According to microedu, there was truly something deeper. Lordship did not mean only a new political order, but this political order brought intrinsic and profound elements of moral opposition to the medieval Church. If the municipality had represented the era of religiosity and of the close connection between civil and religious life, between political and ecclesiastical institutions; the lordship, on the other hand, represented the most developed and differentiated civil society, with a self-awareness by now alive and a desire to beat its own ways and become its own law; with an attitude of religious indifference towards the Church, while the religious principle remains; with the tendency to clearly separate State and Church, indeed to subordinate the Church to the State, for the purposes of the State, which prevail over any other purpose. Within this civil society, there were also demands for sincere religiosity, visible from a thousand signs even in men who were in opposition to the political Church. At its side, not without influence on it, the extreme fractions of Franciscanism which, by other ways and other ends, equally arrived at the idea of separation between State and Church, and, implicitly, since they trusted in the secular arm for the desired church and religious reform, in the idea of the subordination of the Church to the State. During the years of the struggle between the Legate and the lords of northern Italy, Michele da Cesena, head of minors, deposed and persecuted after the general chapter he met in that city declared the doctrine of absolute poverty orthodox (1322), found hospitable welcome at Ludovico il Bavaro, while other dissident Franciscans found it at Robert of Anjou himself. Who always took a position against the papal decisions in the question of poverty: even after Michael’s full break with the Church and the excommunication by which the rebel friar was struck. Marsilius of Padua, who grew up in the political environment of that fiercely anticlerical city, Defensor pacis (1324) and then in the Defensor minor certain political role also to the program of the religious revolutionaries. The problem arises of the state that must ensure that peace, and of its foundation. And this foundation was found in the universitas civium , the custodian of all power, to be exercised directly or through delegated persons. Likewise, in the universitas fidelium he found the foundation of the Church, and its representation in the council. In this way State and Church brought closer together, attributed to this a not divine but human origin, removed its identification with the hierarchy and with the papacy, demolished the omnipotence of that and the absolutism of this, that is the theocratic construction, Marsilius opened the way to free the State from the Church and subordinate it to the State, denying it not only jurisdiction, immunity, free use of temporal goods, but also the free election of priests, the very faculty to inflict excommunication, considered a temporal as well as a spiritual penalty, and any coercive power against sinners, sin being to be corrected, not to be forced, and heretics to be punished, in case, only as disturbers of public order, of a human law. As an offense to a religious law, only God, in the other life, he will be able to punish them. Thus the prince, elective or hereditary, controls the activity of the Church; and the Church, fulfilling a function of the State, is almost resolved in it.
The Lombardy struggle was complicated by the intervention of Ludovico di Baviera. Winner in Germany in the race for the crown and refusing to obey the curia which claimed to be judge of the election and the elect and prohibited anyone from assuming the title and functions of king and emperor, he too went down to Italy with anticurial spirits. Marsilio was with him, who, excommunicated for his book, had found refuge with Ludovico and was now working alongside him as a doctor and as a counselor. In Trent, the parliament declared John XXII a heretic and violator of the rights of the people; in Milan, Ludovico was crowned king by the excommunicated bishop Guido Tarlati d’Arezzo; in Rome, he gathered the people in the Campidoglio, asked them for recognition, obtained the imperial crown from his representatives, then summoned them other times, even together with the clergy, in the Capitol or in St. Peter’s Square, for reforms invoked by the Minorites, for the deposition of John XXII, for the elevation to the tiara of Pietro da Corvara, who received the sacred insignia from the emperor. More conclusive things the Bavaro did not do. Nor was it easy to do them, in the midst of so many oppositions which, during the return to upper Italy, degenerated into insults. The Viscontis also turned against him and Bavaro, vainly besieged Milan, had to return without honor beyond the Alps, followed by his faithful adviser and doctor, Marsilio of Padua. during the return to upper Italy, they degenerated into insults. The Viscontis also turned against him and Bavaro, vainly besieged Milan, had to return without honor beyond the Alps, followed by his faithful adviser and doctor, Marsilio of Padua. during the return to upper Italy, they degenerated into insults. The Viscontis also turned against him and Bavaro, vainly besieged Milan, had to return without honor beyond the Alps, followed by his faithful adviser and doctor, Marsilio of Padua.
The diplomatic intrigue that accompanied and followed the Bavaro expedition to Italy was very dark. The Visconti, the king of France and, more than any other, the curia held the main ranks. Which dealt with everyone. He offered the crown of Lombardy to the king; he did not entirely reject the imperial vicariate of the Visconti; in agreement with the king, against the Viscontis and against Robert, who had failed with Philip of France and with the curia, he urged the arrival in Italy of another character, John of Bohemia, son of Henry VII, who, appeared at the end of 1330, he had great and rapid, but ephemeral fortune. Against him, having come to Italy under papal and French auspices (John will then find hospitality at the French court and will die in the wars of that king), lords and cities turned. On September 16, 1332, Scaligeri, Gonzaga, Visconti, Estensi joined forces with Castelbaldo, “To the honor of God and the Roman Church, and to the preservation of the present state in Italy”: and they also counted on Robert of Anjou and Bologna. They were Ghibellines and Guelphs together. Florence also joined: that is, even free municipalities. In distant countries, those events even presented themselves as a coalition of France, pope, king of Bohemia, emperor. And in front of them, Milan. And to help the Milanese, here are the Italians all. Of course, the construction of John of Bohemia, built in a few months, collapsed in a few weeks, also due to the rebellion of the cities which, after all, did not want to be returned to the nobles. It was always the old whim of the German emperors, who often had no inkling of the Italian reality. Cardinal Del Poggetto was also wiped out, who in the cities of Emilia had done, after the bankruptcy of Lombardy,
In northern Italy and also in Romagna, things continued their course towards the lordship. The papal reaction had, if anything, accelerated it, as did the distance of the popes, which was an estrangement at least morally from Italian life, a subservience to French interests, a search for solidarity from the French or Germans. The new Italian political forces were able to point to the pope and his military troops as many foreigners. And as for the kingdom of Naples, Roberto certainly had a good base there. He too had acclimatized there like the Swabians. He was no longer surrounded by French but almost only by Italians. His links with the overseas mountains with the Avignon curia itself had relaxed more and more, while the king had been able to maintain a certain Italian credit and prestige. Indeed, in the midst of so much disorder and so much illegality, as much as the regions in which the new political order was being formed with difficulty, Robert of Naples could appear as a lifeline for the whole peninsula. Some Italian poet or man of letters could imagine that Rome was waiting for him; that all the “Latins”, that is all of Italy, now reduced to a low state, expired their strength, reputation, noble blood, hoped in him, invoked him as lord, last and only hope. It is the time that among the possible or desirable things there begins to be not an emperor but a king, a king who does not even seem to be the ancient, now identified with the emperor, but a new king, taken from Naples or created from nothing, a king for all of Italy or for a smaller territory.
