XII
THERE HAD BEEN ENMITY between the papacy and Bernabo Visconti, the tyrant of Milan, ever since Bernabo came to power, even though there had been times, during strained truces in between the periods of open war, when both parties suspended further prosecution of their causes. When the legates from Innocent VI arrived in Milan in 1361 with the bull of excommunication, Bernabo forced them to eat it—parchment, seal, silken cord and all—and poured such abominable streams of abuse over them that the Archbishop of Milan attempted to admonish him—a thing which the prelates of his kingdom were extremely unwilling to do, for when Bernabo gave way to his wild rages he spared no one, priest or layman, man or woman. He roared at the Archbishop that here in his own land he was Pope, emperor and God Himself, for here God could do nothing without Bernabo’s permission. . . .
His contemporaries were hardened by the everyday sight of cruel punishment for both the guilty and the innocent, and by all that they heard of acts of violence and the injustice and vengeance of both greater and lesser tyrants: but in spite of this, Bernabo’s cruelty seemed quite satanic. Bernabo was a great hunter, and had quartered his five thousand hunting dogs on his downtrodden subjects. Even the monasteries were compelled to take their share of the hounds. If the animals died he had the wretched keepers whipped or clubbed—sometimes to death. Any peasants or citizens who were suspected of having broken his hunting laws were tortured, blinded, or murdered.
He feared neither God nor man, but depended on his boundless cunning as a politician and his strength as a war lord, certain that he knew all the tricks and finesse of the art of war. His brother Galeazzo, lord of Pavia, was just as godless, but less talented. His wife, Beatrice della Scala of Verona, was worldly and almost as free from moral restraint as her lord and husband.
When Urban V was elected Pope, Bernabo sent his ambassadors to him with good wishes—this was merely a polite routine which all the Christian princes observed. But the Pope reminded the ambassadors that their lord was excommunicated and could not be received into the Church again before he had repented of his sins, and taken steps to repair the robberies and unjust actions he had carried out against the papacy. When Bernabo took no notice of the Pope’s complaints, the Pope, as lord of the Papal States, declared war against Visconti and instituted a league against him. He invited the German Emperor, the Kings of Hungary and France and Queen Joanna of Naples to join him.
Bernabo Visconti counted on the smouldering resentment of the Pope’s Italian subjects towards the behaviour of the French legates who were sent to rule the Papal States for him. In many places this resentment had become violent hatred—it would not be difficult to get the city states and provinces which were the vassals of Rome to rise and cast off a yoke which had become intolerable during the Pope’s absence in Avignon. In 1371 the new papal legate, Pierre d’Estaing, had taken Perugia. The Tuscan republics, which were surrounded by provinces belonging to the Papal States, feared for their independence. Visconti was not exactly a pleasant ally, but if the coalition led by the Pope should succeed in vanquishing Bernabo Visconti, their own situation might become more than difficult.
At the beginning of 1372 Catherine wrote a letter to the Cardinal Legate, d’Estaing, who was at that time in Bologna. “To the very dear and worthy Father in Christ Jesus, from Catherine, God’s servants’ servant and bondwoman, in His precious blood, who longs to see you bound by the bonds of love as you are bound by your work in Italy. . . . This news was a cause of great joy to me, for I am sure that you will be able to achieve much for the glory of God and the welfare of the Church. . . I would wish to see you bound by the bonds of love, for you know that without love grace can achieve nothing.” She writes earnestly to d’Estaing of the love which is the bond between the soul and its Creator, between God and man—that love which nailed God-made-man to the cross. Love alone is able to put an end to discussion, unite those who are divided, enrich those who are poor in virtue; for love will bring to life all the other virtues, give peace, put an end to war, give patience, strength and perseverance in all good and holy causes. “It never tires, cannot be divorced from the love of God and our neighbour, either by suffering or injustice, either by derision or injuries; it cannot be moved by impatience, nor by the joys and pleasures which this unreal world can offer us.
“I exhort you”, the young Mantellata writes to the Cardinal, “to take upon yourself these bonds, this love, so that you may listen to the sweet Truth who has decided your destiny, given you life, form, and order, and has taught you the dogmas of truth.” She commands him to work with all his might to clear away the disgraces and miseries of which the world is full, and which are caused by sin and offend God’s name. He is to use the power given to him by the Vicar of Christ in the way she says: without love he cannot do his duty. But in order to love God with the whole of one’s heart one must tear all self-love out of the heart, and with it, all submission to one’s ego and the world. For these two kinds of love are opposites, so that self-love divorces us from God and our neighbour. The one kind of love brings life, the other death, the one light and the other darkness, the one peace and the other war. Self-love makes the heart shrink so that it cannot even contain its own ego; and certainly not its neighbour. It causes slavish fear which hinders a man from doing his duty, either from ignorance or from the fear of losing his position in the world. So Catherine advises the Cardinal to take courage and strength in Jesus Christ, to be zealous and to raise the banner of the holy cross. She signs this letter in the same way as all her other letters: “Dolce Gesù, Gesù Amore.”
In another letter she writes of the same subject: “A soul which is full of slavish fear cannot achieve anything which is right, whatever the circumstances may be, whether it concern small or great things. It will always be shipwrecked and never complete what it has begun. Oh, how dangerous this fear is! It makes holy desire powerless, it blinds a man so that he can neither see nor understand the truth. This fear is born of the blindness of self-love, for as soon as a human being loves himself with the self-love of the senses he learns fear, and the reason of this fear is that it has given its hope and love to fragile things which have neither substance nor being and vanish like the wind. . . . ” She begs him to learn from the spotless Lamb who feared neither the wickedness of the Jews nor the devil, neither shame, nor scorn, nor abuse—who did not flinch from the shame of death on the cross. “Seek for nothing but the honour of God, the salvation of the soul and the service of the beloved Bride of Christ, the Holy Church. . . Christ who is the Wisdom of the Father sees who receives His blood, and who, through his own fault, does not; and because this blood is spilled for all He suffers for the sake of all who refuse to receive it. It was this longing [the longing to save every soul] which was His suffering from His birth until His death, but when He had given His life this longing did not cease—but it no longer took the form of a Cross. . . . Take courage,” she says, “act like a man: is it not a sad thing to see us at war with God through the countless sins which great and small people commit, and through rebellion against His Holy Church—to see us bear arms against each other, when all the faithful ought to volunteer to fight against the heathen and the false Christians?” Her last words to the Cardinal are “Peace, peace, peace, dearest Father, think of yourself and all others, and try to persuade the Holy Father to worry more about the destruction of souls than the destruction of towns, for God considers souls worth more than towns.”
Pierre d’Estaing was one of the best of the legates who were sent to Italy, and he took to heart the advice he was given by the young woman whom people had come to consider as a saint, armed by God with special grace and powers. After vanquishing Bernabo Visconti he made peace with him, and he won the house of Este over to the Holy See, by acknowledging their sovereignty in Ferrara as vassals of the Pope, to whom they owed a yearly tribute. The peace with Milan however was not of long duration, and in 1374 Cardinal d’Estaing was recalled. Guillaume de Noellet was sent in his place,
as legate to Bologna; and he was a much less worthy prelate.
While d’Estaing was still in Italy the country had been forced to receive yet another representative of the papal government, Gerard du Puy, abbot of Marmoutiers, and a nephew of Pope Gregory XI. He had known St. Birgitta. It seems as though he greatly desired to win the friendship of the Sienese prophetess. Catherine’s letters to the Nuncio are written as answers to letters he has sent her. She begins by expressing her gratitude because he has remembered a creature so unworthy and miserable as herself, but then she continues by answering his question: “With regard to your first question about our loved Christ on earth [the Vicar of Christ], I believe and consider that he would do good in the eyes of God if he hastened to right two things which corrupt the Bride of Christ. The first is his too great love and care for his relations. There must be an end of this abuse at once and everywhere. The other is his exaggerated gentleness, which is the result of his lenience. This is the cause of corruption among those members of the Church who are never admonished with severity. Our Lord hates above all things three abominable sins, covetousness, unchastity and pride. These prevail in the Bride of Christ, that is to say in the prelates who seek nothing but riches, pleasure and fame. They see the demons from hell stealing the souls which have been put into their keeping, and are completely unmoved, for they are wolves who do business with divine grace. Strict justice is needed to punish them. In this case exaggerated mercy is in fact the worst cruelty. It is necessary for justice to go hand in hand with mercy to put a stop to such evil.” Nevertheless she is full of hope that the Bride of Christ will retain her beauty, even though she may be persecuted, when she frees herself from the abuses which shake her to the very roots. With regard to herself, poor unworthy little daughter, she is willing to take the burden of his sins upon herself. “We will burn your and my sins together in the beloved fire of love which shall consume them.” She advises him to repent sincerely of his sins, and begs him to work not only for the temporal well-being of the Church, though this is surely important too, but above all to drive these wolves from the fold, these devils in human shape who think of nothing but their own sinful pleasures and their criminal love of pomp and power. Finally she begs his forgiveness for her boldness, and asks him to pray for her.
But Gerard du Puy continued as he had begun, and drove the Italians to ever-growing exasperation. He was an unpleasant example of Gregory’s nepotism, which Catherine had chastised so openly in her letters. The helmet would have suited him better than the mitre, but with his uncle’s protection the Church offered him the best career. It was chiefly his fault that war broke out a little later between Florence and the papacy. He was made Cardinal in 1375, and in 1377, when the schism occurred, he took the side of Robert of Geneva against the true Pope and died a schismatic.
In the winter of 1373-1374 there was once again open enmity between the Pope and the Viscontis. Their attacks against the clergy and monastics in the archbishopric of Milan were so outrageous that the head of the Church was forced to intervene. But by then Catherine’s influence in everything concerning religion and politics was so generally acknowledged that when Bernabo Visconti sent ambassadors to Siena to see if he could win the goodwill of the Republic in his dispute with the Pope, he gave them orders to make contact with the dyer’s daughter, and if possible to get her support. Catherine sent him a letter in reply, penned by Neri di Landoccio. She addresses the excommunicated tyrant as her venerable father in the beloved Jesus Christ, and begs him to return and take his share of the blood of God’s Son. Can any heart be so hard that it does not melt when it beholds the love which Divine Goodness has towards it? “Love, love, love, and remember that you were loved even before you were created. For God who sees Himself, passionately loves the beauty of His creation, and He created it because His love is boundless, to give it eternal life and to allow it to enjoy the indescribable blessedness which He Himself possesses.” No power is worth having unless one has power over one’s own soul. “This city [the city of the soul] is so strong, you are so powerful within it, that neither devil nor man can take possession of it without your consent.” The soul is given this strength by the spotless Lamb, Jesus Christ—and Catherine with passionate eloquence reminds the tyrant of Our Lord’s sacrifice for the whole of mankind upon the cross. But the blood of Christ is in the hands of the Church, therefore he who cuts himself off from the Vicar of Christ, or rebels against him, is a fool. “I beg you therefore not to continue in rebellion against him who is your supreme overlord. Do not listen to the whispering of the devil that your duty is to attack the bad shepherds within the Church. . . Our Lord will not permit it.” He alone has the right to sit in judgment over His unworthy servants—and we must continue to turn to them to receive the sacraments which God has given to His Church to administer for the sake of our salvation. Catherine, who was willing to offer herself to torture and death if God would receive her as a peace offering for the reformation of the Catholic Church, believed as firmly as St. Birgitta—and all other saints—that there is no salvation outside the Church.
To see the Bride of Christ regain her original beauty, to see the Church washed clean of all that its unworthy servants had soiled it with, became more and more the very core of Catherine’s struggle to achieve perfect unity with Jesus Christ.
Her letter to Bernabo Visconti ends with a passionate exhortation to him to listen to the Holy Father’s call to a crusade against the infidel. Gregory XI had called the Christian princes of Europe to a holy war against Islam, which had conquered all the one-time Christian lands of Asia Minor, Africa and even the south-west corner of Europe. The infidel now stood by the Bosphorus and threatened Byzantium—it seemed as though it was only a matter of years before the Constantinople of the Patriarchs would share the fate of the birthplaces of St. Paul, St. Athanasius and St. Augustine, and the crescent, which had fluttered over the birth- and burial-places of Christ for hundreds of years, advance further and further into the Christian world.
In the nineteenth century a certain school of historians had a tendency to write of the crusaders as bloodthirsty barbarians, whose superstitious beliefs and lust for plunder made them declare war against a more advanced culture. It is true that many of the Christian princes and knights who took up the cross and travelled over sea and land to fight the “infidel dogs” often behaved like barbarians. It is equally certain that the material culture of Europe in the Middle Ages was more primitive than the material culture of the Orientals—that is to say the culture of the upper classes in the oriental countries. The fact that these Eastern governments, in spite of their superiority in science, the arts and handicrafts, turned countries which had been well-populated and rich under the East Roman Empire into deserts, presumably meant as little according to these historians as it did to Catherine. For her they were only the enemies of the cross; wherever they had power Christian men and women were made slaves, both physically and spiritually. Birgitta of Sweden could deplore the fact that brutal and reprobate soldiers were sent to free the tomb of Christ: she had been the wife and mother of soldiers and knew from her own experience many of the conditions which the virgin from Siena had seen all her life, but would not allow herself to be intimidated by. She knew better than Birgitta of the ravages of the oriental pirates along the Italian coasts, and all the coasts of the Mediterranean; she knew the fate of the captured Christians enslaved by the Mohammedans. It seemed to Catherine that when some thoughtless soldier took the cross to stop this disastrous influx, this must be regarded as a step which, with God’s mercy, might be the beginning of his return to God. As the flames of war consumed more and more of her beloved Tuscany and the whole of Italy, Catherine reasoned, somewhat simply perhaps, that as these men, princes, condottieri, and ordinary men-at-arms, seemed to love war, was it not better for them to march against the infidel and those who persecuted Christ and the Christians, than to wage civil war against their Christian brothers?
Catherine wrote also to Beatr
ice della Scala, Bernabo’s proud wife. Again the Seraphic Virgin wrote of the unreality of all worldly things, which finally reduce one’s own soul to nothing, and of the happiness of those who love the realities—God and the blood of Christ. It seems that Catherine had thought of visiting Milan to work for the salvation of this terrible couple. But nothing came of the idea.
In the spring of 1374 she was called to Florence. The Dominican order was to hold its Chapter General there at the beginning of the summer, and she was ordered to appear at it. Obviously rumours of the Sienese Mantellata had come to the ears of the highest authorities of the order—and the rumours were varied. Was she a saint, or was she a hypocrite and cheat? The Master General of the order, Fra Elias of Toulouse, had determined that he would see for himself what sort of person this Catherine Benincasa was.
XIII
CATHERINE AND HER COMPANIONS, who included some of the Mantellate who were her closest friends, travelled through districts ravaged by war. The house of Salimbeni was waging war against its own countrymen. The Sienese had taken prisoner and executed one of the clan, the robber baron Andrea di Niccolo Salimbeni, together with sixteen of his band. His relations took up arms against the justice which had dared to lay hands on one of them, and the districts around Siena were made to pay The terrible scourge of the age, the bubonic plague, had appeared again. The death rate did not reach its highest point until later in the summer, but people were already dying of the plague in Florence when Catherine and her companions arrived in the town about May 20.
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