The effects of that withdrawal were twofold. First, the “lands of the Crucified One,” as the church dramatically described its territorial state, were reinforced in their secular anarchy, and everywhere local “tyrants” seized power from papal officials. Yet, at the same time, the traditions of the church inevitably required that the papacy should return to the Rome where St. Peter had, it was said, preached and suffered. Hence, over the years, with fluctuating enthusiasm, the French popes struggled sporadically to establish obedience, peace, and control over their Italian lands. These efforts indeed played an important role in the foreign affairs of the Italian states in the period. Notable were the attempts at reconquest of the Papal States by Cardinal Bertrand du Poujet (1319–34) and Cardinal Gil Albornoz (1353–63). Yet the results were slight. After a heroic expenditure of money and blood, Albornoz attained some measure of order, largely by appointing the more amenable tyrants as “papal vicars” and by securing from them promises of payment of taxes and services in return for acknowledgment of overlordship. But even these muted successes proved unstable. With the outbreak of war between the Avignon papacy and Florence in 1375, most of the vicars cast off their allegiance. Three years later the Papal States fell into even greater disarray with the outbreak of the Great Schism (1378–1417). For almost four decades, until the Council of Constance, unity was shattered by rivalries between popes and antipopes—one French, one Italian, and later a third one, also Italian.
Amid the confused struggles that engulfed the Papal States in this period, one incident in particular stood out for men of the day and excited the imagination of posterity. The city of Rome, deserted by the papacy, presented a sombre picture of shepherds, herdsmen, labourers, and artisans dwelling by ruins that testified to past glory and were now taken over as the residences of powerful aristocratic families. The Colonna, Orsini, and Annibaldi established their fortifications amid the remains of the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Forum, and the Colosseum, and from there they fought out their ancient rivalries. Here in the 1340s rose the remarkable figure of Cola di Rienzo. A notary and the son of an innkeeper, possessing an imagination that easily accepted the most flattering fantasies, he gained esteem from the rumours he circulated that he was the son of Emperor Henry VII. An avid reader of Classical history and an interpreter of ancient inscriptions, intoxicated by the past splendours of Rome, he preached to his fellow citizens the recovery of its former greatness. Inspired by the Lex Regia, the supposed right of the Roman people to confer authority on the emperor, he announced that the citizens of his own day, under his leadership, could assume that right and resolve all disputes between rival claimants to the office. Achieving prominence as the most eloquent member of an embassy dispatched to Avignon to complain of the absence of the papacy, he excited the admiration of many (including the poet Petrarch) at the papal court. On his return in May 1347, with the help of some mercenary soldiers, he seized power in the city, and a parliament summoned at his command awarded him the title of “Nicolai, the Severe and Clement, the Tribune of Freedom, Peace and Justice, and Liberator of the Holy Roman Republic.”
The following month Cola invited all the Italian states to appear before him to discuss “the security and peace of Italy.” It is a remarkable testimony not so much to his eloquence as to their desperate wish for peace that no less than 25 communes answered his call. During a remarkable round of ceremonies, in the presence of the communes’ representatives, Cola announced that the Romans held jurisdiction over the whole world and conferred Roman citizenship upon all citizens of other Italian states. These chimerical pretensions (described by a contemporary as “fantastic stuff which won’t last long”) very soon came to be unveiled as such. In the following December, faced with an increasingly suspicious pope and a Roman citizenry satiated by novelties, Cola was driven from the city. He returned to Rome and was appointed senator in 1354 (essentially a puppet of Albornoz’s attempt to dominate the Papal States), but within less than three months he faced a popular revolt that ended with his death. Cola’s importance lay not so much in anything he had achieved as in the demonstration of how powerful an influence the thought of Classical Rome could exercise on men of the time. He survives in cultural history (as hero, for example, of the German composer Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi) and in the myths (certainly no more than myths) that he had planned the unification of Italy and was a prophet of the 19th-century Risorgimento. The popolo and the formation of the signorie in central and northern Italy
Meanwhile, in the course of a long process extending through the 13th and 14th centuries, within the towns of the Papal States and most towns of northern and central Italy, there arose from the old communes a new form of government, that of the signoria. The communes of the 13th century had become increasingly dominated by the conflicts of the nobility who controlled their governments. These divisions, though often moved by the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, in fact largely reflected personal, economic, or quite local political rivalries—all inflamed by ideals of chivalric honour and an everyday acceptance of the traditions of vendetta. In large part as a response to these conflicts, there had arisen within the communes the movement of the popolo—i.e., of associations of non-nobles attempting to win a variety of concessions from the nobility.
Within the ranks of the popolo were, in the first place, those who had gained wealth through trade, banking, exercise of a profession, or landholding and sought membership in the ruling noble oligarchies. The second group comprised prosperous members of the artisan or shopkeeping classes who, while not normally seeking a direct position in government, sought a more satisfactory administration of the finances of the commune (particularly a more equitable distribution of taxation), a greater voice in matters that most directly concerned them (for example, the licensing of the export of food), and, in particular, the impartial administration of justice between noble and non-noble. Above all, the popolo (like many of the nobility themselves) desired a civic order that would end violent party conflicts and lessen the effects of noble vendettas.
In some towns the popolo movement succeeded in bringing about constitutional change. In those communes where the nobility did not monopolize all wealth and where the development of trade, industry, and finance had created a complex social structure, the existing oligarchies agreed to come to terms. This came about more easily when the popolo succeeded in ending party struggles so violent that they could be described as a form of civil war. Here, often against the background of some disaster, such as defeat in war, it became normal to establish a council of the popolo, under a captain of the popolo, alongside the old council of the commune under its podesta, as a consultative element in what was now termed the government of “the commune and popolo.” In Florence, where the movement enjoyed its greatest success, the popolo, organized in seven major and five lesser guilds, assumed power in 1282 not simply as the partner of the commune in government but as the dominant element within it. Moreover, in January 1293, by the Ordinances of Justice, it declared that the members of 152 powerful families were “magnates” and, as such, excluded from personal participation in government and subject to particular disadvantages in law vis-à-vis non-magnates.