Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (28 page)

This is not to suggest that the popes of the later thirteenth century were without spiritual aspiration or real achievement. Gregory X genuinely longed for the healing of the schism with the East. This, together with the eagerness of the recently restored Eastern Emperor, Michael VIII Paleologus, for papal assistance against the expansionist ambitions of Charles of Anjou, led to a fragile reunion. Greek delegates attended the Second Council of Lyons, and professed their faith in the papal primacy, the Roman doctrine
of purgatory and the
Filioque.
This reconciliation, however, was dictated on the Greek side by political necessity, not conviction, and the Emperor had the greatest difficulty persuading the Byzantine clergy to accept it. Gregory’s less sympathetic successors tried to impose steadily more stringent and humiliating demands on the Greeks: the union did not last.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Innocent III embodied much of what was best in the high medieval theory of papal supremacy. At the end of the century Boniface VIII (1294–1303) encapsulated some of its contradictions. Benedetto Caetani was a career cleric, trained in law at Bologna and with a distinguished diplomatic career behind him. His immediate predecessor as pope was the saintly but hopeless monk-hermit Celestine V, elected after more than two years of deadlock in the hope that a saint might transform the Church. Instead the unworldly old man (eighty-five when elected) became the naive stooge of the Angevin King of Naples – seven of his twelve first cardinals were Frenchmen, four of them Sicilian subjects of Charles II.

Celestine was a visionary, the founder of a brotherhood of hermits with strong links to the radical Franciscans. He therefore represented precisely that dimension of the thirteenth-century Church which most detested the wealth, worldliness and legal and political entanglements of the papacy. His election fed apocalyptic hopes of a
Papa Angelicus
, a holy and unworldly pope who would cleanse the Church and prepare the world for the advent of Christ. The notion of an unworldly pope, however, was by now almost a contradiction in terms. Three-quarters of a century earlier, Innocent III had managed to hold together hierarchy and char ism, but Celestine’s election highlighted just how incompatible these two visions of the Church had become. Faced with political and financial complexities which prayer and fasting seemed powerless to untangle, Celestine resigned after six months. His abdication speech was written for him by Cardinal Caetani, whom he had consulted about the legality of his resignation, and who was elected in his place. Determined to avoid any danger of schism from the outraged ‘spiritual’ element in the Church who had looked to Celestine to redeem the papacy, Caetani tracked down his predecessor, who had returned to his old life as a hermit, and kept him a prisoner in miserably cramped conditions till his death at the age of ninety.

Boniface is a mysterious man, proud, ambitious, fierce. He achieved a good deal that is in line with the reforming acts of many of his predecessors, founding a university in Rome, codifying canon law and re-establishing the Vatican Archive and Library. Law did not exhaust his understanding of his office. It was Boniface who declared the first Jubilee or Holy Year in 1300, when tens of thousands of pilgrims converged on Rome to gain indulgences, adding enormously to the prestige of the papacy and the spiritual centrality of Rome (and in the process enriching the Roman basilicas, where the sacristans were said to have had to scoop in the pilgrim offerings with rakes). This promise of ‘full and copious pardon’ to all who visited St Peter and the Lateran after confessing their sins was the most spectacular exercise of the power of the keys since Urban II issued the first Crusade Indulgence, and it caught the imagination of Europe. At any one time throughout the Jubilee Year of 1300 there were said to be up to 200,000 pilgrims in the city, and the Leonine wall round the Vatican had to be breached to allow the crowds to pass through. The poet Dante made the Jubilee pilgrimage, and he set the
Divine Comedy
at its central point, in Holy Week 1300. In a famous passage in the
Inferno
he compared the traffic arrangements for the crowds in Hell to the one-way system he had seen in use for the pilgrims crossing the Ponte Sant’ Angelo during this first Jubilee.

If Boniface displayed a commitment to the lofty spiritual claims of the papacy, he also displayed some of the worst traits of clerical careerism, enriching his relatives at the expense of the Church, and waging a relentless war against his family’s traditional rivals, the Colonna family. Boniface even offered the spiritual privileges of the Crusade to anyone who joined in this vendetta against the Colonna. Both his personal character and his orthodoxy were later called into question, his enemies accusing him, in graphic and disturbing detail,
of being a sodomite (sex with boys or women, he was alleged to have said, was no worse than rubbing one hand against another). Even more disturbingly, he was said to have been a non-believer, rejecting the resurrection and saying that heaven and hell were here.

These accusations, spread by the French crown during his lifetime and repeated after his death, have been generally regarded as motivated by malice. But, whatever Boniface did or did not believe about God, sex or the afterlife, he believed passionately in the papacy. His pontificate had begun auspiciously, with Charles II of Sicily and his son, Charles King of Hungary, leading the Pope’s white horse by the bridle as he went to be crowned. Boniface determined to exert to the full the temporal sovereignty this symbolised, but in fact most of his political ventures backfired. He harnessed Angevin support to impose papal rule in Tuscany, but Charles II’s brutal treatment of Florence and the exiling of the leading ‘Black’ or Ghibelline party, including Dante, embittered the region against the Pope. His attempts to secure Angevin rule in Sicily failed, as did his intervention with Edward I of England on behalf of Scotland, which he claimed as a papal fief. He had no better luck in his attempts to settle the succession in Hungary and Poland. It is a significant fact that among the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome in 1300, there was not a single crowned head.

His most disastrous venture into high politics, however, was in his confrontation with the King of France. Since the time of Innocent III it had become established practice to finance Crusading ventures by taxes on the clergy. Philip the Fair now imposed a similar tax to fund his war of conquest in Gascony. Boniface, who longed to unite the princes of Europe under his own leadership in a new Crusade, challenged the French crown’s right to the property of the Church. In 1296 he issued the bull
Clericis Laicos
, forbidding the laity to take or the clergy to give away the property of the Church. The bull’s opening sentence (‘All history shows clearly the enmity of the laity towards the clergy’) was based on scholastic textbook commonplaces, but it nevertheless accurately signalled the militant clericalism of Boniface’s outlook.

That clericalism, and above all his lofty sense of the dignity of his own office, is represented by his remodelling of the papal tiara, elongating it to correspond to the biblical measure of the ‘ell’, a sign, for Boniface, of completeness and superiority. It became
increasingly clear, however, that King Philip did not accept that supremacy, and that he aspired to a new Christian empire stretching from the southern Mediterranean to the North Sea in which the papal state would be swallowed up. Boniface was having none of this, and in 1302 he issued the bull
Unam Sanctam
, the culminating blow in a propaganda war against the French crown. In it the Pope notoriously claimed that ‘it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff’. He insisted that the Pope wielded both the spiritual and secular sword, but gave the secular sword to princes to use for the good of the Church.
²²

Unam Sanctam
was largely made up of a tissue of quotations from previous popes and from great theologians like Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas. Its claims were not in fact very different from those made by every pope since at least the time of Gregory VII. Certainly most of what Boniface asserted can be found in germ in the writings of Innocent III. In his confrontation with the French king, Boniface undoubtedly had both law and tradition on his side. Boniface, however, was reiterating these teachings at a time when his struggle with the King of France was going badly, and when everyone could see that his temporal claims in real terms were hollow. In the long run the insistence on so high a doctrine of the papacy, at a time when the Pope was at the mercy of his enemies, served not to strengthen but to cast doubt on the claims themselves. Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating the French King in September 1303, but before it could be promulgated French forces, accompanied by two of the deposed Colonna cardinals and their relatives, broke into the papal palace at Anagni and mobbed the Pope. Boniface faced his enemies with courage, in full papal regalia and shouting, ‘Here is my neck, here is my head,’ challenging them to kill him. The French troops drew back from that final atrocity, and were driven out of the town by the citizens the next day. Boniface never recovered from his ordeal, however. He returned to Rome a broken man, roaming round his apartments crying out in rage and humiliation. He died a month later. The ‘outrage of Anagni’ shocked Italy and Europe. Dante, who hated Boniface and placed him upside down in a subterranean furnace in hell, nevertheless saw the maltreatment of the Pope at Anagni as the recrucifixion of Christ. In a real sense, however, it called the bluff of the high medieval doctrine of the papacy, for it measured the distance between inflated religious rhetoric and cold reality.

Popes who understood themselves to be the vicars of St Peter were tied to Rome, for Peter’s body was at Rome. The Pope’s altar stood above the tomb of the Apostle. But popes who were the Vicars of Christ, however much they might insist on the possession of Peter’s authority, were not bound by geography in the same way. The popes of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries had been deeply involved in the local politics of Rome. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the internationalising of papal power and papal claims made that involvement seem claustrophobic, limiting and, in the face of popular hostility and aristocratic intrigue, dangerous as well. In any case the popes were increasingly involved in the growing complexities of international politics. From Charlemagne to Frederick II it was the emperors with whom popes had to reckon. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries other rulers, especially the kings of France, loomed on the papal horizon and posed a threat to papal independence.

For most of the fourteenth century, the bishops of Rome lived far away from Rome, in the fortified city of Avignon. The seventy-year exile of the popes at Avignon was a disaster for the Church, and came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy. Yet it came about by accident. Boniface VIII’s successor, the unworldly Dominican Benedict XI (1303–4), survived only nine months. He died in exile at Perugia, and the Conclave to elect his successor met there. The Conclave was bitterly divided into two rival camps, one hostile to France and determined to exact revenge for the scandalous treatment of Pope Boniface at Anagni, the other, smaller group intent on reconciliation with France and anxious to mollify the French crown. The Conclave sat in deadlock for eleven months, till a split in the anti-French party allowed the election of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got, as Pope Clement V (1305–14). Bertrand was not himself a cardinal, nor was he present at the Conclave. He was yet another Bologna-trained canon lawyer with a distinguished diplomatic career behind him and a good working relationship with Philip IV of France.

To please the King, he allowed himself to be crowned at Lyons, and he remained in France, partly because of the chaotic political situation in central Italy, and partly in the hope of bringing about a peace between France and England, so that their energies could be directed into another Crusade to the Holy Land. In 1309 Clement
settled at Avignon. It was a sensible choice, for it was not strictly speaking French territory. The surrounding region was part of the Papal States, and the city itself was subject to the kings of Sicily, until bought by the popes in the mid-century. It was near the sea, and far more centrally placed for most of Europe than Rome had been. The move was not at first intended to be permanent, the Pope camping in the Bishop’s palace, his Curia billeted round the town, and only a minimum working archive being kept in the city.

Clement, first of the Avignonese popes, was a shameless nepotist (he made five members of his family cardinals), but he was also in many respects an impressive character, despite suffering from a recurrent cancer the pain of which kept him a recluse for months at a time. He was a good administrator, who revised and expanded the code of canon law, adding a valuable new section called ‘The Clementines’. Deeply committed both to the Crusading ideal (which would continue to attract European rulers and their subjects, but was destined to disruption by the Anglo-French wars, the chaotic politics of Italy, and by the Black Death) and to the somewhat more positive ideal of preaching missions to the East, he strengthened the already crucial links between the papacy and the universities, founding chairs in oriental languages at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca.

His greatest difficulty was resisting the domination of the French crown. King Philip pursued a relentless vendetta against the memory of Boniface VIII, and tried to force Clement to summon a general council to brand him as a heretic and a sodomite. Clement had no love for Boniface, but realised the devastating consequences such a condemnation would have for papal authority. He managed to resist the call for the condemnation of Boniface when the Council of Vienne, the last great papal Council of the Middle Ages, met in 1311. He was, however, forced to remove all Boniface’s anti-French measures from the papal records, and to canonise Celestine V, whom Boniface had imprisoned. (Clement defused this by canonising him under his monastic name of Peter, not his pontifical name, and as a ‘confessor’, not, as Philip had wanted, as a martyr, with the implication that Boniface had had him murdered.) He was also obliged to dissolve the Knights Templar, a military order dedicated to crusade, whose wealth and power had earned them many enemies, and whom Philip accused of heresy, necromancy and sexual perversion.
The Knights were duly condemned and dissolved at Vienne. Clement did what he could to soften measures against the Templars, and to save their property for the Church, but many were burned at the stake on trumped-up charges, a measure of the weakness of the papacy in the face of royal pressure.