The Eighteen Christian Centuries

But the degradation of the papal chair was not yet complete, and Philip was far from satisfied. Merely to have harassed to death an old man of eighty-six was not sufficient for a monarch who wanted a servant in the Pope more than a victim. To try his power over Benedict the Eleventh, the successor of Boniface, he began a process in the Roman court against the memory of his late antagonist. Benedict replied by an anathema in general terms on the murderers of Boniface, and all Philip’s crimes and schemings seemed of no avail. But one day the sister of a religious order presented His Holiness with a basket of figs, and in a short time the pontifical throne was vacant.

Now was the time for the triumph of the king. He had devoted much time and money to win over a number of cardinals to his cause, and obtained a promise under their hands and seals that they would vote for whatever candidate he chose to name. He was not long in fixing on a certain Bernard de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, the most greedy and unprincipled of the prelates of France, and appointed a meeting with him to settle the terms of a bargain. They met in a forest, they heard mass together, and took mutual oaths of secrecy, and then the business began. “See, archbishop,” said the king: “I have it in my power to make you Pope if I choose; and if you promise me six favours which I will ask of you, I will assure you that dignity, and give you evidence of the truth of what I say.” So saying, he showed the letters and delegation of both the electoral colleges. The archbishop, filled with covetousness, and seeing at once how entirely the popedom depended on the king, threw himself trembling with joy at Philip’s feet. “My lord,” he said, “I now perceive you love me more than any man alive, and that you render me good for evil. It is for you to command,—for me to obey; and I shall always be ready to do so.” The king lifted him up, kissed him on the mouth, and said to him, “The six special favours I have to ask of you are these. First, that you will reconcile me entirely with the Church, and get me pardoned for my misdeed in arresting Pope Boniface. Second, that you will give the communion to me and all my supporters. Third, that you will give me tithes of the clergy of my realm for five years, to supply the expenses of the war in Flanders. Fourth, that you will destroy and annul the memory of Boniface the Eighth. Fifth, that you will give the dignity of Cardinal to Messer Jacopo, and Messer Piero de la Colonna, along with certain others of my friends. As for the sixth favour and promise, I reserve it for the proper time and place, for it is a great and secret thing.” The archbishop promised all by oath on the Corpus Domini, and gave his brother and two nephews as hostages. The king, on the other hand, made oath to have him elected Pope.

|A.D. 1305.|

His Holiness Clement the Fifth was therefore the thrall and servant of Philip le Bel. No office was too lowly, or sacrifice too large, for the grateful pontiff. He carried his subserviency so far as to cross the Alps and receive the wages of his obedience, the papal tiara, at Lyons. He became in fact a citizen of France, and subject of the crown. He delivered over the clergy to the relentless hands of the king. He gave him tithes of all their livings; and as the Count of Flanders owed money to Philip which he had no means of paying, the generosity of the Pope came to the rescue, and he gave the tithes of the Flemish clergy to the bankrupt count in order to enable him to pay his debt to the exacting monarch. But the gift of these taxes was not a transfer from the Pope to the king or count: His Holiness did not reduce his own demands in consideration of the subsidies given to those powers. He completed, indeed, the ruin the royal tax-gatherers began; for he travelled in more than imperial state from end to end of France, and ate bishop and abbot, and prior and prebendary, out of house and home. Wherever he rested for a night or two, the land became impoverished; and all this wealth was poured into the lap of a certain Brunissende de Périgord, who cost the Church, it was popularly said, more than the Holy Land. But the capacity of Christian contribution was soon exhausted; and yet the interminable avarice of Pope and King went on. The honourable pair hit upon an excellent expedient, and the Jews were offered as a fresh pasture for the unimpaired appetite of the Father of Christendom and the eldest son of the Church. Philip hated their religion, but seems to have had a great respect for the accuracy of their proceedings in trade. So, to gratify the first, he stripped them of all they had, and, to prove the second, confiscated the money he found entered in their books as lent on interest to Christians. He was found to be a far more difficult creditor to deal with than the original lenders had been, and many a baron and needy knight had to refund to Philip the sums, with interest at twenty per cent., which they might have held indefinitely from the sons of Abraham and repudiated in an access of religious fervour at last.

But worse calamities were hanging over the heads of knights and barons than the avarice of Philip and the dishonesty of Clement. Knighthood itself, and feudalism, were about to die,—knighthood, which had offered at all events an ideal of nobleness and virtue, and feudalism, which had replaced the expiring civilization of Rome founded on the centralization of power in one man’s hands, and the degradation of all the rest, with a new form of society which derived its vitality from independent action and individual self-respect. It was by a still wider expansion of power and influence that feudalism was to be superseded. Other elements besides the possession of land were to come into the constitution of the new state of human affairs. The man henceforth was not to be the mere representative of so many acres of ground. His individuality was to be still further defined, and learning, wealth, knowledge, arts, and sciences were from this time forth to have as much weight in the commonwealth as the hoisted pennon and strong-armed followers of the steel-clad warrior.

“The old order changeth, giving place to new,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

We have already seen the prosperity of the towns, and have even heard the contemptuous laughter with which the high-fed burghers of Ghent or Bruges received the caracollings of their ponderous suzerain as, armed cap-à-pied, he rode up to their impregnable walls. Not less barricaded than the contemptuous city behind the steel fortifications with which he protected his person, the knight had nothing to fear so long as he bestrode his war-horse and managed to get breath enough through the openings of his cross-barred visor. He was as safe in his iron coating as a turtle in its shell; but he was nearly as unwieldy as he was safe. When galloping forward against a line of infantry, nothing could resist his weight. With heavy mace or sweeping sword he cleared his ground on either side, and the unarmoured adversary had no means of repelling his assault. A hundred knights, therefore, we may readily believe, very often have put their thousands or tens of thousands to flight. We read, indeed, of immense slaughters of the common people, accompanied with the loss of one single knight; and this must be attributed to the perfection which the armourer’s art had attained, by which no opening for arrow or spear-point was left in the whole suit. But military instruments had for some time been invented, which, by projecting large stones with enormous force, flattened the solid cuirass or crushed the glittering helm. Once get the stunned or wounded warrior on the ground, there was no further danger to be apprehended. He lay in his iron prison unable to get up, unable to breathe, and with the additional misfortune of being so admirably protected that his enemies had difficulty in putting him out of his pain. This, however, was counterbalanced by the ample time he possessed, during their futile efforts to reach a vital part, to bargain for his life; and this was another element in the safety of knightly war. A ransom could at all times preserve his throat, whereas the disabled foot-soldier was pierced with relentless point or trodden down by the infuriated horse. The knight’s position, therefore, was more like that of a fighter behind walls, only that he carried his wall with him wherever he went, and even when a breach was made could stop up the gap with a sum of money. Nobody had ever believed it possible for footmen to stand up against a charge of cavalry. No manœuvres were learned like the hollow squares of modern times, which, at Waterloo and elsewhere, have stood unmoved against the best swordsmen of the world. But once, at the beginning of this century, in 1302, a dreadful event happened, which gave a different view of the capabilities of determined infantry in making head against their assailants, and commenced the lesson of the resistibility of mounted warriors which was completed by Bannockburn in Scotland, and Crecy and Poictiers.

The dreadful event was the entire overthrow of the knights and gentlemen of France by the citizens of a Flemish manufacturing town at the battle of Courtrai. Impetuous valour, and contempt for smiths and weavers, blinded the fiery nobles. They rushed forward with loose bridles, and, as they had disdained to reconnoitre the scene of the display, they fell headlong, one after another, horse and plume, sword and spur, into one enormous ditch which lay between them and their enemies. On they came, an avalanche of steel and horseflesh, and floundered into the muddy hole. Hundreds, thousands, unable to check their steeds, or afraid to appear irresolute, or goggling in vain through the deep holes left for their eyes, fell, struggled, writhed, and choked, till the ditch was filled with trampled knights and tumbling horses, and the burghers on the opposite bank beat in the helmets of those who tried to climb up, with jagged clubs, and hacked their naked heads. And when the whole army was annihilated, and the spoils were gathered, it was found there were princes and lords in almost incredible numbers, and four thousand golden spurs to mark the extent of the knightly slaughter and give name to the engagement. It is called the Battle of the Spurs,—for a nobler cause than another engagement of the same name, which we shall meet with in a future century, and which derived its appellation from the fact that spurs were more in requisition than swords.

Philip was at this moment in the middle of his quarrel with Boniface. He determined to compensate himself for the loss he had sustained in military fame at Courtrai by fiercer exactions on his clergy and bitterer enmity to the Pope. We have seen how he pursued the wretched Boniface to the grave, and persisted in trying to force the obsequious Clement to blacken his memory after he was dead. Clement was unwilling to expose the vices and crimes of his predecessor, and yet he had given a promise in that strange meeting in the forest to work his master’s will; he was also resident in France, and knew how unscrupulous his protector was. Philip availed himself of the discredit brought on knighthood by the loss of all those golden spurs, and compounded for leaving the deceased pontiff alone, by exacting the consent of Clement to his assault on the order of the Templars, the wealthiest institution in the world, who held thousands of the best manors in France, and whose spoils would make him the richest king in Christendom. Yet the Templars were no contemptible foes. In number they were but fourteen thousand, but their castles were over all the land; they were every one of them of noble blood, and strong in the relationship of all the great houses in Europe. If they had united with their brethren, the Knights Hospitallers, no sovereign could have resisted their demands; but, fortunately for Philip, they were rivals to the death, and gave no assistance to each other when oppressed. Both, in fact, had outlived the causes of their institution, and had forfeited the respect of the masses of the people by their ostentatious abnegation of all the rules by which they professed to be bound. Poverty, chastity, and brotherly kindness were the sworn duties of the most rich, sensual, and unpitying society which ever lived. When Richard of England was dying, he made an imaginary will, and said, “I leave my avarice to the Citeaux, my luxury to the Grey Friars, and my pride to the Templars.” And the Templars took possession of the bequest. When driven from the Holy Land, they settled in all the Christian kingdoms from Denmark to the south of Italy, and everywhere presented the same spectacle of selfishness and debauchery. In Paris they had got possession of a tract of ground equal to one-third of the whole city, and had covered it with towers and battlements, and within the unapproachable fortress lived a life of the most luxurious self-indulgence. Strange rumours got abroad of the unholy rites with which their initiations were accompanied. Their receptions into the order were so mysterious and sacred that an interloper (if it had been the King of France) would have been put to death for his intrusion. Frightful stories were told of their blasphemies and hideous ceremonials. Reports came even from over the sea, that while in Jerusalem they had conformed to the Mohammedan faith and had exchanged visits and friendly offices with the chiefs of the unbelievers. Against so dark and haughty an association it was easy to stir up the popular dislike. Nobody could take their part, they lived so entirely to themselves and shunned sympathy and society with so cold a disdain. They were men of religious vows without the humility of that condition, so they were hated by the nobles, who looked on priests as their natural inferiors; they were nobles without the individual riches of the barons and counts, and they were hated by the priests, who were at all times the foes of the aristocracy. Hated, therefore, by priest and noble, their policy would have been to make friends of the lower orders, rising citizens, and the great masses of the people. But they saw no necessity for altering their lofty course. They bore right onward in their haughty disregard of all the rest of the world, and were condemned by the universal feeling before any definite accusation was raised against them.

Clement yielded a faint consent to the proceedings of Philip, and that honourable champion of the faith gave full loose to his covetousness and hatred. First of all he prayed meekly for admission as a brother of the order. He would wear the red cross upon his shoulder and obey their godly laws. If he had obtained his object, he would have procured the grand-mastership for himself and disposed of their wealth at his own discretion. The order might have survived, but their possessions would have been Philip’s. They perhaps perceived his aim, and declined to admit him into their ranks. A rejected candidate soon changes his opinion of the former object of his ambition. He now reversed his plan, and declared they were unworthy, not only to wallow in the wealth and splendour of their commanderies, but to live in a Christian land. He said they were guilty of all the crimes and enormities by which human nature was ever disgraced. James de Molay, the grand-master, and all the knights of the order throughout France, were seized and thrown into prison. Letters were written to all other kings and princes, inciting them to similar conduct, and denouncing the doomed fraternity in the harshest terms. The promise of the spoil was tempting to the European sovereigns, but all of them resisted the inducement, or at least took gentler methods of attaining the same end. But Philip was as much pleased with the pursuit as with the catching of the game. He summoned a council of the realm, and obtained at the same time a commission of inquiry from the Pope. With these two courts to back him, it was impossible to fail. The knights were kept in noisome dungeons. They were scantily fed, and tormented with alternate promises and threats. When physically weak and mentally depressed, they were tortured in their secret cells, and under the pressure of fear and desperation confessed to whatever was laid to their charge. Relieved from their torments for a moment, they retracted their confessions; but the written words remained. |A.D. 1312.|And in one day, before the public had been prepared for such extremity of wrong, fifty-four of these Christian soldiers—now old, and fallen from their high estate—were publicly burned in the place of execution, and no further limit was placed to the rapacity of the king. Still the odious process crept on with the appearance of law, for already the forms of perverted justice were found safer and more certain than either sword or fagot; and at last, in 1314, the ruined brotherhood were allowed to join themselves to other fraternities. The name of Templar was blotted out from the knightly roll-call of all Europe; and in every nation, in England and Scotland particularly, the order was despoiled of all its possessions. Clement, however, was furious at seeing the moderation of rulers like Edward II., who merely stripped the Templars of their houses and lands, and did not dabble, as his patron Philip had done, in their blood, and rebuked them in angry missives for their coldness in the cause of religion.

Now, early in this century, a Pope had been personally ill used, and his successor had become the pensioner and prisoner of one of the basest of kings; a glorious brotherhood of Christian knights had been shamelessly and bloodily destroyed. Was there no outcry from outraged piety?—no burst of indignation against the perpetrator of so foul a wrong? Pity was at last excited by the sufferings and humiliations of the brothers of the Temple; but pity is not a feeling on which knighthood can depend for vitality or strength. Perhaps, indeed, the sympathy raised for the sad ending of that once-dreaded institution was more fatal to its revival, and more injurious to the credit of all surviving chivalry, than the greatest amount of odium would have been. Speculative discussions were held about the guilt or innocence of the Templars, but the worst of their crimes was the crime of being weak. If they had continued united and strong, nobody would have heard of the excesses laid to their charge. Passing over the impossible accusations brought against them by ignorance and hatred, the offence they were charged with which raised the greatest indignation, and was least capable of disproof, was that in their reception into the order they spat upon the crucifix and trampled on the sign of our salvation. Nothing can be plainer than that this, at the first formation of the order, had been a symbol, which in the course of years had lost its significance. At first introduced as an emblem of Peter’s denial and of worldly disbelief, to be exchanged, when once they were clothed with the Crusader’s mantle, for unflinching service and undoubting Faith,—a passage from death unto life,—it had been retained long after its intention had been forgotten; and nothing is so striking as the confession of some of the younger knights, of the reluctance, the shame and trembling, with which, at the request of their superior, they had gone through the repulsive ceremony. This is one of the dangers of a symbolic service. The symbol supersedes the fact. The imitation of Peter becomes a falling away from Christ. But a century before this time, who can doubt that all Christendom would have rushed to the rescue of the Pope if he had been seized in his own city and maltreated as Boniface had been, and that every gentleman in Europe would have drawn sword in behalf of the noble Templars?

But papacy, feudalism, and knighthood, as they had risen and flourished together, were enveloped in the same fall. The society of the Dark Ages had been perfect in its symmetry and compactness. Kings were but feudal leaders and chiefs in their own domains. Knighthood was but the countenance which feudalism turned to its enemies, while hospitality, protection, and alliance were its offerings to its friends. Over all, representative of the heavenly power which cared for the helpless multitudes, the serfs and villeins, those who had no other friend,—the Church extended its sheltering arms to the lowest of the low. Feudalism could take care of itself; knighthood made itself feared; but the multitudes could only listen and be obedient. All, therefore, who had no sword, and no broad acres, were natural subjects of the Pope. But with the rise of the masses the relations between them and the Church became changed. It was found that during the last two hundred years, since the awakening of mercantile enterprise by the Crusades and the commingling of the population in those wild and yet elevating expeditions, by the progress of the arts, by the privileges wrung from king and noble by flourishing towns or purchased from them with sterling coin, by the deterioration in the morals of priest and baron, and the rise in personal importance of burghers, who could fight like those of Courtrai or raise armies like those of Pisa and Genoa,—that the state of society had gradually been changed; that the commons were well able to defend their own interest; that the feudal proprietor had lost his relative rank; that the knight was no longer irresistible as a warrior; and that the Pope had become one of the most worldly and least scrupulous of rulers. Far from being the friend of the unprotected, the Church was the subject of all the ballads of every nation, wherein its exactions and debaucheries were sung at village fairs and conned over in chimney-corners. Cannon were first used in this century at the siege of Algesiras in 1343; and with the first discharge knighthood fell forever from the saddle. The Bible was first translated into a national tongue,[3] and Popery fell forever from its unopposed dominion. How, indeed, even without this incident, could the Papacy have retained its power? From 1305 till 1376 the wearers of the tiara were the mere puppets of the Kings of France. They lived in a nominal freedom at Avignon, but the college of electors was in the pay of the French sovereign, and the Pope was the creature of his hands. This was fatal to the notion of his independence. But a heavier blow was struck at the unity of the papal power when a double election, in 1378, established two supreme chiefs, one exacting the obedience of the faithful from his palace on the banks of the Rhone, and the other advancing the same claim from the banks of the Tiber. From this time the choice of the chief pontiff became a political struggle between the principal kings. There were French and German, and even English, parties in the conclave, and bribes were as freely administered as at a contested election or on a dubious question in the time of Sir Robert Walpole. Family interest also, from this time, had more effect on the policy of the Popes than the ambition to extend their spiritual authority. They sacrificed some portion of their claims to insure the elevation of their relations. Alliances were made, not for the benefit of the Roman chair, but for some kinsman’s establishment in a principality. Dukedoms became appanages of the papal name, and every new Pope left the mark of his beneficence in the riches and influence of the favourite nephew whom he had invested with sovereign rank. Italy became filled with new dynasties created by these means, and the politics of the papal court became complicated by this diversity of motive and influence. Yet feudalism struggled on in spite of cannon and the rise of the middle orders; and Popery struggled on in spite of the spread of information and the diffusion of wealth and freedom. For some time, indeed, the decline of both those institutions was hidden by a factitious brilliancy reflected on them by other causes. The increase of refinement gave rise to feelings of romance, which were unknown in the days of darkness and suffering through which Europe had passed. A reverence for antiquity softened the harsher features by which they had been actually distinguished, and knighthood became subtilized into chivalry. |A.D. 1350.|As the hard and uninviting reality retreated into the past, the imagination clothed it in enchanting hues; and at the very time when the bowmen and yeomanry of England had shown at Crecy how unfounded were the “boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,” Edward III. had instituted the Order of the Garter,—a transmutation as it were of the rude shocks of knighthood into carpet pacings in the gilded halls of a palace; as in a former age the returned Crusaders had supplied the want of the pride and circumstance of the real charge against the Saracen by introducing the bloodless imitation of it afforded by the tournament. In the same way the personal disqualification of the Pope was supplied by an elevation of the ideal of his place and office. Religion became poetry and sentiment; and though henceforth the reigning pontiff was treated with the harshness and sometimes the contempt his personal character deserved, his throne was still acknowledged as the loftiest of earthly thrones. The plaything of the present was nevertheless an idol and representative of the past; and kings who drove him from his home, or locked him up in their prisons, pretended to tremble at his anger, and received his letters on their knees.