Papal Resignations! II

Celestine V

In our last posting we spoke of the resignation of Gregory XII.  The pope previous to him who had resigned was Celestine V who was pope for only just over five months in 1294.  Celestine had never wanted to be pope.  He was a hermit, a noted ascetic in an age and culture where extreme asceticism was often mistaken for holiness.  Thus he had a reputation for sanctity while in fact he may have been no more than a pious eccentric.  Of course pious eccentrics are not necessarily bad people and Celestine seems to have been a genuinely good person even if given to devotional extremes. But just as good people don’t necessarily make good presidents—think of Jimmy Carter—neither do they make good popes.  In fact, the last thing that is helpful in the Chair of Saint Peter is a man whose personal integrity leaves him naïve to the evil surrounding him.  That, alas, was Celestine. 

He was chosen pope at a time when the cardinals were deadlocked between the candidates of various rival families of Roman nobility.  The Colonna, the Orsini, the Caetani, and other Roman families vied for control of the papacy and played off one another in conclave after conclave in the thirteenth century.  After the death of Nicholas IV in 1292 the Cardinals were unable to come to a consensus for more than two years.  Pietro Angelerio, also known as Pietro da Moronne (his hermitage had been at Moronne near Naples), a hermit monk known for his rigid asceticism, wrote the cardinal electors a letter castigating them for not giving the Church a pope.  The cardinals, frustrated, elected Pietro.  Pietro refused.  A delegation of prelates and the Kings of Naples and Hungary prevailed on him finally to accept and he was crowned pope at L’Aquilia, about 62 miles north east of Rome.  He chose to reign under the name Celestine V.

His papacy was a disaster and Celestine knew it.  He was an old man—79 years old—and had been a monk his whole life.  He had no idea how to deal with the politics of the papacy.  From the very first he wanted out.  And he had a very sly canon lawyer to advise him on just how it could be done in Cardinal Benedetto Caetani.  Celestine resigned.  Caetani was elected on the first day of the conclave.  Celestine returned to his hermitage but was not allowed to remain there.  Caetani, now Boniface VIII, was afraid that Celestine would fall into the hands of Boniface’s enemies and be used against him as a sort of counter-pope.  Celestine tried to flee to what is today Croatia, across the Adriatic from Italy but Boniface’s agents captured him and kept him under arrest at Ferentino south of Rome.  He died ten months later—some claim murdered on orders of Boniface, but that is unlikely. 

Boniface was an ambitious man who was sort of the papacy’s Richard Nixon in as that he would have been a good pope, even a great pope, except for his character flaws that in the end turned his virtues into vice.  His hunger for power and his arrogance brought him into conflict with Philip IV of France, a man whose greatness was matched by a truly evil character.  (Philip was also known as Philip the Fair, but Fair as in good looking not as in a good man.)  Boniface was flawed; Philip evil to the core—but a great king.  And just as there is a lesson to be learned in the Jimmy Carter like goodness of the ineffective Celestine, there is a lesson to be learned in the evil Philip who was a good king.  Good men are often not great men and great men are rarely good men.  We won’t go into Boniface’s papacy for now except to say that Dante placed Boniface in the deepest ring of hell and he put Celestine in hell as well—though not as deeply—for making Boniface’s papacy possible by himself resigning the responsibility to which he had been entrusted.  And Benedict?  Well his papacy has been lackluster, perhaps even plagued, though by no means as bad as Celestine’s.  But learn from Celestine—there is no guarantee that papacy Benedict makes way for will be any better and it could be worse.  Let us pray that it won’t be.   

Roots of Reform XXII: Otto I and Otto II --Father to Son

Christ blesses the Emperor

Otto II and his wife, the

Empress Theophanu in this 10th

century ivory panel. 

We mentioned yesterday that with the election of John XIII in 965, Otto I was able to bring some stability to the papacy.  However, at the pope’s death in 972 the internecine warfare broke out in an effort to control the papacy.  John had been a member of the powerful Crescenti family but unlike the others in that clan was willing to work with Otto.  The Crescenti and the other Roman families resented the imperial control of the papacy; they were used to controlling it.   This strife over the papacy between the Roman families and the Imperial court is the origins of the Guelph and Ghibelline strife that would trouble Italy throughout the Central and into the High Middle Ages, but at this time perhaps it is more accurate to speak of a Nationalist and an Imperial party.  When Otto I selected the deacon Benedict to succeed John XIII, he was installed as Benedict VI in January 973.  Otto died in May of that same year and the Crescenti lost no time in organizing a mob that overthrew Benedict and imprisoned him in the Castle San Angelo where he was strangled in August 974 to prevent his release and restoration by the Imperial Envoy, Sicco, sent by the new emperor, Otto II.  The papal murder was ordered by Crescentius I, the head of the Crescenti family and was possibly carried out by the deacon Franco Ferucci whom Crescentius and his party named to the papacy as Boniface VII.  Count Sicco intervened, however, and named the imperial candidate to the papacy as Benedict VII.  Boniface looted the Vatican treasury (which was not so much cash as the precious objects such as chalices, crosses, reliquaries, candelabra, and other cultic objects made of gold and silver and set with precious stones) and fled to Constantinople.  But don’t worry—he will be back and back more than once.

Otto had his hands full establishing his power in Germany and so he needed a powerful representative in Rome to protect his papal nominee from the Roman nobility and their thugs.  Benedict managed to hang on to the papacy for nine years and in that time he convoked several reform synods for the Diocese of Rome, in particular outlawing simony—the buying and selling of church positions—a common practice at the time. Part of his success in avoiding the sort of fate that met his predecessor was that he was a member of the family of the counts of Tusculum which provided some balance to the power of the Crescenti.  It was only in 981 that Otto was finally able to come to Rome himself.  Benedict died in July 983, Otto died five months later.  Upon Benedict’s death, Otto named his chancellor, Pietro Canepanova as Pope John XIV.  It was the chancellor’s death sentence as without the Emperor he had no protection from the anti-imperial party and their mobs.

Otto’s death left a political vacuum.  His heir was his three year old son, Otto III.  Otto II’s widow, the Greek Princess, Theophanu, was regent.  The child Emperor was kidnapped by a German Duke in the spring of 984 and the Empress-Regent was preoccupied in regaining custody of her son, leaving Rome open to more trouble.  The Romans resented the imperial nominee pope, John XIV, and anti-pope Boniface VII returned and imprisoned John in the Castle San Angelo where he was murdered.  He was succeeded by John XV, the son of a Roman priest named Leo.  (Clerical marriage was still the norm for the secular clergy.   The Crescenti were opposed to him, but the Empress Regent, Theophanu, resided in Rome during much of his reign and protected him.  John is noteworthy for a variety of reasons, so we will end this entry here and pick up with him in a day or two.     

Before we sign off, however, a final word about Boniface VII.  Having murdered Benedict VI and John XIV, he himself met a most unpleasant death.  He seized the papacy, annulled the papacies of his two predecessors Benedict VII and John XIV.  However, he himself died suddenly in 985, possibly murdered.  He was so hated that his corpse was seized and dragged naked through the streets of Rome and left abandoned at the foot of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.  Not a nice guy; not a nice end.

Today he is considered an anti-pope but for centuries he was recognized as legitimate and the next pope to take the name Boniface (a character of somewhat mixed moral fiber himself) took the name Boniface VIII.   

Note two things.  The first is the imperial power to name popes.  Political theory of the time saw the Emperor as the Vicar of Christ and as the earthly head of the Church.  The pope was its spiritual overlord, but subject in temporal affairs, including the temporal affairs of the Church, to the authority of the Emperor.  The Emperor was seen as having the responsibility for the integrity of the Church. 

The second thing to note is the chaotic way in which popes were elected—the roman nobility, the mobs, and the emperor all had some say.  The Emperor’s attempts to control the election of the popes was an attempt to bring some order out of the chaos and violence that too oftenmarked papal transitions.  One of the most important reforms would be the establishment of the system of election by the cardinal clergy of the diocese of Rome.  But that is still away off.    More on that in the future.

To these popes we owe Chateauneuf du Pape

I am not a big enthusiast for red wine, but I do like Chateauneuf du Pape, a great full-bodied red from the Rhone valley. (My taste, alas, cannot be satisfied cheaply.) Did you ever wonder how a French wine can be called after a castle of the pope? Probably not, but I am pedantic enough to tell you anyway.

I mentioned in an earlier blog (January 16) that the popes have not lived that long at the Vatican but at various other residences in Rome. I particularly mentioned the Lateran palace which was their official residence from the time of Constantine in the fourth century until the early fourteenth century when they abandoned Rome altogether. (note, I said "official," they often lived elsewhere as we shall see.) Rome was not a great place to live in the Middle Ages. Its population had shrunk from the two million or so at the time of Augustus to anywhere twenty thousand or eighty thousand at various times in the Middle Ages. The city was unhealthy—the Tiber and swamps were a breeding ground for malaria. The forum was in ruins; the great buildings of the empire had been ravaged for building materials or collapsed into rubble from earthquakes. The noble families lived in bricked up temples and amphitheatres which they had fortified against rival families and gangs fought in the streets of the city while cows grazed in the forum. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw popes spending a lot of time up in France and Germany; the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw them taking their ease in charming hill towns of Lazio, Umbria and Tuscany. It was at one of these towns, Anagni in Lazio, that Boniface VIII was attacked by Guillaume de Nogaret, the lieutenant of Philip the Fair of France—one of nastiest people God every made. (Philip was “fair” as in handsome; not as in just.) The pope was not only physically assaulted but held captive without food or water for several days. He died within the month. His successor, Benedict XI, reigned only eight months, dying suddenly at Perugia in Umbria. There is a possibility that he was poisoned by Nogaret whome he had excommunicated for his assault on Boniface. Benedict was succeeded by a Frenchman, Raymond Bertrand de Got, who took the name and number Clement V. Clement had no ties to Italy and no desire to live there and he moved the papal court first to Poitiers and then four years later to Carpentras. Clement died in 1314 and the papacy sat vacant for two years. King Philip assembled twenty-three cardinals for a conclave at Lyons in 1315 and they elected one of the more intriguing—and good—popes, Jacques Duèze who took the name John XXII. Duèze came from humble origins; his father had been a shoemaker. He was a bright fellow, however. He had studied medicine at Montpellier and law at Paris. He also had no ties to Italy and no desire to go there—he settled the papacy at Avignon where it would remain almost sixty years. We will do some blogs—someday—on John XXII as he is a very interesting and often overlooked pope, but for today let’s begin to take a look at the effect that the Avignon had on the papacy and the papacy had on Avignon.
In the first place we think of Avignon as being in France—and so it is today. It is a delightful place—well worth a visit (about three hours from Paris on the high-speed trains). But at this point in history it lay across the Rhone river from the southernmost boundary of the domains of the French King. In other words, it wasn’t in what was France in the fourteenth century. And culturally, even today, it has a more Mediterranean, even a somewhat Italian flavor to it. Avignon’s political status is difficult for us today to comprehend. As I said, It was not part of the domain of the Kingdom of France, but was territory of the Kingdom of Arles or as it is sometimes called the Second Kingdom of Burgundy which, in turn, was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus it lay outside the authority of the King of France and in the nominal power of the Emperor. ("Nominal" is the operative word.) The Emperor gave this fief to the Counts of Provence who were of the House of Anjou. In addition to being counts of Provence, the House of Anjou were Kings of Naples—the title was King of Sicily—but after the “Sicilian Vespers” of 1282 (the Sicilian Vespers was an uprising not a Church Service) their Kingdom was confined to the lower part of the Italian peninsula. The House of Anjou had been named to the Throne of Naples (aka Sicily) by Pope Clement IV in 1266—which meant that the Kings of Sicily (who were the same people who served as Counts of Anjou--times were tough and they had to work two jobs) owed the Pope a big favor. Consequently when the popes said that they would like to set up shop in Avignon, the Counts-of-Anjou-Kings-of-Sicily more or less had to say: "mi casa, su casa." After John XXIII, five more popes made Avignon their residence, serving both as Bishop of Avignon and Bishop of Rome. In 1348 the Clement VI bought Avignon from Joan of Naples, countess of Provence, for 80,000 florins (a little over 12 million USD in today's currency). Finally in 1377 Gregory XI was persuaded to return to Rome. We will talk more about that in some future blog, but there will be more to say about Avignon first Meanwhile, pour yourself a glass of Chateauneuf du Pape and toast the French popes,

The image today is the Palace of the Popes, Avignon