A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [220]
More than anyone else, Charles V was responsible for allowing the schism to take hold, for Clement would have had no footing without the support of France. He acknowledged his debt as soon as he became Pope by a grant to the King of a third of the taxes on the French clergy. In the end Charles’s choice was to blight all he had accomplished for the recovery of France. Thinking only of retrieving a French papacy under French influence, he had assumed that his candidate could be imposed. Though surnamed the Wise, he was not immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of their capacity to control events.
No one was a more ardent Clementist than the King’s brother Anjou, for reasons of his own ambition. The moment the Duke learned of Clement’s election, he had it proclaimed through the streets of Toulouse to the accompaniment of mass in the cathedral and Te Deum sung in all the churches. Speaking of the new Pope as a “close relative, the issue like myself of the house of France,” he ordered obedience to the new papacy by Languedoc, sent money to the cardinals, and envoys to gather support in Florence, Milan, and Naples. When Clement suffered defeat by Urban’s forces and lost Italy, he applied to Anjou for military support. Anjou’s asking price was a kingdom.
By agreement between them confirmed in a Bull of April 17, 1379, Anjou was to reconquer the Papal States in Italy and keep the greater part of them (with the exception of Rome and Naples) for himself as a Kingdom of Adria, so called from the Adriatic, along whose shores it was to lie. Bestriding the Apennines, the kingdom was to include Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, the Romagna, the March of Ancona, and the duchy of Spoleto. It was to be a fief of the Holy See paying an annual sum to the papacy of 40,000 francs; every three years Anjou was to give the Pope a white palfrey in token of vassalage. The Bull expressly provided that Adria and Naples should never be united under one ruler. Anjou was to be allowed a delay of two years to assemble finances and forces, but if within two months after the two years he had not yet led an expedition into Italy or sent a “capable general” in his place, the agreement would become void.
Adria was a kingdom in the clouds. If in all their battles papal forces had never succeeded in regaining control of the patrimony, there was no reason to suppose that a French prince would succeed where they had failed. But overestimation of its powers affected French policy more and more from this time on; feasibility restrained it less and less. In the meantime, Anjou’s aid was urgently needed to maintain Queen Joanna on the throne of Naples, Clement’s only base in Italy. In order that he have a vested interest in coming to her defense, Anjou was named—as her distant cousin—the childless Queen’s heir. By naming the same person as future King of Naples and putative King of Adria, Clement was arranging exactly the single rulership he had banned, but perhaps he never expected Anjou to achieve both. With Naples beckoning, Anjou’s destiny now lay in Italy, where it would soon draw Coucy with it.
To rally the French public to Clement, once royal policy was committed to him, required more than mere fiat. Through April and May of 1379 a series of public assemblies was held in Paris to impress upon notables and citizens the invalidity of Urban’s election. The Cardinal of Limoges, he who had nearly suffered Urban’s blow, came to tell in person all that had happened and swear with hand on heart, calling on God, angels, and saints as witnesses to his sincerity, that the cardinals had voted for Urban “under fear of death.” In contrast, he said, Clement had been chosen under the right and proper conditions necessary to the election of a true pontiff. Following him, Charles V rose to say that all conscientious scruples about accepting Clement must now be eased, for it was clear that a man of such authority and wisdom as the Cardinal of Limoges would not “damn his soul