100. "Frederick of _Antioch_." Note the titular coincidence. The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch; here we have our lieutenant of Antichrist also named from that town. The anti-Christian Germans got into Florence upon Sunday morning; the Guelphs fought on till Wednesday, which was Candlemas;--the Tower of the Death-watch was thrown down next day. It was so called because it stood on the Piazza of St John; and all dying people in Florence called on St. John for help; and looked, if it might be, to the top of this highest and best-built of towers. The wicked anti-Christian Ghibellines, Nicholas of Pisa helping, cut the side of it "so that the tower might fall on the Baptistery. But as it pleased God, for better reverencing of the blessed St. John, the tower, which was a hundred and eighty feet high, as it was coming down, plainly appeared to eschew the holy church, and turned aside, and fell right across the square; at which all the Florentines marvelled, (pious or impious,) and the _people_ (anti-Ghibelline) were greatly delighted."
101. I have no doubt that this story is apocryphal, not only in its attribution of these religious scruples to the falling tower; but in its accusation of the Ghibellines as having definitely intended the destruction of the Baptistery. It is only modern reformers who feel the absolute need of enforcing their religious opinions in so practical a manner. Such a piece of sacrilege would have been revolting to Farinata; how much more to the group of Florentines whose temper is centrally represented by Dante's, to all of whom their "bel San Giovanni" was dear, at least for its beauty, if not for its sanctity. And Niccola himself was too good a workman to become the instrument of the destruction of so noble a work,--not to insist on the extreme probability that he was also too good an engineer to have had his purpose, if once fixed, thwarted by any tenderness in the conscience of the collapsing tower. The tradition itself probably arose after the rage of the exiled Ghibellines had half consented to the destruction, on political grounds, of Florence itself; but the form it took is of extreme historical value, indicating thus early at least the suspected existence of passions like those of the Cromwellian or Garibaldian soldiery in the Florentine noble; and the distinct character of the Ghibelline party as not only anti-Papal, but profane.