The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Yet the original models for these dark rivers of humanity were of this world, and fully medieval, for they lived in the year 1300. Their bridge spanned the Tiber and was unimaginably old even then, having been built by the emperor Hadrian to give access to the hulking mausoleum he constructed for himself on the right bank of the river. By Bernard Délicieux’s time, eleven and a half centuries later, that mausoleum had become the Castel St. Angelo, and its bridge the Ponte St. Angelo. The reason for its heavy foot and equestrian traffic in the year 1300 was a great celebration. Dante commanded his underworld denizens to do as the Romans do:

  As when the Romans, because of the multitude

  Gathered for the Jubilee, had pilgrims cross

  The bridge with one side kept for all those bound

  Toward St. Peter’s, facing the Castle, while those

  Headed toward the Mount were all assigned

  The other side.

  Not only Romans were on the bridge. Pilgrims came from all over Europe, having heard that their sins would be forgiven in exchange for going through a few devotional motions and loosing liberally the strings of their purses. The year 1300 had been declared a Jubilee, the first in Christendom, and all believers were summoned to Rome to celebrate. To gain remission of all their sins, pilgrims were enjoined to visit the four papal basilicas of the city several times during their stay. Hordes descended on St. John Lateran, St. Peter’s, Santa Maria Maggiore, and St. Paul’s Outside the Walls. Of the last a traveler wrote: “Day and night two priests stood at the altar of St. Paul’s holding rakes in their hands, raking in infinite money.”

  With hundreds of thousands streaming through the city, the sheer size of the event gave pause. A gentleman of Florence, Giovanni Villani, was so struck by the sight of so many people that he was moved to undertake his Nuova Cronica, a valuable chronicle of his native city and the Italian peninsula in the first half of the fourteenth century. And Dante, Villani’s brilliant compatriot, chose to set his Divina Commedia amidst the crush and chaos of Holy Week in Rome in 1300.

  The great gathering served up an ample sampler of medieval society, as matron, maiden, and wench jostled for elbow room on the bridge with graybeard, squire, and gallant. Noble mingled with peasant, bumpkin with bishop, merchant with purse-snatcher, sinners all, hoping to guarantee themselves a secure berth in the afterlife. Whether, under this heightened expectation, the bridge over the Tiber took on the jolly allure of a Breughel painting or the madness of a Bosch is something we shall never know, but eyewitnesses attested to a crazed enthusiasm in the air.

  The impresario behind this lucrative giddiness was an old Roman nobleman, Benedetto Caetani, known to history as Pope Boniface VIII. A brilliant scholar of canon law and an equally accomplished actuary of church accounts, Boniface was the very model of a medieval papal monarch, curling a lip at the ludicrous pretensions of secular princelings when he alone, as pope, held dominion over all of humanity in this world and the next: “We declare, we proclaim, we define,” reads the famous foghorn of a sentence concluding his bull Unam Sanctam, “that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

  Boniface may be said to be the medieval pope who most resembled his Renaissance successors in excessive self-regard. Taking his cue from Hadrian and his mausoleum, by the Jubilee he had had his workmen put the finishing touches on his massive marble tomb at the Vatican, complete with a fresco showing the keys of spiritual power in the grip of Boniface, and not St. Peter, who is depicted as some sort of apostolic deputy. The expansive pope had called the Jubilee to celebrate the commonwealth of Christendom, of which he believed himself to be the undisputed leader. The religion of Jesus had been out in the open in Rome for nearly a millennium, which was reason enough to celebrate.*

  Pope Boniface looked out over the multitudes with satisfaction. He had taken care to have his likeness adorn several monuments of the city, as visible manifestation that Rome, and by extension all of Christendom, had its monarch. Despite the majesty surrounding his person, Benedetto Caetani’s transformation into Boniface VIII had not passed without unseemly incident. His predecessor, Celestine V, an octagenarian hermit, had been pulled from his limestone cave and made pontiff in 1294 when squabbling clans of aristocrats could not come up with a compromise candidate from among their numbers. Far too holy to discharge the duties of the office, within months a despairing Pope Celestine, who wanted nothing so much as to return to his mountain fastness, repeatedly sought advice about abdication from experienced cardinals, who sagely counseled that he could, indeed, resign his office. One of those cardinals happened to have been Benedetto Caetani—who then acquired the papal tiara for himself, but not before adding a second tier, signifying temporal power, to the crown. After this bit of legerdemain, he then reneged on a promise to let Celestine return to his hermitage, ordering him kept under lock and key until the old man dutifully died.

  Boniface demonstrated his legitimacy and his position at the pinnacle of Christendom through the great numbers of the faithful eager to acclaim their papa. At his apartments at the Lateran, a new loggia had been completed, from which he could greet his flock in person from a balcony, or failing that, have his image, as immortalized in a newly completed fresco, bless any of his eager children who turned their adoring gaze upward.* This outpouring of affection was a testament to success, proof that the dream of the medieval papacy, from the great popes Gregory VII through Innocent III to himself, had finally been realized. The Vicar of Christ had at last been recognized as the unrivaled leader of Europe and, soon, the world.

  On the strength of the adulatory acclaim in his city, Boniface may have fancied himself the unchallenged paladin of Christian civilization; more likely, as an intelligent politician, he may just have made noises to that effect to mask the weaknesses he had discerned in his position. For the hard truth of the matter was that the presumptions of the medieval papacy were dangerously close to unraveling definitively. The papacy in the Jubilee year brings to mind a heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, always at her loveliest, eyes aglimmer, complexion aglow—just prior to expiring. So too with the monarchical medieval pontificate in 1300, so stately, so mesmerizing and magnificent, but just as doomed to disappearance. The pilgrims crowding the bridge over the Tiber were devout, but not devoted; they would witness, indeed usher in, challenges to the old order during the first decades of the fourteenth century as resentments grew and circumstances changed. Through these roiling waters men such as Bernard Délicieux navigated, their acts of courage and defiance observed, perhaps applauded, by those watching from the bridge. The supreme pontiff, or pontifex maximus, a title borrowed from ancient Rome signifying he who builds the bridge and guides the souls across it, would in a very short time be nothing more than a toll collector on that bridge, and, as such, a sitting duck for his Reformation critics in the not-too-distant future. And within a few years following the Jubilee, to pay that collector one would cross not the Ponte St. Angelo but the Pont d’Avignon. Not only did the papacy’s move to its seventy-year exile in Avignon shatter Boniface’s dream and profoundly alter the Church, it also brought the great machinery of papal power uncomfortably close to Languedoc and its agitator, Bernard Délicieux.

  Many crowding the Roman bridge in the year 1300 did not have counterparts in 1200 or 1100, as their place in society was of recent creation. Without these newcomers, the career of the friar of Carcassonne would not have been possible. Among them were men in white robes draped with a black scapular, many of their tonsured pates housing a fevered, fanatical intellect. These were the Dominicans, the brothers of the Order of the Friars Preachers. They had not existed a century earlier, yet by 1300 they had hundreds of houses and convents throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Shock troops, scholars, administrators, inquisitors, and eventually popes, the Dominicans were, above all else, the domini canes—the hounds of the Lord.

  Matching them in numbers marched a legion of similarly soulful m
en, in simple brown or gray robes: the Franciscans, or the Order of the Friars Minor. Coevals of the Dominicans (both Orders date from the early 1200s), the Franciscans rivaled the men in black and white in their explosive expansion during the course of the thirteenth century. However, the fierceness of their piety came to be directed at divisions within their own ranks. Bernard Délicieux partook fully of this Franciscan infighting.

  Together these two brotherhoods (and other smaller religious groupings), known collectively as the mendicant friars, had arisen from the longings awakened by revival. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries a once-drowsy Europe had founded new towns, revivified old ones, launched crusades, cracked the books, begun the construction of soaring cathedrals, and taken to trade routes choked by the weeds of millennium-long neglect. This burst of activity engendered a new outlook and an impatience with the haughty prelates, hidebound monks, and illiterate parish priests who were conspicuously failing to give spiritual succor in a time of change.

  Into the breach stepped men more attuned to their day. At first came charismatic outliers—lone itinerant preachers—then informally organized groupings of laymen interpreting clandestine, vernacular versions of the Bible. All were dedicated to pointing out the correct heading to townspeople left rudderless in a new world of grasping guild and showy burgher. Wealth, the filthy lucre that would damn one to Hell, was accruing; the Church itself, its great reformers of the early medieval period having successfully urged it to engage with the world, had evolved into a multinational machinery of the here and now, enacting laws, deposing dynasties, starting wars, imposing taxes, endowing benefices, anathematizing, excommunicating, imposing interdicts—in short, behaving as an overweening institutional technocracy. As for the holy men and women of the Church, they were locked in monasteries, quietly living out exemplary lives of piety in the wilderness, their backs turned to the laity, their concerns otherworldly.

  As a reaction to both the bedevilment of wealth and the spiritual remoteness of the institutional Church, the idea of apostolic poverty, living a penniless life in the imitation of Christ, rapidly gained ground. More important, this imitation of Jesus’ humanity—itself a novel thing for the Christian to think about—carried with it the obligation to do as the Nazarene had done and preach to the people. Holy beggars stripped to the waist, fakirs at fairgrounds and in meadows, became part of the medieval civic fabric, their message about penance as prelude to personal salvation issuing forth from their heaving, emaciated chests, as their listeners, man and woman alike, swooned ecstatically in the dust and the straw. Worse yet, for a Church adamantly opposed to an increasingly literate laity giving its own reading of scripture, came those who not only viewed the meaning of this scripture differently from that of the dominant orthodoxy, but went so far as to say that the insitutional pyramid with Rome at its apex was the edifice of the devil. Of this latter group, the Cathars, or Albigensian heretics, were the most successful, winning large followings in Languedoc in southern France and Lombardy in northern Italy. To them the Church was the enemy, the impostor, the creature of the evil God that had created the world; their God, the good God announced by Jesus, could be reached only by living a life of apostolic poverty.

  In the first decade of the thirteenth century, a hundred years before the Jubilee crowded the bridge, the founder of the Dominicans, a Castilian priest named Domingo de Guzmán, or Dominic, met the Cathars in Languedoc. His beloved Church was woefully unacquainted with the zeitgeist of destitution. It had excommunicated orthodox proponents of poverty and was now attempting to overawe the heterodox Cathars through revivalist preaching tours conducted by papal emissaries decked out in opulent finery.* It was difficult to convince an ascetic of one’s spiritual bona fides, Dominic realized, while wrapped in an acre of silk.

  Dominic ordered the pope’s men to doff the fancy dress and adopt at least a simulacrum of apostolic poverty. The zealous Spaniard then sought out the Cathars and invited them to debate. The heretics believed all of the sacraments of the Church, including marriage, to be illegitimate practices; the cross, a symbol of imperial Roman torture and nothing more; the creator God of the Old Testament, the equivalent of the devil; the notion of Hell, an absurd fabrication; the fate of all men and women as creatures of matter, a repeated return to this vale of tears; and the entire edifice of hierarchy and grandeur ruled from Rome, a monstrously demonic fraud hoisted on Christians of goodwill by a cabal of ruthless voluptuaries enslaved to the pleasures of the flesh and the appetite for gain.

  Given the heat these debates between Catholic and Cathar must have generated, Dominican lore soon produced the Miracle of Fire. During one of them, in Fanjeaux, a town south of Carcassonne, some nefarious Cathars supposedly threw Dominic’s debating notes, or his breviary, into the fireplace, but the document refused to burn, drifting up and up and up until, at last, it scorched a ceiling beam (still on display at the Dominican church there). However fireproof his notes, Dominic did not win many Cathars back to orthodoxy—but his steadfast selflessness attracted a large following of like-minded men, and soon the Dominican order, begun in Toulouse, awaited papal approval as a confraternity of mendicant friars.

  The Cathars, pyromanes or not, were then mercilessly persecuted by the Albigensian Crusade, a twenty-year, papally sponsored series of atrocities begun in 1209 that aimed to eliminate them from the face of the earth. The scorched-earth wars of the Crusade effectively ended the independence of Languedoc, which would in a few generations become a part of France, but it failed to extirpate the heresy. From the 1230s on, the Cathar survivors of the years of ferocity had to face a permanent, Dominican-dominated innovation: inquisition. Involved in the genesis of Dominican austerity and, later, in the spread of Dominican inquisitorial activity aimed at rooting out every last one of them, the Cathars would also be a bone of contention in the Order’s conflict with Bernard Délicieux, the standard-bearer of the Franciscans in Languedoc.*

  The Franciscans differed from their Dominican brethren in several respects. Their founder, Giovanni Francesco di Bernadone, or Francis of Assisi, was a layman. The son of a well-to-do textile merchant, Francis threw off the trappings of wealth and spontaneously embraced a life of indigence and inspiration. Soon he was joined in this revolt against comfort by other sons of affluent traders—but not by the sons of the peasantry, as poverty held no romance for those born into it. Together Francis and his followers took to the roads of Umbria, sleeping rough, refusing to touch money or women, begging for food and preaching the need for repentance.

  Hagiographical embellishments aside, Francis of Assisi must have been stupendously charismatic, a superstar of spirituality. To find a pious personage of equal power, a holy man in the right place at the right time, one would have to go back six centuries to the Prophet Muhammad. When Francis famously preached to the birds, he undermined the heretical belief, prevalent in the nurseries of heterodoxy in neighboring Lombardy, that nature and creation were evil. When he traveled on crusade and set out across the Nile delta alone to seek and gain an audience with the Ayyubid sultan, Malik al-Kamil, a nephew of the great Saladin, Francis displayed both missionary panache and a willingness to engage in dialogue.* And when he—dirty, scruffy, and serene—dared go to Rome and confront the greatest medieval pope, Innocent III, the man who lit the bonfires of the Albigensian Crusade and whom Boniface VIII, the pope of the Jubilee, vainly tried to imitate, Francis showed a fearlessness bred of unshakable conviction. The times were on his side. The saint’s first biographer had Innocent imperiously dismissing the beggar, then dreaming of him that night, seeing Francis, Atlas-like, shouldering the massive load of the Church of St. John Lateran, then the mothership of Christendom.

  Innocent decided to channel the spiritual athleticism of this motley crew of ragtag beggars into reinvigorating the Church. In the decades to follow, that daring decision to accept rather than to anathematize the mendicant friars proved resoundingly right. Within a few generations, after jettisoning some of the more impra
ctical dictates of destitution, the Dominicans and Franciscans had stormed the nascent institutions of the thirteenth century. The fledgling universities—at such centers as Bologna, Paris, and Oxford—became hotbeds of recruitment and brotherly achievement. Even a partial roll call of friars of genius from their first century—Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus—gives an idea of how influential the brothers were in shaping the Western intellectual tradition. Even the fellow usually credited with slicing scholasticism to pieces with his logical razor, William of Occam, was a Franciscan.

  But their reach extended far beyond the universities. Proselytizing missions were dispatched to the Muslim world (often with friars actively seeking martyrdom by insulting the Prophet in their harangues) and to places farther afield, as in the Franciscan 1294 embassy to the Mongol khan in China.* At home, hospitals were set up, convents established and churches built. The Franciscans gradually went from a lay confraternity to a clerical one, dispensing sacraments, hearing confessions, and celebrating mass. As for the Dominicans, who had been disciplined and clerical from the outset (Dominic had a knack for organization sorely lacking in the dreamy Francis), they took to the pastoral task as well.

  Not that the friars were all living embodiments of some unblemished Christian ideal. With expansion and the normalization of the orders came a watering down of their initial purity: the supposedly gentler Franciscans became inquisitors in some parts of Europe, most notably in Provence and Tuscany—although they were discharged from their duties in the latter province by Boniface because of their venality. The Friars Preachers and the Friars Minors competed fiercely over real estate—who would get the best building site in any given town—and over wealthy benefactors. Landing a rich corpse, with the requisite burial bequests, helped put a lot of food on their communal table, so unseemly squabbles over dead grandees could break out. Few things were exempt in this quarrel of the mendicants: the evangelization of Bosnia, for example, was held up for several years as Franciscans and Dominicans fought bitterly over who would have the honor of going there first. And the two Orders did not just have each other as brotherly enemies. Very early on they had earned the hostility of ordinary priests and bishops for diverting the faithful—and their funds—away from them. The newcomers were seen as poachers, and their runaway success as the thirteenth century progressed created suspicions that behind their convent walls might lie a very nonapostolic opulence.