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Thursday in Passion Week

In the fifty-first year of the reign of Edward III

(8th April 1378)

On the afternoon of 8th April 1378, the feast day of the blessed Callistus, a former pope, and the Thursday within Passion Week, the cardinals met in conclave to elect their new Holy Father before the celebrations of the coming Holy Week.

It was neither a relaxed nor a certain affair.

The cardinals had been appointed by popes who’d lived in Avignon, and all were either Frenchmen themselves—the vast majority—or men closely allied with the French monarchy.

Most, as much as they may have denied it publicly, owed allegiance to the French king before the office of the pope.

What the cardinals wanted to do was to elect a man who would remove them from the swamp-ridden and disease-infested ruinous city of Rome back to the culture and civilisation of Avignon.

What they felt compelled to do was elect what the murderous Roman mob wanted: a good Italian who would keep the papacy in Rome.

Threats did not sit well with the cardinals. On the other hand, they doubted they could get out of Rome alive if they didn’t do what the mob wanted.

It was left to Jean de la Grange, bishop of Amiens, in Rome for the conclave, to suggest a possible way out of the situation. In the days before the conclave, Bishop Grange moved smoothly from chamber to chamber, dropping time after time to his knee to kiss the cardinal’s ring held out to his lips, then raising his face to talk earnestly to the man before him.

The cardinals liked what they heard.

Thursday in Passion Week dawned cool and fine, although a yellow fog rising from the swamps beyond Rome’s walls lasted until almost Nones when the cardinals were due to meet. Murmuring crowds had thronged the Leonine City since the previous night, sure that if they didn’t stake their place well before the election the cardinals would find some way to shut them out. It seemed to the cardinals, peering nervously from their apartments in the palace adjoining St Peter’s, that the entire population of Rome was crowded into the streets and the courts surrounding the Basilica.

Their mood was not festive.

The election was to be held in the Hall of Conclave, a great stone hall to the north of St Peter’s and adjoining the papal palace. In the hour before Nones, the cardinals moved cautiously through the corridors of the palace towards the hall. They were well guarded with militia, and they wrapped their cardinals’ robes tight about themselves and stalked down the corridors, their faces set resolutely to the front, their eyes darting left and right.

The distant murmur of the crowd seemed to swell through the floor beneath their jewelled slippers as much as it did through the window glass.

The cardinals, sixteen in all, filtered into the Hall of Conclave. With luck, the election would not take long. After all, the conclusion had been hammered out in previous days.

Each cardinal moved silently into a curtained-off partition; the voting would take place in seclusion to give the election the aura of secrecy. Within each partition was a chair and a desk. On each desk lay a single sheet of paper and a pen and inkwell.

Each cardinal took his place and, once all were in place and the curtains across each partition closed, a bell tolled from high in the hall’s tower.

The election was underway.

Pandemonium broke out.

The crowds outside surged against the stone walls of the hall, beating the walls with their fists, with pikes, clubs, axes, pots and pans, and any other instrument they had found within their homes that they thought might prove to be useful to aid the smooth progression of the election of an Italian to the papal throne.

“Give us an Italian or we’ll stick pikes into your well-fed bellies!”

“Give us an Italian or we’ll burn the hall down about your ears!”

The cardinals, isolated from each other, as one picked up their pens with shaking hands, dipped them into their inkwells, then hesitated over the sheet of paper.

“Give us an Italian…”

Scowls twisted the faces of the cardinals. Damn the unruly mobs! Damn Rome to hell! They’d manage their revenge on this city if it was the last thing they did.

Scowls slowly contorted into thin-lipped grins.

The revenge, as the result of the election, was already planned.

“Give us an Italian!”

Yet still the cardinals hesitated.

Outside, a locksmith, who had been working on the doors leading to the vaults beneath the hall, suddenly yelled in triumph.

The mob surged forward, pikes gripped in white-knuckled hands.

The cardinals slowly leaned towards their papers, their hands shaking as much with hatred of the mob as with fear.

Then, as they still hesitated, they felt the wooden floor beneath their feet shudder, then, horrifically, spears and pikes burst through the floor in eight of the partitions, splintering the floorboards and making seven of the cardinals yell in fright and horror as the weapons narrowly missed their feet.

One of these seven snarled, and, leaping to his feet, shouted through the now broken floorboards, “We’ll give you your damned Italian, scum, but you have no idea of what you have done this day!”

Then he yelled throughout the hall: “Do it!”

And the cardinals leaned over their papers, each scrawling the same name.

They would see the Romans damned to hell yet!

The mob was almost out of control when the doors of the balcony burst open. A red-robed cardinal strode forth, a paper in his hand.

“Hear this!” he screamed, and the mob growled.

“This day we have elected our most blessed Holy Father—”

The growl deepened.

“The saintly Bartolomo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, is our new Holy Father, Urban VI!”

The mob quietened, urgent voices whispering throughout its mass. Then a great cheer broke out. “An Italian! An Italian!”

Then the former Archbishop Prignano, the new Urban VI, stepped forward to take the crowd’s acclaim. He was a Neopolitan by birth, and enough of an Italian to sate the crowd’s anger and suspicion.

He raised his hands, and blessed the crowd, and then Urban said, “The papacy has returned to Rome, beloved countrymen, and it will never leave again! I swear this to you on the name of our beloved Lord, Jesus Christ, and his mother, the Holy Virgin. I swear to you that the papacy will not leave Rome again!”

Behind Urban, five or six of the cardinals shared concerned glances. Wasn’t Urban taking his pretence a little too seriously?