Absolute Monarchs (28 page)

Prostitutes, he maintained, “swarmed on the papal beds.” Poets, perhaps, never make the best witnesses; but Petrarch—one of the great writers of the Middle Ages—could, had he wished, have given us a brilliant and accurate description of papal Avignon. It is a pity that he has left us instead a travesty that borders on the grotesque.

DID POPE CLEMENT
ever for a moment consider a papal return to Rome? Certainly not. Not only did he complete the Papal Palace begun by Benedict; in 1348 he bought Avignon and the surrounding County of Venaissin from Joanna, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence. Joanna was twenty-two and famed for her beauty, but she had come to Avignon as a fugitive. Three years before, her young husband, Prince Andrew of Hungary, who was living with her in Naples, had been assassinated, on the orders of her great-aunt Catherine of Valois but not without suspicion of Joanna’s own complicity. His brother King Louis of Hungary, on the pretext of avenging the murder, then invaded Naples, claiming the kingdom for himself. Joanna had fled to Avignon with her second husband, Prince Louis of Taranto, to seek protection from her brother-in-law and beg Pope Clement to clear her name.

Clement, who made no secret of his taste for beautiful women, was only too happy to agree. The result of the inquiry that followed was almost certainly a foregone conclusion, but it was obviously important to go through the motions. The pope’s throne was set on a dais with his cardinals ranged on each side of him to form a semicircle; the prosecution was conducted by two ambassadors of King Louis; Joanna, we are told, defended herself—and did so quite brilliantly. Clement then rose to his feet and pronounced her innocent. Her first objective attained, Joanna now had a further appeal to make. Her odious brother-in-law had seized the treasury, and she was penniless. He had now gone back to Hungary, and she had been recalled to Naples by the local barons, but she and her husband did not even have the money to make the journey. The pope was once again delighted to oblige. He immediately made available 80,000 gold florins, in return for which he took possession of the city and county.

What makes this story more remarkable still is that it took place in the year of the Black Death. The plague had reached Avignon in January 1348; by September it had claimed no fewer than 62,000 people—perhaps three-quarters of the population of the city and its surroundings—including Petrarch’s lover Laura and every one of the English community of Austin Friars.
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Pope Clement, who could easily have taken refuge in the countryside, showed considerable courage by remaining in Avignon, where he arranged for carters to take away the dead and gravediggers to bury them—though all too soon both groups were obliged to give up the struggle. He also bought a huge field to be converted into a cemetery. By the end of April 11,000 people had been buried there and another layer of corpses had to be laid on top. According to a Flemish canon who happened to be in Avignon at the moment of the outbreak:

about the middle of March the Pope, after mature deliberation, gave absolution till Easter to all those who, having confessed and being contrite, should happen to die of the sickness. He likewise ordered devout processions, singing the litanies, to be made on certain days each week. To these events, it is said, people sometimes gather from all the neighboring districts to the number of up to two thousand; among them many of both sexes are barefoot, some are in sackcloth, some with ashes, walking with tears and tearing their hair, and beating themselves with scourges even to the drawing of blood.

In the early days of the epidemic the pope himself would join the processions, but realizing that they could only spread the infection, he soon put a stop to them. He himself then wisely retired to his private apartments, where he received no one and spent the entire day and night roasting himself between two blazing fires. When at the height of the Avignon summer this became impossible, he retired briefly to his castle near Valence, but with the coming of autumn he returned to the roasting. The treatment proved successful—he survived—but it was not until Advent that the scourge was finally seen to be on the wane, and by then there were few people in Avignon left to celebrate.

As Europe emerged from the nightmare, it began to look for scapegoats, and, perhaps inevitably, it settled on the Jews. Was the Jew not Antichrist? Did he not kidnap and torture Christian children? Did he not regularly desecrate the host? Had he not poisoned the wells of the Christian communities, infecting all their members with the plague? In vain did the Jews point out that they had suffered every bit as much as the Christians—arguably even more, thanks to the swarming ghettos in which they were obliged to live; their accusers refused to listen. As early as May, there was a massacre of Jews in Provence, and in Narbonne and Carcassone the entire Jewish communities were liquidated. In Germany and Switzerland the persecutions fell not far short of a holocaust. Pope Clement acted swiftly. Twice, on July 4 and September 26, he published bulls which condemned the massacres wherever they might occur and called on all Christians to conduct themselves with tolerance and restraint. Those who continued to victimize any Jew would be instantly excommunicated.

Alas, for many Jews he was too late. Communications were slow in the fourteenth century; despite his efforts some 350 separate massacres took place and over two hundred Jewish communities suffered complete annihilation. But for this Clement cannot be blamed. On the contrary, he should be remembered as the first pope in history to undertake an active defense of the Jewish people, wherever they might be found. It was the noblest and most courageous act of his life—an example which all too many of his successors might usefully have followed.

IN AN ATTEMPT
to revive the downward spiraling Roman economy, Pope Clement had declared 1350 a Holy Year, but it had not been a success. Pilgrims arriving in Rome had been shocked by the general dilapidation and decay. The city, now without a pope for nearly half a century, was as sad as ever it had been. There had been a brief moment when it seemed as though the Romans might recover their self-respect; this was in 1344, when Cola di Rienzo, the son of a Roman washerwoman who happened to be a demagogue of genius, had launched a blistering campaign against the local aristocracy, inflaming the popular imagination with his evocations of the city’s past greatness and his prophecies of a glorious rebirth. Such was his success that three years later, on the Capitol, he was invested with the title of tribune and given limitless dictatorial powers; then, summoning a “national” assembly, he solemnly conferred Roman citizenship on all the cities of Italy and announced plans for the election of an Italian emperor, presumably himself.

But appeals for Italian unity, whether pronounced by German princes or Roman agitators, were always doomed to failure. The dictatorial powers which Cola had so effortlessly acquired went to his head. He took up residence in what was left of the Lateran; he adopted the title of “White-robed Knight of the Holy Spirit”; he took a ritual bath in the porphyry basin in which it was believed that Pope Sylvester had baptized Constantine the Great;
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finally, we are told, he was crowned with six separate crowns. No wonder that by 1347 the Roman mob turned against him and forced him into exile. Excommunicated by the papal legate, he first found refuge with the Fraticelli; then, in 1350, he moved on to Prague, to seek the aid of the King of Germany, Charles IV. This, however, proved to be a serious mistake: Charles recognized a madman when he saw one, locked him up for two years, and then handed him over to the pope. Clement, who could never quite resist Cola, had him put on trial for heresy but secretly arranged for his acquittal.

When, in December 1352, Pope Clement died at the age of sixty-one, Cola di Rienzo was still languishing in captivity at Avignon. In the following year he stood trial and was duly found not guilty. Then, in 1354, Clement’s successor, Innocent VI, who had set his heart on a return of the Papacy to Rome, conceived the idea of sending Cola back there with the rank of senator, trusting that he would help the papal vicar general, the Spanish cardinal Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, to prepare the way by reasserting papal authority in the city, leading the opposition to the ever-hostile aristocracy, and winning over the masses to the papal cause. Cola accordingly made his way back to the scene of his former triumphs, where he was given a guarded welcome; but the old magic was gone. The mob, fickle as always, rose against him. In vain he showed himself on the balcony of the Capitol, clad in shining armor and bearing aloft the banner of Rome; they only jeered the louder. Disguising himself as a beggar, he tried to flee, but the gold bracelets glinting under his rags betrayed him. Minutes later his body was hanging by the feet in a public square, a fate eerily similar to that which befell, six centuries later, his most successful imitator: Benito Mussolini.

Innocent VI was already seventy years old; but he had lost none of his energy. Many of the cardinals, accustomed as they were to the splendor of life under Clement, must, one feels, have bitterly regretted their choice. Under the new regime Avignon suffered a sea change. Away went the color, the luxury and extravagance, the parades and processions; back came austerity, parsimony, impartiality, and discipline. As in the reign of Benedict XII, reform was the order of the day. The new pope himself offered his mansion at Villeneuve, on the far side of the Rhône, to the Carthusians, adapting it to monastic life largely at his own expense.
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But Rome remained constantly in his mind, and he could have had no better representative there than Albornoz. More a general than a churchman, the cardinal rapidly subdued the various despots and feudal lords who had taken effective control of the Papal States. One after another, the rebellious cities fell: Viterbo, Orvieto, Spoleto, Rimini, Ancona. Most important of all, he recovered Bologna from the Visconti of Milan. Not all his conquests were achieved by force of arms—bribery too played its part, not least at Bologna—but by 1364 the Papal States once again all acknowledged papal authority.

The pope had worked hard, and on the whole successfully, to put his house in order. Under him Avignon was certainly a gloomier, grayer place than it had been in the days of his glittering predecessor, but the worst abuses were eliminated and the books were balanced. In the diplomatic field he maintained friendly relations with Charles IV, who in 1355 paid a whirlwind visit to Rome, there to be crowned by the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, even after Charles published his so-called Golden Bull, which regulated the election of the German kings but made no mention of the pope’s right to approve the candidates. But his plans for a new Crusade failed—as by now such plans always did—and his attempt to heal the schism with Byzantium was equally unsuccessful. (Since he followed the usual papal policy of making this conditional on the Byzantines’ total subjection to Rome, the failure was hardly surprising.)

Perhaps Innocent’s greatest diplomatic achievement was to negotiate in 1360 the Treaty of Brétigny, which brought nine years of comparative peace in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War. All too soon, however, he had reason to regret his action. During hostilities the mercenary armies, which accounted for much of the fighting strength of both the English and the French, were generously paid and did, on the whole, pretty well for themselves; now, with the peace, they suddenly found themselves unemployed. What could they do but form themselves into “free companies” and take to brigandage? And where could they expect richer pickings than in the papal capital? In December 1360, only seven months after the signature of the Treaty, they seized the little town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, some twenty-five miles up the Rhône, and cut off Avignon’s communications with the outside world. Before long the city itself was under siege; and that siege was still in progress when, early in 1361, the plague returned. By the beginning of summer there were another 17,000 dead, including nine cardinals.

Pope Innocent, now approaching eighty, gave in. He bought off the brigands, offering them a large sum of money—which he had to borrow—in return for their departure. The precise terms of the agreement have not come down to us. It may well be that it involved their undertaking to move down into Italy, there to assist Cardinal Albornoz in his campaign of pacification. The cardinal is known to have had several free companies in his pay, but did they include the besiegers of Avignon? We shall never know.

POPE INNOCENT DIED
, a sad and disappointed man, in September 1362. The cardinals’ first choice as his successor was the brother of Clement VI—they clearly longed for a return of the good old days—but he refused; failing to agree on one of themselves, they then picked a Benedictine monk, Guillaume de Grimoard, who became Pope Urban V. Thanks to various missions to Italy as papal legate, he was not completely inexperienced in public affairs, but he remained unworldly, austere, and deeply pious. Throughout the eight years of his pontificate he insisted on wearing the black habit of his order, and at night he slept on bare boards in a specially contrived monk’s cell. Several hours of each day he spent in study and prayer. A serious scholar himself and patron of the arts and sciences, he distributed bursaries to poor students with a generous hand—at one time he is said to have personally supported 1,400 of them—endowed a college at Montpellier, and founded universities not only at nearby Orange but as far afield as Vienna and Cracow.

Urban cherished two overriding ambitions: first, a Crusade against the Turks which, he hoped, might also bring the Eastern Church back into the Catholic fold; second, the return of the Papacy to Rome. Once again, the Crusade failed to get off the ground. It was to have been led by the French King John II, who had been captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers and had only recently been released—in exchange for several hostages (including his son) pending the raising of the ransom money. He had come to Avignon, where he had sworn to lead an army of 150,000 men to deliver the Holy Land. But before he could do so his hostage son escaped, and John, as a point of honor, voluntarily returned to his English captivity. He was still in England when he died.