The Avignon Papacy
The next pope was a gentle and humble Dominican named Benedict XI. His primary task was to revoke many of the decrees laid down by his unpopular predecessor, Boniface VIII, and he also hoped to persuade King Philip the Fair of France against establishing a General Council over the controversy. In doing so, Benedict sought punishments for offenders in the Anagni Affair, which saw the notorious previous pope nearly kidnapped in France. However, before punitive measures could be extolled, Benedict XI contracted a bout of dysentery in Perugia which killed him some ten days later, marking the end of a papal reign that lasted a mere seven months.
When the papal conclave met in Perugia in July 1304, the primary concern was in cooling tensions with Philip of France now that the Boniface era had officially ended. Thus, in looking for an outsider, they selected someone removed from the college of cardinals –Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux who took the papal name of Clement V. He had attended Boniface’s synod in 1302 but had still managed to develop a friendly relationship with King Philip. Pope Clement V proved to be an effective administrator having been a canon lawyer, with a focus on expanding missionary efforts and instituting chairs in Arabic and other languages at universities in Oxford, Paris, Bologna, and Salamanca. He showed a certain degree of independence in releasing Edward “Longshanks” of England from his vows to his barons; suspending the Archbishop of Canterbury, excommunicating Robert the Bruce of Scotland for the church-murder of his enemy, John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch; and settling a fifteen-year dispute over the Hungarian succession.
However, as a French subject who was long suffering from stomach cancer, Clement V remained under the looming heel of France. Indeed, an auspicious cloud seemed to hang over his pontificate. While en route to his coronation, which was held in Lyons, a large wall collapsed shocking many spectators, knocking the pope off his horse, injuring several bystanders, and killing the Duke of Brittany. At any rate, the first four years of his rule saw the pope scrambling between locales in France before finally settling in Avignon on the east bank of the Rhone, which was at that time the property of King Philip’s vassal, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and Count of Provence. It was a tiny village of 5,000 inhabitants (dubbed by the poet Petrarch “a disgusting city” with “a sewer where all the filth of the universe is collected”) –Avignon was amazingly to become the home of six succeeding popes for the next sixty-eight years. Perhaps fittingly, it was a town which bore a foul stench –the Aragonese ambassador once became so nauseated by the streets that he fell ill and had to return home. Avignon became a notorious refuge for criminals, and a home to many brothels and taverns. For these reasons, the papal relocation to Avignon –initially an effort to distance the pope from the influence of the French king—later became known as the period of “Babylonian Exile” for the papacy.
In spite of his efforts, Clement V still remained essentially a puppet of King Philip –the king easily compelled the pope to open a formal inquiry into former Pope Boniface in 1309-1311. He also forced the pope to grant full re-institution and compensation for the Colonna cardinals involved in the Anagni Affair, annulments for Boniface’s decrees which negatively impacted French interests, and the absolution of Guillaume de Nogaret for instigating such an outrageous attack on the papacy, and most egregious of all, Philip forced Clement V to push for the demise of the Knights Templar.
The Knights Templar
John Julius Norwich offers the following reflections on the Knights Templar:
“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, those 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 Oleron 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” (205).
Desperately in need of money, Philip the Fair of France sought to expel the Templars and claim their riches in the manner he had previously accomplished with respect to the Jews and the Lombard bankers alike. With various rumors and conspiracies swirling for years about secret Templar rites, ceremonies, and rituals in the dead of night, Philip pushed for a a new inquiry against the order. Rife with flimsy testimony, the Templars were now accused of being “satanists” worshipping an idol called Baphomet, trampling on the crucifix and denying Christ, practicing “sodomy” and siring illegitimate children only to sadistically roast them alive. The more outrageous the accusation, the more the crowds cried out for recrimination –in many ways we can see this very same pathological mania echoed in our own day.
On Friday, October 13, 1307 (a date which is believed to be the cultural origin of “Friday the 13th” and its grim reputation), the grand master of the Temple in Paris, Jacques de Molay, was arrested along with sixty of his compatriots. Under penalty of torture, they were all forced to confess to all manner of wild speculations. It was a grave and hideous Inquisition of which the Church has gained such a shameful reputation the world over. Some 138 knights were put to the rack, and unsurprisingly 123 confessed to at least some of the charges leveled against them. Philip encouraged his fellow monarchs to follow suit, and with support from Pope Clement V (under the “Pastoralis praeeminentiae”), King Edward II of England, already on shaky domestic ground, followed suit alongside his French father-in-law and he arrested the English master of the order along with his accompanying knights.
Many of the Templars later recanted their supposed confessions delivered under pain of torture, including Molay himself, and a revolt among Clement’s college soon followed. However, with the wheels already in motion, those who recanted were tortured again and forced to confess (including Molay) and any future recanters were threatened with burning at the stake –fifty-four knights were to suffer this fate. In fact, Jacques de Molay was brought out before the people in front of the Cathedral at Notre Dame to offer a public confession, but by now in his seventies and with nothing left to lose, he denied all the absurd charges levied against the Knights Templar. He and his friend, Geoffrey de Charnay, were then promptly burned at the stake on a small island in the middle of the Seine, the Ile des Juifs (an island known for countless centuries of brutal executions of Jews in France). With Molay and Charnay courageously rejecting the religious cry of heresy, public opinion had been tempered somewhat and new superstitious rumors swirled once more –Pope Clement V died less than a month later, and King Philip was then killed in a hunting accident before the year was out—and so it was said that Molay had summoned both pope and king to appear for judgment in heaven before the year was out. Shortly after their deaths, the remains of Molay and Charnay were collected and revered as martyrs by Augustinian friars in Paris. Today, the island where all of these monstrous executions took place is connected to the Square du Vert-Galant.
According to John Julius Norwich: “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” (207). Shortly before his death, Clement V transferred the wealth of the Templars to the Hospitalars, suddenly making this Christian sect wealthier than their wildest dreams (no doubt, this final papal bull which greatly angered Philip since he had unleashed this whole Inquisition in order to confiscate the wealth of the Templars in the first place). Clement V is today mostly remembered for being the pope who moved his temporary capital to Avignon, even though he may have possessed wishes to return to Rome eventually. However, Italy was in a state of turmoil at this time –especially in Northern and Central Italy. Lombardy and Tuscany were beset by feuds between the Guelfs and Ghibellines, while the Colonna and Orsini factions fought viciously against one another in Rome proper. When Emperor Henry VII arrived for his coronation in 1312, he had to fight his way into the city where he was crowned upon the ruins of the Lateran which had been mostly destroyed in a fire four years earlier.
The Continuation of the Avignon Papacy
After Clement’s death in 1314, St. Peter’s throne lay vacant for two years. The conclave initially met at Carpentras but the meeting quickly devolved into violence as Gascon cardinals incited an armed uprising against the Italian faction within the conclave. Riots broke out in the streets and the town of Carpentras was set on fire while one of Clement’s nephews looted the papal treasury and then disappeared. The conclave did not reconvene until 1316, and after five months of deliberations, they were locked up in a Dominican convent by Philip V (successor to his father Philip the Fair) who reduced their rations until the bitterly divided cardinals finally selected a seventy-two-year-old Frenchman named Jacques Duese, who took the papal name of John XXII. The new pope quickly proved himself to be a vigorous administrator. One of his first acts was to crush a Franciscan sect known as the “Spirituals” (an “extremist” group not unlike the Fraticelli) which held fast to St. Francis’s original precepts, especially with respect to the vow of poverty. Pope John XXII rejected these “radicals.” He declared that neither Jesus nor his disciples lived like “paupers” and he pronounced that obedience was a greater virtue than either poverty or chastity. He happily engendered a schism within Franciscanism, leading both Michael of Cesana and the English theologian William of Ockham to flee Avignon for the court of the pope’s arch-enemy, German King Louis IV of Bavaria.
The conflict between Pope John XXII and German King Louis IV stemmed from an earlier instance in which King Louis, channeling Otto the Great or Frederick Barbarossa, attacked and captured King Frederick of Austria in 1322, an act which he believed entitled him to the crown as Holy Roman Emperor. However, Pope John denied his request and claimed it was the papacy who should settle the dispute instead. In response, King Louis issued the “Sachsenhausen Appellation” which denied papal authority over such imperial claims and he rejected the pope’s condemnation of the “Spirituals” sect. The pope then excommunicated the recalcitrant German king, only for King Louis to invade Rome and receive a coronation ceremony of his own from the “Captain of the People,” a populist rabble-rouser named Sciarra Colonna. This was followed by the elevation of a new antipope, a Franciscan “Spiritual” who called himself Nicholas V –he arranged to be personally crowned by the emperor himself.
However, King Robert of Naples soon sent an army northward which sent the new emperor and his antipope fleeing northward to Pisa, and amidst the collapsing scenery of this little charade, any prospect of a legitimate new pope quickly faded. Nicholas V soon departed from his patron and wandered alone through Germany before giving himself up to the Church. Pope XXII treated him with leniency, granting him both a pardon and a pension.
Toward the end of his life, Pope John XXII came to some rather controversial conclusions. In his day, it was generally agreed upon by theologians that deceased saints were granted a full image of God in heaven, one of many other fantastical, sophisticated beliefs which predominated the Middle Ages. Hence why it was such a scandal when, approaching the age of ninety, the pope delivered a series of sermons in the winter of 1331-1332 denying the notion that saints ever receive a full “Divine Vision” until the forthcoming date of the “Last Judgment” (until that time, saints could only contemplate the humanity of Jesus, or so he claimed). It spawned a storm of protest and demands for a new Ecumenical Council which forced the elderly pope to issue a modified retraction, namely that the saints would gain a vision “as clearly as their condition allowed,” a statement which John Julius Norwich dubs a “mildly ridiculous formula that nevertheless seemed to satisfy his critics.”
During his reign, Pope John XXII maintained the papacy in Avignon, closely under the influence of the French king while keeping his cardinals stacked with nepotistic appointments (twenty-eight appointments were from Southern France and three were his own nephews). By now, Avignon had grown from the small stinking town it had once been into a lavish city of untold wealth, filled with ornate mansions built for all the cardinals and ambassadors, along with sprawling vineyards, like those at Chateauneuf-du-Pape (founded by Pope John XXII). Writing in 1340, Petrarch remarked on the astounding concentration of wealth in Avignon:
“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.”
When Pope John XXII died on December 4, 1334, the cardinals acted uncharacteristically quickly to replace the pope with the Bishop of Pamiers, a baker’s son and former Cistercian monk named Jacques Fournier who took the name of Benedict XII. He had been a devoted and faithful Inquisitor who had proudly exterminated the last vestiges of Catharism from Southern France (in the presence of five bishops and the King of Navarre, he piously slaughtered no less than 183 men and women, burning them at the stake). It was described by one contemporary as “a holocaust, very great and pleasing to God” (as recounted by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie). As reward for his devout brutality, Pope John appointed him a cardinal.
Pope Benedict XII was a dour and unbending man, but he despised the growing luxury and nepotism of his predecessor popes. He even maintained his own dress in a humble Cistercian habit. He dismissed many of the clerics and vagabond monks who sat around in Avignon collecting fees, growing fat on food and wine, but whereas his domestic reforms were praised by some, his international diplomacy was abysmal. He failed to prevent the outbreak of the Hundred Years War between England and France, thus ending any hope of a future crusade to further enrich the papacy, and he also failed to forge a new partnership with Emperor Louis of Germany. Despite his opposition to opulence, he nevertheless constructed the Palais de Papes in Avignon, thus ensuring the exiled papacy would remain in France for the foreseeable future. Pope Benedict died in his early sixties on April 25, 1342, “weighed down by age and wine” according to Petrarch.
The next pope was Pierre Roger, the son of a landed squire from the Corrèze, who already boasted an impressive career. He earned a double doctorate in theology and canon law, and was appointed Archbishop of Sens at twenty-eight and Archbishop of Rouen at twenty-nine, followed by chancellor and chief minister of France by Philip VI. A good friend of the French king, he took the papal name of Clement VI. Pope Clement sought to return the papacy to a place of extravagance and wealth –he dressed sumptuously, surrounded himself with a gaggle of attendants, and showered wealth and favors on all people within his orbit. His charm and oratory were irresistible, however all the corrupt practices of the papacy continued without obstruction –nepotism, bribery, and voracious appetites. The pope was known to have a taste for beautiful women, as well (such as Joanna, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence). Other rumors centered on Cecile, Countess of Turenne, who regularly acted as hostess at the pope’s palace. Per John Julius Norwich, “Petrarch, as usual, became almost hysterical with indignation… Poets, perhaps, never make the best witnesses; but Petrarch –one of the great writers of the Middle Ages—could, had he wished, have given us a brilliant and accurate description of papal Avignon. It is a pity that he has left us instead a travesty that borders on the grotesque” (214).
This was the era of the merciless Black Death, which had reached Avignon in January 1348 and by September had killed no less than 62,000 people, perhaps three quarters of the city and surrounding population. Thousands of bodies were buried in the areas outside the city, while masses and funeral processions were soon canceled so as to prevent the future spread of the infection. The pope retired to his apartment where he received no visitors day or night. He sat beside two large fireplaces, believing the heat would save him from death. John Julius Norwich offers the following reflections on the lasting effects of the Black Death plague during this period:
“As Europe emerged from the nightmare, it began to look for scapegoats, and, perhaps inevitably, it settled on the Jews. Was the Jew not the Antichrist? Did he not kidnap and torture Christian children? Did he not regularly desecrate the host? Had he not poisoned the wells of the Christian communities, infecting all their members with the plague? In vain did Jews point out that they had suffered every bit as much as the Christians –arguably even more, thanks to the swarming ghettos in which they were obliged to live; their accusers refused to listen. As early as May, there was a massacre of Jews in Provence, and in Narbonne and Carcassonne the entire Jewish communities were liquidated. In Germany and Switzerland the persecutions fell not far short of holocaust. Pope Clement acted swiftly. Twice, on July 4 and September 26, he published bulls which condemned the massacres wherever they might occur and called on all Christians to conduct themselves with tolerance and restraint. Those continued to victimize any Jew would be instantly excommunicated… Alas, for many Jews he was too late. Communications were slow in the fourteenth century; despite his efforts some 350 separate massacres took place and over two hundred Jewish communities suffered complete annihilation. But for this Clement cannot be blamed. On the contrary, he should be remembered as the first pope in history to undertake an active defense of the Jewish people, wherever they might be found. It was the noblest and most courageous act of his life –an example which all too many of his successors might usefully have followed” (216).
Hoping to revive the failing Roman economy, Pope Clement declared 1350 a “Holy Year” but alas it did not yield much in the way of financial success. Newly arriving pilgrims in Rome were shocked to find the city’s general dilapidation and decay. Without a pope now for over a half century, Rome had devolved into a sorry sight. At one point in 1344, a new rising demagogue named Cola di Rienzo, the son of a washerman, blamed the local aristocracy and roused the people of Rome with a vision for restoring the city’s past greatness in a glorious rebirth. He quickly rode this wave to the city’s Capitol where he was granted the title of Tribune and given broad dictatorial powers. He quickly took up residence in the crumbling remnants of the Lateran and sought to unify the Italian cities, dubbing himself “White-robed Knight of the Holy Spirit.” However, it wasn’t long before his lavish personal aggrandizement led to a mob uprising that forced him into exile where he was excommunicated by the pope and tried for heresy (but the pope chose leniency and secretly arranged for his acquittal). When Pope Clement died at the age of sixty-one in December 1352, Cola was released from prison by the next pope, Innocent VI. Innocent thought Cola could help the papacy win back the city of Rome from the wayward mob and the fickle aristocracy, however upon return, Cola was merely jeered by the people and driven out of town disguised as a beggar –only his gold bracelets were spotted glittering from beneath his garments, so within minutes his body was strung up in the city center in a manner “eerily similar to that fate which befell, six centuries later, his most successful imitator: Benito Mussolini” (218).
Pope Innocent VI, now in his seventies, had issued something of a sea change in Avignon. He reinstituted austerity, parsimony, impartiality, and discipline –the message was clear: gone were the days of extravagant pageants and parades. Under Innocent, Avignon became a dreary place of joyless busybodies. Meanwhile, his cardinal-general Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz won back many of the lost Papal States in a string of violent confrontations. And while the pope failed to launch a new crusade, long the dream of the papacy, he was successful in negotiating the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 which brought a nine-year peace to the Hundred Years War. However, once liberated from their duties, the mercenary armies in the war suddenly turned their gaze southward toward the riches housed in Avignon. The mercenaries besieged and captured the city, leaving many in terror, the papacy was only saved by the return of the plague in 1361 which killed some 17,000 people in the region. In its wake, the pope relented and paid the invading mercenaries in exchange for their departure.
Pope Innocent VI died a “sad and disappointed man” in September 1362. In seeking to replace him, the cardinals’ first choice was a vote for the “good old days” in favor of Clement VI, but he refused the offer, so they settled on a Benedictine monk named Guillaume de Grimoard who became Pope Urban V. He was another “unworldly, austere, and deeply pious” cleric. Like all popes, he sought a new crusade to the Holy Land, but it failed to materialize with King John II of France and his troubled in the Hundred Years War. He then attempted to return the seat of the papacy to Rome, but he ran into obstacles among the vast papal bureaucracy –from the cardinals down to the scribes, whose families and homes were all by now located in either Avignon or Villeneuve, and “the last thing they wanted was to leave it all for a malarial, malodorous city known to be in the last stages of dilapidation and decay, perpetually torn apart by a corrupt aristocracy and a famously unpredictable rabble” (220). This coupled with political squabbles between the French free-booter general Bertrand du Guesclin (under the order of King Charles V) against King Pedro the Cruel of Spain. Du Guesclin detoured to Avignon and demanded payment –the pope responded by excommunicating all the offenders, but the soldiers merely laid waste to the countryside, burning towns, raping nuns, and looting homes. A terrified pope levied a new tax on his pious subjects in order to pay the marauding military, but when du Guesclin learned that a tax was levied on the people instead of the Church, he returned the funds and merely demanded payment directly from the papal coffers. Instead, the pope instituted another unpopular tax exclusively on the churchmen in order to pay the invading general –and this time it worked.
From here, a massive return voyage to Rome was embarked upon –the pope and his hundreds of compatriots sailed southward down the coast of Italy only to find Rome badly in need of reconstruction and people scattered throughout the Papal States in open revolt again. Then the Treaty of Brétigny was broken as Aquitaine was annexed by Charles of France in 1369 and King Edward III of England sent two expeditions to recover it –hostilities in the Hundred Years War promptly resumed. While still clinging to the hope of a unified crusade for the Holy Land, the pope could hardly negotiate a peace at a distance from Rome. With a great mix of relief and reluctance, he ordered the full-scale return to Avignon for his entire entourage. Within six weeks of his triumphant return, Pope Urban V died in 1370 at the age of eighty-two. His body later became the object of cult worship, superstitious rumors circulated regarding miracles were said to have occurred at his corpse, presumably this was why he was beatified centuries later by Pope Pius IX in 1870.
Pope Urban was succeeded by Pierre-Roger du Beaufort, a Frenchman who was naturally drawn toward to asceticism and mysticism. He took the papal name of Gregory XI. Upon ascending the throne, he inherited an indebted papacy filled with infighting and a renewed longing for the pontificate to return to Rome. It was also the height of the Hundred Years War, and tensions in Europe remained high, however Gregory was fully committed to finally relocating the papacy to Rome. He was spurred on by a young fanatical mystic named Caterina Benincasa, better known to us today as St. Catherine of Siena, who appeared in Avignon and publicly demanded a new anti-Muslim crusade, and implored the pope return to the spiritual home of his title (i.e. Rome). With the support of a great many of the faithful behind him, the pope eventually departed on September 12, 1376 for Rome. However, beset by storms and loss of life, the papal entourage arrived approximately two months later at long last in Rome. Now, the papacy finally concluded this strange chapter in Avignon at the close of the Middle Ages. How would the global theocracy of the Christian Church fare in a new age of reason and optimism? John Julius Norwich offers the following concluding remarks on this epoch:
“The Papacy was back in Rome. This time it stayed. It was never to leave the city again. But the Italy to which it had returned, though in some respects unchanged, in others differed radically from the Italy it had left seventy years before. Unity was as remote as possibility as ever: Guelf and Ghibelline, their original quarrels long forgotten, still hammered away at each other, and the blood continued to flow as it always had, copious and unavailing. But seven decades without either a pope or an effective emperor had removed old polarities, and the Black Death had drawn yet another curtain across the past, while exposing the present still more mercilessly to the winds of change. The secular, inquiring spirit which now spread across the land was not in itself new. Its roots went back to Roger of Sicily and Greek and Arab sages, to Frederick II and his falcons, to Manfred and his troubadors, to Arnold of Brescia and the scholastics, to the lawyers of Bologna and Salerno. But the fourteenth century had given it a new momentum –in the political sphere with Cola di Rienzo and the despots of the North, in the cultural with Dante, Petrarch, Bocaccio, and the humanists –and at the same time the papal barriers that had so long blocked its progress had suddenly disappeared. The Renaissance was under way” (226).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.