Gregory XI., nephew of Clement VI. was the next pope, and the last of the Captivity. He secured Avignon from being again put to ransom by the Free Companions by taking into his service a troop of them commanded by an Englishman named Sir John Hawkwood.
The Florentines had encroached upon the States of the Church; and Gregory, taking a leaf out of the book of John XXII., excommunicated them and advertised them for sale as slaves; but the Florentines proved to be no more merchantable than the Visconti.
Gregory went to Italy on the same errand as Urban V. and was no better received. He made however a solemn entry into Rome, and was on the point of being driven out, when he suddenly died there. Anybody may die suddenly in Rome; but trite as the event reads, Gregory’s not dying elsewhere brought about a state of things worse than the Captivity.
It was usage to hold the elective conclave in the town where the last pope had died, and the cardinals assembled in Rome. Out of the sixteen, eleven were Frenchmen. All the Avignon popes had been French either native or by adoption; and the conclave was on the point of choosing one more French pontiff when a Roman mob gathered around it and threatened, if the cardinals did not elect an Italian, to “make their heads redder than their hats”—that is to cut them off. Under this threat the cardinals chose the archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan who was not even a cardinal. He took the name of Urban VI. and fixed his seat at Rome.
As soon as the cardinals could levy Free-Companions enough to defend them from the rabble, they met at Agnani the place where Boniface had been seized by the ruffians of Philip, and repudiating the previous election as having been made under duress, chose one of their number, Robert of Geneva who succeeded to the throne of Avignon under the name of Clement VII. Thus began what is called the Great Schism or Schism of the West.
The Church has never questioned the authority of the Avignon popes of the Captivity, but she has stigmatised those of the Schism as antipopes. At that time however, at least half of the Roman Catholic world cleaved to them. To the see of Avignon adhered France, Spain, Scotland, Poland and Sicily; to the see of Rome, England, Germany and Flanders. The Italians now acknowledged and now rejected the rule of the Roman incumbent, as faction and civil strife swayed them.
On the death of Clement VII., the Avignon cardinals elected Peter de Luna one of their number, who assumed the name of Benedict XIII.
No point of doctrine separated the two pontificates; they were kept asunder by party spirit alone; and everybody began to be tired of the scandal. An effort was made on both sides to put an end to it. The disciples of Avignon extorted from Benedict a promise to abdicate which he did not keep. Those of the Roman obedience also revolted and appealed to the Council of Pisa which put forth an edict deposing both popes and electing a new one. The other two refused to lay down their respective tiaras; and then christians, and I fear sinners too, beheld the spectacle of three popes at once, each fulminating bulls of excommunication and anathema against his two rivals. The Council of Constance then tried its hand. It seized John XXIII. the Roman pontiff who had also promised to resign and had not kept his word, and put him in prison. This so dishonored the name John that no pope has assumed it since, though it was the favorite before. Faction however still prevailed, and the two conclaves persisted in making separate elections.
Avignon still disputed preëminence with Rome; but after Benedict XIII. the popes of the Schism do not seem to have resided there, and the Schism itself became apparently more or less vagrant and interrupted. Benedict’s successor a Spaniard named Munoz who called himself Clement VIII. sold out his interest in the triple crown for a bishopric; and the Schism slept. It was awakened again by the Council of Bàle which undertook to depose the Roman pontiff Eugenius IV., on a charge of heresy, and to set up in his place the strangest member of a strange family—that of Savoy. The feudal chiefs of that house had been known as Counts. Owing to their love of fighting and their success at it, the Emperor had created them Dukes; and a scion of that pugnacious race now reigns over Italy. Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, tired of fighting, turned monk. With a few of his nobles he withdrew to a monastery where the whole party made such progress in holiness, that the Council of Bale raised Amadeus to the papacy with the title of Felix V., and scattered bishoprics and other preferments among the rest. Eugenius mocked at the Council and refused to quit, and for nine years more the Church was convulsed by rival popes. Eugenius died clinging to the keys to the last; and the Savoyard, weary of supra-mundane elevation, went back to his monastery, leaving Nicholas V. who had succeeded Eugenius, sole head of the Church. The Schism of the West was at an end: it had lasted off and on within a year as long as the Captivity.
For more than a century, Avignon had been a seat of the papacy; and when it ceased to be so it was still hallowed ground: secular dominion would no longer take root there; and the Holy See remained in possession and governed it. The Eternal City herself had been a warning. During the paralysis of papal authority there, she had been a prey to anarchy. The Orsini, the Colonnas and a score of minor brigands had desolated her pleasant places, and decimated her people.