Absolute Monarchs (25 page)

On January 6, 1266—Epiphany—a group of cardinals in Rome crowned Charles of Anjou with the crown of Sicily. (Neither Pope Urban nor his successor, Clement IV, ever went near the Holy City, preferring to remain at Anagni or Viterbo.) Less than a month later, on February 3, Charles’s troops crossed the frontier into the Regno and met Manfred’s outside Benevento on the twenty-sixth. It was all over quite quickly. Manfred, courageous as always, stood his ground and went down fighting, but his troops, hopelessly outnumbered, soon fled from the field. The battle had been decisive: the Crusade was over.

And so—or very nearly—was the House of Hohenstaufen. Two years later Manfred’s son Conrad IV, better known as Conradin, made a last desperate attempt to save the situation, leading an army of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards into the Regno. Charles hurried up and met them on August 23, 1268, at the border village of Tagliacozzo. This time the battle proved a good deal harder, resulting in hideous slaughter on both sides, but the Angevins again won the day. Conradin escaped but was captured soon afterward. There followed a show trial in Naples, after which, on October 29, the young prince—he was just sixteen—and several of his companions were taken down to the marketplace and publicly beheaded.

Manfred and Conradin were both, in their different ways, heroes. It was hardly their fault that they were overshadowed by their father and grandfather; so, after all, was much of the known world. The fact remains that, politically, Frederick had been a failure. Like virtually all the Hohenstaufen, he had a dream of making Italy and Sicily a united kingdom within the empire, with its capital at Rome; the overriding purpose of the Papacy, aided by the cities and towns of Lombardy, was to ensure that that dream should never be realized. It was unfortunate for the emperor that he should have had to contend with two such able and determined men as Gregory and Innocent, but in the long run the struggle could have had no other outcome. The empire, even in Germany, had lost its strength and cohesion; no longer could the loyalty of the German princes, or even their deep concern, be relied upon. As for North and Central Italy, the Lombard cities would never again submit to imperial bluster. Had Frederick only accepted this simple truth, the threat to the Papacy would have been removed and his beloved Regno might well have been preserved. Alas, he rejected it; and in doing so he not only lost Italy, he signed his dynasty’s death warrant.

The Hohenstaufen were defeated; but it would be a mistake to see the Papacy as victorious. Urban and Clement were both Frenchmen; they had done everything they could to support their compatriot Charles of Anjou. Clement had not even protested at the cruel and vindictive execution of young Conradin. It had been the intention of both popes, however, that Charles’s authority should be confined to his new Sicilian kingdom; instead, his early victories had awakened far greater ambitions in him. These now encompassed the domination of all Italy, the reduction of the pope to the status of a submissive puppet, the reconquest yet again of Constantinople—now once more in Greek hands—its return to the Latin faith, and, ultimately, the establishment of a Christian empire that would extend the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer that his threat to the independence of the Holy See was potentially as great as Frederick’s had ever been.

In November 1268 Pope Clement died at Viterbo, and it says much for Charles’s influence in the Curia that he was able to keep the papal throne unoccupied for the next three years, conveniently covering the period that he was away Crusading in Tunisia with his brother Louis IX. The vacancy ended only when the authorities at Viterbo, where the conclave was being held, actually removed the roof from the palace in which the cardinals were deliberating. Their hasty choice had then fallen on Tedaldo Visconti, Archdeacon of Liège, who as Gregory X proved from Charles’s point of view distinctly unhelpful, thwarting his attempts to have his nephew Philip III of France elected Holy Roman Emperor and allying himself with Byzantium to the extent of actually effecting, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, a temporary union of the Eastern and Western churches. Only in 1281, after four more popes had come and gone,
⁷
did Charles get his way at last with the election of another Frenchman, Simon de Brie, who was crowned at Orvieto as Pope Martin IV. Already master of Provence and the greater part of Italy, titular King of Jerusalem,
⁸
and by a long way the most powerful—and dangerous—prince in Europe, Charles was now free to realize his greatest ambition by marching against Constantinople—whose emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, Pope Martin had obligingly redeclared schismatic. It was only twenty years since the Greeks had recovered their capital from the Franks; as 1282 opened, their chances of keeping it looked slim indeed.

They were saved by the people of Palermo. The French were already hated throughout the Regno for both the severity of their taxation and the arrogance of their conduct; and when, on the evening of March 30, a drunken French sergeant began importuning a Sicilian woman outside the church of Santo Spirito just as vespers were about to begin, her countrymen’s anger boiled over. The sergeant was set upon by her husband and killed; the murder led to a riot, the riot to a massacre. Two thousand Frenchmen were dead by morning. Palermo, and soon afterward Messina also, was in rebel hands. And now Peter III of Aragon, husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance, saw his chance to make good his somewhat shadowy claim to the Sicilian crown. He reached Palermo in September and by the end of October had captured Messina, where the French had made their last stand.

For Charles of Anjou, who had established his court in Naples, the War of the Sicilian Vespers and the consequent loss of Sicily spelled disaster. His kingdom was split down the middle, his reputation gone. His vaunted Mediterranean empire was seen to have been built on sand; he had ceased to be a world power. There could no longer be any question of an expedition against Byzantium. Little more than two years later he died at Foggia. But it was not only the reputation of the House of Anjou that had suffered. There was also the fact that Sicily and the Regno had been granted to Charles by the pope; the Papacy too had to look to its prestige. Martin had promptly proclaimed a Crusade against the Aragonese, but nobody took it very seriously; and it was a sad and disappointed pontiff who—having in March 1285 dined too well on milk-fed eels from Lake Bolsena—followed his friend Charles to the grave.

—

THE PRINCIPAL TASK
of the next two popes was to expel the House of Aragon from South Italy and to restore that of Anjou. The first of the two, Honorius IV,
⁹
being of a distinguished Roman family, was at least allowed to take up residence in the palace he had recently built on the Aventine; but he was already seventy-five on his accession and almost paralyzed by gout. He could hardly stand, let alone walk; he said Mass sitting on a stool, while his hands needed a mechanical contrivance to raise them from the altar. He reigned for only two years, and nearly a year was to pass before his successor was elected. The summer of 1287 was stiflingly hot and killed off no fewer than six cardinals. The rest fled to the hills, returning in the autumn for their conclave. Even now they took their time: it was not till February 1288 that they elected, as a compromise, the first Franciscan pope, a former general of the order, Girolamo Masci. As Nicholas IV, he was no more successful at restoring the Angevins than Honorius had been; nor, in 1291, could he do anything to prevent the Mameluke Sultan Qalawun from capturing Acre, thus putting an end, after 192 years, to Crusader Outremer. From its beginnings it had been a monument to intolerance and territorial ambition, its story one of steady physical and moral decline accompanied by monumental incompetence. Few people in western Europe were sorry to see it go.

After Nicholas died in April 1292 the twelve living cardinals met in Perugia, Rome at that time suffering one of its all-too-frequent visitations of the plague. They took their time, deliberating for twenty-seven months before picking one of the most unsuitable men ever to occupy, however briefly, the papal throne. He was Pietro da Morrone, an eighty-five-year-old peasant who had lived for more than six decades as a hermit in the Abruzzi, and his only qualification was that once, while appearing briefly at the court of Gregory X, he had hung up his outer habit on a sunbeam. There is a fascinating account by one of its members of the journey of a five-man papal embassy to Pietro’s mountain hermitage, only to find that Charles II of Naples had gotten there already. They found the new pope in a state verging on panic, but he recovered at last and, after a prolonged period of prayer, reluctantly accepted.

True, there had long been a prophecy of an “angel pope,” who would usher in the Age of the Spirit; but it is hard to see how anyone, seeing the agonized old man astride a donkey being led to his consecration at L’Aquila, could have believed that the Papacy was in safe hands—or indeed any hands at all. Celestine V quickly proved himself to be nothing more than a puppet of Charles II, even taking up residence in the Castel Nuovo, which still dominates the harbor of Naples. Within it he ordered the building of a small wooden cell, the only place where he could feel at home. He normally refused to see his cardinals, whose worldliness and sophistication terrified him; when he did so, they were obliged to abandon their elegant Latin and adopt the crude vernacular which was the only language he could understand. The duties of the Papacy, political, diplomatic, and administrative, he ignored; favors were bestowed on anyone who asked for them. No wonder that he lasted for just five months, then wisely announced his abdication—the only one in papal history.

The architect of this abdication was Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who is said to have introduced a secret speaking tube into Celestine’s cell through which, in the small hours of the night, he would simulate the voice of God, warning him of the flames of Hell if he were to continue in office. It was certainly Caetani who drafted the deed of renunciation which, on December 13, the pope read out to the assembled cardinals before solemnly stripping off his papal robes and revealing himself once again in his hermit’s rags.

Poor Celestine: he is usually identified with the unnamed figure whom Dante meets in the Third Canto of the
Inferno
and whom he accuses of “having made through cowardice the great refusal”—
il gran rifiuto.
In fact, he was no coward; he simply asked to return to the hermitage that he should never have left.

IT WAS SOMEHOW
inevitable that the successor to the luckless Pope Celestine, elected on Christmas Eve 1294, only twenty-four hours after the opening of the conclave in Naples, should have been that same Cardinal Benedetto Caetani, who now took the name of Boniface VIII. Of all his fellow cardinals he was by far the most able, the most strong-willed, and the most ambitious; he it was who had engineered Celestine’s removal, and we may be sure that in doing so he had taken care to smooth his own path to the papal throne. Born around 1235 at Anagni of a modestly aristocratic family with papal connections—his mother was a niece of Alexander IV—he was now in his early sixties, with forty years of experience behind him. In his youth he had been member of a legation to England, where, during the civil war caused by the efforts of Simon de Montfort to curb the misgovernment of King Henry III, he had at one moment found himself besieged in the Tower of London; he had been rescued in the nick of time by the future Edward I. On his return to Rome he had settled down to work for his own advancement, acquiring a steadily increasing number of benefices to help him on his way.

Having been appointed cardinal by the Frenchman Martin IV, Boniface had always been a steadfast supporter of the Angevin cause in Naples and Sicily; at his first coronation ceremony in Naples, his white horse had been led by Charles II of Sicily and his son Charles, King of Hungary. No sooner was he crowned, however, than he made it known that he was returning at once to Rome—and that his predecessor, Celestine, would be coming with him. The old man was predictably horrified: the whole object of his abdication had been to enable him to return to his mountain hermitage. With his vast following of the faithful, however, he might easily have become all unwittingly the focus of opposition; and Boniface was taking no chances. On reaching Rome, the pope was furious to learn that Celestine had somehow slipped away and taken to the hills once again; he gave immediate orders for his pursuit and arrest, by force if necessary. It took some time—despite his age, Celestine was still remarkably quick on his feet—but at last he was found and brought before his formidable successor. It was then that he is said to have uttered his famous prophecy: “You have entered like a fox,” he declared to Boniface; “you will reign like a lion—and you will die like a dog.”

His words probably had little effect on his fate; he was, whether he liked it or not, too dangerous to be allowed his liberty. Boniface imprisoned him in a remote castle at Fumone—it was, in fact, just the sort of place where he felt at home—and there, ten months later, at the age of ninety, he died.

POPE BONIFACE WAS
recrowned in Rome on January 23, 1295. He was the epitome of the worldly cleric—indeed, he was as unlike his predecessor as it is possible to be. A first-class legist and a scholar, he founded the Sapienza University in Rome, codified canon law, and reestablished the Vatican Library and Archive. But there was little of the spiritual in his nature. For him the great sanctions of the Church existed only to further his own temporal ends and to enrich his family. Foreign rulers he treated less as his subjects than as his menials. As for his office, he saw it in exclusively political terms, determined as he was to reassert the supremacy of the Apostolic See over the emerging nations of Europe. For this task he possessed abundant energy, self-confidence, and strength of will; what he lacked was the slightest sense of diplomacy or finesse. Concepts such as conciliation and compromise simply did not interest him; he charged forward regardless—and ultimately he paid the price.