The War of the Eight Saints, carried on with spates of unprecedented cruelty to civilians, had drained the resources of Florence, though the city had ignored the interdict placed upon it by Pope Gregory, declared its churches open, and sold ecclesiastical property for one hundred thousand florins to finance the war.
Bologna had submitted to the Church in August 1377, and Florence had signed a treaty at Tivoli on July 28, 1378 at a cost of two hundred thousand florins indemnity extorted by Pope Urban VI for the restitution of church properties, receiving in return the papal favor and the lifting of the disregarded interdict.
Urban's erstwhile patroness, Queen Joan I of Naples, had deserted him in the late summer of 1378, in part because her former archbishop had become her feudal suzerain.
Urban had then lost sight of the larger issues and began to commit a series of errors.
Turning upon his powerful neighbor Joan, he had excommunicated her as an obstinate partisan of Antipope Clement, and had permitted a crusade to be preached against her.
Soon her enemy and cousin Charles of Durazzo, representing the Sicilian Angevin line, had been made sovereign over the Kingdom of Naples on June 1, 1381), and was crowned by Urban.
Joan's authority was declared forfeit, and Charles had murdered her in 1382.
In return, Charles had had to promise to hand over Capua, Caserta, Aversa, Nocera, and Amalfi to the pope's nephew.
Once ensconced at Naples, Charles had found his new kingdom invaded by Louis of Anjou and Amadeus VI of Savoy; hard-pressed, he had reneged on his promises.
In Rome, the Castel Sant'Angelo was besieged and taken, and Urban was forced to flee.
In the fall of 1383 he determined to Charles in person and go to Naples, where he had found himself virtually a prisoner.
After a first reconciliation, with the death of Louis (September 20, 1384), Charles had found himself freer to resist Urban's feudal pretensions, and relations had taken a turn for the worse.
Urban had been shut up in Nocera, from the walls of which he daily fulminates his anathemas against his besiegers, with bell, book and candle; a price is set on his head.
Rescued by two Neapolitan barons who had sided with Louis, Raimondello Orsini and Tommaso di Sanseverino, after six months of siege Urban succeeds in making his escape to Genoa with six galleys sent him by doge Antoniotto Adorno.
Several among his cardinals who had been shut up in Nocera with him and had followed him in Genoa determined to make a stand: they determine that a Pope, who by his incapacity or blind obstinacy, might be put in the charge of one of the cardinals.
Urban has them seized, tortured and put to death.
