After Nicholas died in April 1292 the twelve living cardinals met in Perugia, Rome at that time suffering one of its all-too-frequent visitations of the plague. They took their time, deliberating for twenty-seven months before picking one of the most unsuitable men ever to occupy, however briefly, the papal throne. He was Pietro da Morrone, an eighty-five-year-old peasant who had lived for more than six decades as a hermit in the Abruzzi, and his only qualification was that once, while appearing briefly at the court of Gregory X, he had hung up his outer habit on a sunbeam. There is a fascinating account by one of its members of the journey of a five-man papal embassy to Pietro’s mountain hermitage, only to find that Charles II of Naples had gotten there already. They found the new pope in a state verging on panic, but he recovered at last and, after a prolonged period of prayer, reluctantly accepted.
True, there had long been a prophecy of an “angel pope,” who would usher in the Age of the Spirit; but it is hard to see how anyone, seeing the agonized old man astride a donkey being led to his consecration at L’Aquila, could have believed that the Papacy was in safe hands—or indeed any hands at all. Celestine V quickly proved himself to be nothing more than a puppet of Charles II, even taking up residence in the Castel Nuovo, which still dominates the harbor of Naples. Within it he ordered the building of a small wooden cell, the only place where he could feel at home. He normally refused to see his cardinals, whose worldliness and sophistication terrified him; when he did so, they were obliged to abandon their elegant Latin and adopt the crude vernacular which was the only language he could understand. The duties of the Papacy, political, diplomatic, and administrative, he ignored; favors were bestowed on anyone who asked for them. No wonder that he lasted for just five months, then wisely announced his abdication—the only one in papal history.
The architect of this abdication was Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who is said to have introduced a secret speaking tube into Celestine’s cell through which, in the small hours of the night, he would simulate the voice of God, warning him of the flames of Hell if he were to continue in office. It was certainly Caetani who drafted the deed of renunciation which, on December 13, the pope read out to the assembled cardinals before solemnly stripping off his papal robes and revealing himself once again in his hermit’s rags.
Poor Celestine: he is usually identified with the unnamed figure whom Dante meets in the Third Canto of the Inferno and whom he accuses of “having made through cowardice the great refusal”—il gran rifiuto. In fact, he was no coward; he simply asked to return to the hermitage that he should never have left.
IT WAS SOMEHOW inevitable that the successor to the luckless Pope Celestine, elected on Christmas Eve 1294, only twenty-four hours after the opening of the conclave in Naples, should have been that same Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who now took the name of Boniface VIII. Of all his fellow cardinals he was by far the most able, the most strong-willed, and the most ambitious; he it was who had engineered Celestine’s removal, and we may be sure that in doing so he had taken care to smooth his own path to the papal throne. Born around 1235 at Anagni of a modestly aristocratic family with papal connections—his mother was a niece of Alexander IV—he was now in his early sixties, with forty years of experience behind him. In his youth he had been member of a legation to England, where, during the civil war caused by the efforts of Simon de Montfort to curb the misgovernment of King Henry III, he had at one moment found himself besieged in the Tower of London; he had been rescued in the nick of time by the future Edward I. On his return to Rome he had settled down to work for his own advancement, acquiring a steadily increasing number of benefices to help him on his way.
Having been appointed cardinal by the Frenchman Martin IV, Boniface had always been a steadfast supporter of the Angevin cause in Naples and Sicily; at his first coronation ceremony in Naples, his white horse had been led by Charles II of Sicily and his son Charles, King of Hungary. No sooner was he crowned, however, than he made it known that he was returning at once to Rome—and that his predecessor, Celestine, would be coming with him. The old man was predictably horrified: the whole object of his abdication had been to enable him to return to his mountain hermitage. With his vast following of the faithful, however, he might easily have become all unwittingly the focus of opposition; and Boniface was taking no chances. On reaching Rome, the pope was furious to learn that Celestine had somehow slipped away and taken to the hills once again; he gave immediate orders for his pursuit and arrest, by force if necessary. It took some time—despite his age, Celestine was still remarkably quick on his feet—but at last he was found and brought before his formidable successor. It was then that he is said to have uttered his famous prophecy: “You have entered like a fox,” he declared to Boniface; “you will reign like a lion—and you will die like a dog.”
His words probably had little effect on his fate; he was, whether he liked it or not, too dangerous to be allowed his liberty. Boniface imprisoned him in a remote castle at Fumone—it was, in fact, just the sort of place where he felt at home—and there, ten months later, at the age of ninety, he died.
POPE BONIFACE WAS recrowned in Rome on January 23, 1295. He was the epitome of the worldly cleric—indeed, he was as unlike his predecessor as it is possible to be. A first-class legist and a scholar, he founded the Sapienza University in Rome, codified canon law, and reestablished the Vatican Library and Archive. But there was little of the spiritual in his nature. For him the great sanctions of the Church existed only to further his own temporal ends and to enrich his family. Foreign rulers he treated less as his subjects than as his menials. As for his office, he saw it in exclusively political terms, determined as he was to reassert the supremacy of the Apostolic See over the emerging nations of Europe. For this task he possessed abundant energy, self-confidence, and strength of will; what he lacked was the slightest sense of diplomacy or finesse. Concepts such as conciliation and compromise simply did not interest him; he charged forward regardless—and ultimately he paid the price.
It was in a way typical of him that he should have declared 1300 a Holy Year, the first in Christian history. Attracted by the promise of “full and copious pardon” to all who visited St. Peter’s and the Lateran after making their confession, some 200,000 pilgrims are said to have converged on Rome from all over the continent, vastly enriching the city—in certain of the basilicas, the sacristans were said to have had to gather in the offerings with rakes—and adding immeasurably to the Papacy’s prestige. Among the pilgrims was the poet Dante, who set the Divine Comedy in the Holy Week of that year; in Canto XVIII of the Inferno he actually compares the regimentation of the crowds in Hell to the one-way system which he had seen controlling the traffic on the Ponte Sant’Angelo.
Among those thousands, however, there was not a single crowned head. King Charles was soon antagonized, as was Edward I of England when the pope tried to claim Scotland as a papal fief. That operation failed, as did Boniface’s attempts to dictate the succession in Hungary and Poland. Ironically enough, however, the pope’s most implacable enemy was the French king, Philip the Fair. Their mutual hostility had begun in 1296, when Philip imposed a heavy tax on the French clergy to help finance his campaign against England in Gascony—the curtain raiser, as it were, for the Hundred Years’ War. Since the days of Innocent III such taxes had been customary for Crusades, but Philip’s campaign could hardly have been so described. Furious, the pope replied with a bull, Clericis Laicos, that formally prohibited the taxation of clergy or Church property without express authorization from Rome. Had he given the matter any serious consideration, he would have seen in an instant just how shortsighted his action was; Philip simply forbade the export of currency and valuables, simultaneously barring the entry of papal tax collectors into the country. Since the papal exchequer relied heavily on income from France, Boniface had no alternative but to climb down, attempting to recover some of his lost prestige by formally canonizing Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX.
Simult
aneously and quite unnecessarily, he also made enemies of the immensely powerful family of Colonna. Although the family was a traditional rival of the Caetani, the two Colonna cardinals had originally supported his election, but they had quickly become disenchanted with his arrogance and autocratic style. Matters came to a head when, in 1297, a party of their supporters hijacked a consignment of bullion on its way to the papal treasury, claiming that it had been extracted “from the tears of the poor.” Boniface as usual overreacted, threatening to send papal garrisons to their home city of Palestrina and other Colonna strongholds and expelling the two cardinals—who had of course not been implicated in the hijacking—from the Sacred College. Finally he excommunicated the family en masse, seizing and devastating its lands in the name of a Crusade. When the Colonnas all fled to France, his principal enemies in Italy became the Fraticelli, a spiritual branch of the Franciscans, who had rebelled against the increasing worldliness of their order to return to their founder’s principles of asceticism and poverty. Boniface they loathed, not only for his wealth and arrogance but because they held him responsible for Celestine’s abdication, imprisonment, and death.
Now the gloves were off. The pope was made the victim of a campaign of scurrilous abuse probably unequaled even in papal history. Its authors did not confine themselves to charges of nepotism, simony, or avarice, which could all too easily be justified; they accused him of idolatry—because he had erected so many statues of himself—of atheism, and even of sodomy. (Sex with boys, he was accused of saying, was no worse than rubbing one hand against the other.) All these accusations, and many others still more outlandish, were enthusiastically echoed in France—if indeed France was not their original source. Within three or four years of his accession, Boniface VIII was probably the most widely detested pope there had ever been.
Then, in the autumn of 1301, King Philip summarily imprisoned the obscure but contumacious Bishop of Pamiers, charging him with treason and insulting behavior. The pope, without having troubled even to look into the case, angrily demanded the bishop’s release; Philip refused, and the battle between the two entered its final phase. Boniface, in yet another bull, Ausculta fili (“Listen, son”), loftily summoned the king himself, together with his senior clergy, to a synod in Rome in November 1302. Philip, it need hardly be said, once again refused; but thirty-nine French bishops, somewhat surprisingly, found the courage to attend. It was after this that Boniface fired his last broadside, Unam Sanctam, in which—after liberal quotations from St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas—he claimed in so many words that “it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” There was nothing particularly new in this; similar claims had been made by Innocent III and several other popes. None the less, papal absolutism could hardly go further, and there was no question that it was King Philip whom Boniface had principally in mind.
Probably on the advice of his new minister Guillaume de Nogaret—whose Albigensian grandfather had been burnt at the stake and who consequently had no love for the Papacy—Philip now returned to his former tactic of all-out personal attack. All the old charges, together with several new ones such as illegitimacy and heresy, which included disbelief in the immortality of the soul, were repeated, and an insistent demand was made for a General Council at which the Supreme Pontiff would be arraigned. An army of 1,600 under Nogaret in person was dispatched to Italy with orders to seize the pope and to bring him, by force if necessary, to France. Boniface was, meanwhile, in his palace at Anagni, putting the finishing touches to a bull excommunicating Philip and releasing his subjects from their allegiance. He was due to publish it on September 8; but on the seventh Nogaret and his troops arrived, together with Sciarra Colonna and a band of Italian mercenaries. The pope donned his full papal regalia and faced them with courage, challenging them to kill him. They briefly took him prisoner, but he was rescued by the people of Anagni—he was, after all, one of their number—and spirited away. Nogaret, seeing that there was no way of laying hands on him short of a massacre, wisely decided to retire.
His mission, however, had not been in vain. The old pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. After a few days’ rest, his Orsini friends escorted him back to Rome, but he never recovered from the shock. He died less than a month later, on October 12, 1303. Dante, by anticipation—since Boniface died only three years after the poet’s visit to Hell—placed him in the eighth circle, upside down in a furnace. His judgment may be thought a little harsh—but one sees, perhaps, what he meant.
1. The siege was further complicated by the unexpected arrival of St. Francis of Assisi, who gained an audience with the sultan and tried to convert him to Christianity. That was a failure too.
2. Outremer—literally, “beyond the sea”—was the name given to the Crusading states in the Levant, established after the First Crusade.
3. The article on Gregory IX in The New Catholic Encyclopedia—in spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary—endorses this view with the words “on September 8, a large fleet made its appearance, but, feigning illness, Frederick ordered it to turn back to Otranto.” The illness was not feigned, and the fleet was not ordered to turn back.
4. All the Eastern patriarchates were allowed to continue under Muslim occupation—as indeed they still do.
5. Its octagonal shape may well have been the inspiration for his magnificent hunting lodge, Castel del Monte in Apulia.
6. Revelations 13:1.
7. Innocent V lasted for five months, Hadrian V for five weeks. John XXI, a formidably intellectual Portuguese, had been pope for eight months when the ceiling of his study in his new palace at Viterbo collapsed on his head. Because of his avariciousness and nepotism Nicholas III had the distinction of being consigned by Dante to an eternity upside down in Hell; after thirty-three months of dedicated opposition to Charles, he was carried off by a stroke.
8. He had bought the title in 1277 from Princess Maria of Antioch, a granddaughter of King Amalric II of Jerusalem.
9. Honorius was, incidentally, the last pope to have been married before his ordination.
CHAPTER XV
Avignon
The next pope, Benedict XI, was a humble Dominican who, we are told, felt at ease only with other Dominicans. He was one of his predecessor’s few supporters. Despite his gentle demeanor, he had stood shoulder to shoulder with Pope Boniface at Anagni; now he applied himself to the delicate task of pacifying King Philip and persuading him to drop his plans for a General Council as a means of bringing Boniface posthumously to justice. In this he was temporarily successful, though only after he had revoked all Boniface’s existing papal decrees and pronouncements against Philip and his subjects, including every Frenchman who had been involved in the affair at Anagni—with the sole exception of Nogaret himself. Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna, and the Italians, on the other hand, he denounced as being guilty of sacrilege in laying hands on the Supreme Pontiff, ordering them to appear before him before June 29, 1304. They never did so, because, apart from anything else, by that date the pope was already mortally ill of dysentery in Perugia; ten days later he was dead.
The physical attack on Pope Boniface at Anagni had not been forgotten. Hated as he had been, many right-thinking churchmen remained deeply shocked by King Philip’s action, which they saw as an insult to the Papacy and all it stood for. There were others, however, who had been equally disgusted by the pope’s treatment of the two Colonna cardinals and who wanted in any case to see an end to the long dispute with France—for which, with Boniface gone, there was no longer any real justification. The conclave which opened in Perugia in July 1304 was split down the middle, and the deadlock continued for eleven months; it was finally agreed that if a new pope was ever to be elected, he would have to come from outside the College of Cardinals. And so he did: Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V. Not being a cardinal, he had not been present at the conclave; he had however attended Boniface’s
synod in 1302, despite which he had managed to maintain a friendly working relationship with Philip.
Although a shameless nepotist, the new pope was a distinguished canon lawyer and an efficient administrator who concentrated on the missionary role of the Church, going so far as to establish chairs in Arabic and other oriental languages at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. In his dealings with countries other than his own, he was to show an impressive independence of spirit, releasing Edward I of England from his vows to his barons, suspending the Archbishop of Canterbury, excommunicating King Robert the Bruce of Scotland for the murder in church of his old enemy John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, and settling a fifteen-year dispute over the Hungarian succession. Had he been an Italian, elected and crowned in Rome, he might well have proved himself if not a great pope, at least a strong one. Being a subject of King Philip, however, from the moment of his election he found himself under almost intolerable pressure from his master. Philip began as he meant to go on, insisting first of all that, since the new pope was already in France, he should be crowned there. The beginning of Clement’s pontificate was far from auspicious: when he was riding to his coronation ceremony at Lyons, a wall onto which spectators had climbed to watch the procession suddenly collapsed. The pope was knocked off his horse but escaped with only bruises; others taking part in the procession were not so lucky: several were seriously injured, and the Duke of Brittany was killed.
At that time there is no reason to believe that Clement did not fully intend to move to Rome in due course; his justification for remaining temporarily in France was his hope of bringing about an end to the hostilities between France and England, so that the two could combine their forces for another Crusade to the Holy Land. For four years he had no fixed abode; he moved constantly between Lyons, Poitiers, and Bordeaux, his cardinals following as best they could. (By now they were mostly Frenchmen: of the ten he created in December 1305, nine were French—four of them his nephews—and the French element was to be increased still further in 1310 and again in 1312.) Philip meanwhile maintained the pressure to keep him in France; but in 1309 Clement decided to settle in Avignon, which, lying as it did on the east bank of the Rhône,1 was at that time the property of Philip’s vassal Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily and Count of Provence. The little town—with around 5,000 inhabitants, it was at that time scarcely more than a village—was to be the home of six more popes after him and the seat of the Papacy for the next sixty-eight years.
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