by A. N. Wilson
It was the face of Christ Himself which many had come to see. As well as the tombs of the Apostles, Rome also contained that most holy relic the ‘Veronica’. The legend is that, while Christ, sweating and in pain, carried his Cross to Calvary, a young woman stepped out of the crowds and bathed his face with a cloth. She discovered, when he had passed on to his Crucifixion, that he had left an image of his face on the cloth or Sudarium. The legend developed that the woman brought the sacred imprint to Rome. Various stories existed of authentic pictures of Christ. At Rome, to emphasize the point that the relic venerated by the Easter crowds was indeed the True Image, it was called the Vera Icon. Various writers speak of the image of the Saviour which is called the True one – ‘effigies Dominici vultus quae Veronica nuncupatur’, says Matthew of Westminster.7 Thus, the woman who brought the cloth in the legend acquired the name Veronica. Legend embellished the story further. She was the haemorrhoisa, the woman with an issue of blood, who was cured by Jesus in the Gospels; she married the penitent, Zacchaeus. She went to the Bordeaux region to which she brought relics of the Virgin Mary, and was buried at Soulac (or, in another story, in the Church of St Seurin at Bordeaux).8
The cult of the Veronica became entwined with that of the Holy Year. Every Friday, and on all Solemn Feasts throughout the year, the ‘Veronica, the true image of Christ’ was displayed in St Peter’s Basilica.9
It is typical of Dante that, rather than just describing the swarms of people in Rome at this time, he should take a snapshot of just one. That Easter, his mind took just such a photograph – of a pilgrim from Croatia revering the sacred Veronica, and as he did so, thinking to himself, ‘O Jesus Christ, my Lord, the One true God, is this what your face truly looked like then?’ [Paradiso XXXI. 107–8, Mark Musa’s translation].
The Comedy is the story of one man’s inner journey, against the turbulent backdrop of his times. It is also the story of Everyman. And this duality is something which religious ceremonial was also able to supply. When Dante wandered about Rome, and saw the pilgrims worshipping relics, or saw the priests raking money off the altars, we might be expecting this angry, independent-minded figure to turn into a Luther who rose up and denounced the whole bag of tricks. Dante is a much more paradoxical figure than that. He transformed the Catholic faith in which he believed. As we shall see later in this book, he was for many years regarded as a heretic, and at least one of his books was on the Index of books forbidden for Catholics to read. But Dante the pilgrim in Rome in 1300 was a devout pilgrim. At the beginning of the section in his Comedy when he comes to the bottom of Mount Purgatory, he meets a musical friend, Casella, who tells him that for three months (i.e. since the start of the Holy Year) anyone could escape Hell who wished to do so [Purgatorio II.98]. Dante thereby endorses the Holy Year. Making the pilgrimage works. Whatever else the Comedy will undermine – and it is a subversive work – it does not question (though it sometimes comes close to doing so) the truth of the Roman Catholic religion itself. Indeed, Casella tells Dante in Purgatory that the recording angel who ferries the souls to this stage of their redemption collects them all from the mouth of the Tiber.
To that place, where the Tiber turns to salt,
He’s turned his wings: for that is where, for ever, gather all
Who do not sink to Acheron… [i.e. Hell]
[Purg. II.103–5, author’s translation]
In other words, Dante accepted that Rome, its Church, was the means of grace and the hope of glory.
Dante, in common with the other visitors to Rome in 1300, would have walked about in the ruins of the Forum. More deeply, perhaps, than some of the pilgrims, he would have meditated upon the astonishing intricacy of Divine Providence, which had woven the story of the Roman Empire into the story of Salvation. Mankind had sinned and must suffer. Only the innocent and incarnate Word, Jesus, had been good enough to pay the price of sin, but it had to be paid in a court which had universal recognition, a Roman court. Otherwise it could not have been a justice which was universally recognized. (Medieval man believed that the Mediterranean was the centre of the world. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules you were quite likely to drop off the edge of the world. The Southern Hemisphere was uninhabited, and probably covered with water, though a few writers had pondered on the possibility of a land mass ‘down under’ – a Terra australis incognita.10) Hence the vital importance for Christians of including in their creed the phrase that He ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’. But this blasphemy, this deicide, this mocking, scourging, killing of the Incarnate God could not itself go unpunished, as visitors to Rome were reminded, in the middle of the Forum, by the Arch of Titus, which showed the Roman troops entering Jerusalem in AD 70 and razing the Jewish capital to the ground. The massacre of the Jewish people, the uprooting of their Temple, the establishment of the Catholic Church in its stead, all these were ingrained features of the medieval Western European’s view of Rome, and its place in the scheme of things. The modern visitor, looking at the Arch of Titus and its bas-reliefs of Roman troops carrying off the Menorah and the sacred vessels of the Temple, is perhaps chillingly reminded of the massacre of six million Jews in the twentieth century. In Heaven, however, when Dante visited it in his earthly body, he was told not to be sentimental. ‘Just vengeance taken was afterwards avenged by just decree’ [Paradiso, VII.50–51, Ciardi]. We know that Dante was impressed by Roman bas-reliefs. In Purgatory he reaches a terrace where just such bas-reliefs are carved in marble, displaying examples of humility. The bas-reliefs, made of ‘pure white marble; on its flawless face/were carvings that would surely put to shame/not only Polyclete but Nature too’ [Purg. X.32–3, Musa], were suggested by the visually stunning – if to us morally chilling – reliefs in the Forum.
And Dante accepted too the newly formulated doctrine of Purgatory. Purgatory was one of the innovations of that orderly thirteenth century, like time being measured by the mechanical clock. Though the human race, ever since it heard of Heaven and Hell, must have considered that an in-between sort of place would suit most of us better; and though prayers for the dead had been part of the Church’s practice for centuries, it was only in that century of codification and canon law that the Western Church – at the second Council of Lyons in 1274 – had actually defined Purgatory as the place of purification through which souls pass on their way to Paradise. A French historian has elegantly stated, ‘A little more than a hundred years after its inception, Purgatory benefited from an extraordinary stroke of luck: the poetic genius of Dante Alighieri… carved out for it an enduring place in human memory.’11
Dante was destined, almost literally, to put Purgatory on the map. In his lifetime, many intellectuals in the Church, especially in the University of Paris, had questioned the doctrine,12 but in the thirteenth century – when so many states, cities and academic communities drew up self-defining constitutions – it made sense to organize the afterlife as well. Many human beings who were not deemed good enough for Heaven were hopeful that they might not be quite bad enough to merit instant damnation in Hell. What was more natural than to hope that, after death, there would be the chance to purge away our sins and make ourselves ready for Paradise? The generalized hope of earlier ages became a specific place. Now they had mechanical clocks on earth, their time in Purgatory could be measured; and, by undergoing the appropriate rituals, they could actually reduce their purgatorial sentence in advance.
This was one of the points of pilgrimages, and indeed of crusades. The idea of making a journey to a holy place for the good of your soul was inextricably linked with the developing ideas of Purgatory. The earthly journey, undertaken with great discomfort and, in the case of crusades, considerable danger, shortened your purgatorial journey after death.
Given the prevalence of human sin, the more pilgrimage sites the better. Not only did pilgrims dream of making the ultimate haj to the Holy Sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem, but they also could visit the shrines of European saints. In 1220, for example, when the relics of St Thoma
s Becket were placed in the newly built shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, got a special ‘Jubilee remission of sins’ declared by Pope Honorius III. Visit the shrine and you will get remission of your sins. (Opinions seem to differ about whether this shrine gave you a completely clean slate or whether it merely reduced your time in Purgatory.13)
In the everlasting struggle between Church and State, between Bishops and Kings, Popes and Emperors, Becket, murdered in his own cathedral in 1170, had been the ultimate example of a man who backed the Church; and his example was all the more striking because King Henry II, who had him murdered, had been his close friend. Henry had appointed Becket as Archbishop hoping to have a stooge in place who would subject the Church to secular control. Becket was transformed by his office. When asked to choose between the authority of the crown and that of the Pope in ecclesiastical affairs, Archbishop Becket had been in no doubt – ‘Still who can doubt that the Church of Rome is the head of all the churches, the source of all Catholic teaching?’ he had asked in one of his letters. ‘Who does not know that the keys of the Kingdom were given to Peter? Is not the whole structure of the Church built up on Peter’s faith and teaching, so to grow until we all meet Christ as one perfect man, united in faith and in our recognition of him as Son of God?’14
If you believed this, and if you believed in the power of pilgrimage to reduce your time in Purgatory, then to visit the tombs of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome would be of potentially immense value. And this value was not lost on the wise old head of Pope Boniface VIII.
Does this mean that the Pope who summoned the faithful for that Holy Year was Dante’s hero? It does not. Of all the sinners singled out for Dante’s vituperation and scorn in the Comedy, Pope Boniface VIII stands out, if not as the wickedest, then certainly the most hated. These two men of 1300 now seem to us destined to collide, though with hindsight it might be difficult to know which was the Titanic and which the iceberg. Pope Boniface was one of the last great medieval defenders of papal monarchy. He ultimately failed. Dante, having been a supporter of the Popes in their struggles for power against the Emperors, turned from this position into one of virulent hatred of all modern Popes, and of Boniface in particular. Boniface was responsible for Dante’s political downfall. Dante was responsible for Boniface’s immortality as one of the great villains of literature.
One of Dante’s more fair-minded Victorian biographers felt the need to speak in the Pope’s defence. Dante had lived centuries before the era of the Borgia Popes and the excesses of the Renaissance. ‘When one reads these [Dantean] denunciations of a man who at any rate had much of nobility in his character, and with all his greed of power, and of money as a source of power, is not accused of wanton brutality or of licentiousness, one is tempted to wonder what place the poet would have found in his Inferno for the typical Popes of the Renaissance!… Boniface was at least a gentleman in many senses of the word.’15 He was a gentleman who was almost certainly responsible for the murder of his saintly predecessor.16 Certainly, he did not scruple, as the Holy Year came to an end, to double-cross Dante in a piece of astounding political skulduggery. Yet a gentleman he undoubtedly was.
Let us join Dante and other pilgrims in Rome, then, and see the tall elegant old Pope on the newly constructed balcony at the Church of St John Lateran. Giotto di Bondone, the greatest painter of the age, painted a fresco of the scene. A tiny fragment of it survives in the Vatican, and an early seventeenth-century watercolour, which copied the fresco-cycle before it was destroyed, survives in the Ambrosian library of Milan, and shows Boniface promulgating what came to be known as a Jubilee Year, and the crowds of pilgrims at his feet coming to Rome to receive plenary indulgences at his hands.
Who was he? Why did he promulgate a Holy Year? What was going on?
Boniface VIII – Benedetto Caetani – was born around 1235 into the minor nobility at Anagni, that hill town near Rome which produced so many Pontiffs.17 He read law at the University of Bologna, and by the time Dante was being born in Florence, this distinguished-looking man had entered the diplomatic service, eventually becoming a papal notary. He was regarded by learned contemporaries as the greatest of canon lawyers. He was an embodiment of civilization, European civilization; a person of great taste and cultivation. Much of the money raised by Boniface was for the beautification of the decayed old city. He contributed to the adornment of the first Gothic church in Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva,18 building a spindly baldacchino of exquisite delicacy over the high altar. The Mass vestments which he commissioned, and which survive in the museum at Anagni, betoken an aesthete. He commissioned Giotto to paint a triptych of the enthroned Redeemer.19 But the splendour of the ceremonial with which he surrounded himself, and the wonderful vestments and architecture, together with the great Jubilee itself, all had one aim: the strengthening of the Papacy as a political force.
By then, Caetani had made diplomatic visits to Portugal, France and England. He was a tough negotiator. Ptolemy of Lucca calls him ‘fastuosus et arrogans ac omnium contemtivus’ (‘full of pride and arrogant and contemptuous of everyone’). ‘He guided the church,’ says Dino Compagni, a contemporary Florentine chronicler, ‘after his own way, and abased whoso thought not with him.’20 But he did so with intellectual rigour and with a very clear agenda, namely the protection of Church interests versus secular domination. His negotiations with Aragon in 1291 prevented a war breaking out between Aragon and England.21 In Paris he asserted the rights of the mendicant orders against the secularized faculties of the university and against royal interference. In England he did all he could to limit the power of the Plantagenets, championing the Scots against English conquest, for example. He was a man of immense energy, as his prodigiously copious correspondence testifies. One of his first letters, of great length, when he became Pontiff, was addressed to Edward I, King of England – son of ‘the simple-living Henry’, as Dante called him [Purg. VII.132]. This, and comparable letters to other European sovereigns, and the eight papal bulls of his comparatively short reign, all testify to the same purpose, the strengthening and enforcement of the papal monarchy. When, during the Jubilee Year, the German envoys came to Rome to ask Boniface to confirm the title of Albert of Austria as Holy Roman Emperor with a crown on his head and a sword in his hand, the Supreme Pontiff did not mince his words. ‘It is I, who am Emperor!’ he replied.22 He would change his mind about this too late when, finding himself the victim of pressure from the King of France, he would come to feel that support from the Germans would not have come amiss.
During this Pope’s lifetime the Church had faced a whole series of body-blows, any one of which could have been fatal to its survival. For a start, Christendom had lost any hope of healing the fateful division between Eastern- and Western-rite Christian Churches. Despite the best efforts of the Pope’s predecessor in 1274 to patch up differences with Constantinople, the two mainstream Christian Churches – the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox as we should now term them – were irreconcilably split. Christians would never again speak with one voice, and the Christians of the East would never accept the papal monarchy, which for thirteenth-century Western Christians seemed the likeliest bulwark against the other threats to the faith which were so vigorously at work. There was the threat of Islam. Though most of Spain had been won back from the Muslims by James the Conqueror by the mid-thirteenth century, Islam remained a potent military threat to the Holy Places in the East. And the intellectual renaissance of the previous century – the rediscovery of Aristotle, the birth of modern mathematics and physics and medicine – had come about largely as a result of Islamic scholars. Their influence, especially in the University of Paris, was deeply feared by orthodox Catholics. At the same time, the civilization of Provence had been wiped out in a destructive internecine war, the so-called Albigensian Crusade. This wholesale massacre of heretics had technically been concluded by the Treaty of Paris in 1229, but the heresy itself was widespread, not only
throughout France but in Italy, especially in Florence. The new philosophy in universities was teaching clever young Catholics that the soul was not immortal. The Albigensian or Cathar heresy was teaching men and women of all levels of intelligence that God did not make the world, that matter was sinful, that the Eucharist was not necessary for salvation… The triumph of either school of thought would have meant the end of Catholicism.
After Boniface died, the King of France, who had precipitated his death (as we shall see in Chapter xii), tried to justify himself by conducting a posthumous trial of the Pope in 1310–11, accusing him of all manner of sins and heresies. It was said at this ‘trial’ that Boniface had disputed the divinity of Christ. Even those cardinals who defended the Pope of this charge conceded that he spoke ‘jestingly’ of religion when at table, and that if he had made such a remark it was not to be taken seriously. Another witness quoted him as saying that ‘to lie with women or boys is no more sin than to rub one hand against another’.23 Although many of the charges against the dead Boniface were trumped up, a strong consensus about his character emerges. He was a cynic, with the studied frivolity today found in a certain type of academic, or senior lawyer. But he had given his life to the strengthening of the Roman Church and to the extension of the papal monarchy, and in that he would not weaken. As a cardinal, Benedetto Caetani had seen the Church fatally weakened in many aspects, and he was determined to leave the Church and the Papacy stronger, not weaker.
