CATASTROPHE
hardt, he condemned the Defensor Pads and excommunicated Ock- ham. But the ideas harboured by these daring souls were soon to stir in all the nations. They indicated the rise of a new trend in human thought, and retained their vigour long after those who had first con- ceived them were dead.
Ludwig himself was frightened by the teachings of Marcilius, but during 1328 he did not hesitate to receive the Imperial crown from the hand of the city's ruler, Sciarra Colonna, in Rome and "in the name of the Roman people." Marcilius, appointed spiritual vicar of the city, could hardly boast that the people and their ruler already bore his ideal world in their hearts. The things that happened in Rome in no way mirrored the spirit of the Defensor Pacts. Faith in the Church was still deep and strong enough even to feed with its sap the young humanism which had begun to appear. Nor had the end of the Papacy come when the Emperor was induced to proclaim to a popular assembly gathered in St. Peter's Square that the "priest Jacob of Cahors, who calls himself John XXII" had been deposed. Soon thereafter a miserable creature made himself anti-Pope. The rejoicing was of short duration. Ludwig was quite destitute; and without having firmly established his sovereignty in Italy, he left Rome which with farcical pranks dishonoured him and his Pope and all Roman Germans, even the dead. In Pisa, too, the joke was on him when he ordered that the figure of Pope John should be burned in effigy before the eyes of the indignant people; for it was in this city that the anti- Pope was seized in 1330 and dragged off to Avignon. Dressed in his habit (he was a Friar Minor) with a rope tied around his neck, Lud- wig then threw himself at John's feet and wept. The Pope helped him to rise, removed the rope, cast his arms about him as a sign of forgive- ness, and kept him under very mild arrest until the end of his days. John could not, however, make a peace with Ludwig, who was bidden to abdicate because France desired the breakup of Germany, and Avignon wanted a Papal Italy. Princes and people still clung to their Emperor and he had a Franciscan following which strengthened his resistance to his opponents on the Rhone. Ockham and his disciples lived to witness with pleasure that the Pope defended in a sermon the dogmatically objectionable teaching that the just dead enjoy the fullness of beatific vision only after the last judgment. When John
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