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For no
other reason than curiosity, I decided to find out
if there were any Roman Catholic popes from Naples.
Even official Catholic history of the lives of the
popes is scanty on such personal information as
places of birth and exact dates if you get back far
enough—say, before the year 1000. I recall that
there was one pope simply from “southern Italy,”
another from near Benevento and one from around
Avellino. Three are listed as being born in
“Naples.” One of those is from the years before
there was even a Kingdom of Naples, so the reference
is certainly to the city of Naples; I assume that
the later two references are also to the city of
Naples. In that chronological order, then: Boniface
V
Boniface’s relatively short reign
took place in nonetheless interesting times. The
horrible Gothic wars had ended and the succeeding
Italian kingdom of the Lombards had begun. An exception
to Lombard hegemony in Italy was the piece of Byzantine
Greece known as the exarchate of Ravenna, one portion of
which was the Duchy of Rome, ruled politically by a
Byzantine imperial representative but best represented
in things cultural and religious by the head of the
church of Rome, the pope. The late 500s and early 600s
were thus a time when a certain resistance to both
Lombard and residual Greek rule started to take hold in
and around Rome—a sense of separate “Italian” identity,
invested in the church of Rome and its leader. This
started, of course, a few popes before Boniface, in the
person of Gregory the Great. And of marginal historical
interest is the fact that Boniface, himself, was pope
when another religious leader in a distant land was
about to make his mark: our year 622, the middle of
Boniface's reign, marks the hegira, the emigration of Muhammad and
his followers to the city of Medina. It is the year 1 in
the Islamic calendar. The other two Neapolitan popes came along at one of the most interesting and confusing periods in the history of the Roman Catholic church, that of the Western Schism, also known as the Papal Schism. (This is not to be confused with the Great Schism, which refers to the division of the Roman church from the Byzantine church in 1054.) A bit of background: Between 1309 and 1377, the Papacy
resided in Avignon, France (I shall skip the historical
reasons for the move from Rome to Avignon). During that
period of the Avignon
Papacy, there were seven popes, all born in
France. Catholic historians refer to this period as the
“Babylonian captivity of the Church” (an allusion to the
Biblical exile of the Jews in ancient Babylon from
597-538 B.C.) The period directly after the return of
the papacy to Rome in 1378 and lasting until the Council
of Constance in 1417 is the period known as the Western
Schism. It was a time during which there were various
rival claimants to the title of “Pope,” including some
referred to as “anti-Popes,” a curious term about which
there is inevitable confusion even among those who
managed to stay awake during Medieval European History. Urban
VI
Urban’s papacy was, by most accounts,
not a success, but trying to head a divided church is a
task that has an obvious built-in risk of failure and
one that is bound to invite criticism from commentators
in later years. His own queen of Naples, Joanna, went over to the
supporters of Clement. Urban conspired to have her
replaced by Charles of Durazzo and went south to check
out the old neighborhood; he was promptly arrested and
imprisoned in Aversa. He was sprung and fled. The rest
of his reign was a series of misadventures and included
being excommunicated by Clement, the Avignon pope; Urban
also proclaimed a crusade against Clement that did not
pan out. Urban was inconstant and quarrelsome and died
probably as the result of a fall from a mule, though
some sources claim that he was poisoned. Boniface
IX
At this point, someone
will say, “Do you mean that all this anti-Pope
schismatic confusion is due to a couple of
Neapolitans?—typically confrontational,
prototypically schismatic and intent on getting what
they want, just the way modern Neapolitans drive?
—that is, go through, over and around anyone and
anything in their way? I have never read that claim,
nor do I now make that claim. (The idea, however,
has a certain pseudo-sociological charm to it!)
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The first
pope of the Catholic church after the return to Rome was
the Neapolitan Bartolomeo Prignano; he was born in
Naples in 1318 and died in Rome in October of 1389. He
studied canon law at the university of Naples and
eventually became rector of that university before
embarking on the ecclesiastical path that led to his
election to the papacy. He took the name 
Urban was succeeded by another Neapolitan,
Pietro Tonacelli, who took the papal name of