by John Kelly
The third major character in the drama was the urbane and learned Pope Clement VI, a shrewd sybarite with a Friar Tuck–sized waistline and an X-rated libido. One story has it that, when rebuked for wantonness, Clement would plead
ex consilio medicorum—he was following the advice of his physicians; another, that he would confront the chastiser with a list of other libidinous popes he kept in a “little black book,” then wonder out loud why it was that the church’s greatest leaders had also been among its greatest philanderers.
The last major player in the drama was Francesco Petrarch, literary celebrity and early practitioner of radical chic. “I feel I have met a God, not a man,” Petrarch wrote, after encountering the handsome Cola, thereby proving that he was a better poet than a judge of character.
The
deus ex machina that brought these figures into play was the intolerable state of medieval Rome. By 1347 the great capital of Antiquity had shrunk to a squalid little ruin; it was a city of buildings without walls, arches without roofs, pedestals without statues, fountains without water, columns without arches, and steps that led from nowhere to nothing. From a half million—and perhaps many more—residents during Antiquity, the population had fallen to a pitiful thirty-five thousand, and with no other visible means of support, medieval Romans survived by cannibalizing the decaying city. The rich pilfered marble and brick from the imperial ruins to build their gloomy castles and fierce towers; the poor, to erect their stinking hovels. Even the great palaces on Palatine hill, the baths of Diocletian, and the Julian basilica were torn down and thrown into kilns to make lime. Materials the Romans could not use themselves, they happily sold to others. Many of Italy’s great cathedrals and even London’s Westminster Abbey were, in part, built from imperial rubble. On summer mornings medieval visitors could still see women hurrying across the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, balancing bundles on their heads, and fishermen bent over their pots and nets along the banks of the Tiber. But beyond the river, now malodorous and polluted, and the center city, where the poor lived in streets so narrow the afternoon sun never fell below the tiled rooftops, there was nothing but lumpy grassland, broken buildings, and cow pastures all the way to the Aurelian wall, the boundary of the old imperial city.
Life on the Roman street mirrored the city’s physical condition. The Hobbesian state of all against all, characteristic of medieval Italy generally, reached its apotheosis in the gangsterism of medieval Rome. The city’s ruling class—the great aristocratic families like the Colonna and the Orsini—engaged in a perpetual war against one another, and beneath the violence of the highborn there was the violence of the gutter: of robbers and muggers and streetcorner toughs. In 1309, when the papacy, the last bastion of municipal authority, fled to the safety of Avignon, civic order collapsed entirely. With “no one to govern,” wrote a contemporary, “fighting [was a] daily occurrence, robbery was rife. Nuns—and even children—were outraged; wives were torn from their husbands’ beds. Laborers on their way to work were robbed at the very gates of the city . . . ; priests became evil doers, every sin was unbridled. There was only one law—the law of the sword.”
Cola di Rienzo’s emergence as the self-appointed savior of a bleeding Rome owed something to civic patriotism, something to personal grievance—a Colonna henchman killed Cola’s brother—and something to a romantic imagination inflamed by constant rereadings of Seneca, Livy, and Cicero. Sometimes, after studying the Great Ancients, the dreamy young Cola would stand in a cow pasture at twilight and, surveying a broken column or arch, wonder out loud, “Where are those good old Romans? Where is their lofty rectitude? Would that I could transport myself back to the time when these men flourished.” Lacking a time machine, Cola did the next best thing: he invented a fantasy version of himself. Long before his rise to prominence, he took to signing himself Cola di Rienzo, “Roman Consul and sole legate of the people and of the orphans, widows and the poor.” He also began telling people that he was the illegitimate son of the German emperor Henry II, who had seduced his barkeep mother on a visit to Rome.
Cola first rose to public attention in 1343, on a visit to Avignon. He was by then a notary—one of the few careers open to poor, bright boys—and prominent enough to be appointed to an important commercial delegation. To revive tourism in popeless, lawless Rome, municipal authorities wanted Clement to declare 1350 a Jubilee Year and offer a special indulgence—a forgiveness of sin—to pilgrims who visited the city. A similar celebration in 1300 had attracted more than a million tourists. However, when the delegation met with the pope, Cola used the occasion to launch into a furious denunciation of the Roman nobility and their gangsterism. Horrified by the outburst, Cola’s fellow delegates tried to shush him, but Clement, already on record as declaring the nobles “horse thieves, murderers, bandits and adulterers,” was impressed by the ardent young notary. Before leaving Avignon, he put Cola under papal protection and gave him a new title, rector of Rome.
During the same visit, Cola also met the poet Petrarch, another lively fantasist and sly self-promoter, who already had a good part of literate Europe trying to guess the name of the mystery woman who appeared in his love poetry, the luminous Laura.
Love and I, stood agape; we marveled how
no wonders ever amazed the human sight
like the speaking lips and laughing eyes alight
of our lady.
“You say that I have invented . . . Laura to have something to talk about and to have everyone talking about me,” Petrarch wrote to a friend, who, like many others—in the poet’s own time and since—have thought Laura the artful fabrication of an artful fabricator. But the mystery woman in the poems was real enough. Her full name was Laura de Sade, she was related by marriage to the infamous eighteenth-century Marquis de Sade, and Petrarch loved her as deeply and truly as he claimed, though perhaps not as chastely. He had children with at least two other women.
An international celebrity as well as a poet, Petrarch dined with the aristocratic Colonna, walked the beaches of Naples with the beautiful Queen Joanna, attended audiences with Clement VI—if there had been a fourteenth-century
People, the fish-eyed poet would have been on the cover under the headline, “The Fabulous Francesco!” Normally, lowborn notaries were of no interest to the celebrity poet, but besides sharing a reverence for Rome’s past, the bookish Petrarch was infatuated by Cola’s bold man-of-action stance. After their first meeting, the poet gushed to his new hero in a letter, “When I think of our earnest, sanctified conversation . . . I feel afire, as if an oracle had issued from the recesses.”
In May 1347, as the plague was sailing west, Cola, who had been building a power base in Rome since his return from Avignon, launched a coup.
On the nineteenth, a sleepy Saturday, forces loyal to the notary seized the buildings in the municipal district. The next morning, as church bells echoed through the streets, the gates of Rome flew open and Cola strode into the city the way he must have imagined a thousand times in his dreams: dressed in full knight’s armor, with the red banner of freedom and the white banner of justice flapping overhead and the papal vicar at his side. Ahead of Cola marched a phalanx of blaring trumpeters.
“Cola! Cola! Cola!” the crowd shouted. The notary, who looked especially handsome in shining armor, raised a hand in acknowledgment; a child emerged from the crowd; Cola took the bouquet she offered and gave her a kiss. Then the trumpets blared again and the notary’s little ship of state sailed off through flower-strewn May streets to the palace of the capital, where the coup ended with a remarkable oration. As thousands of voices shouted approval, Cola pledged himself ready to die for Rome, swore to restore the city to its former glory, and promised to devote himself to the cause of equal justice for all.
“I think of you day and night,” an excited Petrarch wrote his hero shortly after the coup. “And . . . O Tribune, if you must die in battle do so courageously for you will assuredly be rapt in heaven. . . . Unfortunately,” the poet ad
ded in a postscript, “my . . . circumstances prevent me from joining in your holy war.” Happily, no one had to die in Cola’s cause, not even Cola.
Stefano Colonna flew into a rage when he heard about the notary’s coup. “If this fool provokes me further, I shall throw him out the window,” the old man shouted. The rest of Rome’s aristocrats, however, chose to sit on their swords and await events. When Cola summoned the nobility to the capital to swear allegiance to him, everyone came and solemnly placed a hand over his heart. Many in the illustrious gathering could remember when the notary had been the pet bad boy of Rome’s elite, the impudent provocateur whom fashionable hostesses would invite to dinner parties to shock and titillate highborn guests. Perhaps Cola was a still a fool.
While the great bided their time, Cola collected titles and tried on clothes. On the last day of July 1347, the notary, dressed in a white silk robe embroidered with gold and accompanied by a matching pennant emblazoned with the sun, led a procession to the Baptistry of St. John. There Cola, who had just had himself proclaimed a knight, took a ritual bath in the tub where Emperor Constantine was said to have been cured of leprosy. The next day, now dressed in scarlet, Cola appeared on the balcony of the Lateran Palace. Declaring Rome the capital of the world and all Italians Roman citizens, the new knight unsheathed his sword and made three cuts in the air—one to the east, one to the west, and one to the north. The enthusiasm of the crowds was enhanced by a nearby statue of Constantine; the emperor’s horse spewed free wine from the nostrils.
On August 15, three months after seizing power, Cola gave himself a new title, tribune of Rome. After receiving a silver wreath, a scepter, and an orb, a symbol of sovereignty, the newly crowned tribune stepped to the podium and reminded the audience that he was thirty-three, the same age as Christ when He died on the cross for the sins of humanity.
On the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Cola, now dressed in green and yellow velvet and carrying a scepter of glittering steel, rode to St. Peter’s Basilica on a white charger. In addition to fifty spearmen, the new tribune was accompanied by a horseman holding a banner with his coat of arms, a knight throwing gold coins into the crowd, a chorus of trumpeters blaring through long silver tubes, and a chorus of cymbalists clanging silver cymbals together. On his arrival at the basilica, an assemblage of bowing dignitaries greeted the tribune to the strains of
“Veni Creator Spiritus.”
After a summer full of comic opera events, support for Cola began to evaporate. In September, with the plague now only a few weeks’ sail from Sicily, the pope denounced the tribune as a usurper and heretic. Petrarch, fearful of alienating his powerful friends in the Roman elite, expressed disquiet and doubt, and the Roman crowds, believing their presumptive savior was acting the fool, faded away.
Sensing the change in mood, in mid-September Cola organized a second coup. He invited all Rome’s great barons to a banquet. At dinner, Cola had to endure old Stefano Colonna’s sarcasm about his magnificent attire, but after dessert the notary had his revenge. As the guests prepared to leave, Cola ordered the arrest of seven leading nobles, including five members of the powerful Orsini family, and impudent old Stefano. You will be executed in the morning, the tribune informed the prisoners.
When a priest came to Stefano’s cell the next morning, the old man snarled and waved him away, saying he had no need to confess; Stefano Colonna would never die at the hands of a nothing like Cola di Rienzo. The remark proved prophetic. A few hours later, as bells tolled for the condemned men, the tribune lost his nerve. Executing the Colonna and Orsini prisoners, members of the most powerful aristocratic families in the city, might provoke the other nobles. A few minutes later, a chastened Cola stepped out onto a balcony and, reminding the crowd of the biblical adage “Forgive us our trespasses,” announced that he had decided to pardon the prisoners.
In November, as the plague was arriving in Marseille, Cola alienated his few remaining supporters with an act of unimaginable barbarism. During an attack on the city by a group of nobles, twenty-year-old Giovanni Colonna, old Stefano’s grandson, was cut to pieces by Cola’s cavalry. The morning after the assault, the tribune brought his son Lorenzo to the spot were Giovanni fell. As a crowd watched in horror, Cola unsheathed his sword, dipped it in Colonna’s blood, then placed the red-tipped sword upon his son’s head, proclaiming him knight Lorenzo of Victory.
A few weeks later, as the last of Cola’s support was ebbing away, Petrarch wrote to the tribune, “I cannot alter matters, but I can flee them. . . . A long farewell to thee also, Rome, if these stories are true.”
When the plague arrived in the city in August 1348, Cola was safely out of harm’s way. Unseated the previous December in a countercoup, he was living in disgraced exile with the Celestine monks in Abruzzi. That was too far away to hear the tremendous earthquake that rocked Rome at the start of the pestilence, or to catch the scent of burning flesh rising above the Coliseum, where many of the plague dead were cremated, or to see the piles of corpses lined up along the Tiber like a levee wall.
“I am overwhelmed,” wrote a contemporary, in the sad, desperate voice that became the voice of Europe in the summer of 1348. “I can’t go on. Everywhere one turns there is death and bitterness. . . . The hand of the Almighty strikes repeatedly, to greater and greater effect. The terrible judgment gains in power as time goes by.”
Chapter Six
The Curse of the Grand Master
ON A WINTRY PARISIAN AFTERNOON IN 1314, SEVERAL DOZEN people stood huddled together on a windswept island in the Seine, awaiting an execution. Against the low gray light, the spectators’ faces looked like petals on a rain-soaked bark. But when the jobbers of Les Halles, the butchers of St. Jacques-la-Boucherie, and the prostitutes of Marché Palu arrived to swell the crowd, the petals would merge into a frenzied pastel mass, two thousand faces whipped to high color by a river wind and the expectation of death in the sharp March air.
The crowd had gathered on the island to witness the execution of Jacques de Molay, former grand master of the Templars, until recently one of the most powerful religious orders in Christendom. Earlier in the day, de Molay had caused a great furor outside Notre Dame. In return for a life sentence, the old man had agreed to publicly confess to “crimes that defile the land with their filth,” including sodomy, idol worship, and spitting on the cross. But this morning in front of the cathedral, de Molay had surprised everyone. With half of Paris looking on, the old man boldly asserted his innocence and denounced the charges against him and the Templars as a lie and a crime against heaven. Emboldened, one of his lieutenants, Geoffroi de Charney, had done the same.
The king was infuriated, the Church embarrassed, the Parisian mob titillated. The Templars affair promised to end as dramatically as it had begun seven years earlier, when agents of the French Crown swooped out of an October dawn and arrested two thousand unsuspecting, mostly elderly Templars in a series of nationwide raids. Dazed members of the order were pulled from their beds and their prayers, pushed into carts, and hauled off to royal prisons. By the end of the day—a Friday the thirteenth, the superstitious noted—if there was a Templar alive in France who had not been charged with having intercourse with demons; spitting on Christ’s image; urinating on the cross; administering the “kiss of shame” to the penis, buttocks, and the lips of the order’s prior; or engaging in other homosexual acts, it was because he was hiding in a haystack or under a bed. The Templars’ crimes were “a bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing which is horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear . . . a thing almost inhuman, indeed set apart from all humanity,” declared the author of the charges, the grand master’s former friend, Philip the Fair, King of France and “more handsome than any man in the world.”
Philip’s construction of the Templars affair as a case of odious blasphemers (the Templars) versus a “watch-tower of regal eminence” (himself) was an early example of the Big Lie. Money, not sin, drove the king. The ambitious Philip was an architect of th
e modern nation-state; his great dream was to transform feudal France, a patchwork of regions with different traditions and practices, into a unified nation, bound by a single set of institutions and laws and answerable to a single authority, the French Crown—which is to say, to himself. To a significant degree, he succeeded. Increasingly in the France of Philip the Fair, the king’s peace became “the peace of the whole kingdom; and the peace of the kingdom . . . the peace of the church, the defense of all knowledge, virtue and justice.”
With tax revenues uncertain, however, the new, assertive French state lacked a firm financial foundation. The Templars, who possessed the largest treasury in northern Europe, could provide the king with a lucrative new revenue stream. As a potential target, the order also had the additional advantage of being both loathed and feared. Part secret society—members were rumored to practice black magic—and part international bank, the Templars were viewed as a sinister organization peopled by powerful, shadowy figures. Every
éminence grise in Christendom was thought to wear a Templar cross. The only thing the order lacked was culpability. The society’s crimes might be legion, but none had been directed against the French Crown. However, Philip and his ministers also anticipated another aspect of the modern nation-state, the false confession. The “august and sovereign house of France” was quite adept at constructing fanciful crimes and torturing the innocent until they agreed to confess.
