Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  Urban cherished two overriding ambitions: first, a Crusade against the Turks which, he hoped, might also bring the Eastern Church back into the Catholic fold; second, the return of the Papacy to Rome. Once again, the Crusade failed to get off the ground. It was to have been led by the French King John II, who had been captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers and had only recently been released—in exchange for several hostages (including his son) pending the raising of the ransom money. He had come to Avignon, where he had sworn to lead an army of 150,000 men to deliver the Holy Land. But before he could do so his hostage son escaped, and John, as a point of honor, voluntarily returned to his English captivity. He was still in England when he died.

  As for the long-discussed return to Rome, conditions were now more favorable than they had been for half a century. Albornoz had done his work well; Bernabò Visconti had continued to make trouble over Bologna but had finally been bought off, and the Papal States were—more or less—at peace. And so, in June 1366, Pope Urban publicly announced, not only to his cardinals but to all the princes of Europe, that the Papacy was leaving Avignon for Rome. Whatever the princes might have thought, the news struck the papal court with horror. By now virtually all its members, from the cardinals down to the humblest of scribes, were Frenchmen. Their homes, on many of which they had spent small fortunes, were in Avignon or Villeneuve. Their language was French or Provençal. The last thing they wanted was to leave it all for a malarial, malodorous city known to be in the last stages of dilapidation and decay, perpetually torn apart by a corrupt aristocracy and a famously unpredictable rabble. But the Holy Father had spoken. There was nothing they could do but start packing.

  For a glorious moment it looked as if the dreaded journey might be indefinitely postponed: the French freebooter-general Bertrand du Guesclin, ordered by King Charles V to lead an army of some 30,000—mostly free companies—against King Pedro the Cruel of Spain, took it upon himself to make a detour to Avignon, where he cheerfully demanded 200,000 gold florins, to pay—he said—for his coming campaign. The pope replied by excommunicating the lot of them, but they only became more threatening, laying waste the surrounding countryside, terrorizing the entire neighborhood, raping prodigious numbers of nuns, and generally behaving like occupying armies at their worst. Urban, in despair, instituted a special tax on everyone in the city and paid the sum demanded; but du Guesclin, on learning that the money had been extracted from the populace, immediately returned it, insisting that he had no wish to impoverish the people. The funds he had demanded would be accepted only if they came exclusively from the papal coffers. The result was a new levy, still more unpopular, which fell on churchmen alone; only then did the general lead his men away across the Pyrenees to Spain.

  The court returned to its melancholy preparations. A rump was to be left at Avignon, so that day-to-day papal business could continue until such time as Rome was ready to take over; for the rest, the date of the great departure was fixed for April 30, 1367. It is difficult to imagine the sheer scale of the operation: the transfer of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people, their families, and all their worldly goods, together with the entire papal archives, furniture, and equipment, all to be loaded onto barges and floated downstream to Marseille. From there, on May 19, the pope and his cardinals embarked on a flotilla of vessels supplied by Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and—from their base in Rhodes—the Knights of St. John. The Knights also agreed to escort the bulk of the party, which took the land route, first to Genoa and then southeastward down the west coast of Italy.

  After seventeen days on heavy seas the papal fleet arrived on June 5 at the port of Corneto, where Albornoz was waiting. Urban naturally wished to press on to Rome at once, but the cardinal dissuaded him. The Lateran, he pointed out, was utterly uninhabitable. The Vatican was being prepared but was by no means ready: how much better it would be if the Holy Father were to remain in Viterbo as his guest until the autumn. It was thus not till October 16, escorted by an armed force of 2,000, that Urban entered Rome—the first pope for sixty-three years to set foot in the city.

  He was to remain for only three, but during that time he began a complete rebuilding of the Lateran and instituted an ambitious program of repair to the churches of Rome, nearly all of which were by now crumbling. Meanwhile, the presence of a pope acted on the Romans like a tonic; at last, it seemed, there was a chance of stability, even prosperity. Their morale was raised still further by the lavish celebrations that were organized to greet the various princes of Europe who beat a congratulatory path to the papal door: Peter I of Cyprus, Queen Joanna of Naples, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, and—most remarkable of all—the Emperor John V Palaeologus of Byzantium, who on Thursday, October 18, 1369, formally signed a document declaring his personal acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith, sealing it with his imperial golden seal. There was no question of any union of the two churches, which remained as far apart as ever they had been—not a single Orthodox churchman had accompanied the emperor to Rome. John signed with one purpose only in his mind: to persuade Western Europe to send military help against the Ottoman Turks, whose threat to Constantinople was growing day by day. His signature was binding on himself, but on no one else.

  Urban was the first and the last pontiff to receive visits from both Eastern and Western emperors; and John’s arrival should have marked the triumphant vindication of his decision to bring the Papacy back to Rome, achieved in the face of considerable physical danger and appalling administrative upheaval, to say nothing of the determined opposition of the King of France and virtually the entire College of Cardinals. But the truth was that the pope had had enough. He was now approaching sixty, his heart was still in France—of the eight new cardinals he had created in September 1368, six had been Frenchmen and only one a Roman—and since arriving in Rome the College had if anything increased its pressure. Moreover, Albornoz was now dead, and without his firm grip on Italian affairs the political situation in Italy was again deteriorating fast. Perugia had actually gone so far as to revolt against Roman authority and hire a free company of mercenaries to threaten papal Viterbo. This was under the command of the notorious English soldier of fortune Sir John Hawkwood, who had fought at both Crécy and Poitiers and had now settled in Italy, where he was happily selling his sword to the highest bidder.

  Probably after he had been made an offer that he could not refuse, Hawkwood was persuaded to come to terms; but now the pope received even more alarming news. In 1369 Charles V of France summarily annexed the province of Aquitaine, which had been part of the dowry of Queen Eleanor when she had married the future Henry II of England in 1152. Henry’s great-great-great-grandson King Edward III, outraged, launched not one but two separate expeditions to recover it. The Treaty of Brétigny was forgotten; the Hundred Years’ War raged again, as fiercely as ever it had. To Pope Urban this was a catastrophe. He had given his word to John Palaeologus that he would do his utmost to organize a major Crusade against the Ottoman Turks, but he was well aware that this would be possible only if the French and the English could forget their differences and agree to act together in the cause of Christendom. Somehow he must restore peace between them. Clearly, there was no way that he could do so from distant Rome; from Avignon, however, there might be a chance. And so, with outward reluctance but, one suspects, a good deal of inner relief, he gave the order to return.

  The papal flotilla of thirty-four ships sailed from Corneto on September 4, 1370; before the end of the month the pope was back in Avignon, where on the twenty-seventh he was given a hero’s welcome. Few among those present, whether lay or ecclesiastic, can have believed that, after this disastrous experiment, the Papacy would ever leave Avignon again. Rome was quite simply too remote, too dangerous, too unhealthy, too impractical. Did Pope Urban himself share this view? We shall never know. However glad he may have been to be back in civilization, he must have felt a profound sense of disappointment, even of failure. There is no record of his having opened negotiat
ions with the kings of France or England, but he had little opportunity. Within six weeks of his return he fell seriously ill, and on December 19 he died. He was buried in Avignon Cathedral, but in 1372 his body was transferred by his brother to the Abbey of St. Victor in Marseille. There it became the object of a cult—which is presumably why, five centuries later, in 1870, Pope Pius IX saw fit to beatify him.

  TECHNICALLY, AS WE know, papal Avignon did not form part of France. Culturally and emotionally, on the other hand, its people saw themselves as Frenchmen—or as Provençaux, which at that time was much the same thing. With its population now risen to some 30,000, their city might be only a quarter the size of Paris; but as an intellectual and religious center and a focus of banking and international trade, it could invite comparison with the capital itself. The University Law School attracted students from all over Europe, as did the School of Theology, which was accommodated in the Papal Palace. Here too was the magnificent library with its renowned collections of Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts, to say nothing of its volumes of Greek and Latin literature and philosophy, which were to make the city an early center of humanist studies. Churches and monasteries had sprung up in profusion, both inside and outside the walls. The commercial district was thronged; few were the luxuries from East or West that the merchants of Avignon were unable to supply.

  It was therefore, perhaps, with a feeling of slightly smug told-you-so satisfaction that the overwhelmingly French College of Cardinals met in conclave to choose, after only two days, one of their own number: Pierre-Roger de Beaufort, to be known as Gregory XI. He had been a churchman since childhood. Canon of Rodez at eleven, cardinal—appointed by his uncle, Clement VI—at nineteen, he was deeply religious, ascetic, and inclined toward mysticism, but he also possessed a quality of steely self-will which frequently astonished those who knew him. His one weakness was his health, which constantly gave his doctors cause for anxiety and occasionally even for alarm.

  It was probably the mystical element in his character which decided him that, despite the obvious advantages of Avignon and the unfortunate experience of his predecessor, the Papacy belonged in Rome. True, Avignon was more favorably situated if there was to be any brokering of peace between England and France; but the situation in the Papal States was every bit as important for Christendom, and it was plain that the troublemaking rebel warlords of that region could be kept in check only from Italy. Besides, Gregory was one of the very few Avignon churchmen who genuinely liked the peninsula. In his youth he had studied law in Perugia, where he had known many of the foremost humanist scholars of the day and learned excellent Italian. Later, during Urban’s years in Rome, he had been one of the pope’s principal deputies. And so he made up his mind, and on May 9, 1372, he announced to his cardinals that they would all be leaving “very shortly” for Rome.

  Of course, as he should have known, it was not as easy as that. There was the opposition, not only of the cardinals but of the kings of France and England, to be faced down. Second, there was no money in the treasury to pay the costs of transportation. Campaigns in Italy, to say nothing of the removal of most of the papal court and Curia to Rome and back, had emptied the papal coffers. Gregory was obliged to borrow 60,000 gold florins from the Duke of Anjou and another 3,000 from the King of Navarre simply to keep the Papacy on its feet. Moreover, as always, Italy was in turmoil; once again the Visconti of Milan were on the warpath, threatening Piedmont—which did not worry the pope too much—and Romagna, which worried him a great deal. The strong measures which he took against Milan—a military league, an interdict, even the preaching of a Crusade—all came to nothing, and he was eventually forced to conclude a humiliating peace. Meanwhile, Bologna had declared its independence, and the pope had to summon Albornoz’s successor as his legate in Italy, Cardinal Robert of Geneva, to recruit a troop of free companies through which to assert his authority.

  Cardinal Robert possessed none of the diplomatic subtlety of his predecessor. He immediately blockaded Bologna in an attempt to starve its citizens into surrender, laying waste all the surrounding countryside and allowing his mercenaries to rape and murder to their hearts’ content. His final atrocity was to turn them loose on the neighboring town of Cesena; the result was a massacre of over four thousand men, women, and children. Bologna, however, continued to hold out; it was not till after the pope was back in Rome that a truce was finally concluded.

  All this could only delay matters further, as did a last-minute appeal for arbitration by the kings of England, France, and Aragon. For all these reasons, it was not for some four and a half years after that first announcement that Pope Gregory eventually left Avignon. He might have delayed still longer had it not been for a formidable young Dominican nun, Caterina Benincasa, better known today as St. Catherine of Siena, who appeared in Avignon to demand a new anti-Muslim Crusade, simultaneously calling on him to return the Papacy to its historical and spiritual home.8 He eventually left, with his cardinals and court, on September 12, 1376, bound in the first instance for Marseille, where the ships provided by Queen Joanna and other rulers were waiting. Almost at once the little fleet was caught up in a violent storm, in which several of the vessels were lost. The survivors took two months to reach Corneto, whence they slowly made their way down the coast to Ostia and thence up the Tiber to Rome. Gregory finally disembarked on Tuesday, January 13, 1377.

  The Papacy was back in Rome. This time it stayed. It was never to leave the city again. But the Italy to which it had returned, though in some respects unchanged, in others differed radically from the Italy it had left seventy years before. Unity was as remote a possibility as ever: Guelf and Ghibelline, their original quarrels long forgotten, still hammered away at each other, and the blood continued to flow as it always had, copious and unavailing. But seven decades without either a pope or an effective emperor had removed the old polarities, and the Black Death had drawn yet another curtain across the past, while exposing the present still more mercilessly to the winds of change. The secular, inquiring spirit which now spread across the land was not in itself new. Its roots went back to Roger of Sicily and his Greek and Arab sages, to Frederick II and his falcons, to Manfred and his troubadours, to Arnold of Brescia and the scholastics, to the doctors and lawyers of Bologna and Salerno. But the fourteenth century had given it a new momentum—in the political sphere with Cola di Rienzo and the despots of the North, in the cultural with Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the humanists—and at the same time the papal barriers that had so long blocked its progress had suddenly disappeared. The Renaissance was under way.

  1. The two banks were linked by the twelfth-century Pont Saint-Bénezet, the last bridge across the Rhône before it reached the Mediterranean. Originally it had twenty-two arches; alas, all but four were swept away by a great flood in 1680. This is the bridge that still lives in the old song, though there is a theory that the dancing actually took place under it rather than upon it, on the little island of La Barthelasse.

  2. This is believed to be the origin of the date’s grim reputation.

  3. One of these, the Petit Palais, still stands a hundred yards northwest of the cathedral. Its Renaissance façade was added in the late fifteenth century by the papal legate Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II.

  4. Mullins, Avignon of the Popes. The appalling story is told in detail by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou.

  5. “Nor,” wrote Canon Henry Knighton of Leicester toward the end of the century, “did men care … At Marseilles,” he added still more uncharitably, “of one hundred and fifty Franciscans not one survived to tell the tale—and a good job too!”

  6. In fact, Constantine was baptized in Nicomedia, on his deathbed. See chapter 2.

  7. Now known as the Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction, it was badly damaged in the Revolution. But the double nave can still be seen, with Pope Innocent’s tomb.

  8. She is not to be confused with another female saint, St. Bridget of Sweden, who had put similar pre
ssure on Urban V and is now—since 1999—patron saint of Europe.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Laetentur Coeli!

  A vignon, however, was far from finished. The immense machine of the Papacy could not be dismantled and transported in a matter of weeks. The popes might be back on the Tiber, but many of the papal departments remained by the Rhône, together with the magnificent library and the bulk of the archives, which by now filled a whole wing of the palace. Among those departments was that which dealt with finance; for the fourteen months that remained of Pope Gregory XI’s pontificate, his entire expenses were met by regular shipments of gold from Avignon. In fact, of the innumerable papal staff it was only a comparatively small proportion, consisting mainly of the senior hierarchy, that had traveled with Gregory to Rome; the vast majority of the many hundred clerks, accountants, secretaries, and scribes had remained behind. Among them were even half a dozen cardinals, charged to continue the attempts to mediate between England and France. Avignon, in short, after the pope’s departure, was by no means the sad, abandoned city that might have been imagined—though no one could possibly have foreseen the whole new if slightly dubious lease on life that awaited it.

  Away in Rome, Pope Gregory, though still only forty-eight, was aware that he was dying and was giving much thought to the question of his successor. Acutely conscious that the Church was still split down the middle, he knew that if the Papacy were now to remain in Rome for good, it must become Italian again—and that meant, in the first instance, an Italian pontiff. He in turn would appoint Italian cardinals, so the French influence in the Sacred College would gradually be reduced. When Gregory died on March 27, 1378, it was clear that the Romans agreed with him. They had by no means always treated their popes with particular affection or respect, but they were determined not to let them go again. “Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!”1 they shouted throughout the ensuing conclave, and—up to a point—they got what they wanted.