BOOK VIII. 

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE BONIFACE VIII TO THE END  OF THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE,  A.D. 1303-1418.

 

CHAPTER II.

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE CLEMENT V TO THAT OF THE EMPEROR LEWIS IV, A.D. 1314-1347.

 

The cardinals met at Carpentras, the place of Clement V’s burial, for the election of a successor to him. Of twenty-three who composed the college, six only were Italians, and the feeling of these is shown in a letter which was addressed by one of them, Napoleon Orsini, to king Philip. The cardinal expresses his deep dissatisfaction with the result of the last election. Rome and Italy had suffered by Clement’s withdrawal, and had fallen a prey to confusion. The patronage of bishoprics and other ecclesiastical dignities had been prostituted to money or to family interest. The Italian cardinals had been slighted in all possible ways; the pope had shown his intention to confine the church to a corner of Gascony: and the letter concludes by praying that Philip would concur towards the election of a pope who may be as unlike his predecessor as the good of the church required that he should be.

The Italians urged a return to Rome, and maintained that, in order to preserve the ascendency of the pope over the hearts of men, the chair of St. Peter must be fixed in the apostle’s own city. To this course they were strongly urged by the great poet of the age, who addressed a letter to them, in which he represented the faults which were commonly imputed to their order, lamented the condition of Rome, “now deprived of both lights” (the empire and the papacy), “sitting solitary and a widow”; and he exhorted them to make the disgrace of the Gascons, who greedily attempted to usurp the glory of the Latins, a warning to future ages. The French cardinals, although nearly thrice as many as the Italians, hesitated to force an election by outvoting them; but while the conclave was sitting, two of Clement’s nephews, under pretence of accompanying his body, entered the town at the head of a party of Gascons, who, with shouts of “Death to the Italians!”—“We will have the pope!” attacked the houses of the Italian cardinals, killed many of their dependents, and began to plunder and to burn in several quarters. The palace in which the cardinals were assembled was set on fire, and they were compelled to make their escape by breaking through the back wall of the building. The cardinals were scattered “like frightened partridges”; and although Philip urged them to meet at Lyons for an election, the matter was unsettled at the time of his death.

His son and successor, Lewis X, who from his noisy and disorderly habits acquired the name of Huting was a frivolous, prodigal, childish prince,and while he gave himself up to the amusements of the tilt-yard and to other enjoyments, the real conduct of affairs was in the hands of his uncle, Charles of Valois. The late king’s ministers and instruments were disgraced : Enguerrand de Marigny and others of them were put to death; and in the course of the proceedings against them were discovered the arts of some sorcerers, who, in complicity (as was said) with Marigny, his wife, and his sister, were supposed to practise against the lives of the king, of his uncle Charles, and of others, by placing waxen images of them before a slow fire, when, as the figure gradually melted away, a corresponding decrease took place in the fleshly substance of the person who was represented.

The spirit of party was strong among the cardinals. The Gascons would have no one but a Gascon for pope, while those who had been discontented under Clement were not inclined to elect one of his countrymen. In consequence of these differences the papacy had already been vacant two years, when Lewis, by promising that the rule for closing the conclave should not be enforced, persuaded the members of the college to assemble at Lyons for an election, and deputed his brother Philip, count of Poitiers, to superintend it. But before any decision had taken place, Philip was informed that Lewis had suddenly died, on the fifth of July 1316; and, being advised by some counsellors that the engagement as to the conclave was illegal, and therefore invalid, he ordered that the Dominican convent, in which the cardinals were assembled, should be walled up and guarded, while he himself set off to secure his own interests in the new circumstances of the kingdom. A son whom the widowed queen bore after her husband’s death lived only a few days; and as the only other child of Lewis, a daughter, was set aside on account of her sex, Philip “the Long” himself became king, although not without a protest in the name of the excluded princess.

The cardinals were at length brought, through the management of Napoleon Orsini, to elect James d’Euse, or Duèse, cardinal of Porto, who took the name of John XXII. John was a native of Cahors, and appears to have been the son of a respectable citizen of that place, although some represent him as descended from a knightly family, while others make his father a tavern-keeper or a cobbler.He was a man of small stature, of simple personal habits, and of vehement and bitter temper; he was distinguished for his acuteness, his eloquence, and learning; he had been chancellor to king Robert of Naples, and had held the sees of Frejus and of Avignon, to the latter of which he was promoted by Clement V, in com­pliance with a recommendation which was signed and sealed by the chancellor in the king’s name, but to which Robert himself was not privy. He had been employed in Italy to inquire into the case of Boniface VIII; at the council of Vienne he had rendered important services to Clement by labouring both for the rescue of Boniface’s memory and for the condemnation of the Templars; and these services had been rewarded by his promotion to the dignity of cardinal.

It is said that at the election John conciliated the Italian cardinals by swearing that he would never mount on horseback unless to return to Rome; and that he eluded his oath by descending the Rhone to Avignon in a boat, and walking from the landing-place to the papal palace, which he never afterwards quitted, except in order to attend the services of the neighbouring cathedral.

But although John remained in France, his condition was very different from that of his predecessor. The kings with whom he had to deal did not possess the vigour of Philip the Fair; and the air which the pope as­sumed towards them was not that of a subordinate but of a superior. Even if he endeavoured to bring about that transference of the imperial crown to the royal house of France which Clement’s art had been employed to pre­vent, it was with a view to establishing more thoroughly the superiority of the papacy over the empire. He took it on himself, in disregard of a right which had always been claimed by sovereigns, to redistribute the dioceses of southern France, erecting Toulouse into an archbishopric, with six suffragan bishops under it, and to make similar changes in other parts of the kingdom. And, in reliance at once on his pontifical authority and on his personal reputation for learning, he undertook to reform and to dictate to the universities of Paris, Toulouse, and Orleans.

John was especially severe against those magical practices which have been already mentioned, and by the fear of which the public mind was at that time thrown into a state of panic. The Inquisition was employed to discover those who carried on similar arts —with whom the remains of the Albigensian sectaries were sometimes confounded. For such crimes (real or imaginary) many persons were put to death; among them was Hugh Geraldi, the bishop of John’s native city, who, having been found guilty of having compassed the pope’s death by unhallowed arts, was degraded from his orders, flayed alive, and torn asunder by horses, after which his remains were dragged through the town to the place of public execution, where they were burnt. The lepers, who, during the time of the crusades had generally been regarded with compassion, and who, in the early days of the Franciscan order, had been the special objects of its charity, now fell under suspicion of a conspiracy against the rest of mankind. It was said that they were engaged in a design to poison all the wells of France, by putting into them little bags, containing the consecrated host, mixed with human blood, herbs, and various loathsome substances; that by such means they hoped either to destroy all Christians, or to infect them with their own miserable disease; that with a view to this plot they had held four general councils, at which all lazar-houses were represented; that they had been instigated to the crime by Jews, who were the agents of the Moorish king of Granada; and that, while lending themselves to the plots of the infidels, the lepers had engaged themselves to deny the Christian faith. In consequence of these wild tales, a general persecution was carried on against the lepers. In some places they were shut up in their houses, which were set on fire by excited mobs; many of them were burnt indiscriminately by sentence of the king’s judges, who were commanded to deal summarily with them; but at Paris and elsewhere the distinction was at length established, that such of them as could not be convicted of any personal share in the alleged crimes should be confined for life within the lazar-houses, in the hope that by a separation of the sexes their race might become extinct.

The Jews also, who in the reign of Lewis had been allowed to return to France, and had paid heavily for the privilege, were now persecuted. Many of them were burnt, their property was confiscated, and the pope ordered that the bishops should destroy all copies of the Talmud, as being the chief support of their perversity. Many Jews threw their children into the fire, in order to rescue them from being forcibly baptized.

Under Philip the Long the system of administration which had pressed so heavily on France in his father’s time was resumed. Among other means of exaction, he was authorized by the pope to levy a tenth of ecclesiasti­cal income for the crusade; but when he attempted to collect the money, the bishops, who suspected that it was intended to serve the king in some design on the empire, refused to pay until they should be assured that a crusade was really intended. The oppressiveness of the king’s exactions produced in 1320 a new movement of pastoureaux, which, like that in the reign of St. Lewis, began in the north of France. The leaders in this movement were a priest who had been deprived of his parish for misconduct, and an apostate Benedictine monk; their followers were at first shepherds and swineherds—chiefly boys; and they set out as if for the Holy Land, marching along silently, preceded by a cross, with staves in their hands and empty wallets, trusting to find their support in alms. But gradually the company was swelled by persons of lawless character, and from begging they proceeded to plunder. Their violence showed itself in an alarming degree at Paris, and when some of them were imprisoned, the rest broke open the prisons and forcibly released them. Wherever they went, the Jews were especial objects of their fury. At Verdun, on the Garonne, where many of these had been driven to take refuge, the pastoureaux shut up more than 500 of them in the castle, and set it on fire. At Toulouse they slew all the Jews and plundered their goods, in defiance of the magistrates and of the king’s officers. The wave rolled on, every­where spreading terror, so that the inhabitants of the country fortified themselves against the strangers, and would not sell them any provisions. As they approached Avignon, the pope uttered an anathema Ascension-day, against all who should take the cross without his sanction, and requested the protection of the seneschal of Beaucaire, who had already put many of them to death. When they reached Languedoc, the pastoureaux had numbered 40,000. The seneschal shut them out of Aigues Mortes, where they had intended to embark, and, enclosing them with his troops in the adjoining country, he left them to the operation of famine, of nakedness, and want of shelter, and of the fever generated by the swamps,—occasionally falling on them when thus weakened, and hanging them in large numbers on gibbets or on trees. Thus this unhappy fanaticism was speedily extinguished.

With the extreme party among the Franciscans pope John was very seriously embroiled. The luxury and splendour of his court, the wealth which he was visibly accumulating, although a large part of the treasures left by his predecessor Clement escaped his endeavours to get possession of it—such things contrasted violently with the severe notions which this party held as to the nature and obligation of evangelical poverty. While in other matters they mostly adhered to the opinions of Peter John of Olivi—declaring the pope to be the mystical antichrist, the precursor of the greater antichrist, his church to be the Babylonian harlot, the synagogue of Satan, and in some cases professing to support their opinions by the authority of new revelations,—they denied that the Saviour and his apostles had possessed anything whatever; they maintained that He and they had only the use—not the possession or the disposal—of such things as were necessary for life, of their dress, and even of their food; that the scrip and the purse of which we read in the Gospels were allowed only by way of condescension to human infirmity; that the use of such repositories as cellars and granaries is a distrust of the Divine providence. If, it was argued, the Saviour had possessed, whereas St. Francis did not, He would not have been perfect, but would have been excelled by the founder of the minorites. As even the fanaticism of the fraticelli recoiled from such a supposition as blasphemous, it was concluded that therefore the Saviour possessed nothing; and it was inferred that He ought to be obeyed not only in his precepts but in his counsels. In such opinions John saw a revolutionary tendency which threatened the papacy and the whole hierarchical system; and he condemned them by several bulls, in some of which he argued the question, maintaining that, in the case of such things as food, the power of use involves possession and ownership. But the “spirituals” met the pope’s condemnation by denying his right to dispense with their statutes, by taking their stand on the bull of Nicolas III, which was known by the title of Exiit, and by appealing to a future pope. In Languedoc some convents broke out into rebellion, and the spirituals, who were supported by the popular favour, expelled those who differed from them. An inquiry was set on foot by a commission, of which Michael of Cesena, the general of the order, was a member; and by it many of the more violent faction were condemned either to the flames or imprisonment. A general chapter of the Franciscans, which was held at Perugia in 1322, affirmed the doctrine of evangelical poverty, and Michael of Cesena, who presided, was now with the rigid party. The pope declared the chapter to be heretical, and denounced the Franciscans as hypocritical for enjoying great wealth under pretext of the fiction that the use alone was theirs, and that the possession belonged to the papacy. He renounced the nominal right on which this fiction was grounded; he forbade the order to employ the name of the apostolic see in collecting or administering money, repealed the bull of Nicolas III, on which they relied, and subjected them to various disabilities. The University of Paris, which was under the influence of the rival order of St. Dominic, condemned at great length the extreme doctrine of poverty. A division took place in the Franciscan order, and Michael of Cesena, who had fled from Avignon in defiance of the pope’s orders that he should remain there, and had denied the validity of the deposition which John had thereupon pronounced against him, was superseded as its head by the election of Gerard Odonis in June 1329. But in consequence of these differences with the pope, the more rigid Franciscans were driven into Ghibellinism and while the learned men of the party, such as the famous schoolman William of Ockham, employed themselves in inquiries which tended to the overthrow of the papal pretensions, the results of such inquiries were spread everywhere by the itinerant friars, who familiarized the people, down even to the lowest classes, with the notion that the pope and the Roman church were the mystical antichrist and Babylon of Scripture. And thus that order on which the popes had relied as their surest support and instrument was turned in great part into dangerous opposition to their interest.

In order to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Henry VII, Frederick and Leopold of Austria, the sons of his predecessor Albert, were brought forward; but they were opposed by the late emperor’s partisans, of whom the archbishop of Mayence, Peter Aichspalter, was the leader The candidate of this party was Lewis of Bavaria, a grandson of Rudolf of Hapsburg through female descent, and therefore a cousin of the Austrian princes whom he was reluctantly persuaded to oppose. On the 19th of October 1314 Frederick was elected by one party, and on the following day Lewis was chosen by the other. Both elections took place in the suburbs of Frankfort; but Lewis, in addition to being supported by three unquestionable votes, while Frederick had only two, had the advantage of being able to gain admission into the city, where he was raised aloft on the high altar of the great church, and was afterwards displayed to the people assembled in the surrounding place. As the archbishop of Cologne, when asked to crown him accord­ing to custom at Aix-la-Chapelle, pretended to a right of investigating the election, the coronation was performed there by the archbishop of Mainz; and on the preceding day the archbishop of Cologne had crowned Frederick at Bonn. The papacy was then vacant by the death of Clement V, and each party drew up a statement of its case, to be submitted to the future pope, with a request that he would confirm the election of its candidate. Clement, after the death of Henry, had declared the imperial ban which had been pronounced against Robert of Naples to be null, had claimed for himself—by ancient right, as he pretended—the administration of the empire in Italy, and on the strength of this novel claim had appointed Robert as vicar over the imperial territories in that country. By John this pretension was carried yet further. He issued a bull, declaring that all authority which had been held in Italy under grants of the late emperor was at an end, and forbidding the officials to continue the exercise of such authority without fresh commissions from himself; he even attempted to set up a similar pretension to a vicariate in Germany during the vacancy of the imperial throne, and refused to confirm German bishops in their sees unless on the condition of their owning neither of the elect as king until the apostolic see should have decided between the rivals. In Italy the chiefs of the Ghibelline party were not disposed to obey the new claim; the most conspicuous among them, Matthew Visconti, although he laid down the title of imperial vicar, got himself chosen by the Milanese as their captain-general, and thus founded a hereditary dominion which afterwards became the dukedom of Milan. In consequence of this John thundered against him charges of heresy and other offences, curses, and interdicts, and proclaimed a crusade with the full crusading indulgences; yet Visconti main­tained his power against all the forces which the pope could raise up against him, until a short time before his death, when he transferred it to his son John Galeazzo, and gave up his remaining days to devout preparation for his end. It was, however, found necessary to conceal the place of his burial, lest the papal vengeance should be wreaked on his body as that of one who had died under excommunication.

Robert of Naples, by spending some years in Provence, gained an entire ascendency over his old chancellor, the pope, which he intended to employ for the subjugation of Italy; but throughout the peninsula the dread of falling under his power contributed strongly to foster an antipapal spirit. Almost all the cities had now parted with their republican liberties, and had fallen under the dominion of lords, of whom many were detestable tyrants, yet at whose courts literature and the arts, which were now bursting into splendour, found an enlightened and a munificent patronage. Thus Dante’s last years were spent at the court of Ravenna, under the protection of Guy of Polenta, nephew of that Francesca on whose name the poet has bestowed a mournful immortality.

In the dissensions of Germany John seemed for a time to take no side, giving the title of king of the Romans alike to each of the rival claimants of the crown, while he contented himself with desiring them to settle their quarrel and to report the result to him. But this quiescence did not arise from indifference; for no pope ever entered into political strife more keenly than John, and the part which he at length took was not provoked, as the action of popes in other cases had been, either by any personal vices in the emperor, or by aggressions on the church. In his contest with Lewis of Bavaria, John’s single motive was a desire to assert for his see a power over the empire. He is said to have avowed the principle that “when kings and princes quarrel, then the pope is truly pope”. So long, therefore, as Lewis and the Austrian princes were wearing each other out in indecisive struggles, the pope looked on with calmness. But when the great battle of Muhldorf, on Michaelmas-eve 1322, had given victory to Lewis, and had thrown into his hands Frederick of Austria and his brother Henry as prisoners, John was driven from his policy of inaction, and put forth a manifesto, in which his claims were strongly asserted. The pope lays down that, as the election to the empire had been doubtful, it ought to be referred to him for judgment; he desires Lewis to cease within three months from using the title or the authority of the Roman kingdom or empire, and to recall, in so far as might be possible, the acts which he had done as king. He forbids all obedience to Lewis, and declares engagements to him as king elect to be null. The document was not sent to Lewis, as the pope considered the display of it on the doors of the cathedral at Avignon to be a sufficient publication. Lewis, on being made acquainted with it, sent forth a protest, which was read in the presence of a large assembly at Nuremberg. With much profession of vene­ration for the Roman church, he denounces the injustice and the enmity which he had experienced at the pope’s hands. He maintains that one who had been rightfully chosen by the electors, or by a majority of them, and who had been duly crowned, had always been acknowledged as king of the Romans; and he complains that he himself, after having held that dignity for ten years, should now find his title questioned by the pope, with a disregard of all the usual forms of justice. He repels the charge of favouring heresy, which the pope had brought against him on account of his connexion with Galeazzo Visconti and others, and even retorts on John himself for neglecting the accusations brought against the Franciscans, that they revealed the secrets of the confessional, and so deterred Christian people from confession, to the great danger of their souls. He concludes by appealing to a general council, and he also sent envoys to the papal court, with a request that the time allowed him for defending himself might be extended. To this the pope replied that the time was not allowed for defence, but for sub­mission. He consented, however, to grant two months more; and as within that period Lewis did not submit, he pronounced him excommunicate, forbade all acknowledgment of him as king of the Romans, and annulled all engagements to him as such, while he yet suspended for three months the further penalties which had been threatened.

Lewis again appealed to a general council, and to a true and lawful future pope. He again denied the charge of favouring heresy, and protested against the disregard of the rules of justice which had been shown in John’s proceedings against him. The liberties of the church, he says, were the gift of Constantine to pope Sylvester. He charges John with invading the rights of the empire and of the German electors, and taxes him with cruelty and perfidy towards the imperialists of Italy, with having stirred up rebellion in Germany, with profanation of the sacraments and contempt of the canons, and with having prevented the deliverance of the Holy Land by detaining the money collected for that purpose. And whereas in a former document he had blamed him for partiality to the Franciscans, he now accuses him of heresy and profanity in endeavouring to blacken that order by asserting that the Saviour and His apostles possessed goods in common. John, finding his opponent still contumacious, issued on the nth of July his “fourth process,” by which Lewis was pronounced to be deprived of all that he might claim in right of his election, while his excommunication was renewed, all who had abetted him were placed under ban or interdict, and he was cited to appear, either in person or by proxy, before the pope at Avignon on the 1st of October. The archbishops of Sens, of Canterbury and York, of Magdeburg and of Capua, were charged with the proclamation of this sentence in their respective countries.

In these proceedings the pope did not meet with the general acquiescence and support which he probably expected. Electors and other great personages—even Leopold of Austria—began to take alarm at the ex­travagance of the papal pretensions. At Paris and at Bologna doctors of both canon and civil law gave opinions condemnatory of his acts. In Germany the sentences against Lewis were not published by any prelates except such as had before been his enemies, and at Basel a clerk who ventured to proclaim them was thrown into the Rhine. Some Dominicans in German cities, who adhered to the pope, found themselves deprived of the alms on which they had relied for a maintenance, and were compelled to leave the country. The canons of Freising refused to receive a bishop who had been nominated by the pope. Respect for ecclesiastical sentences had died out, unless in cases where the justice of them was clear; and the charges to avoid the emperor as an excommunicate person were unheeded.

Lewis was aided in his struggle by men of letters, whom the exaggerated pretensions of the papacy had provoked to follow in the line opened by Dante’s treatise “Of Monarchy”, and to inquire into the foundations of the ecclesiastical power with a freedom of which there had as yet been no example. The jurists were, as of old, on the imperial side, and maintained the emperor’s entire independence of the pope; even those who were hindered by circumstances from taking a declared part—as the lawyers of Bologna, who were subject to the pope’s temporal rule—allowed their imperialist principles to be seen. And in the “spiritual” party among the Franciscans, who were already embroiled with John on the question of evangelical poverty, and whose rigid opinions on that subject accorded with the emperor’s desire to humble the secular greatness of the papacy, Lewis found a new and important class of allies.

Of these Franciscans the most famous was the Englishman William of Ockham, so called from his native place in the county of Surrey, who, according to the custom of the schools, was distinguished by the titles of “Singular and invincible Doctor”, and “Venerable Inceptor”. William had studied at Paris under Duns Scotus, of whose system he afterwards became a conspicuous opponent, and he had taught both there and at Bologna. He had revived the almost extinct philosophy of the nominalists, which his followers maintained against the realism of the Scotists with such zeal that their dis­putes often ran into violent affrays. In the contest between Philip the Fair and pope Boniface he had written a treatise on the side of royalty; and, as a provincial of his order, he had taken a conspicuous part in the synod of Perugia, which asserted opinions contrary to those of pope John on the question of evangelical poverty. A papal sentence drove him from Bologna; and, like others of his order, he took refuge with Lewis, to whom he is reported to have said, “Defend me with the sword, and I will defend you with the word.”

Ockham’s chief contribution to the controversy, a “Dialogue” between a master and a disciple, is (although incomplete) of enormous length, while it is also repulsive from its difficulty, and is written with a scholastic intricacy which might often lead any but a very careful reader to confound the author’s opinions with those which he intends to refute. He professes, indeed, to give impartially the arguments for the opposite sides of each question; but the greater weight of argument is always laid on that side which the author himself espoused. After discussing the nature of heresy, he decides that not only the pope, but the Roman church, a general council, the whole body of clergy—nay, all Christians—may err from the faith. He holds that general councils may be summoned without the pope’s consent. He attacks the papal pretensions as to temporal dominion and to “plenitude of power,” and discusses questions as to the form of civil government. He holds that general councils have only a general influence of the Holy Spirit, and are not infallible as to matters of detail; that our Lord’s promises to St. Peter were given for the apostle himself alone. In another division of the work, he denies that the empire is in the pope’s disposal, and maintains that the gift of it may not be transferred to the pope, but belongs to the Roman people; that the emperor is not dependent on the pope, but has the right of choosing him; and that in coactive power the pope is inferior to the emperor. It is not to be supposed that such a work as this “Dialogue” can ever have found many readers; but the anti-hierarchical opinions which were embodied in it were spread in all directions, and made their way to all classes, through the agency of the itinerant friars.

On the same side wrote John, who takes his name from his native village, Jandun, in Champagne, and Marsilius Raimondini, of Padua, a physician, who had also studied law at Orleans. These two are supposed to have shared in the authorship of the “Defensor Pacis”—a treatise of which the title was intended as a sarcasm on the pope for fomenting war instead of acting, as became his office, for the maintenance of peace. Passing beyond the technicalities on which the jurists had rested their assertion of the imperial prerogative, the authors inquire into the origin of civil government, founding their theory on Aristotle’s “Politics”. It is laid down that there ought to be no power uncontrolled by law; that election is to be preferred to hereditary succession that the pope, according to ancient testimony as well as to Scripture, has no coactive sovereignty or jurisdiction, but ought to be subject to earthly powers, after the Saviour’s own example. As to the power of the keys, it is said that God alone can remit sin, with or without the agency of the priest, forasmuch as He alone can know in what cases sin ought to be remitted or retained; that the priest’s absolution relates only to the communion of the church on earth; that he is as the keeper of a prison, who, by releasing a prisoner, does not free him from guilt or from civil punishment. The identity of the orders of bishop and presbyter is maintained, and, in quoting the well-known words of St. Jerome, who speaks of “ordination” as the only function by which bishops are distinguished from presbyters, the writers interpret the term as meaning administrative power. They maintain the equality of all the apostles, and deny that the Roman bishops derive from St. Peter any superiority over others. They trace the rise of the papal power to the peculiar circumstances of Rome. The final decision of ecclesiastical questions is ascribed to general councils, which must, it is said, be summoned by the emperor; and as an instance of the unfitness of popes, who may possibly be heretical, to interpret doubtful points, they mention the reigning pope’s opinions on the subject of evangelical poverty. The precedence of one church over others is declared to be a subject for general councils to settle. The popes are denounced for having assumed an unfounded “plenitude of power’’; for having confined to the clergy the privilege of electing bishops, which ought to belong to all the faithful; for having further narrowed it by excluding the priests of the diocese from a share, and restricting the election to the canons, who are described as rarely in priestly orders, and as ill qualified for such a trust; and, finally, for having extinguished the right of election, by reserving all questions on such matters to themselves. It is maintained that the choice of a pope belongs to the people and to the emperor; and that those who elect are also entitled, on sufficient cause, to depose. The usurpations of the popes on the imperial power (which are illustrated by the fable of the snake warmed in the husbandman’s bosom)—their abuse of indulgences as encouragements to war against Christian princes—their attempts to prevent the election of an emperor, in order that they themselves might claim power during the vacancy; the injustice, and consequent invalidity, of their sentences, the iniquity of John’s behaviour towards Lewis, the hostility of the papal pretensions to all secular government, the great calamities and injury to religion occasioned by the pope’s proceedings—are strongly denounced. The idea of the necessity of one earthly head for the church, the Roman bishop’s claim to judicial power, his pretensions to unfailing faithfulness, are controverted; and the treatise ends by exposing some of the current sayings as to the superiority of spiritual to secular power, and by combating the inferences which were drawn in the papal interest from the alleged transference of the empire from the Greeks to the Germans.

The freedom of speculation which these antipapal writers displayed was, indeed, more likely to alarm than to convince the men of that age; but this effect was perhaps more than counterbalanced by the extravagances into which the assertion of the papal pretensions was carried out by such champions as Augustine Trionfi, an Augustinian friar of Ancona, and Alvar Pelayo, a Spanish Franciscan who eventually became bishop of Silves, in Portugal. All the old claims of the Hildebrandine party were put forward, with those falsifications of history to which time had given the currency of undoubted truths. It was maintained that all powers, both spiritual and secular, belonged to the pope, and that princes exercised power only as his delegates; that to deny this would be “not far from heresy”; that whatever might have been granted by emperors to popes (as the donation of Constantine to Sylvester) was not properly a gift, but a restitution of something which had been wrongfully taken away; that the pope’s sovereignty extends even over the heathen; that he has all kingdoms in his absolute disposal; that he is entitled to appoint and to depose the emperor and all other sovereigns; that the German electors hold their power of election from him; that the pope cannot be deposed for any crime—even for heresy, if he be willing to be corrected; and that he cannot be judged, even by a general council.

The Germans in general were strongly in favour of Lewis, and the more so because the pope showed an inclination to make over the imperial crown, as if it were forfeited and vacant, to the reigning sovereign of France With a view to this, Charles IV, who succeeded his brother Philip in 1322, and who, like his father, bore the epithet of “le Bel,” had visited the papal court in company with king John of Bohemia, who, in consequence of some supposed wrongs, had turned against Lewis. Robert of Naples, who was then at Avignon, joined in the consultations which were held; and it was after these conferences that the ban of March 21, 1324, was pronounced. With the same purpose, an alliance with the Austrian party was projected; but a meeting between Charles and Leopold, at Bar on the Aube, was unsatisfactory, and although the proposal was discussed in an assembly of the German princes at Rhense, early in 1325, it was rejected, chiefly through the effect of an appeal which Bertold of Bucheck, commander of the knights of St. John, made to the national feeling by insisting on the disgrace of transferring the empire to foreigners for the mere gratification of the pope’s vindictiveness.

Leopold of Austria, despairing of success for his party, was induced to send the insignia of the empire to Lewis, in the hope of obtaining the release of his brother Fredericks In this he was disappointed; but an agreement was soon after made by which Frederick was set at liberty on certain conditions, among which it was stipulated that he should renounce all further designs on the empire, and should ally himself with Lewis against all men, especially “against him who styles himself pope, with all who abet or favour him, so long as he should be opposed to the king and kingdom”. Although the details of this compact were kept secret for a time, the pope, without knowing what they were, annulled it, on the ground that no such agreement with an excommunicated person could be binding. But Frede­rick disdained to avail himself of this evasion, and find­ing, after strenuous efforts, that it was impossible to fulfill the conditions of his engagement, he carried out the alternative which had been prescribed in the treaty by repairing to Munich, and throwing himself on the mercy of his rival. Lewis met this “old German fidelity” with a corresponding generosity, and admitted his captive into the closest intimacy. They ate at the same table, and even slept in the same bed; and when Lewis was called away for a time from Bavaria, he left the care of defending the country to Frederick as his representative. A scheme for sharing the empire between them as equal colleagues was devised, as Lewis was in fresh difficulties, which made some compromise desirable; but as this was found to give offence to the electors, who complained that their right of choice was set aside, it was proposed that one of the elect kings should reign in Italy, and the other in Germany. But the sudden death of Leopold, who was regarded as the chief support of the Austrian party, appeared at once to relieve Lewis from all dread of that party, and to release him from any engagements which had not been completed with it.

He now resolved to proceed into Italy, in compliance with invitations which he had received from the Ghibelline chiefs and from a party among the Romans. But on proposing the expedition to a diet at Spires, he found that the great feudatories (especially the ecclesiastical electors) refused to accompany him; for, although bound to do so when a king of the Romans was about to receive the imperial crown, they alleged that they owed no such duty to a king who was excommunicate, and whose relations with the pope were altogether such as to shut out the hope of coronation. Lewis, however, persevered, although the force which he was able to take with him across the Alps was so small that a chronicler of the age likens it to a hunting party. At Trent, where he was met by some heads of the Ghibelline faction, and by the representatives of others, a great demonstration took place against the pope, to whom he had lately made fresh overtures without success. Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun excited the indignation of the assembly by enlarging on the misdeeds of “priest John” (as they contemptuously styled him); eighteen articles were drawn up against him, and he was declared to be a heretic and unworthy of the papacy. In these proceedings the emperor was supported by many bishops, by the grand-master of the Teutonic order, and by a multitude of Franciscans, Dominicans, and others, whose natural attachment to the papacy had been turned into enmity against the existing pope. At Milan, as the archbishop had taken night, the iron crown was placed on the head of Lewis by three bishops who had been expelled from their sees by the Guelfs; but he imprudently alienated the family of Visconti, who had been the chief supporters of the imperial interest in northern Italy, and, by depriving Galeazzo of his signory and imprisoning him, he spread alarm among the Ghibelline tyrants of Lombardy and of Tuscany. In the meantime the report of the meeting at Trent provoked the pope to issue a “fifth process” by which, after a long recital of the previous dealings, Lewis was pronounced to be deprived of all fiefs which he held, not only under the church, but under the empire, and was summoned to appear at Avignon in order to hear his sentence. About the same time were uttered other papal denunciations.

Rome had, since the withdrawal of the popes, been under a republican government, and had in turn been swayed by the influence of Robert of Naples, of the papal legates and other envoys, and of its great families—the imperialist Savellis, the papalist Orsinis, and the Colonnas, whose chiefs, the brothers Stephen and Sciarra, were arrayed in opposition to each other. The Romans had already entreated the pope to return, and now renewed the request; but John excused himself on the ground of important business which detained him in France, of the unsettled state of Italy, and of the commotions and changes which had lately taken place in Rome itself. He promised, however, to return at a later time, and he warned them in the meanwhile to avoid Lewis, as being a heretic, excommunicate, and a persecutor of the church. By this reply, and by the attempt of a Genoese force, in alliance with the pope, to surprise their city and to set fire to the Vatican quarter, the Romans were disposed in favour of Lewis, who entered the city on the 7th of January 1328, and was received with general exultation. Of the clergy who adhered to the pope, some fled, and others refused to perform the offices of religion; but Lewis was accompanied by a train of bishops, clergy, monks, and friars, who made him independent of this opposition. A great assemblage at the Capitol proclaimed him king of the Romans and lord of Rome; and on the 17th of January he was crowned as emperor in St. Peter’s. The unction was administered by the bishops of Castello and Aleria, both already excommuni­cated by the pope; the sword was girt on his thigh by Castruccio Castrucani, lord of Lucca, as count of the Lateran palace; and the crown was placed on his head by Sciarra Colohna, whom the Romans had lately elected as their captain. At the same time the empress was crowned, and Lewis bound himself by three decrees to maintain the catholic faith, to reverence the clergy, and to protect widows and orphans. The pope, on being informed of these proceedings, denounced the emperor afresh, declared his coronations, both at Milan and at Rome, to be null, proclaimed a crusade against him, and exhorted the Romans to arrest the two impugners of the papal authority, Marsilius and John of Jandun—the former of whom had been appointed im­perial vicar of the city, and exerted himself in compelling the reluctant clergy to say mass.

On the 18th of April the emperor appeared with all the insignia of his dignity on a throne erected in the Place of St. Peter’s. In the presence of a vast assembly which stood around, an accusation against the pope was delivered by some Franciscans, and by two syndics who professed to represent the Roman clergy; and the question was thrice proclaimed whether any one wished to appear as procurator for priest James of Cahors, who styled himself Pope John the Twenty-Second; but no one took up the challenge. A German abbot then preached an eloquent sermon in Latin, enlarging on the emperor’s love of justice and on the offences committed by Pope John; and the imperial sentence was read aloud. In this John was charged with having neglected the interest of Christendom and with having exposed it to Saracens and heathens; with having asserted that the Saviour and His disciples were possessed of property; with having attempted to usurp temporal power, whereas Christ commanded that we should render unto Cesar the things that are Caesar’s, and declared His kingdom to be not of this world; with having questioned the emperor’s election, which had been regularly made and did not need the papal confirmation. For these offences John was pronounced to be deprived of the papacy and of all benefices spiritual or temporal, and to be subject to the penalties of heresy and treason; and the emperor declared that, after the example of his predecessor Otho the Great, he held it his duty to provide the apostolic see with a new and fit occupant. The rashness of such a step began to be manifest four days later, when James Colonna, a canon of the Lateran, and son of Stephen (who had been driven from the city by his brother Sciarra), read in public the pope’s last and bitterest sentence against Lewis, which no one had as yet ventured to publish at Rome. After having declared his adhesion to John, he affixed the paper to the door of the church of St. Marcellus, and escaped unmolested to Palestrina. Yet Lewis was resolved to go on.

On the following day a statute was published, by which it was forbidden that the pope should go to the distance of two days’ journey from Rome without the consent of the clergy and people, and it was enacted that, if after three citations he should refuse to return, a new pope should be chosen in his stead.

On Ascension-day, the 12th of May, a multitude was again assembled in front of St. Peter’s. A sermon was preached by a monk, in which pope John was compared to Herod, while Lewis was likened to the angel who delivered St. Peter out of prison; and the bishop of Venice thrice proposed to the assembled multitude that Peter Rainalucci, of Corbaria, should be elected to the papacy. The imperialists were present in such numbers as to overpower all differences of opinion; and Peter was invested with the papal mantle by the emperor, who saluted him by the name of Nicolas the Fifth, placed him at his own right hand, and afterwards accompanied him into the church in order to be present at his celebration of mass. The antipope, a man of humble parentage, had been married in early life, but had separated from his wife that he might enter the Franciscan order; he had held the office of papal penitentiary, and, notwith­standing the aspersions of his enemies, it would seem that he had been highly esteemed for learning and prudence. But, although he had hitherto professed the opinion of the most rigid party among his order as to evangelical poverty, he fell at once, on assuming the title of pope, into the traditional habits of pomp and luxury, for which the means were chiefly provided by the tradi­tional expedients of selling offices and preferments. He made seven cardinals, all of them men who had been deposed from dignities by pope John, or had been pro­minent in opposition to him; he pronounced deposition against bishops who adhered to his rival, and nominated others to fill their sees—among them, Marsilius to be archbishop of Milan; he affected to appoint legates, and on Whitsunday he confirmed Lewis in the imperial dignity, and pronounced on him a solemn benediction, but with a careful avoidance of everything that might have seemed to imply a claim to the right of conferring the imperial office, or a subordination of the secular to the spiritual power.

Lewis soon began to find himself uneasy at Rome. His delay there had given an advantage to Robert of Naples, whereas it is not improbable that, by vigorously pushing forwards to the south, he might have been able to overthrow the Angevine dynasty. A Neapolitan fleet took Ostia, and some of the ships advanced up the Tiber as far as the convent of St. Paul, committing devastations of which the blame was commonly thrown on the empe­ror. The citizens, instead of receiving from the emperor the benefits which they had expected, found themselves oppressed by taxes, which his own necessities and those of his pope compelled him to impose. The Ghibellines had been offended by some impolitic measures; and, while Nicolas met with little or no acknowledgment even among the imperialists of the city, the party of John, whose intrigues were incessant, recovered its force. Provisions became scarce, partly because the supplies were cut off by the Neapolitan troops, and the emperor’s own soldiers, being unable to get their pay, swelled the grievances of the Romans by plundering; the northern Germans quarrelled with those of the south, and many of the soldiers deserted. After a vain attempt to pro­ceed southward, Lewis left Rome on the 4th of August, amidst general curses and derision, mixed with acclamations in honour of “holy church.” Stones were thrown as he retired, and some of his men were killed. In token of the popular feeling, the privileges which had been granted by the emperor and the antipope were burnt in the Place of the Capitol; even some bodies of Germans were dragged from their graves and ignominiously thrown into the Tiber.

At Pisa, where he had been joined by the leaders of the disaffected Franciscans—Michael of Cesena, Bonagratia, and William of Ockham, who had all escaped from detention at Avignon—the emperor held an assembly on the 13th of December, when Michael denounced pope John as a heretic, and the emperor again pronounced him to be deposed. About the same time John at Avignon renewed his condemnation of the emperor as a heretic and a persecutor of the church, and declared the antipope a heretic and schismatic. The antipope joined Lewis at Pisa, where he carried on the system of ejecting Guelf bishops and substituting Ghibellines, from whom payments were extorted for their promotion. But, on the emperor’s departure from that city Nicholas was left behind, and Lewis, as he proceeded northwards, found the Italians less and less favourably disposed, while discontent and desertion became more rife among his own troops. In the end of January 1330 the emperor recrossed the Alps. His expedition to Italy had ruined the imperial cause in that country, and his failure had given additional force to the impression made by the papal curses. The Romans swore fealty anew to the pope, and, with Pisa and other Italian cities, entreated his forgiveness for their temporary submission to Lewis.

The antipope, when left at Pisa, was glad to find shelter with a powerful nobleman, count Boniface of Donoratico, but in the following year was, after much urgency, given up by him to the pope, on condition that his life should be spared. On St. James’s day Nicolas abjured his errors in the cathedral of Pisa, expressing deep contrition for his conduct and casting much blame on the emperor. The ceremony was afterwards repeated at Avignon, where he appeared with a rope around his neck, and threw himself at the feet of his triumphant rival. John raised him up, released him from the rope, and admitted him to the kiss of peace. The fallen antipope spent the remaining three years of his life in an apartment of the papal palace, where he was supplied with the means of study, but was strictly secluded from all intercourse with men.

The death of Frederick of Austria, in January 1330, appeared to favour the establishment of peace between the papacy and the empire; but the pope, acting under the influence of Naples and of France, was bent on effecting the ruin of Lewis. He scornfully rejected the mediation of the king of Bohemia, who had been empowered by the emperor to offer very humiliating terms: he uttered fresh anathemas, in “aggravation” of his former denunciations; he endeavoured to stir up enemies against Lewis on all sides, and encouraged his neighbours to attack him—not scrupling even to let loose the heathens who bordered on Brandenburg for an invasion of that territory, where they committed atrocious cruelties and profanations he urged the German princes to choose a new emperor; he declared Germany to be under an interdict so long as Lewis should be acknowledged. A fearful confusion prevailed in that country, although, notwithstanding all the pope’s denunciations, the emperor was still generally obeyed. Some of the clergy, in obedience to the interdict, refused to perform the Divine offices in cities where Lewis was, and on this account they were driven out by him. Alliances were continually changing, and the ascendency was always shifting from one party to another. In these movements John of Luxemburg played a very conspicuous part. At the age of fourteen he had received the kingdom of Bohemia from his father, Henry VII, as a fief of the empire which had become vacant through the failure of male heirs, and at the same time he had married the younger daughter of the late king, Wenceslaus—thus excluding Henry duke of Carinthia, the husband of her elder sister. But he speedily found that he and his subjects were ill suited to each other, and while the queen, with her children, lived in the palace at Prague, John made his home in his hereditary territory of Luxemburg, and roamed over Europe in quest of adventures, visiting Bohemia on rare occasions for the purpose of raising money. In 1330 he was invited by the citizens of Brescia to defend them against the Visconti of Milan and the Scaligers of Verona, and in consequence of this he proceeded at the head of 10,000 men into Italy; where his intervention was welcomed at once by the Guelfs, who saw in him a friend of the pope, and by the Ghibellines, who regarded him as the son of Henry VII and as a representative of the emperor. His influence was beneficially exerted for the pacification of many Lom­bard cities but gradually both parties began to distrust him, so that he found himself obliged to withdraw before a combination which was formed against him; and, after a second expedition, in which he enjoyed the countenance of the French king and of the pope, he was compelled to retire altogether from the field of Italian politics.

The three sons of Philip the Fair, who had successively reigned over France, were all carried off at an early age; and while the clergy saw in this the vengeance of heaven for Philip’s outrages against pope Boniface, the popular opinion traced it to the martyrdom of the Templars, and to the supposed curse or prophecy of James de Molay.

After the death of Charles IV, which took place in January 1328, his widow gave birth to a second daughter, who lived only a few days; and as the hope of a male heir was extinguished, Philip, the son of Charles of Valois and nephew of Philip the Fair, became king, to the exclusion of his predecessor’s surviving daughter. Philip of Valois revived much of the chivalrous splendour which had lately been wanting to the court of France; and in his ecclesiastical policy he endeavoured, like St. Lewis, to maintain the rights of the national church as against the papacy. When, however, he proposed a new crusade, it was evident that the idea was not prompted by a spirit of self-sacrificing devotion like that which had animated his saintly ancestor. He designed, by placing himself at the head of Christendom in such an enterprise, to gain for himself and his family a title to the empire; and he endeavoured in other respects to turn it to his own advantage by obtaining great concessions from the pope. John granted for the crusade the tithe of ecclesiastical benefices throughout the whole western church for six years; and in October 1333 Philip took the cross, and swore to set out for the holy war within three years. But he was reminded that some of his predecessors, after having collected tithes, as if for a crusade, had spent them on other objects; and, whatever his intentions may really have been, circumstances arose which prevented the execution of the project. When the collection of the tithe was attempted in Germany, the emperor, in a great diet at Spires, declared that no such impost could be raised without his permission, and hinted his doubts whether the money would be spent for the professed object. He added that, if peace were re-established, he himself would head an expedition for the recovery of the Holy Land; for he considered that he would have lived long enough if he might once see a pope who cared for his soul’s good. Mission after mission was sent to Avignon, but all brought back reports of the pope’s implacable hardness. The difficulties which pressed on the emperor were so serious that in 1333 he was willing to resign his crown for the sake of restoration to the communion of the church; but the plan was frustrated through the indiscretion of his cousin, Henry, duke of Lower Bavaria, in whose favour the abdication was intended.

John XXII, who had been so profuse of accusations of heresy against others, himself fell under a new charge of this kind, by asserting in a sermon that the saints would not enjoy the beatific vision until the end of the world; he was reported to have said that even the blessed Virgin herself would until then behold only the humanity, but not the God-head, of her Son. This opinion, although agreeable to the authority of many early fathers, had been generally abandoned for centuries; it endangered doctrines and practices which had become firmly established in the church—the belief in purgatory, the use of indulgences, masses for the dead, and invocation of saints. Although the papal court in general acquiesced, an English Dominican, named Thomas Waleys, raised an alarm by preaching against it. John’s old Franciscan opponents, Michael of Cesena, Bonagratia, and William of Ockham, eagerly raised the cry of heresy; and the question was referred by king Philip to the theological faculty of Paris, in an assembly held at the palace of Vincennes, while John laboured to influence the opinion of divines by heaping preferment on those who sided with him. At Paris great excitement arose, and men were divided in their judgment. The Dominicans opposed the pope’s view; the general of the Franciscans, who had superseded Michael of Cesena, supported it; the doctors of the Sorbonne condemned the doctrine, but suggested that John might have pro­pounded it only by way of a doubt or a question. The king is said to have threatened not only the Franciscan general, but the pope himself, with the punishment of heresy, and made use of John’s danger to extort im­portant concessions from him; while the Italian cardinals, in their dislike of a French pope, threatened to bring him before a general council. John offered to produce ancient authorities in his behalf, but was glad to avail himself of the escape which the doctors of Paris had suggested, and declared that he had intended only to state the opinion, not to decide in favour of it. But the excitement burst out afresh, and at last John, on his death-bed, was brought—it is said chiefly by the urgency of his nephew or son, cardinal Bertrand de Poyet—to profess the current doctrine, “that purged souls, being separated from their bodies, are in heaven, the kingdom of heaven, and paradise; that they see God face to face, and clearly behold the Divine essence, in so far as the condition of separate souls permits.”

On the day after having made this declaration, John died, at the age of ninety. The treasures which he left behind him were enormous, partly the produce of exactions raised under the pretext of a crusade, partly of the arts of the papal court as to the disposal of preferments and favours. In these arts John showed himself a master. Under the pretence of discouraging simony, he kept valuable reserves in his own hands. By the bull Execrcibilis, he compelled pluralists to give up all but one benefice each, and got for himself the disposal of the rest. He took into his own hands the appointment of bishops, in disregard of the capitular right of election, which had been so hardly extorted from sovereigns. Whenever any high prefer­ment fell vacant, he made it the means of promoting the greatest possible number of persons, advancing each of them a single step, and so securing the payment of fees from each. And to the exactions which already pressed on the church, he added the invention of annates—the first year’s income of ecclesiastical dignities. Yet although his long pontificate was chiefly remarkable for the unrelenting hostility with which he pursued the emperor Lewis, and for the extortions and corruptions by which he so largely profited, it must in justice be added that he is described as temperate in his habits, regular in the observances of devotion, and unassuming and unostentatious in his manner of life.

At the time of John’s death, the college of cardinals consisted of twenty-four members, among whom the French, headed by Talleyrand of Perigord, had a great majority. Both Frenchmen and Italians, however, agreed to choose the cardinal of Comminges, bishop of Porto, if he would pledge himself that the papal residence should not be removed from Avignon; but he refused to comply with this condition, and the cardinals, shut up in the palace of Avignon by an officer of king Robert of Naples, began afresh the usual intricate manoeuvres of a papal election. By an unforeseen concurrence of circumstances, the result of which was considered to be a divine inspiration, their choice fell on James Fournier, a member of the Cistercian order, cardinal of St. Prisca and bishop of Mirepoix, whose remark on the announcement of his new dignity was, “You have chosen an ass.” The new pope, Benedict XII., was a native of Saverdun, in the country of Foix, and had risen from a humble condition in life. He was highly respected for his learning, and, notwithstanding his modest estimate of himself, was a man of sense and judgment. He is praised for his sincerity, his justice, his liberality in almsgiving, and his benevolence of character; while his orthodoxy had been displayed by his activity as an inquisitor in his own diocese and throughout the region of Toulouse. Disinclined to share in political affairs he was earnestly bent on a reform in the church, and in order to this he reversed in many respects the system of his predecessors. The crowds which, in hope of prefer­ment, had thronged the city of the papal residence, the idle and greedy friars who hung about the court, were dismissed to their own homes. A reform of the monastic system was strenuously taken in hand. The abuse of commendams was done away with, except only in the case of such as were held by cardinals. Pluralities were steadily discouraged. Expectancies of benefices not yet vacant were abolished, and such as had been already granted were revoked. The late pope’s custom of multi­plying promotions on every vacancy was abandoned. All practices which might appear to savour of simony were forbidden. It was ordered that no canonries in cathedrals should be bestowed on boys under fourteen years of age, and all applicants for the pope’s patronage were examined as to their fitness. Preferments were given to men of learning, without solicitation, and although they did not frequent the court. The pope withstood the entreaties of great men, who attempted to influence his patronage; and he was careful not to favour his own relatives unduly. He refused great matches for his niece, whom he married to a merchant of Toulouse, with a dowry not more than suitable to the husband’s condition; and when the pair visited his court, in the hope of favour, he told them that as James Fournier he knew them, but that as pope he had no kindred; that he could only give them his blessing, with payment of the expenses of their journey. One nephew alone obtained high office in the church, having been urgently recom­mended by the cardinals for the archbishopric of Arles. The officials of the court were required to swear that they would not accept any gifts. The messengers who conveyed the papal letters were bound in like manner neither to ask nor to receive anything beyond food and other necessaries. The pope moderated the expenses of episcopal visitations, which had long been a subject of complaint; and he caused a visitation of cathedrals to be undertaken by commissioners, who corrected such irregularities as they discovered. Yet, great as Benedict’s merits were, he has not escaped serious imputations. His desire to purify the administration of the church and the monastic orders appears to have been too little tempered by courtesy or by discretion, so that it excited much animosity, which has left its lasting traces in the chronicles of the times. Petrarch speaks unfavourably of him in more than one place, and mentions especially that excessive love of the pleasures of the table which is said to have given rise to the saying, “Let us drink like a pope.” And a biographer, whose enmity would seem to have been provoked by Benedict’s avowed dislike of the mendicant orders, charges him with avarice and with harshness of character, with negligence in some parts of his duty as to administration, and with a general distrust and ill opinion of mankind.

Benedict’s virtues were also marred by a want of courage, which prevented him from carrying out his wish to deliver himself from the thralldom of king Philip, and from the oppressive influence of the French cardinals. And, when he attempted to prepare the way for a return to Rome, or at least to Bologna, where the foundations of a palace had been laid by the legate Bertrand de Poyet, he was deterred by the manifestations of an antipapal spirit, by the dangers of the way, and by other such considerations. He therefore, as if to guarantee the continuance of the papal residence at Avignon, began the vast and costly structure which still remains as the chief monument of it; but at the same time he showed his interest in the ancient capital of Christendom, by spending large sums on renewing the roof of St. Peter’s, and on repairing other churches and palaces at Rome. He accepted the office of senator, to which he was elected by the Romans in 1337; he forbade the use of the terms Guelf and Ghibelline, as being continual sources of discord, and he endeavoured to keep up a semblance of influence in Italy, by investing some party chiefs with the character of vicars under the apostolic see.

Philip, however, notwithstanding his ascendency, was not able to gain all that he desired from Benedict. When he asked the newly-elected pope to make over to him the treasures of John XXII, and to bestow on him the ecclesiastical tithe for ten years—professedly with a view to a crusade, but in reality for the war into which he had been drawn with England—Benedict replied that his predecessor’s wealth, having been collected for the crusade, must not be given up until that expedition was actually begun; and he withdrew the grant of tenths which John had previously sanctioned. It was in vain that the king asked the vicariate of Italy for himself, and the kingdom of Vienne for his son; and when he went to Avignon, for the purpose of urging his suit as to the pretended crusade, the pope declared that, if he had two souls, he would gladly sacrifice one of them for the king; but that, as he had only one, he must endeavour to save it.

The controversy which John XXII had raised as to the Beatific Vision, and in the discussion of which Benedict had formerly taken a conspicuous part, was now determined by him in a formal decree, which declared that the glory of the saints is perfect; that they already enjoy the vision of the blessed Trinity; and that, although they will have their perfect consummation in body and in soul after the judgment-day, the joy of their souls will not be sensibly increased.

The pope, both from natural character and from alarm at the French king’s inordinate requests, was heartily desirous of peace with the emperor Lewis, and with a view to this made overtures, both indirectly and directly, to him. Lewis, on his part, sent a fifth and a sixth embassy to Avignon, with offers of submission; but the influence of France, of Naples, and of Bohemia, with that of the cardinals, whose property Philip had threatened to confiscate if they made peace with the Bavarian, prevailed over the pope’s favourable dispositions. Yet he made no secret of his real feeling. Thus, on one occasion, when urged by the representatives of the French and the Neapolitan kings, he asked whether they wished to do away with the empire. On their answering that they did not speak against the empire, but against Lewis, who had been condemned as an enemy of the church,—“Rather,” said Benedict, “it is we that have sinned against him. He would, if he might have been allowed, have come with a staff in his hand to our predecessor’s feet; but he has been in a manner challenged to act as he has done.” The emperor’s sixth embassy, in October 1336, was authorized to offer very humiliating terms : to confess that he had done grievous wrong in setting up an antipope, in his alliances with the Visconti, with the rebellious minorites (whose opinions he disavowed), with John of Jandun and Marsilius, by whom he professed to have been deceived and misled. The ambassadors professed that he was ready to submit to penance, to lay down the imperial title, to persecute heretics, to build churches and convents, if the pope would release him from excommunication and interdict, and would grant him the empire anew. But they became weary of waiting for an answer, and Lewis, despairing of any satisfactory result so long as the French king’s influence should be exerted against him, declined an invitation to resume negotiations, and allied himself with Edward of England, who had now set up that claim to the crown of France which for a century and a half arrayed the two nations in deadly hostility to each other. Benedict’s warnings to Edward against entering into a connexion with an excommunicated person were unheeded, although the king professed all dutiful submission to the papal authority, and said that he had advised Lewis to make his peace by humbling himself.

Another mission—the seventh—in behalf of Lewis, was sent to Avignon by the archbishop of Mayence, Henry of Virneburg, and his suffragans, after a council held at Spires. The pope is said to have had tears in his eyes as he told the envoys that he could not grant absolution to Lewis, in consequence of his breach of treaties with France; that Philip had threatened him with a worse fate than that of Boniface VIII, if the Bavarian should be absolved without the French king’s consent; and that he could hold no communication with the archbishop of Mainz, who had given great offence by a compact which he had lately made with his chapter, in order to obtain admission to his see.

The Germans were indignant that their requests should thus be rejected at the dictation of a foreign sovereign, and that pretensions should be set up which seemed to transfer the right of the electors to the pope. In reliance on this feeling, Lewis summoned a great diet, consisting not only of princes and nobles, but of deputies from cities and cathedral chapters, to meet at Frankfort on Rogation Sunday, 1338. Before this assembly Lewis stated, in a pathetic tone, the course of his dealings with the papal see, and the pretensions which had been set up for the papacy in derogation of the imperial dignity; and in proof of his orthodoxy he recited the Lord’s prayer, the angelic salutation, and the creed. The case was argued on his behalf by lawyers and canonists, especially by the famous Franciscan, Bonagratia; and the assembly resolved that the emperor had done enough, that the censures uttered against him were wrongful, and therefore of no effect; that the clergy ought not to observe the papal interdict, and that, if unwilling to celebrate the Divine offices, they should be compelled to do so.

On the 15th of July the electors, with the exception of the king of Bohemia, held a meeting at Rhense, where they expressed their apprehensions that, if the papal claims were admitted, they might in future have to choose only a king—not an emperor. They resolved that the empire was held immediately under God; that the emperor, chosen by all the electors, or by a majority of them, needed no confirmation from the pope; and they swore to defend the dignity of the empire and their own rights against all men, and to accept no dispensation from their oath. These resolutions were confirmed by a diet held at Frankfort, and several documents were drawn up by which the late pope’s processes against Lewis were pronounced to be null, and pope Benedict was requested to withdraw them, while the emperor appealed against John to a general council. It was declared that the vicariate of the empire, during a vacancy of the throne, belonged not to the pope but to the count palatine of the Rhine; that the oath taken by emperors was not one of fealty to the pope; and it was forbidden to receive papal bulls without the sovereign’s permission.

A great excitement followed in Germany. While the imperialists posted on church-doors manifestoes annulling the papal sentences, the papalists placarded copies of those sentences, and denunciations against all who should hold intercourse with the excommunicated Lewis. The clergy and monks who observed the interdict were driven out, and their property was confiscated; many of them went to Avignon, but, as their distress found no relief there, some returned to Germany and submitted to the emperor. Each party defended itself by the pen; and on the imperial side the most conspicuous writers were William of Ockham and Leopold of Bebenburg, who afterwards became bishop of Bamberg.

In September 1338 the emperor held a meeting with the king of England at Coblentz. The importance of the occasion was marked by a great display of splendour on both sides. Each of the sovereigns set forth his causes of complaint against Philip of France; an intimate alliance was concluded, and was confirmed by oath, and Edward was appointed vicar of the empire over the territories westward of Cologne. Yet notwithstanding the solemnity of his compact with Edward, from whom he received large subsidies, the emperor allowed himself to be soon after enticed,—chiefly through the influence of the countess of Hainault, who was at once his own mother-in-law and Philip’s sister,—into making an alliance with the French king; an incon­stancy which can only be explained by supposing that he was sincerely disquieted in conscience by the papal excommunications, and that he wished to secure Philip’s intercession with the pope. But although Philip affected to mediate, the faintness of his interest in the matter was too manifest, and Benedict looked with no favour on such an alliance between the sovereign whom the holy see had regarded as its especial favourite, and him who had been the object of its most terrible condemnations. He expressed his willingness to listen if Lewis would sue for absolution according to the forms of law, but intimated that the orthodoxy or the heresy of Lewis could not be dependent on the French king’s conveniences.

About this time a new cause of difference arose. Margaret, the heiress of the Tyrol, had been married to a boy six years younger than herself, a son of the king of Bohemia. The marriage had not been happy, and the emperor now formed a scheme of securing Margaret and her possessions for his son Lewis, on whom he had already bestowed the marquisate of Brandenburg. It was alleged that the Bohemian prince was incapable of performing the duties of a husband, and Leopold, bishop of Freising, was found willing to pronounce a separation on this ground, and to grant a dispensation for the marriage of Margaret with the younger Lewis, to whom she was related within the forbidden degrees. But before these things could be done, Leopold was killed, while on a journey, and no other bishop could readily be found to carry out the plan. In this difficulty the emperor’s literary allies, Marsilius and William of Ockham, came to his aid, by writing treatises in which it was maintained that the jurisdiction in such cases was not for the church, but for the temporal sovereign; that it had belonged to heathen emperors, and therefore much more must it be the right of the Christian emperor; that, while it is for bishops and theologians to decide whether certain defects in one of the parties would justify a divorce, the application of the rule so determined is the business of the secu­lar judge; that “it is for the human lawgiver to order that to be done which is established by the Divine law.”

On the strength of these opinions Lewis proceeded. Margaret’s husband was cited, and, as he did not appear, the emperor took it on himself to decree a divorce, and to dispense with the laws as to consanguinity with a view to her second marriage. But although Lewis thus gained his immediate object, this invasion of a province which had always been supposed to belong exclusively to the hierarchy excited a general distrust, which told severely against him. He made enemies of the king of Bohemia, with his uncle the powerful archbishop Baldwin of Treves, and all the Luxemburg party. The pope desired the patriarch of Aquileia to declare the late proceedings null, and to interdict the Tyrol and at this very time the death of Benedict XII made way for a successor more formidable to the emperor.

The election fell on Peter Roger, a Limousin of noble family, who styled himself Clement VI. He had been a Benedictine monk, and at the time of his election was archbishop of Rouen and cardinal of SS. Nereus and Achilleus. He had also been chancellor to king Philip, who, from unwillingness to lose his services, had for a time hindered his promotion to the cardinalate. His devotion to the interest of France was indicated in the ceremonies of his coronation, where the chief parts were assigned to great French dignitaries; and it was soon after more fully shown by the circumstance that, of ten cardinals whom he appointed at once, all but one were French.

Clement was noted for his learning, for his eloquence, and for an extraordinary power of memory; his manners were agreeable, and he is described as free from malice and resentments His morals were never of any rigid correctness; and while he was pope, a countess of Turenne, if not actually his mistress, is said to have exercised an absolute influence over him. He was a lover of splendour and luxury. The great palace of Avignon was growing under his care, and the princely houses of the cardinals rose around it; the court of the successor of St. Peter was perhaps the gayest and most festive in Europe. Under Clement the vice of the papal city became open and scandalous. Petrarch, who himself cannot be described as a model of severe and intolerant virtue, expressed in the strongest terms his horror at the abominations which filled the new “Babylon of the West,” and withdrew in disgust from the papal city to the solitudes ot Vaucluse.

In his ecclesiastical administration, Clement reversed the policy of Benedict. Preferments which the late pope had kept open, from a conscientious anxiety as to the difficulty of finding suitable men to fill them, were now bestowed without any regard to the qualifications of the receivers. Bishoprics, cardinalates, and other high dignities were given to young men whose sole recom­mendation was the elegance of their person and manners, while some of them were notorious for their dissolute habits. Other benefices were declared to be vacant as papal reserves, and were conferred with a like want of discrimination. The higher offices of the church were reserved for the pope’s own disposal, in contempt of the claims alike of sovereigns and of cathedral or conventual electors. The pope’s own kindred, both clerical and lay, were loaded with benefices and wealth to a degree of which there had been no example; among his cardi­nals were one of his brothers, two nephews, and another relation; and when someone ventured to remark on this, Clement’s answer was, “Our predecessors did not know how to be pope.”

The Romans, by two legations composed of persons who represented the various classes of the community, invited the pope to take up his abode in the ancient capital, and Petrarch, who was one of the deputies, urged the prayer in a poetical epistle, setting forth the attractions of the imperial and apostolic city. In reply, Clement alleged the necessity of remaining north of the Alps, that he might act as a peacemaker between England and France; but he promised to visit Rome as soon as the troubles of France should be settled. In the meantime he accepted the office of senator, which was offered to him, not as pope, but as a private person, and he granted another of their requests—that the jubilee, which was supposed to recur only once in a century, should be celebrated every fiftieth year.

Towards the emperor Lewis, the pope, while yet archbishop of Rouen, had shown his hostility by a sermon, in which he condescended to play on the words Bavarian, barbarian, and boor; and his behaviour towards him was marked throughout by a rancour which contrasted strongly with the easiness of Clement’s general character. The emperor sent a mission to Avignon, caused processions and other religious services to be celebrated with a view to an accommodation, and reminded king Philip of his engagement to intercede for him; but although Philip made a show of exerting himself, the terms which the pope prescribed were too rigid. It was required that Lewis should penitently acknowledge all the errors of his past conduct—that he should resign the empire, and restore the Tyrol to the Bohemian prince John; and on Maundy Thursday 1343 a new bull was issued, in which, after a long recital of the emperor’s offences—his contempt of ecclesiastical censures, his opposition to pope John on the question of evangelical poverty, his proceedings in Italy and at Rome, especially the crime of setting up an antipope, his usurpation of the right to grant a dispensation for the “incestuous and adulterous” union of his son with Margaret, “whom her immodesty will not allow us to call our beloved daughter”—the pope charges him within three months to lay down the imperial title and authority, to appear in person for penance, and to amend his offences against the church; and he threatens him with yet worse punishments in case of failure.At the same time Clement, by private letters, desired the German princes to prepare for another election, and threatened that, if they should be backward, he would give the empire a new head, by the same authority which had formerly transferred it from the Greeks to the Germans.

Notwithstanding the French king’s intercession, the pope, at the expiration of the time which he had named, pronounced Lewis to be contumacious; and a meeting of electors was held at Rhense, under the influence of John of Bohemia and his uncle, archbishop Baldwin, who were now strongly opposed to the emperor. Lewis, although on receiving the report of his first mission to Clement he had angrily sworn that he would never yield to the assumptions of the papal court, was warned by tokens of a growing disaffection to attempt a different course. He appeared at Rhense, and was able to avert the immediate danger by professing himself willing to be guided in all things by the judgment of the electors, and to labour in all ways for a reconciliation with the church, and by producing a letter in which the French king held out hopes of his obtaining absolution.

As his former applications had been considered insufficient, Lewis now begged that the pope would himself furnish him with a draft of the terms which were required of him; and in answer to this he received a document to which it might have seemed impossible that an emperor could submit in any extremity. He was required not only to acknowledge the errors of his past conduct, but to profess that he had never thought it right; to give up the imperial title, and to own that it was in the gift of the pope alone; to undertake a crusade whenever the pope should call on him; to amend all faults against the church and the pope, and to promise absolute obedience. Even pope Clement was surprised when Lewis authorized his ambassadors to accept these terms; but still these were not enough. Another docu­ment was prepared, by which Lewis was required to amend and retract all that he had done, not only as emperor, but as king—not only as to Italy and Rome, but as to Germany—and to pledge himself for the future to absolute slavery to the papal will. At this, which concerned the electors as well as himself, the emperor hesitated. He summoned a diet to meet at Frankfort in September 1344, and, after having exposed the pope’s dealings with him, he asked the advice of the assembly. Great indignation was expressed, and it was resolved, in accordance with the determination of the electors in a previous meeting at Cologne, that compliance with the pope’s demands would be incompatible with the emperor’s oath of office and with the duty of the electors. But the feeling of the assembly, instead of being favourable to Lewis, turned against him, as having by his weakness and vacillation lowered the dignity of the empire, and as being now for personal reasons the only hindrance to peace. Another meeting was held a few days later at Rhense, where John of Bohemia took the lead in opposition to him. When Lewis  offered to resign, the electors showed themselves willing to accept the offer, and in his place to set up Charles, marquis of Moravia, a son of the Bohemian king; and the emperor’s attempt to recommend his son, Lewis of Brandenburg, as his successor, was met by the insulting declaration that, since one Bavarian had so degraded the empire, they would have no more Bavarian emperors.

Clement was resolved against any reconciliation. Another mission from the emperor appeared at the papal court, but without effect; and on Maundy Thursday a fresh anathema was issued, in which the pope, after forbidding all intercourse with Lewis except for the benefit of his soul, denying him the right of Christian burial, and, charging all Christian princes to expel him from their territories, proceeds to implore the most horrible curses on him; and the document concludes by charging the electors to make choice of a new king, with a threat that, in case of their neglect, the pope would himself provide a person to fill the vacant throne.

John of Bohemia, who had lately become blind, visited Avignon with his son Charles, who had received in the French court an education of almost a clerical character; and Clement, who, as abbot of Fecamp, had been the prince’s tutor, was now favourable to his pretensions. But when the question of the empire was brought before the cardinals, a violent conflict arose. The French party, headed by Talleyrand of Perigord, bishop of Albano, was with the pope; the Gascons, under the cardinal of Comminges, a nephew of Clement V, were on the other side. Odious charges and imputations were bandied to and fro; the two chiefs had risen from their seats to rush at each other, when they were with difficulty restrained by the pope, and the meeting was suddenly broken up; whereupon the members of the hostile factions fortified their houses and armed their servants, as if in expectation of a general tumult. A paper of terms was offered by the pope to Charles, and was accepted by him. By this the future emperor bound himself to a degrading submission to the papal see.

The pope now issued a mandate desiring the electors to proceed to a new choice. As there was no hope of gaining Henry of Virneburg—to whom, as archbishop of Mainz, belonged the privilege of superintending the election—Clement set him aside in favour of Count Gerlach of Nassau, a youth of twenty; and he desired that Lewis of Brandenburg, son of the deposed emperor, should be excluded from a vote, as holding his position unlawfully. The young archbishop summoned a meeting to take place at Rhense on the 10th of July, when he appeared with the electors of Cologne and Treves, the king of Bohemia, and Rudolf, duke of Saxony. The empire was declared to be vacant; Charles of Moravia was elected by the five, and the ceremony of raising him aloft was performed on the “King’s Chair” of Rhense, as Frankfort was in the hands of the opposite party. The services of his supporters were, as usual, rewarded by large pay­ments or other concessions, and the election was, although not until nine months later, confirmed by the pope.

The general feeling of the Germans was against Charles. They saw with indignation that the same humiliations to which Lewis had submitted only in the extremity of distress were accepted by the new claimant as the very conditions on which he was to be allowed to supplant a lawfully-chosen emperor. A diet at Spires, under Lewis, declared the election of his rival to be null, and denied the pope’s right to depose an emperor. No secular prince would side with Charles; no city would countenance or harbour him; even at Basel, the bishop and his monks were unable to procure his admission. Aix-la-Chapelle, the traditional scene of the German coronations, shut its gates against him; and he was derided by the name of the “priests’ emperor.” In this state of things he found it expedient to withdraw with his father into France; and at the great battle of Cressy, where the blind king died in the thick of the fight, Charles fled from the field. As Aix and Frankfort were closed against him, he was, with the pope’s consent, crowned at Bonn by the archbishop of Cologne; and Germany seemed to be on the verge of a civil war, when Lewis suddenly died of a fall received in hunting, on the 11th of October 1347—the last emperor against whom the anathema of the church was directed, and the one who felt it most severely, although living at a time when such denunciations were generally less dreaded than in the days when men had not become familiar with them through abuse.

 

CHAPTER III.

JOANNA OF NAPLES—RIENZI—

LAST YEARS OF CLEMENT VI. A.D. 1343-1352.