A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [211]
“Not to be held entirely infamous,” Hawkwood, it was said, sent a thousand women to safety in Rimini and allowed some men to escape. Carrying out the solution threatened by Solomon, he was also reported to have cleft in half a nun over whom two of his soldiers were fighting. On the whole, however, he had more relish for money than for killing, and shortly after the massacre of Cesena he abandoned the papal employ, where pay was slack, for more lucrative contracts offered by Florence and Milan. To make employment of the great mercenary permanent, Bernabò Visconti gave one of his illegitimate daughters by a favorite mistress in marriage to Hawkwood with a dowry of 10,000 florins. The political resources of a prince with 36 living children were far-reaching.
For his remaining two decades Hawkwood lived in riches and respect, elected Captain of Florence by the Signoria, and paid for his services, or for immunity, by almost all the city-states of central and northern Italy. He bequeathed to Italy an example of successful rapine to inspire Italian condottieri—Jacopo del Verme, Malatesta, Colleoni, Sforza—who were soon to replace the foreign captains.
Robert of Geneva, who became for Italy the “Man of Blood” and “Butcher of Cesena,” never attempted to excuse or extenuate his action. As far as he was concerned, the citizens were rebels like those of Limoges to the Black Prince. His resort to terror, resounding through Italy, did not enhance the authority of the Church. “People no longer believe in the Pope or Cardinals,” wrote a chonicler of Bologna on the massacre, “for these are things to crush one’s faith.”
Meanwhile, Florence was excommunicated by the Pope, who invited non-Florentines to prey upon the commerce of the outlaw. Her caravans could be seized, debts could not be collected, clients were not bound to keep their contracts. Florence retaliated by expropriating ecclesiastical property and forcing local clergy to keep churches open in defiance of the ban. Popular sentiment was so aroused that the Committee of Eight who directed strategy were called the Eight Saints, and the conflict with the papacy came to be known in Italian annals as the War of the Eight Saints.
By now both sides had reason to want to end the war. Besides drastic effect on Florentine commerce, the excommunication had divisive effects on the league. To hold the multiple rivalries of Italian city-states in cohesion for long was impossible. For the papacy to maintain control of the Papal States from Avignon was equally impossible, and a new danger was added when Florence offered inducements to Rome to join the league. It was as apparent to Gregory as to his predecessor that necessity was calling the papacy home. A clamorous voice at his elbow was adding force to the summons.
Since June 1376, Catherine of Siena, who was to be canonized within a century of her death and ultimately named patron saint of Italy along with Francis of Assisi, had been in Avignon exhorting the Pope to signal reform of the Church by returning to the Holy See. Already at 29 a figure with an ardent following and an insistent voice, she was revered for her trances and raptures and her claim to have received, while in ecstasy after communion, the stigmata of the five wounds of Christ on hands, feet, and heart. While these remained visible only to her, such was her repute that Florence commissioned her as ambassador to negotiate reconciliation with the Pope and a lifting of the interdict. Catherine’s larger mission in her