ed their race to the point of exciting popular indignation. But,
on the whole, they kept to their parties. When Lewis the Bavarian was to
be crowned by force, Sciarra Colonna crowned him; when Henry the Seventh
of Luxemburg had come to Rome for the same purpose, a few years earlier,
the Orsini had been obliged to be satisfied with a sort of second-rate
coronation at Saint John Lateran's; and when the struggle between the
two families was at its height, nearly two centuries later, and Sixtus
the Fourth 'assumed the part of mediator,' as the chronicle expresses
it, one of his first acts of mediation was to cut off the head of a
Colonna, and his next was to lay regular siege to the strongholds of the
family in the Roman hills; but before he had brought this singular
process of mediation to an issue he suddenly died, the Colonna returned
to their dwellings in Rome 'with great clamour and triumph,' got the
better of the Orsini, and proceeded to elect a Pope after their own
hearts, in the person of Cardinal Cibo, of Genoa, known as Innocent the
Eighth. He it is who lies under the beautiful bronze monument in the
inner left aisle of Saint Peter's, which shows him holding in his hand a
model of the spear-head that pierced Christ's side, a relic believed to
have been sent to the Pope as a gift by Sultan Bajazet the Second.

The origin of the hatred between Colonna and Orsini is unknown, for the
archives of the former have as yet thrown no light upon the subject, and
those of the latter were almost entirely destroyed by fire in the last
century. In the year 1305, Pope Clement the Fifth was elected Pope at
Perugia. He was a Frenchman, and was Archbishop of Bordeaux, the
candidate of Philip the Fair, whose tutor had been a Colonna, and he
was chosen by the opposing factions of two Orsini cardinals because the
people of Perugia were tired of a quarrel that had lasted eleven months,
and had adopted the practical and always infallible expedient of
deliberately starving the conclave to a vote. Muratori calls it a
scandalous and illicit election, which brought about the ruin of Italy
and struck a memorable blow at the power of the Holy See. Though not a
great man, Philip the Fair was one of the cleverest that ever lived.
Before the election he had made his bishop swear upon the Sacred Host to
accept his conditions, without expressing them all; and the most
important proved to be the transference of the Papal See to France. The
new Pope o