The History of the Renaissance World (93 page)

That level of defiance was a little over Urban V’s head, and so he appealed to emperor Charles IV, hoping that Charles would provide him with the actual force necessary to drive the man out.

Charles IV agreed, entering Italy in May of 1368 and marching on Milan. Although he was not popular in Italy, he could easily have mustered the other northern Italian cities against the Viscontis; Florence, Padua, and Mantua were all worried about the growing Visconti power. Instead, the emperor allowed the Visconti brothers to buy him off with a good-sized tribute. He then tried to base himself in Lucca, but the people of Lucca, indignant over his pacification of the Visconti tyrants, refused to welcome him.
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Charles IV gave up and went home. Without his support, Urban V lost heart; he was overwhelmed and powerless in Italy, and he began to think longingly of Avignon.

The cardinals knew of his wish to go home; so did most of Rome. The Franciscan nun Birgitta of Vadstena, well known for her mystical revelations, visited the papal court and told the pope that she had received a direct word from the Mother of God. “I led Pope Urban by my prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit from Avignon to Rome . . . ,” she declared, speaking in Mary’s voice. “What did he do to me? He turns his back on me. . . . An evil spirit has brought him to this by deceiving him. He is weary of his divine work and wants his own physical comfort.” If Urban V returned to Avignon, Birgitta prophesied, he would die within the year.
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But Urban was sixty years old, tired and fed up, and perhaps death within the year already seemed likely. He returned to Avignon in September, and died in November after a brief and sudden illness.

His successor was Gregory XI, nephew of Urban’s predecessor Clement VI. Gregory XI was forty-two years old, energetic and politically savvy. He knew that the papacy was in danger of losing the Papal States unless it returned to Rome, but he was aware that he was no more capable of dealing with the Visconti than Urban had been. So, from Avignon, he worked to unify a league of Lombard cities against the Visconti.

This went horribly, disastrously wrong. Gregory XI had hoped that Florence would join the anti-Visconti league, but the papal legate he sent to finalize the alliance swapped sides and took up with the Viscontis. The Florentines, already suspicious of the pope’s motivations, rallied Siena, Lucca, and Pisa against the Papal States. Almost immediately, the conflict mutated into Italians against French, the defense of the homeland against a foreign pope; in ten days, eighty cities and towns joined this antipapal alliance.
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81.1 War in Italy

The nasty, complicated, bloody war that followed saw multiple switchings of sides, including that of the English mercenary John Hawkwood, who fought in turn for Florence, Milan, and Gregory XI; he was in the pope’s pay, though, when he led his men in a sack of the Italian city of Faenza that ended in massacre of the civilians, rape of every woman under the age of sixty, and wholesale looting. A Sienese chronicle says that Hawkwood himself killed at least one young woman, and that a priest with the expedition stood at the gates of Faenza, calling out to the rape victims to submit because “this is good for the army.” A year later, a similar scene unfolded at Cesena, where the pope’s legate Robert of Geneva led an attack in which at least four thousand unarmed citizens were killed: “women, old and young, and sick, and children, and pregnant women, were cut to pieces at the point of a dagger.” Robert himself was heard to shout out, during the attack, “I will have more blood! kill all!—blood, blood!”
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By 1377, both Gregory XI and the antipapal league were sickened by the war, ready to negotiate a peace. On August 21, they agreed to a cease-fire; Gregory XI was still in the middle of messy negotiations with Florence on the one hand and Bernabò Visconti on the other when he died, in March of 1378.

He had come to Rome for the negotiations and drew his last breath there, which finally gave the Roman cardinals the chance to elect an Italian pope. Shouting down their French colleagues, they elevated the Italian-born Bartolomeo Prignano as Pope Urban VI. But the French cardinals, indignant over the new pope’s first months in office (he refused to even visit Avignon, and he was appalled by the luxury in which the cardinals lived; one of his first acts was to decree that they could have only one course at dinner), soon revolted. They left Rome en masse, reassembled at Fonti, declared Urban VI deposed, and elected an antipope: Robert of Geneva, leader of the massacre at Cesena.
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He took the papal name Clement VII and went back to Avignon. The exile of the papacy to France had now developed into something even more disruptive: a dual papacy, one at Rome and one at Avignon, a schism that would last for decades. “King Charles of France acknowledged Clement to be the true Pope,” says Jean Froissart, “as did also the King of Spain, the Earl of Savoy, the Duke of Milan, the Queen of Naples, and the whole of Scotland; but Germany declared itself in favor of Urban, and also Lord Lewis of Flanders. . . . Thus was the Christian world divided, and churches set at variance.”
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Back in Rome, Urban VI (“of a choleric and obstinate disposition,” Froissart says, “and very haughty in the execution of his office”) was not covering himself with glory. He deposed all of the cardinals who had taken part in the election of Clement VII (the “antipope,” according to the Romans) and then quarreled with their replacements. Accusing them of conspiracy, he ordered them tortured and executed; some he had sewn into sacks and drowned.
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He was too occupied with his cardinals to pay much attention to the Italian cities, and warfare blazed out across the north again.

With both pope and German king occupied by their own troubles, the Italian cities ramped up their quarrels with one another. Genoa and Venice, always rivals, restarted their own series of battles; and in 1380, the Venetians destroyed most of the Genoese fleet in a sea battle at Chioggia, a blow from which Genoa never fully recovered. In Milan, Bernabò Visconti’s nephew, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, plotted the overthrow of his uncle; in 1385, he launched an armed raid that took both Bernabò and his two sons prisoner, and declared himself Lord of Milan. When he offered the Milanese drastic tax cuts in return for their support, they acclaimed him at once and forgot about Bernabò. The notorious tyrant died seven months later, still under guard, after eating a big meal sent to him by his nephew.
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Gian Galeazzo then went on a kingdom-building spree, capturing Verona in 1387 and Padua in 1388. Venice and Florence remained free of his reach, but a reappearance of the plague in 1390 weakened both cities. They could not mount any sustained attack on the new Lord of the Realm of Milan. And one after another, Bologna, Assisi, Perugia, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca came under his control.
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Chapter Eighty-Two

Bad Beginnings

Between 1369 and 1381,
the kings of France and England come of age,
and the common people revolt

T
HE
E
NGLISH AND THE
F
RENCH
were still fighting.

In the summer of 1369, Charles V of France was assembling ships and men for an invasion of England. Edward III responded with immediate force. His chief general, his oldest son Edward the Black Prince, was suffering from chronic dysentery and was unable to ride (or even walk for long), so Edward III sent his third son John of Gaunt with four thousand men over to raid and plunder the land around Calais.

Charles delayed his invasion. Instead, he turned his army, commanded by his younger brother the Duke of Burgundy, to meet the English raiders. A series of battles along the northeastern coast began.

At first, the fighting was inconclusive. The Black Prince arrived, carried on a litter, to help his brother; not long after his arrival, he discovered that the English-held town of Limoges had surrendered, at the request of the French, without a fight. He was, says Froissart, “much vexed” and insisted on laying siege to retake it.

English sappers, tunneling under the walls, brought a large chunk of the defenses down without too much trouble. But the Black Prince had worked himself up into a towering fury at the town’s inhabitants, who had been so quick to open the gates to the French. “It was a melancholy business,” writes Froissart. “All ranks, ages, and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge, that he listened to none of them: all were put to the sword wherever they could be found.”
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The Black Prince had been afflicted with spells of irrational rage and frightening hallucinations along with his dysentery symptoms, suggesting that he may have been suffering from porphyria.
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Whatever the cause of his viciousness, three thousand defenseless civilians died at Limoges. Charles V, hearing the news, was “sadly grieved” and equally angry. Taking measure of the popular indignation against the English, he appointed the professional soldier Bertrand du Guesclin to be the new chief commander of the French offensive, with the title Constable of France: a position generally awarded to a nobleman rather than to a common-born soldier.
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And now the tide of the war turned in favor of the French.

The Black Prince, growing progressively sicker, finally went back to England. Edward III announced that the would personally arrive in France to lead the English army, but he was now into his sixties and showing some signs of early senility; he never left England. In 1372, the English fleet was defeated at La Rochelle, by a joint Genoese-Castilian fleet fighting under the French flag; by the following year, the constable Guesclin had recovered almost of all of the land between the Loire and the region of Gironde for France. Only Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Calais remained in English hands. The English now possessed the same French lands they had claimed in 1337, before the war had begun. Badly weakened, disheartened, Edward III negotiated a two-year truce with Charles V.
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“During the period of the truce,” writes Froissart, “on Trinity Sunday, 1376 . . . the Lord Edward of England, Prince of Wales . . . departed this life in the palace of Westminster.” The Black Prince was forty-six years old; his chronic illness, whether it was dysentery complicated by kidney failure or porphyria, had finally killed him.

Edward himself was in poor health, and he immediately made clear that the Black Prince’s nine-year-old son Richard would become his heir. The following year, King Edward III suffered a series of strokes and died. “He had been a glorious king,” notes the contemporary
Chronica Maiora
, “benevolent, merciful and magnificent. . . . [But] I must briefly note that, just as at the beginning of his reign all the popular successes one after another made him renowned and famous, so, as he moved towards old age and went down the sky to his sunset . . . many unfortunate and unlucky disasters mushroomed in their place.”
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Young Richard was crowned in London, lavishly; a castle had been built in Cheapside, with wine flowing from its turrets and through the aqueducts of the city for the commoners to drink. There was some expectation in the capital that the king’s oldest surviving son, John of Gaunt, might challenge the child’s right to the throne; Richard II was now the first English king to inherit the crown without his father’s first holding the throne. But John of Gaunt refrained from objecting.
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