• Buti says that in early times the prelates used to divide the incomes of the Church into four parts; “the first, for the prelate personally; the second, for the clergy who performed the services; the third, for the embellishment of the Church; the fourth, for Christ’s poor; which division is nowadays little observed.” ↩
• Pope Boniface VIII , whom Dante never forgets, and to whom he never fails to deal a blow. ↩
• He did not ask of the Holy See the power of grasping six, and giving but two or three to pious uses; not the first vacant benefice; nor the tithes that belonged to God’s poor; but the right to defend the faith, of which the four-and-twenty spirits in the two circles around them were the seed. ↩
• One wheel of the chariot of the Church Militant, of which St. Francis was the other. ↩
• The track made by this wheel of the chariot; that is, the strict rule of St. Francis, is now abandoned by his followers. ↩
• Good wine produces crust in the cask, bad wine mould. ↩
• Set the points of their feet upon the heel of the footprints, showing that they walked in a direction directly opposite to that of their founder. ↩