Download PDF | Joëlle Rollo-Koster - Avignon and Its Papacy, 1309-1417_ Popes, Institutions, and Society-Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2015).
330 Pages
Introduction
When the Good Lord comes to doubt about the world, he remembers that he created Provence,” the great French poet Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) is said to have offered in praise of his beloved homeland. Few other words better celebrate the region that hosted the papacy for the one hundred years that closed the Middle Ages. The French Southeast, open to the rest of the world via its Mediterranean shores, the broad highway of its Rhône River, and the byways of its Alpine passes, became the papal residence first by historical accident in 1309 but later by choice. The following pages tell the tale of this transplanted papacy at Avignon, the city the popes transformed into their capital. It is the tale of an institution growing and defending its prerogatives, of men both high and low who produced and served its needs, and of the city they built up together. As I reconsider the Avignon papacy and the Great Western Schism (1309–1417) within the social setting of late-medieval Avignon, I hope to recover some of its urban texture, the fabric of its streets, the noise of its crowds and celebrations, and a bit of its people’s joys and pains.
The story of Avignon and its inhabitants is crucial to our understanding of the institutional history of the papacy in the later Middle Ages. Between 1309 and 1378, seven popes ruled the Western Church from Avignon (French today but Provençal territory until 1348, when Pope Clement VI bought the city from the Countess of Provence). Pope Gregory XI returned the papacy to Rome in 1377, but his subsequent death in March 1378 and the tumultuous Roman election of his successor in April shattered the unity of the Church in the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). The increasing dissatisfaction of the cardinals after the election of Urban VI led the majority to withdraw their support from him and to elect a challenger, Clement VII. Both popes considered themselves legitimate. The two contenders established rival courts, and Christendom split into a divided obedience. Clement VII and his court resettled in Avignon while Urban VI remained, sometimes tenuously, in Rome. The Avignon papacy and the Schism encouraged fundamental institutional changes in the history of early modern Europe—effective centralization linked to fiscal policy, efficient bureaucratic governance, court society (société de cour), and conciliarism—but the dubious legitimacy of a divided and non-Roman papacy has cast a shadow over the entire period.
The Schism only fueled the scathing criticism of Petrarch, who himself grew up near Avignon in the early years of the fourteenth century. His judgment that “the worst of all things are there in Babylon on the fierce banks of the Rhône where the infamous prostitute fornicates with the kings of the earth” has echoed throughout history.1 His fame stigmatized Avignon and its popes. With his flair for invective, the negative effect of Petrarch’s acid-tongued propaganda against the papal capital city has taken centuries to undo. Indeed, the scholarly consensus today concerning papal Avignon differs little from Petrarch’s. How could someone possibly show interest in a topic dismissed by the father of humanism in these kinds of disparaging terms? Now I am living in France, in the Babylon of the West. The sun in its travels sees nothing more hideous than this place on the shores of the wild Rhône, which suggests the hellish streams of Cocytus and Acheron. Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee; they have strangely forgotten their origin. I am astounded, as I recall their predecessors, to see these men loaded with gold and clad in purple, boasting of the spoils of princes and nations; to see luxurious palaces and heights crowned with fortifications, instead of a boat turned downward for shelter.
We no longer find the simple nets which were once used to gain a frugal sustenance from the lake of Galilee, and with which, having labored all night and caught nothing, they took, at daybreak, a multitude of fishes, in the name of Jesus. One is stupefied nowadays to hear the lying tongues, and to see worthless parchments turned by a leaden seal into nets which are used, in Christ’s name, but by the arts of Belial, to catch hordes of unwary Christians. 2 Several centuries passed before, in 1866, a single author, Alphonse Daudet, took up the challenge of rehabilitating the city and its popes; but again, as it had been with Petrarch, Avignon was fictionalized. In one of his short stories, The Mule of the Pope, Daudet offers a caricature of papal Avignon joyous to the point of insouciance, peaceful and industrious—in fact, a city that never was.3 At both ends of the spectrum, from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Petrarch and Daudet constructed the city as though inhabited by dramatis personae, both authors inserting a large dose of fiction into their contrived representations For more than six hundred years, historical scholarship concerning the fourteenth century has either neglected the Avignon papacy or vilified it as a French puppet—immoral, worldly, and materialistic in outlook.
As Daniel Waley astutely remarks, the Avignon papacy has been treated until recently as an inconvenience, detrimental to Rome and the papacy in general. Surveys of papal Avignon have been close to nonexistent. And it seems that very few ever questioned the sources fabricated by Petrarch, Giovanni Villani, and their like, chroniclers whose basic interest was to defend a Roman papacy regardless of the location of the papacy, either in Rome or elsewhere in Italy.4 With such historical polarization, the work of a single author, Étienne Baluze (1630–1718), needs to be highlighted for his contribution to Avignon’s reevaluation. This seventeenth-century scholar, an antiquarian and director of the rich and impressive private library of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the first to attempt a somewhat historical approach to the Avignon papacy, by focusing on source work. For many decades long after his death, he remained the sole scholar to edit documents related to the Avignon papacy. Born in Limousin in the French Southwest (like many of the Avignon popes), Baluze used his in-depth knowledge of archives to collect fourteenth-century documents that recounted the lives of the popes; these became the two volumes of his Vitae paparum avenionensium published in 1693.5 Baluze was not intrinsically interested in the Avignon papacy per se; rather, this specific work evolved from his general interest in manuscripts related to Christian institutions of the Middle Ages.
He produced a great many editions of Christian documents, texts, and treatises, and his edition of the lives of the Avignon popes seemed a natural continuation of his monumental endeavors. Yet with one caveat: the Avignon papacy was still an unwelcome bête noire, and in 1698 the volumes were put on the Index (the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books). Despite censorship by the Catholic Church, Baluze’s edition of the popes’ lives stood (and still stands) as the foundation of modern studies of the Avignon papacy before the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881. In 1917, Guillaume Mollat masterfully edited Baluze’s Vitae paparum. Mollat extended Baluze’s two-volume edition with an additional two that enlarged and analyzed the sources Baluze had utilized.6 As Mollat notes, Baluze never worried about a rigorously scientific approach to his edition, never identifying, for example, the provenance of his material. Baluze’s critical apparatus was close to nonexistent. Quite uncritically, he simply collected together various “lives” for each pope, which he organized sequentially.
Thus, each pope had a first, second, or third life, each authored by various medieval chroniclers. Mollat’s task was to identify and check Baluze’s sources (original material from the royal collections and from Colbert’s library, the Sorbonne, the Abbey of Saint-Denis, transcriptions of Vatican material done by Cardinal Casanata, and other material from elsewhere) and to analyze the sources’ reliability, utility, and content. To complete the edition, Mollat clarified ambiguities, filled voids, and added documents that he found during his research. 7 Thus was born the four-volume edition of the popes’ lives, the foundation of all subsequent work dealing with the Avignon papacy. The opening of the Vatican Archives in 1881 and the knowledge derived from that rich collection initiated a marked change of perception: literary and somewhat amateur interest was slowly replaced by a historical narrative reliably grounded in true archival research. The German School of Rome, led by Heinrich Denifle and Franz Ehrle, produced seven volumes of documentary editions concerned largely with texts dealing with the Avignon papacy (Archiv für Literatur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters).8
Their focus fell on ecclesiastical, intellectual, institutional, and theological sources. During roughly the same period, the first volumes of the Analecta Vaticano-Belgica appeared, a series published by the Institut historique belge de Rome, from 1906 to 1987. These editions concerned the institutional history of dioceses in the medieval and early modern periods that today form Belgium. In the Middle Ages, they included Brussels, Cambrai, Liège, Thérouanne, and Tournai.9 This early interest in the institutional history of the Avignon papacy led logically to a study of its financial history. In 1911, Karl H. Schäfer began his transcription of the most important apostolic financial records regarding the Avignon papacy in his Vatikanische Quellen zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Hof- und Finanzverwaltung (1316–1378) for the Historischen Institut of the Görres-Gesellschaft. 10 The records of the Apostolic Chamber opened a window into the day-to-day life of the papal court. Expenses were itemized around several categories that evolved with each pope but generally dealt with the sustenance and functioning of the court.
The kitchen, bread, and wine office itemized purchases of food, drink, and medicine; the stables’ registers recorded expenses related to transportation and horses. All in all, within these categories scribes noted additional expenses relating to the purchase of wax, paper, clothing, fabrics, arts, jewelry, and the papal library, for example. Apostolic scribes also recorded the salaries of curial servants, alms, and finally all expenses related to construction and war. Historians discover invaluable information in these records—from the payments going to cobblers for making the pontiffs’ red slippers, to physicians’ salaries and the medication they ordered for certain popes, to the very names of the papal laundresses, messengers, and purveyors of wheat, wine, and fishes. Over the years, historians have refined the edition of these expense registers, but the early German editions remain the first points of reference for any basic research.
The exploitation of these financial records was complemented in 1899 with the initiation of the project of the French School of Rome. If the Germans focused on finances, the French opted to decipher the papal correspondence and began publication of the papal letters; to date, their research has produced some fifty-four volumes of the Registres et lettres des papes du XIVme siècle. 11 As we will see later, the papal correspondence evolved somewhat with each pope but remained organized around two poles, internal politics and external diplomacy. There always remained the larger division between secret and curial letters for diplomacy and sensitive correspondence and communal letters for internal nominations and responses to petitions. Ironically, the wealth of archive material is itself the result of the effective administration of the Avignon papacy. Because popes knew that they would not remain forever in exile from the Eternal City, they requested that administrative documents be archived twice, creating the so-called Avignon paper registers, the Registra Avenionensia, and the Vatican parchment registers, or Registra Vaticana.
The chancery systematically recopied in the Vatican registers what was contained in the less durable paper registers. After Innocent VI’s reign (1352–1362), recopying became less systematic, only privileging items deemed more important, such as papal bulls. Still, this double record keeping allowed for better conservation of the material. If registers were lost in transport between Avignon and Rome, the odds were good that other copies existed. The registers provided raw material to a small number of scholars (primarily French) who, between the two world wars, produced scores of “local” studies that remain invaluable even today. Interest in major archives like the one at the Vatican sparked systematic and thorough research in local repositories, such as the communal and departmental archives of the Vaucluse (to which Avignon belonged). Gustave Bayle, Robert André-Michel, Robert Brun, Léopold Duhamel, Joseph Girard, Léon-Honoré Labande, and Pierre Pansier pored over local material, and their names still today find an honored place in the bibliography of any work concerning papal Avignon. Gustave Bayle was an early antiquarian (and something of an ethnologist, too), one of the first to draw from the communal archives. Relying on a methodology akin to folklore studies (he was, for example, interested in women’s history, medicine, and prostitution), he integrated this approach to his reading of the medieval past and paved the way for a future social and cultural history of the city.12 During a brief career cut short by the outbreak of World War I, Robert André-Michel (1884–1914) turned the keen eye of a trained social historian to studying the papal capital.13 He published a series of articles on Avignon’s first clock, the building of its surrounding walls, and its defense against the companies of mercenaries (the infamous routiers).14
A few years later, Robert Brun (1896–1978) became one of the first economic historians of the Middle Ages. Brun focused on commercial exchanges operated mainly by the Italian merchant class of Avignon. In his research, he understood quite early the great importance of the Pratese archives, the documentary history of one of Avignon’s most famous merchants, Francesco di Marco Datini.15 These archives became over time a research focus for his understanding of the economic history of the Middle Ages. 16 On a different spectrum, one more closely aligned with archival studies, Léopold Duhamel (1842–1922) initiated a long trend that eventually bound the office of archivist closely to the city’s history. A professional archivist/paleographer, he directed important French archives, including those of the département of Vaucluse, of which Avignon is a part. He also directed the archives of the départements of Vosges and Corsica, organizing and classifying documents in his charge, compiling several inventories and repertories. Besides compiling the first inventory of the communal archives of Avignon, he also edited other series detailing the modern period, for example, Répertoire numerique détaillé de la série L: Administration révolutionnaire, 1790–1800. 17 His impeccable knowledge of the archives allowed him to publish several books on the pope’s palace, architecture, and art. But more importantly, he is the one who facilitated the move of the papal archives from the Préfecture de Vaucluse into the pope’s palace (in fact, an old chapel of Benedict XII), where they remain today. A few years later he convinced the communal authorities to grant him control of the communal archives; little by little, the departmental archives of Vaucluse grew into a research center investigating all aspects of Avignon and the papacy. Another scholar associated with the preservation of the city’s history is Joseph Girard (1881–1962). He is identified above all with the Musée Calvet, which he directed for some forty years before becoming the conservator of the pope’s palace. The museum was a semi-independent institution founded and supported by the eighteenth-century physician and collector Esprit Calvet (1728–1810). Still open today, the museum preserves a collection of stone architectural remains (musée lapidaire), paintings, and ironworks. Of interest for the history of Avignon, the museum acquired under the leadership of Girard a large collection of manuscripts emanating from Avignonese antiquarians and historians (fonds of the Abbé Requin, Léon-Honoré Labande, and Pierre Pansier).18 Active with the Académie de Vaucluse (the quintessential academia for erudite scholars), Girard focused his scholarship on cataloguing his museum and writing a history of Avignon’s monuments.19 Léon-Honoré Labande (1867–1939) is also closely associated with the Calvet Museum. He was a chartiste, that is, a graduate of the prestigious École des chartes, which still prepares France’s conservators and archivists to this day. In 1890, Labande was named conservator of the Musée Calvet and of the Bibliothèque d’Avignon, a position that allowed him to examine all of Avignon’s manuscripts deposited in the communal library. His work culminated in a comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts in France’s public libraries (Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques). He spent much of his career as conservator of the archives and library of Monaco Palace (1906–1939). While in Avignon, Labande’s scholarship focused on textual documentation and urban archaeology, and it extended to the periods both before and after the papal sojourn, so he broadened the scope of research interest in the city from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.20
The last antiquarian/historian to be considered is Pierre Pansier (1864–1934). An ophthalmologist and chief surgeon at Avignon’s hospital, Pierre Pansier’s initial interest in the history of his profession grew into an insatiable appetite for the city’s history at large. I cannot cite here his immense bibliography, and I would be hard pressed to offer a selection of his most relevant work, signaling in my footnotes only the books that pertain closely to the present study.21 Pansier worked on everything from medieval doctors to repentant prostitutes to the history of the city’s streets. He is the first source that historians interested in Avignon turn to (even if sometimes some of his transcriptions are erroneous). We can note that early in his career he joined Joseph Girard to discuss the history of the Temporal Court of Avignon, the judicial institution that monitored the lay population of the city.22 He produced scores of articles in the Annales d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin and the Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse. Avignon advanced from the realm of merely local and antiquarian studies when four French historians—Léon Mirot, Guillaume Mollat, Charles Samaran, and Yves Renouard—opted to focus their research on the Avignon papacy. Léon Mirot (1870–1946) was an archivist and paleographer trained at the École des chartes, a member of the French School in Rome, and a conservator at France’s National Archives.
Like Robert Brun, he focused on the Italians active in France and Provence. Yet unlike Brun, who researched the well-known Florentines of Avignon, Mirot studied the Lucchese families who settled abroad, such as the Spiafame.23 Note that Mirot also published one of the first manuals of historical geography of the modern period, a topic dear to the Annales School.24 Mirot’s interest in the Avignon papacy led him to a study of the papal return to Rome in 137625 and most importantly to transcribe and edit the letters of Pope Gregory XI.26 Guillaume Mollat (1877–1968) left an immense body of scholarship, including seminal works about Avignon’s history such as the first comprehensive survey of the Avignon papacy and (as seen previously) the edition in four volumes of Étienne Baluze’s lives of the Avignon popes (Vitae paparum Avenionensum), still the standard work in the field. He edited the papal letters of four popes, John XXII (sixteen volumes), Clement VI (four volumes), Urban V (one volume), and Gregory XI (one volume).27 His intimate knowledge of the archival material survives in countless articles in the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, Provence Historique, and the Mémoires de l’Académie de Vaucluse. 28 Although his interest remained institutional, he never shied away from addressing the men who worked within the system and, to a lesser extent, Avignon curial society. Although Mollat was a member of the clergy, he trained at the École française of Rome under the direction of another ecclesiastic, the famous Church historian Louis Duchesne (1843–1922). Mollat pursued his research even while fulfilling his priestly functions, traveling back and forth between Rome and France, where he served as chaplain in Montmartre and vicar of Notre-Dame de Passy.29 Guillaume Mollat’s interest in the men who administered the curia, papal justice, and finances paved the way for the next generation of scholars.30 One of Guillaume Mollat’s closest friends was Charles Samaran (1879–1982); together in 1905 they published the first study of the Avignon popes’ finances.31 The extraordinary longevity of Charles Samaran (he died at 104) made him the dean of Avignon historiography, whose work influenced the next wave of economic historians like Yves Renouard (1908–1965) and Jean Favier (1932–2014). Samaran was a humanist in the old sense, a true erudite scholar, a Renaissance man with a deep literary culture and the perfect mastery of Latin so dear to the École des chartes. 32 The study of papal finances pointed to a few truisms. When the papacy moved to southern France in 1309, it was still a Roman curia. Even if accused of being manipulated by the French crown, the curia comprised individuals still labeled “followers of the Roman court,” despite where it was located. The highest echelons of papal government were French, but a large segment of the bureaucratic and financial institution was in the hands of Italian nationals. It was a fact that the French papacy kept close ties with Italy if only because of the large tracts of land it needed to reconquer in order to consolidate its papal states in the area. Conquest and war meant funds, and Italian bankers ran papal finances on a daily basis. The last historian of the mid-twentieth-century group of economic historians, Yves Renouard, understood this and clearly linked papal Avignon to Italy. Yves Renouard may be considered the first modern economic historian. In a 1971 review, Brown University’s Italianist David Herlihy underscores Renouard’s originality, his mode of thought that privileged administrative sources: “The novelty of Renouard’s work in administrative history was his shift of emphasis from the theoretical functions of the various papal offices to the practical operations of the papal government. He sought to explore, as he says in the Études, ‘the reality, the life, which is usually covered or masked in the official texts.’” 33 In 1968, the sixth section of the École pratique des hautes études compiled two volumes containing the majority of Yves Renouard’s articles (approximately seventy of them) completed between 1934 and 1965.34 These articles serve as an introduction to his scholarship. Renouard navigated between three poles of interest—the Avignon papacy, Italian cities, and the French Southwest—all of which he linked with the Italian merchants who traveled from one to the other. As David Herlihy explains, “To judge from his first publication he [Renouard] had been concerned initially with the political and institutional history of the papacy in the Avignon period, but with characteristic alertness he soon recognized the value of these archives for economic history. These documents were the basis of his thesis, published in 1942, on the relations of the Avignon papacy with the banking companies of Italy.” 35 Renouard’s thesis, Les relations des papes d’Avignon et des compagnies commerciales et bancaires de 1316 à 1378, and its continuation, Recherches sur les compagnies commerciales et bancaires utilisées par les papes d’Avignon avant le Grand Schisme, made him the foremost specialist on the Avignon merchant class.36 His work led him to conduct a survey of medieval businessmen and to write another history of the Avignon papacy.37 Renouard thus became the second historian, after Guillaume Mollat, to synthesize the era. Studies of the Avignon papacy became important enough to be translated into English—in 1963 for Guillaume Mollat38 and 1970 for Yves Renouard.39 To date, the best survey in English of the Avignon papacy remains Patrick Zutshi’s chapter in the sixth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History, which deals with the years 1300 to 1415. 40 Fourteenth-century Avignonese records lend themselves to historical demographic analysis and quantitative studies, a growing methodological trend in the 1960s. Once the papal administration settled in Avignon in the early fourteenth century, it organized its services based on local resources. For example, curial officers in charge of finding shelter for curialists compiled lists of available housing. Throughout the period, these assignation and taxation records tracked lodging locations as well as rent charged and paid to property owners. These registers, now housed at the Vatican, were completed with lists of all expenses encountered by the curia. Such accounts offer a glimpse into the day-to-day administration of the curia, from data relating to tax collection by the Apostolic Chamber, to food and clothing purchases, to the making of knives, medicine, laundry lists, and names of mercenaries defending the palace and city walls. Record keeping was rigorous and surprisingly well developed for the time.41 Any person who had a transaction with the curia could expect to have his or her name recorded by papal scribes. Using scores of these documents, Bernard Guillemain, in his 1962 book La cour pontificale d’Avignon: Étude d’une société (1309–1376), wrote the first social history of the fourteenth-century curia.42 His contemporary, Jean Favier, published in 1966 a study of the papal finances during the Great Western Schism (1378–1409).43 Both works (each close to one thousand pages long) remain impossible to ignore for any study of papal Avignon. Bernard Guillemain describes in minute detail the members of the papal government and bureaucracy as well as the numerous immigrants (cortisiani or curiam romanam sequentes, “the followers of the Roman court”) attracted to the city by the presence of the popes. He identifies the geographical origins and occupational activities of these curialists and other immigrants, who had hoped to better their lives within the walls of the Provençal city by offering their services to the curia. Because of its scope, Guillemain’s study of the city during the first seventy-five years of the fourteenth century became a landmark in the social history of medieval Avignon even though it contains some errors. 44 For his part, Jean Favier pursued the analysis of the trademark of the Avignon papacy, its growing financial and administrative centralization, a trait already noted by Guillaume Mollat, Yves Renouard, and Bernard Guillemain. Les finances pontificales à l’époque du Grand Schisme made Favier’s career, which culminated with his nomination as keeper of the French National Archives.45 Les finances remains notable today because it is the sole monograph focused on Avignon during the Great Western Schism. Favier used his study as a means to direct attention to the financial structures of the papacy, essential for its survival during this period of trouble, but also to the men who ran the institution. Like Guillemain’s, his social approach linked religion, politics, and economy to society. He framed his methodology around preoccupations of human interest, focusing on the tax collectors, money changers, and merchants without whom church government would not have functioned, as well as on the means by which it functioned. All in all, Guillemain’s and Favier’s socioeconomic studies presented the papal city as one of the great medieval metropolises, worthy of being placed on the historical map alongside Paris, Florence, and London. In 1979, there appeared under the leadership of Sylvain Gagnière the first and only synthesis of the history of the city throughout the ages, the Histoire d’Avignon. 46 Each chronological chapter was authored by a specialist of the period. Sylvain Gagnière came to history by way of archaeology. The son of a wealthy family, he abandoned a promising career in industry after World War II to pursue his interest in archaeology. A researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and specialist in Provence’s prehistory, he eventually became conservator of the Palais du Roure (a fifteenth-century palace built by a Florentine exile, Piero Baroncelli) and of the pope’s palace. In that capacity, he initiated several digging campaigns subsequently documented in published reports and eventually leading to the first in-depth study of the papal palace.47 Quintessential historian of the palace, he founded the Société des amis du Palais des Papes that is still active today with meetings and a journal, the Annuaire de la Société des amis du Palais des Papes. He may be the sole modern historian who gave his name to a street in Avignon. There is a Rue Pierre Pansier, but it is in Carpentras! Since Bernard Guillemain, Jean Favier, and Sylvain Gagnière, the glitter of Avignon’s archival wealth has attracted more French historians, mainly disciples of the École des chartes and the Annales School. AnneMarie Hayez for the former, and Jacques Chiffoleau for the latter, continue to be their best representatives. Anne-Marie Hayez’s immense knowledge of the archives and their content makes her the ideal interlocutor for anyone interested in the Avignon papacy. This study is deeply indebted to her many publications on taxes and gabelles, the construction of the palace, papal life, and fourteenth-century Avignonese citizens. She has edited countless numbers of papal letters and is responsible for several volumes of papal correspondence published by the École française of Rome, especially regarding Urban V and Gregory XI.48 Anne-Marie Hayez also edited an important volume indispensable for the knowledge of medieval Avignon, the Terrier Avignonnais de l’évêque Anglic Grimoard. 49 Administrative documents (usually labeled terrier or censier) offer an abundance of information on property ownership with detailed descriptions of people and geography. Medieval ownership is a complicated concept somewhat incomprehensible to the modern mind. People owned vacant and arable lands, houses, courtyards, vineyards, and gardens that they or their forefathers had bought from a “lord.” The “owners” could dispose of their property at will with a caveat; they needed to recognize a right of ownership to that same “lord” or his successors. That right of “direct” ownership to another entity was materialized through the payment of a yearly tax, a cens (hence the word censier or terrier for the listings) to the person (a descendant or his representative, often called procurator). Usually that legal persona, or “lord,” was an institution, a diocese, a cathedral chapter, an abbey, a convent, or amonastery. Well-organized lordships compiled registers that listed and counted the parcels, whether lands, houses, or vineyards, and listed their payment due dates in currency and in kind. Hayez edited one of the most important terriers, compiled under the directives of the bishop of Avignon, Anglic Grimoard, by a certain Sicard du Fraisse between 1366 and 1368. Further, she appends an important biographical apparatus to the individuals listed in the terrier, allowing thus a clear identification of who was where in 1360s Avignon. The work is an invaluable tool. Anne-Marie Hayez’s husband, Michel Hayez, is also a historian of Avignon. While director of the Archives of the Vaucluse, he edited a guide to the archives, essential when navigating the massive documentation contained there. He also produced other repertories of archival material unrelated to the Avignon papacy.50 He was a coeditor, with his wife and other collaborators, of the École française edition of Urban V’s letters, and he also coauthored several articles with his wife.51 As sole author, he produced two articles on the departure of the popes from and their return to Avignon.52 Their son, Jérôme, is continuing the familial involvement with the papal city. Chargé de recherche at the Institut d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, he has focused his research on the epistolary exchanges between Avignon and Italy, producing an anthropological study of medieval migration.53 Among contemporary historians, Jacques Chiffoleau has become the French specialist on the city’s religious history and justice. He produced two groundbreaking studies in the 1980s: La comptabilité de l’au-delà: Les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la region d’Avignon à la fin du moyen âge, and Les justices du pape. 54 La comptabilité is a study based largely on notarial archives and testaments from which Chiffoleau measures the impact that crises of the time—plague, war, and immigration—had on religious mentalities. He evokes a world of familial isolation where deep ties of kinship gave way before interclass marriage, the alliances of friends and neighbors, and the abruptly truncated nuclear family—in sum, the birth of modern kinship structures. Les justices du pape uses Vatican and communal material (for the most part) to survey the many justices—or, rather, judicial systems—that ruled Avignon. Two additional French historians have focused on Avignon as well. Jacques Rossiaud has published a study of medieval prostitution and of occupations related to the Rhône River (boatmen and longshoremen), while Daniel Le Blévec has studied charity and the assistance given to the poor in the Avignonese region.
In spite of the dominance of French scholars in the field, a few English-speaking modern historians have been attracted to the Avignon papacy and its capital city. Richard C. Trexler started his career with a study of the Liber divisionis, a census of Avignonese immigrants in 1371, researching a thesis that examined the strained relations between Florence and Avignon that led to the 1376 papal interdict over the city.56 Daniel Williman has researched papal chamberlains and the Apostolic Chamber.57 And a few papal biographies have appeared in English: Sophia Menache authored a life of Clement V, Diane Wood concentrated on Clement VI, and Paul Thibault wrote about Gregory XI. 58 I will return to them while addressing specific popes. Most recently, the Avignon papacy has resurfaced to prominence somewhat. Other scholars have intensively studied the sources, and their research has led to new studies, often fresh perspectives considered through a social and cultural lens. I will engage them in the discussion that follows. In this work, I attempt to rehabilitate the effectiveness of papal governance and to recover the creativity and civic dynamism of the period. The significant contribution of this study resides in its retrieval of the complex interrelationship of court and city, enlarging what might otherwise be a narrowly institutional approach within the wider perspective of a newer urban history. This is not the rhetorical Avignon of Dante, Petrarch, St. Catherine of Siena, or Bridget of Sweden, but the day-to-day Avignon of popes, bureaucrats, and merchants. The first three chapters survey the history of the seven popes of Avignon. These chapters canvass the many issues they dealt with, whether internal or external, and how each pontiff responded. Contrary to older assumptions, there is little doubt that the popes of Avignon defended papal authority rather than acquiescing to the French crown. Many of them were experienced diplomats whose skill at temporizing with somewhat arrogant rulers could mistakenly be perceived as complacency. The fourth chapter elucidates the many innovations of Avignon’s papal administration, the veritable founder of what we would call today “red tape.” Since papal government implanted itself in the city, the chapter also scrutinizes the relationship between administration and Avignon’s space and topography. The fifth chapter addresses directly how city and pope related and the effect of the court’s arrival on Avignon’s physical and social topographies. The last chapter addresses the birth and history of the Great Western Schism as it connected to Avignon’s policies and society.
The Avignon papacy was notable for its economic efficiency—for example, it organized and centralized tax collection, money changing, and banking. Yet institutions are nothing without the people who create and run them. The story of the city and its inhabitants is knitted into the institutional history of the papacy. So this volume examines not only the popes and the people of their courts (cardinals, chamberlains, tax collectors, Italian merchants, scribes, papal messengers, and the myriad bureaucrats necessary for the curia’s functioning) but also the laboring classes drawn to the city to provide the many ancillary services necessary for the court’s comfort, from butchers and fruit sellers to cooks, from shoemakers to laundresses. Late-medieval Avignon experienced tremendous demographic and spatial growth within a short time, forcing the city to face early some of the issues that typically affect modern capitals: unchecked immigration, urban sprawl, social tensions and geographic segregation, health and hygiene issues, poverty, and widespread prostitution, to name a few. The aim of this volume is to give readers a vivid sense of what it was like to live in the crowded fourteenth-century capital of Christianity even as we survey the history of the popes and their court.
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