by Will Durant
Perhaps in excited expectation of the coming Kingdom, a mania of religious penitence flared up around Perugia in 1259, and swept through northern Italy. Thousands of penitents of every age and class marched in disorderly procession, dressed only in loincloths, weeping, praying God for mercy, and scourging themselves with leather thongs. Thieves and usurers fell in, and restored their illegal gains; murderers, catching the contagion of repentance, knelt before their victims’ kin and begged to be slain; prisoners were released, exiles were recalled, enmities were healed. The movement spread through Germany into Bohemia; and for a time it seemed that a new and mystical faith, ignoring the Church, would inundate Europe. But in a little while the nature of man reasserted itself; new enmities developed, sinning and murder were renewed; and the Flagellant craze disappeared into the psychic recesses from which it had emerged.87
The mystic flame burned less fitfully in Flanders. A priest of Liege, Lambert le Bégue (i.e., the stutterer), established in 1184 on the Meuse a house for women who, without taking monastic vows, wished to live together in small semi-communistic groups, supporting themselves by weaving wool and making lace. Similar maisons-Dieu, or houses of God, were established for men. The men called themselves Beghards, the women Beguines. These communities, like the Waldenses, condemned the Church for owning property, and themselves practiced a voluntary poverty. A similar sect, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, appeared about 1262 in Augsburg, and developed in the cities along the Rhine. Both movements claimed a mystical inspiration which absolved them from ecclesiastical control, even from state or moral law.88 State and Church combined to suppress them; they went underground, emerged repeatedly under new names, and contributed to the origin and fervor of the Anabaptists and other radical sects in the Reformation.
Germany became the favorite land of mysticism in the West. Hildegarde of Bingen (1099–1179), the “Sibyl of the Rhine,” lived all but eight of her eighty-two years as a Benedictine nun, and ended as abbess of a convent on the Rupertsberg. She was an unusual mixture of administrator and visionary, pietist and radical, poet and scientist, physician and saint. She corresponded with popes and kings, always in a tone of inspired authority, and in Latin prose of masculine power. She published several books of visions (Scivias), for which she claimed the collaboration of the Deity; the clergy were chagrined to hear it, for these revelations were highly critical of the wealth and corruption of the Church. Said Hildegarde, in accents of eternal hope:
Divine justice shall have its hour… the judgments of God are about to be accomplished; the Empire and the Papacy, sunk into impiety, shall crumble away together…. But upon their ruins shall appear a new nation…. The heathen, the Jews, the worldly and the unbelieving, shall be converted together; springtime and peace shall reign over a regenerated world, and the angels will return with confidence to dwell among men.89
A century later Elizabeth of Thuringia (1207–31) aroused Hungary with her brief life of ascetic sanctity. Daughter of King Andrew, she was married at thirteen to a German prince, was a mother at fourteen, a widow at twenty. Her brother-in-law despoiled her and drove her away penniless. She became a wandering pietist, devoted to the poor; she housed leprous women and washed their wounds. She too had heavenly visions, but she gave them no publicity, and claimed no supernatural powers. Meeting the fiery inquisitor Conrad of Marburg, she was morbidly fascinated by his merciless devotion to orthodoxy; she became his obedient slave; he beat her for the slightest deviation from his concept of sanctity; she submitted humbly, inflicted additional austerities upon herself, and died of them at twenty-four.90 Her reputation for saintliness was so great that at her funeral half-mad devotees cut off her hair, ears, and nipples as sacred relics.91 Another Elizabeth entered the Benedictine nunnery of Schonau, near Bingen, at the age of twelve (1141), and lived there till her death in 1165. Bodily infirmities and extreme asceticism generated trances, in which she received heavenly revelations from various dead saints, nearly all anticlerical. “The Lord’s vine has withered,” her guardian angel told her; “the head of the Church is ill, and her members are dead…. Kings of the earth! the cry of your iniquity has risen even to me.”92
Toward the end of this period the mystic tide ran high in Germany. Meister Eckhart, born about 1260, would come to his ripe doctrine in 1326, to his trial and death in 1327. His pupils Suso and Tauler would continue his mystic pantheism; and from that tradition of unecclesiastical piety would flow one source of the Reformation.
Usually the Church bore patiently with the mystics in her fold. She did not tolerate serious doctrinal deviations from the official line, or the anarchic individualism of some religious sects; but she admitted the claim of the mystics to a direct approach to God, and listened with good humor to saintly denunciations of her human faults. Many clergymen, even high dignitaries, sympathized with the critics, recognized the shortcomings of the Church, and wished that they too could lay down the contaminating tools and tasks of world politics and enjoy the security and peace of monasteries fed by the piety of the people and protected by the power of the Church. Perhaps it was such patient ecclesiastics who kept Christianity steady amid the delirious revelations that periodically threatened the medieval mind. As we read the mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it dawns upon us that orthodoxy was often a barrier to contagious superstitions, and that in one aspect the Church was belief—as the state was force—organized from chaos into order to keep men sane.
VII. THE TRAGIC POPE
When Gregory X came to the papacy in 1271 the Church was again at the summit of her power. He was a Christian as well as a pope: a man of peace and amity, seeking justice rather than victory. Hoping to regain Palestine by one united effort, he persuaded Venice, Genoa, and Bologna to end their wars; he secured the election of Rudolf of Hapsburg as Emperor, but soothed with courtesy and kindness the defeated candidates; and he reconciled Guelf and Ghibelline in factious Florence and Siena, saying to his Guelf supporters: “Your enemies are Ghibellines, but they are also men, citizens, and Christians.”93 He summoned the prelates of the Church to the Council of Lyons (1274); 1570 leading churchmen came; every great state sent a representative; the Greek emperor sent the heads of the Greek Church to reaffirm its submission to the Roman See; Latin and Greek churchmen sang together a Te Deum of joy. Bishops were invited to list the abuses that needed reform in the Church; they responded with startling candor;94 and legislation was passed to mitigate these evils. All Europe was magnificently united for a mighty effort against the Saracens. But on the way back to Rome Gregory died (1276). His successors were too busy with Italian politics to carry out his plans.
Nevertheless when Boniface VIII was chosen pope in 1294 the papacy was still the strongest government in Europe, the best organized, the best administered, the richest in revenue. It was the misfortune of the Church that at this juncture, nearing the end of a virile and progressive century, the mightiest throne in Christendom should have fallen to a man whose love of the Church, and sincerity of purpose, were equaled by his imperfect morals, his personal pride, and his tactless will to power. He was not without charm: he loved learning, and rivaled Innocent III in legal training and wide culture; he founded the University of Rome, and restored and extended the Vatican Library; he gave commissions to Giotto and Arnolfo di Cambio, and helped finance the amazing façade of Orvieto Cathedral.
He had prepared his own elevation by persuading the saintly but incompetent Celestine V to resign after a pontificate of five months—an unprecedented act that surrounded Boniface with ill will from the start. To scotch all plans for a restoration, he ordered the eighty-year-old Celestine to be kept in detention in Rome; Celestine escaped, was captured, escaped again, wandered for weeks through Apulia, reached the Adriatic, attempted a crossing to Dalmatia, was wrecked, was cast ashore in Italy, and was brought before Boniface. He was condemned by the Pope to imprisonment in a narrow cell at Ferentino; and there, ten months later, he died (1296).95
The temper of t
he new Pope was sharpened by a succession of diplomatic defeats and costly victories. He tried to dissuade Frederick of Aragon from accepting the throne of Sicily; when Frederick persisted Boniface excommunicated him, and laid an interdict upon the island (1296). Neither King nor people paid any heed to these censures;96 and in the end Boniface recognized Frederick. To prepare for a crusade he ordered Venice and Genoa to sign a truce; they continued their war for three years more, and rejected his intervention in making peace. Failing to secure a favorable order in Florence, he placed the city under interdict, and invited Charles of Valois to enter and pacify Italy (1300). Charles accomplished nothing, but won the hatred of the Florentines for himself and the Pope. Seeking peace in his own Papal States, Boniface had attempted to settle a quarrel among the members of the powerful Colonna family; Pietro and Jacopo Colonna, both cardinals, repudiated his suggestions; he deposed and excommunicated them (1297); whereupon the rebellious nobles affixed to the doors of Roman churches, and laid upon the altar of St. Peter’s, a manifesto appealing from the Pope to a general council. Boniface repeated the excommunication, extended it to five other rebels, ordered their property confiscated, invaded the Colonna domain with papal troops, captured its fortresses, razed Palestrina to the ground, and had salt strewn over its ruins. The rebels surrendered, were forgiven, revolted again, were again beaten by the warrior Pope, fled from the Papal States, and planned revenge.
Amid these Italian tribulations Boniface was suddenly confronted by a major crisis in France. Philip IV, resolved to unify his realm, had seized the English province of Gascony; Edward I had declared war (1294); now, to finance their struggle, both kings decided to tax the property and personnel of the Church. The popes had permitted such taxation for crusades, but never for a purely secular war. The French clergy had recognized their duty of contributing to the defense of the state that protected their possessions, but they feared that if the power of the state to tax were unchecked, it would be a power to destroy. Philip had already reduced the role of the clergy in France; he had removed them from the manorial and royal courts, and from their old posts in the administration of the government and in the council of the king. Disturbed by this trend, the Cistercian Order refused to send Philip the fifth of their revenues which he had asked for the war with England, and its head addressed an appeal to the Pope. Boniface had to move carefully, for France had long been the chief support of the papacy in the struggle with Germany and the Empire; but he felt that the economic basis of the power and freedom of the Church would soon be lost if she could be shorn of her revenues by state taxation of Church property without papal consent. In February, 1296, he issued one of the most famous bulls in ecclesiastical history. Its first words, Clericis laicos, gave it a name, its first sentence made an unwise admission, and its tone recalled the papal bolts of Gregory VII:
Antiquity reports that laymen are exceedingly hostile to the clergy; and our experience certainly shows this to be true at present…. With the counsel of our brethren, and by our apostolic authority, we decree that if any clergy … shall pay to laymen… any part of their income or possessions … without the permission of the pope, they shall incur excommunication… And we also decree that all persons of whatever power or rank, who shall demand or receive such taxes, or shall seize or cause to be seized, the property of churches or of the clergy … shall incur excommunication.97
Philip for his part was convinced that the great wealth of the Church in France should share in the costs of the state. He countered the papal bull by prohibiting the export of gold, silver, precious stones, or food, and by forbidding foreign merchants or emissaries to remain in France. These measures blocked a main source of papal revenue, and banished from France the papal agents who were raising funds for a crusade in the East. In the bull Ineffabilis amor (September, 1296) Boniface retreated; he sanctioned voluntary contributions from the clergy for the necessary defense of the state, and conceded the right of the King to be the judge of such a necessity. Philip rescinded his retaliatory ordinances; he and Edward accepted Boniface—not as pope but as a private person—as arbitrator of their dispute; Boniface decided most of the issues in Philip’s favor; England yielded for the moment; and the three warriors enjoyed a passing peace.
Perhaps to replenish the papal treasury after the decline of receipts from England and France, perhaps to finance a war for the recovery of Sicily as a papal fief, and another war to extend the Papal States into Tuscany,98 Boniface proclaimed 1300 as a jubilee year. The plan was a complete success. Rome had never in its history seen such crowds before; now, apparently for the first time, traffic rules were enforced to govern the movement of the people.99 Boniface and his aides managed the affair well; food was brought in abundantly and was sold at moderate prices papally controlled. It was an advantage for the Pope that the great sums so collected were not earmarked for any special purpose, but could be used according to his judgment. Despite half victories and severe defeats, Boniface was now at the crest of his curve.
In the meantime, however, the Colonna exiles were entertaining Philip with tales of the Pope’s greed, injustice, and private heresies. A quarrel arose between Philip’s aides and a papal legate, Bernard Saisset; the legate was arrested on a charge of inciting to insurrection; he was tried by the royal court, convicted, and committed to the custody of the archbishop of Narbonne (1301). Boniface, shocked by this summary treatment of his legate, demanded Saisset’s immediate release, and instructed the French clergy to suspend payment of ecclesiastical revenues to the state. In the bull Ausculta fili (“Listen, son”; December, 1301) he appealed to Philip to listen modestly to the Vicar of Christ as the spiritual monarch over all the kings of the earth; he protested against the trial of a churchman before a civil court, and the continued use of ecclesiastical funds for secular purposes; and he announced that he would summon the bishops and abbots of France to take measures “for the preservation of the liberties of the Church, the reformation of the kingdom, and the amendment of the King.”100 When this bull was presented to Philip, the count of Artois snatched it from the hands of the Pope’s emissary and flung it into the fire; and a copy destined for publication by the French clergy was suppressed. Passion was inflamed on both sides by the circulation of two spurious documents, one allegedly from Boniface to Philip demanding obedience even in temporal affairs, the other from Philip to Boniface informing “thy very great fatuity that in temporal things we are subject to no one”; and these forgeries were widely accepted as genuine.101
On February 11, 1302, the bull Ausculta fili was officially burned at Paris before the King and a great multitude. To forestall the ecclesiastical council proposed by Boniface, Philip summoned the three estates of his realm to meet at Paris in April. At this first States-General in French history all three classes —nobles, clergy, and commons—wrote separately to Rome in defense of the King and his temporal power. Some forty-five French prelates, despite Philip’s prohibition, and the confiscation of their property, attended the council at Rome in October, 1302. From that council issued the bull Unam sanctam, which made arrestingly specific the claims of the papacy. There is, said the bull, but one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation; there is but one body of Christ, with one head, not two; that head is Christ and His representative, the Roman pope. There are two swords or powers—the spiritual and the temporal; the first is borne by the Church; the second is borne for the Church by the king, but under the will and sufferance of the priest. The spiritual power is above the temporal, and has the right to instruct it regarding its highest end, and to judge it when it does evil. “We declare and define and pronounce,” concluded the bull, “that it is necessary for salvation that all men should be subject to the Roman pontiff.”102
Philip replied by calling two assemblies (March and June, 1303), which drew up a formal indictment of Boniface as a tyrant, sorcerer, murderer, embezzler, adulterer, sodomite, simoniac, idolator, and infidel,103 and demanded his deposition by a general council of the Ch
urch. The King commissioned William of Nogaret, his chief legist, to go to Rome and notify the Pope of the King’s appeal to a general council. Boniface, then in the papal palace at Anagni, declared that only the pope could call a general council, and prepared a decree excommunicating Philip and laying an interdict upon France. Before he could issue it William of Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, heading a band of 2000 mercenaries, burst into the palace, presented Philip’s message of notification, and demanded the Pope’s resignation (September 7, 1303). Boniface refused. A tradition “of considerable trustworthiness”104 says that Sciarra struck the Pontiff in the face, and would have killed him had not Nogaret intervened. Boniface was seventy-five years old, physically weak, but still defiant. For three days he was kept a prisoner in his palace, while the mercenaries plundered it. Then the people of Anagni, reinforced by 400 horsemen from the Orsini clan, scattered the mercenaries and freed the Pope. Apparently his jailers had given him no food in the three days; for standing in the market place he begged: “If there be any good woman who would give me an alms of wine and bread, I would bestow upon her God’s blessing and mine.” The Orsini led him to Rome and the Vatican. There he fell into a violent fever; and in a few days he died (October 11, 1303).