Volume 3, Chapter 1

GESTA PER FRANCOS, 1270-1314

Section 1: BL. GREGORY X AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF LYONS, 1270-1276

Section 2: THE SHADOW OF ANJOU, 1276-1285

Section 3: FRANCE AND THE SICILIAN WAR, 1285-1294

Section 4: BONIFACE VIII, 1294-1303

Section 5: PHILIP THE FAIR'S LAST VICTORY, 1303-1314

BL. GREGORY X AND THE GENERAL COUNCIL OF LYONS, 1270-1276

IN the summer of the year 1270, terrible news came to France from Africa, and to all Christian Europe. The King of France, St. Louis, had died of fever in the camp before Tunis, and the crusade was over. A world of effort, of sacrifice, and of suffering had gone for just nothing; and something unique had passed from a singularly troubled world. The one leader whom, for his righteousness, all Christendom might have trusted was dead.

In that summer of 1270 the figure of the great French king stood out with especial significance. It was now sixteen years since the last of the emperors had died, vanquished by that papacy which his house had striven to enthrall. In those sixteen years Germany had been given over to anarchy, while the popes, with very varied success, had worked to consolidate their new, precarious, hold on independence. In the end no way had offered itself to them but the old way, the protection of some Christian sovereign's defensive arm. To find some such prince, and install him in southern Italy as king of their vassal state of Sicily, was, then, a first obvious aim of papal policy. No less obviously, St. Louis IX was the ideal champion. Years of negotiation, however, had failed to persuade him to become a partner in any such scheme. The saint was by no means accustomed to accept unquestioningly the papal solutions for political problems. But, in the end, ten years' experience convinced him that, so long as the chaos in southern Italy continued. the popes must be wholly absorbed by the single problem of how to remain independent amid the ceaseless war of political factions. On the other hand, the general affairs of Christendom stood in too urgent need of the papacy's constructive direction for any such papal absorption in Italian politics to be tolerable: the Italian disorder must be ended; and so St. Louis had not only assented to the papal policy but had allowed his youngest brother, Charles of Anjou, to become the pope's man, and to lead a French army into Italy for the defeat of the last remnants of the Hohenstaufen kings of Sicily. [318]

The pope's chosen champion had now destroyed the pope's enemies -- but the papal problem remained. Already, by the time Charles had to fight his second battle, it was becoming evident to the pope who crowned him and blessed his arms -- Clement IV -- that the victorious champion threatened to be as dangerous to the papal freedom as ever the Hohenstaufen had been. Strong protests against the new king's cruelty and tyranny began to be heard from the apostolic see. This pope, French by birth and for the greater part of his life a highly trusted counsellor of Louis IX, bound closely to the king by similarity of ideals and mutual esteem, was ideally equipped for the difficult task of guiding the new French venture through its first critical years. His sudden death, in November 1268, only two months after Tagliacozzo, was an immense loss; and this swelled into a catastrophe; first of all when the cardinals left the Holy See vacant for as long as three years, [319] and then when, while the Church still lacked a pope, death claimed St. Louis too. For long there had been no emperor, there was no pope, and now the King of France had died. The last sure hope of checking the ambitions of Charles of Anjou had gone. In St. Louis's place there would reign the rash simplicity of his son, Philip III. Charles would have an open field, every chance he could desire to build up a situation which the future popes would have to accept -- unless they were prepared to start a new war to destroy him, as he had destroyed for them the heirs of Frederick II.

Of the two deaths the more important by far was that of St. Louis. Sanctity is rare in rulers, and rarest of all is the sanctity that shows itself in the perfection of the ruler's characteristic virtue of prudent practical ability. The pope's death found the Church in crisis -- it did not create the crisis; but the French king alone could have brought the papacy and Christendom safely through the crisis. One thing alone could have saved it, and he alone could have done that one thing -- namely, maintain the tradition, now two centuries old, of French support for the popes in the difficulties which arose out of their office as guardians of political morality, while yet refusing to be a mere instrument for the execution of the popes' political judgments. The papacy needed the French -- but it needed also to be independent of them; and Christendom needed that the French should retain their independence too, and not become mere tools of popes who happened to be politicians as well as popes. This difficult and delicate part St. Louis managed to fit to perfection -- as none, before or since, has fitted it. And never was the lack of a prince to fit the part productive of greater mischief than in the twenty-five years that followed his death. For one main event of those years was the reversal of the traditional Franco-Papal entente that had been a source of so much good to both powers and, indeed, a main source of the peace of Christendom.

The Holy See, when Clement IV's death in 1268 delivered it over to the unprecedented calamity of a three years, vacancy, was already gravely embarrassed by the opposition of various Catholic powers to its leading policies. The popes were, for example, determined on a renewal of the crusade; but the great maritime republics of Genoa and Venice were all for peace with the Turks: war would mean the loss of valuable trade, defeat be the end of their commercial empire. The popes, again, had been favourably impressed by the Byzantine emperor's moves to end the schism between Constantinople and Rome that had gone on now for two hundred years; but Charles of Anjou wanted nothing so little as peace with Michael VIII, whom he was planning to supplant as emperor. The Lombard towns were the scenes of continual strife, the feuds bred by generations of civil war still active. The anti-papal forces in these cities found a curious ally in that wing of the great Franciscan movement which demanded a return to the most primitive form of the Franciscan life, and saw in this the kind of life all Church dignitaries ought to lead. The anarchic element in this movement, which threatened the existence of all ecclesiastical authority, was naturally welcome to rulers who, in every city of Italy, and beyond Italy too, aspired to restore the arbitrary omnipotence of the emperors of ancient Rome and secure thereby the exclusive triumph of material interests. [320] This active unnatural alliance of Franciscan Spirituals and totalitarian capitalists of one kind and another, the popes were bound to fight; and here they were gravely hampered by a legacy from the papacy's own recent past. In the long struggle against the last great Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, the central authority in the Church, under the popes Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254) "saw itself compelled to turn all its activity towards those resources and influences of a temporal kind that were necessary for its defence, and to expand the whole system of its temporal activity in order to secure itself against the attacks of its tireless foe." [321]

This use, by the Vicar of Christ, of fleets and armies to maintain his independence -- and the chronic need for this use in the "Ages of Faith" -- this willing acceptance by the popes of suzerain status in the feudal world over more or less reluctant royal vassals, John of England in one generation, Charles of Sicily in another; this raising of huge sums of money by loans from bankers and by levies on all the sees of Christendom in turn; this use of the crusade ideal and formulae to describe and characterise wars against European princes who remained the popes' children in the Faith despite their disobedience; all this, to the modern reader, seems often to need a great deal of explanation. And the popes who defended, in this particular way, those rights and that independent status which, undeniably, were the bases of the general recovery of Europe from barbarism, had to meet, as we shall see, much criticism of a similar kind from their own Catholic contemporaries.

Naturally enough the first form the criticism took was resentment, well-nigh universal, at the financial levies. From the moment when, in 1261, the newly elected French pope, Urban IV, began the great move to haul the papacy out of the political slough where he found it, the popes' need of money never ceases. Both the bad effect on those who collected the money, and the resentment of those from whom it was extorted, are henceforth permanent active elements of the state-of-the-Church problem. Already by the time Charles of Anjou had established himself in the kingdom of Sicily (1266) there was -- we can now see -- cause for anxiety on this score.

At the other pole of the main axis of European affairs the French State, too, had its serious chronic problems. The traditional policy which had, by 1270, secured the Capetian kings' uniquely strong hold as rulers of a great nation, has been well described as "the slow collaboration of interests and public opinion." [322] In a century when popes are to be counted by the dozen, France had been so lucky as to have but two kings and both of them really great rulers. [323] Their achievement was very great, but it was not complete; and a modern French historian [324] has well described some elements of the problem St. Louis left to his son, Philip III, and which, aggravated by the fifteen years of this king's weak rule, faced the next king, one of the most enigmatic figures of medieval history. This was Philip the Fair, whose reign (1285-1314) was a turning point in the history of the papacy and the Church. " France was falling to pieces. One after another the institutions upon which the whole fabric rested were breaking up and giving way. . . . Some of the feudatories were as powerful as the king himself, the Duke of Aquitaine, for example, who was also King of England; others, such as the Duke of Brittany or the Count of Flanders, ruled provinces that were really foreign countries in their way of life; in Languedoc the people detested the French. From one end of the country to the other, a myriad contradictory uses, customs, traditions, jurisdictions, privileges contended and struggled; none of them subject to royal regulation. The great mass of the nation was set against the classes that ruled. . . everywhere the national life was disorganised; anarchy seemed imminent, and it seemed only too likely that several important provinces would become independent states or fall under foreign rule."

Philip the Fair would meet his problems with new resources and a wholly new combination of strength and ruse. In his bid to be really master of every element of French life, not only would he come into violent conflict with the papacy -- as other French kings had done in their time -- but he would inaugurate a new tradition in the relations of the principal monarchy in Europe with the Holy See. He would not be the partner of the pope, but his master. In his grandfather, St. Louis, there had been seen the perfection of the older conception, the French king allied with the papacy in an implicit pact of mutual assistance, a true defender of the independence of religion and at the same time just as truly defender of the rights of the French clergy-rights to property -- against the papacy itself. This devotion of St. Louis to the cause of the papacy did not ever entail any blind following of every detail of the papal policies. The king refused to allow Frederick II to capture Lyons while the General Council assembled there that was to condemn him; he even assembled an army in case Frederick should move. But, on the other hand, he did not, once Frederick was condemned and excommunicated and deposed by the pope, offer the pope his aid to carry out the sentence. St. Louis remained carefully neutral. Again "In his relations with the French episcopate, whether it was a matter of fiefs or even of applying disciplinary power, Louis IX showed a care to exercise control, and a susceptibility about his rights which conflicted only in appearance with his zeal for the interests of religion. It was his conviction that the prerogatives of the crown were necessary to the good order of the community, and thus the saint made it as much a matter of conscience to defend them well as to use them rightly; the prestige of those to whom religious jurisdiction was confided did not obscure the saint's clear vision of what was right, and in all matters he paid less attention to the noisy demands of the representatives of the clergy than to the canonical rules which ought to be the inspiration of their conduct." [325]

Such was the delicate situation and such the prince lost to the Church, to Christendom no less than to France, on August 25, 1270. Charles of Anjou, supreme for the moment, took charge of the crusade. He made a pact with the Sultan which brought the whole affair to an end (October 20) and, a month later, re-embarked the armies and sailed back to Europe.

Meanwhile, at Viterbo, the papal election continued to drag on. Holy men appeared to harangue and to warn the sixteen cardinals. The General of the new Servite Friars, St. Philip Benizi, fled from the offer of the honour. The kings of France and Sicily tried what a personal visit might effect. Then the people of Viterbo, in desperation with the cardinals' indifference to the scandal caused by their incompetence, took a hand and stripped of its roof the palace where the electors met. At last, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals gave power to a commission of six of their number to elect a pope, and that same day the six found their man. He was Theobaldo Visconti, not a cardinal, nor a bishop, nor even a priest, but the Archdeacon of Liege; and at this moment away in the Holy Land, encouraging the heir to the English crown in the forlorn hours of the last of the crusades. It was weeks before the archdeacon heard of his election, and months before he landed in Italy to be ordained, consecrated and crowned as Pope Gregory X (March 27, 1272).

The new pope, a man perhaps sixty years of age, was one of those figures whose unexpected entry into the historical scene seems as evident a sign of God's care for mankind as was ever the appearance of a prophet to Israel of old. He was largehearted, he was disinterested, a model of charity in his public life no less than in private, free from any taint of old political associations, simple, energetic, apostolic. His first anxiety was the restoration of Christian rule in the East: to this the European situation was secondary. But for the sake of the Crusade, the European complications must be speedily resolved, despite all the vested interests of long-standing feuds. In this work of reconciliation Gregory X's apostolic simplicity, and his aloofness from all the quarrels of the previous thirty years, gave to the papal action a new strength. A vision now inspired it that transcended local and personal expediency.

There was, the pope saw, no hope for the future of Catholicism in the Holy Land, no hope of holding off the Saracen from fresh conquests, so long as Rome and Constantinople remained enemies; and it was the first action of his reign to take up, and bring to a speedy conclusion, those negotiations to end the schism which had trailed between the two courts for now many years. That this policy of reunion, an alliance with the Greek emperor, Michael VIII, cut clean across the plans of Charles of Anjou to renew the Latin empire at Constantinople, with himself as emperor, and across his pact with Venice to divide up the Christian East between them, did not for a moment daunt the pope. Nor did the claims of Alfonso X of Castile to be emperor in the West hinder the pope from a vigorous intervention in Germany which resulted in the unchallenged election of Rudolf of Habsburg, and a close to nineteen years of civil war and chaos. A Germany united and at peace with itself was a fundamental condition of a peaceful Christendom.

This admirable pope knew the problems of Franco-German Europe by personal experience, from the vantage point of life in the middle lands that lay between the rival cultures. His direct diplomacy had thwarted the plan of Charles of Anjou to force the election of his nephew, the King of France, as emperor, and now the pope so managed the diplomatic sequence to the election of Rudolf of Habsburg that it brought these rivals into friendly collaboration. And he managed, also, in a personal interview at Beaucaire, to soothe the disappointed Alfonso of Castile. Nowhere, at any time, did Gregory X's action leave behind it resentment or bitterness.

The Crusade, reunion of the separated churches of the East, and the reform of Catholic life, thrown back everywhere by the fury of the long war with the Hohenstaufen, were Gregory X's sole, and wholly spiritual, anxieties. Christendom must be organised anew, refitted throughout for the apostolic work that lay ahead. The first, most obvious step, was to survey its resources, to study its weaknesses and then find suitable remedies. This would best be done in a General Council, and only four days after Gregory's coronation the letters went out to kings and prelates, convoking a council to meet at Lyons in the summer of 1274.

Gregory X is, above all else, the pope of this second General Council of Lyons. Nowhere in his well-filled reign is his largehearted trust in the better side of human nature more evident, his confidence that charity and a right intention in the pope would call out the same virtues in others. And certainly the greatest charity was needed in whoever hoped to heal the long, poisoned dissension that kept the churches of the East estranged from Rome. The schism, in its causes, went back centuries. Latin despised Greek as shifty and treacherous: Greek despised Latin as barbarous and uncivilised. The association of the two during the various crusades had steadily sharpened the antagonism. Finally there was the memory of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the sack of the great city, the massacres, the expulsion of the Greek ruler and his replacement by a Latin, with a Latin bishop enthroned as patriarch in the see of Photius and Cerularios. That Latin regime had endured for less than sixty years. On July 25, 1261, the Greeks had returned under Michael VIII. Constantinople fell to him with scarcely a struggle, and with the Latin empire there crashed the Latin ecclesiastical establishment. That the immediate reaction of the then pope -- Urban IV -- himself a one-time Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, was to plan a great crusade of recovery, was most natural. That never before in their history were the Greeks so hostile to the Latins, was natural no less. And if this was the moment when Michael VIII proposed to the pope to bring the schism to an end, the observer might see in his action no more than the clearest of signs that the Greek emperor realised how slender was his hold on the new conquest. The King of France -- St. Louis -- had taken the cross in response to Pope Urban's appeal; and Venice, the real author of the piratical conquest of 1204, was also actively preparing. No pope, however, would hesitate between a restoration of obedience forced at the sword's point and a general return to obedience on the part of Constantinople and all its dependent churches. Michael's shrewd move held up the military expedition. From the day when Urban IV sent his Franciscan envoys to discuss Michael's proposal (28 July, 1263) the emperor knew his immediate danger was past.

Urban IV died (October 2, 1264) before much more had been done than to make clearer than clear how diverse were the intentions of emperor and pope. Michael had proposed first of all to complete the work of national unity; to drive out of the imperial territories, that is to say, what Latin rulers still remained. Urban thought that the religious reunion should come first.

Once a new pope was elected, Clement IV (February 5, 1265), Michael was able to begin all over again. It was a great advantage that Clement's plans for a crusade were directed to an expedition against the Holy Land itself. Constantinople now seemed secure against any western attack, and the emperor could safely begin the theological hedging and jousting. The Greeks, seemingly, proposed a council in which the differences of belief should be discussed. The pope replied, in the traditional Roman way, that the Faith being a thing that was settled, such discussionwas impossible. The pope's ambassadors could indeed go into the questions raised by the Greeks and, once the union was a fact, there could be a council to ratify it. And Clement sent a declaration of faith to the emperor (March 1267).

Constantinople was, however, at this moment in the throes of an ecclesiastical upheaval, which produced three successive patriarchs in eighteen months. Politics had the main share in this and now, unfortunately, although the patriarch in possession was a strong supporter of Michael as emperor, he had the disadvantage of being violently anti-Latin. Michael, perforce, must go slowly; and then, while he was considering Clement's reply, the pope died (29 November, 1268) and there began one of the longest vacancies the Holy See has ever known. [326]

If the long vacancy solved, for Michael, the immediate problem how to frame a submission to Rome that would be palatable also to his patriarch, it raised once more the problem of the security of his empire from western attacks. His chief danger in the West lay in the King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou. For this leading Guelf had no sooner overcome the Sicilian Ghibelline (1266), than he began to show himself, in the East, a most faithful follower of Ghibelline policy. To all the kings of Sicily-Norman, Hohenstaufen, and now Angevin -- the emperor at Constantinople was the traditional enemy. It was an antagonism that went back before the crusades, dating from those days when the Normans first conquered from the Greek emperor these Italian lands. And when the Sicilian kingdom fell to kings who were also German emperors, the traditional Mediterranean policy they inherited cut across the simplicities of the papally planned crusade. For these imperialists were enemies, first, of Byzantium. They might conquer the Turk ultimately, but their present thought was rather the Eastern Empire. An assault of this kind had been in the mind of the Emperor Henry VI when death so prematurely carried him off (1197). Seven years later, with the active assistance of his brother, the Emperor Philip, the plan was realised and Constantinople torn from the Greeks -- though not to the profit of Sicily. In the next generation Frederick II, Henry's son was the champion of the imperialistic idea and, surrendering the whole substance of the crusade, he negotiated a settlement with the Turks without any pretence of destroying their power. And now the conqueror of Frederick II's heirs was showing himself just as hostile to Byzantium, just as openly averse to any war against the Turks.

In 1267, while Clement IV and Michael VIII were seemingly planning a reunion of Latin west and Greek east, Charles began to style himself King of Jerusalem, and made the claim that he was heir to the last Latin emperor of the East. He was carefully building up a strong position for the future, gathering in claims and rights which, once Michael VIII was conquered, would become political realities. Clement out of the way, what should stay him? By the spring of 1270 his plans were completed, and to Michael VIII the end seemed very near. In his desperation he appealed to the cardinals and also to St. Louis. The saint, sympathetic to the scheme for reunion, and ever the enemy of such schemes of realpolitik as Charles of Anjou was promoting, halted his brother most effectively by summoning him to take his place in the crusade then preparing against Tunis.

St. Louis' tragic death (25 August, 1270) set Charles free to renew his efforts against Michael VIII, and he had already done much by negotiations with the Latin princes in Achaia and the Peloponnesus, when he met the greatest check of all, the election as pope of one resolved, before all else, to bring together Greek and Latin to defend Christendom against their common foe the Turk. Charles might now style himself King of Albania, and ally himself with Michael's Greek rivals (1272), and even send Angevin forces and some of his own Saracen archers to attack Michael in Greece (1273): the new pope had passed too speedily from desires to action, the work of the Council of Lyons was a political fact, and on May 1, 1275 the King of Sicily was compelled to sign a truce with Michael.

The motives of the Greek emperor in offering his submission to the various popes and so proposing to bring to an end the schism that had endured for two hundred and twenty years were, then, evidently no more than political. Such practical statesmen as Urban IV and Clement IV would no doubt have grasped this, and acted accordingly, long before any formal act of reunion was completed. Gregory X was more optimistic than such papal realists. He readily listened to Michael VIII's new offers and sent a distinguished commission of theological experts and diplomatists to Constantinople to initiate the good work.

The four envoys [327] -- Friars Minor -- took with them the creed or profession of faith, drafted by Clement IV. This the emperor, the bishops, and the people were to accept, and thereupon emperor and prelates were to take their places at the coming council. The arrival of this commission at Constantinople was the beginning of an immense theological excitement. It was immediately evident that the bishops would by no means obey mechanically any order from the emperor to submit themselves.

The leading theological question was the Latin doctrine that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or rather whether the Latins had any right to express this doctrine by adding to the so-called creed of the Council of Nicaea the words "and from the Son". [328] The Greek bishops began by denying their right to do so, and gave the Latins an ultimatum to end the scandal by withdrawing the phrase. The emperor then took charge, and explained to his bishops, in private, that if this proposed arrangement with the Latins fell through, the empire was lost. As to the Latin formulae, no one could object to them as a matter of conscience, for the doctrines they expounded were perfectly orthodox. And he brought theological authority, and also earlier declarations of the Greek episcopate, to support the statement. The most learned man of the day was John Beccos, the chartophylax, [329] and to him the bishops now looked for the reply that would non-suit the emperor's plea. Beccos, however, contented neither party. He did not refute the emperor; but he declared the Latins to be heretics. Whereupon Michael ordered his imprisonment. The patriarch, for his part, organised his bishops to refute the emperor's case and all swore an oath to resist the proposed union.

The prospects of reunion seemed slight indeed. But the emperor could not afford not to buy off the danger that threatened from Sicily and Venice. He was helped by the conversion of Beccos to his views. In prison the chartophylax had set himself to study in the Greek Fathers the doctrine of the processions in the Blessed Trinity. St. Athanasius, St. Cyril and St. Maximus attested that the Latin teaching was the Catholic faith. Beccos, thereupon, revoked his judgment that the Latins were heretics and became the emperor's most enthusiastic aid. While the convert argued with the bishops for the orthodoxy of the Latin position, Michael tried a mixture of diplomacy and pressure. All that would be asked of them, he asserted, was a recognition of the primacy of the Roman see, of Rome's right to judge all cases in final appeal, and that they should pray for the pope publicly in the liturgy. It was in this last point that the final difficulty lay. The popes had tampered with the sacred wording of the creed: how could an orthodox bishop give them any countenance? Michael retorted by threatening the opposition with the penalties of high treason; at the same time he pledged himself that the bishops would not be asked to add so much as an iota to the creed. Reassured, the bishops consented now to accept the emperor's three points; also to make a joint protestation of obedience to the pope.

When the Greek deputation reached Lyons (24 June, 1274) the council had been in session for seven weeks. It had opened on May 7 with elaborate ceremonial and a sermon from the pope. Then, on May 18, it had passed the decree establishing the point of faith about the Filioque, [330] and on June 7 twelve decrees regulating the procedure to be followed in elections of bishops and abbots.

The arrival of the Greeks interrupted these legislative proceedings. The ambassadors were received with solemn ceremony; they presented the letters from the emperor and the Greek bishops; they declared they had come to show their obedience to the Roman Church and to learn from it the true faith. Five days later was the feast of SS. Peter and Paul. At the mass, sung by the pope, the epistle and gospel were chanted in Greek as well as Latin, and the credo likewise (with the Filioque clause repeated three times by the Greeks). St. Bonaventure preached a great sermon. On the octave day, July 6, the formal act of reunion and reconciliation took place. The letters from Constantinople were read; in the emperor's, he repeated the creed sent to him by the pope and declared it to be the true faith, accepted as such by him because it came from the Roman church. He pledged his eternal fidelity to this doctrine, his obedience to the papal primacy. In return he asked that the Greeks be allowed to keep the creed unaltered by any reference to the procession of the Holy Ghost from God the Son, and also that their ancient rite be left untouched. And the emperor's ambassador confirmed all this by an oath made in his master's name.

The General Council which met at Lyons in 1274 was summoned as a great assize to find means for the restoration of Catholic life no less than for the recovery of the Holy Land. With this in view, Gregory X had asked bishops in various countries to send in statements setting out the main reasons for the spiritual decay which he deplored, and to propose remedies.

By far the greater part of the reforms enacted in the thirty decrees of the Council [331] have reference to evils in the life of the clergy. . The pope, indeed, was to bring the council to a close with a sermon in which he declared that bad bishops were the principal cause of all that was wrong. [332] In the council he made no scruple about a direct attack on scandal in the highest place of all, the negligence of the cardinals in allowing vacancies of the Holy See to drag on for months and for years. On more than one occasion already, the faithful people had intervened to coerce the indifference of the cardinals by locking them up until they came to a decision, and a decree of the council [333] now authorised and regularised these extreme measures, imposing the conclave as the rule henceforward. On the death of the pope the cardinals present in the city where he died were to await ten days, but no more, for their absent brethren. Then, with but a single servant each, they were to take up their residence in the palace, living together in a single locked room without any curtains or screens to shut off any part of it. This conclave [334] was to be so arranged that none might enter or leave it unseen by the rest, that there would be no means of access to the electors or of secret communications with them; no cardinal must admit any visitor except such as were allowed in by the whole body to treat of the arrangement of the conclave. The new pope -- so Gregory X seems to have intended -- would thus be speedily elected, for his law next provides that should the election be delayed beyond three days "which God forbid', the cardinals' food was to be restricted to a single dish at each of their two daily meals; after five days more they were to be given only bread with wine and water. There are regulations for the admission of latecomers, for the care of sick cardinals who may leave and then wish to return. The cardinals are forbidden to occupy themselves with any other business than the election, and all pacts or conventions made between them are declared null, even though they be confirmed with an oath. Nor is any cardinal to receive anything of his ecclesiastical revenues as long as the vacancy of the Holy See endures; these are sequestrated and at the disposal of the future pope. Finally, in order that these provisions may not become a dead letter, the responsibility for providing the conclave and guarding it is laid on the civic authority of the town where it takes place; heavy penalties being provided for those who over-act the rigour towards the cardinals which the new law demands.

The cardinals objected strongly to the proposed law, and for a time there was a brisk duel between them and the pope, each striving to enlist supporters from among the bishops. And it would seem that the general sense of the council was against the reform as proposed, for it was not promulgated until some months after the council had dispersed.

The most usual way of appointing bishops or abbots was still, in 1274, by an election, where the canons or monks had each a vote. A whole series of decrees enacted in this council shows the many serious abuses which affected the system, and how thoroughly, in these last years before something was devised in its place, the Holy See strove to reform them. Appeals against elections (or provisions) to churches are to be made in writing and to be countersigned by witnesses who swear their own belief in the truth of the objections made and that they can prove this: penalties are provided for those who fail to make good their charges. [335] The elect must await confirmation before entering upon his charge. [336] He is to be informed of his election as soon as possible, to signify his acceptance within a month, and, under penalty of losing the place, seek confirmation within three months. [337] Voters who knowingly vote for one who is unworthy sin mortally, and are liable to severe punishment. [338] No voter is allowed to appeal against the one for whom he has voted -- certain special cases apart. [339] Far too many appeals are sent to Rome where the motive is not really serious. This practice is to cease [340] and in cases where a double election has been made no objection will be allowed for the future against the majority on the score of lack of zeal, of worth, or of authority, where the majority numbers two-thirds of the voters. [341] If objection be made that there is an evident defect, whether of due knowledge or otherwise, there must be an immediate enquiry into this. Should the objection be shown devoid of foundation, those who made it lose all right to pursue any further objection they have raised, and they are to be punished as though they had failed to prove the whole of their objections. [342] Finally, to protect the successful against the malice of the disappointed, it is laid down that those who revenge themselves on electors for not supporting them by pillaging the electors' property or that of the Church or of the electors' relatives, or who molest the electors or their families are by the very fact excommunicated. [343]

The elective system was already beginning to raise problems almost as serious as those it solved. In another hundred years it would have disappeared in the greater part of the Church, and bishops be directly appointed or "provided" by the pope. The foundation of the new system was the decree Licet (1268) of Gregory X's immediate predecessor Clement IV, a lawyer pope who had come to the service of the Church after a great career as jurist and administrator in the service of St. Louis IX. By that decree Clement IV had reserved to the Holy See the appointment to all benefices vacated by death, if the holder at the time he died had been a member of the Roman curia or had died in the city where the curia then was. [344] This new law had caused much dissatisfaction among the bishops, no less than among other patrons of benefices. At the General Council they strove to have it revoked. But though Gregory X was not, apparently, unsympathetic, he would do no more than modify it slightly, [345] and allow that vacancies falling under the reservation might be filled by the patron if the pope had failed to fill them within a month from the holder's death. [346]

What of the man appointed? and especially of the man who was the foundation of the whole system, the parish priest? It had already been laid down, a hundred years before this time, [347] that no one must be appointed to a parish who was younger than twenty- five. But this law had too often been disregarded, and so the Council now declared [348] that all appointments which violated the law were null and of no effect. It also reminded the nominee that he was bound to live in his parish and, if he were not a priest already, that he must seek ordination within a year or else ipso facto lose his benefice. Non-residence of beneficiaries -- of bishops and of parish priests especially -- was one of the chronic weaknesses of the seemingly powerful structure of medieval Catholicism. The popes never succeeded in their war against it, nor against the related mischief that the same man held more than one benefice: only too often, indeed, policy led the different popes to connive at these evils, and in the end, more almost than anything else, it was these that brought the imposing structure down to the dust. At Lyons, in 1274, laws were made to control the pluralist. No parish was to be given in commendam [349] unless to a priest; he must be of the canonical age of twenty-five and not already provided with a parish in commendam, and the necessity (on the part of the Church) must be evident; furthermore such appointments are good for six months only. Any Contravention of these conditions invalidates the appointment ipso iure. [350] As to pluralists -- clerics who hold more than one benefice -- bishops are to make a general enquiry and if one of the benefices held entails a cure of souls, the holder is to produce the dispensation authorising this. If this is not forthcoming, all but the first received of his benefices are to be taken as vacant and given to others. If, however, he is lawfully authorised he may retain all he lawfully holds, but it is put upon the bishop's conscience to see that the cure of souls is not neglected. Bishops are specifically warned to make certain, when they confer a benefice that entails a cure of souls, that if the beneficiary already holds such a benefice he is dispensed to hold the second with a dispensation which explicitly mentions his possession of the first cura animarum. [351]

Episcopal control of the clergy is strengthened by a canon which forbids bishops to ordain another bishop's subjects without his leave: bishops who transgress, lose automatically the right to ordain at all for twelve months. [352] The clergy are given a useful protection against the bishop in a new rule [353] about visitation expenses. Bishops were already allowed to exact a certain support in kind when they made the official visitation of a parish. The custom was, however, doveloping of asking money or gifts; another abuse was to exact procurations -- the payments in kind - without making the visitations. The council deals with these abuses (already noted and condemned by Innocent IV) by decreeing that all who have exacted these unlawful presents must restore double their amount to the victims. If the restitution is not made within a month, the bishop loses all right to enter a church until payment is made; his officials, if they are guilty, are suspended from office and benefice. Nor is any willingness of the injured party to remit the amount due, or part of it, to affect the automatic operation of the law.

Clerical immunity from the jurisdiction of the lay ruler was an ancient institution more and more contested in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Gregory X at Lyons made a concession to the princes, enacting [354] that the cleric in minor orders who contracted a second marriage lost all his clerical privileges and was henceforth wholly their subject. On the other hand, another canon [355] denouncing yet again [356] the barbarous custom called 'reprisals', -- by which, if the guilty party were beyond the law's power, the nearest innocent members of the community were made to suffer in his stead -- fixed a special penalty of excommunication and interdict for those who subjected ecclesiastics to this abuse.

There are two new laws to safeguard Church property, whether from lay rapacity or from cowardly negligence on the part of the clergy who should be its special defenders. Excommunication is henceforward to fall automatically on anyone -- whatever his rank -- who, unauthorised, takes upon himself the occupation and administration of the property of a vacant see or abbey, and also upon the clerics or monks who abet this usurpation. Those who enjoy such right of administration are warned not to go beyond their right, and that they are bound not to neglect the properties entrusted to their care. [357] The second law [358] forbids prelates -- without the leave of their chapter and the Holy See -- to make over their lands to the lay lord as the price of his protection, retaining for the Church a mere use of the property. All contracts of this kind hitherto made without leave are now annulled, even though confirmed with an oath. Offending prelates are to suffer a three years suspension from their office and their revenues, and the lords who force such contracts upon them, or who have not restored what they obtained through past contracts of this sort, are excommunicated.

The reform legislation of the Council did not only touch the layman in his relations with the clergy. In two canons, on usury and usurers, it strove to halt a mischief that lay at the very roots of social life. Already, by a law of 1179, as the Council recalls, the notorious usurer [359] was barred from the sacraments, and if he died he was forbidden Christian burial, and the clergy were not allowed to take offerings from him. These prohibitions had been largely ignored, and now, not only are they renewed, but it is forbidden [360] to states and rulers to allow usurers to take up residence within their territories, or to allow those already there to remain. Within three months they must be expelled. If the lord is an ecclesiastic, disregard of this new law entails automatically suspension from his office, a lay lord incurs excommunication, and a community or corporation interdict. As for the usurer himself, [361] he is not to have Christian burial, even though his will directs that restitution be made, until this has actually been done or substantial pledges given according to forms now provided. Members of religious orders -- and others too -- who bury usurers in disregard of this law are themselves to be punished as usurers. Unless a usurer first make restitution, or give a real guarantee that he will do so, no one is to witness his will or hear his confession, or absolve him. If his will does not provide for restitution it is, by the fact, null and void.

There is also a canon [362] about conduct in church and abuses of the church fabric from which much may be gleaned about the day to day religious life of the time. Churches are places built for prayer, places where silence should reign, and this especially during the time of mass. All are to bow their heads in reverence whenever the holy name of Jesus Christ is pronounced, especially during the mass. The church is not to be used for secular purposes, such as meetings, or parliaments, nor as a court of law; if trials are held there the sentences rendered are, ipso facto, null and void. Churchyards are not to be used for fairs. It is a terrible thing, says the canon, if places set apart for man to ask forgiveness for his sins become to him occasions of further sin. This canon inaugurated the popular devotion to the Holy Name, and the great confraternity still so flourishing, founded by the Dominicans at the command of Gregory X [363] to further the devotion.

Five of the remaining canons are directed to the reform of legal procedure; most of them relate to the law governing the punishment of excommunication. Excommunication is not incurred by those who hold intercourse with the excommunicated unless these have been excommunicated by name. This is a clarification of a canon of the last General Council. [364] Absolution, from any censure, which has been extorted by violence or threats is not only null and void absolutely, but also involves those using such threats in a further excommunication. [365] Those who give permission to their servants or subjects to murder, imprison or injure in any way, whether it be the officials responsible for a sentence of excommunication against them, or relatives of the officials, or those who refuse all intercourse with them since the excommunication, are by the fact excommunicated a second time; so too are those who carry out these orders. If within two months they have not sought absolution from this second excommunication, they can only be absolved from it by the Holy See. [366] Another new law [367] is directed to check the hastiness of ecclesiastics in issuing penalties whose effects are general. Canons who, as a punishment, propose to suspend the church services, must now give notice of this in writing, with their reasons, to the person or persons against whom this action is directed. If the canons fail to do this, or if the reasons assigned are insufficient, they lose all right to their revenues for the time the services were suspended and must moreover make satisfaction for any losses thereby incurred to those they meant to punish. Also, and here is a reference to a superstitious instinct not yet wholly departed from our midst, it is most strictly forbidden to emphasise the fact of the divine displeasure, to which the suspension of offices supposedly testifies, by such detestable practices as treating the sacred images irreverently -- for example, throwing them to the ground and covering them with nettles and thorns. This the bishops are to punish with the utmost severity.

To check the growing tendency to drag out law suits by maliciously contrived delays, and thereby to fleece the litigant, the council now enacted a most stringent canon. All advocates and proctors are henceforward to declare on oath, not only that they will do their utmost for their client, but also that should anything transpire in the course of the trial to convince them that his cause is not just, they will immediately withdraw from the case. This oath is to be taken at the opening of every judicial year, and heavy penalties are provided for neglect to do so or for any breach of the oath. Also, the canon fixes maximum fees for both advocates and proctors and puts upon them the obligation to restore anything accepted in excess of these amounts -- again under heavy penalties. [368]

Perhaps the Council's most important piece of legislation, after the law establishing the conclave, was the twenty-third canon Religionum diversitatem nimiam, on the new religious orders. From the moment when religious -- men formed by the discipline of the monastic vows and life -- had first begun to give themselves to the apostolic work of preaching the gospel and reconciling sinners to God, there had been trouble with the parochial clergy whose peculiar business and charge this work had always been. It was from among the religious that the missionaries had come who had converted the West from heathendom. On their labours was built the greater part of the present fabric of parishes and sees. It was the religious who was the trained man, in the early Middle Ages, the parochial priest the more or less well-gifted amateur; and as with habits of life so was it with professional learning. The vast mass of the parochial clergy had nothing like the chances of study which were open to the monk. The revival of learning which produced the universities no doubt improved their chances enormously, and indeed it was the chief function of the universities to educate the clergy. But, even so, universities were never so many that the whole body of the clergy passed through them. And long before the medieval universities reached the peak of their achievement as seminaries for the education of the parochial clergy, St. Dominic first and then St. Bonaventure had provided the church with a new kind of religious who was primarily a missionary priest, and the last word in the professional clerical sciences and arts, theologian, preacher and confessor. By the time of the Council of Lyons in 1274 Dominican and Franciscan priests were to be numbered by tens of thousands, and almost as numerous again were the priests of other new orders that had sprung up in imitation. Some of the new orders were as admirable as the models which had inspired them. Others were less so. For very different reasons the appearance of both types ruffled the peace of the clerical mind.

Already sixty years before the Council of Lyons, the Church had shown itself anxious and troubled by the task of controlling the new spiritual enthusiasm as it showed itself in the new missionary brotherhoods. These were almost always lay movements in origin; rarely was it to a priest that the inspiration to) lead this kind of life seemed to come. If there was zeal in plenty in these movements there was rarely any theological learning, or any appreciation that this was at all necessary for the preacher. Very often there was a definite anti-clerical spirit; sometimes there was heresy too. For very many reasons, then, the first rumours that a new brotherhood had been formed to preach penance and the remission of sins, and that it was sweeping all before it in some city of Languedoc or Umbria, can hardly have brought anything but deep anxiety to the Roman curia or to its head.

When the bishops poured into Rome for the General Council of 1215 they brought with them from every see of Christendom the tale of disputes between clergy and religious. Sixty years later, with the new mendicant missionary orders at the flood of their first fervent activity, they took similar tales to Lyons. From Olmuc in Bohemia, for example, came complaints that the Dominicans and Franciscans had gradually ousted the parochial clergy from all contact with their people. Baptism was the only sacrament for which the parish priest was ever approached. And where the people went, there they took their offerings. The bishop's suggestions, in this instance, were drastic indeed. These mendicant orders should lose their general power to hear confessions, or to preach except in the parish churches. Only those should preach or hear confessions whom the local bishop chose and authorised. Nor should any new friary be founded without the local bishop's leave.

The mendicants no doubt put forward once again the solid reason for their admittedly wide privileges; once they lost their exemption from all jurisdiction but that of the pope, how long would they survive in a world where there were bishops? In France, in the early days, the Dominicans, for example, found themselves treated just as layfolk, bidden to attend mass on Sundays, with the rest, in the parish church, and to confess to the parish priest as other parishioners were bound. [369] Twenty years nearly before this time (1274) the differences between clergy and mendicants had blown into a great conflagration at Paris, where the university had demanded from the pope all but the suppression of the orders and, at the pope's bidding, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure had stated the orders' case. Now, at Lyons, the question was raised again: it had already become, what it was to remain for centuries, one of the chronic problems of the Church, and one of the chronic evidences how harsh a soil human nature is to divine charity.

The decree now enacted deals drastically with all abuses, with institutes inaugurated in despite of existing law, and with lawfully founded institutes which have degenerated or seem to be tending that way. But it goes out of its way to protect and to praise the two great orders of St. Dominic and St. Francis.

The Council of 1215 -- says the new law -- had forbidden [370] the foundation of any new orders. This prohibition was now renewed, because, despite that law, rashness and presumption had brought into existence an unbridled mob of new orders -- of new mendicants especially -- who did not deserve approbation. Therefore, for the future, no one is to found any new order, or to enter one if such be founded. All orders and mendicant orders founded since 1215 and not approved by the Holy See are abolished, Those founded since and approved by the Holy See, and which live by alms collected from the general public and whose rule forbids them any rents or possessions, and to whom an insecure mendicity through public begging affords a living, must now follow this rule, namely members already professed may continue to live this life, but no more novices are to be received; no new houses are to be opened; no properties may be alienated without leave of the Holy See, for these properties the Holy See intends to use in aid of the Holy Land, or the poor and for other pious purposes. Any violation of this rule entails excommunication, and acts done in violation of it are legally void. Moreover, members of these orders are forbidden to preach to those outside their ranks, or to hear their confessions, or to undertake their funeral services. This 23rd canon, it is expressly declared, does not however extend to the Dominicans and Franciscans whose usefulness to the Church in general (it is explicitly said) is evident. As for the Carmelites, and the Hermits of St. Augustine, whose foundation dates back beyond the Lateran Council of 1215, they may continue as they now are until further decision about them is taken. A general scheme, says the canon, is in preparation that will affect them and indeed all the orders, non-mendicants included. Meanwhile members of the orders to whom this new rule now made applies, are given generally a permit to enter other approved orders. But no order or convent is to transfer itself as a whole without special leave of the Holy See.

THE SHADOW OF ANJOU, 1276-1285

Gregory X died at Arezzo. January 10. 1276, on his way back from France to Rome. Only eleven days later the cardinals, putting into execution for the first time the new law of the conclave, unanimously elected the Friar Preacher, Peter of Tarentaise. This first Dominican pope was a Frenchman. He took the name of Innocent V and reigned for just five months. There was a short interval of three weeks and the cardinal deacon Ottoboni Fieschi, a nephew of Innocent IV was elected -- Adrian V (11 July). His reign was one of the shortest of all: he was dead in seven weeks, before he had even been ordained priest. For the third time that year the cardinals assembled, and elected now a Portuguese, the one-time Archbishop of Braga, Peter Juliani, who has his place in the history of scholastic philosophy as Peter of Spain. He took the name of John XXI but, scarcely more fortunate than the other two popes, he reigned only eight months. On May 20, 1277 the ceiling of his library fell in and the pope was killed.

These short pontificates wrought much harm to the still fragile restoration of Gregory X. In all the elections of that fateful year, Charles of Anjou was active. Both the French pope and the Portuguese showed themselves much more sympathetic to his policy than Gregory had been; Innocent V favouring him in Italy and John XXI, apparently, willing to forward his designs on the Eastern empire. But nowhere was the change in the personality of the pope more to be deplored than in the most delicate matter of all, Rome's relations with the newly reconciled Eastern churches. Here John XXI showed himself heavy handed and perhaps made inevitable the action of his successors that was to wreck the whole work within the next five years.

A more certain -- but accidental -- effect of John's short reign was to revive the abuse of over-long vacancies in the Holy See. The cardinals' opposition to Gregory X's conclave regulation had been strong. Their criticism now brought John XXI to suspend it, meaning to provide a new rule. His sudden death found the cardinals without any rules at all to bind them and the Holy See was thereupon vacant six months (20 May-25 November, 1277).

The pope ultimately elected was John Gaetani Orsini, one of the most experienced diplomatists in the curia, a cardinal for more than thirty years, who took the name of Nicholas III. None since Innocent IV (1243-1254) had come to the high office with such -- extensive knowledge of the curial routine, of the major problems of the time and the personalities around whom they turned. Nicholas had been Innocent IV's close companion in his exile, [371] and in 1258 had played a great part, as legate, in the national histories of France and of England at the time of Simon de Montfort's first triumph. Since the death of Clement IV (1268) he had been the strong man of the curia, a force to be reckoned with in all the subsequent elections. He is credited with the election of John XXI and in that pope's short reign was, indeed, the power behind the throne. Through all the years that followed Charles of Anjou's introduction into the politics of church defence Nicholas III had been his warm supporter. But events during the several vacancies of 1276 had chilled his enthusiasm. He was now critical, if not hostile, and certainly awakened from the simplicity he had shared with the scholarly French and Portuguese popes, whose inexperience of politics failed to read beneath the surface of Charles's courtesy and seeming submissiveness. The facts were that the King of Sicily's diplomacy had begun definitely to check Rudolf of Habsburg in Germany; that he was once again menacing the Greek emperor and that his power overshadowed all Italy. Charles now took the style of King of Jerusalem, Hugh III having abandoned the mainland and retired to Cyprus, and sent to Acre as his vicar, Roger de St. Severin. The Templars of Venice supported him and the barons of the kingdom had no choice but to do him homage. Of the two great questions of the day, not the crusade seemed now the more urgent but the freedom of the Papal State, and the indefinitely more important thing bound up with this, namely, the freedom of the papal action and so of religion everywhere. It was to be the main aim of Nicholas III to check this new advance of the King of Sicily.

Presently immense plans for the future organisation of Europe began to take shape. New papal agents of proved character and high diplomatic ability -- the future popes Martin IV and Nicholas IV, the Dominican Master -- General John of Vercelli -- began to knit together the medley of jealousies and rivalries in which the ambition of such magnificent men as Charles of Anjou found its perennial opportunity. It was a great pontificate, though all too short for the task before it. Nicholas III was already an old man at his election (25 November, 1271) and in less than three years he was dead (22 August, 1280) Nevertheless he had notably lessened King Charles's hold on central Italy by refusing to allow his re- appointment as Senator of Rome and imperial vicar in Tuscany. More, by a special constitution Nicholas III made it impossible for the future for any reigning prince to be senator. The new senator, in 1278, was the pope himself, and he appointed his nephew to act in his place. Charles, knowing himself for the moment outmanoeuvred, submitted gracefully. In Germany the pope continued Gregory X's policy of support to the new emperor-elect. He won from Rudolf -- and from all the German princes -- an explicit renunciation of all the old claims over any of the territories now counted as States of the Church.

Had Nicholas III still greater plans in mind to establish permanent friendliness between the Habsburgs and Capetians? Did his too speedy death put an end to one of the best of all chances of preventing the coming long centuries of Franco-German warfare and its sequelae of world destruction? Opinions differ, but the pope is credited with the desire to make the empire hereditary in the Habsburg family, and to make the German kingship a reality beyond the Rhine and the Danube. The kingdom of Arles would be detached from the empire and, united with Lombardy, form an independent realm under a French prince. A second Italian kingdom would be created in the lands between the Papal State and Lombardy. Italy, like Germany, would experience a new, peaceful political order. The Papal State would enjoy a new security. Charles of Anjou would be satisfied -- and yet controlled. The major causes of Franco-German rivalry would be forestalled.

But Nicholas died before his liquidation of the political debts of 1276 had been so successful as to allow such major schemes any chance of success. He was the first pope for a hundred years to make Rome his regular dwelling place and all but the last pope to do so for another hundred; he has his place in history as the real founder of the Vatican. The new orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic found in him a constant friend, and his registers show how constantly he turned to them to provide bishops for sees all over Europe. The one real blemish was his over-fondness for his own family. It has won him a most unenviable mark as a pioneer in the vicious business of papal nepotism, and a blistering memorial in the Inferno of Dante.

Among the things which Nicholas III did not find time to do, was to provide the much-needed regulations about the papal election, and after his death the Holy See again remained vacant for six months -- time enough and to spare for Charles of Anjou to turn to his own profit the reaction which usually follows the disappearance of a strong ruler. The new pope, Martin IV (elected 22 February, 1281) Simon de Brion -- was a Frenchman and, from the beginning, he showed himself a most willing collaborator in all the King of Sicily's schemes. It would not be correct to describe him as, in any sense, the king's tool. All goes to show a long- standing identity of views between himself and Charles, and the cardinal's long career in the service of the Holy See had shown him to be a skilful diplomatist and administrator. Like very many of the popes since Innocent III, he was a product of the University of Paris. Like Clement IV, he had been high in the service of St. Louis IX. With many more he had left that service for the Roman curia at the invitation of the newly-elected French pope Urban IV (1261), who had created him cardinal. Much of his life continued to be spent in France as legate, and it was he who had negotiated, for Urban IV, the treaty which made Charles of Anjou the papal champion and set him on the way to become King of Sicily. It is not surprising that in the years between Charles's victories and his own election (1268-1281), Simon de Brion was the king's chief advocate and supporter in the curia. He was, it is said, most unwilling to be elected. No doubt he foresaw the stormy years that awaited him, the difficulties that must follow on any reversal of the cautious policy of the last nine years, and he was an old man. He was to reign just over four years and to initiate a series of political disasters that would leave the prestige of the papacy lower than at any time since the coming of Innocent III (1198).

To Charles of Anjou the election supplied the one thing so far lacking. In the fifteen years since his conquest of Sicily, the king had made more than one attempt to extend his power at the expense of the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople. St. Louis IX had checked him in 1270, Gregory X in 1275, Nicholas III in 1278. Now, with a pope of like mind with himself, his ambition was to be given free reign.

First of all, Martin IV, within two months of his election, reversed the vital decision of Nicholas III that the civil government of Rome should never be given into the hands of a sovereign prince, by appointing the King of Sicily Senator for life. [372] The immediate result was a miniature civil war in Rome that lasted throughout the reign, with all the customary sequelae of excommunication and interdict. Martin himself never lived nearer to Rome than Orvieto and Perugia.

Next, Martin IV definitely broke with the Eastern churches. It was seven years all but two months since the solemn ratification at Constantinople, [373] by the Greek bishops, of the reconciliation made at the Council of Lyons. Never, during all that time, had the popes felt happy about the reality of the Greek submission to their authority; and never had the great mass of the Greeks seen in the act of their emperor, Michael VIII, anything more than a base surrender to the despised and hated Latins. From the very beginning, very many of them, courtiers even, and members of the emperor's own family, had refused all relations with the clergy who accepted the union. But, so long as Gregory X lived, Michael was confident that the schemes of the King of Sicily, to restore, in his own person, the Latin empire at Constantinople, would be effectively checked. This pope's personal experience of the gravity of the crisis of Christianity in the East, and his determination, in the interest of the projected crusade, to forestall any warfare between rival Christian claimants to Eastern principalities, were solid advantages that far outweighed, with the ruler at Constantinople, the popular and the clerical hostility to the union.

But the unlooked-for death, in January 1276, of this rarely experienced pope, patient, understanding, the reverse of doctrinaire in his handling of delicate practical problems, changed all. Moreover, Gregory X had three successors in less than twelve months, and the upset in the curia caused by the rapid appearance and disappearance of these popes was, inevitably, a great opportunity both for those who wished to see the union destroyed, and for those who had never thought it could be a reality. The first of these popes, Innocent V, showed himself much cooler towards Michael VIII than his predecessor had been. For Innocent was a Frenchman, [374] such another man of God as his predecessor, it is true, and no more of a politician. But he was a supporter of Charles of Anjou. When Michael demanded that the pope, for the protection of the Byzantine empire in the approaching crusade, should strengthen the emperor's authority by excommunicating the Latin princes already in arms against him, Innocent, in his perplexity, could only reply by a general exhortation about the need for unity. Before anything more could be asked of him, or a new Eastern crisis develop, his five months' reign was over (June 22, 1276). Adrian V, who followed him, lasted only seven weeks. Then came a third pope favourable to Charles, the scholarly Portuguese, John XXI. It was this pope who despatched to Constantinople the embassy planned by Innocent V, charged to obtain from Michael his own personal oath that he accepted the faith of the Roman See as set out at the General Council, and to absolve the Greeks from what censures they might have incurred through their adherence to the schism now terminated. The nuncios were also to excommunicate, and to put under interdict, all who opposed the union. [375] At first all went well. The emperor made no difficulties; his son and heir, Andronicus, wrote a most dutiful letter of submission, professing his enthusiasm for the union; and the Greek bishops, at a synod in April 1277, reaffirmed their acceptance of the primacy of the Roman See and of the orthodoxy of its teaching about the procession of the Holy Ghost. But in reaffirming this, the bishops somewhat altered the terminology of the statement adopted at Lyons.

John XXI was dead before this last, disconcerting detail of the Byzantine situation reached the curia. It was five months before the vacancy was filled, and another twelve before Nicholas III took up the question. From now on we can note a new stiffness in the Roman attitude. For example, the Greeks are now told that they must add the Filioque clause to the creed. This was, of course, more than the General Council had asked; but there was now every reason why Rome should be doubtful whether Greek opposition to the use of the clause was not the outward sign of a refusal to accept the Roman terminology as orthodox, of a clinging to the old contention that, on this point, the Latins were heretics. The use of the clause was become a touchstone of orthodoxy, as the use of the word homoousion had been, nine hundred years before, in these same lands. The pope also, it would seem, proposed to pass in review the whole Greek liturgy and rite, for he bade his envoys to allow only those parts which were not contrary to the faith. The nuncios were to travel through the chief cities of the empire and to see that all these various orders were really obeyed, and the emperor was to be persuaded to ask for the appointment at Constantinople of a permanent cardinal-legate; so only could Rome be assured that the Greeks really meant what they had professed.

Already there had been riots against the union, and now the emperor and his bishops came to an understanding. They would not break openly with the new papal commission (since only the pope's intervention could preserve the empire from the designs of Charles of Anjou), and the emperor pledged himself, whatever the consequences, not to consent to add the Filioque to the creed. It was now only a matter of time before the purely political intentions of the chief supporters of the union became so evident that a breach with Rome must follow. While, at Constantinople, the emperor stifled all opposition, and punished with terrible cruelty those who stirred up the ever recurring anti-papal riots, to the pope he perjured himself lavishly. The Greek bishops, subtly contriving neither to refuse the pope's demands nor to satisfy them, sent to Rome a reply that was little more than a mass of texts from the Greek fathers, where any and every word but the "proceed" of the Lyons definition was used to express the relation of the divine Word to the Holy Ghost. Only the sudden death of Nicholas III (August 22, 1280) and the six months' interregnum which followed, delayed, it would seem, the rupture that was now all but inevitable.

Then a final certitude came with the election, as Pope Martin IV, [376] of the King of Sicily's staunchest partisan in the curia. Charles had now every encouragement to prepare the type of crusade which the kings of Sicily traditionally favoured, the plan whose basic idea was to install themselves at Constantinople as emperors and make war on the Turks from this new vantage point. Venice -- also traditionally hostile to the Greeks, and already responsible for the crime that had transformed Innocent III's crusade into an immense act of piracy -- became his ally (July 3, 1281) and the pope, this time, joined the anti-Byzantine coalition. [377] The date was fixed for April 1283.

But Michael VIII had not, for a moment, failed to understand that tne bright prospects which the election of Gregory X had opened to him were now gone, perhaps for ever. While he carefully maintained diplomatic relations with Martin IV in the state befitting a loyal Catholic prince, Michael, too, made his preparations. But long before they were complete, only four months after the pact with Venice, Martin IV took the final step. On November 18, 1281, he excommunicated Michael as a patron and protector of heretics, of schismatics and Or heresy.

The emperor did not, however, reverse his religious policy. As long as he lived, another thirteen months only, there was no repudiation of the work of Lyons. It was only after his death (December 11, 1282) that the anti-Roman reaction began. It was extremely thorough. The new emperor, Andronicus, publicly confessed his submission to the pope as a grave sin and begged to be given suitable penance. The patriarch favourable to the Latins -- John Beccos, almost the only sincere convert among the higher clergy -- was deposed, and his successor (the anti-Roman whose place Beccos had taken in 1275) had all the churches of the capital purified with solemn rites, while a sentence of three months' suspension was laid upon the whole body of bishops and priests. The emperor obliged his mother, Michael's widow, to abjure her allegiance to tile pope, and he even refused a religious funeral to his dead father. So Michael, after twenty years of religious trimming, in the interests of Byzantine independence, was found, at the last, rejected and cast out both by the Catholics and by the Orthodox. Although it is extremely doubtful whether, inaugurated in such circumstances, any reunion would have long endured, Martin IV, when he excommunicated its main support, the Emperor Michael, sealed its fate in an instant. Also, in excommunicating the emperor he was excommunicating the prince whom Charles of Anjou was planning to supplant -- excommunicating him at the very moment when the Sicilian king's plans were ripe. It is little wonder that the pope's contemporaries judged his act severely, nor that some were very ready to see, in the disasters to the papal arms which followed, the manifest chastening hand of God.

For chastisement -- if such it were! -- arrived with speed. Far away from Constantinople, at the very opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, was a prince who, for years, now, had nourished a bitter hatred of the French, the King of Aragon, Peter III. Peter had seen his father make over to St. Louis IX Aragonese rights in Languedoc, and also, in the interests of this settlement, break up the unity of Aragon by creating the new kingdom of Majorca. He had seen St. Louis' son, Philip III, intervene powerfully to the south of the Pyrenees in the neighbouring kingdom of Castile -- and in a succession dispute that concerned Aragon very intimately. The French King of Sicily, Charles of Anjou, was especially an enemy; for Peter's wife was the daughter of that King Manfred of Sicily whom Charles had routed and slain at Benevento in 1266, the granddaughter of the last great Hohenstaufen, Frederick II. She was therefore, since Charles of Anjou's execution in 1268 of Conradin the last male of the line a personage of the greatest interest to all the remnants of the Ghibelline party which, suppressed these sixteen years but by no means destroyed, still swarmed in every state and town of Italy. Peter's court was the last refuge of the party, and there, biding his time in exile, was Manfred's capable Sicilian minister, John of Procida.

It was this political genius who planned the great coup. While Charles was busy with his plans to capture the empire of the East, binding to himself the great commercial states of Genoa and Venice, and securing the assistance of the new pope, John of Procida linked together Peter III and the Emperor Michael, the native Sicilians who had already learnt to detest their French rulers, and the Italian Ghibellines everywhere. A great conspiracy against Charles and his suzerain the pope was already afoot, when Martin IV threw over Michael VIII. The rising at Palermo on Palm Sunday, 1282, [378] and the massacre of the French which followed -- the Sicilian Vespers -- was the Ghibelline reply. Before Charles was able to put down the insurrection, Peter III had landed in Sicily. The French were out, and out for all time. Only the mainland territory remained to them and a war had begun, in which the pope was directly involved, that was to last for twenty years. [379]

The pope was involved because Charles was his vassal, the vassal indeed of St. Peter. The pope had no choice but to intervene and, in the name of St. Peter, with all means spiritual as well as temporal, defend his vassal against the Aragonese invader. He excommunicated the King of Aragon -- who, also, was his vassal -- and gave him three months in which to submit; should he obstinately hold out, the pope would depose him. [380] Peter III ignored the excommunication. He had present victory on his side and, in a war that was to be chiefly decided by sea power, he had also the genius of the great admiral of his day, the Sicilian Roger de Loria. The pope then deposed Peter. [381] He offered the crown of Aragon to yet another French prince, Charles of Valois, a younger son of the King of France, and, when the offer was accepted, [382] the pope, to assist the Frenchman, proclaimed a real crusade against Peter. [383] Peter's subjects were released from their oaths of allegiance, forbidden to acknowledge him as king, to pay him taxes or other dues. The kingdom was laid under an interdict. To finance his papally-appointed rival, immense sums of money were advanced by the pope from the moneys collected for the war against the Saracens, and special tithes were levied on ecclesiastical property in France, Provence and Navarre, in Aragon, Majorca, Sicily and in all Italy; and also in the dioceses of Liege, Metz, Verdun and Basle. To all who helped the good work of installing Charles and expelling the Aragonese King of Aragon, all the favours, temporal and spiritual, were granted which might be had by going out to the Holy Land to fight the Saracens. The popes had been unable for years to reorganise the holy war. Now it had reappeared, in Spain, and directed against a Christian prince whose crime it was to have made war on a papal vassal.

The King of France took up his son's opportunity [384] and soon a great French army was preparing to invade Aragon, with a fleet moving in support along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Sicily, since Roger de Loria's destruction of the Neapolitan fleet, was impregnably Aragonese. A direct attack on Peter's homeland, if successful, would be the simplest way to loosen his hold on the island.

At first all went well. The French invaded Rousillon in May 1285, and on September 7 took the Aragonese city of Gerona. But now a double disaster fell upon them. Fever took hold of the army and slew more troops than the enemy. And de Loria, in a great battle off Palamos, destroying the French fleet, cut the main line of the army's communications, the chief means of its reinforcement and supply (September 4). Among those struck down by the fever was the King of France himself, and he was carried back, amid his retreating troops, to die at Perpignan (October 5). For the first time in history French policy had sent a conquering army beyond the natural frontiers of France. The venture had ended in a great disaster.

Charles of Anjou had been spared, at any rate, this crowning humiliation [385] he had died in January 1285, while the expedition was still in preparation, and its chances seemed excellent. [386] Pope Martin, too, died before he saw how his collaboration with the Angevin was ending (28 March, 1285). All that the collaboration had in fact achieved was to end the chances of the reunion scheme of Gregory X, and to involve the papacy in a new war where the stake was not, any longer, the pope's independence -- the one real danger to this, anywhere in Europe, was in fact that very vassal of the pope in whose interest the pope was at war. And the papacy was faced now with the fact, surely full of omen, that in two important territories, Aragon and Sicily, the bulk of the people and clergy were standing fast by the ruler whom the pope had declared to be no ruler, ignoring the excommunication, the deposition and the interdict laid upon them. If, despite such lavish use of the spiritual arm, despite this all but official identification of the temporal with the spiritual, the popes should lose in the conflict, what would be the reaction in the sphere of the people's devotion to papal authority as the centre and source of religious life? Again, all over Italy the Ghibelline factions were busy. Lombardy, the Romagna, Tuscany were filled with insurrection and riot, and there too this same intermingling of spiritual and temporal was a leading, and inevitable, feature of the struggle. Those on the one side were, by the fact, bad Catholics: their opponents were engaged in war that was holy. And from Germany, untouched by the actual struggle, came loud complaints about the taxes levied on ecclesiastical revenues to finance the papal diplomacy and arms. Martin IV's successors were scarcely to be envied.

FRANCE AND THE SICILIAN WAR, 1285-1294

The next pope was a very old man, Honorius IV (1285-1287). The ill-fated French expedition to Aragon had not, indeed, yet begun its march when he was elected (2 April, 1285); but although Edward I of England intervened immediately, [387] suggesting to the new pope that he persuade Philip III to halt the military preparations and that negotiations be opened with Peter of Aragon, the die was cast. Honorius, a noble of ancient Roman stock, [388] might well intend -- it would seem he did so intend -- to reverse his predecessor's policy, and to follow the ways of Nicholas III and Gregory X, working for peace by removing the causes of wars before these became impossible to control. He would hold in check the new powerful French combination, now master of France and southern Italy, by a constant support of the Habsburg emperor in Germany; and also, while, as a good suzerain, he supported the King of Sicily, he would carefully supervise his whole political activity. But the pope could hardly condone, out of hand, the Aragonese occupation of Sicily: it was by all the standards of his time, no more than a successful act of international piracy; nor could he, humanly speaking, have expected the King of France to abandon the profitable holy war against the pirates, now, upon the instant, and at his sole word. The mischief done by the alliance of Pope Martin with King Charles must, perforce, work itself out.

Had Honorius IV enjoyed anything beyond one of the shortest of papal reigns he might, however, really have achieved the aims of his peace-inspired diplomacy. For within nine months of his election the whole international situation altered very remarkably. Charles of Anjou had died and his successor, Charles II -- a feeble king indeed by comparison with his formidable father -- was a prisoner of war in Aragon; Philip III of France had met his tragic death at Perpignan, and the new king, Philip IV, had tacitly abandoned the crusade against Peter III; Peter III himself had also died, of his wounds (November 10, 1285), and had divided up his lands: [389] Aragon and the new conquest, Sicily, were no longer united under the one ruler.

Honorius made good use of his opportunity in southern Italy. Taking over, as suzerain, the actual administration, he decreed a general restoration of law and government such as these had been before the first Hohenstaufen kings had built there the centralised, despotic state that was a model of its kind. And the pope even began to show himself willing to negotiate with Aragon about Sicily. At the same time, in Germany, Honorius IV arranged to crown Rudolf of Habsburg as emperor, to set thereby a seal upon Gregory X's restoration of the Empire. Since Rudolf had refused to join the crusade against Aragon, and had protested against German church revenues being used for it, this great gesture would fix firmly before the mind of the time the papal determination not to be the tool of French ambitions.

But Honorius IV was already in his seventy-seventh year, and long before the date appointed for the coronation (2 February, 1288) he was dead (13 April, 1287); his diplomacy had scarcely begun to put the new situation to good use. With Honorius there disappeared the last authentic representative of the skilful diplomatic tradition that went back to Innocent III, the tradition in which the popes had managed the rival chiefs of the respublica christiana while yet contriving never themselves to descend into the arena of inter-state competition, and always to give to their action the authentic note of an intervention from outside all conflict. Martin IV had dealt that tradition a terrible blow; his immediate successor had not been given the time to repair it; now would follow two long weakening vacancies of the Holy See [390] and two weak pontificates; and when, ten years after the death of Honorius IV, there would come once more a strong pope, moved to remould his universe after the best thirteenth century tradition, the moment had gone by. Nor was that strong pope, Boniface VIII, gifted with the wholly impersonal zeal, and detachment from all but the good cause, which had been the essence of the success he so needed to renew.

The best papal interpretation of the pope's role as chief of the respublica christiana called for action that never passed beyond diplomatic practice backed by sanctions that were spiritual. But in a world where every temporal thing could be regarded as help or hindrance to spiritual well-being, and where, by universal consent, the temporal was subordinate in excellence to the spiritual, it had only been a matter of time before the temporal - - blessed and consecrated for the purpose -- was, in a score of ways, pressed into the service of the spiritual. With Gregory IX (1227-1241) and Innocent IV (1243-1254) especially, [391] the Holy See's use of such temporal things as armies, fleets, systems of taxation, banking and loans, had expanded enormously; its whole conception of its own authority and jurisdiction over temporal affairs had expanded too. By the time of Martin IV and Honorius IV the papacy had become a kind of supranational European kingship, and to quote as a description, if not justification, of their authority the text of Jeremias about planting and uprooting [392] was now a commonplace of the stylus curiae. So long as the papal policies were victorious, what criticism there was of these new developments remained, for the most part, underground. But the succession of disasters in the reigns of these two last popes was an opportunity the critics could not resist. All over Italy the Ghibelline tradition was flourishing anew after a generation of eclipse; and alongside it there flourished a lively revival of the spiritual teachings associated with the great name of Joachim of Fiore. [393]

The Incarnation and the Passion of Our Lord were not, according to this new evangel, the high point of the divine mercy to man, and the foundation of all that would follow. The reign of Christ was but a preparation for a more perfect dispensation, the reign of the Holy Ghost. This was now about to begin. There would no longer be a church; the pope would joyfully resign his power to a new order of contemplatives; the active life would cease, and all Christendom become a vast monastery of contemplatives, vowed to absolute poverty; the law of spiritual effort would cease and, the Holy Ghost being poured out in a new and perfect effusion of gifts and graces, the law of spiritual joy would reign unhindered. Pope, cardinals, hierarchy, systematic theology, canon law -- these would not only disappear but their very presence and survival were, at this moment, hindrances that delayed the coming of the new age. The first duty of the faithful soul, then, was to abandon them, to abandon the reign of Christ, to leave the bark of Peter for the bark of John, and so prepare the way for the coming reign of the Holy Ghost. [394]

These theories are destructive, evidently, of all that Catholicism has ever claimed to be, and destructive also of the whole civilisation which, then, was very evidently bound up with traditional Catholicism. For many years, however, the theories had found enthusiastic support in one section of the great order of mendicant preachers, vowed to live in poverty, that was the great legacy to the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. To those elements in the order who had looked askance at the new detailed regulations called for by the very expansion of the order, and to those who fought the introduction of systematic theological study for the preachers, and to all those -- and they exist in every generation -- who had joined the brethren to satisfy and achieve their own spiritual ideals (and after their own way) these anarchical doctrines were most welcome. Already, in 1257, the pope had had to intervene to save the order from developments that would have dissolved it into a chaos of spiritual factions. Under the general then elected to govern it -- St. Bonaventure [395] -- who was maintained in office for seventeen years, unity was slowly and peacefully restored and the "Joachimite" tendencies disappeared. But they had never been destroyed. Always there had been friars who remained attached to them, and the tradition of devotion to them had been carefully handed down through thirty years in more than one convent of Languedoc and central Italy. The obvious preoccupation of the popes during all this time with the paraphernalia of courts and governments was fuel on which the fire of these "Spirituals" fed greedily. For years they watched these developments and denounced them. In the present disasters to the causes favoured by the Holy See, they saw the manifest chastisement of God's hand, proof that their own theories were true, and the best of all encouragement to press on the attack and destroy the present church.

The "Spirituals" possessed at this time (1287) a leader of great intellectual power, personal charm, and known austerity of life, Peter John Olivi. He was still a young man, [396] and had been a pupil at Paris of Peckham and of Matthew of Acquasparta, the two greatest of St. Bonaventure's own pupils. Olivi was an unusually complex kind of Franciscan, for he was an "intellectual," a scholastic philosopher and theologian indeed of very high power, a "Spiritual" also, and, lastly, a subtle commentator of the gospel according to Abbot Joachim. From a very early age he was regarded as a force in his order; Nicholas III had consulted him when the great decretal Exiit Qui Seminat was in preparation. And then, four years later, in 1282, at the General Chapter of his order at Strasburg, Olivi was accused of teaching false doctrine. His Franciscan judges condemned several of his philosophical and theological theories and Olivi accepted their verdict, under protest that the Holy See had not condemned them. For four years thereafter he was under a cloud, but now, in 1287, his old master, Matthew of Acquasparta, had been elected Minister General, and Olivi was given a lectorship in the great Franciscan school of Santa Croce at Florence. One result of this promotion was a great revival of "Spiritual" ideals in Tuscany.

Still more important to the Spiritual movement than Olivi's personality was, seemingly, the sympathy professed for these friars by one of the leading figures of the curia, the Cardinal James Colonna. He was the lifelong friend and confidant of the pope, Honorius IV, and his contact with the Franciscan Spirituals came through his affection for his very remarkable sister, herself a Franciscan nun of the strict observance and known to us as Blessed Margaret Colonna.

All the old controversies about the real meaning of the rule of St. Francis now revived. Were the "Spirituals" the only real Franciscans? Had the pope any right to lay down rules which -- so the "Spirituals" maintained -- contradicted the will of St. Francis? And with these controversies, and the controversies and fantasies about Abbot Joachim's theories, there went a medley of speculation, preached and rhymed about everywhere, as to the approaching end of the world, the coming of antichrist, the manner of man he would be, and where he was to be looked for. A great internal crisis was evidently threatening. Unusual wisdom, and sanctity too, would be needed in the popes if these restless elements were to be converted to a re-acceptance of the traditional way to perfection, namely dependence on the supernatural forces which the Church of Christ was founded to dispense. Toxins long latent -- whatever their origin -- in the mystical body were increasingly active in the blood stream. How could they best be rendered harmless, and the members they affected be made healthy?

It was against this background of threatening chaos and revolt that the cardinals debated the election of a successor to Honorius IV. After eleven months they came to a choice, the cardinal Jerome of Ascoli, Pope Nicholas IV: the new pope was a Franciscan.

But Jerome of Ascoli's election promised little to such of his brethren as were tainted with the apocalyptic theories of Abbot Joachim. The new pope had indeed, for a generation, been a leading influence in Franciscan life, but not in the circles where Olivi was a master. After a brilliant early career, as teacher in the University of Paris and administrator, Jerome had been sent to Constantinople in 1272 as the envoy of Gregory X, charged with the delicate business of bringing the Greeks to take part in the forthcoming General Council. At Lyons he had appeared with the Byzantine ambassadors as a kind of liaison officer and when, during the council, St. Bonaventure, now a cardinal, resigned his charge as Minister-General of the Franciscans, Jerome of Ascoli had been unanimously elected in his place (20 May, 1274). Very suddenly, only seven weeks later, the saint died, and from that time onward Jerome had been the determining force of orthodox development within the order. It was he who, as Minister-General, had summoned Olivi to deliver up certain of his manuscripts and on reading them had ordered them to be burnt for the harmful theories they contained. Another friar to feel the weight of his severity was Roger Bacon who also, amongst other things, showed a passionate credulity about the Joachimite prophecies. It was, seemingly, by Jerome of Ascoli's orders that this now aged Franciscan suffered his last monastic condemnation and imprisonment.

Nicholas III (1277-1280) had made use of Jerome as a diplomatist and, in 1278, had given him the red hat. The new cardinal had, at the pope's command, retained for a time the general direction of the order and he had been the chief influence in the promulgation of Nicholas' great decretal Exiit Qui Seminat (14 August, 1279) which gave an authoritative decision about the real meaning of the Franciscan ideal of religious poverty, in the hope of ending finally the long disputes of fifty years. The next pope, Martin IV, made him cardinal-bishop of Palestrina, the city that was the chief centre of the Colonna influence; and from now on Jerome of Ascoli gave himself to the care of his diocese. History knows little more of him, in fact, until his unanimous election as pope eight years later.

The death of his predecessor, Honorius IV, in April 1287, had not, of course, halted the war or the wartime diplomacy. The long conclave which followed was a golden opportunity for all parties to develop new positions and advantages. The most striking success had fallen to the King of Aragon. It was his especial good fortune that he still held prisoner Charles II of Sicily, and the special opportunity for exploiting this was the proffered mediation of the English king. Edward I (1272-1307). If Charles II -- religious, conscientious, timorous -- is the one lamb-like figure in all this long contest, our own Edward I, caught between the rival duplicities of the Aragonese king and Philip the Fair of France, [397] shows an inability to appreciate the realities of the case which, in another, might also be taken for lamb-like innocence of the ways of wolves. Time and again Edward's political anxieties made him the tool of the astute Alfonso and so, ultimately, destroyed all belief in the bona fides of his arbitration and played the French king's game, giving the pope whatever justification he needed for favouring France rather than England.

The first fruit of England's intervention was the Treaty of Oloron (25 July, 1287). Aragon consented to release the captive Charles II -- who had already renounced his rights to Sicily -- on the hard conditions of an immense money payment, the surrender of sixty-three noble hostages (among them his three eldest sons), and the pledge to negotiate a peace between the two Aragonese kings [398] on the one hand, and the chiefs of the Franco-Papal alliance on the other, within three years: should a peace satisfactory to Aragon not be concluded King Charles was to return to his captivity or surrender his lands in Provence. The Papal legates, present at the conference, allowed the treaty to be signed without any protest. It was a quasi-surrender of all that the popes had been fighting for in the last five years.

The King of France, however, refused the offer of a truce, refused the hostages a safe conduct through his territory, refused all facilities for the payment of the indemnity. The college of cardinals, also, showed themselves hostile to the treaty, and when, seven months after it was signed, they elected Nicholas IV, one of the pope's first actions was to quash and annul it absolutely, to cite the King of Aragon to appear at Rome within six months for judgment, and to order Edward I to negotiate the liberation of King Charles on terms that the Holy See could accept (15 March, 1288).

[genealogy page 39" />

Louis VIII + Blanche of Castile =>Charles of Anjou K. of Sicily 1266-1285 & St. Louis IX 1226-1270

St. Louis IX 1226-1270 + Margaret of Provence =>Philip III 1270- 1285

James I of Aragaon =>Isabella & Peter III

Philip III + Isabella =>Philip the Fair 1285-1314

Peter III =>Alfonso III & James II

NB. Margaret, the wife of St. Louis, was also largely Spanish by blood

The vigour of the papal reply was promising. It was followed up by the negotiation, under papal auspices, of a treaty between France and Castile (13 July, 1288) in which the two kings pledged themselves to a new attack on Aragon in alliance with the Holy See, and, after some delay from the pope, by new concessions to Philip IV of Church revenues to finance the offensive (25 September, 1288). The Ghibellines had been too active throughout the summer for the pope to be able to maintain his first independent attitude to France. Pisa had opened its harbours to the fleet of de Loria. At Arezzo the bishop had gone over to the same cause. At Perugia there were like activities, and at Rome itself the city was preparing to welcome the anti-papal forces as it had welcomed Conradin twenty years earlier. The pope was at the end of his funds. The only way to wring a loan out of the French was by more concessions.

Meanwhile Edward I had renewed his diplomatic work with the Aragonese and, for total result, he had achieved a treaty [399] still more favourable to Aragon than the treaty the pope had annulled. But the English king had, this time, made himself responsible for the indemnity and the hostages, and Charles II had at last been set free.

A sad dilemma awaited him, for the pledged negotiator of peace walked into a world of friends determined on war in his support. The pope ordered him peremptorily to resume the style and title of King of Sicily. The King of France refused to listen to his argument, and sent him on to Rome with a protective escort of French knights. The pope, knowing now that France was really behind him, felt stronger than ever before. He excommunicated the Ghibelline bishops of Pisa and Perugia, and ordered the King of Aragon to give back the money paid over in accordance with the new treaty; also to surrender the hostages and to come to Rome by October 1 (7 April, 1289). Whereupon the Ghibellines in Rome rose, and after bloody street fighting drove out the pope. He fled to Rieti, forty miles to the northeast of Rome, on the very frontier of King Charles' realm and, undismayed by this local defeat, on Whit Sunday (May 29) in the cathedral there, he crowned Charles as King of Sicily with all possible pomp. Just a fortnight later the Florentine victory of Campaldino (11 June) broke the Ghibellines of central Italy. Success, it would seem, had justified Nicholas IV's bold initiative. This was the high-water mark of his reign. The full flood of papal favours was loosed for the King of France, praise for his devotion in resuming the task taken up by his father in 1285, still more financial concessions (to be wrung in specie from the clergy of France), the preaching once more of the holy war against Aragon.

In reality it was the French who had triumphed; and this aspects of events was by no means lost upon the chief hindrance to their domination in western European politics, Edward I. The King of England was necessarily interested in Franco-Spanish relations because he was Duke of Aquitaine. The fact that he was also, as Duke of Aquitaine, the vassal of the French king made his interest -- and above all his present intervention as mediator -- highly unwelcome to the French, an irritant that came near indeed to being a casus belli. Philip the Fair had not been able to prevent the arbitration, but the award had been so patently anti-French and anti-papal that it had crashed almost of itself.

Edward now approached his problem from a wholly different angle. To divert the pope from the approaching offensive against Aragon, he proposed a new expedition to the Holy Land. He had, months before this, taken the cross and sworn his crusader's oath (December 1288) and now he besought Nicholas IV to rally all the princes of Christendom and to fix a date for the armies to set forth. No demand, publicly made by a special embassy, could have been more embarrassing, at the moment, for the pope. But, as if to prove him right in his preoccupation with the problem of Sicily, de Loria chose this moment to land a Sicilian army on the Italian coast not ten miles from the papal frontier and to lay siege to Gaeta (June-July 1289).

Edward was, for the moment, most effectively answered; and a Neapolitan army moved out to besiege in turn the Sicilian army besieging Naples. And now came two astonishing reversals for the Franco-Papal plans. First a terrible thunderbolt from the East, the news that the Sultan of Egypt had suddenly moved on Tripoli, the second greatest stronghold still in Christian hands, and had taken it. To the English ambassadors' demand that, in the interest of the Holy Places, they should be allowed to negotiate a peace or a truce between the armies around Gaeta the pope could not now say no. And then Charles II -- just as his son Charles Martel had the Sicilians at the point of surrender -- took command of his army, not, however, to fight but to reinforce the pleas of the English. In the conferences which followed he renewed to de Loria his old renunciation of all claims on Sicily, barely three months after the pope had solemnly crowned him as its king. But Charles II was now well away from the pope, and had outdistanced the legates sent to watch his conduct of the negotiations. By the time they arrived de Loria was celebrating his triumph.

All this was a great defeat for the pope, for the new treaty set free the Sicilian fleet to aid the Aragonese. The chances of a successful war against Aragon had suddenly shrunk, with Naples out of the war and de Loria set free to repeat the feats of 1285. With the aid of Charles II the papal diplomacy turned to consider how most easily to make peace with Aragon. The plan finally decided on was ingenious. Charles of Valois, titular King of Aragon since Pope Martin IV's grant in 1285, to enforce whose right the popes had been waging this holy war, would surrender his claims. Alfonso of Aragon -- styled by the popes a usurper, but the actual sovereign, descendant and heir of the long line of Aragonese kings -- would, in return for this recognition, surrender all rights and claims to Sicily. Finally, Charles of Valois, as compensation for surrendering his rights to Aragon, would receive in marriage a daughter of Charles II of Naples who would bring him as dowry her father's hereditary lands of Anjou and Maine. Charles II was willing. It only remained to win the consent of Alfonso, and of Philip IV of France; and in the first months of the new year (1290) an embassy especially strong in personnel left Italy for France. The legates were the two cardinals who had been sent to Gaeta, Gerard of Parma, cardinal bishop of Tusculum, and Benedict Gaetani, the future pope Boniface VIII.

It was now, at all costs, most important that the brother kings of Aragon and Sicily should realise that the King of France actively supported the pope's plan. No one understood this more clearly than the king and, yet once again, he prepared to turn to the permanent advancement of the royal power in France the pope's present need of his support. Philip the Fair's opportunity lay in a dispute that had, for some time now, been raging in France between different bishops and the royal officials.

It was, once more, the bitterly fought question -- never finally decided with any finality in these centuries when all Europe was Catholic -- of the power of the king over ecclesiastics in temporal matters, and the question of the power in temporals of ecclesiastical lords over their vassals; but the conflict was, this time, to prove the greatest opportunity so far given to a new force in the public life of Christendom, to the lay jurist trained in the law of ancient Rome, the man whose political ideal was to create anew, in the person of the medieval king, the emperor of Roman legal theory.

It has already been noted [400] how one very important feature of the reform of Christian life associated with St. Gregory VII (1073-1085), a turning point in the history of civilisation, was his care to recover, by learned researches, the half-forgotten tradition of the ancient Church law. The development, from these ancient sources, of the new scientific canon law, which, by the time of Boniface VIII, was an almost essential instrument of Church government, was contemporary with a great revival of the study of the law of ancient Rome, as this is set out in the corpus of law books published and imposed by the authority of the Emperor Justinian (527-565). [401] How the two systems developed side by side, each influencing the other, so that from the schools of Bologna in the twelfth century came the first great canonists and the first great civilians too, is one of the commonplaces of medieval history. [402] One, most important, result of this renaissance of legal study was the civilians' discovery and development of the Roman conception of sovereignty, as Justinian's books set this forth.

The authority of the ruler, in the early Middle Ages, over his subject who was a free man was considered to derive from a personal relation between the two. It was a relation symbolised in the act of homage, by which the vassal swore to be true to his lord, and by which the lord was considered bound to protect the vassal. What authority over the subject thence accrued to the lord was limited by known and mutually acknowledged conventions. Nor could the lord, rightfully, extend that authority outside the acknowledged field -- say in the matter of exacting financial aids -- without the previous consent of the inferior.

But the civilian legist discovered in the Roman Law an authority that was a different kind of thing altogether -- the res publica, public authority. For the Roman jurist sees not only the thousand, or the million, men living together under the rule of the one prince, but, as a thing distinct from any of them, or all of them, he sees also their collectivity, a something superior to them all, and for the sake of which, and in the name of which, they are ruled -- the State (if we may, by many centuries, anticipate the modern term). It is this res publica that is the real lord: and even the imperator is its servant, even when he is using those extraordinary, final, absolute, sovereign rights that are the very substance of his imperium.

As the centuries go by, the delegation of X or Y to be imperator, and so to wield lawfully these sovereign powers, becomes but a memory, a formality; and then less than that, until, long before the time of Justinian, the emperor has become indeed, what a medieval jurist describes him, lex animata in terris. The State is already a postulate of political order, to which all else is subject; from which all rights derive; owing its authority to none, but itself the source of whatever authority there is; and now the emperor has become the State incarnate. Nowhere do restrictions limit him that derive from any contract with his subjects. Whether he make new laws, or impose new burdens, his right is, of its nature, not subject to their discussion. [403]

That the splendour of this sovereign omnipotence -- impersonal, imprescriptible, indivisible, inalienable -- dazzled those on whom it first shone forth from the long neglected texts of the ancient Roman jurists, is understandable. And for a time they all clung faithfully to the primitive faith that, upon this earth, there could be but one such source of rights. Princes might be many, but there could only be one incarnation of such sovereignty as this. To the one emperor all other kings must then, in some way, by the nature of the case, be subject.

But gradually, during the thirteenth century, legists in lands where the new emperors of these later times -- the anointed chiefs of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation -- possessed not a title of real authority, in the bitterly anti-imperial city states of northern Italy, for example, and in France, developed an accommodation of the theory of sovereignty, that would make, say, the power of the King of France over the French the same kind of splendid, impersonal, all-powerful sovereignty. The new maxim began to have legal force that all kings were emperors, in respect of their own subjects; [404] and of them too was Justinian's dictum held to be true that the prince's decision has force of law. [405] No sovereign prince needs to seek assent or confirmation, from any source, in order that his will may truly bind his subjects.

There are many more implications -- of very great importance for the history of the legal, political, and social development of medieval Europe -- in these principles as they are now being developed. But the interest of these developments for this chapter is in a type of mind which they produced, the mind of the lay jurist who was now to win the Catholic prince's first victory over the papacy and always, henceforward, to fight the princes' battles against the claims of the Church. [406] These developments produced, also, the new "climate" in which, more and more, the fight was from now on to be waged. Against the "common good" which the theologians preached as the criterion of just laws, the legist would now set his own criterion of the "public welfare"; and it would be roundly stated that, given so good a system of law, theology ceased to be necessary for jurists. [407]

This new conception of royal authority which the study of Roman Law began to produce, would, in the end, alter the whole relationship between king and subject. It also threatened to alter the whole relationship between king and pope. [408] Whatever its importance, helpful or harmful, for the civil life of a nation, it is yet, by its very nature, a conception inimical to such an institution as the Catholic religion. From its first appearance, therefore, it is an idea which the popes never cease to fight; and the papal preoccupation with this struggle is, henceforward, a main topic of Church history in every century; for no theory about the nature of their power is more welcome to ruling princes than this that their rights are absolute, once the ingenuity of the jurists has really adapted it to their use.

The reign of Philip the Fair is the time when the jurisdiction of the French monarchy makes its first notable advances on the jurisdiction of the vassal lord's courts, advances based on a principle of political theory -- that all institutions in the kingdom are subject to the king's jurisdiction -- and the campaign is conducted systematically by the professional, civilian, jurists in the king's service. When such advances met the jurisdiction of a lord who was an ecclesiastic they encountered opposition that was due, not to something merely local, but to the Canon Law, to a reality more universal even than the king's jurisdiction, a system of law that was likewise based on principle. There had been, in recent years, fights of more than usual importance on this matter between the royal officials and the bishops of Chartres and Poitiers. When, in the late autumn of 1289, after the Truce of Gaeta, the King of France took up again the question of subsidies for the war, he pressed for a settlement of these dangerous disputes about the rival jurisdictions. If the pope wished for effective aid from France he must not hinder the king's plans to preserve the monarchy and keep the nation united. Philip the Fair is using the pope's extremity to strengthen his position at the expense of ecclesiastical immunities that are centuries old. He twice, within three months, sent to the pope a formidable list of his grievances against the clergy and signified to him that these complaints came in the name of "the counts, barons, universities and communes of the realm." [409] It is not merely the king, the pope is warned, but the whole nation that demands a settlement favourable to France.

Also, it appeared, Philip was disturbed at the pope's apparent partiality for England. In England, too, the last few years had seen trouble between the king and the Church on similar matters of jurisdiction, but the English king had managed to enforce his will without unfavourable comment from Rome. Moreover, in this very summer when Edward's intervention had, at Gaeta, for a third time in two years, cut across the papal policy, Nicholas had appointed one of Edward's subjects and chaplains, Berard de Got, to be Archbishop of Lyons. Here there was indeed a powder-mine, and under the circumstances the nomination was, on the pope's part, an incredibly imprudent move. For Lyons, on the very borders of France, was nevertheless a free city within the jurisdiction of the emperor, and the sovereign in Lyons itself was the archbishop with his chapter. Of late, the Emperor, Rudolf of Habsburg, had shown a new kind of interest in the affairs of these Burgundian lands, and at Besancon he had intervened with an army. Never had it been so important for France that the Archbishop of Lyons should be friendly; and the pope's nomination of Berard de Got gave Philip the opportunity of claiming to be himself the sovereign of Lyons, and of stating, under a new set of circumstances, the case he was already building up in the disputes at Chartres and Poitiers. That royal case went to the very heart of things, the fundamental relation between pope and king, between Church and State; and it is a foreshadowing of the great storm which, in another ten years, was to rock to its very base the good relations between the two. The king's advisers make no secret that their aim is a strong, centralised, singly-governed state, nor of their enthusiasm for this ideal. And, something never before heard of in France, they now flatly deny that the pope has any jurisdiction in temporal matters outside the lands granted him by Constantine. For the king, they declare, within his own realm is sovereign everywhere. Here indeed was grave matter, threats veiled perhaps, but threats without a doubt, and from the papacy's sole effective supporter in its struggle with Aragon and Sicily; threats of such a kind that, by comparison, the revolt of Sicily was but a trifle.

Nicholas IV's first reply to Philip was to increase his favours; and in order to prove how impartial past severities on the question of jurisdiction had been, a special embassy was sent to England to lecture Edward I on his shortcomings and bid him make himself more pleasing to God in this matter before offering himself as God's champion in the Holy Land. But this did not suffice. Philip the Fair returned to the matter with a further list of grievances and stiffened his terms to Charles II very considerably. Little wonder then that Nicholas IV, stirred mightily, sent his two best diplomatists and legists to France, nor that they were absent on their mission for a good twelve months.

The French king agreed to the arrangement proposed for the reconciliation of Aragon. [410] At Tarascon, in the following April, Alfonso III too, after some hesitation, accepted the pope's offer, pledging himself to come to Rome and make his submission.

Between the dates of the two political negotiations, the legates had settled with Philip the Fair the dispute about ecclesiastical jurisdiction, after more than one stormy scene with the clergy in a national synod that sat at St. Genevieve in Paris for fourteen days in the November of 1290. A royal ordonnance announced the terms of the agreement. The king's contention that he was, for all his lay subjects, supreme in matters of temporal jurisdiction was accepted; and clerics who no longer lived a clerical life were recognised to be subject to him as though they were laymen. .

On the other hand the king expressly reproved, and condemned as excesses, certain procedures of his officials that cut across the exercise of the bishops' jurisdiction in temporals. The old immunity of the clergy from lay jurisdiction, outside cases that concerned fiefs as fiefs, was confirmed, and also their traditional immunity from lay taxation. It was a treaty where compromises seemed equal or. both sides, fair and reasonable. But the concessions made by the king are, too often, qualified by captious clauses, and the rights recognised to the clergy are set out in language that is vague. There is nowhere mention of any penalty for the king's officials should they return to their old practices; and the important question who shall decide and how, if king and clergy disagree about the meaning of the pact, is left without any means of solution.

For the moment, however, all seemed well, and with a year of busy and apparently successful diplomacy behind them the legates returned to Rome (February 1291). The King of France had been reconciled with the pope and was making ready for the new, and no doubt final, assault on the Aragonese usurper in Sicily. The King of Aragon had abandoned his brother to his fate, and was preparing his own submission and the reconciliation of his kingdom with the Church.

And then, once again, came news from the East that wrecked in an instant all that the pope may have thought he had achieved. (On May 18, 1291, the Sultan of Egypt captured Acre, after a three- weeks' siege; the last stronghold the Christians possessed in the Holy Land had fallen, the most luxurious and civilised city of the Christian world. [411]

Close upon this catastrophe came another unexpected blow. The King of Aragon died, on June 18. His successor was his next eldest brother, the King of Sicily, late so skilfully isolated from all help from the Spanish homeland. Sicily and Aragon had now a single ruler. And finally, to complete the tale of losses, within another month the papacy's one disinterested supporter in Germany was dead, the Emperor Rudolf (15 July). Nicholas IV had treated him shamefully enough. He had put off the promised coronation, at the very time when he was preparing to crown Charles of Naples, the tool of Rudolf's rival, Philip the Fair; and he had intervened in Hungary to annul Rudolf's grant of the kingdom to his son Albert, preferring to the German yet another French prince, Charles Martel, the King of Naples' younger son. [412] Rudolf had nevertheless remained loyal to the role of peace-bringer assigned him by Gregory X in the restoration of the empire. Now he was gone, and in a Germany which ignored the pope rival candidates battled for the succession.

By the summer of 1291 the whole policy of Nicholas IV lay in ruins, and from all the malcontents of Italy a great sound of reprobation arose. Ghibellines, "Joachimites" and the dyscoli among the Franciscans all joined in a single cry. The true cause of the loss of the Holy Land was the pope's preoccupation with the war against Sicily; not the Aragonese kings but the Sultan was the pope's real enemy. What these critics, as bitter and as vociferous as they professed to be pious, did not know was that the Aragonese kings had been well informed about the Sultan's expedition before ever it marched. More, they had helped him to prepare it, for they were his secret allies, [413] sworn to recognise whatever "conquests, castles, fortresses, countries and provinces God should allow the Sultan and his sons to make in Syria, Laodicea and Tripoli." The Aragonese kings had also pledged themselves to disclose to the Sultan any plans made between the pope, the Christian princes or the Mongols for a renewal of the Crusade. Should the pope, or any Christian prince or religious order, attack the Sultan they were pledged to make war on him, and they bound themselves, finally, not to give any aid to the Christian forces in the Holy Land should the Sultan declare that these had committed any breach of the truce arranged at the time of the capture of Tripoli (1289). In return, the Sultan had guaranteed to the brother kings Sicily, the Balearic Isles and whatever conquests they might make from the French. The ink was still fresh on this infamous transaction while Alfonso was negotiating with the legates of Nicholas IV the pact of Tarascon, and pledging his dutiful submission to the pope. And now his successor, the new sovereign of the united kingdoms, James II, had the pope but known it, was the pledged and devoted ally of the Turk: as his father, the hero of the Sicilian Vespers, had been before him, in that very enterprise.

[genealogy page 49" />

LOUIS VIII 1223-1226 =>St. LOUIS IX =>Philip III 1270-1285 =>Philip the Fair =>1285-1314

Philip III 1270-1285 =>Charles of Valois K. of Aragon (by Martin IV, 1284)

LOUIS VIII 1223-1226 =>Charles of Anjou K. of Sicily (by Clement IV, 1226) =>Charles II =>Charles Martel K. Of Hungary (by Nicholas IV, 1289)

But Nicholas IV, ignorant of this supreme treachery, rose manfully to the task of rallying Christian Europe to the needed new assault on Islam. A council was summoned to devise plans and gather resources; a provisional date was fixed when the expedition would sail, March 1293; ambassadors were despatched to negotiate a peace between the great maritime states of Venice and Genoa, to Byzantium also, and to the Mongols, to knit together an alliance on a Dew grand scale.

Among the first to give a wholehearted adhesion was Edward I of England. But from France came a cold and cautious refusal. Philip the Fair was bidden to take the cross, or make over to those who would the crusade moneys which already, for years now, had been accumulating in France, and to consider a marriage between his sister and Edward I which, healing the new antagonism, would be the basis of the new holy war. But the French king noted how the new King of Aragon, reversing the policy of a generation, had made peace with Castile -- an anti-French peace; and he saw a strong movement in Germany to elect an anti-French emperor in succession to Rudolf. Once more Philip took up his old policy towards Rome, playing now through the Florentine bankers on the pope's fears and needs. He promised nothing about the coming crusade, but instead demanded a new crusade against Aragon and the concession of yet more tithes to finance it.

Nicholas IV gave him the only answer possible. The disaster in the Holy Land had changed the whole situation. Palestine must now be every Christian's first care. All else must wait until the council met and made its decisions (13 December, 1291). And yet, even in this extremity, the pope did not dare to show himself over- generous in reply to Edward I's offer of service. The English envoys also were told they must await the council's decisions and meanwhile the pope repeated his list of grievances against the king (12, 18 February, 1 March, 1292).

The time for the council was now drawing near and gradually there began to come in to Rome the opinions of the various provincial councils, summoned by the pope's order to sound the sentiments of Christendom. More than one of them, especially of course in France, supported Philip's schemes. The Sicilian question should first be resolved by the expulsion of the Aragonese; an emperor should be elected who would be favourable to France. What would have been the opinion and projects of the Church as a whole we shall never know, for the General Council never met. On Good Friday, 1292 (4 April), suddenly, unexpectedly, Nicholas IV died: and in this great crisis of Christian history the cardinals left the Holy See vacant for two and a quarter years.

The death of the pope brought the whole crusade movement to a standstill. Whatever the latent enthusiasm of the general body of the Christian people, the pope was the only sovereign really anxious about the disaster; and once it became evident that the twelve cardinals [414] would be unable to make a speedy election, the various princes turned their attention to questions nearer home.

The real centre of interest for the Christian princes was the activities of Philip the Fair. The moment was now at last come when the long antagonism between France and England must break into open war. The diplomatic duels of the last few years in which each had fought the other, over Aragon, over Sicily, over the affairs of the Empire and the middle states of the Lotharingian lands had, naturally, sharpened tempers on both sides. But this long fight had been, after all, secondary; a mere struggle for position preliminary to a definite settlement about two most important matters where interests vital both to France and to England were violently opposed. These matters were the clash of jurisdiction in the immense territories of France where Edward I ruled as Duke of Aquitaine, Philip the Fair's vassal; and next the war of semi-legalised piracy between the mercantile fleets of both kings that had gone on now for some years.

It is doubtful whether, by the year 1293, any human power could have averted the coming conflict. Certainly none but the pope could have delayed it any longer; the continuing vacancy of the Holy See made war inevitable.

Both sides looked round for allies and made settlements with their other foes. Philip the Fair now completely reversed his policy towards Aragon. In a war against England he could not afford to be simultaneously at war with a power whose fleet was master of the western Mediterranean, and he made peace with James of Aragon; [415] at the same time he patched up some of his differences with princes on his eastern border.

Moreover he intervened to create a French party in Rome. He found ready support in the Colonna -- that clan of Roman nobles who, for centuries now, had played a leading part in the politics of the papal state, lords of a score of towns and fortresses in the mountain country between Rome and Naples, [416] and masters thereby of the communications between Rome and the South; wealthy, ambitious and turbulent. Their present head was that James Colonna whom we have already seen as the patron of the Franciscan spirituals, a cardinal since the time of Nicholas III. In the late pope's reign he had been all powerful, and Nicholas IV, amongst other favours to the family, had created a second Colonna cardinal, Peter, the elder man's nephew. John Colonna, the older cardinal's brother had, in the same pontificate, ruled Rome for a time as senator.

James Colonna was, at this moment, one of six cardinals who remained in Rome, divided against their colleagues who had fled to Rieti from the plague, and divided still more bitterly among themselves into equal groups of pro-Colonna and pro-Orsini. The Colonna were the more powerful and had recently driven out the Orsini and it was to the Colonna cardinals that the French diplomacy now addressed itself, with offers of lands (September 1293).

In return the Colonna cardinals prepared to elect the kind of pope France wanted, and first they notified the absent majority of the Sacred College that they -- the three who alone had remained in Rome -- were the only real electors and that within a certain date they proposed to elect a pope. But this manoeuvre failed completely. All the train of canonists, Roman and foreign, whom the day to day business of the curia drew to Rome, was now at Rieti with the majority of the cardinals. The Colonna manifesto was put to them as a case in law. Unanimously they rejected the claim, and by five votes to two the Rieti cardinals made the decision their own, and fixed the coming feast of St. Luke (18 October, 1293) for the opening day of the conclave, the cardinals to assemble at Perugia. The Colonna had lost the first move, and the appointed day found them reunited with their colleagues at Perugia.

The election, however, still continued to drag, and the factions remained deadlocked for yet another ten months. In March 1294, the King of Naples paid the conclave a state visit. Beyond the fact that he was allotted a seat among the cardinal-deacons, and that he had a lively altercation with one of them, Benedict Gaetani, we know nothing of what he accomplished. In the papal state Orvieto was now at war with Bolsena; the Romans had overturned the government of their city, and called in as senator one of the last surviving officials of the Ghibelline regime of thirty years before. Affairs had gone from bad to worse and seemed about to touch the worst itself, when, in the first week of July, the news arrived that the cardinals had elected a pope.

For the task of reconstructing the badly-damaged fabric of Christendom they had chosen an old man of eighty-five, Peter of Murrone, a hermit who, for many years now, had lived in the inaccessible solitudes of the Abruzzi. The newly elected had begun life as a Benedictine monk. After governing his monastery for a year as abbot, he had sought leave to live as a hermit. Soon the spiritual want of the peasantry around forced him into new activity as a kind of wandering preacher, and he became to this mountainous countryside very much what St. Francis had been, fifty years earlier, to Umbria. Disciples gathered round him and presently Peter had founded a new religious order which followed a way of life based on the rule of St. Benedict. And next, once the various houses of the order were established, the founder had given up his place in it, and had gone back to the life of solitude that had been his ideal throughout. What brought him to the notice of the cardinals in July 1294, was a letter one of them had received from him, violently denouncing their incapacity to provide the Church with a head, and threatening them all with the wrath of God unless they found a pope within four months. The indignation of the letter seems to have been due to a meeting with the King of Naples (whose subject Peter was) after Charles II's fruitless visit to the cardinals at Perugia; the king had explained to the hermit what an immensity of harm the long vacancy had wrought. The effect of the letter was instantaneous. That same day the cardinals chose Peter for pope (July 5, 1294).

Their choice, of course, struck the popular imagination immediately, as it has held it ever since. And yet the brief reign of Peter di Murrone was, as might have been expected, little short of disastrous. No one, in the end, realised this more clearly than Peter himself. There was only one way out of the situation, and being a saint he took it, abdicating his high office as simply as he had accepted it.

Peter was not enthroned as pope -- and did not assume his papal name, Celestine V -- until August 29, nine weeks after his election. The interval was filled with the beginnings of the great scandal that marked the reign, the acts by which the King of Naples laid hold on the whole machinery of church government, while the eleven cardinals -- still at Perugia, still divided -- could think of nothing more helpful than to beg the man they had elected to leave Neapolitan territory for his own Papal State, and to refuse all his demands that they leave the Papal State and come to him at Aquila.

While this deadlock endured (July-August) the Neapolitans and some of the cardinals, and a host of adventurers, clerical and lay, made the most of their splendid opportunity. The basis of this was, of course, the new pope's utter and absolute inexperience of anything beyond the guidance of a small community of peasant monks, his excessively delicate conscience, his simple belief in the goodness of man, and his never-ending desire to put all his authority and power into the hands of others while he retired to solitude and prayer. "His entire and dangerous simplicity" one chronicler of the time remarks as a cause of troubles, while another writes of his unawareness of frauds and of that human trickery in which courtiers excel. [417] In these brief weeks the papacy fell into the most complete servitude which, perhaps, it has ever endured; and it did so with the pope's entire good will, utterly unaware as he was of the consequences of his acts.

The King of Naples was at Celestine's side almost as soon as the official messengers sent with the news of his election. Two high officials of the Neapolitan kingdom -- laymen both -- were given key posts in the administration of the universal church; another subject of King Charles was put in command of the papal armies; and a fourth, who as Archbishop of Benevento had already betrayed Celestine's predecessor, was given the highest post in the curia after the pope. Next the king suggested to Celestine that the number of cardinals was dangerously small -- there were but ten of them. Celestine agreed to create more, and accepted a list of twelve, all proposed by Charles. Five were Frenchmen, like the king himself. Of the others, six were clerics very much at Charles's service (and all Neapolitans) -- one of them the chancellor of the kingdom -- while the seventh was really promoted in order that the king's son, Louis, [418] could be given the vacated see of Lyons. Thus was the number of cardinals more than doubled in a day, and a permanent majority secured for Neapolitan interests.

The king's next move was to persuade the pope to leave the little town of Aquila, that had been the scene of these unusual events, for Naples, his capital. This proposal was strongly opposed by the cardinal Benedict Gaetani who, after holding aloof long after the others, had now joined Celestine. But the king's will prevailed and Celestine, with Charles alone beside him, and carefully segregated from the independent cardinals, set out for Naples. The journey saw still more surrenders to the king. He was freed from the oath he had sworn not to detain the cardinals on Neapolitan territory should Celestine chance to die; the Archbishop of Benevento was created a cardinal, privately and without any ceremony, or notification to the rest of the Sacred College; and the important law of Nicholas III that forbade any sovereign prince to accept the office of Roman Senator was repealed. Also, as the pope passed by Monte Cassino, he changed the rule (substituting that of his own order) and appointed one of his own monks as abbot.

Meanwhile, the papal resources had been shamefully exploited for the private profit of all who could get at the machinery; appointments, pensions, grants of land, of jurisdiction, of dispensations fell in showers. The pope was even induced to set his signature to blank bulls, which the recipient filled up as he chose.

And now the King of Naples overreached himself. It had been a lifelong practice with Celestine to pass the whole of Lent and of Advent in absolute solitude and prayer, making ready for the great feasts of Easter and Our Lord's Nativity. Towards the end of November 1294, as Celestine began to speak of his coming retreat, the king suggested to him that, for the conduct of church affairs during these four weeks, it would be well to name a commission of three cardinals with full power to act in his name. Celestine agreed, but a cardinal (not one of the three) came across this extraordinary document as it awaited a final accrediting formality. He urged upon the pope that here was something beyond his powers. The Church, he said, could not have three husbands. And with this, Celestine's scruples began to master him. Quite evidently he was not the man for the office; ought he not to give it up? and after days of prayer and consultation with friends and with the canonists, he finally resolved the two questions that tormented his conscience. Could the lawfully-elected pope lawfully resign the office? How ought this to be done? The first point Celestine appears to have decided for himself on the general principles of resignation to be found in the manuals of Canon Law. The cardinals whom he consulted agreed that his view of the law was correct. In the delicate technical question about the best way to carry out his plan, Celestine had the expert assistance of Gerard Bianchi, cardinal-bishop of Sabina, and of Benedict Gaetani. Finally, he issued a bull declaring the pope's right to resign and then, in accordance with this, before the assembly of the cardinals, he gave up his great office, laying aside his mitre, his sandals and his ring (December 13, 1294).

BONIFACE VIII, 1294-1303

Celestine V had renewed the law of the conclave. [419] This excellent measure brought it about that the vacancy was soon filled, for the election was over in a single day. At the first ballot Matteo Orsini was elected. He refused the office. The second ballot was inconclusive. At the third, the cardinals chose Benedict Gaetani, December 24, 1294. He took the name Boniface VIII.

Not the least of the difficulties that awaited whoever succeeded Celestine was the primary duty of neutralising the harm produced by the scandalous exploitation of the hermit pope's inexperience. And whatever the personal character and disposition of that successor, it would be only too easy to distort, for the generality of men, his restoration of the ordinary routine of a pope's life after the idyllic episode of Celestine -- the pope who rode upon an ass to Aquila for his coronation, and who had lived in a hut of rough planking set up in the splendid hall of the royal palace at Naples.

Boniface VIII was not the man to be turned, for a moment, from his obvious duty by any such anxieties as these. Indeed -- and this is one of the weaknesses in his character -- it is doubtful if they would occur to him as causes for anxiety. He had a firstrate intelligence, highly trained, and a first-hand acquaintance with every aspect of the complex problem before him, and with most of the leading personalities whom any attempt to solve it must involve. His own speciality was Law, and as a papal jurist Boniface was to close, not unworthily, the great series of popes that began with Alexander III, just over a hundred years before him. He was himself the nephew of Alexander IV, and was thereby kin to the great Conti family whence had also come Innocent III and Gregory IX. For many years the various popes had made use of him in diplomatic missions, and one of these, in 1268, had brought him, in the suite of Cardinal Ottoboni, [420] to the London of Henry III, in the turbulent years that followed the Barons' War. The French pope, Martin IV, had created him a cardinal, and Boniface, in the Sacred College, seems to have been what, as pope, he described himself, always a strong friend to the interests of France and of Charles of Anjou. Certainly in his great mission to France in 1290 -- the peak of his diplomatic career -- he had not given signs of anything like a militant independence of the lay power as such. Indeed he had been all that was tactful and conciliatory towards Philip the Fair. In the conclave at Perugia he had shown himself amused and sceptical about the move to elect Celestine V, [421] and for some time had kept aloof from the regime which followed. When finally he had rejoined his colleagues it had been to watch, somewhat disgusted, the uncontrolled plunder of rights and property that was the order of the day, and then, with his firm advice -- once this was asked -- to point the only way out of the scandal.

The nine-years reign of Boniface VIII was to be one of the most momentous in all Church history; it is, indeed, generally regarded as marking the end of an epoch, and the beginning of the new age when the popes and religion gradually cease to be taken into account as factors in the public life of the Christian nations. And from its very beginning the reign was one long crisis for the pope -- a crisis which, for by far the greater part, was not of his making and which arose from the convergence, brought about by a master adversary, of forces which had plagued the Holy See for years. The chronic problem of the Sicilian revolt; the active Ghibellinism of central and northern Italy; the anti-papal hostility among the Spiritual Franciscans; the determination of the French to maintain and increase their hold upon the Holy See; the renaissance of the wild theories associated with the prophecies of Abbot Joachim; the prevailing talk about the speedy coming of anti-Christ -- these were elements of trouble for which Boniface VIII was in no way responsible. Nor were the new elements his invention; the carefully fostered rumours, for example, that he was not lawfully elected, the jealous hatred of the Colonna cardinals, the libel that he was a heretic (this derived from Charles II's anger at his influence with Celestine and was heard from the very outset of his reign), the associated libel that he had first procured the invalid resignation of Celestine and then his murder -- all these elements were rapidly combined and used in the business of making the pope a tool of French policy.

On the other hand, Benedict Gaetani continued to be his old, violent self, too well aware of his own splendid talent, of the great successes of his public career. He was jealous of his authority, impatient of contradiction, his self-control easily shaken by evidences of malevolent opposition, of treachery, of blackmail -- and these were all to come in plenty. As a cardinal he had had the opportunity of improving his family's fortunes, [422] and he had used it to build up a really considerable feudal lordship in the countryside whence he came, the Lepini mountains and the valley of the Sacco, the neighbourhood of Anagni and Segni. He had not succeeded without making bitter enemies of those he had managed to dispossess. From among them the great clan of the Colonna, whose rivalry he had thereby challenged, would one day recruit willing assistants for the great raid on Anagni that brought the pope's life to an end. It had been a great career for thirty years or so, and it had brought Boniface many, many enemies. He knew well the general duty that lay before him, to deliver the Holy See from the toils in which the events of the last twenty-five years had enmeshed it. Once free of these it would resume its natural place, and lead Christendom as in the great days of Urban II, of Alexander III and Innocent III.

The new pope was confident, and a new strong tone would be evident from his first acts, but there would not be anywhere that reality of strength which only comes from new, generously conceived solutions; from solutions devised by the rare mind which, at a turning point of history, has divined that the actions of men in a long-drawn crisis have ceased to be merely the fruit of political expediency, and that they are now the signs and proof of fundamental change in their whole view of life. It was to be the pope's greatest misfortune -- and the misfortune of religion -- that he remained unaware of the nature of what was now happening, and hence had no more resource with which to meet a real revolution of the spirit than those political and legal combinations in which his genius excelled. The time needed a saint who was also a political genius: it was given no more than an extremely competent, experienced official. [423]

The new pope, immediately, so acted as to prove the freedom of his see from all royal influence. He solemnly rebuked and degraded the senior cardinal who had been Charles II's first and principal instrument in the enslavement of Peter of Murrone; he instantly (as requested by Celestine) [424] revoked all dispensations, grants, appointments, pensions, exemptions, incorporations, the whole mass, indeed, of what were now described as varia minus digne inordinata et insolita, made by his predecessor; also all promissory grants of benefices made since the death of Nicholas IV, Celestine's predecessor; he suspended all bishops and archbishops nominated by Celestine without the advice of the cardinals; he dismissed the laymen whom Celestine had appointed to curial posts; he dismissed from his household all the officials and chaplains appointed under Celestine; and he ordered the papal court to leave for Rome, forbidding any official business to be transacted as from Naples, or any letters to be issued until he had been crowned in Rome and had established the curia there in manifest independence. It was the height of the winter for that fearful journey over the mountains, the last days of the old year, but Boniface forced the pace, and Charles II was forced to accompany the caravan: the king, this time, in the suite of the pope. On January 23, 1295, Boniface was crowned, with all possible pomp, as though to drive home the lesson that the Church by no means refuses, in its mission, to make use of that world it is appointed to save by ruling it.

The first task was to bring together the kings of France and England, now furiously at war. For his legate to France Boniface chose his one-time adversary, the cardinal Simon de Beaulieu. It was misplaced generosity. Simon's rancour had survived, and his mission to the court of Philip the Fair (May 1295) was one starting-point of the schismatical manoeuvres that were the French king's most ingenious instrument to lever the pope into submission. Cardinal Simon laid bare to the French all the weaknesses in the pope's position: the discontent of some of the cardinals at this would-be Innocent III's ambition for his own family, the theories that he was not lawfully elected, the possibilities of the Colonna coming out in opposition to him, the latent menace of the innumerable followers of Abbot Joachim; in brief, the welcome news that at Rome all the material for a control of the pope lay to hand for whoever could organise it. Philip's response was to despatch to Rome the Prior of Chezy, to sound the disaffected and weld them into a party.

While the Prior of Chezy was busy at Rome undermining the new pope's position, reports and complaints were beginning to come in from France of taxes levied on the clergy without their consent, and of sequestration of Church property when payment was not made. The war with England had already drained the meagre resources of the crown, and knowing well the uselessness of asking Rome to grant Church moneys for a merely national war against another Christian prince, Philip the Fair defied immemorial custom, and his own pledge given in 1290, and imposed one tax after another upon Church properties. The like necessity was, at this very time, forcing Edward I of England to adopt similar measures, and the English king also was meeting with opposition from the clergy. [425] The bishops of France, indeed, made no protest, but from the clergy and the religious orders bitter complaints now went to Rome that evil counsellors were misleading the king, but "no royal judgment," it was urged, "can destroy canonical rights." The bishops were showing themselves dumb dogs that had forgotten how to bark, and "no one any longer dares freely to defend the Church against the powers of this world." Will not the pope come to their aid?

As in England and in France, so also was it in Italy, and the petition from France found Boniface already considering the problem. His interest was not lessened by a new turn of events in Sicily, [426] and the certainty of an active renewal of the war and therefore of the Holy See's needing all the ecclesiastical revenues it could gather in.

To levy taxes on all the inhabitants of a country has been, for generations now, one of the most obvious rights of all states; and taxation is a permanent feature of public life everywhere. There is never a time when every citizen is not paying taxes regularly, and as a matter of course, to the government of his country. It is only with an effort that we can realise that this is a comparatively recent institution, that for our ancestors the normal thing was that governments paid their way without need of such permanent assistance from the general body of the people, and that taxes were only lawfully levied when some extraordinary crisis -- a just war, for example -- arose. Moreover, taxes were the outward sign of servitude. Nobles were in many cases immune from them; so too were the clergy. A new theory of taxation was indeed beginning to be heard at this very time, namely that equity demands that all shall contribute to the cost of what profited all [427] . But, as yet, this was a new and novel idea. the pope only followed the then classic opinion that related taxes to servitude when, in answer to the complaints of the clergy of France and elsewhere, he published his new law. This is the bull Clericis Laicos (February 24, 1296). It is written in challenging confident style, without any attempt to argue the reasonableness of the now violated clerical immunity, or to make allowance for the possibility that this was at times abused. The laity -- so it opens -- it is well known, have always hated the clergy. Here is a new proof of this, in the extraordinary new financial oppression of the Church. So the pope, to protect the Church against royal rapacity, enacts the new law. Unless the Holy See had authorised the king to levy it no cleric must pay any state tax levied on church revenues or property. Those who pay such unlawful taxes are to be punished by suspension and, if they are bishops, by being deposed. Rulers who levy such taxes without leave of the pope, are to be excommunicated and their kingdoms placed under interdict. [428]

The law appears all the more severe when it is studied through the storm of conflict which it provoked. But there is every reason to think that the opposition was a surprise to Boniface, and that nothing gave him more genuine and painful surprise than that the opposition came from Philip the Fair. It was a general law, and Boniface had not in mind a particular attack on any prince -- least of all on the King of France. For what now occupied the pope, almost to the exclusion of all else, was the war in Sicily. No prince was at this moment more necessary to him than Philip, and throughout the following months favours continued to descend upon the French king from Rome, while the papal diplomacy was active in restraining the emperor from joining in the French war as Edward I's ally.

Nor did Philip the Fair, for months, give any sign of displeasure at the bull. He first learned of the bull when the Archbishop of Narbonne begged not to be pressed for taxes due, since a new law made by the pope forbade him to pay them (April 1296). The king was in no condition to begin a campaign against Boniface; the war with England was going against him. So, for the moment, he merely noted the fact and was content not to force the archbishop to pay. Later on, in that same year, he came to an arrangement with the emperor which saved him any need of papal protection on his eastern frontier and he now began to work upon the French bishops to petition the pope to withdraw the bull. The king's anger was such, they wrote to Rome, that the most terrible things would happen to the Church in France if he were not appeased.

And then (August 17, 1296) as part of the emergency regulations called for by the war, Philip did something that touched the pope vitally. This was to enact a law forbidding the export of munitions of war, horses, gold and foreign exchange, and expelling all the foreign bankers from France. This was done at the very moment when certain funds belonging to the Holy See, but actually in France, were about to be transferred to Spain, to pay the expenses of the King of Aragon's at last arranged visit to Rome. This, of course, was no ceremonial journey but a highly important move in the papal diplomacy. For the king was going to Rome in order to persuade, or force, his brother, the King of Sicily, to come to an arrangement with the pope. And much diplomacy, it may be understood, had had to be used to bring the King of Aragon to consent. Now, at this crucial moment -- and not without knowledge that the moment was crucial -- the King of France had given his answer to the pope's new law about clerical taxation. It is one of the oddest coincidences that so far was Boniface, even yet, from suspecting this enmity that, on the very day almost of Philip's edict, he wrote to France ordering the legate now to publish the bull. And he wrote on the same day the like instructions to the legate in England. The benevolence to France still continued. This last act was part of it. To publish the bull in France and in England, simultaneously, would be to cut off supplies from both the contending parties, and thereby end a war that was running against Philip. On the same day the pope wrote a third letter to support his pro-French intervention, to the emperor this time, warning him not to attack the French.

The whole action of Boniface during all these months does indeed prove "the confidence with which the alliance with France inspired him." [429] His bitterness when the news of the French edict undeceived him was all the greater. It took shape in the letter Ineffabilis Amoris, [430] a menacing if fatherly lecture addressed to the king, telling him that Clericis Laicos is a law which Philip, as a good Catholic, must obey. How foolish of him to choose such a moment as this to quarrel with Rome, when everywhere in Europe the French are hated ! The pope is the king's one friend. Let him dismiss his evil counsellors, the real authors of that aggressive policy that has antagonised all the Christian princes. Will he now, in a final blunder, force the pope to become their ally, or make the Holy See his principal enemy? Let him disregard the lie that the pope's new law is meant to forbid the clergy to help the state in its necessities. This was not ever the pope's meaning, as the pope has already made clear to the king's ambassadors.

This letter was known in France by the November, and in the next two weeks two very noteworthy commentaries on it began to circulate, the Dialogue between a Knight and a Clergyman and the tract which begins Antequam essent clerici. Both were anti-papal, shrewdly conceived, [431] well written, the work of the lay scholars in the king's entourage. To make his reply to the pope, Philip sent to Rome once more the Prior of Chezy; part of that "reply" was to work up the Colonna and "soften" the pope's defences in preparation for a new French aggression.

The winter months of 1296-7 were, in fact, a critical time for Boniface. The King of Naples -- a principal ally in the Sicilian business -- had taken up the case which the Colonna were preparing. These last were not the only cardinals dissatisfied with the pope's Italian policy, and the great rival of the Colonna, Napoleone Orsini, was hoping, through the King of Naples, to persuade Philip the Fair to undertake the salvation of the Church from the pope ! Then the King of Aragon's visit was a failure. He agreed to the plans proposed, but his ideas about the money that would be needed seemed to Boniface astronomical. The pope had not anything like such sums -- unless he could recover his money from France and also what the Cistercians and Templars (also in France) were willing to give.

And then gradually, slowly, the pope began to yield to the King of France. A new letter went to Philip [432] that was a milder version of the Ineffabilis Amoris and still more explicit in its statement that Boniface had in no way meant to control the king's right to take all necessary measures for the safety of the realm. But Philip should be more careful and precise in the terms of his edicts, lest he chance to infringe on the rights of others. The lines of the compromise are already evident, the formula to be devised to save face on both sides when both return to the status quo ante. A second, private, letter of the same date promised Philip a continuance of the old favours, and new ones also. The cause of Louis IX's canonisation was now complete -- the ceremony would be a pleasant ending to the contest. And a third bull, Romana Mater, also of the same date, practically suspended the Clericis Laicos so far as it concerned France. The principle of that bull, indeed, remained untouched; but a system of general exceptions to the law was announced. Its most important feature was that it was now left to the king to define what was a national necessity, and so a lawful occasion for imposing taxes on the Church without consulting the Holy See.

At the same time the legates in France were notified that, should Philip not allow the transfer of the pope's moneys out of France for the Sicilian war, they were publicly to declare him excommunicated. Boniface had not, by any means, wholly surrendered. And he gave signs of this in another, public, declaration only a few weeks later. This was a letter to the bishops of France allowing them to vote subsidies from Church moneys to the king, now in the first crisis of the revolt of Flanders. The pope is lavish in expressions of sympathy for France. He is most willing that the bishops should aid the king, and he gladly allows them to do so. But it is evident, from the letter, that the pope interprets the petition from France as an acceptance of the principle behind the Clericis Laicos, the right of the Holy See to decide whether church revenues shall be used to aid the state.

The French king was, however, very far from any such surrender as this and, as if to show it, he now worked upon the University of Paris to debate the question, already so much canvassed wherever Boniface had enemies in Italy, whether a pope could lawfully resign; and to publish its decision that he could not do so. As Celestine V was dead it followed that there was now no pope, and this declaration from what was the most influential centre of Christian learning, was an immense encouragement to the various enemies of Boniface.

The chief of these were, by now, the Colonna, and the pope's policy of checking them by increasing the power of his own kinsfolk drove the Colonna, in May 1297, to open rebellion. One of the clan attacked a convoy and captured papal treasure en route for Rome. The pope gave the cardinals of the family four days in which to restore the money, to surrender all the family fortresses and submit themselves. They ignored the command and were thereupon deposed from their rank. Whereupon, a day later, from their stronghold of Longhezza, they issued a manifesto denouncing the crimes of "Benedict Gaetani who styles himself the Roman Pontiff". Celestine V had no power to resign, they declared, and the election of Boniface was no election; a council must meet to put things right, and meanwhile the pope should be considered as suspended from his office. To this they added the accusation that Boniface had murdered his predecessor.

The pope was by no means to be intimidated. He excommunicated the whole faction of the Colonna as schismatic, and made a solemn declaration of the validity of his own election which, for three years nearly, the Colonna cardinals (who had voted for him) had fully and freely recognised. This was a telling blow; and it gained force when all the other cardinals set their signatures to a special statement which told the story of the conclave that elected Boniface, and declared that they wholly concurred in the excommunication of the rebels. The answer of the Colonna was to appeal to their allies in the University of Paris (15 June). Again they demanded a General Council, and denounced Boniface as a man whose sole aim was to amass a fortune. Bishops everywhere, they said, were appointed for a price, and the idea behind this centralisation of power was a hierarchy so dependent on Boniface that they would not dare to question his legitimacy.

It was with Italian affairs in this critical state that Philip the Fair now sent to the pope a mission headed by the chief of his professional lay counsellors, the legist Pierre Flotte. The Colonna had appealed to Philip to keep the promises of support made through the Prior of Chezy and now, on his way to Orvieto, Flotte assured them that his business there was to denounce the pope's crimes and solemnly publish the appeal to the General Council that should judge him: in which, as will be seen, Flotte lied -- but successfully, for, because of his assurance, the Colonna remained in the field and, prolonging the crisis, secured for the French that atmosphere of anxiety and alarm at the papal court in which they could best wring from Boniface the new concessions they had in mind.

In the diplomatic duel now engaged, the Frenchman, from the beginning, had the upper hand. For Boniface was in a weak position; the Colonna were still active and evidently confident, the French possibly willing to aid them, and, what was infinitely more serious, threatening to support a movement that denied him to be pope at all, and so initiate a schism. The danger here was deadly, and under the threat of it the pope gave in at point after point. The surrender was set out in a series of bulls -- sixteen in all. It amounted to a wholesale withdrawal of Clericis Laicos, a very serious modification of the clergy's immunity from arrest and trial in the king's courts, and grants of church money; and a well-timed threat of excommunication to the King of Aragon should he fail in his word to France. "In exchange for the imaginary document which had kept the Colonna in rebellion and Boniface in a crisis of anxiety, the ambition of Philip had won immensely important advantages, positions for future development." [433] From now on, for the best part of four years, Boniface VIII would be no longer the independent chief of Christendom but "an obliging agent for the schemes of Philip the Fair". [434] It was at the conclusion of these negotiations, and as a final gesture of good will to Philip, that the pope published the already decided canonisation of the king's grandfather, Louis IX. Through what a world of revolution had not French -- and papal -- policy passed since the saint's death, twenty-seven years before.

The history of the three years that followed the pope's capitulation at Orvieto to Pierre Flotte, makes the least pleasant reading of the reign. During the rest of that summer of 1297, and the autumn, the war continued to go well for the French in Gascony, in Brittany and in Flanders; while Edward had to face a new leader in Scotland, William Wallace, to suffer defeat from him and then find his own barons resolutely opposed to the whole war policy. It was as one result of a constitutional crisis at home that Edward, in the closing weeks of the year, sought a truce, and when it was made a condition that he should agree with Philip to submit the whole difference to the pope's arbitration he gladly agreed (18 February, 1298).

The French king knew well what he was about, and that he could count on having the pope, by the time the peace talks began, in such a position that France would control the decision The months that had seen the French position grow so strong while Edward's so weakened, saw Boniface VIII ever more feeble in face of the Colonna rebels and Sicily. The rebels still flouted his demands for unconditional surrender, and with the aid of such brilliant lampoonists as Jacopone da Todi they kept up a very successful anti-papal propaganda among the many friends of the Franciscan Spirituals, the visionaries, and the Ghibelline politicians of the towns. When they proposed a league with the King of Sicily, the pope was at the end of all his resources. His only hope lay in the Kings of Naples and Aragon; these would not move without a certainty of money supplies, and Boniface was all but bankrupt.

As a last alternative to surrendering to rebels and schismatics Boniface now proclaimed a crusade against the Colonna (27 November, 1297). To fight against them was as good an action -- and as munificently rewarded in spiritual favours -- as to travel to Jerusalem and fight the Turk. Everywhere legates were sent out to preach the crusade and to gather in alms. But response was slow, and the pope's anxiety had hardly lessened when, towards the end of March 1298, the Flemings and the English came into Rome for the arbitration.

The French followed some weeks later, and from the moment they arrived they had it all their own way. First they refused to take for arbitrator the pope as such: he must judge the case as Benedict Gaetani merely. And the pope agreed to this. Then they hinted to the pope that the English and the Flemings stood to them as the Colonna stood to Boniface -- they were rebellious feudatories. And Boniface, only a few weeks ago so grateful to the Flemings for their wholehearted support, now deserted them. And when the Flemings consulted their English allies-pledged not to make terms without them -- these advised them heartily to accept whatever the pope had in store for them. The English indeed had not much more to expect. The arbitrator's sentence was published on June 30, 1298. It carefully refrained from any decisions on the matters that had caused the war; it established a peace between the two kings, to be confirmed by a double marriage, and it provided for a mutual restoration of captured goods; the territorial questions were postponed. The whole decision had been inspired by one thing only, the pope's desire to please the King of France.

The papal arbitration of 1298 seems a singular mockery of the high claim to supervise the affairs of princes in the interests of justice. It marks the very nadir of the international action of the medieval papacy. But the same months which saw Benedict Gaetani so lend himself to the French king's game, were also those in which Boniface VIII, in the tradition of the greatest of the canonist popes, promulgated a great measure of law reform, completing and bringing up to date the first official code published in 1234 by Gregory IX.

The sixty years since that great event had seen the two General Councils of Lyons, both of them notable for a mass of new legislation. They had seen the reigns of a dozen popes, among them Innocent IV, "the greatest lawyer that ever sat upon the chair of St. Peter", [435] and Clement IV, one of the great jurists of his day. Boniface himself was no unworthy successor to such popes in professional competence as a lawyer. A host of new laws had been made, some to meet special emergencies, others for permanent needs. Until some official collection and arrangement was made of all this mass the law must, in very many matters, remain doubtful and uncertain. Nowhere was the harm of this state of things better understood than at Bologna, the university which was, for Law, what Paris was for Theology. Boniface was no sooner crowned than Bologna besought him to remedy the disorder.

The pope immediately set himself to the task in masterly professional fashion. Four canonists [436] were named and given extensive powers to review the whole mass of legislation since 1234, to suppress what was temporary or superfluous, to resolve contradictions, to abridge, to modify, to correct and to make whatever additions were needed to make the law's meaning clear beyond doubt. Their work was not to be incorporated in the five existing books of Gregory IX's arrangement; but to form a separate, sixth book of decretals -- hence its name, the Sext. In its own framework the Sext -- in its divisions and subdivisions, and in the headings for all these -- is a replica of Gregory IX's book. Thus the Sext is first divided into five "books", each corresponding to and bearing the same name as the several books of the larger collection. In each "book" of the new work, in the same order and under the same headings, are the chapters (capita) which represent the laws of the intervening sixty years. In all the Sext contains 359 chapters arranged under 76 titles, the greater part of these new laws (251) taken from the decretals of Boniface himself. As an appendix there are the Regulae Iuris, 88 in number. The commission took three years to complete its task, and on March 3, 1298, it was officially despatched to Bologna, with the bull promulgating it, as law for the schools and for the courts. This, and this alone, of the legislation enacted between 1234 and 1294 was henceforth law. In its opening words the bull declares once more the traditional divinely-given primacy of the Roman See over the whole Church of Christ, and it does so with that easy serenity that never deserts the bishops of that see whenever they refer to this fundamental truth: Sacrosanctae Romanae Ecclesiae quam imperscrutabilis divinae providentiae altitudo universis, dispositione incommutabili, praetulit ecclesiis, et totius orbis praecipuum obtinere voluit magistratum regimini praesidentes. . .: [437] it also makes an unmistakable reference to the pope's claim to be really, on earth, King of Kings.

At last the tide of war began to turn in Boniface's favour. In October (1298) the Colonna lost their last stronghold, their own "home-town" of Palestrina, to the papal army. And then the rebels gave themselves up. The two cardinals appeared before the pope; kneeling before him, they abjured their wicked manifesto of Longhezza, and acknowledged him as the lawful pope. "Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee," said the older cardinal to Boniface, "I am not now worthy to be called thy son."

It was at Rieti that Boniface received their submission, and he was still resident there when the famous earthquakes of Advent Sunday, 1298, shook the little town to its foundations, and set the whole population in flight to the fields and hills around. The pope had been about to begin a solemn pontifical mass, surrounded by all his court, when the shock occurred. He seems to have behaved with the coolness which all stories of him indicate as a leading characteristic and, with the impatience that was no less characteristic, he snubbed the suggestion of a pious cleric standing by, that perhaps this was the beginning of the end of all.

There were, however, hundreds of pious folk for whom the earthquake was a special revelation of the divine opinion about Boniface and his policies. Rieti lay in a district where every valley had its hermitage of Franciscan Spirituals. Not so far away was Greccio, hallowed for all time by its memories of the great Christmas night when St. Francis set up there the first crib. Down to this time it had continued to be a chief centre of the Spiritual movement. There, for more than thirty years, almost to the time of Boniface's election, had been the refuge of John of Parma, the great Spiritual who had been general of the order until St. Bonaventure displaced him (1257), and who, at the very end of his life, [438] barely ten years ago, had been summoned out of his retirement to advise the cardinal James Colonna. In no part of Italy was there more pious resentment against Boniface, and the coincidence that the pope was sojourning in the midst of it when a thing so unheard of as the earthquake happened, was the clear judgment of God on the surrender of the protectors of the Spirituals to the false pope who had persecuted these holy men.

To the Spirituals Boniface was no pope at all, for he had been elected in the lifetime of the last lawful pope, and the only pope to befriend their movement, Celestine V: and, his succession to Celestine apart, the party had known Boniface for years as a leading enemy. The election of Celestine had, in fact, followed very closely upon the return to Italy of a group of leading Spirituals, allowed by a rare Minister-General of the order who favoured the party to go as missionaries to Armenia. They presented themselves to the hermit pope, explained that they were the only true followers of St. Francis, that they desired only to live according to his rule and spirit (which they alone interpreted faithfully) and to be freed from persecution by the Franciscans now living a bogus Franciscan life according to a caricature of his rule. Celestine saw in them nothing more than men whose way of life recalled his own ideal. He seems not to have realised that, impliedly, to accept this version of the complicated disputes was to call in doubt a whole chapter of his predecessors' legislation; nor to have been aware of the heretical, Joachimite, strain that affected the whole of the Spiritual movement. Without any investigation, or qualifications, he accepted their story and allowed them to form themselves into a new order with Peter of Macerata at its head. They would, however, not be called Friars Minor but "The poor Hermits of Celestine V". [439]

Never had the hopes of this exalte revolutionary party been so high as at this pontifical decision. Peter of Macerata marked well how it could be interpreted when he changed now his religious name and called himself Fra Liberato. From all parts the zealots flocked in to join his order. And it was, seemingly, the realisation what an immense service Celestine had unwittingly rendered to the prestige of the heretical fantasies of these poor fanatics, that brought Benedict Gaetani to abandon his isolation at Perugia and join the pope at Aquila in the September of 1294.

For Benedict Gaetani knew all that was to be known about the great Franciscan question. He was an expert authority on all its phases since the time when, in 1279, Nicholas III had called him to take part in the long discussions out of which came the bull Exiit qui Seminat that gave an authoritative ruling about the Franciscan way of life; it was Benedict Gaetani, indeed, who had written the text of that famous decretal. In those weeks during which Nicholas III and his experts, and the leading Franciscans, had set aside all other business to find a solution for these troubles, the future Boniface VIII learned what he never thenceforward forgot, the invariable tendency in those who clung to the Spirituals' interpretation of the Franciscan ideal to cling no less firmly to the mad theories of Joachim of Flora. [440]

It is not surprising that, once elected pope, he revoked Celestine's rash concession to the Spirituals, nor that he removed from his high office Raymond Gaufredi, the Minister-General of the Minorites who had favoured them, and imposed on the order a superior of his own choice who would resolutely track down these zealots. A last touch to this unpleasant work of correction was a bull [441] that denounced the Spirituals as heretics and listed their several errors and offences. Henceforward it would be for the Inquisition to deal with them.

Nothing was, then, more natural than that the story of the earthquakes at Rieti, as the Spirituals interpreted it, should spread rapidly throughout Italy. The pope was soon threatened with a new crisis. [442] His reaction was to set the Inquisition to work, and soon there was a steady exodus of the Spirituals towards the Adriatic coast and across the sea to Greece and to that church of Constantinople which Joachimite prophecy pointed out as the last refuge of true spirituality. One tiny group -- five men and thirteen women -- passing through Rome, and finding themselves conveniently in St. Peter's, elected one of their number pope.

There was one leading centre of this anarchic religiosity where for years the pope's writ had ceased to run, namely the island of Sicily; and one effect of this latest revival was to stiffen Boniface still further in his determination to expel the Aragonese and to re-establish normal relations with this most important fief of the Holy See. The pope's latest ally, the King of Aragon, had for five months been vainly besieging his brother Frederick in Syracuse, and in his demands for money he outdid even Philip the Fair. Boniface, driven to the last extremity, had to put himself into the hands of the Florentine bankers and the Jews; and as he descended to these humiliations, his rage against the Colonna, to whose patronage he attributed the latest Franciscan ebullition, poisoned his judgment. They were still at Rieti, interned, with all the misery of an indeterminate fate hanging over them, and when the pope now (June 1299) ordered the total destruction of their town of Palestrina as a warning to all future time, and commanded the very site to be ploughed up and sown with salt, despair seized on the Colonna, and breaking out of prison, they fled across the frontiers, to be active centres of opposition as long as Boniface lived, and to nurse a revengeful hatred that would afflict his memory for many years after he was dead. The King of Aragon chose this moment to desert (I September, 1299) and the pope's sole support now was Florence.

It was now that the complicated manoeuvres of papal and anti-papal factions in the Tuscan capital brought into conflict with Boniface the greatest man of all this generation, one of the world's supreme poets, Dante Alighieri. In his verse, Boniface was to live for ever, the object of undying hate as a man and as a ruler, and, then for his last broken hours, the object of Dante's pity as a symbol of that defeat of the spiritual by its own which is the eternal tragedy of the history of the Church. The great poem still lay in the distant future, but in this crisis of papal history Dante set his talents as scholastic and legist to a vigorous attack on that theory of the supremacy of the spiritual power in temporal affairs which had long been current in official ecclesiastical circles, the theory of which Boniface was about to show himself a most uncompromising exponent. [443]

While Pierre Flotte had been successfully exploiting his hold on the pope to the advantage of France abroad, he had used these same years of what we may perhaps call the pope's servitude to consolidate at home the royal victory over ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There was not any attempt to enact anti-clerical laws: the crude mistake of our own Henry II enforcing the Constitutions of Clarendon was carefully avoided. But the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the layman was fettered as much as possible, hindered by every restraint which administrative genius could devise; and everywhere the lay lord was encouraged when he came into conflict with an episcopal suzerain. Soon there were bitter fights in many French sees. And Flotte was planning a new attempt to restore the Latin empire in the East, with a French prince reigning at Constantinople, with Venice and Genoa (reconciled at last and in alliance) supporting him. Italy too would be remodelled, after the plan accredited to Nicholas III, but this time with French princes on both the new thrones of Lombardy and Arles. It was to be a French dominated Christendom, of the kind Pierre Dubois was about to describe in his famous memorandum and, the pope playing his part, Tuscany and Florence would be added to the papal state.

The year which followed the pope's arbitration between the kings of France and England was hardly a time when Boniface VIII could flatter himself that it was principally his ideas and will that regulated the public life of Christendom. The year was to end, however, with a great demonstration of the role of the papacy in the interior life of its subjects, in the system of the believer's relations with God; a demonstration at once of the pope's understanding of his spiritual power and of the Church's faith in it and eagerness to see it exercised.

As the new year 1300 approached there was, to a very unusual degree, all that popular interest which greets the coming of a new century, the usual vague expectation of coming good fortune, but this time heightened -- no doubt very largely through the recent revival and popularisation of the prophecies of Abbot Joachim.

The numbers of the pilgrims bound for Rome began to increase, and when they arrived they showed themselves clamorous for the expected, extraordinary, spiritual favours. Once every hundred years, some of them were saying, by a special act of the divine mercy, not only were a contrite man's sins forgiven, but (upon appropriate penance done) the punishment his guilt deserved was also remitted. Boniface VIII does not, by any means, seem either to have created this spirit of expectation or to have exploited it at all in the service of his public policy. [444] Apparently he did little more than fulfil what, spontaneously, Christian piety was expecting of the Roman See when, by the bull of February 22, 1300, he instituted the Holy Year of Jubilee. It is, in effect, a grant "to all who, being truly penitent, and confessing their sins, shall reverently visit these Basilicas [of St. Peter and St. Paul] in the present year 1300. . . and in each succeeding hundredth year, not only a full and copious, but the most full pardon of all their sins." [445]

The news of the great concession brought pilgrims to Rome by the hundred thousand, and from every part of Christendom, as a mass of contemporary literature testifies; [446] and this novel and unmistakable evidence of what the papacy's spiritual power meant to the Christian millions seems greatly to have affected Boniface VIII.

To the pope too, it has been argued, the Jubilee was a year of special graces. The spring of this Jubilee year saw a joint embassy to Boniface from Philip the Fair and the new emperor Albert of Habsburg, and it saw also an anti-papal revolution at Florence: events that were the occasion, and the opportunity, for a reawakening in Boniface of his natural spirit of independence. But the enthusiasm of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims did more than put new heart into the pope mall now approaching his seventieth year. This concrete demonstration of universal faith in his supernatural office recalled to him in overwhelming force his first duty to be the father and shepherd of all Christian souls -- so it is argued. [447] The whole burden of Benedict Gaetani's case against Celestine V had been that the pope was too weak to defend the Church's freedom against the princes. But what else had Boniface VIII done, for years now, but surrender to princes? [448]

At the audiences given now to the French ambassador, the pope made no secret of his suspicions of Flotte's designs. Tuscany, he declared, was the pope's by right. The very empire itself was the creation of the Holy See, "All the Empire's honour, pre-eminence, dignity, rights" being, as he wrote at this time to the Duke of Saxony, "derived from the liberality, the benevolence and gift of this see." As popes have set up, so they can tear down. Tuscany is a centre of discontent and hate, and so "for the honour of God, peace of Christendom, of the Church, of his vassals and subjects," the pope has determined to bring it once more under the rule of the Church. The authority of the apostolic see suffices for this. The Florentines were reminded of the same truths. The pope is the divinely appointed physician of all men's souls and sinners must accept his prescriptions. To hold any other theory is folly, for any other theory would mean that there are those in this world whom no law binds, whose crimes may go unpunished and unchecked.

Full of this new strength, Boniface brushed aside now the attempt of the French ambassadors to bully him with tales of what his enemies were saying about his private life and his faith, and taking up the complaints that came in from France about the attacks on the jurisdiction of the bishops, he sent to the king the letter Recordare Rex Inclyte (July 18, 1300). [449] This is a remonstrance after the style of the letter -- Ineffabilis Amoris - - which had so roused the king in 1296. Boniface, as though that storm -- and the defeat it brought -- had never been, now told the king roundly that his usurpation of jurisdiction was seriously sinful, and that God would surely punish him for it did he not amend. The pope had, indeed, shown himself patient, but he could not be dumb for ever. In the end he must, in conscience, punish the king if the wrongdoing continued; and the tale of that wrong - - doing is mounting up in the files. As for Philip's advisers, these are false prophets: it is from God's grace alone that his eternal salvation will come.

From the stand taken in this letter Boniface never retreated, though it was to bring him within an ace of violent death.

Philip was too busy with the last preparations for the conquest of Flanders to make any retort, but when Flotte went to Rome in the following November (1300), the atmosphere of the court was very different from what it had been at Orvieto three years earlier. "We hold both the swords," Boniface is reported as saying, and Flotte as replying, "Truly, Holy Father: but your swords are but a phrase, and ours a reality." But there was no break of relations, and the French sent Charles of Valois into Italy to help in the double task of subduing Florence and Sicily. What brought the break was Philip's arrest of the Bishop of Pamiers in the summer of 1301. Serious charges were of course made against the prelate; he was lodged in the common prison, then taken under guard to Paris to stand his trial before the king's court. But his innocence or guilt was a detail beside the real issue, the right of the king to try him, and the fact that the king could trample down with impunity the most sacred of all clerical rights in public law. There is no doubt that this was a deliberately engineered cause celebre, whose success would mark a new era for the expanding royal jurisdiction, and greatly discredit the ecclesiastical world before the nation. [450] And mixed up with the charges against the bishop there was a quarrel about the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, in which prominent Franciscan Spirituals attacked the Dominican inquisitors, and in which it was made very evident that in Languedoc the Albigensian movement was still a power under the surface of life. It is one of the several ways in which Philip the Fair recalls our own Henry VIII that now, while leading a life of blameless Catholic orthodoxy, he was secretly patronising and encouraging these heretics and rebels against the Church as an obvious move in the business of bringing pressure to bear on the pope.

Dom Leclercq, also, notes how "the analogy between the methods employed in the trials of Boniface, of the Bishop of Pamiers, of the Templars and of Guichard de Troyes, reveals a single manoeuvring mind at work. . . [features that] give a family likeness to a set of trials which, actually, are very individual things. Another trait in which they are alike is that, in all cases, it is difficult to bring legal proof that the charges are false. The crimes faked in Nogaret's imagination are all crimes done in secret." H.-L., VI, pt. i (1914), p. 578.

It was late October (1301) before the trial of the Bishop of Pamiers came on. It went well for the king until, in November, the Archbishop of Rheims made a strong, formal protest, in a Provincial Council, held at Compiegne, against the whole business of the bishop's arrest. The council, indeed, laid an interdict on all who, in contravention of the canon law, arrested a cleric. If a cleric so arrested should be transported to another diocese, the diocese in which he was arrested was "interdicted", and the domains of the authority responsible for the arrest. A certain amount of skilful juggling by the king's legists and the more subservient of the French bishops did indeed soon find a way through this law. But the moral effect of the declaration of Compiegne was very great, and nowhere was it more welcome than at Rome. It was indeed the first real check to the king from the French bishops for many years, the first unmistakable sign to the pope that there were bishops in France on whom he could rely.

But Boniface had not waited for this sign before taking the offensive. Flotte had written him a lying account of the trial, [451] but it crossed a packet from the pope with a whole batch of strong, decisive letters for France. The revelations in the Pamiers case that the king was backing the Spirituals and the Albigenses, attacking the Inquisition, and that the mass of the French bishops were looking on indifferently at a most spectacular attack on the rights of their order, lifted the pope above the mere diplomatic game. From now on his action has the grave, apostolic quality of Hildebrand himself.

In these letters, written in the first week of December 1301, the pope demands that the Bishop of Pamiers be set free and allowed freely to make his way to Rome. [452] He suspends all those privileges granted to Philip in the matter of clerical taxation and church property. [453] He summons all the bishops of France to a council, to be held in Rome (in November 1302) where the whole question of the state of religion in France, and of the king's government of the country, will be examined; to this council the king is also invited, either to come in person or be represented there. [454] Finally there is a letter, a confidential letter, for the king. This is the bull Ausculta Fili, 5 December, 1301, [455] which as handled by the French, played a most important part in the events of the next eighteen months.

In many ways this letter hardly differs from the remonstrances which Boniface had already sent to the king. It tells him that his sins, as a Catholic ruler oppressing the rights of the Church, are notorious and a bad example to all Christendom. It lists these acts of usurpation and adds the crime of debasing the coinage. It again warns the king against his advisers, and points out that the whole of France is restive under their harsh, oppressive rule. The king cannot make the ministers an excuse for his sins: and the pope urges him to take part in the coming council. If he does not appear, its business will go forward without him. But all this somewhat familiar lecture acquires a new gravity from the opening passage of the letter, in which there is an extremely clear statement of the king's subject-status in relation to the pope, a statement in which we may read yet a further contribution to the controversy now engaged in which Dante, Pierre Dubois and the two great Augustinian theologians, Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo, are playing leading parts. The Church has but a single head, Boniface reminds the king, and this head is divinely appointed as a shepherd for the whole flock of Christ. To suggest, then, that the King of France has no earthly superior, that he is not in any way subject to the pope is madness, is indeed, the prelude to infidelity. This doctrinal note is to appear again, and still more strikingly, in the controversy.

Ausculta Fili was not a manifesto nor a public state paper, but a confidential letter sent privately to the king: and therein lay Flotte's opportunity. The bull was no sooner read than destroyed, and a tendentious summary of it drawn up, to be the basis of a most effective, national, anti-papal campaign. This summary -- called Deum Time from its opening words -- Flotte first submitted to a conference of theologians and legists. It adapted the teaching and claims of the first part of Boniface's letter to cover power and jurisdiction in the temporal sphere. The pope is now skilfully made to appear as claiming to be, because pope, the king's feudal overlord; the pope's consent is needed, then, for the validity of all such acts as sub-infeudation, and all the grants made so far for centuries must be invalid; also the king, as vassal to the pope, is liable for aids to the pope in all his wars.

This preparatory work done, it now remained to ask the nation's opinion on the papal claim as thus stated. The setting for this was the famous church of Notre Dame in the capital where, on April 10, 1302, representatives of the clergy, the nobles and the towns came together in the presence of the king. Flotte made a great speech, in the king's name, expounding the thesis of Deum Time, adding that the pope's citing the king to appear before him at Rome was a sample of what all had now to expect, the crown of all those usurpations of the Church of Rome on the Church of France under which, for years now, true religion had been withering away. The King of France had no superior as a temporal ruler; he stood out as the real champion of religion. And Flotte ended with an appeal to the nation to support Philip.

In the debate which followed, the suggestion was made that Boniface was a heretic and the nobles set their seals to a letter which, ignoring the pope, recounted to the college of cardinals all the charges made against Boniface, to whom they only referred as "he who at the moment occupies the seat of government in the church"; and, an incendiary statement surely, they say that "never were such things thought of except in connection with anti- Christ." Unanimously the laity pledged their support to the king.

The clergy were not so ready. They first asked for time to think it all over. It was refused them; they were told that opposition would only prove them the king's enemies. So they promised obedience to the king as vassals and asked leave to obey the pope, as they were bound, and to go to the Roman council. This also was refused them. And then they wrote to the pope, an anxious letter telling him that never had there been such a storm in France, never had the Church been in such danger, and begging the pope to abandon the plan for a council.

It was not until ten weeks later (24 June, 1302) that the delegates from the national assembly reached the pope with these letters. They were received in full consistory at Anagni, and two addresses were made to them, one by the Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta and the other by the pope himself. The cardinal explained that the Ausculta Fili was the outcome of many weeks' deliberation between the pope and the cardinals, and he denied absolutely the interpretation put upon it in France. It was a purely pastoral act of the pope who makes no claim in it to be the king's superior judge in temporal matters but who, all men must allow, is the judge whether those whose office it is to exercise temporal power do so in accordance with morality or not.

The pope spoke most vigorously. He reprobated the chicanery which, evidently, had falsified for the public his message to Philip. He denounced Flotte by name as the real author of the mischief and with him Robert of Artois and the Count of St. Pol; they would, he prophesied, come to a bad end. Once again he gave warning that the French were hated everywhere; all Europe would rejoice when the hour of their defeat arrived. The king seemed not to realise it, but the facts were that he was on the brink of disaster. As for the council -- this to the clergy -- it must take place and, severely rebuking the cowardice of the bishops, the pope threatened the defaulters with deposition from their sees. [456]

The cardinals sent a written reply to the letter from the nobles and in it they severely reproved their neglect to give the pope his proper style, and their reference to him by "an unwonted and insolent circumlocution".

Drama was never lacking at any stage of this long-drawn-out controversy, but now it touched the heights. While all France was being rallied to the support of the king against the pope, the French invasion of Flanders had begun. Philip had now to meet, however, not merely the feudal levies of his rebellious vassal the Count, but the enraged craftsmen of the towns. And before the envoys to Boniface had returned with the news of the pope's lurid warnings, barely a fortnight after the scene in the consistory, the French army suffered one of the greatest defeats Or its history, outside the walls of Courtrai, at the hands of Peter de Koninck and his weavers (Battle of the Golden Spurs, 11 July, 1302). And among those slain were the three men whom the pope had singled out by name, Flotte, Robert of Artois, and the Count of St. Pol.

Philip the Fair was now in full retreat, and not alone from Flanders, now lost to the French crown for ever. He no longer sounded defiance to the pope, but allowed the bishops to explain, apologetically, that they could not leave their sees at such a national crisis; and he sent an embassy to represent him at the council, an embassy which made full recognition of Boniface as pope (October 7, 1302).

Of what passed at the council we have no knowledge, but nearly half of the French bishops took part in it (39 out of 79). The pope had so far softened towards the beaten king that there was no repetition of the events at Lyons, sixty years before, when a council had tried and deposed the emperor Frederick II. There was no trial of Philip the Fair in 1303, nor sentence or declaration against him. The solitary outcome of the proceedings was a general declaration to the whole Church, the most famous act of Boniface's career, the bull Unam Sanctam (November 18, 1302). But there was not, in this, any reference to the points at issue with France, such as the list in the Ausculta Fili a twelve month before; these difficulties were now to be dealt with privately, through diplomatic channels, and as his envoy to Philip the pope chose a French cardinal, Jean Lemoine

"The dramatic context" of the bull Unam Sanctam [457] says Boase, [458] "gave it pre-eminence over all statements of papal power," and, we may think, has been largely responsible for the extraordinary interest in the bull ever since. For the more that is known of the detailed history of the struggle between Boniface and the French king, the less dramatic does the famous bull really appear. Two distinct -- though related questions have been in hot dispute for now nearly two centuries, namely the canonist's question about the pope's authority as pope over the temporal affairs of the world, and the theologian's question of his authority as pope to correct what is morally wrong in a ruler's conduct of temporal affairs. The bull deals chiefly with the second of these, but it also touches on the other. Throughout the dispute with Philip the Fair, Boniface VIII has denied that he is putting into force any claim to interfere with the king as a temporal ruler, ill the way for example that the king's suzerain (were there such) would have had the right to interfere. One thing alone has moved the pope throughout -- it is Boniface's constant assertion -- namely his duty to warn the king of sins he has committed in the exercise of his kingly office.

From this point of view Unam Sanctam does but continue the series in which Ineffabilis Amoris and Ausculta Fili have their place. But, unlike these, this last declaration is not addressed to the French king at all. It makes no mention of any particular ruler, but exposes the pope's case in general terms, reminding the Church in general of the nature of the pope's authority over all its members, and of the superiority which an authority of this kind must inevitably possess over every other kind of authority. And, after a certain amount of citation from Holy Writ -- none of it new -- and from Christian writing, to confirm the theory as it is explained, the document ends with the solemn definition, that for every human being it is part of the scheme of salvation that he be subject to the authority of the pope.

The general theme of the bull is that there is but one Church of Christ, a single body with but one head, Christ and his own vicar, Peter first and then Peter's successor. This scheme of things is not a human invention. It was God Himself who so arranged, when He commissioned Peter to feed God's sheep -- not these sheep, or those sheep, but all the sheep. It is by God's will that over His flock there is but a single shepherd. As for those who say they are not placed under the rule of Peter and his successor, they only confess thereby that they are not of Christ's flock, for there is but this one flock of Christ.

At the disposition of this one Church of Christ there are two kinds of power -- two swords, as the Gospel teaches us -- spiritual power and material; and the pope explains, following traditional lines, how the Church herself wields the spiritual authority, and when necessary calls upon kings and soldiers to wield on her behalf the material power. Of these two powers, the spiritual is the superior, in this sense that it is the business of the spiritual to call the material authority into existence, and to sit in judgment upon it should it go astray. Whereas the spiritual power -- in its fullness, that is to say (i.e. as realised in the papacy) -- is not subject to any judge but God. For although those who wield this spiritual power are but men, the power itself is divine, and whoever resists it strives against God. Whence it follows that to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is, for every human being, an absolutely necessary condition of his salvation: which last words -- the sole defining clause of the bull -- do but state again, in a practical kind of way, its opening phrases, "We are compelled by the promptings of faith to believe and to hold that there is one holy Catholic Church, and that the apostolic church; and this we do firmly believe and, unambiguously, profess, outside which church there is no salvation, nor any remission of sins. . . "

The bull Unam Sanctam then is a document which contains a definition of the pope's primacy as head of the Church of Christ; it is a reply to the claim, made by all parties to the anti-papal coalition, that their opposition is religious and Christian; it is a re-statement of the reality of the Church's divinely-given right to correct the sins which kings commit as kings; but the bull does not set out this right in detail, nor, though it states the right in the forms common to similar papal documents for now a hundred years and more, does it define this right in those forms, or indeed define it at all, except in so far as it is included in the general definition with which the bull ends.

The ultimatum sent through the legate to Philip -- for it was nothing short of this -- was dated November 24, 1302. It appears to have been delivered during the national assembly called for February-March of the new year. Philip's reply is embodied in his edict of March 18, 1303. The pope had noted that, seemingly, Philip was already excommunicated and the legate was given power to absolve him if he made amends. The misdeeds noted in Ausculta Fili were recalled once more. Should the king disregard this last admonition, the worst would certainly follow. The king was too shrewd to ignore the message; nor, though diplomacy had greatly improved his position since the disaster of Courtrai, did he make any sign of open defiance. He preferred to say now that his actions had been misinterpreted; and where he did not deny the charges he was evasive. If the pope was not satisfied with the answer, the king would willingly re-examine the case. It was hardly the kind of reply that would suit the pope in his new mood, nor did it at all convey the king's real mind. This public ordonnance, indeed, masked the greatest scheme yet of violence and blackmail.

While the king was playing before the assembly the part of the misunderstood champion of right, William de Nogaret, who since Flotte's death seems to have been the chief of his counsellors, was given a vague and all-embracing commission for some secret work in Italy (7 March, 1303). On March 12 he appeared before the king and his council and made a striking protestation. Boniface VIII was no pope but a usurper; he was a heretic and a simonist; he was an incorrigible criminal. Nogaret formally demanded that the king call upon the cardinals and bishops to assemble a council which, after condemning this villain, should elect a pope. Meanwhile Boniface, being no pope at all, should be put under guard, and this should be the king's care and duty; and the cardinals should appoint a vicar to rule the Church until it had once more a real pope. The king listened to this impassioned harangue with all due attention, and then solemnly consented to take on himself this serious duty. And Nogaret left to play his part in the scheme in Italy!

While he was busy there, knitting together all the forces and interests that hated Boniface, the public duel between pope and king went forward. For the pope did not leave unnoticed Philip's reply to the ultimatum. He wrote to his legate that it was equivocal, evasive, insulting, contrary to truth and equity, and sent a new summons to Rome to the regalist bishops. On both sides the decks were being cleared for action. Boniface at last recognised Albert of Habsburg as King of the Romans and emperor- elect and authorised the princes of the middle kingdom to do him homage. Most significantly of all, the pope brought to an end the long twenty-years-old Sicilian war by confirming the peace, made nine months before, [459] between Charles of Naples and his Aragonese rival, in which the Aragonese conquest of the island was recognised. And Philip made peace with England.

When Boniface's letters and instructions to the legate reached France, the king held them up and, once again, summoned the whole nation to hear his case against the pope. It was at the Louvre that they met, bishops, nobles, commons (13 June, 1303) and the scenes of the Easter meeting of the previous year were repeated. This time the mask was fairly off and the language more violent. The pope, it was said, was a heretic, an idolator, a man who worshipped the devil. There was something to suit each of the many interests represented, and the assembly called out for a council which should judge Boniface and demanded that the king see to its summoning. And Philip, with a great protestation of love and respect for the Holy See, accepted the task. Of the twenty-six bishops present all but one set their names to the protestation and appeal. Just a week later the doctors of the University of Paris came together in the king's presence and made common cause with him, and on June 24 there was yet a third meeting, for the whole populace of Paris, in the gardens of the king's palace. The king was present, and his sons, the ministers, the bishops, the clergy. There was a harangue by the Bishop of Orleans, another by a Dominican and a third by a Franciscan; and with enthusiastic shouting and cheering, the people acclaimed the royal policy of emancipating religion from the rule of Boniface. There followed a purge of the foreign religious who stood firm for the pope, and commissioners were presently touring the whole of France, summoning everywhere meetings after the model of Paris, where the king's case was put and signatures gathered in support of it. Everywhere this organised propaganda of schism succeeded; nowhere did anyone oppose it.

In all these three months no news had come from Nogaret and on August 15 the Prior of Chezy was despatched on the last of his sinister missions to Italy. He was to find Nogaret and commission him to publish, to the pope's face if possible, the charge of heresy and the appeal to a General Council. But, by the time he reached his man, all was over.

The news of all the exciting events in Paris had leaked through the king's censorship and, on the very day the Prior of Chezy received his instructions, the pope replied to the king's attack in five letters which suspended, until Philip had submitted, all elections to vacant sees, all nominations to benefices, and the conferring of all degrees by any university. The Archbishop of Nicosia, the chief of the ecclesiastical traitors, was put under interdict, and finally there was a blistering manifesto that at last exposed the king, and defended to the world the reasonableness of the pope's action.

The French king, Boniface noted, [460] had never questioned the pope's orthodoxy while papal favours were lavished on him. His present criticisms arose from resentment that the pope had dared to remind him of his sins. This is the whole reason for his charges against the pope. The king makes them in bad faith, hoping to escape the need of amendment by blackmailing the superior whose duty it is to correct him. The pope cannot submit to this. "What will become of the Church, what value will remain to the authority of the popes, if kings, princes and other powerful personages are allowed such a way out as this? No sooner will the pope, successor of St. Peter and charged with the care of all the flock, propose to correct some prince or magnate, than he will be accused of heresy or taxed with notorious, scandalous crime. Redress of wrong will be altogether impossible, the supreme power will be wholly overthrown." How could the pope possibly grant this French demand that he summon a General Council and submit himself to its judgment? How could a pope lend himself to the spread of such a demand? Far from assenting to it, says Boniface, the pope will, in his own time, and despite any such disingenuous appeal, proceed against the king, and his supporters too, unless they repent their now notorious crimes.

Boniface immediately proceeded to that further action he threatened, and began to draft the bull solemnly excommunicating Philip and threatening his deposition if, within a fixed time, he had not submitted and sought absolution. It was arranged that the bull should be promulgated in the cathedral at Anagni, where Boniface then was, on September 8. Nogaret learnt of what was in preparation. He realised that, at all costs, the publication of the sentence must be prevented. With a mixed troop of soldiery, gathered from half-a-dozen neighbouring towns hostile to the pope, with one of the Colonna at his side, and the standard of Philip the Fair in the van, he made for Anagni. On the eve of the appointed day he arrived before the little hillside city. Treason opened a gate for his force and after a short, sharp battle, he and his men, to the shouts of "Colonna! Colonna!" were in the papal palace and presently in the papal presence. They found the old pope prepared for them, robed and clasping his crucifix. Nogaret demanded that he withdraw the excommunication and surrender himself for judgment. He replied that he would rather die. Sciarra Colonna offered to kill the pope. The cooler-headed Frenchman held him back. Then Colonna struck the old man in the face.

The outrage was the end of Nogaret's success, however. While he parleyed with the pope, and while the Italian soldiery plundered the palace -- all they wanted and were fit for, Nogaret noted -- the fighting began again in the town, and shouts of "Death to the French!" filled the streets. It would have ruined the French monarchy to kill the pope; it was not practicable to carry him a prisoner to France through an aroused Italy. Indeed, unless Nogaret speedily fought his own way out of Anagni, he would hardly survive to tell France what he had accomplished. Within twenty- four hours he and his band were well away on the road to the north.

But the shock of this terrible Sunday was more than the pope could endure. His rescuers found a broken old man, muttering desires and threats, incapable now of thought or decision. The cardinals persuaded him to return to Rome, and within three weeks he was dead (October 20, 1303).

PHILIP THE FAIR'S LAST VICTORY, 1303-1314

Ten days after the death of Boniface VIII the cardinals went into conclave. They chose one of the late pope's most loyal supporters, the one-time Master-General of the Order of Preachers, Nicholas Boccasini; and they chose him on the first ballot. This pope was no Roman of noble family, but a poor man's son from the Venetian provinces. He was not a canonist but a theologian; and if a skilled and experienced ruler of men, he was, first of all, an excellent religious, a priest with a pastoral mind. As Master- General, Boccasini had kept his order obedient to the pope in the crisis of 1297, and he had been at Boniface's side in the hour of his last ordeal. But he had had no part in the struggle that opened with Ausculta Fili. During the last two critical years of Boniface's reign he had been away from Rome, serving as legate at the court of Albert of Habsburg. It was possibly because he was the one cardinal whom the late struggle had not touched that he was so speedily elected. Here was a man whom none hated because of any share he had had in that struggle, and a pope who would be able to devise policies free from the strain and fury of the late crisis. And his first gesture as pope gave a clear sign, that, while he would be loyal to the past, he would be loyal in his own way. The disciple of Benedict Gaetani did not call himself Boniface IX; with a nuance that only emphasised his substantial loyalty, he announced himself as Benedict XI.

Benedict XI was in a strong position, able to be generous, therefore, towards Philip the Fair, and so resolved. The policy he proposed to adopt was simple, delicate and firm. Nogaret, still in Italy and faced with the perplexing problem of a new pope who was, too, a saintly man, with whom worldly motives would be of no avail, was again meditating the threat of schism -- the Colonna cardinals had had no share in the conclave, therefore the election was not valid. But Benedict XI passed over this new intrigue for the moment; making, from the beginning, a careful distinction between the various personalities responsible for the outrage of Anagni. The case of each should be separately decided according to the past mind and future intention of each. The chief culprit, the one most culpable from his rank, was of course the King of France. If he made a movement of submission Benedict would take it as sincerely meant, and would show himself the representative of Him who called himself the Good Shepherd. And when the pope forgave he would save the position his predecessors had declared themselves bound to defend, and the reality of the forgiveness, by saying outright in what spirit he was acting. But Philip must first of all make his move towards the pope. Benedict was no "appeaser", diplomatically angling for submission by a timely announcement that the terms would be easy and the gesture nominal.

No official notice, therefore, of the new pope's election was sent to Philip, nor any copy of his first inaugural letter. The pope treated the king for the excommunicate he was, and was careful to remind the world of this by a renewal of the sentences of his predecessors, that all those are excommunicated who hinder free communication between the Holy See and the bishops. The deadlock did not last long. It was conveyed to Philip that the pope did not desire revenge; that forgiveness awaited him if he would submit; that the pope would only be inflexible about the principle of free communication with the Church in France: in this matter satisfaction would certainly be demanded, liberation also of all the clerics imprisoned, and revocation of the royal edicts.

Meanwhile, the Colonna cardinals had come out from their hiding places, to throw themselves at Benedict's feet and beg for mercy. He showed himself generous, although "for the moment" he did not restore them to their dignity or their benefices and possessions. The same determination to make peace in a truly priestly spirit moved Benedict to send a legate to Florence, in the first weeks of 1304, with very extensive powers to settle differences and to reconcile the forces so hostile to the Holy See since the "pacification" of the town by the pope's champion, Charles of Valois.

The embassy from Philip the Fair reached Rome in March 1304. It was, by the fact, a submission; and yet a submission craftily prepared, by accepting which the pope would give the French a basis to argue in the years to come that Benedict's pardon was an implicit condemnation of Boniface. Nogaret, returned now to the French court, was as influential as ever and no less dangerous. But Benedict cut through the snares by pardoning the king without any discussion of conditions, and stating that he did so as a loving father will always forgive a repentant child. The bargaining which Nogaret had planned, and which would have made the resultant absolution from excommunication seem an act in a kind of treaty or compromise, did not take place. The pope's simple directness turned the diplomatist's schemes with ease. Philip was absolved because he had repented, and because to forgive the repentant is the pope's first duty -- and all Europe would know this from the bulls. And when the King of France, his position as a Catholic prince restored, raised the question of Pope Boniface's actions towards him, renewing the demand for a council to judge this, Benedict put him off without discussion or comment of any kind.

A few weeks later, from Perugia, whither the pope had now moved, further bulls took up the detail of the settlement, and firstly the problems raised by the law Clericis Laicos. The pope did not retreat from the principles then laid down, but he did the cause of the monarchy a great favour and, very skilfully, he did this by virtue of those very principles. The penalties of Clericis Laicos against lay oppressors of Church revenues were maintained, but those which awaited the clerics who submitted to such oppression were modified, so that they no longer fell automatically on such transgressors. And to help France in the desperate state to which debasement of the coinage had reduced the country, the pope allowed the clergy to pay a tithe for two years and the first fruits of all benefices coming vacant during the next three years, the moneys to be used for the restoration of the coinage (13 May, 1304). About the same time a series of decisions proclaimed what was in fact a general amnesty for all those who had fallen under excommunication in the more recent crisis following the bulls Ausculta Fili and Unam Sanctam. Whoever would repent, the pope would forgive, because he was the pope, and on terms fixed by himself -- namely the sincere repentance of the culprit.

One group was however excepted, and by name, from this generous act of reconciliation. Not even Benedict XI's charity could presume that Nogaret had repented his share in these acts, or that he was likely to do so. At this very moment he was still actively manoeuvring for the council that should degrade the memory of Pope Boniface, and striving to form a party among the cardinals. Nogaret was still, in fact, the principal force at the court of France, influential, determined, ruthless; and the new pope, in the action he now took, showed unmistakably that it was not any fear to strike or any lack of strength that had prompted his willingness to be reconciled with the enemy. A special bull -- Flagitiosum Scelus -- denounced by name Nogaret, Sciarra Colonna and fifteen others for their share in the outrage at Anagni. They were summoned to appear, in person, by the coming feast of St. Peter, June 29, to receive the sentence their crime had merited. To this citation they paid no attention; but before the pope could proceed to the next act against them, he was no more. Benedict XI died, very suddenly, at Perugia on July 7, 1304.

The sudden disappearance of Benedict XI was such good fortune for the policies of Nogaret that, not unnaturally, the rumour spread that the Frenchman had had him poisoned. The Church had lost that rarity, a pope who was a saint, [461] 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, [462] 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, [463] 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) [464] 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. [465] 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. [466]

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. [467] 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 [468] (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. [469] 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 [470] 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; [471] 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). [472] 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). [473]

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 [474] 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. [475] 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. [476]

Endnotes

318: Battles of Benevento (1266) and Tagliacozzo (1268). 2 All but two months November 1268 to September 1271. [back]

319: All but two months November 1268 to September 1271 [back]

320: cf. DIGARD I, p. 3 [back]

321: Ibid I, xxix [back]

322: ib. I, p. 21: " La lente collaboration des interets et de l'opinion publique." From the time of the death of St. Louis the lenteur which has been so largely the secret of the success achieved is to give place, for generations, to something else. [back]

323: Philip II (Augustus), 1180-1223 [Louis VIII, 1223-1226.] St. Louis IX. 1226-1270 [back]

324: FRANTZ FUNCK-BRENTANO, Le Moyen Age (3rd edit. 1923), pp. 338- 9. [back]

325: DIGARD I, pp. xxix-xxx [back]

326: Two years and ten months [back]

327: Appointment dated November 5, 1272, in POTTHAST II, p. 1662 [back]

328: Filioque in the Latin text. The word Filioque was first added in Spain (589) then in France, then in Germany; it was added at Rome by Benedict VIII (1012-1024) at the request of the Emperor St. Henry II: cf. ADRIAN FORTESCUE, The Orthodox Eastern Church, pp. 372-84 for a useful explanation of the theological question. [back]

329: The chartophylax was, at this time, one of the chief officers of the patriarch's curia. He was the keeper of the archives, and also the chancellor through whom all the official correspondence of the patriarch was done. It was also his office to examine all candidates for high ecclesiastical positions, and he was the judge in a court where all cases involving clerics were tried (civil and criminal cases) and which also decided matrimonial suits. cf. the admirable article Beccos (John XI) by L. BREHIER in D.H. & G.E., VII (1934), p. 355. Beccos had been for many years in the confidence of Michael VIII. He had been his ambassador to Serbia in 1268, and to St. Louis IX in 1270. [back]

330: Canon 1; text in DENZINGER (no. 460). [back]

331: The legislation of the council is here described according to its subject matter. The chronological order (i.e. the work accomplished in the six public sessions) so far as this is known, is as follows: Sess. I (May 7) pope's opening addresses. 2 (May 18) constitution on the Filioque, and tithe for six years voted in ail of the churches endangered by the Saracens; Sess. 3 (June 7) canons 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,8,9,15,19,24,29,30; June 24, the Greeks arrive; July 4, the Tartar ambassadors arrive, Sess. 4 (July 6) the Reunion of the Greeks with the Roman See: July 15, death of St. Bonaventure; Sess. 5 (July 16) canons 2, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31; Sess. 6 (July 17) canon 23, and pope's concluding sermon. The legislation of the council was gathered together and promulgated as law by the pope, Nov. 1, 1274. [back]

332: Quod praelati faciebant ruere totum mundum. MANSI XXIV col. 68. [back]

333: Canon 2. Ubi periculum [back]

334: In eodem autem palatio unum conclave. . . omnes habitent in communi [back]

335: Canon 3 [back]

336: Canon 4 [back]

337: Canon 5 [back]

338: Canon 6 [back]

339: Canon 7 [back]

340: Canon 9 [back]

341: Canon 8 [back]

342: Canon 10. [back]

343: Canon 11 [back]

344: Apud curiam Romanam [back]

345: Canon 21 [back]

346: Boniface VIII abolished this modification in 1296 [back]

347: Third Council of Lateran, Canon 3 (1179). [back]

348: Canon 13 [back]

349: Benefices were said to be held in commendam when granted to a titular who already held a benefice of such a kind that it was not possible to execute the duties attached to each. The commendatory, as the one dispensed to hold in commendam was styled, received all the revenues, and enjoyed all the rights but was bound to provide a deputy to do the work, and to ray him the stipend fixed by ecclesiastical authority. The system developed into one of the worst abuses that have ever tormented religion. Even Trent could do no more than beg the popes, where this was at all possible. not to give abbeys in commendam to personages who were not monks. [back]

350: Canon 14 [back]

351: Canon 18. [back]

352: Canon 15 [back]

353: Canon 24 [back]

354: canon 16 [back]

355: canon 28. [back]

356: Innocent IV had already iegislated against it. cf. (in the Sext) c. 1. (P4), VI De cens III 20. [back]

357: canon 12 [back]

358: canon 22. [back]

359: Usurer, i.e. one who charged interest for a money loan, money then being a non-productive thing, a commodity consumed when used. [back]

360: Canon 26 [back]

361: Canon 27. [back]

362: Canon 25 [back]

363: Bull Nuper in concilio: Bullarium Ordinis Praedicatorum I. p. 524. [back]

364: First Council of Lyons, canon 12 [back]

365: Canon 20 [back]

366: Canon 31 [back]

367: Canon 17 [back]

368: Canon 19. This alone, of all the canons of the Council, was not incorporated in the Corpus Iuris Canonici, when Boniface VIII in 1296 made the next addition to it, viz., the Sext. [back]

369: For all this cf. the bulls of Gregory IX Nimis Iniqua (1231), and Nimis Pravos (1227 or 1234) embodied in the Corpus Iuris Canonici Cc 16, 17, X, De excessibus prelatorum, V, 31. [back]

370: Fourth Council of the Lateran, canon 13 [back]

371: cf. Vol. II, ch. x, II. [back]

372: April 29, 1281, POTTHAST II, p. 1758. [back]

373: January 16, 1275 [back]

374: A French Savoyard, to speak more correctly [back]

375: Letters dated November 20, 1276 [back]

376: February 22, 1281 [back]

377: BREHIER, 243 [back]

378: March 30, 1282 [back]

379: cf. Map 1 [back]

380: November 18, 1282: Michael VIII was also, this same day, excommunicated anew, for the third time [back]

381: March 21, 1283 [back]

382: Martin officially recognised him as king, May 5, 1284 [back]

383: June 4, 1284 [back]

384: There was not universal enthusiasm for the scheme in France. At Bourges, in November 1283, the barons had made it a condition that Martin IV should proclaim the war a crusade, and levy tithes for it not only in France but throughout Christendom. The pope, reluctantly, agreed. At Paris, in January 1284, when the decision to go to war was taken, the last of Louis IX's counsellors, Matthew of Vendome, was opposed to it, and so was the heir to the Crown, the future Philip the Fair, who openly sympathised with Peter of Aragon. cf. FAWTIER 280 [back]

385: He had already suffered the loss of Naples at the hands of Roger de Loria (battle of June 5, 1284, in which his heir, the future Charles 11, was captured). [back]

386: cf. FAWTIER 281-2. [back]

387: Edward was inevitably concerned with Franco-Aragonese relations, by reason of his own position as Duke of Aquitaine, the all but independent ruler of a province that lay between France and Aragon. To have, as ruler of Aragon, the son or brother of his suzerain the King of France, would obviously have been a serious disadvantage, and, although remaining neutral in the war, Edward, for years, did his diplomatic best for the Aragonese kings. [back]

388: James Savelli, great-nephew of Honorius III (1216-1227). [back]

389: Aragon to his eldest son, Alfonso III; Sicily to the second son, James II. [back]

390: One of eleven months; the other of two and a quarter years [back]

391: cf. Vol. II, ch. x, 1, III [back]

392: I have set thee this day over the nations, and over kingdoms, to root up and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant. Jer. I, 10. [back]

393: For Abbot Joachim, cf. ED. JORDAN, Joachim de Fiore in D.T.C. VIII (1925) [back]

394: cf. DIGARD 1, 3; II, 134 n.1. [back]

395: The personal choice of his predecessor Blessed John of Parma, deposed by the pope, Alexander IV, for alleged over-indulgence to the "spirituals." [back]

396: Born at Beziers in Languedoc, about 1248 [back]

397: In blood Philip the Fair was very much the Spaniard is it fanciful to suggest that he inherited through Blanche of Castile, their common ancestress, that natural grim austerity which he had in common with Charles of Anjou? or that through his own Aragonese mother he derived that mastery of ruse by which he undoubtedly resembles her brother, the main author of all the Sicilian wars, Peter III? and Peter's sons Alfonso and James, who were to be matched against him for years? It was Philip's daughter, Isabel, who was the terrible queen of our own Edward II. A table will explain the king's descent and relation to these princes. [back]

398: i.e. of Aragon and of Sicily. [back]

399: Treaty of Canfranc, 28 October, 1288 [back]

400: cf. Vol. II, ch. VII, II in fin. [back]

401: The Institutes (an official textbook of legal education); the Digest (an official classified collection of the opinions of the greatest legal thinkers of ancient Rome) the Code (an official collection of imperial laws down to 534). These three works together with the Novellae (a collection of 175 laws of later date than 534) form the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the bible of the legist (or civilian) as the official collection of papal decretals (commonly called Corpus Iuris Canonici) was of the canonist. It should be noted well that in these palmy days of the great systems, the cleric out for a career equipped himself with a knowledge of both, and was indeed what his university degree described him, Iuris Utriusque Doctor (I.U.D.). [back]

402: The detail of that mutual interaction hardly belongs to a general history. cf. MEYNIAL Roman Law, and also LE BRAS, Canon Law, for a very useful summary, in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, ed. CRUMP JACOB [back]

403: MEYNIAL (op. cit., 382) expresses it succinctly: the State "is invested with an unlimited authority over the individual." [back]

404: Rex est imperator in regno suo. [back]

405: Et quod principi placuit, legis vigorem habet. (Instit. i, 2, 6, Digest i, 4, 1, 1, pr.) MEYNIAL (op. cit., 385) notes this dictum as "the starting point of all Romanist doctrine from the twelfth century," i.e. from the revival of systematic study of the Roman Law. [back]

406: Or use the prince to fight the battle of a new conception of public life, and even of international order. Funck Brentano draws the new type well in Le Moyen Age (1923), p. 342. The legists, he says, "are men who belong to a new class. Law is their science; the royal authority their passion. They have studied the history of Rome and they dream of a world empire such as the Caesars governed; they have a veneration for their homeland, wish to see it powerful and respected; their minds arc filled with a vision of Gaul and its ancient frontiers, towards the reconquest of which all their energies are bent. It is not, any longer, from prestige of blood that their strength derives, nor does it come from feats of arms. Their strength is in their own intelligences and their devotion to the king's authority. It is they who are the real founders of the modern state. . . one single idea dominates their lives, becomes indeed an obsession, to enlarge the sphere of the king's rights." Such are the legists; such were Pierre Flotte, William de Nogaret, Pierre Dubois, chief counsellors of Philip the Fair and the organisers, executants and publicists of his contest with the papacy. "They founded." says Renan, "that noblesse de robe whose first act was to establish the omnipotence of the king, to bring low the power of the church, and whose last act was the Revolution." [back]

407: DE LAGARDE, La Naissance de l'Esprit Laique au declin du Moyen Age I, 162 quoting Accursius (1182-1260), author of the Great Gloss. For a jurist to study theology is waste of time, nam omnia in corpore iuris inveniuntur [back]

408: cf. MEYNAL, op. cit., especially pp. 382-6, and DE LAGARDE, op. cit., I, 146-68. [back]

409: DIGARD I, 101: cf. also pp. 91-105 of this work (and the documents, published for the first time, in Appendix to Vol. II, 247-75, the grievances and remonstrances of Philip IV to Nicholas IV), where the forces, and the strategy, that will one day bring down Boniface VIII, can be seen already at work. It may, perhaps, be noted here as one of the main services of Digard's masterly book that it shows very clearly that there was a "Philip the Fair" problem for the Church before Benedict Gaetani ever became Pope Boniface VIII. His detailed study of the reign of Nicholas IV leaves this in no doubt. [back]

410: Treaty of Senlis, 18 August, 1290 [back]

411: HEFELE-LECLERCQ VI, pt. I, p. 273 [back]

412: The third king in twenty-five years "provided" by the pores from the royal house of France. In the table these three kings are shown in capitals [back]

413: Treaty Of Cairo, 25 April, 1290. [back]

414: Six Romans, four Italians, two French [back]

415: One effect of these Franco-Aragonese negotiations was that Aragon now gave back Sicily to the King of Naples, thus bringing to an end the war of the Sicilian Vespers (Treaty of Figueras, 7 December, 1293). But the Sicilians refused to be handed back to French rulers [back]

416: cf. map in BOASE, Boniface VIII. [back]

417: [Ed note: blank in original text document.] [back]

418: A saintly Friar Minor, who died in 1297, three years later than these events Archbishop of Toulouse; canonised by John XXII in 1317 [back]

419: 28 September, 1294; POTTHAST II. p. 1918; and 10 December ib. p. 1921 [back]

420: The future. Adrian V; cf. supra, p. 23 [back]

421: DIGARD I, 177, quoting Cardinal Stefaneschi's contemporary Vita S. Celestini. [back]

422: A dispensation of Nicholas IV in 1291, allowing him to keep his many benefices, gives one source of his wealth and, incidentally, shows how far the evil of pluralities and 'absenteeism' had already gone in the Church. Cardinal Benedict Gaetani was, at this time, Archdeacon of Bar in the diocese of Langres (France and of Poissy in the diocese of Chartres (France), Abbot of Alatri, canon of Langres Chartres, Lyons, Paris and St. Omer (France), of Todi, of Anagni and of St. Peter's Rome, at Rome he possessed also the churches of St. Agatha in Suburra, the Quattro Santi, S. Angelo in Foro piscium and S. Susanna; and he was Rector of Towcester in the diocese of Lincoln. Register of Nicholas Iv, nos. 7382, 7383: quoted DIGARD I 208. [back]

423: RIVIERE (p. 94) notes Boniface as being more skilled in the knowledge of texts than in the handling of men. He was destined to compromise the fortunes of a great truth the primacy of the spiritual in all the affairs of life not only by his own personal views of what this involved, but by his unawareness how much the time and manner of his official exposition of that truth mattered. (cf. ib. 95.) [back]

424: This general revocation was made two days after his election, 27 December 129 and ratified by the constitution Olim Coelestinus Papa, of 8 April, 1295 cf. POTTHAST II, p. 1928, Registres Boniface VIII, no. 770. [back]

425: The story of the fight about taxation between Edward I and the Church has not been told in any detail, lest it should complicate unduly this summary account of the leading event in the reign of Boniface VIII. But the English conflict was long- and it was bitter not so much as a conflict with the Holy See as with the chief of the local episcopate, Robert Winchelsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, a valiant man of principle, whom the papal diplomacy used unscrupulously. (cf. CAPES, The English Church in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, pp. 26-45.) Edward I had already begun the slow national reaction against the vassalage of England to the pope long before this attempt to tax the Church. The Statute of Mortmain (De Religiosis Viris) in 1279 was a royal interference on a national scale with the property rights of ecclesiastical bodies- and six years later, in connection with the writ Circumspecte Agatis, the king set restrictions to the clergy's control of tithes. (For text of these two documents, see GEE and HARDY, nos. xxviii and xxix, pp. 81-5.) When the French war began Edward, in November 1294, demanded as an aid one half of the clergy's incomes and, after a protest, the clergy surrendered. The next year he asked for a further quarter or a fifth. The clergy offered a tenth, and finally the king accepted this. And now the clergy appealed to Rome for protection. [back]

426: By the peace of Figueras (Dec. 7, 1293), Aragon had restored Sicily to the King of Naples. But the Sicilians rebelled against their prospective subjection to French rulers, and plans were prepared to make the island an independent kingdom under Frederick, the King of Aragon's younger brother. For a time Frederick wavered. Celestine V had confirmed the treaty (Oct. 1, 1294) and Boniface, in May 1295, had induced Frederick to abandon the Sicilians, in return for a marriage with the heiress of the Latin emperor of the East and a distant prospect of future glory. But the lady refused Frederick, and then, February 8, 1296, he accepted from the Sicilians the crown of Sicily. The war was on, once again [back]

427: cf.: Richard of Middleton, O.Min., lecturing at Paris c. 1290. "Certe valde equum est communes expensas eorum fieri quorum est communis utilitas:" quoted DIGARD II, 120. [back]

428: Translation of text of the bull in GEE & HARDY, NO. XXXI, p. 87. [back]

429: DIGARD I, 277 [back]

430: 20 September, 1296; Registres de Boniface VIII, NO. 1653; DIGARD I, 277-80. [back]

431: For example, this single specimen from the second work cited: "Holy mother Church, the bride of Christ, does not consist of clergy alone, but of the laity as well. There is only one faith; there is only one Church, made up of both clergy and laity. Are we to say that it was for the clergy alone that Christ died? God forbid." DUPUY 21. For the Dialogue, cf. infra, pp. 103 n., 107 [back]

432: Exiit a Te nuper, 7 February, 1297. [back]

433: DIGARD 1, 345. [back]

434: ib. "un executeur complaisant des calculs de Philippe le Bel". [back]

435: MAITLAND, Moral Personality and Legal Personality in Selected Essays, 1936, p. 228 [back]

436: William de Mendagout, Archbishop of Embrun; Beranger de Fredde, Bishop of Beziers; Richard of Siena, the pope's vice- chancellor; the legist Dino de Rossonibus, who compiled the Regulae Iuris. [back]

437: "We [Boniface VIII], the ruler of the most holy Roman Church which the unsearchable depths of God's providence has, in His unchangeable plan, set in authority over every other church, and which He has willed should secure the chief rulership of the whole world. . . ." For the bull cf. Code of Canon Law (1918) the Preface to which reproduces almost the whole of it. [back]

438: He died in 1289; beatified by Pius VI, 1777 [back]

439: DIGARD I, 193 [back]

440: DIGARD I, 197-8. [back]

441: Sepe Sanctam Ecclesiam, August 1, 1296, Registres de Boniface VIII, no. 1641; cf. Digard's note, op. cit., I, 240. [back]

442: The Spirituals, however, had no longer Olivi to lead them. That great figure had died this very year. He had spent no more than two or three years at Florence (cf. sup., p. 37! when Raymond Gaufredi promoted him to teach at Montpellier. The friar's reappearance in his native Languedoc had been the beginning of fresh troubles there. But Olivi now seems to have satisfied the Inquisitors that his theological views were orthodox, and for the last few years of his life he had lived among his brethren at Narbonne peacefully enough, but no longer in such a position of influence as a university post. On his death-bed he had submitted to the judgment of the Church all he had written and his tomb was for long a centre of pilgrimage until, about 1319, the superiors of the order commanded its destruction lest it should become a centre of heretical spirituality. By this time some of Olivi's doctrines had been condemned by the General Council of Vienne, 1312 (for the text of the condemnation cf. DENZINGER, nos. 480- 483), although Olivi's name did not appear in the sentence. But Olivi also left behind him a commentary on the Apocalypse, the thoughts and meditations of his last years. in which the approaching doom of the Church as now organised is explicitly foretold: the faithful will shortly see the second Herod who will again condemn the poverty preached by the Gospel the Spirituals will leave the carnal church and pass over the seas to preach to the Greeks, the Saracens, and the Tartars and although the new Caiaphas is at hand, St. Francis will return to save the elect and there will arise a descendant of Frederick II destined to conquer the empire, and France. and the carnal papacy. It is not surprising that the whole work of Olivi should fall under suspicion and the Friars be forbidden, by their superiors, to study it. The treatise on the Apocalypse was furthermore condemned by John XXII in 1326 (cf. DIGARD II, 4-6 DOUIE, 112-16). Miss Douie's comment is very much to the point, "The baleful fascination of the doctrine of Joachim of Flora for the Zealots [i.e. the Spirituals] can best be understood when we consider the extent of its influence over the mind of their best representative." For DIGARD (op. cit.,) Olivi is a master of subterfuge and his dying profession of submission insincere, cf. here, DOUIE (op. cit., 114) saying there is little doubt that Olivi identified the Church of his day with the great harlot of the Apocalypse, the scarlet woman in fact. [back]

443: The theories of the De Monarchia of Dante are discussed later, cf. infra pp. 109-112. [back]

444: No act of Boniface VIII lent itself so easily to the calumny and caricature of the bitterly anti-papal historians of the sixteenth century (and their successors) or to the amusement and cynicism of the Voltaireans past and present. MANN, Lives of the Popes, Vol. XVIII, pp. 172-83, deals faithfully with the legends. Digard's note, op. cit., II, 24, is useful: "Since Michelet's eloquent pages about the Jubilee of 1300, historians have excelled themselves in presenting it as a great triumph for the papacy that really turned the pope's brain, and drove him to process through the streets of Rome robed as the Roman Emperor, as a legend we have dealt with elsewhere relates." Legends die hard and the Bampton Lectures for 1942 show this as still surviving; cf. JALLAND, The Church and the Papacy, 417n. BOASE notes (p. 237) Boniface as being away from Rome during most of this Jubilee year. [back]

445: Bull Antiquorum habet fida: translation from H. THURSTON, S.J., The Holy Year of Jubilee, p. 13, the standard English authority on the subject [back]

446: Dante's references to the Jubilee are well known, Inferno xviii 28 ff. Paradiso xxi, 104 ff [back]

447: By Digard. [back]

448: DIGARD II, 85 [back]

449: Registres de Boniface VIII, no. 3901; POTTHAST II, p. 1996 [back]

450: " It is the hand of Nogaret, and can be no other. It is a new system a hideous perversion of law, by men of great skill as legalists, who know how to twist procedures and claim justice for them, and who understand only too well the passions and dark interests of their time, how to appeal to them, and make their excitement serve some ignoble purpose. It is the cause celebre as a political force, lacking only means of publicity to rouse the unsavoury clamour of the mob, but hampered by no theories of admissible evidence, and broadening its effects to make them verbally transmissible and immediately striking. And under the protection of gloating public opinion, new abuses become possible, secret inquests, unwarned arrests, torture, overruling of resistance by sudden presentation of some horrid fait accompli. By these means fell the Templars; by these means was the posthumous trial of Boniface conducted; only more darkly, more daringly, more ingeniously, for this case of Pamiers is a first essay. . . . The spiritual powers will lie after this very much at the king's mercy." BOASE, Boniface VIII, p. 300. [back]

451: Whose "tranquil hypocrisy bears witness to Philip the Fair's confidence in his hold over the Roman Curia." DIGARD II, 81 [back]

452: Secundum Divina, Dec. 5, 1301, Reg. Boniface VIII no. 4432 POTTHAST II, p. 2007 [back]

453: Salvator Mundi, Dec. 4, 1301, ib. no. 4422, POTTHAST II, p. 2006 [back]

454: Ante promotionem nostram, Dec. 5, 1301, ib. no. 4426, POTTHAST II, p. 2007 [back]

455: Same date, ib. no. 4424; POTTHAST II, p. 2006. [back]

456: The text of these two very important speeches should be read either in DUPUY (who prints the Latin originals) or in DIGARD II, 108-14, who translates all the pope's speech and most of Acquasparta's: the summaries in MANN and BOASE are too short to convey the tone of the originals, and they are poor guides to the Roman view, as these speeches very markedly express it, of the nature of the pope's superiority over princes. It is this speech of Boniface which contains the much quoted passage: "Our predecessors have three times deposed a king of France. . . although we are not worth our predecessor's feet. . . we would turn out this king as though he were a footman. . ." The only manuscript of the speech is French (from the Parisian abbey of St. Victor) and this passage is in such violent contrast with the rest of the pope's address that it is by no means fanciful to judge it an anti-papal interpolation. Let the reader judge for himself. [back]

457: The literature about the Unam Sanctam is immense cf. for example the bibliographies in RIVIERE, DIGARD, HEFELE-LECLERCQ VI, pt. i. The full text of the bull will be found in the Corpus Iuris Canonici Extrav. Comm. I. 8, 1 (Freidberg's edition, Vol. II, p. 1245), and in Registres de Boniface VIII, no. 5382; DENZINGER (nos. 468, 469) omits four passages. There is a full English translation in MANN, XVIII, pp. 347-50, and a French translation in DIGARD II, 134-6 both should be carefully compared with the original text. RIVIERE is no doubt, as Boase says the best modern commentator. But Digard whose book was not published when Boase wrote cannot be neglected. For while Riviere studies the bull as a statement of theological and canonist teaching (i.e. in its place among a succession of theological and canonist pronouncements about this question), Unam Sanctam is, for Digard, a manifesto put out in a political controversy. Here it is an incident not in an academic discussion, (and the bull is not read as something delivered in schola) but in a conflict between two governments and Digard's great value is that he sets the bull in a fuller statement of the political action in which, as a matter of historical fact, it appeared, than any other historian has so far produced. Both Riviere and Digard are necessary to any understanding of the present state of the question about Unam Sanctam. [back]

458: op. cit., 317 [back]

459: At Caltabellotta, Aug. 24, 1302; ratified by Boniface, May 21, 1303 [back]

460: Bull Nuper ad audientiam, Aug. 15, 1303; text in Registres de Boniface VIII, no. 5383 [back]

461: Only one of the popes who have ruled since St. Gregory VII a contemporary of William the Conqueror has been canonised seven of them have been beatified Benedict XI among them the last of whom was Urban V (1362-1370). All but one of these eight popes was either a monk or a friar. [back]

462: For a good account, and detailed, documented refutation of the legend that his election was bought by a previous promise to be the tool of Philip the Fair cf. HEFELE-LECLERCQ VI pt. i, 486-95. [back]

463: And who was also that Archbishop of Lyons about whose appointment, by Nicholas IV, there had been such trouble with Philip the Fair, in 1289. cf. supra, p. 46. [back]

464: By the constitutions Pastoralis Cura and Meruit, both in the Corpus Iuris Canonici: Clem., lib. III, tit. xvii De Immun. eccles., caput Quoniam, and Extrav. Comm. lib. V, tit. vii, De Privilegiis, c.2. [back]

465: Berenger Fredol and Etienne de Suisy, creatures both of the French king [back]

466: In the beginning of 1308, H.-L. VI, pt. i, 533, note 1 [back]

467: cf. H.-L. VI, pt. i, 530-1. [back]

468: cf. H.-L. VI, Pt. i, 536-7. [back]

469: It sat at Paris [back]

470: Not a metropolitan see until 1622 [back]

471: Bull of August 6, 1310, in Registers of Clement V, no. 6376: this was in reply to the English king's explanation that the use of torture had no place in English law. In Castile the pontifical commission had found the order not guilty of the charges, but here also the pope now intervened and ordered a new enquiry, with torture of the Templars ad habendam ab eis de praedictis veritatis plenitudinem certiorem (Registers, anno VI , p. 105). The like thing happened in the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon; an acquittal by the pontifical commission, the pope's refusal to ratify this and his order that the case should be tried anew and this time torture be used (ib., nos. 6716, 7493). It also happened in Italy. But at Ravenna (June 1310) the provincial council defied the pope. Here the council decided not to use torture, with the two Dominican inquisitors alone standing out for it, and decided also not to leave the accused to the judgment of the pope, and also to ignore confessions made under torture or under the fear of torture (H.-L. VI, pt. i, p. 630). Dom Leclercq's reflections on this revolting business are surely worth repeating. "What a fantastic system of law that assimilates to a relapse into heresy a man's protestation that, despite declarations wrung by torture, he has never ceased to be orthodox ! What an immoral system, criminal even, where judgments are based on an abuse of force and on confessions made in the unconsciousness of suffering. . . . The procedure we have seen at work is one of those things that no human language can describe; no language is equal to the feelings that call for expression What dominates the mind is a loathing for the system of law and for its agents that can use as a means of investigation, and of conviction, the unawareness of the mind plunged into an excess of pain." (H.-L. ib. 588, 596). For the general question cf. W. ULLMAN Reflections on Medieval Torture in The Juridical Review Dec. . 1944. [back]

472: cf.: especially the bull Rex Gloriae of this date, Register of Clement V, anno VI , p. 411; resume, with extracts translated, in HEFELE-LECLERCQ VI, pt. i, 574-6. [back]

473: Qui Facit Magna in Bullarium edit. Cocquelines (Rome 1741). t. III, pt. 2, pp. 140-3, cf. supra, p. 54, note 1 [back]

474: This is the method urged in one of the pamphlets of the anti- papal "press campaign" of 1308. Ecclesia contra totum ordinem per modum iudicii non habet procedere sed per modum provisionis; cf. H.-L. VI, pt. i, p. 531, note 1. [back]

475: cf. MOLLAT, op. cit., 250-6 for a good resume [back]

476: EUBEL I pp. 13-14. cf. Map II [back]