A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [167]
In April 1367 Urban carried out the great removal, sailing from Marseille over the wailing of the cardinals, who are reported to have shrieked aloud, “Oh, wicked Pope! Oh, Godless brother! Whither is he dragging his sons?” as if he were taking them into exile instead of out of it. Reluctant to leave the luxuries of Avignon for the insecurity and decay of Rome, only five of the college in the first instance accompanied him. The greater part of the huge administrative structure was left at Avignon.
Urban’s first landfall was at Leghorn, where Giovanni Agnello, the Doge of Pisa, an “odious and overbearing” ruler, came to meet him escorted by Sir John Hawkwood and 1,000 of his men-at-arms in their glittering mail. At the sight, the Pope trembled and refused to disembark. It was not a propitious omen for return to the Eternal City.
The malign spirit of the 14th century ruled over the return. Only when he had assembled a temporal army and an imposing escort of Italian nobles was the Holy Father able to enter the capital city of Christendom, now sadly disheveled. Dependent formerly on the immense business of the papal court, Rome had no thriving commerce like that of Florence or Venice to fall back on. In the absence of the papacy it had sunk into poverty and chronic disorder; the population dwindled from over 50,000 before the Black Death to 20,000; classical monuments, tumbled by earthquake or neglect, were vandalized for their stones; cattle were stabled in abandoned churches, streets were pitted with stagnant pools and strewn with rubbish. Rome had no poets like Dante and Petrarch, no “invincible doctor” like Ockham, no university like Paris and Bologna, no flourishing studios of painting and sculpture. It did harbor one notable holy figure, Brigitta of Sweden, who was kind and meek to every creature, but a passionate denouncer of the corruption of the hierarchy.
For a moment in 1368, the arrival of the Emperor in Lombardy to make common cause with the Pope against the Visconti seemed to augur well. But little came of his effort, and the feuds and rivalries resumed. In 1369 the ancient goal of reunion with the Eastern Church seemed almost at hand when the Byzantine Emperor, John V Paleologus, came to Rome to meet Urban in a magnificent ceremony at St. Peter’s. He hoped to obtain Western help against the Turks in return for rejoining the Roman Church, but this project too fell apart when the churches could not agree on ritual.
Harassed by renewed revolt in the Papal States, threatened by a massing of Bernabò’s troops in Tuscany, defeated and disillusioned, Urban crept back to Avignon in September 1370. In deserted Rome, Brigitta of Sweden predicted his early death for betraying the Mother of Churches. Within two months he died, like King Jean of an unspecified illness. Perhaps its name was despair.
In electing a successor, the cardinals thought to play safe with a thorough Frenchman of great baronial family, the former Cardinal Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who took title as Pope Gregory XI. He was a pious and modest priest of 41, bothered by some debilitating ailment from which he “endured much pain,” who, it was believed, would have no spirit for the perils of Rome. Though a nephew of the superb Clement VI, who had made him a cardinal at age nineteen, Gregory did not have his uncle’s lordly ways, nor his prestige, nor any particularly visible strength of character. The cardinals had overlooked, however, the sometimes transforming effect of supreme office.
As soon as he was enthroned, Gregory, like his predecessor, felt the force of the call to Rome, both in the cries of the religious and in the political necessity of leaving Avignon and returning the papacy to its home base. Reluctant and indecisive by nature, he might have preferred a quiet life, but as Supreme Pontiff he felt a sense of mission. He could not move to Italy, however, until the