A country so riven by vicious political factionalism was clearly no safe place for a foreign pope, and no Frenchman could forget the attack on Boniface VIII at Anagni—an act of lèse-majesté that could only have happened with the connivance of the Roman nobles.
So it was quite understandable that the French popes of the fourteenth century refused to hold their court in Rome, and set up their own papacy at Avignon. Avignon was not Italian. But neither was it French. It was an enclave within France, independently papal, like the Vatican today, only much larger.
It ruled the territory known as the Comtat Venaissin. A French cardinal could feel much safer there than in Rome, but still be on papal ground.
It is often imagined that to have a pope living outside Rome was an unusual violation of Church custom. This was not true at all. There were lots of precedents for it.
In the century between 1099 and 1198, the pontiffs spent a total of fifty-five years away from Rome, eight of them in France.
In the two centuries from 1100 to 1304, the popes spent an aggregate of 122 years out of Rome, sometimes remaining in Italy, sometimes not.
Gregory IX (reigned 1227–41) passed more than eight years of his fourteen-year papacy away from Rome. Celestine V never saw Rome at all—elected in 1294, he lasted only five months, then resigned, defeated by the intrigues that swirled around him, thus making “il gran rifiuto,” “the great refusal,” the abandonment of the papacy, for which Dante placed him in the Inferno.
Innocent IV (reigned 1243–54) was elected and consecrated in Anagni but spent no more than a single year in Rome; Boniface VIII spent far more time in Velletri, Orvieto, or Anagni than in the Lateran Palace.
In sum, the only precedent-breaking aspect of the Avignon Papacy was its length—about seven decades. This filled some observers with alarm and foreboding. Papal withdrawal, said one, could be more economically and spiritually disastrous for Rome than even the barbarian invasions. Ferdinand Gregorovius called the Avignon popes “slaves” of the king of France, and this was not an uncommon view among writers and intellectuals at the time. And yet it would be difficult to maintain realistically that the removal of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon was inherently bad for the Church. In some ways, it even meant its improvement: the Church turned out to be more readily centralized, with a more efficient administration, from Avignon. But the ostentation of papal life there certainly grated on those who did not benefit by it. The poet Petrarch, who lived in Avignon, was horrified. “Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee,” he wrote to a friend in 1353.
They have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded … to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations.… Instead of holy solitude we find a criminal host and crowds of the most infamous satellites; instead of soberness, licentious banquets; instead of pious pilgrimages, preternatural and foul sloth.… In short, we seem to be among the kings of the Persians or Parthians, before whom we must fall down and worship.…
Though one might take this for the rhetoric of a disgruntled poet, it was close to literal truth. The papal court at Avignon eclipsed most others in Europe by its sheer extravagance. In the Palace of the Popes, a far more imposing building than the old Lateran Palace in Rome, the floors were covered with splendid Flemish and Spanish carpets, and the walls with silk hangings. The popes and their swarms of courtiers ate from gold plate and trays, lidded goblets, ewers, sauce boats, and flagons, using gold cutlery with handles of jasper or ivory. Pope Clement V’s stock of plate weighed seven hundred marks or 159 kilos; that of Clement VI, in 1348, weighed almost two hundred kilos. Their clothes were tailored from the richest materials: silk from Tuscany, gold Venetian brocade, white woolen cloth from Carcassonne, linen from Rheims and Paris trimmed with ermine or sable. Fur was used with abandon: Pope Clement VI had 7,080 ermine pelts in a new wardrobe that included several capes and no fewer than nine birettas (fur-trimmed hats).
Nor did the Avignon popes keep frugal tables. Their feasts were catered on a royal scale which, if anything, surpassed the extravagance of the Burgundian courts. In November 1324, Pope John XXII gave a wedding feast for the marriage of his grandniece, Jeanne de Trian, to the young nobleman Guichard de Poitiers. It is uncertain how many guests were invited, but they were served 4,012 loaves, 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 4 wild boars, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 580 partridges, 270 rabbits, 40 plovers, 37 ducks, 50 pigeons, 292 “small birds,” 4 cranes, and, rather anticlimactically, only 2 pheasants. They also dealt with 3,000 eggs, 2,000 apples and pears, and 340 pounds of cheese, washed down with 11 barrels of wine.
When the guest of honor was a pope, however, these relative austerities were abandoned. The Italian Cardinal Annibale di Ceccano threw a reception in Avignon for Pope Clement VI in 1343. “The meal,” he reported,
consisted of nine courses, each having three dishes. We saw brought in … a sort of castle containing a huge stag, a boar, kids, hares and rabbits. At the end of the fourth course the cardinal presented the Pope with a white charger worth 400 florins, and two rings, one set with an enormous sapphire and the other with an equally enormous topaz. Each of the sixteen cardinals received a ring set with fine stones, as did the prelates and the noble laymen.
After the seventh course, a jousting tournament, lances and horses, was held in the dining hall, and dessert followed:
Two trees were brought in; one seemed made of silver, and bore apples, pears, peaches and grapes of gold. The other was as green as laurel, and was decorated with crystallized fruits of many colors.
The climax of all this jollity took place outside, where the guests were shown a wooden bridge over the nearby river Sorgues. This dummy structure seemed to lead to the scene of further festivities, but once it was thickly crowded with monks, nobles, and other guests, it collapsed and “the artless sightseers all tumbled into the water”—one of those coarse practical jokes of which medieval humor was so fond, like the giochi d’acqua (water games) which were among the hazards of Renaissance gardens.
While such things were going on in Avignon, the very opposite was happening in Rome. There, the continued absence of the popes, the Curia, and the general life of the Catholic Church had impoverished the city to wretchedness. Suddenly its main business was withdrawn; or, if not withdrawn, then brought to a near-standstill. The contrast between the misery of the Eternal City and the luxuries of Avignon only got worse as time went by. The withdrawal of the papacy effectively deprived Rome of its chief occupation—the effect was comparable to what might happen to modern Los Angeles if the whole entertainment industry, the production and promotion of movies, TV, pop music, were suddenly wiped out. The economy stagnated, and the population plunged. Grass grew in the streets. No pilgrim was safe. License and disorder reigned. The rivalries fought out between the powerful clans of the city, the lawless aristocrats named Colonna, Savelli, Orsini, Caetani, multiplied in number and violence. Bandits who enjoyed the cynical protection of these big shots could not be controlled; no lawful traveler or trader was safe on a Roman street. It seemed that Rome was going bankrupt and careening into anarchy. Then, as sometimes happens, the fermentation of chaos and greed threw up what appeared to be its own antidote—from below.
His name was Nicola Gabrini, and his origins could scarcely have been humbler. His parents were both Romans: mother a washerwoman, father a small-time tavern keeper, Lorenzo Gabrini. In the usual Italian way, his first name was shortened and attached to his father’s, so that he became known as Cola di Lorenzo—Lorenzo’s boy Nicola. There was nothing in his background to suggest the powerful and idealizing effect he was destined to have on Rome, and on Italy in general. But Cola di Rienzo had a vision of Rome, of what it had once been and might become again. He yearned for Rome to rise from the squalor to which the disappearance of the popes to Avignon had condemned it, and become once more the caput mundi, the capital city of the world.