Avignon and All That

"During a January closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, a Trump administration official reportedly warned a Vatican ambassador that America had the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and that the Catholic Church had better take its side.
While the sourcing is limited, the American government confirms the meeting happened (if not the wording used) and Christopher Hale confirms that “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year [for the celebration of America’s 250th].” All of which certainly puts the Pope's comments against American violence in Iran in a different light.
But what’s getting a ton of attention is both the worst sourced, and most intriguing, piece: that an American official in that meeting invoked the Avignon Papacy." (LINK)

Why does that matter? Well, bringing up the Avignon Papacy to a Pope – any Pope – is pretty much a direct threat.

Back in the High Middle Ages, before the Calamitous 14th Century (and thank you, Barbara Tuchman, for one of the greatest histories ever written), i.e., the 1300s, there was only one official church in all of Western Europe, the Church, catholic and Catholic. Everyone was born into it, and it was integral to everything. The Church told you what was right and what was wrong, how to get to heaven, how to love your fellow man, how you should work, how you should live, how you should treat each other. All the social services that government and various non-profit organizations do today were then done by the church and the (often forced) largesse of the wealthy: welfare to widows and orphans, hospitals, asylums, orphanages, schools, etc.

The Church was like breathing, it was all around you. And that was fine with most people. The High Middle Ages, from 950 to 1300, has been called the Great Age of Faith. Cathedrals were built. Crusades were fought. And it helped that it was what's known as the Medieval Warm Period, a/k/a the Climatic Optimum: perfect weather, good harvests, often great harvests, fat bellies...

And then it all went to hell in a handcart, thanks to the Hundred Years' War (between England and France), the Black Death (where a third of the world OR MORE died, and that was just the first go-round), and the Avignon Papacy (a/k/a the Babylonian Capitivity of the Church) and the Great Schism. These three things shattered everything.

AVIGNON AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The papal palace in Avignon

Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

So let's start off with a problematic Pope, Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303): He was from the Gaetani family, wealthy Italian nobility. (Back then, it was pretty normal for a Pope to be elected from among wealthy Italian families and would be so for a very long time.) And it had been expected that he'd be elected to the papacy, but it didn't happen.

Instead, a monk named Pietro Angelerio, a hermit monk was elected by a fluke of frustrated cardinals (who were tired of wealthy noble Italian families running everything, and this was way before the Borgias). Pope Celestine was extremely holy, and wept when he was dragged from his cell to Rome. He was easily persuaded to resign a few months later, probably by Boniface, who was immediately elected Pope.

NOTE: Celestine had been promised he could return to his hermitage, but instead Boniface had Celestine arrested and imprisoned until he died.

Pope Boniface accomplished a lot, including the Regulae Iuris, a collection of legal principles, which is still used as a source for deciding matters of canon law. But his most infamous achievement was the papal bull Unam Sanctam – which declared the pope's jurisdiction over both temporal and spiritual powers: "We declare, announce and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."

This wasn't new: it was pretty much believed throughout Western Europe. Not in Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox Church still considered the Bishop of Rome as just another Patriarch among many. The Catholic/Orthodox schism over papal authority goes back a very long way...

The King of France was Philip IV a/k/a "the Fair" (apparently he was handsome), and did his best to expand French lands. He spent a lot of time at war with England, also with Spain, Flanders, etc., while setting up an alliance with Scotland (the "auld alliance" began with him), conquered Flanders, and made contact with the Mongols with the idea of future military alliances. The trouble is, all that cost money. He was always scrambling for money, and got it a variety of ways, such as arresting bankers and seizing their money.

(Later, under the next Pope, Philip IV pitched a huge fight with the Knights Templar, who had financed most of his war with England, and sent troops to arrest all the Templars in France, accusing them of sacrilige, idolatry, homosexuality, financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. And seized all their large assets…)

But then Philip IV levied taxes on the French clergy of one-half their annual income. Neither the Church nor the papacy would put up with that... Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericos Laicos, forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown.

So between the two bulls, Philip IV of France saw a threat, and held a little assembly of his own in Paris in April 1302. Nobles, burgesses and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery*, Deum Time ("Fear God"), in which Boniface supposedly claimed feudal suzerainty over France, an "unheard-of assertion". Boniface denied the document and its claims, but – insanely – reminded Phillip that previous popes had deposed three French kings. (Also a few English ones, including John Lackland.)

*I know, you thought social media and fake news were modern, right?

And that ticked Philip IV off enough to call for a council to depose Boniface on charges of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony, and sorcery. Boniface prepared to excommunicate Philip, and in order to stop him, Philip hired some thugs who attacked Boniface and imprisoned him for three days without food or water. Boniface was rescued by a group of Italian nobles, but the pope died of his treatment within a month.

Depiction of the death of Boniface in a
15th-century manuscript of Boccaccio's De Casibus

Pope Clement V (r. 1305-1314)

With Boniface's death, King Philip IV promptly bribed the college of cardinals, and Boniface's successor was a Frenchman who revoked Unam Sanctam. And in 1309 King Philip IV moved Clement and the papacy to Avignon, France. Clement brought with him all the French cardinals, papal bureaucracy, etc. In exchange, Philip promised him protection from anything like what happened to poor Boniface.

And there the papacy stayed, at Avignon until 1377, a period that's known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

In case you're wondering, this was a disaster for the Church, because the church expenses skyrocketed. Why? Well, they're in France, and the papal states are in Italy, and the papal states are where a lot of the papal wealth comes from. And the money isn't flowing regularly, so papal taxes went up even more. And, since the pope and his court were in France, and dependent on French support, they rubber-stamped all of the French king's policies and decisions. Especially since, of the 134 cardinals that were created during these 70 years, 113 of them are French.

But it really helped French royalty. A nice, tame Church that could pretty much be controlled…

Gennadii Saus i Segura

A map of Rome, showing an allegorical figure of Rome
as a widow in black mourning the Avignon Papacy

But that's medieval history - why does it matter that someone brought that up to today's representative for the Pope?

The big deal is that the Avignon Papacy began with a king sending a bunch of thugs to capture the Pope, and then setting up his own pope on his own land and controlling the church for 70 years.

Anyone in the Vatican would, and probably did, see "mentioning" it as a threat.

BTW, back in the day, things got worse. Eventually a pope returned to Rome, but instead of things getting back to normal, the French contingent elected yet another Pope in Avignon. So now there were two Popes, one in Avignon, one in France, each excommunicating the other, and all of the others' followers...  Eventually there were three popes...  Briefly... But that's another story, for another time.

Holy Bastard: Pope Stephen VII & the Cadaver Synod

by Brian Thornton

Read, — how there was a ghastly Trial once Of a dead man by a live man, and both, Popes

— Robert Burns, The Ring and the Book

This week's foray into historical bastardry concerns the Papacy and a pope “convicted” of terrible crimes nearly a year after his death!

The late 9th and early 10th centuries marked a period of widespread political chaos in Italy dubbed the “Iron Age” of the Papacy. For example, no less than twenty-five men served as pope between the years 872 and 972. During this time the Papacy came to be viewed as the ultimate “plum job” by Rome’s wealthy families, many of whom vied with each other to see one of their number don the shoes of the fisherman and in turn dispense ridiculous amounts of patronage amongst his kinsmen.

Feuds developed, blood was spilled. A pope was poisoned, and the reigns of his successors became successively shorter (many of them also meeting violent ends). In the midst of all of this chaos, where a pope would change canon law by this or that decree, only to have his reforms overturned by an antagonistic successor, one pope took matters even further.

He ordered a predecessor’s corpse dug up and put on trial.

Funny, he doesn't look crazy…

Enter Pope Stephen VII, who reigned as pontiff from May of 896 to August of 897.

These days people (Catholic or not) tend to view the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church as a benevolent, invariably elderly man dressed in clean white robes, apolitical, a living symbol of the Church’s stances on things such as social justice and mercy.

This was not always the case.

The Papacy has been around for millennia; it is one of the oldest institutions in the Christian Church. It stands to reason that a position like this one, which has been occupied by any number of different men over the course of its existence, has been occupied by the occasional loose screw. In the case of the Papacy, one could make the case that the law of averages has been stood on its head, and the office has seen enough loose screws, screaming rivets and outright nuts to fill a toolbox.

One such loose screw was Stephen VII, a churchman so off his rocker that he was given to toasting the health of the Devil and blaspheming against God. Add in the fact that Stephen was politically beholden to the family that ruled the nearby Duchy of Spoleto, and things start to get interesting.

During the Middle Ages the idea went that if a Pope was Christ’s vicar on Earth, he ought to have actual territory to rule like any secular feudal lord. This usually included the city of Rome and varying amounts of adjacent territory.

Since the Papacy at the time was scrambling for money and troops of its own, a succession of popes (including Stephen VII and many others) made outside alliances with powerful Italian families bent on adding the prestige of the Papacy to their own names. The Popes of this period usually accomplished this end by offering to legitimize the rule of the ally in question with a formal papal coronation (literally having the Pope himself place the ruler’s crown on his blessed head) in exchange for military aid and protection.

One pope who had done this was a predecessor of Stephen’s named Formosus, whose reign lasted five years (891-896). During that time Formosus (whose name in Latin means, “good looking”) had crowned the young Duke of Spoleto Holy Roman Emperor, then turned around and offered the same crown to Arnulf, King of Germany.

Am I saying Jude Law would play him in the movie?
No. But I'm not NOT saying it..

Arnulf had answered Formosus’ invitation by invading Italy and taking Rome, where Formosus promptly crowned him Holy Roman Emperor as well. Needless to say, this caused an uproar in Spoleto, especially with Angiltrude, Queen of Italy, Duchess of Spoleto, and erstwhile Holy Roman Empress, mother of the underaged Duke of Spoleto (who, lest we forget, had already been crowned Holy Roman Emperor himself).

Struck by a sudden mysterious paralysis, Arnulf withdrew from Italy, leaving Formosus to pick up the pieces. Formosus responded by dying shortly afterward, to be initially succeeded by a couple of popes with ridiculously short reigns (one of them only lasted two weeks as pontiff!), and eventually by Stephen VII, the certifiably crazy political pawn of Spoleto’s ruling family.

About six months into his reign, Stephen had Formosus dug up and propped up in a chair in the Vatican, where he was then placed on trial (called, appropriately enough, the Synodus Horrenda in Medieval Church Latin, and known in English today as the far tamer "Cadaver Synod") with Pope Stephen himself sitting as judge. Formosus (or rather his corpse) was accused of (among other things) being ambitious enough to actually want to be pope (the nerve!).

No one is sure of Stephen’s reasons for putting on this, the ultimate show trial, but historians speculate that he was feeling pressure from Angiltrude and her supporters to delegitimize Formosus’ reign (thereby also wiping out Arnulf’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor) and suffering from some well-documented psychosis.

The trial lasted for weeks, during which time Stephen would frequently interrupt his own papal prosecutor in order to rant at Formosus’ moldering corpse, calling it all manner of names, accusing it of murder, blasphemy and several other crimes with which it was not actually charged. How the corpse responded is not recorded.

The Lateran Palace today. The "trial?" took place here.

The trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The corpse was stripped of its expensive papal vestments, the first three fingers of its right hand (the three with which a pope blesses his subjects) were cut off, and the body was briefly reburied, this time in an unmarked grave in a graveyard reserved for foreigners. Within a couple of days it had been dug up yet again and tossed in to the Tiber River, only to be pulled out by a monk loyal to the dead pope’s memory.

This “Cadaver Synod” resulted in riots throughout Rome which eventually cost Stephen first his papal throne and eventually his life. He was strangled in prison less than six months after “condemning” the dead Formosus (once again, Formosus’ reaction, if any, to this news is not recorded).

A fitting end for one crazy bastard.