A Criminal History of Mankind (51 page)

It was power that interested Boniface. After the downfall of the Staufers, he saw no reason why he should not realise the dream of Gregory VII and become the true ruler of all Europe’s kings and emperors. Innocent III, we may recall - guardian of the young Frederick II - had persuaded the ‘wonder of the world’ to remit all taxes on the clergy; but Frederick went back on his word when he became emperor. Now Boniface decided it was time to try again, and in the year he became pope made the matter the subject of a bull. This was a papal edict (so called because of its ball-like seal -  Latin word was preferred because to refer to papal balls would obviously give rise to misunderstanding), and it was regarded as un-contradictable. No priest, said
Clericis Laicos
, could be taxed without direct permission of the pope.

In France, this notion caused rage and dismay. The king, Philip the Fair, was in character not unlike the pope - vain, aggressive and inclined to display and extravagance. As a result, he was permanently in need of money, and to cut off his church revenues caused him acute distress. He reacted promptly by cutting off all the pope’s revenues from France - that is, by issuing an edict forbidding money to leave the country. At the same time, the English king Edward I outlawed the clergy. Within a year, Boniface was practically compelled to withdraw
Clericis Laicos
. He tried to placate Philip by canonising his ancestor Louis IX.

Once again dreaming of power and grandeur, the pope proclaimed the year 1300 a ‘Jubilee Year’, a year for rejoicing, when anyone who came to Rome would receive automatic remission of sins. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked to Rome; hundreds of thousands of pounds flowed into the papal treasury. It was, says Frederick Heer in The
Medieval World, 1150-1300
, ‘the first example of the manipulation of the masses for a political end’. The great procession itself was like a combination of a Roman triumph and a Nuremberg Rally. The pope was preceded by two swords, symbolising his spiritual and earthly dominion, and heralds went ahead crying: ‘I am caesar, I am emperor!’ Gold coins were showered on the tomb of St Peter at such a pace that two croupiers had to pull them in with rakes. All this money was intended by the pope for the subjection of Sicily - that old quarrel still dragged on - and to press his claim as the real emperor of Europe.

The quarrels between Boniface and Philip the Fair began to blow up again. A haughty papal legate gave great offence to Philip with his insolent manners, but since he was the pope’s ambassador, there was nothing the king could do about it. However, the legate happened to be a French bishop, and as soon as his term as ambassador expired, Philip had him arrested, tried for blasphemy and disrespect for royalty, and thrown into prison. The pope was outraged - and began to be alarmed when Philip spoke about appointing future bishops himself instead of leaving it to Rome. In 1302 he issued a bull called
Unam sanctum
that went farther than anything before in asserting the pope’s superiority to kings and emperors. (It has since become something of an embarrassment to the Church, which has been obliged to declare that nothing in it is ‘divinely inspired’ except its last line - about there being no salvation outside the Church). He went on to threaten to depose Philip and excommunicate him.

Philip’s response was to call a meeting of the French equivalent of parliament, the Estates General, which denounced the pope as a heretic and said many other harsh things about him. (Modern research has shown that the heresy charge was not unfounded - it seems probable that Boniface did not believe in the immortality of the soul.) Then Philip sent off a kind of commando unit to Italy to kidnap the pope. This was done with the aid of an Italian family that the pope had offended, the Colonnas. The conspirators went to the pope’s town of Anagni, where he was spending the summer of 1303. With the complicity of the townspeople - who also seem to have had their grudges - they besieged him in his palace, and burst in as he was about to issue the bull excommunicating Philip. During the next few days, it seems fairly certain that the pope was roughly handled by his captors, although he refused to give way to their demands. They were prepared to drag him back to France to stand trial when the townspeople of Anagni experienced a change of heart and rescued him. But the sudden recognition of his own vulnerability had broken the pope’s will. He went back to Rome - where he was made prisoner by some of his enemies - and died soon after.

What we can see - and what the vainglorious and arrogant Boniface was entirely unable to see - is that he never stood the slightest chance of success in realising Hildebrand’s dream of papal domination. He had not even noticed how much the world had changed. Frederick II might be dead, but his spirit was alive and was transforming the world. It was against that spirit that Boniface had broken his head - not against the arrogant stupidity of Philip the Fair. The whole of France was behind Philip in telling the pope to keep his nose out of foreign affairs. And as the news of the ‘kidnapping’ and its sequel spread, the rest of Europe smiled sarcastically.

Philip’s rather underhand schemes continued to prosper. The next pope died - probably of poison - within a year. And Philip made sure that his successor was a Frenchman - a Gascon, Clement V. And Philip bribed or persuaded him not to go to Rome but to transfer the seat of the papacy to Avignon. There he lived in a huge and luxurious palace. This ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the papacy lasted for seventy-three years, during which time most of the popes thoroughly enjoyed themselves - in fact, gave the papacy a bad name for self-indulgence - and, naturally, lent a sympathetic ear to the demands of the French king.

With the pope in Avignon, Philip turned his attention back to the question of how to make money. Somebody’s pocket had to be picked, and one obvious candidate was the wealthy order of knights known as the Templars. They were very rich - they had often lent the king money - and very powerful. Founded in the Holy Land after the success of the first crusade, they had originally been housed in a wing of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. The Holy Land was, as we have seen, a dangerous place during the Middle Ages, and the Knights Templar had been decimated again and again in battles with the Saracens and finally ejected by the sultan Baybars in 1303. Their immense wealth had been bequeathed to them mainly by grateful crusaders whom they had nursed through sickness or injury. Philip had applied to join them, and had actually been rejected. For a man of his childish temperament, this was an insult that had to be avenged.

Ex-Templars were interrogated, and the king soon had a list of hair-raising accusations, such as homosexuality, worshipping a demon called Baphomet (in the form of a wooden penis) and spitting on the cross. The accusations were an imaginative compilation of the medieval ideas about black magic and demons, complete with naked virgins, female demons and endless sodomy.

Secret orders went out, and at daybreak on 13 October 1307, the authorities swooped, and almost every Templar in France was arrested. It was important to work fast, in case there was a public outcry - a matter like this could so easily turn into a boomerang that would make Philip a laughing stock. Disappointingly, there proved to be no documentary evidence of the abominations of which they were accused, and the treasure of the Templars was not found either - it seems fairly certain that they had advance warning and spirited it away. So Philip had the knights tortured horribly - so horribly that thirty-six of them died within a day or two. The new pope in Avignon issued a bull ordering the arrest of all Templars in all lands, and for three years Templars were tortured and tried. It was a nauseating farce, and Philip had not gained by it a fraction of the wealth he had expected. But it had to be carried through. In 1312, the pope admitted that there was not enough evidence to prove heresy; nevertheless, he dissolved the order. The tragedy came to an end in March 1314. Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars, who had been in prison for seven years, was exposed in front of Notre Dame to make a public confession. To everyone’s dismay, he declared that his only offence was to lie under torture; he insisted that the order was pure and that the charges were false. Nevertheless, at sunset, on the Ile de Palais in the Seine, he was slowly roasted to death over a fire. The story went around that the last words of the dying man had been a summons to the pope and the king to meet him in front of God’s throne one year hence, for judgement. Oddly enough, both the pope and the king died within that year.

And so, after the long halt of the Middle Ages, like a train waiting for hours in a country station, history began to rumble forward again. Now that the temporal power of the popes was broken, and thee new universities - Oxford (founded 1264), Bologna, Paris, Naples - were beginning to revive the learning of the ancients, the world seemed set for exciting changes. A university was not necessarily a conglomeration of professors, each teaching his own subject; it might, like the University of Paris, spring up around one man - the controversial theologian Peter Abelard - as the Academy of Athens had sprung up around Socrates; what mattered was that it was vitally interested in
ideas
. For the first time since the ancient Greeks, people were thinking again. Oddly enough, the legal system of Justinian became the subject of enthusiastic study. But this was because men no longer took it for granted that the Church was the one and only authority on matters of right and wrong; they wanted to discuss the whole concept of justice.

Since the west, unlike the east, had largely escaped the scourge of the Mongols, there might seem to be every reason for optimism about the future of Europe. In fact, to the average peasant, things had never looked worse. All the trade and commerce that had been stimulated by the crusades had brought prosperity, and prosperity brought a steep rise in the population. It is now a drearily familiar story, although no one gave it much serious thought until the Reverend Thomas Malthus turned his mind to the problem in the last years of the eighteenth century. Prosperity means that more children come into the world, and that of those, more survive into adulthood. New land has to be cultivated to feed them. By the time the Polos set out for Cathay, Europe was already becoming uncomfortably overcrowded. Methods of agriculture had improved, but not enough to produce anything like abundance. In most years, everybody got by. But as soon as there was a bad harvest, people starved and died. In 1315, the year after the death of Philip the Fair, there was a disastrous harvest all over Europe. The lack of sun not only meant that corn stayed unripe; it also meant a lack of salt - which was produced by evaporation of sea water - and this in turn meant that meat could not be stored for the winter. (This particular problem eventually led the Portuguese to sail around the world in search of spices, and pepper and nutmeg became the most valuable commodities in the world; but that time had not yet arrived.) There was mass starvation; people ate dogs, cats, rats, bird dung, even other human beings. It was a problem that no one seemed to be able to understand; the world was full of new prosperity, and people were dying by the thousand.

The earth itself seemed to be going through a period of convulsions. In 1281, a typhoon had wrecked Kubla Khan’s fleet off Japan. In 1293, thirty thousand Japanese were killed when a seismic wave hit the coast. In 1302 Vesuvius erupted, and in 1329, Etna. And England, in the midst of its starvation, experienced a violent earthquake in 1318, killing hundreds of people already scarcely alive from undernourishment. (Scots were eaten at the siege of Carrickfergus in 1316.) In 1304, the Holy Land itself was subjected to floods, and Damascus was inundated - as if nature itself had gone mad. In 1359, a hailstorm with lightning devastated the army of Edward III in France and killed six thousand horses.

But a disaster that was greater than all of these put together began in China in 1333, when drought on the plains between the Kiang and Hoai rivers brought famine, and then nature went to the opposite extreme and poured down non-stop rain in such torrents that a mountain called Tsincheou collapsed and left a vast hole in the earth; the floods killed four thousand. Another immense convulsion in the earth in the Ki-Ming-Chan Mountains created a lake a hundred miles across; the dead in the surrounding area were estimated at five millions. And the enormous heaps of dead began to incubate the bubonic plague.

Plague is, in fact, a disease that is carried by fleas, which are in turn carried by rats. The disease has always existed in certain areas, so it is still not clear why it should break out at specific times, or why rotting corpses should encourage it. But by 1340 it had spread over much of China; then it went on to India and Mongolia, Persia and Asia Minor. In 1346, it killed eighty-five thousand in the Crimea. When it reached the shores of the Black Sea, the Tartars seem to have decided to look for scapegoats - the old human tendency to ‘magical thinking’ - and settled upon the local Christian traders. The Genoese merchants in the city of Tana were attacked and driven to their trading base, the town of Caffa (now Feodosia), which was fortified for just such an emergency as this. The Tartars prepared to starve them out. And at this point, the plague struck; half the Tartar besiegers were thrown into convulsive agonies of misery and thirst, with the typical large swellings of the groin and armpits and the black spots on the skin that led to the disease being called the Black Death. They decided to abandon the siege; but first of all they used some of their huge catapults - the ones that had been brought from China by Genghis Khan - to toss some of their corpses into the fortress. The defenders immediately carried them to the sea; but the plague took a hold. They scrambled into their ships and sailed back for the Mediterranean. The ships put in at Messina - on Sicily - and Genoa; and within days, people in both places were dying by the thousand. The plague reached Messina in October 1347; by the following year, it had reached England, and quickly killed nearly half the population.