Absolute Monarchs (30 page)

1.
The two banks were linked by the twelfth-century Pont Saint-Bénezet, the last bridge across the Rhône before it reached the Mediterranean. Originally it had twenty-two arches; alas, all but four were swept away by a great flood in 1680. This is the bridge that still lives in the old song, though there is a theory that the dancing actually took place under it rather than upon it, on the little island of La Barthelasse.

2.
This is believed to be the origin of the date’s grim reputation.

3.
One of these, the Petit Palais, still stands a hundred yards northwest of the cathedral. Its Renaissance façade was added in the late fifteenth century by the papal legate Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II.

4.
Mullins,
Avignon of the Popes.
The appalling story is told in detail by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in
Montaillou.

5.
“Nor,” wrote Canon Henry Knighton of Leicester toward the end of the century, “did men care … At Marseilles,” he added still more uncharitably, “of one hundred and fifty Franciscans not one survived to tell the tale—and a good job too!”

6.
In fact, Constantine was baptized in Nicomedia, on his deathbed. See
chapter 2
.

7.
Now known as the Chartreuse du Val de Bénédiction, it was badly damaged in the Revolution. But the double nave can still be seen, with Pope Innocent’s tomb.

8.
She is not to be confused with another female saint, St. Bridget of Sweden, who had put similar pressure on Urban V and is now—since 1999—patron saint of Europe.

CHAPTER XVI

Laetentur Coeli!

A
vignon, however, was far from finished. The immense machine of the Papacy could not be dismantled and transported in a matter of weeks. The popes might be back on the Tiber, but many of the papal departments remained by the Rhône, together with the magnificent library and the bulk of the archives, which by now filled a whole wing of the palace. Among those departments was that which dealt with finance; for the fourteen months that remained of Pope Gregory XI’s pontificate, his entire expenses were met by regular shipments of gold from Avignon. In fact, of the innumerable papal staff it was only a comparatively small proportion, consisting mainly of the senior hierarchy, that had traveled with Gregory to Rome; the vast majority of the many hundred clerks, accountants, secretaries, and scribes had remained behind. Among them were even half a dozen cardinals, charged to continue the attempts to mediate between England and France. Avignon, in short, after the pope’s departure, was by no means the sad, abandoned city that might have been imagined—though no one could possibly have foreseen the whole new if slightly dubious lease on life that awaited it.

Away in Rome, Pope Gregory, though still only forty-eight, was aware that he was dying and was giving much thought to the question of his successor. Acutely conscious that the Church was still split down the middle, he knew that if the Papacy were now to remain in Rome for good, it must become Italian again—and that meant, in the first instance, an Italian pontiff. He in turn would appoint Italian cardinals, so the French influence in the Sacred College would gradually be reduced. When Gregory died on March 27, 1378, it was clear that the Romans agreed with him. They had by no means always treated their popes with particular affection or respect, but they were determined not to let them go again.
“Romano lo volemo, o almeno italiano!”
¹
they shouted throughout the ensuing conclave, and—up to a point—they got what they wanted.

Bartolomeo Prignano, who took the name of Urban VI, was in many ways a surprising choice. He was not a Roman aristocrat but a member of the working class of Naples who had never lost his heavy Neapolitan accent. Though now titular (and absentee) Archbishop of Bari, he had spent virtually his whole adult life in the papal chancery and was a bureaucrat through and through: austere, efficient, conscientious. In other circumstances he might have made a perfectly satisfactory pope. But the years of being patronized and generally ordered about by the French cardinals had had their effect. No sooner had he assumed the supreme power than his character underwent a sea change; the quiet, competent civil servant turned overnight into a raging tyrant, hurling insults at the cardinals during the consistories and sometimes even physically attacking them.

Although several distinguished laymen were also the objects of the pope’s abuse—including the Duke of Fondi and even the ambassadors of Queen Joanna of Naples—it was perhaps inevitable that the thirteen French cardinals suffered the most. One by one they slipped away to Anagni, where on August 2 they made a public statement to the effect that Pope Urban’s election had taken place under the threat of mob violence and was therefore invalid; he must therefore abdicate at once. A week later, there still being no reaction from Rome, they moved to Fondi—within the Kingdom of Naples, where Joanna could give them protection—and declared Urban deposed. Then, on September 20, they elected Robert of Geneva as Clement VII. Each pope excommunicated the other, placing his supporters under an interdict. The Great Schism of the West had begun. It was to continue for nearly forty years.

If Urban had been a surprising choice for the Papacy, Clement was an astonishing one. True, the fact that he was neither French nor Italian may have counted in his favor, but his record in Italy had been one of barbaric brutality, and Urban had no difficulty in raising troops to oppose him. Clement first fled to Joanna in Naples; but though she personally supported him her subjects made no secret of their preference for Urban—who was, after all, one of their own—and Clement soon returned with his cardinals to Avignon. Urban, meanwhile, created a new College by appointing no fewer than twenty-nine new cardinals from all over Europe.

Western Christendom now faced a dilemma unique in its history. Antipopes were nothing new, but the present rivals had both been elected by the same cardinals, and though Urban’s election had been unquestionably canonical—no one took the accusations of intimidation too seriously—the manner of his deposition had been unprecedented: could popes be unmade by those who made them? On the other hand, Urban was clearly becoming ever more unbalanced. And so the continent was split down the middle: England, Germany, north and central Italy, and Central Europe remained loyal to Urban, while Scotland, France, Savoy, Burgundy, and Naples accepted the authority of Clement. So, after long hesitation, did Aragon and Castile.
²

The Church had been able to tolerate a Papacy exiled to Avignon; but the existence of two rival popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, was too much for it to cope with. Two popes meant two colleges of cardinals, two papal chanceries, two appointments to a single see or abbey—and double the expenditure. In this last field Clement at Avignon had the advantage, since the departments in charge of finance had never properly moved back to Rome. He was able to create a court rivaling that of his namesake Clement VI for luxury and extravagance, from which he continued his struggle against his rival. But Urban too was busy. His most immediate enemy was Joanna of Naples, who courageously remained loyal to Clement. She would soon pay the price. Urban deposed her in 1380 and in her place crowned her cousin, the young Charles of Durazzo. Entering Naples the following year, Charles imprisoned her in the fortress of San Fele, near Muro, and there shortly afterward he had her suffocated.

All too soon, however, Urban found the new king just as intractable as Joanna had been. The pope had now become obsessed with obtaining valuable Neapolitan fiefs for his utterly worthless nephew, and when Charles refused to grant them he began interfering in the internal affairs of the kingdom. Now seriously paranoid, he moved with his cardinals to Nocera, where he heard that six of them were conspiring with Charles to create a council of regency that would effectively act for him. Flying into a fury, he excommunicated the king and had the cardinals brutally tortured. Charles now hastened to Nocera and put the city under siege; Urban and his entourage escaped to Genoa. There five of the six cardinals were put to death; the sixth, an Englishman named Adam Easton, was released only at the personal request of his sovereign, King Richard II. Not till 1386—a few weeks after Charles had been assassinated in Hungary—did the pope return to Rome, where he died the following year.

Pope Clement—technically he is now seen by the Church as an antipope, though he himself would have been horrified by the description—outlived his rival by seven years. Never for a second did he doubt the validity of his own election; and it was a bitter disappointment to him when, on Urban’s death, the ensuing conclave did not recognize him as the legitimate pope and so put an end to the schism once and for all. Instead, they insanely elected another Neapolitan, Pietro Tomacelli, as Boniface IX; and there was an alarming moment in 1391 when King Charles VI of France announced his intention of personally conducting Boniface to Rome, though fortunately nothing came of it. In his last years Clement, while still at Avignon, came under heavy pressure—largely from France and, in particular, the University of Paris—to agree to a solution whereby both popes should resign and open the way for a new conclave; but he, like Boniface, firmly rejected all such suggestions, and he was still stubbornly resisting when he died, of a sudden apoplectic attack, on September 16, 1394.

IT WOULD HAVE
been so easy to end the schism; all that was required was that when one of the popes died his conclave should refuse to elect a successor, thus leaving the survivor in undisputed authority. But Rome had passed up the chance in 1387, and Avignon in 1394 did no better. Pope Boniface, apart from an unfortunate tendency to simony, was young and energetic, and Charles VI wrote letters to each of the twenty-one Avignon cardinals, begging them to accept him. But it was no use: on the grounds that they must on no account be swayed by outside influences, they left his letters unopened. Each of them, however, swore to work for the resolution of the schism; and each undertook, if elected, to abdicate if ever there were a majority decision that he should do so. They then proceeded to elect—unanimously—the Aragonese cardinal Pedro de Luna, who now took the name of Benedict XIII.

Benedict had an impressive record. He had been among the last of the original cardinals to abandon Pope Urban, but once he had finally become convinced of the legitimacy of Urban’s deposition he had given unwavering support to Clement, who had appointed him to the Iberian Peninsula as his legate. It was thanks to him that Aragon and Castile, Portugal and Navarre had all eventually given their support to the Avignon Papacy. In 1393 he had been transferred to Paris, where he had publicly championed the scheme of ending the schism by the abdication of both popes, declaring that he would certainly follow such a course in the event of his own election. Whether or not this attitude told in his favor at the conclave we shall never know, but on finding himself pope he instantly changed his mind. A proud and unbending Spaniard, he now made it plain that he and he alone was the rightful pontiff and that no power on Earth could persuade him to relinquish his responsibilities.

And he proved it. In May 1395 there arrived in Avignon an embassy consisting of three royal dukes sent by Charles VI; in June 1397 an Anglo-French mission; in May 1398 ambassadors from Germany. All of them implored the pope to remember his sworn oath and make his formal abdication. He remained immovable. Then, in June of that year, a French national synod decided to withdraw from his obedience. This came as a serious blow, since it deprived him of the all-important revenues from the Church in France; it also induced Navarre and Castile to follow the French example. Several panic-stricken cardinals also deserted him. But Benedict kept his nerve, allowing himself to be blockaded in his palace, confident that sooner or later the pendulum would swing back in his favor.

As indeed it did. The French Church had not gone over to Boniface; it had opted for independence and in doing so had made many of the hierarchy profoundly uneasy. The people, too, who had complained bitterly at paying taxes to the Papacy, were still more resentful at seeing these go straight into the royal coffers. One March night in 1403, with the aid of his most influential ally, the Duke of Orleans, Pope Benedict slipped out of his palace into Provence, where he was immediately and enthusiastically acclaimed. There was nothing to be done. France, Navarre, and even the errant cardinals all returned to the fold. Benedict had won that round, but he was still committed to working for the end of the schism, and in September 1404 he at last felt strong enough to send an embassy to Rome, proposing a meeting of both pontiffs, or at least their plenipotentiaries.

But alas, Boniface in Rome proved every bit as intractable as Benedict in Avignon; and anyway he died—of gallstones—on October 1. All in all he had been a competent pope, repairing much of the damage done by his predecessor, regaining the allegiance of Naples, and, perhaps most important of all, imposing his authority on Rome, putting an end to its republican independence and creating a new Senate—nominated by himself—to be responsible for the city’s administration. He had also undertaken a major reconstruction of the Castel Sant’Angelo. His principal fault was his unscrupulousness in financial affairs: indulgences, simonies, annates (the practice by which a year’s income from a benefice or see was paid directly to Rome)—it seemed that there was no abuse that he would not happily tolerate so long as it kept the gold flowing into his coffers. On the other hand, with the main treasury and the financial departments still at Avignon, it is not easy to see how he and his Curia would otherwise have survived.

Boniface’s successor, Innocent VII, similarly rejected proposals for a meeting; but he was nowhere near as adroit as his predecessor in his dealings with the Romans, and matters came to a head when eleven of the leading citizens, arriving at the Vatican for negotiations, were murdered by his idiotic nephew, who commanded the papal militia. At that the mob stormed the palace; Innocent and his cardinals were lucky to get out alive and make their way to Viterbo. Not until the spring of 1406 was it safe to return, and six months later the pope was dead—though not before he had established a chair of Greek at the Sapienza University, founded by Boniface VIII just a century before.

Why the Roman cardinals should now have chosen the Venetian Angelo Correr—Gregory XII—to succeed him is not immediately easy to understand. Gregory was certainly a distinguished churchman—for fifteen years he had been the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople—and he had long protested that his dearest wish was to see the end of the schism; but he was already eighty years old, and it seemed on the face of it unlikely that his wish would be granted. Since, as it happened, he was to live for another nine years, it very nearly was—though by no means thanks to him.