Avignon

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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:

Prostitutes, he maintained, “swarmed on the papal beds.” Poets, perhaps, never make the best witnesses; but Petrarch—one of the great writers of the Middle Ages—could, had he wished, have given us a brilliant and accurate description of papal Avignon. It is a pity that he has left us instead a travesty that borders on the grotesque.

DID POPE CLEMENT ever for a moment consider a papal return to Rome? Certainly not. Not only did he complete the Papal Palace begun by Benedict; in 1348 he bought Avignon and the surrounding County of Venaissin from Joanna, Queen of Naples and Countess of Provence. Joanna was twenty-two and famed for her beauty, but she had come to Avignon as a fugitive. Three years before, her young husband, Prince Andrew of Hungary, who was living with her in Naples, had been assassinated, on the orders of her great-aunt Catherine of Valois but not without suspicion of Joanna’s own complicity. His brother King Louis of Hungary, on the pretext of avenging the murder, then invaded Naples, claiming the kingdom for himself. Joanna had fled to Avignon with her second husband, Prince Louis of Taranto, to seek protection from her brother-in-law and beg Pope Clement to clear her name.

As Europe emerged from the nightmare, it began to look for scapegoats, and, perhaps inevitably, it settled on the Jews. Was the Jew not Antichrist? Did he not kidnap and torture Christian children? Did he not regularly desecrate the host? Had he not poisoned the wells of the Christian communities, infecting all their members with the plague? In vain did the Jews point out that they had suffered every bit as much as the Christians—arguably even more, thanks to the swarming ghettos in which they were obliged to live; their accusers refused to listen. As early as May, there was a massacre of Jews in Provence, and in Narbonne and Carcassone the entire Jewish communities were liquidated. In Germany and Switzerland the persecutions fell not far short of a holocaust. Pope Clement acted swiftly. Twice, on July 4 and September 26, he published bulls which condemned the massacres wherever they might occur and called on all Christians to conduct themselves with tolerance and restraint. Those who continued to victimize any Jew would be instantly excommunicated.

Alas, for many Jews he was too late. Communications were slow in the fourteenth century; despite his efforts some 350 separate massacres took place and over two hundred Jewish communities suffered complete annihilation. But for this Clement cannot be blamed. On the contrary, he should be remembered as the first pope in history to undertake an active defense of the Jewish people, wherever they might be found. It was the noblest and most courageous act of his life—an example which all too many of his successors might usefully have followed.

Pope Innocent, now approaching eighty, gave in. He bought off the brigands, offering them a large sum of money—which he had to borrow—in return for their departure. The precise terms of the agreement have not come down to us. It may well be that it involved their undertaking to move down into Italy, there to assist Cardinal Albornoz in his campaign of pacification. The cardinal is known to have had several free companies in his pay, but did they include the besiegers of Avignon? We shall never know.

Urban cherished two overriding ambitions: first, a Crusade against the Turks which, he hoped, might also bring the Eastern Church back into the Catholic fold; second, the return of the Papacy to Rome. Once again, the Crusade failed to get off the ground. It was to have been led by the French King John II, who had been captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers and had only recently been released—in exchange for several hostages (including his son) pending the raising of the ransom money. He had come to Avignon, where he had sworn to lead an army of 150,000 men to deliver the Holy Land. But before he could do so his hostage son escaped, and John, as a point of honor, voluntarily returned to his English captivity. He was still in England when he died.

As for the long-discussed return to Rome, conditions were now more favorable than they had been for half a century. Albornoz had done his work well; Bernabò Visconti had continued to make trouble over Bologna but had finally been bought off, and the Papal States were—more or less—at peace. And so, in June 1366, Pope Urban publicly announced, not only to his cardinals but to all the princes of Europe, that the Papacy was leaving Avignon for Rome. Whatever the princes might have thought, the news struck the papal court with horror. By now virtually all its members, from the cardinals down to the humblest of scribes, were Frenchmen. Their homes, on many of which they had spent small fortunes, were in Avignon or Villeneuve. Their language was French or Provençal. The last thing they wanted was to leave it all for a malarial, malodorous city known to be in the last stages of dilapidation and decay, perpetually torn apart by a corrupt aristocracy and a famously unpredictable rabble. But the Holy Father had spoken. There was nothing they could do but start packing.

The court returned to its melancholy preparations. A rump was to be left at Avignon, so that day-to-day papal business could continue until such time as Rome was ready to take over; for the rest, the date of the great departure was fixed for April 30, 1367. It is difficult to imagine the sheer scale of the operation: the transfer of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people, their families, and all their worldly goods, together with the entire papal archives, furniture, and equipment, all to be loaded onto barges and floated downstream to Marseille. From there, on May 19, the pope and his cardinals embarked on a flotilla of vessels supplied by Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and—from their base in Rhodes—the Knights of St. John. The Knights also agreed to escort the bulk of the party, which took the land route, first to Genoa and then southeastward down the west coast of Italy.

After seventeen days on heavy seas the papal fleet arrived on June 5 at the port of Corneto, where Albornoz was waiting. Urban naturally wished to press on to Rome at once, but the cardinal dissuaded him. The Lateran, he pointed out, was utterly uninhabitable. The Vatican was being prepared but was by no means ready: how much better it would be if the Holy Father were to remain in Viterbo as his guest until the autumn. It was thus not till October 16, escorted by an armed force of 2,000, that Urban entered Rome—the first pope for sixty-three years to set foot in the city.

Urban was the first and the last pontiff to receive visits from both Eastern and Western emperors; and John’s arrival should have marked the triumphant vindication of his decision to bring the Papacy back to Rome, achieved in the face of considerable physical danger and appalling administrative upheaval, to say nothing of the determined opposition of the King of France and virtually the entire College of Cardinals. But the truth was that the pope had had enough. He was now approaching sixty, his heart was still in France—of the eight new cardinals he had created in September 1368, six had been Frenchmen and only one a Roman—and since arriving in Rome the College had if anything increased its pressure. Moreover, Albornoz was now dead, and without his firm grip on Italian affairs the political situation in Italy was again deteriorating fast. Perugia had actually gone so far as to revolt against Roman authority and hire a free company of mercenaries to threaten papal Viterbo. This was under the command of the notorious English soldier of fortune Sir John Hawkwood, who had fought at both Crécy and Poitiers and had now settled in Italy, where he was happily selling his sword to the highest bidder.

The papal flotilla of thirty-four ships sailed from Corneto on September 4, 1370; before the end of the month the pope was back in Avignon, where on the twenty-seventh he was given a hero’s welcome. Few among those present, whether lay or ecclesiastic, can have believed that, after this disastrous experiment, the Papacy would ever leave Avignon again. Rome was quite simply too remote, too dangerous, too unhealthy, too impractical. Did Pope Urban himself share this view? We shall never know. However glad he may have been to be back in civilization, he must have felt a profound sense of disappointment, even of failure. There is no record of his having opened negotiations with the kings of France or England, but he had little opportunity. Within six weeks of his return he fell seriously ill, and on December 19 he died. He was buried in Avignon Cathedral, but in 1372 his body was transferred by his brother to the Abbey of St. Victor in Marseille. There it became the object of a cult—which is presumably why, five centuries later, in 1870, Pope Pius IX saw fit to beatify him.

It was therefore, perhaps, with a feeling of slightly smug told-you-so satisfaction that the overwhelmingly French College of Cardinals met in conclave to choose, after only two days, one of their own number: Pierre-Roger de Beaufort, to be known as Gregory XI. He had been a churchman since childhood. Canon of Rodez at eleven, cardinal—appointed by his uncle, Clement VI—at nineteen, he was deeply religious, ascetic, and inclined toward mysticism, but he also possessed a quality of steely self-will which frequently astonished those who knew him. His one weakness was his health, which constantly gave his doctors cause for anxiety and occasionally even for alarm.

It was probably the mystical element in his character which decided him that, despite the obvious advantages of Avignon and the unfortunate experience of his predecessor, the Papacy belonged in Rome. True, Avignon was more favorably situated if there was to be any brokering of peace between England and France; but the situation in the Papal States was every bit as important for Christendom, and it was plain that the troublemaking rebel warlords of that region could be kept in check only from Italy. Besides, Gregory was one of the very few Avignon churchmen who genuinely liked the peninsula. In his youth he had studied law in Perugia, where he had known many of the foremost humanist scholars of the day and learned excellent Italian. Later, during Urban’s years in Rome, he had been one of the pope’s principal deputies. And so he made up his mind, and on May 9, 1372, he announced to his cardinals that they would all be leaving “very shortly” for Rome.

Cardinal Robert possessed none of the diplomatic subtlety of his predecessor. He immediately blockaded Bologna in an attempt to starve its citizens into surrender, laying waste all the surrounding countryside and allowing his mercenaries to rape and murder to their hearts’ content. His final atrocity was to turn them loose on the neighboring town of Cesena; the result was a massacre of over four thousand men, women, and children. Bologna, however, continued to hold out; it was not till after the pope was back in Rome that a truce was finally concluded.