It is not easy to say at what precise time the public action of Catharine began. She was in the twenty-fourth year of her age at the time of the death of Urban V. She had already passed, for about four years, from that life of prayer, mortification, and contemplation with which her saintly career had begun, to one of greater intercourse with others; and she had already brought about some very wonderful conversions, of which Fr. Raymond has given us an account. She had in several cases been successful in obtaining reconciliations between families hostile to one another through the hereditary feuds and traditions of revenge which have always had so baneful an effect on Italian society; but it does not appear that she had had any personal intercourse with Urban V., or any of the great prelates or princes of the time; and perhaps her fame had not travelled far beyond the frontiers of Tuscany. Giacomo Orsini, who passed through Siena in the year following the death of Urban to receive the dignity of cardinal from Gregory XI., may have made her acquaintance in her native town, and carried the report of her wonderful sanctity to the court of Avignon. The next year, 1372, we find her already in correspondence with important persons. War had again broken out between the Holy See and the restless Barnabo Visconti. Barnabo had usurped the dominion of Reggio, a fief of the Church, and had proceeded to other excesses, such as to force Gregory XI. to excommunicate him in 1371. War was now declared; but it was at first favorable to the Milanese tyrant. A league was then organized against him, in which the emperor, the King of Hungary, and the Count of Savoy took part. John Hawkwood, moreover, with his famous English lances, was engaged on the Pontifical side. The success was now chiefly on the side of the league, and Visconti once more betook himself to intrigues and negotiations at Avignon, where he obtained a truce in 1374. We find St. Catharine writing, in 1372, to two great French prelates, the Cardinal Pierre d'Estaing, who had just been appointed legate at Bologna; and the Abbot of Marmontier, a relation of the Pope, who was sent at the same time to govern Peragia and discharge the office of nuncio in Tuscany. Her letters to the cardinal seem to show that she was already known to him. The first contains little but spiritual exhortation, though there is a hint at the end to the saints favorite subject at this time, the crusade against the infidels. In the second she speaks strongly for peace among Christians. The letter to the abbot—who afterward became a cardinal, and died on the schismatical side—is evidently an answer to a letter from him, asking advice for himself and also for the Pope. St. Catharine urges him to prevail on the Holy Father to put down the nepotism that prevailed among high ecclesiastics, to discourage the luxurious worldliness of the prelates, and to choose good and virtuous men as cardinals. A little later we find her writing to the truculent Barnabo himself, the man who made papal legates eat the missives of excommunication which they were charged to deliver to him—who declared that he was Pope in his own dominions, and dressed up a mad priest in mock vestments to excommunicate the Pope in return, and made the monasteries under his rule take charge of his hounds. This letter, again, was in answer to a message brought to Siena from Barnabo by [{551}] one of his servants. Catharine sets before him the crime he has been guilty of in going to war with the Pope, and exhorts him to make amends for it by taking part in the crusade. The letter seems to have been written after the peace granted to Visconti in 1374. The same date, or perhaps an earlier one, seems to belong to a long letter of the saint to Beatrice della Scala, the wife of Barnabo, in which that lady is urged to become more religious herself, and thus to influence her husband, especially to peace and obedience toward the Holy Father. This letter, also, is in answer to a message.
Catharine's life became still more active than before about this time. She was sent for to Florence by the general of her order, and seems to have gone about to several other cities, such as Pisa and Lucca, and to have exercised great influence everywhere. Her presence had before this begun to attract crowds wherever she went: they came to speak to her, to consult her about the affairs of their souls or their family troubles; and her burning words wrought numberless conversions. The B. Raymond, speaking of this part of her life, tells us in his simple way, "If all the limbs of my body were turned into so many tongues, they would not be enough to relate the fruit of souls which this virgin plant, that the heavenly Father hath planted, did produce. I have sometimes seen a thousand persons or more, men and women, come at the same time, as if drawn by the sound of some unseen trumpet, from the mountains or from the villages in the territory of Siena, to see or to hear Catharine. These persons—I don't say at her words, but even at the mere sight of her—were suddenly struck with compunction for their misdeeds, bewailed their sins, and ran to the confessors, of whom I was one; and so great was the contrition with which they made their confessions, that no one could doubt that a great abundance of grace had descended from heaven upon their hearts. This happened not once or twice only, but very often. For this reason Pope Gregory XI., of happy memory, who was both consoled and rejoiced at this great fruit in souls, granted letters apostolic to me and to my two companions, giving us power to absolve all those who came to see Catharine and to confess their sins, in all the cases for which the bishops of the dioceses had faculties. And that truth, that neither deceives nor can be deceived, knows well that many came to find us out who were laden with great sins, and who had never before made confession, or never received as it ought to be received the sacrament of penance. We—that is, my companions and myself—often remained fasting till evening, and were too few to hear all those who wished to confess; and indeed, to declare my own imperfection, and the influence of this holy virgin, so great was the throng of people wishing to confess that many times I found myself quite worn out and wearied by the excess of fatigue. But Catharine went on praying incessantly; and when the holy prey was won, she rejoiced fully in the Lord, as one who had won a victory, ordering her other sons and daughters to wait upon us, who were tending the nets that she had spread. No pen can express the abundance of the joy in her mind, nor even the signs of gladness that she gave, which indeed gave us so much internal delight as to make us forget the recollection of any sadness whatever we had to undergo." [Footnote 83]
[Footnote 83: Legenda, ii. ch., 7.]
Gregory XI. seems before his election to have been well acquainted with St. Bridget, for he was the cardinal through whom she had wished to communicate to Urban V. the message that she had received to deliver to him. He kept up a correspondence with her as long as she lived, and received some tremendous warnings from her about the return of the Holy See to Rome. At the time of which [{552}] we are speaking, 1374, in the fifth year of his reign, he sent St. Bridget's confessor to Catharine to recommend himself to her prayers. This may have been the opening of the intercourse between them. Of the fourteen letters to Gregory that remain to us, none seem to bear an earlier date than 1376. [Footnote 84] It does not appear certain, therefore, whether she had any direct influence upon the Pope's desire to set on foot a new crusade, which he urged on with much vigor about the time of the peace granted to Visconti. But it was one of St. Catharine's three darling projects; the other two being the reform of the prelacy and the restoration of the papacy to Rome. The fact that her confessor and friend, Fr. Raymond, was appointed to preach the crusade seems to imply that she had been in communication with Gregory upon the subject. We have already said that she proposed to Barnabo himself to take the cross. The idea of sending all the turbulent spirits in Europe to fight against the Turks was not a new one; Urban V. had proposed it to the "companies" who ravaged France and even insulted him by exacting a ransom for Avignon; but the freebooters naturally preferred the less dangerous, though less glorious, life that they were living in France. They were at last persuaded to enlist against Peter the Cruel. In St. Catharine's time there was a proposal of the same kind, with regard to the "bands" in Italy, whom we shall presently see the instruments of the greatest possible mischief to that unhappy country. We have a letter from her to Sir John Hawkwood, from which it appears that he and his followers had actually Engaged to serve in the crusade. Other letters on the subject of the same expedition show that she was now in a position to address herself with effect to the sovereigns of great states. She writes at this time to Queen Joanna of Naples, and to the queen-mother of Hungary, in hopes of her assistance in persuading her son, King Louis. But if the peace with Barnabo had made the crusade once more possible, fresh troubles soon ensued in Italy which prevented it, and which occasioned the still greater prominence of St. Catharine as an earnest advocate of peace.
[Footnote 84: Four of these letters (7-10) were written while Catharine was at Avignon, and were only to be found in Latin among the papers of B. Raymond, who was, it appears, interpreter between the saint and the Pope, who did not understand her Tuscan dialect. M. Chavin de Malan (ii., 369) conjectures that the first three of them may be summaries of conversations that passed at Avignon, taken down afterward by B. Raymond. But internal evidence is against this supposition; and it is not at all unlikely, as the opposition to her influence was so strong, that the Pope preferred that she should communicate with him by letter.]
The disturbances were not, this time, the work of the Visconti. Barnabo turned them to his own advantage, but he was not their author. Historians concur in attributing a feeling of general discontent with the internal administration and external policy of the pontifical government in Italy to the conduct of the French legates. We find very strong charges against them; for example, in the chronicle of St. Antoninus, written in the following century; but it may be questioned whether he did more than repeat what he found in other Florentine writers; and, in this case, the testimony of a Florentine is hardly to be admitted without suspicion. But it is very likely that many of the charges of tyranny, ambition, extortion, and luxury are not unfounded. Still, the internal administration of the States of the Church had been settled by Albornoz, and his system might have carried the government through without an outbreak, even under the trial of administrators quite unworthy to succeed him, had it not been for the suspicions that arose, in cities external to the pontifical territory, that its governors aimed at the subjugation of their neighbors. It thus seemed to become their interest not only to defend themselves, but to anticipate the danger by raising revolts in the States of the Church. It is quite clear that Gregory XI. had no such design [{553}] himself, and that he would not have tolerated it in his subordinates. Neither are the acts of the latter such as cannot be explained on other grounds. But what is clear to us at a distance was not necessarily so clear to the contemporaries of St. Catharine. Certain measures of the legate at Bologna, and of the governor of Perugia, had an unfortunate look. In the first place, it seems that the diplomacy of that time did not insist, in the case of a confederacy of a number of powers against a common enemy, that peace should not be made by one member of the league without the consent of the remainder. The peace with Barnabo had been made, it appears, without the concurrence of Florence, Pisa, Siena, and the other allies of the Pope. Another cause of soreness was a measure adopted about the same time by the Cardinal Legate of Bologna, which pressed hardly upon Tuscany. The last two years had been years of great scarcity in that part of Italy, and he now forbade the exportation of grain from the Legation. He was no doubt afraid of relieving his neighbors at the risk of suffering himself. But there was more to come. Sir John Hawkwood and his followers had to be discharged on account of the peace; they were no sooner dismissed than they invaded the Florentine territory, attempted to make themselves masters of Prato, and ravaged the country up to the gates of Florence itself. Thus soldiers, only a few days before in the pay of the Holy See, were attacking one of its allies with fire and sword. It looked very like an attempt to enslave Tuscany. At the same time Siena had a complaint of the same sort against the abbot of Montmajor at Perugia. The powerful family of the Salimbeni were at that time in exile from Siena, the last revolution of which city had put the supreme power into the hands of the popular party. The pontifical governor of Perugia leagued himself with the exiles, and thus appeared to be aiming at the destruction of the liberties of Siena.
Ergo omnis furiis surrexit Etruria justis. Nothing had indeed been done which did not admit of explanation; And, if his legates had really been guilty of aggression, Gregory XI. could, have readily disavowed them. Indeed, he ordered the edict against the exportation of grain from the Romagna to be revoked; in which, however, the cardinal at Bologna refused to obey him. But this conciliatory order came too late. Under such provocation men, and especially Italians, would not wait for explanations. They were jealous of their liberties, and they hated the idea of foreign domination; the representatives of the pontifical government at the time were foreigners to them, and seemed to be seeking to enslave them. Florence flew to arms: she had been long devoted to the Holy See; now she gave herself over to the rule of the faction within her, who had ever been the minority, because they were the enemies of the Pope; and these men, feeling themselves still in reality the weaker party, lost no time in plunging into the most frantic excesses, that they might alienate their country from the Holy Father beyond hope of reconciliation, and wreak their own vengeance on their personal enemies so fully as to leave them no chance of again recovering their power. Hawkwood was soon disposed of; he was bought off for a large sum. The movement in Florence became a revolution, with all its accompaniments of blood, spoliation, and terror. The inquisitors were massacred, the prisons destroyed; the prior of the Carthusians, who presented himself as papal envoy with overtures of reconciliation, was torn to pieces, and his flesh thrown to the dogs. The clergy were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Pope; the nomination of benefices assumed by the magistrates of the republic. These, however, were all changed; a committee of eight, a sort of Comité du Salut Publique—called, in derision, the Eight Saints—seized the helm of government; it was a [{554}] complete reign of terror. But they were not content with turning Florence against the Pope; they sent envoys throughout the whole of Tuscany and Umbria, inviting all the cities to join in league against the pontifical government, and bearing with them red banners inscribed with the word "Libertas." The conduct of the French governors had but too well prepared the subjects of the Pope for these invitations. Citta di Castello led the way; Perugia, Narni, Viterbo, Montefiascone followed; before the end of 1375 nearly the whole of the pontifical territory, the Patrimony, the Duchy of Spoleto, and the March of Ancona, were in open revolt. All that Albornoz had done for the Holy See seemed to have been done in vain. Bologna, almost alone, remained faithful; but even there the government of the legate was very insecure.
It was felt at Avignon that something was now to be dealt with very different even from a war against the Visconti. Some "companies" of Bretons were then ravaging or ransoming cities in the south of France, under two famous captains of the day, Jean de Malestroit and Silvestre de Bude; they were enlisted under the flag of the Church, and prepared to descend on Italy. But Gregory XI. determined to try the method of conciliation before letting them loose. He sent envoys to Florence, who offered terms to which no prudent person could make objection. Perugia and Citta di Castello were to be free, but the Florentines were to cease in their revolutionary propaganda in the States of the Church, and particularly in Bologna. The "eight saints" had all that was reasonable and good in Florence against them, and they dared not openly refuse to entertain terms such as these. But they sent secret instructions to their commander in the field while the negotiations were being carried on; he marched on Bologna, raised the people in revolt, and made the legate a prisoner. They succeeded in their ulterior object: the Papal envoys left Florence without concluding any peace.
After this fresh provocation, nothing remained for the Pope but to attack the Florentines with every weapon at his disposal. The Breton companies were ordered to march, under the general command of the Cardinal Robert of Geneva, a man, it seems, with more of the soldier than the priest about him, who was to be, within three years from the time that he began his expedition, the first of the miserable line of Antipopes who opposed themselves to the legitimate successors of Gregory XI. His present campaign was distinguished chiefly by two events, neither of which cast credit on the pontifical cause: a treaty he made with Visconti (who had before allied himself with the Florentines), by which the Guelfic party in the north of Italy were sacrificed to the enmity of the tyrant; and the awful sack and massacre of Cesena by the Breton troops. But the Pope used spiritual weapons also against offenders like the Florentines; and in their case the temporal consequences of the solemn excommunication under which they fell made themselves far more swiftly and keenly felt than in that of a great seigneur like Barnabo. Their merchants and agents were in every country of Europe: the sentence of the Pope exposed them everywhere to confiscation, imprisonment, and slavery; their commerce was ruined, and it is said that the immediate loss to the city amounted to three million florins. At all events, early in the year 1376, and but a few weeks aft«r they had chosen not to avail themselves of the moderate overtures made by the Papal envoys, the Florentines began to desire peace. It is probable that there had always been but a narrow majority in favor of the violent measures of which we have spoken; now, the great misfortunes of the state made even its revolutionary rulers look about them for a mediator, for their first attempt at negotiation had proved a failure. They had sent two [{555}] ambassadors to Avignon; but instead of apologizing for their undeniable aggressions, they laid all the blame on the pontifical delegates, and were dismissed by Gregory with a confirmation of their sentence. A mediator, therefore, was necessary; and instead of asking the kind offices of the emperor, or the king of France, or some other of the sovereigns of Europe, they determined to seek the help of Catharine of Siena.
Catharine had been in the midst of the tumult, doing what she could to maintain peace. It seems that Gregory XI. had begged her to go to Lucca, where she was held in great veneration, to keep that city from joining the league against the Church. She had also exerted her influence at Pisa, and seems to have succeeded in both places, though with some difficulty. From Pisa she wrote the first of her series of letters to the Pope. She was still there when the magistrates of Florence invited her to undertake their cause. She visited the city, conversed with the principal men of all parties, and it was agreed that they should send another and a humbler embassy to Avignon, on condition that she should precede the envoys, and endeavor to soften the heart of the Holy Father toward his rebellious children. She was already sending letters to Avignon imploring peace, and urging the Pope to return to Rome, and to raise the standard of the crusaders, in order to unite all discordant elements by directing them to a common object. She had sent her most intimate confidant and confessor, Father Raymond, to plead the cause of the Florentines; and soon followed him herself, accompanied by a number of her "disciples," arriving at Avignon about the middle of June, 1376.