According to itypeauto.com, Cola also conceived the relations between Italy and the empire in a new way. For some time, as it was claimed that the empire derives from God, but was conferred “by the authority of the senate and the Roman people” and the Bolognese and Italian jurists saw the first and essential source of imperial sovereignty in the lex regia or de imperio , with which the Roman people had conferred its podesta on the emperor; so he too was spreading the idea that the emperor must reside in Rome and also be Italian. This could be an aspect of the renovatio; it could have been a reaction to the increasing appropriation of the empire that the Germans had been doing for a long time, ever since those Electors, putting the kingdom of Germany instead of the kingdom of Italy at the foundation of the empire, affirmed the man they had chosen to the throne of Germany be ipso iure emperor. Even more now. Two diets of princes, in Rhense and Frankfurt, in 1338, sanctioned that not only their chosen one was to be considered legitimate king of Germany without the need for papal approval, but that, being the empire itself to be considered the thing of the king, of the electors, of the German people, the elected king was also vested with imperial title and powers. With these deliberations and proclamations of German diets, the empire was nationalized and its authority over particular kingdoms and peoples made the authority of a nation over other nations. Hence the growing repugnance of the Italians to the empire or, in fact, to the king of Germany and the Germans. And more or less utopian solutions to the problem of supreme authority were emerging in Italy, but different from those of the previous age and very significant: an Italian king of Italy;
Here is Cola di Rienzo. He made of the empire, to be carried out by chance also in a republican form, a thing of Rome, indeed of Rome and of Italy, almost completely detached from the old framework of the universal monarchy and closely linked to each other: already connected in the creating the fortunes of the empire, Romanorum et Italicorum laboribus propagatum ; connect now in storing it.
But the curia of Avignon continued to watch over these tyrannies from Romagna and the Marches, over this Roman dictator and dreamer of a Rome that was certainly not the papal one, to which it was impossible to be estranged from Italy, from the lands of the Church, from Rome, and from Rome. often from Italy, from the lands of the Church, from Rome came requests and invocations of return. Thus, in 1353, Avignon sent another lieutenant of his to Italy. Now, the aspirations and activities of the curia are more precise and circumscribed. No longer Lombardy, but Romagna and the Marches and state of the Church proper, in order to bring peace between the factions and re-establish papal lands in direct or indirect dependence. The Middle Ages were receding. Political calculation rather than imperial dreams animated the action of the pontificate.
Well received was the Albornoz by Giovanni Visconti. He celebrated, but without conviction, Florence. Bologna closed the doors in his face. It was, together with him, Cola di Rienzo who, after fleeing from Rome, had taken refuge in 1350 with Charles IV, emperor and king, he had been handed over to the pope who thought of benefiting from the tribune for the purposes of the restoration. In fact, Cola was received in Rome, which had fallen back into disorder, with great manifestations of joy and trust. And he regained power, this time as a papal-nominated senator; he went back to work with his usual sincere and a little broken ardor. But the popular revolt broke out again; Cola di Rienzo was killed. And in Romagna and Marche, the tyrannies, one suspecting the other, made one after another act of submission, remaining as vicarys: that was somewhere in between, object of some irony by the jurists of the time. The Manfredis of Faenza and the Ordelaffi resisted. of Forlì. And against them all the weapons were unleashed, all the condemnations pronounced. In a small way, a struggle no different from that of twenty or thirty years earlier in Lombardy. But Albornoz, who also had little strength, got over them.
Albornoz reorganized the lands of the Church, published the Egidian Constitutions in the provincial parliament of the Marches in 1357, and in 1960 he recovered Bologna, after the ten-year vicariate of Visconti had expired; he cleared the way back to the pope, who was increasingly invoked by many parts. Urban V made a short stay in Rome in 1369, who then returned to France, provoking new reproaches and invectives of men of the Church and men of the world, Catherine of Siena and Francesco Petrarca. Pope Gregory XI returned there in 1377, with more firm intention of staying there.
