Absolute Monarchs (27 page)

Throughout this period of Templar persecution the pope’s health was steadily deteriorating; the end came at the castle of Roquemaure on the Rhône on April 20, 1314. Clement V is remembered today principally for being the first of the Avignon popes; the important thing to remember, however, is that there was at no time any official transference of the papal capital. Clement himself never altogether abandoned the idea of a return to Rome; it was just that he constantly postponed it—and no wonder. North and Central Italy were in greater turmoil than ever. Across Lombardy and Tuscany the Guelfs and Ghibellines were at each other’s throats, as were the Colonna and Orsini factions in Rome; when Prince Henry of Luxembourg arrived there in 1312 for his coronation as the Emperor Henry VII, he had to fight his way into the city. (The ceremony was performed by three cardinals amid the ruins of the Lateran, which had been largely destroyed by fire four years before.) There was, in short, little temptation to cross the Alps; the pope, already mortally ill, preferred to die in his homeland.

FOR TWO YEARS
and four months after the death of Clement V the Papacy lay vacant. The conclave met first at Carpentras, but broke up when some of the Gascon cardinals incited an armed attack on the Italian faction. The disorder spread to the town, much of which was set on fire. One of Clement’s nephews looted the papal treasury and disappeared. There followed a long cooling-off period, the cardinals not reassembling until March 1316; even then it was five more months before they could agree, which they did only after Philip V, who had succeeded his father in May, had imprisoned them in the Dominican convent, daily reducing their rations of food and drink until they reached a decision. Their choice fell on Jacques Duèse, who took the title of John XXII. He was already seventy-two but, unlike his predecessor, was a superb administrator; he was also possessed of bounding energy and was always ready to plunge into the fray. It was not long before he did so, in a long engagement with the Franciscan “Spirituals,” an extremist group akin to the Fraticelli which called for a return to the original precepts of St. Francis and the literal observance of his rule and testament, especially in relation to the principle of poverty. John, when appealed to, had no hesitation in pronouncing that there was nothing in the Scriptures to suggest that Christ and his Apostles had been paupers, possessing no property of their own. Obedience, he declared, was a greater virtue than either poverty or chastity. He then went even further by repudiating the convenient arrangement whereby Franciscan property was theoretically vested in the Holy See, which simply allowed the order the use of it. Henceforth the Franciscans were property owners—in many cases rather rich ones—whether they liked it or not.

All this had the effect of splitting the order more than ever, and many Franciscans went into open schism. Among them were the general of the order, Michael of Cesena, and the English theologian William of Ockham, both of whom fled from Avignon to the court of the pope’s archenemy, the German King Louis IV the Bavarian. Louis’s hostility stemmed from 1322, when he had defeated and captured Frederick of Austria in battle, a victory which he believed entitled him to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. John, however, had forbidden him to exercise imperial authority until he as pope had settled the dispute. Louis had replied with what was known as the Sachsenhausen Appellation, in which he first denied papal authority over imperial elections and went on to attack the pope’s condemnation of the Spirituals. To this John had replied with a sentence of excommunication, but in January 1328 Louis arrived in Rome, where he was crowned, by the aged Sciarra Colonna, “captain of the people,” and three months later solemnly deposed “Jacques of Cahors” (that being the pope’s birthplace) from the pontificate, replacing him with an antipope in the person of a Franciscan Spiritual who called himself Nicholas V and on whose head the emperor himself laid the papal crown.

But Louis had gone too far. He was not an Otto the Great or a Frederick Barbarossa, a maker of popes and antipopes, and the Romans knew it. Moreover, he had only a token army with him, and when King Robert of Naples sent an army northward he fled, taking his antipope with him. In January 1329 the two of them were present at Pisa, with Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham, at a ceremony in the cathedral in which a straw effigy of Pope John, sumptuously attired in full canonicals, was formally condemned on a charge of heresy. This bizarre performance did little to enhance the reputation of either emperor or antipope, and Nicholas accompanied his protector and patron no further. With such little authority as he had ever possessed rapidly waning, he left Louis to return alone to Germany, and after a few months of wandering gave himself up. Pope John treated him with surprising leniency, an official pardon, and even a small pension—though he took the precaution of confining him, for the remaining three years of his life, to the papal residence.

The charge of heresy was obviously nonsense; but toward the end of his life, indeed when he was approaching ninety, John XXII sailed a good deal closer to the wind. It was generally agreed by orthodox theologians that the saints in Heaven were immediately admitted to a full vision of God; in a series of sermons delivered in the winter of 1331–1332, John claimed this to be untrue, maintaining that the full Divine Vision would be withheld until after the Last Judgment; until then they could contemplate only the humanity of Christ. The ensuing storm of protest led to his condemnation by a committee of doctors of the University of Paris and insistent demands for an Ecumenical Council. Finally the pope made a modified retraction, confessing that the souls of the blessed would have their vision “as clearly as their condition allowed”—a mildly ridiculous formula that nevertheless seemed to satisfy his critics. Like his predecessor, he was an unrepentant nepotist: of the twenty-eight cardinals he created, twenty were from Southern France and three were his nephews. Unlike Clement, however, he never seriously considered a move to Rome; at his death the Papacy was more thoroughly French—and more under the influence of the French king—than it had ever been.

Avignon was by now a great deal larger—and richer—than on the arrival of Clement V. After a quarter of a century as the home of the Papacy, it was no longer a stinking village. It had now become a city, to which the fiscal system created by Popes Clement and John together had brought untold wealth. Whole districts had been swept away, fine palaces and mansions built for the cardinals and ambassadors, the bankers and merchants, the architects, painters, and craftsmen who came from all over Europe to make their fortunes.
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Papal Avignon was rapidly becoming the first great financial power of Europe. Petrarch, writing in 1340, was profoundly shocked:

Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their ancestors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations; to see luxurious palaces and heights crowned with fortifications, instead of a boat turned downward for shelter …

Instead of holy solitude we find a criminal host with crowds of infamous cronies; instead of soberness, licentious banquets; instead of pious pilgrimages, foul and preternatural sloth; instead of the bare feet of the Apostles, the snowy coursers of brigands fly past us, the horses decked with gold and fed on gold, soon to be shod with gold, if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.

In all this vapid display, John was happy to take the lead. He it was who founded the vineyards of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and a record has survived of the provisions laid in for the banquet he gave in November 1324 on the occasion of the marriage of his great-niece. They included 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 4 wild boars, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 3,000 eggs, 580 partridges, 270 rabbits, 40 plovers, 37 ducks, 59 pigeons, 4 cranes, 2 pheasants, 2 peacocks, 292 small birds, 3 hundredweight of cheese, 2,000 apples and other fruit, and 11 barrels of wine. Perhaps the Spirituals had a point after all.

POPE JOHN XXII
died on December 4, 1334. This time, for once, the cardinals acted reasonably quickly. The new pope was inducted on the twentieth: the Bishop of Pamiers, a baker’s son and former Cistercian monk named Jacques Fournier, who took the name of Benedict XII. He was not an attractive figure. Tall and heavily built, with an exceptionally loud voice, he had made his name as an inquisitor and had taken it upon himself to eliminate the last vestiges of Catharism from the southwest of France. In this he had been entirely successful: in the presence of five bishops and the King of Navarre, 183 men and women were burned at the stake—a spectacle described by a contemporary as “a holocaust, very great and pleasing to God.”
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Pope John had then made him a cardinal, as a reward for a job well done.

Yet, dour and unbending as he may have been, Benedict had his good qualities. He possessed none of John’s arrogance; despising all luxury, he continued to dress in the Cistercian habit. Nepotism he detested—none of his relatives achieved advancement—and he declared war on all the countless abuses which had grown up during the pontificates of his two predecessors. All the clerical hangers-on and vagabond monks who had no good reason for staying at Avignon were dismissed; fees payable for documents issued were fixed for the first time; strict new constitutions were drawn up for the Cistercians, Franciscans, and Benedictines. In the diplomatic field, however, his touch was less sure. He failed miserably in his attempts to prevent the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England—which put an end to any prospect of a joint Crusade—and his efforts to mend fences with the Emperor Louis were easily frustrated by the French King Philip VI and the King of Naples.

There is evidence to suggest that at the very beginning of his pontificate Benedict may have seriously contemplated a return to Italy, though probably—since the situation in Rome showed no improvement—only as far as Bologna in the first instance. Almost immediately on his accession he had ordered the restoration and reroofing of St. Peter’s, and for some years he continued to spend large sums on both it and the Lateran. Before long, however, he seems to have been dissuaded from the idea by the cardinals, nearly all of whom were French, and by King Philip; and by the end of 1335 his subjects were no longer in any doubt that the Papacy was to remain for the foreseeable future—perhaps even in perpetuity—on the banks of the Rhône. Work had begun on the Palais des Papes.

The chosen site was immediately to the south of the cathedral. The first building to rise was a 150–foot tower, the lower part designed to house the papal treasury, the upper to contain the pope’s personal apartments. To this Benedict added a two-story chapel and what is now the whole of the northern section of the palace; he left his successor to contribute the rather more elaborate west and south wings, thus forming a spacious cloister—later to become the
cour d’honneur
—to the south of which is the huge vaulted audience chamber. A somewhat awkward combination of palace, monastery, and fortress, the Palais des Papes can hardly be counted an architectural success; nowadays, too, it suffers from an almost embarrassing lack of furniture. But it remains an undeniably impressive monument to the exiled Papacy.

Pope Benedict died on April 25, 1342. Petrarch claimed that he was “weighed down by age and wine”; in fact, he was only in his early sixties, but there may be something in the accusation: despite his otherwise rigorous austerity, he was known for his prodigious appetite. His successor could hardly have provided more of a contrast. Pierre Roger, though not of illustrious birth—he was the son of a landed squire in the Corrèze—had already had an astonishing career. Possessor of a double doctorate in theology and canon law, Archbishop of Sens at twenty-eight and of Rouen at twenty-nine, he had shortly afterward been appointed chancellor and chief minister of France by Philip VI. The king had actually been so anxious for him to succeed Benedict that he had sent his son to Avignon in the hope that he could sway the election, but the prince arrived to find that there was no need: the cardinals had already elected Roger as Pope Clement VI.

“My predecessors,” announced Clement, “did not know how to be pope.” He set out to show them, though in fact he lived less like a pope than an oriental potentate. Sumptuously dressed, surrounded by a vast entourage of attendants, showering wealth and favors on all who approached him—“a pope,” he also declared, “should make his subjects happy”—in his extravagance and outward display he easily outclassed all the crowned heads of Europe; the cost of his court is said to have been ten times that of King Philip’s in Paris. Three thousand guests sat down to his coronation banquet, at which 1,023 sheep, 118 head of cattle, 101 calves, 914 kids, 60 pigs, 10,471 hens, 1,440 geese, 300 pike, 46,856 cheeses, 50,000 tarts, and 200 casks of wine were consumed. Yet it was not just his surroundings that dazzled; it was the man himself. He was formidably intelligent, the finest orator and preacher of his day; his charm was irresistible. But all the old abuses returned. Back, with a vengeance, came the bad old days of nepotism. Of the twenty-five cardinals whom Clement appointed during his ten-year pontificate, twenty-one were French and at least ten his close relatives; one of them, who was later to become Gregory XI, the last of the seven Avignon popes, was widely believed to be his son. There were other rumors, too, where women were concerned, many of them tending to center on the lovely Cécile, Countess of Turenne, the sister-in-law of the pope’s nephew, who regularly acted as hostess at the palace. Petrarch, as usual, became almost hysterical with indignation:

I will not speak of adultery, seduction, rape, incest; these are only the prelude to their orgies. I will not count the number of wives stolen or young girls deflowered. I will not tell of the means employed to force into silence the outraged husbands and fathers, nor of the dastardliness of those who sell their womenfolk for gold.