Copyright 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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Cover art courtesy of Bridgman Art Library
978-0-674-97184-4 (alk. paper)
978-0-674-98288-8 (EPUB)
978-0-674-98289-5 (MOBI)
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Falkeid, Unn, author.
Title: The Avignon papacy contested : an intellectual history from Dante to Catherine of Siena / Unn Falkeid.
Other titles: I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Series: I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001898
Subjects: LCSH: PapacyHistory13091378. | PopesTemporal power. | Catholic ChurchPublic opinionHistoryTo 1500. | EuropeIntellectual life.
Classification: LCC BX1300 .F35 2017 | DDC 262/.1309023dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001898
Under the cover of darkness on the night between 26 and 27 May 1328, a small group of Franciscan friars left the city of Avignon in Provence and fled southward. Among the group were Michael of Cesena, the minister-general of the Franciscan order and professor of theology; Bonagrazia da Bergamo, professor of canon law and the official representative of the Minors at the papal curia in Avignon; Henry of Thalheim, provincial minister of Upper Germany; and the two theologians Franceso di Marchia dAscoli and William of Ockham, educated at Paris and Oxford, respectively. Breaking their vow to the pope in Avignon, they left the city secretly, without permission. The armed guards, dispatched to pursue them the following morning, could not find them in time. At the very last moment the fugitives managed to escape, and soon after they arrived at the port of Aigues Mortes, from where a ship brought them to the safety of the open sea. Then, on board a galley from Genoa, they wended their way toward the Italian peninsula. At the beginning of June, they arrived in the Tuscan city of Pisa, where they awaited the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Ludwig of Bavaria, and his court from Rome.
Why did such an eminent group, comprising the head and the leading friars and theologians of the Franciscan order in Europe, need to flee Avignon? What was at stake, and what did they expect from the emperor? There are no simple answers to such questions, but the immediate reason was the painful conflict over apostolic poverty that had broken out in the 1320s between the papacy in Avignon and the Franciscan order. The underlying causes, however, were far more complex, closely connected to the ongoing centralization of the church in the fourteenth century and the subsequently increasing temporal power of the pope. The popes authority was encapsulated in the expression of his claimed supremacyhis fullness of power (plenitudo potestatis)over secular rulers, a notion that roused bitter resistance in various groups of people all over Europe.
The conflicts escalated under the reign of Pope John XXII. He had rejected the validity of Ludwigs election in 1314 as the new emperor after the death of Henry VII. Nevertheless, Ludwig entered Rome in April 1328 intending to be crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, even without the popes support. Then, two months after the coronation ceremonies in Italy, he returned to Germany, with a short stop in Pisa, where the group of refugees waited hoping to receive imperial protection and sustenance. And Ludwig did not disappoint them; he took the friars under his wing, and they joined him on his way back to Munich, on the other side of the Alps.
Two of the protagonists in this book were among Ludwigs court. The first was William of Ockham (ca. 1287ca. 1347), a top theologian and logician, who in 1324 had been summoned from Oxford to the pope in Avignon to answer charges of heresy. Up to this point, none of his many works had shown any trace of attacking political or ecclesiastical rulers, but suddenly Ockham found himself in the eye of the storm, with the result that his life and authorship took a completely new direction. The second was Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275ca. 1342), whose huge political treatise Defensor pacis (The defender of peace) was condemned as heretical in 1327. Marsilius had already sought refuge at Ludwigs court in Germany, and in 1328 he followed the emperor to Rome, as both his personal physician and his political adviser.
The other four protagonists in this book are Dante Alighieri (12651321), Francis Petrarch (13041374), Birgitta of Sweden (13031373), and Catherine of Siena (13471380). Two of these six great thinkers were branded heretics (Marsilius and Ockham), two were later canonized (Birgitta and Catherine), and two became leading models for future generations of humanists (Dante and Petrarch). What they all had in common was an intensely critical view of the growing secular power of the Avignon papacy. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, and despite the different, though profoundly innovative, solutions they came to offer for the political and ecclesiastical crisis of their time, they shared a mutual resistance to the rapid development of the papal monarchy in Provence.
THE AVIGNON PAPACY CONTESTED
From 1309 to 1377, the pope and the Roman curia resided in the city of Avignon in Provence in southern France. In this period the church underwent an extraordinary process of centralization. The rearmament of papal power was not novel, but it took a radical new turn in the fourteenth century. Ecclesiastical domination had its roots in Pope Gregory VIIs series of reforms from the eleventh century, which were designed to free the church from lay control and increase the central, administrative power of the papacy.
Although this process of centralization had been taking place for quite some time, it intensified strongly in the fourteenth century. In an attempt to prevent secular states from appropriating church revenues without the popes permission, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericis laicos (1296), which stated that lay rulers had no jurisdiction over clerics or their property. By this time, kings obviously had more power than the pope, and the confrontation between Pope Boniface and secular European rulers was, as the historian Barbara Rosenwein has described it, one sign of the dawning new principles of national sovereignty. The salvos were especially intense between the pope and King Philip IV of France, known as Philip the Fair. Thus, in 1302, Boniface tried to put an end to the conflict by boldly confronting his opponent with his bull
