manna was found in her sepulchre.

The process of her canonization took place at the request of the people of Viterbo, in 1457; and she was admitted into the Roman martyrology. The body of the saintly child is shown incorrupt, in the church of Viterbo at the present day.1 1 For this biography use has been largely made of Kingston's “History of VOL. X.