r late master's enemy. The most famous captain of such
hireling soldiers was Sir John Hawkwood, an Englishman, who is commonly
said to have been a tailor in London before he took to arms; but this I
believe to be a mistake. He fought for many years in Italy, and a
picture of him on horseback, which serves for his monument, is still to
be seen in Florence Cathedral.

The Romans again and again entreated the popes to come back to their
city. The chief poet and writer of the age, Petrarch, urged them both in
verse and in prose to return. But the cardinals, who at this time were
mostly Frenchmen, had grown so used to the pleasures of Avignon that
they did all they could to keep the popes there. At length, in 1367,
Urban V. made his way back to Rome, where the emperors both of the East
and of the West met to do him honour; but after a short stay in Italy he
returned to Avignon, where he soon after died (A.D. 1370). His
successor, Gregory XI., however, was more resolute, and removed the
papacy to Rome in 1377; and this was the end of what was styled the
seventy years' captivity in Babylon.[88]

[88] See page 240.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE GREAT SCHISM.

A.D. 1378-1410.

Gregory XI. died in 1378, and the choice of a successor to him was no
easy matter. The Romans were bent on having a countryman of their own,
that they might be sure of his continuing to live among them. They
guarded the gates, they brought into the city a number of rough and
half-savage people from the hills around, to terrify the cardinals; and,
when these were shut up for the election, the mob surrounded the palace
in which they were, with cries of "We will have a Roman, or at least an
Italian!" Day and night their shouts were kept up, with a frightful din
of other kinds. They broke into the pope's cellars, got drunk on the
wine, and were thus made more furious than before. At length, the
cardinals, driven to extreme terror, made choice of Bartholomew
Prignano, archbishop of Bari, in south Italy, who was not one of their
own number. It is certain that he was not chosen freely, but under fear
of the noise and threats of the Roman mob; but all the forms which
follow after the election of a pope, such as that of coronation, were
regularly gone through, and the cardinals seem to have given their
approval of the choice in such a way that they could not well draw back
afterwards.

But Urban VI. (as the new pope called himself), although he had until
th