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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A book’s faults lie with its author; its strengths reflect the generosity of many kind souls. Dr. Joseph Goering (University of Toronto), Dr. Giulio Silano (University of Toronto) and Dr. Norman Zacour (University of Toronto) provided invaluable assistance in the early stages of this work’s research and composition.
I am likewise indebted to Dr. Pierre Boglioni (Université de Montréal) and Dr. Paul Fedwick (University of Toronto) for their helpful suggestions. Dr. Kerry Spiers (University of Louisville) was both a congenial sounding board and a wellspring of knowledge regarding the Avignonese court. Dr. Thomas Burman (University of Tennessee—Knoxville) provided moral support and practical guidance concerning the publication process. I owe special thanks to Donald Biddle for his fine maps; to May Drost, copy-editor par excellence; and to John Beattie and Bob Whittaker for their exceedingly generous hospitality while I scrambled to finish the book at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In the spring of 1991, I spent a lovely day with my wife and a good friend, Charles Hilken, in Anagni, a dusty little town where history ended in the autumn of 1303.
There were hardly any tourists there; we had the place to ourselves. Around noon we went to the cathedral, where a friendly custodian took us through the crypt. By the time the tour ended it was nearly one o’clock, and the two custodians were preparing to close up for the afternoon siesta. At that moment, a busload of French tourists arrived and entered the cathedral. The custodians managed to conceal their impatience until one man began taking pictures, within arm’s length of a large, multilingual sign prohibiting flash photography. The younger custodian approached him and politely asked him to refrain. The man complied with a smile—then snapped off another half dozen photos and raced out of the Duomo, with an infuriating wave to the two custodians.
The older man stood, shaking his head in disgust, while the younger proclaimed, in rather too-loud a voice, “i francesi—ANCORA i francesi” (“the French—AGAIN the French”). I owe a special debt to those two anonymous Anagnesi curators for reminding me of the enduring power of cultural and historical memory in the ancient places of Italy. Above all, I must thank my wife and fellow scholar, Pamela Drost Beattie, for her innumerable contributions and boundless, loving patience.
INTRODUCTION
Of the many troubles that bedeviled the popes of Avignon, perhaps none was more tenacious or seemingly intractable than the problem of Italy. For seven decades, the popes justified their protracted absence from Rome through liberal use of the formula ubi papa, ibi Roma (“where the pope is, there is Rome”). In the end, though, they could not deny that their true earthly home was in Rome—not the rhetorical Rome that followed faithfully and compliantly in their train, but the real Rome, forever fixed on the banks of the Tiber River, to which Divine Providence and thirteen centuries of sacred history had bound the successors of Saint Peter with indissoluble ties.
But knowing they belonged there was one thing; actually getting there was quite another. For much of the fourteenth century, the Italian peninsula was convulsed by inter-city conflicts and civil unrest. Many northern cities had come under the rule of powerful autocrats who benefited from the pope’s absence and were determined to prolong it for as long as possible; many vital papal allies found themselves paralyzed by economic instability and political division. Rome, for its part, was inhospitable to the point of being very nearly uninhabitable.
Within the walls of the crumbling and under-populated city, poverty and crime were rampant; beyond them lay malarial marshlands and the rural strongholds of Rome’s famously unruly nobles, whose turbulence had increased during the papacy’s absence. Whether the popes wanted to return or not—and, despite their protestations to the contrary, at least some of them, along with a goodly portion of their cardinals, clearly preferred the Rhône to the Tiber—was immaterial, so long as conditions in Italy precluded their safe return. In the face of often strident criticism and impassioned exhortations to return home, the popes of Avignon struggled mightily to pacify Italy.
Were they to struggle a bit too mightily, they were assailed for a bellicosity that ill became the vicars of Christ on earth; if they gave any ground, they were accused of abandoning the City of Peter and Paul. Damned if they did and damned if they didn’t, the Avignon popes expended the better part of seventy years and a veritable fortune on the thankless, immensely difficult, and absolutely essential task of rendering Italy suitable for the papacy’s eventual return.
For better and for worse, Avignonese papal policy in Italy owed more to John XXII (1316–34) than to any other pope. Every Avignonese pope after John either consciously rejected John’s Italian policy and created a deliberately distinct alternative, like Benedict XII (1334–42) and Clement VI (1342–52), or adopted it, with some modification, like Innocent VI (1352–62), Urban V (1362–70) and Gregory XI (1370–78).1 John’s predecessor, Clement V (1305–14), made the first attempts to manage Italian affairs from afar by means of powerful legates, thereby establishing a vitally important precedent for his successors, but it was John who placed such initiatives at the heart of a coherent policy.
Where Clement tried to avoid an overly close cooperation with the Capetian and Angevin crowns, John saw Angevin Naples as the centerpiece of an Italian “Guelf” alliance whose restored primacy he regarded as indispensable to Italian stability and order. It was John, too, who began the systematic transformation of administration in the Papal States, replacing the predominantly Roman and aristocratic rectors of the thirteenth century with a new generation of Gallic administrators schooled principally in the bureaucratic principles and techniques of the fourteenth-century curia.
Most importantly, he made the pacification of Italy the highest priority of his eighteen-year pontificate, investing a tremendous amount of human and material resources into the task. John XXII’s Italian policy was exceptionally ambitious. It was also in many respects quite brilliant in its conception. John did not simply resign himself to an indefinite stay in Avignon; there are far too many elements of his pontificate that argue against such a view.
On the other hand, his knowledge of Italian affairs probably made him much more willing than his predecessor to countenance the possibility of a protracted absence from Rome. John’s Italian policy was grounded in and proceeded from three eminently pragmatic and entirely sensible assumptions: [1] that the pope should do everything in his power to return the papacy to Rome; [2] that the pope should not feel constrained to return before the state of affairs in Italy, and particularly in Rome, made it reasonably safe for him to do so; and [3] that, given the very real possibility of failure, the pope should provide for the best possible administration of papal holdings in Italy during what could well turn out to be a very long absence.
These practical bases underlay virtually everything the pope did or instructed his agents to do with respect to Italy. The implementation of John’s Italian policy was heavily dependent on the activities of French and (especially) Languedocian agents. This should come as no surprise. The fate of Italy was always among the highest priorities of the popes of Avignon; the men they sent to see to it were among their closest and most trusted associates. Of course, all seven popes of Avignon were sons of the Midi—which meant that their closest and most trusted associates were, almost without exception, kinsmen or compatriots from Gascony, Cahors or Limoges.
It was to these men that the popes turned for the management of distant Italy; whether they went as legates, nuncios, or administrative officers in the Papal States, the papacy’s agents in Italy tended quite naturally to come from the same broadly Gallic social and ecclesiastical circles as the popes who sent them. Cardinals Arnaud de Pellagrue and Bertrand du Poujet were intimate associates of Popes Clement V and John XXII, respectively; the popes who sent them to Italy trusted them implicitly as more capable hands in which to leave the important as the affairs of war-torn Italy.
That they were Gallic was neither surprising nor, from the popes’ perspective, terribly pertinent. It did, however, have practical consequences. For one thing, the papacy’s reliance on Gallic agents in Italy very quickly proved a costly affair. The administrative overhaul of the Papal States required a considerable outlay of expenditures. Papal officials were frequently unable to collect customary revenues from Italian territories given over to war or insurrection. Thus, the administration of papal territories came to rely on substantial infusions of money from Avignon. What’s more, to maintain order in papal Italy, especially in times of conflict, papal agents found it necessary to employ mercenary forces whose services did not come cheaply.
Not even the popes’ Angevin allies in the kingdom of Naples could be expected to render military aid to the papacy without expecting some kind of remuneration. It was perhaps an inevitable corollary of the papacy’s removal from the peninsula, but the administration of papal Italy cost a great deal more from Avignon than it did from Rome: as the governance of the Papal States increasingly passed to a new generation of Gallic officials, without indigenous support bases or local resources to draw from, the costs increased dramatically.
There was, perhaps, an even more fundamental problem with the papacy’s reliance on Gallic officials in Italy: the Italians absolutely detested them. The thirteenth century witnessed a dramatic growth of Italian cultural consciousness. This cultural consciousness is, as such things often are, hard to pin down. It is already discernible in the time of Saint Francis, who thought his native Umbrian a tongue worthy of singing the praises of God; it gathered momentum with the work of the early pre-humanists in Padua, Bologna, and other northern centers, who looked back over the span of centuries and discovered Italy’s unique connection to the glories and achievements of ancient Roman civilization.
It was doubtless much easier to experience emotionally than it was to articulate in purely intellectual terms. But it was powerful all the same, and it grew stronger with the foreign interventions of the thirteenth century: every Swabian or Angevin or Aragonese army that passed through the peninsula helped to sharpen the distinction between what was Italian and what was not. In the same way, the papacy’s retreat to the Venaissin in 1305 was a trauma to the Italian spirit that inevitably intensified this burgeoning sense of italianità. In very short order the peoples of Italy conceived an almost universal loathing for the endless parade of Gallic princes, Gallic soldiers, Gallic rectors and Gallic legates that the Gallic popes dispatched from their Gallic resort to protect their interests in Italy.
The Italian view is best summed up by a certain Chico of Pesaro, who wrote to Cardinal Napoleone Orsini in 1326: “These Gauls are the worst men in the world. They despise the entire world, except for their own nation. They give no thought to anyone but those who wish to take part in their idiocy.”2 Given the tremendous resentment that the papacy’s Gallic officials so often provoked, it is hardly surprising that they had to struggle to maintain even the semblance of order in Italy.
Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano Orsini was a rare specimen in the history of the fourteenth-century Church: an Italian who came to play a central role in the Avignon papacy’s Italian policy. He was dispatched as legatus a latere in the spring of 1326 to relieve John XXII’s first legate to Italy, Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet, after a series of disastrous setbacks the previous year; thereafter, Orsini’s legation took place in what had previously been the southern half of Poujet’s legatine territories.
The pope made no mention of Orsini’s background in the documents authorizing the legation; still, it is very difficult to conclude that his choice of an Italian was merely coincidental. After a long succession of Gallic envoys to Italy and little enough to show for it, the pope himself seemed willing to acknowledge that his Italian program needed some adjustment. The immensely capable and boundlessly energetic Poujet was foundering in a northern Italian theater whose social and political conventions he was never entirely able to apprehend.
And he was foundering expensively: Poujet’s campaigns, and the large mercenary armies that made them possible, had already cost the papacy a fortune. Orsini’s dispatch, then, would seem to signal an important experiment in Avignonese policy in Italy. If Poujet could never aspire to be more than an unpopular foreigner, Orsini was a quintessential “insider”; his exceptionally powerful Roman family had a long history of loyal service to the papacy.
There were material benefits as well: the vast resources and extensive connections of the Orsini family could be pressed into the service of Orsini’s legation, to the relief of papal coffers already exhausted by Poujet’s costly campaigns. The general mandate of Orsini’s legation articulated a goal that was as remarkable in its ambition as it was in its breadth: to do whatever was necessary for the honor of God, the greater good of the territories committed to him, and the restoration of the “peace of the faithful” within these territories3 —in other words, to bring about the pacification and general reformation of Italy.
Of all medieval papal legates, only Poujet and, later, Cardinal Gil de Albornoz were directed to so broad and demanding an objective; indeed, the missions of Poujet, Orsini and Albornoz can be seen as marking the apex of medieval papal legations, drawing on centuries of institutional development to pursue an objective of unprecedented breadth. Yet, while much scholarly ink has been spilled on the missions of Poujet and (especially) Albornoz, Orsini’s legation remains little studied. Historians of the Avignon papacy tend to treat it as little more than a footnote to the great events of the period, a mere echo of the far more significant legation of Poujet in the north.
In actual fact, Orsini’s legation was much more than that. It constituted a conscious attempt to depart from a predominantly “Gallic” legatine model, defined in large part by the missions of Arnaud de Pellagrue and, in particular, Bertrand du Poujet. These men were of Gallic extraction and enjoyed exceptionally close personal relationships with the popes who dispatched them. They coordinated activities among a variety of different forces, but tended to rely very heavily on expensive mercenaries. They also had to contend with the hard feelings of Italians, enemies and allies alike, whose increasingly fierce resentment for the Gallic papacy in distant Avignon complicated most major papal initiatives in Italy.
In the end, legates like the Gascon Pellagrue or the Cahorsin Poujet, however talented and determined they may have been, were not always attuned to Italian sensibilities or social conventions, with sometimes disastrous consequences. Orsini’s legation was thus conceived as an Italic alternative to this Gallic model—a model which did not, at the time of Orsini’s dispatch in the spring of 1326, appear to be working particularly well. Orsini’s mission was intended to be considerably less expensive (which it was), to provide a legate who was far more knowledgeable of Italian affairs (which it did), and ultimately, to be (or at least to feel) more genuinely and organically “Italic” in its character and conduct (which it was).
But this was not always a good thing; the mission brought with it a number of distinct problems, unforeseen by John XXII and largely absent from the mission of Poujet—factionalism and familial rivalries; cross-regional antagonism; the legate’s own excessively personal investment in the outcome of certain struggles. In the end, these proved ruinous to both the general peace and the papal cause in central Italy. The ultimate failure of Orsini’s legation should not be adduced as an argument against its historical importance or worthiness of scholarly attention. After all, Poujet’s mission collapsed in the end, but few scholars would suggest that it was therefore insignificant or unworthy of study. Even Albornoz attained, in the final analysis, a rather more qualified success than either he or the popes who sent him might have liked.
Orsini’s mission, like Poujet’s, was crucial to the development of Avignonese papal policy in Italy; its lessons con- tributed directly to the ultimately successful legation of Albornoz a generation later. One could even argue that the scholarship of Avignonese papal policy in Italy remains incomplete without adequate consideration of Orsini’s important and distinctively Italian mission. Orsini’s legation took place in the context of the distinctive Italian policy which the papacy’s relocation to Avignon necessitated.
The development of this policy began somewhat tentatively during the pontificate of Clement V and continued much more forcefully and deliberately during the pontificate of John XXII, under whom it came to incorporate a number of different strategies through which the pope sought to maintain a “controlling interest” in the affairs of Italy without actually being there. Beyond a necessary administrative restructuring of the Papal States, these strategies included the continuing cultivation of strategic alliances with traditional papal allies in Italy; the exploitation of local conflicts to the papacy’s greatest advantage; the promotion of Angevin political interests throughout the Italian peninsula; and, most importantly, perhaps, an increasingly heavy reliance on powerful envoys—and in particular, legati a latere—as executors of papal policy in Italy.
The mission of Poujet was especially paradigmatic; it established a model for the Avignon papacy’s most ambitious legations in Italy, and thus initiated a new phase in both the development of the legatine office and the continuing evolution of papal policy in Italy. The reverses of 1325 forced John XXII to modify his Italian policy. With Emperor Ludwig IV now promising an imperial expedition into Italy, the pope conceded that Poujet should concentrate on the war against the Visconti in Lombardy while a second legate attended to the crises mounting in central Italy. Of particular concern were the seemingly inexorable ascendancy of the Lucchese signore, Castruccio Castracani, whose territorial ambitions threatened the very independence of Florence, and the parlous state of Rome, whose political instability left the city vulnerable to imperial occupation.
Significantly, the man whom the pope selected to undertake this central Italian legation was not “one of the worst men in the world”—that is to say, men of French or Languedocian origin—but a native of the region: Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano Orsini. Orsini had not been especially prominent in the Sacred College prior to his legation; what recommended him to the pope was the enormous power and influence his family wielded in central Italy.
The Orsini were among the most aggressively successful of Rome’s aristocratic clans, with influence and territorial connections that reached far beyond Rome and its immediate vicinity. They could also demonstrate a long tradition of faithful (if almost invariably selfinterested) service to the papacy. The nomination of an Orsini legate, then, may be taken as evidence of a new experiment in papal policy, wherein the pope sought to depart from his customary reliance on Gallic associates in favor of native agents who possessed both a greater awareness of central Italian problems and a substantial reserve of indigenous political and economic resources with which to tackle them.
As legate, Orsini was able, like Poujet, to draw on centuries of canonical development to exercise a legatine authority without precedent in the history of the Western Church. Poujet, Orsini, and the later fourteenth-century legate, Cardinal Gil de Albornoz, were enjoined with restoring an Italian political that had previously depended on the papacy’s physical presence in Rome. No previous legate had been called upon to apply the full range of legatine powers to so ambitious an objective, or to represent the authority of the pope so overtly and comprehensively.
The legations of Poujet, Orsini, and Albornoz may thus be seen as the marking the apex of medieval legatine power. Giovanni Orsini’s legation is divisible into three distinct phases. The first took place in Tuscany between 1326 and the end of 1328 or the beginning of 1329. Here Orsini’s principal objectives were the defeat of Castruccio Castracani and his allies (most notably Guido Tarlati, the renegade bishop of Arezzo), the restoration of Florence after a difficult period in the city’s history, and the defense of Rome against the emperor.
The legate’s success in these endeavors was at best qualified. The fecklessness of his allies, and the legate’s own less than complete commitment to the Tuscan theater, made for a rather dismal showing against the exceptionally talented Castruccio and the tenaciously resilient Guido; only their premature deaths (in 1328 and 1327, respectively) delivered Tuscany from their ambitions. Orsini had no more success in his native Rome, where a pro-imperial revolutionary government not only welcomed the emperor at the beginning of 1328, but celebrated his coronation and witnessed the creation of an imperial antipope, Nicholas V, in the spring of that same year. Orsini’s arrival did bolster the spirit of the Florentines, though he soon squandered their good will by issuing a collection of unpopu-lar (and astonishingly ill-timed) constitutions aimed at reforming the state of the Florentine church.
The emperor’s expulsion from Rome in the summer of 1328, and Castruccio’s death that autumn, left Orsini free to undertake the restoration of order and functional ecclesiastical authority in the cities and towns of the Patrimony of St Peter. Once again, his success was mixed. While any number of towns submitted to the legate and sought absolution from the Holy See, others—most notably Viterbo and Todi—remained intransigent in defying the authority of the Church. The legate’s difficulties were compounded by his increasingly strained relations with papal officials in the region and by the dynamics of old family rivalries: the imperial vicar in Todi, Giovanni di Sciarra Colonna, and the signore of Viterbo, Faziolo dei Prefetti di Vico, came from families traditionally hostile to the Orsini. Still, by late 1329 or early 1330, Orsini managed to effect at the very least a fragile peace in the Patrimony, and could turn his attentions at last to his native Rome.
It is hard to say for certain in what capacity John XXII intended his legate to operate in Rome, where the legate’s status was problematic. The pope already had a representative agent there in the person of his vicar in spiritualibus et temporalibus, Bishop Angelo of Viterbo; municipal government rested, at least nominally, with the agents of Rome’s papal senator, King Robert of Naples. But Orsini wasted little time in pushing his rivals aside and establishing himself as de facto ruler of the city. In partnership with the Roman commune, he asserted Rome’s dominance over the cities and towns of the region; of his own accord, he undertook the aggressive promotion of Orsini interests in Rome and the district.
In so doing, he not only earned several unheeded rebukes from the pope, but managed in the end to provoke a bloody clan war with the archrival Colonna family. The outbreak of the vendetta, and the nearly simultaneous collapse of Poujet’s legation in the north, brought John XXII’s ambitious Italian policy to a disappointing conclusion and occasioned the recall of both legates in the summer of 1334. Quite aside from his high-profile military and political initiatives, Orsini undertook a number of administrative and ecclesiastical reforms. The execution of these reforms he left for the most part to the members of his legatine entourage or to local officials with whom the legate was somehow associated.
These reforms demonstrate a desire to purge the central Italian church of schismatic clerics, to revitalize local religious foundations that had suffered during the upheavals of the time, and to restore normality to the administration of local churches. Orsini was not uniformly successful in this regard. After all, the efficacy of the legate’s reform initiatives was directly contingent on the success or failure of his military activities; he could hardly expect to implement meaningful reforms in communities that remained in a state of rebellion against the papacy. More to the point, perhaps, Orsini’s attempts at reform served to underscore just how much the central Italian church had come to depend on the presence of the papacy—not a powerful papal envoy, but the papacy itself, with the full range of curial organs—for its normal operation. The failure of Orsini’s legation is attributable to a variety of factors. Giovanni Orsini was not particularly well suited to the demands of a legation; he was too impatient, too imperious and too distractible.
He was also, perhaps, too Roman: he showed too little concern for the fate of Tuscany and far too much for the affairs of Rome and the Patrimony, where his excessive investment in the fortunes of his family eventually brought his legation to ruin. There were problems, too, inherent in the legatine office itself. Legatine authority was by its very nature disruptive; it intruded into established hierarchies and overrode ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
These effects were amplified by the peculiar institutional circumstances of the papacy’s Italian possessions, where the legate encountered a network of provincial administrators and other special ecclesiastical authorities with whom to jostle. But even in failure, Orsini’s mission provided some useful lessons for the later popes of Avignon and for the great legate, Gil de Albornoz, whose successful legation was instrumental in effecting the papacy’s return. The aims of the present study are modest. It is not intended as the final word, but rather as a first step. Its objective is to present an analytical narrative of a long overlooked legation, with special attention to the mission’s place in the development of fourteenthcentury papal policy in Italy. It is not intended as in-depth study of Orsini’s activities in each of the locales to which he traveled in the course of his legation (though one might hope that it could lead to such studies).
It seeks to understand why John XXII chose, in 1326, to send a somewhat obscure Italian cardinal as legate to Italy instead of a close Gallic associate, as he was otherwise wont to do. It seeks furthermore to fathom the tremendous challenge that Orsini’s mandate posed, and the vast array of legatine powers he brought to bear in pursuit of it. It tries to articulate the ways in which Giovanni Orsini’s “Italic” legation—dependent on the legate’s knowledge of Italian affairs, his ability to draw on family resources in the prosecution of his objectives, and on his extensive connections throughout central Italy—differed from the more traditionally “Gallic” model of Avignonese legation to Italy, as evinced first in the legation of Arnaud de Pellagrue and developed much more thoroughly in the mission of Bertrand du Poujet.
Finally, it looks to account for the extent to which the distinct characteristics of the mandate, along with certain problems inherent in the legatine office in papal Italy, contributed to the catastrophic failure of Orsini’s mission in 1334. If, in the end, this monograph can add perhaps a few new insights into a critical century in the history of the Church and of the Italian peninsula and peoples, then it will have succeeded; if not, then at least it will have failed no more spectacularly than its subject did in the pursuit of his objectives. In light of the book’s objectives, its principal sources are chronicles and papal letters, rather than archival materials. These sources entail some interpretive problems.
The legate’s own voice, for example, is strangely and lamentably absent from the record. By the thirteenth century it was not unusual for legates to keep registers, which would have included copies of their letters.4 If Giovanni Orsini kept such a register, it has not survived. Later medieval legates to France were required to send a copy of their registers to the Parlement of Paris upon completion of their missions;5 unfortunately, there was no analogous requirement (or recipient authority) in fourteenth-century Italy. The absence of so valuable a resource leaves a gaping chasm in the historical record, especially given the enormous volume of correspondence that legations could reasonably be expected to entail. Cardinal Marcello Cervini produced at least forty-five letters during a legation of just four months in 1540;6 I have yet to locate even a single letter that Giovanni Orsini wrote in the course of his eight-year mission. (Orsini, it would appear, was not always the most diligent of correspondents.
For example, amidst the uncertainties attending the apparently less-than-sincere submission of Todi in the summer of 1331, the pope expressed his frustration at Orsini’s failure to respond to the pope’s own letters: “We recall having already sent certain proceedings and letters to you, as indicated in the schedule enclosed with the present letters, concerning which we do not know whether they reached your hands . . .”)7 For the communication between the legate and the pope, the scholar is thus entirely dependent on the letters of Pope John XXII, some of which have been published in excellent editions or calendars, associated in particular with the École Française. For those that remain unedited the Registra Vaticana are indispensable. In most cases the papal letters give a good indication of the substance, at least, of what the legate relayed to the pope.
In other cases, however, they do not. In the summer of 1327, for example, while the legate was preparing for an important campaign in Rome, the pope wrote to inform him that two nuncios, Guigo de Saint-Germain and Guillaume de Veyrato, whom the pope had dispatched to respond to the latest Roman demands that the pope return, would bring the legate further instructions;8 what those instructions were, and how or even if they related to Orsini’s Roman campaign, remains unknown. Toward the very end of his legation, with his mission collapsing into chaos, Orsini received a letter from John XXII, which reads simply, We give you license, by the authority of the present letters, to do those things which you have humbly requested through your letters to us at this time.9 This particular letter—essentially useless, in the absence of any contextualizing information—underscores one of the biggest problems in any assessment of Orsini’s legation: however invaluable the papal letters might be, the legate’s silence ultimately leaves the scholar with only half a correspondence to consult.
The narrative sources are in the main municipal chronicles, a great many of which can be found in Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Both collectively and individually these chronicles provide a wealth of information, though they also present two rather significant problems. First, no single source provides anything like a sustained narrative of Orsini’s legation. Because the chronicles focus primarily on the affairs of their own cities, the legate moves in and out of view as activities pertain to or depart from the local concerns of each chronicler. An important exception is Giovanni Villani, whose Florentine chronicle is a good deal less parochial than most contemporary Italian chronicles.10 Indeed, the chronicles of Giovanni and Matteo Villani (Matteo continued his brother’s chronicle after Giovanni perished in the Black Death of 1348) were so influential that many other fourteenth-century chroniclers took material from them and incorporated it, often more or less verbatim, into their own chronicles to relate events taking place in the wider world. Certainly, Villani provides more discussion of Giovanni Orsini’s legation than any other narrative source; in fact, his chronicle provides the closest thing available to a sustained narrative of the legation. Even so, the coverage is limited; Orsini’s mission was hardly one of Villani’s principal subjects. The admirable and, by the standards of contemporary Italian chronicles, quite exceptional breadth of Villani’s coverage can sometimes lead one to forget that, for certain events (and especially those that took place outside of Tuscany), other sources might well be more valuable. To give one example: Villani wrote a detailed account of the battle that broke out when Cardinal Orsini and his Angevin allies attempted to enter Rome through the Leonine City in September 1327.11 It is a thorough, lively account whose influence is attested by its appearance, in somewhat abbreviated form, in the Sienese chronicle of Agnolo Tura del Grasso.12 Whatever Villani’s eloquence or influence might seem to suggest, however, his account of the battle in neither as vivid nor as well-informed as the much less familiar account produced by an anonymous Roman chronicler, who was almost certainly an eyewitness to the events he describes. “I remember,” he wrote, “that on that night an armed Roman knight, having ridden to the bridge, heard one of the enemy’s trumpets.”13 The Anonimo’s account is less widely known and far less influential than Villani’s, and most readers would find its Romanesco dialect less accessible than Villani’s Tuscan; it is, all the same, the better-informed and more reliable of the two accounts. One must also recognize that almost all of the urban chroniclers were aligned to some degree with either the imperial or the papal cause. Though few are vehemently partisan in tone, most provide at least subtle clues as to their inclinations. The Roman Anonimo, for example, while by no means a virulent opponent of John XXII, was inclined all the same to identify with the leaders of the Roman commune in their struggle against Orsini and his Angevin allies. He betrays his allegiance with his admiring portrait of Sciarra Colonna and his reference to “one of the enemy’s trumpets,” the enemy here being Cardinal Orsini and the Angevins. By the same token, a chronicler who effectively declines to acknowledge Ludwig IV as l’imperatore (“the emperor”), referring to him instead as il Bavaro (“the Bavarian”) or il duca di Baviera (“the duke of Bavaria”), is probably making a show of his Guelf credentials, whether he means to or not. Of the two positions—Guelf and Ghibelline—the former is by far the better represented among the chroniclers, leaving the reader with a perspective predominantly or even overwhelmingly favorable to one side. In some cases, the biases are anything but subtle; the popes and their supporters were particularly successful in depicting the Milanese Visconti as blackguards of diabolical malevolence.14
One must make a conscious effort not to construct, on the basis of the chronicles (and the papal letters which supplement them so richly), a narrative which divides the Italy of Orsini’s legation between heroes and villains. This is particularly true of the first stage of Orsini’s mission, where chroniclers like Giovanni Villani tend to portray the conflicts of the day in strongly moral and patriotic terms. Villani saw his Florence much as Livy had seen his Rome, as a city of destiny in whose passage through history a transcendent design was apparent. He was, moreover, very much a successful Florentine man of affairs; if his tone is, for the most part, balanced and fair-minded, his Guelf, mercantile and patriotically Florentine perspective is never far from the surface. He took it for granted that the Guelf cities (and some of them more than others) were faithful sons of the Church and upholders of lofty communal ideals, standing firm on the side of the angels against the schismatic Teuton and his ruthless Ghibelline minions.
It would be naive to assume that less celebrated or influential chroniclers were somehow immune to the effects of their own patriotic inclinations. Ultimately, the scholar is dependent upon a patchwork of different sources, cobbled together to create something of a greater narrative that must remain somewhat less coherent, complete, and even-handed than one might hope. In the latter half of the legation especially, the narrative inevitably takes on an episodic quality that borders at times on the picaresque (though this is not entirely inappropriate, given the nature of Orsini’s activities in the final phase of his mission). Nevertheless, in spite of these deficiencies, there are enough materials to permit a reasonable examination of the mission of this least known—and most vigorously Italian—of Avignonese papal legates to Italy.
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