Inspired by Florentine rhetoric, which characterized the conflict as a heroic struggle for liberty rather than as retaliation for past grievances, the rebellion soon spread to the Papal States. One by one the cities of Perugia, Viterbo, Orvieto, and Bologna expelled their legates and joined the anti-papal league. With each defection, Florence grew bolder, and despite Joanna’s ongoing efforts, the chance for a diplomatic resolution diminished. It was against this dangerous backdrop of rising aggression, isolated from her former allies and faced with the intrigues of powerful enemies, that the queen of Naples chose her fourth husband.
His name was Otto, duke of Brunswick. He was fifty-five to Joanna’s forty-nine, a career warrior and experienced statesman who had come to the Piedmont region from his home in Germany a dozen years before and fallen into the service of his cousin, the marquis of Montferrat. In 1372, upon his cousin’s death, Otto had been named guardian of the marquis’ eldest son and had thereby undertaken responsibility for maintaining the child’s inheritance against incursions made by the Visconti family, who sought to expand into Piedmont. The duke of Brunswick subsequently performed brilliantly in the papal war against Milan, holding the important town of Asti against a prolonged siege, which prompted Gregory to write of “our dear son and noble lord Otto, duke of Brunswick, descendant of the imperial line of Otto of Saxony, also cousin of our dear son and noble lord John, Marquis of Montferrat [married to James of Majorca’s sister], whose armies he has led and still leads with great energy… universally known as most valorous, magnificent and honorable, and able to secure foreign help, albeit not through his personal power but with his prudence and empathy.” The duke of Brunswick was brought to the queen’s attention by Niccolò Spinelli, who knew the German commander personally from his own recent experience on the battlefields of northern Italy, and who recommended the alliance as a means by which both to cement Neapolitan control of Piedmont and to secure the talents of a professional soldier in defense of the realm at large.
As a member of the minor German nobility, Otto was of a vastly inferior rank to the queen. There was never any real choice but that Joanna would marry again—to have remained single would merely have invited the unwanted attention of many suitors, some of them armed, which would have placed the kingdom at unnecessary risk—but the fact that the queen was willing to consider a spouse so beneath her represented the triumph of pragmatism over the traditional medieval preference for prestigious lineage. The queen had had enough experience by this time with younger, elite princes who, despite prenuptial promises to the contrary, tried to make inroads into her prerogative by bullying her into submission. Spinelli’s word carried great weight with her, and she accepted the denigration associated with a marriage to the duke of Brunswick for the sake of the realm. For once there was no question of her new husband’s being crowned king, as the Neapolitans would never have accepted as sovereign an outsider of such inferior rank. The pope alluded as much to this when he addressed a general proclamation to the citizenry, recommending that the kingdom receive the news of the alliance “with joy” and requiring that they “honor him as the true husband of the queen.” On December 28, 1375, Joanna and Otto were married by proxy. Three months later, on March 25, 1376, the duke of Brunswick arrived in Naples, and “that very night slept with the queen,” according to the Chronicon Siculum.
Otto would prove to be the most loyal and cooperative of all Joanna’s husbands. Never did he interfere in her government or try to take power away from her. At their marriage, the queen graciously bestowed on her new spouse the customary title of duke of Calabria and also accorded him the principia of Taranto. Grateful for the recognition, and conscious of the slurs his wife had been exposed to by marrying him, Otto worked and fought tirelessly in the queen’s interest. (The Florentines, hoping to provoke Hungarian intervention, complained of the alliance in a letter to Louis the Great, in which they accused Joanna “of humiliating Italy by mixing the blood of the glorious Angevin race with the detestable blood of a German prince.”) If she had had him from the beginning, the queen of Naples might have spared herself and her kingdom years of turmoil.
During the winter months, while her marriage was being negotiated, the conflict between Gregory and Florence had continued to escalate. Joanna’s nuptials had barely concluded when, on March 31, 1376, the pope signed a papal bull placing the Florentines under interdict, at the same time demanding that their citizens be expelled from all states loyal to the church and that their goods be confiscated. This last measure, aimed at the Florentine economy, the commune’s most vulnerable quarter, was extremely effective. “Few princes could resist the temptation to enrich themselves with the confiscated property of outlaws, while also gaining credit for obeying their spiritual lord,” observed a later historian. The cardinal of Limoges wrote that “not one Florentine dares to remain in the kingdom [of France], and all of their goods have been confiscated; likewise in the kingdoms of England, Spain, Scotland, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre and in the county of Flanders.” Joanna, too, enforced the papal ban by evicting the many Florentine merchants operating in the kingdom’s borders and seizing their money and property. Even Louis the Great of Hungary complied with Gregory’s orders.
Determined to retake papal territory lost to the uprising and bring Florence to heel, the pope did not limit himself to the traditional spiritual weapons at his disposal. In May, he asked Robert of Geneva to mount a military effort against the rebellious Italian league. Robert, who had been made a cardinal by Gregory in 1371, was the nephew of Guy of Boulogne. Soon to become one of the most divisive figures of his age, there are conflicting reports of Robert’s physical presence. Italian chroniclers, intensely antagonistic, claimed the cardinal was a hunchback; other observers asserted that he was merely lame and squinted. Those who supported him, on the other hand, insisted that, like his older brother Aimon of Geneva (unsuccessful suitor of Joanna’s eldest niece, Jeanne), Robert was “handsome and well formed.” There was no disagreement at all as to his character, however: the cardinal of Geneva was universally acknowledged as cultivated, imperious, and arrogant. When his powerful uncle finally passed away in 1373, Robert assumed Guy’s mantle of leadership among the French cardinals at the Sacred College.
In response to the Florentine revolt, Robert, with Gregory’s approval, recruited an army of Breton mercenaries numbering some ten thousand men and left the area around Avignon with this intimidating force on May 20, 1376. They crossed the Alps and made their way slowly into central Italy. Upon reaching the Papal State of Romagna, the cardinal augmented his host by once again enlisting the services of John Hawkwood and his free company in the cause of the church, for the respectable fee of 13,520 florins, payable in cash. The force was by this time so overwhelming that when Gregory inquired of one of the Breton generals whether he thought the papal troops would succeed against Florence, the mercenary replied, “Does the sun enter there? If the sun can enter there, so can I.”
But it was already fall, which was late in the year for the sun. Not wanting to fight in the cold weather, the army didn’t go straight to Florence; instead, the mercenaries settled for the winter outside the town of Cesena, on the eastern coast of Italy. When supplies ran short in November, Robert of Geneva allowed the army to invade the town, even though Cesena had not joined the anti-papal league. “They came inside the city,” reported a chronicler from nearby Rimini, “where they devoured, consumed, and forced everything out of men and women.” By February, the local citizenry had had enough. There was a riot and several hundred of the mercenaries were killed. In retaliation, the papal army, under the command and with the explicit approval of Robert of Geneva, turned on the city and massacred its inhabitants, an event that shocked Italy. “Everyone—women, old and young, and sick, and children and pregnant women were cut to pieces at the point of a dagger,” wrote a chronicler from Siena. “Babies were taken by the feet and dashed against the town wall.” In all, some four thousand people were killed and by the end �
�there remained neither man nor woman” in Cesena.
Apparently, even the unrepentant Hawkwood had qualms about attacking a predominantly unarmed, civilian population. A Sienese chronicle reported that the following conversation took place between the English brigand and Robert of Geneva just prior to the slaughter:
“I command you to descend on the land and do justice,” said the cardinal.
“Sir, when you want, I will go and prevail upon the inhabitants, so that they give up their arms and render them to you…” Hawkwood replied.
“No,” the cardinal said, “I want blood and justice.”
“Please think about it,” Hawkwood protested.
“I command you thus,” said the cardinal.
Into this poisoned atmosphere Gregory XI, prepared at last to carry through on his resolve to return the papal court to Italy, set sail for Rome.
The Holy See departed from Marseille on October 2, 1376, in a fleet of galleys once again provided mostly by Joanna. Events leading up to the papal removal from Avignon were reminiscent of the drama connected with the earlier embarkation of Urban V. Again, the king of France sent a team of prominent ambassadors, led by his brother Louis, duke of Anjou, to the pope’s side, to present the old arguments against the plan; again, the dismayed and fearful cardinals pleaded with their master to change his mind; again “never were seen so many tears, lamentations and groanings,” as the day the ships were boarded and the fleet pushed off from the dock. Inconsolable, Gregory’s own father, the elderly count of Beaufort, in a final act of desperation, threw himself on the ground in his son’s path in an attempt to halt the proceedings. But the pope, mindful of a recent speech by Cardinal Orsini, one of the few Italian members of the Sacred College—“Who has ever seen a kingdom well directed and wisely governed in the prince’s absence? It is certain that if the king of France left his kingdom and went to Greece, his own realm would not be well governed. I cannot foresee how peace can come to his domains, if the pope does not reside in his own see”—merely stepped over the prone body of his parent, and continued on his way.
The journey itself was plagued by terrible storms, which caused considerable delay. The pope did not arrive in Rome until January 17, 1377, when, heralded by trumpets, he entered the city at the head of a procession that included dancers, musicians, notable ecclesiastics, a company of knights and soldiers for protection, and delegations of high-ranking barons, among whom were many representatives from Joanna’s court. The citizens of Rome, attracted by the festive air and the promise of an increase in income, cheered.
The queen of Naples’s support, both diplomatic and financial, was even more vital to the pope after he arrived in Italy. Joanna sent Spinelli to Gregory in March, and the grand seneschal agreed to take control of church efforts to separate Bologna from the Florentine league and return the city to papal control, a task accomplished in August 1377. This latest military effort, reliant as before upon the recruitment of mercenaries, was expensive. In desperation, Gregory, who had exhausted his funds, wrote to Joanna asking for money “to help us carry the weight we bear on our shoulders.” The queen responded generously with a payment of fifty thousand florins on April 15, but by fall this had all been spent and the pope was forced to plead again for financial aid. “We don’t know who to turn to besides you,” he wrote in an October 12 letter. Gregory went on to thank Joanna for “the treasure of your compassion and for the immense royal charity towards us.”
By year’s end, the partnership between the papacy and the kingdom of Naples had begun to yield results. Faced with Gregory’s physical proximity, which highlighted in a visceral and highly public manner the failure of the anti-papal league to achieve its goal of eradicating church dominance over the politics of Italy, Florence agreed to participate in talks aimed at mediation. In February 1378, a peace conference was convened in Sarzana, about twelve miles west of Carrara. Europe’s most powerful heads of state—the Holy Roman Emperor, the sovereigns of France, Hungary, and Naples—all sent ambassadors in an international effort to end the conflict. Joanna’s place at the peace table was ably occupied by Niccolò Spinelli, whose presence signaled the importance the queen attached to these proceedings. (Gregory had asked the grand seneschal to represent the interests of the papacy at this forum, but the counselor demurred, choosing to act for Joanna instead.) The congress was mediated by Bernabò Visconti, who had been induced by a combination of threat and bribery to accept a separate truce with the pope.
This peace conference, so fundamentally modern in its conception, represented the apex not only of Joanna’s foreign policy but perhaps of fourteenth-century European diplomacy. For once using the instruments of détente, rather than the apparatus of war, the assembled dignitaries managed to bring the adversaries to terms in less than two months. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in reporting that during the final week of March 1378, a settlement acceptable to both the Florentines and the church was reached, in which Florence agreed to pay reparations of eight hundred thousand florins over a period of five years.
Then, on March 31, 1378, word suddenly arrived in Sarzana that Gregory XI had died in Rome on the twenty-seventh and in a matter of moments the bright promise of peace was abruptly extinguished.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Great Schism
The death of the pope created a vacuum of uncertainty into which rushed all the usual competing interests, grabs for power, and general opportunism common to the transition of rule from one medieval monarch to another. Even measured by the chaotic standards of the fourteenth century, however, the confusion and anarchy unleashed in the aftermath of Gregory’s demise reached new heights. For the first time in seventy-four years, a pontiff had died not in Avignon but in Rome. At once, the most urgent, vital political struggle of the age—who would run the church, France or Italy—rose to the fore and was boiled down to its essence in the choice of Gregory’s successor.
The sixteen cardinals, eleven of whom were of French origin, who were in Rome at the time of Gregory’s death and who would be responsible for choosing the next pope were acutely aware of this issue. As early as February 1378, when Gregory had become so ill that his doctors forbade his getting out of bed, rumors had swept through Rome that he had already died and the French cardinals were keeping his death a secret in order to elect one of their own in his place. So upsetting was this gossip that a delegation of several high-ranking members of the city government intent on discovering the truth insisted on seeing Gregory and were granted an audience in his bedchamber. According to an eyewitness observer, these officials, having satisfied themselves that Gregory was still alive but failing fast, and fearful that he, like Urban, was planning to return to Avignon before he died, were overheard plotting as they left the pontiff’s presence. “The pope will not escape. The time has come to show ourselves good Romans. We must see to the arrangements so that this time, the papacy remains with the Italians and the Romans.” There were mob uprisings at the beginning of February, and then again at the beginning of March, which forced the cardinals to lock themselves into the secure fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo for their own protection, and the French cardinals in particular were warned repeatedly of murderous intrigues against them by members of the Roman populace. “The cardinals feared for their lives months before the election, and with good reason.” Even before Gregory’s death, the members of the Sacred College, worried about the reaction of their host city to the outcome of the papal election, took the precaution of protecting their property as well as their persons. “Since the cardinals, especially the French, felt somewhat uneasy, they arranged for all their private goods, particularly money, books, jewels, and all other mobile possessions to be brought into the castle of St. Angelo, as soon as Gregory died,” reported an official church memorandum of the period.
The pope expired on March 27, 1378, and the next day at the burial ceremony, at the church of Santa Maria Nova, the senator of Rome “and other officials approached them [the cardinal
s] and humbly and civilly submitted the request that a worthy man of the Italian nation should be elected… This request was repeated by them on subsequent days when they gave their reasons: that the Roman see… had suffered greatly through the long absence of the pope; also that the state of the city of Rome itself was ruinous and near collapse… The only way to remedy this state of affairs was to elect a pope who was a Roman and, furthermore, for the cardinals themselves to reside at Rome and not, as hitherto, to despise the city.” The Roman citizenry was not nearly this polite; as soon as the cardinals entered the conclave on April 7, an angry mob gathered just outside the palace doors and began chanting, “We want a Roman!” and sometimes, for variation, “Let’s kill them!” at intervals throughout the election.
Adding to the difficulty of the selection was the fact that the eleven French cardinals, while possessing a decisive majority over their four Italian colleagues (the sixteenth cardinal, of Spanish ancestry, voted consistently with the French), were bitterly divided among themselves along regional lines into two parties: the Limousins and the Gallic. The Limousin party consisted of the cardinals of Limoges, Aigrefeuille, Poitiers, Marmoutier, and de Vergne. The Gallic, or French, faction boasted the remaining French cardinals, plus the one Spaniard. The last four popes had all come from the Limousin party. Even before Gregory had died and the electors had secluded themselves in conclave, the Limousins had floated the names of the cardinals of Poitiers and de Vergne as possible candidates.
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