The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the afflicted;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.
Or Saint John the Divine who said: “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, ‘Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea’ ” (Is. 61:1; and Rv. 1:10–11).
By the summer of 1294, Peter was revered for his age and wisdom. At eighty-four, he was an old man, but Saint Anthony of Egypt lived to be 105, Peter would have reminded his monks. And Saint Paul of Thebes, Anthony’s teacher, lived even longer. Saint Jerome, too, was often visited by angels during the decades of old age that he spent living alone near Bethlehem. Every hermit knew such things.
There have been a few occasions when a letter has changed the course of history.3 This was one of those times. The letter Peter wrote was both private and intended to provoke. Because of his religious celebrity reputation, any communication from Peter would be unusual, even for the College of Cardinals meeting in Perugia.
The letter would have looked rather ordinary. Various types of wood were common for letter-writing during this period, and bark was the most portable of them all. It might seem that bark would be too perishable to be used for a letter written to a cardinal, but in the hands of a hermit that humble material might have had just the effect that was intended. Paper, as opposed to the animal skins used for parchment, was even more impermanent in those days since it was made from rags and “other more vile material,” as Peter the Venerable once put it.4
The actual letter is no longer extant. Perhaps a cardinal accidentally threw it into the fire with a previous round’s ballots, or maybe it was tucked into the pages of a Latin codex, and is still extant, 750 years later, lost in a library somewhere in Europe. All we know is that the letter was written in June 1294 and was addressed to Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini, dean of the College of Cardinals. The letter was written in Latin, which means that if Peter wrote it himself the writing would have been unskilled because, as sources tell us, he was largely uneducated. And we can surmise that the missive was delivered by a younger monk who could maneuver down the rocks and inclines better than a vibrant octogenarian.
I can imagine Peter instructing the young monk charged with delivering his letter to the Sacred College.
Brother, pronto! Presto!
The letter delivered in person to Malabranca on the morning of July 5, 1294, was, according to the venerable hagiographer Alban Butler, filled with “holy rage.” What did the letter say?
God’s judgment falls on those who ignore His will, and on those who are willingly blind in seeking it. You and the others have been like ones charged with restoring a roof to a beautiful house, and yet you leave the tools and plans at home for years on end, leaving those inside to burn in the hot sun and freeze to death during blazing summers and dread winters. The inaction you have shown will surely bring the wrath of Jesus Christ down upon you, upon your families, and upon all of us who call ourselves by his name.
We can’t be certain that these were Peter’s exact words, but these were the ideas and feelings communicated—and something in that letter inspired the cardinal, because we know for certain that he quickly nominated Peter as the next ruler of God’s Church on earth.
2
THE BIZARRE PAPAL ELECTION OF 1292–94
Two years earlier, on April 4, 1292, Pope Nicholas IV, a man whom many had called “the good Franciscan,” because he was the first of Francis of Assisi’s spiritual progeny to rise to the papacy, lay dead in Rome, leaving the chair of St. Peter vacant.
Nicholas was born Girolamo Masci and raised in the Marche region of central Italy, approximately 120 miles (circumnavigating the Apennine Mountains from the Marches north to the Adriatic, then south from there to the Abruzzi) from Peter’s home in the Abruzzi. These remote places of Italy often give one the impression that there are more mountain pines than people. Before becoming pope, Girolamo had been elected minister-general of the Franciscans to replace Saint Bonaventure, the influential friar who’d rewritten the Life of Francis and ordered destroyed all earlier versions written by men who knew the saint best. This was a century when the lines between sanctity, power, and violence can be difficult to discern, and, curiously, the diary of Bonaventure’s secretary was discovered and published only a century ago. In it we learn that the theologian fell victim to a fate not uncommon in those days: murder. He was poisoned, to be exact, most likely by one of his own spiritual brethren.
After Girolamo succeeded Bonaventure, three years later he was made Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, a position created by the Crusades. He lived in conquered Constantinople, governing the Western Church precariously beside the Eastern Church’s Patriarch for three years. In 1281, he moved back to Italy to serve as the cardinal-bishop in Palestrina, and from that position he was elected pope in 1287.
By most accounts, Nicholas IV’s record as pontiff was solid. He was reluctant to accept the post, and in fact was elected by his colleagues in the College twice, in rapid succession, in order to demonstrate how sincerely they believed he was the man for the job. Nicholas IV combined the spiritual sensitivity of a good follower of Saint Francis with the acumen of a world ruler, skills he had learned abroad.
The thirteenth century was a time of creative intensity, not just in Italy, but around the world. It was an era of invention, intellectual curiosity, and adventure. For example, it was in the mid-thirteenth century that gunpowder was first used in a cannon in a land battle between the Mamluks and the Mongols in the Jezreel Valley of Palestine. The use of gunpowder is one of the primary reasons that the Mamluks were able to deliver the Mongols their first, real military defeat, keeping them from advancing toward Egypt. Later in the century, land mines were first used by Song Dynasty Chinese against Mongol invaders in southern China. Meanwhile, across Europe there was an awakened interest in the principles of Hippocrates, leading to the first accurate descriptions of diseases, medical conditions, and cures. Theories explaining the process of circulation of the blood as well as developments in surgery—most of which originated in the East with thinkers such as Averroes (d. 1198) and Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288)—advanced modern medicine. Public intellectuals emerged in this century as well, through the burgeoning of universities. Men such as the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–94), his era’s Doctor Mirabilis, or “Wonderful Teacher,” began to focus on empirical methods of reasoning. Combined with the advancement of knowledge from philosophers in the Muslim East, this led to a gradual collapse of the authority approach to knowledge. Hypothesis, research, and evidence came increasingly into play. No longer were the ideas of a previous era’s experts automatically the starting point for the future. Just as Copernicus would soon reject the ideas of Ptolemy in the study of astronomy, so too did physicians and philosophers of the late thirteenth century begin to dispense with the best wisdom of the early Middle Ages in favor of new researches.
Other social changes were under way, as well. Laborers began forming workers’ guilds and planting the seeds that would give rise to the middle class in the centuries to follow. Powerful mayors and towns began to form as local economies strengthened because of enhanced transportation and trade, leading to the breakdown of old models of serfdom. People became more mobile than ever before, traveling outside their local parishes and provinces, on roads rediscovered and refurbished from the golden travel age of the Roman Empire. People’s lives were no longer completely determined by the situation into which they had been born. And religious life was undergoing rapid change and evolution, fueled by the energy of lay reform movements as well as the new Franciscan and Dominican orders. Early versions of boarding
houses and hostels were popping up to accommodate the pilgrims, friars, and wandering ascetics all about. All of this led to a vibrancy of intellectual, civic, and religious life never before seen.
In other respects, Western Europe and Mother Church were in dire straits. Both were in need of a savior. The center of the world was identified on maps that depicted Asia to Africa to Europe seen from a “birds-eye,” godlike perspective. At the center of the earth was the city of Jerusalem, and beside Jerusalem the hidden location of the lost Garden of Eden. The Holy Land was the pivot upon which the world turned. But it was still in Muslim hands.
Christian fervor to get it back had led to the first of the Crusades in 1095. Over the next two hundred years Christianity warred against Islam (and sometimes Eastern Christians, and usually Jews), and in the process families and inheritances were decimated (the orderly transfer of power from father to son was broken because so many sons were dead). It has been estimated that the capital lost during this time was staggering. To take one small example, the saintly King Louis IX of France is said to have spent six times the annual income of his throne (arming and provisioning 15,000 men and at least thirty-six ships) in order to recover a few relics of Christ’s Passion from the Holy Land to fill Sainte-Chapelle, the chapel he was building back in Paris.1
When he’d first ascended to the papacy in February 1288, Nicholas IV had offered new hope of success with regard to taking back Jerusalem, but it wasn’t to be. Tales of crusading victories as well as devastating defeat had been traveling home to Italy for nearly two centuries, and then the whole movement was dealt a death blow in the spring of 1291. The flow of princes, militant monks, and their recruits seeking adventure, riches, and eternal life came to an abrupt end when Acre, the fortress stronghold on Haifa Bay, capital of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem since 1192, fell to well-organized Muslim troops after a siege. Acre is in what is today northern Israel and was the site of all Western Christianity’s communication and travel in and out of the Holy Land. The fortress was inhabited by crusaders of all kinds, including Templars, Hospitallers, and knights from all over Europe with varying motivations, some good and some not so good. An estimated 40,000 Christians were living in Acre when the outpost fell on May 18, 1291. Within months, all the other nearby Christian footholds in the Holy Land had fallen too. These events took place at the tail end of Nicholas’s pontificate. To retain a foothold in the land where the Savior had walked meant everything to serious Christians of that era, and many believed that the calamity at Acre had occurred because of a lack of strength in the papacy.2 To illustrate, the playwright Peter Barnes offers this opening scene in his play about the life of Pope Celestine V: The most prominent cardinals of the Sacred College are standing in a Vatican antechamber bickering over whom they should elect to replace Nicholas IV. Latino Malabranca Orsini appears to be the most reasonable and spiritually minded among them. He holds up his Bible to the others and pronounces, “Whilst Christ bleeds and His holy blood waters the Holy Land—Acre and Tripoli are lost to the Infidels ’cause we hate.”3
There were other reasons to be concerned as well. Nicholas IV had made two decisions as pope that would have a fateful effect on his Church.
On May 29, 1289, the pope had favored Charles II of Anjou, an astute political strategist, by crowning him as the king of Sicily; he was already king of Naples. This otherwise minor figure in the history of Italy was at that time recovering from the embarrassment of losing Sicily in an important naval battle to Peter III of Aragon. But the papacy had long feuded with Aragonese rulers (before Peter III, it was his father, James I; and after Peter III, it was Peter III’s son Alfonso III), and Nicholas IV was happy to restore to Charles II his Sicilian crown even if it meant little “on the ground.”
Then Nicholas decreed in July 1289 that the cardinals of the Sacred College were to receive half of all the revenues accruing to the Roman See. This money, which flowed into St. Peter’s Basilica from sources all over the world—from the pockets of the faithful, from the simony of civil leaders purchasing ecclesiastical offices, from the taxation of clergy and dioceses—made the Sacred College an almost independent institution. In turn, this windfall gave the cardinals, those in charge of electing a new pope, motivation to maintain position and power. Without a pope, they were accountable to no one.
By the spring of 1294 Nicholas’s body had been buried at the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore for more than two years. It was more than time for the Church to move on. New leadership was desperately needed, yet no pope had been elected to replace him.
An interregnum was supposed to last only ten days. For the first nine (a novena), funeral rites would be conducted by the clergy in Rome for the deceased pope, filling the basilicas with pageantry and memories of the pope’s good works. On the tenth day the Sacred College would gather and begin their work. But factions within the College were stymieing the election at every turn. There was nothing new about this; the politics of electing a supreme pontiff had been complicated and corrupt for centuries.
The College of Cardinals
In the eleventh century, Saint Peter Damian (ca. 1007–72), one of the era’s most influential hermits and theologians—never known to be overly optimistic about the role of clergy in the spiritual life of the Church—spoke of cardinals in idealized language. He expressed the view that they might function like wise men of the empire, as an “ancient assembly of the Romans” who, in addition to steering the world’s ship could also be “spiritual senators of the universal Church.”4 But this ideal usually went unrealized. In the thirteenth century a cardinal was more likely to be a scoundrel than a saint. Typically portly, political, powerful, opinionated men, the cardinals spent most of their days insulated from the daily lives of those whom they served.
Political motivations usually took precedence over religious and spiritual ones. Many of the cardinals inherited their positions from members of their families, and bitter rivalries between these families embroiled both Church and State. This was nothing new. For centuries Scolaris, Scottis, Pierloeonis, and Frangipanis had achieved political prominence and financial patronage through the papacy, and had produced popes from among their numbers. Power was secured along family lines, and civil and religious leaders relied on these family organizations for powerful appointments, security, legal triumphs, and influence. The College of Cardinals was filled, not with the spiritual leaders of Europe, but with its most powerful men. It was little more than an oligarchy. Back then the questions of most importance in the room were Who are my enemies? and Who are my friends?
In response to this state of affairs, keenly felt even in the early eleventh century, an earlier pope, Nicholas II, had reformed the rules governing papal elections at a synod in 1059. Smartly, he declared a bold independence of the Church from the State, removing myriad machinations that had kept medieval popes in the pockets of Roman aristocracy and Holy Roman emperors. Future popes would be elected solely by the cardinals, he stated, and from Rome. But it took a long time—a few centuries—before this bit of wisdom would be followed. It wasn’t in effect in 1292–94.
At the outset of the 1292–94 Sacred College there were only twelve members. (By contrast, today there are usually between 160 and 180.) One of the best insights into how these powerful families controlled the Church comes from Niccolò Machiavelli’s famous book about politics, The Prince, first published in 1532. It shows that the cardinals were “strong men, who lived long, hard lives, and schemed stoutly.”5
To hold down the pope [the powers of Italy] made use of the barons in Rome. Since these were divided into two factions, Orsini and Colonna, there was always cause for quarrel between them; and standing with arms in hand under the eyes of the pontiff, they kept the pontificate weak and infirm. And although a spirited pope … sometimes rose up, still fortune or wisdom could never release him from these inconveniences. And the brevity of their lives was the cause of it; for in the ten years on the average that a pope lived, he would have
trouble putting down one of the factions. If, for instance, one pope had almost eliminated the Colonna, another one hostile to the Orsini rose up, which made the Colonna rise again, and there would not be time to eliminate the Orsini.6
In the election of 1292–94 it was clear from the beginning that the cardinals were in for a protracted process. The two-thirds majority required for a successful election was going to be hard to come by. The two most powerful families, the Orsinis and the Colonnas, were preventing a new pope from being crowned through deadlock after deadlock. Each family sought the man who would most likely support their interests.
The Orsini family had three representatives: Matthew Orsini was the most experienced, participating in a total of thirteen papal conclaves over a long career, including four that took place between 1276 and 1277. The Orsini family had recently produced a pope, Nicholas III (1277–80), and Matthew Orsini would later be elected pope on the first ballot on the first day of the election that was called after Celestine V’s resignation. Matthew would refuse the job, and Cardinal Benedict Gaetani would be elected instead. Also present was Napoleon Orsini, nephew to Pope Nicholas III. Napoleon was the youngest member of the Sacred College, not even thirty years old at the outset. And then there was Latino Malabranca Orsini, the cardinal-bishop of Ostia and the cardinal-presider (what we call the dean today).
The Colonna family was no less influential. It was common knowledge in Rome throughout Nicholas IV’s papacy that the Colonnas controlled him. Even the medieval equivalent of a comic strip remains from those days; as the Catholic Encyclopedia explains it: “The undue influence exercised at Rome by the Colonna … was so apparent … during [Nicholas IV’s] lifetime that Roman wits represented him encased in a column—the distinctive mark of the Colonna family—out of which only his tiara-covered head emerged.” The Colonnas contributed two of the cardinals in the 1292–94 Sacred College: James, one of the most powerful men in the Papal State; and his nephew, Peter, who was made cardinal by Nicholas IV in 1288 as a favor to James.
The Pope Who Quit Page 3
