- ASV
Archivio Segreto Vaticano
- BAV
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
- BNF
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
The death of Pope Gregory xi at Rome in 1378 was followed by two electoral conclaves. Each of the popes who was elected then maintained his own legitimacy and anathematised his rival. The forty-year Great Western Schism followed, when Latin Christendom was divided into the obediences of two and then of three popes; and when the schism was brought to an end the unitary medieval Church was no more. The Western Schism was unlike earlier medieval episodes of mayfly antipopes, each with his little sect of followers. Both Urban vi of Rome and Clement vii of Avignon was elected by the same college of cardinals, nullo dissentiente, and each pope, insisting upon his canonical legitimacy, received the recognition and obedience of large numbers of faithful Christians and of whole national Churches, their rulers and clergy.Footnote 1 This study makes no attempt at the grand history of the schism, nor at judging (yet again) the theological or canonical validity of either of the elections which began it. Those questions still ‘escape the judgement of history’.Footnote 2 It is uncontested that each of the two elections was effective in choosing a pope who would exercise papal authority through the officers of his own Curia. The aim here is limited to explaining in a new way, within the administrative sphere of the Roman Curia, the original anomaly, that is, the twin elections of 1378.
This view of the genesis of the Western Schism does not depend for its validity on the truth and accuracy of the various self-interested and self-justifying accounts offered later by eyewitnesses. According to some Clementists, the Roman mob, crying for their blood, forced and therefore invalidated the election of an Italian; some Urbanists denied that there was any menace at all. Whether the fear in the first conclave was great or small, the cardinals later argued it as the legal justification for their secession from Urban vi, since their real reasons, which became clear and urgent only after his coronation, had no legal value. It is hoped that the differences between this sketch of events and those of other writers, taken from other points of view and giving prominence to other sources, will be seen not as controversial but as complementary.
In the seventy years before 1378, the papal monarchy had developed at Avignon a sophisticated administration, a machinery of worldly, hyper-fiscal and militaristic style which probably estranged the papal Curia from its Italian subjects quite as much as did the succession of seven Francophone pontiffs. The Avignon popes' wide-ranging and autocratic exercise of their power to grant prelacies and benefices to clerics high and low had caused a hypertrophy of curial offices, while the reputation for impartiality of the apostolic judiciary was compromised by its cooperation in the creative fiscality of Avignon. The dominant departments of this Curia, the Chancery and the Camera Apostolica, can truly be characterised as principal ministries of the secular monarchy which the papacy had become, without renouncing its sacral and pastoral dignities and responsibilities.Footnote 3 This article, the result of some decades of reading in the archives of the Apostolic Camera, investigating that institution and its personnel and observing late fourteenth-century western Europe from its viewpoint, offers a bureaucratic construction of the events which began the Western Schism.
1378 saw two unexpected interventions in the apostolic succession, not by conflicting parties within the college of cardinals, but by rival officers of the Curia. The cardinals in conclave on 9 April 1378 were frightened and indecisive as the Roman people rioted, howling for an Italian pope. That election was won by a curial archbishop, the director of the papal Chancery, Bartolomeo Prignano, who had commended himself to the cardinals as an experienced curial officer well known to them, and a man of modest demeanour and pure life.Footnote 4 After his coronation as Urban vi they found him to be a reformer, bent on depriving them of their honours and perquisites, and mentally erratic besides. The second election resulted from a counter-manoeuvre by the archbishop of Arles in charge of the Camera Apostolica, Gregory xi's chamberlain Pierre de Cros. When summer came the cardinals, enabled by Pierre de Cros, put themselves at a prudent distance from the pope of whom they repented and from the Roman mob whose force and arms they blamed for their panic choice, and on 20 September 1378 they elected another, Robert of Geneva, as Clement vii. Focusing attention on the two curial archbishops in turn shows that Prignano had less power and respect than is usually supposed, and that he may have been driven by an embittered ambition, while the Limousin favourite de Cros used his huge discretionary powers to make himself virtually a regent or protector, a keeper of the papal power sede vacante. One after the other, they focused and directed the authority of the cardinals, first toward an Italian papacy, then toward an Avignonese: the two sects of the schism.
Particular attention will be given here to two well-qualified opposing witnesses. Pierre de Cros gave his testimony at Avignon to the ambassadors of King Juan i of Castile on 30 May 1380.Footnote 5 Dr Jacopo di Ceva was also a veteran of the Avignon Camera. He had been the chief prosecutor of the Interdict of Florence from its beginning in 1376 and he was lodging and keeping the court of his special judicial commission in the Castel Sant'Angelo when Gregory xi died. He provided a sort of legal consilium to the University of Paris around the time of the second election.Footnote 6
Bartolomeo Prignano, a pope from the Inferno
When Pope Gregory xi died in Rome on 27 March 1378, Bartolomeo Prignano, archbishop of Bari, was in charge of the Apostolic Chancery. Born some time before 1318 near the piazza di Nilo in Naples, in a block called l'Inferno on account of its many smithies, Prignano was descended on his father's side from minor Tuscan nobility, possessing a coat of arms (an eagle on a red field), while his mother was a Brancaccio of Naples.Footnote 7 This powerful family was probably responsible for the early stages of Bartolomeo's ecclesiastical career, but it was so numerous that his share of their estate and power had to be less than satisfying. He pursued the normal arts course and then canon law at the University of Naples, becoming doctor of decrees. Later, as pope, he would reflect that he had had only had two lords in his lifetime, Queen Giovanna of Naples and Cardinal Pierre de Monteruc. His office under the queen came before 1360, when he served at the royal university, wearing the royal badge and chain of office, as professor and then as rector. The rectorship was a somewhat nominal honour; what Prignano lived on was his canonry of Naples and his stipend as vicar-general, an office which required a well-trained canon lawyer. He was appointed archbishop of Acerenza on 22 March 1363, although only a deacon: he had to be ordained priest before he could receive episcopal consecration. But the lands belonging to him as archbishop were rather poor, the income from them estimated at only 300 florins per year of income.Footnote 8 Even this crust of an appanage had mostly been alienated by his predecessors and was largely occupied by the duke of Andria, Francesco del Balzo, one of the Italian branch of the family de Baux, which prospered under Giovanna as queen in Naples and as countess in Provence.
Bartolomeo Prignano travelled to Avignon to prosecute his claim to the temporalities of Acerenza in the papal courts. The attempt resulted in a net loss and he was a poor man, who had to be grateful for the offer of lodging and an official position, however obscure, under the protection of the cardinal vice-chancellor. This was Pierre de Monteruc, called the cardinal of Pamplona. The last near kinsman of Innocent vi who was still powerful in the Curia, Monteruc was a Limousin grandee of stunning self-assurance. He declined to accompany Urban v and his Curia to Italy in 1367 and yet remained head of the Apostolic Chancery.
In September 1365 Prignano returned to the city of his birth, again to serve as vicar-general to a more favoured archbishop: Bernard de Bosquet, lately cantor of Bordeaux, remained in Avignon as an auditor of the Rota until he was created cardinal in 1368. Even then the cathedra of Naples went not to Prignano but to an archdeacon from Cahors. When the Curia, without the vice-chancellor, arrived in Rome in 1367, it seems likely that Prignano rejoined it, working anonymously and without title in the drafting of papal letters for Italy. The evidence is a Formularium Romanae Curiae now in the Vatican Library which Prignano may have begun assembling in 1367. The exemplary letters in the collection are almost all bulls of Urban v and Urban vi (i.e. Bartolomeo Prignano himself), including the annual Holy Thursday sentence of anathemas, this example dated Rome, 6 April 1368. Much diplomatic material is to be found there, including a list of the bulls necessary to vest a papal legate with all his perquisites.Footnote 9
Back in Avignon with the Curia in 1370, Prignano lived dependent on Monteruc's charity as his commensal chaplain, lodging and dining in his livrée on the present rue Bonneterie, a splendid gated compound of houses claimed by Monteruc as his cardinalatial domain.Footnote 10 The exiled archbishop, like any young donzel or cantor, wore the cardinal's badge of two stars, a chevron and a mount-of-rocks.Footnote 11 There is no evidence other than Prignano's own casual word that he had the title of auditor or judge in Monteruc's palace, although he did a certain amount of significant legal work and took fees as a procurator (attorney) in other cardinals' courts. According to the later account of his friend and advisor Dietrich of Niem, the archbishop seems to have done some Chancery work:Footnote 12 some drafting of papal common letters to ensure that they conformed to canon law, to the petitions which the pope had granted, and to the particulars of the case. Also he examined candidates for benefices, judging whether they qualified in reading, singing and writing. Such jobs, so far beneath his professional degree and his prelatial rank, gave him no official title in the Chancery. It seems that his lord the cardinal treated him disdainfully, or with that aristocratic carelessness that a dependent foreigner would not distinguish from contempt. Later, after his coronation as pope, when he was pressing the castellan to surrender Castel Sant'Angelo, the old slights came back to him: ‘You are taking advice from those wicked, cursed Limousins. You should know that I was auditor of the Cardinal of Pamplona fourteen years and never had a good word from him. When he gave me direction he did not even deign to face me, but gave me the order with his back turned, lowing like a bull calf.’Footnote 13 The contemptuous diminutive archiepiscopellus later applied to Urban vi by the Clementist sect may well have originated in the Monteruc household.
In the Apostolic Chancery thousands of pastoral offices were filled every year by an arbitration of the candidates' ambitions, patronage, qualifications and sense of entitlement, in the light of canon law, regional sensitivities and political claims. Everything looked different in the Apostolic Camera, where papal government was a financial matter: expensive policies to be afforded by the efficient collection of taxes. Excommunication was a favoured weapon of the Camera at Avignon, casually used against foreign prelates regardless of the fact that such spiritual and judicial brutality tended to complicate or annihilate the work of the Chancery. Many examples show that the relation of Camera to Chancery at Avignon was adversarial in part.Footnote 14 According to their records there seems to have been little contact between these two departments, none between Bartolomeo Prignano and Pierre de Cros, the objects of our particular attention. But before he became pope, Prignano's estate was under serious pressure from the Camera. In 1365 the archbishop of Bari (then Bartolomeo Carafa) had actually been excommunicated for failing to pay the ‘common services’, the tax due for his appointment. The chamberlain of that time prosecuted Carafa as one of a batch of defaulters: five archbishops, thirty-eight bishops and fifty-six abbots, all in Italy.Footnote 15 Bartolomeo Prignano had his turn under cameral scrutiny. In May 1376 the collector of an emergency subsidy for the war against Florence reported that the clergy of Acerenza had come up with 283 florins, but the archbishop himself had paid nothing, and neither had the archbishop of Bari.Footnote 16 Acerenza did not even pay its archbishop's living expenses, a situation common throughout Italy for a whole generation.
For Prignano the conflict was intensified by the invidious position that he and other Italians occupied as an ethnic minority in the Curia. Petrarch had taken bitter note of this state of affairs, and there is a parallel in the experience of Coluccio Salutati, who got himself admitted to the household of the papal secretary Francesco Bruni when the Curia was in Italy under Urban v, but found himself slighted and undervalued there. Salutati carried his grudges against Bruni and the Curia to Florence where, as chancellor, he had opportunity to express them.Footnote 17
Bartolomeo Prignano hid his resentment, bore his lot with patience and lived a regular, sober life in Avignon. He improved his time in the desert by making friends with cardinals one by one, a programme for which he had excellent resources. They wanted benefices and other papal favours for themselves and for crowds of petitioners, their relatives and countrymen. With his knowledge of canon law, his practical experience in courts and offices, his connections in the Chancery and among the members of the vice-chancellor's household, he could be of great service to them if he cared to be, and he did care. He was discreet, attentive and efficient, in short, obliging; and the cardinals were duly obliged.
When Gregory xi and his household and Curia were on the point of embarking for Italy in mid-September 1376, the cardinal of Pamplona ‘under pretext of ill health’ announced that once again he would not take part in the expedition. The pope was angry, but at the request of the king of France he permitted the cardinal to retain his title of office in Avignon. Monteruc's substitute in Italy would be Prignano, an Italian out of Monteruc's own household, who, as we have seen, had performed similar duty once before. But the pope's act of appointment was delayed, it left no trace in the surviving archives, and it may have been casually viva-voce. Prignano was with the pope for the long stormy voyage and a month of rest at Corneto. There, on 13 January 1377, the pope transferred Archbishop Nicolò Brancaccio from Bari to Cosenza, and Bartolomeo Prignano to Bari.Footnote 18
The activities of Prignano as vice-gerent to the vice-chancellor in the next year are almost unknown, and his signature does not appear on any surviving acts of the Chancery. It does not appear that he continued in Rome and Anagni the functions of the vice-chancellor at Avignon in processing common letters. For the most important correspondence of his last year, Gregory xi relied on his private secretaries and on the staff of the Camera. His chamberlain Pierre de Cros accompanied him on his long summer retreat at Anagni (16 May to 7 November 1377), together with the eighteen cardinals who were not on missions or still in Avignon. For all the record shows, Prignano may have remained in Rome with most of the Chancery staff, in charge of work which someone had to do but which still gained him no respect: keeping the supplicationes (petitions for benefices) and the registers of common letters. Curial or cameral letters under the papal bull, which were drafted in the Camera, seem to have begun bypassing the Chancery entirely in 1377.Footnote 19 The Chancery was prohibited from issuing letters of justice unless they had been validated and sealed by the auditors of the Rota or the cardinals in whose courts they originated. When vice-gerent Prignano ventured on his own authority to grant an appeal in a cause within the Order of the Hospital he was ordered not to do it again without asking. The pope insisted that letters appointing papal chaplains of honour had to be issued through the chamberlain's registrar, not directly by the Chancery to the parties concerned. The result would be that the new honorary chaplains' cash tokens of gratitude would go to the Camera and not to the Chancery.Footnote 20
When Gregory returned with his cardinals from Anagni to Rome in November 1377 he was sick and weak and the end of his pontificate was on everyone's mind. The Romans wanted him to stay; they wanted his successor to be elected in Rome and not to take the Curia away again to Avignon. They made known their hatred of the ultramontane cardinals and their wish to have a Roman as their next pope. At some point Prignano, who had been cultivating the familiarity and good opinion of the city government and who had even become a Roman, to the extent of buying a house in the city, began to ask himself why he should not be the answer to the Romans' prayers. Pierre de Cros was told that Prignano was attending meetings of the bandaresi in the absence of the senator, the military governor named by Gregory xi, Gui de Prohins. Prignano could have been seeking the papacy already.Footnote 21 Gregory xi died on 27 March 1378. The reverse half-matrix of the great seal, bearing his name and number, was broken; his Chancery – and Prignano's curial duties – lapsed. The secular lordship of Rome, which the city council had been compelled to grant to Gregory xi personally before he would agree to enter in January 1377, reverted to the bandaresi.Footnote 22 The pope's funeral and the following nine days of masses for his soul brought the cardinals together in Santa Maria Nuova in the Forum, where the city officers urged them to elect an Italian; and since none of the four Italian cardinals seemed appropriate, then a worthy Italian prelate from outside the college. They mentioned Prignano's name, for example.Footnote 23
Meanwhile the people of Rome were bringing the pressure of their wishes and their anger to bear on the cardinals and their servants, threatening riot and slaughter if they were disdained and disappointed again.Footnote 24 The city officers took over from the pope's men responsibility for guarding the gates and bridges and, as if to permit the people to riot freely, they sent away the counts of Nola and Fondi, rectors of the bordering church provinces. To stop the cardinals from escaping they confiscated the sails and rudders of the barges and boats in the Tiber. When Passion Sunday came (4 April 1378), folk from the country and the mountains began to appear in the city in large numbers, equipped with pipes and drums and armed with knives and spears, ‘cultural weapons’ which they carried by custom, the tools of their daily work.Footnote 25 They had come for the indulgences to be had in the ancient churches of the city during Passiontide, but they also wanted a Roman pope, and they terrified the ultramontanes. The people's catchy slogan kept echoing: ‘Romano lo volemo, o al manco Italiano!’. It all must have seemed a strong following wind for Prignano, but he very prudently made no effort to get the people's approval as a possible candidate: he did not want the conclave to hear his name howled by a mob. Instead it seems that he made the rounds of the cardinals' houses, ready to do any service he could for his friends while they were sequestered.
When the cardinals entered the conclave on the evening of 7 April 1378 there was no majority in favour of any one candidate. The overwhelming influence common to them was their fear of the people in arms, banging the bells of St Peter's with a hammer, filling the square and surrounding the conclave hall, repeating their cry for a Roman pope or an Italian.Footnote 26 Armed Romans, some official and some not, entered the hall apparently at will to warn the cardinals of mayhem and death if they did not comply; walls were broken through.Footnote 27 The discussions among the electors the next day focused on the question of their safety: what name could they announce and escape with their lives?
Writing on 9 April 1378, immediately after the conclave, Cristoforo Tolomei told Luigi Gonzaga that ‘the lord cardinals, by the goodness and industry of the Roman people, elected lord Bartolomeo, archbishop of Bari, from the city of Naples, doctor of both laws’. As proctor for Mantua in the Curia during the pontificate of Gregory xi, Tolomei was an experienced observer and an eyewitness who knew very well how the cardinals had been persuaded to choose an Italian: the pressure applied by the Romans.Footnote 28 But why this particular Italian? Once the name of Bari was introduced by the cardinal of Limoges, Jean de Cros, the rest saw, to their great relief, a way to fulfil their duty to the Church and also to escape from danger and disgrace. The expert kindnesses which Prignano had done for them in the complicated business of the Curia were now remembered to his credit. ‘They named and elected him, as the one whom they believed they knew best, and who was the most experienced in the business of the Curia’, later declared the cardinals of Florence and of Milan.Footnote 29 Cardinal Aigrefeuille, chamberlain of the college, had frequently had the archbishop at his table in Rome; Sortenac considered him an old friend, as did Pedro de Luna and Simone Brossano; la Vergne liked the archbishop very well (though he had not previously thought of him as pope). The rest, having no strong feeling against him, went along with their affirmative colleagues. Even the cardinal of Brittany, Hugues de Montalais, finally conformed, although he warned his colleagues that they did not know the archbishop as he did, ‘gloomy and given to rages’ (‘melancolicus et furiosus’).Footnote 30
Prignano was called to the palace along with five other Italian clerics as a screen.Footnote 31 There he was informed by two Italian cardinals that he had been elected pope, but that the other cardinals had fled for their lives. He waited with diminishing patience for them to return and declare him elected, to receive his acceptance, and to enthrone him on the altar in the customary way. Hearing that the mob still wanted a real Roman and that he might have to yield, he answered, ‘They don't know me! Even if I saw a thousand swords pointed at me I would not renounce.’Footnote 32 He sent a series of messengers to the Castel Sant'Angelo, including one delegation of armed Roman laymen, to demand the attendance of the six cardinals who had taken refuge there.Footnote 33 When they replied that they had no copes to wear he began snatching the copes off the chaplains who were in attendance to send to them. Finally all the cardinals still in the city arrived to perform the essential rituals, and more: even the oldest and proudest Limousins among them began making petitions for such favours as the ransom of Roger de Beaufort, the late pope's brother, from captivity in England. The pope-elect graciously received all petitions, getting the cardinals where he wanted them, on their knees at his feet.Footnote 34
For some weeks the cardinals naturally sought ‘to make things normal by behaving normally’.Footnote 35 Soon, however, and especially after he was crowned as Pope Urban vi on Easter Sunday (18 April 1378), Prignano began to exercise his supremacy as vicar of Christ in the only way he seemed to know, by insulting and humiliating cardinals and ambassadors, using the Consistory and his dining hall as the stages for a rather clownish tyranny. In the cardinals' later accounts he appears not only ‘gloomy and given to rages’ but spiteful, ignorant and politically inept as well. His supporter Cristoforo Tolomei optimistically reported late in June 1378 that the pope had taken some prudent laymen as counsellors ‘and was and is governing himself according to their advice, although at the beginning of his papacy he was very harsh, especially to my lords the cardinals'.Footnote 36 Urban ordered the cardinals to cut back their retinues and their dinners, to reside in their titular churches and to refurbish them (the condition of most was in fact deplorable) while he deprived them of their shares of the common services and ordered them to give up their pensions from secular rulers. He abrogated the peace which Gregory xi had settled with the Prefect di Vico in Viterbo, and threatened to reignite the wars with Florence and the Visconti, rejecting a hard-earned and desperately needed peace. Queen Giovanna of Naples, who had been ready to continue as his most useful friend and vassal, he made an enemy by gratuitous insults at dinner to her chancellor Nicolò Savelli and then to her husband Otto of Brunswick.Footnote 37 He sought to ensure the loyalty of some kings by sending them scarlet cloth and eagle badges, which is to say, by putting his livery on them.Footnote 38
Once again the cardinals found themselves constitutionally trapped in a position where any action seemed wrong. They all, some more bitterly than others, regretted electing Urban vi, and they remembered the fear under which they had done it, a circumstance which would have vitiated and could have quashed the election if they had argued it without delay, instead of repeatedly and publicly enacting their assent.
Again they found a rescuer from their dilemma within the curial administration.
Pierre de Cros, supreme bureaucrat of Avignon
The head of the other great curial ministry, the Camera Apostolica, was Pierre de Cros, archbishop of Arles and papal chamberlain. The Limousin brothers Jean and Pierre de Cros were cousins of Gregory xi and favourites in his Curia. The elder brother Jean had been bishop of Limoges when the city was sacked by the Black Prince in 1370. He was one of the first cardinals created by Gregory xi after his election in 1371. His brother Pierre, already archbishop of Bourges and doing confidential work within the Apostolic Camera, became papal chamberlain that same year, after the death of Arnaud Aubert, and in 1374 he was given Arles, an even richer archbishopric than Bourges. At least four years younger than Bartolomeo Prignano, Pierre de Cros was the pope's most important and powerful courtier, whose bedchamber in the palace of Avignon was joined to the pope's by a single secret flight of stairs.Footnote 39 He was responsible for the safekeeping of all the worldly goods of the Apostolic See, and it is no exaggeration to say that his powers and functions combined those of a minister of finance, a chief justice and a secretary of state as well as major-domo of the papal household.Footnote 40
De Cros's warrant for the exercise of such grand powers was the judicial commission Apostolice Camere,Footnote 41 which granted him absolute and final jurisdiction in any cause, including causes already in progress before other judges, where in his own opinion the interest of the Camera was involved, regardless of other considerations, even spiritual ones. He was not required to observe the slow, formal ordo iudiciarius, but could proceed ‘summarily and simply, without the noise and formalities of judgement’. Such an unlimited judicial commission had first been given to a papal chamberlain only in 1361, to de Cros's predecessor Arnaud Aubert. Long before the camerariatus officium acquired those vast powers, the permanent electoral constitution Ubi periculum maius of Gregory x (1274),Footnote 42 confirmed by Ne Romani of Clement V,Footnote 43 had provided that the chamberlain, custodian of the temporalities of the Roman Church, would continue in office sede vacante.
The pontificate of Gregory xi was a busy and turbulent time for his chamberlain. Taxes and subsidies had to be raised in France and Languedoc, despite the economic ruin caused by the war with England, in order to fight the pope's wars in Italy, first against the Visconti, then against Florence and the papal cities which rebelled in 1375 under the Florentine flag of Libertas. Pierre de Cros was an energetic and loyal minister of state, a real lion beneath the papal throne both as judge and as diplomat, who vigorously attacked all the secular adversaries of the Roman Church, whether Dauphiné brigands or the brothers Visconti. He did not shine, however, as a fiscal administrator in the severely adverse circumstances of the decade. Unwilling to ride his collectors too hard, or to bleed France and Languedoc, he failed to raise the revenues required by the Italian emergencies. The pope himself had to borrow from the duke of Anjou the funds necessary to move the court to Italy, pledging his own word to repay. In his last months Gregory wrote letter after letter, trying to pacify the duke and secure more time to repay, urging the treasurer at Avignon to gather taxes energetically and to avoid selling any of the treasure. Meanwhile Pierre de Cros was much engaged as diplomat, judge and manager of mercenary armies, trying to secure the peace with the Visconti and to recover the rebellious cities. In Anagni, the court city of the papal province of Campagna, in August 1377, the pope sat as judge with the chamberlain as his assessor to receive the submission of Bologna and to give his sentence lifting the interdict from the city.
With only a week to live, Gregory xi, guided by Pierre de Cros, adopted certain measures to protect the apostolic succession against the violence which the chamberlain expected from the people of Rome. De Cros perhaps drafted the electoral statute Futuris periculis of 19 March, which suspended the rules of the permanent constitution Ubi periculum maius for the sake of a swift and safe election. It is impossible to know how fully, freely or consciously the pope gave his fiat to Futuris periculis.Footnote 44 At de Cros's instigation the dying pope required Pierre Rostaing, castellan of Sant'Angelo, to swear that he would not surrender the fortress to anyone without the written consent of the six cardinals who had remained at Avignon.Footnote 45 De Cros was sure that the Romans were planning to capture or kill him during the novena after Gregory's death and to take the papal treasure. He provisioned the Castel for several weeks of siege, moved the papal treasure and his own goods there, and offered the security of the fortress to the cardinals and other curialists for their own goods.Footnote 46 He even urged the cardinals to hold their election in the Castel, or to go back to Anagni for it, but they preferred not to show such a lack of confidence in the assurances of the bandaresi.Footnote 47 When the cardinals went into the Vatican the chamberlain kept to the Castel; he deputised the bishop of Valence and Die to act as inner guard of the conclave, a duty which the chamberlains had performed at Avignon and which de Cros himself would carry out later at Fondi.Footnote 48 The Breton mercenaries and the Gascon company of Bernardon de la Salle were camped outside Rome, not needed for the defence of the Castel, but awaiting the chamberlain's word on their future contracts and orders.
Pierre de Cros refused to accept Bartolomeo Prignano as pope, beginning on the night of 8–9 April 1378 when he heard the news from his brother Jean de Cros, the cardinal who had led the voting. Pierre was convinced that no valid election had been possible in the midst of such a riot, and that the cardinals who fled to the safety of the Castel Sant'Angelo did not themselves believe that they had accomplished an election. When the bandaresi arrived the next morning to escort the cardinals back to the palace, the chamberlain paraded the garrison in arms and, battleaxe in hand, met the Romans with the words, ‘That fool thinks he's pope? I surely don't consider him pope.’ Then, turning on the tribune Giovanni Cenci, he apportioned the blame for the disorder: ‘You said that the mountain folk came for the indulgences! If it weren't for the safe-conduct I have offered you and these others, I would put you in a place where you wouldn't see daylight.’Footnote 49 But later in the day the cardinals had to go and enthrone the pope, and the chamberlain went with them, pretending normality. He provided gem rings from which the pope could choose one to be kissed.Footnote 50 He later supplied the vestments and the triregnum, the papal mitre, for the consecration and coronation on Easter Day, 18 April 1378, but those treasures were then returned to Sant'Angelo. Claiming illness, the chamberlain himself stayed away from the ceremony.Footnote 51
As the weather grew hotter and the cowed and impotent cardinals despaired of ever finding a normal pope in Urban vi, Pierre de Cros carried on as chamberlain of Pope Gregory xi, keeping the treasure under his own control and performing the duties of his curial office while ignoring the existence of Urban vi. He certainly kept his judicial authority active: styling himself as always ‘miseratione divina archiepiscopus Arelatensis, domini pape camerarius’, using the date ‘Rome, apud Sanctumpetrum, sub sigillo nostri camerariatus officii in testimonium premissorum, die xii mensis Maii, Anno a nativitate domini m.ccc.lxxviii’ (with no mention of a pontifical year), the chamberlain issued a citation to the castellan of Soriano, who was accused of capturing and torturing one Pietro Mochicoso of the contado of Viterbo, robbing him of 250 florins. The castellan was to appear within twelve days of receiving the citation, ‘in our presence, wherever the Roman Curia will then be’. This parchment letter patent had the chamberlain's great seal of office appended to the usual parchment tape; it was written by the familiar hand of the veteran notary of the Camera, Jacques de Solèges, whose signature appears on the turned-up edge.Footnote 52
On 24 April 1378 Cardinal Jean de la Grange, fresh from his negotiation of peace with Florence in cooperation with the Visconti, presented himself to the new pope in consistory, and Urban, ill-informed and spiteful, berated him in front of his peers as a traitor. The various accounts agree that la Grange called him in turn a liar and no pope.Footnote 53 Then he and Cardinal Robert of Geneva, whom the pope had traduced in a similar way, walked out. The other cardinals were roused by the rebellious example. Taking the advice which Pierre de Cros had offered them a month before, they began early in May to secure their independence of action by going in twos and threes back to Anagni, where they had spent the warmer half of 1377. Onorato Caetani, count of Fondi, became a military member of the secession, offering the cardinals his protection in Anagni, where he continued to act as rector even after Urban vi appointed Tommaso di Sanseverino senator of Rome and then rector of the Campagna in Caetani's place.Footnote 54 The chamberlain moved in and out of the Castel Sant'Angelo until late June, making arrangements for the cardinals' villeggiatura, perhaps providing pack animals, transferring the money treasure and the papal regalia to Anagni.Footnote 55 When it became plain to Urban that the ultramontane cardinals had seceded, he summoned them to appear in July at Tivoli, which was to be his own summer retreat.Footnote 56
Between 25 June and 1 July 1378Footnote 57 the chamberlain himself slipped away from the Castel Sant'Angelo. He may have been eager to celebrate the Limousin national day of 30 June, the feast of St Martial, with his countrymen at Anagni. Bernardon de la Salle may have provided de Cros with an escort along the Via Casilina before turning his Gascon troops north to bar passage of the River Aniene. In the battle at Ponte Salario on 16 July, la Salle prevented the Roman militia from reinforcing Urban at Tivoli.
The college of cardinals was not yet ready for overt action against the pope whom they had elected and crowned, but Pierre de Cros proceeded with assurance. Just as he had summoned the castellan of Soriano, so he issued a formal citation to Bartolomeo Prignano at Tivoli, ordering him under pain of excommunication to appear before his own cameral tribunal at Anagni. We can be sure that his citation was written, sealed and sent, though unfortunately we have neither the original nor a registered copy, and the only contemporary witness, the Chronicon Siculum, does not give the date.Footnote 58 If the citation was peremptory, as was usual, its term would be ten days from receipt, after which Bartolomeo Prignano could be declared contumacious, excommunicated and deposed from his archbishopric. Very likely the summons was sealed earlier than 10 July 1378, since the chamberlain's letter to the collectors of 20 July refers to Prignano as ‘former archbishop of Bari’. De Cros was simultaneously planning to arrest the intrusus by force, but he could not come to an agreement with the mercenaries for such a chancy enterprise.Footnote 59
On 20 July the cardinals gathered at Anagni, cautiously following the chamberlain's bold action, sent a joint request to their Italian peers who were visiting Urban at Tivoli, calling them to a consultation about the scandalous state of the Church following an election which had been canonically irregular because of popular pressure. This letter did not prejudge the election as invalid: it did not mention the pope of April in any way, and it was not dated sede vacante. The chamberlain felt no such hesitancy. On the very same day, in an executive letter which he dispatched in three copies to his collectors across the Alps, he ordered them not to recognise four episcopal appointments of ‘lord Bartolomeo Prignano, if lord he deserves to be called, former archbishop of Bari’, because he was an intruder and the Apostolic See was vacant; instead, de Cros ordered the collectors themselves to stand in as administrators of those churches.Footnote 60
The chamberlain's formal and forthright legal action against Prignano as intrusus, in which he was encouraged by Jean de la Grange and Robert of Geneva, was forcing the rest of the college toward a definitive break. The situation of the cardinals at Anagni was irregular and awkward. By custom, they could act in common only in consistory, where the pope presided, or in conclave, to elect a pope. They were stuck between those two situations. How were they to declare that there was no pope and that an election was required? The chamberlain, with his judicial commission from Gregory xi still in force, was warranted thereby to preside at a hearing of his own design on any matter which he considered to touch the temporal goods of the Apostolic See. He had exactly the constitutional authority and executive power that the cardinals wanted, and he went to work for them. On 2 August 1378 the cardinals filed into the hall of the episcopal palace of Anagni, where the chamberlain and three notaries were waiting, and all listened to the reading of an account of the events of early April, concluding with the declaration that the Apostolic See was still vacant. All twelve cardinals assented and signed this judicial sentence, and last of all so did Pierre de Cros, presiding as ordinary judge over this meeting which was neither consistory nor conclave.Footnote 61
Now that their unfortunate error of 9 April had been annulled, the cardinals transferred to Fondi, went into conclave again on 20 September, and elected as pope the most experienced warrior in their number, Robert of Geneva. The Camera, indeed the entire Curia of Clement vii, needed to demonstrate his legitimacy as successor of Gregory xi by a continuity of administrative style. The chamberlain lost no time in reconstituting his own staff at Fondi. He appointed a new procurator fiscal and a new registrar and sealbearer for the Audience of the Camera and on 23 and again on 29 September 1378 he proclaimed his order to all the officers of Gregory xi, especially the scribes of the Chancery and Penitentiary, to report within fifteen days to the Curia at Fondi.Footnote 62 But at some point the registers of papal and cameral letters which had come from Avignon had been lost. Authentic examples of such letters, both original and registered copies, were wanted so that those produced by the Chancery and Camera of Clement vii would replicate their style and appearance. One officer of Gregory xi who came to Fondi was the energetic collector Bertrand du Mazel. He had his own small register of letters recently directed to him by the Camera, and a portfolio of several original papal letters as well. The new pope himself had a number of original papal bulls from his earlier life as cardinal of Geneva. All these were helpfully given to the chamberlain.Footnote 63
For his part, Urban vi needed to create a new Camera Apostolica and to recreate the visual and textual character of the late pope's Chancery. Late in July he had both halves of the matrix of the papal bull cut anew, for the chamberlain had kept the obverse half-matrix of the seal of Gregory xi.Footnote 64 Lacking any registers of papal letters, Urban's notaries began to copy his curial letters into an exemplar-book, an impromptu production so unlike the Avignon and Vatican registers that it has found its home in the Vatican Library rather than the Archives.Footnote 65 To replicate the traditional forms, Urban first appointed Bartholomeus Francisci, a veteran scribe and secretary of the Chancery, as its acting governor – his own successor in that function. Then he went to the source, the household in which he had lived in Avignon. Ranulphe de Gorse, bishop of Sisteron, nephew of the vice-chancellor Pierre de Monteruc, came to Rome in June 1378 as a messenger from the cardinals still at Avignon. Urban took Gorse into his own improvised Chancery as vice-gerent of the vice-chancellor (who was still Pierre de Monteruc); but in the first creation of cardinals on 18 September, Gorse became cardinal and vice-chancellor himself.Footnote 66 Monteruc remained vice-chancellor to Clement vii in Avignon, and the rest of his household stayed with him.Footnote 67
The Western Schism had its roots within the papal Curia. Even before there were two international obediences, or two popes, even before two legal opinions began to be argued about the validity of the April election, and before the ultramontane cardinals and Urban vi had gone to their separate summer refuges of Anagni and Tivoli, the nucleus of the Curia was split in interest and policy between two ministers, the heads of the Chancery and of the Camera, Bartolomeo Prignano and Pierre de Cros.
