The din of the bloody encounter of Gascon, Breton, and Roman troops in the streets reached the cardinals in the privacy of the Conclave. One day, indeed, the armed Romans burst into the sacred chamber, and brandished their weapons before the eyes of the terrified French cardinals. Yet it is generally agreed that there was not such compulsion as to invalidate the election, and Urban VI. became the legitimate head of the Church. In the circumstances a delicate and tactful policy was required, and the austere Neapolitan, of humble birth, who secured the tiara was in this respect the least fitted of the cardinals. He violently and vituperatively denounced the wealth and luxury of his colleagues, and he alienated Italians no less than French by the grossness of his manners. Within a few months the French cardinals retired to Fondi, discovered that the election was invalid on account of intimidation, and set up Robert of Geneva, a ruthless soldier and entirely worldly-minded priest, as Anti-Pope, with the title of Clement VII. So the schism began, and Christendom split into two bitterly hostile "obediences." Clement retired to Avignon, and preyed on France more avariciously than John XXII. had done: Urban's impetuous rudeness wrapped Italy in a flame of war once more. In 1389 another Neapolitan, Boniface IX., succeeded Urban, and it is during his Pontificate that there came upon the scene Baldassare Cossa, the unscrupulous adventurer who became John XXIII. Cossa was a Neapolitan, and is said by his hostile contemporary Dietrich von Nieheim to have been a pirate in his youth.[265] Many recent historians reject this statement, but as it is certain and admitted that Cossa's two brothers were condemned to death for piracy by Ladislaus of Naples, and it is clear that in his youth Cossa took some part in the Angevin-Neapolitan war, it is not improbable that Baldassare was himself engaged in raiding the Neapolitan commerce. He was born about 1368, of a noble but impoverished Neapolitan house, and he seems to have been known to the Neapolitan Pope. In his early twenties he forsook the army or the sea, for which alone he was qualified, and went to study law at Bologna. In 1392 Boniface made him Archdeacon at Bologna: in 1396 he was summoned to the office of Private Chamberlain at Rome, and his career began.