SIX
‘My longing to see Rome, even now when the city is deserted and a mere shadow of its former self, is scarcely to be believed,’ Francesco Petrarch wrote to a friend a few days before Christmas 1334. ‘Seneca rejoiced in his fortune at having seen it. And if a Spaniard was capable of these feelings, what do you think I, an Italian, feel? Rome has never had, and never will have an equal.’
Petrarch was then living at Avignon in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. His father, a Florentine lawyer, had gone to Avignon with the intention of obtaining employment at the papal court and had sent his son to study at the nearby town of Montpellier in the hope that he would follow in the family profession. But Petrarch had little interest in law, and as soon as his father died he gave up his studies to satisfy what he described as ‘an unquenchable thirst for literature’. Passionately devoted as he was to the classical Latin poets, his longing to see Rome intensified with the passing years, and in 1337, when he was thirty-three and already a distinguished poet, his ambition was satisfied at last.
Rome was by then, as Petrarch had envisaged, a sad shadow of the city of the Caesars, withered and decayed, ‘a rubbish heap of history’. Within weeks of the Curia's departure for Avignon, the Lateran basilica had been destroyed in a raging fire, and ever since then, while rebuilding desultorily continued, the city had been torn by violence. Rome's patrician families, bereft of any master, fought each other in the streets. The Colonna waged war on the Orsini; the Conti and the Savelli, the Frangipani and the Annibaldi joined one side then the other; retainers and mercenaries camped amidst dusty ruins and in the deserted houses of cardinals; and priests, many of them related to the belligerent factions, joined in the quarrels and paraded through the streets with daggers and swords. Lawlessness was unbounded. Houses were invaded and looted by armed bands; pilgrims and travellers were robbed; nuns were violated in their convents. Long lines of flagellants filed through the gates, barefoot, their heads covered in cowls, claiming board and lodging but offering no money, scourging their naked backs, chanting frightening hymns outside churches, throwing themselves weeping, moaning, bleeding before the altars.
Petrarch had been warned what to expect. His patron, Cardinal Colonna, had urged him to go to Rome if only to have a romantic illusion dispelled by dismal reality. Yet, walking through the ruins in the company of various members of the
21. Francesco Petrarch, who was crowned as poet laureate on the Capitol in 1341.
Colonna family who described the city as it had been in the days of their forefathers, Petrarch was profoundly and lastingly impressed. He lamented the decay; he was distressed by the lack of knowledge and even of interest that most Romans had in their heroic past. But he told Cardinal Colonna that he found the city, despite its present neglect, even more beautiful than he had anticipated. He begged the Pope, Benedict XII, to return from Avignon and to help Rome to be recognized once more as the caput mundi. He resolved to write an epic poem in the manner of Virgil, extolling one of ancient Rome's most renowned heroes, Scipio Africanus. And he conceived an ambition to be crowned as poet on the Capitol in a ceremony reminiscent of those performed, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, in the time of the emperors.
Three years later, in September 1340, he received the hoped-for invitation to be granted the laurel crown both from the Chancellor of the University of Paris and from the Roman Senate. He did not hesitate in his choice for long. Paris had become Europe's seat of learning; but Rome, though now abandoned, had been the centre of a high culture and a remarkable civilization when the French capital had been a rough riverside settlement. Petrarch went to Rome and on 8 April 1341, in the great hall of the Palace of the Senate on the Capitol, he was summoned by a herald to appear before the people. He delivered an address in Latin, knelt to have the wreath of laurel placed upon his head, then advanced in procession to St Peter's where he laid the crown upon the tomb of the Apostle. Soon afterwards he left Rome but, as though to remind him that even poets laureate are not immune from the trials of ordinary men, he was robbed on the way and obliged to return to the city for an armed escort.
Among those who acclaimed Petrarch that day upon the Capitol was a good-looking young notary, Cola (Niccoló) di Rienzo, as ardent a votary of ancient Rome as Petrarch himself, an enthusiast who was later to boast that he was the natural son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VII, but who was in fact the child of an obscure tavern keeper and a washerwoman. Eloquent, vehement and emotional, Cola was well known in the city as an excitable connoisseur of ancient monuments and inscriptions over which he would declaim with much enthusiasm and some learning. He was a demagogic champion of the people's rights and a vociferous critic of the patrician families in one of whose violent squabbles his brother had been murdered. When, therefore, in 1343 a delegation left Rome for Avignon to request the recently elected Pope, Clement VI, to return and exercise his authority in the unruly city, it was inevitable that Cola, although not yet thirty, should accompany it. Indeed, in Avignon he emerged as the emissaries' leader, impressing the Pope with his vivid and moving account of the plight of Rome and of its people whose lives the aristocrats were making so miserable. Clement declared that he would at least visit Rome as soon as he could, and issued a bull providing for another Holy Year in 1350 and thereafter every half century. Taking personal credit for what he represented as the complete success of the mission, Cola reported
22. Cola di Rienzo, the messianic demagogue of the fourteenth century, who tried to restore Rome's greatness in her days of decadence.
his triumph to the Romans in a letter in which folie de grandeur, later to be a pronounced characteristic of his unbalanced nature, was already evident.
On his return to Rome, where he proposed that a splendid statue of the Pope should be erected in the Colosseum or on the Capitol, Cola enhanced his reputation as a champion of the people and began to see himself in the role of their deliverer from the thrall of the nobles, and as the instigator of a revolution that would restore to them the glory and the grandeur of the days of ancient Rome. The nobility treated him as a joke rather than a threat, inviting him to dinner and laughing at his grandiloquent talk and his prophesies of nemesis. But when he spoke in public, as he did one day in the Lateran basilica, wearing a kind of toga and a white hat decorated with strange symbols of gold crowns and swords, the populace listened and wondered.
Allegorical scenes depicting shipwrecks, fires and like catastrophes now appeared on the walls of the city. Notices were posted on the doors of churches with such announcements as that which appeared on S. Giorgio in Velabro: ‘In a short time the Romans will return to their good ancient government.’ Support for Cola among the people and in the guilds grew day by day: it was felt that with the help of his ally, the Pope, he might well destroy the arrogant power of the nobles who were still the unscrupulous masters of the Senate. And in May 1347 Cola was ready to strike.
On the morning of Whit Sunday he left the church of S. Angelo in Pescheria after Mass and, surrounded by his adherents and accompanied by the evidently nervous papal vicar, he marched towards the Capitol to summon a parliament. His head was bare but he was otherwise in full armour. Armed guards had been placed at intervals along the route. The ringing of church bells and the fluttering of banners above the heads of the marchers gave the procession a celebratory rather than a conspiratorial air. At the Capitol, Cola made an inspiring speech, assuring the thousands of people who had gathered there that he was prepared to die out of love for the Pope and for the salvation of the people. A lieutenant then read out a programme of revolutionary reform directed against the nobles. All the edicts were accepted by acclaim; and the powers of a dictator were conferred upon Cola who announced that he would exercise them in conjunction with the Pope's representative. He later bestowed upon himself the title of ‘Niccolò, by the authority of our most merciful Lord Jesus Christ, the Severe and Clement, the Tribune of Freedom, of Peace and Justice, and the Illustrious Redeemer of the Holy Roman Republic’.
The sudden and unexpected success of the self-styled Tribune threw the nobles into confusion. At first they condemned the illegal usurpation of authority, Stefano Colonna, commander of the militia, going so far as to declare that he would ‘throw the young fool from the windows of the Capitol’. But they did not maintain that attitude for long. A mob appeared in arms before the Colonna palace; its master fled to Palestrina; all other nobles were confined to their estates or fortresses, and then summoned to do homage at the Capitol. Intimidated, they obeyed. The Colonna and Orsini, the Savelli, Annibaldi and Conti joined with the College of Judges, the notaries and guilds of Rome in swearing loyalty to the new Republic and to its ‘Illustrious Redeemer’.
Having enlisted a large military escort of both cavalry and infantry and appointed a personal bodyguard, Cola and his colleagues issued a series of decrees on all kinds of political, judicial and financial matters. Exiles were recalled to Rome; the poor received generous assistance; nobles were ordered to remove the fortifications from their palaces and to take down the coats of arms from their walls. Opponents of the regime were severely punished alongside malefactors, adulterers and gamblers. Corrupt judges were exposed in the pillory with their crimes inscribed on mitres placed upon their heads; a criminal monk was beheaded; so was a recalcitrant noble of the house of Annibaldi. A former Senator, Jacopo Stefaneschi, found guilty of expropriation, was hanged on the Capitol.
Cola was not content, however, with the restoration of a stern though just Republic in Rome. His hazy vision extended to an Italian confederation with Rome as its capital, a national brotherhood of the whole of ‘Sacred Italy’ which would bring peace and order to the entire world. He sent out envoys with silver wands to all the principal cities and rulers in the peninsula, inviting them to send representatives to a national parliament in Rome. And so strong was the hope for a transformation in the melancholy state of spiritual and political affairs in Italy, so powerful the influence which the very name of Rome still inspired, that Cola's pretensions were taken seriously and in many cases with enthusiasm. Respectful replies were received from Milan and Venice, from Florence and Siena, from Genoa, Lucca, Spoleto and Assisi. Twenty-five cities agreed to send delegations to the parliament in Rome. The Pope sent a silver casket engraved with his own arms as well as with those of Rome and of Rome's new Tribune. From Avignon also came warm encouragement from Petrarch: ‘Prudence and courage be with you… Everyone must wish Rome good fortune. So just a cause is sure of the approval of God and of the world.’
Cola himself was convinced that he was under the personal protection of the Holy Spirit. His behaviour became increasingly flamboyant. He rode about the city clothed in gold-trimmed silk on a white horse, a banner bearing his assumed coat of arms flying over his head. On the festival of Saints Peter and Paul he rode to St Peter's on a charger, clad for this occasion in green and yellow velvet, carrying a steel sceptre in his hand. Fifty men with spears guarded him. The sword of Justice was borne before him. Blaring trumpets and ringing cymbals announced his approach, while an attendant scattered among the people pieces of gold and coins engraved for the Tribune by Florentine masters. On the steps of St Peter's the clergy greeted him with a rendering of Veni Creator Spiritus.
The festival of 1 August, the day chosen for the opening of the national parliament and the celebration of the unity of Italy, was marked by the most extravagant ceremonies. Customarily upon this day the chains of St Peter were displayed to the faithful; but before this solemnity was observed, Cola di Rienzo had himself created a knight in the Lateran, appearing in front of the assembled congregation cleansed by immersion in the ancient green basalt basin in the Baptistery where the Emperor Constantine was said to have washed away his paganism. The next day, now clothed in scarlet, Cola presented himself to the people as ‘Candidate of the Holy Spirit, the Knight Nicholas, the Severe and Clement, the Zealot for Italy, the Friend of the World, the Tribune Augustus'. He announced by decree that the Roman people now held jurisdiction over all other peoples as they had done in the ancient past; that Rome, the foundation of Christendom, was once more the head of the world; that all the cities of Italy were free cities with the rights of Roman citizenship, and that, since he and the Pope were now arbiters of the world, the rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire must appear before him and a papal representative to have their fates decided. Raising his sword in the air and pointing it dramatically in three directions, he then called out, ‘This is mine!’ Although not clear as to the exact purport of these words, the populace cheered loudly as a flourish of trumpets brought the proceedings to a close.
Enthusiasm for the Tribune's policies was, however, already waning fast. The Pope, disconcerted by Cola's grandiose claims, expressed regret at his earlier support. The cities of Italy, fearing the loss of their independence, began to reconsider their endorsement of a national brotherhood under so flamboyant and perhaps deranged a leader. Men who had worked with him and had at first been fascinated by his Messianic pronouncements doubted his ability to put his visionary theories into practice. The Roman people regarded their former hero with growing uneasiness, as he had himself crowned with wreaths of plants from the Arch of Constantine and, on the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, compared himself to the Virgin's son. A monk, who had been among his most fervent admirers and who now broke down and wept, expressed the general disappointment and disillusionment.
Encouraged by the Pope who dispatched a legate to Rome to take proceedings against Cola, the Roman nobles now prepared for revenge. Cola struck first by inviting several of the Colonna and Orsini to a grand banquet on the Capitol, and then arresting them after one of the guests, Stefano Colonna, had made a sardonic reference to the gorgeous attire of their host. But Cola shrank from further punishment. While the populace waited for news of their execution, and the bells in the campanili above the prison walls tolled in mournful expectation of their death, Cola pardoned them on condition that they swear loyalty to the laws of the Republic.
On their release the nobles immediately broke their oath and within a month they and the troops they had raised were rampaging throughout the countryside beyond the walls of the city. Inside Rome, the Pope's legate had arrived at the Vatican Palace where he summoned Cola to appear before him. The Pope's anger with the presumptuous Tribune had been inflamed by Cola's recent announcement that the whole of ‘Sacred Italy’ must reconstitute itself as a new Roman Empire and by his evident ambition to become Emperor himself. Neither the French Pope nor the French cardinals had any wish to see the restoration of the Roman Empire which would threaten the independence of the papacy and might well entail the return of the Curia to Rome from Avignon. The papal legate was consequently enjoined to be uncompromising with Cola.
But Cola was not to be intimidated. He arrived at the Vatican wearing chain-armour and a silver crown. In his hand he carried a sceptre and, to the astonishment of the legate, over his mail he had put on a pearl-embroidered dalmatic such as Emperors wore at their coronation.
‘You have sent for me,’ he is reported to have announced with haughty curtness. ‘What do you want?’
‘I have a message from our Lord, the Pope.’
‘What message?’
The impatient arrogance of Cola's demeanour so flustered the legate that he apparently lost the power of speech, and stood dumbfounded in the hall. So the Tribune ‘contemptuously turned his back and left the palace with a curious smile’. At the foot of the steps he mounted his horse and galloped off to fight the aristocrats.
On the cold morning of 20 November 1347, in torrential rain, the opposing forces advanced upon each other outside the gate of San Lorenzo. Cola's troops, mostly infantry still staunchly loyal to his Republic, were commanded by scions of noble houses who had quarrelled with their families. The aristocrats' army of some four thousand infantry and six hundred horsemen was led by old Stefano Colonna, his sons and grandsons and various members of the Orsini, Caetani and Frangipani families in unaccustomed alliance. The clash was short and vicious. At first it seemed that the aristocrats would triumph as they rushed upon Cola's men, incensed by the deaths of the 20-year-old Giovanni Colonna, whose horse fell into a pit, and of his father who was thrown from his saddle. Cola himself, shivering with fear at the onslaught and at the sight of his banner sinking into the mud, cried out in terror, ‘O God! Hast Thou deserted me?’ But his men soon rallied, and before long the nobles' forces were in headlong flight. They left behind them no less than eighty once-feared and respected aristocrats whose bodies, stripped naked, lay on the field until the afternoon, to be insulted by the Roman mob.
Cola, his confidence restored, an olive wreath on his head, led his troops in triumph to the Capitol where, with a theatrical gesture, he wiped his clean and naked sword upon his surcoat before returning it to its sheath and addressing his victorious soldiers. The next day he went out with his young son beyond the gate of San Lorenzo and there, with bloody water from the pool where Giovanni Colonna had fallen, he christened him ‘Knight Lorenzo of the Victory’, obliging his cavalry leaders to dub the boy with their swords.
This heartless act and his craven behaviour on the field of battle lost Cola much of his remaining support. It was said that his character had entirely changed, that he lived in his palace in the greatest luxury, surrounded by wastrels who fawned upon him, flattering his insane vanity, and that he was spending money like water. Certainly he raised taxes to an almost unprecedented height to pay his troops. Yet even this might have been forgiven him for the sake of his past, had not the Pope issued a bull against the Roman people, detailing numerous charges against Cola as a criminal and a heretic, and instructing them to depose him. With the Holy Year so close they dared not offend the Pope and risk losing the profits the pilgrims would bring. And so, bereft of popular support, plagued by terrifying dreams, by fainting fits and giddiness, Cola decided to abdicate. On 15 December 1347 he came down from the Capitol in tears. Some of the people who watched him depart cried too; but no one came forward to prevent his leaving or even to wish him well. Soon afterwards the papal legate made his formal entry into the city, took possession of it in the name of the Church, and announced that the Jubilee of 1350 would take place as planned.
For weeks before this Holy Year began, the roads leading into Rome had been crowded with pilgrims who camped on the verges, importuned by those hundreds of pedlars and tricksters, mendicants and guides, pickpockets, acrobats and musicians who always materialized in Rome when strangers with money appeared. According to Pope Clement VI's biographer, as many as five thousand people entered the city every single day and were lodged and fed there, complaining of the cupidity of the Romans but finding plenty to eat, at a price. The Pope himself remained at Avignon; so whereas the pilgrims of 1300, including the Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani and, perhaps, Dante, had been able to receive the papal blessing from Boniface VIII standing in the loggia of the Lateran, those of 1350 had no such gratification. Nor were they able to admire the Lateran itself which was again collapsing in ruins. Indeed, most of the great Christian as well as the imperial monuments of Rome were now in a deplorable condition, neglected, scarred by war, or shattered by earthquake. The Black Death which had ravaged western Europe two years before, and had killed well over half of the inhabitants of Florence, had not taken so dreadful a toll in Rome as in other large cities in Italy, a mercy commemorated by the marble steps leading to the church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli.1 But the earthquakes of 9 and 10 September 1348 had rocked the city. St Paul's had tumbled in ruins, as had the basilica of the SS. Apostoli.2 Several towers had collapsed; the gable of the Lateran had crashed to the ground; blocks of masonry had fallen into the arena from the upper floors of the Colosseum. And little of this damage had been repaired. ‘The houses are overthrown,’ wrote Petrarch, appalled by the state of the city. ‘The walls tumble to the ground, the temples fall, the sanctuaries perish… The Lateran lies on the ground, and the Mother of all churches stands without a roof and exposed to wind and rain. The holy dwellings of St Peter and St Paul totter, and what was until recently the temple of the Apostles is a shapeless heap of ruins to excite pity in hearts of stone.’
The laws of the city, Petrarch added, were ‘trodden underfoot’; and pilgrims took care to go about in groups, for isolated visitors were in constant danger of robbery and even of murder. One cardinal, in a far from uncommon instance, was shot at from a window as he made his way to St Paul's, the arrow piercing his hat, and thereafter he never ventured out without a helmet and a coat of mail under his habit. Once the Jubilee was over the lawlessness became more scandalous than ever. Nobles, employing brigands as household troops, took possession of their rioni and ruled them as petty tyrants. The papal vicar was driven out of the city, and any pretence of central government was at an end. A group of citizens, encouraged by the Pope, assembled in S. Maria Maggiore on the day after Christmas 1351 and decided to insist upon the appointment of an elderly and respected Roman as Rector. This man, whose installation was ratified by the Pope, was Giovanni Gerroni. But he had not exercised his wide-ranging powers for long when, beset by conspirators plotting his downfall, he declared himself unequal to his task and left Rome, taking the contents of the public treasury with him. Once more the great families, the Orsini and Colonna prominent among them, took control; once more the populace rose in revolt, driving one Senator, Stefanello Colonna, from the city, and burying another, Berthold Orsini, beneath a heap of stones which were hurled at him as he came down the stairs from the Capitol; and once again a popular leader was elected to save the Republic. But the new dictator, Francesco Baroncelli, was no more effective than Giovanni Gerroni had been. And the Romans began to regret the fall of the Tribune, Cola di Rienzo, who, for all his faults, had once brought order to their lives and a hope, if brief, of renewed glory.
After escaping from Rome, Cola had spent two years high up in the fastnesses of the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome, living as a penitential hermit with an austere and conservative sect of Franciscan anchorites known as the Fraticelli. From the Abruzzi he had wandered further north across the Alps and had made his way to the court of Charles IV, King of Bohemia, whom he had pressed to go to Rome as the city's saviour, undertaking to return there first himself as imperial vicar, in the way that John the Baptist had prepared the way for Christ. Elaborating upon this theme, Cola enjoined King Charles to picture himself being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope, to envisage Cola as being created Duke of Rome, and to imagine the three of them, Emperor, Pope and Duke, as representing the Holy Trinity on earth. Wary of his strange visitor and his ‘fantastic dreams’, the King reported Cola's arrival in Prague to the Pope, who instructed the Archbishop of Prague to detain him in the strictest custody. In July 1352 the Archbishop declared that Cola was guilty of heresy and must be handed over to the papal plenipotentiary. The next month Cola arrived in Avignon where, soon afterwards, Pope Clement died.
Clement's successor, Innocent VI, a former professor of civil law at Toulouse, regarded Cola in a more favourable light than his predecessor had done. He thought that his return to Rome, demanded by Petrarch and now also by the Romans themselves, might be used to the Church's advantage. Cola's experience of Roman affairs might well be of assistance to Cardinal Gil Alvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, a Castilian grandee, who had recently been appointed Vicar-General of Italy. Pope Innocent, therefore, ordered Cola's release from prison where he had lain excommunicated and under sentence of death. And so it was that on 1 August 1354 immense crowds thronged the streets of Rome to welcome back their former Tribune. From windows and rooftops decorated with banners and with flowers, he was cheered by excited people as he advanced towards the Capitol.
But Cola was no longer the handsome figure who had left Rome seven years before. Now pale and fat, he had lost his gift of fiery eloquence; his enthusiastic fervour had given way to dreamy introspection, occasionally broken by fits of hysteria in which laughter alternated with uncontrollable tears. Once established in power, he behaved with that tyrannical excess that had characterized his last months as Tribune in 1347, raising money by arbitrary taxes and every other means at his command, even seizing citizens and selling them for the ransoms which could be extorted from their families. Soon not only the nobles but the people, too, were bent upon his downfall.
One morning in October, through the window of his bedroom overlooking the Piazza Mercato, came the shouts of the mob: ‘Popolo! Popolo! Death to the traitor who has imposed the taxes!’ Finding that the guard and his servants had all fled, Cola hastily put on his armour and the splendid clothes he had worn as Tribune, snatched up the banner of Rome and went out on to the balcony. At first, he tried to address the people but their shouts carried his words away. Then, unfurling the banner, he pointed to the gold letters,Senatus Populusque Romanus. But the shouts grew louder and more insistent: ‘Death to the traitor!’ Stones were hurled and an arrow pierced his hand. Then the mob set fire to the wooden fortifications surrounding the palace. As the flames took hold, Cola, having hurriedly shaved off his beard, donned an old cloak and blackened his face, rushed down the stairs through the smoke into the courtyard. Shouting ‘Death to the traitor!’ like the rest, he tried to escape unrecognized in the crowd. But he had forgotten to remove his rings and bracelets, and, catching the glint of these, someone shouted, ‘This is the Tribune!’ as he grabbed the fugitive by the arm. Cola was dragged towards the bottom of the steps by the statue of the Madonna where Berthold Orsini had been stoned to death, and the crowd fell silent. Cola crossed his arms upon his chest. He was now a pathetic figure, the edges of his magnificent grey silk, gold-trimmed dress clearly visible beneath his tattered cloak, his legs still clad in purple stockings. For a time that seemed so protracted that his medieval biographer described it as a full hour, no one moved against him. Then one of his own former officials came forward with a sword and thrust it through his body. His head was cut off, his body stabbed, and his mangled corpse dragged away to therione of the Colonna where it was strung up outside a house near the church of S. Marcello.3 For two days it was left dangling there, to be stoned by street-boys.
Almost every day in these years, sitting by the door of the convent of S. Lorenzo in Panisperna,4 could be seen a fair-skinned elderly woman begging for the poor and gratefully raising to her lips the offerings that were made to her. The daughter of a Swedish judge and widow of a Swedish nobleman to whom she had borne eight children, Birgitta Godmarsson, foundress of the Brigittines, had felt herself drawn to Rome by a vision in which Christ had appeared before her, commanding her to leave immediately for the city and to remain until she had seen both Pope and Emperor there. As she went upon her spiritual and charitable rounds in Rome from church to crumbling church and hospital to ruinous hospital, she had further visions: both Jesus and His Mother spoke to her, strengthening her faith in the eventual salvation of the city and the return of the Pope to it. Around the house where she lived, in what is now Piazza Farnese, stretched the charred shells of burned-out buildings, piles of rotting refuse, deserted palaces, stagnant swamps, fortresses abandoned by their wealthy owners who had gone to live on their estates in the Campagna, hovels occupied by families on the verge of starvation, churches rendered derelict by the long absence of the Curia. Pilgrims took home with them stories of a gloomy, quiet city whose silence was broken only by the howling of dogs and the occasional shouts of a mob.
In Avignon the popes remained deaf to the calls which the Romans made to them, heedless of the prayers which the saintly Birgitta Godmarsson uttered so fervently and of the letters which Petrarch continued to write into his old age. In 1362, however, Guillaume de Grimoard became the sixth of the Avignon popes as Urban V. Encouraged by Charles IV, now Holy Roman Emperor, who offered to accompany him, he recognized the need to return to Rome, not only for the sake of the neglected and decaying city but also for the papacy itself which was now in danger at Avignon both from the mercenary bands roaming throughout western Europe and from the English who were fighting the French in wars which were to last for a hundred years. Pope Urban also hoped to bring about a reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches and considered that negotiations with the patriarch of Constantinople could be conducted more satisfactorily if he were in Rome. In 1367, therefore, Pope Urban travelled across the Alps, knelt in prayer before the grave of St Peter and took up residence in the stuffy, dismal rooms of the Vatican which had been prepared for him. His visit, though, was brief. He found the city oppressive and even more dilapidated than he had feared. The clergy did not encourage an understanding with Constantinople, and he felt that he could more easily carry on the role of mediator between England and France from Avignon. So, having supervised the removal of the Apostles’ heads to the Lateran and seen them enclosed in the silver busts he had ordered as reliquaries, he went back to France in 1370, ignoring St Birgitta's warning that he would die if he abandoned Rome and fulfilling her prophecy by expiring at Avignon within a few months of his return.
Six years later, his successor, Gregory XI, the last of the Avignon popes, fearing that the Church and her estates in Italy would be lost to the papacy for ever were he not to return, made up his mind to take the Curia permanently back to Rome. He was encouraged and strengthened in his decision by a remarkable young woman who was to become patron saint of Italy.
Caterina Benincasa was the youngest of the several children of a dyer from Siena. A spirited, pretty girl, she at first surprised and then dismayed her parents by showing no disposition to marry and by resisting all efforts, including beatings, to change her mind. She insisted upon becoming a Dominican nun, a member of the tertiary order who take simple vows and may continue to live at home. She spent long hours in prayer, experienced a succession of ecstatic raptures and ultimately
23. Pinturiccio's painting of the canonization of St Catherine of Siena, in 1461.
the pain of the stigmata. Her holiness, her ascetism, the long letters and prayers which she dictated, being unable to write, attracted wide attention and a group of faithful followers, the Caterinati, who were to accompany her on her travels. The first of her fateful journeys took her to Avignon where, passionately devoted to the cause of peace within the Church and Italy, and urgently preaching a crusade against the Muslims, she begged Pope Gregory to fulfil his intention of leaving France and returning to Rome. Towards the end of 1376 he made up his mind to follow her advice and the dictates of his own conscience.
Pope Gregory sailed up the Tiber by night and came ashore by St Paul's on the morning of 16 January 1377 to the cheers of the crowd and the sound of trumpets. As recorded on the reliefs decorating his tomb in the church of S. Francesca Romana he was accompanied by numerous cardinals on magnificently caparisoned horses. The artist has depicted him riding beneath a baldacchino with St Catherine by his side and with Rome in the form of Minerva coming forward to meet him. Above the Porta S. Paolo, which is shown as a tottering ruin, the papal chair drifts through the clouds and an angel bears the papal tiara and the keys of St Peter. The scene so charmingly evoked marks, however, not the end of a sad period in the history of Rome, but the beginning of an age of even more bitter discord. For Pope Gregory, though not yet fifty, was already an elderly-looking and dying man. He survived for little more than a year, and his death provoked a papal election of extraordinary animosity.
The Roman people had made it clear, through deputations, addresses and speeches in the various rioni, that the next pope must be an Italian and preferably a Roman; and when the cardinals entered the hall of conclave in the Vatican a large crowd shouted menacingly, ‘Romano o Italiano lo volemo!’ To protect the cardinals, militiamen had been ordered to surround the Vatican, and the Borgo had been barricaded. As a warning against violence, a block and headsman's axe had been placed in St Peter's; and the treasures of the Church had been removed to Castel Sant' Angelo.
The precautions seemed well justified to the nervous cardinals who were informed before entering the curtained compartments into which the hall had been divided that the building had recently been struck by lightning. It was now invaded by the captains of therioni who reminded the cardinals of the Romans' demands. One cardinal, braver than the others, replied that the conclave must be left undisturbed to reach its own decision. As though provoked by this, the shouts from the mob outside grew louder and more threatening. Meanwhile the floor of the hall splintered as lances were pushed up between the beams from below where firewood and tinder were being piled so that the whole place could be burned down should the voting prove unfavourable.
The first ballot showed a majority in favour of Bartolomeo di Prignano, the Archbishop of Bari, whc, although an Italian, was a Neapolitan, a subject of the House of Anjou which still reigned in Naples, and a candidate, therefore, not unacceptable to the French. But a rumour spread abroad that the Roman Cardinal Francesco Tibaldeschi had been chosen. Shouting their congratulations, hundreds of people burst into the conclave to greet their supposed new pope who was persuaded by his fellow-cardinals to act the part to save them all from being hurled out of the windows. And so, while the aged Tibaldeschi sat trembling in the papal chair with mitre and mantle, apprehensively acknowledging the vociferous plaudits of his supporters, the other cardinals escaped to a nearby chapel where the election of the Archbishop of Bari was confirmed. At length Tibaldeschi admitted the imposture, and the uproar in the hall grew more tumultuous than ever. But when it became known that the new pope, who took the title of Urban VI, was at least an Italian if not a Roman, the protests quietened down, and the people grudgingly accepted the election.
The French cardinals, however, did not. Exasperated by Urban, who behaved in so high-handed and yet confused a manner that some of them maintained his elevation had driven him mad, they protested that his election was invalid, since it had been conducted under duress, and declared, on behalf of a majority of the Sacred College, that he was deposed and that Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, was Pope instead. The Great Schism had begun.
The new anti-Pope, the lame and wall-eyed Clement VII, returned to Avignon. The rough and energetic Neapolitan, Urban VI, remained in Rome. And Catherine of Siena, broken-hearted by the division of the Church and by her failure to reform its degenerate clergy, died in April 1380 in Via S. Chiara and was buried in S. Maria sopra Minerva.5
One of those who mourned her comforted himself with the thought that she had been spared the sight of the further degradation of Rome and of the Church which, under Urban's successor, another Neapolitan, the clever and avaricious Boniface IX, celebrated a third Jubilee in 1390. A monetary expedient rather than a holy festival, this Jubilee was financed by the dispensation of indulgences on an unprecedented scale and brought to Rome a stream of pilgrims. But the corruption of the Church was no less distressing to them than the sight of the city, now little more than a decayed provincial town. Goats nibbled amongst the weed of the piazzas and in the overgrown rat-infested ruins of the Campo Marzio; cattle grazed by the altars of roofless churches; robbers lurked in the narrow alleys; at night wolves fought with dogs beneath the walls of St Peter's and, with their paws, dug up corpses in the nearby Campo Santo. ‘O God, how pitiable is Rome!’ an English visitor lamented. ‘Once she was filled with great nobles and palaces, now with huts, thieves, wolves and vermin, with waste places; and the Romans themselves tear each other to pieces.’
Abandoning in despair their attempts to form a strong and stable political state, the Romans allowed the grasping Boniface to assume full control of the city, to turn the Vatican as well as the restored and enlarged Castel Sant' Angelo into a stronghold, to rebuild the Senatorial Palace as a papal fortress, and to appoint his relations and their friends to positions of power and profit. On his death, fear of the King of Naples led to the election of yet another Neapolitan pope, Innocent VII, against whom the Romans roused themselves to revolt in an uprising that ended in humiliating retreat. And after the death of Innocent VII, the election of the Venetian, Gregory XII, who seemed disposed to try to come to terms with the Pope in Avignon, led to the invasion of Rome in 1413 by the King of Naples who was determined not to lose his influence through the ending of the Great Schism.
At about this time a fresh attempt to end the Schism, which was dividing Europe into rival camps, was made by a council of the Church at Pisa. The council's solution was to depose both the Avignon and the Roman pope and to elect in their place the Cretan, Petros Philargos, who took the title of Alexander V. He promptly adjourned the council whose decision was, in any case, not recognized by either of his rivals. There were now three popes instead of two, each of whom excommunicated the others.
A renewed attempt to disentangle the imbroglio was now made by the Emperor Sigismund who summoned another Church council at Constance. By this time a new pope had appeared upon the scene in the unlikely person of Baldassare Cossa, successor of the pope chosen at Pisa, Alexander V, whom he was widely supposed to have murdered. Sensual, unscrupulous and extremely superstitious, Baldassare Cossa, who took the title of Pope John XXIII, came from an old Neapolitan family and had once been a pirate and then a dissolute soldier.
In mutually suspicious alliance with the King of Naples, Pope John established himself in Rome where, in breach of their understanding, the King attacked him on 8 June 1413, driving him out of the city. He fled with his court along the Via Cassia beside which several prelates died of exhaustion and the rest were robbed by their own mercenaries. Yet again, the city behind them was plundered. The Neapolitan soldiers, unchecked by their commander, set fire to houses, looted the sacristy of St Peter's, stabled their horses in the basilica, ransacked sanctuaries and churches, and sat down amidst their loot to drink with prostitutes from consecrated chalices.
Pope John XXIII, who had fled to Florence, went on to the council at Constance where he found himself accused of all manner of crimes, including heresy, simony, tyranny, murder, and the seduction of some two hundred ladies of Bologna. After escaping from Constance in the guise of a soldier of fortune, he was recognized, betrayed and brought back to face the council which deposed both him and the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII and which, once the Germans and English had united with the Italians to keep out the French, elected a new Italian Pope, Martin V.
He came from the Roman house of Colonna which, for all its power over the past three centuries, had not before produced a pope. And he returned to Rome in 1420 under a purple baldacchino, jesters dancing before him, the people shouting their welcome long into the night as they ran through the streets with flaring torches. He was to reign in Rome for over ten years, and was to be succeeded by two other Italian popes of rare qualities, the Venetian Eugenius IV and the Ligurian Nicholas V. There was hope that at last a new age was dawning.