Ladislas proved a born soldier of unflagging energy and purpose, so that he not only conquered his unruly baronage but made himself master of southern Italy, including Rome, from which with unusual Angevin hostility he drove the Pope. Here was a chance for bringing about the union of Italy under one ruler, and Ladislas certainly aimed at such an achievement, but apart from his military genius he was a typical despot of his day—cruel, unscrupulous, and pleasure-seeking as the Visconti—and when he died, still a young man, in 1414 few mourned his passing.
His sister, Joanna II, who succeeded him, lacked his strength while exhibiting many of his vices. Like Joanna I she was false and fickle; like Joanna I she had no direct heirs, so that the original House of Anjou in Naples came to an end when she died. Many negotiations as to her successor took place during the latter years of her reign, and for some time it seemed as if the old queen would be content to accept Louis III of Anjou, at this time the representative of the Second Angevin House, but in a moment of caprice and anger she suddenly bestowed her favour instead on Alfonso V of Aragon and Sicily, and adopted him as her heir. Of course, being Joanna, she again changed her mind; but, though Alfonso pretended to accept his repudiation, the hard-headed Spaniard was not to be turned so easily from an acquisition that would forward Aragonese ambitions in the Mediterranean.
Directly Joanna II died, Alfonso appeared off Naples with a fleet, and though he was taken prisoner in battle and sent as a prisoner to Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan, he acted with such diplomacy that he persuaded that despot, hitherto an ally of the Angevins, that it was much safer for Milan to have a Spanish rather than a French House reigning in Naples. This was the beginning of a firm alliance between Milan and Naples, for Alfonso, released from his captivity, succeeded in establishing himself in ‘the Kingdom’, where withdrawing his court from Aragon he founded a new capital that became a centre for learned and cultured Italians as of old in the days of Frederick II.
We have dealt now with four of the five principal Italian states during the later Middle Ages. In Rome, to pick up the political threads, we must go back to the effects of the removal of the papal court to Avignon in 1308.[46]
From the point of view of the Popes themselves, many of them Frenchmen by birth, there were considerable advantages to be gained by this change—not only safety from the invasions of Holy Roman Emperors aspiring to rule Italy, but also from the turbulence of Roman citizens and barons of the Campagna.
Avignon was near enough to France to claim her king’s protection, but far enough outside her boundaries to evade obedience to her laws. It stood in the County of Provence, part of the French estates of the Angevin House of Naples, but during her exile Joanna I, penniless and in need of papal support, was induced to sell the city, and it remained an independent possession of the Holy See until the eighteenth century.
From the immediate advantages caused by the ‘Babylonish Captivity’, as these years of papal residence in Avignon were called, we turn to the ultimate disadvantages, and these were serious. Inevitably there was a lowering of papal prestige in the eyes of Europe. In Rome, that since classic times had been the recognized capital of the Western world, the Pope had seemed indeed a world-wide potentate, on whom the mantle both of St. Peter and of the Caesars might well have fallen. Transferred to a city of Provence he shrank almost to the measure of a petty sovereign.
During the Hundred Years’ War, for instance, there was widespread grumbling in England at the obedience owed to Avignon. The Popes, ran popular complaint, were more than half French in political outlook and sympathy, so that an Englishman who wished for a successful decision to his suit in a papal law-court must pay double the sums proffered by men of any other race in order to obtain justice. What was more, he knew that any money he sent to the papal treasury helped to provide the sinews of war for his most hated enemies.
The Papacy had been disliked across the Channel in the days of Innocent IV, when England was taxed to pay for wars against the Hohenstaufen: now, more than a century later, grumbling had begun to crystallize in the dangerous shape of a resistance not merely to papal supremacy, but to papal doctrine on which that supremacy was based. Thus Wycliffe, the first great English heretic, who began to proclaim his views during the later years of Edward III’s reign, was popularly regarded as a patriot, and his sermons denouncing Catholic doctrine widely read and discussed.
In the thirteenth century it had been possible to suppress heresy in Languedoc; but in the fourteenth century there were no longer Popes like Innocent III who could persuade men to fight the battles of Avignon, and so the practice of criticism and independent thought grew, and by the fifteenth century many of the doctrines taught by Wycliffe had spread across Europe and found a home in Bohemia.