Before There Were Muslims To Hate the Jews, French Christians Did A Pretty Good Job Of It (cont)

French Knights killing Jews

during the First Crusade

We have been looking at the long history of anti-Semitism in France so as to better understand the current tensions that French Jews are experiencing after the murder of four Jewish victims in a Kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris three weeks ago.  The current outbreak of anti-Semitism is being blamed on Muslim immigrants to France while it is overlooked that the French have a long tradition of persecuting and harassing the Jews.  We have looked at the story up until the Crusades and the High Middle Age.  We will now pick up on that saga.    

The situation of the Jews in France only deteriorated as the Middle  Ages wore on.  All through the period of the Crusades various local bishops and feudal lords instituted programs of forced conversions or expulsion from their territories.  In Lent of 1181 King Philip Augustus had his soldiers round up the Jews in the royal domains while they were at synagogue and forced them to surrender their money and jewelry.  The following year he expelled all those who would not convert to Christianity, giving them three months notice during which they could sell their assets while he confiscated their homes, shops, mills, factories, and other properties.  Their synagogues were turned into churches.  It was not long, however, before the King realized the disastrous implications on the economy of the Kingdom that was caused by the expulsion of the Jews and in 1198 he recalled them, permitting them to settle in Paris and several larger cities in his domain where he licensed them to engage in moneylending and pawnbroking with the Crown receiving a hefty cut of the profits.  The Crown viewed the Jews as their property and it was illegal for a Jew to move from the royal domain to that of another feudal lord.  This restricted their freedom of movement and put them in a position somewhat akin to that of a serf though their work was economic rather than agricultural. 

Louis IX (Saint Louis, reigned 1226-1270) was a particularly pious man and while he seems to have no animosity towards the Jews he did want, in accord with Christian theology, to abolish usury (moneylending at interest).  This had disastrous implications for the Jewish community in as that moneylending at interest was their chief business.  In an effort to end the practice, the King reduced the all debts of Christians owed to Jewish moneylenders by one third but insisted that the remaining two thirds had to be paid to the Jews within a given time frame.  This would pretty much cut the profits from the money lending and return the original amount of the loan.  While requiring the debts to be paid promptly guaranteed a certain justice for the moneylenders, at the same time he handicapped them in their collection.  The moneylenders could not have their Christian debtors imprisoned for failure to pay.  He then ordered the confiscation of all property owed by those who still engaged in moneylending.  On a religious level—as differentiated from the economic questions—in 1243 Louis ordered the burning of 12,000 Talmudic manuscripts.  The King also enforced a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council that required all Jews to wear on their outer garments, both back and front, a circular badge that identified them as Jews.  

Philip the Fair (reigned 1285-1314) expelled the Jews from France in 1306, confiscating their properties, money, and the debts owed them by Christians.  The Jews were arrested on July 22^nd, the day following Tisha B’Av, the annual fast marking the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.  In prison they were told that they had to leave the kingdom before the end of August and they could take with them only the clothes they were wearing and 12 sous (about .6£, at the time not an inconsiderable amount, perhaps two months wages for a working man.)  Everything else was confiscated to the crown; debts owed them by borrowers were transferred to the crown.  Philip was a truly evil man whose concern was motivated by greed for the crown revenues.  The following year he would turn on the Knights Templar, executing their leaders and confiscating their vast wealth to the crown.

In 1315 Philip’s Successor, Louis X, recalled the Jews to France, guaranteeing them they could remain for a trial period of 12 years.  They were forbidden to engage in money lending and required to wear a distinctive armband identifying them as Jews. They could only resettle in those cities and towns where they had lived before and they were not permitted to discuss religion with Christians.  They had to work either at manufacturing or at trade; money lending was forbidden them.  The situation did not last the promised twelve years.  In 1322 many Jews were expelled again from France under Charles IV, being blamed for poisoning wells in the 1321 Leper scare—an alleged conspiracy of spreading leprosy through poisoning the drinking water.  Another expulsion of the Jews from France occurred in 1394 during the Reign of Charles VI.   

In the late 15^th century, much of the region of Provence—until that time not part of France but held by a number of independent feudatories (including the Pope and the King of Naples), passed to the French Crown and was incorporated into the kingdom of France.  In 1501 the Jews of Provence, ancient communities going back to Roman days, were given an order to covert or leave the Kingdom.  Many did convert to Christianity but others crossed the Pyrenees into Catalonia and Aragon.      

Jews began migrating back into France in the early sixteenth century and remained relatively unmolested; in fact unnoticed amid the turmoil and tragedies facing the House of Valois.  In 1615, however, Marie de Medici, regent for her young son, Louis XIII, decreed that Christians should not shelter Jews nor converse with them.  Louis’ son, Louis XIV, considered another expulsion of the Jews in 1648 but by that time more enlightened understanding was beginning to affect political decisions.  Moreover, the economic impact of the Jewish community was considerable to a French Crown that was on a wild spending spree.  As the Church began losing its influence with the spread of Enlightenment thought, religious toleration began to replace  the more rigid patterns of the medieval and counter-reformation periods.  Of course not all saw this as good; nor do all see religious toleration as good today.  We will see that anti-Semitism survived the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to take root in the Catholic Restoration of the 19^th century and still colors right-wing French Catholicism today.

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.   

Shroud of Turin I: the traceable history

The photographic negative

of the face on the Shroud

as taken by Secondo Pia in

1898

Well we looked at Veronica’s veil, now let’s take a look at the “Shroud of Turin,” alleged to be the burial cloth of Christ.   Is it?  Who knows?  It is a mighty strange phenomenon! Scientists have examined it from every angle and under every discipline and have only conflicting theories and opinions.  But we won’t look at the scientific data, simply the historical narrative.  The history is problematic enough.  To begin with we can only be sure of its history for the last six-hundred and twenty years or so.  That isn’t very long and doesn’t help us explain the almost fourteen hundred years between its supposed use for the burial of Christ and its recorded history. 
     The history of the shroud can be traced with certainty only after 1390 when it’s presence in Lirey, a small village in the Champagne region of France, is attested by a letter to the Avignon claimant to the papacy, Clement VII,  in which the bishop of Troyes denied its authenticity as the burial cloth of Jesus.  The shroud belonged to the family of Geoffrey de Charny whose lands included the village of Lirey and who had established there a collegiate church with canons responsible for the custody of the relic.  This would have been a handsome income producer for Geoffrey and his family as a quarter of the revenues of such a church traditionally went to the Advowson—the patron who built (and owned) such a church.  The bishop claimed that the shroud was a forgery by a clever artist and that the artist hadconfessed to the fraud.  Strangely, under the circumstances, this did not stop Clement from granting indulgences to those who made the pilgrimage to Lirey and venerated the shroud though he did prohibit it being referred to as “the True Shroud” of Christ. 

      From Lirey its history is well recorded.  Geoffrey’s granddaughter Margaret married the Count de la Roche who  brought the relic to his castle at Montfort in the Franche-Comté and from there it went to the nearby town of Saint Hippolyte sur Doubs.  The canons of Lirey sued for possession but Margaret kept the relic and after her husband’s death took it on the road with her and exhibited it in various towns and cities of France.  There was a stiff trade in relics at the time and as I said, the shroud was a money maker. As she got older, Margaret was not cut out for carnie life and ended up retiring, selling the shroud and buying a castle with the proceeds.  The new owner was Anne of Cyprus, Duchess of Savoy, who build a collegiate church at the Savoy capital of Chambéry to hold the relic.  It was here at Chambéry that the shroud was damaged in 1532 when the chapel in which it was reposed caught fire and a drop of molten silver pierced the folded cloth within creating sixteen identical burn-holes where it went through the material.  The holes were patched by local Franciscan nuns.   During its time at Chambéry the Shroud was frequently sent out on tour through the Savoy lands in northern Italy and southern France.  Emmanuel Philibert (1528-1580), Duke of Savoy (and one time suitor of Elizabeth I of England) made Turin the capital of his Duchy in 1563 and fifteen years later moved the shroud there.  It has remained there since. The House of Savoy came to the Italian Throne in 1861.  Although the monarchy was abolished in 1946, the shroud was the possession of the House of Savoy, not the Italian government, and so it remained until 1983 when it was given by the once Royal Family to the Holy See.   Although it belongs to the Holy See it remains in the Cathedral of Turin.  This history is all able to be documented and, while it involves certain curious personalities, is not particularly interesting.   

      The more fascinating uestions is how did the shroud supposedly arrive in Lirey?  Well, let’s take it in stages as the history between 1204 and 1390 is a bit easier to reconstruct than the history previous to 1204.  Supposedly—and I say supposedly—the shroud was one of the many valuable relics held in the Greek Capital of Constantinople.  Remember that the Byzantine Empire was a strong and powerful empire that had for centuries ruled the eastern Mediterranean, including the Holy Land.  Especially in the reign of Justinian, (527-565) many holy objects were brought to Constantinople.   The Byzantines lost the Holy Land in 638-39, but still maintained rights of protection over the Christian shrines there.  In 1204 the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—attacked and sacked the city during the fourth Crusade.  This act more than anything else, has permanently (and understandably) poisoned the Greek Orthodox attitude towards Catholicism.  The Italians went for the gold and jewels; the French—ever more pious than the Italians—went for the relics.  Well, that’s not true, at least not totally, but many of the most precious relics did end up in France.  It seems—and again, I say it seems—that Shroud of Christ  which had been reported to have been at Constantinople ended up in the hands of the Knights Templar.  There is no record of it with the Templars and this is what makes it sketchy. But then the Templars were not the sort of men for public display.  To the contrary they were the embodiment of discretion.  The Knights Templar are a fascinating group and we need to do some entries about them.  In 1307 Philip of France—who owed the Templars a huge amount of money—attacked them for heresy and immorality. (The immorality is far more interesting than the heresy; but then it always is.) Among the Templars put to death on the King’s orders was one Geoffrey of Charny, the Templar Preceptor of Normandy.  It is one of his descendents, Geoffrey of Charny whose widow has possession of the shroud in 1390. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that the Shroud found its way from Constantinople to the Templars and from the Templars to Lirey through the de Charny family. That is one theorym, anyway, and the most plausible.  Hmmm.  Now we have to find out how it made its way to Constantinople.  That is for the next episode.

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