A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent design. Constructed in castle style around interior courts, with battlements and twelve-foot-thick walls for defense, it had odd pyramidal chimneys rising from the kitchens, banqueting halls and gardens, money chambers and offices, rose-windowed chapels, a steam room for the Pope heated by a boiler, and a gate opening on the public square where the faithful gathered to watch the Holy Father ride out on his white mule. Here moved the majestic cardinals in their wide red hats, “rich, insolent and rapacious” in Petrarch’s words, vying with each other in the magnificence of their suites. One required ten stables for his horses, and another rented parts of 51 houses to lodge all his retainers.

  Corridors of the palace bustled with notaries and officers of the Curia and legates departing on or returning from their missions. Petitioners and their lawyers waited anxiously in anterooms, pilgrims crowded in the courtyards to receive the pontifical blessing, while through the halls passed the parade of the Pope’s relatives of both sexes in brocades and furs with their attending knights and squires and retainers. The household of sergeants-at-arms, ushers, chamberlains, chaplains, stewards, and servants numbered about 400, all supplied with board, lodging, clothing, and wages.

  Tiled floors were ornamented in designs of flowers, fantastic beasts, and elaborate heraldry. Clement VI, a lover of luxury and beauty who used 1,080 ermine skins in his personal wardrobe, imported Matteo Giovanetti and artists from the school of Simone Martini to paint the walls with scenes from the Bible. The four walls of Clement’s own study, however, were entirely covered by scenes of a noble’s secular pleasures: a stag hunt, falconry, orchards, gardens, fishponds, and a group of ambiguous nude bathers who could be either women or children depending on the eye of the beholder. No religious themes intruded.

  At banquets the Pope’s guests dined off gold and silver plate, seated beneath Flemish tapestries and hangings of silk. Receptions for visiting princes and envoys rivaled the splendors of any secular court. Papal entertainments, fetes, even tournaments and balls, reproduced the secular.

  “I am living in the Babylon of the West,” wrote Petrarch in the 1340s, where prelates feast at “licentious banquets” and ride on snow-white horses “decked in gold, fed on gold, soon to be shod in gold if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.” Though himself something of a lapsed cleric, Petrarch shared the clerical habit of denouncing at double strength whatever was disapproved. Avignon became for him “that disgusting city,” though whether because of worldly corruption or the physical filth and smells of its narrow, overcrowded streets is uncertain. The town, crammed with merchants, artisans, ambassadors, adventurers, astrologers, thieves, prostitutes, and no less than 43 branches of Italian banking houses (in 1327), was not so well equipped as the papal palace for the disposal of sewage. The palace had a tower whose two lower stories contained exclusively latrines. Fitted with stone seats, these were emptied into a pit below ground level that was flushed by water from the kitchen drains and by an underground stream diverted for the purpose. In the town, however, the stench caused the ambassador from Aragon to swoon, and Petrarch to move out to nearby Vaucluse “to prolong my life.”

  More accessible than Rome, Avignon attracted visitors from all over Europe, and its flow of money helped to support artists, writers and scholars, masters of law and medicine, minstrels and poets. If corrupt, it was also Maecenas. Everybody scolded Avignon and everybody came there. St. Brigitta, a widowed Swedish noblewoman who lived in Rome and eloquently deplored the sins of the times, called the papal city “a field full of pride, avarice, self-indulgence, and corruption.” But corruption takes two, and if the papacy sinned, it was not without partners. In the real world of shifting political balances and every ruler’s constant need of money, popes and kings needed each other and made the necessary adjustments. They dealt in territories and sovereignties, men-at-arms, alliances, and loans. A regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king, who soon came to regard it as a right.

  The clergy were partners too. When prelates were gorgeously clad, the lower ranks would not long remain somber. Many were the complaints, like that of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1342, that the clergy were dressing like laymen, in checkerboard squares of red and green, short coats, “notably scant,” with excessively wide sleeves to show linings of fur or silk, hoods and tippets of “wonderful length,” pointed and slashed shoes, jeweled girdles hung with gilt purses. Worse, ignoring the tonsure, they wore beards and long hair to the shoulders contrary to canonical rule, to the “abominable scandal among the people.” Some kept jesters, dogs, and falcons, some went abroad attended by guards of honor.

  Nor could simony stay isolated at the top. When bishops purchased benefices at the price of a year’s income, they passed the cost down, so that corruption spread through the hierarchy from canons and priors to priesthood and cloistered clergy, down to mendicant friars and pardoners. It was at this level that the common people met the materialism of the Church, and none were more crass than the sellers of pardons.

  Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor, in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stuffs or furnishings, grain and fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade.

  The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious, and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function because it shared in the profits.

  The sins of monks and itinerant friars were more disturbing because their pretensions as men of God were higher. They were notorious as seducers of women. Peddling furs and girdles for wenches and wives, and small gentle dogs “to get love of them,” the friar in a 14th century poem “came to our dame when the gode man is from home.”

  He spares nauther for synne ne shame,

  For may he tyl a woman synne

  In priveyte, he will not blynne

  Er he a childe put hir withinne

  And perchance two at ones.

  In the tales of Boccaccio, in the fabliaux of France, in all popular literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke. Priests lived with mistresses or else went in hunt of them. “A priest lay with a lady who was wed to a knight,” begins one tale matter-of-factly. In another, “the priest and his lady went off to bed.” In the nunnery where Piers Plowman served as cook, Sister Pernell was “a priest’s wench” who “bore a child in cherry time.” Boccaccio’s rascally friars were invariably caught in embarrassing situations as victims of their own lechery. In real life their sinfulness was not funny but threatening, for when a friar failed so far in holiness how could he save souls? This sense of betrayal explains why the friars were so often the object of active hostility, sometimes even of physical assault, because, as a chronicle of 1327 stated simply, “they did not behave as friars ought.”

  According to the ideal of St. Francis, they were supposed to wander the world to do good, to walk barefoot among the poor and the outcasts bringing Christian love to the lowest, to beg for the necessaries of life in kind, never in money. By a supreme paradox, the Order that Franci
s founded on rejection of property attracted the support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to offer assurance of holiness. Upon the approach of death, knights and noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit, believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go to hell.

  The Order acquired lands and riches, built itself churches and cloisters, developed its own hierarchy—all the opposite of the founder’s intent. Yet St. Francis had understood the process. Replying to a novice who wished to have a psalter, he once said, “When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate and say to your brother, ‘Brother, bring me my breviary.’ ”

  In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and private funds which they lent at interest. In some they had an allowance of a gallon of ale a day, ate meat, wore jewels and fur-trimmed gowns, and employed servants who in wealthy convents sometimes outnumbered the members. Enjoying the favor of the rich, the Franciscans preached to them and dined with them and took office in noble households as counselors and chaplains. Some still went barefoot among the poor, holding to their role, and were revered for it, but most now wore good leather boots and were not loved.

  Like the pardoner, they bilked the villagers, selling them relics of inspired imagination. Boccaccio’s Friar Cipolla sold one of the Angel Gabriel’s feathers which he said had fallen in the Virgin’s chamber during the Annunciation. As satire, this did not overreach the real friar who sold a piece of the bush from which the Lord spoke to Moses. Some sold drafts on the Treasury of Merit supposed to be stored in Heaven by the Order of St. Francis. Wyclif, on being asked what these parchments were good for, replied: “To covere mustard pottis.” The friars were an element of daily life, scorned yet venerated and feared because they might, after all, have the key to salvation.

  The satire and complaints survive because they are written down. They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not readily dissolve. Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg “during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.” It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter. Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy to dislodge.

  As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to burlesque and unharmed by it. In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy—the curés, subdeacons, vicars, and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-disciplined—whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside out; played dice on the altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was celebrated in nonsensical gibberish; swung censers made of old shoes emitting “stinking smoke”; officiated in the various offices of the priest wearing beast masks and dressed as women or minstrels; sang obscene songs in the choir; howled and hooted and jangled bells while the “Pope” recited a doggerel benediction. At his call to follow him on pain of having their breeches split, all rush violently from the church to parade through the town, drawing the dominus in a cart from which he issues mock indulgences while his followers hiss, cackle, jeer, and gesticulate. They rouse the bystanders to laughter with “infamous performances” and parody preachers in scurrilous sermons. Naked men haul carts of manure which they throw at the populace. Drinking bouts and dances accompany the procession. The whole was a burlesque of the too-familiar, tedious, and often meaningless rituals; a release of “the natural lout beneath the cassock.”

  In daily life the Church was comforter, protector, physician. The Virgin and patron saints gave succor in trouble and protection against the evils and enemies that lurked along every man’s path. Craft guilds, towns, and functions had patron saints, as did individuals. Archers and crossbowmen had St. Sebastian, martyr of the arrows; bakers had St. Honoré, whose banner bore an oven shovel argent and three loaves gules; sailors had St. Nicholas with the three children he saved from the sea; travelers had St. Christopher carrying the infant Jesus on his shoulder; charitable brotherhoods usually chose St. Martin, who gave half his cloak to the poor man; unmarried girls had St. Catherine, supposed to have been very beautiful. The patron saint was an extra companion through life who healed hurts, soothed distress, and in extremity could make miracles. His image was carried on banners in processions, sculpted over the entrance to town halls and chapels, and worn as a medallion on an individual’s hat.

  Above all, the Virgin was the ever-merciful, ever-dependable source of comfort, full of compassion for human frailty, caring nothing for laws and judges, ready to respond to anyone in trouble; amid all the inequities, injuries, and senseless harms, the one never-failing figure. She frees the prisoner from his dungeon, revives the starving with milk from her own breasts. When a peasant mother takes her son, blinded by a thorn in his eye, to the Church of St. Denis, kneels before Our Lady, recites an Ave Maria, and makes the sign of the cross over the child with a sacred relic, the nail of the Saviour, “at once,” reports the chronicler, “the thorn falls out, the inflammation disappears, and the mother in joy returns home with her son no longer blind.”

  A hardened murderer has no less access. No matter what crime a person has committed, though every man’s hand be against him, he is still not cut off from the Virgin. In the Miracles of Notre Dame, a cycle of popular plays performed in the towns, the Virgin redeems every kind of malefactor who reaches out to her through the act of repentance. A woman accused of incest with her son-in-law has procured his assassination by two hired men and is about to be burned at the stake. She prays to Notre Dame, who promptly appears and orders the fire not to burn. Convinced of a miracle, the magistrates free the condemned woman, who, after distributing her goods and money to the poor, enters a convent. The act of faith through prayer was what counted. It was not justice one received from the Church but forgiveness.

  More than comfort, the Church gave answers. For nearly a thousand years it had been the central institution that gave meaning and purpose to life in a capricious world. It affirmed that man’s life on earth was but a passage in exile on the way to God and to the New Jerusalem, “our other home.” Life was nothing, wrote Petrarch to his brother, but “a hard and weary journey toward the eternal home for which we look; or, if we neglect our salvation, an equally pleasureless way to eternal death.” What the Church offered was salvation, which could be reached only through the rituals of the established Church and by the permission and aid of its ordained priests. “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (No salvation outside the Church) was the rule.

  Salvation’s alternative was Hell and eternal torture, very realistically pictured in the art of the time. In Hell the damned hung by their tongues from trees of fire, the impenitent burned in furnaces, unbelievers smothered in foul-smelling smoke. The wicked fell into the black waters of an abyss and sank to a depth proportionate to their sins: fornicators up to the nostrils, persecutors of their fellow man up to the eyebrows. Some were swallowed by monstrous fish, some gnawed by demons, tormented by serpents, by fire or ice or fruits hanging forever out of reach of the starving. In Hell men were naked, nameless, and forgotten. No wonder salvation was important and the Day of Judgment present in every mind. Over the doorway of every cathedral it was carved in vivid reminder, showing the numerous sinners roped and led off by devils toward a flaming cauldron while angels led the fewer elect to bliss in the opposite direction.

  No one doubted in the Middle Ages that t
he vast majority would be eternally damned. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo (Few saved, many damned) was the stern principle maintained from Augustine to Aquinas. Noah and his family were taken to indicate the proportion of the saved, usually estimated at one in a thousand or even one in ten thousand. No matter how few were to be chosen, the Church offered hope to all. Salvation was permanently closed to non-believers in Christ, but not to sinners, for sin was an inherent condition of life which could be canceled as often as necessary by penitence and absolution. “Turn thee again, turn thee again, thou sinful soul,” spoke a Lollard preacher, “for God knoweth thy misgovernance and will not forsake thee. Turn thou to me saith the Lord and I shall receive thee and take thee to grace.”

  The Church gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create. To carve the stone folds of an apostle’s gown, to paste with infinite patience the bright mosaic chips into a picture of winged angels in a heavenly chorus, to stand in the towering space of a cathedral nave amid pillars rising and rising to an almost invisible vault and know this to be man’s work in honor of God, gave pride to the lowest and could make the least man an artist.

  The Church, not the government, sponsored the care of society’s helpless—the indigent and sick, orphan and cripple, the leper, the blind, the idiot—by indoctrinating the laity in the belief that alms bought them merit and a foothold in Heaven. Based on this principle, the impulse of Christian charity was self-serving but effective. Nobles gave alms daily at the castle gate to all comers, in coin and in leftover food from the hall. Donations from all sources poured into the hospitals, favorite recipients of Christian charity. Merchants bought themselves peace of mind for the non-Christian business of making profit by allocating a regular percentage to charity. This was entered in the ledger under the name of God as the poor’s representative. A Christian duty of particular merit was the donation of dowries to enable poor girls to marry, as in the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to “those whom I deflowered, if they can be found.”