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.