The slide towards Christian anarchy in the fourteenth century began in France. Traditionally the kingdom of France had been the staunchest ally of the papacy, the ‘Eldest Daughter of the Church’. St Louis had allowed the Inquisition established by Pope Gregory IX full authority to stamp out heresy, which it did with enthusiasm – 183 sinners burned in a single holocaust – and the King himself perished on his final Crusade. In 1265 the French Pope Clement IV invested King Louis’s brother, Charles of Anjou, with all the privileges of a crusader in order to eject the ruling Hohenstaufen dynasty from the twin kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. After the Sicilians revolted against the occupying French, in the famous ‘Sicilian Vespers’ of 1282, in which five thousand French were massacred, Pope Martin IV (1281–85) and his successor Honorius IV (1285–87) continued to support France in the war with the Sicilians and their supporters, the royal family of Aragon. This cordial relationship was abruptly broken with the election in December 1294 of Benedict Caetani, and his coronation as Pope Boniface VIII in January 1295.
Philip IV of France, commonly known as Philip le Bel (the Fair) who succeeded to the throne in September 1285, became the most powerful monarch of his time, and intended to make France the dominant European power. For the next hundred and fifty years the insatiable ambitions of different branches of the French royal family stretched over most of Europe. King Philip already had relations ruling in Naples and from 1310 in Hungary; France’s eastern frontier was expanding at the expense of the German Empire, as Valenciennes, Toul and lands west of the Meuse were appropriated. Philip ruthlessly centralized the previously incoherent French administration under his own authority, in many ways anticipating the methods of the early Tudor kings, passing over the claims of the great nobles and choosing as his ministers able young men of humble background; the careers of Pierre Flote and Guillaume de Nogaret foreshadowed those of Thomas Lovell and Thomas Wolsey; and like his descendant, Henry VIII, the French king clashed victoriously with the Pope.
For some years prelates had been warily avoiding the throne of St Peter. Rome was a dangerous and turbulent place, torn apart by mob violence and feuding between the numerous noble families, each entrenched in its own fortified town house; nor did Rome, shrunk to a fraction of its former greatness, resemble in any way the magnificent Renaissance city it later became. Pilgrims did not flock to the Eternal City hoping for a sight of the Holy Father; most popes avoided the place, preferring a refuge in the hills nearby, at Frascati, Tivoli, Rieti, Viterbo or Anagni – anywhere but Rome.
It was not surprising therefore that few cardinals wanted the post; between 1285 and 1294 there were two periods, totalling three years, when the Church was without a head. In desperation the cardinals decided on Piero di Morrone, a saintly figure who had founded a religious order, the Celestines, and who lived in seclusion in the lonely Abruzzi mountains. Making the elementary mistake of chiding the cardinals for their two-year delay in choosing a pope, Piero was immediately given the task himself and dragged from his refuge to be consecrated as Celestine V in August 1294. Hating the responsibility, ‘miserably unhappy and in indescribable perplexity’ and encouraged by the ruthless Cardinal Benedict Caetani, he resigned after five months. Caetani neatly stepped into the vacancy, and had Piero confined in the isolated prison of Alatri, where he soon, and conveniently, died. Anguished Celestines produced a large nail which they claim had been driven through Piero’s head.
The new Pope Boniface had one pressing reason to accept the election: an obsession to make his family as wealthy and powerful as possible. Since he was over seventy, time was short. He proceeded to do so energetically and unscrupulously. The Caetani were no more than respectable gentry, but Benedict speedily created one nephew a cardinal, and the other, Peter Count of Caserta, Lateran Count-Palatine, Lord of Sermoneta, Norma and Ninfa – the last purchased for the enormous sum of 200,000 gold florins. The Pope assumed a hitherto unknown splendour, entering Rome on a white horse, flanked by Charles of Naples and his son Charles Martel, scornfully rejecting the German king’s envoys, shouting ‘Ego sum Imperator’.
Such presumption bitterly offended the ancient Roman families, especially the Colonna dynasty, princes of the old Roman nobility and owners of immense estates. The two current Colonna cardinals raised doubts about the legitimacy of Boniface’s election, and claimed that the Pope had ordered his unhappy predecessor put permanently out of contention. Furious at this affront, Boniface formally authorized a Crusade against the family, declared the cardinals to be heretics, and devastated the Colonna lands; the ancient city of Palestrina was razed to the ground, and its treasures of antiquity destroyed. The Pope had made his point, but assured himself of some implacable Italian enemies.
One of these, Sciarra Colonna, made his way to the French court and offered his services in any action taken against the Pope, an offer readily accepted by King Philip. What followed was a perfect piece of realpolitik, which could serve as a model for any modern espionage and destabilization agency. In February 1303 King Philip le Bel summoned his councillor Guillaume de Nogaret to a secret meeting in his palace of the Louvre, and entrusted him with the execution of an audacious conspiracy. Nogaret was to kidnap the Pope, and bring the Holy Father back from Italy as a French captive. It was an unprecedented and outrageous plot, one which was to change the destiny of Europe for more than a century.
King Philip’s objectives were at least twofold: in the short term he intended to humiliate the Pope and destroy papal pretensions, and to make a large profit for both the King and the Italian nobles. Having a saint on the throne of France had sadly damaged the French exchequer, for Louis’s crusades had proved completely unprofitable. Philip’s announced intention was to capture the Pope and transport him to the French city of Lyon, where he would be tried for every conceivable offence. On being found guilty he would doubtless have been imprisoned, his family dispossessed and the papal treasury emptied. A more sympathetic and less obdurate Pope could then be found who would be a reliable ally and a friend to French ambitions.
It was a treasury well worth the looting, in spite of Boniface’s lavish expenditure, since the Pope had been as talented in raising money as he had been generous in spending it. Younger than King or Pope, the poet Dante Alighieri (born 1265), the unquestionable great literary figure of the High Middle Ages, was an accurate and merciless commentator on contemporary events and personalities. His master work, the Divina Commedia, begins in Rome, at Easter 1300, the year Pope Boniface had proclaimed as a great Jubilee, when perhaps two million pilgrims flocked to the Eternal City, promised absolution for all their sins after a visit of fifteen days (Italians, presumably more in need of forgiveness, were obliged to stay for twice the period). The crowds were so great that traffic making its way between the two great basilicas of St Peter and St Paul had to be regulated in two directions over the bridge of St Angelo. Not only were their donations generous – two priests were stationed day and night, with rakes in their hands, literally raking in (tenentes in eorum manibus rastellos rastellantes) the coins offered before the altar of St Paul – but the citizens of Rome did very well out of catering for such enormous numbers, and the papal treasury was filled.
For normal administrative expenses, however, the papacy needed a constant and reliable source of funds, especially from the two states which possessed the most advanced tax-gathering facilities: France and England. Both of these countries, however, had pressing demands of their own; neither King was willing to submit to demands from Rome, and both threatened to cut off financial supplies. Indignant retaliation followed in a paper war of papal bulls and royal proclamations, but negotiations continued; popes and kings needed each other too much to allow too open a break and compromises were reached by both France and England in 1297. The English agreement, which was to share the papal income from the English Church with the monarchy – heavily weighted in the King’s favour – lasted well enough. King Philip’s needs were much more urgent.
Carrying the conflict forward by diplomatic means, the Pope supported Philip’s enemies, the most prominent of whom were the townsmen of Flanders, annexed by Philip in 1300. Like the Sicilians, furious at a French occupation, in May 1302, the weavers of Bruges rebelled and slaughtered all the French-speakers they could find. A punitive French army was met in July by Flemish citizens armed only with pikes and bills, and comprehensively defeated at the battle of Courtrai, with hundreds of knights killed, among them the King’s chief minister, Pierre Flote. Whether Boniface’s agents played any part in the rebellion was uncertain, but its effect was to tempt Philip into drastic action against the Pope.
In February 1302 a papal Bull claiming extensive privileges had been burned in front of Notre Dame de Paris and the Pope’s ambassador expelled. When, in November, Boniface retaliated, he overplayed his hand. The Pope’s Bull, Unam Sanctam, ‘declared, said, defined and pronounced’ that ‘submission of the part of every man to the Bishop of Rome is altogether necessary to his salvation’. Although not entirely unprecedented, Boniface’s claim to absolute power was the most uncompromisingly extravagant ever made, and one addressed to a man certain to react violently. Shrugging off threats of excommunication, King Philip responded by first preparing French public opinion. An armed attack on the Vicar of Christ would, it was thought, arouse shocked horror in most of Europe, and it was essential to ensure that his own subjects at least would support the King. On 12 March what has been called the first genuine French Parliament, attended by royal officials and bishops, combined to insist that a General Council of the whole Church must be held to judge the Pope who, if found guilty of the charges of heresy, tyranny and intercourse with the devil laid against him, should be deposed. Few dissident voices were raised, and de Nogaret began to implement his plans.
Striking a thousand miles from Paris to Rome, with a force strong enough to subdue any papal resistance, entailed complex logistics. Nogaret was given a considerable sum in gold, and unlimited funds were made available through the King’s bankers in Florence, the Peruzzi family. Nogaret himself journeyed secretly, accompanied only by a few attendants and Musciatto Franzesi, the lord of Staggia, near Siena. Making this his headquarters, Nogaret began to muster his troops, with the help of the Peruzzis’ cash. Giovanni Villani, the contemporary Florentine chronicler, protested that the Peruzzi themselves had no idea of what the royal French deposits were to be used for, but de Nogaret hardly kept his intentions secret – and Villani was himself a partner in the bank, which makes his testimony highly suspect. Nor was proper documentation missing; one receipt survives of 10,000 gold florins paid to Raynald of Supino for his ‘help in the attempt to capture Boniface’.
Even with the support of the disaffected Roman landowners, and of some discontented cardinals, the conspirators faced a formidable task. Boniface had installed himself at Anagni, some thirty miles east of Rome, a papal residence and a Caetani stronghold. Sciarra had raised an army of three hundred cavalry, reinforced by infantry from the barons of the Campagna. This considerable force – its movements could hardly have been hidden from the population – had to make its way across the Italian countryside, over a hundred and fifty miles to Anagni. The timing of the strike may have been induced by the news that Pope Boniface was preparing another belligerent pronouncement releasing all Philip’s subjects from their allegiance (foreshadowing Pius V’s 1570 Bull encouraging English Catholics to kill the Queen). The invasion was not opposed, and at dawn on 7 September 1303, the army, with Nogaret and Colonna at its head, flying the ensigns and standards of the King of France, crying ‘Death to Pope Boniface’, charged into the town. The invaders were followed by many of the cheering citizens, and welcomed by the captain of the papal guard. Only members of his own family, who had much to lose, rallied to the Pope’s defence. The coup quickly succeeded, although Boniface, never lacking courage, faced down his aggressors, putting on his papal regalia and exchanging abuse with Nogaret, but was placed in confinement.
Making off with the Pope was, however, a good deal more difficult than kidnapping him. Nogaret’s plans must have provided for an escape route, presumably a French ship on the coast ready to take the Pope to Aigues Mortes, the new military port constructed by St Louis. Whether the ship was delayed, or for some other reason, the conspirators remained in Anagni for three days, long enough for pro-Boniface forces to rally. The people of Anagni turned against the invaders, allowing Boniface to return to Rome, growling imprecations against the French King, only to collapse and die a few weeks later. In spite of Nogaret’s retreat it was a personal triumph for King Philip, and marked the beginning of the end of papal pretensions to assert unlimited authority over lay rulers.
It might be thought that so dramatic and sacrilegious an escapade would have provoked an outburst of indignation, but no official complaints – few reports even – were sent from Rome to the other European courts, and the incident was passed over in contemporary journals; Boniface had attracted few friends. Philip simply continued, unembarrassed, with his plans. Having failed to kidnap a pope, he ensured that a compliant successor was appointed. The cardinals quickly elected a respectable elderly Dominican friar as Benedict XI, who obligingly revoked his predecessor’s condemnations of the French King; and Nogaret continued his brilliant career.
After Benedict’s death in July 1304 it took nearly a year for the cardinals – meeting not in Rome but in Perugia where the Pope had died – to elect a Frenchman, Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux as Clement V. For the next seventy three years all popes were southern Frenchmen: Jacques D’Euse (John XXII 1316–34), Jacques Fournier (Benedict XII 1334–42); Pierre Roger (Clement VI 1342–52); Etienne Auber (Innocent VI 1352–62); Guillaume de Grimoard (Urban V 1362–70); Pierre Roger de Beaufort (Gregory XI 1370–78). All established their administrations at Avignon.
The first of the Avignon popes, Clement V, had divided loyalties. Although French by birth, he was Archbishop of an English see – Bordeaux, part of King Edward I’s Duchy of Guienne – and reconciling the two countries became one of his priorities. He was elected only after a protracted, eleven-month division between the Italian, pro-Boniface cardinals and the French who supported King Philip. In addition to his distinguished reputation as a Church canon lawyer, he probably owed his election to his absence, and to his not being a cardinal, involved in the college’s jealousies; when the news reached him, Archbishop Bertrand was on diocesan business in Poitou, a thousand miles from the conclave in Perugia.
King Philip seized this opportunity to develop a domesticated papacy, and persuaded the new Pope not to return immediately to Italy, but rather to be crowned in Lyon, on the borders of France, and in the presence of the King. For over a year after his inauguration on 14 November 1305 Pope Clement was too ill to take an active part in politics and it was not until May 1307 that Philip was able to arrange a meeting; but the fact that Clement had already created ten new cardinals, nine of whom were French (four in fact his own nephews), and went on to appoint another eighteen, only two not French, indicated that he would be open to royal persuasion, and Philip quickly provided the occasion.
Disappointed of a papal ransom, Philip had attempted a desperate series of cash-raising expedients. The currency was devalued, the Lombards and Jews fleeced and expelled, the currency devalued again; all provided only temporary relief, but the crusading Order of the Temple presented another source of funds. The Knights of the Temple of Solomon and their brothers in the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem had both been founded in the early years of the twelfth century. Drawn mostly from the gentry, having taken monastic vows, both Military Orders protected pilgrims and fought against the Muslims, and both were pugnacious rivals. With the collapse of the Crusader states their brother Order, the Teutonic Knights, returned to their task of forcibly converting the pagan Lithuanians and Orthodox Russians; their rivals, the Hospitallers, found another mission in securing the greater Mediterranean islands, particularly Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta, but the Templars’ original speciality, the provision of security for pilgrims’ funds, which had then been put to use in the international banking system, was now redundant. Their surplus assets represented a convenient source of ready cash.
King Philip began his persecution of the Templars with a campaign of rumours accusing the order of vaguely unspeakable iniquities, and asked the Pope to set up an inquiry, but before this could be done the King struck in a superbly executed dawn raid: on 13 October 1307 all the French Templars were arrested, tried for heresy and tortured until they were ready to confess to any crime however disgraceful. The rest of Europe reacted angrily, refusing to accept the truth of the accusations.
By December, however, enough confessions had been squeezed out of the weaker knights to enable a formidable dossier to be handed over to a papal inquiry; but Clement was a lawyer, and although willing enough to co-operate insisted on proper legal proceedings. Philip stepped up the propaganda campaign, claiming to be the ‘Avenger of the Crucified’ against the Templars’ enormities – whatever they might have been; no punishment could be too severe for such odious crimes, even if actual evidence was tantalizingly elusive. After a meeting between King and Pope in July 1308 a new and wider inquisition was ordered. Their property – the most important point – was seized, and the knights interrogated individually, but results were disappointing: in England, Spain and Germany the Templars were either acquitted or their cases found not proven; only under Philip’s control in France were guilty verdicts given. Finally, in May 1310 fifty-four knights were condemned as relapsed heretics, and publicly burned in Paris to encourage the others. Torture was not always now needed: the accused knew what they were expected to confess. Stalin could not have done better.
To give some respectability to an iniquitous episode a General Council of the Church was summoned to meet in Vienne, on the Rhone, in October 1311. Philip was able to get his own way by threatening to have his old enemy Pope Boniface formally condemned as a heretic. Pope Clement, reluctantly, ‘lest our dear son the King of France take offence’, annulled his predecessor’s decrees (the dogma of papal infallibility makes enormous demands on the faithful), forgave de Nogaret and managed to avoid having Pope Boniface posthumously humiliated. Even then, the Council, although packed with French cardinals and prelates, had to admit that there was not enough evidence to warrant a legal condemnation of the Templars, but that as a matter of expedience, the Order should be suppressed: King Philip had his second papal scalp. No pope would ever again be able to make the claims of universal supremacy that Boniface had advanced, at least in the face of a determined ruler.
How far were the Templars really guilty? It is impossible that any body of men, dedicated to chastity, purity and trained in violence, would not have a proportion of criminals, and sexual irregularities must have been commonplace. But in the only impartial trial, held in Cyprus in 1310, all seventy-six accused were acquitted. Pope Clement immediately ordered a retrial, with enough torture applied by the Inquisition to secure the right result. The King of Cyprus refused to carry out the death sentences, but the Templars were held in prison for the rest of their lives. The final act was the burning of the two most senior remaining knights, the aged Grand Master, Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy. From the execution stake on 18 March 1314, de Molay is said to have called out a curse on the King, and all his children, de Nogaret, and the Pope.
Unfortunately for the King the financial results were again disappointing. The royal treasury had to pay the expenses of the imprisoned knights, which in total approximated to the Order’s sequestrated income. Most of the property, including estates throughout Europe, was taken over by the Hospitallers, who promised to pay, in due course, a sum equivalent to 400,000 gold florins to the King. Philip’s scheme also removed at a stroke one of the most effective Christian defences against militant Islam.
It seemed that de Molay’s curse worked. Within months of his execution King Philip, de Nogaret and the Pope were dead. Philip’s heirs followed: four kings died within fourteen years. The two claimants to the throne were then Edward III of England, whose mother was Philip le Bel’s only surviving child, and Philip of Valois, a cousin. Edward was passed over and under Philip VI (1328–50) the slide of France into the destruction of the Hundred Years War began.
The Babylonish Captivity
After Clement’s coronation at Lyon, and the decision to hold a Council at Vienne, a few miles downstream, the neighbouring Comtat Venaissin was an obvious choice for at least a temporary papal residence. The only papal territory north of the Alps, the Comtat comprised lands to the east of the Rhone, between Dauphiné and Provence. From March 1309 Clement spent the hot summer months there but for the rest of the year settled in the larger and more accessible town of Avignon, adjacent to French territory but actually a possession of King Charles of Naples. It was in many ways a more convenient site for the Holy Father of Christendom than Rome: easily accessible, near enough to the geographical centre of Europe, and in a much more settled area.
Although the Avignon popes were never totally subservient to French kings, French control on Church machinery was stamped by the overwhelming number of French cardinals created – 113 of the 134 promoted by the Avignon popes (the balance was made up by thirteen Italians, five Spaniards, a Swiss and two Englishmen). The complete absence of Germans, and anyone from the developing eastern countries, Hungary and Poland, which constituted so large and so prosperous a part of the Church, was especially notable and demonstrated one reason for an increasing reluctance among many German Catholics to accept papal authority.
In ‘middle management’ the proportions were similarly skewed. ‘Scriptors’, who represented some two-thirds of the papal administration, were entirely Italian in the reign of Boniface VIII; in the Avignon period more than half were French. If all those officials attached to the court, including couriers, bodyguards and domestics, are included 70 per cent were French, 23 per cent Italian. Among the more senior grades the proportions were similar; Christendom outside France and Italy was very poorly represented.
When Clement died on 6 April 1314, the Curia was in Carpentras, the main town of the Comtat. It was more than two years before they could decide on a successor to Clement, their final decision being expedited by a mob who stormed into the conclave demanding the election of a French pope. They chose another lawyer, the Limousin Jacques D’Euse, who had previously been Bishop of Avignon, a tiny seventy-two-year-old who took the name of John XXII. It was expected to be a brief pontificate and no preparations were made for a permanent residence in France. Pope John was able to settle comfortably into his old home, the bishop’s palace of Avignon.
John XXII’s eighteen-year period in office marked the high point of the Avignon papacy, continuity through three reigns being provided by an outstanding official, Gasbert de Laval, Chamberlain from 1319 to 1347. The Pope himself was abstemious and a strict disciplinarian; he also proved himself to be an administrative genius. When the Avignon organization was perfected it became the first bureaucracy of modern times, and one that still in great part survives today. One way of understanding the medieval papacy is to see popes as CEOs of a huge multinational corporation, with commercial and political involvements, while at the same time remembering that a spiritual dimension existed. Even the busiest administrator or most ambitious politician was also a man of God; but among the Avignon popes spirituality was not all that common. Commercially, however, they collectively ranked as the most astute and methodical rulers of their time.
Their responsibilities covered every aspect of the life of a church that owned perhaps a third of Europe, employing hundreds of thousands of men and women. Any questions that could not be settled by subordinates, and any contests between laymen and clerics, could be brought to Avignon for arbitration. National barriers were routinely transcended. In 1369 the Abbot of Alnwick in Northumberland was informed that an Englishman, John Fullour, had seized the church at Yetholm, over the border in Scotland, for which offence he had been excommunicated: it was up to the Abbot to see that the sentence was effected. Delegation was limited, since head office could interfere in the smallest detail if it was thought necessary. Over a thousand clerics routinely reported directly to the Pope – prelates, masters of the Military Orders, generals of the mendicant friars, Franciscans and Dominicans the largest, heads of the monastic Orders and many individual abbots. Supervision was effected by apostolic legates, ambassadors and plenipotentiaries authorized to intervene in national Churches and to negotiate with monarchs, collectors to oversee and safeguard tax receipts; and as the years passed they were joined by thousands of travelling indulgence salesmen.
Four main departments in Avignon serviced and controlled this vast organization: the Camera Apostolica, headed by the Chamberlain and the Treasurer, supervised the finances; seven sub-departments constituted the Chancery, responsible for documentation and records; the Consistory Court assembled the Pope and cardinals to decide disputes, hear complaints and accusations and act as a court of appeal from all subordinate Church tribunals; and the Grand Penitentiary could suspend penalties and grant dispensations and generally tidy up irregularities.
Literally thousands of officers – secretaries, auditors, penitentiarii minores, the personnel of the papal mint and the numerous personal staff of the cardinals, protected by the double walls of Avignon town and the papal palace, were able to work in tranquillity. Between 1198 and 1304 successive popes resided in Rome itself for less than half the period, whereas in Avignon they enjoyed seventy years of uninterrupted peace. But efficiency had to be paid for, and the Curia under John and his successor Clement VI developed ingenious ways of raising money. The Consistory’s fees and the fines levied by the Penitentiary were an important source of income, while, less officially since it constituted the venal sin of simony, benefices – Church posts of all kinds – were often sold by the papal court. Collections were enforced by officials, with diplomatic status, resident in the main cities throughout Western Christendom.
Considerably greater sums were provided by the papal share of clerical incomes. Clerical income tax had been established a century previously as a crusading levy by Pope Innocent III, who also established a comprehensive valuation of all benefices, throughout Europe, to serve as a basis for the tax. All bishops – some 700 including 302 in Italy, 131 in France, sixteen in England and forty-eight in Germany – were assessed for taxation. Some were extremely rich, especially the extensive German sees (Winchester was the wealthiest in Britain) and some miserably poor, but all were obliged to pay fixed sums proportionate to their means. Originally one-fortieth, it was now standardized as one-tenth. The proceeds could be allotted to the lay ruler for a specified period, often of six months or a year; if not intended to fund a crusade the object must be of equal importance, such as the defence of a Christian realm.
Easy enough to calculate, and not too difficult to collect, the problem lay in its distribution. If the cash was not immediately spent on preparatory expenses, it remained in the royal exchequers. If the crusade were to be cancelled, the money should be returned; often a pious hope. The most famous example was a six-year – an extraordinarily long period – pan-European tenth granted at the Council of Vienne in 1312, intended to finance a traditional crusade towards the Holy Land launched with much drama in the next year by King Philip IV and King Edward II in person. When the project was abandoned the English treasury held on to five years’ income, theoretically transmitted the sixth year’s takings back to the Pope, then treated it as a loan, which was never repaid. King Philip, after some complex negotiations, was allowed to keep all except 100,000 florins. Smaller countries with less political clout were forced to repay: King Magnus of Sweden was allowed to retain only half of the proceeds, refunding the rest (partly in walrus tusks) only after protracted negotiations.
Tenths were too easily alienated to provide a reliable income for the papacy and a more secure source was developed by the Avignon administrations. In theory a pope had the right to fill any post in the Church, and practice was brought progressively closer to theory by the Avignon popes. Traditionally priests had been awarded their benefices either by election (cathedral canons elected bishops, monks their abbots) or nomination by patrons, ecclesiastics or laymen, traditions which still hold good, in a modified way, in the Church of England. Popes had previously intervened only in disputed elections, or when the current holder died in the neighbourhood of the Curia. Beginning with John XXII these powers were greatly extended: posts in a specific church, a province or even a state could be ‘reserved’, to be filled only by the Pope, and within fifty years all appointments to ‘major benefices’ – bishops and abbots – were so reserved, as were also many ‘minor benefices’ – anything from parish priests to cathedral deans. Once appointed, by whatever method, a successful candidate had to pay a tax proportionate to his income – ‘annates’ for the richer posts, and ‘services’ for the lesser. The change was initiated by Clement V in 1306, and extended by his successors. At first annates were levied only for a limited period, but from 1326 the charge was made permanent. Papal income could be augmented by simply not making an appointment, but keeping the post’s income, or by fees paid by absentee bishops permitting them to avoid living in or even visiting their dioceses.
Again in theory, appointments should have been made, and often were, on merit; but simple bribery was not unknown. The sin of ‘simony’ – the sale of Church offices – was one of the gravest and Avignon popes were usually too conscientious lawyers to be openly guilty, but most were unashamed nepotists, promoting family members to important offices, particularly the cardinalate.
As well as perfecting the back office, the Avignon popes proved adept at what might be termed ‘product development’. Rome has always been more inventive than the Greek Church in stimulating popular fervour, and the doctrine of ‘Indulgences’, later to be a prime cause of the Lutheran reformation, was perfected by Pope Clement VI. The practice stems from the idea of ‘Purgatory’, a postmortem state in which those souls eventually bound for Paradise were doomed to spend some time expiating their various sins. The concept emerged during the first four centuries AD in the Western Church (never adopted in the East), and was married to the idea of punishment remitted. Prayers from the living, for example, could earn time out for friends or relations already consigned to Purgatory.
Ideas of the nature of Purgatory differed greatly – after all, direct evidence was notably lacking. Dante’s ‘Purgatorio’ was inhabited by worthy souls tormented only by regret for their own shortcomings during life, working their way upwards through seven levels to the final goal of Paradise; there was even laughter in Dante’s Purgatory. For Sir Thomas More, by contrast, the souls are tortured by ‘cruell damned sprites, odious, envious and hateful’. The timescale too was very indefinite, but the idea of an approaching end of the world was never very far from medieval minds, and it was likely that time to be spent in Purgatory was often perceived as being measurable in the terms of relatively few human generations. Individuals’ own transgressions, legal or moral, could be forgiven in the central Christian rite of the Eucharist, where the priest declares that the truly penitent – and true penitence was a central condition of such absolution – were cleansed of the guilt of their sins up to the moment of absolution. Indulgences offered another pathway to forgiveness that avoided the embarrassment of confession.
Indulgences had been developed as an aid to recruiting crusaders; the first ‘plenary’ indulgence, a remission of the punishment due to all sins – in effect an immediate passport to heaven – being given by Pope Urban II in 1095 to those who joined in the First Crusade. By the time of the Lateran Council of 1215 a modified, second-class version had been provided to those who gave financial assistance or advice; this was speedily extended – crusades being very expensive – to all those helping with the crusade, even to the crusaders’ wives. The Avignon papacy was faced with the almost impossible task of organizing and formalizing the system. By the end of the period it was agreed that the payment of fifteen days’ wages for a man-at-arms – three and a half florins – won the full crusade indulgence: this was very popular ‘especially with women and the poor’. It was eventually extended to all the inhabitants of Florence who confessed their sins within three months. The concept of hellfire was nearly extinguished.
The system was reinforced by a more recent idea, developed in the thirteenth century, the existence of a ‘Treasury of Merit’ – the infinite grace stored up by Christ, available to all sincere believers. The new belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary added the benefits of a miraculously pure life to the Treasury, to which the virtue of all the saints could be joined in support: and the key to this mighty power house of salvation was held only by the pope. A pontiff might delegate this power to his subordinates, but only a pope could grant the ultimate privilege of a plenary indulgence, which could remit the penalty of all sins up to the moment of death. A further refinement was that such an indulgence could be granted in advance, to be held in reserve for administration at the actual moment of death. It was enough that anyone present said over the dying person ‘May the Lord absolve you from your guilt and punishment according to the privilege you say you have received from the supreme pontiff’, for the sinner to move directly to heaven.
Pope Clement’s Bull Unigenitus of 1347 clarified and formalized the system, but it is doubtful if most of its beneficiaries understood the full ramifications of so complex a theological fabric. By the time Geoffrey Chaucer began his Canterbury Tales in 1387 the degeneration of the ideal was manifested in his description of the Pardoner, with his wallet full of ‘pardon, comen from Rome al hoot’ and his relics – a pillow case which was Our Lady’s veil, and a glass case of pigs’ bones for which he was able to persuade poor priests to surrender a whole year’s income:
‘And thus, with feigned flattery and japes,
He made the parson and the people his apes.
One of the great advantages of the new product was that apart from some short indulgences granted for a pilgrimage to a specific place, it was exclusively ecclesiastical. Kings and princes might appropriate great slices of the Church’s wealth on one pretext or another, but only the pope had the keys to unlock the Celestial Treasury. All the income from indulgences therefore flowed to the Church, although some could be taken as commission by such salesmen as the Pardoner.
Taxation is always unpopular, and papal exactions were especially resented in England, where the Avignon papacy was often seen as a foreign power. King Edward III spoke for most Englishmen when he chided Pope Clement VI in a stern letter reminding the Pope that ‘the successor to the Apostles was commissioned to lead the Lord’s sheep to the pasture, not to fleece them’. Another grievance was the fact that papal appointees, often non-resident but collecting handsome incomes, were forced upon English churches. In 1326 the Bishop of Salisbury protested to John XXII that twenty-eight out of fifty posts in his diocese had been filled by papal nominees and that hardly more than three had ever been seen there. On the other hand the same Pope insisted on the installation of John Grandison as Bishop of Exeter; not only was Grandison one of the most durable (1328–69) of British prelates, he was also one of the most successful.
It was much easier for popes to interfere with clerical rights than with those owned by laymen. When a foreigner was given the Yorkshire rectory of Upleatham, the patron Sir Robert Thwang raised a riot, summarily burned the intruder’s barns, confiscated his property and gave it to the local poor. Supported by King Henry III, Sir Robert saw his rights admitted by Pope Gregory IX, who promised that laymen’s privileges should be observed.
Bureaucratic delays were another defence against Avignon appointments; in Bishop Trillick’s time in Hereford (1344–60) only six of the thirty-three papal orders were actually carried out. Another, particularly English response, was the multiplication of laws simply nullifying papal orders, the last of which, the third Statute of Praemunire, forbade any sentences of excommunication or demands for new funds entering the country. But in the long run, whatever Parliament did, reasonable relations with the papacy were a diplomatic convenience, and a concordat was duly reached in 1398. The German reaction was more violent, exacerbated by the exclusion of Germans from the centre of power. Papal nominations were disregarded, and the emissaries of the Holy See bound and thrown into the River Main.
Administrative expenses were inescapable, and on the whole well controlled, but large sums were also demanded by the extravagance of the papal entourage, which became notorious. Unless given individual appointments, the cardinals, as a group, had limited powers, which they attempted to increase by agreeing among themselves that whoever should be elected as pope would follow an agreed programme. In practice, once elected, popes pleased themselves. As a compensation, cardinals were able to become extremely rich. They were entitled to a fixed share in all papal revenue, including half of the income from the papacy’s Italian territories. Outsiders looked on the cardinals’ lavish mode of life with envy and distaste; ‘a field full of pride, avarice, self-indulgence and corruption’ according to St Birgitta of Sweden (who had, like many of her later countrymen, opted for life in the more agreeable climate of Rome). Not only cardinals, but relatively junior clerics lived in splendour; a simple canon of Liège Cathedral was followed by twenty men when he attended Mass. Clement VI (1342–52) was notoriously spendthrift; ‘his court was bathed in luxuries and punctuated by sumptuous banquets and grand festivities’. One entertainment, given by Cardinal Annibale di Ceccano in 1343 for Pope Clement, became known as ‘the magnificent banquet’. Twenty-seven dishes were served, ranging from a prodigious pie containing a stag, a wild boar, kids, hares and rabbits; two silver trees bore crystallized fruits; five wines from Provence, La Rochelle, Beaune, St Pourcain and the Rhine flowed from a fountain surrounded with peacocks, pheasants, partridges and cranes. Presents of gold florins were made to all the Pope’s attendants, down to the clerks and men-at-arms. Pope Clement was given a white charger and rings, one set with an enormous sapphire, the other with an equally large topaz. Hardly surprising, therefore, that many outside that charmed circle resented such ostentation.
It was, however, political rather than personal expenses that strained papal finances beyond breaking point. In 1342 the treasury contained over 1,110,000 gold florins; ten years later, on Clement’s death, the Medici bank was owed half a million florins. Innocent VI (1352–62) was forced to sell his own jewels and plate. Urban V (1362–70) personally austere, was able to spend the final three years of his pontificate in Rome, but the expense had been enormous and the treasury was bankrupt.