Seven Ages of Paris (11 page)

AGAINST POPES, TEMPLARS AND PRINCESSES

In his relentless quest for cash, Philippe le Bel now looked towards a source which none of his forebears had dared consider: to the Vatican and the mass of papal wealth. Since 1294, Benedetto Caetani, trained in law at Bologna to become a fiercely ambitious and arrogant pope under the name Boniface VIII, had pursued a policy of worldly intervention in the affairs of states that was as troublesome to France as Innocent III had been. In his view, every human being was subject to the Pope. For the Centenary of 1300, Boniface threw a gigantic party, drawing some two million pilgrims to Italy, and hubristically appeared clad in the insignia of the Roman Empire, exclaiming, “I am Caesar!” His ambitions brought him at once into direct conflict with Philippe, who despite his cash-flow problems nourished grandiose schemes for a new Christian empire stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, controlled from Paris and embracing the papal state. From the time of Innocent III, Rome had financed crusades through taxes on the clergy; Philippe now imposed a similar tax to finance his own military operations in Gascony. Boniface riposted by preparing a bull excommunicating Philippe, a formidable document which might have resulted in the complete dismemberment of France. In Paris, on 24 June, a massive crowd assembled in the gardens of the Palais Royal to show support for the King. Priests loyal to the King were paraded, drowning out the courageous voices of traditionalists faithful to Rome.

Before Boniface’s Unum Sanctum bull could be applied, however, French forces headed by Chancellor de Nogaret invaded the papal palace at Anagani in 1303. They mobbed the pontiff in a scene of unprecedented violence with a view to forcing his abdication. Boniface declared he would rather die, challenging Nogaret’s men to kill him: “Here is my neck, here is my head!” He never recovered, and died a month later. All Europe was shocked by this affront; Dante, though he hated Boniface, regarded it as a recrucifixion of Christ.

Though simultaneously confronted with serious military defeat at Courtrai in Flanders against Edward I of England, Philippe refused to back down. Boniface’s elderly successor, Benedict XI, survived only nine months (poison in a dish of fresh figs was suspected), and there now followed one of the most grotesque periods in all papal history—what came to be known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Popes at Avignon. For eleven months the Conclave sat in deadlock, divided between pro-and anti-French factions, until at last a split in the anti-French front enabled Philippe to triumph with the election of a French pontiff, Bernard le Got, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, as Clement V. Another Bologna-trained lawyer, not even a cardinal, Clement was a shameless nepotist who made cardinals of five members of his family. Using the prevailing chaos in Italy as an excuse, he agreed to be crowned at Lyons and thereafter settled in the bishop’s palace in Avignon, beginning the seventy-year exile, forerunner of the Great Schism, that was an unmitigated disaster for the Church. Never again was the papacy to know the power of an Innocent III or a Boniface, and a French king was the cause.

Clement was prepared to do most of Philippe’s bidding, though he jibbed at his efforts to have his deceased enemy Boniface branded a heretic and sodomite. He did, however, open the door to Philippe’s most fateful act—the dissolution of the Knights Templars. The focus shifts dramatically back to Paris, where the Knights Templars resided in their enclave of the Temple, a vast donjon flanked by four towers just outside the city walls to the north of the Marais. Here they lived in a splendour rivalling that of the Palais Royal. Their wealth was legendary. The order had been founded after the First Crusade, under the edict of Louis VII, with the noble function of defending the Holy Land as “poor chevaliers of Christ.” It had started modestly as a confraternity near the Dome on the Rock, in 1118. Over the years, they and their rival military order, the Hospitallers, left many magnificent castles across the Levant, including the famous Krak des Chevaliers near Aleppo. They were fanatically brave in battle, and as late as the final battle for Acre in 1291 their Grand Master had been among the fallen. Recognized all over Europe by their robes of white with a red cross on front, in 1128 the Templars had acquired a rule, supposedly dictated by the ascetic Saint Bernard of Clairvaux himself, of dedicated austerity as monk-soldiers. But over the course of the intervening two centuries loot derived from the Crusades, coupled with exceptionally skilful husbandry, had enabled the Templars to amass immense riches—and therefore power, making them almost a sovereign state in their own right.

Inevitably corruption had set in, and with it the venal envy of the outside world. Over the thirteenth century, the Templars had become de facto bankers to the Crown (Philippe Auguste actually kept his treasury in the Temple), rivals to the Lombards and the Jews as moneylenders. But they had incurred Saint Louis’s profound displeasure when they had initially refused to raise funds to ransom him from Egypt. His grandson was mindful of this: the Capetians had long memories. The Templars’ reputation for greed was widespread; so were rumours of some of their simpler vices of the flesh. For centuries after their demise the expression boire comme un Templier was common currency in France, while the old German word Tempelhaus became synonymous with a house of ill-repute. Exploiting their unpopularity, in October 1307 Philippe—through the medium of Chancellor de Nogaret—declared war on the Templars, levelling trumped-up charges of heresy, necromancy and sodomy against them, similar to those raised years earlier against the Albigensians. In the preamble to his proclamation, Philippe, employing every image, spoke of:

a bitter thing, a deplorable thing, a thing terrible to think about, terrible to hear, detestable, execrable, abominable, inhuman, which had already echoed in our ears, not without making us shudder with a violent horror. An immense pain developed in us.

The Templars were accused, inter alia, of “sacrificing to idols,” of “infecting the purity of the air” and of “torturing Christ a second time.”

With a nod from an acquiescent Pope Clement, the Inquisition, originally designed to stamp out heresy, now in all its nastiness became the instrument for destroying these declared enemies of the temporal state. In a remarkably well-orchestrated raid, all the Templars were arrested one night and their property declared forfeit. One after the other they appeared before inquisitors, counsellors of the King and torturers, in the cellars of their own fortress, and in the presence of a throng of eager spectators. The tortures were so appalling that one Templar saw twenty-five frères die “under the question.” Public burning at the stake was now the favoured ritual under the Inquisition. In one of the most deplorable episodes ever to be witnessed in Paris, 138 Templars were burned at the stake, a large number between the Bois de Vincennes and the Porte Saint-Antoine. As the flames rose, most of them retracted the “confessions” they had made under torture—sure evidence of the unsoundness of the charges against them.

Proceedings against the Templars went on until the climax was reached in 1314. The Grand Master of the order himself, Jacques de Molay, who refused to answer charges, had been tortured and thrown into prison for seven years, together with his chief assistant, Geoffroy de Charnay. In March that year they were dragged on to the parvis of Notre-Dame to hear their sentence. Philippe, enraged by their protestations of innocence, ordered the two Templar leaders to be immolated that same evening. A special scaffold was set up on the Ile des Juifs, opposite the Quai des Grands Augustins, and roughly where the Vert Galant statue of Henri IV now stands. As the flames licked around him, Jacques de Molay is reputed to have uttered a terrible curse:

Pope Clement, iniquitous judge and cruel executioner, I adjure you to appear in forty days’ time before God’s tribunal. And you, King of France, will not live to see the end of this year, and Heaven’s retribution will strike down your accomplices and destroy your posterity.

Within forty days, Pope Clement V had fallen ill of an agonizingly painful disease and died on 20 April; Chancellor de Nogaret died of mysterious causes a short while later; Philippe le Bel died after a hunting accident that same year, on 29 November, aged forty-six. Over the next few years, his three sons would also be struck down, bringing to an end the Capetian dynasty.

In that same terrible year of 1314, before Philippe le Bel reaped his just rewards, Paris was rocked by a royal scandal. On the Left Bank, just opposite the Louvre, stood the medieval Hôtel de Nesle, a defence tower that had grown into a sumptuous palace. In 1308, Philippe le Bel had acquired it and converted it into apartments for his three sons and their families. The princes—Louis, Philippe and Charles—lived there with their wives, respectively Marguerite (a granddaughter of Saint Louis on her mother’s side), Jeanne and her sister Blanche. Before long Marguerite and Blanche were caught using the old medieval tower as a place of assignation with their lovers, two dashing brothers, Philippe and Gautier d’Aulnay, who were their gentlemen-in-waiting.

The King was merciless. Princesses Marguerite and Blanche were rapidly found guilty of adultery. Under torture, the d’Aulnays admitted that their liaisons had been going on for three years. They were then skinned alive in front of an enthusiastic crowd, castrated and then disembowelled, decapitated and their trunks hung by the armpits on a gibbet to be devoured by birds of prey. The crowd cheered itself hoarse as the executioner held aloft the severed genitals of the lovers—an indication of how brutality and the worst appetites for cruelty had been sharpened in Paris in the years between Philippe Auguste and Philippe le Bel. All who had abetted the lovers were drowned or secretly despatched.

Marguerite and Blanche were forced to witness the execution of their lovers. Their heads shaven like collabos after the Liberation of 1944, they were then condemned to solitary confinement for many months in miserable, icy conditions in Richard Coeur de Lion’s old fortress of Château Gaillard. Then, Marguerite’s husband, Louis, now king, decided he wanted to remarry; rather than spend time seeking an annulment he had her suffocated between two mattresses. After seven years in Château Gaillard, Blanche, divorced by her husband, was permitted to take the veil in the Convent of Maubuisson, where she lived until her death in 1326. Jeanne, who although acquitted was suspected of participating in the tower orgies, was spirited out of Paris until the scandal died down, then reunited with her forgiving husband, Philippe, who had in turn become king. Rather insensitively, it would seem, he gave her the Hôtel de Nesle as her residence. The evil reputation of the Hôtel continued; stories persisted down the ages that Jeanne, watching from her window in the tower, would send for passing students and, having exhausted their virility, would then have them tied in sacks and thrown from the top of the tower to drown in the Seine below.

And so the new century began, opening for Paris on a setting as brutal and menacing as the previous century, under Philippe Auguste, had opened bright and full of hope. France was now the most populous and powerful country in Europe, while Paris—bulging out beyond the city wall—contained 300,000 souls to London’s 40,000. But—in fulfilment of the Templars’ curse—Philippe le Bel was to be followed by a catastrophic sequence of famines, wars and plagues, and it would take four centuries for France to recover that same level of population.

Age Two

1314–1643

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HENRI IV

Paris, from Philippe Auguste to the accession of Henri IV

Click here to see a larger image.

FOUR

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Besieged

I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist.

HENRI IV’S FIGHTING MOTTO

THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR

When Philippe le Bel died in 1314, following the terrible curse of the Templars, and only forty-four years after the death of Saint Louis, he had so dominated his period that it seemed as if “the heart of the kingdom had ceased to beat.” Because of his sin against the Templars, all Philippe’s good works, his institutional reforms, would soon be forgotten. In the 327 years since the election of Hugues Capet, only eleven kings had reigned over France—a prodigious dynasty. Now, over the turbulent fourteen years that followed Philippe’s death, there would be no fewer than three kings, all of them his sons, and none of them producing heirs who survived.

The cuckolded Louis X, Le Hutin (the Headstrong or the Quarrelsome), outlived his father by only eighteen months. Ill at ease in his unruly capital, Le Hutin—like other French kings after him—moved out of Paris to the sombre Château de Vincennes. In May 1316 he died after a brief bout of pneumonia, though rumours of his poisoning by a kinswoman, Mahaut of Artois, were never allayed; and his posthumous son, John, died mysteriously six months later. Theoretically, the succession should have gone to Jeanne, questionable daughter of Louis and the adulterous Marguerite, but Louis’s lanky younger brother Philippe evoked the ancient Salic Law whereby the female line was precluded from the succession—an act of signal importance in the succession of future kings of France—and mounted a coup d’état. As Philippe V (“Le Long”), husband of the supposedly predatory Queen Jeanne, he ruled for six years, dying of tuberculosis in 1322. Then came Charles IV, who likewise lasted only six years. Having divorced the hapless Blanche, he married again but produced only three daughters, and died suddenly at Vincennes in 1328.

Thus ended the Capetian dynasty after three centuries, fulfilling in its entirety the curse of the Templars. The succession now went sideways to a cousin, Philippe of Valois, who started a new dynasty as Philippe VI. The first Valois were scornfully dubbed “kings by chance” by contemporaries. But as he was already acting as regent, and was cousin to the three dead kings, as well as great-grandson of Saint Louis, Philippe VI’s claim to the throne of France was perfectly legitimate. This, however, was not how it was seen by Philippe le Bel’s only daughter, Isabella, the “She-Wolf of France,” who had married the English king, Edward II. Her teenaged son Edward III, king since 1327, laid claim to the French crown, and in 1337 the Hundred Years War began, with a few border skirmishes down in Guyenne.