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His initial successes raised the hopes of Florentine allies farther afield; contingents from Siena, Bologna, Perugia and elsewhere swelled his ranks to 15,000 infantrymen and 2,400 horses, including 500 French knights. By mid-July his Guelf army had taken Montefalcone and began the march to Lucca. Cardona’s bold strategy had the desired effect. Suddenly, Castruccio found himself thrown onto the defensive—a position to which he was decidedly unaccustomed. He had no choice but to withdraw from Pistoia and move to the defense of Lucca itself.

4, col. 205–206, #3234 (23 November 1341). The letter orders the rector of the Patrimony, Bernard du Lac, to recover the castrum from Giovanni (who also murdered an unnamed brother of Pono) for the papacy. 39 For all of his keen attention to detail, John XXII was at times inclined to exaggerate the extent to which local and regional conflicts related to the larger struggle between the papacy and its allies on the one hand and the Empire and its adherents on the other. John’s rather liberal application of the terms “Guelf ” and “Ghibelline,” for example, obscured political realities and implied a breadth of ideological polity that did not, in fact, exist, or at least not nearly to the extent that he assumed it did.

John longed for an Italian ally more like Robert’s grandfather and father, Charles I and Charles II: tough, canny, low-slung men who prosecuted their dynastic war against their Aragonese rivals in Sicily with unflagging energy and very few scruples. But Robert was cut from different cloth. He did not lack in martial ability, and he was certainly no coward, but he was a far less energetic campaigner than his father and grandfather had been. He exercised vicariates and signorie throughout central Italy, though often a good deal less assertively than John would have liked.