The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

at her temerity. In one respect she was more successful. Her impassioned pleading overcame the pusillanimity of Gregory, and in September he left Avignon for Rome. Catherine—in spite of the paintings that you may still see in Rome and Siena—did not accompany him to the Eternal City. She met him again at Genoa, where her indomitable will prevailed over the counsels of the Cardinals, and prevented him from turning back. Then he went on his way, and she saw him no more.

At Genoa, many of her company fell sick. Neri di Landoccio was despaired of by the physicians and Stefano Maconi seemed dying. Both believed that their spiritual mistress and mother healed them miraculously. Seldom did Catherine seem sweeter and more loving than at this time, watching by the bedside of her young disciples, comforting Monna Lapa by letter for her delay, for “with desire have I desired to see you my true mother, not only of my body but also of my soul.”[31] And to her “dearest sister and daughter in Christ Jesus,” Monna Giovanna Maconi, the mother of her Stefano, she writes: “Take comfort sweetly and be patient, and do not be troubled, because I have kept Stefano too long; for I have taken good care of him. Through love and affection I have become one thing with him, and therefore have I taken what is yours as though it were mine. I am certain that you have not really been distressed at it. For you and for him I would fain labour even unto death, in all that I shall be able. You, mother, have given birth to him once; and I would fain give birth to him and you and all your family in tears and in toil, by continual prayers and desire of your salvation.”[32] She was back at Siena in November, sending another of her flaming letters to Gregory, who had reached Corneto on his way to Rome, exhorting him to constancy, fortitude and patience, urging him to obtain peace by making concessions, recommending her native city to him. “I have no other desire in this life save to see the honour of God, your peace and the reformation of Holy Church, and to see the life of grace in every creature that hath reason in itself.”[33]

In January 1377, the Pope made his solemn entry into the Eternal City, received with a perfect delirium of joy by nobles and people alike. Then a thrill of horror ran through Italy. The papal forces—the Breton mercenaries of the Cardinal Robert, with the English companies of Hawkwood—burst into Cesena, butchering men, women, and children, committing hideous atrocities of every kind that cannot be set down in this place. The Pope is said to have kept silence. One more affectionate letter did St Catherine write to him in her own familiar style, pleading for peace and the reformation of the Church. Then he turned against her. “Most holy Father,” she wrote to him through Raimondo, “to whom shall I have recourse, if you abandon me? Who will aid me? to whom shall I fly, if you drive me away? If you abandon me, conceiving displeasure and indignation against me, I will hide myself in the wounds of Christ crucified, whose vicar you are, and I know that He will receive me, because He wills not the death of the sinner. And if He receives me, you will not drive me away; rather shall we stay in our place to fight manfully with the arms of virtue for the sweet Spouse of Christ.”[34] Her last extant letter to Gregory, pleading for peace with the Italians and for the punishment “of the pastors and officers of the Church when they do what they should not do,” recommending to him the ambassadors of Siena who came to treat for the restitution of Talamone, which the papal troops had occupied, is in a colder and more formal tone.[35] Other sorrows came upon her. The Sienese distrusted her intimacy with the Salimbeni, accusing her and Frate Raimondo (poverello calunniato, as she called him) of plotting, whereas she declared that the only conspiracy in which she was engaged was for the discomfiture and overthrow of the devil. One of her own disciples conceived a guilty passion for her and fled from her circle, writing that he had become a vessel of contumely, that he was now “cut off, extinguished and blotted out of the book in which I felt myself so sweetly fed.”

Once more, early in 1378, did Catherine go to Florence to labour in the cause of peace. She addressed the Signoria in a solemn meeting in the Palazzo Vecchio, and induced them to meet the Pope half way by respecting the interdict. “The dawn is come at last,” she cried exultingly: l’aurora è venuta. And she prevailed upon the captains of the Parte Guelfa to offer a firm resistance to the war policy of the Eight, while endeavouring, through Stefano Maconi, to prevent them from abusing the power that their right of “admonishing” put into their hands. She was still in Florence when Gregory died, and the Archbishop of Bari, Bartolommeo Prignani, was elected Pope amidst the furious clamours of the Roman populace, as Urban VI. To him Catherine wrote at once, in the same way as she had done to Gregory, urging him to check the corruption and wickedness of the clergy, to make good Cardinals, to receive the Florentines back into the fold of the Church, and above all (for she knew something of the character of the man with whom she had now to deal) to take his stand upon true and perfect Charity.[36] A few weeks later the terrible rising of the populace, known as the Tumult of the Ciompi, burst over Florence. The adherents of St Catherine, as associated with the hated Parte Guelfa, were specially obnoxious to the mob, and her own life was threatened. A band of armed men came into the garden where she knelt in prayer, crying out that they would cut her to pieces. She prepared for martyrdom as for a joyous feast, and wept bitterly when she was left unharmed, declaring that the multitude of her sins had prevented her from being suffered to shed her blood for Christ. She wrote in this strain to Frate Raimondo, saying that she would begin a new life that day, in order that these sins of hers might no longer withdraw her from the grace of martyrdom; her only fear was lest what had happened might in some way influence the Pope against a speedy peace.[37] At the end of July peace was signed; Florence and the other cities of Tuscany were to be reconciled to the Holy See, and Catherine returned to Siena. “Oh, dearest children,” she wrote, “God has heard the cry and the voice of His servants, that for so long a time have cried out in His sight, and the wailing that for so long they have raised over their children dead. Now are they risen again; from death are they come to life, and from blindness to light. Oh, dearest children, the lame walk and the deaf hear, the blind eye sees, and the dumb speak, crying with loudest voice: Peace, peace, peace! with great gladness, seeing those children returning to the obedience and favour of the father, and their minds pacified. And, even as persons who now begin to see, they say: Thanks be to Thee, Lord, who hast reconciled us with our holy Father. Now is the Lamb called holy, the sweet Christ on earth, where before he was called heretic and patarin. Now do they accept him as father, where hitherto they rejected him. I wonder not thereat; for the cloud has passed away and the serene weather has come.”[38]

Not long did il tempo sereno hold. While it lasted Catherine remained quietly at Siena, dictating to her secretaries, Neri, Stefano, and a certain Barduccio Canigiani (a young nobleman who had joined her spiritual family at Florence), her book—the famous Dialogue. It consists of four mystical treatises on Discretion, Prayer, Divine Providence, and Obedience, in the form of a dialogue between God and a soul “panting with greatest desire for the honour of God and the salvation of souls.” This Dialogue and her Letters represent St Catherine’s literary work.[39] It was finished in October. Already the tempest had burst upon the Church, of which the first rumblings had been heard during her stay at Florence, and Catherine was now to be summoned to Rome to fight her last great battle.

Urban VI. had a high reputation for zeal and virtue; he was, in addition, a good Italian. From the outset he announced his intention of reforming the Roman Court, of extirpating simony and luxury in the Church. “They say,” the Prior of the Certosa of Gorgona had written to Catherine on the first news of his elevation, “that this our Holy Father is a terrible man, and frightens people exceedingly with his acts and his words.” The abrupt violence with which he began his work enraged and alarmed all the Curia, and within a few months of his election he was left alone. The French Cardinals fled to Anagni, and took the Breton mercenaries into their pay. When the Pope nominated twenty-six new cardinals, they held a conclave at Fondi, and, on the plea that the election of Urban had been extorted by force and fear of the Roman mob, and was therefore invalid, they raised the infamous Cardinal Robert of Geneva to the Popedom as Clement VII. All Christendom was now divided in its spiritual allegiance between two men, each claiming to be the Vicar of the Prince of Peace; any earthly prince would have dismissed the one with ignominy from his service, the other was soon to fall hopelessly and shamefully from his fair beginning.

But Catherine believed passionately in Urban, threw herself heart and soul into the struggle. “I have heard,” she wrote to him, “that the incarnate demons have raised up an Antichrist against you, Christ on earth; but I confess and do not deny that you are the Vicar of Christ, that you hold the keys of the cellar of Holy Church, where the blood of the Immaculate Lamb is kept.”[40] And in the twenty months of life that remained to her she battled for him to the death. Letter after letter did she send to him, full of evangelic counsels, urging him—in the boldest possible language—to begin the reform of the Church in his own person. Savonarola himself hardly surpasses the passion of her invective against the corruption of the ecclesiastical world. Urban is at first offended by her frankness, rebukes her messengers, and will not listen to her. Then his heart is touched, and he summons her to Rome. “Pray for me,” she writes to Suor Daniella, a nun of Orvieto, “to the supreme eternal goodness of God, that He may do with me what shall be to His honour and the salvation of souls; and especially now that I am to go to Rome, to accomplish the will of Christ crucified and of His Vicar.”

Catherine reached the Eternal City at the end of November 1378, with a band of her disciples of both sexes, including Alessia, Francesca and Lisa, Neri di Landoccio and Barduccio Canigiani. Stefano Maconi remained at Siena, but Frate Raimondo was already in Rome. The city was in a parlous state. Sant’ Angelo was held by the soldiery of the Antipope, who kept Urban out of the Vatican; the Breton mercenaries threatened the gates, and there were savage tumults in the streets. Urban would have Catherine address his new cardinals assembled in the Consistory, after which he “praised her much in the Lord.” In these first few months of his pontificate, while she yet lived, he seemed an utterly different man to what he afterwards became. He realised to the full the moral value of her support, and would not suffer her to leave Rome. On his behalf she dispatched fiery epistles all over Europe, declaring that he alone was the true Pope, the Vicar of Christ. To simple nuns she wrote imploring them to storm Heaven with prayers for his cause; to monks and hermits, bidding them leave their cells and convents, rally round the Sovereign Pontiff in the Eternal City, or do battle for him in the haunts and abodes of men. “Ye fools,” she wrote to the three Italian Cardinals who were striving to remain neutral, “fools, worthy of a thousand deaths”—but the epistle must be read in its entirety, for it is one of the most amazing documents of the epoch.[41] Other epistles secured the adhesion of the Republics of Siena and Florence, of Venice and Perugia. To the Queen of Naples, as chief supporter of Clement (whom she presently received as Sovereign Pontiff on his way to Avignon), she pleads Urban’s cause with calm reason, turning off the arrows of her words to strike the hostile Cardinals; and in like manner to Onorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, who had protected the schismatic conclave with his hired troops. “Where is the just man that they have elected for Antipope,” she writes again to the Queen of Naples, “if in very sooth our supreme pontiff, Pope Urban VI., were not true Vicar of Christ? What man have they chosen? A man of holy life? No: a man of iniquity, a demon; and therefore he does the office of the devils.”[42] In December the adherents of the Antipope were lying in wait to take Frate Raimondo, whom the Pope was sending on a dangerous mission to France, and the good friar’s courage failed him. Catherine, with her mystic longings for shedding her blood for the cause, was amazed at his pusillanimity, and sent him letters of characteristic remonstrance, reminding him that he need have no fear, because he was not worthy of the grace of martyrdom, exhorting him to be a man and not a woman, laying all the blame on herself (as she invariably does in her severest letters), pleading love as her excuse for rebuking him.

In the meanwhile Urban had hired the Italian mercenaries of the Company of St George, commanded by Count Alberico da Balbiano. On April 29th Alberico gained a complete victory over the Breton and Gascon soldiery of the Clementines at Marino, and the French governor of Sant’ Angelo surrendered to the Senator of Rome, Giovanni Cenci. Catherine is said—and a passage in one of her letters seems to confirm it—to have been the means of effecting the surrender. At her instigation the Pope went barefooted from Santa Maria in Trastevere to San Pietro in solemn procession, to give thanks before returning to take up his abode in the Vatican—an act of humility that aroused astonishment (strange reflection on the pomp of the Curia!) as something that had not been seen for ages. To the magistrates of the Roman Republic she wrote a letter on behalf of the victorious soldiery, which Tommaseo characterises as “worthy of the name of Rome.”[43] Then, flushed with victory, she addresses the King of France, in hopes that he may still be won over; she makes one more flaming, impassioned appeal to the Queen of Naples, and then—sole blot, I think, in all this blameless life—co-operates with Urban, in her letters to the King Louis and his cousin, Charles of Durazzo, in his attempt to raise the power of Hungary and Poland upon Giovanna’s head.[44] Her last extant letter to Urban himself is to urge him to adopt a mild and generous policy towards the Roman People. “You must surely know,” she says, “the character of your Roman children, how they are drawn and bound more by gentleness than by any violence or by harshness of words; and you know, too, the great necessity that is yours and Holy Church’s, of preserving this people in obedience and reverence to your Holiness; for here is the head and the beginning of our faith.”[45] A furious riot broke out at the beginning of 1380. The Roman populace rose in arms and assailed the Vatican, threatening the Pope’s life. Catherine interposed and stilled the tumult. This was her last public action.