A Distant Mirror (62 page)

All the suffering under the “furious wolves” of her time spoke through her voice, and all the craving for religious reform. For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions. In Germany in 1372 papal tax-collectors were seized, mutilated, imprisoned, some even strangled, and the clergy of Cologne, Bonn, and Mainz pledged themselves not to pay the tenth demanded by Gregory XI. In parishes wrecked by the mercenaries, the tithes reduced priests to penury. Many deserted, leaving villages without communion or sacraments, and empty churches to rot or be used for barns. Some priests supplemented their too meager pay by occupation as taverners or horse-dealers or other work disallowed for the clergy as
inhonesta
.

In the upper ranks, property and worldly offices absorbed the prelates, to the neglect of care for the diocese. Because the Church could offer to ambitious men a career of power and riches, many who entered it were more concerned with material than with spiritual reward. “Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.”

Conscious of its failings, the Church issued streams of orders reproving profane dress, concubinage, lack of zeal, but it was tied to the things of Caesar and could not reform at the root without destroying its vested interests. It had become dependent on the financial system developed in the exile at Avignon, and while everyone acknowledged the need of reform, the hierarchy was bound, in the nature of things, to resist it. Even Catherine in a moment of clarity knew reform could not come from within. “Do not weep now,” she said to Father Raymond when he burst into tears at some new scandal for the Church, “for you will have still more to weep for” when in the future not only laymen but clerics would rise against the Church. As soon as the Pope attempted reform, she said, the prelates would resist, and the Church “will be divided, as it were by a heretical pestilence.”

Catherine herself was never heretical, never disillusioned, never disobedient.
The Church, the papacy, the priesthood, the Dominican order were her home, and their sanctity her foundation. She scolded, but from within the fold. Disenchantment among the clergy itself produced the great heretics, Wyclif and, in the next generation, Jan Hus.

Catherine’s appeals gave Gregory XI the strength to resist the pressures exerted by the French King and cardinals against return of the papacy to Rome.
Charles V insisted that “Rome is wherever the Pope happens to be,” and sent his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy, to try to dissuade the Pope. In the same effort, the cardinals argued against going to Rome just when the Kings of France and England, “so long divided by a war which destroys the whole world,” were conducting peace parleys that required his aid. Gregory was unmoved. Despite somber presentiments, he believed that only his presence could hold Rome for the papacy, and when Rome promised submission if he would return, he could postpone no longer.

Confounding all expectations of his French birth and feeble health, he departed in September 1376 despite a fearful storm that damaged his ships as if in warning. At the last moment his aged father, Count Guillaume de Beaufort, in the unrestrained physical gesture of the time, threw himself prone before his son in a plea to stay. Gregory stepped over his parent, murmuring unfilially from the Psalms, “It is written that thou shalt trample on the adder and tread down the basilisk.” One of his bishops, going by land, wrote, “Oh God, if only the mountains would move and block our way.”

Owing to the insecurity of the region, Rome was not entered until January 1377, and fifteen months later, in March 1378, Gregory died. In the interval he had struggled as helplessly as his predecessor, Urban V, in the turmoil of Italian politics. Beset by difficulties and ceaselessly goaded by the French cardinals to return to Avignon, he was said to have agreed, but, feeling the approach of death, deliberately waited to die in Rome in order that the election of a new Pope should take place there and keep the papacy where it belonged. His worthy intention precipitated the crisis that was to damage the medieval Church beyond repair.

The schism had nothing to do with doctrine or religious issue. Sixteen cardinals were present in Rome for the conclave, of whom one was Spanish, four were Italian, and eleven were divided between two hostile French parties of Limousins and Gallicans. Since neither French party was prepared to elect a Pope from the other, hectic
canvassing for votes took place in which Robert of Geneva, leader of the Gallicans, was active even before Gregory was dead. When the necessary two-thirds majority could not be assembled for any one of the cardinals, sentiment gathered for an outsider as a compromise candidate who could ensure that neither French party would triumph over the other. He was Bartolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari and Vice-Chancellor of the Curia, a Neapolitan of lowly birth, short, stout, swarthy, hard-working, and apparently unassuming. Through long service in Avignon he was considered a pliable protégé by both French groups. Although a strong opponent of simony and corruption, with the excitable temper of the south Italian, he was thought by the cardinals, as their social inferior, to be governable and, above all, amenable to a return to Avignon.

On Gregory’s death, the citizens of Rome, seeing at last a chance to end the reign of French popes, sent a deputation of important citizens to the Vatican to urge the election of a “worthy man of the Italian nation,” specifically a Roman. The College contained two Romans, Cardinal Tebaldeschi of St. Peter’s, “a good saintly man” but aged and infirm, and Cardinal Orsini, considered too young and inexperienced. Both were unwanted by their colleagues for the very reason that they
were
Roman.

Clearly expecting trouble on this score, the French cardinals moved their households with all their valuables, plate, jewels, money, and books, and the papal treasury, into the Castel Sant’Angelo, and demanded security measures by the city to assure public order and protect them against violence and insults. Taking no chances, Cardinal Robert of Geneva donned a coat of mail; the Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna dictated his will. Because the cardinals gave no pledge of a Roman, rumor spread that a French-dominated Pope would mean return of the papacy to Avignon. Public excitement rose and threatening crowds gathered as the cardinals, surrounded by “many strong soldiers and warlike nobles,” entered the Vatican for the conclave. Beneath the windows they could hear the populace howling,
“Romano lo volemo!
[We want a Roman!]
Romano! Romano!”
The specter of the deaths of Cola di Rienzi and Jacob van Artevelde, lynched by the mob, rose to the surface.

In fear for their lives, the cardinals resorted to dressing the trembling old Cardinal Tebaldeschi, over his protests, in the miter and cope to be exhibited on the throne as elected Pope for long enough to allow his colleagues to escape from the Vatican to fortified places outside the city. As the bells of St. Peter’s pealed amid clash and confusion, word of the hoax was learned. The crowd’s shrieks turned to
“Non le
volemo!”
and “Death to the cardinals!” Swords were drawn and drunks who had broken into the papal cellars grew rough and uproarious.

Next day, April 9, the cardinals announced the election of the Archbishop of Bari as Urban VI and, under heavy guard, escorted him on a white palfrey amid “angry faces” on the traditional ride to the Lateran. Notice of the election and enthronement was conveyed to the six cardinals remaining in Avignon, with no suggestion of possible invalidity by reason of intimidation. On the contrary, in the first weeks of the new reign the cardinals treated Urban’s pontificate as so much an accomplished fact that they showered him with the usual petitions for benefices and promotions for their relatives.

Papal power, raising him to authority over the high-born cardinals, went instantly to Urban’s head. From a humble unspectacular official totally unprepared for the papal throne, he was transformed overnight into an implacable scourge of simony, moved less by religious zeal than by simple hatred and jealousy of privilege. He publicly chastised the cardinals for absenteeism, luxury, and lascivious life, forbade them to hold or sell plural benefices, prohibited their acceptance of pensions, gifts of money, and other favors from secular sources, ordered the papal treasurer not to pay them their customary half of the revenue from benefices but to use it for the restoration of churches in Rome. Worse, he ordered these princes of the Church to restrict their meals to one course.

He berated them without tact or dignity, his face growing purple and his voice hoarse with rage. He interrupted them with rude invective and cries of “Rubbish!” and “Shut your mouth!” He called Cardinal Orsini a
sotus
(half-wit), and moved to strike the Cardinal of Limoges, only stopped by Robert of Geneva, who pulled him back, crying, “Holy Father, Holy Father, what are you doing?” He accused the Cardinal of Amiens, when acting as mediator between France and England, of accepting money from both sides and prolonging discord to keep his purse filled, causing that Cardinal to rise and with “indescribable haughtiness” to call His Holiness a “liar.”

Carried away by self-assertion, Urban plunged into the secular affairs of Naples, announcing that the kingdom was badly governed because the ruler, Queen Joanna, was a woman, and threatening to put her in a nunnery or depose her because of failure to pay the dues of Naples as a papal fief. This gratuitous quarrel, which he pursued with venom, was to provide a base for his enemies.

The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that the delirium of power had made the Pope
furiosus et melaneholicus
—in
short, mad. Rages and insults might have been borne, but not interference with revenue and privilege. When Urban flatly refused to return to Avignon as arranged, the crisis came. Rather than try, as once before with an obstreperous Pope, any half-measure requiring him to sign “Capitulations” of his authority, the cardinals decided on the fatal course of removal. Since there was no procedure for ousting a Pope for unfitness, their plan was to annul the election as invalid on grounds that it had been conducted under duress from mob violence. Unquestionably they had been terrified when they elected Urban, but equally clearly they had decided to elect him before a threat was heard.

The first hints of an invalid election were circulated in July 1378, and the cardinals began assembling military support through the Duke of Fondi, a nobleman of the Kingdom of Naples. In the meantime, the Romans and their armed forces rallied to Urban, who had won their support by his refusal to go back to Avignon. He reinforced his position by concluding peace with Florence and lifting the interdict, to the jubilation of the people. His messenger bearing the olive branch for once made the papacy popular with the Florentines. Lines were being drawn. Guarded by the Breton mercenaries of Sylvestre Budes, who had been with Coucy in Switzerland, the cardinals moved out of Rome to the papal summer resort at Anagni. Here on August 9 they issued a Declaration to all Christendom pronouncing Urban’s election void on the ground that it had been conducted in “fear of their lives” to the sound of “tumultuous and horrible voices.” After declaring the Holy See vacant, they rejected in advance any arbitration by an Ecumenical Council on the grounds that only a Pope could call a Council. In a further manifesto, they anathemetized Urban as “Anti-Christ, devil, apostate, tyrant, deceiver, elected-by-force.”

Repudiation of a Pope was so fateful an act that it is impossible to suppose the cardinals envisaged a schism. Rather, they acted in the belief that by withdrawing in a body from the Curia, they could compel Urban to resign, or at worst depose him by force of arms. In a test of strength Budes’s company, acting as their military arm, had already defeated a company of the Pope’s Roman supporters in a skirmish in July.

The cardinals moved first to secure the support of Charles V. All the information received by the King of France was heavily weighted against Urban, and his political interest at any rate leaned in the same direction. He summoned a council of prelates and doctors of law and theology on September 11 to listen to the cardinals’ envoys make their case. After two days of deliberation, the council soberly advised the King to abstain from a precipitous decision one way or another on “so
high, perilous and doubtful” an issue. If this was hedging, it was also a well-advised caution which Charles did not follow. Though he did nothing overt, later developments indicate that he must have conveyed assurance of support to the cardinals—the major error of policy-making in his record.

After further legal preparation and efforts to obtain approval from the University of Paris, which was not forthcoming, the cardinals moved to Fondi, inside the territory of Naples, and in a conclave of September 20 elected a new Pope from among their number. Seeking, in the circumstances, a forceful and decisive man they made an incredible choice. The person elected, enthroned, and crowned as Clement VII all on the same day was Robert of Geneva, the “Butcher of Cesena.”

The election of an Anti-Pope was bound to be divisive, and the interests of the papacy might have been supposed to dictate a choice as acceptable as possible to Italians. To elect the man feared and loathed throughout Italy suggests an arrogance of power almost as mad as the behavior of Urban. Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.” Dominated by the French, the College of Cardinals was unconcerned about Italian feelings and so threatened by curtailment of its revenues in the name of reform that even the three
^*
Italian cardinals gave tacit consent to the vote. This was the end product of the exile in Avignon. Only a profound materialism and cynicism could have permitted the placing of Robert of Geneva in the chair of St. Peter. The complaints of the reformers could have had no more telling proof.