Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  In the chasm’s bottom

  the naked sinners faced towards us as they came,

  and, on the other side, hurried faster along with us.

  In the same way the Romans, because of the great throngs

  In the Year of Jubilee across the bridge,

  Have worked out ways of getting the people over.

  So the people on one side face the Castel and move towards St

  Peter’s,

  And on the other path they go towards the Mount.21

  If Boniface displayed a commitment to the lofty spiritual claims of the papacy, he also displayed some of the worst traits of clerical careerism, enriching his relatives at the expense of the Church, and waging a relentless war against his family’s traditional rivals, the Colonna family. Boniface even offered the spiritual privileges of the Crusade to anyone who joined in this vendetta against the Colonna. Both his personal character and his orthodoxy were later called into question, his enemies accusing him, in graphic and disturbing detail, of being a sodomite (sex with boys or women, he was alleged to have said, was no worse than rubbing one hand against another). Even more disturbingly, he was said to have been a non-believer, rejecting the resurrection and saying that heaven and hell were here.

  These accusations, spread by the French crown during his lifetime and repeated after his death, have been generally regarded as motivated by malice. But, whatever Boniface did or did not believe about God, sex or the afterlife, he believed passionately in the papacy. His pontificate had begun auspiciously, with Charles II of Sicily and his son, Charles King of Hungary, leading the Pope’s white horse by the bridle as he went to be crowned. Boniface determined to exert to the full the temporal sovereignty this symbolised, but in fact most of his political ventures backfired. He harnessed Angevin support to impose papal rule in Tuscany, but Charles II’s brutal treatment of Florence and the exiling of the leading ‘Black’ or Ghibelline party, including Dante, embittered the region against the Pope. His attempts to secure Angevin rule in Sicily failed, as did his intervention with Edward I of England on behalf of Scotland, which he claimed as a papal fief. He had no better luck in his attempts to settle the succession in Hungary and Poland. It is a significant fact that among the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome in 1300, there was not a single crowned head.

  His most disastrous venture into high politics, however, was in his confrontation with the King of France. Since the time of Innocent III it had become established practice to finance Crusading ventures by taxes on the clergy. Philip the Fair now imposed a similar tax to fund his war of conquest in Gascony. Boniface, who longed to unite the princes of Europe under his own leadership in a new Crusade, challenged the French crown’s right to the property of the Church. In 1296 he issued the bull Clericis Laicos, forbidding the laity to take or the clergy to give away the property of the Church. The bull’s opening sentence (‘All history shows clearly the enmity of the laity towards the clergy’) was based on scholastic textbook commonplaces, but it nevertheless accurately signalled the militant clericalism of Boniface’s outlook.

  That clericalism, and above all his lofty sense of the dignity of his own office, is represented by his remodelling of the papal tiara, elongating it to correspond to the biblical measure of the ‘ell’, a sign, for Boniface, of completeness and superiority. It became increasingly clear, however, that King Philip did not accept that supremacy, and that he aspired to a new Christian empire stretching from the southern Mediterranean to the North Sea in which the papal state would be swallowed up. Boniface was having none of this, and in 1302 he issued the bull Unam Sanctam, the culminating blow in a propaganda war against the French crown. In it the Pope notoriously claimed that ‘it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff’. He insisted that the Pope wielded both the spiritual and secular sword, but gave the secular sword to princes to use for the good of the Church.22

  Unam Sanctam was largely made up of a tissue of quotations from previous popes and from great theologians like Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas. Its claims were not in fact very different from those made by every pope since at least the time of Gregory VII. Certainly most of what Boniface asserted can be found in germ in the writings of Innocent III. In his confrontation with the French king, Boniface undoubtedly had both law and tradition on his side. Boniface, however, was reiterating these teachings at a time when his struggle with the King of France was going badly, and when everyone could see that his temporal claims in real terms were hollow. In the long run the insistence on so high a doctrine of the papacy, at a time when the Pope was at the mercy of his enemies, served not to strengthen but to cast doubt on the claims themselves. Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating the French King in September 1303, but before it could be promulgated French forces, accompanied by two of the deposed Colonna cardinals and their relatives, broke into the papal palace at Anagni and mobbed the Pope. Boniface faced his enemies with courage, in full papal regalia and shouting, ‘Here is my neck, here is my head,’ challenging them to kill him. The French troops drew back from that final atrocity, and were driven out of the town by the citizens the next day. Boniface never recovered from his ordeal, however. He returned to Rome a broken man, roaming round his apartments crying out in rage and humiliation. He died a month later. The ‘outrage of Anagni’ shocked Italy and Europe. Dante, who hated Boniface and placed him upside down in a subterranean furnace in hell, nevertheless saw the maltreatment of the Pope at Anagni as the recrucifixion of Christ. In a real sense, however, it called the bluff of the high medieval doctrine of the papacy, for it measured the distance between inflated religious rhetoric and cold reality.

  Popes who understood themselves to be the vicars of St Peter were tied to Rome, for Peter’s body was at Rome. The Pope’s altar stood above the tomb of the Apostle. But popes who were the Vicars of Christ, however much they might insist on the possession of Peter’s authority, were not bound by geography in the same way. The popes of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries had been deeply involved in the local politics of Rome. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the internationalising of papal power and papal claims made that involvement seem claustrophobic, limiting and, in the face of popular hostility and aristocratic intrigue, dangerous as well. In any case the popes were increasingly involved in the growing complexities of international politics. From Charlemagne to Frederick II it was the emperors with whom popes had to reckon. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries other rulers, especially the kings of France, loomed on the papal horizon and posed a threat to papal independence.

  For most of the fourteenth century, the bishops of Rome lived far away from Rome, in the fortified city of Avignon. The seventy-year exile of the popes at Avignon was a disaster for the Church, and came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy. Yet it came about by accident. Boniface VIII’s successor, the unworldly Dominican Benedict XI (1303–4), survived only nine months. He died in exile at Perugia, and the Conclave to elect his successor met there. The Conclave was bitterly divided into two rival camps, one hostile to France and determined to exact revenge for the scandalous treatment of Pope Boniface at Anagni, the other, smaller group intent on reconciliation with France and anxious to mollify the French crown. The Conclave sat in deadlock for eleven months, till a split in the anti-French party allowed the election of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got, as Pope Clement V (1305–14). Bertrand was not himself a cardinal, nor was he present at the Conclave. He was yet another Bologna-trained canon lawyer with a distinguished diplomatic career behind him and a good working relationship with Philip IV of France.

  To please the King, he allowed himself to be crowned at Lyons, and he remained in France, partly because of the chaotic political situation in central Italy, and partly in the hope of bringing about a peace between France and England, so that their energies could be directed into another Crusade to the Holy Land. In 1309 Clement settled at Avignon.
It was a sensible choice, for it was not strictly speaking French territory. The surrounding region was part of the Papal States, and the city itself was subject to the kings of Sicily, until bought by the popes in the mid-century. It was near the sea, and far more centrally placed for most of Europe than Rome had been. The move was not at first intended to be permanent, the Pope camping in the Bishop’s palace, his Curia billeted round the town, and only a minimum working archive being kept in the city.

  Clement, first of the Avignonese popes, was a shameless nepotist (he made five members of his family cardinals), but he was also in many respects an impressive character, despite suffering from a recurrent cancer the pain of which kept him a recluse for months at a time. He was a good administrator, who revised and expanded the code of canon law, adding a valuable new section called ‘The Clementines’. Deeply committed both to the Crusading ideal (which would continue to attract European rulers and their subjects, but was destined to disruption by the Anglo-French wars, the chaotic politics of Italy, and by the Black Death) and to the somewhat more positive ideal of preaching missions to the East, he strengthened the already crucial links between the papacy and the universities, founding chairs in oriental languages at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca.

  His greatest difficulty was resisting the domination of the French crown. King Philip pursued a relentless vendetta against the memory of Boniface VIII, and tried to force Clement to summon a general council to brand him as a heretic and a sodomite. Clement had no love for Boniface, but realised the devastating consequences such a condemnation would have for papal authority. He managed to resist the call for the condemnation of Boniface when the Council of Vienne, the last great papal Council of the Middle Ages, met in 1311. He was, however, forced to remove all Boniface’s anti-French measures from the papal records, and to canonise Celestine V, whom Boniface had imprisoned. (Clement defused this by canonising him under his monastic name of Peter, not his pontifical name, and as a ‘confessor’, not, as Philip had wanted, as a martyr, with the implication that Boniface had had him murdered.) He was also obliged to dissolve the Knights Templar, a military order dedicated to crusade, whose wealth and power had earned them many enemies, and whom Philip accused of heresy, necromancy and sexual perversion. The Knights were duly condemned and dissolved at Vienne. Clement did what he could to soften measures against the Templars, and to save their property for the Church, but many were burned at the stake on trumped-up charges, a measure of the weakness of the papacy in the face of royal pressure.

  This continuing vulnerability of the papacy to the French crown under Clement’s six successors at Avignon was not just a matter of external pressure from the monarchy. Inevitably the papacy itself was ‘colonised’ in the course of its long exile in France, and the papacy became French. We need, however, to beware of assuming too much about this ‘Frenchness’. France was still a collection of regions, each with its own language, legal system and local culture. Pope John XXII (1316–34), a southerner, could not read letters from the French King without the help of a translator. Nevertheless, all the Avignon popes were Frenchmen of some sort, and, of the 134 cardinals they created, no fewer than 112 were French, 96 from the surrounding region of Languedoc alone. Seventy per cent of all curial officials during this period about whom we have knowledge were French. Of the twenty-two non-French cardinals, fourteen were Italian, two were English, none at all were German. Though the Avignon popes continued to maintain the universalist claims of their predecessors, and to see themselves as the Father of all Christians, this solid identification of the papacy with France affected perceptions of the papacy, and contributed to a growing questioning of its claims to supremacy in the Church.

  Prominent among these was the emergence of secularised political theory, a development for which in some ways the papacy itself was responsible. Since before the time of Gregory VII the popes had encouraged the development both of canon law and of university theology and philosophy The rise of Aristotelianism within the universities moved reflection on the nature of human society away from the Augustinian pattern inherited from late antiquity – within which the tensions between Pope and Emperor had arisen – towards the notion that the state had a natural autonomy and order separate from that of the Church. In the fourteenth century this line of thought reached its extreme in the teaching of Marsilius of Padua, whose secular account of society effectively reduced the Church itself to a department of state (the Pars sacerdotalis). Marsilius lodged the supreme power, delegated to kings, not in the Pope but in the people. Marsilius’ theories took on concrete form when Lewis of Bavaria had himself crowned emperor in Rome in 1328 by a senior Roman layman, a member of the Colonna family.

  The Pope whom Lewis defied by this act was John XXII, whose pontificate highlighted many of the best and the worst features of the Avignon papacy Personally an austere and frugal character, he emphasised the grandeur of the papacy, insisting on his superiority over and right to appoint the Emperor. He was a financial and administrative reformer, increasing papal control over episcopal and monastic appointments, extending the system of papal taxation (‘annates’) throughout Europe, reorganising the papal Curia and the code of canon law. He was confronted by a major and long-standing division within the Franciscan order, a radical ‘Spiritual’ wing repudiating property and criticising many aspects of current Church life. These ‘Spirituals’ had always blamed the popes from Gregory IX onwards for permitting and even requiring the modification of the Rule from its primitive severity. John now entirely alienated them and even many moderate Franciscans by condemning outright the teaching that scripture proved that Christ and his Apostles were ‘paupers’, that is, that Christ had owned nothing. Even more catastrophic was his repudiation of the arrangement whereby the popes were the nominal ‘owners’ of the property of the Franciscan order, which only had the ‘use’ of it. This drastic abandonment of earlier papal policy split the order, and led to the election of a ‘Spiritual’ Franciscan as antipope in Rome in 1328. The ‘Emperor’ Lewis denounced John as a heretic, and his decidedly eccentric beliefs about the nature of the beatific vision eventually led to John’s formal condemnation as a heretic.

  As the administrative reforms of John XXII suggest, however, the exile was not entirely negative. The Avignon papacy was at least freed from its age-old and mostly disastrous involvement in the intricate family vendettas of the Roman nobility, and the papal court at Avignon became more than ever the administrative and juridical centre of the Church. The popes of the early Middle Ages had drawn their power from the relics of the Apostles, the popes of the Avignon period from their centrality in the legal systems of Europe. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Avignon popes greatly refined and systematised the papal bureaucracy and the papal finances. The system of curial departments had its origins then, and the establishment of the Rota in 1331 created the machinery for dealing with marital cases which though much modified is still in use.

  These reforms carried their own problems, of course. The extension of papal ‘provisions’ from the papal claim to fill vacancies created by clergy who happened to die while at Rome to a multitude of additional cases, eventually including all bishoprics and archbishoprics, helped to eliminate local electoral quarrels and to improve the standard of those appointed. It also invaded many existing rights, and created a bottomless pit of hungry expectation and a scramble for jobs, which the popes could never hope to satisfy. At a time when France, Germany and England were at odds, the fact that a good deal of the papal income came from provisions and procurations in Germany and England led to resentment, and a sense that the resources of the churches of England and Germany were being devoured by France. This was an illusion, in fact, for probably more than half the income of the Avignon papacy came from France. Nevertheless, the impression persisted, and soured attitudes to the popes. The growing complexity of papal administration catered to real needs, but developed a top-heavy life of its own and strained goodwill towards the
papacy itself. Already at the Council of Vienne William Durand, Bishop of Mende, had called for the reversal of the trend towards the centralisation of the Church around the pope, and had argued in favour of greatly strengthened local hierarchies and regional synods. Nothing came of Durand’s proposals, but these dissatisfactions grew.

  Nor were the vastly increased papal revenues wisely spent. Some of the Avignon popes were wildly extravagant. Clement VI was a charitable man who stayed in Avignon during the Black Death there which wiped out more than 62,000 of the inhabitants, supervising sick-care, burials and the pastoral care of the dying. But he was also a bon viveur and a lavish entertainer, who declared that ‘a pope should make his subjects happy’. He spent money with reckless abandon, and once declared that ‘my predecessors did not know how to be popes’. Much of it was poured into the black hole of internecine Italian politics and warfare, as the popes struggled to hold together from a distance the papal patrimony in Italy. It has been calculated that John XXII spent 63 per cent of his income on warfare, and two thirds of all the revenues raised by the Avignon papacy was spent on retaining mercenary armies and on the sweetening of allies in the snakepit of Italian politics.

  The papacy’s seventy-year exile at Avignon came to an end in January 1377 when Pope Gregory XI (1370–8), the last Frenchman to be elected pope, returned to Rome. A deeply religious man of mystical temperament, he believed Rome to be the only right place for the Pope, a view in which he had been encouraged both by the precarious state of the papal territories in Italy, which demanded his personal attention, and by more spiritual persuasions of the Dominican visionary St Catherine of Siena. In her letters she calls him ‘dulcissimo babbo mio’ (my sweetest daddy), but her advice was relentlessly demanding: ‘Even if you have not been very faithful in the past, begin now to follow Christ, whose vicar you are, in real earnest. And do not be afraid … Attend to things spiritual, appointing good shepherds and good rulers in the cities under your jurisdiction … Above all, delay no longer in returning to Rome and proclaiming the Crusade’.23 It says much for the spiritual stature of the Pope that such letters could be written to him, and that he was willing to act on them.