A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [210]
Until now, popular antagonism toward the papal party represented by the Guelfs had not reached the point of taking up arms against the Church. When during a food scarcity in 1374–75 papal legates embargoed the export of grain from the Papal States to Florence, passions reached the point of belligerence. Under the slogan Libertas inscribed in gold on a red banner, Florence organized a revolt of the Papal States in 1375 and formed a league against the papacy, joined by Milan, Bologna, Perugia, Pisa, Lucca, Genoa, and all the various potentates who had territorial ambitions in the Papal States.
To one chronicler it seemed “as if these times are under the rule of a planet which produces strife and quarreling.” In an Augustinian monastery near Siena, he recorded, “the monks murdered their Prior with a knife,” and in a neighboring abbey, after intramural fighting, “six brethren were turned out.” Because of quarreling among the Carthusians, the General of the order came and moved them all to other houses. “It was no better among kinsfolk by blood.… The whole world was fighting. In Siena there was no one who kept his word, the people disagreed with their leaders and agreed with no one, and truly the whole world was a valley of shadows.”
The revolt brought into action an individual destined to be the catalyst of new calamity. Robert of Geneva, the Pope’s Legate in Italy, was a cardinal of 34 who shrank from no force to regain control of the papal patrimony. A brother of the Count of Geneva, a descendant of Louis VII and cousin of Charles V, a relative of the Counts of Savoy and of half the sovereign houses of Europe, he shared the lack of inhibition characteristic of so many princes. He was lame and squinting, and described as either squat and fat or handsome and well formed, depending on partisanship in the coming schism. Imposing and autocratic in manner, he was sonorous of voice, eloquent with tongue and pen, cultivated and well read in several languages, sophisticated and artful in his management of men.
To reconquer the Papal States, he persuaded Gregory XI to hire the Bretons, worst of the mercenary bands, with the extra incentive of removing them from the vicinity of Avignon. Crossing the Alps into Lombardy in May 1376, they spread terror across Italy with swords blessed and consecrated by the Cardinal Legate. They failed, however, to take Bologna, keystone of the Papal States, and suffered several defeats by the Florentines, to the wrath of their employer. With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, including Hawkwood, from a nearby town, he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying, “Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood!), which was what he meant by justice.
He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were