Urban VI was as blind to cautious temporal as to cautious ecclesiastical
policy. Every act of the Pope raised him up new enemies. Joanna, Queen
of Naples, had hailed the elevation of her subject the Archbishop of
Bari. Naples had been brilliantly illuminated. Shiploads of fruit and
wines, and the more solid gift of twenty thousand florins, had been her
oblations to the Pope. Her husband, Otho of Brunswick, had gone to Rome
to pay his personal homage. His object was to determine in his own favor
the succession to the realm. The reception of Otho was cold and
repulsive; he returned in disgust. The Queen eagerly listened to
suspicions, skilfully awakened, that Urban meditated the resumption of
the fief of Naples, and its grant to the rival house of Hungary. She
became the sworn ally of the cardinals at Anagni. Honorato Gaetani,
Count of Fondi, one of the most turbulent barons of the land, demanded
of the Pontiff twenty thousand florins advanced on loan to Gregory XI.
Urban not only rejected the claim, declaring it a personal debt of the
late Pope, not of the holy see, he also deprived Gaetani of his fief,
and granted it to his mortal enemy, the Count San Severino. Gaetani
began immediately to seize the adjacent castles in Campania, and invited
the cardinals to his stronghold at Fondi. The Archbishop of Arles,
chamberlain of the late Pope, leaving the castle of St. Angelo under the
guard of a commander who long refused all orders from Pope Urban,
brought to Anagni the jewels and ornaments of the papacy, which had been
carried for security to St. Angelo. The prefect of the city, De Vico,
Lord of Viterbo, had been won over by the Cardinal of Amiens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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