| ### CHAPTER 3: THE RETURN OF ST. PETER TO ROME, 1362-1420 ###  |

| #### 1. INFELIX ITALIA, 1305--1367 |

| #### #### WITH the death of Innocent VI in 1362 and the election of Urban V to succeed him, a new stage begins in the history of the "Avignon Captivity." There now comes to an end the only time when the papacy can really be said to have seemed stably fixed there. At no time was it any part of the policy of these Avignon popes to establish the papacy permanently outside of Italy. What had kept the first of them -- Clement V -- in France throughout his short reign was a succession of political accidents and crises. His successor, John XXII, strove for nearly twenty years -- as will be shown -- to make Italy a safe place for popes to return to and to dwell in. But he failed disastrously. And it was upon that failure that there followed the long central period of the Avignon residence -- the reigns of Benedict XII, Clement VI and Innocent VI -- when for the popes to return to Italy was something altogether outside the range of practical politics. It is this period, [ ] of enforced stable acquiescence in the exile, which the election of Urban V brings to an end. For with this pope the idea of the return to Rome now begins once again to inspire papal policy, and in 1367 Urban V actually realised the idea. #### Now, whatever the personal preference of any of these popes for residence in his own country, and whatever the pressure exercised over their choice by the various French kings, there was another, permanent, factor, beyond any power of the popes to control, which, throughout the period, was, time and again, a final deciding consideration against any movement to return. This factor was the political condition of Italy. The anxious dilemma which these popes had to face was not of the* making, although -- it can hardly be denied -- by every year of the* absence from Italy they increased the difficulties that stood in the way of the* return. It was, in essence, the dilemma as old as the Papal State itself, and indeed older still. How was the central organ of the Christian religion -- the papacy -- to be securely independent of every other power in the exercise of its authority as teacher and spiritual ruler of the Christian Church? The papacy would not be regarded as free in its action ii the popes were subjects of any particular prince. Therefore the popes must themselves be sovereigns. But once the popes are sovereigns, there is not only created a state where the ruler is elected but -- because of that state's geographical situation -- an elective sovereignty whose policies have a vital effect on all that international Mediterranean life which, in those days, is the Western world's very centre. Control of the papacy, once the pope is sovereign, is indeed a prize; and inevitably, with the establishment of the Papal State, the competition begins among the noblesse of the Papal State to capture the prize for their own families. Inevitably, too, one extra-Italian power, the emperor, is never indifferent to this competition. Constantly he intervenes -- to protect the papacy from its barons, and to seize the prize for himself, in order to make the papacy an organ of his own government. Never, for nearly three hundred years after the first establishment of the Papal State (754), are the popes so strong as temporal rulers that they can control their own barons without that assistance from the emperor for which they, yet, must pay by some new surrender of freedom. #### Then the great series of monk -- popes, of whom Hildebrand -- St. Gregory VII -- is the most famous, finds a way out of the dilemma. In a spirit of wholly unworldly zeal for the restoration of the spiritual, these popes denounce the protecting emperor's encroachment on their spiritual jurisdiction as a sin; they reject it, and defy him to do his worst. Thence come the first of the mighty wars between empire and papacy that fill the next two centuries (1074-1254). #### These popes of the Hildebrandine restoration are first of all monks and apostles; and, because they are men of holy life, moved to action by horror at the universal degradation of Christian life, they manage to use the temporal arm without prejudice to the wholeness of their own spirituality, and without any such scandal emerging as the encouragement of clerical ambition disguised as zeal for the gospel. [ ] Their successors, if good men and fighting for the best of causes, are yet not saints. They are not sufficiently careful about the purification of the means they needs must use -- law, diplomacy, the military arts, their financial system, their own characters, the characters of all their subordinates, and of their allies. And by the time when they too achieve victory over the would-be temporal lord of the world of religion, the ecclesiastical character shows evident signs of grave deterioration. #### The most serious sign of this in the papal action would seem to be that, as though the Church were a great temporal state, it is in the natural, political and military arts that the popes now chiefly put their trust. There is a difference in kind between the spirit at work in the wars of St. Gregory VII against Henry IV, and in those of Boniface VIII against Philip the Fair, or those of John XXII against Lewis of Bavaria. The golden key to the eternal dilemma, found by St. Gregory VII, has indeed, by these later successors, been dropped in the dust; and once more the Church suffers because the popes are victims of the dilemma. Are they to go back into Italy and to Rome? Then they must be certain that they can live there safe from the rebellion of their own barons and the Roman mob, and so be strong that no foreign prince will think of assailing them. There must be security that Anagni will not be repeated. The Papal State must, for the future, be something like what all states are from now on to be, a strong kingdom, in every part of which the prince really rules. Before the pope can go back to Rome a whole world of anti-papal Italian turbulence must first be conquered. There is now no other way in, but by a victorious war. #### At the time when the election of Clement V began the series of Avignon popes (1305), it was more than eight hundred years since Italy had been effectively united under a single political authority. The name was, quite truly, no more than a geographical expression. The island of Sicily formed, since 1302, the kingdom officially styled Trinacria; the southern half of the peninsula was the kingdom called, now and henceforth, Naples; an irregular central Italian territory formed the Papal State, over the greater part of which the papal rule had never been much more than a name; the rest -- Tuscany, Lombardy, Liguria, the ancient March of Verona -- was, for the most part, still the territory of a multitude of city states. Some of these communes were still republics, the great trading and maritime states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa for example, Florence again and Lucca; others had already become the prize of those great families whose names are household words, at Verona the della Scala, at Milan the Visconti, at Ferrara the Este, at Mantua the Gonzaga; and these last states were despotisms, where the princes' whims were indeed law. In the north-west corner a group of states survived of the kind more general in western Europe, feudal in their organisation, the marquisate of Montferrat, the marquisate of Saluzzo and a border state -- as much French as Italian -- the county of Savoy. #### The history of the relations of the exiled papacy to the seething political life of an Italy so divided is far too complex to be intelligible, unless the story is told in a detail which the scale of this book altogether forbids. Briefly it may be said that Sicily and Naples play very little part in that history; the King of Naples is, usually, the pope's more or less inactive ally throughout. The main problem for the popes is, first, to recover control of the Papal State that has, in effect, fallen into a score of fragments, each the possession now of the local strong man, or of some lucky adventurer; and then, simultaneously with this, to regain the old papal influence in the leading small states to the north of the Papal State, most of which are now dominated by the anti-papal, Ghibelline faction. So long as the papal faction is not dominant in these city states (whether they are still republics or, like Milan, ruled by a "tyrant") the popes can never hope for peace in their own restless frontier provinces, and especially in Bologna, the most important of all their cities after Rome. #### The turning point of the story that begins with Clement V, in 1305, is the despatch to Italy, as legate, of the Spanish cardinal Gil Albornoz in 1353. Until that great man's appearance on the Italian scene, the story is one long tale of incompetence and disaster. It is Albornoz who makes all the difference. It is the ten years of his military campaigns, and of his most statesmanlike moderation as ruler, which at last make it possible for the popes to return to Rome as sovereigns. #### The tale of disaster is simple enough to tell, in its essentials. The first chapter is the military action of Clement V in defence of his rights over the city of Ferrara and its surrounding hinterland. When his vassal, Azzo d'Este, died in 1308, it was found that the dead man had bequeathed the succession to his natural son. But Azzo had two brothers, and they disputed this son's right. Whence came a civil war and an appeal, by both sides, to "the foreigner": to Padua by the brothers, to Venice by the son. The son was victorious and Padua, deserting the brothers, went over to him. The brothers appealed to their overlord the pope. Clement thought he saw his chance to recover the old direct hold over Ferrara, always a highly important strategic point in Italian affairs, and now not unlikely to become more a Venetian possession than papal. Venice had, in fact, already won a concession of territory from her Ferrarese protege and ally. So, in August 1308, a war began between the pope and Venice which was to last for a good five years. The pope was finally victorious, and, it is important to note, in the war he used the spiritual arm at least as effectively as the temporal. For he excommunicated the Venetians, put their lands under interdict, and declared the war against them to be a crusade; all who joined in against Venice were, by the fact, enriched (supposing, of course, true contrition for their sins and reception of the necessary sacraments) with all those spiritual favours once only to be had by the toilsome business of fighting the Saracens in the Holy Land. The small states that for years had hated and feared the great republic eagerly joined the alliance. Soon Venetian commerce began to feel the effect of the boycott, and a peace movement began. But the pope inexorably demanded unconditional surrender, and at last Venice had to yield. The republic gave up all the rights it had acquired over Ferrara, agreed to pay the costs of the war, and to surrender many of the commercial advantages and treaty rights which had been one great source of its power in the north. #### The pope had won -- and now he had to provide for the government of a singularly turbulent city. The chronic weakness of these French popes showed itself immediately. Clement would trust none but the French -- until, after four years of bloodily inefficient rule under French administrators, the state of affairs at Ferrara compelled him to withdraw them and to offer the rule of the city to the King of Naples. This semi-French administration fared no better than the other; and in three years the Ferrarese had driven out the Neapolitans and recalled the Este. Except for the huge cost of the war to the papal finances, and the huge mass of anti-papal hatred in Ferrara, things were now, in 1317, where they had been before the war started. #### Clement V was as ill-advised in beginning the war of Ferrara as he was ill-starred in his victory. But at least he had for a reason the solid fact that a valuable possession of the Church was threatened -- something that was actually his, and valuable from the point of view of the independence of the Papal State. The next war, however -- of John XXII in Lombardy and Emilia -- originated in a claim of the pope that since there was no emperor he had the rights of the emperor, and so the right to interfere in the internal affairs of Milan (that was never a papal city at all), and to demand of its anti-papal ruler, Matteo Visconti, that he surrender to the pope the one-time pro-papal ruler of Milan whom he had long ago displaced and since held in prison. The demand was refused, and there followed eighteen years of war. #### The pope looked round for allies but, this time, they were not forthcoming. Then he declared the war against the Visconti a crusade (1322), and presently Milan -- which the pope had laid under an interdict [ ] -- forced out its excommunicated leader. Next, when John seemed on the point of victory, Lewis of Bavaria intervened on the Visconti side (1324), as has been told already. [ ] In 1327, however, the pope was once more master of Bologna, and he planned to make this his headquarters, and to transfer the curia from Avignon. But first the Ghibelline hold upon northern Italy must be really destroyed. The King of Bohemia [ ] now, in 1330, came to the pope's aid, and John XXII, taking up a great scheme that went back to the days of Nicholas III, [ ] proposed to carve out for him in Lombardy a new hereditary kingdom, to be held in fief of the Holy See. The Sicilian experiment was now to be renewed in the north, Italians again to be ruled by a foreigner under the papal suzerainty, for the benefit of the Papal States and the freedom of the Church (1331). But upon the news of this new combination, all parties, Guelfs and Ghibellines in all the cities, came together. Twice in the one year (1333) the papal armies were defeated; the King of Bohemia abandoned the enterprise; Bologna revolted and drove out the papal government and then, in March 1334, John's legate, at the end of his resources after these many years of struggle, fled the country. With his return to Avignon, in the spring of 1334, the last hope for John XXII's great scheme disappeared. "The return of the Holy See to Italy, bound up so closely with the annihilation of the Ghibellines, remained, for the time, all but impossible." [ ] And the war had absorbed the totality of the very high papal revenue of John's long reign. [ ] #### Pope John did not long survive this last of his Italian catastrophes. His Cistercian successor, Benedict XII, was wholly a man of peace. There was no attempt to reinforce the papal armies, nor to renew the war. The pope explicitly declared that not even to recover his states would he go to war. Peace -- of a sort -- was indeed achieved; but it was the local tyrants who, everywhere, really reaped its fruits and now consolidated their usurpations. The rot continued all through the next reign also, city after city in Romagna and the Marches falling into the hands of such powerful -- and notorious -- families as the Malatesta. #### Then, at the eleventh hour, Clement VI intervened (1350), and once more a papal army marched across Italy to assert the papal rule over the last of what remained to the pope of the Romagna. The expedition failed, as badly as such expeditions had ever failed. The Visconti, from Milan, took a hand and, in October 1350, Bologna received them as its masters. Next the pope's general, failing to receive from Clement the money to pay his troops, disbanded the army. Whereupon the Visconti immediately hired it. As of old, excommunications and interdict were decreed against the Milanese ruler, but this time they were totally ignored. Clement applied to Florence for aid, but Florence was not to be moved. Whereupon the pope reversed the policy of generations of popes, and, in a mood of anger against Florence, admitted the Visconti claims, acknowledged him as the lord of Bologna and planned with him a league against Florence, September 1352. Where this terrible series of blunders would have led no man can say, but luckily the death of the pope (December 6, 1352) ended the crisis. #### The next pope, Innocent VI, had this great advantage over his predecessors, that his own personal glory was in no way bound up with the fortunes of the Italian War. Also the Visconti was, first of all, alarmed by the possibility that the Emperor Charles IV might enter the field, and he was eager to make peace with Florence to leave his hands free for a projected attack on Venice. It was not difficult for the papal diplomacy to reconcile Florence and Milan, and Florence and the Holy See. Within four months of his election Innocent VI, by the Treaty of Sarzana (March 31, 1353), had skilfully extricated his cause from a really dangerous entanglement. And, for the task that still remained, of recovering his hold upon the states of the Church, the pope found to hand, at Avignon, the ideal agent -- churchman, statesman, and soldier at once -- the Spanish cardinal Albornoz. #### Gil Alvarez Carillo Albornoz, the greatest ecclesiastical figure of his generation, was at this time a man in the early fifties. He was a Castilian, and descended from the two royal families of Leon and Aragon. From an early age he had been destined for a career in the Church and, his university studies ended, he was named to a post at the court of Alfonso XI of Castile (1312-1350). In 1338, while still on the young side of forty, Albornoz became Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, and Chancellor of Castile. He showed himself, as archbishop, a capable and intelligent reformer of Christian life. When the war against the Saracens of Andalusia was renewed he was appointed papal legate to organise the crusade, and in a critical moment of the great battle of Tarifa (1340) it was Albornoz who rallied the wavering army of crusaders and turned defeat into victory. This was the beginning of a new career. He played a great part in the siege of Algeciras in 1342, and in the siege of Gibraltar seven years later. Then, in 1350, Alfonso XI died. His son, Peter the Cruel, promptly disgraced all his father's friends and Albornoz left Castile for Avignon. Clement VI received him generously, and at the consistory of December 1350 created him cardinal. #### Albornoz was commissioned as legate just three months after the Treaty of Sarzana was signed, and on August 13, 1353, he left Avignon for Italy. For the next ten years all turns on his action; and the result of that long activity -- though compromised more than once by the weakness of the sovereign he served -- was to make the popes' authority over their state more of a reality than it had ever been before. It was at last possible for the popes to feel secure from violence within their own frontiers. Not even the long crisis of the Schism that was to come, so shook the work of Albornoz that it needed to be done anew. To few of its servants has the papacy been more indebted than to this great Spaniard, who, very truly, was the second founder of its temporal power. [ ] #### Albornoz entered Italy with the design of recovering territories long lost, in hard fact, to the popes. His first care was to secure that no Visconti hostility should either block his communications with Avignon or sow fresh trouble by knitting alliances between the defiant usurpers of papal territory and the host of petty tyrants along the neighbouring frontiers. His diplomacy at Milan was entirely successful, and in 1354 he passed on to the first part of his task, the recovery of Rome and the province called the Patrimony, [ ] the centre and first nucleus of the popes' state. Here conditions were worse -- politically -- than in any other part of Italy. The French officials whom the French popes had obstinately continued to send as their agents, had been tyrannous, corrupt, and incompetent. Civil war between the various cities was continual, a Ghibelline was master of Rome and busy with the conquest of the rest of the province. The war went on until June 1354, when the Ghibelline, Giovanni di Vico, yielded and by the Treaty of Montefiascone (June 5, 1354) accepted the legate's terms. The Patrimony was henceforward undisputed papal territory. Albornoz proceeded to reclaim the Duchy of Spoleto, and by the end of the year, here too he had been successful. #### In 1355 he crossed the Apennines to face the more difficult work of subduing the ever-restless cities of the Marches and Romagna. There was a victory in the field in April at Paderno, and a great siege of Rimini. Fermo too was taken, and Ancona. The chief of the tyrants -- Galeotto Malatesta -- made his submission and the Parliament of Fermo, June 24, 1355, marked the definitive pacification of the Marches. #### But now Albornoz came up against the greatest difficulty so far -- Ordolaffi, the tyrant of Forli in the Romagna. Here, in July, the papal army was beaten in a pitched battle. A crusade was proclaimed against Ordolaffi, and in the first months of 1356 reinforcements of supplies and men came in to Albornoz. Nevertheless, he still failed to take his enemy's stronghold of Cesena, and through the rest of 1356 Ordolaffi successfully held his own. #### And now the cardinal began to suffer something worse than checks from the enemy. The great successes of these last two years had roused the fears of the Visconti. The hold they had established, in Clement VI's time, on Bologna was in danger; and soon, at the papal court, they were busy undermining the pope's confidence in his greatest man. Already there had been serious differences between Innocent VI and his lieutenant. The pope thought Albornoz dealt too leniently with the rebels he overcame. For the cardinal -- far more of a statesman than the pope, a realist who knew men where the pope remained in many respects what he had been most of his life, a professor of canon law -- strove always to ensure that his late enemy should become his ally, and the faithful servant of the papacy. Never did he utterly crush any of them. When they surrendered, and abandoned all their claims, Albornoz appointed them to govern, as papal officials, a part at least of the territories they had once claimed for their own. #### The intrigues of the Visconti were, in the end, only too successful. Albornoz received orders to negotiate with the rebel in Bologna the cession of the city to the Visconti. This, giving his reasons, he refused to do, and in March 1357 the Abbot of Cluny was sent out to supersede him. The abbot's diplomatic manoeuvres at Bologna failed, as Albornoz had known they must fail, and when it was clear that the pope's policy was to reinstate the Visconti in this key city, the cardinal asked to be recalled. Innocent was sufficiently disturbed to beg him to remain until Ordolaffl -- now besieged in Forli -- had been subdued. In June Cesena was taken at last, but Ordolaffi still held out, and in August Albornoz handed over his powers and sailed for Avignon. The last great act of his administration was the promulgation, at the Parliament of Fano (29 April-1 May, 1357), of the Constitutiones Aegidienses which were to remain for nearly five hundred years [ ] the law of the Papal State. #### Twelve months of disaster under the incompetent Abbot of Cluny determined the pope to reappoint Albornoz, and in the last days of 1358 the cardinal once more made his appearance in the Marches. Within six months he had overcome the formidable Ordolaffi, whom he treated with his habitual generosity. He visited the Patrimony to arrest the beginnings of new trouble, and then, in 1360, he approached once again the problem of regaining Bologna. Again the Visconti marched to its assistance, and for a good four years the steady duel was maintained. Albornoz took it; the Visconti besieged his conquest (1360); at the approach of an army of Hungarian crusaders they raised the siege, only to renew it the next year (1361). In June 1361 the Visconti forces were heavily defeated at Ponte Rosillo, and what was left of their army fled to Milan. But Albornoz realised that this was an enemy altogether too strong for his resources. He therefore negotiated an anti-Visconti league, in which the della Scala, Este, Gonzaga, and Carrara joined forces with him, and 1362 saw the war renewed more hopefully. #### And then, September 12, 1362, came the death of Innocent VI, to throw the alliance into momentary confusion and uncertainty. No one could tell which of the cardinals would be elected -- it so happened that none of them were, for the new pope was chosen from outside the Sacred College -- nor what a new pope's policy would be. The Visconti, naturally, were ready at Avignon to persuade whoever was elected, that peace, at any price, was a pope's first duty. But Innocent's successor -- Urban V -- resisted the intrigues, and, for the first year of his reign, gave Albornoz strong support. A new crusade was preached against the Visconti; they were once more defeated in battle at Solaro (April 6, 1363); and when the vanquished sought again to win by intrigue what they had failed to hold by force, the pope again stood firm. But this holy pope was no match for the wily Visconti leader. Urban V's great ideal was the renewal of the Holy War against the Turks, masters, by this, of all the Christian lands in Asia Minor and now, for the first time, possessed of a territory in Europe also. [ ] The pope dreamed of uniting against them the hordes of savage mercenaries -- the free companies -- who, no longer employed in the Hundred Years' War, were now ravaging at will through France and Italy. #### It was easy to persuade such a man that the needed first condition for the crusade was peace in Italy, and that it could not be bought too dearly. Albornoz was superseded (November 26, 1363) at the very moment when such strong forces from Germany, Poland and Hungary were coming in to him that the final victory seemed certain. Three months later -- March 3, 1364 -- the Visconti restored to the pope all the cities and fortresses they had occupied in his states, and the pope, in return, agreed to pay them the immense indemnity of half a million florins. #### The treaty was a signal victory for the wily Visconti over the political simplicity of Urban V. All the fruits of Albornoz's diplomacy and military skill through four hard years were thrown away. The pope had more confidence in the word of his treacherous enemy than in his own legate and general. Once more the incompetent Abbot of Cluny was named legate for the north of Italy, and Albornoz -- who had asked to be recalled -- was urgently begged to remain in Italy as legate to the Queen of Naples. Cut to the heart by the pope's disastrous failure to support the real interests of the Holy See in his own dominions, Albornoz yet continued his work for the suppression of the free companies. He fell seriously ill at the end of 1365 and then Urban, accepting as true charges of corrupt handling of public moneys, without hearing the cardinal, deprived him of his authority in the Romagna. Again Albornoz demanded his recall; accusations of this sort, the multitudinous hates amid which he was living, he said, were too much for him in his old age (he was now well over sixty) and he had a strong desire for more leisure for the care of his soul. #### But he was much too useful to the papacy in Italy for the pope to be willing to agree. Publicly, in the consistory of January 30, 1365, Urban declared him innocent of all these calumnious charges, and he besought the cardinal to continue as legate in Naples. Luckily for the pope, and for the papacy, the great cardinal rose above the immense disappointment of seeing his work scrapped for the profit of the Church's enemies. He remained at his post, and it was his continued skilful diplomacy, and military success against the companies, which, by the end of 1366, made at least the Patrimony of St. Peter and Rome a territory to which the pope and the curia might safely return. ####  |