FIRST GREAT JUBILEE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
A.D. 1300
FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS
Benedetto Gaetani, born at Anagni, Italy, about 1228—whom contemporary poets and historians also consigned to infamy—occupied the pontifical throne but ten years, 1294-1303, but those were years of almost continual strife. It is indeed likely that partisanship painted him, in some respects, with colors too black, attributing to him crimes of which he was not guilty. But even these exaggerations of dispraise were due to the unquestioned facts of his character and career. When at length Boniface was worsted in his quarrel with Philip the Fair, a widespread reaction began on the part of the laity against ecclesiastical assumptions, and the great dramatic act by which, under Hildebrand, the papacy first displayed its power had its counterpart in the manner of its decline. "The drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa."
But Boniface enjoyed one year of triumph scarcely paralleled in all the experience of his fellow-pontiffs. This was the closing year of the thirteenth century. Taking advantage of a fresh wave of religious enthusiasm which then swept over Europe, the Pope called upon the Christian world—almost at peace from long warfare—to celebrate a jubilee. The institution of the Catholic jubilee is generally considered as dating from this celebration, though some writers refer its establishment to the pontificate of Innocent III, a century earlier.
Boniface VIII inaugurated the fourteenth century with a pilgrimage festival which has become renowned. The centennial jubilee had been celebrated in ancient Rome by magnificent games; the recollections of these games, however, had expired, and no tidings inform us whether the close or beginning of a century was marked in Christian Rome by any ecclesiastical festival. The immense processions of pilgrims to St. Peter's had ceased during the crusades; the crusades ended, the old longing reawoke among the people and drew them again to the graves of the apostles. The pious impulse was fostered in no small degree by the shrewdness of the Roman priests.
About the Christmas of 1299—and with Christmas, according to the style of the Roman curia, the year ended—crowds flocked both from the city and country to St. Peter's. A cry, promising remission of sins to those who made the pilgrimage to Rome, resounded throughout the world and forced it into movement. Boniface gave form and sanction to the growing impulse by promulgating the bull of jubilee of February 22, 1300, which promised remission of sins to all who should visit the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul during the year. The pilgrimage of Italians was to last for thirty days, that of foreigners for fifteen. The enemies of the Church were alone excluded. As such the Pope designated Frederick of Sicily, the Colonnas and their adherents, and, curiously enough, all Christians who held traffic with Saracens. Boniface consequently made use of the jubilee to brand his enemies and to exclude them from the privileges of Christian grace.
The pressure toward Rome was unexampled. The city presented the aspect of a camp where crowds of pilgrims, that resembled armies, thronged incessantly in and out. A spectator standing on one of the heights of the city might have seen swarms like wandering tribes approach along the ancient Roman roads from north, south, east, and west; and, had he mixed among them, might have had difficulty in discovering their home. Italians, Provençals, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Slavs, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen came.
Italy gave free passage to pilgrims and kept the Truce of God. The crowds arrived, wearing the pilgrim's mantle or clad in their national dress, on foot, on horseback, or on cars, leading the ill and weary, and laden with their luggage. Veterans of a hundred were led by their grandsons; and youths bore, like Æneas, father or mother on their shoulders. They spoke in many dialects, but they all sang in the same language the litanies of the Church, and their longing dreams had but one and the same object.
On beholding in the sunny distance the dark forest of towers of the holy city they raised the exultant shout, "Rome, Rome!" like sailors who after a tedious voyage catch their first glimpse of land. They threw themselves down in prayer and rose again with the fervent cry, "St. Peter and St. Paul, have mercy." They were received at the gates by their countrymen and by guardians appointed by the city to show them their quarters; nevertheless, they first made their way to St. Peter's, ascended the steps of the vestibule on their knees, and then threw themselves in ecstasies on the grave of the apostle.
During an entire year Rome swarmed with pilgrims and was filled with a perfect babel of tongues. It was said that thirty thousand pilgrims entered and left the city daily, and that daily two hundred thousand pilgrims might have been found within it. An exemplary administration provided for order and for moderate prices. The year was fruitful, the Campagna and the neighboring provinces sent supplies in abundance. One of the pilgrims who was a chronicler relates that "bread, wine, meat, fish, and oats were plentiful and cheap in the market; the hay, however, was very dear; the inns so expensive that I was obliged to pay for my bed and the stabling of my horse (beyond the hay and oats) a Tornese groat a day. As I left Rome on Christmas eve, I saw so large a party of pilgrims depart that no one could count the number. The Romans reckon that altogether they have had two millions of men and women. I frequently saw both sexes trodden under foot, and it was sometimes with difficulty that I escaped the same fate myself."
The way that led from the city across the bridge of St. Angelo to St. Peter's was too narrow; a new street was therefore opened in the walls along the river, not far from the ancient tomb known as Meta Romuli. The bridge was covered with booths, which divided it in two, and in order to prevent accidents it was enacted that those going to St. Peter's should keep to one side of the bridge; those returning, to the other. Processions went incessantly to St. Paul's without the walls and to St. Peter's, where the already renowned relic, the handkerchief of Veronica, was exhibited. Every pilgrim laid an offering on the altar of the apostle, and the same chronicler of Asti assures us, as an eye-witness, that two clerics stood by the altar of St. Paul's, day and night, who with rakes in their hands gathered in untold money.
The marvellous sight of priests, who smilingly shovelled up gold like hay, caused malicious Ghibellines to assert that the Pope had appointed the jubilee solely for the sake of gain. Boniface in truth stood in need of money to defray the expenses of the war with Sicily, which swallowed up incalculable sums. If instead of copper, the monks in St. Paul's had lighted on gold florins, they would necessarily have collected fabulous wealth, but the heaps of money, both in St. Peter's and St. Paul's, consisted mainly of small coins, the gifts of poor pilgrims.
Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi pointedly comments on the fact, and laments the change of times, when only the poor gave offerings, and when kings no longer, like the three magi, brought gifts to the Saviour. The receipts of the jubilee, which the Pope was able to devote to the two basilicas for the purchase of estates, were sufficiently considerable. If in ordinary years the gifts of pilgrims to St. Peter's amounted to thirty thousand four hundred gold florins, we may conclude how much greater must have been the gains of the year of jubilee. "The gifts of pilgrims," wrote the chronicler of Florence, "yield treasures to the Church, and the Romans all grow wealthy by the sale of their goods."
The year of jubilee was for them indeed a year of wealth. The Romans, therefore, treated the pilgrims with kindness, and nothing is heard of any act of violence. If the fall of the house of Colonna had aroused enemies to the Pope in Rome, he disarmed them by the immense profits which accrued to the Romans who have always lived solely on the money of foreigners. Their senators at this time were Richard Anibaldi of the Colosseum, from which the Anibaldi had already expelled the Frangipani, and Gentile Orsini, whose name may still be read on an inscription in the Capitol. These gentlemen did not permit the pious enthusiasm of the pilgrimage to prevent them from making war in the neighborhood. They allowed the pilgrims to pray at the altars, but they themselves advanced with the Roman banners against Toscanella, which they subjugated to the Capitol.
We may imagine on how vast a scale Rome sold relics, amulets, and images of saints, and at the same time how many remains of antiquity, coins, gems, rings, statues, marble remains, and also manuscripts were carried back by the pilgrims to their homes. When they had sufficiently satisfied their religious instincts, these pilgrims turned with astonished gaze to the monuments of the past.
Ancient Rome, through which they wandered, the book of the Mirabilia in their hand, exercised its profound spell upon them. Besides the recollections of antiquity other memories of the deeds of popes and emperors, from the time of Charles the Great, animated this classic theatre of the world in the year 1300. Every mind, alive to the language of history, must have felt deeply the influence of the city at this time, when troops of pilgrims from every country, wandering in this world of majestic ruins, bore living testimony to the eternal ties which bound Rome to mankind. It can scarcely be doubted that Dante beheld the city in these days, and that a ray from them fell on his immortal poem which begins with Easter week of the year 1300.
The sight of the capital of the world inspired the soul of another Florentine. "I also found myself," writes Giovanni Villani, "in that blessed pilgrimage to the holy city of Rome, and as I beheld the great and ancient things within her, and read the histories and the great deeds of the Romans—which Vergil, Sallust, Lucan, Titus Livius, Valerius, Paul Orosius, and other great masters of history have described—I took style and form from them, although as a pupil I was not worthy to do so great a work. And thus in 1300, returned from Rome, I began to write this book to the honor of God and St. John and to the commendation of our city of Florence." The fruit of Villani's creative enthusiasm was his history of Florence, the greatest and most naive chronicle that has been produced in the beautiful Italian tongue; and it is possible that many other talented men may have received fruitful impressions from Rome at this time.
For Boniface the jubilee was a real victory. The crowds that streamed to Rome showed him that men still retained their belief in the city as the sacred temple of the united world. The monster festival of reconciliation seemed to flow like a river of grace over its own past, and to wipe away the hated recollection of Celestine V, of his war with the Colonnas, and all the accusations of his enemies. In these days he could revel in a feeling of almost divine power, as scarcely any pope had been able to do before him. He sat on the highest throne of the West, adorned by the spoils of empire, as the "vicar of God" on earth. As the dogmatic ruler of the world, the keys of blessing and destruction in his hand, he beheld thousands from distant lands come before his throne and cast themselves in the dust before him as before a higher being. Kings, however, he did not see. Beyond Charles Martel, no monarch came to Rome to receive, as a penitent, absolution for his sins. This shows that the faith, which the battles of Alexander III and Innocent III had formerly won, was extinguished at royal courts.
Boniface VIII closed the memorable festival on Christmas Eve of the year 1300. It forms an epoch in the history of the papacy, as in that of Rome. The year of jubilee and enthusiasm was followed, in terrible contrast, by the tragic end of the Pope, the fall of the papacy from its height, and the decline of Rome to a condition of awful solitude.