ANARCHY AND JUBILEE IN ROME
[1347-1350 A.D.]
Rome now returned to her old state of anarchy. The senators Bertoldo Orsini and Luca Savelli failed in maintaining a more orderly government than the senators preceding them. Stefano Colonna, the elder, died about this time (1348-1350); Werner von Urslingen, the fierce captain of the Great Company, had returned about a year before to this side of the Alps after having laid Romagna waste, and in November, 1347, he, with fifteen hundred armed soldiers, followed Louis of Hungary in Italy to the conquest of Naples. The confusion with which he filled the kingdom led to the victory of the Hungarians; then Urslingen was licensed, and it being easy to find them he gathered mercenaries under him, and marching towards Rome took and destroyed Anagni; but he did not get any further.
The Black Plague [described in our previous chapter], brought from the Levant in a Genoese galley in 1347, broke out in that year in some places of Tuscany, Romagna, and Provence. It ceased at the advent of winter, and broke out again with devastating force at the approach of spring, and ran riot over the whole of Italy, in 1348, excepting Milan and Piedmont. John Villani fell a victim to this terrible disease. Three-fifths of the population died in Florence, and two-thirds in Bologna. In Rome, on the contrary, it seems to have been less prevalent; at least we have no authentic records of the evil attending this city, now squalid and desolate. At the end of the following year the arrival of the pilgrims for the jubilee at Rome commenced. Germans and Hungarians came in great numbers. The arrival of the pilgrims was attended with no disorder. They were at first attacked by beggars when they reached the district of Rome, and some were killed; but subsequently the Romans had the roads protected. Countless were the Christians that went by thousands to the Holy City. The roads leading to the churches of St. Peter, St. John the Lateran, and St. Paul, and the highways outside the walls, were all crowded with people. Louis of Hungary came to Rome after having returned to his kingdom. Petrarch also came, but he neither found his old friends the Colonnas there, nor his new friend Cola, and he was grieved to see the Lateran half in ruins, the Vatican in disorder, and the church of the Apostles in ruins.
What feelings must have filled the heart of the poet on revisiting the Campidoglio and the district of the Apostles and the Colonna palace—in all Rome there was nothing to remind him of the happy days of his coronation! “Ah! it is not only we who are getting old that change, for the things about us deteriorate,” he said some years later.
[1350-1351 A.D.]
Aribaldo, a Tuscan bishop, was legate in Rome during the jubilee; he died on the 17th of August, 1350. The pope some time previously had deputed him to continue the proceedings commenced by Cardinal Bertrand against Cola.
The jubilee over, Rome relapsed into anarchy soon after it had elected the thirteen good men; and Clement VI, whilst showing himself favourable to the new administration, nominated four cardinals to examine into matters, and he confided to them the main part of the government of Rome. To them Petrarch addressed a letter full of the ideas he had expressed in his epistle to Cola, and, incensed against the malevolent Roman barons, he spoke of the plebe Romana who in old times elected their magistrates; and without touching on the tribunate he added that the two senators of his time, the only advance on the conscript (conscritti) fathers, represented the two consuls of ancient times.
He did not descend to especial admonitions upon the mode of governing, but only maintained the necessity of restoring ancient liberty and freeing the house of the apostles from the tyrants who had laid it waste.