| #### 5. PHILIP THE FAIR'S LAST VICTORY, 1303-1314 |

| #### #### Ten days after the death of Boniface VIII the cardinals went into conclave. They chose one of the late pope's most loyal supporters, the one-time Master-General of the Order of Preachers, Nicholas Boccasini; and they chose him on the first ballot. This pope was no Roman of noble family, but a poor man's son from the Venetian provinces. He was not a canonist but a theologian; and if a skilled and experienced ruler of men, he was, first of all, an excellent religious, a priest with a pastoral mind. As Master-General, Boccasini had kept his order obedient to the pope in the crisis of 1297, and he had been at Boniface's side in the hour of his last ordeal. But he had had no part in the struggle that opened with Ausculta Fili. During the last two critical years of Boniface's reign he had been away from Rome, serving as legate at the court of Albert of Habsburg. It was possibly because he was the one cardinal whom the late struggle had not touched that he was so speedily elected. Here was a man whom none hated because of any share he had had in that struggle, and a pope who would be able to devise policies free from the strain and fury of the late crisis. And his first gesture as pope gave a clear sign, that, while he would be loyal to the past, he would be loyal in his own way. The disciple of Benedict Gaetani did not call himself Boniface IX; with a nuance that only emphasised his substantial loyalty, he announced himself as Benedict XI. #### Benedict XI was in a strong position, able to be generous, therefore, towards Philip the Fair, and so resolved. The policy he proposed to adopt was simple, delicate and firm. Nogaret, still in Italy and faced with the perplexing problem of a new pope who was, too, a saintly man, with whom worldly motives would be of no avail, was again meditating the threat of schism -- the Colonna cardinals had had no share in the conclave, therefore the election was not valid. But Benedict XI passed over this new intrigue for the moment; making, from the beginning, a careful distinction between the various personalities responsible for the outrage of Anagni. The case of each should be separately decided according to the past mind and future intention of each. The chief culprit, the one most culpable from his rank, was of course the King of France. If he made a movement of submission Benedict would take it as sincerely meant, and would show himself the representative of Him who called himself the Good Shepherd. And when the pope forgave he would save the position his predecessors had declared themselves bound to defend, and the reality of the forgiveness, by saying outright in what spirit he was acting. But Philip must first of all make his move towards the pope. Benedict was no "appeaser", diplomatically angling for submission by a timely announcement that the terms would be easy and the gesture nominal. #### No official notice, therefore, of the new pope's election was sent to Philip, nor any copy of his first inaugural letter. The pope treated the king for the excommunicate he was, and was careful to remind the world of this by a renewal of the sentences of his predecessors, that all those are excommunicated who hinder free communication between the Holy See and the bishops. The deadlock did not last long. It was conveyed to Philip that the pope did not desire revenge; that forgiveness awaited him if he would submit; that the pope would only be inflexible about the principle of free communication with the Church in France: in this matter satisfaction would certainly be demanded, liberation also of all the clerics imprisoned, and revocation of the royal edicts. #### Meanwhile, the Colonna cardinals had come out from their hiding places, to throw themselves at Benedict's feet and beg for mercy. He showed himself generous, although "for the moment" he did not restore them to their dignity or their benefices and possessions. The same determination to make peace in a truly priestly spirit moved Benedict to send a legate to Florence, in the first weeks of 1304, with very extensive powers to settle differences and to reconcile the forces so hostile to the Holy See since the "pacification" of the town by the pope's champion, Charles of Valois. #### The embassy from Philip the Fair reached Rome in March 1304. It was, by the fact, a submission; and yet a submission craftily prepared, by accepting which the pope would give the French a basis to argue in the years to come that Benedict's pardon was an implicit condemnation of Boniface. Nogaret, returned now to the French court, was as influential as ever and no less dangerous. But Benedict cut through the snares by pardoning the king without any discussion of conditions, and stating that he did so as a loving father will always forgive a repentant child. The bargaining which Nogaret had planned, and which would have made the resultant absolution from excommunication seem an act in a kind of treaty or compromise, did not take place. The pope's simple directness turned the diplomatist's schemes with ease. Philip was absolved because he had repented, and because to forgive the repentant is the pope's first duty -- and all Europe would know this from the bulls. And when the King of France, his position as a Catholic prince restored, raised the question of Pope Boniface's actions towards him, renewing the demand for a council to judge this, Benedict put him off without discussion or comment of any kind. #### A few weeks later, from Perugia, whither the pope had now moved, further bulls took up the detail of the settlement, and firstly the problems raised by the law Clericis Laicos. The pope did not retreat from the principles then laid down, but he did the cause of the monarchy a great favour and, very skilfully, he did this by virtue of those very principles. The penalties of Clericis Laicos against lay oppressors of Church revenues were maintained, but those which awaited the clerics who submitted to such oppression were modified, so that they no longer fell automatically on such transgressors. And to help France in the desperate state to which debasement of the coinage had reduced the country, the pope allowed the clergy to pay a tithe for two years and the first fruits of all benefices coming vacant during the next three years, the moneys to be used for the restoration of the coinage (13 May, 1304). About the same time a series of decisions proclaimed what was in fact a general amnesty for all those who had fallen under excommunication in the more recent crisis following the bulls Ausculta Fili and Unam Sanctam. Whoever would repent, the pope would forgive, because he was the pope, and on terms fixed by himself -- namely the sincere repentance of the culprit. #### One group was however excepted, and by name, from this generous act of reconciliation. Not even Benedict XI's charity could presume that Nogaret had repented his share in these acts, or that he was likely to do so. At this very moment he was still actively manoeuvring for the council that should degrade the memory of Pope Boniface, and striving to form a party among the cardinals. Nogaret was still, in fact, the principal force at the court of France, influential, determined, ruthless; and the new pope, in the action he now took, showed unmistakably that it was not any fear to strike or any lack of strength that had prompted his willingness to be reconciled with the enemy. A special bull -- Flagitiosum Scelus -- denounced by name Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna and fifteen others for their share in the outrage at Anagni. They were summoned to appear, in person, by the coming feast of St. Peter, June 29, to receive the sentence their crime had merited. To this citation they paid no attention; but before the pope could proceed to the next act against them, he was no more. Benedict XI died, very suddenly, at Perugia on July 7, 1304. #### The sudden disappearance of Benedict XI was such good fortune for the policies of Nogaret that, not unnaturally, the rumour spread that the Frenchman had had him poisoned. The Church had lost that rarity, a pope who was a saint, [ ] and a saint who had in perfection the ruler's gift of prudence; and how real the tragedy was now brought home to all as, for a long eleven months, the factions in the conclave wrangled and fought. #### The majority of the cardinals -- ten of them -- were strong for a pope who would resist the French, and exact some reparation for the outrage on Boniface VIII. But there was a pro-French minority of six, the party which Nogaret had influenced during the last pope's brief reign. Eleven votes were needed to elect, and as both sides held firm the deadlock was complete. On the French side there were threats of schism unless someone friendly to Philip the Fair were chosen. "If any anti-Christ usurped the Holy See," said Nogaret ominously, he must be resisted. On both sides the cardinals began to consider candidates outside the Sacred College. Finally, the intrigues of Cardinal Napoleone Orsini gathered a bare two- thirds majority for the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got, and on June 5, 1305, he was elected, [ ] Pope Clement V. #### From many points of view it must have seemed an admirable choice. Clement V was well on the young side of fifty; he was by birth a subject of the English king, and yet on friendly terms with Philip the Fair. He was brother to that Cardinal Berard de Got who had been one of Boniface VIII's chief diplomatists, [ ] and had himself been employed by that pope in important diplomatic work in England. In the furious months that followed the Ausculta Fili the Archbishop of Bordeaux had been loyal to the pope, and he had gone to Rome for the great council which preceded the Unam Sanctam. His technical qualifications were high, for he was an accomplished canonist, a competent administrator and a skilled negotiator. The most serious drawback, perhaps, was his health; for, although this was not yet known, he was ravaged by a terrible cancer of the stomach. Again and again during his reign, for weeks and months at a time, his sufferings were to withdraw him entirely from all contact with affairs, and finally, after nine years, to bring his life to a premature end. He is spoken of as a man naturally kind and goodhearted, but vacillating, lacking the energy to make final decisions in policy, or to stand by them when made, increasingly at the mercy of his fears, and bound to be the tool, or the victim, of that pitiless cunning and determination which, for years now, had characterised the action of Philip the Fair. #### Clement V, as pope, never left the soil of France. He is the first of a series of French popes who lived out their reigns in France, the so-called Avignon popes. But with Clement this novelty of ruling the Church from outside the Papal State and Italy seems to have been the outcome of a series of accidents rather than of settled policy. He hoped to arrange a final definitive peace between France and England and, inviting both the kings to his coronation, fixed this for the (then) imperial city of Vienne on the Rhone. Later, to please Philip, he decided on Lyons and there, in Philip's presence and that of the ambassadors of Edward I, he was crowned, five months after his election, 14 November, 1305. #### It was no doubt one of the misfortunes of history that Edward I was not present at Lyons, for in a critical hour the French king carried all before him. It was, in fact, after this first famous interview with Philip that the pope gave up his idea of an immediate journey to Rome and, in the consistory of December 15, he gave a sign of what was to come by creating ten new cardinals, of whom nine were Frenchmen. #### The leading motive of the French king's policy was, of course, to win from Rome a formal renunciation of all that Boniface VIII had claimed, and a revocation of that pope's anti-regal acts. These hindrances to the establishment of a real royal control of the Church were to be removed by the only power that could remove them -- the papacy itself; and to bring this about the methods once employed so successfully with Boniface were once more to be put into operation. Pressure would be more easily applied if the pope were established nearer to Paris than Orvieto, or Anagni. And to detain the pope yet awhile in France -- and at the same time to excite such real alarm that he would yield more easily to the demand for a condemnation of his predecessor -- the king had ready a prepared scandal of the first magnitude. This was the question of the religious and moral condition of the great military order of the Knights of the Temple. To the newly-crowned pope, Philip the Fair, in the talks between them at Lyons, made known that for some time complaints of a most serious kind had been made about the Knights. They were, it was said, secret infidels who, on the day of their reception and profession as knights, explicitly and formally denied Christ and ceremonially spat upon the crucifix; the centre of their religious life was an idol, worshipped in all their houses; their priests were always careful to omit the words of consecration in the masses celebrated within the order; the knights practised unnatural vice as a kind of ritual and by prescription. An enquiry was urgently necessary. #### The pope was sceptical. The malevolent gossip about an order hated and envied by many rivals left him unmoved, as it had left unmoved the King of Aragon to whom the "revelations" had first been made. But the French king, and Nogaret, set themselves to produce yet more evidence. They found witnesses in ex-Templars languishing, for one crime or another, in the king's prisons. They introduced spies into the order itself. And then, in the spring of 1307, at a second meeting with the pope at Poitiers, the king repeated his demands. #### Clement, at first, refused. Philip then raised anew the question of the condemnation of Boniface VIII. Already, twelve months earlier, the pope had, with certain reservations on the principles, withdrawn the two great bulls of his predecessor, Clericis Laicos and Unam Sanctam (1 February, 1306) [ ] and the king had, thereupon, ceased his demand for the dead pope's trial. Now, as Clement showed fight about the Templars, the ghost of Pope Boniface was made to walk once more -- and effectively. For the curia proposed a compromise: the pope should quash all the anti-regalist acts of Boniface VIII, and the king should leave the question of the condemnation of Boniface entirely in the pope's hands. But the king refused all compromise. And then, August 24, 1307, Clement gave way and signed the order for a canonical enquiry into the accusations against the Templars. It was to be an enquiry according to the Canon Law -- as was only right where it was a religious order that was accused; and, also, the enquiry was ordered at the petition of the Templars themselves, eager to disprove the calumnies. #### This, of course, was not the kind of enquiry the French king had looked for, with the accused condemned beforehand. He took his own line and suddenly, in the early morning of October 13, all the Knights Templars of France were arrested by the royal order. Next, amid the consternation caused on all sides, Nogaret launched a campaign of anti-Templar "publicity"; France was flooded with proclamations and speeches that explained what criminals the Templars were, and how the pious king, on the advice of his confessor, careful of his duty as champion of the Catholic religion, had ordered their arrest, after consulting his barons, and the pope. #### The next few weeks were filled with the examination of the Knights -- examinations by the king's officials and, of course, under torture, whose object was to induce the accused to admit their guilt. Everywhere the unhappy men broke under the strain, and soon the king had, from the lips of the Templars themselves, all the evidence he needed that the order merited suppression and that its wealth should be confiscated -- if such avowals, and known to be obtained by such means, are indeed evidence. It sufficed to bring conviction to the pope that, at any rate, there was something seriously wrong in the order, and he ordered all the princes of Christendom to arrest the Templars and to place their property under sequestration (November 22, 1307). #### This hideous business of torturing men accused of crime was, by the time of Clement V, part and parcel of the routine of trials wherever the Roman Law influenced criminal jurisprudence. From the spheres influenced by that law it had passed, nearly a hundred years before this, into the procedure of the Inquisition. The canon lawyer was as familiar with the use of torture as his civilian brother, and as little likely to question its morality. Short of being a few hundred years before his time -- or a few hundred years behind it -- no canonist of Clement V's generation would have seen any objection to using the hostile "evidence" procured by Philip the Fair's torturers from the accused Templars. #### The pope had not indeed let Philip's vigorous coup succeed without a strong protest (27 October, 1307). The king had violated the immunity of clerics from the lay power of arrest, and this despite his knowledge that the pope had reserved the whole affair to himself. The pope had demanded, therefore, that Philip surrender his prisoners and their property to two cardinals named as the pope's commissioners. [ ] But Clement had done no more than this, and when the "confessions" were placed before him had admitted them juridically. #### The Templars now passed into the care of the Church and immediately, fancying themselves free of the royal torturers, solemnly revoked all their confessions. Whereupon the pope took the whole affair out of the hands of all lower tribunals and reserved it to himself. [ ] #### Philip the Fair's reply was to call up once more the ghost of Boniface VIII, and to launch a campaign of slander against Clement. All that had ever been said against Boniface, against his administration of the Church and against his private life, was now laid to the charge of Clement. [ ] The scenes of 1302 began to be repeated; there were declarations that if the pope neglected his obvious duty, the king would have to see to it, and, for the sake cf. the Church, act in its name; there was a great meeting of the States-General at Tours (11-20 May, 1308) and the assembly declared the Templars worthy of death. And, finally, Philip descended with an army on Poitiers. Once more, Clement -- who had attempted to escape out of Philip's dominions, but, discovered, been forced to return -- was lectured and threatened to his face, and bidden to act quickly, or the nation, whose indignation no king nor baron could restrain, would take the law into its own hands, and make an end of these enemies of Christ. And the pope was told that prelates who covered up crime were as guilty as those who committed it. #### This moral siege of the pope at Poitiers, where the king met him with an immense array of nobles, bishops, legists, soldiers, lasted for a month (26 May-27 June). But the pope's courage did not yet fail. He did not believe the Templars' guilt proved, and he refused to condemn the order. The king thereupon made an official surrender of the whole case to the pope and shipped off to the Papal Court a picked band of seventy-two Templars, ready to swear to anything as the price of future royal favour or of pardon for past crimes. It was the testimony of these men, many of whom Clement himself examined, that finally broke through the pope's scepticism, and for the trial of the order throughout the Church he entirely remodelled the whole Inquisition system [ ] (July 1308). In these same weeks of the conferences at Poitiers, the pope was again summoned to condemn Pope Boniface. Celestine V -- so the French king urged -- must be canonised, the victim of Boniface VIII; and Boniface's corpse dug up and burnt (6 July, 1308). This time Clement had to make some show of acquiescence, and as he had consented to put the Order of Templars on trial, so he now set up a commission to judge his predecessor (August 12, 1308), and fixed a date for the first hearing, a fairly distant date, February 2, 1309. #### The pope's scheme for the trial of the religious was elaborate. Two enquiries were to function simultaneously throughout Europe. The one, a pontifical commission, its members nominated by the pope, was to examine the charges against the order as such: the other, an episcopal enquiry, to judge the individual knights, was to be held in each diocese where the Templars had a foundation, and in this tribunal the judges would be the bishop with two delegates of his chapter, two Dominicans and two Franciscans. These diocesan findings would be reviewed by a council of all the bishops of the province, who would decide the fate of the individual Templars. As to the order, the findings of the pontifical commissions would be laid before a General Council, summoned to meet at Vienne for October 1, 1310, and the council would decide what was to be done with the order. #### The pontifical commission in France was far from hasty. [ ] It did not hold its first session until August 1309, and the real work did not begin until the following November. The prelates who sat as judges were, all of them, devoted to the policies of the French king; its president, the Archbishop of Narbonne, was one of the Templars' chief foes. And, contrary to the law by which they judged, the commissioners allowed the royal officials to assist at the trials, and to have access to the depositions confidentially made to the court by the accused. This paved the way for some of the most tragic scenes in this terrible story. For when the Templars appeared before the pontifical tribunal, many of them immediately revoked the confessions of guilt they had made. Publicly they now described the tortures which had been used to make them admit their guilt. "If the like torture is now used on me again," said one, "I will deny all that I am now affirming: I will say anything you want me to say." Something like 573 knights stood firm in this repudiation and in testimony that the charges against the order were calumnies. But the chiefs of the order wavered: they understood, better than the rest, the peril in which such retractation would involve them. The immense scale of the retractations, and the contrast presented by the miserable character of the outside witnesses produced by the royal officers against the order, were building up a popular feeling that it was innocent. And, lest he should lose the day, the king again intervened with force. The order as such might be winning its case before the pontifical commission: the king's opportunity lay with the machinery set up to judge these men as individuals. His instruments were the bishops of the provincial council of Sens, to which, in those days, the see of Paris [ ] was subject; upon whose judgment, by Clement V's decision, the fate of these knights as individuals depended. Their retractation, before the pontifical commission, of their confession of heresy was a relapse into heresy, and the punishment for this was death. #### So the Archbishop of Sens summoned his council -- he was Philippe de Marigny, brother of Enguerrand de Marigny, one of the king's chief ministers -- and without any further hearing the council condemned to death fifty-four of the Templars who had retracted their confession (11 May, 1310). The next day they were taken in batches to the place of execution and all of them burned alive, protesting to the last their innocence of any crime. Four days later there was another execution, of nine, at Senlis. #### This atrocious deed had the effect hoped for. The condemned men, still under the jurisdiction of the pontifical commission, had begged its intervention. The only answer given by the president was that he was too busy, he had to hear mass, he said, or to say mass. Nothing, it was evident, could save a Templar who did not admit all the crimes laid against him, and so provide evidence to justify the destruction of his order. Henceforth the courts had all the admissions they could desire. The speech of one of the knights to the papal commissioners, made the day after Philippe de Marigny's holocaust, has come down to us. "I admitted several charges because of the tortures inflicted on me by the king's knights, Guillaume de Marcilly and Hugues de la Celle. But they were all false. Yesterday, when I saw fifty-four of my brethren going in the tumbrils to the stake because they refused to admit our so-called errors, I thought I can never resist the terror of the fire. I would, I feel, admit anything. I would admit that I had killed God if I were asked to admit it." #### The pontifical enquiry in France now speedily came to the end of its business. It had henceforward no more exacting work than to take down confessions, and by June 5, 1311, it had finished. #### When we turn from the bloody scenes which took place wherever Philip the Fair had power, the contrast in what the trials of the Templars produced is striking indeed. In these islands, councils were held, as the pope had ordered, at London and York, in Ireland and in Scotland. But nowhere was there found any conclusive evidence against the order. So it was in Spain also. No torture was used in England until the pope insisted on it; [ ] but torture was used in Germany, and despite the torture the pontifical commissioners found the order in good repute and publicly declared this. All tended to show that, when the General Council met, the order would find defenders everywhere except among the bishops subject to Philip the Fair. That the council would vote the destruction of the order was by no means a foregone conclusion. #### While the Templars were going through their ordeal at Paris before the pope's commissioners, the pope himself, at Avignon, was also suffering duress. For on March 16, 1310, the trial -- if the word be allowed -- of Boniface VIII had at last begun in his presence. To accuse and revile the dead man's memory, all the cohort of Philip the Fair's legists had appeared, Nogaret leading them. Boniface had been a heretic; he had been a man of immoral life, in his youth (sixty years ago now) and through all his later years. He had been an infidel, an atheist, an idolator. He had never been lawfully elected, he had murdered his predecessor after tricking him into a resignation that was void in law. All the malevolence amid which Boniface had pursued his difficult way was now given free reign; and Clement, fearful of provoking yet new savageries from the French king, knowing, nevertheless, that he could never deny the principles for which Boniface had fought, could do no more than delay the proceedings by every expedient which practised finesse could suggest to him. #### At last the international situation played into his hands. The emperor, Henry VII, had just received at Milan the iron crown of Lombardy (6 January, 1311) and, with Robert of Naples, he was planning the reconstitution of the kingdom of Arles. The possibility of the whole of the lands east of the Rhone passing for ever beyond the influence of his house was more than Philip the Fair could allow. He was driven to seek the pope's good offices, but Clement, realising that this was his hour, received him coldly. The French cardinals advised the king that the cause of Boniface VIII was about to cost France more than it could ever be worth. And so, while the Templar commission at Paris was slowly coming to an end, pope and king came to an understanding. The king agreed that the accusers of Boniface should withdraw, and that the fate of the Templars should be left to the council: the pope, in a series of bulls, without condemning Boniface, or adverting at all to the vile charges made about his faith or his character, quashed all the papal acts against the king made from November 1, 1300, by Boniface or by his immediate successor, Benedict XI. He ordered, moreover, that all record of these various bulls should be erased from the papal registers. Nogaret was absolved, and with him Sciarra Colonna and others of the conspirators of Anagni. Finally, Philip the Fair was publicly praised for the zeal he had shown, and his good intentions in his anti-papal strife were officially recognised (27 April, 1311). [ ] It was a heavy price to pay for the cessation of the king's attack on Pope Boniface and, through him, on the reality of the pope's jurisdiction. And, like all similar surrenders, it did not really succeed. For the king was to threaten to renew the attack at a critical moment of the coming council, and so once more gain his way. Two years after this "settlement", Clement canonised the pope who had abdicated, the "victim" of Boniface VIII. But he was careful to canonise the saint not as Celestine V but as Peter di Murrone, and in the bull of canonisation to attest the validity of Celestine's act of abdication (May 5, 1313). [ ] #### The Council of Vienne, summoned for October 1310, actually met just a year later, October 16, 1311. Its principal business was the settlement of the affairs of the Order of Templars; and to consider the report of the various commissions a special committee of the bishops was appointed. To the pope's embarrassment -- with the ink hardly dry on his recent arrangement with Philip the Fair -- the committee, by a great majority, reported that the Templars ought to be heard before the council in their own defence (December 1311). The pope, characteristically, set the report aside, and offered for consideration schemes -- much needed schemes -- of Church reform, and plans for a new crusade. And the French king, raising the memory of his "injuries" at the hands of Pope Boniface, came himself to Vienne, to try all that blandishment and threats could do with the obstinate majority. He was, horrible to relate, entirely successful, and on March 22, 1312, the committee reversed its decision of the previous December and, furthermore, by a majority of 4 to 1 recommended that the Order of Templars be suppressed. #### The next solemn session of the whole council was fixed for April 3, twelve days later. Would the bishops have accepted this recommendation had they been free to discuss it? It is an interesting question; but the pope forestalled all possibility of trouble by imposing silence under pain of excommunication, and instead of deciding the fate of the order the assembled bishops had read to them the pope's own sentence and decision. Without judging the order, or condemning it, Clement simply suppressed it as an administrative action [ ] and not as a punishment for any crime. And next, despite enormous efforts on the part of Philip and some of the bishops, the pope transferred the possessions of the order to the kindred military order of the Hospitallers, except in Spain where the new possessors were the military orders who fought the Moors. The individual knights the pope left to the judgment of the provincial councils. #### The trial of the Grand Master and the chief superiors Clement reserved to himself, and eighteen months after the closing of the council he named a commission of three French cardinals to judge them (22 December, 1313). They were found guilty, on their own previous admissions, and on March 18, 1314, before the main door of Notre Dame, in the presence of an enormous crowd, they were sentenced to life imprisonment. And now, once again, tragedy crowned the proceedings in very terrible fashion. The Grand Master and one of his brethren, free of the prospect of a death sentence, their lot definitely settled at last, renounced their confessions and protested that the order had been gravely calumniated. "We are not guilty of the crimes alleged against us," they said. "Where we are guilty is that to save our own lives we basely betrayed the order. The order is pure, it is holy. The accusations are absurd, our confessions a tissue of lies." Here was an unexpected problem for the three cardinals, and while they debated, uncertainly, how to deal with it, Philip the Fair acted. That very day he decided with his council that here was yet another case of relapse into heresy. The two knights, without more ado, were hurried to the stake and that same evening given to the flames, proclaiming to the last their innocence and the innocence of the order. #### Was the order indeed innocent? The controversy has raged ever since it was brought to so cruel an end. It is safe to say that the controversy is now over, and that it has ended in agreement to acquit the knights. [ ] The order was the victim of Philip the Fair's cupidity, and the pope was, in very large measure, the king's conscious tool in the wicked work. #### The suppression of the Templars, and the associate villainy of the "trial" of Boniface VIII, are events so monstrous in scale that all else in the nine years of Pope Clement's unhappy reign is dwarfed beside them. Certainly these events were, for seven of those years, his chief anxiety and his almost daily care; and they were the chief obstacle to the realisation of his never wholly abandoned intention to live, like his predecessors, the normal life of a pope within the Italian Papal State. For the papal establishment at Avignon, that was to last for some seventy years, was not -- it seems certain -- due to any one definite act of policy, based on a Frenchman's preference for life in his own country. Clement V had been pope for nearly four years before he so much as saw Avignon. It was only when he realised, in the summer of 1308, after the second Poitiers meeting with the French king, the gravity of the imminent crisis, that the pope determined on Avignon as a more or less permanent place of residence (August 1308). To return to Italy while such menace hung over Catholic affairs in France would have been unthinkable. Avignon was on the French frontier and yet no part of Philip's dominions; the surrounding territory -- the County of Venaissin -- had been papal territory for now thirty years. In the circumstances, to set up the curia at Avignon was an ideal solution; and it is simple matter of fact that during the seventy years of what has been called, too easily, the Babylonian captivity, the papal action was far less hindered by civil disturbance not only than in the seventy years that followed the return to Rome of Gregory XI (in 1377) but than it was hindered in the seventy years that preceded the election of the first Avignon pope. #### It was in March 1309 that the pope took up his residence at Avignon -- a very modest establishment in the priory of the Dominicans -- and had sent to him from Rome the registers of letters for the two last pontificates, and a certain amount -- not by any means the greater part -- of the papal treasure. There is no reason to doubt that Clement, had he lived, would, once the General Council had settled the double crisis in France, have passed into Italy. But he was already a man marked for death by the time that council ended. Once more he left Provence and, in the desperate hope of improvement, set out for his native country of the Bordelais. But he had gone no farther than Roquemaure, on the Rhone, when just a month after the terrible end of the Grand Master of the Templars, death claimed him too (April 20, 1314). Six months later Philip the Fair, still on the young side of fifty, followed him into the next world. The Church had lost one of the weakest popes who has ever ruled it, and religion had been delivered from the menace of one of its most insidious foes. #### In two respects Clement V set a new and a thoroughly bad example which was to become a papal fashion through all the next two hundred years. He found places for a host of relatives in the high offices of the Church; and he spent the treasure of the Church lavishly for their enrichment. No fewer than six of his family he made cardinals -- at a time when the total number of the Sacred College rarely exceeded twenty. Others he named to well-endowed sees, while for those who were not clerics he created well-paid posts and sinecures in the temporal administration. It was now that there began what must be judged the most evil part of the Avignon tradition, the excessive preoccupation of the curia with fees. And with the new interest in lawful fees there developed, inevitably, a regime of graft and jobbery where all, from the highest to the lowest, expected bribes and demanded them, a regime which the popes in the end became powerless to change. Cardinal Ehrle has calculated, from the papal accounts of the time, that Clement V was able to save nearly one half of his immense annual revenue. The treasury at his death amounted to over a million florins. Of this he left to friends and relations 200,000 florins, and to a nephew, pledged to equip a troop of knights for the crusade, half as much again. Clement V also inaugurated the Avignon tradition of filling the Sacred College with Frenchmen. He created twenty-four cardinals in all; one was English, one Spanish; the rest were all Frenchmen, and of the twenty-two, six, as has been said, were closely related to him by blood. [ ] |