the oath was a perjury when it was not a farce.
The Prefects' principal duty appears to have been the administration of
the Patrimony of Saint Peter, in which they exercised an almost
unlimited power after Innocent the Third had formally dispensed them
from allegiance to the Emperor, and the long line of petty tyrants did
not come to an end until Pope Eugenius the Fourth beheaded the last of
the race for his misdeeds in the fifteenth century; after him the office
was seized upon by the Barons and finally drifted into the hands of the
Barberini, a mere sinecure bringing rich endowments to its fortunate
possessor.

In Rienzi's time there were practically three castes in Rome,--priests,
nobles, and beggars,--for there was nothing which in any degree
corresponded to a citizen class; such business as there was consisted
chiefly in usury, and was altogether in the hands of the Jews. Rome was
the lonely and ruined capital of a pestilential desert, and its
population was composed of marauders in various degrees.

The priests preyed upon the Church, the nobles upon the Church and upon
each other, the beggars picked the pockets of both, and such men as were
bodily fit for the work of killing were enlisted as retainers in the
service of the Barons, whose steady revenues from their lands, whose
strong fortresses within the city, and whose possession of the coat and
mail armour which was then so enormously valuable, made them masters of
all men except one another. They themselves sold the produce of their
estates and the few articles of consumption which reached Rome from
abroad, in shops adjoining their palaces; they owned the land upon which
the corn and wine and oil were grown; they owned the peasants who
ploughed and sowed and reaped and gathered; and they preserved the
privilege of disposing of their own wares as they saw fit. They feared
nothing but an ambush of their enemies, or the solemn excommunication of
the Pope, who cared little enough for their doings. The cardinals and
prelates who lived in the city were chiefly of the Barons' own order and
under their immediate protection. The Barons possessed everything and
ruled everything for their own profit; they defended their privileges
with their lives, and they avenged the slightest infringement on their
powers by the merciless shedding of blood. They were ignorant, but they
were keen; they were brave, but they were faithless; they were
passionate, licentious and unimaginab