THE SUPPRESSION OF THE TEMPLE
Physical weakness has always been the vulnerable point of the sacred
caste, for priests have rarely been warriors, and faith has seldom
been so profound as to guarantee ecclesiastics against attack.
This difficulty was marked in the early Middle Ages, when, although
disintegration so far prevailed as to threaten the very tradition of
centralized power, a strong leaven of the ancient materialism remained.
In the ninth century the trend toward decentralization was resistless.
Although several of the descendants of Charlemagne were men of
ability and energy, the defence was so superior to the attack that
they could not coerce their vassals, and their domains melted away
into independent sovereignties until the crown became elective, and
the monarchy almost a tradition. During the tenth century it seems
possible that the regal authority might have been obliterated, even to
the last trace, had it not been for the Church, which was in sore need
of a champion. The priesthood cared nothing for the legitimate line;
what they sought was a protector, and accordingly they chose, not the
descendant of Charlemagne, but him who, in the words of the Archbishop
of Rheims, was “distinguished by his wisdom and who found support in
the greatness of his soul.” Hugh Capet succeeded Louis V. because he
was the best chief of police in France.
From such an alliance, between the priest and the soldier, has always
sprung the dogma of the divine right of kings. In mediæval Europe,
enchantment was a chief element of the royal power. The monarch
was anointed with a magic oil, girt with a sacred sword, given a
supernatural banner, and endowed with the gift of miracles. His touch
healed disease. In return for these gifts, he fought the battles of the
Church, whose property was the natural prey of a predatory baronage.
Every diocese and every abbey was embroiled in endless local wars,
which lasted from generation to generation, and sometimes from century
to century. A good example was the interminable feud between the Abbey
of Vézelay and the Counts of Nevers, and a letter of a papal legate
named Conon, which described one of the countless raids, gives an idea
of the ferocity of the attack.
“The men of the Count of Nevers have burst open the doors
of the cloister, have thrown stones on the reliquaries which
contain the bodies of Saint Lazarus, of Saint Martha, of Saint
Andocious, and of Saint Pontianus; they have not even respected
the crucifix in which was preserved a morsel of the true cross,
they have beaten the monks, they have driven them out with
stones, and having taken one of them, they have treated him in
an infamous manner.”[144]
Until the stimulus given by the crusades was felt, subinfeudation went
on uninterruptedly; the Capetians were as unable to stem the current
as the Carlovingians before them, so that, under Philip I., the royal
domain had become almost as much dismembered as the kingdom of Lothaire
a century earlier. Consolidation began after the council of Clermont,
and Suger’s _Life of Louis the Fat_ is the story of the last years of
the partisan warfare between the crown and the petty nobility which had
been going on since the time of Hugh Capet.
During this long period the kings had fought a losing battle,
and without the material resources of the Church would have been
overpowered. Even as it was they failed to hold their own, and yet the
wealth of the clergy was relatively enormous. The single abbey of Saint
Denis was said to have controlled ten thousand men, and though this may
be an exaggeration, the corporation was organized on a gigantic scale.
Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries it held in France alone
three cities, upwards of seventy-four villages, twenty-nine manors
attached to these possessions, over a hundred parishes, and a great
many chapels bringing in valuable rentals, beside numerous vineyards,
mills and fields, with fifteen forests of the first class.[145]
Suger’s description of the country at the beginning of the twelfth
century is highly dramatic. Every strong position, like a hill or
a forest, was a baron’s hold, from whence he rode to plunder and
torment the people. One of the most terrible of these robbers was
Hugh du Puiset, a man whom the Abbot of Saint Denis calls a ruffian,
the issue of a long line of ruffians. To the churchman, Hugh was the
incarnation of evil. He oppressed the clergy, and though hated by all,
few dared oppose him. At last he attacked Adèle, Countess of Chartres,
daughter of William the Conqueror, who went with her son Tybalt to
seek redress from the king. Louis did not relish the campaign, and the
monk described how the lady taunted him with the defeat his father had
suffered from the father of Hugh, who pursued him to Orléans, captured
a hundred of his knights, and cast his bishops into dungeons.
Afterward, an assembly was held at Melun to consider the situation,
and there a concourse of prelates, clerks, and monks “threw themselves
at the king’s feet and implored him, to his great embarrassment, to
repress this most greedy robber Hugh, who, more rapacious than a wolf,
devoured their lands.”[146]
Certainly the priests had cause for alarm, for the venerable Archbishop
of Chartres, who was present, had been captured, loaded with irons, and
long left to languish in prison.
Three times this baron was defeated, but even when a prisoner, his
family connection was so powerful he was permitted to escape. At last
he died like a wolf, fighting to the last, having impaled the Seneschal
of France on his spear.
Even singly, such men were almost a match for both Church and Crown;
but when joined in a league, especially if allied to one of the great
feudatories, such as the Duke of Normandy, they felt sure of victory.
One day, when Eudes, Count of Corbeil, was to join this very Hugh,
he put aside his armour-bearer who was attending him, and said to his
wife: “Pray, noble countess, bring the glittering sword to the noble
count, since he who takes it from you as a count, shall to-day return
it as a king.”[147]
The immediate effect of the crusades was to carry numbers of these
petty princes to Palestine, where they were often killed or ruined. As
their power of resistance weakened, the crown gained, and Louis the Fat
reconquered the domain. His active life began in 1097, the year of the
invasion of Palestine, and his absorption of the lordship of Montlhéri
is a good illustration of his success.
The family of Rochefort-Montlhéri owned several of the strongest
donjons near Paris, and was divided into two branches, the one
represented by Guy Trousseau, Lord of Montlhéri, the other by Guy the
Red, Lord of Rochefort. Guy Trousseau’s father was named Milo, and
all three went to Syria, where Milo was killed, and his son disgraced
himself. Suger spoke of him with extreme disdain:--
“Guy Trousseau, son of Milo of Montlhéri, a restless man and
a disturber of the kingdom, returned home from a pilgrimage
to the Holy Sepulchre, broken down by the anxiety of a long
journey and by the vexation of many troubles. And ... [being]
panic stricken at Antioch at the approach of Corboran, and
escaping down from a wall [he] ... abandoned the army of God
and fled destitute of everything.” [148]
Returning a ruined man, he married his daughter to the illegitimate
son of Philip, a half-brother of Louis, a child of twelve; and as
his guardians, the king and prince got possession of the castle. This
castle was almost at the gates of Paris, and a standing menace to the
communications of the kingdom: therefore their delight was great. “They
rejoiced as though they had taken a straw from their eyes, or as though
they had burst the barrier which imprisoned them.”[149] And the old
king said to his son: “Guard well the tower, Louis, which has aged me
with chagrin, and through whose treachery and wicked fraud I have never
known peace and quiet.”[150]
Yet the destruction of the local nobility in Syria was the least
important part of the social revolution wrought by the crusades, for
though the power of the barons might have thus been temporarily broken,
they could never have been reduced to impotence unless wealth had grown
equal to organizing an overwhelming attack. The accumulation of wealth
followed the opening of the Eastern trade, and its first effect was to
cause the incorporation of the communes.
Prior to 1095 but one town is known to have been chartered, Saint
Quentin, the capital of Vermandois, about 1080,[151] but after the
opening of the Syrian ports the whole complexion of society changed.
Noyon was chartered in 1108, Laon in 1111, Amiens in 1113, and then
free boroughs sprang up on every side.
For want of the mariner’s compass, commerce could not pass north by
the Straits of Gibraltar. Merchandise had therefore to go by land, and
exchanges between the north and south of Europe centred in the County
of Champagne, whose fairs became the great market of the thirteenth
century.
The earliest dated document relating to these fairs is a deed drawn in
1114 by Hugh, Count of Troyes, by which he conveyed certain revenues
derived from them to the Abbey of Montier-en-Der. Fifty years later,
such mentions had grown frequent, and by the year 1200 the fairs had
attained their full development.[152]
Weaving had been an industry in Flanders under the Romans, and in the
time of Charlemagne the cloth of the Low Countries had been famous;
but in the twelfth century the manufacture spread into the adjoining
provinces of France, and woollen became the most valuable European
export. The fleeces were brought chiefly from England, the weaving was
done on the Continent, and one of the sources of the Florentine wealth
was the dressing and dyeing of these fabrics to prepare them for the
Asiatic market.
For mutual defence, the industrial towns of the north formed a league
called the Hanse of London, because London was the seat of the chief
counting-house. This league at first included only seventeen cities,
with Ypres and Bruges at the head, but the association afterward
increased to fifty or sixty, stretching as far west as Le Mans, as far
south as the Burgundian frontier, and as far east as Liège. Exclusive
of the royal domain, which was well consolidated under Philip Augustus,
the French portion of this region substantially comprised the counties
of Blois, Vermandois, Anjou, Champagne, and the Duchy of Normandy.
This district, which has ever since formed the core of France, became
centralized at Paris between the beginning of the reign of Philip
Augustus in 1180 and the reign of Philip the Fair a century later, and
there can be little doubt that this centralization was the effect of
the accumulation of capital, which created a permanent police.
The merchants of all the cities of the league bound themselves to
trade exclusively at the fairs of Champagne, and, to prosper, the
first obstacle they had to overcome was the difficulty and cost
of transportation. Not only were the roads unsafe, because of the
strength of the castles in which the predatory nobility lived, but the
multiplicity of jurisdictions added to taxes. As late as the end of
the thirteenth century, a convention was made between fifteen of the
more important Italian cities, such as Florence, Genoa, Venice, and
Milan, and Otho of Burgundy, by which, in consideration of protection
upon the roads, tolls were to be paid at Gevry, Dôle, Augerans, Salins,
Chalamont, and Pontarlier. When six imposts were levied for crossing
a single duchy, the cost of importing the cheaper goods must have been
prohibitory.
The Italian caravans reached Champagne ordinarily by two routes: one
by some Alpine pass to Geneva, and then through Burgundy; the other by
water to Marseilles or Aigues-Mortes, up the Rhone to Lyons, and north,
substantially as before. The towns of Provins, Troyes, Bar-sur-Aube,
and Lagny-sur-Marne lie about midway between Bruges and Ypres on the
one side, and Lyons and Geneva on the other, and it was at these cities
that exchanges centralized, until the introduction of the mariner’s
compass caused traffic to go by the ocean, and made Antwerp the monied
metropolis.
The market was, in reality, open continuously, for six fairs were held,
each six weeks long, and the trade was so lucrative that places which,
in 1100, had been petty villages, in 1200 had wealth enough to build
those magnificent cathedrals which are still wonders of the world.
The communal movement had nothing about it necessarily either liberal
or democratic. The incorporated borough was merely an instrument of
trade, and at a certain moment became practically independent, because
for a short period traders organized locally, before they could
amalgamate into centralized communities with a revenue sufficient to
pay a police capable of coercing individuals.
What the merchant wanted was protection for trade, and, provided he
had it, the form in which it came was immaterial. Where the feudal
government was strong, communes did not exist: Paris never had a
charter. Conversely, where the government was weak, communes grew
up, because traders combined for mutual protection, and therefore the
communes reached perfection in ecclesiastical capitals.
As a whole, the secular nobility rather favoured the incorporated
towns, because they could sell to them their services as policemen, and
could join with them in plundering the Church;[153] on their side the
tradesmen were always ready to commute personal military service into a
tax, and thus both sides benefited. To the Church, on the contrary, the
rise of the mercantile class was pure loss, not only because it caused
their vassals to seek better protection than ecclesiastics could give,
but because the propagation of the materialistic mind bred heresy. The
clergy had no police to sell, and the townsmen had, therefore, either
to do the work themselves or hire a secular noble. In the one case they
became substantially independent; in the other they transferred their
allegiance to a stranger. In any event, a new fief was carved out of
an ecclesiastical lordship, and such accessions steadily built up the
royal domain.
From the outset, the sacred class seems to have been conscious of
its danger, and some of the most ferocious wars of the Middle Ages
were those waged upon ecclesiastical serfs who tried to organize for
self-defence. In one of his books Luchaire has told, at length, the
story of the massacre of the peasantry of the Laonnais by a soldier
whom the chapter of Laon elected bishop for the purpose,[154] and this
was but a single case out of hundreds. Hardly a bishop or an abbot
lived at peace with his vassals, and, as the clergy were the natural
prey of the secular nobility, the barons often sided with the populace,
and used the burghers as an excuse for private war. A speech made by
one of the Counts of Nevers, during a rising of the inhabitants of
Vézelay, gives a good idea of the intrigues which kept the prelates in
perpetual misery.
“O very illustrious men, celebrated for great wisdom, valiant
by your strength and rich by the riches you have acquired
by your own merit, I am deeply afflicted at the miserable
condition to which you are reduced. Apparently the possessors
of much, in reality you are masters of nothing; and more than
this, you do not enjoy any portion of your natural liberty....
If I think on these things I am greatly astonished, and ask
myself what has become of, or rather to what depth of cowardice
has fallen within you, that vigour formerly so renowned, when
you put to death your Lord, the abbot Artaud.”
The count then dwelt upon the harshness of the living abbot, and ended
thus:--
“Separate from this man, and bind yourselves to me by a mutual
agreement: if you consent, I engage myself to free you from all
exactions, from all illegal rentals, and to defend you from the
evils which are ready to fall upon you.”[155]
Wherever developed, the mercantile mind had always the same
characteristic: it was unimaginative, and, being unimaginative, it
doubted the utility of magic. Accordingly, all commercial communities
have rebelled against paying for miracles, and it was the spread of a
scepticism already well developed in the thirteenth century among the
manufacturing towns, which caused the Reformation of the sixteenth. At
Saint-Riquier the monks carried the relics of Saint Vigor each year
in procession. In 1264 the burghers took a dead cat and put it in a
shrine, while in another casket they placed a horse-bone, to do service
as the arm of Saint Vigor. When the procession reached a certain spot,
the reliquaries were set down, and a mock fight began between two
mummers. Then the bearers cried out, “Old Saint Riquier, you shall
go no further unless you reconcile these enemies,” whereupon the
combatants fell into each other’s arms, and all cried out that Saint
Riquier had wrought a miracle.
Afterward they built a chapel and oratory, with an altar draped with
cloth of gold, and deposited the dead cat and the horse-bone; and
simple pilgrims, ignorant of the sacrilege, stopped to worship the
relics, the mayor and council aiding and abetting the crime, “to the
detriment of the whole Church universal.”[156]
The clergy retaliated with frightful ferocity. As heresy followed in
the wake of trade, the Inquisition followed in the wake of heresy, and
the beginning of the thirteenth century witnessed simultaneously the
prosperity of the mercantile class and the organization of the Holy
Office.
Jacques de Vitry breathed the ecclesiastical spirit. One of the
most famous preachers of his age, he rose from a simple monk to
be Cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, legate in France, and Patriarch of
Jerusalem. He led a crusade against the Albigenses, was present at
the siege of Damietta, and died at Rome in 1240. His sermons burn
with his hatred of the bourgeoisie: “That detestable race of men ...
hurrying to meet its fate, which none or few could escape,” all of whom
“were making haste toward hell.... But above all other evils of these
Babylonish cities, there is one which is the worst, for hardly is there
a community to be found in which there are not abettors, receivers,
defenders of, or believers in, heretics.”[157]
The basis of the secular society of the early Middle Ages was
individual physical force. Every layman, noble or serf, owed military
service, and when a borough was incorporated, it took its place in
the feudal hierarchy, like any other vassal. With the spread of the
mercantile type, however, a change began--the transmutation of physical
force into money--and this process went on until individual strength or
courage ceased to have importance.
As soldiers the burgesses never excelled; citizen troops have seldom
been formidable, and those of the communes rarely withstood the first
onset of the enemy. The tradesmen themselves recognized their own
limitations, and in 1317 the deputies of the cities met at Paris and
requested the government to undertake the administration of the local
militia.
Though unwarlike, the townsmen were wealthy, and, in the reign of
Philip Augustus, the same cause which led to the consolidation of
the kingdom, brought about, as Luchaire has pointed out, “a radical
modification of the military and financial organization of the
monarchy;” the substitution by the privileged corporations of money
payments for personal service.[158]
Thus, from the time when the economic type had multiplied sufficiently
to hire a police, the strength of the State came to depend on
its revenue, and financiers grew to be the controlling element of
civilization. Before the crusades, the high offices of the kingdom
of France, such as the office of the seneschal, were not only held by
nobles, but tended to become hereditary in certain warlike families.
After the rise of the Eastern trade the royal council was captured by
the bourgeoisie. Jacques Cœur is a striking specimen of the class which
ruled in the fifteenth century. Of this class the lawyers were the
spokesmen, and men like Flotte and Nogaret, the chancellors of Philip
the Fair, expressed the notion of centralization as perfectly as the
jurists of ancient Rome. No one has understood the movement better
than Luchaire. He has pointed out, in his work on French institutions,
that from the beginning of the reign of Saint Louis (1226) the Privy
Council steadily gained in consequence.[159] The permanent civil
service, of which it was the core, served as a school for judges,
clerks, seneschals, and all judicial and executive officers. At first
the administration retained a strong clerical tinge, probably because
a generation elapsed before laymen could be equally well trained for
the work, but after the accession of Philip the Fair, toward the end
of the century, the laymen decisively predominated, and when they
predominated, the plunder of the Church began.
Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the
expression of the will of the strongest for the time being,
and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to
generation. When the imagination is vivid and police weak, emotional or
ecclesiastical law prevails. As competition sharpens, and the movement
of society accelerates, religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes
for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor
class.
The more society consolidates the more legislation is controlled by the
wealthy, and at length the representatives of the monied class acquire
that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now
exercised by the modern magistrate.
“The two great figures of Saint Louis and of Philip the Fair
which dominate the third period are profoundly unlike, but
considering the facts as a whole ... [they] have but moderately
influenced the direction of the communal development. With
the bailiffs and Parliament the monarchical machine is in
possession of its essential works; it operates and will stop
no more. In vain the king shall essay to arrest its march, or
to direct it in another course: the innumerable army of agents
of the crown does not cease for a moment to destroy rival
jurisdictions, to suppress embarrassing powers, to replace
everywhere private jurisdictions by the single authority of the
sovereign.
“To the infinite diversity of local liberties its will is
to substitute regularity of institutions; political and
administrative centralization.”[160]
As Luchaire has elsewhere observed, the current everywhere
“substituted, in the paths of administration, justice, and finance,
the lay and burgher for the ecclesiastical and noble element.” In
other words, the economic type steadily gained ground, and the process
went on until the Revolution. Saint Simon never forgave Louis XIV. for
surrounding himself with men of mean birth, dependent on his will.
“The Duke of Beauvilliers was the single example in the whole
course of his reign, as has been remarked in speaking of this
duke, the only nobleman who was admitted into his council
between the death of Cardinal Mazarin and his own; that is to
say, during fifty-four years.”[161]
From the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century
was an interval of almost unparalleled commercial prosperity--a
prosperity which is sufficiently proved by the sumptuous quality of the
architecture of the time. Unquestionably the most magnificent buildings
of modern Europe date from this period, and this prosperity was not
limited to any country, but extended from Cairo to London. Such an
expansion of trade would have been impossible without a corresponding
expansion of the currency, and as no new mines were discovered,
recourse was had to paper. By the year 1200 bills of exchange had been
introduced,[162] and in order to give the bill of exchange its greatest
circulating power, a system of banking was created which operated as
a universal clearing house, and by means of which these bills were
balanced against each other.
In the thirteenth century, Florence, Genoa, and Venice were the chief
monied centres. In these cities the purchase and sale of commercial
paper was, at the outset, monopolized by a body of money-changers,
who, in Venice at least, seem to have been controlled by the council
of merchants, and who probably were not always in the best credit.
At all events, they were required in 1318 to make a deposit of
£3,000 as security for their customers, and afterward the amount
was increased.[163] Possibly some such system of deposits may have
originally formed the capital of the Bank of Venice, but everything
relating to the organization of the mediæval banks is obscure. All that
seems certain is, that business was conducted by establishments of
this character long before the date of any records which now remain.
Amidst the multiplicity of mediæval jurisdictions, not only did the
currency become involved in inextricable confusion, but it generally
was debased through abrasion and clipping. Before clearings could be
conveniently made, therefore, a coinage of recognized value had to
be provided, and this the banks undertook to supply by their system
of deposits. They received coin fresh from the mints, for which they
gave credits, and these credits or notes were negotiable, and were
always to be bought in the market. The deposits themselves were seldom
withdrawn, as they bore a premium over common currency, which they lost
when put in circulation, and they were accordingly only transferred
on the books of the corporations, to correspond with the sales of
the notes which represented them. Thus merchants from all parts of
Europe and the Levant could draw on Venice or Genoa, and have their
balances settled by transfers of deposits at the banks, without the
intervention of coin. A calculation has been made that, by this means,
the effective power of the currency was multiplied tenfold. Of all
these institutions, the corporations of Genoa and Venice were the most
famous. The Bank of Saint George, at Genoa, was formally organized in
1407, but it undoubtedly had conducted business from the beginning of
the twelfth century;[164] next to nothing is known of the development
at Venice. Probably, however, Florence was more purely a monied centre
than either Venice or Genoa, and no money-lenders of the Middle Ages
ever equalled the great Florentine banking families. Most of the
important commercial centres came to have institutions of the kind.
The introduction of credit had the same effect as a large addition
to the stock of bullion, and, as gold and silver grew more plentiful,
their relative value fell, and a general reform of the currency took
place. Venice began the movement with the grosso, it spread through
Italy and into France, and the coin of Saint Louis was long considered
as perfect money.
With the expansion of the currency went a rise in prices, all
producers grew rich, and, for more than two generations, the strain of
competition was so relaxed that the different classes of the population
preyed upon each other less savagely than they are wont to do in less
happy times.
Meanwhile no considerable additions were made to the volume of the
precious metals, and, as the bulk of commerce swelled, the capacity of
the new system of credit became exhausted, and contraction set in. The
first symptom of disorder seems to have been a rise in the purchasing
power of both the precious metals, but particularly of gold, which
rose in its ratio to silver from about one to nine and a half, to
one to twelve.[165] At the same time the value of commodities, even
when measured in silver, appears to have fallen sharply.[166] The
consequence of this fall was a corresponding addition to the burden
of debt, and a very general insolvency. The communes had been large
borrowers, and their straits were deplorable. Luchaire has described
their condition as shown “in the municipal accounts addressed by the
communes to the government.”[167] Everywhere there was a deficit,
almost everywhere ruin. Amiens, Soissons, Roye, Saint Quentin, and
Rouen were all in difficulty with their loans, but Noyon was perhaps
the worst of all. In 1278 Noyon owed 16,000 pounds which it was
unable to pay. After a suspension for fourteen years the king issued
an ordinance regulating liquidation; a part of the claims had to be
cancelled, and the balance collected by a levy on private property. The
bankruptcy was complete.
The royal government, equally hardly pressed, was unable to meet its
obligations in the standard coin, and resorted to debasement. Under
Saint Louis the mark of silver yielded but 2 pounds 15 sous 6 pence;
in 1306 the same weight of metal was cut into 8 pounds 10 sous.
The pressure upon the population was terrible, and led to terrible
results--the beginning of the spoliation of the emotionalists.
Perhaps the combination of the two great forces of the age, of the
soldier and the monk, was the supreme effort of the emotional mind.
What a hold the dazzling dream of omnipotence, through the possession
of the Sepulchre, had upon the twelfth century, can be measured by
the gifts showered upon the crusading orders, for they represented a
prodigious sacrifice.
At Paris the Temple had a capital city over against the capital of the
king. Within a walled enclosure of sixty thousand square metres, stood
the conventual buildings and a gigantic donjon of such perfect masonry
that it never needed other repairs than the patching of its roof.
Beyond the walls the domain extended to the Seine, a property which,
even in 1300, had an almost incalculable value.
On every Eastern battle-field, and at every assault and siege, the
knights had fought with that fiery courage which has made their name a
proverb down to the present day. In 1265, at Safed, three hundred had
been butchered upon the ramparts in cold blood, rather than renounce
their faith. At Acre, whose loss sealed the fate of Palestine, they
held the keep at all odds until the donjon fell, burying Christians and
Moslems in a common grave. But skill and valour avail nothing against
nature. Step by step the Templars had been driven back, until Tortosa
surrendered in 1291. Then the Holy Land was closed, the enthusiasm
which had generated the order had passed away, and, meanwhile,
economic competition had bred a new race at home, to which monks were a
predestined prey.
In 1285, as the Latin kingdom in Syria was tottering towards its
fall, Philip the Fair was crowned. Subtle, sceptical, treacherous,
and cruel, few kings have left behind them a more sombre memory, yet
he was the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with
the Church. Nine years later Benedetto Gaetani was elected pope:
a man as completely the creation of the social revolution of the
thirteenth century as Philip himself. Trained at Bologna and Paris, a
jurist rather than a priest, his faith in dogma was so scanty that his
belief in the immortality of the soul has been questioned. A thorough
worldling, greedy, ambitious, and unscrupulous, he was suspected of
having murdered his predecessor, Celestin V.
When Boniface came to the throne, the Church is supposed to have
owned about one-third of the soil of Europe, and on this property the
governments had no means of enforcing regular taxation. Toward the
close of the thirteenth century the fall of prices increased the weight
of debt, while it diminished the power of the population to pay. On
the other hand, as the system of administration became more complex,
the cost of government augmented, and at last the burden became more
than the laity could endure. Both England and France had a permanent
deficit, and Edward and Philip alike turned toward the clergy as
the only source of supply. Both kings met with opposition, but the
explosion came in France, where Clairvaux, the most intractable of
convents, appealed to Rome.
Boniface had been elected by a coalition between the Colonna and the
Orsini factions, but after his coronation he turned upon the Colonnas,
who, in revenge, plundered his treasure. A struggle followed, which
ended fatally to the pope; but at first he had the advantage, sacked
their city of Præneste, and forced them to fly to France. On the brink
of this war, Boniface was in no condition to rouse so dangerous an
adversary as Philip, and, in answer to Clairvaux’s appeal, he confined
himself to excommunicating the prince who should tax the priest and the
priest who should pay the impost.
Nevertheless, the issue had to be met. The Church had weakened as
terror of the unknown had waned, and could no longer defend its wealth,
which was destined to pass more and more completely into the hands of
the laity.
Philip continued his aggressions, and, when peace had been established
in Italy, the rupture came. Not realizing his impotence, and
exasperated at the royal policy, Boniface sent Bernard de Saisset,
Bishop of Pamiers, to Paris as his ambassador. Bernard had recently
been consecrated in defiance of Philip, and they were bitter enemies.
He was soon dismissed from court, but he continued his provocations,
calling the king a false coiner and a blockhead, and when he returned
to Pamiers he plotted an insurrection. He was arrested and prosecuted
by the Chancellor Flotte, but when delivered to the Archbishop of
Narbonne for degradation, action was suspended to await the sanction
of Rome. Then Flotte was sent to Italy to demand the surrender “of
the child of perdition,” that Philip might make of him “an excellent
sacrifice to God.” The mission necessarily failed, for it was a
struggle for supremacy, and the issue was well summed up in the final
words of the stormy interview which brought it to a close. “My power,
the spiritual power,” cried Boniface, “embraces and encloses the
temporal.” “True,” retorted Flotte, “but yours is verbal, the king’s is
real.”
An ecclesiastical council was convoked for October, 1302, and Philip
was summoned to appear before the greatest prelates of Christendom.
But, not waiting the meeting of this august assembly, Boniface, on
December 5, 1301, launched his famous bull, “Ausculta, fili,” which was
his declaration of war.[168]
Listen, my son: do not persuade yourself that you have no superior, and
are not in subjection to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: he
who says this is mad, he who sustains it is an infidel. You devour the
revenues of the vacant bishoprics, you pillage churches. I do not speak
now of the alterations in the coinage, and of the other complaints
which arise on all sides, and which cry to us against you, but not to
make myself accountable to God for your soul, I summon you to appear
before me, and in case of your refusal shall render judgment in your
absence.[169]
A century before, the barons of France had abandoned Philip Augustus,
through fear of the incantations of Innocent, but, in the third
generation of the commercial type, such fears had been discarded. In
April, 1302, the estates of the realm sustained the “little one-eyed
heretic,” as Boniface called Flotte, in burning the papal bull, and in
answering the admonitions of the pope with mockery.
“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface,
who calls himself sovereign pontiff, little greeting or none.
Let your very great foolishness know that we are subject to
no one for the temporalty; that the collation to the vacant
churches and prebends belongs to us by royal right; that
their fruits are ours; that collations which have been made,
or are to be made by us, are valid for the past and for the
future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors
against all comers. Those who think otherwise we hold fools or
madmen.”[170]
The accepted theory long was that the bourgeoisie were neutral in
this quarrel; that they were an insignificant factor in the state,
and obeyed passively because they were without the power to oppose. In
reality, consolidation had already gone so far that money had become
the prevailing form of force in the kingdom of France; therefore the
monied class was on the whole the strongest class, and Flotte was their
mouthpiece. They accepted the papers drawn by the chancellor, because
the chancellor was their representative.[171]
In July, 1302, Philip met with the defeat of Courtray, and the tone
of the ecclesiastical council, convened in October, shows that the
clergy thought his power broken. A priest relies upon the miracle, and,
if defied, he must either conquer by supernatural aid, or submit to
secular coercion. Boniface boldly faced the issue, and planted himself
by Hildebrand. In his bull, Unam Sanctam, he defined his claim to the
implicit obedience of laymen.
“We are provided, under his authority, with two swords,
the temporal and the spiritual; ... both, therefore, are
in the power of the Church; to wit, the spiritual and the
material sword: ... the one is to be used by the priest,
the other by kings and soldiers; sed ad nutum et patientiam
sacerdotis.”[172]
A sentence of excommunication had also been prepared and sent to
France, which was to have been followed by deposition; but when it
arrived, Philip convened an assembly of prelates and barons at the
Louvre, and presented an indictment against Boniface, probably without
a parallel in modern history. The pope was accused of every crime. He
was an infidel, a denier of the immortality of the soul, a scoffer at
the eucharist, a murderer, and a sorcerer. He was guilty of unnatural
crimes and of robbery.[173]
The bearer of the bull was arrested, the property of the bishops who
had attended the council sequestered, and Philip prepared to seize
Boniface in his own palace. Boniface, too, felt the decisive hour at
hand. He tried to reconcile himself with his enemies, drew the bull of
deposition, and prepared to affix it to the church door at Anagni on
September 8, 1303. Before the day came he was a prisoner, and face to
face with death.
Flotte had been killed at Courtray, and had been succeeded by the
redoubtable Nogaret, whose grandfather was believed to have been burned
as a heretic. With Nogaret Philip joined Sciarra Colonna, the bloodiest
of the Italian nobles, and sent them together to Italy to deal with
his foe. Boniface had made war upon the Colonnas, and Sciarra had
been hunted like a wild beast. Flying disguised, he had been taken by
pirates, and had preferred to toil four years as a galley-slave, rather
than run the risk of ecclesiastical mercy by surrendering himself to
the vicar of Christ. At last Philip heard of his misfortunes, bought
him, and, at the crisis, let him slip like a mad dog at the old man’s
throat. Nogaret and Colonna succeeded in corrupting the governor of
Anagni, and entered the town at dead of night; but the pope’s nephews
had time to barricade the streets, and it was not until the church,
which communicated with the papal apartments, had been fired, that
the palace was forced. There, it was said, they found the proud old
priest sitting upon his throne, with his crown upon his head, and men
whispered that, as he sat there, Colonna struck him in the face with
his gauntlet.
Probably the story was false, but it reflected truly enough the spirit
of the pope’s captors. He himself believed them capable of poisoning
him, for from Saturday night till Monday morning he lay without food
or drink, and when liberated was exhausted. Boniface was eighty-six,
and the shock killed him. He was taken to Rome, and died there of
fever, according to the rumour, blaspheming, and gnawing his hands in
frenzy.[174]
The death of Boniface was decisive. Benedict XI., who succeeded him,
did not attempt to prolong the contest; but peace without surrender was
impossible. The economic classes held the emotionalists by the throat,
and strangled them till they disgorged.
Vainly Benedict revoked the acts of his predecessor. Philip demanded
that Boniface should be branded as a heretic, and sent Nogaret to
Rome as his ambassador. The insult was more than the priesthood could
yet endure. Summoning his courage, Benedict excommunicated Nogaret,
Colonna, and thirteen others, whom he had seen break into the palace
at Anagni. Within a month he was dead. Poison was whispered, and, for
the first time since the monks captured the papacy, the hierarchy was
paralyzed by fear. No complaint was made, or pursuit of the criminal
attempted; the consistory met, but failed to unite on a successor.
According to the legend, when the cardinals were unable to agree, the
faction opposed to Philip consented to name three candidates, from whom
the king should select the pope. The prelate he chose was Bertrand de
Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Boniface had been his patron, but Philip,
who knew men, knew that this man had his price. The tale goes that
the king visited the bishop at an abbey near Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and
began the conversation as follows: “My lord Archbishop, I have that in
my hand will make you pope if I like, and it is for that I am come.”
Bertrand fell on his knees, and the king imposed five conditions,
reserving a sixth, to exact thereafter. The last condition was the
condemnation of the Templars.[175]
Doubtless the picturesque old tale is as false in detail as it is
true in spirit. Probably no such interview took place, and yet there
seems little doubt that Clement owed his election to Philip, and gave
pledges which bound him from the day of his coronation. Certainly
he surrendered all liberty of action, for he established himself at
Avignon, whence the battlements of Ville-Neuve can still be seen, built
by Philip to overawe the town. Within an hour he could have filled the
streets with his mercenaries. The victory was complete. The Church was
prostrate, and spoliation began.
Clement was crowned in 1305, and after two years of slavery he began
to find his compact heavy upon him. He yielded up the patronage,
he consented to the taxation of the clergy, and he ordered the
grand-masters of the crusading orders to return to Europe, all at
Philip’s bidding. But when he was commanded to condemn Boniface as a
heretic, he recoiled in terror. Indeed, to have rejected Boniface as an
impostor, and a false pope, would have precipitated chaos. His bishops
and cardinals would have been set aside, Clement’s own election would
have been invalidated; none could foresee where the disorganization
would end. To gain time, Clement pleaded for a general council,
which the king morosely conceded, but only on the condition that the
excommunications against his agents, even against Nogaret, should
be withdrawn. Clement assented, for he was practically a prisoner at
Poitiers, a council at Vienne was agreed to, and the Crown seized the
Templars without opposition from the Church.
Criticism has long ago dispelled the mystery which once shrouded this
bloody process. No historian now suggests that the knights were really
guilty of the fantastic enormities charged against them, and which they
confessed under torture. Scepticism doubtless was rife among them, as
it was among the cardinals, but there is nothing to show that the worst
differed materially from the population about them, and the superb
fortitude with which they perished, demonstrates that lack of religious
enthusiasm was not the crime for which they died.
When Philip conceived the idea of first murdering and then plundering
the crusaders, is uncertain. Some have thought it was in 1306, while
sheltered in the Temple, when, he having suddenly raised his debased
money to the standard of Saint Louis, the mob destroyed the house of
his master of the mint. Probably it was much earlier, and was but the
necessary result of the sharpening of economic competition, which began
with the accelerated movement accompanying the crusades.
After Clement’s election, several years elapsed before the scheme
ripened. Nothing could be done until one or both of the grand-masters
had been enticed to France with their treasure. Under pretence of
preparing for a new crusade this was finally accomplished, and, in
1306, Jacques de Molay, a chivalrous Burgundian gentleman, journeyed
unsuspectingly to Paris, taking with him his chief officers and one
hundred and fifty thousand florins in gold, beside silver “enough to
load ten mules.”
Philip first borrowed all the money de Molay would lend, and then,
at one sudden swoop, arrested in a single night all the Templars
in France. On October 13, 1307, the seizure was made, and Philip’s
organization was so perfect, and his agents so reliable, that the plan
was executed with precision.
The object of the government was plunder, but before the goods
of the order could be confiscated, legal conviction of some crime
was necessary, which would entail forfeiture. Heresy was the only
accusation adapted to the purpose; accordingly Philip determined to
convict the knights of heresy, and the best evidence was confession. To
extort confession the Inquisition had to be set in motion by the pope,
and thus it came to pass that, in order to convey to the laymen the
property of ecclesiastics, Christ’s soldiers were tormented to death by
his own vicar.
In vain, in the midst of the work, Clement, in agonies of remorse,
revoked the commissions of the inquisitors. Philip jeered when the
cardinals delivered the message, saying “that God hated the lukewarm,”
and the torture went on as before. When he had extorted what he needed,
he set out for Poitiers; Clement fled, but was arrested and brought
back a prisoner. Then his resolution gave way, and he abandoned the
knights to their fate, reserving only the grand-master and a few high
officials for himself. Still, though he forsook the individuals, he
could not be terrified into condemning the order in its corporate
capacity, and the final process was referred to the approaching
council. Meanwhile, a commission, presided over by the Archbishop of
Narbonne, proceeded with the trial of the knights.
For three years these miserable wretches languished in their dungeons,
and the imagination recoils from picturing their torments. Finally
Philip felt that an end must be made, and in March, 1310, 546 of the
survivors were taken from their prisons and made to choose delegates,
for their exasperation was so deep that the government feared to let
them appear before the court in a body.
The precaution availed little, for the knights who conducted the common
defence proved themselves as proud and bold in this last extremity of
human misery, as they had ever been upon the day of battle. They denied
the charges brought against them, they taunted their judges with the
lies told them to induce them to confess, and they showed how life and
liberty had been promised them, under the royal seal, if they would
admit the allegations of the government. Then they told the story of
those who had been steadfast to the end.
“It is not astonishing that some have borne false witness,
but that any have told the truth, considering the sorrows
and suffering, the threats and insults, they daily endure....
What is surprising is that faith should be given to those who
have testified untruly to save their bodies, rather than to
those who have died in their tortures in such numbers, like
martyrs of Christ, in defence of the truth, or who solely for
conscience sake, have suffered and still daily suffer in their
prisons, so many torments, trials, calamities, and miseries,
for this cause.”[176]
The witnesses called confirmed their statements. Bernard Peleti, when
examined, was asked if he had been put to the torture. He replied that
for three months previous to his confession to the Bishop of Paris, he
had lain with his hands so tightly bound behind his back that the blood
started from his finger nails. He had beside been put in a pit. Then
he broke out: “If I am tortured I shall deny all I have said now, and
shall say all they want me to say. If the time be short, I can bear to
be beheaded, or to die by boiling water, or by fire, for the honour of
the order; but I can no longer withstand the torments which, for more
than two years, I have endured in prison.”[177]
“I have been tortured three times,” said Humbert de Podio. “I was
confined thirty-six weeks in a tower, on bread and water, quia non
confitebatur quae volebant.”[178] Bernard de Vado showed two bones
which had dropped from his heels after roasting his feet.[179]
Such testimony was disregarded, for condemnation was necessary as a
preliminary to confiscation. The suppression of the Temple was the
first step in that long spoliation of the Church which has continued
to the present day, and which has been agonizing to the victims in
proportion to their power of resistance. The fourteenth century was
still an age of faith, and the monks died hard. Philip grasped the
situation with the intuition of genius, and provided himself with an
instrument fit for the task before him. He forced Clement to raise
Philip de Marigni to the See of Sens, and Marigni was a man who shrank
from nothing.
When made archbishop, he convoked a provincial council at Paris, and
condemned, as relapsed heretics, the knights who had repudiated their
confessions. Fifty-nine of these knights belonged to his own diocese.
He had them brought to a fenced enclosure in a field near the Abbey
of Saint Antoine, and there offered them pardon if they would recant.
Then they were chained to stakes, and slowly burned to ashes from the
feet upward. Not one flinched, but amidst shrieks of anguish, when half
consumed, they protested their innocence, and died imploring mercy of
Christ and of the Virgin.[180]
Devotion so superb might have fired the imagination of even such a
craven as Clement, but Philip was equal to the emergency. He had
caused scores of witnesses to be examined to prove that Boniface
was a murderer, a sorcerer, a debauchee, and a heretic. Suddenly he
offered to drop the prosecution, and to restore the Temple lands to
the Church, if the order might be abolished and the process closed.
Clement yielded. In October, 1311, the council met at Vienne. The
winter was spent in intimidation and bribery; the second meeting was
not held until the following April, and then the decree of suppression
was published. By this decree the corporation was dissolved, but
certain of the higher officers still lived, and in an evil moment
Clement bethought him of their fate. In December, 1313, he appointed
a commission to try them. They were brought before a lofty scaffold at
the portal of the Cathedral of Paris, and there made to reiterate the
avowals which had been wrung from them in their dungeons. Then they
were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. But at this supreme moment,
when it seemed that all was over, de Molay, the grand-master, and the
Master of Normandy, broke into a furious defence. The commissioners
adjourned in a panic, but Philip, thirsting for blood, sprang upon his
prey.
He gave his orders to his own officers, without consulting any prelate.
On March 18, 1314, as night fell, the two crusaders were taken from
the provost, who acted as their gaoler, and carried to a little island
in the Seine, on which a statue of Henry of Navarre now stands. There
they were burned together, without a trial and without a sentence.
They watched the building of their funeral pile with “hearts so firm
and resolute, and persisted with such constancy in their denials to
the end, and suffered death with such composure, that they left the
witnesses of their execution in admiration and stupor.”[181]
An ancient legend told how de Molay, as he stood upon his blazing
fagots, summoned Clement to meet him before God’s judgment-seat in
forty days, and Philip within a year. Neither survived the interval.
Philip had promised to restore the goods of the Temple to the Church,
but the plunder, for which this tremendous deed was done, was not
surrendered tamely to the vanquished after their defeat. The gold
and silver, and all that could be stolen, disappeared. The land was
in the end ceded to the Hospital, but so wasted that, for a century,
no revenue whatever accrued from what had been one of the finest
conventual estates in Europe.[182]
Such was the opening of that social revolution which, when it reached
its height, was called the Reformation.