emperors—a world wherein also the renewed Gospel was being preached by Francis of Assisi, who did not die till five years later. But St. Dominic died the year of Salimbene's birth. Innocent III., most powerful of popes, had breathed his last five years before, leaving surviving him that viper-nursling of the papacy, Frederick II., an able, much-experienced youth of twenty-two. Frederick was afterwards crowned emperor by Honorius III., and soon showed himself the most resourceful of his Hohenstaufen line of arch-enemies to the papacy. This Emperor Frederick, whom Innocent III., says Salimbene, had exalted and named "Son of the Church" … "was a man pestiferous and accursed, a schismatic, heretic, and epicurean, who corrupted the whole earth."[1]
Salimbene's family was in high regard at Parma, and the boy naturally saw and perhaps met the interesting strangers coming to the town. He tells us that when he was baptized the lord Balianus of Sydon, a great baron of France, a retainer of the Emperor Frederick's, "lifted me from the sacred font." The mother was a pious dame, whom Salimbene loved none too well, because once she snatched up his infant sisters to flee from the danger of the Baptistery toppling over upon their house during an earthquake, and left Salimbene himself lying in his cradle! The father had been a crusader, and was a man of wealth and influence.
So the youth was born into a stirring swirl of life. These vigorous northern Italian cities hated each other shrewdly in the thirteenth century. When the boy was eight years old a great fight took place between the folk of Parma, Modena, and Cremona on the one side, and that big blustering Bologna. Hot was the battle. On the Carrocio of Parma only one man remained; for it was stripped of its defenders by the stones from those novel war-engines of the Bolognese, called manganellae. Nevertheless the three towns won the battle, and the Bolognese turned their backs and abandoned their own Carrocio. The Cremona people wanted to drag it within their walls; but the prudent Parma leaders prevented it, because such action would have been an insult forever, and a lasting cause of
- ↑ Parma edition, p. 3.
