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INTRODUCTION the Fifteenth Century Started Badly for the Cardinals. They Were Blamed for Keeping the Popes in Avignon for Much O

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INTRODUCTION the Fifteenth Century Started Badly for the Cardinals. They Were Blamed for Keeping the Popes in Avignon for Much O INTRODUCTION The fifteenth century started badly for the cardinals. They were blamed for keeping the popes in Avignon for much of the fourteenth century instead of letting them return to Rome.1 After the dramatic events of 1378, the cardinals were also blamed for causing the schism.2 In April, following the death in March of Gregory XI (1370–8), they had elected Bartolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, who adopted the name Urban VI (1378–89). He was the first Italian pope since Benedict XI at the beginning of the fourteenth century to be elected in Rome.3 Shortly afterwards, when Urban VI’s hot temper and desire for reform was exposed, the cardinals claimed that the election was invalid as it had been under duress: it was the first election that had taken place in Rome for seventy-five years, and the local populace had bullied them into electing an Italian.4 In September, the mainly French cardinals elected a new pope, the French Robert of Geneva, who took the name Clement VII (1378–94). 1 On the Avignon period see Étienne Baluze, Vitae paparum Avenionensium : hoc est historia pontificum Romanorum qui in Gallia sederunt ab anno Christi 1305 usque ad annum 1394, ed. Guillaume Mollat, 4 vols (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1914–27); Guillaume Mollat, The Popes at Avignon 1305–1378, trans. Janet Love (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963). There is also a useful outline of the period and the main issues in Geoffrey Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992; first published 1968), 140–64. For another, refreshing, approach to the same period, David S. Chambers, Popes, Cardinals and War: The Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2006), 24–38. 2 Diana Wood, Clement VI: The Pontificate and Ideas of an Avignon Pope (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 98–9; Walter Ullmann, The Origins of the Great Schism: A Study in Fourteenth-Century Ecclesiastical History (London: Burns and Oates, 1948), 4–8; Henri Bresc, “La Genèse du Schisme: le partis cardinalices et leurs ambitions dynastiques,” in Genèse et débuts du Grand Schisme d’Occident, Colloques internationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique 586 (Paris: CNRS, 1980), 45–57. 3 Pastor, History of the Popes vol. 1, 117–27; Edith Pásztor, Onus Apostolicae Sedis: curia romana e cardinalato nei secoli XI–XV (Rome: Edizioni Sintesi Informazione, 1999), 363, 378–9. On the period between the election of Urban VI and the Council of Pisa, Barraclough, Medieval Papacy, 164–77. 4 For example, despite condemning the election of an anti-pope, Catherine of Siena accepts that Urban VI “had treated [the cardinals] with nothing but reproach.” Cath- erine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, vol. 3, ed. and trans. Suzanne Noffke, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 329 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), letter dated shortly after 21 September 1378, 224. 2 introduction The problem of two rival popes—one in Rome and one in Avignon— continued until, in 1409 at a council convened at Pisa, the cardinals attempted to solve the problem by deposing them both and electing a new pope, Alexander V (1409–10). Altogether, this period of two and then three popes, known as the Great Schism, lasted for forty years. When the schism was finally resolved in 1417 with the election of Martin V (1417–31), one of the main casualties was the College of Car- dinals.5 The problems the cardinals had created in the first place—the result of a series of attempts to assert their influence over the pope—left them, as a group, weaker than they had ever been since their emergence as the pope’s exclusive counsel in the eleventh century. The first half of the fifteenth century was a period of consolida- tion for the popes and their cardinals following the exile and schism. Most of all, the papal court had to resettle in Rome and forge close links—both practical and symbolic—with the city. It is this period of reclaiming Rome as papal city that is the focus of this book. Popes and cardinals Late in 1378 the indomitable Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) wrote from Rome to the small group of Italian cardinals who had joined the French to help elect Clement VII—Pietro Corsini, Giacomo Orsini, and Simone da Borzano—making her opinion of them and what they had done clear.6 Her sharp words can be taken as representative of wider feeling amongst Italians and those still loyal to the papacy in Rome: Oimé! Oimé! To what have you come by not pursuing your exalted state virtuously! You were set to feed at the breast of holy church. Like flowers you were put in this garden to spread the fragrance of virtue. You were 5 The College of Cardinals during the councils of Pisa and Constance is discussed in more detail in chapter 1 below. 6 Pietro Corsini had been made cardinal in 1370 by Urban V and was dean of the College of Cardinals; Giacomo Orsini and Simone da Borzano were both cardinals of Gregory XI. The fourth Italian cardinal in the college that elected Urban VI, Francesco Tebaldeschi, died on 6 September 1378, two weeks before the majority of cardinals had elected Clement VII. Although present at the conclave, Corsini had abstained at the election. The three Italian cardinals refused to side with either pope. In January 1379 they finally turned their backs on Urban VI while still not siding with Clement VII. See Baluze, Vitae paparum Avenionensium, vol. 4, cols 837–47, 186–194; Catherine of Siena, Letters, vol. 3, 218..
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