Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Boniface was often asked by pilgrims to reduce the number of days that they had to spend in the city but he usually refused. According to Stephaneschi he made only three exceptions. On Maundy Thursday he appeared in front of the Lateran basilica and announced that all those in the crowd might claim the indulgence after only one visit to each of the basilicas of the apostles. This concession was repeated on 18th November, the anniversary of the consecration of the basilicas. Finally, as the end of the Jubilee year approached, he agreed that foreign pilgrims who had already begun the journey or the fifteen visits might complete them after the end of the year.

  Many pilgrims who attended the Jubilee later had occasion to remember it as a formative episode in their lives. Giovanni Villani, the Florentine merchant and historian, ‘wandered amongst the great monuments of the city and read the histories and chronicles of ancient Rome by Sallust, Lucan, Livy, Valerius, Paulus Orosius, and other masters of the historical art; I resolved then to copy their style and form.’ It was here that he formed the design of his great history of Florence, daughter of Rome and destined for equal greatness. ‘And so with the help of God’s grace I turned back from Rome in the year 1300 and began to write this book.’ Dante was almost certainly in Rome in the Jubilee year and set the Divine Comedy at Easter 1300. William Ventura, the chronicler of Asti, spent fifteen days there, departing on Christmas Eve, the last day of the Jubilee. ‘As I rode away from Rome I saw the roads encumbered with a countless multitude of pilgrims…. Again and again I saw men and women trodden underfoot in the press and I myself was often hard put to it to escape the same fate. It would be a fine thing and agreeable to every true Christian to repeat the festival every centennial year.’

  There were widely varying estimates of the number of pilgrims who visited Rome in 1300. Villani’s figure of 200,000 is almost certainly too low, while William Ventura’s claim of two million is plainly excessive. Every one agreed, however, that the pope and the Romans had made large profits. ‘From the offerings of the pilgrims’, one remarked, ‘the Church gained great treasures and all the Romans were much enriched.’ In the basilica of St. Peter, Ventura saw two priests standing day and night at the high altar drawing in the money with rakes. The rumour in Tuscany was that the offerings had amounted to a thousand livres of Perugia every day. But the truth was less spectacular. According to Stepheneschi the offerings in a normal year amounted to 30,405 florins whereas in this year there were rather more than 50,000. Most offerings were in small coin and many pilgrims were too poor to give anything at all. The nobility were particularly mean and kings absented themselves altogether. All of this, he adds, was swallowed up by the very heavy expenses of the Jubilee; ‘money piously given was piously spent’, on the accommodation of pilgrims and the upkeep of the two basilicas.

  The Jubilee of 1300 was in a sense the swan-song of the mediaeval papacy. No pope had exercised the substance of power like Innocent IV and none was to display the shadow of power more splendidly than Boniface VIII. After the terrible fall of Boniface in 1303 many were inclined to attribute the Jubilee to his ambition and vainglory. In the posthumous ‘trial’ of Boniface, the bull Antiquorum was cited as evidence of heresy and he was even accused of murdering pilgrims in Rome. A French pamphleteer depicted the Jubilee as a commercial enterprise designed to impoverish pilgrims for the pope’s benefit:

  Tel y ala en belle guise

  Qui s’en revint en sa chemise …

  Lors alèrent plusieurs à Rome

  Qui retournèrent mains preudhommes.

  Many went there richly dressed

  Who later came back in their shirt-sleeves …

  Many went to Rome

  And came back wiser men.

  But this was the verdict of his enemies after his fall. Those who attended the Jubilee felt that they had achieved something, that a similar opportunity would not arise again in their lifetime. Stephaneschi emphasized that it offered a unique opportunity to restore the soul to its state as after baptism and, like baptism, it could not be repeated. How many vile crimes had until then lain hidden in the deepest recesses of men’s consciences? ‘Who can say how many grievous wounds were laid bare to the healing hand of the confessor?’ Dante was no friend of Boniface VIII but when he entered Purgatory at Easter 1300 he was told by the shade of his friend Casella that for three months not one sinner had been refused admittance to the cleansing of Purgatory; ‘for three months he has taken in peace all who would embark.’

  The Avignon Papacy and the Jubilee of 1350

  The years which followed the Jubilee were amongst the most dismal in Roman history. In 1305 Bertrand de Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected pope and, fleeing the turbulent politics of Rome, established the papacy in France. On 6th May, 1308 the Lateran basilica was almost entirely destroyed by fire. In the absence of the popes the social and economic life of Rome stagnated while successive papal legates waged incessant warfare against the rebellious magnates of central Italy. Those Romans who remembered the Jubilee of 1300 saw the only hope of reviving their fortunes in the staging of another Jubilee as soon as possible.

  In the autumn of 1342 a delegation of thirteen citizens drawn from various classes of the population made its way to Avignon and petitioned that the Jubilee be brought forward to 1350 and held every fifty years thereafter. The Jewish Jubilee, they pointed out, had been held every fifty years and, besides, such was the frailty of human life that many people born after 1300 would not live to see the year 1400. The pope, Clement VI, approved their request. He embodied his consent in the bull Unigenitus, one of the most celebrated pronouncements of the mediaeval Church. Borrowing a concept of the thirteenth-century schoolmen, Clement declared that Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and the saints and martyrs, had accumulated in their lifetimes more merit than they needed for their personal salvation. The excess was collected in a ‘treasury of merit’ controlled by the Church. The pope, who held the keys of St. Peter, could alone unlock this treasury and use it to release men from their sins by remitting the punishment (not the guilt) due to those who had made a true and contrite confession. Turning to the case in point Clement referred to ‘the clamour of our own people of Rome who have humbly beseeched us on behalf of all peoples of the world’ to release some of the merit of Christ and the saints for the salvation of mankind. The Jubilee would be held in 1350. The arrangements would be the same as those of 1300 except that the Lateran basilica was added to the list of churches to be visited.

  The condition of Italy had changed for the worse in the past fifty years. No time could be less auspicious, as Petrarch remarked, than one in which ‘all France, the Low Countries, and Britain, are engulfed in war; Germany and Italy are crippled by civil strife, their cities reduced to ashes; the Spanish kings turn on each other in armed combat, and throughout Europe Christ is unseen and unknown.’ As the news of bitter fighting in northern Italy reached Avignon, Clement VI sank into a state of depressed lethargy, punctuated by the regular issue of bulls reproving Christendom for its violent ways and lamenting that ‘if our reports are correct many pilgrims flocking to gain our indulgence will be seriously impeded.’ Clement’s efforts to secure a brief truce in the war between England and France ended in failure. Both countries forbade their citizens to attend the Jubilee on the ground that the drainage of currency and manpower would do irreparable damage to the war effort. Nevertheless the prohibition was widely ignored in France, and in England a large number of individuals obtained licences to visit Rome. English pilgrims travelling through France had to chose their route with care. Several were arrested as subjects of Edward III, and some French pilgrims who innocently travelled with parties of Englishmen found their property sequestered by royal officers when they returned.

  Three months before it was due to begin, the Jubilee suffered another blow in the form of a violent earthquake. Much of the population was reduced to living in tents, and a number of monuments were entirely destroyed. The campanile and loggia of St. Paul’s collapsed and the r
oof of S. Maria Maggiore fell in. The Lateran basilica, which had only recently been rebuilt after the fire of 1308, was partially ruined. ‘In the two thousand years since the foundation of the city’, Petrarch wrote, ‘no worse disaster had befallen it. Its grandiose monuments, stunning to the foreign traveller, ignored by the Romans, have fallen to the ground…. An icy pall of gloom is cast over the Jubilee year.’

  In spite of the difficulties, and somewhat to the surprise of contemporaries, the roads were shortly filled with crowds of pilgrims reminiscent of those of 1300. Matteo Villani observed them passing through Florence ‘enduring the hardships of the time, the unbelievable cold, the ice, the snow, and the floods’. By day the roads were crowded out, by night the inns. The Germans and Hungarians travelled in enormous bands and spent the nights in the open air huddled round large bonfires. The innkeepers sold all the food, wine, and fodder that they could find and, as usual, were accused of making excessive profits. So were butchers and grocers. ‘But there was no disorderliness or grumbling; everything was born patiently without fuss.’ Inside Rome the citizens were invited to lay in ample stocks of food ‘so that no pilgrim will surfer penury or starvation, but will be restored and satisfied not only spiritually but bodily as well.’ Aniballe de Ceccano, the papal legate, was instructed to provide for pilgrims, needs at his own expense if necessary.

  Counting the pilgrims was a matter of guesswork. Matteo Villani calculated that the peak was reached at Easter when there were rather more than a million pilgrims in Rome; even at Ascension and Pentecost there were 800,000 and the number never at any point fell below 200,000. Peter of Herenthals was probably closer to the truth when he estimated that about 5,000 pilgrims entered the city every day, which would mean that no more than 50,000 were there at any one time. On the last day of the Jubilee, Rome was still full of pilgrims completing their visits to the three basilicas. ‘Every Roman became an innkeeper and filled his house with pilgrims and horses.’ As a result of the earthquake, accommodation was harder to find than it had been in 1300. A pilgrim could expect to pay one and a half or two gros tournois per day for himself and his horse, falling perhaps to one gros in a slack period. The demand for wine and meat outstripped the supply throughout the year, allowing enterprising merchants to make large sums by importing food from northern Italy. Bread cost a penny an ounce; a bottle of wine three, four, or even five shillings; a sack of fodder fetched five lire. Every kind of meat was unbelievably expensive and some of it was of very poor quality.

  Visiting the three basilicas involved a walk of eleven miles which was accomplished in some discomfort. ‘The streets were so crowded that every one, whether they were riding or walking, had to reconcile themselves to moving extremely slowly.’ Similar inconveniences attended the public exhibitions of the Veronica, which were held every Sunday afternoon at St. Peter’s. Three or four pilgrims were suffocated or trampled underfoot on each of these occasions, and on some days the number rose to six or even twelve. On Easter Sunday Heinrich von Rebdorff saw several pilgrims crushed to death in the crowd. The more distinguished pilgrims took the precaution of applying in advance for a private view. It is clear that the sudarium of Veronica had by now supplanted the body of St. Peter as the principal relic of Rome. For Petrarch, Rome was no longer the city of the apostles but the city of Christ, whose relics eclipsed every other exhibit. Although Petrarch paid a cursory visit to the Calixtine cemetery and the site of Peter’s crucifixion, his overpowering desire was to see ‘the features of the Saviour wherever he might find them, on the napkin of Veronica or on the walls of S. Maria Maggiore’. He would ‘gaze on the place where Christ appeared to St. Peter and would worship his footsteps on the hard ground. Then he would enter the sancta sanctorum of the Lateran … and see the relics of the birth and circumcision of his Lord, and the flask of the Virgin’s milk by which so many had been restored to health.’

  There was another side to Rome in 1350 which stood in pathetic contrast to the celebration of the Jubilee. St. Bridget of Sweden found the sight of the city in the aftermath of the earthquake profoundly depressing, and the absence of the papacy in France pained her. In the churches ‘cracks and rifts had appeared in the arches so that bricks and pieces of masonry fell down on the heads of praying pilgrims. The pillars were buckling and the roofs on the verge of collapse. Mosaic floors, once fresh and beautiful, were now broken in pieces and the faithful stumbled into holes in the floor, doing themselves great injury.’ Beneath the physical ruin, the Swedish visionary detected the signs of a deeper, spiritual decay. Bridget added her voice to the chorus of her contemporaries who pointed to the Avignon papacy as a symptom of religious decline and, although it is hard for a historian to share this view, the sorry condition of Rome must have done much to confirm it in the eyes of the pilgrims. ‘In times past it was a city in which dwelt warriors of Christ, its streets strewn as if with gold and silver. Now all its precious sapphires are lying in the mire and few of its inhabitants live the Christian life.’

  As in 1300, there were ‘many altercations’ about the meaning of the indulgence. The confusion was increased by the fact that alongside the official bull Unigenitus there circulated a number of unofficial bulls which were almost certainly forged by the Romans in order to attract more pilgrims to the city and keep them there longer. In these pseudo-bulls the pope was supposed to have urged priests and monks to visit Rome with or without the permission of their superiors. Italians were ‘required’ to remain in the city for at least a month and extra churches were added to those that were to be visited. In one version pilgrims were required to visit seven churches on at least fifteen occasions before they could claim the indulgence. The pope, it added, ‘would order the angels to admit straight to heaven all pilgrims who die on the route having made a good confession’. These bulls were widely distributed. The canon lawyer Alberic of Rosate, who claimed the indulgence together with his wife and children, knew nothing of Unigenitus and reproduced two of the forged bulls in his handbook of canon law. Peter of Herenthals, the abbot of Floresse near Namur, reproduced them in his biography of Clement VI, and the jaundiced English chronicler Thomas Burton cited them as proof of Clement’s wickedness. John Wyclif denounced them as blasphemy. It may seem unfair to condemn Clement for a bull which he had never issued, but although he had not in fact invited clerics to visit Rome without permission he certainly behaved as if he had done. Many monks did go to Rome without permission; others conjured up ecclesiastical business taking them to Avignon and then made off to claim the Jubilee indulgence in Rome. Most of these illicit pilgrims were able to obtain letters from the pope forbidding their superiors to punish them. Nor was Clement as firm as Boniface VIII in refusing the pressing demands of pilgrims for a reduction in the number of visits required. The papal legate Guy of Boulogne was empowered to reduce the number of days if the crowds in Rome became unmanageable. Alberic of Rosate, who inspected the bull conferring this power, was allowed to leave after six days with the full indulgence. After Easter the shortage of food became acute and Guy reduced the number of visits from fifteen to eight. This had its effect. The crowds diminished, ‘at which the Romans were exceedingly vexed.’

  Louis of Hungary was the only king who came to claim the Jubilee indulgence in person. The others asked to be granted it without having to make the irksome journey to Rome. Philip VI of France protested that he was too old and infirm to go to Rome, Hugh of Cyprus that he lived too far away. Edward III of England sent the celebrated preacher Richard Fitzralph, archbishop of Armagh, to plead on his behalf. Fitzralph pointed out that travelling to sanctuaries had no place in the Jewish Jubilee which Clement professed to be reviving. Jews were simply commanded to behave exceptionally well towards their neighbours in Jubilee years. Could not the English do the same and gain the indulgence by, say, bestowing alms on hospices and schools? This interesting argument carried no weight. The pope affirmed in reply that ‘no one of any status or condition whatever may gain the indulgence without visiting the basil
icas in person.’ Clement’s attitude softened, however, when the Jubilee had ended. In May 1351 Edward III, the queen, the prince of Wales, and the earl of Lancaster were all formally ‘granted’ the Jubilee indulgence. Many of Edward’s subjects were accorded the same privilege in return for a sum equal to the cost of a journey to Rome, the money to go to the needs of the Holy Land. Queen Elizabeth of Hungary was permitted to appoint a confessor and receive ‘the same indulgence as those who visited the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul and St. John of the Lateran in the year 1350’. More spectacular was the concession of an indulgence ad instar Jubilaei to the entire population of Mallorca in June 1352, perhaps as a reward for their resistance to the pope’s great adversary, Peter IV of Aragon. Any Mallorcan could claim the indulgence if he paid eight visits to Mallorca cathedral and to every parish church of the city; he was also to contribute to the endowment of new churches a sum equal to the cost ‘in conscience assessed’ of travelling to Rome and staying there for fifteen days. This was not enough for the Mallorcans, who complained that ‘it was hard to reckon what the cost of going to Rome would be, and the gross errors that would occur might lose some people the benefits of the indulgence. Moreover there are many sons of families, servants, retainers, and paupers who could never afford to go to Rome, and if it were only the rich who could win salvation it would be a grave scandal which would endanger the souls of the entire population of the kingdom.’ It was therefore agreed that the Mallorcans would be granted the indulgence in return for a single official payment of 30,000 gold florins to the papal treasury. This curious transaction established a precedent of which Boniface IX would make full use when the time came to celebrate the next Jubilee.