The Avignon Papacy Contested

An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena

Unn Falkeid

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780674971844
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674982888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The Avignon papacy (1309–1377) represented the zenith of papal power in Europe. The Roman curia's move to southern France enlarged its bureaucracy, centralized its authority, and initiated closer contact with secular institutions. The pope's presence also attracted leading minds to Avignon, transforming a modest city into a cosmopolitan center of learning. But a crisis of legitimacy was brewing among leading thinkers of the day. The Avignon Papacy Contested considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Catholic Church's increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers—a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe.

Unn Falkeid uncovers the dispute's origins in Dante's Paradiso and Monarchia, where she identifies a sophisticated argument for the separation of church and state. In Petrarch's writings she traces growing concern about papal authority, precipitated by the curia's exile from Rome. Marsilius of Padua's theory of citizen agency indicates a resistance to the pope's encroaching power, which finds richer expression in William of Ockham's philosophy of individual liberty. Both men were branded as heretics. The mystical writings of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in Falkeid's reading, contain cloaked confrontations over papal ethics and church governance even though these women were later canonized.

While each of the six writers responded creatively to the implications of the Avignon papacy, they shared a concern for the breakdown of secular order implied by the expansion of papal power and a willingness to speak their minds.

CHAPTER 1

THE EAGLE’S FLIGHT: DANTE’S PARADISO VI AND THE MONARCHIA

Protect me as the most precious part of the eye;
hide me under the shadow of your wings.

Psalm 17:8

When Dante Alighieri entered the political stage with his treatise Monarchia (On the monarchy), there was already a rich tradition of polemical texts that had been produced by the precarious situation between the pope and secular rulers at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Although conflicts between the papacy and secular governments returned to haunt the high Middle Ages, a balance between temporal and spiritual power, based on the Gelasian principle known as the two powers or two swords, had long served as the model for governance and also the common political theory.¹ The idea, articulated in a letter from 494 written by Pope Gelasius I and addressed to the Eastern emperor Anastasius (Epistula 12, Ad Imperatorem Anastasium), was that emperors and kings, popes and bishops, had distinct spheres of authority. In accordance with Saint Paul’s recognition of the divine origin of political authority (Rom 13:1–2), both powers were divinely ordained and, as such, they ought to display a mutual respect for each other’s boundaries of responsibility. Whereas the secular ruler was supposed to establish and preserve public order, the priest aimed at the salvation of souls. Yet despite this independence from one another, the separation was not absolute, according to Gelasius; while the priest depended on the secular ruler and should obey him in matters concerning the state, the secular ruler depended on the priest in spiritual matters and received the sacraments from him.

Early canon law (Gratian’s Decretum) affirmed the view advocating a Gelasian moderation between the two powers, which found support among the most outstanding theologians in the second half of the thirteenth century, such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Despite the increasing and recurrent tendencies of both secular and spiritual leaders to claim superiority over the other, both Albert and Thomas, as the historian Sophia Menache has described it, “supported Gelasius’s tenets as the ideal means of neutralizing the more radical positions in both papalistic and anti-papalistic camps.”² Nevertheless, by the end of the thirteenth century, this balance was greatly disturbed, resulting in repercussions that sent political discourses in completely new directions.

When Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam Sanctam in 1302, in which he pronounced the ultimate subordination of temporal to sacerdotal power, this was meant as a final response to the long and increasingly harsh dispute with King Philip IV of France. Like the monarchies of England and Germany, the French monarchy was undergoing a process of secular, national autonomy. Philip IV of France and Edward I of England claimed sovereignty over their subjects, both clerical and lay. This claim included royal taxation of the clergy to finance the persistent wars between France and England. There was also growing disapproval of the legal immunity of the clerics. According to canon law, only ecclesiastical courts could try the priesthood. To Pope Boniface VIII, the rumblings of discontent from the French and English monarchs, royal taxation of the priesthood, and the attacks on clerical immunity jeopardized the liberty of the church; his response, enunciated in the bull Unam Sanctam, was to maintain the subordination of the temporal rulers under his jurisdiction. He was obviously aware of the risk of the fragmentation of the Western world due to the wars between the European royal houses, and in an attempt to establish peace and save the universality of the church, he encouraged the monarchs to—rather than fighting each other—regain control over the Holy Land, which had fallen to the Muslims in 1291. Boniface was, however, unsuccessful in this task—the national kings had become too powerful to allow their vassals to enlist in a crusade without their permission, as Yves Renourd has explained it, and France and England were too occupied by their own conflicts with each other to think about a crusade.³

Boniface’s theocratic pretensions—the extreme papalist interpretation of the Gelasian theory in his Unam Sanctam—drew considerable support from the new generation of canon lawyers, the decretalists—also called the hierocrats—who eagerly defended the sovereignty of the pope. But the bull also roused strong reactions. Indeed, Boniface’s attack on King Philip provoked one of the most extensive propaganda campaigns of the Middle Ages.⁴ The conflict with the French king resulted in a stream of pamphlets and treatises both for and against the sovereignty of the pope; these included De ecclesiastica potestate (On ecclesiastical power) by Giles of Rome, De regimine christiano (On Christian rulership) by James of Viterbo, De potestate regia et papali (On royal and papal power) by John of Paris, and De ortu, progressu et fine Romani imperii (On the rise and end of the Roman Empire) by Engelbert of Admont. Dante’s Monarchia was written some years later than these treatises, probably at the end of 1318, long after Boniface had been defeated and his heirs had moved to Avignon.⁵ Furthermore, unlike his forerunners, Dante represented a new type of intellectual and political thinker who was neither cleric nor lawyer—in fact, his authority did not derive from a particular group or institution. But, like many others of his time, he was engaged in the government of his city, Florence, from which he was expelled in 1302, the same year that Boniface VIII issued the Unam Sanctam—an event that only spurred on Dante’s political commitment, albeit in new directions.

The Monarchia presents a strong defense of the unlimited jurisdiction of the sacrum imperium in temporal matters, and at the basis of this defense is the universality of Roman law. The treatise has been read as a defender of secular governments and a promoter of early modern notions of the separation of church and state;⁶ as an advocate of Avveroist politics;⁷ or as a reactionary treatise in the way it returns to the nostalgic ideas of restoring the classical past, the Roman Empire, as it existed under Emperor Augustus.⁸ Ernst Kantorowicz once suggested in his now classic reading of Dante’s Monarchia that the poet brought in radically new and original perspectives unprecedented in the history of political thought, such as the notion of the universality of the civilitas humana, which included pagans as well as Muslims and Christian inhabitants.⁹ Albert Russell Ascoli, who has analyzed the treatise from a literary-rhetorical point of view, offers another vital and thought-provoking interpretation. As he argues, although institutional power is at the very center of Monarchia—“specifically, it is concerned with defining the exercise of legal power through transpersonal institutions”—Dante is simultaneously, although discreetly, carving out spaces for a personalized authority, the “aporia dantesca,” as Ascoli calls it, as a necessary supplement to both the emperor’s and the pope’s authority.¹⁰

Despite its indebtedness to earlier work on Monarchia, the present chapter offers a reading of Dante’s political treatise from yet another angle. Through the lens of Emperor Justinian’s long speech in Paradiso VI, we will explore how Dante not only argued for the divine origins and separate powers of church and state, but also used Justinian as a key to criticize canon law and Roman law alike. As such, Dante, through the figure of Justinian, suggested limits to a positivist view of secular powers, which he seemingly defended so strongly in his Monarchia.

Monarchia was written more or less contemporaneously with Paradiso, the third canticle of Commedia, and in the sixth canto of Paradiso the wanderer Dante meets just such an ideal universal ruler that the author invokes in Monarchia. By the end of the previous canto, Paradiso V, a crowd comes toward Dante and Beatrice that is described as a thousand radiances from a veil of intense light. Among this crowd is Justinian (ca. 482–565), the Byzantine emperor who codified the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the uniform compilation of Roman law, which still forms the foundation of our civil rights today. Dante can hardly make out who he is, but, encouraged by Beatrice, he addresses the emperor, who then responds. Interestingly, Justinian’s long answer in the following canto, Paradiso VI, repeats but also challenges many of the arguments that are presented in Monarchia. As such, the poetic language of the poem transforms the plain and logical language of the political tractate into an elusive complexity.

In the following we will examine the underlying discussions of lust and political power in Justinian’s speech and explore how they are connected to Dante’s arguments in Monarchia. As we will see, in the tangled web of the political polemics, theological depth, and poetic subtlety of the emperor’s response, the harmonic model of the universal empire, examined in Monarchia, is disturbed by a most troubling story that not only casts a shadow over the vision of the sacrum imperium but also conceals the idea of the divine origin of Roman law.

DANTE’S VICTORIES AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

Dante came from a Guelph family, which may not mean that much because, according to the historian John Najemy, most Florentines at that time were Guelphs.¹¹ In the Battle of Montaperti in 1260, the Florentine Guelphs had suffered a disastrous defeat against the Ghibelline city of Siena, led by Farinata degli Uberti, who was a banished Florentine Ghibelline aristocrat. The violent confrontations are recalled by Dante in his meeting with Farinata in Inferno X where this ambiguous hero recounts how he came to change his mind: when the Ghibellines planned to destroy Florence like the Romans had once crushed Carthage, he started to defend his native city.

Not many years after the defeat of Montaperti, the Guelphs regained control, so when Dante started his political career in the mid-1290s, Florence was again a Guelph city. By then Dante was married to Gemma Donati, who bore him four children, and he was already an admired poet, celebrated above all for his Vita nuova (1295), the beautiful collection of poems and prose that follows Dante’s life from his birth and early childhood, to his first meeting with the Florentine girl Beatrice, to her death in 1290. In public life Dante came to hold several important posts, and he reached the peak of his political career in 1300 when he served from 15 June to 15 August as one of the six priors of the city. What then went wrong is unclear. In his Vita di Dante, the Florentine historian and humanist Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) refers to a now lost epistle where Dante reportedly explained that the cause and origin of all his woes and misfortunes were the decisions taken during his period as prior.¹²

The Guelphs for a period had been divided into two bitterly opposed factions known as the Blacks and the Whites; whereas the Blacks followed the traditionally Guelph line supporting the papacy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Eagle’s Flight: Dante’s Paradiso VI and the Monarchia
• 2. Marsilius of Padua and the Question of Legitimacy
• 3. Individual Freedom in William of Ockham’s Breviloquium
• 4. Petrarch, Cola di Rienzo, and the Battle of Rome
• 5. The Prophetic Widow: Birgitta of Sweden and the Revelaciones
• 6. Catherine of Siena and the Mystical Body of the Church
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index