The Florentines had encroached upon the States of the Church; and Gregory, taking a leaf out of the book of John XXII., excommunicated them and advertised them for sale as slaves; but the Florentines proved to be no more merchantable than the Visconti. Gregory went to Italy on the same errand as Urban V. and was no better received. He made however a solemn entry into Rome, and was on the point of being driven out, when he suddenly died there. Anybody may die suddenly in Rome; but trite as the event reads, Gregory’s not dying elsewhere brought about a state of things worse than the Captivity. It was usage to hold the elective conclave in the town where the last pope had died, and the cardinals assembled in Rome. Out of the sixteen, eleven were Frenchmen. All the Avignon popes had been French either native or by adoption; and the conclave was on the point of choosing one more French pontiff when a Roman mob gathered around it and threatened, if the cardinals did not elect an Italian, to “make their heads redder than their hats”--that is to cut them off. Under this threat the cardinals chose the archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan who was not even a cardinal. He took the name of Urban VI. and fixed his seat at Rome. As soon as the cardinals could levy Free-Companions enough to defend them from the rabble, they met at Agnani the place where Boniface had been seized by the ruffians of Philip, and repudiating the previous election as having been made under duress, chose one of their number, Robert of Geneva who succeeded to the throne of Avignon under the name of Clement VII. Thus began what is called the Great Schism or Schism of the West. The Church has never questioned the authority of the Avignon popes of the Captivity, but she has stigmatised those of the Schism as antipopes. At that time however, at least half of the Roman Catholic world cleaved to them. To the see of Avignon adhered France, Spain, Scotland, Poland and Sicily; to the see of Rome, England, Germany and Flanders. The Italians now acknowledged and now rejected the rule of the Roman incumbent, as faction and civil strife swayed them. On the death of Clement VII., the Avignon cardinals elected Peter de Luna one of their number, who assumed the name of Benedict XIII.