Henry, after giving some months of repose to his army, took the command of the militia of Pisa, and made war at their head against Lucca; at the same time, he solicited from his brother, the archbishop of Trèves, a German reinforcement, which he obtained in the following month of July. On the 5th of August, 1313, Henry VII departed from Pisa, commanding twenty-five hundred ultramontane and fifteen hundred Italian cavalry, with a proportionate number of infantry. He began his march towards Rome, having been informed that Robert, called by the Florentines to their aid, advanced with all the forces of the Guelf party to oppose him. The declining military reputation of the Neapolitans inspired the Germans with little fear, and Robert had but a small number of French cavalry to give courage to his army; but the priests and monks, animated with zeal in defence of the ancient Guelf party and the independence of the church, seconded him with their prayers, and the report soon spread that they had seconded him in another manner and in their own way. The emperor took the road of San Miniato to Castel Fiorentino, arrived at Buon Convento, twelve miles beyond Siena, and stopped there to celebrate the festival of St. Bartholomew. On the 24th of August, 1313, he received the communion from the hands of a Dominican monk, and expired a few hours afterwards. It was said the monk had mixed the juice of Napel in the consecrated cup. It was said, also, that Henry was already attacked by a malady which he concealed. A carbuncle had manifested itself below the knee; and a cold bath, which he took to calm the burning irritation, perhaps occasioned his sudden and unexpected death.
RIVAL EMPERORS; ECCLESIASTICAL DISSENSIONS
[1313-1322 A.D.]
The electors of the empire were not convoked at Frankfort to name a successor to Henry VII till ten months after his death. Ten, instead of seven princes presented themselves; two pretenders disputed the electoral rights in each of the houses of Saxony, Bohemia, and Brandenburg. The electors, divided into two colleges, named simultaneously, on the 19th of October, 1314, two emperors; the one, Ludwig IV of Bavaria; the other, Frederick III of Austria. Their rights appeared equal; their adherents in Germany were also of nearly equal strength; the sword only could decide; and war was accordingly declared and carried on till the 28th of September, 1322, when Frederick was vanquished and made prisoner at Mühldorf.
The church abstained, while the civil war lasted, from pronouncing between the two pretenders to the empire. Clement V did not witness their double election; he died on the 20th of April, 1314. It was necessary, two years afterwards, to use fraud and violence, to confine the cardinals in conclave at Lyons, for the purpose of naming his successor. They at last elected the bishop of Avignon. He was a native of Cahors, the devoted creature of King Robert of Naples, and took the name of John XXII. He was the first who made Avignon, which was his episcopal town, the residence of the Roman court, exiled from Italy. He was an intriguer, notoriously profligate, scandalously avaricious; he fancied himself, however, a philosopher, and took a part in the quarrel between the realists and nominalists; he made himself violent enemies in the schools, on the members of which he sometimes inflicted the punishment of death. While he used such violence towards his adversaries as heretics, he shook the credit of the court of Rome, by being himself accused of heresy. His great object was to raise to high temporal power the cardinal Bertrand de Poiet, whom he called his nephew, and who was believed to be his son. For that purpose he availed himself of the war between the two pretenders to the empire, regarded by him as a prolongation of the interregnum, during which he asserted all the rights of the emperors devolved on the holy see. He charged Cardinal Bertrand to exercise those rights as legate in Lombardy, crush the Ghibellines, support the Guelfs, but above all, subdue both to the authority of the church and its legate.
The cardinal Bertrand de Poiet launched his excommunications and employed the soldiers whom his father had raised for him in Provence, particularly against Matteo Visconti, lord of Milan, one of the most able and powerful of the Ghibelline chiefs. Visconti made himself beloved by the Milanese, whom he had always treated with consideration. Without being virtuous, he had preserved his reputation unstained by crime. His mind was enlightened. To a perfect knowledge of mankind, he added quick-sightedness, prompt decision, and a certain military glory, heightened by that of four sons, his faithful lieutenants, who were all distinguished among the brave. The Italians gave him the surname of Great, at a period when, it is true, they were prodigal of that epithet. Matteo Visconti, in his war with the Lombard Guelfs, took possession of Pavia, Tortona, and Alessandria. He besieged, in concert with the Genoese Ghibellines, Robert king of Naples, who had shut himself up in Genoa, desirous of making that city the fortress of the Guelfs of Lombardy. Visconti compelled the retreat of Philip of Valois, who, before he was king, had entered Italy at the solicitation of the pope, in 1320.
The following year he vanquished Raymond de Cardona, a Catalonian, and one of the pope’s generals; he persuaded Frederick of Austria, who had sent his brother to aid the pope, to recall his Germans, making him sensible it could suit neither of the pretenders to the empire to weaken the Ghibellines, who defended in Italy the interests of whoever of the two remained conqueror. But, after having made war against the church party twenty years, without ever suspecting that he betrayed his faith, for he was religious without bigotry, age awakened in him the terrors of superstition; he began to fear that the excommunications of the legate would deprive him of salvation; he abdicated in favour of his eldest son Galeazzo, and died a few weeks afterwards, on the 22nd of June, 1322. The remorse and scruples of Matteo Visconti had carried trouble and disorder into his own party, and gave boldness to that of his adversaries. A violent fermentation at Milan at length burst forth; Galeazzo was obliged to fly, and the republic was proclaimed anew; but virtue and patriotism, without which it could not subsist, were extinguished; and after a few weeks Galeazzo was recalled, and reinvested with the lordship of Milan.
The two parties of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, since the death of Henry VII, no longer nearly balanced each other in virtue, talents, and patriotism. In the beginning of their struggle, there were almost as many republics on one side as the other; and sentiments as pure and a devotion as generous equally animated the partisans of the empire and of the church. But, in the fourteenth century, the faction of the Ghibellines had become that of tyranny—of the Guelfs that of liberty. The former displayed those great military and political talents which personal ambition usually develops. In the second were to be found, almost exclusively, patriotism, and the heroism which sacrifices to it every personal interest. The republic of Pisa alone, in Italy, united the love of liberty with the sentiments of the Ghibelline party. This republic had been thunderstruck by the death of Henry VII at a moment when a career of glory and prosperity seemed to open on him. Pisa, exhausted by the prodigious efforts which she had made to serve him, was true to herself, when all the Guelfs of Tuscany rose at once, on the death of Henry, to avenge on her the terror which that monarch had inspired. She gave the command of her militia to Uguccione dà Faggiuola, a noble of the mountainous part of Romagna, which, with the March, produced the best soldiers in Italy. The Pisans, under the command of Faggiuola, obtained two signal advantages over the Guelfs. They took Lucca, on the 14th of June, 1314, while the Lucchese Guelfs and Ghibellines were engaged in battle in the streets of that city; and, on the 29th of August of the same year, they defeated, at Montecatini, the Florentines, commanded by two princes of the house of Naples, and seconded by all the Guelfs of Tuscany and Romagna. But the Pisans soon perceived that they were fighting, not for themselves, but for the captain whom they had chosen. Almost immediately after his victory, he began to exercise an insupportable tyranny over Pisa and Lucca. Fearing much more the citizens of these republics than the enemies of the states, he, on the slightest suspicion, employed the utmost severity against all the most illustrious families. At Lucca, he threw into a dungeon Castruccio Castracani, the most distinguished of the Ghibelline nobles, who had recently returned to that city with a brilliant reputation, acquired in the wars of France and Lombardy. A simultaneous insurrection at Lucca and Pisa, on the 10th of April, 1316, delivered these cities from Uguccione dà Faggiuola and his son.[d]
The Pisans put Uguccione’s partisans to death, and gave the government to Count Gaddo della Gherardesca. This news arrived at Lucca when the Lucchese were tumultuously demanding the liberty of Castruccio. Uguccione not daring to oppose the general wish, Castruccio was taken from prison and presented to the public loaded with chains. At this spectacle the people grew still more furious; Uguccione was obliged to fly; and the chains being taken off Castruccio, the latter, by a rare good fortune, was declared lord of Lucca on the very day which had been destined for his death.[e]