CATHERINE OF SIENA 213
night, which had already fallen while he was still aboard ship. Catherine had counselled him in vain to enter the city with no ap- purtenances of war, carrying only the crucifix and singing psalms. Two thousand troops of Robert's army accompanied the festive entry into the city on the next day, and the Pope rode on a white palfrey. The houses were festooned with tapestries and a shower of flowers descended from the roofs. St. Peter's cathedral, which had seen no Pope during two generations, received the procession in the light of 18,000 lamps.
Gregory lived out another restless year lamenting his return. As he was dying a sombre message was brought to him from England. This country, which a decade before (1366) had seen the parliament of Edward III terminate its status as a fief of the Holy See, now wit- nessed a strong movement against Rome as the result of Wyclif s teachings. This Oxford theologian at first upheld the ideal of a poor Church; but then he went farther and recommended a secularized state church which was to combat monasticism, accept the Bible as the sole authority of the faithful, and attack the Papacy on the ground that Christ alone was the true Pope. Gregory anathematized eighteen of Wyclif s earlier theses and imposed the ban on him. Sensing the coming of a schism and bearing no love for the men and women who had urged him to return to Rome they had, he thought, confused their own erratic fantasies with Divine revelation he died in 1378, the last French Pope.
The schism proved a reality. It began in the year when Charles IV, the self-same Emperor who had prepared the way for a firmer bond between the German crown and the Papacy, died. The weak- ness of the Empire under the succeeding kings Wenceslaus and Rupprecht, the persistent efforts of France to dominate the Curia, the English struggle over a national church, the internecine strife of the Italian republics, the dissolution of the Papal States into small prin- cipalities, and a hundred years of destructive warfare between the Provencal, Hungarian and Southern Italian Anjous for the kingdom of Naples all this helped during a whole generation to unsettle the nations likewise unable to decide who was the lawfully elected Pope, The question of obediences made this schism a temptation for European Christianity to split up into French, Italian, Spanish, German and
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