by Peter Watson
Following the crusades, and the campaign against the Cathars, there was a sizeable French faction in the College of Cardinals, and the introduction of nationalism into the papacy made all elections at the time fairly fraught. The French house of Anjou ruled in Sicily but in 1282 the French garrison there was massacred by the Sicilians in a rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers.81 At that time, the Sicilians gave their loyalty to the (Spanish) house of Aragon. The pope just then was French, owing allegiance to Charles of Anjou. He therefore proclaimed that the throne of Aragon was forfeit and announced a crusade, to be financed in part by the church. This was an extreme measure, with no moral justification. In the eyes of neutrals it demeaned the papacy, even more so when the campaign failed. This failure turned Philip IV against the papacy, too, as he sought a scapegoat. Gradually, the French became more and more intransigent and this climaxed in 1292 when the papal throne became vacant and the French and Italian factions in the College of Cardinals cancelled each other out to the extent that they wrangled for two years without reaching agreement: no candidate achieved the required two-thirds majority.82 A compromise was eventually reached in 1294 with the election of Celestine V, a hermit. Totally confused and bewildered by his election, Celestine abdicated after only a few months. This ‘great refusal’, as Dante put it, was a demeaning scandal in itself, for no pope had ever abdicated and there were many of the faithful who, mindful that the pope occupies the throne of St Peter by divine grace, took the view that a pope couldn’t abdicate. Celestine said that he had been told to vacate his office by ‘an angelic voice’, but that to say the least was convenient. His place was taken by Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, who adopted the title of Boniface VIII (12941303). Boniface turned out to be arguably the most disastrous of all medieval popes. His idea of his office was hardly less ambitious than Innocent III’s, but he lacked any of the skills of his illustrious predecessor.83
In 1294 war had begun between France and England and both powers were soon regretting the enormous cost and looking around for ways to raise funds. One expedient which occurred to the French was taxation of the clergy, a device used to fund the crusades which had been very successful. From Rome, Boniface disagreed, however, and he published a bull, Clericis laicos, which said so. The bull was particularly bellicose in tone and the French retaliated, expelling Italian bankers from the realm and, much more to the point, cutting off the export of money, which denied the papacy a considerable part of its income. On this occasion, Boniface gave way, conceding that the French king, and by implication all secular rulers, had the right to tax their clergy for the purposes of national security. (Taxing the clergy may not seem financially productive today, but remember this was a time when the church owned as much as a third of the land.) A few years later, however, in 1301, another stand-off loomed, when a dissident bishop in the south of France was arrested and charged with treason. The French authorities demanded that Rome divest the bishop of his office so that he might be tried for his crime. Boniface, characteristically, and emboldened by the thousands of pilgrims that had flocked to Rome in 1300 for a jubilee, responded in a high-handed manner. He revoked his previous concession to the French king, regarding clerical taxation, and summoned a council of French clergy to Rome to reform the church in France. A year later he published the notorious bull Unam sanctam, claiming that ‘both the spiritual and temporal swords were ultimately held by Christ’s vicar on earth and that if a king did not rightly use the temporal sword that had been lent him, he could be deposed by the pope’. The bull concluded: ‘We declare, proclaim and define that subjection to the Roman Pontiff is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature.’84
The French advisors of Philip were no less extravagant in their tit-for-tat. At what was later described as the very first meeting of the French Estates General, Boniface was charged with every calumny conceivable–from heresy to murder to black magic. Even more contentiously, the Estates General insisted that it was the duty of the ‘very Christian king’ of France to rescue the world from the monster in Rome. The French were serious. So much so that one of the king’s advisors, William de Nogaret, a lawyer from Languedoc, was sent on a secret mission to Italy where he was met by certain enemies of the pope, both lay and ecclesiastical. His aim was nothing less than the physical capture of Boniface, the pontiff himself, who was to be brought back to France and put on trial. In fact, Nogaret did succeed in capturing the pope, at his family home of Anagni, south of Rome, and he started north with his captive. But Boniface’s relatives rescued His Holiness and hurried him back to the Vatican, where he soon died, a broken man. Dante saw this as a turning point in the history of civilisation.85
So it proved. ‘The French had not succeeded in capturing the pope but they had succeeded, in a way, in killing him.’ The man who succeeded Boniface was Clement V, a French archbishop, who chose to settle not in Rome but in Avignon. ‘Dante wept.’86 This was pictured, inevitably perhaps, as a‘Babylonian captivity’ for the papacy but it endured for nearly seventy years. Even when the papacy returned to Rome, in 1377, the confusion and abuses didn’t end. The pope elected, Urban VI, conducted such a vendetta against corruption that, after a few months, part of the College of Cardinals withdrew back to Avignon and elected their own pope. There were now two Holy Sees, two Colleges of Cardinals, and two sets of Curiae. Even at local level the Great Schism was uncompromising and absurd–monasteries with two abbots, churches with two competing masses, and so on. A council was held in Pisa in 1408 to end the confusion. Instead, a third pope was elected. The whole absurd, comical, tragic business was not settled until 1417.
By then much damage had been done. Politically, the papacy was never as forceful again. There would be other powerful popes–or seemingly powerful popes–in the Renaissance and as late as the nineteenth century. But, in reality, they would never come anywhere near Gregory VII or Innocent III in either their ambition or their reach. No pope would ever again claim to be half-way between God and man. And yet politics was only one aspect of the papacy’s decline. It was the momentous changes in the intellectual field that were to do equally lasting damage.
17
The Spread of Learning and the Rise
of Accuracy
To Chapter 17 Notes and References
On 11 June 1144, twenty archbishops and bishops gathered in the abbey church of St Denis, in Paris, where as many altars as there were senior clerics present were dedicated that day. Most of the bishops, who had not visited St Denis before, were astonished by what they saw. It is no exaggeration to say that Abbot Suger, the man in charge of the church, had created there the first completely new architectural style in 1,700 years. It was an aesthetic and intellectual breakthrough of the first order.1
Traditionally, ecclesiastical buildings had been erected in the Romanesque style, an elaboration of eastern Mediterranean basilicas, essentially enclosed structures designed for use in hot countries, and which had originated using primitive materials. Suger’s new St Denis was quite different. He used the new architectural understanding, which combined the latest mathematics, to create a vast edifice, where the horizontal emphasis of Romanesque churches was replaced by perpendicular planes and ribbed vaulting, where ‘flying buttresses’, on the outside of the buildings, supported the walls, enabling the immense nave to be largely free of pillars, and where huge perpendicular windows allowed in great swathes of light to illuminate the hitherto murky interior and to shine upon the altar. Not the least impressive feature of the cathedral was the stained-glass rose window over the main entrance. The iridescent colours and the intricate lace-like pattern of the stone-work were as breathtaking as the ingenuity shown by the craftsmen in using the glass to display biblical narratives in this new art form.
Though not himself of high birth, Suger had been the king of France’s childhood playmate and that friendship helped guarantee him a place at the highest tables. Later in their lives, when Louis was absent on an ill-fated crusade, Suger acted as h
is regent and acquitted himself well enough. Though a Benedictine, he was not persuaded that renunciation of the world was the correct path. Instead, he thought that an abbey, as the very summit of earthly hierarchies, should display a magnificence that did no more than reflect that fact.2 ‘Let every man think as he may. Personally I declare that what appears most just to me is this: everything that is most precious should be used above all to celebrate the Holy Mass. If, according to the word of God and the Prophet’s command, the gold vessels, the gold phials, and the small gold mortars were used to collect the blood of the goats, the calves, and a red heifer [in the Temple, in ancient Israel], then how much more zealously shall we hold out gold vases, precious stones, and all that we value most highly in creation, in order to collect the blood of Jesus Christ.’3 Accordingly, between 1134 and 1144 Suger totally rebuilt and readorned the abbey-church of St Denis, using all the resources at his command to create this new setting for the liturgy.
Suger proudly wrote up his achievement in two books, On His Administration and On Consecration. These tell us that he thought St Denis should be a summing up, a summa, of all the aesthetic innovations he had encountered in his travels across southern France and that it should surpass them. He took as his inspiration the theology of the saint after whom St Denis was named Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite (so called because, besides claiming to be one of Paul’s first Greek disciples, he also identified himself as one of the officials of the Athenian court of law, the Areopagus).4 Dionysius is traditionally held to be the author of a medieval mystical treatise, which had been given to St Denis by the pope in the eighth century, in which the main idea was that God is light. Every living thing, according to this theology, receives and transmits the divine illumination, which ‘spills down and irrigates the world’ according to a divinely ordained hierarchy. God is absolute light, whereas all creatures reflect His light according to their inner radiance. It is this concept that lay behind the very form of the twelfth-century cathedrals, of which Abbot Suger’s was the prototype.5
In addition to the general concept of light, Suger introduced several new features. The two crenellated towers set in the façade were meant to give the cathedral a military feel, a symbol of militant Christianity and the king’s role in defending the faith. The portal was triple, reflecting the doctrine of the Trinity. The rose window lighted three high chapels, ‘dedicated to the celestial hierarchies’ the Virgin, St Michael and the angels. At the far end of the choir there was a semicircular sequence of chapels (the apse), which both enabled many monks/priests to say mass at the same time and endowed the choir with a glow of light which complemented that from the rose window. And, with the supporting buttresses now outside the church, there was room for an ambulatory, around the nave, from which side chapels, again lit by daylight, led off. These too enabled more and more monks/priests to say mass. But above all, the whole church was now open–especially as Suger removed the rood screen all of it bathed in one light, so as to make the entire structure a single mystical entity.6 The theology of light was responsible not only for the advent of stained glass but for the role in the liturgy of the new cathedrals of precious stones and metals–jewels, enamel, crystal–which so dominate medieval art. Precious stones were believed to have a mediating power, a moral value even, each one symbolic of some Christian virtue. All of these light-related entities were designed to help the faithful gathered together as one enormous congregation approach God.
Suger was more successful than perhaps even he anticipated. Between 1155 and 1180 cathedrals were built at Noyon, Laon, Soissons and Senlis. The rose window at St Denis inspired similar structures at Chartres, Bourges and Angers. The bishops of England and Germany soon imitated the cathedrals of France. They have lost none of their magnificence in the millennium that has passed since.
It was not only for liturgy that the early cathedrals were used. Experienced bishops allowed the guilds to meet there, and other lay meetings. So many locals had worked on the construction of the cathedrals that they all knew the building well. In Chartres, every guild wanted its own stained-glass window.7 It was in this way, with cathedrals attracting citizens as the monasteries never had–for they were well outside the cities, in the country that they also became schools. The area of a town near the cathedral was usually known as the cloister, even though it was open, and this is where the pupils now began to congregate, along with artists and craftsmen. Moreover, the bishops’ schools were different from the monastic ones. Being in the cities, they were more open, more of this world, and the education they offered reflected that. In the monasteries, tuition had been a matter of pairs a young monk was attached to an older one. But in the cathedral schools it was quite different a group of students sat at the feet of a master. To begin with, most of the pupils were still clerics, and for them learning was primarily a religious act. But they lived in the city, among lay people, and their eventual jobs would be pastoral, amid the people rather than world-renouncing, as in a monastery.
In such an environment, word travelled much faster than it had done at the time of the monasteries, and would-be clerics or would-be scholars quickly learned which masters were cleverer, who had the most books, in which schools the debate was liveliest. When contemporaries mentioned schools with distinctive doctrines, they usually referred to a renowned teacher. For example, the ‘Meludinenses’ were named after Robert of Melun, while the ‘Porretani’ were pupils of Gilbert of Poitiers.8 In this way, first Laon, then Chartres, then Paris offered the best opportunities. By now the word schola was applied to all the people of a monastery or cathedral ‘at its work of worship in the choir’.9 What happened in the twelfth century was that the number of pupils mushroomed and extended well beyond the normal numbers required to man a church.
In these contexts, at least to begin with, the main skills taught were reading and writing Latin, singing, and composing prose and verse. But what the new students wanted, the students who were not going to become clerics, were more practical skills law, medicine, natural history. They also wanted to learn to argue and analyse, and to be exposed to the main texts of the day.
Paris had a population of some 200,000 in the early thirteenth century and was growing fast, no longer confined to the Île de Paris. Its advantages were extolled on every side, not least the abundance of food and wine, and the fact that, within a hundred miles of the city, there were at least twenty-five other well-known schools. This made for a critical mass of educated people which helped fuel further demand. There were also many churches in the city, whose associated outbuildings often provided board and lodging for the students. Everard of Ypres, who studied at both Chartres and Paris, says he was in a class of four pupils in the former school but that in Paris he was in a class of three hundred, in a large hall.10
The sheer size of Paris was what counted. By 1140 it was the dominant school in northern Europe, by far, though ‘schools’ is a better word than the singular. Its reputation was based on the fact that there were many independent masters there, not just one, and it was these numbers which provided the interplay out of which scholastic thought developed. ‘By 1140, it was possible to find nearly everything in Paris. True, it was necessary to go to Bologna for the higher flights of canon law, and to Montpellier for the latest and best in medicine; but for every branch of grammar, logic, philosophy, and theology, and even for a respectable level of law or medicine, Paris could provide everything that most ambitious students could desire.’11 From contemporary documents, R. W. S. Southern has identified seventeen masters in Paris in the twelfth century, including Abelard, Alberic, Peter Helias, Ivo of Chartres and Peter Lombard.
By the middle of the twelfth century hundreds of students arrived in Paris every year from Normandy, Picardy, Germany and England. Teaching was still carried on in the cloister of Notre Dame but it was beginning to spread, in the first instance to the left bank of the Seine. The new masters, Georges Duby tells us, rented stalls on the rue de Fouarre and on the Petit Pont. In 1180 an
Englishman who had studied in Paris founded a college for poor students and south of the river a whole new district was growing up opposite the Île de la Cité where, in the narrow lanes, Paris University was born.
The intellectual life of the schools, and then of the universities, was very different from that in the monasteries. In the latter locations, it was not so different from contemplation, solitary mediation on a sacred text, though they did seek to build up good libraries: Fulda in Germany, for example, had two thousand books at the service of scholars and Cluny close to one thousand, including a Latin translation of the Qur’an. But in Chartres and Paris they debated, masters and students faced each other in the mental equivalents of knightly combat, with outcomes that, in the context of the times, were just as thrilling and equally unpredictable the masters didn’t always win. The basis of the curriculum of the schools was still the seven liberal arts that had been set down in the early Middle Ages but now the trivium came to be seen as the elementary or preparatory–part of the course work. The main aim of the trivium was to prepare the cleric for his principal function, to be able to read the Bible and make critical interpretations of the sacred text so as to extract the truth. In order to do so, however, pupils had to understand the finer points of Latin and for this some of the classical/pagan authors were studied Cicero, Virgil and Ovid in particular. Teaching in the schools therefore leaned to classicism and this fuelled a renewed interest in ancient Rome and antiquity in general.12
