Soon after his return from Venice to Bologna, he received the melancholy intelligence of the death of his mother, in the thirty-eighth year of her age.  Her age is known by a copy of verses which Petrarch wrote upon her death, the verses being the same in number as the years of her life.  She had lived humble and retired, and had devoted herself to the good of her family; virtuous amidst the prevalence of corrupted manners, and, though a beautiful woman, untainted by the breath of calumny.  Petrarch has repaid her maternal affection by preserving her memory from oblivion.  Petracco did not long survive the death of this excellent woman.  According to the judgment of our poet, his father was a man of strong character and understanding.  Banished from his native country, and engaged in providing for his family, he was prevented by the scantiness of his fortune, and the cares of his situation, from rising to that eminence which he might have otherwise attained.  But his admiration of Cicero, in an age when that author was universally neglected, was a proof of his superior mind.

Petrarch quitted Bologna upon the death of his father, and returned to Avignon, with his brother Gherardo, to collect the shattered remains of their father’s property.  Upon their arrival, they found their domestic affairs in a state of great disorder, as the executors of Petracco’s will had betrayed the trust reposed in them, and had seized most of the effects of which they could dispose.  Under these circumstances, Petrarch was most anxious for a Ms. of Cicero, which his father had highly prized.  “The guardians,” he writes, “eager to appropriate what they esteemed the more valuable effects, had fortunately left this Ms. as a thing of no value.”  Thus he owed to their ignorance this treatise, which he considered the richest portion of the inheritance left him by his father.

But, that inheritance being small, and not sufficient for the maintenance of the two brothers, they were obliged to think of some profession for their subsistence; they therefore entered the church; and Avignon was the place, of all others, where preferment was most easily obtained.  John XXII. had fixed his residence entirely in that city since October, 1316, and had appropriated to himself the nomination to all the vacant benefices.  The pretence for this appropriation was to prevent simony—­in others, not in his Holiness—­as the sale of benefices was carried by him to an enormous height.  At every promotion to a bishopric, he removed other bishops; and, by the meanest impositions, soon amassed prodigious wealth.  Scandalous emoluments, also, which arose from the sale of indulgences, were enlarged, if not invented, under his papacy, and every method of acquiring riches was justified which could contribute to feed his avarice.  By these sordid means, he collected such sums, that, according to Villani, he left behind him, in the sacred treasury, twenty-five millions of florins, a treasure which Voltaire remarks is hardly credible.