Absolute Monarchs (26 page)

It was in a way typical of him that he should have declared 1300 a Holy Year, the first in Christian history. Attracted by the promise of “full and copious pardon” to all who visited St. Peter’s and the Lateran after making their confession, some 200,000 pilgrims are said to have converged on Rome from all over the continent, vastly enriching the city—in certain of the basilicas, the sacristans were said to have had to gather in the offerings with rakes—and adding immeasurably to the Papacy’s prestige. Among the pilgrims was the poet Dante, who set the
Divine Comedy
in the Holy Week of that year; in Canto XVIII of the
Inferno
he actually compares the regimentation of the crowds in Hell to the one-way system which he had seen controlling the traffic on the Ponte Sant’Angelo.

Among those thousands, however, there was not a single crowned head. King Charles was soon antagonized, as was Edward I of England when the pope tried to claim Scotland as a papal fief. That operation failed, as did Boniface’s attempts to dictate the succession in Hungary and Poland. Ironically enough, however, the pope’s most implacable enemy was the French king, Philip the Fair. Their mutual hostility had begun in 1296, when Philip imposed a heavy tax on the French clergy to help finance his campaign against England in Gascony—the curtain raiser, as it were, for the Hundred Years’ War. Since the days of Innocent III such taxes had been customary for Crusades, but Philip’s campaign could hardly have been so described. Furious, the pope replied with a bull,
Clericis Laicos
, that formally prohibited the taxation of clergy or Church property without express authorization from Rome. Had he given the matter any serious consideration, he would have seen in an instant just how shortsighted his action was; Philip simply forbade the export of currency and valuables, simultaneously barring the entry of papal tax collectors into the country. Since the papal exchequer relied heavily on income from France, Boniface had no alternative but to climb down, attempting to recover some of his lost prestige by formally canonizing Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX.

Simultaneously and quite unnecessarily, he also made enemies of the immensely powerful family of Colonna. Although the family was a traditional rival of the Caetani, the two Colonna cardinals had originally supported his election, but they had quickly become disenchanted with his arrogance and autocratic style. Matters came to a head when, in 1297, a party of their supporters hijacked a consignment of bullion on its way to the papal treasury, claiming that it had been extracted “from the tears of the poor.” Boniface as usual overreacted, threatening to send papal garrisons to their home city of Palestrina and other Colonna strongholds and expelling the two cardinals—who had of course not been implicated in the hijacking—from the Sacred College. Finally he excommunicated the family en masse, seizing and devastating its lands in the name of a Crusade. When the Colonnas all fled to France, his principal enemies in Italy became the Fraticelli, a spiritual branch of the Franciscans, who had rebelled against the increasing worldliness of their order to return to their founder’s principles of asceticism and poverty. Boniface they loathed, not only for his wealth and arrogance but because they held him responsible for Celestine’s abdication, imprisonment, and death.

Now the gloves were off. The pope was made the victim of a campaign of scurrilous abuse probably unequaled even in papal history. Its authors did not confine themselves to charges of nepotism, simony, or avarice, which could all too easily be justified; they accused him of idolatry—because he had erected so many statues of himself—of atheism, and even of sodomy. (Sex with boys, he was accused of saying, was no worse than rubbing one hand against the other.) All these accusations, and many others still more outlandish, were enthusiastically echoed in France—if indeed France was not their original source. Within three or four years of his accession, Boniface VIII was probably the most widely detested pope there had ever been.

Then, in the autumn of 1301, King Philip summarily imprisoned the obscure but contumacious Bishop of Pamiers, charging him with treason and insulting behavior. The pope, without having troubled even to look into the case, angrily demanded the bishop’s release; Philip refused, and the battle between the two entered its final phase. Boniface, in yet another bull,
Ausculta fili
(“Listen, son”), loftily summoned the king himself, together with his senior clergy, to a synod in Rome in November 1302. Philip, it need hardly be said, once again refused; but thirty-nine French bishops, somewhat surprisingly, found the courage to attend. It was after this that Boniface fired his last broadside,
Unam Sanctam
, in which—after liberal quotations from St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Thomas Aquinas—he claimed in so many words that “it is altogether necessary for salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” There was nothing particularly new in this; similar claims had been made by Innocent III and several other popes. None the less, papal absolutism could hardly go further, and there was no question that it was King Philip whom Boniface had principally in mind.

Probably on the advice of his new minister Guillaume de Nogaret—whose Albigensian grandfather had been burnt at the stake and who consequently had no love for the Papacy—Philip now returned to his former tactic of all-out personal attack. All the old charges, together with several new ones such as illegitimacy and heresy, which included disbelief in the immortality of the soul, were repeated, and an insistent demand was made for a General Council at which the Supreme Pontiff would be arraigned. An army of 1,600 under Nogaret in person was dispatched to Italy with orders to seize the pope and to bring him, by force if necessary, to France. Boniface was, meanwhile, in his palace at Anagni, putting the finishing touches to a bull excommunicating Philip and releasing his subjects from their allegiance. He was due to publish it on September 8; but on the seventh Nogaret and his troops arrived, together with Sciarra Colonna and a band of Italian mercenaries. The pope donned his full papal regalia and faced them with courage, challenging them to kill him. They briefly took him prisoner, but he was rescued by the people of Anagni—he was, after all, one of their number—and spirited away. Nogaret, seeing that there was no way of laying hands on him short of a massacre, wisely decided to retire.

His mission, however, had not been in vain. The old pope’s pride had suffered a mortal blow. After a few days’ rest, his Orsini friends escorted him back to Rome, but he never recovered from the shock. He died less than a month later, on October 12, 1303. Dante, by anticipation—since Boniface died only three years after the poet’s visit to Hell—placed him in the eighth circle, upside down in a furnace. His judgment may be thought a little harsh—but one sees, perhaps, what he meant.

1.
The siege was further complicated by the unexpected arrival of St. Francis of Assisi, who gained an audience with the sultan and tried to convert him to Christianity. That was a failure too.

2.
Outremer—literally, “beyond the sea”—was the name given to the Crusading states in the Levant, established after the First Crusade.

3.
The article on Gregory IX in
The New Catholic Encyclopedia
—in spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary—endorses this view with the words “on September 8, a large fleet made its appearance, but, feigning illness, Frederick ordered it to turn back to Otranto.” The illness was not feigned, and the fleet was not ordered to turn back.

4.
All the Eastern patriarchates were allowed to continue under Muslim occupation—as indeed they still do.

5.
Its octagonal shape may well have been the inspiration for his magnificent hunting lodge, Castel del Monte in Apulia.

6.
Revelations 13:1.

7.
Innocent V lasted for five months, Hadrian V for five weeks. John XXI, a formidably intellectual Portuguese, had been pope for eight months when the ceiling of his study in his new palace at Viterbo collapsed on his head. Because of his avariciousness and nepotism Nicholas III had the distinction of being consigned by Dante to an eternity upside down in Hell; after thirty-three months of dedicated opposition to Charles, he was carried off by a stroke.

8.
He had bought the title in 1277 from Princess Maria of Antioch, a granddaughter of King Amalric II of Jerusalem.

9.
Honorius was, incidentally, the last pope to have been married before his ordination.

CHAPTER XV

Avignon

T
he next pope, Benedict XI, was a humble Dominican who, we are told, felt at ease only with other Dominicans. He was one of his predecessor’s few supporters. Despite his gentle demeanor, he had stood shoulder to shoulder with Pope Boniface at Anagni; now he applied himself to the delicate task of pacifying King Philip and persuading him to drop his plans for a General Council as a means of bringing Boniface posthumously to justice. In this he was temporarily successful, though only after he had revoked all Boniface’s existing papal decrees and pronouncements against Philip and his subjects, including every Frenchman who had been involved in the affair at Anagni—with the sole exception of Nogaret himself. Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna, and the Italians, on the other hand, he denounced as being guilty of sacrilege in laying hands on the Supreme Pontiff, ordering them to appear before him before June 29, 1304. They never did so, because, apart from anything else, by that date the pope was already mortally ill of dysentery in Perugia; ten days later he was dead.

The physical attack on Pope Boniface at Anagni had not been forgotten. Hated as he had been, many right-thinking churchmen remained deeply shocked by King Philip’s action, which they saw as an insult to the Papacy and all it stood for. There were others, however, who had been equally disgusted by the pope’s treatment of the two Colonna cardinals and who wanted in any case to see an end to the long dispute with France—for which, with Boniface gone, there was no longer any real justification. The conclave which opened in Perugia in July 1304 was split down the middle, and the deadlock continued for eleven months; it was finally agreed that if a new pope was ever to be elected, he would have to come from outside the College of Cardinals. And so he did: Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V. Not being a cardinal, he had not been present at the conclave; he had however attended Boniface’s synod in 1302, despite which he had managed to maintain a friendly working relationship with Philip.

Although a shameless nepotist, the new pope was a distinguished canon lawyer and an efficient administrator who concentrated on the missionary role of the Church, going so far as to establish chairs in Arabic and other oriental languages at the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. In his dealings with countries other than his own, he was to show an impressive independence of spirit, releasing Edward I of England from his vows to his barons, suspending the Archbishop of Canterbury, excommunicating King Robert the Bruce of Scotland for the murder in church of his old enemy John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, and settling a fifteen-year dispute over the Hungarian succession. Had he been an Italian, elected and crowned in Rome, he might well have proved himself if not a great pope, at least a strong one. Being a subject of King Philip, however, from the moment of his election he found himself under almost intolerable pressure from his master. Philip began as he meant to go on, insisting first of all that, since the new pope was already in France, he should be crowned there. The beginning of Clement’s pontificate was far from auspicious: when he was riding to his coronation ceremony at Lyons, a wall onto which spectators had climbed to watch the procession suddenly collapsed. The pope was knocked off his horse but escaped with only bruises; others taking part in the procession were not so lucky: several were seriously injured, and the Duke of Brittany was killed.

At that time there is no reason to believe that Clement did not fully intend to move to Rome in due course; his justification for remaining temporarily in France was his hope of bringing about an end to the hostilities between France and England, so that the two could combine their forces for another Crusade to the Holy Land. For four years he had no fixed abode; he moved constantly between Lyons, Poitiers, and Bordeaux, his cardinals following as best they could. (By now they were mostly Frenchmen: of the ten he created in December 1305, nine were French—four of them his nephews—and the French element was to be increased still further in 1310 and again in 1312.) Philip meanwhile maintained the pressure to keep him in France; but in 1309 Clement decided to settle in Avignon, which, lying as it did on the east bank of the Rhône,
¹
was at that time the property of Philip’s vassal Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily and Count of Provence. The little town—with around 5,000 inhabitants, it was at that time scarcely more than a village—was to be the home of six more popes after him and the seat of the Papacy for the next sixty-eight years.

Those years are often referred to as the Babylonian Captivity. They were nothing of the kind. The popes were in no sense captive; they were in Avignon because they wanted to be. Nonetheless, it was not a comfortable place. The poet Petrarch described it as being “a disgusting city” battered by the mistral, “a sewer where all the filth of the universe is collected.” The Aragonese ambassador was so nauseated by the stench of the streets that he fell ill and had to return home. As papal territory, it also became a place of refuge for criminals of every kind, and its taverns and brothels were notorious. Nor was it designed to accommodate a papal court. The pope and his immediate entourage moved into the local Dominican priory; a few fortunate cardinals managed to requisition the larger houses; the rest found a roof wherever they could.

The move to Avignon should at least have allowed Clement a degree of independence; but Philip was too strong for him. He himself was a sick man—he suffered from stomach cancer throughout his pontificate—and he soon showed himself little more than a puppet of the French king. Unshaken in his determination to bring Pope Boniface to justice, Philip obliged Clement to open a full inquiry in 1309. Delays and various complications ensued, and in April 1311 the proceedings were suspended; the pope, however, had to pay a heavy price: the complete rehabilitation of the Colonna cardinals, full compensation for their family, the annullment of all Boniface’s actions that had been prejudicial to French interests, and the absolution of Guillaume de Nogaret. But a greater humiliation still was in store: the part Clement was forced to play in Philip’s plan for the elimination of the Knights Templar.

—

IT IS DIFFICULT
for us nowadays to understand the influence of the Templars in the later Middle Ages. Founded in the early twelfth century to protect the pilgrims flocking to the Holy Places after the First Crusade and owing much to the patronage of St. Bernard, these warrior-monks were within fifty years firmly established in almost every country of Christendom, from Denmark to Spain, from Ireland to Armenia; within a century, “the poor fellow soldiers of Jesus Christ” were—despite their Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—financing half of Europe, the most powerful bankers of the civilized world. By 1250 they were thought to possess some nine thousand landed properties; both in Paris and London, their houses were used as strongholds in which to preserve the royal treasure. From the English Templars, Henry III borrowed the purchase money for the island of Oléron in 1235; from the French, Philip the Fair extracted the dowry of his daughter, Isabelle, on her ill-starred marriage to Edward II of England. For Louis IX, taken prisoner in Egypt at the end of the Sixth Crusade, they provided the greater part of his ransom, and to Edward I they advanced no less than 25,000 livres tournois, four-fifths of which they were later to recover.

Of all the countries in which the Templars operated, they were most powerful in France, where they effectively constituted a state within a state; and as their influence increased, it was not surprising that King Philip should have become seriously concerned. But Philip also had another, less honorable reason for acting against them: he was in desperate need of money. He had already dispossessed and expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers; similar treatment of the Templars, which promised to secure him all the Templar wealth and property in his kingdom, would solve his financial problems once and for all. The order would, he knew, prove a formidable adversary; fortunately, however, he had a weapon ready to hand. For many years there had been rumors circulating about the secret rites practiced by the Knights at their midnight meetings. All he now needed to do was to institute an official inquiry; it would not be hard to find witnesses who—in return for a small consideration—would be prepared to give the evidence required.

And so King Philip set to work, and the results of his inquiry proved even more satisfactory than he had dared to hope. The Templars, it now appeared, were Satanists. They worshiped an idol of their own, which they had named Baphomet. They underwent a secret ceremony of initiation, in which they formally denied Christ and trampled on the crucifix. Their vow of poverty, as the whole world knew, had long since gone out the window; it was now revealed that their vow of chastity had suffered a similar fate. Sodomy in particular was not only permitted, it was actively encouraged. Such illegitimate children as nevertheless happened to be engendered were disposed of—frequently by being roasted alive.

On Friday, October 13, 1307,
²
the grand master of the Temple, Jacques de Molay, was arrested in Paris with sixty of his leading brethren. To force them to confess, they were put to the torture, first by the palace authorities and then by the Inquisition. Over the next six weeks no fewer than 138 Knights were subjected to examination, of whom, not surprisingly, 123, including Molay himself, finally confessed to at least some of the charges leveled against them. Philip, meanwhile, wrote to his fellow monarchs urging them to follow his example. Edward II of England, who probably felt on somewhat shaky ground himself, was initially inclined to cavil with his father-in-law, but when firm instructions arrived from Pope Clement he hesitated no longer. The English master of the order was taken into custody on January 9, 1308. All his Knights followed soon afterward.

The Templars, however, had their champions. When Molay was interrogated by three cardinals sent expressly to Paris by the pope, he formally revoked his confession and bared his breast to show the unmistakable signs of torture. In consequence, at Clement’s first consistory, no fewer than ten members of the Sacred College threatened to resign in protest against his policy, and early in February the Inquisition was instructed to suspend its activities against the order. But it was impossible to reverse the tide. In August the grand master, examined and tortured yet again, pleaded guilty for the second time.

The public trial of the Templars opened on April 11, 1310, when it was announced that any of the accused who attempted to retract an earlier confession would be burned at the stake; on May 12 fifty-four Knights suffered this fate, and in the next fortnight nine others followed them. The whole contemptible affair dragged on for another four years, during which pope and king continued to confer—a sure sign of the doubts that refused to go away—and to discuss the disposition of the order’s prodigious wealth. Meanwhile, Jacques de Molay languished in prison until his fate could be decided. Only on March 14, 1314, did the authorities finally take him out onto a scaffold before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, publicly to repeat his confession for the last time.

They had reason to regret their decision. As grand master, Jacques de Molay had hardly distinguished himself over the previous seven years. He had confessed, retracted, and confessed again; he had shown no heroism, few qualities even of leadership. But now he was an old man, in his middle seventies, and about to die; he had nothing more to lose. And so, supported by his friend Geoffroy de Charnay, he spoke out loud and clear: as God was his witness, he and his order were totally innocent of all the charges of which they had been accused. At once he and Charnay were hurried away by the royal marshals, while messengers hastened to the king. Philip delayed his decision no longer. That same evening the two old Knights were rowed out to a small island in the Seine, the Île des Juifs, where the stake had been prepared.

It was later rumored that, just before he died, Molay had summoned both Pope Clement and King Philip to appear at the judgment seat of God before the year was out, and it did not pass unnoticed that the pope was dead in little more than a month, while the king was killed in a hunting accident toward the end of November. Molay and Charnay faced the flames with courage and died nobly. After night had fallen, the friars of the Augustinian monastery on the farther shore came to collect their remains, to be revered as those of saints and martyrs.

A great pope—Gregory, for example, or Innocent—could and would have saved the Templars; Clement, alas, fell a long way short of greatness. His craven subservience to Philip in the most shameful chapter of the king’s reign constitutes an indelible stain on his memory. In one instance only did he show any inclination to go his own way: Philip, who had instituted the campaign entirely to get his hands on the Templars’ money, cannot have welcomed the bull by which, on May 2, 1312, the pope decreed that all their property—outside the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Majorca, on which he deferred his decision—should devolve upon their brethren the Hospitalers, who suddenly found themselves richer than they had ever dreamed. But the king was dead long before the decree could be put into effect.