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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. [ ]
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