Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  An uneasy truce broke down again by 1239, when it became clear that Frederick planned to turn the empire and Sicily into an hereditary monarchy. This was to be the first step in the imperial capture of the whole of Italy, including Rome. Emperor and Pope exchanged insults like fishwives. Gregory denounced the Emperor as a heretic, an oath-breaker and a man who had gone native by adopting Muslim customs, including a harem guarded by eunuchs (which was perfectly true). Frederick denounced the extortion of the Roman curial system, claimed that attacks on himself were really attacks on all secular rule (in which there was also some truth) and denounced the Pope, though not the papacy, as Antichrist. Confronted by Frederick’s call to the princes of Christendom to unite against Rome, Gregory summoned a general council in 1241. In retaliation, Frederick invaded the Papal States. The council never met, because Frederick coolly waylaid the Genoese fleet and kidnapped 100 of the bishops arriving by sea, and the Pope died in August of the same year.

  His death was the signal for the first formal papal Conclave (the word means literally, ‘with a key’, a reference to the fact that the cardinals were locked in till they produced a pope), which rapidly turned into a nightmare. The civil ruler of Rome, the Senator Matteo Orsini, determined to secure a strong and anti-imperial pope fast, had locked the ten cardinals then in Rome in the ancient Septizonium Palace, with armed guards to keep them inside. No candidate could gain the required two-thirds majority, and as the crippling heat intensified the primitive lavatories overflowed, and one cardinal died. In desperation they elected the elderly theologian Celestine IV: he survived his election only seventeen days, however, and the terrified cardinals fled the city. It was to be almost two years before they met at Anagni and elected the brilliant canon lawyer Sinibaldo Fieschi as Innocent IV (1243–54). Innocent completed the assault on Frederick which Gregory had begun. Excluded from Rome, he moved to Lyons, where in 1245 he summoned the Council Gregory had been unable to hold. The agenda he proclaimed at the opening of the Council on the eve of the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul included the healing of the five ‘wounds’ from which the Church suffered – the sins of the clergy, the loss of Jerusalem to Islam (since 1244), the troubles of the Latin kingdom of Constantinople, the Mongol invasion of Europe, and the persecution of the Church by Frederick. Of these, the last was the burning issue, and the Council duly excommunicated Frederick for perjury, peace-breaking, sacrilege, heresy and murder, declared him deposed, and encouraged the German princes to elect a new king.

  This solemn deposition of an emperor by a general council was a remarkable sign of the authority of the Pope. No German bishop defended Frederick at the Council, and the deposition marked the beginning of the end for the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Frederick had been crowned in 1220, but there would be no further imperial coronation until 1312. After Frederick’s death in 1250 the Hohenstaufen empire fell apart, and Germany descended into a long period of political chaos and contested successions. The papacy had called the empire into existence in 800 to protect it from its enemies. Four and a half centuries later, it presided over that empire’s funeral rites. In the process, however, it had stirred fundamental questioning about the secular power of the popes and the wealth of the Church. Conflicting parties had come into existence and would dog the politics of Italy for generations to come. The Guelphs, who drew much of their support from republican sentiment in the Italian communes, supported the papacy in its opposition to German emperors. The Ghibellines, who included many of the older aristocracy, looked to a renewed empire which would restore unity and honour to Italy. The party labels, derived from German factions, soon ceased to have exact meanings, but it was an ominous sign for the papacy that some of the most penetrating and most Christian minds of the time, like that of the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, should side with the Ghibelline and not the papal cause.

  As the empire faded, the nations of northern Europe grew in importance, and most of them looked to the papacy for prestige and support. Henry III of England, insecure against his own barons, hoped for a share in the Hohenstaufen inheritance in the Mediterranean. He paid Pope Alexander IV (1254–61) to have his son Edmund declared king of Sicily, and tried to have his brother Richard of Cornwall made king of the Romans and so heir to the empire. Henry also summoned the symbols of Rome’s secular and religious past to prop up his own shaky monarchy. In the late 1260s he imported Cosmati workmen from Rome to decorate Westminster Abbey in the Roman style. The Abbey, dedicated to St Peter, was under papal protection, and the shrine of St Edward, Henry’s own tomb, and the great sanctuary floor with its imperial or papal circles of porphyry, became the only examples of Cosmati work outside Italy.

  The popes themselves valued these links with the northern monarchies, and in 1263 Urban IV sent Cardinal Guy Foulques, the future Clement IV, as legate to England specifically to help Henry against his barons. Above all, however, the popes turned increasingly for protection to France and the Angevin dynasty. The holding of the deposition Council of 1245 at Lyons was a portent of future developments here, and much of the energies of the popes in the third quarter of the century, when two of the popes, Urban IV (1261–4) and Clement IV (1265–8) were French, were devoted to the struggle to replace Hohenstaufen control of the papal fief of Sicily – and hence of southern Italy – with that of Charles of Anjou. This dependence on Charles was to backfire, for just like his Hohenstaufen predecessors he set himself both to become master of Italy and to conquer the Byzantine empire. Papal independence was once more under threat, and the papacy cast yet again in the role of Frankenstein, having created a monster it could not control.

  The danger from an overmighty French king in Sicily was not the only price the papacy had to pay for its victory over the Hohenstaufen. The struggle with Frederick and his sons placed ruinous strains on papal revenue, and forced the popes to work their financial machinery ever harder, relentlessly expanding their demands on the regional churches. From claiming the right to intervene in disputed episcopal elections, the papacy went on to claim the right to nominate to all bishoprics, however chosen. In effect this meant not that they selected all bishops, but that they exacted a fee from all of them. By the end of the thirteenth century every new bishop and abbot had to pay a tax of one-third of his first year’s income, half to the Pope, half to the cardinals.

  The papacy also hugely expanded its rights in the ‘provision’ of benefices. Clement IV began this process by reserving the right to ‘provide’ or appoint to all benefices whose incumbents died while they were in Rome. This was extended to all benefices whose incumbents died within two days’ journey of Rome, which of course in due time became all benefices whatever within a two-day radius of Rome. Papal provisions benefited more than the Pope. Fortune-hunters all over the Church besieged the Curia with requests for preferment through the papal machinery, not least the crowned heads of Europe, who discovered that the cheapest way of paying their great servants of state (mostly clerics) was by securing bishoprics and abbeys for them by means of papal provisions. The system made enemies for the popes as well as friends. The Council of Lyons in 1245 heard a formal complaint from a group of English noblemen about papal provision of Italian and French clergy to English benefices, and the English anti-papal heretic John Wyclif owed at least some of his hostility towards the papacy to his own unsuccessful application for preferment through the papal court. Supply, inevitably, was never able to keep pace with demand.

  Nor were escalating financial demands and provision to benefices the only factor which helped discredit the late-thirteenth-century papacy. Papal patronage of the Dominicans and Franciscans (first Dominican pope 1276, first Franciscan pope 1288) and the extension to them of privileges and exemptions enraged the secular clergy and the local hierarchies, and caused questioning of the whole principle of papal exemptions. From Innocent IV onwards many of the popes forfeited moral credibility by using some of the most solemn spiritual weapons of the reform papacy for purposes which were blatantly political. Innocent, for exampl
e, preached ‘crusade’ against Frederick and his successors, and Martin IV (1281–5) and Honorius IV (1285–7) supported as a ‘crusade’ what was blatantly a dynastic war waged by France against the kingdom of Aragon. The search for a counterbalance to the Hohenstaufens resulted in the unedifying spectacle of popes hawking the succession in Sicily, and eventually that of the kingdom of Germany, to almost anyone who would take it. In the hands of lesser men the lofty spiritual claims of Gregory VII and Innocent III came increasingly to look like a cloak for cynical political manipulation.

  Institutionally, too, the papacy’s authority was being eroded. Aristocratic factions within the city of Rome once again made it an insecure base for stable papal government. Innocent IV was exiled from Rome and even Italy for six years, and all but two of the papal elections of the thirteenth century had to take place outside Rome. The skyline of Rome itself was now dominated by the fortified war-towers of the aristocracy (a hundred were built in Innocent IV’s pontificate alone) and the popes increasingly spent their time in papal palaces at Viterbo and Orvieto.

  In the midst of these thirteenth-century struggles, a bizarre legend began to circulate which both highlighted and made mock of some of the papacy’s most central claims. The story of Pope Joan first occurs in an anonymous Dominican chronicle written in 1250, the year of Frederick II’s death: it soon spread throughout Europe via the international network of the Preaching Friars, endlessly repeated and embellished in chronicles and collections of sermon exempla. In its full-blown form the story tells of an Englishwoman, Joan, educated in Mainz, who passed herself off as a man, became a monk and was ultimately elected to the papacy, taking the name John. Sexually promiscuous with secret lovers, her fraud was dramatically exposed during a solemn papal procession to the Lateran. The crowds blocked the papal progress in the narrow streets near the basilica of San Clemente, the jostling of the popes horse triggered a premature labour and the ‘popess’ was publicly delivered of child: in most versions of the story the enraged crowd then lynch her.

  The setting for this story was hazy in the extreme – always in the remote past, it was located first in the early twelfth century, but eventually in the year 854 (when in fact Leo IV was still Pope). Medieval storytellers were fascinated by it, for, in the manner of the scurrilous rituals of carnival, its mockery went to the heart of the sacred, turned on their heads all the central affirmations of the reform papacy, and played on some of devout men’s worst fears – a sexually active pope, a woman in the place of the highest authority, deception at the heart of the Church, lawlessness and fraud in the seat of law and truth. No one during the Middle Ages questioned the historicity of the myth, and as the legend established itself it was pressed into service by people with axes to grind and points to prove. William of Ockham, the great fourteenth-century Franciscan philosopher, would use it as a weapon against Pope John XXII when the pope condemned Franciscan teaching on poverty: Ockham argued that the existence of Pope Joan demonstrated that false popes (like John XXII) could deceive almost everyone, yet be no true pope after all.

  So ‘the popess’ became part of the accepted history of the papacy, and her portrait appeared in lists and galleries of past popes (like the one still to be seen in Siena Cathedral). It even came to be believed that every papal coronation contained a solemn verification of the pope’s masculinity. When a new pope took possession of his Cathedral at the Lateran, ancient ceremonial required him to sit briefly on two ancient Roman chairs of porphyry, the ‘sedia stercoraria’, each seat of which was pierced with a hole (no one knows what these holes were actually for, but they were possibly imperial birthing stools or, more probably, ancient Roman bedroom commodes or bidets). By the mid-fifteenth century, travellers and humanist historians were apparently seriously repeating as fact the preposterous tale that when the new pope sat down in the first of these chairs, a junior cardinal approached and knelt in order to reach up under his robes and feel his genitals: the cardinal then cried out ‘Testiculos habet’, and the crowd responded joyfully ‘Deo Gratias’ (‘He does have testicles’, ‘Thanks be to God’). This ludicrous hotchpotch of legend and mis-read ritual was to prove a godsend to the enemies of the papacy, during the debates within the Franciscan order over poverty, in the Conciliar movement and during the Protestant reformation, when much was made of Pope Joan as the archetypical ‘Whore of Babylon’. It would not be finally laid to rest until the mid-seventeenth century, when a Protestant historian, David Blondel, worked patiently through the successive versions of the legend and demonstrated its impossibility from start to finish. But the pull of the story, and its four centuries of survival, depended on the fact that it held a disturbing and distorting mirror up to the institution it satirised. ‘Pope Joan’ was a sardonic commentary on the apparently limitless escalation of the claims – and the reform programme – of the high medieval papacy.

  The second half of the thirteenth century saw a rapid turnover of popes – thirteen between 1252 and 1296, as opposed to the four who reigned between 1216 and 1252. The influx of French cardinals into the college meant that some cardinals were in effect lobbyists for their monarchs. The consequent political polarising of the college into factions led to long and indecisive conclaves, and long vacancies between pontificates – almost three years between the death of Clement IV in 1268 and the election of Gregory X (1271–6). The best Pope of the later thirteenth century, Gregory X, tried to legislate against this at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, by requiring the Conclave to meet behind locked doors within ten days of a pope’s death, and by providing for the systematic reduction of the rations of the cardinals during prolonged conclaves. This produced a short-lived improvement, but meanwhile the cardinals became more and more conscious of their own power, and more concerned to bolster their oligarchy against the papal monarchy.

  This is not to suggest that the popes of the later thirteenth century were without spiritual aspiration or real achievement. Gregory X genuinely longed for the healing of the schism with the East. This, together with the eagerness of the recently restored Eastern Emperor, Michael VIII Paleologus, for papal assistance against the expansionist ambitions of Charles of Anjou, led to a fragile reunion. Greek delegates attended the Second Council of Lyons, and professed their faith in the papal primacy, the Roman doctrine of purgatory and the Filioque. This reconciliation, however, was dictated on the Greek side by political necessity, not conviction, and the Emperor had the greatest difficulty persuading the Byzantine clergy to accept it. Gregory’s less sympathetic successors tried to impose steadily more stringent and humiliating demands on the Greeks: the union did not last.

  At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III embodied much of what was best in the high medieval theory of papal supremacy. At the end of the century Boniface VIII (1294–1303) encapsulated some of its contradictions. Benedetto Caetani was a career cleric, trained in law at Bologna and with a distinguished diplomatic career behind him. His immediate predecessor as pope was the saintly but hopeless monk-hermit Celestine V, elected after more than two years of deadlock in the hope that a saint might transform the Church. Instead the unworldly old man (eighty-five when elected) became the naive stooge of the Angevin King of Naples – seven of his twelve first cardinals were Frenchmen, four of them Sicilian subjects of Charles II.

  Celestine was a visionary, the founder of a brotherhood of hermits with strong links to the radical Franciscans. He therefore represented precisely that dimension of the thirteenth-century Church which most detested the wealth, worldliness and legal and political entanglements of the papacy. His election fed apocalyptic hopes of a Papa Angelicus, a holy and unworldly pope who would cleanse the Church and prepare the world for the advent of Christ. The notion of an unworldly pope, however, was by now almost a contradiction in terms. Three-quarters of a century earlier, Innocent III had managed to hold together hierarchy and char ism, but Celestine’s election highlighted just how incompatible these two visions of the Church had become. Faced w
ith political and financial complexities which prayer and fasting seemed powerless to untangle, Celestine resigned after six months. His abdication speech was written for him by Cardinal Caetani, whom he had consulted about the legality of his resignation, and who was elected in his place. Determined to avoid any danger of schism from the outraged ‘spiritual’ element in the Church who had looked to Celestine to redeem the papacy, Caetani tracked down his predecessor, who had returned to his old life as a hermit, and kept him a prisoner in miserably cramped conditions till his death at the age of ninety.

  Boniface is a mysterious man, proud, ambitious, fierce. He achieved a good deal that is in line with the reforming acts of many of his predecessors, founding a university in Rome, codifying canon law and re-establishing the Vatican Archive and Library. Law did not exhaust his understanding of his office. It was Boniface who declared the first Jubilee or Holy Year in 1300, when tens of thousands of pilgrims converged on Rome to gain indulgences, adding enormously to the prestige of the papacy and the spiritual centrality of Rome (and in the process enriching the Roman basilicas, where the sacristans were said to have had to scoop in the pilgrim offerings with rakes). This promise of ‘full and copious pardon’ to all who visited St Peter and the Lateran after confessing their sins was the most spectacular exercise of the power of the keys since Urban II issued the first Crusade Indulgence, and it caught the imagination of Europe. At any one time throughout the Jubilee Year of 1300 there were said to be up to 200,000 pilgrims in the city, and the Leonine wall round the Vatican had to be breached to allow the crowds to pass through. The poet Dante made the Jubilee pilgrimage, and he set the Divine Comedy at its central point, in Holy Week 1300. In a famous passage in the Inferno he compared the traffic arrangements for the crowds in Hell to the one-way system he had seen in use for the pilgrims crossing the Ponte Sant’ Angelo during this first Jubilee.