alliance, to renew its ties with the Angevins. Naples, however, fell into the incompetent
hands of Joanna, granddaughter of Robert the Wise. Without effective Angevin support
and unable to rely on Clement, Florence began its own campaign to dominate all of
Tuscany. None of these tensions prevented the pope from organizing a short-lived Latin
League to campaign against the Turks; but rivalries between Genoa and Venice prevented
it from exploiting its initial success. The rising tensions in Italy were the background of
Gil Albornoz’s campaign to win control of the papal states for Clement’s successor,
Innocent VI (r. 1352–62). That native of the Limousin, a more austere and reforming
pontiff than his predecessor, poured money into his legates’ campaigns. Fiscalism
predominated, although some of the curia’s income went into bribing free companies
turned loose in a lull in the Hundred Years’ War to leave Avignon alone. Albornoz won
sufficient success to prepare the way for a brief return of the papacy to Rome in the reign
of Urban V (r. 1362–70). Urban, however, left part of the bureaucracy at Avignon,
evidence of French reluctance to face the perils of Italy. Pressure for a more permanent
return persisted from figures as different as Petrarch and Bridget of Sweden.
The decisive decade for the Avignon papacy was the 1370s. Urban’s successor,
Gregory XI (r. 1370–78), a nephew of Clement VI, was modest, pious, and learned but
lacking in resolution. Sufficient resolution to return the papacy to Rome was provided by
Catherine of Siena, who lectured the pope on his duty both through letters and in person.
The divisions of the curia about a return can be seen in the contemporaneous building
campaigns of Gregory around Avignon and in Rome. Both helped exhaust a papal
treasury already drained by the benefactions of Urban V. Other distractions were
provided by Anglo-French tensions, war with Florence, and the pope’s efforts to suppress
the Waldensians of Provence. At last, Gregory agreed to go to Rome. He left in 1376;
but, once more, part of the curia remained in Avignon. The pope entered Rome in 1377,
and he remained there until his death the next year. The Limousin and Gallican factions
in the College of Cardinals, unable to elect a cardinal from either group in the tumultuous
atmosphere of Rome, whose populace feared another flight to Avignon, chose a curial
official, Bartolomeo Prignano, who became Urban VI (r. 1378–89).
Matters might have reached peaceful resolution had Urban VI proved reasonable. His
efforts to reform the cardinals, however, were tactless, and his temper was violent to the
point of seeming insanity. The cardinals, even the few Italian ones, fled Rome. They met
in Fondi, in Joanna’s Neapolitan kingdom, and chose Robert of Geneva as Clement VII
(r. 1378–94). After failing to drive Urban VI from Rome, Clement returned to Avignon.
The princes of Europe held inquiries into the cases for the two pretenders; but the choice
between Rome and Avignon tended to follow the lines of alliances in the Hundred Years’
War. Despite loud cries for unity, Christendom remain divided for four decades until the
Conciliar Movement healed the rupture, though not before a third papal line was begun at
the Council of Pisa (1409). The papacy never would regain the degree of control it had
exercised from the palace at Avignon in the days of Clement VI. Avignon itself would
remain a papal possession until the time of the French Revolution, when it was annexed
by the First Republic.
Thomas M.Izbicki
[See also: AVIGNON; BÉGUINES; CLEMENT V; CLEMENT VI; CLERICIS
LAICOS; CONCILIAR MOVEMENT; FRANCISCAN ORDER; NICHOLAS OF
The Encyclopedia 169