The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (13 page)

• and Charles II did likewise. Charles took him over, escorting the new pope (who took the title Celestine V) to Aquila, which he entered riding on a donkey. He was crowned not in Perugia, where the cardinals were, nor in Rome, but in the church of Santa Maria di Collemaggio in Aquila, a town which lay within the territory of Charles II. There were very few cardinals present, so he was crowned a second time a few days later when more turned up. When Celestine made cardinals, as he did virtually immediately, he created twelve, an evident reference to the twelve apostles.
  

For however humble he might have been, Celestine had an almost messianic view of his appointment. Thanks to the writings of Joachim de Fiore, a mystical writer who had died just under a century before, many believed that a new age, the age of the Spirit, was about to dawn, an age which would be heralded by an “angel pope” – the role in which, perhaps, he saw himself. It may be that others had already seen him in that guise – hence the surprising choice in the conclave. It turned out to be a disaster. Holy Pietro del Morrone certainly was; Bishop of Rome he could not be, never having served in any appropriate capacity in all his life. He never set foot in Rome. Charles dominated him. He insisted that the pope live in Naples and guided his choice of the twelve new cardinals.

After the confusion of the process which elected him, Celestine decided to reinstate the regulations which Gregory X, or more accurately the Council of Lyons, had enacted. He did this in a series of three “bulls” – the most formal of all papal documents, com- plete with the papal seal or “bulla” – which made clear that there were three ways of electing a pope. The first was by inspiration, when a cardinal or cardinals nominated a candidate, and this was greeted with unanimous acclaim. The second was by “compro- mise,” an odd description because it simply meant that the choice

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was by a mediating committee. The third form was by scrutiny, in other words by a secret ballot, requiring the by now customary two-thirds majority. Charles II was also declared to be the guardian of the conclave.

And a new one was shortly to occur. Celestine gathered his cardinals on 9 and 10 December and explained that he was going to abdicate; he was old, ill, and, as far as running the Church was concerned, incompetent. On 13 December he read out a formula of abdication that had been drawn up by Cardinal Caetani, a church lawyer whose advice he had sought and who had advised him that there were precedents. Caetani was not being entirely honest. Two earlier popes were thought to have resigned – Pontian in 235 and Silverius in 537 – but their cases were different. Both had been deported from Rome and were unable to continue as the city’s bishop. This was not the situation in which Celestine found himself, but he resigned anyway and returned to being Pietro del Morrone. At first he occupied his cell at San Onofrio, but ended his days locked up on the orders of his successor in the castle of Fumone near Ferentino. He died on 19 May 1296. He was eighty- four years old.

The election which followed the abdication observed the regula- tions of
Ubi periculum
as reenacted by Celestine. The cardinals waited ten days, then on the third ballot voted in the man who had so dominated the short pontificate of Pietro del Morrone, Benedetto Caetani. He promptly broke the papacy’s ties with Charles II and moved the curia back to Rome. He was elected on Christmas Eve 1294; he was crowned in Rome on 23 January 1295, taking the title Boniface VIII. One of his earliest acts was to incorporate Gregory X’s regulations for the conclave, the constitu- tion
Ubi periculum
, into the canon law of the Church.

His was perhaps the most fraught pontificate of the Middle Ages. Certainly he had the highest expectations of the papal o
ffi
ce, expectations which brought him into open conflict with Philip the Fair of France. The Colonnas, who had supported his candidature

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for the papacy, also turned against him; two Colonna cardinals were deposed from their o
ffi
ce. They provided Philip’s lawyers with evidence to charge the pope with immorality. While he was in Anagni he was seized by the Colonnas and held captive – the idea being to take him to France to stand trial. The people of Anagni, however, forced his captors to free him, and he returned to Rome under the protection of the Colonnas’ great rivals, the Orsinis. But he died in the Vatican just a fortnight later, on 12 October 1303.

The conclave which followed, the first to take place in the Vatican in conformity with the strict interpretation of
Ubi periculum
, was inevitably influenced by Boniface’s seizure by the Colonnas and his sudden death. The cardinals, with the exception of the two who had been deposed, gathered in Rome and unani- mously elected Niccolò Boccasini, who had been Master General of the Dominicans and was made cardinal by Boniface himself. But Boniface had then sent him on diplomatic missions which were for the most part distant from the conflicts surrounding the papacy. In a deeply divided college he was seen as neutral, hence the widespread support. But it did not last. Though Benedict XI, as he was styled, absolved the two Colonna cardinals from the sen- tences of excommunication which Boniface had passed on them, he did not reinstate them. As a result there was an uprising in Rome, which was heavily dominated by the Colonna family, and Benedict had to flee to Perugia, where he died after a pontificate of only eight months.

By that time the divisions had not healed. There were two clear factions as the electors gathered in Perugia. There were eighteen cardinals with a right to vote (the two Colonnas – uncle and nephew – had still not been restored) but three were absent. Those who wanted to persevere with Pope Boniface’s high-handed poli- cies and punish those who had attacked him in Anagni numbered eight; on the other side there were seven who believed that the chief imperative was a reconciliation between the papacy and Philip the Fair of France. The regulations of
Ubi periculum
were not enforced,

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and there was no great pressure on the cardinals to come to a decision. After eleven months of on-and-off negotiations, in which the king of France had played a part, the solution finally agreed was to appoint someone from outside the college. The choice fell on Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who was well known to the cardinals, not least because his elder brother, Bérard, now dead, had been one of their number. His name had first been put forward by the Bonifatians and rejected by the pro-French party, but the leader of the pro-French cardinals, Napoleone Orsini, changed his mind. Bertrand de Got heard the news while he was in Poitou. He returned to Bordeaux and there announced that he would be known as Clement V. He went on to Lyons, where he was crowned on 14 November 1305. In December he created ten cardinals – one Englishman, the rest French, four of the latter being his relatives.

Though he had originally intended to return to Rome, such was the pressure from the French king that he was never able to do so, and in 1309 he settled in Avignon. In a sense it was a compromise. Avignon was French enough for Philip the Fair, but legally belonged to the pope’s vassals, the Angevin kings of Naples. The papacy was to remain there until 1377.

6

Pope Clement V’s election had been long-drawn-out, despite the provisions of Gregory X’s
Ubi periculum
. Clement decided to attempt, once again, to speed up the process. In 1311, during the Council of Vienne, he issued a Constitution
Ne Romani
, which reasserted
Ubi periculum
, said that the election was to take place where the pope had died, or wherever the curia had been estab- lished (strictly speaking where lawsuits referred to the pope were heard), and told the authorities of the town where the conclave was gathered to force the cardinals to return if they had abandoned the conclave, apart from those who were ill.

Clement died at Roquemaure on 20 April 1314. At the beginning of May the cardinals gathered in the bishop’s palace at Carpentras, just north-east of Avignon, where the curia assembled and shut themselves up in accordance with instructions. It rapidly became clear that a swift election was impossible. There were twenty-four cardinals in all, but one was missing, and there were three factions among the electors. Of the twenty-three, ten belonged to the Gascon faction, made up largely of relatives and associates of the late pope; there were six cardinals in a “French” bloc; the remain- ing seven were Italians, but did not form a clear-cut party. The Italians threw their support behind the “French,” but the Gascons wanted one of their own number and would not budge.

The stalemate led to rioting in the town, starting with street battles between Italians in the service of the papal court and the supporters of the Gascons. People died. The body of Clement still

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lay in the town and two of his relatives turned up with armed retainers to claim it – but then turned on the Italians, killed some, and, having set fire to parts of Carpentras, laid siege first to the house in which the Italian cardinals were living and then to the bishop’s palace where the conclave was meeting. The Italian cardi- nals fled. This did not suit the Gascons, who had solicited the Italians’ votes, and they went off to Avignon and declared they would go ahead with the election on their own. The Italians then said that, if they did, they – the Italians – would reject the Gascons’ choice and elect someone else.

The Italians fled Carpentras on 24 July 1314 and it was not until March 1316 that the cardinals could once more be gathered together, under pressure from the king of France, who left it to his brother, the Count of Poitiers, to ensure that the cardinals met again in Lyons. They made their way there. But then the king died and his brother had to return to Paris. He decided, however, to ensure that a conclave took place. He locked the cardinals into the Dominican house in Lyons and set troops to guard it. To get the cardinals to assemble he had made an undertaking not to lock them up, but he declared that the threat of schism nullified this promise, and he went off back to to the royal court.

The cardinals were locked up on 28 June; a month later they were still discussing. The impasse was broken only because Napoleone Orsini fell out with Pietro Colonna and threw his weight behind the Gascons – though they then had to agree on a compromise candidate, Jacques Duèse, Cardinal Bishop of Porto and a native of Cahors. In the end the election was unanimous, those unhappy with the choice making the best of it. Duèse was at least French, if not the preferred candidate of the Gascons, and was elderly and sickly, and therefore, it was thought, unlikely to last long. He was elected on 7 August, after a vacancy of more than twenty-seven months, and took the title of John XXII.

John, however, confounded expectations by living to the age of ninety or thereabouts and dying in 1334. His pontificate was

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controversial on many counts, including his treatment of a group of Franciscans who had radical views on poverty, and his attitude to the imperial claims of Louis of Bavaria. The two controversies rather melded into one when Louis in Rome claimed to depose the pope and got the Roman clergy to establish an electoral college of thirteen to choose a successor – a Franciscan, Pietro da Corbara, who took the name of Nicholas V (18 April 1328) and was fairly swiftly dumped by Louis when no longer useful.

But John had also got into di
ffi
culties with theological theories about life after death. He propounded the view that the saints would not see God until the final judgment, rather than the tradi- tional belief that this happened immediately after they died. The cardinals clearly thought that the Church needed someone with sounder views, so as soon as John had died they gathered in the papal palace in Avignon in the required manner and promptly chose Jacques Fournier, who took the name Benedict XII. Fournier was greatly surprised, but he was not only a respected figure among the cardinals but also had the advantage, as far as they were concerned, of being something of a theologian. He proved that their confidence was not misplaced by promptly putting an end to the embarrassing controversy in which John had become embroiled with views that were scarcely orthodox. Benedict XII’s views certainly were – his registers recounting his efforts to extirpate the Albigensian heresy form the basis for Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie’s famous book
Montaillou
.

Benedict died on 25 April 1342. His rule, as one commentator has described it, had been “rigid, austere, autocratic” (he was, after all, a Cistercian monk), and the cardinals wanted a change. They chose Cardinal Pierre Roger, and got the change. Clement VI, as the cardinal named himself, was promptly and unanimously cho- sen on 7 May 1342 after only three days of discussion. His court became renowned both for its much-admired ostentation and for the artists and scholars it attracted. Like his predecessor, Clement talked to representatives of Rome about returning there, but it was

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he who formally acquired the city of Avignon and its surrounding countryside from the Kingdom of Naples as a part of the papal states.

On 6 December 1351 he issued the constitution
Licet in constitu- tione
, which considerably modified the severity of
Ubi periculum
. The cardinals in conclave were to be permitted two servants rather than one; they were allowed curtains around their beds to ensure a modicum of privacy; their meals were no longer to be quite so frugal – they could have meat, fish, eggs, cheese, fruit. When the twenty-five cardinals met in the papal palace on 16 December 1352 to elect a successor to Clement they did not face quite such a harsh regime as had been imposed by Gregory X.

Nonetheless, despite these ameliorations, it took them only two days to reach their decision. They were no doubt spurred on by the fear that, if they did not quickly elect a new pope, the king of France might interfere. Their first choice was an unworldly cardinal, the Abbot General of the Carthusians, but one of the politically mind- ed electors persuaded the assembly to choose someone more worldly-wise. They then decided to enter into a pact to restrict the sphere of activity of whomever they elected. Each one of the elec- tors undertook to have no more than twenty cardinals – and not to create anymore until the number had dropped to sixteen; new car- dinals were to be appointed only with the agreement of the other members of the college. Similarly, papal powers in the papal states, in the raising and spending of taxes, and in the appointment of senior o
ffi
cials of the papal states and the curia were to be limited so that they could be exercised only after approval by two-thirds of the cardinals. What lay behind all this was the conviction of the college of cardinals that they shared responsibility with the pontiff for the running of the Church.