hundred mounted horsemen, the bridles of his horse being held by the count of Montferrat and an Orsini. The city magistrates furnished the bishop’s palace, where the pope lodged, with four large casks of French wine, four of Elsass, and eight of native wines, and the citizens of Constance made him a gift of a large drinking-cup made of silver gilded with gold.[1] The city attracted people of every rank bent on all sorts of business. Such a scene on so grand a scale had not been witnessed in the West before. It was a golden occasion for social and mercantile intercourse, for pride and display as well as a religious event concerning the well-being of Latin Christendom. In comparison with this assembly, the synod at Clermont, 1095, the fourth Lateran, 1215, and the councils held in Lyons, 1245 and 1274, were provincial synods. Here all Catholic nations were represented by delegations from Bohemia to Scotland. The chief scholarship of the age as well as the leading prelates were there. The normal population of the city, which was under six thousand, was enormously swollen by the flood of strangers, whose number is put at from fifty thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand by Richental, a resident of the city who, twenty years after the council adjourned, wrote down a graphic account of what he had seen. He had the interest of a modern reporter, went everywhere, into alley and palace, from house to house, taking down notes. His busy pen preserved the names of all the visiting dignitaries, civil and religious, together with their retainers. There were thirty thousand beds for strangers. Five hundred are said to have been drowned in the lake during the progress of the council. Bakers, grooms, goldsmiths, scribes, money-changers, merchantmen, and sutlers of every sort, even to traffickers from the Orient, flocked together to minister to the needs and tastes of princes and prelates. According to the tables of Richental there were in attendance 33 cardinals, 5 patriarchs, 47 archbishops, 145
- ↑ Richental, 25–28.
