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The seven Avignon popes were a singularly competent line. Rarely indeed
has there been, in the papacy, such a continuous succession of
administrative ability. No less unusual -- in its medieval history --
was another feature of the regime, namely, that for as long as seventy
years the papacy was established in the one place. Nowhere, in fact,
had the popes -- from the time of St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) at least
-- been less at home than in Rome; and for three-quarters of the
century that divides the reign of Innocent III from the establishment
at Avignon, the curia had wandered from one town to another of the
papal state, settled anywhere rather than at Rome. Now, from 1309, that
vast establishment was for seventy years stably fixed; and three
successive generations of Catholics saw, as a new thing, what has, ever
since, been so much the rule that it appears to us in the very nature
of things, namely the pope and the great administrative machine through
which he works permanently, and as it were immovably, placed.
To say this of the Avignon papacy is to say that conditions then
favoured, as never before, all that conscious development of a
centralised papal government of the universal Church, which had been so
notable a part of the papal policy ever since St. Gregory VII had
discerned in it a mighty means of reform and a strong defence of
reforms accomplished. More than ever, then, this is a period which sees
the translation of rights and law into the fact of a regular
bureaucratic administration; the fixing into hard tradition of tile
ways of administrators, financiers, judges. The Corpus Iuris Canonici
is now, at last, really to begin to come into its full supremacy, not
merely as an instrument which men use, but as that greater thing than
any of these individuals, a law which they all serve; and it is to
produce the most competent, completely centralised system of government
-- i.e. on a very great scale -- which the Middle Ages knew. [ ]
Perhaps more than any individual pope of the next two hundred years it
is this system which is to matter. In an age when theology declines,
the canon law flourishes -- as does its twin sister, the Roman law as
the Middle Ages knew it; it is now that the Roman law receives a new
birth in the genius of Bartolo. It was but the justice of history that,
when the great catastrophe of the sixteenth century arrived, the
canonists should come in for some of the blame. "Holy Father, it is the
teaching of the canonists," so the report begins of the cardinals whom
Paul III, in 1537, commissioned to examine the causes of the new
revolt. [ ]
The pope's chief agents in the ruling and administration of the affairs
of the Church universal continued to be the college of cardinals. Its
numbers were still restricted, by comparison, that is, with the
standards of the last four hundred years: [ ] in the conclaves of this
period (1305-1378) the number of electors fluctuates between eighteen
and twenty-six. But never, after Boniface VIII, did the college shrink
to the dozen and less, which was all that it counted in the great
thirteenth century. [ ]
The importance of these high dignitaries in the life of the universal
Church -- in origin they are but the more prominent cf. the clergy of
the local Roman Church -- goes back, of course, to the decree of
Nicholas II in 1059, which constituted the cardinals the sole electors
of the pope. The Avignon period is most important in their history as a
college because they now, very definitely, begin, as a college, to aim
at influencing, and even controlling, the action of the pope. Here, and
not in the universal episcopate, is the beginning of the dangerous
movement to reduce the traditional administrative supremacy of the
pope. The cardinals are few, they are wealthy, they all reside in the
curia -- for, as yet, in the rare event of the hat being conferred on a
diocesan bishop, he leaves his see to live in the curia -- and they are
organised. Their pressure on the papacy is constant. At every vacancy,
from the end of this century, they make election pacts to ensure their
own enrichment and to fetter the action of the future pope. It is the
bad will of the cardinals -- if not their bad faith -- that is
primarily responsible for the Schism of 1378. They play the traitor to
Urban VI in 1378, and -- so general by now is the idea of their
independence -- in 1408 both sets of cardinals betray their masters,
the rival pontiffs Gregory XII and Benedict XIII. At every crisis
throughout the fifteenth century, and down to the very eve of Luther's
revolt, the pope's first anxiety is how the cardinals will behave. Not
until e coup d’etat of Leo X, who, in 1517, swamps the opposition. by
creating thirty-one cardinals in one act, are the popes really free of
their factious collegiate interference.
Meanwhile their importance could not be greater. It is in the
consistory that the main acts of Church government take place, where
each cardinal has rights of speech and of opposition. The pope needs
their consent for many acts and, very notably, before creating
additional cardinals -- and to new creations the college is, almost by
instinct, habitually opposed.
In the consistory there is also transacted much political and
international business. This makes the cardinals objects of great
interest to the different Catholic princes -- an interest that
increases steadily as the great states of modern times, and the new
permanent international rivalries, take shape in the fifteenth century.
But already, at Avignon, it is beginning to pay the princes to be on
good terms with the cardinals, to attach particular cardinals to their
interests, to make them handsome presents, to dower them with pensions.
Not that the cardinals are necessarily poor men otherwise. Far from
this, they are in the fourteenth century a byword for wealth, pomp and
luxurious living; Petrarch in Italy and Langland in England speak here
a common tongue. By law they have a right -- that is to say the college
-- to divide equally with the pope the taxes called servitia comunia. [
] In the eighteen years of John XXII, pope and cardinals thus shared
more than a million gold florins. They enjoyed the revenues of the
numerous benefices which it was now common form should be heaped on
each of them, parishes, canonries, abbeys and diocesan sees --
benefices they never saw, where the work was done by a deputy at a
fixed salary, while agents farmed the revenues for the absentee
cardinal titular. Then there were the gifts made by the popes at fixed
occasions, on their election for example, and on its succeeding
anniversaries. So John XXII, in 1316, and Benedict XII, in 1334,
divided up 100,000 florins between the cardinals. Clement VI, in 1342,
gave them 108,000; Innocent VI, 75,000 in 1352; Urban V, ten years
later, only 40,000.
The princely style in which the cardinals lived brought them bitter
words from Petrarch -- somewhat ungratefully, for he had his share of
it in his time. And it brought, also, frequent reproof from the popes.
Cardinals began to be most unpopular figures in the Church. The feud
between them and the bishops deadlocked, and nearly wrecked, the
Council of Constance. Continually, for the next hundred-and-fifty
years, whenever projects of reform take practical shape the first item
is usually that the cardinals shall diminish their households, dismiss
the horsemen, the jesters, the actors, and all the varied paraphernalia
of their courts, that they shall take for their service only clerics,
and that these shall be dressed as clerics and live as clerics, and so
forth. But all will be in vain, for all that time, until the day comes
when the Dutch reforming pope, entering his States on his election,
will need to have it explained to him that the gaily-caparisoned
princes who salute him are indeed the cardinals of the Holy Roman
Church.
One last word about the college under the Avignon popes -- it is almost
wholly French. The seven French popes of this time created between them
134 cardinals; 111 of them were French, there were sixteen Italians,
five Spaniards, two Englishmen. It will be noted there was none from
Germany, the perpetually unsolved problem of the papal administration
But this was not merely because these popes were French. There had been
no German cardinal in the sixty years before the "Captivity" began.
Nicholas of Cusa, created cardinal in 1448 by Nicholas V, was well-nigh
the first German cardinal for two hundred years.
Like every other system of government, the papacy had had to create a
highly-organised department where all state documents were prepared,
and whence they were despatched: grants, licences, monitions, and
appointments of various kinds; this was the Chancery and at its head
was the vice-chancellor. In its archives copies were preserved of all
the documents despatched, and also the original petitions from which so
many had originated. Here was a vast secretariat which put into
writing, in the appropriate form, the day-to-day decisions of the pope
and saw to their transmission to the interested parties. But for
matters of conscience which touched the private lives of individuals
there was a special office called the Penitentiary. [ ] Here, under the
direction of the cardinal grand penitentiary, a host of experts in
theology, and canon law, dealt with such matters as requests for
dispensation from the innumerable impediments to marriage; or for the
removal of excommunications, interdicts and suspensions; or for power
to absolve from sins reserved to the pope. This department had its own
staff of clerks, and also a staff of eighteen penitentiaries who sat in
the churches of the city to hear the confessions of all comers, with
special faculties to absolve from sins reserved and also from reserved
censures.
Another feature, common alike to the government of the Church and of
states, was a system of law courts. Here the Avignon popes were great
innovators. Their predecessors had devised the practice of naming
judge-delegates who did all that was necessary in a lawsuit save to
give the sentence -- this being reserved to the pope and, generally,
his personal act. But the number of cases which came in to the pope for
decision increased so enormously, from the beginning of the fourteenth
century, that the popes now began to grant, to the judge-delegates whom
they appointed, power to give a definitive sentence. Alongside these
new methods the old permanent tribunals continued to function: the
consistory, and the court that came to be called the Rota.
The consistory was the whole body of cardinals present in curia, with
the pope in person presiding. it was the primitive, omni-competent,
engine of the ecclesiastical system; the pope's cabinet, his council,
his tribunal for any case it cared to hear; where all kinds of business
was transacted, spiritual, political, administrative, international;
where ambassadors were heard and treaties signed. And during the
Avignon period it remained the principal instrument of government as
before.
The origin of the court which, about this time (1336), came to be
called the Rota is obscure. It is really the "court of audience for
causes of the Apostolic Palace, " and its competence extends to all
cases sent to it for judgment by the pope or the vice-chancellor. [ ]
But its principal, and indeed usual, employment is to hear and decide
suits arising out of presentations to benefices. This is the period, as
will shortly be explained, when the papal centralisation reaches to
such a height that almost every clerical appointment may come within
reach of the papal curia. What hordes of petitions, and
cross-petitions, pour in to Avignon from now on can easily be guessed.
The judges of the Rota-the auditors, there are eight of them ill 1323
-- hear and decide these disputes. From their sentence there is no
appeal. But the elaborate law of procedure gives the litigant a rich
variety of means to delay the sentence, or to hold up the trial. When
the canons of Hamburg and the citizens of the town brought their
disagreements before this court, the ingenuity, first of one side and
then of the other, dragged out the case for as long as sixteen years. [
] So many were the pleas for delay, and so great an opportunity was
thereby offered to legal chicanery, that the popes set up a special
court to examine the expedients brought in to delay discussions. This
was the court of "audience of disputed letters" (audientia litterarum
contradictarum), more usually called "the public audience. " [ ] It
seems not to have been notably successful, and, in the end, only added
yet another complication to the already complicated system.
There were also courts where the various cardinals were judges. But
these were courts that only functioned when commissioned by the pope to
judge a particular case. For the most part, they undertook the
preliminary enquiries needed to bring out, for the pope or the
consistory, the real facts at issue in the suit. Clement V greatly
simplified their procedure; but there were two serious inconveniences?
always, for those who made use of these courts. The one was that, since
cardinals were liable, at any time, to be despatched on missions
abroad, there was great uncertainty when the case before them would
finish; and the other was the extent in these courts of what is best
and most expressively described as "graft, " if not for the cardinal’s
services, then for those of his household and his officials.
The law administered in all these courts, [ ] to which suitors came
from every diocese in Christendom -- they were indeed the only courts
that could hear suits between sees in different ecclesiastical
provinces [ ] -- was the canon law as this was promulgated in the great
compendium of 1234, [ ] to which Boniface VIII had, in 1296, added a
sixth book [ ] and John XXII, in 1317 [ ], the laws of his predecessor,
Clement V -- the Clementines. It was a law made up of the decrees of
councils, and decrees and decisions of earlier popes; some of these had
been enacted for the generality of the Church, and others were
decisions given in particular cases but establishing a general doctrine
of law, and henceforward given force of law universally.
The first legal foundation of this massive, and -- by this
time-scientifically organised, instrument of government was the
collection of disciplinary canons of the earliest councils of the
Church, as far as these were known, and of what rules of discipline
could be found in the history of the earliest popes. Much of the more
ancient part of this lore -- whatever its legal usefulness, or its
intrinsic truth -- was, historically, mere apocrypha, the -- as yet
unsuspected -- invention of ingenious ninth-century forgers, anxious to
produce new and most convincing evidence in support of beliefs and
practices long traditional.
These forgeries, which we know as "the False Decretals, " [ ] added
nothing to the substantial foundation of the corpus of the canon law.
Much more important was the influence upon that corpus, in its critical
nascent years, of the contemporary revival of the study of Roman law.
Like all the other early medievals, the first professional
practitioners of the canon law (whether they functioned as legislators
or in the ecclesiastical tribunals) could not have escaped -- even had
they so wished -- the far-reaching influence of this great creation of
legal thought. It is not so much that here is a code of laws ready made
for a variety of occasions; but here is law as a body of coherent
thought; here are legal principles and doctrines, laws seen as the
fruit of law; and also a most remarkable, technical, legal language. [
] The first founders of the canon law, as this appears from 1234 in the
papal books, were no less skilled in the Roman law, the civil law, as
it is also called; and in the legal procedure thence onwards built up
by papal legislation, the influence of the Roman procedure in law is
everywhere apparent. Roman influence is apparent elsewhere too, in more
than one canon-law doctrine, and also in the spirit in which the
canonists develop the administrative machinery by which the popes rule
the Church divinely committed to their supreme authority. [ ]
It was not, however, the canonist who was the leading figure at the
Avignon curia. The pope's most confidential adviser, the official whose
word was necessarily most weighty, was the cardinal placed at the head
of the finances, the Camerarius. [ ]
And here something must be said of a new practice -- not the invention
of the Avignon popes indeed, but one which' they developed enormously,
namely the reservation to the Holy See, and its use in practice, of the
right to present to benefices throughout the universal Church. Here is
the most striking act of the centralised papacy of the Middle Ages. It
began forty years before the "Captivity" when Clement IV, in 1268, by
the famous decretal Licet, declared that for the future the popes would
keep in their own hands the nomination to all benefices vacant by the
death of their holder while at the Roman curia. The principle set forth
was speedily developed by succeeding popes. Boniface VIII, in 1296,
extended "at the Roman curia" to mean within two days' march of the
Roman curia. Clement V's extensions, and those of John XXII, as
codified in the constitution Ex debito, bring within the papal reserve
all benefices vacant through the deposition or privation of the last
incumbent, or through his election not being' confirmed, or by his
resignation made to the pope, or vacant by the incumbent's acceptance
of a new benefice through papal provision or papal translation, and a
host of other ingenuities. Further extensions followed until, by the
end of Gregory XI's reign, almost every benefice in the Church was at
the pope's disposal.
This new development inevitably increased the work and importance of
the Camerarius. At every nomination, or concession of a provision,
there were fees to be paid. At every death of a beneficiary nominated
by the pope there were certain rights due to the pope. The Camerarius
needed to have agents in every diocese of Christendom, and, because of
the wide range of his department, no officer of the curia was so much
in touch with the universality of the papacy's problems. By his office,
too, it was the business of the Camerarius to know all about the rights
and privileges of the Holy See everywhere. In political crises he was,
for this reason, an extremely important person; and, financial
transactions on his imperial scale necessarily involving contacts with
governments, the Camerarius was, at all times, the pope's chief agent
for the day-to-day business with the Christian princes; the political
correspondence of the Holy See was done through his clerks; and his
collectors -- who are already by this time the regular source of the
Holy See's information about the state of Europe -- will one day
develop into the nuncios who, with the Secretariat of State, to-day
make up the papal diplomatic service.
The Camerarius had also his own system of courts -- with a special bar
-- to hear and decide the inevitable, and innumerable, disputes about
assessments and payments. He had a special prison at his disposal, and
he controlled the papal mint.
The vast engine of collectors which the Camerarius controlled is,
perhaps, to students of the vernacular literature of these times, to
readers of Chaucer say, or of Langland, the best known, indeed the most
notorious, feature of the "Avignon Captivity." It was, from the papal
exchequer's point of view, a most admirably devised machine. Never
before had so much milk been got from the cow. The system of taxes and
charges was twofold; one series was payable at the curia itself, while
the other was collected in the taxpayer's own diocese. In all cases it
was a taxation of Church property and of Church revenues only.
All bishops and abbots paid, on appointment, one third of the annual
assessed income of their see or abbey, and also a second tax which
varied in amount from one twelfth to one twenty-fourth of this income;
the receipts from the first tax (servitia communia) were divided
between the treasuries of the pope and the sacred college, those from
the second went to officials and to the officers of the cardinals. If
the prelate was an archbishop he had pallium fees also; and if he were
actually consecrated at the curia (or blessed) there were additional
fees amounting to a sixth of what he paid as servitia communia. From
these fees only those were exempted whose revenue was less than, say,
£500 a year, present (1946) value. [ ] At fixed intervals bishops were
bound to make, personally or through an agent, a pilgrimage "to the
threshold of the Apostles" to report on the state of their dioceses,
and to pay a special ad limina tax. There were of course, as in all
governments, taxes and fees at every stage of the concession of
privileges, licences, appointments; another source of revenue lay in
the money payments to which vows and penances were at times "commuted."
And there was also the tribute, paid annually by the vassal kings of
Naples, Sicily, Aragon and England. [ ]
More familiar to the generality of Christians, however, were the taxes
gathered by the small army of officials sent from the curia into every
part of the Church. These taxes were of two kinds. First of all there
were taxes levied for special occasions; the tithe for example, that is
to say one tenth of the income of all benefices as this had been
officially assessed, and the "loving aid" (subsidia caritativa). [ ]
This last was, originally, a voluntary contribution made by a benefice
holder in response to an urgent general appeal from the Holy See. But
by the time of the Avignon popes it had ceased to be voluntary; the
collector fixed the amount due, and delay was punished (as everywhere
in the system) by excommunication.
The permanent taxes were, of course, a much more serious matter. The
most profitable was that called Annates, the first year's revenue of
every benefice after the appointment of a new incumbent. It was Clement
V who devised this system, first of all for England only, in 1306, and
for benefices vacant by the death of their holder while at the curia
(apud curiam Romanam). Twenty years later this tax was extended to the
whole Church for all benefices to which the Holy See had nominated. The
number of benefices where the Holy See reserved to itself the right to
nominate grew steadily all through the fourteenth century, and by 1376
hardly any see was exempted from this extremely heavy tax.
A second principal permanent means by which the popes drew on the
resources of the clergy anywhere and everywhere was the right called
"spoils." From the custom of pillaging the household goods of a dead
bishop or abbot, there arose the retaliatory practice of the bishop or
the abbot pillaging in the same way when beneficiaries died who were
under their jurisdiction. As the Holy See became, more and more, the
universal collator to all benefices of any value, it took over this
right of spoils, and under Urban V it was extended to the property of
all benefice holders whatsoever, regular or secular, wherever they
died. The local representative of the papal collector entered into
possession. He paid all debts due for work that had profited the Church
or the benefice, and he paid off the servants. The dead man's heirs
were given his books and all else that had been bought either with his
private fortune or from the fruits of his own industry. The church
ornaments and plate the collector left undisturbed (unless he could
prove these had been bought out of benefice revenues in order to
defraud the pope) and he did not take the food, wine, cattle and tools.
But the rest he sold up. These sales of the moveables of dead bishops
often brought in vast sums. Their best vestments and church plate the
popes often kept for the papal treasury; and they also kept the
valuable books. So, between 1343 and 1350, their library at Avignon was
the richer by no fewer than 1,200 valuable works. [ ]
As the popes now claimed the first year's revenue of the
newly-appointed holder of a benefice, so they also began to demand all
the revenue for the time the benefice had lain vacant. A final,
general, permanent charge on sees was that levied for dispensations for
procurations. A "procuration" was the amount of money which a bishop
had a right to receive when he made the visitation of a benefice.
Originally this was no more than hospitality for himself and his suite.
But, gradually, it had become a money payment and in 1336 the maximum
amount was fixed by a law of Benedict XII. The practice now began that
bishops begged the Holy See for the right to exact the procuration even
though they had not made the visitation, and the popes began to grant
such petitions, on the understanding that the bishop paid to them a fee
that varied from a half to two-thirds of the sum he himself received.
The bishops next endeavoured to recoup, by a diocesan tax, the sums
they had been compelled to disgorge to the curia, but here the popes
intervened and a law of Urban V, in 1369, forbade the practice.
How far did the system really work? What sums of money did it bring in?
The accounts of the central exchequer, and of the collectors dispersed
through the different sees of Christendom, survive in very large part
and they have been extensively studied. [ ] From them we can trace the
financial history of the Avignon popes through fifty years of
fluctuating solvency to a final state that borders on chronic
bankruptcy. For expenses always outran receipts, and it was upon a
papacy that had exhausted its own resources, that had scarcely any
effective hold on its own territories, and that had severely tried the
patience of Catholics everywhere, that the terrible crisis of the Great
Schism fell.
On the death of Clement V (1313), there was a sum of something more
than 1,000,000 golden florins in the treasury. But the dead pope's
generosity to his heirs left his successor, John XXII, little more than
70,000 of them. It is this pope who was the chief architect of the
system just described. The new taxes which he devised, and the system
of collecting them, raised the revenue to an annual sum of 228,000
florins. Expenses, however chiefly due to the wars in Italy -- topped
receipts throughout his long reign, and John XXII would have died
insolvent but for loans and timely legacies. As it was, he left to the
new pope, Benedict XII, a fortune of 750,000 florins. Under this
Cistercian pope drastic economy ruled, and the Italian wars slackened;
Benedict was even able to remit taxes (including the highly profitable
first fruits) and to manage on a revenue of less than a fourth of what
his predecessor had enjoyed. At his death (1342) the treasure,
nevertheless, amounted to more than 1,100,000 florins. But Clement VI,
to whom all this came, was the most princely of all these popes in his
way of life, a pale but sinister forerunner of the Medici and della
Rovere of the next age. As his expenses mounted, the taxes mounted too.
Soon the revenue was 188,000 florins, threefold what it had been under
Benedict XII. But, even so, it did not nearly suffice, and the pope was
forced to borrow. To Innocent VI, who succeeded him in 1352, Clement VI
yet managed to leave 300,000 florins. The next ten years are the last
in which the financial situation is even tolerable. Taxes contrive to
mount indeed, and the annual revenue rises to a quarter of a million
florins, but the war in Italy is once more raging violently and it eats
up all this and more. The Holy See falls now into a chronic state of
debt; and under the last two of the Avignon popes, Urban V (1362-1370)
and Gregory XI (1370-1378), though the hold on benefices is pushed to
the extreme limit and the taxes are crushing, the financial history of
the Apostolic See is one long misery.
The discontent which the system caused was general and it was immense.
Where did the money go? To judge from the discontent, as the new
popular literature expresses it, the complainants, naturally enough,
saw it as the life blood of the princely style in which the Avignon
popes lived, the means by which they maintained one of the most
splendid courts of the time. But modern study of the accounts has made
it clear beyond all doubt that the amount spent on the court was small
indeed compared with the sums swallowed up by the endless wars waged in
Italy for the recovery and defence of the papal states. The total
revenue received by John XXII, for example, in the eighteen years of
his reign, amounted to 4,200,000 florins. [ ] The household expenses
for one year that we know (1329-30) were 48,600 florins [ ]; if this
were an average year the total on this account would be in the
neighbourhood of 875,000 florins; but the Italian wars cost this pope
no less than 4,191,446 florins. [ ] Nothing so sweals away the riches
of a government as war.
We do not, however, need to turn to the poets, the novelists and the
satirists of the time for evidence of the immense discontent, nor to
the papacy's foes. We can find it in the outspoken comment of such
personages as St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena, and,
even, in the very account books of the collectors. And were there no
evidence at all, given the facts of human nature, we could surely take
it for granted; at no time would men ever have continued to suffer such
a yoke in silence. In France the royal officials systematically did all
they could to hinder the functioning of the system -- and it was in
France that the business was best organised, for there were as many
collectors for France as for all the rest of Christendom together. In
Germany the collectors were frequently attacked and imprisoned, and at
times the clergy banded together in non-payment leagues, taking oath to
stand by one another if penalties were inflicted. In England the joint
business of the taxation of benefices [ ] and the extension of the
papal right to collate, raised a very great storm indeed.
England, since King John's surrender in 1213 to Innocent III, had been
subject to the Holy See in temporal matters too, that is to say as a
vassal to its suzerain. But this had never hindered the English bishops
from protesting strongly against the popes' provision of foreign
clerics to English benefices; and the barons -- speaking for the lay
patrons whose rights were thus, at times, curtailed -- were more
vehement still. The one personage in England whose action was always
uncertain, and ever seemingly inconsistent, was the chief patron of
all, the king. Whatever the king's personal resentment at new
extensions of the papal claims to collate and to levy taxes, he had
usually too great a need of the pope's aid in the complexities of
international diplomacy to allow his resentment free play. From the
time of Edward I (1272-1307) onward England offers the interesting
picture of laity eager to protest against this papal policy and to
check it, of clergy willing to connive at the protest, and of the crown
seeking to use this situation as a means whereby to coax, or coerce,
the pope in other policies.
The first anti-papal, parliamentary event to have any lasting effect
was the debate in the Parliament of Carlisle in January 1307, the last
parliament of Edward I's reign. Here all the grievances of the time
were set out in a petition to the king: complaints about papal
provisions as an injury to the rights of patrons, about papal claims to
first fruits. The king listened to the petition but it was not allowed
to mature into a law. The one law certainly made in this parliament [ ]
is a prohibition against monasteries which owe obedience to foreign
superiors paying taxes and tributes to them or lending them money.
Edward I died within six months of the Parliament of Carlisle, and in
the twenty years' anarchy of his successor's reign -- Edward II --
there is more than one protest from the clergy against the double
taxation to which they were now beginning to be continually subjected:
the popes taxed them for papal purposes, and the kings taxed them --
with the popes' permission -- for national purposes. Edward II, like
his father before him, seized the priories subject to alien superiors
and confiscated their revenues for a time; and in 1325 a royal writ
ordered the bishops to ignore all papal bulls unless the king had given
leave for their introduction into the realm. [ ]
But the events of 1307 bore no real fruit until the reign of the next
king, Edward III (1327-1377). Once Edward III had begun the great war
with France (1338) it could not be long before the English kicked hard
against the French popes. Not only were the French legates these popes
employed unpopular, but by the papal hold on appointments, and their
taxation of English clerics, good English money was now flowing, via
the papal treasury, into the war fund of the national enemy. [ ] In
1343 a bill was introduced into parliament to make it a penal offence
to bring into the country any bulls from the pope, any provisions to
benefices, or reservations, and forbidding the acceptance of such
provisions; also, clergy who, on the basis of such provisions, brought
suit, either against the patron of a benefice or against the incumbent
whom the patron had presented, were also to be punished. In 1344 the
penalty of outlawry, perpetual imprisonment or exile was proposed
against those violating this law; also, a most significant addition,
the same penalties were to be enacted for those who appealed in these
matters from the royal courts to the Holy See. Neither of these
projects passed into law. For the moment the king held back the
indignation of his subjects. The barons, in May 1344, sent a petition
of grievances to Clement VI, but the pope answered evasively. In 1347
the barons made a new attempt to enact the bills proposed in 1343 and
1344. They were again not successful. These hints to the papal
officials, threats of what might be done, were wholly without effect at
Avignon, and the king at last consented to allow the enactment of a
statute. So there was passed, in 1351, the first Statute of Provisors.
[ ] This famous law begins by telling the story of the Carlisle
petition of 1307, and makes its own the complaint of that document that
the papal policy of granting English benefices to foreign clerics --
who are always absentees -- is doing serious harm to every kind of
religious activity. Now, in 1351, the mischief is worse than ever.
English kings are bound, by law and by their oaths, to provide remedies
for it. So, with a statement that the legislation of 1307 has never
been repealed, it is now enacted that all elections of bishops and
abbots are to continue to be freely made by the various chapters, and
that all ecclesiastical patrons are freely to present to the benefices
in their gift, and that where the Roman curia "in disturbance of the
free elections, collations or presentations aforenamed" has made
provision of a benefice, the presentation is, for that occasion, to
fall to the king. Anyone who, fortified with a papal provision,
presumes to disturb the person presented by the king or by an
ecclesiastical patron, [ ] is to be arrested and, on conviction,
imprisoned until he pays a fine left to the king's discretion, makes
satisfaction to the party aggrieved and also gives security that he
renounces his claim and that he will not prosecute his suit or make any
appeal in the pope's court. If the provisor cannot be found he is to be
outlawed.
Two further acts of parliament supplement the Statute of Provisors and,
thereby, perfect this new instrument of royal control of Church
affairs; they are the Statute of Treasons (1352) [ ] and the Statute of
Praemunire (1353). [ ] The first of these was enacted in order to state
with precision what those offences were which amounted to high treason,
and one clause of the statute declares that all who procure from the
papal curia any provison to a benefice fall outside the king's
protection; they are outlaws and whoever finds them may do as he wills
with them. This is only incidental to the main purpose of the act, but
the papal jurisdiction in matters of benefices is the very subject of
the second statute. This first Statute of Praemunire does not indeed
make any mention of the pope or his courts. It declares that many of
the king's subjects complain that they are cited abroad to answer in a
foreign court for things cognizable in the king's court, [ ] and also
that appeal is made to "another court" from decisions in the king's
court. This is a manifest injury to the king's authority and to the
common law. So it is now enacted that whoever, bearing allegiance to
the king, thus draws another out of the realm, or who sues in another
court to defeat a judgment given in the king's court, shall be given
two months and a day to answer personally in the king's court for this
contempt. If he comes not -- and here follows the penalty known
henceforward as a Praemunire, and still good law for various offences
-- he is from that day outside the king's protection, the whole of his
property is forfeited to the king, and when found he is to be
imprisoned for as long as the king chooses.
Papal presentations to benefices in England are, from this time onward,
by English law, null. It is a crime to procure them, and a crime to
make any appeal to the pope's courts to bring about the execution of
the pope's provision -- and indeed a crime to make any use of the
pope's court for matters where the king's court claims jurisdiction.
Here is the most ingenious instrument so far devised by which a nation
can check the pope's universal power of control over the Church. The
interesting thing is that the kings made almost no direct use of this
instrument. The next forty years saw many conflicts between the English
and the popes; in 1364 the penalties of Praemunire were renewed in an
act of finer mesh that brought in all those accessory to the offence of
using the pope's courts; in 1366 the whole nation repudiated for ever
the papal suzerainty; in 1369 the alien priories were seized once more,
and their monks finally banished in 1377; strong complaints were made
in parliament in 1376 about the heavy papal taxation of English
benefices and the luxury in which the collectors of these taxes lived
-- and also of the way in which the best of the benefices went to
absentee cardinals of the papal curia. The Statute of Provisors was
evidently not in operation -- even as a threat it was hardly effective;
and there was thus no occasion for the Statute of Praemunire to be put
into force. The fact was that the king continued to find the pope
useful, and had no desire to begin a major quarrel on such a general
issue as underlay these English statutes. In the Concordat of Bruges,
of 1375, neither side raised the issue of principle; and both agreed to
annul actions which contravened the legal arrangements made by the
other, and to remit the penalties incurred. But in 1390 the Statute of
Provisors was re-enacted, [ ] and in 1393 the Statute of Praemunire. [
]
To accept a benefice in contravention of the law entailed, from now on,
banishment for ever; and the same penalty was decreed against whoever
harboured those so exiled. Also all who brought into the realm any
summons, sentence or excommunication affecting those who put the
Statute of Provisors into execution were liable to capital punishment.
The new Praemunire law declares its motive to be the recent acts of the
pope. [ ] He has excommunicated English bishops who, in accordance with
English practice, have instituted to benefices the presentee declared
to be such by a decision of the king's court; and he has planned to
translate bishops from one see to another, without their consent and
without the king's consent -- which translations go against English
law, and to acquiesce in this policy would be to submit the crown of
England to the pope. At the suggestion of the Commons the king has put
the matter to the Lords temporal and spiritual. The barons, like the
Commons, agree to stand by the king. The bishops and abbots will
neither deny nor affirm that the pope can so excommunicate or translate
bishops, but they agree that such excommunications and translations are
against the king and his crown. And it is thereupon enacted that all
who have any share in such excommunications or translations "or any
other things whatsoever which touch our lord the king, against him, his
crown, and his royalty or his realm" incur from now on the penalties of
Praemunire.
The effect of all this legislation -- against which, in 1426, Martin V
protested strongly but in vain -- was to make the king so far master in
his own house that, although the popes continued to name and provide to
benefices, and Englishmen to accept the provision, in contravention of
the law, none was named to whom the king had any objection; and to
bishoprics the popes always provided the man the king named to them.
Not until the closing years of the fifteenth century was any foreign
absentee cleric named to an English see, and then it was done at the
king's request, the cleric provided being the king's ambassador at the
papal court. [ ] The laws brought about a tacit understanding between
the papacy and the crown -- so long as pope and king continued to be
friendly the laws might as well not have existed. But the instrument
lay by, ready for service whenever crisis came. Thanks to these laws,
long before Henry VIII's new invention of the Royal Supremacy the
English were well habituated to a very great measure of royal control
in religious affairs. It is no more than the bare truth to say that
Henry's Catholic ancestors had furnished him, not only with an armoury
of useful precedents, but with more than one of the main instruments
his policy called for. [ ]
In the end, the curia broke down these alliances of princes and people
against its claims, by the simple policy of offering to the prince a
share of the tax; and by a system of agreement as to the candidate to
be provided to the vacant sees, it gained the princes as allies against
the discontented chapters now deprived of their right to elect.
But to the last the papacy remained powerless, comparatively speaking,
in Germany, where the bishops were themselves sovereign princes. Here
the chapters -- close corporations with their membership reserved to
aristocratic and princely families -- steadily ignored the system of
papal provision and elected their own candidates. There are stories of
the canons, arms in hand, driving out the papal nominees; and one
Bishop of Wurzburg even forbade, under pain of death, that anyone
should bring into his jurisdiction a papal provision. To assert their
rights, in the face of such opposition, and to avoid at every vacancy
conflicts which would never end, the popes were reduced to the
miserable expedient of first quashing the election (as invalid) and
then themselves nominating to the see the man whom the chapter had
elected.
Gradually, however, the system of papal provision established its hold
almost everywhere, and it is one mark of the new state of things that
prelates now begin to style themselves, "Bishop of X by the Grace of
God and the favour of the Apostolic See."
It was once a thesis largely taken as proved that one thing alone had
produced this system of papal provision, to wit papal greed for power
and money, libido dominandi. Certainly abuses now began to flourish as
never before; and it was perhaps the immense fact of the abuses that
distracted the attention of scholars from the question why the popes
came to construct and to extend this system of reserving benefices to
their own appointment. There is a world of evidence [ ] that the
elective system had, by the fourteenth century, so broken down that, in
one see after another, it led to double elections, to doubtful
elections, to disputes, riots, feuds, and even to schisms. It is also
becoming certain that the popes were really alarmed at the fact that,
in Germany, religious life was passing into the control of a laicised
clerical aristocracy, whose power they were resolved to break by
destroying their right to co-opt others of their kind as their
successors. A very high proportion of the opposition to the system of
papal provisions -- as distinct from the opposition to abuses in the
system -- came from that lay aristocracy whose hold on religion the
popes had been steadily fighting ever since the days of Gregory VII. It
is only in recent years that a study of the actual process of
Provisions as a working system has begun to reveal these all-important
elements of the question. [ ]
They are, indeed, all-important elements, because the terrible abuses
which, in the end, accompanied the system everywhere did more than
anything else to bring about that indifference of Catholics to the
cause of the Church as such, which is, perhaps, the chief single cause
of the collapse of Catholicism in the sixteenth century. For with papal
reservations the systematic practice grew of giving papal dispensations
for the same man to hold more than one benefice -- the grave abuse
called pluralities; an easy way for popes to reward (or to maintain)
high officials to whom they could not pay a sufficient salary. [ ] With
the appearance of pluralities as an ordinary feature of high
ecclesiastical life, there came simultaneously the inevitable, related
abuse of absentee pastors -- bishops or parish priests -- who drew the
revenues while some deputy did the work (in his fashion) for what
stipend the titular could be compelled to pay. Here are the seeds of
incredible scandals, of sees left for generations without a resident
bishop, and of bishops appointed to sees solely for the sake of the
revenue they will draw from them, bishops who do not so much as trouble
to seek consecration, nor even ordination as a priest. It is now that
the hideous ulcers begin to form which disfigure the Church of those
later years in which were born such iron reformers as St. Ignatius
Loyola and St. Charles Borromeo. And over it all there begins to be
noticeable the stench of accretions of immense ecclesiastical wealth, [
] of wealth acquired or wealth desired; wealth that comes according to
law and by lawful dispensation; wealth that comes against all law, in
ways no dispensation can legitimate -- by simony. It is one of the
greatest sources of all these evils that the benefice -- an
ecclesiastical office that carries with it a right to a sure,
ascertained income -- comes more and more to be discussed as a property
(which of course, in part, it is) and that considerations of Canon Law
rather than Pastoral Theology inspire the discussions.
The main problem of the Church in this century of the Avignon popes is,
of course, the eternal problem, how to keep men good, how to keep them
up to their obligations and their professions. It was one great, and
inexplicable, weakness of these popes of the later Middle Ages that
they never devised a system of training adequately the parochial
clergy. Laws of clerical behaviour there were in plenty; on every
possible occasion they were proclaimed anew, and when opportunity
offered they were stiffened up enthusiastically. But none of these
popes seems ever to have taken stock of the problem as a whole, to have
proposed or considered such a reconstruction as, for example, John XXII
introduced as a solution for the disorders that for so long had vexed
the Friars Minor. Denunciation of sins there is indeed in plenty, but
nowhere a constructive policy that will affect, as well as the causes
of sin, the circumstances that serve to assist these causes. The "State
of the Church" problem begins now to be chronic, and to the official
ecclesiastical world it is in danger of becoming an inevitable element
of Christian life. Officialdom never ceases to protest against abuses,
nor to call for amendment; but it never effects any substantial lasting
improvement. The day comes, at last, when the whole framework begins to
fall apart. By that time the papal control of the whole initiative of
Christian life has been, for centuries, a fact known to every Christian
man; it is not possible so to take on the burden of a universal
administration and to remain untouched in the hour of disaster. The
papacy was to feel the full force of the storm, and nowhere more than
in the collapse of men's faith in the divinity of its origins; and in
that same day it would be seriously suggested as a necessary measure of
reform, that the totality of the religious orders be abolished. ii. The
Popes, 1334-1362
John XXII had survived to the great age of ninety. He was active and
mentally vigorous to the end, and in some respects his death seems to
bring to a close a whole age. It was not merely that the pope was so
old that he could recall the momentous pact between the great French
pope, Urban IV, and the crown of France from which had come the
destruction of the Hohenstaufen (and also the new menace of the Angevin
princes); nor that, in him, there had been active a personality formed
as long ago as the age of St. Louis IX. But John XXII was the last of
the series of popes whose genius created the canon law; with him there
was finally brought to completion the work that had begun with
Gratian's own pupil, Alexander III. For a hundred and seventy-five
years now the genius of that first great papal jurist had dominated the
public action of the papacy. In all that time the great popes -- with
scarcely an exception -- had been great canonists, churchmen who had
viewed their world, and worked for its betterment, through the medium
of this new great instrument. It was then a striking reversal of
history that John XXII was succeeded by a pope who was a theologian and
a monk, and that in this pope, Benedict XII, there reappeared for the
moment the kind of pope who had characterised not so much Gratian's
age, but rather the age that had produced Gratian, the golden age of
those monastic popes who, from the time of St. Gregory VII, had pulled
the Church free of the slough of the Dark Ages.
Benedict XII was still, at the time of his election, a faithfully
observant Cistercian, after nearly twenty years spent in public life.
Inevitably he was a reformer. There was already much to reform; it is
now indeed that we first begin to meet, as an acknowledged feature of
Christian life, the "State of the Church" problem. Benedict XII -- it
is his great glory -- gave himself wholeheartedly to its solution.
Though he was still some months short of fifty when he was elected, he
reigned for little more than seven years, but in that time he laboured
to restore or remodel every one of the greater religious orders. To
this fruitful activity the Bullarium is a simple and striking witness,
where Benedict's decrees occupy three times the space taken by the acts
of the longest-lived pope of all this period. [ ]
The Cistercian pope came to the supreme charge with an enviable record
as a good, competent and hard-working bishop in the two poor country
sees he had occupied. [ ] He seems to have been especially successful
in his work against the heretics -- Vaudois and Cathars -- who still
lingered in those mountainous regions. This was, however, hardly the
career to train a man for the first place in the government of
Christendom. The monkpope's inexperience of diplomatic business, and of
general politics, was to cost him many a reverse, and a certain
narrowness of outlook was to give some of his monastic legislation a
rigidity of detail that would not stand the strain of practice. But
Benedict has the great merit that he recognised the nature and the
scale of the evil of monastic decay, and much of what he did remained
until the Council of Trent -- and has remained even to our own day --
the basis of the organisation of the great religious orders. [ ]
The pope began early, sending home from Avignon, only a month after his
election, the innumerable bishops who had deserted their sees to live
there in expectation of favours to come. In May 1335 he abolished the
iniquitous system of granting abbeys to non-resident abbots (who,
often, were not even monks) to be held in commendam, and in December of
that same year he revoked all grants made of the next appointment to
benefices. The system of papal provisions he maintained, but showed
himself most conscientious about the qualifications of those to whom
they were granted -- so conscientious, in fact, and so personally
concerned, that the system began to break down, the pope keeping places
vacant for months until he found a man thought really suitable. He was
a striking exception to almost all the popes of this and the following
century in his horror of nepotism, and he was almost as exceptional in
his disregard of the wishes of ruling princes about appointments.
Something has already been said about Benedict XII's share in the
remodelling of the Curia Romana. He showed himself a deadly enemy to
the systematic jobbery that disgraced it, and in the first month of his
reign there was a general flight from Avignon of guilty officials
anticipating discovery and punishment. The history of the papal
finances during this century shows how Benedict XII was able to carry
through the work of building the great palace of the popes at Avignon,
and yet leave the treasury in good condition, despite a generous
surrender of fruitful sources of revenue. This was due in part to the
pope's careful administration, but also to his resolute abandonment of
the war policy of his predecessor. At the very outset of the reign
Benedict XII declared explicitly that he would not resort to war even
for the defence of the territories of the Church. The Church, he
declared, could in the long run only lose by using such a means. [ ]
Benedict XII secured peace also in the heart of the curia, in the
delicate business of the pope's relations with the Sacred College. For
he habitually worked with his cardinals, discussing all matters fully
with them, and labouring to win their consent to his plans. He was
sparing in his creations, adding only seven to the college, in the
consistory of 1338, of whom all but one were French, and four were
religious. In the next conclave there would be eighteen cardinals,
fourteen of them Frenchmen.
The work of Benedict XII as a restorer of the life of the religious
orders began with an attempt in the bull Pastor Bonus, [ ] to check an
evil from which none of them was free, the presence all over Europe of
monks and friars who, on one pretext or another, had taken to live
outside their cloisters. Superiors were urged to find out where their
missing subjects had gone, and were given new powers to compel their
return. They were also to work for the return of those who, without
proper authorisation, had made their way into other orders, and to make
provision for the return of those who had abandoned the monastic state
altogether -- the apostates in the technical language of the canon law.
To make the path of these last unfortunates smooth, the superiors were
authorised to lighten the penances due for this offence, and indeed
Benedict urged upon them that clemency was a duty.
Next the pope took up the reform of the several orders, Cistercians,
Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinian Canons-Regular.
In every case he took the superiors of the order into his confidence,
and -- with the exception of the Dominicans -- they all agreed to, and
accepted, the reforms he proposed.
Two abuses, the Bull Fulgens, 12 July, 1335, suggests, lie at the root
of the Cistercian decay, namely the abbots' disregard of the monks in
their administration of the monastic properties, and the growth of new
customs which have destroyed all real community life. The pope, in
great detail, now forbids abbots to alienate property, to grant leases,
or to contract loans without the consent of their monks. Abbots are to
take an oath to observe this law, and their officials also. The bursars
of the monastery, who are to be appointed by the abbot and the senior
monks, are to render a quarterly account. Abbots are henceforth to be
fined who refuse, or neglect, to attend the general chapter of the
order -- that mechanism whose good functioning is the condition sine
qua non of Cistercian well-being; and new powers are given to the
superiors of the order to punish those abbots who neglect to pay their
quota to the order's general fund, which fund is to be collected and
administered according to rules put beyond the chapter's power to
alter. The order is sternly recalled to its first austere ideals, by
decrees that forbid all use of silver plate, and that limit to a single
companion the train of abbots en voyage. There are to be no more
dispensations from the rule of perpetual abstinence from flesh meat,
and those hitherto granted are revoked. Breaches of this rule are to be
punished by three days of bread and water, and a flogging. [ ] Abbots
and monks alike are to wear the same simple habit. All are to eat the
same food, in the one common refectory, and all are to sleep in a
common dormitory -- where cells have been built they are to be
destroyed within three months, under pain of excommunication. There are
to be no more arrangements to divide revenues as between the abbot and
the community, and concessions of this sort are revoked. Abbots who
break this law are to be deposed, and the monks imprisoned. A long
section which forbids the abuses by which monks have, in fact, become
owners, says much, in its carefully detailed prohibition, of the
general decay that has come upon the fundamental monastic ideal of
voluntary poverty. Finally, there is a careful provision for monastic
studies. In every abbey a master is to be engaged who shall teach
grammar, logic and philosophy to the young monks; and every year monks
are to be sent -- in the proportion of one for every twenty monks in
the monastery -- to the various universities, Paris, Oxford, Toulouse,
Montpellier, Salamanca, Bologna and Metz. Monks found suitable for
university degrees in theology are to be left to complete their course,
but none are to study canon law, the science which is the high road to
ecclesiastical preferment and a standing temptation to the monastic
vocation.
The bull in which Benedict XII sets his hand to the restoration of the
classic monachism of St. Benedict is one of the longest of all. [ ] It
repeats very largely the provisions in the Cistercian reform about care
for monastic property, for a revival of the life in common, and for
study. It recalls the famous decree of 1215 which imposed on the
Benedictines the Cistercian invention of provincial chapters, and it
went a step further in the same direction by now grouping the
Benedictine houses of the various countries into provinces, thirty-one
provinces in all. [ ]
The same defects in the community life are legislated against, yet once
again, in the long bull that remodels the Augustinian Canons. [ ] The
abbeys and priories of this rule were, seemingly, establishments on a
very much smaller scale than the Benedictine or Cistercian monasteries.
Special reminders are given that the canons are not to go hunting, nor
to carry arms without the leave of their superiors; and again that
conspiracies, and sworn pacts amongst the brethren, are to be sternly
put down.
Benedict XII did not wait to be crowned before he publicly expressed
his opinion on the state of the order of the Friars Minor -- still, it
may be supposed, unsettled by the late tragedy of Michael of Cesena and
Ockham. In the Advent Consistory of 1334 the pope reproached the
Franciscans with their tendency to heresy, their scorn for the
hierarchy, their relaxed discipline and their revolutionary turbulence.
Two years later the bull Redemptor Noster [ ] prescribed appropriate
remedies. The tone of the bull is extremely severe. Yet once again, all
tendencies towards the "Spiritual" movement are condemned; the friars
are bidden to take more seriously the duty of the choral recitation of
the Divine Office, all are to be present at it, and there is to be no
levity in carrying it out. Once again there are special laws to restore
a common table, with silence and reading during meals. The brethren are
to be given sufficient food; and all are to have the same food,
clothing and sleeping quarters -- superiors and subjects alike -- so
that none may have excuse to live lives of their own outside the
community. The greatest care is to be taken as to what friars shall
preach outside the convents. None is to be sent unless of mature years
and formed character; and even so, he is not to go unless with a kind
of passport that states exactly what his mission is, and until what
date he is lawfully outside his friary. [ ] One very necessary
condition of good preaching is theological knowledge, and Benedict XII
is here most insistent In addition to the studies made in the convents
of the order; he decrees that every year three friars are to be sent
for theological studies to the university of Paris, three to Oxford and
three more to Cambridge -- all of whom must first have read the four
books of Peter Lombard with the commentary of approved doctors. [ ] The
pope goes out of his way to insist that all friars thus engaged in
studies are to be treated with special care and respect by their
brethren, and lays down that each convent shall be plentifully supplied
with books of grammar, logic, philosophy and theology. Also, there is
to be a careful censorship of new publications.
The Minister-General of the order is to visit personally, within ten
years of his election, all the provinces -- except Ireland, Greece and
the Holy Land, to which remote territories he is allowed to send a
deputy. Finally -- a most important innovation -- novices are to be
sent for their training to a special house, under the care of a special
"master of novices"; and until they reach the age of twenty-five the
professed friars also are to be under the rule of a "master of the
professed."
When Benedict XII publicly lectured the Franciscans in 1334, he held up
to them as a pattern of life their great rivals, the Friars-Preachers,
even saying that St. Dominic headed all the orders. It is a curious
irony that with the Dominicans alone the pope's efforts at reform
failed, and even produced a violent struggle, that only ended with the
pope's death.
Benedict XII died, all too soon, after a short seven years and a half,
before he had had time to do more than promulgate his many schemes of
reform. His austerity and his reforms gained him enemies everywhere,
and especially among the courtiers and humanists. He died one of the
most reviled of all the popes. Yet if there is any other of the long
line whom this great Cistercian brings to mind, it is the Dominican,
St. Pius V, the one undoubted glory of the Counter Reformation. So
great then was the effect of a saint upon the papal throne, when a
saint did finally appear there, that even his naturally easy-going
successor was compelled to a faithful continuation of his work.
Benedict XII was less fortunate. Those who had chafed at the new rigour
had their way in the conclave which followed his death. [ ] His
successor, Clement VI, was also, it is true, a monk; he was a brilliant
man of affairs, and an experienced administrator, but one who, by the
prodigality with which he scattered dispensations of all kinds, ruined
much of his predecessor's work. The next ten years' reign was indeed a
time "du laisser-aller et des largesses." [ ]
The crowd of needy clerics that had lately fled Avignon now returned,
at the new pope's express invitation to send in their petitions within
two months. To satisfy them, and as a means to put into execution his
own express declarations that "no one should leave a prince's presence
discontented," and that "a pope ought to make his subjects happy,"
Clement extended the reservations of appointments to cover the whole
field of benefices. When complaints were made of this prodigal use of
his authority, he had but one word, "My predecessors did not know how
to be popes." Whether these sayings are really authentic, they
undoubtedly describe the spirit which reigned at Avignon for the next
six years -- when the Black Death suddenly descended and carried off
half the population. [ ]
Clement was liberality itself to his own innumerable relations and to
the French kings, [ ] and to his princely neighbours, lending them huge
sums of money. He completed the great palace that Benedict XII had
begun, and it was he who, in 1348, finally bought from its lord the
city of Avignon. Upon Clement VI there lies the main responsibility for
the chronic bankruptcy in which the popes henceforth laboured. In many
respects Clement VI is an unique figure among the Avignon popes, and it
is of him alone that the conventional picture of an Avignon pope is
true. The fourteenth century was a time when ways of life were rapidly
growing more luxurious, and that clerical life -- the life of the
clerical aristocracy -- reflected this is, of course, yet another
evidence of religious decay. "The pope," says M. Mollat, examining
critically the charges brought against the Avignon popes, "regarded
himself as a king, and as a king he surrounded himself with a
magnificent court where the cardinals took the position of princes of
the blood-royal. . . . In the fourteenth century no power, not even one
essentially spiritual in kind, could dominate the world, if its means
of action were not based on territorial property, on moneyed wealth,
and above all on that pomp and circumstance which simple folk have
always looked on as the characteristic evidence of wealth and
authority. . . . The example given by the pope became contagious. . . .
The clergy began to dress sumptuously, wearing the check silks and
long-toed shoes which were then the height of fashion and, what went
contrary to all ecclesiastical custom, with their hair allowed to grow
its length." [ ] That a pope who chose to live in such a style -- a
pope who was still in the prime of life -- should be accused of grave
moral offences is not surprising. Petrarch, especially, has piled up
against the memory of Clement VI "un requisitoire accablant." [ ] But
Petrarch is far from being a disinterested witness, and a very
different kind of testimony must be adduced before Clement VI can be
condemned for this also.
Clement VI's reign was marked by two great catastrophes, the effective
opening of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the
Black Death. The immense upheaval caused by the war in the social life
of both countries is a commonplace of general history. In that general
deterioration -- and from that deterioration -- the religious life
suffered too, as it must, when such calamities come upon a generation
where religion is already failing and lacking zealous and competent
leaders. [ ]
The Black Death is the special name given to the great plague which,
between 1348 and 1350, visited every country of Europe in turn,
carrying off from all of them between a third and a half of the
population. The witness of the contemporary writers in all these
various countries is roughly concordant. In the proportion of dead to
survivors which they give their accounts tally, as they do in the
description of the symptoms and course of the disease. What the effect
-- the immediate effect, first of all -- was of this sudden appalling
catastrophe on the general spirit of the age, on its religious
organisation and life, on its social and economic history, no one has
yet worked out in detail, with the full contemporary documentation
which the proof of any thesis about the matter must call for. The old
theory that the Black Death wrought an immediate revolution in modes of
land tenure, and was the cause of an immediate social upheaval, no
longer has the universal approval of the historians. And the readiness
of apologists to lay to the score of this great plague all the ills
which manifestly afflicted religion a hundred and fifty years later,
has bred an equally unscientific tendency -- in people who are not
apologists -- to speak as though it were impossible that the
unprecedented calamity could have had any really important lasting
effects. [ ]
It was in the early weeks of 1348 that the disease first appeared in
the West, at Genoa, brought thither by a ship from the Genoese colony
of Caffa in the Crimea. Thence it rapidly spread to Venice, where
100,000 died, and down through central Italy, to Florence, where again
100,000 is given as the number of the dead, and to Siena, where 80,000
died, four-fifths of the population. Sicily was especially its victim.
At Marseilles, where the disease began to show itself in the same month
it arrived at Genoa, 57,000 died in a month -- two-thirds of the
population -- with the bishop, all his canons, nearly all of the
friars. The ravages at Narbonne and Arles and at Montpellier -- the
seat of the great medical university of the Middle Ages - - were just
as severe. Avignon suffered still more severely, losing more than half
its population in the seven months the plague raged. As the year wore
on the contagion gained the north of France, 80,000 falling victims at
Paris, and in July it reached the south coast of England, whence it
spread, during the next eighteen months, over the whole of the country.
No part of northern and western Europe escaped. The plague ravaged
Spain in 1349 and, crossing the Alps from Italy, it passed through
Switzerland and the valley of the Rhine to Germany and to the Low
Countries, and by Denmark to Sweden and Norway. The ease with which the
infection was taken, the speed with which death followed, the seeming
hopelessness of the case once the disease took, caused everywhere the
most terrible panic and, with the general fear, a general feeling of
despair that showed itself in wild outbreaks of licentiousness.
At Avignon the luxury-loving Clement VI rose to the occasion,
organising what scientific knowledge was at his command, sanitary
services and medical aid; and, when the horror and the terror found an
outlet in a furious burst of anti-Semitism -- the Jews had caused it
all by poisoning the streams and wells -- especially in the Rhineland
cities, the pope intervened to denounce the calumny, and threw open his
own state to the persecuted fugitives.
Gradually, in the winter of 1349-1350, the plague wore itself out, and
the survivors slowly took up the task of reconstructing their social
and political life. Ten years later the disease appeared again (1361),
to ravage France and England once more, and more severely than any
plague, except that of 1348. Who shall reckon the extent of the moral
disaster of these visitations? Did they indeed, coming at a time when
spiritual resistance was already low, take the heart out of the Middle
Ages?
Certainly the Black Death was not the sole begetter of the complication
of spiritual evils under which the medieval organisation of religion
ultimately went down. But in many respects life was never the same. The
population seems never to have climbed back to its earlier density, the
elan of the earlier time was never recovered, the note of despondency,
of pessimism. in religious writers is now hardly relieved, the spring
has indeed been taken out of the year. One particularly heavy loss
ought to be mentioned. The Church, considered as a great organisation
of human beings, finds itself henceforward faced with the insoluble
problem of staffing its innumerable conventual institutions from the
depleted and less generously-spirited population. The thousands of its
great abbeys depend, ultimately, for their spiritual effectiveness on
the diligent performance of the Opus Dei, the daily round of solemn
liturgical prayer. If in an abbey, over a long period, there are not
monks or nuns enough to ensure this as a matter of course, its end as a
spiritual power-house is inevitable; and not only does the
semi-derelict abbey cease to be useful to religion, it is a parasite,
an active source of new serious weakness. And more and more this now
came to pass. Very few indeed were the abbeys which, after the plagues
of the fourteenth century, ever regained the full number of religious
needed for the fullness of healthy community life. From such a
situation there was but one way out -- the suppression and amalgamation
of the depleted houses, retrenchment until better times should come. It
was not taken. The great monastic reforms of Benedict XII were thus, at
the outset, seriously checked by the social catastrophe that fell so
soon after they were decreed, and then by the ensuing development,
within the world of monasticism, of an entirely new situation.
Innocent VI, who succeeded Clement VI in 1352, was, in ideals and
intention, another Benedict XII. But he was already a very old man,
vacillating and despondent, and from the outset depressed by the
immensity of the task his lighthearted and prodigal predecessor had
bequeathed to him.
The conclave which elected him lasted little more than a day, but the
cardinals found time to draft the first of those election pacts --
called capitulations -- which are an eloquent sign of new anti-papal
tendencies, even in the Sacred College, and which were from now on to
be the bane of pontifical activity. This pact, to which all the
electors swore, bound the future pope in such a way that he would be
little better than the chairman of a board of governors. There were,
for example, never to be more than twenty cardinals, and no more
cardinals were to be created until the present numbers had fallen to
sixteen, nor should anyone be made a cardinal without the consent of
the cardinals. Similarly, without their consent the pope would not
depose a cardinal, lay censures upon him, or deprive him of any rights
or properties. Again, before alienating, or granting in fief, any
province, city or castle of the dominions of the Church, the consent of
two-thirds of the cardinals would be required; and the consent of the
same majority must be sought for any appointments to the chief places
in the curia. The future pope would not make grants of money to princes
without the consent of the cardinals, and for the future the papal
exchequer would pay over to the treasury of the Sacred College one half
of all the revenues. As though somewhat doubtful of their right to make
these conditions, the cardinals had attached to the pact a restrictive
clause, "If and in so far as this is according to law." [ ]
Innocent VI, for all his age and his weaknesses, was still too much the
famous lawyer he once had been [ ] not to find a way out of the pact.
Six months after his election he declared it null, as being contrary to
the conclave laws of Gregory X and Clement V, which forbade the
cardinals to busy themselves in the conclave with anything else than
the choice of a new pope.
Once again a more rigorous spirit informed the curia, the legal
qualifications for benefice holders ceased to be a matter of form, and
there was an exodus of idle clerics from Avignon. Innocent VI had his
troubles with the Franciscans, and his severity towards the remnants of
the old "Spiritual" group drew down on his memory terrible words from
St. Bridget of Sweden. [ ] It was before this pope that so much of the
enmity of the secular clergy against the friars found vent in the
famous speech of the Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Fitz Ralph (November
8, 1357), a new quarrel which the pope stifled by imposing silence on
all parties. The condition of the Friars-Preachers, that Benedict XII
had vainly endeavoured to improve, had, in places, been seriously
worsened by the Black Death, and now the Master-General of the order
had no choice but to call in the pope to aid him in his work of reform.
Once more the proposed reforms seemed likely to split the order; by a
majority of four the definitors voted the deposition of the
Master-General; but, after a papal enquiry into the charges against
him, Innocent restored him to office.
Innocent VI's reign ended miserably -- not through any fault of the
pope. He was never able to make good the financial disasters of his
predecessor, and finally he was compelled to sell off paintings and
other art treasures, jewels and church plate. To add to his distress
the truce of 1357 between France and England, and the definitive peace
of Bretigny three years later, set free thousands of hardened mercenary
troops, and these descended on the helpless Papal State. Only at the
last moment was the pope saved, by a general rally of new crusaders
from Aragon and southern France, and even so it cost him thousands to
bribe the mercenaries to leave his territories and betake themselves to
the wars in Italy. Then, in 1361, came a renewal of the plague, and in
three months 17,000 people died of it at Avignon, including a third of
the cardinals. By the time Innocent himself came to die, September 12,
1362, all the glory of the Avignon papacy had gone, never to return.
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