A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The first hints of an invalid election were circulated in July 1378, and the cardinals began assembling military support through the Duke of Fondi, a nobleman of the Kingdom of Naples. In the meantime, the Romans and their armed forces rallied to Urban, who had won their support by his refusal to go back to Avignon. He reinforced his position by concluding peace with Florence and lifting the interdict, to the jubilation of the people. His messenger bearing the olive branch for once made the papacy popular with the Florentines. Lines were being drawn. Guarded by the Breton mercenaries of Sylvestre Budes, who had been with Coucy in Switzerland, the cardinals moved out of Rome to the papal summer resort at Anagni. Here on August 9 they issued a Declaration to all Christendom pronouncing Urban’s election void on the ground that it had been conducted in “fear of their lives” to the sound of “tumultuous and horrible voices.” After declaring the Holy See vacant, they rejected in advance any arbitration by an Ecumenical Council on the grounds that only a Pope could call a Council. In a further manifesto, they anathemetized Urban as “Anti-Christ, devil, apostate, tyrant, deceiver, elected-by-force.”

  Repudiation of a Pope was so fateful an act that it is impossible to suppose the cardinals envisaged a schism. Rather, they acted in the belief that by withdrawing in a body from the Curia, they could compel Urban to resign, or at worst depose him by force of arms. In a test of strength Budes’s company, acting as their military arm, had already defeated a company of the Pope’s Roman supporters in a skirmish in July.

  The cardinals moved first to secure the support of Charles V. All the information received by the King of France was heavily weighted against Urban, and his political interest at any rate leaned in the same direction. He summoned a council of prelates and doctors of law and theology on September 11 to listen to the cardinals’ envoys make their case. After two days of deliberation, the council soberly advised the King to abstain from a precipitous decision one way or another on “so high, perilous and doubtful” an issue. If this was hedging, it was also a well-advised caution which Charles did not follow. Though he did nothing overt, later developments indicate that he must have conveyed assurance of support to the cardinals—the major error of policy-making in his record.

  After further legal preparation and efforts to obtain approval from the University of Paris, which was not forthcoming, the cardinals moved to Fondi, inside the territory of Naples, and in a conclave of September 20 elected a new Pope from among their number. Seeking, in the circumstances, a forceful and decisive man they made an incredible choice. The person elected, enthroned, and crowned as Clement VII all on the same day was Robert of Geneva, the “Butcher of Cesena.”

  The election of an Anti-Pope was bound to be divisive, and the interests of the papacy might have been supposed to dictate a choice as acceptable as possible to Italians. To elect the man feared and loathed throughout Italy suggests an arrogance of power almost as mad as the behavior of Urban. Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.” Dominated by the French, the College of Cardinals was unconcerned about Italian feelings and so threatened by curtailment of its revenues in the name of reform that even the three* Italian cardinals gave tacit consent to the vote. This was the end product of the exile in Avignon. Only a profound materialism and cynicism could have permitted the placing of Robert of Geneva in the chair of St. Peter. The complaints of the reformers could have had no more telling proof.

  “Oh, unhappy men!” cried Catherine, voicing the Italian reaction, “you who were to nourish yourselves at the breast of the Church, to be as flowers in her garden, to shed forth sweet perfume, to be as pillars to support the Vicar of Christ and his bark, as lamps for the enlightenment of the world and diffusion of the faith … you who were angels upon earth, have turned to the way of devils.… What is the cause? The poison of selfishness destroys the world.” If her rich imagery was mixed, it was also a measure of the reverence felt for the great ones of the Church and the corresponding sense of betrayal. With the native common sense that often broke through her verbal rhapsodies, Catherine gave no credit to the cardinals’ claim of having elected Urban under duress.

  Far from resigning, Urban created an entirely new College of Cardinals within a week and hired a company of mercenaries under one of the first Italian condottieri, Alberigo da Barbiano, to maintain his See by force of arms. War on schismatics gave Catherine a new holy cause. “Now is the time for new martyrs,” she encouraged Urban. “You are the first who have given your blood; how great is the fruit you will receive!” And so it proved, initially. In a battle against the forces of his rival, commanded by Sylvestre Budes and the Count of Montjoie, Clement’s nephew, Urban’s forces were victorious. They regained the Castel Sant’Angelo and took prisoner the two enemy captains, with the result that Clement had to flee Rome and take refuge with Joanna of Naples. So hostile was the populace, however, crying “Death to the Anti-Christ! Death to Clement and his cardinals! Death to the Queen if she protects them!” that he was forced to leave. With no safety for him anywhere in Italy, he returned with his cardinals to Avignon in April 1379.

  With one Pope and College of Cardinals in Rome and another Pope and College in Avignon, the schism was now a terrible fact. It was to become the fourth scourge—after war, plague, and the Free Companies—of a tormented century. Since the election at Fondi, every sovereign power had taken sides, often with divisive effect between ruler and clerics, or clerics and people. Charles V recognized Clement officially in November 1378 and issued a proclamation forbidding obedience to Urban by anyone, cleric or lay, within the realm. He rejected settlement by an Ecumenical Council as advocated by the University of Paris, because he wanted no solution that might prove contrary to French interest. The University, profoundly troubled, was forced to comply.

  England, in natural opposition to France and a French Pope, remained loyal to Urban; Scotland of course took the other side. Flanders, though a fief of France, remained Urbanist largely because the Count of Flanders was following a pro-English policy in the war. The Emperor Charles IV died just in time to be spared a decision, but his son and successor, Wenceslas, so recently and lavishly entertained in Paris, declared for Urban and carried most of the Empire with him, except for certain areas such as Hainault and Brabant closely linked to France. The stand taken by the new Emperor, followed by Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia, was a bitter disappointment to Charles V, who had thought his own decision would draw other sovereigns in its wake, leaving Urban isolated and forced to resign.

  Charles’s old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain “neutrality,” saying that, while faithful to the French alliance, he could not go against the conscience of his subjects. Common people, nobility, clerics, learned men, he wrote, were all Urbanist. “What government, O wise prince,” he pointedly inquired of Charles, “has ever succeeded in triumphing over public conscience supported by reason? What punishments are available to subjugate a free soul?” During a career of more than ordinary Spanish confusion, Juan I from time to time sent out signals of serious thought about the relationship of ruler to subject. Unfortunately, Charles was already demonstrating that he could indeed frustrate “public conscience supported by reason.” Neutrality in the schism, in which Pedro IV of Aragon also tried to take refuge, was illusory. Political pressures forced both Spanish Kings and eventually Portugal, too, to opt for Clement.

  Urban’s actions after his repudiation grew more savage, irrational, and uncontrolled than before. He excommunicated Joanna of Naples for her support of Clement and declared her deposed in favor of one of her many throne-hungry relatives, Charles of Durazzo. Urban thereby plunged his papacy into a remorseless conflict. He quarreled with Catherine of Siena over this issue, and when she died of self-willed privation shortly afterward in 1380, he l
ost what had been the warmest voice in his support. He devoted infinite devices to the advancement of a worthless nephew, Francesco Prignano, and when Charles of Durazzo refused to grant the nephew certain favors, Urban resorted to arms. On being besieged by Charles of Durazzo, the Pope mounted four times a day to the battlements to excommunicate the besiegers. If he had not been mad before, the cardinals’ challenge had unhinged him now.

  Increasingly alienated by his wildness and vindictiveness, two of Urban’s cardinals defected to Clement, but most felt they had no choice but to remain with Urban rather than accept a return to French subjection. Burdened with a crazed Pope, they planned a kind of regency council to govern for him while holding him in protective custody, but Urban learned of the plot and arrested the six cardinals involved. While they were being tortured to extract confessions of conspiracy, he was reported by an observer to have walked up and down beneath the windows, reading his breviary in a loud voice while listening to the cries of the victims. Five were executed for conspiracy. The sixth, an English cardinal named Adam Easton, spared through the intervention of Richard II, survived to testify to what he had witnessed. As the years passed, Urban became as hated and vilified as his rival. With two such men claiming leadership of Holy Church, it seemed as if God had good reason to repent of His house on earth.

  Of all the “strange evils and adversities” predicted for the century, the effect of the schism on the public mind was among the most damaging. When each Pope excommunicated the followers of the other, who could be sure of salvation? Every Christian found himself under penalty of damnation by one or the other Pope, with no way of being sure that the one he obeyed was the genuine one. People might be told that the sacraments of their priest were not valid because he had been ordained by the “other Pope,” or that the holy oil for baptism was not sanctified because it had been blessed by a “schismatic” bishop. In disputed regions, double bishops might be appointed, each holding mass and proclaiming the ritual of the other a sacrilege. The same religious order in different countries might have divided allegiance, with its monasteries under two competing priors and its abbeys torn by strife. When, as in Flanders, political and economic rivalries caused a city to ally itself with the French under Clement, loyal Urbanists, fearing to live under Anti-Christ, left their homes, shops, and trades to move to a diocese of the “true” persuasion.

  Though no religious issue had created the schism, once it became an accomplished fact, partisans were divided by the same hatred as marked the later religious wars. To Honoré Bonet in France, Urban appeared as the falling star to whom was given the key to the “bottomless pit” in St. John’s vision of the Apocalypse. The “smoke of a great furnace” arising from the pit to darken the sun was the schism darkening the papacy. The accompanying “locusts and scorpions” were the “traitorous Romans” who, by terrorizing the conclave, had forced the false election.

  Since papal revenue was cut in half, the financial effect of the schism was catastrophic. To keep each papacy from bankruptcy, simony redoubled, benefices and promotions were sold under pressure, charges for spiritual dispensations of all kinds were increased, as were chancery taxes on every document required from the Curia. Sale of indulgences, seed of the Reformation, became financially important. Instead of reform, abuses multiplied, further undermining faith. When a French bishop or abbot died, according to the Monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reign of Charles VI, the tax-collectors of Avignon descended like vultures to carry off his goods and furnishings on pretext of making up arrears in clerical tithes. “Everywhere the service of God was neglected, the devotion of the faithful diminished, the realm was drained of money, and ecclesiatics wandered here and there overcome with misery.”

  Legates of each Pope no longer strove for peace between France and England, but worked openly for one side or another because each of the principals sought military support to eliminate his rival. Meanwhile their mutual vituperation and unedifying struggle over the body of the Church degraded Christendom. The Church was pulled this way and that, sorrowed the Monk of St. Denis, “like a prostitute found at the scene of a debauch.” She became “a subject for satire and object of laughter for all peoples of the world, and they made up songs about her every day.”

  More than anyone else, Charles V was responsible for allowing the schism to take hold, for Clement would have had no footing without the support of France. He acknowledged his debt as soon as he became Pope by a grant to the King of a third of the taxes on the French clergy. In the end Charles’s choice was to blight all he had accomplished for the recovery of France. Thinking only of retrieving a French papacy under French influence, he had assumed that his candidate could be imposed. Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events.

  No one was a more ardent Clementist than the King’s brother Anjou, for reasons of his own ambition. The moment the Duke learned of Clement’s election, he had it proclaimed through the streets of Toulouse to the accompaniment of mass in the cathedral and Te Deum sung in all the churches. Speaking of the new Pope as a “close relative, the issue like myself of the house of France,” he ordered obedience to the new papacy by Languedoc, sent money to the cardinals, and envoys to gather support in Florence, Milan, and Naples. When Clement suffered defeat by Urban’s forces and lost Italy, he applied to Anjou for military support. Anjou’s asking price was a kingdom.

  By agreement between them confirmed in a Bull of April 17, 1379, Anjou was to reconquer the Papal States in Italy and keep the greater part of them (with the exception of Rome and Naples) for himself as a Kingdom of Adria, so called from the Adriatic, along whose shores it was to lie. Bestriding the Apennines, the kingdom was to include Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, the Romagna, the March of Ancona, and the duchy of Spoleto. It was to be a fief of the Holy See paying an annual sum to the papacy of 40,000 francs; every three years Anjou was to give the Pope a white palfrey in token of vassalage. The Bull expressly provided that Adria and Naples should never be united under one ruler. Anjou was to be allowed a delay of two years to assemble finances and forces, but if within two months after the two years he had not yet led an expedition into Italy or sent a “capable general” in his place, the agreement would become void.

  Adria was a kingdom in the clouds. If in all their battles papal forces had never succeeded in regaining control of the patrimony, there was no reason to suppose that a French prince would succeed where they had failed. But overestimation of its powers affected French policy more and more from this time on; feasibility restrained it less and less. In the meantime, Anjou’s aid was urgently needed to maintain Queen Joanna on the throne of Naples, Clement’s only base in Italy. In order that he have a vested interest in coming to her defense, Anjou was named—as her distant cousin—the childless Queen’s heir. By naming the same person as future King of Naples and putative King of Adria, Clement was arranging exactly the single rulership he had banned, but perhaps he never expected Anjou to achieve both. With Naples beckoning, Anjou’s destiny now lay in Italy, where it would soon draw Coucy with it.

  To rally the French public to Clement, once royal policy was committed to him, required more than mere fiat. Through April and May of 1379 a series of public assemblies was held in Paris to impress upon notables and citizens the invalidity of Urban’s election. The Cardinal of Limoges, he who had nearly suffered Urban’s blow, came to tell in person all that had happened and swear with hand on heart, calling on God, angels, and saints as witnesses to his sincerity, that the cardinals had voted for Urban “under fear of death.” In contrast, he said, Clement had been chosen under the right and proper conditions necessary to the election of a true pontiff. Following him, Charles V rose to say that all conscientious scruples about accepting Clement must now be eased, for it was clear that a man of such authority and wisdom as the Cardinal of Limoges would not “damn his soul for love or hate of a living person.” At further meetings, fur
ther cardinals confirmed the version of duress with solemn oaths.

  Formal assent was obtained from an imposing group assembled at the Château de Vincennes on May 7 in the presence of the King and Anjou and the Sire de Coucy, among other leading nobles, ministers, prelates, and masters of theology. After each cardinal in turn was again asked by the King to declare on his conscience all he knew of the circumstances, in order to clear all hesitant minds of doubt and “fortify their faith,” the assembly, with hidden anguish in many hearts, voted unanimously in favor of the new Pope. A week later for the benefit of the public a great ceremony was held in the plaza of Notre Dame, where on a platform especially erected for the occasion the four cardinals supported by the Duc d’Anjou proclaimed the advent of Clement VII and declared schismatic anyone who refused obedience.

  The University of Paris remained unreconciled. Masters of Theology, less affected by the compromises of worldly office, did not bend so easily as bishops. To them the succession of St. Peter was a serious matter. Under extreme pressure from the crown, they formally accepted Clement on May 30, but the acquiescence was sullen, not unanimous, and a precursor of trouble. Two years later, after the death of Charles V, all four faculties passed a resolution in favor of a General Council to put an end to the schism, and appealed to the crown to summon one. Although authority to convene was uncertain, fifteen such councils had been held so far in the history of the Church to settle grave issues of doctrine. The University’s appeal in 1381, presented by a master of theology, Jean Rousse, was necessarily addressed to the hostile ears of the Duc d’Anjou, then Regent. As a fearsome example to quiet all such talk, he had Rousse arrested and imprisoned in the Châtelet. The insult to clergy and University created a scandal, not appeased when Rousse’s release was secured only at the cost of an order by Anjou prohibiting any discussion of a council or a papal election.