The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

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  AVIGNON AND THE SCHISM

  1305 A conclave meeting in Perugia elects Bertrand de Goth, archbishop of Bordeaux, as Pope Clement V. He decides to be crowned in Lyon. Since Rome is riven by aristocratic infighting, Clement keeps his court in Poitiers.

  1307 Fire destroys the Lateran Palace, Rome.

  1309 Clement removes his court to Avignon.

  1377 Gregory XI returns the papal court to Rome.

  1378 Bartolomeo Prignano, archbishop of Bari, is elected as Pope Urban VI by a conclave split on a Franco-Italian divide. Dissenting French cardinals withdraw to Anagni and elect Robert of Geneva, archbishop of Cambrai, as the anti-pope Clement VII who establishes a rival papal court in Avignon.

  1378–1417 The Western schism: five anti-popes resident in Avignon maintain their legitimacy in opposition to the popes established in Rome.

  1417 The general Church council meeting at Constance (1414–18) sets aside the rights of all papal claimants and elects Oddone Colona, archpriest of the Lateran basilica, as Pope Martin V.

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  THE IMPERIAL PAPACY

  The papacy of Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) marks the high point in the effective assertion of papal authority, with Lotario dei Conti bringing his legal scholarship to bear on the definition of the papal claim to universal rule. All power came from God, and all rulers were therefore answerable to the pope who was God’s representative on Earth, the chosen instrument of the divine will and autocratic ruler of an universal Christian empire which was superior to all secular expressions of might. The holder of the papal office was therefore not just the high priest of God’s Church but also humanity’s supreme judge in legal cases and a universal king whose majesty dwarfed all secular princes. It was this plenitudo potestatis or fullness of power that distinguished God’s vice-regent and gave him the authority as priest-emperor to mediate between God and man: “God is honored in us when we are honored, and in us is God despised when we are despised.”

  This exalted conception of papal authority shaped the views of Benedetto Caetani, a scion of the minor nobility and whose family owned estates in the region of Anagni to the southeast of Rome. Caetani, like Pope Innocent, was trained as a jurist and his career as a member of the curia was a distinguished one. After becoming a cardinal in 1281 he often worked on diplomatic missions as a papal legate sent to the royal courts of Western Europe. Caetani was elected to the papacy in 1294 as Boniface VIII, and his statement “Ego sum Caesar, ego imperator” showed the extent of Innocent III’s influence on Caetani’s frame of mind. Catastrophe—both personal and institutional—marked Boniface’s papacy, and although his own lack of judgment contributed to that collapse the major reason lies within the evolution of European power politics that had moved decisively against the idea of a monarchically supreme papacy. Clericis laicos, a bull issued by Boniface in 1296, showed his readiness to confront the kings of France and England over the issue of taxing the clergy.

  CLERICIS LAICOS

  BELOW Pope Boniface VIII and the Sacred College of Cardinals are depicted in this 14th-century version of Liber Sextus Decretalium, a collection of papal legislation first issued in 1298.

  Popes had long since allowed kings to tax the clergy in order to raise money for papal-sponsored crusades, but Clericis laicos made the strident assertion that papal approval was always necessary before kings could even think of diverting Church revenue to secular purposes. In retaliation Philip IV forbade the export of bullion from his territories, and supplies of French money to the curia in Rome dried up in the late 1290s. The extravagant assertion in the 1296 bull that the laity en masse had always been hostile to the clergy was an example of the papacy striking attitudes, and in the following year Boniface was forced to concede that kings could tax the clergy in circumstances of national emergency. It had already been necessary for Boniface to explain to France’s Philip IV that none of his statements applied to customary feudal taxes due to the king from Church lands.

  Papal self-confidence was, however, boosted by the success of the jubilee year in 1300, a tradition instituted by Boniface and in the course of which pilgrims who came to Rome were assured pardon and remission of their sins. The pope was therefore in no mood to compromise when the news arrived of a major attack by Philip on Bernard Saisset, one of Boniface’s key supporters in the French Church. Saisset was a Languedoc aristocrat steeped in his region’s culture and language. In his years as abbot of St. Antonin in Pamiers from 1268, and then as bishop of the local see since 1295, he had led the local resistance to the French monarchy—an institution that he and his followers regarded as an alien and northern Frankish force bent on destroying the liberties and customs of the south. Philip had Saisset arrested as a treasonous supporter of Occitan independence, and the bishop was charged in October 1301. But before any further judicial proceedings could take place Saisset would need to be deprived of his see by Boniface and thereby stripped of clerical protection. Only then could he be tried for treason. Boniface unsurprisingly refused Philip’s demands in this regard and insisted that Saisset be released and sent to Rome where he would face any judicial investigation.

  DISPUTES BETWEEN KING AND PAPACY

  By the end of 1301 relations between pope and king had broken down entirely. The public letter issued in December was entitled Ausculta fili (“Listen, my son”) and told the king: “Let no one persuade you that you have no superior … for he is a fool who so thinks.” At the same time Boniface announced that a council of the French bishops would be held the following November in Rome. Philip retaliated by holding his own assembly on Church affairs in Paris in April 1302, and the clergy and laity who obeyed his summons to attend rejected the notion—not itself advanced by Boniface—that the pope was France’s feudal overlord. On November 18, 1302, in response to the Paris assembly, Boniface issued the papal bull Unam Sanctam. Its statement that “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature should be subject to the Roman pontiff” was an extreme declaration of the papacy’s supremacy as both a spiritual and a temporal institution. Following the bull’s release the pope contemplated further measures, including Philip’s excommunication. The king then summoned another anti-papal assembly and that body, attended by senior French ecclesiastics, gave vent to a collective rage accusing Boniface of idolatry and heresy.

  Philip had by now decided that only Boniface’s removal from office could resolve matters. Guillaume de Nogaret, a former professor of jurisprudence at Montpellier and senior adviser to the king, persuaded Philip that Boniface should be seized and brought to France where a special council of the Church would then depose him. It was a risky venture, and Nogaret had to proceed in secrecy. He first gathered a band of mercenaries in the Apennines and made contact with the Colonna family who were bitter enemies of Boniface’s clan, the Caetani. Sciarrillo Colonna, whose uncle and brother had been deprived of their positions in the College of Cardinals by Boniface, joined the group of some 2000 soldiers led by Nogaret. On September 7, 1303 they arrived at Pope Boniface’s family palace in Anagni where he was seized and subjected to three days imprisonment, beating and humiliation. The mob stopped just short of killing him. Sciarrillo is said to have hit the pope in the face, and that “slap of Anagni” became a Europe-wide cause célèbre.

  ABOVE This fresco from the Duomo of Florence shows Dante Alighieri holding a copy of his Divine Comedy. He stands symbolically under Heaven, between the gates of Hell, the mountain of Purgatory and the walls of Florence.

  Anagni had also been the home town of Innocent III, and it was in the local cathedral that the pope had excommunicated Frederick II in September 1227. It was an all too appropriate setting, therefore, for the humiliation of the papacy by a secular power that was consigning Innocent’s elaborate doctrines to history. Even Dante Alighieri, no friend of the pope and a fierce opponent of the notion that the papacy was a universal monarchy, was appalled by Boniface’s humiliation. De Monarchia, written in 1312–13, is a co
nsidered rejection of theocracy and a defense of the imperial power’s autonomy. Both emperor and pope, Dante maintained, had been given power by God to rule over their respective domains. But he still viewed the pope as exercising a spiritual power derived from God, and the repugnance the poet felt at the shameful treatment of Boniface is given a literary form in the Divine Comedy’s description of a new Pilate imprisoning the vicar of Christ (Purgatorio, XX, vv. 85–93). The local population at Anagni rose up and released Boniface, who returned to Rome a few days after his release. But the ordeal had badly shaken up the 78-year-old pontiff, and he died a month later.

  The election of the very pliant Clement V in 1305 signified a papal capitulation to French force, and the pope obliged Philip by supporting the campaign of persecution he launched in 1307 against the French members of the order of the Knights Templar. Philip nonetheless pursued his vendetta against Boniface beyond the grave. In 1309 he persuaded the pope to instigate postmortem judicial proceedings to investigate charges of heresy and sodomy against Boniface. It was not unusual for opponents of Philip’s royal will to be accused of sodomy—as in the case of the Knights Templar—but the Church council that met at Vienne in 1311 dropped all charges against Boniface for lack of evidence.

  BELOW The Papal Palace in Avignon, a fortress-like structure designed in the Gothic style, was built in the mid-14th century to house the pope and his court.

  THE PAPACY AT AVIGNON

  In 1309 Clement moved the papal court to Avignon. Avignon was a self-governing city located within another enclave—the lands of the comtat or county of Venaissin. The comtat had been inherited as its possession by the papacy in 1274, and both territories came under the over-lordship of the counts of Provence. Since the days of Charles of Anjou, the junior, or Angevin, branch of the French royal house had ruled the county of Provence. In the early 14th century these Capetian-Angevins were also rulers of the southern Italian mainland as kings of Naples.

  Joan I, queen of Naples, sold Avignon to the papacy in 1348, with the result that both comtats then formed a unified papal domain. The region of Avignon therefore did not form part of the French Crown’s territorial holdings, but the French influence on the papacy in the years of its exile from Rome was profound, both politically and culturally. French cardinals were the dominant force in the running of the curia, and the rituals of the papal court imitated those adopted by French kings. The austere magnificence of the new papal palace at Avignon, built during a quarter of a century from the late 1330s onward, was the setting for one of Europe’s most lavish courtly societies, with the papacy’s zealous emphasis on a centralized approach to the raising of revenue helping to pay for the splendor.

  The system of benefices—the income enjoyed by the holder of an ecclesiastical position—could be abused with candidates buying posts (a practice known as simony). Spiritual duties might then be farmed out to incompetents or not performed at all, and there were plenty of opportunities for enjoying the fruits of more than one office (pluralism). The tithe system was a venerable one by c.1300, but it was the Avignon papacy that systematized the annates by which the income gained in the first year of holding a high office, such as that of bishop, was remitted to the papacy. The Avignon Exchange was one of Europe’s first foreign exchange markets, with agents of the great Italian banking houses acting as intermediaries between the Apostolic Camera (the papacy’s central board of finance), the papacy’s creditors and also its debtors—those who remitted to it the taxes and tributes. Regions that lacked an organized money market—Scandinavia, for example, and most of central and Eastern Europe—still sent coined money to Avignon by land or by sea, though these were precarious methods.

  A BACKLASH BEGINS

  A reaction against the papal lushness was not slow in coming, with the followers of John Wycliff (c.1324–84) in England, the Hussites in Bohemia and the groups of the Fraticelli in Italy registering their revulsion at the parade of riches, and preaching a return to apostolic values of poverty and simplicity of life. There were intellectual critiques, too. Defensor Pacis (1324), by Marsilio of Padua (c.1275–c.1342)), goes beyond Dante’s hostility to a monarchical papacy and seeks to justify the emperor’s supremacy over the pope. In 1328 the English philosopher and Franciscan William Ockham (c.1288—c.1348) had to flee Avignon, where he had been teaching, after concluding that the papacy was in error by not following the mendicant poverty of Christ and his disciples. Ockham’s Dialogus (1332–48) is a major work of political theory with its emphasis on property rights, rejection of absolutist monarchy and the advocacy of limited constitutional government.

  Both Ockham and Marsilio were excommunicated on account of their writings, whose political context is supplied by the conflict between Pope John XXII (r. 1316–34) and the emperor Louis IV (r. 1328–47) who revived an ancient debate by rejecting the pope’s accustomed right to crown an emperor. Backed by the German nobility, Louis invaded Italy with an army in 1327, and on entering Rome he installed the anti-pope Nicholas whose brief period of influence (1328–29) anticipated the later schism. This episode inevitably made the papacy even more dependent on French support, and Clement VI (r. 1342–52), a former archbishop of Rouen, excommunicated Louis in 1346.

  Clement’s bull Unigenitus (1343) justified papal “indulgences,” which relieved the penitent of some of the temporal punishments for sins committed—and that system lent itself to later abuse by professional “pardoners” who sold indulgences. But although sanctity might not have been one of his attributes, Clement was a keen patron of musicians and composers, and it was he who commissioned the paintings on the walls of two of the papal palace’s chapels.

  Pope Gregory XI (r. 1370–78) had the wit to see that the papacy needed to be in Rome if it was to retain its authority in Italy. In reaching this conclusion he was much influenced by Catherine of Siena, a Dominican nun and prodigious correspondent whose letters advocating the pope’s return were sent to the clerical and lay leaders of Italian opinion. However, the subsequent Western schism of 1378 to 1417 did great damage to the idea of a universal Church, with England, the empire, Poland and northern Italy supporting the pope in Rome, while France, the Spanish kingdoms and the kingdom of Naples backed the Avignon anti-popes.

  ABOVE An early 15th-century woodcut of The Pardoner from the Ellesmere Chaucer, an illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

  In the early 15th century the conciliar movement sought to renew the Church by locating its authority within representative councils whose meetings would supplement the traditional role of the papacy. But despite the return to Rome, and the presence once again of just one “supreme pontiff,” the papacy looked increasingly like one other European power jostling for position among more formidable competitors.

  PETRARCH—CHAMPION OF ROME’S RENAISSANCE

  Critical accounts of the papacy’s period in Avignon started early and many take their cue from the Italian poet Petrarch who, while staying in the city in the 1340s, wrote: “I am astounded to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations.”

  Petrarch’s polemicism ignores the fact that many Avignon popes were able administrators. John XXII (r. 1316–34) for example sanitized Church finances, and Benedict XI (r. 1334–42) campaigned against clerical corruption. Successive Avignon popes, seeking to defuse the persistent disputes between French and Italian cardinals, built up the curia as the Church’s central administration. Nepolistic appointments were sometimes made as a result. Increasing bureaucracy and centralization were the unintended consequences of the papacy’s attempt at reforming itself.

  Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was born in Arezzo he was partly brought up in Avignon where his father, a lawyer, had moved the family in order to be near the papal court that he found to be a lucrative source of business. After a period spent studying law (a profession he loathed) at Montpellier and Bologna, Petrarch moved back to Avignon in the mid-1320s, and by c.1330 he was work
ing in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. But it was Rome that drew him, and a visit to the city in 1337 inspired Petrarch to write L’Africa, an epic poem composed in Latin and which described the defeat by Scipio Africanus of the Carthaginian general Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). The Colonna family in Rome liked the poem, and Petrarch benefited from their patronage while working on the project. The theme first came to him while walking in the mountains of the Vaucluse near Avignon, and Petrarch’s treatment of Scipio as a heroic figure is central to the poet’s artistic vision of the glories of the Roman past together with the urgent contemporary need to revive the classical tradition in the arts and letters. A comparison between the decadence of Avignon, a city of “licentious banquets” and “foul sloth” in Petrarch’s words, and the sublimity of Rome is therefore implicit to his programmatic account of a “renaissance.” L’Africa was dedicated to King Robert of Naples, who liked it enough to award Petrarch with a laurel crown in 1341. The ceremony, held in Rome on Easter Sunday, consciously evoked the emperor Augustus’s patronage of Horace, Ovid and Virgil. Ceremonial trumpets sounded, the king clad his laureate poet in a special robe, and Petrarch’s speech of acceptance would in time be seen as a manifesto for the Italian renaissance. This was a trionfo inconceivable in Avignon, Petrarch’s “Babylon of the West.”

  Petrarch’s statue stands outside the Uffizi Palace in Florence.

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE