The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

Not long did il tempo sereno hold. While it lasted Catherine remained quietly at Siena, dictating to her secretaries, Neri, Stefano, and a certain Barduccio Canigiani (a young nobleman who had joined her spiritual family at Florence), her book – the famous Dialogue. It consists of four mystical treatises on Discretion, Prayer, Divine Providence, and Obedience, in the form of a dialogue between God and a soul “panting with greatest desire for the honour of God and the salvation of souls.” This Dialogue and her Letters represent St Catherine’s literary work.39 It was finished in October. Already the tempest had burst upon the Church, of which the first rumblings had been heard during her stay at Florence, and Catherine was now to be summoned to Rome to fight her last great battle.

Urban VI. had a high reputation for zeal and virtue; he was, in addition, a good Italian. From the outset he announced his intention of reforming the Roman Court, of extirpating simony and luxury in the Church. “They say,” the Prior of the Certosa of Gorgona had written to Catherine on the first news of his elevation, “that this our Holy Father is a terrible man, and frightens people exceedingly with his acts and his words.” The abrupt violence with which he began his work enraged and alarmed all the Curia, and within a few months of his election he was left alone. The French Cardinals fled to Anagni, and took the Breton mercenaries into their pay. When the Pope nominated twenty-six new cardinals, they held a conclave at Fondi, and, on the plea that the election of Urban had been extorted by force and fear of the Roman mob, and was therefore invalid, they raised the infamous Cardinal Robert of Geneva to the Popedom as Clement VII. All Christendom was now divided in its spiritual allegiance between two men, each claiming to be the Vicar of the Prince of Peace; any earthly prince would have dismissed the one with ignominy from his service, the other was soon to fall hopelessly and shamefully from his fair beginning.

But Catherine believed passionately in Urban, threw herself heart and soul into the struggle. “I have heard,” she wrote to him, “that the incarnate demons have raised up an Antichrist against you, Christ on earth; but I confess and do not deny that you are the Vicar of Christ, that you hold the keys of the cellar of Holy Church, where the blood of the Immaculate Lamb is kept.”40 And in the twenty months of life that remained to her she battled for him to the death. Letter after letter did she send to him, full of evangelic counsels, urging him – in the boldest possible language – to begin the reform of the Church in his own person. Savonarola himself hardly surpasses the passion of her invective against the corruption of the ecclesiastical world. Urban is at first offended by her frankness, rebukes her messengers, and will not listen to her. Then his heart is touched, and he summons her to Rome. “Pray for me,” she writes to Suor Daniella, a nun of Orvieto, “to the supreme eternal goodness of God, that He may do with me what shall be to His honour and the salvation of souls; and especially now that I am to go to Rome, to accomplish the will of Christ crucified and of His Vicar.”

Catherine reached the Eternal City at the end of November 1378, with a band of her disciples of both sexes, including Alessia, Francesca and Lisa, Neri di Landoccio and Barduccio Canigiani. Stefano Maconi remained at Siena, but Frate Raimondo was already in Rome. The city was in a parlous state. Sant’ Angelo was held by the soldiery of the Antipope, who kept Urban out of the Vatican; the Breton mercenaries threatened the gates, and there were savage tumults in the streets. Urban would have Catherine address his new cardinals assembled in the Consistory, after which he “praised her much in the Lord.” In these first few months of his pontificate, while she yet lived, he seemed an utterly different man to what he afterwards became. He realised to the full the moral value of her support, and would not suffer her to leave Rome. On his behalf she dispatched fiery epistles all over Europe, declaring that he alone was the true Pope, the Vicar of Christ. To simple nuns she wrote imploring them to storm Heaven with prayers for his cause; to monks and hermits, bidding them leave their cells and convents, rally round the Sovereign Pontiff in the Eternal City, or do battle for him in the haunts and abodes of men. “Ye fools,” she wrote to the three Italian Cardinals who were striving to remain neutral, “fools, worthy of a thousand deaths” – but the epistle must be read in its entirety, for it is one of the most amazing documents of the epoch.41 Other epistles secured the adhesion of the Republics of Siena and Florence, of Venice and Perugia. To the Queen of Naples, as chief supporter of Clement (whom she presently received as Sovereign Pontiff on his way to Avignon), she pleads Urban’s cause with calm reason, turning off the arrows of her words to strike the hostile Cardinals; and in like manner to Onorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, who had protected the schismatic conclave with his hired troops. “Where is the just man that they have elected for Antipope,” she writes again to the Queen of Naples, “if in very sooth our supreme pontiff, Pope Urban VI., were not true Vicar of Christ? What man have they chosen? A man of holy life? No: a man of iniquity, a demon; and therefore he does the office of the devils.”42 In December the adherents of the Antipope were lying in wait to take Frate Raimondo, whom the Pope was sending on a dangerous mission to France, and the good friar’s courage failed him. Catherine, with her mystic longings for shedding her blood for the cause, was amazed at his pusillanimity, and sent him letters of characteristic remonstrance, reminding him that he need have no fear, because he was not worthy of the grace of martyrdom, exhorting him to be a man and not a woman, laying all the blame on herself (as she invariably does in her severest letters), pleading love as her excuse for rebuking him.

In the meanwhile Urban had hired the Italian mercenaries of the Company of St George, commanded by Count Alberico da Balbiano. On April 29th Alberico gained a complete victory over the Breton and Gascon soldiery of the Clementines at Marino, and the French governor of Sant’ Angelo surrendered to the Senator of Rome, Giovanni Cenci. Catherine is said – and a passage in one of her letters seems to confirm it – to have been the means of effecting the surrender. At her instigation the Pope went barefooted from Santa Maria in Trastevere to San Pietro in solemn procession, to give thanks before returning to take up his abode in the Vatican – an act of humility that aroused astonishment (strange reflection on the pomp of the Curia!) as something that had not been seen for ages. To the magistrates of the Roman Republic she wrote a letter on behalf of the victorious soldiery, which Tommaseo characterises as “worthy of the name of Rome.”43 Then, flushed with victory, she addresses the King of France, in hopes that he may still be won over; she makes one more flaming, impassioned appeal to the Queen of Naples, and then – sole blot, I think, in all this blameless life – co-operates with Urban, in her letters to the King Louis and his cousin, Charles of Durazzo, in his attempt to raise the power of Hungary and Poland upon Giovanna’s head.44 Her last extant letter to Urban himself is to urge him to adopt a mild and generous policy towards the Roman People. “You must surely know,” she says, “the character of your Roman children, how they are drawn and bound more by gentleness than by any violence or by harshness of words; and you know, too, the great necessity that is yours and Holy Church’s, of preserving this people in obedience and reverence to your Holiness; for here is the head and the beginning of our faith.”45 A furious riot broke out at the beginning of 1380. The Roman populace rose in arms and assailed the Vatican, threatening the Pope’s life. Catherine interposed and stilled the tumult. This was her last public action.

She was spared the sight of Urban’s fall, and was not doomed to witness the shame, the blood and the madness in which “her most sweet Christ on earth” ended his unhappy pontificate. Fearful visions of demons began to assail her, mingling with the celestial visitations of her Divine Spouse. Her bodily sufferings became unendurable. She cried to God to receive the sacrifice of her life in the mystical body of the Church. Praying in San Pietro on Sexagesima Sunday, it seemed to her that the Navicella– the Ship of the Church – was laid upon her shoulders, and that it crushed her to death. The few weeks of life that remained to her were one prolonged martyrdom, out of which we have her last letter46– written on February 15th, 1380 – her farewell to Frate Raimondo, full of mystical exultation in her own sufferings, tanti dolci tormenti corporali. But all who approached her wondered at the tranquillity and the sweetness with which she spoke, and “albeit she was excessively afflicted in her body, her face remained always angelical and devout with a holy gladness.”

At last on April 29th, 1380, the Sunday before the Ascension, she passed away, surrounded by her spiritual family and leaning upon Alessia Saracini, uttering “certain most profound things,” writes Barduccio, “which because of my sins I was not worthy to understand.”47 To Stefano Maconi, who had hastened from Siena to stand by her side; to Monna Lapa, who had taken the habit like her daughter and daughter-in-law; and to each of the others, she gave a separate charge as to their mode of life after she should be dead. “And she prayed with such great affection that not only our hearts as we listened, but the very stones could have been broken. Finally, making the sign of the Cross, she blessed us all; and so to the last and most desired end of life she drew near, persevering in continual prayer and saying: ‘Thou, Lord, dost call me, and I come to Thee; I come not through my own merits, but through Thy mercy alone, the which mercy I ask from Thee in virtue of Thy blood.’ And then, many times, she cried: Sangue, sangue! At last, after the example of the Saviour, she said: ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend my soul and spirit.’ And so, sweetly, with her face all angelical and glowing, she bowed her head and gave up her spirit.”

CHAPTER III

The People and the Petrucci

AFTER the expulsion of the Riformatori in March 1385, a new supreme magistracy was instituted to rule the Republic. It was composed of ten citizens – the “Signori Priori, Governatori della Città di Siena” – who held office for two months. Four of these priors were of the Nine, four of the Twelve, and two of the People. A new order – the Monte del Popolo– was formed to include those plebeians, or Popolani of the Greater Number, who had not shared in the government of the Riformatori; and it gradually rose in importance, reinforced in later years by families of nobles who became popolani and by others of the lower classes who had come to Siena from elsewhere.

A turbulent and unsettled period followed, of incessant plots against the new government and of disastrous wars. In November 1385, Siena joined in a league, offensive and defensive, with the Communes of Bologna, Florence, Pisa and Lucca, against the wandering companies of mercenaries. But presently that never-healed wound, the question of Montepulciano, opened again, and a prolonged war with Florence followed in consequence. Both Cortona and Montepulciano were lost to Siena. In 1389 the Sienese allied themselves for ten years with Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who had dethroned his uncle Bernabò and was now manifestly intending to conquer all northern and central Italy. A Sienese poet, Simone di Ser Dino Forestani (“il Saviozzo”) hailed him as the coming deliverer of the Italian nation in a noted canzone, which Carducci has called the last cry of Ghibellinism. A number of the Malavolti and Tolomei, headed by Messer Orlando Malavolti, chose exile in the following years rather than see their country fall into servitude. Giovanni Galeazzo was created Duke of Milan by the Emperor Wenceslaus in 1395; and, when the end of the term of the alliance drew near, the Sienese found themselves so exhausted with war, famine and pestilence that in 1399 they formally surrendered the independence of their city, with its contado and district, to the Duke and his successors, swore obedience and fidelity to him in the persons of his ambassadors, and hailed their new yoke with wild festivities. The Duke died in 1402; he had just taken Bologna and intended, as soon as Florence fell into his hands, to be crowned King of Italy. His newly acquired dominions fell to pieces. In November 1403, the Salimbeni (who, in opposition to the Malavolti and Tolomei, had been among the foremost in introducing the ducal sovereignty into Siena) and the heads of the Dodicini, probably instigated by the Florentines, called the Sienese to arms to recover their liberty. The Noveschi and People opposed them. There was a struggle in the Campo, an attempt to capture the Palazzo; but Francesco Salimbeni was killed and the Dodicini expelled from the government. In the following year the liberation of Siena was peaceably effected. Peace was made with Florence in April, and, the ducal lieutenant having left the city, the Sienese annulled the suzerainty and all the authority that had been given to the Duke of Milan and his successors, and commanded that his arms, wherever they had been set up in the dominions of the Republic, should be completely obliterated. But Orlando Malavolti returned to his native city only to die. On his way to salute the Signoria he was treacherously murdered in the streets by the hirelings of those who had seized upon his possessions, which they hoped thus to keep in their hands.

In the meantime the form of the chief magistracy had undergone various alterations. Not only had the Dodicini been expelled, but the Riformatori had been readmitted. It now consisted of nine Priors, three of the Monte del Popolo, three of the Monte de’ Nove, and three of the Monte de’ Riformatori; with a tenth, the Captain of the People and Gonfaloniere of Justice, chosen from each Monte and from each terzo of the city in turn. But throughout the period that follows, and indeed down to the end of the Republic, we shall find the real authority vested in what was known as the Balìa. This originally simply meant the power or authority committed to certain citizens for some special purpose; but it gradually became converted into an ordinary magistracy, distinct from the Signoria or Concistoro. From 1455 – when it was specially instituted in this form to superintend a prolonged and dangerous war – until the fall of the Republic, the Collegio di Balìa had the supreme control of the State, with authority over the laws and government of Siena, although the outward appearances of supremacy were left to the Signoria, the members of which (the Signori) were still, nominally, the chief magistrates of the Republic.

The first three-quarters of the fifteenth century in the history of Siena are a medley of somewhat inglorious wars with incessant faction. We find Siena allied with Florence against King Ladislaus of Naples (the son of Charles of Durazzo), then at war with Florence again, then allied with Pope Calixtus III. against the great condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, in a war more famous for the stern penalty that the Republic knew how to exact from a treacherous general than for any action in the field.48 There were alarms and excursions from the fuorusciti in the contado; there were conspiracies within Siena itself, especially one most formidable in 1456 to subject the Republic to King Alfonso of Naples (who had substituted an Aragonese dynasty for the House of Anjou in that kingdom), in which certain families of the Monte de’ Nove – headed by Antonio Petrucci, Ghino di Pietro Bellanti and Marino Bargagli – were deeply involved. But, all the while, great personalities are moving across the Sienese stage.

San Bernardino Albizzeschi, born of a noble family in 1380, the year of St Catherine’s death, may be said to have carried on, in part, her work during the first half of this century. A zealous reformer of morals, for forty years this Franciscan friar wandered over Italy from city to city, preaching repentance, healing schisms, rebuking tyrants, stilling the bloody tumults of political factions, reconciling peoples and princes. “He converted and changed the minds and spirits of men marvellously,” writes a contemporary, Vespasiano da Bisticci, “a wondrous power he had in persuading men to lay aside their mortal hatreds.” He has left his mark upon almost every street of his native city, of which he refused the bishopric. In a place where he had wrought many conversions, a maker of dice represented to the saint that he and his fellow-craftsmen were being reduced to beggary, by reason of his denunciation of gambling. Bernardino bade him make tablets with the letters I.H.S. instead. This devotion to the Divine Name grew apace, above all in Ferrara and Siena; and when, worn out with his apostolic labours, Bernardino died in 1444 at Aquila, there was hardly a town through which he had passed that had not placed upon its gates and palaces, no less than on the private houses of its citizens, the sacred sign of the Name in which he had overcome the world.

A young nobleman stood listening in the Campo when Bernardino preached there in 1427. “He moved me so much,” he wrote in after years, “that I, too, very nearly entered his order.” This was Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who, born at Corsignano in 1405, was then a student in the city and a rising poet. Two imperial visits during this epoch have left their mark in Sienese art. Sigismund III. came to Siena in 1432, on his way to be crowned in Rome, and stayed some while in the city that then, as ever, professed unalterable loyalty to the Holy Roman Empire. Memorials of his visit are the curious graffito picture of him enthroned, on the pavement of the Duomo, and a most unedifying love story, De Duobus Amantibus, describing an intrigue between one of his barons and a lady of Siena – written a little later by this same Enea Silvio, who had left his native city to seek his fortune elsewhere, and was now poet laureate. Frederick III. came at the beginning of 1452 to meet his bride, Leonora of Portugal. A fresco in the library of the Duomo and a pillar outside the Porta Camollia still record the event; and “all the resources of that festive art in which the Italy of the Renaissance so excelled were displayed for the entertainment of the noble pair during their stay in Siena.”49 Our poet laureate was now the Emperor’s secretary and the Bishop of Siena itself. Six years later Enea Silvio Piccolomini was elected Pope in 1458, to succeed to Calixtus III., and took the title of Pius II. “Shall we raise a poet to the Chair of St Peter?” asked a rival cardinal, “and let the Church be governed on pagan principles?”

It will be better to speak of the character and deeds of Pope Pius II. when we stand before the frescoed story of his life in the Duomo. Suffice it now to say that there was great festivity and rejoicing when the news of his elevation reached Siena, but coupled with some mistrust. The Pope was suspected of being a partisan of the gentiluomini, who were still rigorously excluded from the Signoria, the Balìa, the Council of the People and all the chief offices of State. To please him, the Piccolomini were qualified to enter the government (messi nel Reggimento), by being distributed among the three ruling Monti; while Nanni Todeschini, the husband of the Pope’s sister Laodamia, together with his four sons, Antonio, Francesco, Andrea and Giacomo (to whom Pius had given the arms and name of Piccolomini), was similarly qualified for the Signoria and Council of the People, and received into the Monte del Popolo. The Pope, however, demanded that all the nobles should be made eligible to all posts in the government; he told the Sienese envoys that, unless his request were granted, he would withhold the favours that he had intended to confer upon his native city. In spite of the intervention of the Duke of Milan, the Sienese remained obstinate, until the Pope threatened to go to Florence without passing through Siena. Then the Balìa yielded in part, and Pius came to the city in February 1459. He had a magnificent reception from all orders in the State; but Malavolti tells us that on the part of the chief men of the Republic the rejoicing was more simulated than real, for that they bitterly resented his attempted insertion of the nobles into the popular government of the city. Nevertheless, during his stay Pius loaded the Sienese with favours, gave the Golden Rose to the Commune, and raised the See to the rank of an archbishopric. His attempts to allay the factions and to obtain the admission of the nobles were only partly successful; and what little share in the government had been granted to the latter was taken away from them (exception being still made for the Piccolomini), after his death in 1464. To this day Siena bears more of the stamp of Pius II. than of any other single man. Everywhere in her streets the arms of the Piccolomini are as much in evidence as the sacred monogram that San Bernardino had set up. The Loggia that Pius raised to his family, the palaces that his kinsfolk built, still stand, while the Library of the Duomo gleams still with the gorgeous frescoed pageant of his life. And away to the south, in the district of Montepulciano, the little village of Corsignano, where he had been born in 1405, and was transformed by him into a city, is still called from his name Pienza, and still bears the imprint of his genial and splendid spirit in the noble buildings, secular and religious alike, that his munificence reared.

A potentate of a very different character now for a while overshadows the Republic – Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, son of King Ferrante of Naples. The Duke meditated the acquisition of all Tuscany, and between 1468 and 1480 he made Siena the basis of his operations. The Republic joined the King and Pope Sixtus IV. in the war against Lorenzo de’ Medici, and had the one real battle of the campaign of 1479 depicted in fresco in the Palace of the Commune. Gorgeous pageants and dances greeted the visit of any member of the Royal House to Siena. The Duke “became the centre of the extravagant, pleasure-loving Sienese society; and the cruel, passionate Alfonso, who recognised no scruples in matters human and divine, became the popular godfather to the babies of the Republic.”50 There was a strong party within the city itself that would gladly have accepted him as their suzerain, and he still lingered at Buonconvento after the peace had been made with Florence. On June 23rd, 1480, the Noveschi and some of the Monte del Popolo, together with the mercenaries left by the Duke in charge of the city, occupied the Campo early in the morning, and expelled the Riformatori from the government. The Duke returned to Siena the next day, and was received with enthusiasm at the Porta Romana. There was a wild demonstration in the Campo, as the people, all armed, with frantic cheering and deafening uproar, brought him to the Palace. “When he got to the door of the Palace,” says Allegretto, “all the people rejoiced with such sounding of trumpets and of bells that rang a gloria, and with such firing of guns and shouting, that it was a jubilation.” In the place of the suppressed Monte of the Riformatori, a new Monte of the Aggregati was formed – composed partly of nobles, partly of those Noveschi who had been excluded from the government for the conspiracy of 1456, partly of popolani who had never held the priorate, and to these were added a few of the Riformatori at the Duke’s request. But the capture of Otranto by the Turks, in August, recalled the Duke to his father’s dominions, and in the following year the decision of King Ferrante (la iniqua sentenza, as Allegretto calls it), compelling the Sienese to surrender certain towns and castles to the Florentines, destroyed the last remnants of his popularity.

Seven years of tumult and faction followed the departure of the Duke of Calabria. The annulling of the new Monte of the Aggregati, the re-admission of the Riformatori and the Dodicini, were accompanied by a series of furious battles in the streets. In July 1482 there was a general rising of the people – Popolani, Dodicini, Riformatori – against the Noveschi, who, headed by the Bellanti, Petrucci, and Borghesi, assembled in arms in the Postierla. The Noveschi swept down the Via di Città, but were hurled back to the Postierla, and their leaders forced to take refuge in the palaces of the Pecci and Borghesi, which, after a fierce contest of more than three hours with crossbows and guns and long lances, surrendered, at the persuasion of the Cardinal Archbishop, Francesco Piccolomini (the nephew of Pius II.), and the arms were laid down for a while. It is on this occasion that the name of Pandolfo di Bartolommeo Petrucci first appears prominently as a leader of the Noveschi.