A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Behind the trances were extreme austerities of fasting and deprivations of sleep and comfort. The more extreme in such practices, the more a person was removing himself from material life. (According to La Tour Landry, “To eat once a day is the life of an angel; twice a day the right life of men and women; more than that the life of a beast”). Catherine was reported to have lived on hardly more than a little raw lettuce, and if forced to eat, to turn her head away and spit out what she had chewed or cause herself to vomit lest any food or liquid remain in her stomach. She had practiced asceticism since the age of seven, when she saw her first visions, perhaps not unconnected with being the youngest of 23 children. Thereafter she stubbornly secluded herself from the worldly commotion of a large family in a dyer’s household, and dedicated her virginity to Christ.

  The ecstasies of the union were very real to Catherine, as they were to many women who escaped the marital bond by entering religious life. Christ confirmed her betrothal, Catherine wrote, “not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy flesh, for when he was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his holy body.” Taught to read at the age of twenty by a Dominican sister of noble family, Catherine read the Song of Songs over and over, repeating in her prayers the sigh of the bride, “May he kiss me with the kiss of his mouth,” and was rewarded when Jesus appeared to her and bestowed upon her “a kiss which filled her with unutterable sweetness.” After her prolonged prayers to be fixed in “perfect faith” and to become an instrument for the salvation of erring souls, Jesus took her for his bride in a ceremony performed by his Holy Mother and attended by St. John, St. Paul, and St. Dominic, with music from David’s harp.

  As a tertiary or non-cloistered member of the Dominicans, Catherine threw herself into the care of humanity, seeking out prisoners, the poor, and the sick, tending the plague victims of 1374 among whom two of her siblings and eight nieces and nephews died. In an extreme episode she sucked pus from the cancerous sore of a hospital patient as if acting out the mystics’ insistence on direct contact with the wounds of Christ as the source of spiritual experience.

  In the words of the German mystic Johannes Tauler, Catherine’s contemporary, it was necessary “to press one’s mouth to the wounds of the crucified.” The blood that flowed from the wounds, from the thorns, from the flagellation, obsessed religious fanatics. It was a sacred bath to cleanse sin. To drink it, to wash the soul with it was salvation. Tauler dwelt on the subject for so long in his thoughts that he felt he must have been present at the source. He calculated the number of lashes and knew that Jesus had been tied so tightly to the column that the blood spurted from his nails; that he had been whipped on the back and then on the chest until he was one great wound. St. Brigitta in her revelations saw his bloody footsteps when he walked and how, when crowned with thorns, “his eyes, his ears, his beard ran with blood; his jaw distended, his mouth open, his tongue swollen with blood. His stomach was pulled in so that it touched his spine as if he had no more intestines.”

  Catherine herself hardly ever spoke of Christ, her bridegroom, without mentioning blood—“blood of the Lamb,” “the keys of the blood,” “blood filled with eternal divinity,” “drinking the blood of the heart of Jesus.” Sangue was in every sentence; sangue and dolce (blood and sweet) were her favorite words. Words poured from her in a torrent unhindered by need of pen. Even her devoted confessor, Raymond of Capua, a cultivated nobleman and future General of the Dominican Order, sometimes fell asleep under the redundant flow. That so much of Catherine’s talk was preserved was owed to the astonishing capacity of medieval scribes to record verbatim the prolix speech of the period. Speech was customarily filled with repetition to allow time for the listener to absorb what was being said. Information and learning were still largely acquired through listening to heralds, sermons, orations, and reading aloud, and for that very reason, scribes, before the age of printing, were far better trained to take down the spoken word than at any time since.

  As word spread of Catherine’s visions and fasting, people came to see her in her trances. Between raptures, in moods of earthly and warmhearted common sense, she settled civil quarrels and converted notorious rascals to penitence and faith. She acquired fame and worshipful disciples to whom she felt as a mother, calling them to her, as she put it, “as a mother calls a child to her breast.” They in turn called her Mamma. From 1370 on, she took an increasing part in public life, exhorting rulers, prelates, town councils, and individuals in effusive letters of political and spiritual advice.

  Her influence lay in her absolute conviction that God’s will and hers were one. “Do God’s will and mine!” she commanded Charles V in a letter urging crusade, and to the Pope in the same tone she wrote, “I demand … that you set forth to fight the infidels!” Next to reform, “holy sweet crusade” was her incessant theme. Gregory himself, in all the letters of his pontificate, was an advocate of crusade, not only for defensive war against the Turks, but as a means of reconciling France and England and draining the mercenaries from Europe. While Catherine pleaded for peace at home, crying, “Woe, woe, peace, peace, for God’s sake …,” she implored all the potentates no less heartily to visit war upon the infidel. For her, crusade had an exalted religious value in itself. This was Christians’ work for the greater glory of God, and the more earnest its advocates, like Catherine and Philippe de Mézières, the more ardent their summons to war.

  “Be a man, Father, arise!… No negligence!” she hectored the Pope. Hawkwood was likewise exhorted to rise against Christ’s enemies instead of tormenting Italy with misery and ruin. In a letter addressed to “Messer Giovanni condottiere,” delivered in person by Father Raymond, she wrote, “Therefore I pray you sweetly, since you delight so much in making war and fighting, make no more war upon Christians because it offends God.” Rather, she told him, go to fight the Turks so that, “from being the servant and soldier of the Devil, you might become a manly and true knight.”

  Catherine’s favorite admonition was “Be manly!” In her devotions, the Virgin Mary hardly appeared, all Catherine’s passion being absorbed by the Son. Yet in worldly affairs she often appealed to feminine influence, writing not to Bernabò Visconti but to his strong-minded wife, Regina; not to the King of Hungary but to his dominant mother, Elizabeth of Poland. Of the Duc d’Anjou, whom she envisioned as leader of the crusade, she begged that he (of all people) despise the pleasures and vanities of this world and unite himself to the cross and the passion of Jesus in holy war. When she visited him and the Duchess in person, the Duke, who among his other ambitions was quite prepared to lead a crusade, accepted the mission.

  In Avignon she was oppressed by the atmosphere of sensuality and “stench of sin,” and by the curiosity of the grand ladies who poked and pinched her body to test her trances after communion or even pierced her foot with a long needle. To the Pope, whom she addressed in a familiar version of Holy Father as “my sweet papa” (dolce babbo mio), she poured out all her themes in endless letters and in public and private audiences in which Raymond of Capua acted as interpreter because Catherine spoke in the Tuscan dialect and the Pope in Latin. Let him begin reform through the appointment of worthy priests, she demanded, let him pacify Italy not by arms but by mercy and pardon, let him return to Rome not with armed guard and sword but with cross in hand like the Blessed Lamb, “for it seems to me that Divine Goodness is preparing to change furious wolves into lambs … and I will bring them humiliated to your bosom.… Oh, Father, peace for the love of God!”

  All the suffering under the “furious wolves” of her time spoke through her voice, and all the craving for religious reform. For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions. In Germany in 1372 papal tax-collectors were seized, mutilated, imprisoned, some even strangled, and the clergy of Cologne, Bonn, and Mainz pledged themselves not to pay the tenth demanded by Gregory XI. In parishes wrecked by the mercenaries, the tithes reduced priests to penury. Many deserted, leaving villages without communio
n or sacraments, and empty churches to rot or be used for barns. Some priests supplemented their too meager pay by occupation as taverners or horse-dealers or other work disallowed for the clergy as inhonesta.

  In the upper ranks, property and worldly offices absorbed the prelates, to the neglect of care for the diocese. Because the Church could offer to ambitious men a career of power and riches, many who entered it were more concerned with material than with spiritual reward. “Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither the money.”

  Conscious of its failings, the Church issued streams of orders reproving profane dress, concubinage, lack of zeal, but it was tied to the things of Caesar and could not reform at the root without destroying its vested interests. It had become dependent on the financial system developed in the exile at Avignon, and while everyone acknowledged the need of reform, the hierarchy was bound, in the nature of things, to resist it. Even Catherine in a moment of clarity knew reform could not come from within. “Do not weep now,” she said to Father Raymond when he burst into tears at some new scandal for the Church, “for you will have still more to weep for” when in the future not only laymen but clerics would rise against the Church. As soon as the Pope attempted reform, she said, the prelates would resist, and the Church “will be divided, as it were by a heretical pestilence.”

  Catherine herself was never heretical, never disillusioned, never disobedient. The Church, the papacy, the priesthood, the Dominican order were her home, and their sanctity her foundation. She scolded, but from within the fold. Disenchantment among the clergy itself produced the great heretics, Wyclif and, in the next generation, Jan Hus.

  Catherine’s appeals gave Gregory XI the strength to resist the pressures exerted by the French King and cardinals against return of the papacy to Rome. Charles V insisted that “Rome is wherever the Pope happens to be,” and sent his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy, to try to dissuade the Pope. In the same effort, the cardinals argued against going to Rome just when the Kings of France and England, “so long divided by a war which destroys the whole world,” were conducting peace parleys that required his aid. Gregory was unmoved. Despite somber presentiments, he believed that only his presence could hold Rome for the papacy, and when Rome promised submission if he would return, he could postpone no longer.

  Confounding all expectations of his French birth and feeble health, he departed in September 1376 despite a fearful storm that damaged his ships as if in warning. At the last moment his aged father, Count Guillaume de Beaufort, in the unrestrained physical gesture of the time, threw himself prone before his son in a plea to stay. Gregory stepped over his parent, murmuring unfilially from the Psalms, “It is written that thou shalt trample on the adder and tread down the basilisk.” One of his bishops, going by land, wrote, “Oh God, if only the mountains would move and block our way.”

  Owing to the insecurity of the region, Rome was not entered until January 1377, and fifteen months later, in March 1378, Gregory died. In the interval he had struggled as helplessly as his predecessor, Urban V, in the turmoil of Italian politics. Beset by difficulties and ceaselessly goaded by the French cardinals to return to Avignon, he was said to have agreed, but, feeling the approach of death, deliberately waited to die in Rome in order that the election of a new Pope should take place there and keep the papacy where it belonged. His worthy intention precipitated the crisis that was to damage the medieval Church beyond repair.

  The schism had nothing to do with doctrine or religious issue. Sixteen cardinals were present in Rome for the conclave, of whom one was Spanish, four were Italian, and eleven were divided between two hostile French parties of Limousins and Gallicans. Since neither French party was prepared to elect a Pope from the other, hectic canvassing for votes took place in which Robert of Geneva, leader of the Gallicans, was active even before Gregory was dead. When the necessary two-thirds majority could not be assembled for any one of the cardinals, sentiment gathered for an outsider as a compromise candidate who could ensure that neither French party would triumph over the other. He was Bartolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari and Vice-Chancellor of the Curia, a Neapolitan of lowly birth, short, stout, swarthy, hard-working, and apparently unassuming. Through long service in Avignon he was considered a pliable protégé by both French groups. Although a strong opponent of simony and corruption, with the excitable temper of the south Italian, he was thought by the cardinals, as their social inferior, to be governable and, above all, amenable to a return to Avignon.

  On Gregory’s death, the citizens of Rome, seeing at last a chance to end the reign of French popes, sent a deputation of important citizens to the Vatican to urge the election of a “worthy man of the Italian nation,” specifically a Roman. The College contained two Romans, Cardinal Tebaldeschi of St. Peter’s, “a good saintly man” but aged and infirm, and Cardinal Orsini, considered too young and inexperienced. Both were unwanted by their colleagues for the very reason that they were Roman.

  Clearly expecting trouble on this score, the French cardinals moved their households with all their valuables, plate, jewels, money, and books, and the papal treasury, into the Castel Sant’Angelo, and demanded security measures by the city to assure public order and protect them against violence and insults. Taking no chances, Cardinal Robert of Geneva donned a coat of mail; the Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna dictated his will. Because the cardinals gave no pledge of a Roman, rumor spread that a French-dominated Pope would mean return of the papacy to Avignon. Public excitement rose and threatening crowds gathered as the cardinals, surrounded by “many strong soldiers and warlike nobles,” entered the Vatican for the conclave. Beneath the windows they could hear the populace howling, “Romano lo volemo! [We want a Roman!] Romano! Romano!” The specter of the deaths of Cola di Rienzi and Jacob van Artevelde, lynched by the mob, rose to the surface.

  In fear for their lives, the cardinals resorted to dressing the trembling old Cardinal Tebaldeschi, over his protests, in the miter and cope to be exhibited on the throne as elected Pope for long enough to allow his colleagues to escape from the Vatican to fortified places outside the city. As the bells of St. Peter’s pealed amid clash and confusion, word of the hoax was learned. The crowd’s shrieks turned to “Non le volemo!” and “Death to the cardinals!” Swords were drawn and drunks who had broken into the papal cellars grew rough and uproarious.

  Next day, April 9, the cardinals announced the election of the Archbishop of Bari as Urban VI and, under heavy guard, escorted him on a white palfrey amid “angry faces” on the traditional ride to the Lateran. Notice of the election and enthronement was conveyed to the six cardinals remaining in Avignon, with no suggestion of possible invalidity by reason of intimidation. On the contrary, in the first weeks of the new reign the cardinals treated Urban’s pontificate as so much an accomplished fact that they showered him with the usual petitions for benefices and promotions for their relatives.

  Papal power, raising him to authority over the high-born cardinals, went instantly to Urban’s head. From a humble unspectacular official totally unprepared for the papal throne, he was transformed overnight into an implacable scourge of simony, moved less by religious zeal than by simple hatred and jealousy of privilege. He publicly chastised the cardinals for absenteeism, luxury, and lascivious life, forbade them to hold or sell plural benefices, prohibited their acceptance of pensions, gifts of money, and other favors from secular sources, ordered the papal treasurer not to pay them their customary half of the revenue from benefices but to use it for the restoration of churches in Rome. Worse, he ordered these princes of the Church to restrict their meals to one course.

  He berated them without tact or dignity, his face growing purple and his voice hoarse with rage. He interrupted them with rude invective and cries of “Rubbish!” and “Shut your mouth!” He called Cardinal Orsini a sotus (half-wit), and moved to strike
the Cardinal of Limoges, only stopped by Robert of Geneva, who pulled him back, crying, “Holy Father, Holy Father, what are you doing?” He accused the Cardinal of Amiens, when acting as mediator between France and England, of accepting money from both sides and prolonging discord to keep his purse filled, causing that Cardinal to rise and with “indescribable haughtiness” to call His Holiness a “liar.”

  Carried away by self-assertion, Urban plunged into the secular affairs of Naples, announcing that the kingdom was badly governed because the ruler, Queen Joanna, was a woman, and threatening to put her in a nunnery or depose her because of failure to pay the dues of Naples as a papal fief. This gratuitous quarrel, which he pursued with venom, was to provide a base for his enemies.

  The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that the delirium of power had made the Pope furiosus et melaneholicus—in short, mad. Rages and insults might have been borne, but not interference with revenue and privilege. When Urban flatly refused to return to Avignon as arranged, the crisis came. Rather than try, as once before with an obstreperous Pope, any half-measure requiring him to sign “Capitulations” of his authority, the cardinals decided on the fatal course of removal. Since there was no procedure for ousting a Pope for unfitness, their plan was to annul the election as invalid on grounds that it had been conducted under duress from mob violence. Unquestionably they had been terrified when they elected Urban, but equally clearly they had decided to elect him before a threat was heard.