A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [166]
Inevitably the effort to reconquer the Papal States collided with the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna, a papal fief, in 1350 and threatened to become the dominant power of Italy. When the papal forces succeeded in regaining Bologna, Bernabò Visconti in an epic rage forced a priest to pronounce anathema upon the Pope from the top of a tower. Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives. When he ignored a summons to Avignon to be sentenced for debaucheries, cruelties, and “diabolic hatred” of the Church, Urban V excommunicated him as a heretic in 1363 and, in one of the century’s more futile gestures, preached crusade against him. Hostile to the Avignon papacy for its worldliness, rapacity, and its very existence in the French orbit, Italians regarded Urban as no better than a French tool, and paid no attention to his call.
Born Guillaume de Grimoard of a noble family of Languedoc, Urban was a sincerely devout man, a former Benedictine monk, who genuinely desired to restore the credibility of the Church and revive papal prestige. He reduced multiple benefices, raised the educational standards for priests, took stern measures against usury, simony, and clerical concubinage, forbade the wearing of pointed shoes in the Curia, and did not endear himself to the College of Cardinals. He had not been one of them but a mere Abbot of St. Victor’s in Marseille when elected. His elevation over higher-ranking candidates, including the ambitious Talleyrand de Périgord, had been owed only to the inability of the cardinals to agree on one of themselves, but the public thought this astonishing departure outside their own group must have been inspired by God. According to Petrarch, pursuing his favorite theme, only the Divine Spirit could have caused such men as the cardinals to suppress their own jealousies and ambitions and open the way for elevation of a Pope who would return the papacy to Rome.
This Urban intended to do as soon as he should have firm control over the patrimony of St. Peter. Among the devout everywhere, the yearning for return to Rome was an expression of their yearning for a purifying of the Church. If the Pope shared that sentiment, he also recognized that return was the only means of controlling the temporal base, and he understood the necessity of terminating what the rest of Europe saw as French vassalage. It was clear that the longer the papacy remained in Avignon, the weaker became its authority and the less its prestige in Italy and England. Over the violent objections of the cardinals, and the resistance of the King of France, Urban was determined upon return.
In Italy, Bernabò was not the only enemy of priests. Francesco Ordelaffi, despot of Forlì, responded to excommunication by causing straw-stuffed images of the cardinals to be burned in the market place. Even Florence, though allied on and off with the papacy out of need to resist Milan, was anti-clerical and anti-papal in spirit. The Florentine chronicler Franco Sacchetti excused Ordelaffi’s vicious mutilation of a priest on the ground that he had not acted from the sin of avarice and that it would be a good thing for society if all priests were treated in the same way.
In England they had a saying, “The Pope has become French and Jesus English.” The English were increasingly resentful of the papal appointment of foreigners to English benefices, with