ABSTRACT
When the popes returned to Rome from Avignon early in the fifteenth century, conditions in Italy were only a little better. It was plain to all the popes that the papacy as an institution and even their own lives were not safe unless the temporal power of the church was secure. The reasons for the moral decline of the Church in the Renaissance were many and dated back well into the Middle Ages. During the absence of the popes in Avignon and during the Great Schism much of Italy suffered a political state of near anarchy. Popes and cardinals alike flaunted their mistresses, wallowed in ostentatious luxury, and waged wars against their fellow Christians to secure control of a few castles or of some district of small importance. Their worldly example was imitated by less exalted members of the clergy. Many of the best-informed observers in Renaissance Italy recorded bitter opinions about the Church in their time.
