Bernard of Clairvaux.

Rome lay along the river, in those days, like wreckage and scum thrown
up on the shore of a wintry sea. Some twenty thousand human beings were
huddled together in smoky huts, most of which were built against the
outer walls and towers of the nobles' strongholds--a miserable
population, living squalidly in terrible times, starving while the
nobles fought with one another, rising now and then like a vision of
famine and sword to take back by force the right of life which force
had almost taken from them. Gilbert wandered through the crooked,
unpaved streets, in and out of gloomy courts and over desolate wastes
and open places, the haunts of ravenous dogs and homeless cats that
kept themselves alive on the choice pickings of the city's garbage. He
went armed and followed by his men, as he saw that other gentlemen of
his condition did, and when he knelt in a church to hear mass or to say
a prayer, he was careful to kneel with his back to the wall or to a
pillar, lest some light-handed worshipper should set a razor to his
wallet strings or his sword-belt.

At his inn, too, he lived in a state of armed defence against every
one, including the host and the other guests; and the weekly settlement
was a weekly battle between Dunstan, who paid his master's scores, the
little Tuscan interpreter, and Ser Clemente, the innkeeper, in which
the Tuscan had the most uncomfortable position, finding himself placed
buffer-like between the honest man and the thief, and exposed to
equally hard hitting from both. Rome was poor and dirty and a den of
thieves, murderers, and all malefactors, dominated alternately by a
family of half-converted Jews, who terrorized the city from strong
points of vantage, and then, on other days, by the mob that followed
Arnold of Brescia when he appeared in the city, and who would have torn