The Age of Chivalry (32 page)

The system of
benefices
—the income enjoyed by the holder of an ecclesiastical position—could be abused with candidates buying posts (a practice known as simony). Spiritual duties might then be farmed out to incompetents or not performed at all, and there were plenty of opportunities for enjoying the fruits of more than one office (pluralism). The tithe system was a venerable one by
c
.1300, but it was the Avignon papacy that systematized the
annates
by which the income gained in the first year of holding a high office, such as that of bishop, was remitted to the papacy. The Avignon Exchange was one of Europe's first foreign exchange markets, with agents of the great Italian banking houses acting as intermediaries between the Apostolic Camera (the papacy's central board of finance), the papacy's creditors and also its debtors—those who remitted to it the taxes and tributes. Regions that lacked an organized money market—Scandinavia, for example, and most of central and Eastern Europe—still sent coined money to Avignon by land or by sea, though these were precarious methods.

A reaction against the papal lushness was not slow in coming, with the followers of John Wycliff (
c
.1324–84) in England, the Hussites in Bohemia and the groups of the Fraticelli in Italy registering their revulsion at the parade of riches, and preaching a return to apostolic values of poverty and simplicity of life. There were intellectual critiques, too.
Defensor Pacis
(1324), by Marsilio of Padua (
c
.1275–
c
.1342)), goes beyond Dante's
hostility to a monarchical papacy and seeks to justify the emperor's supremacy over the pope. In 1328 the English philosopher and Franciscan William Ockham (
c
.1288—
c
.1348) had to flee Avignon, where he had been teaching, after concluding that the papacy was in error by not following the mendicant poverty of Christ and his disciples. Ockham's
Dialogus
(1332–48) is a major work of political theory with its emphasis on property rights, rejection of absolutist monarchy and the advocacy of limited constitutional government.

Both Ockham and Marsilio were excommunicated on account of their writings, whose political context is supplied by the conflict between Pope John XXII (r. 1316–34) and the emperor Louis IV (r. 1328–47) who revived an ancient debate by rejecting the pope's accustomed right to crown an emperor. Backed by the German nobility, Louis invaded Italy with an army in 1327, and on entering Rome he installed the anti-pope Nicholas whose brief period of influence (1328–29) anticipated the later schism. This episode inevitably made the papacy even more dependent on French support, and Clement VI (r. 1342–52), a former archbishop of Rouen, excommunicated Louis in 1346.

Clement's bull
Unigenitus
(1343) justified papal “indulgences,” which relieved the penitent of some of the temporal punishments for sins committed—and that system lent itself to later abuse by professional “pardoners” who sold indulgences. But although sanctity might not have been one of his attributes, Clement was a keen patron of musicians and composers, and it was he who commissioned the paintings on the walls of two of the papal palace's chapels.

Pope Gregory XI (r. 1370–78) had the wit to see that the papacy needed to be in Rome if it was to retain its authority in Italy. In reaching this conclusion he was much influenced by Catherine of Siena, a Dominican nun and prodigious correspondent whose letters advocating the pope's return were sent to the clerical and lay leaders of Italian opinion. However, the subsequent Western schism of 1378 to 1417 did great damage to the idea of a universal Church, with England, the empire, Poland and northern Italy supporting the pope in Rome, while France, the Spanish kingdoms and the kingdom of Naples backed the Avignon anti-popes.

A
BOVE
An early 15th-century woodcut of The Pardoner from the
Ellesmere Chaucer,
an illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales.

In the early 15th century the conciliar movement sought to renew the Church by locating its authority within representative councils whose meetings would supplement the traditional role of the papacy. But despite the return to Rome, and the presence once again of just one “supreme pontiff,” the papacy looked increasingly like one other European power jostling for position among more formidable competitors.

Critical accounts of the papacy's period in Avignon started early and many take their cue from the Italian poet Petrarch who, while staying in the city in the 1340s, wrote
: “I am astounded to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations.”

Petrarch's polemicism ignores the fact that many Avignon popes were able administrators. John XXII (r. 1316–34) for example sanitized Church finances, and Benedict XI (r. 1334–42) campaigned against clerical corruption. Successive Avignon popes, seeking to defuse the persistent disputes between French and Italian cardinals, built up the curia as the Church's central administration. Nepolistic appointments were sometimes made as a result. Increasing bureaucracy and centralization were the unintended consequences of the papacy's attempt at reforming itself.

Although Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) was born in Arezzo he was partly brought up in Avignon where his father, a lawyer, had moved the family in order to be near the papal court that he found to be a lucrative source of business. After a period spent studying law (a profession he loathed) at Montpellier and Bologna, Petrarch moved back to Avignon in the mid-1320s, and by
c
.1330 he was working in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. But it was Rome that drew him, and a visit to the city in 1337 inspired Petrarch to write
L'Africa
, an epic poem composed in Latin and which described the defeat by Scipio Africanus of the Carthaginian general Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218–201
BC
). The Colonna family in Rome liked the poem, and Petrarch benefited from their patronage while working on the project. The theme first came to him while walking in the mountains of the Vaucluse near Avignon, and Petrarch's treatment of Scipio as a heroic figure is central to the poet's artistic vision of the glories of the Roman past together with the urgent contemporary need to revive the classical tradition in the arts and letters. A comparison between the decadence of Avignon, a city of “licentious banquets” and “foul sloth” in Petrarch's words, and the sublimity of Rome is therefore implicit to his programmatic account of a “renaissance.”
L'Africa
was dedicated to King Robert of Naples, who liked it enough to award Petrarch with a laurel crown in 1341. The ceremony, held in Rome on Easter Sunday, consciously evoked the emperor Augustus's patronage of Horace, Ovid and Virgil. Ceremonial trumpets sounded, the king clad his laureate poet in a special robe, and Petrarch's speech of acceptance would in time be seen as a manifesto for the Italian renaissance. This was a
trionfo
inconceivable in Avignon, Petrarch's “Babylon of the West.”

Petrarch's statue stands outside the Uffizi Palace in Florence
.

Like many European towns, Florence adapted and survived in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman empire. Florentia (“the flourishing one”) was founded by Julius Caesar in 59
BC
, and its position at the confluence of the Arno and Mugnone rivers, as well as road links to the Po valley region, gave the town important trading advantages. But early medieval Florence first needed to re-establish its primacy as a regional center, since the Lombard monarchy—which controlled most of seventh-century central and northern Italy—decided that Lucca should be the capital of its duchy of Tuscany. Florence's position further inland also exposed it to attack from the Byzantines, who were still established in Italy's northeast. Lucca moreover offered a more direct land route to the Lombard capital of Pavia. Florence overcame these disadvantages and attained a cultural and financial pre-eminence during the central middle ages
.

The march (or margraviate) of Tuscany was established following Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in 774, and this frontier area to the Carolingian empire's south consisted of a collection of counties that included Florence. Lucca remained the seat of the margrave—who owed allegiance to the Holy Roman emperors—until the mid-11th century, and by then Florence was fast evolving as the Tuscan region's main administrative center. Bureaucracy, however, went hand in hand with Florence's emerging intellectual and cultural role, with the city's ruling élite being strongly committed to the Gregorian reform and therefore supporting the papacy against the empire. Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was backed by Matilda, margrave of Tuscany from 1076 onward and owner of the castle at Canossa where the emperor made his temporary submission to the papacy in 1077. Although many of Tuscany's cities—including Lucca—rebelled sporadically in favor of the empire, Florence's loyalty to Matilda was never in doubt. Her marriage in
c
.1189 to the future Welf II, duke of Bavaria (r. 1101–20), brought a trans-alpine cohesion to the anti-imperial cause. Although her husband left the margrave after a few years on discovering that her lands were bequeathed to the Church, the marriage contributed to Florence's fateful association with the Guelph faction—the Italian political expression of the German Welfs' pro-papal policy.

R
IGHT
Florence's massive cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, with its red tiled dome, is closely flanked by the octagonal Baptistery and by the campanile designed by Giotto di Bondone in the 1330s
.

Florentine solidarity, evident when the city defended itself successfully against Henry's army in 1082, bound Matilda to her subjects, and she was correspondingly generous in the granting of local liberties and privileges. By the time of Matilda's death in 1115 Florence, entrenched behind fortified walls that had been greatly extended during the imperial siege, had all the appearance of a typically independent Italian commune. In 1125, a defensive collective identity turned into opportunistic aggression; following the death of the emperor Henry V, who had no legitimate direct heirs, Florentine forces attacked and conquered the neighboring city of Fiesole. During its early history as a commune Florence was run by the local nobility with merchant support, and although the emperor Frederick Barbarossa tried to limit Florentine political autonomy by re-establishing the margraviate of Tuscany in 1185, that proved to be a short-lived experiment. Barbarossa had deprived Florence of its
contado
, the territories surrounding the city, but in 1197 it regained control of its lands by once again taking advantage of a hiatus in imperial affairs following the death of Barbarossa's successor, Henry VI.