Those years are often referred to as the Babylonian Captivity. They were nothing of the kind. The popes were in no sense captive; they were in Avignon because they wanted to be. Nonetheless, it was not a comfortable place. The poet Petrarch described it as being “a disgusting city” battered by the mistral, “a sewer where all the filth of the universe is collected.” The Aragonese ambassador was so nauseated by the stench of the streets that he fell ill and had to return home. As papal territory, it also became a place of refuge for criminals of every kind, and its taverns and brothels were notorious. Nor was it designed to accommodate a papal court. The pope and his immediate entourage moved into the local Dominican priory; a few fortunate cardinals managed to requisition the larger houses; the rest found a roof wherever they could.
The move to Avignon should at least have allowed Clement a degree of independence; but Philip was too strong for him. He himself was a sick man—he suffered from stomach cancer throughout his pontificate—and he soon showed himself little more than a puppet of the French king. Unshaken in his determination to bring Pope Boniface to justice, Philip obliged Clement to open a full inquiry in 1309. Delays and various complications ensued, and in April 1311 the proceedings were suspended; the pope, however, had to pay a heavy price: the complete rehabilitation of the Colonna cardinals, full compensation for their family, the annullment of all Boniface’s actions that had been prejudicial to French interests, and the absolution of Guillaume de Nogaret. But a greater humiliation still was in store: the part Clement was forced to play in Philip’s plan for the elimination of the Knights Templar.
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IT IS DIFFICULT for us nowadays to understand the influence of the Templars in the later Middle Ages. Founded in the early twelfth century to protect the pilgrims flocking to the Holy Places after the First Crusade and owing much to the patronage of St. Bernard, these warrior-monks were within fifty years firmly established in almost every country of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Armenia; within a century, “the poor fellow soldiers of Jesus Christ” were—despite their Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—financing half of Europe, the most powerful bankers of the civilized world. By 1250 they were thought to possess some nine thousand landed properties; both in Paris and London, their houses were used as strongholds in which to preserve the royal treasure. From the English Templars, Henry III borrowed the purchase money for the island of Oléron in 1235; from the French, Philip the Fair extracted the dowry of his daughter, Isabelle, on her ill-starred marriage to Edward II of England. For Louis IX, taken prisoner in Egypt at the end of the Sixth Crusade, they provided the greater part of his ransom, and to Edward I they advanced no less than 25,000 livres tournois, four-fifths of which they were later to recover.
Of all the countries in which the Templars operated, they were most powerful in France, where they effectively constituted a state within a state; and as their influence increased, it was not surprising that King Philip should have become seriously concerned. But Philip also had another, less honorable reason for acting against them: he was in desperate need of money. He had already dispossessed and expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers; similar treatment of the Templars, which promised to secure him all the Templar wealth and property in his kingdom, would solve his financial problems once and for all. The order would, he knew, prove a formidable adversary; fortunately, however, he had a weapon ready to hand. For many years there had been rumors circulating about the secret rites practiced by the Knights at their midnight meetings. All he now needed to do was to institute an official inquiry; it would not be hard to find witnesses who—in return for a small consideration—would be prepared to give the evidence required.
And so King Philip set to work, and the results of his inquiry proved even more satisfactory than he had dared to hope. The Templars, it now appeared, were Satanists. They worshiped an idol of their own, which they had named Baphomet. They underwent a secret ceremony of initiation, in which they formally denied Christ and trampled on the crucifix. Their vow of poverty, as the whole world knew, had long since gone out the window; it was now revealed that their vow of chastity had suffered a similar fate. Sodomy in particular was not only permitted, it was actively encouraged. Such illegitimate children as nevertheless happened to be engendered were disposed of—frequently by being roasted alive.
On Friday, October 13, 1307,2 the grand master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, was arrested in Paris with sixty of his leading brethren. To force them to confess, they were put to the torture, first by the palace authorities and then by the Inquisition. Over the next six weeks no fewer than 138 Knights were subjected to examination, of whom, not surprisingly, 123, including Molay himself, finally confessed to at least some of the charges leveled against them. Philip, meanwhile, wrote to his fellow monarchs urging them to follow his example. Edward II of England, who probably felt on somewhat shaky ground himself, was initially inclined to cavil with his father-in-law, but when firm instructions arrived from Pope Clement he hesitated no longer. The English master of the order was taken into custody on January 9, 1308. All his Knights followed soon afterward.
The Templars, however, had their champions. When Molay was interrogated by three cardinals sent expressly to Paris by the pope, he formally revoked his confession and bared his breast to show the unmistakable signs of torture. In consequence, at Clement’s first consistory, no fewer than ten members of the Sacred College threatened to resign in protest against his policy, and early in February the Inquisition was instructed to suspend its activities against the order. But it was impossible to reverse the tide. In August the grand master, examined and tortured yet again, pleaded guilty for the second time.
The public trial of the Templars opened on April 11, 1310, when it was announced that any of the accused who attempted to retract an earlier confession would be burned at the stake; on May 12 fifty-four Knights suffered this fate, and in the next fortnight nine others followed them. The whole contemptible affair dragged on for another four years, during which pope and king continued to confer—a sure sign of the doubts that refused to go away—and to discuss the disposition of the order’s prodigious wealth. Meanwhile, Jacques de Molay languished in prison until his fate could be decided. Only on March 14, 1314, did the authorities finally take him out onto a scaffold before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, publicly to repeat his confession for the last time.
They had reason to regret their decision. As grand master, Jacques de Molay had hardly distinguished himself over the previous seven years. He had confessed, retracted, and confessed again; he had shown no heroism, few qualities even of leadership. But now he was an old man, in his middle seventies, and about to die; he had nothing more to lose. And so, supported by his friend Geoffroy de Charnay, he spoke out loud and clear: as God was his witness, he and his order were totally innocent of all the charges of which they had been accused. At once he and Charnay were hurried away by the royal marshals, while messengers hastened to the king. Philip delayed his decision no longer. That same evening the two old Knights were rowed out to a small island in the Seine, the Île des Juifs, where the stake had been prepared.
It was later rumored that, just before he died, Molay had summoned both Pope Clement and King Philip to appear at the judgment seat of God before the year was out, and it did not pass unnoticed that the pope was dead in little more than a month, while the king was killed in a hunting accident toward the end of November. Molay and Charnay faced the flames with courage and died nobly. After night had fallen, the friars of the Augustinian monastery on the farther shore came to collect their remains, to be revered as those of saints and martyrs.
A great pope—Gregory, for example, or Innocent—could and would have saved the Templars; Clement, alas, fell a long way short of greatness. His craven subservience to Philip in the most shameful chapter of the king’s reign constitutes an indelible stain on his memory. In one instance only did he show any inclination to go his own way: Philip, who had
instituted the campaign entirely to get his hands on the Templars’ money, cannot have welcomed the bull by which, on May 2, 1312, the pope decreed that all their property—outside the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Majorca, on which he deferred his decision—should devolve upon their brethren the Hospitalers, who suddenly found themselves richer than they had ever dreamed. But the king was dead long before the decree could be put into effect.
Throughout this period of Templar persecution the pope’s health was steadily deteriorating; the end came at the castle of Roquemaure on the Rhône on April 20, 1314. Clement V is remembered today principally for being the first of the Avignon popes; the important thing to remember, however, is that there was at no time any official transference of the papal capital. Clement himself never altogether abandoned the idea of a return to Rome; it was just that he constantly postponed it—and no wonder. North and Central Italy were in greater turmoil than ever. Across Lombardy and Tuscany the Guelfs and Ghibellines were at each other’s throats, as were the Colonna and Orsini factions in Rome; when Prince Henry of Luxembourg arrived there in 1312 for his coronation as the Emperor Henry VII, he had to fight his way into the city. (The ceremony was performed by three cardinals amid the ruins of the Lateran, which had been largely destroyed by fire four years before.) There was, in short, little temptation to cross the Alps; the pope, already mortally ill, preferred to die in his homeland.
FOR TWO YEARS and four months after the death of Clement V the Papacy lay vacant. The conclave met first at Carpentras, but broke up when some of the Gascon cardinals incited an armed attack on the Italian faction. The disorder spread to the town, much of which was set on fire. One of Clement’s nephews looted the papal treasury and disappeared. There followed a long cooling-off period, the cardinals not reassembling until March 1316; even then it was five more months before they could agree, which they did only after Philip V, who had succeeded his father in May, had imprisoned them in the Dominican convent, daily reducing their rations of food and drink until they reached a decision. Their choice fell on Jacques Duèse, who took the title of John XXII. He was already seventy-two but, unlike his predecessor, was a superb administrator; he was also possessed of bounding energy and was always ready to plunge into the fray. It was not long before he did so, in a long engagement with the Franciscan “Spirituals,” an extremist group akin to the Fraticelli which called for a return to the original precepts of St. Francis and the literal observance of his rule and testament, especially in relation to the principle of poverty. John, when appealed to, had no hesitation in pronouncing that there was nothing in the Scriptures to suggest that Christ and his Apostles had been paupers, possessing no property of their own. Obedience, he declared, was a greater virtue than either poverty or chastity. He then went even further by repudiating the convenient arrangement whereby Franciscan property was theoretically vested in the Holy See, which simply allowed the order the use of it. Henceforth the Franciscans were property owners—in many cases rather rich ones—whether they liked it or not.
All this had the effect of splitting the order more than ever, and many Franciscans went into open schism. Among them were the general of the order, Michael of Cesena, and the English theologian William of Ockham, both of whom fled from Avignon to the court of the pope’s archenemy, the German King Louis IV the Bavarian. Louis’s hostility stemmed from 1322, when he had defeated and captured Frederick of Austria in battle, a victory which he believed entitled him to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. John, however, had forbidden him to exercise imperial authority until he as pope had settled the dispute. Louis had replied with what was known as the Sachsenhausen Appellation, in which he first denied papal authority over imperial elections and went on to attack the pope’s condemnation of the Spirituals. To this John had replied with a sentence of excommunication, but in January 1328 Louis arrived in Rome, where he was crowned, by the aged Sciarra Colonna, “captain of the people,” and three months later solemnly deposed “Jacques of Cahors” (that being the pope’s birthplace) from the pontificate, replacing him with an antipope in the person of a Franciscan Spiritual who called himself Nicholas V and on whose head the emperor himself laid the papal crown.
But Louis had gone too far. He was not an Otto the Great or a Frederick Barbarossa, a maker of popes and antipopes, and the Romans knew it. Moreover, he had only a token army with him, and when King Robert of Naples sent an army northward he fled, taking his antipope with him. In January 1329 the two of them were present at Pisa, with Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham, at a ceremony in the cathedral in which a straw effigy of Pope John, sumptuously attired in full canonicals, was formally condemned on a charge of heresy. This bizarre performance did little to enhance the reputation of either emperor or antipope, and Nicholas accompanied his protector and patron no further. With such little authority as he had ever possessed rapidly waning, he left Louis to return alone to Germany, and after a few months of wandering gave himself up. Pope John treated him with surprising leniency, an official pardon, and even a small pension—though he took the precaution of confining him, for the remaining three years of his life, to the papal residence.
The charge of heresy was obviously nonsense; but toward the end of his life, indeed when he was approaching ninety, John XXII sailed a good deal closer to the wind. It was generally agreed by orthodox theologians that the saints in Heaven were immediately admitted to a full vision of God; in a series of sermons delivered in the winter of 1331–1332, John claimed this to be untrue, maintaining that the full Divine Vision would be withheld until after the Last Judgment; until then they could contemplate only the humanity of Christ. The ensuing storm of protest led to his condemnation by a committee of doctors of the University of Paris and insistent demands for an Ecumenical Council. Finally the pope made a modified retraction, confessing that the souls of the blessed would have their vision “as clearly as their condition allowed”—a mildly ridiculous formula that nevertheless seemed to satisfy his critics. Like his predecessor, he was an unrepentant nepotist: of the twenty-eight cardinals he created, twenty were from Southern France and three were his nephews. Unlike Clement, however, he never seriously considered a move to Rome; at his death the Papacy was more thoroughly French—and more under the influence of the French king—than it had ever been.
Avignon was by now a great deal larger—and richer—than on the arrival of Clement V. After a quarter of a century as the home of the Papacy, it was no longer a stinking village. It had now become a city, to which the fiscal system created by Popes Clement and John together had brought untold wealth. Whole districts had been swept away, fine palaces and mansions built for the cardinals and ambassadors, the bankers and merchants, the architects, painters, and craftsmen who came from all over Europe to make their fortunes.3 Papal Avignon was rapidly becoming the first great financial power of Europe. Petrarch, writing in 1340, was profoundly shocked:
Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their ancestors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations; to see luxurious palaces and heights crowned with fortifications, instead of a boat turned downward for shelter …
Instead of holy solitude we find a criminal host with crowds of infamous cronies; instead of soberness, licentious banquets; instead of pious pilgrimages, foul and preternatural sloth; instead of the bare feet of the Apostles, the snowy coursers of brigands fly past us, the horses decked with gold and fed on gold, soon to be shod with gold, if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.
In all this vapid display, John was happy to take the lead. He it was who founded the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a record has survived of the provisions laid in for the banquet he gave in November 1324 on the occasion of the marriage of his great-niece. They included 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 4 wild boars, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 3,000 eggs, 580 partridges, 270 rabbits, 40 plovers, 37 ducks,
59 pigeons, 4 cranes, 2 pheasants, 2 peacocks, 292 small birds, 3 hundredweight of cheese, 2,000 apples and other fruit, and 11 barrels of wine. Perhaps the Spirituals had a point after all.
POPE JOHN XXII died on December 4, 1334. This time, for once, the cardinals acted reasonably quickly. The new pope was inducted on the twentieth: the Bishop of Pamiers, a baker’s son and former Cistercian monk named Jacques Fournier, who took the name of Benedict XII. He was not an attractive figure. Tall and heavily built, with an exceptionally loud voice, he had made his name as an inquisitor and had taken it upon himself to eliminate the last vestiges of Catharism from the southwest of France. In this he had been entirely successful: in the presence of five bishops and the King of Navarre, 183 men and women were burned at the stake—a spectacle described by a contemporary as “a holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.”4 Pope John had then made him a cardinal, as a reward for a job well done.
Yet, dour and unbending as he may have been, Benedict had his good qualities. He possessed none of John’s arrogance; despising all luxury, he continued to dress in the Cistercian habit. Nepotism he detested—none of his relatives achieved advancement—and he declared war on all the countless abuses which had grown up during the pontificates of his two predecessors. All the clerical hangers-on and vagabond monks who had no good reason for staying at Avignon were dismissed; fees payable for documents issued were fixed for the first time; strict new constitutions were drawn up for the Cistercians, Franciscans, and Benedictines. In the diplomatic field, however, his touch was less sure. He failed miserably in his attempts to prevent the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England—which put an end to any prospect of a joint Crusade—and his efforts to mend fences with the Emperor Louis were easily frustrated by the French King Philip VI and the King of Naples.
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