Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion
Page 22
Paris preacher: Haimo, Vita S. Abbonis, IX, col. 397; cf. Abbo, Ep. X, PL. cxxxix. 471. On the year 1000, see Plaine.
Panic of 1009–10: Glaber, Hist., III. 7, pp. 71–2. Adémar, Chron., III. 48, 68, pp. 171, 194. Vita Gauzlini, III, ed. P. Ewald, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, iii (1887–8), p. 353. On Raymond’s pilgrimage, M-A-F. de Gaujal, Etudes historiques sur le Rouergue, vol. ii, Paris, 1858, p. 38.
21 Panic of 1033: Glaber, Hist., III. 3, IV. praefat., 5, pp. 62, 90,103–6. On Glaber’s own feelings, see Petit. GC. ii. 105 (instr. XXXIX), 24 Oct. 1036 (Hictor). J. Doinel (ed.), ‘Un pèlerinage á Jérusalem dans la première moitié du xie siècle’, BEC. Ii (1890), pp. 204–6 (Hervé). Cf. Cartulaire de Conques, nos. 419, 453, pp. 308–9, 328–9.
Panic of 1064–5: Vita Altmanni Ep. Pataviensis, III, MGH. SS. xii. 230; Annales Altahenses Maiores, p. 66; and see Eicken, p. 317. Millenarian formulae suddenly appear in Limousin charters of this year, e.g. Chartes, chroniques, et mémoriaux pour servir á l’histoire de la Marche et du Limousin, ed. A. Leroux and A. Bosvieux, Tulle, 1886, p. 13 (no. 9).
22 Provencals in 1099: Raymond of Aguilers, Hist. Francorum, XX, p. 296. ‘Tell me then …’: Peter Damian, De Laude Flagellorum (Opusc. XLIII), IV, PL. cxlv. 682–3.
23 William of Hirsau: Haimo, Vita Willelmi Hirsaugiensis, XXI, MGH. SS. xii. 218.
CHAPTER IX
THE LEGACY OF THE CRUSADES
The first crusade is the central event in the history of mediaeval Christianity. In proclaiming the holy war at the council of Clermont in 1095, Urban II promised salvation to a world obsessed with its own sinfulness. ‘God has invented the crusade’, Guibert reflected, ‘as a new way for the knightly order and the vulgar masses to atone for their sins.’ In the two centuries which followed, the crusade offered a route to salvation which eclipsed every other spiritual exercise. In the celebrated phrase of Gibbon, the pope had unwittingly ‘touched upon a nerve of exquisite feeling’. Yet, although it was born in the mood of intense spiritual feeling which hung over the eleventh century, the crusading movement was ultimately to destroy the spiritual values of Christian Europe. Those who fought on the crusades or contributed to their cost, received a ‘quantum of salvation’ which was precisely defined and measured. In the course of time their rights and duties were embodied in the codes of canon and civil law. This uncompromising precision greatly simplified the moral values of Christendom, and it was without doubt the root cause of the astonishing success of crusading preachers from Peter the Hermit to Jacques de Vitry. The crusades brought a new formality to the notion of pilgrimage, a formality which radically altered its character. Thus the doctrine of indulgences, whose development was greatly assisted by the crusades, transformed the pilgrim’s journey into a ritual, devoid of the intensely personal and spiritual quality of the pilgrimages of the eleventh century. The enforcement of the crusading vow became the principal method of recruiting crusaders, and in its wake came an apparatus of dispensations and financial commutations with far-reaching consequences for the spiritual life of the west.
These symptoms affected every aspect of spiritual life in varying degrees. Pilgrimages were, perhaps, affected more than any other because the crusaders regarded themselves as pilgrims, and in contemporary eyes, so they were. They shared the same hopes of spiritual rebirth, performed the same rites, enjoyed the same legal privileges and expected the same esteem from their fellow men. They were surprised and angry when the inhabitants of Asia Minor refused to sell them food ‘taking us to be no pilgrims but mere bandits and plunderers’. Moreover, the early crusades were joined not only by ‘armed pilgrims’ of this sort but by crowds of unarmed hangers-on who travelled in the unshakeable conviction that God would reward their piety by delivering Jerusalem into their hands without a battle. The expeditions of 1096 and 1146 were both accompanied by a lunatic fringe which castigated in violent terms the bearing of any arms at all. This fifth column was brutally excluded from the later crusades, but their ideal of conquest by holiness alone lived on. Even the sober Jacques de Vitry believed that the crusaders had lost Jerusalem on account of their degenerate and sinful ways. The notion of the true crusader remained inseparable from that of the pilgrim.
The Pilgrim’s Vow
‘Is there anything that a man can do to atone for a vow unfulfilled?’ asked Dante of Beatrice in Paradise; ‘nothing’, she replied, ‘for when you consent, God consents, and nothing can stand in place of God’s consent.’
Though the vow of pilgrimage was as old as pilgrimage itself, the age of its greatest impact began with Urban II’s momentous pronouncement at Clermont. Towards the end of his speech, the pope required every crusader to swear a solemn oath to fulfill his pilgrimage and, when he had raised his hearers to a high pitch of emotion, the pope had crosses quickly distributed among the crowd ‘for whoever accepted this sign … could never go back on his decision.’ Fifty years later St. Bernard too had crosses sewn to the tunics of his audience when he was preaching the second crusade at Vézelay. In ‘taking the cross’ the pilgrim, often unwittingly, passed a point of no return. So much so that a thirteenth-century satirist warned his readers against attending revivalist meetings lest they should suddenly find themselves ‘imprisoned by crosses’.
Canon law prescribed that no one could break a vow of pilgrimage and be saved. Whether the culprit was a peaceful pilgrim or an armed crusader was immaterial. The vow was enforced by excommunication and in parts of Europe failure to fulfil it was punished by both secular and ecclesiastical courts. Such sanctions were rarely necessary in the twelfth century, but as enthusiasm for the crusade began to wane, so the authorities became more vigorous in their attempts to enforce vows. The fourth crusade, which developed into a war against the Christian empire of Byzantium, was the first to encounter really serious recruiting problems. Innocent III sternly reminded the Hungarian king of his crusading vow. The doge of Venice was informed that his salvation should be regarded as unlikely ‘if, ignoring the wrath of God, you fail to do as you are told.’ The fifth crusade drew a similar series of testy letters from Honorius III. The tardiness of the emperor Frederick II in fulfilling his vow involved him in a prolonged dispute with the papacy which culminated in his excommunication.
In some circumstances a pilgrim might even be bound by the vow of another. In a letter to duke Andrew of Hungary, Innocent III declared in general terms that if a pilgrim died before fulfilling his vow, his heir might be made to do it for him. This ambitious idea cannot have been enforced in practice, but it had a certain moral authority even when the pilgrim was not a crusader. In the 1170s a parish priest in Lincolnshire was cured of a fatal illness after two women had vowed in his name to visit the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury. A vision of St. Thomas made it quite clear that he was bound by the vow: ‘others promised for you; the fulfilment of their promise is your duty.’
Until the thirteenth century, these stern rules admitted few exceptions. It was agreed that vows made in childhood were not binding, and Alexander III formally declared this to be a principle of the canon law. Would-be crusaders who were prevented by illness or some other impediment had always been allowed to send a substitute, as Thierry, duke of Lorraine, did in 1096. Such dispensations were common enough in the twelfth century, and in 1200 Innocent III laid down a procedure for granting them. The procedure applied to crusaders and non-crusaders alike, but in the course of the thirteenth century a distinction was gradually recognized. The canonist Henry of Susa appreciated that there was a difference between ‘pilgrims who fight and pilgrims who pray’. In practice an ordinary pilgrim obtained his dispensation without much difficulty.
As dispensations became increasingly common, the crusading vow imperceptibly ceased to be a spiritual act. The growing difficulty of recruiting volunteers made the thirteenth-century crusades dependent to some extent on expensive mercenaries. In 1240 Gregory IX made an important pronouncement to the effect that all crusading vows could be co
mmuted for money whether or not the would-be crusader was capable of fighting in person. According to the jaundiced English chronicler Matthew Paris, large numbers of women, children, and old men took the cross in order that they could buy a dispensation and still gain the crusading indulgence. Thereafter, an excuse was sometimes required, sometimes not. The friars who preached the crusade in 1290 were empowered to commute vows for two hundred livres of Tours, and the same authority was given to them in 1308.
Until the end of the fourteenth century the Church did not concern itself much with vows of pilgrimage, other than those involving the Holy Land. Such vows were, however, enforced by strong spiritual pressures especially if they had been made in public. Countless popular stories related the fate of those foolhardy persons who broke a promise to the saint. One was struck blind, another afflicted with paralysis or leprosy. Infirmities cured by the saint returned if the patient failed to show his gratitude by praying at his shrine. An English knight whose broken arm was healed by St. James forgot to visit the hand of St. James at Reading, and the apostle therefore broke his other arm. ‘And by this example’, the author of the tale concluded, ‘one may see how powerful is faith and how dreadful it is to break an oath.’ By promising to visit a shrine, the pilgrim conceived that he was uniting himself to the saint by a bond of mutual self-interest: the saint wished to be venerated and desired offerings for his clergy; the pilgrim wanted to be protected against sin, disease, and natural disasters. Failure to fulfil a vow was both sinful and imprudent. This notion was implicit in the prayer of a Polish nobleman who visited St. Gilles-de-Provence towards the end of the eleventh century, after narrowly escaping death in a hunting accident: ‘Holy St. Gilles, on condition that you offer me your good offices with the Lord and preserve me from human perils, I solemnly agree that I shall mend my ways and forthwith make a pilgrimage to your shrine.’
Bargains of this sort were particularly common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when fewer miracles were reported at the shrines themselves. In large miracle collections of this period, the great majority of stories tell of marvellous happenings near the pilgrim’s own home. He has come to the shrine, not to beg for a miracle, but to give thanks for one which has already occurred. When, in 1388, St. Martial of Limoges suddenly began to corruscate in wonders, in almost every case the miracle occurred before the pilgrimage; the one was, in fact, conditional upon the other. A citizen of Limoges declared that ‘if the ever-glorious St. Martial were to heal my sick son, I would offer a candle at his shrine’; the son recovered and the father presented his candle in the saint’s basilica. A cowherd swore to visit St. Martial if he protected his cows from English bandits. Another would do so if ever he found his lost gold pennies. Thus the subtle idea that human troubles were caused by sin and removed by penitence slowly lost its force, and was replaced by the simpler notion of a contract, freely entered into, between the saint and his votary.
Indulgences
When a Christian confessed his sins and sought absolution, a penance was imposed on him. An indulgence was a formal act of the Church by which that penance was remitted. An indulgence did not pretend to release the sinner from his guilt (only confession and absolution could do that), but in the words of a thirteenth-century schoolman it ‘excused him from suffering the temporal punishment due for his sins’.
The indulgence grew from modest beginnings. In the tenth century the Frankish Church allowed penitents to redeem their penances by payment if they were physically incapable of performing them, and remissions of this sort were pronounced to be legitimate by the council which met at Rheims in 923–4. Such indulgences were only granted if the circumstances of the individual case warranted it. The earliest general indulgences, offered to anyone who was prepared to fulfil the conditions, did not make their appearance until the eleventh century, when Christendom was becoming morbidly preoccupied with the problems of remissio peccatorum. The rapid development of indulgences, like that of the vow of pilgrimage, owed everything to the crusades. At the council of Clermont, Urban II declared in unequivocal terms that ‘every man who sets out for Jerusalem with the army to liberate the Church of God shall have the entire penance for his sins remitted.’ Urban was offering them a ‘plenary’ indulgence, that is, an indulgence which erased all the penance due for the sins of a lifetime. It was, in the words of the Lateran council of 1215, a guarantee of salvation.
The crusading indulgence was the first plenary indulgence, and for two centuries it remained the only one. But partial indulgences, which remitted a stated proportion of the sinner’s outstanding penance, made their appearance at about the same time. The earliest papal indulgence which can be accepted as authentic dates from 1091, when Urban II promised that all who assisted the restoration and repair of the Norman monastery of St. Austreberthe at Pavilly would enjoy the remission of ‘a fourth part of the penance enjoined by a bishop or priest’. During Urban’s tour of France in 1095 several pilgrimages were favoured with indulgences of this kind. ‘It is right to consent to pious requests’, one of them begins, ‘in order to help the sinner to achieve his salvation…. We recommend therefore that the church of St. Nicholas of Angers be honoured, protected, and visited by the faithful …, and we accordingly remit a seventh part of the penance imposed for any sins, for all those who visit the church in a devout frame of mind on the anniversary of its dedication.’
During the twelfth century the papacy granted indulgences sparingly, and made only modest claims for them. Others, however, were less restrained. The churches which received indulgences grossly exaggerated their efficacy, while those that did not, forged them. Moreover, bishops also claimed the right to issue indulgences and showed themselves much more generous to local shrines than the papacy. Their indulgences were far more numerous than those issued by the papacy, and their impact on contemporary religious life correspondingly greater. In 1215 the Lateran council addressed itself to the problem. Bishops were forbidden to issue indulgences of more than forty days for the feast of a patron saint or one year for the anniversary of a dedication. Within a few years, however, the excessive indulgences granted by some bishops to insignificant shrines had attracted the hostile attention of the university of Paris. The decree of 1215 was reissued with a frequency which suggests that it was widely ignored. In 1339 the council of Aquilea complained that bishops not only exceeded the limits laid down by the Lateran fathers, but even granted indulgences outside their own dioceses.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century the issue became less important as the papacy itself started to issue indulgences more generously. The charity of the popes began, naturally enough, at home. In the reign of Alexander III (d. 1181), the basilicas of the apostles already offered indulgences which were extremely large by the standards of other pilgrimage churches. A century later, at the death of Nicholas IV (1292), indulgences of astounding generosity were available in every church of Rome, and at every altar of the basilicas of the apostles. But no pilgrimage offered a plenary indulgence until 1294, when Celestine V ‘opened the treasury of mercy confided to him by Christ and bestowed it upon those who were truly confessed and penitent.’ In fact, he issued a plenary indulgence to the church of Collemaggio, near Aquila, for the feast of John the Baptist. After Celestine’s abdication in the following year, this act was quashed by his robust successor Boniface VIII together with all his other indulgences issued ‘in ignorance of the canon law and of all his pastoral responsibilities’. But only five years later Boniface issued a plenary indulgence of his own, to the basilicas of the apostles on the occasion of the first Roman Jubilee.
The indulgence which finally opened the floodgates was the indulgence of the Portiuncula. St. Mary of the Portiuncula was the small chapel near Assisi which had been made over to the use of St. Francis and his earliest followers. It was here, in 1226, that Francis had died. By the middle years of the thirteenth century the Franciscans were claiming that the founder had secretly obtained from Honorius III a plenary indulgenc
e for the chapel which would, if genuine, have been the only plenary indulgence in existence other than the crusading indulgence. Its authenticity was disputed from the outset on several grounds. It was said to be prejudicial to the reconquest of the Holy Land. The Portiuncula chapel was said to be too obscure to enjoy an indulgence which was denied to the greatest churches of Rome. It was an incitement to sin, others alleged; it brought other indulgences into contempt. These arguments, which could never have been advanced a hundred years later, are alone sufficient to show how novel and unfamiliar the idea of a plenary indulgence for pilgrims was in the thirteenth century. A commission of enquiry met in 1277 to examine the authenticity of the indulgence, and much scholarly ink has been spilt over the matter ever since. It is, on the whole, unlikely to be genuine, and even if Honorius III did grant an indulgence to the Portiuncula, it was certainly not a plenary one. None of these considerations, however, weighed very heavily with contemporaries. By 1295 the number of pilgrims was already greater than the friars serving the chapel could deal with, and in the early years of the fourteenth century the brothers were stated to be dealing daily with cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, kings, dukes, counts, and barons. However dubious its origins, the pilgrimage of the Portiuncula was among the most prosperous in Europe. It was the first pilgrimage which owed its success entirely to the skilful advertisement of an indulgence. Other shrines were quick to learn the lesson of the Portiuncula, and Celestine V undoubtedly had the Franciscan indulgence in mind when he declared a plenary remission of sins for pilgrims to Collemaggio.
No indulgence ever purported to release pilgrims from guilt as well as penance. Confession was therefore an essential preliminary to every pilgrimage. The preacher of the sermon Veneranda Dies inveighed fiercely against those who imagined that a pilgrimage to Santiago would erase their sins without it. However, there is no doubt that many, perhaps most, pilgrims did not appreciate this point. Many of those who flocked to Assisi to claim the Portiuncula indulgence, or to Rome to claim the Jubilee indulgence of 1300, had dispensed with the formality of confession, and in strict canon law their journey was wasted. Their error is scarcely surprising in view of the extravagant claims made for some indulgences by preachers and writers of miracle stories. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these claims were regularly made notwithstanding repeated declarations that priests responsible for them were automatically excommunicate. In unlettered minds the confusion was exacerbated by the use of the misleading term ‘a pena et culpa’ (‘free from guilt and penance’) to describe plenary indulgences. This phrase did not in fact mean what it said. Almost every papal document which used it, even the notorious Jubilee indulgence of 1510, insisted in the next breath that those claiming it must be ‘truly confessed and penitent’. But few pilgrims would have seen these documents and fewer still would have read the learned commentaries of the canon lawyers. Their mistake would be discovered, if at all, only when they reached the shrine. By then it was often too late, for until the fourteenth century the Church insisted that confession be made to one’s own parish priest before departing and, outside Rome, very few pilgrimage churches enjoyed the privilege of confessing visitors on the spot. At Rocamadour in the twelfth century, pilgrims were asked whether they had confessed and were sent home if they had not. A favourite anecdote of mediaeval preachers told how unconfessed pilgrims had suffered every kind of disaster, or how a mysterious force had physically prevented them from entering the church. A Burgundian pilgrim was physically unable to climb the steps of Mont-St.-Michel until she had confessed her sins. Ten strong men were unable to push a French nobleman through the entrance to the church of Our Lady at Villalcazar de Sirga on the road to Santiago, for his mortal sins had not yet been absolved. ‘And the moral of this is that no man may enter the church of God who has not first confessed his mortal sins.’ These considerations applied just as strongly in the later middle ages, when the doctrine of indulgences had provided a measuring-stick with which to assess the merit of a pilgrimage. The fourteenth-century Miracles of St. Martial tell of a pilgrim who was struck to the ground when he tried to kiss the sarcophagus of the saint, and this, says the author, was because he tried to claim an indulgence recently granted by pope Gregory XI without first going to confession.