TIME LINE OF KEY EVENTS
1. In the Middle Ages and until 1939, L’Aquila was known simply as Aquila, but for purposes of clarity, the town is referred to by its current name throughout this book.
PROLOGUE
1. Despite the fact that seventy-five years ago, Maurice Powicke wrote the following overstatement: “Few episodes in medieval history are better known than the brief pontificate of Pope Celestine V in the year 1294.” Sir Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 50.
2. Dante, Inferno, canto III, lines 58–60. All quotations from Dante’s Divine Comedy are taken from the legendary translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
3. Anne MacDonell, Sons of Francis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 318.
4. I am particularly indebted to Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation, ed. Katherine L. Jansen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
INTRODUCTION
1. Monsignor Slawomir Oder with Saverio Gaeta, Why He Is a Saint: The Life and Faith of Pope John Paul II and the Case for Canonization (New York: Rizzoli, 2010). Oder made this announcement in January 2010 when the book was first published in Italian. The English translation was published in October 2010.
2. These public assemblies were outlawed by papal decree of Pope Clement VI in 1349.
3. Luke 9:58. All quotations from the Holy Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition.
4. Sophia Menache, Clement V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202.
CHAPTER 1
1. See Emma Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples of the Central Apennines (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), 127.
2. Dench, From Barbarians to New Men, 111.
3. Consider the handwritten note that a young King Henry VIII addressed in French to his lover Anne Boleyn, pledging loyalty to her despite the fact that he was already married to Catherine of Aragon. With that letter, some historians believe, Henry committed himself to the course of action that would end his marriage and lead to England’s formal break with Rome and the Catholic Church. It is owned and housed today in the Vatican Museum.
4. Quoted in Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 6.
CHAPTER 2
1. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, Second Edition (New York: Continuum, 2005), 192–93.
2. Eleven years after the siege that brought down Acre, only one small island off the Syrian coast remained in Christian hands, and then it too was lost. Centuries would go by before Christians would again travel freely to or reside in the Holy Land. Napoleon attempted an unsuccessful attack on Acre in 1799.
3. Peter Barnes, Sunsets and Glories (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 1.1.2.
4. Quoted in Patricia Ranft, The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 50.
5. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 29.
6. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince: A New Translation, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 46.
7. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Hegesippus. See John-Peter Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42.
8. Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman, 45–59.
9. See Frederick J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 39–41.
10. It wasn’t until the Western Schism in 1378 that all papal elections would take place at what we now know as Vatican City. Only in the last century have they always taken place in the Sistine Chapel. Each elector of a conclave has to make a solemn oath that he will keep the secrets within those walls, and he makes a vow not to serve the interests of any nation or government other than the Church in his discernment and voting.
11. Giovanni Boccaccio describes such a scene—a similar summer of plague in Florence one generation later—in the introduction to his Decameron, colorfully painting the picture of what was probably happening during those summers of 1292–94: “Some say it descended on the human race through the influence of heavenly bodies. Others say it was a punishment of God’s righteous anger looking on our iniquitous ways.… The plague began in the early spring in a terrifying manner. It didn’t take the form it had assumed in the East, where if one began to bleed from the nose it was a sign of certain death. Here, its earliest symptom in men and women was the appearance of swellings in the groin or armpit, sometimes egg-shaped and other times the size of an apple.… Very few people ever recovered from it … and whenever those in suffering mixed with those who were unaffected, it rushed onward with the speed of fire spreading through dry wood or oil.… This led some people to callously say there was no way to remedy against a plague than to run from it—and without thinking of anyone but themselves, large numbers abandoned the city, their homes, relatives, and belongings, and headed for the countryside.” (My own translation. Compare to Giovanni Boccaccio; The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam [New York: Penguin Books, 1972], 50–53.)
CHAPTER 3
1. Frederick J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of the Papal Elections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 44.
2. Edward Armstrong, in The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7, Decline of Empire and Papacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 4.
3. Sir Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 50.
4. It was Philip the Fair and the Colonnas who would, sixteen years later, pressure Pope Clement V to canonize Celestine V, in part as a rebuke to the papacy of Boniface VIII.
5. This is my own rendering. A previous version in English can be found in G. G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1935), vol. 1, 235.
6. Quoted in Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (New York: Collins, 1979), 56.
7. All quotations from John Paul II’s “Apostolic Constitution,” Universi Dominici Gregis, are taken from the English-language translation available on the Vatican’s website. Composing a document such as this was not in itself suggestive of anything; many popes throughout history have sought to bring the rules of conclaves and elections into a contemporary perspective.
8. It wasn’t until the end of the Great Schism (1378–1417), when two men simultaneously claimed to be pope, that elections were consistently held in Rome, and it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that a strict conclave was consistently maintained during papal elections. Since the February 1878 election of Pope Leo XIII, every papal election has been decided by a two-thirds majority vote from within the safe, enclosed hall of the Sistine Chapel.
9. Instead of leaking anything, Cardinal John Joseph Carberry, archbishop of Saint Louis (USA), said at a press conference the day after the election of John Paul II: “I would like to tell you everything. It would thrill you. But I can’t.” Quoted in Hebblethwaite,The Year of Three Popes, 146.
CHAPTER 4
1. Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller, trans. Caroline Hillier (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995), 66.
2. For example, see Peter Herde, “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–83.
3. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 37–38.
4. “Donation of Constantine,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1913).
CHAPTER 5
1. William Langland from Piers the Ploughman, quoted in Virginia Davis, “The Rule of Saint Paul the First Hermit,” in Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W. J. Sheils (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 213.
2. Thomas Aquinas, in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, ed. Simon Tugwell (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 559. Aquinas was also a strong advocate for the need of the state to aid human beings to find full happiness. He wrote: “It is … necessary for man to live in a multitude so that each one may assist his fellows, and different men may be occupied in seeking, by their reason, to make different discoveries—one, for example, in medicine, one in this and another in that.” (Quoted in Dino Bigongiari, Essays on Dante and Medieval Culture [New York: Griffin House, 2000], 106.)
3. Peter Damian Letters 151–180, trans. Owen J. Blum and Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 181.
4. Sophia Menache, Clement V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202.
5. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 42.
6. John-Peter Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72.
7. Caroline Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy 1266–1343 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 172.
CHAPTER 6
1. See Robert Brentano, “Sulmona Society and the Miracles of Peter of Morrone,” Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little), ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
2. Estella Canziani, Through the Apennines and the Lands of the Abruzzi: Landscape and Peasant Life (Cambridge, UK: W. Heffer and Sons, 1928), 183.
3. I have slightly paraphrased the quotations from the Autobiography of Celestine V. See Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society, ed. Michael Goodich (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 170–80.
4. In our own day (since 1963) the two regions have been separated. As a result, today’s Molise no longer includes the Morrone and Maiella mountains.
5. Canziani, Through the Apennines and the Lands of the Abruzzi, 5.
6. John Hooper, “Pope Visits Italian Village Hit Hardest by Earthquake,” Guardian, London, April 28, 2009.
7. Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, trans. Harvey Fergusson II (New York: Atheneum, 1960), 3, 4, 5.
8. See Augustine Thompson, O.P., Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes 1125–1325 (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2005), 294–96.
9. John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500: A Reader, 2d ed. (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2007), 19.
CHAPTER 7
1. Pope Nicholas III, Exiit qui seminat, trans. from the Latin and in the public domain: http.franciscan-archive.org.
2. John C. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216): To Root Up and to Plant (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 11.
3. Umberto Pappalardo, The Gulf of Naples: Archaeology and History of an Ancient Land, trans. Peter Eustace (Verona, Italy: Arsenale Editrice, 2006), 126.
4. Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, in 1109. This translation is my own rendering. See G. G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 106–7.
CHAPTER 8
1. See Lisa M. Bitel, “Saints and Angry Neighbors: The Politics of Cursing in Irish Hagiography,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society—Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 123–50.
2. Letter 161 in Peter Damian Letters 151–180, trans. Owen J. Blum and Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 133.
3. Letter 152 in Damian Letters, 7–9.
4. Letter 152 in Damian Letters, 9.
5. Saint Stephen’s order was known as the Grandmontines and was mostly extinct by the late eighteenth century. See Brenda M. Bolton, “Via Ascetica: A Papal Quandary,” in Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W. J. Sheils (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 171–73.
6. Most sources do not identify the mountain of Peter’s first years, but Peter Herde does in “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 279–83.
7. The fifth-century Egyptian anchorite Abba Isaiah of Scetis wrote: “If you wish to ask an elder about some thought, bare your thought to him voluntarily, if you know that he is trustworthy and will keep your words.” (Abba Isaiah of Scetis: Ascetic Discourses, trans. John Chryssavgis and Pachomios Penkett [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2002], 53.)
8. Both texts are taken from John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 330–31. I have revised the translations slightly.
9. Anne MacDonell, Sons of Francis (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), 320.
10. This expression is from John Howe (quoting Ernst Werner), in “The Awesome Hermit: The Symbolic Significance of the Hermit as a Possible Research Perspective,” Numen 30, no. 1 (July 1983): 106.
11. Also quoted by Howe in “The Awesome Hermit.”
12. Today it’s a national park, Parco Nazionale della Majella, with a website.
13. Ignazio Silone, The Story of a Humble Christian, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 17.
CHAPTER 9
1. Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1940), 18.
2. The image appeared in the pages of a history book written by Ludovico Zanotti. See Leonida Giardini et al., Celestino V: e la sua Basilica (Milan: Silvana Editoriale Spa, 2006), 52.
3. Peter Herde suggests that Joachim’s influence is seen on Peter in the frequent inscriptions to the Holy Spirit that are found on monasteries he founded. See “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 281. For more on this interpretation of history, see the discussion of Joachim of Fiore, in chapter 11.
4. Robert Brentano, “Sulmona Society and the Miracles of Peter of Morrone,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society (Essays in Honor of Lester K. Little), ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), x.
CHAPTER 10
1. See Pascal Montaubin, “Bastard Nepotism,” in Pope, Church, and City: Essays in Honour of Brenda M. Bolton, ed. Frances Andrews et al. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2004), 145–46.
2. Joseph F. Kelly, The Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: A History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 96.
3. George Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 50.
4. Today, ironically, the hill of Collemaggio no longer exists because the valley attached to it was filled in during the nineteenth century by the local government in order to make pilgrimage to the Basilica of Santa Maria easier.
5. Peter Herde, “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 280.
CHAPTER 11
1. This quotation is from the article on “Indulgences” from the old Catholic Encyclopedia, originally published in 1913, and currently available online at www.newadvent.org.
2. Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975), 142.
3. Quoted in Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 14.
4. The phrase “evangelical awakening” comes from Marie-Dominique Chenu, in Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, ed. J. Taylor and L. K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), ch. 7.
5. During the days of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, in 1571 a papal bull sought to suppress this loosely organized order after one of its members attempted to murder an emissary of Pope Pius V’s, who’d been charged with reforming the group.
6. David Abulafia, ed., Italy in the Central Middle Ages: 1000–1300 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11.
7. Peter Herde, “Literary Activities of the Imperial and Papal Chanceries during the Struggle between Frederick II and the Papacy,” in Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, ed. William Tronzo (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994), 233.
8. Roger Bacon, quoted in Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 125.
9. Roger Bacon, quoted in Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, 129.
10. Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 5.
11. Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 153. All quotes from Joachim’s writings are taken from this translation.
12. Marjorie Reeves, “Some Popular Prophecies from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Popular Belief and Practice, ed. G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 111.
CHAPTER 12
1. See Erik Thuno, Image and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2002), 163–71. Thuno writes: “[T]he Lateran in the Middle Ages was often linked with the Old Testament temple … from the tenth century on to Mt. Sinai where the Law was given, and later … said to contain the actual Ark of the Covenant including its sacred contents within the high altar” (p. 165).
2. David Willey, “Agony of L’Aquila,” Tablet, April 18, 2009, 8.
3. Susan Twyman, Papal Ceremonial at Rome in the Twelfth Century (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 2002), 1–22.
4. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 40.
5. Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, Vol. 1, ed. Regis J. Armstrong et al. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), 86.
6. In 1279 Pope Nicholas III wrote a bull entitled Exiit qui seminat, trying to reconcile the two factions within the Franciscans. As a former protector of the order, he was in a privileged place to accomplish this. He succeeded to some extent, and his teachings showed a reasonable way forward—a possible, middle way. First, he affirmed Francis’s teaching that Jesus and the disciples never owned a thing and never handled money—meaning that to truly imitate Christ, a Franciscan would do as Francis taught. But he then applied scholastic finery to the distinctions of what is to be defined as “money,” what it means to have enough for the present and its needs, and how friars may have recourse to benefactors who have money. Many doors and windows were opened on the topic of the handling, obtaining, and use of money by friars after all.
7. Angelo Clareno: A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, trans. David Burr and Emmett Randolph Daniel (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005), 6–7.
8. See “Celestine V,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, online at www.newadvent.org.
CHAPTER 13
1. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xi.
2. Jean Dunbabin uses both descriptions for Charles I. See Jean Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe (New York: Longman, 1998), 194, 198.
3. Richard Mortimer, Angevin England: 1154–1258 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 113.
4. Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 115.
5. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 46.
6. Lawrence V. Mott, Sea Power in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Catalan-Aragonese Fleet in the War of the Sicilian Vespers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 36.
7. It is from the Sicilian Vespers that we trace the origins of the geography of Sicily (the island only) that continues to today.
8. Caroline Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy 1266–1343 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 242n75.
9. One contemporary Italian scholar, Roberto Paciocco, acknowledges their confusing relationship with the Church by writing that if one were to survey “the links between the Angevin dynasty and the Spirituals,” the best conclusion “in all likelihood would be to describe the rulers’ behavior as hovering between open support and conniving protection.” Quoted in The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina: Art, Iconography and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Naples, ed. Janis Elliott and Cordelia Warr (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 29.
10. As well as Alfonso III. However, Dante talks with Charles Martel in heaven in the Paradiso.
CHAPTER 14
1. John C. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216): To Root Up and to Plant (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 4.
2. Dino Bigongiari, Essays on Dante and Medieval Culture (New York: Griffin House, 2000), 23.
3. Quoted in David Abulafia, ed. Italy in the Central Middle Ages: 1000–1300 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96.
4. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 would describe the creation of the Vatican State in these terms: “Italy recognizes the full ownership and the exclusive and absolute power and jurisdiction of the Holy See over the Vatican as it is presently constituted, together with all its appurtenances and endowments, creating in this manner Vatican City for the special purposes and under the conditions given in this Treaty. The boundaries of the said City are set forth in the map which constitutes Attachment I of the present Treaty, of which it forms an integral part. It remains understood that St. Peter’s Square, although forming part of Vatican City, will continue to be normally open to the public and to be subject to the police power of the Italian authorities, who will stop at the foot of the steps leading to the Basilica, although the latter will continue to be used for public worship, and they will, therefore, abstain from mounting the steps and entering the said Basilica, unless they are asked to intervene by the competent authority. Whenever the Holy See considers it necessary, for the purpose of particular functions, to close St. Peter’s Square temporarily to the free passage of the public, the Italian authorities will withdraw beyond the outer lines of Bernini’s Colonnade and their extension, unless they have been asked to remain by the competent authority.” The complete text of the Lateran Treaty is available on a Vatican website: www.vaticanstate.va.
5. Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975), 143.
6. See John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion 1000–1500: A Reader, 2d ed. (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2007), 404–5.
7. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 159.
8. Cardinal Gaetani, quoted in T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 48.
9. Castle Nuovo would remain at the center of political, commercial, and artistic life in Naples for centuries. It was here, thirty-five years later, that Giotto would spend a few years painting. In 1347 the castle was sacked by King Louis I of Hungary. The room known as Baron’s Hall was made famous in 1485 by a conspiracy hatched there against King Ferdinand I. The barons who conspired against the king were invited for a great feast, only for the doors to be shut upon them, and all of them arrested.
10. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 48.
11. Sophia Menache, Clement V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23.
12. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.131–33.
13. Peter Herde, “Celestine V,” in Philippe Levillain, general editor, The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 281.
14. James Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3–4.
15. Stefaneschi is quoted in E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes (New York: Dial Press, 1969), 83.
16. John L. Allen, Jr. Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election (New York: Image Doubleday, 2002), 71.
CHAPTER 15
1. St. Gregory the Great: Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 3–4.
2. John C. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216): To Root Up and to Plant (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 1.
3. Perhaps the most infamous case of warrior religious in Italy happened at the battle of Tusculum in the Marches of Ancona in 1167. The archbishops of Mainz and Cologne combined forces against a Roman army of 30,000 men and roundly defeated them. One contemporary chronicler reports, “In the morning the Romans hastened out to the battlefield to recover the corpses of their fallen. They were driven to flight by the bishops, who sent their knights out against them.… Finally, they sent emissaries to the bishops to beg that they be allowed, for the love of Saint Peter and respect for Christianity, to recover their dead. The bishops granted this plea on the condition that they would count the number of men on their side that were killed or captured in this battle and would report this to them personally in writing with a sworn guarantee of their truthfulness.… When they went about this accounting, they found the number of some 15,000 of their men who had been killed or captured in this battle. After receiving permission, they buried the remains of their dead, which they recovered with loud lamenting.” (See De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History at http://www.deremilitari.orgRESOURCES/SOURCES/tusculum.htm.)
4. Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Sacramento: University of California Press, 1990), 68–69.
5. Dante, Paradiso, canto 9, lines 133–35.
6. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 49.
7. Quoted in Boase, Boniface VIII, 45.
8. This is from the testimony of James Stefaneschi, in book 3 of his Opus Metricum. The Orsini family had recently produced a pope in Nicholas III (1277–80), and Matthew Orsini would himself be elected pope on the first ballot on the first day of the conclave that was called after Celestine V resigned. He refused the job, and Cardinal Benedict Gaetani was then elected on the third day.
CHAPTER 16
1. Peter Damian Letters 151–180, trans. Owen J. Blum and Irven M. Resnick (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), letter 165, p. 170–71.
2. Peter Damian Letters, letter 165, p. 173.
3. Adrian I, from A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 536–37.
4. Quoted in various media, including the Telegraph (London), February 8, 2005.
5. In fact, this is the short statement that exists today in the Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church about the possibility of papal resignation: “If it happens that the Roman Pontiff resigns his office, it is required for validity that the resignation is made freely and properly manifested but not that it is accepted by anyone” (332 §2). The complete Canons are available on the Vatican’s website: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P16.HTM.
6. John of Paris, from the treatise De potestate regia et papale, quoted in Edward Peters, The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature 751–1327 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 227–28.
CHAPTER 17
1. This is my rendering. The original Latin text appears in the classic, Annales Ecclesiastici, compiled by Odoricus Rainaldi, for the year 1294, number 20.
2. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 55.
3. John Eastman, “Holy Man of the Abruzzi and the Limitations of Papal Power,” Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 4: 763.
4. Peter Barnes, Sunsets and Glories (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 2.7.66.
CHAPTER 18
1. G. Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 86–87.
2. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 14–15.
3. Castle Fumone would haunt Boniface VIII long after the death of Peter Morrone. It was from Ferentino that William of Nogaret and fellow conspirators set out on September 6, 1303, to attack Boniface in Anagni on the following day. They held and abused him for two days before escaping with their lives, leaving the pope to return to the relative safety of Rome.
4. This is suggested by David Burr in Catholic Historical Review 70 (April 1984): 297–98.
5. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 104.
6. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 104.
7. John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 47.
8. Peter Hebblethwaite, The Year of Three Popes (New York: Collins, 1979), 139. See also chapter 9, “The Thirty-three Day Pope,” pp. 114–29.
9. For conspiracy theories see David Yallop’s bestseller, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (New York: Basic Books, 2007). For a scholar’s perspective see John Cornwell’s A Thief in the Night.
10. Rainer Decker, Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 28. Pope Leo X (1513–21) was also plotted against—in this case by some of his cardinals. They attempted to poison him while treating him for an illness, but they were unsuccessful.
11. Biondo Flavio, Italy Illuminated, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Jeffrey A. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 161.
12. As reported by the Associated Press, “Monk Contends 13th-Century Pope Was Murdered with Nail,” on August 20, 1998. As of March 1, 2011, large portions of Padre Quirino’s work were available in English translation on his website: www.padrequirino.org/INTRO.PDF.
13. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII, 369.
14. Much of the following discussion of poisons has been aided by Martin Levy’s classic article, “Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of ibn Wahshiya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts,” Journal of the American Philosophical Society 56, part 7 (1966): 5–130.
15. “Many positively asserted that by Nero’s order his throat was smeared with some poisonous drug under the pretence of the application of a remedy, and that Burrus [the victim], who saw through the crime, when the emperor paid him a visit, recoiled with horror from his gaze, and merely replied to his question, ‘I indeed am well.’ ” (Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, ed. Moses Hadas [New York: Modern Library, 1942], 347.)
16. Levy, “Medieval Arabic Toxicology,” 15.
17. Quoted in Brian Tierney, ed., The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 176–77.
18. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII, 171.
19. Edward Peters, The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature 751–1327 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 226.
20. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieaval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 215n61.
21. Quoted in Charles T. Wood, ed., Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII: State vs. Papacy, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 65.
CHAPTER 19
1. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 412.
2. Angelo Clareno: A Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor, trans. David Burr and Emmett Randolph Daniel (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005), 157.
3. Jacopone of Todi, Laude 35.
4. After Celestine V came Boniface VIII, and then Clement V in 1305. Like Celestine, Clement was lenient with the Spirituals and pleaded with them to find monasteries in which to reside, wanting to bring a peaceful end to the controversies surrounding observance. As a result, three Franciscan monasteries saw an influx of Spirituals return, all in the Languedoc region of France. But within a few years, when both Clement and a sympathetic Franciscan minister-general (Alexander of Alexandria) had died, Conventual superiors were again appointed at these convents, and the conflict really heated up. The Spirituals were booted from the three monasteries, and they responded by attempting to take two of them by force. This won them quick, fresh excommunications, but the Spirituals persisted, this time by peaceful means, taking their appeal to yet another general chapter meeting of the order, in Naples in 1316. In the year following, Pope John XXII, at the urging of minister-general Michael of Cesena, brought a number of the Spirituals’ leaders, including Angelo Clareno and Ubertino of Casale, to appear before him in Avignon for a doctrinal trial. They were ordered to submit to authority or be excommunicated and burned at the stake. “Great is poverty, but greater is obedience,” Pope John infamously said. Twenty-five of these Spirituals were given over to an inquisitor, who, according to the euphemistic language of the Catholic Encyclopedia, “succeeded in converting twenty-one of them,” which means they were tortured. The remaining four refused to acknowledge a religious authority higher than the original Rule of Saint Francis. These four were burned at the stake in Marseilles on May 7, 1318. The two most prominent Spirituals were spared: Ubertino of Casale, because he was defended in Avignon before the papal court by a sympathetic cardinal; and Angelo Clareno, because he fled for his life.
5. William J. Irons, trans., Hymns Ancient and Modern, Standard Edition (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1922), 459.
6. Jacopone of Todi, Laude 25.
7. Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. Michael F. Cusato and G. Geltner (Boston: Brill, 2009), 134.
8. Bernard Guenee, Between Church and State: The Lives of Four French Prelates in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 216.
9. Paul Johnson, The Renaissance: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 3.
10. Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, trans. Brian Tierney in The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 188.
11. Boniface, Unam Sanctam.
12. This translation is my own. For another, see Bernard of Clairvaux: Five Books on Consideration—Advice to a Pope, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976), book 4, p. 3.
13. Selected Letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England (1198-1216), trans. C. R. Cheney and ed. C. R. Cheney and W. H. Semple (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), 177, no. 67.
14. Selected Letters of Pope Innocent III, 188–89.
15. All extracts are from Saint Bridget of Sweden, Liber Celestis, book 3, ch. 27; the translations are mine.
CHAPTER 20
1. Francesco Petrarch, De vita solitaria, 2, 8.
2. Leonida Giardini et al., Celestino V: e la sua Basilica (Milan: Silvana Editoriale Spa, 2006), 56.
3. Michael Goodich, “The Politics of Canonization in the Thirteenth Century: Lay and Mendicant Saints,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, ed. Stephen Wilson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 181.
4. Sophia Menache, Clement V (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 203.
5. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater, eds., Butler’s Lives of the Saints: Complete Edition, vol. 2 (London: Burns & Oates, 1956), 345.
6. Peter Barnes, Sunsets and Glories (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 1.7.24.
7. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 2d ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 159.
8. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (Toronto: Macmillan, 1933), 45.
9. John R. H. Moorman, The Sources for the Life of S. Francis of Assisi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1940), 155.
10. John-Peter Pham, Heirs of the Fisherman: Behind the Scenes of Papal Death and Succession (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72.
11. G. A. Holmes, review of the German edition of Peter Herde’s biography of Celestine V, English Historical Review 97 (1982): 839.
12. Edward Armstrong, The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7, Decline of Empire and Papacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 4.
13. A. N. Wilson, “Best Pope: The Pontiff Who Quit,” New York Times, April 18, 1999.
14. Sir Maurice Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages: And Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 51.
15. Dante, Inferno, canto 3, lines 55–60.
16. Peter Herde, “Celestine V, Pope,” in The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing (New York: Routledge, 2010), 152.
17. Herde, “Celestine V, Pope.”
18. Daniel J. Wakin, “Do Popes Quit?” New York Times, April 10, 2010.
19. The speech is available on the Vatican website, but only in Italian: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1966/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19660901_s-celestino-v_it.html. One example of the media speculation regarding Paul VI may be seen in this story from Time, September, 30, 1966: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,836464,00.html.
20. Colm Toibin, “Among the Flutterers,” London Review of Books 32, no. 16, August 19, 2010, 3–9.
21. George Weigel, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 2.
22. A. C. Flick, quoted in Charles T. Wood, ed., Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII: State vs. Papacy, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 11.
23. Lisa Wangsness and Matt Rocheleau, “Amid Furor, Priest Gets Support,” Boston Globe, April 13, 2010, A1.
24. Sergio Luzzatto, Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, trans. Frederika Randall (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 4.
25. Ignazio Silone, The Story of a Humble Christian, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 18.
26. One recalls the prophetic words of Albino Luciani, the future Pope Paul I, on August 26, 1978, to the cardinals who elected him: “May God forgive you for what you have done to me.” (Quoted in David Gibson’s The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World [New York: HarperOne, 2007], 225.)