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For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s permissions site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007) 1e32 www.elsevier.com/locate/jmedhist Contra damnationis filios: the Visconti in fourteenth-century papal diplomacy Sharon Dale Humanities and Social Sciences, Penn State-Erie, The Behrend College, Station Road, Erie, PA 16363-1501, USA Abstract This article seeks to reappraise the relationship between the Avignon papacy and the Visconti lords of Milan during the fourteenth century. Avignon popes generally viewed the Visconti as the major obstacle to papal temporal power in Italy and thus fashioned propaganda that demonised them. This mythic portrayal, that was re-framed by Florence to justify its own imperialistic ambitions in Tuscany, has been accepted uncritically by modern historiography. Documents from the Vatican archive reveal a more complicated diplomacy. Papal policy toward the Visconti was far from consistent, as the curia welcomed Visconti money and Avignonese popes regularly granted the Visconti papal vicariates. This article demonstrates that the papal-Visconti struggle was a key factor in the creation of the strategic alliance between Florence and the Visconti that made the War of Eight Saints possible and ended the Guelph alliance. This study further suggests that the political ambitions of Giangaleazzo Visconti were stoked in great measure by the Great Schism when partisans of both popes looked to him as the saviour of the Church and of Italy. Finally this article suggests that a re-evaluation of fourteenth-century diplomacy might accord closer scru- tiny to the role played by the Church in destabilising Italy. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Visconti; Diplomacy; Papacy; Great Schism; Italy Author's personal copy E-mail address: [email protected] 0304-4181/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2007.01.001 2 S. Dale / Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007) 1e32 The portrayal of the Visconti in Italian historiography is curiously bifurcated.1 Recent schol- arship in Italian political history has illuminated the critical role played by the Visconti ducal state in the formation of regional states in Italy.2 Yet, an image of the Visconti as malevolent tyrants has been a stock feature of Florentine historiography in which the Florentine struggle against Giangaleazzo Visconti is cast in Manichaean terms: ‘the only champion of the ideals of democracy and liberty in Italy’,3 defeats Visconti tyranny through the virtu` of its citizens. This study attempts to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory views of the Visconti by locating the source of both the villainous image and the emerging regional state in the Trecento struggle between the Avignon papacy and the Visconti. The iniquitous image was not the prod- uct of a ‘struggle for liberty’, in Florence as Hans Baron termed it,4 but of papal ambitions for temporal power in fourteenth-century Italy. In fact, Florence had appropriated an already com- plete model of a demonised Visconti from elsewhere. The Avignon papacy in its propaganda against the Visconti regularly applied terms such as ‘heretic’, ‘Belial’, ‘son of iniquity’, ‘son of perdition’ and ‘son of damnation’, creating a mythic image of villainy that was adapted only later by Florence. The Visconti were one of many families, equally ambitious and often equally rapacious, that vied for political power in northern Italy and were opposed to any expansion of papal temporal authority. But papal diplomacy singled out the Visconti, casting them as enemies needing to be defeated and rooted out of Italy by papal armies. Moreover, the papacy, and most notably its legates, unwittingly created an aura of Visconti invincibility, for time and again, the forces of the Avignon popes could not extirpate them. And, documents from papal archives reveal that the papacy’s policy was far from consistent, for the papacy welcomed Visconti money and made frequent accommodations with Visconti power by 1 Giannina Biscaro’s, ‘Le relazioni dei Visconti con la Chiesa’, Archivio Storico Lombardo, 46 (1919), 84-227; 47 (1920), 193-271; 54 (1927), 44-236, based on an intensive examination of papal registers in the Archivio Secreto Vat- icano (hereafter ASV), is a model of archivally based scholarship and was the stimulus for the present article. Biscaro did not, however, consider the larger issue addressed here. The series was continued by Gerolamo Biscaro in the same journal and under the same title in 55 (1928), 1-96 and n.s. 2 (1937), 119-93, but, these latter works are only lightly dependent on archival research and evince a distinct and pervasive anti-Visconti bias. A startlingly different interpre- tation of this diplomacy was advanced by Mollat, whose model of cunning, vicious Visconti versus Avignon popes who were ‘nobly’ working to bring peace to Europe, is hardly borne out by the evidence in papal registers, many of which Mollat himself edited. See Guillaume Mollat, The popes at Avignon 1305-1378 (9th edition, London, 1949), 62. Modern scholars, in the main, have relied on Mollat and extended his model. 2 Pioneered by Giorgio Chittolini, the subject has been the subject of numerous excellent studies. See for example, Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Alcuni considerazioni sulla storia politico-istituzionale del tardo Medioevo: alle origini degli ‘stati regionali’’, Annali dell’ Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento, 2 (1976), 401-19 and Principi e citta` alla fine del Me- dioevo, ed. Sergio Gensini (San Miniato, 1996). 3 Antonio Lanza, Firenze Contro Milano, Gli intellettuali fiorentini nelle guerre con i Visconti (1390-1440) (Anzio, 1990), 13. Lanza was expressing a view best identified with Hans Baron, The crisis of the early Italian renaissance: civic humanism and republican liberty in an age of classicism and tyranny (rev. edition, Princeton, 1966) and sub- sequently extended by numerous historians. The model has been challenged and in many ways discredited yet, the portrayal of the ViscontiAuthor's has not been re-evaluated. personal See James Hankins, ‘The ‘Baron thesis’copy after forty years and some recent studies of Leonardo Bruni’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56 (1995), 309-38. Even a careful scholar like Gene Brucker refers to the ‘Visconti behemoth’ of c. 1360 while describing Florence’s conquest of Tuscan cit- ies as ‘The steady extension of communal authority into outlying areas d for example, the cities of Pistoia and Volterra’. in the same period; Gene Brucker, Florentine politics and society 1343-1378 (Princeton, 1962) 150-1 and 183. 4 Hans Baron, ‘A struggle for liberty in the renaissance: Florence, Venice, and Milan in the early quattrocento’, Amer- ican Historical Review, 58 (1952-53), 265-89, 544-70. S. Dale / Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007) 1e32 3 granting nearly every Visconti lord a papal vicariate. Such concessions of titles of legitimate authority give the lie to the allegedly obdurate opposition of the papacy to Visconti political power. Their demonisation by successive popes, coupled with the inability of the papacy to de- feat them, led to the perception that the Visconti were more powerful than they really were, until, ironically, they were viewed as and eventually became the major obstacle to papal temporal domination in Italy. And the Visconti exploited their vilification by the Church so that even the most zealous Guelph city-state, Florence, sought their protection against the papacy in the War of Eight Saints. Moreover, the corrosive effect on the reputation of the Avignon papacy in Italy as a result of its wars against the Visconti had a major role in its own demise. Onerous taxes levied to pay armies in the papal state eroded support for the papacy in Italy.5 And the Great Schism, was, in part, a product of the bellicose Ital- ian policy pursued by Avignon. Finally, the schism effectively neutralised papal resistance to the Visconti and allowed Giangaleazzo Visconti to assume a mantle of virtual invincibil- ity that only death e or the civic virtu` of Florence, could defeat. Thus a new myth arose from the ashes of an earlier one. The pattern that shaped papal diplomacy with the Visconti was set early in the fourteenth century by Pope John XXII (1316-34), whose election followed a contentious two year vacancy on the throne of St Peter. Following Henry VII’s death in 1313, imperial power was contested between Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria, which precipitated a crisis when the pope declared the imperial throne vacant. The bull Si fratrum, issued in April 1317, was a transparent attempt to expand papal temporal authority in Italy at the expense of the empire and Italian Ghibellines.6 It stipulated that since the disputed imperial election of 1314 had created a va- cancy in the empire, the pope was obligated to assume its jurisdiction. Further, the exercise of the imperial vicariate in Italy without papal authorisation would be punishable by excommu- nication and temporal sanctions. To implement this expansion of power, the pope appointed as his legate to Italy Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet, who brought the confrontation directly to the Visconti.7 Beginning in July 1319, du Poujet led a papal-Angevin army into Lombardy and Piedmont.