by John Kelly
Within days the pogrom spread to neighboring villages: to Digne, Mezel, Apt, Forcalquier, Riez, Moustiers, and La Baume. In some places, the Jews were offered the option of conversion; most chose death. “The insane constancy shown by [the Jews] . . . was amazing,” wrote a chronicler. “[M]others would throw their children into the flames rather than risk them being baptized and then would hurl themselves into the fire . . . to burn with their husbands and children.” On May 14 Dayas Quinoni, a La Baume Jew who had been in the papal city of Avignon when the pogroms broke out, returned home to find his family dead and the local Jewish quarter burned and deserted. “There is no one left but me,” M. Quinoni wrote that night. “. . . I sat down and wept in the bitterness of my soul. Would that the Lord in his mercy allow me to see the consolations of Judah and of Israel . . . and permit me and my descendants to rest there forever.”
Easter week violence against the Jews was a tradition in the Middle Ages. The season, with its echoes of Jewish “complicity” in the Crucifixion, perhaps inevitably stirred hatred in Christian hearts. But the outbursts in Toulon and La Baume were quickly superseded by a new and far more venomous form of anti-Semitism. As the plague swept eastward across France, Germany, and Switzerland in the summer of 1348, rumors began to spread that the mortality was a Jewish plot. In the earliest iterations, the rumors were just that: vague accusations. Christians, it was said, were dying because their wells were being contaminated with a Jewish plague poison.* But during the fall, as the pestilence worsened, the rumors grew increasingly elaborate, detailed, and bizarre—until they constituted a medieval version of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By November 1348 every well-informed citizen in eastern France understood that the plague was not the act of a vengeful God or of infected air, but of an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at achieving world domination. “It is our turn now,” one well poisoner is alleged to have told his Christian interrogators.
Authorities in the Swiss town of Chillon played an important role in promoting the rumors. The confessions they obtained from local Jews in September 1348 gave the plot a persuasive patina of fact. The confessions spoke of a mastermind, a sinister Rabbi Jacob, formerly of Toledo, Spain, now living in eastern France—and a network of agents who purportedly delivered packets of plague poison to Jews throughout Europe. The Chillon conspiracy theorists even created names and personalities for the agents. There was the bullying Provenzal, the kindhearted merchant Agimetus, the maternal Belieta, the compliant barber-surgeon Balavigny, and a clever youngster known simply as “the Jewish boy.” The theorists also created a list of supposedly “contaminated” sites. One was said to be a certain fountain in the German quarter of Venice; another, a public spring in Toulouse; a third, a well near Lake Geneva.
Even the poison used to contaminate the Christian water supply was described in meticulous detail. It was “about the size of an egg,” except when it was the “size of a nut” or a “large nut,” “a fist” or “two fists”—and it came packaged in “a leather pouch,” except when it was packaged in a “linen cloth,” “a rag,” or a “paper coronet”; and the poison was variously made from lizards, frogs, and spiders—when it was not made from the hearts of Christians and from Holy Communion wafers.
Jews who were questioned in connection with the well-poisoning plot were required to swear to a special “Jewish” version of the interrogation oath. “If what you say is not true and right,” the interrogator would say to the prisoner, “then, may the earth envelop you and swallow you up . . . and may you become as leprous as Naaman and Gehazi, and may calamity strike you that the Israelite people escaped as they journeyed from Egypt’s land. And may a bleeding and flowing come forth from you and never cease as your people wished upon themselves when they condemned God, Jesus Christ.”
Special “Jewish” tortures were also available to interrogators. One technique was to place a crown of thorns on a prisoner’s head, then smash it into the skull with a mailed fist or a blunt instrument. Another was to place a rope of thorns between a Jewish prisoner’s legs and then yank it up into the crotch and scrotum.
Between the summer of 1348 and 1349, an unknown but large number of European Jews were exterminated. Some were marched into public bonfires, others burned at the stake, still others barbecued on grills or bludgeoned to death, stuffed into empty wine casks and rolled into the Rhine. In some localities, the killings were preceded by show trials; in other cases, there were no legal proceedings—sometimes not even an accusation. Jews were killed simply as a prophylactic measure.
The pogroms around Marseille not only pointed to this new form of plague-related anti-Semitism, they also heralded an important change in the nature of French anti-Semitism. Traditionally, Langue d’Oc—roughly, Mediterranean France—was the land of the troubadour; it was cosmopolitan, romantic, poetic, sensual, and tolerant. Jews had a long, mostly happy relationship with the south. Langue d’Oui—roughly, Atlantic France—was the land of the knight; it was ambitious, aggressive, resolute, and intolerant. The pogroms in the southern villages of La Baume, Apt, and Mezel were a signal that this historic division was coming to an end—that the north, which had long had political designs on the tolerant, more cosmopolitan south, was beginning to absorb the southern region culturally as well militarily. The torchbearing citizens of Toulon and La Baume were acting in the grand tradition of Atlantic French anti-Semitism, a tradition that included the 1240 trial of the Talmud—Parisians celebrated its conviction for blasphemy and heresy by burning fourteen cartloads of Talmudic works—a mass expulsion of the Jews in 1306, and the violent pogroms of the post–Great Famine era, which ended with nearly every Jew between Bordeaux and Albi dead.
The singular achievement of Black Death Marseille was to resist the wave of anti-Semitism and remain true to its Mediterranean heritage of tolerance. During the plague, the local Jewish community of 2,500 experienced no harassment or attack. Moreover, as the pogroms mounted in ferocity, Marseille gained a reputation as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere.
Avignon, January 1348
In Avignon—where there were seven churches, seven monasteries, seven nunneries, and eleven houses of ill repute—the plague arrived in bitter January of 1348, filled the local cemeteries to capacity, and further damaged the already tarnished reputation of the papacy.
In February 1300, when Boniface VIII, the last of the great medieval popes, stepped onto a Vatican balcony and proclaimed 1300 a Jubilee Year, “in order that . . . [Rome] be more devoutly frequented by the faithful,” the papacy had seemed invincible. But the aura of omnipotence was an illusion. Even as Boniface stood basking in the adulation of the faithful that wintry February morning, history was working against the Church, and if the pope was still oblivious to the fact, his longtime nemesis Philip the Fair was not. Within a decade “the august and sovereign house of France,” the new power in Europe, would humiliate the papacy not once but twice. In 1303 Philip’s agents arrested Boniface at his summer palace, an experience the aged pope found so shocking, he dropped dead a few weeks later. Then, in 1308, Boniface’s successor, the pliant, jolly Gascon Clement V, was bullied into acting as Philip’s surrogate in the Templars affair. After fifty-four members of the order had been executed in the squares of Paris for drinking the powdered remains of their illegitimate children and for other crimes “most wicked” and of a “burning shame to heaven,” Clement, with Philip at his side, announced that the bulk of the Templars’ treasury would be awarded to the French king, in recognition of his efforts in bringing the order to justice.
At his execution, Grand Master de Molay did not forget to thank Clement for his participation in the order’s demise. Legend has it that as he went up in flames, the grand master invited the pope to join him and Philip in hell.
Nothing the French Crown did to the papacy, however, was as damaging as what the papacy did to itself in Avignon. The concept of the pope-out-of-Rome was not new when Clement V fled to the Provençal count
ryside in 1308. Between 1100 and 1304 popes had spent more time out of the Holy City than in it. But the Avignon exile was different. First, there was the suspicion that Clement would not come to Rome because he was unwilling to leave his beautiful French mistress, the Countess of Perigord. Secondly, there was Avignon itself: full of burned-out houses—a legacy of the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusades—and crooked little streets, swept by violent winds, and surrounded by crumbling walls, the town had all Rome’s decrepitude, discomfort, and filth, but none of its historic glamour and authority or its infrastructure. The close proximity of the French Crown—Provence was still nominally independent—also enhanced the impression that the pope was becoming a French puppet.
The most damaging aspect of the Avignon papacy, however, was its utter lack of moral seriousness. Clement V and his successors transformed the Church into a spiritual Pez dispenser. The fertile minds at the curia had managed to create an indulgence for every imaginable situation and every imaginable sin. For a price, an illegitimate child could be made legitimate, as could the right to trade with the infidel, or marry a first cousin, or buy stolen goods. Dispensations were also created for special niche markets such as nuns who wished to keep maids, converted Jews who wished to visit unconverted parents, and people who wanted to be buried in two places (a wish that required cutting the deceased in half). The opulent lifestyle of the Avignon popes added further to the air of moral squalor that hung over the town. “The simple fishermen of Galilee” are now “clad in purple and gold,” complained Petrarch.
A dinner party Clement V gave in 1308 is characteristic of the imperial style of the Avignon papacy. Under exquisite Flemish tapestries and silk hangings, a staff of four knights and sixty-two squires served thirty-six papal guests a dinner of nine courses on plates of silver and gold. Each course consisted of three elaborate
pieces montées, or centerpieces, such as a pastry castle made of roast stag, roebucks, and hares. Between the fourth and fifth courses, the guests presented the pope with a magnificent white charger valued at 400 florins (one florin could buy a man a good sheep) and two rings, one with an enormous sapphire, the other with an enormous topaz. To show his appreciation, Clement gave each guest a special papal ring. During a second interval between the fifth and sixth courses, a fountain spouting five different kinds of wine was rolled out. The margins of the fountain were garnished with peacocks, pheasants, partridges, and cranes. At an interval between the seventh and eighth courses, guests were treated to an indoor jousting match. Following the ninth course and a concert, dessert was served. It consisted of two edible trees; one, silver-colored, bore gilded apples, peaches, pears, figs, and grapes; the other, garden green, was laden with candied fruits. The evening concluded with another round of entertainment. A pair of hands clapped, and the chef and his staff of thirty came racing out of the kitchen to perform a dance for the papal guests.
John XXII, Clement V’s successor, was more frugal, but only because the spindly, pinch-faced John preferred counting his money to spending it. In an idle moment one scholar calculated that John’s personal fortune of twenty-five million florins weighed ninety-six tons.
Benedict XII, John’s successor, returned the Avignon papacy to the tradition of opulent magnificence. On a country walkabout in 1340, Benedict’s papal party was led by a white charger surrounded by several grooms; next came a chaplain, squires holding aloft three red hats on poles, two pontifical barbers carrying red cases containing papal vestments and tiaras, a subdeacon with a cross, and a mule with the Corpus Christi. In the middle of the procession rode Benedict, mounted on a white horse, shielded from the noonday sun by a canopy held aloft by six nobles, and followed by a squire with a papal mounting stool, should the pope wish to dismount. The tail of the procession was made up of assorted chamberlains, stewards, prelates, abbots, and, at the very rear, like an ambulatory exclamation mark, a papal almoner, tossing coins to the crowd.
However, compared to his successor, even Benedict looked parsimonious.
“No sovereign exceeded him in expenditure, nor bestowed his favors with greater generosity,” wrote an observer of Cola di Rienzo’s former patron, Clement VI. “The sumptuousness of his furniture, the delicacy of his table, the splendor of his court, filled with knights and squires of the ancient nobility, was unequalled.” And that was barely the half of it. Clement VI had a personal wardrobe of 1,080 ermine skins, delighted in games of “chance and in horses,” owned “the finest stud to be procured,” and, despite clucking tongues, kept “his palace . . . open to the fair sex at all sorts of hours.”
On misty mornings, the magnificent papal palace at Avignon rose above a surrounding belt of oak-filled and dew-splashed meadows like a spectral presence: a stately jumble of rocket-shaped turrets, wandering rooftops, and pyramid-shaped chimneys floating atop a pigeon gray cloud.
“Valde misterioseum et pulcrum”: very mysterious and beautiful, declared one visitor. “Of solemn and wondrous beauty in its dwellings and of immense fortitude in its towers and walls,” declared another. The solemn magnificence of the palace was enhanced by its setting on a rock above the Rhône and by vast, cathedrallike corridors with vaulted windows, where red-hatted cardinals glided across checkerboard patterns of shadow and light like living chess pieces.
Daily, live saltwater fish from Marseille, freshwater fish from the Rhône, sheep and cattle from the Alpine pastures, and fowl and vegetables from the Provençal countryside flowed to the papal dining table. The palace also had a staff of more than four hundred, who worked in several kitchens, dining halls, money chambers; a papal steam room with a boiler; a zoo for the papal lion and the papal bear; and a large contingent of papal relatives, most of whom dressed in expensive brocade and fur and were usually accompanied by a knight or two.
When asked why he was more profligate than his predecessor, Clement VI replied haughtily, “My predecessors did not know how to be popes.”
If everyone above the rank of bishop lived in opulence in Avignon, nearly everyone below that rank lived in squalor. As scholar Morris Bishop has noted, moving the enormous papal bureaucracy, the curia, to semirural Avignon was akin to moving the United Nations to a small New England town. The almost overnight influx of thousands of new residents strained the local infrastructure, then broke it. Petrarch, a sometime resident, complained that Avignon was “the most dismal, crowded and turbulent [town] in existence, a sink overflowing with all the gathered filth of the world. What words can express how one is nauseated by the rank-smelling alleys, the obscene pigs and snarling dogs, . . . the rumble of wheels shaking the walls, and the carts blocking the twisting streets. So many races of men, such horrible beggars, such arrogance of the rich!” The mistral, the Provençal version of the sirocco, was another bane; it scattered papers, flared up skirts, stung eyes, and left everything covered with a fine coat of dust, but few complained because, as a local saying went:
“Avenio, cum vento fastidiosa, sine vento venenosa”—“Avignon, unpleasant with a wind, poisonous without it.”
Papal bureaucrats suffered most from the lack of adequate infrastructure, says Professor Bishop. They shivered through winters in unheated, drafty buildings; sweltered through summers in shuttered rooms—to protect piles of paper from the disruptive mistral; and worked in semidarkness all year round. Beeswax candles were too expensive for routine use, tallow candles smelled awful and required constant trimming of the wick, while oil lamps lacked sufficient illuminating power for office work. Each evening, joints aching and eyes strained, the bureaucrats of the curia would arise from their stools and descend into Avignon’s streets, and, with no sights to see or friends to visit, head for the local taverns to drink and wench. Residents boasted that while the Holy City had only two whorehouses, Avignon had eleven.
“A field full of pride, avarice, self-indulgence and corruption,” declared St. Birgitta of Sweden. “The Babylon of the West,” Petrarch agreed.
If it was fashionable to criticize Avignon, it w
as also fashionable to come and gawk.
Crossing the bridge at Avignon on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1345, a visitor might encounter any number of celebrities, including Petrarch himself. As his graceful figure emerges from an avenue of oaks near the Rue des Lices, where papal employees and the native Avignonnais live, the poet looks as his friend Boccaccio described him: light and agile of step, cheerful of gaze, and round and handsome of face. Vain about his supposed lack of vanity, Petrarch, in
Letter to Posterity, writes, “I can’t boast of remarkable good looks”; then, a few sentences later, he boasts about his “brown, sparkling eyes” and “high complexion neither light nor dark” to the reader.
On such a pretty morning, Petrarch could be thinking about almost anything, but probably he is thinking about Laura, the companion of his soul. The poet may be on his way to the studio of Simone Martini, who is painting a pocket portrait of Laura for him or planning a nocturnal visit to her home to swoon under the balcony—or a stroll through the gardens, where the pair sometimes walked and where once they quarreled.
There is no peace; I am too weak for war,
fear and hope; a burning brand, I freeze.
. . . This is my state my lady; It’s your doing.
Linger on the bridge for a while longer, and a visitor might see Laura herself. Like other fashionable Avignon women, she is wearing a