504 Readings in European History 211. The beginning of schism in holy Church. (From Froissart's Chronicles.) How Gregory XI resolved to return from Avignon to Rome. I wanted to communicate to you, as both my stomachs 1 are troubling me you need look for nothing agreeable from me to-day. Sweet water cannot come from a bitter source. Nature has ordered that the sighs of an oppressed heart shall be distasteful, and the words of an injured soul harsh. Froissart, in his famous Chronicles, gives the following account of Pope Gregory XI's return to Rome and of the opening of the Great Schism due to the election of Clement VII. Ye have heard herebefore how Pope Gregory, the eleventh of that name, was in the city of Avignon. And when he saw that he could find no manner of peace to be had between the kings of England and France, wherewith he was in great displeasure, for he had greatly travailed thereabout and had made his cardinals to do the same, then he advised himself and had a devotion to go and revisit Rome and the see apos- tolic, the which St. Peter and St. Paul had edified. He had made promise before that, if ever he came to the degree to be pope, he would never keep his see but there where St. Peter kept his and ordained it. i This pope was a man of feeble complexion and sickly, and endured much pain, more than any other. And he thus being in Avignon was sore let with the business of France, and so sore travailed with the king and his brethren that with much pain he had any leisure to take heed any- thing to himself or to his Church. Then he said to himself that he would go farther off from them to be more at rest, . . . and then he said to his cardinals, " Sirs, make you ready, for I will go to Rome." Of that motion his cardinals were sore abashed and dis- pleased, for they loved not the Romans, and so they would fain have turned his purpose, but they could^not. And when the French king heard thereof he was sore displeased, for he thought that he had the pope nearer at hand there than 1 Perhaps a pun on the Latin stomachus, which means ill humor as well as stomach.
