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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.
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